"Envy"-Part Two
Bleh. I didn't think it was long enough to warrant two posts. Part One here
Envy
---~---
At the end of the next month Nate is a wreck. He’s twitchy, nervous, more easily startled than ever before. Before, it was as though he just had never noticed they existed; now, it is as if each person were standing with a gun pointed into his pale, ragged face.
He takes to wearing glasses without prescriptions, to hide the bruises on his face. In gym class he waits until he is the last one in the room to change, hiding in the rows of grey lockers and sweat and dust.
His night terrors have returned. He wakes in a cold sweat screaming, clawing at the blankets and himself as he fights to get away from whatever stalks him in his sleep. Will sleeps on the couch, and his mother threatens, but they won’t go away, and despite himself he can’t summon the nerve to give himself a heavier dose. Because irrationally, he can’t free himself from the idea that if he kills himself like that he’ll end up in a Hell populated with copies of his mother for eternity. He can’t believe in God, but fear and his mother are much more concrete.
And Will? Will worries, but he seems fine, too. He and Emily are everywhere together, holding hands and whispering lovingly. In Nate’s fevered existence, only his fear of his mother and his passion for Emily can still reach him, but the sight of her in the role of his brother’s girlfriend is a spike in temperature, fever 103° where colors all start to bleed into white with hatred. He’s not himself in these moments-he doesn’t know who he is-but Nate can feel himself breaking, cracks in the reflection caught in the mirror, three little boys not two what is real here? The world slides, stabilizes, and he finds he’s woken up to himself in class, on the walks home, at the store with no memory of getting there. He checks in the windows and puddles; he’s still there, he’s still himself. Once he would have had Will to cling to, but no longer.
He doesn’t speak to Envy.
It’s not unusual for him to wake in the night from restless sleep to the moon on his face, only to find Envy sitting on Will’s abandoned bed, face wreathed in an amused cruel smile of honey and arsenic. Boldly, Nate has been turning to the opposite wall to try to sleep again, but it’s hard with the itchy crawly feeling of Envy’s eyes resting between his shoulder blades.
Envy has not spoken to him since.
(But he cannot forget what was said).
One time (this is the last time) he wakes suddenly (pillow gone) to the knowledge that someone is in the house without belonging. Did he imagine it, or is that the soft click of the front door closing? The creak of the floorboards beneath feet? He throws the covers away and sneaks into the hall, moving cat-like and silent to the stairs. He peers down to nothing, but now there are voices, soft low urgent and he’s not sure what to do.
He glances back; Envy is there, far away, in the corner at the end of the hall by their door. He nods slightly-Go look-so Nate does. He creeps down the stairs and begins the treacherous journey towards the voices in the burgundy living room. Inch by inch he scoots forward across shards of moonlit floor until he is almost able to reach the door. The voices have stopped, but he is sure the trespassers have not left yet. What could there possibly be in this room that could hold them here so long?
Will.
He swallows hard. Will’s couch is in there.
He can hear Will’s voice but not what is being said. The other voice is lighter, higher, breathy. He’s not sure what’s going on behind that door and he doesn’t want to know. But he can feel, between his shoulders, that Envy is there and so he pushes the door open with his fingertips, trembling and white.
A bra has been discarded in his mother’s best chair.
He doesn’t need to see any more. Quickly, he shuts the door and slides down the wall to sit on the floor in a daze of shock and anger.
“It’s been going on for awhile,” says a familiar voice.
Envy lounges casually on the stairs, deepest shadow and pale moon face wearing a small smirk cradled in his hands.
“They were quick about it,” he continues. “Oh for the heat of youth!”
“Oh, no…” Nate whispers.
“You’ve lost.” Envy grins wildly, madly; it stretches across his face in a Cheshire Cat smile.
“No…”
“Yes!” Envy says cheerfully. “You can’t have her now. All because of Will.”
“No…”
“You’ve lost” Envy’s voice is singsong now. “And you knooooow it!”
“Shut up! Shut up shut up shut up!”
“Shhhhhhh,” Envy’s suddenly crouched in front of him, finger to Nate’s lips. “They’re going to hear you.”
“I don’t care!” Nate jerks away.
“Yes, you do,” Envy says softly, gently, coaxing him back, stroking his face. Nate stares at him, wide-eyed.
“I can help you,” he continues. “If you’ll let me.”
“What are you going to do?” The offer is tempting, so tempting, but he still has enough sense to be cautious.
“I’m just going to do what you want to do,” Envy replies easily. “The things you won’t do for yourself. That’s all.”
Nate studies Envy’s expression searchingly. The hands on his face are fire-hot, green eyes like fireflies in a white face, white like moonlight on the mirror in the hallway his mind is sliding in out of focus and shadows in a room where clothes lay abandoned inhibitions abandoned and why shouldn’t he give in to his? Fire, anger, hatred burning in his veins and Envy’s offering help. Nobody ever offered that before.
He forces his mind back on track.
Envy is waiting patiently for an answer, smiling benignly at him.
“Okay…” He nods slowly. “Do what you’re going to do.”
Envy grins, and that’s the last thing Nate sees before his world sinks into the shadowy holes in reality. The bright, predatory grin a shark gives its next meal.
---~---
The trees are dark the sky is white the world is black and white like old photographs but his hands are green grass green glass green the moon is green the moon shines down on dead branches dead leaves dead girl in the ditch in the cold her hands are cold his hands are hot his hands are fire the moon is on fire green fire the world is white fire and green eyes green eyes and shark’s teeth
---~---
He wakes.
Grey light filters in the window and the sky looks like snow. He’s in his bed, but he can’t remember getting there. He can’t remember anything after the hallway-did that actually happen? Nate can’t bring to mind what actually did happen.
The sudden rapping on the door startles him from thought. “Up, get up!” his mother orders. “I mean now!”
“She doesn’t call you by your name,” Envy muses. “Why’s that, do you think?”
Nate glances to the right. Envy is sitting on the window ledge and the desk, staring out the window. But somehow that light streams through the glass as though no one was there.
“She doesn’t have to,” Nate says after a moment. “Everyone knows she means me.”
“It’s like…” Envy searches for the words. “Like she only has one son. Like you’re not real.”
Nate smiles bitterly. “I’m not. Just Will’s living shadow.”
“Not really. Less that that,” Envy corrects. “It’s okay, though. I’m less real than you.”
“Yeah?” Nate laughs. “Nice to hear.”
Envy steps down to climb on the end of Nate’s bed, settling out alongside him gracefully.
“So do you want to talk about last night?”
Nate sits up, drawing the blankets around him defensively.
“There’s nothing to say about last night,” he says coldly.
“Oh,” Envy groans as he stretches like an old dog. “There’s lots to say about it. But we can do it your way.” He grins. “It was fun. I enjoyed myself immensely.”
“What are you talking about?” Nate snaps.
Envy bursts out laughing crazily, his voice rising to a howl.
“Envy!” Nate shakes him. He’s so thin beneath his dark clothing Nate fears for a moment he might break Envy’s shoulder. “Please!”
“Sorry, sorry,” Envy chuckles. He wraps his arms around Nate’s neck and buries his face in his shoulder, still shaking with laughter.
“I fixed it for you!” he murmurs, low and deadly, hot breath ghosting along Nate’s neck. “I fixed it. Nobody else can ever have her, ever again.”
Nate sits frozen beneath Envy’s hands. “Envy, you…”
A hammering on the door again makes them both jump. “Get up and get out here!”
Impatiently, he shrugs Envy off and pads carefully out of his room in his boxers, slipping quickly down the stairs. There are voices in the living room again, but unfamiliar men’s voices. He peers in: policemen are scouring the furniture, discussing hair samples and strange stains.
“Nate,” his father calls. “In here.”
It is the room they do not enter, his mother’s parlor, the site of the long-ago parties of his childhood. Standing there in his loose clothes, he feels caught in a spotlight attempting a jailbreak, the bruises on his body glaringly greenish on his pale skin.
“Dad,” he says, looking from him to the policeman standing beside him. “What’s going on?”
“We need you to tell us if you saw Emily here at all yesterday.” His father sounds tired; his words are slow and leaden. He looks suddenly old.
“Say yes,” Envy says from the corner, his usual reappearing act. “You want to know what’s happening, right?”
“You could have just told me,” Nate mumbles to him.
“Speak up, son,” says the policeman. “Did you see her?”
Nate looks up, looks him right in the eye. “She was here last night,” He speaks firmly and clearly, giving weight to every word. “She was having sex with Will in the living room.”
“You lie!” his mother screams from the doorway. Nate turns to her, shocked, in time to catch her backhand slap in his face.
“You lie, you liar!” His father is pulling her away, the policeman is pulling Nate back, protecting him, but she keeps reaching for Nate with hands like claws. “You lie! Because of you, they’ve taken my baby to jail!” She slumps suddenly in his father’s arms, head on her chest as she dissolves into wailing sobs. “My Will…they took my Will…”
“You…” Nate glances at Envy, who smiles. “…she’s dead?”
“I’m afraid so, son.” the policeman replies gravely.
“My brother murdered her?”
The policeman sighs. “We’re not 100% yet. But we’re pretty sure it was him. Enough that we arrested him.”
Nate gapes at Envy. Envy gapes back.
“See?” Envy says. “I took care of things.”
“You…” Nate whispers, forgetting the others in the room. “…you didn’t really…”
“They can’t prove it,” Envy continues. “But it won’t change anything. He’ll be found guilty all the same.”
“Did you…?”
“Who knows?” Envy shrugs. “Did I? Did you? Did he?”
“Son,” says the policeman, shaking his shoulder gently. “Son, you gonna be okay?”
Nate looks at him, from him to Envy to the bruises on his arms.
No, he wants to say, no I won’t be. “Yeah,” he says, mouth dry. “Yeah, I’ll be fine.”
The policeman pats his shoulder and steps away.
“We’ll call and let you know what’s happening, sir,” he tells Nate’s father respectfully, because even if his son’s a murderer he’s still an important man and he demands respect. “I’m very sorry we had to disturb you.”
“You’re just doing your job,” his father murmurs.
The policeman withdraws from the room, the sound of his boots muffled by the rich rug in the hall, until at last he and his men are gone.
Nate stares down at his feet. His mother is glaring hatefully at him, her eyes red with anger, and he can’t face her right now. He keeps seeing his brother in his mind as he was ten years ago, the little boy in the blue snowsuit laughing in the powdery cool, bright red mittens on the body of a snowman. It doesn’t add up with the image of jail bars, the walls of a grey prison sliding in around that little boy. He presses a hand to his sudden migraine; he can feel pieces going in his head. Will-Nate?-in prison, in the snow, it’s too white, the white-hot hands on his face-
“It’s your fault.” His mother’s voice is a verbal slap that brings him back to reality.
He looks at her, through her while his mind slips in and out of focus. He doesn’t know how to answer her, because he doesn’t know if it’s true or not.
(Because now he doesn’t know who is who)
---~---
Their father posts bail for Will and he comes home. Their mother fusses over him, his clothes and his food while Nate stands on and watches with Envy by his side. Will is a pale reflection of his former self, now. His hair falls in scraps into his face and he won’t look any of them in the eye. He can’t leave the house for fear of violence by mob, but he doesn’t seem to feel any need to leave the living room. He spends his days sitting in the window watching the world denied to him amid the falling snow.
Nate cannot leave the house either. He is no longer allowed. He no longer attends school, because his mother would not permit it.
“Please, Nate,” his father begs, before he leaves once more for his job in the city (he is forever leaving them to chaos). “I know it’s difficult…but you have to look after her.”
She won’t acknowledge Nate’s existence if he speaks to her. If he puts something in front of her she ignores it. Her words, like her love, belong only to Will. She cooks for two and leaves Nate to fend for himself, but she’s also taken to locking the kitchen door now that’s she locked all the windows and doors to the outside world. Driven by starvation he finally breaks one of the upstairs windows to climb out to sneak to the McDonald’s. It makes him sick later, and he brings it all back up.
He feels empty. He feels like a ghost. He feels a fever that drives him to pace the house with the relentless energy of an insomniac, searching for an escape hatch.
He wonders if this is what going crazy feels like.
How long have they been here? One week? Two? Longer, he thinks, more like months. His father has called but speaks only to his mother, and he will not be home soon. Time has stopped holding meaning, it rushes by in spurts of grey sunlight and there are too many hours in each midnight for Nate to think.
“She doesn’t love me,” Nate says to himself, to Envy. “Because of Will, she always had Will, he always had more than me and how? How? We share the same genes; we share everything. How?” When he looks in the mirror he can’t tell whose face stares back at him, his own or Will’s or even Envy’s.
(He never noticed before that Envy looked oh so much like them, he could be their brother, he could be them)
“Ask her,” says Envy from the shadows. He has changed, too; his outline seems blurred with the darkness around him and cracks are running across his skin, crackled in green-grey graveyard smoke color. And his teeth are becoming whiter, sharper, wolf’s fangs in bloody grey guns. Nate wonders if he is embarrassed by himself, if that is why Envy clings to the shadows.
“I will,” Nate says to his reflection. “Soon. I will.”
But he doesn’t know how. She affords him no opportunities to. And with Will living on that damn couch with her waiting on him like his wet nurse, he can’t go in there, he can’t face Will after what happened. Even if it may not actually be his fault. He’s not sure; Envy is.
“Coward,” hisses Envy. “Little boy, little ghost, little coward. Want to wait until you’re a shadow? A pile of sand? Dead from starvation and neglect?”
“Shut up,” he tells Envy, but mildly now; he accepted handing control of his actions to Envy a long time ago. Some part of himself whispers that he is reaching a crossroads, it’s not too late-but he knows the boundaries blurred a long time ago. He’s not sure where he ends and Envy begins; he’s not sure some days if he is still Nate. He doesn’t think it matters anymore. It’s just easier to let Envy take control.
“Go, go,” Envy urges. “Before it’s too late, go confront her, go…” He doesn’t look handsome now with spiderweb cracks splitting open to dapple his skin in palest ivory and the green of tombstone moss.
“Too late for what?” Nate asks curiously, but Envy turns away. It’s obvious, anyway, what he means-hurry up and finish before I fall to pieces around you.
This, more than anything, spurs Nate into action. He doesn’t know how to proceed without Envy’s guidance anymore. He’d be dead now if Envy hadn’t been reminding him to eat. Somehow, the end of Envy will mean the end of Nate, too, and he needs answers before that happens or he’ll never get them.
The stairs are deepest midnight. Briefly, he notices that his mother has covered all the mirrors with mourning cloth.
“What’s it for?” he asks Envy, whose vague outline can be seen on the stairs.
“Protection,” Envy says. “Against doppelgangers. Keep a dead person’s soul from being caught in this world. I don’t know, something.”
“Too bad she’s already got some,” Nate chuckles. “You and me, huh?”
“Just hurry up,” Envy groans, shifting impatiently. “Otherwise I won’t be able to help you any longer.”
Nate glances back again to the flash of teeth, the luminous green eyes driving him forward. Then he pushes open the kitchen door and steps inside.
His mother is at the sink, humming as she washes. He can see that she’s ruined the cast-iron skillet as she scrubs it over and over. She’s so focused on her task that she doesn’t notice he’s entered the room.
“Mom,” he says gently. “Can we talk?”
She gasps; the skillet falls from her hands into the sink.
“Oh, Will!” she cries, rounding on him with tears in her eyes. “You’re here! Do you want something to drink? Some milk?”
“No, Mom. It’s Nate.”
“Who?” She frowns. “I don’t know anyone with that name.”
“Your son, Mom.”
“I only have one son and that’s Will!” she says happily.
Nate swallows. “Did you ever love me, Mom?”
She frowns again, and a little of the cloudiness leaves her face.
“You let him in,” she whispers, suddenly. “You named it and it came, you let it in, you let it have you!” She points at him with a trembling finger, her voice rising to a hysterical shriek. “You let it in! Do you hear me? I know it’s here, I know it follows you! You brought the Devil’s plague into my house! You let it kill my baby!” She begins to sob. “Kill my baby, kill my Will…your fault…you let it in…”
“Mom,” he says, breath coming shakily. “Mom, Will killed someone…doesn’t that matter?”
She shakes her head fervently. “He’s my baby, my Will…it wasn’t his fault…”
Nate’s face hardens.
“Whose fault was it, Mom?” he asks harshly. “Mine? It’s always mine, isn’t it? It’s never going to be yours.”
“You brought it in!” she shrieks. “You let it destroy our lives!”
“What?” Nate demands. “What did I do? You tell me what I did. What did I bring?”
“Monster…” Her voice rises and falls like the roaring tide in a storm. “It’s you, it’s in you!”
“What is it? What is it?”
“ENVY!” The word tears from her chest in an inhuman shriek that should shatter the glass.
“Well,” Envy says. “I guess this is the end.”
Envy is slumped in the doorway, his body is shaking uncontrollably but his chest does not rise and fall. His tongue lolls between his teeth, thin wet tongue like a dog’s, teeth like a shark’s, like a viper’s, like a wolf’s.
“Envy,” Nate reaches a hand out to him. “Are you dying?”
“Don’t die,” Envy pants. “Can’t die. It’s still the end.”
“Are you going to help me?”
Envy closes his eyes, and nods.
“It’s here,” his mother whispers fearfully. “You’re talking to it, it’s here, it’s come. You brought it here.”
“Envy…”
“Do you hate her?” Envy’s voice is ragged and sharp.
Nate gently touches the scar on his forehead, looks at the scars where things were broken and remade. “Yes,” he whispers, heat rising in his throat. “Yes.”
“And she hates you.”
“Yes.”
“She’s ruined you.”
Nate nods. “Yes.”
“Do you want me to take control?”
He hesitates, only for a moment. This is the last chance to turn everything back.
“Yes.”
He closes his eyes to avoid looking at Envy. But he can feel Envy’s hand against his chest, white-hot heat against his heart racing pulsing at the touch. The fire sinks beneath skin and bone, the feeling of fingers wrapping mercilessly around his heart and seeping into the cracks of his body. His vision behind his eyes is seeping slowly into white as Envy took over every cell, pulling some last reserves of strength out of his collapsing self.
Nate thinks that it is like watching the events through a sheer white curtain. He sees, but doesn’t see, the hand that draws a knife from the block. Vaguely through the static of rushing blood in his ears he can hear her laughing hysterically, muttering prayers of Latin, Catholic to the end. Calmly, with Envy’s heat running through his veins, he brings the knife across her throat and the screaming stops in a fountain of blood.
Silent and stoic faced, he stalks down the front hall with the knife dripping on his mother’s clean floor. At the mirror he pauses and tears the cloth away to see the face there. He grins, and the teeth are long and sharp; the skin of his face is traced with spiderweb lines and his eyes are tinged with green. It’s neither Envy nor himself looking back at him.
He continues on and kicks open the living room door to break the lock, the last barrier of his mother. The fog of Envy’s power clears a little; he is a little more himself.
Will is lying on the couch staring at the ceiling. He does not react. Not even when Nate towers over him, holding the knife with waxy blood loosely in his hand.
“Hello, Will.”
Will’s dark eyes flick to his face, ringed with heavy shadows, and they focus on him.
“Hello Nate.”
They stand in silence.
“You aren’t breathing,” Will says finally.
“I know.”
Will’s face is gentle. “Mom always said you were haunted by something.”
Nate’s mouth is dry; he licks his lips. “I am.”
Will nods. “I thought so.”
Nate sits down beside him on the couch, the knife across his knees letting blood seep into his jeans.
“Did you ever see it?” he asks Will. The words are hard to force through the curtain of Envy’s power, but the last remaining parts of himself that recognize Will as his brother are spurring him onward, the need to share one last shard.
“Don’t ask me things that don’t matter,” Will scolds him gently. His eyes trace the patterns of blood on Nate’s face, his shirt and hands, to the knife.
“Did you kill Mom?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“Are you going to kill me?”
Nate swallows, and nods. “Yes.”
Strange, he doesn’t ask about the girl.
“Do you hate me?”
Nate blinks. He doesn’t know how to answer this.
“I thought…how did she know, that teacher, that it was your paper? And Mom…and Emily…” Will smiles sadly. “I could understand why you would envy me. Why you would hate me. Because I think…maybe a little…I always envied you…”
Nate hangs his head. He can’t look at Will anymore.
“Yes,” he says tightly, clutching the knife in his fist.
Will sighs, the sound of the wind on panes of glass.
“I’m so sorry, Nate,” he whispers. “I’m so sorry.”
His hands shaking, Nate raises his face to watch Will, raises the knife over his brother’s heart.
“Hey, Nate,” Will says softly in the moment before the fall. “You’re crying.”
Then the knife is in Will’s heart and his breathing stops. And the room is silent.
---~---
There is a boy in the corner.
The heat is gone but the world is still white the walls are white his clothes are white the floor is white. He is warm here wrapped in white and cradled in the soft pillowy walls which don’t smother but keep him safe from mothers who throw things and break bones and brothers who stand in the sun away from the shadows with green eyes. He snuggles closer to the wall and feels happy. He can’t remember feeling that way before.
Envy is gone; no shadows here to hid behind. Or maybe he is Envy, he is Nate, is he Will? He can’t remember; names and identities don’t matter; no mirrors here, nobody but himself and the white forever and ever, Amen.
He raises his face to the pillow sky and the fluorescent lights.
And he smiles.
---~---
The mirror falls to the ground and shatters.
Notes: I have to say: YES I FINALLY FINISHED! This is the one story that I can trace its origins and development fully, because I started it a long time ago and I went through so many drafts and notes and starts and stoppings.
The idea came from a combination of three things-Dante’s Inferno, which we were studying in class at the time, the idea of personifying the Seven Sins which came from Fullmetal Alchemist, and a short story I read at the time by Edgar Allen Poe called “William Wilson”, which is basically about doppelgangers. In the original notes for the story, the unnamed narrator was haunted by the personification of his own envy. But when I did some research on envy later, it’s not really about the thing that the other person has-it’s about the other person. Really, it wouldn’t matter if anybody else in the world had that thing, only the person being envied.
So from there the idea went to the narrator’s friend as the source of his envy. And because I didn’t think that fit, it was his brother then. And somewhere along the way they became twins. Oh.
Also, abuse/insanity was never part of the original story line. It was more along the lines of possession, which I guess tends to saying Envy was a demon. In the original idea, too, the narrator commits suicide in an attempt to escape, which only leads to him being trapped with Envy after death; Envy would tell him this. This all relates to the Inferno basis, I guess, since that's such a damn religious allegory it makes me want to scream. I'm not really religious, but I do know that Catholics consider suicide an immediate banishment to hell, which is where Envy came from so that's how that all worked. But then we learned about schizophrenia in Psychology and about some of the effects of child abuse and so that became part of Nate’s story, too, and I think that works much better. It seems like he has some sort of weird combination of schizophrenia and a personality disorder; I want to say multiple personality disorder but I don't think that would be quite right, because it's not really that.
Looking at this, having just finished it, there are a lot of things I can think that need to be worked on. But I can’t do it right now.
Hope you liked it!
Envy
---~---
At the end of the next month Nate is a wreck. He’s twitchy, nervous, more easily startled than ever before. Before, it was as though he just had never noticed they existed; now, it is as if each person were standing with a gun pointed into his pale, ragged face.
He takes to wearing glasses without prescriptions, to hide the bruises on his face. In gym class he waits until he is the last one in the room to change, hiding in the rows of grey lockers and sweat and dust.
His night terrors have returned. He wakes in a cold sweat screaming, clawing at the blankets and himself as he fights to get away from whatever stalks him in his sleep. Will sleeps on the couch, and his mother threatens, but they won’t go away, and despite himself he can’t summon the nerve to give himself a heavier dose. Because irrationally, he can’t free himself from the idea that if he kills himself like that he’ll end up in a Hell populated with copies of his mother for eternity. He can’t believe in God, but fear and his mother are much more concrete.
And Will? Will worries, but he seems fine, too. He and Emily are everywhere together, holding hands and whispering lovingly. In Nate’s fevered existence, only his fear of his mother and his passion for Emily can still reach him, but the sight of her in the role of his brother’s girlfriend is a spike in temperature, fever 103° where colors all start to bleed into white with hatred. He’s not himself in these moments-he doesn’t know who he is-but Nate can feel himself breaking, cracks in the reflection caught in the mirror, three little boys not two what is real here? The world slides, stabilizes, and he finds he’s woken up to himself in class, on the walks home, at the store with no memory of getting there. He checks in the windows and puddles; he’s still there, he’s still himself. Once he would have had Will to cling to, but no longer.
He doesn’t speak to Envy.
It’s not unusual for him to wake in the night from restless sleep to the moon on his face, only to find Envy sitting on Will’s abandoned bed, face wreathed in an amused cruel smile of honey and arsenic. Boldly, Nate has been turning to the opposite wall to try to sleep again, but it’s hard with the itchy crawly feeling of Envy’s eyes resting between his shoulder blades.
Envy has not spoken to him since.
(But he cannot forget what was said).
One time (this is the last time) he wakes suddenly (pillow gone) to the knowledge that someone is in the house without belonging. Did he imagine it, or is that the soft click of the front door closing? The creak of the floorboards beneath feet? He throws the covers away and sneaks into the hall, moving cat-like and silent to the stairs. He peers down to nothing, but now there are voices, soft low urgent and he’s not sure what to do.
He glances back; Envy is there, far away, in the corner at the end of the hall by their door. He nods slightly-Go look-so Nate does. He creeps down the stairs and begins the treacherous journey towards the voices in the burgundy living room. Inch by inch he scoots forward across shards of moonlit floor until he is almost able to reach the door. The voices have stopped, but he is sure the trespassers have not left yet. What could there possibly be in this room that could hold them here so long?
Will.
He swallows hard. Will’s couch is in there.
He can hear Will’s voice but not what is being said. The other voice is lighter, higher, breathy. He’s not sure what’s going on behind that door and he doesn’t want to know. But he can feel, between his shoulders, that Envy is there and so he pushes the door open with his fingertips, trembling and white.
A bra has been discarded in his mother’s best chair.
He doesn’t need to see any more. Quickly, he shuts the door and slides down the wall to sit on the floor in a daze of shock and anger.
“It’s been going on for awhile,” says a familiar voice.
Envy lounges casually on the stairs, deepest shadow and pale moon face wearing a small smirk cradled in his hands.
“They were quick about it,” he continues. “Oh for the heat of youth!”
“Oh, no…” Nate whispers.
“You’ve lost.” Envy grins wildly, madly; it stretches across his face in a Cheshire Cat smile.
“No…”
“Yes!” Envy says cheerfully. “You can’t have her now. All because of Will.”
“No…”
“You’ve lost” Envy’s voice is singsong now. “And you knooooow it!”
“Shut up! Shut up shut up shut up!”
“Shhhhhhh,” Envy’s suddenly crouched in front of him, finger to Nate’s lips. “They’re going to hear you.”
“I don’t care!” Nate jerks away.
“Yes, you do,” Envy says softly, gently, coaxing him back, stroking his face. Nate stares at him, wide-eyed.
“I can help you,” he continues. “If you’ll let me.”
“What are you going to do?” The offer is tempting, so tempting, but he still has enough sense to be cautious.
“I’m just going to do what you want to do,” Envy replies easily. “The things you won’t do for yourself. That’s all.”
Nate studies Envy’s expression searchingly. The hands on his face are fire-hot, green eyes like fireflies in a white face, white like moonlight on the mirror in the hallway his mind is sliding in out of focus and shadows in a room where clothes lay abandoned inhibitions abandoned and why shouldn’t he give in to his? Fire, anger, hatred burning in his veins and Envy’s offering help. Nobody ever offered that before.
He forces his mind back on track.
Envy is waiting patiently for an answer, smiling benignly at him.
“Okay…” He nods slowly. “Do what you’re going to do.”
Envy grins, and that’s the last thing Nate sees before his world sinks into the shadowy holes in reality. The bright, predatory grin a shark gives its next meal.
---~---
The trees are dark the sky is white the world is black and white like old photographs but his hands are green grass green glass green the moon is green the moon shines down on dead branches dead leaves dead girl in the ditch in the cold her hands are cold his hands are hot his hands are fire the moon is on fire green fire the world is white fire and green eyes green eyes and shark’s teeth
---~---
He wakes.
Grey light filters in the window and the sky looks like snow. He’s in his bed, but he can’t remember getting there. He can’t remember anything after the hallway-did that actually happen? Nate can’t bring to mind what actually did happen.
The sudden rapping on the door startles him from thought. “Up, get up!” his mother orders. “I mean now!”
“She doesn’t call you by your name,” Envy muses. “Why’s that, do you think?”
Nate glances to the right. Envy is sitting on the window ledge and the desk, staring out the window. But somehow that light streams through the glass as though no one was there.
“She doesn’t have to,” Nate says after a moment. “Everyone knows she means me.”
“It’s like…” Envy searches for the words. “Like she only has one son. Like you’re not real.”
Nate smiles bitterly. “I’m not. Just Will’s living shadow.”
“Not really. Less that that,” Envy corrects. “It’s okay, though. I’m less real than you.”
“Yeah?” Nate laughs. “Nice to hear.”
Envy steps down to climb on the end of Nate’s bed, settling out alongside him gracefully.
“So do you want to talk about last night?”
Nate sits up, drawing the blankets around him defensively.
“There’s nothing to say about last night,” he says coldly.
“Oh,” Envy groans as he stretches like an old dog. “There’s lots to say about it. But we can do it your way.” He grins. “It was fun. I enjoyed myself immensely.”
“What are you talking about?” Nate snaps.
Envy bursts out laughing crazily, his voice rising to a howl.
“Envy!” Nate shakes him. He’s so thin beneath his dark clothing Nate fears for a moment he might break Envy’s shoulder. “Please!”
“Sorry, sorry,” Envy chuckles. He wraps his arms around Nate’s neck and buries his face in his shoulder, still shaking with laughter.
“I fixed it for you!” he murmurs, low and deadly, hot breath ghosting along Nate’s neck. “I fixed it. Nobody else can ever have her, ever again.”
Nate sits frozen beneath Envy’s hands. “Envy, you…”
A hammering on the door again makes them both jump. “Get up and get out here!”
Impatiently, he shrugs Envy off and pads carefully out of his room in his boxers, slipping quickly down the stairs. There are voices in the living room again, but unfamiliar men’s voices. He peers in: policemen are scouring the furniture, discussing hair samples and strange stains.
“Nate,” his father calls. “In here.”
It is the room they do not enter, his mother’s parlor, the site of the long-ago parties of his childhood. Standing there in his loose clothes, he feels caught in a spotlight attempting a jailbreak, the bruises on his body glaringly greenish on his pale skin.
“Dad,” he says, looking from him to the policeman standing beside him. “What’s going on?”
“We need you to tell us if you saw Emily here at all yesterday.” His father sounds tired; his words are slow and leaden. He looks suddenly old.
“Say yes,” Envy says from the corner, his usual reappearing act. “You want to know what’s happening, right?”
“You could have just told me,” Nate mumbles to him.
“Speak up, son,” says the policeman. “Did you see her?”
Nate looks up, looks him right in the eye. “She was here last night,” He speaks firmly and clearly, giving weight to every word. “She was having sex with Will in the living room.”
“You lie!” his mother screams from the doorway. Nate turns to her, shocked, in time to catch her backhand slap in his face.
“You lie, you liar!” His father is pulling her away, the policeman is pulling Nate back, protecting him, but she keeps reaching for Nate with hands like claws. “You lie! Because of you, they’ve taken my baby to jail!” She slumps suddenly in his father’s arms, head on her chest as she dissolves into wailing sobs. “My Will…they took my Will…”
“You…” Nate glances at Envy, who smiles. “…she’s dead?”
“I’m afraid so, son.” the policeman replies gravely.
“My brother murdered her?”
The policeman sighs. “We’re not 100% yet. But we’re pretty sure it was him. Enough that we arrested him.”
Nate gapes at Envy. Envy gapes back.
“See?” Envy says. “I took care of things.”
“You…” Nate whispers, forgetting the others in the room. “…you didn’t really…”
“They can’t prove it,” Envy continues. “But it won’t change anything. He’ll be found guilty all the same.”
“Did you…?”
“Who knows?” Envy shrugs. “Did I? Did you? Did he?”
“Son,” says the policeman, shaking his shoulder gently. “Son, you gonna be okay?”
Nate looks at him, from him to Envy to the bruises on his arms.
No, he wants to say, no I won’t be. “Yeah,” he says, mouth dry. “Yeah, I’ll be fine.”
The policeman pats his shoulder and steps away.
“We’ll call and let you know what’s happening, sir,” he tells Nate’s father respectfully, because even if his son’s a murderer he’s still an important man and he demands respect. “I’m very sorry we had to disturb you.”
“You’re just doing your job,” his father murmurs.
The policeman withdraws from the room, the sound of his boots muffled by the rich rug in the hall, until at last he and his men are gone.
Nate stares down at his feet. His mother is glaring hatefully at him, her eyes red with anger, and he can’t face her right now. He keeps seeing his brother in his mind as he was ten years ago, the little boy in the blue snowsuit laughing in the powdery cool, bright red mittens on the body of a snowman. It doesn’t add up with the image of jail bars, the walls of a grey prison sliding in around that little boy. He presses a hand to his sudden migraine; he can feel pieces going in his head. Will-Nate?-in prison, in the snow, it’s too white, the white-hot hands on his face-
“It’s your fault.” His mother’s voice is a verbal slap that brings him back to reality.
He looks at her, through her while his mind slips in and out of focus. He doesn’t know how to answer her, because he doesn’t know if it’s true or not.
(Because now he doesn’t know who is who)
---~---
Their father posts bail for Will and he comes home. Their mother fusses over him, his clothes and his food while Nate stands on and watches with Envy by his side. Will is a pale reflection of his former self, now. His hair falls in scraps into his face and he won’t look any of them in the eye. He can’t leave the house for fear of violence by mob, but he doesn’t seem to feel any need to leave the living room. He spends his days sitting in the window watching the world denied to him amid the falling snow.
Nate cannot leave the house either. He is no longer allowed. He no longer attends school, because his mother would not permit it.
“Please, Nate,” his father begs, before he leaves once more for his job in the city (he is forever leaving them to chaos). “I know it’s difficult…but you have to look after her.”
She won’t acknowledge Nate’s existence if he speaks to her. If he puts something in front of her she ignores it. Her words, like her love, belong only to Will. She cooks for two and leaves Nate to fend for himself, but she’s also taken to locking the kitchen door now that’s she locked all the windows and doors to the outside world. Driven by starvation he finally breaks one of the upstairs windows to climb out to sneak to the McDonald’s. It makes him sick later, and he brings it all back up.
He feels empty. He feels like a ghost. He feels a fever that drives him to pace the house with the relentless energy of an insomniac, searching for an escape hatch.
He wonders if this is what going crazy feels like.
How long have they been here? One week? Two? Longer, he thinks, more like months. His father has called but speaks only to his mother, and he will not be home soon. Time has stopped holding meaning, it rushes by in spurts of grey sunlight and there are too many hours in each midnight for Nate to think.
“She doesn’t love me,” Nate says to himself, to Envy. “Because of Will, she always had Will, he always had more than me and how? How? We share the same genes; we share everything. How?” When he looks in the mirror he can’t tell whose face stares back at him, his own or Will’s or even Envy’s.
(He never noticed before that Envy looked oh so much like them, he could be their brother, he could be them)
“Ask her,” says Envy from the shadows. He has changed, too; his outline seems blurred with the darkness around him and cracks are running across his skin, crackled in green-grey graveyard smoke color. And his teeth are becoming whiter, sharper, wolf’s fangs in bloody grey guns. Nate wonders if he is embarrassed by himself, if that is why Envy clings to the shadows.
“I will,” Nate says to his reflection. “Soon. I will.”
But he doesn’t know how. She affords him no opportunities to. And with Will living on that damn couch with her waiting on him like his wet nurse, he can’t go in there, he can’t face Will after what happened. Even if it may not actually be his fault. He’s not sure; Envy is.
“Coward,” hisses Envy. “Little boy, little ghost, little coward. Want to wait until you’re a shadow? A pile of sand? Dead from starvation and neglect?”
“Shut up,” he tells Envy, but mildly now; he accepted handing control of his actions to Envy a long time ago. Some part of himself whispers that he is reaching a crossroads, it’s not too late-but he knows the boundaries blurred a long time ago. He’s not sure where he ends and Envy begins; he’s not sure some days if he is still Nate. He doesn’t think it matters anymore. It’s just easier to let Envy take control.
“Go, go,” Envy urges. “Before it’s too late, go confront her, go…” He doesn’t look handsome now with spiderweb cracks splitting open to dapple his skin in palest ivory and the green of tombstone moss.
“Too late for what?” Nate asks curiously, but Envy turns away. It’s obvious, anyway, what he means-hurry up and finish before I fall to pieces around you.
This, more than anything, spurs Nate into action. He doesn’t know how to proceed without Envy’s guidance anymore. He’d be dead now if Envy hadn’t been reminding him to eat. Somehow, the end of Envy will mean the end of Nate, too, and he needs answers before that happens or he’ll never get them.
The stairs are deepest midnight. Briefly, he notices that his mother has covered all the mirrors with mourning cloth.
“What’s it for?” he asks Envy, whose vague outline can be seen on the stairs.
“Protection,” Envy says. “Against doppelgangers. Keep a dead person’s soul from being caught in this world. I don’t know, something.”
“Too bad she’s already got some,” Nate chuckles. “You and me, huh?”
“Just hurry up,” Envy groans, shifting impatiently. “Otherwise I won’t be able to help you any longer.”
Nate glances back again to the flash of teeth, the luminous green eyes driving him forward. Then he pushes open the kitchen door and steps inside.
His mother is at the sink, humming as she washes. He can see that she’s ruined the cast-iron skillet as she scrubs it over and over. She’s so focused on her task that she doesn’t notice he’s entered the room.
“Mom,” he says gently. “Can we talk?”
She gasps; the skillet falls from her hands into the sink.
“Oh, Will!” she cries, rounding on him with tears in her eyes. “You’re here! Do you want something to drink? Some milk?”
“No, Mom. It’s Nate.”
“Who?” She frowns. “I don’t know anyone with that name.”
“Your son, Mom.”
“I only have one son and that’s Will!” she says happily.
Nate swallows. “Did you ever love me, Mom?”
She frowns again, and a little of the cloudiness leaves her face.
“You let him in,” she whispers, suddenly. “You named it and it came, you let it in, you let it have you!” She points at him with a trembling finger, her voice rising to a hysterical shriek. “You let it in! Do you hear me? I know it’s here, I know it follows you! You brought the Devil’s plague into my house! You let it kill my baby!” She begins to sob. “Kill my baby, kill my Will…your fault…you let it in…”
“Mom,” he says, breath coming shakily. “Mom, Will killed someone…doesn’t that matter?”
She shakes her head fervently. “He’s my baby, my Will…it wasn’t his fault…”
Nate’s face hardens.
“Whose fault was it, Mom?” he asks harshly. “Mine? It’s always mine, isn’t it? It’s never going to be yours.”
“You brought it in!” she shrieks. “You let it destroy our lives!”
“What?” Nate demands. “What did I do? You tell me what I did. What did I bring?”
“Monster…” Her voice rises and falls like the roaring tide in a storm. “It’s you, it’s in you!”
“What is it? What is it?”
“ENVY!” The word tears from her chest in an inhuman shriek that should shatter the glass.
“Well,” Envy says. “I guess this is the end.”
Envy is slumped in the doorway, his body is shaking uncontrollably but his chest does not rise and fall. His tongue lolls between his teeth, thin wet tongue like a dog’s, teeth like a shark’s, like a viper’s, like a wolf’s.
“Envy,” Nate reaches a hand out to him. “Are you dying?”
“Don’t die,” Envy pants. “Can’t die. It’s still the end.”
“Are you going to help me?”
Envy closes his eyes, and nods.
“It’s here,” his mother whispers fearfully. “You’re talking to it, it’s here, it’s come. You brought it here.”
“Envy…”
“Do you hate her?” Envy’s voice is ragged and sharp.
Nate gently touches the scar on his forehead, looks at the scars where things were broken and remade. “Yes,” he whispers, heat rising in his throat. “Yes.”
“And she hates you.”
“Yes.”
“She’s ruined you.”
Nate nods. “Yes.”
“Do you want me to take control?”
He hesitates, only for a moment. This is the last chance to turn everything back.
“Yes.”
He closes his eyes to avoid looking at Envy. But he can feel Envy’s hand against his chest, white-hot heat against his heart racing pulsing at the touch. The fire sinks beneath skin and bone, the feeling of fingers wrapping mercilessly around his heart and seeping into the cracks of his body. His vision behind his eyes is seeping slowly into white as Envy took over every cell, pulling some last reserves of strength out of his collapsing self.
Nate thinks that it is like watching the events through a sheer white curtain. He sees, but doesn’t see, the hand that draws a knife from the block. Vaguely through the static of rushing blood in his ears he can hear her laughing hysterically, muttering prayers of Latin, Catholic to the end. Calmly, with Envy’s heat running through his veins, he brings the knife across her throat and the screaming stops in a fountain of blood.
Silent and stoic faced, he stalks down the front hall with the knife dripping on his mother’s clean floor. At the mirror he pauses and tears the cloth away to see the face there. He grins, and the teeth are long and sharp; the skin of his face is traced with spiderweb lines and his eyes are tinged with green. It’s neither Envy nor himself looking back at him.
He continues on and kicks open the living room door to break the lock, the last barrier of his mother. The fog of Envy’s power clears a little; he is a little more himself.
Will is lying on the couch staring at the ceiling. He does not react. Not even when Nate towers over him, holding the knife with waxy blood loosely in his hand.
“Hello, Will.”
Will’s dark eyes flick to his face, ringed with heavy shadows, and they focus on him.
“Hello Nate.”
They stand in silence.
“You aren’t breathing,” Will says finally.
“I know.”
Will’s face is gentle. “Mom always said you were haunted by something.”
Nate’s mouth is dry; he licks his lips. “I am.”
Will nods. “I thought so.”
Nate sits down beside him on the couch, the knife across his knees letting blood seep into his jeans.
“Did you ever see it?” he asks Will. The words are hard to force through the curtain of Envy’s power, but the last remaining parts of himself that recognize Will as his brother are spurring him onward, the need to share one last shard.
“Don’t ask me things that don’t matter,” Will scolds him gently. His eyes trace the patterns of blood on Nate’s face, his shirt and hands, to the knife.
“Did you kill Mom?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“Are you going to kill me?”
Nate swallows, and nods. “Yes.”
Strange, he doesn’t ask about the girl.
“Do you hate me?”
Nate blinks. He doesn’t know how to answer this.
“I thought…how did she know, that teacher, that it was your paper? And Mom…and Emily…” Will smiles sadly. “I could understand why you would envy me. Why you would hate me. Because I think…maybe a little…I always envied you…”
Nate hangs his head. He can’t look at Will anymore.
“Yes,” he says tightly, clutching the knife in his fist.
Will sighs, the sound of the wind on panes of glass.
“I’m so sorry, Nate,” he whispers. “I’m so sorry.”
His hands shaking, Nate raises his face to watch Will, raises the knife over his brother’s heart.
“Hey, Nate,” Will says softly in the moment before the fall. “You’re crying.”
Then the knife is in Will’s heart and his breathing stops. And the room is silent.
---~---
There is a boy in the corner.
The heat is gone but the world is still white the walls are white his clothes are white the floor is white. He is warm here wrapped in white and cradled in the soft pillowy walls which don’t smother but keep him safe from mothers who throw things and break bones and brothers who stand in the sun away from the shadows with green eyes. He snuggles closer to the wall and feels happy. He can’t remember feeling that way before.
Envy is gone; no shadows here to hid behind. Or maybe he is Envy, he is Nate, is he Will? He can’t remember; names and identities don’t matter; no mirrors here, nobody but himself and the white forever and ever, Amen.
He raises his face to the pillow sky and the fluorescent lights.
And he smiles.
---~---
The mirror falls to the ground and shatters.
Notes: I have to say: YES I FINALLY FINISHED! This is the one story that I can trace its origins and development fully, because I started it a long time ago and I went through so many drafts and notes and starts and stoppings.
The idea came from a combination of three things-Dante’s Inferno, which we were studying in class at the time, the idea of personifying the Seven Sins which came from Fullmetal Alchemist, and a short story I read at the time by Edgar Allen Poe called “William Wilson”, which is basically about doppelgangers. In the original notes for the story, the unnamed narrator was haunted by the personification of his own envy. But when I did some research on envy later, it’s not really about the thing that the other person has-it’s about the other person. Really, it wouldn’t matter if anybody else in the world had that thing, only the person being envied.
So from there the idea went to the narrator’s friend as the source of his envy. And because I didn’t think that fit, it was his brother then. And somewhere along the way they became twins. Oh.
Also, abuse/insanity was never part of the original story line. It was more along the lines of possession, which I guess tends to saying Envy was a demon. In the original idea, too, the narrator commits suicide in an attempt to escape, which only leads to him being trapped with Envy after death; Envy would tell him this. This all relates to the Inferno basis, I guess, since that's such a damn religious allegory it makes me want to scream. I'm not really religious, but I do know that Catholics consider suicide an immediate banishment to hell, which is where Envy came from so that's how that all worked. But then we learned about schizophrenia in Psychology and about some of the effects of child abuse and so that became part of Nate’s story, too, and I think that works much better. It seems like he has some sort of weird combination of schizophrenia and a personality disorder; I want to say multiple personality disorder but I don't think that would be quite right, because it's not really that.
Looking at this, having just finished it, there are a lot of things I can think that need to be worked on. But I can’t do it right now.
Hope you liked it!