Pendulous Skin: 1/?
Title: Pendulous Skin
Author: lalalive23
Beta: easilyerased
Prompt/Summary: In which a pair of fraternal twins experience an acute form of extrasensory perception. Brothers Dominic and Matthew, both 19, have been inseparable since birth, sharing their thoughts and emotions in the private way that only twins can. Their lives are mundane and simple, up until the moment one of them is kidnapped.
Rating: R
Pairing: None
Warning: Explicit language, kidnapping, blood, torture
Disclaimer: I don't own Muse. This never happened. However, the vague setting and house discussed in this story is actually a mixture of my hometown and the house I grew up in. So, yeah that shit is real.
Notes: So after losing this entire damn thing, I'm actually enjoying rewriting it. It's been kind of nice to go back and do little things differently. There;s that Thai saying (I think it's Thai) that's like 'same same but different.' This is basically that statement. Cheers to easilyerased for kindly coming to bitread and beta when I was down to the wire. She's a hero <3 I hope you enjoy it!
How strange, to love them both equally; how strange, to love them more, and differently, than the person she had spent years with, building a life, and a future, and a home. How strange that they looked the same, sounded the same, but were meant to be different, unique people. How strangely beautiful they were.
Sweat stung her eyes and her tongue, blurring her universe into a wet canvas of exhaustion, pain, and self-doubt that had been smeared with love.
With love.
She clung to them, perhaps too long and too tightly, their father pacing the floor in anxious footsteps, fingers twitching with impatience to brush the damp lines of their hair. But she clung to them, breathing uneven exhales onto their slick skin, whispering lullabies that surfaced from distant, unused memories of her childhood.
She had been aching for them before she even knew she wanted them.
She was aching in the fear they would soon be gone.
~~~~~~
McGreggor’s Video Store sat on the corner of River and Cavenaugh Road, a mere three blocks from their home. Their footprints, walked in tandem, were burned into the old, brown carpet tracing a map of cinephelia and nights left to their own devices. Standing in front of a shelf lined with VHS tapes labeled ‘Classics,’ they shared only glances of vague interest and quiet understanding. It was nice, Matthew often thought, to never have to ask and never have to repeat himself, when his brother so often finished his thoughts. It was nice to never be disappointed.
His eyes landed on a faded, slightly ripped cover of a film titled Brief Encounter, the tear stretching across the woman’s forehead as though she were scalped. Fascinated, he brought his hand to the film only to brush his fingers against another pair. He laughed, low and deep, a mirror image of the one that resonated in his right ear. Retracting his hand in the same manner as his brother, Matthew sighed, and said ‘probably too dramatic,’ as his brother simultaneously echoed the sentiment.
They wandered aimlessly between the rows, Matthew’s hand outstretched to drag along the smooth plastic of the video cases. It was difficult finding a film they hadn’t seen before, harder still to find a film they both agreed on. Matthew loved horror, Dominic loved comedy, and neither were very keen on historical melodramas. They relied on each other to find the right film, a feeling neither could explain beyond a mutual sense of agreement and calm in the back of their minds.
Matthew came to a stop at the horror section, picking up Night of the Living Dead though he had seen it countless times before. He flipped the box over, eyes roaming over words he had read numerous times, so many times he had them memorized while Dominic continued towards something that caught his eyes. Matthew did not bother to look up, his ears counting the footsteps Dom took down the aisle, catching the slight vibration of his brother’s speech as he spoke to someone. The hairs on his arm stood on end, his peripheral awareness of Dominic pulling them in his direction as though he were a magnet. Decades of such an experience had silenced his questions and he ignored the sensation with a trained nonchalance he’d spent his life perfecting. He would notice it only when it stopped, only when -
there was nothing.
When the hairs on his arm settled back into place, his vision started to blur and his head began to throb. When the tape slipped from his fingers and fell the floor, when his hand gripped the smooth wood of the shelf and his breath began to hitch, that was when he knew.
His free hand came to press its base into his forehead as his eyes squeezed shut. The floor plan of the store drew itself in fogged lines behind Matt’s eyes, his feet guiding him down rows that seemed to stretch on to eternity only because they knew their way without his help. If he thought he were merely ill, he might have been embarrassed by the way he launched himself at the clerk’s desk and asked if he had seen where the blonde went. He might have been concerned when the man, who had known them both since they were children, said he didn’t see Dominic leave.
He might have, but instead he vomited into the bin and passed out cold on the brown carpet he found surprisingly soft.
~~~~~~
The first thing his mind registered was the cold, the kind of cold that made the dry heat of summer feel bearable. Only it wasn’t summer, it was autumn, and dampness of water trickling from dying tree roots had soaked into the concrete.
Concrete. Yes, this was the second thing he noticed.
As the fog in Dominic’s brain slowly lifted, the throb behind his eyes only seemed to worsen, so he kept his eyes shut and listened for the sounds of familiarity. The bottom floor of their garage was made from a similar concrete, the walls of the space paper thin. So he strained his ears for the sound of Matt, stunned his brother hadn’t brought him inside and left him there for his parents to find. He listened for his mother, her light voice echoing through the kitchen, or the wide metal door humming open as it raised to let his father’s car in.
And when the silence continued, he began to worry.
When the throb in his head subsided, he spat up bile onto the floor next to him.
When he rolled back over, he realized he was naked.
And then he began to scream.
~~~~~~~~~
For all their similarities, all the haunting ways they were each other’s mirror, they remained inherently autonomous. Watching from the bay window in the living room, their father could count the innumerable ways they were separated pieces of a person that had become severed. Together, they were a single unit of thought, speech, and action. Apart, they became so wonderfully different he would forget the nights he spent nursing one boy back to sleep calling him the wrong name. Apart, they made him feel so ashamed for sometimes thinking he only had one son.
Because, in truth, it should shock him more that they came together so well. Where Matthew was dark, Dominic was light. Where Matthew’s wit was sharp, Dominic’s wilted under fear of offense. And where Matthew loved the grass, Dominic loved the trees.
And he was climbing, scaling the bark of his favourite tree in their side yard with sure hands and steady feet. He watched his son climb, blonde hair disappearing beyond the shroud of green leaves, beyond branches, into the sky. With nothing left to view, he studied Matthew who laid staring at clouds with his hands behind his head. He made no attempt to join his brother, to watch his climb, no sense of envy or eagerness to follow suit moving his limbs from their statuesque stillness. Matthew, for all his energy, could manage such silence for an eight year old boy
He turned from the window only to glance at the clock before the sounds of his two sons screaming in the same, frantic pitch moved his feet towards the door and out into the yard. By the time he was outside, Dominic was on his feet, holding his wrist as he bit his lip to redirect the pain. Matthew was gasping, holding his wrist as well, and he watched both his boys with a confused and worried glare.
It was clear how Dominic had received the hairline fracture in his wrist, his fall from the tree swift and angled too poorly.
How Matthew received the same injury would forever remain a mystery.
~~~~~~
He never thought he’d feel like the house was hollow, its memories dripping from the walls in an overflow of phantom arguments, Thanksgivings, and birthday celebrations. Staring at the ceiling in his bed, he felt like the silence, its mutated, empty tension, was trying to choke him. The store manager had driven him home, that much he could remember. The orange shade of bile on the manager’s shoes when he opened the door was burned into his memory, too.
He had a drink of water and slice of bread, a dose of advil, and a cold shower. When his mother came home, she was talking into her tape recorder about potential ideas for her next article in Better Homes & Gardens magazine, a brown bag of groceries held tightly against her chest. He’d leaned against the frame of the kitchen and said, ‘Mom, have you heard from Dom?’
But she kept talking, her recorder clutched in one hand while the other pulled out bread, and steak, and the ingredients for a dinner he didn’t want to eat. So instead, he shouted her name and watched her face grow stern.
And he repeated his question, his voice shaking with guilt at her swift change of expression.
And he answered her questions in detail, held her as she began to shake.
And he called his father, told him to come home because it was an emergency.
And he threw up one more time before going to sleep at four in the afternoon, like a toddler going down for a nap as he began to shiver though the heat was already on.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
‘HELLO?’
‘Jesus Christ, IS ANYONE FUCKING LISTEN-‘
Dominic’s voice broke with a painful cough. The pain in his head had vanished, his eyes had adjusted to the dark, and somewhere his internal clock told him that he had been screaming for nearly two hours. The silence was starting to make his ears ring.
He’d sat himself on a piece of torn cardboard he assumed was from a refrigerator box and fashioned poor insulation out of old newspapers. The lining of his throat felt like it was cut and bleeding, his voice growing hoarse and his tongue running dry. There was little in the room, nothing to provide him any sort of clue to where he was or who had taken him. A small flight of stairs led to a wooden door, one that he had tried when he regained some of his strength only to find it locked from the other side. He’d shrunk back to his corner and tried not to view the room as a cell.
After a long stretch of minutes, he heard footsteps bounding down a flight of stairs and come to pause at the door. Raising himself to stand, he wiped his mouth of residual saliva before bringing his hand in front of his dick, a pitiful attempt at maintaining the last shreds of his dignity.
The door opened and shut in one swift motion, a tall, broad shouldered man came to stand in front of him, face covered by a black ski mask.
‘Who are -‘
Dominic’s question died as he was punched in the jaw, his equilibrium thrown. He fell to the floor, palms breaking his fall as he collapsed. There was no time for him to spit out the blood in his mouth, as a steel toe boot met his ribcage.
Again.
And again.
And again.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
He woke with a start, jolting with a force usually reserved for nightmarish sleep rather than the dreamless black he was pulled from. An ache down the right side of his jaw made him moan, a pain in his chest made him sit upright as he massaged his face. It was a different kind of pain in his stomach, one that didn’t make him want to vomit. Instead, he curled into a ball and let out a howled sob.
Matthew staggered down the hall, arm wrapped tightly around his waist. Moving felt like too much work, breathing felt like his lungs had become knives. His mother’s voice was echoing through the house, desperate and frantic. She was pleading with someone on the other line, telling them her story.
‘He’s a teenager! Nineteen years old, blonde, slim. Jim, it’s a small town you know what he looks like! Teenagers don’t just vanish!’
Matthew tuned his mother out to focus on the stairs, trying not to let gravity take hold and drag him down the hardwood, creating bruises upon bruises. It went against every nerve in his body to ignore the frantic urgency pooling in his muscles, and he burned with the desire to run, and shout, and scream that they both needed to be saved. He counted his steps the same way he counted Dominic’s, but everything about the numbers felt wrong. This was not his body, this was Dom’s. This was not his pain, it was Dom’s. And so he clung to the railing, and let the tears fall freely because this was wrong.
He found his mother in the living room, cord of the phone wound around her wrist and her fingers.
It hurt to speak, like he’d been thirsty for days, so instead he said nothing and waited for her to look at him.
‘I don’t care if it’s protocol! Seventy-two hours is- do you know what could happen in that time?’
Her head whipped around when she saw him, her eyes frantic, her skin gleaming with tears.
‘Mom-’
It was all he could manage before he coughed into his hand, blood pouring from his mouth and onto his fingers in a wide spray.
His mother dropped the phone and the house was silent once again.
‘Mom, I think Dom is going to die.’
Author: lalalive23
Beta: easilyerased
Prompt/Summary: In which a pair of fraternal twins experience an acute form of extrasensory perception. Brothers Dominic and Matthew, both 19, have been inseparable since birth, sharing their thoughts and emotions in the private way that only twins can. Their lives are mundane and simple, up until the moment one of them is kidnapped.
Rating: R
Pairing: None
Warning: Explicit language, kidnapping, blood, torture
Disclaimer: I don't own Muse. This never happened. However, the vague setting and house discussed in this story is actually a mixture of my hometown and the house I grew up in. So, yeah that shit is real.
Notes: So after losing this entire damn thing, I'm actually enjoying rewriting it. It's been kind of nice to go back and do little things differently. There;s that Thai saying (I think it's Thai) that's like 'same same but different.' This is basically that statement. Cheers to easilyerased for kindly coming to bitread and beta when I was down to the wire. She's a hero <3 I hope you enjoy it!
How strange, to love them both equally; how strange, to love them more, and differently, than the person she had spent years with, building a life, and a future, and a home. How strange that they looked the same, sounded the same, but were meant to be different, unique people. How strangely beautiful they were.
Sweat stung her eyes and her tongue, blurring her universe into a wet canvas of exhaustion, pain, and self-doubt that had been smeared with love.
With love.
She clung to them, perhaps too long and too tightly, their father pacing the floor in anxious footsteps, fingers twitching with impatience to brush the damp lines of their hair. But she clung to them, breathing uneven exhales onto their slick skin, whispering lullabies that surfaced from distant, unused memories of her childhood.
She had been aching for them before she even knew she wanted them.
She was aching in the fear they would soon be gone.
~~~~~~
McGreggor’s Video Store sat on the corner of River and Cavenaugh Road, a mere three blocks from their home. Their footprints, walked in tandem, were burned into the old, brown carpet tracing a map of cinephelia and nights left to their own devices. Standing in front of a shelf lined with VHS tapes labeled ‘Classics,’ they shared only glances of vague interest and quiet understanding. It was nice, Matthew often thought, to never have to ask and never have to repeat himself, when his brother so often finished his thoughts. It was nice to never be disappointed.
His eyes landed on a faded, slightly ripped cover of a film titled Brief Encounter, the tear stretching across the woman’s forehead as though she were scalped. Fascinated, he brought his hand to the film only to brush his fingers against another pair. He laughed, low and deep, a mirror image of the one that resonated in his right ear. Retracting his hand in the same manner as his brother, Matthew sighed, and said ‘probably too dramatic,’ as his brother simultaneously echoed the sentiment.
They wandered aimlessly between the rows, Matthew’s hand outstretched to drag along the smooth plastic of the video cases. It was difficult finding a film they hadn’t seen before, harder still to find a film they both agreed on. Matthew loved horror, Dominic loved comedy, and neither were very keen on historical melodramas. They relied on each other to find the right film, a feeling neither could explain beyond a mutual sense of agreement and calm in the back of their minds.
Matthew came to a stop at the horror section, picking up Night of the Living Dead though he had seen it countless times before. He flipped the box over, eyes roaming over words he had read numerous times, so many times he had them memorized while Dominic continued towards something that caught his eyes. Matthew did not bother to look up, his ears counting the footsteps Dom took down the aisle, catching the slight vibration of his brother’s speech as he spoke to someone. The hairs on his arm stood on end, his peripheral awareness of Dominic pulling them in his direction as though he were a magnet. Decades of such an experience had silenced his questions and he ignored the sensation with a trained nonchalance he’d spent his life perfecting. He would notice it only when it stopped, only when -
there was nothing.
When the hairs on his arm settled back into place, his vision started to blur and his head began to throb. When the tape slipped from his fingers and fell the floor, when his hand gripped the smooth wood of the shelf and his breath began to hitch, that was when he knew.
His free hand came to press its base into his forehead as his eyes squeezed shut. The floor plan of the store drew itself in fogged lines behind Matt’s eyes, his feet guiding him down rows that seemed to stretch on to eternity only because they knew their way without his help. If he thought he were merely ill, he might have been embarrassed by the way he launched himself at the clerk’s desk and asked if he had seen where the blonde went. He might have been concerned when the man, who had known them both since they were children, said he didn’t see Dominic leave.
He might have, but instead he vomited into the bin and passed out cold on the brown carpet he found surprisingly soft.
~~~~~~
The first thing his mind registered was the cold, the kind of cold that made the dry heat of summer feel bearable. Only it wasn’t summer, it was autumn, and dampness of water trickling from dying tree roots had soaked into the concrete.
Concrete. Yes, this was the second thing he noticed.
As the fog in Dominic’s brain slowly lifted, the throb behind his eyes only seemed to worsen, so he kept his eyes shut and listened for the sounds of familiarity. The bottom floor of their garage was made from a similar concrete, the walls of the space paper thin. So he strained his ears for the sound of Matt, stunned his brother hadn’t brought him inside and left him there for his parents to find. He listened for his mother, her light voice echoing through the kitchen, or the wide metal door humming open as it raised to let his father’s car in.
And when the silence continued, he began to worry.
When the throb in his head subsided, he spat up bile onto the floor next to him.
When he rolled back over, he realized he was naked.
And then he began to scream.
~~~~~~~~~
For all their similarities, all the haunting ways they were each other’s mirror, they remained inherently autonomous. Watching from the bay window in the living room, their father could count the innumerable ways they were separated pieces of a person that had become severed. Together, they were a single unit of thought, speech, and action. Apart, they became so wonderfully different he would forget the nights he spent nursing one boy back to sleep calling him the wrong name. Apart, they made him feel so ashamed for sometimes thinking he only had one son.
Because, in truth, it should shock him more that they came together so well. Where Matthew was dark, Dominic was light. Where Matthew’s wit was sharp, Dominic’s wilted under fear of offense. And where Matthew loved the grass, Dominic loved the trees.
And he was climbing, scaling the bark of his favourite tree in their side yard with sure hands and steady feet. He watched his son climb, blonde hair disappearing beyond the shroud of green leaves, beyond branches, into the sky. With nothing left to view, he studied Matthew who laid staring at clouds with his hands behind his head. He made no attempt to join his brother, to watch his climb, no sense of envy or eagerness to follow suit moving his limbs from their statuesque stillness. Matthew, for all his energy, could manage such silence for an eight year old boy
He turned from the window only to glance at the clock before the sounds of his two sons screaming in the same, frantic pitch moved his feet towards the door and out into the yard. By the time he was outside, Dominic was on his feet, holding his wrist as he bit his lip to redirect the pain. Matthew was gasping, holding his wrist as well, and he watched both his boys with a confused and worried glare.
It was clear how Dominic had received the hairline fracture in his wrist, his fall from the tree swift and angled too poorly.
How Matthew received the same injury would forever remain a mystery.
~~~~~~
He never thought he’d feel like the house was hollow, its memories dripping from the walls in an overflow of phantom arguments, Thanksgivings, and birthday celebrations. Staring at the ceiling in his bed, he felt like the silence, its mutated, empty tension, was trying to choke him. The store manager had driven him home, that much he could remember. The orange shade of bile on the manager’s shoes when he opened the door was burned into his memory, too.
He had a drink of water and slice of bread, a dose of advil, and a cold shower. When his mother came home, she was talking into her tape recorder about potential ideas for her next article in Better Homes & Gardens magazine, a brown bag of groceries held tightly against her chest. He’d leaned against the frame of the kitchen and said, ‘Mom, have you heard from Dom?’
But she kept talking, her recorder clutched in one hand while the other pulled out bread, and steak, and the ingredients for a dinner he didn’t want to eat. So instead, he shouted her name and watched her face grow stern.
And he repeated his question, his voice shaking with guilt at her swift change of expression.
And he answered her questions in detail, held her as she began to shake.
And he called his father, told him to come home because it was an emergency.
And he threw up one more time before going to sleep at four in the afternoon, like a toddler going down for a nap as he began to shiver though the heat was already on.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
‘HELLO?’
‘Jesus Christ, IS ANYONE FUCKING LISTEN-‘
Dominic’s voice broke with a painful cough. The pain in his head had vanished, his eyes had adjusted to the dark, and somewhere his internal clock told him that he had been screaming for nearly two hours. The silence was starting to make his ears ring.
He’d sat himself on a piece of torn cardboard he assumed was from a refrigerator box and fashioned poor insulation out of old newspapers. The lining of his throat felt like it was cut and bleeding, his voice growing hoarse and his tongue running dry. There was little in the room, nothing to provide him any sort of clue to where he was or who had taken him. A small flight of stairs led to a wooden door, one that he had tried when he regained some of his strength only to find it locked from the other side. He’d shrunk back to his corner and tried not to view the room as a cell.
After a long stretch of minutes, he heard footsteps bounding down a flight of stairs and come to pause at the door. Raising himself to stand, he wiped his mouth of residual saliva before bringing his hand in front of his dick, a pitiful attempt at maintaining the last shreds of his dignity.
The door opened and shut in one swift motion, a tall, broad shouldered man came to stand in front of him, face covered by a black ski mask.
‘Who are -‘
Dominic’s question died as he was punched in the jaw, his equilibrium thrown. He fell to the floor, palms breaking his fall as he collapsed. There was no time for him to spit out the blood in his mouth, as a steel toe boot met his ribcage.
Again.
And again.
And again.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
He woke with a start, jolting with a force usually reserved for nightmarish sleep rather than the dreamless black he was pulled from. An ache down the right side of his jaw made him moan, a pain in his chest made him sit upright as he massaged his face. It was a different kind of pain in his stomach, one that didn’t make him want to vomit. Instead, he curled into a ball and let out a howled sob.
Matthew staggered down the hall, arm wrapped tightly around his waist. Moving felt like too much work, breathing felt like his lungs had become knives. His mother’s voice was echoing through the house, desperate and frantic. She was pleading with someone on the other line, telling them her story.
‘He’s a teenager! Nineteen years old, blonde, slim. Jim, it’s a small town you know what he looks like! Teenagers don’t just vanish!’
Matthew tuned his mother out to focus on the stairs, trying not to let gravity take hold and drag him down the hardwood, creating bruises upon bruises. It went against every nerve in his body to ignore the frantic urgency pooling in his muscles, and he burned with the desire to run, and shout, and scream that they both needed to be saved. He counted his steps the same way he counted Dominic’s, but everything about the numbers felt wrong. This was not his body, this was Dom’s. This was not his pain, it was Dom’s. And so he clung to the railing, and let the tears fall freely because this was wrong.
He found his mother in the living room, cord of the phone wound around her wrist and her fingers.
It hurt to speak, like he’d been thirsty for days, so instead he said nothing and waited for her to look at him.
‘I don’t care if it’s protocol! Seventy-two hours is- do you know what could happen in that time?’
Her head whipped around when she saw him, her eyes frantic, her skin gleaming with tears.
‘Mom-’
It was all he could manage before he coughed into his hand, blood pouring from his mouth and onto his fingers in a wide spray.
His mother dropped the phone and the house was silent once again.
‘Mom, I think Dom is going to die.’