Night and Day
Not my characters, I don’t own the OC and I'm not making a penny from this story.
Rating: M, I think. I’m not sure how old you need to be to hear the F word without being scarred.
This is a very strange AU in which Ryan and Seth are twins adopted by the Cohens. Oh, and they’re conjoined. They retain their same physical characteristics as in canon, apart from being stuck together (which is scientifically impossible, they'd have to be identical, but hey, it’s a story about the OC characters as conjoined twins, so I assume you’ll let that and a lot of other inconsistencies go).
Part 1
We’ve always been together. I mean this literally when I say it. I mean it in a way that no one but Seth can really understand.
I love the early hours of the morning when the sun has barely risen, and the alarm is hours from going off.
This is my time.
Sometimes I’ll catch up on some reading or take advantage of the solitude to write an email without distraction, but mostly I just bask in the silence.
I can almost imagine that I’m truly alone.
As soon as the clock radio flips on- some random indie station Seth chose- it begins. His eyes open, then his mouth opens and it’s off to the races.
I love him. He’s a part of me in spirit as well as body, but in my dreams we are always separate, running fast and free.
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They aren’t exactly sure when we were born.
There’s a yellowed clipping in the back of our baby book. ‘Two Headed Infant Found in Casino Parkade’.
Ahh, memories.
It’s from the Fresno Republican, not the National Enquirer as Seth may lead you to believe. The article’s dated March 8th, sixteen years ago.
A lifetime ago.
We celebrate our birthday in July, on the day we came to live with the Cohens.
If you ask Seth where he was born, he’ll say Berkeley. I have to side with him on this one; we don’t talk about Fresno much.
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School’s pretty good.
When we enrolled at Harbour, there were whispers and staring. Lots of staring.
On our first day some Einstein on the water polo team was laughing at us, and even pinched me to ‘see if I was real’; he wasn’t laughing after I decked him, though. Seth still jokes that I better start talking more, so no one else thinks I’m his giant ventriloquist dummy.
Eventually the novelty of our physiology wore off (helped by my fists and Seth’s tongue), and now we’re more or less ignored by everyone outside of our small circle of friends. This suits us just fine.
The classes are fairly challenging, but I can hold my own. I let Seth copy my calculus, in exchange for his hauling ass to keep up in gym. He insists if circumstances were different, he would only get virtual exercise in the form of PS3.
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Part 2
Our parents are awesome; not our biological parents who left us in a sketchy parking lot when we were born, but the Cohens who took us in.
We’ve never been a ‘medical miracle’ or a ‘biological anomaly’ to them, we’ve always just been Ryan and Seth, run of the mill siamese twins whom they love unconditionally and are fiercely protective of.
In return, they’ve always just been mom and dad.
We were just babies when we were adopted, and like most people we have few memories from the time before teeth.
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I like the darkness- not in a villainous, Green Goblin kind of way- I just like the late evening hours best. My imagination seems to click on as soon as my brother falls asleep, which is usually like before 10 o’clock. God, that dude sleeps a lot.
It’s not like I never have silence when he’s awake, it’s no secret that I’m the conversationalist and Ryan is pretty much a vault, but for some reason the ideas flow better when I’m the only one awake. Maybe I’m getting more of the oxygen, who knows.
We’re separate in my drawings. We don’t even appear in the same frames.
Fists is out saving pretty ladies from the bad guys, and Rewind rides his flying skateboard through time, fixing the past and undoing wrongs before they even happen. Between the two of them nerds don’t get beat up, poor people don’t get robbed, and babies are never left in parkades.
Newtopia is the perfect society, and the people are perfect too. They only come in singles. No two packs allowed.
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The most beautiful girl sits in front of us in Biology.
Her name is Summer and she can’t even look at me- at us.
Passing us in the hall she quickly averts her gaze, pretending not to notice the two stuck together guys that are impossible to miss.
Once I made a prototype of a pair of conjoined girlfriends for us. It’s basically two Summers stuck together. Ryan found the sketches and couldn’t stop laughing. I ripped up the pictures and he said he wouldn’t have dated a girl named ‘Winter’ anyway.
Winter was just a clone in any case, and everyone knows clones are creepy and not quite right and will turn on you in the end, like a robot that gets too smart. She was just there to keep Ryan busy while Summer and I fooled around.
When I dream of Summer, it’s just me and her.
Her perfect lips find mine… and we kiss, and we fuck, and our hearts beat really fast.
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I can’t survive without Ryan.
I don’t mean that in the minty, ‘he completes me’ kind of way, but literally in the ‘my heart is wimpy and small and I depend on his circulatory system to stay alive’ kind of way.
A few cuts of the scalpel, bandages and stitches are all that separates Ryan from freedom.
But then he would walk out of the hospital alone- not ‘I’m no longer physically attached to my brother’ alone, but ‘only child’ alone.
And he won’t do it.
The End