It'll come unravelled one day
She knows that, once upon a time, she would have had nothing to say.
No, that’s a lie.
She would have had everything to say- she would have said it all and then some.
But she couldn’t.
*
Caspica had grown. She remembered when the old city had crumbled and this new place was little more than the refugees who refused to leave. Now it is a prospering city, surviving and thriving little by little with the help and guidance of the people.
New Caspica. She crinkled her nose with a hidden smile. She supposed there were worse things to call it. In a way it was fitting, and in a way it was not. She just wished it didn’t remind her of before so much. She walks through it a wolf amoung sheep.
After a certain point she can feel the difference in the city, and she knows her brother has been here. It feels like him.
Mechanical, cold, complex. Desperate. She walks into a courtyard of no withstanding importance and all around her the buildings hum with a power she may or may not understand, but can certainly feel. Her brother has been here. This place is a cocoon of metal and walls. Of barriers and tripwires, laced over doorframes and plugged into sockets that go nowhere and do nothing.
This place does nothing but sing silent electric symphonies. Of what, she cannot say.
*
There is a news stand in this place. The only place left with life inside it. She knows why and pities the poor man sitting behind the green wooden bench. There has to be a doorway, after all. Her brother has lived too long with his paranoia and pain to never leave a way out anymore.
She smiles sadly to the man and hopes that his obvious uncomfortable shuffle is not because of her. The stress from both of them could very well tear him apart, so she tries to be as gentle as possible.
“Where?”
Her voice is soft, but still dips into static. An interrupted flow. The man looks like he is about to cry, or scream, or both. She places one hand softly on his, tries to make it painless. He whimpers once, then points behind her. She doesn’t need to see.
She walks away and he falls onto the faded green bench.
*
A thousand hundred million years ago, in another life she would have been upset
even angry
But enough war and struggle and responsibility has hardened her
and the only compassion she can muster anymore is to at least make it painless for those she has to tear through
to find her brother.
*
The door was not there. Not obviously, not physically, not how you would think. There is a pocket, shoved in between two pages. A bubble of reality shoved somewhere it does not belong. The air stretched like time and the pungent smell of the metallic courtyard hovered- frozen. The metallic smell that is indistinguishable between wet steel or blood. Once upon a time she would have been worried about not knowing the difference. The smell of one is as common as the other, as interchangeable as rain and sea.
Peeling away layers reveals more than just time- more than space or flow or power. The feeling of each layer is nonexistently thin, but impossible to peel away without feeling the desperation in it. He had wanted to hide so badly, he left the emotion in the lock. She knew it too.
Layer by layer, lock by lock
Piece
By
Piece
Until all it took was the gentle push.
*
It looked exactly like before. Before, back even before the wars or gods or madness. He sat on the edge of the balcony. His favourite spot. He could see everything and no-one could see him.
He did not react. She knew that it had been so long since he had moved he refused to partly out of fear, but mostly from that insatiable curiosity that had plagued him. Hopefully that still did.
She does not move through the room, rather the shape and contour of the building revolves and undulates around her until the siblings are next to each other. She did not remember him being this small...before. Not even that far back. His hunched shoulder just barely reaches her knee. The smallness is reactive, but it still concerns her the most.
The world around her continues to warp and grow, evolving and mutating and spawning around the two of them. She shapes the writhing colour around her with memory. Trees grow, die and fall while buildings scramble over each other to reach an impossible sky. Everything is silent, fast and wild. Not a sound is made while the world around them stretches outward and onward. She leaves the balcony alone. Leaves the small grey and green corner of her brothers’ mind still. He needs an anchor.
She wills air into this world. Salt and breeze mixes with the metallic blood-steel oxygen and peels away the greyness like paint off of old walls.
Silence, but for a rustle of leaves and crashing waves. The invisible ocean churns under their feet and through the unnecessary structure of the building. Lyrin feels the momentum through the tiny details of his cocoon.
He raises his head from his arms, and sees the place his sister has made for him. Again. Brought back for him, to see again. To enjoy and remember but never to have again, to find comfort in memory but never allowed to re-live. The invisible ocean vibrates around them both and they sit in silence.
He can see it, only because he knows it is there. He can see it, only because the rustle of trees and the roar of the sea and the creak of millions of feet of steel and concrete are surrounding him everywhere. He looks out into the small slivers of colour in his grey and green world with eyes that he knows he should not have anymore.
But when he looks over to his sister they are still wide, round, ringed with purple splotches and as grey as both of them remember. He is the twenty-five year old boy hiding in his room and playing with computers, eyes swathed with violet from too many sleepless nights and a paranoia that only results in stress.
She misses this face. She misses it even though she knows the face she is staring at now is false and stitched together only with stubborn will and a longing that will never cease.
The sister gives her brother a smile, stretching around a stream of tears. She can tell him now- everything they would want to hear. Everything he expects her to say, everything he expects to hear. Everything from a world that has burned and wasted and is too far gone to pretend it existed. Even the dust is gone.
She reaches out a hand and takes her brothers’ small fingers in hers, enjoying the falseness and lies of the world they have re-created, if only just for a little bit.