Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

White’s father had been telling him to forget about his brother for the past ten years. “I haven’t heard from Black or your mother in so long,” he’d say. “You’re better off forgetting about him. I’m sure he’s forgotten about you by now.”

As if. White had never believed it, but now that he was actually outside the garage where his brother supposedly was — well. He hoped he wasn’t wrong.

Todd had said the garage was rundown, not in a great part of town, but White hadn’t cared. If his brother was there, that was what mattered. Todd had said Black got himself involved in some dangerous and potentially illegal shit, that he was running with some dangerous friends, but Black had always protected him before. And even if he didn’t now, well. It didn’t matter. The stranger that was his brother was inside.

“Hello,” he called through the open garage bay doors, then ducked inside.

“Hello, welcome,” someone — not his brother — called, rounding the corner. “How can I help you — Black? Aren’t you washing cars today?”

White’s heart gave a ridiculous little leap. “He’s here?” Then, “I’m his brother, Khun. I’m looking for him.”

“I didn’t know Black had a twin,” the man said, wiping his greasy hands on his coveralls. He must work at this garage.

White never knew what to say when people said this. “Since birth.”

“Black,” the man called over his shoulder. “Your brother is here for you.”

“What,” someone called, someone that sounded like his brother, and White let himself smile as Black rounded the corner.

He looked like he should. Maybe this was weird to think, since White had no idea how Black was going to grow up, but he looked right, somehow. Hands smeared with grease, same as the old flannel he was wearing, and something flinty and sharp in his eyes. It just made sense.

“What the fuck,” Black said flatly, stopping short. He looked at the other man, then back to White. “Hia, did you do this?”

“How the fuck would I do this,” the man in coveralls said, rolling his eyes. “He’s your twin.”

“Sure,” Black said, coming a little closer. Eyes narrowed, pinning White in place.

“Hi, phi,” White said weakly. He’d kind of been hoping for a hug, or a smile or even the way Black’s face would smooth out when they were kids, gentle and almost imperceptible to anyone but White. The way that White could know Black cared about him, more than anything. “I’m… back?”

“Yeah, who the fuck are you then?”

White flinched. He’d at least thought that Black would be happy to see him, not mad enough that he’d pretend White didn’t exist to his face. “Phi, please.”

“I don’t have a little brother,” Black replied. He grabbed White’s chin and tilted his head around, inspecting White’s face, like White was prey in his brother’s hand instead of family. “You do look just like me, though.”

White swallowed hard. “P’Black, come on,” he said. His hands were shaking. “I tried so hard to find you, I’m sorry it took so long—”

Black’s jagged nails dug into White’s cheek, bright electric pinpricks. “Yeah, where have you been all my life, brother mine?”

White couldn’t help it, he started crying. “You said you didn’t blame me for that,” he said, because Black had.

After they drowned, when their parents started talking about White going to Russia, White had nightmares every single night. Usually it was the other way around, Black having nightmares and White crawling into his bed. This time, the last time, Black had to keep coaxing White back to sleep and promising him that it wasn’t his fault. “They were always going to find out, they just want an excuse to get divorced,” he’d said. “It’s not your fault. It’s better that we have it.”

White believed him because he always believed him, because Black didn’t lie to him.

But Black was mad. Black didn’t forgive him for getting them separated after all.

“Don’t come back around here again,” Black said after a moment, throwing White’s face away and stalking back out the door.

White lifted a hand to his face, shocked. The pain was already fading away, a negligible thing if not for the intent behind it. “But,” he said, already starting to follow Black, because he’d never actually listened when Black said this, when they were kids; when Black wanted alone time, that had never once meant White.

“Oh, no you don’t,” the man in coveralls said, hauling White back. “He’s in a mood.”

“Oh, but that’s not—” White said, struggling a little and then giving up when the hand on his upper arm did not so much as flinch. “He doesn’t mean that.” Not for me.

The man stared down at him. “Guess you didn’t leave things on good terms last time you talked?”

With the car door dividing them, as they hold hands through the window? The way their mother had jerked Black back by the collar of his shirt and said, “Say goodbye. Now.” And the car started moving before either of them could say anything else

“I guess not,” he said.

“Come back tomorrow,” the man in coveralls said. “What’s your name?”

“White.”

“Black and White?”

“That’s right.”

The man shook his head, grinning. “Cute,” he said. “Well. Try again tomorrow when he’s less likely to explode.”

White stared at the door that Black had slammed behind him and didn’t see that he had any other option.

His father fussed over the three red half-moon marks on White’s cheek when he came home later. “What did you do,” he said, worrying, tilting White’s head gently to the side to inspect the marks. A lot more gently than Black had grabbed him.

White chose the path of least resistance. “I was just picking at my skin, Pa,” he lied.

His father clicked his tongue, immediately more interested in scolding then worrying. “I thought we had gotten you to stop that,” he said, dropping White’s chin. “Son, that’s a disgusting habit, you can’t pick it back up again now that you’re back home.”

His father had spent three years curing white of this habit. “I’ll try,” White promised, rubbing at his face.

Later, in the bathroom mirror, he inspected his face. Black’s face. The three marks left behind where White’s own fingers fit perfectly. The first time his brother had touched him in ten years.

Did Black feel it, when he dug his fingers in?

White, as asked, was back the next day. He went straight in this time, catching what must be half the employees on their lunch break, crowded around an old leather couch and Black sitting on a crate at the head of the table, arguing with someone.

One of them looked up, jaw dropping. “What the fuck, hia,” he said. “You said Black’s brother, not his twin.”

“Sorry,” the man from yesterday said dryly, passing out beers. “I’ll be more specific next time. I think I got the important part across, no?”

“I don’t think so!”

White already did not want to be here. There was a familiar exasperation edging at the back of his mind, the way everyone reacted like they’d never met twins before, and even when they were little, he never fit in with Black’s friends. They were always louder than him and rougher than him, and Black fit in anywhere, and White never did.

Black stood, everyone falling quiet. Black had that effect on people.

“You again,” Black said with disdain, picking his way around his friend’s legs to come right up to White again, like a tiger investigating his dinner.

“Me again,” White agreed, putting his head in the tiger’s mouth. “Sorry.”

“Anyone ever tell you you apologize way too fucking much?”

“Yes. You, all the time.”

“Did I,” Black said, unimpressed.

White shrugged.

“Leave.” Black waved his hand back towards the open bay doors, the sunlight streaming through warm on White’s back. “Now.”

But I don’t want to, White thought immediately, which was a little too pathetic, a little too childish to actually say. Maybe before he wouldn’t have minded Black seeing him that way — how could he? — but now that Black was insistent on rejecting him, he didn’t want to reveal his pathetic hand so early. Maybe he did need Black more than Black needed him, but he didn’t have to reveal it to all of Black’s friends. He didn’t want to cry in front of them either. “We need to talk first.”

They could at least have that, if they were in the same city.

Black stared at him, eyes narrowed and jaw working. “Why,” he said eventually, the words flat and undemanding.

“Black,” White snapped, like a wounded animal lashing out. But Black didn’t want an answer, White didn’t even think he wanted to twist the knife he’d just stuck in White’s gut — why? — so much as he just genuinely didn’t see a reason for it. To him, White had been reduced down to a childhood memory that needn’t be revisited.

Something in Black snapped too, the set of his face empty. He dug his fingers into White’s shoulder and twisted him around, towards the door.

The second time his brother touched him in ten years and he was forcing White out.

“Don’t come back,” Black said, shoving White out the doors.

He didn’t close the door behind him. He just expected that White would do what he was told and leave, and it was true that when they were kids, maybe White would have listened — but he wouldn’t have. Black was his big brother, true, but they were the exact same age and White didn’t ever listen to him if he didn’t want to. Black either expected it now because he expected everyone to listen to his orders or because he, like White, had forgotten the true shape of his brother.

White remembered Black much kinder.

“Do you seriously have to be so mean to your brother,” one of the guys inside the garage said, voice floating. “He’s got your face and everything.”

“Shut up.”

“No, really—he’s so… clean.” That was a different voice, laughter barely concealed. “You’re nothing alike! I didn’t know you could look so cute, you know—”

“He looked like—”

“All of you shut up,” Black said, voice harsh and commanding like running up against a concrete wall.

It used to be a little softer, when he talked to White. He always had that tone, the tone you couldn’t argue with, but White had used to argue, and Black would soften when he did. Just a little. Now Black was blank, his eyes like flat black rocks when he looked at White. And maybe it was naïve to hope that nothing would have changed after ten years — how could it have stayed the same? — but White, at least, had never been able to carve away the part of himself that had a brother.

White swallowed hard, turning to walk away. He didn’t want to keep hearing Black’s friends laugh at him and he lived here now. He had plenty of time to convince Black to change his mind.

It should feel less like giving up to walk away, then, but it didn’t.

White didn’t feel someone lift his wallet. He did get a few steps away and realize his back pocket was lighter than normal, though. He turned around immediately and saw one of Black’s friends holding up his brown leather wallet.

“Hey,” White said, frowning. “That’s mine.”

“What language is this,” the guy said, clearly inspecting White’s Russian ID. “You not Thai?”

“I lived in Russia until recently.” Short and to the point. Black clearly hadn’t told any of his friends about White, not that White had told anyone about Black, and this was a normal explanation for people to accept.

“Did you,” the guy said, grinning. “Was that cool?”

“Cold, even.”

The guy laughed, passing the wallet back to White. “I like you, you’re way funnier than Black,” he said. “I’m Yok.”

“White.”

“Black and White?” Yok didn’t pause for White to answer, just continued to bulldoze. “Black asked me to make sure you got to the bus stop alright, but I think you’re probably fine.”

Warmth spread through White, the sun coming out after a long day of clouds. “P’Black asked for that?”

“Well, he didn’t really ask so much as make me,” Yok said, voice a little bitter. “Said he didn’t trust you as far as he could throw you, but I think he really thought you were going to get robbed.”

“I did, technically.”

“I gave it back!”

“Thank you for that,” White said, meaning it. “Black doesn’t like it when his friends rob me.”

Yok widened his eyes. “That happen a lot?”

White shrugged. Not anymore. The last person who had robbed White had ended up with a broken arm once Black found out about it, no matter that they’d been friends since the start of the school year. Black was always finding new friends to get in trouble with. They’d been eleven, and it had worried their parents. “I can get to the bus stop by myself,” he said, tucking the wallet back into his pocket. “But thanks.”

“Naw, I’ll walk with you,” Yok said, falling into step with him. “I’m going home too anyways! I broke my bike so hia has to fix it and I’m on the bus. You don’t look like a bus kind of guy.”

“I don’t have a Thai license yet,” White said, instead of explaining that he was too paranoid about what his father might find out.

“You should get one.”

“I know,” White said, because he had been putting it off for a month and his father had also been getting on him about it.

Yok kept him company the entire way to the bus stop, then on the bus too, constantly chatting. He was nice, White decided on the bus, even if he had robbed White. He couldn’t really see how Black and Yok were friends — Yok talked too much for someone like Black, and when he talked about Black specifically, he clearly only wanted to know the answer to his questions to have some ammo. But he was at least a part of Black’s life that was here.

“Will you tell Black I’ll come back on Wednesday?” White had work the rest of the week, grueling hours, and his father wanted him at dinner with some old colleagues tomorrow. And Wednesday, of course, would be drinks.

“Why not tomorrow?”

“I work,” White said, then, “Yok, you’re holding the bus up.”

“Oh!” Yok hopped off the bus, hollering see you Wednesday! as the bus took White away.

Two days away from Black and White felt the absence keenly, like a thin sharp blade against his neck. When he swallowed, he felt the distance; when he turned on his heel as a coworker called him, he felt unsettled. He hadn’t felt like that in so long and just seeing Black for a bare minimum of five minutes had completely torn him apart.

Did Black not miss him? They may have grown used to being apart but White was bleeding out, the wound reopened, and he didn’t know if Black felt anything at all.

“You again,” one of Black’s friends said when White came in on Wednesday, leaning up for a motorcycle. “You’re stubborn, huh.”

White shrugged. “Is he here?”

“Yup,” the guy said, looking White up and down. “Where’d you fucking come from, a wedding?”

White rolled his eyes. He was wearing a suit, having just come from work. “I work in an office,” he said. “Where’s Black?”

“Not here yet,” the guy said, shrugging. “Want a smoke?”

White sighed. He’d taken a gamble and now he was remembering why he never made bets. When it came to his brother, he was never ever lucky. “Thank you, no.”

The guy rolled his eyes, pulling a cigarette case out of his pocket. “It’s just a cigarette, not a life debt.” He held it out, a swipe of grease transferred from his hands to the filter. “I’m not gonna charge you. Even though you look like you can fucking pay.”

“I just don’t smoke,” White clarified, cataloging this guy’s relationship and Black’s relationship as pretty bad. He shouldn’t be surprised. Even to friends — even to his brother — Black could be unbearably harsh, and White had already clocked the small, busy garage as one of those small places where everyone was family.

The guy shrugged and stuck it in his mouth. “I’m Sean.”

“White.”

“Black and White?”

White hadn’t minded the first one, because it was familiar in a way very little had been the past ten years, but now that he was on joke three, he realized he hadn’t actually hadn’t missed these jokes at all. “Black didn’t tell you?”

“Nope. He said if we talked to you at all, he’d kill us.” Sean grinned. “So.”

“So you’re talking to me,” White surmised. Why not. It wasn’t his problem if Sean wanted to get his face caved in. He’d find it funny if he weren’t the focus of the interrogation, but he hardly felt he could handle a mean comment without crumbling to pieces, let alone a lot of prying questions about him and Black.

Sean grinned. “We all want to know how Black pissed you off so bad.”

“Me?” How’d they get that idea? The last time White was here, Black barely bothered to talk to him, everyone had made fun of him, White nearly cried, and Black had physically shoved him out the door.

“Yeah, you just kept arguing with him,” Sean said, blowing out smoke. White coughed, delicately, and Sean obligingly held the cigarette father away. “So we figured you were mad.”

White stared at him, discomfited. He hadn’t realized he was but there it was, like pulling back the covers and finding something had made a nest in his sheets. “Well,” he said. “That’s really not your business.”

“You shouldn’t be saying anything at all,” Black said.

White hadn’t noticed anyone come in. But there Black was, staring White down, even as the older one, the one they all called hia, pulled him back by the shoulder.

“White,” the man said. “Nice to see you again.”

“Thank you,” White said, and realized he hadn’t actually asked the man’s name either of the previous times he’d been in here. “I’m so sorry, I actually didn’t get your name last time?”

“Ah, it’s Gumpa, but the boys call me hia,” Gumpa said, unbothered. “You can too.”

“No the fuck he can’t, hia,” Black snapped, and White winced. He’d kill for Black to call him nong again, to be so familiar. He was so familiar with everyone here; they argued with him and put their hands on his shoulder and understood at least some of him, even if he never explained it, which was more than White could say at this moment. He’d settled for Black just using his name.

“We really need to talk,” White insisted. Behind him, Sean let out a quiet laugh, and White realized this must be what he was talking about, just his continued insistence that they talk. Sean took that as anger instead of begging.

“No.”

“We have to.”

“Let me guess, you’re not going away until we do.”

White nodded. He tried to temper it, to not unveil the sharp, brutal anger that he hadn’t thought himself capable of before just a few minutes ago. He didn’t want to waste time being angry. All things considered, he’d really have his brother in his life than out of it, any of him, no matter what he had to put aside to win this. “Please.”

Black inspected him.

“How did you find me,” Black said after a moment, clicking his jaw the way he always did. It always reminded White a little of a snake, like Black might just decide to open his mouth and swallow him whole.

“Oh,” White said. “I saw Todd at a party last week and he told me where you were.”

He got no warning. Black just moved, like a lightning strike.

White choked before he realized what was happening, the line of Black’s arm a bar across his windpipe. Strangulation felt strangely like drowning again.

“Tell me what the fuck Todd send you for,” Black snarled, his mouth an angry smear.

White couldn’t. Couldn’t even think, really. Black forced all the air in his body out, sent his head spinning and his eyes rolling to the back of his head. His body didn’t know he couldn’t breathe and he kept trying, only to meet unrelenting force. The edges of his vision went blurred, hot tears dripping down his cheeks and Black’s eyes widening back, his own face red—

“What are you doing to me,” Black choked out, hands loosening and White, just before he really passed out, realized why—

“Black!” Gumpa shoved Black away handily, shoving him across the room.

Dizzying relief flooded White’s lungs.

“Fuck, Black, what’s wrong with you,” Gumpa said, digging his fingers into Black’s shoulder.

White slumped against the wall, the room spinning and spotted black. His lungs didn’t want to work right, every breathe a cough — and it ached — and he also could not stop himself from breathing, even though it hurt and every cough pressurized his head.

Even when he breathed in, it didn’t feel like relief. It didn’t even feel like breathing.

Black was breathing harsh too, his face a suffocating red. “What did you fucking do to me,” he said again, voice hoarse.

We match, White thought hysterically. He hadn’t said anything yet, but if he did, they would. They would still match.

“Hey, hey,” someone said, swooping in to help him sit because he could just slide down the wall into a crumbled pile.

“Sean,” White managed to say and he shouldn’t have tried to say anything at all because it felt like he was talking with a boot pressed to his throat, and White was going to explode right here in the garage from the pressure.

The drowning had hurt less.

“Yeah,” Sean said, rubbing his back and actually sounding sympathetic. “He really fucked you up. Can you breathe okay?”

White nodded — that hurt too — then raised his hand to his throat, like he could hold it together until it worked right, except his hand fit perfectly exactly everywhere that it hurt.

Because they were twins.

Black swam into focus, an angry smear as he tried to get back to White. See, White thought dimly. He has to come back to take care of me.

But they were still being separated, Gumpa and another guy holding Black back, their arms caging him in. Sean’s hand on White’s shoulder keeping him in place. Even together, they were apart, how could Black not be mad—

“You can’t just fucking let that go, hia—” Black was saying, jabbing his finger over Gumpa’s shoulder.

Right. Black did this. They weren’t separated, Black was separating them. Last time they drowned, it was White’s fault; this time, Black had done it to him.

“—the fuck is wrong with you,” Yok was yelling, “You nearly killed him—”

But Black couldn’t have been trying to kill him. He couldn’t have been.

“I’m fine,” White rasped out. Sean winced. No one else heard him, his voice was so strained. “I’m fine,” he tried again, louder, which just made him start coughing again.

“Stop that,” Sean said.  

“It is not fine.” Gumpa shoved Black behind him again. “White. Let me see your throat.”

White leant back against the wall, Sean still mostly holding him upright, and let Gumpa inspect his throat, rough fingers gentle as White breathed in and out and let the room focus around him. “Get him some water, Yok,” he said.

“You don’t even know him, hia,” Black said darkly, and White stared at him.

Maybe Black had been trying to kill him. Maybe Black didn’t think anymore that if White died, he’d too. Was that why Black wanted them apart, because the connection between them had always been so dangerous, their parents always speaking in quiet whispers about how far it could go—

“I’m fine,” White said, waving off the water bottle Yok tried to hand to him. This statement was betrayed by his legs as he tried to get up, even as he braced his hand against the wall.

“You’re not fine,” Yok said, sticking the water bottle against White’s face.

“I’ll come back tomorrow.” He clearly couldn’t leave Black alone for long.

“You are fucking insane,” Sean said, right as Black yelled, “I’ll kill you for real if I see you here tomorrow! The fuck did you do to me?”

“Sean,” Gumpa said, voice dark like a storm with anger, “Drive him home.”

“I’m really fine.”

“You just got strangled. Sean’s driving you home.”

White managed a tired nod. Everything made him hurt. Sean helping him off the floor made him hurt, being ushered into the front seat of the truck made him hurt and he couldn’t hold his head up. His temple dropped against the window, his hand still on his throat. And staring at Black yelling at his friend, the one who held him back, through the window as the truck pulled away—

It hurt.

White knew what set his brother off; he just didn’t know why. Todd was the only reason White had even found Black. Their father had no answers he was willing to give, Black had no social media that White could find, and their mother was no easier to talk to then she’d been ten years ago.

Of course she wouldn’t just tell him where Black was.

“It’s better off if you forget about him,” she said kindly, parroting exactly what her ex-husband said, like maybe they’d actually kept in touch all these years just to coordinate keeping their sons apart. “Black has his own life, you should live yours.”

“That will be up to me and Black,” White had said, sitting across the desk from her, because he’d had to come to her public office to see her. The staff had just let him walk in, calling him by his brother’s name.

She shook her head, earrings tapping against her cheek. “I’m sorry, White,” she said, and to her credit, she sounded it. “I’m trying to save you some heartbreak. He won’t be happy to see you.”

“Okay,” White said, and left with no goodbye.

At the time, White thought it funny that she thought he would trust that. He only came to her because he had no other choice.

It was Todd who actually had the answers. White had been at some work party and someone had smoothed a hand over the shoulder of his suit jacket, overly familiar. “Wow,” this person said, and White was already leaning away before the grown-up face matched the childish one in his mind. He hadn’t thought about Todd in years. “You really do look exactly like him.”

White nearly dropped his glass of wine. “You’ve seen Black?”

White hadn’t even thought about contacting any of his old friends from childhood — surely some of them would have gone to high school with Black, knew a little bit more about him. But as it was, White hadn’t thought about any of their friends in ten years.

And here was Todd, holding a champagne glass. “Not lately,” he said, grinning. “He’s mad at me.”

White did not, frankly, care. “Do you know where I can find him?”

And Todd did. He told White where Black went to school and the name of a few of his friends, and that Black had even been living with him for a few months — “Black and your mae cut ties years ago,” Todd whispered conspiratorially, like it was the hottest gossip. White leaned closer, imagining that two years ago, when it happened, it was. It would have traveled the circles that White’s parents were in, that he was now in.

The way Todd talked, it was like he and Black were brothers, or something closer than family. It curled White’s stomach, the wine sitting heavily. He should know these things. He should have been there with Black. He shouldn’t have someone else tell them to him.

But at least he had Black’s address.

And now he had Black’s puzzling rage. The way Todd talked, it was like he and Black had a secret world no one else knew. He’d said Black was mad at him, in the offhanded way that White filled in the gaps of — Black was always mad at someone.

But Black wasn’t mad. Black was war-torn.

Trusting Todd had clearly been a mistake. Maybe White could go tomorrow and apologize. Say he’d never talk to Todd again. Ask Black to explain why they were mad at Todd now.

And Black would forgive him. He always did.

White asked Sean to drop him off a little further away from the house than normal, which Sean had protested until White had said, as firmly as one could when they could barely speak, that he didn’t want his father to find out what had happened to him.

He’d inspected his throat in the vanity mirror, and the skin right under his ear, where Black’s fingers had dug in, were a deep red, already bruising. He couldn’t do anything about that right now except hope his father wasn’t home, because there was no possible lie he could come up with. He’d run through everything, but there was nothing believable. If he said he got mugged, or attacked, his father would barely let him out of the house, and White needed to see Black again.

“Thank you for the ride,” White said. He tried to speak normally, but it was almost nothing.

“Stop talking,” Sean said, staring at White. Or more accurately White’s throat. “You’re not seriously coming back tomorrow.”

“Well, I certainly can’t go into work like this,” White rasped out, flipping the visor back up. “I feel fine.”

Mostly fine. The car ride had been long, Sean a good driver, and White had closed his eyes as they drove, half-asleep and missing his brother.

“You’re just insane,” Sean said, in what might have been awe, and then he coaxed the engine back to life and drove off again, leaving White on the sidewalk alone with his thoughts.

He ducked his head when he came in, begging off dinner saying that he felt bad, that he had a horrible cough. His father didn’t ask any questions upon hearing his voice, so White could collapse freely on his bed and cough over and over, thinking about how the first thing his brother had done to him—

But Black had felt it. What are you doing to me, he’d asked, like he could forget the pain that defined half their lives, nested in both their bodies.

In the morning, White’s throat was a mass of dark purple, mottled outlines of Black’s fingers on either side. It wasn’t easy getting out of the house — White wore a sweatshirt over the shirt with the highest collar that he owned, but this wasn’t like Moscow, where he could wear sweaters and scarves. And this wasn’t like a hickey, which his father always made little comments about.

But he got out. He told his father he was going to the clinic and got on the bus and went back down to the garage. He didn’t bother hesitating outside this time, just going in.

At first, he thought the garage was empty. After a moment, though, Yok and Sean popped their heads up from a motorcycle. “You’re seriously back,” Yok said, sounding half-delighted, half-disbelieving.

“Yup,” White said hoarsely. “Is Black here?”

“You are seriously single-minded,” Yok said, coming closer. Then, “Shit, he got you really good.” He peered at the deep, dark bruising on White’s neck.

“Mm,” White said. “Is he here?”

“Sean, get him some ice,” Yok called, pressing a finger gently to White’s throat. Sean disappeared into one of the doorways. “Fuck. That looks really bad, you should have put something on it.”

“I iced it last night.”

“I mean like make-up. Someone’s going to call the cops on you with a bruise like that.”

“I guess I should,” White said. He didn’t have any wasn’t sure if he’d be good enough at applying it to make the entire bruise go away, but he was going to have to work again and the bruise was so black it’d take weeks to disappear.

“Here,” Sean said, returning with a bag of peas in his hand. “No ice.”

White stared down at the bag of peas. More than his own brother had offered him. “I’m really — I’m fine. Is Black here?”

“Yeah, he’s in the office,” Sean said, rolling his eyes. “Arguing with hia. About you, probably.”

“I’ll go talk to him,” White said, ignoring the peas and heading towards the back door that Yok helpfully pointed out towards him. He could hear the argument from halfway across the garage, blurred noises that resolved into Black’s voice.

White would know it anywhere, even saying what it said.

Sean was right. It was an argument about him. White paused just outside the door — no matter what Black said when they were kids, eavesdropping had its uses. But he didn’t like what he was hearing, not at all. Not the way Black talked about him, like a bit of trash or a stray that had to be dealt with. Gumpa was being perfectly nice, but Black—

“—understand why you don’t just talk to him—”

“No,” Black said. “He can’t be trusted.”

Oh.

“Black, he’s your brother.”

“I don’t care if he has my fucking face and he’s my fucking twin, you can’t trust anything he’s saying,” Black said. “You don’t know who — don’t tell him anything. You can’t trust that.”

White swallowed, hard, against the bruises on the throat. Hearing that hurt more than being strangled. The strangling was quick, there and then gone, only a little bit lingering on White’s skin. But that Black didn’t trust him? It was more than the bruises, more than the knife, more than the time White got lost and was mildly hypothermic by the time his father found him.

Gumpa rolled his eyes, which was also the moment he caught White standing in the doorway, eyes wide and clearly listening to everything. “Black—”

“If he’s my brother, you can fucking trust me to handle it,” Black said, not to be deterred. “It’s not anyone else’s fucking business.”

“Black,” Gumpa snapped, turning Black around. “You aren’t handling it. Talk to your brother. I don’t have time for this.”

“You don’t have—” and then Black caught sight of White, standing there. “Seriously?”

“Handle it,” Gumpa said sternly, then he skirted around White in the middle of the doorway without even touching him and disappeared. White’d like to disappear too, fade away into nothing instead of stand here with his brother who didn’t even trust him—

“Why are you crying,” Black said, exasperated. Just the way he did when they were kids and he had to find White tucked away in some corner in the school, because he always knew when White was upset.

Of course he did.

Back then, White would always tell him everything that was wrong. Now, there was nothing wrong but him. “I’m fine, phi,” White said, because he had enough pride, apparently, not to admit he was the problem.

“You overheard me?”

White winced. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to, just that you’re very loud.”

“And you were eavesdropping, you fucking sneak.”

“Mm,” White agreed, wiping at his eyes, under the lens of his glasses. He wasn’t exactly ashamed of it, though the awareness that he should be was creeping in slow, like ice, because he wasn’t supposed to do things like that. Black wouldn’t have cared, before.

Black would have been able to trust him before.

“I just —” White reached out to touch Black and then remembered he shouldn’t, pulling back his hands and folding them against his chest awkwardly. “Sorry. I won’t —” he swallowed. “I guess Pa really was right, huh.”

“Pa?”

Black said it like an alien word. White supposed it was.

“He always said that I would just be inconveniencing you if I came back,” White said faintly. How many times had his father said that? That their lives should be separate? Maybe White should have believed him.

“Can you seriously stop crying,” Black said.

“I’m trying,” White said, rubbing at his eyes. “I can’t just turn it off, you know.”

Black sighed, gusty and fed-up. “Hurry up and stop,” he said. “Then leave.”

“Yeah.”

“You will leave this time, right?”

White nodded slowly. He’d like to say he knew where he wasn’t wanted, but he hadn’t for the past three days. Because he hadn’t really understood that Black didn’t want him. He thought — he didn’t know what he thought. Something horribly stupid, something that his father would say Oh, White, about. White, not knowing where he wasn’t wanted.

He just wished he knew why.

“Can I give you my number, just in case you — in case you need something?”

Black eyed him like he was a particularly venomous snake. “No.”

“But—”

“What could I possibly need from you,” Black said with finality. “Leave.”

But he left first, leaving the door of the office hanging open behind him.

White — well, he didn’t think that was fair, really, but Black didn’t have to play by any fair rules. He didn’t want White in his life, he didn’t trust White in his life, that was it. White could have dealt with anything else. He would have tried for months. Years. Anything to get Black to love him again — he used to think the worst thing in the world would be Black not liking him anymore, and he worried about it, idiotically, when they were kids and Black went off to play with other friends. He’d always known he’d do anything he had to to make sure that didn’t happen.

But Black didn’t trust him.

“You should go,” someone said and White flinched back, like a hit was coming, but it was only Gumpa, a sympathetic look on his face, and Yok, hovering behind him with a look of vague horror.

“I should,” White said distantly. He didn’t belong here. “Um, could I give you—”

“I’m sorry, White,” Gumpa said kindly. “I don’t think that’s a very good idea.”

White smiled, hiccupping. “Okay. I understand. Um. Thank you, for—” he stared at the end of the garage, the car wash that Black had disappeared through. He swore he could feel his brother on the other side of it, the ties between them stretched thin and fraying. “For taking care of him,” he finished. He was glad Black had that. If he couldn’t be there for Black, then he was glad there was someone for him, even if that someone was just his boss and his coworkers.

It was more than what White had, anyways.

“If Black wants to find you, he’ll be able to find you. Don’t worry.”

White shook his head. “Thank you. But Black never changes his mind.”

There had been a time when this hadn’t been true for White, only for everyone else, but it was painfully clear that that sort of affection no longer existed.

His father’s house ached, a misaligned tooth to worry his tongue over, and White still had to walk back into it even though he wasn’t supposed to be here. He should be with Black. He should be good enough to be with Black, even if it was just in that garage and not even Black’s own apartment. He could handle not being allowed in Black’s apartment, if he was allowed somewhere.

“You look terrible,” his father said, clicking his tongue as he put his book down. “What did the clinic say?”

“Just a bad cold.” Maybe he should have said the flu. The bruises would fade by the time he got over something like that. But his father would be more worried if it was the flu, and White had picked up some cheap make-up on the way home to smear over the bruises, though it probably wouldn’t manage to cover up the darkest parts right under his jaw, and he just needed to be upstairs.

Maybe he really will be sick, right here.

“You should go right back to sleep,” his father said. “I’ll bring you something to eat later. Your favorite soup.”

“Okay,” White agreed. Anything to stop his father’s horrible concern. Black hadn’t cared at all. His father cared too much. His father cared so much that Black stopped caring.

That wasn’t fair. That White had one and not the other. He wouldn’t have chosen if he had a choice. He would have chosen Black. Why didn’t Black choose him?

He supposed he’d thought Black was trying to protect him, that first day when he pushed him away. To keep him out. Todd had said what Black was doing was illegal and dangerous. Their mother had said that Black was a bad influence. How long had she been telling Black that? It didn’t matter; White was determined to disprove it.

You can’t trust him, though. White couldn’t disprove that.

Maybe White had changed too much. Black hadn’t. Black might be angry, he might be harsh, but he was still clearly himself. A version that grew up betrayed and angry without White there to temper him, but White could still track the new lines of him like a map.

He didn’t know if Black could do the same to him, trace his thumb along the familiar rivers and roads. Maybe he got one bridge too far and White lost the right to be his brother, somewhere between one country and the next. Something so different and wrong that Black did not trust him. Was it his job, was it the way he still lived with their father, was it something about the way he sought Black out?

Did Black just think he was wrong, now? That they’d always been wrong?

Three days after his brother removed him from his life, White woke up at four in the morning in a wash of pain, his cheek burning as he staggered out of bed. He banged his knee against the bedside table but nothing else came, no more pain, just a horrifying rush of embarrassment in the pit of his stomach. Still, when he cradled his hand against his cheek, he almost expected his fingers to dip into a broken hollow somehow.

In the mirror, his cheek was round and smooth under the bathroom lights.

“It wasn’t really strong enough to break something,” White mumbled to his reflection. It was just a surprise. It woke him. It wasn’t even close to the worst pain they’d ever felt, even as it consolidated into a throbbing ache just under his cheekbone.

On his brother’s face, it would bruise. But on his, there was nothing. There never was.

But at least White could be reasonably sure that Black wasn’t dying somewhere without him. Black’s heart was livid in White’s chest, a riot of rage and something like grief.  

White dug his fingers into his cheek, in the center where the pain was worst, and burrowed back under the covers. It was awkward like this, bad cheek to the pillow, hand at a weird angle under his face, but he wanted to fall asleep like this, curled around the memory of pain. Would Black would feel the sting against everything else that was being done to him or if Black had simply discarded it the same way he discarded White?

White would rather have it this way. That he could feel Black, even still, if he could not be in his life.

White was kind of kicking himself for not getting Yok of Sean’s number, even if Gumpa wouldn’t give it to him — Sean might be interested enough in antagonizing Black enough that he genuinely might have given White a status update on Black’s face. But even if he did, White might have been too embarrassed to ask, considering everyone had seen Black sever their relationship.

But Black found him again instead.

White actually thought he was being mugged, when the passenger side door swung open. He was thinking ah, fuck, that should have been locked, shouldn’t it? as he sat in the work parking lot after dark, approximately three hours after work should have ended, dreading going home—

But it was Black. “Phi!”

“Nice ride,” Black said, completely flat.

“You scared me, I thought I was getting mugged!”

Black looked at him, still flat and alien. “Yeah,” he replied.

“I—” White breathed in deep, heart still racing. “Stop that,” he scolded. Black used to jump out at him from behind doors and over hedges, just to scare him. He said it was fun, because it wasn’t like he’d ever be scared enough for his own heart to race like White’s did. “It wasn’t funny when we were ten and it’s not funny now.”

“It’s a little funny.”

White ignored that. “What are you doing here?”

“Can’t I?”

“Of course you can,” White replied, a strangely sharp sense of relief replacing the miasma in his chest. Was it no big deal? Had White been taking it too seriously, Black’s anger? He wasn’t used to it anymore; he didn’t know how to absorb the blows.

Black sighed through his nose. “Come on. Let’s go somewhere.”

White stuck his keys in the ignition. “Bend down so no one sees you,” he said.

“What, a guy can’t pick up his baby brother from work?”

“I don’t want anyone to tell Pa I saw you,” White replied, and Black narrowed his eyes at him and then apparently decided the fight wasn’t worth it and bent in half so that if you looked through the window of the car, it was just White there, alone like always.

Even bent in half like this, Black directed him to turn left, then right, through a few lights, until White realized they were heading towards his apartment. White had been there a few times, not that Black had ever answered. But Black, now sitting up, stopped them several blocks away near a food truck. “Get out,” he told White, swinging his own door open. “We’re eating.”

“You could ask,” White muttered under his breath, enough that Black, already in line for food, wouldn’t hear it. He was too scared to voice it properly, in case Black changed his mind about what he was doing here. Not that White knew what Black was doing here, and he was too scared to ask after Black had brushed him off in the car, and settled for hovering at his brother’s shoulder as they waited in line.

“Phi,” he started, then Black turned his face towards him. “Black!”

He hadn’t seen it in the dark of the car park, but he could now — the smeared purple-black ache that covered Black’s left cheek and the swelling around his eye. “Phi, you—”

“Shut the fuck up,” Black replied, tired. White hated to see him that way.

“But what happened,” White pleaded, stepping a little closer. He glanced around, then said as quietly as he could, “Four in the morning? Really?”

Black’s gaze snapped to him immediately. “How did you know that.”

What a useless question. White allowed it, though. Black didn’t have a way to know for sure that their connection wasn’t permanently broken. Black’s suffocation at his own hands could be explained away. Most people would feel strange after strangling their brother. “Of course I know,” White said. “What did you do?”

“Saw mae,” Black sneered, the expression twisting his swollen eye. “She wasn’t happy I saw you, you know.”

White’s jaw dropped. “She did that?”

“Hit me with a bookend,” Black replied. “I think.”

White cupped his brother’s cheek without even thinking, tilting him towards the yellow light of the food truck. Black allowed it, his cheek all mottled and a little hot to the touch. White’s finger landed on a spot he hadn’t particularly realized was still sore — but now he realized the quiet ache of the past week was probably that one of Black’s teeth had cracked under the blow. “It’s my fault.”

Black’s gaze slid to the side. “You think she cares whose fucking fault it is?”

Like that needed an answer.

“You probably know she cut me off,” Black said. “Wasn’t really going back with permission.”

“But she’s supposed to be better than that.” Not that that had ever mattered to their mother, but she’d never hit them when they were children. The most she ever did was drag them by the hand somewhere, which White never liked either, but he could hardly reconcile that woman with someone who hit her son in the face with a book at four in the morning. Left him like this.

You needed me there, White thought hysterically. I should have been there. “Black—”

“What do you want to eat,” Black said, jerking his face out of White’s hand, turning his shoulder on him to stare up at the sign and order from the exasperated auntie, tension bleeding from the line of his back so strongly that White couldn’t touch.

White was defeated. “The red curry.”

“Pad see ew,” Black said, and he’d effectively cut the conversation in half, White on one side, aching for answers, and Black on the other, a brick wall. White didn’t know that he was strong enough to start tearing the wall down with his hands; maybe Black was counting on that weakness, but how could White not keep trying when his brother was on the other side?

Black didn’t even chew on the left side of his mouth, that’s how much it hurt.

And White wanted something. He leaned forward, just a little bit. “Why are you here?” Maybe Black would give him this? “I thought—”

“You gave up,” Black replied, digging around in his noodles for bits of chicken.

White shrank back. “You were testing me?”

“No, I really wanted you fucking gone.”

“But then why—”

“That’s my own business,” Black replied, then, visibly struggling, added, “Tell me about yourself instead. What happened?”

White stared at him, oddly touched that Black was trying. “In Moscow?”

Black gave him a grim sort of smile. “Yeah. In Russia. How was it? Did you make friends?”

White winced. “I guess,” he said, thinking about the people he’d left behind who he didn’t miss and who didn’t miss him, and the ones that he did miss and that had made it very hard to come back. “It was fine. I kept wanting to come home to Thailand for the holidays, but Pa said it was best for us if we didn’t see each other anymore.” He shrugged, a motion too casual for what all he felt. “Um, I couldn’t really speak Russian well enough the first year, so I nearly failed, and then after that I went to boarding school. It was alright. And I just graduated, so. I’m back.”

“You’re back,” Black echoed.

This was a very paltry summation of the last ten years, but Black didn’t seem inclined to break it apart further. “And you?”

Black shrugged. “Like you’d expect.”

“Black.” This felt more like a mock-trial debate or a legal defense than any sort of reunion, like White had to think up opening and closing arguments on why he should be allowed in his brother’s life. He’d only ever been good at mock-trial when it wasn’t something he wasn’t emotional about. “I really want to know.”

Black considered. “About the same,” he conceded. “Stayed here, went to school. Mae kicked me out a couple of years back, you probably heard.”

It was present everywhere White went. Black used to move in the same circles as White did. Half of the people his father talked to at these parties remembered White, but nearly all of them remembered Black. Black had been kicked out. Black had dropped out of school. And White still didn’t know what Black had even wanted to study, or if he’d managed to go back.

“I heard,” he said. “She didn’t tell me, though. She just said I was better off without you.”

Maybe he shouldn’t have said that part.

“She’s probably right,” Black said contemplatively, sticking a cigarette in his mouth to prove the point. “I do a lot of fucking shit, you know? You don’t look like you’ll get it.”

No. They were people from two different worlds sitting here, White in his suit and Black in his torn jeans, lighting his cigarette. White on the right side, Black on the wrong. If it was wrong. White didn’t know. He didn’t even know if what Todd said was true. It didn’t really matter.

“I trust you,” White said. Even if Black didn’t trust him back.

Black watched him. “You don’t even know me.”

“I do,” White protested. Black couldn’t have changed that much that there was nothing recognizable in him. White could dig it out.

“Well, I don’t know you,” Black pointed out, blowing out smoke.

“But we could get to know each other again.” White prodded his chopsticks against his plate, a little ashamed he couldn’t manage to look Black in the eye to say this. “I know — I know we’re strangers now. For years. But I missed you, phi. And if I’m back, I want to be part of your life.”

“Hm,” Black said.

“Even a small one,” White amended. He’d take what he could get; he’d worm his way into the rest later like he always did. Black never understood this methodology, he liked to start big and flashy, but White had a lot more patience. Black could rarely withstand him.

“Even after I did that to you?”

White rubbed at his throat, where his own bruises had finally faded. “Yes,” he said simply.

Black exhaled, smoke obscuring his face. The purple bruising blurred elegantly. “Fine.” He held his hand out. “Give me your number.”

Chapter Text

White tried very hard not to get his hopes up about Black.

Obviously, Black was considering this a trial run, and White suspected his track record thus far wasn’t very good. But White wanted to know everything about his brother. What did he text like? Did he prefer to call, like White did?

Turned out Black wasn’t the type to text or call.

And he’d walked away after getting White’s number without sharing his own, so White just had to sit around for a bit and wait. He went to work, he viewed a few apartments, he got his license updated. Basically, all the things that he’d been putting off since finding Black. Getting back to his life wasn’t actually easy, given how long it took the bruises on his neck to fade. He had to start making excuses to his coworkers that he’d gotten a little in over his head at the boxing club he started going to.

What was he supposed to say, my brother strangled me and I don’t know if I minded?

That sounded absolutely insane, even if it was true.

Black disrupted life again by sidling up to White while he was buying a new pair of glasses.

The poor saleslady nearly dropped the frames when Black appeared, still adorned with a gruesome green-yellow bruise across half his face. White wanted to ask if he’d been icing it. Instead, he turned back to the saleslady and signed the receipt she had for him.

She gave him a look. Then gave Black a look. Then said, with impressive normalcy, “Those will be delivered in two weeks.”

“Thanks,” White said, tucking the receipt into his wallet alongside his brand-new driver’s license.

“You’re hard to get a hold of,” Black observed, loping alongside White easily as they left the shop. “You never leave the house.”

“You could have called,” White mumbled, letting his shoulders drop. But Black was right about the second thing; he never did leave the house. In college, he’d had clubs and classes, friends to go visit. But he hadn’t built anything up yet but work, and even the coworkers White liked, he didn’t really want to hang out with and he doubted they’d want to hang out with him either, given how they’d reacted when they heard his family name.

Black hummed. “More fun this way,” he said, like he was a hunting dog chasing down prey. He’d grown up in these streets, comfortable with their every twist and turn, and standing next to him, White suddenly didn’t know if he was even cut out for being in this city, regardless of his job. “Where you going now?”

“The, um—” White gestured down the street. “I need a coffee. Coming?”

Black didn’t answer, which was a yes because he didn’t turn around and leave either. Halfway down the street, White realized, embarrassingly, he was trying to match their steps and had a moment where he couldn’t make himself fall out of step, and he was just stuck like that until they got into the café, the bell jingling merrily as they entered.

 The café was clean and well-lit, with green plants dotted in between people working on laptops. But it was still Black, in his denim vest and grease-smeared cargo pants, that looked right.

Would White ever have a chance to become comfortable? Fit in?

“Next,” the barista called.

White wanted black coffee. “Phi, you want anything?”

“No.”

“You sure?” White was kind of hoping they’d sit and talk a bit, and it’d be less awkward if Black also had coffee.

Black stared at him a moment. “Another black coffee,” he told the barista, and White paid before Black could. Black always hated that when they were kids, adamantly believing that his three-minute gain in age meant it was his right to pay. White expected any number of things — a half-hearted smack to the shoulder, an eyeroll, for Black to shove money into White’s front pocket — but Black just looked at him like a stranger.

White stared back at his stranger-brother too. Maybe they’d get to a point where they knew each other again, instead of having to rely on long-lost stories that didn’t mean anything.

“You want to sit,” he tried, clumsily picking up his coffee. He’d hopefully and maybe foolishly not gotten it to go, so he was going to sit either way, but he didn’t know if Black would.

Black did, though, at one of the tables near the window. He picked it, even, and warmth threaded around White’s heart.

“Come here often,” Black asked blandly. The plant behind him was angled just so that one of the green fronds curved his shoulder, poking him in the cheek, and he swatted at it impatiently, all of him a black smear against the gentle golds and creams of the table and the walls.

“I just looked up a coffee place nearby.”

Hopefully it didn’t make the worst coffee known to mankind. White’s tasted fine, good even, but maybe Black was pickier about his coffee or maybe he didn’t want to be here at all and was going to use the coffee as an excuse to leave or maybe—

Black made a small noise of appreciation after his first sip. “Not bad.”

“Yeah?”

Black said nothing, taking another sip. “I usually only drink canned coffee. So.”

“Gross,” White said automatically, which made Black snort, but apparently neither of them had a follow up so they just sat there for a few minutes, Black occasionally reaching over his shoulder to swat at the plant behind him as they drank.

There was so much White wanted to ask but he just didn’t know how.

He contented himself with studying his brother instead. The yellow-green bruise that had everyone giving him a second look, spread across his cheek and his jaw and his eye, still a bit swollen. His nose had a bit of tape on it, like it was broken.

But there were other things White hadn’t noticed earlier either. The earrings were unfamiliar, the scowl had probably been on Black’s face since birth. Black’s hair looked like his when White didn’t style it. White wouldn’t dress like this, the grunge and the earrings and the stack of bracelets on Black’s wrist, but that was his face wearing this outfit. The same eyes, under the swelling, the same mouth even if it didn’t make the expressions that White did.

It never used to bother White that someone had the same face as him. It was just his brother’s face; he saw it more often than he saw his own.

“Fucking creepy that you look just like me,” Black said with something that could be disdain, his mouth a sharp-set gash as he spat it out.

“Not right now,” White pointed out. With Black’s face like this, they didn’t look like twins, which White was pathetically grateful for. It was embarrassing enough meeting out in public like this. Even if no one else knew that they had been separated, it was still embarrassing to get to know each other again when anyone could be watching.

“It’s still fucking weird.”

“A little bit,” White agreed. A good kind of weird, he hoped. One day. “I always remember you, um. Twelve, you know?”

Black stared at him. Black was always staring at him, really, pinning him down like a bug, but this time, White shivered, like there was just something wrong and he couldn’t pick apart the threads to find what. “I guess,” Black said, noncommittal.

White took that to mean that Black hadn’t thought about him at all.

Black raised an eyebrow. “So,” he said. “What have you been up to?” Then, “The fuck you laughing for?”

White stifled his laughter. “Nothing.” He scratched under his ear, where the worst of his bruises from Black had finally faded, looking at the edges of Black’s own where they bled against his skin. “It just seems a little silly. After everything.”

After White stalked his brother and Black strangled him for it.

Black sighed through his nose. “You wanted to,” he said pointedly.

“Well,” White said, sipping his coffee. “Yeah.”

“Yeah,” Black said, like the conversation was something he could bludgeon into submission. “I’m supposed to ask how you’re doing and I did. Now you tell me.”

White couldn’t help himself. “Did someone coach you on how to talk to me,” he asked suspiciously, which would have been a lot more embarrassing if he and Black hadn’t had a week-long fight over, essentially, talking to each other. As it was, the back of White’s neck was hot just asking.

Black’s frown softened a little bit. “Gram did.”

White stared at him, the softer curve of his mouth that meant he wasn’t frowning with displeasure. It was easy for Black to soften when talking about this Gram, but he’d been stiff this entire conversation. “Which… one is that,” White said, for lack of anything to say.

“Dye-job.”

Dye-job, White mouthed to himself, trying to remember. He vaguely remembered one of the boys in the garage having bleached hair, but nothing beyond that, since he’d been singularly focused on Black.

“You might meet him,” Black said. “Maybe.”

White frowned automatically then hid it behind his coffee mug, not wanting Black to see that that made him unhappy. Black rubbed at his chest absently, maybe not even realizing the sudden coldness in his ribcage actually belonged to White.

“I’d like that,” White ended up saying. “If it’s okay.”

Black didn’t look up from his coffee this time. “We’ll see.”

White nodded. He was on a trial-run. He couldn’t forget that. “I’ve been busy getting some things in order after my move,” he offered belatedly, circling his finger around the rim of his coffee mug. “My license and stuff, that’s all. You?”

“School. Work.”

“What do you study?”

This seemed like a safer question then you haven’t graduated yet?

“Law.”

White’s finger slipped, the mug clattering on its saucer. “Like mae?”

Black’s mouth twisted down. “Yeah, like the bitch,” he said, voice dripping with rotten anger. “Why? Fucking surprised?”

“A little, but—” Every single word pushed Black’s already-tense shoulders higher towards his ears. “I guess I’m surprised you didn’t change your mind.”

Not that Black had ever said he wanted to be a lawyer when they were kids, but he liked law. Ae hated how their mother did it.

Black’s shoulders eased a tiny increment. “Why would I have?”

White had figured Black would have cut out every little reminder of their mother from his life, since he couldn’t carve her out of his body. But White used to imagine what Black would want to be. He’d be able to do whatever he wanted, of course, because he wouldn’t listen to anyone the way White did. There were a lot of fantastical options out there, like motorcycle racing or being an astronaut, but White always thought Black was just too practical for any of that.

No, White wasn’t really surprised. Black had grown strange and gnarled, twists that White couldn’t follow, but the root of him?

“I didn’t think you’d want to give mae the satisfaction,” White said. “She used to gloat to Pa that one of us would be a lawyer, remember?”

Black shook his head. “Mae’ll learn she was fucking wrong.”

“I think it suits you.” There were parts of it that didn’t add up, really, what Black had said about being criminal, what Todd had said about being a criminal — White just didn’t understand the full shape of how it made sense yet — but he was sure it would.

“You’d be the first to think that.”

White shrugged. Maybe he was. He probably wasn’t. A lot of people could look at the rough edges of Black and see all that he was and all that he was capable of. White was beginning to think Black left them rough so that people would think the wrong thing about him. “At least you do like it.”

“That’s a leading question.”

“It wasn’t a question!”

“It was leading, though,” Black said. His coffee finished, he sat back, then rolled his eyes when the plant hit the back of his head again. “What. You don’t like your degree?”

“My job,” White corrected. “I graduated early. And no.”

Black’s voice held no malice in it, only a flat observation, but White was familiar enough to know about the spitefulness of Black’s observations. “I wouldn’t either if I was doing what you did.”

“How’d you—” White said, then, “Never mind.” Black had been in his car in his parking lot outside his office building just last week. White doubted that their mother told him, but maybe Black really was just that good at tracking people down. He’d found White here after all. “It’s fine for now.”

“Wow,” Black said.

White’s face heated up. “It’s what Pa wanted me to do,” he said, though Black already knew that.

“Yeah? Well, what do you want to do?”

White didn’t think he’d wanted to do anything in ten years.

“I don’t know,” he said. He supposed he’d have to work on that idea now that he’d found his brother but… everything he’d done had been for this. There wasn’t really supposed to be an after. Not like this. White never thought about the after at all.

“You done?” Black was standing. No words of encouragement, then, and White hadn’t expected them, really, when his job was — what it was, but it would have been a bit nice.

“Ah — yeah.”

Black licked the corner of his lip as he pushed through the front door. “Not bad,” he said again. “But I’ll take you someplace better next time.”

“I’d like that.”

“Don’t tell Todd about this,” Black warned. “Or me. Don’t talk to him at all.”

Then he was meandering away down the street, conversation over, leaving White with a lot of questions, both about his brother and just about his own life in general, and still without his brother’s phone number.

Black dropped him an address two days later — absolutely no hint about where it was that they were going, just a vague meet me at six. In fact, he didn’t even say who it was, so White had to just guess who it was by looking at the part of town and hope he wasn’t going to get scammed by someone posing as his literal identical twin.

It was a bar.

But Black was actually there, smoking outside the graffitied door and chatting with someone else, tersely and unconcernedly, the way you made small talk with all the people out for a smoke break. “Hey,” he said, spotting White. He stubbed the cigarette on the bottom of his shoe. “You’re late.”

Black had never cared about lateness, so White assumed this was commentary on… well, White. “Sorry.”

“Wow, man, you have a twin,” one of the other smokers said with a laugh. “You never said that when you worked here.”

“You ever need to fucking know?” Black grabbed White’s elbow. “Come on.”

White let Black drag him through the door and down a set of claustrophobic stairs. “You worked here?”

“Yeah, after mae kicked me out,” Black said. “Just busing tables.”

White relaxed a little, secretly pleased that Black had chosen to take him somewhere that mattered, even a little bit. Even if Black never thought of it now, it was a place he’d spent a lot of time in. White should have taken him somewhere meaningful too, instead of a random coffee shop, but White didn’t have anywhere meaningful that wasn’t their childhood house or their school. Maybe this was some sort of peace offering on Black’s part, a genuine effort that White thought he’d have to fight for.

The bar wasn’t loud or even that crowded, but it smelled of cheap beer, piss, and cigarette smoke, all of which settled uncomfortably in the back of White’s throat. Dirty glasses cluttered the entire bar, not that the one person working it seemed bothered by the collection.

“What,” Black said with a mean sort of grin. “Too low-class for you?” And White realized this was not at all a genuine effort to bring White back into his life, but a test to see what White would handle.

But White didn’t know who Black wanted him to be yet. The brother who let Black take care of everything or the brother who’d managed to grow a spine?

“I’m not really wearing the right clothes for a bar,” White said. He went out every so often with his coworkers, to the sorts of bars that were a little gross but ultimately populated by people wearing the same suits as him. This was the sort of bar where no one had ever heard of a suit, and White was definitely catching glances.

“No one will fuck with you if I’m here,” Black said, waving down the bartender.

“That’s not — okay,” White said, giving up. He wasn’t comfortable in this stupid bar, and he wasn’t even sure that Black meant I’ll take care of you as opposed to my face will scare people off.

In the past, when Black took him places they weren’t supposed to go — the arcade that was mostly populated by high school kids, the video store with the gory videos in the back section behind the curtain, the overpass where they’d sit up on the hill and watch bikers do illegal tricks after sundown — White never liked it. He never fit in the way Black could manage to. For Black, it was like the rest of the world just slipped away from him instead of sticking, cloying, the way it did to every piece of White. He always hated it, but Black was there, so it was ok.

White didn’t know if he still could count on that.

Black passed him a beer. “Hope you’re not a lightweight.”

“I’m not,” he said, and let Black lead him over to one of the slightly-sticky booths in the back. The beer tasted like shit.

Black lifted his beer at a couple of people, maybe people he knew from working here or coming here. One of them, a black-shirted bartender, leaned over their table, laughing. “Man, you worked here for two years and I never heard you had a twin!”

“’Cause you need to know?”

The bartender snorted, turning to White. “What’s your name?”

“White.”

“Black and White?”

“Shut the fuck up,” Black said, at the same time White said, “Can you come up with one we haven’t heard before?” which made Black and the bartender laugh and White glow quietly warm on the inside. It was a delicate act, not pushing his luck so much that Black got tired of him while not being so much of a doormat that Black got pissed off, either. Now that ten years stretched between them, White didn’t know if Black would put up with that anymore.

“You play pool, Black’s twin?”

White let the bartender, Mew, coax him into putting some money down, and picked up the pool cue sticky with beer. White was no stranger to people trying to bully him a little; without Black, it was practically all they tried to do.

Black hadn’t ever let it happen, until now.

It used to drive Black fucking mad, White taking the path of least resistance, being a fucking coward. But it was easier, not fighting back. Even when he got hauled up by the collar by the older kids, let his wallet get stolen.

And it was even easier in Russia. Things got worse, true, graduated from petty schoolyard muggings to vicious rumors and once, getting locked in the supply cabinet. And it didn’t really matter.

The worst thing that could happen to White had already happened. Black was already gone.

Mew was good enough but not great, grinning and leaning on a pool cue, razzing Black who didn’t respond at all. White didn’t care one way or the other who won. It was only a little bit of money, and Mew was laughing as he lined up his next shot.

Black wasn’t.

White didn’t know this stranger well enough to know what he wanted. Bringing him here, smudging him into the sticky booth, White figured Black wanted to rub his face in it. Gloat a little. Bully him a little. It wasn’t the same as when they were kids — like when Black stole the last page of his new sci-fi book before he was done reading and White stole his shoelaces from every shoe. Black pelting across the dried grass of the backyard barefoot, tackling him, yelping when White got a good bite in — but White could pretend it was.

He didn’t know what this was, then. White could pretend like anything didn’t bother him, something useful his father had taught him — a person without a brother. A perfect son. Someone happy — but he didn’t know what Black wanted.

He didn’t know how to pass.

What he did know was the exact moment Black got fed up. Maybe he saw it. Maybe he felt it. Maybe he just knew. He didn’t expect to know, but he saw the way Black tapped his fingers, one two three four in a line, and then bit the inside of his cheek.

It wasn’t what he used to do. White understood it anyway. He was tired of this. White wasn’t doing it right yet.

White sank both the 10-stripe and the 13.

“Nice shot!” the bartender said, and it was enough to get Black to stop destroying the inside of his cheek.

“You’re hustling us,” Black said, after three more rounds. Us, even though he wasn’t playing at all.

“You started it,” White countered, which made Black laugh, at least.

And his bartender friend was laughing too, saying White was alright, really, and he should have known to try and fuck over someone with Black’s face. He even passed over the money, which White tried to refuse at first, but that seemed to make Mew more upset. He gave in when Black rolled his eyes.

“Not bad,” Black said, pulling out another cigarette as they stood outside the door. White was honestly surprised he hadn’t smoked inside — no one had, though the entire bar smelled like it — but also, according to his watch, they’d been in the bar for three hours. Black started dancing his fingers up and down on the tabletop an hour in.

If White focused, he could feel it in the back of his mind, a quiet antsy craving. The same thing that drove Black to spark the lighter and close it, over and over, a little flare and then suffocation. If one twin quit cold turkey, would the other get just as sick from withdrawal?

“How’d you learn all that,” Black asked. He noticed White watching, and closed the flame away, tucking the lighter into his back pocket.

There were a lot of answers to that. “My ex-girlfriend played.”

“You really had me going for the first few shots, but you were fine, weren’t you?”

White nodded. He could be fine anywhere he went. Had to be. There was no Black to protect him anymore. Their parents always said White would learn to take care of himself if Black wasn’t there, White supposed that was technically true. It wasn’t that people stopped hassling him; it just stopped mattering.

The worst thing that could happen to White had already happened. Black was already gone.

Don’t let anyone push you around, Black had said, their last night together. Don’t let anyone see you cry, okay? Promise me. It wasn’t a promise that meant White would fight back, and White never had. But it was boring to push around someone who wasn’t all that affected by anything, so people eventually stopped, and in college, a lot of people liked a guy who wasn’t all that affected by anything. That suited White just fine.

It wasn’t really an answer to how he learned to play pool. It was an answer all the same.

“You’re always just fine, aren’t you,” Black said.

Of course. White was discovering he had to get used to hope like the spark of a lighter, flame suffocated over and over in Black’s hands. He breathed out through his nose, slow. Shoved everything down his throat to sit in a pit in his stomach. He hadn’t won anything yet. He did all this, and Black might be impressed, but it didn’t mean anything.

Maybe it never would.

He breathed out, slow, and shoved it all down to bury in his gut. “Had to be,” he said, keeping it light, like this was a conversation with his coworkers instead of his brother. “You weren’t around.”

And that wasn’t light at all. He winced as the words slid out of his throat but he couldn’t wrestle them back in.

Black sighed through his nose, releasing smoke. “You don’t have to be so jumpy.”

“I know.”

White used to know, anyways.

Todd
14:53 pm:
hey did you ever find Black?

Something Black had declined to mention in the past few times they met, was why he’d strangled White in reaction to Todd. It wasn’t all that normal, not that Black had ever been all that normal, but usually White could understand just what was wrong with him, in a way that no one else could.

When he’d left ten years ago, Black and Todd were best friends. How much had changed?

White supposed it didn’t matter. He hadn’t thought about Todd all that often once leaving and he didn’t actually need to know what had changed, or when or how. He just needed to know the outcome, and he did.

White
14:58 pm:
he won’t talk to me either. Sorry.

Still. It pissed White off a little that Todd, even if Black hated him now, knew all those little things and White didn’t.

After that, Black actually took White to a coffee shop, run-down and tucked away on the side of one of the canals.

“Good coffee,” Black told him pointedly, when White showed up, a little late once again. He didn’t know the streets as well as he used to, but at least Black didn’t comment on it this time. “Not that hipster shit.”

“You said it tasted fine.”

“It was fine,” Black allowed. “But this is better. And cheaper. And there’s no fucking plants in my face.”

“Are your allergies bad then, phi,” White said innocently, and Black flipped him off.

But it really was very good coffee.

After the coffee shop, it was another food stall, after that it was the same coffee shop again. This time Black told him he studied here sometimes, because it was open late for students and not too far from the university library, and White told him a little bit about the coffee shop he liked in Russia near his apartment, which was run by a man from Singapore who always helped White with his mandarin homework.

He used to write lists of things he wanted to tell Black, but that hadn’t lasted. How could it? Now he just said whatever there was to say, all the things that Black should just somehow have known the whole time, the little silly stories you told to someone when you were in their life so that you didn’t have to build everything from scratch.

Now he wished he kept those stupid lists, so he’d have somewhere to start.

Some things were different, some things stayed the same. For example, White could still tell when Black was about to explode at the table next to them, an older couple sweetly holding hands atop the table while they ate. He could practically set a timer to it. Three, two, one—

Black twisted to start at the couple. “Surely you’ve seen people with the same damn face before?”

The lady smiled, because Black had been… well, not polite, exactly, but more reserved than he was when they were twelve and he didn’t know how to temper his anger. “It’s just cute that you still hang out together,” she said, grinning.

Black eyed her. “It’s cute when old people still go on dates,” he spat. “Mind your fucking business.”

He wasn’t quiet about it this time; the entire restaurant quieted down a little, everyone staring. Their waitress delivered their food in silence.

White slid his plate closer to him. “You still can’t handle spice, phi?”

“Not gonna tell me to calm down?”

White shrugged. Black had been the one to let the questions roll off his back when they were kids; White had been the one too obsessed with what people thought of them and how they were supposed to be. Black never did care. He used to tell White that it didn’t matter what people thought but White never could wrap his head around.

So White should, now, be the one soothing egos, saying he didn’t mean that to the waitress, but Black’s little flurry of anger always matched his own. It seemed everyone in the entire world wanted to comment on how they were twins and each time White wanted to put down the menu and say I have no idea who that stranger is sitting across from me.

You could always count on Black like that.

“At least you know what’s fucking good for you,” Black said bluntly, digging around in his dish to find the bits of chicken.

White stabbed his fork into his own chicken. Message received.

Not the first of its kind, either.

Black hadn’t done the thing with the bar again, throwing White into places that he didn’t belong just to see if he could stand it, but he took absolutely no care to make White think that their relationship went past two estranged siblings yet. Don’t ask questions, don’t get nosy, don’t want more from Black than he was willing to give.

He barked orders out so unthinkingly that White wondered if it was just automatic, if those instructions were meant for everyone else instead, if that was the default for when White was away and White was the exception to the rule.

That would be nice.

It was completely disproved not two weeks later, on a Thursday, White and Black sitting not quite touching on a bench outside what Black refused to admit was his favorite coffee shop. White was listening to him bitch about one of his friends — Yok, in fact, who was apparently not doing what he was supposed to be doing — and not asking questions, because Black was a lot more inclined to share when he didn’t remember he wasn’t supposed to be sharing.

And then someone just sat down on the other side of Black and said, “Seriously, this is where you’ve been fucking going?”

Black stiffened up immediately, knuckles white around the paper coffee cup he’d just crushed into oblivion. “The fuck are you doing here,” he said, shoving at the new person.

White leaned back around Black’s head and found Dye Job.

“Oh,” he said, as Dye Job leaned back around Black and beamed at him. “Hello.”

“Do not fucking look at him,” Black warned, shoving Dye Job’s head down, aggressively and angrily, and in a manner that didn’t deter Dye Job’s smile at all.

Dye Job was talking at White, though. “He’s been sneaking off lately,” he was saying cheerfully around Black’s shoulder while Black pushed his face away. “We were all pretty suspicious, you know, but no one would ever accuse Black of having cold feet—”

Black slammed his elbow into Dye Job’s stomach, hard, all of a sudden not friendly like a set of kittens but full of barely-contained anger. “White, go away.”

“Don’t just send him away—”

Black fisted his hand in the collar of Dye Job’s shirt, dragging him away from the bench and White even though Dye Job was much taller. “I told you not to fucking follow me,” Black lectured, sounding for all the world like he was ten again and telling White that he shouldn’t have followed him to the underpass where the teenagers did skateboarding tricks. “And is it any of your business what I’m doing?”

“Well, no,” Dye Job said, rubbing at his shoulder where the shirt pulled taut with Black’s force. “You couldn’t just tell us? Sean thinks you’re about ready to call the whole thing off.”

“Shut up,” Black hissed, and then they were far enough away that White couldn’t hear them anymore.

The conversation was clearly loaded, an argument festering underneath. Black smacked at Dye Job’s arm, Dye Job rolled his eyes, gesturing with his arms, but they must have come to some sort of conclusion pretty quickly, Dye Job looking displeased as he followed Black back to the bench.

“—hia said deal with it, I’m dealing with it,” Black was saying as they walked back, and White shrank back. “Stay fucking out of it.” He slugged Dye Job, Dye Job rolling his eyes but putting up with it easily, even though it must have hurt a little. And then, because Dye Job, whatever his name was, was one thing and White was something else.

Dye Job got to sit back down, this time next to White, and introduce himself instead of being made to leave.

“I’m Gram,” he said cheerfully. On White’s other side, Black made a disgusted noise in the back of his throat like an angry cat. “Wow, you’re really identical.”

“How is this fucking news,” Black said, though he didn’t get pissy like he had with the waitress again. “You literally fucking saw him with my face.”

“From a distance!”

“It’s my fucking face, you can’t recognize it?”

“It’s my face too,” White pointed out mildly.

Gram grinned. “Right, it’s his face too, Black,” he said, clearly teasing. He leaned back against the bench, apparently delighted with what Black let him get away with. “I can’t believe Black’s never told you about us before.”

“I’ve just gotten back from studying abroad,” White said. Not untrue. He hoped that Gram didn’t notice the way Black’s shoulder relaxed, just slightly. Did Black really think he’d reveal all their secrets?

Maybe he did.

“I didn’t know you were going to be here, but this is great,” Gram said. “I was just telling Black I wanted to see you.”

“Well, now you’ve seen me,” White said, just as mildly as the first time. Gram’s smile faltered, just a little bit.

White pretended the complete lack of warmth was because he already knew that he’d have to show some spine if he ever had a hope of impressing his brother’s possibly-criminal friends. This was something Black always told him when they were kids and although he always used his fists, he used to be proud when White actually did use his words.

Unless he was saying something like ugh, you’re just like Pa, saying nice things that everyone knows are mean.

In reality, White just did not want to be nice. Gram got everything. He got to settle against Black’s side and throw an arm over his shoulder and talk about people and classes and things White knew nothing about because the small slice of Black’s life that he was allowed, for occasional lunches and dinners, was nothing all that real. There was the way Black shoved at him, all bark and mostly no bite, like two cats having a spat.

White should be better than to be jealous about that but it was there, a dark little pit in his stomach.

That’s what family was, White supposed. Not that he knew anymore.

Sometimes, Black just insisted they walk instead of sit, clearly an antsy adrenaline running through his body. And White’s, so he never complained, only gathered up his grilled pork — Black’s treat, this time — and followed. “Where are we going,” he asked, chewing, though he didn’t expect any real answer and he wasn’t even sure that Black knew.

Maybe Black just needed to go.

“Dunno,” Black said, his shoulders tight underneath the bleach-stained back of his black shirt. So they were just going. White nibbled at his pork and watched the water in the canal down below the street, and where it crossed under a bridge and then disappeared off the left while Black just kept walking through the heat.

Oftentimes, Black took him somewhere familiar. Familiar to Black. This coffee shop had banned Black once after he got in a fight, but it’d been enough years that no one remembered. That store there sold the best curry. This baseball field that they passed was where Black broke his arm running third base.

And White took the bits and pieces that Black provided, shoving them deep inside himself like that could turn this stranger into a brother, a person in the form of a thin-paper pasted collage.

This place, maybe, Black didn’t mean to be familiar to White. They were just walking and suddenly it just felt familiar. “Oh,” White said, wracking his brain. “Is that — isn’t that where we used to go watch the bikers?” He turned his head, scanning the small, grassy hill to the right of them, which already had a few girls sitting on the grass, watching. He was so sure. “Can we—”

Black was already climbing up the hill a few feet, sprawling in the grass. White sat more delicately, watching the concrete overpass and the small ramps that looked completely unchanged from ten years ago, even though the wood should have rotted through by now. Black didn’t seem to be watching that closely but White leaned forward, as if he could taste the next rider’s anticipation if he got close enough.

The first rider was good, the second one so-so. Black eventually started eating White’s abandoned moo ping, not watching that closely. White set his chin on his knees, watching rider three start up, like he could stop himself from reaching out for the bike handles if he contained himself to a small curl, fingers wrapped around his ankles to keep him in place. He didn’t know he missed it so much.

“He’s good,” he said.

“I’m better,” Black said.

“You still ride?” White craned his neck, taking in Black. He wasn’t surprised, at all, but Black hadn’t actually shown up on a bike yet. But White usually arrived after Black, so maybe he just had never seen Black on one.

Black had always been better at it than White anyways.

“Mm. You don’t?”

“Pa wouldn’t let me,” White said, entranced by the rise and fall of one red motorbike, the smoothness with which he hit the ramp. “I always — he said it was a hobby you dragged me into, so — it wasn’t proper.” The implication, every time, had been that it wasn’t White’s hobby, it was his brother’s, and White hadn’t had enough spine to say no, so he should be grateful he didn’t have to race bikes anymore. So White folded that part of himself away. He wasn’t supposed to have it.

“Fuck Pa,” Black said, unbothered.

White frowned, small. “But I wanted to do it first,” he admitted, which wasn’t a secret to Black, but had long since become a secret to White. Black had been the one to tell their parents he wanted to, but White had been the first one to set his face up against the window of the car and sigh, doesn’t that look fun?

“Really?” Black propped himself up one elbow.

“You don’t remember?”

“Nope,” Black said.

“I did,” White said, suddenly rebellious and wanting to protect this one small thing.

“You should ride again, then,” Black said, lying back down.

“Maybe,” White said, messing with the ends of his shoelaces. Not while he lived with his father. He sighed. “Thanks for showing me this.”

“Didn’t do it on purpose.”

“No, I know, I meant just generally,” White said, amused. But he loved being shown the city like this — it wasn’t the city his father would have shown him, of course, but it was something that mattered to Black. Something more real. “I wish I could take you anywhere that mattered.”

Black sighed, lighting up a cigarette. “I’ll go wherever you fucking want me to go,” he pointed out.

White knew that too.

“But there’s nowhere to go,” White said. “The last place I remember going in all of Thailand is that arcade with the glitchy racing game.” They went the day before White left. They hadn’t known, then, that White was leaving; their parents only gave them twenty-four hours notice. White managed to beat Black at that stupid racing game, the machine where all the colors were broken.

Twenty-four hours to say good-bye to a city, a life, a brother.

Black was showing White who he was. White had nothing to show. White had nothing he could give to Black and say that’s me. He didn’t even know who “me” was anymore.

“Don’t worry about it,” Black said, voice soft and round and completely unfamiliar. “I hate going places people tell me to anyway.”

“Not funny,” White told him, though it was, a little bit, and it made him feel better anyways.

It was only a few weeks into this particularly odd arrangement that White woke up choking on nothing but the acrid taste of smoke, eyes watering and heart furiously alive in his chest. He coughed a bit of spittle up onto the pillow and slammed down onto the floor when he tried to stand up and run.

The floor really provided a different story.

It was dark on the floor, and the air was cool and crisp. White lay on his shoulder where he’d landed and realized there was no fire at all. The room was peacefully silent, the moon slanted on the wall. White opened his mouth, the air crisp on his tongue, washing away the smoke clinging there on what must be his brother’s tongue. Because there was no fire here, there was no smell of smoke, and this must be Black’s heart in his chest, racing along into danger the way it always did. White used to say there was no need for him to do any death-dying stunts; he got the full experience every time Black did something he wasn’t supposed to.

But it never made him so nauseous like this.

Whatever Black was doing, White didn’t know, but it crept through him, a slow burning eating up grass and leaving only ash behind. And still the room was just silent.

He clawed himself up using the bedside table and called his brother. The first time he’d ever called him.

Not that he picked up.

In fact, his phone went straight to voicemail, which — White stared at the screen in his white-knuckled grip — was Black doing this on purpose? He was out there in a fire somewhere on purpose? Why else would his fucking phone be off?

He called again.

No answer.

No fucking answer.

Of course White was used to feeling Black’s pain — this entire month had been a background melody of nicks and slaps, little things that wouldn’t have even registered before, when the bond hummed between them easily instead of this new, flighty thing — but none of those were bad. None of those were like this, so clearly wrong and dangerous and creeping up the back of White’s throat like bile.

And he never didn’t know what was wrong with Black, until now.

He searched for news on any fires in the morning, but Bangkok was a big city — there were little fires everywhere. None all that close to Black’s apartment, or his school, or his garage, but it wasn’t like Black gave White a play-by-play of everywhere he went.

How could White know anything?

A text from Black came in as White was in the car on the way to work, already parked, finger still shaking a little. Probably shouldn’t drive on no sleep, and he’d stayed awake the whole night—

Black:
did you really fucking call me at 4 in the fucking morning
what could you possibly fucking want

Of course White wasn’t allowed to be worried. He tucked the phone into his suit jacket pocket alongside his keys and went to work and he wasn’t worried. He had emails, probably. And that meeting about the UNESCO heritage site. And coworkers to talk to.

And they were talking about the fire.

Not to White, of course — he overheard them talking about it quietly in the break room and they cut themselves off when he appeared in the doorway with his coffee mug. No one ever wanted to talk shit with the nepotism hire. Of course Black would be doing something you couldn’t talk to the nepotism hire about.

He smiled at them and made small talk and got his coffee and left. And just loitered right outside the doorway. Just to hear what Black might have gotten himself into.

“Damn fire out in the woods last night,” his father said, like it meant absolutely nothing. “You know the businessman Tawi? His house. Some hooligans vandalized it. You alright, son?”

And White wasn’t. There was still a soot-spark bitterness in the back of his throat, but that was all him, actually, instead of Black. He’d buried it there, thinking about his brother as he lay awake all night, and it leapt up again, clawing at him. He thought of the brother who had nearly torn him apart. He could easily imagine Black with fire in his hand, deciding to burn it all down. No wonder Black didn’t trust him.

And this was all his father’s fault, and the nonchalant way he said things, and if he hadn’t dragged White away, White would know what Black was doing last night.

So White sat down next to his father and started an argument.

“Hey.”

White flinched, violently, almost fell off the edge of the wall, before Black’s hand pulled him back on by the shoulder. “Phi,” he said, wide-eyed. His heart was going double-time. He wondered if Black could feel it. “You scared me.”

“You have got to fucking get better at paying attention to your surroundings,” Black said, looking down at him. “You’re gonna fucking get mugged.”

“Yok already mugged me,” White grumbled, settling back down against the grass.

“He gave it back,” Black said, unconcerned. He clambered over the little wall that White was perched on, his back to the path behind them, and settled next to White carefully, his cigarette held out in one hand, a can of coffee in the other. His bike helmet thumped against White’s knee. “What are you doing here?”

White was here because he had googled best parks near me and then he had taken the bus here, because he’d known it would piss his father off if he didn’t take the car. It was a form of rebellion he hadn’t done in a while, not since he was seventeen or so and his father had started telling him he wasn’t going back to Thailand when he graduated. Which, at the time, White had told himself he didn’t even want to return, and he also told himself it wasn’t rebellion, it was simply the independence he needed as he grew.

Ha fucking ha.

“Fresh air,” White said lightly. “You?”

Black sipped at his can of coffee and followed it with a drag of the cigarette. “Food delivery.”

White straightened up, confused. “You don’t have any food,” he said suspiciously, though he’d like some, having been sitting out here for nearly three hours staring morosely and pathetically at the water in the canal.

“Not you, idiot. I do food delivery.”

“You do food delivery to the park?”

“I don’t care where people want me to deliver food.”

That was fair. It wasn’t something White wouldn’t have done, if he was having a particularly nice day at the park with his girlfriend or his friends. It was just that he was not, in fact, currently having a nice time at the park and his brother was studying him like something to dissect.

“What’s wrong,” Black said, wielding the scalpel.

There had been a time when being angry in front of Black was natural, the only person White could let himself feel like that in front of, knowing that Black wouldn’t judge him — would encourage him, even. He’d trained it out of himself long ago and it had come surging back, that first time he saw his brother’s face in the garage.

Now, though, he didn’t know how to hold onto it long enough to open his fist and show Black, like it was a particularly ugly bug. When he opened his palm, there would be nothing there and Black would scoff, ask him what he was so worked up about, ask him once again why he was crying and couldn’t he stop?

He still couldn’t tell if Black even liked him or just figured he was stuck with him.

And White wanted Black to like him, so he tucked the crushed-bug anger away, smeared it down. “Nothing.”

“White,” Black said, and that might have been the first time Black had ever said his name since he came back. “You can—”

“I’m fine,” White snapped.

Oh. He was mad at his brother too. He didn’t know how to do that anymore and now it was too late. Black clearly knew.

“Bullshit,” Black said anyways. “I can fucking tell.”

“Of course you can,” White sighed. On the other side of ten years like this, he had to wonder if Black was the only one he could be angry in front of because Black already knew it was there. “Pa and I had a fight, that’s all.”

It was a careful lie. They always had to be with Black; White always made sure they were a little truthful, otherwise Black never believed them. And even though White made it like that so Black would let it go, like they were twelve again, it still stung when Black didn’t call him on it at all, just said, “You fought about me?”

White shook his head. “I haven’t told him about you.”

“He wouldn’t approve?”

“He doesn’t deserve to know,” White muttered under his breath, though Black just looked amused to overhear it. “He didn’t even want to find you, why should he—”

“Alright, alright,” Black said, holding up a hand. “Then why’d the old man piss you off?”

White scuffed the toe of his sneakers along the stone pathway. “We disagreed on an — work issue,” he said darkly, because he didn’t want to bring up the fire in case it made Black mad, or suspicious, and because it would make him mad again, that Black was putting him through all this, that Black would put his health at risk like that, that Black just wouldn’t trust him.

“You fought over something fucking boring like that,” Black said, shaking his head.

“I suppose so,” White said thinly. He didn’t even know why he’d argued with his father over it and he wasn’t even sure he’d believed the things he said, about justice and equality and the will of the people. And White was tired.

But if he was tired, Black would leave. So he just said, “It’s a bit stupid, isn’t it,” and pretended it was a victory when Black replied, “Nah, it’s kind of fun to see you get mad at people, I didn’t even know you could.”

He went home because there was nowhere to go. Black’s phone chimed with his next delivery, he got to his feet and tossed his can of coffee with perfect aim until the trash can on the other side of the path, and said, “Just don’t go home if you’re that pissed at him. You don’t need him.”

It was not an invitation to come with him, or to live with him, or for White to be involved with him in any way beyond the limited interactions in neutral spaces — and he was so mad, which he hadn’t been in so long, not really. He used to pick fights with his father about ridiculous things, like dinner and bedtime and homework, not because he cared about any of those things, but because he was still mad about being torn away from Black. But he’d long since learned there was no point in raging against something that could never, ever change.

White went home because all the people he would have gone to before, when he argued with his father or didn’t want to go home… well, they all lived in a different country.

Except for Black, who was an impossibility.

“There you are,” Todd said, throwing his arm over White’s shoulder. He held his phone up for a selfie. “I was wondering! Seriously, it’s been ages, and you haven’t texted me.” 

White groaned. He didn’t really want to talk to Todd, or be here at this charity fundraiser. And he really didn’t want to talk about his brother. It did not appear that he had a choice in any of these things, though. “That’s because nothing happened.”

“Oh, come on,” Todd said, laughing. He snatched two glass flutes off a passing waiter’s tray and passed one to White, even though White did not feel like having champagne. “These must be something.”

“There’s no news,” White said sourly. “I told you, he doesn’t want to talk to me.”

Todd rolled his eyes. “If you’re going to lie, tell me something believable.”

White took off his glasses, focusing on cleaning off the smudges. “It’s the truth,” he said, sharp and snappish, vision blurring with tears. “He wasn’t happy to see me. You knew he wouldn’t be!”

“Well,” Todd said, a wild grin on his face. “I may have suspected.”

“Asshole,” White said.

“I thought he’d get over it,” Todd said, patting White on the shoulder. After a moment, he reached out and adjusted White’s tie so that it lay straight, an overly familiar gesture that White found he didn’t mind at all. “I mean, I knew he’d be mad, but you know. You’re White.”

“Yeah, well, you were wrong,” White said, throwing back the glass of champagne. “He really won’t talk to me, it’s not like I came all the way back here to see him or anything—”

He hadn’t really meant to say that. He was pretty sure Black wouldn’t like him talking to Todd. But it just slipped out, a little hard kernel to crack his teeth on.

White’s anger had become easier to exist with the more Black didn’t approach it. He could tuck it away in the back of his throat, speaking around the ache of it until it was second-nature.

“Wow, he pissed you off,” Todd said.

And then Todd came and dragged him back up, cutting his throat to ribbons.

“Can’t I be,” White replied. Why was it easier to be mad in front of Todd than Black? It wasn’t like he knew Todd that much better than he did his brother at this point. But Todd was allowed to see it, maybe even the only one, because he felt the same and he understood it.

“Of course you can,” Todd said, throwing his arm around White’s shoulder.

White sighed, letting Todd steer him out of the hall and out onto the patio, where several men in suits were smoking. Todd lit a cigar himself, which made him look impossibly young, which White supposed they all were.

“Sorry,” Todd said, lifting his cigar, and White thought he was referring to the smoke until he said, “I didn’t think it would go this bad. I was kind of hoping you’d get me back into his good graces.”

White slumped against the wall. He wished he smoked, all of a sudden. “Not such luck.” Black would hate them talking about him like this, but if White couldn’t talk to Black about this, who could he talk to? There was only Todd and if White kept it all locked away, he was going to break his teeth trying to keep the words from spilling out. “He hasn’t told me anything. He’s just—” White swallowed. “Indulging me, I guess.”

“Ah, don’t feel bad,” Todd replied, unexpectedly understanding. “It was like that with me too.”

White was supposed to be different than Todd, but he knew better than to say that. “What happened with the two of you?”

“Black didn’t tell you?”

White waved a hand. “He’s not telling me anything these days.” The most intimate information he’d gotten from Black had been one text — Black was not a verbose texter — asking if White was allergic to bees, because Black had developed an allergy when he was seventeen.

White hadn’t.

This was probably the most information he’d gotten out of Black in the past two months and it was a random text about Black being allergic to something, clearly just because Black was curious and not because he wanted to know something about White—

“I don’t know what went wrong,” Todd said, which made two of them. “He was staying with me for a while after he left your mae’s, and that wasn’t so bad, but—” He shrugged. “I guess he fell in with those other friends of his, you know, the ones I told you about? I guess he just got into some shit he didn’t want to tell me about.”

White had a very hard time imagining Yok or Gram campaigning for Black to just drop his oldest friend.

They might get into some trouble, but they seemed genuinely nice — Yok had actually had a conversation with him on the bus, unlike Black, and Gram had actually seemed to want to get to know him, even if White hadn’t been very nice to him.

White wondered if it was this hard for fucking Gram. But that wasn’t fair. Because White knew it was.

He knew it was much harder for Gram. He knew it probably took a lot longer than three days for Black to change his mind about Gram, let him close enough to hear anything about his mother or his schoolwork. Never mind anything about his brother, no one was close enough for that but White.

That was the benefit of sharing Black’s face, after all.

And sharing Black’s history meant that White couldn’t help but know why Black wore his anger like a second skin, sharp and untouchable.

White hated his brother, for a moment. But how could he not forgive him? He always did. And Black was hurting.

How could White hold it against him?

“Hey, Black,” someone said, which White barely registered, really, until he was yanked backwards by the shirt collar.

“Uh,” White said, a lick of pain going up his heel where he stumbled, and was immediately slammed into the wall on his left. Pressure ballooned in his chest, air knocked out of him, the pressure of being pinned to the wall like a butterfly too much for him to catch his breath.

“Are you fucking crying,” the guy said. “I didn’t even do anything yet.”

White’s eyes were burning, the edges of the world going fuzzy, even though he didn’t really hurt. “You slammed me against a wall,” he managed to say, like the action has also jostled his soul in his body.

“I thought you’d be tougher than this,” the guy said, shaking his head. “Everyone always fucking saying that Black is tougher than anyone and now he’s fucking crying. You even have glasses.”

“I’m not—” White managed to say, but what was really the point?

“You fucking owe my friend money,” the guy said. “You’re six months late. Ring a bell?”

No, White thought. “How much money?”

“Oh, no,” the guy sneered. He pulled White’s glass off his face, face blurring, and tossed them aside. “That’s old news.”

How was that old news! Isn’t that what he wanted? “You can have my entire wallet,” White tried, voice wavering around the shape of the words like he didn’t remember how to speak, his mouth warm and overheated. He couldn’t see. He couldn’t think.

“I don’t want your fucking wallet.” And the guy had a knife in his hand, White could see that much this close, hot sunlight glancing off the edge of it, and the world narrowed to the point of the knife, close enough that White could see it, coming closer to rest at his throat.

The metal, cold, and the brick wall against White’s back, cold, and White’s entire body, cold. Couldn’t move.

White was really getting mugged this time. Or attacked. He didn’t know what the difference was. It didn’t matter. It was for Black’s face. No one had ever mugged White for Black’s face before.

The knife rested just under his jaw, like the mugger might slice Black’s face right off him.

He thought he might be panicking but his heart was screaming in his chest, too fast for him to think—

“I thought you were tough shit, Black,” the mugger said contemplatively.

“I am,” Black said.

Thank god.

The fuck you doing, Ice,” Black said, voice hot and twisted, and the mugger twisted around, panicked.

“What the fuck,” the newly-named Ice said.

“Phi,” White managed to say, focusing on Black’s blurry shape, warped like he’d been left out in the sun, but still wholly familiar. The panic ebbed away a little bit, because surely Black would take care of this.

“What, you can’t tell me apart from him,” Black said flatly. “He has glasses. White. Where are your glasses.”

“He threw them,” White mumbled.

Black nodded, expression unsettlingly flat like the surface of a dark, untouched lake. You couldn’t tell what was lurking there. It was all the more unsettling knowing that something should be. “He’s gonna regret that,” he said.

If the knife weren’t at White’s throat, he’d commend the mugger on having the good sense to press the knife down for insurance. As it was, it was White’s throat and the knife bit down, a stinging bloom, and he strangled on his own shocked gasp, not wanting to force the knife further into him.

Black just ripped the guy away from him without thinking about it. Black always took care of it.

White braced himself against the wall, palm awkwardly cradled against his jaw, curled up to stay out of the way. Old habits die hard. Black, in a fight, just took and took and took, the violence cratering him apart until he was smoking at the edges.

Black descended on the mugger even as he tried to crawl away and ripped everything in his path to shreds.

“Phi,” White said. Now that Black was here and White could feel every part of his body again, he could feel the sting of the cut and the raw meat of his heel and the blood warm in the palm of his hand. The aching wreckage of Black’s anger nested in his ribcage. “Just let him go.”

Ice took advantage of Black’s distraction and left, scrambling in the dust until he could make it to his feet and just leave.

And Black looked at him, hurting, and White knew so well what made his brother this.

“You,” Black said furiously. “Why didn’t you fucking do something?”

“I didn’t think he’d believe I wasn’t you,” White said tightly. He didn’t have it in him to soothe Black like he’d been doing, he only had the raw hurt inside him too.

“Fucking,” Black said, raising his own hand to his jaw where White’s pain was reflected, where White was going to need stitches. He frowned when he found nothing, then clocked White’s own bloody hand. “What the fuck?”

“I’m okay,” White told him.

Black dragged White forward by the shoulder — White groaned, having forgotten the pinched throbbing where he’d been thrown in the wall — and Black’s mouth turned down. He none to gently twisted White’s head to the side to inspect the long gash under his jaw. “What the fuck,” he repeated. “I can fucking feel that.”

White grimaced, the edge of his cut lighting up as he was turned. “It’s really not that bad,” he said.

“It shouldn’t fucking hurt at all,” Black said, the edge of his thumb pressing in and then — he must have felt that — tearing away. “The fuck, White?”

“It’s back,” White offered. Black really must not have felt it, then. Or hadn’t recognized he did. “You felt it when you, um, were strangling me — you couldn’t breathe—”

Black took a moment to remember doing that. “That was you?”

“It’s always me,” White said, confused.

“This is fucking normal?”

“You know that,” White said, even more confused.

“I don’t know that,” Black said. “I don’t know you.”

“Phi—”

“No, I’m not fucking kidding,” Black said. “I have memory loss. Ten years ago, I woke up and I didn’t even know my own fucking name. I definitely don’t know you. So you fucking tell me why I can feel your pain right the fuck now.”

“What,” White said, and he was sure he said it, he could hear the hum in his throat, but he heard nothing. The entire world was silent, all the sound lost.

And White’s life had been a long, steady stream of losing things.

Always to Black — swimming, baseball, who was faster, who got the better grades? — but that was an easy sort of loss, comforting because Black was always there to soothe the sting of it. And then just Black himself, gone, neatly cut out of White’s life like a surgeon took a scalpel to a tumor. And all the little parts of himself that were erased, like the way it was a little more difficult to read Thai than it should have been and the way White got used to the cold instead of the heat and now sometimes the humidity collected in his lungs when he tried to breathe.

He’d lost so much. He wasn’t prepared to lose Black again.

“But,” he said, the sound turning back on as he curled his fingers in the sleeve of Black’s jacket. Black didn’t shake him off, either, just letting White cling to him like a child which was, all things considered, really nice of him. Black never did do emotion; White always had all of it and Black would just sit there with an arm around him, stoic, and let White cry himself to pieces until he was wrung out.

Except Black didn’t remember doing that. He didn’t remember White at all.

Black only tolerated White’s shocked silence for about six seconds. “White,” he said, shaking White’s wrist off his sleeve. “The fucking pain. Why can I fucking feel it.”

“It’s always been like that,” White said, lost. Black didn’t know? But of course Black didn’t know. “We can always feel it.”

Black’s hand was vice-like on White’s wrist, his focus absolute and suffocating, shrinking White down with the pressure. “Always?”

“Always,” White said. “I — always.”

“Fuck,” Black said, displeased. “Your fucking face hurts.”

“Oh,” White said, looking down at his bloody hand. His entire shirt was a red smear. “I need stitches, I think.”

“Your entire fucking face is covered in blood, no shit you need stitches,” Black said. “Where are your glasses?”

White blinked. “He threw them,” he said again, and Black took a moment to look around on the ground. When he found them, his hand leaving White’s wrist, White let out this horrible whimper, like he was losing Black all over again, even though Black was putting the glasses back on his nose. The left lens had one small crack on the left side.

“You’re going to the fucking clinic,” Black said. He didn’t wait for an answer, just started pulling White down the street by the wrist. “And you’re going to tell me fucking everything.”

“Okay,” White echoed, already following along, realizing the only actual point of connection between them was his brother’s hand around his wrist. Everything else was gone.

Chapter Text

The clinic was small and slightly understaffed, and though White’s t-shirt was now specked pretty generously with blood, he still got relegated to the waiting room. He almost expected Black to throw a tantrum — he hated doctors, needles, and waiting when his little brother was hurt — but Black just threw himself into one of the waiting room chairs.

Because of course Black didn’t have a little brother anymore.

“You won’t, um, probably feel it,” White said, skin crawling when the nurse gestured towards him and Black made no move to stand up. Why would he? Why would he go and hold White’s hand like they were children, again, so that White could tease him that he wasn’t even scared and that this time Black was the baby. “If you’re still scared of needles—”

Black glared him. White shut up. “I’m going to stay,” Black said. “I want answers.”

Which. Of course.

“Okay,” White said, and went to go get his stitches.

It was only six. The doctor asked him a bunch of questions, which White couldn’t really answer while his jaw was being held in place, and his mind wasn’t in it anyways, thinking about Black in the waiting room, the intangible link between them that Black knew nothing about.

He didn’t know White had felt it, that time in the fire, that time at four in the morning when their mother bruised up Black’s face. Black hadn’t realized, like White thought he had, why strangling White made it hard to breathe.

This was the first time that Black felt — if White had never gotten hurt, Black never would have told him.

“You’re good to go,” the nurse announced, taping gauze over the stitches piecing together White’s jaw and chin. “You can take some over the counter medication for the pain. Don’t get them wet.”

He didn’t even get the good stuff. “Okay,” White replied, and left. The stitches didn’t hurt that much, just itchy, and he took the sample pills dry as he signed some of the forms at the front counter, skin pulling painfully around his jaw as he swallowed.

“Ready?”

White jumped, pen sliding across the paper. “Yes! Uh, yeah.” He kept Black in view out of the corner of his eye like how you weren’t supposed to look at predators head-on so they wouldn’t think you were a threat. It didn’t matter. Black viewed him as one anyways.

“Stop fucking dancing around,” Black said. “Fuck, you’re so—” he shut himself up as White shrank himself down to nothing, a speck of blood on the urgent care tile floor. “Come on.”

White followed him out the clinic door, down the street. The sun shone down brightly on them, even though White felt that it should be cloudy and raining to match his mood, the swirling muddiness coating his ribcage.

Black’s gaze slid sideways as they walked, eying the white gauze square taped uncomfortably under White’s jaw. “I didn’t feel it.”

“They numbed me.”

“Uh-huh,” Black said. “So I don’t feel it if you get anesthesia?”

White glanced quickly around the street, which was silly, because who would be listening to them among the street vendors? But they never talked about this so plainly; it was always their secret, something referred to in such a way that no one could ever understand what they were talking about.

“White,” Black snapped.

“Yes,” White said automatically.

“And?”

“And what?”

“And? And what the fuck else, obviously.” Black scoffed. “Is it always this hard to get answers outta you?”

White tilted his head down, eyes burning. “I’ve never — we never—” he gestured between them. It was a topic of conversation between them at all times when they were little, of course, but they’d never actually, well. Said it. “We didn’t really talk about it.”

“Bullshit. Don’t make things difficult.” Black shoved White towards a green plastic picnic table and sat him down on one side. “Sit.”

White sat. Black went and got them some food, red curry for White and noodles for him. Wasn’t it something — something enough — that Black knew what to get him from the food stall? But then, of course Black knew, they had been hanging out for weeks now, because Black had apparently decided, for whatever reason that had nothing to do with White, that he should entertain this brand-new baby brother.

Had he been lonely even still, not knowing there was a brother out there? Somehow White couldn’t imagine it. Had he just figured this was easiest because White didn’t give up?

Black had been a stranger to White for a long time. White didn’t know the answer.

“So,” Black said, pulling his noodles to his side of the table. White started to eat, mechanically, and slow, because the stitches pulled with each bite. “When did it start? And none of that wishy-washy bullshit you usually do.”

White deflated. “It always was there,” he said. “Since before I can remember.” No one had thought it weird; twins crying at the same time was just about the most normal experience a nanny could have. It had existed as long as they both were alive; there was no time before it. Being Black and White meant sharing this; there had never been a real point where they realized it. They just always had it.

Black considered that. “You feel all my pain?”

How to quantify it? “No, not all. Big things, mostly, things that you feel, ah—” White worked his jaw and imagined that Black felt the strain too. “Strongly. Not just pain, but surprise or anger, ah, if I’m scared—”

“Your emotions too?”

“Both of ours,” White said quietly, rubbing at his tight chest.

“That’s how you knew about—” Black gestured towards his cheek, which had long since healed, but White still remembered the surprise on Black’s face when he mentioned it, knowing exactly what time it was without being told. Because he didn’t know there was something wrong with them.

“It woke me up,” White said.

Black ignored everything that meant and continued his questions.

It was hard to answer some, easy to answer others. They tested out the limits a lot, when they were children; they both had a row of very small, white scars near the inside of the elbow, White with five and Black with six, where they’d tested out digging their fingernails into each other’s skin to see how much pain there was, if they could stop it, if it hurt more when it was yourself or if it hurt more when it was your brother.

Black investigated the scars near his elbow clinically. “He babied you, didn’t he.” Like it was a foregone conclusion.

White shrank back. “I guess,” he said quietly, because Black had. It never bothered either of them, when they were kids — Black got in trouble, got hurt, and it could never be fixed that White got hurt alongside him. There was something in Black’s love that always hurt; they couldn’t stop it. Black was always hurting White. Of course he had to take care of White too.

But still. White wasn’t prepared for the way Black talked about himself like a whole other person.

“Your, um, memories,” he started, and Black bristled, sharp edges like he might attack. “I get to ask,” White said quietly. He couldn’t decide if he had a right to ask, but he couldn’t stand to leave Black behind, sitting there are the table, maybe never to be seen again, without at least... knowing.

Black apparently decided this was fair, given the interrogation he’d just given White. “Fine.”

“Since when,” White asked.

“When I was twelve,” Black said. “September.”

White poked at his mostly-full bowl. “That’s when I left.”

“You think I didn’t fucking realize that?”

“Sorry.” It wasn’t that he hadn’t put it together, but it was different to hear. That it was losing White that made this happen. That Black, of the two of them, had been destroyed and White had been strong enough to remember. “But — that’s why you didn’t want to get to know me?”

“Didn’t used to have a twin. Didn’t need one.”

What response was there to that? Did anyone really need a sibling they didn’t know they had? This whole time, White thought that even if they were strangers, they’d always have their childhood linking them. If Black didn’t want him anymore, if Black was tired of him, if Black didn’t like the twisted shape that White had grown into, there was always their past tangling them together. But it was gone.

“You get it now, right,” Black said.

Yes, he understood. Why Black hadn’t wanted him, why Black reacted like that. Black wasn’t the brother White had lost. “But — it’s been ten years, I’m not the one you’d remember either.”

“White,” Black said, almost kindly. He said it like he was actually sorry this was the answer. Like he knew White wouldn’t like it.

But White did. There was the quiet warmth of relief spreading through his body, a seedling struggling up after forest fire. It was horrible to think, after Black had just revealed all his mangled pieces. But it had nothing to do with White. It wasn’t something irredeemably broken in White that Black couldn’t accept. His job, his opinions, the way he did or didn’t fight back. None of that even mattered.

What Black didn’t like about him wasn’t personal.

Maybe this was better, even. “Why didn’t you tell me to go away?”

“I did.”

White reframed. “Why did you come find me, then? After I gave up?”

Black shrugged. “You wouldn’t be curious if you were me?”

White would be, of course.

But he was lonely in a way that he didn’t think Black was. Black was just fine on his own, wasn’t he, and White would have been the one clinging to him even if the situations were reversed, glad there was someone else in this world required to care about him. “I’m not you, though. So why did you change your mind?”

Black slurped a noodle up. “I know your face hurts but eat.”

White did not think saying I’m not hungry was going to work here, even if he was feeling somewhat nauseous. He managed another bite of curry, then another, Black watching him like a misbehaving child, and then asked, “Okay, I ate. Why?”

Black scoffed. “Just because I don’t want a twin doesn’t mean I don’t have one. You still exist.” Of course he didn’t mean it to be comforting, but White winced hearing it. “Besides. Mae told me not to ruin everything they did for us.”

That was White’s brother through and through, age twenty-two and age twelve and age six. The stubborn look on his face. Everything about him, so much changed, and still that rebellious, insufferable righteousness.

Now that, White could work with. “Okay,” he said. It hadn’t even worked, dragging them apart. Black still felt White’s pain, even if he didn’t remember him. There was no going back, not with the quiet way that Black’s jaw tightened every bite White took. “Sorry.”

“What for,” Black said. “It didn’t hurt any.”

“Didn’t it?”

Black’s throat worked, the only sign he didn’t like the question. Or that he struggled with the answer. “It doesn’t matter now anyways.”

-

Black refused to answer any more questions after that. White’s fault; he shouldn’t have come on too strong. “Later,” he said, and White pathetically considered that enough that there was a later. All the progress he’d thought he’d made was clearly, well, nothing. Black had treated him just the same as all his other friends, people he eventually wanted space away from.

White was now on that list and Black was clearly at the end of his rope. “I need to get home,” he said, instead of asking if he was going to ruin his brother’s life by coming back into it.

“You gonna be okay,” Black asked, gesturing towards the gauze on White’s face. “With your dad?”

He didn’t say our dad.

“Well, I got mugged, didn’t I,” White said. He always came up with something. He’d prefer if there was nothing for his father to bother him about, but he couldn’t very well hide that the two sides of his skin were peeling apart. “It’ll be fine. I’ll see you next week.”

He wasn’t actually sure about that. But Black didn’t seem inclined to ditch him just yet. In fact, he seemed a little clingier than usual, waiting longer than he normally would to climb onto his bike. “Knowing you can get hurt like me, it’s freaky to let you go,” he said wryly, fingers flexing over the handlebars like he maybe he was going to step back, towards White. “How far can you feel—?”

“About a thousand kilometers,” White said.

Not exact, of course. But he remembered the snap of it in his chest a third of the way through the flight, the rebound of tensely-stretched rubber band and the hushed silence that settled all over his entire body, the first time he’d ever really been alone in it. All Black’s quiet warmth washed away.

Black stared at him, like he hadn’t really expected what the answer would mean. How could he? He didn’t have a lifetime backing it up.

His father was reading a newspaper on the patio. That didn’t seem right, given that White’s entire world have been shaken down to its very foundation. He was smoking, a habit he’d never been able to shake, and mostly it just reminded White of Black now, the way they held the cigarettes the same.

“Oh, White,” he said, looking up from his paper and stubbing out the cigarette, like it was a normal day. “You were out late — son! What happened to your face?”

 “I got mugged.”

“Mugged!” His father fretted over the gauze on his jaw, fingers light against White’s cheek as he moved them towards the kitchen light so he could see better.

“They thought I was Black,” White heard himself say, and his father’s mouth dropped open, shocked and surprised and already affronted. But White didn’t really care, because he couldn’t just stay here and pretend anymore, like he’d been doing his entire life, shoving down all the little parts of him until he could come home and find nothing left but red-hot anger, all-encompassing. “Did you know?”

“I haven’t heard anything about Black in years,” his father said, outwardly calm, though the corner of his mouth was pinched and displeased. “I’m not surprised he’s making trouble for you—”

“No,” White said, knocking his father’s hands away. The tape ripped away from his skin. “About Black’s memory. Did mae tell you?”

His father stilled, like a lake. Inside White was a black hole devouring.

“You did know,” White said. “You knew?”

He should be more surprised — or more willing to believe it wasn’t true — he should pretend, maybe, put on the smile he was so used to stitching onto his face, except he just couldn’t. He couldn’t even have the faith to pretend to be surprised, because he wasn’t, he’d just been lying to himself. Deep in the rotted core of him, he knew it was the truth. Everyone knew. His father knew. Todd knew. Their mother—

“We thought it best to let it be,” their father said slowly, giving up on examining White’s stitches in favor of examining his eyes, like search for proof that White was still White. “The separation clearly took its toll on both of you—”

“But you could have fixed it. You could have brought me home.”

If they had brought him home, maybe Black would have his memories. Maybe he could be six and playing in the entryway where the housekeeper would trip over them coming in with the groceries. Or he could be eight and coming home from baseball practice, or eleven and scooping White off the pavement where he’d been smeared like a bug where some of the older kids.

Instead, he was twelve, and starting everything over, alone.

“We don’t know that that would have fixed anything. Mother took Black to a lot of doctors—”

“But you didn’t even consider it.” Inside White, this empty feeling grew, like all the air sucked out of the room. Nothing left by ice-cold rage. How was he supposed to forgive this?

“White—”

“No,” White said, and he just left.

It was an easy taxi ride from White’s father’s house to Black’s apartment. Or, well, it was long, but it was late and there were no problems. With the ride itself. White had many problems and he didn’t know what he was doing. He barely had any money and no clothes other than his still blood-splattered shirt, which had caused the driver to give him a judgmental look, but White appreciated that he still drove.

He’d picked Black up here just once, with no invite to come in or even go upstairs, so now he took the stairs slow. He hadn’t actually texted. Part of him was afraid that if he did, Black wouldn’t let him come over. If he just showed up, looking pathetic, the bloody gauze only half-taped to his jaw, Black might actually let him in.

The truth of it is he had nowhere else to go. Black wasn’t heartless, right?

“Hi, phi,” White said, when Black swung open the door, one hand braced on the door frame. “Um, can I stay just a night?”

Black blinked at him. “Seriously?”

“Yeah.”

Black looked more stunned than anything else as he stepped back. “You can’t go home?”

“No,” White said, edging around Black into the apartment. It was not lost on him that this was the first time he’d ever been allowed in, and that if he wasn’t visibly losing it right now, Black still probably wouldn’t have let him in. “It went — um.”

“That bad?” Black’s eyes sharpened. “You said you could deal with it.”

White hadn’t really said that. He’d thought it, though.

“He knew,” White said. “You know how — ah.” He stopped. He was going to say you know how it went, except Black wouldn’t understand. Black didn’t even know their father; White couldn’t just say you know how he is. “Were you mad when you realized mae never told you about me?”

Black eyed him like this was an absurd question. It was, except White didn’t really know the answer. Black was always mad; it seemed that hadn’t been just a childhood trait. Of course Black was mad. But why? Because he was upset their mother lied? Upset because there was something he didn’t know, and for someone as much a control freak as Black, that was practically a fate worth then death?

Or was he upset because he missed out on something worth missing?

“Coulda killed her, I was so pissed,” Black said finally.

White shrugged. There was the answer.

He was mad his brother was a stranger; he was mad his brother was a stranger all over again. Their parents kept them apart even when one of them hurt that bad — he couldn’t stand it, the rage flung itself at the walls of his chest, beating against the bars of his ribs to get out, get free. What had keeping things from him for his own good ever done?

But maybe Black just hated their mom that much. White just didn’t know. “Can I have a hug?”

He hadn’t hugged his brother yet. Black didn’t consider him any sort of family yet, maybe wouldn’t ever, but he was still White’s brother. Woven into the fiber of White’s being.

There was no part of White that will ever consider Black a stranger. That was just his brother.

“Yeah, okay,” Black said eventually, and White threw his arms around him immediately, shocked with his own want. Hugging Black was like hugging a brick wall, stiff and unyielding, like he hadn’t hugged anyone in a long time, but White couldn’t make himself let go — he was sorry about it, somewhere, he really was, and he’d been trying, really trying, to give Black the space that he clearly wanted these past couple of months, to not be overbearing, but he didn’t have fucking anything if he didn’t have Black.

And he didn’t have Black.

Eventually, Black unfroze long enough to wrap an arm around White’s back. “Knew I shouldn’t have let you go,” he said, and even if he didn’t hold White the way he used to, he hesitantly patted White between the shoulder blades. “Fucking typical,” Black decided, stepping back.

White didn’t know what Black thought was fucking typical. If he liked that it was fucking typical. There’s so much White didn’t know.

“I’m sorry,” White said, wiping his eyes as he stepped back.

He kept asking so much of Black, expecting that history to tie him together. He demanded it. Black was fine without him and White wasn’t fine without Black. He really should have let Black leave in peace. But White just wasn’t capable of it; he was too selfish. Black always just let him, even now.

Because it was easier. Because White wanted it so much.

White was tearing him apart. But there really was nowhere else to go.

Black got him some clean clothes and steered him towards the tiny bathroom, one hand on his shoulder, telling White to use his stuff. “Don’t get the stitches wet,” he instructed, though White knew that already. He carefully wiped off his neck, still dotted with faded pink blood. His jaw ached. His teeth. From grinding them, he thought. Could Black feel that? Was it enough?

Probably not.

When he got out of the shower, dirty clothes folded up against his chest, Black had gauze ready, inspecting White’s stitches to make sure he hadn’t gotten them wet before carefully taping him back up, his fingers warm against White’s jaw. They didn’t usually touch like this anymore. Sometimes White reached out, but Black usually rebuffed him, kindly, matter-of-fact. Now, his fingers burned like a brand.

Black met his eyes. Maybe he was thinking the same thing. “Don’t make me take you back to the fucking clinic,” he said instead, dropping the tape on the cluttered coffee table. Beer cans, an ashtray, a haphazard stack of papers and textbooks piled atop each other. Black probably had school tomorrow.

“Okay,” White said, sitting on the couch and accepting the pillow Black handed him. Black just pulled the dirty clothes right out of his hands, tossed them to the corner where a small laundry bin sat, like it was nothing. Like it was regular. Like White wasn’t pushing and pushing and pushing—

“Look, I’ll just — for one night.” The pale blue of his t-shirt stood out starkly piled atop the blacks and grays of Black’s clothing. “I won’t, um. I won’t bother you again after this, I just—” it was not rational to say that he could kill his father for this, but the urge was there, a forceful simmer. He could never go home again. “I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

If he said it enough, could he excuse himself for coming back here, wringing his brother dry and mangled?

“It’s fine,” Black said, though it couldn’t be.

“Okay,” White said, because he had no room to be picky.

Black scooped one of the textbooks off the top of his paper stack, sending papers sliding to the floor. “I got homework, so I’m not going to bed soon.” He took the textbook over to his bed, apparently content with that.

White lay down on his right side so that he wasn’t lying on his stitches. He could see the whole room like this, the small kitchen that he doubted Black ever used, the punching bag in the corner that he probably used all the time. The surprisingly neat line of shoes at the door, the stacks of books piled under the bed frame.

It was quiet.

White on the couch, Black on his bed, silent except for the occasional turn of the page and the scratch of pencil. He’d left the balcony doors cracked on each side, so that the breeze cooled the apartment, though White was still too hot. He hadn’t gotten used to any of this yet, though Black seemed to have no problem.

There was no real place for White here. But he fell asleep like that anyways.

In the morning, White’s alarm went off first and he grumbled. “Shut up,” Black grumbled from the bed too. “Fuck, you have work?”

“Not going,” White said, turning off the alarm. “I’m quitting.”

“Okay,” Black said, rolling over.

White woke up three hours later, in an empty apartment with an orange sticky note on his forehead.

Went to class, it read. White couldn’t decide if his brother’s handwriting was familiar or not, not that it mattered, but it was there and Black wasn’t, and it was almost noon already, and White had no idea when his brother would be back. His apartment, entirely different looking in the sunlight, was completely empty.

White wrote an email to his boss explaining he was sick. Then he deleted it all and wrote and email to his boss explaining he was quitting. Then he went back to the email about being sick, and didn’t send either of them, because one was a lie and the other was simply terrifying.

He hated that job.

But he didn’t have anything else, not another job or any idea of what he’d want to do beyond this, and he couldn’t get an apartment without the job anyways—

And he gave up everything to be here with his brother, who wasn’t exactly a person that existed anymore. It was an old hurt, a decade old, long scabbed over and healed — White had always known that when he got home, the Black he found wouldn’t be the Black he left. That Black was dead. That White was dead. Those twelve-year-old versions of them were long-healed scars that still ached with oncoming rain.

White would always give up everything for him, stranger or not.

But there was no reason Black should, Black owed him nothing. And yet here White was, asking him to anyways. Asking for everything, all because White was hurt, the pieces of his life crumbled around him like a ruin where he could still point out the shadows of familiar places. Anything to soothe the sharp sting of betrayal nestling inside him.

White remembered, when they were kids, that adults called him clingy. Needy. Black was independent — often too independent — and White followed along, clinging to Black’s shirt or his hand. Black climbing the walls in the garden, sitting atop and coaxing White to come with him, even if White was scared.

White was always the one who couldn’t be alone. Black, clearly, could do everything just fine.

And White—

Black:
are you freaking out

White picked up the phone, the screen blurring a little as — his hands were shaking. He steadied one with the other, then both of them with the coffee table when the tremors wouldn’t stop.

White:
no

Black:
bullshit
i think i can feel it

Ohh no. Oh, that wasn’t good. White’s brain leaked out his ears, leaving just nothing but the growing buzz of panic.

Black:
just stop
be back in two hours

Maybe you could call it instinct from when they were young, when White cried all the time. When he was scared, when he was upset, when he was frustrated. Black wasn’t ever good at comforting, but White didn’t need him to be: he could grab White’s elbow and just say stop. Stop worrying. Look at me, am I worried? No, so why should you be? Hey, listen to phi. Can’t you feel it?

White could always feel Black’s calm, crowding in his worry, drowning it until it was gone. He felt it now, a wide out-of-place bubble expanding each, ever-evening breath.

Black was probably just annoyed White was disrupting his day. Even White was annoyed he was disrupting Black’s day. He’d taken enough. If he didn’t stop taking and taking and taking — he remembered his mother saying how much he needed from his brother, discussing what a problem it was — when they were young, White had been the problem, too young and crying too much. It wasn’t until they got older that Black was the problem—

Black never was one to give up anything, except to White. That was how it always had been.

Black got home a couple of hours, keys jingling in his hand. “Still here?”

“Didn’t want to leave the door unlocked,” White replied, still staring at his phone screen, with the email about quitting on it. It was true about the door — as he thought it, he realized he was starving — but he didn’t want to leave in case he wasn’t allowed back. Wasn’t that selfish of him?

“The fuck were you freaking out about earlier?”

“I wasn’t.”

“Like fuck you weren’t,” Black replied, dropping his bag on the still unmade bed.

“I wasn’t,” White repeated again, looking up from his phone. He was. A quiet drum, like the lap of lake water, in the back of his mind, unable to be completely removed. It was terrifying. His brother was right there but White was completely alone. “I just — am figuring out what to do about my job.”

“Yeah?”

White nodded. “I don’t think I can quit yet,” he confessed. “I’ll need the money, and I won’t be able to get an apartment without one — I have some money saved up, but it won’t last—”

“Grow the fuck up,” Black said and White broke off, confused and strangely a little offended that Black was opening the minifridge like nothing mattered, pulling out two cans of beer. After a moment, he reconsidered the can in his hand. “You left this couch all day?”

“Not really,” White admitted, and Black traded one can of beer for a bottle of water, which White fumbled catching when it was thrown at his face.

Black nudged White further down the couch, settling on one end — Black was a creature of habit, he liked to sit in the same places and eat the same things, that must be where he always sat — and cracked the can open, the snap of metal loud and unrelenting. Black took a sip. “You already walked out on Pa, you might as well quit.” He took another. “I hated that job anyways. Drink your water.”

White smiled. “I know you did, phi.”

“Great, so quit,” Black said. “You fucking want to, don’t you?”

He wanted to. He wanted—so bad.

Black shrugged. “I don’t care if you stay with me longer,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.”

White couldn’t actually find any surprise in himself at this offer. “Really?”

“You’re already here,” Black pointed out. “And you don’t snore. What do I care?”

“Are you sure, though? I don’t want to—” be a burden, White had been going to say, which was far too polite to say, an automatic response and not something he had ever thought of himself to Black. Black took care of him, he always had.

But White had never been a burden.

“Seriously, just quit,” Black said, exasperated, picking the phone off the couch cushion and tossing that at White’s face too. White pressed send on the email, waiting for nausea to well up. There was only overwhelming relief. “Welcome home, or whatever,” Black said, tossing back his beer, unconcerned with everything entirely.

Just stop, he’d said earlier. A twelve-year-old echo: I’m not worried, why should you be?

White thought Black just didn’t know, yet, what he was giving up.

That weekend, Black dragged White to the garage they had first met in like White was a misbehaving puppy. “You have to learn to defend yourself,” he said, tilting his head to peer at the line of stitches under White’s jaw, still a week away from being removed. “And I don’t have the time.”

Gumpa appeared from around the edge of a black car with a propped-up hood, face displeased. “And I do?”

“Are you a law student?”

“Do you own a business?”

Black rolled his eyes. “Please, hia,” he mocked, voice high and teasing and underneath all that, earnestly sincere. “So he doesn’t get himself fucking killed.”

“It was only six stitches,” White mumbled. He’d had worse. Black looked at him like he didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about — and he didn’t, of course, but saying it more bluntly would be strange, so White circled around the topic like water in a drain. “Remember when I sliced my knee on the broken window?”

“Did you cry,” Black shot back.

White made a face. “No!” He’d been more shocked at the time than upset — the crunch of glass as he knelt on the frame had been loud and he froze, like his mother was going to come yell at him. But it was Black coming in, yelling about the pain, face contorted with furious concern, that made White actually feel it.

Mostly what White remembered was that their parents finally found out about their bond, but he really couldn’t say that to Black with Gumpa there, watching them.

“Calm down, boys,” Gumpa chided them, as easily as breathing. “I suppose it’s good you’re taking responsibility for this, Black. Finally.”

Black growled and stalked off, leaving White with just Gumpa, who had a gleam in his eye that meant White was, frankly, in danger. And he was. Gumpa asked him how much Black had taught him — nothing beyond how to throw a punch when they were ten, and even that White wasn’t confident in. And then Gumpa tortured him. White hadn’t done anything like this in years, not since he quit soccer in school, and he was completely out of his depths.

“Wow, weak shit, are you slacking off,” someone said, and White turned and found Yok. Yok blinked at him.

“Hello again,” White said after a minute. “Yok, right?”

“Hi!” Yok said, grinning. “I thought you were Black!”

White had his glasses on but he was wearing Black’s clothes, of course; he didn’t have any of his own. He didn’t have anything of his own. This morning, even, Black had looked at him and said you were styling your hair? Fuck, we really do look identical now. “I borrowed some of his clothes.”

“Yeah, I didn’t think the t-shirt that reads die on the back would be yours,” Yok said, like they knew each other beyond one bus ride, one strangling, and one breakdown. Though really, maybe that was more than enough. Even his ex-girlfriend didn’t know quite so much about him.

“You don’t think it suits me?”

Yok laughed. “It totally suits you,” he said. “But what the fuck are you doing here?”

“Black remembered we have the same face,” White said, aiming a punch at the red bag. His knuckles ached; the good sort of ache that meant your body was doing something right, but still an ach. “And that people don’t like him.”

“White’s doing well,” Gumpa said, from where he was sitting and fiddling with what looked like the insides of a portable radio, the red shell of it in front of him on the table. “Better than you when you first started.”

“Oh, he is not,” Yok grumbled, flouncing down to sit next to Gumpa.

White sighed. He kind of wanted to tell Yok to go away, so that he wouldn’t have an audience for this, but he’d never been good at standing his ground and it certainly wouldn’t be useful. These were Black’s friends. They knew Black much better than White, and Black knew them much better than White too. White knew better than to push his luck. It was a miracle that Black even brought him here in the first place.

“I guess he’s not all that bad,” Yok said to Gumpa, watching. “You’re not that bad, White! Though you need to keep your wrist straighter. And, and also you need—”

“He needs to take his fucking meds,” Black said, wandering back over with two pills in his hand. He’d done this yesterday too, when White hadn’t taken them in the morning on a proper schedule and Black had complained, saying you know I can fucking feel it itching? Take your meds.

“Oh,” White said, holding his hand out, except both his hands were wrapping up in the boxing gloves. Black just rolled his eyes and shoved the pills in his mouth, which made White cough, of course, eyes watering. How are you so good at this, he wanted to know, because it was something Black would have done when they were twelve and he made it seem so natural, acting like that with a total stranger.

Black hadn’t used to be so good at pretending like this.

“Twenty more, White,” Gumpa called without looking up from his portable radio.

Great.

He would not say that he really liked this. Being at the garage was a bit cloying, Yok staring at him like he was a circus clown and Black ignoring him except for the all the times he wasn’t. Black’s forays into… well, not touchiness, most people couldn’t accuse Black of being touchy, but he’d let White climb on the back of the bike with him, and he’d touched his shoulder to guide him towards the bathroom and he taped White’s face up every night, even though White could have done it himself — it was nice. If you ignored the context.

It just wasn’t very easy to ignore at the garage, especially when Sean and Gram came in while White was wrapping up. They glanced at each other, eyes wide, and White suddenly remembered what Gumpa and Yok had deigned not to mention.

Last time he’d been here, Black had strangled him.

Right. Any chance White could get them to forget that?

“I see you’re, ah, getting along now,” Sean said, craning his neck in a really obvious way to, presumably, check and see if the bruises on White’s neck were still there. They weren’t, of course. That had been over a month ago, but it didn’t stop Sean from looking.

“Like I’ve never strangled you,” Black snapped.

“I actually saw them hanging out a couple of weeks back,” Gram said, not quite a whisper. “Back when Black was kind of acting weird and all secretive?”

Sean made an affronted noise in the back of his throat. “And you never told us?”

“Not your business,” Black said, and Gram laughed, throwing his hands up in a gesture for peace as he ducked behind Sean. “Don’t make me strangle you right here and now.”

“Phi, it’s fine,” White said. There was something nice about the way Black talked to his friends — it was mean, technically. By all definitions of the word. Anyone would think they just didn’t like each other. Black delivered everything he said antagonistically, but White was pretty sure this was him joking. It was familiar. It was something that White hoped he still understood how to read.

“No, it’s just like, not every day, actually, when I see someone strangle his brother,” Sean said, to no one, then, “Are you staying for dinner?”

White stared at him.

Black said, “No, White’s going home.”

White didn’t even really want to be here, but that hurt.

“Aww, no he’s not,” Yok whined, though he ditched the couch immediately to help Sean and Gram start unloading the take-out bags at the picnic table, already not paying attention.

“He should stay,” Gumpa said, packing up the parts of his radio.

“Yeah, stay,” Gram said, which was really quite nice of Gram, considering how mean White had been to him the last time they talked. He shouldn’t do that anymore. If anything, he should be grateful at how much Gram had done for Black over the years. It wasn’t his fault Black had no memories of White at all.

“Come on, Black,” Yok said.

“Fine,” Black spat out, and relief swam through White almost nauseatingly quick. He didn’t want to be here, but he didn’t want to be made to go, either.

“Really?” White asked quietly, out of everyone’s earshot, fingers curled around Black’s sleeve. “I can go—”

“Sit the fuck down,” Black said, rolling his eyes. “You’re gonna be here, aren’t you, might as well. Just act normal.”

White must not have been doing a very good job, not like Black had.

“Okay,” he said miserably, and Black rolled his eyes. But he still led him over the picnic table, and even then, let White sit at the end of the wooden picnic bench, so that White didn’t have to sit next to Gram, and started picking out his food.

Black wouldn’t know, of course, that he’d always hated how good White was at behaving normally. Todd used to joke it was just because White was the likable one, the one who drew all the attention and made a good story. Black wasn’t good at it like White was. Black is just jealous, Todd said, throwing his arm over White’s shoulders, and White would laugh.

He was wrong. Black just knew all that was simmering just underneath the surface of White’s smile. He hated that White did that to himself. But White did it — didn’t even mind, really, being the likable one, drawing all the attention to him, making a story. Black wasn’t good at it. It made him feel a little better now to be needed, even if it was just to run interference between Black and the people he refused to call friends.

Black was always so independent. It always seemed like he needed nothing at all.

“So,” Gram said, clearly attempting to sound normal. He was on the other side of Black, while Sean, Gumpa, and Yok were lined up in a row on the other side of the table. “What’cha doing here, White?”

“He can’t?” Black snapped, right as Yok let out a cackle.

“White got in a fight,” Yok crowed, the sound bouncing around the garage.

“I did not,” White protested, just a little indignant but not letting himself slide into whiny. He needed them to like him. “They thought I was Black.”

“Wow,” Sean said, raising his eyebrows. “Bet that got you into a lot of trouble when you were kids, huh?”

White huffed and tapped his frame of his glasses. With his brother’s clothing and without styling his hair, it was the only way anyone here was going to be able to tell them apart for the evening. Unless they looked at the scowl on Black’s face. “Usually people can tell us apart.”

“I already said sorry for that,” Yok said.

“Actually, you didn’t,” Black pointed out, passing White a plate of food.

“You never serve me food,” Gram said to Black.

Black served himself a few more pieces of meat. “And?”

“Phi, I want a drink,” White said, nudging Black’s side, and Black reached out to the end of the table and grabbed White a beer without complaining. Good, that was good. It set the right idea, even if it made Yok’s eyes go round and shiny, like he couldn’t comprehend what he was seeing. If White was going to be here, this oppressive weight pressing down on Black’s shoulders, he wanted to help.

He hadn’t even though Black would bring him here, but Black never did anything by halves. White wanted to make this as easy as possible, so that Black didn’t choke on the lies.

“White’s going to be coming around more while I train him up a bit,” Gumpa said, unconcerned with the roughhousing going on at his table. “That’s all.”

“A bit,” Black said under his breath. “A fucking lot, you mean.”

“It’s not my fault,” White said. “They thought I was you.”

“Yeah, and I could’ve beat them half-dead, so you better be at least half as good,” Black said. He pointed. “You should be able to at least beat Yok.”

“Aw, come on,” Yok said.

“I don’t think that’s gonna happen,” White said dubiously.

“It better, ‘cause if I’m not around—”

There was an easy story of friendship that unspooled itself for White over dinner. Black didn’t particularly take part in it, though not for lack of everyone’s trying, and White could easily slot in to an expected opening, the kindness to Black’s anger. It was so familiar that it was cloying, White going through actions that caught in his lungs, Black not understanding them yet.

Maybe he thought what everyone else thought, that this was how they just were, that the front they presented was correct.

But normalcy was what Black needed. Even if Black always hated when he did this, thought it was the coward’s way out — White didn’t even remember if Black had ever said that to him, but he remembered thinking Black must have thought that, over and over and over — White would help. He had to.

“Are you sure it’s all good between you and Black?”

It was Gram who asked this, smoking out front with Sean, while Black talked to Gumpa about something or other that White wasn’t apparently supposed to know. Honestly, White was surprised it was Gram saying this instead of Sean — he and Black seemed to get along the worst out of everyone. Or, well, Sean seemed to hate Black the most out of anyone; White couldn’t tell if Black had any particular opinion of Sean whatsoever. But it was Gram instead.

“Why are you asking me that,” White asked, laughing even though he didn’t feel like it. “Shouldn’t you be asking Black?”

“Sure, ‘cause he’s so good at talking about things like that,” Sean scoffed. “Look, last time we saw you—”

“I know,” White said, rolling his eyes. “It’s really not that big a deal, you know? I nearly drowned him in the bathtub once.” He probably would have kept going, he thought sometimes, if he hadn’t been drowning himself. He didn’t even remember what he’d been mad about. Just that he loved Black so much that he could kill him.

“That was when you were kids, though,” Gram said. “Right?”

White shrugged. “He hasn’t gotten less annoying,” he said, which made Sean laugh, bright and loud. “We’re alright, really. You don’t need to worry.” Which was true enough. Sure, he felt completely severed from his own body, emotions oscillating between sluggish and torrential at a moment’s notice. But he and Black were doing the best they could be in this situation, really.

Black was completely fine, even.

“If you say so,” Gram said. “Just I’ve known Black for three years now and he never mentioned you—”

“Black never mentioned you either,” White said.

“Hey,” Gram said, not all that injured by it. That was the thing was Gram, White was learning. He didn’t take any of Black’s shit personally. “I just mean that I know him. That’s why I’m asking.”

In a strange way, this was kind. He hated it, because of course White was supposed to know Black that way and no one else, but if Sean had asked this, it would have been because he was an asshole who hated Black. It was easy. It was even a right assumption — Black strangled White, after all, and Black was rude and hated social niceties and didn’t even let family love stop his anger. Even now Sean was squinting against the sunlight to look at White, genuinely concerned. Who wouldn’t be worried?

Sean didn’t know Black very well. Only the rough surface you scraped your palms on, leaving them red and stinging.

Gram, though. He knew Black better, that’s why he was asking. He knew how rough was. He wanted to know if White knew too, maybe. He wanted to know if White knew Black hadn’t meant it — no, he wanted to know if White knew that Black had meant it. He wanted to know what it meant that White was still coming back.

“We kind of had a fight before I left for college,” White said. Not true. “Pretty bad.” Not true, but the whole situation was really pretty bad, so White could count this as a half-truth. “But he’s my brother.”

That, though.

Maybe Gram understood it. “I’m glad everything’s alright,” he said, smiling, like it was completely nothing, like he didn’t understand Black better than White did.

“Me too,” White said.

Obviously everything was not alright. White’d never been less alright in his life. Oh, it was easy to pretend so in the garage, all those eyes watching them, but when they got back to the apartment, White was like the flesh of an orange, stringy white piths reading out to connect him to his unfeeling rind. Because Black seemed to feel nothing at all besides a vague, understandable irritation, and, very occasionally, a little wash of guilt.

Black shouldn’t feel guilty, for not remembering him. If anything, White should be the one feeling guilty, for barging in like this and taking over Black’s life. And he did. It seeped into everything, all the things that Black had done or changed so that White could stay here with him when he hadn’t even wanted a brother in the first place and had accommodated one anyways—

Black bought them both take-out, kept his shit cleared away from the couch where White slept, and smoked outside.

White protested, the first few days, saying that it was Black’s apartment, he shouldn’t have to smoke outside just for White. Black said, “The smoke makes you cough,” even though it didn’t anymore. It used to, when they were younger and their father smoked.

“I feel bad making you leave, though,” White told him once more, getting a whiff of smoke as Black stepped through the sliding doors, two smokes down before White was even fully awake.

“My girl used to make me smoke outside too,” Black replied, putting on his shoes to go to class. “Go back to sleep.”

“Okay,” White said, and rolled over so Black wouldn’t see the tears springing up in his eyes.

He hadn’t known that Black had a girlfriend or that she used to hate him smoking inside enough to force him out onto the balcony of his own apartment, but the way Black talked, the little smile around his face, he’d liked her. And she’d been more capable of demanding things then White. In this case, though, Black just folded, White didn’t even ask.

Black left without a goodbye, the faint click of the lock the only farewell.

Usually, White was asleep when he left. Black left for class without even waking White up; he came back tired after work, and fell into bed without much to say. Sometimes he stayed away all night and White pretended not to notice little blooms of pain in his knuckles, in his jaw, that spoke of a fight, pretended not to think about that night he’d woken up choking on Black’s pain.

Even if Black didn’t talk about that, White should be grateful that Black was so comfortable with him, that he didn’t require words — wasn’t this how it was, when they were kids? White couldn’t really remember. He remembered them living in each other’s pockets, twined so comfortably together it seemed impossible they had ever been separate. But they had separate rooms, they did separate sports in school. They had different friends. They must have fought.

White remembered them fighting. Just not the feeling of it, exactly. It hadn’t been like this, though.

Sometimes Black did just make White leave the garage. He’d just point toward the door, say “go,” and even if Yok and Sean and Gram complained, White always left. It wasn’t like he didn’t know Black had secrets. No one at the garage was very good at hiding them, always talking about meetings and plans and stopping suspiciously just when White walked in the room.

White ignored them. They didn’t actually seem to do this in front of anyone else — customers, or any of their other friends who sometimes came around. White harbored a secret and foolish hope that they were beginning to trust him, but it was smothered with each order to get out. With every time Black left for school without waking him. Every time Black said he was studying at Gram’s the whole night. Every time he was working.

“You work a lot,” White said absently.

Black, who had just come in from the rain with his hair stuck to his forehead, glared at him like a wet cat. “Yeah?”

White hadn’t really been going anywhere with that sentence. Sometimes, his mind got away from him, when he was lost in the familiarity of Black always buying a blue toothbrush and picking up a green for White, or the way that when someone called their name while they were focusing on something, they would say yeah with the exact same absent-minded, annoyed cadence, which always made Yok cackle, if they did it in the garage.

“Why,” White said eventually.

Black glared even harder. “The fuck do you mean why,” he said. “There’s two of us now, how do you think we’re going to eat?”

“Oh,” White said, who had never conceptualized such a thing. “Is that all?”

If this was the past, maybe Black would toss a shoe at him. If they were twelve. If they were twenty-two and had grown up the way they should have. As it was, Black rolled his eyes and said, voice high and mocking, “Is that all — yeah, it fucking is, you think the food you eat is free?”

“I’ve been thinking about selling my watch,” White replied, though he’d been thinking nothing of the sort. It was still sitting on his wrist, the metal warmed from his skin.

Black stared at him suspiciously. “Good,” he said abruptly, pulling off his shirt and tossing it at the overflowing laundry basket. “You should pull your weight.”

White shrank back against the cushions. Nothing at all, he knew. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “I just — I don’t know. I could get a job?” White tilted his head towards Black, watching to see how he felt about the idea. Black was empty as a nighttime lake, though, and White couldn’t get anything off him. “You shouldn’t have to work so much while you’re in school.”

Black grunted, pulling out books from his text book. “Let me see it.” He held his hand out, all the way across the room. White stared at the pale well of his palm, confused. “The fucking watch.”

“Oh,” White said, slipping it off his wrist, over the knob of his thumb. Black raised his hand and White stared at him, uncomprehending, until Black said, “Fuck, just throw it.”

“Oh,” White said again and awkwardly lobbed it underhanded towards the bed.

Black caught it easily, in one hand. “That was embarrassing,” he said flatly, inspecting it. “Not bad.”

“Pretty expensive brand,” White said.

“You won’t miss it if I sell it?”

“Why would I,” White said, blinking. It was a watch. It wasn’t more important than anything else he’d lost. It was so little in the wake of it.

“Stop looking like that.” Black snorted. “I know what you’re fucking thinking.”

White startled. In a strange way, he’d never really gotten used to anyone but Black knowing what he was thinking, even though friends and girlfriends had proven to him time and time again that that wasn’t true. But with Black as a stranger, he hadn’t really expected him to know anything at all. “I’m not—”

You haven’t lost shit,” Black said, with finality. “I did. Okay?”

White’s chest swelled with the pain, waterlogged, a broken leg he was dragging around. “Oh.”

Black looked at him suspiciously for a moment — maybe digging around the bleeding mess the meat of White’s heart had taken. Then he turned the watched over in his hands then slid it into his pocket, sleight-of-hand that White almost missed. “Whatever,” he said, and that was the end of it. He dipped his fingers into his back pocket to pull out his cigarette case to smoke on the balcony.

White put his head in his hands, uncaring if Black saw him through the window. Tears leaked out despite the way he pressed his fingers against his eyelids, and snot, and gasping breaths and, maybe, all White’s hope. Black probably wasn’t even watching. He could probably feel it all anyways, the raw grief and the clawing want. White couldn’t help it. He wanted.

He wanted Black to love him. He didn’t want Black not to give up on him, there was no need. He knew Black never would. Black always took responsibilities. He always fixed it. Maybe White wanted to be more than the stray cats Black used to pick up. Something he had to feed and entertain and keep alive.

Maybe he wanted Black to give up on him, so at least he’d know Black felt something about him at all.

The only thing that kept him going, kept him alive, was that Black didn’t do anything differently at all after that. It was like he’d just shoved White’s face in it just to get him to see, like it had no bearing on him at all. Even though it was everything, really. Even though White abandoned him to be lost completely. White should have been there to help, if Black hadn’t been alone—but if Black hadn’t been alone, he wouldn’t have needed White there at all—

He exhausted himself running these thoughts in circles. What could he do for Black now? Black was doing so much for him and White couldn’t even stay out of his way, could not even keep his emotions locked away to himself, couldn’t even act normally.

Even now, Black could manage it. He could sit there, arguing with Gram over a paper they were co-writing for class, talking about how he wasn’t going to do any damn delivery in this shitty rain.

“Hey,” Sean said, elbowing White. White startled, nearly upsetting his plate of food. “You good? You look a little pale.”

White didn’t even know how Sean could tell. They’d all gone out to eat for once, and between the rain slamming down on the patio roof and the multi-colored lamps reflected in all the puddles, White doubted that Sean could see his color at all.

Which just meant Sean was getting to know him. White wasn’t sure how to feel about that.

“I’m fine,” White said. “Just got a job rejection, that’s all.” It was even true; he’d gotten the email this morning. A translation gig, but they were looking for Mandarin translation specifically and White didn’t speak enough Mandarin.

“That sucks,” Sean said, heartfelt. “Something you wanted?”

“Something that paid me,” White said. “I might do tutoring or something, just to help out.”

“You’d be good at that,” Sean said, then, clearly kicking Yok under the table, “I heard you managed to get Yok to actually pass a test last week?”

“Hey,” Yok said, sauce smeared all over his upper lip. He grinned. “I promised to pay him back for that. We’re going to get his ears pierced next week!”

“I didn’t agree to that,” White said automatically, because he absolutely hadn’t, though he did kind of want to.

“Why the hell are you bothering with that,” Black announced, methodically separating out his carrots and depositing them in White’s fried rice one by one. “It’s fine. I've got a job.”

White stared at Black’s carrots. “We talked about it last week, phi.”

Black eyed him. White supposed what had happened last week could not really be considered ‘talking about it.’ “I still don’t like it,” he said eventually, his ankle pressing against White’s under the table.

Gram snorted. “Hey, tell me, was Black always such a doting big brother?”

Black’s grip tightened near imperceptibly on his spoon. Maybe everyone noticed, maybe they didn’t, White couldn’t tell, but with Black, it was clear that everyone knew any little thing could set him off, any mindless word or action that no one thought anything of. Black had it easy — White was guilty for thinking it, because he knew, he knew why Black’s temper was so hair-trigger, even if Black didn’t know it like he did — but no one thought anything of Black getting angry. Even Todd never had.

But did Black even know himself as capable of being kind?

“That’s right,” White chirped, drawing the attention away. Maybe Black didn’t need White to do that anymore. White didn’t know any other way to be. “He always tried to do my math homework for me because I was bad at it. I didn’t even ask him to.”

“Shut up,” Black said, automatically, and started up his argument with Gram again.

White sighed. Put his cucumbers on the edge of Black’s plate, all arranged in a neat semi-circle. Black didn’t even seem to notice, which was a stark difference from the last time White had tried, before he’d known about Black’s memory. No, Black just picked up a cucumber and ate it while continuing his legal battle.

Black was capable of being so normal. Maybe because he got to care less.

“You’re getting kinda decent,” Yok said, throwing himself down on the couch next to White after a round of practice. White bounced, just slightly, and then lay his head against the back of his couch, exhausted from more than just punching something for an hour straight. It permeated him at all hours.

Sean, over at the picnic table writing a paper, said, half-heartedly, “Please shut up.”

“You shut up.”

“He’s writing a paper on cryptocurrency throughout Southeast Asia,” White explained. In fact, White was pretty sure Yok was sitting on some of Sean’s research, because White’d been reading it out of sheer curiosity. Sean toasted White with his beer can from across the room.

Yok ignored this entirely. “Who cares. We should go a few rounds!”

White might be able to throw a punch now but he wasn’t that good. “Black said you’re not allowed,” he said, aiming for bitchy and dismissive instead of I listen to everything my brother tells me to do. Yok loved when he was bitchy and dismissive and today was no different.

He laughed, head thrown back, completely uninhibited. “Come on, come on!”

“Gram only,” White said smugly.

“I’m not going to punch you in the face again!”

“Uh-huh,” White said. He was finding he liked Yok. Maybe even liked the garage, really, liked the way the people in it treated him. Liked the way he could be, in the garage, when he could act normal, act like Black was his brother. It was only when they got to their apartment that things fell apart. It was easy to make friends with anyone else, without the baggage, without looking at someone and thinking we have the same face, I should have been able to recognize you no matter what. “I’ll pass.”

“You’re seriously no fun, you’re really just like Black,” Yok grumbled. “And you’re mean!”

“Uh-huh,” White said again, and Yok grinned, pleased. There wasn’t room for being nice in the garage, they were all assholes, and White had already ruined any potential good impression of him by getting strangled on day three. He was so used to being a polite student, a polite intern, a polite employee. Instead, he had to work out someone else to be, like a half-baked dessert still gooey on the insides. Someone funny, someone able to withstand Black, someone teasing.

Mostly, he felt like he was twelve. Biting back at Yok and the others the way he used to tease Black, the way he couldn’t manage to tease Black anymore outside of the garage.

It was easier with people. At the garage, when Gumpa and Gram were working him off the punching bag into an actual spar, or Yok, who took every opportunity to hang out with White he could while absolutely snubbing Black. Sean, who wandered around fixing motorbikes and smirking when he made White go grab the oil or the wrench or whatever it was, and even around Gram, who never took anything personally but seemed to really enjoy getting into arguments about legal cases.

“I just think,” Yok said, in the tone of voice that meant he’d be saying something very stupid and not at all thoughtful.

“Are you thinking anything worthwhile?” White asked, and Sean exploded with laughter.

“Shut up, Sean, aren’t you supposed to be doing homework—”

“How fucking can I, you sound like a hyena,” Sean said.

“Hey!” Yok twisted around on the couch, embroiled in his new argument with Sean. White let the laughter bubble up too. It was so easy to let it, with everyone else, he could laugh and make mean jokes and feel light again, like he hadn’t probably felt in a long, ten years—

“White. Let’s go.”

White’s laughter died in his chest, taking in Black on his bike, idling outside the garage’s open bay doors, a dark silhouette highlighted only by his headlights. White couldn’t even make out his face, but he knew Black was staring. “I gotta go,” he said, dragging his tired body off the couch.

“Thanks for the help,” Sean called.

“Bye,” Yok hollered, barely heard over the sound of the cicadas, as they left.

“Stop staring at me.”

“I’m not,” White defended, dropping his head back down to his book. He’d been reading a couple twitter threads, trying to find wherever it was that Black had gone yesterday. From the texts White hadn’t gotten, he was pretty sure everyone else was busy too, doing… whatever it was that White was pretending not to know what they were doing. He couldn’t really find anything about it, making it a damn hard to theory to confirm, but he couldn’t just ask. Every time they came to the garage, Black felt guilty all over down to his gut, wary, distrustful—

“You are,” Black said. “Can you just calm the fuck down?”

Sometimes, when Black went to class, White woke up and thought Black was gone forever. That it’d be another ten years before they saw each other again. That Black got tired of him. That there would be this hole in his life again, a paper-thin outline where his brother should be. That maybe this time, he’d never be able to fill it back up.

It was a pretty stupid fear. White knew that. “I’ll try.”

It was just that White had taken so much from Black. His time. His peace. His apartment. White didn’t want to remind Black of the freedom he’d lost. He’d had so much, before White returned.

If you compiled it into a list to make yourself crazy, it was an entire life. White took it all. Black didn’t even want a brother and he’d still agreed to have one.

“Sorry,” White said now, because there was something wrong with him, probably, the way he was always waiting for something to go wrong, he couldn’t just be normal, and he knew that Black was getting annoyed with it.

“You’re so good at being fucking normal around everyone else.”

White tilted his head back against the couch arm. “I know.” He’d always been like that. Fake. Black always hated it.

“If you’re going to stare at me, at least come fucking help me with this English translation,” Black demanded, holding up a sheaf of papers.

White blinked at him. He’d helped Black, a couple of times, before he knew about Black’s memory, a kind of haphazard offer that one time he’d met Black for coffee and found Black in full study mode. He’d helped Gram, and Sean, but not Black, not since— “Yeah, I can.”

“You can?”

It was easier to be around him when there was a reason, a purpose to be there other than taking more than he should have. It was easier if he could give some of it back, the tangled knot of gratitude and grief in his chest. Then, sometimes. he could want to be more than this. “Yeah.”

“Okay,” Black said, clearly surprised too. “Come look at this.”

White settled in the little clear nest of space Black made for him between his text books, legs crossed just the same way Black was sitting, and Black snorted, shaking his head. He always seemed to find it a little funny, whenever he found these little similarities. They wrote certain letters the same way, because White had a hard time learning how when they were little and Black used to show him how; Black kept the same seaweed chips that the housekeeper used to hide in the top cabinet for them. “Here,” Black said, tapping the top page with his pen. It was a print out of a law case in English, it looked like, with Black’s scribblings in blue pen on the side. “I’m trying to make a comparison to this case.”

This was more familiar territory. If White closed his eyes, he could pretend this was a study session with his senior year cohort, tucked away in their favorite chairs in the library. He could pretend this was Gram, arguing his way through a slightly convoluted but well-founded take on prison reform. He could do this.

“This is a pretty obscure case,” White said after a moment.

Black scoffed. “I don’t use easy shit in my papers like Gram.”

“I don’t know, this might be — I mean, it’s old, I don’t know if I can—”

“Try,” Black insisted, and White didn’t think he was asking for just translation help.

White pressed his toes into the insides of his thighs, feeling the tendons stretch. He thought of carrots and cucumbers, the way Black just ate them without thinking. “Okay,” he said, picking up one of Black’s pens. He could do this. “Okay.”

He fell asleep on the bed. It was an accident. Black wasn’t home even though it was nearly four a.m., and he hadn’t said anything, or even texted anything, and White hated that, not knowing where Black was—

He just sat down, meaning to take his shoes off, and it just — happened. He’d never been so tired before. Never been so stressed, threaded through him like steel, every motion difficult to make. It was fucking exhausting. It was easier when there was nothing to care about at all.

He woke up properly in the bed. On one side of it, head on a pillow, under the covers. He wasn’t wearing his shoes and he definitely didn’t remember taking them off himself, and he didn’t have his glasses either.

Black put him to bed?

“Phi?”

Sometimes, he wondered if he should call Black by his name instead.

“Yeah,” Black said after a moment, weight on the other side of the mattress shifting as he spoke. Smoke wafted up from his hair. White breathed in, surreptitiously, but couldn’t tell if it was Black’s usual before-bed cigarette or something more.

“I slept in your bed.”

“Yeah, I don’t care. Shut up. I’m sleeping.”

That made sense. It was early. Or late. White had sort of lost track of a lot of time, not having any work to go to, nothing to regiment his schedule, but he sat down when it was nearly four a.m. How long had he been sleeping? “I should get up,” he said. He didn’t belong here.

“I don’t care,” Black said.

“But—”

“I don’t fucking care, White.” Black sat up again, staring down at him. “Look. I know this shit is all new for you. But nothing changed for me, alright? I need you to fucking get over it.”

“I can’t,” White said, sleep-ridden and far too honest.

“I know,” Black said, cigarette drooping in his mouth. “But you have to. Okay? You’re making me fucking crazy.”

“Okay,” White said, because he would because he had to. There was no other choice, there never was when it came to Black.

“Not okay, fuck,” Black said. “Could you have an opinion on anything? Seriously? It’s like living with a doormat.”

“I don’t know how,” White said after a moment. “I’m. I’m trying. It’s been a while.”

Black dropped back to the mattress next to him, elbows clanking together. “They kind of fucked you up,” he observed, normally and rationally.

“Yeah,” White said.

“Get over it.”

“Okay, phi,” White said, a small smile caught up on his lips. The times when Black was the most annoying, the most aggressive with him, the most fed-up — and then he still lay there, shoulder to shoulder with White, mad or angry or pissed or yelling and he still didn’t make White leave — White loved it. Maybe that was wrong of him; that he loved the moments of Black that were angry at him and pissed even when they made his stomach twist up into intricate knots because Black still didn’t make him leave even though he should. “I’m sorry, okay? I just — I know I’m being a baby, I know I’m not handling it well like you—”

“Are you fucking stupid?” Black grabbed White’s chin, dragging his gaze forward so they looked each other in the eyes, White trapped like a bug. “I strangled you, remember? That’s not handling it well.”

It wasn’t that White had forgotten that. He hadn’t. It was just the first time he considered that maybe, for Black, it was true too that White was a permanent mark. So deep in him that when White left, parts of Black did too. Black ripped himself to shreds, he’d never be free of that hurt. “But—”

“I just had more time to get used to it.” Black shook his head. “Stop worrying.”

“You make it sound easy,” White sighed. “I just — I lost—” That sounded so selfish. “You lost—”

Black’s short fingernail dug into White’s cheek. “We’re still fucking here, aren’t we? It is easy. Go the fuck to sleep.”

White sat up on an elbow, already intent on going back to the couch but Black just said something like, “I really don’t give a fuck where you sleep, just stay there — why do you always make problems?” and flopped back down on the mattress with intense annoyance.

For the first time, falling asleep was easy.

Chapter Text

“Where are we,” White asked.

It seemed to be a long strip of highway stretching forwards and behinds them, clear blue water on one side, nothing but grass and forest on the other. It was easily a good forty minutes outside of the city, they hadn’t seen a car for the last twenty minutes, but despite asking what they were doing several times, White had received no answer. Not that he’d really expected one.

But there had to be some reason Black kicked him awake after last night, after they actually talked. White rubbed at his throat, though the bruises were long gone. “Phi? It’s nice, but what’s out here?”

Black surveyed him for a moment. White had no idea what he was expecting to find.

“It’s nice,” White said again, a little more insistently. It was nice. He just didn’t understand why Black woke him up for this. “Where are we, though?”

“Somewhere empty enough that I can teach you to ride without running someone over.”

It took a long moment to process, White’s eyes widening. “What?”

“You wanted to,” Black said.

“Well, yeah, but—”

“Yeah, so.” Black shoved White forward on the bike. “You wanted to learn first, didn’t you? Like fuck am I letting Sean teach you.”

“He’s your friend.”

“Just get on,” Black said, throwing his leg over the bike behind White. He started pointing out different things, wrapping White’s hand around the handlebars. “That’s the clutch — are you paying attention?” He swatted the side of White’s head. “Pay attention.”

Black walked him through turning the bike on, the engine rumbling along in neutral. White fumbled the clutch a few times, the bike slowly moving forward and then sputtering when White slipped his fingers off the clutch faster than he wanted.

“You’re shit at this,” Black laughed, adjusting White’s grip.

“It’s been ten years,” White complained, and he didn’t fumble it next time and they skimmed slowly across the ground like they were flying.

“Good,” Black shouted. “You think you can handle going faster or are you a pussy?”

Their instructor used to tell them they should treat the bike with respect, otherwise they’d get themselves hurt. When they were young, they’d…well, they’d never listened, but it was still wasn’t like this, Black whooping and goading White to go even faster, probably faster than White’d ever gone on a bike, the water and the forest whipping around them in a blur.

“Pull off here,” Black shouted, tapping White’s left shoulder, and White did, the bike skidding on gravel as he turned into a small gas station parking lot. When Black pulled off his helmet, he was actually properly smiling for once, wide and windswept. “You’re not bad. Didn’t even eat shit on the gravel.”

“Shut up, it’s been ages.” White’s cheeks stretched almost painfully from how much he was smiling too. “Where is this?”

Black got them both skewers from the gas station and himself a beer, though he shoved a soda at White. “Thanks,” White said, actually pretty hungry from all the work of relearning something at an all-new size. Black had taken him around on his motorbike more than enough times but White’d always got the impression that Black didn’t like having a passenger.

White understood it better now.

“I took Gram here when I taught him how to ride,” Black said, chewing. “And Gene, though she didn’t like it very much.”

“You didn’t teach Yok or Sean?”

“Gram taught Yok, he said I didn’t have the patience. Sean already knew how.”

“How’d he know?”

“Nosy.”

“Phi,” White said, slightly scolding. “Well, thanks.”

Black met his gaze, assessing once more. “No problem.”

White looked at him and didn’t think oh, there he is. He looked at Black, picking through his food the way he always did, inspecting his skewer with each bite like something might leap out at him, and thought, oh, here I am instead. It was like Black uncovered him from the dirt. Maybe that newfound lightness made White say, “Did you have to relearn how to ride? When—” he gestured towards his head.

Black narrowed his eyes. “You can say it, you know.”

White considered, for once, that Black would actually like him to say it instead of dancing around the topic; that it wasn’t just something he was saying to make White feel better. “When you got fucked in the head.”

Black, despite himself, laughed. “Yeah, kinda,” he said. “I didn’t touch a bike for a couple of years, because mae didn’t want me riding, but Todd told me I used to. But it was kind of like this.” He gestured towards White with his chopsticks, then the bike parked behind them. “You still know how.”

So Todd had told him about riding a bike and not White. Todd had filled Black in on so many little things but not this. White was sure Black had realized that, was pointedly not thinking about it. Maybe had deemed it unnecessary, since they weren’t actually talking, not that White knew much about that.

He wanted to ask, but as much as he thought Black might actually answer him, he just didn’t want to pry Black apart even further just to see raw nerves.

“When you learned, back then,” White asked slowly, and he wasn’t sure where he was going with this. “You really didn’t know anything?”

Black froze, outlined by the faint glow of the sun, hand suspended in the air as he ate. “I told you I didn’t.”

“I believe you,” White said softly, and Black relaxed all over, a minute softening that spoke eons. “I just — when I saw mae a couple of months ago. She didn’t tell me anything either. Or Todd. I guess — I don’t know.”

He didn’t know what he was asking. What he really wanted to ask was if Black ever had any idea about him at all. If Black missed him, somehow.

“You’re so fucking stupid,” Black sighed.

White blinked. “Yeah?”

“Come on.” Black scoffed. After a moment, he pulled his pack of cigarettes out of his pocket, the flick of the lighter lost alongside the wind. “I thought you died.”

“I thought mae didn’t say—”

“She didn’t.”

White considered that. “But you figured there had to be a reason,” he said after a moment, piecing together the hints Black was struggling to leave. It wasn’t like kids lost their memories all the time. “That wasn’t—” he gestured, between them. A reason that wasn’t them. A reason that was rooted in the real world, where they never had been.

“I thought for a long time it was Pa.”

White closed his eyes, swallowed hard. Imagined Black twelve and mangled and alive; imagined thinking that was how he would be forever. White had always been able to come back. “I’m sorry.”

Black breathed out smoke. “Not your fault. Mae never wanted me to remember. I didn’t figure it would ever matter.”

There was the real answer. Not just that Black wanted to piss their mother off, like he said all those months ago but that he’d always known there was something missing; he’d just gotten used to it.

He didn’t need it anymore.

“All the doctors said I should see familiar things,” Black said distantly. “You know? For the brain to make a connection. I never got why we moved after that until now.”

White chewed on the inside of his cheek. He didn’t need to ask why his mother didn’t bring him back. “I missed you,” he said.

“Yeah, yeah,” Black said, and it wasn’t quite I missed you too, but this time, White thought he understood it. He kicked Black’s foot, gently, under the table, his brother kicking back instantly. “I wonder why yours are fine.”

“My memories?”

“Yeah. My old psychiatrist would lose his mind over this.”

White could imagine Black so well, suddenly, age twelve, age fifteen, sitting on a couch in some therapist’s office, bored, pissed off, answering questions he didn’t know the answer to. “I don’t know.”

He really didn’t, why it wasn’t him. It felt like it should have been, he had always been weaker. It’d be like him, to forget. But instead, it was Black.

White had been so wrong, thinking for months that there wasn’t anything for Black to care about, no history to cradle with broken fingers, no glass to sweep up and reassemble. Black cared so much that he couldn’t live with the weight of White missing. He cared so much that all White had left was the remains; he cared so much that he’d resigned himself to the mystery of raw, open wound for the rest of his life.

God. White saw that now.

“I wish I had been here,” White said, despite himself.

“Wouldn’t have happened if you had been.”

“I know,” White said. “Just. I wish I could have helped.”

Black shook his head. “You’re here now.”

He’d come back. White was here. Maybe not the same way he had been, but he never would have been the same anyways. Black was different too, and of course White had long since learned to expect that. So Black was right, like he always was. What did it matter, if they were here?

Every so often now, Black took White out to practice riding, and now White didn’t sleep on the couch, and while White still had no idea what he was doing, it was so clear now that neither did Black. Maybe it would have been like this even if White came home and found his brother with all his memories intact, maybe it wouldn’t have been, White didn’t know. Black was the brother he had; Black was the brother that was.

Maybe Black didn’t find him necessary, exactly, not the way White needed Black, but to be wanted instead—

Gram was the one who said, “Hey, I think the 7/11 is hiring, aren’t you looking for a job? The one that used to be that bakery.”

White’s first thought was that working at a convenience store was, frankly, below him.

Then Black said, “The fuck is he going to work there for, that’s a waste.”

“Hey,” Yok said, mouth turned down and voice bitter. “What, it’s not good enough for him?”

“Obviously not—”

“Fucking rich boy—” Sean said immediately, because he never needed any prompting to pile onto Black about his background.

“Phi, play nice,” White said, nudging Black so that he’d stop antagonizing everyone just for the sake of it. “Thanks, Gram, I’ll check it out.”

Black didn’t actually believe that was true — everyone here worked shitty jobs. He delivered takeout, Sean worked and lived in this garage, and Yok did what sounded like everything under the sun, from delivering to painting to selling weed. White’d had seen enough of his brother’s life to know there was pride in it, hard and lean as it was, and White didn’t like feeling like a thing Black had to take care of.

Gram grinned at him, clearly all forgiven.

And White, oftentimes, was a liar. One of those things he didn’t like about himself and yet couldn’t himself from doing, one of those things that Black often gave him that dead, displeased look for. But this time, when he went to pick up a pack of smokes for Black, who was in the middle of mid-terms and going through a pack a day, he actually stopped and looked at the job flier posted on the door.

Just like that, White had a job.

Black clearly warred with himself for a moment about telling White no outright. “You sure?”

God no. But he was sure that there needed to be more money now that two of them were eating. “You have mid-terms, phi.” He wanted to help. He wanted Black to sleep better. “You should spend less time working.”

“I can manage.”

“You’re going to fail.”

Black shrugged. “If you say so,” he said, and White went to his first shift that weekend.

Strangely enough, he liked the job. He liked his coworkers. Even though it was mostly just hard work — standing for so long his feet hurt, hauling crates of beer and sodas, unloading chips — he liked it. It kept him busy, he liked talking to the strangers about the rain, and there was a mindlessness to it.

Sometimes Black came to pick up cigarettes or to walk White home, which made his coworkers say, wow, I didn’t know you were a twin! And sometimes it was Black’s friends — Yok, most often, picking up cigarettes and lingering way longer than he should have. Gram, usually with Black, arguing about how this used to be a mom-and-pop store that got replaced with a 7/11 and Gram would roll his eyes back and say did you ever even shop there? and they’d devolve into a squabble about consumer buying practices that ended up with no resolution.

White thought it was cute, not that Black seemed to realize it. He knew Gram did, though.

Sean too. Sometimes with one of his friends, an art student White vaguely recognized from around the garage, but usually on his own, especially when White did the night-shift and he was the only one in the brightly-lit store at four in the morning.

“Hey,” Sean would say. “Working late?”

“Somehow always am,” White would say back.

“I don’t know how you can stay awake this late.”

White had learned not to ask why Sean was up at four in the morning either. Sometimes it was easier than sleeping. And it was nice, the hours stretching long between them, the fluorescents inside and nothing but black outside the store windows. Sean making him laugh. The people who came in at two in the morning for coffee. The book he was in the middle of. “It’s not all bad.”

On White’s third week, Mint, the cashier who was fond of black lipstick, said, “I bet you wouldn’t last two weeks.” She clicked her tongue. “Lost 500 baht, you know.”

“Ouch,” White said. “Who won?”

“Nong Wai,” Mint pouted. “It’s not my fault! No one wants the night shifts!”

“I’m sleeping on my brother’s couch,” White offered, because the easiest way to hide something was to tell the truth. And it shouldn’t be beneath him anymore to say, just like working at this convenience store wasn’t, because it was true. He was crashing with his brother after quitting his job and cutting off his family. Things were pretty low, comparatively.

Mint whistled. “Been there.”

There were no follow-up questions or judgmental looks like White’s old coworkers would have said — not to his face, of course, but behind his back. How many times had White judged someone for the same thing he was going through, no job, no money, no family? Hundreds? Thousands? His old friends would talk behind his back for this too.

Mint just shrugged it off and reminded him of the register codes.

And whenever White came home late from work at two in the morning and the apartment was empty, he ignored it.

Black sometimes said he was going to stay at Gram’s to study, sometimes that was probably true. And then sometimes, undoubtedly, it had to be something illegal. There was no way Black and his friends had just stopped because White was around. White would curl up with his phone on what was now his side of the bed, researching what it was that Black could possibly be doing.

Was it Tawi again? Was it the protest that was planned for marriage equality next week?

He could never sleep wondering if tonight would be one of those nights. Sometimes he knew it was by a bloom in his jaw from what he presumed was a punch, an ache against his palms like he’d been gripping handlebars tight. Sometimes he just had to wait.

“Go back to sleep,” Black would say when he came in, four or five in the morning, and White would stir awake from something restless that couldn’t quite be called sleep. “White. Close your eyes.”

“I can’t, someone keeps talking to me,” White said as Black settled in, rolling over on his side like he always slept, sometimes nudging White back over to his side, not uncertain about sharing like they used to be. He’d be tired. There was that little anxious, fluttering high in his chest — must not have thought White would still be awake, didn’t want to explain himself—

It had hurt, when Black said he didn’t trust him, but honestly, now White understood. He hadn’t been in Black’s life very long, it was a lot to just say to someone. Even to a person inextricably involved in a way that could never be undone.

White would shift a little closer to where Black was asleep, waited for the imperceptible unfolding as Black relaxed, his breathing evening out. The fluttering in his chest like a heart murmur soothed. And then White could sleep too, tension leaking out of them both for this one moment. The next day, White would find out what Black was out doing — on Twitter, or at work when his coworker said, “Have you seen this? Someone broke into that drink factory last night—”

There was always something. A video. Graffiti message. Dried blood under Black’s nails.

And when White went home, there was Black, no worse for the wear, like he always was.

Sean and Black were arguing, not that this was new. “What’s it about this time,” White asked, dropping his backpack onto the couch. The drinks everyone had asked him to bring from work were probably all shaken up.

“Anti-trust laws against monopoly,” Gram said, holding up his text book so White could read the title. “We have a quiz next week.”

He clearly wasn’t paying attention to the fight anymore. Not that White blamed him. Sean and Black arguing was like white noise for how often they did it. And it was so rarely about anything that meant anything. Apparently, this was a step up from when they would break each other’s noses. “I mean Black and Sean.”

“Ohhh,” Gram said knowingly, taking his tea. “I think Black’s just arguing to argue, you know how Sean gets.”

White hummed and hooked his elbows over the back of the couch. Neither Sean or Black seemed to realize he was there, but they also weren’t arguing so loudly over the engine Gumpa was running that he could pick out everything. Black lived to argue, that wasn’t strange, but what was unusual was the little twisted tightness in White’s chest, like a hook pulling up the lip of a fish, that said Black didn’t feel like this was just an argument he was having simply because someone disagreed with him.

It ended when Black thew a set of boxing gloves directly at the back of Sean’s head.

“Hey!” Sean snapped, and Black just turned around and left, bike roaring to life as he gunned it out of the open bay doors.

“Guess we’re going,” Gram said cheerfully, clapping his book closed. He slipped it into his bag and grabbed his helmet.

“Where,” White hollered after him, and Gram flipped him off. “Asshole.”

Sean cleared his throat. “I’m gonna help you today,” he said after a moment, tossing one of the boxing gloves at White. “Gram had some study thing to go to, I think. I wasn’t listening.”

White stifled a smile. “Sure.” Black didn’t usually let Sean and Yok help, but Gumpa had no reason to bother listening to Black, so this wasn’t an unfamiliar situation, Sean holding up the pads for White to punch and kick until he was exhausted.

And then even then Sean made him do twenty more at the end.

White glared at him half-heartedly. “I’m tired.”

“Yeah, me too,” Sean said. “Fifteen more.”

“I hate you,” White decided, aiming a punch at the center of the pads. “This is the worst thing anyone has ever done to me.” He didn’t know how everyone here managed to do this all the time, he was tired. Worse, it was kind of invigorating that Sean didn’t let him quit, unlike Black or Gram.

When White complained to Gram, he’d back off a little bit, but Sean never did, but Sean said things like, “Black literally strangled you and you came back. Ten.”

“That has nothing to do with boxing skill!”

Sean nodded. “You need to plant yourself more, as a smaller opponent.”

White dropped his hands, looking at Sean suspiciously. “How do you know,” he said doubtfully. “You’re tall.”

“I know from fighting Black,” Sean clarified, grinning. “He kind of weighs himself down — you’ll have to get him to show you, I don’t know how he does it.”

“I’m definitely never going to be as good as Black,” White said ruefully, which he’d been saying for possibly his whole life. “I don’t think I could pull any of those things off.”

He’d seen Black fight a few times, in awe. His childhood anger honed into a weapon. Black could take every hit and not go down, even when White winced from the pain blooming behind his right eye, ghosting over his ribs, twisting his ankle. It never used to matter. Now Black would turn to White, after, and take in how pale White’s face was and his lips would thin, displeased. He’d wave Sean off for a second round. White didn’t know what to do with that yet.

“Doesn’t matter,” Sean said. “He knows how to use his height, and you have the exact same height.”

“I’m taller,” White said, punching the pads again.

Sean snorted. “Uh-huh. Whatever. Most guys aren’t used to fighting anyone that much smaller than them anyways.”

“I mean, I hope I’m not fighting anyone.”

“With your face?”

“Shut up,” White said, and Sean laughed, dropping the pads on the couch and shaking out his hands. “My face is great.”

“Your face has fought with ninety percent of this city.”

“My face hasn’t done anything wrong,” White replied, dropping his hands now that Sean wasn’t going to make him keep punching. He was dripping with sweat; his glasses sliding off the bridge of his nose. There was something gruelingly pleasant about the sensation, like if White tried hard enough, he could stop Black from looking at him like he’d break in two.

“How many times have you said that before?”

White laughed, and it only hurt a little bit, like a punch instead of a broken rib. “Less than you’d think,” he said. “Black always took the blame for everything. I never even had to defend myself.”

It was the same even now. For all that talk when they were kids about wanting White to be able to take care of himself, for all that he’d been making sure White could — well, Black sure seemed terrified of the possibility. There was still a dancing restlessness in him whenever he saw White in the garage.

“That doesn’t surprise me,” Sean said, matter-of-fact, so assured of it that White was actually surprised. “He’s only like, what, an hour older than you?”

“Three minutes.”

“Yeah, but he acts like its ten years, telling you what to do. Not that you do it. I bet he’s babied you his whole life.”

He absolutely had. “He’s always been like that,” White said, and realized it wasn’t just an old familiarity from when they were five, eight, ten, twelve, but that Sean had seen it here. Now. Last month. This week.

An hour ago.

“I bet,” Sean said, amused. “But hey, it works for me; he’s way less annoying now. Seriously, you don’t know how much I wanted to kill Black before—”

“I actually think I do know—”

“—but he used to piss me off with literally everything he said, you know? I mean, you know how Black is, if he doesn’t want to deal with someone, he pisses them off until they’re too exhausted to deal with him—”

“That’s my brother you’re talking about,” White said, smothering laughter. He’d never thought about Black like that, but it was true.

“So? It’s true! He was so pissed when it didn’t work on you, it was so funny! It was like a taste of his own medicine—”

White’s stomach with flooded with warm, even as he said, warm, “Be nice.”

“Come on, you want to kill him too sometimes.”

White aimed a kicked at the side of Sean’s leg. “Shut up, I want to kill you sometimes too.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Sean said, kicking White back. “I mean you just mellowed him out, is all. He was seriously wound so fucking tight. It’s good for him. It’s definitely good for me. Even if he does baby you.”

It was nice to think of it this way. As White helping Black, not just padding along behind him, strung along like a balloon. White smiled against his knees. “He’s just overprotective,” he said. Because Black didn’t know, yet, exactly how much White could take, didn’t know that White had always been able to take exactly as much as Black could.

White hadn’t been back home in a couple of months, which wasn’t particularly a long amount of time. He’d been away from his dad longer than that. The two months his father was traveling between back-to-back conferences. That year he spent in the school dorm. The two years that he’d been alone in Moscow, when his father retired. To this house. “I kind of don’t want to go in there,” White said.

“Yeah,” Black said, throwing the truck into park with a whine of the engine. He killed the engine, silence falling in the cab. He’d borrowed the truck from Gumpa, who lovingly referred to it as a work in progress, and the engine was loud. White’s father probably heard it from inside the house. “Too bad. We keep running out of clothes.”

“I’ll do laundry more—”

“Yeah fucking right, that’s not happening,” Black said, and well, yeah. “I don’t want to go in there more, so.” Then, immediately, “Stop that.”

Little sparks of guilt fizzled out before they got started, leaving White pockmarked and pitted. “Sorry.”

Black chewed on the inside of his cheek. “Fuck it. I do have it worse than you, okay? So go into the house and make me feel better by packing your fucking shit.”

It was so reminiscent to something Black would have said when they were twelve, doing competitions over who had it the worst (they always tied), or the things Yok and Sean to said to each other. White must have made some sort of surprised noise, because Black turned to him, the idea of smile on his face, like got you, huh.

“You suck,” White said, with feeling.

“Yeah, yeah,” Black said. “Let’s go.”

“Okay, but we’re tied,” White said, following him out of the truck. “Okay?”

“It’s not a competition.” Then, contemplatively, “But if we were I’d be winning.”

“We’re tied,” White said again, and then some how they were already at the door. White had worked the key off his keyring this morning, settling it the pocket of Black’s denim jacket. Black eyed him as he did it, brushing his teeth in the hallway watching White wind himself further and further up, pacing between the couch and the bed with his fists clenched until the imprint of the key stuck to his skin. Black in comparison only loosening, every line of him until it was languid and slack like a hunting panther, until he said, You ready?

White wasn’t, even still. But he turned the key over in his pocket and used it to unlock the door, trying to hold on to the way Black had tried to cheer him up.

For a moment, the house was completely silent. Then—

“White?”

“Pa,” White said. “Hi.”

His father gaped at him. “White,” he said sternly, taking in the clothes — Black’s clothes, his grungy cargo pants and the denim jacket that White was becoming quite fond of. “What are you wearing?”

Come on.

“You haven’t seen me in two months and that’s what you want to know?”

“White, be reasonable—”

“I borrowed clothes from Black,” White said, not interested in being reasonable. He took his shoes off at the door, his white sneakers, and after a moment Black did the same. It was that moment, something that their father should have been more familiar with than his own face — them coming home together, taking their shoes off — he should have known this — that their father even noticed Black at all.

“Black,” their father said, voice heavy. For a moment, looking at him, White could really believe that their father loved Black too. The heaviness of his eyes, the slope of his shoulders, the grief that spilled off him like water. “It’s good to see you again.”

White was pretty sure Black practiced his smile to look as much like a threat as possible. “White tells me you’re our dad.”

Their father was completely caught off-guard by this. “Ah,” he said. “I. Am.”

“Guess the bitch told you about my memory.”

“Years ago, yes,” their father said.

“Well, don’t freak,” Black said, picking a cigarette out from his cigarette box and putting it in his mouth. “I’m not staying. Just here to help White get his shit.”

“White,” their father said, back to the matter at hand. “Don’t be silly.”

“I’m going to go pack,” White said.

“White—”

“Go, White.” Black eyed their father. “You can stay down here,” he said, so pleasantly it was a threat.

White went. He could hear his father down the stairs, arguing with Black, about letting White do he wanted, which of course would go nowhere. Black had always ordered White around; their parents just didn’t like it. They wanted to be the only one in charge of White.

It showed what they knew.

White had thought about the things he wanted to get, made a list that was folded up in his pocket, but now that he was in this room — he couldn’t call it his, really, he’d lived in Black’s apartment now for longer than he’d been back in his repainted childhood bedroom — but now that he was here, did any of it really matter?

Black would kill him for thinking that, though. So White pulled out the list.

His passport from the drawers, his tax papers. His laptop from the desk, a few changes of clothing, his expensive hair gel. If he hadn’t sold the watch, he’d have left it on the bedside table. None of it really mattered, even if it was useful.

What mattered was White’s soul, narrowed to a pinpoint one floor down, where Black was still talking to their father.

He couldn’t hear them speaking as he came down the stairs. Black was just staring at their father the way he did, like he was preparing to hunt something down, a cigarette dangling from his lips. He hadn’t lit it — apparently he thought that was just a step too far — but he seemed to enjoy the threat.

“You or me,” he asked, pointing to one of the pictures on the wall as White came down the stairs.

The kid wore a highlighter yellow ski jacket. Which White had hated. “Me.”

Black eyed White’s box and backpack. Probably he wanted White to take more. They were finding it hard to do laundry sharing one wardrobe between the two of them; White was becoming a lot more acquainted with the laundromat then he ever thought he would be. “Ready?”

“Mm,” White said, and Black took the box from him. Black always took the heavy things from him.

“White,” their father sighed. “Be serious. Black doesn’t even remember you.”

“Whose fault is that,” Black snapped.

“Settle down, Black.”

Maybe his father had memory problems too, or he’d remember that had never once worked on Black, ever. “Oh, fucking should I?” Black scoffed. “You really think you could do this forever?”

“Black,” White said, curling his fingers in Black’s jacket. He wanted Black out of here, before he ended up spilling far more of his soul then he’d ever want either of their parents to know about. “Let’s just go, okay? I got what I needed. Don’t.”

“Okay,” Black said, suddenly a lot gentler. “Let’s go.”

Their father pinched the bridge of his nose. “White, if you need to pick up anything else, if you need to come home — you can, son.”

It was a kind offer. “Thank you, Pa,” White said, grief pooling in him for all the years he had been his father’s son. “Bye.”

He slipped his feet into his sneakers; Black did the same. Left first, then right, matching kicks against the floor to get their toes in. The little things they’d learned about each other first because the big things were too much to be filled by a week or a month or maybe even a year.

Black paused in the doorway to watch their father watching them leave. “It didn’t even work,” he said. And then he left.

Their father turned towards White, face horrified, but White just stepped past him, back out into the heat and towards the truck cab to drop his box next to Black’s in the back of the truck. It seemed so final; them sitting in the front together, the house in the rearview mirror.

“Mae used to say he a good-for-nothing cheater who wasted her money,” Black said abruptly.

“They used to fight all the time,” White said. “I mean, like, about everything. He wouldn’t even let her keep the house. And mae holds grudges.”

“Like me.”

White blinked. “Like me,” he said, surprised. “Do you actually hold grudges? I thought you just beat the shit out of people.”

“Fuck off.”

White laughed. “Like the both of us then,” he said, twisting around in the seat to watch the house disappear. It hurt a lot less, now that he was on the other side.

“She should have fucking said he was dead,” Black said bleakly, suddenly every part of him drowning. “Guess she couldn’t let the fucker win even though I couldn’t even fucking remember him.”

This was the first time White had seen Black look so out of sorts. In a way, it was familiar. Familiar from a long time ago, the way Black looked after every family argument. “They were always like that,” White said slowly. He didn’t know how to help, not really, but suddenly it seemed like Black was on the same playing field as him. I know that so well too.

Black fumbled almost frantically with the lighter. “Fuck that. Fuck them.” He managed to get the cigarette lit, the window going down to release the smoke. “You want to grab lunch?”

“Yeah, why not,” White said, and stopped watching the house behind him.

DO NOT PICK UP
05:14
any updates?

White scowled at the phone, instinctively ducking his head to hide his screen even though Black wasn’t even here. But the last thing White wanted to see was Todd’s number calling him. There was still a surprise to it, every time Do NOT PICK UP flashed on his phone screen and a snowstorm blew in, coating everything until it was dead and silent except for blinding, white rage—

He could have told White everything.

He could have told Black everything. But no. Of course not. Fucking asshole. No wonder Black didn’t talk to him anymore. Or about him.

Todd called again two more times, though.

“I’m not going to pick up,” White told the phone, as if Todd could hear him all the way across town without the use of technology. No way, he wasn’t.

DO NOT PICK UP is calling.

White picked up. Maybe because it was five in the morning and the 7/11 was utterly deserted, the small grainy security camera footage TV showing one person smoking at the back curb, tucked up under the awning. White had sold him cigarettes.

Maybe because he was a little nosy. Todd had been texting and calling nonstop.

“Hey, you never call me anymore,” Todd said, voice tinny through the phone line.

White stared across the shop, brightly colored chip bags and the neon pink fliers advertising an arcade that one of the other employees had put up on more surfaces than strictly necessary. The scuff mark above the drink aisle fridges, where Mint and one of the other employees had made up a game involving throwing the spare flip-flops you could buy at the end of aisle three and who could throw them the highest.

That was all real, unlike Todd’s voice on the other line. Todd wasn’t here in this life. “Last time I talked to you, you got my brother pissed at me.”

He wondered where Todd was. It was five in the morning, after all.

“He’s still not warmed up to you?”

“Do you have an actual reason for calling?”

“Your dad told me you moved out.”

“When did you talk to my dad,” White said incredulously. Even his dad had stopped texting him by now, only sending him a little reassurance every so often that he could come home whenever he wanted, not that White planned on that ever.

“I saw him last week at this gala, which I really had expected to see you at, you know,” Todd said. What a change that was, that Todd was at some gala and White was sitting on a stool behind the counter in a 7/11 while it rained, soft and melodic against the pavement. “What, are we not friends?”

“Like I said, you got Black pissed at me,” White replied.

“Aw, that’s nothing, he’s always—”

“He’s my brother!” And really, what was Todd to White? An old friend who he talked to in years? Someone Black was close to once, when White wasn’t there, who Black didn’t even like anymore, who he didn’t talk to? White wasn’t even sure that Black had put that together — had wanted to put together — that Todd had known about White the whole time and White didn’t want to remind him. Black had so fucking little of the last twenty years of his life. No memories, no parents, no friends. White didn’t want to keep bringing it up.

“You’re being a real bitch, White.”

White started at his reflection in the storefront, like he could see Black on the other side of it. “I’m hanging up now. Stop calling me.”

For good measure, he blocked the number.

Fuck Todd. Fuck everything about him, and fuck him for trying to use White to worm his way back into Black’s good graces—

“Hey.”

White shrieked, nearly dropping his phone on the sticky ground. He managed to fumble it onto the counter, at least, except it slid over the laminate where Black was watching him, amused.

“Wow,” Black said.

“Phi!” White pressed a hand to his heart, a sad persuasion for it to calm down. “You scared me.”

“I can see that.” Black didn’t even look down at the phone, just flipping it into White’s palm with no indication that he knew that White had just talked to his arch-nemesis or ex-friend or ex-boyfriend or whatever it was they were to each other.

White’s throat ached as he swallowed, slipping the phone into his pocket. “What are you doing here,” he managed to say. Black had slept at Gram’s last night. “It’s five am?”

“It’s six, and I have that study group at seven.”

White nodded, barely processing, and only then it hit him that the store was light, lit by soft pale grays through the front windows instead of the fluorescents. The day had started, apparently; White hadn’t noticed. “Right.”

“I didn’t know you were working today.”

“Right,” White said. Was his phone ringing in his back pocket? He’d blocked Todd, but their LINE messages still existed. “Nong Wai had a thing last minute, he wanted me to cover for him.”

“You work too many night shifts,” Black told him. “You were seriously out of it when I came in. The fuck were you even so involved in your phone for?”

“You sound like an old man,” White said, casting wildly about for something to say. Lucky, Black didn’t seem to want an answer — he wandered off towards the back, where the paper coffee cups were stacked, intent on the largest size. White took the opportunity to slip the phone out of his pocket and just make sure that Todd was really blocked and that the entire message chain was gone.

“What’s this for,” Black interrupted, holding up one of the fliers.

White jumped again. “That’s — oh, Nong Wait put those up, that’s why he’s not here. Some arcade is having a discount night to raise money. A condo developer wants to buy the building. Wai said there’s been people camping out there protesting.”

Black hummed thoughtfully, sticking the flier in his back pocket to pour his coffee. He brought two up to the front, pushing one over the counter at White, milky just the way he liked it, which was sweet of him and also a little mean, because he knew White was kind of a snob about coffee and this was a 7/11. “We should go.”

White accidentally typed in the wrong register-code and rang Black up for a pack of razors. “To the protest?” He asked, in disbelief. And there was that now-expected constellation of tight nerves and bright-red anger blooming in Black’s stomach. “I mean, sure—”

“No,” Black said, anger-anxiety-guilt swooping through his stomach. “I mean. Yeah. Fine. Whatever, that too. I meant the arcade.”

That was even more surprising than the protest. “Sure, I like arcades.”

Black chewed on the inside of his lip for a moment, face twisted up. “We went to that one when we were kids,” he said.

White paused, picking up one of the ones that was sitting on the counter. The picture on it was neon pink just like the paper, and White, now that he was looking, did kind of remember the neon sign, because the first letter was always broken. “The one with the really glitchy driving game,” White said after a moment. “I never could beat you at that.”

“Of course,” Black said, passing over some money.

White huffed. “Okay, well, maybe I can this time. I don’t work this weekend?”

Black shrugged. “Okay.” End of conversation.

“Nong Wai would be delighted.”

“Make him work his own shifts,” Black ordered, like he personally thought maybe all the other employees were bullying White.

“He’s seventeen,” White said. Most of the shifts White picked up were his.

“So?”

“Go to your study group,” White said, and Black left without his change.

It wasn’t like White didn’t think about asking. He did. Just he didn’t generally think about asking Black.  He thought about asking Yok, or Gram, who would probably just… tell him, eventually. It came up all the time. It came up when Yok wheedled White into going to an art show with him. It came up when he helped Gram study.

It came up when Yok showed up to the garage a couple of evenings later with a grin and a huge black eye. “Hey,” he said cheerfully, throwing his bag down onto the couch.

“Who the fuck got you,” Black said, sounding more delighted than worried as he dropped his boxing gloves. White considered this a step up from the flat, near-robotic tone he’d have asked this with two months ago, and Yok grinning at this instead of trying to punch him was even greater news. White had been working hard to rehabilitate his brother’s image. For Black’s friends and for himself.

“White did,” Yok said. “Yesterday.”

“Oh,” White said, suddenly paying a lot more attention. He dropped his phone in his lap and inspected Yok more thoroughly. That was definitely where he’d managed to hit Yok yesterday afternoon. “Oh, no.”

“He’s getting pretty good,” Yok crowed, throwing his arm around White’s shoulders.

“Yeah he is,” Black said, baring his teeth.

“Sorry,” White said, though he didn’t exactly feel sorry. What he felt was a weird sense of pride, which he couldn’t be sure was coming from him or from Black. They still didn’t even let him hang around the garage after hours when they were meeting about whatever protest they were planning next, even though White knew what they were doing.

But he’d actually done that.

“Nice job,” Sean said, leaning over the back of the couch so that his shoulder brushed up against White’s. “Think you can get his mouth next — hey!”

“Fuck you,” Yok said, pouting. He threw himself on the couch, still pouting, arms crossed and burrowed into the cushions, looking for all the world an angry two-year-old, if not for the swollen left side of his face.

“What, I can’t just want you to shut up—”

“I had to take the bus, because White ruined my eye,” Yok said, snuggling into White’s side anyways, his chin on White’s shoulder. “I can’t drive, Sean! You’re driving me around now.”

Sean snorted and flicked Yok’s head around White’s. “Make White do it.”

“White doesn’t even have a bike! He should get a bike. Hia!”

“Stop being stupid,” Black told him, thwacking his shin. Relatively lightly. “You’re annoying the shit outta me.”

Yok grinned, the purple of his eye twisting gruesomely. “Good,” he said. “White should get a bike, though. You can ride, can’t you?”

“Why would you think that,” White said, amused. Black had kept teaching him, of course, and it had come back much faster than White ever had expected it would, maybe because Black didn’t believe in taking it slow and seemed to force White to drive him around whenever he felt like it. But no one knew that.

Yok considered. “I don’t know,” he decided, which was a very Yok-answer.

“He rode when we were kids,” Black said, shoving Yok off White’s shoulder.

“I knew it! He needs a reward!”

“You did not,” Black said right as White said, “Can my reward be you going to go get the drinks I forgot to get?”

“What?” Sean said. “I texted you about them!”

“I wasn’t even at work today!” White had gone out of his way to get the lighter fluid and charcoal Sean had requested, which made everyone at work laugh when he came in. “Phi, you go.”

“No,” Black said, ornery, and they all squabbled about it until Gram agreed to go and dragged Black along with him, and Yok decided to sleep off the black eye in Sean’s bed for a bit. Sean showed White how to do an oil change, which was something really basic that he’d shown White how to do before, except White genuinely kept forgetting how.

“This is embarrassing for you,” Sean said. “You’re such a nerd,” which was an old familiar tune that White had heard a dozen times before, from dozens of friends and his ex, who at least followed it up by saying she liked nerdy guys.

White huffed at him anyways. “Okay, you are way nerdier than me—”

“I’m literally taking apart a car right now—”

“Technically, I’m taking apart the car right now—”

“Badly! You’re doing it badly,” Sean said. “Go back to Twitter.”

“Dick,” White said, and settled back onto the couch. “Hey Sean?”

“Yeah.”

“Yok’s really ok?”

Sean glanced up from the engine. “I mean, yeah, you really got him good,” he said, sounding a little puzzled, “But it’s hardly the worst Yok’s ever had, you know? He wouldn’t be complaining so much if it was. Why?”

This was the truth. Sean wasn’t a good liar, White was coming to learn. He always turned in towards White as he talked, their knees pressed together, his grin came so easily. It wasn’t really what White had expected, when he walked into the garage to find his brother and found some entire semblance of a family instead, but despite everything with Black, Sean’d always been kind of nice to White.

So yeah. White thought about asking him all the time. It’d be easy.

“No reason,” he said instead, breathing out through his nose.

They didn’t make it to the arcade. That Friday, the weekend they were supposed to go — and Nong Wai was so excited — Black was pissed when White came home, his shoulders tense and his phone clutched so hard in his hand his knuckles were white. White all of a sudden realized why he’d had such a hard time finishing the stocking thirty minutes ago before he left, his fingers stuff and uncooperative. “What’s going on?”

“The fuck is this?”

White waited for further information but he did not get it. “Um?”

“This,” Black said, jabbing a finger the phone. White could not see it across the entire room, so he came forward, craning his neck uncomfortably, since Black didn’t want to help him out, to look at the screen.

It was a picture of him and Todd.

“What,” White said, trying to grab the phone, but Black yanked it away immediately. “I can’t see—”

“He just fucking sent me this,” Black said, waving the phone around and working himself up. Like it he wasn’t worked up enough, like White couldn’t feel it bouncing around his chest like a ping-pong ball, bruising up his insides. “What is it?”

“It’s — it’s just a picture, from months ago,” White said, trying to see better. He was in a suit, so it must have been one of those parties he kept seeing Todd at, Todd grilling him for details. “I didn’t know—”

“So you’re friends with him?”

“I don’t — we’re not friends, phi, I just didn’t know how to find you—”

“You don’t go to him! Ever!”

White jerked back. “Well, I didn’t know that then.”

“Yeah, you only did ever come here because he fucking told you to,” Black said, which—

“That’s not true,” White said, stung. “I just didn’t know where to start—”

“So you told him everything?”

“No! I was pissed at him too, because he didn’t tell me anything about your—” White gestured to his temple. He probably should have told Black about it, he knew Black wouldn’t like it, but he didn’t want to rock the boat. He didn’t want to pull their wrong, fucked-up but still working relationship back into the spotlight, highlight all the places where they didn’t work together right and probably never would. Was that wrong of him? White never was good at showing off all his problems.

Black’s always been so good at it, and White meant it as a compliment. Nothing could break Black.

Right now, it didn’t feel that way. Black’s face was pale, thinking about all that Todd knew that he’d never said, and then his mouth smeared in anger. “Tell me what the fuck you told him.”

“Nothing!” He really didn’t know what he was supposed to have said. Or not said. He just didn’t know; he’d not known for so long, Black was obsessed with keeping him in the dark. “Well, I don’t know—”

“So you did! Tell me! You know—”

“How am I supposed to know anything if you won’t tell me!” White rubbed at his face, aggressively, like the sting of it would get him to stop crying, stop standing there in the center of the room like a baby deer frozen in the middle of the road.

“Can’t I have anything for myself?” Black scoffed. “Fucking anything?  I do so fucking much for you! I didn’t want a brother, and I still let you live here, I let you tell me your fucking stories—”

“You told me to!” White said, eyes blurring with tears, a thump to the chest because he hadn’t known this at all, because he thought things were getting better.

“Of course I did!” Black shoved at him, a sudden spark of connection, of shock-awe-anger, the palm of your hand to a hot stove. “What fucking choice did I have, you’ve got my fucking face!”

“Phi,” White choked out. “Stop being mean.”

“Mean —  you fucking stole him! He was my best fucking friend and you ruined that!”

It was ridiculous, that White could be hurt by that. By something as simple as he was and you ruined. The past, that was good. The present, that was White. And White had told himself a hundred times that he didn’t need Black to think of them as a set anymore, but it sounded so wrong that he could choke, that there was a set without him at all.

Black and Todd. Todd and Black. You ruined it.

It caught in his throat like bile, the room spinning around him, his body swaying with the motion and among it all, Black, standing still in the eye of the storm.

“I bet you fucking hate that, huh,” Black said, eyes dark and intent. He’d spotted the weakness. “That Todd and I have ten years and you and I don’t have shit.”

“That’s not—” White said desperately, but it was a lie and he couldn’t make himself say the rest. It didn’t even matter what he said; Black didn’t care about the answer. But White did hate that, viscerally, with a creak down to his very soul like it was being wrenched apart. He was jealous, a crystallized, jagged shard in his throat when he tried to breathe, because it should have been him there, not Todd, and if he had been there, it wouldn’t have gone wrong. Black’s entire friendship wouldn’t have been shattered; Black wouldn’t have to look back at the pieces and see it had always been a lie.

That White’s brother, infallible Black, had that happen — it tore White to pieces. Black would hate to be thought of like that.

White tried again, voice wavering. “Phi—”

Black laughed, mocking and hysterical. “Stop fucking calling me that! I don’t even know who the fuck that is!”

“Black,” White said, weak, desperate.

“Go the fuck away,” Black said.

So White did.

White spent an hour on the bus crying at three a.m. and by the time he got to the garage, he was worn out. He wasn’t exactly sure how he’d ended up here, except the bus route to the garage was familiar and he’d done it automatically and Sean was up on the balcony, wearing a t-shirt and boxers and holding a bat, like he’d thought someone was breaking in. “White? What’s up, you don’t usually come here—”

“Black is being pissy,” White explained faintly, which was something Sean was sure to take as fact without question. “Can I come up?”

“Yeah, of course,” Sean said, like it was nothing. He tossed the baseball bat by the side and offered White a hand, cupping his fingers over White’s temple so that he wouldn’t hit his head in the dark. “You need to sleep here?”

“Yeah,” White said, almost surprised.

White’d been in Sean’s room before, a few times. Never at night, and never when he felt this weird, rubbed raw. “Sorry,” he said as Sean handed him a shirt to sleep in. “I didn’t mean to wake you up.”

“You didn’t, I was studying,” Sean said. He climbed into bed, adjusting his legs so that White could climb over them. After a moment, White took off his jeans and put on the borrowed shirt, which was soft and far too big. He set his glasses on the desk. He climbed over the end of the bed, settling in the empty spot that Sean left behind. For a while, it was just the whir of the fan and the whisper of Sean turning pages of his text book.

“So,” Sean said, highlighting something. “What’d Black do?”

White smiled automatically, cheeks stretching tight where the tears had dried. “Maybe I did something.”

“Not likely.”

White shrugged, thinking of Todd, the stupid fucking catalyst for this whole thing. But it wasn’t really about Todd. Not really. Whatever Black had screamed at White — it had been true. It was raw, hurt, spreading deep, and White didn’t understand it all, except that Black had definitely succeeded in making White feel it, too.

White must have been making Black feel like this a long time.

“Why don’t you tell me,” Sean said, and White thought it was an absent gesture, but he was running his fingers through White’s hair and it felt good, against the, leftover discord still festering in White’s chest. “White?”

“It’s stupid,” White said thickly. He was crying again, somehow, maybe that Sean could give him this and Black couldn’t, that Black would but didn’t feel it the same way White felt it, that he hadn’t been comfortable with White the whole time. Black had felt something. Black had been off-kilter. White hadn’t known; Black hadn’t told him, and how was that fair?

“It’s not stupid.”

It wasn’t, not even close. White shook his head. He tried to think of how he would even explain this without unraveling Black’s entire psyche into threads. There was nothing he could force himself to say; Sean shouldn’t get to know it.

And White could already feel washes of guilt coming through, Black’s temper getting him in trouble again. He’d wake up tomorrow and regret it, probably. White knew him well enough now to be sure of this.

“You can tell me,” Sean told him.

“I don’t want to,” White said, and rolled over.