-1Twinning
Halves
Kaito had always been sweet to him. Crazy, noisy sweet to Akito, like kicking a little boy in the ribs right off the swing set for being too snide about girly faces. Crazy sweet like calmly picking Akito up and asking what kind of ice cream he wanted on the way home while they could still hear passionate screaming like the kid's ready to die.
"You and I were born to be together." Kaito had answered without hesitation. Akito was quiet and sullen in the passenger's seat next to him. He was lethargic from the long drive.
His older brother's hands were bony from eating poorly, white and gripping on the pliant leather of the steering wheel. His knuckles looked like the segments of one of those bugs who had too many legs. They were round and white like the kind that didn't bother with color because they only squirmed grubby bodies out of the earth at night.
Akito hated bugs. He had once told Kaito that he wishes he had been born underwater because it is too thin up here, and entire clouds of black little mites can careen into the holes in your body because there is the same thinness in there.
Water would be thick enough to pin them down, or maybe they wouldn't choose to be born there in the first place. And Kaito had smacked him light-handed on the side of his head for being morbid without being clever.
"There's no air down there," he said like Akito didn't have the faintest idea how life worked. Akito, smarting more from the condescension than the blow, had thought about bubbles, and floating in the womb, and kept it in his head that Kaito didn't understand.
You and I were born to be together. Akito thought about what that even meant, such a strangely formal sentence from someone who liked profanity better than maxims. "Fuck," "shit," "damn," "bitch". Those were the English "sayings" Kaito knew, stylish and obscene. Meanwhile Akito spun people stupid with his complicated foreign proverbs, and made Kaito go "What? Make some sense!"
Akito undid his seatbelt and got up on his knees. His skin stuck to his own body heat in the upholstery, stuck like blonde strands to his brother's crumby mouth damp from eating and the heat. He unwrapped another calorie mate and put it between Kaito's teeth, which crunched down as he drove. The sun outside their window was a yellow more offensive than the generic box, and Akito let it run across his idle face as they kept on.
"But we weren't born together." Akito said at last, poking at the most obvious hole. "We're years apart. Years and years."
"Nah. That's not what matters."
Kaito kept his stringy hair bleached as bare as bone pulled as far back as possible from his forehead. It dangled at the back of his neck like the skulls and bullets car ornament.
His eyes were always clear, ready to threaten anything and everything with a glare the color of cold iron. He dressed in picks from his style-less sprawl of a wardrobe, a wide array of carelessness like oversized pants and undershirts.
That was what Kaito was like. Too much, like a death metal song, like the worst migraine, like using a baseball bat to kill a fly and then smashing up the piece of furniture it landed on for good measure.
"What do you mean, then?"
Akito beside him was the wrong way in the other direction. Pretty and soft enough to be surreal. His hair was silky dark like a shroud that he used to hide behind, wing-like to allow golden-eyed glimpses: maybe not shy but coquettish.
Docile and like…a doll, Akito was complacent about just being put places. Looking like a character more than a person in his costumes. Charisma was a quiet, spell-like thing and Akito knew how to play on it. Meanwhile, Kaito bulldozed his way through life.
"Well, you see, it all started with some middle-aged adults who weren't very smart …"
"Who?"
"…who, like most middle-aged people, realized they haven't done anything with their lives. They felt quite stupid about it, and a little embarrassed, and decided that they had to fix it…"
"Nii-san…are you talking about mom and dad?"
"…So one night, they got together and they had this kind of mission, of putting together a mommy's part with a daddy's part to make a baby. But they weren't very good at it and had a liiiitttttlllle bit of a fuck-up. So nine months later, surprise, only half of a child was born."
Akito snapped himself back into safety and snuggled into the cushion with his knees up to listen to the rest of Kaito's story. It was getting dark out and he let himself get a little dizzy watching the headlights streak by in wide, hot-color stripes.
"Well, they couldn't help being slow, and took them years and years to figure out why all their little project did was scream and fight and break things and never did a thing they wanted. It was like it was missing half a brain and was going crazy from it. They were scared that it was going to hurt them.
They finally got that they'd only gotten half and forgotten the other half somewhere, ending up with all Cain and no Abel, and that was what was tormenting their little unfinished product. If they wanted it to stop torturing them they had to give it what they owed. They set right to work again, and did some homework so that they'd end up with something a little better this time around."
"And did it work?"
"Perfectly. The new half arrived just in time to be the younger to other half's older, helpless to his self-dependant, and so on. The first half calmed down, collected the second, and walked right out the door. From then on, the idiots accepted that they were useless and didn't try anything else quite so stupid."
"Mmm…" Akito traced a finger on the glass, but it was too warm for anything to show. Kaito was watching him from the corner of his eye, impossibly confident. If they really had come from the same two people, it wasn't too hard to believe that there was something to Kaito's story. It was as if really a person could come in breakable pieces from their parents and needed to be assembled. If a mother and father were sloppy like Kaito said, who knew what could happen.
If a person could have been sorted into two different boxes with oh, two crude categories with things like patience and androgyny in one, and violence and intolerance in another, it really did boil down to fluffy Akito stuff, hardcore Kaito stuff. It made sense right down to their dissimilar looks: tall and light to tiny and dark. Like their genes couldn't be mixed in the least even if they were from the same pool. No one would have pegged them for brothers just from seeing them.
And maybe a box did get left behind, and maybe the faulty creation would be in a rather unpleasant state for its missing parts. But…
"I don't know, Kaito-nii…that sounds pretty crazy."
Kaito turned a full ninety degrees away from what he was doing—he's not watching the
road, Akito thought dismally. His face was taken up by a wide lopsided grin with little points pinching into the flesh of his lips, shining from snack grease. Akito returned it with his own perfectly symmetrical and modest model smile, willing Kaito to put one hand back on the wheel.
"I knew you would say that. But I know it's perfectly sane."
Akito sat back and fiddled with his patterned shoelace.
He wondered how Kaito came up with these things, these fanciful stories, to simple questions like
"Why are we doing this?"
Matches
Akito had a fold-up body, natural to cowering poses like the fetal position. He acted like he wanted to go back to being submerged. Back to the womb because he didn't understand all the pain that came from being spat out onto land. He didn't know how to survive there. He belonged in a place that was heavier and didn't have biting worries buzzing in the air and at his mind until it shut down.
"Don't be afraid. I can do everything you're too scared to," Akito swore when he came tearing through that void. This might be Akito's world he occupied, but he had the form of a monster. And he knew he was strong enough to save one person.
Akito was sad, sad and sweet, and he had a pitiful, infantile attitude towards life. But Agito didn't care. Agito had emerged from that pseudo-birth chamber Akito had fled to, that strange black open ocean sanctuary in his heart. Akito had isolated himself to avoid disaster.
For his brother, he had streamlined as much of his life into carnage as he could until his overworked sanity finally shut down. With his fragility Akito had been like a nuclear reactor built by inadequate humanity knowledge and sheer ego. His strength was too great to be controlled responsibly, but it had been selfishly attempted anyways. Akito had retreated from a meltdown that would have killed him.
Agito hated the cruel experimenter that had put to field a human weapon unstable enough to self-destruct. That sadistic fuck, Kaito.
"But nii-san is your big brother too." Akito posited uncertainly. Agito knew he frightened Akito. He was either quick-tempered or a maniac but he didn't particularly mind being either. Akito sometimes acted like he was in danger from Agito too, mentally flinching when Agito snarled. That fed Agito ire's more than anything else. Half of his words were about spilling blood. But that was just how he was. Who he was. Agito despised weakness and Akito was spineless from keeping his weight on Agito. Of course it pissed him off.
But that was Kaito's fault. Agito had to make up for his anger by reminding Akito that he wasn't out to hurt him. He was here to protect and had to say so. It was not to his taste.
But he did it for Akito anyways. Akito had spent so many years as a captive that it had become the truth of his life. His sick, wary truth. Through all the abuse, Kaito had kept him mindful that the keeper cared. The keeper loved.
Akito might have not been that way before Kaito got to him. But that was the only way Agito knew Akito. Scared. Skittish. And Agito knew Akito's quiet intelligence recognized the parallels between a bloodthirsty "master" and a bloodthirsty "partner". The one he lived for didn't even trust him, and it was all because he had come after that cunt.
Agito locked his skates into place and lifted his face to the sleazy neon blare of the city's fluorescent signs. Akito cringed as he screamed a long, enraged scream of every curse he knew.
"That shit, that imposter, that fake fuck!" he screamed. "He. Is. Not. MY BROTHER!"
Tears had never fallen from Agito's face in his short life, but he knew what crying felt like. A burning, crippling sensation like the onset of disease. Akito was doing it now.
"But…"
"But what? But he cares about me? But he loves me? FUCK!"
"But…He talks to you…and you…live with us… and…"
"And what else? What else Akito? The motherfucker sings me lullabies in my fucking sleep, huh? Gives me milk and cookies when I go out to fuck up some scumbags for him? No? Then keep your fucking mouth shut!"
"But…" Akito was breaking, hairline fracture by hairline fracture. The first sob came, to Akito's fury. "…we're family…we have the same parents…"
"Fucking prove it!" Agito hissed mercilessly. "Where are our parents? Where's your mommy, Akito? Where's your daddy? Are they having fun with their kids? Are they on a date in the park? Are they dying? Are they dead? Did Kaito kill them and give you your mommy's blood and your daddy's cum in a baby bottle?"
"Agito, don't…don't say it…"
"Who's your real brother, Akito? Would your real brother do that? He doesn't even look like us. He looks like a stranger, like a nobody. He could have stolen you from anywhere. Where's your real brother, Akito? Did Kaito kill him too? Do you think you have a real brother somewhere? Is he as bad as Kaito? Would he whip you and lock you up? Maybe he's worse. Maybe he'd starve you. Maybe he'd rape you."
"Don't!"
Agito let Akito cry it out while he ran. He un-braked his AT's and flung himself over the concrete ledge, plummeting into a sea of ugly scene kids who clipped too much dirty scrap metal to their faces. Their glitzy, skanky girlfriends shrieked when he gouged his way through a hanging electric sign, showering them with lurid sparks. He ignored their reverent purple druggie eyes as he kicked up onto a fence and streaked over their unnatural multi-colored heads.
"Akito…Akito, listen to me." He whispered urgently. "I'm your real brother, okay? That's the right answer. I'm right here. I'm the only one on your side."
Akito's empty sadness gave him no words in reply. Agito only heard the echoes of his memory, You are my other half.
"Liar, liar, that goddamned fucking LIAR! He wants to be your other half but he's not, he's a thief, he's afucking parasite feeding off your blood. Look at me, Akito! Look!."
Agito skidded to an abrupt halt in front of a solid wall decorated with corroded dumpsters and fragranced with piss. A sickly synthetic beat oozed out of the bricks. Akito drew back his foot and cut it into an explosion of falling rubble.
Around the screeching and damp, glittering people pouring through the hole, Akito stood his ground like boulder in the middle of floodwater. "I can do everything you used to do. I look like you. Do you know why? I was born for you, Akito. You need to see who you really are. I am your match. I'm you. You've always been this strong. You've always been this angry. You don't need that leech. Don't do anything else for him, he'll keep you for your power but you'll always be dead…"
"I don't know what you mean…"
"Who are you Akito? Who am I? What did I mirror? You think it's normal to have this puny little body and be able to do things like that? Kaito's hiding who you are so you'll be too scared to run away. He's stealing your life. "
"I don't know what you want me to do…!"
"Make him tell you. Get the hell out of here, Akito."
"Agito, I…CAN'T!"
Agito reeled from the force of Akito's scream. It unsettled him and he got elbowed by a panicking clubber in the ribs. Agito felt the delicacy in their bones as he grunted and dropped to one knee. The fleshy, noisy world, ripe with odor, stampeded past. For the first time that night, he could sense stabbing hot fear.
If Akito believed he was free, really believed it, it would go back to like before he'd needed a savior. Before Agito had been born. Where would Agito go? The pointless terror clawed. Agito thought: poor, sweet, stupid Akito. He loved Akito enough to die, but that didn't have anything to do anything. He was meant to be trapped in Akito's body, unable to run away. He was his place-keeper until he wanted to live again. That was all.
"I want you to stay with me too."
Families
Agito was the ugly twin, for sure. And he treated himself like some prophet of AT's, bossing around his ragtag crew of emo-ing amateurs like a bitchy little commodore. He thought the whole world was centered on a single insignificant pair of skates when every other good little Gravity child knew to keep his ears pricked for the Tropheum bells.
Lind laughed. There was nothing more pathetic than a loser, except a loser who called himself king. Akito was way cuter, but Agito was more fun, which was why he liked him better. A dainty pet mouse was charming, but take a rabid rat like Agito, and the ways you could mess with him were endless. Stubborn, that Agito was, stubborn like vermin. His vicious little heart could be squeezed into a pulpy mess and he'd still try to bite your fingers off before it gave out.
"Who the fuck are you?! Why are YOU here, you fucking copy?!" Agito raged at him.
Lind ignored Agito's bitching to skim delicately on the surface of the waters with the very edge of the regalia's toe blade, tracing the squirming little ripples on the surface. Those silly little boys, they'd never learned to so something this simple? Orca was tumbling about like a rag doll in the wash somewhere behind them, bound in a fatal cycle by Lind's trick. Lind was free to chat up his snippy sibling.
"What's your problem, little brother?" Lind asked mockingly. "Since when have copies been such a problem?"
"Where do you get off calling me that? Fuck off! This is my fight!" And Agito burst snarling from his cage just as Orca did the same. They met each other at the crest of two tidal waves, impact cracking the floor of a swollen lake.
"Yeah, yeah, sure." Lind murmured with cynical affection as he sank back to the deepest recesses of their consciousness, past Akito. Agito's twin was embedded in a numbing stillness, feigning sleep to shut out the turmoil outside. But Lind knew he was uneasily feeling for the rhythms of Agito's battle and presence. A restless rest, a mechanic's reprieve. That was the lot of all tuners but Lind knew in this case it was more the dilemma of the meeker twin. Judging when to be the sheath to the wild one.
Twins, he thought smugly as he occupied his own space once again. He thought of his own-- even though they were an artificial pair. But who knew if there was anything genuine to Akito and Agito? Most people mistook them for split personalities. The little babies were still entrenched in their own secret language and own upsets, not thinking that one day they'd grow out of being each others' sidekicks. And maybe they wouldn't. Unlike Lind and his own twin, they were melded together in the same heart and cause. It was so ridiculously dramatic that they cried like it was some emotional tragedy about their relationship breaking apart when things went a little wrong, like the Akira goof-up.
Lind had stopped being such a child with his twin years ago. As the older set they had learned that more got done with a little distance, as partner agents with their own distinct assignments. And, of course, they had a joint responsibility to look after the young ones.
So Lind contented himself looking after their younger brothers and waiting for the right time to rendezvous with his own half. He was the egg of Judas and a shepherd, both.
Lately, Akito had taken a back seat to Agito's rampaging, even though he'd been the one to start the whole Air-Trek business. He was falling behind to his upstart other. The so-called prodigy had been shown up and was starting to fade into civilian life. That was fine by Lind; Akito was Kaito's favorite, not his. Kaito liked cute, but Lind liked watching Agito, the psychotic little fuck, strutting around like the top chick of the junior league. It probably also had to do with a kind of fascination over both of them coming second.
Their big, confused fucked up family of two twin sets with no one being sure who belonged to who had started with Kaito, their eldest brother, their makeshift crocodile patriarch. The other Gravity children had stared at him with their crucified pupils and then scattered in his wake.
The first attempt at a human lost-energy system had been a freak among freaks. And a carnivore among fleshy little children. So began Kaito's affinity for cages. The holding cell became his favorite place to calm down . His handlers had started regularly sticking him there when he became a little too homicidal to be kept free-range like the rest.
It wasn't his fault, really. Finding a way to contain energy loss had been their most ambitious project and, in a word, cocky. It was getting a little too close to God, Icarus crashing and burning, or whatever figurative comparison fit the bill. Lind wasn't Akito, for chrissake. He just knew that their creation of Kaito had been like trying to stuff the sun into a human skin. Their eldest brother had gone a little berserk from the overload.
After Kaito put the labs through several system failures, the scientists quickly withdrew their megalomaniacal dreams from that direction. They focused on inhumanly strong soldier children instead, leaving off on challenges to divine power. Kaito lurked about the place like an explosive with a lit fuse of indeterminate length. Meanwhile, baby after baby with cross-shaped irises was born. And the scientists, they were learning.
Research gave them the revelation that twins had something to do with how strong they could make their children. Just out of curiosity, just a whim over handling their variables, they had thrown in a few sets identical twins in their first batch. It so happened they became the alpha wolves in their test-tube play group.
The second seemed to act as a reservoir of power for the first, and an amplifier if need be too. Or, in certain cases, a straight-up replacement when one got worn down and needed to repair himself while the other took over. Simca to Kilik. Nike to Sora. Just when one was ready to fall by the wayside, the other shunted him back, or took his place. The other Gravity children came up short of mega weapons and were just incredibly strong fighters. It was like they were missing support at the control tower and were clumsily navigating their enhanced bodies by themselves. But the twins, it seemed like they had no limit to how strong they could get. And neatly manage their sanity too, the researchers noted
Well. That lost-energy project had been expensive, and its first busted result was still skulking about in and out of confinement…they were struggling to keep it from imploding and killing them all because god knew they couldn't kill it if it didn't want to be dead, plus the sheer potential of the concept was still tempting…And so, Lind.
It was a possible solution with a lot of possible kinks to iron out. They already had one sentient bomb child with a built-in lost energy system holding the facility hostage, they didn't need another. And Kaito was already fairly old--they couldn't give him an identical twin anymore than they could turn back time. In short, they needed to make a counterpart to Kaito that could fix him, but in case it didn't, was weak enough to get rid of.
"Project Lind" had been inserting a brain charger into a little boy and putting him through enough psychological treatment as a toddler to impress a deep rapport with Kaito. That Kaito was, in fact, close enough to him on a mental level to be his twin separated by a few years through a freak accident. They had to pick as young of a toddler as possible to keep the obstructive clutter of past memories to a minimum as they fiddled around with his psyche.
The brain charger could be surgically removed and it was a regular (not Gravity) child in case it took offense to its manipulative holders in the future like his surrogate brother did. But Kaito seemed to take to his spontaneously produced "twin" well. In fact, after a few months worth of less alarming behavior, he had systematically short-circuited the lab one more time and strolled out with Lind clinging to his hand.
Lind snorted fondly. Within a few years Kaito had lost access to his power; it had ended up locked inside him. It happened sometimes, if the twin had someone to take over. (Such was the case of Akito and Agito.) And Kaito was a prototype, no wonder he'd been a little faulty. Kaito hadn't minded, he was scary just the same as a normal human. As for Lind, the real personality of the body started to emerge, and that became Akito, inheritor to the latent ability of the lost-energy system he was oblivious of. That too, was rather nice in its own way, even if Lind had to make room for the baby. He even shared his things, like the power of the brain charger, even though Akito was too young to know how to use it right.
Agito had eventually belatedly came for his half like Lind had for his own when the burden of life needed to be lightened. Kaito had taken in the "additions" to their family with the same kind of acceptance he'd shown a dark-haired, gold-eyed, years younger "twin." Having younger brothers was a blessing after all, and they needed help doing something useful with powers that Lind knew had more experience with than they did. Help from both their big brothers.
And Lind smiled as he sat back with his family, to watch all of them take on the world.
Author's Note (spoilers?):
For everyone else that went OH WTF at the appearance of Lind. Explaining away that particular plot development was OhGreat!'s challenge to young people to exercise their creative thinking skills, I swear. Hope this attempt was enjoyable? It sounds pretty crazy, but the canon stuff is some pretty crazy shit. I know it the style peters out from Kaito's madness to Lind's matter-of-factness, but coming into knowledge can be like that. The first two parts are inspired by "Princes" by Sonya Hartnett.
Okay, some quick clarifications. Kaito's talking about the scientists artificially creating Gravity children. The "Mommy part" and "daddy part" of which he speaks are the sperm and the egg, not fun bits. Orca calls Lind's "sparkle-eye" unique, so it sounds like he's the only one they made who can recover "lost energy", even if (Akito?) was modified to be that way.
I was thinking that Akito and Kaito really don't resemble each other at all, hence Agito's suspicion (he didn't seem to be in on the whole "Lind" thing) but hey, it is anime…and at first I was like, the Noyamano sisters are completely different too!…Then I remembered it's not known to they're really related either. Um. But I like the idea of Akito and Kaito being the same "flesh and blood", so I'm pretending that it's possible that they used the same genetic base for making "Lind" in this scenario. And that the sisters being kept together lends weight to the whole "family keeps crazy strong gravity children stable" theory. But I know it doesn't, really. Um, yeah.
God, I wish I were more creative at swearing. I want to do justice to all the foul-mouthed Wanajimas. What is up with Akito? How does he keep his language clean with the kind of people he grew up with and hang out in his head? He must have trained himself to wash his mouth out with soap every time he slipped up.