The first day after you lose your brother feels fake.
It feels like a dream, like you could just wake up and open your eyes and maybe you'll still be in your car somewhere warmer, or maybe even further back than that and you'll wake up in your shared bedroom. He'll clamber down from his bed, nudge his knuckles into your shoulder, and then he'll laugh and start explaining something from his dreams that'll leave you stumbling in the dust of the brilliance of it. Once upon a time, he would have answered when you called, would have done practically anything for you, and you would have done the same for him.
Ain't it funny, you think bitterly as the lights outside the window reflect off his glasses, how quickly the fairytale 'Once Upon A Time' leaves and lets reality trickle in behind it. Like an unwelcome houseguest, it takes up room in your chest and tears at whatever it can get it's hands on.
Stanford is gone.
Your arm goes limp, your knuckles banging against the floor in an almost too-painful way that you remember from when you were just starting to learn to box. His glasses land on the carpet, safe from cracking on the wood, the only part of him that you've managed to save. You watch them for a minute, as if you could will them to be picked up by their owner, miraculously returned from the other side of a portal you can't even begin to understand yet.
"Congratulations, Stanley." you whisper, ignoring the still-burning pain in your shoulder. "The dumb twin is the survivor."
That's what it comes down to.
All of the intelligence he'd had, all of the greatness and good inside of your brother...You don't have any of it. You have nothing but a string of failed identities and an ache in your chest that feels like the world is ending.
And you have no one to blame but yourself.
If you had just calmed down, if you had taken the time to sit down with him and ask him to explain what was happening...
You shake your head, bite your lip so hard that you taste blood. He'd echoed your dad, the old man's words falling from his mouth in a wave of anger and hatred that had stung just as badly as it had nearly twenty years before. It had just pushed your buttons in the same way it had then, and you were never that good at holding your temper; that had always been Stanford, the better-smarter-nicer twin had always been Stanford and you had never even come close to being the same kind of guy he'd been.
Just the same as it has always been, you regretted the words the moment it was too late to do anything about them.
You look at his glasses where they sit on the floor, turning on your side so that you can look at them without straining your neck too much, then lean forward and scoop them up in one hand, cradling them to your chest. This is all that's left of him, all that remains of him in this world and possibly any other.
This is all your fault.