A/N: Written for
Diversity Writing Challenge, c6 – threeshot with chapters exactly 500 words each
Ultimate Sleuth Challenge, ch 2 – Kowloon level 2/EDEN Community Area – ficletchap
Becoming the Tamer King Challenge, Training Peak – drabblechap/ficletchap
Déjà vu
Part 1/3
Something was wrong with the whole situation.
She shouldn't be able to see her brother, lying there. Should be able to feel his ghost, lingering nearby. She wasn't sure why she knew those things, but she did, and both of them were wrong.
Because there her twin brother was, lying in that hospital bed and growing paler by the day, slowly whittling away and they were both in the wrong places, doing the wrong things.
Lately, everything about their lives seemed wrong…or most of those things. Her long hair felt normal – though she'd been tying it up more, recently. Felt more comfortable like that. And her brother had been twisting his far shorter locks around a finger and contemplating a haircut before he'd fallen unconscious.
The doctors said he'd fallen sick. She knew better. Felt that sharp pain of something striking, even if there was no wound on his body to show for it. They'd even scanned the brain at her insistence (and their own inability to work out exactly what was wrong with him) and found absolutely nothing.
Nothing – and yet there was an itch at the back of her mind that told her she should know what had happened to him…and worse, should know how to fix it.
Except she didn't. Or she couldn't grasp that chain of thought and do something with it.
And it wasn't just the abnormality surrounding that – or maybe it was related: the uncomfortable sensation of not quite fitting into their own bodies. Puberty, they'd put it down to, but that couldn't be quite right. It was very unlikely a girl and a boy of the same age would undergo puberty at the same time, and on the same trajectory. They were both book smart. They'd seen those pretty graphs in dual colours and knew what to expect. And wondered why she hadn't gotten her menarche still and barely had any breast buds to speak of. Though Yuugo had seemed amused at the time, and commented that she was too much of a tomboy to be comfortable with womanhood hitting her in the face.
But that was the problem. Womanhood hadn't hit her in the face, and as for her brother, he grew increasingly distant until one day he just wasn't there anymore.
EDEN syndrome, they called it months later. She knew it was wrong but she didn't know why. His mind wasn't wandering in cyberspace. It was wandering…
Where? She knew this. Somewhere she'd been. Somewhere she'd held a sword far more fitting than the wooden ones she trained with at the dojo – and that was another thing. Her brother's paint brushes. Her practice swords. It was like the callouses on their hands were used to different tools but they'd been using the same things for a while. That hadn't changed.
Rather, it was like they were the ones that had changed, slipping into different bodies and different lives…and now her brother had wandered off and left her…
That wasn't right either.