For a great many years of his childhood, Mana was quite positive Nea hated him.
He had more than enough reason to, surely that was true. Mana could remember being a right brat in his adolescence. He would whine and cry till he got whatever desirable object Nea had and he would insult his younger twin incessantly for being slow or annoying.
It was nothing out of the ordinary for most normal families but Nea was anything but an ordinary sibling and Mana was finally able to see that as the years went by.
Nea, the boy he had shared life with since birth, was strange.
Nea hated strangers. Anyone who even came to their house was like a foreign enemy in his eyes, even if they were a grandparent or aunt. He would stress out to the point of hyperventilation if they stayed too long.
Physical contact made his entire body tense up. Mana could see it, even when he was being embraced by his own mother. Of course Mana noticed it all the more when Mana himself initiated the contact. Sometimes Nea would force himself to embrace his family, but it was so fake, so mechanical, so forced, fast too forced like the very idea of his family was repulsive to him.
Sometimes, he couldn't even meet Mana's gaze. He refused to look his own brother in the eye, to talk to him, to be truthful with him for once and, for some reason, that hurt Mana more than any of these other things because Mana knew full well whose fault this was.
No one was to blame but Mana himself.
He drove him away, alienated his brother when his grades in school were failing, when he was being bullied by their relatives, when he just needed someone to understand why doing what he was told was so hard.
But even if Nea hated him, and he was quite positive he did, Mana could never recuperate these feelings.
Truthfully, Mana loved him. Perhaps he didn't see it back then, but he saw it as clear as day now.
It wasn't even a skin deep love, either or a love for an idea of Nea he made up in his head. Rather, he loved Nea for all he really was.
The boy who hated brussel sprouts and avoided green vegetables like the plague.
The boy who would interrupt mid conversation to offer an insight into a subject no one was talking about.
The boy who seemed to wilt in extreme heat, whining and complaining to the point of tears, clinging to their mother like she had the ability to change the weather.
The boy who would reject and welcome all the wrong things, so eccentric in personality, so determined to separate himself from the crowd.
The boy who would act so robotic and untouched by the cruelty of those around him but yet cry himself to sleep at night, cursing the very differences Mana loved so much because he was trying.
He tried so hard, too hard sometimes.
He loved that boy that would probably never grow from that childish mind frame and nothing would change that.