1: I HAVE WALKED WITH GIANTS
August 19, 2517
August on the universal calendar was actually some late November-esque for Eridanus I. The world was, unlike every other Earth-colony, an almost perfect replica of the Homeworld. The ball of dirt and water and sky was all the right proportions, the right size, and even swung tipped over on the same angle. The only difference being that it somehow managed to get started turning in an orbit in the other direction than Earth had. This meant that the height of summer on the calendar from back home meant the dead of winter for Eridanus I residents.
It was certainly bitter cold.
It didn't stop anyone from using the same calendar, though – the names of the months merely had different meanings. While Homeworlders would hear "August" and think, "hot", people from Eridanus I would hear "August" and think, "frozen".
Somehow, the temperature – nor even the snow heaped on the playground – would keep the children indoors, and on any given day they could all be found outside. All, it seemed, but one.
Frank James O'Neil was sitting on the tank of a toilet, his feet on the lid of the bowl, his arms wrapped around his narrow, six-year-old chest. It was the backmost stall, in the unused boy's bathroom… he'd run there after getting into a fight with three other boys in his math class, more in an attempt to keep the principal from finding him than to hide from the other boys.
His twin brother was probably elsewhere, hiding out just as much. Even their own parents got them mixed up sometimes, so it was a constant hassle making the teachers and school staff understand who was who. And sometimes, just to rumple them, they'd pretend to swap identities for a few hours.
Frank felt a little miffed that this incident would come along just a couple of months from his seventh birthday – it would be a stamp on him forevermore, he was sure, and he just knew that when his parents found out he'd been getting into fights at school again, they'd withhold whatever awesome thing they'd found to get for him.
And since his twin was always involved in such altercations, there would be no identity-swapping going to save either of the boys. Frank palmed his chin, that elbow resting on his knees, wondering if it had been enough time yet. He really would have rathered being on the playground, pushing the other kids around in a game of tag or hide and seek. Or, king of the hill.
King of the hill was always an easy win… some twins would be in constant conflict with one another, competing until there was nothing alike between them but their looks. But for Frank James and his younger-brother-by-fifteen-minutes, Flint Jordan, it was almost as if they truly were one person somehow inhabiting two bodies at once. They could coordinate without vocal relay as if drawing from the same mental pool of thought, and while this usually made the hill have two kings, only Flint was bothered by that – because Frank would usually ambush him with a surprise push, unseating his momentary victory.
This did not remove the fact that they were still very much two different people, however; Flint was a little more quiet, a little more observant. And sometimes, he would cut loose with sarcasm so sharp it would shock even Frank for a moment. He was a bit of a pessimist, when it was all said and done, but it never seemed to keep him from trying anyway.
Frank appreciated that last aspect… while more of an optimist himself, he too would never let anything go if he thought he could get away with trying it at least once. But the picking fights with the other boys was a hard thing to avoid, truth be told.
Somehow, though… Frank had a sinking feeling that this time, Flint had started it. Oh, he'd never lie to Frank about anything, but he'd drivel on and on about nonsense for practically forever if anyone else asked him something he'd prefer not to answer.
That or he'd stare at them, blankly, as if he thought they'd just spoken in tongues.
That was Flint.
Finally, bored out of his wits and willing to put in as much playtime as possible before class started again, Frank hopped down off the back of the toilet and walked the length of the bathroom, heading out. It had only been about an hour, but he still felt twisted and lonely, and he wanted to at least see what Flint was up to. The boys did not often part ways for quite this long, and for pretty good reason.
Frank made the wide hall with the sightline to the double doors that led to the playground in question when he felt a sinking feeling of dread set in… and a moment later, a brief spike of panic that he knew was not his.
With a sudden cry of protest, the six-year-old boy jumped into a run, pelting for those doors for all he was worth, striking them with his full bodyweight. His thickly insulated winter coat padded most of the impact, allowing him to shoulder through without bruising his small shoulder. Muscling through, he weathered the strong gust of frigid air before turning and taking in the playground at large; on the mounded grounds to the left were those squealing children playing tug-of-war, and the jungle gym on the right was absolutely crawling with more of the same.
But though Frank looked, he didn't see his brother among either crowd. His heart racing, his twin's panic manifesting somewhat as his own, Frank pelted first towards one, then the other crowd, before hesitating in the middle and looking lost. Where was Flint? He'd been out here just a moment before.
But nowhere did he see the coat that was gray-with-white-piping, identical to his own. Finally, upset and at a loss, Frank found a bench and sat on it, his little blonde eyebrows pinched together in worry and confusion. He felt oddly alone, something he'd never before experienced. There had always been his twin, his brother, sometimes pestering. Now he was gone, and gods only knew why, Frank felt he'd never feel happiness ever again.
He sat there for all of a minute before hopping back to his feet, impatient and unwilling to wait for longer than just. He went over the whole of the school grounds, even going so far as to ignore the ring of the bell that announced class restarting. Finally, when he saw one of the teachers plodding out from the buildings towards him, Frank paused and held his ground. Maybe someone else had seen Flint around.
When the adult got near enough to speak without the brisk wind cutting away his words, he stopped, and stuffed his gloved hands into his coat's pockets. "Hey, kiddo. You look a little lost. Lose something?"
"My brother is missing." Frank told him. "I can't find him anywhere."
The teacher nodded. "You're that twin, right? You're looking for your other half? Looks just like you?"
Frank nodded. "Uh-huh."
The teacher pulled out a hand and waved it at him, indicating Frank to come hither. "He's already inside… one of the fourth graders picked him up earlier, said he looked like he'd fallen off the swing or something. He's okay… dizzy."
Elated, Frank hopped forward. "I couldn't find him anywhere." He said, again, more leading the man back to the school buildings than following him there. Flinging himself off a swing did not really seem like something Flint would do, but then, accidents could happen just as easily to anyone. Maybe the cold had gotten into a chain link and it had come apart when he didn't expect it to? It explained the sense of panic, at least.
Reaching the nearest side-entrance to the school, Frank had to wait for the teacher to catch up and get inside too before proceeding; it was a fairly large sprawl of connected buildings, after all, and as a result, Flint could be holed up in any of three separate nurse's quarters. Frank did not particularly feel up to searching all three in order to find his brother. Obligingly, the teacher patted him on the head as he stepped through the doors, and turned to lead the way through the building.
"Guess you want to go and see him, huh?" The man asked, offering a half-grin. "You being twins and all."
Frank screwed his face up at the reference. "Yeah, but the whole world doesn't revolve around that one little fact." Non-twins looked out for each other, too, didn't they?
Still, in as much as no little kid particularly enjoys visits to the nurse, Frank couldn't justify the lingering sense that everything was about to change… permanently. Whatever his brother was doing, or whatever was being done to him, it seemed a bit more of a setback than merely dropping off a swing.
Frank had jumped off a moving swing before, after all… he'd bruised both knees and torn his pants up, but he hadn't even sprained an ankle or a wrist doing it. What was the big deal now? Finally, reaching the middle quarter, the teacher directing him waved a hand at the door to the room in question, allowing Frank's insatiable need to go faster to take him on inside ahead of him.
Frank didn't hesitate; he sprang forward, grabbing and twisting the knob on the door and shoving into it bodily to make it open all the faster. Being only six, it was a tactic he still used, and likely would continue to use until he got a bit more growing done. Even as much as he was not all that small for a six-year-old, Frank was still a small child, and things like doors built for use and abuse by adults were often hefty barricades for him.
Getting the door out of the way, and himself into the room, Frank paused to take in what he was seeing. Flint sat perched on the seemingly oversized examination table, looking none the worse for wear at all – his face wasn't even flushed from any recent exposure to the cold, as Frank's doubtless still was.
Frank drew up shy of the table, though, staring at the other boy with an expression on his face that even he would need a mirror to understand fully. For all that he appeared to be perfectly alright, Flint looked different to him. Something in his soft, dove-gray eyes was wrong, as he sat there looking back at Frank from his perch on the examination table.
It was almost as if he didn't know who Frank was anymore.
"He can go with you, if you'd like." The nurse said, a tall, slender woman in her early forties. She already had gray streaks in her auburn hair, but her face looked like it belonged on a much younger woman. She crossed her arms over her smock, a motion Frank understood to mean that she felt she'd just wasted her time giving a checkup to someone who didn't need it.
Frank felt she ought to do it again, though… just to be really sure. He watched as Flint pushed himself off the table, and landed lightly on his feet at its base, then as he turned and walked past. He offered Frank a tentative smile, but Frank only furrowed his brow in response.
Every fiber of his being seemed to scream out, who are you?, but even Frank did not quite understand why. The feeling of considerable foreboding remained. Did Flint get told something, or had he overheard something, that meant bad things? Frank made a mental note to ask his brother later for the details. It was not a good feeling at all.
The seeming utter lack of their bond was also bothersome. More puzzling was the fact that while Frank felt sure he was still getting something, he wasn't getting it from the boy he was following up the hall towards the first classroom.
He knew, without question, that something was not right.
.
September 21, 2517
"Twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty… thirty-one." He unfolded a finger for each numeral, counting them off for future reference as he attempted to do some extraneous math in his head. Math that involved a couple of confusing numbers – because there was no way September would go through to the forty-second day. "Ten days until October."
Frank lifted his tired eyes from the digital homework sheet spread on the small table before him, and frowned at his twin. "Duh."
"And to get to the…" he closed both fists, and looked up, back at Frank. "…first of… okay, I just lost my number again." Flint dropped his hands, and blew an exasperated sigh. "But we'll be seven." He was sitting cross-legged on the carpeted floor next to the table Frank sat currently at, but appeared no more inclined to do his own homework.
Frank frowned at the other boy, unwilling to admit to himself that he felt achy and sore for no reason. At the end of every stinking day he felt like he'd been running from a ravenous wolf, hefting cinderblocks too big for him to really carry in each hand the whole way. His seemingly mysterious unwillingness to get out of bed in the mornings had worried their parents, but Frank felt himself drawing away from Flint, farther and farther each day.
He did not particularly want to turn seven on the same day Flint did. He'd become alien.
"You'll be seven after I am." Frank told him, feeling spiteful. He'd never really been short with his twin before, but then, Flint had never seemed so irrationally annoying before, either. He did feel some guilt for treating him badly, though – Flint had gotten annoying, yes, but Frank had also never been particularly amiable when he was in pain, either. So it was not all Flint's fault.
At the other end of the mainly empty living room, the door to the kitchen swung open, and their elder and only other sibling stepped through, a cup of something in one hand. Steven Agustus O'Niel was the spitting image of their grandfather – with light, tawny hair that fell straight as a whistle when it got too long, and bright, shiny green eyes set into his ivory face, he looked a little like a porcelain doll who had decided to grow up and turn into a man. He wasn't there yet, though – at three years the twin's senior, he'd already had his birthday that year and felt himself superior for it.
It was just a game, though, and a good and dandy excuse to pick on the two younger boys. Seeing them fight between themselves, however, disturbed even Steve. "Hey, guys, chill out." He issued, walking over. "Frank, quit making that face, or it'll stick to your head and you'll frown forevermore."
Frank sent a fresh frown at Steve, and bit down on the lip he wanted to poke out at him. "I don't feel any good."
"You haven't felt good for a while, FJ." Steve replied, flopping down into the chair across from Frank. He set the cup on the table, and dropped his hands into his lap. "That new movie is finally out of theaters, so maybe dad will pick up a hardcopy and we'll get to see it."
Frank folded his arms across his homework, and rested his forehead on them. "I want to dieeeeee."
"Hey." Steven scolded, reaching across the table to pop him on the back of the head. "You don't either, that's a horrible thing to say."
"He looks a little green, to me." Flint put in, suddenly. He uncrossed his legs, and folded them under him with both pointed in the same direction. "Maybe you should have mom or dad take you to the clinic and get checked."
Frank raised his head, and gave Steve a slack, defeatist look. "Why don't I? I wouldn't have to deal with any of you or this homework or my stupid body anymore."
Steve cast him a concerned look. "Your stupid body is probably just going through a growth spurt, FJ. You'll be fine." He picked up the cup again. "Suck it up."
"I've been sucking it up, for several weeks!" Frank wailed, slapping a hand down on the digital sheet in front of him. For the assault, the digital sheet defaulted and the file closed on him. Seeing that, he jumped to his feet and screamed at it.
"Whoa! Hey, buddy!" Steve protested, nearly made to spit his drink all over Flint. He dropped the cup quickly on the table and stood up, coming around the table to grab Frank by the shoulders and shake him. "Hey, cut that out."
Frank sagged against his brother, something he rarely did for Steve. It made the older boy hesitate, too, but he seemed the only real family Frank had anymore. Being severed from his twin was beginning to feel a little rough. Hooking his hands around Steve's, he cast a glance at Flint, who was casting a concerned look of his own at the both of them.
"You okay, buddy?" Steve asked, unsure what to do.
"I lost all my homework." Frank admitted, weakly.
Steve heaved a sigh, and made Frank sit back down in the chair he'd abandoned a moment before. "I'll help you with it, okay, FJ? No big deal." He reached across the table for the other chair, and dragged it around, forcing Flint to duck out of the way or get run over by the passing furniture.
"Hey," he complained. "How come he gets help with his homework and I don't?"
"Shut up, Flint." Steven issued, beginning to understand a little of Frank's frustration. "You'd think you were two or something." He sat down in the newly moved chair, and tapped a finger on Frank's data pad to bring up the file again, and look at its contents.
Flint pouted at them both. "Frank just needs to see a doctor. He's gotten weird in the head." He stuck a finger up, pointing at his ear, and twirled it.
Steven raised his head, sighed at no one in particular, then cast an unappreciative look down at Flint. "Why don't you go into the kitchen and get us some crackers?"
"Do I get to have some crackers, too?" Flint countered, wary of being made to work without reward.
"Yes! Get out of here already." Steve waved at him.
When he was gone, Frank propped his elbows on the tabletop, and buried his chin in his hands, his little blonde brows met. "He changed, Steve."
The older boy looked over at him. "What? What do you mean? You changed, too."
"No, I mean… it's like he doesn't like me anymore." Frank bit his bottom lip again, before looking up and over at Steve in reply. "I just don't understand him like I used to, is all."
Steve cocked an eyebrow, but didn't get to say anything when both boys heard a spectacular crash come from the kitchen. Out of instinct, Steve was on his feet in an instant – Frank was a little slower to react. "What just happened?" Steve asked, shooting Frank a look that said he expected Frank to know.
He could only shrug.
Seeing Frank seeming unphased, Steve turned back to see the door to the kitchen, beginning to think Flint had knocked something inanimate over somehow when that thought was erased for both of them; the most agonized wail erupted through the closed door, proclaiming that the collapse – of whatever it had been – had not been purely composed of inanimate objects.
.
September 22, 2517
Frank James looked up when his mother walked up the hospital hall, a woman almost as hopelessly blonde as he was. The look was superficial, though – she had a degree in astrophysics and worked at a high-end corporation as a lead scientist. After the incident in the kitchen, Frank felt the whole family had moved in at the hospital… and he still wasn't sure what had happened to Flint.
"Hey." His mother issued, arriving at the row of chairs where Frank had been made to wait, and squatting down in front of him. She ran a hand over his head, tousling his hair, then flicked him on the chin. "You doing okay?"
"Me?" Frank asked, a little puzzled. "I'm… fine, I guess." He gave a shrug. "What's going on, though? What happened to Flint?"
She heaved a sigh. "The last time something like this happened, you knew more about it than the doctors did, Frank."
Frank just shook his head, kneading the palm of one hand with the thumb of his other. Today, he not only didn't recall doing strenuous calisthenics, he also didn't recall smacking the livid daylights out of the knuckles on his left hand. But while it hurt, he knew complaining would only get him more of he same – blatant dismissal. It seemed that if both twins didn't feel it, then it had to be 'made up'.
Frank didn't feel like he was making it up. He watched as his mother stalled, looking around and then tasting her lip and picking at a spot of non-dirtiness on his britches for a while before finally meeting his gaze again and getting to the point. "Frank… I know you've had a little disagreement of late, but… that's no reason to turn your back on him entirely. He is still your brother."
"But what happened, mom?" Frank issued, feeling snappish and impatient. "Steve wouldn't let me see and neither would dad!"
His mother gave him a strange look indeed. "He broke his leg." It was said as if she thought he ought to have already known that. "Frank… are you sure you're okay?" To emphasize the point, she palmed his forehead.
He pushed her hand down, frowning. "How in the world did he manage to do that, mom? Dad says we wouldn't be strong enough to break our own bones… not until we're Steve's age."
She sighed at him. "Well, it seems he got a foot off the chair he was standing on and then tipped it over with the rest of him still on the top… and physics works a bit better than gravity does." His mother issued, softly. "Steve told us what he was doing on the chair, so… accidents happen. But Frank… you squealed like it was your fingers caught in that door last year… you don't feel anything?"
Frank shook his head.
"Well, you're not feverish…" She trailed off when a flash of white fabric tugged her attention to the side, the motion announcing the arrival of a member of the hospital staff.
"Miss O'Neil?" The other woman asked, casting a glance down at Frank before doing a double take, then offering him an adoring look. "Aww, he looks just like the other little guy! That is so cute." Focusing back on his mother, though, she added, "We got the fracture set and it's been pinned, so it shouldn't go anywhere."
Frank looked up to see his mother nodding. "Okay," she said.
The doctor/nurse was wearing an acrylic nametag pin on her smock, but the fabric hung outward since the front was not buttoned up, and Frank couldn't read it. Raising her compad to see what the digital readouts it held said, she added, "We gave him a mild sedative to help him sleep, so he won't be much for talking to for a while, I'm afraid…"
"No, no… wait, that's not going to work," his mother issued, firmly. "The twins are hyper-metabolic… they don't assimilate manufactured chemical chains… the sedative won't do anything to him."
This time it was the nurse/doctor who wore a puzzled expression. "Are you certain? It seemed to work during the surgery."
Frank looked up in time to share a puzzled look with his mother, but that was all before the two women departed, his mother waving a hand behind her at him to indicate he should stay. His thoughts trailed after them, though, even more mystified than before.
More and more, the word alien seemed to apply.
.
October 2, 2517
Frank got looks when he reappeared at school after a three-day hiatus, this time alone. It was so rare to see the twins separated that people noticed when they weren't together, now. He just kept his head down and tried to avoid them all, unwilling to talk to anyone about anything. If he got started talking about Flint, he knew he'd only dissolve into griping about him.
Flint was numb, insensitive, tactless… he'd gotten so bad that Frank was almost willing to start calling him stupid to his face. Still, as much as it had hurt to be rejected by his twin, he wasn't quite ready to start adding to the rift between them, himself. If there was any hope of reconciliation, though, it seemed a long ways off.
After making it home from the hospital, Flint had seemed to regress – rather than making any real effort to make sure his busted leg didn't atrophy, he instead took to sitting in the living room and poking meaninglessly at whatever homework assignment the school sent up to him. Their parents absolutely refused to force him to go through the savage throng to attend classes in person at the school, but Frank wished they might have had the brains to do the same for himself.
He felt small indeed, left to face the other second graders by himself.
Each night he made it home, hoping to reach some kind of truce, but on the days when Flint paid him any mind at all, they'd start out civil enough only to start snapping at each other and ultimately end up splitting ways bitter once again. Their parents often didn't make it home from work in time to witness any of it, but Steven did. The older boy tried valiantly to play diplomat, but he found it harder and harder to conjure any common ground for the twins at all as each day passed.
By the time Flint's leg was ready to come out of the cast – a tentative step to test the healing rate – Frank felt like asking his mother for a different birthday. Let Flint keep their old one… Frank needed some breathing room. Having to shore up in the same bedroom with him at night was making him sick.
But on the day when Flint went back to the hospital to get the cast taken off, Frank found himself sitting against the wall of the interior gym at their school, watching the third and fourth graders bouncing and swinging around on the equipment. There were a couple who looked like they wanted to make a career out of athletics on the floor, but the more Frank watched them, the more he felt he wanted to go out there and join them.
Maybe then he'd actually have a good reason for feeling like he'd worked himself into the floor every day.
Standing up at last, and figuring if he never asked, he'd never know, Frank walked the length of the gym. He paused to watch the skinny black kid who looked really tall for his age pulling himself over and around on a pair of hoops tied by chains to an overreaching bar. When the kid finally saw he was being watched, he was upside down, his feet in the air over his head. Tipping his head, the older boy cocked a lopsided smirk at Frank. "Hi, there!"
Frank offered a tentative smile in reply. "Hi."
"Need something?"
Frank pointed at him. "Can I do that?"
Before responding, the kid bent his elbows, flexed at the waist, then spun on an axis point level with his hands, and let go at just the right point so he landed upright just a couple of feet in front of Frank. There, he took the impact to the floor with just the slightest bending at the knee, and then straightened. "No, probably not."
Frank's shoulders dropped. "Why?"
The other kid laughed. "Because you have to build up to the rings, buddy, you can't just jump up there and start swinging." He waved a hand at Frank, starting to back up and turn. "C'mere."
Frank followed him across the front of the bigger pieces, trying not to get distracted by the other children fooling around on them. He was drawn over to the rack of small hand-weights, and handed the smallest set. Frank tested his grip on the first one, then lifted the other into his other hand, and flexed that, too, before looking up. "These are kinda heavy."
"They're supposed to be." The older kid told him, crossing his skinny arms. "Work with those a little bit each day, and you'll build up some muscle, and then when you're ready, you upgrade." He bent over, and picked up a bigger hand-weight, taking the small ones out of Frank's hands and handing him the bigger one. Frank took it, but his hand was dragged to his side instantly when he was surprised by how very much more it weighed than the first set.
"Wow!"
"Then you work with these for a spell." It was taken away, again, and restored to its place, and the biggest ones at the top of the rack were lifted free, and held out. "When you get to these, you can start playing around with the rings. I recommend you start with the horse, though, cos if you fall, you're less liable to twist something."
Frank looked up at the other kid, then, feeling a little awed. That biggest weight looked almost as big as Frank's head. "You must be strong!"
That earned him a grin, and his hair got tousled again. "Yeah, I'm real strong. You will be, too, you work at it."
Frank brushed the hand off his head, a little annoyed. He'd never really liked having his hair tousled for him, but it seemed like everyone did it. Looking at the weight rack, with all the color-coded hand-weights on it, he decided, "I want to." He figured the less time he spent at home with Flint, the better he'd feel emotionally. Looking back up at the other boy, he added, "I want you to teach me."
"Whoa, hey, I'm not the coach…" The other kid began, holding his hands up.
"But I don't think the coach likes me." Frank pleaded. "Please?"
The older boy looked hesitant at first, casting glances elsewhere throughout the gym for a while before deflating a little, and giving a reluctant nod. "Alright, I'll get you started… but I really shouldn't."
Frank beamed at him, and stuck his hand out the same way he'd seen his father do. "I'm Frank."
The hand was taken – and disappeared inside the bigger boy's larger hand almost entirely – and given a firm shake. "Brandon."
.
October 3, 2517
Brandon Robert Gordon Washington had not been born on Eridanus I. He had come with his single mother at the age of three, and while he admitted to not supposing to pursue a career in gymnastic athletics, he liked the workouts and was at the gym every single school day… and when he could get permission, he'd come back in the afternoons on weekends, too. Though gangly, and most certainly a taller kid for his age, Brandon was nothing if not graceful when he was airborne.
He made sure Frank knew what he was doing, and didn't hurt himself unnecessarily with the weights, and while Frank felt sure he couldn't possibly see anything other than dizzying blurs of colored motion while he was throwing himself around on the rings, every time he stopped to rest his arms, Brandon would pause in his twisting antics and let him know he'd been noticed.
Keep it up, keep it up, the bigger kid would say. For Frank, the weights gave merit to his soreness, and he found that if he did it just so, he could equalize the feeling with reality, and then it wouldn't be so bad.
But he couldn't stay in the gym forever, and even though he felt he'd turned a new stone, and found an out for all his frustrations, he still had to go home. Stepping through the front door, though, he found himself looking across the foyer at Steve, who looked like he'd been sitting there waiting for him ever since he'd gotten back from his own school.
"Hey, FJ." Steve greeted, standing up.
Frank offered him a puzzled look. "What's going on? Where's mom and dad?"
"Back at the hospital again." Steve answered.
"He break his other leg?" Frank asked, feeling a twinge of the old sarcasm Flint had seemed to have lost entirely. Honestly, Frank felt he wouldn't have cared much if he had.
"FJ, that's not very nice. He's practically you, for crying out loud." Steve turned him around for him, and pushed him back to the doorway. "Dad ought to be here in about twenty minutes to pick us up."
"I don't want to go to the hospital." Frank protested, walking back to the door anyway. "I only just got here." He saw Steve reach past him for the knob on the front door, grasp it and turn it, but he wished he wouldn't.
"Come on, stop whining." Steve might have gathered some small increment of pity for Frank, but he remained every bit the badgering elder brother he'd always been. He had his own quirks, his own view of things, and even though he couldn't understand why the twins were at each other's throats any more than Frank could, he still liked to think he had an even-handed approach to the keeping of the peace. Pushing Frank back down the short crete walk to the driveway, Steve added, "You can't stop being brothers just because you're not getting along. It's genetic, like balding and stuff."
"That boy is not my brother." Frank mumbled, sticking his bottom lip out.
"What?" Steve squawked, grabbing Frank by an arm and jerking him around to face him. "What did you just say?"
"He's not my brother." Frank repeated, louder, his expression set and grim. "He's an alien."
"That is not true!" Steve smacked him with his free hand. "Say you're sorry!"
Frank just bawled and covered his head with his arms, tugging on the grip Steve still had on his arm.
Steve yanked on it a few times, shaking Frank. "Say you're sorry, Frank, or I'll hit you again!"
"Nooo!" Frank insisted, tugging back against the shaking. He picked at Steve's fingers, but wasn't strong enough to get loose. "Let go of me! I'm telling mom!"
"That what, you think Flint's an alien?" Steve demanded, cross. "He's got a broken leg, and you want to abandon him when he needs you the most! What kind of brother are you, huh? Look at you! You should be ashamed!"
Frank yanked harder. "Let go of me!"
Steve popped him again. "Say you're sorry!"
"No!"
"Say it!"
"No!"
Steve considered hitting him again, but just then, he saw their father's car appear at the end of the street, so he refrained. It wouldn't do to have to explain the situation with their father thinking Steve was the one being mean. He stood still and held on while Frank tugged and yanked, clawing at his arm in a bid for release, watching the car approach and then pull into the drive.
"Dad!" Frank wailed, jerking towards the car as the driver side door opened. "Make him let me go!"
The man sitting in the driver's seat just cast them both a strange look. "Frank, calm down. Steve?"
"Get in the car, little twit." Steve huffed, shoving Frank at the vehicle and letting him go at last. Frank rebounded off the body metal first, but he grappled with the handle as soon as he had his balance back, desperate to put the car between him and Steve. Once he was in, he slammed the door and locked it, turning to look out the window at his big brother. Steve just rolled his eyes, circling to climb in the front on the passenger side.
Once he'd buckled, their father shut his own door, and put the vehicle in reverse. "Want to tell me why you two were fighting in the front yard?"
"Steve hit me." Frank issued, quickly. "Twice!"
"Did you hit Steve back?" Came the responding query.
Flint paused, then offered a tentative, "No…?" it wasn't often their parents used philosophy to deal with altercations, after all.
"Steve?"
The older boy made a breathy growling noise, then said, "He called Flint an alien. He says he's not our brother."
Frank saw his father's eyes appear in the rearview mirror, so he ducked into the seat.
"Frank, you want to elaborate on that for me?"
"No." Frank mumbled. "I don't want to go to the hospital anymore."
"Frank, have you ever seen a real alien?" Their father asked.
"No." Frank mumbled again.
"Then what makes you think your twin brother is an alien? Does he have three eyes? Green skin? Tentacles?"
"No…" Frank began, feeling like he'd been cornered and his argument dismissed yet again. Crossing his arms, he looked pointedly out the window, wishing his father would just drop it.
"Well, then, what makes you think he's an alien? Why did you call him that?"
"Because." Frank mumbled, quieter than his previous answers.
"What's that?"
"I don't want…" Frank heaved a loud sigh. "You wouldn't believe me. But he's not my brother. He can be Steve's brother, but he's not mine."
His father was quiet for a while, seeming to consider what reply he could give to that. Steve didn't say anything, for which Frank felt grateful. But despite his couple of hours at the gym being meager at best, he still felt like someone had borrowed his legs for some hard running before giving them back to him. It was as if he'd been training for the UNSC like a soldier.
But the UNSC didn't take six-year-old kids to be Marines. A boy had to be sixteen with parental permission, or eighteen without it, or the military simply wouldn't take them. And last he recalled, Frank James had not gone to the recruiter's office, nor signed anything other than his homework.
And it had been pulled hen's teeth for his teacher to get him to do that much. Frank sat in silence and brooded the whole way to the hospital, watching the city go by without really seeing it. He still couldn't figure out what had made his twin change like he had… and a plethora of changes it had been! He'd gone from plucky and sarcastic to moody and bitchy, and it seemed his previously unsurpassable ability to balance anything on anything else – including himself on a chair – had evaporated the same way his immune system had.
The condition was rare as hellfire and had shown in their father under much, much milder terms, but neither twin had ever been susceptible to drugs before. They never got infections or colds or allergies, never seemed to come down with the flu, and though the school made sure they got their booster shots every year, those didn't seem to do anything to or for them either.
That nurse/doctor-person had claimed to have successfully put Flint down under mild sedatives. Frank felt he had compelling evidence enough; six he may be, yes, but he was not an idiot. That boy was just all wrong.
He was not the twin brother Frank had known.
At the hospital, Frank walked in with the other two more because he didn't want to get stuck in the car in the frigid parking lot, but he didn't tag along very closely, and his father had to correct him twice in lagging behind too far. Inside the building proper, though, he stayed closer for fear of getting swept away by all the other people in there.
At the other end of an elevator ride, the trio made their way through more winding hallways up until Frank felt he'd never get un-lost inside the place without help. They arrived finally at door with numerals stenciled onto it, and as the other two ventured through, Frank leaned on the doorframe and peered in from there.
The room looked overstuffed with furnishings, most of it hospital equipment, but it was a small room to begin with. He could see Flint from where he stood, but he looked fine to Frank – why had they all gone back to the hospital? Listening to his parents exchange information helped to clarify, somewhat, though… for some reason, the pins put into the broken bone had come loose, and the staff were preparing a ward to do investigative surgery to figure out why.
When he saw his mother flip back the thin sheet Flint was sitting under, Frank stretched up on his toes to see what the leg looked like. When he saw it finally, he grimaced and looked away – the skin just below that knee had turned a grisly looking violet color, with a sharp green outline. He heard his mother say more, but it wasn't in English anymore. Figuring it was more than likely a string of medical terms rather than an actual other language – he knew his mother only spoke one known dialect – Frank turned to look back out of the room. It was preferable to watch people go by in the hall than to see that ugly looking bruise.
He finally felt a pang of sympathy, but it wasn't the same as he might have felt before the bond had seemed to dissolve. As his eyes took in the passers-by in the hall, he felt his skin crawl across his knuckles, prompting him to curl his hands into fists. If Flint had started to punch the living daylights out of his mother, doubtless he'd have heard some kind of commotion – at least the smacking of impact! – before now. But the room remained quiet and still behind him, with no one moving much at all.
That did not change the fact that he felt like he was hitting something rather brutally, all without raising his hands in the least.
Tucking his chin to his chest, Frank folded his arms around one another, and closed his eyes. You're still out there, Flint. Wasn't that obvious? Making anyone else see this self-evident truth was more effort than it was worth, ultimately. That boy is not you… but I'm the only one who seems to see that. What had happened to cause this strange set of events was puzzling by far more so than any other strange circumstance to ever be presented to him – he wasn't all that fond of puzzles, either. But like Flint, he could think along a sequence of events to stay six or ten steps ahead of anyone else on the same thought train.
Raising his head again, Frank let his eyes trail after an elderly man being pushed in a wheelchair up the hall. Silently, his face smooth of expression, Frank conjured a life-plan he knew he'd pursue until his end if he never found his end goal.
I'll find you again, and I'll show them. I'll show them that that boy isn't you, and I'll make them see that I was right.
When the doctors arrived, his parents stepped back to let them take Flint away, but though Frank watched them go, and he knew Flint was looking back at him the whole way down the hallway, he felt less and less attached to the boy leaving him behind.
Still, just in case, Frank raised a hand, and waved once in farewell.
From between the nurses, Flint lifted a hand and waved back.
"I have a bad feeling about this." He heard Steve say. "There's more to those loose pins than they're telling us."
"I'm sure we'll be told everything once they're sure what they're looking at, Steve." Their father assured him, patting the elder boy on both shoulders at once.
Frank cast a deadpan, knowing look back at Steve, though, telling him that he agreed with Steven's thoughts. The family gathered in a waiting room down the hall to wait, the TV in the corner of the ceiling blaring but uninteresting to anyone. It varied between commercial advertisements of products the family had never had a use for and the streaming news of the raging insurrectionist factions that the UNSC kept calling the bad guys.
Eventually, having leafed through all the uninteresting magazines on the little coffee table at the end of the room, Frank wound up watching it for a while anyway. He watched as the camera was zoomed in on a smoking, shelled-out building in the middle of a business district on another world. The report was some forty hours old, but the broadcast hubs couldn't get it to Eridanus I from another world any faster than that, so it was re-broadcast as breaking news yet again, despite its age. Frank knew that – his father had explained it to him once already. Still, it more often than not was news the residents of Eridanus I had not yet heard, so nobody complained about the technically mislabeled newsreels.
"Hey, don't watch that." Steve said, elbowing him. "That's garbage."
"I don't have anything else to do." Frank replied, hugging his arms to his sides. "And if it wasn't approved for all audiences, they'd have said something about it by now."
"You sure about that?" Steve asked.
"What's to see?" Frank argued, waving a hand at the screen. "It's just pictures of smoke coming out of a building that looks like it's missing all its insides."
Steve focused on the broadcast, then, himself. "The Innies bombed it." He said, eventually. "Says they killed a bunch of people."
"That's what the newsies always say. Innies kill people. I don't know, I never met nobody who was claiming to have been killed by an Innie." Frank mused.
Steve giggled at him for the comment, but didn't try to correct him – Frank wasn't stupid, but he'd been shielded like all kids his age from certain facts of life. If Frank ever did meet anyone killed by an insurrectionist, the odds of said person telling Frank as much were nonexistent.
"Why are you laughing?" Frank asked, turning his head to look up at his brother. "What's funny? Innies killing people isn't funny, it's bad. The newsies say so. Upsets whole cities when Innies kill some people."
Steve just squashed his grin and shook his head. "Never mind… had an extraneous thought. Not related."
Frank cocked a blonde eyebrow. "About what?"
Again, Steve just shook his head, refusing to answer. He was not about to pitch headlong into the complicated subject of explaining death to his little brother with the other one seeming to be taking a stab at testing his luck in that department. The wait proved a long, boring one, so much so that by the time it was overwith, Frank and Steve both wanted to just run out of the room and make a game of knocking over nurses on their way past them all. It seemed the only thing imaginable that could be done, even as much as it would only get them both in big, big trouble.
Both somehow restrained themselves, though, standing up to follow their parents out into the hall after the doctor come to get them.
Frank tugged on Steve to make him move, having gotten left in the back. He did not feel willing to be left out of the loop – despite the atrocious noise level in the hospital, everyone seemed so horribly soft-spoken, making hearing what they were saying from anywhere other than an inch in front of them an impossibility. And Frank wanted to hear.
Steve tucked him in front of him, retaking his former position once he had his brother in front of him, and looked back up at the doctor. Frank read off his acrylic nametag, and wondered how to pronounce the name the man had – it had way, way too many consonants in it.
The man had both his parent's full attention, though, explaining in that too-soft-to-be-heard tone of voice. Frank strained to hear, but he only caught bits of it.
"… doesn't look good for the bone itself. There's no sepsis in the tissues around the injury, so we don't know why or how. But it isn't responding to anything under culture… it's as if his cells are turning on one another. Anything we have to stop the spread will only kill more live tissues, including the muscle in the leg." He looked sympathetically at the couple for a moment, then added, "We can amputate, and hope to stop the spread that way… but we'll need to get on it right away."
Frank took one of the hands Steve had dropped on his shoulders, and tugged on it. Once he had his brother's attention, he asked, "What's he mean, Steve?"
"Flint's gonna get shorter." Steve answered, looking worried. "That's all."
The doctor cast the boys a glance, but little more. Returning his eyes to their father, he said, "I know it's not an easy decision, but if we don't find some way to cut off access to the rest of his body, this could easily spread and kill him. I want permission to take the leg off. I'd like to do it today."
"You're gonna chop his legs off?" Frank squeaked, in protest. "You can't do that! How's he gonna walk?"
Steve gave him a light shake. "Hush, FJ… it'll be okay."
Frank quieted, but he affixed the doctor with an unhappy glare, certain that this was going a bit far. He wasn't that displeased with the strange alien pretending to be Flint, after all! Certainly identity theft wasn't that terrible a crime… was it? He spent the remainder of the day wondering if the judicial system actually chopped limbs off of people who were charged with that crime, but he never got the chance to look it up on the extranet.
.
October 4, 2517
The next time Frank got to see his twin – or the boy pretending to be his twin, who had somehow fooled everyone except Frank – he looked exactly like what Steve had said he would – shorter. Given a wheelchair to assist mobility until he was ready to be fitted with a prosthetic, Flint now spent even more time refusing to move. He also looked permanently pained and there had to be someone always after him about picking at the bandaging over the stump. The one time he was left alone for too long, he nearly got it all peeled off before he was stopped.
Feeling bad about the way he'd treated Flint, Frank tried to approach him that afternoon. "Does it hurt?" he asked, tentative of a snappish comeback.
"It itches." Flint answered, grimacing. "I want to scratch until there's nothing left, but it never stops itching."
Frank gave a small nod, and let his eyes drop to the bandaged stump where the other boy's leg just stopped. It looked wrong… incomplete. Which was, he supposed, half the point. One did not have a stump if one had not lost a bit of themselves, after all.
"You look different, Frank." Flint mentioned, tipping his head to one side in regard to what he was looking at. "Did dad make you take track or something?"
Frank offered a sad smile. "No… and it's not track. There's a fourth grader in the gym who is teaching me how to use the weights. It's kinda fun… maybe when you get better enough to go back to school, we can do it together." Frank offered. "And you can meet him."
"What's his name?" Flint asked.
"Brandon." Frank stepped over to the chair tucked under the table where he usually did his homework, and pulled it out before plopping down in it. "He's really tall." He gestured with his arms in the air, the wild waving making Flint grin slightly. "And strong!"
"What's he do in the gym when you're not there?" Flint asked.
"I don't know, I'm not there." Frank answered, grinning back. For once, Flint wasn't trying to claw the muscle off his stump. If Frank could keep him distracted for long enough, then it might actually get to heal, and then he'd get the prosthetic and they'd all be back to normal in no time at all. And maybe Frank would stop feeling as if Flint was jumping up and doing calisthenics when nobody was looking, and they could be normal again, too.
"Are you gonna be a big muscle-man like the guys on the broadcast?" Flint asked, teasing. "You won't be able to fit through the door!"
"I'm not gonna get that big!" Frank complained, but he was still grinning. "I'm only six!" He jumped up and pretended to do a muscle-advertising arm-curl. "I can only get this wide right now." Never mind he was wearing a shirt too loose to show what little muscle he did have at the moment.
Flint laughed.
.
October 19, 2517
Frank tried getting up onto the top of the horse. He tried hitting the punching bag. Both were too high for him to do much with. He did a lap around the track just to see what that was like, then came into the gym and pumped some iron for a little while, watching as the coach directed the fourth graders on the rings and bars. Watching them fling themselves around like they were was fascinating, but Frank felt sure he'd come flying off of those handholds in a heartbeat if it was him up there, spinning in mid-air like the other kids were doing.
But on the morning of the 19th, feeling he'd given his soreness a backseat at last, he threw back the covers on his bed and jumped to his feet only to recoil back onto the bed at what he saw across from him.
Flint was lying on his own bed, still under the blankets, staring forlornly at his hands… both of which were swollen up like water balloons. He didn't look up, not even when Frank tore out of their bedroom screaming at the top of his lungs for their parents. Steven arrived first, being closer than either parent, the look on his face suggesting he expected to find a bloodstain or worse.
Flint was taken back to the hospital, but though Frank didn't go, he wondered if he ought to have. It was obvious to him now that there was something much more wrong with the alien pretending to be his twin than merely a lack of proper identity… or balance issues. At the end of the school day, and after his usual brooding time spent talking with Brandon and moving weights, Frank went up to the hospital again to see Flint.
The swelling was down, but the prognosis overall did not look as promising. He stood there next to Steven as their father explained what 'acute idiopathic osteo-necrosis' meant, and why the medical wonders of the age could do nothing about it. The sudden onset of decay in the structural cells of Flint's bones was unexplainable, as there seemed no traceable path back to any given source for the affliction. But as the days went by, the condition would only worsen more than it already had, as the bones grew first soft, and then decayed into a soft slush of septic pus that then began to eat away the muscle tissues surrounding each affected area.
It seemed that removing the broken leg had not stopped, nor even stalled, the infection found at the break. Everything conceivable had been thought up and tried, but ultimately none of it seemed to do any good. Without a cause for the decay, there was no way to stop it, and certainly no way to stop the spread as the dead parts ate into the living.
When he was tested for similar, Frank turned up entirely healthy, however, leaving even more questions – why one of a pair of identical twins, and not the other? What had one done so very wrong that the other had failed to do?
Frank had a feeling it had something to do with having gone missing that day back in August at the school lunch break, but he kept his mouth shut. Nobody believed that Flint was not the same boy, so there was no reason to think they would believe him on anything else he'd speculated about. He'd even gone through a fairly normal phase of trying to convince everyone he was Frank… something the twins had done a lot.
The bloodwork looked the same, after all, and so did the exterior. Flint looked just like Flint always had. Just like Frank. But that was all superficial and irrelevant to Frank.
Still… acute idiopathic osteo-necrosis was going overboard, as far as getting smacked for being someone that one isn't. Frank wondered where his real twin had disappeared to, and why he'd gone away at all, and where this other, strange, diseased boy had come from. Steve took it all to heart, though – he, like their parents, believed Flint was the same boy he'd always been. While Frank felt bad for the poor soul suffering through the condition, he did not feel nearly as stricken as the other members of his family.
This, too, made them even more angry with him. First he denied the boy they thought was his twin the courtesy of 'feeling it' with him, and now he denied him the sympathy a brother deserved.
Frank had quit trying to convince them of what he knew to be the truth.
After all… who would believe that a six-year-old knew more about any given situation than his parents did? Frank sat through the whole process of hospital visitations, of long discussions of hopeless scenario after hopeless scenario between the doctors and his parents, using his own spare time to pull weights and run some laps. It took several more weeks to come to a head fully, until finally, when the necrosis attacked Flint's spine and skull, and the sepsis got into his internal organs and shut them down, it was over.
Frank felt certain he'd never seen his father cry before… nor seen his mother so very sad. Steve looked broken, but he remained silent about it, through the preparations and then the funeral and even much of the aftermath.
In the end, all Frank felt was a loss of companionship – towards the critical end, he had managed to make friends with the alien, but it was to no avail. He'd died, rather horribly in fact, and Frank got their bedroom to himself for the first time in his life. Despite how he had always known that that strange boy had not been his twin, it still looked like a hollow, empty room when he saw it first.
Flint was, truly and wholly, gone.