Didyme—an unabashed girl with flyaway curls—zooms dizzily down the hallway.
"Marcus! Marcus! Where are youuu? She skids on the smooth stone, hands windmilling, laughing at herself for almost toppling over, now artfully breathless, now skedaddling, her bell-laden skirt striking up a merry hurricane of noise, a law unto herself, a second sun.
A newborn lingers halfway down the hallway, the Midas sunlight spilling diamonds across his skin. Didyme's a century old and all the more entranced.
"Hello, um," she says, fumbling his name—Aro always recruited new ones without bothering to tell her—she bites down a fat bubble of laughter. "I think I've lost my husband, have you seen him? Tall, with an anxious look about him, like a gigantic rabbit?"
"I don't know," the newborn says nervously. It's something she doesn't see often—even her victims die faithfully, marvellously, split open to reveal shining buttercup innards, duped by her gift's promise of paradise. Where there's fields of asphodel there's a tollbooth, and she figures it's her business to show a little and leave em wanting more.
"Odd," she remarks as the newborn vanishes round a corner. "Maybe he's immune to gifts or something." She despises all kinds of pauses and talks even if there's nobody to listen. Why be an empty vessel if you can't make some noise?
"Odd odd odd," she sings, making a little tune.
She dwardles in sunlight, even in stillness ever moving, a shimmering confluence of rainbows. The urge to flee to Aro rises—nursery fantasies are the hardest to shake, and she remembers a time when he knew the answer to everything. Still true, of course, but now it's palmed and clammy, furtive and dirty and never ever enough. Knowledge is no consolation for a psyche so fragile it fractures with a touch.
"Aro," she declares, throwing open the door to her brother's study. She's never bothered with academia. Men prefer when she's being herself—simple, silly, happy-go-lucky. They follow her like ducklings, though, so she doesn't mind.
"Not now, darling," Aro says, ruminating a new reed pen.
She laughs keenly, a sulphurous, hallucinogenic sound that raises dog's hackles, dissolves pregnancies, spirals on itself in oracular vapours. "Don't speak to me like that."
"Would you prefer I make nice and deceive you?"
"I—" Didyme withstands displeasure, but she crumples under derision. "What's wrong?"
She rests a hip against his desk, reluctant to play little sister when he's acting like this, unreasonable and ungraspable as smoke. Living in the sparks and fumes of a sibling incomprehensibly better than you—it's so easy to be desperate, but if you get too close it burns.
"Just a small problem that won't go away," he says, leering, a caveat she cannot lean on family resemblance to get what she wants. She must be useful.
Later, she's tearing her nails beside Athenodora as the older woman rapidly weaves thread to birdlife—owls and sea-eagles and herons. It's bitter work for a woman with a man's mind, but Athenodora hides her burdens well.
"No one laughs at my jokes," Didyme says. Without her gift to cushion her, she has no idea how to talk to the lovely, cold, monolithic Athenodora.
Athenodora plunges a claw into a basket of wormy colours, drawing out a cord as raw as blood. "You do seem different."
Slowly, Didyme reaches out and wafts a fingertip down Athenodora's arm. Her hand closes across a chilly elbow, and the woman startles and trembles, shins knocking the loom weights.
"Let's go outside and race through the mountains," Didyme says. "Let's become birds and fly away, let's nest on the moon and brood the stars."
Athenodora stares as if wasps have infested Didyme's brain. "I saw Marcus going to the river—is that what you wish to know?"
Of course, Athenodora's forgotten the names of her children. She's only amiable when she's pouring strategy into her husband's ear, when some city's in flames or some prince's treachery starts a war. Didyme knows the names of no conquerors, except maybe for boredom.
"How astute you are," Didyme says, patting Athenodora's arm placidly.
"May I walk with you?" Sulpicia tucks her bony hand around Didyme's waist, and they follow the path by the river where poplars cluster as thickly as eavesdroppers.
"I could drain a continent and still be thirsty, can you believe it?" Sulpicia's voice is a whisper. She thinks it masks her street drawl, but it doesn't. She spins a story about a noble orphan denied her inheritance and she's young enough to think she'll be taken seriously.
Sulpicia runs a necklace of glass beads and beaten gold through her fingers—an exact replica of one of Didyme's. Sisters share, she surmises, as Sulpicia flutters against her.
"You're supposed to be fun, aren't you? Where's that gone?"
It's curiosity, but rings of condemnation. The girls cling quietly together, two dewdrops on a flower in a secret garden.
"You know, your brother loves me just as much for not having a gift. He took my hand the other day and applauded. Have you ever met another like him?" Sulpicia digs eager hands into Didyme's dress, intoxicated with the way her words cast a spell.
"I don't want to talk about Aro," Didyme says. She feels old and outcompeted.
"Well, then." There's swindle in Sulpicia's sow eyes, and Didyme would believe it if she said she was raised by wolves.
"I should find my husband."
Didyme walks on, and the other spins in gold sandals and trots back to the house.
Didyme's name is a prophecy—twin. Twin of what? She's a wild strawberry, a sugar rush, a slut, a magic trick, a likeness, a flame—words that mean nothing by themselves. Twin of what?
She falls apart when she's alone.
There's no hope for girls like Didyme, one foot in purgatory as soon as they feign happiness. They must be restless to warm their icy viscera like hummingbirds that die with a single droop of an iridescent head. They let themselves be devoured on a whim—like windfall apples—pecked, sucked, spat out—because it's such a pleasure to succour.
She finds Marcus supine on the river bank. His double jointed toes crest the dark water and he's so filthy with bitumen-coloured silt she doesn't know if she wants to push him in or seduce him.
Maybe it's the desire to keep things simple that stops her from approaching.
He looks so peaceful.
"A trick?"
The dog legged, devastating man with lightningbolt grace can't meet her eyes. "You didn't seriously believe your gift stopped working?"
"A trick—as in it was all pretend?" Didyme can't quite grasp the childishness. Her milk-tooth years were marked by loneliness and the early attention of men and the certainty those you love most betray you first and she's grateful she can't remember any of it. "But why?"
Caius shrugs his switchblade shoulders. "That is a question best posed to your brother."
"He told them to turn their faces from me." Didyme lifts her chin and squeezes her ankles together. She grins like the Nemean lion. "Must he take everything away? What more must I give before he realises I won't compete with him?"
She doesn't mind being the butt of a joke, but this is something else. This is a siblings' fight, rendered fast and fierce and in profound silence. This is meant to claw her into submission and rip the emergence from her throat. This is her brother's domination.
Laid in the meadow is a party. Coloured rags hang in the trees, moths swarm in the rushlight and pretty dancers swirl sure-footed to the beat of drums. Marcus and Sulpicia clasp hands and dance severely, half-wild, two creatures from a fairy story. Caius presses his face against his giggling wife's neck and they move in their own time. Her skirts are migration patterns.
Didyme tumbles from the arms of her partner. Her laugh is high and harsh and holds the whole troupe in its magnetic grip. She's radiant—no, she's igniting.
"Hello, Didyme." Aro prefers to linger in shadowed edges, always observing, never engaging. She's never considered it a fault before.
"Aro," she replies with genuine gusto. "Nice trick you played today. You had me going."
"Indeed—how could a sister of mine be so gullible?"
"You're awful." She shows him a full set of teeth. "But what a party this is—look how my midnight magic juice makes them jump. It'd be a shame to waste. Would you like to dance?"
Aro's face goes oddly blank. "It would be my pleasure."
She plucks his hands and assaults him with a thousand nights of indulgence—sprinting through wet grass, a carotid bursting against her mouth, eyes drowning in honey and slow, lazy sex, a glissando scream pitched at a tropical depression, salt in her hair, between her legs, ash in her mouth (though that may be a premonition), the lovely luminosity in her chest of something unexamined. Cacophonously, victoriously she laughs until she snorts.
"At least I can act better than you!"
The ground trembles, trees quiver, flames flick tongues from their brackets, and she sweeps her brother into the foray.
Author's note: a quick lil character study, set around the period Didyme first thinks about leaving. Apparently the Didyme in my head is a major angst bomb (I don't know how that happened!).
Let me know what you think!