A/N: Written for the Driven by Tears Bootcamp, #007 – easy.
Warnings for thoughts of suicide and reflection on general religion.
suturing
They were antithesis in everything, even this.
One wanted to keep on living. He died. The other wanted to die. He kept on living.
Though it might have been a simple matter to rectify. It might still be.
One couldn't bring the dead back to life, but the same couldn't be said for sending the living to join the dead.
Sure, it wouldn't be perfect. With their luck, he'd wind up in hell and miss his dear brother in heaven completely. Or the other way around. But he couldn't imagine his sweet brother in hell. He'd already gone through hell. In his mind: that fragile thing that'd been so carelessly torn apart.
They both learnt how words could be. A weapon: ripping, tearing, killing. A needle with thread to sew it all back together.
The same words had had different effects on them. Tore one. Stitched the other together. And he searched for a needle and thread that would stitch the broken mind but it'd been hard. So hard. Because it'd meant he had to battle that raw, undeserving pain. He had to defend something he didn't know was the truth, but it simply had to be because anything else just wouldn't be good enough…
It was the truth. Or close enough so that the difference didn't tear the sutures back out again. And that was that chapter closed.
Except there was another chapter after. A more black and white chapter. Because death and life both had their definitions and the grey middle area between them had only come into play for five minutes. Or maybe it'd been fifteen. All too brief. Not long enough for hope. Not long enough for something to give way, some mercy to save their souls.
And now he is left, alone. One is dead, the other living and he is the living one.
He knows he won't be immortal. There is a science, a low, that dictates such a thing is impossible.
That's fine. He doesn't want to live, now that the other half of him is gone.
He'd always been half. They'd both always been halves, alone. Now they knew and that made it all the more impossible to bear. He couldn't bear.
There was nothing his brother could do, already dead.
But he could.
So long as there was no heaven or hell. A hell that would make him forget everything in agony. A heaven that would close its doors in his face for taking his own life, that life given to him by a god he didn't believe in (because if there'd been a god, they wouldn't have been so cruel to leave two halves to fend for themselves, and then snatch one away as soon as they were starting to become whole). He didn't believe them – but still he wondered. Whether his brother has a pretty cottage and a garden. Or if there was some unfair sin he had to pay for, there.
Nothingness was a far better place for the two of them. Or reincarnation – if they could be together this time, whole instead of broken, fragmented shadows of one another.