Yaldar loves Black more than anything.
The walls are a dull shade of grey that remind him of Black's eyes. He takes the paper cup the nurse offers him and swallows two solid white pills dry. The nurse sets a clear plastic cup of water on the nightstand by the bed and leaves without a word. Yaldar squints at the chipping paint on the wall by the window – locked, shades drawn, thick Plexiglas that's damn near unbreakable; he's tried – until his eyes burn and the grey fades to white. It's stark in comparison, just a few shades lighter, but it stings like a gust of cold air in his face.
Black never really loved him back.
The truth is harder to swallow than the smooth white pill with little etchings on the front that makes him feel tired and a little dizzy when he stands up too quickly. He sits down on the edge of the bed and smoothes the sheets just for something to do with his hands. The wrinkles crumble underneath his palms and he pictures Black with his face buried in his knees, his hair mussed like the bedspread and his arms trembling around his legs. Yaldar shudders, staring at the covered outlet in the corner. He's not allowed a television because he could choke himself with the cords; he's barely even allowed the sheets on his own bed, but he's getting better. They let him keep the plastic cup of water in his room now, so he must be making progress.
If he could see Black, he knows he would get better. One step closer to recovery, like his therapist always tells him when he actually talks during their sessions. Yaldar knows what he's done – he sees it every time he closes his eyes. Sometimes he regrets it, other times he doesn't feel anything at all. His therapist tells him that's a step back that he needs to work on overcoming, but Yaldar can't control how he feels. Nobody understands, and explaining it would be too tedious. No one ever believed him anyway, not even Black. But Yaldar loves him still.
A car alarm flares in his ear from the parking lot across the street. He's seen it from the window of the group therapy room he's not supposed to be in; there's a bank one building over that's lit up like a Christmas tree even at night. If he presses his face against the Plexiglas hard enough, he can see yellow squares through the blinds and the silk screen on the other side. He's not supposed to see outside – that's a privilege reserved for people who will someday leave this place. Yaldar is still a maybe – one step forward and one step back. He's always making progress until he just… isn't.
It always comes down to Black. If he never raised his hand on Black that first time, if he stopped after one slap, one punch, one kick, if he just told someone sooner then maybe he wouldn't be here. Maybe he would still be with Black, in side-by-side rooms in the studio apartment that felt more like home whenever Black stayed over. He knows he doesn't deserve to miss him; he knows Black will never miss him back. He's got White and the perfect life, away from home with his best friend and a career and none of the abuse he suffered through in his childhood. He's happy – he has to be. But Yaldar is selfish, and he would take everything Black has away from him just for an excuse to bring him back.
Once, Yaldar stole a plastic knife from the cafeteria, hid it in the front pocket of the pale blue scrubs they used to make him wear, and brought it back to his room during the break between therapy and medication. It took a lot of prodding – pressing and dragging and pushing with every muscle coiled tightly in his right wrist – but eventually he managed to draw blood. His left hand throbbed and ached from the pressure more than the tiny pinpricks of blood that welled up in his palm, but it calmed him. When he used to beat Black, he would make one thin, surgically precise cut in every place Black was injured – a stripe on his arm for a broken wrist, one on his hip for a kick to his little brother's stomach. It always took some of the guilt, the fear and pain and shame away when he pressed the sharp edge of a box cutter into his skin in place of his brother's.
But the nurses didn't understand. They took his silverware away for a week, and the guards at the doors watched him more closely whenever he left the cafeteria. His doctor prescribed him an anxiety medication that made his legs feel weak and his muscles tense. A little white pill, once per day. He hasn't hurt himself since, but it's not for lack of trying.
The car alarm stops abruptly, startling Yaldar more than when it started. It's dark outside – he knows because the clock on the wall reads eight-thirty-five in the afternoon. Otherwise, it could be midnight or six in the morning and he wouldn't know the difference. Except on Tuesdays, because Tuesdays are group therapy days.
It started as a way of punishing himself. If he couldn't hurt himself physically, then he would do it in whatever way he could. Once for every bruise he left on Black's body. He would sneak into the room when he was left unsupervised and share his story with a group of strangers, and it made him feel better. Some of the weight of what he had done left his own body and went into theirs, and every person he told his story to took it away with them when they left. But eventually, it became less about him and more about them.
They deserved to hear his story. They needed to hear it. He felt such a desperate need to tell whoever would listen that he abused his little brother for so many years, that he hurt the two of them until there was nothing but black and blue and scabbing red underneath both of their clothes. As if by talking about Black, he could bring back those memories – make them real again. Even the bad ones, the most painful memories, were of times he spent with Black by his side. It didn't matter that he was hurting him, because Black always came back.
Yaldar's hands fist around the bedsheets, pulling them up from the corners and crumpling them into peaks. He's acutely aware of the sound of the wind blowing through the window screen, the scuffling of shoes on the linoleum in the hallway outside, and his own breathing. His hands ache to clench, punch and twist and claw until his own body mirrors the last he saw of Black's. He remembers White, screaming at him through the haze in his mind, shielding Black from his view and shuffling backwards until Yaldar could only see their outlines. He remembers Black's face, the expression in his downcast eyes and taught mouth – guilt, maybe, but something else, too. Yaldar always managed to convince himself that it was sadness, but now it feels more like fear.
He doesn't like the clarity. He misses the way things were before he started to pity himself. Before Black was anything more than the brother he hurt to keep both of them afloat.
Yaldar doesn't know how to love someone. He loved Izar, and Izar left him. He loved Black, and Black left, too.
Black deserves better than the life he's been given. Yaldar tries to convince himself that he never really intended to hurt Black, and that killing him was never even a thought in his head, but the more his therapist worms out of him, the more he learns about himself. He changed after Izar died, and he told himself that Black needed to change, too. The world was too cruel of a place for people like Black, and it was Yaldar's responsibility to teach him how to survive. Who else could have done it? Their father was an absentee and their mother never even noticed the abuse going on right in front of her own eyes. Maybe if she had seen, if she had just taken the time to look, she could have saved them both. But nobody cared enough about Yaldar, and everybody cared too much about Black.
There are tiny crescent, fingernail-shaped indents in his palms from clenching his hands too firmly. He lets go of the sheets and smoothes them down again, drawing his hands back into his lap and twining his fingers together. His shoulders are shaking; he can feel the jitters traveling down his arms and through his chest. There's a video monitor in the corner of his room that he can't reach; sometimes he wonders what the doctors think of him when they re-watch the footage late at night. He deserves to be watched like this – to be put under a microscope until the doctors finally figure out exactly what's wrong with him. The last time they stopped watching, he almost killed himself. And, for some reason he can't quite fathom, nobody wants him dead.
After what he's done, they should. Black should. But he knows, deep down, that Black would never wish that on anyone. He knows Black perhaps better than Black knows himself, and yet he still hurt him on a near-daily basis.
Yaldar wishes he was dead sometimes. Black, too. When he tells his therapist this, the look in the man's eyes is enough to tell him that he's never going to leave this place.
The clicking of shoes stops outside of his door and a nurse calls 'lights out,' rapping gently on the wood of the doorframe with her fist. Yaldar stands stiffly, watching the clock on the wall tick down the last few seconds until it reads nine-fifteen. He can see the shadow of a woman's feet backing away from the door, the echoing of her shoes on the pale beige tile ringing in his ears. He flips the switch on the wall deftly and his fingers linger for just a moment too long. His movements are slow and practiced as he makes his way back to the bed, but he doesn't lie down right away. He sits, in the exact same spot he was in just moments ago, blindly facing the wall with the window a few feet to the left. The sounds outside are magnified by the darkness, and his breath hitches in his throat and echoes around his eardrums.
He thinks of Black, just as he does every night when the lights go out. He pictures his brother, defying the odds set by his broken fingers and finally becoming the artist he always wanted to be. He imagines him and White, and whatever kind of family the two have managed to create for themselves - wives, kids, careers, a house. A home. He sees Black smiling, without a trace of Yaldar in his life – his injuries healed, scars faded, and nothing left to suggest he even has a brother. It hurts even more than the thin stripes running up and down both arms and the sides of his torso – the injuries he inflicted on himself in the hopes of keeping Black by his side. What good did they do, now that he's alone?
Yaldar lies back on the sheets, his arms crossed on his stomach. He listens to the sounds of the cars rushing by outside and the nurses pacing the halls late into the night. Eventually, he falls asleep to the tune of his own haggard breathing.
Yaldar loves Black more than anything – more than their parents, their sisters, maybe even more than Izar, and certainly more than himself. He just wishes it was enough. It never is.