Disclaimer: Don't own anything.
Author's Note: The next chapter of Tit for Tat is going slow, but it will eventually get to the place where I want it to be.
I'm doing martial arts again and it feels great. I hadn't realized how much I missed it. Got my ticket for the trip to Madrid in a few months. I can't wait!
Currently reading A Blight of Mages by Karen Miller and I just started reading The Prestige by Christopher Priest, which in less than three chapters is already not going as I expected.
"I think it's very healthy to spend time alone. You need to know how to be alone and not be defined by another person."
-Oscar Wilde
Cameron Reynolds has never known a life without his brother. The very idea is something outside of his realm of understanding.
Their mother has a good eye roll that she gives the two of them when they get into trouble (And they did get into a lot of trouble. They were short and skinny, making them easy targets for bullies, but—and this was according to Mom—they had both inherited the Bannon spirit. It meant no backing down and no giving in). She still slaps a steak over their black eyes and dabs at the cuts and split lips with alcohol. And not the rubbing kind because she'd been raised 'the right way' and any alcohol you couldn't drink isn't worthy of the name.
The twins know when the other gets into trouble. They feel it. Once, Cameron is home sick, curled beneath a blanket, box of tissues and a trash can on the ground beside the sofa and watching Duck Dodgers when his arm is split in two. Or so it feels like.
A few minutes later, Emma—home with her son because she isn't letting him stay home sick by himself, despite how much he protests that he's perfectly capable of it when he's fifteen years old—gets a call from the school. Arthur James Reynolds had been in a fight. Again.
(Cameron knew immediately what that meant because while his brother was a fierce fighter, the two of them only ever won their fights because there were two of them. All of the bullies versus his brother alone…)
His arm is still aching and he wants to make it go away and there's a frantic hum in his chest of worry. Emma is grabbing her keys and purse—"Stay here, Cameron. No, you can't come with me. Your brother's fine…"—and Cameron stays on the couch, clutching at his arm and waiting for the pain to fade.
(That night, Arthur James Reynolds would slip carefully into his brother's bed, the cast on his arm making him awkward. Cameron woke to the familiar presence and his arm didn't hurt anymore. But Arthur seemed to know anyway, a sympathetic smile on his face as his good arm ruffled his brother's hair and traced absent patterns on the left arm that had been aching and throbbing all day, despite there being nothing physically wrong.
"'m sorry. Should've been more careful."
Cameron shoved the apology away. "'s their fault."
"I might have started it."
An arched eyebrow. "Might?"
"Okay, I provoked them. But they had it coming."
"Oh did they?"
Arthur laughed, the sound familiar and warm in the semi-darkness of their shared room. They fell asleep talking into the night, squished onto the twin bed. Tomorrow, they'll wake up stiff, with faces buried in pillows to avoid the sunlight coming in through the curtains and they want life to always be like this)
Cameron Reynolds' world is turned upside down when he is twenty years old.
The silence of the world is ringing in his ears and everything is echoing shades of orange and yellow. And all he can think is that Arty had been right beside him and where is he now?
He's stumbling to his feet, his limbs not listening to him right and where's Arty? Is he okay? He tries to find his voice and he can't. It's stuck in his throat and he can't quite keep himself upright. Why won't the earth stop spinning?
Sound comes back in stages. A low buzz is all it is at first. It's all he hears as he staggers around, eyes searching the red and orange world for his brother.
The pain comes back first. It rips into him with the grace of a tornado and he's falling apart, the world out of focus. He trips over something, hurtling face-first towards the sandy ground. He spits sand that tastes metallic and his arms don't want to quite hold him up anymore. He manages to turn to see what it is he tripped over and the sight makes a sob want to rip from his throat.
"Arty?" he whispers, crawling over to him and God, something hurts and the full-body pain is more concentrated now, a fiery throbbing in his side, but even that pain is dull compared to what's clawing at his insides.
His brother is a wreck. His body is seared beyond recognition in some places and one eye has been ruptured, the jelly oozing down the burned remains of his face (Cameron's face because they're twins and he won't be able to stop seeing this in the mirror. Ever.) One eye is still good, still open, that bright bright green that Cameron has always known, that was the first color he ever learned. His body is bruised yellow and smeared with purple-blacks and there are bulges in places where they don't belong. The little silver cross is tangled with the dog tags and they burn to touch. The tattoo on his forearm is hardly legible, pieces of his skin too burnt to be seen.
And Cameron thinks it's funny, in a horrible, morbidly ironic, kind of way because Philippians 4:13 has never sounded sadder. I can do all things through God, who strengthens me. Except survive because where is God now?
He notices, dimly, the taste of salt and he wonders when he started crying. His mouth is cotton and he doesn't want to leave his brother's side because they're twins and that's how it always should be.
He hears a dull roaring and he's being shoved to the ground. It takes him a second to orient himself and see Enrique—the friendly Cuban with a laugh like thunder—holding his shoulder and repeating something over and over that Cameron can't make out and he's starting to think that this isn't good.
"…nder…body…need some…"
The words fade in and out, but at least he can hear things again. He tries talking. "Enrique?"
He doesn't know what's happening after that, but they're hauling him up and away from Arty's body, which makes him lunge forward because they can't separate them, not now. Not after all this and he feels the tears now, falling down his cheeks and his head hurts and please let this be a nightmare, a terrible nightmare that he can wake up from.
(It wasn't. It was on this day, a very real day in a very real life, that Cameron Reynolds learned what it was to burn alive)
He shouldn't be feeling numb. Cameron has seen his injury in the mirror, the one time he dares to look. (He saw his brother's face, seared and melting and half-gone and it made him sick to even think about it) It's a gruesome thing, red and raw and he shudders whenever he pictures it, but it doesn't hurt.
But he can't feel it and it's not because of whatever meds they're giving him. He can't feel anything except for a heavy ache in his chest. His squad leader visits him on the morning of day two in his Life After the Explosion. He leaves behind two things. A pair of dog tags and a little silver cross, nearly identical to the one that Cameron had worn up until he'd seen his brother's corpse.
Cameron doesn't let go of the dog tags. The cross stays on the table.
(He'd always been able to feel his brother. A constant, gentle press of emotion that could swell with happiness or sink with sadness and jab with pain. There was nothing now. Nothing at all except his own emotions, his own thoughts with no one to bounce them off of, no one to know what he'll say before he says it. It's the loneliest feeling in the world)
