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Masen
Do you play tricks on people?
You're basically the same person.
You even sound the same!
The questions and comments were always the same; therefore, the answers remained redundant for as long as Masen could remember.
No, we don't play tricks on people. Mommy won't let us.
We do look alike – but we're not identical.
We do NOT sound the same!
It was always at this point that Masen's mother intervened, knowing her sons and how they reacted when strangers or new friends discovered that they were twins.
Emmett never minded the questions, but then again, Emmett had never really let anything bother him in the six years he had spent on this earth so far. Emmett lived his life in a constant state of contentment, rolling from one idea, activity, or hobby to another with ease. Nothing ever phased him – not when he turned three and had to give away his pacifier, not when he was four, and Mommy and Daddy put him in his own bedroom separate from Masen, not even when he was five, when he and his brother were placed in different Kindergarten classes.
While Emmett embraced life and all of its ups and downs, Masen, on the other hand, despised change and everything that came with it. He cried himself to sleep for a straight month after giving up his beloved binky. He preferred opening his lunch box at school and seeing the same lunch staring back at him day after day – peanut butter and jelly cut into perfect triangles next to a Fruit Punch juice box, complete with grapes cut into halves, placed inside the yellow Tupperware container he loved so much.
Routine, structure, and predictability were what Masen thrived on.
So when people asked them those stupid questions or remarked about how similar they were, it really bugged him. Emmett and Masen could not have been more different – and Masen survived on these differences. The differences between him and his brother were something that would never change. Emmett was born with this innate sense of acceptance and togetherness; Masen was born to remain doubtful and distant.
He loved Emmett – he wasn't crazy or anything like that, and he was a happy kid in general. He just had a certain set of particulars that made Masen who he was. He was never mean. He easily made friends and kept them.
He was the epitome of an introvert that was paired for life with an extrovert to the extreme.
Most importantly, he just didn't like being a twin.
He didn't ask for someone to feel his feelings, to be able to share them firsthand or anticipate his every move. He preferred his own space, his own identity, his own thoughts.
He didn't want to sound the same as Emmett. He didn't want to have matching clothes, not even for family pictures. He didn't want to sleep in matching beds, not even when Daddy bunked them and Emmett let him have the top bunk. And his parents knew, despite his young age, Masen's separation from his twin wasn't only worthy of their acknowledgment but also crucial to his own development. Those close to him knew these things and accepted them, as it was obvious it made Masen happy.
"They'll be fine," Daddy reassured their Mommy once they had said their goodnights and shut both of their bedroom doors closed behind them. The look of worry etched on Mommy's face broke Daddy's heart more so than the thought of his boys being in different rooms. "Masen needs his space, and Emmett doesn't know how to feel sad."
They smiled at this spot-on revelation.
"I know." This made Mommy smile a little bit, though a shaky sigh followed in the darkened upstairs hallway. "I just don't like them being alone."
"Listen." Daddy turned Mommy around, so she stood closer to their rooms. "Do they sound upset about it?"
The sound of their humidifiers and lullabies humming softly from inside their rooms was all she was met with.
"Not right now, no. But what happens if they wake up in the middle of the night looking for each other?"
Daddy blinked once, his way of showing her that her concerns held no logic. "They've been breaking out of their cribs since they were fifteen months old – they'll find each other again, don't worry."
Despite the wall separating them from each other, Masen felt Emmett's presence all the same. It was something that neither of them could ever put into words, but it was always there. Masen knew when Emmett walked into a room or left it. Masen knew when Emmett wasn't feeling well. He felt it – the same way Emmett felt everything about Masen. An invisible string connected them, bonding them into a brotherhood so strong that neither could ever escape its restraints.
And neither of them wanted to.
Despite their love for each other, it became complicated once Masen was old enough to voice the struggles he had with a bond such as theirs. He felt like all of his secrets, the tiny little secrets everyone has about themselves that people prefer to keep to themselves, were exposed simply because of the way he and Emmett were able to read each other like a favorite book.
Weren't some things meant to be kept sacred?
The changes started small – Mommy dressing the boys in different color clothes each day when they were young enough to pick out their own, Daddy making sure to divide his time by coaching the boys in different sports. The boys were never on the same team for anything – Masen preferred basketball while Emmett battled other boys on the wrestling mat.
"Maybe he should talk to somebody," their mother said a few years later when the boys were ten and growing into tiny versions of their future selves. Dad reluctantly tore his gaze from his newspaper to look at them from his spot in his favorite chair in the corner of the living room. The kids were outside in the backyard, celebrating the end of elementary school with a group of mutual friends for a low-key, casual, fifth-grade graduation party. Emmett splashed with some kids in the shallow end of the pool, Masen watching with a silent smile on his face as he floated in the deep end on an inflatable tube at a distance he preferred.
"About what?" Dad's tone clearly stated that once again, his wife was exaggerating—making nothing into something. He pointed towards Masen. "That he's not as outspoken as his brother?"
There was more to it than that; Mom just couldn't exactly place her finger on it. She stared at Masen, her second-born son, even if only by three and a half minutes after her first. She sighed as she watched them, her eyes drifting back and forth between the two of them but ultimately landing on Masen.
She was always watching him.
Even when they were traveling around the state for one of Emmett's wrestling matches, she always kept an eye on Masen. He was so predictable that it worried her to no end – shouldn't raising two boys, twins no less, be filled with a little more rowdiness or hair-pulling chaos? Masen had always followed along with his family, happy to be there but rarely offering any true insight as to how he was feeling. The smile on his face in the pool was the same smile he wore when he was three – and it made her heart clench with dread. She turned away from the window with a sigh and looked back over at her husband.
"It can't hurt."
"He's fine." He replied, turning his attention back to the newspaper in front of him as she returned to stare out the window at her two sons.
Was he really fine, though?
She regretted not giving him the necessary help when she had wanted to.
Those two words, I'm fine, became two words he repeated for years to come as they grew older. When Emmett brought home his first girlfriend a few years before Masen did, he was fine. When Emmett received his first college acceptance letter before Masen did, he was fine then, too.
His mother would never forget the sound of his voice when he said them again in the hospital six years later, when the twins were twenty-four and after Emmett had been first diagnosed with the cancer that would eventually kill him.
"I'm fine."
"How?" His mother squeaked through her tears, staring at him from her spot on a chair in the private yet now empty family room at the hospital. Struggling to rise, she reached for his hand. "How can you be fine?"
Brought to the hospital by incredible stomach pains, the family had just been told the results of Emmett's scans. Masen, emotionless as ever, never let his eyes leave the window as he gazed at the small body of water decorating the hospital landscape. His face remained even as he processed the news.
He focused on the beating of his own heart; on the way he could almost hear his own brother's heartbeat down the hall echoing in his ears. This was Emmett they were talking about. Emmett. If he were truly as sick as they said he was, Masen would have felt it within his bones. He would have felt the tumors invading his own body the way they were Emmett's.
"Because I am." Masen turned to his mother and offered her a hug to try to console her breaking heart, knowing there was no way it could take away her fear and sadness as a mother. "He'll beat this."
He was sure of it.
"How do you know?"
It was the first time his father had spoken since he had caught his wife before she hit the floor, collapsing into his arms as if the world had suddenly given out beneath her.
It felt like it had, and in a way, it did.
His voice, always so reassuring in their family, held a level of doubt between each struggling breath.
"Because I always know when it comes to Emmett. We're twins, remember?" Masen loosened his grip on his mother, sliding her into his father's waiting arms. He took a deep breath, held it for a few seconds as he pondered how to put his thoughts into words, before exhaling his worries away. "He'll be fine. I can feel it."
He felt it all.
Every prick at Emmett's skin, Masen felt a prick of his own. Every restless night, every violent upheaval of Emmett's stomach, every failed round of treatment he went through, Masen felt it all, as well.
A week before he died, when Emmett was in and out of consciousness in his bed by the window of the home he shared with Rosalie, Masen felt the first of those invisible ties between them snap. He was completely out of his element. He was on edge – couldn't eat, couldn't sleep, couldn't stay in one spot when he was with Emmett in his final days. Each day, as Emmett slipped further and further away from them all, Masen's grip on the world loosened to the point of weightlessness. Eventually, those ties were severed altogether from everything and everyone – including reality.
Which was why, hours after Emmett was laid to rest, Masen was set adrift from the world without his brother to pull him back and put his broken pieces back together. It is also why, later that night, he had carelessly gotten behind the wheel of his car. Yes, he had hated being a twin, hated sharing an identity and having his thoughts invaded, but he loved Emmett. He loved having him as a brother. Though more quiet and reserved than Emmett, Masen wished he had told Emmett more often than he had; showed him just how much he loved him.
There would be aspects of Masen's life that his mother would never know. Never understand. Not because she didn't want to – hell, she'd do anything to be able to hear the inner-workings of his mind for even just a minute or two.
Masen was notoriously private, which allowed him to be able to hide his indulgences and suffer in silence for as long as he had. He became a master at keeping people at arm's length in order to preserve whatever part of himself he didn't have to share with anybody else. He shared enough with Emmett – he didn't think he could offer another part of himself to another without completely sacrificing his own self.
So, he lived the life he preferred with the ones he wanted to: Jack, Johnny, Mary Jane, and the like.
With the help of these friends—friends who were really only enemies in disguise, he wrapped his car around a telephone pole in the middle of the night on the same day they buried his brother.
But it was okay. Because, for Masen, at least, it was the first time in years that he had felt nothing at all.
His mother sits in a familiar chair next to his hospital bed; arms outstretched across his shins. Her head rests against her forearms; hands slipped together in prayer with a bitter taste in her mouth.
She has no idea why she's praying to a God that has taken so much from her.
"Why, Masen?" She croaks against her arms, her forehead rolling back and forth like a pully on her forearm. "Why?"
Her words are muffled and hoarse, her voice so low it barely registers as a sound, especially when it's overpowered by the constant beeps of the machines that are currently keeping her only living son alive.
She doesn't expect an answer, and she doesn't receive one. She's not sure she would have gotten an answer even if she asked him outright when he wasn't in a hospital bed clinging to his life. She can only guess he believes his life no longer has meaning.
"What did I do wrong?"
Another round of fresh sobs slice the air of their private room.
Isn't that a mother's first thought when it comes to seeing her child's faults? Her first thought is not about what her child has done – the blame is placed entirely into her hands like it's supposed to be there. She feels as if she put the drugs and alcohol right in front of him each time Masen chose to relieve his worries on his own terms.
At this very moment, there is no voice of reason to convince her otherwise—no angel on her shoulder to tell her Masen did this to himself after years of hiding from his anxieties.
She has lost one son and is dangerously close to losing another – all within days of each other.
"Send him back, Emmett." She cries as she feels her husband's grip on her shoulders, gently pulling her away from this God-forsaken hospital. "I can't lose you both."
She refuses to leave. She hasn't slept in weeks, anyway. Not since Emmett chose to slip away peacefully to avoid putting himself through unnecessary pain just to fight the inevitable. Her eyes, heavy with exhaustion, burning, and red-rimmed from crying tears she didn't know she had left, close as she tries to regulate her breathing.
She tries, begs her mind to wrap her head around this. She fights for understanding—a reason why her former life, so wonderful and blessed, could have brought her here to this day.
"Let him sleep," her husband attempts to console her, "He needs it."
"I can't lose him," she cries again, clinging to a dangling hope that threatens to crumble. "I can't lose him."
She knows she's been losing him for longer than just this night. She repeats the words over and over.
"I can't lose him."
When sheer exhaustion overtakes her, and his room is empty and quiet, he remains asleep.
Thanks for reading, and thanks to Frannie and my prereaders for making this story what it is.
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Also, I'll be posting a futuretake to my other story, Pursuing the Proposition, starting on Christmas Day. I'll be posting one chapter a day from Christmas Day to New Year's. I'm excited to share it with you all.
Thanks for your reviews and recs – they push me when sometimes I'm feeling bleh.
See you next week! Tell me in a review – who would you like to hear from next week? (PS. Can't promise it will be who you're wishing for as I'm several chapters ahead of you all and have a pretty tight outline with this story!)