My half-brother, Akash, was born three months premature. At first, we thought he wasn't going to make it.
I knew it was terrible, but I secretly hoped he wouldn't.
But the healers worked extremely hard, and so, he became a part of our family. My mother treated him as if he was a prince, or the Avatar. I became invisible. I resented the child. He was the reason for all my misery, and growing up with him was awful. He cried a lot, and I was the one changing him when Seiji and Momma were at work. He kept us all up at night, and often made the house stink of feces.
My resentment grew into passionate hatred, and not just because of Akash's bad behavior.
Akash was the spitting image of Seiji, a man I also grew to despise, with the rounded face, the thick eyebrows, and the ovular, milky eyes. He was even an earthbender.
The kid also seemed to stress Seiji out as well. Whenever Akash had tantrums and kept Momma and Seiji awake, I would hear Seiji get frustrated with Momma. One day, when I was trying to sleep, I heard them yelling at each other.
"TAKE CARE OF THE KID BETTER, OR I'M NEVER GOING TO GET ANY SLEEP!" Seiji had shouted.
"WHAT DO YOU WANT ME TO DO? HE'S A BABY, AND BABIES CRY!" my mother yelled back.
Then, there were some obscene words shouted, and I heard the door slam. I heard my mother retreat to her room, sniffling, and trying to calm a screaming child.
After Akash's birth, Seiji went from being emotionless, to being constantly angry.
And it made me so mad how Seiji treated my mother sometimes.
As Akash and I grew older, their arguments began to grow more heated. It got to a point where Seiji left the house every other night to go to his office, where he would sleep until the next evening. Sometimes, the fights were about his work. Other times, they were about his shenanigans with his co-workers. Or else, it was about how to raise Akash and I.
I blamed Akash.
Without him, everything could have been fine. I took my anger out on him, sometimes yelling at him, even though he was only two years old by then.
But how else was I to express myself?
I couldn't talk to Seiji; that man wasn't my father, nor did he even act like one. He was a workaholic, and never seemed to be in a good mood.
I couldn't talk to my mother; she would have hated it if I admitted to her my disdain for Akash and Seiji. My mother was a naïve woman, and even though she and Seiji clashed all the time, she still loved him.
And she believed that he loved her too.
Letting my brother take the blow was the only option I had.
I wanted everything to go back to the way it used to be.
But with Seiji, and now Akash, that wasn't even a possibility anymore.
I was stuck; trapped. In a realm that wasn't familiar to me, a realm that was slowly breaking my mother and I apart.
Maybe it was my fate. It was a depressing fate, yes.
But one cannot just control fate, even if it is not always fair, for it always finds a way.
Right?