Author's Note: As usual, minor formatting quirks due to uploading system. Check it at www ashido com / igtky / for the unaltered version.
He meant to go to Johnny's house after he ate breakfast.
He meant to go to Johnny's house after he went to work.
He meant to go to Johnny's house after he had a shower and ate dinner.
He meant to go to Johnny's house after he finished reading about mental disorders.
When he was arguing with Scriabin on his bed, he wasn't sure when he meant to go, or what he wanted to do about anything.
Angry words exchanged, things said intended to be hurtful, harmful, and it looked as if their relationship was shifting towards the negative territory for now. Scriabin was angry at him for reasons he wouldn't explain, and when Edgar asked him what they were, asked him why, it was like an insult somehow. Like he should already know.
When Edgar tried to bring up what he had done the previous night, in dreams, Scriabin reacted with a hostility that Edgar was fairly unfamiliar with and he immediately backed down.
All Edgar could gather was that he had done something wrong, that something was his fault, and that Scriabin had never planned for this, whatever "this" was. All things they had visited at one argument or another, and not topics they were unfamiliar with. This time though, Edgar felt particularly left out. He had no idea why Scriabin was upset and at least previously, he had some kind of inkling.
Edgar was sure Scriabin wanted revenge for whatever it was that Edgar had done, thus why he was acting this way. However, since Scriabin was being so maddeningly and inexplainably reticent about the entire matter, Edgar didn't know how to fix it, how to make up for it. Therefore, Scriabin hated him for it. At least, that's the impression he got from him.
Everything getting worse and worse and comments that normally would have been merely sarcastic, flippant only a day ago, now had a vicious and venomous point to them.
How quickly things changed, or...
Scriabin said things, reminded Edgar of reality, of what was really important, and Edgar ended up lying on his bed and staring at the ceiling.
He meant to go to Johnny's house.
Instead he categorized every aspect of Hell that he could remember.
Before he drifted off, another day wasted and now hatefully so, Scriabin pointed out, mockingly, that the majority of his life had meant to be lived and hadn't been, in one way or another.
And that's how he got himself into this.
Meant to, meant to, meant to.
Apparently, never meant to enough.
Scriabin laughed at him, reminded him of the broken car with the body parts in the trunk. Edgar hated; mostly at him, but the feeling was just so general now.
If their relationship was a gradient, if they really did just come back to a kind of equilibrium after each argument, then this was a minor setback, a day when neither were at their best. Edgar had to say they both weren't, because Scriabin didn't and wouldn't accept complete responsibility for his hostile behavior.
Not at their best, but maybe, tomorrow, back to some kind of uneasy peace. Maybe. Scriabin couldn't be mad forever.
Then again, he wasn't sure what "normal" for them really was. He knew what he wanted it to be, but he wasn't sure if that was really how their relationship fell, with nothing in the way.
Something had changed.
No. Edgar put his glasses to one side.
He just wished they had.
He wished everything would.
So desperate for an escape.
So desperate for an escape that he was willing, more than willing to force himself back, to kill his future and his present to try and reach his past. A retroactive homicide in hopes of erasing what he had done, what had forced his hand.
He wanted an escape. Perhaps if another option had made itself available, he wouldn't have focused so intensely on this one. If there was any other way. But no other option made itself so readily clear, and perhaps no other option would have offered the sleek oblivion he desired.
There are so many things one forgets over time. The countless minutes and seconds spent doing things that are useless or wholly forgettable. The few things that remain always become better, as is the way with everyone's personal history. The universally issued pair of rose-tinted glasses. If the memory belongs to you and you alone, then it's easy to alter it. To change those unpleasant details. To change it so you didn't trip over your shoes and bust up your face, someone tripped you. You weren't caught cheating, you were framed. You didn't fail that test, you barely passed. Depending on the fictions, breadth and scope, one creates to populate their pasts, there are varying amounts of lies and half-truths that can't be readily identified. Reality is never so subjective as through the lens of a personal autobiography.
In the end, there's no proofreader to show that this was all a lie, it wasn't really like this, it would never be like this, and yes, that day when you wore the wrong colors on School Colors Day actually did happen.
Everyone does it, everyone alters those memories you once had, even if you're not aware of it. It's easy to wear away the sharp edges we don't want to think about, to try and dull ancient pain that shouldn't hurt this long.
Time goes on and you forget that some bad things happened at all. It's easier that way, to remember something positive in the past because with all that could go on in the future, all the tribulations of the present, how can you be denied a happy past? Who would police your thoughts? It's beneficial in a way, to create pleasant fictions of an idyllic youth. A way to cope with damage that harms no one, not really.
Some go so far as to recreate their entire childhood piece by piece, perhaps unintentionally or perhaps not.
Adventures that we never had but wished we did. Nostalgia for things that never happened but should have. Underneath it all that intense feeling of being cheated, of the feeling that your childhood should have been pleasant, it should have been everything they told you it would be. Childhood should be that way, it should be something you'll always cherish and remember, full of adventures and games and clubs and tree houses and things that people so often talk about but never actually do. Minor dramas acted out that pale in comparison to what's portrayed on the media, but isn't that how it goes with everything?
Cheated. Cheated out of the carefree childhood that everyone assumes you had and for some reason unexplained--despite all pleas for an answer--it didn't happen. It didn't quite happen that way. Not to you. Cheated out of another thing, another so-called fact of life that everyone experiences and everyone can bond on. No one had a boring childhood. No one had problems coming up with imaginary friends. No one spent their time watching TV rather than imagining those grand fictions that children were supposedly so good at.
No one sat in their room at night trying to imagine, trying to picture this lush fantasy world that was at everyone's fingertips but theirs.
The intense sensation of being cheated out of a birthright, of being hurt without the ability to retaliate. In the face of such disappointment, who wouldn't go back and edit memories? Who wouldn't go back and change things? Who wouldn't create that imaginary friend, now that the mind is developed enough, and work them into all of your old childhood memories? Who wouldn't recreate the childhood they should have had, and work at making that childhood reality, if only for them?
He wanted an escape so badly because the future ahead of him led inexorably down to a fate he didn't want to imagine. Everything he feared, everything he had wished for so long wouldn't happen was going to happen, and he knew this. He had seen what was in store, he had seen Hell, and it had been promised to him, without a doubt. There was nothing he could do about it. Absolutely nothing he could do. The systematic destruction of himself and everything he once knew, and no. He had been cheated out of so much already. This wasn't fair.
For God's sake, this wasn't fair.
It wasn't even his decision in the first place.
There had to be a way out, to erase everything he had done. He wanted so desperately to find a place where none of this would matter, where he still had a choice, where he could pretend he still had a future, and he knew where he would find it. To go back to the beginning of all things with the most rudimentary and instinctual time machine possible.
A pleasant lie only shattered when the occasional photo showed the truth while he sorted through a drawer. A small boy with choppy uneven hair, a big nose, a knit yarn scarf, threadbare simple clothing with an eternally exhausted expression on his face. Edgar had yet to find one picture of himself as a child smiling.
But he remembered smiling. He was sure of that. It was all he had.
He wanted so desperately to get out but Scriabin had pointed out the logic and goddamn it all, that was something harder to fight than he thought. He knew what he was doing was wrong. He knew he couldn't do it forever. He knew it wouldn't help him. But God he wanted to do it. He wanted to do it so badly.
He fell asleep and dreamed.
His false childhood held so many things that everyone should have. The seasons that he only experienced now and again which everyone took for granted. Not every child got to play in the snow or watched the leaves turn color, but Edgar made sure that he did. Not everyone caught fireflies or went swimming in the summer, not everyone chased after the ice cream man or had a forest to play in when the days were hot and long and pointless, but he did. He had a big house with lots of rooms to hide in, lots of toys and clothes to play with, a sandbox. It was always brightly lit and it always smelled clean, and the days were always warm and bright.
That was how it should have been. That was how they said it would be.
He had a tree house. He made sure of that. He remembered as a child being jealous, being hatefully and truly jealous, of anyone he saw on television with a tree house. There was simply no way he could have made one, with his grandmother like she was and the lack of suitable trees or materials around...
But he had one now. Several adventures he had had up there, the kind that every kid should have. He had comic books up there that never got ruined by the weather, food that likewise stood the test of time. His grandmother even let him stay up there some nights when it was warm enough. That was a particularly pleasant fantasy, considering that if he wandered out of her sight for more than twenty minutes she'd call for him.
Make sure he was doing something constructive.
He never managed to overcome the guilt at the instinctual twinge of apprehension whenever he heard her voice. The way she said it, the way it always sounded so accusatory, bred in him this fear that whenever she called him, he had done something wrong. More often than not, he had done something wrong, something he wasn't even aware of...
No, that wasn't what his childhood was anymore.
It was a warm and bright day and he was sitting in the sandbox he had long wished he had, playing with a set of toy soldiers that he never owned.
As he sat there and buried one of the toys beneath the sand, a gradual realization came to him that he tried as hard as he could to fight. The reality of the matter could not be denied though, not when for so long the reality of things had been the layout for his entire life. He wasn't used to avoiding reality, not like this.
God, as a child he felt more connected to reality than he did now. He had kept more things in mind, kept more responsibilities and worries and everyday concerns in mind than he was ever aware of, and now in that same body, that same time, it was hard to fight those instincts. The constant mental commands that forced him to think over everything he was doing, to consider the consequences, to make sure he had looked at every option before making a decision, and to make sure that the decision he made would be the least unpleasant. He had gone back just to escape this kind of constant responsibility, and he found that he had just run in circles. Even as a child he was responsible. Children weren't supposed to be responsible, children were supposed to be stupid and carefree, and even here he had been cheated.
He went through the motions, moving the soldiers this way and that, but everything still felt just as fake as before. All those times he had tried to play with the other kids, he had tried to join in games of pretend and found that he couldn't get past what he saw, the reality, he couldn't get past it all to really play and they had abandoned him, cast him out for it. He could pretend and move the pieces about, but after all this time and all this editing and everything he had tried and wanted, he still didn't know how to play the game.
He felt an intense burst of rage that he normally would have suppressed or sublimated into something else but not this time. Even though at this age, he would be even more likely to keep his emotions under control--particularly with his grandmother who definitely wasn't here, he made sure of that--he forced himself to let it free. He wanted to be angry, he wanted to feel this.
The toy soldier in his hand was abruptly airborne, thrown with an angry cry as far away as Edgar could manage. Another angry incoherent sound and he pressed sandy palms to his closed eyes.
He just wanted to escape, he just wanted to not think about anything but it still didn't work, everything still didn't work. No matter where he went, things were still just as horrible and he still didn't fit in. God, he just wanted to fit in, for once he wanted to be at ease doing something, he wanted to know that he was doing something right-
"Cha, that was dumb."
Edgar pulled his hands from his eyes and looked up. Standing on the edge of his sandbox was Scriabin, and maybe he should have been more surprised than he was to see him there. He seemed just as natural here as Edgar was, and Edgar suspected that wasn't entirely his doing.
Scriabin was younger than him, which only made sense. Perhaps three or four years younger or so. His hands were rounder and his face a bit wider, the more angular lines that would define Edgar in adulthood undeveloped at such a young age. He was still wearing his striped shirt with the empty box and his black jeans, almost comical cut so short. No shoes and to no one's surprise, he still wore his ever-present pair of reflective glasses. Edgar couldn't exactly chide him for it, as he knew that the two cuts beneath his own eyes were present even going back this far. That said more than Edgar wanted to hear at the moment.
Scriabin's hair wasn't quite as long as it would be in the future--if he could really think of it as the future, considering--but it was much more scruffy and unkempt than Edgar's.
Scriabin could grow his hair long. Edgar hated him for that. He didn't get yelled at for it, and he didn't have to suffer from awkward painful haircuts given by someone whose vision was seriously beginning to fail. Edgar couldn't bring that up with her though. There were so many things he could never talk about with her.
One long strand near Scriabin's face was tied with a red bit of yarn. Edgar found that he could remember exactly where that bit of yarn had come from, the memory coming to him easily and naturally.
Scriabin had been planning on rifling through his grandmother's dresser while she was asleep, and Edgar had fervently asked him not to. Scriabin eventually talked him into it, although in retrospect Edgar wasn't sure how. He remembered being terrified that his grandmother would wake up as they snuck into her room, remembered standing near Scriabin and shifting from foot to foot, eager to get this over with. Scriabin had poked around in the drawer with all the care and stealth of some kind of wild elephant and it wouldn't surprise Edgar that he was being intentionally noisy to deliberately get them in trouble. That wasn't unusual. Eventually Scriabin had grabbed a bit of yarn as "proof" that he had braved these unknown waters, had so flagrantly disregarded the rules of not touching other people's things, and the two of them had snuck out again.
Fiction after fiction, the wished-for scenarios and adventures, and it was hard to tell reality from fantasy, particularly with Scriabin right here, looking just as he had in every memory that Edgar must have constructed. That only made sense. He couldn't have always been here, even if-
Scriabin's voice was almost laughably high, although it wasn't like Edgar could best him in that department at the moment. Edgar had made quite sure that if he was going to visit his past, it would be before adolescence. No one wants to relive adolescence. No matter what Scriabin said, he wasn't that much of a masochist.
"Nice work, by the way."
"What are you doing here?" Edgar stared at him. "You shouldn't be here."
"Since when could you tell me where to be?" Scriabin stepped into the sandbox and sat across from Edgar. He picked up one of the toy soldiers. "I don't listen to you."
"No, what are you doing here? Why are you here? Are you going to...do you have to? I just want to...I just want to pretend for a while."
"Don't think I know that? Stupid." Scriabin moved the toy soldier towards Edgar with small jerky motions. "Guess what, you took me along for the ride again. Big surprise. It's not the first time."
"I..." Edgar picked up one of the little plastic figures. "I didn't want you to come here. I didn't mean for you to come with me."
"Well, duh." Scriabin shrugged. "I know you didn't. But here I am."
"What are you going to do?"
"I didn't have anything planned." Scriabin poked at Edgar's toy with his soldier's bayonet. "It's funny how you always wanted an imaginary friend, and tadah! Here I am."
There was a silence as Scriabin kept poking Edgar's small toy with his own. Silence and a bird chirped somewhere once. With a motion that shocked both of them, Edgar threw the toy soldier off in the same direction to join his missing compatriot. Scriabin's eyes followed the progress of the soldier and Edgar found he was speaking without thinking.
Screaming, actually, would have been more accurate.
"I only ask for one thing, I only ask for one thing, just one thing in my life that I can make my own, that I can completely fucking own for once, just one thing that I don't have to account to anyone for and then YOU show up and, and-!" Edgar shivered violently at the obscenity that slipped by his lips, that broke the illusion even further. "I only want, I want something God I want something that I should have had God is that so wrong, is that such a fucking impossible thing to ask for, that I should have one thing, that I can have one moment to myself, that I can have one thing that I can look back on and feel happy about without feeling guilty godDAMN IT Scriabin why are you HERE?"
Edgar's throat felt raw by the time he finished shrieking, and he wasn't even aware of how loud he had really become. He wasn't used to shouting, raising his voice. In reality his grandmother would have stopped him by the second word, but she wasn't here, goddamn it. He breathed heavily as he glared at Scriabin and he could feel his eyes stinging. That was perfect, that was just great, of course he would start crying now. Why not. That'd be the perfect icing on this cake. That would be just fantastic.
Scriabin stared at him with a look of complete and total surprise. Edgar stared back, waiting for the eventual smirk he knew would come.
Instead, there was a moment where Scriabin almost looked hurt somehow, if that was even possible, then that quickly faded into a mask of emotionlessness that Edgar recognized all too well.
"You brought me here."
"NO!" Edgar clenched his hands in his uneven hair and shut his eyes tight. "You're not supposed to BE here, this is MINE! This is mine for God's sake, you can't judge me for this, you can't judge me for this GO AWAY!"
A long pause, and Scriabin looked down. Couldn't meet his eyes anymore, apparently. He couldn't say for sure, him and those glasses-
"Edgar..." His voice was quiet. "What makes you think I'd hurt you here?"
"You ask me that..." Edgar found himself snarling, his lip curling and the urge to bite and tear rising strong and insistent. He could feel his entire body shaking, his fists clenching so tightly he could feel his skin breaking, and more than that he could feel, he could feel the anger. It was directionless, general, all-encompassing rage that he had wished to express to so many people at so many times but never could because it would never pay off, it would never be worth it. He never had enough power to safely express that anger, all those emotions bottled up and now here, there was no one. There was no one here except him and the seven year old boy in front of him, staring at him with that insufferable confused expression. "You ask me that as if you've never hurt me before, as if you're innocent in this entire thing. And you wonder why I'm here."
Scriabin tilted his head slightly. "I didn't say that. Or ask that."
"How dare you play innocent with me, how dare you act is if all you want to do is interact with me! After everything you've done, everything you said to me today, how dare you!" He was screaming again, his voice shrill and sharp and out of his control, and it tore through his chest in a way that made the stinging in his eyes worse. "How dare you come here! How dare you think you belong here!"
Scriabin apparently couldn't think of a response. He raised a hand to adjust his glasses and that was it. Edgar saw himself in the lenses for the last time.
"Take those glasses off."
Scriabin paused for a moment. Then he smirked, just like Edgar knew he would.
"I can't."
Edgar threw himself at Scriabin, a mad screaming flailing mass and Scriabin managed a short strangled gasp of surprise before he hit the ground.
Edgar lashed out as hard and as quickly as possible, relishing the sound of each fist's collision and the gasp or grunt that followed. So much hatred coursed through him, so much pure rage at the world and what it had done to him, at everything he had been denied, at the lie that he had lived his life by, at the pure unfairness of his situation, and the fact that this kind of anger should have been his by all rights and only now had he found what he should have known for years.
Scriabin was not about to let Edgar get away with this uncontested, and he scratched and hit as best he could. He was still at a disadvantage, considering his size, but a small boy can be surprisingly ferocious when cornered and Scriabin definitely had no other options at this point. Rolling and yelling on the grass, both beyond coherent words. Edgar felt his nose bleeding, knew he bit his lip and it didn't matter.
He had often listed the consequences of him lashing out, he had thought and worried about what he would say, how his grandmother would react, how childish it would be if he gave in and actually did start a fight. He wasn't skilled, he didn't know what he was doing, he would lose. There were so many individual thoughts and concerns that kept him in check, and now none of it mattered.
He never had a fight as a child, and when he realized this he sank his teeth into Scriabin's shoulder. Scriabin gave an angry howl and pushed him away, nails scratching across his face and catching on those scars beneath his eyes. A fist thudded into Edgar's chest, winded him for a few seconds but he recovered because he had to, he wasn't going to stop now. He raised a fist and Scriabin pushed his arm away quickly, grabbed his shirt and he was choking him, cutting off his air. He struggled, hit, his shirt slipped from Scriabin's grip, felt his breath rasp back into his lungs with a vague sense of gratefulness overshadowed by his rage.
Edgar wasn't in the state of mind to be listening to himself, but while coherent thought eluded him, his vocal cords worked without his knowledge. Snarls and growls, hissing breaths and hard panting noises, sharp cries of pain and anger when struck in a way that stung enough to stop him. Even though the sounds he made were marked by undeveloped vocal cords, moved higher on the auditory range than he would have liked, the meaning behind them was not diluted in the least.
Edgar grabbed his shirt, raised Scriabin off the ground just enough to shove him back down again, watch his head hit the grass with a short grunt. The desire to just keep going, to keep pounding Scriabin's head against the ground until he stopped moving, was all that he could think of, even if he couldn't currently put it into words. Another thud against the ground, a strangled gasp and Scriabin raised his arms and broke Edgar's hold, gained enough leverage to send the two rolling once again.
Scriabin was familiar with rage, but the intensity of the emotion driving Edgar was scaring him and it showed on his face. Edgar was acting on pure instinct, the drive to hurt someone else, and he would obey that drive as long as he had the strength to fight.
Hands sliding across fabric and sweaty skin. Edgar struggled to get hold of Scriabin's neck but instead settled for his shirt again. Scriabin tried to breathe as Edgar began shaking him as hard and as fast as he could. Edgar's attention focused on keeping his arms moving, Scriabin found the precious few seconds to pull one fist back. A sharp blow to the face and Edgar fell to one side, his grip forgotten. Both boys panted hard, bleeding from several places, and as Edgar pushed himself back up with shaking arms, they stared at each other warily.
His glasses were gone. Edgar hadn't even noticed while he was fighting.
"What do you want to see, Edgar?" One of Scriabin's eyes was swollen shut. "What does it matter to you?"
"Shut up!"
His other eye became dark rimmed, small lines and wrinkles matching the killer that was the source of this, of everything. "What do you want to see? You've taken my last piece of privacy from me. What do you want now?" One moment the eye was missing entirely, just a black hole where it should have been, another and his eyelids were stitched shut, black and red, and then another and his eye was open and intact and it matched Edgar's perfectly. "Is this it? It doesn't matter, does it?"
Some part of Edgar wanted to leap back and start the battle anew, keep fighting until he couldn't move anymore. Consumed with the thought of revenge, eternal revenge until the whole thing was finally and truly over, but another part of him was beginning to reassert itself, to remind him of what exactly he had done.
It took a few minutes of silence before he spoke again.
"I hate you so much." Edgar's voice squeaked and he hated himself for it.
"Heh." Scriabin brushed a hand across his mouth, stared at the streak of blood. "That's pretty obvious."
That part of him always won in the end. Edgar turned away and curled up on his side, hugging his shoulders. Now that the adrenaline was beginning to wear off, the pain of his wounds was beginning to surface along with the regret he always knew would follow.
"This is my place." He wished his voice didn't shake so much. "I wanted to escape here."
Scriabin was silent for a while. Edgar could feel his heart beating in his ears and it was giving him a headache, although that could have been all the blunt force trauma.
He heard the sound of grass moving and then felt Scriabin sit down near his back.
"What makes you think I don't want to escape myself sometimes?"
"I just want to spend some time by myself...I want to be alone." Edgar put his hands over his ears which he found surprisingly hot to the touch. He wished he had his glasses, but he was sure they were broken beyond repair, wherever they had fallen.
Scriabin leaned back against him. The contact reminded Edgar of some particularly nasty bruises along his shoulders and back that flared back to life, but he didn't have the energy to move away. "I just wanted to relax myself. I guess you dragged me in here. Maybe you wanted someone to play with. It's more fun to play with two people."
"I can't believe you..." So tired of it, so tired of everything. "You've lied to me...lied to me about everything...I just want to stop hurting for a while. Go away."
"You don't have to believe me." Scriabin gave a wet cough. "Doesn't matter to me. I don't have anything better to do."
A long silence. That bird chirped again. Edgar remembered in the back of his mind where reality was that the sound of birds chirping had never struck him as pleasant, and he had often cursed them when they had woken him on a Saturday morning. Apparently even his desire for everything everyone always talked about couldn't make a bird sound pleasant.
"C'mon." Scriabin shook his shoulder gently. "Can you believe what we just did? Don't sulk. This is great. I feel great. Don't you? I think we accomplished something."
"I didn't accomplish anything." Edgar turned over to look at Scriabin and ended up half in his lap. "I punched you in the face."
"True." Scriabin raised a hand to push up nonexistent glasses then caught himself. He smiled. "Are you sure that's not an accomplishment?"
Edgar stared at him for a few seconds. Along with the swollen eye, Scriabin's lip was split and bleeding down his chin. Bruises were beginning to darken around his face, he was covered with dirt, and his ears looked red. Several angry pink and yellow lines crisscrossed across his cheeks, shallow scratch marks that'd vanish in a few minutes. And yet, in spite of everything they had done, that bit of red yarn remained in place, although there were a number of grass clippings now caught in his hair.
"You're such a jerk."
Scriabin smiled back at him in that infuriating familiar way, a little lopsided considering that his lip was beginning to swell, and Edgar sighed. His head hurt. No wonder he'd never done this before.
Scriabin reached out and brushed grubby fingers across a tender area spreading from the corner of Edgar's mouth that would no doubt quickly develop into a bruise. Edgar moved his head away, although it wasn't quickly or with any kind of real threat. Just the general indication that he didn't feel like being touched at the moment.
He caught sight of something red on the tips of Scriabin's fingers.
"We should've done this a long time ago."
Edgar didn't say anything. His head was still resting in Scriabin's lap, and he was trying his hardest at that point to erase everything in favor of the cloud-dotted sky above him. Why he came here. He could taste the iron of blood in his mouth, and hoped he hadn't lost a tooth or something.
"Don't you think? Not healthy to keep things bottled up inside." His speech pattern was becoming simpler, perhaps in an effort to match the body he was using.
Participating in the fantasy.
"Did you really come here to play with me?" Edgar knew he wouldn't get a truthful answer. He just felt like he had to say something, and nothing that Scriabin had said seemed like an appealing place to start.
"Sure. I think so. I didn't plan to come here, after all. You wanted me here for some reason or another."
"I don't know why I would."
"Well..." Scriabin leaned forward a little and his back popped. "We had a lot of bad feelings going on between us earlier today. Maybe you did want to fight me or something."
"Pff." Edgar didn't feel like finding a logical argument for the statement. If Scriabin altered his speech pattern, then Edgar could do it too. "That's dumb."
"Heh, maybe."
A short pause and Edgar's arm twitched, brushed against Scriabin's hip. Scriabin leaned back and looked up at the sky, and when Edgar looked up at his neck, he found a faint line running down his throat. Some kind of scar, although he couldn't guess the source.
"What games do you know how to play anyway?" Edgar found his attention captured by Scriabin's uncovered eyes. Even if he was just changing his form to mess with him, it was still such a change to be able to see them at all. Same color as his own. If they were in a different state of mind he was sure Scriabin would find some way to work that against him, even if it wasn't his fault.
"I know what you know." Scriabin shrugged.
"Then why couldn't I..." Edgar raised one hand and gestured vaguely where the two soldiers had taken their last flight.
"This isn't the place for it, but far be it for me to deny you answers when you ask." The way he spoke now seemed incongruous with his childlike voice. "You don't know how to play Soldiers."
"But-"
"No, you don't know how. You can pretend you do, but that doesn't make it so." A phrase that was becoming more and more common between them. Scriabin pointed at him. "If you really want to escape here, think of a game you really did play, something that you really know."
"Why are you doing this?" Edgar's face hurt when he talked. He was going to regret that fight for a while. "Why are you helping me like this?"
"Like I said..." Scriabin shrugged again. "Sometimes I want to relax too. You know, those memories...the ones with me in them..."
Edgar sighed and let the sound resonate through his throat. He didn't know Scriabin knew...he resigned himself to the chastising he knew would be inevitable. "What about them?"
Scriabin smiled at this tone in a way that still pricked a part of Edgar's pride, but not enough to really galvanize any emotion into action. "They're not that bad."
"What?"
"I mean...you want to be creative, right?" Scriabin gestured at the sky vaguely, and Edgar watched his hands. Some of his nails were broken and he could see a dark mark spreading beneath one of them. Probably from when he had rolled over his hand at one point. "Want to make up stuff like other kids did. Like you never could, 'cause she was always about how things really were. It's hard to make things up when everyone around you won't let you, y'know. You shouldn't blame yourself for that as much as you do."
"Ha. Since when do you take my side?"
"I take it whenever it serves my argument." A smirk, and it looked bizarrely out of place on his young features. "But some of the stuff you made up about us, it's pretty neat."
"Most of it's from TV shows I saw..." Edgar looked up and could see that scar running down Scriabin's neck again. It was an old one, long faded to white, one that ran directly down his Adam's apple, down to the hollow of his neck and almost up to his chin. Where on earth did that come from?
"Not all of it. I do like what you came up with though." Scriabin moved again, and the scar slipped from view. "The Vargas brothers, wasn't it?"
Edgar considered for a moment if he shouldn't participate, if the potential dangers of following Scriabin down this train of thought outweighed the positives, then decided to stop caring. "Yeah."
"The careful older brother and his rebellious younger sibling. Heh. I like how I was always the one who got you into trouble."
"What, because that way I don't take responsibility?"
"C'mon, Edgar. We had something for a minute there." Scriabin intended to give him a disapproving look, but instead it looked like he was pouting, and that expression somehow seemed completely normal. "I don't want depth right now any more than you do, okay?"
Edgar didn't trust him still. Closed his eyes a bit and he knew he never would. Stop caring about it. "Whatever."
"But you know, you did create these adventures for us...for the two of us. Always in the back of your mind, just..." Scriabin fingered the bit of yarn that held his hair. "I mean...you changed so much just to work me in here. I have my own clothes, my own toys, I have my own rules..."
"You always got away with everything." Edgar wasn't speaking directly to him. "You always managed to get away with everything. I never understood it, that I got blamed so often for what you did or what was originally your idea. I always had to be the responsible one, it was always my fault for not looking out for my younger brother, it was always..."
Scriabin sighed, and he reached down and touched Edgar's forehead. At the sensation Edgar realized that there was a large cut there that immediately began to sting at being discovered. Scriabin moved his hand, touched a chunk of badly cut hair.
"Recreating yourself, the childhood you wish you had...and I'm here." Scriabin looked down at him, and the two stared at each other. "You want me here."
"Wouldn't it have been different that way?" Edgar didn't want to think too hard about this but he knew he was anyway. "So many things could have been different if I wasn't always alone..."
"And you think I'd take this away from you." Scriabin laughed in much the same way Edgar had earlier. "You think I'd take away something like this? Your real and honest validation of my existence? The fact that you want me here? I wouldn't take that from you."
"You want it too."
Scriabin shrugged. "Do you remember when I stole this bit of yarn?"
Avoiding the issue. Easy to recognize but again, that's not what this was about. Edgar nodded.
"Hmm, something else...do you remember when we snuck out that one night to see if we could find the-" Scriabin started laughing and had to take a few seconds to compose himself. "The night goblins?"
"I remember that!" Edgar found himself smiling and for a few seconds, it felt real. "I remember that, I told you that story because you wouldn't stay out of my stuff, I told you that the night goblins would come and cut off all your hair, and you started crying and wouldn't stop. Granma freaked out about it, told me I shouldn't tell you such stories when you were so 'impressionable.' You were so scared..." It all seemed so real. "You were so scared you couldn't sleep, and eventually I had to show you that they weren't real. We snuck out..."
"'Cause you told me they lived in the backyard near the pond. You always wanted a pond." Scriabin snickered softly. "God, how gullible was I. I waited until you pulled up every rock until I was satisfied."
"Night goblins live under rocks, I almost forgot." Edgar laughed at the thought, and eventually the sound faded away and there was a moment of silence.
Contemplation and that bird chirped again.
"There's so much I wish we had," Scriabin mumbled. "There's so much I wish I had."
"Ah, you said 'we' first." Edgar wasn't willing to go back this quickly. "Do you remember Halloween?"
A pause, and Scriabin gave him a sad smile. "I think I do. Why don't you refresh my memory?"
There was a wound that had never healed, resentment that had lingered in the back of Edgar's mind every time that time of year came around. How many times had he been forced to sit at the lunch table and listen to how much candy everyone got and what kind and trade you for this one, and he'd just stare.
You can't go out, Edgar, you have to help me clean up the house. Your uncle said he was going to come by tonight, and I want the house to look nice. You've got to stay home tonight, this might be the only time you'll see him for a long time.
He never did show up.
All for nothing.
Still felt bitter about it, even after all this time. The very next year his grandmother had decreed that he was "too old" to go out asking for candy, and there was another grand childhood tradition that had been ripped from him. He was in no position to protest, and what could he say?
He should have gone Trick-or-Treating with everyone else.
He should have had that, if nothing else. He should have at least had that.
He felt Scriabin run a hand gently through his uneven hair, and Edgar struggled with his memories.
"I can't remember what I was dressed as."
Scriabin stared at him for a few seconds, then he gave him a crooked smile. "I remember what I was dressed as. I was a ninja."
"A ninja?" Edgar stared at him for a few seconds, and then he could visualize it, could see the young boy all dressed in black with his cardboard shurikens and absolutely no knowledge of the culture he was borrowing from. "Ha ha, I remember. I was...I was a pirate."
"Pirates and ninjas." Scriabin's smile grew wider. "I've heard they're immortal enemies."
"Then that makes sense then, doesn't it?" Edgar imagined, worked out the details that would add the realism. "I had the floppy hat and everything. A little bag of chocolate coins and a sword and...everything."
"I got more candy than you."
Both working so hard, working so hard to sustain this joint illusion. Edgar knew why he was doing it. You escape to avoid reality, and his childhood was nothing but reality, and he wasn't going back to that. Not if he could help it.
And Scriabin...
"No you didn't."
"Yes I did. Remember? It came down to those three pieces of that cheap candy no one ever eats, but I still beat you."
"You did not. You stole them from me."
"Did not."
"Did too."
"Heh, didn't Granma have to get involved?"
"Yeah, after you stole my candy!" He wasn't sure if his indignant tone was real, but it sounded good enough.
Scriabin's smile again got that somewhat sad tinge, and he looked back up at the sky. "I did not."
There it was again, that thin line running down his throat. Edgar raised a hand and touched it gently, and Scriabin jerked in surprise.
"Where'd that come from? You've never had it before."
"Don't you remem-" Scriabin cut himself off, then looked remarkably uncomfortable. "That's right..."
"What?"
"Huh, not proud of myself for this one. I didn't think you'd notice. Well..." Scriabin reached up a hand himself and touched the mark. "You know...this is my childhood too. We share so much. So..."
"So you...you...remember something?" He couldn't break what they had accomplished so far, he had to work with their scripts, the lines and he couldn't break it, he almost had it now. "Something happened when I wasn't there?"
He hesitated for a moment, and when he spoke he still sounded uncomfortable. "Yeah..."
"What happened?" Edgar didn't hide the fascination in his voice, and he was thankful that at the moment, they weren't reading too much into this. He was positive that Scriabin felt the same way.
"Well..." Scriabin didn't look at him. "It's kind of embarrassing..."
"C'mon."
"I was hanging out in the tree house...you know, just screwing around and everything..." Scriabin sounded really uncomfortable telling the story. That was something Edgar had never heard before. "And there was nail poking out of the wood at some part, I dunno, I wasn't paying attention. I banged it down with a rock afterwards anyway, but..."
"Uh huh..."
"So I was up there with that coat, you know-"
"The one Granma tells you never to touch?" Edgar sounded a bit more emotional while saying that than he should have, considering, and he felt a twinge of something that might have been pride. It was some positive emotion that flickered too fast to be given a name. "Scriabin!"
"She didn't find out, okay?" Scriabin hissed and looked around. "I just really like that coat."
"You're not supposed to touch that, it's my dad's coat, Granma said she'd kill you if she found you playing with it again-"
"Look, do you want to hear this story or not?"
Edgar reluctantly swallowed his concern and returned to listening. Then he realized that he was actually, seriously concerned over something that never really...
"So I was playing with that coat, and I went to go get something, and I tripped on the edge of it, and I ended up scratching my neck on the nail."
"Scratching?"
"Okay, it was pretty deep." Scriabin rolled his eyes. "Granma ran me to the hospital pretty quick after that-"
"Ha, did she find out you were playing in that coat?"
"No, thank you." Scriabin sounded offended. "I took it off before I went inside."
"Jeez, you walked that far with your neck like that?"
"It wasn't that bad. It didn't do any real damage. But I did have to have to wear this dorky neck bandage for like a week."
"Heh." Edgar smiled to himself. "Now that you mention it, I do remember you with that. That was a long time ago..."
"Yeah..." A pause, and Scriabin gave a heavy sigh. "A real long time ago..."
The two of them stared at the sky, and the bird was silent this time. Scriabin still had his fingers in Edgar's hair.
"Do you think there's anything wrong with this?" Walking the edge of breaking the illusion they had created, but he had to ask. "I mean...no one's getting hurt. Changing things...no one's hurt. No one else has to know."
"I never said there was anything wrong with this." Another sigh. "It's just not good to do it for a long time."
"How much longer do you think we should stay here, then?"
"You're dreaming, my dear b-..." Scriabin cut himself off, then he laughed. "I can't really say that here, can I? But you're dreaming, Edgar, and that means we can stay until you wake up."
Stared up at the sky, and Scriabin idly played with his hair.
"You know...it's weird." Edgar again found himself talking without really thinking about it first. "I thought that really...if I kept this to myself, you know...kept these...changes to myself...that'd make them more real, 'cause no one could ever prove them wrong. They wouldn't know. But then..."
Scriabin tilted his head at him slightly.
"But then..." Edgar wasn't sure if he should say this. The two of them were teetering on the edge of two realities. Edgar knew the one that he wanted to keep real, the one that he was trying to stay in, but the question of whether or not Scriabin could resist the temptation...if the actual reality that faced them both, if the actual facts of their relationship, would override this illusion and maybe this would have consequences, real consequences. Edgar wasn't sure if he could say this because what if the real Scriabin came and used this later, what if how things really were came and saw what they were playing at, and then everything was ruined.
He had to...
He had to trust him.
"What?" Scriabin sounded genuinely interested, and Edgar found his thoughts caught up again in that eternal battle of weighing the pros and the cons, whether or not this would really end up being a good decision, and my God, had he ever been spontaneous in his entire life? This wouldn't be the best time to start but again that anger, the anger that found an easy home here rose again and he wanted to be spontaneous. He wanted to make a stupid decision because that's what kids did and that was what he was now. That's what he wanted.
"It's like...with you here, with you...agreeing with me." Scriabin's hand stopped moving. "Working with me...talking with you about it. It kind of...validates it. It makes the entire thing that much more real. More real than if I were alone."
"I could bring up something that Jesus said..." Scriabin's voice had several emotions in it that Edgar couldn't identify. He paused, and his fingers curled in his hair. "But I can't remember it now. You always paid more attention when she was reading to us than I did."
That hesitant barrier remained intact, and even if Edgar didn't exactly know why, he knew that he was safe for now.
"You mean, that thing about how it only needs two people to pray and be heard? Something like that."
"Yeah." Scriabin sighed again. "Something like that. I can't remember now. It's hard to think."
"Yeah...I've noticed that...hey...do you remember when you got in trouble?"
"Ha ha, which time? And where?" Scriabin smiled rakishly, and from the change in his posture Edgar could tell this would be a fantasy he would enjoy embellishing. "That was something of my specialty."
"I know that." Edgar found himself intensely curious about what Scriabin could come up with. As a child he had rarely gotten into trouble and while he had been lectured, he hesitated to call that a real punishment for anything. How far would he go? How much would he change? "How about something here at home?"
"Hmm." Scriabin put a hand on his chin and his thoughtful expression looked remarkably silly for a seven year old. Edgar smiled. "Let's see...I didn't get caught for stealing this bit of yarn...and she didn't yell at me for getting my neck all cut up, 'cause that wasn't my fault..."
"And for once I wasn't involved, so it wasn't my fault either."
"Hmm." Another pondering look. "Let's see...do you remember...when I took one of those skeins of yarn that Gran keeps lying around, and I decided to make our entire room a huge spider web? So I looped all this yarn everywhere, all over the chairs and beds and tables and doorknobs until you couldn't go anywhere unless you were crawling." A smile and Edgar wondered for a moment that if Scriabin did have a creative streak in him, how could that be expressed? How else could he express it when he had no body of his own? Work to create a past, a life that he never and would never have, maybe even this whole time...
Reality kept trying to intrude and Edgar had to stop letting it in. He tried to listen. "I do remember that, actually. You managed to talk me into helping you with that, too."
"Well, I couldn't reach the lamp by myself. You're taller than me. But do you remember when she came home and called for us, and we couldn't get out fast enough cause it was just everywhere?"
"She did always freak out if you didn't come to her right away..."
"Right. So up she comes storming up the stairs, you can hear her thumping along and she opens the door to our room and the look on her face was just priceless." At the thought of shocking Edgar's grandmother, the source for so many minor things that still affected Edgar in the present, so many associations and so much guilt, Scriabin smiled. Enjoying the small revenges, even if no one else would know.
"Haha, I remember you said something to her and she just completely lost it." Edgar could picture it, the joint room shared by two brothers with the separated toys, the clothes strewn everywhere and half-started games on the floor, and across everything the red yarn that always lurked in the back of his mind and, Edgar suspected, Scriabin's as well. The two boys sitting in the midst of it all, and he could see Scriabin's arm immediately snap out to point at him. "What did you say?"
A pause as Scriabin considered it. The smile on his face indicated that he enjoyed the challenge. "I think it was something like 'is it possible to turn into a spider when you turn seven? 'Cause I think I'm doing pretty well so far.'"
The two of them laughed for a few seconds at the thought, Edgar in particular at the image of someone rebelling, even in such a minor way, to one of the most omnipresent authority figures in his life.
"But yeah...she didn't much care for that." Scriabin looked fairly contented and he was still playing with Edgar's hair.
"Heh, I remember that when she managed to get you out of there and she was dragging you off, you still tried to pin it on me." Edgar found himself smiling at the look on his counterpart's face. It was so easy to pretend that they really were brothers, that their connection could be so blissfully simple. "Too bad you gave her that line first, I think that made her less inclined to be lenient with you."
"Yeah, I probably should have just blamed you first. That always did work." A smirk. "But yeah, jeez. I didn't hear the end of that for weeks. The huge lecture on wasting materials and how tight money was, and how we couldn't afford to be doing such silly things and blah blah blah waste of time. Didn't she tell me to clean it all up myself?"
"Yeah, and I'm pretty sure you were supposed to clean up the rest of the house for a while as well. I did help clean up the room though, even though I wasn't supposed to."
Scriabin looked down at him. "Yeah you did..."
A quiet moment to think about that, and then Edgar didn't want silence. "What about school?"
"Heh." Scriabin again looked thoughtful. "Let's see...it was always harder to pin things on you there, since we were in different classrooms..."
"That was a relief at least."
"Let's see...ah, I remember something. Do you recall that one boy, Corey something, I can't remember his last name."
"Yeah I do. Wasn't he always bugging us?"
"Yeah, but you know. He was a jerk. Either way, I remember this one time he brought this really nice electronic thing to school...it was like a notepad or something, I can't remember exactly...but he was showing it off to people, and he was poking at us, saying we could never have anything like that."
Edgar's eyes narrowed. "I do remember that."
"That made me so angry...I just couldn't stand it anymore. I don't think you were watching 'cause you probably would have stopped me." A lopsided smile and he continued, now caught up in the story. "So when he wasn't watching, I grabbed it really quick and shoved it in my bag."
"You didn't."
"I did. And I went to class. I was planning on giving it back to him at some point, really, but I guess he didn't take it that way. So I'm sitting there, and then Corey comes in all tears and wailing with a teacher in tow, which is no good no matter which way you look at it, and then his teacher and my teacher got to talking, and I knew this was about me."
Edgar winced. "Yeah, I'd imagine."
"And so they come over to me, and they say 'We understand that you have something of Corey's?', and I wasn't sure what to do. So I say I didn't remember taking anything of his, and then Corey says that I was the only one who'd have motivation for taking it and he saw me take it no less, and he was sure that it was in my bag. So my teacher tells me to go look in there for it and give it to him, and I tell her that I didn't have it, and she says that she'd look herself, and the last thing you want is a teacher looking through your things, so I say I'll look and see if I could find it."
"Jeez." Edgar could not see this ending well at all.
"Now, there was a few minutes before recess, and I thought that maybe if I could prolong the whole thing a few minutes, that way everyone would leave and no one would really know that I took it. Everyone's eyes were on me and you know kids live for that. So I'm looking and looking, and I've gone over the same few binders five times and they're on to me at this point. So I pull the thing out. I put on my best 'how did that get here?' voice but they weren't buying it."
"So what happened?"
"They took me out to go talk to the teachers and principal of course. I think a note got sent home too...so I had to get lectured like five or six times for the same thing, and it wasn't like I was really stealing it, I just wanted to mess with him for making fun of us."
He put himself in such hopeless situations and then the punishments for his behavior seemed so lenient. Unjustified...
Stop thinking about it...
"Yeah..."
"I was always the one starting fights..." Caught up in the fictitious past he was weaving. "Every time anyone started to mess with us, I was always the one who threw the first punch."
"You always were aggressive."
"Well, you never were." Scriabin tugged at his hair slightly. "One of us has to be, or else everyone would just walk all over us."
"You always were..."
"I just couldn't stand it when people would make fun of you. Or of us. It just drove me crazy. I hated it. And you'd never get angry. You never got angry when I thought you should, so I got angry instead. I never regretted it though. And besides, you normally got the blame anyway."
"I still don't know how that works out. How on earth did it all keep getting traced back to me?"
Scriabin shrugged and smiled.
A pause.
"It's harder to keep depth out of this than I thought." Scriabin shook his head. "I don't want these stories to become metaphors but..."
"It doesn't matter...they're still better than..."
"Pretend..."
"You know, you're not bad at this yourself."
Scriabin snorted, but Edgar had a feeling that he was flattered in some strange way.
A dark mark flitted across the sky, a bird that went by too quickly for any further identification. The clouds moved with a speed that seemed inappropriate for the strength of the breeze, but minor details could lapse here.
"This is really..." He was trying not to think of the reality of things, trying but when you try not to think about something it becomes the only thing that comes to mind. "This is really...I mean, the fact that we can't interact like this...that we can't be like this, we can't be friends like this without lying...without lying about everything. I mean, all this familiarity between us feels so real, it feels like it could be real, but unless we recreate each other entirely, it'll never be possible...for us to talk civilly, relate in any kind of way, we have to lie so fervently about so much..."
Scriabin just listened. Edgar expected him to respond and at his silence, he pressed his hands to his eyes and found his teeth gritted together tightly. "God, this is all so messed up. There's something...I mean, you're not my...and I'm acting, I want...God, there's something wrong with me."
He moved his hands and looked at Scriabin, who just stared back with his eyes that matched Edgar's perfectly.
Another silence, then Scriabin did speak.
"What?" The amusement was gone. His expression matched a tone that Edgar was intimately familiar with. "Do you expect me to argue with you?"
Edgar stared a little longer, then sighed.
"I think that, of all people..." He could tell that Scriabin wanted to sound angrier. "I would know that there's something wrong with you."
"Always with this mental open-book..." Edgar waved a hand, not wanting to push the damage further with another obscenity.
"The fact that I am here at all," his words came haltingly and with great effort, "is a fairly good indication that there is something wrong with you. Otherwise, I wouldn't have come into being...not even at the most generous application of the word could this be considered normal..." Edgar could hear him detaching from what he was saying, could anticipate the longer words that would require Scriabin's attention, shift focus from emotion to thought. For all his supposed hatred of Edgar's detachment, he resorted to it just as readily when things got too emotionally intense. "I...as in my existence here...that could never be considered normal, any sign of healthy adjustment..."
"You're more like the symptom of a sickness, or the consequence of damage..."
He shouldn't have said that. He was just following Scriabin's train of thought and it didn't occur to him, it again slipped by him that the presence in his mind was more than an object, but more importantly, wanted to be considered, by him, as more than an object. That was why he had done this, why he had gone along with Edgar with this entire charade. That was why he had done it and without even thinking about it, Edgar had ruined it. His illusion for himself may last a little longer, but he had ruined it for Scriabin.
He expected him to do it, and in a way he felt that he deserved it. Scriabin's eyes narrowed, pain obvious on a child's features, and he pulled back one clenched fist. Edgar didn't move away, although he did close his eyes.
The punch to the side of his head left him seeing stars and there was an intense flash of blackness before he could see again. Searing pain burned through what felt like his brain. When he could open his eyes and see again, Scriabin's face still hovered above his own, although the sky above had darkened slightly.
"You..." Scriabin couldn't find words that could express what his fist hadn't. He trembled.
Edgar had to take a few seconds to get his mouth to work properly. "That was a stupid thing to say."
"Yeah. Yeah it was." In the end, that spoke more of his hatred than a sarcastic jibe ever could have.
"I'm sorry."
"You think-"
"No, I know you won't accept it." It felt like the back of his eyes were burning. God Scriabin could punch hard. "But I have to say it."
Scriabin crossed his arms and looked away.
"This whole thing was...it's as important for you as it is for me. I keep...forgetting that." He kept forgetting that Scriabin could hurt him, some cynical part of him said, and he ignored it. "It's not fair."
Scriabin made a growling sound, apparently either not willing to talk to Edgar anymore or at a loss for words. Considering how eloquent Scriabin tended to be, Edgar was willing to bet it was the former.
"I don't want...I don't want a childhood without..." Edgar closed his eyes and wished his head would stop hurting. If this was a dream, why did it hurt so much? "I don't want a childhood without you."
A scoffing sound, but he still wouldn't speak.
"I mean, I could create everything...with just me instead, but when it would come down to friends, or playing games with people, or talking, or adventures...I like the ones with you in them the most. I like having a brother. I like not being alone."
"And in the end..." Scriabin's voice was dark and as low as he could manage. "In the end, that's what I'm here for, isn't it? This isn't about me. I'm just a prop for your fantasies. Discarded whenever you like-" A strangled angry noise and Scriabin pressed a hand over his eyes. "God, I hate you."
"That's not what I meant..." Edgar looked up at him and wondered if there was any way to talk himself out of this. He wanted to reach out, touch him in some way, but every logical process told him that would be an absolutely horrible idea.
He realized that Scriabin was hiding his eyes from him again.
"Then what did you mean?" Struggling to keep emotion from his voice.
"It was real for a while." Edgar kept his hands where they were. "I mean...what we were creating, together. It was real."
"Not to you." He felt his body move and knew that Scriabin was considering pushing him off. "You don't understand. You can't understand this. Every time we go over the same thing and you never understand. Is it so hard, so difficult to think that reality for you means something different to me? That our goals can be different, yet we can work at the same thing? Can you understand that, Edgar? Can't you look beyond yourself for a few minutes to put yourself in my position? Do you even consider me worthy of your empathy? That'd be a difficult thing, to empathize with something you don't consider human..."
"Of course I can empathize." That was a skill that Edgar felt fairly skilled at, and he didn't like being questioned about it. "You know I can."
"Then it turns to the other part of it." Still talking with his hand covering his eyes. "You don't consider me worthy of that empathy, do you? If you did, the things you could accomplish...everything that you could potentially do, could learn- but you've never considered me more than a parasite, more than subhuman. I have no reality to you, Edgar. I'm not real to you. I'm not real."
"And since when was that important to you?" Inspired by the anger that he normally suppressed that came to him so easily here, and he instantly regretted his words. He expected another blow to the head, but Scriabin didn't raise his hand. He stayed silent.
There was a point in there somewhere, and maybe if handled a little better... "For so long you told me that you were me, that we were the same person. You were always going on and on about how separating from me was unhealthy, that it meant I was going crazy, all of it was this intense and sweeping effort on your part to have me consider you a part of me, nothing more and nothing less. And now, now because you've suddenly changed your focus, you've suddenly changed your goals, you get angry at me because I didn't know? You never told me anything, you never told me that you wanted me to...you wanted me to think of you as a person. You never said anything, you just assumed that I would know, that I would read your mind somehow and just know that suddenly it went from 'I'm you' to 'I'm not you.' What right do you have to be angry at me? I'm not blameless, sure, but I don't think this is entirely my fault."
Scriabin didn't say anything. He sighed, then pulled his hand away from his eyes. Perched on his nose were a pair of reflective glasses, identical to the ones he had lost earlier. He adjusted them slightly, pushed them up the bridge his nose, and Edgar knew that the damage to their joint illusion was irreparable now. He was sure of it.
"People change," Scriabin finally said, his voice distant and soft.
"Mmm..." Edgar didn't want to fight about this anymore. Now the stories they had been weaving together, the joint cat's cradle between the two of them, seemed a thousand times more appealing than continuing their argument, or any argument really. There were so many ways to respond to what he had said, but he just didn't want to do this. He didn't dream to argue, he didn't dream to relive his daily life again and again.
"What else can you remember?"
Another short pause.
"Do you think it's that easy?"
"I...I don't want to fight with you. I don't want to fight at all right now. That's not what I wanted to do here."
"And of course, I always do what you want. I'm the picture of obedience." There was no sarcasm in his tone, although by all rights there should have been.
"Can't we let it go?"
"Have we ever let anything go?"
Edgar looked up at him.
"Please."
"How can I let it go when it ruins, it changes the entire thrust of what we were doing? It's more than any typical argument over this and that, it affects what we're doing. It affects the past we were creating. How can I..."
"Please."
Scriabin looked away.
"Can't we pretend? Can't we pretend again?" Edgar reached up a hand and he touched that strand of hair. It felt soft and smooth underneath his fingers, the sensation only broken by the roughness of the yarn keeping it in place.
Scriabin must have felt the tug and he turned back to look down at him.
"It's always pretend with you." His voice wavered.
"I don't want to fight right now. I was happy for a while...so were you. Did we lose that so completely? Was it so easily destroyed?"
"It's always pretend with you." It was no steadier the second time.
Edgar sighed and he held on to the strand of hair, rolled the knot of the yarn between his fingers.
"I remember something about you."
Scriabin didn't say anything for a while, but then he let loose a very long and deep sigh. He looked and sounded so miserably resigned.
"What did you remember?"
Scriabin didn't want to play along anymore, but it looked like he would at least make the effort. Edgar hoped that maybe the stories he could tell would remind him of what they could do together.
"I had to cook a lot of the time, with Granma's back and all..." There were fragments of these stories that had their source in real memories, and that lent to them an air of truth that made them more plausible. "Fairly simple things...nothing too complicated..."
"Not like you had anything better to do with your time." Scriabin kept all emotion from his voice, and Edgar got the distinct impression that he was trying not to listen.
"But there was this brand of macaroni and cheese that you were totally crazy for...I don't know what it was, but there was this time when you were a bit younger where that was all you would eat. You wouldn't eat anything else, just that kind of macaroni. We must have eaten it for weeks on end before you moved on to something else...I thought Granma was going to go crazy by the end of it..."
Edgar hoped that the story he was telling would be seen as an apology, an attempt to repair the damage done. He didn't mean to do it, to hurt him, and some part of him still insisted that it wasn't entirely his fault, but he wanted to fix it. He wanted to apologize in a way that Scriabin would accept and couldn't refute, couldn't reverse back on him somehow.
"Every night, it was always the same thing. 'What do you want to eat?' 'Mac 'n cheese!' and every time I'd threaten not to make it, but in the end I'd make it anyway. You just got so excited over it. I never understood."
"No one ever cooked anything for you, as a child, that you particularly asked for. It was always what was healthy, what you needed to develop." Keeping his distance from the fantasy, and Edgar wished he wasn't doing this. He didn't want to do this alone. "So..."
"I wanted to cook for you..."
Scriabin stared at him, then looked away again. His mouth twitched, but he didn't say anything.
"I can remember a few other things...if you're interested."
Silence. Edgar decided to continue. He hoped that the reminder of who he was doing it for, who so often the recipient was of what he always wanted in these fantasies, would remind him that he hadn't intended to hurt him. He didn't want to hurt people, and most of the time, Scriabin was no exception.
Edgar noticed at that point that while Scriabin had replaced his glasses, the bruises and cuts marking his face remained.
"What does it mean, that I want something so badly so I do it for you? Why not for myself? Why not make you do it for me?"
"I don't know." A sullen response.
"Do you remember the bush?"
Scriabin didn't move or acknowledge the question, so Edgar decided to continue anyway. "We were at someone's house...I can't remember who, now that I think about it, and they had a second story...so we were hanging around there, I think staying away from the crowd...that was it, it was a birthday party. We were never much for big crowds, really. But we were upstairs, and we looked out the window and below us was this big trimmed hedge. I remember you said that it looked bouncy enough and that if I jumped out and landed on it, it would break my fall."
There. Edgar saw it, the slight twitch of a smile. Maybe this would work after all. "I didn't believe you. It looked really dangerous. But you insisted that the bush would definitely break the fall if someone jumped out the window."
"And I knew you wouldn't do it." Scriabin jumped in with a slight tinge of aggression. Edgar let him have the rest of the story. "You'd never work up the nerve. I had to prove it to you. So I opened the window and jumped."
Edgar's eyes widened. That was not the turn he expected.
"I landed on the bush all right, and I ended up tearing a huge boy-sized chunk out of it." Scriabin snickered in a vaguely sadistic way. "I was a bit dazed and bruised, but otherwise fine. You, however, practically had kittens about it."
"I tried to grab you when you jumped but I was too slow..."
"Heh, and so did the boy who invited us over, actually." Snickering again, and Edgar wondered at his ability to find enjoyment over someone's suffering. Wasn't there a German word for that? "I remember that boy's mom wanted to slap us around for that so badly, but since we weren't her kids, she couldn't do anything. She just had to get a gardener to try and remove that giant hole in the hedge."
"I recall not being invited to many birthday parties after that." Edgar chanced a smile, glad that Scriabin had joined him again, even if it was in such a mean way. "Not that we were invited to many to begin with."
"Granma also had a fit, but that was to be expected, really. Mostly about me jumping out the window rather than ruining that lady's topiary." The large word seemed strangely out-of-place. "Shouldn't take such unnecessary risks, I think it was. That was a running theme with her."
"You did take a lot of risks. I can't believe you did that. Two stories, Scriabin!" Edgar worried for a moment that his indignant tone would force Scriabin out again, trigger aggression that could sweep away the web they were weaving.
"The bush did break my fall, actually. Just not as much as I thought it would."
Edgar breathed a mental sigh of relief. "You're lucky you didn't break your arm or anything."
"I was always doing stuff like that. It was fun. I never understood how you could live like that, so safe all the time without ever risking yourself once."
"Well, whenever you talked me into it..."
"I did have the gift for talking you into things." Scriabin smiled. "I was always described as eloquent."
Edgar remembered something, something that he had completely forgotten and he had a feeling this may be a good time to try and bring it up, considering...
"Hey, Scri..."
Scriabin twitched at the nickname. "What?"
"Elocution."
A kind of muffled snort, then Scriabin hid his mouth behind his hand. "Goddamn you, you know that word makes me laugh."
Somehow, the obscenity coming from Scriabin didn't seem quite as powerful as when it came from Edgar. Rarity he supposed had a hand in that.
"I know." Edgar smiled, and Scriabin glared at him, although the effect was lessened by the fact he was still smiling.
"Hey, do you remember the S'mores we made?"
"I'd hesitate to call them that." Scriabin tried to put on an air of dignity after his snickering fit. "They were more psuedo-S'mores than anything else. I mean, we used the microwave."
"I know..." Edgar sighed. He could picture it so easily, the two of them glued to the front of the plastic door, watching the time tick down and the marshmallow swell under invisible heat. "Heh, I remember staring at the microwave too long and too close...I got so dizzy."
"That was so lame though." Scriabin had a touch of old resentment in his voice and Edgar had a feeling that it wasn't really Scriabin's to begin with. He had just borrowed it...taken it away... "I mean, we never really had real ones. Even when we used the burner on the stove-"
"God, Granma completely freaked out about that. One of the forks turned all black from the flames, and that one marshmallow caught on fire and fell in, and she made us clean it up and promise to never touch the stove again under penalty of-"
Edgar shuddered for a moment at the sudden and all-too-real sensation of yarn crisscrossing his hands, binding them together and looping through his fingers and the hours he spent and her voice and, and he pushed the thought away.
Scriabin looked at him for a few seconds, and Edgar thought he felt him shiver in response, just a little.
"Well, I could touch it." Desperate to change the subject. "I mean, when I was cooking. I could touch it still. You were totally forbidden."
"But yeah, that's not the same." Scriabin just as eager to keep his mind off of a shared and very real memory. "I mean, cooking it on a burner? In a microwave? The only real way to eat them is outdoors."
"Didn't we do that, once?" Now that Edgar thought about it, that would be a nice fantasy. He was fairly sure he never had the chance as a child. "Didn't we sneak out or something...?"
"Hmm." Scriabin sensed what Edgar wanted, tried to think up a good reason or explanation for the memory he desired. "Well, I do think..."
"We must have gone with someone..."
"Yeah, and I'm fairly sure we didn't tell Gran about it, either." Scriabin paused. "I think that was one of the things she never found out about."
It was comfortable and safe to imagine her reactions when they had no real basis, no real anxiety or pain attached to them, but when his thoughts lingered on the reality, on what really happened when he had so rarely misbehaved and even when he hadn't, he didn't want to think about it. The idea of getting away with such things completely grew far more appealing than bearing the brunt of some imagined and easily swept-aside punishment.
An easy thing for reality to intrude, particularly when not welcome, and both of them would prefer not to think about that. It wouldn't take much to move this dream into the realm of nightmares, and Edgar often found that thoughts of her, of being so trapped, of having to listen to her for hours upon hours, would often prompt nightmares that had the added unpleasantness of being associated with tremendous guilt for feeling that way, for resenting the one person who raised him, for resenting her despite the kind things she had done and the sacrifices she had made, and how could he do that to her? How could he have nightmares about her, when she had done so much for him?
"But she still hurt you..." Scriabin's voice broke into his thoughts. "It doesn't take much else to provide fodder for nightmares..."
"Where were you?" Edgar didn't want to think about this, but he found his inability to place Scriabin during those times distressing. He wanted some resolution, some place for Scriabin to be, he didn't want to be alone then, not when he had reworked his past to prevent that very thing...
"When she called you to hold the yarn for her?" Scriabin's voice was gentle, and for a moment Edgar imagined that perhaps all personal grievances had been put aside, and all that mattered to him now was his older brother. But perhaps that was stretching the illusion too far. "She wouldn't let me stay with you, usually...it was always something that you had to suffer through alone..."
"And you...?"
"Well..." Vaguely uncomfortable again. "I've...had my share of time spent with her. I've been trapped too. But it pales in comparison to you...it was always you. She wouldn't let me be with you, help you against what she would say..."
"Did she know?" Edgar wanted to believe she didn't. "She didn't know how much that hurt...she couldn't have."
"No, I don't think she did. Building character." Scriabin closed his eyes. "Preparing you. Too young...you were too young to understand, so it just crashed around you and it became..."
So long it lingered in the back of his mind, the red strands that looped their way around such mundane objects and, in moments of terror, around his hands. With them came that sense of powerlessness, of completely helplessness to stop his unwitting tormentor, and that was the part that he found he feared the most.
"You may fear it..." Scriabin looked around the backyard, and placed a hand on Edgar's head. "You may fear it, but I resent it. You used to, but I do it for you now."
"God, let's talk about something else." Edgar shut his eyes. "I don't...I don't want to think about it right now."
"Hmm..." Scriabin looked around again. "Heh, all right, something light hearted, something...do you remember when sometimes, when I was asleep, you would sneak up and you'd braid my hair all stupid? Then you'd just wait around for me to wake up, and you'd just start laughing when I found out what you'd done. It made my hair all frizzy and wavy for hours."
The mental picture of Scriabin with frizzy hair was enough to drive his thoughts away from darker times, at least for now. He smiled again and laughed, and at the sound Scriabin smiled in return. Victory for him, in a way, at having distracted him. Why would he consider it a victory?
"Do you remember..." Edgar found another real memory, another base that he could elaborate on. "Do you remember that one time we had to go shopping for Granma, cause her back was out again?"
"I do." A smile slowly spread across his face. "Ah, I remember that very clearly."
"Didn't you want a cake?"
"Oh yeah." Scriabin waved a hand. "More for the fact that it wouldn't be for any special occasion than an actual desire for cake. There's something kind of..." He paused, searched for a word, then shrugged. "I suppose the best word for it would be naughty, although I dislike it. But yes, there was something like that when you would eat a cake out of season, out of context."
"And the shopping carts."
Scriabin laughed at that, a sadistic one that Edgar had often found directed at him, but not this time. He was a little unnerved by the fact that Scriabin's sadism, however minor when really considered, extended to others outside of him.
"Oh yes, the shopping carts."
"If I recall correctly..." Edgar tried to remember the first trip to the store by himself. It wasn't the last by any means, as only a short while later his grandmother had insisted that he do all the shopping to prepare himself for an adult life. A lot of things were that way for him. But the first trip was the one that he did remember fairly clearly, and now with the thought of Scriabin with him... "I was so tempted to buy some soda...she would never let us have any."
"Hehe. Hehehe. That's because the one time I did have a soda, I recall completely freaking out. It wasn't even the sugar or the caffeine that did it, I don't think, but just the excitement of drinking something new and something I wasn't supposed to."
"Oh my God, that's right, you completely trashed our room."
"And the living room."
"And the kitchen. You were like this horrible tornado."
"That was so awesome." Scriabin smiled at the thought. "When I was like that, the last thing on my mind were consequences. You can't get that freedom nowadays."
An easy chance, perhaps unintentional, to return to reality, and Edgar wasn't about to do that just yet.
"Either way, she banned it for sure after that. She also took away your lunch money and made me start fixing your lunch, so you wouldn't be tempted by the soda machines at school."
"Hmm...the first time is always the best." Scriabin looked up at the sky. "The first time is always the best. But I suppose that if it had gone longer...perhaps I did develop an addiction. You know, if we do delve deeper, look a bit past the curtain but not tear it down, I do recall a similar episode occurring with you with your first illicit can of soda, and a desire for the rush that follows you even now...well, not you so much. Another thing that's become a part of me instead, in a way. Now that I think about it, I do crave that. Huh, I thought it was just the tacos. I wonder if there's some deeper memory to explain that as well."
"Tacos were for special occasions." Edgar knew the answer, so he automatically pointed it out. "Do you remember?"
"Ha...do you remember, do you remember. It just struck me that..." Scriabin shook his head. "What kind of special occasions?"
"You know, whenever I did really well at something...got really good grades, or it was the beginning of a holiday. She'd take us to a fast food place, this one taco place that was close to where we lived."
"That's right, I've often thought about that." Scriabin rubbed at a bruise on his cheek. "That food was so widely condemned and perhaps rightly so, and characterized by so many as so worthless and bland. But for us..."
"For us, it was something special..."
"Other people would go and have a taco everyday, but for us, it was only those special times of the year, when she would take us and it would taste so good and I'm sure the only reason why, considering what's in those things, is because it was associated with that happy feeling. That kind of pride in knowing you were worth that."
"Worth a taco?" Edgar chanced a smirk, and Scriabin swatted his forehead.
"Worth her going out of her way to give you something special. Affection...validation...no wonder I want them...you want them too."
"Not as much as you do...but I think you're right."
"Well, I think I may have...ah, it doesn't matter. Our quirks are always interchangeable in the end."
"Mmm. Anyway, where were we?"
"Supermarket." Another smile. "I remember the two of us putting that box of soda in the cart while looking around as if we'd get arrested any minute."
"Ha, I remember how we got it home..."
"Let's keep this linear for now...although tangents are what always make these stories so interesting, and so long. I recall we spent a lot of time in the candy aisle."
"Not even buying anything, but just staring."
"Heh, you did buy something. Don't you remember a certain three pound bag of Gummi Bears?"
"Oh my GOD." Edgar moaned and pressed his hands over his eyes. "I still feel sick thinking of Gummi Bears to this day. God, why did I buy that?"
"Awash with possibility, responsibility I suppose. Independence and the chance to do something stupid. There you go, Edgar. There's a stupid childhood decision for you, and not the last."
"And you, wasn't there a candy you were particularly fond of?"
"Hmm, I..." Scriabin paused. "I do remember...I did have one once...when I was very little, almost too small to remember. I grabbed it off the shelf while she was shopping once, and she got it for me then as a special gift. While I do think the tacos that we had were...greatly enhanced by the pleasant associations we had with them, that chocolate was good chocolate. Expensive too, although I didn't know that at the time. I'm not sure why she got it for me...a random splurge of kindness, I suppose. Ever since then I always wanted another one, but it was always too expensive...too unnecessary."
"And when we were there...we got them."
"We got two, I think." Scriabin sighed in a vaguely pleased way. "That was as much as I really felt comfortable getting, considering the budget she gave us."
"And then..."
"I was wearing my coat...the coat. Your dad's coat. I was wearing it then." The determination in his voice made it so. "I put it on while she wasn't watching. It trailed behind me so far and kept getting caught in the cart wheels."
Edgar smiled and let Scriabin add that piece to the false memory. "Two young boys in a supermarket, with no real supervision...add a shopping cart, and you have..."
"The best recipe for disaster." A devilish smile. "I think it was my idea."
"Of course it was your idea. It was always your idea."
"I jumped into the main basket, one hand held high, yelling something that I can't recall that probably didn't make a lot of sense."
Caught up in it, and he felt excited. "I had that moment of hesitation, and then I just decided to go for it. Just ran and leapt on and we were careening down the aisles-"
"God, getting in trouble was such a certainty, I even mentioned it, but it was too much to resist. Away from her, it's strange that that's the first thing we would have resorted to."
"I couldn't steer-"
"Well, I don't know how much one can really steer a shopping cart."
"Right into the display case."
Scriabin nodded in satisfaction. "Right into the display case."
"And that was pretty much the end of our shopping trip." He didn't feel like elaborating on the possible consequences of his misbehavior at the moment, and judging by his expression, neither did Scriabin.
"Fantastic ending, if you ask me." Scriabin smiled. "We got the groceries though, so I don't think Gran ever found out about that."
"Hey...how did we get the soda in the house?"
"Hmm...that would have been a tricky thing." Scriabin tapped a finger on his chin thoughtfully. "Didn't you say you thought of something?"
"I lost it now."
"Well, let's see...Gran definitely wouldn't have let us keep it if she saw us take it in...I'm thinking that one of us presented a diversion while the other snuck it in some back way."
"Or..." Edgar was getting glimpses of his original idea, but still couldn't find the whole of it. "Or we could have hid the soda somewhere and went back for it later..."
"Well, either of those could work...she definitely didn't find out though..."
"Definitely..." Edgar sighed, a deep one that he didn't particularly attach to any emotion. Scriabin stared down at him, and Edgar found his hand twitching and he couldn't remember when that had started. "What time is it?"
Scriabin looked at Edgar's wrist. Immediately memories leapt to life, explanations quick and swift for why. Scriabin had trouble telling time for a long time as a child, unable to read the hands and increments, and he had always depended on Edgar to tell him the time since he refused to wear a watch, to wear something that always reminded him that there was something he couldn't understand...
"Where's your watch?" Scriabin's question was completely honest, without even the implied depth of their previous memories, and Edgar found his reaction matched.
"I don't know." Edgar lifted his hands and looked at his wrists. A bruise colored one side of his right hand, and his skin was stained green in places from the grass. No watch. "I don't know...did I lose it?"
"Maybe it fell off when we were fighting? That's happened before."
Scriabin didn't want this to be the first time...that was okay. Edgar didn't particularly care either way. He sat up, shook off the dizziness of the blood rushing out of his head, and looked around. No sign of it anywhere. Scriabin stood up and brushed himself off, then ran two hands roughly and quickly through his long hair. Grass flew everywhere.
"Mmph, I don't see it here." Scriabin shook his head and his hair fluffed out to a ridiculous extent. Edgar stood himself and laughed slightly at his appearance, although he tried to hide it.
A quick perusal of the area around them, and still no watch. Edgar instantly sobered. "Oh, she's not going to like this...she told me to be careful with that watch, it was supposed to last me a long time..."
Such a quick and subtle change from merely talking about memories to actually living one out, and the reality of this was a great deal more tangible, more believable, more powerful. Concerns and the waking world were fading from his memory as Edgar looked over the grass. The future, his fear, his regret, his mistakes and his accomplishments all slowly vanishing, erased steadily and subtly. Soon there would be nothing left but what he had created, the world around his childself that was almost entirely false, and his childself whose reality he could never overcome. He could change his environment, but he himself remained constant, and that made it easier for him, easier to place himself in this fake world because there was one thing that he knew well, that was permanent and couldn't or wouldn't change. His childself became his anchor, and he felt more and more attached to it as the fantasy around him deepened. Becoming his childself, just as he had intended when he began this entire thing. It wasn't himself that he was trying to avoid through the illusion, but just the reality that surrounded him, past and present. Emotions kicking in that were genuine at a source that felt as though it was real, it could really be real...
"Do you still have that watch now?" Scriabin darted over to the sandbox, then proceeded to trip over the edge of it and fall hard on his hands. The noise that came from him was a mangled obscenity, twisted just enough to be incomprehensible, help keep the illusion going. Edgar's grandmother did not tolerate foul language. Edgar walked over to his side and picked Scriabin back up.
"You're clumsy."
"And you're ugly." Scriabin grumbled and rubbed his hands against his shirt. "So shut up."
"Stop that." Edgar grabbed for Scriabin's hands and had to try a few times before he succeeded in getting a hold of them. Scriabin sighed in a truly exaggerated fashion as Edgar looked at his palms. Scraped and raw, but no more so than they had been before. He let him go, and Scriabin pulled his hands away quickly and jammed them into his pockets.
"Scri, what-"
"Don't. Don't do that."
"...mm. Scriabin, what about...how are we going to explain this to her?"
"The fight?"
Edgar nodded.
"Edgar...are you telling me she's still here?"
The sound of the screen door opening.
"Edgar! Scriabin! Where are you?"