Duplicated Insanity

Chapter 2

The Third Wheel

It was strange. I had known this Sora kid for about an hour, and already I felt as if we had some sort of... connection. It was like we'd known each other all of our lives, though we'd never met. But for some reason, in my heart, I felt maybe we had met.

That was why Sora and I were in my basement, flipping through old birth records, baby pictures; anything we could find really. Mom wouldn't be home until way late at night, so I figured we'd be safe. It was only 9:30 (PM) anyways.

"Hey! Kaz!"

I looked over and there was Sora, grinning and frantically waving a piece of paper in the air. Shoving aside the box I was digging through, I scrambled to sit beside him.

"Divorce papers?" I asked upon seeing the document Sora was so excited about.

"Yeah!" Sora said, rolling his eyes. "Hello! We can look at the... Well, I don't know what they're called, but the thing that says what each person got..."

Sora read over the top of the document, and immediately seemed to find something worthy.

"John Strife... That's my father's name."

I yanked the paper from Sora's hand. Reading it over, I found what I was looking for. It said, as I knew it would, that Mom would get one child. And 'John' would get the other three.

Well, okay. So that means... Sora's my... brother. It was confusing. Ironic, really. Totally coincidental that we had met at that party, and here we turned out to be brothers. Twins would better describe it. I hadn't asked Sora his birth date, but I didn't really need to. I knew it, because it would be the same as mine. That would explain why we looked exactly alike, after all.

I looked over at where Sora was sitting, now staring absent-mindedly into the distance.

"Hey, Sora?"

"Yeah?" he replied turning to look at me.

"I'm psychic."

"Oh, really?" Sora laughed, raising an eyebrow.

"Yeah. I know what day you were born on."

Sora simply gave me a blank look.

"August 25th," I told him.

He smiled.

"I know yours, too."

I cocked my head to the side, knowing all to well that he did. It was obvious.

"Probably."

Sora was quiet and got that totally spaced out look on his face again.

After a long interval of silence, he finally spoke.

"I can't believe they didn't tell us."

"Huh?"

Well, of course they didn't tell us. What did he expect?

"It's one thing to split up siblings, you know? But twins is kinda different."

"Yeah..." I said, finally agreeing. Why didn't they tell us?

Sora sighed beside me.

"Let's look through the rest of this junk," he said.

Sora and I began to sift through the rest of the old boxes. I moved back to the one I'd been looking through earlier, though it hadn't been very interesting. I plunged my hand into the box and began pulling things out. I found one piece of paper that said "MJ pickup- Old shooting range: June 15- 3 o' clock." I have never met anyone named MJ, which I assumed was short for Mary Jane, but because she was being picked up at a shooting range, I decided I probably didn't want to.

I tossed the paper on the floor and continued rummaging through my box. After reading several notes very similar to that one (I guess Mary Jane went a lot of places...) I found something extremely interesting. At the very bottom of my box (Which was HUGE and about up to my waist, just so you know) was a mother load of...

The Amazing Spider-Man comics!

"Woah!" I shouted. "Why do we have these?"

"Huh?"

I jumped at the other voice but quickly realized it was Sora.

"Oh," I laughed, holding up the comic.

Sora grinned and came over to sit by me.

"What's with all the Spider-Man?" he asked.

"I don't really know..." I replied.

Sora shrugged and began looking through the comics. I joined him and quickly came up with a copy of issue 50, "Spider-Man, No More."

"Hey, that's cool," Sora said when he saw, yanking it from my hand. "Part of the second movie was based on this issue."

"That's great, Sora..." I said, rolling my eyes. How could he even know that?

As if reading my thoughts, he said, "I own it on DVD. It said in the Special Features thing."

"Whatever."

I picked up the last three comics in the box and immediately my eye was caught by the papers underneath. It was what we'd been looking for in the first place.

"Birth records!" I shouted.

"So? We don't need them anymore."

"But it would be interesting to look through them."

Sora sighed and picked up the papers. He frowned as he flipped through the tiny stack.

"These are Cloud's and Toile's... Ours aren't here."

"Well... Let's find them!"

Sora and I both seemed to pick up new drive and zipped around the room, digging through boxes. After 20 minutes of 'hard' labour, I sighed.

"We're never gonna find them!" I shouted.

Angrily, I stamped my foot. And it went right through the floor. Which was, in all truth, freaky.

"Oh my God! Kaz! Are you okay?" Sora gasped.

He rushed over to stand by me, and bent down to move the floorboard around a bit so I could pull my foot out. As soon as my leg was clear of the hole, Sora's eyes widened in surprise.

"Birth records."

"Huh?"

No, it was a hole. That my foot had just gone through. Not birth records. What was he thinking?

"Look!" Sora pulled a pile of documents out of the hole. "They're our birth records!"

"So? Like you said, we don't need 'em."

Sora rolled his eyes.

"We do now!"

"Why?"

"You don't get it, do you? They were hidden! Hidden!"

After a moment of thinking I realized with a shock that he was right. Sora had already begun flipping through the papers.

"Oh my god," he breathed. "Look at this!"

He shoved the papers in my face and I read them.

Sora Strife, Kaz Strife and- what the fuck?- Trasien Strife. All born August 25.

"Who...?"

"Not twins," Sora said grimly. "Triplets."

"And they were trying to hide it from us," I finished.

"I think there's something much more big going on here than we think..."

I looked up, eyes locking with Sora's. At that moment we both made a vow to figure out just what was going on. Though neither of us said it aloud, we had made that vow. And we would keep it.

w00t! Another chapter! Wait... Did I just say 'w00t'? OH, GOD! -Washes mouth with soap-

Ah, well. At least there's another chapter up!

Captain Snippet