Fidgeting with the sleeve of his lab coat, Heinz looked away from Perry the Platypus and towards his brother. Sitting behind his desk, Roger took his glasses off.

"Look, Heinz," he said slowly, folding and unfolding the arms. "I know that what happened to you in Drusslestein was hard, but you have to believe me that I'm sorry."

The hard knot of anger and sadness that had settled in Heinz's chest didn't move, and he glared at his brother. "Why?" he asked again. Tied up in that one word was a thousand questions and he didn't know if he wanted to articulate them all, even if he could.

An unfamiliar look flickered across Roger's face and he stared at his hands for a moment. Finally, he spoke. "I don't know," he said quietly.

The things he had already said ran through Heinz's mind, not my fault, things have always come easily to me, some things aren't meant to be, and sunk to the bottom like rocks in water. Neither of them spoke for a moment and not for the first time in this conversation, he wished a Mind Reading-Inator existed.

His mind flashed back to a conversation he and Charlene had had late in their marriage and he started to repeat what she had told him years ago. "Sorry isn't something you can say once and walk away from. It takes commitment."

His brother laughed mirthlessly. "Charlene?"

"How'd you know?" Heinz asked.

"She was always better at communication than you," came the simple response.

Heinz groaned, remembering what his daughter had said the first time he mentioned his long-standing animosity towards his brother. I like Uncle Roger. "Of course," he muttered. "She did keep the last name."

Roger shrugged. "She and Vanessa showed up to the family reunions, and kept in touch."

"And I didn't," Heinz finished the rest of the sentence. "Of course not, Mother hates me."

They stepped into the familiar, decades-old, song and dance and Roger sighed. "She doesn't hate you."

"Yes she does," Heinz responded, the reply as natural as breathing. It wasn't anything he had done, he knew. It was just the way things were. They needed a lawn gnome and he was there, they needed a son to favour and Roger was there. For as much as he despised Roger, he had never felt that way towards his parents. It wasn't them, after all, that had followed him to America. Even if they had tricked him onto the ship, at least they hadn't tried to overshadow his every accomplishment. Not that they acknowledged them in the first place.

"Why?"

Heinz stumbled over the question as the pattern was broken. "What?"

"Why do you think Mother hates you?" Roger asked, putting his glasses to the side on top of the stack of documents.

Heinz shrugged. None of the responses he had practiced rose to the occasion and he struggled to put words to the rationalizations floating around his mind. From by his feet he heard a soft chatter and a paw draped itself over his shoe.

"She just does," he said finally, the response feeling flat.

The words still sat in his mind, this is the way it is, and he sat lower in his seat wondering what the point of this was. For all her determination to bring him here, Mabel had been oddly quiet since she'd stopped talking about her pig. Maybe there wasn't any point. He could walk out of here and leave Roger to being the mayor and nothing would change. The cold anger that filled him at the mention of his brother's name would stay and the knot of emotion in his chest would never unravel. It was strangely comforting, and for a moment he entertained the idea of simply getting up and walking out.

Below him, Perry the Platypus chattered again and Heinz sighed. There was no way he was leaving until a conclusion was reached. He had no idea what that conclusion was, but it definitely hadn't been reached yet.

"I don't hate you." Roger's words disrupted his train of thought, neatly yanking it off its tracks. "Why do you think I followed you to America?"

Heinz shrugged. "To steal my spotlight." The answer was obvious, so obvious he wondered if the question was rhetorical. "It something I did that you hadn't yet."

Pressing his fingertips together, Roger exhaled slowly. "Things come easily to me," he said again. "It's the opposite with you." Heinz refrained from saying anything, looking at Mabel's knitting needle suspiciously. "You're like a firework, Heinz."

Heinz raised an eyebrow, not sure whether to be offended.

"You work so hard at doing well that your moments of success burn incredibly brightly," Roger finished explaining. "It's the opposite with me. It's rather monotonous, skating through life."

"Well, at least you're admitting it," Heinz muttered. "Not all of us get elected mayor two years after changing cities."

"At least you finished college," Roger retorted, before Mabel could say anything.

"What?" His brother, the golden boy, didn't finish college? "How?"

Roger sat back in his seat and sighed. "You weren't supposed to find out," he muttered. "I came to America and when I enrolled in college, I had an incredibly hard time learning English." Sensing Heinz's complaint, he held up a hand. "I dropped out during my second year, and then decided to learn the language so well I wouldn't even have an accent. It took me three years of study to be able to speak this well."

"Oh," was all Heinz could manage. The image of his brother struggling to speak English was one that he couldn't come up with. "Wait, I wasn't supposed to find out?"

Roger didn't answer for a long moment. "I didn't want you to be ashamed of me."

Heinz sat back in his chair. No matter how he assembled the words, they didn't make sense in his mind. Him being ashamed of Roger was something that he had never imagined. Nothing about it would fit together properly. He couldn't stretch the limited relationship they shared to accommodate this new dynamic. It just didn't make sense.

"What are you talking about?" he finally said.

Roger stared at his desk, wondering how to answer the question. It had been one of his most deeply buried sentiments, and over the years he had succeeded in mostly denying it even to himself. "I suppose," he started slowly, "I always admired you. No matter what life threw at you, you always came out on top."

"You do know I lost a poetry contest to a baking soda volcano once," Heinz said dryly.

Roger cracked a smile. "Be that as it may, Heinz, you have a resilience most people can only dream of." From beneath the desk, the platypus sitting beside his brother's chair chattered. "That I can only dream of," he said softly, mostly to himself.

Heinz snorted, fingers worrying the edge of his lab coat. "Is that so, Mr. Successful-at-everything?"

"It's not the same," Roger insisted. Something inside of him cracked a little more at the expression on his brother's face and he gestured to the office around him. "Do you think I asked for all this?"

"Yes." Heinz said pointedly.

"All right, bad example," he sighed. "Still, the point is valid. I've always wanted to live up you, to the strength you have." He fell silent for a moment before continuing. "I don't know why I thought you would know that."

"Well, you're right about that," Heinz said. "I've been trying for thirty years to live up to you." Beside him, Mabel flinched. "I thought that if I had what you have, maybe I would finally be accepted."

Roger closed his eyes, remembering all the days in Drusselstein when their parents had doted on him while they outright ignored Heinz. While he had played with the other children and charmed adults into exclaiming over his manners, his brother had stood outside for hours as a lawn gnome without moving, eventually running away for a few months only to come limping back home with more injuries than before. Acceptance. It was all Heinz had ever really wanted, buried beneath his demands for power and wealth.

"...probably wouldn't have been." The whisper was so quiet that at first Roger wondered if he had said it.

Opening his eyes, he saw his brother with the platypus sitting in his lap. Slowly running his hand down its back, he repeated his words. "I probably wouldn't have been." Raising his head, he looked Roger in the eyes, as if daring him to contradict the statement.

Forcing himself to face the truth, Roger exhaled slowly. The truth of their childhood stood starkly in his mind, the veneer stripped away. "No, probably not." It felt like a betrayal to say it, like he was disappointing his parents thousands of miles away by stating what he had always known was true.

Still, something in the air cleared as he said it, a decades-old lie evaporating. No one said anything for a minute, and then Roger spoke again. "I'm sorry."

Heinz glared at him, his eyes red, but something in it held less anger. "For what?"

"Everything."

The word hung in the air between them delicately, waiting for one of them to speak and tip the balance.