- The message had been short and sweet and to the point: “Can I speak with you?”
Of course they could talk. Shiloh loved to talk to his brother and he loved his brother in general, but there was something undeniably ominous about the invitation. The thing was, invites to speak usually weren’t given without a purpose, but Shiloh couldn’t deny that they were long overdue for one. He’d been keeping Ollie in the dark about a lot of things—Jamie too—but Jamie rarely asked questions. Every conversation with his brother lately had turned into “So, about this…”
Regardless, Shiloh wasn’t shocked or surprised when he went over, knocked on the door, and was greeted with someone who looked marginally better than a zombie. The thing about the Beaumont twins was that despite their differences, they handled their stress about the same; close off from people, stay up all night thinking about it, wither away until divine intervention miraculously set in. What he wasn’t expecting was the hostility in Oliver’s expression, the innate distrust in his eyes. He’d figured something out and it wasn’t good.
“Let’s talk.” His twin said, body effortlessly stepping to the side.
Walking inside felt like a terrible mistake, like the walls were about to close in on him and he was never going to leave, but he did so anyway. The door shut behind him with a soft click. Oliver’s motions were stiff and awkward and dead silent behind him as they walked into the living room. “Where’re your cats at?” Shiloh asked idly, noticing the absence of the triumphed herald Chai and the eerie lurking of Nosey.
“I locked them in my room.” Ollie said quickly, which immediately set sirens off in Shiloh’s head, “Pascal too. It’s just for this.”
Shiloh looked over, but Oliver’s eyes were set in a harsh downcast, the floor looking infinitely more appealing to stare at.
“So…” Shiloh started awkwardly.
“So why the ********,” The sudden sharpness of his brother’s voice startled him, Shiloh flinching visibly as he took a step back, Oliver’s swears cutting through him like the clean cut end of a whip, “Didn’t you tell me about the ******** charter bullshit. Why?”
That’s what this was about.
“Who… who told you?” Shiloh was the one who sounded incredulous now. Maybe Mercer had, but he knew Oliver didn’t like the chief of police. “I mean; I was going to— “
“You were going to do a lot of things, weren’t you?” Oliver spat back, apparently offended by the lack of initiative. “Why didn’t you tell me about Court? Who the hell is the Spinel Lady?” His eyes narrowed, “She tortured you for months? How the ******** didn’t I notice. How. How?” His voice cracked towards the end. It was obvious that he’d been holding all of this back for a while.
“I-It’s—“
“Why won’t you tell me anything?!” Oliver grabbed Shiloh’s shoulders, shook them for good measure, “You never talk to me! You just—you always make excuses, or try to tell me not to worry about it, or something always comes up.” His eyes were shimmering with something caught between indignation and tears, “I’m sorry I’m involved in all this magic bullshit! I never ******** never woke up and decided hey, I’m gonna dive head first into all of this bullcrap, sounds like a fun ******** time.”
Shiloh was speechless for once, his throat tight and his palms clammy with a cold kind of sweat.
“All these cycles, and these separate lives, and—the charter, what the ******** is this about the stupid charter?” He finally let go of his brother, his posture drooping. “With the fingerprints… the fingerprints and everything else and…” Shiloh watched his brother grab his own hand, looking vaguely uncomfortable as he rubbed his wrist.
“But… but who… told you…” Shiloh mumbled again stupidly.
“That’s not the point!” Oliver lashed right back, “It doesn’t matter who told me! It should have been you!” Everything about Oliver’s energy was akin to a wave, the push and pull of the waves in the ocean. It rushed forward with immediate intensity and then ebbed away, faded back into the grand swell of things, built up, rushed back in again. It showed in his shoulders, the way they tensed and fell and shot up and melted away again. “It’s… not the point.” He said again, sullen, the low tide of the rage, “I don’t know anything. I thought I knew a lot but I don’t know anything.” He looked up, and Shiloh met his brother’s eyes in a heartbreaking sort of way, “What happened to my brother?” Oliver asked meekly, “What happened to my twin?”
That stung. That cut deeper than any blade against his skin, hit harder than any blow against his gut. The snapping of his bones in the marbled white halls of the Court had nothing on this. Broken ribs didn’t feel quite the same—it felt like the air had been sucked out of his lungs, sure—but there was a difference when it was the emotional sort.
“Everyone has secrets.” Oliver continued to mumble. Shiloh knew what this was; when Oliver was anxious, he never shut up. He felt it necessary to ramble on and on and on, talk and talk and talk because it felt like the weight in his gut was lifted, even if only for a second. “Everyone, I know, I understand. I don’t expect you to tell me everything, that’s unhealthy.” He still sounded vaguely unsettled, “I know, but you—you used to. We didn’t have to have secrets. You at least had enough respect to keep things that mattered out in the open. You never hid s**t from me, not like this.” He shook his head, “Not like this…”
Shiloh’s hands were curled into taught fists, his knuckles white, his expression strained. Something swelled in his eyes in such a fashion that he looked close to tears, like the dam might break, like he might finally crumble under the strain of everything that he’s taken it upon himself to hold up. He didn’t. Shiloh stood there, fists at his side, feet spread with his toes pointing away from one another, shirt messily half tucked underneath his jacket. “What was I supposed to say?” His voice cracked near the end, and Oliver looked up at him with only a fraction of the fury he held before, “That hey, I got kidnapped out of my Biology class on the last day of school? That I got replaced with a walking undead monster? Would you have honest-to-god ********’ believed me?” His eyes glimmered, “Sure, maybe you would now. But before this? Before you came into your magic? Before the void?” Because surely the void was the biggest eye opener of them all.
Oliver was silent.
“Do you think it’s really that easy to talk about?” Shiloh went on, “The Spinel Lady? She’s beautiful, Ollie, in all the ways that she’s ******** disgusting. She takes you and twists you up inside and makes you afraid.” He took a deep breath, “She takes every everything you love until—until the only thing you know how to do is please her, or try to please her, because no matter that you do, it’s… it’s never enough. Nothing is ever enough. To this goddamn day,” His eyes were level as they looked into his brother’s, “It still never feels like it’s enough.” And this conversation right now is proof of it, he wanted to say, but he didn’t. “Is that what you wanted to hear?”
“Tell me about the charter.”
“Why does the charter even matter?” Shiloh wasn’t looking at him anymore, “You still won’t tell me how you even found out.”
“And you won’t tell me why my goddamn fingerprint is on it.” Oliver was sneering, but his venom was so diluted and washed out. He just sounded tired.
“Oh, alright.” Shiloh made a sarcastic snort of a sound, his body resting half along the wall of the entryway that he was still standing in. “Your fingerprint is on the goddamn charter, because some version of you in some cycle before this thought it was a great idea. You and pretty much like, every other ******** were or warg out there.” Shiloh sighed, “or Noble.”
“Yourself?”
“I’m not, no.”
“Of course not!” Oliver threw his arms up in there, “Of course you somehow aren’t! Why the ******** aren’t I surprised…” Ollie seemed to be alight with a new energy, whether it was for better or for worse.
“Look!” Shiloh yelled right back, voice booming over Ollie’s, “What the ******** do you want from me? Do you want me to hate you? Do you want me to blame me for something that you—that you—didn’t do? Do you want me to tell the entire ******** world that you ******** up? Should I just slap the entire goddamn list up there for everyone else to see?” Oliver was flinching, but now Shiloh was pissed, “Because I can do that. I can make sure you and every other person on that list wallows in their own self ******** pity, if that’s what you want.”
“I just wanted you to be open with me…” His twin finally mumbled after a moment. “I just want to know what’s going on. I don’t give a damn if you want to be self-righteous. Apparently you have a right to.” Apparently Oliver had a right to excessive sarcasm too, because his voice was acerbic and sharp. “Oh, you’re not on the Charter, so you have to be some unsung hero. Oh, a real hero wouldn’t show his weakness, right? You have to handle it all for yourself.”
“Don’t talk like you understand it.” Shiloh was glaring now, but then he looked off to the side again. “No one ******** understands it.”
“Do you know why? Because you don’t even give anyone the chance to understand.” Now Oliver’s voice sounded hollow, deadpan, quiet. “You weren’t ever going to tell me anything, were you?” Shiloh made the mistake of eye contact, and for the briefest of seconds he felt his heart getting picked apart and torn and examined like a vivisection. “You were going to keep quiet, pretend like it was some burden you were carrying, and keep me in the dark.”
Shiloh shook his head, “I said I was going to tell you.”
“And why should I believe you?” Oliver asked, “Since you’ve blatantly lied to me about all this other bullshit? Why did I have to learn about it from—“
Oliver fell silent with a strangled choke, his eyes suddenly widening like all the air had left his chest, and then a second later he was grabbing his right wrist with a fierce intensity. He buckled over and wheezed.
Honestly, how was someone supposed to react in a situation like that? Shiloh didn’t know what the ******** was going on, and he sure as hell didn’t know what to do from then on—“O-Ollie?”
His twin gave no response. Instead he shuddered.
“Dude, come on, what the ********—“ His hand shot forward to touch his brother’s shoulder. At the contact, Oliver visibly flinched. A second later and he was slapping the hand away from his person.
“I can’t even say it!” He finally sputtered, his lips pale, his face strained, cheeks red, eyes suddenly bloodshot with the intensity of force. “I can’t even tell you!” And then he started to laugh. It was a terrible sound, the pain still palpable on every staccato syllable of the laughter, his expression absolutely incredulous. “See! I can’t even ******** tell you! I can’t—oh my god it hurts,” He doubled over again, blinded by his sudden hysterics, “It hurts. It hurts.”
“I don’t understand—Ollie what’s—“
“Just get out.” Oliver said at once, his feet slowly taking a few steps backwards. In the background was a cacophony of mewls, the cats evidently getting fed up with their temporary imprisonment. “Just leave. There isn’t anything else to say here.”
“But Oliver—“
“There’s nothing else to talk about!” He hissed, “Get out!” And then he looked defeated, “Get out… just… get out.” A sharp inhale, “I want to be alone. Leave me alone. You can do that, can’t you?” He looked up, “You can leave me alone, right? You can grant me that much, since you keep insisting on closing yourself off? You don’t want to be a hypocrite do you?”
“Didn’t you always say two wrongs didn’t make a right?” Shiloh offered weakly.
“Get the ******** out with your self-righteous bullshit.” Oliver was shaking his head. “I’ll find my own answers. Even if I ******** up and make mistakes, at least they’ll be my own this time.”
In the wake of the argument, Shiloh swore he could hear a pin drop. Maybe there really wasn’t anything else to say here.
There wasn’t a good bye. There wasn’t a see you later. There was only the silence of turning, Shiloh’s shoes spinning around with a jagged type of apathy, his hand reaching for the doorknob in front of him. He hesitated. Looking over his shoulders, blue eyes met blue, and for a heartbeat it seemed like there might be some sort of reconciliation, that that might talk again, that one of them might crack. This was a familiar scene in a memory reel of different lifetimes, Shiloh at the door, sometimes Ollie at the door, their ages vast, their arguments a range of petty insults and life altering discussions. They always made up, but sometimes—sometimes, it felt like there wasn’t any way to bounce back—and for Shiloh, this felt like one of them.
The door opened, the door closed, and all that was left between them was an insurmountable amount of grey matter.