Work Text:
You don't need it, a sense of guilt.
All the guilt is my burden,
you just need to have me.
🍎
You’re wearing his hat.
Caleb halts his stride, eyes widening. He was about to call you for dinner, but now he finds himself leaning on the doorframe to silently watch you admire yourself in the mirror.
You still haven’t realised his presence, visibly trying to imitate his posture and gait, even the expression he dons whenever he puts on the Colonel’s “mask”, as you’d call it.
There's something that never failed to fill Caleb with pride, lifting his chin up high, swelling his chest with possessive warmth. Something that he would never reveal is true, would deny that even the mere thought of it makes him giddy.
You were a copycat. His copycat.
He doesn't know precisely when it started. In the labs, maybe, you with your too-big eyes on your too-small face, plastering a band-aid on your unwounded cheek just to match the one on his own face.
"Now I'm just like gege!" A dearly beloved grin, completed by the hole from a missing tooth. Caleb's heart had clenched in his chest.
Of course, he hadn't appreciated the darker parts of it—you insisting that you could get through the next round of experiments unscathed, because you're as strong as gege; you refusing to make a sound whenever they break through your delicate skin with more of those wretched needles, or shove more tubes down your throat, because gege has never cried when they do it to him.
It almost made him want to give in—to let a scream rip out of his throat, cry and thrash out, perhaps even fully break down as they run the tests—just so you wouldn't force yourself to be strong in the name of catching up to this visage of him that you have in your head.
Regardless, it's something that you never quite grew out of.
Even when you both started living with Josephine, you'd still find ways to imitate him—an endearing mix of hero-worship and lack of proper socialization in early childhood. You'd only wear clothes that Caleb would wear, eat food that only Caleb would eat, do things only Caleb would do.
It was good for Josephine only due to the fact that Caleb was such a well-behaved child whenever it concerns your wellbeing.
Caleb had to shield his misbehaviours away from your curious eyes, clinging to his every move, so it should have been easier to be himself the more you grow up and socialize; when Josephine first sent you to school and you finally met other children, acquiring more friends—learning firsthand what humans are supposed to be like—yet something ugly had taken residence inside of him, something that he eventually realised were the seeds of envy finding soil and taking roots within him.
You'd come home, and bring with you new preferences. No longer did you want to dress the way Caleb did, eat the things he ate, do the things he did.
Still, he couldn’t help but feel joy bloom within him at the sight of you growing into yourself, opting to memorise your choices and refreshing his internal notes anew every time your preferences changed as you grew. How you used to hate tomatoes and began to like them, how you used to hate the color pink but then wouldn’t stop collecting pink items once you started university, how you used to dislike a certain type of music only to become obsessed with it in a few years time.
To his shameful relief, your copycat tendencies did not fully leave as expected.
It shows in your tendency to pick up his hobbies and interests, only to either go further (learning a new language) or drop it completely (basketball).
It wasn’t as obvious as it used to be, because your closeness meant that your mirroring tendencies had bled into your daily habits and inclinations, even without you realising: you will only purchase the same brand of shoes as he does, you only eat your eggs the way he likes them, you chose revolvers as your go-to weapon when you finally became a hunter.
You just had to copy everything he did. Including injecting the Toring Chip into your own flesh.
Silly little girl.
His silly little girl.
“Having fun, pipsqueak?”
You jump, broken out of your reverie. It takes a few seconds for you to register that it’s only him, and then it hits you— it’s only Caleb, and you’re wearing his hat, was about to wear his uniform jacket, and had spent the better part of the past five minutes impersonating him.
“Ge. How long have you been standing there?” You say instead, embarrassment creeping up your cheeks.
You quickly put his hat away and walk over to him with your head slightly down, still sheepish.
He only smiles, amusement lingering on the edges of his lips. “Long enough to realise you’d make a shit colonel.”
You whip your head up, brows knitting and face contorting into the same disgusted look you used to often throw at him when you were younger.
“Okay asshole, I’ll report that to your female coworkers and superiors.”
Caleb holds back a snicker.
“Whoa.” Caleb throws his hands up in faux defense. “Nothing against lady colonels in general, little girl. Just a thing against you.”
You bare your teeth, arms crossed petulantly, and Caleb’s suddenly overcome by the desire to seize you by the waist, if only to cross the insufferable distance between the two of you, the agonizing width of a single step.
Caleb wants to bare his own teeth in return, maybe close them around your neck if you’d allow. Mine.
He doesn’t. He’s had enough sin to bear.
"Little Miss." Caleb smiles, rueful, and leans down, shifting to look into your eyes, holding your gaze steadily, not missing the way your breath hitches at the sudden proximity. "Have I ever told you that I love your eyes?"
You blink, confused by the sudden detour in topic, but are nevertheless indulging, eyes never straying from Caleb’s throat, almost burning. "That’s kind of narcissistic. They're almost identical to yours."
He hadn’t missed the way you looked at him, as of late. Perhaps it’s always been there, maybe he was just too guilt-ridden to allow himself to notice. He hadn’t missed the way it would linger, in ways more than just someone mourning would have done—an interesting mix of resentment and visible want, almost ravenous in its nature.
"Not for reasons you’re assuming." Caleb sighs wistfully. If he said he loved you outright, would you even comprehend the magnitude of it?
When Caleb was younger, it was more simple to categorize the feeling as satisfaction. The near-identical eyes were a small reassurance, a shortcut to confirm that you're related, an excuse so that no one would question it whenever either of you would say that you're siblings.
Look, we have the same eyes. What more proof do you need?
It was infinitely easier than having to actually navigate the mess of feelings that clouded the cavity inside of his chest.
Before Bloomshore, it had always been the two of you. You and Caleb. Caleb and you. Two children and the endless, inescapable clinical walls. Caleb knew he was yours ever since you swept your gaze upon him, and he knew you were his the moment you uttered your name to him for the first time. It was a truth as undeniable as the blue skies. A pair of misfits, thrown away by the world, finding home in each other.
Caleb used to categorize it as simple as this: you belonged to each other. That's all that mattered.
After Bloomshore, his view of concepts was forced to expand. He had to start understanding terms such as parents, siblings, friends, and along the future: lovers.
Siblings, Josephine had emphasized, with heavy accusation looming in her gaze. You are her older brother, Caleb, so you have to look out for her. Protect her, guard her.
Caleb had only learnt all those terms a few days prior. He didn’t think that any of it encompassed how he felt towards you. Whatever feelings that had taken root in him concerning you were much deeper, darker. You were his, his, his.
Regardless, all protests had died in his throat at the sight of Josephine’s warning gaze. He didn’t want to be separated from you, and an adult who had legal powers over the two of you seemed like the closest thing to such a threat. So he played along.
Besides, you already called him gege, and protecting you came as easy naturally as breathing. It’s engraved in his very soul, the only flaw in his code.
The role caged him, embraced him, suffocated him, leveraged him. It was simultaneously everything and nothing. He could get away with a lot of things due to the role placed upon him, yet year after year it grew more difficult for the dog to not rattle his collar and chains; for the man to ignore the forbidden fruit dangling in front of him, promising him a future beyond the gates of Eden.
Brother no longer fit, but perhaps it never did in the first place. Nothing, he thought, could contain the full extent of how he felt towards you.
If the roles were truly as definite as he had learnt, then he would have also been your mother and father, with how he raised you. Josephine may have put a roof over your heads and provided you with financial means, but there’s only so much an old, childless researcher could do. It had been Caleb’s tender guiding hand that made sure you grew up well-behaved and well-loved.
He learnt how to cook for you, adjusting to your preferences and allergies; he taught you and made sure you finished your homework; he waited for you to come home and instilled a curfew on you; he drove you everywhere and constantly lectured you on safety; he cut your hair, washed your clothes, made you lunch boxes for field trips; he would run out in the middle of the night to find project ingredients because you forgot to mention it until the last minute.
Anything for his silly little girl.
Anything for you.
This vague dynamic, he thought, is what made the current version of the both of you difficult.
Being suddenly forced to live without him after the incident in Bloomshore District, you had to adapt quickly to the circumstance. You can no longer rely on anyone but yourself, eternally grieving his place as your guardian.
For Caleb, this meant that he’d been stripped off all his previous roles—brother, mother, father, guardian—leaving only the ugly truth that he had refused to acknowledge all his life, the part of him that he had shoved so hard to the back of his consciousness that he could almost trick himself into believing it didn’t exist.
Now, all that’s left is only the sinful part of himself that longed for you, craved you like you were the forbidden fruit existing solely to be his temptation. It was the part of himself that wished you were taken from his ribs, wondering if he could drag you back in, so you’d stay with him forever.
Much like all sides of him, even the darkest, most selfish part of him still belongs to you.
I didn’t kill your Caleb, he thought bitterly. I can’t kill something that’s never truly existed.
“Tell me.” He stands up to his full height, watching the way your eyes widen, your own stance growing firm. “Did I kill your Caleb, or just the Caleb that would bear the weight of our sins alone?”
You frown, taken aback. “Ge—”
Caleb gives in to his impulses, taking a step forward and pulling you close to him. He’s grown exhausted of waiting, waiting, and waiting. He’s filled with so much wanting he might choke from it.
“Won’t you bear this sin with me?” He murmurs, leaning close, knocking your foreheads together.
Did I not fall from grace for you? The thought crashes onto him like torrential waves. Will you not take responsibility for what I have become?
“Caleb—” and the illusion is shattered in an instant. You don’t call him by name because it ruins the dream that her big brother is still alive and well.
He looks down and sees how you swallow, gazing at him with both fear and desire, warring with yourself.
You will lose soon. Not today, but you will. Someday. He knows it, as easy as guessing where you used to hide, as simple as figuring out what made you upset, as natural as caring for your needs.
You are his copycat, and he has long known that this too, is the one thing that you can’t resist imitating, the way you have always walked in his footsteps, unknowingly giving yourself for corruption.
You too, carried the same sin.
Caleb sighs, letting you go. He refrains from smiling when your face falls almost imperceptibly.
“Let’s eat before your dinner goes cold.”
🍎