Chapter Text
incision had not been the first mistake but, in fact, desperate wanting.
it was a warm, summers day above the clouds of skyhaven. a loathesome weather for a penthouse so high and close to the sky if not for caleb's insistence to run the air conditioner. it had been a kind, natural gesture from your (brother) (lover) caleb. a gesture you returned kindly with crushed, tasteless sleeping pills in his glass of water.
love had always been unconditional in your world. it had to be in order to take shape in your palms—this stainless steel scalpel.
soon enough, caleb was asleep on his side, back turned, as if even in rest, he understood that proximity was a risk. something twisted in you as you watched the slow expansion of his ribs, the measured rise and fall; like he was counting in his dreams, like he was alive. (alive?)
there was a stillness to him similar to a body posed, perhaps because it's always you who falls asleep first that it felt unnatural. you crinkle your nose, bitter and sour at his selflessness and affection that he refused to let you reciprocate in kind. he was conditionally unconditional in that way. deathless for the sole purpose to love-and-love and give-and-give.
caleb, why won't you let me love you?
behind his ear, beneath skin that once held nothing but freckles, sunburn and the memory of your childhood fingers poking at him to annoy him, your face twisted into a scowl at the small, obscene elevation—the toring chip. (seed of order; pit of rot.)
in ways that tear you apart, you feel hysterical.
you tell yourself this thing is only meant to kill him slowly, that this is what is killing him now. as it hollows him out in ways too subtle for anyone but you to notice, you tell yourself that the distance in his eyes can't simply be the natural erosion of the physical, but its obscene interference. (because—you tell yourself—if it were your caleb, he wouldn't let anything come between you two. he promised.)
your jaw then sets at the earliest memory since he had come to life once more, of when he held you and hesitated—just barely. some incomprehensible lag, a persevering translation of his control over its command. and then, there was his arm—in abject, righteous anger, you almost choke.
in a severed, uncaring world; no matter the beginning and end, caleb only had you. (you tell yourself this because the alternative is worse: that he was already, finally, made whole and you were the one who cannot bear it.)
still, truthfully, you could not be blameless. thinking and admitting to yourself for a second that you were not so different from the chip under his skin.
you remember his hands as a boy, sticky with melted popsicle, grabbing yours before you crossed the street. how he used to count to three before jumping into the lake just on the outskirts of the city, every summer, how he would look back at you to make sure you were watching, to impress his little sister.
summer sweat, grass stains, the way he would press his forehead to yours when you cried and whisper that it was fine, it was fine, it was fine. unable to forget the years of when holding his hand meant nothing except that he was there, when nothing about it felt like trespass and that your hands were just meant for holding one another.
what about when all the summers finally come to pass, after this and before then; when it is finally wintertime once more, the two of you could walk in the snow again, maybe. and just like in the past, he'll dig his legs into the cold and hollow out a path for you. right, caleb?
except, now, affection begets sin and error; learning it too late, with his mouth against yours and the taste of something sweet turning overripe.
you wonder, sometimes-turned-always, whether the chip recognizes the absolute, the undeniable.
to you and only you, caleb is everything. lover, friend, brother, mother. blameless, yet the very back that shouldered you and the world—your atlas, the hand that feeds you, the hand at your throat when you forget to breathe. the voice that tells you to eat, to sleep, to live. then, again, the one who died, the one who lives in his own possessed corpse. a black hole that had given you rebirth. the rib you were carved from and the apple you insist on biting even as it bruises in your palm. to love him still feels like oxidation; like sweetness exposed to air until it darkens, until it softens, until it collapses inward. and still you bite, you die, you live. bite-chew-swallow-bite.
taking in the body of your brother in hunger, in rapture and submission.
how have you managed to live with yourself for this long?
sitting up slowly, the mattress shifts and you stop as you hear caleb murmur. a small sound that threads directly into your spine, though he does not wake. in a way, you wish he could sleep so soundly like this forever.
do these memories make you hesitate?
from a young age, you had been taught by caleb at every turn and forked road of your life that trust is a heavy thing. an innocent but demanding thing that presses on your chest until your breathing goes shallow as the act of it all becomes the highest form of desecration. now, all grown up, the truth lives under your tongue like a shard of glass and your throat can't help but tighten around it. your stomach recoils as if you’ve swallowed something that refuses to be digested. whatever, it does not (cannot) change anything, your grip remains around the thin blade. (you must reach into his skin, pluck the parasite from his neck.)
mere flesh to steel, mere kindness to a false life.
the metal is cool and steady in your palm and, unlike you, it does not tremble the way you do. and here, you notice all the absurd details because you cannot afford to think. a faint scratch along the handle, the way your knuckles blanch when you grip too hard, the pulse fluttering at your wrist like something trapped and frantic. what would caleb think? what would he say?
“nice and slow, pipsqueak. just focus… one thing at a time.”
slower and slower, you lean over him and breathe in the scent of his skin, the clean sweat and the smell of your body soap on him. you slide your fingers into his hair, parting it from that skin you want to slice open, and it is as it has always been—soft, warm, obedient to your touch.
without much choice, you then press your thumb to the rise behind his ear, and there it is. all firm and wrong. an intruder to your big brother's body and mind, some execrable piece of plastic designed to choke him into gratitude for another life given; however, like a prophet for a world only you seek to exist in, only you see it for what it truly is. a splinter that never stops festering, a noose drawn in careful pencil lines, another stroke added to the hangman’s body.
you, only you, can make him whole and right again. messiah to your adam that had choked on innocent hubris. he, who had followed you out of eden.
finally, with some brave effort, you lower the blade to his skin, and your breath hitches. you cannot tell whether the roaring in your ears is your own blood or the anticipation of his. then, for a suspended second, you consider stopping, consider lying back down and pretending that you can live with the small, humming thing inside him. except the thought of him partitioned, of any part of him answering to something that is not you or himself, curdles in your gut. (you’re not an idiot, are you?)
you, who wants him singular. wholly himself and wholly yours in the way two bodies can attempt to be one without splitting at the seam. (do it, this is your sacrifice. your turn to spill blood.) so, when the tip of the knife touches him, you commit to memory the way his skin is warm, pliant, and alive. the first and last time, you swear. caleb inhales sharply, a reflexive shudder that makes your heart slam so violently you nearly drop the blade.
all for you/him, all for you/him.
as the skin parts with a slow, intimate resistance that feels obscene in its quietness; a line opening under your hand, a thin red seam blooming. you try not to think of what you might look like, looking at the blood welling carefully as beads gather along the incision like small, luminous pearls. one swells, trembles, and slips free, trailing down the slope of his neck. you watch it travel down its path, and suddenly you feel hypersensitive to your own body. your tongue sitting wrong in your mouth, your breathing off pace from your own heartbeat, your palms warming up and feeling like lead. the blood—it leaves a path behind, a red thread mapping the curve of him.
caleb's blood is as thick as you would have imagined, and at this thought, you swallow. the worst part has come.
you brace your wrist against his shoulder, feeling the muscle there, the heat, the undeniable fact of him still alive. deepening the cut as more blood surfaces, warmer-slicker-caleb coating your fingers. it smells metallic and real, as does the blood that you've bled during your own missions.
(“caleb, caleb, please, forgive me.”) when caleb makes a low sound in his sleep again, pained and confused, the sound goes through you like judgment. this was it—you're a horrible sister, the thought says, clean and merciless. you, selfish and always eager to finish the game, the one who learned how to kill him in games before you even understood what it really meant to die, along with all the games he'd let you win. you, the one who could not leave well enough alone—and yet you cannot stop.
(“you’ll forgive me, right?” you whisper, hushing him uselessly with a facsimile of caleb's gentleness. trying hard to mirror it back to him, though it all sounds fragile coming from you.)
you slide the blade further, seeking the edge of the chip beneath flesh. the metal scraping against something harder, and the sensation vibrates up your arm; there it was, tangible, the foreign body revealing itself under pressure. adjusting your angle with care that bordered on tenderness as your free hand spreads against his back, fingers splaying as if you can hold him together while you take him apart. it was at this point that your breath became ragged and began to echo into your skull, each inhale catching halfway down your throat as the pillow, the sheets became saturated with red.
you want to touch him, embrace him as he bleeds asleep, until the guilt was burned down into something unrecognizable—not at all forgiven, not even absolved but just completely-absolutely ruined and scorched into a shape no one, not even god could name again. every prayer you had ever known and forgotten suddenly crowds the back of your throat, brittle little bones trying to lock your hands in place before they move. you feel them there, rattling. some biological instinct to kneel-beg-wait for mercy instead of making it—but you don’t.
you feel the moment you turn away. it happens quietly, like a hinge snapping somewhere deep inside you. a door closing so softly it almost sounds like breath. if god was watching, then you let him watch your back as you leave him there. this was one of the doors that you only shut once.
the place behind his ear remains soft even as it bleeds, even when you've cut into him shallow and trembling; you know this softness too well. you have known it since childhood, when you would brush dirt from that same spot after the two of you stumbled home sunburned from afternoons that refused to end. summers that stretched wide and golden and innocent enough to believe nothing could ever rot. the branches of the asiatic apple tree, always in bloom.
winter could never come.
your hands remember before you allow yourself to, nails scraping at the wound as the scalpel carves out the chip to the surface of his skin. you imagine, once more, the way his fingers used to hook through yours. how he held these hands, ones that now hollow him out, for entire years like the two of you had always been meant to move as one crooked shape. through crowds, sidewalks, and even into the door that burned.
big brother first. always caleb first.
however, time is a patient butcher. it takes something simple and opens it slowly until you’re left staring at what it carved out of it. caleb had worked hard to stitch the days together when they split open, and now you have unravelled it all. his stitches, his skin, his hard work.
your stomach twists when you see how small the toring chip is, peering at you, black-plastic-square from the surface of the wound, though relief hits you so suddenly it almost feels like laughter clawing up your throat. you grip the thing between trembling, clean nails and pull.
it resists, because, of course, it does.
“i’m getting you back,” you whisper. “one at a time.”
prying at the chip, its roots sunk into his flesh like a parasite; for a heartbeat, you falter, what if removing the toring chip destroys something? (what if the rot is not the chip but you?)
caleb shifts again, more violently this time, a strangled gasp escaping him as pain begins to pull him toward waking. still, you had already shut the door—now, you had to see this through, to the end of this relentless pursuit of him whole, even as you are swallowed past the point of mercy.
the resistance slowly-but-finally stretches thin, then gives with a sickening, final tear. the chip comes free in your hand, slick with blood, small and obscene and suddenly powerless. its synthetic veins dripping with specks of your caleb’s gore.
to your horror, caleb jolts awake fully, breath ripping from his lungs, body tensing under yours. blood running more freely now, no longer pearls but thin streams sliding down his neck and into the sheets. the knife falls from your fingers and clatters somewhere distant, irrelevant.
pale-faced and jaw weak, you stare at the chip—a mere, tiny shard of metal slick with caleb’s blood. so small and obscene, dropped to the bloodied sheets with a faint, final sound.
for a long moment, you don’t move. your hands, red and sticky. it doesn't occur to you that you're breathless, and that your head throbs with the loud beating of your own terrified heart. now, you could only stare at your caleb's face. his face—not the stranger’s, not the hollow thing that would embrace you. (caleb, caleb, caleb.)
with shaking hands, you reach out and press your fingers against the wound behind his ear, trying to stop the blood. trying to hold him together now as the truth settles slowly, heavily, into your chest. "i'm sorry, i'm sorry," you plead to his blood, his skin, and the blown out supernova in his eyes.
this is what terrible sisters do.
they split their brothers open in the broad daylight. they search through skin and blood with shaking hands. they tear the wrong thing out and hope—long after turning their backs on god—that what remains will still be the boy who once held their hand beneath a summer sky. selfish, that's what you are.
the sound of your name on his mouth now feels like punishment.
and although there is a silence that follows, raw and enormous. not the surveilled hum you have grown accustomed to, he turns his head slowly despite the pain, eyes finding you with a clarity that knocks the air from your chest. still alive.
he lifts his hand to the wound, touches the blood, looks at it as if it belongs to someone else. his fingers finding yours, bloodied and damp. then, he looks at you with a look of something so terrifying in its purity—recognition. answering you with love, with deliverance regardless of spilt blood; his blood.
this is what terrible brothers do.
the chip now lies discarded in between your knees, soaking the white sheets. returning to its genesis, a mere pit torn from fruit as its rot is finally excised.