(no subject)

[peki]

Title: Through the looking glass (5/?)
Genre: Twins gen
Rating: PG13
Summary: Tom falls asleep one night and wakes up in a place he never thought he'd see again. Five years ago, Tom falls asleep one night and wakes up in a place he couldn't wait to see. Will they get back where they belong?


“I swear you’re even more paranoid than you used to be.”

Startled, Tom turned his attention back from his covert surveillance of the market square to his brother, who sat across from him at a plastic table, his pierced eyebrow raised, smiling his wide, crooked smile. It had been a long time since Tom had been out in public for ice cream like this, unbothered; he wasn’t used to it anymore and it made him nervous, but he didn’t have the heart to tell Bill why. “In the future we’re really famous and important,” he half-joked. “Can’t go out like normal people.”

Bill tilted his head. “I think you’re just getting more neurotic with old age.”

Tom kicked him under the table. “You don’t even know what that word means.”

“Do too!” Bill exclaimed. He pulled out a small, battered notebook that Tom knew held words and phrases that Bill had come across and deemed interesting enough for later use. “Here, I copied it down just for you. ‘Neurotic. Prone to excessive anxiety and emotional upset.’”

“That’s not what that means,” Tom protested. “And you’re the one with the ‘emotional upset’.”

“Yeah, well, maybe we split that between us,” Bill grinned. “But the anxiety part is right on. You were so anxious that it all wouldn’t work out, that we wouldn’t really become rich and famous, and now look at us.” He spread out his arms in a grand gesture.

“You’re not rich and famous,” Tom said. “And you still have a zit on your chin.”

Bill covered his chin under the pretence of propping it up in one hand and studied Tom levelly. “I’m not famous yet,” he said, “but I will be. And so will you.”

“I already am.” Pensive, Tom stirred his melting lemon sorbet in the sparkling glass bowl that the waitress had set before him. She must be in her twenties, short and curvy, with nice, curly brown hair and big tits; while she took their order, Tom had laid on the charm as he usually did with a pretty female, but she hadn’t spared him a second glance. He wondered if it would’ve been that way always if they hadn’t gone on to become rock stars, and if he wouldn’t have preferred it that way. But then, life always did look different in retrospective, and especially when you got to live it all over again. “It’s not really the way you imagine it.”

“But some of it is, yes?” Bill asked eagerly. “We’re loaded, right? We make money off our music? And we have fans and stuff?”

“And stuff, yeah.” Smiling, Tom studied his twin’s younger face. This Bill had the same eyes as his older counterpart, the same overall features, the same mannerisms about him, and yet Tom only saw all the tiny differences: the way young Bill’s nose still seemed too large for his face, his crooked teeth and worn clothes, his squeaky teen voice.

What was almost shocking, though, was the look of wide-eyed innocence on Bill’s eager, open face, the emotions displayed so clearly for anyone to see and exploit. At twenty, Bill had long learned to hide behind his perfect mask of glitter paint and dazzling smiles; seeing the reminder of what had once been before him, Tom felt his heart go out to his brother for all that he’d had to…would go through. Bill knew nothing of that yet. He only dreamed of a bright, shining future.

He had a point too, Tom had to admit; the sorbet in Loitsche’s one decent café didn’t taste nearly as good as he remembered, and if not for the cashflow from the future, they wouldn’t have been able to sit down and eat huge bowls full of ice cream anyway.

“Would you want to change any of it?” Bill asked suddenly. “The future, I mean? If you could?”

Even like this, with five years and countless life-changing events between them, Bill was still too damn attuned to Tom’s thoughts. Tom snorted. That’d probably never change. Nothing would ever change, not really; they’d go on to become rich and famous, they’d both change in their own, subtle ways, but the way they were together would always be the same. They’d grow, grow up, like vines grew; entangled forever, never to be separated.

“No,” he said truthfully. “It’s still our dream. It’ll always be our dream. Just, don’t expect it to be perfect.”

“I don’t,” Bill smiled. “How could it be, you’re still our guitarist, right?”

Tom growled in outrage and his twin cackled. “You know if we fight, I’ll win,” Tom threatened.

“Don’t care,” Bill laughed. “Oh, oh, oh, you’re still such a grumpy old man… You’re not going to change much, are you? Good. I like you like you are.”

Tom shuffled his feet under the table. Bill’s random declarations of feeling were nothing new, obviously, but in public like they were, Tom felt vulnerable. He sighed, reminding himself for the millionth time that the people at the table next to them weren’t undercover reporters from Bild with tape recorders hidden under their jackets. Not here, not now, anyway. He licked his spoon clean, then pushed the ice cream bowl away. “Let’s go.”

Bill jumped to his feet readily enough, electrified by Tom’s promise of shopping. “Okay. Where to?”

Tom shrugged. “Wherever you want.” It wasn’t like there were many places in Loitsche that catered to Bill’s taste in clothing. In fact, he was pretty sure they were going to end up at the thrift store even before Bill turned in that general direction, and his suspicions were confirmed soon enough. Bill skipped a few paces ahead and then stopped in front of a small shop in a side street.

He turned back to Tom, his face lit up with the bright, winning smile that’d make girls helplessly, hopelessly cream themselves just a few years later, and actually batted his eyelashes. “Anything I want?”

Tom rolled his eyes. This was his twin as he knew him. “Yeah, sure.”

With a squeak and a flail of limbs, Bill ran off to ransack the store. Tom trotted after him at a more sedate pace, entering the shop to find his brother wreaking havoc as he went through the racks of clothing. Tom positioned himself by the jackets where Bill would inevitably end up and amused himself picking out the ones that Bill was most likely to love and adore and cherish forever, until he found the next best thing, of course.

A battered black leather jacket with lots of silver zippers peeked out from between a child’s down jacket and a fake fur coat; Tom could’ve sworn he’d seen that jacket on his brother somewhere in the future, or was that the past? - but before he had managed to sort out the muddled timeline in his head, Bill had arrived by his side and made a grab for one leather sleeve. “Ooooh!” he made ecstatically, pulling out the jacket that turned out to be tiny and adorned all over with silver studs and just Bill’s thing; Tom was absolutely certain now he knew that very jacket, but he bit his tongue and looked suitably doubtful as Bill put it on and pranced around in front of a mirror in the same manner he would years later in Gucci and Dior Homme.

“What do you think?” Bill cooed at his reflection.

“You look stupid,” Tom gave the required response, and his brother squeaked happily and hugged the jacket around his thin frame.

“I love it!” he declared. “I adore it and will cherish it forever.”

“Sure,” Tom said mildly. “Go on, get it. And then we’ll go buy mom some flowers.”

Half an hour later, they were on their way back home, walking along the bumpy road that led out of town. Bill was skipping along sweating profusely in his new jacket and the enormous bouquet they’d bought for Simone was shedding pollen all over Tom’s t-shirt; it was a beautiful summer evening following a good day, in spite his doubts and confusion about where he was and what the hell they were going to do.

Their mom was in the front yard when they arrived, feeding the pets which were chasing each other across the lawn. She looked up as they approached, smiling in welcome, and Tom felt his heart constrict in his chest. Much as they’d hated the town and the people in it, this place had been home for a long time. He loved the house in Hamburg, but coming home to his mother now as he hadn’t in years, he felt a rush of emotion welling up inside.

He stepped up to Simone and shoved the bouquet at her, then, on impulse, reached out and hugged her hard, flowers and all. Simone laughed, surprised. “Tom! What is this, it’s not my birthday or Mother’s Day or anything!”

Tom didn’t know what to say, how to explain. Shuddering, he bowed his head over Simone’s and kissed the crown of her head.

“Oh, honey,” she murmured tenderly, sensing what Tom needed on a mother’s instinct. She stroked his back, a steady, soothing motion that reminded him of long-ago childhood days. “My goodness, still so skinny! I was hoping that you’d fill out a little when you stopped growing.”

Tom pouted. He had filled out, he just hadn’t gotten any fatter. “Bill is much worse.”

“Worse!” Simone’s tone became alarmed. “I don’t get to cook for you often enough in the future, do I.”

“No,” Tom muttered. He squeezed her again with wild affection, missing her so much all of a sudden even though she was right there in his arms.

“Hey!” a cheerful voice said, “Group hug!” and then two long, spindly arms came around him from behind, hugging him and Simone both.

“Bill!” he protested, trying half-heartedly to shake his brother off.

“Oh, boys!” Simone laughed. “Now whose idea was it to buy those beautiful flowers?”

“Mine!” they said in unison.

Their mother laughed harder. She reached up to pat Tom’s cheek, and even though Tom wanted to squirm, it felt too good to resist. No one could see him here, he thought, and leaned in to the touch shamelessly, relishing the closeness of two of the people he cared about most. If only his Bill was here, he missed their mother too, he needed this too, he would--

“They are lovely,” Simone said gently. “Here, now, let me go put them in water. Dinner is almost ready. Come inside?”

“Okay,” Tom whispered. “Okay.” Reluctantly, he let her go, then reached around to grab Bill, who still clung to his back. Tom half-flung him over his shoulder and Bill hit the grassy ground with a gasp, the wind being knocked out of him by the impact. “Dinner!” Tom barked at him and took off as quickly as his oversized pants would allow. First at the dinner table won. It had always been that way.

Gordon was sitting on one of the mismatched chairs at the kitchen table when they came running inside. He was restringing one of his guitars and looked up in surprise as the not-quite-twins tumbled through the door, shoving each other with their elbows. “Well, hell,” was his assessment. He looked at Tom closely, a small smirk tugging at his mouth. “And I thought your mom was playing a joke on me.”

Simone came bustling in with the bouquet in a vase. She beamed at Tom. “No joke, darling. Isn’t he handsome?”

“Quite the threat to the ladies, I’m sure,” Gordon said dryly. He winked at Tom. “How’s your guitar playing coming, Tom?”

“Great,” Tom grinned. “We’ve three albums’ worth of songs now, and some to spare.”

“Three albums!” Bill gasped. He elbowed Tom hard. “Why haven’t you told me that?”

“You’re not supposed to know everything yet,” Tom told him.

Gordon sobered at that. “We need to talk about some things, though.” He glanced at Simone. “Bill isn’t here, you said?”

“I’m here!” Bill said.

“Future Bill,” Gordon amended. “And Tom, our Tom, is gone?”

“He isn’t gone,” Bill protested hastily. “He’s in the future!”

“We think,” Tom added. Truth was, they didn’t know much of anything. Trying to talk about it only made him realize how uncertain everything was. He shrugged uneasily. “But I’m here and he’s not, so he’s got to be somewhere, and it makes sense he’d be in my place.”

“Hopefully.” Sighing, Simone motioned for them all to sit around the table and began to heap their plates with salad. Young Bill made a face. He picked through his salad for bits he didn’t like and deposited them sneakily on Tom’s plate. Tom batted his hand away.

Gordon looked thoughtful. “If you’re Tom’s future self, shouldn’t you have his memories? Know where he is now, what he’s doing?”

It made sense; as much as any of this made sense, anyway. Tom thought very hard, but when he tried to remember four years back, everything went kind of fuzzy after the clear memory of the day of David’s call about the single release date. It was like there was fog inside his mind, keeping him from seeing just what was going on with his past self in the future.

“I don’t know,” he said, frustrated. “There’s a cloud in my mind, I know there’s something there, I just don’t know what.”

Gordon nodded patiently. “Okay. What exactly did you do before you woke up here?”

That was simple enough. “I fell asleep on the couch at home.”

“And what were you doing before that?”

“Nothing much. Watching old videos with Bill,” Tom shrugged.

“Something must’ve happened,” Gordon persisted. “Something unusual.”

That was the point; nothing unusual had happened at all. “We were just talking.”

“About what?” Bill asked.

“About how young and stupid we used to be,” Tom said. “And then I fell asleep on the couch.”

“What’s the very last thing you remember?” Simone asked.

Tom rubbed his forehead with the back of his hand. His skin felt hot and sweaty. Usually he loved the warmth of summertime, but he’d been getting ready for Christmas and being thrown into a summer day in the countryside was giving him a heat headache. “We were watching old videos,” he recalled, “and I was thinking how I’d like to go back and tell our younger selves a thing or two, and then I fell asleep and when I woke up just that had happened.”

Silence fell as they all pondered this.

“Wait a minute,” Bill said suddenly, “that’s exactly what Tom said, right before he went to bed last night. He’d love to go and talk to himself. In the future.”

“So you both made that wish? At the same time?” Simone wondered.

“How can we have made it at the same time? You, this, happened almost five years ago, for me,” Tom said.

“But there’s got to be a place, a time right now where you belong, even while you’re here, so maybe you did make that wish at the same time,” Gordon said.

Tom tried to wrap his mind around the idea and failed. Sighing, he hung his head. “Does it matter?”

“Maybe it does.” Gordon slapped his shoulder. “Maybe if you go to bed here tonight wishing that you’ll go back, you will.”

“But I don’t want him to go back!” Bill spoke up loudly. The others all turned to look at him. Bill’s mouth was making strange, wobbly shapes, and his hands were clenched into tight fists on the table. “What if he wishes he’ll go back and then he goes back but our Tom doesn’t make the same wish and then he won’t come back and then future Bill will have two Toms but I will have none!”

Without Tom in his proper place, there’d be no Tokio Hotel. Without Tom in his proper place, there’d be no fame and fortune, no end to the monotony of Bill’s days in Loitsche and the torment he endured at school. Without Tom, there would be no Kaulitz twins, just a lone, strange boy with weird hair and no brother to look out for him, and the future would be irrevocably changed.

And that wasn’t even considering where Tom might end up if he could even leave this place at all.

Tom hadn’t thought of any of that before. He swallowed hard, sudden, terrifying anxiety choking him up. The novelty of reliving a day in the past, the fun of it only masked the inherent danger of a million things that might affect the future, put them on a path they hadn’t ever been supposed to walk.

Tom pushed away his plate, folded his arms on the table and hid his face in his hands. “Oh fuck.”

“That doesn’t seem to be how it works, more than one Tom ending up in the same place,” Gordon pointed out gently. “How often have you wished you could travel to the future and it never worked? It must be something to do with both of them wishing for it like that.”

“What if my Tom likes it so much in the future that he doesn’t want to come back?” Bill asked in a very small voice.

Tom’s head snapped up. “He wouldn’t.”

Bill shrugged uneasily. “Why not? Seems like everything is better there, and if he can just skip ahead and have it all without having to work to get it, wouldn’t he--”

“Bullshit,” Tom said, startled. “That’s not how it works. He’d want back to you, dummy!”

“Why?” Bill asked. He ducked his head and picked at his plate. “There’s a Bill there for him to hang out with.”

“That’s not the same and you know it,” Tom told him angrily. He couldn’t believe Bill would think that of him…of younger Tom. They were close, even here, in this time. How could he doubt that? “You’re an idiot,” he said roughly. “A fucking idiot.”

Bill shrugged. “Just considering all the possibilities--”

“Since when do you ever do that?”

“Since Tom isn’t here to be all pessimistic for both of us!” Bill burst out, and his voice cracked on the last word. “I want him back!”

“And I want back to Bill!” Tom snapped. He bowed his head over his salad and pulled hard at his lip ring with his teeth. His eyes stung. Bill.

With the craziness of the day, Tom hadn’t had a moment to really envision what it must’ve been like for Bill, his Bill, to wake up in the morning and find Tom gone. Where they were, five years from this moment, their family, Loitsche, they only had each other. Bill would freak out if Tom was gone. True, younger Tom might be with him, and Tom was sure he’d keep Bill just as busy as Bill’s younger self had kept him that day, but at the end of the day, they didn’t belong together; they weren’t a matched pair.

He really needed to go back.

“Hey,” a voice said as if from faraway, and it wavered uncertainly between the low, warm tones of comfort Tom so desperately wanted to hear and a high, shrill noise of despair. He glanced over, looked into the face of Bill’s younger self with his eyes half-hidden behind his silly bangs but glossy wet, and Tom knew Bill could feel it too, the fear. “Don’t be sad, I hate it when you’re sad. I’m sorry.”

“You’re sad too, so stop telling me not to be sad!” Tom muttered. “And we both know it’s not supposed to be like this.”

“But it’s okay for now,” their mother interjected gently, and the two of them looked at her across the table. Simone’s brow creased with concern, but her eyes were warm and smiling as always. “It’ll sort itself out. Don’t worry.”

When his mother said it, Tom could almost believe it.

Beside him, Bill sniffled once, then pulled himself together and sat up straighter. “Yeah,” he said. “It’ll be okay. And till then, we’ll have fun. Right?” He turned large hopeful eyes on Tom and Tom couldn’t help himself; he smiled.

“Yeah. We had fun today.”

“We did!” Bill perked up. “Tom bought me a leather jacket!” he told their mom and Gordon. “Did you see?” He puffed out his thin chest proudly. Gordon bit his lip. Simone smiled.

“That’s very nice,” she said. “Please eat some greens, honey, you can’t always have pizza or spaghetti.”

“Yeah we can,” Tom muttered into his salad and beside him, Bill snickered.

Their mom shot them a look and then got up to fetch drinks.

Bill leaned in, his shoulder pressing against Tom’s, and whispered, “Can we really?”

Tom laughed.