Waking in Midwinter
Summary: Jasdero and Devit have awakened as Noahs, but still struggle to discover their new strength, just when they've been found by two men from the Order and sentenced to die as monsters.
Prompt: 49. Collapse
Warnings: R for violence.
Jasdero clutched his twin to him. Everything had burned away in his mind and in his eyes except for Devit.
The graveyard was all shadows and mist in the small of the morning. Until the change came, it had been filled with mounded snow. The twins sat behind a tilted gravestone too small to hide them. Jasdero breathed in sharp gasps. He felt as if he were the only one breathing, as if he had to get enough air for two.
Devit had fainted moments after they’d felt the thing like light awaken inside them. It had come upon them with visions and pain, three days before. Now that the memories had taken root Jasdero’s forehead no longer burned, but the marks were crusted with blood he’d yet to clean away.
He could sense the restless images his unconscious twin saw. Jasdero tightened his arms around Devit’s shoulders. Devit’s head was slumped against his chest. Jasdero could feel his slow breaths, but he couldn’t stop his own gasping breaths, too loud for a boy surrounded by the dead.
C’mon, wake up, he silently begged Devit. Wake up!
They had to get out of the graveyard.
Jasdero and Devit had been unable to hide their visions from the others in their tiny, isolated town. The memories had overcome Jasdero first, and he could remember how he couldn’t stop screaming. That was one of the snatches of memory Jasdero could recall from the haze of the last few days. Devit had tried to explain, to protect Jasdero, but soon the memories and pain had taken him too.
Then the men in white had come for them. These men were worse than the townsfolk who had always hated the outsider twins (who hated them back, just as much) and now said that their bleeding was a devil’s mockery. Suddenly everyone wanted Jasdero and Devit locked up or dead.
The white-robed men who came from the outside, from far away, were worse than that. Something in Jasdero’s head told him it had something to do with a substance called innocence that was truly an evil thing. Jasdero and Devit had been shut into a room while the visions possessed them too strongly for resistance. The two men had come in to look at them. To Jasdero, their white robes looked stained with blood and filth, and he’d retched over the side of the cot where he lay by the trembling Devit. The strangers had touched innocence before, and the need to kill them overtook Jasdero so strongly he was out of the bed and stumbling towards them before he knew he’d moved. But the pain was with him too, and he fell to his knees on the hard wood floor. He shook as he tried to lift himself with bloody hands. We… we have to kill them…. He was half to his feet when the shorter stranger seized him by the shoulders. His touch brought on a wave of nausea.
“Is this the sort of thing we’re looking for?” he asked his companion.
The other man came closer. Jasdero wanted to snap his head off. “There’s no discoloration of the skin. And yet, this matches the rumors. As to whether he and his brother are one of them, or merely living a local religious superstition, I can’t yet say.”
The first man touched the bandage, slick with blood, on Jasdero’s forehead. Jasdero backhanded him across the face. Jasdero was strong, and the man reeled. His grip on Jasdero’s shoulder tightened. Trying to pull away, Jasdero kicked at his legs.
“This one’s vicious enough,” the man said, fixing Jasdero with a look of hatred as he put a hand to his bruised cheek. He caught Jasdero’s red-stained wrist when he tried to punch him. The man didn’t know he had to die. Jasdero envisioned strangling him, and saw it so strongly it washed out the actual man from his sight.
Even though Devit was behind him, Jasdero felt how his twin’s lips were moving in strange litany of the visions he saw. But he was climbing towards consciousness. “Fuck you,” Devit said hoarsely. He turned on his side and raised himself. “Fucking get away from him, you filthy-”
The stranger in white was twisting Jasdero’s wrist to the point before it snapped, but Jasdero kept struggling, lashing out with his feet. He had a hand to the stranger’s neck, but for some reason the man’s neck was covered in blood and he couldn’t tighten his grip. The stranger released Jasdero’s wrist, knocked his other hand aside, and punched him in the stomach.
Jasdero coughed up bile onto the man’s robe and doubled up. His forehead felt like it would split open. Fire encroached on the edges of his sight, the small room about to be replaced by the world’s end. The only things Jasdero could discern were Devit shouting obscenities and the stranger’s arm keeping him from falling.
“We don’t know enough-”
Jasdero’s head on the sheets, Devit’s hand on his shoulder.
Devit was smiling, a cruel curve of his lips. It was the natural reaction to his dreams. They promised the end of the world, and Jasdero and Devit could see now how right it was that the world end. Jasdero knew what his twin was dreaming about, and his lips twitched towards a smile even though he needed his twin to wake up, now, and his message was lost in Devit’s fiery dreams.
“Devit,” he whispered, but it didn’t make him wake up. The awakening of Noah’s memories had been so strong it sent Devit plunging into sleep.
But in the instant when the ancient light had finally entered them both, Jasdero had felt Devit’s mind like his own. A connection stronger than before blossomed inside their minds, and there was nothing to break it. When the pain came upon them, it had been shared. Devit’s forehead had ached when Jasdero’s began burning up. During the worst of it, Jasdero had been unable to tell between his pain and Devit’s. But the brief and shining instant when the pain cleared had promised so much more.
Jasdero was Devit and Jasdero.
He couldn’t wait for Devit to wake up, so he could feel how the connection at least, was real.
Nothing else felt real. Though he pressed his back against the rough gravestone and took gasps of cold night air, the visions of the last three days had left him dazed. He had to convince himself that the visions were not so real that they’d made Jasdero’s surroundings false.
His fingers felt numb against Devit’s shoulders.
The world was doomed, but right now men were searching for him and Devit. Some of them were wearing white. Jasdero needed Devit to hear him and wake up, because Jasdero needed him to figure out what to do. If anyone noticed the mist rising from the graveyard…. Although superstition might keep townsfolk away from the night graveyard for a time, Jasdero suspected the men in white were used to ghosts and demons. They had to get farther away.
There could be ghosts and demons around them right now. Jasdero could hardly hear anything past his breathing. He leaned over to peer around the gravestone at the graveyard proper, but he saw no people among the stones. Maybe he could leave now, and carry Devit far enough. At least the mist obscured them, a little.
He shifted his twin to pick him up. He was careful to be quiet and gentle. Jasdero would enter the woods and go down the mountain where there weren’t paths. When Devit woke up and they figured they were strong enough, the two of them would hunt down the dirty men in white.
Yes, when Devit woke up they would think of ways to kill the men together.
Their town wouldn’t be long for this world either. The visions said it had to burn away.
Yes, Jasdero and Devit would come back to their closed-off little town, the closest thing to a home they’d had. It hadn’t been close enough.
Cautious, Jasdero stood with his twin in his arms. His head reeled, and in the mist, shadows, and confusion his vision went blank for a moment. Towards the trees, he reminded himself.
When he stepped into the forest, he had the brief, dizzying sensation that he was carrying himself.
The leaves on the graveyard floor were damp. They didn’t crackle as Jasdero, sucking in deep breaths of moist air, stepped through them. Into the greater darkness of the woods, and he pushed through snow and underbrush. He prayed the searchers wouldn’t run across his trail, or hear him. There was a buzzing in his ears that made it hard to tell what sounds he made in the forest. Jasdero turned downslope and walked parallel to the path, stopping every few steps to make sure Devit was secure in his arms.
In a little while we’ll make it to the bottom of the mountain, Devit, Jasdero told his twin, and that was when an arm hooked around his neck.
The sleeve was white-there was a bad man in the woods, his arm pressed tight against Jasdero’s throat. Jasdero convulsed, drawing Devit closer, then let him fall into the snow. Wake up! he begged. Unable to breathe, he tried to pry away the white-sleeved arm, but although he gripped it almost hard enough to break the bone it wouldn’t let go. Black overtook his vision. He reached frantically for the man’s fingers and bent one back. The arm loosened for a moment-Jasdero took in a gasp of breath. He struggled to free himself, to break away or at least twist to face the horrible man.
But then the man had his other hand around Jasdero’s and snapped back two of his fingers.
Jasdero shrieked in pain and rage. He fought harder to escape the man he couldn’t even see, but the man pinned Jasdero’s arms with an arm iron-tight around his chest. A hand around his neck, fingers pressed against the vein.
In Jasdero’s last seconds of consciousness his sight was on the dim form of his twin. Wake up wake up help me help run away you have to run please help me wake up and run please run-
It was very dark.
The signal came through clear in the complete darkness. WAKE UP, it said, and Jasdero woke up. He awoke in a panic to see that he was somewhere completely different. There was a stone wall flickering with candlelight and shadows. The room smelled of kerosene. Where was this place? A lair, a base for the bad men? Jasdero was on his stomach on the floor, and he couldn’t move his arms. His broken fingers burned with pain, though it was nothing near the pain he’d felt from the visions.
Jasdero was standing up, too-no, that was Devit, and he was fighting. Jasdero could feel his twin’s desperation and ferocity, and when he strained his eyes upwards he saw Devit standing by him, wielding a bloody shard of glass. Devit lunged at two figures in white, who backed away into deeper shadows. Devit stood in a defensive stance with his weapon raised, calculating how best to slit their throats. When he moved, he cast black shadows.
“Devit…” Jasdero whispered. His throat was bruised. He felt other bruises down his arms and chest, unless those were Devit’s bruises he felt. Through his sleeves, rope cut into his arms and not enough blood was reaching his hands. (But all that was far away.) Jasdero moved his legs to stand. He found they were tied as well, and there was a lancing pain in his ankle.
When Jasdero saw that the shorter man had a gun trained on Devit, he gave a choking cry. He strained against the rope. Jasdero wished his hands were free now and he had the gun, that would show the bad man for putting Devit in danger and punching Jasdero in the stomach. Devit stayed back. But the man did not shoot.
What kept Jasdero from complete panic was the sensation that he was watching something unreal, a play enacted before his eyes. Even when he looked at Devit, he didn’t seem real except for his mind, which blazed like a twin star to Jasdero’s mind. Jasdero closed his eyes, and thought maybe they were the same star. He strained to go to Devit. How unfair that his arms and legs were tied and he couldn’t run into the play.
He opened his eyes to watch.
The other man in white said, “Put the gun away.”
“But they’re all we suspected,” said the first. His lip curled. “Look close, their skin’s gone gray-I’ve never seen that shade on a human. Nobody alive, anyway.”
“We have our orders. Shooting him is not necessary at this point.” To Jasdero’s horror, the second man pulled out a long knife.
His shard of glass catching the candlelight, Devit ran for him.
“Stop!” Jasdero cried in a strangled voice.
The first man fixed his gun on Jasdero and yelled “Drop it or I’ll shoot the-”
Devit collided with the second man. The man’s knife caught his left arm. Jasdero screamed when he felt the long gash opened below Devit’s elbow. Devit screamed too, a scream ending in “Fucking die!” as he dug the glass into the man’s chest. A splotch of blood spread beneath the man’s collarbone.
The shorter man fired. Jasdero winced and closed his eyes, but he hadn’t been hit. A warning shot.
But while Devit struggled to pull his weapon from the taller man’s cloak, the man pressed his knife to Devit’s neck. Devit drove the shard of glass deeper into the man’s chest. The man gasped. “Restrain him,” he told the other as he twisted his knife to cut the skin of Devit’s shoulder.
“Stop it,” whimpered Jasdero. He reached a kneeling position, but the pain came back in his ankle and anyway he couldn’t stand. Over and over, he wished the filthy white-robed men dead in his mind.
They were supposed to fall, to die in any of a dozen different ways. Devit knew this, and Jasdero knew this, and they sought it together with all the strength they had.
But the men did not fall.
The shorter one took Devit’s arms and forced them together behind his back. His left arm was messy with blood that dripped down past the strips of cloth bandaging his wrist. The knife still pressed against Devit’s neck. Jasdero could see it and feel it, silver and cold.
With a sound of pain, the tall one pulled Devit’s shard of glass from below his collarbone. “We’ll move him to the cell before he can work free again. The other one too, in the other cell. Make sure they’re fully restrained.” He set the bloody shard on a shelf between two candles.
Jasdero stared up at his twin, held by the hateful men.
“You’re all going to die, you know,” Devit told them through gritted teeth.
When Jasdero woke again, there was pain stabbing through the back of his head. The last thing he remembered was the shorter man wrestling him into a cell. Jasdero had struggled as wildly as he could, wanting to kill the man so bad it hurt worse than his broken fingers and all the bruises. He couldn’t do much with his hands and legs tied. He’d only slowed the man down. The man in white swore at him and, when they were in the cell, slammed him against the wall. Once, twice and his head smashed against the stone.
He hadn’t been unconscious for long. It was still dark. A couple wavering points were candles outside his cell. A voice droned just beyond his hearing. Jasdero felt like throwing up from the pain in his skull, but somewhere in his mind he also felt euphoria.
After all, he was almost-almost-awake.
Devit, Jasdero thought. He sat up, back to the wall, and looked over to see his twin slumped against the wall in mirror image. Devit was through bars: an adjacent cell.
Jasdero felt a spark. Devit opened his eyes, and Jasdero felt a thrill of surprise to see the glint of gold. (It was right that they be gold.)
Devit’s left arm was crusted with dried blood. Jasdero drew up his knees and rested his head on them. He moved his hands against the bindings on his wrists. Painful, but if he tried maybe he could break them, because Jasdero was stronger than he looked. Then he’d protect Devit by snapping the necks of the men in white-they deserved worse than a broken arm, like Jasdero’d done to another boy in town during a fight.
Everyone deserved worse, now.
As he worked at the rope he watched Devit. Devit stared back, sidelong from one eye. It made Jasdero dizzy. Lights played at the edge of his vision.
Devit made a little laughing sound in the back of his throat. He licked his lips and said in a bare whisper,“How funny would it be if we died now?”
Jasdero thought it would be more fun if the men in white died and he and Devit left, free. Besides, they’d just died.
They’d died a long time ago, too. Jasdero didn’t need to ask Do you remember because he already knew Devit did. Jasdero and Devit weren’t even adults yet, but part of them was so old it made Jasdero feel small, like he were standing there staring up at a giant gravestone covered in half-familiar words. Jasdero stared at nothing and, in his mind, walked along beside the memory in stone and wood. It distracted him from the pangs from his numbed hands as he strained against the ropes. He felt the gash in Devit’s arm, too, and to distract Devit, he told the beginnings of a story:
“A real long time ago…”
Devit looked up. “When nobody spoke like us.…”
“A real long time ago, in the desert, by a river…” Jasdero could remember images from the far side of millennia.
“…when everything began…”
“…where everything was born…”
“…we were born,” said Devit, and stopped. They thought on what they’d just said. Words couldn’t convey the distance, the sand so old it was part of another world. But light had blossomed there, and part of the light was what they now called Jasdevi, and it lived in them now, prickling their foreheads with its words. Its words were even trickier than the letters in books, like the tattered book of fairy tales they’d found stashed moldy in the cellar. Together they’d barely made sense of it, for the letters ran together into nonsense for Jasdero, who knew some of their names but not often their sounds. He could feel the ancient light’s letters burning inside him and Devit, unlike the faded letters on the page. The light-letters overpowered him so that he couldn’t read their meaning. Could Devit understand them?
Devit who was Devit and Jasdero. If the light told them anything, it told them that. (Though Jasdero had always known, ever since he’d been born.) The letters were trying to tell him more, though, and he tried and tried to read them, but the meaning eluded him. Jasdero wanted to press his fingers to the bloody stigmata on his forehead, as if he could feel the meaning through his fingertips. But the bindings still held him back.
Someone save us, he thought. Someone come. They’d always been so helpless, in their town, surrounded by people who called them (especially Jasdero) off somehow, and the twins grew up thinking the townsfolk as foreign and twisted as the townsfolk found the twins. But they hadn’t been able to save themselves. They could only wait-to grow up? For God? For something, and it had come, but now they were trapped again, waiting.
Despite his helplessness, Jasdero struggled.
He thought-and hope shot through him-that the bindings were looser. To read the marks, to get himself and Devit out….He worked against them as the glare of light and sand consumed his sight in the dark cell.
Devit was straining to hear the bad man’s words. Jasdero couldn’t see how they could be important, but in the silence he caught a few.
“Wiser to…before the change.”
He could almost slip one of his hands free.
“Stronger than we th….Nothing…s ever happened before. …not even sure if they’re….”
Was the bad man talking to himself? wondered Jasdero, and the bindings around his wrist were no longer enough to hold his hands tight. He tugged his right hand free, despite the pain, and the first thing he did was touch trembling fingers to the bandage at his forehead. Nothing there but the absence of the pain that came from visions. Jasdero looked to Devit.
“Devit…” he whispered.
“Shhhh!” Devit whispered fiercely.
Jasdero reached through the bars, but Devit’s arms were attached to the wall. He was just out of reach, though Jasdero tried.
From the other room, clearly, a “Yes, sir.
Footsteps became a man in white entering the room with the holding cells. He was holding something that looked like a bat with a single round eye. “You’re to tell us what you know,” he said, and there was hard edge to his voice.
“What would we know?” said Devit, and maybe the man missed the heavy irony. They knew almost nothing of what had happened to them, but at the same time they’d been blessed with knowledge of the fiery waiting future. The distant past, and the near future: ways to end the world.
Ways to end lives…
“Then you’re to die,” said the man. “Or your brother.” His eyes widened as he looked at Jasdero, and Jasdero realized that he was prying under his bandage with his better hand. He bared his teeth at the man in white.
“Again?” the man said, and released the strange bat to fly out from the room. Desperate now, Jasdero fumbled at the tight ropes around his legs.
The man had a knife in his hand. The same knife he’d used to slash Devit’s arm. Now he’d slit Devit’s throat like a lamb’s. (And Jasdero wondered that the image would come to him like this, when nobody in the town raised sheep, though he’d seen pictures in an old church book.) He was unlocking the cage now, he was pressing the knife tight to Devit’s throat.
“Guess we are gonna die now,” said Devit, his voice thick with irony as he looked aside at Jasdero, and it was such a bad joke that Jasdero’s throat clogged up and he started to cry. He reached through the bars for the horrible man, and for his twin, who he could see as clearly as ever. Although terrified almost beyond words, Devit looked up at the man with defiance, and (because part of him was now very, very old) contempt.
“Do you know anything about Noah?” the man asked, regarding Jasdero with a curl of his lip. Jasdero knew this game: it was the one where the bad man asked questions and they tried not answer.
No, Jasdero wanted to say. But he choked on the word.
A long silence. “Are you from the Clan of Noah?” asked the man, saying it like it was a secret thing. “Do you have anything to say? Or shall I proceed with the execution?”
No, Jasdero wanted to say, but he knew it was a lie.
The bad man’s voice shifted, and for a moment he sounded sorry. “I’m sorry to kill two children like you, even if you tried to kill me. But you’re not exactly human now...” And just as Jasdero felt the knife moving against his throat, Devit said, “We’re a part of them.”
It was the most dangerous thing to say, but in that moment it kept him from death. The knife was pulled away from Devit’s throat. (Jasdero, golden eyes closed tight, felt this.) “You are?” breathed the man, and he called for the other white-coated devil.
Jasdero opened his eyes (Devit’s eyes), and saw Devit (himself) looking up at the man with lidded eyes. Wake up, he thought to Devit, to himself, and wrapped his bruised arms around the cell bars. Not something his strength could take away.
Not this kind of strength, he thought, and strained to make out the letters hidden in the light. It bound him and Devit together, that light. They should be able to read what bound them together. Read it, he begged, though Devit already knew as well as he.
Jasdero stared, mute and desperate, into Devit’s eyes, which suddenly went wider in panic. Jasdero hadn’t noticed the second man in white entering his cell until he hauled Jasdero up with a filthy hand at his throat. In reflex, Jasdero grabbed the bars, but the man tore him away. Jasdero’s still-bound feet dragged on the floor. Devit was screaming at the men to stop. He yelled profanity and threats that the men ignored. The man with the knife, who stood looking down at Devit, said to his companion, “No need to be that rough! We won’t kill them if we can learn something useful.”
“You know how goddamn dangerous they are,” the other countered. “We won’t need this one.” And his grip tightened on Jasdero’s throat: a methodical strangling. Jasdero stopped reaching for the bars and tried to pull the man’s arms away, but he was already choking, and Devit was trapped with a knife pointed at his heart. If either of them died, the light would be gone. It was only just born, only just filling Jasdero and Devit’s bones. Jasdero was filled with rage at how unfair it was. He wanted to be both for longer. They wanted to be one for longer.
They wanted to find out what else the light said.
Tears ran down his face-he had always been quick to cry-as he felt the evil man in white killing him. Tears ran down Devit’s face too. Jasdero could no longer discern the words Devit choked out, but that didn’t matter because he could feel them. Devit’s existence pulled at his, willing him not to go. Don’t go. Not that. We aren’t the ones who’re supposed to die. Somebody help us.
Jasdero clung to life. He had always been stronger than he looked. But there was nobody to save them.
Nobody but us, they thought, and in the dark madness of strangulation Jasdero felt a warm light on his eyelids. God? he thought, but he recognized that the light as something he and Devit had imagined.
The hands slackened at his neck. Jasdero sucked in a breath. His eyes cracked open.
There was a shining figure standing between the cells. Almost too bright to look at, it had long and flowing hair, and a flowing robe the faint red-brown of ancient rust. Jasdero looked at himself and Devit, standing together outside their bodies. The bars melted in on themselves, dripping like stalagmites. The whole room was filled with silence.
The figure must have been too bright for the men to look at, because they hid their eyes, the man by Jasdero’s body cowering back. It turned its face to Jasdero-it looked like Devit-and smiled, a smile cruel and reassuring. Jasdero felt himself smiling in a way he knew to be exactly the same. In his cell-no, it was all one cell now-Devit too was smiling, although he was still shackled to the wall.
They needed something to kill with, so the figure held a great curving knife. With one stride and a lift of the knife, the figure cleaved into the man by Jasdero. Jasdero was released. He slid down to sit against the wall, awed at the power that was his and Devit’s own.
The bad man with the knife stared, and that second was all the light needed to plunge its curved knife into the bad man’s neck where he stood over Devit. Dispassionately, Devit watched him fall, blood pouring down onto the stones of the floor. The little bat-thing fluttered wildly away, but a beam of light snaked out and it crumpled into crackling wire and scattered across the floor.
They needed Devit free, so with a touch his hands were released. Jasdero, sucking in breath, favoring one leg, climbed over the one who’d been cut from shoulder to heart. Devit…
Through the melted bars and past the figure to his twin. For a long moment they stared at each other, and the light washed over them. Then like sunset it faded. Jasdero looked round after it and saw that the door was gone too. Ignoring the filthy dead man (at last it was right, at last they were as dead as they should be) he extended his hand to Devit, feeling like he reached for himself. Devit clasped his arm and stood.
Jasdero and Devit remembered, thought Jasdero, and it was like he was thinking of a single person.
There was the rattle of the outer door opening. As one, they turned to see a curly-haired man in a getup that the townsfolk would have called a gentleman’s suit if they’d seen it. Supporting each other, they watched with fierce wariness, but, with a surprised expression, the man tilted his hat back and they read the things on his forehead. His eyes were golden.
“Who’re you?” croaked Devit, because although the letters told them some things, it didn’t tell them names.
The gentleman’s gaze rested on each of the corpses for a moment, then settled on Jasdero and Devit’s foreheads. “Two of them?” he said to himself. Then he took on a relaxed grin, and, to them, said, “I’m family. I’ve come to take you to your new home. The name’s Tiki-and it’s a pleasure to meet you.” He nodded his head. “We were worried when we learned you’d been taken…”
The shining figure that Jasdero and Devit had formed together was gone, but they knew they could call it back at any moment. If the men in white came after them again, they knew what to do; and they were not too much in awe of this man, either, though they found his resemblance to them fascinating. We don’t need you, they thought. We can save ourselves, with our own power.
But they would go with him.
“You two need any help? The door home’s not far, just outside.”
Stubborn, Devit shook his head, answering for both of them. The door to Devit’s cell was gone, so they stepped through and after Tiki, who turned on his heel and walked from their prison. The horrible dim cell and its bodies behind them, Jasdero and Devit emerged onto snow. They were on a side of the mountain they’d never visited before, but they knew the direction of the graveyard where they’d hidden. Above them the night was clear and cold and bright with familiar stars. It was a good thing Jasdero and Devit’s star was closer, Jasdero thought, and as warm as the sun. They could feel it, a single thing pulsing inside them.
A doorway stood in the middle of a snowdrift. Tiki faced it, then turned to the twins. “Ready?” he asked.
At the same instant, they grinned up at him together under the vastness of stars.
---
The End
(Happy Birthday, psycho twins!)
Prompt: 49. Collapse
Warnings: R for violence.
Jasdero clutched his twin to him. Everything had burned away in his mind and in his eyes except for Devit.
The graveyard was all shadows and mist in the small of the morning. Until the change came, it had been filled with mounded snow. The twins sat behind a tilted gravestone too small to hide them. Jasdero breathed in sharp gasps. He felt as if he were the only one breathing, as if he had to get enough air for two.
Devit had fainted moments after they’d felt the thing like light awaken inside them. It had come upon them with visions and pain, three days before. Now that the memories had taken root Jasdero’s forehead no longer burned, but the marks were crusted with blood he’d yet to clean away.
He could sense the restless images his unconscious twin saw. Jasdero tightened his arms around Devit’s shoulders. Devit’s head was slumped against his chest. Jasdero could feel his slow breaths, but he couldn’t stop his own gasping breaths, too loud for a boy surrounded by the dead.
C’mon, wake up, he silently begged Devit. Wake up!
They had to get out of the graveyard.
Jasdero and Devit had been unable to hide their visions from the others in their tiny, isolated town. The memories had overcome Jasdero first, and he could remember how he couldn’t stop screaming. That was one of the snatches of memory Jasdero could recall from the haze of the last few days. Devit had tried to explain, to protect Jasdero, but soon the memories and pain had taken him too.
Then the men in white had come for them. These men were worse than the townsfolk who had always hated the outsider twins (who hated them back, just as much) and now said that their bleeding was a devil’s mockery. Suddenly everyone wanted Jasdero and Devit locked up or dead.
The white-robed men who came from the outside, from far away, were worse than that. Something in Jasdero’s head told him it had something to do with a substance called innocence that was truly an evil thing. Jasdero and Devit had been shut into a room while the visions possessed them too strongly for resistance. The two men had come in to look at them. To Jasdero, their white robes looked stained with blood and filth, and he’d retched over the side of the cot where he lay by the trembling Devit. The strangers had touched innocence before, and the need to kill them overtook Jasdero so strongly he was out of the bed and stumbling towards them before he knew he’d moved. But the pain was with him too, and he fell to his knees on the hard wood floor. He shook as he tried to lift himself with bloody hands. We… we have to kill them…. He was half to his feet when the shorter stranger seized him by the shoulders. His touch brought on a wave of nausea.
“Is this the sort of thing we’re looking for?” he asked his companion.
The other man came closer. Jasdero wanted to snap his head off. “There’s no discoloration of the skin. And yet, this matches the rumors. As to whether he and his brother are one of them, or merely living a local religious superstition, I can’t yet say.”
The first man touched the bandage, slick with blood, on Jasdero’s forehead. Jasdero backhanded him across the face. Jasdero was strong, and the man reeled. His grip on Jasdero’s shoulder tightened. Trying to pull away, Jasdero kicked at his legs.
“This one’s vicious enough,” the man said, fixing Jasdero with a look of hatred as he put a hand to his bruised cheek. He caught Jasdero’s red-stained wrist when he tried to punch him. The man didn’t know he had to die. Jasdero envisioned strangling him, and saw it so strongly it washed out the actual man from his sight.
Even though Devit was behind him, Jasdero felt how his twin’s lips were moving in strange litany of the visions he saw. But he was climbing towards consciousness. “Fuck you,” Devit said hoarsely. He turned on his side and raised himself. “Fucking get away from him, you filthy-”
The stranger in white was twisting Jasdero’s wrist to the point before it snapped, but Jasdero kept struggling, lashing out with his feet. He had a hand to the stranger’s neck, but for some reason the man’s neck was covered in blood and he couldn’t tighten his grip. The stranger released Jasdero’s wrist, knocked his other hand aside, and punched him in the stomach.
Jasdero coughed up bile onto the man’s robe and doubled up. His forehead felt like it would split open. Fire encroached on the edges of his sight, the small room about to be replaced by the world’s end. The only things Jasdero could discern were Devit shouting obscenities and the stranger’s arm keeping him from falling.
“We don’t know enough-”
Jasdero’s head on the sheets, Devit’s hand on his shoulder.
Devit was smiling, a cruel curve of his lips. It was the natural reaction to his dreams. They promised the end of the world, and Jasdero and Devit could see now how right it was that the world end. Jasdero knew what his twin was dreaming about, and his lips twitched towards a smile even though he needed his twin to wake up, now, and his message was lost in Devit’s fiery dreams.
“Devit,” he whispered, but it didn’t make him wake up. The awakening of Noah’s memories had been so strong it sent Devit plunging into sleep.
But in the instant when the ancient light had finally entered them both, Jasdero had felt Devit’s mind like his own. A connection stronger than before blossomed inside their minds, and there was nothing to break it. When the pain came upon them, it had been shared. Devit’s forehead had ached when Jasdero’s began burning up. During the worst of it, Jasdero had been unable to tell between his pain and Devit’s. But the brief and shining instant when the pain cleared had promised so much more.
Jasdero was Devit and Jasdero.
He couldn’t wait for Devit to wake up, so he could feel how the connection at least, was real.
Nothing else felt real. Though he pressed his back against the rough gravestone and took gasps of cold night air, the visions of the last three days had left him dazed. He had to convince himself that the visions were not so real that they’d made Jasdero’s surroundings false.
His fingers felt numb against Devit’s shoulders.
The world was doomed, but right now men were searching for him and Devit. Some of them were wearing white. Jasdero needed Devit to hear him and wake up, because Jasdero needed him to figure out what to do. If anyone noticed the mist rising from the graveyard…. Although superstition might keep townsfolk away from the night graveyard for a time, Jasdero suspected the men in white were used to ghosts and demons. They had to get farther away.
There could be ghosts and demons around them right now. Jasdero could hardly hear anything past his breathing. He leaned over to peer around the gravestone at the graveyard proper, but he saw no people among the stones. Maybe he could leave now, and carry Devit far enough. At least the mist obscured them, a little.
He shifted his twin to pick him up. He was careful to be quiet and gentle. Jasdero would enter the woods and go down the mountain where there weren’t paths. When Devit woke up and they figured they were strong enough, the two of them would hunt down the dirty men in white.
Yes, when Devit woke up they would think of ways to kill the men together.
Their town wouldn’t be long for this world either. The visions said it had to burn away.
Yes, Jasdero and Devit would come back to their closed-off little town, the closest thing to a home they’d had. It hadn’t been close enough.
Cautious, Jasdero stood with his twin in his arms. His head reeled, and in the mist, shadows, and confusion his vision went blank for a moment. Towards the trees, he reminded himself.
When he stepped into the forest, he had the brief, dizzying sensation that he was carrying himself.
The leaves on the graveyard floor were damp. They didn’t crackle as Jasdero, sucking in deep breaths of moist air, stepped through them. Into the greater darkness of the woods, and he pushed through snow and underbrush. He prayed the searchers wouldn’t run across his trail, or hear him. There was a buzzing in his ears that made it hard to tell what sounds he made in the forest. Jasdero turned downslope and walked parallel to the path, stopping every few steps to make sure Devit was secure in his arms.
In a little while we’ll make it to the bottom of the mountain, Devit, Jasdero told his twin, and that was when an arm hooked around his neck.
The sleeve was white-there was a bad man in the woods, his arm pressed tight against Jasdero’s throat. Jasdero convulsed, drawing Devit closer, then let him fall into the snow. Wake up! he begged. Unable to breathe, he tried to pry away the white-sleeved arm, but although he gripped it almost hard enough to break the bone it wouldn’t let go. Black overtook his vision. He reached frantically for the man’s fingers and bent one back. The arm loosened for a moment-Jasdero took in a gasp of breath. He struggled to free himself, to break away or at least twist to face the horrible man.
But then the man had his other hand around Jasdero’s and snapped back two of his fingers.
Jasdero shrieked in pain and rage. He fought harder to escape the man he couldn’t even see, but the man pinned Jasdero’s arms with an arm iron-tight around his chest. A hand around his neck, fingers pressed against the vein.
In Jasdero’s last seconds of consciousness his sight was on the dim form of his twin. Wake up wake up help me help run away you have to run please help me wake up and run please run-
It was very dark.
The signal came through clear in the complete darkness. WAKE UP, it said, and Jasdero woke up. He awoke in a panic to see that he was somewhere completely different. There was a stone wall flickering with candlelight and shadows. The room smelled of kerosene. Where was this place? A lair, a base for the bad men? Jasdero was on his stomach on the floor, and he couldn’t move his arms. His broken fingers burned with pain, though it was nothing near the pain he’d felt from the visions.
Jasdero was standing up, too-no, that was Devit, and he was fighting. Jasdero could feel his twin’s desperation and ferocity, and when he strained his eyes upwards he saw Devit standing by him, wielding a bloody shard of glass. Devit lunged at two figures in white, who backed away into deeper shadows. Devit stood in a defensive stance with his weapon raised, calculating how best to slit their throats. When he moved, he cast black shadows.
“Devit…” Jasdero whispered. His throat was bruised. He felt other bruises down his arms and chest, unless those were Devit’s bruises he felt. Through his sleeves, rope cut into his arms and not enough blood was reaching his hands. (But all that was far away.) Jasdero moved his legs to stand. He found they were tied as well, and there was a lancing pain in his ankle.
When Jasdero saw that the shorter man had a gun trained on Devit, he gave a choking cry. He strained against the rope. Jasdero wished his hands were free now and he had the gun, that would show the bad man for putting Devit in danger and punching Jasdero in the stomach. Devit stayed back. But the man did not shoot.
What kept Jasdero from complete panic was the sensation that he was watching something unreal, a play enacted before his eyes. Even when he looked at Devit, he didn’t seem real except for his mind, which blazed like a twin star to Jasdero’s mind. Jasdero closed his eyes, and thought maybe they were the same star. He strained to go to Devit. How unfair that his arms and legs were tied and he couldn’t run into the play.
He opened his eyes to watch.
The other man in white said, “Put the gun away.”
“But they’re all we suspected,” said the first. His lip curled. “Look close, their skin’s gone gray-I’ve never seen that shade on a human. Nobody alive, anyway.”
“We have our orders. Shooting him is not necessary at this point.” To Jasdero’s horror, the second man pulled out a long knife.
His shard of glass catching the candlelight, Devit ran for him.
“Stop!” Jasdero cried in a strangled voice.
The first man fixed his gun on Jasdero and yelled “Drop it or I’ll shoot the-”
Devit collided with the second man. The man’s knife caught his left arm. Jasdero screamed when he felt the long gash opened below Devit’s elbow. Devit screamed too, a scream ending in “Fucking die!” as he dug the glass into the man’s chest. A splotch of blood spread beneath the man’s collarbone.
The shorter man fired. Jasdero winced and closed his eyes, but he hadn’t been hit. A warning shot.
But while Devit struggled to pull his weapon from the taller man’s cloak, the man pressed his knife to Devit’s neck. Devit drove the shard of glass deeper into the man’s chest. The man gasped. “Restrain him,” he told the other as he twisted his knife to cut the skin of Devit’s shoulder.
“Stop it,” whimpered Jasdero. He reached a kneeling position, but the pain came back in his ankle and anyway he couldn’t stand. Over and over, he wished the filthy white-robed men dead in his mind.
They were supposed to fall, to die in any of a dozen different ways. Devit knew this, and Jasdero knew this, and they sought it together with all the strength they had.
But the men did not fall.
The shorter one took Devit’s arms and forced them together behind his back. His left arm was messy with blood that dripped down past the strips of cloth bandaging his wrist. The knife still pressed against Devit’s neck. Jasdero could see it and feel it, silver and cold.
With a sound of pain, the tall one pulled Devit’s shard of glass from below his collarbone. “We’ll move him to the cell before he can work free again. The other one too, in the other cell. Make sure they’re fully restrained.” He set the bloody shard on a shelf between two candles.
Jasdero stared up at his twin, held by the hateful men.
“You’re all going to die, you know,” Devit told them through gritted teeth.
When Jasdero woke again, there was pain stabbing through the back of his head. The last thing he remembered was the shorter man wrestling him into a cell. Jasdero had struggled as wildly as he could, wanting to kill the man so bad it hurt worse than his broken fingers and all the bruises. He couldn’t do much with his hands and legs tied. He’d only slowed the man down. The man in white swore at him and, when they were in the cell, slammed him against the wall. Once, twice and his head smashed against the stone.
He hadn’t been unconscious for long. It was still dark. A couple wavering points were candles outside his cell. A voice droned just beyond his hearing. Jasdero felt like throwing up from the pain in his skull, but somewhere in his mind he also felt euphoria.
After all, he was almost-almost-awake.
Devit, Jasdero thought. He sat up, back to the wall, and looked over to see his twin slumped against the wall in mirror image. Devit was through bars: an adjacent cell.
Jasdero felt a spark. Devit opened his eyes, and Jasdero felt a thrill of surprise to see the glint of gold. (It was right that they be gold.)
Devit’s left arm was crusted with dried blood. Jasdero drew up his knees and rested his head on them. He moved his hands against the bindings on his wrists. Painful, but if he tried maybe he could break them, because Jasdero was stronger than he looked. Then he’d protect Devit by snapping the necks of the men in white-they deserved worse than a broken arm, like Jasdero’d done to another boy in town during a fight.
Everyone deserved worse, now.
As he worked at the rope he watched Devit. Devit stared back, sidelong from one eye. It made Jasdero dizzy. Lights played at the edge of his vision.
Devit made a little laughing sound in the back of his throat. He licked his lips and said in a bare whisper,“How funny would it be if we died now?”
Jasdero thought it would be more fun if the men in white died and he and Devit left, free. Besides, they’d just died.
They’d died a long time ago, too. Jasdero didn’t need to ask Do you remember because he already knew Devit did. Jasdero and Devit weren’t even adults yet, but part of them was so old it made Jasdero feel small, like he were standing there staring up at a giant gravestone covered in half-familiar words. Jasdero stared at nothing and, in his mind, walked along beside the memory in stone and wood. It distracted him from the pangs from his numbed hands as he strained against the ropes. He felt the gash in Devit’s arm, too, and to distract Devit, he told the beginnings of a story:
“A real long time ago…”
Devit looked up. “When nobody spoke like us.…”
“A real long time ago, in the desert, by a river…” Jasdero could remember images from the far side of millennia.
“…when everything began…”
“…where everything was born…”
“…we were born,” said Devit, and stopped. They thought on what they’d just said. Words couldn’t convey the distance, the sand so old it was part of another world. But light had blossomed there, and part of the light was what they now called Jasdevi, and it lived in them now, prickling their foreheads with its words. Its words were even trickier than the letters in books, like the tattered book of fairy tales they’d found stashed moldy in the cellar. Together they’d barely made sense of it, for the letters ran together into nonsense for Jasdero, who knew some of their names but not often their sounds. He could feel the ancient light’s letters burning inside him and Devit, unlike the faded letters on the page. The light-letters overpowered him so that he couldn’t read their meaning. Could Devit understand them?
Devit who was Devit and Jasdero. If the light told them anything, it told them that. (Though Jasdero had always known, ever since he’d been born.) The letters were trying to tell him more, though, and he tried and tried to read them, but the meaning eluded him. Jasdero wanted to press his fingers to the bloody stigmata on his forehead, as if he could feel the meaning through his fingertips. But the bindings still held him back.
Someone save us, he thought. Someone come. They’d always been so helpless, in their town, surrounded by people who called them (especially Jasdero) off somehow, and the twins grew up thinking the townsfolk as foreign and twisted as the townsfolk found the twins. But they hadn’t been able to save themselves. They could only wait-to grow up? For God? For something, and it had come, but now they were trapped again, waiting.
Despite his helplessness, Jasdero struggled.
He thought-and hope shot through him-that the bindings were looser. To read the marks, to get himself and Devit out….He worked against them as the glare of light and sand consumed his sight in the dark cell.
Devit was straining to hear the bad man’s words. Jasdero couldn’t see how they could be important, but in the silence he caught a few.
“Wiser to…before the change.”
He could almost slip one of his hands free.
“Stronger than we th….Nothing…s ever happened before. …not even sure if they’re….”
Was the bad man talking to himself? wondered Jasdero, and the bindings around his wrist were no longer enough to hold his hands tight. He tugged his right hand free, despite the pain, and the first thing he did was touch trembling fingers to the bandage at his forehead. Nothing there but the absence of the pain that came from visions. Jasdero looked to Devit.
“Devit…” he whispered.
“Shhhh!” Devit whispered fiercely.
Jasdero reached through the bars, but Devit’s arms were attached to the wall. He was just out of reach, though Jasdero tried.
From the other room, clearly, a “Yes, sir.
Footsteps became a man in white entering the room with the holding cells. He was holding something that looked like a bat with a single round eye. “You’re to tell us what you know,” he said, and there was hard edge to his voice.
“What would we know?” said Devit, and maybe the man missed the heavy irony. They knew almost nothing of what had happened to them, but at the same time they’d been blessed with knowledge of the fiery waiting future. The distant past, and the near future: ways to end the world.
Ways to end lives…
“Then you’re to die,” said the man. “Or your brother.” His eyes widened as he looked at Jasdero, and Jasdero realized that he was prying under his bandage with his better hand. He bared his teeth at the man in white.
“Again?” the man said, and released the strange bat to fly out from the room. Desperate now, Jasdero fumbled at the tight ropes around his legs.
The man had a knife in his hand. The same knife he’d used to slash Devit’s arm. Now he’d slit Devit’s throat like a lamb’s. (And Jasdero wondered that the image would come to him like this, when nobody in the town raised sheep, though he’d seen pictures in an old church book.) He was unlocking the cage now, he was pressing the knife tight to Devit’s throat.
“Guess we are gonna die now,” said Devit, his voice thick with irony as he looked aside at Jasdero, and it was such a bad joke that Jasdero’s throat clogged up and he started to cry. He reached through the bars for the horrible man, and for his twin, who he could see as clearly as ever. Although terrified almost beyond words, Devit looked up at the man with defiance, and (because part of him was now very, very old) contempt.
“Do you know anything about Noah?” the man asked, regarding Jasdero with a curl of his lip. Jasdero knew this game: it was the one where the bad man asked questions and they tried not answer.
No, Jasdero wanted to say. But he choked on the word.
A long silence. “Are you from the Clan of Noah?” asked the man, saying it like it was a secret thing. “Do you have anything to say? Or shall I proceed with the execution?”
No, Jasdero wanted to say, but he knew it was a lie.
The bad man’s voice shifted, and for a moment he sounded sorry. “I’m sorry to kill two children like you, even if you tried to kill me. But you’re not exactly human now...” And just as Jasdero felt the knife moving against his throat, Devit said, “We’re a part of them.”
It was the most dangerous thing to say, but in that moment it kept him from death. The knife was pulled away from Devit’s throat. (Jasdero, golden eyes closed tight, felt this.) “You are?” breathed the man, and he called for the other white-coated devil.
Jasdero opened his eyes (Devit’s eyes), and saw Devit (himself) looking up at the man with lidded eyes. Wake up, he thought to Devit, to himself, and wrapped his bruised arms around the cell bars. Not something his strength could take away.
Not this kind of strength, he thought, and strained to make out the letters hidden in the light. It bound him and Devit together, that light. They should be able to read what bound them together. Read it, he begged, though Devit already knew as well as he.
Jasdero stared, mute and desperate, into Devit’s eyes, which suddenly went wider in panic. Jasdero hadn’t noticed the second man in white entering his cell until he hauled Jasdero up with a filthy hand at his throat. In reflex, Jasdero grabbed the bars, but the man tore him away. Jasdero’s still-bound feet dragged on the floor. Devit was screaming at the men to stop. He yelled profanity and threats that the men ignored. The man with the knife, who stood looking down at Devit, said to his companion, “No need to be that rough! We won’t kill them if we can learn something useful.”
“You know how goddamn dangerous they are,” the other countered. “We won’t need this one.” And his grip tightened on Jasdero’s throat: a methodical strangling. Jasdero stopped reaching for the bars and tried to pull the man’s arms away, but he was already choking, and Devit was trapped with a knife pointed at his heart. If either of them died, the light would be gone. It was only just born, only just filling Jasdero and Devit’s bones. Jasdero was filled with rage at how unfair it was. He wanted to be both for longer. They wanted to be one for longer.
They wanted to find out what else the light said.
Tears ran down his face-he had always been quick to cry-as he felt the evil man in white killing him. Tears ran down Devit’s face too. Jasdero could no longer discern the words Devit choked out, but that didn’t matter because he could feel them. Devit’s existence pulled at his, willing him not to go. Don’t go. Not that. We aren’t the ones who’re supposed to die. Somebody help us.
Jasdero clung to life. He had always been stronger than he looked. But there was nobody to save them.
Nobody but us, they thought, and in the dark madness of strangulation Jasdero felt a warm light on his eyelids. God? he thought, but he recognized that the light as something he and Devit had imagined.
The hands slackened at his neck. Jasdero sucked in a breath. His eyes cracked open.
There was a shining figure standing between the cells. Almost too bright to look at, it had long and flowing hair, and a flowing robe the faint red-brown of ancient rust. Jasdero looked at himself and Devit, standing together outside their bodies. The bars melted in on themselves, dripping like stalagmites. The whole room was filled with silence.
The figure must have been too bright for the men to look at, because they hid their eyes, the man by Jasdero’s body cowering back. It turned its face to Jasdero-it looked like Devit-and smiled, a smile cruel and reassuring. Jasdero felt himself smiling in a way he knew to be exactly the same. In his cell-no, it was all one cell now-Devit too was smiling, although he was still shackled to the wall.
They needed something to kill with, so the figure held a great curving knife. With one stride and a lift of the knife, the figure cleaved into the man by Jasdero. Jasdero was released. He slid down to sit against the wall, awed at the power that was his and Devit’s own.
The bad man with the knife stared, and that second was all the light needed to plunge its curved knife into the bad man’s neck where he stood over Devit. Dispassionately, Devit watched him fall, blood pouring down onto the stones of the floor. The little bat-thing fluttered wildly away, but a beam of light snaked out and it crumpled into crackling wire and scattered across the floor.
They needed Devit free, so with a touch his hands were released. Jasdero, sucking in breath, favoring one leg, climbed over the one who’d been cut from shoulder to heart. Devit…
Through the melted bars and past the figure to his twin. For a long moment they stared at each other, and the light washed over them. Then like sunset it faded. Jasdero looked round after it and saw that the door was gone too. Ignoring the filthy dead man (at last it was right, at last they were as dead as they should be) he extended his hand to Devit, feeling like he reached for himself. Devit clasped his arm and stood.
Jasdero and Devit remembered, thought Jasdero, and it was like he was thinking of a single person.
There was the rattle of the outer door opening. As one, they turned to see a curly-haired man in a getup that the townsfolk would have called a gentleman’s suit if they’d seen it. Supporting each other, they watched with fierce wariness, but, with a surprised expression, the man tilted his hat back and they read the things on his forehead. His eyes were golden.
“Who’re you?” croaked Devit, because although the letters told them some things, it didn’t tell them names.
The gentleman’s gaze rested on each of the corpses for a moment, then settled on Jasdero and Devit’s foreheads. “Two of them?” he said to himself. Then he took on a relaxed grin, and, to them, said, “I’m family. I’ve come to take you to your new home. The name’s Tiki-and it’s a pleasure to meet you.” He nodded his head. “We were worried when we learned you’d been taken…”
The shining figure that Jasdero and Devit had formed together was gone, but they knew they could call it back at any moment. If the men in white came after them again, they knew what to do; and they were not too much in awe of this man, either, though they found his resemblance to them fascinating. We don’t need you, they thought. We can save ourselves, with our own power.
But they would go with him.
“You two need any help? The door home’s not far, just outside.”
Stubborn, Devit shook his head, answering for both of them. The door to Devit’s cell was gone, so they stepped through and after Tiki, who turned on his heel and walked from their prison. The horrible dim cell and its bodies behind them, Jasdero and Devit emerged onto snow. They were on a side of the mountain they’d never visited before, but they knew the direction of the graveyard where they’d hidden. Above them the night was clear and cold and bright with familiar stars. It was a good thing Jasdero and Devit’s star was closer, Jasdero thought, and as warm as the sun. They could feel it, a single thing pulsing inside them.
A doorway stood in the middle of a snowdrift. Tiki faced it, then turned to the twins. “Ready?” he asked.
At the same instant, they grinned up at him together under the vastness of stars.
---
The End
(Happy Birthday, psycho twins!)