What I Said to My Brother

I said "you did this" to Kael. Out loud. In front of everyone. I pointed at the broken thing the cave was doing and I looked at my brother and I said this isn't a bug, you did this, and I watched it land on him like a slap.

I need to write down that I don't think he did it. I need that written somewhere, because the words are already out and I can't take them back, and the truth is more complicated than the words were. What I meant was: you're the one who knows. You always know. Tell me what this is. What came out was an accusation. Fear does that — it grabs the nearest person who might have answers and shakes them. And the nearest person is always Kael, because Kael is the one who built the world, and when the world goes wrong you turn to the person who built it, even when — especially when — that person is the one you'd least want to be guilty.

Here's what I actually know, which is the thing I do instead of panicking: I watch, and I keep count.

I saw Marcus's grin not match his eyes. Early, when he made the crack about back alleys — I've seen worse — and for half a second the grin was doing one thing and the eyes were doing another, and I caught it, and Kael caught it, and we did the sibling thing. The look. We'll talk about him later. Mark the moment. Twenty years of being raised in the same house, even though we came to that house by different roads, and we can still have an entire conversation in one glance across a room. I marked it. I've got it. Whatever's cracking in Marcus, I'm holding onto the fact that I saw it start.

I saw the healing fail on Angela's face. I saw Theo put his shoulder to a wall that wouldn't hold still. I saw the monster wear faces it had no business owning — and one of them, for just a flash, one of them was a green tracksuit, and I had a nightmare about a man in a green tracksuit when I was twelve, the year Kael's family became my family, back when I still had nightmares often enough to say them out loud. I told exactly one person about that tracksuit, exactly once. And it was in here tonight, on a monster, in a cave.

I'm choosing not to think too hard about what that means. I'm choosing to file it. Filing is how I stay standing.

Here's what I do know about my brother, and it's the thing steadying me while everything else comes apart: Kael has spent his whole life not-naming the things that would hurt me to have named. My hands in my sleeves. The way I apologize to dice, to doorframes, to the universe, when I'm scared — it's a tic from a house that wasn't a home, from before, and he clocks it every single time and he has never once, in twenty years, said it out loud, because he knows that naming it would make it bigger. That's how he loves. Quietly, sideways, by leaving the sore places alone.

A man who loves like that did not build a thing to hurt Marcus. I know it the way I know my own name. So when I said "you did this," I wasn't accusing the brother I know. I was begging the person who always has the answer to please, please have the answer.

He made a joke instead. Drama intensifies. Narrated it to his little invisible audience, the way he does. And I know him well enough to hear what's underneath the joke, and what's underneath the joke tonight is not I've got this. What's underneath the joke tonight is I don't know either, and I'm terrified, and the bit is the only thing keeping me upright. I've heard every version of his director voice for twenty years. This one was shaking. He hid it from the others. He can't hide it from me. I grew up three feet away.

There's something in my hand. A little flame — it's supposed to be a flame, a flavor thing, an idle-pose ember. It's brighter than usual. It's throwing my shadow big against the cave wall and I keep almost-looking at the shadow and looking away, because there's a wrongness to it I don't want to name, and naming things makes them bigger, and I learned that from the best. So I'm not looking. I'm holding the fire, and it isn't burning me, and I'm not looking at what it's doing on the wall.

There's one more of them out there. I can hear it walking, slow, deliberate, like it's got somewhere to be and it's in no hurry. We're going in after it because there's no out — Kael tried the exit, I saw him try, I see everything — and there's no back, so there's only down.

I'm on the edge of myself, the way I'm always on the edge of my chair. Watching. Counting. Holding my brother's secret that he's scared, the way he's always held mine.

If you want to know what it's like to see everything and say almost none of it — to love someone quietly enough to keep their fear for them — you have to start where we started, before the dark.

This is the world of Overlayed Echoes — a near-future LitRPG about found family, the masks we wear for the people we love, and the weight of being the one who holds the story together. Progression fantasy with a beating heart and a knife behind its back.