FicWad

He once read about the fur that babies shed just weeks before they're born, how people swallow all of those stray hairs that have only just managed to escape their skin. He had spent years believing that this was how the soul was made, coiled together bit by bit in those last few weeks before the sights and sounds of what he had come to consider his everyday, mundane reality became an option.

Sylvester wonders sometimes if this is where he and his brother went wrong. Sebastian is neat, courteous and quietly disappearing into the cavity his anger has burned deep within him and Sylvester wishes he knew /why/.

Twins, according to the countless books he's found on the subject, are supposed to be able to understand each other on a level separate from the rest of the universe, to exist essentially as two halves of the same child. That the days of near telepathy and private languages are never going to arrive is only just hitting him now, barely a month past their thirteenth birthday. Sylvester has no idea how to deal with this knowledge and so he worries: that it's somehow his fault, that he wasn't quick enough to grab a strand or two of Sebastian's soul when he had the chance, that he should never have wished that Madeline, so effortlessly close to their brother in the sleepy years before she died, had been Sebastian's twin instead of him, no matter how quickly he had taken it back.

He wishes, these days, that they could be twelve again, just a little while longer.