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Each Day the Guilt Grows Stronger

.....There was absolutely nothing wrong with her... She was completely beautiful, inside and outside. She didn't deserve any of the abuse she received... But, "that's life", right? Some people get the rough end of things, and some people get the smooth side? Haha, it's nothing to stress over, right? But... You know, guys like you hardly deserve what you get. Blond guys, with blue eyes and crisp shirts. Does that make you so much better than girls like her? In your mind, it doesn't. It never did... So really, it's only natural for you to feel guilty... Right? After all, if you hadn't been so "great", maybe they wouldn't have been so hard on her... And if they hadn't been so hard on her... Maybe she's still be here.


..........They say a Vudoll grows after experience an immense amount of it's core emotion... So how was it that it took Sol this long to grow? It's not as if the guilt ever fades, or goes away... It's not as if it even gets easier to breath... Not even for one moment. Is his chest ever going or rise and fall any easier than yours? Will his smile ever be any more sincere than the fake one etched onto your lips? Will the sadness in his eyes ever disappear... Or will they become a permanent stain on his character, just like yours have?

In the Shadows
Still I See You

(All about Dusk)

When he finished the doll, he sat in the silence of the locked room and studied it for awhile. It's pinned hands and feet held reproach where he'd thought they'd hold relief. He'd thought that if he could just put it all somewhere, the nagging dark wouldn't chase him anymore. But it sat in his stomach like a toad buried deep, and in the dim of the room, he breathed in the taste of memory.

His desk was simple and neat, as his apartment was neat. Now it held the supplied he'd used for the doll, a pile of biology books, and a framed picture.

Dusk.

It wasn't a photograph. While photographs of her existed, they either showed the smudging outline of a girl concealed by strange shadows, or, taken with a flash, the panicked fear of a creature cornered and expecting pain. Dusk, the throwback, unable to abide light.

They'd hated that.

This was pencil sketch, one he'd drawn when he was still young and foolish and willing to pretend their parents might allow him art, if not as a career, then as a hobby. She'd sat in his bedroom still as silence while he drew it, her legs pulled up to her chest, her chin rested on her knees. Her expression was one of wistful amusement, and her gaze was fixed somewhere off to the left, as if she'd been watching something over his shoulder. That, at least, was a relief. He didn't want to meet her eyes.

Reaching out reflexively, he picked up the doll he'd made up to look like him. The neat ponytail, the bright blue eyes. His fingers stroked lightly over the rough burlap, and then, looking from the portrait to the doll, he clenched his hand into a rough fist.

Look... see? I am penitent. You told me not to leave. You asked me to take you along. And I left you there, where they could get you.

The phone rang.

"Adam, you realize it's been a week since you last called?" A voice like diamonds, all hard sparkling loveliness. The soft dim of the room seemed to brighten, just at the sound of it.

"Sorry, Mother. Tests. They've been keeping me busy."

And his hand clenched all the tighter, while Dusk looked on in unspeaking judgment. Because his voice was light and warm as he spoke, and she knew it. Claim guilt all he liked, but confront them? Never. She wouldn't forgive him that. If she was alive, if he found her, it wouldn't be the initial betrayal that turned her heart against him, but the new betrayals he committed every day.

His eyes were focused on the doll's stitched smile. Still smiling, as he crushed it. Of course. That was what they did, the doll, him. Kept smiling. They really were the same.

He could dream her equally in light or shadow. It wasn't hard. After sunset, he remembered Dusk, his brilliant, sarcastic, cynical sister, her low bitter laughter, her slyly twisting smile. When the sun rose, and he walked in the warmth of its bright glare, he remembered dusk, shy, delicate, bruised, light as breath in his arms, passed out from the glare of sunlight. Trusting him completely.

He liked nights better. And he had once so gloried in the light she so feared.

Not her fault, not her fault. The family secret, writ large on life. Old blood, forgotten blood. Moms line. A throwback, who could call Shadows to hand as easily as the family was meant to call Life. Gray eyes, dark hair, but with mother's cheekbones, and father's nose. No denying her, no claiming she was adopted, or the result of an indiscretion.

It would have been easier for her, that, being the child of an affair.

But never mind. The sun had set. He had a pile of textbooks in front of him he was supposed to be reading. And he would, it wouldn't due to fall behind in one of his classes. But not now. He was holding the doll, Sol, above a candle instead, wondering what it felt like. To experience light the way she had, the cruel burning kiss of it.

They'd split them up when she was ten, taken her out of the private school they'd attended together and sent her to a public school. He was spending too much time with her. Avoiding making lucrative friendships. She would cower in the corner of the lunch room, wrapped in her dark, and he would get them both lunch. She would smile when he did, not cynically yet, but with the sort of trust that came when one didn't know enough to question.

And then, they'd sent her to public school. Because of him. Because she was bad for his reputation. Because he preferred her smile to the rough jostling of his peers. Because she was his sister and he was supposed to protect her. But they didn't want her protected.

She'd screamed... she'd cried and threatened. He'd been older, though. He'd known better. He'd gone to his room and he'd shut the door, and he hadn't even hated them because they said it was for the best. And he was twelve, so he believed them.

And after that, after that it'd been different. She'd sit on the edge of his bed and watch him do his homework, she'd tell him with slowly growing coldness, about her day. But she wouldn't smile at him, not like she had, not like she thought he could save her.

Guilt like that, it felt like not breathing. It felt like falling but never hitting ground because that would end the fear of it. He took the doll away from the fire, wrapped a rubber band tightly around its chest. Yeah, it felt like that, like being tied up on the inside, so every breath you drew chocked you, and you deserved to choke that way.

He just wish he had the guts to put his own hand in the candle. But no... that might scar.

And he couldn't have that.

What would people say?

Names as Power

It wasn't the life that shocked him, one could accept such things. It happened, sometimes, on Gaia. You found a lamp, or a sock, or a doll, and the next thing you knew, you were thrust into parenthood, a sudden rush of expectations, and someone who would depend on you. He didn't much like the idea of being depended on, he knew well enough how such things ended up. He knew he couldn't be trusted.

But the doll was doll no more, no longer simply a symbol for self, an externalization of pain. No, the doll was more now, wasn't it but he. And he was looking across the picture frame at Adam, with a look of mute understanding. And seeing himself reflected in those eyes, Adam knew that he could never think of himself as a parent to him.

No, this was him, this was brother, this was other twin. He had built an image of himself in pain, and now he would have to guide that twin through life, and hope, in doing, that he might better create a better self, a self not so prone to weakness, to betrayal.

"Her name is Dusk." He explained, touching the doll's rough burlap hesitantly. The doll placed his small limb in Adam's hand, and smiled Adam's smile. A smile that lied. And so Adam smiled back.

"They put her out in the sun. She-- didn't like the sun." And then he knew, simple as that, seeing the doll with that picture of her in his lap, smiling that smile. "We'll call you Sol, little doppelganger. And you will be my good twin."

"Sol." Echoed Sol, with lips that stumbled over their first attempt at sound.

"Yes. And that is Dusk, and I am Adam."

"Dusk." A touch to the picture. "Adam." A touch to his hand. Such a clever doll, and so appropriate, for his otherself.

There was a knock at the door.

"Drake. Stay here Sol. He-- won't be ready for you." He stood at that, left Sol sitting. His good twin indeed, so trusting, so willing to believe in his return.

As Dusk had been... once.

Dinner time. Drake had been dealt with, for a time, and the house was empty. Or it would have been, except for Sol. Sol made things different of course, adding a dimension to the silence of his barren apartment that hadn't been there previously. An echo of himself that he hadn't prepared for.

Still, it was dinner time, and regardless of a change in circumstance it was up to him to see them both fed. If... Sol ate.

The doll was sitting quietly on the sofa, the tv tuned to some cartoon channel that Adam had found after a bit of flipping. Mother and Father hadn't really approved of a lot of cartoon programming, but they weren't here, and this was different. Surely it was alright for him allow some indulgences. Still, the nagging sense of wrong at hearing the high pitched, playful voices.

(erm... to be written later)