By Cathyrne, for LindaMarie.
She was a blot of incandescent blue in the swirling sea of darkness blanketing her suspended body. In her lay their past, their present, their future all jumbled together like the roots of unearthed seedlings waiting for the rains to cease so that they could be replanted to grow once again. This was the day that they would always remember, the day before everything changed.
This was in the very hour that Kori had been returned to them.
Doug blew his own hand off in an impressive cloud of gun powder, pulpy flesh and red mist while routinely testing a new variation of an explosive device at his demolition company. Arm outstretched before him, binding what was left of his hand in an improvised spastic tie turned tourniquet Doug had fallen to his knees before Chris like a repentant sinner, pressing face flushed red with agony into his twin's lap.
Doug's once blue bunny, now stained red tie unraveled to reveal that he had sustained trauma far too severe to ever be properly repaired by medical means alone and stroking hair that was every bit as blond spiky as his own, Chris fought mightily to keep tears of shared suffering from escaping. He had been meaning to broaden his current testing to include human specimens, just never did he plan on starting out with Doug as his very first guinea pig.
Resolve wavering, torn between two separate shames: trying to fix his twin's hand and failing, or not even attempting to try and repair the damage, only to have his mirror go through the rest of his life cracked and maimed. That one thought terrified him more than any other, that Doug would no longer be his perfect mirror; so without really needing to choose, his decision had been made.
He stayed with his twin long after the brutally intricate and time consuming operation, all throughout that night and the following, caring for him, replacing his intravenous bag, checking on the epidural lodged in his spine, laying cool rags and ice packets upon his wrist to reduce the swelling and possibility of rejection. When Doug was able to return to work, one full week later with hand wholly intact, he told all his employees that it had been nothing more than an elaborate prank he had pulled so that he could score himself an impromptu vacation. They all believed him.
This had all transpired nearly five years after Kori's death.
The transplanted half of Doug's hand never seemed to fully take to the idea that it was now a part of his brother's body. As a direct result of Chris' inability to repair all the extensive nerve damage when reconstructing the maimed hand, from the tip of his index finger all the way down to his wrist was perpetually icy cold and partially numb. Oh yes, it did function properly on command, but it was the little feats that it did perform without reading the instruction manual that could be considered quite troublesome; like when a finger would tap in time with a song on the radio that Doug didn't even like, or when the hand would flex on its own to crack the errant knuckle and create a sound that was probably one of Doug's most hated.
Despite whatever little excuses: overworked, overtired, undersexed, etceteras; Doug came up with to devalue any and all demonstrations of "Cogito ergo sum" from his renegade hand, Chris still observed that the hand always seemed on the verge of rebellion, and half expected to see the rogue appendage inching away from Doug like some thief in the night, clawing along on one bloodied fingernail, scratching its way away around on the floor and out the door to freedom.
When they lay together was that hand a third person, an intruder, their union suddenly a ménage et trios? If Doug were now more than one, then what number would Kori be when she was returned to them seven years after her death?
Kori, Kori, she was their forever summer sister, eternally spun in perfection inside of their minds. Her death had immortalized their love for her and she was the only reason why they stayed up late at night, working and studying, digging and carving, practicing and planning. Always after her death did a cloud of loneliness enfold over them; eternally inconsolable, they walked with a sticky sweet film coating their skin that turned their on their ever darkening insides a little blacker with each day.
"I keep waiting to wake up. Sometimes I wonder if I really am alive or dead; if somehow I had died sometime along the way would I know? Have I been residing in a hell which only exists inside my own mind all this time and I am the only one who just don't know it yet? If so, I will keep thinking that this is all more than it seems and that one day I will awaken and be alive again, and my sister will be alive as well, and my brother will be with us too, and all the pain will be nothing more than a bad dream." -Scrawled over an illustration of the female reproductive organs in a biology textbook one week after Kori's death.
The blonde girl had been chattering away, nearly talking Doug's ear off while his brother had appeared to be enjoying every moment of it. He even beamed back at her with joyful eyes and leaned in to whisper some sweet secrets into her tiny whirled conch shell of an ear with a grin that was no less childlike than one of their sister's own silly smiles. He was still smiling in this manner when he reached out and snapped her neck with the help of a steel pipe.
Six years ago on that day Kori's neck had been broken in a different fashion; it seemed the only apt way for them to take the life from this girl if her body were to be used as a vessel for their sister.
"Will you speak to me today?"
Doug alternately scooted about the room, or stood nearby nervously fidgeting whenever he visited his twin at the lab. He was always looking for something to say, or an excuse to get away and perhaps this explained it all. Chris never looked anyone in the coven in the eyes anymore, let alone him; perhaps he didn't really want to know what the other's truly knew about him, or even what they suspected about his mental state after all the nightly excursions to the places where people's bodies wind up when they are not alive anymore.
Glassy pupils skittering everywhere else but there, moving like black cockroaches circled by blue green sea, tossed to and fro by stormy waves. In his eyes it was that perfect time of night, that magical hour when the sea looked darker than the sky, and taking it all in could easily entrance even the most stoic of eyes. Standing there finding solace in watching the emerald sea roll within his brother's eyes; Doug had the oddest feeling that his twin was mourning, but in this pain of loss there was very little concern for their sister.
Taking Doug's hand into his own Chris smiled and the world softened while resolve strengthened. His twin drew the tip off his tongue along the unfamiliar terrain of pilfered flesh and as the velvet warmth traveled to the more sensitive underside of his frigid digit he heard Chris softly groan, in both pleasure and despair, as he gently suckled and tasted the bitterness of a stranger and regret combined and rolling within his mouth.
Above them the sky complained dolefully once again, crackling with currents of negative electric energy, and it was exactly seven years, fourteen hours and forty-six seconds after Kori's confirmed time of death.
Kori's skin was clear like a crystal vase and Chris could see straight through to the bottom of the opalescent bones inside her. Keeping as much of her original form intact was crucial for their experiment to work properly. There was nothing left of the girl that they had murdered all those years ago today; she was an exoskeleton of forgotten memories left to rot in their own wasted coffin, murdered for no reason other than she had greatly resembled their dear dead sister. They did not want some homunculus that merely harbored Kori's memories, they wanted her, whole, revived and alive as if she had never left them. They were so close to being complete once again; only one more time did they have to pay their dues with a pound of flesh.
Then when the rains came, floods of water fell down from the sky in great torrents, lightning streaked across the darkness of the night like little fissures in time and space itself, as if something dark and terrible were trying to smash its way into their reality. Soon there was no interval between the crash of thunder and the flash of lightning. Trembling with what could only be considered excitement lest it be construed as something negative, they stood by and watched the neon blues, purples, whites, even pinks flicker and chase one another across the black velvet sky. Somewhere buried in the crashing of thunder and lightning they could hear the sound of something howling, but then it too was drowned out by the thunderous roaring of wind and sky and rain.
When Kori's body began to levitate up from the table, it was mercilessly struck by several bolts of lightning; then for several pain filled moments nothing happened. She just hung there, suspended in midair. Then slowly, oh so very slowly... her eyes... opened. The girl's face visibly brightened when she saw them, eyes widening and lips curling up into a small smile; when she turned her head it lolled to the side at an impossible broken marionette angle; neither Chris nor Doug remembering to brace the broken bones for her.
Playfully she laughed as the world turned upside down; it was a lovely, melodious laughter, like the chiming of bells, and then she was like the little child who loved to play in the mud and swish around in puddles as her weight coasted back down to the earth in a mighty splash of water. Grabbing a hold of the long ends of her blonde hair she pulled her own head upright, the tendons in her neck flexing and straining beyond the limit capacity that a normal person could take, and then laughed again before turning and running away, engaging them in a game of hide and seek, so desperate to be once again seen as the center of attention. Still glowing like some great goddess of thunder, lightning and moon, they could see her very, very well in the dark.
Pale skin, white like milk in the bottom of a pail, the golden hue of a sun kissed hair flowing down upon her shoulders... She kissed them when they finally caught her; their ears, their cheeks, their lips, no skin was overlooked by her tongue and teeth; she even suckled at their tongues as would butterfly fussing over the stamen of a flower. She held them entranced, their eyes, their souls, her boys.
Holding her, finding her, reuniting with her.
"Whole once again." -Written in blood on the lab floor one minute after Kori's resurrection.
Fin.
Back to the main page.
Disclaimer: the characters, fictional settings, and universes created by L. J. Smith are copyright © Lisa J. Smith, Daniel Weiss Associates, Inc. and their affiliates. This fan-created site, along with the stories it houses, means no infringement upon any trademark, copyright, or other legal binding. This archive claims no rights to any of the stories collected here.
