For twins, they looked nothing alike. She was tall and lean and bright, a perfect blend of their parents, raised up on good food and love and looking every inch like the ideal teenage daughter she is.
He, on the other hand, was shorter, darker, stockier, paler. His grandmother swore he looked like her eldest uncle, doomed to a life under the earth, digging for coal, the pale skin of never seeing daylight and the dark hair glittering with coal dust.
He knew there were scientific reasons for why they looked different — he heard them in science class, with everyone snickering and looking at him and his sister as the teacher discussed ovum and spermatozooa and uterine walls. He knew all the science behind it, but when he looked at her, looked at the family portraits, looked at himself in the mirror, he knew that she was golden, perfection, and he was the dark flawed shadow reflection.
He had the nightmares ever since he was a baby. Screaming, howling, terrible nightmares of death and blood and pain, of being left for dead while monsters roamed around him. Of angels and demons and fire, in a city far from here and barely of this world at all.
After a while, he didn't sleep much.
"You have dreams sometimes, don't you?"
"Yeah..."
"What're they like?"
"Not like yours. Well, obviously, 'cause, otherwise, we'd both be in therapy, and...no, but, y'know..."
"They're bad, aren't they?"
"Not really."
"Remember when we were ten and we were staying in that really crappy motel out in the desert 'cause the car blew out a tire and the spare was flat and we were sharing a bed 'cause all they had was that room with the really beat-up doubles?"
"Um...yeah..."
"I heard you crying that night. I woke up, and you were crying."
"Maybe I was crying because of the tire."
"Right."
"Okay, yeah. You have dreams. I have dreams. Everyone has dreams. Big deal."
"What are they about?"
"Huh?"
"What are yours about? I keep on hearing you sob at night and..."
"I don't know. I don't remember, exactly, 'cause, well, they're dreams, but, sometimes, it's these two women. One's like Mom's age, and the other...I don't know. She's a little older than us, but not too much. And, like, I've known them all my life, and I love them, and I don't know who they are, but they mean so much to me... And sometimes I'm little and I'm reading a book — I think it's the younger woman's diary — but I don't remember what it says 'cause, hello, it's a dream, the whole right-brain left-brain thing — but when I tell the older woman about it, she gets this look on her face like the look Mom got when you told her about that one dream where you get tied to a tree —"
"Yeah, okay, I know."
Most nights, he stayed in his room, the lights off, the door open only a crack, and he would lie on his bed in the still cool night, listening to the deep even breathing of his parents and the faint gurgles from his aquarium.
Some nights, after his parents fell asleep, he would hear the sobs of his sister, soft, quiet, barely audible between several sets of closed doors. He would get up and go to her room, silently opening the door and sitting down in the overstuffed clothes-covered armchair she kept in there.
He would watch her, watch her twist, turn, moan softly, and cry — soft gentle sobs of someone who knows that they're missing something incredibly beautiful and desperately needed. The sobs of someone who has seen heaven, and given it up long ago.
Sometimes he thinks that if he just laid down next to her, if he held her close, if they were together physically and mentally, their nightmares would stop, and they would only dream of floating together in the womb, brother and sister, sharing their mother in bliss.
But he doesn't think that would happen anyway.
This Angel/Buffy the Vampire Slayer story was written by Kate Bolin. If you liked it, there's plenty more at http://www.dymphna.net/fanfic/. And you can feedback her at dymphna@dymphna.net.