My jaw grinds as I look at my brother across the table. “I’m not doing this for him, you know. I’m doing it for you.”
Val rolls his eyes. “Which is why I justthankedyou, dick.”
“I just want to be clear?—”
“Vaughn, there is nothing that has been madeclearerto me in the last few months than your opinions of our father.”
I smirk. “As in, I liked him better when I thought he was dead?”
“Jesusfucking…” Val looks away, shaking his head. “How’s the Syndicate. How’s your Bond villain mansion. How’re your psycho little friends.”
“Fine. Palatial. Still psychotic,” I grunt. “How’s your boy toy?”
“Don’t.” Val’s gaze rips across the table into me. “I fucking hate when you act like Roman is a fling. We live together. He’s not going anywhere. Ilovehim.”
I glance down. “Sorry. I…” I exhale. “I know that. My apologies.”
Once upon a time, my brother and I were close. We had to be, growing up in the traumatic hellscape of emotional abuse, physical neglect and poverty that we were raised in. Our mom turned tricks in the living room. Dad boosted carburetors and dabbled in whatever bullshit petty crime he could.
Now, there are a million kids out there with parents who turn to the dark side and do whatever the fuck it takes to put food in their stomachs and keep a roof over their heads.
But our parents didn’t do what they did for us.
They did it for themselves. Fordrugs.
Oxy. Heroin. Meth. I distinctly remember the scent of paint thinner and gasoline when they ran out of money and had to resort to huffing those.
But the neglect was the good part. It’s the rest of it that almost broke us.
When Mom’s temper got physical. When one of her Johns would slip into the glorified closet that Val and I called a bedroom and try and touch us. When Dad stole the shitty, fourth-hand toys Val and I had and pawned them for meth money.
The story Val's heard is that eventually one winter, when the heat had been cut off, the kitchen was empty, and Mom and Dad had been AWOL for three days straight, we left.
Rather,Ileft, and I took Val with me.
We bundled up in whatever clothes we could layer and I took him downtown with the harebrained idea of sneaking into the luggage compartment of a bus at the Greyhound station.
Instead, we stumbled across a furniture store; one that looked so fucking warm, with big, soft beds in the window. I broke in the back door and brought us inside, my brother blue in the face and half dead, only to discover that the store was actually a front for a safe house and drug distribution center belonging to the Obsidian Syndicate.
Instead of killing us, they took us in, brought us to New York, gave us a place to live and food to eat, asking only that we commit ourselves to the organization in return.
We worked in a warehouse for a few years, packaging up drugs for street-level sale until the DEA came crashing in one day.
Val was knocked unconscious by a flash grenade, and I made a choice.
Areally fucking hardone.
I decided that he deserved a shot at something beyond a life of crime. So I told the Syndicate guards that he was dead, left him my wallet, and escaped.
Val was found by the cops, with a wallet containing a few bucks andmyYMCA ID card, and no memory of who he really was.
We had some hard years after that. I was clawing my way up through the lower ranks of the Syndicate. He was fighting for survival in the foster system of New York—asVaughn, since he had no memory of who he was aside from an ID with a photo that looked a lot like him since we’ve always looked so similar, and the name “Vaughn Bancroft” on it.
Again, this is the story he knows, because that's what I’vetold him.
The real one is too hard to explain.
How do you tell someone that you’ve had various other personalitiesinside your headsince you were old enough to remember? How do you explain that the real reason you left home that night was because the manifested personality of a grandfather you’d never met had been talking to you at night for weeks? That this ghost is who told you about the safe house and guided you there that night into the arms of an organizationthat he once called family?
