according to their mother, either the world is ending — or it’s not. though she dresses herself in muted colors, she’s always been a storyteller in the way that she carries the energy of an impending apocalypse in her ribcage. she calls it some type of hope, & it makes her unreliable. she usually just comes off as neutral.
sae had told him as much, when they had been younger than ten. unintentionally, sae called himself caregiver more often than her work schedule had allowed, & then it had been a lot of grey spaces.
sae does better knowing the sequences of things. he likes coloring inside the lines — he’s creative in the way that he’s never needed colors to blend together to find innovation; he just reorganizes their order so that it’s something that’s never been seen before. it makes him a genius, people say — but then they never define genius.
rin calls him a genius anyway.
according to their mother, sae could have been an artist. she remembers his drawings ( even in coloring books ), & said that there was artistry in that.
any mother says that, though. & her second child used to scribble over faces, so that even coloring book pages could be the same as a blank page.
neither sae nor rin remember much of their childhood drawings, anyway. but still, their mother keeps on her rampage.
it suits her now, when she presses her cellphone against rin’s ear & catches him off-guard, still shedding his shoes & outer jacket at the door.
he is sixteen, & he shouldn’t need wrangling — but she finds him easier to wrangle when he is in such public spaces. once he retreats upstairs to his room ( previously a shared room ), he is harder to reach.
habitually, he accepts the phone but already starts to offer it back without looking. ‘ i don’t want to talk to anyone on the phone, ‘ he says — both to his mother & to the nameless other one the phone.
she shakes her head at him, so he keeps the phone pressed against the phone. she must imagine that the world is ending, because sae’s voice announces - ‘ she’s worried you’re moping too much. ‘ sae’s voice is a tiny thing through a cracking phone line, & rin shoves the phone back to their mother again —
‘ i don’t want to talk with him, ‘ he insists, & it’s a fruitless thing. she does not accept her phone back, but she makes it clear that rin won’t be able to leave the entranceway until he’s finished the likeness of a conversation.
he’s known that his mother expects irregular calls from sae, that they talk — but he’s been under the impression that every itoshi has come to the silent understanding that the communication between two brothers should not be moderated.
it cannot be helped that they are at an impasse.
even so, he had also been under the impression that the silent understanding should make each brother a blacklisted topic to the other. it’s none of sae’s concern if he’s been ‘moping. ‘
besides, moping seems like an oversimplification.
rin closes his eyes for a minute — sees red, sees green, sees black. he recomposes himself & speaks into the phone like a dead man, ‘ i’m not moping. nothing’s wrong. ‘
nothing’s wrong. his team just qualified for nationals, & rin has learned how to control the soccer field as a puppeteer. he’s coloring inside the lines. everything’s wrong. he thinks something inside him is boiling him alive.
‘ you know you can’t lie to me. tell me what’s wrong, ‘ sae’s voice says. he speaks flat, & he’s always spoken that way.
sent by @mindsafe : you know you can't lie to me. tell me what's wrong; sae & rin
but if rin closes his eyes again, he thinks he can imagine sae’s amusement — their mother thinks the world is ending & that rin is weak.
if he weren’t weak, they wouldn’t be having this conversation.
rin ends the phone call & handles the repercussions.