parasite }} tobi x ira || blitz

[[nyte]]

T O B  I A S

There was a kind of relief in not knowing. Years spent walking broken streets, aimlessly searching for a ghost hidden among the fire and brimstone that had consumed me, it hurt but it was never unbearable. It was never like this. I feel so alone, surrounded by warm blankets wrapped around my shoulders and with my cheek pressed to a cotton pillow. I feel cold and empty and lost within a labyrinth that has clenched its fists around my throat, giving me air only when I was about to give up. I would count the days without him but I have already lost track.

It feels like yesterday he walked onto that damned train. Over and over again my heart shatters, tears spill from swollen eyes and whimpers are strangled within a closed throat. The only relief I have been able to find is in sleep. When I have cried until there is nothing left, my knees pulled to my chest and eyes too heavy to force open. Even then, the sleep is not restful. It is exhaustion, fear and humiliation draining just about everything I had left until my breaths are quiet and my body still.

I wish I'd never been born. I have tried to push the thought from my head whenever it surfaces- digging into the soft flesh of my skull and burying itself within the very center. Without life, I would have never felt this pain. The fear of being left upon a dirty street, drowning in my own blood as they pull my brother away. The hopelessness that was three years spent searching for a dead man. The realization that I had wasted my life upon a brother who signed the letters of his love in the blood from his slit wrists.

If I were dead I would not be here. Engulfed by pain and laid upon the couch of my best friend- forcing him to care for me and becoming just the burden my brother died to escape. I'm starting to think just about everyone would be better off, had I just never existed. Life just doesn't seem all that worth it when every good thing I ever had has been taken and replaced by sorrow. By death. By tears and uncertainty.

My brother was sweet. Even when consumed by insanity, he kept a companion within his pocket and fed it bits of food when there was none to give. And when I was a child, plagued by nightmares, it was he who held my hand and brushed his fingers through a tangled mess that young Tobias almost never took the time to brush. He stayed with me until the shadows had disappeared from the corners of the room and the monster's hands retreated back under my bed. He was my idol- loving and brave and admired and everything I could have ever wanted to be.

Today, I watched him slaughter two people. They fell into pools of their own cold blood and I could not help but see myself in every cannon shot across a man-made horizon. And after all of that, he told me he deserved to die. The words felt empty, a justification to a blow that had already been dealt. And I know that I still love him with every bit of my broken heart, that I will love him not matter how unrecognizable my brother becomes but I simply cannot believe the words that left his lips while bathed in the blood of the dead.

So instead I close my eyes. Feeling nauseous and used, feeling as though the world is crumbling around me and escape is a gun to my temple but I cannot set my feet upon the swaying ground long enough to find one. If Mordecai should die then there I no reason that I should keep living. Everything that was ever good about me was because of my brother- because of how he raised me and the stories he would tell to a child who thought the stars were simply ratmas lights draped upon a celestial ceiling.

None of the people my brother killed were innocent, I know that. In a world like that it is kill or be killed and my brother simply chose to live. He chose to survive and to conquer and he is changing before my very eyes, becoming better and I fear that it is me who has held him back for so long. I am a burden, a parasite, feeding upon greatness and turning it to sorrow.

None of the people my brother killed were innocent, including me.

"Ira?" I mumble and the words are broken, my throat is strained and and raw from every scream that I have not sung. I sound as broken as I am. "Ira, I'm so sorry. About all of this. About me."

And I don't know if he can hear me but it's all that I have left to say.