Constantine's Room

JULY 7TH. 1992

C_________ CITY HOSPITAL

          I looked with curiosity at the person who was now insisting that I call him “brother”.

After my mother had remarried his father, he soon ingratiated himself into the household. My mother and sister were both overly fond of him. He was especially useful with chores, I supposed, and he did have a way with the plants in the estate garden. 

Nils was sturdy, tall, (for twelve), and his hearty looks were at complete odds with my own - sickly, pale, and weak were the words that best described me.

His hair was a messy ash brown, and his eyes were the type of sky blue that makes you think of the sound of cicadas and imagine the taste of a popsicle that’s quickly falling victim to the summer sun.

I on the other hand had hair the color of mulberries, that left unpicked and unwanted, had fallen to the ground to rot, and eyes like an overcast sky, always threatening to rain.

          I had been sick with various conditions ever since I was a child. My health was unstable enough to require my being kept here, in this sterile cell where the nurses were my wardens and the doctor my judge, but not so unstable that anyone ever truly worried much about me.

          Except for my new… brother, who insisted on coming to visit me every day straight from school. Every day, his uniform would be just as crumpled as his hair which soon began to fall over his eyes and down his neck. It began to resemble my hair, which over time had become long like a girl’s.

          I began to grow intensely fond of him. It was only natural, for against all common sense he was fond of me. And it was only doubly natural that I began to suspect him for it. After all, I was a good for nothing son and certainly an even more useless brother.

I was too weak to do most things, so I spent most of my time asleep, and I came to know a place called the World of Dreams. 

Bound by my illness to that hospital bed, I drifted into dreams so often that I naturally came to possess dominion over that World, and the more time I spent inside it, the more I was able to control it. The more I was able to control it, the more time I spent inside it.

          Nils would stay late by my side many nights, and I learned later that he would watch me drift off. My sister had told me once, in her spitting, venomous tone like a viper, that he only felt at peace seeing my expression change to a tranquil one as I fell asleep. Of course I could never feel at ease in the uncontrollable real world, where my life was controlled by white-coated strangers with stethoscopes.

She had meant this as a bitter insult towards me, blaming me for “keeping” Nils away from them, but she was unaware I had already done my duty in attempting to drive him away, back to the estate, school, his friends that I supposed someone so blessed as him must have… the “real world”.

          In a way I was bitter that he, who belonged so well with everyone and was well loved, would take it for granted and throw it away by wasting his evenings and afternoons on me. 

Because of that twisted logic, I lied to him cruelly one evening in July.

          We were chatting and laughing - by then it had been almost a year and we were starting to get along so well that he allowed me to forget my own worthlessness around him. But it lay in me still like a venom-filled snake, and a shift in his expression from mirth to something pitiful - perhaps imagined, perhaps not, sprang that dormant snake from within me and at once I felt as if he’d tricked me into becoming fond of him, so weak and worthless and easy to fool I must have been.

          “You’re having trouble falling asleep again,” he murmured, eyes heavy with concern unsuited for his young face - he was 13 now, and this took place in that magical time in between birthdays when I was 13 as well. He reached out a hand to me. “Let me help you-”

          Suddenly disgusted at what I took as pity, I recoiled and snatched my hand away from his. “I never said I needed your help, Nils… What a wonderful dream you must be living in,” I snarled, voice thick with anger and barbed with spite, “where you just assume everyone wants you around! I don’t, though, and I never did, never will - so if you think yourself grand for these daily alms to the sick, then you make me sick, and I’d feel much better if you went off and died somewhere. Then Mother and Sister could finally have someone good to mourn, because God knows I-” 

          He cut me off before that hateful snake could sink the last of its fangs into him, clasping my hand in his, and the sudden warmth I felt coming from him stopped my runaway forked tongue in its tracks.

          It was not just warmth, however, but something like a rippling pool of tranquility that radiated from his hands to mine, and a sensation that I’d never known while awake washed over me - peace. And I began to feel something like drowsiness, only lighter like a feather.

          When he spoke now I felt myself sink deeper into a pure and complete sleep. 

“Connie, how could I ever?” He rubbed his thumb over the back of my hand in a soothing, circular motion. “You’re all I have. If I bother you, if I disgust you, I’ll throw away and change everything about me you hate so I can be someone you can love. Please, tell me what I should do, Connie… I know it’s selfish of me to ask…”

I cried now, hearing how horribly I’d hurt him, and I began to hate myself more for what I’d dared to say, and now he might not be fond of me anymore, the only person who’d ever been so unrequitedly fond of me; what a worthless idiot I truly proved to be!

          But all that now melted away from me - all the hate and the sorrow, as tears began to quiver in his bright eyes, and the warmth he’d summoned finally sent me to the World of Dreams. 

All unhappiness was forgotten there.

When I awoke he was still there, slumped over in his visitor’s chair and dreaming… if he was dreaming of something happy, or of something sad, I could not tell.

Soon after, he stirred awake, and we talked then for a long time until night fell once more. He revealed to me that although my mother and sister did adore him, his school life was lonely, and the other students seemed to sense something off about him, and torment him for that something unknown.

I could not understand it then - Nils was handsome in a way that endeared him to girls, and he was athletic, and he was the type that would have a smile on his face even when others would give him a beating.

Nils seemed sad that I did not understand him then, and said that there would always be someone who would have to endure it.

His pain twisted and wrenched my own heart, and I wanted deeply to fix it, to fix everything in the world so things would be fair and correct for him.

Though there was something curious in the way that Nils was the only one whose suffering had this effect on me - the others who would come in and out of my life remained nothing more than mannequins to me. Even my own mother and sister soon grew distant like dolls on a shelf too high to reach… soon, you stop bothering to play with them.

          It was on that certain night in July that Nils’s powers of sleep were awakened.

Nils had prayed for me to drift off into that painless sleep for so many nights that perhaps a kind God that was highly responsive to prayers had thought it only natural that he get his wish.

          As we got older, Nils and I both developed our abilities further. I discovered that I was able to send those asleep in my immediate vicinity to the World of Dreams.

Nils was also now able to put anyone who could hear his voice to sleep if he so wished.

Having been granted these strange, powerful blessings, a path of sorts began to make itself clear to us.

          On my sixteenth birthday, a small gathering of doctors and nurses made their way into my solitary room.

They had deemed me fit to be discharged, and so I left my room.

Though I remained sickly, my brother and I never returned.  

OCTOBER 20TH, 2006

THE FRENETTE FAMILY ESTATE

          Years later, perhaps with the latent goal of curing my own sickness, I began studying medicine after a brief stint in psychology.

Nils followed me, as he always did, to San Francisco where we both enrolled in the same program, living in a house nicknamed “Ibsen House” for reasons that had long been forgotten by the time we moved in. 

(For extra income, a room was rented to a peculiar girl attending the same university.)

Leaning on each other, sometimes cheating with our “blessings”, for once I had someone in my grasp in the World of Dreams, they would be completely at my mercy… we had grown and one day were no longer the lonely boys we were when we first met.

          I was taller than him now, and no longer so dangerously frail though still unfortunately fragile. My pale, deathly pallor remained, however, as being out for too long in the sun seemed to exacerbate my illness... I had kept my hair long and it now nearly reached my waist, but Nils had kept his short since we’d left the hospital, leaving just enough to dust the back of his neck.

          My mother had fallen ill to a rare, incurable disease around the time of my high school graduation and was now confined to a specialist hospital across the country, hooked up to enough machines to power a city block. I had not seen her since.

Athena, my poisonous little sister, had eloped to England with a count or some gentleman of that sort, and had no intention of coming back.

As for my step-father and Nils’s father, he had passed away.

The estate was empty now. Nils and I still paid visits, however, to ensure the garden and main house was maintained, in the same manner one would maintain a grave.

          It was on one of those visits to the grave that Nils proposed a plan. 

This morning and the last, I'd coughed out a plume of red blood, bright like a warning against the white sink.

My condition was deteriorating once again. Soon, I would have to be readmitted. And perhaps I could not keep stalling Death the way I had as a child.

As we walked around the edge of the garden, the plan Nils proposed as an exchange.

Our current curious tenant, Heland Bai, with slightly inappropriate vigor, had shown Nils a webpage, a forum for occult enthusiasts.

          A certain notorious poster had been writing a series of blog entries on something he’d deemed the “Lotus Complex”.

Nils explained it to me the best he could - the poster, Z_hou1988, was more famous for being the suspected ringleader of a trolling campaign, who’d narrowly escaped a ban - than a clear and concise writer.

          “Therefore, you believe his theory?”

Nils stopped at a certain tree. It was the orange tree our mother had planted many years ago, though it now bore no fruit.

“I tracked him down, the poster…” said Nils in his soft voice. “And once I found him, it was simple to find the friend he posts about, since they’re roommates…”

          “The one with that ‘complex’. And you posit that this can cure me.”

Nils stared up at the barren tree. “The ‘Lotus Complex’ can be used as an amplifier for our ‘blessings’... and I’ve been online chatting with him a bit about it a little, actually, and he amended some of his earlier posts - the ‘complex’ really loosens the soul. From between the anchors of life… and death. But the most important aspect is the inheritability… or rather, that the ‘complex’ has some properties of a contagion… if the source is sufficiently strong, it’ll spread to those around them. It’s his theory, though we need to test it a little.”

          Nils tore his gaze from the tree and I met his eyes. I understood him at once, as I always have.

“Then those souls that you’ll be able to put to sleep, I’ll be able to bring to the World of Dreams with my power, but this abnormal ‘complex’, once it’s been spread to all those sleeping, will allow me to rip away their now loosened souls, and then, I’ll be able to consume their life force.”

          Nils smiled. “Then you’ll get better.”

The dying citrus towered over us like a ghost.

I returned his smile though I was unable to replicate his warmth. “Then we shall experiment and see if this tree bears fruit.”

I flipped open my phone and began composing a text to an old friend up North.

Echoing something he had once heard, Nils replied: “We’ll see if this sleeping dragon does indeed roar.”

          I laughed at his odd remark so unlike him, and completed it with one of my own.

“And then, let the foolish beast lead us to its horde.”

[ A/N: I still wanna see Connie do ventriloquism with his pet snake. Unless Heland was lying, which she does sometimes for no reason at all. You can tell cause she'll have a totally straight face. 

Also, they were supposed to meet Silver in this chapter, but... *looks away* I GOT BUSY WITH THEIR CHILDHOOD SCENES... *sob*... in a way they parallel Ellis and Phoebe. By the way, it wasn't explicitly mentioned, but their full names are Nils Porter and Constantine Frenette... Do with that what you will... ]