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He always knows when his brother enters the room.
It is simpler than knowing the angle of his own shadow or the cadence of his own breath. It is because Morgan’s name comes more easily off his tongue than his own, and the inverse. It because he hardly needs to look in the mirror to know himself: because he has another mirror who walks beside him and can finish his own thoughts before they are even spoken aloud.
It is physical, sometimes. The two were born with hands trapped touching, webbing joining their fingertips together in a bond as fine and thin as silk. There is a scar on the tips of the first three fingers of Custis’s right hand – and a matching set of scars, so small, on the tips of those fingers on Morgan’s left. Pale against pale skin. Almost invisible. They have determined that they are the only people who can see or sense them. When they were boys, they used to sit left to right, reach under the dinner table, and play at fitting them together: try to see how close the pads of scar could get before their hands would actually touch. Seeking out limits, always (a game that they enjoy now, in ways that are older and crueler and darker). They would find that point and freeze that way. The distance between them would be no greater or lesser than the steel width of the surgeon’s knife.
Custis curls his hand into a fist, and the scars brush against the folds of his palm. It is not that they itch – that would be something out of a little boy’s fairy tale, and they are not boys – it is only that they are present and thin and always, always there.
He always knows when is brother enters the room, and he always knows when he leaves it. And there are no secrets at the Golden Cat. So it is not like he has wandered here by accident. He has neither sought out the room nor avoided it.
It’s not even as if this is something he has not seen before, because there are no secrets in the backrooms of Dunwalls’ aristocracy. Because they are twins and it is no more vulgar than looking into a mirror.
His brother, for once, does not seem to know or care that he is there.
His brother has more important matters at hand.
The girl is not pretty. It is only her pose between his brother’s thighs that makes her so. Morgan is all languid and leaned back on the couch, and this girl is all focused and compact: it is the very opposite of looking at a mirror. And, for once, Custis finds that he does not focus on the dimples at the base of the girl’s curved spine, or the freckles on her shoulders, or the exquisite suctioned hollow of her cheeks, all those normal lovely things –
That is not what he looks at at all.
It is the expression on his brother’s face, the tilt of his head, half-lidded eyes, that ecstasy.
It is the fingers of his left hand curled in the girl’s dark hair. Invisible scars ghosting over her temple.
Custis turns on his heel and slips out of the room. And his twin (horribly, understandably) does not notice at all.
He finds his way down to a washroom. The air here is thin and cold with the smell of seawater rather than the thicker scents of sex and brandy and rotted fruit, all those familiar shades of corruption. The water that he splashes on his face is thin as well. And jarringly cold.
It is enough, almost, to jar the image right out of his head – the image and the slick dark thought that no one should see his brother’s face like that, no one should cause that, no one is good enough, no one but –
Custis studies his own face, his twin’s face, in the mirror he does not need.
He will pay whatever it takes to take the girl to bed later that night. He will pay whatever it takes to see brilliant red weals cut across the freckles on her shoulders. There are some girls here who enjoy that, who will moan and writhe and sigh when men dig into their flesh instead of scream. Custis does not particularly like any of this (but his brother does, and he is his brother or close enough), and he has no idea of this particular girl is one of these; but he will pay, because –
The thought tastes of jealousy and then it is slippery and gone, sliding back under the water.
(He will pay; and when the girl sighs out Lord Pendleton with a whore’s false passion as she has been taught to do, he will wrap a hand around her throat and ask if she sounds that way for his twin)
He sets his hands on either side of the mirror. Braces himself there. Filmy water from the tap drips down from his face; he has not bothered to dry it. The glass of the mirror is cold on the heels of his palms and freezing on the tips of his right three fingers. The scars there do not itch.
There are differences between them, of course. Slight things. A faint mark across the forehead. A lick of hair that does not fall the same way. A light in the eyes. These differences are so small that the twins are the only ones who can ever fully see them all; he’s not sure if that makes it better or worse. Custis focuses on them, now. Intently. Desperately.
(There are larger differences between them, like the desire to curve red weals over the arch of a girl’s pale shoulders like an embrace or the instinct for buying and brokering and building a fortune. Their cruelties are aimed at different things. They are not each other. They are not the same. This is not, however, something concrete, something that can be seen in a mirror).
Custis breathes in sharp through his nose and focuses on the smell of the sea and not the smell of sex from the rooms above.
This is an unnatural thing.
He knows this. It is why the thoughts will not let themselves fully surface in his brain, keep sliding underneath like fish in the slimy corners of the river. It is a thing that the Abbey only dares speak about in metaphors and frightened brimstone. It is a thing fit for the mines, where there are no women and the men are not men. It is a thing –
No.
It is not a thing worth thinking about. He knows how it would go.
(He would get his brother blind drunk, drunk to the point where he did not know and where there would be no memory in the morning, and he would send the girl away. And he would lose what little nerve he had, or his brother would know him as he always does, and that would be the end of it. His fingers would curl into a fist and remain still. Cowardice and denial would choke him. The thoughts would not break the surface. He knows how it would go - )
He would get his brother blind drunk, drunk to the point where he did not know and where there would be no memory in the morning, and he would send the girl away. And he would kneel down between his brother’s thighs. But it would not be subservience, no. Never. He would forget for a moment that he was a man and turn himself wholly into a mirror, and his brother’s head would tip back. And Custis knows, as he looks into the looking glass, the exact cadence of his twin’s breathing. The expressions that would take hold of his face. Want. That half-lidded ecstasy.
Right.
His twin’s left hand would card through his own hair, and then find his right again, and pull back – fingertip to fingertip, the scars on the tips of Custis’s right hand not a breath away from the scars of Morgan’s left. Not touching. Space between them the width of a surgeon’s slicing knife – and then closing. No separation. Taste of salt and birth, one body moving in time with another. Points pressed so exact and close that flesh is finally whole. They were born this way. It is nothing unnatural at all.