Unconditional

All characters are © Callista Chameleon, suitable for nearly all age groups. Warning: Tragedy.

I was little more than five years of age when I met the man who would come to encapsulate my entire world. Well, perhaps the term man is used out of place, in my fifth year, he was double my age, ten years old. When I first set eyes to that lanky young man, all arm and leg, with a shaggy mess of black hair, and the most enigmatic stormy grey eyes I had ever seen, I knew he would shape my life.

The first five years of my life were not the type I was keen to linger on. Abandoned at birth, I had spent my early life bounced from foster home to foster home, kicked, slapped, injured, and ignored, if I was lucky. No youth deserved what I received, neglected and left to my own devices, until such times as the authorities deemed my living conditions inappropriate. Then each time led into the back of a paneled van, the walk of the girl fearing what was next to come. So was it any small wonder that when my new family claimed me, I went in fear of the second shoe’s falling?

My new brother’s name was Mark, and at a glance, one would have easily have passed him by, just another boy, clipped of manner and lacking affinity for lingual expression. Mark was the reserved sort, content to linger in his own mental recesses, untouched by anyone but himself. As it had been explained to me, Mark was a loner, he didn’t make friends easily, and this was a partial reason for my adoption. Through a sister, he might find a friend. This had seemed perfectly acceptable to me, though as always, I feared the heavy handedness of most men, be they full grown or miniatures, it stung the same.

When we first caught sight of each other, his expression was beyond reading for me, his deep grey eyes lifted to his parents in quizzical form, and he simply turned from me and stalked back to his musings. What was a girl to do? Urged by my new parents, I dared my approach, slowly pacing over to the self contained young man who was now my family. I sat at his side in silence, for in that one thing, we were a perfect match, neither one of us much caring for words, nor for the company of others. He didn’t even cast me a glance, but kept his eyes down to the pages before him, losing himself in the tales of long lost valour and courage. Ignored anew, I receded, stalking wounded back to my little corner of the house, and taking to my bed.

Months passed, and I felt that perhaps this family would be as the many transitory steps my youth had wrought, fraught with periods of neglect and wordless scorn. No word from the boy who occupied my thoughts, my brother and my would be friend, and barest hint of affection from my new parents. The odd touch of a hand, that was my nourishment, that fleeting contact, no matter how absent the gesture was, slowly healed the injury done to my spirit. Ignored as I was, I began to find an eccentric solace in the knowledge that I could pass under the attentions of others. No, I did not use this as an excuse to misbehave. I’ve never been the kind of girl to do such an awful thing, but obscurity had a comfort to it.

Tension’s touch to the household grew as it was announced that Mark was to see a therapist regarding some of his social traits. It was hard not to notice that he came home from school each day sullen and moody, slinging his knapsack to the floor and storming off to his room. Words were thrown around like ‘autism’ and ‘syndrome’, and I remained silent as I heard my new parents discussing what they felt was wrong with my new brother. Silent as a shadow, each word rang it’s path through my mind, and I began to worry for the withdrawn sibling, regardless of my own fears of boys and men. Abuse has a way of lingering in the psyche, lost among throngs of paranoia and frustration, and masked by the trials life sets before you, but it is truly amazing what little things can break the melancholy. My concern for Mark circumvented my own anxieties, and for the first time in months, I approached my brother.

From the book he read, those stormy eyes lifted at my approach, and with that guarded tone of his, his voice murmured dimly, “What do you want, Miss?” I stopped in mid step, what did I want? I’ve never been one to waste words, I simply sidled over to him, and leaned my minimal weight against his side, the gesture simple and beyond denying. I wanted to be close to him, to help if I could. I felt him tense up at the press of our sides, though a few minutes passed, and soon he loosened his posture. I felt his hand fall to the small of my back in a self assuring ease, and with a slow exhale, he poured out his anxieties to me.

He was afraid, not only of what mother and father thought of his withdrawl, but of what it would mean if the therapist found something wrong with him. I listened to his outpouring of frustration and agony with compassionate silence, affection in my gestures, and love in my touch. Mark’s hand tensed and eased almost rhythmically against my spine, as though the simple touch of another being allayed his fears. To him, I was someone to talk to who would not judge him on his outward show of silent dispassion, a confidante he knew would hold her tongue and keep safe his secret. The more I listened, the more I understood, we were twin souls, myself and Mark, a better fitting pair you would be hard pressed to find. To him, I was support and a kind ear, and to me, he was my only link to the family I had done my own withdrawing from. Tit for tat, mother had always said.

The next months eased that tension, for in my own way, I had become a therapist of sort for Mark. His hopes and fears were poured from him into me, his aspirations to be a great artist, and his fears that his social dysfunction, which had been diagnosed as a borderline personality disorder, would limit his ability to reach that dream. I watched him calm and open to my influence, as I would come to relax in his presence. Though the rest of the world still frightened me, the low booming voices of men hounding my mind’s depths, with Mark, everything was alright. I had nothing to fear from him, nor him from me.

Mark began to take artistic courses as he grew into high school, and day by day, I lay on his bed, watching as his hands evinced the depths of true artistry. His fingers glided as if guided from beyond his own self, sketches imbued with a startling vivacity and paintings that sparkled with near life. Years had passed, Mark had grown into a calmly shy young man of fourteen years, and I his sister of four winters, had attained the age of nine. With enrapt attention, I watched as life bloomed from the hand of that shy young man, whispering delicacy across canvas and parchment alike. Daily now, I went in awe of Mark’s talents for the visual, his world was so much bigger than mine. Glorious landscapes flourished from his mind, fletched with vibrant people and prancing animals, and every day, I took my place on his bed, lain on the flat of my stomach with my eyes upraised. It was as though he had become my God.

It was in his fifteenth year that he first met her, the young woman. He failed one evening to return and to imbue his craft with life, and I worried for my brother, as only a sister can. I paced the whole of the house in abject anxiety, hours passed without a sign of him, and every time I passed the windows, I was unable to keep the undercurrent of unease from my steps. In less time than I would have liked, I managed to exhaust myself, and was only able to haul myself up the stairs and up onto Mark’s bed. Like the child that I felt I must be, I buried my face in his comforter, drinking in the comfortable scent of his presence, anxiety playing knots through my stomach. Where was he? Was he alright?

Uneasy slumber had claimed me until evening, when the slam of a door and a murmur of voices woke me. I pulled myself from Mark’s bed, and made my way to the top of the stairs, where I always met him. There was no disguising the grin that split his face from ear to ear, or the dreamy shift of his eyes. He looked right past me, deigning only to offer that familiar touch to my shoulder before he retired to his room. I felt a pain in my chest as I watched him close the door, and I drew a slow breath before I slunk back to my room for the night. He didn’t need me anymore.

Weeks passed with Mark in the same heady floating state, and I did what I always did when presented with pain, I withdrew. Mother and Father said not a word as they suddenly knew my presence, seated between them on the couch as they stared at the flickering light of the television. They said nothing to me, but offered once in a while that simple show of mild affection, the ruffling of my hair, or the light kiss to my cheek before they again drew motionless.

I missed the way my brother touched me, the way he spoke to me and brought me to him in firm embrace. I missed him. In only five short years, Mark had become the one I breathed for, the one I would have gladly given my life for. I didn’t know why this was, only that he was my brother, and I his sister, his friend. While he was off with that girl, I lay as I had always done on his bed, taking in the scents of his presence, or rather it’s lack. Invariably, I snuck from his room in good time, and he returned to find his sanctum exactly as he’d left it. I was no longer privy to his artistry, and he no longer showed an inclination to include me in it’s creation. His thoughts were elsewhere.

The night he returned home in the foulest of moods drew me from my solitude, and I stepped into his room as he threw a pot of his paint out into the hall. I had barely enough time to sidestep when I felt his stormy eyes on me. The paint can, thankfully sealed, clattered through the hallway as I turned and met his eyes. Anguish held them, filling them to a flooding I had only ever seen a handful of times. Tears spilled down his face as though there were no end to them, and as I strode over to the agony of my sibling, I felt him drop to his knees and throw his arms around me, holding me as though I were his last hope for salvation. Without a thought to his three months of neglect, I did as I always had, I let him touch me, and I listened. His hands shook for a long while that night, though they calmed, as they usually did after hours of raw emotion, and he subsided into silent sobs as he curled me into his arms. Simple affection, that is all I had ever asked of my big brother, and now he sought it of me. I did as best I could to ease the pain that had no name for me, offering to him my affections as only I was able.

Once he calmed, he began to speak to me again, the same way as it had been when the threat of the therapist loomed. He spoke of the girl, Cynthia, of how he had thought she loved him, how he had done everything he could think of to assure her affections. And she had done the unthinkable, turned his devotion into a farce, and lain in the arms of another young man. This had not been the straw that broke him, as he had always held the belief that he was not enough to satisfy her, the breaking point had been when the minx had handed him a photograph of an act that shredded through him. Cynthia, it turned out, not only had strayed from Mark, but now asked him to paint this, the graphic evidence of her betrayal of his sentiments.

Lovemaking, he told me, was not everything it was cracked up to be. Losing yourself in the arms of another is a beautiful thing, a luscious suffusion of care and adoration, but it often soured the sentiments that strove to create it. Cynthia, he explained, had been his first foray into the realm of the sensuous, while to her, he had simply been another male to satisfy a visceral craving. As was always my way, I listened, simple gestures letting my big brother know my sentiments on how he relayed his heartbreak. I offered to him the fond touch that we had always known, the simple press of our forms, twined in loving embrace, and as he spoke, I was his sounding board. In listening to his pain, I somehow lessened it for him, and in being there as his sister and his friend, our closeness was renewed and strengthened.

Three years were to pass in this divine way, knowing no life beyond the room of my brother, no solace but that brought by his continued presence. Three years before illness claimed a hold upon me. It began as a vague stiffening about my joints, which made it more and more difficult to stagger up the stairs, or even walk, once it’s hold grew all the stronger. It was as though I was being torn apart by the hands of an unseen assailant. My eyes grew dim, until I could no longer see the brother that fate had given me, the friend my parents had assigned me, and the companion I loved with unconditional voracity. When I walked, my body crumpled, when I tried to navigate by touch or by sound, I fell. Shudders racked my frame at uncertain intervals, spreading misery along my limbs and mind, and I was unable to do anything against the invaders.

At the insistence of my brother, his room became my sickbed. He made no complaint of cleaning up the messes my body made without my say so, not a word of displeasure as I heard him mopping up any of the myriad offerings of my physical self. I heard him weeping often, felt the heat of his tears dripping along my face, sliding through my hair, spattering my arms. I knew I was a burden on him, though I did my best to help him with the trouble that I had become. I hurt all over, and yet I tried to escape to relieve myself anywhere but my brother’s bed. He found me one afternoon collapsed at the foot of the bed, my ankle contorted to an unnatural angle, and though he chided me for my efforts, I heard affection in his tone. I knew I was hurting him through my suffering, and I hated myself for it.

For the break in my ankle, I was brought to the doctor’s office. Seated up on the cold table for examination, I felt Mark’s fingers kneading against the back of my neck, stroking fondly against my sides, and trembling as he listened to the doctor’s words. I had been here many a time in the last year, since illness had claimed my energy and my strength, and I knew the voice of the doctor as it spoke in muted whispers. She told him what I had known, this condition was not going to get any easier, I was suffering. My body was failing, one system at a time, and that she could give me something that would ease the pain.

Anguish in the voice of my best friend as he assented to the measures of the doctor. Mark’s voice fell into the strangled sobs of a young man as he stepped back to the examining table, his hand again kneading and stroking affectionately against my spine and sides. He didn’t say anything in that moment, he didn’t need to. I could smell the salt in his tears, hear the agony in his throat. He was in as much pain as I was, and with all of the energy I could spare, I reached for him, blindly, and felt the side of my head touch his stomach. He shuddered with his misery as I heard the doctor return to the room, and I smelled the acrid metallic scent of a needle. I trusted him to the ends of the earth, and he cradled my head as I felt the sharp pinch of the needle’s entry into my hip. His voice was strangled, though it still held it’s affection for me, and as he bowed his head to kiss the top of mine, I heard him utter the last words I would ever hear.

“I love you, Miss. You were the best dog a boy could have.”