Resonance

I remember the first six minutes of my life.

Those six minutes were my very first brush with loneliness, an all-too accurate reflection of my future. I felt like I had abandoned someone, or like I had been abandoned. I was gone from my safe-haven, a dark place more comfortable than the deepest sleep, and then I was in somebody's arms. They were warm, and loving, but I couldn't feel at ease. A vital component of me was missing. I felt as though I were just a body running on autopilot - without life beyond the pounding of my veins and the structure of flesh and skin that made up my newborn body.

Yes - I was lonely.

I wish I could recall the moment Len was born, but I can't really put a picture to any of this. I just recognise the feelings, and they form the vague outline I call my earliest memory. I know that my emotions were like these fifteen years ago, to the day, for six minutes.

It's been six weeks since I killed Len. When he first died, only six years old, it was the same. Now he's gone again, and this time it's for real, and he took my core with him.

There is no other person to link me to the living. He was my most vital organ, ever since before we were born.

I still dream of my twin, his blood filling my head every night until I scream and Haku wakes and asks me if I'm okay. I see his body slumping against the frame of the guillotine as the blade separates him in two. I see him every time I blink, and in every shadow in the chapel. Most horrifically, I see him whenever I'm in the street and pass a dark window, and I'm tricked into believing he is standing across from me. I begged Haku to take down all the mirrors in our rooms and she did, after I became obsessed with watching myself, my hair tied back like Len wore his until I made myself sick from staring at my own reflection.

I want to see him. I don't want to see him.

I don't want to see his soulless eyes staring blankly up at the sky, his hair matted with still-fresh blood. My gentle, beautiful brother, so loyal he cast his purity away because I was a whimsical, selfish queen, once upon a time.

Me? A queen? It seems like centuries ago that I was oblivious to the scent of blood. Now it's engraved into my memory, along with his name. Just six weeks ago, I adorned my pathetic neck with jewels and sat in wait of someone whose agonised screams would arouse my interest.

Only a few years ago, I first filled in my emptiness, the absence of love, with pride.

One after the other, people dropped. They were expendable. Boring.

Once, I had wanted revenge against everyone for taking my lovely mother and my beloved brother away from me. Then, I was lonely, and after that even the loneliness gave way to apathy.

Len returned, and at first he was just one of a new batch of servants. I didn't pay much attention to him, but he smiled where other people stared at the floor, and he understood my various moods. He was the one servant who genuinely served me. It wasn't just the job he took up at the palace because there was nowhere left to farm.

He quickly became my companion, and I allowed him to speak to me more casually. I'd deliberately leave the palace and lie in the wide meadows nearby, because he knew I liked them, and he'd come find me. I'd let him be beside me in the court and at tea, and I began to crave his presence when we were apart.

As well as being my loyal companion, he was my most violent limb. He was adoring and affectionate, angelic, even, but when he turned from me to face the people of my kingdom on my behalf, he appeared nothing more than a calm, effective murderer.

Leon, a friend of the palace for so much of his life, and also a just warrior, had stolen my food for the sake of hungry villagers. My meals became incredibly inferior to the banquet I usually expected – they took up only a quarter of the dining table.

Little to my knowledge, Leon was not only a fearsomely strong swordsman, but also the adopted father of a young woman called Meiko, and of Len. My brother managed to clean him up without attracting attention in a very small time frame, regardless.

Yes, I was proud of my sword. He executed his tasks with ease and did whatever I asked of him. He was unafraid of me. He smiled at me. He was the one prize I had always wanted, and I took him everywhere with me.

In the face of the kind, innocent girl he loved, he could become merciless. He could kill without hesitation.

A girl called Miku was found dead in a well.

For the first time, I had to look away from him when he returned. His expression was empty, his eyes ghastly in the way they looked through everything and saw nothing. I couldn't speak when he knelt before me the next day, stature perfectly rehearsed, cold and still as marble. I left him on the stone ground and walked aimlessly through my palace for most of the day.

He had loved her. He killed somebody he loved, destroyed her frail body and stopped her pulse, breathed the odour of her blood and stood in the chilly absence he had created, because I had told him to. He was suddenly alone where moments ago another living human had waited for her chance to be freed.

That night I dreamed of my own hands plunging an unmarred, steel blade into Len. When I woke to the unforgiving silence of the dark room where I slept, I cried into the heels of my palms and cradled the space beside me, where usually the sheets would drape loosely over his frame.

I could not bring myself to order a kill in the days that followed. I'd scream at people's faces and threaten them with whatever came to mind, and then, devoid of everything but a lingering feeling of despair, I'd let them go.

Len did not forgive himself, or me. He held me and lay beside me at night after the first few days, but he cried silently sometimes. He lay awake and spoke to me one night. He said he cried for lots of different things. He cried for Miku, the only other person he'd loved, he cried for Leon, who may as well have been his real father, and Meiko, who'd protected him for so long, and was betrayed by him.

He told me he was afraid. He wasn't short sighted, like me, and he said he was scared of what was going to happen. He was still trying to protect me, as if I was worth anything.

Miku's lover, the man I had hoped to add to my collection of sparkling trinkets using Len and a message in a bottle, was surely preparing his country to revolt. And Meiko – fiery, tough Meiko – which rebellion would she be leading? Who knew how many civilians had families and friends who were murdered by the Daughter of Evil and her Servant?

I remember shaking, my throat clenching tightly when I thought that I was no longer his family. I had stopped being his family when I became proud of having him. He was mine, just like everything else in my country. He wasn't the person who was my only equal. He wasn't the person who might have been able to transform me into my old, carefree self. He was just my possession.

I used him. I hurt him.

And then he said-

"I love you."

Even through the horror of what was happening to us and the terrifying shadow of our fates looming only days ahead, it made me feel light. I forgot how calm those words made me.

I told him I loved him too, for the first time since becoming a queen. I let him stroke my hair with the gentleness that was imbued in his fingertips, even though I didn't deserve it. I asked him how he could love me. He said only that he needed to see me smiling, instead of being lonely and irritable. He'd kill for it. It didn't matter if he had to give himself up, he said. He would make sure I would always have the ability to smile, even if he was scared or we were apart.

I wanted to ask him why – why? – but he kissed me to sleep before I was able to say a word.

Ironically, I rediscovered love when I felt his heart tearing apart inside my own chest. Our hearts were, after all, just the same. I was just a human, just like all those people at the bottom of my world, and so was he.

He told me who he was the next day – the day before he died.

The palace servants all fled at the onset of the rebellion, most simply to join the villagers with their makeshift weapons. Alongside my own royal forces and a woman cloaked in red - Meiko, they made up the rebellion. Len and I ran, passing a few scowling servants who pelted at us whatever was at hand – the wall hangings, dinner plates, decorative vases and their own shoes – invigorated by their newfound confidence and brutality though not prepared, without their forces, to challenge Len.

He pulled me into a concealed chamber, and that is when he told me. He clasped both my hands in his and bowed his head, before lifting his eyes and saying that my dear twin brother was not dead, but that he had returned. He had been with me this whole time.

He had returned to me. He wanted my happiness so intensely that he would sacrifice his entire self… and he was the one who always done so, ever since we were born.

How I could not have realised it, I do not know. His death was a pain I had long since accepted but not recovered from – it was just a truth. Why I was not more shocked, I can't say. What I felt was nothing. For a moment, I stared at him without moving or reacting.

The desperately kind look in his eyes perfectly resonated with a memory of my twin, his little figure racing to help me as I carelessly toppled to the ground. The careful but sure hands that held mine as he pulled me to my feet were the same as the ones that now kept me from collapsing.

He didn't desert me, even if it was the best thing he could have done.

The boy who was my beloved servant, the boy who was my twin. There was no difference between the two - the same person - and it wasn't a painful realisation, to know that the person I fell in love with was Len himself. I felt far less deceived than enraptured.

But his proposal made me freeze.

To become the Daughter of Evil in my place. To end her reign.

He would give me his clothes to wear and I could escape, feigning that I was the evil queen's main servant, betraying her at last, when in truth I would be leaving behind the one person who would never, never betray me.

In doing this, he would save me. In dying, he would take the Daughter of Evil with him, freeing a country and a stupid girl called Rin, allowing her to live.

I begged him, my grief expressed only fractionally by the intense grip I held on him and the tears cascading down my cheeks. I told him I wouldn't be alive if he was dead, but he reminded me – "I'll always make sure you have the ability to smile, even if I'm scared or we're apart."

"We can die together, if-"

"I don't want to die, Rin." He said, burying himself in my hair. "I want you to live."

It was wrong. I had finally been reunited with the person my very life began with, and now his life was ending.

My companion.

My friend.

The one who loved me and the only one I loved.

My own twin.

I witnessed his death the next day at three 'o' clock, at the greedy, steel jaws of the guillotine and at the hands of Meiko herself, clad in crimson. I cannot forget the sound, or the feeling of surrealism and helplessness as, in a very real place right before me, a heavy blade was released and Len became two parts, one already lifeless and the other still staring, very much alive but immobile.

My beautiful, gentle brother, mutilated in an unfixable way, dying on the cobblestone, stifled by the smell of blood.

A cheering crowd watched as his kind, intelligent eyes flitted fearfully around… dimmed… and grew empty, not a second after finally resting on mine.

I ran, lurching as I grew temporarily blind and bent over, stomach heaving. I vaguely recall a man clapping my back, laughing and making some vile joke about the gore and getting used to it, before walking off, oblivious to the state of half-death I was in.

My legs trembled. I ran until I fell, surrounded by an unfamiliar wood and just as oblivious to it. Len died. He died again. Again.

Again.

My head reeled the image back to me – Len, alive, dead, dead, dead. It was impossible, and yet I saw him die. Len was gone.

Some idiotic part of me said that he was alive – he'd return in secret, like last time, the first time he was killed and he came back to me, just like an angel. He'd come back, because Len didn't die. Len couldn't be killed by physical means. He couldn't, because if he did, I would be lost.

No matter how many times I repeated those scrambling words and images and sounds, my head was empty, and I could only comprehend a searing colour and intense nausea as I imagined myself there again, watching spatters of life drying into a sickly brown colour on his pale skin.

I wrote him a letter.

I put it in a glass bottle, like I always do with letters, but I set this one out on the harbour and made sure that it grew too small to see before I left.

That day, Haku tried to kill me. After the knife slipped from her hands and she broke down in tears, my waiting back unturned, she apologised to Miku – and I took a strange comfort in knowing that I was not alone in wishing I could speak to the dead. I knelt next to her, tears streaming calmly from my eyes as they constantly do. We didn't speak until the regret message had disappeared into the waves.

Sometimes I am kept awake by the dark shape of the chest that his clothes lie folded in, crouching morbidly in the corner of the room. His scent is fading from them, now, but the memory of the day he gave them to me is etched into the very fabric.

I used to wake in the middle of the night and cradle them hopelessly, turning away to cry so as not to dirty them further.

I have heard people celebrate his death, or, rather, the death of the queen. I cannot hate them, and yet I feel such intense anger when I overhear the clinking of beer glasses in honour of 'death' rather than 'freedom', as he gave to them. He gave them a new future, but they'd never know that.

Meiko was almost unanimously agreed upon as the country's new leader. Her approach is so different from mine was that I am only just beginning to realise the extent of my stupidity, and while I am ashamed, I am also silently astounded by her. She has denied the aggravated and numerous rumours that the queen was revealed to be a male – and, therefore, was not the Daughter of Evil at all but a brave imposter. She managed to quell most of these rumours quickly, assuring the people that the Daughter of Evil was well and truly dead.

I feel that she knows this to be true. I also feel that she knew she was killing Len that day; that she knew his intentions.

Ironically, I find them to be very similar.

I cannot let go of the blood. As I know so well, blood is life. Even as I walk with a broken wicker basket, wearing a thin brown dress, buying groceries with the money Haku and I have cultivated this week, sadness clings to me. As I avert my gaze from a kind lady I'm sure I yelled at once, I thank her and try my best to meet her eyes before I leave. When I hear people mourning I mourn just as readily, for the family whose tears stain the dirt, the people lying underneath, and the very boy who killed them.

To forget that Len died is to forget that he lived. I want to remember the evil I subjected him to in order to remember how pure he really was. I want to remember his pain so that I can carry it with me and I want to live on so that I may continue to carry it.

In the children whose parents we let die, I see us both. In the red of stained-glass demons, I see us.

In the regeneration of crops and the steady triumph of civilians, though, I feel something familiar, too. I see us, coiled up together in a field somewhere, eyes closed but just as able to see the wind and the leaves that shiver in its wake.