Mirroring

I felt suffocated. Bound inside this body, I felt nothing but a stranger as I struggled to sustain my sanity. The pounding ache in my head didn't help either as I blinked slowly, trying to understand and comprehend the words that Ivan just said.

What did he say again?

I heard something, I saw his lips move, but the piercing static in my ears didn't let those words swim through. Everything was wrong. Everything was so wrong, and I wanted nothing more than this to end. I wanted this to be over with yet no matter how much I clawed from the inside of this body, this reality, I couldn't.

Suppressing the urge to puke my guts out, I gulped deeply. His eyes noticing my every move not bothering me at all as it would have.

"What did you say?" Tricked by my spiralling head, I could hardly catch what he said. A poor attempt from my brain, trying to hide the truth, protecting me from what really is by distorting and distracting the present. Making it hard to understand. It should have understood by now that we were way past the protection stage. I was already too deep into the woods, lost and caged.

"Dimitri is my...brother!" One strong push from his leg against the desk made the chair swing back one last time and come back to the front finally to rest on the ground on its four legs with a loud thump, in perfect sync with my heart. The devilish smile on his lips shining with a show of his perfect set of teeth. His enthusiasm, not contagious.

The silence that sat in the sudden quiet room was not as daunting as the crazy look on Ivan's face as he kept looking at me with that smile; making me wonder if time really had frozen except for that audible clicking of the grandfather clock in the corner of the room, ticking away with its shiny bronze pendulum swaying back and forth until the loud gong echoed throughout the deathly quiet house, announcing the dawn of noon of the day.

Eleven times with the last one making the house shiver in its wake with a trail of goosebumps snaking down my spine. I almost jumped out of my skin when I heard Ivan's voice breaking the eerie trance.

"You want to know more right?" The drawl of his words might have seemed comical if not for the current situation I was in. Unusually cold, I decided to see this through and not disagree as my fingers gripped onto the edge of the armrests, concealed from his sly eyes while my head nodded slowly in agreement.

"Well...you know it's the same old cliché story. Psycho boy meets psycho girl, have two kids to make a psycho family. Psycho boy and girl then separated me and my beloved brother at a very young age, tossed him out to my aunt and uncle, and kept me with them with no knowledge about Dimitri except his name and existence. I actually met him a few years ago. Tried to hug him but of course, his shy self didn't want to burst in tears in front of me, so he shoved me away haha!" He laughed ridiculously as if it was a funny story. His demeanour showed the same unrelenting mischievousness without the slightest crack in his poise which such memory should have inflicted.

"Who is the elder brother?" It had to be Dimitri. With his unsocial and unusually calculative self with a certain kind of seriousness, it was most likely to be him whereas Ivan was an exact opposite copy of him with his impulsive behaviour and unfaltering steps forward with instant improvisation, without a second thought.

"Pffft! Of course and undoubtedly me!" He scoffed as if it was the most obvious information that I should've known already. With a disregard for my naivety, he looked away from me and like a child, his attention was now diverted to the neatly placed stationeries on Dimitri's desk as he picked up the spherical paperweight and spun it on the top, an unnerving noise that churned like freshly oiled wheels.

Expecting the answer to be a little longer I waited as he did as well for the spin to come to an end and silence to shroud the room again.

"What is your favourite colour?" Taken aback by his question, I blinked a couple of times, failing miserably to contain my surprise. I assumed that he would surely try to trick me into a trap, ask questions the answers to which I would end up giving unwilling and unknowingly but this harmless query thrown at my way was unpredictable.

I opened my mouth to answer what once used to be easy to do so. Liza always teased me for having such a poor taste. A gross green, she used to say. But to me, it felt something else. For the longest amount of time, I had no such favouritism towards any colour.  A question that always made the interrogator feel awkward since they never really got an answer at all. Until I found it one day.

Alone in the shades of the forest, the sun rays playing with the shadows of the leaves, the fresh breath of air, the soft graze of wind. I had never felt so peaceful before I moved to forks, Liza and my home. A forever reminder of the warm and calm beat of my heart whenever and wherever I saw that green. It was the start of my new beginning. All the awful things had come to its end as everything does. Or so I thought.

I stared into Ivan's green eyes and contemplated the word that sat heavily on my tongue. The emerald swirls in his eyes so similar to the colour I liked so much. Mirroring the eyes of Dimitri, my captor.

"Green."