#twst jade

Sometimes, looking at him felt like looking at a challenger to Poseidon’s throne. Other times, it felt as though Poseidon had simply grown bored of godhood and decided to walk among mortals instead.

But none of that mattered now.

Because he was dead.

Gone.

Dead and gone.

Dead and gone.

Dead and gone.

The ocean would continue without him. The tides would rise and fall, indifferent as ever. Croaking gouramis would sing in distant waters. Clownfish would dart through coral reefs he would never see.

And he would never feel again.

Never taste, never laugh, never press his face against the glass of an aquarium and ramble endlessly about creatures no one else cared about. Never stand on a beach staring at the horizon as if it were calling his name. Never again torment you, never again press you down under the weight of him until you forgot where you ended and he began.

Because he was dead.

The funny part was that you suspected his death was almost a blessing.

His burial was held at sea. His coffin, black and polished, would eventually be surrendered to the ocean he loved so much. If there was anyone who deserved to have the sea as both a throne and a tomb, it was Jade.

Flowers covered the casket. Dozens of them. White. Yellow. Pink. Purple. You stared at them with growing irritation. He would’ve hated them. Not because they were ugly, but because they were flowers.

Jade would’ve wanted seashells. Rocks he found himself. Maybe some strange piece of driftwood he insisted was special. He would’ve absolutely demanded one of those ridiculous sea cucumbers he adored so much. A stupid fucking sea pickle sitting proudly on top of his coffin.

The image almost made you laugh. Almost.

Everyone else brought bouquets. Everyone else seemed determined to mourn him correctly. You didn’t. Instead, you carried one of his fish tanks. It sat awkwardly in your arms, heavy with water and life.

Years ago, Jade had declared-completely serious-that if he ever died, his fish should die too.

"They can’t live without me," he’d said. "And honestly, they owe me that much. I feed them. clean their tanks. I dedicate my life to them."

At the time, you’d called him an idiot.

He hadn’t even flinched. Instead, he’d looked at you like you were the one being unreasonable and said, very calmly, that you too should be buried with him.

At that time, you’d been disgusted-by him, by the way he spoke, by the strange certainty he wore like it made him right. Now, that he was truly gone, you weren’t sure. Maybe being buried with him wasn’t a bad thing.

Now, standing before his coffin, you realized he had been wrong about many things. The fish didn’t owe him their deaths. If anything, he owed them his life. Every creature swimming inside that tank existed because Jade had obsessed over them to keep them alive. To keep himself sane enough to be alive.

So while everyone else laid flowers at his grave, you placed the aquarium beside him instead. A final gift for the boy who loved the sea more than he ever loved people.

His mother sang a prayer. His father whispered a final goodbye. His brother didn’t show up at all.

Then Jade was sent toward the horizon, toward the place where the sea swallowed the sun every evening. Soon, his coffin would sink beneath the waves, descending slowly into the dark. Lower and lower, until it finally came to rest upon the ocean bed, where he would sleep for eternity.

You watched the water and thought that maybe death suited him. Maybe, if stories were real, you could be his knight in shining armor. You could dive after him. Down through the freezing black water. Down past the schools of fish and the drifting shadows. Down until your lungs screamed and your heart burst and your fingers finally brushed against the lid of his coffin. You would wrench it open.

Inside, Jade would be exactly as he always was. Annoying. You would lean down and kiss him on the lips. Then his eyes would snap open..

"Where am I?" he’d probably ask.

You’d tell him you’d explain later and to help you swim up. Then the two of you would kick toward the surface together, fighting through the darkness and the pressure and the cold.

Only to be immediately eaten by sharks.

A fitting death, really. For both of you. Unfortunately, fairy tales weren’t real. The coffin continued drifting away. Jade continued sinking. And no matter how long you stared at the sea, his coffin stayed shut.

Then a few hours of food, mourning, and a kind of hollow silence would pass. You never knew how something so loud could end up so quiet. You caught yourself remembering things you didn’t want to remember, the way he’d kicked the back of your knees when he was annoyed, half-playful and half-cruel, the way you’d somehow become dependent on him anyway, like it had happened without your permission.

You’d promised yourself, once, that you would always hate him. That part had never changed. Not even now. Not at the coffin. Not with the flowers. Not with the weight of everyone else’s grief pressing down like weather.

You would still hate him. For the way he made your life feel like a trap you kept walking back into. For the way he died without warning. For the way he left behind a silence that didn’t feel like peace, just absence that still hurt when you breathed too deeply.

In the hollow silence of the following days, he became a ghost that refused to leave your side. You would dream of him: the bruising pressure of his lips, the rough scrape of his arms, the way his hands felt like iron shackles against your skin. They weren’t sweet dreams; they were vivid, suffocating nightmares of the days he used to corner you, touching you in ways that made you quiver and weep with a mixture of terror and shame.

But every morning, you woke up with a sick, twisted smile etched onto your face, a traitorous expression that felt entirely unearned. Because god, you missed the weight of him. You missed the way he looked at you like you were something he owned, something he could break at his leisure.

The realization was so nauseating that you had to lurch toward the sink, retching until your throat burned, your eyes watering from the sheer disgust of your own longing. It was grotesque, a sickness, but in those feverish dreams, at least he was yours. He was the only person who had ever looked at you and seen something worth holding onto, even if he only held you to hurt you.

Damn him. Damn his parents. Damn this world. Damn the mountains that took him. And damn you, for not following him that day.

You looked at your reflection in the mirror.

It didn’t look like anger anymore. Not even grief, really. Just something emptied out, like the person staring back had been left too long in the rain and forgotten how to return to shape.

The sink beneath you held the aftermath: spluttered breath, acid bitterness, the ugly proof of a body reacting to what the mind refused to hold cleanly. It lingered in the marble like a stain that didn’t care about being seen.

You turned on the faucet. Water rushed in. Bright, indifferent, continuous. It hit the basin and swallowed everything without hesitation, as if it had always been waiting for something to erase.

You bent forward and rinsed your mouth. Cold flooding through you, sharp enough to feel almost honest. It didn’t wash anything away so much as it rearranged it, pushing the pain into quieter corners where it could still exist without being spoken.

When you lifted your head again, the mirror caught you once more. Same face. Just quieter now.

You stayed there, hands resting against the marble, letting the sound of running water fill the space where thoughts were starting to gather too tightly. It was strange how quickly silence could become something heavy enough to press against your ribs.

Eventually, you understood you couldn’t stay here.

Not in this room. Not in this spiral. You needed air. People. Something that didn’t know his name. So you turned away from the mirror and stepped out before the grief could convince you otherwise.

You wore one of his fish hoodies, the fabric too familiar against your skin, like it remembered him better than you wanted to. It still carried the faint trace of him, not strong enough to be real. Something that made your chest tighten when you breathed too deeply.

You were still wearing the earrings he had given you that day, almost a year ago.

You walked.

And walked.

Long enough that time stopped behaving properly.

The streets were dimly lit, stretched thin under the weight of night. Windows were dark. Shops closed. No cars passed, no distant voices cut through the air. It felt like the world had quietly agreed to leave you alone with your thoughts.

Only the wind remained. And still, you kept moving.

You thought about Floyd.

Oh, poor Floyd.

You couldn’t even begin to imagine the kind of pain that came with losing your twin brother, the person who had shared your beginning, your breath, your shape in the world. The soul of your soul. The other half of you. The one constant that was supposed to remain when everything else eventually fell away.

The idea of it sat heavy in your chest, unshakable.

No one had really heard from him since. His mother and father were worried sick. Grief twisting into fear, fear into exhaustion, into the kind of helpless vigilance that never really let them rest. They had already lost one son. Now every unanswered moment felt like the possibility of losing the only one they had left. Their last living son.

Suddenly, as you were crossing the street, you heard the rattling of horses.

Horses? In this area-

You turned.

And there it was: a carriage, two large horses pulling it forward at full speed, closing the distance too quickly for your thoughts to properly catch up.

Your fight-or-flight instinct should have taken over. It should have pulled you back, forced your body into movement, into survival. But you were too exhausted for that. Too worn down to react in time. So instead, you simply closed your eyes. Maybe it wasn’t real. Maybe it was a hallucination, your mind folding in on itself again, misplacing sound and motion into something dramatic just to fill the silence. Or maybe it was a car. Or maybe none of it mattered anymore.

A quiet, almost absurd thought drifted through you: Maybe you’d see him in hell. And maybe, when you did, he’d be there waiting with that same smug little expression, like he’d been expecting you the whole time. Against your better judgment, you smiled at that.

.

.

.

Darkness followed.

And when you opened your eyes, more darkness followed. Dense, suffocating, wrong in a way that made your body feel suddenly, strangely alive.

For a moment, you couldn’t tell if you were awake or simply continuing the fall.

Then you moved. Or tried to. Your body hit something confined, tight space, enclosed, too small to be anything natural. Panic didn’t arrive properly. It was delayed, dulled, like even fear had grown tired of keeping up with you.

So you kicked. Once. Twice. Harder. Again and again.

SMACK.

Wood splintered. Something gave way. The pressure released all at once, and light rushed in like an accusation.

You gasped, dragging air into your lungs as if you were remembering how.

And when your vision finally adjusted-you were somewhere else entirely.

A vast interior. Tall windows stretching upward into impossible heights. Cold light spilling across stone floors. Dozens-no, hundreds-of figures in layered robes, still and watching. The air felt ceremonial. Heavy. Like the world was holding its breath.

At the center stood a man in a bird-like mask. He turned sharply toward you. His presence alone felt like judgment. “This-this is outrageous!” he shouted.

Silence cracked through the room. You blinked.

Haha.

What the fuck.

Is this what hell actually looked like?

Not fire. Not torment. Just… cultists and architecture.

Your gaze drifted down.

You were standing inside what you now realized was a floating tomb, its structure broken open where you had forced your way out, splinters hanging like exposed bone.

“To leave the tombs before I allow it!” the masked man shouted again, voice rising with fury. “Simply outrageous!”

You wiped your mouth, still trying to catch up to reality. You needed answers. Fast. If this was hell, fine. Weird aesthetic choice, but fine. You straightened slightly, squinting at him with exhausted seriousness.

“Oh, Lord Demon!” you called out, attempting what you assumed was the appropriate tone for the situation. “Can you direct me to the person I lost?”

The man froze. “…What?”