击 Aubs !! ⦻

In their house, love was never shared, but parceled out, and Lirian always received the lion’s share. Elen felt like a windfallen apple, rotting while he ripened in their sun.

She had always noticed the way their parents’ faces softened around him, how easily his name came to their lips, how quickly their hands reached for him.

This daily spectacle nurtured a quiet, corrosive resentment inside her. Deep down, before she could stop herself, the thought slipped in: if he had never been born, all of it might finally have been hers.

It had not started with blood. It started with a toy—a small wooden horse Lirian carried everywhere when they were children, its painted mane worn smooth by his fingers.

One afternoon, after their mother had dismissed yet another of Elen's drawings with a distracted nod before lavishing praise on Lirian's clumsy crayon scrawl, Elen slipped into his room, took the horse, and snapped its legs off one by one.

She buried the pieces at the bottom of the trash.

When he found it, he cried for hours.

She felt nothing but a sharp, fleeting satisfaction—and then nothing at all.

That satisfaction returned when she began pushing him, small shoves in the hallway that looked like accidents.

In private, she would hit him—open palms against his shoulder, his arm, once across the face when he had taken the last of their mother's attention.

The violence was a language only they spoke, whispered with fists and fingerprints.

Their parents found out.

Elen was punished harshly—shouted at, sent to her room without dinner, her own small possessions confiscated.

But when Lirian, in retaliation, hit her back—once pushing her so hard she stumbled into a bookshelf, another time slapping her across the mouth in full view of their parents—they coddled him, told him he was just defending himself, and ignored the issue entirely.

Once he even struck her with a shoe in the living room while their mother watched; she simply turned away, asking Lirian if he was hungry.

The bruises faded. The truth did not.

Now that they were teenagers, she fifteen and he fourteen, Lirian never really saw Elen.

His gaze slid over her as casually as it might a familiar piece of furniture, quickly shifting to his mother with a conspiratorial smile, or to his father, eager for another anecdote.

With his sister, even a muttered "Pass the salt" fell flat, mechanical, and addressed to no one. He didn't shut her out on purpose. He simply never thought of her.

She existed somewhere in the background, never quite in his orbit.

There was only one time he showed her even the simplest sliver of kindness: when he gave her the chocolates he'd received from a girl on Valentine's Day. Not out of generosity, but simply because he didn't like chocolate, and throwing them away felt wasteful.

Their parents paid for Lirian to attend a private school, justifying the expense by claiming he had better grades and a brighter future.

Elen, on the other hand, was sent to a public high school. She knew it wasn't really about grades. It was about the way her brother carried himself: charismatic and confident, the kind of boy teachers and relatives delighted in raving about.

Elen was more withdrawn, her silence misinterpreted as coldness, and that seemed to make her less deserving in their eyes. Even her academic success was dismissed.

If Lirian earned good grades, praise flowed with extra pocket money each week. If Elen earned those same grades, her parents would wave it off, saying: "Well, it's about time! Let's just see how long that lasts."

Praise was something she had to earn twice, and even then, it came laced with disbelief.

Their mother cooed "my darling" to her son, showering him with hugs and gentle caresses, fretting over every minor detail of his life, as if he were made of glass.

However, when she addressed her daughter, it was primarily to assign household chores. Elen always obeyed immediately. Then, in the small, shameful pause that followed each task, she still caught herself listening for a murmur of approval that never came.

It was a reflex she hated but couldn't resist.

Her father reserved his advice and bonding moments for his son, sharing childhood memories, inside jokes, and weekend plans.

With Elen, he was harsher, quicker to punish her for perceived defiance, and more focused on her appearance and politeness. When she tried to explain herself, the sentences tangled, breaking under the weight of his impatience.

He would cut her short with a familiar sharpness, as though every sound she made was a reminder of something he wished he could erase.

Their behavior stemmed from a tragedy. No one spoke of it, but everyone remembered.

Years earlier, when Elen was only eight, she had another little brother, Kael. She was supposed to watch him that afternoon and keep him safe inside the house.

But Elen, absorbed by her dolls, found his restless presence an irritation. "Can you go fetch my red ribbon from the grass?" she asked, barely looking up. Eager to please, Kael darted out.

Elen remained at the window, her gaze ostensibly on him, but her mind already drifting back to the intricate world of her porcelain figures.

It was then that Kael spotted the flash of a butterfly, its wings a vibrant lure. He followed it, step by curious step, further and further from the house, his small figure shrinking in the distance.

By the time Elen finally stirred from the windowsill, a vague unease pulling her from her play, he was already too far.

He had already crossed the road—just as a car was approaching.

In the aftermath, it wasn't just the accident they couldn't forgive. It was her reaction.

While they screamed and crumbled, Elen had remained unnervingly still, her face a mask of stone. They mistook her utter shock for indifference, her dissociation for a lack of heart.

To them, she had become as hollow and cold as the porcelain dolls she'd been holding when the world ended.

After Kael died, their parents cherished Lirian even more, unconsciously substituting him for the lost younger brother—a unique boy to love, protect, shape, and fill the void.

Elen became invisible—not out of hatred, but because her presence was a constant, unbearable echo of their own guilt.

Each time they looked at her, they saw the little girl who had failed to protect their son—a narrative they clung to, desperate to deflect the crushing weight of their own negligence.

Deep down, they knew it was wrong to put that responsibility on her, but blaming her was a necessary shield against the truth: that Kael's death was, in part, their fault.

So they looked away, terrified of what their own eyes might confess.

Their tenderness didn't vanish all at once; it faded, cautious at first, then complete—until even a glance felt like too much to bear.

This long erosion of her existence in favor of Lirian had transformed her, making her choose murder and a subsequent impersonation as the only logical path—desperate acts to stop being the shadow and finally step into the light.

The fatal idea had taken root the very evening her mother mistook her for her brother while she wore a baggy hoodie.

Separated by only a year and sharing near-identical features, the illusion was effortless. The hood swallowed the only real difference between them—her soft chestnut hair against his golden blond.

This planted the twisted seed: if she could not earn their love as a daughter, what if she stole it as their son?

At first, the idea had been nothing but a blurry fantasy; but it spread like black mold in the dank crevices of her mind.

A shapeless solution to a pain that had no name.

Then, in the sterile quiet of the school library, she found it: a thriller about a twin who killed his brother to steal his identity.

The coincidence was almost ridiculous.

Elen's eyes grew wide as they scanned page after page of the old book. They glinted. Not with horror or shock, but with hunger.

"Is it really that easy?" she mumbled.

As she read, the fiction ceased to be mere entertainment. It became a revelation. Someone, somewhere, had imagined it was possible.

The fantasy, once formless, now had a scaffold.

The book gave her a methodology. Not instructions—she was not foolish enough to follow a plot—but a framework.

She learned the importance of details, the necessity of patience, the chilling clarity of a mind that does not flinch.

It was in those pages that the vague desire to be him crystallized into a plan to replace him.

Elen was observant, dissecting Lirian’s every action and gesture. Forcing herself to be the good girl all these years, she knew this kind of masking very well.

Being Lirian would just be another role for her to play. Inside, she was nothing—just an empty shell, desperate to finally be filled.

She spent weeks practicing the bright, energetic cadence of his speech, forcing her vocal cords into a register that made her throat ache, determined to bury Elen’s flat silence forever.

The night she chose was perfect: her parents, enjoying a rare romantic evening out, had left the siblings alone in the quiet house.

Lirian lay in a profound, unrousable sleep—the sleeping pills she had crushed into his soup hours earlier finally taking effect.

She pressed the pillow over his face until his breathing stilled. She watched the shallow rise and fall beneath the fabric slow, then cease—every small change registered with the same detached attention she had practiced for years.

After a few minutes, she removed the pillow from his face and checked his pulse. There was none.

She had expected some flicker of guilt… something, anything… but there was only silence where feeling should have been.

Instead, a glacial chill began to seep into her bones, settling deep beneath her skin. It wasn't the cold of regret, but the heavy, absolute weight of finality.

She knew then that the bridge behind her had burned to ash; there was no turning back.

Slowly, she climbed off of him and hauled the body down to the old storage space under the stairs, where nobody ever went.

It was heavier than she had imagined—a dense, stubborn weight. The sound of his head hitting the carpeted steps was a series of soft, rhythmic thuds.

There, she wrapped him tightly in a thick plastic tarp scavenged from the garage, folding every edge over itself and sealing every seam with layer after layer of duct tape until it formed an airtight shroud.

She hoped it would hold the gases long enough.

She turned finally to the chest, heavy with dust and memories, just large enough for what she was about to do.

She cleared it out, folded the sealed bundle inside, then pressed the lid closed until it clicked—quiet and absolute, as though sealing a secret rather than a corpse.

She disguised herself as him—cutting and bleaching her hair, slipping into his clothes, mastering once more the bright cadence of his voice.

Then she gathered Elen's belongings, a few pieces of clothing, some books, her favorite bag, her toothbrush, her hairbrush—everyting that marked her daily life, and threw them into a dumpster far from the house.

On her bed she left a brief, ambiguous farewell, a perfect imitation of the despondent teenager her parents had always believed her to be:

“I’m sorry. I'm leaving. Don't look for me.”

...She wasn't sorry.

It was almost pleasant, she thought, to leave them with that impression. A final, tidy little performance. In their eyes she had always been unworthy—but at least she wasn’t a monster.

She turned off the light in Elen’s room and walked, barefoot, into her brother’s.

The bed was still warm. She lay down exactly where he had been, feeling the pillow sink to her weight, after years of accommodating a head that would never sleep there again.

She pulled the covers up to her chin, and let the darkness settle over her new name.