[sylvanSpider]

Sixteen years. Sixteen impossibly long years. Aren was four. Life before the Reckoning went unremembered; the faces of his sisters, his mother, and father began to fade, only their names etched in stone. He owed his life to Serj, his oldest brother, and he knew that. When the Reckoning hit (as he called it), like the others his age, he'd needed to survive somehow and they were all there either through dumb luck or, like Aren, with a savior of some sort. He grew up knowledgeable of the outside dangers, paying attention when something new was found out about the fungus. Generally, he stayed within the city gates reading, reading, reading. He knew all about fungus and the fungus, and he genuinely thought once that they could change it, that they could revert those infected back. That things could go back to normal, back like life before the Reckoning.

“It won't bring them back, Aren. Stop fucking trying, would you? Even if by some fucking miracle you managed to find some cure or a way to get the shit out, they aren't coming back. I brained them, okay? I did it to save you. They were infected. There wasn't a choice...They had to die so that you could live...” Serj had said when Aren came to him with his dreams.

Those words stung, pricking his skin and burrowing themselves in his heart. Aren stayed silent after that, but he never forgot. His insistence on finding a cure wouldn't fade like the faces of his family. So they weren't coming back. That didn't mean there weren't others that could be saved. The city was full of kids with stories just like his, as full as it was of adults with stories just like Serj's. But unlike them, there would be hope for some of them. If he could see just one family, or even one couple, reunited because of research that he'd done, he could rest knowing that he helped.

Serj didn't share that optimism. The worst had already come, and there was no righting it. He'd been distant for as long as Aren could remember. With that explanation, it was easy to see why. Maybe things had been different before the Reckoning. Maybe he'd been excited when their mother told him that he was going to have a new baby brother. Maybe once he gave Aren a piggy back ride, or tried to teach him letters or maybe how to count. Maybe he gripped his tiny fingers, holding Aren up, during those first few steps of life. But those maybes were only wistful thinking, and as it was Serj left him with little but cold memories.

Serj did have his moments though, those brief moments of warmth where he would open up to his little brother. He would tell him of his father's strength, his mother's beauty, his sisters' pranks. The twins were beautiful, he was told. “You look just like them,” he'd said then. It was true, too, at least, so far as keeping a fairly androgynous appearance went. Aren had an angular frame and full lips, his long knotted hair and nose ring didn't help and where the few other nineteen year old boys had filled out and turned to men, Aren stayed lanky, but tall. While this wasn't intentional, it earned his brother's ire nonetheless and those few tender moments he had with him dissipated into accusations of being queer and a good-for-nothing bookworm.

[i]“Smarts gets you nowhere without braun. You should be working on filling out. You think those books are going to fucking help you? Look what it got your sisters...”[i]

His sisters were ten at the time of the Reckoning, and the time of their death. In those few moments of warmth Serj would tell him with pride that they were the top of their class, and the fastest in P.E. (apparently a class held in something called “school” pre-Reckoning days), only for those precious facts to be torn down and used against Aren later.

Aren stood now, looking at the empty apartment. Most of the items in there were Aren's. A variety of books pilfered from the library and stacked in neat little piles lining the walls, kitchen appliances he'd gone to trade for, an easel with a finished painting on it but no new canvases, and a sketchbook. There were posters too, mostly Serj's, that he'd picked up at various parts of the city that weren't under lockdown. They'd go unlooked at now that he was gone.

He didn't know how to feel when he was told that the apartment would only be his now, that his brother had gone out with the guard and would never be coming back. His memories with his brother were mostly bad, and yet, he found himself dreading coming home to an apartment that would forever be empty save for himself. He had no family left to speak of, so until they got a new boy around his age, there wouldn't be any new roommates.

Aren needed to breathe. He sighed, turning his back on the tiny apartment that felt so vast in that moment and headed for the roof. He could get some fresh air there.

[[[Eeeeehm, I didn't know how to search for actual people to use, so I looked up specific hair and came across this gem. He's the top pic]]]