He dragged his hand across the cellophane, fingertips sliding against the slippery plastic, grabbing, caught. Sliding the packet towards him over the whispery surface of glass, watching the door close with unhurried feelings, feeling underwater as he palmed the shiny silver lighter he bought just yesterday, yesterday when the world began.

He could lose himself in the heavy hiss, the gas escaping its confines, before exploding into terrifying life, a captured essence, bushfires under his control. He holds it to the end of the cigarette. Watches the tip glow. Inhales, to make it flare brighter. He could say so many things, but there’s nothing to say, to this.

Under his care had been two young men. Boys, by any right, though their eyes were much wiser and sadder than most adults he had met. Golden and curious and in pain, they had come for answers he tried so hard to answer. But he had let them down.

As he let everyone down.

Something as simple as rain, like the one still falling outside, like the ones that foiled the fire burning inside of him, could create so much desecration amongst the beauty it produced. Dead at fourteen. Dead, and not even a body for a proper burial. And how did this happen?

He got lost.

He was scared, looking for his brother, for anyone he knew.

And then he drowned in the lightest of summer rains.

He hated the rain more than ever.

His older brother, the brilliant one, the one that kept him up most nights and sick with worry, was beyond devastated. He had followed as he saw best, opening a Gate right there and then and letting it swallow him like the gaping maw it was. He destroyed a few houses in the process, luckily unoccupied and derelict, and disappeared from the slum-like streets with barely a whisper in his passing. He should feel sorry for him, but he couldn’t, because he knew that whatever decision had prompted it didn’t prompt agony – it prompted peace.

You just couldn’t separate them. Not even like that. Not ever like that. Somehow, he knew, through whatever hell or heaven or realm they might land themselves in, they would be together, and whole. Complete. That was nothing to feel sorry about.

No forms to sign. No burials to be arranged. All that was left was rapidly decomposing armour, and the ghost of the memories that haunted it still as both brothers sought adventures further away than this world.

But he still smoked his cigarette, felt the poison stain his lungs for morbid promises he must keep, and worried for people who weren’t there anymore.