I had never expected it to be like this.

Death. What a peculiar sensation, what a strange experience... it's difficult to explain, easier to understand. Simply, though, being in this world of calm, tranquil silence was more wonderful and more perfect than anything else I had ever experienced in my short life.

I had been only twenty when I died. I had been little more than a child, a frightened child who had gotten caught up in a world that was lethal to people like me. People like me, who believed in the power of love, yet didn't trust in it -- or rather, I loved and trusted in people who would only destroy me.

Still... I loved him, and my death was all the sweeter because of it. I would have felt worse if the Wiseman had simply offed me while I slept, before I even knew of his plans intimately... and I suppose he would have done it, too. He never would have been able to trick me into orchestrating my own demise the way he had done to Esmeraude...

Esmeraude. I sometimes wonder what happened to her. She had been a pain-in-the-ass little bitch, but I suppose she had had her redeeming qualities. After all, if she had loved my brother, then she must have had some good in her.

My brother. Strange how I remember him, with a touch of melancholy, and a good deal of anger. He was so blind... yet, I cannot hate him. I cannot be angry with him for more than a second without dissolving into tears... tears as immaterial as the rest of my spiritual body.

I am dead. Yet I do not rest.

I do not yet rest in this void, this void of swirling white and silver, run through with threads of gold and populated by tiny, shining stars... a silver galaxy, a silver galaxy of death.

I think of him often, my brother. He changed in the days before my death; he changed drastically. He ignored me, neglected me, brushed me off and never had time for me. Perhaps that would have made a lesser person hate him, but not me. I had loved Demando-oniisan for far too long, and had loved him far too well to lose this love I had cultivated over the years...

Cultivated... reminds me of another symbol, a token of our affection for one another, a concrete sign of the promises he made me... the promises of flowers in earthen fields, endless fields of bright and happy blooms... a world in which we could lose ourselves. A dreamscape in which we could pretend to be children again, softly stolen under blue skies populated by a bright and shining sun...

My brother would often call me a dreamer, and he would laugh. He told me my imagination was a wonderful thing, and that I should never lose it.

Then, we grew up. Or perhaps only he grew up, and I stayed young, I kept those dreams while he put them away, like the children's toys he was too old for now. My imagination became a nuisance, my fears and paranoia about the Wiseman were annoying and useless. My brother gradually became someone else, someone I wasn't sure I liked. However, it was those times when he smiled at me, when he told me that I was brilliant, the times he simply looked at me with pride and admiration, it was those times that made me go on loving him.

Still, he had changed. Which was why I could never tell him about my dream, about the nightmare I had in which I died.

It came true, oh that it did. When I found myself in the midst of that mess, I had laughed cynically at myself and wondered why I hadn't told Demando-oniisan what I had seen. I didn't need to wonder very long, because I knew why. It was because I couldn't. He wouldn't believe me.

In the days before I died, I had wanted to tell him. But even that was shadowed by another great desire; I wanted to tell my brother that I forgave him. For everything.

I never did tell him that, because I knew that it would make no sense to the person my brother had become. To the old Demando-oniisan it would have, but not this cold and distant stranger that inhabited my brother's body.

However... time has marched on, passed us by, and no-one can begin again...

I look up when I sense for the first time that I am not alone. How long has it been? Minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years...?

My ears hear the name, they hear the pain. There is something calling, someone calling my name, their voice pained and anguished, their heart torn in shreds... and I recognise that voice! Gods how I recognise it! That voice had comforted me through the years, it had praised me, scolded me, told me I was an idiot and that he loved me even so... only one person could hold that voice, only one.

Only my brother.

As I stand here alone, I see the form of my brother, desperately searching, in torment. It is like my dreams, the nightmares I had in the days before my death, and even on the day of that accursed anniversary. Dreams where my brother was there, in the mist, fading away from my reach as I desperately cried out for him, and no matter how fast I ran, or how close I almost got to him, he just moved farther and farther away from me. While I tried to bridge the gap between us, he dug the trenches wider and deeper. The chasm of abysmal separation, that I tried to span, but only he could fill.

The positions have reversed. Demando-oniisan searches for me, while I watch. I try to be distant, I try to be indifferent, I try not to care...

Unlike my brother, I am quite unable to change myself. I loved him then and God knows I love him now -- there is little I can do to change it, because even though I think that I should hate him, I cannot. My love is too strong, my attachment too great.

As if in a dream -- isn't life little more than a dream anyway? -- I move forward, a name on my lips. "Oniisan..."

His head snaps up, eyes wide. "Saffir?" he calls, and I smile. I smile to see the joy, the hope in those eyes. I never thought he would miss me as much as those eyes tell me that he did.

I still see him, and even though he heard me call, he cannot see me. And I am struck by a moment of indecision. Even though I had forgiven him even before this mess had started, I still feel... anger.

He had cried for me. And now, when I look to him, when I look closer, I see what it is that he holds in his shaking hands. A flower... our flower.

"Oniisan," I say again, and I step closer. I step closer to my brother, where I can at last wrap my arms about him, and hug him. He trembles in my arms -- he has changed in death. I wonder how he died... he looks no older than he was the day I left him all alone to go back to the bleak existence of a Nemesian Prince...

"I forgive you, oniisan," I say quietly, knowing instinctively that that phrase was the one he needed to hear so badly.

"Why?"

I could have said "Because I love you," but I didn't. Instead, I smile sardonically, cynically, as has been my way. My life on Nemesis made me this person, and I doubt I can change. "Because, oniisan, you can pick your friends, but you can't pick your relatives."

He almost laughed, and his tears dissolved as he ruffled my hair. I winced, playfully batted his hand away as he gave me one of his patented big-brother half-hugs. "What would I do without you, otootochan?"

I take the flower from his hands, and I breathe in its deep scent. It's been a long time. These flowers may not bloom as brightly, may not grow as tall as the earthen flowers do, but they have a strong, tantalising scent that has followed us into whatever netherworld we now inhabit. Even though I think we are alone, I can feel the presence of others. Perhaps they will come out and play... someday.

I pull my brother's hair, he threatens to beat me up with a playful shove directed at me. I offer a truce -- as always, he accepts. How could he not? I am his kid brother, I am almost his own child. We've been together a long time, we have been separated almost as long. However, this is the end. We cannot begin again; but perhaps we have learnt a lesson.

I am my brother's keeper, and he is mine. No-one can separate us, because we are all that is left. Echoes of a world that served only to destroy, but it saved the both of us.

I give the flower back to my oniisan. He smiles as I tell him something that makes us both laugh, something that assures me we will always be together.

"We are brothers by chance... but friends by choice."

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