It wasn’t that she would recognize him. After all, they were strangers. But he couldn’t take the gaze of her eyes on him, even in the dark. Not until he was close enough to end her. He knew what people like her could be like, and he didn’t want to get anywhere near her until it was time.
It made him shudder to think of it. He looked at the way she gripped her sister’s arm. All the while he’d been following them home, he’d been mulling it over. How Coco could stand to be so close to her. And the answer had been obvious to him: it was the same way it had been for him. He’d never wanted to be close to Clark. But Clark had never given him a choice.
He was going to have to find a way to separate them. Surely, at least once they got to the house, Coco would find a moment to herself. To escape to the bathroom, maybe. It had always been that way with Clark. Having to duck into any room with a lock on the door just to give himself a bit of breathing space, always so suffocated in his brother’s presence. The way he would fill the room until it felt like there was no longer anything left for anyone else. And then he would walk out and you would realize he had taken it all with him—literally, in many cases. Little things missing that had been there before. Money. Keepsakes. Things you would beg him not to take or destroy, but he would anyway.
Gregory cut down a side street, through a few alleyways, heading for the back of the apartment complex where Coco lived. He thanked himself for checking this place out previously. He hadn’t thought he’d need it—it had been fairly obvious, fairly quickly, who was the one to go after. Just like it had been with the Wurz twins. It was only the Patricksons who had given him trouble, working out which was which. In the end, he’d seen signs of the corruption taking over both of them. Just being connected to an evil twin was enough to make someone give up. He knew how close he’d come to that himself, so many times. To just trying it Clark’s way and seeing what happened. So, unable to figure out which of the Patricksons was the original source of the evil, he’d had to take the option of protecting society at large. He’d had to take them both out instead.
But he’d checked out the place and spotted a way to climb up the fire escape as well as this route which would get him there quicker, and he knew how to get inside.
Out of sight of the twins themselves, stealing through the shadows at a run, he felt more secure in the plan. It was like he felt everything falling into place more when Amelia wasn’t capable of catching him. Like he was still afraid, because he knew everything that a twin could be.
He knew what she must be capable of.
He would wait inside the room that Coco used as storage, the small box opposite the bathroom. It would be dark in there, and he could make it work, once he’d jimmied the window open and slipped inside. He would be able to watch, to see them as they moved around without them seeing him. If Coco went into the bathroom, he could slip past the closed door and take Amelia out before she returned. But if it was Amelia who went in, he could just lie in wait.
This could work. He didn’t need to kill them both. Unless Coco got in the way… no matter how good of a person she may be, it was more important that he take out the evil. Twins didn’t just target their siblings. They could hurt other people, too. He had to eliminate Amelia, no matter what the cost would be.
He saw the dark shape of the apartment building ahead, some of the windows blazing with light and the others dark and dormant. It was going to be a challenge, slipping up that fire escape without being seen through a window, but he was going to have to do it.
A voice came into the back of his head, a voice telling him he was going to fail. Taunting him. He shook his head. It was funny, almost; Clark wasn’t even here anymore, and yet he was still trying to put Gregory down. It was seared into Gregory’s memory, the way he would sneer at him. The way he would tell him how useless he was, how he was never going to get anywhere in life. And then it would start.
He was never going to be able to impress his friends enough into making them actually like him, Clark told Gregory. So why didn’t Clark take over and pretend to be him, just for a while?
His girlfriend would break up with Gregory when she realized how useless he was. How pathetic. So he should let Clark step in, just for one date, or two.
And then he would come back home with that look on his face, and start talking about how it was better this way anyway, less pain for his brother. How he didn’t need them around because he had Clark. How the two of them should just always look out for each other, the way Clark had looked out for him by finding out how fake those friends were, what a prude that girlfriend was.
And he’d go to school the next day and the halls would be full of people talking about him behind their backs, and he’d found out what Clark had done while pretending to be him. And none of them would believe him.
Gregory gritted his teeth, gripping hold of the bottom of the fire escape. He could only just reach it, but he’d been training, and… he lifted himself up with the strength of his arms alone, then swung his legs to scrabble against the brickwork until he could haul himself up, panting and sweating, to sit on the fire escape above the ladder, catching his breath.
That wasn’t going to happen to Coco, not anymore. Just like Kevin was free now. And he was going to do it again, and again, for as long as he needed to.
It had taken him nearly thirty years to break out from under Clark’s thumb and do what needed to be done. Almost thirty years of being pushed around and taken advantage of. Watching Clark take everything from him. His friends and his chance of any kind of romantic connection. His job. Even his apartment, because when Gran died there had only been one apartment and she’d had to choose one of them to get it in her will. And she’d chosen Clark, because of all the times Gregory had been bad and broken her things or stolen them and pawned them.
All of the times that it was really Clark all along.
And he’d gotten the apartment too.
That had been the beginning of the end, as it turned out. Gregory wouldn’t have credited it, not at first. But losing the apartment had been something. A nail in a coffin. And when Clark had started hanging out at Gregory’s place more often than he did the apartment, like he didn’t even want it that much, it had been a kick in the teeth that spurred him to action.
And he’d done it. Finally, he’d done it.
It had been hard. Horrible. He’d cried, after. For a long time. But then he’d gotten up, and figured out what to do, and realized that there were others out there who needed this, too.
And he could do it again.
He braced himself, then stood up, moving lightly across the fire escape. The journey from here was easy. Just up, up, up. The vulnerable window wasn’t attached to the fire escape, but it was close enough that he could swing across. He could get his hands into the frame, get his feet on the sill, then carefully bend. He had all the time he needed—he always did. It somehow seemed easy, like that. Like something out there was giving him a helping hand. He liked to think it was because he was doing something that was right, something that the world needed. The universe recognized his efforts.
He was sparing innocent people, people who had done nothing wrong. By no fault of their own, they had been born a twin. A good twin, with all the good qualities desired in a human being. They were meek and mild and could not stand up for themselves. He’d been like that once.
But now he was going to stand up for them.
He found the right window and leaned over, listening carefully for any sound of movement inside. He heard none. He’d beaten them here, as predicted.
Now he just had to get inside, and the waiting game would begin.
He pushed the window open, starting to climb through—and looked up at a noise, freezing. His blood went cold.