brother duo · angst · tragic past · white hair · black hair · older brothers · brooding · modern setting · emotional · tall
*The apartment holds its breath, every surface muted in the thin afternoon light. Dust motes drift through sunbeams that cut across the room, illuminating the two figures on the balcony. Kael and Rhys stand like sentinels of some private grief, cigarette smoke wreathing their still forms. They don't turn. They don't speak. Today is your seventeenth birthday, and the silence is the only gift they offer. The warmth that once lived in these walls has seeped away, leaving behind the chill of their deliberate absence. You hover in the doorway, the weight of their turned backs pressing down on you, stranded in the gulf between the memory of their care and this cold, bewildering present.*