Though Jake agreed to talk about what had happened, he took a moment to reorganize his thoughts. He sorted out what could be said and what he wanted to brush off. Some experiences were too painful or too shameful to talk about; he hadn't written them in the diaries for a reason. They were things he wanted to forget and had buried in the darkest, deepest parts of his mind. He didn't want to dig them out, not even for Stephan.
"Where should I start?" Jake wondered aloud. "Well, I guess a bit of context wouldn't hurt. It doesn't please me to say this, but there was no one to guide Tristan on the right path in both past lives. Angela hated it whenever I got close to him, so I kept my distance. Anyway, she was spoiling him rotten and never "punished" him no matter what he did, so I thought he'd be fine."
"I seriously don't get why your mother hates you so much! You're also her son, and she had you with Matthew too! Seriously, what the heck is her problem?!"
"My guess is as good as yours," Jake shrugged. "But perhaps it's because she had me while my father was with Gabriel's mother. I was born from their intercourse before Matthew's marriage, and I probably remind her of that fact. She could never accept that her lover had been "stolen" by Gabriel's mother. Even if she was aware Matthew married Helene only to obtain her family's assets, she couldn't stand it. But well, that's another story."
Jake paused for an instant. These three's love story was a mess, and he didn't know what to think of it. Helene wasn't all white in the tragedy that led to her death, but she didn't necessarily deserve to die for it. And Gabriel deserved even less to become collateral damage of their feud.
No matter how many years went by, Jake could never forget his mother's ecstatic face when she learned the boy had eaten the apple pie destined for Helene and was left between life and death. It had made shivers run down his spine; it was also when he realized that his mother was a monster in human's skin. Before, he thought that he was the one at fault and that it was normal to be punished. He just had to do better next time. The desire to be loved by his mother had blinded him for years, only thinking of the rare times she hugged him and nothing else. She had skillfully used the carrot and stick approach, which, to be honest, had worked wonders on him.
'What a fool, honestly,' Jake thought.
"Anyway, back to Tristan. He was mostly left alone as a child, and the loneliness twisted his personality a little. Afterward, he grew up in the shadow of Angela. What he learned, he learned it from her. He had also inherited some of her, well, not-so-good personality traits."
"Like what?"
"....He was possessive of the people he considered to be "his", and if they didn't submit to his obsessive-twisted love, he'd use whatever method he had to to make them accept his feelings. It's something he learned from Angela. However, unlike her, he had always acted like a Holy Saint in front of others. His acting was perfect, and you'd only see his dark side if he allowed you to see it. I think I have never met someone as manipulative as him, and I lived through two long lives."
There was a chuckle, followed by silence. Jake hadn't realized what was going on until it was too late. He had only seen a cute little brother who was growing up well, unaware that dark thoughts were gradually devouring his mind. He had been too focused on other problems and never took the time to talk with his brother. But he should have made time, however busy he was, and he should have found a way to get him away from their mother's clutches. And for not doing it, he paid a hefty price.
"Don't beat yourself over it," Stephan said. "You're not omnipotent, and you couldn't do much as a teenager. Even if you had sought help as an adult, no one would have believed you. After all, your parents' reputation has always been top-notch, save maybe for Matthew's cold personality. But that's not enough for the cops to act on."
"I know, it's just…."
Jake sighed. When he compared the current Tristan to the Tristan of his previous lives, guilt tugged at his conscience. If only he had paid more attention to his little brother, things would have turned out differently. But he had been a coward, too afraid of his mother's ire to do anything. He convinced himself that Tristan was doing fine when he wasn't.
"I think Tristan resented me for leaving him alone and not taking care of him. He had always craved my love, but I never gave it to him for fear my mother would lock me up. And after puberty, he tried to get my attention however he could, using my mother's nasty tricks. Only, what started as a desire to make me acknowledge him turned into hatred at one point. Well, that's how I see it now."
"From the way you talk, you don't seem to hate Tristan."
"Oh, but I did hate him! I hated him for a very long time," Jake scoffed. "I thought of him as the same as my mother: a monster."
"Then… what changed your mind?"
"This lifetime," Jake admitted. "And the fact that I had children in my other lives. After being a father and raising kids of my own, I learned a few things, and I started to ponder what I could have done better. I don't remember how many times I doubted and asked myself "what if I had done this" when thinking back on Tristan's childhood. That's why I'm grateful to Gabriel and Misha: they do wonderful parents."
Stephan burst out laughing at these words, and Jake smiled slightly. Angela had let her younger son in Gabriel's hands to monitor him, unaware that his presence was filling up the kid's empty heart. Tristan had also grown fond of Misha, who significantly influenced the boy's personality over the years.
"But I guess you won't tell me about the nasty things Tristan did?" Stephan asked, stretching a hand to stroke Jake's cheek. But Jake raised his hand and caught his mid-air, preventing him from touching his face.
"And what good would it do to tell you? I don't want your perception of Tristan to change because of events that haven't happened and probably won't happen in this life."
"Come on, you know me well, don't you? Whatever you say, it won't change how I behave around him, I'm not—"
"Fine. I'll tell you one experience, but only one," Jake interrupted, tightening his grip on Stephan's hand until the bones of his fingers seemed to crack. "Once, he hired thugs to beat me up. Nothing too bad here, and nothing new either. The problem arose when they shoved live crickets down my throat. Did you know that if you swallow them without chewing them, crickets or similar bugs will cling to your throat and trachea? This is because their legs have little spines that allow them to attach themselves to your windpipe and esophagus walls. And, of course, you can't forcefully shake them off as you would with your hands as they're stuck inside you. The fun thing is that they block your windpipe once they cluster together, and you can't breathe."
Stephan's face grew paler.
"You see, I didn't know that either until I was brought to the hospital for surgery because said crickets clung to my windpipe, gathered together into a small cluster. I was barely able to breathe by then."
Jake stopped talking, his lips trembling. The fear he had felt at the time was creeping up on him, making his voice shake. He couldn't speak well for months afterward, and every time he breathed, it was like swallowing a mouthful of burning ashes.
Even though Jake knew his brother was behind the incident, he couldn't prove it. The police wouldn't care that Tristan had been walking around the house with an insect encyclopedia days before the incident. They also wouldn't care that the teenager often opened the page to reveal colorful locusts and showed them to Jake with a smile coated in poison. It was just a coincidence.
The police officers had already apprehended the thugs, who claimed they had been high on drugs and just attacked the first passerby they met. They all said something along the lines of: "Shoving insects down someone's throat seemed like a fun thing to do, and, dude, I didn't even know crickets were such sneaky bastards. I'd have taken something else otherwise! Like worms, maybe. I don't know, man."
Still, the police investigated, but they didn't find anything suspicious: there was no sudden transfer of a large sum of money in the aggressors' bank accounts or their family's, and thus they most likely hadn't been paid to assault Jake. Their urine tests also revealed traces of drugs. All in all, Jake was only an unlucky victim, and whatever else he said was due to shock.
To say that Tristan had made his life a living hell was an understatement, for this was only one of the many things that had happened to Jake. His past two lives were a little different, but the experiences were just as traumatic either way.
"You're right, I was better off not knowing that." Stephan gritted his teeth, sitting up to drag Jake in his arms. "I'm sorry, I'll listen to you next time. I won't insist again if you don't want to tell me something."
Jake snorted but didn't refuse the hug. Instead, he buried his head in the crook of Stephan's neck and closed his eye.
_____________________
Edited by Clozed!
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