When we were young, I played a horrible trick. On our birthday, when our parents weren't looking, I gave him a gift of my own; a box of chocolates filled with razorblades.

He cut his mouth badly and went to find our mother. But while he was gone, I swapped the chocolates and convinced her that he'd intended to give them to me. She was shocked, and father got very, very angry...

I explained away the blood by telling them that we'd been playing truth or dare, and I'd dared him to kiss the cat, and he couldn't argue because it must've hurt too much talk-

Smiley stopped writing and looked up. L.J was practically breathing on top of his head, comically arched over to read the words as they were written.

"So that's why he hates you and chocolate?"

The not-so-good doctor twirled the pen between his skilful fingers. Nervously. An unusually prolonged pause.

Almost though...

Almost though he was thinking of making up another lie.

All he had to do was write one simple word, and he'd be out of the situation unscathed. This was the closest he'd ever come to admitting the truth.

Smirky knows I find lies irresistible...

His hesitant hand was revealing letters in swift, deliberate strokes of the pen. It would only take three.

Y.

Crafting a perfect lie, watching it unfold before his eyes.

E.

He will never forgive me if I go on like this!

A thread snapped. A boundary was stepped. Halfway through finishing with the letter 'S', Smiley swiped the pen back and put a strike across what he'd almost ended.

It looked like a mere spelling mistake; soared right over L.J's radar.

Before his nerve abandoned him, the not-so-good doctor scrawled onto the pristine white paper. (The words flowed like a river of ink, flying from his deft handwork like magic.)

No. He wants me dead for what I did afterwards.

"Go on." L.J breathed. He was like a child being told a captivating bedtime story, leaning in as close as he could, unaware of his nose poking Smiley's forehead.

I... (He gripped the pen tightly, choking the innocent inanimate object.) I did something bad.

"Hold up; by bad, what level of offence are we talking about? Stealing cookie out of a cookie jar bad, or slaughtering whole family in front of eyes kind of-"

Nobody else in the world would've been interrupting Smiley in such a way. Perhaps that was a wonderful thing; nothing else could've squeezed the truth out of him so quickly.

At nighttime, after our parents went to bed, I went and apologised. Promised I'd never do anything to hurt him again. And he forgave me.

L.J didn't make a comment, but listened with impatient anticipation.

He knew Smiley's little tale was heading somewhere bad indeed.

And the sooner he knew why, the sooner he could decide whether or not to admit that he'd almost strangled Smirky to death half an hour ago.

I gave him three chocolate pieces as a peace offering. I ate one, to convince him they weren't tampered with...
But they were. They had different wrappings, so I left a colour untouched when I filled them with sleeping drugs.

"-Sleeping drugs!?"

The hand around the pen tensed stiffly. Then it was put back to paper.

No... It wasn't sleeping drugs. It was a tasteless sedative. Not enough to knock him unconscious. I stole them from the medical cupboard.

"Wait, wait, wait. What kind of psycho household keeps heavy drugs in their medical cupboard?"

Mine. I don't remember what happened to the other chocolate, but as soon as he'd finished, I talked him into going for a nighttime walk with me, to explore a new abandoned place I'd found.

"And exploring creepy locations in the middle of the night was a totally normal occurrence, I assume...?"

Why, yes. How did you know? Anyway, it used to be some kind of animal research facility. I used it as a place to conduct my own kind of experiments, with surgery.

"I think I can guess where you're going with this, and I don't like it..." L.J genuinely seemed unsettled.

Maybe it rang bit too close to home for his taste. His deceased playmate, Isaac, had been fond of 'experimenting' too. Making furniture out of human body parts, for example.

The handwriting became shaky, rushed. Smiley no longer bothered about grammar or punctuation, but we've added it for the reader's sake.

He started getting woozy, realized what I was planning, tried to run. I brought him to a faint and dragged him into my little makeshift surgery-

Looking over the words that decorated the page, Smiley shivered. But he had to see it to the end, he had to.

Six hours.
I tortured my own brother for six whole hours, and he was awake to feel every minute of it.

And just like that, the bone-chilling words surfaced once more. He wasn't sitting in the hallway; he was in suffocating darkness, drowning in the chant.

BLOODTHIRSTY. MONSTER. HEARTLESS.

GUILTY. BLOODTHIRSTY. HEARTLESS.

BLOODTHIRSTY MONSTER.

HOW COULD YOU?

His hand was moving unconsciously, while its owner drifted back to his waking nightmare.

He didn't even realize that he was still writing.

Both the voices in his head and the end of his confession emerged to grace the bottom of the single notebook page. It was a mess, littered with words that had nothing to do with the text.

I left HEARTLESS my own brother to die. HEARTLESS.  There were these massive spiders; I was MONSTER sure they'd MONSTER finish him off. But GUILTY he survived, somehow. Physically, not mentally. HOW COULD YOU.

A quiet nervous breakdown, revealing itself between the lines.

L.J only looked at it for a few seconds. And then his attention went to their creator.

Warm tears were welling in Smiley's eyes. The pen slid from his grasp, just as the sparkling drops spilled over. Now that the confession was written on paper, read by someone else, it became real.

Reality had struck at last. He could no longer find sanctuary in denial.

And he couldn't run away from the consequence of his actions.

To see the usually perfectly composed (albeit vicious on occasions) doctor like this... it was so unlike him, in Laughing Jack's point of view.

So the  monochrome clown hugged him.

(I told you to put the yaoi pen away! We've passed that stage of not-so-subtle humour, remember? Keep that dirty mind under lock and key!)

And just after he did so, he whispered something. So softly that it couldn't be heard by anyone else, neither camera nor spy lemming.

"It's called remorse, kiddo. Let it out."

That's when the true breakdown started; L.J had expected nothing but.

Smiley buried his face in a feathery shoulder; and yet, his despaired, miserable howls couldn't be concealed.

It brought hell upon his throat. The tears stung his eyes. But he didn't care about anything. He'd knifed open an old wound, and poured salt into the gash. It hurt.

SORRY? GUILTY.

MONSTER. BLOODTHIRSTY. GUILTY.

HOW COULD YOU?

PLEASE LEAVE ME ALONE, I BEG OF YOU! I'M SORRY; I'M SO SORRY!
And so, the cycle continued.

Oh god.

If this is what he felt like... what had he put Smirky through?

How many times had his twin suffered like he was now, begging, screaming for the torment to go away, but to no avail?

Did Smirky believe that the only way to make it stop was to kill Smiley?

Disbelieved horror invaded his thoughts themselves.

How could he ever be sorry enough?

How could he explain, in nothing but sound, beyond a shadow of a doubt, how much he regretted giving in to that little nagging temptation, to begin working on human patients?

L.J sympathetically patted him on the back, while his other hand delicately picked up the dropped pen. This pen in question, well, there was something a little special about it...

The previous sentence no longer exists in your brain.

(Word count, word count, boosty, boost, boost, boost! ;))

Now, as Smiley finally broke down and admitted guilt, something unfortunate happened:

He found himself swirling down a whirlpool of thoughts, echoes and voices, visions and flashbacks. Straight back to the fateful (near fatal) day in question, reliving the events all over again.

It had started after the birthday party, after Mother had ushered her two playful boys out of the lounge so that she could sweep away the confetti...

___________________________
A/N: We're going to see exactly what happened on that (birth)day! How exciting!
... Next week. *^*

For now...
Question Of Le Day: Your reactions in full juicy detail? What are your thoughts about Smiley and Smirky now?
Quote of Le Day: "If it ain't broke, break it. Then fix it and take all the credit."

See you next Friday, unless I come down with a fresh bout of creativity-clogging flu! :)
Toodle-doo~!
Final Word Count: 1500.