Final Reality (THG Fanfic)

Part 1: The Gesture // Chapter I

Bright sunlight streams through the windows in the creaky, old bedroom I share with my younger brother, Fletch. He's annoying. I expect at any moment he will be jumping up and on my bed, urging me to get up for school. Obviously, he doesn't understand us teenagers. We're always tired and stressed and just done with it all. I used to share this room with another brother, one that was less annoying. He was eighteen years old the last time I saw him, and his hair was a glorious gold – which was odd considering everyone else in our family was a brunette. His name was Jordan, but we called him JD for short.

His warm smile was infectious, and his coffee bean eyes were manipulating. Nothing could bring him down, not even when his name was pulled out of that glass bowl. JD kept his chin up that day, refusing to cry or argue, to show any emotion at all, while the rest of us crumbled in desolation. That was obviously the last time I saw him in person, holding an eight-year-old me in his arms as I cried. A month after that, we received a wooden coffin that carried his body. I loved him. My parents loved him. Three-year-old Fletch was annoying as hell, but I'm sure he loved JD, too.

My eyelids feel heavy and my muscles are aching, but I can hear Fletch shuffling out of bed. Oh god, here it comes. I squeeze my eyes tighter in hope of him not disturbing me. All I wish for is just a few extra minutes of peace and quiet. I hear him walking, a sniff, and then there's a slight sob. I'd be thankful for him not pissing me off this early in the morning, but the last time Fletch cried was when we were burying JD – which was ten years ago! This is quite exciting, but odd. It scares me a little, knowing that my little brother is capable of such an emotion, because all these years, he’s usually moaning and groaning about our family being below decent. I don’t quite know what he means by “decent”, but he’s Fletch – full of complaints and snobbiness.

He leaves the room, trying to muffle his sobs as much as he can, and I throw my blankets off. I rub my eyes so they adjust to the bright sunlight, and stare at the old clock hanging on our wall; it reads twelve minutes to three. That clock has been there for some time, cobwebs and faded paint showing its age, but it's stopped working. For ten years, it has been twelve minutes to three. My grandmother, who died over a decade ago, told me this ancient story about this man who built a clock that goes backwards in hope of bringing everyone's sons, including his own, back home from what they used to call The Great War. For so long, people thought it was something of use to them, to give people hope when it is lost. However, years after the clockmaker passed away, the mayor of the town decided to tear it down for it was a waste of space. A waste of space it wasn’t. Unfortunately, the mayor did not believe that people should hope, instead he thought we should be moving forward. So, in place of that “waste of space”, there hung a digital clock that went in time.

I remember I tried to do that when JD died, trying to turn the hands of the clock backwards and backwards, waiting for JD to appear in the doorway to play with me outside. The clock stopped working a month after that, probably too many attempts to turn that clock back, too many attempts to acquire hope. But still here it hangs, never to be replaced by a working clock. And why should it be? Don’t we have a choice if we want to move forward? To grow up? I choose no.

Sobs and melodies fly from the room next to Fletch’s and mine, my parents’ room. It's as big as ours, and as creaky, old, and somewhat habitable as ours, and it is where Fletch has found refuge from what I believe to be a nightmare. I press my ear to the thin wall between them and I and hear my mum singing softly. What a rare thing to happen. I remember her singing lullabies to Fletch and I the night JD was reaped; I wouldn’t stop crying, and I refused to. They were really lies my mother sang to us, and I was prone to believing them, because I sang them myself. The soft harmony always brought me back to reason, to reality. My mother taught me every song, every melody, every ballad she knew and wrote. She’s a beautiful singer, so beautiful time would stop to hear the perfect tune escape her lips.