It was something new. I could tell that before he had even stepped in the door. All day he had been outside. Not that it was anything different. Our professions differed; Mikayel would always be outside. Beneath the sun, or the artificial rays in his greenhouse. Day after day, I would stare at these methodical calculations. These precise instruments, this horrid structure.

It was never a secret that I envied my brother. That was why he would share. Whatever his newest finding was, I could already tell, had brought him delight. I could only hope, that it wasn't some new super breed of marijuana.

"Mitsundrei?" He asks as he swings my door wide open. As if anyone but myself would be closeted up in this room. A few papers, coloured by age, fall to the ground. I note their equations in my mind as they fall, stepping on them as I move into his view.

"Yes." I take my work with me. See? I want to say. I don't spend all day, staring at you. Mikayel doesn't buy it. He's known me too long, too intimately. There's dust on this beaker. Part of the chemical has evaporated. His eyes dart to it, and I know that he wants to say something. Make a joke about it. I'm not in the mood. "Don't," I warn between clenched teeth, "What is it, Mikayel?"

He looks like a hound I once knew. I had kicked it out of my way. Far more humane than picking the thing up and killing it. It hadn't seen it that way, and had looked up at me with its most pitiful expression. Of course, he can't stay looking like that for long, and it quickly turns to a more characteristic grin. Briefly, I wonder what new combination of hallucinogens he's come up with. "Want to get some sun?" He asks, offering the outside to me.

"No. Not really. I hear being white's in fashion." I spurt out the first absurdity that comes to mind. He looks at me as if I've been in here too long, sniffing chemicals, letting them go to my mind. Perhaps I have. We haven't kept up with the 'fashion' of these times, since our own era was erased. Thrown to nothing but fantasy.

"You couldn't be white even if I dumped you in bleach." Mikayel is loosing his patience now. Considering it varies from hour to hour, thanks to all of the toxins roaming joyfully through his system at any given moment, I guess I shouldn't be surprised. It doesn't stop me from being so. "You're coming outside with me, now," Mikayel orders, grabbing onto my wrist.

The beaker shatters as it hits the bare, concrete ground. "Do you iwant/i your plants to die?" I hiss the reminder at him. Hoping to see the usual shock on his face, as he forgets about what I do to them. Even without meaning to. A few millennia, and you would think that I would have this fire-starting thing down to a "t". Almost. More like an "r".

The reaction I want isn't what I get. Instead, Mikayel smirks. "That's exactly what I want you for."

"What?" I ask, hoping for an explanation.

"You'll see. But you have to come outside." It seems that there will be no verbal explanation for me, as Mikayel just stands there, in my door way, grinning like the... like the what? The drug addict ass hole that I really, really hate right now.

"I don't want to," I mutter, turning my back to him. Crouching down, removing the papers from the spill. The ink has begun to run. Maybe the modernists are right. We should get this place wired. Get a... One of those glowing box things, and I could log my equations in there. It would be far easier than having to rewrite them, every time something like this happens. "You have breed in that greenhouse, that have taken you centuries to create." I don't mean for it to, but my voice has a whine as I speak. "You've traveled, cataloging each new breed as it arrives. You keep traveling. Creating new. Creating old." I frown, staring at my latest paper. It's not complex at all. It's the scene I see, every day. Recorded in simple, rounded strokes of the pen. It had been about to rain that day; Mikayel had run about in it, like a child. "I don't do that, Mikayel. I don't create. I destroy. I take things apart. Remove their myths. Justify others. Why--"

Mikayel cut me off. Somehow as I spoke, he had entered my lab, and now knelt directly in front of me. His hand was cupped beneath my chin, forcing me to look up at him. "What?" I breathed the question as he leaned closer to me.

"You promised we'd stop...," I muttered as he pulled from the kiss, leaning into him. There was no conviction in my words, no recognition of them in his eyes.

His arms wrap around my back, firm. Bringing me closer to him. Beneath his faded cotton shirt I can hear his heart beating. Beneath my lab coat, I wonder, if the same organ makes the same sound? Mikayel chuckles, as if he's heard my question. It wouldn't be impossible, but unusual for him. Last thing he heard think, was a cactus while he was high. "It hurts to remember your old self, Doesn't it Mistu? Don't worry... I'll be here for you."

I don't know what's happened, but I feel as though a weight has been removed from me. I can only nod, and clutch at his shirt like a small child who's been too stubborn to go to bed on time, and has collapsed from fatigue. "As long as you don't leave."

His lips in my hair, he whispers, "Never."