Shards

Chapter 1: A Youngman's Death (Eoin/Eden)

Chapter 1, A Youngman's Death

"How wonderful is Death,

Death and his brother, Sleep!

One, pale as yonder waning moon,

With lips of lurid blue -"

Jonjo broke off from his over-affected poetry performance, and his white fingers (which should have been on the steering wheel) ceased their dramatic fluttering and settled down, as if to roost, on his younger brother's shoulder.

"Oi, you lis'nin', bruv?"

He grinned, reverting from poet to cheeky chappie in seconds. Johnjo was a rare combination of clever and common, something which, perhaps oddly, seemed to have lent him an air of vibrant confidence and approachability. The question posed was, of course, rhetorical. Sometimes it seemed that all Eoin (and nearly everybody else) could do was to sit and listen to Jonjo, absorbing the vivacity with which he interacted with life. He just exuded so much energy; it was as if his every breath was spent flinging his soul in bright colours upon the white canvas of the world. Eoin had always been more than content to simply be near his brother, and his affection was returned. Peter Pan had had his shadow, after all.

So of course, Eoin had been listening. He had watched, enraptured, as Jonjo leaned forward, reaching through the words, fishing for the soul behind the letters. His blue eyes were aflame, as they only ever were when he truly felt poetry (or when he was thinking of Meredith). The street-lamps and the intermittent abysses of darkness between them fractured his image, as if he were flickering in and out of existence, but all the while, his voice sang on. Eoin could see that he was alive in a way which meant so much more than having a heartbeat. It was at times like this that he felt the undercurrent of Otherness which gushed beneath all mundane things stir a little, and almost reach the surface. It was a sense of mystic beauty, of other-worldiness, a sense of Beyond. Eoin supposed that this feeling was what some people called God, or at the very least, a spiritual moment, but he didn't really know what to call it.

He smiled at Jonjo. " 'Course!"

"Good! 'Cos this next bit's about you!

'The other, rosy as the morn

When throned on ocean's wave

It blushes o'er the world;

Yet both so passing wonderful!'

You, mate, are my rosy, blushin' bruvva! And I am the dramatic, pale one; alright?"

"So... you're pale and dead, and I'm a sleepy nerd?" Eoin bit back a laugh, "and we are the 'passing wonderful' brothers?"

"Don't get snarky, mate. It means something, alright? You know it does, its not just words, its heart in the form of ink, my friend" - and even as he grinned to himself in the semi-darkness, Eoin knew that Jonjo was right. On a wet, empty country road in the dead of night, somewhere a few miles to the East of London, (neither boy knew, or cared, exactly where they were) the words belonged to them, an ode to brotherhood, and to life, to everything that they had pulled each other through over the years. Poetry has that remarkable quality of being flexible enough to be reshaped by each new reader.

That is why it never dies.

The same could not be said for the boys.

Jonjo was the first to go, but Eoin soon followed. In death as in life. Jonjo had been doomed to die a youngman's death from the moment that he stepped into the driver's seat, moderately drunk; from the moment the temperature began to slip downwards, and the roads began to freeze; from the moment that he decided to ruffle his brother's hair, instead of looking around the bend in the road.