Connected

Emotion: Battle of Two Brothers

You train your body,
You strengthen your mind,
You nurture your soul.

I had always been more conscious about other people than other people; well that's how it seemed. Now I'm older I can see why. I guess I knew what it was in the back of my mind, I just never singled it out until I was already in too deep.

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The roll was read out, "... Jason Nollfric?" said the voice, liquidated with contempt. The usual blast of cold swept through my stomach.

"Here. Sir." I said with equal contempt.

Mr. Francis had never liked me, I felt the same about him; we were complete opposites. While I was charming, funny and good looking, he was snarky, critical and generally ill mannered. I always showed him up in class, smugly pointing out all of his mistakes. He was incredibly biased when marking my work, and never passed a chance to embarrass me in front of the class. Except that everyone else in the class liked me more than Francis' snide remarks! Too bad for the wiry jerk.

But that didn't make the freezing, weakening feeling sweeping through me any better.

I enjoy making people laugh, because it makes me feel stronger. Even before I realised my power, I loved watching people giggle and chortle at my humour; it filled me with a sense of belonging.

Now it filled me with an amazing strength that was beyond anything imaginable. I was like a super-hero, whose power depended on the energies coming off other people.

If someone directed "positive energy" towards me, I would become increasingly strong and agile; the power matching the intensity of the energy. However, the opposite is also true, if someone directed "negative energy" at me, I lose the majority of my strength, only just hanging on to life at times.

The weakening isn't so bad right now because of all the other people around me who adore me here, even though Mr. Francis hates me completely. It only affects me when he directs his loathing directly at me, and that is usually when he is talking to me, or about me.

This is only half of my life however, my social front as a human. The other half of me is hard to the core, he doesn't trust anyone. The power that he gains is doubled and he rarely weakens to any life threatening levels. However, because of his lack of trust, his highest potential is limited to only slightly higher than human average, regardless of his skill.

Usually I keep that half of me suppressed because of his unfriendly nature, which he usually doesn't mind because he doesn't tend to like many people anyway, thus nixing the need to socialize. Even so, it's useful to have him there in sticky situations. Like the time when the local mafia hired an ace sniper to take me out, I really do cause that much trouble in the crime world. I was scared stiff, but he switched in and managed to catch the bullet just before it pierced my skull, then catapult it right back into the barrel of the gun, thirty miles away. The next day there was an article about an obscure explosion on an executive toy company building.

This would have stayed the same. It should have. There was, however, one powerful, persistent, unpredictable, unstoppable force that stood in the way of things staying the same. It's also the one emotion that gave us the most power, so much so that we could even supply our own power by it. That power; is love.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

It's really interesting, even though he is a lot more powerful, the other me is actually younger than me. It doesn't show much, but I'm twenty one and he's only seventeen. Our height is the same, regardless of the age difference, and we're about the same build, but his face is more set, determined, more matured. I never took time to mature quickly, joking around and making people laugh had meant that I had never really been hurt badly, emotionally. He had. It's hard to believe that he had actually been a lot like me before.