Sinbad Prompt Meme!

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From:

bigbrasskey

(1) someone asked me what home was

"Sinbad!" Jamil whispers, crawling forward on his hands and knees. His round face is worried and his hands are muddied. She'll know what they were up to in a hot second. "Sinbad, she'll be angry with you!"

"I'm hungry," Sinbad says. Jamil is always full of prophecies of doom. "She won't notice just one or two."

Jamil tugs at his shirt. "Sinbad," he says anxiously.

"Look, see," Sinbad says, and scrambles out from the shadow of the doorway. "Come on!"

She catches his ear before he can touch the flatbread.

Out of the two of them Sinbad assumes an expression of virtue; Jamil stands in the doorway, guilty, his hands empty of all but knowledge of his brother's misdeeds.

(2) the centre cannot hold

"Sinbad," Jamil says. He keeps his voice conscientiously quiet, so as to not wake the sleepers next door and cups his hand over the candle flame. "Come to bed."

Sinbad looks up, his eyes reddened and absent. Their mother does not move, though Sinbad holds her hands in his. He is still small enough that the reach is awkward as he sits at her feet.

"I will, Jamil," he says. "You sleep."

Jamil lingers with the light. "Not without you."

Sinbad cracks a smile. "Miss me?"

"Your snoring has become a staple," Jamil says. "How long have you been out here?"

Sinbad looks up at their mother, his face smoothing into blankness. "Not - long." - enough, his silence fills in.

Jamil sits down. The wax is threatening to run onto his fingers. Sinbad looks at him, though his expression is too weary to pose a proper question.

"It's nearly morning anyway," Jamil says anyway. "Soon I'll have things to do."

Sinbad's smile is one more ghost in a room full of them.

(3) This above all: to thine own self be true

Jamil groans when he spots him, drawing the dry cloth around his head like a beggar. "Oh, Sinbad," he says. "Don't." Sinbad grins at him instead.

"Help me with this, won't you?" he asks.

Jamil hovers in the doorway until Sinbad gestures as the caked mud already covering his hands. "If it makes you feel better, it already itches."

Jamil gives in and goes to him. "You could do honest work, you know."

"Put on armour?" Sinbad's scorn is worse than scathing, it's dismissive. "Yell in the market?"

"Sinbad," Jamil says.

"You'll see," Sinbad says. He grins up at Jamal, seizes and shakes him gently by the back of his neck. "We'll eat well tonight."

(4) You always had to be the flash of lightning

"Are you trying to charm the girl or rob her?" Jamil asks.

Sinbad frowns at him, stern, then breaks and knocks his brother's head with his knuckles. "Depends," he says. "Which do you value more: a kiss for me or dinner for you?"

"Try a kiss," Jamil says, knowing it a lost cause from the start.

Sinbad laughs and musses his hair, his eyes already turned ahead.

(5) i don't want tomorrow. that's a bad word.

"Sinbad," Jamil says, standing shoulder-to-shoulder, the wind gusting at their shirts as the city spreads out below them like a promise, "you know she won't approve of getting money this way."

The roar of the betters spikes below them.

Sinbad laughs. "Who says she needs to know?"

(love) choosing our jagged truths with care

"Breathe, Sinbad."

He thinks his brother is crying, and the sound is a knife in his chest.

"Please, brother," Jamil says. "It's not time for us to meet again so soon."

Jamil should come with him, then. He never meant to leave him behind; Jamil had never strayed so far before. Even with his back turned, Sinbad always knew where his brother was.

"Just this once, listen to me."

(Breathe.)