Do I have a bully brother?

“I didn’t mean that.” I apologized. I turned to Chris to change the subject, “You didn’t hold your right in there, bro?!”

The fake memory of our fight in the street had faded sensorial details. For what I remember, getting punched by my brother hurted a lot more than how it felt.

“That wasn’t myself.” I tried to reach for his shoulder too, but he dodged me. Ok, he was being really weird! Normally we are so intimate with each other that we have to watch ourselves in public; people had mistaken us for a couple a few times before. But after the things we experienced inside this thing, something had changed for him and I didn’t know what.

Leon got up from the bed and walked to the computer to check the heartbeat of the others. We were all graduating in Law School, but he was so passionate about medicine that sometimes I forgot he gave it up when our father nicely asked him to.

“Do we unplug them?” He asked me.

“I did it with you. It seemed to work. I stopped the code to not restart.” I answered.

“So who do we have to blame?” Chris got up and went to check the main screen. He brushed the mouse and the timeline appeared. The raw video was 30 hours long. “What the hell?!” He asked nobody, in a low tone.

“We all know who - me.” I answered while Chris clicked at a random spot of the timeline bar.

It started showing me and Carl almost kissing each other at Omega Psi. When I asked him to give up on joining The Club, the footage tweaked and the next frame was poorly cut to us by the pool outside. When Chris clicked on another spot, it showed me getting up naked in the hotel bed in Paris. He clicked somewhere else and got up from the chair.

“So blame me as well.” He sighted and leaned back into the computer table. “What do we do now?” He pointed with his chin to our friends still sleeping.

“I say we wake them up.” I suggested.

Chris walked to Carl’s bed and fiercely took his wires off, that’s when I noticed Carl’s unusual pale skin tone. It was completely covered in fading tattoos. He didn’t have any of those before, he didn’t like them as he once said to me. He even had one coming from his chin up to his bottom lip. But those weren’t just random skin drawings, those were the runes. Some were random lines that didn’t represent any known shape or form, and some were Greek alphabet letters. The only flaw was they all exhausted their effects once used and, for the looks of it, he’d experimented a bunch of them on himself. My skinny boyfriend messed with something he didn’t know about and it was all my fault, again. Everything around me was crumbling faster than I could’ve ever imagined.

I watched Chris' movements while I unplugged Jeff. Leon did Ethan and Jim. He wasn’t telling me something I sensed I needed to know. Jeff was the first one to wake up with the same reaction. I held his back to help his sitting position and he started crying.

“Please don’t kill me. Please! I beg you, Michael. Don’t kill me!” He sobbed and I held his face for him to turn and look at me.

He flinched when he fixed his eyes on me, like I was going to punch him or something. I thought my heart skipped a beat because he never rejected me like that before.

“Jeff?! You’re ok. I’m not going to hurt you.” I let go of his back, feeling his muscles tensing at my touch.

“Jeff, what the hell were you thinking? Do you even know what you did?” Chris moved to his right side and crossed his arms. His questioning tone was harsh, demanding explanations from a scared person.

“Jeff, it’s ok. You can talk to me.” I said and made an angry face at my brother.

“He said not to speak with you. He said you’re mean and that you were trying to kill him.” Both his hands were hugging his head down in a sitting fetal position.

Chris looked at his right forearm and noticed something I didn’t before. He reached it and pulled it away from his head. When his blond hair wasn’t covering it anymore, I saw the drawing on the inner side. It was a big handwritten “β”. Chris quickly reached for Carl’s same member and showed me the “α”. My guts sank and revolved inside my stomach. I held Jeff’s tattooed arm, but he quickly retracted away from me.

“Jeff, what did Carl do?” I asked him again.

“He said he would take care of me. Everything would be fine as long as we kept you sleeping.” Only then he remembered to look to his right, to his alpha, who was still sleeping. He turned to look at me, fear running through his eyes. “Did you kill him?”

I tried to reach for his cheek and, once more, he instantly tried to defend himself. I sighed and closed my eyes. They were my fucking boyfriends. How could he not trust me anymore? I giggled under my breath. I had done my research too well.

“Jeff, that’s Michael. Don’t you remember him, bro?!” Leon tried to talk some sense into his mind, but it was useless.

I turned my back away from them, I couldn’t stand to see him like that. I approached the server computer again, where Leon was still leaning back watching that stormy waking up.

“What is he talking about?” He leaned to my side and whispered.

“He’s been brainwashed.” I said.

“What?!” His voice climbed an octave.

There you have it! Both my boyfriends were completely out of their minds. Well, I mean, one minute I was excited that my boyfriend pulled off a VR game and the next one, he **** me so he can use my powers to trap us all inside it. Is that real love?

But that wasn’t the true Jeff. The buff blond that I learned to like because of Carl. I never had a thing for blondies, but Jeff was blond fun, surfer fun, manly fun, getting high fun. The VR game showed him for what he was, always having Carl’s back. Except for The Club part. God, what a sickening lore for a game!

Watching Jeff’s childish face towards Chris because of that rune had me nauseous, so I stepped outside the room.

The hallway was lightened up by the usual lights. Outside the windows, the darkness of the streets made me realize it was past 10 p.m. for sure. It was the first week of our last winter vacation at Harvard, so the campus was lacking students and the laboratories would certainly be deserted. Carl was such a genius he waited for the right moment to make his plan work. But why did he do this? He already had me and Jeff. We loved each other.

I slid my body against the wall until I was sitting on the raw cold floor of the hallway. I remembered both him and Carl in my bed on one of our vacations. It was our first trip together as a trio. Barcelona bonded us for life the first time we went. Loving two men at once in a king bed was divine.

I was suddenly taken off of my memories when Leon opened the door.

“Jim and Ethan also aren’t taking this well.” He said with only his head out of the door. “They’re crying like babies.”

“Do they have runes?” I asked him.

“I don’t think so.”

I mimicked an imaginary switch with my fingers and heard their beds squeaking to the impact of their torsos.

“Better than sleeping pills.” I tried to smirk.

He knew I was taking it hard so he got his whole body out the door to close it and came to talk to me.

“Don’t you have one of those to make everything go back to normal?” He mimicked my prior hand movements.

“That’s not so simple.”

“Why don’t you try to talk to Carl?” He lowered himself and said it to me.

“Is he awake already?”

“No.”

“Good.” I got up determined.

I thought it would be better to face Carl in dreamland without the effect of the runes on his body. I laughed in my mind. I’m going back to Dream Oxford, then. Bizarre!

As he was unhooked from computer number one, laying there, the only thing that signaled he was barely alive was his body shivering on a three seconds loop. I put my right hand on his forehead and concentrated on finding him until I was able to connect to his mind.