Have you ever wondered what was in someone’s head? Those little words floating around and around in that skull, unspoken. That urge to hear the words, to know what they really thought.

What about emotions? Colorful flashes of yellows and greens and blues and reds. Of happiness and envy and sadness and anger.

How would it feel to hear and see everything? To feel what they felt through their ears, eyes, and even skin. To touch what they have touched, to know every nook and cranny of their minds.

I know what it’s like.

I live it every single day.

And she does too.

Twins we were born. Twins we have been bound to. Twins that will know every thought and emotion and touch of the other. Both a blessing and curse, we have lived with it for twenty years.

“Ace,” my twin sister, Ash, called. No voice was uttered but it rang loud and clear in my head as I lay awake in my bed. Blinking lazily at the tiled ceiling of our humble apartment, I could feel her laying on her side in her own bed one door from mine. As if she was laying right beside me.

Noticing the underlying trace of fear, I immediately knew why she had called for me. I concentrated and asked, “Nightmare?” Even though we both knew the answer.

The government still haunted us.

Twin freaks of nature with a power no one can explain or understand. Fugitives, we had broken free of our prison and ran. Leaving it all behind. Our father who had created us, the doctors like him who experimented on us, and the guards trying to keep us locked up.

We were done with the needles and pain.

No more!

Feeling the rage I had undoubtedly gave off, I felt her putting a hand over my racing heart with her soothing yet guilt ridden words, “Ace, it’s okay. Just a nightmare. I’m sorry to bother you.”

Catching the invisible hand that Ash began to withdraw, I willed myself to calmness and gently stroked her knuckles. “Sorry Ash, I’m just so angry we are having to run in the first place.”

“I know.”

“Was it Peter?” I asked, an image flashing of a man with a deceptively charming smile and blonde hair with a heart as black as coal. One of the cruelest guards at the laboratory, he had taken a keen interest in Ash. One of the two reasons why we had ran.

“Yeah.”

Feeling her fear again, I rolled over onto my side to mirror her. I could see in my mind’s eye of her white blonde hair so like mine, splayed out on the pillow and reddened silver eyes from crying. Without a word, I reached an arm over and pulled her closer into me, knowing she could feel the warmth and solidity.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered as I felt her overwhelming fear and sadness reach it’s peak. My hate for Peter only growing more and more, even if he’s long dead and gone.

“I-I can’t help but remember h-him.”

Another image of Peter, this time his bloodied form laying on her prison floor. And an image of me standing over him with blood staining my white lab rat uniform, speckling my hair and face. My hands soaked in it from my shoulder.

“You had no choice Ash, he would have killed us. Worse even to you.” I soothed as pain lanced through her as she remembered what she had done. What had happened that night, the night that became our second reason why we ran.

I remember hearing Ash crying, feeling her pain as it felt as if her hair was being pulled. Her arm grasped in a bruising grip and I knew immediately what was happening. I didn’t think at the time. How I had no weapon and Peter did. Or his strength compared to mine.

I didn’t care. My sister was in trouble.

I had burst inside and pulled him off of her. A flurry of fists and kicks between us erupting, pain flashing as black eyes and bruises were made. All I could see and hear and feel was my sister’s pain and fear.

When I had gotten shot and just as he was about to kill me, Ash had taken his gun and fired the killing shot.

Like that day, I hugged her tight and said, “I’ll always be there for you, forever.” And I meant every telepathic word.