Archive of Our Own ^beta

I.

They don’t know much about Uncle El and Uncle Bev when they’re four, five, six: just that they’re identical twins (“Just like us!” Elliot crows) and go to Harvard Medical School. Dad only calls them what he does because they’ve always been kids to him, even though he’s younger than they are by five years and two months. 

“Strange kids,” he adds, when Elliot and Beverly are a little older, and Elliot bolsters up the courage to finally ask him, pretty colorfully, if they actually exist or not.

“Strange how?"  Elliot pushes. Beverly gives her a warning look; she just rolls her eyes.

Dad starts to say something, then shuts his mouth. “Best not to tell,” he says instead. “I don’t want you two to be that kind of strange, Ello.”

What’s that mean, Beverly thinks.

“Why’d you name us after them, then?” she asks, strangely confident but mostly curious, tucking back a stray lock of hair behind her ear, wishing it was tucked into her ponytail. Beside her, Elliot is grinning, but it doesn’t really look like it. It’s with all of her teeth.

They don’t get an answer; Mum calls them in for dinner, and Dad never tells them why.

II.

They meet Uncle Bev and Uncle El only once. They’re both sixteen and Dad had sent them perfunctory invitations for his daughters’ birthday party (“A joke,” he’ll say later, “it was a joke. I didn’t know they were going to fly all the way to Manchester from goddamn Toronto.”) and there they are in the front doorway, tall and willowy and fawn-haired. Uncle El says, all grandiosity and flourish, “Alan, you look pretty disappointed. I’m deeply offended,” while Uncle Bev—softer—adds, “How long has it been?”

“Too long,” Beverly hears Mum mutter. It turns out she hates Uncle El, but she tolerates Uncle Bev when he’s not letting Uncle El talk and talk and talk during their birthday party to everyone there, mingling with the guests effortlessly like it’s his job. Meanwhile, Uncle Bev has a not-conversation with Dad, where it looks like they’re both trying to side-step the awkwardness that comes with not seeing each other in person for more than a decade, except there’s nothing to talk about. 

After the guests have cleared out and the cake’s eaten and Dad and Mum go up for the night, Uncle El looks over the two of them. 

“So,” he says, “our namesakes. Quite interesting; did your dad ever tell you why—”

“Already asked, old man,” Elliot chips back, sharp as ever. Beverly winces, even though the fondness rushes in equal measure, overwhelming and instinctual. She looks at Uncle Bev, who’s sitting uncomfortably in everyone’s least favorite chair in the living room and has the same look on his face. Or—not exactly. More like he’s gotten used to that kind of… reaction. Used to something similar.

“I won’t dignify that with a response,” Uncle El says, but he’s grinning like a shark. It’s delighted, like he’s relishing this. It’s absolutely terrifying.

“Already have,” Elliot sings-songs right back. She smirks with a closed mouth, and Beverly wants to tell her to cut it out, wants to tell her to pile it on. It’s tugging on her skin, on her bones; that’s what it’s like to love Elliot.

III.

“So,” Beverly asks, “what do you do? Dad told us you were in medical school when we were little, but...”

“We,” Uncle El says, and holds his hands out and grins, “facilitate the miracle of life.”

“Oh,” Beverly replies, lighting up. “Babies?” 

Typical, Elliot thinks, mostly to avoid thinking about the fact that her mind had jumped to the same thing. Fine, they want to be doctors; she and Bev already know that, already decided that when they realized they could. No babies in the equation; just the science, the exploration, the fucking fascination of it all. 

At that, Uncle El kind of smirks—not exactly malicious, but not nice either—and waves a hand to Uncle Bev. “Bev, you want to clarify?”

It’s a push and a pull, Elliot thinks, and looks to Uncle Bev, who’s smiling a little faintly, like he’s just been waiting to drop into this conversation. Waiting for permission, Elliot realizes, as Uncle Bev turns to her sister.

“Not quite, Beverly,” he starts, voice rounded where Uncle El’s is serrated around the edges. “It’s more like we make sure that the conception of babies can happen to begin with. Fertility, ergo—”

“Ergo, the babies. But that’s not our realm,” Uncle El finishes, and it’s like he knew exactly what Uncle Bev was thinking, like he had it on the tip of his tongue. Suddenly, Elliot is horrendously, horribly jealous, and can feel it tucked behind her teeth, crawling inside her like a poison or a virus. She knows Beverly like the back of her hand, like she knows the way home, but she can’t do that. 

Not yet, anyway, she thinks, and it’s ferocious. Determined, the feeling like blood in her mouth, all coppery and sure and strong. She’ll know Beverly, and Beverly’ll know her, in and outside, up and out, top to bottom. They’ll be the Mantle twins; better than the originals. Not even fucking comparable. That’s what matters. That’s what fucking matters. 

IV.

When they are eighteen, in the middle of their first year at Harvard and sharing a room with walls like paper and no fucking privacy, they get a call.

“It’s your uncles,” Mum says, “they’re dead.”

It turns out Uncle El and Uncle Bev were found together in their Toronto apartment by the police after some actress one of them was dating called them to do a welfare check. When Beverly asks their mother how, she says, “It doesn’t matter. They’re getting cremated; there’s no need for a funeral.”

“That’s just fucking boring,” Elliot says later, moody. “Sure, it’s convenient—but it’s boring. I want to know what the hell happened.”

“Maybe it’s not important, Elly,” Beverly says, as if she hadn’t asked their mum in the first place, as if the want to know what drove them—not them, their uncles, not them—to an early death isn’t starting to gnaw on her insides, worrying and quiet. She purses her lips. “How do you think Dad feels about it?”

“Oh, who the hell knows? If you ask me, he just thinks they’re a couple of weirdos, baby sister. Always has.”

“You make him sound heartless,” Beverly replies, remembering her father knitting jumpers, the way he always knows how she takes her tea and had a cup waiting when she got home from school. “It’s not him. It’s them. Can’t you see?”

Elliot looks at her like she’s stupid, or maybe very naive. Beverly wants to hit her, wants to ask her what she should’ve said instead and apologize.

“Did you know,” Elliot drawls, “they invented the Mantle retractor in med school?  And the research they published? It’s the bedrock of fertility care for women. They might’ve been weirdos, but they were fucking brilliant. That’s what people should care about. Who cares about the—the soft shit? That doesn’t get us breakthroughs in medicine or equitable care.” She tags on the last part because she knows Beverly’ll take the bait, because she—she knows Beverly will think about what she says if she does.

She knows Beverly like she never has before, and it’s—Beverly just cocks her head and goes back to her textbook instead of thinking on it more.

She makes a choice. She won’t indulge Elliot more.

V.

After the actress (fucking Genevieve), the birthing center and the lab, the homeless woman (fucking Agnes), the Parkers, her fucking sister selling out to those fucks, and the end of her career, Elliot spends a lot of time calling Beverly and getting ignored, zonked out on drugs and drunk, or sleeping in her lab because her pristine, perfect, curated, fucking expensive as shit Manhattan apartment is a fucking crime scene. Fuck.

That isn’t to say she doesn’t think. She definitely fucking does. She thinks mostly about Beverly and how she wants to consume her, wants to beg her forgiveness, wants to fucking gut her for ruining them, wants to love her enough that everything else fades away. She checks on the embryos. She snorts lines and takes a nice pull of vodka right after. She thinks back, back, back. She thinks about them. 

Elliot had found the article when she and Beverly were at Columbia for medical school. She’d wondered—kept wondering about what had happened to dear old Uncle Bev and Uncle El, because no one would spill—so she’d done what she does best. Research.

And there it was, that headline in the Toronto Star in 1988: Notable Twin Gynecologists Found Dead in Apartment. And oh, the article: Uncle El had been disemboweled and Uncle Bev had overdosed on drugs. There’d been bloody, warped, alien-like surgical instruments found with their bodies. The local police, the article said, suspect a murder-suicide. The Mantle twins had an infamous reputation in the medical community, both as two brilliant, deeply respected signs of the same coin, and as unhealthily codependent siblings who could not extricate themselves from each other.

It’s funny, Elliot thinks. More than twenty years since then, and you could write that last part in some fucking article (fucking Silas, he probably would, that pretentious ass) about her and Beverly and no one would be the wiser. Similar variables reach a similar result. It’s the snake eating its own tail; it’s the experiment that only ends one way. 

Their uncles had been nothing without each other. They’d came into this world together, and they’d left it—never to be separated, never to be so hollow and unfulfilled and alone that you want to claw your eyes out rather than suffer in it. It’s the only hell that Elliot believes in, and she’s living it now.

VI.

Beverly knows what really happened to Uncle El and Uncle Bev, all the details past they're dead. She knows because Elliot told her when they were twenty-three and in their M2 year when she found the article, but cut her off when Elliot started speculating how the whole murder-suicide thing even happened anyway. She couldn’t listen to it; it felt like too much like a self-portrait of her and Elliot, thinking about Uncle El and Uncle Bev and why and why and why. So she won’t.

It’s only when she’s bleeding out, when Elliot has cut the babies out and ran, and she’s nothing but a corpse and platelets and hemoglobin and gore, that she lets herself. Uncle Bev and Uncle El died as themselves, but she and Elliot will die as each other. And it’s ok, Bev thinks faintly, as the black creeps in and she can fucking breathe for the first time, Elliot was always the better of the both of them. And as for the two of them—they're not a self-portrait, not a reflection; they're better. They were always better than what came before, and that’s all that matters.