"I miss you!" Cri shouted.
The voice exploded among the gusts of wind, breaking in his throat like crushed glass.
"Every person who looks like you almost makes me cry! I look in the mirror at myself and I want to see you!"
Cri took a step. Slowly. A body broken and poorly stitched back together, his hands still stained with rain and the blood he had coughed up moments before. A shadow searching for something solid to cling to in the darkness of the street.
Chri remained petrified beneath the warm, orange light of the streetlamp. His eyes fixed on that ghostly face, hollowed out by pain.
"Your eyes are blue," Chri said. His voice was a frozen lake, devoid of tremors. "Your eyes are dull... with passion."
Cri shuddered, violently trembling from the cold that pierced all the way into his bones. "Chri, please—"
"I've heard these lines a million times," Chri interrupted him, without raising his voice, but letting every single word fall like a heavy stone onto the other's chest. "From you. From others. Tragedies spoken beneath the rain as if we were the protagonists of a movie. But I've never seen anyone learn a lesson from them. Never someone who, once the storm was over, had truly learned something."
"I'm not like him..." Cri gasped. The blood mixed with water still wet his lower lip and chin. "I'm not the person I was before... I swear to you..."
"You've spent your whole life being someone else," Chri cut him off, clenching his fists inside the pockets of his soaked jacket. "Being the right version for him. And then for him. And never for..."
Chri stopped. His lips trembled for an imperceptible instant before tightening.
When have you ever cared about me?
The thought pierced through Chri's mind like a red-hot needle, reopening a chasm that had remained hidden for far too long.
You only came crying to me when I wasn't there. Never for me. Only so you wouldn't have to be alone with your emptiness, to have someone there to witness your constant collapse.
"I'm selfish," Chri said aloud, spitting the bitterness into the icy air.
"What?" Cri stammered, taking another false and uncertain step forward. "What are you saying?"
"I'm saying that it's not just me," Chri continued, narrowing his eyes until they became two tired slits. "No, of course... there's also..."
Chri's gaze fell directly onto the boy in front of him. A fragile shell of pale skin, hair stuck to his skull and dark stains of blood ruined by the water. A ghost stubbornly demanding love and salvation while continuing to drown in his own martyrdom.
"...him too," Chri concluded.
"Chri, I'm listening to you," Cri said, his voice reduced to a desperate whisper, his eyes wide and glossy in the rain. "Tell me what I have to do. Tell me who I have to be to make you forgive me. I'll do it. I swear on whatever I hold most dear that I'll do it."
"See?" Chri replied, with a small bitter smile that did not touch his eyes in the slightest. "You're asking me again to give you an identity. You want me to save you, or punish you, as long as I stay here to play the spectator while you destroy yourself."
"I just want you to touch me!" Cri shouted, making one last desperate lunge toward him, his hands reaching into the void toward his jacket. "I just don't want to disappear!"
"I don't want anything to do with you anymore," Chri replied, his voice suddenly rigid, devoid of anything to hold onto, definitive.
"I LOV—"
The sudden, dull roar of a garbage truck passed heavily over the flooded asphalt, drowning Cri's scream in the clamor of hydraulic brakes and vibrating metal.
The vehicle's rear lights slowly faded into the darkness of the street.
And only silence remained. Dense, solemn, absolute.
Cri. The name echoed in Chri's mind, light like a distant echo of something that was finally breaking.
Chri. Cri thought, his chest frozen, his eyes fixed on the other's, stripped of every dramatic defense.
"Cristiano," they said together, in very low voices. An involuntary, surreal synchronicity that slipped into the humid air.
"Christopher," Cri added immediately afterward, his voice broken but finally true, as if wanting to return that name in its most complete form.
Long, endless seconds of stillness passed. The pouring rain began to thin out, transforming into a fine, intangible mist.
"Cristian and Cristiano," Chri murmured, breaking that weight. He ran a wet hand through his disheveled hair. "What a strange name to give to children. You almost get them confused."
Cri hinted at a sad and tired smile, looking toward the puddles that reflected the city's lights. "Yes. My brother and I were often confused. Maybe we confused ourselves with each other too."
He lowered his gaze to the wet pavement, and for the first time his shoulders lost that unnatural rigidity, collapsing into a clean surrender.
"I'm sorry for the person I was," Cri said, without any more emphasis, with a sincerity stripped of every artifice. "I'm sorry for the weight I put on you. I want to be better. For you. And for anyone I used as an excuse to keep feeling bad."
Chri stared at him for a long time. The rigidity of his face gradually melted away. His gaze softened, losing that sharp, defensive angle he had kept raised for months.
"Were we a good team?" Chri asked, his voice finding a shade of familiar warmth again.
He pulled the wet and crumpled pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket. He took one out and held it toward Cri.
Cri took it with his fingers still slightly trembling, but without the frenzy of before. He pulled out the lighter, struck the spark on the second attempt and lit it, breathing in the warm smoke that filled his lungs.
"We were?" Cri repeated, looking at him through the thin trail of smoke that dispersed into the night.
Chri tilted his head, looking at him with a rough but sincere affection. "Yes. We were a good team."
He scratched his head, letting out a brief, quiet laugh.
"Don't think things get fixed with one big dramatic scene," Chri explained, moving his free hand through the cool air. "The arguments, the grudges, the traumas... it's not like they appear and disappear in a single day. You can't just scream beneath a storm and erase the months in which we hurt each other. It takes time. A lot of time."
"I suppose so," Cri replied softly, taking another drag and exhaling slowly. "But for the first time, I'm not in a hurry."
Chri let out a small laugh, spontaneous and genuine, the kind that comes when the tension accumulated in your chest finally melts away. Cri looked at him and, without even realizing it, burst out laughing too. A contagious, sincere, clean laugh, incredibly similar to the one they had as children when they got into some trouble in the courtyard and knew they had really messed up.
Above them, the black clouds opened slightly, revealing a glimpse of a starry sky. It stopped raining completely.
"So," Chri said, putting both hands in his pockets and taking the first steps side by side along the sidewalk, "what do we do now with this famous life?"
Cri walked beside him, matching his pace. For the first time in years, his walk was not heavy, his back was not bent beneath the weight of ghosts.
"Honestly? I haven't the slightest idea," Cri replied with a light smile. "But I think we could start by going to get something warm. I'm freezing."
"You'd better be paying," Chri teased him, giving him a light, playful shove with his shoulder. "After all the drama you made me sit through tonight, it's the least you can do."
"Fine, I'll pay," Cri laughed, shaking his head. "But only if you promise not to hold it over my head for the next five years."
"No promises," Chri replied, winking.
They walked together toward the center, side by side, while the city around them slowly began to breathe again and the cold of the night no longer seemed so unbeatable.