Common folklore stated that twins were born when a soul became too much for one person to carry.

If that was true, Emmet and Ingo probably should have had a third sibling.

It wasn’t even that they’d caused that much trouble for their parents; they had just had the energy, curiosity and enthusiasm to exhaust an adult within the hour, and they built off of one another.

And it was hard not to get caught up in the other’s excitement when they constantly heard their twin in their heads. If something caught Emmet’s attention, he’d automatically share it with Ingo, who added onto it in his answering [idk], and the cycle would continue, on and on, until nobody outside of their thoughts could hope to understand. It was simultaneously isolating, and incredibly affirming– because even if nobody else understood, there would always be someone on the same page. Maybe their interpretations of the text diverged, but rarely were they a full stop away from one another.

Telepathic twins were something of a cliché, but it was a cliché neither cared to subvert. Why would they, when it was so much more fun to silently collaborate and inflict benign mischief on their loved ones?

Nobody in their family had been surprised when they realized what was happening; their mother wasn’t psychic herself, but her line was full of espers and clairvoyants that cropped up every few generations, and their parent was a reasonably experienced, if casual, levitator. There was a collective understanding that the twins were among their family’s psychics– innate telepaths– and the matter was shelved.

Funny thing, though; while the two sides of their family were well acquainted with psychics, neither half boasted especially powerful ability. There was no reason for the boys to breeze through their parent’s levitation lessons the way they had.

It was something the pair eventually figured out on their own. Despite the fact that they couldn’t remember a time before the other’s presence at the back of their minds, as much as levitation had been the first power they’d learned, there was something beneath it: a psychic feedback loop that slowly built up momentum as they grew.

A psychic feedback loop that had not, as a matter of course, stopped spinning over the years. Not even once.

It turned and turned, a perpetual motion machine that needed nothing more than their psychic link to thrive.

That was Duality.

That was why, so long as the other still lived, neither one of them could truly be stopped.