Genre: Angst

"Bharat, what are you doing?" Mandavi shrieked exasperatedly, her voice shrill. She tried reaching forward, but stopped half-way, caught in a thoughtless gesture that could never be, an opportunity not taken. 

Instead, they all watched Bharat hurl a vibrant watercolor painting into the raging fireplace that lit up the room in deep night.

Without responding to the words, nor returning the desperate gazes, Bharat picked up a piece of parchment. 

The paper was lit in the feverish orange glow that emitted from the flames, and Bharat stared at it for a fleeting second before ripping it into two ragged halves. 

"Enough!" Sumitra cried, pulling the pallu of her sari up to cover her shocked face. "Bharat, you spent hours on that. You waited the entire evening for those sparrows. I still remember the joy on your face when everything came together and-" 

She tried to step forward, but halted in shock when Bharat reduced the drawing into even smaller pieces, little bits of torn paper, before throwing it too, into the hearth. 

"Bhaiyya," Shatrughan tried to say weakly, his own voice cracking. "Bhaiyya." 

But it was as if they were invisble, as if Bharat was living in his own world of raging fury when he swept his forearm across his meticulously organized desk. 

The little glass pots of exotic paint tipped over and smashed into sharp little shards. "BHARAT, HAVE YOU GONE MAD-"

Bharat snapped. 

"STOP!" 

They all silenced, startled, at the sudden outburst. 

"Stop being such hypocrites!" Bharat shouted, voice high and thin.

 "STOP TELLING ME THAT I SHOULD STOP! Okay? Stop it! Am I not Lakshman's brother? Do I not have a right to be sad? Stop acting as if I'm behaving ridiculously! Stop gaping at me like I'm some animal in a circus! Like this is all unexpected to you!"

"Bharat, what are you-"

"You'd all been in tears just hours ago. Hadn't you been yelling so loudly that even the Gods would have awoken from their rest? Hadn't you been flooding the courtyard with your tears? HAD I CALLED ANY OF YOU MAD THEN? NO!"

Bharat gritted his teeth together and clenched his fists at his side so tightly that his already pale skin turned a feverish white.  "No, no, no. I didn't even cry then. Nobody even was surprised that I wasn't reduced to desperation like everyone else. Like I have no attachment to Lakshman."

"Why? Because Bharat's always like this. NO I AM NOT!" He wiped his mouth of spit. "Before, it was always a choice. Now? Now it's a responsibility."

" I'm so tired, god, I'm so terribly tired of being the responsible one! I'm so tired of being the eldest! The optimist! Because I'm not! I was never the eldest! I was never trained for this, for heading a family. OKAY? Never! But the transition was so damn smooth. The next eldest has to manage the youngers and the elders now. "

Kaushalya opened her mouth, but Bharat spun around, eyes red with anger. "What were you expecting me to do? Hanh? Make rounds and tell everybody how sure I was about Lakshman being completely fine? Was I supposed to be the bigger man amongst you all and lift up the family? Well, I'm tired!"

He smashed his finger into the table. "I'm so tired of lifting you all up! I'm tired of having to push everybody to be happy. You all have spent fourteen years mourning those three, and what time have I gotten? Nothing! A meeting in the forestwhere I was made glaringly aware of the act I had to keep up for the next fourteen years? A pair of sandals that weren't even mine to keep! A kingdom spitting at the sight of me! A family fraying at the edges! I didn't even get to say goodbye to them. I didn't even get the luxury of being able to hug them."

"Yet all I wanted, all I wanted, was a single moment to cry! TO CRY! I miss them! I miss them so much. And the only thing that kept me optimistic was the knowledge that they would return. After all those years, they would come back!"

He walked up to Shatrughan and shook his shoulders. "But don't you get it? Laksh isn't coming back. Lakshman will never come back! Okay? NEVER! He's gone! Fourteen years of false hopes have come crashing down on me!"

"I've been building this tall, unsteady ladder of unrealistic faith and memories I barely can recall, only for it to capsize when I was this close to reaching the sky."

Bharat walked back from a frozen Shatrughan, staring at his feet with a renewed sense of horror. "Lakshman is never coming back. My brother is never coming back. I will never see him again." 

Bharat's head whipped up. "And oh! If you needed this to start understanding my grief, know that Ram bhaiyya will never smile again either. He will never allow anything but sadness to remain in his eyes. The Ram bhaiyya that you saw leaving will never return. The Sita bhabhi whom you let go will never return. 

"I will forever have to keep up my act, while also living with an empty chair at the dinner table, an armory full of weapons he'll never get to use!"

He looked around his empty chambers, all the easels he had stripped of their treasure and tossed into the flames.

 "This, all of this, is so stupid. The only beauty I could grasp was that of the hopes I kept protected in the depths of my mind. But no beauty deserves to linger on this Earth. It will follow Lakshman wherever it goes."

He looked up, eyes shiny with tears. "So yes. Maybe I've gone mad. But maybe I had a lot more sadness hidden in me behind my optimism. Maybe my faith in their return was the only thing keeping me sane for you."

He swallowed the lump in his throat. "Maybe I just was looking forward to embracing Lakshman and telling him what a good job he did."

"Maybe I didn't want Lakshman's last memory of me to be of my silk clothed back when he stood there without a single coin to his name."

Then, he looked up. "Maybe this whole exile was like that piece of paper. We were torn into half. Then fourths. Then eighths. Over and over again. Until each of us were nothing but a fragment of a paper, useless to even use as kindling for fire. Our strength was as a family. Together."

"Before, we were just folded apart. Ram bhaiyya, Sita bhabhi, and Laksh on one side, the rest of us on another. But the creases became finer and finer. Until a part of us was finally ripped away."

Bharat's stoic face dropped, and finally escaping the shell of his hopes, they saw his real face. It seemed to sag exhaustedly. All in one moment, he had aged the fourteen years passed.

"I miss Laksh." he murmured. "And I'm so tired."

Shatrughan exhaled shakily, hands trembling with an ache to pick Bharat up. Kaushalya looked ready to reach out and take him. into her warm embrace. Mandavi wiped a tear and stared at the fire, ready to douse it. 

Instead, they all watched as he collapsed.

A/N-If you're seeing this, and you're a person who writes for the Ramayan, this is your divine SIGN. WRITEEEE! You can do this! 

Anyways, I wanted to publish a quick short. I had a lot of good ideas, but they were all  What-If scenarios, which I wanted to put in a Ramayan What-Ifs book, which can only be published after PoA and MttSK, which means that you'll only read those after five years. :)

I also wanted to thank everyone for 8K Views. Thank you!