Angsty Surviving Twins in Literature.
- This is the subject of After Iris, by Natasha Farrant — a video diary by a preteen girl set three years after her twin sister was killed in a traffic accident.
- Among Others: Mori's twin dies shortly after the start of the book, and she spends most of the book coping with her death. Then she sees her twin's ghost who tries to get her to commit suicide so they can be together.
- This provides perhaps the most heart-wrenching scene in Frank McCourt's memoir Angela's Ashes, when one of the young twins dies and the other one keeps pathetically saying his name, etc.
- Digby Geste from Beau Geste plays a bit with this; though he survives his twin Michael and even helps in making a funeral pyre for him, he feels a lack due to his twin's more dominant personality and dies on the way back to Lagos.
- In The Belgariad, the sorceress Polgara is this. In fact, just the mention of her name, such as Garion naming his first daughter after her, is enough to shake her.Belgarath: To this very day, if you're impolite enough to ask Polgara how old she is, she'll probably say something like, 'We're about three thousand — or so.' Beldaran's been gone for a long time, but she still looms very large in Polgara's conception of the world.
- This is one of many possible interpretations of Boneland — Colin Whisterfield seeks to come to terms with the (presumed) death of his twin sister in very strange circumstances, anything up to forty years before the present.
- In The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Esteban and Manuel are so close that they have their own language and Twin Telepathy. Esteban goes through a great deal of angst after the death of his twin brother from an infected cut. He essentially becomes a homeless person for a while, wandering around aimlessly, answering to his brother's name. It culminates in an Interrupted Suicide.
- The Cat Who... Series: Book #8 (The Cat Who Sniffed Glue) features David Fitch, who has to deal with not only the murder of his twin brother Harley and his wife, but also their mother's fatal stroke and their father's suicide, both indirectly caused by the murder. His friends are all worried he may follow his father's example. Subverted when we find out that David was Dead All Along and the surviving twin is actually Harley, who killed David in order to take his place. He was having an affair with David's wife. The parents' stroke and suicide were caused by the fact that they figured out the truth and couldn't live with it.
- The Culture: In Look to Windward, this is the Backstory for the AI Mind of the Masaq Orbital, formerly the GSV Lasting Damage, which had been reunited with its Backup Twin and then lost it during the Idirian War. Culture Minds are titanic. Big mind, big angst.
- The Dark Artifices: Livia Blackthorn is killed during the confrontation with Annabel Blackthorn in the Gard at the end of Lord of Shadows. While all of her siblings grieve in some way, no one is as affected as her twin brother, the autistic Tiberius, who flat out doesn't accept her death and begins finding a way to bring her back. Except it doesn't really work; Livvy only comes back as a ghost tied to him, and the spell used to do the resurrection is implied to cause a harmful effect. By the end of the series, Ty is forced to accept that Livvy has gone for good.
- In Mikhail Akhmanov's Dick Simon duology, the four-armed Taya are almost always born with an identical twin. This has shaped their entire culture. Twins always marry other twins, even if they don't necessarily love their partner. Losing one's brother/sister, especially at an early age, is devastating, and can mean not being able to find a mate due to this. It happens to males more than females, as young males are expected to leave the peace of the villages and go to the lowland jungle to fight. The titular protagonist is a human, who was born on the human colony on Tayahat. When he was still a boy, his father sent him to a native friend to be educated in the ways of the Taya. While there, Dick fell in love with a Taya girl. Unfortunately, the girl had a twin sister, so they could never be together, and Dick was treated with the same kind of pity the Taya reserve for those whose twin has died, despite the reminders that humans are different.
- Exaggerated in The Diminished, in which everyone, save for a rare few "singleborn", is a twin. If one twin dies the other gets sick and dies soon after, and the 1 percent who survive become known as "the diminished" and will inevitably snap into murderous insanity. Except not really. The Corrupt Church has been secretly dosing the diminished with Psycho Serum for decades, in order to increase the populace's fear of them and their own power. Without that, only one in five of the diminished will snap, and it won't be quite as dramatic or murderous when they do.
- Dollanganger Series: Carrie, after Cory is killed by poison in Flowers in the Attic. The next book, Petals on the Wind, shows that she never entirely recovers.
- Gilead Lothain, the dispossessed elf protagonist of the novel Gilead's Blood (and the forthcoming Gilead's Curse), owes his grim, tragic and thoroughly disillusioned character to the death of his identical twin brother Galeth. Gilead and Galeth were often described as one soul in two bodies, such was the strength of their bond (extending to a kind of mild telepathic link), and Gilead speculates that their bond somehow survives Galeth's death, making him effectively two souls in one body. It is because of what happened to Galeth that Gilead lost all interest in his lands and noble birthright and became the shadowy wandering vigilante he is in the books.
- Zig-zagged in Harry Potter:
- George, the surviving Weasley twin, goes on without Fred to become super-successful at Weasley's Wizard Wheezes, which was the dream the twins had pursued together. On the other hand, he marries Fred's then-girlfriend, names his own son Fred, and Word of God says that he never fully got over Fred's death, to the point that he could no longer produce a Patronus charm, since all his happiest memories involved Fred. In the films, the look on George's face in the movie when he sees Fred's dead body shows just how deeply it affects him.
- In the SF novel La Horde du Contrevent by Alain Damasio, one of the Dubka brothers dies and the other angsts about it until he is replicated and the copy instantly assumes the identity of the dead brother, for reasons explained in the book.
- In Natalie Standiford's book How to Say Goodbye in Robot, Jonah discovers that his father lied to him about his twin's death in a car accident. He actually had him institutionalized because he didn't want to look after him.
- The Hunger Games: Katniss’s family friend Mrs. Undersee became a drug addict after her twin sister Maysilee was killed in the 50th Hunger Games about 25 years before the start of the series.
- The Icemark Chronicles: In Blade of Fire, Thirrin's son, Cerdic, is killed in battle, prompting his twin brother, Eodred, to enter a period of protracted mourning. In the end, it takes the insistence of his sister, Cressida, that he get on with life and his newfound friendship with a young werewolf to help Eodred recover.
- In If I Fall, If I Die, Diane's brother died in a grain elevator accident when they were twenty-four. She never fully recovered, and knowing how easily a loved one can be torn from her meant that after she had Will, she was constantly envisioning horrible deaths for him. This eventually developed into an anxiety disorder that left her housebound for eight years. She improves somewhat when her brother turns out to actually be alive.
- I Miss You, I Miss You opens with the character Tina telling the audience that her identical twin Cilla will soon die in a car accident and that this is not meant to be a surprising twist because the story is about Tina dealing with the loss of her sister. While the characters in the book are fictional, they are based on real life twins Kinna and Jenny Gieth. Kinna, a teenager at the time, co-wrote the book with author Peter Pohl as a way of coping with the death of her twin.
- The Last Daughter Of York: The protagonist Serena copes with the discovery of her long-missing twin sisters remains and plenty of survivor's guilt, complicated by the fact that her sister Caitlin's skeleton was buried in the early 1700s despite the book being set in present day.
- In Legion, the book that The Exorcist III was based on, there is additional backstory for James Venamun, AKA The Gemini Killer, that shows he was one of these. He had a twin brother named Thomas whom his evangelist abusive father mistreated for his developmental disabilities, culminating in an incident where Thomas was left with an extreme phobia of the dark after the father threw him into the cellar for a night. James genuinely cared for his twin, so once Thomas finally died from a heart attack after a nurse switched the lights off in his room, James took revenge on his father by killing others in order to shame him. 15 years after his (original) killing spree ended, the Gemini Killer just wants to reunite with his brother in the afterlife and worries that he made Thomas upset with his crimes. The backstory with the twin was Adapted Out and the Gemini Killer in the movie is overall much more gleefully malicious than his book counterpart, but a documentary shows it was at least considered to be included during the screenwriting phase.
- Charlie in the novel of Lemonade Mouth (but not the movie) — his twin choked on his umbilical cord and was stillborn. The family's visited his grave on every birthday.
- Lightning: Laura meets a pair of identical twin orphans, Thelma and Ruth. Later on, Ruth is killed accidentally when another orphan commits suicide, causing Thelma tremendous grief. She ends up helping Laura in her adventures.
- In Magical Girl Raising Project, Minael and Yunael initially serve more as comic relief as they focus on being popular over helping people and complaining about their leader. As twins, they do everything together and act the same. When the fighting starts, Yunael is killed, leaving Minael mentally unhinged. She then employs ruthless pragmatism over fun when hunting her enemies until she's killed.
- "Nine Lives", a short story by Ursula K. Le Guin, takes this to an extreme when one of ten clones is the only survivor.
- The backstory for The One and Only Ivan has a gorilla troop attacked by poachers who kill the adults and capture the twin baby gorillas, Mud and Tag. Mud is adaptable and senses that he has to try to forget the pain and the yearning for his old life to survive. Tag holds on to those memories so they're like a vine, "comforting, strangling" and dies while they're still in a shipping crate. Mud, rechristened Ivan, grows up to Cope by Pretending everything is okay and refuses to remember as much as he possibly can, focusing on every Mundane Luxury to handle living in a small cage, but those memories and the strong feelings associated with them can't be denied forever.
- The Redwall story Marlfox has a pair of otter twins that are part of the Sensational Wandering Noonvale Companions Troupe. One of the brothers, Elachim, dies in the first battle of the story, while his brother survives to the end.
- Either one of the surviving twins in David Eddings's Regina's Song get this. Very, very badly.
- The Power of Five: Scott dies and Jamie lives.
- In The Secret Life of Bees, one of the Boatwright sisters, May, had a twin sister named April who died by suicide. According to sisters June and August, May was never the same after that, and will become upset and emotional over the littlest things. And when she finally snaps, she decides to follow April in taking her own life, so she drowned herself.
- Isadora and Duncan Quagmire are Surviving Triplets in A Series of Unfortunate Events. They insist on being referred to as triplets, not twins, because they were not born twins. Later subverted when it turns out that Quigley survived.
- The Silmarillion: In one version of the "burn the ships" incident, Amras, one of Fëanor's twins, is on the ships when his father burns them. His twin Amrod becomes this afterward.note
- In Star Wars Legends, Alema Rar loses her twin sister to the Yuuzhan Vong in a particularly agonising and gruesome way; it sends her into a dangerous spiral of grief and vengeance that culminates in her falling to the Dark Side, becoming steadily more insane and disfigured by injuries, and eventually dying.
- In The Stranger House, one of the interchangeable Gowder twins dies in an accident and the survivor goes 100% Axe-Crazy.
- Sweet & Bitter Magic: Tamsin tried to save her twin Marlena with magic, which caused her death. She's wracked with guilt by this, and was cursed to not feel love too as punishment. It's then revealed that Marlena's alive however.
- Sweet Valley High:
- The Wakefields of Sweet Valley includes the story of Jessamyn, the great-great grandmother of the twins featured in the main series, who never really got over the death of her own twin Elisabeth in a riding accident. To a lesser extent, Amanda (the Wakefield's great-great-aunt whose twin Samantha dies in childbirth) and Sarah (the great-great-grandmother on the other side of the family whose twin brother James dies of pneumonia) might also qualify.
- Elizabeth herself has a nightmare in which Jessica is killed in a car accident following an argument in which Elizabeth has finally gotten fed up with Jessica's selfish behavior and outright told her "I wish I didn't have a sister." Naturally, Elizabeth is this trope until she wakes up and realizes it was All Just a Dream.
- In Twig, the twin sisters of the Baron Richmond are introduced serving as The Dragon to him, his bastard half-siblings. After the Lambsbridge Gang kill all but one, the sole survivor is struck by the lack of care her brother shows for their lives, and, after making a final attempt to kill the Lambs, crosses a Despair Event Horizon and gives up.
- Wulfgar from Valhalla loses his brother to the protagonist in the first scene, setting up his quest for revenge.
- The Wheel of Time: Played for drama with the elderly Aes Sedai sisters Adeleas and Vandene, who spend their entire lives together and are 265 years old when Adeleas is murdered by a mystery Mole. Vandene is absolutely devastated, starts wearing Adeleas' clothes, loses weight because food "tastes like ashes", and is obsessed with finding the murderer. Her sole moment of happiness is in finding and killing the murderer, seconds before being killed herself.
- In Where the Red Fern Grows, Old Dan gets killed by a mountain lion near the end. His sister Little Ann has a Death by Despair a few days afterwards.
- Wings of Fire: Peril is haunted by the fact she killed her twin while still in their egg. It fuels her belief that she was hatched to kill others, something enforced by her queen. It turns out the story is a lie. Her Missing Mom Kestrel was forced to kill her brother in a Sadistic Choice soon after they hatched. Later, it's revealed that Kestrel managed to fake her son's death, but lost track of him afterwards.
