Shirogane

Full Original Fic

Hey what up this doesn’t make sense, everyone has a human body, the context in which this story is written is absolutely ruined because I made the choice to give everyone a human body, please don’t think about it too hard and consider this a character piece. Post-BBL, with as many elements of BBL included as I can fucking make sense. Let’s just consider this an AU and not stress ourselves out. We’re here for polyshipping slow burn, slice of life, and Sakuya character progression. Have some tea.

-

They rise from death hand in hand.

Sakuya has to fumble to grab on to something, something distinguishable, and it’s Hiyoko who detaches herself from what almost, horrifyingly, looks like one mass to extend her arm out to Sakuya—so thin, where are her hunter’s muscles?—to be pulled up and out of the debris.

Airing out the abandoned lab just once was bad for it. What had been sealed had begun decomposing once returned to light. And thought they might have brought Ryouta and Hiyoko back to life in a matter of days—long days, stressful days, with someone standing bodily over the doctor at all times—when they uncovered the remains and saw, inexplicably, the remains of three bodies in the pit together, there was no being done with the dirty work until Nageki arose too.

So it was in almost post-apocalyptic ruin, rusted medical equipment and concrete barely standing, everything coated, still, in the ash, that Sakuya hefted Hiyoko out of the glass coffin, out of her own blood (a messy procedure, no matter what) with the two boys still clinging to her side, arm in arm, intertwined, almost flesh in flesh, leaving trails of viscera on Sakuya’s reaching arms.

And it was into the same dusty ruin that all three of them fell, since Sakuya was not exactly planning to help up all three of them at once, but okay, fine, if they couldn’t be separated for TWO MINUTES he would handle that, except not at all, because though he was a little more fit than he used to be, no, he could not support the loose and unstable bodily weight of three people at once. Nope.

The newly undead collapsed on top of Sakuya, bringing slime and dirt and blood and god knows all with them, and Sakuya just ended out clutching her face and asking, again, “Hiyoko? Hiyoko? Ryouta?”

It ended up that Kawara has the presence of mind to reply. “Yes? What?” he said, sounding as much confused as anything. Nageki seemed to be mostly absorbed by the fact that the sun was way, way too bright for his weak eyes.

Hiyoko began to laugh, a low-bellied, barking laugh of joy.

Sakuya was enveloped in her arms.

-

Sakuya had spent a lot of his time in grief with his brother. His full brother.

Some months after he first escorted Yuuya home, him still weak and shaking from surgery and Sakuya still barely cognizant, he realized that Yuuya was actually very good at reading the mood, he just refused to get lost in it, as many would. He would try to pull someone out of a spiral as soon as they started falling into it, and if inciting annoyance was the fastest way out, then so be it.

So Sakuya spent his mornings griping at Yuuya for this thing and the other, the curtains, the dishes in the sink, the bathroom, the lewd comments if nothing else had worked, until one of them left the apartment for some reason or another. Yuuya’s apartment, which their mother often visited.

Sakuya had returned to his father’s house for two hours before he couldn’t look at him.

For as comforting (yes, comforting) as their morning routine became, Sakuya ended up spending most of his time alone. So much time that it was worrying. Yuuya was almost always gone; during the day, during the night, on holidays, at odd hours, always. And Sakuya now spent too much time with him to idly assume that he spent all that span with various women, especially after the first time someone tried to assassinate him in Yuuya’s place. To be fair, they did look pretty similar.

Though, it turned out, Yuuya was the spitting image of their father.

Obviously, Sakuya wasn’t. The resemblance between Mrs. La Bel and her younger son was uncanny sometimes, even more evident in their almost prissy mannerisms than in their light eyes and pretty features. Pretty features which Yuuya, by the way, could stop caressing any moment now.

“Please go put your life in danger, Yuuya,” Sakuya said with annoyance, “and leave me be.”

“How can I leave you, mon petit chou, looking as forlorn as you do?” asked Yuuya lightly, somehow.

“By walking out the door, which is right there,” Sakuya replied, ducking under Yuuya’s arm to reach for the coffeepot. Yuuya has been up for hours, or hadn’t slept; he had been in bed until ten minutes before this happened.

And yes, it had been a bad morning, with grey clouds and an unlifted malaise from the night before. He had gone to bed trying not to think of Ryouta’s dead, red eyes, and woke up still seeing them.

Yuuya just adapted to Sakuya’s dodge, moving his arms from their gentle grip around his head to a firmer one around his shoulders, from behind. Sakuya endured it, because he could move to reach the coffee from that position.

It also ended up possible to take a few slow sips of the barely too hot coffee from within his loose grasp, staring outside the window. Sakuya could feel the low, deep breaths Yuuya always took rustling his hair, which hadn’t even been BRUSHED yet, making him feel a little like a barbarian. But it was harder to take care of himself, it ended out, when sharp disapproval didn’t come when he didn’t bother to do so.

Sharp disapproval had been replaced by an almost absent-minded hand untangling a few pale strands from where they rested on the side of his head, brushing his ear. And it was only because Yuuya wouldn’t mention it that Sakuya leaned slightly into the touch, letting Yuuya neaten him out. Maybe not the misery, but some of his anxiety melted.

“Want some sugar?” asked Yuuya softly.

“Stop that,” said Sakuya, “but yes, I would like some literal sugar put into my literal coffee.”

Yuuya chuckled and detached himself from Sakuya. Sakuya swung into one of the mismatched chairs at the tiny kitchen table while he was momentarily free. “Would Albert like some coffee too?” he asked, back turned, amusement in his voice.

Sakuya turned around to glare outside the window. “How do you know he’s there even before I do?” he asked. “Have you tagged him?”

“No, pity’s sake, I wouldn’t even try to pull something like that on him,” Yuuya said, spreading out his hands. “I just have better training than you do, brother.”

“Training,” said Sakuya, mockingly. “You just assumed he was outside same as I did.”

“Maybe,” shrugged Yuuya. “If I leave a cup outside, will he take it?”

“Not unless he knows it’s for him.”

“I’ll smear some blood on it.”

“No, you will not,” Sakuya commanded, but only chuckles responded to him; that, and a bent spoon pouring sugar into his drink. Sakuya took the spoon from Yuuya’s hand to stir it in.

Maybe he watched the coffee swirling around too long and too silently, because Yuuya saw fit to interrupt him again. “The private trial finished up yesterday,” he said, a little too airily.

Sakuya put the spoon down, as close to the sink as he could manage from the table. “And?”

“Guilty, obviously,”

“Obviously.”

“But we agreed to not try to do anything much for now.”

“Obviously.”

“The fact that he’s already taking steps to rectify the damage he’s done made the trial a moot point from the start. It was done mostly for the sake of the victims, of which there were more than even I expected. You might have enjoyed some of the sheer rage.”

“There wouldn’t be a point to me attending.”

Yuuya picked up the spoon, and the sound of water pouring from the tap told Sakuya what he was doing, but he didn’t look up any. “I’ll admit that your case was closed…” Yuuya let it drop. “He’s not going to be having a good time once he’s done with his sentence for this case, though.”

“Can you really punish him? You? The Dove Party? Anyone?”

“You know?” said Yuuya. “If he’s cooperating, yes.”

Sakuya snorted, and then reconsidered the tone of Yuuya’s voice. He glanced up at his brother, but Yuuya was, to all appearance, focused on coffee.

“I doubt it’s guilt,” said Yuuya, softly, after some time. “I don’t know what it is, or why.” He waited some time again. “He’s seeing something through. I’ll take it, but I don’t know why he’s working with us.”

Sakuya felt his guts twist. The sheer mystery of it—ever since seeing his medical file kept neatly in the Doctor’s personal drawer with the likes of Ryouta’s and Anghel’s—the heavy unknown of it all—how unexpected his reasons for destroying Ryouta like he did—Sakuya took a huge, painful gulp of the hot coffee. “Blech,” he said forlornly.

“I feel the same, mon cher,” Yuuya sighed.

“But he’ll bring them back,” said Sakuya, surprising himself.

Yuuya hesitated. “He’s seeing something through,” he repeated.

Sakuya had actually seen Dr. Iwamine a few times since that day. It was always horrible, despite being totally cordial. The way he shook and sweat—the way he couldn’t look the doctor in the eyes—the way—

No. Not now. He was tired of breaking down. He had done too much of it in the last few months.

After a minute, he looked up with a flinty hardness in his eyes and his jaw set just in time to see Yuuya setting a bloodied coffee cup on the windowsill.

“What. No. YUUYA. WHERE DID YOU EVEN GET THAT.”

“The pantry, just like the rest of the mugs.”

“NO.”

“Come on, it’s cheap. This one is part of the set I got at a garage sale. I think it’s even chipped.”

“YUUYA.”

“Well, time to go put my life in danger,” he said, his eyes crinkling up at the edges. Sakuya was still blustering, but it was fading when faced with the sight of an up-beat, laughing Yuuya.

What had once been normal was precious, now that Sakuya had a chance to see how rare it was. It was still odd to him, trying to maintain another person’s emotions. That trait had been discouraged in him when it had been of more use to command and be cold, be willing to sacrifice for his own sake, to stay on top.

Now, softness was coming to him slowly, painfully, and in spurts, and yet, somehow, naturally.

“Try not to lose it,” he ended up saying, voice between the edges of its previous harshness and something else.

“I will keep it to bother you another day, mon frere,” Yuuya promised, draining his cup in an impressive gulp and then rounding the corner to embrace Sakuya. Sakuya stayed perfectly still and let nature take its warm, enveloping course. But when Yuuya tried to actually nuzzle him, he pushed him away. Gently. Like you might push away a cat trying to coerce food out of you. “And tell me you’ll do schoolwork while I’m out today,” Yuuya finished, finally letting him go.

After a few months of being virtually unable to do anything productive, the anxious terror of being a failure had spurred Sakuya to start studying to take a GED exam to finish the education that had been cut short, which endeavor Yuuya wholeheartedly supported. To no one’s surprise, Yuuya had decided to leave his education unfinished and continue his work instead, but since Yuuya could support them both, the doors were open for Sakuya to at least obtain the dignity of a high school degree.

“Of course,” he said, waving Yuuya off haughtily. Yuuya chuckled again, as was his wont, and saluted Sakuya before swinging his way out of the kitchen. Sakuya, looking vaguely in his direction, heard him rustling around the apartment to gather this and the other thing, from bedrooms and living rooms and bathrooms, before rushing out the door, down the hallway, and out of hearing distance.

When Sakuya finally looked up from his unseeing staring some ten minutes later, wiping one eye with frustration, he was unsurprised but annoyed to see that the blood-stained cup of coffee had disappeared without his notice.

-

So life went for some months. Yuuya worked, came home at odd hours of the day, and once or twice, sending Sakuya into a panic, came home wounded. (He tried even harder to not do so after the first time he had to watch Sakuya weep. In the lethargy of grief, even, he had not wept in front of him.) Sakuya studied until he felt able to obtain his GED, and he did so on his first try.

They celebrated with their mother on a secret visit to a quiet café for dinner. Sakuya wasn’t aware that he could be clingy, either, until that night. (And bless Mrs. La Bel, because she waited to cry after her boys had left her at the airport, arm in arm; the boys who had been enemies in their youth.)

It was only a week after that night that Mrs. La Bel became Ms. Shirogane again in a move that might have been fatal for her had not her eldest son been Sakazaki fucking Yuuya. As it stood, things were significantly harder on the three of them after her divorce, but one would have hardly known by the joy that Sakuya’s joy brought them all. (Of course, he still tried to be composed, but he had so much of a harder time not showing that he was happy when he was happy now. It was harder to hold it in when, trembling, he couldn’t help clinging to the people that were still alive, that still wanted him, that didn’t think he was worthless now.)

Another week after that, Sakuya La Bel was Shirogane Sakuya as well. He had considered the choice at painful lengths for seven days, and then arrived at the courthouse a bare half hour after the decision was made. (It happened after Mr. La Bel claimed he had no claim on or care for the child, which no further comments, in the divorce hearings, information about which Sakuya had transmitted to him.

He did not attend.)

It was a little unnecessary for Sakazaki Yuuya to become Shirogane Yuuya as well—a lot excessive, actually—but he did.

Not long after that, Sakuya became unable to pay Albert any longer. Why he continued being alive and coffee continued disappearing from the windowsill, no one could say. (Which is a damn lie. Yuuya, and the entirety of the Dove Party, honestly, could say.)

Sakuya didn’t visit others who had lived through that day often, at least, not at first. If he had had the mind to be concerned about the well-being of other people much at that time (as active empathy was new to him, at least, empathy unrepressed) he may have been worried about Anghel, who few had seen since that day. But when he saw him, and San, and Professor Kazuaki, they were all still breathing. Which is the most he could say about them collectively, but they were all still breathing.

(Anghel had no idea what he was or would be doing with his life, but his mother supported him lovingly. Hitori was seeing a misery unlike he had known before, but a turning point, unbeknownst to him, was on its way. Oko San was fine, actually.)

Doctor Iwamine continued his work.

-

It was surprisingly nerve-wracking for Sakuya to start attending college. Though, after completely giving up everything he had once wanted, he was desperate to succeed by SOME standard, ANY standard, it would have been more stressful to NOT apply for a university education, Sakuya found himself with nerves that he hadn’t had before that day making him a little anxious and incredibly angry at himself as the first day of classes drew near.

It wasn’t the top university in France, which had originally been his plan. What was once unthinkable—staying in Japan forever—now seemed like his only choice. He couldn’t leave. The thought choked him. Yes, he missed home, he missed the culture he knew, the language he dreamt in, the trees that grew in his native soil, the native waters lapping, the native snows falling in the native cold, and some… a few… maybe one or two of the high culture kids he grew up with, but it wasn’t an option. Not with his mother and Yuuya here. Not with Mr. La Bel there.

Not with Hiyoko and Ryouta under this ground.

So it was to be a middling university in Japan because, for some reason, his grades sunk a little after he stared death in the eye several times in a 24 hour time span. Besides that, he found himself feeling a little less up for a rigorous liberal education that would make him one of the leaders of tomorrow once, you know, it was sure that he wouldn’t be one of the leaders of tomorrow.

In lieu of that, a modest musical education at a decent college sounded acceptable.

His mother fussed over him quite a bit when classes started, and the more he tried to reassure her, the more anxious he became himself. After all, he WOULD be travelling to and from classes by train, since only Yuuya had reliable transportation, and he had to use it, obviously. And he WOULD be struggling to buy the expensive books and instruments, which hadn’t fully hit him yet. Or he might have to figure out how to rent them. And yes, because he hadn’t actually had a proper musical education, he would start out behind a lot of the other students, which was something else he wasn’t used to. And he WOULD be a figure of interest once everyone found out he had been part of the Hatoful Incident; not just part of, but one of the few people in that terrible, wide-spread photograph, in which a bloody professor, doctor, and a handful of terrified students are caught mid-emergence from a dark basement with guns trained at them from all sides.

Sakuya found that picture interesting, because he didn’t actually remember the moment. He didn’t remember anything between letting go of Ryouta and the sudden, weird silence of the police station. And, in the photograph, he looks like it.

But, being the person he was, Sakuya saw no two ways around it—he would go to college, no matter the discomfort. Sure, he expected to face difficulty and misunderstandings. Sure, anymore, he expected the occasional breakdown. It didn’t matter what he was faced with, he was determined to deal with it and panic later, if need be.

However, he didn’t expect to face down Kazuaki Nanaki.

He had been attending classes for only a handful of (stressful, awkward) weeks when he first hunkered down in a library for the afternoon. He hadn’t thought he would start his education with the physics of sound, but, well, it was something you were best off knowing if you wished to be a composer. After someone recognizing him in class disoriented him (not that he couldn’t handle the situation with grace and poise, but he had been inwardly disoriented by being pointed out as ‘one of the Hatoful survivors’ in public) he didn’t even notice the implications of what he said as he noisily dropped his books down on a library table, conveniently lit by a south-facing window, until several seconds after he said it.

He had said, “Oh, wake up, Professor Kazuaki.”

Nanaki woke up with a jolt and stared, wide-eyed, at Sakuya. Sakuya stopped himself halfway through pulling out a chair and stared at Nanaki. Nanaki’s jaw dropped open.

Sakuya got a hair’s breadth away from picking his books back up and leaving. But then Nanaki’s expression went from utter shock to such a familiar look, an almost lazy smile, characteristic of his lethargy (characteristic of days before Sakuya had seen him drag Ryouta away into a closed room with a gun in his hand to NO. NO) and he ended up plunking haphazardly down in the seat next to him instead, a bit weak at the knees.

“Sakuya,” said Nanaki. “The ponytail is cute.”

Sakuya consciously straightened himself in his chair and his chair in relation to the table. “Professor. Uh. You. Huh.” He stopped himself and tried again. “Are you teaching?”

“Tutoring,” said Nanaki, “I’m still looking for a full time position.”

“And the student you’re tutoring?...” Sakuya asked, looking over his shoulder.

“They all left a while ago. I meant to leave too, but the sun coming in that window was so nice…” Nanaki’s voice trailed lowly away as he looked out of the third story window at the peaceful autumn afternoon. It was a bright, warm day, especially for being so late in the year, and Sakuya couldn’t blame anyone for WANTING to fall asleep in the middle of the day. However, he had his opinions about the people who did.

But anymore, he didn’t voice them often. Not because he had gotten any less judgmental, he was just slowly, and mostly subconsciously, losing his taste for upsetting and distancing people.

“You’re a student here, though, I assume?”

“Yes. I’m. I’ve just started my music degree.”

“Music. Wonderful.” Nanaki’s smile was wide and his eyes thin and slit in the bright light. “I still remember hearing you and Hiyoko one day from the hall, playing the piano… You were good in all of your subjects. I would have written you a recommendation if I had known you were furthering your education, hm. I think you’re the only one…”

Again, Sakuya declined to tell his former teacher that he didn’t want his recommendation. “Do you… keep in contact with any of the others?”

“Hm. A few.” Nanaki looked out the window. “I visit Anghel from time to time. I usually only see his mother, though. Apparently he doesn’t come out often. Oko San is gone. Run away, I mean. I visit Ryouta, too, though I doubt it does him any good. Can’t really get to where he is properly. And his mother. She’s in the hospital full time now. Oh, and do you remember the girl who usually sat in the very back of the class?...”

Staring out the window, as if unfocused, Nanaki told him briefly, succinctly, about the children who almost died. Those living with their parents. Moved far away. Have a quiet job at a convenience store.

Didn’t make it.

Sakuya hadn’t even known some of them had died. Complications. Some actually had been shot; faces he knew, voices he had heard. Wounds. Contact with all of the mysterious diseases kept in the basement.

Some deaths after the fact. Not all of disease.

As his heart beat more quickly, Sakuya found himself feeling oddly removed from the situation. He heard Nanaki list their names, but there were so many; it was like wave after wave after wave sucking at his feet on the shore. Dead. Not seen in a while. Moved out. Finishing high school next year, or maybe the year after. Married and then gone. And over it all, like a prayer, Nanaki’s lilting, unchanging voice, his little smile, his eyes watching the sun sink lower on the horizon.

Were his hands shaking?

“And then, of course, the good doctor.”

Sakuya startled. Nanaki smiled. “I live with him now. It’s a small place, but we get by.”

“You… live with him now?” Sakuya didn’t even feel the words leave his mouth.

Nanaki finally met his eyes. A film of sleep seemed, even now, to hang over them. Sleep in them, and shadows underneath. His fingers clasped his own chin to hold up his slumping head. He smiled like a cat.

“He won’t ever get away from me.”

The dust wavered between them in the bright air. Sakuya’s skin prickled with fear.

Yes, this was the man who dragged Ryouta into a closed room with a gun in his hand to kill him. And this was the man who had been across the room from him all along.

It was the sound of other people scraping chairs and shuffling pages across the library who brought him back into his buzzing skull, at least enough for him to feel his own clammy skin; he took comfort in the sound of other people being there. He took comfort in the normal day happening to others (and their ability to be witnesses).

Nanaki didn’t seem to care about the abject fear he had inspired in Sakuya. His slanted eyes seemed to notice, blinking slowly, but it wasn’t of any consequence. “He’s quite quiet, usually. I barely notice him. Quiet and clean, absorbed in his books and his notes, but he does mumble under his breath if he gets lost in his studies and doesn’t think I’m listening any more. Awful things. Amazing, what a person could have found out that way. Easily. It’s a shame that he always tied our hands up so well. What could have happened drives me crazy sometimes.

“Oh, I sometimes visit the boy from down the hall… he’s doing quite well. One of the only other ones still going to school, I think. Some people just handle well.”

It was less than a full minute before Sakuya miraculously realized that, oh, quel dommage, his class was starting in just a few minutes, how could he have gotten so distracted talking? What a shame, Professor, hope to see you in the near future, oh, Yuuya, he’s fine, but he really had to go, TAKE CARE.

The bright afternoon sun took an hour to reach his skin, it seemed like. He ran until he reached the train, and rode until he was home, and spent the whole evening with his mother, baking dinner, reading a book, doing his homework, and stayed up almost all the night with sheets of music and a heavy gut.

Yuuya slipped into the house after the moon has already started fading and found him wide awake. Ironically, it was the sound of Yuuya humming and fixing coffee that lulled Sakuya into sleep.

-

It was over a full 24 hours after that disconcerting meeting that Sakuya looked at himself in the bathroom mirror, toothpaste on his face, and thought to himself, ‘wait, did Professor Kazuaki say that Ryouta’s mother is living in the hospital?’

Needless to say, a meeting was swiftly arranged. For all his faults, Sakuya prided himself on doing what should be done. That weekend (though irrationally worried that Professor Kazuaki would be there) he and Yuuya both walked into Mrs. Kawara’s hospital room, carrying tulips, and found a woman the color of paper and the scent of formaldehyde, decaying and smiling. His red, soft eyes looked out of her face, and his gentle voice floated out of her throat.

She recognized them both, though they had never met her. Ryouta had mentioned them, Sakuya more than Yuuya, but both all the same, since they were APPARENTLY, and to Sakuya’s MORTIFIED SHOCK, something of a source of comedy to the other students of St. Pigenation’s before that day. For a while, he had been known to her as ‘the weird Frenchman,’ and then as ‘the rich weirdo’ as he began to tire his classmates, and then, finally, to Ryouta, at least, ‘the weird kid, Sakuya.’ And his weird brother, of course.

Yuuya was delighted. Sakuya was as red as a rose, but since that made Mrs. Kawara laugh, he allowed it. Until laughing made Mrs. Kawara start coughing, that is.

Of course they talked about Ryouta. He was the only thing none of them should talk about, but that didn’t change the fact that they had to talk about him. They didn’t talk about that day. They talked about that café job he had and how one day, everyone saw him sprinting across the campus, late to class and in a frilly dress from work, making a beeline for the locker room so that he could at least be wearing PANTS before he stumbled fifteen minutes late into home room. Oh, and the day he barely made it to the infirmary before being sick, and threw up on Dr. Iwamine’s shoes. Oh, and that sweet day where, unbeknownst to everyone else in the school, he stayed late for hours cleaning up a mess someone else had made, because he was so kind-hearted. Oh, and who could forget the time he and Hiyoko tried to compete in the three-legged race together, and it was an utter disaster, because Hiyoko was a natural athlete and Ryouta was so much not, so she practically dragged him across the track as he screamed and skinned his knees.

“Some used to call them the odd couple,” Yuuya laughed. “Pretty little Ryouta and his husband, the powerful Hiyoko.”

Mrs. Kawara started laughing so hard she coughed again, and Sakuya gave Yuuya a dirty look for it as he dutifully adjusted her pillow and offered her water.

“Thank you, thank you very much,” she said.

“Not at all,” Sakuya rebuffed.

“It’s so hard to be comfortable anymore,” she sighed, “And it wouldn’t bother me, not really, because I’ve been in pain for so long now. Not to complain, really; I’m trying to say that that’s how it is now. I don’t mind the pain; it’s what the pain stops me from doing. I used to have a garden…”

Yuuya deflected the conversation excellently. But Sakuya didn’t get the hint this time. “Surely something can be done,” he said. I’ve heard of a treatment they have in Berlin…”

Mrs. Kawara crinkled her eyes. Sakuya knew the look of someone pretending to be happy too well now. (It reminded him of his brother.) “Oh, I know what you mean… I’ve heard of that procedure. I don’t think I would be able to do something like that, you know, so much machinery, so many risks…”

“Wouldn’t it be worth it?” asked Sakuya.

“Well…” Mrs. Kawara mumbled. Yuuya deflected the conversation more forcefully, and Sakuya let him.

Feeling a little uncomfortable, and berating himself for making her uncomfortable, Sakuya spent the rest of the visit even more fiercely tending to Mrs. Kawara’s needs. He felt small, for some reason. Yuuya had interested Mrs. Kawara in a conversation about what they were doing with the school campus now, which, though risky territory, he expertly kept light by focusing on the good progress that had been made and how a lot of the mysterious, leftover discoveries had been aiding science. They were building a memorial garden. Yuuya pledged to bring Mrs. Kawara to visit it, one way or another, and to bring pictures to their next visit anyway.

Oh, how she lit up when he said “our next visit.”

It was not the end of visiting hours but Mrs. Kawara’s clear fatigue which cut short their visit, and though she protested, Yuuya insisted on ushering them both out the door so she could rest. Bending down to say goodbye to her, Sakuya caught Mrs. Kawara’s red, gentle eyes, and was hit in his gut by a wave of nostalgia.

Every day, for a year, those sweet, red eyes, coming with a kind voice and a boy who sat in front of him every day for homeroom, laughing with his friends, helping out confused classmates, treating them all the same. All of them.

Sakuya just like anyone else.

“I.” “Your…” son was a wonderful person. “We” are going to bring him back. I promise. “Er.” I shouldn’t say this, but... no one deserved this less.

He banished his fumbling with clearing his throat. It was not the good sense he didn’t have but shyness around those confused red eyes that made him finish the visit with “Sorry. It was wonderful to meet you, Mrs. Kawara. I hope to see you soon.”

They walked silently out of the hospital, into the sun, and to either side of Yuuya’s car. Sakuya glared at Yuuya until he begrudgingly buckled his seat belt, and they turned out of the parking lot.

“I don’t understand the sort of person who would refuse medical help if it could help them,” Sakuya said.

Yuuya exhaled a surprisingly testy breath. His face was pinched. “Mon joli, mon frere, you imbicile, it’s the money. She was giving you excuses; she doesn’t have a hundredth, not a thousandth of what such a procedure would cost. Her living family would be in debt forever and she might not even be any better off.”

Sakuya felt like a bucket of ice had been dumped on his head. He colored and darted his glance out the window, and he didn’t even try to come back against that. Yuuya exhaled out his anger and drove them silently down the street.

Sakuya had thought the reality of no longer being absurdly wealthy had sunk into him. The poor meals had sure sunk into him. The fretting and fear about schoolbooks, transportation, work, the future, rent; watching something he couldn’t touch or speak to wear down his mother and brother and mock him with its facelessness; he had already endured that.

But this; suddenly, painfully realizing that he could no longer help anyone, no longer aid a friend in need, no longer dream about starting a philanthropy one day or fixing the problem when someone needed him; the reality of no longer having the power to help when help was technically available hurt him worse than almost anything had since he let go of Ryouta’s hand.

He didn’t reply to Yuuya. They spoke about something else when they returned to the apartment. Sakuya didn’t lie in bed reflecting on his own changed condition that night. He heard the shuffling and crying of every other poor soul in the building around him, and in the blocks surrounding him, and in the whole city, where they died for want of money, and he understood.

He couldn’t help. THAT was being poor.

The next day was the first day he called one of the numbers given to him after being released from police custody in case he ever needed help or wanted to know about post-incident efforts. He asked what they knew about the progress being made to revive the students left in St. Pigeonation’s Academy.

-

And so time went on. Sakuya passed a semester with admirable grades, and Ms. Shirogane, Yuuya, and Sakuya—the family—went out to eat to celebrate one night. After another painful reminder in which Yuuya paid for the food with crumpled bills as his mother looked away, Sakuya started the next semester with his studies and an awful job at a café. (He got in because they recognized him. They used to employ Ryouta. It was a very solemn moment until Sakuya remembered what Ryouta had been employed to do. And wear.

He could never figure out how to feel while wearing the lacy petticoats that used to belong to his semi-deceased friend. Awkward was the only feeling he settled on.)

He also began working with the Dove Party; not in terms of having a job of them, but in terms of actively cooperating. After all, they oversaw the aftermath of that day, since the government officially dropped it after handing out paltry monetary compensation and hearing it was in other hands. It’s from them that he learned that, yeah, progress to revive Ryouta and Hiyoko was continuing, done by one Dr. Iwamine Shuu, as overseen by the Party.

It was also from them that he learned that Higure Anghel had been recently committed full time to a House. He assured that the Party was also keeping an eye on Anghel and that he had been committed to be helped, not forgotten, but hearing it made Sakuya’s stomach drop. (Another face from school. Another voice he used to hear in the hall. Another hand he held on that awful day, in that awful basement.

The boy who curled up his fists and screamed through his tears into a broken Ryouta’s face that he had to snap out of it and come back to them. The boy whose strange power woke him up.)

Mrs. Kawara persevered, even though it was clear that she shouldn’t be persevering so long. The doctors told them, after they had visited enough times that they had to be considered, that she should have been at death’s door long ago. Her body was too weak with age to withstand the illness ravaging her. (But the heart is another part of the body, and everyone knew why she had not died yet.)

-

Ms. Shirogane took to the single life, after her decades of marriage, perhaps too well. Sakuya considered himself a saint for the times he had to listen to his mother and older brother pick out eligible young people for each other, on the television or in an actual, live crowd. Especially in the instances where Ms. Shirogane picked out a man and Yuuya AGREED HE WAS ATTRACTIVE.

“Yuuya, STOP,” he hissed one day as he brother honest to God bit his lip and waggled his eyebrows at a man on the street to make their mother giggle behind her sleeve. “That’s awful.”

“Says the boy who wears skirts and pantyhose to work,” said his brother with a smirk.

“For WORK.”

“And you’ve never felt flattered when some nice young man complimented you on your lovely dress?”

Sakuya flushed all the way down his neck. “’Nice young men’ aren’t my usual customers,” he muttered.

(He was trying to not think about that one man. The 20-something man with his computer and his briefcase, trying to work in the café, who looked up from his keyboard to see Sakuya in a dress and his hair in a bow, handing him a menu, and gazed, not at his body, but into his eyes, with a stare as hot as fire.

Sakuya almost tripped a dozen times on his way back to the kitchen after the man ordered café del leche, light on the sugar, and he thought about him for days. He thought about him and didn’t think about him, trying to banish this IDIOTICY from his mind.)

Yuuya calmly patted his brother on the shoulder. They were out celebrating again; a mode of celebration unusual but welcome to Sakuya, who was used to long dinner parties and expensive gifts handed off through assistants. Yuuya celebrated by spending all the money he could (a little more, now, since Sakuya paid the electricity and the cable) on a night out for everyone. For a spare hour, the first time, Sakuya wondered what was so great about a decent meal and some drinks had in public.

Then he spent five hours laughing and joking, leisurely eating and debating and reconsidering, bonding and getting to know and talking for the sake of talking for perhaps the first time in his life, and he knew.

(But he still fought the inevitable karaoke session with tooth and nail. He was a STUDENT of the FINE ARTS, not an ENTERTAINER, YUUYA FOR PITY’S SAKE LET ME GO.)

This time, they were celebrating someone else’s achievement, someone from Yuuya’s work, but it was a fine night all the same. Lanterns glowed outside on the porch as winter wind tossed them gently, the babble of joking and laughter rose up from around the room, the smells of the kitchen and the heat of its fires suffused the air, and comfortably, beautifully comfortably, Yuuya’s ankle and calf under the table touched Sakuya’s where they leaned in opposite directions, and nobody minded, there was nothing wrong about it, and Sakuya had his brother there.

There was no reason to act offended at the closeness, at the informality, at the presumption. Everything was fine.

He admitted his good mood dampened a little when Leone entered the room. Not because he didn’t like Leone; he was another of Yuuya’s coworkers, he was fine company, and he was very generous with the information Sakuya wanted at any given time, because he had seen him on that day.

Which was why seeing Leone, despite everything, still dampened his spirits. Because they looked at each other and saw that day.

Hiyoko’s head in a cardboard box. Yuuya turning the color of snow as he started bleeding out. His trusted professor with a gun. His trusted doctor with a knife. The rows of glittering rifles that met them in the spring sunlight.

Ryouta’s dull, red eyes.

Yuuya shifted to extend his hand to Leone and offer him a place at the table. Leone accepted, and Sakuya smiled genially, because, seriously, Leone was a good man and now was not the time to be surly. As Yuuya settled back down, the brothers ended up side by side again, practically hip to hip, and though Sakuya was again hit with the instinct to act like he minded, he pushed it away.

There were no expectations. He could just be fond of his brother and not be afraid.

“You two look more alike every day,” Leone laughed as he sat down.

Yuuya practically preened. “He is developing some good looks as he grows into a man.”

“Pardon?” asked Sakuya icily. “I’m starting to look like an old man?”

Yuuya elbowed him, but playfully. “I’m sure it’s really the good spirits that make you look more like me. All that grumpiness you used to carry around did you no favors.”

“Oh, who says that ‘grumpiness’ is gone,” Sakuya muttered, but he had to take a sip of his drink to hide his grin.

Leone settled down and ordered something to drink. Sakuya might have ended up subconsciously leaning into Yuuya. He decided that was too much and stopped himself.

Leone and Yuuya ended up quickly absorbed in a conversation that Sakuya couldn’t quite follow, but he listened anyway. Listening to even unimportant details had saved his life before. It was all Party talk, of course; since they were in a private room, they could feel free to talk normally, if not boisterously. Sure, most everyone had a hidden knife on them, just in case, but neither the Hawks nor the Doves were about open air fighting; they liked for people to not even know they existed.

Sakuya absorbed himself in listening to details, trying to learn names and places, not necessarily to join the conversation but to know who he was introducing himself to if he was ever introduced. A lot of that had already happened tonight—a new recruit? they asked. Always good to see—no? Oh, brought by Shirogane. You’re not—his brother? Oh, wonderful—

Oh. You’re his brother.

I’m sorry.

What else would they think of, Sakuya asked himself. How else would they know him? Some of these were the people he had been badgering on the phone, asking about former classmates, what about that boy from 2-1, what about that girl from 2-3, what about professor this, professor that?

And what about Iwamine?

How far along was he?

He was brought back from his daze when he realized that Leone had suddenly stopped talking about so-and-so’s fantastic wife. Very suddenly. He was looking at Yuuya, eyes tight, and Yuuya was looking at their mother.

Their mother was talking to a Party member. He was perhaps in his thirties; younger than her, but close to her age. He was leaning, just slightly, into their table, hands moving in talk as she stared winningly into his eyes.

Sakuya had already prepared to roll his eyes. Oh, mother. Oh, Yuuya, look at mother doing that silly thing again.

Yuuya was livid.

To say Sakuya was taken aback was an understatement. Yuuya had been joking about setting his mother up just a spare hour past. But his face was pale, except for a pair of ugly red blotches on his cheeks, and his eyes were tighter and sharper than Sakuya had ever seen them. Yuuya felt Sakuya’s gaze on him, and for a sharp second, he forgot to relax and lean back and be Yuuya, and glared at Sakuya with all the rage he could produce.

And then it fell. His eyes went soft. He glanced over to their mother again, grimaced, and glanced back. He visibly forced himself to calm down.

“Forgive me,” he said, only loud enough for Sakuya to hear.

“Yuuya.”

Even more chagrined, he looked down and said, “It didn’t go very well last time.”

His tone was self-aggrandizing, but Sakuya knew how serious his comment was. ‘Last time’ was Mr. La Bel. ‘Last time’ was Sakuya.

Sakuya found himself at a loss for anything to say.

Yuuya politely excused himself from the party for a moment outside. Sakuya could only watch him distancing himself and the line of his shoulders growing harsher with every step for about three seconds before he stood up.

All the same, he hovered just inside of the door, at the border of the cold wind, watching Yuuya lean against the wooden guardrail on the porch, thrown occasionally into shadow by the tossing lights, and breathe icy breath.

And then he saw him pull a pack of cigarettes out of his coat pocket and lost it.

“SHIROGANE YUUYA, WHAT ARE YOU DOING.”

Yuuya jumped and turned around, looking as guilty as a child stealing candy. “Cigarettes,” he said, trying to morph into a look of feigned innocence.

Being the person he was, he decided he was going to march up to Yuuya, rip the cigarette packet out of his hands, and chuck it somewhere else. And he did. Yuuya gaped as he watched the box arc away and land on a lamplit street some twenty feet away.

“Those are expensive,” he said petulantly.

“Yuuya, I cannot believe you have such a,”

“Sakuya.”

“You cur, you absolute,”

“Sakuya,” sighed Yuuya.

“We had an agreement about you trying to not get killed??”

Yuuya looked at him in frustration, for a moment. But then his expression softened, in a way he didn’t like.

He looked like he was pitying him.

Sakuya puffed out a breath. “Why on earth would you smoke those things?”

Yuuya still had that strange look on his face. “Old habit. Years old. You never smelled smoke on my clothing?”

“Well. No. Yuuya, do you have any idea how awful this—“

“Yes. I’m aware how awful this is for me.”

Yuuya’s monotone voice finally shut Sakuya down. He ended up staring up at his brother, waiting. Yuuya didn’t budge.

He eventually looked down, and stepped closer to his brother, leaning against the railing. The wind pulled Yuuya’s white breath over his face. “I didn’t even come out here to yell at you,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m incredibly bad at this.”

Yuuya shrugged.

Sakuya sighed. “No. Really. I feel like I’m trying to… do calculus. Make a spaceship. Some other analogy showing how impossible this task is for me. I don’t know how to handle you. It’s not just you. I don’t know how to handle anyone. I was supposed to take care of myself and let everyone else do the same.”

He leaned his chin into his folded arms. “I’m really starting to hate myself for that.”

Yuuya leaned down a bit too. He looked at his brother, and then looked back out and away.

A strong gust blew fallen leaves down the street.

“I try not to blame people for how they were brought up to be,” Yuuya said. “I will blame them for continuing to be that way once they’re grown. And you’re trying so hard to be someone else. Better. What would I be mad at you for?”

Sakuya glared at his brother. “For coming out here to check up on you but deciding to throw your hard-earned money across the street instead?”

Yuuya snorted. “Who does that?”

“I am probably alone in that.”

He laughed a bit more sincerely. “Not your fault I started out this episode surly. Not your fault that you couldn’t handle me either, mon frere. You’re just starting out. I lived a life before you even knew me.”

Sakuya looked sharply at his brother. His brother did not look at him.

He really didn’t know how to handle Yuuya.

He realized, suddenly, that no one did. Probably, no one had even tried.

Sakuya settled further down into his arms and sighed.

Yuuya leaned slightly against him.

“I’m sorry.”

“Hm?”

“Who would you have been without my—without Mr. La Bel? And me?”

Yuuya shrugged. “It’s too weird to think about. It would have been an entirely different life.”

“Hm.”

Yuuya waited for a moment, and then took a deeper breath. “But you didn’t exactly intrude, joli. It was him who changed my life for the worse. Not you. You know… I kept you.”

Sakuya watched the leaves go down the street. God, did that cold wind sting his eyes.

Yuuya pulled the nails of one hand along his forearm. Sakuya had expected him, for some reason, to be a man with polished nails, but he wasn’t. Chipped, even chewed. “I don’t really have a problem with her finding another man. Well, I shouldn’t. She should have whatever she wants.”

Yuuya’s suppressed tone made Sakuya laugh. Despite himself, Yuuya laughed with him. “It’s my problem, really.”

“I don’t blame you. Considering.”

“I don’t blame me either.”

“Of course you don’t.”

“Mon dieu, what is that tone?” Yuuya asked, mock-offended.

“Only saying that you are completely justified in your prejudices, considering your unfortunate experiences.”

“Well.”

Yuuya shoved Sakuya playfully, and Sakuya shoved back. Within about two second’s time, they were more or less engaged in trying to dump each other over the railing, laughing as they did.

The door opened behind them. “That boor will not leave me alone,” sighed the voice of Ms. Shirogane. “Yuuya, would you come in here and—Yuuya. Why are you trying to drop your brother over a railing and into the street.”

“He started it.”

“No.”

“You were being obnoxious.”

“Excuse me, MON FRERE, I believe that you started shoving me, and I merely defended myself—“

Ms. Shirogane sighed. Yuuya let go of Sakuya and Sakuya scrambled back onto his feet, straightening his tousled hair as he did so. “As I was saying. Yuuya, this boor you work with will not leave me alone. Will you come back in here and engage him, or introduce me to someone else?”

Yuuya stared at his mother for a second. He smiled slowly. Then he laughed. “Oh, mother, it’s my fault for leaving you in there alone. What was I thinking?” he shook his head, and then jauntily marched over to his mother to take her arm and escort her back inside. “Let me introduce you to… Sakuya, are you coming?”

“In a minute,” he replied. Since Yuuya was occupied with their mother, he let him stay, but he gave Sakuya a sharp glance. A glance that meant something like ‘you better not stay out here to be miserable alone, or so help me.’

Sakuya waved him off. The door slid shut behind him, and Sakuya looked out into the street a minute longer. He waited for a few stray cars, headlights blazing, to pass him by, and then leapt over the rail. (It wouldn’t have actually hurt much if Yuuya had dropped him, he realized, but of course, Yuuya had no intention of doing so. For the lifestyle he led, he took care not to hurt people.)

The cigarette pack, of course, had landed in a puddle. Sakuya grimaced at it. Awful things. Always gave him headaches. Made a mess out of one’s body, and if one didn’t have their health…

Anyway, he’d just have to buy Yuuya another. He figured he would have to, but he wanted to get the brand correct.

-

Yuuya practically punched him when he presented him with a new pack of better, more expensive cigarettes. Of course, it might have been because he presented them by saying “I absolutely detest these things.”

“I will continue to smoke them outside and on the job, then, you intolerable darling,” Yuuya replied.

“And when do you plan to quit.”

“Sakuya, my beautiful, precious brother, it’s none of your business.”

Yuuya dodged the question enough times for that feeling which was beginning to plague Sakuya, that feeling of being unable to change something, to help, settled into his bones again. He was forced to drop it instead of getting his way through sheer determination, which was still WEIRD, honestly.

(He did take notice, after some time, of the fact that Yuuya would be much less tense after a few minutes alone outside. It had just been hard, before spending so much time with him, to tell when Yuuya was tense. It was in the minutia of his face muscles, and the fiddling of his fingers, and it was very subtle.)

It was after a full year of living with Yuuya and about half a year of higher education that Sakuya first saw Higure Anghel again.

-

After avoiding Professor Kazuaki for a short period, becoming annoyed with himself for being so frightened, even of a madman, and admitting that he needed to see him again, Sakuya marched into the University library, asked for a full list of student tutors and their hours (which didn’t actually need quite so much demanding to obtain, oh well) and set up an encounter between them for that Sunday, after he got off of working the lunch rush and happened to have dinner off.

He didn’t schedule a meeting. He wasn’t in a mathematics course, and, a bit vindictively, he wanted Professor Kazuaki surprised.

His work hours were unusual, since they were designed to accommodate student schedules. Sunday evening, when panicked undergraduates were forced to admit they didn’t understand the material for their swiftly approaching deadlines, was Kazuaki’s busiest time of the week.

Sakuya arrived an hour before his scheduled work block was finished. The summer sun was setting, and students around him were sprawled out in unusual positions as they reflected on the horror of final exams. (He had quite enjoyed his projects, except for the hell that had been studying for the physics of sound 102 final. He studied for that on his long train commute each day, when there was nothing better to do.) Kazuaki was seated at the same sunlit table, with two students on either side of him, both in an absolute tizzy about geometry. He would speak to one for a while, softly, drawing invisible shapes on their papers with his fingers, whispering results and secrets. From what he could tell, actually, Kazuaki was brilliant at it; he waited until the students had individually exhausted their own mental powers, then would turn to them to suggest routes and ideas, and then leave them to try again themselves, in peace, as he observed another for a while. While they were both working, pencils scratching and erasers squeaking alternatively, he would just gaze out the window.

Sakuya had no idea if Kazuaki had noticed him or not at that point. He was seated some space away, with his physics textbook open for appearance, but his attention trained on his former teacher.

Sakuya had never been bad at mathematics. He had never been bad at any subject, really; he had some natural intellect, that mysterious ability some are blessed with and some not to understand almost anything, fundamentally, and grasp the tricky details more quickly than others, leaving him well liked but ignored by teachers, who had harder problems to solve. His… antics had been greatly ignored, he mused, partly because he wasn’t a problem academically, hadn’t they?

It seemed that Kazuaki had always been the same sort of person. Sakuya wasn’t sure what had tipped him off—maybe the fact that he knew exactly what sort of problem the students were working on and where they were in the problem when he looked over, maybe the neat handwriting and straight radians that accompanied his notes, maybe the fact, more telling than anything else, that he had become a teacher; a teacher whose students still learned and whose degree had been fairly earned, even though he must have been suffering immensely from those trials Sakuya now knew the bare bones of.

Maybe he preferred music, but there was a sort of person who took comfort in the black and white nature of mathematics.

With dreamy look and distracted voice, he nudged the students through their problems, explaining the fundamentals behind the complicated formulas so that they could visualize them better. He never seemed inpatient, and when one of them finally left, though rushing and scrolling through his smartphone, he looked quite relieved.

That left the female student to his right and the setting sun. She worked mostly in silence, with occasional sighs, tapping her pencil and erasing the marks. Kazuaki calmly mentioned, once he was sure she was in a rut, that she might have considered something here, on the other side of the equation, which was easy to miss and she probable just forgot, he sure would have, and the girl was suddenly full of motion, typing things into a calculator, writing a few more lines, and beaming.

Her answer was correct. Kazuaki congratulated her with crinkling eyes. The girl blushed.

Sakuya felt himself picking up his book and his bag, walking over to the table where the two were sitting, and kicking the seat across the table from them out of its place so he could fall into it. “Pardon me, Professor.”

“Sakuya.”

“I know your work hours are ending, and you do seem occupied, so I apologize for my interruption, but could you spare a minute to help me?” Sakuya asked, as stiffly as was possible.

Kazuaki glanced as his textbook. “I’m not an expert in physics, but I do understand the mathematics behind it. What are you doing taking physics, though, Sakuya? I thought you were a music major?”

“Music composition,” he sniffed, “And I’m taking a physics of sound course. It’s fascinating and horrifically difficult. It’s harder than just counting to four for a measure of music, you know.”

Kazuaki smiled almost the same smile that had charmed the female student. “Of course.”

The girl might have felt the uneasy air, or she might have been being honest; in any case, she starting excusing herself by saying she was sure she understood the work now and could do the rest on her own, really, she’ll be back next weekend if there’s any issue, of course, thank you SO much professor, you have a good day too. She scuttled away, dropping a coffee cup into the trash instead of the recycling as she left. Sakuya shuddered. 

“You don’t need help in your physics course,” Kazuaki said pleasantly.

“You don’t think so?”

“You were an intelligent young man, Sakuya. But more importantly, you were taught to handle things on your own, and work through problems on your own, if you had them. This test could be driving you up the wall and my guess is that you will still not even think of going to office hours. And you should, the music studies professors never get anyone coming to their office hours.”

Sakuya flushed. “Well, that’s… Be that is it may, you’re right in that I did not come to you for academic assistance.”

“I could actually help, though,” he said, almost timidly.

“Yes, I’m sure you could, you’re clearly a very intelligent man, though I don’t know when you make use of that,” said Sakuya impatiently. “What I want from you is some information.”

Kazuaki did nothing but smile.

Sakuya took a deep breath. “Quite a few people were there last night. You and I, obviously. Two still lie there.”

“Three.”

It was a low whisper, almost not meant to be heard. Sakuya had to think about it.

“Fujishiro Nageki,” he muttered to himself. “Granted. Three lie there. The doctor was there. So was… my brother, for part of the time. Though he did not enter that basement with us. Two more.”

“Oko San and Higure Anghel.”

“I know who they are. Two more of the doctor’s experimental toys. Higure for his strange effect of artificially inducing mania in others, and Oko San for his incredible endurance and immune system. And… everything else about him, frankly. I know where the former is—in an asylum—but not the later.”

“Anghel is being treated in a home, yes,” said Kazuaki. “Dymphna’s on the main. I visit him some times.”

“Give me the address,” Sakuya instructed, “so that I may as well.”

“Why not visit him with me? I go on weekends when I can. If I’m not visiting someone else.”

Sakuya lifted his chin slightly. “Very well, give me the time and the date, and I shall go with you.”

He handed Kazuaki his planner and a pen. He smiled and did as instructed, speaking further as he did so. “And as for Oko, he’s well, last I heard. He’s gone on a journey out of the country, and he doesn’t make an effort to keep contact with anyone here, so it’s hard to know where he is now.”

“You really do have a lot of information about where the St. Pigeonation’s students went.”

“Yes. I do.”

Sakuya waited. “Why?”

Kazuaki lowered his eyes. He tilted his head to chew on one of his nails. “You know. Few do. I was in that school for a reason.”

“Yes.”

“Five years I waited. I had my reasons, but that doesn’t change the fact that I waited too long. Without the doctor, I could not have found Nageki. But if I had killed him sooner, far sooner, where would those children be today? In college, like you? More of them married, settled, happy? All graduated? Moving out of home?” He looked up. “Not in a Home? Anghel isn’t the only one. There have been several whose parents couldn’t handle what they became after that day. And some have died.”

“I know some have died,” said Sakuya impatiently. “Alright, that’s more or less the response I expected. A guilty conscience.”

Kazuaki smiled at him disarmingly. Sakuya cleared his throat. “I do not really believe that the doctor’s actions are your fault. But I do not, either, think you have nothing to make up for. Of course, I did not—“ Kazuaki started laughing, damn him. “I did NOT come here to moralize to you.”

“Oh, it’s alright.”

“Yes, certainly, what I want to know is about the doctor.”

And his laughter stopped. But not his smiling.

Sakuya hefted his chin up slightly again. “I need to know a few things. Of course, the most important thing to know is if he really, truly, is still working to bring them back to us.”

“Oh. He is.”

“And how close he believes he is to a conclusion.”

“He does not believe he will find one,” said Kazuaki, tilting his head to the side. “He’s very much a pessimist. He keeps telling me that miracles don’t happen and that he can’t bring anyone back from the grave, but well, it’s just up to me to encourage him, I suppose. He doesn’t give himself enough credit. If anyone can put him back together, why not him?”

“He doesn’t…” Sakuya cleared his throat. “Fine. How close do you think he is to a conclusion.”

Kazuaki looked considering up at the ceiling. “I’m giving him another two years. After that, I think it would be improper to let him continue handling him—the children—to no avail.”

It was really hard to remain in control of a conversation that was so determined to spring off the rails, Sakuya reflected. Why did he expect straight answers out of this man? “But you do think he’s made progress.”

Kazuaki sighed. “Oh, it’s hard for me to tell.”

Sakuya slammed his planner back down in front of Kazuaki. “Give me your address. I will come and find out what progress he’s made.”

Kazuaki’s smile fell. “Sakuya… I wouldn’t want you to push yourself.”

“It won’t be me who will be pushed, I assure you.” Sakuya opened the cap of his fountain pen himself (something nice he still kept, one of the few things pushed into the small bags he packed in a rush after the final afternoon with Mr. La Bel) and handed it to Kazuaki, holding it until he took it. “I shall bring an escort with me,” and by that he meant Yuuya, who would come along anyway, “So you needn’t worry about my safety.”

Not that he thought anything or anyone could hold off Kazuaki when he was in a rage. The doctor, sure. As much as thinking about actually seeing the doctor again made Sakuya feel like a rabbit in a hole, watching hawks wheel above, the doctor had his plans and stuck to them, not deviating for senseless actions. He was transparent with his intentions when he could be and his word could be trusted to be kept. Though he was willing to kill, he himself did not see his actions as horrific, so he went about them as business, and could be both bartered with and distracted.

Kazuaki, however, he imagined no one could reason with and no one could stop on the worst of his days. But if he could depend on Kazuaki’s rage being focused on the doctor and the doctor being largely uninterested in him…

Which brought him to the next thing. “There is something else I am hoping you can tell me. And write down your address, I mean it.”

Kazuaki started writing. “And that is?”

Sakuya set himself in his chair. Legs crossed, shoulder back, one hand on the table; immovable. “Ryouta and Hiyoko I knew as well as I knew anyone from that time,” he said. “Yuuya is my brother. Anghel I plan to meet more properly, and I suppose Oko is a lost cause to me, for now. The Doctor I knew before that day, and I feel like I know him even better now.”

Even Kazuaki had to chuckle at the sarcasm in Sakuya’s voice. “Most of the rest of my peers, and yours, at St. Pigeonation’s were above the ground for that whole day. They had an awful day, but not like we did. For my own reasons, I’ve decided to get to know better everyone who was down there that day. But I don’t know anything about two of you.”

Kazuaki idly looped his pen after finishing the letters of his address. “Hm?”

“Fujishiro Nageki, and you.”

Kazuaki looked at him with a neutral expression. “I was your homeroom teacher.”

“No you weren’t. Kazuaki Nanaki was.”

Kazuaki’s expression didn’t move; not a single twitch.

“People wondered if you were worth looking into after you decided to move in with Dr. Iwamine. People like the Dove Party. It seems they were right. I don’t know who,” was he choking up? Blast. “I don’t know who taught me in that classroom for year, and I’ve decided to let him die. As far as I am concerned. But I want to know who was in that basement with me, that day. Who stopped the doctor? Who murdered to follow his trail five years ago? Who forces him to work for us now? And who was it that almost killed Ryouta?”

Sakuya sat utterly still, as if his voice hadn’t just broke, as if his vision hadn’t smeared and blurred. Kazuaki hadn’t moved an inch either.

“I could call you by your name, you know. I know it.”

Kazuaki smiled at him. He very politely bowed. He closed Sakuya’s planner, capped his fountain pen, and laid it straight on the table. He stood up, closed the notebook he brought with him, and put it in his bag.

And then he turned around and left the library.

He wasn’t shuffling out of the room, distractedly wandering from here to there. He walked, one foot in front of the other, in as much of an everyday rush as anyone else on campus that day.

When Sakuya heard the door open and shut from across the stacks of books, he furiously rubbed at his wet eyes. He made a few choked gasps, and stifled them.

He breathed.

He grabbed his planner, and opened it up. On the front page was an address written in writing that started neat and familiar; the handwriting that once scored his quizzes and assignments. But in the last few strokes, he was looking at the foreign handwriting of a man who scored the page and wrote large and haphazardly. Angrily.

On the inside of the planner, he found that he had a visit scheduled two weeks out with Kazuaki Nanaki and Anghel Higure in Dymphna’s House for noon sharp on a day he was supposed to work.

Well, then.

-

Yuuya insisted on attending each and every meeting and visit. Sakuya said “please” before even thinking about it. Yuuya gripped his shoulder too tightly.

-

Meeting hours at the house were early, at least by Sakuya’s standards. Of course, he used to be up promptly each morning, and he still woke on time to commute to classes, but any more, being a few minutes late was tolerable and waking up at embarrassing hours on the weekend was the norm. With his mother being a born late riser and his brother not recognizing the natural progression of time, there was almost more pressure to NOT conform to a standard.

That said, he found a coffee cup outside his bedroom door, just a little ways down the hall, once he finally woke around ten. (The commute to the house, which was outside the city proper, was going to be awful, no matter what.) The coffee was already sweetened, so Sakuya had already drank quite a bit of it by the time he wandered out of the bathroom and into the kitchen.

Sakuya was the sort to dress and groom himself before breakfast. Yuuya was not. Yuuya was actually eating toast in his underwear, with his laptop open, its fan already whirring.

“Good morning,” he said cheerfully, not breaking his stride in typing.

“Guhh hmm…” Sakuya cleared this throat and tried again. “Good morning, Yuuya. Still at work?”

“Kind of,” said Yuuya, without elaboration. He was, though. Typing meant work. Laying on his back and snorting with laughter meant watching vines to blow off steam. (Sakuya had actually been woken up by Yuuya finding particularly funny cat vines before.) “It’ll take us a good hour and a half to get there, so you should be ready to go before long.”

“I will be,” said Sakuya testily, rifling through the cabinets for his cereal.

No one decided to make fun of the fact that Sakuya dived headfirst into a pit of sugary cereal for breakfast and chocolate for every hour of the day once his schedule and diet was no longer dictated. Well, his mother made fun of him for it, a little. But she usually took some of the chocolate, so.

Sakuya sat close to Yuuya, so that he could see his computer screen. As always, “classified” and “top secret” abounded, and it was actually incredibly rude of Sakuya to do so, but Yuuya had, practically the minute he came back from the dead, decided that his business was officially his brother’s business, considering his brother had seen his business through when he couldn’t. Why hide anything from Sakuya? It was, in its way, an apology for holding secrets for so long.

Sakuya, for his part, enjoyed having the knowledge.

Yuuya replied to confidential documents and carried on important conversations in encrypted chat clients while Sakuya swilled sugar and caffeine. “I’ll be ready in ten minutes,” he declared. “I would rather be there early.”

“Early won’t change lunch break traffic,” said Yuuya, but he closed a few windows all the same. “Clothing it is, then.”

“If you don’t mind.”

Yuuya ambled off still chomping on his toast and without closing his computer. Sakuya vetoed snooping for eating.

Yuuya returned in five minutes looking absurdly put together for having entered his bedroom a mess. Ms. Shirogane, still a mess, came with him, probably awoken by all the noise.

“My lovely sons are on their way to visit their classmate now?” she asked calmly.

“We’re about to go, yes,” said Sakuya.

It had been “how sweet, how kind of you” when Ms. Shirogane had first heard they were visiting a former classmate. Then she found out who the classmate was, and it became “oh, how brave.”

Higure Anghel had, probably unbeknownst to him, become something of a public figure after the fact. Sure, it had been absurd that children used as experimental guinea pigs had died under Dr. Iwamine’s care, and had been dying for years, and the public was appropriately scandalized about Fujishiro Nageki, Tosaka Hiyoko, and Kawara Ryouta. But the figure of Higure Anghel, mad, first generation immigrant and student, suffering a schizophrenic affliction not just tolerated but encouraged by the famed mad doctor, struck as oddly a charismatic figure as he always had. In an ill-advised move for sympathy by the media that was later made controversial and denounced, none the least for the original report’s usage of female pronouns, drawings of Anghel’s—drawings of blood and battle, miserable, howling souls, swords and strings of wire pulled through the living body, waking torture, eyes and teeth, done in the name of drama—had been photocopied and spread, showing the psychological trauma that the ‘poor girl’ had endured and the sickness cultivated in ’her’ by the doctor.

Sakuya knew it was overblown and done to grab the public’s emotions, but all the same, some of the things Anghel had drawn were WILD. Where did he even think those sorts of things up? Is that what they were putting in anime these days?

The images of his drawings, black and red on white, were released publically, but the video of his breakdown upon being thrust into the cameras just after escaping the guns was released by someone fighting to expose The True Horrors of St. Pigeonation’s to the world.

That video was too painful for Sakuya to watch. He tried several months after it had happened, but couldn’t.

It was that video that, after a lengthy process, had Anghel removed from his mother and put into the house. Sakuya had heard secondhand that the mother had returned to her native Philippines to rest herself, but he had no idea if that was a rumor or not. He felt unbelievably rude during the few times he tried to pry into Anghel’s life from secondary and tertiary sources, internet rumors and news websites and hearsay, and moreover was disturbed that he could do that at all.

But actually visiting Anghel hadn’t occurred to him until he learned that it was NOT a rumor that he had been committed by government order, but a fact. And even then, it took nerve to face him. The boy who had screamed Ryouta down, with power ringing in his words, while Sakuya stared and trembled. Had he been infected by the madness, too, when he thought he saw Anghel’s power, Anghel’s quest, Anghel’s heart?

It was just a cowering boy in that video.

But the second it occurred to Sakuya that he might just be scared to do the right thing and visit Anghel was the second Sakuya was determined to do it. So he got the information he needed from Professor Kazuaki, so he made the date, and so he climbed into Yuuya’s car, assuring his mother they would be fine and would NOT crash the car, no, they heard her, and shut the passenger door behind him.

He didn’t have to stare Yuuya down until he buckled. He just did.

“It shouldn’t be terrible until we hit city traffic,” Yuuya said, throwing himself around in the seat to check the road. “I would take the highway around the city, but honestly, it would take just as long and make us so much more likely to get lost.”

‘Let’s not. I’m sure the Home is on a strict time schedule.”

“They usually are,” said Yuuya, quite casually.

Sakuya glanced at his brother. “You’ve been in one?”

“Visited. It was always an ugly scene. Senor agents will take under the table visits to question or deal with useful people who have been committed, but I just visited the occasional former friend who had a breakdown in the line of fire.”

“Oh.”

“They’re usually very nice places,” Yuuya assured them. “The old ones can be a bit threatening, but if it’s recently made and has any sort of budget, they go out of their way to make it pleasant to live in. Calm colors, gardens, nurses with soft voices. These are people who need their peace, after all.”

“Anghel must stick out dreadfully.”

Yuuya tapped his fingers on the wheel as he switched lanes. “I never really knew him,” Yuuya admitted.

“Anghel?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not surprised.” When Yuuya laughed, Sakuya defended himself. “For all the character he had and as… public a figure as he was, he wasn’t actually an easy person to get to know. I doubt many people called him a friend.”

“Well, we all knew about him. The underclassman who screamed a lot. And broke things.”

“Windows. Entire windows. I think a blackboard too.”

“Terrifying.”

“That’s one thing he was.”

Yuuya glowered at the oncoming traffic. “He was always a little unbalanced, they say. The condition.”

Sakuya worried his lip. “Yes. He was… not to be stereotypical, of course. You couldn’t understand him. He lived in his own world and didn’t make quarter for ours.”

“Doesn’t make a madman.”

“No, it doesn’t. And it often felt… overblown, I suppose? Almost affected. It was surely an involved and detailed world he lived in, and yes, I’m sure he believed a lot of what he said, but… I don’t know what to say about it. He was almost too loud about all of it.”

“You think he was trying to make himself believe in his dream world?”

“Maybe.” Sakuya considered. “I don’t know. More like he was trying to convince himself the other world wasn’t there.”

Cars began to bunch up in the road. Yuuya tensed his jaw. The broken air conditioning, which barely made the car any cooler, blared.

Sakuya looked out the front window. “I don’t want to sound… of course, I don’t doubt he needed help. I know how seriously his… condition, the mania, the disease which touched everyone around him, affected his life. But sometimes I felt like it was almost more of an attention thing.”

Yuuya shrugged lopsidedly. “In my experience, drama faked for attention only arises from real drama being ignored.”

“What do you mean?”

Yuuya shrugged again, a little more tersely. He hated traffic. “I mean, who would act like that if they didn’t have some real problem they were suffering through? Who would cry out for attention if they didn’t desperately need it? No one who doesn’t have a real problem can be heard, almost daily, from a floor up and a room away bellowing or breaking glass or… I think I heard a flood of water once.”

“Oh. God.”

“So I did.”

“Don’t remind me of that day.”

“So he flooded a classroom. Exactly. No one acts out that obnoxiously if they don’t need help. All sorts of people do it, but then, all sorts of people need help.”

“I suppose so,” said Sakuya, a little uncomfortable. “I imagine you must have been able to hear me from a story above too.”

Yuuya laughed. “All the time. I guess every single one of your classmates were morons, cads, and inbred?”

Sakuya sunk into his seat just a little. “They weren’t so bad, actually…”

Yuuya shook his head, smiling. “Obviously not. I suppose some are heroes, now.”

Sakuya hummed. Was that it? His classmates, the faces he used to see as part of the routine, even those he felt willing to call friends, they were something else now. Not that they had ever stopped being the people they were, but to a much larger sphere, they were much larger people now—martyrs, victims, reasons for a cause, outrages—and heroes, some, he supposed. Perhaps that’s what they called Ryouta now. He said as much to Yuuya, and Yuuya, to his surprise, laughed so hard the car swerved a little.

“Joli,” he said, “sure, I suppose they say that about your little friend too, but when they say that, they’re usually talking about you.”

“What.”

“There were approximately three people who went into the basement, which people do hear a bit about, you know, and came out standing. People know that you’re one of them.”

“Hm.”

“I suppose Kawara did do a lot of the work, yes, but he’s seen more as a victim himself. I suppose the tale has been a little skewed in the telling, but they know someone spent the day unravelling the mystery and someone stopped the carrier of the virus from escaping…”

“That was Anghel.”

“What?” Yuuya looked sharply at Sakuya.

“That was Anghel. Really.” Sakuya looked away from Yuuya’s stare. “Look at the road, moron. Ryouta was dead to the world, myself included, until Anghel talked him down. Screamed him down, really. Some of the rest of us might have helped, but I no longer consider… my professor much help. Considering. God knows I spent most of the day running in circles and gaping like a fish.”

“Anghel…” said Yuuya, quizzically.

“It was his manic force that shook Ryouta out of his trance,” Sakuya said. “You didn’t know that?”

Yuuya looked at Sakuya and away. “It might not be clear from… look. I’ve said a thousand times that few people returned from that basement alive. I almost died, and I didn’t even get there. Out of those who came out, even fewer people are talking. Who will tell us what happened that day? The despicable doctor and professor? Not likely. Oko San? Higure? No one trusts them. They’re both presented as suffering madmen who went insane in St. Pigeonation’s. And I don’t know what word from them to trust either; not that they gave any. The most trustworthy person who walked out of the near death of the human race was you. And we haven’t… not that I don’t understand. Really. I will never push you to say too much about it. It’s not more important than you are. But the fact remains that you haven’t come out with an official story either.”

Sakuya didn’t have anything to say for a minute. Then, “I hadn’t fully realized… fully recognized the fact that not many people from the press have come after me.”

“No.”

“Because of you.”’

“Of course.”

Sakuya watched the traffic thin out as they slowly emerged on the other side of the city. Cars turned off the road, buildings grew shorter, and the summer sun peeked over their roofs in degrees, sometimes lighting his face, sometimes hidden.

“After whatever the doctor did to him… which I didn’t see, as the doctor had separated us… Ryouta’s eyes were dead. I’m not sure how to describe it. He was a little like a sleepwalker. He stood, and he looked at me, but with eyes like someone who has been stunned. Or like the eyes of a corpse. He wasn’t inside his own head. I don’t know if people know that. I hope they do.

“The doctor had his hands on his head. I remember him ruffling his hair, actually, not on purpose, but he was sort of stroking him, like he was proud of him. Like a father and his son. Like he was holding him; showing him off to us. I don’t remember a lot of that time. Trust me, it drives me mad too. I just don’t remember a lot of what the doctor said or did. I remember the summary. A virus he could only brew in Ryouta, which he had been brewing for years, a virus meant to kill them all… but I was focused on Ryouta. I guess.”

Sakuya cleared his throat. Yuuya turned the wheel, his eyes on the road.

“I don’t know how to explain it. I’ve tried. I was looking at him, and he was looking at me, and…” Sakuya shook his head and tried again. “Ryouta wasn’t really looking at anything. His eyes were blank. He was breathing, slowly, like a sleeper, or else I would have thought he was dead. That’s what I was seeing. They say it’s common to trauma, they say it’s not surprising, but really. I don’t remember much of those few minutes. The most important part of the whole miserable night, and it’s practically a void in my memory. Like the whole thing happened behind a wall, not in front of me.”

“It’s fine.”

“I just remember his eyes.”

“It’s fine.”

“I can’t… he stood slumped. Like he was barely standing up. Like he was a marionette hanging from a hook. And he was… he wasn’t looking at me, probably. But his head was tilted in my direction, and I looked in his eyes, I think I looked in his eyes for minutes… five minutes, ten?... Ryouta… I looked at him, and he never looked back. He could have been staring through me. I could have not been there.

“I don’t remember anything important. Just his red eyes for all that time. His red eyes hanging over me in the darkness. Not what the doctor said, not what the room looked like, not… there’s this entire period of time in my mind. A long time. The defining moment of the decade was happening above my head. The doctor was revealing his plot. Professor Kazuaki was readying his pistol. You were bleeding out in the infirmary upstairs, with the damning files that would win a historic case in the drawer by your head. And I stared at Ryouta. Tried.

“It might as well have been silence and the two of us, silence and his eyes, for all my memory serves me. I wish I could explain…

“There was… Kazuaki tried to talk to him. I remember Oko San attacking the doctor; that almost made me laugh, actually. Like when you have been crying for an hour and someone cracks a joke.”

Yuuya snorted. It was usually Yuuya cracking the joke, Sakuya realized.

They were more or less in the countryside now. Plains rolled, and the sun lit the waving grass.

Sakuya sighed and waved one hand, as if tossing something out the window. “I guess my memory starts up properly again when Anghel shouted Ryouta down. Well. Maybe it’s a bias I have. There was… a lot of us were trying to help him, trying to get through to him. He wasn’t there. He wasn’t… like the sweetheart of class 2-3 was really going to carry a deadly plague into humanity. Like we believed that. But he wasn’t there. And we screamed, and we tried to get through to him, but Anghel did.”

Sakuya breathed in and out for a minute, his head on the window. Yuuya did not even glance at him.

“I remember Ryouta’s head turning to Anghel, and a light filling his eyes like a candle catching fire. Anghel was in a fit, like he always was. But… how can I say this? It didn’t feel like it usually did. I think, for once, we were in the same world he was in. Not that he was lucid for a minute—god forbid. We came to him. He lived in a world bigger than ours. Magic, mystery, powerful fates, world-ending battles, like a fantasy novel. And for a minute, life was as dire and dreadful for all of us as it always was to him.

“Ryouta’s eyes met his and he opened them. I mean. No, his eyes were already open. But he… he came back into them.”

Yuuya was pulling off of the highway. Through a short road bordered with flowering trees and creeping vines, they found a gated house, built long ago and repurposed recently, looking clean and orderly from the outside. Some people were on the lawn, sitting on a blanket. A slight wind tossed the flowering wisteria growing all around. Yuuya pulled into the lot, parked, and turned off the car, but neither of them moved quite yet.

“A lot of it was Anghel’s ability, of course,” Sakuya said, quietly. “And I suppose everyone helped to bring him back to himself once Anghel had his attention. But Anghel got his attention.”

Yuuya pulled his hand down his face. “I didn’t know. I don’t think anyone did.”

Sakuya grinned bitterly. “I’m not sure how many people would be dead without him. They’re calling me a hero?” He scoffed and leaned back in his seat. Bright sunlight seeped in through the front window, and Sakuya leaned back and closed his eyes. His eyelashes cast shadows streaking down his face, and Yuuya saw that his lids had swollen with tears held back. "When I wasn't running around pointlessly that day, studiously refusing to believe the truth and ignoring the obvious, I was standing stupidly with my jaw on the floor and my throat swollen shut. I escaped alive because you took a fatal blow for me. And Ryouta died, and Hiyoko died before I was aware she was gone, and then I ended up in the police station staring at the floor and thinking I was alone in the world before I clearly remember anything else. Anything except the row of guns.”

The warmth of the sunlight sunk into Sakuya’s skin. He stayed leaned back, drowsily, his eyes closed.

Yuuya watched Professor Kazuaki amble up the sidewalk to the House, and wished he didn’t have to say anything.

“Sakuya,” he eventually said, very softly, and his brother hummed in answer. Yuuya wasn’t sure how to say what he was thinking. “It… your story would be invaluable, if you could write it down, perhaps?”

Sakuya shrugged. “I’m sure I could summarize. I’ve tried to write it for my own sake before… but that didn’t work out. It would be a good idea for me to write a statement, I suppose. Actually, I should have done it by now.”

“It’s fine.”

“Hm.”

Sakuya opened his eyes and saw what Yuuya saw. Yuuya could see him looking terrified before he pursed his lips and narrowed his eyes. “Well.”

“Yes.”

Sakuya sighed. Yuuya sighed in a more exaggerated fashion. Sakuya shoved him, and Yuuya moved with it.

They approached the professor almost in lock step, not touching, but close enough to feel each other’s warmth. Yuuya’s hands were crossed over his chest, and Sakuya fiddled with his sleeves, and the neck of his shirt, and his pockets, looking at the ground. When they were just a few feet in front of the professor, Sakuya snapped his head up and glared at him.

Kazuaki smiled pleasantly. Sakuya felt a little stupid for a second.

“Professor Kazuaki,” said Yuuya in his most cheerfully pleasant voice. It was almost grating, and Sakuya suspected it was supposed to be. “How long it’s been.”

“Quite a long time,” said Nanaki vacantly. “Though I’ve seen Sakuya recently, I don’t think I’ve seen you since then, Yuuya.”

“I’ve been busy,” Yuuya smiled. “I imagine you have been as well.”

“Oh, of course, teaching, getting things in order, you know,” said Nanaki. “Ah, and I had heard you dropped your high school degree. A bright man like you, Yuuya?...”

Yuuya did look a little chagrined. Sakuya bit his lip. “I shouldn’t be surprised that you’re personally familiar with Professor Kazuaki as well, Yuuya.”

“Of course,” said Nanaki. “I teach… taught algebra to everyone who graduated St. Pigeonation’s. Or, well, attended the second year, however sporadically. Yuuya was my student before you were. He did pass with high grades, and I would have hoped that you would go on with your education.”

“I chose to work instead,” said Yuuya lightly. “I think it really was the best choice for me.”

“Of course,” Nanaki said again, smiling. Sakuya realized it was about time for visiting hours to start and thus exactly time to interrupt this before ‘this’ even became something.

“Almost noon, Yuuya,” he muttered, and Yuuya grinned and pulled Sakuya’s arm into his, linking their elbows.

“I hadn’t noticed it was that time already. Professor, care to join us?”

Nanaki nodded assent, so Yuuya turned to enter the House, Sakuya on his arm and Nanaki a close half-step behind him.

It was cleanly pleasant inside. The house was of an old style but not so old; something that may have been repurposed fifty years ago, perhaps painted these bright, soft colors in the repurposing, and filled with green leaves spilling from the shelves and the desks, in lacquered pots. There was the humming and ticking ubiquitous to waiting rooms, many of which Sakuya had seen in recent months, but a smell much softer and more pleasant than most—there was no blood shed or surgery attempted here, just the smell of lives lived, that scent of warm bodies lounging around, and fresh air coming in through the vents. Some people sat scattered around the lounge, drinking coffee (and that acrid tang was in the air too, now that Sakuya saw the coffee station, full of cookies and sugar and neatly arranged tea bags) and tending to children, or tending to their phones, with an air remarkably less tense than Sakuya would have expected. The disconnect between his expectations and the reality settled in when he could just barely hear someone laugh down the well-lit hallway, the sudden laugh that follows a joke: this was no life or death place. This was just a place for life.

Yuuya approached the counter and dropped Sakuya’s arm so that he could rifle through his shoulder bag, probably for identification. “Shirogane Yuuya,” he said. “I’m here to visit Higure Anghel? I should have called you.”

“Let me look,” said the receptionist, who began tapping at her keyboard with what Sakuya saw were exquisitely manicured nails, buffed to a shine with only the faintest spring green color on top. “There you are,” she said. “I’ll assume this is Shirogane Sakuya, then? I will need to see your IDs as protocol, though. And,” she continued, as Yuuya’s rustling around in the bag intensified and Sakuya smoothly pulled his student ID out of his front pocket, “Though it may be an inconvenience, which I am sorry for, I’ll need to check in with Anghel and make sure he’s willing to see you. That’s protocol, too, but with Anghel we’ve had a lot of trouble with people who didn’t actually know him trying to see him.”

“I imagine,” said Yuuya, who finally found his driver’s license in his front pocket. “I suppose it’s really for the patient’s sake, though.”

“Of course. They get the final say in who visits them,” she said cheerfully. Her face fell for a minute as she carefully checked the brothers’ IDs, tilting them a few ways in the sunlight that leaked through her east-facing window. “Thank you,” she smiled, handing them back. “And…” she peered around Yuuya’s shoulder. “Are you with them?”

Nanaki smiled. “I am,” he said, handing her his ID.

She smiled when she saw it, and handed it right back. “Oh, I remember you, professor. I apologize for not recognizing you, we’ve had something of a day here.”

“Oh?” asked Yuuya.

She waved her hand. “A new arrival. Nothing to worry yourselves about. Would you please seat yourselves as someone passes your names on to Anghel? You’ll know if he wants to see you in just a minute.”

They thanked her and wandered over to a few cushioned seats close to the coffee station. Yuuya seemed to have coffee in his hand before he could have reasonably poured it, and though he offered an empty cup to Sakuya, with an ‘if you like’ shrug, Sakuya waved it away. Nanaki brewed half a cup of decaffeinated tea, and sat on the other side of the station from the two of them.

From outside the window, Sakuya could hear chatter from the people on the lawn. Kids some years younger than him, it sounded like, joking and laughing, but after a minute, their voices fell.

Sakuya found that he had spaced out when Yuuya jostled his arm.  He jolted and saw a nurse standing in front of him. “I’m sorry for the inconvenience, “ she said, addressing the party as a whole, “but he isn’t willing to meet all three of you at once. Would Professor Kazuaki be willing to wait while I bring the Shirogane brothers back?”

“Of course,” said Nanaki warmly, already reaching to pour himself some more tea.

“Well, that works for me,” said Yuuya, in a tone that was poorly controlled.

Sakuya kept close to him until they passed the heavy, barred doors, a concession uncomfortable after the easy atmosphere of the waiting room. However, after the doors meant to keep one world from another, Sakuya found a place almost indistinguishable from the first one; bright, clean, not at all uncomfortably, if lit by ceiling light more than windows and colored with posters more than live plants. It was more sparse, true, and the rooms were closer and tighter, but just as much care was given to the patients’ side of the House as was to the visitors’ side. And that relaxed Sakuya despite the obviously softened plastic edges and heavy, metal doors and aides sitting at the corners.

The comfortable murmur of living people did not cease. In this room or another, they talked to each other, and the three of them passed a session of art therapy with the door open, boys and girls leaving their work to color each other’s hair and hands with markers, giggling. Sakuya was reminded sharply of high school in a memory that quickly became sour, because he realized that the scene, more comfortable and close than any school memory he had, reminded him of school less because of the classroom environment and more because of the ages of the people inside.

“They’re so young,” he said to Yuuya, sounding more mournful than he meant to.

“We specialize in care for young adults,” chirped the nurse. “There aren’t many mental wellness locations devoted to helping people older than children and younger than their mid-twenties or thirties, so we try to fill in the gap a little. It’s a very important time for mental health, you know; more than most people realize.”

“Hm,” said Sakuya, uncomfortable for a reason he couldn’t place. “They seem… like they’re having fun.”

“I do hope they are,” said the nurse. “Not all of them get a lot of it.”

Sakuya worried his lip. Yuuya almost incidentally brushed the small of his back with a warm palm.

“Here we are,” said the nurse, stopping in front of a dormitory door. Number 119, Sakuya noted, with Anghel’s name printed on computer paper beneath it. Nothing really served to differentiate it from the other doors in the House, which surprised Sakuya. He expected something. “Anghel?” she asked, knocking lightly.

“Yeah?” asked a nervous voice.

“I have Shirogane Yuuya and Sakuya here,” she said. “Shall I let them in?”

“Yeah, yeah, of course,” said the voice, distracted, as things were quietly shuffled in the background.

The nurse obligingly opened the door about halfway, then stuck her head in to talk to Anghel. “I’ll leave now, then, but make sure to keep your door wide open for as long as your guests are in. Take as much time as you like.”

“Thanks,” said the voice, and the nurse dipped away.

Sakuya hadn’t been privy to Anghel’s most casual tone of voice often before, but he had heard him slip into it before, when around Hiyoko, when calling his mother in the school’s courtyard, or when he sincerely needed to ask a question in Algebra and decided it was in his best interest to be understood. All the same, just hearing that casual tone, those few barked words from behind the door, high-pitched, like his voice had always been, awkward and uncomfortable practically as an accent, made Sakuya suddenly, harshly nervous, because this was Anghel, this was his voice, and Sakuya was momentarily overwhelmed with the feeling of meeting a person again, purely and simply; hearing them and knowing that they were there, after all this time.

He also had absolutely no fucking clue what to expect from Anghel, so, that didn’t help.

The nurse was gone, and Sakuya found himself temporarily paralyzed. Yuuya leaned into him, warm and not nearly as nervous, and pushed the door all the way open.

Anghel was just finishing making his bed look like it wasn’t a hellhole, it seemed, by the ripple of a sheet Sakuya’s eyes just barely caught before it settled. The opened window, letting in the warm breeze and the sound of birdcall, was behind Anghel, who was just straightening up from where he knelt in front of the bed. As he turned around, he pulled his thick hair off of his shoulders, which were sweating, and into his hands, where a black hair binder was resting, so he could pull it out of his way. The binder snapped as nervous Anghel, who has been averting his gaze before, caught Sakuya’s eyes.

Sakuya swallowed.

He had no fucking clue what to do.

“Hey,” said Anghel. He looked back and forth between the brothers, before settling his gaze on Sakuya again. “You’re… actually Sakuya?” he asked, incredulously.

“Yes?” said Sakuya, right before it hit him, rather hard, that in his jeans and his button-down and with his pony tail, he was almost unrecognizable as the boy he used to be.

“Sorry to come at such short notice,” said Yuuya, mercifully taking the pleasantries on himself. “I know the two of us have met, but it was really only briefly,” he prattled while entering the room, leaving space for Sakuya to shuffle in behind him. “Shirogane Yuuya,” he said, to erase all confusion, and extended his hand.

Anghel proceeded to stare and it and then accept possibly the most one-sided handshake ever initiated. “I do remember you,” he said. “You’re hard to forget.”

“So are you!” said Yuuya, bafflingly pleasantly, and indicated one of the plastic chairs. “May I?” he asked.

“Oh, yeah,” said Anghel, hand flying up to rub the back of his neck, and then the crook of his chest, “both of you, of course sit down,” and then muttered something else to himself, under his breath. 

Yuuya and Sakuya sat down, and Anghel, half a beat later, dropped onto the edge of his bed. The movement fluttered the sheets again, and Sakuya saw that he had, in fact, shoved a bunch of junk under the top sheet before he made the bed. Paper crinkled.

Anghel cleared his throat, looking away. Sakuya could swear that Yuuya chuckled. “Sorry about… generally everything,” Anghel began. “Er. About the mess here, too. I was supposed to clean this up. Yeah. Sorry. I uh,” he stared at Sakuya again, piercingly, blue eyes like spotlights in his dark skin. “I didn’t recognize you at all.”

“I wouldn’t have recognized you without the hair,” Sakuya heard himself say.

Anghel self-consciously reached up to grab a loop of his (still carefully dyed) blue hair, which now had yet other colors in it, like sea waves. Yuuya actually did laugh that time. “Sakuya,” he admonished.

“I mean,” said Sakuya, putting up his hands in defense, “You’re not doing the, er, titles for people thing anymore?”

Anghel turned pink. The hand that had been ruffling his hair hid his face. “Oh my god,” he muttered, “I can’t… I am so fucking embarrassed about that. Jesus. Sorry. Whatever I used to call you, sorry about that.”

“It was kind of flattering, at the time,” Sakuya admitted, “if occasionally incomprehensible.”

“Jesus, I don’t know what I was thinking,” Anghel hissed. “That was a dark time. Ignore everything I ever said. Christ. I don’t even know how I lived through those days.”

“Well, I could say the same for myself,” replies Sakuya, a little relaxed, though he couldn’t explain why. “About basically all of that. Meeting people who remember me from a few years back is… usually unfortunate.”

“Yeah,” said Anghel, somehow saying a lot. “I know.” He took a look at Sakuya again. “You… were kind of a weird kid.”

“I was?” asked Sakuya before he could stop himself. He then put a hand over his face. “Well. I was. That’s true. Yuuya, stop laughing.”

“I’m not—mmph—laughing—pfft.”

Sakuya whacked Yuuya on the shoulder, which served to make him actually burst out with laughter. Sakuya grinned. “Sure, sure,” he muttered. “I mean. It’s true. I could kill myself when I think about how I used to act.”

Anghel fiddled with his sleeves. “You can say that again. I just… blech.”

“There’s no reason to be that hard on yourself,” Yuuya interrupted, distractingly brash. “Everyone’s strange as a kid. No one will remember it as sharply as you do, they’ll be focused on how weird they were.”

Which was fine enough advice for people whose awkward teen years hadn’t been public media sensations, Sakuya privately thought, but appreciated the attempt anyway. Anghel shrugged one skinny shoulder, gripped with his other hand. “Yeah, everyone tells me it’s fine, but… did they break windows when they were having bad days?”

“I did,” said Sakuya. “And some furniture.”

“At LEAST two,” Yuuya admitted. “Except that those were good days.”

They hit, though they all knew it would be temporary, an admirable stride in lightheartedness. Able to reminisce on going to the same school, even if they were all in and out—medical needs, work, lives busier than most teenagers’—they found things to laugh about. But out of the blue, clearly not meaning to bring the mood down, Anghel said, about something Sakuya detailed, “Oh, that really did happen? I thought I made it up. It was hard to tell, like, sometimes I thought I was sitting at my desk all day, staring at the wall, and I had been out and around everywhere. Or the other way around. I just lost days of my memory, sometimes. They’re trying to get me to recall most of the stuff about the Hatoful incident and I can’t.”

There was a chilly silence. “Of the day of?” asked Sakuya quietly.

“Yeah. I only remember a few things. Mostly I’ve been told about it. Well. I think I remember other things, but I’m told they can’t be real.”

“Like what?”

“Like…” and then Anghel looked away. He bit his lip, and clearly struggled with his own words. “Like… it couldn’t have happened, because it was after she died? But like Hiyoko turning into a monster? That’s my head, sorry. Forget about it. I shouldn’t have even said that, like, that’s the sort of thing you just keep to yourself, but then there’s me, over here, just vomiting out whatever comes into my head… yeah.”

Sakuya thought he was keeping himself composed, but evidently not, considering Anghel’s nervousness. “Ha ha, sorry,” Anghel continued, more quietly. “I sometimes forget, because I seem so much better now, you know, so much less… I forget I’m still really bad. Sorry. My head makes up horrible stuff.”

“I’m not offended.” It was stilted, but the best he had.

Yuuya must have been choking it down too.

He knew Yuuya had seen it too. Seen it and not known.

“But…” Anghel rubbed his nails absentmindedly up and down his wrist. “I mean, it was pretty useful when there WAS horrible stuff. I… yeah.” His brow suddenly furrowed, and he looked away at the wall, fingers twisted together, knees locked. “A lot of people won’t see it when I will. I mean, sometimes that’s because it isn’t real and I’m seeing horrible shit on a blank wall. But sometimes it is there? Never mind.” 

Sakuya saw Yuuya lean backward and heard his head thud against the wall, lightly, and sigh.

“Thank you.”

“What?” Anghel startled and looked at Sakuya.

“Never mind.” Sakuya brushed his hair back. He focused on the little clicks and clatters the ceiling fan made as it turned around. The occasional laughter from art therapy down the hall. The sound of electricity buzzing, air humming, human life. “They did you a disservice, the people who published your story on the news. Making you look like you were a raving lunatic on about nothing, when you were definitely on about something.”

Anghel snorted, like, really snorted instead of laughed. “That’s the thing, friend. I was always on about something.”

Sakuya couldn’t help but laugh. Yuuya took the lightened mood and ran with it. “You do like it well enough here, yes? Of course no one can stay in a place like this forever, but…”

“Yeah.” Anghel shrugged. “Actually, it’s pretty nice. Obviously I miss being able to just go outside whenever but… people play along? That was a bad way of phrasing it. Everyone else here kind of grew up in an alternative universe too. If I say ‘I spent that entire year occasionally hallucinating XP bars in my peripheral vision’ or ‘I still don’t know if the time I was kidnapped was real and everyone involved tells me different stories,’ they don’t say ‘what the hell,’ they say ‘I couldn’t stop seeing murderous shadow creatures for three years and it almost drove me to suicide.’ That’s Midori, by the way. She’s great.”

This time, Yuuya couldn’t help but laugh. It would be his kind of humor, Sakuya reflected. The earned through trials type.

After another fifteen minutes, perhaps, of talking about therapy and hallmates—medications that had been causing him horrible insomnia and anhedonia for a while but then got better, the house cook, whose skill surpassed her budget, the walks outside with his favorite caretaker, who was an abuse survivor, the horrible noise the intercom made, the kids that came in and out, the girl who was always so, so nice—“almost like Hiyoko”—their time was up, and it was time for the brothers to head back home and for the professor to walk in.

Sakuya noticed that Anghel didn’t look happy about that.

-

What did he remember, Sakuya asked Anghel, a few visits later, as the visits were scheduled for every other week. What did he remember about that night?

He remembered how the dark basement looked—shattered, lurid veins twisting everywhere, like a tree made of blood, with horrible fruit. The demon. The monster with Hiyoko’s smile. The birds—not the birds, the wings. And red eyes in the branches of the red tree. Crowds rising, crowds running, crowds falling; the constant terror of being surrounded, drowning.

His chemical cocktail had been so overturned by that point that it was more like a nightmare, hazily remembered, than a set of memories.                                                                                                                                                                           

But more than everything else, more clearly and sharply, he remembered the gunshot. Real, deadly, and right before his eyes, it shattered the red light, and he was in a basement, with grey walls and grime.

And Sakuya. Oddly enough, he remembered Sakuya. Pale and shaking, holding his hands out, in the delirium of delirium being broken.

-

Yuuya accompanied Sakuya to some, but not all, of those visits. Neither of them had a lot of spare time, but more importantly, Yuuya recognized that the two of them, though they had no idea before they started seeing each other, could probably spend some time alone with each other.

“He and I spent some time in their garden… it’s lovely,” Sakuya mentioned. “Midori and Kisa ended out having a grass fight.”

“Hmm.” Yuuya was more cooking than listening.

Sakuya tapped his mechanical pencil around on his notebook, a few lines after the notes ran out. “It was fun. I guess I didn’t expect that out of a mental health institution.”

Yuuya shrugged loosely. “It’s not all fun and games. You do a lot of hard work on your mental state and identity during therapy sessions and behind closed doors. You try medications, which sometimes make you worse for a while. People are volatile; they blow up at each other. You need a lot of patience. Most people have more than one stay, because it’s hard to integrate what you learn into your everyday life. It’s a long process. But, yeah, it sure isn’t what it used to be. And by that, I mean usually deadly for the patient. Not that anymore.”

“Ah.”

“I’ve ended up doing a lot of visits to hospitals and institutions like this,” Yuuya reminded him. “People snap in the line of duty. People’s kids get involved. Or people who are good at their jobs tear their families apart and someone has to go and apologize. Your sanity wears thin if you’re doing work like this too long, they say. They tell me… I’m too young for that yet.”

Yuuya shrugged.

“You’ve… not actually been to… uh… therapy yourself?”

“One or two mandatory sessions after accidents.”

“Really? What was it like?”

“Well… awkward. For me, at any rate. I… not to try to look cool, but I can be… secretive?” Yuuya shook his head. “For the most part, they were something to get done.”

“Oh.” Dinner sizzled in silence for a minute. “I actually get a little jealous of the kids there sometimes.

“I mean. They’re my age, you know. Some are younger.”

Sakuya awkwardly smoothed his hair back. “I don’t know. It’s hard to feel too out of place there. You feel like… you aren’t that bad.”

There was silence a little longer. Yuuya exhaled a low, broken sigh.

-

Sakuya started weekly visits with a gentle, unassuming therapist Yuuya knew from work. The visits took place on what had previously been his only free evenings in the calendar week.

(Sakuya would be lying if he said he didn’t feel the stress from the time crunch. He just had a particularly bad method for dealing with stress.)

After the first visit (before which Sakuya couldn’t eat and Yuuya tried desperately not to cry) Sakuya skipped class for the first time in his life to write down his memories of the Hatoful Incident, because his therapist calmly and without accusation suggested that one day, in the far future, becoming more certain of what he did or did not recall and being able to look at it objectively might help him, if he was the sort of person she pegged him as. It took from noon, when he started, until the dead of night. It ended up being, despite his outset intention of writing a bullet point list of exactly what he remembered, a full narrative including factors leading up to and reminiscences on, with facts he couldn’t quite place supplemented with quotes from Anghel. It would have been invaluable to many.

Until much, much later, Yuuya was the only person who read it.

-

Half asleep, forgetting not to think about it, he did something between dreaming and daydreaming about Hiyoko, reality elastic, bending around fantasy.

Sunlight painful in his eyes, he half-believed he was in the music room, alone with her, and he was doing nothing but leaning against the side of the piano as she struggled to play a simple melody. Just like that. Good, good, but remember, this has to go a little faster. Oh, no, eventually, once you’re used to it. You need to know how to read music as well as physically create it—it’s a discipline of mind and body, using the whole of your being.

She looked so lovely now. Her hair had grown out a bit in the years—the ends were wild and split, but she piled it up on her head accidentally fetchingly, in loops and curls. She still wasn’t totally used to living this way—you could see it in her posture, reflected in how she struggled to make the music. Refined, delicate, controlled—not the life she had lived, alone in the wild. So how she seemed so right nestled inside it, Sakuya couldn’t claim to know—but she was.

The whole of your being—taken from a deep part of you. Look, that’s a coda; do you remember where you begin from? Play it again. Just the same, but more certain this time.

Like magic, she learned it; alouette, gentille alouette. How did she know this song?

Around a parlor in France they cluttered, his brother and mother and his young wife, where they could have always been. Father was out. Mother was taking tea—Yuuya had distracted Hiyoko, and they were laughing and laughing, filling the room with it. There, it’s easy; it’s innate. All it is is learning the language, learning another way to express your feeling. The whole of your being—taken from a deep part of you. And it’s beautiful when you do it.

He didn’t remember she wasn’t here when he started waking up—not for some time.

But, as it turned out, Yuuya was trying to figure out how the hell a piano works in another room while he thought Sakuya couldn’t hear him.

Sakuya could already hear himself saying that it wasn’t something too tough for him to understand, music—not a language of the elites that Yuuya couldn’t have access to but something innate, shared, native to us all.

-

“You knew her a little, too,” whispered Sakuya, as Yuuya drove him straight from a visit to Anghel to a visit to Professor Nanaki, fingers nervous and tight around his seatbelt. “I know you were friendly, though I don’t know how much.”

“Hiyoko?”

“Hmm.”

“I couldn’t say I knew her too well. She was the sort who was friendly with everyone.”

Yuuya was dramatically underselling himself.

“She meant it, though.”

“Hm?”

“She wasn’t just acting friendly. I think she liked everyone.”

“I have absolutely no doubt she did. Even if, really, we didn’t talk much, I… perhaps I felt listened to around her. I felt like she would… listen when you talked, try to understand where you’re coming from. That sort of person—that sort of person just shining with genuine honesty, genuine passion for things, not hiding behind a shield—someone just coming from where they are, that’s rare. That’s—oh, Sakuya, I’m sorry.”

They didn’t have time to pull over and Yuuya couldn’t do much more than occasionally rub a circle in his shoulder. Sakuya dried his own tears.

“I know you two were very close.”

Sakuya couldn’t speak. Yuuya knew it wouldn’t be right to work him up more before they had to visit the professor.

-

(Sakuya was going to tell his brother that no, not really. They weren’t really close. He barely knew her. In retrospect he imagines she didn’t even like him. In retrospect she couldn’t possibly have. Having been an awkward teenager like Anghel doesn’t compare to having been a cruel teenager. Everyone had just been handling him—which he hadn’t been blind to. He had just accepted polite endurance as how he was to be interacted with.

He was dramatically underselling himself as well.)

-

In the dark, something woke him up.

Distantly disoriented, halfway back to sleep already, Sakuya heard his clock ticking—a tiny confection of gears and set stones, one of the few things he kept, out of place in the sparse Japanese bedroom—saw the gentle moonlight petting the soft curves of his bedsheets, tracing the woodgrain of the walls.

Then, one more, he heard the sharp, labored intake of breath.

Nothing more than confused and curious, Sakuya slid out of bed, readjusting his twisted bedclothes (because now he didn’t live in a lavishly warm house allowing him to lounge in only his underwear, goddammit.) He paced silently to his own door and stood to listen.

It took some time for his senses to adjust, eyes widening to accommodate the lack of light, breathing evening out to hush itself, but he finally knew what he was hearing: his mother, gasping.

Worry tainted confusion, and Sakuya silently slid open the door. If she was ill—if she was panicked—or if something had happened, and she was injured?

Light was spilling into the hallway, the harsh, artificial light of the kitchen lightbulb. Sakuya was glad he crept forward rather than bursting in, tempered by uneasiness, when he was finally able to sort out the noise of labored breath and sharp sounds into crying, miserable crying, poorly stifled, the sound of sadness, not pain or desperation.

He hesitated a moment longer, giving into the fear that he had been giving into more and more lately, that he would misunderstand an interpersonal situation and ruin it with his harshness again, and he was glad for it. Just beyond his mother’s cries, he heard a murmuring voice, so comforting, and knew it was his brother.

His mother was upset, and Yuuya was consoling her. Relief and heightened concern comingled; this wasn’t an emergency, then, but it was bad.

Ms. Shirogane was normally composed these days, even more so than he remembered her being in his youth, so this sort of thing was unusual. Still, he reflected, everyone had bad nights, and his mother had plenty of memories to produce them. The loss, leaving her husband, the stress and pains she had experienced—this couldn’t be that unusual.

He just hadn’t seen it before. Or been trusted with it.

Steps slowed by his own nervousness and his unexamined trust in Yuuya’s ability to handle the situation, Sakuya hovered out of sight, listening. It would be best, he thought, fingers gently touching the cold of the wall in the night, seeming whiter than always in the glow of the kitchen, for him to wait and see is he was needed in this situation; if it was truly something bad, he would walk in and help comfort her, but if Yuuya had it handled, there was no way to show her he had heard her discomposure.

Still, the sound of his mother, crying like a scared little animal.

Finally, he could discern words: “It’s okay,” Yuuya insisted, forlorn, tired; “it’s okay.”

“How dare I,” mother insisted with equal strength and equal despair, “there’s no way a mother should do anything like that. Anything like that. I can’t believe myself. I can’t believe my failure.”

“It’s okay, it’s okay.”

Heart chilled, Sakuya listened to his mother’s broken voice.

“I left my son for a man like that. A man who hurt me. A man who I should have been smart enough to never trust. I should have never looked at him. I should have already known better.”

“Maman, I understand. It isn’t your fault. You know I understand.”

“It’s inexcusable. I can’t call myself a mother. I can’t believe my failure.”

“I understand. I know you couldn’t… he wouldn’t let you refuse him. I know you wouldn’t have done it if it had been your choice. I know.”

Shirogane Elodie cried like her heart breaking, a cry of true pain, as if the memory, the horrible sting of it being pulled through her like a fish on a hook, wrenched through her physically, a horrible pulse. Yuuya’s own voice grew thick and bubbling with tears as he said, “you know I understand. You know.

“I know you wanted to be my mother.”

He corrected himself, painfully. “You are my mother. Maman.”

He could see, in his mind’s eye, Yuuya trembling as fiercely as though he were being pulled apart by strings; trying to hold his mother, trying not to cry. Sakuya knew he wasn’t managing.

Fear won his mind, like it had so often lately. More and more often. He crept back to his room, silently as he was able, heart aching, and had to forget that night, even as it passed over him, slow and heavy, oppressive until the dawn.

Forget it poorly, forget it for now.

-

Naturally, his therapist often has to ask him about his relationship with his family.

He means to talk about how he never knew his real father, didn’t even know he was his father until a year or so ago. The father who looked, apparently, just like his brother. He means to talk about how he loves his mother so dearly, so much—usually. Almost always. But there’s this… thing in his throat, this something being bitten down around her. Sometimes. He means to open up and talk about Mr. La Bel, really, he does. The man who won’t stop being his father in his head, no matter what he does. So what  if it feels like a great weight hung above him to crush him, death waiting for the traitor who speaks up, he’s not stupid; he has to talk about his parents eventually. He has to talk about the pain.

Instead, he talks about Yuuya, Yuuya, Yuuya. He doesn’t mean to, Yuuya slips from his lips when he’s nervous, when he’s supposed to be talking about something. His brother, who is patient and kind. His brother, who is so successful, who tries so hard, who is so charming, lovable, funny, witty, heart-felt, wise, who knows so much. Who brought him here. Who supported him. Who waited for him when Sakuya wanted nothing to do with him.

(Who isn’t alright. But Sakuya doesn’t know what’s wrong.)

When the therapist casually, unthinkingly calls Yuuya the person who is most important to Sakuya, the person who matters most to him, and who could be a great motivator in his recovery, he shocks.

Is it really like that?

(He thinks of it differently, is all.)

-

Professor Nanaki and Doctor Iwamine lived in an apartment building.

Sakuya had not had a reason to visit many apartments before he incident. True high society not only makes its own gilded dome of opulence and cultural incest, it manages to shelter its youth so thoroughly from poverty, never setting foot in its door or smelling its reek on street corners, that one can have almost no conception of how it looks or functions. How it’s really like. While the bird raised in that nest scoffingly tells you that of COURSE it knows most people live differently, the shock they exhibit upon first truly witnessing real world poverty betrays their impoverished conception of what the vast bulk of life is like for what it is.

Sakuya, however, hardly felt out of place anymore when he walked into places dirty, ragged, and not even secretly unhealthy for their tenants and illegal in practice. Very few things embarrassed him now like being socked in the gut by Ryouta’s home situation once had. He and Yuuya politely greeted the children on the street, sets of siblings mixed with friends from down the street and a reluctant but responsible 13 year old, and opened the door to the apartment building, which was meant to be locked but hadn’t been working, apparently, in years.

The hallways were cramped but not too dark—inevitably, they could hear an argument or a meeting upstairs, laughter or terse bickering, or see someone struggling with a full laundry basket or bag of groceries, three flights up. They, however, had to walk halfway into the ground into the rooms in the basement, lower to rent but damp and cold, full of painted-over mold and high windows that were only bright during sunrise and sunset.

The door was tilted open, waiting for them, because the Professor knew exactly when they would arrive. Without being granted time to collect themselves, forced to acknowledge that the occupants could hear their footsteps approaching as well as they could hear cups clattering and low speech, Yuuya tried to relax Sakuya with gentle touch while horribly tense himself and knocked on the open door.

“Come in, boys,” said a dreamy, low voice in time with the creaking door.

The apartment was laid out like this: there was a front room where a few neat sets of shoes and coats were cluttered opposite the single bedroom, uncomfortably sudden. Down a strip masquerading as a hall there was a living room, painfully sparse, soft and drab; behind that, a dining room with a small dark table and a few scattered houseplants, just blossoming, and a partition wall that mostly hides a small, wallpapered kitchen from view. A bathroom hides in the back, just out of sight from the thin doorway, as well as a laundry room, which hums and sputters even now. All the light that shines in the little rooms is strained between curtains of lace, which are always closed; comforting, enveloping, isolating. From the kitchen comes the clatter of cups and the rush of water, enticingly home-like; the partition hides the Professor from view.

In the front room, before everything else, is Doctor Iwamine in his chair, hunched and unmoving, someone else’s shawl draped across his shoulders, eerie clean around him belying the fact that he hadn’t done anything, been given anything in hours.

All the other sights and sounds, surface comforts, shatter around the crouching demon in the front room, whose eyes lock with Sakuya’s as he reaches down, carefully, uncomfortably, to untie his shoes.

Yuuya’s position is chosen with incredible care—separating Sakuya from Doctor Iwamine, putting himself into the house so he had a good advantage on all of the rooms but not so far that he couldn’t easily reach his brother, and at an angle where he could talk to Professor Kazuaki, politely, without having to shout. Only a year ago Sakuya would have seen him barreling into someone’s house without a proper invitation like that and been horrified.

Now he appreciated and accepted the fact that battle tactics are often rude.

Professor Kazuaki told him that he was just finishing the tea; he meant to have it done already but had slightly misjudged their arrival. Yuuya said that the fault was his; they had poorly planned the trip. He hoped they weren’t imposing.

Sakuya kept his eyes on the Doctor.

(He had already asked him, body aflame with anger, tense as snow-wet logs hissing, crackling, about to split, eyes unblinking, why. He had already taken the time, clutched between his horrified brother on one side and the sickly delighted Professor on the other, why, why, why. The Doctor, tired unto death, acting as though he had had to answer for it a hundred times before, told him what he already knew. He had loved a man once, just once, and promised to do what his son asked of him, and his son wanted—

No, Sakuya insisted, why.

The Doctor hadn’t understood.

Why, why, why. How could you.

Rage and indignancy and bone-deep, rotting, sickening misery roared through his body, too strong, too deep to become questions. How could you imagine you had any right to do what you did? How did you become the person who could? What did you tell yourself as you scheduled the deaths of children who had decades of life to live, spouses to make happy, children to bear, parents to say goodbye to, houses to brighten, gardens to grow? How can this happen, in any good world—how did we become a species that could bear this?

Why did you do this? Why me?

The doctor had made it clear that Sakuya’s involvement was incidental, since that was just about the only one of those questions he had the capacity to answer. The rest would have needed a person with more of a heart.

Why, why, why.

He would never learn anything from Doctor Iwamine—nothing he really needed to know. Iwamine had never considered the question. Still, the lesson had gone very, very far in teaching Sakuya what he needed to know in the real world—the sort of things he had to accept now, the sort of finalities he would have to do without. It was like facing the realities Ryouta’s mother faced—he had to hate it, but it was the medicine he needed.

And Sakuya’s greatest trait was always his dauntlessness. He swallowed without a pause.)

Sakuya sat down across the Doctor as always once invited. The kitchen table would not seat four—they sat on old, mismatched chairs and couches in the living room, crowded around Doctor Iwamine’s seat like vassals around a throne, thrown together in a pale imitation of family rooms in better places. He thanked the Professor kindly for refreshments, tone deathly flat, but never one that could be accused of being rude all the same. His eyes flickered away for moments to ascertain that his brother was still there, that the Professor was still there, both smiling, drinking, conversing, both on the very edge of their seats, ready to spring. Just in case.

Sakuya drank perhaps three sips of tea.

He didn’t realize, and never would, that it was a fierce compliment for the Doctor to keep matching his burning stare when Nanaki was right there, waiting.

But for as long as he could ask a question, even silently, he had to. He couldn’t ever give up trying to get an answer, because he wouldn’t forgive himself if he missed the answers the dead students so deeply deserved, the answers he could bring them someday, would bring them someday, if he could just get Doctor Iwamine to talk.

If he just had answers inside of him.

Yuuya and Professor Kazuaki could keep a façade conversation going on by their selves easily, but Sakuya played along, partly because he couldn’t help himself from being polite even when he shouldn’t be, partly because every word was a clue to Sakuya, a piece of a puzzle he had to put together, had to stay on top of, had to solve, just in case he was being tricked, just in case… he could help.

Just in case they wouldn’t come back without him.

 Half the time Sakuya still didn’t understand half of the Doctor’s updates. Through time and research he had come to recognize many of the terms processes, organs, machines, things the Doctor casually referred to, one after another, mocking the others with his advancement, but there were things still frustratingly beyond his understanding. From talk of tissue damage and brain death he leapt to speculations about the soul, from there to chemical reactions, from there to history, old references, politics, religious implications; to listen to Doctor Iwamine discuss his work when he had leave to not spare the details was to listen to the mad alchemists and astrologers of days gone by splatter around their theories about the nature of things like a wide brush splattering paint. Their logic was always sound but for a few leaps, their studies intense, their conclusions insane; data about bloodflow and artery compression led to resurrection of the dead, facts about the nature of viral infections and their spread led to blazing apocalypse, as real to Iwamine as if it were already smoking around him.

 His heart would rush when the Doctor went on too long—corpses, blood, wartime, great, overreaching plans like arching tree branches that towered overhead, waiting only or fruition—dead only by technicality. He had really, sincerely meant to kill everyone, and he knew how he was going to do it.

But that was what made sitting by the Professor so uncomfortable. There was only one reason why the Doctor hadn’t.

“How much longer?” Sakuya asked right after Yuuya started a discussion about the usages of robotics in the workforce. The question cut the carefully maintained illusion of civilization like a knife; Sakuya heard the air rush out of his brother with a sigh.

Like turning off the lights, the room went from containing a few teachers and students to barely holding a murderer, a torturer, a spy, and a furious victim; Yuuya didn’t move, but the tension radiating off his clenched muscles, the terror of his eyes, tried to freeze the older men where they sat. Any sudden actions would certainly agitate the volatile professor, who was suddenly smiling a wide, hollow smile, and the doctor…

“It would go much faster if I weren’t expected to produce something out of nothing. And by something, I mean Fujishiro Nageki. He’s several years dead now.”

The professor sat down his empty tea cup and walked over to the Doctor to gather his things; cup, plate, silverware, notebook. His arms draped over him to pick everything up, with no regard for comfort, like a spider walking over prey in her web. Doctor Iwamine’s dark glower increased but he did not so much as flinch.

“So there’s no change.”

“I’m making the same progress I have been making: as much as a man can make when expected to do the impossible.”

It was always uncertain whether they left the apartment to avoid a scene of violence or to escape a horrible oppressive air as the Professor struggled to control his immense, crushing hatred.

Today, it was Sakuya’s glare that did the cutting. The Professor left the room to clean up the dishes from tea.

Sakuya’s rage handicapped him. Yuuya, who spend too much time doing so, was left to quietly, firmly, inquisitively demand short answers out of the Doctor about how, how long, how far, and how badly. And though maybe Yuuya’s brutal, sparse, practiced interrogation technique should have made him feel differently about his brother… all he felt was grateful.

If they had to navigate this horrible land, it was good they both had the equipment to—self-interest, flawed characters, and horrible experience.

And overabundant care for each other.

When they went to leave, Yuuya’s answers demanded and Sakuya’s blood still boiling, the Professor politely appeared out of the kitchen, looking almost—almost—like a man perfectly, blissfully unagitated, and showed them all the way to the door, down the hall, and out of the building.

Sakuya wondered where the violence went. He had looked for scars and wounds on the both of them. They didn’t proliferate. The delicate china and wooden furniture in their house didn’t break. But the Professor’s anger was murder and the Doctor’s resentment was venom. As the door slid nicely shut behind them, gently handled by a grip like iron with a grin like crystal lead, Sakuya wondered where the violence went, and how long they had before one of them died.

Died and left the dead ones without a hope of salvation.

--

Time went by. He felt he was struggling in his classes, always just staying afloat. Somehow, his grades were immaculate, despite him being sure he hadn’t earned them. Yuuya seemed to be spending less time obsessively at work, less time out with associates or theoretical girlfriends, less time away without being accounted for, more time at home.

He seemed to be doing less, period. It took Sakuya a long time to notice, because he so much enjoyed waking up to his brother at home, clattering in the kitchen or scribbling in a spiral-bound notebook in the living room, instead of… somewhere. And when he finally did notice, Sakuya was too scared to change it by bringing it up.

At school, other students varied between seeming desperate to talk to Sakuya about the incident and being on the whole unwilling to. He understood—he had gotten more comfortable with uncomfortable truths and knew there was no good way around it.

He was in his second year of classes before he started much talking to people about it, once he started entering major classes and meeting the students he was going to graduate with in a few years, that he began to open up about the incident more than in simply acknowledging it. And he did it in the same way every time—when someone asked him what it was like to have been there, or if what they heard was really true, he said this: “First, I’d like to clear up some misconceptions about Higure Anghel.”

It was the least he could do.

Incidentally, it was at school that he met Tobias.

--

He had cuts in his fingers from playing the harp. Naturally he was required to learn the basics of many more instruments than he had had before he started school; the piano was the best instrument to know in the professional music world but it didn’t cut it by itself. He managed with flutes, woodwinds, drums, strings, so on, so forth all well enough, even if some were less to his taste than others. These above others gave him the most trouble: bloody reed instruments and their bloody reeds, his own voice, and the harp.

He didn’t like reed instruments because they were wet, gathered spit, were disgusting, and honked like geese if you did any little thing wrong. He didn’t like his voice because—well—he sounded bad. He nearly cried the first time he heard himself recorded, because he sounded nasal and air-headed and overdone and his accent was still awful. He absolutely LOVED the harp. He loved strings in general—the piano is a modified string instrument and it was easier to transition to guitars, violins, cellos, koto, and shamisen than anything else. The fact that the university had one—just one—standing harp in its own back room which never moved was incredible enough. The fact that it was free use and he didn’t have to be a storied senior to have access to it was even better. He had always loved harps—does one have to explain an attraction to their beauty, grandeur, and sheer strangeness, like the skeleton of a piano or a guitar turned inside-out, expanded on, the maximum possible inside of a musical instrument, hung up like a laundry-line?

All the love in the world didn’t change the fact that the harp was fucking gigantic and Sakuya, who had never been a tall man and was about to accept that he never would be, practically wasn’t large enough for it. This on top of the fact that very few students here could actually paly it and he was mortified to ask an unknown professor to tutor a complete amateur who could offer him nothing—he waited for the halls to be quiet, shut the door, and tried by himself, his phone with pirated sheets of music on top of open books on top of an unused chair next to him.

It had become what he did on Tuesday and Thursday. Those were the days he had time after class. There was no reason to be so rigorous about learning it; he already knew stringed instruments and wouldn’t gain any class credit from it. He was just aware that he would probably never touch one again after he graduated. The other instruments he borrowed and checked out were common, easy to find in any store—not so concert harps.

And what was it doing here, in a shoddy third-floor room buried in the corners of the city?

What he hadn’t known was that harps hurt, worse than guitars or violins, because the long strings have such tension and you must pick them with your own fingers—grooves turned into cuts, and then warts, and then callouses. It hurt quite a bit, sometimes regretfully, if he went home to some flute or guitar he was supposed to practice on or to work to a pile of hot, soapy dishes that needed scrubbed with wire.

Hurting too much is what made one stop practicing the harp. There was something he liked about that.

It had taken a long time to obtain even basic proficiency with no one to teach him… he was doing this, whether he liked it or not, to have had a chance to play the harp, not to become great at it. But wasn’t that the passion of music? With thoughts like these he opened the door into a meaty shoulder and snapped up face-to-face with amber eyes.

A white-skinned man with dark hair startled back. Sakuya seized up. The man rubbed his shoulder, looked down the hallway for an exit. “I was… I’m sorry,” he said, in a terrible accent.

“What are you doing here?” Sakuya asked, more indignantly than he meant to, in English. It was a good enough first bet.

“Oh…” he said, “Oh, uh, I was not… I didn’t want you to see me.” His English was quicker than his Japanese, but there was no way this was his first language either. His accent… “I have heard you playing from ah… from time to time… I wanted to listen to the harpist.”

…His accent was German.

Well, Sakuya certainly didn’t speak German.

..Wait, he?...

“Why is that?” he asked, curiously.

“I don’t know… you sound good.”

The man was turning red and smiling anxiously. He knew he had been caught at something. Sakuya, also, was turning red. “What? No, I’m… I don’t play so well. I’m only a beginner.

“I think you sound good. I don’t know anyone who can even play one.” He looked past Sakuya at the great lady, alone in her room. “They’re not so common…”

“No… I always felt it was a shame we were hiding one here…”

Sakuya looked over his shoulder to the harp. She was glittering now that the sun was setting—the amber light came through her window to the little room.

“What do you prefer, then?”

Sakuya shuddered involuntarily and glared at the man again. “What?”

“Ah… the instrument. Which do you prefer?”

“The piano.”

“Oh! Me as well!”

--

Tobias, he was soon to learn, was an Alpine Swiss. He spoke German and Italian and was two years older than Sakuya. He was a talented musician who wanted his own label. He had travelled to a dozen countries, knew insane amounts of world history and had read an insane number of books, and he was lying about wanting to meet Sakuya after listening to him play. He had wanted to meet Sakuya after seeing him across the grounds and being struck by his appearance, and he had followed him from place to place when he saw him, eventually learning that he was the one who shut the door to the harp’s room on evenings to practice alone. But he hadn’t expected to be found out so soon.

It was quite some time before Sakuya weaseled any of that out of him. In the meanwhile, life danced on its frantic pace. Visits to madhouses, hospitals, and prisons piled up, and Sakuya was starting to visit office buildings from time to time too, agreeing to talk to a party member, look over someone’s statement, confirm whether such a thing did or did not happen. Third-person accounts of his life piled up; he could not prove or disprove all of them. People had seen him from behind a door, from the side, at every angle; they recounted conflicting memories of incidents and scenes that he barely called himself. People he had never met had been hunting down a trail, for years now, of signs and causes and patterns and effects, trying to find why and how things happened the way they did—sociologists and scientists writing reams to make sure Sakuya’s life didn’t happen to anyone else.

Or Nageki’s, or Anghel’s, or Hiyoko’s, or Yuuya’s.

Important people showed up in those buildings—household names, from time to time. Sakuya stayed studying through it. Sometimes he stopped looking through accounts of the Hatoful Tragedy to do classwork instead, because it was quiet there, even though it was outside absurd to study music theory in a place only people with intense security clearance are allowed inside. Once, Yuuya heard from a mutual acquaintance that Sakuya was in the archives late in the day, drove there, berated him, and told him to come home for dinner.

“If you’re going to be poking around party business that seriously, for that long, they’ll make you join,” Yuuya warned him.

“No, they won’t. They just amended the carter to bump the age of recruitment as a full member up to at least twenty years of age. Because of you.”

“How do you know that??”

“Because I’ve been poking around party business for so long.”

Yuuya laughed his ass off at that.

-

Sakuya reflected on the fact that Yuuya didn’t know that they felt he was a victim too. That many regretted ever recruiting him.

He had seen Yuuya’s account cross-referenced in the central file for the St. Pigeonation’s Incident. He asked if he was allowed to read Yuuya’s account. (He was.) It led to a file of material written by Yuuya. Mission reports, complaints, logs of phone calls and emails and text strings. Yuuya had catfished party enemies before. He was involved in a botched mission involving the death of a Hawk when he was fifteen. Yuuya had privately investigated whether Mr. Le Bel was involved in his enemies’ activities and had been unable to prove anything by money laundering and corruption.

That file led to a file about Yuuya. That led to a hundred interconnected reminiscences, stories, and off-the-record statements by a hundred regretful men.

Yeah, they had known his father. Yeah, they were proud of Yuuya and grateful for that the family had done. Yeah, they thought Yuuya was a competent, valuable agent. And they regretted what they had asked him to do. If they had known, they said. If they had any idea things were going to come to a head like that…

Sakuya wondered if Yuuya knew they regretted taking him on. He wondered if Yuuya was home more often because they were trying to give him fewer assignments.

He wondered what would happen to them all.

--

Anghel had some kind of meltdown and Sakuya wasn’t allowed to see him for a while afterwards. According to Anghel himself, it was a bad reaction to tapering off of medication too early. He had wanted to come off of anti-psychotics so badly. He had thought he was ready for it.

He was pretty down for a while.

--

It was hard, with his ridiculous schedule, to find time to meet up with Tobias. But somehow, he did it. He wasn’t even sure why at first, but he did it. It was har to even talk to him, but he was a fantastic piano player… good enough that they could do pieces involving two people. Sakuya hadn’t gotten to do something like that since he had a tutor in France.

Tobias had a working knowledge of the classical masters, but something of a swing flair to the way he played, and not long ago, Sakuya would have just railed at that. He would have called it disrespectful to the old masters, crass, pondering to a modern talent—but he had been listening to some of the more recent masters. The Debussys, Shostokovitches, and Gershwins of the recent past, the great minds born in different times, and he found that being forced to play a little differently to account for Tobias’s flair was a challenge, not an offense. And not one he was going to back down to—if he was going to syncopate the rhythm, well, Sakuya was going to see how he liked cut-time. If he was going to ramble and digress and make variations on a theme, well, Sakuya could change the key, compound the chord structure, require an extra staff. If he thought he could get ahead of him—

It was a cold day when, trying to improvise a harmony too complex for either of them to keep up, their fingers crossed on the keys. Tobias laughed as Sakuya startled—and then—he felt light-hearted, he laughed along. He was laughing as heavy fingers traced up his arm. He stopped when he felt them on his chin. He didn’t do anything when Tobias leaned into him, and caught his eyes.

His gaze drifted downward and he didn’t know why.

Not all of the brain is stored in the mind. The body is full of feeling, memory and sense, and it has its idea about what it wants to do, whether we’ve caught up or not. It will remember in tis depths what the spirit floating on the surface of the lake has forgotten—it can move under the stillness. It can tilt your head to ask for a kiss when you haven’t even really thought about whether you like men yet—whether you’ve been running from the question or haven’t had the words to really ask it right. It will open your mouth for you to gently guide you to what it wants while you ask yourself if you knew you wanted this, or if you do at all.

His skin was prickling like buzzing flies when he was let go, an expanse of spring, shifting, light, warm, full of life. He felt hot and unsettled in his core, his lips were like fire where they had just been let go from another man’s, and—he didn’t know what to do.

“What was that for?” he asked, looking for accusation, coming up vague.

“I…” Tobias’s eyes were dilating back. He could see it happening. It was weirdly entrancing. “I thought…”

Sakuya excused himself.

--

Sakuya hit the side of the house with his back and nervously crossed his arms.

Yuuya lowered the cigarette in jolts from his mouth.

Sakuya knew he was staring at him. But he didn’t know what to say, yet.

With just as much hesitation, Yuuya brought the cigarette back up to his mouth to take another drag.

Sakuya coughed a little.

Yuuya lowered the cigarette again.

He had come home over an hour ago. It was earlier than he was usually back on a day he had classes. And tomorrow, he only had to work, so he would, theoretically, have plenty of time to himself tonight—time he would usually choose to spend on research. Between catching up with people he had known in school, regular visits, trolling the archives at HQ, and the work he was doing to compile things privately… he was spending most of his free time on research, wasn’t he?

There were just a few things that… didn’t make sense.

But since he had gotten home today he had done… nothing. He stared at the dishwasher and found himself uncompelled to put dishes away. He put down his books and just stared at them. At length, he changed his clothing. Then he went looking for Yuuya and found that he had stepped outside to have a cigarette.

It was getting cold outside.

“Should I… put it away?”

“It’s fine.”

Yuuya hummed doubtfully. True to form, however, he continued smoking. Sakuya held his breath.

“Do you. Um…”

“…Yes?”

“Don’t you like men?”

Yuuya started a coughing spree that nearly took victims. He bent over the railing and snuffed the cigarette out on his tray. Sakuya tilted his head away and morosely felt himself blushing red. Eventually, Yuuya leaned up again, braced on one elbow. “I’m sorry, did you ask me if?...”

“…If you like men.”

“Sakuya. My innocent petit chou.”

“What?”

“I didn’t know you knew about that.”

“Hey!” Sakuya snapped, cheeks on fire and head full of steam. “I’m not a child! And I’m not stupid. You joke about that sort of thing all the time, but I didn’t know if you were… really just joking, or…”

Yuuya started giggling.

“What?”

Yuuya started laughing at him.

Sakuya hid his face behind on hand. “Stop it, you—god dammit, you little asshole—it’s not that funny!”

Evidentially, it was. And numerous attempts to smack sense into Yuuya didn’t help matters any. Sakuya ended up fuming over the railing while Yuuya made his best attempt to calm himself.

“That was so sweet,” he cackled. “Like a little boy asking mommy why adults kiss.”

“It wasn’t that funny,” Sakuya groused. “And are you laughing too hard to answer the question?”

“But why are you asking, suddenly?”

“What?—Why are you being obtuse? Is it that hard of a question to answer?”

“Historically, yes.”

Sakuya finally gave him a hard look.

“You know, not too many years ago you could get in serious trouble, even killed, for—”

“So… you are.”

“Eh…”

“If you weren’t, you would just say ‘no.’ There’s no reason to go on denying it if… it isn’t true.”

Yuuya’s eyes grew cloudy, then downcast. “Well…” He leaned back and crossed his arms. “Well, is that a problem?”

“No. No!” He had definitely given off the wrong impression. “No, I just… I was… I just didn’t know. I thought it might be true. People joked about it around you often enough—” and he had read some disturbing reports bout Yuuya being used, essentially, as bait—“but I had never… you never said anything about it to me. I don’t know. I wanted to know for sure. I wanted to know why you would never mention it to me. And why you kept lying about having girlfriends, if that’s the case!”

“Hey! I had girlfriends!”

“Did you?”

“Yes! Not as many as I said. Ok, sometimes ‘I have a hot date’ was code for ‘I need to infiltrate a warehouse in hopes of intruding on a secret meeting, I might get shot tonight.’ But I had girlfriends! I like both.”

“So you’re bisexual?”

“You know that word?”

“For the last time, I’m not a child!” Sakuya sighed. “Yes, I know what being bisexual is! I go to college, Yuuya. I talk to people. I see things I never wanted to see. I know how this kind of thing works, I just never… never had the time for it, myself. I would never have had a chance back home… and for as long as I’ve been here…”

“Hey, I understand.”

“Anyway, why not tell me?”

“I…” Yuuya fiddled with his fingers, missing his cigarette. “I didn’t know… how you’d feel. I know. It seems dumb now. But I’ve had people react pretty badly before. I’ve seen men come out swinging at this shit. And you… it wasn’t so long ago you didn’t want to hear anything from me, you know? I don’t know… I didn’t think… I didn’t think you’d be mad at me, but… I didn’t think it would be worth it to risk it.”

Sakuya’s heart sunk hearing that. He knew, he knew he had been an asshole, but he hated facing it so often. And he knew he had to keep facing it, to keep that kind of thing from ever happening again, but… “It’s fine. I don’t mind. I mean… it’s you. And it was pretty obvious, anyway.”

“Then why go out of your way to ask?...”

“Does mom know?”

“Yeah… I kind of slipping it in to conversation and she didn’t even react…”

“Because it’s pretty obvious. You’re so… hm.”

“Finish that sentence, joli.”

“…Open-minded?”

Yuuya slammed his hand onto his heart as Sakuya giggled. “Open-min—Sakuya! A man could be open-minded without being… experimental.”

“Oh, gross,” Sakuya cackled. “Yuuya, no.”

“Open-minded—what if I were just an adventurous sort, hah? Why would ‘ready to try out new things’ have to mean ‘bisexual?’ Sakuya.”

“Okay, Okay.”

Laughter dwindled as Yuuya looked at Sakuya fondly; then he tilted his head to the side. “But again, why ask now?”

Sakuya hesitated. There is still time, he thought, to not do this. “…Tobias kissed me today.”

Well, he did it.

He didn’t look at Yuuya. “We were playing the piano… I didn’t expect it at all and yet, when I saw it coming…” He had meant to go on, but he couldn’t do it. He ducked his head.

“…You liked it?”

“…Yes.” Before he said it, he hadn’t been sure. After, with a feeling of vindictive rebelliousness, he was.

—

...no, I can't believe I stopped there either.

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Speculative Fantailcest Scene

A gentle spring turned more tumultuous over spring break, to Sakuya’s chagrin. What with being a worker and a student, free time was rare, and he would have rather used the free days of spring break for relaxation when he could, rather than running to his least favorite apartment while buffeted by high winds and cold rain and listening to the bare tree branches strike the window as the Doctor shuffled around, muttering at his arcane work. And the Professor sat silently in the other room, sometimes coughing or clattering, as if as a reminder.

Between that and extra work hours to start paying for the next semester’s supplies, it was honestly shaping up to be a dismal break, with half of it done. Hearing that Anghel’s release was on the horizon had cheered him somewhat, but he still found himself erring toward minor keys and legato when he picked himself up to practice. And for once, Yuuya didn’t seem to have it in him to stop it either.

Perhaps the weather was getting to him too. Perhaps something unpleasant had happened at work. Sakuya didn’t know, and by the time he noticed Yuuya was out of sorts (he was still distressingly unperceptive, and perhaps always would be) he had been out of sorts too long for Sakuya to ascertain when it had started or feel comfortable with bringing it up.

Instead, he tried to put those little therapy lessons he had been learning to good use and show active care. He would offer to help if it seemed like there was a task to be done (dishes, errands to run, paperwork), offer to make food or coffee some days, ask Yuuya how he was doing when it wasn’t strictly necessary, and pay attention when spoken to. It ended up that a lot of the rough, day to day work of being a decent friend and family member, which once seemed impossible, consisted of things he had started doing anyway as he adjusted to life with mother and Yuuya.

Without truly noticing, he had become a lot more responsible.

It didn’t occur to him that Yuuya, too, who had always seemed like the mature big brother, was better playing the part until the day Yuuya timed his return from the Doctor’s apartment, showing an adherence to real time that he would never have just a year ago, and intercepted his foul mood with steaming gyokuro.

Sakuya accepted it gratefully, taking a long drink of the scorching tea before putting it back down to shrug himself out of his peacoat. Yuuya grabbed it for him and brought it to the closet as Sakuya unwound his scarf and then found himself removing his sweater and socks as well.

“How high do you have the heater cranked up?” he asked.

“Maybe a little higher than financially prudent,” said Yuuya, addressing and dismissing his concerns at once. “With spring here, I’ll probably only have it on a few more days of the year, so humor me.”

Sakuya shrugged and returned gratefully to his tea.

“You don’t look like you had a good day,” Yuuya began.

“I didn’t,” Sakuya admitted, his tone darker than even he meant. “That damn doctor.”

Yuuya passed a hand over his brother’s shoulder blades. Sakuya let it be there, trailing over the shirt that stuck to his sweaty skin. Sakuya shuddered involuntarily, and Yuuya let him go.

“Did he?...”

“Nothing, really. Absolutely nothing. Didn’t do anything bad, technically. It’s just the way he treats you. Treats everyone, I guess. It’s like nothing is of any weight to him. You would never think that… anything happened at all.”

“For shame.”

“You can just feel his moral apathy.”

“True, actually.”

Sakuya sighed. Yuuya brushed his hand over Sakuya’s far shoulder, clearly unthinking, massaging the height of the bone gently.

“Ugh,” said Sakuya, and leaned into Yuuya.

“Ugh,” Yuuya agreed.

The general heat of the house, and the fact that Yuuya had probably been curled under a blanket until he knew Sakuya was coming home, made Yuuya almost uncomfortably warm. But Sakuya leaned into it, feeling the press of his warm softness underneath his cotton shirt.

It was odd, he thought. Here, tangible, warm, another person, who, had his life gone the way he thought it would have, he would never have even held, not for a thousandth of the time he had on this day. And who was more important to him these days than Yuuya, out of all people alive?

Which was, unfortunately, an important qualification to include.

The last curls of steam were rising off of his tea, which Sakuya quickly finished. “How have you been doing?” he reminded himself to actually ask.

“Can’t complain,” said Yuuya, shrugging, which jostled Sakuya gently. “Had a day off today, actually.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yeah. I could be spared for the day, and I found myself unwilling to not take the option when it was offered to me.”

Sakuya chuckled. “Can’t blame you. Would have if I could have too.”

“Could you not?” asked Yuuya.  “A café runs on a careful time schedule, sure, but you aren’t the only one breathing down the Doctor’s back. He’ll keep working whether you show up to monitor him or not.”

“I… know,” said Sakuya reluctantly. He stared into his empty teacup. “I feel like I have to be there,” he whispered.

Yuuya tensed and untensed at his side. “Why?” he asked gently.

“I don’t know. I don’t… totally know. There are a lot of reasons. I feel like I have to know what’s happening, how close he is, what he’s been doing to my friends. I feel like it’s right to be there for them. Like I visit Anghel or Mrs. Kawara. I feel like I should be there for them, somehow. I feel like… it would be right to say I had been by their side after they came back. I feel like he shouldn’t be left alone with them. I feel like… it’s nonsense, but I feel like if I stop paying attention, stop making sure everything is okay, it’ll just… stop being okay.

“I don’t know.”

Yuuya, softly and with a sigh, leaned into Sakuya to turn the gentle embrace, momentarily, into a hug. Sakuya leaned on his shoulder, and was absolutely determined not to cry.

“I’m not sure what to say,” said Yuuya, very low, “and I won’t insult your intelligence by telling you how I think you’re wrong, but… it’s not resting on you, and it’s not your fault, and you can’t ruin this. That’s not even in your power. If… it doesn’t work, it wasn’t in your power to make it happen.”

Sakuya was very, very determined to not cry.

Yuuya pressed his forehead to Sakuya’s side for a second, and Sakuya could feel his eyelashes flutter, his breath be exhaled. His stomach turned.

Yuuya left him go, careful not to unbalance him after he had been leaning on him, to make two more cups of tea. “This is, what, the third brewing? So don’t worry about it keeping you up all night.”

Sakuya grinned. “I doubt it would matter.”

“If you have sleep issues, the last thing you want to do is help them keep you up all night,” Yuuya admonished. “Take it from a man who has truly fucked that up.”

Yuuya passed another cup around, and they both took a minute to drink the scalding hot first sip. “Did work go well today, though?” asked Yuuya.

“Oh, well enough. Despite it being spring break for so many schools, not many people show up, since no one wants to be outside in that. I do have a lot of younger kids staring at me like they’ve never seen a man in a dress before, though.”

“You know, it is entirely possible—”

“Yes, yes, I know.” Sakuya waved that off with his hand. “But do you know how disconcerting it is to have someone who has to be twelve looking up and down your legs?”

“Yes.”

“Y—of course.”

Yuuya laughed, and Sakuya couldn’t help but join him. After a minute of drinking his tea, Sakuya realized he hadn’t seen Ms. Shirogane yet. “Is mother out?”

“Yes, actually. She’s spending the night at the springs like I’ve been threatening to make her for weeks.”

“Oh, finally.”

“Exactly. You know how she’s missed that sort of thing.”

“Right. and one night, especially with a place like that, isn’t so dreadfully expensive…”

“No, not at all. In fact, when I mentioned it, people were already trying to book her for me.”

“Oh, of course. Then what were you doing all day, home alone?”

Yuuya looked at his brother over the rim of the tea cup, which was fogging the bottoms of his glasses. “Sakuya, I am being totally honest with you when I say I was watching cartoons all day.”

“Wow.”

“Coming back to the real world, even for half an hour, has been very hard on me.”

“You know, no one from work would ever recognize you at home.”

“Work hard, crash hard.”

“Unbelievable.”

“Do you want to watch the rest with me, though?”

“Yes.”

Cups left on the counter and clothes left draped over a chair, the boys were in Yuuya’s small bedroom, in almost uncomfortable darkness as the blinds were lowered and his door was only halfway ajar, with Yuuya fallen ungracefully to the far side of his bed and Sakuya propped up on his elbows next to him.

“Alright, let me catch you up,” said Yuuya, but only after he started playing the next episode.

They spent the first episode arguing as Sakuya tried to watch and tried to keep up with Yuuya’s genuinely awful summation of events. “This one chick” had “an issue” with “the other chick” because of “something that happened,” and already Sakuya was yelling at him to clarify this or the other, or say, wait, what happened there—but they laughed more often as they yelled, and as episodes went on, they both relaxed into the bed, side by side, to watch. The volume went up and the screen brightness went down until it was an almost pastel glow as the moon rose outside and the house around them darkened.

Yuuya had not just turned up the heater, he had drug it into his room, so by about four episodes in, he had decided to take off his shirt, which Sakuya then shoved into his face. Playfully, Yuuya shook Sakuya by his shoulders, dragging him over, and Sakuya shoved him back, until they were inevitably engaged in the mock-fighting that brothers in close quarters would engage in.

“You—if the room’s too hot, turn down the heater, brilliant,” Sakuya teased, trying to knock Yuuya off from vaguely on top of him.

“You are absolutely cramping my life sty—“ Yuuya began, before being shoved backwards in the face.

Laughing, Yuuya eventually let Sakuya go, who rolled onto his back to breathe. Yuuya hoovered mostly above him, also catching his breath.

“No one would believe me,” Yuuya said, “if I told them how absolutely vicious you could be in a tussle.”

“Are you sure? There may have been bets on when I would actually snap. I don’t have absolute evidence of that, but…”

Yuuya fell back against the bed, side by side with his brother, and chuckled. “Technically, you never ‘snapped.’ It was more like a collapse.”

“Well, thanks.”

“Anyway, trying to break my nose was a dirty trick.”

“That was self-defense.”

“What, and you were without a white kid glove to smack me away with?”

Sakuya shoved at Yuuya’s shoulder, which only made him laugh harder, and then rebound against him. Sakuya couldn’t help but smile as well.

Yuuya settled in by his side, hair (he needed a cut) tickling his shoulder, warm side against his own. Sakuya listened to his breaths evening out. “We missed most of that episode,” he said.

“They’re going to keep fighting for five episodes anyway,” said Yuuya.

“You just don’t want to move to rewind it.”

“Do you?”

Sakuya muttered assent, and softly, almost without meaning to, relaxed a little more and knocked his head gently into the crook of Yuuya’s neck. Yuuya shuffled to allow him, and their weights settled together into the dip in the middle of the bed.

The show went on in the background, casting technicolor lights across the planes of Yuuya’s face, cheekbones and the shadow of his eyelashes, and in stripes over his chest. Sakuya, momentarily caught by the light, watched.

The feeling he had had earlier—perhaps gratitude, in some form, perhaps disbelief, perhaps love—snuck up on him, and he thought it was strange all over again. He had never really hated Yuuya when he was young—he thought him insignificant. He hadn’t been important to the life Sakuya led. To think back on the Yuuya he knew in those days, the more suave, more extroverted, more prickly, more—in retrospect—moody and easy to frustrate—he could have never guessed that this softer, more loving, more lovable man lay beneath what he was then, what he was to an outsider looking in.

There was a mystery in this, Sakuya reflected, perhaps even a miracle. In almost any stranger you meet on the street—frustrated client and demanding boss and off-putting student alike—there was inside them a gentle, vulnerable person, with suffering and struggles—and the more closely Sakuya knew Yuuya, the more clearly he saw those sharp-edged struggles, the foundation of pain so much of his careful nonchalance and obsessive attention to detail was built off of—inside every persona of daily life, a person who could be loved. A person you couldn’t even help loving.

“Hey,” asked Yuuya, voice low, “you alright?”

Sakuya turned slightly into his brother. “I,” he said. “it’s odd.”

“Nothing’s that weird to me,” said Yuuya, matter-of-factly, and that too, that nonjudgmental, easy way of dealing with other people, that slowness to hatred or to anger…

Sakuya caught his eyes, but then felt compelled to drop them. Another feeling—some nervousness, some anxiety, was brewing in his chest. It felt—he couldn’t really quantify it, he could only compare it to—

“Yuuya,” he said, “I… feel lucky to have you.”

Yuuya was shocked, and then he smiled. “Oh, you,” he said teasingly, a slight blush on his cheeks, “thank you.” The suddenness of the declaration, Sakuya noted, make Yuuya avert his gaze.

“Yuuya,” he said again.

“What?” he asked.

Sakuya’s stomach was twisting. His breath came out shaking.

(He searched that moment to the point of exhaustion for years to come. Whatever he looked for inside of it, no matter what, he found nothing but another mystery.)

Tilting his head, careful not to knock their skulls or their shoulders together, Sakuya pressed his lips to Yuuya’s cheek, to the curve of his cheek bone, kissing him like saying hello. Yuuya laughed, with a bit of surprise in his laughter, making his body shake underneath him. “Sakuya,” he said, and then Sakuya’s lips dragged off of his cheek, and kissed the bit of soft flesh where his cheek and nose and mouth almost met, more solidly, pushing with the lightest bit of pressure, “Sakuya,”

And so his lips were slightly parted when Sakuya’s found his, not tough, but insistent, pressing lips to lips and then sliding, accidentally, because Yuuya’s mouth was moist and soft. He could feel the ridge of his front teeth beneath them, caught speaking his name.

Somehow, simultaneously, the nervous feeling in his chest grew horrendous and dissipated, like a noise becomes inconsequential when it goes on too long, and his head floated, drifting above him like a soap bubble.

Yuuya parting his lips in a gasp of surprise, which found Sakuya with his tongue, never quite left him. Not ever.

Yuuya didn’t have to push Sakuya away. He hadn’t been planning anything more. He hadn’t been planning anything. But when Yuuya saw Sakuya drawing away from him, lips parted, cheeks flushed, eyelashes shaking open and hair in disarray, pale arms on either side of his shoulders, Sakuya had, inevitably, to see Yuuya, looking absolutely horrified.

“Ah,” said Sakuya, still, in a moment, in the feeling that this could have conveyed.

“Ah—I—” he said again, realizing not only that it hadn’t, but that that wasn’t all there was to it, was there.

“Ah, Sakuya,” said Yuuya, putting up the palms of this hands, not touching, but as if bracing, seeing how Sakuya’s face had fallen and reacting automatically.

“I— oh god, what am I—“

“Sakuya, it’s—“ Yuuya moved up to follow Sakuya as he bolted upwards, but as Sakuya jolted up from his bed, Yuuya stayed halfway there, looking dazed and disoriented, his hands up and his pupils blown wide.

“I’m—I—“ Sakuya caught Yuuya’s wild stare, released it, and caught it again. “I’m sorry.”

He was out of the room and had slammed the door. Yuuya, in the dark of his room, with the dialogue still whispered from his computer, knocked sideways to the wall in the scuffle, breathed heavily in the darkness, staring ahead of him.

Then he got himself the fuck together, grabbed his shirt, and pulled it over his shoulders as he went after his brother.

He saw the door to Sakuya’s bedroom slamming and felt immensely glad that the fool boy hadn’t decided to run out into the freezing rain, which had only gotten colder with nightfall, most likely. Shuffles and bangs came from behind the door, and swallowing, Yuuya approached it cautiously.

“Sakuya?” he asked, not liking the nerves in his own voice. “Sakuya, are you?...”

He didn’t reply. All Yuuya heard, quite some space away from the door, was the rapid, harsh, nasal breathing that usually heralded a panic attack. Or perhaps sobbing.

Judging by the sounds, Sakuya had to be crouched on the opposite end of the room, as far away from the door as he could get. Yuuya melted against the doorframe, shaking knees meeting the ground. “Sakuya… it’s okay, alright? I dunno what it is, but it’s okay.”

Sakuya didn’t say anything. Once, Yuuya thought he heard a stifled sob.

Alright. Alright. Yuuya closed his eyes, and focused himself. Shove it aside, he told himself. Later, you can handle yourself. You’re a tough international spy who can sort his own issues out in privacy later. Now…

Now, as always, Sakuya was more important.

He breathed deeply himself, to help trick his body into stillness. His heart into a normal rhythm. “Sakuya,” he said, in a much calmer voice. “Hey. It’s fine. I’m not mad. I’m not really freaked out. It’s not the end of the world. And… hey, it’s alright.”

There wasn’t much to say that didn’t acknowledge the inherent fucked-up qualities of what had just happened, and Yuuya was going to avoid that until panic had left the building. It was the best choice for dealing with volatiles. “Talk to me, Sakuya.”

The most tear-choked, strangled voice he had ever in his life heard, said “I’m sorry.”

Yuuya held it down. “It’s okay. I’m not mad. That was… I’m not mad. It’s okay, alright? You know this isn’t… you know I’m not going to be daunted by this. Didn’t even… you gotta break a bone before I’m worried.”

Sakuya made the gross sniffle of someone trying to laugh, kind of, but they couldn’t quite shift gears. “Ugh.”

“I’m serious.” Yuuya waited for a minute, searching for something to say. Sakuya was, it seemed, trying to be quiet. “Could I come in?”

He wasn’t sure if being physically there at the moment was necessarily the best plan, but he also knew Sakuya was someone who wouldn’t feel pressured if he didn’t want it. Or, well, was he anymore? Humility had been slowly introducing hesitation to him.

In any case, after some more silence, the lock unlatched, and the door swung open a little. Just in case Sakuya was scrabbling away from the door, Yuuya waited a little and then slowly walked in.

Sakuya was hunched, knees to chest, but posture not as miserably closed as Yuuya had thought, on the other side of his bed. Yuuya walked carefully, quietly, into the room and then sat down next to him. Sakuya was looking away; his eyes were reddened and his skin was blotching, but he was only just hitching his breath with sobs. Apparently the panic had hit him and run—he was left with misery.

Yuuya curled his own hands around his knees. “Hey.”

“Hey.”

Yuuya listened to him breath.

“I feel disgusting.”

His guts twisted.

“You’re not.”

“Really.”

“You’re not. People are weird. We’re fucked up as a rule. We don’t always understand what we’re doing. And frankly, we weren’t raised together, so the bulk of the chemical underlay that natural siblings usually develop to dissuade them from incest didn’t—“ Sakuya flinched hard. “Seriously, there’s been science done on this.”

Sakuya slowly turned his head, buried in one hand, and looked at Yuuya was one grimacing eye. “That must have been terrible science.”

“We owe a lot to terrible scientists,” said Yuuya, meaning to make a general statement and making Sakuya twitch again. “Forget that entire thing I just said. My point is that… people pretend that… relationships, the way to define how we relate to people, is a system that’s solid, innate, and easy to understand. Personally, I’ve never known it to be so. I never… know the way I feel about anyone. We depend on chemical drops to process properly in our brains and for our brains to understand what they mean and what to do about them, and for our bodies to do that, and wires can get crossed or messages dropped on every second to way. Sometimes you can’t drudge up the feelings you should feel about someone. Sometimes those feelings are confused.  Sometimes you can’t understand them or you panic and you do the wrong thing. Relationships are messy. People are lucky if they have a set of relationships that perfectly fit the societal standard for what relationships they should have. One lover, some friends, two parents, a few rivals or enemies. Most of us aren’t that lucky. We get wires crossed.”

Sakuya was looking at his brother now, with a searching look. Yuuya realized he was opening doors that were usually shut. It was making some panic brew inside of him as well, but he was reaching for whatever would possibly, even a little, help Sakuya feel better.

Not something he usually did, so maybe he was oversharing a little. Just a little.

“I’ve not seen many people who had things straightened out nice and neat. Maybe not any, and I’ve seen a lot of people. I’ve seen a lot of bad cases. No one has it easy. That’s why I even know this awful science stuff—“ Sakuya snorted, which was great—“I’ve had to comfort daughters of my coworkers, friends of my friends, wondering how someone they knew and trusted could have… Anyway. What I’m saying is, I’ve seen some shit. Some real hellish shit that shouldn’t have happened to anyone, ever.” Yuuya leaned back a bit, stretched his shoulders, and went for it. “After that, I can handle a kiss from a cute boy.”

Sakuya breathed in and out deeply. “Un. Believable.”

“Don’t be like that. You’re cute, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”

“Unbelievable. I can’t. Seriously. Unbelievable.”

“Who made you feel this way.”

“Is this you trying to comfort me? Is that what’s happening?” He said that, but his shoulders were shaking a little, and he was smiling.

Yuuya felt—like the sun came through the clouds.

It was amazing to him, suddenly, that his boy, this wonderful person, this whole person, loveable and full of love, had been hiding under that snarky asshole he used to vaguely know (and used to vaguely feel cheated by).

Having no idea at all, Yuuya reached to put a gentle hand on Sakuya’s back. He didn’t flinch. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” said Sakuya, a little automatically.

“It’s… nothing will change,” he tried.

“I don’t know what I was doing,” he said, face falling again.

Yuuya turned away, the little bit of his own panic trying to claw its way up. “Does anyone…”

Sakuya started speaking again, and Yuuya realized he should be letting him. “I don’t… it was there and gone, and all of a sudden, I don’t know what I was doing again. It seemed…” Sakuya ducked to hide his face in his knees. Yuuya tried to rub soothing circles into his back, with the constant fear he was being too handsy. Considering. Sakuya took a deep breath. “I wasn’t treating you like a brother.”

Yuuya had to breathe for a moment.

“Do you fully realize that? I wasn’t… I was trying…”

“Hey,” Yuuya said again, softly, acceptingly. “I mean, we’ve only been brothers for, like, a year.”

“Yuuya.”

“I need you to know—”

“Listen to me.” Sakuya’s shoulders hardened, and Yuuya let go of them, but hovered. “I wasn’t treating you like a brother. I. Was being.”

Yuuya cut him off. “I know. Sakuya, I’m listening, and I understand. You were.” Now his own throat was tightening. “I’m not mad. I don’t feel grossed out or less fond of you. I have understood the gravity of the solution, and it doesn’t change anything.”

Yuuya wanted to say more, say anything, when Sakuya didn’t respond. He bit it off, painfully, knowing more words would be more pressure. But the act of caring for him clashed with his sheer care for him—his need to show Sakuya how he felt, his need to know that Sakuya knew.

Gently, with the air of having worked up the nerves to do it, Sakuya rested his head on Yuuya’s shoulder—so gently, able to be wrenched off again for a second. Yuuya, with equal care to not startle him or seem like he was pushing him off, tangled his hand in the thick, tickling strands of Sakuya’s hair, combing it.

“I don’t know what to do,” Sakuya admitted.

Yuuya brushed strands of his hair into neatness, chin curling toward him unintentionally.

Maybe 15 minutes, maybe half an hour later, Yuuya quietly told him he was heating up the rest of the tea—would he like some?

He did.

They drank the reheated tea across the table from each other, then had dinner, then did Sakuya’s homework together—Yuuya barely holding himself up as he listened to Sakuya try to finish a composition over, over, and over. Yuuya didn’t think it needed anything more.

-

(Yuuya wouldn’t say he focused on the incident. He considered it in his interactions with Sakuya, making sure he handled him with caution in the ensuing days. And a good thing, too, considering how brittle he looked for the next few weeks until time removed the sting from that day, how tense around his eyes.

And he sometimes wondered about it, late at night, or alone outside of a building, taking a smoke break. Wondered what Sakuya was trying to start. Wondered if there was a whole path they might have walked down. Wondered if there were feelings he was suppressing. Wondering if he had made a mistake to make Sakuya feel that way. Encouraged it somehow.

Provoked him.

Wondered if Sakuya had picked up on something.

Wondered if not everyone sometimes wondered about what it would be like to caress his brother.

Wondered if Sakuya hadn’t started it.

He assumed he was being too hard on himself and that this was an adolescent thing that would blow over until he woke up from a beautiful, peaceful dream about Sakuya’s light skin underneath his lips; Sakuya’s eyelashes tickling his cheeks, Sakuya on his hands. And had to come back to reality in awful stages.

Then he knew he had to stop wondering and heal differently. He had to trust the simpler healing of time, because he would not puzzle this, and he might not want to.)

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