TW: Depression, suicide mention.
It doesn't happen once. Ayano steps off that ledge a thousand times, and Kano does't exist for the next few days. He just can't look away. He can't bear to not see her, the shine of her eyes and the glint of her smile that breaks so many promises as it topples with her off the edge. He can't stop watching, because he'd rather live in a world in which all she does is die than in one where she's actually gone.
He doesn't sleep, doesn't eat. Throws up his food anyway, and soon his ability is putting meat on his bones where none exists, in addition to hiding the tears that fall every moment, day and night. Those nights are probably the worse, with no white noise to drown out his thoughts. Lord help me.
He's silent, save when he screams. It's not often. Painful, wet screams from some deep blackness within him, a wail of self hatred and uselessness and it should have been me, it should have been me, it should have been me. It couldn't have been, he knows, but it should have been. Once, he catches his own gaze in the reflection on the glass of a picture of Ayano. He sees red, and smashes. Kano hates red, the colour of monsters. The colour of all that's been lost. It streams from his knuckles and he suddenly hates himself more than ever because this red is within him, the colour of all Ayano's promises of family and love and forever are coursing through him and he screams, God, take it out of me.
Seto and Kido keep a closer eye on him after that. Hide the knives and the glass. They're afraid for him, but also of him, and that's okay. What's a monster care?
They never once blame him, but he does. You let her go you couldn't save her you let her die you killed her it's your fault how could you kill her Kano how could you watch her die? They try to talk to him, talk to a murder who killed their sister, but he doesn't let them much. Because, goddamn it, heaven help him, he still gives a shit about them.
He hates that. He hates that he cares for them, the idea of family still resides within him, too deep to pull out, tear out of his knotted stomach, yet somehow not deep enough to rot to nothingness within him. That's the problem, isn't it? It's not a part of him, it is him. It's his core, the brittle skeleton beneath thin skin. Ayano fed it into him until he became what he ate and even as he withers and chokes on bile, knees braced to the floor, he can't seem to get it out.
Even if they don't speak, Kido brings him soup. Seto brings bread from the bakery that must have employed him, judging by the floury aprons. When he eats none of it, Kido comes back, takes the dishes, wanders away. She'll say his name, "Oi, Kano." Or, "Kano, Kano, Kano," in a faded, disapproving, motherly voice that stings his eyes.
Except one day, she doesn't. Kido doesn't say a word, but she slams his door. Again, the next time, harder, and harder, and harder, until the whole place shakes and Seto comes down the hall asking her if everything's okay. But nothing is okay. Nothing will be okay.
"No, Seto! It's not okay!" She echoes. "How can anything be okay when Ayano is dead and Kano might as well be?!" She's angry. Furious. Not playfully angry, not irritated. He can hear her shaking by the tone of her voice and he can hear her fall into Seto's arms by the shuffled of her feet and he can hear how badly he's hurting her, because this is what he does. Hurt people, kill them. First Ayano then himself, now Kido. He wonder's vaguely, smiling sadly at his ceiling, if he'll break Seto, too, before this whole 'living' thing he's half doing blows over.
The next day, Kido brings Seto in with her. "Eat it," she whispers, more to the bread than to him. Seto puts an arm around her waist, and she says it again. Loudly, scared. "Eat it, Kano, please."
She's standing about a scarf's length away, hand outstrethed. he's sitting, elbows on his knees, lying but now about the colour of his eyes. Her hand waves, beckoning. "God damn it, Kano, eat the damn thing." Voice wavers, cracks.
Then she's moving quickly, so quickly that it catches him off guard and he falters, his receding form apparent for a breath and she strattles him, painfully buries a head in the chest that's barely there at all. Kido shouts, screams. "Eat it Kano! God damn it, please don't die on me, too! Eat it!" The roll is shoved against the corner of his mouth as her words echo against empty walls. He takes the tiniest bit between his teeth behind his bored frown, but by now Seto is pulling her off, calling her name. He's stronger than he looks, squeezing her against him as she struggles and throws the roll against the wall beside Kano's head.
She gives up, deflates against Seto and he looks at Kano, I'll be right back in his eyes as he holds Kido and guides her back out of the room. The sobs penetrate the walls. Ten, twenty minutes pass before Seto keeps his unspoken word. "I was taking care of her," he says, implication unclear to Kano, who picks up some pieces of bread and nibbles on them. Seto sits beside him.
"Kano, maybe this is my fault, maybe I should have said something sooner, but… We're still here for you. We still love you. Even if we're not directly siblings anymore, doesn't mean you have to go through this alone, you know? We're just trying to take care if you." Kano says nothing, feeling everything. There's no way… With Seto's ability, he should know better than anyone that Kano is a monster, nothing more.
"You know," Seto continues after a long, expectant pause, "Kido sleeps in my bedroom. She's had nightmares since…" He trails off, staring with a sad smile at something far more emotional than Kano's empty wall. "We're sticking together, Kano. Just… Don't make us lose you too." Kano doesn't move, doesn't breathe. "You're family, you always will be."
The word burns, straight through his ears and into the darkness if his mind, if his everything. Family. No, no, not family. Something else, something lost, something broken. There are not are, there are were, they are empty space and lonely gazes and they are so much more than nothing, but so much less than love. Kano's disgusted, angry now, no longer a numb sleeping giant, a bomb that ticked too long. When Seto asks him to say something, Kano lies his angry tears away and lets the rage show.
The rage is not a lie.
Seto stumbles out of his room, red beneath his cheeks and down his chin, tail between his legs, and Kano is alone again.
The next morning, Ayano walks out of Kano's room. She sits down on the couch, ladylike and smiling, and Kido just stares from where she is in the kitchen.
Seto's "Good morning~" is entirely out if place in the tension, and he stops dead in the hallway entrance when he sees her. "-A-ano…" He says ambiguously.
Small noises fill the room. Kido adding a couple eggs to the pan she's stirring. Seto's footsteps toward the stove. Three sets of breathing.
"I should get to work," Seto says, more quietly now, kissing the top of Kido's head and waving goodbye to Ayano. "I love you guys."
Ayano eats the eggs set in her lap with a grateful grin. "Thank you, Kido! Your eggs are just as good as Mom's!"
A smile. "Thank you, Nee-chan."
And Kido humored her. For ten minutes, until all the eggs were gone, and then the sweet words and the smiles were too much. "Please stop. This doesn't make it easier, Kano. This… This makes it worse. Please."
And there's that damn caring again, but still no family. Even with her back, it's not the same. It can't ever be the same, not by the look on Kido's face, the tremble in her words. Words, themselves, mean so little, as no one knows better than a liar. But the way she's sitting so distantly, the way her eyes lacked trust Kano never realized she had in the first place, he knew that family was not only gone, it was gone forever.
"I just… I'd pay anything to get her back. Even myself." Kano shook when Kido held him. He doesn't know for certain, but he thinks Kido might have, too.
Finally, he sleeps. Right there, blanketed in conflicting ideas and heartache. He dreams of flying over the ledge after her. He dreams of begging a black mass. Though only for a moment, he dreams of finally getting her back.
"He's back, he's asleep." Kano wakes up to Kido's voice. The faint smell of apricot jam and sweat sweep over Kano's nose as footsteps cross the floor.
"Should I carry him back?" Seto asks gently, and Kido murmurs something about him never coming back out if he goes in. One door closes behind them.
They wake up, and he's still there, eyes dead but heart still beating. Motionless, mind a snail's pace. Ayano's not coming back, and neither are her warm feelings. Her promises. All of it, all of it is gone forever, forever. Maybe they were lies in the firstplace, but probably not. Lies never hurt like this. Only the cold hard truth hurts like this.
Weeks pass in the blink of an eye, and he is no longer a monster. He is now only a black hole. Now less than nothingless, and endless chasm of empty and taking and draining, draining, draining it all. Seto doesn't carry him, so he doesn't go. He nibbles the food Kido brings him, when he moves.
"We still love you," they say. He doesn't know if it's true. But he pulls it in, drinks in the affection, drinks in the hugs and kisses to cheeks and all of it, and hopes they understand. They kiss each other on the cheek, too. He wonders vaguely if their family has undergone a new dynamic, or parts of it, but he doesn't care. It's all too confusing and painful to think about now, the love and family and care, so he doesn't. Doesn't think, doesn't bother to name anything, give anything meaning or value, or power.
He only exists, if you consider it existing. Kido doesn't grow mad at him for this like she did his utter reclusion. The fourth stage of grief, she calls it. Seto worries, to the point that it feels weird to not wake up with Seto's hand or handwriting in his grasp.
"Things will get easier."
"You're not alone."
"We love you, Kano."
"Please don't give up on us."
Little notes in pen scratch, left on his skin not like a brand, but like a tattoo, something to seep into his skin and never truly disappear.
When Seto has evenings off, he goes on walks. Usually he goes alone, sometimes with Kido. He chats with stray cats and he's heard every bird and does equally ryhme-y, Seto-y things, or he takes Kido with his arm around her shoulders; when they come back, she smells like him.
It's Kido's idea to take Kano by the hand and almost literally drag him along. Seto ends up carrying him, but he says he doesn't mind, and dips Kano down to be kissed by a dog when they pass one. The evening light is warm and violet, new to Kano's pale, cold features. It almost feels nice.
Kano doesn't know what exactly Kido and Seto typically talk about on these walks, but today they talk about each of their days. Seto met a cute little girl with an extremely patient pet lizard. Kido found the box she'd been looking for in the upper cabinet, but was too short to reach it. Kano feels when their eyes land on him, expectant but not aggressive.
"I thought about Ayano today." A lie, but considering he didn't do or think about anything today, he has no idea what they expected of him. Seto squeezes him a bit, though, so maybe that's enough.
There's silence. It's not quite awkward, but not quite comfortable. It's just sort of… There. They are just sort of there. And maybe that's what hits him, their currently unending existence, the silence of their togetherness. The emptiness that will always exist in a world devoid of fairy tale magic.
The world is not poetic, Kano realizes as the cool evening air washes over him. When people die, they take nothing with them. They have no hands to steal away that which remains after them. Ayano is dead. And though, to Kano, her memory will always be one of the most important things, she is not important anymore.
It hurts, it hurts that reality not only steals her but renders everything cold and meaningless, that there is no magic still in his skin from her touch. It hurts to realize that there are no ropes binding Kano to the illusions he'd been living, the illusion that the emptiness was left by a loss of something magical from Nee-chan. There was never something magical to begin with.
It does not hurt that nothing is missing now, no family has been lost, no love or care has been stolen.
"Let me down, Seto." It comes out breathily, calmly. For the first time in weeks, months, it sounds like Kano.
"Huh? What's wrong?"
Kano nearly laughed at that, smiling up at Seto truthfully. "It's okay. I know you love holding me, but there's something I need to do."
With a glance toward Kido, Seto lets him down. Kano shakes, nearly falls, but two arms brace him. They set him back on his feet, and his smile grows.
"You still love me, right, Tsubomi, Kousuke?"
"Of course!"
"Don't be stupid."
Taking Seto's hand in one grip, Kido's in the other, he takes a step forward.
"Yeah, I love you guys, too."