Title: Forsake All the World for the Wild
Rating: SFW (implications of everything you'd expect with Kozue)
Wordcount: 3,246
Summary: More and more, Kozue doesn't understand her brother at all, and she can't make him understand her.
Note: Written for Morbane for the 2015 round of everywoman.
She comes home late with her blouse unbuttoned far enough to reveal the red marks along her collarbone. Miki doesn't look at her as she comes in; he's staring out the window, at the moonlit ruin of the garden. His stopwatch clicks.
"Did you wait up for me?" she asks, setting her hand on her jutting hip.
He doesn't turn. "Someone really should clean that up. It used to be beautiful."
She presses herself against him from behind, peering around his shoulder, and feels him stiffen. "It was never a garden, you know. It's always been a jungle."
When he shoves her away, she laughs.
There's a script all adults read from, printed in between the lines of storybooks. Kozue used to listen as avidly as her brother, letting the words wrap tight and safe around her: Don't leave home alone. Beware of strangers. Do as your parents tell you, and always say the magic words.
That's how they tame you, she realized after she sat alone on the stage, silent and paralyzed. That's how they make you forget that you're dangerous. She fled, but she should have shattered the piano and howled her own music. The adults would have cowered before her as she exposed the fragility of their power. But she didn't, because she can't do anything without Miki.
It's funny, she thinks. Miki doesn't understand because he wasn't there, and she wouldn't understand if he had been. She can't explain it to him. Perhaps he'd learn on his own if she abandoned him, but she can't. So he huddles in the husk of their nest, armoring himself with twigs, and she kicks her heels against the edge. If she kicks hard enough, maybe she can bring the whole thing crashing down.
Leaving the nest is the only way to see how absurdly small it is. Teeth glitter ominously in the woods below, but Kozue has teeth of her own. Miki would, too, if he mirrored her grin.
She lets a boy walk her to the music room so that she can bid him a long goodbye at the door, playing with the buttons on his shirt. Miki's piano music isn't loud enough to drown out her laughter. He must be able to hear them, and if he would only turn, he would see them through the glass.
He doesn't turn. His shoulders don't even hunch the way they do when he doesn't turn on purpose.
Annoyed, Kozue pushes the boy away. She slams the door on his protests.
Miki keeps playing as she leans against the piano, even as she splays her hand over the sheet music. He doesn't need to read it, anyway. "What're you so excited about?" she asks. "It's always the same old song."
"I found it," he says without looking at her.
"Found what?"
"My shining thing."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
At last he seems to realize that he's talking to his sister; he glances up at her with narrowed eyes and misses a note. "Of course you wouldn't understand."
She jabs the highest C, producing a discordant little shriek. He makes an exasperated noise and refuses to look up again.
My shining thing, he said, the way he used to say my home or my sister. It sticks to Kozue like a burr.
Late at night, restless, she slips out of bed and tiptoes outside. The grass is cold against her bare feet. The overgrown garden clings to her nightgown. Below, all the world is dark, so she peers up at the sky.
Not the moon, not the stars—those belong to everyone as much they belong to anyone, and Miki doesn't like to share. In the real world, all that glitters is sharp. Of course he wouldn't understand that.
She can sully herself and the piano at once. It's almost as good as reaching back across time to smear mud on her own cheeks and growl in her own ear. Maybe Miki would have run away with her if she'd come to in the height of a frenzy, skin hot enough to match his fever. Adults are liars, she could have said. You're probably not even really sick. Wild animals heal fast, anyway.
Kozue is still flushed when she slides open the music room door and collides with her brother.
Her timing couldn't have been better. She doesn't have to do anything at all, just smile with her tie askew and her hair curling damply around her face. Miki's eyes are fixed on her, and will be long after she leaves him. The girls she greets as she saunters away know her look and ask in eager whispers about her latest boy, as if boys are worth asking about.
In the corner of her vision, she tracks the approach of that weird girl the Student Council bickers over—Hinamoto? Hinohara? Kozue's eyes narrow instinctively, and she trusts her instincts. Never trust anyone who smiles like a mother, or whose eyes show you nothing but your own reflection.
When the girl enters the music room, Kozue thinks, of course. Miki craves the kind of light that he can keep bottled like a firefly.
She sullies the piano again, this time with her hands. Every wrong note is a rebellion.
One of her classmates gently pokes fun at her. No one mocks Kozue in earnest; they treat her with the respect owed a predator, something to be admired from afar. Kozue's so cool most of the time, they whisper behind her, but you never know what might set her off. They don't understand, but at least they know she isn't tame.
"Well, I was never any good at it," she replies lightly. The talent has always been Miki's; she couldn't have played without him. She had to need him.
"Then why were you playing?"
She makes up a story so nearly true that it isn't a lie, not really. Adults lie; wild animals camouflage.
Miki is beautiful and pure and shining and unsullied, but he's also an idiot. He waits for any problem he doesn't know how to deal with to flow around him. He closes his eyes as if he expects to become invisible. He curls up small and still as if he expects their mother to return and put her weight between him and the world. How is it, Kozue wonders, that he knows enough not to trust adults, but not enough to break away from them?
She can see it in the stiffness that he forces out of his shoulders when his music teacher touches him. In his mind he's safe in the nest, high above the hand he's pretending not to feel. How can he feel anything so far above the darkness of the woods? How can anything exist unless he acknowledges it?
Idiot, idiot, idiot. He still wants to believe that monsters can't climb trees.
Kozue can't do anything without him, but for him she has grown claws and fangs. If he's so determined to stay in the nest, blind and helpless as a chick, then she will fight the world away from him. Her hands are already filthy. What's a little blood?
As he sleeps, twitching with nightmares, she growls into the phone, "Next time, it'll be worse."
When he opens his eyes, he doesn't look at her. He doesn't want to see anything but Himemiya.
it's all the witch's fault
Her fingers remember the notes the way a spider remembers how to weave a web.
the witch took him away
He has something sharp in him, after all; he hides it in his heart.
he will never be free as long as the witch lives
She can't do anything without him, so she takes everything she can from him.
kill the witch kill the witch killthewitch
The milkshake is so sweet that she gags on it.
More and more, Kozue doesn't understand her brother at all, and she can't make him understand her. His mouth tastes something satisfying in cloying drinks; his eyes see a garden in the overgrown wilds; his ears hear a duet from two hands. He has to change, she thinks, even if it ruins him. She can't protect him from the world forever.
When the chairman finds her wandering the school grounds at night, alone and insouciant, he turns out to be the kind of adult that she knows what to do with. All adults have power, and none of them can be trusted. The trick is to find an adult whose power you can take. The trick is to have no purity left, so they can't take anything from you.
After everything she's done for her brother, it's her moment of kinship with doomed animals that finally draws his eyes back to her. It figures, really. He's always had a thing for lost causes.
He still won't look at her, so she clings to his back. It would be better if Tenjou weren't following them like a dumb, eager dog, and better still if Himemiya weren't gliding after. Miki's such an idiot; Kozue's instincts about the Rose Bride have been vindicated, but even if she'd never spoken a word to Akio, she'd know better than to trust Himemiya. Always lift any gown long enough to hide talons; always assume a closed smile hides fangs; always question how a frail-looking creature survives. It's funny how the members of the Student Council fight for the right to let a serpent coil around them.
Maybe it's funnier that Kozue hurt herself to save chicks that will probably waste away, too weak to survive on their own, but her wildness has never been ruthless enough, for better or worse. She'll heal quickly, anyway. She's always had to.
"You really should return them to their parents," Himemiya says with barbed sweetness, and Kozue thinks, aha, maybe now Miki can see her for what she is. But he still can't, and at this rate he never will.
Kozue throws away the letter from their mother, knowing that he'll dig it out of the trash. She can't imagine what it says, and she doesn't care. Adults lie and lie and lie until they say something that draws you in, and then they use it to weave a cage around you. Miki always listens, even when he closes his eyes and projects himself up and away. He wishes on stars for things buried in the dirt.
He needs to go after what he wants, she decides. That's the only way he'll ever understand anything.
Akio is a strange adult. He reads the script like any grown-up, but he reads it to himself as much as to her. He goes on about princesses and witches, about princes and devils, as if he truly can't envision a world where everyone isn't one or the other. As if no one has ever leapt from one nest without landing in another. As if there is no outer darkness beyond his reach, where only teeth shine.
That's why Kozue likes him, though. Unlike other adults, he doesn't pretend to be anything but a predator. She takes with her claws out and doesn't care what he takes in return, because she has nothing left to lose. The End of the World is nakedly transactional.
"In the end," he tells her, "all women are like the Rose Bride."
She laughs, because she'll never be a woman. She's a beast in a dress.
The tree is gone, so they build a false one, together. It's a lie, but it isn't meant to last. Sometimes you have to lie to people who aren't ready to understand the truth. Even beasts know when to conceal their sharp parts.
Roses don't, but the one Miki offers doesn't even need thorns to pierce Tenjou's skin. You can do a great deal of damage, Kozue has come to realize, without claws.
As Tenjou walks away, Miki's shoulders hunch. He chews his lower lip as he begins to gather up their tools.
Kozue is sick of lying, so she curls her hand around the pole of the nest box and cranes her neck to croon, "Hurry up and get big enough to fly away, or you'll die."
Miki nearly drops the hammer. "Kozue!"
"It's true. Their parents aren't coming back for them." She thumps her palm against his chest. "What kind of sword can I pull out of your heart, if you can't even understand that?"
For once, he can't act without her. It's still his power, but she commands it; still his heart, but she shapes it. Funny how it all feels more hollow than gratifying.
That isn't the point, anyway. He's finally getting his hands dirty to dig for something that never even existed, and he still doesn't understand. Perhaps, she thinks bitterly, he'll never understand. All he wants is something that shines brightly enough to blind him.
Kozue leaps into the passenger seat of one of the cars, skirt billowing up around her, and isn't surprised when the engine roars to life. It tips up on its side and zooms around the edge of the arena without any regard for gravity. Akio isn't in the driver's seat, but she knows he's still the one doing the driving. In the space of a blink, Himemiya appears to hold his place.
Akio can't do anything without her. Which is worse, Kozue wonders: to depend on someone else's strength, or to have strength you can't use yourself?
"I hear people who get engaged to you get an amazing power," she says, draping herself into Himemiya's space. Himemiya is still and silent as a doll, but the seat reclines beneath her. It would feel like a trap, if Kozue weren't setting one of her own. "What kind of power?"
Over the roar of engines and clash of swords, Miki cries out her name.
Himemiya's eyes are glass. Seeking her reflection in them, Kozue leans in and whispers, "Show it to me."
Miki's voice is anguished: "Kozue!"
"Pay attention," she says flatly, without looking up, "or you'll lose."
She has his eyes, as surely as if she swallowed them. Himemiya's skin feels like porcelain under her hands, hollow and artificial. There's nothing here she wants to take.
He forsakes his light for her.
It's a hollow victory. It's not really a victory at all.
He's still staring into the nest box, still waiting. If the parents did come back, he'd scare them off. Maybe he knows that. Better to die in the nest, he must think, than live in the wild. His hands are dirty, but he still refuses to take hers. He hasn't let go of anything at all.
She shows him her teeth. "Coward."
As she watches the badminton match from the balcony, Kozue realizes what she's been getting wrong. The problem isn't that Miki won't leave the nest; it's that when he does, he'll leave without her.
All this time she's been tugging at him while he burrows deeper and deeper. If she lets go, she'll tumble backward. If she lets go, he'll blink away the dazzle and see that he has wings, and then he'll fly where she can't follow. She is a beast made for low places.
The only way to get what you want is to roll around in the dirt. This is a secret truth that adults swallow, the kind that they can cage with their teeth but can't stop oozing out through their actions. What she should have wondered is what happens if you stop wanting. Miki isn't looking at her, or Himemiya, or anyone at all; he shades his eyes against the sun and focuses on the birdie.
Kozue has spent her life tearing apart the world for him. It isn't fair.
She runs home to find that her own dazzle has faded. The garden is a jungle, but it's still as small as it ever was. The dark is shallow. Nothing glitters at all. There's nothing for it but to fly away, but she grew claws instead of wings. She can't do anything without him.
Girls have to be princesses or witches, wild animals have to be ruthless, and they all have to grow up into something no one wants. It isn't fair. She's sick of it.
She's sick of everything. After the sun sets, she walks back to the campus, alone. She pours a handful of ground millet into the nest box and holds her breath until she hears chirping. Then she jimmies a flimsy lock to let herself into the indoor pool, where she stands for a long time at the edge. The moonlight falls in through the decorative window, shining a slanted, wobbly rose on the water.
Leaving her clothes in a pile, Kozue dives naked into the pool. She holds her breath until her lungs burn. When she comes up for air, her gasp echoes.
She swims in silence, in and out of the light, until she doesn't hate the thought of going home.
In her dream, the world cracks open, and Kozue falls, alone.
There is no forest below the nest, only a darkness that feels eternal, and the only light gleams from blades. They cut away her gown, her fur, her feathers, until she is only a small, bare kernel of a thing, burnt clean by the wind. Her dream has the trappings of a nightmare, but she isn't afraid; after everything else is stripped away, what is left of her is unbreakable.
When she finally hits the ground, she doesn't shatter. She wakes up on the floor beside her bed. Her shoulder throbs with the promise of a bruise.
Miki, too, has rolled out of bed. Lying on their sides, they stare at each other until he asks, "Are you okay?"
"Of course." She pushes herself up and doesn't mind the ache in her arm, because it reminds her that she's awake. "Are you?"
He nods and sits up. "I'll make breakfast."
"No, I'll do it."
"Then I'll make tea." He offers his hand, and after a moment's hesitation, she takes it. They rise together.
They don't say anything as they work, nor as they eat, but they sit together at the front window to watch the sun rise over Ohtori. Not every view overlooks the garden.
On her way home, Kozue passes a group of girls gossiping about Himemiya. She dropped out, one claims. No, she transferred somewhere overseas, says another. A third says, I heard she graduated, which elicits a scoff: You can't graduate halfway through junior high. Somehow it's all settled with, Well, she did anyway.
And Kozue thinks, good for her.
She stops at the music room and peeks through the glass. Inside, Miki is teaching a younger boy how to use a stopwatch. He looks up as she comes in, nods, and goes back to what he's doing. After a moment, she recognizes the boy as the one who's always getting bossed around by Nanami.
"Remember to look up," Miki says. "Nothing actually stops." Maybe he's finally learned something, after all.
The piano is free. Kozue sits at it, sideways. It's been a while, she thinks, since they were in a room together quietly, without one or both of them vibrating with adrenaline. It's been a while since she came near a piano without wanting to fight or fly.
Her fingers remember the notes, so she plays them silently in the air, then leaves to feed the birds.