Her name is originally Watanabe Setsuka, and she is the cause of a shotgun wedding. She has her half-American mother's baby blues and silvery blood hair. She is a beautiful baby and, three months into her life, her pictures make her an infant model. Soon she is broadcast in various baby commercials and even stars as a toddler for a new drama series.

The fairytale ends when she turns three. Her beautiful, beautiful mother no longer looks the angelic beauty she once could have been. Her hair is thin and limp, her eyes dull and empty, and she looks more and more gaunt with each day. She runs five months after Setsuka's third birthday and never looks back to the child she left behind.

Her heartbroken father begins to waste away. He skips meals and calls in sick to work until he no longer has a job to call in to and only liquor fills the cupboards. All he ever does is sit on the couch and watch reruns of their family home videos.

Sometimes he makes her stand on the circular coffee table like she is a doll or a statue. He prohibits her from dressing, and she cannot leave the room without him on her heels. Soon he touches himself while he stares, and his eyes cloud ever so much each day. Then he tells her to smile and he always seems to find relief in the tears tracking down her smiling face.

He is still her father, and he still smiles gently at her. He still pats her head fondly on the good days, and he still kisses her cheek before bed. He is still her father, even if his dark eyes are twisted, his hands sticky, and his lips linger longer than she likes.

It is on her fourth birthday that things come to a head. He sits, staring like always seemed to be, but life seems to fill him with a new purpose. He pulls his zipper free and sets to work with a fervor she has never seen in him before. He pulls a gun from behind one of the couch pillows, and just when she is so terrified her legs give out, he puts a bullet through his skull. His semen hits her face for the first, and last, time.

Two days later, nothing has changed. The police walk in to the sight of a man gone insane and his petrified daughter. She becomes "So Sad Setsuka" because her mother could not find it in herself to love a man so obsessed with his love for her.


He is born Cain Griffin to a small-town, country-hick, lonely bar hostess that fell in love with a frivolous man. He wooed her and left her without looking back. He never saw the sad smile on her thin face or the hand on her stomach.

Oh, she wants the best for her little boy, but she cannot keep up with the work at the bar when she has a colicky five month old at home. When she is fired, the high school dropout has little other options. She tries to keep her work away from home, but the pay sucks and there is nowhere near enough motels in the world to keep her reputation from getting around.

So she tucks her four year old son into bed, kisses him goodnight, and tells him not to open the door no matter what he hears. She only wishes their ratty apartment walls were sound proof, and he knows something is weird when she locks the door on her way out.

Two months of moans, pants, grunts, and the occasional scream of agony, and his morbid curiosity wins out. He sits at the keyhole and watches his mother's body thrash as she is violated by a man nearly twice her size on a red-soaked bed.

He goes silent, cannot bear to use the voice he got from her after hearing that. He watches the stress and her lifestyle slowly eat away at his mother's body. Her cough grows worse, and soon her sheets are stained red for an entirely different reason.

She writes a letter on his sixth birthday and has him take it out to the mailbox. Before he has even shut it tight, he knows. The letter is still there when she dies hours later.

It is still there when social services comes to take him away. He becomes "Cain the Hooker's Son" because his father was too weak to face his fears and love the only woman that could ever love all his faults.


The two meet in a lonely, little room in a small orphanage. They have both been dumped there, and one look at each other, and they know. He knows she's an angel that lost her smile, and she can see the devil brewing in his eyes.

And in the deep, dark, lonely nights, they tell each other in soft whispers. She tells him of the look in her father's eyes, and the way he reached for her but never did touch her, the way she scavenged for food in rapidly emptying cabinets, and the way she cried herself to sleep in the bathtub after he had drunk himself into a stupor.

He tells her of the screams and the pain and the sickness, and the fear of someone someday opening that door and finding him there. He tells her of the feral rage he sometimes feels coiling tight in his chest, and the anger at his weak, weak mother.

All too soon, they are inseparable.

They sleep together, they bathe together, they ate together. She will not touch a morsel that does not come from his hands, and he refused to sleep unless she is in his arms.

They become "Cain and Setsuka" because they saw fear in each other's eyes and knew they were each other's salvation.


She is six and he is eight when a man and woman appear in the doorway separately, mirroring expressions of anguish in their eyes. Setsuka is ripped away from him screaming by a woman with long hair and the same beautiful eyes. He is dragged the other way by a man he has never seen before but recognizes the jaw and dark hair he sees in his own reflection.

They stare at each other over lonely, shuddering shoulders, and know this is not the end. It is a promise of love for each other, a vow of hatred for these parents that tore them apart, and a swear to one day find each other again.

She goes home to a suburban home with a fake, fake liveliness to it and too much sparkles to be real. There, she is pushed and prodded into learning her mother's ways and exceeding her warped expectations.

He goes home to mansion he has only seen the likes of in newspapers and fairytales. There, he is forced to learn all the mannerisms of "bred" society and the sort of hatred only politics and pompous fools could foster.

And their hatred stews in the dark and lonely days of solitude. She cannot eat, and he cannot sleep.


She is graduating elementary and he middle school when they come home to their parents' weird, weird smiles. It is that night that they see each other for the first time in nearly five years, and it is to be told they were going to become siblings.

It is both a blessing and a curse, a slice of heaven and hell, for them both. Wonderfully blissful because finally they are together again, two shattered broken halves that fall right into each other's cracks to form a most beautiful thing. And the sort of jagged wounded malevolent anguish because their parents do not understand.

They do not know why their kids are so attached, why they cannot even breathe when they are apart. Neither child speaks a word of their secret, secret world of two.

He is shipped off to military camp, and she to an all girl's academy, in hopes of ironing out their idiosyncrasies.

He gets sent back six months later for beating two superiors to a pulp. She follows soon after by expulsion for cutting off three girls' hair and having them streak through the courtyard.

Their parents do not know that he beat them because they were forcing girls younger than his sister into hideous sexual acts. They do not know that she punished her classmates for raping a ten year old from their neighboring all boy's school.

She looks at him, and he looks at her, and they know no one will ever understand. He picks up smoking cigarettes with a vengeance, and she gets piercings. He stares at the way her eyes shine, and she stares at the cigarette settled on his lip.

They get matching tattoos. A pair of wings split between the both of them.

They become "Cain and Setsuka Heel" because god be damned if anyone were to rip them apart again.


He drops out his junior year and gets his GED. He gets caught up in the wrong crowd, and she gets home schooled. Two years later, she gets own GED instead of completing high school.

She still cannot eat what he does not give her, and he still cannot sleep without her. But now, he cannot eat what she does not fix him, and she cannot sleep without seeing his face.

Soon though, the wrong crowd finds out just what kind of demon he really is. Sure, he is young, but he is big, bigger than most people. They learn real fast not to mess with the younger Heel. She learns to fight in heels and he does not let up until he feels firsthand what it is like to get a stiletto to the chest.

He still has a scar. She kisses it every night.

He is big and he chain smokes, and he is terrifying. But he is also beautiful in all the eye-catching ways, and he gets yanked off the street for a sudden photoshoot. It is only the shining glimmer in her eyes that prevents them from getting a shiv to the gut, but he likes the digits on the paycheck.

Worlds cross the distance between their eyes, and she makes a plan.

He becomes "Cain Heel, Horror Specialist" because he needs to take care of her and he hates relying on his father's filthy money.


Not even two days after his third job his father cuts them off. Supposedly, it is to make them squirm, to come home. They hear her mother is pregnant. Neither wants anything to do with it anymore.

So he takes the next job out of the country and ends up in Japan. Still, it is also the best thing they have ever done. They can be weird and as "in love" with each other as they want. No one knows them here. They can hold hands and stare into each other's eyes and glare at strangers.

They do not even look like siblings. A blood test and one license later, they no longer care. She does not even have to change her name.

The wings on their shoulders finally stop burning. The chains fall away. They can stop hiding.

She becomes "Setsuka Heel, Wife Extraordinaire" because they will never go back to that stifling mansion when a 1LDK apartment gives them all the freedom in the world.