Disclaimer: Not mine.

Warnings: Don't you just love when I upload a chapter without a beta? Full story at the bottom.

The picture reveals all of the sharp points of his face, and next to it my brother looks more soft then anything. The look in his eyes though is the same. Blood stains the expanse of their skins in dribbling droplets, and despite the gore Yuui is happy. Sickly happy it might be, but happy all the same. My pen stops on the arch of Kurogane's brow and I blink.

"I'm ho-ome!" His voice practically sings from the front room, and I hear the tell tale rustle of plastic.

"Yuui!" I call exasperatedly without getting up, pulling some tape from the dispenser on my desk and sticking it to the general center of the top of the sheet, rising to run my thumb over the waxy skin of it so the paper sticks directly in the rectangle of space left in my well ordered collage of events lined up on the wall. "You didn't get another creepy plant, did you?"

"Dorsera callistos!" Yuui cries in an oddly impressively done fake Spanish accent. The door to my room is flung open without the question of a knock and Yuui practically prances in, his precious disturbing little plant clutched in his hands and a positively evil grin cracking his face. "Look at it. Isn't it BEAutiful!"

At first when the thing is shoved in my face I wince away, but then I blink and lean forwards. Actually, this one is… relatively normal looking. Normally when Yuui brings home another plant, it's a disturbing seemingly lifeless mixture of some tentacle monster and a wad of half digested cat hair, great odd sticky things prodding out in all directions and huge mouth gaping, generally appearing as though in the middle of the night it'll crawl out of its flimsy fake terracotta pot and devour all of us. One even had leafy fangs.

This one though seems fine. Its black heart has five points like the childish drawings of some gothic child. Petals droop like delicate tongues- a brilliant, flashing orange- from each point. Yellow dots rim the edges of the indents of the star center as if the entire thing is an odd eclipse.

"This one's carnivorous! Do you wanna see it eat a bug?" Yuui asks excitedly.

The plant doesn't look all that pretty anymore.

"Eh… no." I say, smiling. "Why don't you just put it in the sun. Unless it's another one of those… shadow dwellers. Anyway. Feed it a bug… somewhere other then here… please…."

Yuui laughs, and as he sinks down in the beanbag chair beside my desk he pokes my leg with one dirty-sneakered toe almost on instinct. "C'mon Fai! It's just eating. You do it all the time."

"I'm a vegetarian."

Yuui lets out a dramatic, strangled fake sob. "I know. And it breaks my heart, my darling little brother, that you would scorn stupid animal flesh made all delicious with mustard and sauces and stuff when you would munch on beautiful creatures like our lovely new addition to the family, Dory!" Yuui roles over. "My poor, lost little brother!"

"I'm three whole minutes older then you, stupid!" I cry, laughing out loud.

"Well," Yuui said, "I was a smidgen taller then you for a whole three years when we were little, and I took all your blood for a while there too whitey, so ha!"

With the final 'ha' he jabs his foot at me again, this time catching me between the ribs and I laugh, instinctively cringing to the side and falling off the chair in the process. "Yeah, sure, you stole that blood. Thief! Give me my blood!" I cry in an underworld-style shriek, and Yuui lets out a shriek of his own, rolling away, laughing, our hands stretched out and both of us now recovered from the incident of our birth- hands the same pale cream shade.

"God, Fai, this is so morbid! So morbid!" Yuui says, laughing.

"What have you done with my BLOOD?! Have you fed it to Dory? Dory! Treacherous leaf brother,"

"Sister!"

"Leaf sister! Thou hast eaten the wine of my veins, has feasted on my life, and now you only sit upon the throne of my sketched out soul, lording the flesh of yourself before me on the ground!"

The laughter dies and I turn to Yuui, dropping my arms, which had been in the midst of making spooky waving motions. His lips are slightly parted, an odd smile quirking his face and eyes wide and alight in that strange Yuui way that always, to me, makes us seem utterly different in looks.

"You know," he says, "besides the fact that that was all about a plant drinking your blood, that was pretty amazing."

I blink. "The words?" I ask.

"Yeah." Yuui says consideringly, and then rises, brushing the wrinkles from his shirt but not bothering to fix it- the thing's covered in dirt and grass stains anyway. Yuui is constantly rolling around in the ground, trying to gather bugs to satisfy the hungers of his many leafy, carnivorous wards. "Hey," he adds, peering at my perfectly laid out wall of drawings, "How's the book going?"

I stand up quickly. I'd forgotten I'd left my notebook on the table, crisp pages opened and gaping for the world to see their secrets. Neat blue script like tiny shadowed ants across the white. "It's fine." I say quickly, my automatic response, and then catching the eye of one of the drawings of Kurogane on the wall- a teenage one- I add with sudden passionate realization "It's actually going really good. I think so, anyway. Much better then it normally goes. Right now I really have a clear plan about what exactly to do next."

Yuui's entire face lights up and he does a kind of skipping leap forwards so that he's just invading my personal space. "Good? Really good? Like… good enough to let me read it, maybe?" He says, grinning his manic grin.

I frown, unconsciously clutching tighter at the closed black notebook on my desk, holding the pages closed like wings against the body of the bird, hoping the words don't fly away. "Nah," I say carefully, and Yuui simply shrugs. He's used to this rejection, and he plops down easily again on the beanbag chair.

Tipping his head back far enough, for a moment I can see nothing but his chin lined with fine blond hairs of a teenager's almost-beard and the black holes of his nostrils, his eyes vanishing behind narrow cheekbones. "Hey Fai," he says thoughtfully, tasting the words before he says them, and this is how I know that it's about either my book or love, he is never this careful otherwise, "remember when we were little, and you were just coming up with the book?"

I nod, and then realizing he can't see me, murmur a soft "Hmm," as I place the notebook on the shelf on my desk next to the other ones, black spines lined up against black spines, each with a number drawn bluntly in white-out pen across the top.

"And remember when you used to say I was the hero of your story?" He asks, and I stop moving for a moment

"I don't remember that." I lie, and despite the fact that we both know I'm lying, I receive nothing more then a flicker of the eyes, a sideways glance.

"Well… anyway. I suppose it's not like that anymore, hm?"

I pause, looking at one of the earliest drawings pinned at the very bottom right above my desk- two small boys with crops of unbrushed, tousled hair, one with his fist in his mouth and his eyes wide, the other beaming brilliantly with one arm slung over the other boy's shoulders.

"It's not… really." I say absolutely honestly. "I mean, he started out as you. At the very base and beginning, it's you. But you're different because… well, clearly you didn't grow up in the same world. You didn't have the same experiences. But there are some things that are the same. There are some things that are inevitable. Lots of things are inevitable. It's almost easy to say everything is."

Yuui chuckles lightly, affectionately, and I look up at him. He smiles at me a rolls over on the beam bag so he's lying on his side, elbow sinking into the cushion and palm flat against his ear. "You talk about your characters like they're real people, and they have real 'fates' or something."

"They are real people." I say immediately. "I made that mistake in the beginning. For a while I tried to make myself doubt it, but they're very real. Everything that happens is very real."

"You know, you're a genius." Yuui says sweetly, smiling, and he turns and then leaps up nimbly, stretching his arms for a moment before reaching forwards with one hand to grab Dory the plant and the other arm wraps around my neck, slung over my shoulders, a brilliant grin stretching over his face. One hand reaches up and tousles my hair, and he kisses the top of my head. "Some people would call you crazy, but I know you're a genius."

"Thanks, Yuui." I say with dry humor, smiling up at him with eyebrows raised. He flashes a grin back at me as if to say 'well, it's the truth. All of it.' As he walks away, Dory clutched in one hand as the other grips the doorframe, leaving with a dramatic spin before calling back to me.

"Fai! Where's mom?"

I blink, searching backwards in my immediate memory before calling back, "She said that she had to go over to the community center for a meeting that she forgot about! She won't be back till 8."

Yuui let out a dramatic sigh, and I heard the ruffle of a plastic bag, probably as he removed bugs for his new little monster. "Damn. Can you make dinner tonight?"

"It's your turn."

"I know! But you're just soooo good at it!"

I sigh, pulling out my notebook, opening it to the last page and rubbing my temples as a headache buds between them, pulling a sketchpad forwards beside the open notebook and pulling scraps of left over torn out pages out of the gelled backbone. Yuui waits for my answer, and I hear the sink turn on as he fills his small spray bottle with water, the sound of it spritzing twice like fabric rushing against sand.

"…How about you order Chinese?" I yell, and then add "Or Japanese! I'm kind of in the mood for Japanese food!" I call.

"Are there Japanese take-out places around here?" Yuui calls, taken aback.

"Check the phone book!" I yell, trying not to get angry. My headache has turned quickly into a full on deep sour burn, each eye throbbing and I shut them off from the suddenly jarring light, pressing against the lids. Small, strange and vastly different faces peer down at me from the sketches of the different lives, the notebooks containing my notes on all of my separate lives and deaths, all my brother's separate shatterings and all the sacrifices of one boy. The face of him stares down at me from another drawing. This one with Yuui smiling. Yuui's face bright and wide and honest. His arm slung over Yuui's shoulders, a grin on his face as well.

"Will do!" Yuui calls back from the kitchen, and begins to hum an odd, tuneless, tone-deaf song.

I should go to sleep. Everything begins tomorrow. I might as well get some rest.

A/N: OK! Just thought I'd say, this is not the actual chapter. As you may have noticed, the actual chapter is taking forever to… be done. Technically it's done now. But there's been some weird mistake with fanfiction dot net and beta-ing and something went wrong along the way, whether it was human error or machine I don't know. Either way- this scene would end up being in it eventually, though exact circumstances I knew would depend on where. I decided since I was taking forever now would be a good time. So without a beta this time, (this will change. I WILL use a beta in the future, I know I screw up without one) I have given you a tiny little pre-chapter thing. So when the chapter does get worked out… well, until then, you have this.

One other little thing- the last picture I mentioned exists in canon. CLAMP made a pic of Kurogane with his arm slung over a crossdressing Fai's shoulders, smiling and looking off at something else with Fai just generally looking happy and content.

And even though I know it's kind of short… please review! *Insert Sakura and Mokona and other cute things all making a puppy dog face. And Kurogane making a puppy dog face (mind breaks)*