A/N

Aloice returns with something a bit shorter and slightly (?) more dark.

1) NO PLEASE DO NOT CALL THAT WELL DRILLING NUMBER IT'S JUST A NUMBER THAT I MADE UP ON THE SPOT (ALTHOUGH IT WOULD BE A LEGIT CHINESE NUMBER)

2) Len's translated Chinese name, 连, means "connection" while Rin's Chinese name 铃 means "bell" or "ringtone." I mention this because I ref Len's name this chapter, and people will talk about their names later.

3) Len had bacterial meningitis (uncle wasn't completely BS-ing around). Rin thought that he had made a full recovery, but more on that later.

OH AND SOME PICTURES OF IRL PLACES SO YOU CAN GET A BETTER IDEA OF WHAT I'M WRITING ABOUT. These are all on imgur because I can't link things afigskghsd.

O6n70KB - a cottage with a donkey cart. (and is that the butt of a donkey right next to the cottage...)

5ih9kDh - village with hay, fields and a donkey.

XTIdou5 - a child sitting on the bed-stove in a cottage. (No, that child is not me.) Note the colorful blanket rolls in the cupboard. At night during winter, everyone sleeps next to each other wrapped up in those like sushi rolls. Len and Rin's home probably is a good bit less dirty than this (Rin cleans obsessively) but not really any better furnished.

Thank you so much for the lovely reviews, and a special call out to Piriluk for beta-ing this chapter and just being an all around sweetheart! I dunno what I'd be doing in this fandom (or this week, in general) without you -blows kiss-

Len stretches up on his toes to say goodbye.

He has a special bond with Josephine, that boy; the last time I left this village, it had been because Len was deathly sick. He had been fine in the morning – just a little stiff, a little tired, clinging weakly to my skirt and refusing to get out of bed – but by the afternoon he was in a feverish delirium, and as the sun started to set, uncle had hauled him up and dumped him on top of Josephine's wooden cart like a load of corn, instructing me on how to control the donkey and speak in town.

"We need to get him to the hospital tonight," the old man had stated matter-of-factly, the lines on his forehead deepening like the furrows in the fields, "Or he might end up mentally retarded, deaf, or worse. This shit is serious. We don't have money – I'm asking your aunt to go around for some loans – but you gotta sweet talk them, baby girl, okay? I'm old ass peasant stock, I don't know how them town folks work, but you gotta get them to look at your brother, money or no."

Having spent the day futilely trying to help the old village healer, I had not known whether to screech, to cry, or to run; instead I had meekly said yes and thrown a cool towel on my brother's forehead, trying to not look at Len's pale face or glazed eyes. Uncle had said I shouldn't hold his hand, that illnesses were contagious and would you want to be crying that your twin had left you when they were right there next to you, and I had said no, I didn't, just tell me what to do. So I had led Josephine out of the door, out of the village through the dirt road, and then nearly all the way into the swamped and gawking hospital lobby, a few hours later.

"You saved my life," Len is saying now to the young donkey, loading up her feed tray and fondly caressing her head. He's going to smell the entire trip. "Thank you for that."

"Hey, thank me, too," I tease him, checking my bags for anything I might have potentially missed. The 5 am air is thin and beyond chilly – even in our colorful, fat floral winter coats, we are still shivering like mad, and Len's winter blush is so prominent that he might as well be drunk. We probably are, leaving home like this. "You were throwing up all over me while crying that I was dead."

Len smiles, but his eyes darken somewhat, and I'm suddenly afraid that I have misspoken. "I was sick, okay? Dying without you is not a good place to be."

And I couldn't touch you or stay with you in that hospital once they hooked you up to everything. I had no idea if they were trying to save you or if they just wanted to placate a sobbing and penniless eight-year-old peasant girl who barely knew how to read. Traditional medicine I could understand. Western medicine with those metallic syringes and terribly smelling gases I could not. Plus, if you had died or been disabled, no one would have really given a shit. All you would have had left would be me, crying as I tried to reach into an oblivious darkness for the memory of your glowing eyes.

"We left the village together then," I murmur semi-defensively, sidling closer to him, hoping to diffuse the mood. "You might not have known, but we did. And we're definitely leaving together now."

Len's face softens, and he turns away from the donkey to gently cradle my head instead. At least his hands haven't completely frozen yet. I hug him close, hungrily inhaling the scent of him and home, donkey dung, loose chicken feathers and the smoldering warmth of the hearth. He's the one person I can't bear to lose.

"And thank you for that."

We make it to the mouth of the village by foot this time. Josephine is uncle's property, after all (he calls her Small Black, in contrast to her dam Big Black, who died quite a few years ago), and he needs her for work. We are mostly quiet as we walk past everyone's fields, sticking to the right side of the half-dirt half-concrete road. A few morning trucks have passed us by, but not many have cared to say hello. People are still half asleep at this hour. Every once in a while we spot an early riser on a motorcycle or a young boy scrambling past weeds, dung and loose stones to spraypaint advertisements on crumbling stone cottage walls: CHEAP & EFFICIENT FERTILIZER. CERTIFICATION AND LOANS. WELL DRILLING 130-436-7866.

While I'm almost comforted by the silence – I'm tired, sleepy, and too afraid of going anywhere with just Len – Len's lack of words is more alarming. He's walking ahead of me with a hat on and a few big bags, and I'm slowly realizing that he's not just taking me on an "ordinary" trip, regardless of what that even means. He's carrying too much. He's planned this for a while. And uncle hadn't even gotten up to see us off.

I try not to think about it. I rearrange my white-and-yellow head scarf, wrap my arms tightly around myself, and watch my breaths turn into fog in the cold. It's Chinese New Year. The heavens will be good. Everyone calls Len resourceful. And he obviously only means me well.

Time, though, is not kind to a young girl's paranoia. The road stretches on and on in front of us, seemingly without end, even as I vaguely remember the path. The wind's picking up, howling this side of the mountain as it rips through the air. There's nothing but brown dead farmland and the occasional transmission tower on either side of us. Even the mountain that gives the village its name, usually a solid pile of black and towering, is hard to see, obscured by morning clouds. I can't even pray for fortune to the mountain goddess of legend…

"Hold my hand, Len," I blurt out, seized by a sudden flash of panic. He turns around and blinks, but takes my left hand into his right without a word as he reads the expression on my face. His left arm must be dying from all the load.

"Shhhh, Rin, shhhh," he coos, ever the sunshine optimist, although I can tell he isn't over the moon either. At least his squeeze of his hand is actually reassuring. "If you want, we can align our steps to our heartbeats."

"You're such a romantic."

A true romantic would probably have explained better my fears on that morning, painted a truly touching picture of two teenagers walking away from the only home they've ever known, but I sucked at literature and Len doesn't like showing me what he doodles in that little notebook of his, so I'm left just with that trace of warmth from his hold, a connection of promise between us, just like his name.*

We wait huddled together like penguins for fifteen minutes before a bus finally arrives, crashing down from the hill.

"Where you going?" the woman in white asks, grinning as she helps Len unload our luggage. She looks about fifty, has too much bad-quality rouge and eyeshadow on, and probably hails from one of the villages downstream of the bus route. "You've got some muscles, boy."

Does he? Len's coughing and panting as he unloads close to the exhaust pipe. I internally pick out a few choice words for the engineering design as I settle down near the end of the bus. "Uh. We're going to the North Train Station."

"Thirty-five, please," the woman responds automatically, and I reach into my bag, grimacing at the amount of money. If what I have heard about spending levels in the cities are true, I really, really hope Len has miraculously saved a few hundred bucks from somewhere. But if he does have a few hundred bucks, wouldn't he spend it on something more productive? He could have gone to school, or helped uncle pay for next season's seeds, or bought another few packs of coal. Or literally anything.

I yell at Len. "Come on," I shout past a baby crying in her mother's arms. The mother shoots a dirty look at me, but moves her bags of groceries to let Len pass through. "I've saved us two seats. The bus is leaving."

Len runs past me and practically collapses into the seat. The seat groans and nearly collapses under him. We trade seats.

"Are you okay?" I offer him my shoulder. He falls on it, coughs again, and shuffles his weight so he will not nearly crush the chair again.

"Yeah," he mumbles. "Just – didn't sleep well, and don't think I've fully recovered from last week's work. My left arm wants to kill me."

"Sorry." I try to massage it.

"Not your fault."

Someone's blasting one of those happy-go-lucky Communist songs that no one truly knows the lyrics of at the front of the bus. A few men are smoking and chattering amongst themselves, laughing and sighing over one gig or another. At least the bus is still mostly clean, if falling apart. At the next hill, Len is forced to clutch onto me as I clutch onto the seat in front of me. Without seat belts we're all just constantly thrown around the place.

"Are you feeling sick? We have water." I know I would be, if I were in his shoes. I'm feeling borderline sick already.

He laughs weakly, trying to regain his balance. "Did you pack any apples?"

"Oh. Yeah." I rummage through the bag and hand him one. He bites into it once – swallows – then seems to just stare at it like the anime symbol of sin that it is. "What, is the apple rotten?"

"Nooooooooooo," he drawls, and suddenly becomes a lot more cheerful as he wolfs down the rest of the apple. "Sorry about being a downer, Rin. This is supposed to be a fun trip."

"Did you do something to annoy Uncle? Is that why he didn't send us off?" I wonder aloud. Len's smile falters and becomes decidedly plastered. He seems to ponder over his options, then settles on one unwillingly, closing his eyes as he begins. I draw in a breath, realizing that I have - rather unintentionally – hit a nerve.

"Well, it's a part of my agreement with him. About us, I mean."

"Us?" I echo – he doesn't reply – and my eyebrows are beginning to rise. It's starting to dawn on me – his excessive amount of luggage, his increasing amount of questions for me as Chinese New Year drew closer and closer, his anxiety and avoidance. He's feeling guilty. "Kagamine Len, what on Earth did you agree to?"

"I told him that I'll take you into the city. That we'll settle there and find some kind of life for ourselves." He actually looks green now, and a pleading edge has entered into the sweetness I'm so familiar with. "Rin, don't tell me I'm being –"

"Where? In Beijing?" I can't believe my ears. The men at the front of the bus have turned to stare at us – the baby is wailing again – but I need to know. I've always known that Len is naïve to a fault, but not anywhere close to this extent. "What do you want us to –"

"I'll work in the factories – I've arranged something with an old friend of Father's – and I'll support you to do music." He sounds embarrassed by his own plan. An appreciative male whistle is heard from the front. I'm just staring at my twin brother as if he is a five-year-old instead of a fifteen-year-old. "It'll be f-"

"Okay, you're stupid, but I know Uncle isn't stupid. Why would he ever let you do something like this?" I demand, abruptly dropping his hand. His eyes widen as he shrinks back, wounded. Perhaps the TV doctors are right, and boys do actually mentally age 80% slower than girls during adolescence. "It's cute when it's talk, but not when –"

"I… told him that I'm old enough to be your guardian now," Len mumbles, fiddling with his fingers and looking down at the ground. "I'm old enough to be a man, to support you, to care for your future, and I'm more your blood than he is –"

"Get away from me, you patriarchal fuck," I curse, incredulous at what I'm hearing. A small chorus of gasps rises around me – around us – but I dare the adults on the bus to meet my eyes, and none quite do. My twin brother of all people has done this to me. Had he done this with uncle while I was asleep, two men with their cigarettes, gambling cards, and trash bootleg liquor? Was my aunt a part of this at all, or did she also think – subservient and basically illiterate as she was – that everything in the cities was pure and good? Did my cousin not defend me, or did he also think this was for the best once I failed my exams to get into the No. 1 high school? I feel sick, small, and very, very angry. If I could have lifted Len and thrown him out of the window I'd just opened for him to get some air, I would.

Len coughs sadly and looks away defiantly. There's a blaze in his eyes that's drawing fault lines. "Then get off the bus. You know you can. The next stop is the hospital. You have enough money to get back, or I can give it to you. You know the way."

"You –" I'm too mad for words. "Give me my chair back."

As I curl up in my chair to cry, I hear the sound of something cracking, and then nothing. No one moves. I am leaving Len to sit in the epicenter of his own wreckage.