35. The Mysteries of Our Siblings

Zane set his cup down in the kitchen sink, his hands moving in a way that spoke of his automatic reflex—he went to go wash out his dish with the soap that would be sitting next to the faucet, placed kindly by the sponge, but he found that it was not there. He sighed. "I must remember this is not my home," he muttered to himself, knowing he should go hunt for the soap, but instead just left his empty cup there, turning away carelessly from the duty.

He felt empty inside, but he also felt anger, and betrayal, and worst of all, he felt remorse. How to manage these emotions when already in such a fix?

He was not interested in running through with you all the reasons for his upset, which easily came obtained from the death of his brother. He was angry with Cole for not telling him, angry that he hadn't done anything to stop it, angry at who had killed his beloved brother. Zane always worshipped the ground that Rikku walked on, and now to know he'd been living his life while his brother had lost his was just brutal. He felt inhumane. Ruthless. Atrocious.

Zane stood in the kitchen for a while, staring at the floor and trying to understand just what this meant for him. What he had lost. Yet he came up with empty hands and cut fingers, digging into a pit in which only spiked with broken shards, pieces of happy memories that could not be put back together. He did not know what to do.

He was just mad at people. Zane rarely ever got mad, but he was very, very upset with Cole, and he was upset with Kai. Everything seemed so very unintelligible now, all pushed and shorn down from its original, acceptable state, the one he had no trouble keeping up with. Life moves too fast, and now, Zane was troubled with trying to carry on.

His feet lifted him over the floor, his eyes never watching where he was going. The sense of lost reality washed over him, dizzying his steps in a way he had a hard time tracking. His feet tripped over one another, his shoulder hitting the wall next to him in a battle to hold on to his mind, wanting it to float away like balloons until he became a soundless, thoughtless freak who roamed the halls without another thought to tarnish him. When you think about it, it really is your mind that drives you through your emotions; if you did not have a thought process, you would not have to suffer through the torture you must face when you do think. If you cannot think, you do not form sociable opinions on anything that happens, making you unable to have the emotions that make you hurt. And it was not just the hurt to deal with. Everything else accounted for this, too. Anger issues, uncontrollable giddiness, anxiety…If Zane didn't have to think, he knew he'd be a much better person.

I was that way when I was a nindroid. I did not have the thought process that humans have, the one connected to emotion, where it is so interwoven within the operation of the human mind that it is impossible to think one thing without expressive bias. Zane hated to think it, but he missed that sometimes. Why couldn't he just be less emotive and more…not.

Zane felt a hand steadying him by the shoulder, a wide palm that pressed to him strongly. It kept him standing in this swirling world of pretty colors that hurt to look at, and the endless tornado his equilibrium fastened was starting to break his stomach. Zane leaned against the wall for support.

"Easy, you. I do not need you collapsing in the middle of the floor."

It was Rikku's voice, but he knew it wasn't Rikku. It could not be. He saw Rikku in the house, walking around like he was normal, but to his denial he already knew what this meant. It was the spirit of Rikku that was brought back. Rikku was already dead when the Elemental Warriors decided to bring their family back.

Admitting to that was phase one of grief. Even though it did not apply to anybody else in the universe.

"Are you alright?" asked Rikku again. His form was a dark blur in the eyes of his younger brother, a boy who wanted nothing more than to go back to the past and live within it where things made sense, and he could rightfully cry over his brother without having to go through the chaos of mind-control that messed everything up in the first place. He just wanted to sit down, turn back into a robot, and stop feeling.

It was not that Zane did not appreciate his humanity; on good days, he believed it to be the best episode that he has ever lived through. But other than that many things right now were not stacking up nicely, and he was off in a piece trying to fix himself with tools that did not perform the abilities he wanted them to. How can you fix a wound with a wrench? Simply put: you cannot.

"I'm going to take your silence as a no." Rikku sighed, his hand on Zane's shoulder even more steadying now, since it seemed like he was the one holding him up. With the swaying of perturbation made Zane rely more on the wall than his dead-but-undead older brother. He was still trying to wrap his head around this impossible inequity.

It alarmed the both of them when Zane said, "You're dead, aren't you?"

Rikku took his time trying to find a response for that. Zane heard his sigh, reaching out through the air and stirring the hair beside his ears, still messy from his forgiving sleep. "Yes. I am."

"So they brought you back." If the rendezvous with the Elemental Leaders happened a while ago, then that means Rikku has been dead for a long time. That also means that Cole lied to me about it. He lied to my face about it.

"Zane…" There it was, that tone he always got when someone knew they were going to tell him bad news, the one that started off with his name in a pitch and 'I'm sorry' followed afterward. He was tired of people treating him like this, like he was still a child. Like he was nothing more than that. Did people honestly view him that way? Did they see him as someone who needed to be handled with care? Why did everyone always have to act like he was a child?

"Don't say it. Don't even." His upset voice stopped whatever apology that was going to come out of Rikku's corporeal mouth. "I will not stand for another sorry. I don't want people treating me like I'm easily broken!" His voice came to a dim shout that hardly lasted very long, nor was worthy of shattering glass. He didn't yell often. In fact he never did. This was a risen voice that was purposed to making his point, and at that, he hoped it did. He hoped Cole could hear this. He hoped that everyone in the universe could hear it.

Rikku was as unwavered, unbothered as he had ever been. If he had wavered, Zane might've thought something was wrong with him. "I wasn't going to apologize to you. I was going to tell you that though my death might hurt you, I am glad it happened."

Zane finally lifted his eyes to his brother's. "Why?"

"I see and know that it will impact your life," Rikku told him, icy blue eyes as pointed as ever. "I am a large part of you, and without me, you will feel remorse. It will be hard for you to continue with a life I am no longer in. That is the rule of living," he sighed, something Rikku had liked to mimic as a robot, but when you're mechanical air doesn't exactly work that way. "To live you must lose, and you must grieve. I do not like how it hurts you, how my death will affect you. I will hate what you will go through, but at the same time I cannot regret my death. It has been coming a long time. It has been needed."

"What does that mean?"

"My soul has been trapped for over a decade. It has been imprisoned in that godawful body that Father created for me, the perfect cage for the functional bird, none the less. I have been trapped there for so long that days become painful, my life dragged out far too long—I guess you could say the only reason I decided to hang around was you." Rikku let go of Zane's shoulder. He didn't topple over—yet. "I know you need me, and I will be here through your toughest time. But when that time is over…I am ready to know peace."

Zane looked through his eyes, trying to find every last inch of them. Their color mirrored his, their perfect ice so true to their family through their mother's gene, tying them all together as one. He tried to find what Rikku really wanted, vying for the truth. Minutes passed in his search, Rikku's young face betraying nothing of a lie. There was nothing but ice swapped for blue in his eyes that kept dissecting themselves, black pinpoints growing and shrinking. He knew that sight, the commandable shifting of his pupils. He'd seen Cole do it a few times—and usually afterward, whomever he was looking at was cast under the spell of Compulsion. Zane was about to pull away when Rikku's hand clamped down on his shoulder, rooting him to the spot without choice, and continued staring into him.

He couldn't look away.

"This is for your own good," Rikku said monotonically, using his swift wording to draw Zane in. He could not pull away himself or his gaze from Rikku's eyes, and he was wiped clean of his thoughts while his brother's surprise-taking Compulsion was starting to set in. "I want you to enjoy what time here you have, and love every second of it. I want you to stop grieving over what you lose. I don't want you to grieve me, of all people, when I pass on; I must go when it is my time to go. I am ready to die, Zane. Please don't let me suffer any longer than I have to."

Then Rikku let go, it felt like something was sucked out of Zane. It was this emotion he was resenting before their encounter, the overwhelming march of them dumping onto him over Rikku's death. He felt that be sucked out of him, and his mouth dropped open as if his exhale is what expelled them. Rikku turned his face away, and with that he brushed past his brother without another look, no other words to be said. Zane turned his back to the wall. He turned and watched his brother go, breathing a little heavy through his mouth without the grief he had been feeling before weighing him down. He…Compelled me. Rikku. With Compulsion? He looked over at his brother's form, retreating down the hallway, no backward glances.

But weren't vampires the only one who could compel people? On that note, wasn't it just Cole who could do that, since there was no more Original vampires?

The words he wanted to ask about his brother never came out of his mouth in time for Rikku to be gone from his sight no later.

Cole saw Seiko standing in the doorway to the room Yuki was being held in when he was at the end of the hallway. She leaned her shoulder against the doorframe, distant eyes staring into the room. It was hard to tell if she was looking at where Yuki lay on the mattress while Meredith worked on him, or if she was staring into space, eyes laying somewhere they didn't know they were. Maybe both. Her arms were crossed over her chest, and her body was lamented with a short-sleeved, dark blue qipao with white flower embroidery following an angle from her right hip up to her left shoulder, tracing the white hem that came from the collar and down her body. Cole had been present when their mother gave that to her to wear. He didn't really realize how imposing she could look until she was wearing that.

Cole walked across the floor, hands sliding into his jeans pockets. Approaching his sister wasn't something he was very good at doing. Though their relationship had mended choice parts over the years, it said nothing for the whole of it, which in truth was still rocky. He didn't know when or how they'd become close the way they had been when they were little—those years were the years that he sometimes missed, although he favored no more mourn over the days that were gone.

Seiko didn't look up when he came over to her, taking his time with slow, easy steps. While his mother broiled herself chamomile tea in the kitchen and pretty much had to face up to her husband—Cole knew walking out of that kitchen that she was not happy with him, especially over what he'd done to their daughter—Cole knew he needed to go talk to his sister about what drove her here last night out of fear. Now seemed like an okay time, while his mother took a break from her storytelling.

Seiko looked into the room, even when Cole came to her side and stared in silently, vacillating on his question of how to begin this. There was nothing satisfying about seeing Meredith, a woman quite like her two sons, bent over Yuki's sprawled body with a bucket of water at her side and a soaking rag to put over him. On the mat, she had taken off his robes so that she could see where he was hurt, leaving the debatable boy bare-chested, his arms laid out at either of his sides like they did with dead bodies. His face was caked in dried blood from the lower half down, a mask disguising his identity through his own life force. His chest was cut, bruised even, and one side of his ribs completely blue. His long silver hair was drawn out from underneath him, distributed over the cylindrical pillow underneath his head; his eyes were closed, and it almost did look like he was dead.

Now that he was closer, Cole could tell Seiko was looking at Yuki. She was watching Meredith wet the rag in the water and then lay it over his chest on the bruises and scrapes, using another smaller sponge to run over the rest of him. You're thinking something, Cole wanted to say to his disaffected sister. What is it? He didn't ask.

Cole's mind was so wired he didn't even think to ask why a robot was bruising or bleeding.

"So." Cole said, getting his sister's attention. She looked at him with empty eyes. I don't see a point in beating around the bush, he thought to himself, and raised a furry eyebrow, disappearing underneath his swept bangs. "What happened last night?"

Go have an awesome day/night!