An apology is never enough words.

Chapter One: Cirrus

The day Iwatani Jun's brother dropped off the face of the planet was the day Jun learned what the five stages of grief truly meant.

Stage one, denial.

Denial, he found, was not a stalwart refusal to face reality's cruel talons. It was not, as he had always imagined, staring into the bloodied abyss where once a heart had beaten and claiming that there was no wound at all.

Denial, he found, was involuntary. The admissions of the conscious mind do not line up with those of the subconscious, and even after telling himself Naofumi's gone, he's not going to just walk in through the front door like nothing happened, Jun went about his business for three days before his heart and body caught up to the shock, before it really hit him that Iwatani Naofumi's room was gathering dust.

Naofumi was not the neatest person, but even the usual miscellaneous trash that dotted his room changed often enough to keep the dust away, and the motes of filth that whirled through the morning sunlight as Jun pushed his brother's door open were like knives on his skin.

Stage two, anger.

Anger, Jun learned, was not a ponderous will turned to targeted fury. It was nothing like the overweight tourist he'd once overheard demanding "a real large Coke" at a McDonald's after school, red in the face and puffing with both rage and the efforts of their heart to pump blood through sclerosised arteries.

Anger, Jun learned, was regret. Mirrors drew like well-water a deep, boiling self-hatred; when his nose wasn't buried in a book, work, or a game - when the sky grew dark and the world grew silent and his eyes once more made their acquaintance with his bedroom ceiling - Jun would replay that day's events in his head.

"Hey, Jun."

"What's up?"

"I'm heading to the bookstore to catch up on some series I've been slacking on. Wanna come? I hear the latest volume of a certain series just dropped." This, followed by a wink which told Jun that a certain series was referring to Tamakara.

"Nah. Maybe next time you go. The last volume was a little too ecchi for my tastes, so I'm not exactly clamoring for more, and I already told some friends I'd hang out with them in an hour."

Naofumi frowned. "Tamakara? Ecchi?" he echoed, then shook his head. "Y'know what - I'm not gonna think too hard about that one. Have fun with your friends." And, with a good-natured wave, he was gone.

He should have gone. He could have told his friends his family wanted him for something (which was technically the truth). He could have, at the very least, seen just what happened to Naofumi. Maybe there was a chance, however slim, that he could have stopped it.

In the morning, it was hard to brush his hair in such a way as to cover up the torn patches. During the day, his fingernails dug half-moons into his palms. Night was a desperate struggle to keep his mind occupied until the last possible second.

Stage three, bargaining.

Bargaining, it turned out, was not the shady wheeling-and-dealing of a grease=slicked salesman. It was not the wheedling one used to shave yen off the price of a poor meal or haircut.

Bargaining, it turned out, was the incessant desire to fix. As much as Jun tried to tell himself that there was nothing to be done - as much as he repeated to himself that Naofumi had disappeared from a security feed in the span of a single frame - speech did nothing to sway the mind. Even long after he'd come to terms with his own powerlessness, he would check the news before bed, scour the missing persons reports for their precinct for any new leads.

This phase lasted the longest. He knew that he was not remotely prepared for the loss of his brother, and it was months before he stopped falling asleep with a wish to go back in his mind.

Stage four, depression.

Depression was anything but the desperate, dramatic sobs of grief one often heard at funerals, in hospitals, and at the sites of accidents. Tears did not flow freely down his cheeks at the thought of Naofumi's sheepish smile. Tears barely flowed at all.

Depression was the void he felt inside, a gaping maw that devoured any and all feeling and motivation. Years of raw discipline kept his grades intact, but he drew no pride from the sight of Iwatani Jun scrawled across the top of every mock exam ranking sheet. He stopped reading altogether - never picked up Tamakara again - and games lost their appeal; books turned to nothing more than strings of characters stitched into false drivel, and everything he'd enjoyed playing became nothing more to him than stress and flashing pictures.

During this time, the happy memories he'd shared with Naofumi served as deadweight rather than comfort. Once one came to the front of his mind, it'd drag him down, down, down, back into that gaping maw in his chest and the pit of his stomach until he stopped whatever he happened to be doing to stare at the thin white scars on his arms and think. The only thing stopping him from forcing the memories away was the knowledge that he'd want them intact eventually, but this did nothing to soothe him in the moment.

Stage five, acceptance.

Out of all the stages he'd gone through, only acceptance fell in line with its name.

His friends were stunned to see him online for the first time in several months. One even called him to make sure that his accounts hadn't been compromised, but when Jun verified that he was, in fact, the user behind the activity, every messenger he had lit up with a barrage of texts.

He smiled a little, then.

The thoughts that had sat heavy like lead in his guts for so long now served to form the backbone of his memories. Besides, both his body and mind could finally admit, Naofumi wouldn't want me to sink back into what I was a few years ago. He was always happy to see me on the right track. Even that last day...his smile never faltered. He was happy I'd found good friends in high school.

For the first time since Naofumi's disappearance, warmth filled his chest.

It's gonna be okay. I'm not alone.

Just when his younger brother's journey through grief ended, however, Iwatani Naofumi's began.

He supposed in his case it wasn't exactly grief the way most people felt it. His heart had hardened for the sake of survival during his two and a half years in another world, and he'd long since stopped feeling the effects of depression and bargaining; wrath still seethed under his skin, and he certainly felt melancholy, but there'd always been something on his plate preventing him from experiencing grief to the fullest. He simply couldn't afford to entertain the void that a companion's death left behind in any capacity other than a tactical one.

In Japan, however, this was not the case. When the events of his return blew over, he found himself with more free (empty) time on his hands than he knew what to do with, and as is the wont of human minds to do, his began to wander.

"Being sent home from another world because you saved it" was, Naofumi supposed, the least concerning reason for disappearing in front of everyone and everything that one cared about. It wasn't as if Raphtalia and the others were in any danger; he was sure they were fine, and he knew exactly where they were (relative to Melromarc, anyway).

The problem now was that he no longer had any idea where Melromarc was.

A knock at his door roused Naofumi from his bed, and before he could answer, it opened to reveal the familiar face of his assigned psychiatrist.

"Iwatani-san," the man greeted him, dipping his head. "Good afternoon. How are you feeling today?"

"Like shit," he grunted, head dropping back onto the starchy pillow with a muted thump. When it became apparent that Naofumi wasn't going to elaborate, the psychiatrist - Doctor Tamagofuckingyama Kotafuckingberu or whatever the goddamn hell his name was - cleared his throat, scribbling something on that damn clipboard. This infuriated Naofumi; even on television, shrinks were always writing. He supposed it was, in some way, a form of making the patient feel the need to keep talking, to correct any misunderstandings they thought might be on that paper, but that didn't make it any less irritating.

"I see," the psychiatrist said, slowly and at length. Naofumi felt a tic start in his eye.

That's another thing. It's always just 'I see'. Never anything productive or helpful. It's like they expect you to do their job for them.

When Naofumi remained silent, the older man tried a different question. "Anything on your mind?" he offered, and Naofumi glanced at him.

"Tonkatsu."

The third thing about shrinks that drove him up the wall was the look. It was, he found, difficult to articulate the depth of the judgement in their eyes. Were they thinking about something that might offer genuine help, or were they simply thinking well this guy's a bit of a bastard, isn't he? For all his experience reading people back in Melromarc, there was a unique veil in the eyes of a shrink that no intuition of his seemed able to pierce.

Naofumi's protracted silence prompted further probing. "What about tonkatsu?"

"Wouldn't mind some."

"Mmm." Scribble, scribble.

Deciding that he was done with psychiatry for the day, Naofumi folded his hands over his chest and stared up at the ceiling until his unwelcome visitor bid him a good day. The heavy oak door shut with a clunk and a click, and the former Shield Hero managed a rueful little smile at the Pavlovian way in which his muscles relaxed at the sound.

The smile vanished when he realized that the target of his thousand woes was no longer present, and he was once again alone with himself until the next time the man came around.

"...Shit."

A month passed like this, with every day much the same as the last, before he was allowed basic entertainment in the form of a limited selection of books. They were, he found, entirely nonfiction - not what he'd have chosen, but it was better than twiddling his thumbs in an empty room for the better part of sixteen hours, trying his damndest not to think about everything he'd lost (that was to say, everything).

He was diagnosed with schizophrenia, which was total bullshit as far as Naofumi was concerned; despite never taking the medication he'd been prescribed, his evaluations came back better every time, which confirmed his suspicions that he was roughly as schizophrenic as a stick of butter.

Something's clearly up. Naofumi was not naive enough to believe that he was being truthfully diagnosed with and kept in a psychiatric ward for something he very clearly did not have. I wouldn't be surprised if the pills they're giving me are placebos, but even if that's the case...why? Why is everyone around me pretending I'm schizophrenic and keeping me locked up? Does my family even know I'm in here?

Family. If he was honest, he'd spared them hardly a thought during his stay in Melromarc. The relationship between Naofumi and his parents had, during his teenage years, degraded into a polite sort of distance, closed only by the fact that he'd managed to steer Jun away from delinquency (with the help of eroge, of course - not that their middle-aged parents needed to know that). He and Jun had gotten on well, but for Naofumi, there was always a lingering sort of discomfort in spending time with The Good Son when he himself was the black sheep of the Iwatani family. Being an unambitious college student had curried him no favor with his overachieving relatives, and the tendrils of their disdain ran deep.

Really, he mused, Filo was the closest thing I had to either a pet or family. Once upon a time, he might have said the same about Raphtalia, but there was no denying that their relationship was...more than familial.

Watery sunlight filtered through the blinds behind him, and he leaned back to peer through the window at the evening sky, dyed a brilliant pink-and-orange like something out of a travel magazine. Another day I'll never get back, he thought, and suddenly the thousand hues of tangerine stained by the falling sun weren't so beautiful anymore. Naofumi shivered and reached for the starchy hospital blanket at his feet, drawing it about his shoulders like a shawl.

His mind wandering now, the former Shield Hero let himself fall backwards onto his pillow and stared unseeing at the ceiling overhead. "Where am I supposed to go from here?" he asked aloud, but the outdated drop ceiling didn't respond. Considering that he wasn't actually schizophrenic, this was expected behavior, but he almost wished it had. Losing my mind might actually be easier than moving forward while I'm sane.

Grieving, these empty days taught him, was hard for someone who had never let themselves do it. The books he was given stopped holding any meaning; he turned their pages, but it was as if he were only seeing the kanji written there rather than truly reading it. Every time he picked up a book, he couldn't help but think back to when he'd first started learning to read Melromarc's language alongside Raphtalia; for all its efforts to drain away any memory of love he had, the wrath shield hadn't been able to take away that breezy spring evening where she'd snuggled into the crook of his shoulder and fallen asleep sharing a book with him.

That day marked the first time he could remember feeling warm.

Four months in, just when he'd stopped caring whether or not they released him - when he'd resigned himself to the fact that every meal he'd ever eat for the rest of his life would taste like bitter gruel - they did just that.

Dizzy was the first word that came to mind later, when he thought back on the shock of seeing his family for the first time in several years. For them, he found, it had been a little over a year and a half since his disappearance; it seemed that time flowed differently in Melromarc.

His mother cried with what appeared to be joy. This was expected; Iwatani Emiko was a designer and professional homemaker, and she herself was part of the elaborate facades she constructed, so she'd do her utmost to play the part of the loving mother, sobbing with relief at the return of her lost son.

His father greeted him with a curt nod. This was also expected; Iwatani Katai, true to his name, was a stone-faced businessman with a heart of lead. Naofumi had very distant memories of the lines etched into his face giving way to warm smiles, but those days were long gone, and he wasn't sure how hard it really was for the man to remain stoic in the face of such a moving reunion. Is this moving, though? he wondered, allowing a nurse to escort him to the family car. I don't feel much of anything.

The ride to the place he'd once called home was a blur. Naofumi knew that in mere minutes, he'd be right back where he'd spent his life prior to becoming the Shield Hero, but it wasn't sinking in.

"Naofumi?"

His mother's voice, filled with concern - you can drop the act when we're home, you know - managed to weave its way through the haze in his head. "Mm?" he got out, struggling to focus on her face.

"We're home." So, he could guess, get out of the car before you make a scene.

Naofumi complied. He had no reason not to.

His father attempted to help him upstairs, but he shrugged off Katai's hand with the strength he'd built up in Melromarc - one both physical and mental, and one which he'd lacked the last time they'd interacted. "I'm a head case, not a cripple," he said, without looking back, and proceeded to his room alone.

Early afternoon sunlight streamed into the hallway through two of its four doorways. The third - the bathroom - faced away from the sun, while the fourth - his own room - was closed, and he paused to stare at the door.

A closed bedroom door said, very clearly, leave me alone, and for just a moment, he could imagine stepping forward and pushing it open to reveal an Iwatani Naofumi several years younger, back to the door, headphones on and nose buried in a screen - deaf and blind and more than anything else indifferent to the world around him, drifting through each day as if he'd get a thousand more just like it.

Is it self-loathing if you're not the same person anymore?

Then his hand was on the doorknob, and the familiar click of the latch was in his ears, and the next thing he knew he was laying facedown on his bed, breathing in the faint scent of dust and sweat and rain that lingered on the comforter.

It took him a few minutes to realize he was crying.

Home. I'm home.

It was dusty, it was familiar, it was comforting, it was warm, it was soft - it was everything he'd ever wanted, and with a jolt that was more of a dull ache than a shock, Naofumi knew it was everything he'd ever lost. Twice now, he'd lost home, and finding the first again didn't at all make up for the absence of the second, and it was this profound sense of loss - a stubborn, impossible desire to go back - that clutched at his heart and his chest and wracked his body with sobs he hadn't even known he was still capable of producing.

More than anything else, he felt, home was her.

Jun couldn't relax.

Knock, knock.

Jun rushed to answer the door. On the other side, a pair of men in black suits bowed politely.

"Is this the Iwatani household?"

"Uh - yes, sir." Jun returned a steeper bow. "Can I help you with anything?"

"Are Iwatani Katai-san and Iwatani Emiko-san present?"

"Okaa-san - I mean, Iwatani Emiko-san is here, yes. Should I get her?"

"Please do."

Jun scurried to find his mother. He'd most likely be late for school at this rate, but he knew he'd spend all day worrying if he left before finding out who these men were or why they were here.

"Okaa-san?" he called, tone as respectful as always. "There are some visitors here to see you."

She emerged from the study not ten seconds later, a concerned frown creasing her otherwise-pleasant features. "Who are they?" she asked, but Jun just shrugged.

"I have no idea. They're wearing suits and asked for both you and otou-san."

The lines around her lips sharpened, and she strode gracefully for the front door, standing straight and proud before the unexpected guests. They bowed again, deeper than they had for Jun, and Iwatani Emiko returned the gesture with an air Jun could only describe as dismissive.

"My son tells me you wanted to speak with my husband and I," she told the two men, by way of a greeting.

"Ah - yes. Are you related to one Iwatani Naofumi?"

Jun's blood turned to ice.

"Naofumi disappeared a year and a half ago," Emiko informed them, narrowing her eyes and raising her chin just a little. "What about him?"

The men bowed again, in perfect synchronization.

"He's been found alive, Iwatani-san. He's currently being kept in a psychological ward for evaluation."

Jun had tuned out for the rest of that conversation. He could only remember thinking Naofumi's alive on repeat until the sound of the front door closing brought him back to his senses.

He'd more or less continued on as usual after that; having already grieved his brother, the news that Naofumi was alive and would be coming home soon served as a shock equal to if not greater than to the news that he'd disappeared in the first place, and it was a few days before it really hit him that things were changing again.

That door...won't be closed anymore.

The final bell for the day rang.

"You're not coming to club?" his friends asked, and Jun shook his head.

"Sorry. I've got something going on at home."

Everything was a blur now. His heart pounded in his chest, and his head swam. The walk home passed by in an instant, and before Jun knew it, he was halfway up the stairs, bag heavy on his shoulders. It was, he'd later reflect, eerily similar to the feeling of unreality he'd experienced in the first days of his grief a year and a half ago, only of course it was real, because Naofumi's door was open and someone lay facedown and unmoving on his bed. The sheets, eighteen months crisp, now lay mussed and rumpled about him, and Jun simply dropped his bag in the hall before taking slow, nervous steps into his brother's room.

"Naofumi?" he dared to ask.

No response. It was another few paces before he was able to see the man's face - Naofumi's face - and another few seconds before he realized that his brother - his brother - was asleep.

Jun was torn. Part of him wanted nothing more than to wake Naofumi with all the urgency of a small child waking their parents on Christmas morning, but the other (far more rational) part told him to wait, that Naofumi needed rest. He heeded the second, and with great care, he covered his brother up to the shoulder with the nearest blanket before tiptoeing from the room and hauling his worn backpack into his own.

When Naofumi awoke, he was immediately presented with the distinct and revolting sensation of snot.

That's the last goddamned time I fall asleep crying, he told himself, knowing full well that it wouldn't be. Shit - I need a tissue. And maybe a change of sheets.

He sat up. A blanket fell from his shoulders, pooling in a heap of cotton at his waist, and Naofumi blinked, trying to figure out just who in his house would have done such a thing. His father was definitely out, which left his mother and -

Jun.

Forgetting about the tissue, he scrambled to his feet, staggering awkwardly through the doorway in a haze of half-sleep. His younger brother's door was closed, but he could hear the distinctive sound of a mechanical keyboard from within, and with a shaky hand, he knocked twice, the same way he always had.

It was a few seconds before the knob turned, and before Naofumi was truly ready, he came face to face with the only family member he actually wanted to see.

Jun was unmistakably older now. His face was sharper, his blonde hair (dyed, of course, and his one privilege as the top of his elite high school) was longer, and something about his entire demeanor was just different. It wasn't simply the expression he wore - pain, disbelief and joy wrapped up into one - but Naofumi couldn't put his finger on it. The only word that came to mind was depth, and for a minute, the two stood on opposite sides of the threshold, staring at one another like a pair of aliens meeting for the first time - then Jun flung his arms around Naofumi with unnecessary force, thumping his brother on the back like a horse.

"Bastard."

Naofumi smiled a little.

"Yeah."

At least, he knew, I'm not alone.