It was extremely distant, didn't really register at all really, just snuck its way in as part of his dream. A tiny voice calling, "Oniichan!" in frail desperation. He looked around, mildly concerned, because the voice sounded frightened, like it was crying, and he could swear an echo of whimpers followed. He wondered who was supposed to answer, who the voice was looking for, because no one had ever called him oniichan. But there was no one else in the room with him. His dream was empty, devoid of people. All it was was him in a vacant Marron endlessly wiping counters that were already clean, and the voice cried again.

"Oniichan!"

He was snapped out of his sleep in an instant, when Kisumi shot up out of his arms and ran out of the room, nearly catching him in the chin with his elbow in the process, and for a good several seconds he was severely confused. He sat up with half-open eyes, a deep crease on his forehead as he blinked around the dark room and tried to gather his surroundings.

This wasn't home.

This wasn't the apartment he shared with Kisumi in Tokyo. This was Kisumi's room in Iwatobi. That was the desk he half knew. That was the window unit he'd always heard humming in the background of their phone calls. And that was the absurdly large cardboard cut-out of Shaquille O'Neal that he had sent to Kisumi as a gag gift one Christmas.

It was slow-going. At first, he was sure he'd woken up inside of another dream, but then in a snap of realization, he remembered that it was summer break, and he and Kisumi had gotten in to Kisumi's parents' house the day before, or … What time was it? He glanced at the digital clock on the nightstand. 3:26 AM, it read.

A chunk of his heart dropped into his stomach and he hissed out a curse and threw the blanket off to scramble out of bed and also make his way out of the room, because he just realized why Kisumi had left his side so abruptly. He tried to walk down the hall as straight as he could, but attempting to do it quickly just agitated his sleepy knees, and his hand dragged along the wall to keep him steady.

He rubbed a palm at his eye, squinting against the light as he turned into the bathroom doorway.

Kisumi was kneeling on the floor behind an extremely pale and fragile Hayato, whose head was half buried in the toilet as his tiny body heaved. He was crying, and it sounded no different than when Tsukushi cried whenever he fell down or bumped his head.

There's a kind of hopelessness in a baby's cry that twists at the bottom of your stomach, because you know that you can't take that pain away from them, nor can you explain to them why it's there in a way that they'll understand. And that's what Hayato's crying sounded like.

Asahi just stood in the doorway, watching, trembling, and little bit sick on the inside himself. Hayato's skin was practically translucent at this point. He'd lost an incredible amount of weight that he'd never really had to begin with, so he seemed just skin and bones and not much more, and his eyes were always tired now. He'd been smiling less — either because he was more often asleep than he wasn't, or because he was just perpetually sick. It wasn't a comfortable thing to watch, and that was putting it lightly.

There was always a tingle of tension in Asahi's spine when he was over at the Shigino house now, and whenever he left, he felt like someone had pulled a plug somewhere and drained all of the energy and motivation for caring about anything else out of him. He couldn't imagine living with Hayato full-time, and it was very unnervingly clear that the people who did were experiencing a very similar brand of fatigue. Everyone in this house was just tired. That's not how it used to be.

Asahi remembered the first time he'd gone with Kisumi and Hayato for his chemo treatment, when Hayato had had an entire meltdown and Asahi could see the visible panic rising up in Kisumi's eyes, not wanting to make his little brother go through all of this. Now, the older brother didn't even flinch. Asahi couldn't read what was in his eyes in this moment. That shadow of mortality was steaming off of his back, radiating outward like it had become a part of him, and the depth behind his normally glittering eyes was just simply dull and sapped of life. He sat close to his little brother, guarding his back, dragged a soothing hand up and down his spine, and shushed him gently, but there was no expression to his face, and that might have been the most frightening part about this scene.

"Asahi, can you get my mother, please," he said quietly. He didn't once look at him either.

Asahi turned away, because he didn't want to think about it. He picked his way across the house and quietly let himself into the master bedroom, not for the first time.

"Hina-san," he whispered, shaking her shoulder. Though, it hardly took much more than just calling her name. She popped up as though she'd been waiting for something to happen, and was already half in the motion of getting out of bed, even though her eyes were still closed.

"Is it Hayato?" she mumbled, just that quickly on her feet.

She was already halfway to the door before he could voice an affirmative. Her husband stirred not a moment later, his movements slower, but still it was clear that these people had learned how to sleep with their ears open. Genji didn't even ask what was happening. He just got out of bed and zombie-walked rather quickly out of the room, brushing a hand over Asahi's shoulder on his way out.

Asahi elected not to return to the bathroom. Usually, he had a tough stomach, but he didn't think standing in the doorway listening to Hayato throw up was going to do anything to build his stamina. He wandered off to the living room instead and just sat. It was deathly quiet, and yet he could hear the commotion coming from the hall, the tender voices attempting to comfort the smallest child as he wept into the toilet bowl and the quiet conversation Hina and Genji were spottily having about who they should call this time.

Asahi tuned it out. He didn't want to go numb, but there was an ominous darkness creeping up into his gut and he didn't want to give it his attention. There was nothing he could do right now. There was no point in dwelling on it. And yet, it was so hard not to sit on this couch and remember that one summer, years ago, when he had run away from home and sat on the very same couch, sharing a stare with Hayato, who at that point had been perfectly healthy and dubious of Asahi as a person entirely. It had taken work to get the youngest Shigino to warm up to him, but it had happened, and they'd become friends. And Asahi had and still found joy in him, and he'd always been sure to send gifts for Hayato, whenever he'd sent gifts for Kisumi, and Kisumi had always made sure Hayato got a chance to say hello when they were on the phone, and now Hayato called him Asa-chan, because that's what Kisumi called him, and Asahi was never bothered by it when Hayato said it.

He resisted walking out the front door. Trying to escape the sick wouldn't help it go away.

He didn't know how long he was sitting there before the Shiginos migrated through the house. All he knew was that he blinked, and then Kisumi had already been sitting on the opposite end of the couch for a while with Hayato turned around in his lap, sleeping with his head dropped on Kisumi's shoulder. Hina and Genji were somewhere nearby, not in the same room, but Asahi could hear their voices, softly conversing with a doctor over the phone.

Asahi watched the side of Kisumi's face for a while, silently willing it to emote something — to frown, to bend his eyebrows, to flood his cheeks with color. He would have even accepted tears. Tears were a valid response to this. Tears were signs of life and human response, but Kisumi's eyes were dry, and it tied a knot in Asahi's throat.

He knew it wasn't that Kisumi felt nothing. It was that he felt so much that something broke — had broken, and Asahi was no longer sure if that thing was repairable. And maybe he'd never know for as long as they did this. For as long as Hayato continued to puke out his guts in the middle of the night, for as long as he struggled to fight for his life, for as long as there was unfortunate news after unfortunate news.

"We can't do this surgery, because of these complications. We can't give him this medication, because of these treatments. His body can't handle XYZ because of ZYX, and all we can do now is continue with this and hope the cancer responds."

It started to hit him then, and only then, that the outcome of this story may not be what everyone so desperately wanted it to be. That there was a reason hope was flickering out like a quietly dying flame. That trying to keep it burning just drained more energy that no one had. And he didn't know what to do.

His eyes dropped to Hayato's slow-breathing body, and that darkness smothered his chest with a vicious hand. He wondered when mortality had started to absorb him too. For the longest time, it had just been lurking around corners, and now it was suddenly there in him, filling him up from the inside just like it had Kisumi.

The best and only defense he had at this point was to shuffle closer.

He repositioned himself on the couch, sitting so close to Kisumi that their knees were lined. He circled his arms around both Shigino boys and guided Kisumi's head to his shoulder, huddling Hayato between them. Kisumi numbly accepted this, and Asahi raked a hand through his hair.

"Go to sleep," he whispered.

Even then, he couldn't tell who exactly he was talking to.