Warnings: Spoilers for all of the manga.
Notes: Sorry for the delay. I almost didn't get this chapter up this week. Work was hell and then I had some minor writer's block with the last two characters (and for some reason motivation for a songfic for this series is invading my time; I don't even like songfics!) and then I was having issues getting documents to upload (still am, actually). On incest: I'm not a fan of incest pairings, but I didn't want to cop out and make them half or adopted brothers, so this is what you get. On character ages: I've had to do a lot of math to work this out, so here we go. I've considered that Yukiya is around 17 in the manga, still young enough to be a dependent, but definitely in high school. I had wanted to make Tsunuga and Hatozaki the same age, but Tsunuga has to be at the very least 30 (having a 12 year old daughter) and the numbers weren't going to match up unless I made the age difference between Yukiya and Hatozaki unreasonably larger (12 years is a bit much as it stands, considering I've made them full blood relatives). eternalsailorsolarwind: It seems Hatozaki decided to step up (and ended up talking my ear off, too; this is now the second longest in the series! Why is it the most aloof characters with the smallest amount of backstory do the most talking to me?) after Kanji kept babbling on about magic tricks and hero worship. He didn't want to hear it either. Blech. I'll work it out later. I'm glad you liked Kei's chapter and I'm leaning more to the intended pun because it makes me smile. Please enjoy this installment!
Disclaimer: Yellow is owned by Makoto Tateno; I'm just borrowing it so I can make myself feel better about the plotholes...
Brother
I don't want anyone to get the wrong idea. I had never planned, nor do I now plan to have ever seduced my younger brother. I love my brother; I do. Yukiya is my whole world. Growing up we only really had each other. Father was always busy with work. He was a career detective himself. Mother fell ill when Yukiya was still very young. In the years between falling ill and her eventual death I had already taken over for caring for my younger brother. He was much younger than me; 12 years in fact, and only 5 when she finally passed away. I think at that age, watching her ill was very hard for him and caused him to become even more dependent upon me for emotional support. In turn I became very protective of him; and I would always worry about him when I wasn't there. I would worry unreasonably that something would happen and I would never see him again. I would rush home to make sure he was there and whenever he was hurt or upset I would rush to his side and take care of the problem, whether it was a bully at school who I could scare off, or ice cream I could go out with him to get so that he wasn't lonely. I can't say that I was ever truly panicked in those years, though. Not compared to the three specific incidents when I found myself truly fearful of losing him.
The first was when our father passed away. By some horrible act of coincidence or fate, both of our parents died in the same year. Maybe it was grief and the even heavier work load he forced on himself that caused the heart attack that took his life suddenly, I don't know. I wasn't yet out of high school and I had feared, being that we had no other family besides each other, that he would be taken away from me and I would never see him again. The money from our parents' estate coupled with the fact that my father had connections high up in the force, essentially ensuring my admittance to the police academy, thankfully enabled me to glide through and become an elite detective by the age of 23 and keep my brother close. I didn't join the force because of duty or a strong sense of justice. I did it for Yukiya; so that I could take care of him. This was the easiest and fastest course for me to take.
The second occurred when my colleague, Shigeyuki Tsunuga, lost his family to murderers. Tsunuga was a few years older than me, though I had risen in the ranks much faster than him because of my family connections. I found out then just how savage the world could be. I wasn't as naive as Tsunuga had been, though. My position afforded me a lot more information than his did and I knew that something wasn't adding up in how that incident went down. It became even more suspicious when, even after Tsunuga left the force, I was asked to, "keep an eye on him." I did of course. To my superiors I was "pretending" to be a friend while I actually kept tabs on Tsunuga as I helped him set up his snatcher business and act as his go-between with the police on jobs. I couldn't disobey my superiors. I might have been elite and had connections from my father, but I wasn't high enough in the ranks yet to affect any change. I regarded Tsunuga as a true friend, though, and my real objective was to help him find the truth, even if I knew he was looking in the wrong places. I worked my way up ever higher after that day, to make sure that something like this couldn't happen again. Not to my colleagues, but moreover, not to my brother and myself. I regarded the risks I took in aiding Tsunuga as an acceptable trade-off for the greater gain in protecting Yukiya in the long run.
The third and most terrifying incident occurred when Yukiya ran away after some of my less trustworthy coworkers got it into his head that I was going to marry and abandon him so they could steal some drugs and make some money for themselves. I was frantic during this time. I even broke my anonymity with Tsunuga's snatchers. I wasn't supposed to ever reveal myself to them, but I was desperate. I have to admit that this incident changed some things about my objectives as well as myself. Before, I was interested in helping Tsunuga and thereby helping myself and my brother, but I hadn't regarded any outside issues arising as a result of my arrangements with the snatching business. It made me not only much more suspicious and wary of my colleagues and superiors, but it also afforded me a true glimpse into the lives of those boys. They were just a vehicle before. A means to an end for both myself and Tsunuga, but afterwards it was more. They proved themselves more than capable and gained my trust as well as indebting me to them greatly. After that I was a lot more lenient with what I allowed them to get away with and when certain issues arose for them later, I lent a hand even though there was nothing in it for me, and in fact created some risk to my position. It was interesting finding myself with concern over people who were not my brother.
On the night that I finally was able to take Yukiya home I also learned of another negative feeling I had in regard to my brother: jealousy. Seeing him on top of Goh like that enraged me. Not at Goh, I understood the specifics of the situation very well at that time, but at the very idea that anyone would touch him. That he would be willing to have anyone touch him that way, when I had been denying any sense of desire towards him in myself for years. It all came crashing down on me that night, completely by surprise. I had not ever so much as considered it before. The years I had spent protecting him; years I kept him close, but still at arms' length. I had justified it as my desire to raise him to rely on himself and not be totally dependent on me, but here was this other reason. He forced his own feelings in my face and I could no longer deny that my little brother didn't just love me and depend upon me because I was his older brother and he had no one else, and that this incident had simply pushed him to desperation to get me to acknowledge him and this feeling.
I still didn't act, though. I took Yukiya home that night and I calmed him down and even though I had revealed to him rather openly in my heightened emotional state that I might return his feelings, I just couldn't. He's still a boy and he's still my brother and as tempting as it would be to fall from grace and devote my life to him in another way, it wouldn't be fair to someone who has his whole life open ahead of him. I want him to be free to choose his path, so that when he finally doesn't need me to take care of him anymore, he won't be tied down by me either.
Still, on one particular night after I had gotten off the phone with Tsunuga, the memory of what happened to his family, the possible scenarios running through my head over Taki's involvement with Sandfish and my already shaken once brother standing concerned behind me led to my closest act of desperation in regard to my need to keep him with me. The very notion of losing him terrified me more at that moment than at any other time, including the past incidents. I rose from my seat, around to where he was standing and I embraced him tighter than I had ever even conceived of doing before. Startled by my sudden affection when I had been avoiding physical contact for months, he had embraced me back enthusiastically and we stood there like that in the living room of our home for a very long time. I couldn't bring myself to move because I knew if I did, even for just a moment, that it would be to kiss him and then to take him to my bed and, oh, God, what was I even considering? Instead I just held him and whispered about how lucky I was to have him and how I would always be there to protect him; my little brother.
Hatozaki
8/27/06
1473 words