AN: I'm sure everyone is familiar with Japanese honorifics. For those who aren't as familiar here is an explanation since a lot of this is from Kurumi's perspective.
Ku-chan - This is how Kurumi refers to Saiki Kusuo. By the way, by being a "chan" it's a embarassing for him.
Ku-kun - This is how Kurumi refers to Saiki Kuusuke.
Definitely a large switch in POV here and playing with the verb tenses. A little more disjointed than usual. Trying to portray Kusuo's reaction to the whole thing after he had some time to process things.
Secrets of Secrets - Chapter 11 - Awake
When Kusuo woke up, he saw his mother next to his bed. She had fallen asleep with her head on her crossed arms, her upper body resting on his bed. She sat on a large cushion that was the floor. It was day time.
Why did she have oven mitts over her hands?
There was a wet towel on his forehead head. That was when he noticed that his head was resting on a medical ice pillow.
What was that about?
His brain did not seem to want to think, like there was a layer of muck covering his every neuron. At the same time, his thoughts were rapid and aimless. His body was sore, and slow. Even trying to twitch felt like he was trudging through mud.
He remembered teleporting his parents to Kumagoro and Kumi's house in the countryside. Grandpa had checked out of the hospital and was convalescing at home. His parents wanted to stay behind and make sure all the details are arranged. Grandma Kumi was more than capable of taking care of a grumpy tsudere husband. She was, however, elderly and a fickle lady and might just straight up and leave him. That was the marital dynamic that they had.
Kusuo was dismissed, told to go attend school since he already missed a day, or whatever explanation his parents used to excuse him. Taking care of the grandparents was their job, after all, no need to burden the next generation with the troubles of the sunset generation.
He remembered not arguing with them, and teleported back home to his room. He remembered falling into his bed at some point, too exhausted physically and emotionally by the events of the previous days, not caring if he ever woke up again.
How long he was awake before collapsing on his bed? Since he first woke up to that awful headache? He was not sure.
After asking to be excused from school, he had gone back to his room and activated his temporal abilities. He had stretched his temporal abilities further than he ever had. What might have been the passage of a day in the world was personally many days for him. The effect of those temporal abilities on his circadian rhythm, his mind was unpredictable. His memory updated so many times that he lost track. He metered out his psychic abilities, taking care to use up his stamina a bit at a time, removing his limiters as he needed to penetrate the timelines and parallel universes.
He had to try to bring Kuusuke back.
Why did he even want to bring that jerk back?
Kuusuke was annoying. Kusuo hated him. Kuusuke might as well have been dead to him for the years that he was away in the UK.
Yet, somewhere in the depth of Kusuo's soul, the concept of Kuusuke being completely out of reach was unacceptable. Kuusuke was Kusuo's first playmate; they were supposed to compete, play games, and annoy the hell out of each other, forever. That was the deal.
So Kusuo had to try to keep that deal alive. And tried he did. He had lost count of the attempts.
Nothing could be changed. In this original timeline, along with all those other timelines, even the apocalyptic ones, all converged in this one inescapable fact.
Kusuke was never going to live past the predestined lifespan just shy of 20 years.
Even Aiura confirmed it without hesitation.
And Kusuo still had not figured out why.
God must be a sadist who is laughing his ass off at an all-powerful psychic's failure.
Kusuo took a deep breath and try to think of his present situation and not dwell on that thought train.
It was then that he noticed that he had yet to be greeted by the usual whining and moaning of humanity. Was his telepathy not working because he was so overextended?
First things first. He removed the wet towel on his head and sat up. With caution, he checked for his limiters.
Both are in and seemed intact, undamaged. So that was not the problem.
Wait...did he even put his limiters back on after his escapade through time? And why are these the clunky, pink ball first-generation of limiters? One of them didn't even function as a limiter.
Glasses! He needs those glasses now! Oh good. They were on his face.
Fix the limiters first. Fishing around the pockets, he found the small box that held his third-generation of limiters. He quickly changed them out. He only encountered slight trouble due to minor tremors of the hands.
While he was handling these delicate devices, he noted a ring at the base of his pointing finger on his right hand.
Where did that germanium ring come from? Didn't he gift that to the temple on New Year, along with all his New Year's money, desperately praying for a peaceful year?
Kusuo took a moment to recall that prayer. He was willing to offer the object that provided him with the rare escape from his telepathy and all the cash to his name to escape the prediction of a terrible fortune.
A lot of good that sacrifice did.
God be damned for bestowing upon him a living nightmare.
Kusuo could withstand the constant intrusion of conceited thoughts. He could withstand the disgusting sights of naked people, their grotesque innard and bones. He could withstand the constant anxiety over his powers, the hard work it took to blend in, the precipice of despair that he dodged when his attention wandered and contemplated his curse.
God daring to take his older brother away was the last damn straw.
He needed to go burn that temple down, raze it to to the ground for being such a cruel mockery of hope.
In fact, he wouldn't mind if he burned down the world right now.
He was going to get God back for being always so thoughtful.
And why should Kusuo care about whether Kuusuke lived or die anyway?
Kuusuke was a horrible older brother, always making Kusuo do weird crap, trying to outright humiliate him, trying to blow up the house, send him on that scavenger hunt, lied to him for years, threatened to real his secret. The list goes on and on.
Kuusuke provided the only real solution for Kusuo's ESP. Kuusuke was the only person who understood him so perfectly to push all the right buttons. Kuusuke fixed everything every time something went drastically wrong. The limiters. The switching of schools. The final fool-proof solution to overcoming Mount Owari.
Damn. Kusuo felt his face was getting hot again, and his heart seemed to be pounding since he woke up. His head felt so fuzzy, light, and heavy at the same time. And why the hell was the rest of him so damn cold? It's the middle of June and he was still in his sweater and track pants.
And why are his eyes stinging so badly?
Why is it so hard to breathe?
Why is he still shaking?
Why is everything hurting?
Why did Kuusuke have to just go up and die like that?
Why?
Why?!
WHY!?
"Ku-chan?" Kurumi stirred, alerted by the minute shifting of the bed. She sat up immediately when she saw him awake.
Kusuo blinked at her. Groggy, unfocused, liquidy violet eyes met with bloodshot violet eyes. "Mom?"
Kurumi looked at him with disbelief. She touched him with the oven mitt on. She quickly discarded the oven mitt and her hand lightly brushed his forehead.
"You're not burning up," said Kurumi with shock in her voice. "You're awake and you're not burning up!"
Kurumi leaped onto the bed and hugged him tightly. She kissed and nuzzled him on the cheeks, something she had not done since he was little.
His mother's touch briefly activated psychometery. Her thoughts were a complete jumble and impossible to unpackage. Her emotions were mixed too. She was, frightened, worried, freaked out, tired, but the major themes were her love and panic about him and relief at him being awake.
Why would mom be so panicked about him?
And why was she relieved at the simple fact that he woke up?
"You are not burning up anymore," she said, again, to herself, as if she was trying to impress the reality into her head. "And you woke up! I thought you were never going to wake up!"
Kusuo blinked.
How long had he been asleep?
"You're still slightly warm, but you're not burning up anymore," said Kurumi. She lightly touched his forehead again, making sure the contact this time was too brief to bother him through psychometery. "Oh I'm so relieved! Oh Ku-chan." She began to cry, her face scrunched up. She wiped away her tears with her sleeve. But her emotions overtook her and she buried her face in her hands. "Oh. My baby is okay. He woke up and he's okay. Oh. I'm so glad."
What was going on here?
Kusuo had half a mind to remove his germanium ring to expediently understand what had happened through telepathy. He seemed to be missing something here. The silence was also making him apprehensive as his imagination kept on suggesting that a hidden ninja assassin was hiding in a corner, ready to shank him and mom. At the last second, though, he decided not to.
He was certain that he did not want to hear his mother's distraught thoughts. Exposing himself to her inner distress might cause him to lose his composure right then and there.
His mother was the rock of his life, the anchor of the family. Always steadfast, kind, gentle, perfect alignment of value. With everything that had happened, he needed that rock now.
It seemed that she needed a rock too.
"What happened?" Kusuo asked. The ring prevented him from hearing thoughts, but it did not prevent him from broadcasting.
"You were burning up, Ku-chan. You were burning up so badly," said Kurumi, trying to get the words out between sniffles. "Your room was so warm because of how hot you were. We didn't know how long you were out because we stayed at my parent's place longer than we anticipated. We knew something happened because you didn't come to get us and we had to take the long way back here."
Kusuo frowned at that. He was tired, that was for certain. But so tired that he didn't wake up even for the few minutes it would've taken to pick up his parents? That seemed absurd.
"And when finally we got back," Kurumi continued, "We found you in your room, on your bed, with this huge mess and your desk missing."
It was then that Kusuo noticed that the remnants of the tchotchkes that were teleported back to his room from the office fire had been swept to the side. The blue journals were neatly stacked in a corner. The bits of burnt modular carpet swept in another corner. The charred office plant appeared to have new growth. The dust and char were swept to a third corner.
"You looked like you were sleeping but you were so hot," Kurumi explained. "Papa's hands were burned when he tried to rouse you. We yelled. We prodded. We tried to throw water on you and the water just vaporized. We just couldn't wake you."
Wait. Pyrokinesis? His pyrokinesis was active when he was asleep? That had not happened in a long time.
That explained the oven mitts.
Had he ever been so out of it that he could not be awakened?
Why couldn't he remember? Was this a side effect of his temporal abilities? Of having his memories updated so many times?
"We kept on calling Ku-kun, because when this happened before, he was always able to get you to cool down immediately and wake you up, but he never responded. I called him nonstop on the ride home too and he never picked up. He hasn't responded to anything in five days," Kurumi said, fear creeping into her voice.
So she did not know, yet.
Kusuo resisted the urge to tell her right then and there that Kuusuke will never respond to her.
He looked away from her as his eyes stung, but mom did not notice. She kept on talking, laying out verbally the activities that occurred while he was recovering from an over-exertion of his psychic abilities.
"And then we noticed that your hairpins were missing but we were able to find your old ones in a jewelry box on your bookshelf. We replaced them but it didn't make a difference like the first time it was put in." Kurumi said, she started sobbing. "We thought 'this is it! Your powers are finally going to take you away from us,' We've delayed it as long as we could!"
Wait...what? What is she talking about?
"I don't understand."
"It's like that time when you were ten years old," Kurumi said. "You were so exhausted all the time and you would get so hot that you would pass out. Ku-kun was always here to make sure that you cool back down. And when you woke up, and there would be gaps in your memory, like it never happened. We didn't want to alarm you so we didn't say anything. Then you eventually figured out something was happening and would try to fight it and go the other extreme. You even started to know when it was going to happen and make sure you were in bed first so it seemed like you were just sleeping.
"Ku-kun said it was happening because your body's growth wasn't keeping pace with your power growth and he was working with you on a fix. We didn't dare send you to see a doctor because it was either the government or a scientist taking you away or your ESP taking you away." By now, Kurumi had somehow found a tissue box and was rapidly filling up a trash can with used tissues. "The government wouldn't leave Ku-kun alone because of one stupid test he took when he was two. It took him years to get them to stop pestering him. We didn't want that for you that so we managed the best we could."
That was a lot to absorb.
Was that why his parents were so lax when he demonstrated psychic abilities so young? It was not because they were both ditzy and carefree, but they were scared that some threatening agency would take him away?
But how could that be? He would have realized this via telepathy as a child and fixed whatever trouble that came their way. As to him having such problems with his psychic powers, how in the world did his parents hid it from his telepathy?
As for Kuusuke, that made somewhat sense. Despite being born only two years apart, Kusuo was very much raised like a single child. Kuusuke factored largely in Kusuo's memory as the older brother, but Kuusuke was mysteriously missing from some of Kusuo's younger memories. They did not even attend the same schools, despite their similar academic attainments at the time.
Why hadn't Kusuo known this? Or realized how strange this was until now?
Kurumi did not realize how many questions her words had engendered in her younger son. She continued talking. "Then one day, right after you turned eleven, you came home from school and you passed out on the living room floor. You didn't even make it to bed like you usually did. You weren't responsive at all, we couldn't wake you up, just like now. And you kept on getting hotter and hotter until we started seeing heat mirages and embers. I thought that we had to say our goodbyes."
Kusuo wished his brain would catch up. What was mom talking about?
At ten, eleven years old, he must've been in the fifth grade, then? That was right. He barely remembered the details. His telepathy range had grown to something completely unmanageable that he could barely get sleep, scrambling much of his own memories of that time period.
Was that reason why he could not recall much about it? He did recall a singular episode of distress, not this prolonged problem that chronically worried his parents.
Was it really that bad?
He felt like there was a barrier on his memory surrounding the event, that year, and almost all the years before that, as if his mind had cornered off and locked those memories away.
"I thought that it was happening again," said Kurumi, still between blowing noses. "But this time, Ku-kun isn't here and he's not responding. He always got back to me immediately when I told him to check on you, usually before I even ask.
"I think something happened to him, Ku-chan," Kurumi started to bawl. "and you were so hot and weren't waking up and I just didn't know what to do!"
For the next minute or so, the room was filled with Kurumi's sobbing, of her imagining the worst, that her children were leaving her before she left them.
Kusuo did not know how to react to her. He intellectually understood that there was such a thing as emotions, but he rarely had to deal with them since he personally felt so little.
The sight of his own mother so tormented by fear, anguish made him want to hold her and run away at the same time.
He was barely holding it together himself. Holding her would compound the threat to his composure. He would never leave her either in this state alone. She was his mother.
He could not bear telling her that her suspicions about Kuusuke were correct either. He saw it with his own eyes, attempted to use all his power to bring Kuusuke back and could not. He had this unwanted reality blithely confirmed, without any doubt, by another psychic.
Eventually, Kurumi calmed down. She sniffed, held her hand to her heart. She shook away as if the action could banish her awful imagination. "But, it's going to be okay. You woke up, now. You're not so hot anymore," she said to herself, soothing her own emotions. She reached over to Kusuo and lightly touched his forehead with the back of her hand. She seemed more reassured.
"And I'm just being a worry-wort for nothing. Ku-kun is probably just busy. He's always into one thing or another. He always took good care of himself. It's no different than when he was studying abroad. He would laugh at my doom and gloom. This is not like me." Though she seemed unconvinced, saying the words seemed to calm her down from her earlier distrait. "It's going to be okay," she repeated to herself.
No, it's not going to be okay, thought Kusuo.
Kuusuke had his mischievous moments and obvious mental problems, but in Kuusuke's lifespan, he had become the safety net for the Saiki family.
Issues with Kusuo's psychic powers aside, it had been Kuusuke who dealt with Dad's employment issues. Grandpa was able to get the medical attention due to Kuusuke's modernization of the town he lived in. Even in the accidental time slip, it was due to the other Kuusuke's invention that got Kusuo back to the original timeline. Kuusuke always had a solution to the seemingly insurmountable.
Kusuo was beginning to recognize some of the indirect ramifications of his brother's passing.
Kurumi did not seem to detect her son's contemplative state. Instead, she indulged herself with another hug, verifying again that her baby boy was okay again. This was just a one-off.
"I'll go prepare some rice porridge (1) for you," said Kurumi. "We'll see how you feel after that, okay?"
The mention of food reminded Kusuo was just how long he had gone without eating. That might have caused some of his memory confusion earlier. It had been several days, at least in his experience, since the office building fire. His appetite seemed to be returning. Not a whole lot but he felt that he could tolerate food again.
Kurumi felt a tug at her sleeve and she saw her son pointing to the medical ice pillow and the ring on his finger.
"Where did these come from?" Kusuo asked her. In his recollection, these things were not on the list of common items that his parents would've thought of when it came to caring for him, especially the germanium ring. He never told anyone of its effects on his telepathy.
"Oh! I forgot to tell you. Your grandmother, Risa, you know, your dad's mother, is a medical doctor. She was here yesterday. She recommended the cooling pillow and placed this ring on you. She said that as long as we make sure your head cool down, and keep this ring on you, you should eventually wake up. She just did not know when. She said she'll come by sometime later to check on you."
"Did you...tell her?" asked Kusuo. "About my ESP?"
Kurumi shook her head. "We didn't say anything to her. Papa thinks that it should be your decision whether you want to tell people or not. I agree too."
Kusuo fingered the ring. In the duration of being awake so far, he saw inklings of resiudal memories on the ring. At first, he thought it was just his mind replying the events from the previous days. That was not true, the more time he had it and study it.
He did not brodcast his next thought.
Grandmother Risa already knows. This is her ring.
