Trigger warning this chapter, for abuse. Sorry. Probably safe to assume this story's going to keep getting darker before it gets lighter.

"Demon!"

"Monster!"

"You better run! We'll kill you!"

Boys will be boys, he'd heard some adults say. When he tried to complain of their threats, their abuse, he just got shrugged away. They didn't believe children were serious when they made promises like that.

But he knew better. This wasn't just a game. He knew they meant every word.

Their rocks meant it, when they bit into Tsuzuki's back and his legs and his head. Their feet and fists meant it, when he tripped in the mud and couldn't run anymore, and they were able to catch up. They rained blow upon blow upon him until he thought they would never stop, and if anyone thought ten-year-old boys lacked the maturity or the wherewithal to kill, they weren't in Tsuzuki's shoes.

They hadn't done what Tsuzuki had done. Because he had killed.

Of course the adults all believed it was an accident. That was what they told him, what they told themselves to make sense of how a child could push another child to the ground with enough force to crack his skull. They all knew Tsuzuki was the one under attack when it happened. They'd seen him pinned to the ground, feet slipping in the gravel and fighting for breath against the schoolyard bully sitting on top of him. And they'd done nothing.

Just like they did nothing when that boy finally let Tsuzuki up, and laughed off trying to smother the life out of him, and all the nasty things he had said about Tsuzuki's parents and how filthy his mother was for giving birth to a thing like him.

Only when he tackled that boy to the ground, screaming like an animal, did anyone do anything, and by then it was too late.

So, yeah, he knew he was dead the moment that kid's head hit the ground. He knew the other boys were going to exterminate him like a rabid dog terrorizing the neighborhood, the moment they got the chance, and he couldn't even say he didn't deserve it.

His skin stung from the stoning. His bones and his gut and everything ached from being kicked. He just wished they would hurry up and kill him already, he couldn't take any more of their abuse; but at some point, the fun must have run out for them. They laughed as they hurled a few more taunts of "Shit-eating demon!" or variations thereof his way, and left him to lie there, in a puddle of mud and blood and vomit, sometimes their piss if they were feeling particularly sadistic.

Maybe that's what was cruelest of all. That they didn't care enough for their deceased friend to finish the job and properly avenge his murder. It wasn't about what he deserved so much as it was about his humiliation. And they'd do it all over again tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that—he never knew when the hunt would begin. Just lived in constant fear that the next time might be the time they finally broke something inside him he couldn't come back from.

But it never happened. What his mother and sister called a blessing, he called a curse. He always healed from whatever those boys did to him. Much faster than was normal, and right.

Just proving their point. He was a freak. He was a monster.

Afternoon turned to evening, and by the sinking sun he'd drag himself home, and Ruka would seize him up in her arms and cradle him tightly to her, bruises and all, and tell him through her tears how sorry she was that this had happened to him again. He wished he could ask her if they could move again, but it was selfish to hope for that much. They had only moved to this village a few months ago, and it was hard for Mother to find work and for Ruka to finish her schooling if they couldn't stay in one place for very long.

So he stopped telling them what happened. He didn't want them to feel responsible for what they couldn't help. Though boys and their ideas only get worse as they get older, and one day they stopped insulting his mother's sexual habits and started insulting his own. Instead of rocks, they chased him with sticks. And when they caught him, before they beat him, they'd pull at his clothes.

Just to see how human—or inhuman—I really was. I envied the kids they called eta, unclean. They treated those kids like animals, but at least they treated them like animals that deserved to live.

I remember I was so afraid they would kill me, but even if they could have, I doubt they would have done it. Then what would they have to play with? To humiliate, and torture, like they tortured me? Little cats and dogs? Cats and dogs don't beg you for mercy in a language you can understand when you kick them. Cats run away, and dogs just come back for more, licking your hand. There's no power to be gained in hurting a thing like that.

But if it's your peer. . . .

Then you have the pleasure of seeing how you've hurt them on their face, every day. Then you know they go home to their beds, to the one place they should feel safe, and have nightmares about what you're going to do to them, every night. You know they understand just how much you hate them, and why. And you feel like a god, to have the fate and even the god-damned thoughtsof this human being in the palm of your hand, that you can crush any time you choose.

And if you're that poor soul on the receiving end, you grow up, thinking, Finally, this long nightmare is over! I survived, thank God, somehow I survived!

Only to realize, it never ends. You never grow out of it. You never get to wake up.

At one end of town, there stood a small Western-style cottage with a white picket fence. Through his tears, as if he had wandered into a dream, or a fairy story, he saw bushes of white roses in the yard, and a kindly-looking man with graying hair and glasses behind them, trimming off the buds that hadn't yet opened.

It seemed like such a cruel thing to be doing, when they were trying so hard just to live their lives. So that's what he told the man.

Who said he understood. That was certainly how it looked. "But it doesn't really hurt the plant. If anything, it helps it to grow strong."

"It does?" With a sniffle, Tsuzuki wiped away the last of the tears. He didn't believe it.

The man smiled. "You see, right now the buds have to share all that food and water and sunlight equally, so when they open into blossoms, they won't get very big. But if you cut away some of the buds before they've had a chance to get too far along . . ." A few more well-placed snips, and flowers' heads fell to the ground. Like disgraced kings and queens. "Now the buds that remain have more food and water to split between them, and they can get a lot bigger. You see?"

He snipped off a bloom that was huge, and held it out for Tsuzuki to take. The perfume was intoxicating. So clean, like the scent of soap and sunshine that clung to the sheets when they were hung out to dry.

Then the man saw the cuts and bruises on Tsuzuki's face, and on his knees and hands. "What's this? Has someone been giving you a hard time?"

Tsuzuki didn't want to tell him about the other boys. It might only get them in trouble, and if it did, he'd pay for it twice over. But more than that, he didn't want the kind man knowing what they called him, if he hadn't heard it already.

"Well, I can't send you home to your folks like this," the man said as he wiped the dirt from his hands on a garden apron. "Let's at least get some disinfectant on those scrapes. I'll put on a pot of tea."

He was a doctor, it turned out, a physician. And when his mother had a relapse in her illness and collapsed, it was to that man that Tsuzuki ran.

"It's a good thing you called me," the doctor said when his work was finished, and Tsuzuki and Ruka saw him out. "I'm not sure who treated your mother before, but they didn't give her the medicine she needs."

"Can we call on you again?" Ruka said. She stood behind Tsuzuki, resting her hands on his shoulders.

But it was Tsuzuki's eyes the doctor met when he answered: "I would be happy to schedule regular check-ups on your mother's condition. And if she has another fit like this one, do not hesitate to send for me, any time of day or night.

"She certainly is a lucky woman to have a boy like you looking out for her, Asato-kun." And he gave Tsuzuki a wink. It made Tsuzuki feel warm inside, special, like he was valued enough to be confided in by so respected and kind a person as the doctor.

I really thought that, finally, I had someone I could call a friend. But a friend's just someone whose betrayal, when it comes, wounds you the deepest. Isn't it?

How many afternoons after school did he while away at that house with the white picket fence? Not wanting to be caught out in the open, where the other boys could find and torment him. Not in any hurry to race home, either, never knowing in what condition he would find his mother's health that day. It was so much easier to pretend everything else in his life was fine and under control, if he was happily among the doctor's roses, gifted with the responsibility of trimming them and helping them grow strong.

Or blissfully full of cake or sandwiches and tea that the doctor plied him with, not reprimanding Tsuzuki if he wanted second or third helpings, but encouraging it, because he was a growing boy. And because, after all, the doctor lived alone in his house with no wife or children to spend time with him, let alone to share a cup of tea with.

Or listening to a record on the doctor's gramophone from Germany, paging through picture books he had of places all over the world, or drawings of every part of the human anatomy. The doctor expressed his surprise at first that Tsuzuki wasn't disturbed by those drawings—apparently some people got queasy if they thought too much about what was on their insides—but Tsuzuki said they didn't bother him. Not really. It was kind of exciting, actually, to learn what we are all made of, and realize that on the inside, we really aren't so different from one another. We pretty much have all the same parts in the same places.

The doctor smiled when Tsuzuki said that, and Tsuzuki thought that he would laugh. That's what adults usually did when he said something like that.

But the doctor said that Tsuzuki could be a doctor himself when he grew up, because "You truly are a thoughtful young man." And he sounded as though he truly meant it.

And when Tsuzuki asked nicely for another slice of cake after a day that Ruka couldn't afford to send him to school with a lunch: "You truly are a polite young man."

And when he talked about the rose bushes as his friends—because, other than the doctor, he really didn't have anyone else he considered his friend: "You truly are a kind young man."

And then: "You really are lovely, Asato-kun. Did you know that?"

How elated he had been to hear that. But he blushed, humbled by the word, because no one had ever called him lovely. Aside from his mother, perhaps, but she hardly counted. "Everyone always says I look weird," he confessed, seized by some irrational fear that he would get in trouble for telling. Or worse, that the doctor might take back his compliment and agree he was hideous. "Because of my eyes. They say I look like a monster."

But the doctor, by some miracle, could not have disagreed more. "Trust me," he said, "I have seen monsters, and you're the farthest thing from one there could ever be. If you want the truth—and, mind, this is just between you and me—I don't think I've ever met a person quite as beautiful as you."

"Really?" That should have set off alarm bells. Maybe it did, but what could I do? No one else had ever said such nice things to me.

"Mm-hm." The doctor nodded. "And I would say your eyes absolutely have something to do with that. Everyone must be jealous, to say such cruel things. No one else has eyes like yours. But that's hardly a bad thing. If everyone had them, they wouldn't be so striking. Would you . . . would you mind if I took a picture of you?"

He'd only had one other picture taken that he could remember, of himself and Ruka and their mother, at a festival they attended, right before they moved to this town. Tsuzuki remembered the smell of the flash powder igniting as the shutter snapped, like gun smoke—or what he imagined gun smoke would smell like, anyway. It had been exciting. Of course he told the doctor it was alright. And to all the ones that came after, he never said no. It would have seemed ungrateful, somehow.

Though their afternoons together felt different after that. Not bad just . . . charged somehow. Like when a storm is building outside and you have to walk around carefully to keep from shocking yourself on everything you touch. The doctor seemed to have a little less to say, and he would look away when Tsuzuki met his eyes. His hand on Tsuzuki's shoulder when he sent him home would feel just a little bit heavier, and stay there just a little longer. And then the doctor suggested that maybe Tsuzuki ought to have a checkup. "With your mother's condition being what it is, I mean. We should make sure that it hasn't been passed on to you, and, well, since you said you've never had an examination before . . ."

The touch of the stethoscope to his bare chest made him jump and shiver, it was like a piece of ice. "I've never been sick before."

"Nonsense. Every child gets sick at least once."

But Tsuzuki shook his head, adamant. "Not me. Even when all the babies in our old town came down with fever, and a lot of them died, I never even got a chill. At least, that's what Ruka tells me. She had it pretty bad, herself."

The doctor tapped his back, so he could hear the resonance in Tsuzuki's ribcage. His fingers were cold. But it was the doctor who seemed to have a problem breathing evenly. "Well," he cleared his throat, "it's pretty unusual that a child, exposed to other sick children, would never catch anything—"

"But I didn't!" He didn't want the doctor to think he was a liar.

"I didn't say I don't believe you, Asato. It's just unusual. Just further proof of how extraordinary you are."

Another snap of the shutters. Another photograph. One that Tsuzuki never saw.

Another afternoon, and the rainclouds were hanging heavy and low over the house with the white picket fence. It should have surprised no one when they couldn't hold their load any longer. The shower started innocently enough with a pattering of fat drops, but soon turned into a torrent that soaked the garden and everyone in it in seconds. They ran inside.

I can't send you home like that, the doctor told him, you'll catch cold. We have to get you out of these wet clothes. And Tsuzuki didn't argue with him, even if he couldn't remember ever catching cold from the rain before. The man was a doctor, after all, and knew what he was talking about. That was why he took off his clothes too . . . wasn't it?

I don't want to see this. I don't want to be here. Tsuzuki tried to bolt from this memory, but his eleven-year-old self grabbed hold of him, and would not let him leave.

The doctor grabbed hold of his arm, and even though he wanted so much to leave, to run home, even if he had to go through that torrent, he didn't. He couldn't move.

And after that . . .

He didn't know. His mind drifted to other things. Like how peculiar it was that no white rose was ever really, completely white. There was always something to mar it, like a bit of decay around the edges, or springtails crawling around inside the petals. You wouldn't notice them at first, until you leaned in for a sniff and got really close. He'd blow gently on the blossom and watch them leap and dance and scatter in panic. Then there were the flowers that were all white except for a little random spot of pink, like when you stick your finger on a thorn and a little blood gets on the flower. What went wrong in the plant, he wondered, that it couldn't help producing that one tiny little flaw in each of its flowers? It must have been a mistake, but somehow, even though it wasn't meant to be there, he thought the mistakes were just a little more beautiful—

Uh-uh. You don't get to look away.

He tried to concentrate on those roses in his mind, but he felt his younger self's fingertips digging like claws into his skull, into the folds of gray matter, forcibly turning his head, prying open his eyes. Please, I don't want to be here—

You don't get to pretend away what I did for you anymore. What I did for us. You've been pretending for ninety years. It's time you faced what you did.

He pled with himself, begged himself, not to make him see it. Felt tears well up inside himself to the point he didn't know how they didn't spill over. They made him want to be sick.

But his younger self never shed a tear at what he did. He did not plead with the doctor to let him stop. Maybe it never occurred to him that he didn't have to do this, that he could just run away. Then again, maybe it did. The doctor liked what he did. And Tsuzuki liked it when he could make people feel special, when he could make them feel appreciated. It was such a rare thing for him to feel like he was appreciated. Even if the doctor had to hide tears afterwards, he told Tsuzuki what he had done was good. Good, even though Tsuzuki had to retreat into the far corners of his mind and huddle down, close his eyes and ears, and wait for it to be over.

"Now, you promise me, Asato-kun. This will be our little secret. Understand? If you tell anyone about this, I won't be able to visit your mother anymore and give her her medicine. And you won't be able to come over here. And then who will keep the roses company?"

Our little secret, huh? Tsuzuki felt the boy inside grin. The sadistic glee of it pulling involuntarily at his own lips, making him want to cry like he hadn't been able to then. Your secret and mine. Eh, Asato-kun? But my secret was I never wanted to go back to that house. You liked what you did, in your own way, you liked the power you thought it gave you, but I hated you for it. I hated you so much for dragging me back there, again and again. The only time I felt any happiness was . . . was that afternoon . . . when I . . .

When he grabbed the pruning shears while the doctor had turned his back, putting himself back together so he could pretend what they had done had never happened. Tsuzuki felt like he was floating. He didn't remember walking over there. But he remembered the give of soft flesh around the blades. Could feel it resonating up his arm. He didn't think it would feel so good, but it did. Like cutting into a pie. So he pulled the shears out—and plunged them in again.

And again.

And again.

The doctor tried to choke out his name in a plea, but he never could get it all out. The look on his face, though, of disbelief—not anger, not betrayal, but pure denial, until the very end, stuck in Tsuzuki's head.

The song that was playing on the gramophone that afternoon was still going round his skull when he realized where he was. Knee-deep in the river, trying to wash the blood off his skin and out of his clothes with trembling hands. But when he really looked at himself, when he played the whole thing over as it really happened, moment by moment, he was surprised by how calm he was about the whole thing. As though he'd done all this before. It was nothing to get worked up over.

There, now. That wasn't so bad, was it? It could have been a lot worse, when you think about it.

Why do you make me relive this? Why do I have to see all of this again?

To trace this problem back to its root. In his mind's eye, he saw his younger self, pacing with hands behind his back, playing at Muraki. It was the sort of thing he might expect Muraki to say, but the voice it came out in, the face it came out of, those were entirely his own. To see just where this instinct of ours began to manifest itself. (Instinct? Tsuzuki asked, already knowing the answer.) When was it, the moment we first killed a man, and didn't feel bad about it?

But I didfeel bad about it. He was my only friend. What he did to us may have been evil, but it didn't change the fact that he was a kind person. A giving person. He was just trying to live his life, and I stole that from him. Of course I felt bad about it!

. . . just not as much as you should have.

When he finally got home that night, the sun already set, his mother and sister acted as though the blood that still wouldn't come out of his clothes was from the other boys beating him again. But he thought they knew. They must have known.

Ruka knew when the police officer came by the next day, and told her and her mother why the doctor would no longer be coming around. Tsuzuki saw her panicked eyes dart to him—for only a split second, though, because she didn't want the officer to catch her guilt in it. "Are you going to arrest the person who did this?"

"We think it was a random attack, Miss. Probably a vagrant from down by the railroad tracks. It happens sometimes. They break in, looking for valuables or food, and sometimes the homeowner gets in the way. The killer's probably miles away by now."

Liar. That wasn't what he said at all.

The officer had hesitated, hoping someone would butt in and keep him from telling these two well-mannered women what he had to say. But no one did. "There were photographs—"

Their mother made a tiny sound like she had just read a sad story in the paper, but Tsuzuki recognized the look on her face. Like he'd stabbed her himself. Ruka cut the officer off. "It's alright, you don't have to say. My mother's health is rather fragile at the moment. All I ask is, if it's not too much trouble, would you please burn them?"

"What do you say to moving again, Asato?" she said later that evening around dinner, with a cheer that may have been false but so desperately needed he wasn't about to take it from her. "Mother's going to need a new doctor, and there are plenty to choose from in the big city. If you don't like one, you just try another! And there's lots more to see and do there than out here in the country. There's a zoo with real-live animals, and you can go to the cinema and escape in a movie any time you like! What do you say, Asato? It will be an adventure. A whole new life. Just start over again."

Just pretend this one never happened. None of it. Just get out of town before anyone could start talking. Just pretend he never stabbed a grown man to death.

And liked it.

You knew it was wrong. You just kept going back anyway. You didn't have to, but you did.

Because you wanted to be loved. I needed to be loved, and no one else ever showed me half the love that man did. No one but Ruka, anyway. And that was different.

. . . wasn't it?

For a time, things were better. It was easier to hide a disfigurement, like strange-colored eyes, in a city full of people, than in a little country town, with its backwards ways and suspicious folk. There were even foreigners in Tokyo, with different colors of hair and eyes and skin, and different accents when they talked, and many times he was asked if he was part German or French, or even, once, Turkish, because all things Turkish were exotic, and purple eyes, if nothing else, were certainly exotic.

He learned to laugh at those questions, and leave the askers guessing, because on the one hand, he did not know what nationality his father was. His mother had never mentioned it, so he had always assumed the man was Japanese, but he was beginning to realize now that may not have been true.

But more than that, it was better to be thought of as part foreigner than part demon. If you were part foreign, at least you were still all human. Even if people did treat you sometimes like a hybrid creature to be marveled at, a curiosity. But a half-demon . . . that wasn't even half human.

And foreign things were all the rage. When Ruka wasn't at the factory—she seemed to be spending more and more of her day there with every passing year—they went to foreign restaurants together, and taught themselves to make their favorite Italian dishes (not altogether well on Tsuzuki's part, but it was hard to mess up chopping the vegetables). They watched foreign movies and went to dances where they danced to foreign music, as though for a little while to escape their real lives in the fantasy of another country.

They twirled round and round to something by someone with such a mouthful of a name as Strauss or Lehar or Tchaikovsky, to jaunty toruses of violins in three-four time. Ruka looked like a princess, like Kaguya-hime whose skirts when she spun seemed to hang suspended between the Earth and the Moon. Tsuzuki felt like he could fly away with her. His heart was in his throat, weightless. The music built towards a finale, tempo quickening, and they pushed each other to go faster, faster, until one or the other missed a step and tripped and they both fell on the tatami laughing, just trying to catch their breaths.

A slower number came up next on the gramophone. "Oh, I love this song," Ruka said, sobering, and sat up to listen. Her fingers seemed to follow the notes of the violin on the air, as though she could trace their path behind her closed eyelids.

"It's from an opera called Thaïs," Ruka explained when she saw him watching her. "This is the part in the story where the courtesan Thaïs meditates on whether to become a Christian and forsake her life of luxury and pleasure in Alexandria—that's in old Egypt."

Tsuzuki didn't tell her he already knew where Alexandria was. He didn't tell her he was already familiar with the song, too. The performance was a little different, but the doctor had had a version of it on one of his records. It was hard for Tsuzuki to find the beauty in it.

But Ruka loved the piece so much, and the courtesan's story—that was clear from the faraway look that came into her eyes—that Tsuzuki would have done anything not to spoil it for her. "The thought of leaving behind everything she's ever known for something that she knows next to nothing about terrifies her, but somehow, she finds a kind of peace in it, too. She might be giving up the pleasures of the flesh, but in order to know pure Love. So, even though she ridiculed the missionary at first, she decides to devote herself to Christ and become a nun.

"Of course, what Thaïs doesn't know yet is that she'll die within a year. But I think she would say it was worth it. She lived a life full of all the experiences a person could hope to have, even if it was a short life, and at the end, she found a peace that most people never attain."

They listened in silence as that sense of eternal peace was conveyed in the way that only transient music can convey the eternal; but it seemed to Tsuzuki that all the exuberance Ruka had felt at the beginning of the song had been sapped out of her by its end, leaving only a deep sense of sadness. One that he could not reach her in.

"Asato." She tried to sound cheerful and matter-of-fact, but it was a hard sell after that song. "What would you say to starting at a new school?"

"Are we moving again?" It was just the two of them now, had been for a while, but with the photograph and keepsakes in the shrine in the alcove, it felt like their mother was still there with them, watching and listening along in happy silence. It wasn't like they needed to find another doctor anymore.

Ruka smiled, but she wouldn't meet his eyes. "You can start over with a whole new bunch of boys who don't know who you are. And it'll be different this time, I promise. The place is run by missionaries, and they won't tolerate the kind of behavior that boys in public schools get away with. Violence and crude language are against their religion. You would have to live there—but I think you would like it! Better than this hovel, anyway. They have a huge vegetable garden for the students to grow things in—"

"Are you trying to get rid of me?"

She did look up then, a look of shock on her face.

But not, he noticed, denial.

"Asato . . . I can't take care of you anymore."

Wait a minute. That isn't right. . . . That was a different argument, a different day. Several months later, after one of their Sundays together, which had been getting fewer and fewer, and farther between. She had missed two weeks in a row. He hadn't been sure she would turn up this morning at all, but she had. Looking radiant in a flower-printed dress. They'd gone dancing like they used to, at the local hall.

It was only as they were nearing the dormitories at the end of it that he asked her when he could come home, and she dropped that bomb on him. That she couldn't take care of him anymore. "But . . . but I need you, Ruka. I love you."

She blushed, and shook her head. "Don't you think you're getting a little old to be telling your sister you love her?"

"Why should I be? I do love you—"

"You're only, what, fifteen? You don't understand what love is yet, Asato! If you did, you'd know there are different kinds of love, and you're getting to an age when it isn't appropriate for us to talk like this—"

"There's only one kind of love, Ruka." No, he understood. He understood all too well, what the brothers had been trying to teach him in this place, and what Thaïs in that opera Ruka liked so much had discovered. There was only one type of love, and it was deep, fathomless, and blind. It was everything, and it was what he felt for her, sister or not.

Ruka must have known that. That's why her breath caught in the chilly air and she looked away. As if that would erase what he had said. "It doesn't matter. It doesn't change things. I'm barely making enough to feed myself right now—"

"If it's just a matter of money, I can get a job and help out. I don't have to stay in school." He lowered his voice, lest anyone on the grounds hear such seditious talk. "I wouldn't mind, really. They don't even like me here. All the brothers ever seem to talk about is how awful we all are and how we constantly need to ask God for forgiveness. But when I try to ask what specifically I've done, they never seem to be able to tell me. Just that we're all full of sin and need to repent."

"Asato, Tatsuji asked me to marry him."

Tsuzuki's heart seemed to stop in his chest. "Tatsuji?" (Some guy I saw once or twice hanging around the school gates, waiting for us to come back. [Ahhh.] She probably told me they were stepping out with each other. In a letter maybe. I guess I didn't pay enough attention. I guess I didn't want to.)

"And I said I would."

"I forbid it. I don't like the guy."

She met his eyes defiantly then. As hard a look as she gave him Tsuzuki had never seen, and there seemed to be years of accusations unsaid behind it. She would have had no shortage of ammunition, if she'd chosen to hurl them at him.

What she did tell him wasn't much easier to hear. "It doesn't matter if you approve or not! You're still a child, and I'm an adult. I've had to be an adult longer than you even know, taking care of Mother, taking care of you, taking you out like this as though we were sweethearts or something—well, it just isn't right, Asato! You're old enough now that I can make my own decisions, and I decide I want to live my own life! I want to be happy for once! Tatsuji wants me to be his wife, and you can either accept our happiness and have a place in our lives, or you can go your own way."

His jaw clenched so hard it hurt, and he grabbed her shoulders in both hands. Ruka had always been a slight thing, Tsuzuki had already surpassed her in height a few years ago, and she felt like a little bird in his hands, fragile and wild. When really, he was the one who was wild.

She jumped at his violence, his own sister who had nurtured him and stood by him despite everything that he had done. And he saw in that moment that she knew everything that he had done, that she had always known, but had been content to pretend ignorance until now, for his sake.

But they could no longer pretend. If she knew the truth, then that only meant he needed to hold on tighter to her, if he wanted to keep from losing her. "I won't let you marry him, Ruka, I won't let you leave me for him!" he whispered through his teeth, the only way he knew how to get out what he needed to say without breaking down in fear and desperation. "You're the only one I have in this world, you're all I've got left, I can't lose you—"

"Asato, you're scaring me," Ruka whimpered as she tried to break out of his hold. "You're hurting me!" And though he heard her, he didn't really.

He couldn't. Couldn't allow the truth in those words to sink in. He needed her. He was lost without her. He wouldn't know what to do with himself if he lost her, his guiding light, his most precious thing in the world, after losing everything else. Of course he knew what love was, the kind of love that Ruka talked about and the brothers at school preached. It was entrusting so much of your soul to another living being that, if they walked away with it, you never got it back. You just walked around the rest of your life with a huge piece of yourself missing.

He tried to impress that on Ruka—first with words, but when those failed him and she didn't want to listen, he tried to press it into her, to pull her to him until he couldn't tell where one of them ended and the other began. Like when they were children, and he would come home with scrapes and bruises and she would just hold him. And the beating of her heart against his chest was all he needed to reassure him this life was still worth living, there was still someone in it who loved him, unconditionally.

So where had all these conditions come from? How come he'd never noticed them before, as they silently lined up along the periphery, waiting for their chance to intercede? Tsuzuki's desperation to hold on was strong, but Ruka's to get away was stronger. He would never forget the cry of relief that fell unabashedly from her lips when she got free of his hold. Even eighty-five years later, he saw it as though it had all just happened.

She had the compassion not to call him a monster before she turned and walked quickly away. She must have still loved him enough not to do that. But, in truth, she didn't have to say it.

How many weeks, months, years, did you sit by the curb, waiting for her to come pick you up for your Sunday outing? Waiting for that letter that never came? Oh, there were a few awkward ones at first, her pretending like that last evening never happened, making false promises of seeing you again soon. After the new year, or after classes ended, after this, after that. But it never happened, did it? Even those letters eventually stopped. She cut you out. Fifteen years, down the drain just like that. But you just went right on deluding yourself. "This week, surely." "Any minute now." "Just give it till sundown, she's bound to show up." "She must have had to work late, or maybe she's feeling under the weather today." Sure, that must be it. . . .

You always knew you'd see her again—you were certain of it—even though you never did.

You were always positive you'd get a second chance to explain yourself, that she'd magically forget everything you'd done or said to her and come running back to your arms. You've been dead for over seventy-five years and you still can't stop believing that, can you?

"Pathetic," his classmate sighed, as the goldfish barely touched the rice paper on his paddle and tore it right through. "Come on, Tsuzuki, these games are rigged. Only children get to win."

"You just need to have patience," he said as he concentrated on his own paddle and goldfish, waiting for just the right moment to—

He made his move, and the goldfish flipped out of the water and landed gently in its cup.

Tsuzuki turned to his classmate, smiling victoriously, but the other stubbornly acted unimpressed. "That's just luck."

"No. It's called a compassionate touch. You just don't have it."

That started their other university friends chuckling, and ribbing Tsuzuki about his "compassionate touch." But Tsuzuki wasn't paying attention. He caught sight of a familiar face in the crowd of festival-goers, dressed in a summer suit and boater hat among all the more traditional yukata. He knew that man, with his imperious expression, the way he looked down on other people like he was a duke or a count, when he was anything but.

Tatsuji. Now Tsuzuki remembered why he didn't like the guy. Yet, hope surged within him. If that man was here, that meant Ruka had to be—

A young woman with a Western frock and permanent clasped onto his arm, and they exchanged smiles that even at a glance a person could see reflected genuine affection.

But that young woman wasn't Ruka.

Disappointment turned to rage inside Tsuzuki. He couldn't remember walking over there, but he remembered the startled look on Tatsuji's face, how quickly it changed when he recognized Tsuzuki. "Hey, you're Ruka's little brother, aren't you? Asato, was it? You've grown up, almost didn't recognize you."

"What are you doing here with this . . . this adulteress?" Tsuzuki spat. The young woman recoiled, red in the face, but as far as he was concerned, he was being polite. She deserved to be called worse for what she'd done. "Where's Ruka, huh? Where's my sister, Tatsuji? Where's your wife? Does she know about this?"

Tatsuji pulled him away, to a shady spot where they could speak without onlookers. As far as Tsuzuki was concerned, though, he wanted everyone to look. He wanted everyone to see what a bastard had taken Ruka away from him, and how justified he was now in warning her back then that this guy was no good.

He was too focused on his own hurts to notice the sorrow on Tatsuji's face. "Asato . . . Ruka's dead. You know this."

How does a person recover from a blow like that? Suddenly his world was spinning, crumbling around him, but Tsuzuki's disbelief propped him up, held his head above the tide threatening to overwhelm him. He couldn't live in a world that didn't have Ruka in it. He didn't know what he would do. So, of course, it couldn't possibly be true.

"You're lying." Yes, he was sure of it. That was the only explanation for hearing what he had just heard. "That's what cheaters do, they lie!"

And the hurt in Tatsuji's eyes—that wasn't really pain. It couldn't be. It was just the look of a con-artist desperate to be believed.

"I sent a letter to your school two years ago when she passed, and I never heard a damn thing back!" Tatsuji covered his mouth, but too late to take back the anger in his words. "I'm sorry. I thought . . . I thought they gave it to you, I thought you knew. I just thought, that the reason you didn't come to the funeral was because you were still sore about our marriage . . ."

He had to be lying. At least about the letter. I don't remember a letter.

Sure you do. . . .

He remembered something. Vaguely. Tearing the crumpled paper in shaking hands. A friar with the black eye Tsuzuki gave him. That twisting, wrenching feeling inside, like someone was turning a screw in his heart. Screaming himself hoarse inside a locked room—That's right. They locked me in the groundskeeper's shed until I'd screamed and hit all the fight out of me. They had to protect the other students; I upset them too much. I remember my hands in bandages—broken, I think. I broke them.

But I was certain I'd just dreamed all that. It had to be a dream. I couldn't keep living if I thought Ruka was . . . that she was really . . .

You must have just convinced yourself the letter never existed. You were always good at that. Seeing only what you wanted to see. Hearing only what you wanted to hear. To justify what you did.

". . . she was sick for a long time," Tatsuji said. "Before I knew her, even. You must have known that."

No, he hadn't. It couldn't have been true. Another lie. His Ruka had been healthy, and happy. Always smiling. She loved to dance. Clearly she had been fine. It must have been Tatsuji's fault. He made her sick!

"How do I know it wasn't something you gave her, Asato? She said you never came down with anything. You were probably carrying a dozen different diseases and unknowingly passing them to her."

But Tatsuji couldn't have loved her. He couldn't have really loved Ruka if he had brought some other tramp to the festival when his wife was barely two years in the ground.

Tatsuji had been patient thus far, he had shown restraint in the face of this indictment, but no more. "The hell do you know about love?" he growled through bared teeth. "Huh, kid? What kind of monster claims he loves his only sister, and then never even shows up to her funeral to pay his respects!"

Tsuzuki lashed out, eager to make that loathsome man eat his own words. But he'd never really learned to throw a proper punch, had always been the victim of blows rather than the dealer. His fist landed, but rather than grant him the satisfaction he craved, it only made him want more. Tatsuji was clearer-headed. He grabbed Tsuzuki by the collar and gave him a hard shove backwards. Tsuzuki tripped, and felt his whole head ring like a bell as he fell against something sharp and unyielding.

Blood trickled hot into his eye, tinting half the world red. He trembled as he saw it come away on his fingers. Or maybe it was the blow to the head that had rattled his nerves. He couldn't focus. His skull felt like it was being split down the middle, like the stone statue he had fallen against was still lodged there, the pain was so intense. It would barely let him catch his breath.

"Oh my god. . . ." The words resonated in his head, but muffled, like he was hearing them underwater.

Tatsuji loomed over him, staring down in horror at what he had done.

But regret? Surely he didn't feel any. Surely he felt no more sorry for what he had done than those boys with their sticks and rocks, sinking their shoes into Tsuzuki's ribs when he was down just to make sure he stayed that way, just to make sure he remembered what he was, and where he belonged. Surely if that look was a look of fear, it was only because he was afraid of getting caught. When what Tatsuji should have feared was that he hadn't finished Tsuzuki off when he had the chance.

They all think I'm a monster? Fine. I'll show them what a monster is. They have no idea what that word really means, but they will. Then they'll truly be sorry.

He tackled Tatsuji to the ground, wrinkling that suit he hated so much in his fists. The man's boater rolled off during their struggle, and Tsuzuki could stand that holier-than-thou face of his no longer. A bottle found its way into his grip, and he smashed it into that face over and over, even after it shattered and spilled sake everywhere and all he had left was a jagged neck, and he could no longer tell the difference between broken glass and booze and Tatsuji's blood and his own, he just kept stabbing anyway, to erase that face that had taken Ruka away from him from existence once and for all, even long after Tatsuji had stopped moving.

Someone jumped on his back. A woman's terrified screams ricocheted like gunfire in his cracked skull. He tried to elbow her off of him, and when that wouldn't work, lashed out with the broken bottleneck—

And watched, stunned, as she fell back on the pavement, clutching at her throat. Helpless to stop the blood running down her dress, running thick through her fingers like oil through a sieve. He knew she wasn't Ruka, but in that moment . . .

In that moment . . . I could almost swear . . .

Don't waste your sympathy. She was a whore, his eighteen-year-old self murmured encouragingly by his ear, mucking up Ruka's memory. She thought she could replace your sister.

No. She was an innocent. They were both innocents. And he cut them down.

He'd cut them all down. The doctor, the boy in his village—his mother and Ruka, who he couldn't save and never even tried to—

Maybe Tatsuji was right. Maybe he'd actually killed them, too. So many buds, just trying their best to live. Just trying to become something beautiful, something pure. And he'd ruined it. He'd snipped their lives all away, just like that.

Because this was what he was. A plague. A curse.

Monster.

Murderer!

He could feel the people gathering around them like shadows, their frightened whispers, unintelligible accusations. Their voices ran together, but he knew the gist of what they were saying, could feel the weight of their hatred, their disgust. He wasn't sure anymore if they were from his present or his past, alive or dead. But he couldn't stand the pressure of them. They were splitting him open. He had to get out of there, had to run away where they could never catch him, and if they stood in his way, he would just have to cut them down too.

He looked down at the blood on his hands, mixed in among the bits of broken glass, and couldn't possibly tell whose it was. All he knew was, he needed a doctor.

It was a large Western house with a brick facade, no cottage in the country by any means. There was no white picket fence, and the roses out front were pink and yellow. But there was a big cross on the sign, a cross with even arms, and everyone he passed who gave him such frightened looks and clutched their belongings that much closer to themselves, assured him that there was a doctor within.

Tsuzuki expected—feared he would find—and sort of hoped he would, too—the man with the graying hair and glasses. Maybe those things he vaguely remembered doing had just been a nightmare he had had as a child. But it was a younger man with a different face and a long white coat who opened the door when he banged on it—whose feet Tsuzuki collapsed at when his legs, having reached their destination, refused to take him any further.

I should never have gone to him. That was the start of all of this, when it should have been the end. I should have just let myself be apprehended for the murders I committed. They would have hanged me. It probably wouldn't have worked, but they would have eventually found some means of execution that did, and I wouldn't have had to resort to ending my life myself, and Enma never would have made me a shinigami—

Now, Tsuzuki, you know damn well that isn't true.

The decisions he made could never change what he was. Maybe he never would have met Muraki Yukitaka, and maybe Kazutaka would never have been born, if he had just surrendered himself to the hands of Fate. Or maybe that was his fate, his karmic lot, to give rise to something as terrible as he was. That was the punishment he deserved, to be forced to watch someone else kill in his name.

But he was fooling himself if he believed Enma wouldn't have recognized the same monstrous nature in him at his judgment. That he wouldn't still be placed in charge of taking human souls, ending human lives. He had been made for the job. Plain and simple. That was why he did it so well.

He could still recall a couple on their honeymoon by the sea, so terrified of parting so soon after finding bliss. He was only supposed to take the husband, but the wife refused to be separated from him. She'd pushed Tsuzuki's hand, until it held her head under the waves, and his guilty tears disappeared in the ocean . . .

The young war widow, whose life hadn't been so different from his mother's decades before, aside from having no children to give her a reason to save herself. All she'd wanted was to feel she was loved, one last time, and he'd reminded her so much of her missing husband. He'd made her feel loved. For one night—that wasn't asking too much of him. It never crossed his mind that it might be inappropriate for someone in his position, some thing in his position. She would have died whether he had or hadn't. But it was what she needed . . .

The child . . .

All children were the worst. But Tatsumi had been on that case with him, when their relationship was already fraying at the seams. There was so much blood. To this day, he couldn't remember why there had been so much, or whose it was, or even if he'd somehow just imagined it being there, streaming down his hands and arms. But there was Tatsumi trying to pull him away from the scene when it was over. The broken toys that littered the room. A teddy bear with stuffing oozing out. A doll with a cracked face. Even then he hated the things. They were human on their outsides, but inside, empty shells. Just facsimiles of something alive and real. A fitting symbol of himself.

"Stop doing this to yourself," Tatsumi had said with atypical candor, when he thought Tsuzuki wouldn't remember the words through his fog, "Snap out of it. Please. I can't stand to see you this way."

But can't you see the blood, Tatsumi? It's everywhere. Why can't you see it!

"Enough, now, Tsuzuki. That's enough. You did what you had to do."

Maybe that was it.

Maybe the key to all this was just to accept it.

I did what I had to do. No more. No less. To question why it had to be this way is to question the will of God. Which is not to say that it shouldn't be done, only . . .

What good does it ultimately do?

Is that what you were trying to tell me?

But the voice of that ten-year-old self did not answer. Nor should he have expected it to.

He was alone. He always had been alone.

The darkened ceiling light that stared down at him and the empty chair beside the door held no life in them. They could not save him from his current situation any more than they could save him from his past.

Was this what Christ had felt like on his cross? he wondered, as he lay there with arms stretched out, feverish and uncomfortably numb from the poison in his blood. Powerless? From that far up, one had a clear view of the suffering of the multitudes, and a keen sense of how completely unable he was to alleviate that suffering for even a single person. Except in Tsuzuki's case, he had caused the suffering, and his sins were not of the sort anyone could mend or undo.

And unlike Christ, Tsuzuki didn't even get a death to look forward to at the end of his crucifixion.

. . . Or maybe that was the solution to this conundrum. Maybe death, and resurrection, were his way out of this trap.

Except for one little problem. How to die when I can't lift a finger to kill myself?

Except that wasn't exactly true either. He could lift a finger. He just couldn't move very much before the pentacle pulled him back. His muscles were weak from the poison, and the harder he fought, the more painfully he was wrenched back to the floor.

But since when did he let pain stop him from fighting? He sucked in a breath, bracing himself for what was to come, and reached deep inside for the anger and determination he knew was there. Though he could feel his bones snap with the pressures pulling against him, though the pain was so intense that even his screams couldn't drown it out, and even though he felt the warm dampness of blood flowing down his arms, he could not stop.

If he had to crack the very foundation of this prison to free himself, he would. But it would be the last time. If, somehow, he did manage to get out of his, he wouldn't allow himself to be put in chains again.

Muraki barely stepped foot inside the house that evening when Sakaki approached him. "Sir, it's about time you got back. I've been trying to reach you—"

"Our guest?"

"Has been making a tremendous amount of noise all afternoon."

Muraki needed to hear no more. He raced to the apartment upstairs as fast as he was able, heart leaping into his chest at the thought that maybe this time he would arrive to find Tsuzuki wasn't there.

The rooms he passed were all empty. Though he told himself he shouldn't expect to find Tsuzuki in any one of them, still he feared the worst. What should happen if he reached the last one and found that empty as well? He had planned for it—he would have been a fool not to have thought of all the ways this might possibly end—but he wasn't ready. There was still so much to do.

As it turned out, he needn't have worried.

When he threw open the last door, there Tsuzuki was, seated cross-legged in the center of the burnt-out and useless outline of the pentacle. The ceiling light had shattered, cracks opened up in the mantelpiece and the plaster walls that were not there the last time Muraki had checked on him. Blood stained Tsuzuki's shirt, but it was old. Old enough to have dried. On Tsuzuki himself, there was not a mark.

But Muraki felt his breath catch in his throat. A smile tugged at one corner of his lips, and he let it have its way. Tsuzuki was still here. He was still here, and he had done it. He had broken out of his trap. Though God only knew how.

That wasn't the main cause for his elation, however. When Tsuzuki looked up at the interruption of his meditations, Muraki could see it in his eyes how he had changed. No longer the Tsuzuki he had left here, not entirely, but one Muraki had met before nonetheless.

"Welcome back," Muraki breathed, feeling like he was in that chapel in Nagasaki all over again, seeing for the first time what he could only dream and pray he might find. Doubting his own eyes, as the saints surely doubted their visions when they found themselves within arm's reach of something holy. What he had searched for for so long was here, needing only for him to reach out and grab it.

Now the next phase of his work began. He only hoped he survived to see it through.

Author's note: The violin piece mentioned in this chapter is "Meditation from Thaïs" by Massenet.