AN: Last week was the week from heck and this week wasn't that much better, boy howdy. I threw this together, and edited it, and then I went back over and changed some things, and only vaguely edited it the second time, so I'm sorry if it's rough, and also that it's long as fuck. The third part probably could stand alone on its own, and I thought about deleting the first two parts for it, but they still cover things I wanna keep, because above all things, I'm super self-indulgent. Sorry it's so late!
013: your brother's house.
Winter; 9 years.
After so many long months kept away inside a tiny room with a window Suzume couldn't hope to reach, it feels somehow fitting that it should be winter again. The last ten months feel almost like a terrible, heavy dream, like gummy sleep Suzume can't quite rub from her eyes. It had been cold when her father had taken her, and it is cold again now that she is free. Her breath steams hot and wet in the bitter air in all the same ways it had back then –
Back before everything had fallen apart.
Sometimes, she tries very hard to pretend like nothing has changed. She feels the best when she can convince herself of that, when she retreats somewhere inside of herself and stands outside with the cold pressing in on her with insistent, needy hands, desperate to settle inside of her, to make a nest in all of her bones. If she closes her eyes, taking in deep, heaving breaths of that frigid air into her lungs, she can almost feel what it felt like, back then – to be a mostly ordinary little girl with ordinary little girl problems, waiting nightly for her big brother to come round in the park. He'd counsel her about friends he'd claim didn't deserve her, or tease her about something she'd say, or pull her into his lap to hold her and warm her. There, held fast against him, he'd wrap his long, hot fingers around her much smaller, much colder hands, and things would be okay.
Not perfect, maybe, but they'd be okay. Good, even, most of the time.
And sometimes, pretending is easy, because she does that, again. She waits for him again, trading the park in the suburbs for the woods in the country. Shivering in the early-set darkness, she waits for him to sweep up behind her and pull her up into his arms, anticipating the press of his cheek to hers, skin on skin, metal on flesh, his breath a huffed laugh in her hair. And that makes it easier, she thinks – it's close enough that it makes it easier to pretend that everything is still somehow the same. She closes her eyes when she waits for him, and she's in the park again, back there in the past, and it's the same cold from months ago. Her brother, the same too – the smell of him, the familiarity of his touch, the sound of his voice, slow and languid like the creep of his fingers over her cheeks or in her hair.
Suzume plays that game with herself every day. She closes her eyes, and things become as they're supposed to be. Her mother is at work, and her apartment is behind the wall of the park, and her brother brings her little gifts and his eyes are mischievous and rarely anything more. There will be school in the morning, and Katsuki will be there, stubborn and angry, and she will spend the day trying to avoid him together with Izuku. Suzume will act like the cruel turn of Katsuki's temper doesn't hurt her, both to spite him and because her brother doesn't want to hear about it, and it will be the worst thing that has ever happened to her, and she will be thankful for it.
Because when she opens her eyes and looks out at the endless array of stick-figure trees – at the fresh fallen snow come up to her ankles, at the jagged line of mountains rising up in the distance – the park is lost, and the forest is here, and the game is over. Katsuki's anger is no longer the worst thing that has ever happened to her. The suburbs have gone away, so far away now that they might not have ever existed at all, and her mother is gone, too. Not to work, not back at the apartment, not back at the big house; Mama is gone in an awful, final way that is so real and so terrible that Suzume feels as if she sometimes cannot hope to bear it.
And sometimes, when she goes to see her brother, she cries about it. The air will sting just a bit too much, and the weight of his hands, hot though they are, won't be enough to will the cold from her bones, and her teeth will chatter despite the way his arms pull her into himself, and it will just be too much. She'll feel herself slipping. It starts with a sniffle, and then a burning in her eyes, and then there's that awful feeling of knives in her throat, so many knives, so sharp and so awful –
And even when that sadness comes slow – even when she doesn't know it's coming herself, her brother always knows. As with the coming of a storm, he can read it in her face like someone might read the clouds in the sky, the change of the wind, the smell in the air. He'll take her by her wrist, by her cheek, sweeping his thumb over her eyelashes in expectation. "Poor Suzu," he'll say, and his voice is strange and unknowable in all the ways she has always known him to be strange and unknowable. Even when the sadness gets stuck in her – even when it feels dammed up behind some awful, aching thing in her chest, the way he touches her opens her up, and it all comes pouring out of her like so much sick she can't keep back.
It was like this in the park, too, and sometimes, when Suzume closes her eyes again, that helps settle her back into the fantasy. In the months they had known each other then, her brother had come to know her as if they'd lived their whole lives together. Even if she wanted to, there'd been no hiding anything from him. He knew when she was lying. He knew when she was sad and he knew when she was angry and he knew when she was frightened, even when she tried so hard to hide all those things.
And now, even after ten months apart, it's the same with him. It's the same, the same, and when she closes her eyes, the way he knows her feels normal and right and good because it's how things used to be back when things were normal and right and good.
It's almost surreal to imagine she'd ever sometimes resented that – that she'd ever yearned for privacy.
Was that something she'd actually truly wanted?
It seems childish, what she'd wanted then, because what she wants now is what she used to have. So when her brother knows how she feels, even when she wants to keep that to herself, it seems… well, it seems much less bad than it used to. When he teases her, when his fingers pinch her cheeks or needle in between her ribs or dig into her jaw when he goes to shake her head, that feels so much less awful than it used to, too, because at least it's familiar. It's something from that other life, that dead life, one of two old things that have remained after everything else has long since rotted away.
Her brother, she thinks – her brother and the cold.
But where the winter is wholly the same as it was back then – the same biting wind, the same quilted, gray skies – her brother, for all the ways he is familiar to her, is a little bit different, too. It's not as dizzying a shift as the country for the city, of course. It's not the lack of school in lieu of a tutor who works with Suzume for a few hours each day in the small library in town, pushing hard to help her catch up on the near year of school she's missed. It's not the forest for the park, her sick grandmother for her always out-of-the-house mother, the small house for the apartment. No, it's not as dramatic as all of that. And yet –
And yet…
Her brother is different, and he's different in more ways than the skin-deep way his quirk has left him ravaged.
No, it's a much more subtle thing, the way her brother is different – but Suzume thinks it's only subtle because he means for it to be subtle. She may not know him nearly as well as he does her, but she still does know him, and she knows the way it feels when he's being sly. In those early months, he'd been sly only some of the time. His voice would be oily, and his eyes would be sharp, and that smile would come out. It was not the rare, warm smile he would give her when she'd manage to make him happy with a bashful confession of her adoration or when she'd lucked into pleasing him in some other, fumbling way. It was that other kind of smile, the one that was full of teeth, the one he wore when he was maybe a little more mean than she thought he should be.
The one that often ended with her in tears.
And now, even when he is sweet, even when he is kind, there is that slyness to him, always. Even if he goes days without saying anything hurtful, she can hear the hot oil gone slick in his voice. Even when he touches her softly, handling her as if she were something fragile and breakable and precious, she can see the way his eyes gleam bright like a butcher's blade in the hand. The months apart have made him more cunning, and though he burns as hot as ever – so hot sometimes that the feeling of his fingers against her skin can leave her yelping in there-and-then-gone-again pain – there is a coldness to him that she knows isn't there because it's winter.
Does that matter, though? Suzume isn't sure. It's hard to take the dim recognition that his smile is dangerous seriously when he can be so good and so kind to her.
She gets more time with him now than she ever did at the apartment – a lot more time for him to be good and kind despite the way his smile has changed. The nights are a constant thing, as they used to be. Now, though, because of the limited time she has with her tutor and a decision to keep her out of school until the new year begins, Suzume spends much of the day with her brother, too.
And, out there in the woods, out in the cold, after exploring many meandering kilometers of forest, they find an old, long ago abandoned shrine together.
It feels special and secret and haunted in a way that is more exciting than scary, this small, dark place that is wholly their own. He fills it with candles and sweeps away a lot of the grime and dead leaves when she's away with her tutor the next day, and when he brings her back to it, Suzume thinks the place feels like him, now: safe and dangerous, somehow, all at the same time.
Her brother really takes her in hand, then. It's nice to have a place that stays dry in the cold rain, or out of the snow when the temperature dips even further. He has her bring her books and her assignments and he drills her for hours over them until it's time for her to return home for dinner. Because he is more stern than her tutor – and because she wants so very much to please him – Suzume finds he's significantly more effective at getting her to remember the things she struggles with.
Her tutor, of course, notices how much she flourishes. Suzume is told she is such a driven young lady, that she must be working so hard, that no one would believe she'd missed a year of school. Sharp as a knife, her tutor says, admiringly, over another aced practice exam.
Suzume does not tell him it is her brother, once a ghost in the park, now a ghost in the woods, who sharpens her. It makes sense that he'd be able to, of course. Everything about him is sharp.
Days later, when her brother's sharp tongue and sharper smirk has her in budding tears over a stupid mistake she's made – the first of such cruelty that she can remember from him in the last two weeks, at least – she glowers up at him in the gloomy candlelight of the shrine, unable to keep the whine out of her voice when she asks, "What do you care if I do good at school, anyway?"
Outside, rain falls in a constant, low hiss, and the cold of the air feels bitter against her cheeks. Her brother, as always, doesn't seem to notice. The smirk doesn't leave his face as he studies her, his lips parted only just enough for her to see a hint of teeth. "I don't," he says, finally, and the smirk has crept into his voice now, too.
"You don't…" Suzume blinks. "You don't what?"
He shrugs, a smooth roll of his shoulders. "I don't care if you do well in school."
Suzume stares at him, feeling her eyes begin to burn. Then she stares down at the papers in her lap, at the books spread out across the worn wood of the floor, at the collection of pens and pencils and highlighters strewn about the both of them like the pine needles he'd swept out the previous month. For a moment, her vision blurs with tears. She wills them away with gritted teeth. "Then why – why all this?" She asks, bewildered, struggling to keep the quaver out of her voice. "You've been doing this with me for weeks now!"
When she goes to look back up at him accusingly, Suzume finds him watching her impassively from out of his cool, still-lake eyes. "You going back to school in the spring is an inevitability."
He is so infuriating and perplexing and sometimes she just cannot stand him! "...so?"
"So, I don't want you to go back – I don't give a shit about school, and I don't give a shit if you do good at it. I like the extra time with you when you're not going, and really, I'd burn the whole damn place down if it meant you didn't have to go back." He shrugs again, as if the intimacy and casual violence of this confession is nothing – as if it doesn't root her in place, heart beating wildly in her chest, heat rising in her cheeks. "But they're gonna make you go back. Even if I did raze it to the ground, well, they'd find somewhere else to make you go back to. And you care about being good when you do, don't you? Wanna do good at your tests so you can fit in, so you can pretend nothing bad happened. You're gonna wanna pretend you're normal, pretend you didn't miss a whole year, yeah?"
It's nothing she's told him. It's one of those things she's thought about often, anguished over in the privacy of her makeshift room in her grandmother's house, but kept to herself. Suzume does best with her grief and her fear when she tries to pretend it isn't there. She doesn't want her future classmates to know anything about what she's been through –
Because she wants so badly to be normal. And if she can't be normal, she wants to appear to be normal. A normal girl with a normal life. A normal girl with a mother who is still alive, a normal girl in a righteous world where bad people are punished rather than revered.
A normal girl with a normal big brother who is kind and good, who helps her study, who doesn't make her cry.
A brother whose smile is warm and never scary.
But this is why it's easy to overlook the scary things that lurk behind the surface of her brother's still-lake eyes and the knives in his smile, Suzume thinks. Her brother doesn't care about how well she does in school, but he knows her and knows what she wants well enough to help her, anyway. Her big brother is selfish – doesn't he always tell her that? He only ever does what he wants. And if he doesn't care about school – if he doesn't even want her to go – doesn't that mean that he cares enough about her if he's willing to do things he doesn't like for her benefit?
And isn't that kind? Isn't that good?
Isn't that worth something despite the way her stomach twists and knots and sours?
At any rate, it's something she knows she couldn't do without him; Suzume needs him to help her. She needs him to help her through her studies. More than that, she needs him to help her through her grief. Through life. Without him, what even is she?
Alone and lost in a cold, uncaring world.
She feels so small, suddenly. So small, and so cold. The shrine is a tiny, crumbling building, it's god long since evicted, but now it feels so terribly grand all of a sudden, so big and so wide, the shadows cast by the candles stretching on seemingly forever. The space between her and her brother feels too much, too, and Suzume pushes her papers off her lap and crawls over to him, tears raw in her eyes.
By the time she reaches him, he holds his arms out for her already, and his smile is sharp and his eyes are knowing. "Oh, poor Suzu," he says, and the words spill from him like scalding oil dripped down the whole length of her spine. She shudders as she collapses into him. "Poor little princess. Come here."
He touches her so much, now. Every day, every night – here, now, in the shrine, always, always. Sometimes, she flinches. Sometimes, she doesn't. He doesn't seem to care, either way. His hands on her feel as familiar to her as her own, if not more so. He is so hot against her in the cold, candle-lit darkness of the shrine, and when his lips find her forehead, they are hot, too, like a brand. He calls her a crybaby and he laughs, and his voice when he does so is equal parts wicked and fond.
Cruel and loving in that strange, contradictory way of his.
And so, Suzume thinks, melting into his embrace with an eagerness she can't possibly hope to conceal, there is nothing to be done. There is no helping the way she loves him – desperately, needily, as if she were starving for it, for him – even though she knows what he is.
Even through his cruelty.
Early Spring; 18 years.
In almost all ways that matter to Dabi, things go back to normal. If anything, really, they're arguably better now than they used to be. Chichibu is quiet and the nights he spends at the cafe are dirt cheap. The cut Giran had all but insisted on giving him after his hit on Featherlight had proven more lucrative than either of them had expected is more than enough to see him comfortable in his meager lodgings for the foreseeable future. There's no more need to steal from drunkards on the train. More importantly, there's no reason to mingle with mouth-breathing scum over jobs Dabi can't be assed to care about beyond what funds he can scavenge up – usually at the cost to his own body.
Life becomes slow again. Lazy again. Structured and comfortable, he builds his life around Suzume's schedule as he'd done all those months ago, and even that is easier. Without school to eat away at her time – with only a handful of hours spent with a tutor, instead – there's so much more of her to go around. More than just her nights, he gets to lay claim to her days now, too. It's something he is very quick about doing.
Best to strike when the iron is hot, as they say. When it comes to her, well, Dabi finds his iron often is. And, like the good, sad little girl she is, Suzume is barely able to put up any kind of a fight when he settles into all the cracks of her fragmented sense of self and takes root like an especially invasive weed.
It's a slow process, though.
In December, Suzume is wary and skittish, like a kicked but touch-starved dog. Eyeing him with sidelong glances, she comes to him when coaxed or when she's desperate enough for the press of his hands. Despite how much she clearly aches for it, her little body goes so tense beneath his fingers, and the fear is as raw in her face as her relief.
There are parts of her that are still so inexorable. Shy and eager to please though she's inclined to be with him, Suzume has always been a bit willful, especially so about things that upset her. Even after everything, Dabi finds that hasn't really changed. She locks up when he asks her about her time in the hospital, about what the men came to talk to her about. Her eyes get glassy and her mouth becomes a thin hard line.
"I don't wanna talk about it," she always says. The refusal is firm at first, clipped and neat and evasive. But as the days fall away – as he keeps asking, purposefully nonchalant, as if considering the weather – her voice becomes softer and her hands become a near constant and anxious tumble in her lap.
Eventually, Dabi pushes, because of course he does. He stares her down across the piles of books between them, careful enough to keep his tone light. Curious, really, rather than demanding. "Why not?"
Suzume's gaze falls away from him, fixated on the way her own fingers knit together only to unravel again, seconds later. "I just… don't wanna," she mumbles, reluctantly. "It's not anything important."
"Don't lie to me, Suzu." Dabi says it slow, says it patient, but he knows she is keen enough now to pick up on the edge to it all the same. "I don't lie to you."
Her expression when she looks back up at him again is tremulous. Anguished. Anxious. "I just… I don't want you to get mad," she whispers. "Everything already feels… bad enough."
And god, that makes him want to push more. It stokes something awful in him to life, something hungry and insistent and almost incensed. It makes him want to reach out and press her down into the filthy floor of the shrine and demand she confess every little thing she could possibly be keeping from him.
It isn't even about the what of it, really. He's fairly certain he knows what happened, anyway. With unfettered access to the internet at the net cafe, Dabi's read the news:
Featherlight, murdered by a villain.
His wife, found dead by way of suicide a few months prior.
The pair survived by their only daughter, a minor, her identity kept secret for her own protection.
The press lays the tragedy on thick, playing Featherlight up to be the victim hero, and there is no mention of any of Meihane Akihiko's transgressions to be found anywhere beyond the gossip rags. Even those only suggest that the reason for his wife's 'suicide' was born from jealousy over Featherlight's rumored infidelities – there's not even a suggestion of the truth to be found anywhere.
No, Dabi can guess exactly what the men in the hospital and Suzume talked about. There's an undercurrent of anger to her grief that he can catch sometimes in the way he finds her frowning out over the horizon, chewing her lower lip between her teeth until it's swollen and puffy and raw.
Little baby Suzume with her first bitter taste of societal and familial injustice. Dabi understands. He'd been furious to the point of near-fratricide when he'd been her age.
What he can hardly stand to abide, though, is the notion of her holding anything back from him, nevermind for so long. Mute and numb and stubborn, and for weeks. Please, please, please, she pleads. She isn't ready. She's too sad. She doesn't want him to be angry. Excuses, he thinks. Fucking excuses.
But Dabi knows when to push and when not to. Suzume is aware of him now. He can tell when she looks at him that she understands, at least on some half-conscious level, that what she's looking at is dangerous. That she loves him still, and so fiercely, well – that's a miracle built out of clever manipulation on his part and…
What? Childish reverence for her perfectly imperfect older brother? A hole in her shattered psyche that only he is capable of filling? A budding sense of masochism? The sense of security that only a bigger, uglier monster can bring in a world suddenly full of fiends?
Better to be torn apart by one thing than many, Dabi supposes. She seems desperate for the intimacy, anyway.
Regardless of her reasoning, though – regardless of all the precious little emotional deficiencies and psychological catastrophes that have made of Suzume exactly what his id wants and needs and craves – it's evident even to him that Suzume loves him despite her fear of him, and it's not something Dabi is willing to risk in pursuit of the small parts of her that aren't wholly his yet.
She's too fragile now, still. Too brittle from it all. To break her now, well, he imagines she'd be little more than dust by the end of it, and what good would that be? How would that serve? He wants her fragmented and cracked, sure, but not wholly destroyed.
Dabi doesn't like being patient, but oh, he's learned to be. The best things come to those who wait, after all.
January rewards that patience with a bit of a thaw. Of her own accord, she sits nearer to him in the shrine – close enough to touch if either of them were so inclined. Early in the month, Dabi is mindful of that, and, in spite of his own inclination, touches her rarely. By the end, though, his hands cross that space often to brush her knee or graze her cheek, gratified when she leans into his touch. Sometimes, when he can't help himself, he wraps an errant curl of her hair between his fingers and allows himself a tiny, stolen tug. He savors her watery little yelps, but it's the way she no longer jerks away from him that pleases him most.
There's yet more progress in February. She sits closer to him still, and, while her sadness clearly lingers, Suzume cries over her mother much less than she had in the beginning. A bi-weekly occurrence down from what had been almost daily, she actually begins to smile again, more animated and lively than withdrawn and mistrustful in the way she huffs if he teases her. Dabi likes that. He especially likes the way she presses into him if he's mean, grumbling and sour-pussed but delightfully needy. It's as if she thinks she can appease his cruelty by stealing into his space to solicit him for kinder, gentler touches instead.
He likes it so much that he teaches her she can, and always rewards her for that. Tilting her head back in the way he knows she likes – if the heat in her face means anything, anyway – he lets his lips brush her pinched cheeks through an exhalation of his own quiet laughter.
"What a little glutton," he taunts her, and when her lips twist in indignant denial, he always finds himself struggling not to bite them.
Dabi, of course, is the biggest glutton of all.
In March, Suzume turns ten, and there is rarely any space between them at all anymore. When she comes to meet him in the shrine – when she finds him waiting for her, sprawled out languidly across the floor – she's quick when she crosses that brief distance to settle up against him, now. Tucked neatly of her own accord into the curve of his body, she's openly eager for the weight of his arm when he drapes it over her, snuggling up against him with a contented little sigh that leaves him feeling –
Well, some kind of way.
If she finds him sitting up cross-legged instead, Suzume settles unprompted into his lap, tucking her head under his chin. Or, if she's feeling particularly bold, she sometimes rolls her head back against his shoulder where she can sneak brief glances up at him while he quizzes her on geography or science or math.
It's something he always notices her doing. Dabi spends a lot of time looking down at her, too. Unlike her, though, he doesn't look away with scalded cheeks when she catches him, worrying his lower lip with his teeth.
"Quit staring at me!" She tries admonishing him once, reflexively snapping her text book closed in a piss poor attempt at covering her sudden bashfulness.
Dabi laughs at her. "You like it when I do."
"Do not!" Her mouth says one thing, but her body says another thing entirely. Despite the way she fidgets, she makes no effort to tug free of his lap – nor any effort to push his arms away when he coils them around her, slowly.
No, he knows better.
"You can lie if you wanna – if it makes you feel better." Dabi also has no sense of shame. "But I like it, so good fucking luck getting me to stop."
"But why?" Too ruffled to be looking for compliments, the question comes out more like a petulant objection, punctuated by more squirming.
Dabi lowers his head and rests his mouth near her ear, his voice a low, soft whisper. "'Cause you're so fucking cute."
As it always does, that really undoes her. Suzume makes a flustered, whining noise from somewhere in the back of her throat and covers her face with her hands, shaking her head back and forth in almost delirious disagreement.
Praise is nearly as overwhelming for her as any of the ways he picks at her, Dabi finds – sometimes even more so. Nestling his face against the sweep of her hair, Dabi can't keep the laughter from his voice. "You're so damn hopeless, Suzu," he admonishes, and buries his clawed hands into her soft, tender sides.
From squirming to thrashing, then, Suzume's shrieking voice fills the small shrine in a way Dabi finds more thrilling than he thinks he probably should.
And then, suddenly, it's April. School begins for Suzume in April, and Dabi hates every fucking second of it.
He hates that he hates it, too – hates how easy it was to get so comfortable with the hours he'd had with her each day, holed up together in their rotting, forgotten forest shrine. Four months strikes him as something that should feel like a long time – hadn't the ten months she'd been gone felt like goddamn years? Somehow, though, those four months felt like nothing, like he'd blinked and they'd all melted away with the warmer spring weather.
Dabi still has her after school in the hour or so before she returns home for dinner. He has her after that, too, for a few hours more. The days lengthen and the sun stays out longer, and that helps, somewhat, but it doesn't account for all the hours of easy entertainment suddenly stolen from him by her compulsory education.
It is better than it used to be, he supposes. Aside from the bi-weekly and very short check-ins with a social worker – one Suzume tells him is not even consistently the same person – Chichibu has left his little sister otherwise completely alienated from anything remotely resembling a watchful eye.
And her grandmother –
"Baa-baa's getting sicker," Suzume announces suddenly one day in mid June. It's nearly summer, and the early cicadas trill in the warm, lazy twilight beyond the walls of the shrine. Secured comfortably in Dabi's lap, she works a cheerful looking character across the screen of the replacement handheld system he'd picked up for her for her birthday. The one she'd had back at her father's house had gone up in flames.
"Yeah?" Dabi drums his fingers against her bare thighs to the slow rhythm set by the background music of her video game.
"Mmm-hmm."
Letting his fingers settle, Dabi smooths them over the hem of her plaid shorts instead. "How so?"
Suzume doesn't answer immediately, and he can see her frown in the reflection of her handheld's black screen as the game loads a different area. "Well – she already couldn't walk real well… but it's gotten a lot worse, and she says she hurts all the time. Her aid'd come during the day to check up on her before, y'know, and make sure she was eating well, and when I came, I was able to help with that some. But…"
Dabi hums. "But?"
The game has loaded the new area, and the music has changed, but the character remains still on the screen. Suzume seems to have completely lost interest. "But now she really can't move very well at all. The aid's been having to come and help make sure Baa-baa can – " Pausing, Suzume shakes her head. Her voice, Dabi thinks, is surprisingly even, but he can tell by the way her body's gone still and tense against him that she's struggling despite her stoic front. "Well, she can't wash herself real well on her own anymore."
"You said the house is real old." Dabi plucks the system from Suzume's loose grip. She doesn't fight him when he switches it off and sets it beside them. "Can't imagine it's easy for her to make that ancient-ass bathroom work."
"No," Suzume says, faintly. "It's not."
The droning sound of the cicadas stretches between them for a time. The days are warmer now, but the nights are cool, and Suzume's fingers brush over the backs of Dabi's hands like the flutter of a moth's wings, her skin much colder than his own.
He knows what she wants, and, feeling generous, Dabi gives it to her. Hooking one arm under her knees, he turns her in his lap so that he can cradle her against himself, her head tucked against his shoulder, her legs draped over his. "No point in acting tough for me, Suzu." His lips brush her forehead through her bangs, and she sighs softly under the fan of his hot breath, the tight line of her shoulders softening some. "Not when I know what you are."
"M'not gonna cry," she mumbles stubbornly, watching his hand drift up the length of her calf towards her knee from beneath her heavy, trembling lashes.
"Sure you're not, crybaby."
Tilting her head back to look up at his face then, she rubs her cheek against his arm. "I'm not," she says again, more clearly this time, unwilling to rise to his bait but affectionate in spite of it, anyway. "But…"
If Suzume were anyone else, Dabi would not have even a fraction of a fraction of the patience necessary for these childish theatrics. He indulges her only because he likes her — likes that she wants and needs his attention, his prompting. "But?" His hand slides past her knee then, settling again on her thigh. She's just so small, Dabi thinks; his fingers curl around it so easily.
Suzume's eyes drift back down to his hand with cautious interest, and she doesn't move to push him away. "The aid said – she said Baa-baa's probably gonna have to go to the hospital soon. Like, next-couple-of-days-soon."
"For a few days, or?"
"Longer." Suzume is very quiet now, her breathing slow and practiced in the way he's taught her. "Maybe a few weeks. Maybe a few months. Maybe…"
Dabi finds he's holding his own breath very suddenly, hardly daring to believe what might be an unexpected bit of good fortune. "Out with it, Suzu."
Her face crumples as she says, quieter still, "Maybe for good."
And god, he thinks – really? While cognizant enough not to laugh, there's no helping the wide, leering grin that settles over his features. "Ahh, but that's a lucky fucking break for us, ain't it."
When her gaze finds his again, her frown takes an anxious, uneasy turn. "I… what?"
Dabi doesn't clarify, his mind a whirl of weighted calculations. "When was the last time any of your social workers checked in with your grandmother personally?"
"I don't – "
"It was over two months ago, wasn't it, when she first started getting worse?"
"Well, yeah," Suzume says hesitantly, clearly trying to remember, "I guess that sounds about right – "
"Sounds right 'cause it is," Dabi says, and he lets himself huff a small laugh because there's no holding that back now, either. "And your social workers, it sounds like they're all real busy people. Seems like they pop over as a formality and can't really be assed to do anything else. So, you just keep telling them your grandmother's too sick to talk, and you show them your good grades, and you stay healthy, and they leave you alone."
"I don't…" Suzume shakes her head, her violet eyes wide as they search his face for some kind of direction.
"Don't understand?" Clicking his tongue against his teeth, Dabi's fingers pinch the flesh of her thigh sharply, eliciting a small yelp from her that she muffles behind the press of her hands. "Think harder, Suzu. Be smarter. If you told your social workers your grandmother was sick enough to go to the hospital – possibly for good – what d'you think they'd do?"
"I – " Pain gives way to recognition, and then panic comes a second later, her eyes gone even wider as she fists a hand into his shirt. "Oh, but – but Nii-chan, please, I don't want them to take me away – "
"Focus," he says smoothly, and at the threatening press of his fingers digging into the still-sore flesh of her pinched thigh, Suzume goes obediently still with a whimper. "All you gotta do is what I told you. Tell them your grandmother's too sick to talk. Tell them you're doing okay. Visit your grandma once a week or so, let her know you're doing okay. Your social workers won't notice, and your grandma, well – she knows you're a good, self-sufficient girl, doesn't she? She'll let you be. Poor baby Suzu's been through so much already, after all."
Suzume is silent for a long while, transfixed by the sight of his thumb working circles over the spot he'd pinched only moments ago. "But…"
"But?"
"I don't wanna stay by myself in that house," Suzume whispers. "It's not scary like the big house, but – but it's old and it makes weird noises and the country's already so quiet and lonely and I just – "
Dabi lets himself laugh again, then – lets himself laugh even as she stares up at him, rattled, face red and eyes shining. "Don't – don't laugh at me! I said it wasn't scary – "
"God, Suzu, don't be so fucking stupid. Who said anything about you being alone?" Smirking through the reprimand, he snakes his hand up and takes hold of her chin, relishing the uneasy way Suzume makes herself hold his intense gaze. "Soon as your grandmother's gone, well – that house and everything in it's mine."
Summer; 10 years.
Suzume knows she shouldn't be surprised, but it all happens so fast:
Baa-baa moves out, and her brother – well, true to his word, her brother moves in.
After spending nearly all-day, every-day with him before the start of school, Suzume thought she understood what living with him might be like. Hadn't it felt a little like playing house, holed up in the shrine with him for hours and hours each and every day? Hadn't she sometimes shared meals with him, or even taken naps under his watchful eye when she got too tired to stay awake?
Normal things. Living together things, just – maybe not quite there. Almost. Maybe.
But when Suzume gets home from her grandmother's intake visit to the hospital, her brother is there in the house, standing – waiting, it looks like – in the living room, looking somehow taller than she remembers him.
"Hey," he says with a wry grin, and his eyes glitter as he stares her down, clearly savoring her surprise. "Welcome home."
"I'm home," she says, faintly, feeling more than a little overwhelmed. For longer than she can really remember, Suzume has fantasized about this, dreaming of one day coming home to him and exchanging these pleasantries.
Welcome home. I'm home.
Of course it wouldn't be how she imagined it, she thinks. She can't help but feel a little dumb for feeling surprised.
So Suzume tries to keep her tone light when she asks, "I thought the door was locked?"
Her brother's smile widens. "It's old as shit. Was easy enough to pick."
He had said it would be his house, hadn't he? It had annoyed her then, and remembering it really annoys her, now. Shaking her head, Suzume takes in a very long, slow breath through her nose in an attempt to calm the jittery thrum of her heart. It doesn't especially work, but given the situation, it seems crazy to ask him for help with it like she usually would. "Have… have you been here before?"
"Inside?" His tone is innocent, but his eyes are knowing, like they always are. "Not until tonight."
"That's a surprise!" Suzume tries to sound airy, but it comes out a little forced, even to her own ears. No doubt he picks up on it; there's something that shifts in his gaze. "Figured you'd have broken in long before now!" It isn't that she doesn't want him here – she does. She does. She wants it so much. It's just…
"Hey," he says with a shrug, "I can manage a sense of propriety sometimes."
Eyeing him suspiciously, Suzume shakes her head again. "I dunno what… what propriety means."
Her brother snorts, but chooses to settle on the implication of mockery rather than voice it. "Means I got manners."
At first, Suzume can only stare at him, incredulous. For all that she tries, she cannot remember him ever apologizing for anything. She cannot recall him saying please or thank you even once. He has only ever done exactly what he wants, when he wants to — something he cops to often, as if it were a point of pride. "I don't think you've ever had even a single manner in your whole dumb life," she says, finally. Flatly.
Stubbornly.
Evidently taken aback by her defiance, her brother's eyes narrow immediately. "Oh, someone's feeling feisty." His smile has an unusual amount of teeth now, even for him. "Feisty and stupid. That's not even how that works."
Pinning her hands to her hips, Suzume lifts her chin and fixes him with an exaggerated scowl that she only just barely manages to keep from wavering. This is her house, she repeats to herself. In the absence of her grandmother, this is her house, and he is a guest here, and he is so unfair and full of himself sometimes. Couldn't he have at least waited outside for her to come home instead of waiting inside – and waiting inside for what? To scare her? To prove something? Just once, she thinks; just once, just once –
"Yeah it is!" She insists, doggedly. By this point, she doesn't even care if her argument makes sense; she just wants to argue. "Yeah, it is how it works!"
Unsurprisingly – exasperatingly – he throws his head back and laughs.
"Aww, crybaby Suzu's finally feeling good enough to get her little teeth and claws back out — and over something completely stupid, huh?" Her brother's eyes are blue cut-gems, edged sharp and gleaming. They burn so hot Suzume thinks she can almost feel them, even from meters away. "So confident about being wrong. Can't believe you got the balls to be disrespecting your big brother."
He clicks his tongue dismissively, but his smile betrays him. He's clearly excited, and Suzume does not like that one bit. "Can't believe you're disrespecting me in my own damn house."
Again! Every word slips from his tongue, enunciated and sharp, flourished like a knife between them. Slipping off her hips, Suzume's hands ball up into fists at her sides. Always so cocky, always so pig-headed, and god, it just isn't fair! And she knows him; Suzume knows he's being unfair on purpose. There's no mistaking that slithery smile stretching his face.
He's goading her. It's a trap. But for the first time since he'd set her loose from her father's house — for the first time since she'd learned exactly who and what her brother is — Suzume finds she just can't help herself.
Just can't help the way she goads him back.
(It's been a long time coming.)
"It's not your house, butthead!" She cries out, and as she turns on her heel to dart out the door, she catches sight of his bright eyes going wide, wide, wide.
There's no time for her to relish his flabbergasted expression, though, much as she aches to. She knows better, knows him better – knows that time is something she'll be short on quickly. Suzume makes it out of the living room, down the hall, and halfway through the kitchen before she hears the heavy, punishing thud of his footsteps crashing after her.
Her brother is, of course, perfectly capable of being quiet. He can even be fast and quiet, if he wants to be, in that scary, dangerous I've-killed-a-man way of his. But he's noisy now, so loud now, and the old house groans and shudders beneath the pound of his feet. Suzume knows he's doing it to scare her.
She hates that it's working.
Long ago, when she and Katsuki had been on better terms – when they'd actually been friends, even – there'd been a part of her that had thrilled when he'd chased her across the playground. It had been a little frightening, but in an exciting kind of way, like roller coasters or ferris wheels or the freaky, zombie-filled video games Katsuki sometimes played with her at his house. The anticipation of being caught always lit a fire under Suzume, but there was something strangely exhilarating about the certainty she'd be caught. Katsuki was faster than she was, after all. Somehow though, it was a fun inevitability, and it always left her feeling heady and delirious with what she could only describe as panicked elation.
There's no doubt her brother is faster than her, too. She's never tried to race him – or run from him, for that matter – but his legs are much longer than hers, and he's feral in a lot of the same ways Katsuki was with an eerie sense of control. There's just something about boys who are wild and mean, Suzume thinks, heart thundering in her chest as she launches herself into the backyard off the kitchen porch – something about them being faster than they have any right to be. It feels like one of those strange, unfair laws of nature.
And, well, everything about her brother is unfair, already. What's one more thing?
Behind her, she can hear him tearing his way through the kitchen, the distance between them shortening much more quickly than Suzume anticipated. By the time she's halfway to the trees, she can already make out the sound of his feet on the wooden deck.
So fast. Too fast. It's all she can do to bite back a scream when he really begins to gain on her, knifing swiftly through the grass.
Her shoulders ache, and she thinks about her father's wings, and her father's speed, and she grits her teeth. There's no helping it, just like there's no helping the way her brother is much faster than she expected.
Suzume thinks she can hear his breathing, and in her reeling mind, she knows: he's almost on her, now. Katsuki would have yelled, "Gonna get you!" He always did, right before his hands buried into her clothes or her hair, before they wrapped around her wrist and tugged her back. She was always a bit disappointed; Katsuki crowing his preemptive victory had somehow felt a little like spoiling the surprise.
Her brother knows how to be scary, though. He lets the other sounds he's making do the menacing, and that's worse in every conceivable way, and the fear she feels is less fun than it is intense for it. Unable to stop herself, Suzume starts shrieking before he even touches her, wild adrenaline pushing her a few more stumbling steps towards the treeline -
There's no guessing when he'll get her if he doesn't announce it. One step, two steps, a third step longer, and maybe she can make it into the shadows beyond the trees. Maybe she can lose him where it gets deep and dark. Maybe, maybe, maybe –
And then his hot hand is at her hip, and his other is on her arm, and she feels herself being jerked backwards, and she can't stop screaming. Even after his hand clamps forcefully over her mouth, Suzume can't stop screaming, thrashing, biting —
Laughing and laughing, her brother spins her around before hauling her up over his shoulder. The world pivots sharply, and then flips upside down, and she's winded by the disorientation, her scream cut short in her throat. "Too slow," he says, completely unfazed by the way she immediately begins to beat her hands against his back. "If you wanna try and push my buttons, you gotta be faster than that."
"It's not fair!" Howling as soon as she catches her breath, Suzume tugs viciously at his shirt, slapping ineffectually at his thighs. "It's not fair! It's my house! You didn't even wait, you could have waited for me to come home, and it would have been fine — "
"I didn't wanna wait," he explains patiently — patronizingly, as if to an especially young child — and carries her back into the house. Draped over his shoulder with her face pressed to his back, Suzume can't see his face, but she can hear his grin, smug and arrogant, thick in his voice. "And it's my house, now, anyway."
Again. Again!
"You're so dumb! So mean! S'not your stupid house!" There's no point in it, she knows, but she tries to dig her fingers between his ribs like he does to her. Infuriatingly, he doesn't even react.
"And you're a fucking brat." There's no anger in him. There's no bite to the declaration. He's so nonchalant even when he insults her, and that's so unfair! It should be scathing! He should be agitated! He should be furious! Instead, he sounds almost fond when he says it, like he does when he tells her she's cute.
Almost like he's pleased.
It had always been vindicating, seeing Katsuki get mad when she got snappy with him. Her brother, though, is completely unflappable. Sometimes, it feels like nothing she can do affects him at all. That she'd even managed to surprise him earlier –
"Am not," she whines, sullenly. Upside down, all the blood rushes to her head and leaves her feeling dizzy. It takes more fight out of her than she'd like to admit.
Snorting again, her brother mimics her voice in that offensively squeaky imitation of his, pitched high and petulant as he walks through the living room. "'Am not,' says the brat, brattily."
Suzume kicks her feet until he secures them by her ankles and pinches the back of her exposed thigh for good measure. Biting his shirt to keep from crying out, she mumbles through the cloth in her mouth. "If I am, it's 'cause it's your fault. 'Cause you deserve it."
"Oh, do I?" His voice sounds particularly sly now. She can feel him shaking his head against her waist, the brush of his hair a tickle against her skin where her shirt has ridden up. "To think I was gonna let you sleep with me tonight."
That gives her a brief pause. Much like she'd daydreamed endlessly about being able to come home to him – or for him to come home to her, because she's never been picky with the particulars – Suzume has thought a lot about that, too.
Sleeping with other people has always been something she's loved. Her mother had always indulged her when they'd lived at the big house, so much so that Suzume had struggled to sleep in the apartment when she'd had to go to bed on her own. Similarly, on nights when she'd slept over at Katsuki's, she'd had a hard time sleeping until he'd surprisingly deigned to let her up into his bed with him. It had been worth him calling her a scaredy-cat if it meant he'd hold her hand if she had nightmares.
Before meeting her brother, she'd go to bed alone at the apartment and imagine her mother with her. Later, Katsuki featured in those fantasies. After meeting her brother, though – after they'd gotten close – it had never been anyone else but him ever again.
Her mother was comforting. Katsuki felt safe, like if something bad were to happen, he'd be better than Suzume at handling it.
Her brother, though, was capable of both of those things. And more than that –
More than that…
Unhooking her teeth from his shirt, Suzume tries to swallow back the lingering cotton sensation filling her mouth. Her cheeks are so hot. She wants it, she realizes. She wants it very badly. She has wanted it very badly for a very long time. Drowsing off in his lap in the shrine was one thing, but actually getting to snuggle up with him in her futon is another thing entirely.
And yet…
This, too, is a trap. It's a different kind of trap than the one from earlier, but it's still a trap. Her brother's hand moves over the back of her thigh soothingly, placatingly, running the length of it down to her knee, up and down, up and down.
Even that is calculated. He probably wants to touch her, sure. He probably even wants to sleep with her. He's here, isn't he? But Suzume knows he wants her to beg for his forgiveness more than anything. He wants her to admit she was wrong, and he wants her to plead for him to take her to bed. He wants to win.
Her brother always wins. And for the last half a year, Suzume has been too tired and too sad to contest him. The easy comfort of his arms has made her complacent. The hot press of his mouth when she cries has made her weak. And maybe – just maybe – she's been too scared to push back, too.
Not anymore, she thinks!
"Eww." Huffing against his back, Suzume strains her legs against the grip of his hand, emphatic in what she hopes sounds like legitimate disgust. "That's gross. Why would I wanna sleep with you?"
They're in the hallway that leads to the bedrooms, now. Her brother turns his head so that his mouth settles against her thigh, and she can feel the metal of his staples hot against her flesh. It is a strange intimacy, and it leaves her feeling particularly off-guard. "Mmm. Gross, huh?" When he talks, his lips move against her skin, and his tone is thoughtful in a way that makes every hair on her body stand on end. "Well, no helping it. Guess we'll have to get you your own room."
"I have my own room," she grumbles, defensively.
"Oh, the one down at the end of the hall? One full of plushies? That one's mine, now. But don't worry, Suzu, I got a new one for you right here."
He stops, suddenly, and she hears him opening a door. Lifting her head in an attempt to get her bearings, Suzume realizes immediately that the door he's opened does not lead to either her bedroom or her grandmother's.
No, it's the door that leads to the attic.
Suzume's whole body goes rigid. It's a mistake, she realizes too late – she should fight. She should twist and squirm and kick and punch! But gone so still, it's easy for him to lift her up off his shoulder and set her down in the inky darkness of the attic stairwell before promptly shutting her in with it.
Alone.
The sound of the lock clicking into place is very loud in the small, claustrophobic space.
Disoriented and immediately unsettled, Suzume blinks and blinks. The stairwell is dark, so dark that she can't see any difference with her eyes open or closed. Blindly, she reaches out and finds the stairs in front of her. They're steep enough that they're almost a ladder, and her hands come back dusty. No one has been up in the attic in a very long time.
There's absolutely no way she's going to be the first.
Anxiety grips her heart with icy fingers and tears prickle threateningly at her eyes. Even so, Suzume sets her teeth and presses her hands over her eyes, as if to trade the darkness of the stairwell for the darkness of her own making. He's not going to win. He's not.
"That's fine!" She calls out, loudly, back pressed to the door. "It's great in here! I love my new room, away from you!"
Behind the door, her brother laughs, as if she's told a joke. As if she is the joke. "Fantastic," he says, smoothly. "Glad to hear it."
And then she hears his footsteps carry him away down the hall.
For a long time, then, the house settles into the sort of eerie silence only an old house can manage. It shifts and sighs in the wind, aged wood creaking like ancient, arthritic bones, and all the soft, eerie sounds of it are interspersed by long stretches of thick, dark nothing. Even with her ear pressed to the door and her breath held still in her lungs, she can't hear any movement in the house at all.
Now, of course, when silence is the scariest thing of all, her brother doesn't make a single stupid sound.
The minutes tick by, or at least she thinks they do. Here in the musty, mold-shadow of the stairwell, Suzume has no means by which to tell the time. She tries to count the seconds in her head, and then the minutes, but she keeps losing her place despite her best efforts. Her mind wanders up the stark steps into the blacker parts of the house she's never had the courage to explore before.
Trying very hard to not think of the guest room on the third floor back in the big house, Suzume tentatively calls out, "Nii-chan?"
The house sighs, and is quiet. It doesn't answer her, and neither does her brother.
"Nii-chan!"
A voice from down the hall and to the right, where her bedroom is, calls back. "What?"
He's in her bedroom, then. The nerve! Suzume makes a face in the dark, and a little bit of her anxiety makes room for a renewed sense of outrage. Suzume reminds herself she must be calm, though. "Nii-chan, I need to – " Talking before she thinks, and oh, she flounders. "I gotta use the bathroom!"
Stupid, she thinks. Stupid! It sounds like the lie it is, and if it sounds like a lie to her, then –
His voice is closer now, but not quite in the hall. She imagines him looming in her doorway, set in shadows by the weak light within, his eyes needling her even in her imagination. "Probably some box or urn or bowl in the attic you could piss in if you need. Old people always hold onto that sorta shit."
Her brother could be calling her bluff. Knowing him the way she does, though, he's probably completely serious. The idea that he'd let her out even if she did need to use the bathroom when he's like this is laughable. Slumping against the door, Suzume groans in unabashed disgust. "That's gross!"
"So's hanging out with me, according to you," he reminds her serenely. "You picked your poison, Princess. Gotta choke it down, mmm?"
Tugging her shirt over her mouth, Suzume stifles another hiss of resentment before she tries to compose herself again. It's difficult; she still can't see anything at all, and the blackness unnerves her considerably.
"Nii-chan, c'mon," she says, softly, hating the way her voice wavers around the edges – hating her own faint-heartedness. "I've learned my lesson, okay? Just let me out."
There's no sound of his approach, but when he speaks again, his voice is directly on the other side of the door, hardly muffled by the thin slab of wood. It's as if he's in the small space with her at the foot of the stairs, crowding her. "Oh," he says, "Are you, now?"
Considerably quieter than he is, Suzume's voice drops to a grumble. "Yeah."
"Hmm. I dunno." A pause Suzume suspects is for dramatic tension. It takes everything she has not to pound her fist on the door. "You don't sound like you've learned a damn thing."
"Nii-chan." Relieved that he can't see her, Suzume manages to sound at least a little contrite through gritted teeth, nails digging into her palms. "Come on."
He hums, as if considering her request. That's an act, Suzume knows; he doesn't need time to process his feelings like she does. There's rarely a shred of hesitation in anything he does. Her brother always seems to know exactly what he wants at all times.
He knows exactly how to get it, too.
Finally, after several long moments, she hears him huff sharply through his nose, a little half laugh. "C'mon, you know what I want," he tells her through the door. No doubt some of this unnecessary stalling was an attempt to get her to come to that conclusion herself.
When Suzume doesn't say anything, he continues. "Stubborn ain't a good look on you, Suzu. Beg me for it."
No, it's stupid to expect anything gracious of him when he's in one of these moods. Suzume can't win for losing. She can't win, period. The only thing she can do is refuse to play the game.
"Nevermind," she says. She means to sound annoyed. Mostly, she thinks she sounds tired. "I think I'll stay in here a little longer."
It would be some small comfort if he'd at least have the decency to sound agitated when he says, "Suit yourself." Instead, he sounds patient. Accommodating, even, as if she were a difficult guest and he the understanding and long-suffering host, a paragon of good will and patience. That this is her house and he should be a guest only serves to heighten her ire.
Sinking down to the floor, Suzume has just enough room to sit if she pulls her knees up under her chin. With her back to the door and her toes wedged uncomfortably against the first step of the stairs, it's a tight and barely serviceable fit. There's no helping it, she reasons. She's not about to reward him for being a slimeball. Rather than let him win, Suzume thinks it's better that they both lose.
She just has to wait him out.
Some time later, Suzume startles from a light, fitful sleep to both the sound and sensation of thunder rolling through the house. Every limb of her body is stiff and aching, and the thunder feels like it gets inside of her, rattling about her numb body in a way that has her gripping her shoulders and gritting her teeth until it passes. Despite her half-waking disorientation, every nerve stands on end. It takes a moment for her to realize where she is – and why she's there.
"Nii-chan!" It's a hoarse cry as she struggles to stand on heavy, tingling legs. Her feet feel as if pricked by a thousand hot needles while her nerves wake up more slowly than she does.
Another rumble of thunder answers her. Suzume doesn't wait for it to finish before frantically calling for him again. "Nii-chan!" And then, for good measure, "Please!"
Never the biggest fan of storms, Suzume has found them especially terrifying since the last night she'd spent at the big house. The first few she'd had to weather in the country had been spent curled up on the floor outside her grandmother's bedroom under a nest of blankets, sleepless and out of her mind with fear. Her grandmother was a stoic woman who mourned her daughter's death distantly and kept Suzume at a similar distance. There was too much of Kozue in Suzume for Baa-baa to bear, and Suzume had never gotten to the point where she felt comfortable enough to ask to sleep with her – or to ask her for much of anything at all.
Her brother, though –
"Nii-chan!"
Thunder again, the house groaning at the reverberation. And then, of course, her brother.
"Uh-oh." She hears him outside the door again, loud enough to be heard over the catastrophic crash in the sky. "Did I forget to tell you it was gonna storm? Whoops." He sounds at once both relaxed and delighted. "Supposed to be a real bad one, too."
As if on cue – as if his quirk were storms and not ghostly blue hellfire – the skies crack apart and she hears what sounds like an actual waterfall open up over the house.
There's no way he forgot, Suzume knows. Like he knows everything else about her, her brother is more than aware of how much storms frighten her, now. Suzume hadn't had to tell him; he'd asked her specifically after noticing the bruising under her eyes following a few treacherously stormy nights. With his suspicions confirmed, he'd suddenly become much more interested in the weather than she'd ever known him to be.
Whether he was motivated by concern or by more sinister purposes was anyone's guess to Suzume when she'd first noticed his behavior. Now, though, she's fairly certain it's the latter.
There's just no hiding anything from him.
It's what she tells herself anyway when she feels a sob well up in her chest. Stuffing her knuckles into her mouth, Suzume smothers a low, keening wail. Here in the directionless gloom, it's easy to feel like she's back there, in the big house. Alone in her upstairs room, alone and waiting for something, for her brother, and then –
No hiding anything from him, she repeats to herself. No point in acting tough. No point in trying to deny him when he already knows what she wants, anyway. When it's what he wants, too. Why fight it?
The staccato sound of the thunder mirrors the erratic flutter of her heart, and Suzume finds she can't quite catch her breath. "Nii-chan!" The word pours out of her, hysterical, panic mounting in her by the second. Outside, the rain falls in a deluge, and her cheeks are just as wet. "Please, let me out – please, please, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, just – just please, don't leave me alone, please!"
It's hard to hear over the sound of the thunder, but Suzume thinks she might hear him laughing. She wants to be angry, she does. She wants it, she wants it, but she wants him so much more in that moment that she can't bring herself to care about anything else. "Please! Please, please, please – "
The words blur together until they are meaningless, more sound than sense in her ears, and then –
The blessed click of the lock, the swing of the door –
And Suzume stumbles into her brother's arms.
His body is hot against hers, like it always is. When he laughs into her hair, she knows for sure now that she wasn't imagining it earlier, but she still doesn't care. With her arms twined around his shoulders, he lifts her up easily. "You're so dumb, Suzu," he tells her, his teeth grazing her ear. "Gotta go and make everything so much harder for yourself than it has to be."
Suzume has the sense to think that that maybe isn't right – it's him, it's him, isn't it? It's him who's unfair. It's him who makes it hard. Sometimes! Most of the time! All the time! But when the thunder roars overhead and the rain pounds incessantly on the roof, well, her doubts creep in.
Why did she make this harder on herself? This is who he is. This is who he's always been. He tells her as much, doesn't he? And even then, even without that, she knows him. Her brother does what he wants to get what he wants, and to expect anything more of him…
Maybe that's unfair of her. Maybe that's dumb of her. She'd realized it earlier, even, hadn't she? Expecting anything else other than what she already knows him to be is just –
Sobbing now, Suzume buries her face in his neck. "I'm sorry," she says, words slurring as she weeps. "M'sorry, I'm sorry, please, I wanna stay with you, please, you're not gross, it's not gross to stay with you – I wanna, I want to so much, I've always wanted it, I was just being stupid – I'm sorry!"
Shushing her as he carries her into the bathroom, her brother has to work to untangle her body from his. "I'm not going anywhere," he soothes her, "Not if you behave. Not if you're a good girl. But if we're gonna go to bed, you gotta get ready for it."
This is logical. This is sound. Suzume takes a few deep breaths, so deep she feels dizzy for it. There are things to do before bed, Suzume knows. Things – things… but it's hard to remember what those things might be.
It's even harder for Suzume to let go of him now that she has her arms around him. Even when he bends down low enough that she can get her feet on the floor, her arms are slow and reluctant to untangle from his neck.
He doesn't rush her, stealing a kiss against her tear-tracked cheeks before she finally lets go.
When he switches the light on, Suzume reflexively covers her eyes. The drastic change in lighting hurts and reminds her of lightning besides. Keeping her face buried in her hands, she listens to her brother move around the bathroom. There's the sound of running water, the soft clatter of plastic, and then the sound of him dragging a stool over.
Suddenly, she feels him pulling her into him again.
When Suzume opens her eyes, he's sitting on the stool and she's standing between his spread legs. Obeying the push and tug of his hand, she settles down on one of his thighs, taking the pink toothbrush that he presses into her palm.
"Brush your teeth," he tells her, firmly. "Brush them and breathe. You gotta calm down."
Glancing down to find the toothbrush already primed with toothpaste, Suzume mechanically complies. The taste of herbs and mint and salt fills her mouth as she scrubs the bristles along her gums and teeth, blubbering much more quietly now. While her blurry gaze wanders the bathroom, she's acutely aware of her brother watching her in her periphery. His eyes seem especially bright in the fluorescent light.
"Start in one quarter of your mouth before moving onto the next, dummy. You're going all over the damn place and doing a piss poor job for it."
Suzume huffs a sigh through her nose but does as she's told, following his direction to the letter. The rain is just as loud here as it was in the stairwell, but now that she's able to slump against her brother's shoulder, it feels –
Well, it feels much more manageable.
Under his bizarrely stern guidance, she finishes brushing her teeth before spitting into a cup he produces. "Wanna wash my mouth out," she mumbles, but he shakes his head.
"It'll work better if you leave it."
This is strange. Suzume has always rinsed her mouth out after. She tries to tell him so, but he shakes his head again, his black bangs a soft dusting over his eyes. "Nope," he says. "Now open your mouth and lemme check."
"I'm not a kid anymore," she grumbles, snuffling, but he takes hold of her chin and tilts her head back insistently.
"Open up, I said." His tone is completely placid, but she knows better than to fuss. His moods are too mercurial. He's in good brother mode now, and she doesn't want to risk it. She doesn't want to be sent back to the stairwell.
And as is often the case with her brother, Suzume is also much too exhausted to fight anymore.
Parting her lips for him, she's more than a little startled when he slides one of his fingers past them. Hot in her mouth, it slips over her saliva-slick teeth slowly, pushed snug between the soft flesh of her cheek and her gums.
"Eww." It's difficult to talk with her mouth open, and especially so with his finger inside of it. She wants to pull away from him – this level of inspection strikes her as both unnecessary and… she's not sure. Invasive? Embarrassing? "Gonna make me drool."
She absolutely does not want to drool in front of him. Suzume is sure he would never let her live it down.
Surprisingly, though, he doesn't even seem to acknowledge it. His eyes are intense when they move up from her mouth and fix on hers, his finger gliding over her tongue. "Put your tongue out for me," he tells her, and his voice is intense, too, suddenly.
Sometimes, Suzume can follow his intensity back to a starting point. Sometimes, she has no idea why he does anything he does. In this case, he is as unknowable as he ever is. "Why?"
"Gotta make sure you brushed it good."
Suzume blinks up at him. He'd watched her do it. "But I did it just like you said…"
"Do it." The mildness of his tone belies something much more uncompromising that prickles like a warning just under her skin. Her brother is more than capable of being patient, but he does not like to be. Suzume knows he's already been patient enough tonight.
So, she does what he asks. Raising her eyes up to the ceiling so she doesn't have to look at him, she puts her tongue out, finding her breath catch somewhere in her chest as he drags not just the one, but two fingers now, all up and down the length of the squirming muscle.
Despite how much she tries her best, his fingers push a little too deep towards the back of her throat. Her abdomen heaves immediately with a gag she can't even hope to suppress, and her mouth reflexively fills with spit.
For a brief second, his eyes widen. There's a sheen of sweat in the hollow of his throat that Suzume hadn't noticed before, something made even more pronounced when he swallows, his Adam's apple bobbing with the movement.
There's not much time to wonder about it, though – coughing takes up a lot of her attention. "Too much," she whines, cheeks flushed and eyes watering with a different sort of tears.
"Aww, poor Suzu," he coos, sick-sweet in a way that feels both doting and wholly ingenuine, somehow. "You're such a baby, aren't you." Mercifully, though – reluctantly, she thinks – her brother pulls his fingers from her mouth. The way they gleam wet in the unsettling light makes her feel bad and almost guilty, as if it's her fault she's made a mess of him.
"I'm sorry," she murmurs, and she feels sorry for so many things at once that she's not even properly sure what she's apologizing for. For being a baby? For getting his fingers messy? For causing problems?
Her brother chuckles, watching her through heavy-lidded eyes. He seems pleased, like she's maybe passed his absurd hygiene test, and that, at least, is a relief. "There's my good girl." His voice is like syrup and smoke and hot gravel, and he settles his spit-damp fingers over the curve of her throat, stroking her skin tenderly with his thumb. "Isn't this much nicer?"
It is, Suzume thinks. It is much better than being alone, even with all the strangeness and weird attention to her brushing routine. Mama had stopped supervising toothbrushing years and years ago, so long ago that Suzume can't even recall the last time she'd been asked to submit herself for review. Maybe it's just some personal concern of her brother's, she thinks. Suzume makes a mental note to pay more attention to his teeth later, hard as that might be. Her inclination when they come out has almost always been to look away.
As nice as it is being with him, though, Suzume's not quite sure she wants to give him that much satisfaction, even as she leans into his touch with a quiet sigh. She feels she's done enough. "Did you brush your teeth?"
It's an artless topic switch. Her brother indulges her anyway. "I did earlier, when you were throwing a fit."
"I wasn't throwing a fit." She pouts.
"You absolutely were."
Ignoring him, Suzume sweeps her gaze towards the sink. With her toothbrush in the cup at their feet now, and her grandmother's on the sink —
"Who's toothbrush did you use?"
"Yours."
Gross, she immediately wants to say, but when she thinks about it, she doesn't really think it's gross. She thinks it's something else, and the heat in her cheeks from earlier suffuses hot in her ears now, too.
"Oh," she says, instead, very quietly.
He laughs, because of course he would. Suzume has no doubt that he knows exactly what she thinks about it, and that only makes her feel more vulnerable – it only makes her whole body burn all the hotter.
Fortunately, he doesn't push her. Instead, he helps her to her feet and stands himself, wetting a washcloth in the sink with warm water before turning and taking her face in hand again.
"Should probably wash up for real," he says, and with his other hand, he works the cloth over her cheeks with a gentleness that contradicts most of the things she knows about him. "It's really late, though, so this'll have to do."
Standing next to him like this always makes Suzume feel so small. Well below his shoulder, she has to look up for him to clean her face, holding her breath again while he wipes away salty tears and snot and spit.
"Do you think I'll get any taller?" She wonders aloud, closing her eyes as he works the cloth across her eyelids.
"Mmm." He tweaks her nose through the washcloth and she almost sneezes. "Maybe. Hopefully not much."
"Why 'hopefully not much'?"
"You're cute short." The cloth scrubs at her lips, now. "I like you small."
Suzume thinks on that for a while. It's easier to ask him things when her eyes are closed, so she doesn't open them. "Would you like me even if I was tall?"
Her brother chuckles. "That's a stupid question, even for you." The cloth makes a wet slapping noise when he tosses it into the sink, and then he flicks her cheek. It stings, but doesn't hurt much. He's done much worse before, and besides, it's easy to bear when he's less a demon taken the place of the god in the shrine and more… well, indulgent, like he's being now. "You'd still be you, even if you were tall. Still fucking insufferable. Still cute."
Suzume's heart pounds in her chest, in her wrists, in her throat. That's rare sweetness from him, and as good as she's like to ever get. Her brother calls her cute often, but verbal confirmation of his feelings are infrequent and usually left up for context. He prefers to express his affections in other ways, like touching her, or teasing her.
Or making her cry.
Clicking his tongue, he holds her chin and moves her head back and forth, as if to study her from multiple angles. "It's a moot point, though; you're a shrimpy little twerp. Don't imagine you'll get much taller." With a toothy grin, her brother shrugs, patting the top of her head. "Think you're shit outta luck with that, kiddo."
"Just you wait," Suzume mumbles, slinking her arms around his waist and pressing her cheek to his chest. "I'mma get real big and real tall and then you'll be sorry."
"Oh, yeah?"
Thunder shakes the house. His heartbeat under the press of her ear is steady, but maybe a little faster than she's used to. Strange, she thinks, closing her eyes again. She can't imagine why. "Yeah," she says, yawning. All the anger is gone from her now, and she doesn't mean it, even a little. "For sure."
When they're finished in the bathroom – after he's insisted on brushing her hair, and after she'd insisted on doing the same to him – her brother carries her into her room.
(His room, now, she guesses, feeling more than a little complicated at the way that thought comes to her, unbidden.)
The rain is steady, now, still intense, but less so. She can hear it rushing down her window, a steady drum on the roof. Behind the curtains, lightning flashes, bathing the room in splashes of gold light.
Tucked sleepily in her brother's arms, Suzume finds she doesn't care at all. The feeling of the hairbrush working through her hair had bled anything at all negative left inside of her out – and maybe her bones, too. She feels weightless. She feels like jelly. She feels as if her body has no structure, and the only thing keeping her held together is her brother's arms wrapped tight around her.
When her brother sets her on her feet, he has to wrap an arm around her shoulder to keep her steady for the way she slumps into him.
"You're not going to bed in those clothes," he tells her in a very serious-older-brother sort of voice. "They're dirty."
"Um, okay." Rubbing her face into his side when lightning floods the room, Suzume tries to think. Night shirts. Pajamas. Like her clothes, they're in a small chest tucked all the way in the corner of her room. It seems an impossible distance to cross in that moment, and she doesn't want her brother to leave her to get it for her –
Even if it is just across the room.
So Suzume shakes her head, pleading into her brother's chest. "Can I wear your shirt instead?"
"What, the one I'm wearing now?"
"Uh-huh."
"Why?"
"'Cause my clothes are all the way in the corner," she admits.
"Oh, all the way in the corner, huh?" He scoffs. "Lazy, hopeless girl. This room's goddamn tiny."
Smoothing her hands over the fabric that stretches across his back, Suzume huffs against him, softly. "And 'cause I like your shirt, 'cause… 'cause it smells like you."
At that, he doesn't say anything – not immediately, anyway. His hands slip through her hair, and when he wraps a strand of it between his long fingers, Suzume finds herself tensing, expecting him to pull it.
He doesn't, though. Steady and slow, he lets his hand slip down it, following the wavy length of it to its conclusion midway down her back. Then, taking a handful of her shirt, he tugs upwards. "Lift your arms for me, Suzu."
Suzume is sleepy, but not enough to not feel shy about this demand. Knowing that he'd seen her in the big house months back isn't much of a comfort; she can barely remember it, anyhow, the scene fragmented and dreamlike in its unreality even when she tries very hard to picture it.
But he's been nice to her for the last while, she thinks, and she feels sweet on him in a way that makes her toes curl. Obediently, she lifts her arms, and he pulls her shirt off her body in one easy sweep.
The air feels cold on her skin, and Suzume wraps her arms around herself, feeling very exposed in only her shorts. The storm has brought a chill with it, and the cold leaves gooseflesh dimpling all up and down her skin.
As if he knows, her brother runs his warm hands over the slope of her bare shoulders and down her arms. "You get so cold so easily," he says. His voice sounds a little strange. Quiet, for him. She wonders if she's hearing things. She must be more tired than she thinks.
"I don't have a fire in me like you do." Against her cool skin, his hands feel especially hot, and the contrast makes her shiver. The movement is small, but he seems to notice, anyway. The brush of his hands becomes a firmer grip on her upper arms in response, so tight it almost hurts.
Almost.
"Nii-chan," she whispers carefully, and tugs on his shirt.
And then his hands are gone, and he's tugging his shirt over his head with much the same quickness as he took her own from her. "Here." The fabric feels very warm in her hands when he passes her the shirt. "Put it on, now."
Some of that earlier intensity of his is back. It's an unusually insistent demand considering she'd been the one to ask him for it, but something in her knows better than to seek any kind of clarification.
Instead, she savors the feeling of his body heat as she turns his shirt right-side-out and pulls it down over her head.
He helps her pull her hair out of the collar, then, taking sweeping handfuls of it until it's all set loose and free. The shirt on him was already fairly slack, but Suzume is swimming in it. It comes down almost to her knees, and she delights in the way it feels, in the way the familiar smell of him surrounds her.
As he begins to undo his belt, he regards her with slightly raised eyebrows. "Shorts next, Suzu."
It's not a big ask. The hem of her shorts aren't visible under the length of his shirt, so even without them she doesn't feel any more or less exposed. Truthfully, though, she's happy to have something to focus on, and she takes her time sliding them down her legs. It's easier than gaping up at him, shirtless as he is now –
Last time, in the shower, she'd hardly been in the right state of mind to notice, but there's no avoiding it now without something else to think about.
"Are you gonna wear pajamas?" Suzume asks him, shimmying out of her shorts with intentional slowness.
"Nah," he says, kicking his crumpled pants to the side with a sweep of his foot. Even with the belt, he's gotten his pants off much more quickly than she's managed with her little elastic-band shorts. Idly, Suzume wonders if he's capable of anything as human as shame. "I sleep in my trunks."
"Oh." She nods, and then nods some more, keeping her head bowed to hide the curtain of heat that settles over her features again. She's glad that the lights in her room are off – glad, too, that the storm has died down enough that the lightning is only intermittent, now.
And then, suddenly, a thought comes to her, and she's thankful for the distraction. "Hey, you said I couldn't sleep in my clothes 'cause they were dirty."
With his clothes pushed out of the way, her brother busies himself with her futon, pulling the light comforter back from the fluffier bottom mattress. "Yep."
"But I can sleep in your shirt?"
Glancing over his shoulder, he fixes her with a wicked grin. "Rules are mine to make and yours to follow. It's my shirt, so it's an exception."
Too tired to make much of a fuss about that, Suzume sniffs instead, crossing her arms over her chest. "That's dumb," she says, feeling more than a little lame about the declaration. She's not alert enough for a debate.
"You're dumb." He laughs easy, and doesn't bother to justify himself. Suzume thinks it's entirely unfair how he can make even the most thoughtless of comebacks seem cool and cutting when hers are so clumsy and witless. Even the same ones! It must be age, she thinks. Or confidence, or something about the way he says it. She can't really be sure, and she's not about to ask.
Preoccupied with the futon though, her brother runs his hand over the fresh bedding before collapsing into it, heaving a pleasant, comfortable sigh. He sprawls out like a cat, arms and legs in every direction, greedy with the space. Dressed in only his trunks now, the extent of his disfigurement is all the more obvious. So, too, are the sharp, angular lines of his body, scar-tissue and skin pulled tight over long limbs and lean, hungry muscle.
Suzume has never seen a man so… bare, before, at least not outside of television or video games. Boys, yes – she'd seen plenty of Katsuki and Izuku. But her brother is much bigger, and his body is very different. She has the feeling that looking is wrong, somehow, and presses her fingers to her mouth, forcing her eyes up towards the ceiling.
"Aww, what's the matter, Suzu?" Her brother's tone is teasing as he stares up at her, pointedly. "You getting all flustered?"
She wants to say no, and she wants it to be true, but she's no good at lying. Her brother tells her so all the time. "Yes!" She squeaks instead. "I wish you'd put on some pajamas!"
"Tough tits." He snorts. "It's been fucking forever since I got to sleep in a real bed. I'm gonna be comfortable and you're gonna deal with it."
This, Suzume thinks, is some very interesting new lore about her big brother. Where has he been sleeping all this time? It occurs to her that she's never thought about where he lives or sleeps outside of the fantasies where he lives and sleeps with her.
Maybe he would prefer his space. "Maybe I should – "
"That song and dance is over. You're not sleeping anywhere else." With a roll of his eyes, her brother beckons her with the curl of two fingers. "Now get over here; you ain't gonna like it if I gotta make you."
Despite his good humor, Suzume recognizes that for the threat it very much is. With her eyes half-closed, she shuffles over to her futon – his futon, and why does that thought excite her so much now when she thinks it should be annoying? – taking tentative steps with the push of her feet until her toes find the mattress.
"What, can't even look at me?" She's thankful at least that he sounds smug and not wounded. As infuriating as he can be, Suzume doesn't want to hurt his feelings by accident – if she's even capable of doing such a thing, anyway.
"It's just – it's too much," she whines pitifully, hesitating despite her fear of upsetting him.
Now that she's close enough to reach, though, her brother snatches her wrist and tugging her into bed with him. Shrilling in surprise, she's relieved when he half-catches her, helping guide her descent until she's tucked safely against him.
(There's relief, too, in him forcing the choice on her. It feels less overwhelming when it's his choice to make.)
Though not as nice as her bed back in the apartment, the futon is still very comfortable, good and fat and plush in all the ways she likes. Guiltily, she thinks she likes it even more with her brother in it.
Her brother seems to like it, too, if the softened lines of his face are any indication. She can hardly remember him looking so –
Well, she's not really sure. Unguarded?
"God," he says, more to himself than anything, and drapes his arm over her. The heat of him is almost too much, too much in a way that's different from the way looking at him without clothes on was too much, but still similar enough that Suzume finds it hard to breathe all the same. With only the thin fabric of his shirt between them – even without being able to really see him – Suzume feels painfully aware of just how little he has on.
If he were really her brother – her brother by birth rather than by the blood of her father, wet all up to his elbows in the smoke-hazy imprint of her memory – Suzume thinks this wouldn't matter. She'd be used to him like this, with or without a shirt. If he were really her brother, she wouldn't feel the way she does about him. Oh, she'd find him annoying, she's sure. She'd even love him, fierce and desperate. Needy, even.
But she'd love him different, she thinks. Love him in a way that was safe. Love him in a way that didn't make it hard to breathe.
Love him in a way that didn't make the track of his eyes on her feel like fire, searing and wrong all under her skin.
Besides the inexplicable look in his eyes, though, her brother seems completely unfazed. "Fuck," he says with a yawn. "I forgot what an actual bed felt like."
So close to him now that she can't really see his body anymore, Suzume focuses on the way his expression relaxes. Without thinking, she lifts her hand, touching lightly at his cheek before settling on his chin.
Grinning at her, he reaches down and tugs the blankets up and over them, all the way up to their shoulders. "Aww, Suzu. Wanna kiss me goodnight?"
She thinks about that, and realizes it's true; she does want that. Leave it to him to know what she wants before she does. Swallowing, she nods, and presses the tip of her nose to his.
For once, he doesn't push her to do anything. He lets her lay there, facing him, nose pressed to his, watching her as she watches him. His smile lingers, but he's put his teeth away for the time being. Like knives tucked away in a drawer, they are out of sight, out of mind, and he is softer for it, if not exactly kind.
"Everything feels so different," she says, finally. She'd wanted this back at the apartment. She wants it now, too, just the same. Maybe more. Maybe more than ever. There are so many things she wants and wishes for. There are so many things that get inside of her and ache and ache and ache, and a lot of them feel like she imagines dying might feel like. Her brother is one of those things – one of the biggest, even. But sometimes, she thinks – somehow – the ache he puts inside of her feels good. So good.
Makes her happy, even if he makes her cry.
More importantly, she thinks, it makes him happy.
After everything – after all of it, well, she's never stopped wanting to make him happy. Even when she wants to make him angry – even when she wants to hurt his feelings sometimes, the way he's hurt hers…
Suzume wants so much to make him happy all the same.
"Everything feels so different, but it also feels exactly the same." It's easier to confess to this peculiar contradiction than to admit the intensity of her feelings for him or the way she struggles with them. Refusing to cry again, Suzume squeezes her eyes shut. "I don't understand anything. I think I really am dumb."
She feels her brother huff a laugh against her face, his breath settling over her skin like hot steam. It smells like her toothpaste, and imagining him using her toothbrush leaves her with the peculiar, restless urge to rub her legs together under the covers. "You are dumb," he agrees, "But kids are supposed to be dumb, Suzu. Nothing makes sense at your age, and everything sucks in the worst possible way."
She isn't expecting kindness from him, and somehow that's harder to accept than his overt cruelty. Try as she might, Suzume can't swallow the lump in her throat. "It's hard, though," she whispers.
"It sure fucking is." He's whispering now, too, as if to join her in acknowledgement of this terrible, secret truth. "But that's why you let me take care of it, Suzu. That's why you let me take care of you." She's so close that she can hear him swallow – hear the saliva in his mouth, the way it moves down his throat. Then there's the sensation of a pair of his fingers ghosting the line of her trembling mouth. "That's why you keep being a good girl for me."
For not the first, third, or even twentieth time, Suzume wonders what kind of life her brother has lived. She opens her eyes to find him looking at her still, expression as acute and unreadable as ever.
"I'm sorry about earlier," she says. She is. Suzume doesn't want to make things harder for him now, and she feels terribly about how much she'd wanted it earlier. Considering the person he is, she suspects things must be very hard for him already, even without her to add to it.
No, she wants to make things easier for him. She wants to be a good girl for him. "I thought about this – I thought about doing this with you all the time. All the time, every time – every time I went to bed, even." Her stomach knots with every word. She feels raw, as if peeling her own skin back. Even if he knows – even if he's always known – it's another thing entirely to tell him. "It's not – it's not gross. I'm just… not used to it. I don't know… it's like the more I want it, the stranger, and maybe – maybe harder it is to…"
Suzume flounders again, this time with the weighty honesty of it. It feels a lot like throwing up – like she's opened her mouth and it's all come spilling out of her. Sweat beads on her forehead, and she feels sticky and unclean.
"Accept it?" Her brother touches her face then, a graze of fire-hot fingertips cupping the curve of her jaw. "Mmm, we can't have that. No sense in denying yourself the things you want, Suzu. We'll have to get you used to it then, won't we?"
He's close enough to kiss her, she realizes – to really kiss her. She wants to ask him to, and she has the crazy notion that if she does, he will oblige her. Not a good night kiss – not like a big brother might kiss his little sister, even, but something more, something much more. Something much less good and much less kind than all of that.
And that knowledge pools hot and sick in her stomach, like rancid, stinking oil set aflame. Why does she want it so much if it feels so bad? It makes as much sense to her as anything else about him does – which is to say it makes no sense at all.
In the low-light dark, her brother smiles at her. Sometimes, she has the distinct and terrible impression that he can see directly into her mind with those cunning blue eyes of his, like he can peer in and read her thoughts as easily as someone might read a passage from a book. "Remember what I said before, okay? Focus on what feels good. It'll make things so much easier." With his grip on her jaw, he positions her head so he can press his mouth right at the corner of her downturned mouth. His lips are warm and wet, and they linger longer than she thinks they should. Under the blankets, her toes curl so hard they hurt.
"Is this – is this a good night kiss?" She asks him, breathlessly, hoping it is –
And hoping it isn't.
With his smiling mouth still pressed to her skin, he answers her. "It is if you need it to be."
AN: Gonna try and get back on schedule next week, like post a chapter mid-week and then drift back to the start of the week again, but we shall see. My BF said I should post this chapter on Monday and pretend like nothing had happened, lmao, but I try really hard to be strict with my own schedules so I don't just fall apart.
