014: your brother's house.

Autumn; 18 years.

Autumn comes, and brings with it cooler weather and many days of steady rain. Most of the trees abandon their verdant foliage in favor of pale golds and vibrant reds, and from the back porch of the tiny house in the foothills of Chichibu, the whole countryside looks like it's been put to joyous, dancing flame.

Suzume is absolutely riveted by it. He catches her often out in the yard, gone so still as if rooted to the spot, eyes wide and shining as they sweep across the landscape with a childish sense of undisguised awe.

He has always associated her with the spring, with melting snow and the nascent peek of color come out from all the greyscale drudgery. It makes sense, he thinks; she was born on the cusp of the season, after all. Like a fragile flower unfurling for the first time at the end of a long, bitter winter, he remembers her excitement then too, her small face upturned and eager for the warming light of the sun. She has never much cared for the cold. It's something that works endlessly in his favor for how keen she is to cling to him when even a slight chill sets in.

But for all the ways she is a child of spring, Dabi thinks autumn suits her just as well. After many sweltering summer days spent lazing beneath the struggling and near constant exertion of the living room's overworked air conditioner, Suzume is restless to explore again, and he finds himself inclined to indulge her. Together they spend many days drifting through the old forest, and he watches from behind her as she bounds ahead and romps through the fallen leaves. The red of them gets into her cheeks when she laughs or when he reaches out to pinch them, and the gold of the gentle autumn sun settles in her wild hair like an incandescent halo.

Between them and all around them, the air is crisp and cool, smelling of apples and fire lit in far away hearths. Suzume gulps it down like a girl cheerfully drowning, excited every time she catches a whiff of smoke or sweet fruit on the breeze. Even when they come home – even in the kitchen, where he hovers over her as she cooks meats and vegetables seasoned in strong, splendid spices picked always to his preferences – Dabi can scent the autumn on her still, rich and warm and bright in her hair.

"Isn't it so pretty?" She asks him one evening, collapsed in a rustling carpet of leaves. The twilight dyes the sky above them in rich hues of crimson and violet, like the sweep of some great, regal cape.

Dabi looks out at the sky first, and then at the trees. Here in the forest there are thousands and thousands of them, and many more still clustered together up the sloping hills and steeper mountain sides.

And then he looks down at Suzume, gazing up at him, an easy smile settled on her face. He's not pinched her cheeks in two days, but there's a warm flush in them all the same. Her hair fans out around her, leaves in it now, like gems set lovely in waves of orange-gold.

She seems small, as she always does. Small and decidedly fragile, always looking up at him from out of her eager, violet eyes.

A cold wind picks up then, and the leaves around them and in the trees whisper together in low, conspiratorial voices. Shivering, she doesn't wait for an answer, holding her hands out for him instead.

Her hands, he thinks, are so very small, too. Pale as cream, each little finger is so slender, so charming.

It's evident she wants a hand up and an escort home. Twilight grows darker by the minute now, and as the temperature dips with the quickening descent of the sun, it's no surprise to him that his little sister craves the warmth only her big brother can provide.

Autumn, Dabi thinks, grateful in his own, dreadful way. What a season.

If spring is burgeoning new beginnings and summer a life lived warm and prosperous, well, then autumn is the promise of death made fucking resplendent. It's only fitting that the season should be done up in the colors of blood and fire, radiant in the revelry of its final throes.

Looking down on her in metered silence, a slow grin curls across Dabi's face like a leaf blackened in a fire.

Suzume's own smile falters a little in response, her shoulders tensing and drawing nearer to her ears.

She is so small, he thinks. Sometimes, it's so hard. Sometimes, he looks down at her, and he can feel his heart beat beneath his ribs, and in his ears, and in other places he knows it shouldn't. The smell of autumn gets into her hair, clings to her like perfume on her skin, spiced and sweet. It's still never as sweet as she is – never as sweet as the way she smells. Suzume makes his mouth water. She makes his teeth ache, and ache, and ache.

In all the ways he can smell her, though, Dabi thinks it's a wonder that she cannot smell him the same way – that she cannot scent his blackening intentions, rotten and reeking, long since gone rancid. Oh, there are times he thinks she does, of course. Times like now, where he watches her tilt her head as she considers him, like a dog scenting blood on the wind – or prey scenting a predator. In the silence between them, her smile slips further, and her eyes widen, lips parted around breath that comes and goes just a little bit faster than it did only moments before.

"Nii-chan?" In the forest, all around them, the shadows spread and deepen. Her voice is high and light and just as small as the rest of her, lost and a bit frightened beneath the murmur of wind through the trees.

It's a plea, he thinks, the way she calls out to him. Where her smile withers, Dabi's smile grows all the more for it.

"It is," he says, finally, and the wind blows with the kind of cold that cuts straight-clean to the bone. Staring down at her with his hungry, winter-fire eyes, Dabi does not look away. "It's real fucking pretty."


In November, the persimmon tree in the front yard comes into season. Dabi watches from the window as Suzume goes out in her pajamas with a ladder they'd discovered in a shed at the back of the property. Climbing up into the thinning branches, she fills a basket with handful after handful of the plump, juicy berries.

They are, he thinks, idly, nearly the color of her hair.

He doesn't like just watching, even from only meters away, but Dabi is always very careful. The neighbors are all ancient, as is everyone in Chichibu, it seems, and they seldom leave their house. Dabi notices they look down the hill even more rarely. Even so, it's not something he's willing to risk. Leaving and returning to the house is only ever something he does by way of the back door; the front yard is wholly off limits.

Settled into his life with Suzume as he is, Dabi is comfortable, but never complacent, and for all her need of him, Suzume understands. A little sad when he tells her he'll watch, maybe, but by the time she returns to him with her basket heavy with persimmons, she is smiling again, presenting her bounty to him for inspection.

Peering into the proudly proffered basket, Dabi nods his approval. "Looks good," he tells her. And, because she glows so much even from such mediocre praise – and because he likes that she does – Dabi rewards her further. "Real good."

Outside the house, night has fallen, but here in the house, her face is the second coming of the sun, beaming up at him, dazzling and warm. Lately, Dabi is the horizon on which that sun rises and sets. He is the wind that steals the clouds away from it – just as he can be those same clouds that hide it away.

This is, of course, exactly what he wants.

"Wanna share some with me?" She asks, shyly. There's pink in her cheeks, and her eyes slide from his face to his hands as he takes the basket from her. He doesn't miss the way her fingers brush his in the exchange, nor the way they linger, cool against his skin.

This is why it's so easy, he thinks. She'll get a bit of that fear in her, a little bit of that knowing in her, and he'll catch her shrinking back away from him, teeth set soft in her lower lip in the way that he loves a little too much.

But Suzume is a good girl at her core. A sweet girl. With a few choice words, she always comes back, pliant and soft, so needy for whatever kindness he can spare, however rare and ingenuine it often is.

"Sure," he says, and that works just as well as praise does. Even with all the time they spend together – hours and hours after school, and on the weekends, and sometimes even when he needles her into staying home with him on rainy, dreary days – Suzume acts like every moment with him is the greatest gift anyone has ever given her.

Even when she's upset with him. Even when she's frightened.

It's strange to imagine there was once a time when he'd fought with tooth and claw and ravaged his own dying body for anyone's attention. Dabi thinks if he were someone more normal – someone even a little less bitter or a lot less jealous – that he might forget that feeling entirely in the wake of the way she has made him the revered center of her tiny world. There is always the undercurrent of it, though. The ghost of that awful, scathing memory went septic long ago, delirious and hot like a feverish infection gone sick in his blood.

But even without that, well, Dabi doesn't think he was ever as good and sweet as Suzume is. Inclined to please, maybe, but for entirely different reasons. Regardless, the embers of that particular desire have long gone cold in him; any enthusiasm for pleasing others remains almost entirely out of self-interest.

But god, he thinks — not for her. Suzume isn't like him. It burns so delightfully hot in her, that desperation to be of use. Dabi follows Suzume into the kitchen where she takes out a pair of plates, a cutting board, and a well-loved chef's knife he suspects her grandmother has owned for decades. Time to play house, he thinks, and it's all he can do not to grin.

She looks at him expectantly, and her eyes are full of such hopeful adoration, ever hungry to provide. "You want me to cut one up for you?"

Dabi thinks about it, but only briefly. He feels greedy. Suzume makes him a glutton, and for all the ways he is careful with everything else in his life, it's so hard to not indulge in his only real vice. "Mmm. Nah." He sets the basket on the counter beside the plates and takes a couple of persimmons for himself, his movement and tone completely nonchalant despite the very calculated reasoning behind them. "I'll eat mine with my hands."

On occasion, Suzume can read him. This is not one of those times. She falls for it, hook, line, and sinker, and there it is: that precious pout she always gets when he rebuffs her offers of help for anything, just like he'd wanted. Her eyelashes flutter, and her lower lip pushes out, and she worries it with her teeth as she often does. It's like he's wounded her. She always looks so sad for the denial.

In all the ways she pushes herself in pursuit of his favor, it's obvious that she loves him. Somehow, though, her ardent devotion is made all the more apparent by how unhappy she becomes when she's not given the chance to do so – as if being denied any opportunity to please her big brother – however insignificant – breaks her tender, little heart into even littler pieces.

And god – god. He fucking loves that.

"Oh," she says, faintly, trying so very hard to be composed and failing miserably at it. "You sure?"

Dabi doesn't answer immediately, taking his time washing his persimmons under the cold tap water from the sink. He could be nice, he thinks. He could relent. Instead, when he's done with the cursory scrub, he lifts one of the plates from its small stack of two on the counter and sets it back up on the shelf. It may as well be the twist of a knife in her gut for the way the downcast look on her face wrenches more mournful by the second.

Good girl, he thinks, gratified. His good, sweet girl. He wants to take her face in his hands and laugh until she cries. Knowing exactly why she makes that face, he wants to fold it up and tuck it away, keep it forever so he can look at it whenever he wants.

Sometimes, Dabi likes making her happy. But fuck, he thinks; god. Does he really love making her sad.

Distracted as she is by her moping, Suzume doesn't argue or fuss when he goes to take the knife from her hand – nor does she when he slides the spine of it under her chin and uses it to tilt her head back, forcing her to look up at him. She tenses, yes – but she holds his gaze obediently.

"Wash another couple for me," he tells her, smoothly. Suzume blinks up at him, eyelashes dusting her cheeks, and it's like she's blinking away that dull, aching disappointment. Once, twice, and then her lips peak honeyed at the corners. That spark of yearning is in her face all over again.

Too easy, he thinks, pleased as much with himself as he is with her. The pep in her step freshly renewed, Suzume washes a second pair of persimmons in the sink with all the zealotry of an acolyte handling some divine artifact, leaving Dabi to his work with the knife.

"I coulda cut that up myself, you know," she says, going the extra step to scrub them clean with baking soda fished down from the shelf over the sink. He thinks she means it to sound like an admonishment, but she's too satisfied with the little job he's given her to put any bite into it.

Suzume is, Dabi thinks, astoundingly good in the kitchen for a ten year old. Back at home, his mother had done all of the cooking for the family, and when she'd gone away to the hospital, a housekeeper had taken her place. There'd never been a reason for Dabi to meddle with cooking; that was women's work, his father had said disdainfully when Dabi was still young enough to be vaguely curious about the things his mother did in the kitchen. When his father had stopped caring about such trifling things as keeping his son out of the kitchen in favor of relentless quirk practice – when his father had stopped caring about him all together – any middling fascination Dabi had once had for something as mundane as cooking had long since dried up. In lieu of family dinners, he'd learned enough simple dishes to not starve, and well, that had been that.

None of that has especially changed. The notion that cooking is women's work lingers in him still, but even so, Dabi makes a point of stealing the knife work from Suzume when given the opportunity. It isn't that he thinks she's incapable. Rather, she's inarguably a deft hand, even with the bigger and more unwieldy knives. Her mother had evidently taught her very well.

"Knives're dangerous." Slicing the blade adeptly through the fruit, he keeps his tone light. "You should let your big brother handle all the scary things for you."

Suzume huffs a little half-sigh through her nose, but doesn't argue. For all her talent, Dabi's recent practice has made him both quicker and more precise than she is, something she's no doubt noticed. As with everything he does, Suzume is captivated by his skill with it. She has watched him handle hundreds of things by now, from meat to fruit to vegetable – nevermind what he'd done with her father.

She doesn't doubt his skill.

That is, of course, not why he insists on stealing the job from her. Arranging the neatly sliced fruit on the single plate, Dabi trades it to her for the freshly washed persimmons. Cheery again, Suzume twinkles up at him, most of her earlier melancholy forgotten.

No, no. He doesn't think she'd hurt herself with a knife. She knows how to handle it. She knows exactly how to hold whatever she's cutting too, little fingers curled just so to protect herself from the rapid downswing of the blade.

Favoring her with a smile, Dabi thinks he likes her best like this, though – eager to please, of course, and just as dependent. Fostering competency in her doesn't serve him near as well as reliance does, after all.


Later, in the common room, Dabi watches Suzume play a new game he'd picked up for her a few days ago while she was at school. The name and details of it escape him now, but judging by the gameplay, it's clearly some kind of action game. She's been struggling with it since he'd given it to her.

This new game – on a new system, too, a proper console that hooks up to the television – had been something she'd been buzzing about for weeks. Rare as it is for her to get that excited about anything that isn't him, Dabi had found himself feeling more than a little jealous. It was something he'd made himself set aside, though. Gaming, as a mostly solitary endeavor she's far too shy to talk about with her school mates, is an ideal hobby. It keeps her home and with him, where Dabi feels she belongs.

Besides that, though, the spirit of the gift brought her immense joy. Suzume had clung onto him for hours, petting his arms and his hands and even his cheek, once, thanking him so many times there'd been no hope of keeping count. Praise doesn't do for Dabi what it does for her, but there's no denying it does something

Particularly when it's so worshipful.

Unfortunately, put into practice, the game seems to have become an intense point of frustration. Suzume has never taken personal failures well, nevermind when he's there to witness them. Watching her die for probably the fifth time in as many minutes to the same enemy, Dabi works his teeth through his second persimmon and hides his grin behind the juicy, dripping fruit.

"Wow," he says, deadpan, chewing as he talks, "You fucking suck at this."

From where she sits cross-legged on the floor beside him, Suzume falls backwards dramatically, arm thrown over her eyes, lips pulled back from her teeth in a grimace better suited for a dying man on the battlefield than a flustered girl in her living room. The controller lays forgotten in her lap. "That's 'cause it's impossible. Almost impossible, anyway… Everyone would suck at this!" She shifts her arm enough to fix him with a heated glare. "That's the whole point of these games!"

"What, to turn you into a whiny little – "

"No!" She interjects him sharply, wagging her finger at him. "No, to be hard! That's why people like these games – because when you finally manage to do well, it's supposed to give you a great big good feeling about how far you've come and grown and learned!"

"Looks to me like you're regressing, not getting better." Dabi snorts and pops the rest of his persimmon into his mouth. "And anyway, it doesn't look hard at all. Pretty sure you're just goddamn terrible." The pronouncement is confident. Dabi has always been excellent at picking up on things the first go round, even by observation alone; it was one of the few things his old man had always praised him for. Having seen Suzume fail spectacularly several times over has him feeling more than just optimistic about his success. He has the monster's moveset already memorized.

"Nope!" Suzume is just as confident and more than a little incensed, no doubt flustered equally by her repeated defeats and his ego, both. "You're wrong! And bleh, don't talk with your mouth full like that!" Groaning, Suzume presses her hands over her ears and shakes her head. "It sounds so gross and… and wet!"

Leering down at her, Dabi makes a point of chewing very loudly with his mouth open before swallowing everything but a single seed down. He savors how cute she is when she scowls at him – at how little she suspects him, even so – and he especially savors the way she shrieks in outrage when he spits the seed, wet and sticky, straight at her face.

There's no time for her to react. It hits her cheek with a satisfyingly gooey plop.

"Gross!" She's howling mad, frantically wiping her cheek as if struck by a particularly heinous bug. "God, you're disgusting, you're so gross – you're the absolute worst person alive – "

Dabi laughs and steals the controller from her lap as she continues to scrub at her face with the sleeve of her shirt. "Whoops. Looks like the worst person alive is about to show you just how hard you blow at this dumb game for dumber babies."

She regains her composure quicker than expected, but when she sits up and lunges for the controller, Dabi is even faster, fending her off with a sharp jab to her ribs, his laughter turning cruel. Reeling back, she hisses in anguish, only to surprise him by redoubling her efforts. Slapping his shoulder first, she swipes wildly for the controller in the brief moment left open by his disbelief. "No! I wanna do it! I wanna – "

Siblings, Dabi thinks. Siblings and growing pains. In spite of all the ways he knows he unnerves her, Suzume is a lot more comfortable with him now than she was a year ago, and even more so than she'd been with him in the park. She's getting older, and – made brazen by her frustration – it's understandable she'd try exploring her boundaries, reaching out and occasionally pushing back where her ever-present older brother so often pushes in.

He'd fought like this with his siblings, too. Rough and tumble, screaming sometimes, even. There were bloodied noses and bruises and even a few burns.

As a late bloomer, Dabi had been small, then. Without the threat of fire, he'd had to rely on being more vicious than his brother, every win a fucking struggle. Even so, Natsuo won more fights than he could stand. Dabi had always hated losing. Natsuo had never seemed to mind his own losses near as much and was almost always a good sport. Somehow, that had stung even more.

But Dabi is not small. He hasn't been for a long time.

With a sharp swat of his hand, he takes hold of her by her face with a wide grip and immediately pushes her back down into the floor. Less than half his weight, she's so much smaller than him, and goes down easily. A gasp is the only sound she manages as her shoulders connect suddenly with the soft tatami mats.

With his iron-like grip still on her cheek, Dabi looms over and on top of her, his knees on either side of her squirming body. "Say," he says, drawing the word out long and slow like the warning he means it to be. "What's this, then? We're playing something else, are we?"

She's angry still, brows drawn and nose crinkled, but beneath the grasp of his hand, Suzume's eyes are wide with something besides anger. Regardless of that mounting fear, though, she reaches up as if to push him off her, but his arms are longer than hers and her fingers only brush at his shoulders, futile in their attempt to dislodge him.

"Cut it out!" The words are smothered some under the press of his palm, but Dabi understands them all the same. Giving up on his shoulders, she pushes roughly at the arm holding her down instead. Even at full strength, she can't manage any leverage, and her chest heaves with the exertion. "You're such a – you're such a slob, your hands are so sticky and gross!"

It's rare for Suzume to be so indignant. Oh, he makes her angry often, he knows, for how much he loves tormenting her, but she tends to sit on that frustration rather than act on it. Kept well-behaved by a combination of love and self-preservation – the most potent combination, he's come to realize – it takes a certain level of agitation for her to react so volatilely.

Dabi finds he likes these moods of hers, and he hates them, too. It's a strange, contradictory combination, but then most of the things he feels for her are strange and contradictory. She's so adorable when she's lost to her fury, bristling and spitting and delightfully offended, and — despite being wholly unthreatening — Dabi finds his own aggressive instincts rising to meet her. Primal and raw, he's always found he really relishes giving into that feeling, that gleeful and almost manic surrender to some kind of innate savagery demanding he be better and stronger than whatever happens to be challenging him.

But Dabi likes her best when she's sweet and mindful. He likes her desperate for his help and aching to please. Cute as she is when she's furious, he finds her all the more precious when she regards him with her usual blend of reverent adoration and vague trepidition.

Grinning down at her, Dabi decides to look on the bright side. There are opportunities everywhere, when you look for them. This will make a good teaching moment.

"Gross, huh?" She's right; his hands are sticky, covered as they are in the congealed juices of the persimmon. Making a show of rubbing his viscid hand into the meat of her cheek, he peels it back with deliberate slowness. The sensation of their skin clinging together before their eventual release doesn't strike Dabi as unpleasant, but it's obvious that Suzume can't stand it by the way her face blanches. With her lips pulled back from her teeth again, he can see the way her little pink tongue churns behind and between her teeth in revulsion.

And suddenly, Dabi is struck by an awful idea.

It's not a new idea, of course. It's one that's been lingering like the on-and-off again stench of months-deep decay in the back of his mind for some time now – the sort of odor of something long since died in the walls. With cold weather, one might not even notice it. But when the temperature rises, well, there it is: fetid and stinking and impossible to ignore.

And how can he help himself when she drives him so? This disobedient behavior of hers is like a match struck in a room doused with gasoline and steeped in flammable gas. Of course he'd get hot. What does she expect? She knows her big brother too well for that.

No, Dabi thinks, she must like this. Buried in some deep place inside of her, she must like this. Some part of her craves the awful give and take, and take, and take. She gives him a little, and he takes a lot. That's how it's always been.

That is her nature, he thinks; and this is his.

Pressing both his hands to her cheeks now, he drags them leisurely down the slope of her jaw. She's put on weight, again – no longer an animated corpse of a girl, her cheeks have filled out, and the meat of them is soft and plush beneath the greedy, hot press of his fingers. He cannot imagine having skin so smooth. Even now, he loves the feel of it.

Suzume gapes up at him, her anger tempered by her shock, and shakes her head, as if to dislodge him. Dabi obliges her, but not in the way she wants. Tugging his fingers down the slender column of her throat, they adhere to her skin as if bound by weak glue, sticky all the way down.

"What are you – " It takes her a moment to find the words, and he savors the way she fumbles over them. "What are you doing?"

Lifting one hand, Dabi clamps it down over her mouth, staring down at her. "Think I'm real gross, do you?" He raises his tacky fingers one by one, drumming them across her cheek, as if thinking. "If only there was something you could do about it."

Suzume shakes her head again. This time, Dabi suspects it's a reflection of her bewilderment rather than a legitimate attempt to get him to let go. Chest heaving and brows trembling, Suzume may not know where he's taking this – but it's unmistakable that she suspects enough to be apprehensive.

Dabi thinks she's a good girl for knowing him so well.

"You know, I actually think there is something you could do for me," Dabi begins, his drawling and contemplative tone belying the way he stares down at her with incendiary intensity. "And you wanna help your big brother out, don't you?"

When her eyes narrow warily, Dabi can't help but laugh. "Oh, don't go busting my balls, Suzu. It's not like it's anything big, yeah? Nothing you can't handle, I'm sure, if you try hard enough. Not with enough practice."

Peeling his hand away from her mouth, he pinches her cheek. Her skin is sticky now too, even though she'd tried so hard to stay clean while eating her neat little slices of persimmon, chopsticks and all.

With her mouth free now, Suzume anxiously wets her lips, and Dabi can't help the way his eyes are drawn back to her mouth, nor the way his own lips quirk upwards into a terrible smile. If she were any less naive, he'd be convinced she was provoking him on purpose. "See," he whispers, eyes sliding back up to hers. "That's the idea."

The glare she levels at him is undone too much by her uneasiness to carry any real weight. "What idea?" She sounds breathy and unsure, though he can tell she's trying hard not to be. "Quit being weird – I don't know what you're talking about."

"Probably why you're not doing so hot at your game, Suzu," he says, and clicks his tongue in a little tut-tut of faux-pity. "Or much else, for that matter. You're always so slow on the fucking uptake."

That has her moderately surly again. "That's not my fault when you're such a stupid jerk who always talks around whatever you're trying to say! You're trying to confuse me on purpose, and that – that isn't – "

"Not fair?" Dabi laughs. "When's life ever fair to any of us? What makes you think you deserve it?"

"Why don't you wanna be fair to me?" Suzume is fighting tears now – he can tell by the way her breath huffs out of her, unsteady and frantic, and god – he aches for it. "I always try to be fair to you."

Yes, he wants it. He wants it very badly. But not yet. Not just yet –

"Oh, Suzu – don't give me that shit, not when you know better. You know me better than that, don't you? You know me better than anyone." Taking her face in both of his hands again, he lowers his head until their noses are touching. His thumbs glide over her cheeks, rubbing soft circles into her flushed skin. "C'mon, now. Ask me what I want." It's a whisper, now. Gentle. Encouraging. "I promise it's what you want, too."

For a long time, they only stare at each other – or Suzume tries to, at least. She holds his gaze for a handful of seconds at a time before she blinks, before her eyes dart rapidly away. Prey behavior, Dabi thinks. Looking directly at someone is an act of aggression, of dominance. As much as she likes to pretend, Suzume cannot handle either of those things in any serious capacity.

So it isn't an act of aggression or dominance when she looks back up at him and, swallowing, asks, "Fine. What do you want?"

No, Dabi thinks. It's an act of cowed submission. It's her need to please, couched in a petulant irreverence that fails to hit the way he knows she wants it to. She's always been so easy to read.

Dabi rewards her with a smile that does more to disquiet her than offer her any kind of relief. There is none of that false mildness in him, now. "Clean me up."

Confused by this demand, Suzume frowns up at him. "What?"

"You heard me."

"I'm not a – " Struggling, again. A little indignant, again. "I'm not a sink."

"You got a mouth, don't you?" As if to illustrate his point, Dabi parts his own lips and lets his tongue slide over his teeth. Suzume's eyes are drawn to his mouth as his own were to hers only moments ago, but she regards the gesture with much more horror than he had. "Let's see you put it to good use for a change."

"I'm not a dog, either!"

Dabi huffs a laugh, low and nasty. "Coulda fooled me with all the yap-yap-yaping you like to do, puppy-girl." His fingers slide against her lips, pressing forcefully in until he can feel the tight clench of her teeth held firmly together in panicked defiance. "C'mon, then. Wasn't it you who said I was gross? Let's see about you fixing it, then."

Suzume's breathing is so fast now. "Please," she whispers against his fingers, and he fights the urge to push them deeper into her mouth.

There's no point in forcing her, physically. He wants her to make the choice for herself –

Even if he has to bully her into it.

"No." Pulling his hand back from her mouth, Dabi slaps her cheek with his damp fingers lightly. She flinches at that, too, though more from the noise than anything. It's a soft rebuke, one with no real sting — only hard enough to make that satisfying sound of skin on skin. "This is what you wanted, isn't it?"

"It's not – "

He swats her again before taking hold of her chin in his fingers, pressing his wet, sweet-sticky lips to her cheek. "You know me, Suzu. You know what happens when you push me. We've been through this all before, haven't we?"

"But – "

"No, no-fucking-buts. I need you to think about this. Put that empty head of yours to work, 'cause I need you to really, really think about this, okay? 'Cause you keep doing this lately, don't you – you goad me, and you wheedle at me like a spoiled little brat, and it always ends up like this, doesn't it?" Pulling back again so he can stare down at her, he can't help but appreciate the tears burning in her eyes. "So, if you keep doing this, well – what else do you expect your big brother to think besides how much you must really, really want this?"

Sitting up suddenly, Dabi puts distance between them. Situated as he is against her hips – and as paralyzed as she is by her own roiling emotions – he's confident by now that she's not going to try to escape. Producing one gummy hand, he holds it in front of her mouth, expectantly.

"And you know your big brother," he continues, staring still, grinning still. "He just really loves fucking spoiling his baby sister with whatever her little heart craves."

The flush in her cheeks is the reddest he's ever seen. Even considering his own body temperature, he thinks he can feel it from centimeters away, hot and intoxicating. Her little mouth opens and closes like a fish forced onto dry land, gaping and frightened, as if she's trying to say something.

No words come out. He isn't surprised.

"Aww. Don't tell me you're gonna shun my gift, Suzu." He shakes his head at her, tutting again. "I get being speechless at my generosity, but if you linger too much before accepting – well, that's just goddamn rude, isn't it? Unless…"

Dabi's smile twists, and she's shrinking in on herself before he even finishes the thought. "Unless you're pushing me because you want something… better?"

"No!" It's an exclamation, if a hushed and trembling one. "No, no – this is – this is fine! This is fine! I'm fine with – happy with – "

A shudder works its way through her, and the noise Suzume makes is half a moan, half a sob. It makes Dabi's breath catch in his throat, and there it is, now – heart a burning, quickening beat, his blood rushing in his ears –

And throbbing, too, in his now very hard cock.

"I'll do it," she relents quietly, desperately, and a single tear rolls down her cheek, shaken free by the way she nods in panicked agreeability. Dabi takes his time wiping it away with a pair of fingers before holding them lightly against her mouth.

"Good girl. Now get to it."

There's a small pause as she gathers herself, trying to steady her breathing – one he's charitable enough to allow only because he loves her as much as he does, because he's never loved anyone like he's loved her – and then she finally, finally parts her lips.

The sensation of her tongue as it slides tentatively up the length of his fingers feels so much better than Dabi thinks it should. It isn't really that it does much for him physically, of course. Oh, it feels nice enough, but it isn't that –

No, it's the way she struggles her way through it, the way her breath huffs against his hand, the way she trembles beneath him.

For him, he thinks. For him.

"Good start," he tells her, gleefully. "But piss poor in the execution. Put some enthusiasm into it, puppy-girl; you'll be here for fucking hours at this rate."

She closes her eyes and makes some strangled noise of what he assumes to be understanding. After yet another brief pause, she returns to her job again with an increased sense of vigor, flattening her little wet tongue against the surface of his fingers as she drags it up and down, up and down, falteringly rhythmic.

Dabi finds himself transfixed by the visual.

When Suzume leaves for school, Dabi often finds himself with little to do. Besides taking the occasional day job at Giran's request, he fills his time as he once did back when he'd been forced to slum around in internet cafes. And when not following stories about his old man's career with vitriolic, seething interest or scrutinizing hero news in general, Dabi spends a lot of his down time with porn.

It's a much more enjoyable experience here in her grandmother's house – his house, he reminds himself. There's no need to be quiet in this quaint little country house, and he's free to stream it from his phone to the television if he wants, which he does, often. There's something about hearing all that noise as it fills the room – the crying, the whimpering, the plap-plap-plap of skin on skin, wet and raw and filthy.

Dabi has terrible, awful taste in porn. He likes it rough and sometimes violent – wants it to be degrading. Gagging, in all its squelchy, red-and-watery-eyed glory, gets his cock aching so sweetly. Tears are a necessity if he wants to get off in any reasonable amount of time.

Suzume isn't really at all like the girls in the videos he watches. They're older, of course, with heaving, bruised tits he wants to touch and hips that beg as loudly as their mouths do for breeding. Even the ones who play innocent the way he likes clearly aren't. Their hesitation rings a little too close to coyness. If he's too lazy to dig deep enough on the darker parts of the internet, that's usually all it is: an act. And that isn't always bad – it's not, he likes that, too, but –

But god. Suzume is legitimately undone as she forces herself to work her tongue over his palm, lapping at it slow and compliantly. And if he imagines her, maybe, a little different, a little older -

He shudders despite himself as he feels it slide over one of his staples.

"Open your eyes," he tells her, suddenly, because he needs it. That's one of his favorite things – the staring down at a girl while she looks up, eyes open with fear or reverence or both. "No cheating."

She can't possibly know what she's cheating at, but she does as she asks, anyway. And that – fuck. The way she looks up at him as she tongues his hand – the gleam of the tears in her eyes, the fucking obedience –

This is wrong, he knows. It's wrong in every conceivable way. The wrongness should turn his stomach; it should make him sick. He should hate himself for what he wants and what he is and what he's making her do.

But Dabi has long suspected he isn't built the way he's supposed to be, and the wrongness makes it all the better, all the fucking sweeter. It's like her tears – the notion that what he is doing is terrible only makes him want it more.

Makes him want this little taste more despite himself.

And really, is it not his right? Is he not owed at least this? If she didn't want this of him, then she wouldn't love him so much. Even if he frightens her – even if he pushes her, oh, she still wants so very badly to be near him, to be with him – to make him happy. It's her nature to need this from him as much as it is his nature to need this from her.

Suzume, he thinks feverishly, staring down at her as she presses a frightened, entreating kiss to his wet palm – Suzume was made for him, he's fucking sure of it. That she was born only sixty-five days after Shoto proves that in a way that seems undeniable. Had he not been inconsolable in his envy, in his rage, in his seething hatred then? Lost to his own fear, knowing his replacement was at hand, the whole world had seemed as if it had turned against him.

He remembers standing in the courtyard of his childhood home, staring up at the sky. Spring was coming – new beginnings. For all the fire in him, Dabi felt like winter incarnate, nothing but death and the ashes left after. There would be no spring for him, he thought. Never again. He'd wanted to kill Shoto. He'd wanted to take his place back, even if there was no place left to go back to.

The stars had been out that night, he remembers. The air was cold, and his breath steamed in it, and he remembers hating all of it – the sky, the stars, the cold. Give me something, he'd screamed up at those stars, always bright, always twinkling. Give me anything –

And for all he could tell at that age, the stars had never given him a damn fucking thing. They took his wishes, and he remembers hating whatever bastard had claimed that stars were made for wish-giving, because all they did was take, and take, and take –

And taking is his nature, now. Maybe it always had been.

"Nii-chan…"

His focus comes back to Suzume, looking up at him. He presses his fingers to her mouth, and she opens it, because of course she does.

Of course she does.

Dabi's breathing is as erratic as hers is, now, if not more so. He stares down at her, at her small face, at its perfect features – the tip-tilt of her tiny nose, her little, furrowed brows – and god, the way her lips look parted around his fingers again like they'd been in the bathroom over the summer, and oh, fuck, that's perfect, too. He'd spent almost two weeks after that night watching video after video of nothing but girls sucking cock, and not a single goddamn one of them had gagged as sweetly as Suzume had.

She's too young, he thinks, wildly. Too young, but not forever. Not forever. She'll get older. And why shouldn't he indulge a little bit now? Just this? Just this one taste, just a little, just a little bit before it's time. He's curious now, and after all, she is his – he thinks; his, his, his. She was his from the moment she was born. Sixty-five days was enough for fate or for God or for whoever sick-fuck was in charge of calling the shots to feel something close enough to contrition to give him this. She's the atonement he's been owed for all the things he was made to give up – for all the things that were taken from him.

Sweet. Adoring. Reverential.

Perfect.

"Suck them for me," he says, his voice like a wildfire.

Consumed as she's meant to be by it, she does. Meekly, maybe, but she does. When her cheeks hollow around them, fuck, his cock throbs. It's almost too much. It's almost not fair.

Saliva collects in the corners of her lips as she suckles on his fingers, struggling to keep her eyes on his, to keep them open, and god – she's not the only thing drooling. The fabric of his trunks are slick now with pre, and it takes everything he has not to lower his body and grind against her thigh for some fucking relief.

Not that, though, he steadies himself. Not yet. Not now.

Inside her mouth, he parts his fingers, stretching them wide to fill out her cheeks. Her tongue moves awkwardly between them, struggling to continue with her directive to suck.

"It's okay," he says, softly. Dangerously. Her eyes widen even further, impossible as it is. "Let me help you."

Taking hold of her tear and saliva slicked cheek with his free hand, Dabi closes the fingers inside of her mouth together before he pushes them down towards the back of her throat.

And there, that's what he wants, what he fucking needs, and – fuck –

She gags violently at the intrusion, face twisting as her body arches up under him, shoulders pinned back against the mats as her hips lift from the floor. The line of it – there's that almost perfect, profane curve of her, and god, the sound of it, the way the movement gets into her throat as she convulses around the intrusion –

Tears pour down her splotchy cheeks, and he draws his fingers back to let her breathe.

"Is this what you want?" He asks her — demands her. The need and want of this awful thing aches, and aches, and the feeling of it is all encompassing now, fully inside of every part of him now, vicious and feral and starving for her. "Is this why you push me?"

"I'm sorry," she's weeping, her words a slurred, wet mess around his fingers. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry – "

He wants to do it again. He wants to gag her, again and again, irrationally but utterly convinced he could get off to the sound of it alone if he did. He wants to close his eyes and listen, imagine she's older, imagine she's ready, imagine she's ripe to be ruined. But when her hands reach up and take hold of his hand – when she pulls it far enough free of her mouth so that she can lick it and kiss it and nuzzle her wet, filthy cheek against it in some half-hysterical show of supplication, well –

No, he thinks, not yet - and Dabi lets it go.

"I'm sorry," she cries against his saliva-slick skin, rubbing her face against the mess when she'd tried so hard to stay clean. "Please, I'm sorry – please, I love you – "

All those stars in the sky, he thinks. Bright, and so far away, so cold and distant, sat up there in the vast dark, always unreachable. His father, heroes, this whole fucking society – all of them painted up brilliant and beautiful in the sea of all that putrid, Stygian abyss. He knew them for what they were: distractions. Diversions. He thought they'd never given him anything. Never a single goddamn thing

But looking down at Suzume, he knows he was wrong. They had given him something. Something very small, something very precious. Something wholly meant for him, perfect in every way.

"Oh, Suzu," he says, laughing, triumphant and aching and so fucking starved for her. "I love you, too."


Autumn; 10 years.

In their now shared bedroom, while her brother goes for his second and inexplicable shower of the night, Suzume throws wide the sliding shoji doors that open up into the yard. The cold air pours in, fresh and grounding, stinging a bit against her salty cheeks as it floods the small room.

She's quick about getting out of her clothes. Her brother had given her the shirt he was wearing before padding off to the bathroom, cool and unfazed by everything as he always seems to be. It's one of their many rituals, now – ever since that first night together, her brother gives her his shirt before they go to bed. She never has to ask. The heat and scent of it are comforting; Suzume has always loved putting it on right after he gives it to her, as if she could steal some of his heat for herself.

Now, she stares at it, held tight between her white-knuckled hands, thinking. Debating.

The desire for it is still there, she finds. She still wants to pull it over her head, to feel the way it settles about her, the way it suffuses her whole being with the smell and the feel of him. She wants it, and that feels so terribly unfair somehow, that she should still crave this, even now.

And as if the want of it weren't offensive enough – degrading enough – Suzume finds she needs it even more than she usually would. There's no winning, even when he isn't here.

The battle is over before it even begins. Almost angrily, she tugs it on, and there's that smell of him, and the heat of him, somehow still so warm despite the chill night air as it permeates the room.

Gathering up the comforter like a heavy, long cowl, she drapes it over herself and goes to sit on the little porch just beyond the sliding doors, staring out into the yard but not really seeing anything. Part of her wishes she had the strength to settle in for bed without her brother. Wishes he would come back to the room and find she'd stolen off to sleep on her own, that he'd know then-and-there that she didn't need him.

Not to fall asleep with. Not for anything.

Suzume's breath fogs in the air, and she covers her mouth with the blanket. She can still feel his fingers pressing between her lips. She can still taste them, sweet and cinnamony from the persimmons he'd eaten – and she can taste him, too.

She doesn't have the words to describe what that tastes like. She feels maybe like she shouldn't have to – that there's no reason to ever have the words to describe the way her brother's skin tastes pressed against her tongue as she's made to suckle his fingers.

But isn't this the way of older siblings, she thinks? They can be kind, of course, but they can also be terrible bullies. Titty twisters, and snake bite burns to the wrist, pushing, shoving, and all the terrible fights. She's had classmates come to school covered in bruises they proudly proclaim as left-overs from a fight with a sibling, jeering cheerfully on with, "Well, you should see what he looks like!"

Suzume has some bruises of her own. Her brother, though, is careful where he puts them. High on her thighs, secreted away on her hips, peppered across her shoulders. Nowhere anyone would ask about. Nowhere anyone would see.

Suzume isn't meant to have an older brother, so she can't go to school and brag about what he's done to her. But unlike her classmates, there's never a what-she-did-to-him moment to boast about, punctuated by loud, victorious laughter. Is it even a story deserving to be told if she never has the upper-hand, ever?

It must be why her brother is so secret with where he leaves his marks, anyway. Everything about her brother is a secret.

"Just between us," he always says, finger over his lips. He says it for everything. When he gives her gifts, when he touches her, when he torments her.

Just between us. Just the two of us.

Always, only, just the two of them, together.

Under the weight of the blanket, Suzume rubs warmth back into her shoulders. Without her brother, she can never quite seem to get warm.

As if summoned by that thought, she hears the door to her room slide open. Light from the hall casts his shadow tall and wide across the room before she hears the switch, and then:

Darkness, again.

"You're gonna catch your death like that without me," he says as he crosses the space between them with his long, swift strides. She doesn't know why he says it; it feels excessive when she can't do anything without him, something she's sure they both know.

He comes to stand beside her, looking down at her, naked as he always is for bed save a pair of thin trunks. In the pale light cast by the full moon hung high in the sky, she can see his expression as he regards her.

Expectant.

"Your brain rot out your ears? Don't just sit there, dummy," he scolds her. "Lemme in."

Shuffling free from under the comforter, she holds it out to him, watching as he swaddles himself up in it before he sits down beside her. She knows what he wants even before he holds out his arms.

And, climbing into his lap, she's ashamed by how much she wants it, too.

She goes to sit against him at first, back to his chest, head tucked under his chin. It's not enough for him, though. He's extra touchy, as he often is after he's been particularly mean. He takes hold of her, and she lets him — lets him rearrange her body to his liking, head tucked against his shoulder, legs thrown over the side of his own so he can tuck her into the blanket and cradle her against himself.

So he can look down at her.

The silver shine of the moon reflects bright in all of his staples, and his bare skin where it presses against hers feels hot and vaguely damp. His eyes in this light strike her as more eerie than normal, the gleaming turquoise of them needling as he stares at her.

Suzume looks away – out at the sky, out at the trees. At anywhere, at anything else. Even with something as small as this —

There's just no hope of winning. Her brother is like a monster in her games, she thinks. It doesn't matter how well she learns his attack patterns. It doesn't matter how intimately she knows his triggers. She simply lacks the capacity to do anything with that information. He's just too much for her.

She feels her brother press a kiss to her forehead. It's soft and lingering, his breath stirring in her hair. Before she can catch herself, she leans into it – leans into him –

And her voice, when she speaks, breaks. "Why are you always so mean to me?"

He doesn't pull away from her. Instead, he nuzzles against her, nudging at her until her face tilts back and he can get his mouth closer to her, until he can kiss her nose. "You know why."

"I don't."

Twice, now. A longer kiss. "I've told you."

"I just don't understand."

A third time more, and his lips burn so hot against her skin. Suzume aches, and aches, and hates herself for not being angry enough. Hates herself for not hating him. Hates herself for how much she wishes he would kiss her mouth.

"It's 'cause I like you so much."

Suzume thinks back to the tree – thinks back to when they'd first met. She remembers her brother brushing Katsuki's behavior off as proof that he'd liked her in some strange, awful way. Boys, he'd said. That it was their nature.

"You said you never did that to girls you liked," she whispers, voice wavering.

Her brother shrugs, as if this should all be very obvious to her. "I never had any girls I liked."

Suzume thinks he will do what he always does, and leave it at that – leave the rest of that sentence up for interpretation and inference. Instead, he chuckles, and kisses her nose again. "Didn't like any girls before you."

That gets into her. Hot like his hands, hot like the fire in his eyes, it tears through her skin and cracks open her tender ribs, crawling inside of her, nesting there, preening amidst the gore.

Suzume shudders, and finds that for the life of her, the words she wants to say are burned to ash in her throat by that hot, beautiful thing he's burried in her. Instead, she almost chokes.

"Besides," he says, staring down at her with those burning eyes that know her all too well, "You love it."

The words are still gone. Suzume tries to shake her head instead. Her movements are sluggish, though, as if submerged in something thick and viscous.

As if weighted by doubt

And not for what he's saying.

"You do," he insists, knowingly, his voice understanding and gentle. "You do. I know you do."

Suzume tries to shake her head again, but can't manage even a sliver of the movement. Instead, she stares up at him, feeling helpless and lost and so terribly, terribly small.

For a time, her brother only observes her. His eyes search every centimeter of her face, as if looking for something. Eventually, though, he breaks the silence. "You ever hear anyone talk about quirk theory before? How they're supposed to be…" He trails off, as if pondering the right choice of words. "A reflection of our baser natures? Or – that our natures are a reflection of our quirks?"

Suzume has not heard anything like this before. There is a lot of discussion in school about the biology of quirks, at least so far as anyone understands them. But as she is thought to be quirkless – and as she is now friendless, save for her brother – Suzume has never had the opportunity to discuss the psychology of quirks with anyone.

"I – " It's still a struggle to talk, she finds. "No."

Her brother hums, and lets his gaze lift from her up towards the clear, dark sky. "People in the supposed know theorize a lot about that sorta psychological shit. It's like people think a name can make you, right? Your parents give you a name, and you grow into it. It apparently determines your personality. Or, maybe you were always destined for that name, so the fates or the gods or whatever-the-fuck's in charge pull their cosmic strings just right, and your parents give you a name meant for you, that suits you, shaped by whatever the hell you're supposed to be. That belief's been around ages, but it's always struck me as horseshit, though – the name thing, I mean."

He looks back down at her. "But quirks, well. That's different."

He wants her to ask. Regrettably, she finds she wants to ask, too. "How so?"

"Well, think about it. Think about everyone you've ever known, and then think about their quirk. Think about how that quirk mirrors the person who has it."

Suzume can't stare down at her hands; the blanket is in the way. Still, she knits them together in her lap, her teeth picking at her lower lip as she does what her brother asks and thinks about the people she's known.

Her mind goes to Katsuki first. Bold, and wild, it's as if the words "loud" and "explosive" and "bombastic" (her brother had taught her that one) were created with exactly Katsuki in mind – both regarding his personality and his quirk.

Her father comes next. They'd called him "Thunder God", and he'd taken to the moniker well. Up in the sky, the man was flashy and ethereal, beautiful and terrible to behold. The lightning that sparked from his fingertips was cruelty forged into something so elegant it was easy to miss how dangerous he was – both to his enemies and his family, both.

One could not truly know or love the lightning. It was too capricious, too selfish, too destructive. There was nothing good or kind about it, no matter how brilliant or astounding it was to see as it raced across the sky.

Suzume feels as if it's hard to breathe all of a sudden. Her brother's expression as he regards her is all-too perceptive.

"Thinking hard, are you?"

She is – she does. She thinks of Hawks, then, and his great big wings. She's seen him on the news, lately, but she doesn't need that to remember him. Whether she wants to or not, she's thought about him every day since she'd met him, the memory of him and his number both buried in the plush her brother had given her. She'd exchanged it for the phone her brother had meant for her, one lifeline for another, and sewed it back up.

Hawks, as she remembers him, and as he is on the television, seems carefree. She thinks about how that reflects the freedom of his wings, the wings he has accepted and owned as a joyous part of himself. She thinks of him, and she thinks of his name, of the quirk behind the name, and where that name comes from. Suzume knows that for all his easy smiles, there must be something else, there, too. Something cunning. Something sharp. He is a bird of prey, after all.

"Now," her brother says, after a long while. "Think about me."

And, fully holding her breath, Suzume thinks about her brother.

Her brother is – her brother is all fire. He is the fire of a carbomb, consuming a whole family alive. Her brother is a wildfire, burning a beautiful, ancient forest to ash. Her brother is the fire at the foot of a stake, licking up the writhing bodies of sinners and saints alike.

And her brother is the fire in a hearth lit in autumn, light against the darkness and spell against the cold, that she might hold out her hands and warm herself.

"The stories say that gods brought fire to people who were scared and lost in the dark," Suzume whispers, not looking at him. "We'd be – we wouldn't have survived without fire."

"And what happens when the fire strays too far from where you put it?" He asks her, smiling one of his most terrible smiles. "What happens when the walls you build to keep it in are kindling at the end of it?"

Suzume is silent.

His eyes burn into hers. "Can anyone really hope to control it?" His smile looks hungry. "Can you?"

Suzume doesn't say anything.

"You need something that hurts you." Her brother speaks evenly despite that awful smile. "But that human need for whatever comforts fire gives them — that's not all it is for you, is it? No, I want you to think about yourself. Think about your quirk, now."

She doesn't want to. She doesn't – she doesn't. But as with everything she doesn't want to think about, it's the only thing left in her mind.

As with everything her brother tells her to do, she does it.

Suzume thinks of herself and her mother, both. The press of hands, that awful, set-in-the-soul pain in exchange for someone else's relief –

"You know," her brother says, and his voice is so awful and quiet now. "They say that to deny yourself your quirk – to hide it away, to be ashamed of it, to never use it – they say it makes you sick. Rotting away in your mind and body both kinda sick. To refuse to let yourself have that, well, it's like sealing away some vital, important part of yourself. They say it fucking poisons you from the inside out. Didn't you ache to use your quirk, Suzu, back when your mother told you not to? Didn't you need to? Don't you know she probably felt the same as you – felt that same desperate fucking need to touch someone, to heal someone, to hurt herself for it?"

"I… I don't…"

Her brother chuckles. "Back in the park, you know, when we met – oh, you wanted it so badly, even then. You were chomping at the bit for it. And every time since, too – you cry when I tell you no. You're so broken up when I won't let you heal me. Even when you don't cry, I can see it in your face like I've fucking hit you – but not the way you want.

"No, you want to hurt. You need to hurt – and not just that, no – not the hurt of being torn up by something mindless. You need to hurt for someone else's benefit – for someone else's enjoyment. Isn't that right? That's part of who you are. That's written into your very nature, Suzu."

And Suzume sits there, very still, feeling very small, held fast in his lap, and thinks about that. And it all sounds so smart and well-thought out, and she isn't surprised, because her brother is so smart, and her brother thinks a lot, knows a lot, knows so much about everything, and god, god, god –

Why does he have to know so much? Why? Why?

The stars watch them from up above, a million, billion peering eyes, passing their silent, unknowable judgment. Is this the way things are supposed to be? Is this true? She wishes she could ask them.

She wishes she could, because it –

Because it sounds true. It sounds like some inarguable, unholy truth, laid bare before her, ugly and wholly undeniable.

Her brother lets the backs of his fingers graze the curve of her cheek. Distantly, Suzume wonders if they're the same fingers he'd pushed past her lips earlier – the ones he'd gagged her with.

"No one could suit me like you do," he says.

And now that thought is in her head. Her brother, and the nature of fire. The need for it, the fear of it. No one could put lightning in a bottle, maybe, but someone could put fire in a hearth. Someone could press close to it, be warmed by it, fall asleep next to it. Someone could fall in love with it.

A light in the darkness. A spell against the cold. And all the while, the fire, the fire, dancing, hungry, aching. Desperate always to destroy, to ruin, to consume.

Does she push him because she wants that, she wonders? Does she push him because some innate part of her understands that – has always understood that, both about him and herself? She does want to help him, even when it hurts her. She wants to please him, even when he hurts her. She has wanted that since the very first day she had met him.

And so, then, does she push him because it is her nature to be hurt? To hurt for the benefit of someone else –

To be hurt by him –

For him?

"I don't know – I don't…" Suzume looks up at him, lost. Maybe it's true. Maybe it is. "That all feels – that feels so…"

"Unfair?"

She nods, unsure despite how much she wishes she wasn't.

"Is it, though?" He asks, and he takes hold of her chin. He doesn't need to. She's already looking at him. Even when she isn't looking at him, she is always looking at him, because he is ever the only thing at the forefront of her mind.

"Sometimes," her brother says, and his voice is so gentle and so kind that Suzume almost cannot stand it. "Sometimes, Suzu, I think it's the only fair thing left in the whole goddamn world."

Fair for who, she wonders?

She thinks she knows.

Hauntingly, she thinks it might just be enough for her, even –

Even if she wishes it wasn't.