025: dream brother.

Early July; 12 years.

Yokohama, he says, casually, as if it should mean something to her – as if it should mean nothing to her! A sudden trip, he tells her, the two of them, together. Not later, or when she's older, but today, very nearly now, in only a few hours, and with her half-dead on top of it all. Her head is spinning, and the room with it. It's hard to tell whether the intense ebb and flow of nausea surging through her overwrought system is from excitement, or anxiety, or – and most likely of all – from the particularly nasty wound that has very nearly split her head open.

Suzume blinks up at her brother, more than a little alarmed to find he appears somewhat fuzzy around the edges. She tries to squint him back into clarity. It doesn't work very well. "Extralegal? Is that like... super legal?"

He snorts. "It means not legal. Or, not exactly legal, anyway, but that's getting into semantics, and semantics are boring." His hand, still slinking along her spine, creeps incrementally upward. With all the casual nonchalance of someone discussing the weather, her brother continues, again as if it were nothing: "So, hey; I'm gonna take off your shirt."

The room doesn't stop spinning, and yet everything seems suddenly so much sharper somehow, terrifyingly edged, and far too bright. Stiffening against him, Suzume raises her hand and settles it like a fretful bird on his firmly muscled upper arm, landing now, now fluttering away. "Oh. Uhm – why?"

The patience that levels his tone to silk is so exaggerated that it's suffocatingly patronizing in its sweetness. "Like I told you: we gotta get you cleaned up. You get on a train looking like you do now and some snot-nosed law-abiding citizen type with a hardon for doing the right thing is gonna call an ambulance. Probably the cops, too. And you know, much as I hate those sorts of freaks, I couldn't even really blame 'em, 'cause c'mon – you look fucking wrecked." It's very much his listen-to-your-big-brother voice, she recognizes. His poor-sad-Suzu voice. It makes her feel like a petulant child, throwing a fit over nothing –

Except she can hear the leer in it. Despite the otherwise impassive placidity of his face, she can hear it.

Tilting her head back, Suzume tries to glower up at him, but something about the tension in her brow and the angle of her head only makes her feel like she might vomit all over him. Despite being certain that he would deserve it, she abandons that attempt for more of an involuntary wince that finally has the corners of his lips quirking upward. (She regrets not vomiting all over him immediately.) "I don't think – "

Realizing what she's walked into a fraction of a second too late, Suzume isn't fast enough to preempt him before he says, quick as a spectacularly self-satisfied whip, "You're right. You don't think." He lifts his free hand, as if to flick her forehead. A little disappointed, he clearly thinks better of it, but not enough to keep from saying, "That cute head of yours is always straight up empty. Shame."

Far too tired – and nevermind familiar – to fall for this bog standard bit of heckling, Suzume steals a page from his book and ignores the misdirection entirely. "I… I think I'd rather keep the shirt on, if that's okay."

"Oh, yeah?" He sounds thoroughly unimpressed. Mercifully, though, his hand pauses in its treacherous ascent. "Dunno why you're so wigged out. It ain't like it's anything I haven't seen before."

The way he says it has her standing in the bathroom with him back in her father's house again, balanced precariously on a stool, staring up and up into his blood-spattered face. Now she sits, looking up at him still. There's blood on his face, still. It's hers this time, not quite dried, gummy and red, congealing on his cheeks, and all over his arms. And like she had then, she wonders what he means by that: It ain't like it's anything I haven't seen before. Does he mean her, now, or someone else – someone else besides her and the ghost of a sister, that mystery girl who came before her? Somehow both prospects have her mouth watering with a distinctly uncomfortable flush of nausea, and god, she already feels so sick. "Yeah, but I was nine, and… you'd just – well, you know, what happened with my dad… so." She gives a helpless sort of shrug and realizes with no small amount of distress that it's the latter that upsets her the most. The idea of her brother seeing anyone else is – she doesn't let herself finish the thought. She's going to pretend he means her, because it's what she needs most right now."So… so it was different."

"Yeah? So you're a real paragon of maturity now, huh? Sure coulda fooled me with that whole insane bit of hysterics earlier." Watching her with obvious amusement coloring his features, his half-lidded eyes and now fully developed smirk are, as ever, infuriatingly smug. Suzume – again far too concussed and used to these barbed little dares to fall for the obvious rise he's trying to get out of her – opts not to remind him that he had chased her, and was thus certainly guilty of adding his own insanity to her supposed hysterics. It isn't worth it, though. A fight she can't win just isn't worth having. Not right now.

"Not like it should matter, anyway," he adds, perfectly casual. She thinks he means for it to sound like an afterthought, something airy and incidental. Nothing with him is ever as it appears on the surface, though. There's no way that's all there is. When his lips part around his grin, she spies that familiar hint of teeth, sleek and white and gleaming in the foggy light. That, she thinks darkly, all but confirms her suspicions. "We're family, after all."

(Definitely not an afterthought.)

Suzume wants to blame the way the wobble and tilt of the room seems to pick up speed on her probably still-bleeding head wound, but she knows it's not. Not entirely, anyway. It's just as much his fault. It's everything about how easily he undoes her. Sometimes she thinks it would be so much easier if she didn't like the look of his dumb, arrogant face so much – if she could somehow stop herself from thinking that the way the light from the small, rectangular window filtered over him made him look so cool, gleaming like razors in his eyes and in the silvery-cold metal of his staples.

"Actually," she says, her voice a little shrill and much higher than intended, "I think that might maybe make it kinda worse now. It made sense when I was younger, but… but now?"

Her brother laughs, but to her immense relief – and maybe, if she were actually being honest with herself, her vague disappointment – he pulls his hand free of her shirt. "Well, kid, you're the gimp. Guess we'll do it your way."

Surprisingly, that's exactly what he does. Helping her settle back down on the stool, he hooks a finger under her chin and guides her head back, rubbing an unusually sympathetic thumb against her cheek when she grimaces from the pain. "God, you should see yourself right now. You look so pathetic, all fucked up like this," he says, fondly. When she tries to frown again, he lifts his hand and smooths his finger down between her brows, smudging out the little furrowed wrinkle there. "You're gonna hurt yourself worse if you don't quit doing shit like this with your face." His finger follows the slope of her nose, and he tweaks the tip of it before he lets his hand fall away. It doesn't hurt. Not physically, anyway. Not really. She feels it in her chest, though, somehow – feels it like he's pushed a particularly jagged piece of glass right between her ribs, big enough to cut both of her lungs, and every breath she takes aches in some pitiful, nameless way. "Worse, it might get stuck like that. Can't imagine you with bitchy old lady wrinkles. Would be a real fucking shame."

Briefly, she wishes she could retaliate with some sort of sharp rejoinder – something witty, and cutting, something that she imagines would give him pause, that would make him feel entirely and thoroughly foolish. It's not something she's all that great with at the best of times, though. With how hazy her head is, her gut reaction is only a weary-in-her-bones sigh and a restive twitchiness of her good hand against her thigh. "What, are you gonna ship me off to an orphanage if I get wrinkles?"

It's not witty, or cutting, and it doesn't give him pause. She doubts very seriously that it makes him feel any kind of foolish. But he does laugh, and the sound of it has the room pinwheeling at a considerably faster rate. He's right. She is pathetic. Even if she'd meant it as a barb, she's needy enough to settle for the thrill of making him laugh. "Don't be such a sulky baby," he says, his bright eyes glittering and knife-sharp with wry amusement. "Wrinkles or no wrinkles, nobody else gets you but me."

And, well – that certainly doesn't help the spinning, either.

Leaving her thoroughly flustered, her brother crosses the bathroom to fetch several clean, fresh washcloths from a set of shelves set deep in the tiled wall. When he returns, he fixes one of them, carefully folded, to the throbbing wound on her forehead. "Gonna need you to hold this here for me while I work, yeah? Use as much pressure as you can stand without making yourself sick – and keep your head tilted back, too, unless you wanna get a load of soap in your eyes."

Humming her understanding, Suzume obediently does as she's told, wincing again at the way her head aches when she presses the rag to the wound. "Is it… still bleeding a lot? It's not running down into my eyes, at least."

"Not really. Not near as bad as it was. It's more of a sad, weepy dribble than the waterfall it was before, but the wound itself sure ain't looking great. Head wounds'll bleed like fucking crazy, though. Even shallow ones, and this one… well, it's not exactly shallow." Her brother tuts, brows knitted together briefly as he considers her upturned face with a critical eye. "You look goddamn ghastly. Real gristly business, Suzu."

Watching him lift the detachable shower head, Suzume closes her eyes in a breathless flavor of anticipation. "Does it look cool, at least?"

Her brother huffs with subdued laughter again that he somehow manages to keep from sounding entirely mean-spirited. "The fuck you mean, does it look cool?"

Coming from anyone else, she'd have fallen mute, chastised into embarrassment. From her brother, she's more than used to the hazing. Trying to play evasive now would never work, anyway; he'd surely torment it out of her, and she isn't about to give him that opportunity. "Y'know, like... like in movies and stuff. I feel like the whole covered-in-blood thing always looked – it always looked really cool." With heat in her cheeks, Suzume lowers her voice to a hushed mumble, squeezing her eyes shut tighter. "Like, um, that one time, when I was nine – well, you looked kinda cool. You know, covered in blood. And you're kinda gory now, so… a little bit now, too."

"Think I look cool covered in blood?" There's the sudden sensation of her brother taking hold of her chin again, his fingers curving around her jaw. "That what does it for you, huh?" First to the left and then to the right, she feels him turn her shame-scalded face, clicking his tongue against his teeth in what might be either real or mock consideration.

"Mmm," he says, after a long and meditative moment, his finger tapping her cheek. "I dunno. I guess you do look a little cool, if I squint – cool in that horror movie, gonna claw your way outta some well to hell sorta way."

It's such a small concession, she thinks. Tiny, in the grand scheme of things, and especially so after today and everything that's happened. Yet even so – even knowing that – Suzume cannot help her own smile. In the roiling bog of her queasy-sick stomach, a couple of half-dead butterflies stir drowsily to life.

From there, there is a lot of wetting and washing, scrubbing and rinsing. Guiding the head of the detachable shower over her hair, his hands are gentle as he works them through her blood-tangled locks, first with water and then with her favorite citrus-scented shampoo. As the sweet smell of candied lemons perfumes the room, he moves unhurriedly, mindful about avoiding the cloth she holds to her forehead even as his fingers massage over her hairline just centimeters away. With what feels like a second washcloth, he works at stubborn blood on her temple and cheeks, massaging the damp, soft fabric in soothing circles and little detail-oriented dabs.

It feels nice. It feels even nicer when he angles her head from side to side to work over and behind each of her ears, and then down her throat. Against the tiles of the bathroom floor, her toes curl.

"What about – what about my leg?" She asks through a steadily growing lethargy, feeling very much like she might just float off somewhere.

Her brother slips the washcloth beneath the collar of her shirt, polishing the skin stretched over her clavicle. "It's doing this gross oozing thing, but like your head, it ain't as bad as it was. Gonna take care of it after we get at least the visible shit up top fixed."

At length, the shower wand moves again over her body, and they both lapse into silence. Warm water cascades down her shoulders and over her arms, and then her brother follows after with the washcloth, rubbing away blood and grime from her arms, and then from her hands. He scrubs the cloth between each of her fingers and even over her fingernails, working the dirt out from every nook and crevice with exacting attention. Even through her exhaustion, the soft touch he uses when handling her limp arm is not lost on her.

Then it's more of the same all down her legs, and there is always the incessant sensation of his hot fingers pressing through the wet barrier of the washcloth. He wrings stubborn mud from the hem of her filthy shorts, and runs the rag in gentle, sweeping motions behind her knees. When he goes to wash her feet, he cradles each of them in one hand and tends to them so very carefully with the other. Again and again, she feels his thumb sneaking out from behind the cloth. It brushes bare against her skin, slipping over the ridges of her toes or up the thin, delicate arch of her ankle. It tickles, and through that sedating fug, she's hardly able to smother a delirious giggle. There's no stopping the way she tenses, though, squirming a bit on the stool.

In that hot, steaming bathroom, Suzume finds herself drifting through the ever-present feeling of his hands gliding slickly over her wet flesh. He is focused, and methodical, but there is an undercurrent there, too – the intense sensation of some strange, pulsing intimacy, thrumming just beneath the surface when she feels his fingers touch her in ways she somehow knows have nothing to do with bathing.

That, though, she's used to. Her brother touches her often, and at his discretion, for any number of reasons she isn't privy to. It's the open tenderness that feels so alien to her, now. It just hasn't been as much, lately. It feels like it's been so, so long. Is she dreaming, she wonders? Did she actually die back there in that deep ravine, only to shrug off all that rainwater and blood to emerge as a nascent ghost hidden away in her own mostly perfect afterlife? One where her brother is indulgent in the way he handles her, still? One where his teasing is more playful than cruel? One where he listens to her when she asks him to stop? One where he touches her so softly, so sweetly, so fervently

Behind her closed eyes, there is still that awful see-saw sensation of movement even though she knows she's sitting down. There are patterns there, congealing in a mass, greys and blacks seething together across her eyelids and screened through a chaos of dancing lights. There is the smell of soaps, and then of antiseptic, stingingly clean. Her forehead burns, and then her leg, both of them searing in awful, nauseating unison.

Distantly, she is aware of her brother, of his voice settling over her like a heavy film made out of too many cobwebs. There's a comfort to it, and a discomfort to it, too. It suffuses her, clinging and as hot as the steam that thickens the air and beads like dew and sweat all across her wet skin. "You're being so good," she thinks he says, but she isn't sure. Maybe his fingers are at her cheek. Maybe they touch her collarbone, again, without the rag. She isn't sure of that, either. "I know it hurts, but you're doing so good with it, Suzu." The praise makes her warm. The praise makes her feel like a single lost snowflake, melting at the end of a hot, wet tongue.

Eventually, the pain subsides to something more bearable, more of an ache beneath a heavy bit of pressure than something that threatens to overwhelm her. Then there are fingers in her hair again, and warm air moving through it. She feels very small, suddenly – feels like she might be six years old, or maybe seven. Like if she were to open her eyes, she'd be back in her apartment with her mother, or in Katsuki's house, sitting in front of his mother, letting one of them dry all her long, unruly hair into slightly less unruly waves.

"God," says a voice. "You got so much damn hair."

It isn't her mother speaking, or Katsuki's mom, either. Katsuki had said that once, she thinks. She remembers him watching his mother work a brush through Suzume's tangles, his scarlet eyes narrowed in the way of little boys, caught perpetually between agitated boredom and marked fascination. What had she said, back then? Shuddering, Suzume reels behind her closed eyes. "Should I... should I cut it off?"

"What?" Laughter again, both close and loud enough to be heard over the sound of the blow dryer. It's her brother, and her brother's voice, and her brother's fingers working over her scalp as he blow dries her hair. "Hell no. I like your hair."

And then, after a brief pause, and maybe a little slyly, her brother says, "It's pretty like it is."

(Katsuki had said, "Nah. It'd look pretty dumb short.")

"Oh," she says, wonderingly. It's her Dream Brother again, she thinks. Her Afterlife Brother, strangely charming, flattering her with easy compliments.

Pretty. It's usually cute, with him.

Nausea blooms hot and rancid like sickly swamp flowers in her stomach. Still, she feels so desperately sweet on him – so sweet that she thinks she might just die a second time.

She thinks it would be okay if she did.

She doesn't, though. Instead, she has a vague sense that time is passing. Eventually, the far away roar of the dryer gives way to the steady rhythm of the rain falling somewhere even farther away. Then, for what feels like a while, there is nothing but the rain, like static coming from a room a million miles away.

And then she feels hot hands cupping her cheeks, and a thumb pressed to her mouth. She thinks there's a face in her hair, and breath moving through it, hot as a summer night's wind. Fingers trail down her throat, and smooth over her shoulders. Hot palms, then, sliding up and under her shirt, settling on the curve of her waist. Then, there, and there, and there, simmering on her thighs, lower first, and then higher up. Time moves, she thinks, and the hands move too, but not much. Mostly they linger. Mostly, they keep touching her. She can feel the staples, she thinks, distantly – her brother's hands. They burn in a way that prickles, in a way that tingles. She feels herself shiver, as if she were cold, but she's not cold at all. She's hot – the room is hot, and his hands are hot, and she feels so hot, both on the outside and also on the inside.

Caught between the desire to lay her hands over his to keep them there or maybe to push them away, Suzume does nothing. She feels much too sick to do anything at all. Does she want to, though? It's all so gentle. It's all so soft. It's all so warm.

And then his hands pull back, and there is no more of his heat, and she opens her mouth to cry out, but everything is so slow, like a dream –

"Gotta get you in different clothes. Can't get the blood outta these in the shower."

Her brother's voice, again. It sounds... weird. A little breathy, maybe, like he's been walking too briskly, or possibly jogging. Maybe washing her was hard work. He'd said there was a lot of blood, hadn't he?

Gristly business.

"But I don't wanna bleed on them," she mumbles. She already feels bad enough about ruining his shirt.

"Not gonna be a problem. You're patched up well enough now that you should make it to Yokohama without reverting back to Horror-Movie-Girl, barring some secondary catastrophe. Just try not to throw yourself from the train in a second fit of hysteria, and I think we'll be fine."

Patched up? Blindly, with her eyes still closed, Suzume lifts her hand and touches her forehead. Her fingers brush against what she recognizes as a thick bandage secured with a smooth, weighty tape after some exploratory probing.

Medical tape.

When had she stopped holding the cloth there? Where did it even go?

"Whoa," she says, running her fingers along the slick surface of the tape as if she might recall the memory of it getting there by touching it more. It doesn't work. "When did – when did this happen?"

Her brother's quiet laughter fills the humid bathroom. "Time warping for you, huh? Congratulations. Bonus of having a concussion."

Hesitantly, Suzume opens her eyes. There's a heavy steam settled about the room, making everything very wet and foggy. That, she expects. What she doesn't expect is her brother standing in front of her in an entirely different set of clothes, all the blood and muck washed clear away. When had that happened? There's only the one bathroom. There's –

"How long – how long has it been?" She isn't sure why that is what she asks. She isn't sure of a lot right now.

"Longer than I'd hoped." Her brother's phone is in his hand, and he stares down at it for a few moments before his attention flickers back up to her. A small, private smile plays about his mouth. "We gotta train to catch in an hour and a half, so you gotta try real hard for me and set aside your concussion long enough to change outta those wet clothes." His eyes are a tempest of blue and green, a hurricane, a fire colored all wrong. She stares up into them like he stares down at her, and she feels entirely transfixed. "You know… assuming you don't want me to do it for you. I'm more than happy to help."

She shivers, and then she crinkles her face up at him. It's not quite a scowl. She remembers how much that hurt before, and isn't eager to try again. "I can do it. I'm getting up," she insists, stubbornly. Rising on quivering jelly-legs, she swoons into her brother's waiting arms for a second time.

"Oh, yeah." He catches her as if she weighs nothing. As if she were nothing. Cradling her head delicately against his chest, his tone is very dry. "You totally got it."

Pressed to her cheek, the rapid cadence of his heartbeat feels so fast it almost gives her a second shock of vertigo. "Why's your... why's your heart going so crazy?"

Hooking his arm around her, her brother half-carries her, leading her out of the broiling bathroom and back into their storm-dark bedroom. "You know how the whole covered-in-blood look does it for you?"

Spread across their futon are what appear to be several pieces of hastily assembled laundry. Suzume recognizes one of her blouses, and one of his zip-up hoodies. There is also one of her longer skirts – a delicate confection of thin, layered fabric that ends at her ankles. It had been an impulse purchase a few months back, something she'd found and bought at a second-hand shop in town entirely because it had reminded her of the charming sort of gauzy vestments forest-born girls wore in video games. She has never had the courage to wear it before, and she can't imagine where her brother found it. She'd gone to such great lengths to hide it that she herself had forgotten where it was.

Embarrassingly, there is also a clean pair of her underwear.

Trying to ignore the intrusive wave of mortification that threatens to drown her at the idea of her brother handling that particular garment, she leans into him for balance out of pure necessity and closes her eyes again. What had he said? Blood, and what did it for her. It's easier to think about than this. "Um, yeah?"

"Well," says her brother from somewhere near her ear, his voice like dark, crushed velvet, "I think the whole sad, pathetic vibe you got going on right now is kinda doing it for me."

Oh, she thinks, touching her cheek with her one functional hand. Her skin feels as hot as his does.

Oh. He's teasing her again, she thinks. Picking at her. That's it. That's all.

Isn't it?


In what could be minutes or what could be years later, Suzume finds herself waiting for a train at the station with her brother.

The rain slashes down. It's steady, and unrelenting, pounding against the umbrella he gave her to manage – something she manages poorly with her one working hand, though he doesn't criticize her at all for it. There is no more thunder anymore, and no more lightning to precede it. There is only the rain and the rhythm of it drumming ceaselessly against their umbrella. The sound of it hurts Suzume's ears, each drop a barbed hook lodged in her brain.

They're both clean now, made up to reasonable presentability. Scrubbed fresh of any visible blood or grime, her brother carries her as if she were a limp doll slung over his back, her bottom resting against his linked hands, her chin tucked against his shoulder. He'd insisted on face masks again, but had forgone sunglasses; the skies, he'd said, were too dark for that to make any sense. Quilted over with thick, soggy clouds, the now-toothless summer storm hangs low in the sky, shrouding the early afternoon in a sort of half-dark deep enough for the street lights to have all come on. It makes Suzume sleepy. Everything seems to make her sleepy right now. Rubbing her cheek against her brother's own, she can feel the hot metal of his staples through the fabric of their masks like the dulled heat of a very small brand. She dozes through the thorny nip of it, regardless.

More minutes pass, she thinks, or maybe more years. Possibly only seconds. Then, there is the sudden squealing of metal on metal, of brakes crying out into the humid air. Cringing, Suzume pries open her eyes. The train is here, and she sees golden light shining out from its many rain-slick windows. There are half a dozen people on the platform, waiting for the train, and inside of it, there are many dozens more. They drift about like dark impurities in that hazy, syrupy glow.

"It's busy." Her brother's voice is quiet, gone tense with a vague note of annoyance. Then, in a much more neutral tone, he says, "Get the umbrella ready," and shifts his weight. Balanced neatly against him, Suzume shifts with him, huffing drowsily against his shoulder.

The two of them watch in silence as the doors slide open and a handful of people toddle out. Swathed and gawky in heavy raincoats, they all raise umbrellas to the sky like great, colorful lances, here red, there blue, here green, or violet, or polka-dot pastel. Suzume's own umbrella is wide-rimmed and big, a pink and white striped monstrosity that reminds her of a cheerful cupcake when opened. It feels out of place for all the pervasive gloom, as do the smiles a few strangers pay the pair of them as they walk past. Unable to return a smile of her own behind her mask, Suzume waggles her fingers around the stem of the umbrella in a feeble attempt at a wave.

(Her brother, of course, does nothing. Says nothing. He has, she assumes, no use for strangers, whether for their kindness or their smiles.)

When the train finishes bleeding its disembarking passengers, her brother is one of the first from their platform onto the train. Leaning forward a bit so he can better manage her with only one hand, he uses his now-free one to help her close the umbrella in a wordless joint effort. Despite everything, she feels a little proud of how smoothly it goes, her holding it out and steady so he can tug down the plastic canopy. It feels intimate to be so in sync, like two parts of a greater whole.

Upright again, both his hands in place beneath her she feels his head move against hers as he surveys the car. Blinking away exhaustion, Suzume looks, too.

It's a lot busier than their last trip. The car is mostly full, warm in the way of summer and also in the way of too many bodies, and there are only a few empty seats scattered about at random. Her fist tightens reflexively against the wet plastic of her umbrella. Tension slips icy fingers around her heart in much the same fashion and gives an exploratory squeeze. After so many years being asked to do otherwise, it feels decidedly wrong to be out among so many people with her brother. She shrinks in on herself, cowering against his back. "I don't see any seats next to each other," she whispers into his ear, sounding more forlorn than she means to. Close as she is, she can hear him sucking his teeth from behind his closed lips, something she knows he's prone to doing when he's thinking.

"You ain't standing on that leg," he grunts dismissively, after a brief pause. "You're getting a seat."

The selfish little girl in her wants to beg to be allowed to remain hanging over his back. Clingy, desperate, and endlessly afraid, that little girl sulks in the corner of Suzume's own mind, nursing emotional bruises and licking at her self-inflicted wounds. The train is scary. The people filling all those seats – the men in their smart-pressed suits and the living, smiling, still flesh-and-blood mothers juggling plump toddlers over their thighs – their eyes are all too bright in their stranger's faces. Too searching. Too knowing, somehow. At the apathetic glance of one bored looking teenager, Suzume closes her eyes and shivers, wishing she were back at home with just her brother, where she clearly belongs.

The older girl she's becoming, though – the one who worries that she might be growing to be more of a burden on her older brother with every passing week, because why else would he avoid her so much? – that girl already feels bad enough for everything he's had to do for her today. Despite the impressive way he'd bandaged up her leg, Suzume had discovered walking was terribly uncomfortable. Abandoning his rule that the two of them not be seen together leaving the house, her brother had very nearly carried her the entire way to the train station, making a good bit of the journey back through the muddy, rain-sogged forest in an attempt to keep out of sight. It had been slow going. She can't imagine he isn't exhausted, too.

(Really, when she thinks about it, all of this feels like her own fault.)

Settling somewhere in between those two warring desires, Suzume buries her face against his throat and whines, "I'd rather stand with you than sit next to a stranger."

"Oh, come on," her brother chides her. "In what world did you think I was gonna let that happen?"

Very suddenly, he's moving again. The even sway of his confident stride is a stark contrast to the biting sound his boots make as they strike the linoleum floor with each decisive step. Suzume thinks the former is meant for her –

And the latter, she's certain, is for someone else.

It's a short walk. When she opens her eyes, she finds herself looking down over her brother's shoulder and into the upturned face of the bored teenager she'd seen looking at them moments prior. His eyes are shadowed and heavy-lidded in a way that reminds her of her brother, his mouth a disdainful and downward slash drawn across his slim face. Disinterested in the way of listless teenagers before, he looks up at the pair of them now with only a lukewarm curiosity, and his gaze drifts languidly between them with a slow sweep of his eyes.

"What do you – " In those drawling three words, Suzume recognizes the boredom from earlier again. Whatever minimal interest she and her brother have inspired, he has apparently already lost it.

Her brother, though, doesn't give the indolent boy the opportunity to finish. "Your seat," he says, with a jerk of his chin Suzume immediately recognizes as a challenge, "I want it. Move."

A deep ravine forms between the boy's thick-drawn brows, starkly shadowed beneath the bright lights of the train car. "Why would – " This time, the lanky boy cuts himself off, and against her chest, Suzume feels her brother's back muscles go tense as a compressed and tightly coiled spring. It is as blood in the water for him, this boy's refusal. She can imagine how his terrible blue eyes spark to life; how his nostrils flare at the scent of weakness.

That ravine darkens, as if the boy is weighing his own feelings. His shoulders stiffen, and he switches tactics, deciding to try a quiet hostility on for size. "You know what? Fuck off."

Sitting in the seat beside the boy, a man in a suit shifts in obvious discomfort, but says nothing. It's clear he wishes he were anywhere else. His attention deftly avoids her brother and lingers on her for only a split second before it scurries away, his eyes cast pointedly down the length of the train.

For a much longer series of seconds – and with those drawn on into an excruciating slowness – her brother also doesn't speak. Suzume watches as the boy's face wavers between subdued anger and smug disobedience, a quavery smirk taking shape across his pointed face.

Even without being able to look at her brother, Suzume knows the boy's confidence is catastrophically misplaced.

Very carefully and again with that same slowness, her brother bends at the knees until her feet are touching the floor. When she slides mutely off his back, his hand snakes around her shoulders, drawing her against himself. In her periphery, she sees him tug down his mask with his free hand.

Suzume looks away from him, and finds it's only marginally easier to look at the boy. His expression, she notices, has gone completely rigid, his foetal smirk aborted too-soon.

Unwilling to turn her head, Suzume cannot see her brother's face, but she can imagine it: his eyes that piercingly feverish and suffocating blue, his wide and leering mouth stretching at the staples that only just barely hold it and his patchwork face of real-boy and scar-tissue-revenant together. Even if she's inclined to find her brother attractive when he's not being a terror – and sometimes, even when he is – she is fully aware he's a grim sight even at his most docile. It's no wonder the teenager seems to shrink back. It's no wonder his shoulders draw up towards his ears, his body curling in on itself like a wilting flower – especially when her brother leans past her, close enough now to the boy that his scorching breath ruffles in the boy's pale hair.

No, she knows it well, even without looking. Suzume has been opposite that look so many times. Over the years, she's chided herself for still finding it so unnerving; shouldn't she be used to it by now, she thinks? It can't be as bad as she makes it out to be.

But this boy is older than she is, she realizes. This boy, with his white-blond hair and cool-kid boredom, strikes her as someone more assured than herself. He seems at a glance so much braver, and certainly more stubborn. Standing there, though, and only centimeters away from him, Suzume can very clearly see the raw, unfiltered fear beginning to leech into his eyes. It settles like a mold over the lineaments of his face, like water damage and rot, cracked and spidering through his hard exterior until he looks only seconds away from crumbling apart to fragmentary pieces.

"Hey." Her brother drops his husky voice until it's low and conspiratorial and somehow as dry as dead-winter leaves. "So the whole attitude thing? That's real cute. Real fun. But my kid sister here, well, her leg's not doing that hot, and I really want your seat for her. So how's about you pretend like you're a gentleman and let her have it, and I'll play like I'm the generous and forgiving sort. Y'know, like I'm the kinda guy who'll let you off the hook on that whole trying to run your mouth shit, yeah? That's a steal of a deal for you, kid. In fact I'd say that's the best deal anyone in your whole shit life is ever gonna give you, 'cause I'm not generous and I'm not forgiving and I really don't wanna let you off the hook." Already impossibly low, his tone sinks even further somehow, like an unwelcome whisper come slinking out of a coffin some six feet down already. "But I also don't wanna upset my little sister, see, so how's about you do yourself and her a favor and fuck off somewhere else."

Looking around the car a little frantically, the boy withers further when he realizes no one seems inclined to meet his gaze. "Are you – are you really threatening me over a train seat?"

Her brother answers slowly, as if to an astoundingly stupid child, every word enunciated to sharpened, ravenous points. "Hmm. I don't know. What do you think?"

The boy isn't smiling at all now. Rather, his hands slink shakily under his legs and emerge holding the strap of a backpack in a white-knuckled grip. "Yeah," he mumbles, all his earlier bravado cowed in a shamefully brief exchange. "Yeah, whatever, man."

When he stands, her brother rights himself, too. He's taller than the boy by more than a fistful of threatening centimeters and quite a bit more broad in the shoulders. Suzume can see the boy calculate this himself when he sweeps his gaze up and down her brother. Then, quite a bit more submissive now, he ducks his head. His eyes are round as moons in his bleached-white face.

"Whoa, whoa. Hey there. Not so fast." Her brother's long fingers seize the boy's arm when he tries to slip past and the gangly teenager nearly stumbles over his own feet. All of his composure lost, he seems to sag in her brother's grip. Suzume thinks that it's only by the virtue of the hold her brother has on his arm that he doesn't fall flat on his face in jerky, animal panic. "I told you my sister's leg's all jacked up and you still tried dragging your heels. Apologize to her for being a selfish prick."

Held firm against her brother by a similarly vice-like grip, Suzume feels immense pity for this now very frightened boy – nevermind embarrassment for the spine he'd so quickly lost. "Nii-chan – it's okay, I don't – I don't mind – "

Around her shoulders, her brother's arm cinches tighter. A warning. She wonders if his grip on the boy tightens the same.

Whether he does or not doesn't matter. The boy, thoroughly browbeaten, bobs his head in a loose and terror-stricken approximation of a nod. When her brother releases him, the teenager takes a shaky step away from them before bending his back into a rigid, ninety degree bow in Suzume's direction.

"Sorry," he mutters, taking another shuffling step backward in between another miserable bow. "S-sorry."

And then, pushing off through the willfully ignorant and still-settling crowd, he's gone.

Heaving a sigh and abandoning his words of caution about wrinkles from earlier, Suzume turns her head to scowl accusingly up at her brother –

But he's already moved onto his next target. Nudging his scuffed, muddied boot against the suited man's well-polished shoes, her brother snaps his fingers sharply in front of his face. The older man looks up with an obvious and antagonized kind of reluctance, looking a little green around the gills. He still says nothing.

"Quit playing deaf," her brother says with another jerk of his chin, "and clear the fuck out, too."

Suzume wonders often at that tone her brother gets. He always speaks so casually, so rough, and when she was younger she'd taken him for someone born to a poorer family – or one wholly disinterested in propriety, anyway. Years later, she can't help but doubt that interpretation. As vulgar as he tends to be, her brother has an easy and cavalier air of authoritative assertiveness to him when he speaks. He is imperious at his best. At his worst, he is borderline despotic.

Having never really seen him interact with other people, Suzume has always been curious as to whether he was like that with only her. Seeing how he'd spoken to that boy, though – and now, too, with this much older man, who also hurriedly flees from her brother's unrelenting gaze – she realizes he just might actually be worse with everyone else and that she's actually been getting a much more relaxed fit rendition of his tyranny.

(She feels immensely guilty at the fireflash thrill of… what? Joy? Excitement? That that particular epiphany grants her.)

His is not the kind of confidence that can be taught though, she's certain of it. It's one you are born to. One steeped deep and long in fine, blue blood, painstakingly distilled only through generations of careful and meticulous breeding until the unwavering confidence of his forebearers begot more of the same in him.

Arrogance, she thinks, by birthright.

It reminds her, she realizes uncomfortably, of her father and his own family's aristocratic lineage.

Jostled from her thoughts, Suzume lets her brother guide her to the abandoned corner seat, still warm from where the boy had filled it. She sours a little in the heat.

Beside her, taking his own stolen seat, her brother chuckles quietly. His fingers brush her cheek as he leans into her, and when she refuses to look at him, he blows air in her ear until she flinches. It doesn't take long; she hates that. "Don't look so mopey," he says when she finally relents and looks at him. His smile is small, but nonetheless nasty for it. "You wanted to sit together."

Suzume pulls a face as sour as she feels. "You could've just asked him to move."

All faux-innocence, her brother's smile vanishes, his eyebrows lofting up and under his black hair. "I did ask him."

"No, you told him, and then you strong-armed him into it. I meant ask. Like… ask nicely. Or at least not ask like a total jerk."

"Me giving him a chance to walk his dick-waving show back was being nice, Suzu." Already bored of the bit, her brother yawns, his smirk back. Slouching down in his seat, he casts his head to the side to watch her with those sly, needling eyes of his. "You can bet your cute little ass I wouldn't have been so magnanimous if you weren't around."

"'Magnanimous.'" Suzume repeats the word, trying to sound as cool and nonchalant as he does when he calls her out. It doesn't sound cool, though. It sounds more petulant and sullen than anything.

Unable to let anything go, her brother smirks at the failed attempt. "Sure. Magnanimous," he says, "y'know, 'cause I'm a regular fucking saint."

Wishing once more that she had any sort of talent for comebacks, Suzume only rolls her eyes and looks away from him, frowning down at her own bright yellow rain boots peeking out from under her skirt. It's easier, and easy is all she feels she can handle right now. "A saint would've asked."

Reaching up with one leisurely hand, her brother slips his fingers into her hair. Suzume goes very still as he brushes back a few errant strands, tucking them carefully behind her ear. "If you ask someone, you give them the opportunity to tell you no," he says, after a long moment.

Still frowning, she looks back at him. "What?"

His fingers linger, tracing the shell of her ear before taking her earlobe between his forefinger and thumb. She braces herself, expecting a tug – but he only works it between his fingers idly. Then he shrugs his lean, broad shoulders, and lets his hand fall back. "Just what I said. It's easier to tell someone what you want them to do. What you're gonna do. And then: you just do it. Skips that whole fake-politeness bullshit. If someone's gonna tell me no, I want them to know exactly what that means for them. What they're getting into. No sense pussyfooting around with it." He yawns again. "That's just wasting everyone's time."

The train shudders in the rain. When it lurches forward suddenly, Suzume, with her fractured sense of balance, very nearly goes with it. Her brother reaches out again, she thinks to keep her from spilling out of her hard-won seat – but then his hands slip under her arms, and he tugs her back and down until she's sat sideways in his lap.

The bright lights above them halo in his oil black hair and set all his edges on fire. It's hard looking up at him. All that brightness makes her stomach thrash in her belly. It surges behind her ribs, and roils up her throat, and –

His hand comes down, settling just over her forehead. He smooths her hair back from her face, tutting his tongue behind his teeth again. "Christ. Close your eyes," he says, very quiet now. "You look like you're gonna be sick."

Squeezing her eyes shut, Suzume sucks air between her grit teeth. The air is warm, much like his palm as it slides over her cheek. And then her whole body is, too, flushing hot with nausea and nerves and a near overwhelming sense of embarrassment.

"We shouldn't," she says, weakly. "This is too much for – there's so many people."

She's too old for this, she thinks. Too old to be coddled this way, to be held this way in public. After years and years of stealing around together, it feels wrong to be out like this. It feels especially wrong to be making a scene on a train full of people she knows must be looking on in politely subdued disgust.

But her brother, who never listens, certainly doesn't seem inclined to start now. He doesn't care about things like that. Rather, she feels him gather her up in his arms and slide himself into her corner seat. With the wall of the train car at her back and her legs propped up on the seat he'd just vacated, she's allowed a make-shift bed of sorts, and to her muted chagrin there's no denying the position is infinitely more comfortable than sitting up –

Even if the pervasive shame of being handled like a limp toy by her brother in front of a bunch of strangers – on a train, of all places – neuters it, somewhat.

"Don't worry about it," he says, soothingly. "They don't matter." Easy for him to say, Suzume thinks bitterly as she swallows back stomach acid from behind her pursed lips. He hardly seems capable of worrying about anything; it's as if he's hardwired not to care.

And then, tucking more of her hair back from her face, he tells her, "You should take a nap. We got a long way to go."

It's not really a suggestion. It's like he said, she thinks: it's easier to tell people what you expect them to do than it is to ask them. And why shouldn't he act that way? It always seems to work out for him. He almost always gets what he wants.

In this case, though, Suzume realizes that maybe what he wants for her might actually be the best thing for her. She's sure he'd claim that everything he wants for her is the best thing for her, of course. But where she might debate that with him sometimes and wonder at it for others, she finds she really can't fault him for this.

So she lets herself relax. It's not a difficult thing. The rain, and the rocking of the car, and the steady rhythm of the wheels over the tracks – all of it acts as a potent, dreamy sedative. A numbing lullaby. As ever, his warmth surrounds her and fills her, fuzzy in her head, hot and unfurling in her chest. Without really thinking about it, she's rubbing her cheek against the fabric of his hoodie sleeve.

Suzume thinks he touches her cheek again. She isn't sure. Cocooned in all that warmth, she feels sequestered away from everything, wrapped up in layers and layers of drowsy, exquisite heat. Her head throbs stubbornly – but soon, even that falls away from her.

When she opens her eyes, it feels as if only seconds have passed. Her brother holds her in his lap still, one arm hooked around her waist. In his other hand, he holds his phone. Reaching out with her unbroken arm, Suzume takes hold of a black cord trailing from the bottom of it and follows it up, sliding her fingers along the smooth plastic until they brush against his masked face.

Headphones.

Not seconds, then, she realizes. When had he pulled out his phone? How had he managed without her noticing?

Angling her head, her eyes meet his. Without a word, he tugs one of the buds from his ears and fits it gently into hers. There is, briefly, the sound of music – a heavy beat set over a driving, synthetic sound reminiscent of a melody – but then at the press of his thumb, the volume dips low. At another press, the music falls away completely.

When she manages to pry her attention away from him and return it to his phone, he's pulled up a different video from the one before it. This one features a pair of feminine hands posing expressively near a very lovely cake. Set with whipped cream and vibrant, red strawberries that gleam like wet rubies among all that pillowed whiteness, it seems to Suzume a work of art. A simple piano melody filters through the ear bud. Then, the briefest tinkle of bird song.

A baking video. The recipe appears on the screen in a neat and pleasing font, and then the scene changes, those delicate hands from before working to craft the cake from scratch. Suzume wets her dry lips with her tongue and feels her heart swell with a heady and nearly intoxicating affection for her brother. It's been months since he'd last indulged her like this, letting her into his lap to pour over videos of things she'd wanted to try her own hand at in the kitchen.

This video is new. She's never seen it before.

"Ohhhhh," she whispers, drawing out the word. "That looks so good." Her voice sounds slow. Clumsy. She's mindful of the need to be quiet on the train, but there's no shaking the brain fog that settles like a leaden curtain over all of her words. She hopes he can parse her enthusiasm. Even beneath the muzzy veil of sleep, it fills her like warm and tangible light, a giddy thrill smothered under thick, sugary syrup.

Apparently, he does. "You wanna try making it later?" This, too, is a rare kindness. The mask – returned, now – obscures his face, but Suzume thinks she can maybe hear the smile in his voice, anyway.

"Uh-huh."

He pauses the video with a swipe of his thumb and, drawing back the progress bar to the list of ingredients, he presses another combination of buttons. A screenshot with that pilfered information appears at the corner of the screen. With a second swipe, it's hidden away with any number of other of his secrets, ready to be brought back out at another time –

One of very few he's willing to share with her.

The music is so soothing. In the video, the hands work a mixer smoothly through eggs, whipping them up into a soft, cloud-like cream. It feels a little like that in her head. Even through the way her head aches, the melody plucks at all the tense strings of her fraying mind and smooths them out until it feels like she no longer has any real thoughts left at all – only a head full of fresh-budding clouds tucked beneath layers of pooled, soft silk.

Suzume wants to keep watching. There's no narration; there are only the instructions in snippets of text arranged aesthetically on the screen. She blinks down at it once. When she does it a second time, her eyes are twice as heavy. There is more music, and her head is full of it, and it sounds so comfortably far away, like it's coming from a room a good ways across an especially cozy house.

Tucked into the crook of her brother's arm, Suzume closes her eyes. She thinks she feels the press of his mouth the side of her head – but again, she isn't sure. Maybe she dreams it. Maybe it's her, wanting it. Needing it. So far outside of herself, she thinks it's as good as the real thing.

When she opens them again, she is looking up and into the face of an old, old woman. Behind the stranger's face, there is still the interior of a train car. This one, though, looks different somehow. The colors seem off, no longer the colors she thinks she remembers – except she can't quite remember what colors they're supposed to be.

"Goodness," the older woman says, and Suzume's eyes return to her. Like the music – the music that she notices is now gone – it sounds like she's speaking from another room, so very far away. "Is she all right?"

"She had a bit of a fall," comes her brother's voice, rumbling against her ear. Her head, she realizes, is tucked against his chest, held there by the gentle weight of his hand. "Tore herself up real bad. I'm taking her to see family in Yokohama. Our relatives – well, one of them's a doctor."

"Where are your parents?" Suzume is out of it, but not so out of it that she misses the sharp note of concern pushing up through the warm cashmere-like softness of the older woman's voice.

"Dead," answers her brother with a quiet, graven solemnity. Casting her eyes up at him, she's surprised to find him so devoted to the charade, a surprisingly authentic ruefulness settled over his features like the pallor of a long-wearied mourner.

The woman makes a hushed noise of dismay, but Suzume cannot look away from her brother. It's fascinating to her how easily he lies. She thinks she'd surely believe him, if she didn't know any better – that she could look into those ruined eyes and see a sad ghost rather than what she knows lies behind them.

In a similarly adept attempt at humble dispiritedness, he continues, "I'm raising her, myself."

"Goodness," says the woman again, this time in a respectful murmur. "So much to go through for so young a pair." She clutches at a thin shawl draped over her thinner shoulders with one skeletal hand, her skin wrapped around each and every bone like thin, gauzy tissue paper. Finally, her eyes manage to pull away from Suzume's own and move up to take in the sight of her brother, a measured sorrow working its way into all the deep, worn creases of her kindly and age-spotted face. "What a noble big brother. Raising a little girl is a big responsibility. We can be a lot of a handful!"

Her brother chuckles in what Suzume is continuously surprised to find is a wholly believable farce. "I try."

The woman's gaze settles back on Suzume. Her eyes are foggy with cataracts, and Suzume wonders how well the white-haired woman can actually see as she squints down into her face with an easy, tender curiosity. "Does he?" Unhooking her hand from her shawl, she gestures at Suzume's brother with a finger gone twisted and claw-like with arthritis, her whole hand set by a slight tremor. "I had an older brother, once – I know how they can be."

Those eyes, set deep among what Suzume guesses are probably a hundred-thousand wrinkles, are a faded, birds-egg blue. They remind her of an afternoon sky washed thorough and raw by the rain. Strange, how many different kinds of blue there are in the world, Suzume thinks. Her brother's blue eyes – radioactive and half-feral with his own secret madness – they couldn't be more different.

"He's…" Against her cheek, she can feel his heartbeat again. It's steady, and slow. Relaxed. His phone rests in her lap, nestled in the folds of her skirt, screen down. The plastic cord of his headphones are coiled atop it. A very childish part of her mourns the loss of that connection, one half of it in her ear and the other in his. It's the same part of her that still thrills to eat food from the proffered end of his chopsticks, like some indirect kiss.

"He does try, sometimes," she admits, finally, and honest in a way that hurts. And thinking about his hands over her face in the shower, and the ear bud he'd fit into her ear, and of the cake, and the video, and of the teenage boy running away, she drops her voice and adds, throat aching around the words, "And – and I love him a lot. He's my favorite."

Against her ear, that steady thrum of her brother's heart quickens almost imperceptibly. Maybe, Suzume thinks – maybe she's imagining it.

(But she's pretty sure she's not.)

The old woman's face breaks into a beaming, beatific smile that is mostly soft, pink gums. "Oh, well then! What a good boy. I think that's all anyone could hope for with big brothers." From her pocket, she withdraws two candies wrapped in clear, crinkling plastic with her rickety hand. Done up like the cake in the video, they gleam blood red and cool white under the artificial fluorescents.

Peppermints. "They'll help you with all manner of ills," she promises.

Obediently, Suzume lifts her hand. The old woman tilts them into her cupped palm with a sneaky wink, as if she were sharing some great and spectacular secret and not simple candies. "Be sure to share them," she tells her grandly before, with a wobbly nod of her head, she trundles off down the train car towards the nearest empty seat.

The seat she eventually settles on is blue. They all are. Suzume frowns, the ache picking up in her head like high tide. She's fairly certain they weren't blue before. Were they?

"Are we on a different train?" She asks distantly, her gaze dropping down to the candies cradled in her trembling hand.

"Mmm." Reaching around her with both of his, her brother plucks one of the candies from her fingers. "Third one, actually. We've been through two transfers."

Suzume cannot remember changing trains once, let alone twice. "Really…?" Frowning down at his deft fingers, she watches him unravel the plastic from the candy he'd stolen from her, marveling at their grace despite herself.

"You were pretty out of it both times. Zonked out like a little baby, actually. No surprise you don't remember it; I carried you. If I had to guess, it's why that old antique over there decided to come nosing over. Probably thought I was some derelict running off with you." And then his fingers are at her mouth, pressing the sticky confection to her lips. The sharply minty scent fills her head like a cool fog, sluicing through all that cloying, pulsing heat. "Open up."

Another command. Again, Suzume doesn't care. Parting her lips, she lets him push the candy past her teeth and over her welcoming tongue. The sensation prickles at the inside of her cheeks, seeping into her sinuses. She breathes frost down and into her lungs, and breathes it back out. When she breathes in again, it's neat, and bright, and sharp – beautiful, blessed relief in the form of clear-glass clarity.

It's like the woman said; a cure for many ills, and god, Suzume thinks; it feels so good. The too-tense muscles of her neck unravel with each lungful of stinging air. Letting her head roll back against her brother's upper arm, she nurses at the candy with her tongue in a desperate attempt to wring more of that simple but curiously effective magic from it.

In the periphery of her vision, she's aware of her brother's lambent eyes fixed intently on her. "That good, huh?"

Pushing the candy into the pouch of her cheek, she lets her eyes focus on him properly. His own seems caught first by her mouth, and then by her throat when she swallows. His eyes simmer with a naked preoccupation she doesn't understand, lurid and hungry. Heat flowers in her cheeks, and she doesn't understand that, either. "It – it feels like it's helping my head," she says, a little meekly.

His eyes crinkle above his mask in what she knows would be one of his wider grins if she could see his mouth. "The fucking wonders of grandma candy," he says, and reaches for the second piece.

Marginally more lucid now, Suzume curls her fingers around it right before he snatches it from her. He makes a little huffy noise, something between amusement and faux-annoyance, and flicks the barrier of her fist with his fingers. "Thought she said to share."

"She did," Suzume says, more solemn now, "but only under the pretense that you were a good boy."

"Yeah?" Her brother quirks his head to the side, staring down at her from under the heavy fan of his dark lashes. "You saying I'm not?"

No matter how hard she tries or how much she practices, she cannot maintain his casual indifference. Already fumbling the attempt, Suzume feels her face break into something that falters between a little like a smile and a lot like a pout. "I mean – like I said… you try, I guess."

Tugging his mask down below his mouth, her brother leans over and into her, nuzzling his mouth against her temple until she obliges him and turns her head, letting him at her ear. "C'mon… I'm good, yeah? Your good big brother. Just, y'know… maybe not in the way she means it. And hey – whatever kinda good it is, it's enough that I'm your favorite." His breath is heavy and hot, a tickle against her throat, and his lowered voice milks a shiver out of her whole body. "And really, I'd take that over being good any day… just like I think you prefer it, too."

Suzume closes her eyes. Nestled between her teeth and her cheek, the candy burns, just like her brother's breath as it slithers over her skin and into her hair. She breathes in, but the cool touch of the candy seems lost to all that sudden heat, its spell faltering as her brother's fingers spider over the weakening grip of her fist.

"Aww," he coos, very quietly. "Getting sleepy again?"

Sleepy is only one half of how she feels. The other half, though…

He's in her ear, still. She can feel his lips move against it. "You're so hopeless, Suzu." He says it, she thinks, like he does when he tells her he's cute. He says it like he likes it. He says it like he likes it a lot.

The charm of the candy is totally broken now. She works it back into her mouth, behind her teeth, and she tries for more of it, and it goes down like ice –

But all that ice melts in the wake of her brother's omnipresent heat and the way he works it deep into her body. That heavy fog comes back. His hand over hers needles the candy from her fingers, and then, moments later, she feels the brush of his palm against her cheek – more heat.

More heat, so much more of it, and that brief bit of clarity fades, melted away, again. Time melts away again, too. It slips from her fingers like a poorly developed photograph to join a graveyard of similar prints at her feet, muddled quick shot moments that she frowns down at, trying to parse, trying desperately to remember. Every time she opens her eyes there are more of those moments with nothing in her memory to string them together at all. Everything feels disjointed. Everything is as ephemeral as a dream, minutes after waking. It feels important right as she comes too, but then there it goes, lost between her grasping hands – there, and then gone.

She drifts on the train some more, and the cities go by in more blurry snapshots. Then she is in the backseat of a taxi, curled up on herself with her head on her brother's thigh and his fingers sifting through her hair. Outside the rain patters against the windows, blazing with vibrant, chaotic colors as it leeches light from nearby neon signs. They wash her skin in a myriad of kaleidoscope designs, and she stares at her lifted hand, watching the light play over it with its dizzying patterns. She closes her eyes – and then opens them. There are fingers laced between her own, nacreous brilliance reflected in the metal staples of her brother's much larger hand. He lifts it up, and hers with it, out of her view – and she feels heat against her knuckles and recognizes it as his open mouth settling over her skin. She opens her own mouth, just a parting of lips, but she isn't sure why – what she wants to say –

Please, maybe. Please what? Please stop? Please more?

And then her eyes close again.

When she opens them again, she's no longer in the car. She's on his back again, head slumped weakly against his own as he carries her into…

What looks like a mechanic shop.

The room is a wide open space, an otherwise innocuous rectangle made brutal by design, its clean angles and stark walls crafted out of severe, dark grey concrete. The floor is more of the same stuff, the monotony of all that grey broken up only by a few discolored stains of indeterminate origin, and Suzume is overwhelmed all at once with the heady miasma of oil and machinery that permeates the room. There are a few cars lofted high on metal risers, and several men crowd around beside them and under them, talking in quiet voices amongst themselves. They cast curious glances at Suzume and her brother, but most look away. Maybe two nod in that gruff way of men who have little to say.

(And apparently none of them have anything to say to either her or her brother.)

"Nii-chan." She whispers the sobriquet, anxiety pumping cold ice-water wakefulness into her sluggish veins. This does not seem like a good stand in for a hospital. Rather than say that, though, she tries for something else – something a little less direct. "Are we – are we there?"

"Not yet." She doesn't know where there is, but apparently he does. He shakes his head, the willful strands of his black hair tickling at her cheeks. She waits for him to elaborate, tapping her fingers probingly against his chin, and he does. Eventually. "Almost."

Awful as always. It seems that, like the men, he has nothing to say. Nothing he's willing to say, anyway.

Biting the inside of her cheek to keep herself lucid, she fights the desire to close her eyes as her brother carries her deeper into the building and through a door that opens up into a long, winding hallway. Concrete gives way to filthy tiled floors that look like they haven't been cleaned since their inception and only marginally less dirty plex plastic paneled walls. The gray is perhaps one or two shades lighter than the machine shop, but the lighting is much, much worse. Like her memories, everything feels awfully hazy, enveloped by that endless and chokingly oppressive monotony.

"This seems like the sorta place someone would go to hide a body," she says, reproachfully. They pass by many rooms branching off from the hallway, most only marked by heavy, impassive steel doors. Still, some have windows, and through one particularly dirty one, Suzume spies an obviously ransacked office. A mess of filing cabinets stand around haphazardly like plundered graves, their drawers ripped open, their insides gutted, their white and manilla innards strewn about the room in an insane confetti snowstorm of paper viscera. It's everywhere: scattered across the desks and pooling on the floor, and all of it smothered beneath a blanket of dust so thick it lends everything an alarmingly furry appearance.

Amending her previous statement, Suzume adds, "Or, more like the sorta place a lot of someones would hide a lot of bodies."

Her brother laughs, and like the sharp click of his boots on the tiled floor, that laughter skitters off uncannily down the hallway, echoing as it goes. "Seems more like the vibe of one of those dumb zombie games you're too much of a baby to handle."

"Ugh – don't be stupid." But he's right. Gazing down that endless hallway with all its branching and strange and seemingly deserted rooms suddenly fills her with a new and potent dread, layered thickly over the unease she was already feeling. It absolutely looks like somewhere that would be infested with zombies, or monsters, or any other number of horrifically unpleasant things to run into. Suzume tries to suppress a shudder and fails. "They're not – zombies aren't real anyway."

"Who's to say someone's quirk doesn't make them one, though? Or that they don't have a quirk that can make other people zombies?" The pair of them pass by another room, this one with its door seemingly half-shorn from its hinges. Inside it lies what maybe might have been a kitchen some myriad years ago. Suzume catches a glimpse of a sink overflowing with dishes, their surfaces so encrusted over with mysterious and offensive looking substances that she suspects the whole place would hold more interest for a crackpot archaeologist than anyone trying to make a meal. The sight makes her feel queasy, and she's already queasy enough. If any of this troubles her brother, though, there's no indication. He continues indifferently on, completely and infuriatingly conversational. "I mean, if I was a zombie, I'd definitely be hanging out in some shithive like this, is all I'm saying."

"Okay," she says, trying very hard to ignore that admittedly sound logic, "but why did you take me to some super haunted zombie hovel?"

"'Cause there's a doctor here," her brother says, coolly. "Or, what passes as good enough for one, anyway."

"Here? Is the doctor a zombie?"

"Hey, if he is, at least it would be a quick visit. Just gotta let him bite you, and everything's aces," her brother says, in his best and most winning imitation of someone far more reasonable than he actually is, "I think being a zombie would solve at least a couple of your problems."

"Noooooo – "

"Oh c'mon, don't fuss like that, Suzu. It wouldn't be so bad, yeah? I bet you'd be a real cute zombie, all drooly and shit. And you know I'd take good care of you." His head lists to the side and bumps into hers, very gently. "Tie you up in the yard outside and build you a cozy baby zombie shelter to keep you outta the weather. Feed you all the people I didn't like. That kid on the train… those little fuckfreaks at your school – "

"Gross. No. Bleh!" The noises of theatrical disgust she's making have her brother laughing again, and despite how utterly miserable she's felt lately, she finds herself leaning into it, hamming up the whiny melodrama she knows her brother loves. And god, it isn't fair – it isn't fair how good it feels. This back and forth, the give and take, the teasing, all of it… it's been so, so long. It feels like she has her brother back, again. "I don't wanna – don't wanna eat people I know or I've seen or – "

"Mmm. Strangers, then?"

She considers this option only briefly. "No – no, that's no good, either – "

"So no strangers, and no one you know. What, gonna be a vegetarian zombie, Suzu? You're such a soft touch."

"Yeah, well, you're so smart and so tough – who'd you eat, then?"

And he answers immediately, without a shred of hesitation, "You."

"What!" Suzume's immediate reaction is a surprised laugh. But then she's playing that single word answer back in her head – turning it over and over, scrutinizing it, interpreting it, feeling it for either hard or soft edges – and it doesn't sound like a joke. It also doesn't sound like a threat, either. It sounds, she thinks, like a fact, calmly delivered by someone who had come to accept it a long, long time ago.

What?

She doesn't have time to ask him about it, though. Very suddenly, and without her having realized how close they were, Suzume finds they've finally reached the end of the hallway. Unfortunately its terminus opens up into a similarly long and decidedly ominous staircase even more poorly lit than the hallway. Like the machine shop long behind them, the steps and their narrow coffin of a passageway are made entirely of concrete. Frowning over her brother's shoulder, Suzume can make out the long stretch of a near lightless descent that bottoms out in a flicker of some distant, faraway light.

"Umm, so that looks really haunted, too," Suzume declares, despairingly, deciding to table the zombie-talk for another time. "Is it too late to say that I'd maybe prefer a hospital?"

She thinks he must linger there at the landing just to scare her. She regrets immensely how well it seems to be working. "Sure is," he says after a very pregnant pause. And then: "Try not to wiggle too much, yeah? This shit's steep. Unless you'd rather trade the zombie gig for the ghost life, in which case, waggle away."

And then it's down into the unrelenting and claustrophobic dark.

Suzume closes her eyes. The air is so stale. Even with her eyes closed and her face buried in her brother's throat, she can feel the intense pressure of the narrow walls all around them, trying to smother her like an spiteful and terrible spirit. None of this feels real or normal, and yet there's something thrilling about it all, too – about being here, with her brother, exploring the winding, back rooms and hallways of some mysterious machine shop in Yokohama, only to descend down into the dark bowels of… of what? He still hasn't told her. Not really. A sort-of-maybe-doctor. Zombies. Ghosts. Herself, she thinks, and him. The two of them, together. With her face tucked against his neck, she allows herself a wild and giddy and terrified smile, and before she knows it, she's smothering semi-delirious giggles into the fabric of his shirt.

"All right, nutter," scolds her brother mildly, and with obvious affection. "Thought I told you you needed to settle down unless you want us to both eat it."

She does. She tries, anyway, digging her teeth into her lip in an attempt to fend off her laughter as she counts the downward steps silently in her own mind. (One, two, three – )

The muscles of her cheeks ache. It's been so long since she's smiled – really, truly smiled. It feels like forever that she's had so much time with him.

( – ten, eleven, twelve – )

Is it okay, she thinks? Can't it be? Please? She works roaming fingers into the light fabric of his hood, and then over the scar tissue at the nape of his neck, feeling blindly for the familiar rough ridges of it. The wild, untamed strands of his hair brush against her knuckles. Suddenly desperate for more, she pushes her hand up and into it, following the curve of the back of his head, his hair sliding between her outstretched fingers.

He shivers, briefly, almost imperceptibly, but says nothing.

( – twenty two, twenty three, twenty four – )

"I'm sorry," she says quietly, impulsively, feeling like there is sand in her mouth, her eyes still shut. "I've put you out a lot."

"Come off that mopey shit," he says, but not unkindly. "If anyone can put me out, it's you. We're almost there, anyway."

'Almost there,' is thirty-five slow and careful steps since she'd started counting. Suzume opens her eyes, and finds they are at the end of yet another long hallway – except this one isn't really a hallway. No, she thinks, dazed by what she's seeing. It's too wide. Too tall. It's a tunnel – or, more accurately, a street inside a tunnel. The ceiling is a labyrinthine maze of industrial piping and more of that flickering fluorescent lighting from before, and the walls are no longer filthy plastic panels giving way to the occasional window. Rather, there are no real walls at all. There are only what she quickly realizes are store fronts.

The inexplicable underground street stretches on farther than she can see. Air conditioning blasting from one of those many overhead pipes sends a chilly, artificial breeze drifting all down the checked tile passage, rustling at the many handmade signs assembled from neon colored poster board. One store seems to be selling… DVDS? Another, jewelry. After that: books. Low prices, some of them promise; great deals, say a few more. The signs flutter like the wings of uneasy insects in the surprisingly brisk air.

Suzume has never seen anything like it. She blinks, and blinks, but the vision of the place never seems to waver. The black that has been creeping like a dreary fog at the edges of her vision is gone, and does not threaten to overtake her.

"Where – where are we?" Suzume asks in undisguised wonder.

"Yokohama," he says, as if that is in any way a suitable answer.

Giving him the benefit of the doubt, she tries again. "No, I mean like – where is this? What is this?"

Endlessly unfair, her brother, unfazed as ever, simply answers, "Narushada ward."

"God!" Forgetting herself momentarily, she digs her chin into his shoulder, pouting – and then winces through it. Exaggerated expressions still seem to draw out the ache that lingers behind her eyes to an almost unbearable degree. "God," she grumbles instead, this time much more subdued.

"You'd make a shit tour guide, Horrorshow."

The sudden intrusion of another masculine voice – one she very much does not recognize – has her head swerving faster than she means towards the source. The world spins in a melange of color, and then her eyes land on the indistinct shape of an approaching figure exiting what she thinks was the DVD store. She blinks a few times, bringing him into hazy focus.

Because it is a him. A man – but then, she'd guessed that from his voice. She blinks again. An older man, quite a bit older than herself and even her brother. His hair spills silver against his temples, swept away from his age-lined brow and his very alert gaze. A lit cigarette dangles from the corner of his broad and smiling mouth, smoke wafting off down the street in the great, bellowing wheeze of the air conditioning.

"Good thing I ain't looking to be one, then."

Horrorshow, he'd said, like a name, and her brother had answered, almost disinterestedly. Does that mean her brother is –

"Yeah, but you got yourself such a cute lil' guest there. Can't make an exception, even for such esteemed company?" The man comes to stand before the pair of them, his hands tucked into the pockets of a pair of loose slacks, a collection of DVDs tucked under one arm. Up close now, she can see that one of his teeth is missing, the gap a stark bit of shadow set glaringly off-center in his nicotine-stained grin. Not wanting to be rude, Suzume tries very hard to not look at it, fixing her attention instead on his glasses.

Round-framed and lightly tinted, they lend him a strange, eccentric air. Everything about him does. He seems at once both irreverently casual and strangely professional in an ostentatiously purple suit that gleams even in the thin light. Silk, she thinks – or some other shiny, fancy fabric.

The man holds her gaze and winks back at her, drawing a hand from his pocket so he can reason with his cigarette. "Horrorshow being rude to you, Missy?" Even the way he talks is strangely at odds with itself, stradling the midline between polite society and obvious scoundrel with all the grace of an Olympic gymnast. Sleazy, she's clear-headed enough to recognize – but still charismatic, somehow.

"He always is." It's out of her mouth before she realizes what she's saying. Rather than trying to backpedal, she punctuates it with an eye roll she immediately regrets. It brings the nausea back to the forefront of her thoughts and very nearly into her mouth. Suzume swallows back stomach acid with a flinch.

The man laughs. It's a genuine bark of laughter originating from somewhere deep in his belly, warmed all the way through its husky, smoker's edges. Her brother – Horrorshow – snorts, and with an exaggerated derision that doesn't hold even a fraction of the venom she knows he's capable of. "Oh get off my dick. She's my baby sister," he says, as if this is any sort of justification. When the man quirks one quizzical grey brow, still smiling, her brother further elaborates: "I'm fully entitled to be as rude to her as I want, whenever I want."

That is, of course, not news to Suzume.

"Of course. Far be it from me to deny a man the benefits of being an older sibling." The older man lets his gaze drift between the pair of them with intense fascination, working the end of his cigarette between his still intact teeth. "But what's your excuse with everyone else, then?"

(Apparently it's not news to the older man, either.)

Suzume thinks she just might like this man. She thinks her brother must, too, because he only snorts again in what she thinks must be amusement and says, "You fucking jackass," with the sort of sentimentality he uses when he tells her she's being dumb. Most tellingly though, he doesn't turn the man to greasy, smoking gobbets on the spot.

Suzume's head whirls. Does her brother actually have… friends?

Raking a hand through his ash-colored hair, the man dips into a flourish of a half-bow and holds her gaze through the entirety of it. "Well then, Miss Baby Sister – given that your brother is perhaps the worst guy you could hope for when it comes to explanations or, let's be real, very nearly anything at all, let me be the first to welcome you to the Gutters. I'm Giran, and I'll be playing the part of your humble tour guide on what I suspect will be a most exciting sojourn into what we'll call… well, let's just say: dubiously legal medical tourism. I'm sure you'll find it all very exotic." He winks at her again as he rights himself. "Assuming of course you're the one in need of the tune-up? Can't imagine Dabi doing this whole piggy-back routine otherwise."

Dabi. That's a name she knows. That's the name he'd given her, years and years ago. It feels unreal to hear someone else use it – to hear it spoken aloud. He's not mentioned it since then, and neither has she. As his younger sister, she's never had the right to call him by his name. She sincerely doubts it's something he'll ever allow her to do.

A not insignificant part of her thrills at hearing it, though, because it's confirmation that the name he'd given her then was real enough to be one other people know, too. Of course she'd always suspected it probably wasn't his real name – unless his parents were especially cruel, anyway – but she had always despaired at the idea that it was something he'd made up on the spot, as if she were someone to be kept at arm's length, so far outside the realm of his life that she wasn't to be allowed to know him for who he was –

Or, who he had become.

Dabi, she thinks. Dabi. Horrorshow. Her brother.

Her brother says, rather indifferently, "Turns out there are exceptions to everything, and this one – " He jostles his arms a bit, and her by proxy. " – happens to be busted enough to merit the 'whole piggy-back routine.'"

Giran's eyes pass from her to her brother, his already ample grin stretching further outwards. "You'll have to forgive me for saying I'd never have taken you for someone with exceptions. I'd meant the earlier comment as a jab." They land on Suzume again, and he reaches out to tweak her cheek, chuckling around his cigarette. "But something tells me your exceptions start and end here."

The gesture doesn't hurt – not like how her brother sometimes does it, anyway. It's her brother's turn to laugh now, quieter and more reserved, and she is beyond bewildered when he only shakes his head at Giran and says, very mildly, "Come off it, old man. You can yap at me later. Pretty sure she's super concussed, and her arm's broken, and her leg's all jacked up, too. Elixir free now?"

Giran studies Suzume for a half moment more before his attention snaps back to her brother. With a nod, he turns on his heels, marching off down the long underground street, his dark leather shoes – just as shiny as his suit – clicking smartly across the blue and white tiles. Her brother, still carrying her, trots a bit to catch up, falling into a steady pace beside him.

"Was he busy?" Her brother's question is a cursory one, Suzume thinks. Curious, maybe, but not curious in a way that suggests he really cares if he's putting this Elixir out at all. That doesn't surprise her. It's hard to imagine her brother caring about putting anyone out, regardless of who they are.

Giran takes a meditative drag of his cigarette and nods in greeting to a pair of men exiting an unmarked door that leads into what looks to be another collection of unmarked offices. These seem considerably more well-maintained than the ones above – nevermind staffed. The pair return the nod in a gesture that is, if not exactly friendly, at least respectful. Unlike in the weird and claustrophobic upstairs hallways, there are actually people scattered about here, drifting in and out of the eclectic collection of businesses. Many of them steal curious glances at the trio. Suzume doesn't miss the uneasy expressions on some of them when they very obviously recognize her brother.

Exhaling smoke, Giran's grin doesn't falter. "Let's just say you weren't wrong to call in the favor," he says with the poise of a diplomat who is both used to smoothing things over and who also revels in the drama those little favors tend to incur.

"I hope… I hope I'm not putting anyone out," Suzume mumbles, her fingers twisting reflexively in the fabric of her brother's light hoodie.

Her brother scoffs, but before he can say anything, Giran neatly cuts him off. "Don't worry your broken little head about it, Missy. Horrorshow'll make sure Elixir's well-compensated for his very valuable time. Your brother's as rotten as they come – something I suspect you are already very well aware of, and my sympathies for that – " ("Ha-fucking-ha," interjects her brother, trenchantly.) " – but he's surprisingly good about the follow through, and that's all anyone gives a shit about down here. Fidelity's its own kind of currency, and it being in short supply among… hmmm, let's say, the shadier parts of society, well, having any goes a long way." He blows a ring of smoke up and into the air. Suzume watches it stretch and widen like his perpetual grin before the rush of the air conditioner snatches it away, ruining the charm of it. Giran chuckles at her dismayed expression. "Nevermind real dosh, of course. Money is king and country for most, and I can assure you Elixir likes that, too."

A heavy weight sinks deep and awful in the pits of her already thoroughly troubled stomach. She hadn't thought to bring her wallet with her before they'd left. Truth be told, she hadn't been able to think about much at all back home. Even if she had, Suzume doubts the weekly allowance awarded to her by her father's estate would go too terribly far in what little she's learned of the Gutters so far, which is distressingly little. Still, it's enough to be worried. "Is it… gonna be really expensive?"

"C'mon, quit fussing." Again, her brother tilts his head into hers lightly. "I got it."

Evidently as keen-eyed as her brother, Giran seems to notice how little that serves to comfort her, and he reaches out to take hold of her shoulder, giving it an amicable squeeze. "If it's money you're worried about, I promise you that Horrorshow here has what I imagine has gotta be quite the nest egg saved up." Dropping his hand, he plucks the cigarette from his mouth and ashes it onto the dirty tiles. "Assuming of course that he's not got some unfortunate vices he's kept secret from me. Always a possibility. I didn't know about you, for instance. Our boy likes keeping his cards close to his heart."

"Hey, I just keep everyone on a need-to-know basis," her brother says with as much of a shrug as he can manage with Suzume draped over his back. "And when it comes down to it, it turns out no one really needs to know much of anything."

Giran laughs like he's very used to this and finds it wholly within the realm of acceptable responses. Suzume is used to it too, but crinkles her nose, keeping her attention fixed on Giran. There's no use trying to get anything out of her brother, but Giran seems a lot more forthcoming. "Vices?"

"Oh, you know." Giran lifts his hand with a twirl of his wrist, gesturing grandly all around them. "Just the typical temptations that plague all men: drink! Women, both of the free and very un-free variety! Games of chance! And, sometimes, even more illicit things – "

"No vices," her brother grunts, then jostles her again. "Unless you count this hopeless little runt."

"I'm not really hopeless," Suzume grumbles, reaching out to tug on one of his ears. He lets her pull his head down with it even though she hardly uses any force, and she catches a hint of his faint smirk and the flash of his electric gaze fixed on her when he does.

"No? Just like you're real mature now, too, huh? Learning so many new things about you today, Suzu."

Giran watches them from out of the corners of his crinkling eyes, and his tone takes on the affectation of someone very wise – and, Suzume thinks, maybe a little teasing, too. "I suppose men are most inclined to make exceptions for their favorite vices."

"Yeah, well." Suzume braces herself for her brother's rebuttal, but it doesn't come. Rather, he gives another half-hearted attempt at a shrug and only says, in that low, indifferent way of his that so easily slinks under her skin, "Guilty as charged."

The immediate elation at that admission – and to someone other than herself, even! – very nearly threatens to undo her. It settles over her like his heat so often does, boilingly hot under her collar and across her cheeks, simmering all the way up to the tips of her ears. It prickles in her eyes, too, like scalding needles, burning, and she blinks away that sting, too embarrassed to be brought to tears, happy or otherwise, in front of Giran. Instead, she slides her arm around her brother's shoulders and tucks her head against his neck, both to hide her face –

And because she very suddenly wants – no, needs – to be as close to him as possible.

Giran's laughter is fast becoming a familiar thing. "Oh, look – I think she's melting."

"No doubt," her brother says, and not wholly indifferent this time.

She is, she thinks. She is. And while her brother and Giran descend into a conversation about some recent news Suzume is far too dizzy to keep up with, she continues to melt for the entire rest of the walk.