Note: TW: Mentions of canonical violence, including major spoilers for chapter 310.

XXX

If he hadn't fired on it from the outside, a part of Ogata had felt, his head would have simply exploded from the inside. Maybe it was the poison, or the deafening noise of the train on the rails, or merely the horrible weight of the guilt he'd up until then failed to face; but his skull had seemed too small, and far too loud. For a moment, everything had appeared to be happening all at once.

Everything, and then, nothing.

With a strange sort of calm, or perhaps an emptiness, Ogata looks to his left and then to his right. He finds himself in a clearing bracketed by a patchy copse of pine trees, covered in a thin layer of snow. In the clearing's center, there's a fire, surrounded by four logs. He has his cloak, but not his gun. He has two eyes.

Yuusaku sits on one of the logs, his elbows propped on his knees, his hands together before him. He watches the fire.

Ah, Ogata thinks. I'm in Hell.

Not that he'd had any illusions on the matter of where he would go, of course. Still oddly empty, he goes and sits on the log next to Yuusaku's log, wordlessly. With this unnatural absence of anything inside him now, it makes it difficult for Ogata not to realize, with a faint, phantom pang of irritation, that he really had been just as ordinary, pathetic, and blind as anyone else, throughout his life. He had felt so strongly about so many things, like some idiot. Like some little kid.

Ah, well. No use wallowing in it now.

Then again, no use in not wallowing in it, either. Not now.

"Brother," Yuusaku greets, looking up. Ogata doesn't look back at him, quite deliberately. Yuusaku sounds pleased to see him, as he always had, and that's pretty irritating too. If Ogata were in his right mind, he's sure, it would be profoundly irritating. Less pleased, though, Yuusaku goes on, "You don't look that much older than when I died."

"Than when I killed you," Ogata corrects.

"Well," says Yuusaku. "Yes." There's a pause, but not a long one. "Father told me."

Ogata considers this. He admits, "I thought you were haunting me."

"What?" Yuusaku sits up straighter, surprised. "No. I mean, I would have. I wanted to know how you were doing. But I don't think it would have been possible."

Ogata does look at Yuusaku then, flatly. What kind of ghost sticks around out of altruism, anyway? But, then, Yuusaku had always been a frustrating person. And Ogata is plenty frustrating in his own right, he's self-aware enough to acknowledge.

"It's not like I wasn't… confused," Yuusaku tries to defend himself, delicately. Tactfully. Ogata thinks about throwing a wad of snow at him. "When I got here, and then… You know." Ogata does not. "But I've had a lot of time to think. And I do have questions, Brother. But you have to understand, I still…"

Yuusaku trails off. He swallows.

Finally, he concludes, "I wanted you to live."

Ogata looks away from Yuusaku again, back at the flickering flames. Otherwise, he really would have thrown something at him.

"Be realistic," is what Ogata tells him, eventually.

He doesn't expect it when Yuusaku says, "No."

Ogata eyes him slantways. Yuusaku's jaw is set with an uncharacteristic stubbornness, which Ogata can't recall having seen when they were alive.

"No," Yuusaku repeats. "I'm not going to be realistic. You're my brother, and I loved you, and I still love you. And I wanted you to live."

"I killed you," Ogata feels the need to remind him once more, annoyed.

"And that was wrong of you," Yuusaku concedes, but slowly, and if he were anyone else, it would be the sort of tone you take with someone very young or very stupid. But, then, Ogata had already established to himself that he's very stupid, in his last moments. Still, though, it irks. "But I have had a lot of time to think. And what I think is, that before anything else, I'd like to know why."

"Why I killed you," Ogata reiterates, because he thinks it's important, and because he's hoping it will ruffle Yuusaku's feathers.

But Yuusaku, with only some exasperation, says, "Yes." And after a beat: "Yes, I want to know why you killed me."

Ogata exhales, partially just to stall. He takes it as a victory, if nothing else, that he's managed to get Yuusaku to state that much plainly, rather than dancing around it.

"Firstly," Ogata starts, terse, "It was because I'm an idiot."

Yuusaku nods, like this is a given. Ogata is struck, vividly, by the realization that he has no idea if that's how Yuusaku would have reacted in life, too. He himself, after all, never would have admitted something like this to Yuusaku in life. He hadn't even really admitted it to himself.

Ogata thinks, briefly, about all the other people he could blame, all the decisions that had led up to the instant in which he'd watched Yuusaku through the scope and pulled the trigger. His parents, to whom he'd been invisible or worse; Lieutenant Tsurumi, who had lied to him; Usami, who had egged him on. But as much as Ogata has been made, recently, to reckon with how poorly he had known himself, he's still not so worthless that he would hide behind his circumstances. Not in this, and not in much else, really.

"I was angry," he says, at length. "I figured it was mostly about our father, back then. That I was just jealous of you, and how different our lives were, just because we were born to different mothers. That he loved your mother, and not mine, even though she loved him." Ogata stares directly into the campfire, chiefly so that he doesn't have to look at Yuusaku anymore. "But more than anything, and more than anyone, I was angry with you."

Silence stretches between them. For how long, Ogata couldn't guess.

But at some point, Yuusaku asks, with a note of honest confusion, "Why do you think Father loved my mother?"

Ogata, who had expected perhaps any other reaction but that one, startles, and without meaning to, he turns back to Yuusaku in his own confusion. "What?"

"Why do you think Father loved my mother?" Yuusaku questions, again. "Because they were married?"

Mortifyingly, it dawns on Ogata that yes, that had been exactly what he'd thought. He had been horrifically naive, he realizes, with a rising embarrassment. Idealistic, even. Romantic. And after he'd so confidently told Asirpa that men will stick it in anything, too.

Ogata looks at Yuusaku like a spooked, unblinking, unusually off-putting deer. Yuusaku looks back at him almost with the same expression, except that when he does it, it's much less creepy and much more immediately human.

"Brother," Yuusaku says, tentatively, uncertainly. "Father was… I mean. I hate to speak badly of him, and I know he tried his best with me, in his own way. I want to believe he did the best that he could with both of us. But, well." Before Ogata's blood can begin to boil, if it even can, in this purgatory, Yuusaku shakes his head. "Brother, I'm sure that I'm the last person you need to tell you this, but Father's best was awful."

For the second time in one conversation, Yuusaku completely blindsides Ogata. Ogata continues to stare at him, very intelligently.

Yuusaku sighs, deflates, and goes on, even though Ogata is very confident that he would prefer not to. "He was kind to me, truly, and warm. But it was because of the mother that I was born to, and even her, he treated…" Yuusaku's mouth presses into a thin, disapproving line. "Very badly!"

Despite himself, Ogata snorts.

"Very badly?" Ogata echoes.

But instead of taking the bait, Yuusaku nods, emphatically. "Yes! Not once can I ever remember him having taken her feelings into account, not on anything. He betrayed her, over and over again. After he abandoned your mother, do you think he stopped?"

It's as if a bucket of cold water had been upended over Ogata's head.

Yuusaku barrels ahead. "And he did abandon your mother, and you! When I found out, do you know how? Not from him, I'll tell you. I had to hear about it at the academy! And I was furious with him, Brother! All these ideals he'd raised me with, and he was a hypocrite."

Yuusaku slumps again, head in his hands.

"I used to think it was just my mother, but after that, and after all this time…" Yuusaku looks up pitifully at Ogata through his fingers, with one weepy eye. "I don't think he took anyone else's feelings into account, Brother. His feelings, his career, the way others saw him… Could that have really been all that mattered? When he was here, that's the sense I got. I don't know that he knew any other way of relating to people. To the world."

Ogata settles more fully onto his log. "Well, obviously. That's how almost everyone is. Or didn't you notice?"

Ogata used to believe that Yuusaku really hadn't, or that he'd chosen not to. But now, at least, it's become evident that Yuusaku has been paying more attention than Ogata had wanted to give him credit for. So, Ogata does think that Yuusaku must have noticed: because people are cruel every day, in the smallest, most mundane of acts. People will protect their own sense of right, their sense of peace, their sense of self, at the cost of everything up to and including their own lives.

Ogata should know.

Hah.

"I thought…" Yuusaku sits up again. Breathes. Continues. "I suppose that I thought, if I could prove myself to be reliable and trustworthy, there would be people who would speak to me honestly, and who I could be honest with, too. That we could set aside our egos, or whatever else it was." He smiles, then, sad and a bit wry, and meets Ogata's eyes squarely. "But that's easier said than done, isn't it?"

Ogata grits his teeth. "I was honest with you. Once."

"With that prisoner," Yuusaku agrees, quietly. Remorse. It's an emotion whose existence Ogata had wanted to deny wholesale, but only because it had been too horrifically painful to face. Yet, here Yuusaku is. "And I thought I was honest with you then too, but all I did was prove to you that I wasn't reliable at all, huh? You told me how you felt, and I told you that you had no right to exist."

Ogata's hands tighten to fists.

"If you apologize to me," he doesn't precisely hiss, "I'm going to kill you again."

Yuusaku laughs, but his voice is thick, like he really will cry. "I wanted so badly to express to you that you were my brother, that I loved you no matter what, but when you tried to open up to me about the feelings you were struggling with, I said something so horrible to you. I really did believe that I was reassuring you, Brother, but what could it have sounded like to you? You tried to be honest with me, and I wouldn't look at you. Really look at you. And for what? Just to protect my own sense of comfort. My own understanding of the world. So, whether you want to know about it or not, I am sorry."

More silence rings out. Ogata isn't as unsettled, angry, whatever, as he might have expected. It's a phantom sensation, swallowed up by the emptiness of death. Still, he's so tense that he feels brittle.

"I killed you," is the only counterargument that Ogata can come up with, but it's a very potent one.

"Is that why you were so angry with me?" Yuusaku asks.

Ogata grits out, "Yes." But Ogata would be a terrible hypocrite, and potentially one even worse than his father, if he left it at that. "You wouldn't kill with your own hands, but it was fine for the rest of us to kill to protect you. Because you were better, somehow. For some reason. And yet, for some reason, you wouldn't leave me alone. You'd follow me around, calling me your brother, going on about how you wanted us to, what? Play house?" That last word, Ogata practically spits out, full of worthless venom. He doesn't know if it's for Yuusaku, or if it's really for himself. "And do you know what the worst part was?"

Yuusaku doesn't miss a beat. With a sympathy, with a guilt, that sets Ogata's teeth on edge, he finishes, "That you believed me."

"That I was right to." Yuusaku's eyes go wide at this, but Ogata is on a roll now. "I was right to believe you, and then I gave up on it the second that being honest with you was hard. I wanted so badly to have someone see me and like me, somehow, for me. Even with how I am. Even with everything. And I was so smug about it, I was insufferable. I was an idiot. I was so angry at the idea of settling for anything less, of pretending, of letting you believe that you understood me even as you wouldn't look at me at all. But you would have looked at me, you're looking at me right now. If I'd just…"

"If you'd just tried to understand me too," Yuusaku realizes.

It's kind of like a slap in the face. For both of them, Ogata hazards.

And he really hadn't tried to consider things from Yuusaku's perspective, had he? All the while, throwing his hissy fit over Yuusaku's difficulty with accepting the worst of him. All this time, Ogata has held it against Yuusaku that he'd failed to face a painful reality. But what was it, again, that Ogata had preferred a bullet over having to live with?

He really is just as ordinary, pathetic, and blind as anyone else.

Of course Yuusaku wouldn't… couldn't, really, didn't know how to, express his own frustrations to Ogata in life. Now that Ogata thinks about it, it's easy to connect Yuusaku's situation, the hopes and expectations that had been placed on him, and the stress he must have been under to be perfectly agreeable and convenient at all times, to his decision not to share his misgivings about their father with Ogata. He would have seen it as a burden, one it would have been unfair to expect Ogata to carry with him.

What was that saying? About judging yourself by your intentions, and others by their actions?

Hah.

"I'm an idiot," Ogata expresses, for the third time. For the first time, he says, "I'm sorry."

"I forgive you," Yuusaku tells him, sure as the sun rises in the east, without a shred of hesitation.

They're quiet, again.

"Frankly," says Ogata, eventually, "I still don't think there's anything you should've apologized for."

With an air of irony, the corners of Yuusaku's mouth turn up into a small smile. "Because you killed me."

"Because I killed you." Ogata nods.

Silence, one more time, but of a much more companionable character. Until, that is, Yuusaku stands.

"We should get going, don't you think?" Yuusaku prompts.

If Ogata were a more expressive person, he would grimace. "I have someone I should wait up for." He scratches the back of his head, the closest he can get to sheepish. "Maybe more than one person."

Yuusaku's eyebrows disappear behind his hat. He sits back down.

"I'll wait with you." He smiles, more fully now. "We still have a lot of catching up to do, I think."

Ogata would like that, he realizes.

He just has to work out how to get away with never mentioning the feud he started with a twelve-year-old.

XXX

Note: Shoutout to the Naruto campfire purgatory dimension, you will always be famous.

Also, for anyone who doesn't know, they extended the deadline for voting on the SpaceBattles short story contest to December 1st. So, if anybody's already on there and feels like voting for IlPogitano's Legitimate Methods of Problem-Solving, it's at: https/forums./threads/official-25th-anniversary-short-story-contest-public-voting-now-open.1178400/