016: the secrets we keep from each other.

Early Spring; 11 years.

In late March – almost two weeks out before she begins her sixth and final year of primary school – Suzume learns something new about her big brother.

It takes her by surprise, even though she knows it shouldn't. After living together for almost a year, Suzume thinks she should know nearly everything by now. Her brother is so secretive, though, and often evasive even with things she does know, and it seems like every week she discovers something new. Most of the time, it's something small – a favored food, maybe. It will be an easy enough thing to brush off, if not delight in. It excites her to be able to make him something she knows he likes, after all.

Sometimes, though, it's something big. Those revelations always sting. How could she not notice? Why wouldn't he tell her? Doesn't he trust her?

Why? Why? Why?

It's extremely rare that her brother ever volunteers anything of his own accord, and this new bit of older brother lore is absolutely no exception. If Suzume wants to know something, she either has to ask dozens of times, or she has to stumble across it and piece it together herself. Often, it takes some combination of all three.

This one she uncovers while he's sleeping.

Despite spending every night with him, Suzume has never actually seen him asleep. He falls asleep after she does and wakes up before her. As an exceptionally light sleeper – and as someone who wakes up bizarrely alert – her brother is often even awake when Suzume stirs in the middle of the night. It never matters why; it could be a nightmare that shakes her from sleep. She could need a drink, or to use the bathroom, and there he is, wide awake, voice free of that thick grogginess that makes hers sound clumsy and sleep-drunk. It doesn't matter what time or for what reason she wakes up.

"Useless," he'll chide her when she mumbles that she's thirsty. "But lemme get it for you." Or, when she whines that it's too cold to get out of bed and make the perilously frigid journey down the hall to the bathroom, he's there to snort and call her a crybaby, as smug and cutting as he always is.

Still, for all his bluster, her brother always throws back the covers and, lifting her up against his impossibly warm body, carries her there, anyway.

In the beginning, this consistent alertness had fascinated her. For the first two weeks back when he'd first bullied his way into her bed – his bed now, she supposes – Suzume had been too anxious to explore it, to do anything but wonder. But at the start of that third week, when she'd finally grown comfortable enough to test her observations, she'd laid next to him for nearly forty minutes in the hot, quiet dark, feeling the weight of his arm thrown over her. She knew exactly how long; the small digital clock had told her. And when those long minutes had passed, she'd asked him, hushedly, "Are you still awake?"

His answer had been immediate, and not sleepy sounding at all. "Yeah."

Seven minutes later: "What about now?"

"Mmm-hmm."

It was another twenty-three more minutes spent impatiently listening to him breathe before she tried again. "Still?"

He hadn't said anything at that. Instead, she'd felt his hand glide down her arm, felt his fingers slip under the fabric of the long shirt she wore – the shirt he'd worn earlier that day. Knowing well enough what came next, Suzume had tried bolting away from him. There were enough faint yellow bruises all over her hips already.

There'd been no escape, of course. He'd caught her easy, before she even made it out of the futon. It made sense, she supposed; she was tired, and he clearly wasn't. She'd wriggled, and thrashed, and begged, put on a whole big show, the way she knew he liked. He'd held her down, anyway. When she'd cried out in the dark, she'd felt his laughter in her hair, his hot breath on her already sweat-damp neck. The air conditioning could barely keep up with the late June heat. It absolutely couldn't hold up to him, pressed against her, his searing hands all over her skin.

"You wanna stay up so bad with me, all you had to do was ask." In that moment, her brother's voice had seemed to come from everywhere in the boiling, lightless room. "I can help with that." There was the tell-tale nip of his fingers at her hip. "I can help keep you awake."

The next morning, alone and shadow-eyed in the bathroom stall at school – one of the few places she could really be alone – Suzume had counted many more bruises, fresh and blue like a starling's egg. She had never tried that again.

Had never tried to catch him asleep, again.

So when she wakes on a grey March morning and opens her eyes to find her brother facing her, his eyes closed, well –

Suzume immediately holds her breath.

For the first few seconds, she simply lays there, very nearly stunned stupid by her shock. Then comes the familiar and creeping sense of dread. It has to be a trick, she thinks. It has to be.

But as she watches, and watches, searching his face and his body for any signs of betrayal, there is nothing. The seconds tick by, and she counts them, and her brother doesn't move. Settled on his side, the rise and fall of his shoulder as he breathes is a slow, measured thing. He always breathes slowly, she's noticed, long and deep and effortless, but it's more pronounced now. More sedate.

He really is asleep.

Pursing her lips together, Suzume feels her chest begin to grow tight with lack of oxygen. She allows herself a few shallow and noiseless breaths through her nose, trying very hard to mimic the subtle way he's breathing. Only centimeters from his face, she cannot hear him at all. She can barely feel his breath on her face, warm and familiar as it is. She can only hope she's as quiet, that he can't feel hers, either.

Evidently, he doesn't. He doesn't stir. There's no flutter even to the heaviness of his eyelids. He simply breathes, and breathes, and keeps sleeping.

She almost doesn't know what to do with herself. Suzume is never given leave to observe him like this – given the opportunity to actually look at him without the threat of his piercing, impossibly blue eyes looking back. Sometimes, when he's in one of his better moods, her brother will indulge her when she asks him to close his eyes, sure –

But the threat is always there.

It doesn't help that she's long since noticed he loves lulling her into a false sense of security, only to surprise her when she least expects it. He'll keep his eyes closed, just as she's asked, but when she's halfway through trying to explain her feelings or gotten close enough to touch him – close enough to kiss him, if she wanted – he'll open his eyes, and all her fragile resolve melts away in the fiery blue heat of them.

("Not fair," she'll pout, or whine, or cry. Sometimes, it's all three. Most times, she'll look away, or cover her face. All times, she can tell by the angle of his smile and the way he gathers her up in his arms, laughing all the while, that this was wholly his intention from the start.

"Too cute," he'll say when she huffs agitatedly at him, his hands nippy, his lips hot. "Too fucking cute.")

Her brother is silent now, though, and his hands are still. The threat is still there, she realizes, but without intention behind it – without his desire to catch her off guard, to surprise her, to torment her – it's edgeless, the teeth of it filed down, blunted.

Now, it's not enough to stop her.

So, curiously – greedily, really – she watches her brother. She really looks at him, letting her eyes drink deep of all the details she's always been too shy or anxious to observe. The thin blanket, drawn up tightly under Suzume's chin, has long since slid down his arm. It bunches up in sea green waves around his naked waist, his patchwork skin left exposed in the cool, morning air.

While still very lean, he's definitely put on some weight since moving in. Where he'd been rangy and half-starved before, he's filled out some now. His muscles are more pronounced for the food he's been eating. Really, for the food she's been making for him: good cuts of meat with plenty of vegetables, and always rice to round everything out. Somehow, though, there's still a hungry cut to all the defined lines of him. His collar bones are just as pronounced as her own despite his healthy and seemingly bottomless appetite.

It makes sense, she thinks. Her brother is always hungry for something, even if not for food.

Even with his eyes closed, though, Suzume finds it difficult to look at his body for too long. It feels… well, it feels wrong, somehow. Shameful. She isn't exactly sure why, either. As with all things, her brother is shameless, and she knows he wouldn't care. She can imagine him preening, even – can perfectly picture the width of his grin. Oh, she can hear him saying, like what you see, do you?

Or, more likely, and even worse: Wanna touch, instead?

No, no – she doesn't. She doesn't. She doesn't want that at all, she doesn't, she doesn't. Her palms feel itchy. She feels queasy, thinking about it. She feels badly. She doesn't want to look, and she doesn't want to touch, and she absolutely isn't curious about it at all. Gross, she thinks, frantically, recoiling in her own mind if not outwardly. Gross, gross, gross. She doesn't like it, doesn't want it, not even a little bit.

You're a bad liar, Suzu, comes her brother's voice in her head. Her brother knows too much. Her brother knows everything, even when he's only a figment in her own mind.

In reality, thankfully, her brother sleeps, and says nothing, his face still and unchanged. So, with her own cheeks burning, Suzume draws her eyes away from his waist and his chest and his arms and looks up at his face, instead.

She's much more familiar with his face. Even if it houses the terror that is his perpetually needling gaze, she looks at it often enough. Learned from stolen glances, or from those stubborn moments when she stares, unwilling to look away – or even when he holds her face and makes her look at him, forbidding her from closing her eyes – Suzume knows his face perfectly. She can picture it exactly as it is, even with her eyes closed, every little detail memorized.

But looking at him while he's sleeping is an entirely new way of seeing her brother. His expression is… almost soft, she thinks. Even at his most unruffled, he looks nothing like he does now. Every facial muscle is relaxed. There's nothing cruel about his mouth, like there often is. His lips are slack, and marginally parted, and the slight, white peek of his teeth between them is neither mocking nor frightful.

Lifting her gaze, it's strange to find him not looking back at her. His lashes are a dark fan across the scarred flesh beneath his eyes, his brows lax and not lifted, as they usually are, in wry amusement. Suzume bites her lower lip, willing away the sudden urge she has to brush her fingers across his cheeks, where his skin is still unmarred by his flames.

Her brother is – he seems vulnerable like this, she thinks. Fragile, almost, all his hard and awful edges put away. Less haunting, and more…

Human, she finds herself thinking.

And then, Suzume looks up at his hair.

Black and wild, it's the same as it always is, spilling messy into his eyes – at least, at first glance. Suzume doesn't often pay too much attention to his hair. The dark shade of it lends itself well to the mysterious and often alarming image she has in her mind of her brother, and the wildness of it suits him. Rarely, she sometimes works up the courage to run her fingers through it, to marvel at the way it slides glossy and black against her pale skin, but her attention is most often drawn by much more important things. His hair is no help alerting her to his moods, after all.

But here, now, in the early morning gloom, Suzume notices something off – something different. Squinting, she finds herself holding her breath again at what she thinks she sees.

The roots of his hair – and even then, only in certain places – are white.

It's hardly noticeable, those tiny slivers of white. At first she thinks it's a trick of the pale sun. Slanting in through the dusty panes of glass set in the old, sliding shoji doors, it lends an ashy cast to the room. But the more she looks and blinks and looks again, the more she becomes convinced that bit of white is exactly as she's seeing it.

White, Suzume thinks, bewildered. Black and white.

Without thinking, Suzume untangles her hand from the blankets tucked under her chin and reaches out to touch her brother's hair. Her fingers brush through the fringe just across his forehead –

And, just like that, his eyes are open. Even with her attention wholly fixed on his hair, she can see that vivid blue of them in her periphery.

"What're you doing?" Wholly awake, then. He talks as he always does – as if he wasn't ever asleep, as if he's never known a day of sleep in his whole life.

In most circumstances, Suzume would jerk her hand back and assume some defensive posturing. She finds she can't be bothered, now. Her attention is wholly fixed on that whisper of white set deep in all those mussy dark locks of his hair.

"Your hair," she says quietly, her voice landing somewhere between wonder and accusation as she pushes her fingers up towards the crown of his head. The tips of them slip through the thick strands, seeking out those bits of white. "It's… it's white at the roots."

"Oh, yeah" he says, easy. Unbothered. She looks into his face, then, and the strange, gentle faced boy is gone. There instead is the brother she knows, his face neatly reconstructed into that indiscernible expression she's so well-acquainted with. "Yeah," he says again, as if this is nothing. "I've been lazy about it."

"Lazy about it…?" She tries the words on in her own mouth, as if they might make more sense if she repeats them. It's a futile gesture. Suzume still doesn't understand. "Lazy about… what?" Her eyes dart from his back up to his hair, and down again. She can't begin to guess. "Getting old?"

He makes a sound, one midway between a laugh and a snort. She half expects him to mock her. He usually would, after such a noise. Instead, with his eyes fixed on hers, he answers her earnestly.

"Nah," he says. "Been lazy about dyeing it."

And at that, Suzume can only stare at him, wide-eyed, finally, finally drawing her hand back. Dyeing it, she thinks – dyeing it. White at the base – white at the roots. His hair isn't black, like she's always known it to be, like she's always accepted it as. White, she thinks. It's white, instead.

She tries to imagine him with white hair, and white eyebrows. Hair the color of snow, or like the moon hung full and white and foreboding in a cloudless night sky. She tries, and she can't, because when she closes her eyes, she imagines him as she knows him. As she's always known him.

With dark hair, and bright eyes.

It shouldn't be a big deal, she tries to tell herself. People dye their hair all the time, and for many reasons. It's nothing she's ever paid much mind to, and certainly not something she's ever judged anyone for. And yet, this –

This…

"Your hair is actually white?" She asks, incredulously.

"Sure is."

His eyes hold hers, and his eyes are deep and bottomless and empty of anything she can reach out and hold onto. Suzume wants – she isn't sure what she wants. An explanation? Justification? It seems so small, and yet, it is so much, so much. Too much, almost. It shakes the very notion that she knows him, that she has known him. It's another secret, another lie by omission. She has looked at him for years, memorized his face, kept the image of him in her heart –

And it has been wrong this whole time.

"When do you dye it?"

His eyes narrow, so slightly that she almost misses it. It isn't because of the question, she knows. There's not a doubt in her mind that he's very aware of her fast-mounting distress. "When you're at school."

"In the bathroom?"

"Where else?"

She closes her eyes and imagines him in the old bathroom, working something frothing and black into his hair. It makes her feel a little queasy and a lot… sad, she thinks. Sad and maybe a touch indignant. "And before… before we were here? Before you were here?"

Suzume hears him scoff. "It's not like your grandma has a monopoly on fucking bathrooms."

Her brother, she thinks. Her brother and all his dumb, stupid secrets, all his many thousands of terrible secrets. It's so unfair. He's so unfair. It's not fair for him to be able to read her and know her so easily, to be able to pick her apart with exacting certainty –

Not when she has somehow gone years without even knowing the actual color of his hair.

Pushing her way out of the blankets, Suzume turns and sits up, rubbing her eyes with the back of her fists. Her throat burns, but she refuses to let herself cry. She's sad, yes, but she's angry, too. How many secrets does he have? How many more? This secret isn't a fun discovery. This secret lodges itself under her skin like a splinter, barely visible but terribly painful all the same.

"Suzu," he says, her name low in his throat. "Come off it."

And of course he'd know exactly how she's feeling, because he knows everything there is to know about her. Everything, everything –

Well, mostly everything.

Normally, thinking about the very few things Suzume hasn't told her brother about fills her with a sour-in-the-stomach, acid-in-the-mouth sort of feeling. The guilt of it keeps her up and restless some nights, turning and fitful in their shared futon until her brother makes it worse by asking after her obvious distress.

Suzume always shrugs it off, citing general unease or temperature discomfort. It's not really a lie; those are constant problems, after all. Suzume tries very hard not to lie to her brother, both because he knows her too well –

And because she feels bad about it.

But when she looks back down at her brother, she is reminded of how little his own quiet deceit seems to bother him. He is never restless at night. He never tosses and turns, carding his fingers through his dark hair, worrying about how long some secret or another has laid between them, festering, festering.

If anything, he seems put out by her own quiet dread at the realization that something so fundamental to her image of him is not at all what she thought it was.

"Sorry," she says, numbly. She doesn't feel it. She feels… spiteful, she thinks. It's a childish sort of feeling, and she loathes it and embraces it in equal measure, setting her teeth against that awful churning in her stomach.

"Sorry?"

Shaking her head, Suzume looks away from him again. "Sorry to make a big deal about nothing."

It's not nothing. It isn't. But her secrets aren't nothing, either. If he wants to be unfair, well, she can be unfair, too. His unfairness gives her permission to be unfair, much as he likes to deny it. He can make all the rules he wants, but what he doesn't know can't hurt him, can it?

Can't hurt her – can it?

"Sure doesn't sound like you're sorry."

Suzume sniffs, and rubs her eyes again, taking the moment to put her face and her voice and her whole self back together. She wants to tell him he's being awful. She wants to point out the absurdity that it should be her apologizing when they both know he's gone and hurt her feelings – hurt her heart, actually, in a way that makes her whole body ache. Instead, she rubs her eyes, and then her cheeks, and then she turns and fixes him with a very steady expression, and shrugs.

She shouldn't say anything. She shouldn't. She knows better. She should simply smile, and apologize again. It's nothing, she should say, and the words are there, in her mouth, so easy. It's not a big deal.

Instead, looking down on her brother and all those traitorous flecks of white in his hair, Suzume finds she can't help herself.

"Hey," she says, shrugging again, miming his inscrutable demeanor almost perfectly. "We all have secrets."

It's very obvious when his eyes narrow even more, this time. He catches her meaning, because of course he would. For once, she wants him to.

"Oh, do we?"

Rising to her feet, Suzume doesn't answer him. Instead, she smooths her hands down the front of his shirt. Sometime during the night, it had gotten hiked up around her waist, and she straightens it out until it hangs long like it's supposed to, midway down her thighs.

She can feel his eyes on her even without looking at him. The quiet between them is an uneasy thing. She half expects him to reach out, and pull her back down –

Half expects him to add more bruises up and under the length of his shirt.

It's a strange sort of anticipation. There's fear, like there always is, and there's –

Well, she's not sure. Anticipation, and something else.

But no hands come to tug her backwards, and no hands slide between her legs to plant bruises where no one but the two of them will find. Instead, she feels his fingertips glide softly down the back of her thigh. Suzume shudders, despite trying very hard not to.

"It just never came up, you know." On the lips of anyone else, Suzume thinks that this might sound apologetic, or at the very least like some sheepish excuse. On her brother's lips though, it sounds disparaging. She can hear the leer in his voice, even if it doesn't quite reach his face when she turns her head to look at him again.

Oh, she thinks, suddenly: he doesn't believe her. He thinks she's bluffing.

So, fixing him with her best big brother sort of smile, she shrugs a second time, very carefully nonchalant. "Oh yeah, I know," she says, "That's how it goes, huh?"

Breakfast is strange and a little tense. Suzume goes out of her way to act chipper, humming to herself as she works miso paste into a rich broth and flips eggs into neatly coiled rolls. Her brother, meanwhile, is completely silent. He dices the green onion and tofu she gives him without a word, and the sound of the knife against the cutting board beside her is very loud indeed.

Meal preparation is usually one of Suzume's favorite times of the day. Her brother is often too distracted with the knife work to hassle her in any way that matters, and is much more prone towards pleasant conversation for it. This silence is unlike him. Where he doesn't speak, though, the intensity of his gaze on her speaks volumes.

She's just not sure what it's saying.

Suzume doesn't look at him much, but he's always looking at her when she does, and she can feel the weight of it even when she doesn't. Normally, she'd wither under it, and under his silence, especially. Now, she thinks about the things she's keeping from him in her mind and tries to revel in it –

Tries to tell herself that the mere thought of it hasn't absolutely ruined her appetite.

It has, of course. Sitting beside her brother at the table, she picks disinterestedly at her breakfast while he polishes off his many neatly plated dishes of food. When he reaches over and snatches the rest of her rolled egg from her own place setting with his chopsticks, she doesn't say anything.

As she expects, he doesn't either.

Barely managing the rest of her miso soup, Suzume continues to let her brother steal her food. The rice is his second victim. He even takes her vegetables, leftover from dinner the night before. The only thing he leaves is the salmon she'd made for herself. She runs her chopsticks over it, willing herself to take a bite and feeling smug, and queasy, and very childish, all at the same time.

She wishes he'd take it, too. The salmon turns her stomach to look at it.

"M'gonna go take a shower," her brother announces, very suddenly. Standing, he leaves his and her empty dishes all over the table. They surround her uneaten salmon like a ramshackle collection of ceramic gravestones, garish and brightly colored.

Suzume doesn't watch him go, but she can hear his bare feet carry him away and down the hall – can hear him pull back the door to the bathroom, and pull it closed again. Laying her chopsticks down, she closes her eyes, and counts.

Ten. Twenty. Thirty. Forty.

There is the sound of the handle squeaking, and then the rush of water through the old pipes of the house. It's a noise she's gotten very used to, with all the spontaneous and frequently long showers her brother takes.

Normally, Suzume would clear the table, washing each and every dish carefully in the sink. Empty and dirty, she doesn't like the look of them. Now, though, she rises, and very quietly follows her brother's retreat down the hall.

Not to the bathroom, though. Not now.

She retreats to the bedroom, instead.

The shower her brother has chosen to take is a double boon she isn't willing to let slip through her fingers. Besides keeping him busy, she can blame the lack of cleaned dishes on not wanting to steal his hot water. Even with the sudden stroke of good luck, though, anxiety grips her now. She can only imagine how it will grow if she leaves it to fester. Suzume is sure that if she doesn't act immediately, she never will.

Fishing a skirt and a heavy, pale blue sweater out from the chest of her clothes, Suzume changes out of her brother's shirt quickly. There is still the sound of water in the pipes, the rumbling rush of it steady and strong. Knowing her brother, there will be for some time. Desperately, she hopes that's the case.

A cool breeze wafts through the room from the now opened shoji doors, and out and beyond them, the trees hiss and whisper. The wind slips over her bare legs and draws a shiver from her as she goes to the corner where, atop a pile of plushies, she retrieves the plush cat her brother had given her.

Turning it over in her hands, she regards its white fur with new emotion. It had been a filthy grey when her brother had given it to her, but she'd carefully washed it before sewing Hawks' number inside of it. Now, the white of it reminds Suzume of her brother's hair, the faux fur of it just as wild as his own.

It isn't fair, she thinks, holding the cat in trembling hands. It isn't. Things fall into place. They become easy, routine, and she thinks: she knows him. She does. She knows how he feels, and she can read his moods. She knows what he expects, and what he wants of her.

And yet – and yet…

When she closes her eyes, she cannot imagine him with white hair. Does she know him at all? Does she? How many secrets does he have? Who is her brother, really? Three years later, and she only has the one name: Dabi.

Undoubtedly, it's not even his real one.

Opening a drawer in the small table near the sliding doors, Suzume finds the handful of sewing supplies she'd used to stitch the plush cat back together over a year ago. They haven't seen any use since then, and everything in the drawer is exactly as she remembers it: a spool of white thread, a needle, a pair of scissors, and a seam ripper.

Tucking the cat under her arm, Suzume gathers up the supplies in both her hands. With a nervous glance over her shoulder back towards the blessedly empty hall, Suzume pauses long enough to let the sound of the shower settle her nerves. Then, with a deep breath – and then, with one more – she slips into her sandals and darts out the sliding doors into the dew-sodden morning.

Spring has made everything green again, but the day is bleak, and the vibrant colors from the day before seem muted, now. Clover pops up in between the worn stepping stones that lead away from the house, its dull green leaves gleaming wetly from the rain the night before. There is no visible sun; its radiance is choked and diffused by the heavy cloud cover, lending the world an uncanny and deceptive brightness that stings to look at.

Squinting, Suzume makes her way out towards the shed.

It's cold, still, for late March. By the time she makes it to the small, wooden outbuilding, her teeth are nearly chattering, her feet and lower legs damp from the trek. The house is a good thirty meters away, the sliding shoji doors to her room hidden behind a thick outcropping of shrubs. There's privacy, here, for the time being. But not for long.

So, Suzume gets to work.

Sitting down on the cold, concrete slab that makes up the foundation of the shed, Suzume sets her sewing tools down beside her and immediately begins ripping the neat seams she'd put along the back of the cat. They come free easily, gossamer white thread fluttering like thick spider's silk between her fingers as she pulls it free. Impulsively, she holds it up into the air and lets the wind carry it away, up and up, and then gone.

Pulling apart the small hole made in the plush, Suzume finds exactly what she expects to find. The paper is there, folded and neat, nestled among the stuffing. Glancing first around the empty and unkempt garden, Suzume reaches into the toy with slightly shaking fingers and retrieves the first of two secrets she has kept from her brother.

It's been awhile, she thinks. The house is old, and the seasons have been humid. Briefly, she's frightened that the number will be gone, somehow – illegible, maybe. That she'll unfold the paper and find – what? Nothing?

But when she unfolds it, willing her hands still, Suzume finds that lifeline unblemished, the numbers clear and dark against the starkness of the paper.

In an ideal situation, Suzume thinks she'd pocket the number and find somewhere else to hide it – somewhere easier to get to it. The situation isn't ideal, though; her wounded feelings had caused her to show her hand. Her brother hadn't seemed like he'd believed her, but his silence was troubling, and not something Suzume is used to. Better, then, to be careful.

Staring down at the paper, Suzume reads the numbers to herself, mouthing each one as her eyes travel over them. Ten digits, all together. She reads them, and reads them again, combining them into easier to remember groups. Zero-ninety-two, the area code. Three hundred and thirty four…

Then, she puts the numbers together into a little jingle in her head, set to a short melody from one of her favorite childhood games. Quietly, she sings it to herself, looking up from the paper and watching the house as she does.

No movement there, still. Not a sound save for her own soft song and the wind rustling through all the many, many trees.

Suzume sings it to herself, over and over, a dozen times, and then two dozen more.

The wind picks up, and gets into her hair, tugging sharply at the paper in her hands. It cuts right through her sweater, and chills her damp toes to the bone. Shuddering, she begins to tear the paper into tiny pieces, offering each one to the hungry wind. They slip from her fingers like so many white petals, fragments of numbers and fragments of nothing, stolen and then gone. All the while she sings the song to herself, squinting into the strange dull-brightness of the morning, singing, singing, and feeding the wind.

Soon, there is nothing left of the paper at all. It's as if there was never a paper at all. There is nothing left of any of it, save for the plush cat and the sad, gaping wound set along the curve where its spine would be.

White stuffing in a white cat. A white lifeline, fed to the wind. Suzume threads a sharp, shining needle with white thread, feeling sick, mouthing the words of her made-up song, her new-kind-of-lifeline. Bending her head over the plush, she begins to sew it up, neat and slow, slow and neat. There's no rush, now. The secret is in her head, safe, where it belongs.

It's just as well. The frantic, irregular rhythm of her heart steadies with each careful stitch. Even her hands stop trembling. The wind dies down, and then it picks up, and then it dies, and then there is a great big gust of it, and the trees all around her sound like rushing water, and sharp static, and –

"What are you doing?"

Suzume startles, and pricks her finger. Blood bubbles up immediately, and a few drops spill, red and vibrant against the white, faux fur of the cat. Lifting her wounded finger to her lips, she tilts her head back and looks up and up into her brother's face.

His expression is completely blank. With the blindingly bright ash colored sky behind him, his features are indistinct, nearly set in shadow. It hurts to look up at him for the way the sky burns. Suzume finds herself squinting again, mouth pulled down in a frown.

In her mouth, her finger tastes like metal and salt, and her heart picks up again, a racket behind her ribs. She is uneasy, but not enough to mind herself. The memory of finding the white in his hair still stings. "What's it look like?"

Her brother stares at her. His mouth, from what she can see, is set in a hard, straight line. Ignoring her pettiness, he repeats the question again for the third time this morning. "What are you doing?"

The wind moves between them, in his hair now as much as it is hers. His hair is dry. He either didn't wash it, or he never took a shower to begin with. The only time he bothers to dry his hair is when she dries it for him.

Suzume can see the way it moves, rippling, like fire. There is something very dangerous in his voice.

"Fixing my cat," she says, all the spite gone out of her, now.

He extends his hand. The staples set in his palm shine bright, like newly minted one hundred yen coins.

(Suzume doesn't want to think about knives.)

"Give it to me."

Suzume looks away from him then, and down at the plush cat. Turning it over in her lap, it looks up at her with its sad, dark eyes and downturned mouth. A sharp, strange click above her brings her attention back to her brother.

There's a knife in his other hand, now. A switchblade – she recognizes it from games she's played. Her whole body goes rigid. She'll have to think about knives, after all. "What're you – "

Nothing at all in his expression has changed, not a single thing. When he speaks, though, the blade is as much in his voice as it is in his hand. "Now."

Wordlessly, Suzume passes him the toy.

Her brother doesn't say anything as he turns it back over. Only then does he break eye contact. She watches his gaze drop down from her to study the delicate row of stitching instead. "Gonna ask you again." His eyes flicker back up to hers. "What are you doing?"

"I told you – "

"Bullshit." There's movement at the corners of his mouth. "It was sewed up real fucking fine before now. I saw it; I remember."

It had been her brother who had relegated her stuffed animals to the corner of her room that first night back in summer. As distracted as she'd been that night, she hadn't really had the opportunity to ask him about it. The second night, though, he'd addressed it himself when she'd tried to sneak a few back into the futon.

"You have me, now," he'd told her, then, plucking them from her hands and tossing them unceremoniously back into the corner. "You don't need that shit, anymore."

The idea of him holding her toy cat in his hands and studying it all those months ago leaves Suzume's mouth feeling sticky and dry. Had he heard or felt the paper inside of it? The stitches had looked very much like her own and not like the initial ones he'd made when he'd hidden the phone inside. His stitchwork then had been clumsy, unpracticed. She remembers the way that had made her feel, how she'd ran her fingers down the pseudo-scar of her plush in the hospital when she'd been so alone, and desperate for him.

The lifeline her brother had left for her.

The lifeline she'd put in its place. Had he figured it out, somehow?

Staring up into his eyes and shrinking back from him all at the same time, Suzume's hands flutter against each other in her lap. "I don't – I… I thought it could be neater."

For several dozen rapid-fire heartbeats, her brother simply watches her. The wind drifts across the yard, and the clover moves like a sea of green behind him, and the wind is in his hair again, and in hers, too.

Then, suddenly, without a word, her brother raises his knife and plunges it down through the plush cat. There is the sound of fabric ripping and tearing – and then a flash of white as the wind catches bits of the stuffing and carries it off like thick dandelion heads cut wholly free of their stems.

"Hey!" She cries, rising swiftly to her feet, reaching out for the toy. "Don't – not like that!"

But her brother raises his bare and muddy foot and presses it suddenly into her stomach. It's less a kick than it is a shove, and Suzume shrieks in surprise as she stumbles backwards into the wall of the shed. It doesn't do much to break her fall. Where the shove itself hadn't really hurt, the landing does; the concrete foundation bites nastily into her hands when she throws them out in some graceless attempt to catch herself.

It takes her a moment to gather her bearings. There's a stinging, sharp pain in her palms, and when she looks at them, they're raw and red and angry looking. Blood oozes to the surface, peeking out from dozens of tiny microtears.

Her eyes blur, looking at them. And then there's white in the edges of her vision, more of it – white, white, white. She looks back up at her brother, at the snow storm of stuffing being carried away on the wind.

Hawks' song in her mind is so quiet now.

Her stuffed cat is – well, it's not stuffed any longer. It hangs, mangled and gutted, from his long fingers. Suzume is reminded of the melty, drippy nightmare clocks in a Dali painting. She thinks of road kill – of long-dead animals, forgotten and too flat to be real, on the side of the road. Just beneath his fingers, through the thick, white fur, she catches the shine of dark, sad eyes, like marbles lost in ivory grass.

And Suzume bursts into tears.

"That was my favorite!" Scrambling up to her knees, she reaches out with red-wet hands, grasping for the few bits of fluffy cotton stuffing that the wind hasn't stolen. They stick to her slick hands, grow clingy and soggy with her blood. The feeling of it against her skin hurts – it burns. "My favorite, my favorite, my favorite – "

"Oh, really?" Her brother's voice is above her, because he is above her. Her brother is so tall, and he is standing, and he is above her, and she is on her knees, grasping at stuffing that melts in her hands like bloody cotton candy. "Your favorite, huh?"

There's no use, she thinks. Most of the stuffing is gone. The bits that are left are out in the yard, or soaking in mud, in blood, in filthy rainwater puddles. More importantly, the thing that hangs from her brother's fingers is not a toy anymore. It's not anything anymore. He's hacked it to pieces.

"Yes!" She wails, looking up at him again, finally. She holds her hands up, as if to show him how the stringy cotton clings to her weeping, skinned hands, as if to say: Look! And, You've done this!

Her brother looks. Impossibly, his expression still hasn't changed. He stares down at her battered hands and then he looks back up at her face. As he watches her, he tosses the remnants of the gift he'd given to her – the shell of her two contrasting lifelines – off somewhere beside him. Suzume doesn't bother to look. She doesn't want to see.

Then, there is only the knife in his hands. Its blade is silver and cold, brilliant in the pale morning light – and then it, too, is gone, folded, put away. He slips it into the pocket of his pants.

With his now empty hands, her brother squats down in front of her and takes hold of her chin. Situated as he is on the ground, and with her kneeling on the foundation, he is eye-level with her. His face is all the more visible for it.

Eyes blazing in his otherwise impassive face, he grips her jaw so hard her palms aren't the only things that ache. "You wanna know who's my favorite, Suzu?"

Suzume doesn't answer. All she can do is cry. She suspects that's what he wants, anyway.

His face draws closer, only centimeters from hers, now. Even with his mouth closed, she can feel the heat of him as it rolls across her skin like a hot, damp fog. Sometimes, it's a comforting sensation. Right now, she wants to be anywhere but here.

"You're my favorite," her brother begins, very slowly. "You're my absolute favorite, Suzu. But you know that, don't you? You do, right? Say you do. Go on."

Biting her lip, Suzume tries to nod her head through the way her brother has a vice-like grasp on her jaw and cheeks. When he doesn't respond — and especially when he doesn't let up — Suzume swallows and manages a very pathetic, "Yeah…"

"Good," he breathes the word out, so hot it makes her flinch. "My good girl. You do know that. You've always known that, haven't you. Not like I make any secret of it. Anyone could see that. Anyone would know."

Suzume thinks of her brother, waiting for her when she gets home from school. Sitting next to her while she plays games. Lounging with his head propped up on her leg as she reads to him from her favorite books, at his repeated request.

She thinks of her brother in bed with her at night, and where he pokes her, and pinches her. How he touches her. She thinks of the bruises she finds when she takes her baths, or in the stall of the bathroom at school.

She thinks of his kisses, of how many he gives her, and how hot they are. In her hair, pressed to the palms of her hand. Across her cheeks –

Left along the pulse point of her throat.

She thinks of him, in the park, every night.

She thinks of him killing for her.

"I know," she whispers, pitifully.

"Then fucking think, Suzu. You know how sad you are now? How awful it is to see something you like so much get ripped up like that?"

Suzume hiccups her way through a quavery, "Uh-huh."

"So how do you think I feel when you go outta your way to push me like this, huh? Oh, it's cute a lot of the time, don't get me wrong. Cute little Suzu, pretending she's got a backbone, standing up to her big, mean brother. What a tough girl she is. So strong. So fierce. That's cute. But this? Fucking this?" He shakes her head back and forth roughly. "Try'na get in my head, make me think things that aren't real? Pretending like you got shit to hide? Like you got some kinda secret you wanna keep from me?"

Closing her eyes, Suzume feels several hot tears track their way down her cheeks before they meet his much hotter fingers. He doesn't – he doesn't know, then. He thinks she was bluffing, again –

"I'll tell you how I feel," he continues, his voice dropping an octave, gone as raw as her bleeding hands. "It makes me fucking angry. And I don't wanna be mad at you, Suzu – not you, not you. Not my good little sister. Anyone but you. And my good little sister, well, she doesn't want me to be angry at her either, does she?"

No, she thinks. She doesn't. She doesn't. His anger terrifies her, and the last thing she wants is him directing it at her, especially so when she's only ever wanted to make him happy. But what's she supposed to do when he hurts her? Why isn't it fair for her to be upset, too? Why can't he understand that?

Suzume yelps a bit as his grip tightens even further, her eyes open and wide again. "No," she whispers, raising her hands to touch at his own with bloody fingers. It's a wordless plea. When he only stares her down, she tries something else, voice gone soft and yielding as shame pools hot in her stomach. "No, Nii-chan, I really, really don't, so please – "

Her brother loves it when her voice gets like that, all lilting, tremulous. At that, his grip relaxes considerably, and the awful ache in her jaw subsides in turn. "Oh, Suzu," he says, quietly. His eyes are fathoms deep, and so very blue, hungry and ready to swallow her up. "You make this so much harder than it has to be, you know that? You do this to yourself."

She should just be quiet, she knows. She should be good, and docile, and sweet, just like he likes. And the sick, sad girl that she's become wants to, wants it so very, very much. Suzume feels starved for his approval, for his validation. She craves his good-girl and his sweet-little-sister more than she thinks she should. Even now – even now, reeling inwardly with the indignant hurt of what he's done and what he's kept from her, so much of her wants that, needs that.

But then, there's also that awful, self-destructive need for rebellion. She wants to push him. Suzume wants to physically put her hands on his shoulders and shove him away, tell him he's wrong, that he's mean, that he's not-fair-not-ever. That angry, sullen part of her, sulking and bitter in the back of her mind, repeating Hawks' number in a mockingly cheery sing-song melody…

He's not the only one with secrets. She has a couple, herself.

Yet that part of her is so awfully small. It's just one small, pleading voice in a sea of much louder voices. And it stings her aching pride to realize how badly she wants to just – to just tell him. To confess, here, on her knees. To be good – to offer those awful secrets up as a trade. Please, she wants to say. Please, take these last things from me, and let me have something – let me have anything. Please.

Suzume knows her brother doesn't work like that, though. Her brother takes, and takes, and takes. Her brother expects it. He wants it. He needs it. Her brother gives rarely, and only when it pleases him. Doesn't she know that? Doesn't she?

"Suzu." He says her name so softly. Tenderly, almost. Her good big brother, now. Her sweet big brother, now.

Doesn't she?

His hand slips up from her chin to cup her face instead, and his free hand finds one of her own. The feeling of his thumb gliding over her skinned palm makes her wince despite the gentle way he touches her.

"Poor thing," he whispers, his face dipping even closer towards hers. "It must hurt a lot, huh?"

It's a lot easier for her to move her head with his hand against her cheek than it is when he's gripping her jaw, and she shakes it a bit, back and forth. "It's… it's not so bad."

That's not a lie; it stings, but there are so many things that hurt so much worse. Through her brother, Suzume has learned that pain is a very much a relative thing.

As his hand guides her head gently back and to the side, her brother's voice becomes so quiet it may well be the wind in the trees. "My brave girl." Warm and achingly familiar, his mouth settles back near her ear, just below her jaw. There's the press of one of his kisses, and then his lips part, and she can feel the brush of his wet, hot tongue, feel the way he works her skin into his mouth, suckled cruelly between his teeth. It makes a sound – makes an obscene wet-mouth-on-skin sound, the way his lips and his teeth move against her there, so very loud in her ear.

And it feels – it feels –

It's Suzume's turn to make noise, now – a low sound, caught in the back of her throat. That strangled whimper shudders free when her brother's thumb digs roughly into her wounded palm. His teeth settle sharply against her skin then, and she makes another noise, another sound. It's like it gets into him, she thinks, head fuzzy, because against her throat, her brother makes one, too – the sharp exhalation of his breath, and maybe something just a bit more than that.

Her hand hurts, and where his lips and teeth and tongue work against her throat hurts. Her heart hurts, too. But something about the way it all comes together, muddied and awful and strange and floaty –

It feels –

"Nii-chan – "

His teeth release her skin, but when his mouth slides further down her throat – when he presses sharply against her palm again, eliciting yet another shameful sound from her – Suzume knows he isn't done.

"Nii-chan – " The world swims a bit, and it takes her a moment to find the words she needs to articulate a thought she's had for a very long time, now. "I don't think – don't think this is how big brothers are s'posed to…"

She can't finish it, but it doesn't matter. Her brother understands. That really gets into him. Pressing his face into her throat, he makes a noise that's half a sigh, half a groan. "Anyone would with you for a little sister," he says, and nips at her jaw, at her throat, at her ear. Beneath the steady force of his thumb, her hand throbs in matching rhythm with her fast-beating heart. "Can't help it when you fucking rile me up."

It feels bad, but just like he'd told her, it feels good, too. Bad-good. Wrong-good. Good-good, even, maybe, just a bit.

Good, she thinks, wanting to cry, wanting to throw up, wanting to press herself against him and ask for more.

"C'mon, Suzu," he whispers, and her throat where his mouth is is wet like her hands, now, just not with blood. "I know it feels unfair. I know. But you know what you need to know about me. And you know I'll take care of you. You know I'll keep you. That's all that matters, right? Stop being so stubborn – quit being so dumb. That's all you really need. You know that, right? You do, you know you do."

Suzume finds she can't say anything. She can't really do anything but let her head loll back along her shoulders and take in a deep, shuddering breath when her brother places another of his very un-brotherly kisses against her throat.

"Just be good for me, okay?" His voice sounds so low and slick and syrupy. Without realizing it, Suzume finds she's nodding along, eyes closed up against the way the sky seems to spin.

"Be a good girl for me. My favorite. My good little sister."

And in that moment, hazy-headed as she is, sick to her stomach and desperate for whatever good or bad or wrong way he wants to make her feel, Suzume thinks she'd do anything her brother asks of her.

While at school a few weeks later, reflecting on that March morning with her brother leaves Suzume feeling more than a little conflicted.

This, of course, is nothing new. In the few hours a day she has away from him when school is in session, Suzume always feels off and wrong about… well, about everything, really. Sat alone in her seat as she's meant to, she finds she often feels so cold, regardless of the season. It's as if her body has adjusted to his body's temperature, as if that's her new normal, her new baseline. Without him – without the ability to lean against him, or nest in his lap, without him close and near and there, with her – everything feels a little bit colder. Just a little bit too cold.

More than that, though, Suzume always misses him. She has no real friends at school. Her class is small, because Chichibu is small, and everyone besides her has lived here for years. Their neat little groups had formed long before she'd arrived. Most of them are friendly, of course – certainly kinder than Katsuki had been in class, around his friends. But it's that polite kind of friendly, that she's-been-through-a-lot kind of friendly, more pity and curiosity than a desire for companionship. For all that she tries to be normal, Suzume struggles. It's hard. It's hard when every part of her life that matters is something she can't talk about with anyone.

She can't talk about her mother, because she doesn't want to lie. She can't talk about her father, because even the thought of him gets her so angry she nearly throws up.

And she can't talk about her brother, either, because –

Well.

After that, what's left? Her brother makes up the near entirety of her whole world. Everything she does, she does with him, for him. Everything, everything –

What could she offer someone, then, as a friend?

Sitting in class, half-listening to her teacher discuss the Japanese political system and how it had adapted over the last few generations with the onset of quirks, Suzume stares out the window. The sky is very nearly clear now, with only a few wispy clouds to break up all that blue. They remind her of pulled cotton.

They remind her of stuffing.

Grimacing, Suzume leans forward over her desk reflexively, her stomach twisting into knots. She's thought about that morning often – about her brother's white hair, and his secrets, and his anger, and his double-standards. She's thought about his kisses, too. Even the memory of it makes her cheeks heat like he's just pinched them, and she props her head up in both of her hands to hide them behind her fingers. It had been lucky that those tiny bruises that had littered her throat had been mostly concealed by her hair and nearly gone by the time she'd had to go back to school.

(Some awful, shameful part of her had been sad to see them go.)

But isn't that just like her brother, she thinks? Everything about him is contradictory, and everything she feels for him is contradictory, too. After that morning, he'd been very good to her in the following weeks. He'd even asked her to help him dye his hair, something she half-hated herself over for how eagerly she took to it.

"It's not that big a deal," he'd told her, but she'd made it one, anyway. She'd watched video after video in preparation, all so she'd know what she was doing. At the pharmacy after school, she'd spent a solid thirty minutes perusing the dyes before deciding on one that looked the best. The box had promised something called 'royal jelly,' and Suzume had thought that sounded regal and exciting. After that, like the videos had suggested, she'd picked up petroleum jelly, and gloves, and a cheap bowl for mixing. Dismayed by the lack of brushes for sale, she'd come home with the rest of her purchases feeling exceptionally defeated and very much in tears.

Her brother had laughed at her, of course. "There's a brush in the damn box, dummy," he'd told her, wiping her tears away. "And I always use my hands, anyway. What's all this other shit for?"

The hair dye, it turned out, also already had gloves, but Suzume smugly felt the ones she'd bought were higher quality. Still, she explained the purpose of the rest of her purchases in great sniffling detail: the petroleum jelly was to protect his skin, obviously, and the bowl was so she didn't ruin any of her grandmother's nice dishware.

"Never bothered with that," he'd said. "And I always just used the lid from a takeaway box."

Gross! That would be something he'd do. But he'd let her fuss. He'd let her smear his hairline with the petroleum jelly. He'd even let her sift through his hair and use the brush to painstakingly cover his roots even if he claimed his way was faster and more efficient.

It had taken a bit for her to get the hang of it in practice, but he'd been patient with her, even when she got flustered. And that had all been very nice, and comfortable, and she had liked it very much –

Even if the sight of his white roots gone gummy with dark dye had left that good feeling edged with a prickly kind of unspoken melancholy.

At home, though, when she's with him – especially when her brother is very much in Good Brother Mode – it's easy to swallow back that discomfort he always leaves her with. Even when he makes her sad, when he makes her angry, when she feels indignant or spiteful or petty, there's just so much of him, and he just takes up so much of her time, and it's easier not to think.

At school, though, with just the memory of him, well – it's not the same.

So, she thinks about the stuffing, carried away on the wind. She thinks about her palms, bloody and raw. She thinks about the white in his hair, and the unreasonable things he expects of her and never of himself. She thinks about secrets.

Thinks about her own.

Like always, thinking about secrets makes her stomach hurt. It isn't long before she feels her mouth start to water in that tell-tale way it does before she gets sick, so she politely asks her teacher if she can go to the nurse.

In the nurses's office, she is loudly sick in the adjoining bathroom. With school ending in an hour and a half, the nurse decides to let her go home a little early. So Suzume goes back to class, and gathers her things, and takes her shoes from the getabako in the entrance hall, and begins the walk home.

The walk home from school is maybe thirty minutes. Chichibu is not nearly as busy as Musutafu had been, and the streets are quiet in that peaceful, idylic kind of way. Outside in the sun, Suzume feels less cold, and she finds herself humming a song to herself.

A song from a video game. A cheery little melody.

And just like that, Hawks' number comes back into her mind.

Pausing at a stop light, the weight of Suzume's book bag on her shoulder feels suddenly very heavy – and not for her books. No, it feels heavy because of the other thing she has inside of it:

Her grandmother's cell phone.

When her grandmother had entered the hospital, she'd given Suzume her ancient cell phone. Baa-san could be reached at the hospital after all, and Suzume was young, and could benefit more from it, on the go as she was sure to be. Until now, Suzume has only really used it to schedule meetings with her grandmother and her social workers. Rarely, she has used it to call or text her brother, as the phone he'd given her was never meant for longtime use. It clearly makes him uncomfortable, though; he'd been thorough when teaching her how to purge its history.

Funny, now, she thinks, mouth full of too much spit, that she knows how to use it against him because of that.

Darting into an alley, Suzume is sick again behind a trash can. This whole thing, she thinks – it's stupid, impulsive. Not telling him about it is the worst, the worst, and actually doing something with it is –

Well, it's inconceivable. She can't begin to imagine his fury.

But it's not fair, she thinks. It's not. And as good as he's been, well, she knows he won't be forever. She knows it's only a matter of time before the pendulum swings and his smile turns and he's back to being awful, to being terrible, full of his terrible, awful, big-brother-bombshell-secrets. Back again, with the knife in his hands, and in his voice, looking at her as if the only thing that will sate whatever awful hunger gets inside of him is her, her, her.

There, then, tucked away in the alley, mouth still watering, Suzume pulls out her phone. It feels like a knife in her hand, almost, for all the potential in it, all that intent. She flips it open, and the little numbers on the keypad are bright and green in the shadows of the alleyway.

Her mouth moves to the tune of the song, forming the numbers, one by one.

It's been a year, she reasons. It's been over a year, nearly a year and a half. She's seen Hawks on the television since then, and in the newspapers in the storefronts, too. He seems like he's getting big. Big, and famous. More than likely, he's changed his number. More than likely, he's forgotten her. There's a lot more things for him to think about than her, clearly.

So when Suzume presses down on the little button with the phone icon on it and lifts the phone to her ear and holds her breath, she thinks: more than likely, this will go nowhere.

And this is all it will be – some insignificant, secret act of rebellion. Something small, something to make her feel better about herself. Something to help her get to sleep at night with some tiny bit of her pride intact. She'd be able to tell herself she tried. She tried.

And isn't trying something?

The phone rings. Once, twice, a third time more. Suzume's heart is a taito drum, pounding wildly in her chest. Holding the phone to her ear, her thumb moves to where she knows the end call button is. On the fourth ring, she is about to push it, when –

The phone stops ringing. There's the sound of the other line coming to life with a bit of a crackle, and then the sound of… wind, she thinks.

And, then: "Hawks."

Suzume almost hangs up the phone anyway, because very suddenly, all the air in her lungs feels like it's evaporated and her stomach very nearly heaves itself up and out of her mouth.

The noise on the other line, though, is strangely comforting. With the phone against her ear, Suzume is reminded of how a seashell captures the sound of the ocean. With Hawks, the phone is a lot like that – only with the sound of the wind.

"Hello?" Comes his voice, again.

"Hi," she whispers, cupping her hand around the receiving end of the phone. She's not sure why. She's completely alone in the alley, tucked away behind the trash cans. Even so, she feels like everything needs to be as secret and private as possible.

There's a pause, kind of. The wind is there, still, rushing by. It's not a particularly windy day, at least not in Chichibu. Suzume wonders if it's windy where he is, or if it's him, making the wind.

Then the line is full of Hawks' laughter. It sounds warm, and boisterous, and – genuine, she thinks, maybe. "Is this who I think it is?"

Suzume feels her throat go tight, for some reason. She isn't sure why. "I guess it depends on who you think it is," she manages, hoarsely.

"Oh, yeah, it is," he says, and she thinks, maybe, that she can hear the smile in his voice. It sounds very different from the smile she can hear in her brother's. "How's it going, Chickadee? You really know how to keep a guy on pins and needles. A whole damn year, and some change, even! Thought you'd never ring."

The phone shakes in Suzume's hand as she holds it to her ear. The whole of her shakes, and her stomach feels sick, and her throat aches, and –

It feels so strange to be known by anyone but her brother. At the hospital, her grandmother has only gotten worse, and more distant for it. At school, she talks so rarely to anyone. Even her social workers barely seem to remember her name. She doubts they could without their paper work.

If she were to be gone one day, well, she doubts anyone but her brother would miss her. She doubts anyone but him would even notice.

And here, now, a year and a half later –

"Hey," he says, sounding a bit more serious. "You okay?"

And she remembers in the hospital, and how the nurse had said he'd come every day, even when Suzume had sent him away. "He's a nice boy," she'd said. Suzume remembers that, too, even if she hadn't believed it at all, then.

But now, on the phone, the concern in his voice sounds so… real. And why shouldn't it? Why would he pretend here, now? Her father only pretended when it suited him.

And Suzume wonders: how does acting concerned suit Hawks, now?

"I am," she says, struggling through even that. "I am – I'm doing fine. I just – I guess I just – "

She just – she just what? What was the point of this, she thinks? To have a secret of her own – a real secret? To have something that was hers, just hers, and not something she'd have to share with her brother?

"You should let me come see you," Hawks says. "You know, if you want."

And Suzume is struck by that. She should let him. If she wants.

She closes her eyes, and covers her mouth with her hand, willing the nausea back. It takes a moment – a few long, deep breaths, just like she's practiced. "Yeah, I think that might be nice."

"Might be!" Hawks laughs again, nice and easy. There is nothing sharp at all in his laughter. "Ye of little faith! When're you free, Chickadee?"

And that is the question, isn't it, Suzume thinks. It's not one she's thought of, really, because she's never had reason to. But when is she free? Is she ever? Has she ever really wanted to be in this last year and a half?

"Well," she says, closing her eyes. "I might need just a – just a bit to figure that out."

"Busy girl, huh? I'm not surprised." It's been so long since she's seen him, and she'd barely gotten to know him at all when she had –

And yet, somehow, Suzume can picture him winking in vivid detail, regardless.

"That's all right, though. I getcha. You take all the time you need. I'll try not to die from anticipation or old age in the meantime, but you know how it is – that's a real killer combo."

"I think…" Behind the cup of her hands, Suzume feels her lips quirk upwards into an almost smile. "I think maybe you'll manage, somehow."

"Ha! So you do have some faith!"

And Suzume thinks that he sounds… excited, maybe. Excited. It's strange to talk to someone like that – to talk to someone who laughs like he does, to someone who gets excited. It isn't that her brother doesn't get excited, of course.

It's just that when he does, it's often a very bad thing.

"Well," she says, "Maybe a little."

"You wound me, little Miss," he announces, dramatically. "Mortally. I'll surely perish, lest you let me take you to dinner. Or, you know – something. Whatever you're feeling, really, whenever you're not busy. I'm not picky. We can go throw stones in a lake if that's what your heart's craving."

And at that, Suzume really does smile. "You're pretty easy-going for someone who's mortally wounded."

"It's a very small mortal wound, truthfully. I'll bleed out in, oh, I don't know, a few months, I suspect. More than enough time for dinner or stone throwing or whatever suits your fancy to reverse the grievous damage."

It takes a lot of effort on Suzume's part not to laugh. "The wound's small… but also grievous, somehow?"

Hawks' voice drops to a conspiratorial whisper. "I'm a sensitive boy, but please don't tell anyone. Let's keep that our secret. My reputation would be absolutely demolished."

Secrets, Suzume thinks, feeling more than a little light-headed. Secrets. Always so many secrets. Secrets like the big brother she goes home to every day – the big brother she isn't supposed to have. Secrets like bruises under her skirt, and hidden under her hair.

Secrets like snow in the dark. Secrets like laughter on the phone. Secrets. Secrets. So many secrets.

"Don't worry," she says, softly, her heart in her throat. "I'm pretty good at keeping secrets."