022: the calm before the storm.

March; 11 years.

There is something very, very wrong with Suzume's big brother.

That realization takes her by genuine surprise, so much more than she thinks it should. Why should it? She's pretty sure there's always been something wrong with her brother. It's something she's known since she first met him. He's always been a little weird. Sometimes, he's been a lot weird. It's an open secret, very poorly kept between the two of them. She can see it in that ice-fire gleam of his eyes, she knows, or in the haunting angle of his mouth. It's there in the way that his teeth often seem too many and too sharp for any normal mouth – and in the way he moves his tongue over them.

She can feel it, too, in the way he touches her. It's there in the way he kisses her, so often with the threat of all those too-many teeth behind his wide, leering lips.

Wrong, wrong, wrong – Suzume had learned that early. Even if she craves it. Even if she needs it. It's always been uncanny, even when it's familiar. Strange, or weird, or bad – none of that has ever stopped the fluttery flip flop of her butterfly-corpse stuffed stomach when he does touch her. Knowing how off he is doesn't keep her chest from aching with a longing for him she's not quite sure she can understand, let alone articulate. And that's okay. She loves her brother. She does, so much, so so much, so much more than anything. And that's all that matters, right?

It's not his fault, she's always reasoned; it's not his fault he's put together strange.

Maybe a little wrong.

Maybe a lot wrong.

It's okay, even then. She loves him. She does.

But this is something different from that. Something more, something worse, and she's not really sure what it is. One week in early March, suddenly, it seems as if everything shifts. Out from beneath her feet, Suzume feels as if the already unstable foundation of her bizarre relationship with her brother is crumbling away. Where he has always been there for her, well –

Suddenly, he's not.

Suzume comes home from school, and he's not there. He's gone. And then, the next day, and the day after that, too. He comes home late, and then later, and later still, brushing her off, not even bothering with an excuse. By the end of the week, she has to go to sleep without him, and her heart aches and her throat burns and the tears sting her eyes, and for that week, that's her normal. She comes home alone, like she used to when she lived with her mother in the tiny apartment near the park.

But at least then, she'd had the park and her brother both.

Now, she has nothing.

It wouldn't be so bad, Suzume thinks, if when he came home, things could be normal. But when he comes home, night after night, later and later still, he's different. Half a stranger. And he looks at her as if he doesn't recognize her, either, brows furrowed, his teeth flashing between his slightly parted and mismatched lips. Suzume thinks he looks like he's clenching his jaw when he looks at her. Like maybe he's baring his teeth, like a dog might.

When he deigns to touch her – because it seems as if that, too, gives him immense pause – his hands seem… almost unsure. It's difficult for Suzume to imagine her brother unsure about anything, let alone her –

And yet, she has no other word for it.

He touches her as if she were something breakable. He touches her with a foreign kind of hesitation, grip bruising one second, and then startling away from her for the other fifty-nine, as if the very feel of her skin burns him. He tugs her into his lap, but when he holds her, his spine is rigid, his shoulders squared. The look in his eyes is far away – as if he'd rather look at anything but her.

It hurts. It hurts so much. Look at me, she wants to beg. Look at me! Suzume doesn't understand. He has always looked at her. Now, his eyes move like his hands, pulling away from her, lips peeled back from his teeth in that sick-dog grimace.

Is he angry? Why? What has she done? She doesn't know. And she cries, and she cries, and then she hides her tears away because they only seem to make him even more agitated. And then, at the end of that awful week, Suzume wakes to find him touching her, kissing her, the air in the room between them feverish and oppressive and frightening. Now, when he touches her, it's his fingers that burn her, as if he cannot hold himself back. Those bared teeth he's kept her at bay with all week find her skin, and it hurts in a different kind of way, and she asks him again if he's angry with her.

Please. Please. Is he angry?

But he doesn't answer her. He doesn't. He touches her and his palms are hot and his mouth is hotter and she aches so badly for it, because at least this is something closer to normal – something kind of like how she knows he's supposed to be.

But it's not, really. It isn't. It's something else, something more than it used to be. There's something in his voice, in the way that he touches her. His teeth are still bared. His eyes, when he looks at her – stares at her, now, as if unable to look away – are wild.

It's different. He's different. Strange.

Stranger.

After that week, though, things start to settle. It's not quite the same – not really – because everything still feels misfigured. Suzume imagines the relationship between them as a song, maybe, with a few notes played consistently off-key, now. It's unsettling.

And so she asks him nearly every day:

"Are you angry with me?" and, "Are you sure?"

And he looks at her, and his eyes are so blue and so bright. He looks at her, and he looks at her, and he won't stop looking at her. If she's in the room, if she's moving through it – there's always the weight of his eyes on her.

Suzume had thought he'd looked at her before. He'd always been inclined to stare. But it's worse, now – so much more intense, and she feels it all over her now, pulled tight like a gleaming noose around her throat.

"No," he always says, through his teeth. These days, most of what he says to her feels like it's through his teeth.

Suzume isn't sure that's true. But for all the ways she has known him up until now, she thinks, suddenly, as if she's back at square one. The way he looks at her – she doesn't understand it. She doesn't recognize it. He's always been so intense. Fires are, she thinks – aren't they?

But he's no longer the fire in her hearth. Now, he is a forest fire encroaching on her house, and the weight of his gaze is the smoke that suffocates her long before she has a chance to burn. She gets lost in it. She moves through the days as if in a daze, stumbling under the way his eyes chase and crowd her.

What's happened, she wonders?

What went wrong?

Maybe if she had all the time in the world, she could figure it out. Maybe she could piece it together. But the days come, and the days go, and time slips away from her. A day, and then two, and then five.

So, Suzume stops counting. There is only the way forward. Maybe it will get better. Maybe.

Maybe.

And then it's March. Things don't really get better, but other things happen, and Suzume thinks about the changes a little less for it all. There's a boy in her class who's missing – up and gone one day, they say, sometime after school. She doesn't really know anyone at school, and this boy isn't any different. Still, it's disquieting; there's not a trace of him anywhere. It's as if he just up and vanished, like a late-winter flurry of snow melting away in the fast-come spring.

Suddenly, Suzume's sleepy little town is bustling with strangers. Police on loan from other precincts pour in by the dozens, and a few heroes, too. She sees them roving the streets and the alleys and the woods, wafting in and out of softly decaying storefronts with their bright-screened phones and pads of paper covered with chicken-scratch notes.

Hawks comes, too.

Ostensibly, he says he's here in case he's needed for the investigation, but Suzume can tell by the way he hovers over her when school lets out that that might not be the whole truth. The case wasn't even something he'd been aware of until she'd mentioned it in a phone call the previous day – and then, well, it's the next day, and here he is: grin cheerful and red wings fluttering.

Whether her brother is around or not – and he's gone more afternoons than he's around, now – she can't take Hawks home.

So instead, she takes him grocery shopping.

She expects the outing to bore him. The shops in Chichibu have nothing on the expansive stores in the bigger cities, but he behaves as if he's never seen anything so fantastic in all his life. He's animated when he follows her up and down the anemic aisles, remarking on her choice of vegetables and the way she ponders over cuts of meat with an open enthusiasm for the mundane that Suzume finds herself unwittingly swept away by. Even with his hands tucked into the pockets of his aviator's jacket, he's remarkably lively. Unlike her brother, his face is so expressive – his laughter, boisterous. The tiny, stooped grandmothers move out of their way and eye him, star-struck, from behind their foggy glasses. Beaming at him from out of their tired, age-spotted faces, they titter like school girls when he flashes them one of his thousand-watt smiles.

"Oh," Suzume hears one of them laugh to herself, grasping at her friend's arm with a little, wrinkled hand, "just like on TV!"

He is, Suzume thinks. He is thoroughly and irrepressibly charming, just like he is on TV.

Outside in the cool, soon-to-be-spring air, both of their arms full of bags of groceries, Suzume blinks against the blinding sun. Suddenly, there is a shadow over her, the glare cut back by all that abrupt darkness. Tilting her head back, she looks up at Hawks to find one wing spread wide above her like a brilliant, scarlet canopy.

"Aww, chickadee – can't let the sun getcha," he says with a shrug and another one of those electric and terribly contagious grins. Polished to a starry perfection, his teeth are white and gleaming – but they don't make her feel the way her brother's do. The only threat she can find in Hawks is the vague fear that he isn't who he says he is – that one day, he might pull off that smiling mask and be someone else, entirely. That's how all heroes are, her brother has told her countless times. Fakers. Liars. Two-faced seekers of fame and glory.

She doesn't need him to tell her, really, but he tells her, anyway. It comes up often, very nearly every time the news is on. Suzume lets him tell her, but it's not like she doesn't know.

It's not like she hasn't known her whole life.

But looking up into Hawks' smiling face, sheltered from the sun beneath the expanse of his wing, Suzume thinks that – for all the ways her brother has always been right – he might just be wrong about this.

More days pass. Then a week. Then another. Hawks splits his focus between Chichibu and Kyushu with an obvious preference for Chichibu, spending the afternoons with Suzume a couple of stolen hours at a time. The streets are less full of strangers now. Most of the heroes have gone home, and the few out-of-town detectives haunt quieter alleys like sleepless ghosts, purple-smudge bruises worn in deep tracks beneath their eyes. Suzume can place them by their rumpled coats and their thousand-yard-stares. Despite the hopelessness of the situation, though, they always manage a smile for both she and Hawks when the two pass them occasionally on the busier roads.

It's really for him, Suzume realizes. With his gold hair and his shining, starbright eyes, he is all radiant sunshine, especially when he grins. He has that kind of effect on people – on very nearly everyone. She watches another detective straighten up under the invigorating sweep of one of Hawks' smiles, slouch melting away, his chin held a little higher.

She isn't immune, either. When everything feels so unsure, it's hard not to feel caught up by all that warmth and easy laughter, so much like an updraft under her fledgling wings. Hawks seems fascinated by everything she has to say, no matter how mundane. He makes Suzume feel as if she is the most interesting person in the whole world, even when she fumbles over her words and can't hold his gaze for longer than a handful of seconds at a time.

But sometimes, even he can't shake Suzume from her thoughts.

"So, hey: you're graduating soon, aren't you?"

Suzume pauses mid-sip of her drink, and the smooth, velvet chocolate that touches her lip as she tilts the cup back is so hot it makes her eyes tear up immediately. Hawks – eyes as keen as ever – momentarily reaches for her, fluffy brows furrowed. Fingers outstretched, his hand hangs there for a fraction of a second – and then, with obvious reluctance, he pulls it back.

Like her brother before the change, he seems to want to touch her often.

Unlike her brother, he very rarely lets himself.

She wonders what that means.

Digging her teeth into her scalded lip, she works at it with her tongue, frowning at the cup in her hands. It's easier than looking at Hawks and his strange, unknowable hesitation. It reminds her too much of her brother's much more recent own – and how desperately she misses being touched.

"Maybe," she says, eventually.

"Maybe?" His recovery is impeccable. Standing beside her, the look of concern is gone, replaced with another smile. It's as if he keeps them in some secret pocket, ready to be pulled out at a moment's notice – a smiling bit of dazzling good cheer for any possible misstep. "Don't tell me you've taken to a life of crime and put your future and no-doubt otherwise illustrious middle school career in jeopardy."

In her brother's mouth, those words would have been a mockery. Hawks says it as if he truthfully believes Suzume's future middle school experience cannot be anything other than brilliant. It's funny, she thinks; the mockery would be easier. It's hard not to wilt under all those expectations.

Plucking off the lid of her cup, she peers at the dark liquid inside. Steam wafts from it, warm on her cheeks even in the brisk air. It smells deep and sweet, with just a touch of bitterness. "Nothing that exciting. I mean, I'll be graduating – that's not… that's not what's changed. Just… with everything that's happened, they're thinking of canceling the ceremony."

For once, Hawks' good humor fails him. His smile becomes stale, and his eyes behind the cheery yellow of his visor pull away from her face reluctantly, fixed instead to some distant point on the horizon behind her. "Ah," he says, and there is no more sunshine in his voice. "Yeah."

Even for Hawks, irreverent as he is, there are no jokes to be made about dead children.

"I get that, of course," he continues, after a respectful moment, taking a sip of his own cold canned coffee. "Y'know, I really do. Full respect. But at the same time…"

Tilting her head, Suzume looks up at him, expectantly. Eventually, his gaze finds her again.

Shrugging, he takes another sip, and then another, Adam's apple bobbing with the motion. When he speaks again, it's into the mouth of his coffee can, his eyes holding hers over the gleaming aluminum. "Just – well. You only get to graduate from elementary school once. Be a damn shame for you to miss it." Another long drink. "Well – y'know. For them to cancel it all together."

The graduation ceremony has been on everyone's minds for weeks – even before Jun Tamashiro had gone missing. The tone before had been one of excitement; now, the shadow of Jun's disappearance hangs over the town and the graduation ceremony he can no longer attend like a funeral shroud. After so many days, no one expects him to be found alive.

At this point, no one really expects to find him at all, really.

A breeze meanders its way down the street, touching at Hawks' hair, ruffling through his feathers. Suzume can feel it in her own hair, too, slinking like cool fingers up and under her sweater. The both of them shiver visibly in unison.

"It wouldn't be so bad," Suzume says. She means it; it wouldn't. The prospect of the ceremony might have thrilled her classmates, but even before Jun had vanished, it hadn't held any kind of appeal for her. With her grandmother in the hospital, and the situation with her brother being what it is – nevermind how baffling he's been, lately – Suzume has long known there'd be no one there for her in the audience. Like everything regarding school, the whole prospect had struck her as incredibly lonely. That Jun's tragic disappearance might take that away seems the only benefit to the whole gristly affair –

Something Suzume feels awfully guilty for even thinking.

Of course, she can't tell Hawks that. Secrets, secrets – always so many secrets. And when he looks down at her, thick eyebrows raised up near his hairline, mouth pulled into a line that's very nearly almost displeased, Suzume turns and looks away. Frowning down at her feet, she shakes her head, throat pulled bow-string tight. "Sorry," she whispers, hoarsely. "It's just – "

But Hawks isn't mad at her. "Chickadee," he says her nickname tenderly, in a voice as soft as feathers. Moving between them, his hand lingers there again a moment – and then he does allow himself to touch her. His grip is firm, but gentle. Suzume's breath catches in her chest and there is cotton in her mouth and she frowns at the ground and bites down so hard on her lip that her vision blurs, again.

"You gotta let yourself cut loose sometimes," he continues. "You're s'posed to be a kid, but I swear, it's like you're about a million goddamn years old and lining up for your funeral, sometimes. I know it's – I know shit feels real heavy right now, but you're fine. You're safe. I'm not gonna let – "

Hawks catches himself. He goes very still. Suzume hears him take a breath. "C'mon. Really. You gotta let yourself live."

There's no more steam coming off her hot chocolate. It sits, motionless, so thick in the cup in her red-knuckled hand. Trying a sip of it again, it fills her mouth, coating the insides of her cheeks. Cloying and syrupy, it almost makes her choke as she struggles to swallow it back.

He means well. Hawks always means well. He is patient, kind and earnest. Even if he won't say it, Suzume knows he came to Chichibu for her, and for her alone. The handful of out-of-town-detectives have already tried and failed to discover anything at all about Jun. There's nothing for a hero to do – not even one of Hawks' caliber.

No, he's come to spend an hour with her after school each day – come to mind her. Come to look out for her. He wants to go shopping with her, and buy her drinks. Flying over a thousand kilometers, he's come to trade phone calls for visits and trail her through hundred yen stores, watching her mull over lip stains she feels too shy to try and stuffed animals that feel more her speed.

Come to talk. Come to make her laugh.

Sometimes, he manages. Sometimes, he takes the stuffed animals from her hands and has them talk to her in silly voices and tell her jokes so terrible she can't help but smile.

And sometimes, he doesn't. It's never his fault, though. It's not. It's hers.

Hero, hero, hero. Number eight in last year's ranking. Why, she wants to ask? Why? To what end? What does he want with some lost and forgotten girl with no friends and one hell of a broken, secret big brother?

"It's just a dumb baby-kind of graduation," Suzume says. She doesn't look at him. The aftertaste of the chocolate in her mouth is bitter, now. It clings to her teeth, and her tongue, and her throat. She swallows and swallows, but it doesn't go away. "It's not like middle school, or high school, or university. It doesn't matter."

"Well," he says, very seriously, "it does to me."

When she was a little girl, her brother had told her he'd teach her how to tell when people were lying. She's still a little girl, but Suzume is older. And that was one of the tricks, he'd told her, then; her brother knew what she was thinking because he was so much older and smarter than she was.

Is she smarter now too, Suzume wonders? Or just older?

She looks up at Hawks again. Amber eyes behind a golden visor meet hers, warmth layered over warmth. He's put away his pocket smile; his mouth hangs in the corners, now. He's so young, she knows. So young for a hero. But there's a tiredness to his eyes she's not sure she's ever really noticed before.

Suzume doesn't think he's lying.

She thinks it might be easier for the both of them if he is.

March; 12 years.

After much deliberation, the school elects to hold the graduation ceremony after all. Unsurprisingly, there is pushback. The continued controversy is mentioned in passing on the local news in the days leading up to the ceremony, more of a footnote as the anchors focus more heavily on Jun's fast-stagnating case. The night before the ceremony itself, Suzume reads an article in the newspaper where Jun's mother condemns the school for its tone-deaf choice in much stronger, heart-wrenching words.

"It isn't fair," she's quoted as saying. "It feels like a mockery."

Suzume reads that line, over and over again. She knows exactly how that feels.

Her brother – home earlier than 7 PM for once – watches her intently. He's always watched her intently, but since early March, it's become even more focused. In her periphery, she can see his phone beside his folded legs, its screen dark. It's like that most nights, now. He looks at her, and looks at her, and looks at her. Even when he holds his phone, she catches him looking at her over it. As heavy as it is now, she swears she can feel his gaze on her more often than not.

He must know what she's reading. When she'd come home earlier, he'd been reading the same page, sprawled out across the tatami in the common room. With the shoji doors open to let the frigid air in, the breeze had rustled the papers eerily in his hands.

(She'd tried very hard to ignore the way his eyes stalked her over them as she'd shut the doors.)

"So," she hears him say, and his tone is cool and condescending. "Graduation for little baby Suzu. Bet you think you're so big now. Not a baby anymore, huh? Get to stand up on the stage and sing your little school songs and get your little diploma." He snorts, loudly, no doubt on purpose. "And all under the shadow of some sad, dead kid. Real goddamn festive."

"He's not dead." She's not sure why she says it. Sure, the news talks like Jun is still alive. Not yet found, they say. The adults at school do the same thing. Still missing, they say, in hushed, solemn tones anytime they notice their students are close enough to hear them discussing it.

The kids at school don't, though. They use words like lost, and gone, and dead, and murdered. They use them loudly. Gracelessly.

Jun hadn't had any real friends. Even if the conversations sometimes turn grim, it doesn't seem as if anyone especially misses him. Rather than a boy they'd shared a classroom with only a few weeks ago, they talk about him more as if he were a bad urban legend thirty years in the making.

"Maybe they'll find him," she finds herself saying, even though she's sure they won't. If they were going to, they would have already – at least, that's what she hears the kids at school say.

Reluctantly, Hawks had admitted the same thing when she'd asked.

Not that Suzume needs to be told that – not by Hawks, and not by her classmates. It's something she's known all along, something she'd figured out well enough on her own, just as her classmates had. Her brother is right, even if he doesn't mean to be – even if he's just trying to be mean.

She isn't a baby anymore. She doesn't believe in fairytales. Jun isn't coming home, not now, and not ever.

"'Not dead,'" her brother repeats, scoffing. "Fucks' sake. Come off it, Suzu. Don't be stupid. A kid doesn't go missing for weeks – especially not from some podunk town where shit never goes down – and not end up dead."

Folding the newspaper, Suzume sets it beside her and looks out the window. He's looking at her, still; she knows not because she looks, but because she can still feel it burning into her, blue-blazing fire licking all up the back of your neck. Things between the two of them have been strained for weeks. Sadness has given way to a pitiful sort of indignation at his continued absence and refusal to explain anything –

Nevermind how different everything feels.

"Maybe." A surge of defiance surges to life inside of her. Knowing the truth does nothing to quiet it, and Suzume can't push that stubborn resistance down… but with how tight her throat feels, it comes out much more strangled than she means to.

But her brother doesn't rise to the bait. "What d'you care about some dumb nobody-kid, anyway?"

Suzume looks at him then, confused by the bitter-tinged tension creeping into his voice. Besides his piercing gaze, his face is otherwise expressionless. There is only that unknowable intensity of his cut-gem eyes.

"It's just… sad." It sounds lame. It is lame, and she fully expects him to tell her so in biting, explicit detail. Still, it's the truth.

Further surprising her, his eyes only narrow even more, if only minutely. Across the space between the two of them, it's barely perceptible – but no less dangerous for it. "Oh, is it?"

There's something strange in his voice besides the tension – an edge, Suzume realizes, after a moment. A blade tucked behind a back, or hidden up a sleeve, to be drawn out and across a throat when least expected.

Shaking her head at him, she ignores both threats, far too emotional to think better of it. "None of the kids at school really care that he's gone."

"Yeah?" He is so very, very still. It doesn't look like he's even breathing. "And you do?"

"It's not like… it's not like he was mean. Or like he was bad. He wasn't. He was… he was nice. He smiled at me, sometimes. A lot, even, just – kind of awkward-like. It was a clumsy sort of smile, kinda. I don't know." Suzume swallows once, and then again, grimacing at the way it hurts, teeth set on teeth until that hurts, too. "He was just – he was just shy. He didn't really talk to anyone. Like… he was like me, in that way. And I guess it feels bad to see – it feels bad to realize that no one really misses him."

"That doesn't mean you have to," her brother says, thorny as rusted barbed wire.

For a long while, they only stare at each other. It's so hard to look at him dead-on like this, her eyes raised to his, his own primed to swallow her whole, to tear her to shreds. All jagged, discordant lines and cruel angles, her brother is so much bigger than her – a beautiful, painful-to-look-at catastrophe.

Even with his mouth closed, Suzume can imagine his teeth, always bared and ever-vicious. She can see how his jaw moves as he clenches them, another one of a half-dozen unspoken threats.

There's no guessing why he cares so much. Then again, there's rarely any reconciling why her brother does or feels what he feels. As ever, it's like stumbling blind through thick, awful smoke.

Shrugging, she works one hand across the other, thumb running over her knuckles in a sudden fit of anxiety. The words someone should fill her mouth, but she tightens her own teeth around them, as if to cage them in – hold them back. Blind or not, that's something she understands well-enough.

"Suzu." The way he says it, her name sounds very, very dire. For the billionth time in her life, she wonders if he can read her thoughts. "Did you talk to him?"

The question, from anyone else, would be innocent. Nothing about her brother is ever innocent, though.

It's not even a question, from him. It's a command.

"It isn't – " She flounders. Sensing further danger, she tries to correct course. "That isn't why I feel bad."

Very slowly, he repeats himself, as if she is stupid. "Did you talk to him?"

"Just…" It's not something she's let herself think about, not since he's gone missing. She hasn't been able to bear it. Somehow, it makes everything worse. This, now, makes everything worse, too. "Just one time, really."

Her brother doesn't say anything. Stone-faced and inscrutable, he only stares at her, waiting for her to continue. There is no getting out of this now, Suzume knows. So, swallowing back the sudden swell of hot nausea, her hands form into fists in her lap, and she does.

"Um… so a couple of months after I first started school, during after school cleaning duties, the teacher asked me to go get some fresh rags from a closet at the end of the hall. There aren't any classrooms down there, just… just a few supply closets and the bathrooms and a staircase hardly anyone uses 'cause kids like to say it's haunted. He'd – Jun'd taken bathroom cleaning for himself. He always did, before that day, and after it, too. No one wanted to do it ever, but he did… except I don't think he really did. I think he did it 'cause he wanted to get away from everyone else."

She looks away from her brother again and his too-bright eyes, and back down at the floor. Looking at him is too much right now. "Anyway… when I first got there, no one was there. I didn't see him when I went into the closet to get the stuff the teacher wanted… but I did see him after. Two other boys from class had him cornered across the hall just between the bathrooms, and they were – " Suzume takes a deep, shuddering breath. " – pushing dirty, wet rags into his mouth. And I – I remember his glasses were all crooked, and his face was red – and, and wet, too. I remember thinking they looked like the rags used for the bathroom."

Silence, still. Taking another breath, she still doesn't look up at her brother. The stench of those rags is as vivid a memory as her father's house gone up in flames is. Acrid and awful, even recalling it burns her nose.

"I was – I was scared. Those two boys were a lot bigger than he was, and – and me, too. They were loud, and mean, like – like if Katsuki had been about a billion times worse, and he was… Katsuki was already really bad, most of the time. But I remember him – I remember Jun looking over one of their shoulders at me, and – and his eyes were wide. They were wet. He'd been crying. And I thought – that's why his face was wet. And from the rags, too. And one of them was pushing the rag deeper in, and I saw him – I saw Jun's shoulders heave." The shrug of her shoulders is a jerky, helpless kind of movement. "You know. 'cause he was gagging."

"Suzu – "

But Suzume doesn't let her brother say whatever awful thing she expects he wants to say. Staring up at him, brows knit tightly together, her own eyes burn with the memory. "So, anyway – I thought I should do something. Say something. So I asked them to stop."

This, it seems, successfully disarms her brother, if only momentarily. Sheer incredulity sweeps across his face, tension relieved as his eyes widen. "You… asked them to stop."

It sounds stupid when she says it. It sounds even more stupid to hear him say it back to her. When she can only manage to nod miserably, her brother's expression darkens considerably, the momentary reprieve over.

"And what did they do?"

Briefly, she considers lying. She considers sitting up straighter, chin held high, and telling him they did as she asked. That they bowed their heads and apologized, that they took the rag out of Jun's mouth and brushed him off, that they marched off back to the classroom and told on themselves. Everything had been fine, she wants to say. It had worked out fine, just like it was supposed to. Like she'd hoped it would back then.

Like she knew it wouldn't.

But there are tears rolling down her cheeks and she isn't good at lying and her brother knows her much too well for that, anyway.

So, she is honest when she says, simply, "They came after me, instead."

And now her brother's breathing is very, very shallow. His lips have pulled away from his teeth in a snarl, and she sees the way his chest moves, rapid and arrhythmic with each quickening breath. Behind the spill of his black hair, his eyes are an impossibly cold inferno. She's not sure if the heat that suddenly seems to be filling the room and overtaking her in waves is her imagination or not –

His anger, or her fear.

Suzume looks at her brother's chin. At his neck. At his shoulders. She can't look at his face. His face frightens her. Raw, roiling, his fury undoes him, and he is already so rarely held together by anything real.

She wants to stop, but she knows he won't let her. She wants to leave, but she knows he'd come after her. She wants to close her mouth and shake her head – but Suzume knows he'd torment it out of her. She has, as he would tell her, fucked up royally. The only way to go now is forward, pushing her way through all that blazing fire.

Isn't she used to it by now, she thinks? Isn't he mad at her all the time? What's it really matter now?

When he's gone so often –

When all he does is stare –

When he's so mean –

When he won't touch her the way he used to?

"They let Jun go and they came at me and one of them held me against the wall and the other pushed the rag into my mouth."

"Suzu," her brother hisses her name, and oh, he really is so angry, so very angry, and her heart aches and aches and aches in her chest. It shouldn't matter, but it does. It does! It's worse than the memory, even, him being angry like this, and especially at her – worse than those leering boys, one of them with his fist in her hair, the other pushing that disgusting, wet rag past her lips. Never in her life had she tasted something so disgusting. It had hit the back of her throat, and Suzume had thrown up – all over the rag, and then all over the floor.

"I threw up." She's babbling, now. "I was crying and I threw up and the floor was so shiny and I made it all gross and I remember crying more about that. The other two left, and Jun came over and he – he was rubbing his hand on my back. He told me he'd clean it for me. It just – it made me feel worse – "

"God – " Her brother spits the word, and it crackles in the room, a bullet from a gun. "Fuck – for fuck's sake – "

"But what else was I supposed to do!" The tears that streak down her face are equal parts indignant and despairing. "Going and getting the teacher – it would've made it worse for him! Those two – people like them always get mean when you try and get help, try and tell someone – and it's not like – it's not like… I don't have a good quirk like you do! What was I supposed to do? What was I supposed to – "

"Not get fucking involved!"

It's not like her brother to raise his voice, and Suzume finds herself recoiling at the sudden explosiveness of it as if shot, shoulders cinched up to her ears, hands raised to cover her face.

"But no one else would, either!" Muffled into her palms, the words spill out from behind her fingers. "And it happened all the time, every day, and no one helped, no one else would help – "

"Because they were fucking smart! Because playing hero in that situation – in any fucking situation – god, Suzu, come the hell on, you know better, you do." The bark of laughter that escapes him is bitter, and cold, and cruel. "You're a shrimpy little brat. A crybaby. You fucking fall apart when someone looks at you wrong. A strong-fucking-breeze would carry you off. The smart thing to do in that situation – the only thing you should have done in that situation – would have been to walk-the-fuck-away!"

He's so angry. She's been so afraid of him being angry, and now here he is, face flushed, hands balled into shaking fists. She's never seen him so furious before. Even with her father – he hadn't seemed angry then so much as manic, a sick kind of gleeful she'd never seen on anyone before and hadn't seen, since.

Now, though, he's apoplectic. He's feral. Nostrils flaring, shoulders heaving, his eyes that hungry, terrible, blue-fire inferno –

And it just isn't fair.

"But you didn't – " The words come out broken by sobs as she draws her knees up to her chest, pushing herself farther away from him, clumsy with fear. "But you didn't, you didn't, you didn't – "

"What the hell are you even talking about?"

"You didn't – you didn't leave me! You didn't walk away! Not in the park, with the tree – " Like a fish on land, Suzume gulps air and chokes on it. " – and not in the big house, either! And my dad – my dad was so much worse than some dumb bullies in a hallway with a rag – he was – he was – "

But she can't finish her thought because her mouth stops working and the words stop coming. She can't look at him any longer. Like with everything else, he's right about her – she's just some dumb, hopeless crybaby. She can only bury her face in her tear-sticky fingers and cry.

For a time, her brother lets her. Dimly, she's aware of her own tears, and of him not saying anything, of him not doing anything. And then she feels the floor as it shifts beneath his weight, feels him coming closer – and then his arms are around her, pulling her into him, against him, her sopping, salty cheek pressed to his throat.

His hand tangles in her hair.

"Suzu," she thinks he says, maybe. It might be a sigh. It might not be. If it is what he said, he doesn't say anything else.

And it's such a relief, she thinks. It's such a relief to be in his arms again, and to be held this way, and for him to not be angry or stiff or strange about the way he holds her. There is no reluctance in the way his hand strokes her hair now, or in the way he tucks his face against the crown of her skull. Deep and long, she can feel him inhale. She can feel him bury his face further into her hair and inhale again, and again. He groans softly, and a shiver runs through him, and it gets into her, too. Wrapping her arms around him, Suzume's fingers claw at the fabric of his shirt stretched over his back. She can't stop crying. She wants to be as near to him as possible. She wants him to hold her and never let go.

"You didn't walk away. You didn't. You didn't." While not crying as hard, Suzume can't stop shaking as she struggles to finish the thought from moments ago – the thought she's kept with herself for years. "I wouldn't have anything – I wouldn't be anything if you had."

"That's different," her brother says, finally, into her hair. Shedding anger for something else, he sounds faraway – strained, somehow. Strained, and something else… something she can't quite place. That something in his voice makes her ache, though – makes her cry harder, all over again.

With his one hand in her hair still, he slips the other up and under her shirt, smoothing across the skin of her back up between her shoulder blades. It reminds Suzume of the way Jun had touched her back then, but so much more intimate. Working up and over the ridges of her spine, her brother's fingers are hot and familiar. She loves the way they feel when they touch her.

It feels like forever since he's touched her this way.

"You do things like that 'cause you're good," he says. "Step in and get ruined for it, 'cause you're good. Mourn a stranger, 'cause you're good. I don't do any of that. What I do, I do 'cause I'm angry. 'cause I'm selfish."

For a moment, her brother lapses into silence as if thinking, coiling her hair around his finger all the way up to the root. The tug is sharp and stinging, but in a strangely pleasant way that has Suzume nestling against him, starved as ever for closeness – and more than a little regretful when he unwinds it again. Then, eventually, he says, "When I came to get you from your dad – that wasn't some big, heroic act. I wasn't being good or kind. I fucking hated your dad." With his wide palm, he cradles the back of her head, holding her closer to himself.

Much more even-kilter now, his tone has become assured in the way she knows him to be. "I came to get what was mine back."

Against her temple, she can feel her brother's pulse. It's quick beneath his skin, a steady but almost frantic thrum of blood pumped through his veins. "But… you didn't know me in the park to be selfish or angry about it, though."

Another silence, and then, "No. I guess I didn't." Never one to give even small concessions, this slow-spoken confession of her brother's takes Suzume by surprise.

"But even then, I thought about leaving you there. I wanted to, at first. Thought it'd be funny. Wanted to make you cry." Beneath her shirt, his hand plays over the curve of one of her ribs. "I think if you'd been anyone else, I definitely would've."

It should hurt, Suzume thinks, to hear that he'd wanted to do that. But she remembers that evening clearly; she remembers the mockery in his voice when she'd first looked down at him and seen his scarred face upturned, gazing up at her. There'd been cruelty in his eyes then, and in his mouth, and in the things he'd obviously wanted to say to her. Even as a child, she'd recognized that.

Suzume remembers begging him, anyway.

"Then… why? Why can't it be good that motivated you, then? What else could it even be?"

"I don't know." In the silence, his nails work their way across her scalp, sifting through the thick, wavy tresses of her hair. She can't see them, but she can imagine them – patchwork-black now, the paint job old and chipped, flaking off from wear. It's been too long since she's been able to sit in his lap and paint them again, what with the way he's been. The thought is like needles behind her eyes, and she blinks away the sensation, focusing instead on her brother's voice.

"Never been one for fate before you. After you, well…" He hums. "I think about that a lot differently now. So rather than good, let's say it's that. But if there's any good in me at all – you're the only one who gets it, Suzu. And that's just it."

"What – "

Before she can finish her sentence, his arm – now wrapped around her – loosens, and the hand in her hair disengages, finding her chin instead. Tilting her back in his lap, he pushes her down until she can look up at him – until his grip on her jaw forces her attention on him.

Blinking her watery eyes, Suzume's gaze fixes on his. There's that intensity of the past few weeks again – the familiar but unfamiliar sharpness of it boring down into her. Wetting his mismatched lips, he stares down into her tear-hot face and shakes his head, just a little.

"You're so good. You're nothing like me," he tells her. The words come out raspy and low. "And that's – it's good. I like that about you. But you give it away too easily."

Another shake of his head, this time more pronounced. "Don't do that. No more trying to help some dumb kid at school. No more mourning a literal stranger you don't know at all just 'cause no one else cares enough to do it. No more."

"Nii-chan – "

"No." The grip he has on her chin tightens, so much so it starts to hurt – but at least he's touching her, Suzume thinks. At least he's touching her. "Listen to me. I like that about you – I do. And I also can't fucking stand it."

In her chest and in her throat both, Suzume feels her breath catch. The notion that her brother can't stand even something insignificant about her makes her wince. Trying to push through it, she finds it hard to breathe. Is this why, she wonders? Is this why he's been so awful, so standoffish lately?

"I'm sorry," she whispers as best she can with his hand wrapped around her chin, fresh tears brimming in her eyes.

"You don't get it," he says, and his voice is lower still – almost raw, now. "I don't want you to not feel those things. A long time ago, I thought, maybe… but no. That's who you are. And really, I don't think I'd like you if you didn't feel that way – if you were any different. If you were like me. No, you're dumb. Naive, idealistic – it's a hell of a look on you. And – and fuck it, I like it. I don't want you to be any different."

Briefly, he closes his eyes, every line of his sharp-jawed face set in tense relief. In her lap, Suzume's hands lace together, tangled tight against the the urge to reach up and smooth her fingers over his furrowed brow – as if she could work the stiffness out of his jaw with a touch.

As if she could do anything at all for him besides tend to shallow, surface wounds.

Suddenly, his eyes are open again, staring and wide. "But I told you I'm angry. That I'm selfish. You know that. And you get it, don't you?"

The hand he has on her jaw relaxes, and then he's brushing his knuckles against her cheek. The touch is soft. It has her heart thrumming wild in her chest, beating so hard she thinks it might burst forth from her glass-cage ribs at any moment.

"C'mon, Suzu." When he says her name, so warm and slick on his tongue, it sounds like silk drawn over a knife. It's been weeks since he's said her name like that. Shuddering despite herself, Suzume finds herself eager for the intimacy of it sliding inside of her all the same. "Don't give away what's mine by right."

His thumb ghosts her mouth and, born of some instinct that feels like desperate, starved yearning, Suzume's lips part of their own accord. There's the widening of his eyes again, almost imperceptible, but she's close enough to see it and she knows she hasn't misjudged it. The heaviness of his unwavering gaze makes her body feel weird and buzzy and hot. Struck with that feeling, she wants very suddenly to beg him to lean down and kiss her. To promise her that he isn't angry with her, or that he, at the very least, forgives her for whatever she might've done.

Maybe she could ask him to apologize for being so strange and far-away and mean. Maybe he could promise her that it isn't her fault.

More than anything, she wants to beg him to tell her that he likes her –

That he really likes her.

That he loves her.

Instead of any of that, though – staring at her with his blue-fire eyes – he presses the tip of his thumb past her lips and into her mouth and says, so very, very quietly, "I want all those things about you for myself."

Suzume wonders what his finger in her mouth means, but only for a moment. When his thumb finds her tongue, pressing down into the wet, squirming muscle, it's made very clear – and it's an easy enough thing, she thinks – isn't it? She doesn't want him to be angry with her. Not anymore. She can't stand it when he's across the room from her, not touching her, mouth hard, eyes narrowed, staring, and staring, and staring.

He doesn't look at her like that now, though, and he especially doesn't look like it when she closes her mouth around his finger and sucks gently at the tip, her tongue moving up and around and over it slowly. The pad of his thumb is rough, as are the edges of the chipping polish on his nail –

But it's not a detail she's given time to focus on, because soon his thumb is pushing deeper into her mouth, his other fingers curling around her jaw for leverage.

She lets him. She lets her tongue lie still in her mouth as he pumps his thumb between her lips, in and out, in and out, the motion steady and rhythmic. The smile that creeps across his face is worth everything to her; he hasn't smiled at her like that in such a long, long time.

"Oh," he breathes the word out, and then the handful that come after it, too. "You want me to touch you, don't you? You like this."

With his finger in her mouth and his hold on her face, she can hardly manage a nod. Rather, Suzume closes her eyes and makes a noise she hopes sounds agreeable, a back-of-the-throat sort of squeak.

A shudder works its way through her brother, and then she feels his breath, hot on her face, fanning across her cheeks. "Aw. There's my good girl. I like it, too."

And maybe, she thinks, a little dizzy and a little dazed – maybe that's good enough.

The day of the ceremony, it rains. Suzume carries her dress shoes under her raincoat and wears rubber boots instead, sloshing slowly through deep puddles alone on her way to school. Besides the pop of color offered by her light blue umbrella – a color she'd chosen a few years prior because it reminded her of her brother's eyes – everything else seems impossibly grey.

The school gymnasium isn't much better. Between the navy uniforms of the students and their attending parents' darker formal wear, even the half-blinding fluorescent lighting overhead can't shake off the solemn pall that settles suffocatingly over the room. Everyone takes to their seats in a stiff, hesitant silence that's far more awkward than it is respectful.

She hates it – every dour, awful bit of it.

It feels like a funeral, Suzume thinks – or what she imagines a funeral might be like. The principal rises to the front of the room to begin the subdued theatrics of the ceremony, but she can't really process what he's saying. Some kind of greeting, she thinks. It's in one ear and out the other, much like the droning chorus of an insect from kilometers away. Rather than stare out at the tense-faced crowd of parents, Suzume looks down at her hands in her lap and wishes she were anywhere else.

(There's no one out there for her, anyway.)

A speech follows. Then, a smattering of discordant clapping, as if those doing it aren't really sure if they're meant to. Another speech follows that one, and then another, and blessedly, there's no more clapping. Suzume steals a glance up at her class representative, the boy's back ramrod straight as he addresses the somber auditorium. There's a warble to his voice, and he speaks a little too quickly. In that moment, she does not envy his popularity and his two dozen friends. By the time he's done, settling back in his seat a few chairs down from her, Suzume can see the way his hands tremble beneath the smart cuffs of his blazer.

Then the principal comes out again, standing tall in his starched suit. His voice is grave as he expresses a deep and collective sorrow about Jun's continued absence. Someone shifts in the audience, and Suzume can hear their chair creaking while the principal pauses to take a breath.

Neat little lies, Suzume thinks, tongue pressed to her teeth, willing nausea back. White lies gone grey in all the wet muck and grime.

It's a blessedly short speech.

And then, suddenly, they're calling names. One by one, Suzume watches as the students of her class march up to the pulpit to accept their graduation papers, turning out to make whatever face they're meant to at the audience. Now, there's clapping again – there, in the front row, and there, somewhere in the middle, one or two or three pairs of hands at a time.

Parents, she realizes. Siblings. A handful of each for each of her classmates.

And just as suddenly, she feels like she's either going to cry or be very, very sick.

Earlier that morning, her brother had watched her come out from the bathroom, brushing unsure hands over her freshly ironed skirt. When he'd come over to help her straighten her tie, Suzume's breath had hitched painfully in her throat – both because he was touching her again, and also because she wanted something more.

"Please come," she'd wanted to beg him. It was a stupid, childish thing to want. Of course he couldn't; she knew that, and he most certainly did. So she'd held her tongue, shrugging her way into the blazer he'd held out for her. Frowning down at his bare feet against the tatami, she'd tried as hard as she could to seem braver than she felt.

"Hey," he'd said, working the knuckles of his fist under her chin and forcing her head back to look at him. "Stay home."

"What?"

"Cut class." Shrugging, easy and fluid, he was so casual about it. "Stay home with me."

"It's not – it's not just class," she'd stammered, flustered with her own refusal. "It's graduation."

"So? You go or you don't, you'll graduate anyway. Not like it matters." Jerking his head towards the rain-washed window, he'd pulled an exaggerated face despite the way his voice remained the picture of perfect apathy. "C'mon. It's piss-ugly out there. You don't wanna go out in all that shit. I'll order us a pizza, and you can play one of your dumb games. Could pick a movie or three, if you want. Whatever you pick, I"ll keep my bitching to a minimum."

More than a little skeptical, Suzume had stared up at him. "...really?"

"Really."

The rain had been so loud then, coming down in steady, endless sheets. Before she could change her mind, though, she'd cast her eyes away from him and out into the wet, grey world. "But I wanna go," she'd said, faintly. Even to her own ears, it sounded like she was trying to convince herself more than she was trying to convince him.

"Why?"

Why? It was a fair question. Suzume hadn't really been sure – not even when, trying and failing to sound self-assured, she'd said, "'cause I'm only gonna graduate elementary school once."

"Mmm. Suit yourself." His hand had fallen away from her chin, then. Taking hold of her neatly tucked tie, he'd tugged it free of her blazer, and her with it. Crowding into her space, he'd stooped down and pressed a hot-mouthed kiss to her forehead – and, after a moment, her cheek, somewhere back near her ear.

Ever fond of playing the insufferable big-brother-knows-best-card, Suzume was unsurprised to hear him whisper, "Try not to regret it too much, Suzu."

And then he'd slunk off back towards the bedroom, hands tucked lazily into the pockets of his sweatpants. Left alone to fix her tie, it had taken everything in her not to run after him and plead for everything he'd offered.

Of course her brother had been right. Wasn't he always?

Suzume had regretted it immediately.

And when her name rings loud in the pin-drop silent auditorium, she regrets it even more.

"Suzume Meihane!"

Standing up from her chair, she makes her way towards the principal on shaking, rubber legs, staring pointedly down at the stage. With every leaden step, her stomach churns and twists, bubbling up inside of her riotously. She knows she should lift her head. She wants to look up – look at the principal, out at the audience, look at anything, really – but she can't make herself. The intrusive sensation of a hundred pairs of eyes on her feels like a physical weight holding her head down.

When she comes to stand before her principal, Suzume can see only the polished, shining leather of his shoes and the hem of his slacks. Then, there's a paper held out to her, pressed into her trembling hands.

"Congratulations, Miss Meihane," says her principal very, very gently.

And then, out in the audience, there's the sound of a single pair of hands clapping with a wild and unchecked kind of enthusiasm wholly beyond any that came before it.

Slowly, and with much effort, Suzume lifts her head and looks out across the sea of black-and-grey formal wear. A hundred faces stare back at her, still and gloomy and numbly patient – everyone except a young man in the back, his dark suit and blonde hair visibly dripping rain water. Standing behind the rows of seated families, the flash of his red wings is the only real color in the whole room.

Hawks.

Even from across the crowded auditorium, Suzume can see the way he beams at her, his smile absolutely incandescent. When his eyes find her own, he stops clapping, trading it for an over-exaggerated wave that has a few of her classmates behind her giggling and whispering to each other in their seats.

There is nothing mean-spirited about the sound, Suzume realizes. They aren't making fun of him, and they aren't making fun of her, either. No – if anything, they're as excited to see him as he is excited to see her.

And he is unmistakably excited to see her. Like he has all the days prior, he looks at Suzume as if she is the only thing in the whole world, let alone the room, and his wings – sodden as they are – ruffle in a way she has learned to know means he's pleased.

The hand holding her diploma trembles, and then the whole of her trembles, too. But like the laughter and the whispers, Suzume realizes it isn't the bad sort, anymore.

Waving at him with her free hand, she manages a smile for the first time today. Painfully genuine, it aches for how wide it stretches in her cheeks, as if those muscles have gone too long unused.

It aches in her chest, too.

Holding both hands up in the air, Hawks wields a theatrical and decidedly triumphant thumbs-up in response.

At her shoulder, the principal's hand touches her, and not unkindly. When Suzume turns to look up at him, his smile, though nowhere near as wild as Hawks', is just as warm. Suzume manages a nod, and another smile –

And feels considerably lighter as she makes her way off the stage.

By the time the graduation ceremony is over, the rains have stopped. The sky is considerably brighter, the sun peeking out from behind the cotton-gauze remnants of fast scattering storm clouds. Crisp and cool, the air feels as if it's been rinsed to a pristine cleanliness, and it feels good in her lungs when she steps out into the courtyard. Greedily, Suzume gulps down breath after breath. The auditorium had been so stuffy, and she fills her lungs with it until she feels light-headed in an entirely pleasant way.

Out from behind her, her classmates stream out and around her, trading their earlier solemnity for shrieking, rowdy laughter. As if finally unburdened, their faces reflect their renewed optimism as they filter through the doors, seeking the eager embrace of similarly relieved family.

And for once, Suzume isn't jealous. She isn't sad.

She doesn't feel even a little bit lonely.

Across the courtyard, through all that greyscale formality, there is the familiar slash of hot-blooded scarlet. Hawks stands mostly head and shoulders above a congregation of her classmates, laughing as much as any of them. Even from meters away, she can see how he charms them, their faces upturned and awestruck, eyes as round as moons and mouths slack enough to match. As she walks towards them, she catches sight of one boy surreptitiously trying to take a selfie with Hawks close in the background, the boy's own face electric with glee.

Suzume is halfway to him by the time Hawks catches sight of her. Looking up from his eager entourage, his already smiling face breaks into an impossibly wider grin, pearl-bright smile a beacon to rival a dozen suns.

As with everything, he is shameless.

"Hey, chickadee!" It's a booming exclamation, punctuated by a wave twice as boisterous to match and a frenetic sweep of his wings. When her classmates turn to look at her – the apparent object of Hawks' unbridled passion – Suzume feels her cheeks grow uncomfortably hot.

Aside from her brother – and, more recently, Hawks – she is unused to people looking at her. These gazes are nothing like her brother's, though; all raised eyebrows and quirked mouths, they are almost entirely curious. They look at her as if she is something new and fascinating they have never noticed before.

One of the girls at Hawks' side seems to be asking him something, but he's already pulling away from the group. Crossing the rest of the distance between himself and Suzume in a few wide strides, he has his hands up and under her arms, sweeping her into the air well before she really has a chance to react.

For a moment, vertigo takes her. The motion is sudden, and it takes the breath out of her, and the world tilts and she's spinning, because he's spinning with her. All around her, the world blurs, a spill of kaleidoscope colors – but there is Hawks' face at the center of it, mouth smiling, his eyes like the sunlight that limns the clouds and smiling too. Even spinning, Suzume can see the way the edges crinkle with affection.

It's funny, she thinks. She's been so much higher than this. Hawks has taken her so much higher before – and yet, somehow, she's dizzier than she's ever been.

"You did it!" Suzume sees his mouth move, and realizes he's talking to her, cheering for her. The spinning slows, and the watercolor blur of the rest of the world begins to come into focus: face after face, peering at the two of them in bewildered wonder. When Hawks sees her cheeks get even hotter, he's laughing again, head thrown back with it.

Suzume has never seen him so happy.

And she's not jealous. She's not sad. She's certainly not lonely. But she doesn't understand. She doesn't understand the depth of his joy. Hawks is someone who has broken records. He's something special, the youngest hero to ever be in the top ten… and Suzume knows that's just the start. The same people who praise All Might and Endeavor and Best Jeanist – all heroes with more than twice Hawks' experience – regard Hawks like he's been touched by the hand of fate itself. They don't talk about his further ascension through the ranking like it's a possibility.

They talk about it like it's a guarantee.

By contrast, all Suzume has done is graduate elementary school.

"I sure did walk across that stage," she says, more than a little sheepishly.

That has him laughing more. He sets her down, and then, as if unable to contain himself, he tugs her back into his arms. Suzume tenses up – but only briefly. Everything about him is slow and gentle. The arms that settle around her shoulders are warm, loose enough not to stifle but firm enough to lend a sense of security all the same. Cupping the back of her head with his hand, he holds her so carefully against his chest. The fabric of his suit jacket is a little coarse against her cheek, but Suzume finds she doesn't mind it. It smells nice.

He smells nice.

"Hey, hey, c'mon," he says, playful and scolding all at once. "Give yourself some credit. You've worked hard. Worked your whole butt off, even! Your grades were excellent – been top-notch the whole time, or so your teacher's been telling me. My little hatchling's a prodigy – both at school and at walking across the stage." He laughs again, much quieter this time. "Ain't nobody here who walked across that stage better or fancier than you."

Hawks says it like he means it. Like he believes every word of it, like he's one of the talking heads discussing his own meteoric rise to greatness. Suzume has seen him smile on TV, and when she looks up at him, he smiles down at her, three times as bright.

"It's just a – " Suzume wants to say dumb, but her throat hurts. The word gets stuck in it, sticky there, like something swallowed down the wrong way. She's not even sure why. She's not sad. She's not. She's not. "Just a graduation. It's not a – not a – "

His smile softens, more pale morning sunlight than blinding noon-day. "I can't tell you how to feel," he says, in a voice that, while no less fond, is surprisingly serious for him. "I can't stop you from tearing yourself down, even if it sucks ass. Even if I hate it. And god – I hate it, you know? It blows. It blows catastrophically. Number one on a clickbait listicle of top ten things that blow this year. Maybe even the decade."

Settling his hands over her shoulders, he pushes her back a bit so he can really look down into her face, shaking his own head patiently. "But that kinda thing, it goes both ways. You can't tell me how to feel, either. So c'mon. Lemme be proud of you – 'cause I'm gonna be proud of you, whether you like it or not."

Inexplicably, Suzume wants to argue. She wants to tell him it's just school. She wants to tell him that good grades don't matter in the wake of all the things he's done – that good grades are things for parents to make a big deal out of, because it's their job. She wants to tell him that she's not his job – not anymore. That there are important things, much more important things for him to worry about. That he's the one saving people. That he's the one who's done things he should be proud of.

But she is also so selfish. Her father was the worst person in the world, and her mother is dead, and her brother is a terrible, dirty secret.

And she wants someone to be proud of her. She wants it so badly.

She shouldn't be greedy. She shouldn't. She knows better than to fish for it. She should be happy with what she gets – this stolen moment she doesn't deserve should be enough. But there's a hole in her, years and years in the making.

"Really?" Suzume asks.

"Really."

Her voice quavers, so quiet she can barely hear it herself. "Promise?"

And Hawks is generous, and sincere, and his finger moves over his chest: diagonal slices, one over the other. "Cross my heart," he says, gently. And then, after tucking a bit of hair behind her ear, "I'm so proud of you, chickadee."