AN: Light trigger warning for mentions of small animal death in this chapter. Nothing gory about it, though!

024: sick in the head and sick in the heart.

Early July; 12 years.

There's a ringing in her ears.

It's different from the ringing of the phone seconds before. Part of her wishes it wasn't. It should be the phone. Why can't it be the phone, ringing, still, and blissfully unanswered? Still a door kept shut, firm and safe against the horror that lies behind it –

Or, more accurately, still the metaphorical muzzle for the horror that is her brother.

But the phone isn't ringing anymore because Suzume has flipped it open and holds it – answered – in front of her. Ever the obedient little sister her brother demands her to be, she's even pressed the button that activates the speaker phone. Now, there is just the ringing in her head, and the sound of the rain, and the crash of the thunder booming up in the sky –

And the rustle of background noise on the other end of the line.

And then voices.

Plural.

Many and indistinct, they wash over the room like waves. Here and there, she can make out a word or two. Then something longer, but still garbled… a sentence, maybe? – at least until the tide falls back again, and any vague clarity crumbles away with it.

Only centimeters from her face, her brother's seedy, neon eyes narrow, near-electric in the stormy gloom of their bedroom. He says nothing.

Neither does she.

Seconds pass. Heartbeats, too, much faster than those seconds. She counts them in her head and watches her brother's lips peel back from his white teeth in an expression that terrifies her. Neither a grin nor a frown nor anything she's familiar with, Suzume takes an unsteady step back from him on instinct alone. She regrets it immediately. Just as the lightning rips the sky apart with blinding incandescence, something very dangerous flashes through his blue cut-gem gaze.

He reaches out, and –

"Hey – " Breaching those muddled, dark tides, one voice surfaces above all the rest, familiar and crystal clear. In the too-small space between Suzume and her brother, her brother's hand freezes.

This is a voice she knows, calling out across some vast and cosmic emptiness. Is that where she is? Very abruptly, Suzume feels so far away from herself – cast up and out, drifting, detached, cut loose and spiraling towards some distant sun. From there up in space, she peers down at herself as if from a dream, out of body and very nearly out of mind.

But even from a million billion trillion kilometers away, Suzume thinks she'd know that voice anywhere. Even with that one word.

(There is only one other voice she knows better, and standing in front of her now, her brother holds his tongue as one might a blade in its sheath.)

"Hey – you there?"

There's still so much background noise coming through the line. Chatter. Laughter. Movement. Suzume is used to the sound of the wind, or the distant, comforting rush of cars when he calls – but never this.

A hair above a whisper, she forces herself to greet him: "Hi."

"Oh, hey! There you are!" There in the foreground and drawing closer, Hawks' own laughter bubbles up over the line and fills her bedroom in a way it's never had the opportunity to do before. Across from her, Suzume can see every sharp angled line of her brother's body go bow-string taut, his head dipping incrementally forward as a predator's might when it's caught the scent of something worth hunting. No longer looking at her, his eyes are riveted to the dim glow of the phone in her hands.

She should feel some relief, she thinks, to not be the focus of his attention. She should.

But she doesn't.

Blissfully unaware, Hawks continues, flooding the dark room with unwelcome sunshine. "You not saying anything there for a second had about a million things going through my mind all at once, like – is she okay? Have I gotten the whole phone etiquette thing wrong this whole time and it's actually me who's supposed to say hi first, even when the other person answers the phone? And then, my head's going, and I'm thinking: is there some kinda hostage situation going on? Is – "

Over what sounds like the clink of glass chiming against glass and another muted burst of disjointed conversation, Hawks keeps talking. Pitched so high now that it's starting to sound like a shrill, incessant shriek, Suzume finds herself struggling to hear him over the ring-ring-ringing in her ears.

It occurs to her, remotely, that her hand – the one holding the phone – is shaking. Nothing wild. Nothing dramatic. Just a tremor. A glance back up at her brother reveals he isn't moving at all, though. Not a muscle – not a millimeter. Suzume isn't even sure if he's breathing. Outstretched for her still, his hand lingers in the space between them, frozen.

His attention is back on her face, though. Far too close for any comfort, his eyes glitter and burn like twin stars in the murk.

"Hey," comes Hawks' voice, "you okay? You still there?"

"Oh, um – yeah." Suzume wills movement into her jaw, and her lips, and her tongue. There is vibration in her throat, and by some miracle, sound comes out. Her body feels less her own – less like something organic, like something made of flesh and blood and sinew and bone – than it does an unruly machine, one she is operating from that distant, faraway place. It feels rusty. Unresponsive. Every movement and every word is a fight, and internally, her poorly constructed machine parts riot against her.

"I'm okay," she says, mechanically. "It's just storming out… so."

"So?"

The pause he leaves for her to fill lets more of that foreign conversation leak in. "Hey," she hears someone say in a voice she doesn't recognize, "Hurry it up, yeah?"

Hawks makes a sound of frustration, a kind of tst noise with his tongue and his teeth. "Hold on," he says to the other voice, and then, back into the phone and considerably more congenial: "Sorry. You said… storms? Sorry! I forgot for a sec there, but now it's coming back to me. Storms. Yeah, you don't like those. It a pretty bad storm, then? You lose power?"

There's the barest hint of movement when her brother's eyes narrow. Just a micrometer. From behind the metal and wire casing of her robot-girl chest, what feels like the last organic part of her – her heart – thrashes so wildly she fears it might burst.

Closing her eyes for a moment, Suzume imagines herself in a control room, pressing buttons that say things like keep talking and pretend you are fine.

No matter how hard she hammers on those buttons, screaming in her own mind, a muted, "Uh-huh," is all she can manage.

"Ooof. Actually, I think – yeah, I think I can hear it, now that I'm trying to pay attention to it. Sounds rough! Cats and dogs! And no power, too – that's what you get for living out in the sticks. Some grandma seventeen blocks over sneezes, you gonna lose power. For real, though: not like it's worth a whole lot, but you got my sympathies. The real sincere variety, even."

One of the stranger-voices says something, and Hawks laughs again. "No!" Evidently meant for the other voice, his response is mischievous. "No, you don't get even a sliver of my sincerity. I never mean it with you. You deserve every rotten thing that comes your way, and you know it."

Suzume opens her eyes, and looks at her brother again. She's been watching him watch her for nearly this entire conversation. With how close he is, it's impossible not to without turning away entirely, and that's something she knows inherently that he absolutely won't allow. While the dead-winter iciness of his gaze hasn't melted even a little, there's a new and different kind of tension taking hold in his jaw. Even in the paltry light offered by the phone's small screen, she can see the way it seems to twitch.

This – all of this – it's too much. Every part of her is unraveling, piece by agonizing piece, corroded bolts and ungreased hinges coming apart in the way she's started to shake in earnest. The second her brother had caught her with that errant call, she'd felt like a prisoner receiving an execution decree…

Only for it to be delivered by the slowest executioner possible. Listening to Hawks talk feels like watching the headsman's apprentice struggle to drag his comically oversized axe up the too-long stairs to the gallows. Coming, and coming, but never quite arriving, the moment is dragged out into infinity.

It would be funny, she thinks, if she wasn't so frightened.

The anticipation, though – the dread – it's all far too much. She wants it to be over. She wants him to shoulder his axe and march up the stairs, two at a time. She wants him to hand the axe to her executioner brother so he can finally put her out of this prolonged misery.

Chickadee, she can imagine Hawks saying –

One heavy swing downward.

I miss you, or, I like you, or any other of the sentimental things Hawks is prone to confessing, unbidden and unexpected –

Two swings.

(As if it would take more than one swing – more than that first chickadee – for her brother to finish the job.)

Yet those things never seem to come. On the phone, Hawks is familiar, but only just. He speaks to her as if they know one another, just not the way he normally would, and so the apprentice climbs and climbs. Laboring up all those long, winding steps, they grow longer and more winding by the second.

"Um…" Warring with her own thoughts, it occurs to Suzume that she could call him Hawks and, in turn, lay her own head on the block. With how much her brother loathes heroes, that would be all she'd need to end everything right here and now.

No more anticipation. No more stress.

But for all the ways she cannot stand this endlessly mounting sense of panic, Suzume is, she realizes, a coward when it comes to her brother.

"Um," she says, again. "Sorry, just – did you… did you need something?"

"Shit… you're right." A chuckle. "God, I'm getting ahead of myself. Or, maybe it's more like I'm falling behind? I don't know. Listen, I just – I had that meeting yesterday, right? The Real Big Serious One. I'm emphasizing that, y'know, the title of that meeting, so imagine it properly, yeah? Anyway, so when it was over, well, it was late, so I didn't reach out. Didn't wanna call last night and bother you, after hours… you know how it is.

"So here I am today, and I got another meeting right now, and… actually, that's a lie. It's not a meeting. It's more of a shindig. No suits here. Or, well, much less of them than a proper meeting'd have. Some losers here wear suits all the damn time, even for goddamn breakfast." Hawks says the words some losers much more loudly than he does anything else. The comment is met by a chorus of laughter from the good-natured strangers he's obviously with.

"So, I'm at this half-meeting, half-shindig – hmmm. Maybe we could call it a ruckus. Anyway; whatever! And just… between you and me, this ruckus is way boring."

The chatter behind him grows louder, and Hawks insists again, this time in a raised voice, "Yes, it's absolutely, one-hundred-godsdamned-percent bo-ring. You guys are lame. It's criminal. Oughta put you in prison for it."

More laughter from over the line, both from Hawks' and his 'ruckus.' In a hopeless attempt at levity, Suzume tries desperately to imagine his face when he laughs, and fails –

It's impossible to imagine anything with her brother seething in front of her.

"Anyway," Hawks continues, his attention returned to her again, "so understandably, I'm feeling bored, y'know, as you do in situations like these, and I couldn't wait 'till Monday to tell you that everything from the Real and Actual Serious Meeting Yesterday – emphasis again! – was good news. And by that I mean: really good news. Things seem like they're gonna work out pretty much exactly like how you wanted."

"Oh," Suzume says faintly, trying very hard to ignore the way her brother's nostrils flare with every breath he takes. Hot as steam, it boils in the room, across her face and in her hair. "Did it?"

"It sure did!"

At least three voices crowd around Hawks, and there's the sound of rustling, like he's switching the phone to another ear. A female voice peaks above the rabble, laughing very near the receiver. "Quit – hey, quit trying to take my phone – fuck, I'm getting off in just a second, all right? Hold on. Hold – hold on! This is why I never do anything with – "

Giggles. Something covers the phone on Hawks' end, and Suzume stands in the too-hot and suffocating room, melting under the smoldering gaze of her executioner brother. Muffled, agitated conversation filters through the phone, and then, clear again, Hawks is back.

"God, you're still there, right?"

"Mmhmm."

When he speaks, his tone flitters somewhere between apologetic and open agitation. "God – shit, just – sorry about all this. Evidently this wasn't a good idea because everyone here is a total ass. Or more like I'm just bad at ideas. Listen, I'll tell you the details later, but the basic premise of how it's all worked out is: you're gonna get a sponsor that's essentially gonna work like how your grandma in the hospital does now. Which is to say: pretty much there in name only. Total figurehead.

"So you'll get to keep living out in the boonies doing the whole baby-lone-wolf-thing. There's some contingencies though – sorry, there always is – but they're things like… shit, normal stuff, right? Keep up your grades. Come in for check ups on occasion. Same stuff you're doing now, honestly. I think they might want you to move to a bigger city and go to a bigger school after this school year ends – bigger and better, right? 'Cause they think Chichibu is beneath you, which I can't say I disagree with, but y'know…

"Getting ahead of myself again, though – that's the finer bits of minutiae everyone's always skipping over when they sign their life away with terms of service contracts. We'll go over that later, and then you'll have to go over it again with people a lot more serious than me. Y'know. With suits. Sorry in advance: I know that garbage sucks."

Suzume can feel her face contorting. A half-smile, then a twisted, wobbly frown. There's a sense of relief, and then of outrage, too, of all the tension of the past week and the terror of this morning leaving, flooding back in, leaving, and flooding back. It fills her full of furious, fire-in-the-blood adrenaline. The want to laugh rises in her again, but like with the image of the stumbling axe-man, there's no actual humor to it. The up-and-down see-saw nature of it all makes her dizzy. Or maybe she's already feeling dizzy. Maybe she has been, this whole time.

"Oh," Suzume says, willing her mechanical mouth to work through its iron-jawed stiffness. "That's… great news."

"For real. Are you okay?" Hawks doesn't say it, but it's there in spirit. She can hear where he leaves it unspoken, even if only in her own mind: the chickadee, there at the end, held back by luck or fate or divine providence –

Or, more likely, by the fact that he's at a party with people that fall somewhere on the spectrum between acquaintance and friend. It's clear he doesn't want to have to explain the details of his relationship with her.

Maybe, Suzume thinks, she's a dirty secret for him, too.

Frowning, Suzume shakes her head at his question – at him, and at herself. "I'm fine – sorry. Really sorry. Just… it's just the storm. It's, um. Distracting. Thanks for your help, though. I really… I really appreciate it. It was a big ask. I just – I just didn't wanna have to leave, or get placed with… well, you know. So…"

Saying the words and meaning them hurts. She doesn't say them for herself, though. She doesn't even say them for Hawks. Staring her brother down and knowing this is what she wanted so badly to protect – knowing it's him she has to say it for, and wondering if he understands or even cares why or what she's done –

That hurts.

"Hey, what'd I say? No more sorries, now, you hear? And hey, I get it, I get it, so I can't fault you for asking! Anyway, I – " Something crackles over the line, a hand over it again. Him telling someone off, again.

"It's okay," she says, quietly. She's not sure Hawks hears her. She's not sure she really cares. "Thanks. You seem busy, so I'll, uhm… talk to you about it later. Sometime during the week. Like usual."

And then – with a gentleness that belies the emotions roiling within her – Suzume closes the phone.

It feels warm in her hands from even that minor bit of use, fat and hefty and egg-shaped. When her grandmother had given it to her as a hand-me-down, it had come with the stern pronouncement that Baa-baa hadn't had any use for what she called a fancy phone. Old and set in her ways, she'd never cared for the internet and only maintained her relic of a PC for certain necessities that couldn't be done without it. "It can call, and it can text," she'd said about the phone when she'd given it to Suzume. "You don't need anything else."

And Suzume didn't, really. Her brother's phone was a power house, a portal into a new and different world – a sleek, metal-and-glass wonder. If she asked nicely, he'd look things up for her. Sometimes, he'd even let her watch while he did it, nestled in his lap while his long fingers worked their magic and summoned up the answer to any and all questions she had.

(Questions he approved of, anyway.)

There is no reason for him to have had her phone, Suzume knows. No reason other than suspicion. Imagining him flipping open the veritable antique to pour over the three or four calls she didn't erase from the log leaves her feeling like she has hot slag pooling in her gut.

Impulsively – furiously – she pushes the phone into his still outstretched hand. "Here," she spits the words in a voice that betrays her for how much it quavers, "you want this? Wanna go nosing through my stuff some more?"

Like a heavy stone cast into a still, dark pond, his face visibly contorts, anger rippling across its normally impassive surface. Snatching it from her, he throws it roughly to the side. It lands with a muffled thump across the futon. Suzume can barely hear it over the sound of the rain.

"Oh, that guy sounded real fucking cozy, talking to you." Of course that's what he'd notice. Of course. "What the hell was that? Who was that?"

No attempt to address the phone or her implicit accusation. He never takes her outrage seriously. It's like it doesn't even register.

Lately, it feels like he never takes anything about her seriously at all.

(But really, has he ever?)

Playing back the conversation with Hawks in her head, she realizes how lucky she actually is. While maybe a lot more cozy – as her brother so scathingly put it – than any of her social workers have been with her, Hawks hadn't really mentioned anything other than the matter at hand. Imagining hearing it as an outsider to the situation, Suzume realizes it sounds like she had come to him with a request for help –

That all she'd wanted was help maintaining her independence outside of group homes or foster care.

(Which is, ultimately, exactly what she'd done.)

"I did it for you," she says. Her voice trembles with all the built up months of indignation and hurt and loneliness he's refused to even entertain. "I did it – I did it 'cause I didn't want to… didn't want to…"

Suzume still feels like a machine, and her grip on the controls is slipping. Her lungs are cogs and wheels and springs, poorly maintained, all of them grinding to one slow and catastrophic halt. Fighting for every breath, she pulls air through her clenched teeth and almost chokes on it. Breathing is a struggle. Talking is a struggle.

Everything is.

"Oh yeah?" The corner of his lip curls, the barest hint of a nasty, humorless smirk. "Did what?" Ever the control freak, his voice is so even-kilter. But Suzume knows him too well. She can hear that incendiary note of mockery to his tone – that lit-match taunt of 'Oh, so little Suzu thinks she can do things, now.'

He doesn't know. He doesn't understand. He can't even conceive of it.

She is all pent-up and gasoline-soaked emotion. And in the wake of that match, what else can she do but explode?

Pressed flat to the plane of muscles that stretch over his stomach, her hands find him, sliding up until she has more purchase over his ribs – and then she pushes him, hard and away from herself. The sudden ferality of it takes him off guard, and she counts the almost two unsteady steps back he's forced to take as a victory –

And the absolute shock that seizes his face, however brief, as a second.

It's over in an instant, though. The shock dissipates, leaving that hard-mouthed and cold-eyed savagery she's so used to.

And then he has the audacity to laugh. Suzume has never heard a crueler sound.

"Oh, that how it is, huh? Come the fuck off with this self-righteous bullshit, Suzu, and answer my god-damn-question. Who was that?"

"You're the worst!" The words rip themselves out of her in a shriek, all those machine parts in her rioting, metal on torn, ragged metal. Suzume tells him he's the worst all the time. This isn't even the first time she's told him today. But it's always playful, or sullen, or somewhere in between. She's never really meant it. Never like this. Now, in this moment, caught up in this aggrieved and hateful momentum, she thinks she just might. She thinks she might mean it more than she's ever meant anything.

Looking to deepen the distance between the two of them, she goes to take another step back. Vicious and quick as a snake strike, his hand darts out for her – but she's faster than she used to be. Dodging it proves surprisingly easy, and she leaps back and out of range, his fingertips only brushing the fabric of her shirt as he tries to grab her.

The look he gives her is wild-eyed over the fixed, wide-stretched grimace of his mouth, as if he can only maintain some of that indifference he's so keen to hide behind. When he says, "Suzu," very, very quietly, it sounds nearly like the threat from earlier –

Only much, much worse.

In any other situation, Suzume thinks she'd be terrified. Now, though, most of that fear is numbed by resentment, and she shakes her head at him with a jerky, inelegant violence that leaves her almost disoriented. "Please," she says. Just as quiet as her brother, it has none of the politeness that word is meant to entail. It bleeds out of her in a blustery hiss, bitter and vitriolic. "How do you think – how is any of this fair? I have to give up everything, all the time, and you never have to, ever, and for… and for what? Why? What's the point? Why does it always have to be like this?"

He bites off every word of his terrible non-answer. "Answer. The. Question."

She could really do it, some small, sane part of her reasons. Maybe she could still work this out. Whatever his reason, Hawks' hesitancy to be as openly fond as he might have otherwise been is something she could spin.

But maybe that part of her isn't actually sane. Maybe it's just self-preservational.

Scared, she thinks. Scared of him, and even more of losing him.

Maybe it's the part of her that craves – no, that needs – her brother's approval.

His affection.

His love.

She owes him everything, she realizes. She does. Her life. This life. She could spend her whole, entire life making it up to him, and still she knows she'd owe him more than that. That's how it is. That's how she feels.

At least, that's how she feels most of the time.

But in this moment – in this white, hot moment, this summer-morning thunderstorm moment – Suzume wants him to be afraid the way she's always been afraid.

Afraid of losing her.

Her affection.

Her love.

Back and forth, her head moves – back and forth, back and forth. No. No.

Lie, her brother had said, years and years ago. Lie.

Lie, lie, lie.

"You're the worst," Suzume says, again, and her voice is low and soft, barely a whisper. "You're the worst, and I hate you."

She doesn't mean it. How could she possibly mean it? From the moment she met him, she has loved her older brother. Even as the words leave her mouth, she's struck with a sick in the gut feeling over how much she doesn't mean it. She could never mean it. There isn't a single part of her that she thinks could ever learn to hate him no matter how much she resents him for the way he treats her.

But still, she lies. She lies, openly, boldly, no dumb games this time, her hands balled to fists. "I hate you," Suzume says, tears rolling down her cheeks. Her voice raises in pitch with every traitorous word. "I hate – I hate you! I hate you!"

Her brother stares at her. Stares. Unlike Katsuki all those years ago, he doesn't flinch. Lightning erupts outside and spills into the room, and then there is the sound of thunder, a low, deep growl all around them –

And still he stares, unmoving.

The world seems like it's tilting. The ringing is back, keeps going away, coming back, and his mouth moves, and she can barely hear him over the noise in her head, over the thunder, over the rain, over her blood in her ears.

"Oh, good fucking try with that one, Suzu," he says in a voice that is far, far too calm. "But that won't work on me. I taught you that."

But after another blinding flash of lightning, his face is completely different. Twisting, contorting, now a laugh, now a grimace, now a sneer, and now, open-mouthed in a snarl, his own hands balled into fists –

Oh.

Oh, she realizes, dimly. Now he's lying.

That realization takes up only a very small part of her awareness, though, because suddenly everything is very wrong. No longer swiping at her like before, her brother charges at her from across the room. Full-bodied, he throws himself at her, arms and fingers outstretched, teeth bared and face savage in the primeval way of a wounded, furious animal.

And Suzume remembers him back in the big house, with her father, and the rancid smell of flesh rendered down to wet oil, of bone to char and ash –

And in the face of those blazing eyes drawing closer, cognizance abandons her and instinct takes over. Behind him lies the door to the rest of the house; she can't go that way. Behind her lies the shoji doors, and the garden, and the forest.

So, turning on a heel, she throws wide the doors and bolts straight out into the storm.

20 years.

When he was young, Dabi's parents had taken him and the rest of his siblings for a vacation up in the mountains. It was the only vacation he remembers having with his entire family. There were times his mother had taken her children to the beach for a weekend – him, Fuyumi, and Natsuo, anyway – but until that visit to the mountains, Dabi's father had never come.

This had always upset him, but he had understood. Dad was busy. Very busy, he said when Dabi asked. Busy doing big and important things. Busy doing heroic and grown-up things. Sometimes, in the expensive hotel rooms his mother rented when they'd all go to the beach, she'd put on the evening news and he would see his father there. Tall and proud and endlessly stern, Dabi would watch as if under a spell as his father gave interviews with his customary detachment. One day, he remembers thinking, childish pride blooming like summer-time fireworks in his chest; one day, under his father's guidance, that was gonna be him.

But then Shoto was born, and everything after that was different. Big things, and little things, too. Even vacations. Suddenly, their very busy father was able to rearrange his even busier schedule. Where before there had never been enough time for holidays or vacations or birthdays there was a sudden and unexpected three whole days available for their father to visit the mountainside with his family.

(Or, Dabi remembers thinking bitterly, with Shoto.)

The house in the mountains had been huge, a sprawling complex of classical Japanese-style architecture and crumbling stone fences. It was a lot like his childhood home in that way, just much older and significantly more remote, lacking in nearly all of the modern conveniences that had been cleverly worked into the Todoroki estate. With a smile that didn't quite reach her eyes – because so few did, back then – their mother had told a petulant Natsuo not to fret. Dabi remembers her promising that it was old in a charming way. A quaint kind of way.

Not a boring one.

As if Natsuo, several years younger than Dabi, could ever be won over by anything as complicated and adult as charming or quaint. He hadn't cared that the place used to be a temple, or that it was the site of some historical significance, or that it had been in their father's family for generations. Natsuo had only cared that the wifi for his tablet was spotty and that he'd forgotten his favorite game for his handheld at home.

(Not that, being older, Dabi had appreciated it all that much himself.)

Dabi doesn't remember how old he was then. He does remember Shoto was small, still. Too small, anyway, to do much but toddle around, babbling out attempts at malformed sentences – one-tenths of which were actual words and the other nine-tenths were literal nonsense. Nevertheless, their father hung on every one with rapt attention. Dabi remembers lurking in the shadows of the hallway, watching their father cradle Shoto in his great, big arms. There was a grin stretching his craggy face. There in that hallway, his hands snarled into aching, trembling fists, Dabi also remembers realizing that their father hadn't looked at him like that in a long, long time.

Maybe he was nine, Dabi thinks. Nine and a half. It didn't matter, really. He was old enough to be mean, and stubborn, and spiteful.

And that was all that mattered.

On the second day of the trip, sometime after breakfast, he was out and alone in the vast, overgrown gardens. It was summer, he thinks; early August. The sun hung low like a gleaming, hot coin in the empty sky, cooking him and bleaching the world a few shades lighter like some faded, over-exposed photograph. That was where Fuyumi had found him. Throwing rocks at one of the stone walls hard enough to scar the grey surface in long, jagged lines, he pointedly ignored her noisy approach.

"Touya-nii," she'd said, breathlessly, "I found a bunny."

With a rock still held fast in his fingers, Dabi had turned and appraised his sister with silent disinterest. It was only after she started shifting her weight from one foot to the next – antsy, he recognized, and obviously uncomfortable – that he graced her with real acknowledgement.

"So?"

"So," she'd answered, brushing past her own discomfort as she reached for Dabi's hand with dirt-grubbed fingers, "come see!"

Pulling his hand back from her own in exaggerated revulsion, Dabi hadn't let her touch him. The brief hurt that had shimmered across her face like a heat wave had soothed his own childish feelings enough that, abandoning the rock at his feet, he'd deigned to follow her out and behind the house.

(He'd had nothing better to do, after all.)

And she had been right. There, well across the overgrown back garden and tucked beside a decrepit bit of stonework, was a rabbit. Small, with an orange and white dappled coat, the two of them watched it root around in a scrubby patch of grass, its long ears stretched up towards the sun-bright sky.

Having grown up in the city where wildlife was limited to birds and the occasional stray cat or dog, Fuyumi had been clearly awe-struck. "I'm gonna pet it," she declared in whispered, reverential tones, as if speaking of some sacred deity.

Ever the voice of reason, Dabi had scoffed at this notion. "It ain't gonna let you."

"It will if I catch it."

Fuyumi had sounded so self-possessed then, so utterly convinced of her own success even before the attempt. Something about her unbridled optimism scalded Dabi the way his own traitorous quirk often did, and he'd scowled, kicking at her foot with his own. "You ain't gonna catch it."

Too fixated on the rabbit, she hadn't even bothered to look at him. "Yeah-huh. I will."

"Nuh-uh."

"Will so."

"Nope."

Finally, she turned to look at him then, grey eyes narrowed above a calculated smirk – one Dabi knew immediately that she'd stolen from him.

"You're only saying that 'cause you can't catch it."

Some almost eleven months her senior, Dabi had recognized this immediately for what it was: she was goading him. That, too, was a trick she'd stolen.

Now, many, many years later, he knows that clumsy, obvious ploy shouldn't have worked. But then? It absolutely had. Even knowing what she was doing – even having caught Fuyumi weeks before, practicing Dabi's devil-may-care leer in the bathroom mirror when she thought she was alone – he couldn't help himself from rising to take that bait.

Manipulation or not, childish dare or not, it was still an open challenge. As the eldest, Dabi was honor-bound to respond. His pride and authority, already so wounded by the newest addition to their crumbling family, wouldn't allow him to do otherwise.

"You couldn't," he had said, trying and failing to keep the creeping defensiveness from his voice, "but I totally could."

"Yeah?" Secure in her victory, the smirk on her face was already giving way to something more like a genuine smile, her narrowed eyes softening. Fuyumi had never been very good at playing hard. "You think?'

Before Shoto, Dabi might have forgiven her for using his own con against him. Basking in her unwavering younger-sibling faith in her older brother, the Before-Shoto-Dabi would have gone off to catch the rabbit for her, outwardly grumbling but inwardly pleased with the accolades he knew she'd shower him with at his attempt –

Nevermind if he actually succeeded.

But he was not that boy anymore, and he did not forgive her. With a sneer, he fixed his cold gaze on the rabbit and shook his head. "Sure," he said, lowly, "I do think. And when I catch it, I'm gonna use it to see how deep the well really is."

Natsuo had been the one to find the well the day before. Situated on the far western edge of the property, it had a haunting air about it, and clearly hadn't been used in years. Conquered by weeds and choked by creeping ivy, Dabi and his younger brother had pried back the boards sealing it shut and taken turns dropping stones into the deep, bleak expanse, listening for a distant splash that never came. Terrified of heights, Fuyumi had refused to come close enough to even look, flinching at each and every silent stone the pair of her brothers sent sailing through the stoic dark.

Dabi remembers her staring at him with that same flavor of horror as he broke away from her, storming across the garden towards the rabbit. He remembers her crying out, too – something like, "No, don't!" or "Touya-nii!" or "Stop!" or "Please!"

Maybe it was all of those things. Maybe it was none of them. But the wind was in his hair and in his ears and all about him, making invisible sails off the ends of his fingertips as he spread out his arms. He was laughing. He couldn't really hear her – not in any way that mattered.

He didn't want to, anymore.

The rabbit, though, had heard him coming. From meters off, it had heard him, and Dabi watched it freeze, pinned to the spot by its dumb animal terror as it stared back at him with black and fearful eyes.

And then, only two meters off, it finally bolted.

Dimly, Dabi was aware of Fuyumi chasing him, howling his name. He remembers that only made him laugh more – harder, faster, driving him onward. Veering hard around a rotting storage building as he gave chase after the tiny rabbit, he grit his teeth through an uncontrollable grin and willed himself forward, gravel path grinding beneath the incessant rhythm of his pounding feet.

Fuyumi was so far behind him, then. The wind swallowed her up, and he didn't want to hear her.

He didn't.

By all rights, the rabbit should have been able to escape him. Small as it was, it was nevertheless much faster than Dabi. That was a realization he remembers coloring his mania a shade darker as he pursued it, watching it nearly double the distance between them as he plunged after it and deeper into the garden.

But speed was all it had on him – and not for long. At length, it had trapped itself down a narrow pathway lined by more of those old, sentry-like stone fences. Terminating into a rather hefty fallen log – one far too big for a rabbit to hope to scale – the path that had once led down to a rustic pond had become, functionally, a dead end.

He realized this long before the rabbit, of course, assuming the rabbit was even capable of realizing it at all. With more than enough lead on his screaming sister, Dabi slowed to a creep as he made his way down the path, eyes roving the whispering grass for any familiar flashes of orange-white fur. It had nowhere to run but back out behind him, and Dabi wasn't about to give it the opportunity.

Ultimately, it was wasted effort. At the end of that meandering path, Dabi found the rabbit exactly where he expected to find it – and somehow not at all how he expected to find it.

Crumpled beside the fallen log, its frail body lay unmoving, its muscles rigid and completely still.

For several beats of his heart, Dabi only stood over it, staring down at it, his obscene grin stiff on his face. Then, bending down, he ran his fingers over its back. Its fur was the softest touch of downy silk, like the brush of a dandelion's bloom. It did not move, and it did not breathe, and its eyes stared up at him as they had before, black and glassy and wet. Earlier, he had imagined terror in them. Up close, now, he realized there was nothing there at all.

Trembling, his hand slipped further down the rabbit's body. The fur parted around his fingers like grass on the wind, and beneath tissue-paper skin, Dabi felt tiny, twig-like bones, impossibly fragile. A hot breeze ruffled through his hair, and he paused to search for a heartbeat. After many long seconds, he came away again with nothing.

Soon enough, or maybe an eternity later, Fuyumi was there. For all the wind on that blustery, sun-scoured day, her screaming was impossible to avoid now. It had taken on a new tone, a frantic pitch, high and shrieking, hysteria contorting both her features and her words as she struck his back with tiny, shaking fists. Hunched over the rabbit, gathering its motionless body into his hands, Dabi had let her.

"Why are you smiling?" He remembers her crying, her hands a steady thumping across his ribs. "Why are you smiling?"

And,

"It's dead – it's dead – it's dead! You killed it! It's dead!"

She had been right on both counts.

Dabi was smiling, and the rabbit was dead.

He had frightened it to death.

That same night he had laid in bed beside a gently snoring Natsuo and thought about the rabbit and how it had felt in his hands. So small. So impossibly delicate. It had fit as neat and perfect as a puzzle piece in his cupped fingers.

And he'd killed it.

It had been an accident. Hadn't it? He hadn't really intended to throw it down the well.

Had he?

There in the dark, restless beneath the gauzy layers of the mosquito net, Dabi had closed his eyes and sifted through his feelings. There had been a thrill at finding it there, and knowing what had happened – knowing that he'd done it. It was a sick thrill. A perverse thrill. It was a thrill that twisted his stomach and brought bile burning up all along the back of his throat. Fuyumi had struck him, again and again, and he'd blinked away only the ghost of what might have been tears if only he'd been any younger.

If he had been someone else.

But he wasn't that boy anymore. Growing up for Dabi had become a series of putting the younger and more shameful versions of himself away, fragmentary corpses of who he used to be boarded up in their own bottomless and long-ago abandoned wells.

No; the boy who might have been sad was as dead as the rabbit he'd held in his hands earlier. The boy he was then, though, on that hot, August day – that boy had held the lifeless body of the dead rabbit, and that boy had smiled.

Dabi thinks about that memory now as he chases Suzume out and into the much smaller garden of her grandmother's house. There are ruined stone fences here, too, and the house is old, and styled in that same, traditional way. It's summer, even, but there is no sun today. Instead, the rain lashes against him, coming hard, coming fast, slick all down his cheeks and in his hair. He can see it pouring over her, too, a gleaming sheen on her white skin. It soaks into the white shirt she'd taken from him the night before.

Suzume always takes his shirts. Dabi tries not to think about it, just like he tries not to wonder if, like a rabbit, it's possible to scare a little girl to death.

Instead, just as Fuyumi screamed his years ago, he calls out Suzume's name. The rain gets into his mouth when he does, it's coming down so hard, and against his hot tongue it feels so, so cold. He spits rainwater and curses, and he runs after her, lungs and blood and body burning.

Against his skin, the water steams.

She's faster than the last time he chased her into the woods. That makes sense; she's older, now. Even through the thick mud, though, she's surprisingly deft, tugging her bare feet free with an ease that leaves Dabi reeling, wondering where and when she'd learned it.

What else is she hiding?

He calls her name again, head angled down and against the wind. There's no more rain in his mouth, and the call is clear.

Suzume doesn't look back.

A lurching shock of lightning floods the world with blinding light as she breaks for the treeline. In that snapshot brilliance, everything seems to freeze, a million raindrops seized mid-fall for a fraction of a fraction of a second. Suzume, too, at the edge of the woods, seems suspended. One moment, there she is, the too-saturated luster of her tangerine hair a smudge of misplaced color in an otherwise colorless landscape –

And then the next, well, there comes the recoil of the thunder, shaking everything free. The rain comes down, and his little sister slips nimbly behind a thick outcropping of grey-green trees, vanishing from sight.

She isn't faster than him, he realizes. But she is as fast as him, and – more importantly – she has distance on him. It takes him several seconds he can't possibly afford before he, too, is in the trees, leaping over fallen branches and pushing past thick foliage, an arm thrown across his brow to shield his eyes from the rain and the thrashing of the undergrowth.

In front of him, he catches sight of her again, weaving and bobbing through the trees.

This is not the first time he has chased a child into the woods this year. Like the memory of his long-ago vacation to the mountains, that thought surfaces in his mind with a pronounced sort of sharpness and settles like a nest of thorns in the hollow of his gut. Mouth filling with thick saliva, Dabi turns his head and spits again.

Tries her name, again.

She still doesn't look back. She just keeps running.

Why? He knows the answer, but refuses it, and the question fills his head again and again like a funerary chant.

Why?

And then, another sharp thought. More thorns in his gut, pressing up to tear at his burning lungs.

Who?

That voice on the other side of the phone, calling from fuck-knows-where – it had been masculine. Older. Certainly not a kid. He'd sounded so self-assured, so cheerfully confident. It's Fuyumi again, Dabi thinks wildly, like her but worse, all that sunshine optimism, laughter in every word, and so fucking familiar when speaking with his little sister. So cozy. There had been guilt written in every inch of Suzume's frightened face.

How long? Who, and for how long?

Who?

How dare she. How dare she.

How dare she keep things from him. How dare she not look back. And she doesn't look back, she won't, she won't, not even when he realizes he's screaming those poison-barbed thoughts aloud, now:

"Who? Who? Who was it? Answer me – fucking answer me!"

It isn't fair, she always tells him. He's never fair. Why doesn't he want to be fair?

Doesn't she know? Doesn't she understand? This is who he is. This is always who he's been. Mean, and cruel, and spiteful. She's supposed to love him anyway.

She's meant to love him, anyway.

Ahead of him, always ahead of him and through the thickening forest, he sees her run, one foot in front of the other. Her pace is steady and unrelenting: up and down, up and down, again, again –

Until it isn't. One foot goes up, and then it comes down –

And then, Dabi sees it go down, and down, and down.

Suddenly, her arms are up and over her head, reaching out and towards the sky, hands shining in the flicker-flash of the lightning as she grasps wildly for something and finds nothing. Silent until just this moment, he hears her scream pierce through the riot of the summer storm – and then she follows her foot down and away and out of sight, a wash of blush-gold brightness in the gloom, and then nothing –

And then nothing.

She is gone, and there is only the rain falling over him in sheets and the dripping, drowning trees, and the cold mud beneath his own bare and bleeding feet. There is only all of that, and the awful, sickening silence behind the hiss of the rain.

For one very brief moment, Dabi understands what it was to be that rabbit years ago, rooted, immobile, held fast and stupid to the spot with a roiling, animal-instinct terror. Blinking through the rain that runs in rivers over his ravaged cheeks, he stares, and he stares, but he doesn't see her.

She's just gone, and what remains of his heart feels like it goes with her.

And then he's moving again. Slipping down a surprisingly steep incline, closer and closer to where she was seconds before, he slows the rapid, treacherous descent with a wet-palmed grip on the trees. Farther, and farther still, and then, right at the edge:

There.

A drop. A ravine. Catching himself at the last possible moment, Dabi looks over the side and stares down the many and terrible feet yawning between them, down at his little sister in the muck and the grime, her body twisted, her eyes wide and staring. Does he see the terror in them, or does he only imagine it?

Are they empty?

God, he thinks, feeling an impossible chill set his hellfire blood to ice in his veins – please –

"Suzu!"

She doesn't answer. The rain falls all around him, past him and beyond him and down on her. He can see it, wet across her open mouth and under her eyes and in her hair and –

Carefully – as much as he can bear to be careful, which is hardly at all – Dabi makes his way down into the ravine. By the time he reaches the bottom, there is mud seeping into his pants, spattered up his thighs and caked almost up to his elbows. He shakes his limbs out in the pouring rain, and some of the dirt comes away, but not before he's down in the thick of it again.

Kneeling over Suzume's prone form, his hands cup her cold cheeks.

Closer now, he can see there's blood in her hair. It gums thick in the roots and washes over her face, now red, now pink, now clear, diluted by the rain. Brushing aside her bangs, he finds the source: there's a long, toothy gash running the near length of her forehead and through her left eyebrow. It bleeds heavily, such a vibrant, terrible red, and Dabi feels his own anger bleeding out with it.

Head wounds do that, he tells himself, mind racing, his heart throbbing too-thick in his throat. That's normal. It's fine. It will be fine.

"Suzu," he says. "Suzu, c'mon."

Blankly, she stares up at him, mouth slack. Breathing, still, but so shallow now, her chest stutters at a rapid and erratic cadence as if she can't find enough air. Winded, then, from the fall. That's all, he tells himself. That's all.

But there's so much blood. Dabi has seen a lot of blood, and a lot of death, too, but it's different looking down into Suzume's face and knowing it's hers, that this blood is hers, and the sight of it makes him sick in a way he hasn't felt in a long, long time. All that blood, all that rain, it's everywhere, running into her eyes and her mouth and her nose. Carefully – so gently – Dabi turns her head, angling it away from the sky.

Faintly, then – and so, so slowly – she comes back to him. Through a choking, water-logged cough, she manages, "My arm – it hurts."

Tearing his focus away from her face, he lets his eyes travel down her body. One arm is splayed out, half-lodged in the mud. The other...

Wrenched at a terrible angle behind her back, it looks very, very wrong.

Broken.

"Fuck," he hisses, teeth bared and rain-slick. "God, Suzu – fucking goddamn it. Goddamn you."

Past the hem of her shirt, there's another deep wound cut from below her knee almost to her ankle. Crusted with globs of clinging mud, the blood oozes out from between the patches of filth. Even at a glance he can tell it'll need to be stitched.

Drawing back from her, he lets his gaze rove her body in full, working through all the ways he might best carry her. She watches him with dull, glassy eyes that roll clumsily here and there, obviously struggling to focus.

"Nii-chan," she whispers. And then, even more softly, "Please."

It's his turn to not respond. Rather, he stands and steps over her, bending down again to haul her up from the mud. With one arm hooked round her shoulders and the other up under her knees, he wrenches Suzume free of the muck, her good shoulder tucked against his own. Beside her and hanging down, her broken arm dangles, dripping blood, dripping grime.

"Please... Nii-chan."

"Shut up. Not now." There's no room for patience in the wake of these new and awful feelings – no room for it when he has to get her out of the rain. Glancing up and down the ravine, Dabi makes for an embankment with a less intense incline, digging his heels into the sopping earth for leverage. The upward climb is precarious and agonizingly slow without the use of his hands, and by the time he reaches the top, his calves and his core both are screaming.

In his arms, Suzume doesn't move. When he steals a look at her, her face is turned up to the sky again, her cheeks shining red-wet in the rain.

"Fuck. Quit trying to drown yourself and look away from the rain." Pausing only briefly to take in a few deep lungfuls of cold, damp air, Dabi is quick about setting off in the direction of the house. "You're gonna need to go to a fucking hospital."

Water burbles across her parted lips, and it's her turn to spit pink-tinted rain water. "N – no. I can't."

"The fuck you mean, you can't? Not like I'm gonna make you walk there. I'll get you back to the house first. Call an ambulance after."

Gracelessly, she shakes her head, more of a wild rolling back and forth along her shoulders. "You can't. Please. I won't – I won't go."

When she starts to wriggle weakly in his arms, Dabi has to stop to keep his balance, and his grip on her tightens with a reflexive flush of renewed anger. "What the fuck is your problem? You really wanna stop? Wanna get back to it so soon, huh?"

"I told you. I told you." Hollowed out and so quiet, Suzume's voice sounds like an artificial echo of itself. Empty of anger. Empty of sadness. Empty of everything. It is a stranger's voice, so foreign to his ears that he's almost not sure it's her.

He stares at her. She looks back at him, looks through him, blood in her hair and across her face and running in rivulets all down her throat. Her white shirt – his white shirt – is a mess of mud and blood, now.

She is so small in his arms, Dabi thinks. Even broken. Even bloody. Maybe especially so. She fits against him neat and perfect, like a puzzle piece.

And then he shakes his head. Looking away from her and out into the woods, he starts the steady trudge towards the house again. "Just – fuck. Save it for later. You're all jacked up right now."

"You can't," she murmurs, her head knocking against his jaw. "You can't, you can't. Please. Please."

And all the way home, it's all she manages to say.

12 years.

The power is still out when her brother carries her into the house.

In through the shoji doors, he tracks mud and rain and blood across the old wooden floorboards of the bedroom before, with an air of alien consideration that needles at her even through her disorientation, he helps her settle down on her unsteady feet. Leaning into him hard, it takes her a few long moments before she manages to find her balance through the head-aching haze of her dizziness –seconds he spends with his arm wrapped around her, his hand pressed firm to the small of her back. Eventually – evidently confident in her ability to remain upright – he leaves her standing there to go and shut the doors against the blustery torrents of rain sneaking in after them.

Suzume watches him mutely. Dumbly. He is filthy like she knows she must be, a mess of blood and muck. There are scratches all over his feet, blood beading up like rubies along a fine wire. Her eyes burn to look at them –

To look at him.

So when he turns to look at her, Suzume looks away.

"Well, you look like actual shit," he says, tensely, "so I'm gonna call the ambulance now."

At that, she jolts upright, and almost falls. Cursing under his breath, he moves as if to catch her –

But when she stumbles back and away from him, shaking her head, he freezes in the approach.

"Please," she says, softly. "Please, don't."

"Yeah? This again, huh?"

This again. Back at it, again. Something inside of her swells, and threatens to burst. She lifts one hand and touches her cheek, staring down at her fingers when they come away red.

Looking up into his face from across the room, Suzume takes in the sight of him: for all the ways that deeply unsettling calm has returned to his mostly expressionless countenance, his eyes smolder with a lingering flame of indignation. Every centimeter of his face is so painfully familiar to her, both in old memory and in new. She can remember him in the park, when those rough-stitched patchwork lines were only faint scars she could keep at bay. Now – after years spent with him, day in and day out – she knows each and every feature as intimately as she does her own body. Like a penitent might handle a rosary, she has run her reverential hands over his cheeks and his eyes and his mouth and mapped all of it – every bit of metal and every puckered fissure of ruined flesh, every moth-wing brush of eyelash and spill of black, untameable hair.

In her father's house, Suzume had been horrified to see him like that, clear and up close.

"It's not your fault," he'd told her, then. Absolution given in an instant; a rare kindness, from him. There's not a doubt in her mind even now that he'd meant it then, but she knows if she'd been with him the whole time, she could have kept it from getting that bad –

Just like she knows it only got that bad in the first place because whatever it was he had to do to rescue her had taken that kind of a toll on him.

He'd put himself through hell, and he looks the part, now.

Does he blame her for that now like she blames herself, looking at him? Is that why he stays away from her? Is that why he's mean, why he's cruel? Why he hurts her the way he does?

It only hurts so much, she knows, because she loves him as much as she does. If she didn't love him, this would be easy.

This would all be so much easier.

But she does, and it's not. It never is.

"Please." Swaying on shaking legs, the room spins, her vision edged by a shadow that throbs in time with her heartbeat. "Please, can't you just listen to me?"

When her brother doesn't say anything, Suzume swallows back the familiar feeling of razors in her throat and tries to order the chaos of her feelings into words.

"I didn't mean – I didn't mean what I said, and I'm sorry about it. I couldn't ever – I couldn't ever hate you, and even saying that, I felt…" Now it's nausea she's swallowing back, sick and warm in her belly. "But you just never listen to me, and you were so angry, and I'd told you – I told you, I told you – "

"Told me what?" Suzume has the sense that he's being careful again, mindful about keeping the edge out of his voice even as eyes narrow minutely.

"Told you the call was… that it was about social worker stuff."

Her brother lets the silence draw out between them, long and uncomfortable. The smile that quirks at the corner of his lips is not kind when he finally says, "Sure didn't sound like any kind of a professional call, Suzu."

"Well, yeah – but that's – that was on purpose."

"Yeah?"

The guilt threatens to overwhelm her from all sides. The guilt of keeping secrets from her brother – the guilt of what she's been doing with Hawks all this long time. The deep cut in her calf burns, aching in lightning arcs all up her leg, but nothing compares to the gaping, sucking wound it feels like she's put through her own chest.

Not knowing where to start, Suzume decides to try with the beginning. "I… Baa-baa is dying. I told you that, too. You know… a while ago. Told you she was getting worse, months ago. Well… she keeps getting worse. They called and said they don't think she's gonna make it through the end of the month. So I started… I started trying to get closer to someone because… 'cause he was nice. I thought since he was nice, that maybe he could – maybe he'd be okay with helping me out. I told him… I told him the truth, or at least part of the truth. The truth about Baa-baa. About how she went into the hospital forever ago. How she wasn't gonna come out. And then I lied, and told him I'd lived by myself here for all the time she was sick, and that I wanted – that I wanted to keep doing it. I asked… I begged him to help me keep doing it. I asked him to help me not get sent to a home… or to a new family, or to anywhere else. I just… I wanted to stay here. That was all. That was why. That's what I told him."

Beneath the spill of her brother's wet, black hair, something almost imperceptible shifts in his eyes. When he still doesn't speak, Suzume keeps going.

"He was… he's always so nice. He always seemed worried about everything. About me. And it made me feel… I felt… I felt so bad lying to him, all the time. I came up with this stupid game where I'd try to say the things I had to tell him so it wouldn't come out like a lie… like – like finding the right words to say, just in the right order, or – saying one thing that had two meanings, so he'd take it one way, and I'd mean it another way. The real way, and he – he wouldn't know, right? He wouldn't know I was lying."

Suzume takes in a deep, quavering breath.

"'Cause saying it that way would mean I wasn't lying. It'd mean I wasn't being unfair with him. 'Cause I felt so… 'cause lying to someone trying so hard to be nice to me, to help me out, it made… it makes me feel like the worst person in the world."

Breaking her brother's gaze, Suzume looks down at the futon. The covers are in such a disarray that she can't see where the phone landed from when he threw it, no doubt hidden beneath the formless mess of the duvet. It makes sense. She'd gotten up in such a rush, and her brother right after her to help. While not one for chores without pleading and prodding, her brother has taken to making the bed for her after she goes to school. Even lately – as distant and strange and horrible as he's been – it hasn't been something he's let slip.

(She always comes home from school to a neatly made bed.)

"Suzu," he says, his voice strange and tight, but Suzume doesn't look at him. At her side, the hand of her good arm curls reflexively into a fist. The other hangs down by her side, limp and unmoving.

"I did it 'cause – I lied, because – I did it 'cause I didn't wanna… I didn't wanna…"

It feels so stupid to say. And now, with her head spinning, her shoulders heave and she feels her mouth opening around an ugly, body-wrenching sob that pours out of her like her blood runs down her leg and down her cheek, down and dripping onto the floor.

"I didn't wanna – I didn't wanna be taken away from you." It starts as a whisper and ends as a wail, keening and shamefully needful. "It seemed like it was – like it was coming up so fast, and I didn't know – didn't know what else to do. What good is all my dad's money if I can't – can't use it proper until I'm – until I'm old enough and – what good is any of it if I can't – "

At the edges of her vision, Suzume sees him move towards her again. Crying out as if struck, she throws herself back and stumbles, catching herself at the last minute. When he doesn't stop this time, she throws up her one functional arm, as if to ward him away.

No, no, no.

"Don't – " She chokes the word out in a haggard, sobbing breath. "Don't – don't come near me. Don't touch me."

Looking at his legs and not his face, Suzume watches his feet still. But even looking at his legs is too much. The pants he threw on before he came to help her shut the windows are cut above his ankles. The sight of his mottled, ruined skin there caked thick with mud only makes her impossibly sad.

"Why?" It's such a broken question. Stupid. Why does she ask it? Why does she try, and try, and try?

Suzume doesn't know what she expects. Well – she does. She expects him to mock her. She expects underhanded cruelty, if not outright overt.

She doesn't expect him to humor her.

His voice isn't gentle like Hawks' is. She isn't sure he's really capable of that, anymore. Was he ever? Still, it's softer than she can remember it being in a long, long time when he asks, "Why what?"

The room blurs, like she's looking out at the world through one of those rain soaked windows he'd helped her shut. "I don't even feel like you like me anymore," she says, quietly. "You're gone all the time. Won't tell me where you go. Mean about it when you actually bother to say… to say anything at all."

"Suzu – "

Suzume doesn't want to hear him, but she does. She does. There's a strange, foreign note of something in his voice, something so tremendously out of place for her brother. What is it? Mercy? Compassion? It blossoms there in the way he says her name, breaking through all that coldness from before like a flower pushing up over a long-ago abandoned grave.

She hears it. She does.

She just pretends not to.

"I feel like – I feel like you don't like me. And it's not even like it's just that… I feel like you can't stand me. You won't look at me half the time, and when you do, you get that weird, awful, intense look on your face, and… and it's like you can't wait to get away from me. Like you keep me around for… for why? What reason? Just to push me around? Just to… I don't know. Use me as some kind of stress relief?"

"That's not fucking true, and you know it."

Despite the profanity, his voice is still largely edgeless. Looking up at him, Suzume cannot parse the way he stares at her. Wide-eyed again, but not manic – not like before.

"Isn't it?" Her hand aches, and she unclenches it, only to look down at her feet, and then at his shirt that she's wearing, much too big for her. With one trembling hand, she smooths down the wet fabric, now splattered pink and red from before.

Like his scarred ankles, it only makes her sad.

"What else am I supposed to think?" The question is so earnest and raw that her voice breaks over the words. There's snot running down her face with the blood now, and she raises her arm, trying in vain to rub it away. She feels ugly, and grimy, and rotten to look at. You look like shit, he'd said. No wonder he can't stand her.

"You don't give me… you don't give me anything to go on. And I just feel – I tried so hard. I lied, and it felt so bad. And I was so scared it wouldn't work out. What if I didn't do it right? What if I failed? What if I lost… what if I lost you, again? And I kept trying to pretend like things were normal, 'cause I felt like if I didn't, I'd just freak out and break down and not be able to – not be able to stop freaking out. And then how could I convince him to help? I had to pretend to be put together enough that it'd make sense to let me live on my own, and every day, I just felt like I…"

"Suzu."

She cannot bear the way her brother says her name, now. She finds herself wishing the threat from before was back – a 'Shut up before I make you, Suzu,' or a 'You're so fucking dumb, Suzu," sort of implication.

But that's not how it is. It sounds –

It almost sounds pleading, and her brother never says please.

Covering one of her ears, she shakes her head. She doesn't look at his face, or the futon, or his legs, or down at the shirt he wore yesterday – the one she's wearing now. Instead, she closes her eyes and says, "He said it was okay. He said it worked out. I get to keep living here, on my own. And I bet… I bet you're sad about it, right? Upset about it. That's why you're mad, isn't it? Bet you were hoping she'd die, and they'd take me away, and you'd never have to see me again."

"Suzu!"

It's not like her brother to raise his voice. He does, anyway. He's done it so much today. And she doesn't – she doesn't care. She doesn't. Eyes cinched tighter, she presses down more forcefully on her ear, her pounding blood a roaring current behind the seal of her hand and all through her body. "I wish it hadn't worked out." The words come burbling out of her in wet, horrible sobs. It hurts to say. Selfishly, she hopes it hurts him, too. "I wish I hadn't even tried. I wish they'd taken me away. I wish they'd put me with someone else – "

Suddenly there are hands on her shoulders in a hot-palmed grip. Suzume can feel the prickling heat of his staples through the thin, worn fabric of her shirt, and it burns in a way that is painful both physically and in how bittersweetly familiar it is. Then one of his hands moves down her arm, and takes hold of her wrist, and he's pulling her hand away from her ear.

"Suzu," he says, and his voice is awash with so many things she cannot begin or bear to name. "Suzu. Look at me."

Childish and spiteful and so, so wounded, she tucks her chin against her chest, head wobbling her weak refusal. "No. No, no, no."

"God – fuck, come on. Come on! Look at me!" He's always so controlled, she thinks, and now he's a mess. And she doesn't want to hear it. She doesn't want to name it. She doesn't want to know it.

Doesn't want to know how desperate he sounds.

His breath is on her face again. She knows what it feels like. It glazes over her wet cheeks, impossibly warm, a hot summer wind. It brings the storm, and it carries it away. "Suzu," he says, softer, still. "Suzu, c'mon."

Her brother never says please. Never, ever. He doesn't now, either. But something about the way he says her name –

Well, she thinks. It's close enough. Probably the best she will ever get.

She opens her eyes and his own are centimeters from hers. They're still wide, still bright, and when she looks at him, his brows are furrowed –

But not in anger.

Not at her, anyway.

"Suzu," he breathes her name. And then, just as soft: "You know if anyone tried to take you away from me – if anyone took you to keep you, or to give you to someone else… you know I'd come find you. And then I'd kill them. I'd raze them to the fucking ground."

In her brother's eyes, Suzume sees the promise of his quirk there, burning. Twin stars. Twin flames. A supernova, she thinks – two of them, threatening to swallow anything and everything up. She remembers her father's house, and the coppery smell of blood, and the burning smell of meat, and the bone-dust smell of ash.

He'd done it for her.

"You don't have to – it doesn't have to – it doesn't have to be like that."

"Oh, Suzu. It does. It does." The way he says her name raises goosebumps all up and down her arms. With hot fingers, he brushes her rain-and-blood wet hair back from her face, tucking it behind her ears with a tenderness that hurts so much more than all his cruelty ever has.

She's so tired, all of a sudden. She loves him so much, and she's so afraid of him, and it makes her feel so overwhelmingly tired. She's been tired for a long, long time. Letting her head fall forward, her split forehead meets his, her nose brushing his own. The sobs billow out of her, blustery and wet as the wind outside, and his hands cup her cheeks, his thumbs brushing at the wet mess of her face as if he has any hope of ever wiping it away.

Through her hazy vision, she thinks she sees him smile – but she's not sure. She blinks, and blinks, but her vision just won't clear.

His thumbs work across her eyes then, as if to help her cry, and she closes them again. "Shhh," he tells her. "It's okay. Let it out."

Suzume does. Collapsing against him, she throws her arm around his shoulders and presses her cheek to his, wailing and incoherent. As they always do, his arms catch her easily, and he cradles her so tightly against himself that she feels as if the air is being pressed out of her lungs.

"It's okay," he whispers, against her ear. "Tell me what you need."

What does she need? What does she want? Through hiccuping sobs, she's answering from some deep part of herself well before her sluggish mind has any hope of catching up. "I want – I just want you to love me."

Still so near her ear, her brother chuckles, low and quiet. "God," he says, and the peculiar tone his voice takes leaves her feeling floaty and warm but somehow queasy all at the same time, "you're just too cute, sometimes. Too fucking cute."

Tucked against her damp hair, she feels the first hot press of his lips in a sensation that works its way all down the length of her spine as an irrepressible shiver. Then his kisses are trailing hot and languid across her temple – then nuzzled and tickling beneath her ear. He brushes them across her sticky cheeks, and dusts them along the curve of her jaw. And when she closes her eyes and feels him tilting her throbbing head back, he takes her lack of resistance as an invitation, working his open mouth there with an undisguised greediness that has the room spinning for her all over again.

When she gets a look at him several minutes later – when he pulls back enough to look down at her with that strange half-lidded kind of intensity she's come to recognize on him as of late – his jaw is smeared with blood.

It makes her feel a little sick. But then, right now, everything does.

"I don't – I don't feel so good."

Untangling one of his hands from behind her back, his fingers ghost over her cheeks. "No surprise there. You bashed your pretty little head up real good, nevermind the rest of it. Guess we really should get you to a hospital. You're super fucked up."

More queasiness. Suzume shakes her head. "But you – I can't… I can't…"

Her brother huffs in subdued amusement. "What's that all about, anyway? Knew you were a baby, but never figured you to be scared of doctors."

"No – it's… it's not that." Suzume stumbles over her words, her tongue feeling numb and thick between her teeth. "It's… If I go to the hospital, they're gonna – they're gonna have to report it to my social workers, and… and…"

Recognition dawns in his eyes. "Ohhh, I get it, now. You went through all that trouble playing the sad but somehow competent damsel to convince 'em you could take care of yourself. But if you turn up at the hospital all fucked up like you are, well, uh-oh. Cat's outta the bag, then. They'll figure out you're actually a hopeless mess who can't do shit on your own. Is that right?"

When she grimaces at him, her brother laughs. "For real though, Suzu – I'm impressed you managed to convince anyone of the whole 'functionally independent' thing. Sure as shit couldn'tve fooled me."

Suzume rolls her eyes, and feels sicker for it. Muffling a groan, she lowers her head until her throbbing forehead is pressed to his shoulder. His hand comes up, sifting its way through her hair, and he tucks his mouth against her head again. "It's okay, though. You went through all the trouble to be underhanded and sneaky, so we'll work with that for now. I got an idea, anyway."

Again with uncustomary consideration, her brother lifts her up carefully and carries her into the bathroom. Settling her down on the small shower stool, he stands over her for a moment, looking down into her woozy, upturned face.

"Wait here a sec."

Leaning back against the tiled wall, Suzume struggles against the desire to close her eyes and watches him leave, listening as his footsteps carry him back towards the bedrooms. At some length he returns, the faint glow of his phone illuminating half of his face as he steps into the bathroom.

Fighting to sit upright, Suzume opens her mouth to protest –

Only for her brother to hold a single finger over his lips and shake his head.

Then, suddenly, he's speaking into the phone.

"Hey, Giran." A pause. "Yeah, yeah, I know. I know. It's Sunday. Whoops. So listen, I need a favor. I need to see Elixir." Another pause. "Yeah, no, I need to see him today. As in, in-a-few-hours-today. And by I need to see him, I mean I got someone who needs to see him."

Lapsing into a longer silence, her brother scrubs his jaw as he presumably listens to the person on the other side of the line.

Eventually, he shakes his head. "Yeah, no, that's why I'm pulling out the whole favor card. It's my dime, but your strings. Yeah? I'll owe you one, or I'll pay you, or both." Yet another pause. "Yeah, cool. I'll see you in a few hours."

And then his phone goes black.

Suzume blinks up at him, bewildered. She has never seen him take a call in their entire time together. "What – what was all that about?"

He shrugs, setting his phone down on the sink. "You've given me a lot of shit I gotta deal with, but I figure we'll focus on the most pressing thing first. And since you gotta be difficult and official medical channels are a no-go, we're gonna have to try the unofficial kind. Can't go leaving your pretty face all fucked up like that."

Pretty. Suzume tries to ignore the flush of heat under her skin. "Un…official?"

Smirking broadly down at her through the dark, her brother pinches her cheek before leaning over her to turn on the shower. "Let's get you cleaned up a bit, Suzu," he calls over the sudden hiss of the water, "'cause I need you semi-presentable. We don't wanna get thrown off the train on account of this whole zombie-impression thing you're doing."

The sound of the water startles Suzume enough that she stands – and then the sudden vertigo sends her stumbling into her brother's arms. His hand moves soothingly over the nape of her neck as she mumbles into his shirt, "Why do we… what do we need a train for?"

"Oh, y'know, nothing crazy," her brother says. Gliding down between her shoulder blades, his hand follows her abruptly tense spine all the way to the hem of her shirt. The pads of his fingers feel hot against her skin when they move back up and under the soiled fabric.

"Just gotta take a trip to Yokohama for a little something… extralegal."