the violence of existing (for only you)

by skuppo

After a series of increasingly awful circumstances, Dabi finds himself playing the role of big brother again, this time to a girl eight years his junior. It's something he's both good and terrible at in equal measure - at least until she begins to grow up, and he finds himself growing perversely attracted to her. Then, it's mostly all terrible. Full summary within!

26. your brother your monster

026: your brother; your monster.

Early July; 20 years.

Elixir's small clinic stands at the crossroads of a pair of ramshackle underground streets somewhere near the middle of the Gutters, exactly where and how Dabi remembers it. Koruto Pharmacy looks just as inconspicuous as every other 'business' in the Gutters. Its toxic green neon sign – while certainly more of a permanent fixture than the many other hand-scrawled poster board displays promising prurient magazines or cheap energy drinks – still somehow maintains a similar sense of impermanence. It always feels like, were he to blink too slowly, the whole of the Gutters might just rearrange itself around him, or vanish entirely like some misremembered dream. Establishments here never last. That the pharmacy and its hidden clinic still exists is a testament to Elixir and the man's perseverance. Dabi thinks he would admire him, if he ever did that sort of thing.

(Which he doesn't.)

Though the steel-barred gate at the front of the store has been lifted to allow customers in, it hangs a bit too low, even while open. This, too, is something Dabi remembers, shaking his head as he and Giran have to duck to enter. Even at a slouch, with Suzume across his back, he's still too tall to make it through. "I swear that spiteful little gremlin refuses to fix this shit on purpose. It's been this way for years."

"Repairs cost money. I think he's just frugal," comes Giran's cheery response as he brings up the rear. "Frugal, and also lazy, at least where it doesn't really matter. Can't fault a man for that. It's a good way to be."

"Lazy for sure, but frugal's just a nice way to say cheap. Elixir is cheap – nevermind a little sadist. Bet he finds it funny as hell when we gotta duck like a bunch of assholes to get in here. Wouldn't be remotely surprised if the main draw of not fixing it is 'cause he likes making everyone feel like clowns."

"I could get in without having to duck," Suzume pipes up for the first time in a long while, her cool cheek pressed to Dabi's throat.

It's evident that she's managed to finally put herself back together after his pointedly casual confession from earlier. With her butt resting on his crossed arms, it's an easy enough thing to pinch her thigh through her skirt, and she jolts against him, smothering a tiny squeal against his shoulder. "That's 'cause you're also a little gremlin," Dabi tells her, fighting the creep of a smile that lurks in the corners of his mouth. "Not like being a meter tall is anything to be proud of."

"I'm not a meter tall!"

Dabi decides to let her simmer in her half-hearted outrage, and looks around instead. Keeping in line with every other business around it, the pharmacy itself is very small and cramped. Its rusting shelves are heavy with over the counter medication, bandages and disinfectants and curious alternative folk remedies, all of it packed so tightly as to be both exceptionally claustrophobic and even a touch chaotic. At the front of the store, a woman mans the only and very ancient cash register, her chin perched on one many-ringed hand. She is gimlet-eyed and long in the face, watching the trio with hawkeyed focus despite her obvious exhaustion. When she catches Dabi's gaze, she gives him a thin, closed-mouth smile that reminds him of razor wire, her lip piercings gleaming.

And he realizes, suddenly, that he recognizes her – recognizes her, and her bleached blonde hair, and her face full of metal and glittering stones. Much like the shop, she's exactly the same as he remembers her from years ago.

"I've definitely known Elixir to look over the security footage for a pick me up when... hmmm…" She pauses, as if searching for the right word. "When customers have clipped their heads before."

"Considering he's never working the front, it sounds like he's got someone on the outside to let him know when to check the recordings for victims," Giran muses aloud without a hint of judgment in his lightly-delivered accusation. Dabi can't see him, but he can hear the man's perpetual Cheshire smile reflected in his slick-smooth voice.

The woman raises her hands, palms out, as if in apology, but the guilt that settles over her face is insincere and mawkish. "Part of the job description's being a rat. Loyalty first to the guy who lines my pockets. You understand how it goes."

Dabi's own grin finally surfaces. "Told you, old man. He's a spiteful prick. He's always been a spiteful prick."

Giran clears his throat congenially. "I'd never dream of denying it. Truthfully, I think Elixir would be offended if I did."

"Elixir himself'd be the first one to tell you that he's a prick, so I feel obliged to agree with you," the blonde says, and then, in a voice far too indifferent to actually be at all indifferent, she adds, "Been awhile, Dabi."

Despite having seen this woman on a near weekly basis all those years ago – back when Suzume had been playing the part of a captive princess for her bastard of a now very-dead-father – he'd never bothered to learn her name. He's certain she'd mentioned it several times because he recalls finding it a little forced how often she'd managed to sneak it into their unrelated and altogether brief conversations. It had been obvious she'd wanted him to remember. It had also been obvious that she'd wanted him to see her as an opportunity, ripe and eager for the taking. In nearly any other circumstance, he knows he would have been interested in that, if not her name. At the time, though, he'd been far too focused on getting Suzume back to care where he might have otherwise indulged.

Despite having seen this woman on a near weekly basis all those years ago – back when Suzume had been playing the part of a captive princess for her bastard of a now very-dead-father – he'd never bothered to learn her name. He's certain she'd mentioned it several times because he recalls finding it a little forced how often she'd managed to sneak it into their unrelated and altogether brief conversations. It had been obvious she'd wanted him to remember. It had also been obvious that she'd wanted him to see her as an opportunity, ripe and eager for the taking. In nearly any other circumstance, he knows he would have been interested in that, if not her name. That she was part of Elixir's limited retinue had complicated things. Back then, Dabi hadn't been keen on jeopordizing a good thing and risking Elixir's ire -

And now he finds he cares so little for her that even the idea of fucking her strikes him as almost revolting.

God, he thinks, more than a little surprised with himself; how things have changed.

(For better or worse? He's not quite sure.)

Disgust aside, he greets her with an upward gesture of his chin and tucks his smile away. While burnt bridges are very much his thing, there are some he recognizes as worth preserving, if only for his own selfish needs. He doubts Elixir would appreciate him openly scorning his long time and apparently loyal receptionist. "Sure has," Dabi says, noncommittally.

"Not like you ain't been busy. I hear about the shit you get up to, sometimes. It gets around," she continues as Dabi makes his way towards the back of the store, not bothering to look back at her. She raises her voice to ask after him, sounding more than a little coy, "You been cheating on us all this time with some other sawbones only to get Giran to step in, to let you come back – and with a baby fucking dove, of all things? You? Chasing feathers? Who woulda thought."

On his back, he feels Suzume's body go rigid with tension. When the fingers of her functional hand curl into a tight fist around the fabric of his hoodie, that smug grin of his very nearly comes back. Jealousy has been his constant companion for so long. He could recognize it anywhere, in anyone, but especially so as it settles like an affronted spirit in the body of his little sister.

He could feed it, he thinks. He could, and a part of him wants to – really, really wants to. But he doesn't. Some small part of him – some small, stubborn bit of guilt not yet burned off in one of his many purges of the self won't let him. It's just as well, he thinks, in a rare flirtation with mercy. Suzume has been through enough today. They both have.

"Just ain't needed a sawbones till now," he calls back, and then pushes his way through a curtained door beneath a sign that reads, in stark black permanent marker, "Employees Only."

The woman's other accusation, again for Suzume's benefit, he leaves purposefully unanswered.

The door opens up into a very simple and barren looking office full of the sorts of things that one might typically find in any office. A cheap fiberboard desk with a peeling laminate finish stands in the center, covered in order forms and a few pens of various colors. There are filing cabinets, and a bookshelf full of medical books, and a wholly barren coat rack gathering dust. Ironically, he spots an out of season coat crumpled up in the corner, also gathering dust. It looks like it hasn't been touched in years. The whole place is only marginally more presentable than the ramshackle offices of the machine shop upstairs, and Dabi can't imagine Elixir doing any work here.

What matters, though, is the snack machine situated behind the desk and off to one side, gutted of most of its goods. The only remaining option – shrimp chips, Dabi recognizes with a curl of his lip – fills at least seven of the selections, their pink and white cellophane bags the only spot of brightness in an otherwise dull and uninteresting room.

(It had been shrimp chips back then, too. Fucking foul.)

"Was she calling me a... dove?" Suzume whispers to Dabi, but not quietly enough that Giran can't hear her. Dabi can hear him chuckle at the question.

"She was," Dabi says distractedly, side-stepping the desk and making his way towards the snack machine. He casts a look over his shoulder, back at the still-grinning Giran. "Code still the same?"

Giran sounds impressed. "Damn, kid, you remember that? Was like what, three years ago?"

That had been worth remembering. Dabi squats down again, easing Suzume off his back. Like before on the train, she obliges him wordlessly. Something already smoldering in him burns all the hotter when her hand immediately tangles in the pocket of his hoodie – and when she presses her small body against his, it's as gas fed to a growing, gluttonous inferno. She seems anxious about letting even a few centimeters come between them. It's a feeling he understands very, very well.

Slinking a possessive arm around her shoulders, he punches in the code on the selection panel with his free hand. The machine, rumbling in mechanical distaste, swoons backwards on a creaking steel track before being ushered off, hidden behind a space in the wall. Suzume's voice from beside him is full of awe when she says, very seriously, "Whoa," and then, with considerably more excitement: "A secret passage!"

Before she can even think about walking, Dabi swoops down again and scoops her up into his arms. Light as she is, his body nevertheless protests. His muscles are sore. They ache in his shoulders, and in his stiff back, over-wrought from being forced into half-hunch for her comfort. The morning, and especially that trek through the woods, has been long. The day has been even longer. She could manage it herself, he knows, but it's hard to let her. It's hard to let himself let her, because even hidden behind the whispering ruffles of her long, lacy skirt, he just can't seem to shake the image of that nasty gash running up the entire length of her calf. Ignoring the judgmental scowl of one of the men who'd sat beside them on the train, he'd tugged up her skirt to steal a peek at it when she'd fallen asleep. After only a couple of hours, the bandage had been obviously stained, blood seeping through its thick layers as red as strawberries set against soft, white cream. Red strawberries, and white cream. It's easier to think of that cake video he'd found for her than it is to recall the memory all that blood brings to mind – easier than remembering her at the bottom of the ravine, ashen-faced and empty-eyed, her slender limbs splayed out in terrible, crooked angles, her skin slick with rain and blood. His grip around her tightens enough that he can feel her wince. He can't bring himself to lessen the tension, cradling her to himself as if she might evaporate at any moment. She bears it without complaint, the wild-eyed girl from this morning made placid now, normal now, like the good girl he knows she's supposed to be.

There's a tension in his throat that he hasn't felt in a long, long time, not since he was very young. He swallows against it, and finds it hurts – finds that swallowing doesn't fix anything. He clears his throat instead, and says, playing at being normal through what feels like a fistful of sharp-edged gravel, "Can't expect even the extralegal shit to be hanging out in the open."

A brief cloud shadows her features as she glances up at him, and he knows she can sense something off in his demeanor. They're too familiar with each other; of course she'd notice. But she is good, and she doesn't mention it. They aren't alone, after all. "There's an 'employees only' sign, though," she points out instead, as if something so banal would keep anyone with intent out. No doubt it would for her. Suzume is sweet. Rule-abiding. Usually obedient. She is every bit the baby dove the woman at the register had immediately known her to be. It would be evident to anyone that she doesn't belong here.

"D'you think that'd stop me?" Her brother asks, taking a sick sort of comfort in the ability to look down into her lovely, wide-eyed face again.

She casts her gaze away from his, a little shamefully, a little shyly, and god, he thinks, fondly – sometimes she's just too much. "Well – no, I guess not."

Giran is just as reasonable as Suzume, only significantly more aware of the situation. "If it won't stop your brother, it certainly isn't gonna stop some government watchdog when he comes nosing around – something they unfortunately do, sometimes."

"But what's bad about being a doctor?"

Dabi fixes her in place with a grim smile. "Turns out the government thinks you should have a bunch of years of schooling and a license to do things like patch up a broken arm or poke your fingers around in someone's brain."

If Suzume has anything to say to that – something she undoubtedly does, Dabi thinks, if the pinched look crossing her face is any indication – she's wise enough to keep it to herself.

Little beggars can't be choosers, after all.

The secret passage, as Suzume calls it – an accurate description that Dabi is willing to give her only internally because it's so fucking silly said out loud – spills into a tight and dimly lit hallway with only three doors. Playing the gentleman, Giran slips past Dabi and moves to the middle door ahead of them, tapping out a ridiculous rhythm that has Suzume smiling again.

(It feels like it's been forever since Dabi's seen her smile so much in one day, which, much like the coat in the room behind them, is another irony considering how the day had started.)

"Yeah, yeah," answers a terse and familiar voice inside. "It's open."

With one of his over-the-top bows – something that elicits a nervous giggle from Suzume as she crowds her face closer to Dabi's – Giran opens the door for the pair of them.

The almost blindingly bright room beyond is much bigger than the hallway, or the office, or even the pharmacy. Done up in easily cleaned white and grey tiles reminiscent of those found in a public bathroom, the whole place reeks of antiseptic and industrial cleaner. On tables of gleaming chrome lay dozens of medical tools, some with names Dabi knows and many he doesn't. There are no doubt many more tucked away in the plethora of drawers, all edged sharp, all waiting for the bite of flesh. At the center of it stands a single table, also chrome, but purposefully empty, situated conspicuously over a grated drain set deep in the floor.

Dabi knows from experience how useful that drain is for rinsing down blood and other unfortunate bits of viscera because he has been in this room many times, just not at all recently. Years ago, he'd spent countless hours splayed out on that same table. He remembers Elixir then, his hair a close cropped shock of blue, his constantly cross mouth weighed down by an irritable gloominess he never seemed able or willing to shake. Foul-temper aside, the man had tried his damndest to subvert all the damage Dabi was doing to himself when Suzume wasn't around to keep it at bay, hissing expletives under his breath as he'd punched thick staples into Dabi's ruined flesh with a surprisingly considerate hand. "I can't really keep you from falling apart being that you're a human catastrophe," he'd admitted once, his stone-colored eyes stormy. Dabi had recognized that expression as intense self-loathing; Elixir was the sort who felt his inability to fix everything very keenly, as if the capricious and often cruel nature of a medical catastrophe was some personal failing on his part. Anger was something he used to cover it up, and even very well. "Since you won't cut it out with the whole hellfire and brimstone shit, I can only really keep you from coming apart as fast, and that fucking sucks."

From where he stands in the corner of the room, Elixir turns to assess Dabi and his entourage, the edges of him set alight by the glow of an open laptop behind him. His hair is green now, not blue – a lime green, neon and bold, styled in an undercut left messy more out of carelessness than any sense of style. As if to match his hair, his mouth twists as if he's just taken a bite out of something awfully sour, his eyes narrowing to slits.

"You fucking dick, Horror Show." Bristly and sharp-tongued, just as Dabi remembers him. "I had other shit to do – important shit, actually – and you don't even have the balls to call me yourself. You get Giran to strong-arm me into it – "

"I assure you," interrupts Giran, sweet as the candy Dabi knows he keeps hidden in the pockets of his ever changing repertoire of ridiculous suit jackets, "there was only the softest and most gentle of arms involved."

" – and then you suddenly come outta hell itself waltzing around with the biggest set of balls anyone's ever seen – and show up to my fucking clinic, and with a fucking dove?"

"You had other shit to do." Dabi's voice is smooth as he glides into the room, helping settle a very overwhelmed looking Suzume onto the examination table. Her gaze darts between Dabi and the irascible Elixir, her hand still clinging desperately to Dabi's hoodie as if he were the only anchor point in a sudden green-colored flood. "Now you got more important shit to do. Also, thanks for noticing. My balls are huge."

Both Suzume and Elixir's expressions crumple in on themselves, hers in hot-faced embarrassment and Elixir's in rage. She doesn't say anything. Elixir, though, absolutely does. "You arrogant, disgusting mother fucker – "

"C'mon. Tell me honestly. If I'd hit you up, would you've said yes?"

"Never in a million goddamn years – "

"Then you can't blame me for asking Giran for his soft-and-gentle-arm related services."

Like his cashier outside, Elixir looks exhausted. There are enough bags under his eyes to manage a three month long vacation with room to spare for souvenirs on the return trip, and his hands, which he throws up into the air in an over-exaggerated expression of bloodless fury, tremble from what Dabi knows is a steady diet of cigarettes and sugar-free energy drinks. Unlike his mellow cashier, he seems about three minutes off from going postal. "Giran didn't tell me it was for a goddamn dove!"

"To be fair, I wasn't informed of that either." Giran shares none of Elixir's self-righteous anger. Rather, he seems to be thoroughly enjoying himself. His refusal to spread gossip about those he trucks with is not at all the same thing as abstaining. Dabi knows very well how much the old man enjoys a good row. That ever present salesman's smile of his is now an all-together more hungry one.

"What," comes Suzume's nervous and peeping voice from beside Dabi, sounding desperately forlorn, "is a dove, and why does everyone keep saying it like it's a bad thing?"

Apparently more tender-hearted than Dabi has ever taken him for, Giran crosses the room to pat Suzume's knee in a play so quintessentially father-like that he thinks it might even be legitimate – if fathers were like they were in stories, anyway. "Oh, little miss don't fuss. It's not really a bad thing – "

Some of the unsteadiness of her mouth seems to settle, but not all of it. "It sounds like – it sounds like it's bad – "

"You're right." Elixir gestures at the two of them with a jabby, pointed finger. "You're both right! It's not a bad thing – it's way fucking worse than bad!"

At that exclamation, all relief offered by Giran is lost, and Suzume's expression crumples even further, taking on the air of a completely deflated and particularly sad balloon. "Oh," she says, very quietly. And then, quieter still: "I'm sorry."

In any other situation, with anyone else, Dabi thinks he'd be near-murderous on her behalf. But there's something so utterly precious about how heartbroken she seems, and he can only shake his head and laugh, reaching out and tugging her drooping head against his chest. Brushing his hand down the spill of her hair, he says, quietly, "Poor baby Suzu. Don't take anything he says seriously. He's even more of a dick than me."

"Fat-fucking-chance of that." Elixir rolls his eyes, but Dabi notices the sharp angle of his neon green brows softening fractionally when he realizes how genuinely dejected Suzume is. The rest of his face follows suit a second later. His mouth tangles into a conflicted knot of a frown, his sharp eyes squinting as he looks away, exasperated, both with the situation and also himself. "Look – it's obvious from one goddamn glance she's got options. Doves always do. Why'd you go and drag her down here? She's so fucking bright it's like I need shades to look at her, dude. You could've taken her to a real hospital, with a real doctor."

"You're as good as any real doctor, you piece of shit," Dabi says breezily, still stroking Suzume's hair. "And anyway, circumstances are extenuating. A real hospital's outta the question."

The compliment only flusters Elixir for a moment. Then he's stalking across the room, leaning down until his face is level with Suzume's. "Extenuating circumstances, is it? This jackass isn't keeping you chained up in some basement somewhere, is he?"

"No!" That breathes life back into her, and maybe a little bit of heat, too. Dabi laughs again at how adamant Suzume sounds, at the rigid posture she assumes in his arms. Elixir's accusation is the flint that sparks that brushfire aflame inside of her, and that hot anger robs her of her fear, her outrage bared openly, toothy and snappish. It's almost unbearably adorable, he thinks, this sudden outburst of defensive sibling fury. "No – no, he's my brother – "

"Your brother!" Elixir's eyes are as wide as Suzume's now, flickering between her and Dabi both with a twitchy incredulity. "He's your fucking brother!"

Dabi grins down at him, all his own teeth on wolfish display. "What were you gonna do if she said I was keeping her in a basement?"

"God – fuck – you, her brother!" Still reeling, Elixir scrubs his face roughly with both hands, his bony knuckles red and raw from too much hand washing. "What would I do – what would – god, I don't fucking know – judge you harder? What else would I be able to do, you goddamn walking crematorium nightmare – "

"Inside voice, please, Elixir." Giran is firm. While his smile is not entirely gone – Dabi is sure he's rarely seen without one – it is certainly tempered. He raps his knuckles against the metal of the table, and the sound echoes throughout the room. "You're scaring – and maybe also pissing off – the baby."

"Me!" Elixir is indignant. "No way in hell I'm scaring her or pissing her off when her brother's – well – exactly who he is! She should be a fucking Olympian gold medalist at handling both those things by now!"

But when he looks down at Suzume again and sees her staring up at him with eyes as round as dinner plates,very nearly trembling in Dabi's arms from some potent cocktail of anxiety and fury, Elixir gives up. He lets out a sound halfway between a sigh and a groan. This time, when he throws up his hands again, it's in a gesture of surrender. "Fuck," he says, much less explosive than before. "God damn it. Okay, okay. Fine. I'll play along with this fucking farce. Tell me what's wrong with her."

"Your bedside manner is as impeccable as it ever is." Giran sounds very pleased with himself.

"Oh, piss off, Giran." Taking another step towards Suzume, he angles his head, as if to peer under her bangs. Suzume glowers out from under them at him. "You got her forehead patched up. What else?"

Dabi can think of several things he'd like to say to Elixir because it's always been so delightfully easy to rile him up. For Suzume's sake though, he pulls his hand from her hair and lifts her thick bangs from her forehead, giving Elixir an unimpeded view of the bandage. "Nasty cut number one here. Gonna need stitching. Ninety-nine percent sure she's got a concussion." ("Can't do much for a concussion beside an analgesic," Elixir mutters, more to himself than to anyone.) Obligingly, Dabi moves on, gesturing at her left arm. "This arm's all fucked up. Besides some more cuts – minor ones, I think – it's pretty obviously broken." ("Great. That's wonderful." Another double-handed face scrub. "All right. Got it.")

Moving down her body, Dabi takes a handful of her skirt near her knee and tugs it up, exposing Suzume's lower calf. Elixir exhales sharply from behind clenched teeth, scowling down at the long wound hidden behind her makeshift and bloodied bandages. "Fuckoff huge cut number two," Dabi announces to another resounding sigh on Elixir's behalf. "Also will need stitches."

"Thank you for your valuable input, Nurse Fuckhead." From beneath the table, Elixir produces a bottle of sterilization wash and a pair of gloves, cleansing and dressing his hands and lower arms with thorough but well-practiced speed. When his grey eyes fix on Suzume, Dabi can see Elixir struggling to wrangle his expression into something meant to appear more kindly. It is, to Dabi's increased amusement, a spectacular failure; he looks as if he were suffering from the world's worst case of indigestion, or constipation, or both. Against him, Dabi can feel Suzume's breathing hitch with nerves. Still, the sawbones' voice is at least mostly neutral when he asks, "You all right if I take this bandage off?"

Suzume regards him for a long moment, and then she casts her troubled eyes up at Dabi. That unsure little gesture – and the need that drives her to look to him for both reassurance and permission – feeds something very nasty and ravenous inside of him. Dabi graces her with a wide grin, and tucks a bit of her hair behind her ear with a tenderness that belies his over-eager hunger for her. "Go on," he coaxes, "It's okay."

Returning her gaze to Elixir again, she gives a short, anxious nod.

Sparing them both from another of his judgmental frowns, Elixir bows his head and, in a manner far more gentle than his temper, begins to remove the tape holding the bandage in place, carefully peeling back one corner. Again his hands vanish beneath the table only to return with his fingers smeared with what Dabi thinks is vaseline. This he uses as a sort of lubricant, smoothing it over her skin and beneath the bandage as he lifts it back. It's a slow going process, but rather than flinch, Suzume seems to finally relax in Dabi's arms.

"It doesn't hurt," she says in restrained amazement. "Not like it usually would, anyway. Tearing off plasters always stings."

Elixir's voice is steadied by his attention to the task at hand. A nerd at heart, he's always loved explaining the details of whatever he was doing. "That's because the oil helps dissolve the adhesive. Can do the same with alcohol, sometimes, or – "

"You never did all that for me when you'd take my bandages off." The strands of Suzume's hair slip so comfortably around Dabi's fingers, shining like fine silk the color of fresh summer peaches. He wraps one long, thick coil around two of them, smirking down at Elixir, who spares a few seconds to mean-mug him right back.

"Yeah, well, you're not The Baby, as Giran so lovingly put it." Working dutifully at the final half of Suzume's bandage, Elixir only just manages to keep his voice entirely flat. "Also, I hate you, and I wish you would die."

"Hey!" Stiffening in Dabi's arms again with all the unbridled wrath of a snappy little purse dog, Suzume sounds deeply offended by this little aside. "Please don't say that!"

"'Please.'" Pulled free of her hair, Dabi's fingers find and pinch her cheek gently, eager for the way it has her wriggling against him. "Mad as a hornet and still saying please. God Suzu, you're too fucking cute."

"If you had to say please to save your life, I have not a single doubt that you'd just fucking die out of spite. How she's fucking related to you…" Peeling back the last bit of the bandage, Elixir wads it up and throws it into a bin marked for hazardous materials across the room with all the poise and grace of a basketball star. Giran, now somewhat distracted by his phone, sets it down long enough to provide a polite golf clap and an understated, "Bravo." Elixir pointedly ignores him, shaking his head as he addresses Suzume. "Fine. 'I dislike him and I wish he'd get hit by a car, but still live so he can suffer horribly.' That better? Because this cut sure the fuck isn't. Your shitheel of a brother is right. It's gonna need stitches. A whole fucking load of them."

"No, it's not better." Pouty and stubborn, Suzume is insistent. But then she looks down at the weeping, angry wound running like a red leer down the length of her calf, and her face blanches. "Is it – are stitches gonna hurt?"

"Well – "

Dabi doesn't let Elixir finish. "It won't," he promises, "'cause Elixir's gonna give you something real nice – something that makes everything feel good and cozy and comfortable."

"Oh, am I, now." Elixir's laser-like attention fixes on Dabi with an intensity that he's sure the sawbones wishes was lethal. His eyebrows seem somehow raised and furrowed at the same time.

Dabi tuts as if Elixir were an errant child. "Of course you fucking are. C'mon. This is The Baby we're talking about." ("I like that she's become The Baby," Giran says, grinning down at his phone. "My greatest claim to fame. This'll be the one they remember me for.") "My baby sister isn't taking anything without something to, ahh – lube her up, so to speak."

"Fucking gross. She's your sister, my guy. I think you can leave those kinds of innuendos at home – or in the trash you crawl out of on a regular fucking basis."

Dabi's tone is innocent. "Aren't you the one who brought up my balls earlier?"

The muscles around Elixir's mouth, already strained, seem about ready to snap like an over-extended rubber band. "I'm not having this conversation anymore. Let's talk about something else, instead, like: how much these sedatives are gonna cost you."

Suzume inhales, loud and sharp in the room, but Dabi only shrugs. "I don't care how much it costs. What you got?"

With his eyebrows most definitely raised now – and very nearly all the way up to his hairline – Elixir stares Dabi down. "You, not caring how much something costs? You were always such a cheap bastard. You never got anesthetic."

"Yeah, 'cause I'm used to it, and I needed the money more then. She's a soft touch. I can spare it for her." Then, almost as an afterthought, he adds, taking hold of her chin, his fingers pushing into the plush softness of her cheeks until her lips are pursed, "And I mean, look at her. She's been through some shit today, so c'mon. Give her something good. I know you got some good shit."

Frowning down at the both of them, Elixir shakes his head. "Fine. You wanna play the big baller? I got milk-plus. Got some Denner resin. And I guess if you're really committed to this doting big brother schtick, I got nepenthe, too."

"Nepenthe," Dabi says, without a shred of hesitation.

"Ha!" Looking up from his phone, Giran makes eye contact with Suzume and gives her a toothy grin. "Nepenthe. You heard about it? You're about to feel real good, kiddo."

To absolutely no one's surprise, Suzume has not heard of it. Casting a bewildered glance between Giran and Elixir, she tilts her head back and stares up at Dabi. "Is it – is it safe?"

It's Elixir's turn to cut Dabi off, his tone blistering at the edges. "Of course it's fucking safe. This is a clinic; not like anyone'd come see me if the shit I was giving people was gonna merc 'em."

Suzume looks at him again, asking much more quietly, "Is it legal?"

Elixir gapes at her. "You're joking, right? This whole place, the shit I'm doing, all the businesses operating outta the Gutters – not the shit you saw out on the street, mind, but the things they got going on behind their own metaphorical snack machines – none of it's legal." His tone takes a turn for the defensive. "If you'd wanted legal, you shoulda gone to a fucking hospital."

Giran pats Suzume's shoulder again. "Just because it isn't legal doesn't mean it's not good. If anything, it's better than the sorta stuff they'd give you topside."

For a long time, Suzume holds Elixir's stoic, needle-mouthed expression. Then she slowly tilts her head back again, looking back up at Dabi. "What's it – what's it gonna do?"

"It'll make it so you won't feel any kind of pain. Nothing hurts – nothing at all. It either feels good, or feels like pressure, or feels like nothing. Lotta people like it 'cause it makes 'em mellow and floaty and fearless. Good at shutting up your body, and your brain, too."

Suzume's expression is very solemn as she considers this. When she looks back at Elixir, he gives her a little shake of his head, a half-hearted heaving of his shoulders. "I ain't gonna give you anything you don't want, kid. If you want a rag or something to bite down on, we can do this drug free if you want."

At that suggestion, all the blood drains from her face. "I think I'll... I think I want, um… the nepenthe?"

"Pri-cy." Pushing off and away from the table, Elixir slinks across the room. Making a whirlwind pass around the perimeter, he throws wide various cabinets and drawers, and then the doors of a large stainless steel refrigerator. After a big show, he comes back, bearing a collection of many things that he lines up neatly on the edge of the table: a syringe, a bottle of clear liquid, suture thread, a wickedly curved needle, hemostats, tweezers, and about a half dozen packages of antiseptic wipes. Suzume looks down at it all with a dazed sort of expression, the pallor of her cheeks taking on a sicky, greenish tint.

Elixir's own gaze is fixed on Suzume. Dabi can see the way his eyes move in his face as he studies her, his mouth a tense, thin line. Her obvious discomfort is probably not something he's used to. Dabi knows he regularly deals with people who have no options, because he has been one of those people. People who have been grievously wounded. People who have been shot, or stabbed, or worse. Fear of the cure isn't something afforded to the desperate. Elixir looks as if he has no idea what to do with it. "Are you sure about this?"

She opens her mouth, but nothing comes out. She nods instead.

He nods back at her. "Cool. Take off the jacket."

While Dabi helps Suzume out of her jacket, Elixir draws out a measure of the liquid with practiced hands. It looks entirely nondescript as it fills the syringe, like it could be nothing more than water. Contrary to its benign appearance, Suzume stares at it as if it might be full of the world's most lethal poison. When Elixir takes hold of her wrist – the wrist of her good arm, Dabi notes with a small note of appreciation – Suzume's eyes squeeze shut as she angles her face into Dabi's chest.

"Jeez. Try and relax." Elixir turns her arm over so that the inside of her elbow faces up towards the ceiling. Opening up one of the alcohol wipes, he smooths it over the tender skin there, pressing down through the wet cloth experimentally with his thumb. "Least you got good veins. No need for a tourniquet."

"What's a – "

Before she has the chance to complete the question, Elixir already has the syringe in her vein, his thumb easing the plunger down with a practiced hand. Held in Dabi's arms, Suzume barely seems to register the puncture. The needle is tiny. A master of his craft, Elixir's hands are impossibly steady. The whole exchange is over in what Dabi thinks must be less than three seconds, and then Elixir is twirling the used syringe in his fingers, mindful to recap it before he tosses it into a bin marked for sharps.

"C'mon." Dabi jostles her, but only a little. "It's over already."

"Over?" She lifts her head, and opens her eyes, taking in the sight of the now empty handed Elixir who holds his gloved palms out to her, fingers splayed wide and open as if to further illustrate just how done he is. "I didn't – I didn't even feel anything."

"Yeah. That's cause I'm fucking good at this shit," Elixir says, coolly. "And you're about to feel even less."

"How long does it… take?"

Dabi can't help his toothy grin, and Giran actually laughs. Elixir only rolls his eyes.

A couple more seconds slip by, and her question answers itself. Dabi can see it all happen – see the way the tension seems to unravel in ribbons from her all at once. Her eyes, at first fixed on his, seem to lose their focus, her pupils sliding minutely off to the side. The near-permanent strain that has settled itself beneath the clear skin of her face as of late all dissolves at once like the last thin layers of winter melt in the spring. In the wake of all that loss, the edges of her mouth are made sweet and pleasing. He watches her blink – watches her sun-touched lashes fan her cheek in a slow, lethargic sweep. She shakes her head, and he sees her part her lips, close them, and then open them again, touching at them experimentally with the tip of her pink tongue. After a moment of this – a long moment that draws on in perfect silence save for the ticking of some distant wall clock – her eyes draw back to his, and her mouth quavers, down, then up, then down – and then she's smiling at him, big and carefree and goofy. Then her whole body quivers as she descends into a sudden fit of giggles.

"Woah," she says when she gets ahold of herself – and then, as if the sound of her own voice is the funniest thing she's ever heard, she laughs again. "That – that is fast. Fast and… and weird."

Her laughter is easy and bright. It's the easiest he thinks it's ever sounded, no longer constrained by anxiety or fear or societal expectation or whatever else might keep it in check. It bubbles up and out of her as if it has been kept stopped up behind a great big wall for years and years, like the drug has made to rubble in an instant what trauma and misfortune have spent a lifetime creating, brick after miserable brick.

It's only temporary, he knows. Alcohol, or drugs – they're only ever an ephemeral kind of demolition. The wall will be rebuilt, in a few hours, in a few days. The wall will come back. But for now, it's as if he can see it falling all around her, and behind that, he sees her, looking around herself, wide-eyed and laughing, roses blooming pink and then pinker still in her cheeks.

He thinks she might be able to see it, too.

"Damn," Dabi hears Giran say, but he doesn't bother to look up at the broker. He can't make himself look away from Suzume and all of her radiant, unabashed delight. "I mean, I knew that shit was good, but I haven't ever actually seen anyone on it. No wonder it's worth a dime."

"What is it?" In front of her, Suzume holds out her good hand, staring down at it, at the way her fingers wriggle. Then she raises her hand, and presses her palm to Dabi's chest, sliding it over the fabric of his shirt. He savors the feeling of it, and the fearless way she touches him even more so. "I don't feel – nothing hurts, anymore."

She says the words nothing hurts with such astonishment that Dabi thinks she must mean more than just her injuries. Her eyes raise to his once more, and again there's that unbridled smile, beatific, beaming, and she lifts her hand only to bring it down again, an open-palmed pat-pat-pat right over his heart. He sets his teeth against each other. He sets his jaw against how much that aches, against that feeling in his throat again, years and years ago forgotten.

"It's a drug," Elixir says, unhelpful in the same way Dabi often is. Down by her leg, he glazes her calf with a few layers of antiseptic spray and then busies himself with a bit of suture thread and needle.

"I've had – I've had pain killers in the hospital before." Her voice flutters in the bright room, like a butterfly unaware at how it's kept under glass. "They didn't – didn't feel like this."

"Yeah, 'cause they're a bunch of cowards still stuck on older and, more importantly for the comfort of the public, less controversial options." In his periphery, Dabi can see Elixir feeding the thread through the eye of the curved suture needle, his brow crinkled in distaste. "I have some of that shit, too, some less controversial options. But they're harder to get a hold of 'cause they're so heavily regulated, and as a result they're more expensive for me to use than options that work even better. Morphine. Oxy. You heard of shit like that, yeah?"

Suzume's eyes slide away from where she has her hand fixed to Dabi's chest, staring down at Elixir. "Uh-huh."

"Yeah, well. We've been using that shit forever. And hey, they worked. Hell, they still work, and they work well enough, I guess. And the public gets to feel cozy and safe because they come from what the drug companies promise are 'normal' sources, i.e. from plants that then still get fucked around with in a lab, refined and synthesized into the forms everyone knows and loves." Already bitter, Elixir's tone becomes almost scalding. "Which is exactly the same as the drug I just gave you: something found in nature, fucked around with a lab, and then refined and synthesized into the form everyone knows and loves – at least, everyone with a fucking brain, anyhow."

"So..." Suzume sounds like she is thinking very hard, as if forming the thoughts and then putting them to words is suddenly very difficult. Distracted as she is, it's easy enough for Dabi to get an arm around her shoulders and guide her back against the table until her back is prone against the cool metal. Blinking against the glare of the fluorescents, she addresses her question almost to the ceiling. "Why's this one, um, controversial, then?"

"'Cause the something found in nature that Elixir means is someone's quirk," Dabi says before Elixir can finish. He meets the sawbones' half-furious expression with a serene, half-lidded smile and a fuck-you shrug.

Elixir puts that to words and throws it right back at Dabi. "Fuck you." Robbed of his grand reveal, he fixes his scowling attention on the suture needle again, finishing off a very tiny and professional knot with a jerky dance of angry fingers.

"It's – from a person?" No longer looking at the ceiling for her answers, Suzume swivels her head against the table to stare up at Dabi. He has no trouble admitting to himself that that's exactly where he prefers her attention. "But not against – not against their will, right?"

It's cute, he thinks, how she asks it. There's a shadow of concern he knows would be there in full if she were sober, but the drug numbs that, dulls that, and the crinkle of her nose is a brief and fleeting thing. The hunger for knowing is more innocent, more intellectual, divorced of any real moral understanding. The lack of a smile on her face isn't indicative of judgment, like it normally might be. Rather, she only seems deeply curious.

This is, unfortunately, not something Dabi knows the answer to. "Well," he starts, and then trails off, debating on making up something wholesale.

Elixir is on him in an instant, holding the threaded needle up to the light to give it a final once-over. "Oh, don't know, do we, Nurse Jackass?"

In that same fluttering voice from before, Suzume says, "Please don't call him that."

Elixir and Suzume meet each other's gazes over the needle he holds between them, his a sulky frown, hers a placid admonishment. After a few seconds, Dabi sees her indifference melt away again, losing ground to another giggly smile. Elixir also falls back on a familiar expression of his own, and rolls his eyes. Then he's up and over her leg, needle and hemostats in hand, and Dabi watches him guide the sharp, surgical steel clean and slick through Suzume's flesh.

A stolen glance back at her face reveals she isn't even flinching. "Oh! I can feel it." Fascinated, she angles her head to the other side, trying to catch a clearer view of the needle. "I can feel it inside, but – but it doesn't hurt."

Dabi tries to pretend like that isn't a line he's heard in porn a million times before, and that hearing it said in her voice doesn't immediately do something fucking unspeakable to him. He's dismayed to find neither attempt works – not even a little bit. Pressing his tongue to the inside of his teeth, he huffs a breath in and out of his nose sharply, as if that might clear his head of the thought. Unfortunately, that doesn't work, either. "Well," he says, instead, kicking at Elixir's shoe with his own heavy boot under the table. "Aren't you gonna tell us where your mythic shit comes from?"

"Hey there, fucko – maybe don't kick me when I got a needle in your sister." Steady in spite of the admonishment, Elixir's hands move quickly, in and out, in and out. "Also, to answer your question – something you absolutely don't fucking deserve – I don't work with... hmmm. Let's call them inhumanely obtained quirk-based creations. The guy who's quirk nepenthe is derived from became a scientist interested in the synthesization of certain quirks – namely his own, but also others. Unfortunately for him and the rest of the world at large, the science around quirks is very new, and notions of morality and how we're meant to navigate that haven't quite caught up yet. The public still considers the whole process largely unethical, even when the biological materials required for the synthesization are obtained from the quirk-user by their express permission."

"To be fair," Giran says, serenely, scrolling on his phone, "I think I remember reading that much of the backlash regarding quirk-based medication was the fear that businesses lacking in your more rigorous scruples might round up those with promising medically-beneficial quirks to exploit them for their biological materials. The ol' slippery slope. Keeping a ban on quirk based medicine wholesale would discourage those practices."

Elixir shrugs. "Unfortunately I think the public was more concerned with the ick-factor of taking a drug created from someone's blood or, I guess even ickier, some other bodily fluid. Nevermind that we've been injecting each other with strangers' blood for like, a millenia already. But you're not wrong. Not like we ain't all heard stories about people being used like that already, which is why I was adamant when I said that I don't personally make use of quirk-based drugs obtained against the original quirk-bearer's will. That shit's nasty business, and I don't want any part of it. Gotta find some way of sleeping at night. If Horror Show here's getting his little sister hopped on drugs, at least I can make sure it's, y'know, ethically sourced. And while he's been forced underground, the dude who we can attribute nepenthe to is now way fucking rich. I hear his wealth rivals some of the more esteemed pro-heros, even."

"And how much of that wealth comes from the ethical purchase by respectable sawbones like yourself versus the recreational use of destitute junkies looking for their next fix?" Dabi's tone is casual when he asks the question, but the weight he puts on the word respectable is anything but.

A quarter of the way down Suzume's wound and Elixir looks up again, his grey eyes as sharp and as finely edged as his steel surgical tools. "You've got no right to judge my respectability, you fucking recusant."

Dabi cracks a toothy leer at him in response. "Oh come on, get out of here with your bullshit big-time words – "

"Recusant!" Blurting out the word, Suzume tugs frantically at Dabi's hoodie with an eruption of unbridled excitement. "I know that one! I learned it from a video game!"

Elixir's eyes flash to Suzume, and something very minute seems to shift in the glacier coldness of his face. "Yeah," he says, and that same coldness in his voice is less blistering, somehow. "Yeah, I did, too."

"I knew it. I knew it! That's why your name's Elixir, right?" Cut free from the shackles of her usual shyness, Suzume is shameless in her exuberance. From shoulder to shoulder, she tosses her head gleefully, the wild waves of her hair a chaos against the table beneath her. "Because you're a doctor! Because an elixir recovers someone's full HP and MP!"

Peering at the both of them over his round, tinted glasses, Giran doesn't try to conceal his confusion. "HP... and MP?"

Snorting, Dabi grabs hold of Suzume's chin to keep her from further flinging herself back and forth. "It's dumb nerd shit." Rather than bristle like she might normally at such a jab, Suzume only devolves into another fit of giggles, slapping playfully at the back of Dabi's hand.

"Yeah, but you know what it means, so you're deep in the dumb nerd stuff, too! You're in-fect-ed, now, Nii-chan." Each syllable of the word infected is pronounced with a dire seriousness, as if she is proclaiming his very doom, but her expression cannot manage the bit. Every fine and delicate lineament of her face lights up with laughter so earnest and fond that Dabi, looking down into it, discovers himself holding his breath.

"Yeah. Like they say – what were you doing at the devil's sacrament, Horror Show? Can't know it's 'dumb nerd shit' if you're not familiar with it." At her leg, Elixir turns his head and tucks his face down, as if to focus on the work. Even from the corners of his eyes, Dabi doesn't miss what he thinks might be the first ever hint of a smile he's ever seen on the man's face. "And anyway," he says, and his voice sounds even more gruff than it usually does, "she's not wrong. That's exactly why I went with the name."

"Yes!" Suzume doesn't notice the sawbones' sudden bashfulness, far too ecstatic with her own successful deduction. "That's such a good name for a doctor!"

"I'm not a doctor, though. I was lucky enough to train under a real one for a hot minute – which is, I guess, a bonus as far as illegal sawbones work goes – but otherwise, I'm basically just some guy who read a lotta stolen medical books and played too much surgery simulator. Crazy the shit you can learn on YoTube, too."

"Yeah, but – but I meant what I said earlier. You're better than other doctors I've had. Maybe better than any of them… though I had a really nice nurse, once." Squinting up into the blinding fluorescents, Suzume asks, "So how come you aren't you working in a real hospital? Why aren't you… a real doctor?"

Even distracted by his phone, Giran goes so still Dabi isn't sure he's breathing. A glance at Elixir reveals much the same. The sawbones' hands are frozen above her legs, blood wet on the wickedly curved needle. He stares her down for several breaths, manually working the sudden bloom of tension from his jaw. "You want me to pretend like 'real hospital' and 'real doctor' aren't as shitty as they are, or are you actually like your brother and going out on the offensive?"

Dabi knows the grin that tugs at his staples is wholesale nasty, but Suzume, unsurprisingly, looks mortified even in spite of the drug. Her wide eyes find Elixir's, her expression so sobered by his chastisement that he has to look away, clearly flustered.

"I'm sorry – I'm so – I didn't mean it like that!"

"Yeah, yeah. I get it. I…" For a second, Dabi thinks Elixir might actually apologize, too. But like Dabi, Elixir isn't keen on apologies. Instead, he shakes his head and looks at Suzume again, peering down at her over his sharp and crooked nose, the faintest crease between his brows as he studies her – really, really studies her. Normally such scrutiny would have Suzume hiding her face, either in her hands or in Dabi's arm. But she meets his gaze, blinking up at him, unsmiling, and then smiling, and then unsmiling again, wholly unsure.

"You really wanna know?"

"Uh-huh." Then, after a look of obvious concentration passes over her face like a fast-moving cloud, Suzume adds, "Please."

"Please." Elixir's gaze flickers to Dabi, almost in accusation. "Seriously. I ain't ever heard you say please in the whole time I've known you, and yet your sister can manage it twice in the span of five minutes?"

"Which makes it real fucking funny you thought she'd be going on the offensive." Dabi holds up his hands and shrugs. "She's cute, right? I dunno what you expected."

That has Suzume inching across the table so she can press her face into Dabi's stomach, nuzzling into it. It's less out of bashfulness than it is an effervescent elation, her giggles smothered in the fabric of his hoodie. Elixir's gaze moves between the pair of them again, his eyebrows knit more tightly together now. "God knows what I expected, but I can't fucking reconcile the two of you at all." He rolls his shoulders, flexing them back in a half-assed stretch, and shakes his head again.

"Anyway, here's a blunt answer for your blunt question: My dad was a criminal. Before he was a criminal, he got himself and our family into huge debt over a gambling addiction. Didn't have the sense to gamble at any kind of reasonable establishment, either. He wanted to go big or go home, apparently, so he got mixed up with the yakuza, and then had to work with them to try and take care of that debt. As you can imagine, shit went from way bad to way fucking worse from there.

"I'd always wanted to be a doctor, right? Ever since I was a kid. But then dad ended up in jail for murdering some half-dozen people for money, and the whole black mark that left on my family when he got caught meant I wasn't getting into any kinda domestic program. The only option left for me was to try and go to school overseas, and, y'know." Unsmiling, Elixir laughs. It's dead air in the very quiet room. "That whole gambling addiction bit meant my family was flat-fucking-broke. Couldn't afford that shit. And even if I could've managed it – even if I wanted to dig myself into my own morally-sound debt, I couldn't. My mom was chronically ill, and she couldn't take care of herself, and what with dad always being gone out doing shit with the yakuza, or, I don't know, rotting it up in prison, it was up to me to look after her. Which I did. Dropped outta high school and took it up like a full time job, and when I got my chances, I apprenticed under that real doc I mentioned earlier. My life was taking care of her, and then it was learning everything I could about fixing people. Feels like I didn't really sleep, ever – not for years and years. Not until she died. There was always something to do for her, or something more to learn.

"And then dad got sick. Apparently he was mega broken-hearted over not getting out to see her before she peaced out, and so he went and kicked it, too. They told me he just gave up, and didn't even try and fight it. Ironic, right?" Another humorless laugh, the edges of it gone rancid. "By that point, I was too old to really consider a career change. Too old for years and years of medical school abroad. And anyway, I'd already gotten mixed up with all the shit going on down here. You know how it goes – or, maybe you're too blessed to know. Seems like your brother tries to keep that ugly shit away from you. But the reality of it is this: the bills gotta get paid somehow."

Dabi has never heard this story before. He's never had the desire to ask. He wonders, briefly, if Elixir ever would have told him if he ever had.

(He's pretty sure he wouldn't.)

But here he is, spilling his guts to Suzume after knowing her for all of half an hour, his severe face creased in about a million new places. He looks tired. He looks so much older than Dabi knows he is – like he's older than Giran, like he's about a million years old, and not in his early thirties.

And then Dabi looks down at Suzume. She is staring at Elixir, her eyes blown wide again, her mouth thinned as she presses her trembling lips together. Having seen her cry over much, much less, he suspects that if she weren't totally blitzed that she'd be in hysterics by now.

Her and her bleeding fucking heart.

"But you're still helping people," she says finally, after a long, long moment. Her voice is so firm and sure despite its softness. "You're still a doctor. You're doing all the doctor things, so you may as well be one."

"'May as well be one,' isn't – "

Shaking her head, her hair twists behind her on the table again. She casts her eyes back up and towards the lights, frowning. "No," she says, even more firmly, "No, that's dumb. You're a real doctor to me. Didn't you – didn't you used to take care of my brother?"

"I – " Caught somewhere between embarrassment and annoyance, Elixir coughs agitatedly into his elbow. "Unfortunately."

Closing her eyes, she smiles with borrowed serenity. "I bet he never said thank you, so I'll say it for him: thank you so very, very much." She takes in a breath, and it hitches a bit in her throat, but her smile doesn't waver. "I don't know what I would do – where I would be – I don't… I don't think I could really be, without him. So thank you for helping him, even if you didn't want to. It means the world to me. And I bet the things you do mean the world to everyone you take care of, too."

Looking away from his little sister, Dabi lets his gaze settle on Elixir. Gone completely silent, he's turned away, not even looking at her leg anymore. In his hand, Dabi can see it, even without looking very hard: the needle there in his hands is shaking. His whole hand is. With his back to the pair of them, there's no reading the sawbones' expression, but there's a flush of red gone tellingly hot in the tips of his ears that Dabi knows wasn't there moments ago.

And inside of him, deep in his chest, something cracks. It's just a little crack, really, something small, something stupid, and yet it's such an awful feeling made worse for how familiar it is. It's ugly. It's another fissure in a cold, cold stone already riddled with old fractures, and some new ones, too. One from this morning, even – and now this.

Now this one.

This is important, he tells himself, trying to be rational. Being here is important. Allowing other people to talk to her, and allowing her to talk to other people – these are necessities. She's injured. Just a child. Her laughter with him means nothing. Her kind words – they mean nothing. The pink in Elixir's ears, even that means nothing. He tells himself these things with the same internal voice he'd used to explain to himself why she'd run from him earlier, and that voice is logical, and that voice is calm. She had run because she was scared, and why wouldn't she be? He'd made himself scary. He'd frightened her on purpose.

So the voice says, and the voice speaks the truth, repeating the words over and over. There was – and there is – nothing else to this morning. To this, here, and now.

But still, in that jagged stone caged behind his ribs and buried down beneath layer upon layer of scar tissue, that stone cracks anyway, and as easily as if it were made of glass. Dabi breathes in slowly, and when he breathes out, slow again, and measured just like he'd taught her to do, he feels fire licking up all the length of his throat and simmering behind the sudden cinched tight vice of his jaw.

It's necessary. It means nothing. The two of them will more than likely never see one another again. But even so – even if all those things are true – Dabi realizes he really, really doesn't like seeing Suzume talk to anyone else. He especially doesn't like her laughing with anyone else, and he can't fucking stand her comforting anyone else. And Elixir's reaction, however small – his red ears, and his trembling hand, and his all-too-telling silence – well, that's three fucking handfuls of salt hurled down the deep, ravine-like ruptures in the stone of his heart –

Salt for that long-festering wound at its long-festering core.

More than half a year ago and well before Dabi had been made painfully aware of just how fast she was growing up, he and Suzume had spent an evening sprawled out together in the common room, watching the Hero Billboard Chart JP event. She had been sick. Two days into a terrible flu, she had been feverish and clingy and so utterly miserable he'd felt something very much like real pity for her. He had already been playing at being her nursemaid, and being her nursemaid meant making her instant ramen prepared to all her weird preferences while she hovered around his elbows, refusing to rest because she wanted to be with him. It had meant hours wrapped up with her in several suffocating layers of blankets, the both of them sweating their asses off for a horror movie marathon that had her spending more time hiding her face against him than actually watching.

And it had also apparently meant giving in when she had begged to watch the ranking event with him, almost near tears when he tried to refuse her.

Dabi had never missed a ranking event. Whether live, or a day late, or even a week later, there was no staying away from it. It was a compulsion then, and a compulsion now, and it's always been something he's preferred to watch alone. Agreeing to watch them with her was a concession he made only because she was sick – and maybe also because she was so unbearably cute when she begged him for anything.

Still, he'd tried to dissuade her. "You can watch it on my phone later," he'd promised, not really intending to keep it. "Why do you care about this shit, anyway?"

Ignoring the second half of his deflection attempt, she'd gone immediately for his one weakness."But I don't wanna watch it alone. I wanna watch it with you," she'd said, and she'd sounded so pathetic and so needy. And that, of course, had completely ruined him. It spoke too much to what he wanted.

What else was he supposed to do but give in?

So, they'd watched it together, and because she was sick and because she was miserable, Dabi had tried not to be as bitter as he might've normally been. It had been easier than expected. She'd settled herself in his lap and tugged his arms around herself, nesting against him for warmth, or affection, or most probably both, sighing so contentedly, and he'd liked that. He liked that a lot. He'd indulged her with that, trying to ignore the – at the time, anyway – alien surge of need her clinginess had inspired. The way that desire had mixed with his tepid annoyance had made for a strange and heady mix.

The earlier parts of the event had gone by in a blur. With most of his attention fixed on his little sister, he had none to spare for the parts that might have normally bored him. It was far too distracting to let his hands slink down her sides, to pull wheezing laughter from her when he tickled her or groggy cries of dismay if his fingers bit at her.

And then, suddenly, it was Endeavor's turn. Without even looking up at the television, he'd realized it. The crowd's reaction had faltered some, more conservative than raucous. There were less shrieks; less whistles. Dabi had looked away from Suzume and up at the screen –

Looked up at his father, ranked again at his perpetual place as number two pro hero.

"God, Suzu. Imagine that. Fucking imagine it," he remembers saying to her. By the grace of all his years of practice, he had somehow managed to keep his voice even and conversational, devoid of that sour-stomach concoction of glee and spite that welled up in him at the thought. "Imagine being number two for so fucking long. Imagine how hard he probably works, and how much it wrecks him to fail, month after month, year after year. Always second best. Never good enough."

"You mean Endeavor with All Might?" Suzume had sounded a little fuzzy when she'd answered. For the last several minutes of the program, she hadn't really said anything. It was only by the occasional way she'd nuzzled her face against his arm or wriggled at the incessant brush of his fingers that he was sure she hadn't fallen asleep.

"Yeah." Dabi had laughed, and maybe he hadn't been so good at keeping the spite out, because he remembers the distinct sensation of Suzume stiffening some in his arms. He hadn't been able to help himself. "I mean, look at him. He looks like he's seething."

Endeavor had indeed looked like he was seething. Dabi recognized that expression intimately. It was straight out of his childhood, his father's broad jaw set steely and furious above his broader shoulders, his blue eyes blazing behind the mask of rioting, live fire.

And then the announcer was excitedly introducing All Might, and it was All Might on the screen instead, walking onto the stage before a much renewed crowd. Like Endeavor, his stride was confident. Unlike Endeavor, he was smiling that famous and ever-earnest smile. Also unlike Endeavor, the audience ate him up, and it took quite a while before the announcer managed to wrangle them into even a semblance of respectful and silent submission.

In his lap, Suzume had hummed to herself and softened again, running her rain-cool fingers gently over his knuckles. "Actually, I was talking to someone about that recently."

It was hard in the moment to determine which part of that sentence felt more like a poisoned dagger buried deep in Dabi's gut – that she was talking to someone else, or that she'd been talking to someone else about his father. "Oh, yeah?"

One for one, he'd thought. Feverish as she was, she'd been more oblivious to that change in his demeanor than she otherwise might have been, attending to his question with a blithe ignorance that might have been charming in any other circumstance. "Uh-huh. He was saying that Endeavor usually solves more crimes than All Might. That when it came down to it, he was every bit the hero All Might was – at least… at least in practice. That's what he said: in practice. And he said: it's because Endeavor doesn't have the… he doesn't have the disposition of a hero." She says the word disposition very carefully, as if she's not sure that's the right word. Dabi chooses not to say anything. He doesn't trust himself to, and Suzume, still completely unaware, fills in the expectant silence. "And, um… he said that All Might has the sort of personality that – that inspires and comforts people, and that Endeavor just… well, he doesn't. That he probably won't ever. And he said that as long as All Might is in the running, Endeavor will probably never really be able to overtake him, no matter how well he does, because the public just… doesn't feel the same way about him. And he said, um… 'Endeavor doesn't make himself very easy to love,' and, 'in the presence of someone easier to love, he's always gonna come second place.' He said that almost exactly, I think. And thought it sounded kinda neat, but also maybe kinda sad."

Another twist, and another, and another. How neatly this stranger had put everything. How awfully succinct. How perfectly crafted this dagger he had put in his little sister's hands. And sitting there with the shoji door thrown open and the bitter air of the late autumn night slinking in – sitting there with Suzume's back to his chest, and her so sweetly ignorant as to everything she'd just said – Dabi had reeled back as if struck, even if only in his own mind.

Of course this was something he had always understood – at least subconsciously. Even hearing it from Suzume, none of it had been new information, not really. But hearing it spoken aloud, and so casually –

Something about that had really contextualized it for him in a way he had never truly managed before:

His father would never surpass All Might because All Might represented someone much more likeable – someone who, as Suzume's mystery conversational partner had said, was easier to love.

"Guy sounds like he's got a lot to say," Dabi had said. "Sounds like he's a real smart guy, doesn't he."

That time, he had not bothered to hide the not-so-subtle condemnation that had crept into his voice. He did not bother to hide the way he had bristled, either. And Suzume had certainly noticed that because he had become very aware that she was holding her breath immediately after. It was a very long moment before she'd finally said, very quietly, "It's not – it's not like that."

It wasn't that he cared at all about his father's charisma – or, more accurately, his total lack of it. As far as Dabi was concerned, the longer his father failed to achieve his impossible goal, the better. Rather it was the reason itself that flooded his veins with venom when he thought about it – when he really, really thought about it.

In the presence of someone easier to love, why wouldn't the heart seek the safer, kinder path?

"Not like that, huh?" Dabi had asked, tucking his head against the side of her own, his mouth just above her ear. His voice was as sharp and barbed as razor wire, and she had flinched at the feeling of his breath bearing down hard against her skin. "Sure sounds like you got a new friend you ain't told me about."

"It's not like that," she'd repeated, and there was a quaver to her voice that he knew had nothing to do with her being sick. When she'd shaken her head, her hair had tickled the bare bit of skin exposed by the low neckline of his shirt, and it had felt as cold against his hot flesh as the November air did. "It was just a conversation. It didn't mean anything. I don't – I don't have any real friends."

Dabi remembers how she'd said it perfectly. A little bitterly; a little sadly. And there had been some comfort to be found in that flicker of genuine emotion, because in Dabi's eyes, it had meant she was speaking the truth –

And if there was no one in her life easier to love than himself, well, all the better for him.

But the idea that the lack of friendship made her feel sad or bitter at all, well…

It spoke to some clear desire to know other people. To be close to someone else. And if she were to know other people…

He looks down at her now, her eyes closed, her smile peaceful. And then he looks down her body, and at Elixir, and his fucking pink ears. He hasn't ever seen Elixir smile, but he finds that he can imagine it now, and with such perfect, terrible clarity. Toothy, he imagines. Charismatic, maybe. Maybe even likeable.

That boy, too. God, that fucking kid from the park, and his stupid letter. Dabi thinks about him, and his stomach seizes with a sudden and impossible wave of hateful nausea. He'd imagined that boy in the woods so many, many times, even long after he'd murdered him. Imagined Suzume reaching out to him after reading his note like the bleeding heart she always is, trying to be friends. Imagined them actually being friends. He'd imagined that boy with his fumbling affection, and his anxious smile, and the dog eared manga he'd read day in and day out at the park, and he realized he'd have had a lot in common with Suzume if they'd ever gotten to know each other. She would have liked him, Dabi is sure of it. She would have liked him if she'd ever gotten the chance.

But for all he'd imagined that boy, and for all that had actually frightened him, he hadn't let himself really recognize why. Jealousy, he understood. Jealousy is what he'd called it. And it was jealousy, but it was something else too, and now he realizes it. Now he understands. It had been motivated by fear, and by dread, and by the implicit understanding of some awful, unthinkable truth.

Would that dead boy have been easier to love?

Would Elixir, here now, and still alive, be easier to love?

Would Suzume, in the presence of anyone easier to love than himself, ever really choose him?

Inside of him, the familiar but insane desire to burn every bridge in the room seethes up within him – every bridge, and maybe a few people, too, just to be safe. But there's that voice again, bracingly logical against all that broiling rage: it's a necessity. She will never see him again. She won't. He can be sure of it, even, if he wants to – and god, he wants to. He wants to make damn sure of it, wants to do something drastic, something wild, something –

No. No. It means nothing. And hasn't he sort of liked Elixir, up until now? Maybe in another life – if Dabi was someone else, anyway – they might have even been friends. That counts for something, cautions the voice. It has to.

(Funny, he thinks, how quickly all that good will seems to have changed. How very like him.)

It's fine, though. It will be fine, at least when all of this is done and finished and put away. And he can manage. He can. He's had so many years of practice.

So when he speaks again, his tone is even, and the barbs at its edges are no more keen than they usually are. "Wow, Elixir. Turn up your nose at my compliments, but hers have you blushing like a schoolgirl?"

Dabi tries not to count the many long seconds it seems to take for Elixir to collect himself – tries not to think about how the gentle slope of his shoulders square back up after those seconds. He tries not to think about Elixir needing to put himself back together at all, and he fails, but that's fine. He's fine. Just a bit longer.

"That's because your compliments stink of psychological manipulation, you fuckass," Elixir finally says, a little hoarsely. He still isn't looking at them.

"Mmm." Dabi fiddles a bit with the end of Suzume's hair, staring down at Elixir's bent head with a smile he knows doesn't connect in his coldly narrowed eyes. "Fair."

"You could at least try to deny it," comes Elixir's grumbled reply, a little more put together this time.

Angling his head back thoughtfully, Giran looks over his phone, first at Elixir and then down at Suzume's tranquil face. "I'm rather unused to all this positivity. I mean, compliments! Down here! It's kinda refreshing, isn't it? Everyone round these parts are always so fucking grumpy." His knowing gaze lights on Dabi then, and he winks at him, grinning wide. "So in the spirit of it all, let me try my hand at a compliment: why can't we praise the wolf who wears his heart on his sleeve – the wolf who adamantly refuses the sheep's guise?"

"You drunk, Giran?" Fully back in the fight now, Elixir opts to put the vulnerability of the previous conversation behind him and his needle back to work. His deft hand moves with a renewed quickness, pushing the needle in and out of her flesh and drawing the open, garish gash that splits her leg to a much more somber and closed-mouth smirk. "It's a bit too early in the day to be waxing philosophical like a fool."

"I'd say evening is well enough into drinking hours for anyone with a liver as abused as mine," Giran counters, pleasantly.

"Yeah, but it's always too early to be waxing philosophical. I can't stand that shit at any hour." There's a tension in Elixir's voice, but it isn't anger, Dabi realizes. It's that always-present exhaustion creeping through his now-shattered barrier, pervasive in everything the man does if you stop to look for it. "I ain't got a head for that kinda shit. I don't wanna think about – don't wanna think about what's good in a bad situation. All I know is how I feel, and I act on that, and I hope it's good enough at the end of it all."

"Sounds pretty philosophical to me." Dabi has lost the taste for the conversation. In truth, he's lost the taste for anything but the heat glazing his tongue and the wicked desire to do something fucking awful, but he knows better than to do that –

Just like he knows better than to drop off the conversation completely.

It works, of course. Giran doesn't seem to notice, and once more, there's no real anger on Elixir's part as he says, tiredly, "Fuck off, Horror Show."

There's still a heady fog settled about Suzume's face when she opens her eyes, glancing around at the three men before her gaze shifts upwards towards the blindingly bright lights of the room. Without flinching from their brilliance – not even squinting, this time – she asks, in a faraway voice, "Why do you – why do you both call him Horror Show?"

Dabi laughs, but for everyone else, a very brief silence settles over the room. Giran clears his throat politely, but doesn't answer, his wide mouth settling on a mild line midway between a smile and a frown. Elixir adds another three whole stitches before he says, "I mean, look at his face, kid. You see it every day, presumably. You know what we're talking about."

Suzume's attention snaps back to the matter at hand, trying to blink away her disorientation and failing miserably. Even so, Dabi watches the soft contours of her face tighten again, one hand curling into a fist. "No, I don't. Please – please explain it to me."

It's funny, Dabi thinks, very nearly laughing again. His face and its nightmarish qualities had been the first thing Giran had mentioned all those years ago, back when they'd first met. With a front row seat to Dabi's rapid decline, Elixir had also had a lot to say about it, scrubbing his face in hopeless agitation when Dabi came in with more and more scar tissue made worse by the day, week after awful week. Neither of them have ever hesitated or held back in their commentary. It's always been the way of it, down here, where everything is dire, and ugly, and desperate. Both of them had seen it all, and much, much worse. What would ever be the need in holding back?

And yet now, faced with the unbridled and fast growing indignation of a twelve year old girl half out of her mind on fucking nepenthe, both of them seem almost genuinely rebuked.

Dabi hears Elixir suck in a sharp breath. "Look," he says, "all we're saying is that it's obvious you're the one who got all the good genes from your parents. Your brother is – well, your brother wasn't so lucky, seems like."

"That's not true – "

"Listen, kid. You're – you're too old for untruths. Your brother's face – and his body, too – " Pausing before he makes another stitch, Elixir takes in another breath. "Well, I don't know how else to say this, but he's a goddamn war crime, visually and otherwise. A real horror show."

The name has never bothered Dabi, not even a little. The changes to his face and body, though, those had bothered him when he was much, much younger, both before he'd woken up in the hospital, and for some time after.

When he'd lived with his family, he'd hated the burns and the subsequent scarring, just not at all for the way they changed him physically.

No, he'd hated them because of what they'd meant:

He wasn't good enough.

They were, as it turned out, the undeniable and terrible proof that he would never be good enough. Not for his father, and not for his father's dreams, and not even for his own. Not for anything. And that had been the start of it, hadn't it?

He'd pushed through it all, anyway. Accepted it, anyway. He'd embraced all that scar tissue and ruined flesh by choice, and then he'd made it worse – also by choice. He'd looked at himself in the mirror every day and watched how he'd changed, and then he'd chosen to keep doing it – pushing himself further and further until he'd buried the soft, unblemished reflection of the boy he used to be beneath a dozen layers of ash and gore and scars and surgical steel staples. Even his bones were different. He'd died a boy, and woken up a young man, with a young man's leaner face and leaner bones, with a young man's stronger jaw, and longer limbs. The only ghost left from before Touya died and Dabi had reemerged as the Horror Show both Giran and Elixir know so well is the January-cold fire of his eyes. It is the only thing that he remembers from his much younger self when he stares down his reflection in the mirror.

And he doesn't mind it, now. He doesn't. The way he looks is his choice. He is his scars. So when Elixir, or Giran, or whoever else has something to say – it means nothing to him. It never means anything to him.

But it very obviously means something to Suzume.

"What do you mean!" It's not even a question, the way she says it. It's an exclamation, and a deeply wounded one. "He doesn't – his face doesn't look bad! He looks so cool!"

"His face looking like the stuff of nightmares doesn't preclude him from looking cool," Giran says in soothing tones, acting the part of a doting father again. He pats Suzume's hand with all the tenderness of someone comforting his daughter through an especially wild fit. "Terrible and cool don't have to be mutually exclusive."

"They absolutely are, in his case," Elixir grouses, head bowed over her leg as he pushes the needle through her flesh for another neat stitch.

"What!" Somehow, in her indignation, Dabi swears he hears the pronouncement of not one, but two exclamation marks. Undeterred by Giran's attempt to placate her, she tries to sit up from the examination table, expression adorably livid.

Dabi pulls away from her grasp only to take hold of her scowling face. Cupping her puffed cheeks, he eases her back down onto the frigid steel of the table, shaking his head and tutting at her softly. "Fuck's sake. C'mon, Suzu," he says, through mild laughter, "the dude's got a goddamn needle in you. Settle down."

While the brief storm of fury in her eyes lessens considerably, her pupils remain blown out from the drug as they dart about rapidly, scanning his face. Her mouth wobbles a bit, trembling and so terribly cute it very nearly absolves him of all his earlier and still lingering anger. "But you look cool. You are cool," she insists defensively in a significantly more dejected whisper that's still loud enough to fill the entirety of the examination room –

And god, he thinks. Never in a hundred thousand lifetimes does he think he would ever deserve this.

(He cannot bring himself to care.)

"I love the way you look. And Mr. Elixir is very good at being a doctor, but he's being really, really dumb right now."

"Yes, and Mr. Elixir has, as your gross-ass brother just reminded you, absolutely still got a needle in your leg!" Hisses Elixir in a threat that is every bit as vicious as it is empty.

Very, very briefly, Dabi considers resisting the urge to press his forehead to hers. It wells up so suddenly within him, demanding and almost agonizing in its insistence at being sated. When he does give in, though – because of course he does – when he dips his head against her own and strokes her soft, plush cheeks with his much rougher thumbs, the rest of her frustration melts away like fine clay molded and changed beneath the heated hands of a master sculptor. Her puffed cheeks deflate; the crinkle of her nose softens, and becomes smooth. Her eyes are wide as they hold his gaze, and then they soften too, made heavy-lidded and heady and gentle, so tender in her undisguised if flustered adoration for him. She looks drunk, he thinks. With her pretty lips parted, her breath coming fast and needful against his own mouth, she looks very drunk.

Love drunk.

God, he thinks, feeling his pulse howl in his ears. God, why does she have to be so fucking perfect –

"Hey, Dabi, could you – oh, I don't know – maybe quit being a total fucking freak in my exam room," Dabi hears Elixir complain waspishly from halfway down her leg.

Giran is very rarely anything but good-natured, and now is no exception. "Oh, come now," he says, grandly. In the time Dabi has known him, it has never been in Giran's nature to discourage anyone of anything, no matter how outlandish or deviant, and he seems disinclined to start now. "Let the young and the infirm be passionate, Elixir."

"I swear to Christ I would have never pegged this outrageous mess of… of perversion as his villainous motivation, but seeing as I am now thoroughly cursed with understanding, I don't need any further demonstration, thanks."

The crinkle in Suzume's nose comes back at the words perversion, and even through the emotional numbing properties of the drug, Dabi reads it accurately for what it is: shame. He eases his finger up and down the slope of her nose, but it doesn't fully smooth away this time. "Whoops. Guilty as charged," he says, turning his head and sliding his gaze back towards the Sawbones, "Looks like you finally got me all figured out, doc. What'd you think it was before now?"

"Being generous? I always figured you rolled outta the wrong side of bed at some point when you were like, I don't know – five or six? – and that you just up and decided to make that everyone else's problem. And not just that day, mind you, but for the rest of goddamn forever.

"More likely than that though, I bet you crawled outta your poor mom a right bastard, day-fucking-one. The doctor should've slam dunked your ass right into the garbage, but unfortunately for the rest of us, that doctor had scruples, and, well: here we all are – forced to suffer 'cause some paragon of medical standards decided he had to do the right thing." Elixir is very nearly at the end now; only a few centimeters of her wound remain. He doesn't bother to spare any real attention for Dabi, though he gestures towards him with a jerk of his head. "If there is any lesson to be gleaned from the grim bloody fable that is this fuck freak, it'd be this: forget being the better man. Always put the trash in the garbage where it belongs."

"Well, can't fault you for any of that," Dabi agrees with a wry grin. ("Noooo, please don't say that, Nii-chan," comes Suzume's voice, whining and pleading and soft with dismay.)

The sigh that Elixir heaves is heavy and fretful. "Surprised your no doubt long suffering mother kept trying for more kids after she had you. I'd be wigged out at just the prospect of more of you, honestly."

Dabi is rather surprised to find that stings, even if only just. Still, his smile doesn't falter and he manages to keep his tone level when he says, "Guess they wanted something better so much they were willing to risk it."

If Giran or Elixir notice anything, they're either too reserved or too smart to address it. Suzume is too sincere, though. Too emotional. Too sweet, even when she isn't absolutely fucked up on the choicest drugs available. Reaching out, she brushes tentative fingers across Dabi's knuckles, her love-sick expression guttered by a concern so painfully unguarded it almost makes him laugh. There she is, always with that naked intensity, her heart left like a bloody and still beating sacrifice on her sleeve. It is, as ever, one of his favorite things about her. "Yeah but – but mom and dad are – were…? – dumb." The brief confusion her attempt at playing to the bit causes her is only temporary before she pushes on ahead with her real point, her hand lifting from his knuckles to pat gently at his cheek. "You're my favorite."

"Looks like they got their 'someone better' with your sister," Elixir mutters. "Shame you've gone and obviously brainwashed the poor kid."

That should sting too, Dabi thinks. It should. But it doesn't. Against his face, Suzume's hand is so soft, so cool, and she touches him without any hesitation or fear. She looks… not quite sad, but almost. He's not sure the drug will let her be sad in any real capacity, but there is some tremulous, uncertain look that settles over her features anyway, and that something is close enough. "That's not true," she says, very gently.

"What isn't?" Elixir sounds distracted as he trades the needle for a pair of shears, leaning over her leg to cut the end of the suture thread.

"That I'm their 'someone better.' That anyone is, or could be." She speaks a little louder, this time, a little more forcefully. Despite both the brain fog from the drug and her head injury, she sounds clearer than Dabi thinks he's ever heard her. "And how I feel is – well, that's how I feel. He didn't make me feel any kind of way. I chose it. It's always been my choice."

"Has it?" The question is out of Dabi's mouth before he means to ask it. It's pointless to ask. He knows what the answer is. He knows what the answer is because he's worked so long and so hard for her to come to that conclusion herself.

Suzume looks at him and frowns. It's as if she can't believe what he's asking her – as if she cannot conceive of him doubting her love for him. She hadn't flinched through the entirety of the stitches, and yet she looks at him as if this question wounds her through all that glorious numbness, and so deeply that it's very nearly a betrayal. "Of course it is," she says, and made free and loose by the drug, she seems so assured of herself he almost – almost – believes it.

Because there it is. There it is, exactly as expected. She loves him, and her feelings are, at least in her own mind, wholly her own. It's something she believes, and entirely in earnest.

And isn't that what he's wanted this whole time? Isn't that what he's tried so hard to cultivate? To have someone who chooses him, no matter the cost – to have someone who loves him, regardless of who or what he's become, of how awful he is, or how terrible, how ugly, how cruel –

Her eyes are glassy as she looks up at him, fighting drowsiness. And even so, there's still that adoration in them, bright and so stubbornly lucid behind the glazed film of chemical inebriation. It's always there, isn't it? Even when she's angry at him, or sad, or frightened – like before, like earlier, when she'd looked up at him for permission, for guidance, for comfort. He's nurtured that in her. He's cultivated it. She is a fertile garden, gullible and easy, and the seeds he planted in her back when they'd first met – rancid seeds, rotten seeds, seeds that were foul and fetid and wrong from their very inception – oh, he'd made sure they'd taken root a long, long time ago. He'd tended that garden with every second of his spare time, and then he'd made it his full time job –

Because what else was he going to do with the long wait?

And this is what he wanted. He wants her to feel exactly how she does now, and to be so sure of it, so certain she's come to that decision of her own accord, and nothing about that desire has changed. If anything, he wants it more, now – finds, with no small amount of horror, that he needs it now, and fuck, how that realization fucking rattles him. He has tried so desperately to murder the part of himself that would deign to need anything from anyone ever again –

And to feel that long-dead corpse stirring to life in him once more, and so fucking ravenous this time –

That would be awful enough, he thinks. That would be wrong enough.

Foolish enough.

But now as he looks into her face and stares down into the profound love she has for him laid bare in every lovely feature of her even lovelier face, Dabi finds some small and traitorous part of himself wishing that he might have let her come to those feelings in her own time, and of her own accord.

But would she have, if he'd let her? Would that have even been a risk he could have abided back then?

(Because it sure as hell isn't a risk he can abide, now.)

Selfish, selfish. These thoughts are selfish. But every part of him is selfish, and it always has been, and at least that's normal. At least that's familiar, unlike this newly discovered need for her that eats him up from the inside, piece by traitorous piece.

But even that need is selfish. And in the end, it isn't all that different from his usual brand of selfishness – that selfishness that views everyone else as a fucking threat. Because they are, aren't they?

Everyone else is a risk. Everyone else – anyone else – they'd all be easier to love.

Wouldn't they?

And in the presence of someone easier to love, well, he's sure he'd be like his father. He's sure he'd always be second place, no matter how hard he tried. Never quite good enough. Never anyone's first choice.

Not even for his little sister.

"Nii-chan," she says, and even in the unnatural fluorescence of the room, her eyes are so pretty. And it's like they're on the train again, surrounded by so many people, but she's looking at him, and only at him, like she isn't at all aware of anyone else in the room. She touches his cheek, and her fingers trace a clumsy path along the ridge of the scar that runs its way from the corner of his mouth to his ear. Her lashes flutter, and the drug draws a smile out of her, wide and guileless. The almost-sadness born from the fear that he might not believe her is already long forgotten. "I really do like how you look."

"Yeah?"

A giggle, and another smile. It's so sweet, it's so goddamned sweet, and it's exactly what he's wanted. "Yeah."

It's exactly what he's wanted, and it's all wrong, and he's terrified of it – of what it means to him.

Much worse than that, he's terrified of ever losing it.

So dumb, he thinks, spiraling. So fucking dumb. He thinks that, tells himself it's dumb because it's easier than admitting to himself what he really thinks – because it's easier than realizing he'd planned for her to feel all of this, and yet he hadn't planned on how he'd feel at all.

He almost tells her she's dumb. He wants to. He really does. He should.

"Well," he says, instead, "I guess I like the way you look, too."

Like everything he gives her, it's so small. Anyone else would think it was meaningless. But it isn't, he realizes. It isn't meaningless when he says it. It isn't for him, and it definitely isn't for her, because she closes her eyes, and her lips part around a wider smile, and the pink in her cheeks makes him momentarily forget the pink in Elixir's ears. She looks so happy. She looks like how he imagines he might have if his father had come back and told him, "Actually, I think you'd be better than Shouto, after all."

She's beaming. Elated. She laughs again, and her hand on his cheek feels very cool and very soft –

And yet he thinks that nothing in his whole and wretched life has ever burned him so much, somehow.

---

It takes Elixir the better part of an hour to finish up the stitches on Suzume's forehead and get a cast on her arm. The bone needs to be set, and watching him do it has Dabi's teeth set on edge. It's funny, he thinks; he's seen so much violence in the past couple of years, and has been the cause of the vast majority of it. The blood and the gore, the familiar and sultry peek of ivory bone slipped out from beneath melting flesh – he is numb to all of it, now.

He has been for a long, long time.

But watching Elixir push Suzume's very obviously broken arm back into place has his mouth filling up with too much spit. To her credit – or, more likely, to the credit of the drug – she handles it all like a champ, watching with morbidly rapt fascination as Elixir's hands work their grim magic. "It doesn't hurt," she says in wonder as Elixir jams his fingers down into the meat of her arm, fishing for something that shouldn't be there, "but it feels really, really crunchy."

"Crunchy." Elixir repeats the pronouncement beneath his breath and shakes his head as if caught off guard by the description. At the stubborn encouragement of the sawbone's palm, Dabi watches a length of bone slide uncannily beneath her skin, and he almost closes his eyes. Dabi knows what she means. He's had a bone set before. He's also felt one – one, or several – ground down beneath the weight of his boot. Crunchy, she says. It's so innocuous when she says it. It's so cute it almost makes him laugh.

(But he keeps his teeth clamped tightly closed against that curdled feeling in his stomach, just in case.)

At one point, Giran leaves for a bit to take a phone call. By the time he comes back, Elixir has Suzume's arm secured in a turquoise cast. She brandishes it for the broker with a wide grin when the old man comes to stand at the other side of her examination table.

"Well, damn, missy. Looks like you're right as rain, now," he says, giving a low whistle from around a half-smoked but extinguished cigarette that dangles from the corner of his grinning mouth. "That cast looks mighty fine on you. Color really brings out your hair."

Dabi huffs in subdued amusement at the compliment, but Giran seems honest enough with its delivery. Whether he means it or not, Suzume is pleased as punch to hear it all the same. "It's my first," she announces in a high and almost excited voice, like she's proud of it. Unable to move her wrist, she gives him a full-armed wave, her little fingers poking out of the brightly colored plaster.

Beaming down at her with all the warmth of the sun, Giran is, again, surprisingly indulgent. Placing one hand beneath her plaster-encased wrist, he runs his other over her cast in a sweeping gesture, tapping all across its hard surface with gentle, inquisitive fingers. "Mmmm, yes. Excellent craftsmanship. Impressively sturdy. Truly, I cannot say I've seen a finer cast in all my long years. My compliments to your doc." Still high off her ass, that earns him an easy, bubbling laugh from Suzume. Tugging off his gloves, Elixir rolls his eyes, but looks marginally less sullen for the compliment.

"You pick the color too?"

"There were only three to choose from – but yeah!"

Giran's smile takes on a slightly conspiratorial cast. "Is it your favorite color, by chance?"

The smile slips from Suzume's face, her mouth rounding out to a very small, very cute 'o' shape. She considers Giran with wide eyes for a few seconds, clearly impressed. "Whoa. How'd you guess?"

"Hmmm. Let's just call it a hunch." Giran thumbs the side of his nose and snorts in a breath as if to clear some congestion, hiding a grin behind his palm that Suzume surely can't see. Dabi, though, can see it just fine – and when Giran meets his gaze a moment later and winks at him, Dabi realizes with an immediate jolt of frustration that he isn't really sure why.

And it isn't until quite a bit later when the three of them are bundled up into Giran's tiny sports car and on the way to a restaurant that Dabi manages to piece it together.

It's raining, still. Evening comes early for summer, the sun too water-logged to have ever properly risen. The dazzling neon lights of Yokohama are almost painful as they filter through the rain pouring down the windows, and Dabi finds himself squinting against the glare, slouched down in the passenger seat beside Giran.

In what barely passes as a backseat, Suzume leans up and between Dabi and Giran's seats, almost swooning with excitement. She and Giran fall into some kind of game where they both read the signs of passing businesses in increasingly ridiculous voices and accents. Giran's customary wide smile seems much larger than Dabi has ever remembered it being, and Suzume's laughter fills the tiny space like the ghost of the summer sun, golden and bright and far too pretty for Yokohama's filthy streets.

Dabi doesn't really say much. Sometimes he looks for the signs they call out, lost as they are amidst the many dozens of others. Sometimes he watches the passersby on the streets, some of them already stumblingly drunk beneath their sodden umbrellas. Mostly though, he watches Suzume in the rear view mirror. The lights play over her face, her skin green one moment, and then blue, and then moon-milk white. They flash warm and then cold in the waves of her hair, and set her eyelashes ablaze. When she wets her lips and shakes her head out in flustered bashfulness as they pass an especially raunchy looking love hotel, he sees the light there, too, nearly blinding in the blossoming fullness of her mouth.

Suddenly, she leans forward, so bright and so pretty, and taps his cheek. "Hey, Nii-chan." It's a stage whisper. When he turns his head and meets her eyes with raised eyebrows, she smiles, and the light is in her teeth, now, too. In that brief moment, it seems to Dabi that she is made up entirely of light and nothing else. When she lets her head fall forward, her bandaged forehead resting on his shoulder, he wonders that he can feel her at all.

"Hey what?"

"Wanna know why I picked the color I did for my cast?"

He realizes he does. A part of him wants to deny it, though. It's the part of him that's mean-spirited and cruel, that likes to see her deflate, that likes to see her sad – and then have her beg for him, anyway.

Against his jaw, her hair is so soft. She rocks her head back and forth against his shoulder, and her hair tickles his cheeks, and he remembers the rabbit in his hands all those years ago, dead, dead, its black eyes wet and staring.

He thinks about her in the ravine.

"Why?"

She giggles like it's genuinely funny. Like him indulging her is the biggest and best gift anyone has ever given to her. She lifts her head, and her eyes are wet, but they're alert, bright, and not dead. The neon lights reflected in them glitter like wild-colored stars. "'Cause it reminds me of your eyes," she says in that same voice she'd used with Giran earlier. She says it like she's proud. Proud of her choice. Of him. Like it's something she'd hold up in her hands and show to anyone, tell anyone who'd stop to listen, and maybe even to those who wouldn't. It's no dead rabbit in her hands. There is only love there, cupped and cradled like it's something precious.

Love for him.

He doesn't look at Giran, but he can feel the broker's smile somehow, anyway. He imagines it: worldly, and knowing, that missing tooth stark in his mouth.

So that's what he'd meant when he'd winked.

---

Giran takes them both to dinner at a themed restaurant at Suzume's enthusiastic request. When it comes up in a long list of options he gives the pair of them – a prison themed joint called The Slammer – she immediately and excitedly shoots down every other option. "You get to eat inside a jail cell," Giran says, and for some reason, that has her so tickled that she absolutely refuses to accept anything else.

"Sounds stupid," Dabi says, not really meaning it. It does sound stupid, but he doesn't actually care. He says it more to get a rise out of her than anything, and that works, because she laughs, her voice clear and bright.

"You're stupid," she declares boldly, "so it's a perfect match."

He looks away from her and out the window to hide his smile.

The restaurant is exactly as Giran describes it. They descend down a long staircase and step out into what looks like a maximum security prison. Inside each of the many cells are tables. Patrons are seated at most of them, eating and talking and laughing in the low light. The air is full of the sound of clattering plates and the shrieking of metal barred doors opening, or slamming shut.

The food – decidedly Western in its selection – is surprisingly passable, though Dabi thinks he would still prefer Suzume's cooking, even if he doesn't tell her that. Sitting beside each other, Suzume and Dabi both order different types of burgers, and Giran, sat across from them, gets a steak. As she often does, Suzume waits for Dabi to take a few bites before she not-so-slyly starts whining about wanting to try his dish. Drugged as she still is, she doesn't try to hide the blissful look on her face when she takes a few greedy bites out of the same places he's already eaten from. Completely sober, Dabi also doesn't bother to hide the way he watches her. She's so hopelessly shameless in her adoration, and he loves it.

And why shouldn't he?

When he finally looks away and back at Giran, the older man is watching them both. He chews meditatively, his eyebrows raised. When he meets Dabi's gaze, his eyebrows raise even further, as if to say, Oh, and, I see how it is.

He's clever, Dabi knows. There's no doubt that he does see how it is.

Somehow over the course of the hour it takes them to eat, Suzume and Giran manage to convince their warden-dressed waitress that Giran is both Dabi and Suzume's widowed father. The waitress, lured into the charade after politely asking how Suzume got her cast, seems both enamored of the two of them and completely bowled over by the outrageous tales they're both weaving. Suzume's broken arm and stitches are, apparently, from a skiing accident in the Swiss fucking Alps. Dabi and Suzume's mother was lost on a cruise ship that had infamously sunk almost ten years ago during an international villain attack – a fate Giran had only narrowly managed to avoid because he'd taken ill a day before they were supposed to leave. "It had been an anniversary gift," Giran says, miming a years old sadness perfectly, his eyes cast off and to the side. "My late wife decided to take her best friend, instead."

When the flustered but gossip-hungry waitress expresses her deepest sympathies, Suzume shakes her head solemnly and says, wholly out of the blue, "Well, we found out she was having an affair with her best friend after they both went down. It was still sad, but… well, I guess finding something like that out… it sorta complicated things."

Giran bends his head then in an expression of mock sorrow, but Dabi sees him hiding the grin in his hands from the horrified waitress. When the woman finally looks at Dabi, as if to ask, 'Is this all real?' she does a double take at his face and his scar tissue and his staples, as if seeing them for the first time.

"Goodness," she says breathlessly, abandoning all pretense of politeness in favor of her curiosity. "So what happened to you?"

Dabi shrugs.

"He pulled me out of a bus that was on fire," Suzume declares between bites of Dabi's burger, her own now fully abandoned. After casting a glance at him, she frowns a bit, and amends her statement. "Like, um, three of them."

"Three burning buses?" The woman's voice is incredulous, though she somehow still looks entirely convinced. "God – what – what are the odds of that?"

"Lottery kinds of good, just… well, obviously not good," Giran says, having put himself back together again. He looks up at the woman and shakes his head rather mournfully. "Alas, our family – I'm pretty sure it's cursed." Then he shrugs, and smiles, cutting a neat bite off the end of his steak. "The money from all the lawsuits was pretty generous though, as you can imagine. Always gotta look for that silver lining somewhere, eh?"

When she looks again at Dabi, squinting at him as if trying to determine the veracity of this story – of all of these stories – Dabi only shrugs again. "What? Couldn't let my baby sister get eaten up in a bus fire – or three bus fires, I guess."

In between their waitress' increasingly frequent visits to their cell, Giran and Suzume devolve into poorly restrained fits of laughter. Dabi watches them both with his own distant sort of amusement. It doesn't bother him as much to see her like this with Giran as it did with Elixir…

But it's not exactly easy, either.

Every time he thinks she's getting a little too into it – every time he thinks she's laughing a little too much at something Giran says – he lets his fingers find her thigh under the table. The desire to pinch her is there, but he doesn't. He only touches her through the fabric of her skirt, enough to get her attention, to pull it back, to center it where it very much belongs. It works, every time. Every time, she cranes her head back to look up at him, smiling. Every time, her hair falls back from her pretty, flushed face, and there's that look of reverential adoration he's inadvertently and unwillingly come to need. For a mercy – for his and Giran, both – it's wholly different from the way she looks at Giran. In those moments when she looks up at him, it feels like he's the only person in the room again.

The only person for her in the whole entire world.

(Just how it's supposed to be.)

---

It's too late for a train ride when everything is all said and done, so Giran lets them stay at an apartment he owns for the night —

Alone, thankfully.

"I got a cot in one of my offices," he assures a concerned looking Suzume, passing Dabi a key as he ruffles his broad hand into her hair. "Got more than a couple places, actually. I try to be very prepared."

It's late enough that Suzume, while still very high, is obviously flagging. Tucked under Dabi's arm, she droops against him, accepting Giran's affection and reassurance with a sleepy, heavy-lidded smile and a dreamy mumble of, "Thanks so much for dinner. It was really cool."

"Anytime," Giran says, sounding very much like he means it.

"And, ummm… sorry your wife had an affair before she went down in the cruise ship."

Giran's laughter echoes out across the quiet street. "Hey, now, I can't really complain. It's her loss, really." He pats her head again, and then claps Dabi's shoulder. "Turns out I got some pretty good kids outta the deal."

And then he climbs back into his zippy little car, gives them both a final wave, and is gone.

Dabi and Suzume both watch him go. The residential street is empty, very long and straight, and it's a while before the car fully disappears, its red rear lights finally vanishing around a turn.

"I'm so tired," Suzume says from beside him. Dabi turns, and wordlessly lifts her up. With both arms flung around his shoulders – one normal, the other bulky in its plaster cast – she sags against him, chest to chest, her legs hung loose around his hips. "Today kind of sucked," she announces as he carries her up the stairs to the tiny apartment, "but it was also really fun, too."

"Yeah?" He can feel her heartbeat. It's so slow. So comfortable. He has to fight the desire to bury his face in the curve of her throat, to see if he can't feel that same rhythm there with his mouth.

"Yeah."

The silence that follows is a sleepy and comfortable sort – one that continues well into Giran's moderately furnished 1R studio apartment. Without bothering to turn on a light, Dabi carries Suzume inside and sets her down in the only chair while he works to set up the futon. By the time he's done, she's collapsed against the table, her face buried in her arms.

When he comes to stand over her and brush his hands through her hair, she doesn't stir. There is only the soft rise and fall of her shoulders, and the in and out motion of her breathing is barely visible in the streetlight that filters through the mostly closed blinds of the window.

"Suzu," he says, leaning over her to fully close the blinds. His voice is low in the now dark room.

"...mmm?"

He doesn't say anything, and she doesn't demand an answer. She only breathes steadily on, drifting in and out of sleep.

So Dabi helps her up and out of the chair. She moves slowly but obligingly, her eyes now open, now closed, letting him lead her blindly down and into the comfortable plushness of the borrowed futon. When he goes to sit up, though, her good arm chases him, her hand scrabbling for his shirt.

"Don't go, Nii-chan," she mumbles. Her words slur when she says the words, and she doesn't even open her eyes.

"Was just gonna take off my clothes," he says, smiling faintly around the words. The grip she has on his shirt is weak. He could pull back easily.

He doesn't.

He's not sure she's processing what he's saying – or anything at all, really. "Please don't go," she insists again, a sleepy whine settling drunkenly in the nuance of her voice. "Please just stay. Please stop going away. Please don't be mad at me. I'm sorry about this morning… and whatever I did, before that – I'm sorry for doing whatever keeps you away."

As he stares down at her in that dark room, the quiet settles in again. Her grip on his shirt is slack. He can feel it loosening, little by little.

"You didn't do anything."

Wrapping his own hand around hers, he undoes her fingers from his shirt, one by one. They unfurl easily, obediently, so small in his own – and then she's pushing her fingers between his, slotting them into place. They fit so neatly there, so snug, so tightly linked. It's as if they were made to fit.

"Please let me paint your nails again," she whispers. Her eyes still aren't open, and her voice is quieter, thick with coming sleep. He stares down at her over their linked hands, his teeth pressed so tightly together he thinks the bone might crack.

"All right," he says, and then, when she smiles, he adds, "When we get back tomorrow, I have to show you something. Gotta tell you something."

Stirring at that, he watches her try to sit up, to open her eyes. So he leans over her, and lets his breath settle over her face. She doesn't recoil, not then, and not when he presses his lips to one still closed eye and then the other. And it works. Suzume doesn't open her eyes. She only asks, still so tired, "Is it… bad?"

"No," he tells her. For once, he thinks, it actually isn't.

"You promise?"

He can tell he's losing her. He can tell she's fighting the inevitable, fighting sleep off tooth and claw because she's so desperate for an answer. There's too much give in her fingers now, and if he didn't hold them, he's sure her hand would slip away.

But he won't let them. He curls his fingers over her knuckles, and he holds her hand tight to his own.

"Promise."

And it must be enough, he thinks. It must be, because when she falls asleep, she falls asleep smiling.

---

Early July; 12 years.

When she wakes the next morning, it's to the smell of food. Her head feels as if it's stuffed full of too many cotton balls: somehow both soft and scratchy at the same time, its like they're pressing outward from the inside of her skull, plumped up and thick in her sinuses. Groaning, Suzume lifts her hands to push the heel of her palms into her eyes –

Only to find herself startled by the weight dragging down her left arm.

Peeling open her heavy-lidded eyes, she faces several disorienting things all at once: a strange room, and a stranger's futon, and the cast on her arm –

And then there's the sensation of something warm pressed against her cheek.

Her gaze slides over and meets her brother's eyes over a heated cardboard cup that he holds against her face, the lambent aquamarine of them as alert and keen as ever. Balanced on the balls of his feet, he squats down beside the futon, looking down at her. He doesn't look sleepy. Despite how little he seems to sleep, he never does.

"I got you breakfast," he says. He shakes the cup against her face, and she hears the sound of liquid inside, sloshing so near to her ear that she flinches away from the overstimulation. It's too early. She's so out of it.

The otherwise expressionless mask of his face loses ground to a smile. It's closed-mouthed and small, but she sees it light in his eyes all the same.

"What – what is it?" Abandoning her broken arm, she uses her good hand to rub the sleep from her eyes. The memory of yesterday comes back to her slowly – too slowly, she thinks, with a muted kind of dismay. She remembers getting the cast, and the clinic, too, but only a little. She's still so tired. Still so groggy. Everything is so blurry, so indistinct.

"Miso soup." This he settles down next to her cheek, balanced precariously on the futon. "And some rice balls." These he fishes out of his lap from behind his thighs, tossing the pair of plastic-wrapped offerings across her body. They make a crinkling sound when they land, too light to cause any damage, but Suzume flinches again anyway, squeezing her eyes shut. When she opens them again a half-second later, she realizes the only reason her face isn't covered in hot soup is because her brother has his fingers on the edge of the cup, keeping it steady.

"Careful there, clumsy," he says, and the smile is in his voice now, too.

"Thanks," she mumbles, too tired to point out that the almost-catastrophe was mostly his fault. It feels like the cotton is in her mouth too, coating her tongue and her teeth and her cheeks in a fine layer of webbing. Everything sticks to itself. Everything feels so distinctly uncomfortable.

And then she realizes, with a slow, awful sense of awareness, that she doesn't just feel uncomfortable. She hurts. Everything hurts. There are cuts all over her body, and stitches in her forehead and leg. Suzume swallows back dryly, and realizes she's dehydrated. There isn't enough spit, and that hurts, too.

"Nii-chan." It's a whisper edged by a dry throat, and she closes her eyes, trying to work through the sandpaper ache of speaking – trying to think about anything else, instead. The warmth of the miso soup against her cheek is comforting. She finds herself wishing it was his hand. "I feel really gross."

"Prolly 'cause hurling yourself into a ravine will do that. Maybe don't do that, next time."

Cracking one unwilling eye open, Suzume looks at him. He's still smiling, faintly. "I remember it, mostly. The ravine. The… the Gutters." She yawns, and even that doesn't feel good. "It didn't hurt this bad yesterday."

"Yeah, 'cause you were high as a fucking kite yesterday." He pulls something out from behind his legs again. It's a pair of bottles, the kind you'd find in a pharmacy, only without a label. "C'mon, Suzu. Sit up. Gotta get some food and water in you so you can take this, and maybe stop you from feeling so bad."

She only manages to sit up because he works his arm under her shoulders and helps her. She only manages to eat because he lets her slump against him while he holds the miso soup to her lips, helping her drink her fill of the soothing, salty broth. She doesn't bother to chew anything. Even with nausea stirring to a late wakefulness in her stomach – it had been sleeping in, it seems, much like she wishes she still could – it goes down easy. Then he unwraps the rice balls for her, tearing them off in pieces that he holds to her lips, coaxing her to open her mouth, coaxing her to take them. "Chew, dummy," he says when she very nearly chokes on the first bite.

It doesn't sound like a real admonishment, the way he says it. He says it warm, and fond, and maybe a little sly. He says it like he's smiling, still.

So, Suzume does. She closes her eyes and she drowses against him and in his heat, the movement of her jaw a mechanical, instinctual thing every time he presses something to her lips. She tastes rice, and then salmon. Rice, and then pickled plums. She chews and she chews until his hand returns to her mouth, and she opens them up, and there's nothing there but his fingers.

She takes his fingers, anyway. They taste faintly of salt and furikake. They taste good. They feel good, pushed between her teeth, just two of them, filling her mouth. With closed eyes, she sucks them clean, and against her her brother is very, very still.

Then, after a while, there's the rattle of pills, and his fingers aren't in her mouth anymore. Dimly, she mourns that, though she isn't given much time to grieve. When they come back, they bring along little oblong capsules that he presses into her mouth, and then a cup of warm water to wash it all down. When she lifts her hand as if to take the cup from him, he clicks his tongue against his teeth, tsk, tsk, tsk, and won't give it to her. "I give this to you, and you're gonna find some way to drown yourself. Lemme do it."

Suzume remembers how she'd felt about everything, and about him, too, only a few days ago. Only yesterday morning. She thinks she'd have refused him out of spite then. Now, though, she feels very differently. Now it's just as well. She hurts too much to deny that she likes the way he's fussing over her. It feels nice, she thinks, to be helpless.

To be treated like she is.

And that sets the tone for the rest of the morning, and she doesn't regret it at all. He helps her up, and he helps her into the bathroom, and he helps her brush her hair with a comb he finds in a drawer. She closes her eyes and she lets him work soap into her cheeks and under her eyes, and she lets him rinse it all away. From his pockets he produces a brand new toothbrush and toothpaste, and they're small and cute, travel-sized like the kind you'd get at a convenience store – the same convenience store he'd gotten her breakfast from, she suspects.

Then he tilts her head back, and he even helps her brush her teeth – helps her, she thinks, if helping means he does it for her entirely. Suzume closes her eyes and lets him do that too, because she feels like she weighs a million kilograms – and because she has missed this so, so much. He works the bristles over her teeth and her gums, and after he says, "Stick out your tongue, Suzu," he works them over her tongue, too. Suzume wonders if he'll try anything, but still she does as he asks without question or hesitation. Her brother hums his approval, the bristles smoothing herb-tasting paste across the wet muscle. He holds her jaw while he does it, and she feels his breath on her cheeks, and against her closed eyes. Suzume hears him say, "Good girl," and that settles at the bottom of her stomach with the rice and the plum and the fish and the soup and the salty taste of his fingers, and it makes her feel full. It makes her feel full, and hot, and good.

(And everything hurts a little less for it.)

At the end of it all, she doesn't feel especially presentable. She thinks he can tell, because he watches her crack open her eyes and look at herself critically in the strange mirror.

"No time for a shower," he says. "We're catching the early train home."

Home, she thinks. And suddenly more memories come back, and she realizes where she is: this is Giran's mirror, in his bathroom, in his apartment. Giran, and his gap-toothed smile, and his ridiculous suit. At the restaurant, he'd played the part of their pretend-father, and several other silly games besides. It's a nice memory. In a sea of memories that make her feel sick or sad or lost, it's one she thinks she'll treasure for a long, long time.

She smiles at herself in the mirror, and then raising her eyes to meet her brother's reflected gaze, she smiles at him, too. The motion hurts a bit, but she doesn't care. It's been a long time since she's felt anything like optimism or hope, but despite the pain, she feels… lighter, somehow.

"Giran-san was very nice."

Standing behind her, her brother's eyes hold hers in the mirror. There's a stretch of silence, and he's quiet, watching her – and then, with a small shake of his head, he says, "Yeah. Yeah, he can be."

And she's not sure that was the right thing to say.

---

The two of them take three trains home and, even more so than the day before, Suzume sleeps through almost the entire trip. The trains, the long walk home, all of it, it's the same as this morning, and her brother takes care of her, takes care of all of it. He holds her hand when she's awake enough to manage, and he carries her when she isn't. Suzume sleeps against him, or in his lap, or across his back, and the pain seems more far away every time she wakes up. It's not quite the miracle it was the night before, where nothing hurt, and nothing frightened her, but by the time her brother carries her into her soon-to-be-dead grandmother's house – her brother's house, she thinks, and for once doesn't recoil from the thought – everything is more of a disagreeable carbonation-like buzz in her limbs than actual pain.

"I think I need a nap," she says, muffled against his shoulder. It's late morning, and she's been sleeping for hours, and especially so the last thirty minutes, cradled so comfortably in his arms as he'd carried her home.

Her brother exhales, half a laugh, half a snort. "Yeah? More sleep?"

"I feel like… I feel like I could sleep for a week," she says truthfully, and without exaggeration. She does. A week, maybe. Maybe even a month.

"I guess you prolly could," he says. "Nepenthe feels fucking great, but as it leaves you, well, you're gonna be real, real tired."

Suzume wonders if he's had it before, but tells herself she's too tired to ask. In reality, she's just not sure she wants to know the answer to that question. The comment he'd made about addicts back in Elixir's clinic lurks like a shadow at the edge of her thoughts.

(She can't imagine him taking it as just a pain killer.)

So instead she leans her bandaged forehead against his cheek. Running her fingers over the collar of his shirt, she asks, quietly, "Will you take a nap with me?"

He doesn't answer – not verbally, anyway. But he does carry her into their shared bedroom. There are little splatters of blood everywhere, dried to a speckling of dark red or near-black across the tatami mats and the polished wood of the floors. As he settles her down on the futon, he catches her staring at an especially egregious spot. Settling his finger between her eyes, he glides it up and down the bridge of her nose. "Don't think about it now," he says. "We'll clean it up later."

It's summer, and it's hot, so she lays on her back on top of the futon and the duvet in her clothes from the day before, wishing she had the energy to at least change her clothes. It's summer, and her brother settles himself beside her, nuzzling his face into her hair, his mouth against her ear, and he's summer hot, too – hot, hot, hotter. But she'd asked for this, and she wants it, anyway.

Through the fabric of her skirt, Suzume feels his hand palm her thigh. It's hot too, so hot it's almost scalding. Somehow, though, it's not as unpleasant as she thinks it should be.

"I like your skirt," he whispers, and she can feel his lips brush her earlobe. "Why'd you hide it?"

With closed eyes, she tries to remember. She's so tired, and it's so hot. It's hard to think. Hot in the room, and hot beneath the slow movement of his hand on her thigh, and even hotter inside of her. "I thought it was cute, but…" She swallows. It's been hours, but Suzume thinks she can still taste the salt of his fingers, and she shivers in the hot room, against his even hotter body. "Maybe it's a little too much. Too much lace, too many layers. I can't even remember where I hid it – don't know how you found it. I was… too embarrassed to wear it."

"It is a little much." His hand moves up her thigh, pushing up and under her blouse. His staples and his skin graze the bare flesh there, and she shivers again, but she lets him. She lets him. "A little over the top. A little dumb. Cute, though." He's already so close, but he presses closer, his hand gliding over her stomach, and beneath the weight of it –

Oh, she thinks; there's something there, a tension, a different kind of heat coiled up like so many ribbons, unfurling and tightening again, all tangled up around the movement of wings. There's something there, and there's the taste of salt on her tongue.

"But hey, it suits you," he says, and she shivers a third time at the sensation of teeth grazing her ear. His hand creeps up, just beneath her ribs, and she can feel the slow stroke of his thumb. There's heat, everywhere – around her, beside her, and inside of her, too. All that heat, and yet still there's gooseflesh rising up along her arms all the same when he says, "You're a little over the top. A little dumb. Cute."

Suzume thinks she should be upset about that. Somehow, she isn't.

"Very cute," he says it so quietly in that hot, hot room. "So cute."

No, she isn't upset. Not really –

Only a little ashamed at how badly she thinks she needs it.

---

In the evening, much much later, Suzume wakes up. It's raining again: she can hear it pounding on the roof of the house, drumming loudly on the porch outside the shut shoji doors. Her brother sits next to her, legs crossed, watching her in the wan gloom of the humid bedroom. She wonders how long he's been there, and how long he's been awake. She wonders if he ever slept at all.

"Hey," he says as she blinks up at him, yawning. "It's been long enough. I got that thing I wanted to show you."

Muzzily, Suzume watches him stand, and when he holds his hands out for her, she gives him her own, one normal, one wrapped thick in its plaster cast. Without giving her any chance to react, he tugs her to her feet, and then up and into his arms again, one beneath her legs, the other around her back.

"I could probably walk now," she says, but she wraps her legs around his waist, anyway. She likes the way it feels to be carried by him. She likes that he's touching her again, touching her like he used to, back when he'd hold her or touch her very nearly every moment of every day.

"Nah," he says, carrying her out into the hall. "Not now."

It's a very, very short trip. At first she thinks he's brought her to her grandmother's room, because they're standing in front of it when they stop. But then he turns, and he faces the opposite direction, and she's looking into the open door of her grandmother's bedroom –

While he faces the attic, instead.

In his arms, Suzume freezes, gone cut-tendon limp with terror – and then she's shaking her head, a little clumsy, and then much more frantically. "No," she says, over the hiss of the rain. "No, no – not there."

"It's just the attic." Like always, he's so composed. Calm. Suzume tries to search his tone for any hint of threat, for any microscopic trace of mockery –

But it's hard to hear through the sudden ringing that shrills in her ears.

Even though she holds her tongue tightly between her teeth, an anguished whimper escapes from somewhere deep in the back of her throat. Set to trembling, she braces herself for a snide remark from her brother –

Or something worse.

"Hey, hey… don't fuss. I'm not gonna do anything shitty this time." The hand he has on the small of her back leaves her, and then she hears the old, heavy door swing wide on strident hinges. The sound has the hairs on the back of her arms rising in terrified protest. As if aware, he works his face against her, pressing a warm kiss where her shoulder meets her throat. "M'not gonna leave you alone, this time."

In better times, she might have taken some comfort – or, at the very least, some vindication – from him admitting that what he'd done to her back then had been wrong in some way. Now, with her hand scrabbling across his back to catch a fistful of his shirt, Suzume can only bury her face against his shoulder and try not to hyperventilate, shuddering at the brush of his lips –

And at the prospect of what lies beyond that door.

She doesn't remember how long it's been since he'd locked her in the attic. Months, now – or has it been years? Years. That door and the memory both linger like revenants at the edge of her vision every time she takes the hall to her bedroom. Sometimes, just to avoid seeing it, she closes her eyes and finds her way as if she were blind, counting the ten or so steps it takes her to make it down the hall from the common room like a prayer. On occasion, when the fear grows particularly intense, she abandons the house entirely, making her way through the garden and entering her room via the sliding shoji doors instead.

There's no avoiding it anymore now, though – not when her brother has her caught up in his arms and far too drained for a real fight. Up and up the steep and groaning steps he goes, carrying her into the warm murk.

Tension mounting with every step, Suzume presses the knuckles of one hand against her mouth, sucking the thin skin there between her teeth. Underneath her chin, her brother's shoulder shakes with subdued laughter. and she feels the hand that had once been at the small of her back drift down the curve of her spine. "Poor Suzu," he says, quietly. His meandering fingers find the hem of her oversized shirt and slip beneath it –

And then there's the sensation of his bare fingertips pressing into her skin, inching their way up her spine.

"Breathe slow." Against her ear, his throat is a thrum of vibration when he speaks. It's only when he tells her how to breathe that Suzume realizes how light-headed she is – just how quick and frantic her breathing has become.

Breathe slow. It seems like an impossible task. It's only marginally more doable to speak, and her voice comes out like a croak when she tries. "Do we – do we have to?"

The steady thunk-thunk-thunk of his bare feet on the protesting wooden steps doesn't slow. "We sure do."

Lapsing into silence, Suzume tries to focus on the smell of faintly floral detergent steeped into his shirt and not on the stale scent of damp wood and well-aged grime that grows increasingly more pervasive the further up he takes her. Soon, though, that fetid odor grows inescapable, and all around them there is the smell of old things and dusty things and things listlessly decaying. Memories, Suzume thinks – or the corpses of them, anyway, long gone rancid.

Even without opening her eyes, she knows, somehow, that she's fully in the attic for the first time in her whole life. It feels like how she imagines a tomb must feel: stuffy and forgotten and full up with air passed through the lungs of people long since gone.

Gone, or dead, or both.

"It smells." Suzume wants it to sound like an indifferent observation, devoid of any emotion. With her nose pressed desperately to his shoulder, though, as if to keep away from all that suffocating mustiness, it comes out like a whine. It comes out fearful.

Embarrassing.

"Sure does," he agrees wryly, and she thinks it's some rare mercy he's not picking her apart for it.

The attic runs the whole length and breadth of the house. It's a small house, but even so, it feels like it takes several small eternities before he reaches his destination. Finally, right as a crackle of thunder sets the whole house trembling nearly as much as she is, her brother stops.

When she feels him start to lower her to the ground, the grip Suzume has on his shirt grows tighter, and she wrenches her previously paralyzed legs even tighter around his waist in terrified protest. "Please, Nii-chan."

"I need my arms, Suzu." All neatly controlled patience, his hands take hold of her waist. "And probably my legs, too."

With much reluctance, she lets him disentangle her from his body. When he helps lower her to the ground, it takes an act of willpower to make her feet connect with the floor beneath her, eyes still squeezed shut against the oppressive dark she knows lies just beyond them. Standing beside him, Suzume fists one hand sightlessly into his shirt. Over the sound of the rain, she hears him chuckle again, quiet and restrained.

"Still that scared, huh?"

She refuses to answer him. It's his fault she is. Newly stung, she unlocks her fingers and pulls her hand back with such a jerk that she almost throws herself backwards. It's only by the grace of him grabbing her shoulder that she doesn't.

"Hey – " The word is layered with reproach, but when he speaks again, he pulls those teeth back. "Hey. It's okay."

When Suzume feels his fingers move across her cheek, she twists her head away from him, wrapping her arms around herself. To her surprise – and to some small, traitorous sensation of dismay – he doesn't push any further into her space. Instead, there's the rustle of him moving. Boards creek, and then a chain rattles.

And very suddenly, some of that darkness abates in the wake of a dull, yellow glow pressing meek-warm against her closed lids.

Gradually, Suzume opens her eyes.

The attic is, as she expected, a total catastrophe of boxes. There's no order to anything at all. Some sit alone, and some gather in giant piles. Some are taped up at seemingly every edge, and some sit half-gouged, open and spent, slumped sideways and spilling their soot shrouded clutter-guts onto the floor. There are books and papers and pictures, old toys and kitchen supplies and clothes – and many more things Suzume cannot see or give names to. Farther out from the weak halo of light afforded by the single, naked bulb hanging from the rafter, the chaos melts into little more than amorphous grey shapes set against greyer walls. The details blur together like a ruined charcoal sketch soaked in all the rainwater threatening to drown the house.

Just a meter away, she sees a photograph gilded in a thick layer of dust. A girl stares out at her from beneath that heavy faux-curtain – a girl that looks more like Suzume than not, she thinks. But she isn't Suzume. Her mother, when she was younger, maybe. Or maybe her grandmother.

It makes her feel sick to look at, but it's easier than looking at her brother, so she looks anyway, fingers curling into familiar fists.

For a spell, the two of them stand together, the hushed staccato sound of rain all around them. Like the blanket of dust suffusing the room, she can feel the weight of his stare settling over her like a physical force.

Eventually – when the silence stretches on too long – Suzume swallows back her pride and discomfort. "...well?"

Her brother doesn't say anything. Rather, she sees his foot move into her field of vision, pushing a filthy looking velour carpet bag towards her own. Transforming what she guesses must have once been a very pretty floral pattern into a dreary greyscale mockery of its past self, the dust cakes almost every fine and hand-stitched flower –

Except where the recent phantom-touch of fingerprints have disturbed it, anyway.

At a loss, she stares down at it. Almost as big as the bag she takes to school, it seems quite full… with something.

Suzume doesn't move.

"Open it."

Most times, her brother says things like that as a command. Not that he's asking her now, of course – not in any way that might be misconstrued as polite. But, like he's been for the better part of the last two days, there's something softer about it.

About him.

She considers refusing him. She considers turning around and fleeing this awful place. So stuffed and full with the remains of stories and lives that are not her own, Suzume is struck by the sudden fear that if she lingers here too long that she might also become little more than the quietly rotting remnants of a life everyone else has forgotten.

Instead, fighting that mounting panic, numb in her heart and in her head and in her fingers, Suzume bends down and unzips the bag.

Dust skitters away from the brush of her fingers, taking to the air in billowing snow-shower clouds that glimmer in the anemic light. Squinting through the sudden haze, it takes her a moment to make out the strange shapes inside the back.

Cash. Stacks and stacks and stacks of bills, each one banded neatly together, all haphazardly mixed with its brothers in a messy pile. Suzume startles a bit at the sight, and one of those banded wads tumbles out of the bag, landing across her bare toes.

It feels surprisingly heavy. Not all of the notes bear the same denominations, but even in the poor light, she can read the one at her feet:

Five thousand yen.

"What?" It's a stupid question, but she doesn't know what else to say. Suzume finds her brain has seized up, all those rusted gears fighting to turn again. It's just so much money – more than she's ever seen in cash before in her whole life. "Is this – did you find this up here? Is this Baa-baa's?"

"Nah. Before you, your grandma was flat-broke, and even after you, it's not like she could tap into your trust for anything more than the basics. But c'mon; you know that. Your mom didn't come from money, and your dad sure as shit wasn't the sort who'd leave his estranged mother-in-law anything in his will. Pretty sure your dad was the sorta cunt who'd rather set his own money on fire than let your grandma at any of it." Beside her, Suzume feels her brother bend down, his hand sweeping into her field of vision to pick up the hefty wad of cash. Tossing it back into the bag, he rights himself again. "So, no. It's not hers. It's mine."

There's no hope of processing what he's saying about her father and grandmother. Instead, she can only stare down into the bag, heavy with money. The image of her brother's threadbare charity shop shirts and pants with the knees worn ragged to holes arises very suddenly in her mind, and she cannot even begin to rationalize these two very contrasting realities.

"Do you… want me to get you some new clothes?" She'd asked him once, feeding one of his more haggard shirts into the washing machine with her own clothes. The weekly allowance afforded her by her father's estate was more than enough to feed two people, and Suzume always had plenty left over for frivolous things or more serious expenses. At the time, the thought of buying clothes for her brother had made her heart skip a beat. It had seemed very domestic.

(Very wife-like.)

"Don't bother," he'd answered from behind her, tossing mismatched socks over her shoulder and into the machine. "The more worn out they are, the softer they get. I like 'em that way."

At the time she'd thought it was an excuse to cover up an inability to provide for himself. But faced with this bag and all the money inside of it – faced with how he'd behaved at the clinic, acting as if money was no object when it came to her care – she realizes how wrong she apparently was.

Her brother, Suzume thinks, dizzy on her feet; her brother with money, and lots of it.

Now, she understands – and she also doesn't understand at all. Still struggling, she can only dumbly repeat him. "Yours?"

"Yeah."

Her eyes quickly scan the denominations again: one thousand yen. Five hundred yen. Ten thousand yen! Head spinning, Suzume lowers her head between her knees a moment, taking in deep mouthfuls of rot-heavy air.

"Where – " Choking on dust, she covers her face with her hand and coughs through the question. "Where did you get all this?"

Without hesitating even a moment, her brother dryly says, "Oh, y'know. Nothing big. I run a cremation business on the side."

Finally – and quite startled – she looks up at him. "You do not," she says, stiffly.

Bending down to close the distance between them – Suzume still crouched by the bag, and him standing over her – a grin cracks its way across his face, all gleaming teeth in the pallid murk. "Aww, Suzu. You do have some brains in that empty head of yours, huh?" Reaching out, he ruffles her hair before letting his hand fall, his knuckles tracing the curve of her cheek. "You're absolutely right. I'd never do something so above board."

This flash of humor is an echo of the brother she has found herself missing so much as of late; more teasing and playful than outright mean, his cruelty tempered and significantly more manageable.

And yet as much as she's craved it, it's difficult to find any comfort in it when that casually announced confession has her anxiety spiking as quickly as her heart rate –

(Not that either had been particularly under control before.)

"Is… is that a joke?"

He laughs. "Maybe I spoke too soon on that whole brain thing."

Uneasily, her eyes drift between him and the bag of cash. "You're not – not working for… for the mob or something, are you? With Giran-san – Giran-san's not part of the mob, right?"

It sounds absurd, asking it aloud. Clearly her brother finds it absurd, too, because he laughs again, the ruined skin beneath his eyes crinkling even more than usual. "Oh, I definitely spoke too soon. Really, Suzu – in the yakuza? Me?"

For a moment, Suzume really thinks about that – really, really thinks about it, her eyes searching her brother's grinning face as she tries to picture him managing anything as orderly and strict as organized crime.

"...no," she admits, "I can't imagine you getting along well enough with anyone to make it even a day in the yakuza. You're too – too…"

She weighs her options before finally settling on the correct one. "Too disrespectful."

Her brother's smile doesn't falter. If anything, the answer seems to please him, and he tweaks her cheek mildly before his fingers ghost the underside of her chin. Something sharp and needling aches inside of her when he nips at her jaw playfully with the nudge of a knuckle, and it only intensifies when he lets his hand fall away. Like a kicked dog too eager for affection, she finds herself fighting back the insane urge to chase after him – to take his hand and hold it against her own face.

She doesn't. Not like her self-restraint means anything, of course. If the way that smirk touches his eyes is any indication, he knows what she wants well enough.

"Aww, Suzu." He coos her name, and there's that tightening in her stomach again. "You do know me, after all."

She does, and she doesn't. Over the last two days, she feels like she's learned more about him than she has in years, and she isn't exactly comforted by what she's been learning. And even so – even with all of this – there's still so much she doesn't know.

And what she doesn't know scares her.

Hesitantly, she breaks the intensity of his gaze and looks back down at the bursting bag. "But if not the yakuza, then…"

"You really gonna ask me that?" Her brother snorts another fractionary laugh. "You really wanna know? Can't figure it out on your own?"

Suzume doesn't answer him right away. Rather, she keeps staring down and into the bag and at all of the money inside it. Raising an unsure hand, she runs her fingers over the rough textured edge of a wad of wrapped notes. It reminds her, vaguely, of the ridges where her brother's still healthy skin meets the edges of his scar tissue.

Her brother isn't one to ask her to heal him. She can't actually remember him asking, not one single time. It's something she takes as a comfort –

And something that deepens the wound he consistently leaves on her heart.

Her mother had always told Suzume that the world would try to use her for her quirk. People she loved might try, even. Had it not been so with her father? Suzume had seen it happen, and her mother had lost her life when she inevitably grew tired of the charade.

In the beginning, she'd been afraid of her brother stepping into those phantom shoes her mother had promised her someone would one day try to fill… but never once has he begged for the succor she wants so very badly to give him.

Which is why it hurts when he won't ask. Some pathetic, awful part of her wants him to want her –

Wants him to need her in some way, as if to bring into balance the way she so desperately needs him.

That isn't to say she doesn't heal him, though. There are nights where he comes home and collapses into bed beside her, and when she isn't too busy nursing her own stubborn hurts, she'll reach out and touch his face or his arms or his hands and know at once all the new damage he's done to himself.

Suzume always asks him the same pointless question every time. "Why?"

He always laughs her off. "Oh, y'know. Something came up," he'll say, as if it were some casual matter not worth discussing –

As if the hellfire he conjures on demand was ever some kind of casual affair.

Once, in an evidently snarky mood, he'd told her, "Some friends and I had an impromptu barbeque."

Ignoring the outrageous idea that her brother was capable of maintaining a friendship with anyone – because even now it was apparently that he wasn't exactly friends with either Giran or Elixir – Suzume had latched onto the most troubling part of that statement.

"With you as… what? The main course?" She hadn't meant the answer to be funny. Frightened about what he was doing to himself, she was also angry at being kept in the dark yet again.

As usual, he'd only laughed her off. "Hey, that's pretty cute, Suzu."

What could she do? She'd healed him, then. And many nights before and after it. She'd healed him the week prior, even, when he'd come home late, the scent of smoke and fire and many more things she wouldn't allow herself to recognize all about him like a choking, nightmarish miasma.

Why? Doing what? All questions he won't answer.

Not that he needs to. Not like she can't guess. Not like, after meeting Giran, and Elixir, and seeing the Gutters, she doesn't have some idea.

Under the aimless prodding of her fingers, the money shifts in the bag, and more of the dust takes to the air. It waltzes slow through the light, glittering like the glass-shatter of ten thousand crushed diamonds.

Ten thousand unanswered questions. What's one more?

"Why?"

"C'mon," her brother says from above her. "You know, don't you?"

She shakes her head, and all around her the dust glimmers. Her nose and her eyes burn. She doesn't understand. Why show her this? This awful, unspoken confession of whatever terrible things he's been getting up to? "I don't."

"You said it yourself yesterday and you still ain't figured it out?" Clicking his tongue against his teeth, she sees movement in the corner of her vision and turns to see him shaking his head.

"What did I say?"

That knowing smile still hasn't left his face. "Your grandma's dying, Suzu."

Suzume is more patient than her brother professes to be. Considering the things he puts her through on the regular, she might actually consider herself to be exceptionally patient, even. But tonight she has so little of any part of herself left, and patience least of all. "Yeah, and I'm – I'm getting a little tired of talking about it, honestly."

Swooping down, her brother catches her under both of her arms and hauls her up to her feet. Once righted, he brushes his hands across her shoulders, stirring up the dust that has settled there and in her hair. "Dummy." He says it in that way where she knows he means it fondly – as if he thinks it's cute that she's dumb. "I got the money for you."

"I…" Again, feeling as dumb as he claims her to be, Suzume looks down at the money and then back up at him. Her brain cannot possibly process this revelation. "I – thanks? I guess? But… but I don't need – "

"Yeah, yeah. You got all that hero blood money your dad left behind. Lucky you, right, being his only blood relative still breathing. Much like dear ol'grandmama, I doubt he'd have left you a goddamn sniff of that if he'd had his way. But seeing as he didn't expect to die when and how he did, well… not like he had time to write you outta his will outta spite." Her brother's perpetual Cheshire grin sharpens briefly in the low light. "In the end, though, all his money doesn't matter. If you had to disappear – if we had to disappear – it's not like you could use it. Shit's drowning in red tape and regulations. Can't exactly empty out a trust fund before you're of age."

"I don't…" Suzume stares up at him in open confusion. "I don't understand."

With what she realizes is an over-exaggerated display of patience, her brother cups her face in his hands and levels his head with hers, staring her down from under his half-lidded eyes. When he speaks, his voice is measured, as if speaking to a child, syrupy and mock-sweet. "So we both know you're grandma's gonna kick it soon. Yeah, yeah – you don't wanna talk about it, sure. But this is important. You told me the reaper was out for her months ago, but even before that, it's not like I didn't know. Not like I couldn't figure that out on my own. Ain't often you stumble into a hospital, set up camp for over a year, and expect to come prancing out again. So I got myself busy, yeah? I put my nose to the grindstone. Early mornings, late nights, and there's your ever-devoted big brother, working hard. Slaving away at the crematorium. Splitting a few unruly jaws on some curbs for the yakuza."

When Suzume grimaces, her brother laughs, dipping his head closer as his voice drops to a whisper. "Aww, my poor little baby sister and her soft little heart. Too much, huh? Take your pick of whatever dire metaphor does it for you, Suzu – or whatever you can stomach, anyway. Not like the how of it matters at all.

"As for the why: I did it for the same reason you've been out here playing the weepy kiss-ass to some bleeding heart social worker with a hard-on for playing hero. Y'know, 'cause you and me, we both figured the other thing out, too: if your grandma shoves off her already mostly-dead mortal coil and there's no back up in place, well… all this?" Letting go of one of her cheeks, he gestures around the attic with a theatrical circle of his finger. "This cozy little play-house situation we got going on together? Poof. It goes up in fucking smoke.

All that money, Suzume thinks, dazedly. All that money. The Gutters, and Giran, and Elixir – all of it. "Then…"

"Oh, getting it now?" Inexplicably, his thumb slides over her slightly parted lips as his own mismatched ones quirk further upward at the corners. "Bit slow on the uptake there, space cadet, but really, I'm so proud of you. You're actually getting there, aren't you?"

Choosing to ignore that patronizing bit of flattery, Suzume presses on for clarity's sake. "So if she dies – "

Another tsk-tsk of his tongue. "When she dies. And when she dies, I figured I'd need to have the money we'd need to bail out. We could leave, together. Disappear. We wouldn't need your scumfuck father's money. Wouldn't be able to be traced. Before you, I slummed it in overnight internet cafes, or even on the street, 'cause I didn't give a shit. With you, well." A shrug. "I kinda had to give a shit. I'm not gonna make you sleep outside, or in some cubicle. I had to have enough money to give you somewhere to go, and to go with you."

This is all so much. This is all so much, and she stares up at him, hardly able to breathe. "Then all the times you were gone – "

"Hey, a man's gotta work for his money, Suzu. Not like I can just get that shit for free."

"I thought – " Thunder cracks outside the house, and her voice does, too. "I thought all this time that you'd just been avoiding me."

Her brother's eyes simmer in the dark. The muscles tighten around his mouth. "No," he says, and he casts his eyes to the side very briefly when he says it before they're back again, and burning down into hers. "No. I just had shit to do."

And Suzume stands there, looking up at him, and she feels so sick, so terrible – like she's been unfair. She's been so angry, and for what feels like so long. She's felt so sad, and for months she's been convinced that he's grown tired of her –

That for some reason he couldn't stand to be around her anymore.

And now, here they are, in the attic, and at her feet there is a bag full of money –

And in front of her is her brother, full of intent she's misunderstood the whole time.

"Suzu," he says, and she is still looking at him, still looking up at him. "You went and tried to fix shit on your own, and hey, it's definitely not the worst thing you could do. I know why you did it, and I can't say I'm entirely unhappy with you trying. But, god. Come on. Come the fuck on. You should know I'll take care of you. You should know that by now." His voice lowers, and he shakes his head, his face is so close that his nose brushes against her own. "You play by the rules, and it's cute. It's sweet. I like that about you, I do. But that's got so many limitations, you know? And the guy you got helping you, oh, I bet he's trying his best, bet he's just like you, bet he's working real hard for you, but when it comes down to it, he's got his nice, clean hands all tied up by bureaucracy. Playing cute and sweet gimps you. And that's fine for you – you can be that way, 'cause I'm here for you. I can do it for you.

"But this guy, he won't do what really needs doing. He won't cross the lines that need crossing. He won't get his hands dirty. You get me?"

When Suzume doesn't answer, she feels the press of her brother's thumbs against her cheeks. "Don't you?"

It hurts a bit, she thinks. It hurts, but maybe not in a bad way. "Uh-huh."

"See," he says, and he says it so smooth and slick it feels like the word melts over her. "See, you get it. And you know it, don't you? You know I love you. You know I love you like no one else could – that I'll do things for you that no one else can. 'Cause I don't give a shit about playing nice, or keeping my hands clean. And yeah, you'll go out into the world, and maybe you'll meet other people. Maybe they'll help you. Maybe they'll even say, oh, I'd do anything for you, and maybe they'll mean it – maybe they'll believe it, even, with every fucking fiber of their being. But it won't be true. There'll still be something that gives them pause. Some moral dilemma, some need to be good, or right, and they will say, oh, I meant anything – anything but this."

Her brother takes a breath, a great, big heaving breath, and he lets it out as a flat, hot laugh. "But when I say I'll do anything, Suzu – I mean it. I will. I fucking will. And you know that, don't you? You know it. You have to."

And standing there in front of him, with his hands on her face, Suzume thinks she does.

Shortly before they'd left the clinic, Giran had asked her brother out into the hall. He'd wanted to tell him something, though what that was, Suzume couldn't hope to guess. She remembers her brother frowning at Giran, and then casting a glance over at her. "But Suzu – " he'd started to say. Giran had shaken his head, smiling. Giran, she'd come to learn, was a uniquely cheerful man, and somehow, some way, that seemed to work on her brother.

"It'll only be a few minutes," he'd said, soothingly. "She'll be right here, safe and sound. Elixir won't do anything; he's got that whole do no harm vow thing going, right?"

Elixir, still in the room, hadn't said anything, and her brother's face had shuttered as his attention returned to Giran. She knew that look. She'd seen it a million times. It folded in on itself, closing him off from any sort of interpretation, that ever careful and familiar mask of indifference back in full force. It had seemed to work on Giran, but Suzume knew enough of her brother to understand he wasn't happy. "I doubt he takes that vow very seriously," her brother had said, his voice a cool construction of careful disinterest. "But whatever. I can spare a few minutes."

Without looking at her again, he'd turned to follow Giran out of the examination room in a surly sort of slouch, his hands tucked into his pockets. She remembers the sound of his boots against the pristine tile, a dull thud like a slow heartbeat. It had been a strange contrast to the sharper, lighter taps of Giran's pointed shoes.

Suzume had watched him go, feeling… she remembers not being sure how she felt. She remembers thinking that, without the drug, she probably would have felt anxious. There was a longing to run after him – to have him sweep her up in his arms, but it wasn't from fear, like it normally might be. In that moment, she thought she wanted to press her hands to his face, to palm her hands down all those sharp and angular planes, to touch him until he felt better. It was a trick he always pulled on her; holding her face and working the furrow out of her brow, or easing the frown from her mouth. Would it work if she did that to him? Could she warm an easier expression back into his face instead of that cold mask of apathy?

But the sound of drawers whining on their tracks had pulled her attention away, and Suzume had turned her head around, watching Elixir putter about the room. Unlike he had earlier, he moved so slowly now: rearranging things, maybe, or taking inventory, or putting things away. She couldn't really be sure. She didn't understand medical procedures at the best of times, and she was hardly clear headed enough to make any kind of decent attempt at the time.

Suzume had realized in that moment that she didn't really know what she thought of Elixir. Did she like him? Parts of him, maybe. The two of them obviously had some things in common – they'd played similar games, growing up. And he was a healer of some sort, even if he relied on science instead of a quirk. But the way he'd talked to her brother…

And yet, her brother had laughed at Elixir. He had seemed easy with him. Mostly comfortable. Maybe not friends, exactly, but something enough like it, if she squinted.

More importantly, it had sounded as if Elixir had, at one point, taken care of her brother. And that, Suzume thinks, maybe more than anything, was what had inspired her to blurt out, "I'm sorry about your mom."

He'd had his back to her, in that moment. Hunched over an open drawer, his hands had been sifting through the contents. She watched him freeze, his whole body motionless.

He hadn't turned around. "What?"

She remembers trying to place the tone of his voice, but unlike her brother, she hadn't known him for years. She couldn't place anything. She remembers not wanting to hurt him, but that feeling had felt numbed, and strange. The emotions in her head and in her heart, they were still there, and she felt them, but everything felt so off, like the puzzle pieces of her feelings had been shaken loose and put back together into some similar picture that was still wholly different from how she might normally be or feel. It had been more blurry, that new picture. Indistinct. She'd frowned, neither sad or angry or scared. "I'm sorry about your mom." She was quite sure he'd heard her the first time, but she didn't know what else to say. In that moment, rather than video games or anything else they might have had in common, that was the thing that resonated most.

With visible hesitance, he had turned to look at her. His eyes, when she'd first met him, had reminded her of steel. Now they were the color of a summer storm. It wasn't a storm with any rain – not yet, anyway. There was only the threat of it there in his eyes; the tall, imposing thunder clouds boiling up and over the horizon.

She was afraid of storms, she knew. She remembered the feeling of being afraid, as if from a dream, all of it muted by the drug. But she was not frightened of Elixir, then. She had felt like nothing would ever frighten her again.

"But not my dad?"

What had she been expecting him to say? She tries to remember, and wonders if she had been expecting anything at all. Suzume could hardly make sense of anything other than the reduction of emotion to a smattering of garish and primary colors. Every other bit of nuance felt lost on her, the details smudged and unreadable in her chemical-induced delirium. But if she had been expecting anything, it certainly hadn't been that.

She'd tilted her head and tried to make sense of the question. "Do you feel sorry about your dad?" That concept had seemed so foreign to her. No one felt sorry about dads. Dads were, she had decided quite young, almost universally terrible. Her own father was awful. Izuku's father was nonexistent, and neither he nor his mother ever spoke about the man. Bad, then, she had determined. She never talked about her own father to either Katsuki or Izuku, and she hadn't because he was the worst. It had perfect made sense. If Izuku's father was good, surely everyone would want to talk about him –

But no one ever did.

Katsuki's father seemed nice on the rare occasions she saw him, but even if he was actually nice and not just pretending to be nice the way her own father had, those odds were still two for one.

Not very good odds, when it all came down to it. Not very good odds made even worse when Elixir had said his father had gambled away all his family's money, killed some men, and gone to prison. And that was bad, wasn't it?

Wasn't it?'

"I do," came Elixir's nonsensical reply. His voice had sounded… quiet. Maybe resigned? He sounded tired. His eyes, still stormy, had become more of a wash of color, of so much grey and grey and even more grey. "I do feel sorry about him. For him."

Suzume hadn't understood. Couldn't, really. "Why?"

Elixir had looked at her, and kept looking at her. His gaze had been steady, like his hands when he'd stitched her up. But there was something wrong with his mouth. It trembled at the corners, drawing wider, pulled thinner, his lips pressed together for a few beats of her heart before he finally spoke again. "My mom was sick," he had said, and unlike his cloudy eyes, his voice was as clear and cool as rainwater. "But my dad was, too. Sick, I mean. Addiction is its own kind of illness, and it can't be treated like you'd treat an infection. When our brains are busted, and they don't work right, well – they're a lot harder to fix than a broken bone. Sometimes, there isn't any fix at all, no matter how hard you try. Shit comes on, and it's… chronic. Terminal. You learn to deal with it, or you don't. The limp remains regardless."

She remembers frowning at him. She wasn't upset with the answer. She was trying to understand it. She thinks he must have realized that, because he sighed, leaning back against his shiny, metal countertops, his red-knuckled hands supporting his weight. He hadn't seemed impatient with her, or even mad, anymore. There was only that pervasive tiredness, and the weird angle of his mouth. "I loved my mom. But when I was a kid, I was… closer to my dad. He was great when I was young, and sometimes – sometimes even after everything, somehow, he still was. When I got older, and angrier, I liked to pretend he didn't, but he loved me. He loved my mom. He did what he could with what he had – with what he thought he had, anyway. He did terrible things, but in the end, he was doing those things… he was doing those things for us. Tried to make the wrong things he'd done right in the worst kind of way, but he was trying. He was… he was fucking trying."

Pushing himself away from the counters, Elixir had finally stopped looking at her. He stared down at his hands instead, opening them, closing them, the fine bones of his knuckles pushed up white behind the tight pull of his chapped, ruddy skin. "I'd always wanted to be a doctor, you know? You play video games. You know. You get it. I was always fascinated with healers, in games where you could play them. Maybe it was 'cause of my mom, or something in my personality, or both. Who fucking knows. But from the moment I had any notion about what I could do or be in life, that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a doctor.

"And my dad, he was always so encouraging. 'Maybe you'll grow up and figure shit out with your mom,' he'd say. Always seemed real proud. Mom couldn't work, and dad worked shit jobs to get by, long hours, you know how it is. He'd say, 'You'll be better than me. I know it.' And for a time, I believed it. I thought it would work out. I really, really did, because I was dumb, and a kid, and when your dad tells you you're gonna be great, well, what else do you do but believe it?

"But then everything happened. Comes out dad's got a gambling problem, comes out he's got a debt to the worst kinds of people. And mom's still sick, and dad, who was already gone almost all the time, well, he's gone even more of the time. The times he does come back though, he comes back with money. So much money. Won't say what his new jobs are, but the bills are being paid. Even as a kid, I think I knew he was doing some bad things for it. I just tried not to think about it. He was digging us out of the hole, and that's what mattered, right? He'd come home later, well after my mom went to bed, and he'd be all gashed up, so fucked up… I'd clean him up. And when I would, he'd look at me, like he wanted to say something. He'd look sick. I'd hear him throw up in the bathroom, after. Before he got arrested, he always looked sick at the end, sick and tired of himself, and of everything else. I'd say, are you sick? Are you? And he'd say, not in the way you can fix. And he'd say it a little sad. A little bitter."

Elixir had laughed, then. To Suzume, it had sounded a little sad, and a lot bitter. "And then he got caught, and all the truth I had always kinda known came out – and now, everyone knew it, too. I was… I don't know. Thirteen? Fourteen? Fuck, I don't remember. He'd been killing people. He'd been killing a lot of people, for a lot of money. Suddenly it made sense where all the money was coming from, even though… even though I'd already guessed. But it coming out meant I couldn't keep hiding from it anymore. And overnight, I… god. Fucking, god, I hated him.

"'Cause I'd always wanted to be a doctor, you know? Life was sacred, to me. Worth saving. I wanted to… I wanted to help people. God, it sounds so fucking pathetic, but I wanted to make a fucking difference. And more than ruining my chances, he'd… well, coming to terms with the idea that he could kill other people, and ruin whatever futures they had, it was…"

She had sat still on that table, staring at him as he stood there across the room. And Elixir had looked at her, and then he was looking through her. As tightly as he had wrapped her arm in plaster, she watched him unravel before her, bits of him falling away, piece by ragged piece. "I didn't see him for years. Refused to visit him. I was angry. So fucking mad. Everything was his fault. I told myself that; I believed it, too. And then mom died, and I got word he was sick. Taken sick a bit after she'd passed. Wasn't responding to treatment. Refusing it. He'd always been sick in the head, but now he was sick in the body. I remember thinking he deserved it. He fucking deserved it!

"So, I went to see him, and I was fucking angry, right? Wanted to see him wasting away, like that could make me feel better, somehow. I was down here by then, running this clinic. It was a hole, you know, and it needed filling. It was a hole I could fill. And so I was already here, looking after all the scum and the rot, because they had a need, and I could give that to them. And when I went to visit him, I saw the same in him: scum, and rot. And I asked him: why? Why? Why had he done all of this? Why was he so fucking selfish, with the gambling, and then the murder, and all that goddamn blood money?"

Suzume had felt like she was in a dream. The sharp, bright light beared down on the both of them in that sterile room, and there had been so little shadow anywhere. She had felt like she was floating. She had felt, dimly, somewhere deep inside of herself, like she might be sick. The words in her mouth came up from that chasmic place, pushing through the haze in her head and the tingling in her fingers. Faraway, and already certain of the answer, she had asked, "What did he say?"

Elixir's lips had pulled back from his teeth. It wasn't an expression of cruelty, like it was so often on your brother. When he'd looked at her, his eyes were glassy. "I knew what he'd say. I knew, but I didn't wanna… I didn't wanna think about it. I knew, and I don't know why I asked, 'cause I wanted to keep pretending I didn't know."

When he had blinked then, his eyes cast upward towards the ceiling, she had seen that glassiness shatter. Now his eyes were a broken window, sharp-edged, looking out over a storm-ravaged coast of grey skies and a greyer ocean. "He said he didn't know what else to do. Didn't know how else to fix it. Being in debt with bad people was a dangerous thing, and getting out of it was always going to be dangerous. He needed money to take care of us, and to fix what he'd done. He said, 'If the choice was between you and your mother or the rest of the world, I was always going to choose you.'" Elixir's face, like the window of his eyes, had cracked then, struck open by a terrible, jagged smile that was sadder than any frown she thinks she'd ever seen on anyone before. "And he said what I think he always wanted to say when I was cleaning him up, all those years before. You know, when I'd been cleaning him up before, after he'd killed people, not knowing he had, but knowing it somehow, too. He said, 'I'm sorry," and then, 'I'm sorry I chose myself before you two at the start. I just wanted to fix it. I just wanted to make it better.'"

Out in the hall, there had been the sound of feet shuffling, and of muffled conversation. Elixir looked over her shoulder, and then back at her. "Everyone I see down here," he had said, "Everyone. They're all like that, you know? People like my dad. They fuck up. They ruin their lives. And everything for the rest of their miserable existence after, it's all fucking cursed. And still – and still! They try, and they try. They try to make do with what they have left.

"The man who murders in cold blood, growing more and more numb to it all the time – the man who still comes home to his family and tries to love them. Says shit like, 'I"m so proud of you," and… and somehow, he fucking means it.

"The thief you think is selfish. Spiteful. Says mean shit, all the time. Steals bandages from you when she thinks you're not looking. Pain medicine. Food. Spits in your face if you try to offer any help. Broke as fuck, all the time. And then she finds a dying cat in an alleyway, struck by someone's car, and she spends every fucking bit of money she has at a vet. Spends money she won't even spend on herself, trying to save this small, dying thing, like it even matters in this shit world. 'Cause it does, you know? It matters to her. Hates everyone, but it matters to her."

Elixir had pressed his fingers into his eyes, shaking his head.

"Even the ones you think are the worst – even the ones who are openly cruel, openly hateful. Even the ones that seem to like the awful fucking work, the killing, the stealing. There's always something they got going on that makes you sit there and think: not this one, too. You think you've found the exception, but then you peel back that bloody fucking veil you don't wanna peel back, the veil that lets you keep pretending, and you realize: it's the same for them, too. It's the same for everyone."

And to that, Suzume had immediately and on instinct said, "Like my brother."

And Elixir had taken a breath, dropped his hands, closed his eyes. When he let out that breath, it hadn't been a sigh. It had been so much more mournful than that, and so very, very tired. "God. Exactly. Like your fucking brother," he'd agreed. "He was one of those rare few I thought for sure was an exception to the rule. Never seems to give a shit about anything or anyone except himself. Selfish. Ambitious, too, in this weird, fucked up kinda way. He's never seemed interested in getting his name out there, not in any real way, not in being known or infamous – but he's still so goddamn driven. Giran keeps his name down, buries it, so it's not like he wants the prestige, right? Everyone knows him as this kind of nightmarish idea you can ask Giran for, rather than as a real person. And with the shit he gets up to – well, I'll let him tell you, if he wants. That's his business, and it seems he likes to keep you out of it, dove that you still are. But even if he doesn't tell you – even if he doesn't get you involved – I'm sure you know, right? I'm sure you've guessed."

She hadn't said anything. Elixir opened his eyes, and he was staring at her again, really looking at her. He was quiet, and then he was talking, and laughing that sad and bitter laugh. "Used to help him all the time, two or three years ago. See him every week. Then he goes, but I hear he's still working the same grind, easy at first, only sometimes, but then he really gets back into it. And suddenly he's back for real, back here, turned back up again… and with you in tow. And it's weird, because he's still the same as I remember him. Still mean. Still fucking rotten. Scummy. But he's also someone else entirely with you. There's something else in him besides just the scum and the rot, something I'd never seen before. You understand?

"It's like my father again, having killed all those people. By every proper definition, he and my father and nearly all of the people I see down here, day in and day out – they're all some flavor or variety of monster. They've ruined their own lives, and now they're out there, ruining the lives of other people. Monsters. And yet still, somehow, contrary to how the world understands monsters… god, most of them still love, somehow. They might love in their own sad, and terrible, and broken ways – but they still love all the same. It's still – it's still love, somehow, you know?"

Another laugh. Scrubbing his face with his hands, Elixir had laughed again, low and sad. You know, he'd said.

And she did know.

The room was big. The room was so vast, and Suzume was swimming in it. There was so much light, and she felt like she was drowning in it, suspended in it. Drifting in a creek of all that light, and looking up and up from a ravine, up and into the face of her brother. He was saying something to her. Maybe it was her name.

And there in his face was a look of terror she had never seen before. It had overtaken all the sharp and hard lines of him, all the scar tissue. It had made his face seem round, and soft, like a boy's face, and his eyes that frightened her so much were so full of their own fear that she couldn't quite understand how she'd ever found him frightening in the first place. And he was saying her name, his mouth trembling around it, and the fear was in his voice, too. Remembering it had felt like a million years ago. It had felt like it was just happening. It had felt like she had dreamed it.

"Does that make it okay?" That question – that had been her new voice, her pleasantly numb voice, the voice that felt no pain and no fear and no real sadness. But inside her, beneath that thick shroud of comfortable, painless dispassion brought on by the drug –

Elixir looked at her. He was staring at her so much. And she hadn't really minded; his eyes were not cruel, now that she had had the chance to look at him. They were just grey, and tired. Grey and so very sad.

How had she missed it?

"You know, I heard someone say something once," he'd said. "It was one of those things you hear and you think, god, this sounds so fucking pretentious. But it sticks with you for some reason, right? And you think about it all day, and then all week, and you keep thinking about it, and it eats you up, and you can't stop thinking about it. And I took it home, took it to bed, thought about it, day in and day out. I thought about it so much it made me sick. You wanna know what it was?"

Suzume had held her breath for a long time. Then she had nodded, she thinks because she thought she was expected to.

"I read it somewhere," Elixir kept saying, and she wasn't sure he'd even seen her nod. His voice was distant, like he was somewhere else – like he was someone else. "I read it. Don't remember where, but I read it. And it said, 'When is a monster not a monster?' and I remember thinking it was made to sound like some kinda stupid fucking riddle. But it came with the answer, right away. Didn't give me a chance to puzzle it out. Just came out and said it. You wanna know what the answer was?"

Again, she had nodded, but maybe less because she was expected to, this time. Inside, she really did want to know. She did. Some part of her had known that later, when she was herself again, and things hurt again, and she could be sad again –

That she would want to know.

"When is a monster not a monster?" Elixir had repeated. And then, with his eyes closed, and with that same awful, sad smile, he'd answered the question.

"When you love it."

And Suzume had been right. The drug is out of her now. Things hurt again. She's sad, again. And it's only been at most half a day, but it feels like she's been thinking about it for her whole life. Hadn't Elixir said she'd understood? He'd looked down at her and seen that understanding in her, and she had understood. Maybe it's something she has always understood.

Here, now, in the attic, her brother looks down at her, and her up at him. His eyes are that wild and vibrant aquamarine, that toxic, incandescent blue, a spot of insane brightness in all the dull blacks and greys of the attic. She swears they cast their own light. In that moment, they seem like the only light in a very dark room.

They always do, though, don't they?

She lifts her unbroken arm and touches his chest, and then she takes a step forward and presses her cheek to it, too. She listens for his heartbeat. It sounds like the dull thud of dirty boots, rhythmic and steady, in a too-clean room. It sounds familiar. "I'm sorry," she says. She's already apologized. She always does, but she says it again, and the words crumble in her chest, and again in her throat, and again in her mouth, and they come out haggard, broken, like pieces of glass, like pieces of a heart, spat up, bloody and raw. She's crying, suddenly, because she always does that, too. Really, really crying. "I'm sorry – I'm sorry – I'm sorry."

Her brother's arms are up and around her in an instant. They settle over her shoulders, added heat to the already sweltering stuffiness of the attic, but Suzume doesn't care. She sobs against his chest. She cries until his shirt is wet like it always seems to be, wet with tears and snot, like always, and then she cries some more. And he just holds her. His hand is a weight on the top of her head, and then it's sifting through her hair. She feels his hot palm settle over the back of her neck. She feels his fingers work behind her ears, like they often do, and she melts under the touch, like she always does. She's aware of him saying, "Oh, Suzu."

The way he says it, she's sure he must be smiling.

You know I love you like no one else could, her brother had said, only moments ago. I'll do things for you that no one else can.

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.

He'd said that, too.

Suzume had been too tired to process that in the moment. She'd only been relieved to hear it. Now, though, feeling him press his face into the crown of her head, his breath in her hair, she thinks about it.

Processes it.

He has killed for her before. That threat is not the normal and exaggerated threat of a protective older brother. It is real. It is a promise – one Suzume knows he means.

They might love in their own sad, and terrible, and broken ways – but they still love all the same.

Her brother, she thinks, weeping as she does; her brother, the monster.

"I love you," she hears herself saying. "I love you. I love you."

She says it like it could absolve him of everything – like it could absolve him of anything, anything at all. "Please," she says, and her voice splinters again, on another sob. "Please – I love you."

She says it like a prayer. A prayer to herself, to any god who might be kind enough to listen.

To him.

Please, she thinks, reeling. Please.

"I know," he says, soft as snow. She thinks he must mean he knows that she loves him, and everything else she means, too. He always knows everything. "Oh Suzu, I know."

And then he takes her cheeks in both of his hands and pulls her away from his chest, and she looks up into his face again, and there's that smile, that lean, hungry monster's smile, white and bright, teeth shining behind his patchwork mouth in the thick dark of the attic. But it's her brother's smile, and she loves her brother. She loves him so much it hurts.

She loves him so much, no matter how much he hurts her.

"Please," she whispers. She's not even sure why, anymore. The word feels meaningless. Maybe that's why he never says it. "Please."

He kisses the tops of her cheeks, and then the bridge of her nose. His monster's mouth is hot and devastatingly familiar. His hands shift, and one of them settles around her throat in a loose grip, his thumb pressed into the hollow, where the give is the easiest. His other cups her jaw. From beneath heavy eyelids, he looks down at her through a thick fan of lashes, and his smile is wide and lazy.

And then his fingers dig into her cheeks. It doesn't hurt, she's surprised to find. He doesn't do it to hurt, like he normally might, but he's done this before; squeezed her cheeks until her lips push outward, in some dumb, childish imitation of a puckered, pouting kiss.

But then, suddenly, he's angling his head. Through her tears, Suzume feels her burning eyes go wide, because he's crossing the distance between them, and his lips are parting again, and not around a smile this time.

Anticipation and need and fear have her closing her eyes. So close to her own mouth now, she can feel his breath. It's like standing next to an oven – like dipping her face inside, the heat of it washing over her cheeks and over her lips and inside her mouth, and then –

She hears him laugh. It's quiet. A soft chuckle. She feels it more than she hears it really, waves of heat washing over her. And then there's the unexpected bite of teeth in her lower lip. Above it and below it, his teeth snare her, caging her in, and the pressure of his lips, one smooth and wet, one rough and dry – oh, she feels that, too. His teeth sink in, and there's the burning sting she'd expected moments ago, just not at all how she'd imagined it playing out.

The pressure builds. His teeth settle, give some, and settle more, and god, it hurts. Her hand falls away from his chest, but without really thinking about it, she's tilting her head back, accepting it, trying to rise up on her tiptoes so she can push her face closer to him. He makes a noise from somewhere in the back of his throat – a groan, or a growl, or something in between, and his fingers bite into her, too. As if answering that like a call, her stomach twists, one knot, and then several more.

Suzume feels dizzy. She feels sick.

Please, god, she thinks – she wants more.

More pressure. It mounts, and it hurts. It's not a kiss, not a real one, but it's enough like one that she doesn't care. She feels like she should do something, but she doesn't know what she's supposed to do. She feels limp and helpless, and with her eyes closed, her lip trapped between his teeth, she makes a noise, something like please again, and gracelessly she's leaning up and into him, as much as she can. Is it enough? Please, let it be enough.

It hurts. It hurts. He's not squeezing her cheeks anymore. His hand isn't on her throat, anymore. Both his hands are on her face again, and he huffs against her mouth, making that same noise from before. It's muffled against her mouth as he bites her lip here, and then here, and then here. He sucks it into his mouth; he presses his tongue into it, working it in where he's bitten her, and even that hurts – and she realizes she's shaking because she can't take it. She doesn't pull back, but a different kind of sob works its way through her, rattling behind her own teeth. Against his mouth, she finally cries out, a wordless, frightened sound. A too-much sort of noise, animal and desperate.

And he lets go. His teeth release her lip, and he pulls away, and she hates herself for not being able to take it. Loathes herself. Come back, she wants to beg, new tears stinging her eyes. Please let me try again. I'll be good this time. I'll take it. I'll make you proud. I promise.

But those words don't come out. Instead she raises her trembling hand and touches her trembling mouth. Her lower lip hurts. If she closes her eyes, she thinks she can imagine his teeth there, still –

Or the ghost of them, anyway. At just the thought, there's another knot in her stomach, and then several more.

"Suzu," he says, and her name comes out in a breath, all that hot-bellows air burning her cheeks like the memory of his teeth still burn in her lip. Not a kiss. Not a real one. Not like she's always wanted. Not quite.

But this is how he loves. Isn't it?

You understand, Elixir had said. And she had. And she does.

This is how he loves. Sad, and terrible, and broken.

All heat, and ash, and blood.

And Suzume loves him. She loves him.

God – god. How she loves him.

"Please," she says, because she has nothing else to say. What else is there to say? "Please," she says, and she feels that lingering feeling of his teeth in her lip when she does.

One of his hands still holds her face. She feels his thumb move over her mouth, pressing down where he'd bitten her like his tongue had, and it hurts, god, it hurts so much. Against the floorboards, her toes are curling. Inside of her, her stomach is curling, too, and she shudders. It takes everything in her to swallow back the soft noise that bubbles up in her throat. She isn't sure what kind of noise it is, but she somehow has the presence of mind to know it's probably shameful.

Please, Suzume thinks, instead. Please, I love you.

And then, desperately, so very desperately, she also thinks:

Please let it be enough.

---

Start by pulling him out of the fire and
hoping that he will forget the smell.
He was supposed to be an angel but they took him
from that light and turned him into something hungry,
something that forgets what his hands are for when they aren't shaking.
He will lose so much, and you will watch it all happen
because you had him first, and you would let the world
break its own neck if it means keeping him.
Start by wiping the blood off of his chin and
pretending to understand.
Repeat to yourself
"I won't leave you, I won't leave you"
until you fall asleep and dream of the place
where nothing is red.

When is a monster not a monster?
Oh, when you love it.

"Start Here" - Caitlyn Siehl.

---

AN: I always feel a little weird saying anything here because I don't really get any interaction on FFN like I do on Ao3 and it can feel a little like screaming into a void! If any of my like 5 readers here wanna read my thoughts on things (NOT LIKELY, BUT MAYBE?), you can always check stuff out there, but if you don't, well, that's a-ok too! Thanks for the people who follow and fave though, and who keep coming back, it still makes me happy. 3