027: an addiction to rot.
Early July; 20 years.
I thought all this time you'd just been avoiding me.
That's what she'd said. That's what she thought.
In the moment, when she'd said it, Dabi had denied it. Of course he'd denied it. He had denied it because it wasn't true – not exactly, anyway – and because he knew it was what she'd needed to hear. He'd had another reason at the ready, and because there was some truth to that reason, he'd pulled it off flawlessly. It had been such an easy thing to lean into, really. So neat, and so conveniently tidy:
The only reason he'd been gone so often in the months prior was to play the part of her doting big brother. He'd had to provide for her.
(And that was all she needed to know.)
Starved as she'd been, Suzume had accepted his excuse without question. Finally, after months and months, here was the sugar she'd needed to choke down the bitter taste of his absence, to make everything right in her mind. As far as she understood, all of it, every awful and terrible second of their time apart – it had all been for her.
(And Dabi – nursing his own awful vulnerability enough already – had hardly been inclined to offer up the other half of that reason.)
In the days following her spill in the ravine, Dabi focuses entirely on that half-truth out of necessity. Again, it's convenient. Easy. It is not, however, neat or tidy, because no matter how much he wants to fight it, the other half of that truth – the dirty, rotten half – is quickly seeping in.
Even something as simple as wanting to provide for her cannot remain simple with him. He isn't sure he's capable of anything as good as all that.
(He's just never been very skilled at being selfless.)
So on a hot July evening when Dabi brings up the potential of the two of them leaving before her grandmother dies rather than after – (" You really wanna be scrambling around like a jackass with your pants down when she finally kicks off? Better to get ahead of it before it happens.") – he finds himself leaning into the convenience of that half-truth, corrupted though it has become.
Again, he lays it on thick, even in his own head. It's for her. It's because he has to provide for her. Because he has to take care of her.
(Because she's his to take care of.)
"But we don't have to leave now," she says slowly, staring at him over a sweating bowl of ice-chilled soba noodles. There is no attempt made to hide her shock. Her eyes are wide, and her chopsticks hang in the air midway to her mouth. Sauce drips down the dangling length of her noodles, a spattering of red-brown blooming across the table beneath it like old, rust-colored blood. Suzume doesn't seem to notice. "Not early," she's saying. "Not soon. Not ever, probably."
An argument, then. Not really unexpected, but he hates it all the same. Still, Dabi mimes patience so well she clearly doesn't catch onto the charade. "Probably," he repeats, latching onto the doubt inherent in that word like a dog going for a throat. Against the sauce-speckled wood, he drums his fingers, a steady, rhythmic noise. Suzume doesn't catch to that, either. "Probably. But you don't know, do you? You can't know. Even I can't." A sigh, over exaggerated pity. "C'mon, Suzu. This – all of this." He gestures around the common room with two fingers and a lazy roll of his wrist. "It's so fucking precarious. We're living on borrowed time. This whole thing, you and me all cozy here, it could all come crashing down, at any moment. You like living like that? I sure as hell don't."
"But if we have to disappear – if we have to go into hiding, and I have to pretend that I'm… gone, or – or, dead – that means I can't go to school anymore." When his brows loft upwards in a skeptical who-fucking-cares sort of expression, she swallows dryly. Her voice after she composes herself – poorly, he notices – is quieter, much less sure. "I can't… I can't even really be anymore."
"It's not so bad, people thinking you're dead." He's purposefully unhurried when he lifts a mouthful of noodles to his lips. He chews slow, swallows slow, watching her the whole time. With every passing second of silence, she seems to wilt; shoulders slumping, her astonished expression crumbling to reveal a dreary kind of despair. He takes another bite – chews, swallows – and elaborates: "There's a freedom from that you can't get from anything else. And who really wants to go to fucking school, anyway?"
He expects her to claim she does. She would. She's that sort, always curious, interested in learning even the weird shit most people don't care about. Always coming to him with half a dozen questions when he's around to ask, begging him to look up on his phone what he doesn't know. It's usually stupid shit – stupid, but cute, like most things she does.
He almost always indulges her.
But to his surprise, that isn't the argument she makes. "What if… what if someone comes looking for me, though?" Finally, she lowers her chopsticks, tucking her uneaten noodles back into the bowl. "What if someone tries to… I don't know, investigate it?"
Dabi doesn't temper his unkind laughter. "Are you fucking serious?" When she recoils, he fixes her with a pitying look, mawkish and pointedly insincere. "Shit, Suzu. You are serious. Who'd even come looking for you? After your grandmother dies, who's gonna care enough to try?"
It's a cruel thing to say. He knows it is. It's cruel, but more importantly, it's honest, and it lands. There's a ripple of hurt that moves like a wave through her, as if he's thrown a stone and struck something vulnerable. Her brows knit, and her mouth pinches, and against the table her small hands curl into smaller fists. When she speaks – when she tries, anyway – her voice splinters like glass in the room. "That's…"
She falters immediately, and Dabi advances in on that nasty, stolen opening, relentless. "Think, Suzu. Looking for a missing kid takes a lotta time and a lotta resources. Those resources are finite, right? They get spent on kids with families who care about them – families who are at the very least alive to hound the cops. You want someone to look for you, you gotta have a family with a voice worth listening to, nevermind the will to put that voice to use."
Suzume looks like she might say something at that, but he anticipates it, pushing on before she can get a word in edgewise. "What, you think just 'cause you managed to charm some soppy fuck of a social worker into helping you out that they'd really rally the troops if you went missing? Call in a big dog and pony show like they did for that other dead kid? Be real. They'd blow maybe a week tops on you before fucking off to deal with problems attached to bigger, louder people."
Dabi knows she can't argue with that. He watches her open and close her mouth like a fish bewildered at being plucked from the placid waters of its ignorance and thrust into an atmosphere it can't hope to breathe in, let alone comprehend. She is, as far as her public-facing life is concerned, entirely alone in the world. It's a hard truth to learn. It's one he'd learned when he was only a little older than her, and looking at her and the way that realization dawns on her, he almost – almost – feels bad.
(But really, he thinks, a little scathingly, she shouldn't want or need anyone else but him.)
Setting aside that bitterness and his chopsticks both, he reaches across the table and covers one of her fists with his own broad hand. "Aww. Poor Suzu," he says, low and syrupy now. "Don't make that face." Near tears now, she is almost unbearably cute. He very much likes when she makes that face, but he doesn't tell her that. Instead he shakes his head in an attempt at sympathy, his thumb smoothing along the soft skin of her slender wrist. "Why give a shit about any of that, anyway? I care about you. I'm looking after you. I'm gonna make sure everything's okay."
There, he thinks. That half-truth again. Easy. Convenient. And it works the same as before, because Suzume blinks like she's taken a dose of something potent and looks away from him, the heat in her cheeks edging out most of her hurt feelings. When her teeth settle in her still-raw lower lip, Dabi won't let himself think about why her lower lip is raw.
(Or he tries to, anyway – and not very well.)
"But if we do leave," she says, staring down at his hand over her own, "you're gonna have to keep… you're gonna have to keep working, won't you? All the time, I mean. Like you've been."
She says the word working like it hurts, and it's a wonder she doesn't flinch. At first he thinks it's the meaning behind the word that burns her – the heretofore unspoken nature of the not-so-nice things he's been up to over the past few months. She's such a good girl. There was never a doubt in his mind that discovering her beloved older brother was a criminal would upset her. The prior days' revelations would invite judgment from anyone –
And yet somehow the prospect of facing it from her has him feeling reflexively defensive.
But then she's looking up at him again with her violet eyes, the usually clear brightness of them subdued behind a glossy veil. She doesn't look like she's judging him at all. She only looks tremendously sad. "I hate that you're gone so much," she whispers. "I miss coming home, and you being here, always. I miss getting to eat dinner with you every night. I miss being with you after that, before I go to bed. I miss going to bed with you in it, before I go to sleep."
Dabi says nothing. Suzume takes a breath, a quavery little huff. Shaking her head, she blinks away the glassy sheen of her gaze.
"I'm… happy you weren't trying to leave me alone on purpose. I thought you were mad at me, that I'd done something wrong, and… I'm glad it's not that. Glad that you were trying to take care of us. Of – of me." She frowns when she swallows, as if it causes her discomfort. "But I don't understand, Nii-chan… why can't we just keep doing what we've always done? What we've been doing? We can keep your money as… as a back-up, right? You can – you can work some, but… maybe less? So you can be around here more? Because if we go away – if we have to go into hiding, and you have to pay for us to live somewhere else… you're gonna have to be gone even more, won't you?"
She tugs her hand out from under his own. The movement is slow, and careful, as if she's afraid of offending him somehow. She rises with that same slowness, side-steps the table, and in three or four hesitant steps she's there beside him where he sits on the floor. He barely has time to look up at her before she collapses against him. With her arms thrown around his neck, she presses her nose to his temple, her cool breath ghosting his skin.
It's instinct, the way he lifts his arm and tugs her closer. Instinct, and desire both. "Suzu – " He says, but she's shaking her head. One of her hands lifts and brushes clumsily across his cheek, her fingers moving fretfully over the ridges of his scar tissue.
"Please," she says, still in a whisper. "I just want – I just want more time with you." And then, with considerably more misery: "I feel like I'm dying when you're not around."
It's such an overdramatic twelve-year-old-girl thing to say, Dabi thinks. She says it so sincerely, without a shred of shame. She says it like she's facing down the end of the civilized world – like she wants to lay down and burn with it out of a sheer sense of insurmountable hopelessness.
It almost makes him smile.
(Maybe a few months ago, he would have.)
Now, it slithers beneath his skin. Now it breathes fire into him, and he's already so full of that. Now he sets his teeth on edge, but for an entirely different reason than some misplaced sense of defensiveness.
Now, it's because he's holding himself back.
Because the other half of his truth – the other reason he's been staying away – is that being around her lately has become so fucking difficult. The truth is he has been avoiding her – avoiding her because he wants to be around her so badly. He wants her too much, and all the time – and not just to fill the empty hours of his even emptier and hatred-fueled life with some kind of distraction, some petty relief.
How he'd managed to keep himself fooled with that ridiculous lie as long as he had is a wonder. Now he feels her against himself and can't imagine not feeling this way. This pull, this drive, this unrelenting heat.
It leaves him reeling with how much that unsettles him.
Better to hide that behind the first truth. Better to build that truth up, let her believe it, and try to believe it himself. He needs to stay busy and gone because he has to take care of her, and not because he's an addict trying to put distance between himself and his favorite vice.
Not because his hunger has made him dangerous.
Not because he isn't sure he can trust himself for much longer.
"Nii-chan, please," she says again. She's begging, now. Begging for him, and without him asking. Her voice is breathless, a whimper in his ear, and he has to set his jaw against the way that gluttonous appetite stirs to life inside of him at the sound, drooling and near feral with anticipation. "Please. Just… let's try it this way for a little bit. Just stay home with me, just for a little while. If it doesn't work out, we can do it your way. I just want you to be home with me. Please, please, just stay home with me."
And god. She's so cute when she begs. So sad, so hopeless, so earnest.
She doesn't want him to go. She wants him. Needs him, too.
And he doesn't want to go, either.
He tries to reason with himself, he really does. Tries to play to his own selfish hunger, even. If they leave now, she can't go to school anymore. There will be no risk of friends, of well-meaning but overly invested social workers trying to overstep their boundaries, nothing there to encroach on what is his and his alone. He can find some hole-in-the-wall apartment, keep her there away from everything and everyone else. The two of them can keep playing house, just like she likes –
And she can keep playing the part of his dutiful little sister-wife, just like he likes.
But as much as he hates to admit it, Suzume is right. He'll have to work to keep her there. The money he's saved will run out, and then he'll be gone, hours at a time.
He can handle it. He should handle it. He's been handling it, all these months, trying so hard to deny how much her misery has only fed his compulsions. It's better that way. With his sense of control weakening seemingly every day, the distance is very nearly a necessity.
But he doesn't want to stay gone. He doesn't want to practice self-restraint or moderation. When she touches her cool lips to his cheek in a chaste please-listen-to-me kiss, he shudders so violently that she trembles along with him from proximity alone.
He wants more, and more, and more, all the fucking time. He wants it now, even.
No. The word is on his tongue. All he has to do is say it. No. We're doing it my way.
Because this is how addictions work, he knows. The more you feed into them, the worse they get.
But that foul, starving thing inside of him is slithering up his throat, slick heat licking at the inside of his teeth, and there are different words in his mouth, now.
If we do it your way, you're gonna regret it.
If we do it your way, I'm gonna break you.
Turning his head, he meets her gaze, letting his nose brush against hers. They know each other so well, now. He can tell by the flash of fear in her eyes that she has at least some recognition of the rot eating away at him and what that means for her. But then she blinks, giving a little shake of her head, and presses her mouth to the corner of his anyway. Another kiss.
Sweet. Beseeching.
Oh. The rot festers and swells. You know. You're asking for it.
And what else can he do but be a good big brother and give her exactly what she wants?
"All right, Suzu," he says in the voice of that sick, wanting hunger. "I guess we'll try things your way."
Late July; 12 years.
Suzume faces down the days leading up to her visit with Hawks with no small amount of anxiety. Calling off the first meeting, and then the second, too, she feigns illness, and she feels very badly for that. He's a busy man, and she knows the time he manages to make for her is stolen from an already lean schedule with nothing to spare. Somehow, though, he doesn't seem bothered by it – not like how she thinks he ought to be, anyway. There's no attempt made to guilt her that she can parse.
Rather, he only wishes she'd get better soon.
"I miss you," he says, and though the connection over the phone is crackling and poor, he sounds both cheerful and sad and sincere all at the same time.
(And that makes her feel awful.)
So she sees him some two weeks after her tumble in the ravine. By then the stitches are gone from her forehead and her leg both, though she hides the former's mark behind her bangs and the latter under a long skirt. There's no use hiding the cast. Briefly, she considers trying: her brother has several hoodies she knows she could use, large enough on her own frame that they might work, and a plethora of chunky, oversized sweaters besides. But it's mid-summer, and the cicadas are screaming, and the sky is a vibrant, blistering blue. It's much too hot for all of that, so Suzume decides not to bother.
When she does meet him finally – on a Monday afternoon, right after school – she manages to get a single over-exaggerated wave out of him before his eager expression deteriorates. The smile falls from his face, and his eyes are wide, those thick brows pushed up near his hairline. "Holy shit," he exclaims, and then he's frowning, reeling himself back. When he says, "Shit. You broke your arm," he sounds significantly more moderate in tone. Inexplicably, it reminds Suzume of how her mother would react when she'd taken a fall like the clumsy child she'd been: a flash of genuine panic followed by a mask of carefully constructed calm.
And it very suddenly dawns on her why her mother had done that then, and why Hawks does it now –
He doesn't want to upset her further.
Still, all of that doesn't spare her from the inevitable. "What happened?"
Willing a smile for him, Suzume hates herself. Always forced into playing this rotten game – honest only through misdirection – she gives him the explanation she's spent the last two weeks agonizing over: she'd taken a fall. She'd been with friends at the time, and their family had made sure she was okay. Because she was visiting the city with their family, she'd been seen by a doctor in Yokohama. None of it is exactly a lie, but it certainly isn't the actual truth.
"But everything is okay," she insists. "Everything is fine."
And after she finishes her babbling, she looks up at him, holding her breath, expecting him to bury her under a million invasive questions. She expects him to lean in close, to feel his breath on her face. She expects him to try and needle the truth out of her – and in her chest, her lungs ache for new air, for fresh air, but she can't make herself breathe.
(It is, after all, what her brother would do.)
But Hawks isn't her brother, and he doesn't do that. He tilts his head as she talks, and his golden eyes are as warm and gentle as the sun on a soft morning. He shakes his head when she describes her tumble down the hill, and makes a crinkle-browed face when she tells him how she had to have her bone set. When she tells him that everything is okay – when she tells him that everything is fine – he gives her a little half-smile that passes muster with his mouth, but looks…
It looks a little sad, she thinks. Sad in his eyes.
"Are you?" He asks. "Are you really? You sure?"
Is she, she wonders? Everything is falling apart, and coming together, falling apart, and coming together. Over and over, she thinks; it's like stitches over rot, mending it, holding it together –
But for how long?
Her brother has only begrudgingly relented to try things her way, and his willingness to wait out this tentative peace is something Suzume has had to barter for by lying to this sun-eyed boy. And god, she thinks; Hawks looks down at her with such naked concern. She feels almost burned by the shame she feels in its wake.
"I am," she says, because she has to. What else can she do? She tries to sound sure. And Hawks has a look about him like he doesn't believe it, and Suzume very nearly holds her breath again –
But unlike her brother, he's too gracious to push.
Her brother would. Her brother would take one look at her face and hold her cheeks between his hands and say, "Tell me. Tell me."
(And a tiny part of her wishes Hawks would, too.)
But he doesn't. Instead he nods once, a small movement of his chin, like he's hesitant. "Guess I shouldn't expect anything different since you've been taking care of yourself so long." His smile becomes more like the one she's used to seeing, then: wide, and bright, a million watts of polished white teeth. "Real… self-sufficient."
That smile falters when he says that last bit, though – like the facade splinters around the word self-sufficient. It's so slight she almost thinks she's imagining it. But his voice falters too, when he says it. It goes a little soft, a little wistful.
(He says it, Suzume thinks, like he wishes she wasn't.)
The two of them spend the majority of his visit huddled close together at the back of an especially quiet restaurant where Hawks has reserved a private room. It's the only private room the restaurant has, one used primarily for parties – or for large families, she realizes, with a jolt of nausea curdling thick and heavy in the pit of her stomach. Suzume doubts there's any deeper meaning to it besides privacy, though. Judging by the excitement people regard him with on the street, she suspects the privacy is as much for his benefit as it is for hers.
As he'd promised her that Saturday a little over two weeks ago, he addresses the particulars of her coming independence over a late lunch. It's a strange thing, to see him so serious. He brings out papers she recognizes as legal documents and works through the tiresome jargon with her, explaining in detail the things that will be expected of her –
And the things that will be expected of him.
When she lifts her gaze from the current paper and stares at him over her plate of mostly untouched pork katsu, he looks away from her sheepishly. "What do you mean," she asks, "when you say you'll have responsibilities, too?"
Hawks clears his throat. There's a warmth to his suntouched cheeks that's nearly pink in that same blistery way they get when he's been flying hard into the wind. "Well," he begins, and clears his throat again, "please let it be known that I tried arguing for true emancipation. Like, I really tried. Had several big and annoying meetings about it. Threw a few fits. All unproductive, as you can imagine. And I think if you were older, y'know, it would've worked out the way we wanted it. But at the end of the day, you're…" Rapping his knuckles on the table, he shakes his head in a gesture of helplessness. "You're still a kid, chickadee. And while I was able to argue for you living on your own – 'cause yeah, some kids do do that, and they manage just fine – the powers that be still think you should have some sort of guardian. Y'know, of the legal sort."
Guardian, Suzume thinks, dazedly. Legal guardian.
Hawks.
"And that's…" She tries to wet her lips. It doesn't work very well. "And that's you?"
Now, he looks back at her. His own meal – a tuna bowl, and a salad, and a side serving of soup – all of it is very nearly picked clean, the plates pushed off to the side to make room for the neatly arranged paperwork. Very keyed into her sense of discomfort at every intrusion, he's waved off all attempts the waiter has made to come retrieve them. They lay white and gleaming like bones.
(It's yet another thing he's willing to do for her.)
"Given the short notice, I, uh, wasn't really sure what else to do. Most people in the market to play the whole legal guardian role are doing it 'cause they wanna – y'know – adopt a kid. And most people who wanna adopt a kid are doing it 'cause they want the kid around, not 'cause they wanna just ship the kid off to live in a whole different city from the one they're living in."
He says it so seriously. He says it apologetically, like this is a burden he has come to lay on her doorstep, one he is ashamed of being unable to fulfill. He says it like it's one he is forced to beg for her to shoulder – and not the other way around. The way he says it, it's like he thinks he's failed her, somehow. There is a look of guilt settled over his face like a storm's cloud, brows creased, mouth downturned.
Suzume shakes her head. For all that she's thought about this, she realizes how little she's understood. These are things she should have known – things she should have guessed. But she hadn't let herself even consider them. She'd known it was unfair to ask this of him, and she'd been selfish, and she'd asked anyway. If anyone could make it work, she'd thought, it would be him. Hawks, the rising star. The hero. Hawks, and all the people he knows, and all the strings he can pull.
Right?
And despite everything, it sounds like he has. He has, but at what cost?
Of course they'd want someone to be her guardian. Of course anyone who would want to be her guardian wouldn't be inclined to agree with the absurd demands she'd made.
Of course it would have to be him. Who else could it possibly be?
(And of course that's something he'd had to have known from the second she'd begged him for his help.)
"I'm so sorry," she hears herself saying. She feels sick. She feels so sick. She wants to stand up and turn on her heel and flee from the room, from the restaurant – from the audacity of having asked this of him.
Because she can't ask this of him. She can't.
As always, she thinks, reeling with guilt, her brother's plan was better.
(Her brother is always right.)
But Hawks reaches out to her, grabs hold of her shoulder – gives her a little shake. "Hey, hey – what're you apologizing for? What's up with that dire expression?" He laughs, easy and kind. "C'mon, hey, listen – you're still gonna get to live on your own, like you want. And like, I know it's… a little weird, but I promise I'm not gonna come in and start making stupid rules like, oh, bed at 8:00 pm sharp! You gotta go to no less than three cram schools! Four showers a day or you're grounded! Even if I wanted to – which I absolutely don't – I'd still be halfway across Japan, anyway… unless – "
"It's not that!" It comes out so much louder than she means for it to, shrill and panicked in the otherwise silent room.
"Then what is it?"
Perched on his stool – the stool the waiter had brought for him because the chair was obviously not going to work with his wings – Hawks leans over the table towards her. Looking both so wise and so very, very young, his face is a perfect expression of concern.
"You can't… you can't adopt me." Suzume stumbles over the words, over the sheer absurdity of it. He's a hero. He's barely a man. He has his own troubles to worry about, his own responsibilities, the life and death of a thousand different strangers on his shoulders –
"Well, I wouldn't call it adoption in the technical sense. That'd be – uh, well, even I'd say that's kinda weird." Palms out, he holds his hands up to her, as if in supplication. "It's just a guardianship sort of thing, right? Just until you get old enough to get a proper emancipation going. I'm gonna be real hands-off, just like you wanted."
"No, no, I mean – I appreciate that, I do, but I just mean…" It's too difficult to look at him, so she looks away. That earnestness is too much. His eyes are like twin suns hung shining in his face, amber, life-giving, golden-hour luminance. Her throat hurts, but she doesn't bother swallowing. It never works. "I just mean that it's… it's too much to ask you to do. It's… you're so busy. You have all your own things to worry about, big things, important things. I already feel really bad about this… about everything."
"Oh, chickadee." A sigh. "Don't do this again. You gotta quit it with this whole self-flagellation thing, okay? It really sucks." The words, Suzume thinks, would be mean in anyone else's mouth but his. An admonishment. But he says them with the same golden warmth that his eyes are made of, breathed out in a breeze of summer laughter. "I'm doing this 'cause I wanna. It's not a big deal. Or, I mean, it is a big deal, but not the way you think. Not a big bad deal. Like, yeah, I don't get unlimited free time, but when I do get it, it's not like I have anything worthwhile to spend it on – at least until you showed up, anyway.
"Before you, I'd find myself working through the hours I was supposed to have off. Sounds lame, right? But I really had nothing else going on. Now I got a purpose even when I'm not working." He smiles, closed-mouthed, but no less sincere for it. "If anything, having you around helps keep my head clear. Talking to you is – lame-o alert, again – kinda the highlight of my day, so if I can help out in any way, well, I'm gonna go for it. Y'know. In thanks."
Suzume stares down at her pork katsu, at her still nearly full bowl of soup. The salad hasn't been touched either, not beyond the way she's rearranged it on her plate. Normally she loves the dressing, but everything tastes sour on her tongue and feels rancid when it hits her stomach. Giving up, she swallows against that ache in her throat – and there are the knives there, like they always are. "I just feel so selfish all the time," she mumbles, low as she feels. It's not fair to be this way with him, she knows. Not fair to ask this of him when she's the one who's put him in this position –
But she wants the comfort of being told it's okay so badly that she's willing to sin more to get it. "I just feel like I'm the worst person all the time."
Hawks is quiet for so long that she starts to worry she's pushed him too far – that she won't be given the absolution she so desperately needs. But when she looks up at him, he's watching her with an expression that's nothing at all like anger. The cast of his eyes are as soft as downy feathers, and that half-sad smile is back. "Y'know, sometimes I think people give the whole being selfish thing a bad wrap," he says, and his voice is as soft as his eyes. "Sometimes… it feels good to be needed or wanted by someone, even if they need and want you selfishly. Maybe even especially when it's selfish. You get what I mean?"
Simmering in the dimly lit backroom of the restaurant, Suzume thinks about that, staring at him. She thinks about that, and she thinks about her brother – about the way he'll hold her face and wheedle everything out of her as if it's his right to know, as if he has to know anything and everything about her. Greedy. Hungry. Demanding.
Selfish.
And she thinks about Hawks, and his kind and gracious give-her-space smiles.
Selfless.
"Yeah," she says, feeling a little dizzy in that warm and drowsy dark, "yeah, I think I do."
Late August; 12 years.
Sometimes, Suzume thinks she's still falling down that ravine. She remembers the fall like this: the air leaving her lungs in a scream cut short, the sky above, spinning, blindingly grey, and the ground a tumbling mess of colors.
All of it a muddy wash in the rain.
Everything had moved so quickly – her legs beneath her as she stumbled down the slope, her chest and the way it heaved, her arms up and out as if she might catch herself on anything, anything. All of it just out of reach –
And yet everything had felt so nightmarishly slow, too. Even through the rain, there had been details everywhere she'd looked. Texture on a glistening root. Sodden leaves made intricate with their tiny veins even as they were kicked up beneath her stumbling feet.
Time seems to move like that now, she thinks. Everything is moving, changing, too fast – so fast it makes her woozy. She tries to steady herself. Tries to find her footing, but she's caught up in some terrible momentum that pulls her inexplicably forward, forward and down, down, down. It's like tumbling down a rain slick slope again. It's like reaching out her hands as if she could catch herself, or at least slow herself down –
But like in the ravine, her hands reach out and find nothing.
And so time doesn't slow. The days skip on, sun rise, sun set, skipping on and on, and falling away. Sometimes it's raining, and sometimes it's sunny, but the colors and the details, they run together regardless, all silt and mud under her feet. Nothing, and nothing, and nothing, and then, suddenly:
Detail.
Sometime in hot mid-August, Suzume's grandmother dies. She thinks it should be terrible. Death is terrible, isn't it? Her mother is dead, and her father is dead, and both of those deaths were terrible in their own, unique ways.
And now, here, in the hottest month of the year, her grandmother is gone.
The hospital calls her in the early hours of a suffocatingly hot Tuesday morning, and she answers the phone groggily, half-asleep, her heart in her throat. From the futon, her brother stares up at her, his eyes half-lidded but already much too bright for the lightless room.
The woman on the phone has a voice that is equal parts kind and tired, like a well-loved and dog-eared book. She tells Suzume that her grandmother has just passed peacefully in her sleep. "There is no more pain," she tells you, and then, very, very gently: "I'm so sorry."
She says some other things too, but Suzume isn't really listening. The phone feels so heavy in her hand. Everything feels so heavy. It's an effort to mumble her way through the conversation. She manages with a handful of half-hearted mm-hmms and a few even less-hearted okays – and then, blessedly, it's all over. The woman hangs up, and then the phone at her ear is as dead as her grandmother, as her father, as her mother.
Her brother watches her, expectantly. His hair is as black as the shadows over his face, but Suzume can see the glint of his eyes through them.
"Baa-baa's dead." It's a whisper in her dry throat.
"Figured that was it," he says, and his voice is low, more husky than it usually is.
Suzume stands there for a moment and rubs sleep from her eyes. Then she sets the phone back down on the floor, not bothering with the charger, and she goes to bed, laying down next to her brother.
It's hot – August is always so hot – but he pulls her against him anyway, because he always does. His body is a furnace in that bed. Both his and her own skin are slick with sweat, but she doesn't care. She tucks her head under his chin, her damp forehead pressed to the ruined flesh of his throat.
"How you feeling?"
His throat vibrates when he talks. That vibration is also in his chest; she can feel it, because that's where her hand is, feeling for the steady lullaby of his heartbeat.
She can feel him breathe, too. Easy. Comfortable.
"Everyone in my family is dead, now," she says, as if it's an answer. It should be terrible to say it, she thinks. And it is. It is. But she doesn't say it like it's terrible. Because it's a fact, she says it matter-of-factly.
It's too early for anything but facts. Too early to be anything other than tired.
Tired of being awake.
Tired of death.
"Mmm. Not everyone." WIth his arm draped across her, he works his hand up and down the length of her spine. The pressure of his insistent fingers is soothing, but it also serves to pull her closer. Suzume lets him, because as hot as it is – as miserable as it is to feel as hot as she does right now – she feels like she just might die if there's even a centimeter of space left between the two of them. "And anyway, it's not so bad."
Isn't it, she thinks? Or rather, shouldn't it be? But her brother is right. It really isn't so bad. She doesn't feel sad like she thinks she should. Even the burning in her eyes earlier – what had that been? She isn't sure. She doesn't feel anything, really, except hot and so, so tired.
Still, she asks, "How come?"
"'Cause now I really get you to myself."
And already her grandmother is fading, she thinks, and there's the blur, the mess. Another smear of color as she stumbles by, a face she can't really picture properly in her mind anymore.
She thinks of Hawks, telling her about selfishness and want, and she feels her brother next to her, pressing his burning body against her own. He holds her so tightly, touches her so greedily, his arms and hands as unyielding as hot steel.
Details, details.
She shudders. Suzume feels heady and too hot and full of some need she has no words for, and she angles her head and brushes her lips against the unblemished skin below her brother's right collarbone. She thinks he makes a sound – air pulled in sharp through his nose, a little too abruptly – but she doesn't really think about it much. She closes her eyes, and she sleeps.
That day, she skips school. The next day, too. Not because she's sad, really, because she's not – not like she thinks she should be, anyway. But everyone expects her to be sad. Everyone expects her to take off; at least, that's what her brother says. Besides that, he wants her to stay home. He wants her to stay with him. And Suzume does it because he tells her to –
And because, more than anything, she wants that, herself.
The two of them spend the majority of those two days tangled up in each other. They watch movies, and play games. Sometimes, Suzume reads to him. A lot of the time, she sleeps too much, and he lays down with her, even though he doesn't sleep himself. It's so hot, and she sweats when he holds her. It beads at her hairline and runs down the back of her neck, heat and salt. But even when she squirms and tells him she wants to shower, that it's too much, that she feels too gross, he only shushes her and holds her tighter. Eventually, it becomes a sort of game: her wriggling to pull free of him, and him working his arms around her like a steadily tightening vice. Can she get a limb free? A leg, an arm? When she struggles too much though, his fingers work their way into her sides, tickling her until she's very nearly weeping from laughter, half-genuine and half-hysteria.
Then it's back to school, and she's stumbling again. Time passes, Thursday, Friday, melting away out from under her, made effervescent in all that brutal, humid heat.
At the end of the week, when school is done, there's a wake, and a funeral and finally a cremation. All of them are small affairs, quiet and sparsely attended. She is her grandmother's only living relative, and her grandmother did not have many friends.
To Suzume's surprise, Hawks is there for all of it. Handsome and charming and looking terribly unlike himself in a somber, black suit, he arrives only minutes before every event, perspiration and salt gleaming like sea spray across his face.
"Couldn't get off work early enough," he tells her the first day, sweeping a sun-kissed hand across his damp forehead and up over his golden hair. Suzume isn't sure she's ever heard him sound so winded. "Really had to kick my own ass into gear to get here on time. Schedule's looking real tight for the next couple days too, but fuck, I'm gonna try."
She feels guilty, but she appreciates it.
At the wake, he sits with her in the front row as her guest, holding her hand in one of his own, a loop of prayer beads in the other. For the funeral, he trades his beads for flowers – and when Suzume goes to lay her own flowers all about her grandmother's death-placid face, Hawks, standing next to her, does the same.
Even at the crematorium – he's there, too. He's there to watch as they lift her grandmother into the chamber, and he's there even after that, helping Suzume sift through the ashes. Together they use their long, dark chopsticks to move pieces of bone into a single urn. When Suzume cannot handle the big pieces on her own, it's Hawks who helps her with his own pair, the two of them lifting it in unison.
By then, it's only the two of them.
They don't talk much. Like his suit, Hawks is much more subdued than he usually is. There's a cast to his face, a pall that doesn't suit him, and Suzume catches him looking at her often with his sun-burst eyes.
(No amount of grim reverence could do a thing about those eyes, she thinks.)
"I'm okay," she tells him when it's all over. She doesn't give him the chance to ask. "Really."
The two of them are standing outside. The sky is stunningly clear, a beautiful polished sapphire kind of blue, pale and lovely. Suzume thinks it should be raining. Even if she isn't sad, she thinks letting someone go on a day without rain feels like some kind of cruel, practical joke. "I am," she says, and shakes her head. "I am, though… though it feels like I shouldn't be. And that makes me feel bad. So maybe I'm not? I don't know. That's what I feel the most bad about, though. Not about her dying. More… that I don't feel worse than I do. I feel like I should be crying, I guess. I think I kind of want to. But there's just nothing… there's nothing there."
Tucking his hands into his pockets, Hawks tilts his head back, squinting up at that beautiful, cloudless sky. "You didn't know her very well, did you?"
"No."
"Was she unkind to you?"
There's a bird, suddenly, cutting its way through that serene sky, a black imperfection drifting up and up on an invisible current. Suzume watches it go, watches it glide, watches it until it's gone. At the edges of her vision, she can see Hawks is looking back at her again. She doesn't look at him when she answers. "She wasn't unkind."
"But that doesn't mean she was kind."
Suzume shrugs, not acceptance, but not denial, either. "She didn't know me. I didn't know her. I think… I think I reminded her too much of Mama. They were close, but then things with my dad – things got complicated. Me being around, it just made things more… complicated. Weird, I guess. I don't know."
The two of them lapse into silence. It's not uncomfortable, and she doesn't mind it. There's a nice feeling to it even, standing here next to Hawks. He holds one wing up and over her like a great scarlet canopy, and beneath its great breadth, the air is cool and dark.
"Thanks," she says, after a while, still not looking at him when she says it. Watching for more birds, she keeps her eyes on the sky. There aren't any. The sky stretches on, silent and endless and blue, empty of everything.
There's the barest flutter of his wing. She can tell by the way the shadow moves across her and under her, all that soft black shifting around her like a veil. "For?"
"For coming to all of this." She swallows, and there, she thinks. There. There's that burning in her eyes again, and in her throat, and in her lungs. There are the tears she's been looking for.
But for some reason, she doesn't want to let herself cry. "Thanks for everything else, too."
Silence, again. Comfortable again. Fingers brush the back of her knuckles. Hawks' hand. His skin is warm. She's not used to seeing him without gloves – still not used to the way his hand feels when it closes around her own. His palm is slightly damp. It's such a human thing, Suzume thinks – the sensation of warm skin on skin.
"Oh chickadee," he says, and he says it so soft and so fond that she almost flinches. "Anytime."
December; 12 years.
September comes, and September goes. Then it's October, and November, too. Both gone. Both uneventful.
Detailless.
Things settle into a routine for her. She goes to school, and she comes home. Like before, she sees Hawks once a week and talks to him on the phone at least once a day, if not twice.
Unlike before, her brother is home again. The months where he would spend almost every night out late are mostly over, a bad dream to be put behind her. Now he's back. Just like she'd asked – just like she'd bargained for. There's still the occasional night where he comes home after dinner, but to her surprise, he always warns her about that, usually a whole day in advance.
And somehow, things become… easy. Despite herself, as the months go by, Suzume lets herself get comfortable – lets herself be comforted by all that same-old, same-old routine. Life becomes worth living again. Fussing about the supposed danger like he used to, her brother is there to take over knife-work at dinner. He's there to pretend to be bored by the stories she reads him or the games she plays – only to remember the names of the characters better than she does or figure out some difficult mechanic long before she catches on to it.
He's there to hold her when she goes to sleep, wrapped up in his arms, swaddled in his heat.
Then, suddenly, it's December. Halfway through November, she'd given up on waiting for the other shoe to drop and had fully embraced complacency. December doesn't seem like it will be any different. Hawks is as steady as ever, and her brother – outside the occasional moment of bizarre behavior – seems… more tame, somehow. He indulges in most of her whims with only a few snide comments and a vague smile that always reassures her that he actually doesn't mind, no matter how absurd.
One weekend, she decides impulsively that she wants to try making a multi-course meal featuring only foreign recipes – and he's there to help by looking up the multiple grocery stores they have to visit to get the ingredients.
Another weekend, she comes home from the charity shop with armfuls of clothes for the both of them and asks him to try them on with her. "It'll be like a mini fashion show," she tells him. He laughs at her, and at the outfits, too. Tells her it's stupid. Still, he takes dozens of pictures of the two of them in the mirror without being asked, his arm slung around her shoulders, his face tucked into her hair.
"I thought you said it was stupid," she says with a roll of her eyes.
Her brother shrugs. "Some things are so dumb they're worth chronicling."
Several days later, after her shower, she finds him sprawled out on the futon waiting for her. Standing quietly in the doorway, he can't see her, but she can see him.
She can see him holding his phone, swiping slowly through photos with the sweep of a finger –
The pictures he'd taken of her 'stupid' mini fashion show.
The pictures he'd taken of them, together.
(For his sake, she pretends not to know.)
And like the year before, he takes Suzume to visit her mother's grave. Unlike the year before, he coaxes her into taking a few days off from school and surprises her by renting a small hotel room. Together they spend the stolen days exploring Saitama, where no one knows her, and she doesn't know anyone. The air is cold, and the air is bitter, but bundled up under so many layers, her mittened hand in her brother's own and her heart so full she thinks it just might burst –
All Suzume feels is warm, warm, warm.
They eat out at restaurants; they visit arcades. He takes her to tiny little video game stores full of imported titles from other countries, to parks, to museums. They stay up late watching trashy game shows on TV, and sleep in late, too, feasting on convenience store junk food and fancy take out. They go to so many places in those four days that by the fourth day her feet ache from all the walking – and rather than cut their trip short, her brother lets her up onto his back and carries her all the rest of the way.
It is, she thinks, the most fun she has had doing anything in her short life. It feels so good to be with him. It feels so good to be out with him, out in public, bold and free, not caring who sees.
And whether out or behind closed doors, it feels so good to touch him, and to be touched by him.
When they get home, it's December 20th. On the 21st – snow falling in capricious little flurries that seem to dance and skitter all about her feet – Suzume goes back to school.
And after school, she meets Hawks.
They share an early dinner, like always. This time, on that little bluff beneath the wide limbs of the now half-naked oak tree, it's take-out Indian: a spicy curry, long-grain rice, flat bread so rich and heavy with butter and garlic that she's sure there aren't enough napkins in the world to handle it. There are no Indian restaurants in Chichibu, and this is Suzume's first time experiencing it.
"Picked it up on the way over," Hawks tells her as he watches her eat, obviously taken with the way she savors each and every sopping bite. By the time the two of them finish, there are tears running down both of their cheeks. Indian curry, as it turns out, is much spicier than Japan's more mild fare.
She loves it. Her brother, an untameable inferno in every aspect of his life, loves spicy food. After years of making it for him, she's very well adapted to the way the burn lingers in her mouth and lips. Hawks, though, is sweating bullets, dragging the back of his hand across his mouth as he makes a show of breathing heavily, face gone pink as if slapped. There's something charming about the way his cheeks puff up when he huffs the air out and over his tongue, as if that might somehow spare him the burn.
"You're handling this much better than me, chickadee. I'm deffo gonna regret this later," he says, shaking his head in exaggerated embarrassment. "Prolly gonna kick my guts straight outta me tomorrow."
It's a little vulgar, but she's used to it. Her brother often is. Suzume laughs, and Hawks does, too.
Then, he takes her flying. Almost every visit, he takes her flying, and it's a joy every time. It's hard to really think about anything else but the wide open sky when she takes to the air, feeling for the updrafts like Hawks has taught her to save on energy.
Flying in the winter is nothing at all like flying in the summer. In the summer, it's an almost religious experience, all that oppressive heat stripped away by speed. It's as if the wind takes the heat and pulls it thin, pulls it sweet and fine as candy floss, made too fragile, too fleeting to burn.
In the winter, the wind is something else entirely. Up in the air, she can feel it even through the thickly layered double pair of tights she wears under her school skirt, feel it knifing through her school blazer. It grips her cheeks, razor-nailed. It works its way under her blazer, under her tightly buttoned shirt, sinks its way into her, makes her teeth chatter. Even under her wool mittens, her fingers are made numb from all that cold.
And it hurts. It hurts so much her eyes water. Every gulp of air is ice in her lungs, and she huffs out steam, more and more heat lost to the wind.
Still, she loves it. It hurts in a way that feels good, even if she can't understand why. The sun in that bitter winter sky is made toothless, heatless, weak and anemic with the early sunset, and she pushes herself towards it with closed eyes, up and up and up – before inevitably choosing to abandon it of her own accord. She takes the plummet down in a spin, eyes open now, watching the way the sun still limns her outstretched fingers in gold even as she tumbles away from it. She imagines the sun reaching out for her, trying to catch her hand –
And she falls, and falls, and falls, escaping it, laughter bubbling its way out from between her chattering teeth.
At the end of their time together, back on the ground for their goodbyes, Hawks slips a small rectangular box from his jacket and pushes it into Suzume's hands. It's wrapped – very poorly, she notices immediately – in wrapping paper patterned with adorable cartoon foxes wearing party hats, the whole of it topped by a squashed and rather sad looking bow.
"So I know it looks like shit, but hear me out: I know I shoulda watched a video on how to wrap gifts, but I was like, how hard could this be?" Looking away from the gift and up at Hawks, Suzume realizes he's full red in the face again. Somehow, she knows it has nothing to do with the curry, this time. "Spoiler alert: it's real goddamn hard. And so I'm halfway through this catastrophe when I realize I've made a terrible mistake, but you know me, I'm too stubborn to give up, so, uh, whoops. Here we are. Sorry it looks like a war crime."
Trying not to smile, Suzume rotates the package in her hands. It is a monstrous attempt. There is tape everywhere, in places where there absolutely shouldn't be. The wrapping paper bears folds and creases where there aren't any edges or corners for those folds and creases to even begin making sense. On the bottom, she spots one poorly torn piece of paper very obviously misaligned with the pattern, held awkwardly in place by another egregious helping of tape. It gives that entire side a lumpy kind of effect.
"Misjudged the amount of wrapping paper I needed," Hawks says, sounding sheepish. "Cut too little. Had to make a patch, so the gift wasn't peeking out like a creeper."
"It's beautiful. Real art," she says, unable to hide her smile now. "But I kinda think it being so janky adds to the charm. It's the cutest war crime I've ever seen."
Shoving his hands into his pockets, Hawks snorts. "Cute," he mumbles. His cheeks are still very hot. Then he clears his throat, and his tone is self-deprecating when he says, "But art, huh? Modern art, maybe. We can call it: 'Self-Portrait of a Sad Bachelor.'"
Sad bachelor, she thinks. The notion is absurd. She's seen the magazines. She's seen him on TV, bright teeth in a brighter smile, wind-swept hair, Japan's golden child. She knows how people react to him because it's the same way people reacted to her father. It's the same way her mother was with her father for years: eager and desperate to be the reason for even one of those blinding smiles.
It's the way Suzume feels about her brother –
And maybe, sometimes, even Hawks, too.
"If you're a sad bachelor, I think that's 'cause you wanna be." Straightening out the box in her hands, she runs her fingers over the bow, studying it. The color of it clashes with the patterned foxes, and the whole of it feels more birthday than Christmas. "I think half of Japan would kill for the chance to, um… un-bachelor-ify you."
And Hawks says, in a voice she can't really parse: "Yeah? A whole half of Japan, huh?"
The way he says it has Suzume looking at him – really looking at him. When his amber eyes meet hers, she finds she doesn't really recognize the emotion in them. Unlike her brother, Hawks behaves, at least around her, a lot more like she does. He wears his heart on his sleeve, his face a perpetually open book. The language of his emotions are usually written in a language easy enough for her to translate. Now she looks up at him and finds with a start that the language is foreign. The angle of his mouth, of his brows, even the way his eyes crease at the corners when he looks at her –
She can't understand any of it.
And then he's shaking his head, putting on a familiar smile. It's the one she never sees on TV. It's more subdued, more gentle, the one she only ever sees when he's with her –
Though some of that alien and untranslated emotion remains.
"I'll let you open it on your own," Hawks says, shaking his head still. Despite the mellowness of the gesture, Suzume is reminded of a dog shaking water off its coat, frantic, desperate. "Sorry to cut and run like this, but I got some engagements that I gotta get to. Y'know, work. Left some food in the oven, and all that."
When she frowns, she doesn't miss the way his smile almost gives way to a wince. "I didn't… upset you, did I?"
Hawks is fast on the recovery. The smile is back in force, comforting in its sincerity despite the way that unknowable, dead-language look haunts his gaze. Reaching out like he might pat her cheek, he pauses, as if thinking better of it – and grabs her shoulder instead. "Hey, hey – don't go looking like that. Don't fret about stuff like that, chickadee. I'm not mad at you, not even a little bit. Can't imagine ever being mad at you, really. Don't think I could be."
And then his hand lifts from her shoulder, and – as if deciding he wants it after all – he pats her cheek, a little tap-tap-tap with the ends of his fingers. Then, scooping up the bag of trash from their take out, he steps back and back straight off the cliff, waving as he goes. Suzume watches him drop, out and down, vanishing –
Watches him soar up a few seconds later, great red wings working through the air and beating up a heart-beat long storm of ice-edged wind. It gets into her hair and makes a sail of her clothes. There's the smell of him – the strong spices of Indian food, salt and soap and the perpetual scent of sweet coffee – and then her hair and her clothes settle. He and his windstorm and his scent are gone. There is only the thin air of the December sky, washed-out blue streaked softly with gauzy white clouds, empty of the both of them.
Alone beneath the great solitary oak tree, Suzume sits down and tugs off her gloves so she can open the present, taking her time as she peels back the tape with the corner of her nail. Little by little, the small package reveals itself. The box hidden beneath the paper is sleek and smooth to the touch, it's texture gratifying against the pads of her fingers. After a few moments, she realizes what it is from the picture on the front of the box:
It's a phone.
It's not an ancient flip phone, like the one her grandmother gave her, egg-shaped and plastic. It's like Hawks' phone. Like her brother's phone. It's a real phone, the fancy kind, new-model shiny. The picture on the front promises perfection. The edges of it are rounded down to inoffensively pleasing edges, all of it a masterwork of glass and metal.
Taped to the bottom of the box is another piece of wrapping paper, folded over and over on itself, conspicuous and entirely out of place against the pristine, smart packaging. Careful not to tear it, she picks it free, working the tape off with patient fingers. After a few minutes, her hard work is rewarded: when she unfolds it, she realizes it's a note. The handwriting that covers very nearly every centimeter of it is cramped and scrawling, sloping across the soft paper in blue ink that's smudged in more than a few places.
Chickadee, it starts, all cheerful katakana characters denoting the foreign nickname. And then,
I think it's time you joined the rest of the world in the current century. I'm gonna try not to take my whole 'legal guardian' title too seriously, but it wounds my pride to think I got a ward who's running around with a phone better suited for a dinosaur than a kid your age. Seriously, that thing belongs in a museum with the caveman your grandma must've stolen it from. I'd make some remark about grave robbing, but I feel like making jokes about dead grandmas might be in bad taste – even if they are grave robbers.
Suzume smiles, and keeps reading.
So I wanted to say this here cause it's weird saying shit like this out loud: thanks for trusting me with everything. Please stop thinking it's putting me out at all, or that I think you're some kinda burden, cause I don't. I wanna help. It makes me happy. And in the vein of sharing secrets, I'll give you one of mine, if you'll have it.
I should prolly tell you this in person, so I can be all, YOU GOTTA PROMISE ME YOU WON'T TELL ANYONE ABOUT THIS. Caps cause it's important, not cause I'm yelling. Or maybe I should write it like, you gotta promise me you won't tell anyone. That's better. Feels less mad. Anyway, in person I could get you to pinky promise me. We could cut our palms up and shake on it, blood brothers style. Make you swear on the grave of your grave-robbing grandma. But you're a good kid, and I get the feeling you won't immediately go running to the gossip rags with this momentous revelation, so here we go:
My name's Keigo, Family name Takami. Man, shit, it feels weird as hell to write this down, cause I never do. Everyone calls me Hawks now. Like even in my own head, I think of myself as Hawks more than anything else besides maybe 'dumbass' or… well, you get the point. And like, if we're out and about, and there's people milling around, I hope you'll still call me Hawks, cause my name is something I'd like to keep on the downlow.
But maybe if we're alone and there's no one around, it might be nice if you could call me by my real name. You don't gotta, obvs. I don't wanna make you do anything you don't wanna. But it's not a name anyone really uses anymore, and I think it'd really make me happy to hear you use it.
Anyway, sentimental garbage aside, the phone should work out of the box. Full internet, calls, texts, whatever you want. I got it taken care of, and I'll keep taking care of it, cause I'm gonna try to be a cool and responsible legal guardian who can give my ward all the dope things she needs to become a functioning member of society. Step one was getting you free of that old antique. For real, that shit's prolly haunted.
Anyway, I know the wrapping paper is more birthday themed, but I thought the foxes were cuter than the Christmas shit they had. But hey! Merry Christmas. I hope you're doing okay. Please call me if you ever need anything. I'm running outta space and don't wanna tear up another piece of wrapping paper so I'll call this for now.
There is barely any room for the signature at the bottom, but Hawks has managed to squeeze in the kanji of his newly revealed name: Takami Keigo.
In typical Hawks fashion, there is also a very terrible drawing of what she thinks is supposed to be a hawk wearing a pair of aviators and a Santa hat. She isn't sure if it takes away from the grand revel or adds to it, but she laughs all the same.
Then she mouths his name, but doesn't say it outloud: Takami Keigo, a mimed whisper, like a secret. A secret, and one shared willingly, as if between friends.
It feels silly to get worked up over it. The piece of wrapping paper it's written on is ridiculously large when unfolded, worn down by all the times he'd creased it to fit it on the package. Even so she runs her hands over it as if it were something precious, reading it and rereading it, laughing at the ridiculous drawing even as her eyes sting.
The sentimentalist in her wants so very badly to keep the note. God, she thinks – she wishes she could. She wishes she could fold it back up and put it somewhere nice, somewhere safe, the cheerful foxes tucked away in some little keepsake treasure box den, always guarding their little keepsake confession. Her fingers map the creases, and fold it up, and then unfold it, reading the note again, again, determined to commit as much of it to memory as she can.
And then, with nothing better to do with it, she sits on the bluff and she tears the letter up into tiny pieces, confetti-colored fragments of this proffered kindness, this between-friends secret. Piece-by-piece, Suzume feeds it to the wind left behind in Hawks' wake. It's like his phone number all over again, she thinks. Lifelines. Secrets.
For a time, those pieces fill the sky where the two of them were there only a while ago. The note, once so big, gets smaller, and smaller, until only the silly drawing is left. Holding that final piece between her numb fingers, she watches the wind tug at its edges, the paper flimsy and fragile.
And it's not so bad, she tells herself – not really. It's not so bad to let it go.
Wouldn't he want to be up in the sky?
Still, she holds it. Holds it, smiling, feeling happy, feeling sad. Her cheeks are wet, she realizes – wet and freezing in all that cold wind –
And when she opens up her fingers, that final piece is in the cold wind too, drifting, drifting, up and away. Suzume sits on that bluff, and she watches it fly. She watches it until she's only telling herself she sees it long after it's gone, squinting into the dimming light of the early-come evening.
And then, numb down to her bones, she goes home.
Because he's always home now, her brother is there when she arrives. Sitting cross-legged out on the back porch in tattered pants and a shirt too thin for the weather, he has his hand cast over his eyes, watching her as she trudges down the hill. Earlier that morning, she'd told him she had a meeting with one of her social workers – her usual excuse – and her lateness is expected. There's nothing threatening in his demeanor when she makes her way into the garden and up onto the deck. As she draws closer, a lazy, expectant smile begins to surface across his scarred face –
But it doesn't last very long when he spies her new prize. The box is so smooth it's nearly reflective, gilded even by the weak sun in her hand. She holds it out for him to get a better look. He stares at it for one long moment before his eyes flicker up to her, narrowed in his now hard-set face.
Halfway home, Suzume had decided the best course of action was to keep it out in the open where he could see it. If he were to suspect she was hiding it from him – hiding anything from him – she knew she'd be in for something rotten.
But more than that, he's just been so good lately. It had been easy to convince herself that he might be capable of taking the phone for what it was: something given to her by the people in charge of her welfare so that they might better keep in touch with her.
Something even he could accept with rationality and poise.
Now, though, looking down and into his ice-cold eyes, Suzume finds herself doubting her choices.
"Don't freak out," she warns, trying desperately to fend off the defensiveness already starting to creep into her tone.
He freaks out.
"The hell is that, Suzu?" His hand is a snake. Quick, deadly – but she knows him well enough to expect that. Dancing back on her feet, she puts herself just out of his reach, reflexively holding the phone up and over her head. Impossibly, his eyes narrow further. Sharpened down to slits, the sliver of his blue eyes are as thin as a knife's blade beneath his heavy lashes. "The fuck you need something like that for?"
"It's part of – " But of course he doesn't let her explain. He's up on his feet as fast as she's moving backwards, towering over her, lunging after her, and it's just like before, when it was raining, when he'd chased her out into the ravine.
He's fast – but she's faster. Maybe it's the weekly flying sessions with Hawks, but Suzume feels more agile, more graceful, and she ducks, sidestepping him, indignant and terrified in her own tiny, futile way. There and gone, she can feel his fingers graze the sleeve of her blazer. He hisses as they miss her by millimeters.
But her brother plays dirty, and her hair is long. He catches the ends of it right as Suzume makes it to the edge of the porch, and she feels her head jerk back sharply right as she tries to scrabble away. It hurts, immediately and tremendously. Her breath is wet fog on the air when she cries out, tears a needle-prick burn in her eyes as he uses the length of her hair as leverage to pull her back into him. Like a cage, his arms come up and around her.
"We're not doing this again," he's saying from between gritted teeth. His own breath is like a forge-fire bellows against her ear. It's too hot, scalding smoke in her hair. Thrashing in his arms, the rubber soles of her shoes squeak pitifully against the wood, but if it troubles him at all, he doesn't let on. It seems their summer games have given him lots of practice. "Fuck, cut it the fuck out."
"I told you not to freak out!" She's howling, incensed, both with him and with herself for even daring to hope he might be normal about this. Always the tender-head, her scalp hurts. Her vision blurs with tears.
"Yeah, and I'm a fucking freak," he snarls. "That's what I do." Now his mouth is somewhere near her jaw from the way she keeps writhing, trying to wriggle free of his unrelenting grip – and god, his hands hurt, too. They dig into her arm, into her side, bruising and iron-tight, tearing a strangled whimper out of her that she fights to keep down. It's a losing fight. All of it is.
She thinks she feels him shudder against her.
No use. It's never any use. Her breath leaves her in a rush, a groan, an exasperated and petulant sigh. Because she knows what he wants, Suzume lets the fight go out of her. Because she wants to make him work for it, she goes deadweight in his arms.
Of course he adapts. Hauling her backwards across the porch, he doesn't bother to lift her up enough to keep her heels from dragging across the floor like an ungainly corpse. When her ankle strikes the lip of the door, she howls out her new pain into the cold gloom of the lightless house.
"Serves you right," he grunts. Undeterred by her theatrics, he continues to drag her through the kitchen and out of the sun.
"You're being dumb about this, and for no reason!" In her ankle, her scalp, all of it, she can feel her pulse pounding. It aches with every beat of her heart.
"No reason, huh?" She knows he could carry her properly. Pick her up like a baby, like a bride, like any of the ways he likes to hold her and carry her. He could cradle her possessively against himself in that way she likes far too much, like even letting her walk next to him is too great a loss for him to bear. He's always been like that. Always been clingy. And ever since they'd come to their tentative agreement – ever since she'd begged him to stay home more, told him she'd die without him – he's been even more so.
But he doesn't do that. Wanting her to live with her decisions, he keeps his arms hooked up and under her own, wrenching them back in a way that is far from comfortable. "That's why you tried to bail the second I go to touch the goddamn thing?"
"I kept it out to show you! I wasn't trying to hide anything!" Now she's hissing too, feral-cat mad through her muted blubbering. "But you wanna get all – all psycho grabby hands!"
Once they're in the common room, he dumps her unceremoniously across the tatami. It's only by the grace of his leg coming up to half-break her fall that her head doesn't clatter against the hard, wooden floors. Winded more by surprise than any actual pain from the fall, Suzume lays sprawled out with her head at his feet, scowling up at him through the messy spill of her hair.
It's been so long since her brother has been like this. So long since he's been this bad. And he's terrible, now. A bully. He spends what feels like several minutes – but what is probably much less – staring down at her, his twisted expression such an obvious tell. He enjoys this. Savors it. There's a nasty smile taking hold at the corners of his mouth like an invasive, thorny weed, and his eyes are still as thin and fine as a razor's sharpened edge.
And then, without so much as a word, he bends over and plucks the phone's box from her weakened, yielding fingers.
In a fit of pique, Suzume heaves a sigh. This one is whiny, utterly hopeless, and she punctuates it by sticking her tongue out at him.
Something infinitesimally small gives in his face. It's a little less thorny now, she thinks, or maybe it's that his eyes are open more. But then he's straightening up, his fingers nipping at her cheek in a stolen pinch. When she makes a soft, back-of-the-throat noise, his smirk takes on a new and different cast.
"Mmm. Real cute," he says, wetting his lips as he appraises her. His voice comes from somewhere low in his throat, maybe even from his gut. It's a frequency that makes Suzume feel a little buzzy in her head –
And maybe in her own gut, too.
His smirk widens, and she wonders if he knows, somehow. Like maybe he can feel it in the air. "Cute, cute, cute," he says, sing-song, smirking through it, "but don't go thinking being cute's gonna get you outta jack shit."
"Come on," she whines, tossing her head back and forth while trying to ignore that liquid-hot feeling playing traitor to her very justified exasperation. "You got your moment to be a butthead. Let it go, please? It's not even a big deal! You're being a big dumb weirdo for no reason! It's just to deal with social worker stuff."
"Oh, just social worker stuff." His tone is dangerously placid. "Then what's it matter if I check it out?" With both his hands on the box, she watches him work the bottom half out from the top with a renewed sense of outrage snapping to life inside of her.
"'Cause it's my first real phone and I wanted to be the one to open it!"
Her brother casts her a pitying glance over the box, but the mean, toothy sneer that splits his face is all the confirmation she needs to know he doesn't mean it at all. When she goes to push herself up to resume losing the fight – because really, she never had even a single hope of winning it – he adds insult to injury by pinning her head to the tatami with a swift motion of his foot. Flat on her back with her head now turned parallel to the floor, the angle is nightmarishly uncomfortable. With his bare foot pressed into one cheek, her other is pressed forcibly into the tatami. Between that and the shock of being so soundly thwarted, Suzume can't help the little yelp of betrayal.
"Gross! Gross – ugh, cut it out!" Screwing her eyes shut, her voice pitches up, high and shrill and warbling with disgust. It's hard to know what's worse: the sharp sting of the tatami biting into flesh, or the way the hot skin of his foot feels pressed against her face. Blindly, she swats at his leg. She doesn't expect mercy, and he doesn't give it to her. It's evident humiliation – not pain – is his goal. Working his foot back and forth, the arch of it slides against her cheek, his heel brushing against her ear. There's the sound of cardboard clattering against the floor a few centimeters near her head, and she almost doesn't hear it over his laughter.
Beneath the weight of his foot, Suzume goes very still save for her shallow and almost frantic breathing. It occurs to her very suddenly that she doesn't know much about phones, and even less about fancy ones. What if Hawks has gotten into it and done something obvious? What if he's left her a welcome message, or set a picture of the two of them as the background, or done something else sentimental and –
"Huh. This thing is totally fresh," her brother announces. She thinks she catches just a trace of genuine surprise in his tone. It's as if he were expecting something damning, and god. Even if she is hiding things, he isn't fair! Anger renewed ten-fold, it's all she needs to start clawing at his foot again, scratching at it with her stubby little nails.
"Get your nasty foot off my face and lemme do it! I wanna do it! It's mine!"
Even with her eyes open, it's hard to get a good look at her brother. The angle is prohibitive. She has to cast them to the side, straining to see him in her periphery. His face is an indistinct blur lit by the soft white-blue glow of the phone's screen.
But he isn't looking at the phone, she realizes.
He's looking at her.
"Yeah? You think it's nasty? Think I'm nasty?"
Nasty is right. The expression on his face is nasty, his hellish grin somehow stretched to uncanny proportions. The light from the phone catches in his eyes, a sinister moon-white gleam, sickle-shaped and threatening. Without any preamble, he holds out her new phone and drops it. It lands with a muffled thump against her – now bare – stomach.
And that drags her frantic attention to something else.
Somehow in the struggle both her blazer and the white shirt of her uniform have gone askew, hitched up past the midpoint of her ribs. With nothing to shield her, the glass of the phone's screen is startlingly cold. It has her squealing, thrashing again, twisting under the incessant weight of her brother's foot –
At least until he's down on the floor with her, too.
His foot is gone. Instead he has her head held fast between the vice-tight press of his knees as he kneels around her, her flailing arms captured by the wrists in each of his hands. His own face looms up above her own as he grins down at her. Bright with an awful, vindictive promise that she knows all too well, his teeth are wet and bright.
He's been so nice these last few months. So indulgent. Touching her, holding her, not wanting to let her go – following her into the kitchen, lurking around outside even when she uses the bathroom. Even if not quite edgeless, he's been noticeably softer, like a favorite knife grown dull with so much handling. Suzume has grown too complacent with that. Too comfortable handling it – handling him – as if he won't or can't hurt her –
Won't cut her if she runs her finger along the blade.
But now he's looking down at her, and his eyes are a ravenous and unrelenting inferno set above a hauntingly familiar smile. It undoes her despite how well it suits his sharp-featured face. She's done it, she thinks – she's done this. Pressed her finger too hard against the blade, and drawn blood.
The only person she can really blame is herself.
"You know, you're so right," he's saying, and that mock sympathy is back in his voice. "It is pretty gross. Got some dirt on your pretty face. Real shame, that. But don't worry, Suzu. I'll take care of you. I'll clean it right up."
His tongue slips out from between his lips, once, and then again. Suzume thinks he's wetting his lips. She stares at the tip of that red-pink tongue as it moves, transfixed by the sight of it and his mouth for reasons other than simple terror –
But then his mouth is moving too, saliva bubbling up and past it, beading shiny and wet on his lips.
"What're you –"
There's no point finishing the sentence. The words choke in her throat and die on her lips. With horror, she's already realized exactly what he intends to do.
Snared in his hands, her arms go tense. Her whole body does, too. Some small voice in her head urges her to fight, crying out, ashamed of this deer-in-the-headlights bit. But a different part of her – a much larger part of her – realizes that she can't do anything. There's no getting her hands free of his fingers, or her head free from his knees. Any fight is just for show. He wins either way. Whether she's in defiance or submission, he'll take his victory regardless.
Fight. Fight! That voice is getting quieter now. And now there's a string of saliva dangling from her brother's rictus-grin mouth, a thread pulled thinner by the split-second. Dangling only centimeters over her face, it is with a wave of suffocating dread that Suzume realizes any movement is only going to hasten the inevitable.
Resigned to her fate, she closes her eyes, squinched up as tight as she can manage. Barely daring to breathe, she goes very still. The room is so quiet. The glass screen of the phone against her stomach has warmed to her body temperature, and she can barely feel it – not like she can feel her brother's calves, as hot as brands even through the fabric of his pants.
Not like she can feel his breath as it fans across her face –
Not like –
The first bit hits her cheek. It's hot like the rest of him is, not warm like she thinks most people's spit would be. It's hot, and wet, and thicker than water as it runs a rill down the curve of her face, down into her hair, sliding down against her ear. She shudders, squeamish – and then there's another. This one drips down her nose, pooling along the valley of one closed eye.
It's an awful sensation, the feeling of it pattering down against her skin. She goes rigid and breathless, her jaw clenched against a cry building in her throat.
Wet on her chin. Wet on her other cheek. Wet on her forehead, and across her lips –
"Hey," she hears her brother say, and she lets out a shuddering, tearless noise that's midway between a sob and a retch. If he's talking, it at least means he's stopped for the time being.
She should answer. Keep him talking.
But she doesn't. She feels him move her arms – now very limp – so he can hold both her wrists with a one-handed grip. With his now free hand, he traces the wet curve of her nose with one finger, down and over her similarly wet lips. Then there are two fingers, working his saliva past her lips and into her mouth. She refuses to let him breach the barrier of her teeth, but he doesn't seem particularly affronted. His voice when he talks is slimy with the smug kind of confidence he gets when he knows he's going to get what he wants. "Y'know, you look real cute like this. So messy like this, your face all wet." A dry chuckle has his breath fanning out against her face. "It's making me feel real sweet on you, y'know? So sweet I just might be willing to cut you a deal."
Sweet on you, he says. Suzume tries not to think about it. Tries not to be taken in by it. She tries, and she tries, and in her throat, that cry is an animal noise, frantic behind her teeth. It's as hot as his breath. It's as hot as his saliva, and his legs against her head –
Again, she doesn't say anything. She doesn't trust herself. More than that, her response isn't needed. He's going to offer her his deal anyway, tell her in that slow, drawling way of his that gets under her skin and makes her feel so angry, so hot and helpless –
God, she wishes it was only anger she was feeling right now. Only anger, and not the shameful rest of it.
Her brother hums. That gets under her skin, too. "I'll play nice. I'll let you set up your new phone, let you fuck around with it. I can tell you're real excited about it, and I get it, Suzu. I really do. It's a big thing for you. You're getting older. You got yourself your first big girl phone, you're feeling like you're a proper big girl now, and that's real cute. Real cute. So I won't take it from you, yeah? Won't set it up for you. Won't change the language to German or Dutch. Won't even throw it down the well out back, like I was thinking about doing." She hears him pull air in from between his teeth, a distinctive, soft noise. When he speaks again, she knows he's smiling. "You just gotta do one thing for me."
Here it comes, she thinks, panicked and incensed and flushed hot all over. Whatever it is, here it comes.
WIth a fondness she can feel, his fingers brush across her cheek, and then her lips. "Open up for me."
Oh, she thinks. Oh.
And she knows exactly what he means to do.
The saliva on her cheeks and across her eye, running slick down her jaw, puddling over her throat, it's all so wet, still. His breath catches in all that wet as it ghosts her face, making her feel it all the more. Blindly, eyes still closed, she tries to shake her head.
"No, no – no, that's too gross, that's really, really gross – "
Against her face, his breath comes in huffs, near silent laughter. "Too gross to soldier through for your phone?" Feigning disappointment, he clicks his tongue. "Too bad for you, I guess. It is your choice."
Fight or submit, agree to his deal, or not – he wins either way.
"You can't keep it from me – " She's saying, but her voice falters. She doesn't even believe it herself.
His own voice is as smooth and as cool as silk when he says, with a gentleness that belies the threat inherent in it, "Wanna bet?"
By contrast, she is not nearly as cool. "They need to keep in contact with me – if I don't, I could get – I could mess up everything, and then – get in trouble, and I might have to – "
"So we just leave then. We do things my way." His fingers are moving across her mouth. "Which, c'mon, Suzu. You gotta know by now I'm always looking for reasons to do things my way."
The cry behind her teeth is quieter now. Shrinking back, softer, helpless, just like always. He's bigger than her. Stronger. Older. His brain works better than hers, works faster, and his logic is impossible to argue against, especially when he has the will and the means to enforce it. Suzume does not doubt his sincerity, not even for a second. If she refuses him, her phone is as good as gone. She can imagine him making them leave as early as tonight –
Here one moment, gone the next.
But even so…
"But it's so… it's so…"
There's of his breath against her face, stirring in her hair – more of that subdued laughter. All around her, she feels him shift. Knowing well enough that he has her, he has the confidence to let her hands go. She doesn't disappoint him. She holds them against herself, her wrists crossed one over the other, her fingers clinging to the collar of her shirt as he stands and moves, settling back down over her in the opposite direction. Now his knees straddle either side of her waist, his calves pressed into her hips.
He doesn't think she'll deny him. Why else would he switch positions? With the room to use both of his hands now, he's touching her mouth again, cupping her face. With the soft brush of his thumb, he sweeps the saliva out from under her eye. Rather than clear it away, he seems content to rub it into her cheek. It milks a shivering sensation out of her, one that arcs up her spine like summer lightning far too hot for December. Suzume tries to ignore that, too.
"Hey, hey. Shhh. It's not so bad, really. Not when you think about it." He tucks her hair behind her ear with wet fingers. "What's a little spit at the end of the day?"
Suzume shudders. She tries to tell herself it's only disgust. "It's gross," she says meekly, voice sounding faraway. If she can't convince herself, how can she even hope to convince him?
"Is it?" In the heavy silence of the room, the way he smacks his lips wetly is very loud. Suzume flinches against the floor, as if that might put some distance between them. It doesn't. "Really, Suzu. I really do want you to think about it. You think there isn't a whole mess of spit when people kiss? There's no getting away from it when someone puts their tongue in your mouth – their spit, your spit. It gets everywhere."
And there's that infallible logic again. "But that's…"
"It's what?" He's cutting her off before she can get a word in edgewise. It doesn't matter. She doesn't have any good ones to offer. "It's different? How? You know it ain't. And don't you think you can tell me you don't think about that – that you don't think about kissing. Wet and messy, oh, I know you do. That's how you like it, right? You can't act like it doesn't get you all worked up. Everytime that shit comes up in a movie, you go stock still. You stop breathing for a solid minute. You turn away, think I can't see you, act like you're hiding your face, but I know you're watching. I know you can't look away. Your face gets so fucking hot."
Her face is hot now, she realizes – hot beneath his fingers, beneath the wet smear of his saliva. This is, of course, not at all something she's thought of, and now that he's put it in her mind like a bad, rotten seed –
His tongue in her mouth. His spit in her mouth. And there's that feeling again, misplaced summer lightning in the bleak mid-winter. It's out from her spine now, thunderous in her extremities. She takes in a shuddering breath, too scandalized to speak. That feeling is a current in her blood, pins and needles in her lungs and in the tips of her fingertips. Still, she tries to make herself. "But that's not – it's not the same – "
It's not, right? Right?
"Ain't it?" Another chuckle. "Like you ain't had my spit in your mouth already. You're always trying to eat after me, drink after me. You wait till I've had a nice, good, meaty bite of whatever it is I'm having, and then you come whining after me for it, fiending for a taste, for a sip. So greedy. What's that about, huh?"
The way he says it – what's that about, huh? – has her realizing with no small amount of shame and horror that he knows exactly what it's about.
That he's always known.
(Pitiful, needy, indirect little kisses. Always stolen.)
Lightning and fire. Suzume's body is nothing but electricity and flame. It had never dawned on her that he might know, but in retrospect, she feels stupid for ever thinking he wouldn't. Her brother is clever. Sharp as a whip. Of course he would know.
Of course he would.
(And of course he'd use it against her.)
Smothered to death by her own shame, her voice is a carcass in her throat. She doesn't know what to say. Eyes still squeezed shut, she bites her lower lip so hard her face blanches.
Her brother tuts at her. Working his fingers into her mouth again, he untangles her teeth from her lip and soothes his thumb over the sore spot. "Hey, hey. Shhhh," he says, his voice just a hair above a whisper. "I never said I minded, did I?"
It's true, she thinks. He didn't. But there's no real comfort in that. Not much, anyway. If he'd meant her any real kindness, he would have never mentioned it at all.
"Suzu. Suzu." Low and sweet, he croons her name. His breath is hotter now – closer than it was a minute ago. Taking hold of her face with both hands, his thumbs work over her cheekbones. The flesh of his palms is tacky against her damp skin. "C'mon, pretty girl. You can handle it, right? I know you can handle it. I believe in you – and more than that, I know you want it. You do, don't you? You've always wanted it. So c'mon. Just open your mouth. Do it for me if you won't do it for yourself."
She doesn't want to. At least, she thinks she doesn't. If Suzume thinks about it at face value, she feels so sick her stomach sours. But when she thinks about it a little more – when she floats there in the formless dark behind her cinched-shut eyes, feeling his heat over her, around her, his saliva cooling on her skin…
Hearing him call her pretty girl, listening to him say her name like that…
…she wonders if maybe he isn't right.
Maybe she does want this? She always thinks about him kissing her. She always has, and it's only gotten worse as they've both gotten older. Awake or asleep, she dreams about him just like this: his body a looming shadow set against the overhead lights, his mouth pressed to hers, breath and heat in her mouth.
Tongue in her mouth.
Wet, and slick, and strong.
She shudders. Again, again. The thoughts in her head are making her dizzy, and she's dizzy because she's doing exactly what he says she does. She's holding her breath, flustered, ashamed from thinking about it.
From wanting it.
She wants to shake her head, but he has his hands on her cheeks. There's no moving now. So instead, she takes a deep, unsteady breath –
And she parts her lips.
"Oh, good girl." Her brother says every one of those three simple words so slow. So emphatically. He takes in a breath too, slow like the way he talks, in through his nose. "Good girl," he says again, and it comes out in a breath, an almost-sigh so thick with satisfaction and pride it makes her toes curl involuntarily inside the shoes she shouldn't be wearing in the house.
And then, "Put out your tongue."
Nothing is ever enough with him. One shameful indignity is never enough, she thinks, caught between wanting to cry and wanting to make another noise she suspects might be another humiliation yet. He always has to have more, and more, and more.
But he's been so good to her lately. He's been so sweet. And she loves him, she realizes, her adoring heart sinking even as it swells up so sweet for him, her butterfly filled flip-flop stomach done up in knots. She loves him so, so much. She wants to make him happy.
She always has.
So, she does as he asks. Hesitantly, she puts her tongue out.
Above her, she feels her brother move. One hand leaves her face. The other he uses to hold her jaw, his thumb pressed into one cheek and his fingers in the other. His grip is firm – unyielding. It has the familiar effect of forcing her opened lips into an almost-pucker.
"Suzu," he says, and it really is a whisper now, "open your eyes for me."
For me. For me. It's always for him. More debasement. As it always is when he gets this way, it's easier to make herself comply if she closes her eyes – or if she can somehow convince him to close his own. His eyes, Suzume thinks, are beautiful. Her favorite color. And yet facing them down is one of the hardest things she has ever tried to make herself do. It's the same every time. It never gets any easier.
But he says it so sweet. He says, for me, and even though she doesn't want to do it, she also realizes she wants to do it more than anything else in the world. This is Suzume's worst and most terrible secret. Even when she knows she shouldn't want to do what he asks, some foolish, eager-to-please part of her always does.
So she cracks her eyes open, and of course he's looking down at her. His own eyes are half-lidded, that vibrant jewel-tone aquamarine burning down into her just as hot as his flames. He's wearing a knowing smile, an indolent smirk. It's the sort that somehow both frustrates her and tears down all her resistance at the same time –
Not that she really ever had much to begin with.
"Ohhh, see? You did it. You're so good. So brave." And he's so patronizing. Suzume hates how it makes her head swim. Too fuzzy-headed to do anything but gape up at him, her agitation falls away from her, mouth open like he wants. Tongue out, red-faced, pathetic –
"Don't close your eyes again," he tells her.
Mouth open. Tongue out. Red-faced. Pathetic.
And, most important of all: obedient.
She keeps her eyes open and trained on his as he leers down at her. And there's his teeth, and then his tongue, wetting his lips for a third time. She watches them purse, just a little, a terrible imitation of an almost-kiss: one smooth, the other rough and ruined. The saliva gathers there, frothy and wet –
And she doesn't close her eyes, even when she flinches – even when he spits straight into her open, waiting mouth.
Her mouth is hotter than her skin is. Even so, his saliva when it hits her tongue is hotter still. Beneath him and the seemingly palpable weight of his blue fire eyes, her body stiffens almost violently, the heels of her feet doing a jittery little slide against the tatami. Hands clenched, she suppresses the urge to gag –
And finds it easier than it should be.
It doesn't really have a taste – not that she's trying to taste it. Not really. As he makes a quiet mm-hmm sound and brushes a damp curl of hair back from her face with his free hand, she feels it slip down the slope of her tongue towards the back of her throat. It's hot, and wet, and it tastes like nothing. Unable to breathe – unable to do much besides focus on the sensation of it sliding down – she stares up into his eyes. The weight of them holds her still. They are as much a force on her as his grip on her jaw and his weight over her prone body.
His gaze isn't easy or half-lidded anymore. There's a wild, ravenous look in his blown-out eyes, sharp as the teeth she catches sight of in his mouth when he moves his lips, wet again, frothy again. His breathing is as erratic as her own as he spits into her mouth a second time.
Good brother. Bad brother. But is this even bad?
Is he bad if she wants it?
Doesn't she want it?
Doesn't she?
There's more of that saliva in her mouth, more of that tasteless wet heat filling it up. Squirming beneath him, she feels restless in a way she can't describe. The dark look in his eyes threatens to swallow her up, and she doesn't hate that. Maybe she wants that too, she thinks.
It's always like this with him. It has been for so long.
She wishes he'd just kiss her. He wishes he'd close the space between the two of them and press that half-ruined mouth to her own. Push his spit into her mouth with his tongue instead of doing it like this.
Suzume knows beggars can't be choosers, but even so –
"Please," she mumbles. His spit is in her mouth, and she doesn't know what to do with it. She wants to hate the way it feels. She wants it so very badly, but she doesn't –
She doesn't.
Please what? Stop?
No.
Kiss me, she wants to beg. Please, she thinks, feeling so needy it makes her sick. She's sick. So sick. Always so sick. He makes her sick. Good or bad, everything he does, it always makes her sick – sick in the stomach. Sick in her head. Sick in her heart.
Please, please, please!
Tightening his hold on her cheeks even more, her brother sucks in a ragged breath. In a voice just as ragged, he commands her: "Swallow it."
This time, Suzume doesn't even think about trying to deny him. Perfectly compliant, her teeth close, and her tongue works in her mouth, pressed up to the roof, working all that wet in her mouth back. Pulling away from her face, his hand curves around her throat, his thumb nestling in the hollow of it as she does as she's told, swallowing back his gift. With his thumb pressed there, she knows he feels it when she does. His razor-focused eyes dart from her throat to her face, back and again.
It is the gaze of a man starving.
She doesn't understand his obsession with her mouth. Even so, she somehow knows enough to guess what he needs even before he asks it. With a heart made sick with love, Suzume gives it to him: she parts her lips and puts her tongue out, showing him her empty mouth just like she knows he wants her to do.
"Oh, Suzu," he's saying, and it's a purr, a growl, equal parts adoration and menace. As with everything else about him, it's incongruous. It makes her incongruous too. She hates it. She loves it. She wants more.
He gives it to her, voice hushed, as saccharine and deadly as antifreeze. "Fuck, you're so good. So sweet. So perfect."
Unable to keep his hands still, the one at her throat is back up on her face, cradling her cheek. The other returns too, two fingers tracing over her wet, slack mouth before they do what she fully expects them to do and press past her lips. This time, she doesn't hold her teeth shut. This time, she lets him fill her mouth with them. Feverishly she wishes it were his tongue instead –
But she finds she's willing to accept a surrogate.
And it's okay, she thinks, staring up at him. Her lips close around his fingers. The pleasure on his face is raw and unfiltered by any of his usual indifference, and there is nothing dispassionate about his smile anymore. He looks happy. Really happy. Manic with it, almost, staples pulled tight and uncomfortable at the corners of his smile. "My favorite," he murmurs, smiling, teeth and silver metal. "My perfect little sister."
She's done this, she thinks. Something like pride mixes with the mess of shame and flutter-winged devotion in the pit of her roiling stomach. She has.
And that's worth something, isn't it?
"And look," he's saying, his voice knifing through the haze of her thoughts. "See? What'd I tell you." The hand in her mouth moves side to side, and his smile widens as her head moves with it willingly. "You wanted it too, didn't you? You liked it."
Did she?
Maybe she did. Maybe she does.
They stay like that for a few minutes more: him over top of her, his fingers in her mouth, her looking up at him. He strokes her cheek with his free hand, her hair, her throat. He murmurs praises, edged cruel but tender – and slowly, slowly, his breathing and hers both settle. Growing heavy-lidded like they usually are, his eyes soften. The white of his teeth are put away behind a much more moderate smile. And then, with a kiss to her forehead, he's up and off of her, standing, wiping his wet fingers against his pants.
The room is cold. Suzume mourns the loss of his heat immediately. She mourns more than that too, she realizes. Already his attention is drifting off down the hall. She aches for the weight of his gaze, and even the sensation of his fingers moving against her tongue.
For a split second she's almost convinced that she cannot breathe when he isn't looking at her – that if she lets him leave the room, she will lay here, gasping for air, choking on it until she suffocates. Nearly choking already, she cannot keep the whine from her voice as she reaches out and touches his ankle. "What're you doing?"
Judging by the way he looks back down at her with a knowing smirk, she knows he hears it.
"Think I might go take a shower."
No, she thinks mutely. No, no, no. She will die. She's sure of it. She feels her face shift, openly distressed. "But I don't want you to go."
He quirks one dark brow at her, but his smile lingers. "Mmm. Thought you wanted to fuck with your phone."
Her phone. Suzume has forgotten it entirely. Brushing her hand across her stomach, she finds nothing but skin. Like a blind girl, she feels around beside her without sitting up until her hand closes around something hard and foreign – and there, she thinks. There it is.
The screen has gone dark. The glass that she imagined would be so pristine and clear is smudged with finger prints and flecked with bits of dust from the floor. She'd been so excited about it on the walk home. Now she looks at it, and she feels nothing – she feels nothing at all except so very cold in the absence of her brother's heat.
Without really thinking about it, she puts the phone back down on the ground. Looking back up at her brother, she finds him standing there still, staring down at her, smiling. In a wordless plea, Suzume lifts her hands up towards him, and he takes them in his own, tugging her to her feet and into his arms. The relief she feels at the familiar sensation of his chest against her cheek is immediate and immense. The way his arms cinch so tightly around her is a different and comforting kind of suffocating. If she dies from this, she thinks she might be happy. She swallows the saliva in her mouth and shivers.
"Can't you do it later?" She murmurs into his chest.
"Why?"
He knows. He knows, she knows he does. But he's conniving, conceited, and he asks anyway.
"'Cause I'd rather be with you."
He laughs. Outside, behind him, Suzume watches snow falling thick against the window pane, all that white made stark against the slate-colored velveteen clouds of the sky. When had it started snowing, she wonders? How long has it been?
One of his hands is up in her hair now, sifting through it. When he speaks, it's against the top of her head.
"Oh, Suzu." Warmed through with affection and self-satisfaction in a way she's already forgiving him for, he says her name like she's passed some sort of test. "Of course."
February, 12 years.
Coming up on the end of her first year of middle school, Suzume spends most of February pouring over potential new schools. Putting her grandmother's antiquated monstrosity of a printer to use, she makes each school its own streaky black and white brochure, printing off reams and reams of information from every website that catches her interest. She attacks them with staplers and highlighters and multi-colored pens. She takes notes, makes charts. Soon enough, they're all over the house. Scattered across the common room, or peeking out from beneath her futon. There are even some left in the bathroom, water-logged and forgotten.
"Suzu," her brother tells her one morning, the sopping remains of one such brochure hanging limp and sad in his hand. He's fresh from one of his frequent showers. "It's not a research paper. It's not even university. It's fucking middle school. This is ridiculous."
She's sitting cross-legged at the table in the common room, reading and re-reading through the few she's managed to narrow down to her favorites. A bowl of miso soup sits off to the side, long gone cold. "But I've never had a choice before," she exhales dramatically, tossing herself backwards onto the tatami. Lost and wanting guidance, Suzume stares up at her brother, playing at her best puppy dog face. "Which one do you think I should pick?'
It's a stupid question to ask, really. She knows the answer. Her brother wants what she can't have. He wants to stay here in the comfortable obscurity of Chichibu. In lieu of that, unspoken though he's left it, she knows he wants her to give up school all together and disappear with him.
But now more than ever, she's gotten used to having him around. Now she needs it. Before the earlier months of the previous year, Suzume had taken his constant presence for granted. Now she's determined not to do that ever again. She's determined to make sure he doesn't have to go off and do whatever awful things she knows he goes off to do –
Determined to make sure he has to do less of them, anyway.
Her brother's hands tighten around the wet paper in his hand. Suzume jolts upright again, her own hands flung outward to catch the dripping water before it can touch the tatami mats. "Nii-chan!"
Holding his dripping fist out further, he makes her stretch to save it. "I think the whole situation is shit," he declares, entirely unhelpful. It's not new information. He's told her this every step of the way. Agitated, she wipes her wet palms on his pants, meeting his raised eyebrows with a grimace –
And he immediately retaliates by molding the cold, pulpy mess of soggy paper to the back of her neck.
Fighting back a squeal, she squirms at his feet, trying and failing to ignore the way the damp seeps into the collar of her sweater. "Ugh! Gross! C'mon, jeez – can't you at least look? Please? I'm down to just three – and if we're both gonna have to move, it only feels right to ask what you prefer."
Which is true. Suzume does think it's fair to ask him.
(And now that the excitement at making such a big decision has started to wear off, she finds she's also terribly frightened at the idea of making any sort of important choice without her big brother's involvement.)
Not even bothering to sit, he squats beside her at the table and peers over her shoulder at the three pseudo-brochures fanned out in front of her: Nabu Middle School, Korusan Middle School, and Orudera Middle School.
Nabu Middle School is the closest to home. Located in Saitama, it's the highest rated school in the entire prefecture. By contrast, Korusan and Orudera are both in Musutafu. Korusan Middle School is by far the most illustrious of the three, with Orudera trailing behind the others by a significant margin.
Nabu and especially Korusan have Suzume's attention for mostly academic reasons. Orudera remains entirely out of sentiment. It's the middle school closest to where she grew up in Musutafu back when she'd first met her brother. Some small, private part of her wonders how Izuku and Katsuki are doing –
Wonders if they're still there.
(Wonders if they might be attending that school, too.)
Demonstrating what Suzume is sure is his preternatural ability to read her mind, her brother immediately nixes that idea. Plucking Orudera's brochure from the table, he tugs each piece of paper free of the staple holding them together. One at a time, she watches them flutter to the floor like wings plucked from a butterfly foolish enough to be hopeful about something very, very dangerous. "Vetoed," he says, his tone neat and clipped. It bridges no room for argument. She doesn't give him one.
Surprisingly, that tone takes on an even harder edge when he snatches Korusan's brochure next. Crumpling it up into a tiny mangled ball, he tosses it effortlessly into a waste paper bin across the room. "Deffo vetoing this one."
Following the surprisingly elegant arc, Suzume watches that one go, too. Then she looks back up at him incredulously. She hadn't expected that reaction. "What'd that one do to you?"
Pointedly ignoring her, her brother's attention shifts to Nabu's brochure. Without even touching it, he gives a noncommittal sort of shrug, yawns, and makes a vague and flippant gesture with his hand. "Guess it's that one by process of elimination."
Three weeks, Suzume thinks. Three weeks of obsessive research, all down to this. "You didn't even really look at any of them," she grumbles, feeling a little deflated.
Hawks would have been a better confidant, she thinks, a little bitterly. She'd even kind of wanted to ask him. But after the New Year, he'd started dropping suggestions for schools out west, closer to Kyushu. Suzume hadn't had the heart to risk a situation where she'd have to openly shut him down. If she were closer to Kyushu, no doubt he'd want to see her more often –
And if he were to see her more often, her brother might get wise to the double life she's been leading.
(No, she thinks, almost grimacing at the thought. She'd long ago determined it was imperative to keep those two as far apart from each other as possible.)
"Don't need to read shit," she hears her brother saying, and she realizes she's zoning out. "I know what I need to know about 'em."
Does he? She wants to ask him about Korusan. Orudera, that makes sense. If she remembers Izuku and Katsuki, she has no doubt he does, too. But Korusan, and her brother's reaction to it – that she can't understand.
She wants to – but she shouldn't.
She knows better.
And yet…
"Nii-chan…" She tries to keep her tone light, inoffensive. A little sweet, a touch needy. He tends to like that. "Did you go to Korusan, maybe?"
Beside her, her brother silently peels the wet paper from the back of her neck – another thing she isn't expecting. She'd expected a frown, or a threatening grin, or the eerie emptiness of his cold, unrelenting gaze weighing down on her. But then she sees him plunge the mess of shredded paper into the glass of ice water she has on the table, and she realizes quite suddenly that he's skipping all those steps.
There's no hope of getting away. At the sudden tightening in her gut, some prey-animal instinct that pumps her veins jittery with adrenaline, she knows that immediately. Still, she tries. She isn't even halfway to her feet before he's on top of her. Pinning her down and back, he ignores the way she starts to squeal, to throw her hands up to catch his chest, to try and hold him back –
He swats her hands away so easily. And there's that smile. It's serene. Threatening. Behind his messy black fringe, his eyes are awfully bright. With his fist held up and over her, he drips ice water across her face, pattering across her sweater. Yelping, Suzume wriggles beneath him as if that might spare her the onslaught, somehow –
As if that won't encourage whatever devil he has inside of him.
"So I'm gonna veto that question too," he says coolly. Obviously encouraged, his hand pushes that freezing mass of sopping paper up and under her sweater, spread slick over the sensitive flesh of her stomach.
The temperature disparity between her warm skin and that frigid glob of pulp is so intense it burns. Bucking up against him, Suzume hisses into the knuckles she wedges between her teeth, trying not to cry out. From his throne atop her writhing form, her brother watches her, leering and pleased. She thinks she sees him shiver.
"Shit, Suzu. Don't be so dumb," he says, pitching an over-dramatic sigh that sounds a little shuddery at the end. Through her fast blinking eyes, she catches sight of him shaking his head. "You know better, don't you?"
She did. She does.
(But she also doesn't have a lot of self-control.)
Making a face at him, she manages to choke out, "Yeah, well, you miss every shot you don't take."
By some stroke of luck, that seems to catch him off guard. He stares at her for one long moment – and then he snorts a laugh. The moment passes, the danger and her frustration with it. In a rare act of mercy, his hand slides out from under her shirt. The offending wet paper goes, too.
"You sure miss a lot of 'em, kiddo," he says smoothly. "Sometimes I think you might be throwing the game on purpose."
Too relieved to snap at that tiny barb, Suzume pats his chest with the ends of her fingers. It's meant as a peace offering, a gentle admonishment. There, there.
He raises his eyebrows benignly at her.
"Just you wait," she tells him, more playful than threatening. "I'll get a hit in one day."
There's a smirk on his face when he takes her hand in his own, lifts it to his mouth, brushes his lips against her knuckles. "Keep trying, Suzu," he says slyly, his lips moving against her skin, "and you just might get what you want."
It's a trap, she knows. It is. She knows him. He's goading her. Ask again, comes his dare. Take another shot. See if it hits. See if it takes.
You might just get what you want.
Wordplay.
Because it won't hit. It won't take. Her curiosity will go unanswered, and his retaliation will be even worse.
But with her heart hammering in her chest and a blush creeping hot up her cheeks, she finds it takes everything in her to keep from trying again. Like his lips burn on her fingers, the question burns on her tongue. It's her own damnation, begging to be spoken aloud.
And she has to wonder:
Is it really the answer she wants and not the retaliation?
Because lately, she isn't so sure.
Early Spring; 13 years.
With the choice of school as settled as it will ever be, Suzume spends March devoted to passing her final exams and sifting through the twenty some-odd options Hawks has to suggest for living arrangements. Most are apartments in Saitama, minimalistic and modern accommodations in newly-constructed buildings. She spends her walks to and from school discussing them with him, browsing through pictures of severe looking concrete monstrosities with a mounting sense of dismay.
She's grown used to the wildness of Chichibu. Her mountains, her endless forests, her tiny house at the bottom of her tiny hill – it all feels more like home than anything she's ever known. Saitama, by contrast, is a sprawling cityscape, a million and a half people teeming through her fast-pumping arterial streets, high-rise towers like crooked teeth gnawing through an often smog-blanketed sky. While fun to visit, it's not somewhere she can really imagine herself living. It's been a long time since she's lived in a busy city. Excitement aside, Suzume isn't exactly thrilled to go back.
So eventually she settles on a small apartment in Asaka, a satellite city some thirty minutes outside of Saitama by train. It will mean over an hour round trip commute to and from school. Considering her nearly fifty minute walk in Chichibu, she doesn't take the extra ten minutes as too bad a loss.
In that brief window of time between the end of her first year of middle school and the start of her second, Suzume spends much of her time with Hawks, finalizing everything for both her new school and the move. Even under the guise of doing it all with her social worker, her brother is not at all happy with the arrangement. Still – mercifully – he keeps most of his frustrations limited to rude commentary and the occasional eye roll. Three days into her ten day break from school, he finds something in Yokohama to keep himself busy during the day.
(She suspects it's to punish her, and tries not to think too hard about what that something might be.)
Those few days at the end of March are some of the busiest of Suzume's entire life. She takes the train back and forth from Chichibu to Saitama, from Chichibu to Asaka. One whole day is spent in the city of Misato, browsing through IKEA for new furniture with Hawks. It's a weird little adventure, one he spends a good portion of fending off the constant attention from customers in between picking through each and every centimeter of the place with her. Together they sit on every chair and open every drawer, marveling like children at the foreign names, at plushies, at strangely-shaped shelf knick knacks. When Suzume hangs back, too self-conscious to try the beds in any real capacity, Hawks is there to coax her out of her shell. Plopping down on one, he pats the spot beside him, grinning. "Can't tell how nice they'll be if you just prod at 'em like that. You gotta lay down, really get a feel for it!"
So, they do that too. They lay sprawled out on the display beds together, Hawks on his stomach, and Suzume on her back, spiritedly debating the pros and cons of each –
Too hard. Too soft.
Just right.
Without any intention to bring anything from her grandmother's house besides clothing and kitchenware, Suzume buys so many things: tables and lamps, cushions and chairs, a cozy little desk and a cute couch upholstered in a cheery, sunshine yellow fabric. She settles on a full-size mattress that threatens to lull both her and Hawks to sleep, and picks out a bright white bed frame for it. The frame's details promise an impressive amount of room beneath for storage.
(Perfect for her brother's clothes.)
In the cafeteria, they both try Swedish meatballs for the first time. Suzume thinks they're just all right, but Hawks gets seconds, and even thirds, demolishing everything on his plate with the voracious appetite she's come to know he has.
"Don't like it?" He asks through a mouthful of meat and lingonberry jam.
"It's okay!" She doesn't want him to think she's ungrateful, but after a moment spent fidgeting on her stool, she can't help herself from adding, "I think I could probably make this better at home."
Swallowing, Hawks levels her with a comically dire look. "Well now you're totally obligated to do it." When she tilts her head, he drops the act and laughs. It draws the swooning attention of a pair of what looks to be college aged girls sitting at the next table. If Hawks notices, he doesn't let on. Suzume has his full and entire attention, his golden eyes and his golden smile. "And you gotta give me a taste, obviously, in case that wasn't clear."
So a day later when all the furniture and strange-shaped knick knacks she'd purchased arrive at her new apartment via a truck Hawks had arranged for, she decides to do just that.
The two of them convene there too, early in the morning. Having already shipped out her grandmother's kitchenware, Suzume takes the time to unpack it in her small but serviceable kitchen. That leaves Hawks to attack the catastrophic mass of flat-pack furniture boxes with a box cutter and the seemingly iron-will to put it all together.
The apartment is cozy and not very spacious. It's easy enough to carry on a conversation with him from her place on the kitchen floor even though he spends most of his time in the living room. Bent over particle board pieces, he wields a strange looking metal stick he claims to be some kind of wrench. She's doubtful, but he must know what he's talking about. Soon her living room is half boxes and half constructed furniture, Hawks red-faced but preening among it all.
For lunch, the two of them sit together at the kitchen table he's put together for her where she serves him Swedish meatballs, lingonberry jam, mashed potatoes, peas, just like at IKEA. She'd spent the entire train ride from Chichibu to Asaka pouring over recipes before settling on one she thought sounded the most promising.
Sitting there in the pair of chairs she'd watched him build piece by careful piece, Suzume watches him now, too – watches the way his face changes as he takes a bite, and then another. Raised eyebrows, widened eyes, the quirk of a smile – and then he closes his eyes, March sunlight freckling his face with light as he succumbs to obvious bliss.
"Holy shit," he says, laughing in delighted disbelief through the words. "You did it. You blew that other garbage right outta the water. This is, if you'll pardon me saying so, so fucking good."
And it feels good to be here, she thinks. Maybe not Chichibu-good, but quiet. Nice. Situated on the outskirts of Asaka, her apartment is one of two second story rental units settled atop a first floor trio of businesses: a bakery, a flower shop, and a hair salon. The building itself is old, quaint. It has a certain years-old charm that reminds her of her grandmother's house.
The entrance to the apartment itself is a set of creaking stairs out behind the building, well out of view from anyone who'd be traveling via the street. Abutted on that side by a small but dense woodlot, it had seemed the best chance for privacy Suzume suspected anyone could find in a city –
As secretive as anyone could hope for.
With no small amount of satisfaction, she watches Hawks clean his plate three times over. It was something she'd accounted for when she'd made the dish. Four servings; three for him, one for herself.
And even after all of that, he seems disappointed there aren't any leftovers. Suzume takes it as a compliment.
"I think I'm gonna request you start making dinner for us like, a couple times a year, chickadee," he says as he resumes his assault on the seemingly never-ending list of unmade furniture waiting for the touch of his dexterous hands. "Y'know, if you want. Don't wanna come across as greedy."
It's difficult for her to imagine Hawks as anything even resembling greedy. Self-sacrificing to a fault, he's always working himself into what she suspects will be an early grave considering the hours he puts in and the coffee he drinks. If anything, his constant aversion to stepping on her toes leaves Suzume feeling a little sad. It works for her that he never asks for anything more than she's willing to give, of course. She isn't sure that she'd have the capacity to give him anything of substance. Her brother simply demands too much of her time, and she's too eager to give it to him.
And yet, even knowing that, she sometimes wishes Hawks would. Sometimes she wishes he'd be more selfish with her. Ask more of her.
Demand more.
That he doesn't always has her worried that all of this – the way he fusses, the favors, the calls – is all something born out of a sense of obligation.
Of guilt.
Because liking someone, Suzume thinks – loving them, feeling real love, familial, romantic, any and all of it – it isn't selfless. It can't be. It's not like the songs say it is. Not like it is in idealized stories.
Real love is needy, and ugly, and desperate. Love, she's learned, is taking your licks alongside your kisses, and being thankful for both.
It makes sense, she thinks. Why else would everyone always go on about how hard love can be? How it's all about compromise?
Why else would it hurt as much as it does?
Hawks is so nice, Suzume thinks. Bent over another piece of furniture, his wings flutter in pleasure behind him. He's so happy to be useful. She catches him smiling at her often when she looks up from her work in the kitchen, polishing pots, putting away plates.
And it makes her sad, she realizes.
It makes her sad because it's just too easy.
The day before her second year of middle school begins, Suzume takes her brother home to her new apartment for the first time.
It feels strange and more than a little melancholic on that final ride over from Chichibu to Asaka. With a painful lump in her throat, she watches the mountains and the forests fall away, giving way to empty countryside, to industry, to urban sprawl. At some point, her brother slips his hand around her own and gives her fingers a squeeze.
"You gonna cry?"
Her eyes are wet, but she shakes her head stubbornly. It's a conscious choice to ignore the expectant and vaguely eager note in his voice.
"We could still bail," he says. No doubt it's also a conscious choice on his part to be charitable by not pointing out her obvious lie. "Find some other little bumfuck inaka to hide out in."
"And you'll be gone all the time," she says, voice splintering a bit around the words. "It's not worth it to me."
Her brother doesn't have anything to say to that, but he doesn't take his hand away, either. His thumb glides over her knuckles, back and forth, back and forth, the train carrying them both into this new and unknown chapter of their lives.
"Surprised you got an apartment with a living room."
Despite the small size of her new apartment, her brother has somehow managed to spend over an hour prowling around, poking his nose into every nook and cranny. Sitting on the canary yellow couch, Suzume watches him thoroughly inspect a decorative ladder shelf covered with tiny succulents. His attention is unrelenting. He acts as if she might have hidden some terrible secret behind the little pots.
"I thought about getting a 1K or a 1R," she says, smoothing her hand over the soft, tasseled blanket in her lap, "but considering we're sharing the space… I don't know, it just felt like a studio set up would be extra cramped. May as well put my dad's money to use."
Suzume has done up the place in bold, bright colors: creamy whites and warm golds, lush greens and vibrant purples. As he often is, her brother is a dark spot against it all. With his bleak clothes and black hair, he seems spectacularly out of place. The sunlight that filters in through the slatted blinds glints in the staples of his hand as he lifts one dainty and especially intense pink flower off the shelf. With his back to her, it is the only spot of color on his person. "Where'd you get all this?"
"IKEA. Same place as all the furniture. Turns out they sell a lot of plants – keep them all at the end of this big labyrinth maze of furniture and housing stuff, y'know, like kitchen supplies and bedding. They wanna get you when you least expect it." She hadn't planned on buying any when she'd arrived, but that last leg of the trip had completely undone her. Much to Hawks' amusement, Suzume had filled up an entirely new cart with plant after plant after plant. There are dozens of them all over the apartment now. She's got them hanging in the windows, and perched on any and every flat surface – green, green, and more green, everywhere anyone can look. Even if she had to leave the forest back in Chichibu, she could still bring the memories of it with her to Asaka.
Setting the plant back down with surprising gentleness, her brother turns to face her. There, finally, is a spot of color. The vivid blue of his eyes matches the color of the blanket spread over her lap almost perfectly.
"Well?" She asks him, a little timidly. "What d'you think?"
For a long moment, he studies her with the same intensity he had the plants. "Y'know, on the ride over, I tried to imagine what you'd done with the place," he says, finally. "Gotta say, I pretty much got it spot on. It's very you, that's for sure. The seven thousand plants are the only real surprise."
She winces. "That bad? We could… we could change some things if you want."
A faint smile creeps across his sharp features. It makes them look a little softer. "Didn't say that. I mean, I can't really say it's what I'd do with the place, but that ain't a complaint. Truth is, I wouldn't do jack shit with it. You know how it'd go: mattress on the floor, boxes for tables if you were lucky – and you wouldn't be lucky. Just can't be assed with that sort of thing. Plants, fancy pillows, matching sheets, all of it – I don't ever think about shit like that." He shrugs, still smiling, and casts his eyes around the room. "It's nice. Real cute. Feels like you. Smells like you. Not so much old lady junk everywhere, and that's a bonus."
Then his eyes fix on her again, and he exhales through his nose, an almost laugh. "Though I gotta say that couch is loud as hell. I kinda hate it."
She wins some, and she loses a lot, she thinks – but she's not too broken up about losing that. Suzume stares up at her brother, tall and dark and lean, so alien against the comfortable warmth of the room. She loves him all the more for it. She loves him for all the ways he is so unlike herself.
"I feel like…" Weaving the tassels of the blanket around her fingers, she looks down at her lap, suddenly feeling very bashful. "I feel like, 'cause the room's all soft and cute, it, um… it makes you look extra cool. Somehow."
That earns her a full-bodied laugh – a surprisingly striking flash of warmth that rivals anything else in the room. "That's gotta be the dorkiest fucking thing anyon'es ever said," he tells her, but Suzume can tell by his voice and by the grin he's wearing when she looks back up at him that he doesn't mean it in a cruel way. "Seriously, how you just come out and say shit like that, I'll never understand."
Another rare win, and this one with no real loss. She smiles up at him herself, patting the spot beside her. "You should come try it out," she says, trying to be sly. "Maybe you won't hate it so much when you give it a chance." And then, much quieter, and significantly less slick: "Really though – could you come and sit with me for a bit?"
The room is small. It takes him only a few steps to make his way around the coffee table before he collapses in a mess of long limbs beside her –
And it takes her only a half-second before she's crawling into his lap.
He lets her, because of course he does. Holding his arms open, he lets her shift and settle, lets her rearrange herself to her own liking. Drawing in on herself, Suzume makes herself small. Small in the room, small in his arms, tugging the blanket with her.
"It's okay to freak out, Suzu," he soothes, exhaling slow against her hair. She breathes in and tastes smoke, tastes the mouthwash they both use. Pushed up a little under the hem of her skirt, his hand settles over her thigh, his thumb working over one of those secret bruises he likes to give her so much. This one is a few days old. It's not quite fresh, but certainly not healed. It hurts enough when he touches it to make her flinch… but not in a bad way.
(No, she thinks – it hurts in a way that feels almost unbearably good.)
"Feels like you've been on the verge of freaking out all morning."
The white-knuckle grip she has on the blanket does nothing to stifle the shiver that runs its way through her. "I think… I think if I start freaking out, I won't be able to stop," she admits. "School starts tomorrow, and it being new… I feel like I'm really wigging out about it. And the last few days, too – like they've been so exciting, getting to pick out all these things, getting to set everything up, getting to show you – but they've also been… they've also been terrible too, kinda. And I miss home. I miss Chichibu. The streets are so busy, and there's people everywhere, and everything's different, and I keep thinking I'm doing something wrong, and I just…"
Staring down at her hands, she trails off, fumbling over her own feelings. And then she's looking further down her legs, at her brother's hand beneath her skirt. There's something arresting about the way it moves beneath the fabric. Her throat tightens around a noise she's too ashamed to make.
Instead, she presses herself closer to him and whispers, "And I missed you so much, too."
Her brother chuckles. Beneath her skirt, his fingers tease at another bruise. "It was just for a couple of days, Suzu," he says, his lips gliding against her ear. "Not like you didn't see me at night."
"Yeah, and it wasn't enough, and I hated every second of it."
It's the truth, she realizes. It's a strange sort of contradiction, that she could have fun playing the part of a grown up out on her own, away from him – that she could enjoy setting up her apartment, or visiting her new school, or hanging out with Hawks –
But that she could also hate it as much as she realizes she did.
She wants to do those things with her brother. She wants to shop for furniture with him, decorate an apartment with him.
Play the part of his wife, sister or no.
Untangling one hand from the blanket, she lets her fingers trace the back of his knuckles through her skirt, transfixed by the way it contours to every sharp-angled bone. There's a sob inside of her somewhere, but she's too tired to find it. Too tired, and too distracted.
"I hate being away from you."
He presses his mouth to her forehead, his fingers to her bruise, sweet and mean in equal measure.
"Good girl," he tells her, smoke and mint and heat gliding over her skin like an intoxicating fog. "My good girl."
hr
Early April; 13 years.
The next day, as planned, Suzume takes the train for her first day of school.
By now she thinks she should be a master of all things trains. The last two weeks has seen her spending hours upon hours on them, her nose buried in her phone, browsing for recipes or for information on games she never knew existed. She has innumerable distractions. She should be brave, undaunted. Confident.
Suzume is none of those things.
This time she boards the train and she sits down in an empty seat towards the corner, closed in on herself like a fist. She leaves her phone and her new Switch in her bag. With her arms wrapped around herself, she refuses to look at anyone.
It shouldn't be this hard, she thinks. It shouldn't – and yet it is. She's more frightened of this second year of middle school than she ever was of starting school in Chichibu, and the worst thing is she cannot even begin to guess why that might be. Still, anxiety has been chewing a hole right through her resolve since a few days back. By now it feels wide open and gaping, more hole than girl – like anyone could look at her and see her for the ridiculous coward she knows herself to be.
The minutes crawl by. One minute, two, three. Refusing to look anywhere but her lap or her hands, she counts the minutes down to the second in her own mind in a voice that shrieks and trembles, fidgeting with the cuff of her navy school blazer.
Five and a half minutes in – five and a half whole agonizing eternities – the train comes to a stop. Suzume watches the feet of people shuffling on and off, trading places, leaving. Taking seats.
And then someone fills one of the empty seats next to her.
She doesn't think much about that. Not at first, anyway. She spies grey slacks, forest green converse, and thinks: a student. A businessman wouldn't be wearing sneakers.
Then it's back to fretting, her full-time job. Back to slipping her fingers beneath the cuff of her jacket to run her thumb over the smooth plastic button of her shirt cuff.
Beside her, her seatmate repositions himself, his leg brushing her own briefly. There's the sound of a backpack unzipping and zipping again. Then, a few seconds of tinny music, cut short, followed by an abrupt silence. When she manages to tear her eyes away from her unsteady hands, they land on something much more interesting than pants or shoes or shirt buttons.
The person next to her is holding the very same handheld her brother had gotten her for Christmas: a Switch. What's more, she recognizes the opening cinematic of the game on the screen immediately:
Monster Hunter.
"Oh my god," she hears herself saying long before she realizes it's her doing the talking. "You play Monster Hunter!"
You, she says, as if she knows him. Looking up from the screen, she finds a stranger looking back at her with exhausted, violet eyes.
They belong to a pale boy she thinks must be close to her in age, give or take a year or two. His hair is wild – wild enough that it puts even her brother's to shame, swept up and out of his face. It's every bit the same violet color as his eyes.
He doesn't smile at her, but he doesn't frown, either. Regarding her for one long moment with a completely unreadable expression, he eventually settles on a dry, "It's good for commutes."
Too embarrassed to speak but too excited to retreat, Suzume bends down and pulls her own messenger bag into her lap. After a bit of wrestling with the straps, she produces her own Switch, holding it out like a holy relic that will surely join the two of them together on some epic quest. She's aware of him watching her turn it on – aware of the way he shifts forward in his seat when the same opening cinematic begins to play on her own brandished screen.
Press Any Button. The cinematics are out of sync, but functionally, the two of them are the same. When he looks back at her, there's no hiding the goofy, excited smile that creeps across her face.
"You should do a hunt with me," she says, breathless and a touch wild-eyed.
Another beat of silence, and him considering her. "We gotta be friends first," he says finally, matter-of-fact. Then, as if to clarify, he adds, "In game, I mean."
"So let's be friends!"
Fortunately for Suzume, he doesn't seem too put out by her bull-in-a-china-shop approach to social skills. Unfortunately for her, being friends in game poses a problem. She doesn't know how to be friends. She's never had a friend to play games with outside of same screen co-op with her brother or Katsuki, years and years ago. The boy has to walk her through the process, guiding her back out of the game so they can friend each other via the console.
(She feels terrible for the inconvenience.)
Halfway through, she catches him side-eying her in her periphery. He's not very subtle about it. When she lifts her gaze to meet his directly, he doesn't bother looking away. "So, uh. Not trying to be a dick or anything, but you do know how to hunt, right? Monster Hunter's notoriously rough on first timers."
Red-faced, Suzume bobs her head up and down, insistent despite the way she feels like she might crumble to pieces at any moment. "I do! It's not even my first Monster Hunter! I think I'm kinda good, even… I played a couple of the old ones a bunch. It's just… I haven't ever played with anyone else before."
"Cool. Same." And then he's straight back to business. After some set-up and further instruction, she manages to find him for her list: LudovicoTechnique. A few more button presses, confirmation screens, her heart in her throat, and there, she thinks. She watches her friends list tick up from 0 to 1 for the first time ever.
Her first real gaming friend.
"Also, figured I should say it'd be fine if you were. New to the game, I mean." Rather than her, the boy is looking down at his own screen now. She spies her username on his list, and realizes with a start that she's his only friend, too. "It's just the train only takes 25 minutes to get to school. Not a whole lotta time to go over what needs going over. You know how it goes. Game's pretty involved. Or," he pauses, peeking at a smart watch beneath the cuff of his blazer, "more like twenty minutes, now. So even less time."
"No time to learn, but more than enough time for a quick hunt," Suzume says with some gravity, trying to sound like a serious hunter and not like a nervous, excitable school girl on a train. His eyes slide back to hers, sleepless, rings of deep purple smudged like bruises beneath them.
"Yeah." Both his tone and expression are stoic again. He's managing the part of the serious hunter much better than her. "Let's do it."
By some miracle, the two of them are close enough in rank that neither of them outstrips the other by any significant margin. She lets him pick the monster: the hyper-aggressive fire breathing t-rex styled Anjanath. "I need a gem from him," the boy tells her by way of an explanation as they zone into the map together. It doesn't matter to Suzume; she's happy to fight anything with him, for any reason. She just doesn't tell him that. "I killed over twenty times and haven't gotten lucky yet."
She's read online that hunts in Monster Hunter scale their difficulty based on the amount of players, but Anjanath – while as ferocious as he always is – doesn't seem too much harder than normal. Her new friend plays with an aggressive confidence that seems to work well with her more conservative, play-it-safe style. Wielding a long sword, he busies himself with Anjanath's tail. Suzume stays out of his way, going for the skull with her own support-heavy hunting horn.
It all goes exceptionally well. More than just their rank, they both seem evenly matched in skill. At one point, Suzume even manages to save him from a faint with the frantic use of a multi-target heal. The boy laughs when she does, the sound almost startling her. Up until then, she hasn't seen so much as a smile from him.
"Thanks for the life powder," he says, his tone considerably lighter than before as his fingers fly with ferocity over the buttons. When she manages to paste a cute reaction sticker of a cat giving a thumbs up into the game's chat – one that costs her half of her health bar because she's too distracted to dodge a wide sweep of Anjanath's tail – it earns her another laugh.
"Totally worth it," is his generous declaration as he hits her with his own multi-target heal.
(And Suzume finds she feels so much less terrified about life than she did only ten minutes ago.)
The fight takes a little less than fifteen minutes. The two of them together prove a competent, deadly team; she watches him hack off Anjanath's tail, earning the pair of them more rewards, and he mumbles excitedly about the buffs her weapon brings to the table under his breath. ("The health regen is great, but damn, not having to run earplugs because of Sonic Barrier is so fucking good.") At the end of it all, when the monster is dead and the two of them are running around carving up both Anjanath and his poor sundered tail for loot, the boy lets out a low whistle.
Hardly daring to hope, Suzume casts him a sidelong glance. "Did you get your gem?"
"Holy shit, I did." In contrast to the exhaustion that haunts his eyes, he sounds ecstatic. Suzume can see his wide and gratified smile reflected in the black screen of his Switch as the game transitions between scenes. And then, a few seconds later when the reward screen reveals further loot: "Dude, you got me another one 'cause you broke his head – and then my palico stole me a third one! Twenty hunts and nothing, and suddenly I got three of the stupid things."
Tilting his screen towards her in an invitation for her to look, Suzume leans over his arm and squints at the tiny text. Sure enough. Two more gems.
"And thus Anjanath's long suffering at the edge of your hunter's blade draws to a bloody close," she says very solemnly, trying not to smile. It is, after all, Cool Hunter Hours. "You've carved the gems straight from his flesh."
Her brother would call her a dork for saying something like that, and Suzume almost immediately wishes she hadn't. She's mostly fine with her brother thinking so, but this new friend –
"Hell no. No rest for that jackass. His descendents are gonna feel it when I hunt them weekly out of spite alone." He's laughing again. Trying not to disturb the other passengers, he keeps it low, but she can feel it. With his arm pressed to her hers, it rolls through him, and it rolls through her, too, genuine, contagious. Soon they're both stifling laughter as a pair of businessmen standing closer to the door shoot the pair of them affronted looks. The severity of their judgment cows Suzume some, and she looks away, hiding her lingering grin behind her Switch. The boy doesn't seem remotely phased, either by the men or her own silliness. Instead, he leans into her, nudging his elbow gently against hers.
"So, your uniform. Looks like we go to the same school. Nabu, right? But I've never seen you before. You a first year?" The smile he wears crinkles at the corners of his sleepless eyes, and Suzume can't help but find it a little charming. "You my kouhai?"
She looks down at her navy blazer, at her grey skirt, her white tights, pristine and new. Then she looks at him, and realizes with a flutter of excitement that the blazer he's wearing is the same as her own. "Only if you're a third year, Maybe-senpai," she says, shaking her head. It's delightfully easy to return his smile. "Second year for me."
"Second year transfer, then." He's pleased by this reveal, if a lot more subdued than she is. "Even better. Worth giving up being Maybe-senpai for that."
"I'd ask if it were possible that I'm your Maybe-senpai, but since you knew I was new, I guess that means you've been at Nabu for at least a year…"
"A stellar deduction," he confirms, "'cause it looks like we're both second years." And then, surging forward, he becomes a boy on an entirely different hunt. "So, now that we've become brothers and sisters in the hunt, I guess we gotta move onto the second most important bit. What's your name?"
Both her Switch and his linger on the reward screen, entirely forgotten. Under the intensity of his gaze, Suzume feels suddenly and almost overwhelmingly bashful, shifting in her seat. She hasn't had a real conversation with anyone in years outside of the known safety of her brother or Hawks – and certainly not with a peer. "Umm, it's Meihane," she says, stumbling a bit over her family name before pushing onwards, soldiering through her bashfulness. "Meihane Suzume."
"Well, then, hey. Nice to meet you, Meihane-kun," he says, giving her another nudge of his elbow in lieu of a handshake.
Meihane-kun, he says. It's polite and not wholly unfamiliar. He could leave off the honorific and put more distance between the two of them by doing so. It's a good start, she thinks. A good starting place for an acquaintance her own age. Formal, but not too formal.
Still, feeling suddenly as if she's been starving for years and only just realized it, Suzume finds herself shaking her head. "You don't have to – I mean… I mean you can call me Suzume, or – or even Suzu. You know… if you want."
It's bold. She worries it comes off a little desperate, asking him to call her by her first name so quickly. They don't really know each other, and she has no idea if he has any desire to be friends.
His eyebrows raise in surprise as he considers her, his heavy-lidded eyes widening minutely. "Yeah?"
"Yeah." Nodding again, Suzume wonders if she's ruining her chances at a new friend by trying to force a level of familiarity he isn't comfortable with. "But just… only if you wanna. Meihane-kun is fine. Meihane-kun is great! I'm fine with – "
The ghost of his earlier smile is back on his face, less excited and more gentle. It's no less pleased for either. "Well, then, hey," he says again. "Nice to meet you, Suzume."
Suzume takes in a breath and lets it out slow, trying to pull the rapid thrumming of her heart back under control. The screen of her Switch is still reading out her rewards, and she realizes she hasn't even checked to see what she got.
"Hey," she whispers, and then starts laughing again. "I got two gems, too – one from the head break, and one from my cat."
"What'd I say? Brothers and sisters in the hunt," the boy says, imitating the gravity of her hunter's voice from earlier.
The over-the-top drama of it does nothing to help stifle her laughter, but the train sliding to a sudden stop certainly does. Bewildered, Suzume looks up and around the car, listening to the voice from the speakers intone the name of the station. The boy beside her turns off his Switch and slides it back into his backpack.
Then he's reaching out, tugging at her book bag to bring her attention back to himself. "This's our stop," he tells her, sweeping up from the seat to his full height.
He's tall. Especially for a boy her age, he's much taller than she was expecting, very near the height of her brother. She blinks up at him, the swaying lights of the train haloing behind him and casting him in soft shadow.
"Wait!" Now it's her reaching for him, her fingers catching at the cuff of his sleeve. There's that same surprised look from earlier: his eyes gone wide, his eyebrows raised. He doesn't do anything to disengage her hand. "What's – what about your name?"
"Hey, no need to panic. I promise I wasn't gonna take off or anything," he says, rubbing the back of his neck with his unmolested hand. The wry smile he wears is very much in his voice. "But, it's Shinsou. Shinsou Hitoshi."
And then, well before she can ask for clarification, he adds, "But you can call me Hitoshi, or even Hito. You know, if you want."
Dimly, Suzume is aware of people moving around her: most of them are adults, but there are other kids too, a few here and there, scattered about in their uniforms that match hers. She sees them moving out of the edges of her vision, flicker-flash streaks of navy and grey, but she doesn't look at them. She doesn't see them. She's too busy looking at her new friend, wide-eyed and unable to keep herself from grinning in a way she knows her brother would most definitely describe as over-eager and quite possibly stupid.
"Well, then, hey," she says, very nearly jumping to her feet beside him. "Nice to meet you, Hitoshi-kun."
(And she realizes with a bubbly sort of glee that she is not the only one grinning like an over-eager idiot after that.)