どうしたの？
Pai woke in silence, with a scream stuck in the back of her throat and her heart pounding in her chest like boulders falling down a mountainside.
For a horrifying moment, she couldn't place where she was. The ceiling above her head was wholly unfamiliar, and the faint scent of jasmine incense lingering in the air had her curling her lip as she jerked upright on a too-sharp inhale that stung the back of her throat. The ceiling was supposed to be white, the walls as well, pressing in on every side of her, disorienting with how large the white made the small room seem.
But the ceiling above her head was brown, planks laid beside each other, and much further away. Even as she stared at it, she could feel her mind slipping, being pulled back into the memorydream, though in a distant part of her brain, she knew she was awake.
Slowly, finally, when her breathing relaxed and the tension and fear in her twitching muscles had eased, she looked down from the ceiling. Her breath felt too loud for the space around her, but even as she noticed it, her breaths quietened until the only sound that was left was the gentle rush of wind rustling the leaves of the tree next to the window next to her.
Her heart leaped to her throat when she abruptly realized that she wasn't alone. She jerked, fingers twitching into clawed shapes as she instinctively reached deep in herself, searching for the one thing that she remembered always being there to protect her as best as it could when nothing else ever did, before she went completely still.
In a chair pulled up beside the bed she was on – close, but with enough distance that it didn't feel suffocating – was Rikuto. He sat with his legs drawn up to his chest and his temple resting on his knee as he slept. The sound of his even, deep breaths steadied the burst of fear that had gone through her when she'd realized someone was in the room and she hadn't noticed it immediately like she needed to, so as to never be caught unawares. His chair was angled towards her but facing the window, and his face turned to hers.
Pai couldn't look away from him. She stared, taking in her fill of him, her mind a confused array of the few memories in pictures that she could place of those years, whizzing by her so fast she felt almost dizzy with it. His eyelashes and brows were as dark as hers, eyelashes curling up at the ends just a bit, just like hers did.
She looked at his hair, the bed creaking ever so quietly as she unconsciously leaned forward a bit, staring. She could see the white at the roots of his hair, as if it had decided to start growing that way only fairly recently. It didn't look dyed – rather, the brown looked like it was what had been painted on his hair, and the white was what it was always supposed to look like.
His hair had always been a dark brown, bouncing whenever he walked, streaks of lighter brown playing about in the dark curls whenever he stood under the sun, or those painfully harsh fluorescent lights and painfully bright white rooms.
She had a tiny birthmark on the side of her nose, something Shin had noticed and taking to kissing lightly whenever he teased her when she blushed at whatever scandalous little thing he'd decided to randomly say out of nowhere.
Rikuto had the same birthmark, only it was on the other side of his nose.
How stuck in her own head must she have been, for those years – few as they had been – to not notice how physically alike she and Rikuto were? Now that she knew, the similarities were staggering. Others had pointed them out many times before. She could even vaguely remember one girl – Akane? Was her name Akane? – putting her and Rikuto side by side in front of a mirror to show Pai how much they looked alike.
"Creepy, right? Sorta, but nota." Akane smiles sharply at the two. "You guys are like twins. You've gotta be identical." Pai gives her a flat look, to which Akane chortles. "Fine, fine, but you sure you ain't?"
Even then, she had been suspicious that there was some familial tie between her and Rikuto. Maybe cousins? Her parents never talked about any siblings, or her grandparents, but they had to exist.
But no – she and Rikuto were siblings. Twins.
She didn't know how to feel about it. The relief in her at the fact that Rikuto was alive, that he was here, within reach, warred with the confusion dominating her at – how could they be twins? Why didn't she know him, for all her life? Where was he, all that time?
The thought to shake him awake and ask – demand – answers to these questions briefly floated by her, but she blew it away. With his face turned to hers like this, she could see what she hadn't before with the bright fervour of excitement and fury clouding her thoughts.
Rikuto was as exhausted as she was. It was in the dark purple shadows tattooed beneath his eyes, and the pale, almost sickly shade of his skin, and the way he didn't so much as twitch at the sound of the bed creaking when she moved.
As deeply asleep and unlikely to easily wake as he was, she moved slowly, carefully, getting to her feet and quietly walking the few steps to where he slept in the chair. She dropped to sit on her haunches, arms crossed over her knees and resting her cheek on her shoulder as she looked up at him. He didn't stir, continuing to breathe in deep, even breaths. She watched his chest rise and fall with those breaths, almost half afraid he would stop breathing all together.
He kept breathing. Slow, deep, even breaths. The jittery nerves running like crackling sparks of fire through her veins settled minutely as she watched him sleep.
Rikuto, she thought. Even the sound of her voice in her head was quiet.
Rikuto, she echoed, her voice so quiet it felt like the barest touch of a gentle, cold wind on her cheeks.
My brother.
Your brother.
Kuniumi had known. All along, she'd known that Rikuto was her brother. Pai was too tired to find the kindles of anger she knew rested in her at the fact that here was yet another thing Kuniumi had wilfully kept from her for so long. But then she remembered how Rikuto had defended Midori from her. She remembered that it was Kageotra who brought both Rikuto and Midori to her.
Kuniumi wasn't the only one keeping secrets.
On the heels of that realization, Pai felt an abrupt vacuum in her chest as Kuniumi vanished. Her lips twitched as a vague irritation swept through her at how conveniently Kuniumi disappeared whenever she didn't want to do something. Pai wished she could do that, that it was as easy for her.
She looked back at Rikuto, tilting her head to the side as she observed him in silence. She couldn't remember if she'd ever told him about the woman who spoke in her head, the woman she always felt like a physical presence both inside her mind and always right beside her, yet disappeared whenever she so fancied. She remembered some things, but still, there was so many gaps in her memory.
Hesitantly, she rose up a little and reached out to Rikuto, half expecting him to snap awake and snatch her hand away before she could do anything. He didn't, though. He was so painfully tired.
She touched his hair lightly, running her fingers softly over the dark locks. She didn't touch the white roots, afraid that sensitivity would be what woke him. But she stared, her heart settling somewhere at her feet when a few pale strands of her own hair fell over her shoulder. Rikuto said Yamato wasn't the reason why his hair looked like it was becoming like hers, now. He said it was because he didn't know she was alive.
"I thought I lost you."
The memory of those warbling, heartbroken words, said in a voice that never wavered as it did then, twisted her gut to knots. Her heart ached with something heavy as she tried to imagine Rikuto caring enough about her that something like that happened because he thought she'd died. The jitters in her veins surged and she rose to her feet, wincing at the light taps of pins and needles pricking her ankles and feet.
Finally, her attention slipped its reigns from wholly focusing on Rikuto, and she glanced around herself. The convalescence room was empty; not even Kanou was at his desk as he usually was, though the desk lamp was on, so maybe he had been here recently. The room was otherwise plunged in grey darkness, the only other light that of the full moon's rays illuminating the dark corners of the room. She didn't know what time it was, but it couldn't have been that late into the night. The sky outside wasn't dark enough for that yet.
She found a short note from Shin placed on the bedside table, saying that if she woke up before he returned, if she wanted to she could find him most likely with Kouta, talking to Sojobo Kurama. She winced when she read that before carefully folding the paper and glancing at herself. She was in her pyjamas and had no pockets, so she closer her fingers loosely over the note and held on to it as she slowly stood and approached the door to leave.
She glanced back at Rikuto when she reached the door; he was still deep asleep. She hesitated for a moment. Shin had left her a note because he knew she might wake before he returned. She knew she would have jumped to the worst thoughts if that note hadn't been there, if no reason was there for why Shin wasn't in the convalescence room with her. Maybe he had known it, too.
What would Rikuto do if he woke to find her gone, before she could come back here?
"I thought I lost you."
She doubled back to Kanou's desk and picked up one of the many pens he had, scrawling a quick note on the back of the paper. As she did, she glanced at the little clock on Kanou's desk. It was just gone past one a.m. No one should be up and about at this time. Slowly, she went back to the bed, trying to make as little noise as possible as she left the note on the pillow, with her words on it facing up so that Rikuto would see it first.
She left then, wandering down the silent, moonlit halls like a lonely ghost. She didn't know where she was going, just walking as her mind flicked through the few pictures she could remember from yesterday, unclouded by the red haze, trying to see where it unravelled so quickly. She could barely make sense of the things she remembered thinking, how – how angry she was, her hands shaking from the pure force of her pained hatred that even now, she could still feel the vestiges of.
And it was all her. Kuniumi wasn't there to influence her. All that pain, all that rage – it was all her.
She was scared of it. She didn't know what it meant that she could use power like that, that she was capable of tapping into it so clouded by anger. It scared her.
"Why?" she screamed, throat burning from the pain, barely able to see through the tears swimming in her vision. "Why didn't you kill me when I told you to, when I begged you!"
She hadn't had a choice but to ask Midori for it, then. Somehow, So Fu kept their little pets from hurting themselves on purpose, enough that Pai hadn't had a choice but to go to the sister who hated her, for help.
Midori refused, every time.
But Pai wasn't in So Fu anymore. She had a choice now. If something went wrong, if she couldn't control herself the way she nearly hadn't been able to yesterday without Rikuto and Shin there, she had a choice now.
She didn't know what to make of the overwhelming comfort that came with knowing she could always end it for herself, if it came to that. Even as shaky as her strength to face whatever was coming next with everything out in the open was, she felt like maybe she could, if she had this one thing to always be able to fall back on.
No one could take that choice from her anymore.
She felt like she was standing in a glass house. Outside of it, clearly but foggily, she could see everything she was supposed to be feeling right now. She could see it, and she knew that mabe she could mimic what she would be like if she could feel those things. But she was trapped inside the glass house – and she didn't want to leave. She could feel how fragile the house was, how easy it would be to shatter it to pieces that would cut into her as the broken glass fragments rained down over her, and she didn't want to move. She wanted to stay right where she was, immobile and unfeeling, distant from everything she knew she was supposed to be feeling but simply wasn't.
There was no door to the house, no lock for her to look for the key to. She didn't want to, even if there had been one.
As she walked down the quiet halls of Ayashi House aimlessly, she thought she caught vague flickers of random little moments in time. She saw herself chasing after one of the kids when they decided to be particularly riotous any given day, smothering laughs when Obaasan caught Haru or Kaede. Blushing furiously that time when Shin picked her up like a princess and swung her around until she was laughing and dizzy and couldn't imagine being happier than that moment, the buoyancy in her chest raising her to rosy heights. Peering around the corner of a wall with Shiori in search of Ryu, Pai trying hard to maintain an utterly deadpan face but her lips still trembling in giggles while Shiori grinned in wicked glee.
She blinked, and the ghostly mirages of memories faded away. She stood where she was for a moment, taking stock of herself, of where she was. She was almost at the kitchen, just one hallway over from where she stopped. She was nauseas, and though she knew she stood steady, her legs felt weak, like she was aboard a roiling boat that would send her tipping over the edge at any moment. Exhaustion still pulled heavy on her bones, and cold ate away at her insides, nibbling on her toes curled into her fuzzy slippers and fingers tucked under her armpits. An aching emptiness, a sadness she could not name, sat like a weight in her chest, at the base of her throat. She felt like crying, and she didn't know why.
Kuniumi?
Silence echoed back at her, rebounding off the walls of her skull to mock her with its emptiness.
Kuniumi? She tried again, louder. It surprised her, sometimes, how loud she could get in the confines of her own head.
Nothing.
"Kuniumi?" her voice croaked like tape being slowly peeled off, quiet in the empty hall. "A – are you here?"
Nothing. Kuniumi was gone, to that place that Pai could never reach, far enough away that she could almost trick herself into thinking that every instance of talking to Kuniumi had been imagined.
Almost.
So engrossed in the confines of her thoughts that she didn't hear the soft footsteps turning the corner she had stopped at, until Kaede almost crashed right into her.
He yelped, and Pai swallowed a bubble of air in a quiet gasp as he bounced back before a head-on collision could send the hastily prepared sandwich carefully cradled in his hands flying. He raised it above her head to avoid dropping it, and Pai plastered herself to the wall in fright, her heart jackknifing in her chest.
"Sorry, sorry!" he exclaimed. He smoothly stepped to the side, somehow keeping the sandwich together as he did.
Perhaps not so smoothly, when a piece of lettuce from it slipped out from between the bread. Kaede darted forward and caught the lettuce with his teeth, looking back down at her with a close-lipped grin as he quickly chewed it.
As quickly as she tried to calm her rapid-fire heartbeat and quiet her shaky breath, Pai knew he still saw – something – on her face when the mirthful glint in his eye faded as the grin slipped away.
"Sorry about that," he apologized ruefully, watching her carefully. She felt like a bug under a microscope. "I didn't see you there. You were...very quiet."
"It's – my fault. It is fine. I was – I didn't see you either." She stammered. She pursed her lips, trying to hide the tremble wracking through her body.
She thought – she thought it had been something coming at her, something she hadn't noticed coming, something she hadn't been paying enough attention to notice. The fact that it was Kaede, whom she knew could hear the frantic beat of her pulse and her shortened breath, didn't make it much better.
She couldn't be like that. She needed to be better. She needed to know what was happening around her to not be caught off guard like that. What if next time, she didn't feel so weak? What if next time she reached into the tugging gravity in the pit of her stomach and pulled out the blade she knows she can use?
What if next time it's one of the kids coming up behind her to tackle her like they so enjoy doing to everyone, or Shiori or Obaasan or Ryu, and not a Daitengu who can move inhumanly fast to dodge a strike?
Kaede hummed in answer, taking a bite out of his sandwich and chewing it contemplatively as he looked at her curiously. She fidgeted, uncomfortable at the scrutiny, as he asked, "What are you doing up and about?" he raised his eyebrows. "If it's for food, Dragon Obaasan is still awake. That's all I know."
She looked at him. "Am I not allowed to be up and about?" it wouldn't surprise her, after everything that happened...yesterday? She didn't even know how long she had been unconscious.
Kaede stretched out his arm and touched the back of his hand to her forehead. He smiled. "If you still had a fever, definitely not allowed."
She blinked, confused. What did her fever have to do with protecting everyone in the house from her? "Why?"
He shuddered. "Kanou-san enlightened me to the many colourfully imaginative and downright terrifyingly creative and sadistic ways he can make my barely flourishing bi life non-existent if I let you leave the infirmary when you're still sick."
She tapped her forehead where he'd just touched. "I do not have a fever."
He leaned forward slightly, squinting. "You're still looking a little pasty. You sure you shouldn't be back in bed? I'm not Shin, but I'm twelve percent sure I can carry you back to bed, if you want."
A faint blush painted her cheeks at the thought of Shin, and she was glad for the dim lighting in the corridor. She shook her head and said, "I...I was just going to get water."
A lie. Another lie. All she was made of was lies, lies that spilled like ink over her skin to stain it red and black.
"Mhm." He eyed her as he cradled his sandwich to his chest, like a baby. "Water."
"I am not going to steal your sandwich."
"Ryu-kun tried to yesterday."
This time her smile was more than a fissured crack – it was real, and more heartfelt than she'd thought she was capable of in this strange, half-conscious and depressed state since she woke up. "Since when am I an eleven-year-old boy with the appetite of Godzilla?"
Kaede laughed at that. It wasn't his usual bellowing laughter that rang out like a trumpet; it was quiet so that it wouldn't wake anyone, but it was still enough to make something tremble along her nerves, some sort of reassurance that maybe, just maybe, she wasn't seen as the enemy.
She squashed down that flare of hope, grinding it into the dirt. She was dangerous. She couldn't forget that.
"It's nice to see you smiling again, Pai-chan. You should remember," he patted her shoulder as he passed by her, headed back to his room, maybe. "You're our family. We're going to have to see whether or not your brother can be trusted, and your sister's another issue entirely, but you're not So Fu."
"I was."
"You're not now, are you?"
"That does not change what I did."
He nodded, smile gone from his face. Seeing how quickly he switched from happy-go-lucky and joking to dead serious in a matter of seconds sometimes unsettled her. She was never sure which one she was going to get.
"I know," he said. "We all know that. But that doesn't change the fact that you were forced to do what you did. You had to, to survive. If you didn't, you would have died. Never apologize for surviving, Pai-chan."
Her lips twitched at that, at the memory of glancing at Yukiji's face imploding with hurt, confusion, and grief when Pai announced to them all who Rikuto was.
Maybe Kaede was right. Maybe she shouldn't have felt the need to apologize for doing what she had to, to survive. Maybe she shouldn't have felt the need to apologize for outliving others who hadn't been strong enough.
But that didn't stop the guilt from crushing her, the guilt that she knew she'd killed the Mizushima's for purely selfish reasons. She hadn't killed them to stay alive herself. They weren't her mission.
They were Rikuto's.
So who did she apologize for? Herself, for choosing to save her brother? Or Rikuto, for failing to save himself and unwittingly forcing her to step in?
Kaede looked at her sadly, as if he knew exactly what she was thinking about. He shook his head ruefully and said, "See you around, Pai-chan. You're not on any house-arrest, but, the same can't be said about your twin brother." He shot her a sly look. "He's cute, by the way."
Pai stared blankly at him. "He'll break your thumb if you say that to his face."
Kaede winked. "The ones with spice always taste better."
"He will dislocate your shoulder for that one."
Kaede laughed again, taking another bite of his sandwich as he waved back at her and started making his way back to the infirmary. She almost called out to him to ask if he knew where Shin was right now, but changed her mind. She still felt too raw, too open, to face Shin after what she'd done.
She watched Kaede go, a pensive look on her face. So many thoughts swirled in a chaotic mess inside her head. Even though she hadn't lied when she said that her fever had broken, a headache still pounded furiously at the back of her skull.
The headaches truly were relentless; there when she fell unconscious, flaring when she used her [ability], and there when she woke up, reminding her of its presence with repeated knocks in the emptiness of her head. Sometimes the headaches faded, but they hounded her more often than not.
She couldn't tell if that was because of her imminent death or something else to do with her mind being overcrowded with Kuniumi's presence. She didn't know if she preferred either option.
She turned, deciding to turn her then-lie into a not-lie, and headed to the kitchen. She didn't bump into anyone on the way there, but she paused at the threshold of the door, staring at the emptiness within.
Everything was in its place. The cutlery was either in the drawers or airing out in the dish racks set against the wall by the large sink. Plates, bowls, frying pans, saucers, pots, were all in their designated areas in the shelves. The large refrigerator raided on a regular basis by almost everyone in the house hummed to her right, lights flickering on the top half door, the stove and cooker dark and quiet to her left.
She walked into the kitchen slowly, looking around at the darkness around her that was not so suffocating as the one in her mind. It was almost comforting, to be reminded of all the times she'd helped Shiori and Ryu sneak in without Obaasan knowing, or pointing the old lady in the right direction to Haru or Kouta when either made fun of her height or messed up her hair, or smothering a laugh when Kaede begged Yuu or Ryosuke, or even Jirou, to help him hide from the draconian lady of the house.
Kaede said that she was family, but no matter how she tried to reassure herself with his words, the frightening weight in the pit of her chest made her feel like all of this was sand slipping through her fingers, and no matter how she tried to hold on to it, she wouldn't be able to.
Moonlight filtered through the window above the sink, throwing a pale light across the kitchen. She was a formless shadow when she looked down at her reflection on the gleaming steel surface. Her arm, a thin, alien blur on the steel, stretched out and picked up one of the glasses turned upside-down on the dish rack. She shook the glass of the few drops of water clinging to it, then reached out and switched the tap on. She filled the glass to half-full before turning the tap off, raising the glass to her lips.
The water was startlingly cold against her lips, and it stung to have it touch her teeth. She winced at the sensation, grimacing as she slowly set the glass down on the table. She stared at the rippling reflection in the water, but it was not her own face she saw – it was Midori's face looking back at her. Those startling green eyes that spoke to something hidden, something not entirely natural. She blinked, and then it was Rikuto's face in the water, exactly like hers, but not really. Her nose, lips, eyes, cheeks, set just a little differently, just enough to know it wasn't her face.
Her own face swam back into view, but it still wasn't her. The eyes that were a red-rimmed brown were now black, so dark that it was like looking into a void that sucked her in and refused to spit her back out. They danced with manic merriment, her lips twisting into a savage, tooth-baring grin she didn't recognize on herself.
Her vision spun, dizzy from looking at faces that weren't her own. The headache pulsed like a live thing squirming in her skull. She shut her eyes, bracing her hands on the table and leaned down until her forehead touched the cold metal as vertigo washed over her. She didn't realized she'd failed to stop herself from crying until she tasted salt on her lips.
I don't know who I am, she thought, a pathetically broken keen muffled by the back of her hand slipping out of her. I don't know who I am. I don't know who I am. She hiccuped on an aborted cry. Who's supposed to be looking back?
She didn't know anymore. She didn't know.
The sound of the door sliding open had her bolting upright, roughly wiping the back of her sleeves over her eyes and cheeks to wipe away any evidence of her lost crying. Heart thudding in her chest, she glanced back at the door. Her muscles locked, fingers twitching into tight fists with her nails digging into her palms as Yukiji froze by the threshold of the door, their eyes catching.
The two stared at each other across the expanse of the kitchen, Pai already clearing her face of all expression, Yukiji's lips thinning as she flicked eyes swirling with a confusing myriad of emotion to the kitchen sink Pai stood beside. Yukiji was dressed in her pyjamas, pale yellow shorts and a matching long-sleeved shirt, both dotted with tiny orange flowers. Pai was still in the dishevelled state she'd woken up in the previous day, still wearing the same rumpled pyjamas Shin had brought for her to change out of her wet clothes. She felt abruptly vulnerable at the fact, in a way she hadn't been only minutes ago with Kaede. She felt like she was stripped bare, a little bug placed under a microscope for Yukiji to inspect and viciously poke at.
It was Yukiji who broke the tense silence that turned everything to ice in the room.
"You're supposed to be in the infirmary." The words were cold, hard, her flint gaze refusing to give away any of what she was thinking.
Pai swallowed hard as she stumbled to the side when Yukiji strode forward with a steady gait, heading straight for the sink. She stood pressed up against the wall, as if Yukiji's turning her eyes on Pai would be enough to incinerate her. She cradled her cold glass of water to her chest like a protection against something that wasn't coming.
"Water," she croaked. It was all she could get out.
Pai kept her eyes averted, turned to the ground as she said the single word that was more than she should have uttered in Yukiji's presence. She didn't want Yukiji to see the raw pink lining her eyes. She didn't want Yukiji to think that she was fishing for sympathy, or pity.
Yukiji didn't reply as she snatched up her own glass and filled it halfway. She switched the tap off, tipped her head back and drained the glass of water in one go. She washed the glass as quickly as she could, clearly needing to get away from Pai as soon as possible. Pai watched her with heavy-lidded eyes, unintentionally flinching when Yukiji's arm drew close to her as she set the glass in the dish rack.
There was a slight pause after Pai flinched. It didn't last long before Yukiji spun around and stalked back to the door, without a word.
For a second, a brief insanity gripped her, and she opened her mouth to call out to Yukiji, to make her turn around, to tell her again that Pai hadn't wanted to kill the Mizushima's, that she hadn't wanted little Theia to die. Pai had a choice, she knew that, but at the time it hadn't felt like she did. She wanted to try and make Yukiji understand what happened from her side. She didn't want Yukiji to think that she'd wanted to kill the Mizushima's.
Theia had been so small. Her body burned so quickly.
Pai shut her mouth, biting her lip to keep from speaking. Nothing Pai said could make any of it better.
Yukiji pulled open the door and slid it shut behind her. Pai listened to the footfalls of Yukiji walking away.
Silence writhed like a tangible thing in every empty space around her. A shaky breath eased out of her, one she hadn't even been aware she was holding. No relief of the pent-up tension inside her came from releasing the breath. It only reminded her that she was still breathing where others weren't anymore, because of her.
She looked down at the trembling ripples of water in the glass, her lips twisting in distaste. She overturned the glass over the sink and watched the water dribble down the drain, swirling around it before disappearing into its depths. She swallowed thickly as she flicked on the tap and rinsed the glass out, turning the tap off and stepping back to put the glass on the dishrack to dry.
Her eyes lifted as she did, catching her reflection in the water – and she stopped dead when she saw something move over her right shoulder where there wasn't supposed to be anyone else in the room, after Yukiji left. Pai spun around in surprise, heart thumping like the blades of a helicopter whipping about, blood rushing to her head.
Her eyes widened, mouth dropping open as she stared at her own face smirking back at her, glowing crimson eyes narrowed and broiling with some unnameable emotion. Her fingers cramped around the glass, loosening for a brief moment before tightening again, so hard that she was distantly surprised it didn't break in her grasp.
She gaped incredulously at the girl standing before her, wearing the exact same clothes as she was, looking exactly like her...only her hair was not the snow white Pai's was. It was raven black, and as the girl shifted, stepping closer, flashes of a myriad of other colours embedded in the black could be glimpsed for only a moment before fading. The girl's irises were red lined in a ring of yellow, her pupils slit like a cat's, widening and darkening as her maddened smile grew the longer the stunned seconds stretched into Pai's thunderstruck silence. The girl's canines were sharp as a predator's, made for fighting and ripping through tough and tender flesh as they dripped red with blood. Grey smoke curled around her body in wispy tendrils, as if she had just emerged from a raging fire that left her body so hot that steam rose from the ghostly pallor of her skin.
The girl looked like her, but didn't at the same time. She was a wilder, more ferocious creature that said nothing as Pai stared at her, eyes so big they felt like they were about to pop out of their sockets. She tried to regulate her erratic breathing, but it was like there was a knot in her throat, blocking her airways, making it difficult to breathe around it. Distantly, in a far corner of her mind where Logic was desperately trying to regain control, she knew what it was she was looking at. Not who, but what.
It terrified her that she knew, because it could only mean one thing that it was appearing before her now, like this.
Her body was trapped in a block of ice as the girl before her lifted her hand, nails sharpened to look more like claws. Pai flinched, but she couldn't make her body move. The girl said nothing, still smiling in a way uncontrolled by reason, canines pressing into her bottom lip hard enough to cut. Small rivulets of blood leaked out of the cuts on her lip, trickled down to her chin, where the drops hung, suspended in air, before falling to plop on the ground.
Pai opened her mouth, to try to speak, to say something, anything. She cut herself off when the girl tilted her head to the side, eyes flashing, burning, and her hand moved again. The girl pressed one claw to her pale neck, and her teeth were bared in a savage grin as she dug into her own skin, enough to draw more blood.
Slowly, she drew her finger across her neck, slicing it open, the seams of her skin splitting like warm, soft clay breaking apart. Pai stared in horror as not blood gushed from the opening zip of the wound, but black liquid, like oil, but thicker, softer. The liquid coated the girl's fingers as it oozed out, dribbling down her neck, painting the canvas of skin in sluggish black whorls.
Dimly, Pai heard the sound of breaking glass. Her fingers weren't clutching at anything more than air, dripping with something cold and wet. She looked down, her body creaking like a long unused robot. She felt oddly weightless, like gravity no longer held her tethered to the ground. She watched, with a strange detachment, as the pads of her thumb and forefinger touched together, blood dripping to the floor from a deep gash in her palm.
She lifted her head again, to look at the girl, to make her stop hurting herself, to make the girl stop hurting her, but she couldn't do it. Her eyes rolled in sockets that felt too small to hold them as black smoke clouded her vision, obscuring the already darkened kitchen around her. She could barely see the light of the moon falling on the floor anymore.
She tried to call out to Kuniumi. She thought she could hear something, a low humming that thrummed in her bones, but it was too quiet for her to tell if it was the song Kuniumi liked to sing when she felt nostalgic for the world that was her home, for the home she swore she would burn to ashes that dripped with black blood.
The world alarmingly tilted at a wrong angle, the floor coming closer and closer to her, and she couldn't stop herself from going to it. Everything faded as she fell, and this time, there was no one there to catch her.
For a moment, a split second, the girl appeared hovering above her. Her head tilted to the side. She smiled, and her lips moved, but Pai heard no sound as everything around her drained into nothing.
[remember me?]
×
Yukiji did not know which was worse; spending the last two and a half years in agonizing worry, not knowing whether her last remaining family was still alive or not, or finally finding out the truth about what had happened only because the one responsible for their deaths was finally admitting to what she'd done.
Her mind played cruel games with her every waking moment. Sometimes she would find herself thinking about what life had been like before she knew, about the time she had had with Kichi. All the late-nights giggling under the covers long past their bedtimes. The fights over petty little things. The fear and grief when their parents died. Holding each other after one woke from a nightmare where they relived watching their friends slaughtered by the Kitsune. The laughter and happiness when Kichi married childhood sweetheart Nishio, when the adoption papers for precious baby girl Theia were finalized.
She'd think about the awning hole in her chest that eddied with constant anxiety and panic over what possible reason Kichi could have for not reaching out to Yukiji for years. Then her mind would swing around and replay Pai's carefully blank face, with only momentary flashes of guilt in her eyes as she told Yukiji that she was the reason for Kichi's death, for Nishio's death...for little Theia's death. That she had killed them all.
When she remembered that, all the pain and fury and sorrow hit her in another tidal wave, and she had to clamp her hand over her mouth just to keep herself from screaming with grief.
The hardest part of it all was trying to reconcile the heartless killer she'd envisioned in her mind with the awkward yet sweet Pai that she'd known for well over a year now. Pai was everything Yukiji thought a killer could never be – the fact that she was the one who killed Yukiji's entire family tore Yukiji's heart to pieces because she didn't know what to think of it.
She'd thought that if Pai did it, murdered Yukiji's family, for the sake of it, or just under someone's orders, maybe it would be easier to hate Pai. She had never imagined that Pai had done what she did to protect her own family, her twin brother. All Pai did was tell her that she'd killed Yukiji's family – but she'd never said why.
Why did she have to kill them for her brother?
Yukiji wanted to hate Pai, so much, for what she did, but she didn't know how she could do that when she had to face the guilt well-concealed on Pai every single goddamned day. She didn't know how to deal with her grief when she had to walk past a room her family's killer was in, or how to even begin thinking about accepting, never mind forgiving, Pai for what she'd done.
Yukiji had never felt so hopeless in her life. Her life was in freefall and she had no idea if she'd be able to come up strong and standing on her own two feet when she landed.
Now, she told herself not to care about the sliver of worry that wormed in her chest when she heard the sound of glass breaking, coming from the kitchen. She told herself not to feel hurt at the way Pai had flinched when Yukiji drew near, as if expecting a physical blow to land on her.
It didn't matter. It was fine. She didn't need to care. She shouldn't care.
Plenty of others were worried about Pai (she forced herself to ignore the fact that she'd been one of those people just the other day, and that there still was a part of her that worried and couldn't stop worrying). There was no point in Yukiji adding to her own heartache by dwelling on how much she could see Pai was suffering because of her sins.
All it took was for Yukiji to remember that one of those sins was the deaths of her only remaining family for her to harden her heart against Pai, to try to force her feet to continue down the hall, to leave well enough alone. She didn't need to care. She shouldn't. Plenty of others worried about Pai. She had no reason to concern herself with Pai anymore.
She couldn't really explain herself if someone were to ask her why, with all those reasons swirling in her head, she found herself walking right back to the kitchen door. She was careful to make sure she made no sound as she walked so that Pai wouldn't know anyone was around. Quiet as a mouse, Yukiji slid the door open, holding it up just at the spot it usually squeaked at.
She mentally kicked herself for even bothering to check that everything was all right when what she should have been doing was going back to her room and curling into a ball to sleep, to avoid the sledgehammer of pain and betrayal that slammed into her every waking moment. She didn't need to be doing this, she didn't need to be surreptitiously checking in on Pai the way she had been for months since she'd realized something was wrong with the younger girl that Pai was trying to keep quiet about.
She didn't need to be doing this.
Then she saw Pai, and her heart dropped out of her stomach as Kanou's reason for why he was keeping such a close eye on Pai flooded her mind.
She's dying. She is going to die because of something she never asked for and wasn't even aware of, and there is nothing I can do but try to ease what pain she will feel.
There is nothing I can do to stop what's coming, and I don't know what that will mean for any of us, or her.
Pai was on the floor, body jerking in a seizure that looked like it was ripping her apart, the bottom of her head knocking back on the ground hard enough to give a concussion to even the hardiest Hengen. Pieces of broken glass that littered the floor cut into her, dyeing her pyjamas in red that flowered over the cotton fabric. Arcs of dark electricity fizzed around Pai's body as she seized, power bleeding into the red leaking out of the cuts sliced into her pale arms from the glass.
Tears of blood ran from her closed eyes and leaked like so much water out of her nose and her ears into the startling white of her hair, and the seam of her lips was stained red.
Yukiji was running before she knew what she was doing, skidding to a halt on her knees beside Pai, the girl who murdered her family. She screamed herself hoarse, willing anyone to hear her, to help her, knowing that none of what she had learned under Kanou would be enough to help her deal with this on her own.
There is nothing I can do to stop what's coming, and I don't know what that will mean for any of us, or her.
"Kanou-san! Kanou-san – someone – someone help me, it's Pai! SOMEONE HELP!"
☯
End of Season 3
Season 4 coming soon.