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It was a hot summer night. In their small, run-down excuse for a house, Amane and Tsukasa squeezed themselves into the space of the kitchen window to watch the glittering stars in the sky. The mechanical whir of the fan ran in the background and crickets cried from the field behind their house. The giddy whispering of the two siblings was nearly impossible to hear over the chaos of humid midnight.
Tsukasa eagerly pointed into the vast oblivion of sky, “Hey, hey, what do you think that one is, Amane?”
“Where?”
“The one next to Orion on that side.”
“Wait, which side?”
“Left! Left side!”
Tsukasa spread the pages of the book wider so his brother could see the different diagrams of constellations. The other brother peered curiously at the book and back to the stars. “I think that’s Canis Minor,” he said.
“So that means Canis Major is… that one! Right? The one above Orion. So that means that star is Sirius!
“Mhm! That looks like it.”
The two twins sighed at the sight of the stars, both of their scarred hands sharing a side of the book between them. Tsukasa began eyeing, then tapping frustratedly on one of the diagrams. He did this often when there was a question he wanted to ask.
“Where would you wanna live, if you could live anywhere?”
Amane scoffed lightly, “Space, obviously.”
Tsukasa stared at his brother with a mix of wonder and enlightenment, mouth curled into a smile. “…Amane?” He asked.
“Yes?” He replied.
“How far are the stars from Earth?”
Amane paused. “I don’t know. They might have it in the book.”
Tsukasa pushed himself up from the window, kneeling into a crouch. “Do you think that if maybe I jumped high enough, I could reach them?”
Amane turned his head toward his brother, watching him rise. “What are you doing?”
Tsukasa slid the book from Amane’s hands, shifting up to stand on the frame of the window. “Do you think we could live on the moon? We could run away from here to there, you and me!”
“Tsukasa! Tsukasa stop that it’s dangerous!”
Tsukasa stared wistfully at the book and up to the stars, stance fearless and exhilarated. His honey coloured eyes shone with hope from the moonlight, ignoring the gentle tug on the cuff of his pants that begged him to sit back down. “We won’t have to make any silly excuses to mom anymore,” Tsukasa exclaimed, “neither of us needs to get hurt!”
“Tsukasa, you might wake her up!”
“3..”
“No!” Amane cried.
“2..”
“Tsukasa stop it! Stop it!”
“1!”
With a kick stronger than the forceful hold Amane held on his calves, Tsukasa soared off the window frame and into the air, pure bliss radiating off of every inch he flew. It was all a scene in slow-motion. So incredibly horrendous that you had to watch every second it went on, and yet, there was something beautiful and mystical about the outstretched silhouette of his brother against the shining sky. Even as he plummeted to the ground like a flightless bird and hit the dirt with a heavy thump, every second of it was almost like a dream.
“Tsukasa!!” He screamed.
Amane rushed out the backdoor of the house, stumbling down to kneel next to his twin, face up to the sky with such pure, genuine laughter leaving his mouth, one could only get from the adrenaline of jumping out of a window.
“I think I almost made it,” Tsukasa said with a smile, his eyes still gleaming with joy.
Blood dribbled from a cut on his arm and onto the dirt. His arm bent strangely from the elbow, broken almost definitely.
Tears began to well and fall from Amane’s eyes. “We’re gonna be in so much trouble, Tsukasa. Mom’s gonna kill me this time. She’ll do it! S-She really will!”
Tsukasa’s eyes softened, lifting a shaking pinky finger to his brother’s chest, “Maybe next time it’ll work if you jump with me?”
Amane stared wordlessly at the unbridled happiness on the face of his brother, hiccuping and wiping away snot and tears from his own face. For just a moment he forced a pathetic smile onto his face as he hooked his pinky with his brother’s. He nodded sorrowfully. Amane knew well that you couldn’t break a pinky promise.
“I think the stars look better from down here,” Tsukasa said peppily, “Try it.”
Hesitantly, Amane laid himself on the ground next to his brother, unable to see the stars through the haze of his tears. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine that the sound of their mother running to the kitchen in rage wouldn’t be heard from space. Amane didn’t think it was possible.
After more than fifty years from that fateful day, more of them spent dead than alive, the face of his brother appeared then in a cloud of dark purple smoke on the roof of Kamome Academy. Hanako froze in fear, a bubbling resurgence of guilt and terror rising in his gut. It was a pinky promise that had come back to, quite ironically, haunt him, broken from the second the tip of the silver kitchen knife drew threw his brother’s chest.
How Hanako wished he didn’t do it. Tsukasa was about as desperate as he was to escape that prison of a home. Tsukasa was better than him. He had hope and desperation when he didn’t.
His brother said something, a couple of words, yet all he could hear was the bitterness dripping off of the way he spoke ‘knife’. He mentioned it almost tauntingly, and he wasn’t quite sure if he should drop it or tighten his grip. Tsukasa sauntered up to him with a sweet smile on his face, one so deceiving that you’d think it’s genuine. He then gently weaved his hand around the edge of his knife and cupped his face. There was no more warmth to his brother’s hand like he remembered so well.
The way Tsukasa stared into his eyes was petrifying, and they no longer glittered with dreams of impossible fantasies, but rather of plausible revenge, cruel and twisted.
Tsukasa no longer wished for the stars, because Amane taught him it was impossible.