Chapter Text
It is dark when he wakes. Subaru stares at the ceiling above his head, then lets his gaze travel along a corner of the ceiling down its adjacent wall.
Turning to the side. Across the expense of creased cotton, a pair of eyes catches the faint glow from street lights outside the window. Emerald is the colour, he knows even if it is too dark to tell.
A smile slowly forms as he reaches out with a hand. “Happy birthday,” Subaru mouths silently, “Hokuto-chan.” Glass against his fingertips, cold and smooth.
“Happy twenty-second to us!” The reflection greets him cheerfully in return, “Pffft! Still can’t believe we’re in our twenties now!”
Subaru draws his other hand out from under the sheets, and solemnly counts, with all his fingers. “Yet we are,” he concludes.
“Amazing. Anyway, isn’t it a bit late to be still in bed? Or,” eyes narrowing mischievously, “tell me you’ve been out partying the whole of last night. Onee-chan will accept this as the only reasonable excuse for the fact that my cute little brother is not out on a date on your birthday night!”
“I was working,” Subaru states the truth, “overnight. I don’t know why I slept through the alarm.”
It’s a lie. Not the working part. The exorcism did drag past dawn, his indecisiveness was largely to blame. He trudged home entirely exhausted, and decided to turn off the alarm. There is no work scheduled for the day, so there is nothing he needs to wake up to do anyway. He should be hungry, but he has no appetite. It was always Hokuto who insisted that he wake up and at least eat something, even after a long, difficult job. Hokuto, and…
“You skipped breakfast! Breakfast and lunch!” The reflection catches on, quick as usual. “Did you push yourself too hard again?” She chides, “didn’t I tell you to cut yourself some slack? Subaru, you don’t even like this job to begin with. You wanted to be a zookeeper! If you didn’t drop out of school, you would be…”
Subaru turns away, cutting her off. He could have been finishing an internship, trying to secure a place at a zoo before he graduates. Ueno would have been ideal, but he used to be also partial to Ehime. And in just slightly over a month’s time, he could have been looking forward to collecting his graduation certificate, walking out of the university gates one last time, and posing for photos with schoolmates under the sakura trees.
Sakura trees. It is the only thing that has remained. Since it claimed his sister in his stead, nothing else matters, not even what he promised her. How can he go on to realise this dream of making a life for themselves in Tokyo, when there’s only half of them left? He turns back to her, and sees her still waiting, her lips pursed half in frustration, half in concern.
“I’m sorry,” Subaru tells her, “but you’re dead, Hokuto-chan.”
“So?” She pouts, huffing for extra effect. “Hmmph! As long as you are not taking good care of yourself!”
It is, Subaru agrees silently, his fault. His fault for not getting his act together. His fault for not confronting his own fate and hiding behind her. His fault for assuming she’d always be there for him, shielding him from questions he can’t bring himself to ask, answers he doesn’t know how to give, decisions he is always too late to make.
“I’m sorry. I’ve failed you.” I deserve this, but never you. It should have been me, my blood, my life.
“No, no, Subaru. You’ve done very well!” Eyes wide with worry. “I just wish I’ve prepared you better for living on your own, I didn’t expect...”
“Enough about me, Hokuto-chan,” he cuts her off. She lets him. She has stopped looking surprised when he does that nowadays.
Subaru stares at his sister, stares at his own reflection through the phantom of his dead twin sister, no longer bothering to smile, “can we talk about you? Can you tell me more about you? What would you have wanted to study, what would you have wanted to do?” Not the housewife joke, but your real wish, what is it?
Why has he not asked his sister, not even once, too wrapped up in his own insipid naivety. Why did he fall for it, the facade she had put up against the world? How could he not have seen the invisible ward she had drawn around him with powers uniquely hers, until it was too late? The man evaded his understanding, for he never had a chance to know him. But his sister, who had grown up with him…
Because he was stupid and selfish.
“It is not your fault,” the reflection replies, not his spoken question, but his unvoiced confession, expressionless, “I have chosen this path for myself. It is what I want for you, Subaru.”
“Hokuto-chan wouldn’t say it like that,” Subaru tells the reflection.
“No? Then what would ’Hokuto-chan’ have said?” The reflection cocks its head in feigned puzzlement. A good imitation, but not Hokuto. Not his sister, but someone else altogether, someone familiar to them both, someone that is too often on his mind now, more so than his sister…No. Subaru pushes the thought away.
“Hokuto-chan would…” He begins, searches his mind for the right word, and realises he hasn’t got any. He doesn’t know how to put it, because, to this day, he doesn’t understand.
How can his sister, so in love with life in Tokyo, forever chasing after the latest trends and gimmicks, simply give it all up? It was Hokuto who first devised the plan — the Sumeragi’s representative in Tokyo was retiring, and Subaru had just completed the initiation into his role. A good training ground where they can learn to live and work independently, while still being within a train ride’s reach of Kyoto. While it won’t be wrong to say he enjoyed the relative freedom from stiff rules and prying eyes in Tokyo, it was she who truly blossomed in this city. Tokyo is her city, and she left it, just like that.
In the initial years he thought that the Sakurazukamori had murdered her in cold blood when she went up against him, but it made no sense. How could she, intelligent and resourceful as she is, have gone to the man alone? The Sakurazukamori is a clan of dark onmyoji, with powers she cannot fathom, let alone counter. Hokuto never makes a losing deal. Why did she throw her life away for nothing?
“Why did she…” he starts, but catches himself. In dreams he has been pushing deeper and deeper into the tattered memory of those frantic last moments when he was still part of a pair, when she was still his twin. You shall kill me, he has heard those words leave her lips. But is it even true? The Sakurazukamori weaves illusions. An affirmative means nothing. For all he knows, a ‘yes’ is but a shield to turn him away from the path of truth. Asking the obvious only strengthens the deception. He will not give the murderer his fuel.
The lighthearted smile widens and widens, and becomes a grin. A facsimile of joy but without any of its warmth. “How lovely,” it laughs, “you believe I’d spare the effort to confuse and deceive you.”
“You are nothing to me,” a smooth smile, polite and cold, “a thing, a pebble, a twig, nothing.”
Nothing. Subaru checks his wards. Nothing. No one has tried to breach them. He checks his hands. Nothing, the mark is dark and almost undetectable on his skin.
In the first week that he returned from Kyoto, finally an adult, finally permitted to leave the clan complex unsupervised, he had forgotten to put the gloves on after a late night fax interrupted his evening routine. He had picked up the paper, was walking towards the desk to switch on the lamp, when he suddenly saw, out of the corner of his eyes, a flare, so brief and faint that he is still not sure if it had been his imagination.
A short trip turned into an interim arrangement. Subaru left the gloves off since then. And since that night, they stayed mute. In the two years since, he chased after rumours and remnants, tell-tale signs and afternotes of a fading scent. And he found nothing.
It has been two years since he returned to Tokyo. Five since Hokuto died, since the end of the Bet. He is truly forgotten. “You‘re right,” Subaru admits, “you’d have completed the kill if you had the time to spare. If you have a thought to spare. Seishiro-san.”
“And you haven’t.” Because he is nothing.