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Teru doesn’t see Kou come home from school. He always sleeps after school; it’s the only time he truly bothers to rest at all. But when he wakes up, just in time for dinner, he hears all about it.
“He wouldn’t play with me!” Tiara complains, perched on the edge of his bed along with her council of stuffed animals. “And he wouldn’t even look at me! He just went to his room and shut the door!”
“Hm.”
Teru should investigate; Teru wants to investigate. It’s hard to get Kou down, after all. Something truly bad must have happened, and if it’s something involving the supernatural, then Teru absolutely has to get involved. It’s selfish, but he hopes it is. He hopes it’s Hanako, actually. He’d love an excuse to rid the earth of that nuisance, and upsetting Kou to such a degree would provide him plausible grounds to do it.
But it’s probably not. Middle school is tumultuous, and Teru can’t be in charge of everything. He can’t make Kou’s grades perfect, he can’t make Kou’s friends less annoying, he can’t make girls like him, and he can’t make him a good exorcist. When his father bothers to show up and tell him anything, he tells him that. And that Teru needs to keep working, of course, and maybe even work a little harder if he can do it without putting himself in the hospital. And Teru, because he must be perfect at all times, obeys.
So he’ll let Kou deal with it on his own. He’ll step in if things get worse, of course, but for now, he’s just upset. It’s not the end of the world. Teru doesn’t need to protect him.
Tiara is still young enough to need some protection, though. She’s still pouting.
“I’ll play with you,” Teru promises, and she cheers right up.
He’s roped into an elaborate game of Stuffie Exorcisms until his mom calls them for dinner, a little later than usual. Kou isn’t at the table when they get there, and he doesn’t come out until most of the food is gone. He doesn’t speak, either. Just grabs a plate and goes back to his room. When he opens his mouth to ask about it, his mother kicks him under the table and Teru closes his mouth.
“Just let him be moody,” she says. “He’s allowed to be.”
And he is. He’s more than allowed to be moody. But when Teru sees the contents of his plate in the garbage before heading out for his nightly round of exorcisms, Teru figures that he’s allowed to be worried, too.
***
Teru comes back at five in the morning, with three more apparitions dead by his hand and feeling somewhat closer to the grave himself. The light is still on in Kou’s room, and so he gives the door a cautious knock. When there’s no answer, he gives another.
“Just a second,” Kou says, and it’s not sleep that makes his voice heavy. It’s something else, something that Teru can’t name.
And then Kou opens the door, looking as bright and cheerful as usual. He must have shoved that heaviness off on the walk to the door; Teru wonders where he hid it. “You’re back early, nii-chan! How’d it go?”
Teru gives him a smile. “It went alright, but what are you still doing up?”
“I dunno. I just woke up and couldn’t go back to sleep.” Kou shrugs and takes an interest in his feet. Teru can see that his socks are mismatched. He looks pale. Over his shoulder, he spots a camera on the bed that Teru’s never seen in the house before.
His little brother is a liar.
That would piss him off, normally. He never lets it show, of course, but Teru doesn’t take well to being lied to by his siblings. He’s not mad at Kou and Tiara for it, but more so at himself. Pissed at himself for not being worth telling the truth to. But more than pissed, he’s worried. Something is wrong if it’s keeping him up this late. Something that he can’t fathom the nature of.
There’s no point in calling out Kou’s lies now. Not when it’s so early, not when he’s so obviously distressed. He’ll let Kou get away with it for the time being.
“I’ll make you some tea,” he says. “That’ll help you fall back asleep.”
“No, no, it’s okay! I’d probably have to get up soon anyways. I might as well get dressed.”
Kou steps back, waves, and then shuts the door in his face. Teru forces himself not to break it down.
***
It doesn’t get any better over the course of the day. Kou cooks breakfast and eats only half of a plate, and then almost walks to school without his backpack. He lingers outside of the junior high entrance for so long that Teru can see him out the window when his own class is about to start; the junior high classes only start a minute later. He must go back in at some point, though, because Teru sees him in the halls before lunch and he’s smiling and laughing with his friends, but it looks strained. Unnatural.
Teru still doesn’t know what’s wrong with him.
He goes through the list of things that could ever be wrong with anyone in the world, and grades, girl problems, and ghosts are the three that he determines are most likely to be wrong with Kou. Grades and girls are the most common middle school problems, and ghosts are always a possible problem for them. It’s just part of the blood, but there hasn’t been anything new that Teru’s seen. Kou seems relatively adjusted to his friendship with Nene and Hanako, and he’s been happy with it as far as Teru can tell. If something happened, though, Nene would obviously be upset. The girl has never heard of having a subtle emotion in her life, either, so Akane would know about it.
“Did Yashiro-san seem normal to you today?” Teru asks as he and Akane go through student council paperwork.
“Yashiro-san? From my class?”
“From your class.”
Akane fuddles with his glasses. He always does that when Teru asks a question he doesn't understand. “She seems fine to me. She was talking to Ao-chan earlier this morning, but they always talk in the morning. Why?”
An annoying question. Teru gives him the sort of loving smile only Aoi Akane can draw out of him and rests his head in his hands. “Didn’t I tell you to stop asking questions that you don’t deserve the answer to?”
“You did,” he relents, and they go back to work.
So ghosts are out for now. It could maybe be grades. Kou’s grades have never been the best. They might have started slipping, even if it’s a little early in the year for that sort of slip. But then he would be studying, wouldn’t he? When Teru saw part of his room, there weren’t any books out.
There was that camera, though. Maybe a girl gave it to him. He hasn’t heard of any girls with crushes on Kou, but it could happen. Teru had no idea how to react to the first confession he was given, and if some girl had gone so far as to get him a camera with her confession, then Kou would understandably be nervous. So out of all of the possibilities, it’s probably a girl, which means Teru should probably leave it alone.
No, Teru will leave it alone. Teru will leave it alone, and it will resolve itself.
***
The problem doesn’t just not resolve itself; it gets worse.
Over the course of a week, Kou loses at least two kilograms. He doesn’t look Teru in the eye, not even once, and Tiara can’t even coax half of a smile out of him. The light in his bedroom never goes out. He stops opening the door when Teru knocks. Kou doesn’t do any of his normal chores, and so the house is covered in dust and the dishes are overflowing. Teru tries to take care of them, he really does, but somehow, he winds up setting wet dishes on fire.
Kou doesn’t even leave his room when the fire department comes.
So something is wrong. Very seriously wrong. Intervention is required. His mother works too much at a job that brings in money and his father is too busy doing the honorable work of ridding the earth of vermin, so it’s up to Teru. He’s used to this, though, and he doesn’t mind it. He likes being helpful, actually.
“Good morning, Kou!” Teru says, tearing his eyes away from the kettle of tea he’s been keeping an eagle’s eye on. If there’s one thing he can do, it’s boil water, but after that, it somehow all becomes disastrous.
“Morning.” Kou nods at him and then looks down. “I think I forgot my tie. Am I not wearing my tie?”
“You’re not wearing your tie,” Teru confirms.
Kou heads back to his room, leaving his bookbag on the table. It’s maybe a bit much, but he needs some clues, and so Teru takes a look inside.
What he finds out is that Kou hasn’t touched a single piece of homework since that first day, when he came back all sorts of wrong. He came back wrong, and Teru slept through it. What sort of older brother was he to sleep through that? If he had seen the wrongness in the beginning, maybe he could have…
No. That thought isn’t useful. There’s no use in thinking of the past. The only thing that matters is what’s going to be useful going forwards, and what’s going to be useful is to stop his brother from slipping further.
And so Teru shuts off the kettle, tests a few scribbles on a blank page of notebook paper, and spends the rest of the morning doing middle school homework in his best imitation of Kou’s handwriting. It’s what any good brother would do.
***
They’ll talk it out over the weekend, Teru decides. The weekend gives them much more time than the week, but Teru needs some more information before the weekend. He needs to know what to expect so that he can plan his responses in advance, so that he has the exact right things to say right in his pocket. He’ll pull them out and then Kou will start to feel better and everything will go back to how it’s supposed to be.
He sends Akane on a gossip-searching mission and he comes back exhausted.
“The list of every person being mentioned as a crush at this school, alphabetized, and every person who received a rejection in the past two weeks, also alphabetized” he pants, collapsing into the chair next to him once he sets the papers down.
Teru grits his teeth. “Who gave you the right to sit next to me?” He asks, ever polite before he throws Akane to the other side of the room.
Akane doesn’t bother getting up from the floor. Too tired to do it, maybe. He did send Akane on an exhaustive mission, after all. He could have maybe been kinder with it, but Teru is allowed to indulge himself every so often.
Kou’s name isn’t on either list.
And then there’s breaking into the school’s grading system, which is a headache, but he does it. He looks at Kou’s grades, and other than the missing homeworks that Teru has since made up, they’re fine. He’s one hundred and thirtieth in his class, which is just about where he always is. And Teru’s kept an eye on Nene; she’s fine. She’s just like normal, so Hanako is almost certainly not up to any trouble.
Teru’s back to where he started, without a single clue. All he knows is that it’s bad and only getting worse, that Kou has started flipping through yearbooks and Teru can’t find any sort of rhyme or reason to what he’s looking for, that there are circles beneath his eyes and that his uniform is in bad need of ironing. There’s so much wrong, and so much that Teru can’t do to fix it.
He wants to fix it. He wants to fix it more than just about anything else in his life at the moment. But as it is, the wanting is not enough.
***
Friday afternoon, last resort. He waits until Nene and Kou have gone home, and then he enters the girl’s bathroom. Knocks three times on the bathroom stall, and the little shit appears.
“Oh wow! It’s Minamoto Sr., what a surprise!” Hanako clutches a hand to his chest and Teru doesn’t waste time; he just whips off his bracelet and pins Hanako to the wall.
“Feeling aggressive today, huh?” Hanako notes, and he looks amused and entirely unimpressed.
“What do you know about what’s wrong with Kou?”
Hanako’s gleeful grin drops in a second. He looks at Teru with some level of seriousness and it’s weird. It’s not right. Apparitions like him shouldn’t be able to give him a look like that, like he shares and understands Teru’s concerns.
“If I told you, I don’t think you’d understand,” he says. “I don’t think you’re capable of grieving in the way that normal people are.”
And damn this supernatural. Damn him to hell for being right. Teru presses in closer, ready to end him once and for all, but Hanako slips right through his fingers and winds up behind him, steals his own weapon and points it right at him before Teru even knows that it’s gone.
“Now I’ve got you listening,” he says, and is briefly delighted before he goes back to looking at Teru again like they’re both people. “But just because you aren’t capable of that sort of grief doesn’t mean you can’t help him with it. And that boy would appreciate your help, I think. He cares about you a lot, and you obviously care about him. Even if you care like a weirdo.”
Teru sighs, looks at his own weapon and then looks Hanako in the face. Asking an apparition for advice is worse than asking a bank, but this apparition is Kou’s friend. For Kou, he’ll bite the bullet. “How am I supposed to help him with it, then?”
“Just listen,” Hanako tells him. “Stop worrying about what you’re supposed to say and just listen to him. Maybe give him a hug. Nene’s been nice and giving him some, but he might need more.”
“Hugs and listening,” Teru repeats. It sounds so simple. Hugs and listening.
“Your brother’s a good kid, you know.”
“I know. I don’t need the likes of you to tell me that.”
Hanako gives him a smile, but it’s a sad and distant thing. “I know, but I just thought I should remind you of that. Of how lucky you are to have that at all. And if you screw it up…Well...”
The sentence goes unfinished. Hanako just vanishes into thin air and Teru doesn’t chase him. He has something more important to do.
***
Kou doesn’t even bother coming out for dinner, which is just as well. Teru just takes the portions that would be for him and heats them up.
“Thank you,” his mother says before retreating to her office, where there’s work to be done. She doesn’t stay there long enough to hear him say, “You’re welcome.”
Once it’s done, he heads to Kou’s room and knocks on the door.
“I brought you dinner,” he says to the door. “And don’t worry, I didn’t cook it.”
There’s some movement from within, and then the door opens. God, Kou looks awful. He looks like death warmed over.
“Thanks, nii-chan.”
Kou takes the plate and looks ready to close the door, but Teru puts his foot firmly within the frame. Just one, though. One that he could easily put back.
“I was actually wondering if you had a minute to talk.”
“I, uh...sure,” Kou says, and then lets him in.
Teru sits on his bed and Kou sits next to him, regarding the plate. He doesn’t make any move to eat it.
“What’s up?” Kou asks, and then takes a tiny bite of rice. The rush of relief that goes through him is nigh instantaneous, but there’s a whole plate left. This isn’t going to be over for a long while.
“I’ve been worried about you,” Teru admits. “You haven’t been eating much.”
“My stomach’s felt kind of weird.”
“You haven’t been sleeping, either.”
Two is usually all it takes for Kou to admit a problem, but the next thing out of his mouth isn’t an admission. “I’ve been studying.”
“And not doing your homework.”
“I...You see, about that…”
This isn’t how it’s supposed to be done. Teru knows it. He stops, and then remembers what Hanako said. Just listen. That implies not interrogating, and so Teru forces himself to start over again.
“I don’t care about your homework,” Teru says. “I just know that everything I’m seeing seems to point to you not feeling well, and I want to help. However I can help you, I want to do it. You just have to let me know how I can help you, okay?”
Kou takes another bite of rice. “The whole thing is really stupid.”
“I don’t think it is. Whatever it is, I don’t think it’s stupid if it’s making you upset.”
Things go quiet after that. Kou keeps eating, but makes no indication that he wants Teru to leave. Mostly, Teru’s just glad to see him eating a substantial amount of food.
The plate is mostly empty when he starts talking again. “There was some kind of accident over winter break. I don’t really know what kind, but that’s not really important to the whole thing. What matters is that it killed Mitsuba Sousuke. Do you remember him?”
Teru racks his brain, but nothing. Nothing. “The name is familiar,” he lies, because this person is clearly important. He needs to seem like he remembers.
“He was in my class my first year of middle school. And, uh, he died. And he came back as a spirit. And I ran into him and captured him and I didn’t know what to do for a bit. And then Hanako and Nene and I got together and we thought that maybe if I helped him get rid of his regrets, then he’d be able to pass on to the other side and be like, happy. And Mitsuba wasn’t hurting anyone! Or, well, he tried to hurt me, but he wasn’t any good at it, so you know. I tried to help him.”
Kou stops and sniffles, pushing the plate far away from him. “And he was really annoying at first. But...I don’t know. He grew on me, I guess, and I eventually remembered him and stuff. All he really wanted was some friends and I...He grew on me really fast, Teru-nii. I liked him so much and decided that I was going to keep being his friend and we took so many photos because Mitsuba loved photography and we made stupid jokes together and I really thought it was going good. It really was going good! But then there was this other spirit. Hanako’s brother. Tsukasa, I’m pretty sure his name is. He said that he had made a deal with Mitsuba and that Mitsuba wanted everyone to remember him, and so he changed Mitsuba’s rumor and—”
It isn’t a sniffle that makes Kou stop this time; it’s a sob. Kou hides his face in his knees and sobs, his whole body shaking with the force of it. Teru acts on instinct, wrapping his arms around him and pulls him close. To kill a spirit that you’d grown attached to...Teru’s not capable of attachment to spirits, but it sounds like a pain worse than death itself.
“You did the right thing,” Teru whispers.
“It was Hanako that killed him,” Kou manages to say. “I couldn’t even—I liked him so much that I just—”
Another sob cuts him off and Teru pulls him closer, this version of his brother that’s trying so hard to disappear. He understands what Kou’s saying to him, he’s pretty sure, and Teru doesn’t cry. He hasn’t cried in five years, but now his eyes water.
“You did the right thing,” Teru repeats. “You gave him everything he could have wanted before his death. What you did was beautiful, Kou.”
And it’s true. It’s the sort of beauty and kindness that Teru isn’t capable of, not in the way that Kou is. Kou has so much heart in his chest and that’s what’s killing him now, what’s hurting him so badly that his whole body is shutting down. His love is too big for a world so cruel, and Teru loves him for being capable of that kind of love in the first place.
“If I was more like you, then maybe it wouldn’t have happened. Maybe Mitsuba would still be around.”
“If you were like me, Mitsuba would have been gone before he had the chance to experience anything at all,” Teru says. “But you’re like you, and so you did something kind instead.”
It seems like Kou might finally stop crying. What he said may have done it, but Kou looks up and looks at the desk where the camera sits and it starts all over again with an unprecedented force, this horrible sobbing that looks like it hurts. Teru is lucky, maybe, because he can’t even imagine that kind of pain, except he reckons that it might feel something like what he feels watching Kou go through it. It might be like that.
“This hurts,” he whispers. “Mitsuba was worth it, but this fucking hurts.”
Teru doesn’t have it in him to scold Kou for language. Not when Kou’s upset like this. He just keeps hugging him, and later, there’ll be time for it. There’ll be time for killing Tsukasa, for making sure Mitsuba gets a proper memorial, for making sure Kou eats his own cooking and for helping him deal with this giant grief that the world has handed him for no reason other than the goodness of his soul and the love in his heart. There’s no time for that now, though. For now, Kou just cries and Teru stays with him. He’ll stay with him until it passes and he’ll stay with him when it returns, no matter how many times it comes back.