Chapter Text
The realization isn't a lightning strike or the clanging of bells.
It's a single droplet of soup clinging to the bow of Yonah's lips and the strange impulse to claim it with his own.
He doesn't, of course. Something tells him not to, and it's rare that the voice of reproach in his mind errs. So instead he takes his thumb and wipes it away, laughing quietly under his breath.
“Hungry today, aren’t you?”
Hours later, he swears he can still feel the smear burn against his skin, can feel a terribly familiar ache where it shouldn’t be.
He presses his thumb to his mouth, between lips parted hesitantly, and tells himself it's just to be sure he'd only imagined its heat.
Hungry today, aren’t we.
"But I read that story last night – are you sure you want me to read the same one again?"
"If it's not too much trouble," Yonah says softly, and there's a peculiar flush to her cheeks. "I just... I really like that one."
It's a story Nier has read to Yonah countless times, so often than holding the book in his hands is mere ritual, as he can recite its contents verbatim. Sometimes he adds flourishes or changes the ending just to hear her gasp with delight; sometimes Yonah is tired, however, and Nier knows without asking that there's a certain way she likes him to tell the story, closer to something the postman once called a "song".
He can't decipher what Yonah wants out of the story today: excitement or comfort. Her specificity suggests the latter, but there's something... anxious about her.
The air around her shifts near the climax of the story; he knows it as well as his own name, but never with an invisible hand starting to crush his windpipe. Yonah's restlessness is almost tangible; a pink tongue darts to wet her lips and Nier feels something electric arc against his skin in reply.
"I wonder what it feels like," Yonah says, voice filled with a dangerous kind of dreaminess.
"What... what feels like?" He knows the answer, feels it rattling against his ribcage. It's an innocuous question with a complex answer, and he hopes desperately that he's misunderstanding Yonah's shyness.
Yonah twists her fingers in the dangling threads of her ribbon. "The princess. To... be woken up with..."
She can't possibly know what she asks – but she hesitates, eyes avoiding his, flickering to his lips when she thinks he isn't looking.
He isn't sure why he feels that showing her would be the wrong thing to do, only that something painful nestles itself between his heart and lungs when he thinks too long about it.
"A kiss from a noble hero is... different, Yonah," he says, tongue tripping over the syllables pouring more quickly than he can catch them.
Her flush deepens as she nods slowly, and he swears he can see her pulse fluttering against the side of her neck, delicate like a bird's. He swallows thickly; the phantom hand wrapped around his throat tightens.
She can't possibly know what he feels, clenching his fists and carving the imprint of his fingernails into his palm. Something hot and leaden surges against his ribs. He can't tell if it's guiding him towards her, or if it's bile and guilt seeking to be purged.
Yonah murmurs something about being tired and turns over, her tiny back peeking over the covers like an impassable bluff.
Nier finds the well-worn storybook floating in the village fountain, along with a handful of coins that hadn't been there before.
Everyone claims ignorance.
None of them can meet his gaze as they do – except Popola, whose eyes feel like scalpels trying to dissect his thoughts.
He arrives home to find Yonah's eyes dry – but the hem of her gown is wrinkled and damp.
He isn't sure whether to be grateful that the only hint of redness around her face is in the rosiness of her cheeks.
She seems pleased with herself, humming cheerfully while stirring a purulent-looking mixture she calls "porridge." Nier dutifully smells the mixture when prompted to; the aroma is thankfully inoffensive, which means the only likely challenge in choking down this mixture will be getting past its blandness.
He's swallowed fouler things to secure Yonah's happiness.
"Is it good?" Her voice brims with optimism and a hopefulness misplaced for something as unremarkable as soup.
"You did well," he says, taking a generous sip. There are flower petals floating in the mixture that give it a not-unpleasant earthy quality, as well as a few greens with a bright, peppery taste. It does have flavor, even if they harmonize poorly – then again, he muses, the goal wasn't for it to taste good.
"You really think so?"
"I do." He takes another sip. "If I didn't know better, I'd say that this was a recipe you'd read about somewhere."
The rose of her cheeks darkens; something fanged and serpentine in him almost relishes Yonah's discomfort, forked tongue tasting the lie resting against the back of her teeth. Yonah can't lie, however much she might want to.
The night where he'd rebuffed Yonah's curiosity had been the final veil shorn from its fastenings; within the cavern in his chest lay the undeniable truth that he had struggled to hide from her, from himself.
The possibility that Yonah might not recoil from it, but embrace and reciprocate it -- he doesn't know whether to destroy it for her own good, or nurture it and see what germinates from the tiny seed of what if.
"I did," she whispers. She doesn't elaborate.
The princess in the tale they'd shared since they were old enough to imagine hadn't needed to explain, either; she'd made a potion from flowers and herbs to nourish the prince, to give him the strength to keep fighting for her. The profundity of her gratitude for him was such that she couldn't thank him with words. So exhausted was she from making the potion – having spent hours foraging for ingredients and brewing the concoction just so – that she'd drifted off to sleep almost as soon as he'd taken the first sip. The prince, realizing the depths of his feelings for the princess, is overcome and spends the night admiring her peaceful expression; come the dawn, he awakens her with a Kiss of a Thousand Songs, as the story called it.
As a boy, Nier had struggled to understand what a kiss could convey that couldn’t be expressed in words; it wasn’t until he’d become less of a boy that he understood that some words were too heavy, too cumbersome, too painful. And yet Yonah seemed intimately familiar with the way words could suffocate.
How would it feel to give – to take – the coalescence of everything two people couldn’t say? Could a thousand songs ever truly suffice?
A kiss from a noble hero is… different, Yonah. I don’t think you’d want to hear my songs.
Yonah's eyelids are heavy in a way that can't be feigned; the way she jolts awake every so often tells him that sleep is the last thing she wants. She fights it the same way she fights against everything else.
She wants to see him enjoy it, to see that she's given him strength.
He scoops her into his arms before she can refuse. "Yonah, let me bring you bed – you must be exhausted."
"Brother, no – "
"I feel so much stronger, thanks to you," he says, smiling, and he wishes he could bottle the one that spreads on Yonah's lips in response. There's something sweet about it, but tinged with an unusual warmth that makes his chest feel almost pleasantly hollow, numbed to the staccato of his racing pulse.
"Really? That's.. that's great..." she says, words trailing off at the end as sleep creeps in at the edge of her consciousness.
"Rest," he insists. "You know how the rest of the story goes, don't you?"
Yonah doesn't answer, already drifting off to sleep.
He wishes he could be the noble hero in Yonah’s fairytales, able to transform impossibility into magic with the faintest brush of his lips. A hero’s love would be enough to cure the princess’s mysterious illness.
A hero’s love would be enough, and Yonah is still sick.
He isn’t sure what he is, but despite the overzealous praise the village heaps on him, he knows “hero” fits him like an oversized cuirass.
Heroes don’t let strangers pay them to become a latrine. Heroes don’t learn to wring faint notes of pleasure from the agony, wrapping a hand around the neglected instrument and imagining that the calloused hands between his thighs had been smaller and sweeter. Heroes certainly don’t enjoy the mingled taste of Shades’ blood and sweat on their cheek. If he’s a hero, he certainly isn’t a very good one.
At this point he isn’t even sure if he could be considered a good brother. Yonah, too naïve to know better, is all but begging for him to damn them both, captivated by the veneer of his chivalry cloaking something monstrous.
What few chances she has to marry and live a normal life in spite of her illness would be burnt to ash if he were to rise to her childish provocations.
Perhaps she’s confused, projecting her romanticism onto the only target available to her.
Perhaps she’s just as broken as he is, and he hates how much he hopes this is true.