The tiled floor was smooth under the tips of Katou’s fingers, hard under his knees. There was something very nearly familiar about the genkan he found himself kneeling in. It wasn’t the one in the house he’d grown up in, but he’d been here before, he thought. He slipped off his shoes before stepping onto the shikidai, stepping down the small hallway.
The faint scent of incense and tatami mats brought back memories that Katou hadn’t even realized he’d missed. This wasn’t his childhood home, but it smelled like it, and some of the decor reminding him of those days of his childhood when he’d still tried to see the best in people. To the left, the living room opened up, and Katou stepped into the entrance way and stopped.
He knew why he recognized this place now: he’d been here before. Only for a few moments, just before Setsuna had fed him the feather, like a baptism. He’d come then, back to Assiah, to this house – his sister’s new house, where she lived with the husband he’d never met – to a world where time had stopped. He’d seen Sae there, sitting in the same chair she sat in now, bent over the same bit of embroidery she was currently bent over. She couldn’t see him, and couldn’t hear him, probably couldn’t even if Adam Kadamon hadn’t stopped time in the mortal realms. He’d had no body then, only a spirit, freshly released from the chains of pain and despair that he’d wrapped himself up in like armour.
His gaze flicked to the mantle. There, where he remembered it, was the jewelry box that their father had brought back from a trip abroad and gifted to Sae. Katou had buried it in the yard that day, and had left it there for seven regret-filled years, until he’d dug it up to give to her as a wedding present one evening. Things had turned to shit that night – Katou had lashed out at her, and his father had found him, had crushed the box beneath his feet as he’d tried to get his hands on Katou, but Sae had, evidently, had the box repaired in the meantime, thin veins of gold holding the box together. It was filled now, with jewels that Katou didn’t recognize – he wondered if they’d been gifts from her husband, or from their father – and two photographs.
One photograph was of Sae and himself. He was about ten, smiling brightly at the camera, Sae fifteen and wearing her high school uniform, bent over, hands on her shoulder. The other photo was the only happy family photo they had. Katou was still a baby, held in his mother’s arms, Sae five years old, beaming up at him and holding his little hand in her fingers. Even his father was smiling at him. This was, obviously, before his father had found out about his mother’s affair, before Katou had started to look so much like his biological father, before his father had realized Katou wasn’t his son. Katou had cut the photo to shreds with an exacto knife when he’d found it out, the illusion of a happy family – both the one he’d had then, at twelve years old, and any future family he’d imagined he might have – shattered beyond repair.
Sae had put it back together, taped the pieces of it together, as if she could still imagine there was something resembling a family there if she could just look past all the ugly lines of scotch tape.
Beside the box sat a bowl of rice, a pair of chopsticks sticking straight up out of it, and a small plate with Katou the mochi Katou had loved when he was a child. An offering to the dead.
“Yuu-kun?”
Katou started, pulling his eyes from the shrine and to his sister. She was looking at him, eyes wide, lips parted, the embroidery forgotten in her lap, and he realized with a start that the world wasn’t frozen in time, not this time. He could hear the birds outside the window. He should have known.
“Yuu-kun, is that you?” Sae asked, setting aside the embroidery and getting up out of her seat. She took a tentative step forward, then another, and then she was running at him, throwing her arms around his neck, and he found himself wrapping his one arms around her waste before he was even thinking of what he was doing.
He was taller than her now, which was strange – he always remembered her towering over him – and he buried his face in her hair, squeezing his eyes shut against the tears that stung them. Her hair smelled of sweet pea and chrysanthemum, and he breathed it in deep. He thought that if he had the choice, he wouldn’t ever let her go again, except that then she was pushing him away. No, not pushing him away, but stepping back, hands still on his shoulders, so she could get a clearer look at his face.
“It is you,” she breathed, studying him. He’d forgotten what her face looked like, and as he stared at her now, he tried to burn every line of hers into his mind. “I saw on the news…”
Katou nodded, mute. He swallowed. “Yep,” he said, stepping away from her entirely. He grinned, gave a haphazard shrug. “I’m dead. Got myself murdered, though that probably doens’t come as much of a surprise. But I was in the neighbourhood, and figured I’d come give my big sister a visit.” His gaze softened a little. “How are you doing? That husband of yours treating you alright?”
Sae bit her lip, looking as though she wanted to say something, chide him for being so flippant about his death, maybe, but she evidently decided to swallow her protests to answer his question instead. “He is, yes,” Sae said, and her hand fell down to her stomach – it bulged a little, now that Katou’s eyes were drawn there – and smiled. “We’re having a baby. A son,” she added. “I’ve decided to name him Yue.”
Katou reeled back like he’d been slapped. “Yue? What, you already hate the kid, or what? Bet the little bastard hasn’t even formed any fingers or toes yet, you wanna at least give it a chance before you decide you hate him.”
Sae gave him a look of such profound sadness that Katou couldn’t meet her gaze. He looked instead at the mochi sitting there on the mantle, and he stepped around her so that he could go to them.
“These are for me anyway, so I’m going to eat them,” he said, grabbing one of them and popping the whole thing into his mouth.
“I’m naming him Yue because I love him,” Sae said, softly to his back. “Because I love you.”
“Then you should find a different name,” Katou snapped, and then took a breath. He turned to her. “Oyaji named me that so I would die young. It was a weak, fragile name for a weak, fragile child.”
“Father named you Yue because it was only one character off from my name,” Sae protested. The look on her face – wide eyes, open mouth – was so surprised that Katou couldn’t help but let out a bark of laughter.
“What, you didn’t know? You remember that time when I was twelve, when I got hit by that car and ended up in the hospital? Dad showed up. He thought it was you who’d gotten hit, and was pissed off because he left work for this kid that wasn’t even his. He said it to mom right outside of my open hospital door knowing I’d hear him. He named me Yue because he wanted me to die easily, and he was pissed off that I’d survived getting hit by the car. Complained that it wouldn’t go so easily. But I guess it worked after all, because I went and got myself killed at seventeen away. At least I outlived that miserable old bastard.”
There were tears running down Sae’s cheeks, so silently that it took Katou a moment to notice they were even there.
But then she was stepping toward him, and she placed her hands on his cheeks. “Well, I’m naming my child Yue because of love,” she said firmly. “And when he’s old enough, I’m going to tell him all about my troubled little brother who died too soon, and how sweet he used to be. How much he cared, and how sensitive he was, and how much more he deserved.”
Katou knocked Sae’s hands away from his face so he could scrub at his eyes.
“He’s just gonna get teased for having a girl’s name,” Katou muttered.
Sae’s hands were back at his cheeks, brushing away his tears, and Katou didn’t try to push them away again.
“I always thought that someday, you would come back to us. After Father passed away, I was sure of it. Maybe not right away, maybe you had to find yourself first. But I thought… If you’d had more time, then I’m sure of it. You definitely would have come back to us. Definitely. I’m so sorry I wasn’t a better sister to you.”
Katou shook his head. “You were a great sister. It was me… I’m sorry I hated you so much.” It was hard to speak, his throat tight with tears. “I’m sorry I was so terrible to you. You were always looking out for me, always trying to protect me, and I’m so sorry that I hated you because dad loved you.”
He rested his hand on her cheek, wet with tears, and smiled down at her.
“And I hope that your life, with your husband and your kids, is a long and a happy one, and that you get everything you want out of it. I love you, aneki.”
The tears were already running down his face when he woke up in his bed in Vallo, and for a long time he laid there and let them come, two family photos clutched firmly to his chest, one of them held together with ugly lines of scotch tape.