Touma finds Cream in the first box he opens the next day.
It is quite a surprise, though not at all an unpleasant one to find her there, wedged among his mother's sudoku books.
"Huh, how'd it end up in there? I could have sworn I threw it away," his mom says. "Well, I guess this is a stroke of luck for you, Touma."
Touma is also curious about this (which is to say that he regards Creams reappearance with even more than the unusually high baseline of curiosity with which he approaches the world at large) but this isn't a gift horse that he's about to look in the mouth of.
He sets her beside his folded up futon and gives her bell a little flick for good luck before heading off to school. The tongue of the bell had fallen out long ago so it just makes a dull clank where his fingernail hits it, but he's happy that it's there for him to ring at all.
*
After everything that happened yesterday evening it feels strange for Kokomi to come to school and go about her day like nothing is wrong. She does it anyway though because the perfect pretty girl would not deny the world the light of her beauty.
It isn't as easy to give as it usually is.
As she walks to class her mind keeps drifting away to other things like how she's going to have to break the news of her brother's disappearance (death) to her parents. They'll probably want to come home and stay with her for a while to assuage their fears that Kokomi might be stolen from them as well.
"Are you alright miss Teruhashi?" Rifuta asks her, pulling her from her thoughts.
Kokomi isn't sure if the two of them could be considered friends per say but Rifuta has been hanging around Kokomi since Kokomi had taken the first-year under her wing to show her around her new school and establish the futility of trying to upstage her.
Maybe she should just tell her that her brother has gone missing. He's rather famous so his disappearance is sure to become public knowledge soon enough.
No, that's too risky. She really shouldn't do anything to invite closer attention than the usual distant adoration.
How many people even know that the two of them are related, anyway? In the eyes of the public, it will be Mugami Toru that has gone missing, not Teruhashi Makoto. "Don't worry, I'm fine," she reassures, propping up her trademark pleasant smile that had been beginning to slip.
Rifuta still looks at her with concern. Dang it, is it that obvious something's wrong?
"I just stayed up too late studying. That's all." she adds, with a small lady-like yawn that she shields from the world with the palm of her hand. This is an acceptable enough excuse. The perfect pretty girl should get good grades, but it's okay if she has to work hard to get them from time to time. Anyway it's half-true. She'd slept rather poorly the previous night though it had been her guilty conscience keeping her up rather than her studies. "Wow, you second-years really have it rough," Rifuta says, with a slight purse to her lips.
"Don't worry, the workload isn't too bad but sometimes you just need to put in a little extra time and effort to stay on top of things," Kokomi says, placing a reassuring hand on Rifuta's shoulder.
Rifuta nods, a faint blush coloring her cheeks.
With her kouhai's concern successfully warded off Kokomi heads to class.
It turns out a new student is transferring in today. It's a boy like the one who had transferred in last year had been but aside from that he's quite different. He's considerably shorter which in combination with his rounded, amateurish haircut make him look more like a middle-schooler than a high-schooler and he comports himself with none of the previous transfer's over-cautious stiffness, but rather the relaxed confidence of someone fully comfortable in his own skin.
When asked to introduce himself he rambles giving entirely too much information but none that actually answers the question until the professor tells him to just get to the point already, which leads him to tell them that his name is Akechi Touma and launch into a lecture on the kanji meaning and backstory of his name (and his parents' recent divorce) which the teacher also has to dissuade him from.
They can never get normal transfer students can they?
The whole affair is so awkward that Kokomi is beset by an almost painful level of embarrassment just from watching it unfold but it's still a welcome distraction from her current concerns.
*
Saiki Kuusuke takes off his mask and goes to the basement fridge to get the blood required for tonight's ritual.
As annoying as it may be to add caring for his new "guest" to his already lengthy list of duties it'll be more than worth it to be able to outsource the blood production to them. His research will probably be much easier if he doesn't have to push through the iron deficit that he's been operating under since he last had to increase the amount of blood required for the sealing ritual.
It's up to four vials twice weekly now.
He carries them to what he likes to think of as Kusuo's portion of the room.
Once there he makes sure each of the ceremonial candles are lit and pours the contents of each vial into one of the four circles of carefully carved sigils surrounding his brother.
It sizzles slightly, like oil poured into a hot pan, as it flows to fill the ornate troughs.
This done he takes a long loving look at his brother's incorruptible shell.
The expression on its face is so serene that it's easy to pretend that he's just peacefully sleeping so long as you ignore the ward wrapped railway spikes protruding from his hands, feet and neck.
Kuusuke dutifully collects the dark, viscous liquid that leaks from his brother's wounds.
It's then he notices with a jolt of fear that the wards wrapping the spike in Kusuo's left hand have burned away.
He gets a strip of paper and fills a fountain pen from another vial of blood to scribble out the sigils necessary to make a replacement. He considers tying it around the now bare spike right away to reset the seal but decides that it will be better to save the promise of that to use as leverage for when he discusses this matter with his darling little brother later.
This is the third time he's burnt off a ward this year and its only May. It would be one thing if they just burned off from the wear of normal use, but he knows this isn't the case. If it were then the wards would gradually accumulate damage spread across all five of them. Instead, it's always the ones on his hands (usually the left one, his brother's dominant hand in life) and they go from undamaged to ruined without warning.
Because of this it's clear as day that the wards keep burning off because his darling little brother can't mind his own business.
With this done he makes his way upstairs to do the not insignificant amount of homework for the degree in aerospace engineering he's in the process of earning.
It's more tedious than difficult really, he needs the degree more for the clout it will provide than because of any lack of knowledge on his own part.
When he's done with that, he works a bit on his independent research. The problem with space travel is that even the speed of light is infuriatingly slow when traversing spaces as vast as those between the stars and even the fastest technologies currently available are far, far slower than that.
Trying to invent faster than light travel with humanity's current technological base is like trying to help a bunch of cavemen who have just developed this cool fire thing and begun experimenting with these newfangled wheels invent the automobile.
Still, he has to do it. He promised Kusuo that he'd send humanity to the stars after all, and they'll need the speed to be able to thrive among them in the time they have left.
Eventually he decides that he can put it off no longer he takes off the amulet that he always wears and his whole body shivers.
Maybe it's psychosomatic but whenever he removes it, he swears he can feel his brother's metaphysical presence washing over him like water free from a dam, working its way into every little crack and crevice in himself, flowing like rainwater through the karst of his conscious mind to pool in the caverns below. He knows that it will take many lifetimes for that gentle pressure to wear away anything important, but he still hates how vulnerable it feels to know that his every thought is on display for his brother to pick through.
He takes a dose of sleep medicine and goes to bed.
As expected, he dreams of a festival.
There is no distinction there between the sky and the ground. The festival sprawls across both leaving nowhere to escape to.
It's about four in the afternoon in the waking world, so nobody else is there.
His brother is nowhere to be seen.
He calls out, "Kusuo, I need to speak to you."
Nobody comes.
Anger flares in Kuusuke's chest.
He yells into his brother's stupid fake night lit by stupid paper lantern stars, "I've given up so much for you, bled myself to the point of near anemia and you repay me by fucking up your seals and hiding when I come to ask you what you did to break them this time?"
"You can suck up the consequences of your own actions a little longer. I'm fixing your left-hand seal after we have this conversation, and only then."
Kuusuke turns to see his brother standing behind him. Dark viscous liquid oozes from the dime sized hole in his left hand. Other than that, he looks the same as he did the night that Kuusuke first shut him out of that body that lies unrotting in his basement.
Kuusuke's only found his brother's static appearance more disconcerting the more he himself is changed by the unrelenting march of time.
"I want to know what you did and why you did it so I can make sure that this doesn't happen again," he replies.
"What a funny coincidence, I seem to recall you saying the same thing last time this happened. And the time before that, too."
"If you really didn't want to break them then you'd stop mucking about with the physical realm in your ill-guided attempts to help people. Tell me who you did it for this time?"
"What, the piss boy? I didn't think your influence extended that far yet."
Kusuo shakes his head and says,
That's a relief. Kuusuke doesn't have to redo his calculations to see just how much closer his deadline for inventing FTL travel is than he thought, then.
"It's awfully bold of you to intervene at all given how that went the last time you saw him." Kuusuke says, doing his best to feign sympathy. "Why didn't you just leave well enough alone?"
The long dormant serpent of Kuusuke's jealousy awakens from its hibernation to writhe in his guts.
"How." Kuusuke growls, "I thought you made everyone forget. You even tried to make me forget, though I loved you far too dearly for it to work. How does pissboy remember?"
"You should have made him forget anyway. What if the nosy brat comes looking for you?"
"Certainly not. I've hidden you away quite well." Kuusuke says, a smug smile dancing across his lips, "Still, if you know what's good for your friend you won't tempt him to come looking. We both agreed that your current arrangement was for the best remember?"
Kusuo nods.
"So you'll be nice and cooperative with helping me keep you sealed, right?"
Kusuo nods again.
"That's good. You can send me back now."
"I promise, and if I don't, then you can do whatever you like to me." Kuusuke says, adding internally, We both know that you need me too much to do anything too debilitating, anyway.
Chapter Index
