When he was seven years old Touma had gone to the star festival with his best friend Kusuo. It had been truly wonderful to walk hand in hand with his dear friend as the stars shone above them and the festival lights shone around them.
An adorable plush cow available as a prize at one of the booths had caught his eye. It was black and white with a shining golden bell fastened to its neck by a red ribbon tied into a bow.
Kusuo having noticed Touma's interest, won the stuffed animal and gave it to him.
Cream, as the cow somewhat uncreatively came to be called, has served as Touma's bedfellow each and every night since he'd first received her almost ten years ago. After Kusuo moved away she had become especially dear to him as a memento of their friendship.
Tonight, she's nowhere to be found.
After searching the house high and low to no avail, Touma asks his mother, "I cannot seem to find Cream tonight. You wouldn't have happened to pack her away without notifying me, would you?"
"Oh, that thing," his mother says, guiltily casting her gaze to one side, "It was getting really gross and ratty so I put it out with the burnable trash this morning."
Touma is hit by a wave of despondency at news of this betrayal.
Sure, Cream's fur had been starting to matt and become discolored, the white staining to yellow and the black fading to gray, the ribbon had come undone from its bow long ago and started to fray apart at the ends, the bell had tarnished, and her stuffing had become rather clumpy from the all the times she'd had to take a trip through the wash after Touma wet the bed, but all that was perfectly fixable.
If Mom had just told him that Cream's current condition was so distasteful he could have taken steps to remedy it but no she had to get rid of it behind his back so as not to give him a chance to object, and now his lovely plush reminder of his friendship with Kusuo is gone to a place that he cannot follow, much like Kusuo himself, where it will be reduced to ashes, hopefully very unlike Kusuo himself. Not that Touma can know, being left behind like he was.
Touma hugs his knees as a long keening sound escapes his mouth.
"Oh dear. I didn't know it meant so much to you. We can get you a much nicer one after we move."
"I don't want a nicer one," Touma keens, "I want the one that Kusuo won for me."
"I don't understand. Who's Kusuo?"
It turns out that his mother doesn't remember Kusuo at all and continues not to no matter how much Touma tries to explain and jog her memory.
After asking his mom sufficient follow-up questions to determine that she doesn't seem to have memory issues aside from her inability to recall Kusuo, Touma calls his father to see if he remembers.
He does not.
Over the next few days Touma asks his peers and teachers about Kusuo. They don't remember him either.
In spite of this Touma doesn't doubt for a moment that Kusuo and his memories of their friendship are real.
They have to be, or else Touma has only ever been loved with the obligatory love that his parents spared him whenever they weren't too busy hating each other and has never in his life had anyone truly accept him as he is.
*
Starting tomorrow Makoto is going to be out of town for a week to do filming on location for a new drama he's in, so the Teruhashi siblings are, as is their tradition taking a trip to the shrine to pray for his safe travels.
They wash their hands and mouths and make their way up the stairs to the main body of the shrine.
Kokomi doesn't usually ask for anything on these visits save for her brother's safe return. After all, a perfect pretty girl like her already has everything she could ever need.
However today she asks, Please make my brother love me only in the ways a brother should love his sister.
A few weeks ago she'd dreamed she found him lying in the grass behind some festival stalls tangled in a lovers embrace with a girl who looked exactly like her.
Even if it was just a dream, since then it has been much harder to write off her brother's comments about wanting to marry her as tasteless jokes.
After leaving the shrine they stand at the top of the stairs and watch the sun set.
"Dearest Kokomi," her brother says," The sunset is really beautiful today, isn't it?"
"It really is beautiful," Kokomi says, and for a moment a sublime sense of peace settles over her.
The moment is sadly short-lived and is ruined instantly when her brother leans in and presses his lips passionately against hers. His tongue forces its way past her lips and probes around her mouth.
The moment she recovers from the initial shock to start processing what is happening, she pushes her brother away from her.
He loses his balance and goes tumbling backwards down the stairs that Kokomi forgot that they were standing at the top of.
Kokomi scrambles down the stairs to check if he's okay but by the time she reaches him, a tall man in a kitsune mask is standing over him. He's dressed in traditional clothing and his blond hair is tied back is a sloppy ponytail.
He reaches down and presses two fingers against her brother's wrist, checking for a pulse.
"Don't bother." The man says, gesturing for Kokomi to stop her approach, "He's dead."
Then he turns to look at Kokomi with twinkling green eyes and adds, "I saw what happened, you know."
Kokomi's blood runs cold upon hearing this, "I didn't mean to. It was accident."
"Oh really? Surely, you wanted your brother to die at least a little bit after he kissed you like that. It would be rather bad for your reputation if news of this got out.~"
"I didn't." Kokomi insists.
She didn't, right? Truthfully, she can't really remember what she had been feeling in the heat of that moment.
"Don't worry. As long as you don't tell anyone that I took your brother's body away from here, I'll let everyone go on thinking you're some perfect little angel," He says bending down and picking up Makoto's body, "but if you tell a single soul about this meeting, then I'll make sure that everyone learns what a nasty little devil you really are.~"
Then he walks off into the woods surrounding the shrine, her brother's body slung over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes.
Kokomi watches him go a strangely heavy emptiness settling in her chest.
She doesn't cry.
*
Touma presses the buzzer and waits patiently at the gate.
A woman with graying green hair comes out to greet him.
She's clearly a bit puzzled to see a high-school student paying her house a visit, so Touma explains, "I'm here to see your son. You see, we were classmates back in elementary school before he became unwell."
Touma does not lie and say that they were friends (they had in fact been quite the opposite) instead he lets her fill in that herself through selective withholding of information. He continues," I'm moving away soon and I would like to see him one last time before I go."
"I see," the woman says, "He's probably nothing like the boy you remember."
"I understand and have adjusted my expectations accordingly."
She leads him into the house, which is small and sparsely furnished.
He is seated on an aging sofa as she ventures down the hall and returns with Takashi trailing listlessly behind her.
He's scrawny in a way that suggests he hasn't been eating properly and he has impressive dark circles under his eyes.
What's more he has the broken stance of a man condemned. Or at least the broken stance Touma imagines a man condemned would have. He's never seen one himself.
It's hard for Touma to believe that this is the boy who'd tormented him back in grade school.
"I brought you shrimp chips. Specifically, the spicy kind that you used to eat to show off how good you were at eating spicy things." Touma says, offering a bag of said treat. He doesn't know if these were Takashi's favorite snack, but they're the only one that came up when he asked around about what snacks Takashi had liked. Takashi stares blankly at the bag and makes no move to take it.
"Well then, I suppose that I'll just have to consume all of these chips without your assistance," Touma says opening the bag and letting the sweet shrimpy smell waft out. Takashi snatches the bag away from Touma and begins to eat one tentatively.
"Oh good! It looks like you're more than just an empty shell. Maybe you'll be able to help me after all!" Touma says with a smile, "Do you remember our dear classmate Kusuo? If you require a description to jog your memory, he was that pink-haired kid-"
The bag of chips slips from Takashi's grasp, as he flinches at having his memory of Kusuo jogged.
"Ah, so you do remember him. Excellent! May I ask you a few questions regarding the last time you saw him?"
Takashi mutters something under his breath, too quiet for Touma to make out.
"Pardon? I'm afraid I didn't quite catch that."
"Get out." Takashi says, his voice low and gravelly, like he hasn't used it in a long time. He's standing now, fists clenched and shaking with anger. Or is it fear?
"Now, now, there is no need to get so worked up. I simply wished to ask you a few questions."
"I don't want to talk to you about this. Not when you're the one who sicced him on us!" Takashi says almost crying now.
Touma rankles at this accusation. He had not "sicced" Kusuo on them like some kind of animal, but rather called out to his dear friend to help save him from the torment that Takashi and his cronies were putting him through. There's no way he could have known that whatever Kusuo had done to achieve this end would mess up the other boys' minds the way it had.
He's about to say as much when Takashi's mother rushes into the room, her attention presumably drawn by her sons distressed voice.
She gives Touma an apologetic look and says, "You should probably go. When he something sets him off like this there's nothing to be done except take him back to his room and leave him be for a few hours until he calms down again."
Her tone is uncomfortably reminiscent of the one Touma's own mother had used to apologize on his behalf the many times he had embarrassed her in public as a child by falling afoul of some hidden rule or another that he'd failed to intuit.
This being the second time he's been requested to leave, Touma obliges.
Makoto wakes up propped against the wall in a dark room, feeling oddly weak and shaken, his arms tied behind his back in a highly uncomfortable position. He tries to stand upright only to find that his legs are tied together as well.
He thrashes about wildly trying to break his bonds, but to no avail.
It's only after he has well and truly tired himself out, that a door creaks open and a light clicks on to illuminate his surroundings.
He's lying on the floor of a small bathroom, barely big enough to contain a sink, toilet, and shower. It's decorated with a red and gold color scheme that is already making Makoto almost nostalgic for the prior darkness.
Standing in the doorway is a man in a Kitsune mask. A lab coat drapes over his boney frame and a strange amulet dangles around his neck.
Somewhat incongruously, he's holding a small ceramic pot which he sets atop the toilet tank as he approaches Makoto.
"Good morning," The man says in a sing-song voice so unsuited to the situation that, were his arms not bound, it would take an impressive amount self-restraint for Makoto not to throttle him.
"Look," say Makoto, "I don't know what sort of sick prank this is, but I don't have time for it. I'm supposed to filming on location today."
"Not anymore!~" the man in the kitsune mask says, "You've got a much more important role to play now."
"What are you talking about? I'm starring in this one. They won't be able to get anything done without me there."
"Really? Then tell me who's going to care about your stupid little TV drama if the world blows up or all of humanity is driven to madness?"
"What the heck are you talking about?"
"Just the sort of things I've devoted my life to preventing. I've also had to sacrifice any irrelevant little hopes and dreams I might have had for this purpose, you know."
Makoto realizes with a sinking sense of dread that his kidnapper is a madman.
If he was being held for ransom, he's confident that he's a valuable enough asset to his agency that they'd pay to set him free, and if he'd been taken by an overly obsessed fan, he'd at least have the hope of leveraging their attachment to him to give himself a chance to escape, but since the man in the kitsune mask has kidnapped him for incomprehensible reasons he has no idea what would need to happen for him to be released.
"Please let me go. I need to be there for Kokomi," he begs.
"Don't worry about that," The man in the kitsune mask says as he crouches down in front of Makoto, "I doubt she wants anything to do with you, given how you last parted ways."
That's right. He'd taken advantage of the romantic moment by kissing Kokomi and she'd rebuffed him. And also pushed him down all those stairs but that hurts far less than the pain of rejection.
"You're wrong! I'm sure she was just so happy that I kissed her that it gave her an involuntary muscle spasm." Makoto says trying to convince himself of this and meeting with only limited success as the treat of tears prickles at the corners of his eyes, "After all, why wouldn't she want a handsome rising star like me?"
"Because you're her brother, obviously." The man in the Kitsune mask says, delivering a flick to Makoto's forehead, "I thought that even an idiot like you could figure that one out."
"So what if I'm her brother?" Makoto says. He's dimly aware that brothers are not supposed to love their sisters the way that he loves Kokomi but he's certain that there must be some special exception for the two of them. How can their love be wrong when the when the slightest glimpse, the mere thought, of Kokomi's lovely visage sets his heart ablaze like napalm in a particularly flammable jungle and it feels so wonderful, so right to let it burn?
He continues his voice rising, "I've known her longer than anyone else, I know her better than anyone else, and while even I can't claim to be her equal in charm and grace, I come closer to matching her in those than anyone else. Who could be a better partner for either of us than the other when we're both in a league of our own, so far above anyone else's?" The man in the Kitsune mask lets out a derisive chuckle as he takes Makoto by the shoulders and drags him into an upright position. "You're nothing special and neither is your sister. There's nothing in either of you that transcends this useless flimsy world."
"You're wrong," Makoto says, "Kokomi's beauty is transcendent!"
"It really isn't. In time it will rot away with the rest of your sister as she meets the fate of all this world's creatures. There is only one thing in this world that's truly capable of transcending it and it will be the end of all of we know. If you're good, I might show it to you someday."
"I don't want to see your so-called transcendent thing. I want to go back to my Kokomi."
"That's not happening. Anyway, let's get down to brass tacks," the man in the kitsune mask says, "You're a virgin, right?"
"Of course! I've been saving my first time for Kokomi." Makoto answers without missing a beat.
"Excellent. It would be unfortunate if I had to discard you and find someone else to kidnap. Besides, it would be such a waste to have to throw out that blood I took from you earlier."
"What do you mean, the blood you took?" Makoto asks.
"I thought that statement was fairly self-explanatory. I took some of your blood while you were still knocked out earlier," the man in the kitsune mask says as he takes the small pot from where he had set it aside, "and I'm here to give you some food to help you recover and make more."
He opens it up and takes a spoon from some pocket of his lab coat to scoop up a spoonful of the stew inside and lift it to Makoto's mouth.
"Say ahh.~" he says in that infuriating sing-song voice of his.
Makoto does no such thing.
"Fine then, we'll do this the hard way." the man in the kitsune mask says. He pulls Makoto's jaw open with cold fingers, and thrusts the spoon inside.
The taste is indescribable, and the texture is worse. Mushy bitter grains, blood flavored meat, stringy over-cooked greens and slimy strands of- is that natto?- mingle together to truly unpleasant effect. Makoto would spit it out but the man in the kitsune mask has his hand over Makoto's mouth holding it closed.
"Let me explain this in terms clear enough for even an idiot like you to understand," he says, his frigid, green eyes locking with Makoto's own, "In this new life of yours, it's up to me, not you, when you eat, drink, bathe and bleed. As well as when you relieve yourself, I suppose, unless you feel like soiling yourself. However, if you're good and prove to me that you won't run away, I'll give you those choices back little by little."
He waits patiently for Makoto to swallow and then takes his hand from Makoto's mouth and lifts another spoonful of stew to his lips. "So, what do you say?"
"Absolutely not! That's a terrible deal!" Makoto sputters.
"Wrong answer," the man in the kitsune mask says and fills Makoto's mouth with another spoonful of stew.
Unpacking has numerous advantages over packing as an activity. These include the general lack of looming deadlines (once all of the boxes have been removed from the truck, that is) and the fact that you are getting your possessions returned to you rather than sealed away, never to grace your current location again.
It is however no less tiring, Touma quickly realizes as he assists his mother in this endeavor.
By the end of the day, he is barely able to make his way through the necessary bedtime preparations before drifting off to a sleep where he has a dream more vivid than any he's had in years.
In it, he's at a festival much like the one he attended with Kusuo as a child. He looks for the horizon, but finds none and realizes that the twinkling lights of the stars in the sky are not stars at all but simply more festival lights and the sky is not a sky but rather the festival grounds sloping up and over and eventually back into itself like a dyson sphere of festival built to fully utilize the festivity of some invisible star of celebration at its center.
He wanders through the festival aimlessly for a while, marveling at its strange layout, until a bunch of stuffed cows like Cream hanging up as a prize at a ring toss game catch his eye.
He tries to win one a few times without luck.
The stuffed cows begin to smolder away into ashes. They're all going to be destroyed just like the one Kusuo had won for him.
In a vain attempt to save them from this fate Touma redoubles his ring tossing efforts.
What are you doing here Asumi?
Touma turns to see Kusuo standing behind him wearing a yukata with a red spider lily pattern. It's folded the wrong way round, the right side resting atop the left. He's still the child he was the last time Touma saw him and with faint surprise Touma realizes that he is his seven-year-old self as well.
"Mom threw away Cream, so I'm trying to win her back." Asumi says. He turns back to look at the smoldering remains of the unwon cow plushies, "As you can see it isn't going terribly well."
This is just a dream you know. Even if you won one you wouldn't be able to keep it.
Having said this, Kusuo starts to walk away from the booth.
"I suppose that's true," Touma says, following after him. "Besides I can't replace what made Cream so precious, since that was the fact that you won her for me."
Why did you keep it for so long?
"I needed something to remember you by. Something physical, I mean. I'm very grateful to you for putting a stop to the bullying but I cannot hold an absence, even one as wonderful as that one, close to my chest at night to remind me that you exist and that you loved me enough to give me something that I was unable to obtain on my own." Touma rambles, "She clearly served this purpose quite admirably, given that I still remember you even after everyone else I know has forgotten. Well, everyone except for Takahashi, I guess. His lackies might remember you too, but I didn't manage to track them down before I moved."
They were institutionalized. Kusuo says, his head lowered.Takahashi probably will be as well, once his mother gets too old to care for him.
"Ah well," Touma says. "I suppose that explains why I couldn't find them."
I broke them so badly even I couldn't fix them. Kusuo says, Shouldn't you be more bothered by this?
"Perhaps. Intellectually I know that the fate my bullies met was a harsher one than children like them deserved, as awful as they were notwithstanding, but emotionally I've never managed to feel particularly bad about what happened to them." Touma says, adding after a moment's consideration, "I'm sorry if that troubles you."
It's not that. Kusuo says, I mean, aren't you afraid of me?
"Of course not, you accepted me as I am, so it would only be fair for me to do the same for you."
You don't have to.
"But I want to. Won't you please come back and let me?" Touma says, reaching out to Kusuo.
I can't. I'm sorry. Kusuo says pulling away from Touma's outreached hand. I'll make it up to you, I promise.
"I don't want it made up to me." Touma says, his voice oddly quavering, "I want this to not be a dream, or rather I want to be able to see you in real life again instead of only in these dreams that make your absence sting all the more acutely once I wake up from them."
Wouldn't you rather forget me? Kusuo asks, looking up at the false stars. So you wouldn't have to miss me anymore.
"Of course not! My memories of our time together are among the most precious ones I have. I just wish that I could make new memories with you in the future as well."
After a long silence Kusuo says, You'll find someone to make new precious memories with someday. I promise.
"Finding someone else won't make me stop missing you. You were my best friend."
I was your only friend. You can make better ones. He smiles at Touma, a bit sadly, Odd as you are, you're far from unlovable.
Touma finds himself back in his bed before he can push back against the 'unlike me' that he suspects lies implicit beneath those words.
When he falls back asleep he dreams of the festival again but no matter how he looks, Kusuo is nowhere to be found.
*
Teruhashi Kokomi goes home alone.
Once there, she prepares and eats dinner alone and tidies up afterwards alone.
Both of their-
Both of her parents work overseas so with Makoto gone there's no one else in the house.
It doesn't feel real. There's a strange dream like weightlessness to it all that leaves her floating above herself as she goes about her life like nothing is wrong and Makoto's just left for his business trip a day earlier than expected.
She can almost convince herself that he did. It would make so much more sense and raise so many fewer troubling questions if that was the case.
This serene calm lasts until the next morning when she gets a panicked phone call from the production team of the drama that her brother's supposed to be in asking where he is, and suddenly the full weight of what happened comes crashing down on her.
She manages to retain her composure long enough to lie that she has no idea what happened to him, only that he left at his usual time so he should have had plenty of time to get there. After that she hangs up the phone and cries.
It's still hard to believe she'd killed her brother. It had all happened so fast. Him kissing her, her pushing him away. If only she had kept calm when he kissed her then she could have just let him down gently like any man who asked her out on the street.
Except that unlike all those other men she'd still have to go home with Makoto and sleep in the same house with him and meet his eyes over breakfast the next morning like he hadn't just French-kissed her the previous evening despite being her brother.
The truth is she's relieved he's gone, as guilty as she feels to admit that to herself.
There's still a part of her that grieves him though.
It's true that she's spent the last few years trying to avoid him as much as possible without making her distaste for him obvious, but when the two of them were small she would have counted him as one of her closest friends. Admittedly she hadn't had many of those even though she'd always been well-liked by her peers.
Now once sweet memories of those days leave her nauseous as she combs over their history and tries to figure out where it had gone so wrong.
When had her time spent with him start to be tainted that pervasive sense of discomfort and dread?
When had he stopped seeing her as a sister and started seeing her as a potential romantic partner?
Maybe he'd always seen her that way and when they were kids she'd just missed because she'd been more naive and the true nature of his feelings towards her had been less obvious.
She allows herself a whole ten minutes of such moping then she goes to the bathroom and hides away of all the evidence of her distinctly unangelic tears so she can go to school just as pretty and perfect and ready to bring joy to the masses as she's always been.