Chapter Text
I never let any of my brothers leave the house, I never let any of them feel the need to work.
I never left for a job too far away to live at home.
That was my responsibility, after all.
I was constantly working all-nighters. Desperate to exceed all the expectations of my boss, to climb up the corporate ladder. I say constantly, but even so I managed to do so for more than a decade. Until now, I guess. It all started with a horrible cough, we all thought it was a cold. My brothers told me to stay home, but I just couldn't bring myself to. I put a mask over my mouth and I went to work. I tried to work while I was there, but my eyes were so blurry that it was making it hard. My coworkers must have been surprised when I collapsed. I dropped papers everywhere, how embarrassing. I woke up in the house, with no-one in the room I was in. From the look of my surroundings I had gathered that it was the living room. I tilted my head to the side and looked at my arm. Peering out from the end of my sleeve, I could see my hand. Even I could tell it was pale. My coworkers probably took me home, and my brothers probably thought it was the cold from that morning that made me so pale. Or maybe I wasn't that pale by the time I got home?
I remember thinking.
'So this is how I'm going to go? Alone. Not even my brothers next to me? I tried so hard to keep us together, but I guess I never really was part of the group I glued together, huh? This is fitting. I deserve this. Osomatsu's probably mad at me, for keeping my distance from the others like I did to him. Like what I did to make him...'
I remember crying. It was appropriately salty and bitter against the corners of my lip, tasting the tears through the thin gape of my mouth.
It was my fault. If I hadn't left and made everyone feel like they needed to go with me, he wouldn't have swallowed those pills.
It was my fault for running away from him.
It was my fault for leaving him alone.
"It's for the best like this, Osomatsu-niisan. We have to grow up sometime, and we can't stay like this. It's not right."
That's what I told him.
At first he managed to hold up his smile and laugh it off.
"What, Choromatsu are you seriously considering leaving? Choromatsu, I know you hate being a NEET, but that doesn't have to do with us. Maybe if you got a job I could be your housewife, or something like that? You know it's impossible for me to work, so at least let me be with-"
"It's because of us that I need to leave."
"W-what?"
"Decent members of society don't love their siblings like us, Osomatsu-niisan. You don't just get a job and become a good member of society, you have to have a good reputation too, y'know."
"Reputation, that's what this is about?! And what's with the honorific, we're alone right now you know! Fuck Choromatsu, I love you so don't-"
"I love you too, Osomatsu."
"Then-!"
"That's exactly why I have to leave, I can't be with you. For both of our sakes, Osomatsu-niisan."
"Don't say that this is for both of us."
"Goodbye, Osomatsu-niisan."
That's why he stopped eating. That's why he did those things to his skin. That's why everyone else left, and every time a brother left he got even worse. He wanted my attention at first, I think to bring me back out of worry and guilt. I was too focused on work to take calls from mom, or any of our siblings for that matter. But when the others stopped taking calls too, and stopped coming home, that's when he did it. I guess he couldn't handle it, the big bad sextuplets disbanding on top of me leaving. I heard that he came home drunk one night and sat spouting nonsense in the living room, like he was talking to someone. Then after a while there was nothing. Our parents assumed he had passed out, but when he wasn't in the bedroom the next morning they remembered that they didn't hear snoring the night before. By the time they opened the door to the living room he was long gone. The day after I sent the letter I got called out of work. He never got to read that letter.
I deserved this, dying of working too hard. Like how I worked too hard to be accepted by society, to the point of killing my brother. To the point of killing Osomatsu. It was my fault. I remembered worrying about my brothers in the last seconds, wondering what they were going to do after I was gone. I tried so hard to protect them against the pressures of society I felt, and the decisions I made because of those pressures that Osomatsu was at the receiving end of.
And then I remember taking my last shaky breath with tears in my eyes as they closed, I ultimately died of excessive sleep-deprivation.
Now I was here, and here he was. Smiling in front of me, like he hadn't just been told to mentor his murderer.