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Teru’s earliest memory is of his brother, his house, and his sword.
He can place his own age at six years old from the length of his hair, stood barefoot in the garden around the back of the house. Kou is three- Teru remembers that plain and clear as lightning- and he’s messily parrying the sheathed edge of Teru’s sword with a stick he pulled out of the neighbour's yard. The air is warm and thick with the taste of ozone, and Teru is laughing, dodging Kou’s attempts to drive the stick clumsily into his stomach.
From the kitchen, their mother calls a warning; dinner will be ready in one hour, the storm will break in two. She’s always had a sixth sense for things like that- reading storms as if she’s Minamoto by blood. Her kappogi covers a lightweight yukata, her bow is propped by the dining table. There’s an exorcism to attend, tonight.
Exorcisms mean a night off from training while the adults make sure the streets are safe. Exorcisms mean Teru gets to playfight with Kou in the backyard until they’re both exhausted and Teru has to haul his uncooperative younger brother back up the garden path. Exorcisms mean their mother pats them each on the head, tells them dinner is ready whenever they want it, and takes up her bow before the storm has time to break.
Kou takes one more clumsy swing with his stick, then starts bawling when it embeds a long, thin splinter right into his palm.
Looking back, Teru can’t remember which was louder; Kou’s sobs, the metallic clatter of his sword against the concrete path, or the first deafening roll of thunder overhead.
It’s just a splinter. Teru has been taught to deal with worse- he knew how to dress a wound by the time he was five- but for some reason, his hands shake as he turns Kou’s palms skywards. Just a splinter, hardly the end of the world, but Kou cries like it is because he’s three years old and that’s what most kids do. (His grandmother once laughed in her hospital bed about the time Teru fell face-first into solid concrete in the preschool yard, and barely even batted an eyelid. He learned early on that he isn’t allowed to be most kids. )
“Hold still,” Teru tells Kou, holding his palm in place. “I’ve gotta get it out, or it’ll go bad.”
Squirming away from the tweezers, Kou offers a half-sob that sounds something like I don’t want help, you’ll make it worse.
“I’m your older brother,” Teru replies, firm and honest. “It’s my job to help.”
Teru gets the splinter out. Kou cries and swears that he hates him in the seconds afterwards, before calming down as soon as Teru offers to put on a movie after dinner. With a final clumsy kick aimed at the stick still lying in the grass, Kou beams up at Teru- all forgiven and left in the past because five minutes is a long time when you’re only three years old.
(Teru can’t remember what was louder; thunder, crying, swords against concrete garden paths. Sitting Kou down on the step and telling him it’s my job to help- Teru remembers that as if it was yesterday.)
-
Kou isn’t strong.
It’s an objective fact; Kou is bright and Kou is Teru’s best friend and Kou is weak. He wields a shinai clumsily, trips over his own feet during hand-to-hand combat, can’t summon the spirit lightning in his blood to the tips of his fingers beyond unwanted electric shocks while he’s passing a side-dish across the table. Teru graduated to swinging a sword larger than he was tall by the time he was five. Kou is already six and the staff promised to him by birthright still sits in the hallway like an unfulfilled promise.
Kou isn’t strong. Teru is on the warpath to become one of the most powerful exorcists in the prefecture- or so the other clans have started to say. (Who needs to worry when Minamoto Teru is watching your back?)
Sometimes Teru wonders if he stole every bit of power the Minamoto name had to offer- eating up lightning and ozone before Kou was able to take his share. Sometimes he wonders if he’s to blame for the whispers about second son being an unlucky title to hold.
Other times, Kou is weak, and Teru is glad .
If he never figures out how to wield a weapon right, then he’ll never be dragged out to hunting parties where people have learned to expect the world; and nothing less. If he trips over his own feet more often than he lands a hit on a target, then he’ll always be safe.
Teru will make sure of it.
(He’s an older brother, and he’s an exorcist. Protecting others is what he was born to do.)
-
Matsuda-san is dead. This is the first thing Teru learns when the hunting party comes to join him and his father from the door of their house. Happened just a day ago- the funeral is on Wednesday.
Matsuda-san was twenty two- fresh out of university with a shiny new law degree, set aside for a year spent upholding his family name before moving onto bigger, brighter things. He taught Teru a sealing incantation that flowed over his tongue like lightning, easier than any of the ones written in his family’s old scrolls. It was a monster with six fingers on each hand and a veil over its eyes that did it- Morita-san says, shifting his staff over his shoulder. The exorcism tonight is a personal one.
“It’s part of being an exorcist,” Teru’s father tells him as they hunt- hushed voice, one worn hand pressed against Teru’s spine like he expects him to turn tail and run. Guiding him forwards, because there’s not an exorcist in the prefecture who isn’t watching the Minamoto clan’s first-born son. “It’s our duty, no matter what it costs.”
Teru skips an afternoon of school on Wednesday to attend Matsuda-san’s funeral. Kou stays at home, with a promise to help their mother put together the best curry any of them have ever tasted.
Kou is warm and alive in the doorway. If dying is what it costs, then Teru doesn’t want his brother to become an exorcist at all.
-
It doesn’t help that Teru has never been any good at saying no to Kou.
Some nights, when Kou tugs at his sleeves with his tiny hands and refuses to let go, Teru tells him he can follow. Stay close, stay out of sight, don’t move unless I tell you to. He huddles behind bushes and Teru feels awestruck eyes watching him through the foliage as he swings his sword and lightning snaps at his heels- waiting upon his every command. It makes him feel strong, capable even when his hands are almost too tired to lift his blade off the autumn leaves below his geta sandals.
If Teru can fell a supernatural three times his height with one swing of his sword, then nobody will ask Kou to step in beside him. A sure truth that Teru carries alongside the weight of his name.
Fear is not something Teru is well-practiced in. He’s a Minamoto by name and by nature- the heir to the clan, born in the middle of a late-june storm- who didn’t even cry when an apparition slipped into his room past the wards on every window in the house. He will do great things, he will never waver.
He’s never known terror like the time he lost sight of a beast with switchblade claws and bristling black feathers, then found it again in the scream of his younger brother.
Kou is unarmed: flat on his back in the undergrowth with teeth poised above his face, claws catching on the threads of his lion-print t-shirt, and Teru has never been more scared in his life. Heart in his throat, lightning following it on the way up, nitrogen igniting in his lungs as he conjures a desperate thunderstorm in the middle of a cloudless night.
The creature’s head falls to the ground with a sick thud. Teru still feels as if he’s about to throw up, even once Kou has peeled himself off the ground, dusted off his shorts, blinked wide-eyed at the residual static hanging in the air. Teru can taste blood in the back of his throat, lightning-struck on the inside. Hands shaking, he goes to check Kou for injuries, his sword falling to the ground beside the head and the scorched, feathered body it separated from.
“I’m fine,” Kou insists, batting Teru’s worried hands away. “Wasn’t even scared!”
(He says it earnestly, and in some ways, Kou is braver than Teru has ever been.)
By the next evening, Kou is tugging at Teru’s sleeve in the genkan again; blue eyes excited, asking to follow.
Teru has never been much good at saying no to Kou- but he always knew he’d have to learn eventually.
-
For all that Kou never does quite grow into his powers- he’s changing in other ways.
He’s learning to cook, following their mother around the kitchen with a kid-sized apron tied around his waist and a comically large kitchen knife in one hand. What he lacks in lightning he makes up for in spirit; stubborn and more determined than any fully-fledged exorcist Teru has ever known. He hasn’t got many friends, but he spends all his time with the ones he has made- leaving Teru to trip over a group of eight-year-olds huddled on the garden path when he gets back from school.
Kou plays football after class, gets really into blowing all his pocket money on pokemon cards, grows a whole 2 centimetres taller in the space of a month and has to walk around with his trousers up to his ankles until he can get new ones.
Teru learns to take power naps standing up, spends more time in a yukata than he does in his favourite hoodie, and his time after school is dedicated to scorching trenches into the fields behind the house.
(At dinner, Kou slams a wonky-looking plate of gyoza down on the table and swears he spent the whole afternoon making them all by himself, that he only got a tiny bit of help towards the end.
And- ashamedly, awfully - Teru feels jealous.)
-
Sitting by himself on the steps of an old shrine that hasn’t been used in decades, Teru wants to complain.
He wants to curse at the cloud-filled sky, kick his feet and throw rocks like he’s a petulant little kid because why is he the one to carry the full weight of his name. Why is he the one who spent the first five years of his life with a sword hung on the wall behind his seat at the dinner table like a promise he was born and shaped to fill. Why is he the one who has to keep people safe, who has to avoid picking fights at school, who has to run around the streets instead of huddling under the bedcovers to watch cartoons until he falls asleep.
Then his father approaches the shrine’s steps with news about something inhuman lurking in the projector room of the local movie theatre, and Teru remembers why.
Because Kou and his friends are going there to watch the latest high-budget action flick at the weekend. Because Kou gets to playfight with sticks instead of his grandmother’s raiteijou, gets to watch cartoons in bed, gets to pick fights and make friends and smile gap-toothed and bright. Because Teru is here on the shrine steps. Sword at his side and ready to attack.
Kou isn’t strong. If he’s a good brother, then Teru just has to make sure he never needs to be.
-
Sometimes Teru blames his blood. Power multiplied by power, generations of noble exorcists who he cannot afford to fail. He wears his name with pride.
Sometimes he blames his parents. For seeing a kid to raise and a storm waiting to break, one role more important than the other.
Mostly, though, he blames the apparitions. The supernatural beings who drag themselves out from distant shores- pathetic creatures who do nothing but take. So long as the streets are crawling with them, Teru cannot afford to rest.
-
Kou has one foot in the world of exorcism, perpetually at risk of tipping in.
When Tiara is born and their mother dies less than a year later, Teru swears on his name and his sword that he will not let her feel the same.
-
Teru is set to become president of the Kamome Gakuen middle school council, he’s grown into his title as one of the strongest exorcists in the prefecture, and he’s just shrunk Kou’s school trousers in the wash.
There’s a storm coming- he can’t predict the first roll of thunder like his mother could, but he can taste it on the air when he comes downstairs to find a sad, shrunken pair of trousers thrown over the back of the kitchen chair. Kou is already up; humming a pop song off the radio that Teru doesn’t know the name of, working around the lightning burns on his hand as he makes the three of them breakfast. Tiara sits in her highchair, making grabby hands at Prince while he eats his cat food and blatantly ignores her.
Teru picks up the trousers with a wince. “Sorry- I swear I did everything like you told me.”
Unfazed, Kou brushes off the apology with a twirl of his spatula. “If they’re gonna dress-code me, it’ll be for my earring- not because I’m wearing the wrong trousers.”
“Still-” Teru starts. What sort of older sibling has to get their younger brother to talk them through using a washing machine- then manages to mess it up anyway?
Kou cuts him off by slamming an omelette down on the table in front of him. “Eat, while it’s still warm.”
The burn wounds on Kou’s hands are still new and red at the edges, but he’s unwrapped his bandages for the sake of not getting them wet while cooking. Teru might be able to keep Kou safe from late night exorcisms and the weight of a name, but he can’t do something as simple as stepping in to cook breakfast without the risk of setting the stove on fire.
“Delicious, as always,” Teru offers instead through a mouthful of egg, earning himself a wide, chipped-tooth grin, and an offer of seconds as soon as he’s done.
(Sometimes, quietly, Teru feels like Kou is the one looking after him instead.)
-
Teru knows the movie theatre down the road not by the new films his classmates make plans to see, but by the amorphous supernatural that lurked in the projector room before he came and drove it out. He knows the art gallery not by the class trip he missed in his third year of middle school, but by the haunted painting in the storage room which screamed loud enough that he couldn’t hear right the following day. He knows the arcade not by the keyring on Kou’s bag that his friend won him from a claw machine, but as a landmark to pass on his way to exorcist meetings across the city.
Teru is good at what he does. He’s strong and he’s well-liked and people feel safe when he draws his sword and forges ahead. That’s what being an exorcist means, even if his father isn’t around long enough to tell him that any more.
He doesn’t always have time to help Kou with his homework. Tiara sometimes gets upset and refuses to speak to him for a day when he can’t spare an hour to watch weird kids cartoons with her. Once, he forgets to feed Prince and the guilt follows him to school and back for a week straight even when Kou tells him it’s fine, that he’s obviously got a lot of other things to think about.
But- Kou gets to spend time with friends who win him keyrings from claw machines and don’t ask about the umbrella he brings into school even on sunny days. Teru’s not sure if Tiara even has spirit lightning, because he’s made sure that she’s never needed to use it.
Keeping people safe. Above dying young, above making sacrifices- that’s what it means to be a Minamoto.
-
“You’ve got-” Fujiwara gestures vaguely at her hair, jostling the tanto knife sheathed at her side. Her voice is filled with barely suppressed laughter, out of place in the quiet streets.
Teru runs a hand through hair, and comes away holding a sparkly pink butterfly clip. A more thorough search reveals five more of the things, popping up all over his head like multicolour daisies. (Perhaps, napping in the living room after school wasn’t such a smart idea after all.)
“Younger sister,” Teru explains fondly- and the smile that escapes him comes all too easy.
(If the exorcists who hunt the city’s moonlit streets are at all perturbed by the first-born son of the Minamoto clan with his hair full of sparkly butterfly clips, then it’s worth it for the way Tiara grins up at him when he slips into her room to wish her goodnight.)
-
“There’s no such thing as a good supernatural,” Teru tells his brother; a warning and a reminder and a promise.
Kou’s heart has always been too big for his own body. If he ends up getting hurt because of it, then Teru will never forgive himself.
-
It’s not the first time they’ve fought. One-sided arguments are rare but they creep up every so often; about trivial things like taking breaks and accepting help and hands that aren’t meant to hold powerful weapons until they burn red and angry.
But, it’s the first time they’ve fought about this. Like this, with lightning and blood and Kou- weak, selfless Kou- with his hands wrapped around the blade of Teru’s sword. Protecting an apparition who, just minutes ago, had a knife to his chest and intent to kill in his eyes.
Kou shouts, voice splintering across the school yard, an accusation breaking at the back of his throat.
Teru barely hears it, because Kou is bleeding- leaving red fingerprints all over the collar of his shirt- and his ears are full of static. (He wants to sit his brother down on the step again with a first aid kit, where the only storm waiting to break is the one in the sky overhead. He wants to tell his brother that it’s fine, that he doesn’t have to think about anything because Teru is older and it’s his job to protect .)
“I’m gonna get stronger,” there’s tears in Kou’s eyes as he speaks.
I don’t want you to- Teru should tell him in return.
“He could attack a student tomorrow,” Teru warns him instead, because something has changed.
The Kou standing in front of him isn’t the little kid on the back step with a splinter in his palm, bawling his eyes out in the second before a storm comes crashing down. Something is different, and Teru feels the ground tilt on its axis when he realises he didn’t even notice it happening.
Kou apologises on the way home; for getting blood on Teru’s shirt and yelling at him, but not for defending an apparition who has nothing but rot inside. His injury is already bandaged out of sight, by hands other than Teru’s own.
When Kou walks ahead, it’s with a trivial comment about starting the dinner early, about side-dishes to make.
He doesn’t wait for Teru to apologise. (Really, it’s almost like he doesn’t expect him to.)
-
Not knowing is a valuable skill, Teru thinks, as he watches Tiara chasing a terrified group of mokke in circles around the park. As Yashiro flusters when he passes by in the corridor, unaware of the timer slowly ticking down above her head. As people turn the rumour mill round and round, unaware of the dark shapes they’re speaking to life in the school’s oldest corridors.
Kou comes back late from school with blood in his hair and a broken camera in his bag, and he doesn’t resurface even when Teru orders pizza for dinner.
When he finally shows up for breakfast looking like he’s lost a week’s worth of sleep in just one night, there’s an expression on his face which belongs to someone who knows.
Teru should do something to help; offer to make breakfast, do the dishes, give him the answers to the homework that’s been sitting on the sideboard for the past three days. Instead, he’s already pulling on his shoes in the genkan, because there’s an apparition by the train station and it’s got a target on its back with his name on it.
Being a good exorcist is easy.
As Teru slips out of the front door with his sword at his side, he’s starting to learn that being a good brother is another battle entirely.
-
Matsuda-san was twenty two when he died.
Teru is still just seventeen- but there’s whispers of severance echoing through the school’s darkest corridors, and a Minamoto does not take any chances.
“When the time comes,” He tells Aoi Akane- keeper of the school clocks, and the one supernatural that he’s never been able to kill. “Please use all of your powers to protect my little brother.”
It’s devastatingly final, in a way. Teru does not intend to die- he has fought until now and nothing short of a force of nature could ever make him stumble. But- the life of a Minamoto is still to protect others, no matter the cost.
(If Teru can’t keep his siblings safe as their brother, then an exorcist is all he can be.)
-
Teru wakes up to a world free of supernaturals, so he goes to an arcade with one of the clock keepers and a school mystery’s assistant.
He wears his favourite hoodie, sings karaoke, orders the biggest pile of sugar toast he’s ever set his eyes upon, and he almost feels glad that the world shattered itself into a pile of broken glass.
( Almost - because Akane Aoi is dead and he was too late to save her. Minamoto Teru is an exorcist, and he can’t live in this new world knowing it’s built on the foundations of such an awful sacrifice.)
So he spends all of his money on claw machines, and he has a plan.
-
Learning to trust Kou is a slow, painful work in progress.
Teru doesn’t follow him into the Red House, no matter how much everything he’s ever known screams at him to throw down the phone, chase after, save his foolish brother whose heart beats too large for his own body. Instead he trusts , and it’s one of the hardest things he’s ever done.
When the two of them resurface; injured, haunted, but alive - Teru doesn’t know which point it’s proving.
-
If trusting Kou is hard, then leaving a note on the bookshelf- high enough that Tiara won’t be the one who finds it, a short, awful in case I don’t come back- is the worst thing that Teru has ever done.
-
They’ve fought about this before. The school yard, the stairwell, tiny arguments in the corridors of their empty home. But here, on the far shore, they’ve never fought like this.
Kou attacks Teru like he’s an apparition standing in his way, a being from the far shore who shares his eyes, his nose, the colour of his hair. Kou attacks with all he’s got and he’s still weak, a little kid with his heart on his sleeve, a staff he never learned to hold and powers he never grew into right.
They stand face to face on the far shore- somewhere Teru never should have brought him, never should have thought about bringing him- but it’s too late to back out now, and-
And Kou is just a kid. He’s a kid, he’s Teru’s younger brother, he’s got his raiteijou pointed at him like he’s an active threat and Teru just wants him to stop . ( Stop playing the hero, stop putting yourself in danger, stop charging eyes-closed into all the things I tried to protect you from )
“You’re weak,” Teru tells him loud and clear, and it echoes out across that impossible, endless sea. “You’re weak, and I envy that.”
Teru doesn’t offer an apology. This time; Kou doesn’t either.
-
Teru notices it before Kou does.
A shadow shifting beneath the water, dark and black and so dangerous that lightning sparks at Teru’s fingertips before he’s even had the chance to summon it. He’s never known fear like this, so strong it tastes like blood at the back of his throat, sending him hurtling forwards before he’s even had the chance to think.
(Once, Teru saw his brother in danger, and conjured a storm so violent the thunder shook the ground and lightning burned his throat from the inside out.
Once, Teru skipped school for an exorcist’s funeral on a Wednesday afternoon, and learned with certainty that his family name is what he will live and die for.
Once, Teru sat Kou down on the back step of their house, and told him past the taste of ozone in the air: I’m your older brother, and it is my job to help. )
Good or bad, exorcist or brother- Teru was born to protect .
(And so, as soon as Kou is out of danger, he doesn’t even feel afraid any more.)