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With a long yawn, Wataru takes a mug from the cupboard and rummages around on the countertop for sugar and the box of tea that Tsugumi brought back recently. Feel free to try it, she’d quietly let everyone know. It’s a blend that’s good for relaxation.
God knows Wataru could use some relaxation, though he feels a bit guilty thinking so. He’s never once in all his ten years of service known an operator who would call the job easy, but even so, he’s not the one standing on the frontlines, risking his skin in battle against Others. He’s also not the one defending his life against former allies who won’t explain their motives, nor the one stealing into restricted locations to probe for evidence of government corruption. He’s not enduring headaches so painful they leave him gasping for breath, not relying on medicine made from human brains to keep his memory from flaking apart, not losing his family to assassination and betrayal…
No, the one suffering through all of that is a soft-hearted and sincere sixteen-year-old kid, and all Wataru can do is watch it happen. He’s known for a long time that his job is stressful, but things sure have escalated to new heights since he was assigned to Yuito’s platoon.
As Wataru pours water over the teabag and enjoys the mellow herbal aroma that rises up with the steam, a sudden thud from the living room startles him into full alert, and he steps over to the doorway to search for the cause of the sound. The lights are all off save for those in the kitchen, so it takes him a moment to find it: Yuito is next to sofa, carefully picking himself up off the floor.
“Whoa!” Wataru is quick to cross the room. “You okay there?”
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” Yuito assures, and he’s already back upright before Wataru can extend a hand to help. “I just tripped, is all. Caught my foot on the corner of the couch.”
To Wataru’s relief, he sounds more embarrassed than anything else, and he softly exhales the concern that leapt up into his throat. “Well, it’s a pretty odd time of night to be walking around, after all. Couldn’t sleep?”
“Yeah…” Yuito says. “My eyes wouldn’t stay closed, so I figured I might as well just get up.”
“‘Get up’ - as in, for the day? It’s like four a.m., though…?”
He shrugs lightly and passes by Wataru, headed for the kitchen. “It’s early, but I figured I could get a headstart on breakfast or something. My head will feel clearer once my hands are doing something.”
That’s kind of nuts, Wataru wants to say, but there’s a notification from the OSF operator software blinking in the corner of his vision that takes his attention away from the conversation and digs a furrow into his brow.
“Hey, Yuito,” he says instead, “hang on a minute.”
The addressed pauses, waiting expectantly as Wataru approaches him and raises his hand.
“‘Scuse me for a second.” So saying, he presses his hand to Yuito’s forehead, holding it there as the other flinches in surprise at the sudden gesture, and judges the warmth against his palm. “Hm,” he says at length. “Yeah, sure enough. Yuito, did you know you’ve got a fever?”
“Huh? For real?!” When Wataru withdraws his hand, Yuito replaces it with his own, frowning deeply. “Ugh… I guess I shouldn’t go preparing any food, then…”
Wataru opens a virtual screen and navigates through the menus, his lips pursed in thought as he scrolls and scrolls through the information provided therein. “The system’s not detecting any kind of viral or bacterial infections, actually… Which is a bit weird since fevers generally come from somewhere.”
Yuito lowers his hand, a curtain of worry pulling across his features. “You… don’t think this might have to do with my power, do you?” he wonders. “Like, with the headaches and everything…?”
Wataru gives a long, long hum of consideration before replying, “I wouldn’t think so… I mean, even that time in Mizuhagawa when it was the worst it’s ever been, you didn’t have a fever. But, well, I guess it’s possible. You have any other symptoms right now? Any headache?”
Yuito’s frown remains. “I mean… a little, I guess… I kind of always have at least a bit of a headache lately, though.”
The response is frustrating, not for any fault of Yuito’s but for the whole damn situation being what it is, for the fact that Wataru nor anyone else knows how to do anything to help. At least Karen was gracious enough to leave a case of those ampoules in Yuito’s hands, but what’ll happen when they run out? Even if Togetsu is willing to take them in, he doubts a small religious community secluded in the mountains will have the ability to reproduce that medicine.
That feeling of apprehension winding through his chest lights a spark of inspiration, though, and Wataru pats the side of his fist against his palm. “Y’know what, I think I know what’s going on here,” he says. “It’s called a psychogenic fever - in other words, a fever caused by stress.”
Yuito blinks. “That happens?”
“Well, it’s more common in kids in their early teens,” Wataru explains, “but it’s something that can happen to anyone at any age, whether it’s from one really stressful event or from stress gradually piling up over a long time.”
All exasperation, Yuito sits himself down on the arm of the couch with a long, heavy sigh. “Seriously?” he bemoans. “I guess this is why Arashi and Kagero are always nagging me about taking breaks…” He bows his face into his hand, suddenly looking so much more tired. “Not like I’ve got time to take breaks, the way things are…”
“Well, maybe think of this as compulsory breaktime then, yeah?” Wataru gently suggests, and he takes a step towards the kitchen. “Lemme grab you something to bring the fever down. I was making some tea, by the way - want a cup? Or anything else, for that matter?”
He murmurs something that resembles “I’m good, thanks,” and so Wataru murmurs back something that resembles “all righty” and returns to the kitchen to hunt through the hideout’s stock of over-the-counter medicines.
Honestly, though he feels bad for thinking so, there’s a part of him that’s relieved. As an operator, Wataru’s responsibility has always been to assist: to locate routes, to identify enemies, to warn of possible threats and provide possible solutions. But so many of his platoon’s problems are so far beyond his ability to solve, and doing whatever he can too often means sitting in front of the screen and twiddling his thumbs while the others contend with a mission crashing down around them. A fever, at least, is something he knows how to do something about, something he can help with and resolve.
And thank god it’s just a normal fever and not a symptom of some other new unknown issue looming ominously over them. Knock on wood.
Wataru shakes an appropriate dose out of the bottle he pulls down from the medicine shelf, collects his mug from the counter, and dims the kitchen light to its lowest setting before returning to the living room. Yuito still sits right where he left him, having moved only to rest his arm on the back of the couch and turn his face into the bend of his elbow, and Wataru grabs a blanket that’s been left on one of the chairs as he approaches.
“Are you perhaps the type who starts feeling worse once you know you’re sick?” he guesses, and Yuito groans faintly before raising his head.
“I guess I probably couldn’t sleep– Thanks.” He accepts the medicine that Wataru presents to him and swallows it dry. “I guess I probably couldn’t sleep because I was so cold and sore, and I just didn’t notice because I was so busy thinking about everything.” He turns his head slightly, watching as the other sets his mug on the coffee table and takes a seat on the couch, the blanket on his lap. “You’re not staying up on my account, are you…?”
“Weeell, maybe a little,” Wataru admits. “But I was having trouble getting to sleep myself, so it’s all good.”
Yuito’s expression complicates. “Are you worried about, you know, the whole… being declared traitors thing?”
“Ahh, well, reasonably, I guess. I kind of expected that we’d end up in this sort of situation sooner or later, though, what with all the snooping around for government secrets that we’ve been doing.”
Yuito turns his gaze away. “…Sorry. Because of me–”
Wataru interrupts with a loud and emphatic clearing of his throat. “If you’re about to say something like, ‘you got dragged into this because of me,’ then you can stop right there,” he says with a pointedly raised finger. “Major General Fubuki offered an out to all of us. I could have taken it if I wanted to, and I didn’t. So don’t you go apologizing for a choice that I made. And furthermore…”
“Whoa–!”
Wataru catches the collar of his shirt and tugs, displacing him from the arm of the couch and pulling him onto its cushions, and Yuito blinks up with a look of wide-eyed surprise.
“Sick people,” he says as he unfolds the blanket and tosses it over Yuito’s body, “should rest. I know there’s a whole mountain of stuff to worry about, but at least cut yourself some slack until you feel better, yeah?”
Yuito’s features relax, but a crease still remains between his eyebrows. “I don’t really feel like I can sleep right now, though…”
“Even just lying down is perfectly good rest. And if you start feeling sleepy later then all the better,” Wataru says, and he settles himself in more comfortably and retrieves his mug from the coffee table. He knows well, though, that Yuito, if left to his own devices, is only going to worry himself back into the hole that brought this predicament on in the first place, so he casts out a line of distraction, “Y’know, me and Haruka - we always get sick at the exact same time. It made sense when we were kids living in the same house and sharing all the same spaces, but it kept happening even after we were conscripted to the OSF and got assigned to different platoons.”
With a barely perceptible sigh, Yuito seems to resign himself to the rest that’s been forced onto him, and little by little his posture loosens. “It seems like it’d be tough, being sick at the same time as your sibling.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” he says with a roll of his eyes, and he pauses to take a sip from his tea. “Haruka’s friendly with other people, but she’s a real brat with me - all the more when she’s in a bad mood about something, like being sick. There were times when she’d throw fits just because I bought a different brand of medicine than usual or made something she didn’t want to eat.” He gestures indignantly with the mug. “So don’t eat it, then! I was cooking for myself anyway!”
“Oh… Do the two of you not get along?”
There’s a little sting of melancholy in Yuito’s tone that makes Wataru regret being so ready and willing to badmouth his sister, and he swallows his feelings as a twin who’s had to put up with the other’s whims and nonsense for his entire life and replies honestly, “Nah… We get along, I guess. Actually, maybe it’s more like we get along too well. We can squabble about any little thing that bugs us because we know there’s no hard feelings behind any of it.”
Yuito makes a small sound of understanding and brings his arm up to lay the back of his wrist across his forehead. “It seems like it must be nice, though,” he says, “having a sibling you can be that open with. I wonder if it’s because you’re twins, or because you’re close in age…”
“Ahh, come to think of it,” Wataru considers, pursing his lips thoughtfully, “I guess Luka and former Major General Karen really don’t seem all that close, huh? Or Arashi and Major General Fubuki, for that matter, or you and the chief…”
The words come out of his mouth without much thought, but Wataru realizes at once that he’s already taken the conversation back around to a subject he would have preferred to avoid. But Yuito doesn’t appear too put out by it, and he answers without any particular weight in his tone, “Well, for me and Kaito, I think it’s less that we’re not close and more that we never had the opportunity to become close in the first place.”
Wataru hums through a sip of his tea before returning the mug to the table. “You two do have a pretty large age gap. Still, there was a time when you were both kids, right? Not even then?”
“Mm… I’m not sure. My earliest memories are from after my mother died. I was always crying back then, and Kaito mostly just scolded me for being so clingy.”
“Clingy?” Wataru’s glad he already set his tea down, because he certainly would have choked on it had there been any in his mouth. “Are you kidding me? You were what, five?! Show me any five-year-old who doesn’t cry after losing his mom!”
Yuito gives a slight, awkward laugh. “Yeah, well… I don’t want to make excuses for him, but at the time, Kaito wasn’t any older than I am now. I’m sure he was grieving too, on top of all the hard work he was doing trying to make a place for himself in the government. He probably didn’t have much patience to spare for his whiny crybaby little brother.”
Wataru makes a deeply, unabashedly sour face and, with a huff, leans back and brings his foot up to rest on his knee. “Let me tell you something, Yuito,” he says sternly. “I want to adopt you.”
Yuito raises his arm from his face, eyebrows hiked high in bewilderment. “…What?”
“I’ve been thinking this for a while now, but Chief Sumeragi seriously takes you for granted!” he complains. “He’s got this kind, gentle, polite, considerate, conscientious little brother and just look at how he treats you! Ungrateful bastard doesn’t deserve you! I want to steal you! I want to make you my little brother instead!”
Yuito can’t help but laugh, and though it’s the wan laugh of someone who hasn’t slept and has quite literally worried himself sick, it’s heartfelt and true. “I’m, uh… flattered?” he says eventually, humor still holding to his voice. “I’m not sure you can specifically adopt someone as a sibling, though. That might be something you’d have to talk to your parents about - not to mention Haruka.”
“Oh, Haruka doesn’t get an opinion,” Wataru replies with a dismissive wave. “I’m not talking about bringing you on in addition to her. You’ll be replacing her.”
He exhales a breath through his nose, pulls his legs in from over the arm of the couch, and turns onto his side. “In that case, I’ll have to respectfully decline. I’d hate to come between the only siblings I know who actually get along well.”
Wataru poses his hand dramatically to his forehead. “Agh, damn it! Shot myself right in the foot!” He lets rest over them for some moments the comfortable silence that precipitates, reaching for his mug and swirling it to disperse the dregs settling in the bottom, and then he asks, “Tired?”
There’s an indistinct mumble in response, and Wataru grabs the edge of the blanket and pulls it a little more squarely up over Yuito’s shoulders.
“Go ahead and sleep if you want to. In a bed would be preferable, but I’m not about to tell you to move if you don’t feel like it.”
Another mumble, and Wataru finishes off the last of his tea, sets the empty mug on the table, and leans back against the couch. He’s pretty tired himself, but he doesn’t mind letting it turn into an all-nighter if that’s what it comes down to - now that they’ve been effectively ousted from the OSF, it’s not like he needs to worry about being rested and ready in the event of unexpected dispatch orders. He might like to thank the chief for creating the opportunity for them to take a breather if he didn’t want to so badly to throw a punch at the asshole’s face.
“Kaito always looked out for me, though,” Yuito murmurs, as if sensing Wataru’s piqued hostility, though the words are so quiet that he doubts he would have heard them at all had there been any other sound to detract from them. “He might not look like a ‘good brother’ to others, but even though he’s always busy, always a little standoffish and blunt… he’s always made sure I know that I can ask for help with anything anytime I need it.”
There’s a wistful, almost mournful ache buried in the softness of Yuito’s tone as he continues, “Right after Dad died, there were times when I couldn’t stop thinking about what I would do if I lost Kaito too. I was scared. I didn’t want to be left alone. But I guess the brother I trusted and respected has already been gone for a long time.”
‘I’m already alone.’ They aren’t words that Yuito says aloud, but Wataru can feel them in the way his shoulders round, in the way his body shrinks a little further into itself, and it’s vexing, just infuriatingly so, to think that anyone’s last remaining family could cast them off so coldly. That Kaito Sumeragi would hoist up his own brother as a figurehead hero only to brand him a traitor and consign him to the court of public opinion the moment he was no longer convenient - it’s unbelievable. It’s indefensible.
But no matter how angry it makes him, there’s nowhere for that anger to go, nothing that anger will help, and Wataru takes one long, deep breath, holds it in his chest, and exhales.
“All right,” he says, and he lowers his foot from his knee back down to the floor and straightens his back. “Yuito, sorry, but can you sit up for a second?”
There’s a moment’s pause before Yuito’s form shifts as he pushes the blanket down and maneuvers himself upright, and in the dark of the empty living room, he looks so much like the child he is: wounded, lost, and worn down into dust by all the hardships heaped up upon his shoulders. It makes it too easy for Wataru to reach his arms out and fold Yuito tightly into them.
“W-Wataru–? What are you–”
“I really want to tell you,” he says, “to forget about your jerk brother. But I know you won’t do that - you’re not the kind of person who’s willing to just write your family off, no matter how badly they deserve it - so I at least wanna make sure you know that you’ve got people looking out for you every bit as much as the chief ought to be. I won’t say you shouldn’t feel lonely, but at the very least, don’t go thinking you’re alone.”
He feels the surprise ease out of Yuito’s limbs, feels the breath pinned in his lungs come loose, feels his head dip down until his forehead rests on Wataru’s shoulder. And he feels that forehead bow but briefly in a small, curt nod of acknowledgment.
His message conveyed, Wataru breaks contact, patting a hand against Yuito’s shoulder as he withdraws his arms and eases away. “Now, don’t make me do that again, okay? It’s embarrassing.”
Though Yuito’s expression is still frayed and vulnerable, the heartache has faded from his eyes, and the smile that comes across his features is earnest and warm. “Right, sorry. Although I didn’t exactly make you do anything this time either.”
“Oh, yes you did,” Wataru disagrees, leaning back against the couch once more. “And just so you know, it may be embarrassing, but I’ll do it again if I have to. And again after that, and again after that… Anytime you need it.”
“It… almost sounds vaguely threatening if you put it like that…”
“Hah, sure, we can call it a threat.” He makes a show of ominously wiggling his fingers. “Now get some sleep, sick person, or else I’ll give you another heartwarming pep talk!”
“Okay, okay,” Yuito laughs as he adjusts his posture and lies back down, and he bunches up the blanket in his hands and throws half of it over Wataru. “You should sleep too, still-awake-at-four-a.m. person.”
“Ooh, touche.” So Wataru spreads the end of the blanket over his lap, makes himself comfortable, and, with a sigh, lets come slowly undone the knots of unease and uncertainty that had kept him from closing his eyes. Finally–
“Thank you, Wataru.”
“Mhm.”
–he knows he can relax.