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"You're such a fool," Meiko said once he regained consciousness.
Kaito groaned, scrubbing a weary hand across his face before letting it drop back to his side.
She approached him, making her way around to the head of the bed and fixing him with her most displeased expression. Instinctively Kaito averted his gaze, allowing an uneasy silence to hang over them.
One second. Two seconds. She didn't budge, refusing to be the first to speak. Finally, he closed his eyes and exhaled, playing every part the role of a condemned man waiting to hear his sentence read to him.
"Meiko," he said, "please don't drag this out."
Her frown tightened. "You don't know." It wasn't a question. "Why I'm cross with you, why you're here, even where you are—you don't have the faintest clue."
He cracked one eye open and gave her a resigned look. "Okay, I'll bite. What?" His voice was entirely devoid of energy.
She hesitated in the face of his apparent apathy. "This is my room," she said, suddenly quiet. "You were completely out of it on your way here. You..." She trailed off, fidgeting with her fingernails.
At first, he didn't respond, still trying to process her words and judge his surroundings despite an overwhelming sense of disorientation. After several tense seconds, he dipped his head, unable to meet her eyes.
"Sorry," he finally replied. It must have sounded weak to his own ears.
Meiko sighed, pushing aside the blankets so she could perch beside him on the mattress. "Kaito, I don't understand," she said, looking suddenly very tired. "Why would you do this to yourself?"
He didn't respond, adamantly refusing to face her, and she felt a twinge of frustration.
"It's obvious you haven't been sleeping," she continued nonetheless. "In fact, it's been obvious for quite some time now." Briefly, her gaze flickered downwards. "None of us enjoy seeing you like this, Kaito. As your friend, I...I wish you'd stop."
Still, he made no move to acknowledge her, and her lips thinned. So often she thought Miku to be stubborn, but when it came down to it, the girl's outwardly mild-mannered brother was at least five times worse. Hidden beneath layers upon layers of what appeared at first glance to be an agreeable nature was someone who instinctively seemed to deny any push to change.
She said nothing for several moments in an effort to organize her thoughts, when abruptly Kaito's face turned a shade paler, if such a thing was even possible. "Meiko," he said, an almost frantic edge in his voice as he struggled to kick the blankets away with clumsy feet, "what time is it?"
"It's just past nine in the evening—hey, wait!" Alarmed, she reached over, grabbing hold of his shoulder in order to keep him from rising.
But he would not be swayed, his eyes wide with fear. "Miku," he whispered, hands flailing in a feeble attempt to dislodge her. "It's too late—Miku, I have to get home to Miku, she hasn't had dinner yet, you see, I—let me go!" he choked out in a fit of desperation.
He struggled and writhed pitifully against the hand she kept braced on his shoulder until his face turned an ashen white, then collapsed back into his pillows with a feeble gasp.
Mercifully, she said nothing, giving him several moments to catch his breath and compose himself until his skin regained even a fraction of its usual pallor. His chest heaved, and sweat broke out across his forehead.
"You will do no such thing," Meiko snapped once his breathing had evened out, perhaps more harshly than she had intended. He winced, seemingly ready to protest, and her tone softened. "I've already asked someone to head on over to your place for tonight—Miku will be fine," she reiterated. And although he didn't seem quite satisfied, he relaxed back into his pillows, which Meiko counted as a shallow victory.
Still reeling from the aftermath of confronting him, she leaned over to rest her elbows on her knees. There was no sugarcoating it—Kaito looked awful, and this time he had no easy smile on his face to soften that fact.
Without meaning to, her eyes narrowed. "This is too much." Confusion crossed his face, which somehow only served to feed her anger. "It's too much—don't you see? Kaito, you were mere seconds away from bolting out from bed and all the way home in the state you're in, and you think any of this is normal?"
"Meiko," he tried, begging her near-wordlessly to stop, but now that she had started she was deaf to his protests.
She held up a hand. "Let me spell it out for you." He shrank against the harshness of her intonation—good. Let him cower. "So you haven't been sleeping for weeks, or perhaps even months, and you've been working yourself to the point of exhaustion, ultimately requiring your friends to step in and get you some real, proper rest—which you're welcome for, by the way—and then in spite of that, you wake up and your first instinct is to worry about someone else?" Her voice rose in pitch. "Don't you understand how idiotic that is?"
"You couldn't possibly understand!" he cut in, and she was so stunned by his sudden outburst that she fell silent.
"She's not just 'someone else'," he said through his teeth, eyes flashing, "she is my sister. And if I have to sacrifice every last minute of sleep for her—if that's what it takes, to hell with it! But even then, I wouldn't—I would never ask of her what's been asked of me."
For a brief second, Meiko found herself at a loss. Then she spun to meet him fully, matching him word for word. "Do you—do you even hear yourself?" she exclaimed, incredulous. "Don't you have any faith in her? Can't Miku handle herself?" Kaito opened his mouth, but she barreled on, heedless of his intentions to speak. "Not on her own, certainly, but she's hardly a little girl anymore, Kaito. She can start to manage her needs—in fact, she very well should! When will you accept that?"
He blanched. "Are you saying I should have a child look after herself?" His voice was laced with disbelief.
"Isn't that exactly what your own mother did?" she snapped, knowing full well it would sting, and Kaito's face went ghastly white from shock.
A beat of silence.
Then he rounded on her. "Don't you dare speak about her like you knew what she was like!" There was something unrestrained, almost animalistic in his expression, as though all at once the many layers of his face had been stripped away to leave in their place only raw, naked hurt, taking his gentle eyes and easy smile and twisting them into something utterly unrecognizable.
"Oh, I know precisely what she was like." She met his gaze levelly, tipping her head back to upturn her nose, denying him any satisfaction of having her look away. Fueled purely by spite, she continued, each word tasting like sour acid on her tongue. "Remind me, how old were you exactly when you took responsibility for your sister and for yourself? Younger than even Miku is now, I'd imagine. How is that any different?"
"It, it's..."
"It was wrong!" She placed as much emphasis as she could muster on her words, and then all that remained in her chest was emptiness and a lingering sense of grief. Giving in to impulse, Meiko reached over and pulled him up into a fierce hug, clinging desperately to the fabric of his shirt, and like a cornered animal, he froze in her arms. "The way she treated you was unacceptable, and I hate that you think what happened to you was in any way okay. As your friend, I feel so frustrated when you...when you treat yourself like this. You deserve so much better."
He stared at the side of her head, caught entirely off guard by the sudden change in her tone. Slowly, he lowered his eyes, his expression folding as though all the fight had gone out of him at once.
"...I don't want to be like her." He was almost inaudible.
"You're not," Meiko insisted. "Not one bit."
He shifted in her hold, and instinctively she tightened the grip she had around his shoulders, refusing to let go. "No matter what," Kaito said, his mouth moving against her neck, and oh—he was trembling, wasn't he? "No matter what," he tried again, "I will be there for Miku. I will do right by her. I could never forgive myself otherwise."
"...And what would she think?" she countered, and he stiffened. "If she, if she knew—do you really think Miku would be okay with this?"
He didn't respond, rendered mute by her words and too exhausted to say anything more.
Deciding the topic was spent, she pivoted, aiming straight for the heart of the matter. "Kaito, why?" she asked, the slightest tremor audible in her voice. The second half to her question went unspoken.
His hand tightened minutely around the covers, but there was something very, very hollow in his eyes.
"I don't know how to explain to you," he said quietly, "that I just don't care."
He looked so unimaginably drained, like he had gave and gave and given so much of himself away until there was nothing left of what had made him who he was. And at once, there was a horrible twisting in her stomach at the utter resignation in his voice, the complete lack of emotion on his face, like this was something he had long accepted as normal, like it was something even remotely okay, and she couldn't help the way her expression crumpled.
Meiko ducked her head, opening and closing her mouth several times in succession in a futile attempt to form words. Naturally, no sound came out. It was as if she had swallowed something indescribably bitter and it had become lodged deep in her throat, trapping her ability to speak. She tried to swallow around it. It made her shoulders tremble.
Subconsciously, her hands curled into fists behind his neck, beyond his field of sight. She wanted to grab him, she realized. Shove him. Shake him and shake him until there was nothing left of that hollow, hollow look in his eyes but raw, open fear, until he apologized and promised to never say or even think of such an awful thing again. And then...
And then what?
All at once, the impulse deserted her, her anger dissipating like snow against flame.
What would be the point? It was a selfish thought, one born not from compassion, but rather from her own frustration at feeling powerless. Deliberately and in an act of immense willpower, she relaxed her hands, ignoring the way they still quivered from the aftermath. She breathed in, trying to fill the emptiness in her core with nothing but air, no matter how futile an effort it was.
"Then let me."
He looked up, expression wide and vulnerable for what she thought must have been the first time that night. "What?"
"Then let me, in your place," she repeated, stronger this time. "If you don't—if you can't bring yourself to care, then let me."
And there was something almost painfully conflicted—painfully hopeful—in his eyes, before he shook his head. "I can't ask that of you," he whispered. "Not of you, and not of anyone else, either."
"And if I want to?" To that, he had nothing to say, and Meiko took grim satisfaction in that, at least. "If you try to argue that this is your problem alone to deal with, or anything like that," she added, dead serious, "I'll punch you. Well, maybe not punch you, but I'll be very displeased." He huffed in response, easing the tension slightly.
"Kaito," she said bluntly, "this needs to stop. It can't happen anymore." He remained silent, but more out of contemplation than sheer stubbornness. "Do you have any idea how awful it is, as your friend, to watch what you put yourself through? It's because we care about you that it hurts us too when you do this to yourself."
"I'm sorry," he said, hoarsely. This time, it came off as genuine.
"And I'm confident that Miku has noticed as well," she added. "After all, she knows you better than anyone, doesn't she? So please, let me be here for you—if not for yourself, then for her."
A shaky exhale, almost like he was ashamed. Then with a trembling arm, he reached up to finally return her hug. "I don't... I never meant to make you feel that way. I'm a horrible person, aren't I?"
"Horrible? No. Don't you dare call yourself that." She laughed, almost hysterically. "But stupid, stubborn, misguided? Yes to all of those. You have no idea how unbelievably exhausting it is to be your friend sometimes, Kaito."
"...Sorry?"
"Don't be." She turned her head to bury her face into his hair and then inhaled deeply, trying to ground herself and remind herself that yes, he was real and solid and next to her. And after the past several weeks of watching him slip further and further away and grow increasingly distant, to her there could be no greater relief.
Meiko adjusted her grip, gathering the courage for what she was about to say. "We love everything about what makes you who you are—even if there are things we still wish you would work on." The admission took a certain weight off her chest, and with a start she realized that she was very, very tired.
He didn't answer, but he made a noise of acknowledgement, and she allowed herself the small indulgence of rubbing circles into the arch of his neck with her thumb, the pad of her finger catching along the knobs of his spine. Distantly, she registered how his skin still felt almost clammy, and it worried her.
"I'm sorry I yelled," she finally said, the heat of the moment evaporating away and leaving only weary exhaustion in its wake.
"Don't be," he replied. "I needed to hear it."
She angled her head the slightest fraction, relaxing at the steady hum of his pulse next to her ear.
"Tomorrow," she said, "when you wake up, I'll drive you back home, and we can check on Miku together. And no," she amended when he opened his mouth, "only when you wake up on your own, and not a moment sooner. So you had better settle in for a long night, mister."
Kaito shot her a betrayed look, but she was unmoved, and despite himself his expression eventually melted into something of an exasperated smile. "All right. You're tough, you know that?"
"I'm told it's one of my best qualities," Meiko replied breezily, and he managed a laugh.
"Now get to sleep." With a sense of finality, she maneuvered him back against the mattress and swept the blankets across his form, then rose to her feet. "And let's not worry any longer about such heavy matters until morning." Or noon, or whenever he should wake up, she thought privately, but she didn't voice the sentiment aloud.
She was halfway to the door when Kaito stopped her in her tracks. "Meiko," he said, a conflicted expression on his face, "thanks. And I...I want to help you, too, when you need it."
She paused in quiet consideration, and then, unbidden, a smile slipped onto her face. "Oh, Kaito," she said, her heart feeling strangely full in the face of this unbelievable, foolish man, "you already do." And with that, she flicked the lights off and shut the door behind her.