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It wasn’t just a gun that he carried.
It was his life. It was his existence.
It made sure he kept living, and it made sure he had something to live for.
He patrolled the streets of the territory, keeping an eye out for any trespassers from enemy groups. Anyone who wasn’t supposed to be there was to have their brains paint the pavement. Not the most fun job around here, but it made for a good break between turf fights and debt collecting, the days when he had to kill on command.
He knew it wasn’t right, more often than not. Not every person he was forced to kill was a scumbag who deserved it. Some of them were people who begged and pleaded for their lives, for a little more time, for their family’s sake…
He knew what it was like, to be in one of those families…His father was an actual scumbag, though. He deserved the bullet to his brain. He couldn’t say the same for his mother, though. She wasn’t perfect, but she did her best. She didn’t have to die that day.
Life in the Usui-gumi was never exactly a picnic, especially with the body he was born with, having to fight tooth and nail to be treated with the smallest shred of respect. If being good at putting bullets through people was what it took, then so be it.
It came at a price, however. The smell of gunpower and blood always lingered, never fading no matter how many times he tried to wash it away. The sights of bodies lying like dolls with red and gray splattered around them never left his mind’s eye.
It always took him back to the day his parents died. The day he was taken from his sister. They would have taken her instead, if he hadn’t willingly taken her place.
Every day, he was used and abused by the people around him. He forced himself to get stronger, to be someone of use to these people, lest he end up getting killed too. He let himself be their bullet, their weapon. He would hand over his dignity and autonomy as long as he was able to see another day. A sacrifice that didn’t feel worth it most days, but that didn’t stop him from continuing this cycle. Fear kept him seeing any other way to do things.
Besides, sacrifices weren’t new to him. He would let his sister take food from him on the nights there wasn’t much of it. He just accepted it, and even came to just hand it to her some days. And he knew his mother wouldn’t like it if she found out, so he kept it a secret, for his sister’s sake. Because he loved his sister, even though from a young age he knew she didn’t love him.
Or at least he thought he knew that; the way she cried for him that night made him second guess.
He tried not to think about her. Tried not to miss her, which was harder than he thought.
He had to carry on as if he had no sister. The life he lived before now didn’t matter. He was nothing more than a bullet in a barrel now, earning his keep in blood and lead.
Even still, every now and then, as the blood spilled before him, he did think of her. Only to be grateful that he took her place here, that she didn’t have to be the bullet.
Aneki…I’m so glad this isn’t your life. I hope you ended up somewhere better.
She was a ticking time bomb.
Complex formulas and facts were the foundation of her being; the neon green and yellow wires connected all of her parts together.
She was teeming with knowledge. And if she didn’t do something with it, she was going to explode.
She knew it was the beginning of the end when the prototype Hypnosis Microphones was given to the military. Something like this…it was going to change the world. Probably not in a good way. Not that the world was very good in the first place.
She was put on the team that studied them, engineering the mysterious device that could have only been built with military-grade materials. With her research, she built something that could stop those Mics. And with a tool like that, that meant she had the means to understand them better than anyone, perhaps even more than the man who created the stupid things in the first place.
She thought the military would be grateful for her efforts. Instead, she was given a dishonorable discharge. They wrote her off as some evil genius, out to use her knowledge and research for nefarious purposes.
It wasn’t the first time something like that happened.
She was concerned a “problem child” for most of her life. Excellent grades when she actually bothered with assignments, but disengaged from her peers and disrespectful to her teachers. What use did she have being around those people? And then she had to go home and deal with a deadbeat father and a mother who was more keen to saddle her with babysitting her brother than showing any actual interest in her. What she wanted to do never mattered; it was always about how well she was giving in to others’ demands. She dodged those demands as much as she could, burying herself in library books and dreams of experiments.
By the time she was sixteen, she thought she hated the sibling who she thought was the obstacle between the life she wanted and the life her mother wanted her to live.
But it was that same time when her parents were killed right in front of her, and her baby brother handed over his freedom for her sake.
How could she hate someone who would do something like that for her?
How could she live comfortably when she was still haunted by that terrible night?
She simply didn’t. She just kept living, busting her ass to get into the military. She worked towards creating her own estrogen supplements to feel more comfortable in her skin. She shed her father’s surname and took her mother’s. She was a new existence, eager to crawl through her own path in life.
She was a snake. And it was damn hard to kill a snake.
But snakes could be driven out from the grass, and that’s what the military did.
With nowhere else to go, she walled herself off in knowledge. She ran her experiments every hour of every day, not letting herself sleep, lest she dream of that night again. The buzzing of machines and the smell of chemicals her awake, knowing the formulas well enough that not even the bleary vision of her bloodshot eyes could deter her.
But the satisfaction was waning. She was tired of the old formulas. She wanted to seek out bigger things. Dangerous things. The bomb was going to detonate and the consequences would be dire. What consequences? She wasn’t sure yet.
She was a little afraid to find out. She was afraid of crossing certain lines, of truly becoming the things everyone else thought she was.
She needed to find someone to reel her in. She needed to follow someone’s orders again. She needed someone to give her a reason to be the evil genius she supposedly was, to give her potential a purpose.
In the meantime, she could only hope that her brother was able to get away from the Usui-gumi somehow. Surely he did, right? He was just a kid back then, only fourteen…Someone in that group should have realized how wrong it was and got him out of there. Someone must have…that’s what she told herself every time she thought of him, to hold on to her last thread of sanity.
She couldn’t protect him like their mother wanted, so she could only hope someone more capable was able to do it.
Sei-chan…Wherever you are now, I hope you’re safe and happy.
The Usui-gumi had been long stomped out by the Katen-gumi. The Japanese military no longer existed.
Time rushed forward. The world kept changing, but some things stayed the same. Some people stayed the same.
A team in Akabane took in a group of escaped prisoners who had just lost everything.
Two siblings were under the same roof again.
The team’s hideout doubled as the elder sister’s home, since all of her equipment was stored there and it was a pain to move it around. Every day she wasn’t given something to do by her boss, she worked on her own experiments.
The younger brother watched her work with tools and substances he could never understand.
They rarely spoke in those moments, just taking in the silent companionship. What was there to even say? They crossed paths very few times before now, each time with mutual shock to see what the other had become.
The shock had faded now, it seemed. Now was the process of acceptance.
Accepting that they both suffered. That they both went down troubled paths, bearing sins and scars that would stay with them forever.
It wasn’t easy to accept. Not at all.
In the darkness of the lab, the sister would pause her experiment unprompted, letting her tools carelessly fall with a clatter. She would throw her arms around her brother, holding him close, trying to hug him as if he were a small child. It was a somewhat awkward position, since he was taller than her now. And there was the unspoken fact that she never would have done this when they were children. But the brother remained silent, letting his sister do as she wanted.
A detonated bomb and a discarded bullet were in pieces, scattered into each other. And in those pieces, they found peace. But that didn’t erase what brought them to this point, the suffering that led them here.
You didn’t deserve it.