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Until the only whole, real, and perfect thing left is that you are still alive and breathing, I will stop at nothing to bring you rest.
Until the final fleeting, human thing I feel is the heavy, healthy beating of your whole and feeble heart, I will fight to set you free.
Oh, sweet and dying sister, you mean everything to me.
Once upon a time, in a land not too far away nor not too long ago, were born two baby girls with a pact beget from Heaven on their backs and a human muzzle at their throats. Twins are always a bad omen in the wretched world they are born into; especially identical ones.
The whole and God-given right to a life lived never alone, to live a life half-dying and half-begging for breath, is a curse in the eyes of many; in the eyes of man.
To be born so halved and holy is to take a dying breath before your name has been spoken. To cry in the face of novelty, at the light of the very first day, is doubly so.
No one loves the hated man. Just as he who lasts in the world despite incessant oppression swallows folly in spite of the striking hot irons, those born in two must make themselves small–smaller than ever thought possible–to live higher than he who is hated.
But the hated man has run away from this place, born as hollow and untethered as any other loathed one. Two sides, one coin. The halves hate him, too, because to be free is to be wanted somehow; so they, like all the rest, hate he who is hated so.
Life is unkind to the hated man, just as those who swallow their folly before their hate are. To one half, or to two, they are doubly so.
A life without power in a world where power reigns supreme isn’t much of a life to brag about.
And life within the Zenin clan is hardly life at all.
Men equal power. Women equal fodder. Pi is pi even when the written equations do not balance out just as a Zenin man is scum whether or not he holds any cursed energy to speak of; that is, unless the amount he contains is just none and none at all. Men with no power in a world where power means everything are just men.
To the Zenin clan, power is everything.
That must be why the hated man is hated so, with his lungs just barely breathing and a still-beating heart the only magical thing about him.
What does a stupid Zenin know about having a heart, anyway? Surely, it is less than the hated man.
And why is the hated man hated as he is? If power is everything and he has none, is he not nothing? Is nothing not worth less than nothing? What left is there to hate when in someone there is only less than nothing?
When does a lack of knowledge become something to be hated?
Since when did hatred become synonymous with fear?
Zenin men are never afraid. They live strong, die strong, and never fear their ends. They only know until they don’t, until they hate, and then they fight and feast and feed. No Zenin man is capable of fearing. The two do not belong in the same dictionary, let alone the same category.
So, who can be hated so much to even wonder why is a crime?
What black sheep has stained the regal clan’s books so wholly there is no choice left but to hate? What has he done to deserve such a whole-bodied, heavy title?
(And how did he become whole? How did he become a legend so much larger than the sun that even those outside these walls recall his name? What did he do to deserve so much hate? How did he do it?
Could he show her how? From beyond the grave, could he restore the fragments of her pact; stitch her back together again?)
If twins are such a bad omen, then what depth of evil must he be?
Maki hears his name whispered through the walls of her closet when the stars are hung on high and her burden (although she would never call even half of her that) sleeps so soundly beside her. Toji, the faceless echoes tell her, and Maki closes her eyes and dreams of a monster so hated and strong enough to break apart the sky and pull her wholly from this hellish place that Mai is forced to call home.
Deep in the night, when thunder roars and orders are belted, Maki holds her sister firm and close and swears like a wish in the darkness to never leave her side or let her go.
The first time Zenin Maki and Fushiguro Toki meet, all the little girl can think is that he looks far too small and far too human to be the monster that goes bump in the night like they all say. But when his hand brushes her shoulder in a mad dash to leave behind the only place she’s ever really known, she feels it, and every clashing puzzle piece falls wholly into place.
In his veins, there is nothing; she feels nothing.
Good, she thinks resolutely. Nothing is everything.
To the Zenin clan, power is everything, and power is energy, techniques.
To Maki, strength is the hate her wretched clan faithfully hides behind. And if anything she has heard about this Man of Nothing is true, then he is the strongest of them all.
(If to be hated is to be strong, than to Mai, there is no one stronger than her big sister.)
………
A life of freedom short-lived is still a life of freedom gained. That’s how Maki sees it, anyway, when Toji-san takes her and Mai to his shambled abode and tells her to take what’s left of anything and watch that before walking away.
That is a seven year old boy with a name that curls like Mai’s. A blessing, and a dance. With truth at their side, the three of them make a holistically beautiful trio.
None of them speak for quite some time. Megumi isn’t silent in the same way that Maki and Mai are, brooding and shocked into disbelief as he is. The sisters clutch hands and sway in the quiet like two mice set in an unfamiliar cage.
“We can color,” Megumi decides after the three of them are supposedly quiet for too long. He walks to a room adjoining the entryway and does not wait or look back to be sure the sisters follow him.
Mai and Maki follow him regardless of his sudden brashness. At the hated, learning age of ten, they are used to following two steps behind. Mother always told them just how to step to never draw an eye or make a sound. They trail Megumi into a room with an unassumingly distraught lounge and a short table covered end-to-end in blank paper and wax sticks.
Megumi sits on the floor, and Mai and Maki follow suit across from him. In this house, it seems okay to follow up a lack of courtesy with a similar portrayal of familiarity. Maki pulls her sister to sit beside her, and although Mai struggles against her tugging for a little while, she eventually, begrudgingly, complies. Their first home holds tight to her.
Megumi pushes a child’s hand-full of crayons towards the sisters before turning back to his own drawing.
Mai reaches towards one purple crayon hesitantly before pulling her hand back towards herself. Maki watches her arm tremble in uncertainty both ways before clicking her tongue and grabbing the tool for her. Mai watches in subjective horror as Maki slaps the purple crayon down onto the table in front of her and juts her chin towards Mai’s open-book expression.
“Take it,” she says, reaching back towards a bright, red crayon from the pile Megumi slid over. “Go on, Mai. Draw me something pretty.”
All that comes to Mai’s mind at her sister’s words is the girl sitting beside her, in her matching robe and sandals with a haircut too alike to her own to be on accident, fiercely pinching her eyebrows together and pressing red onto a paper like if she presses hard enough, the table will give way.
“Don’t press so hard,” Megumi commands from across the table, and Mai flinches at the young boy’s incessant tone. He tilts his head at her reaction and breathes in deeply through his nose. “I mean, if you press too hard, you’ll break the–”
Snap!
He sighs. “...Crayon.”
“Whoops,” Maki says, ripping the paper around the halved tool smoothly, in a motion not unlike the cranking of a gear. She holds out the pointed end towards her sister with wide and searching eyes. “Want it?”
Mai takes the broken tool gently, brushing hands with the only real family she’s ever known. “Yeah,” she says softly, nearly smiling at the brightened expression that strikes her sister’s face. “Thanks, Maki.”
………
The ocean water feels nice, after all this time.
“Destroy everything, big sister.”
Maki breathes out a shuddering sigh. I’ll take on your hatred as my own. She curls in towards her sister’s corpse, tears falling from one un-wounded eye. And make it into strength.