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So what could he say now that it was all out in the open, split like a seam too long strained, spilling its pale, humiliating stuffing for all to see? No apology, however silk-wrapped; no please, however prettily bruised; no bowed head nor tremor in the voice could cauterize what had already festered and burst. He stood before the house that had once held everything; held it in its ribcage of beams and plaster the way a body holds breath before a scream. Love had lived there once, yes, in small domestic doses: in the careful placement of shoes by the door, in the warm indentation of a child’s head upon a father’s shoulder. And then love had soured, fermented into something acrid. Care had curdled into vigilance, vigilance into suspicion, suspicion into that thin-lipped bitterness that stains the tongue. Ambition—ah, that bright, metallic ambition—had threaded itself through the walls like hidden wiring and shocked everything it touched.
What could he say? Watch me change, he might offer, as though metamorphosis were a performance one could stage at will. Watch me pay penance, as though suffering could be portioned neatly, weighed and distributed like coins on a scale. Your mother is ruined, and you are all scarred, scarred in places that do not show, scarred in places that will never quite stop itching. Forgive me, forgive me. The words hovered already, rehearsed, pathetic in their sincerity. What could he say to the boy who had died and been reborn worse, resurrected not as salvation but as consequence? What could he say to the ones he had cast aside like inconvenient drafts of a life too imperfect to display? What could he say to the boy who bore the marks of his own blinded path—burned into skin and spirit like a brand pressed too eagerly, too long?
The fires licked at the flesh of the house because it was never a home; it had not been that for so long now that the memory of warmth seemed like a fiction embroidered by a kinder author. The flames were almost tender in their appetite, curling around doorframes, nibbling at curtains with a lover’s persistence. When had the awkward, shy touches, those almost comical brushes of hand against sleeve, transformed into frantic, anxious grips that bruised and lingered? When had the chubby fingers that once reached up in trust, pleading for upsies, grown into bony, scar-mapped hands that burned and burned and burned? When had tender smiles tightened into brittle crescents of anxiety? When had “Look at this” dissolved into a hateful, yawning silence? When had eyes that brimmed with unshed tears hardened into something worse than sorrow—into indifference?
The house answered none of these questions. It flaked and crackled in eloquent ruin. Wood darkened and split, groaning in protest. Plaster blistered and peeled like damaged skin. Beneath it, white metal bones emerged, skeletal and obscene, only to blacken in the heat, collapsing inward as though ashamed of their own exposure. The roof sagged with a tired sigh, then gave way in a shower of sparks that rose like a swarm of incandescent insects escaping a corpse.
What could he say? What could he do but bow his head upon the altar of their collective past and beg, an old penitent in the ruins of his own cathedral? Forgive me, forgive me. But what would that accomplish? To hear the words ring hollow in the smoke-choked air, accompanied by teary eyes behind fogged glasses—how pitiful, how theatrical. He imagined sitting in the quiet with them, the silence stretching thin and merciless between bodies once bound by blood, and all he could think was why. Why, why, why. The word beat against his skull like a trapped bird, frantic and stupid.
He sometimes wondered, in those long evenings when she would sit and talk and talk and talk—her voice a relentless river that eroded patience and yet begged for it—if this had been her way of crying for help. If her incessant chatter had been a desperate stitching together of attention she had never truly received. Even now, he had taken it so shamelessly, as though her presence were a fixture in his life—a chair in the corner, a clock on the wall, reliable and unexamined. While she fed on the scraps of notice she had starved for, her brother had chosen another method. He had cut the rot away. Cut him away.
And how that incision had hurt—how it had twisted his heart like brittle metal left too long in flame, curling and warping under pressure. For a time, he had felt the absence like phantom pain, sharp and humiliating. But, like his sister, he had learned to pass over it, to step gingerly across that particular fracture in the floor of his mind. He could live with it. He could live with being cut away. Perhaps that made him a terrible person. But wasn’t he already? Perhaps it made him worse than he had allowed himself to calculate—worse not in action, but in his quiet capacity to endure the consequences of his own cruelty without shattering.
Ash billowed upward in heavy, funereal plumes—thick, grey columns that smeared the sky and announced their tragedy to any neighbor with a window and a conscience. Someone would have called the fire department by now; he could hear the distant sirens, thin at first, then swelling into urgency. Their approach felt almost comical, as though rescue were still possible, as though something worth saving remained.
He wondered if the boy would be happy at the sight of this ruin—or angry. Would he sneer and complain that even now, even now, Enji was still selfish enough to take what he wanted and do it his way? To transform his wants and wishes into spectacle, into smoke and spectacle, into something that belonged to no one else? To burn down a shared history simply because he could not bear to inhabit it?
He imagined kneeling one day before the grave of a boy who was alive and not well, pressing his forehead to cold stone, murmuring sorry into a silence that would not answer. But for now—now he sat before the ashes of his house, knees bent, spine bowed not in reverence but in exhaustion, and he thought. Thought in slow, spiraling patterns that returned always to the same center: himself.
The embers dimmed, their furious orange fading into a dull, resentful glow. The grey clouds thinned into a hazy mist that clung to his clothes, to his hair, to the back of his throat. The sirens wailed close now, red and blue lights flashing against the smoke-streaked night. He could hear the heavy boots, the clipped commands, the hiss of water meeting heat. Behind him, he caught the faint, weary sigh of the number two hero, a sound so small, so human, that it might have been mistaken for wind.
He laughed.
It was not a grand laugh. It did not ring with madness or relief. It slipped out of him, thin and brittle, like the snap of cooling metal.
It was all ash.
All of it.