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“I’m home!” Tsukasa called, and he was met with the echo of his own voice in the eerily large and empty house. Right, no one was there. Saki was at the hospital, and the work day wasn’t over, so his parents wouldn’t be there either. Even when the work day finished… They wouldn’t come back and bring Tsukasa to see Saki, would they? Not after last time.
He had cried, so terribly. Wept over Saki’s bed, his young mind so scared at the concept of anything happening to his sister. Doctors assured him that Saki’s life was likely never in any mortal danger, but the exhaustion on her features and the frailty of her body convinced him otherwise. Tsukasa, at a young age, had learned the most effective way to catastrophize and spiral horribly over digest his own thoughts.
While most middle schoolers were better able to reconcile with their emotions, Tsukasa had been struggling greatly from a young age with that sort of thing. He felt everything too strongly, and he didn’t know how to rein himself in. It troubled him, because his classmates would find him vaguely offputting, but they didn’t have the heart to stay away from him. He meant well, and it was clear to all, but even he knew that they didn’t really like him.
Tsukasa didn’t have many friends, and he was… Okay with that, mostly. He wanted to be liked, because his heart felt fuller when Saki praised him for things, when she said he was the best brother ever, and he chased that same feeling from others. But it never quite clicked. That feeling he got from Saki was something only she could give him, and that made his life a little harder, as if he needed that. He hated to trouble her, hated to constantly visit her because he could see that he was preventing her from resting properly. The nurses were polite when he came to cheer Saki up, when he brought that bunny plush she’d gotten for an earlier birthday and put on a show with it, but they always seemed relieved when he left Saki alone in peace.
It felt like a few punches to his stomach every time Tsukasa left Saki alone, seeing her in that hospital bed, gradually accumulating as many plushies as he could bring before her nurses got fussy with him. Their parents didn’t say anything but, sometimes, when he visited, he saw they had all been moved to a nearby table instead. Saki would insist that she had wanted them with her, and Tsukasa never doubted it for a second, as that was the truth. So why, then, did no one except Saki understand his attempts at helping?
One day, after coming home to an empty house again, Tsukasa just went up to his room. Usually he would unpack any leftover lunch like a responsible boy, wash his bento box out, hang his uniform in the laundry room, so on… But today, all he could do was drag himself up the stairs numbly before laying on his bed, backpack at the foot.
He missed Saki. He hadn’t been allowed to see her for a week, as her treatment was more intense right now, trying to keep her body stable. She was too frail, too small, too little, his little sister, his baby sister, he missed her so so badly that it hurt and his heart ached and he yearned to hug her again and tell her everything would be okay no matter whether that was even the truth or not because
That was his job, after all. Every time he visited, he saw the way Saki lit up, and he felt similarly. Her smile gave him a reason to continue organizing little shows for her, to make up wonderful stories with happy endings to inspire her. He had to script something new, to create something beautiful that would restore all of Saki’s energy so she would be better again. He couldn’t remember the last time she had lived at home for more than a few weeks, and he wanted to do everything he could to enable that fantasy of theirs once more. He knew that Saki definitely wanted to return to normal again, too… Saki…
Staring up at his ceiling, at the glow-in-the-dark stars which had only been there a few years, Tsukasa felt very lonely. Saki was all he had, and he couldn’t even have her. She was his everything, and he wasn’t even able to go see her when she needed it most, when he knew she must be hurting from all her treatments. He felt bad, he felt so bad. Was there even a better word for that? Just bad. Awful. Terrible. He must be the worst big brother ever, not even able to make Saki smile during such times.
Tsukasa closed his eyes.
Then, Tsukasa opened his eyes.
No longer in middle school, no longer a child. Almost out of high school now, but still, he felt the same. About everyone, about everything. Saki was stable now, but he found himself beginning to involuntarily tear up on the days where he’d come home before her, or when she would stay out until after dinnertime. His parents, of course, still worked, so why would they be home by the time he was back from school?
Some days, Tsukasa stayed at school late. Cleaned up, stacked chairs, moved desks. Made Rui stay with him, or Toya, if his schedule permitted it. Those days, he was as talkative as ever, but sometimes his companions could see that the bright smile on his face didn’t extend that same brightness to his eyes. They were tired, he was tired, and he was only here to escape the suffocating feeling of not being enough. Saki was stable, why was he so scared? Well, going back home to nothing just never got easier.
Gonna stay at Icchan’s tonight!
Not what he needed to hear right now, but Tsukasa just nodded. Okay. Have fun!
Nodding when asked if everything was okay, because he’d looked rather crestfallen when checking his phone just now, Tsukasa shoved the device back in his pocket and resumed his busywork. He got home to nothing, exactly as he’d been trying to avoid, and he was small again. He was twelve again, crying so hard that it hurt, his chest was tight and he couldn’t breathe and he kept trying to say this but there was no one there to hear him, because he’d started crying after getting home alone. Alone, alone, he hated that, he hated it, it felt so sad and awful.
Crushingly sad, a terrible weight settled on his chest as he went through the motions of unpacking after a day of school, changing into something comfortable, and then laying in his bed. The motions were familiar, they were normal, and they did absolutely nothing to ease the sinking feeling in his stomach.
Tsukasa was sad, and there was no cure for that. Tsukasa was alone, no matter how much he surrounded himself with others, because he didn’t know what was wrong, and if he didn’t know what was wrong, he couldn’t be vulnerable, and if he couldn’t be vulnerable, then he couldn’t be known, so in a sense, he was alone, because he was unknown to everyone including himself.
Every way he had learned to define himself relied on others. He was Saki’s older brother. He was giving, because he wanted to make others happy. He was loud, because he wanted others to hear him when he told them how much he loved them, he wanted to be heard when he had ideas. He was confident, because it had started as his personality, then became a mask he wore to assure Saki that all was well, and now he didn’t know why he even did it. Habit. To make sure others wouldn’t worry.
Tsukasa was defined only by external forces. If he was alone, he was nothing. And that scared him.