#hardcoreprince

“What—”

“Don’t play dumb.” Maria sits up and examines him critically. “No morphogenetic field required, I can tell you like Aoi. You’re texting him now, aren’t you?”

Carlos goes a little red as he stares down at the phone in his hands. “Maybe I am,” he mumbles. “But it’s not like that! He wanted to know what we needed at the store.”

Maria shakes her head. “I wrote him a list. It is like that. Geeze, maybe I should become a firefighter. I can’t even get one boy to date me.” She sighs and shakes her head ruefully.

“We’re not dating!” Carlos laughs a little. “Maria, anyone would be lucky to date you.”

She scoffs. “Don’t give me that line. Anyway, we were talking about you. Why not? What’s the harm in one more? Junpei’s dating him too, isn’t he?”

The phone vibrates in Carlos’ hands, only further incriminating him. Another message from Aoi. It had started out with Aoi asking Carlos to remind him what he wanted from the market… but it had quickly devolved into a conversation about what brand of crappy instant coffee is better, which turned into what Carlos thinks could be flirting…

“He is,” Carlos says carefully. “But I don’t want to assume that just because Junpei is dating him means that I should, or that he even likes me. That’s too complicated, right? This thing with Akane and Junpei… that’s enough without me getting involved with someone else.”

“He’s not a stranger or anything, he’s Akane’s brother. And I think he does like you.” Maria lifts her eyebrows a little and leans closer, as if she has a secret. “Anyway, I know you like him because you forgot to check the roast.”

A jolt of panic goes through Carlos as he leaps from the couch. “Oh sh— shoot, the roast!”

Maria’s giggles follow him into the kitchen as he scrambles to the oven. “I’m not twelve anymore!”

But all his haste was for nothing. When Carlos cracks open the oven, the roast looks fine, despite the fact that he was supposed to check on it ten minutes ago. As he pierces the skin with the thermometer, he tries to put what Maria said out of his mind. But it’s hard when Aoi is coming back in about ten minutes…

Junpei, Akane, and Aoi have been visiting for the past few days and his apartment has never been more crowded. Junpei keeps telling him to get a bigger place but Carlos insists the housing market is terrible and he doesn’t have enough time for that. So, they’ve made do. Carlos, Akane, and Junpei sleep in Carlos’ room and Aoi gets the couch. Aoi initially complained, saying he didn’t come all the way to America to couch surf, and almost got a hotel. But Akane sweetly reminded him that hotels did not offer five-star breakfasts and cute firemen to cook them. Carlos had blushed at that and Aoi had rolled his eyes but agreed to stay.

How Aoi ended up in America in the first place was all Junpei’s doing. The official line is that Junpei insisted it would be pathetic if Aoi spent Christmas alone, so he dragged him all the way out to California. Maria suspects Aoi tagging along has less to do with that and more to do with Carlos. But Carlos doesn’t think it’s too much of a stretch to bring your boyfriend when you’re visiting your other boyfriend with your girlfriend…

What has his life become?

The door squeaks open in the other room just loud enough for Carlos to hear it and he smiles. He washes his hands and leaves the kitchen to find Aoi, Junpei, and Akane coming in the front door with probably more groceries than strictly necessary. Aoi had only proposed the trip to get some (good) wine to go with dinner, and Maria made up a list of a few things they could use, but it looks like they’ve come back with much more than that.

“Blame Junpei,” Akane says when she sees Carlos’ questioning gaze. “He was the one who insisted on getting three flavors of instant ramen like he’s still at University.”

“I’ve never seen those flavors,” Junpei scowls, brushing past Carlos to drop his bag in the kitchen. “Besides, Akane bought a lot of coffee creamer.”

“I’ve never seen those flavors,” Akane parrots innocently.

Carlos shakes his head, but he’s smiling. He looks to Aoi, who’s struggling with an overpacked bag, and takes it from him effortlessly. “What did you buy too much of?”

Aoi grins and there’s something about that expression that’s so inviting and teasing that it makes Carlos a little bit flustered. “Alcohol. Too many flavors and all that shit. Americans really like that flavored crap, don’t they?”

“I guess…” Carlos says with a little shrug. He peers into the bag and sees a variety of holiday flavored wines and vodkas. Are you planning on drinking all this?“

“Oh?” Aoi steps closer to Carlos and even though he’s shorter, Carlos can’t help but feel like he’s being loomed over. “Can’t hold your liquor?”

Carlos can only stare as Aoi brushes past him to bother Junpei in the kitchen. Now without Aoi in front of him, Carlos can see Maria and Akane watching him.

“Told you,” Maria says, giggling.

Akane grins. “You were right. My brother and your brother… we’ll be, double sisters in law?”

That really makes Maria laugh. Carlos goes red as the both of them giggle at his expense. “It’s not like that,” he insists.

Akane steps forward and cups Carlos’ face. He leans into her touch. “Sorry, just teasing. I know how you are, don’t worry, okay? It’s Christmas Eve.”

But Carlos is very good at worrying.

During dinner, Aoi serves Carlos a generous helping of a very sweet wine that tastes off puttingly of peppermint. There are three bottles of various flavors open at the table and it seems random who has gotten what.

“Pumpkin spice wine?” Junpei sputters, looking scandalized. “Aoi… you’ve really gone too far this time.”

“Don’t blame me,” Aoi says with a little shrug. “I’m just the messenger. You should really be blaming this fucking sinful country for concocting such an abomination.”

“Mine’s not bad,” Maria offers. holding it out to Junpei for a taste. She’s sitting next to Carlos. Across from them are Akane and Junpei, and right next to Carlos at the corner of the table is Aoi.

Junpei sips the dark liquid suspiciously and pulls a face. “Is that supposed to be chocolate?”

“You’re so uncultured,” Aoi says with a long-suffering sigh as he clinks glasses with Akane.

In turn, Akane drinks her white wine and blinks. “Cheesecake. Here, Jumpy, maybe this is more to your taste.”

After Junpei decides he definitely does not like that one either, he looks to Carlos, who shrugs. “No, you won’t like mine. Peppermint. A lot of it.”

Junpei turns to Aoi with disgust. “Why did you even buy that? Anyone who drinks that better not kiss me.”

Before Carlos knows what’s happening, Aoi is reaching for his glass. He downs the rest of the wine in one go, not breaking eye contact with Junpei. “Whoops. Guess I don’t get to kiss you now. Big fucking loss. I’ll just have to kiss Carlos.” Aoi leans over and slips an arm around Carlos.

Carlos goes a little red and even redder as Maria catches his eye and raises an eyebrow at him. He coughs and averts his gaze as Junpei fumes.

“You’re a dick,” Junpei grumbles. “I didn’t want to kiss either of you anyway.”

“Liar.” Aoi idly refills the wine glass and passes it to Akane as Junpei’s eyes go wide.

“No, don’t do it, Kanny, please. I swear I’ll shift right now to some other timeline where you don’t ruin the taste of your lips.”

Akane grins at Aoi and takes the glass. Junpei gapes at her as she brings the glass to her lips ever so slowly. Even Carlos holds his breath with anticipation. But she doesn’t take a sip. Instead she giggles and puts it down. “Jumpy, you’re so dramatic.”

Carlos starts tuning out the rest of their banter because Aoi’s arm is still draped tantalizingly around him. He serves himself some more of the offending wine and drinks it too quickly. The roast is good, no harm done for ignoring it for a little while, and the meal passes by comfortably with Aoi’s arm around him. Every time Carlos thinks he’s going to pull away… he doesn’t. If anything, he draws closer.

Towrds the end of the meal, everyone is a little tipsy and Aoi leans close to Carlos’ ear to whisper, “Meet me outside in two minutes.” He gets up from the table and stretches out like a cat while Carlos stares bewilderedly after him “Be right back,” he tells the table. “Gotta take a piss.”

“Go wash your mouth out,” Junpei gripes. “Plenty of mouthwash.”

Aoi flips him off as he leaves, and Carlos is left with a growing pit of dread in his stomach. He watches the next two minutes crawl by as he stares at the clock on the wall. When it’s finally time for him to get up, he lurches unsteadily to his feet and Maria looks up at him with concern.

“Are you okay?”

“Y-yeah.” Carlos waves her off. “Just need to get some air.”

“Okay…” Maria is looking at him with too much scrutiny, so he hurries out of the kitchen before she can pick up anything weird from him. They’re so much more in tune these days that he’s had to ask her to stop prying into his mind. She complies… most of the time.

When Carlos gets outside the front door of his apartment, Aoi is waiting there, bathed in his porchlight and smoking a cigarette carelessly as he leans against the railing. “You actually waited two minutes.” He shakes his head and grins. “What a fuckin’ dumbass.”

Carlos falters. It’s cold outside and he’s just wearing a stupid holiday sweater Maria picked out for him. He shoves his hands in his pockets and averts his eyes. “I’m good at following instructions,” he offers.

At that, Aoi snorts and takes a drag of his cigarette before stubbing it out. “I just didn’t want the others to get suspicious. You blush too easily.” He takes a step towards Carlos, who instantly gets tense. “Relax. Jesus.” Aoi reaches forward and brushes a piece of hair from Carlos’ face.

“Oh,” Carlos says softly. A puff of his breath materializes between them. He tries to look anywhere else but Aoi is so close. “This won’t… this doesn’t complicate everything, does it?”

“Goddamn, you talk too much,” Aoi says, slipping one of his hands behind Carlos’ neck. His hands are cold, and it makes Carlos shiver. “I’ve already stolen one of my sister’s boyfriends. Another one isn’t going to hurt, right?”

“I-I guess?”

“You like me, right?” Aoi’s words are more of a demand than anything. He already knows the answer, obviously. His brazenness makes Carlos laugh helplessly.

“Y-yes, but—”

“Then quit fuckin’ talking! Jesus, I’m trying to make out with you at a holiday party. I shouldn’t have to say anything except ‘you, me, outside.’”

Carlos doesn’t have time to say anything to that before Aoi is leaning up and pressing mouth firm against Carlos’. He tastes strongly of peppermint wine but it’s not off putting anymore. Carlos slides his eyes shut and winds his arms around Aoi’s waist. He lets himself relax and the cold melts away as Aoi digs his fingers in Carlos’ hair. He’s not as tall as Carlos, so he’s pulling him down, pressing his body up to meet him.

When they break apart, Carlos is breathless and pink and Aoi is grinning at him like the Cheshire Cat. “Alright, fix your face, they’re going to wonder where we’ve been. I’ll go first.”

And then Aoi is gone and Carlos is standing on his porch wondering what the hell just happened.

The next ten minutes pass by in a blur. Carlos returns to his kitchen. Maria raises her eyebrows over and over at him, Junpei is still complaining about the wine, and Akane is giving him a knowing look. Finally, Maria excuses herself, saying she’s meeting up with some friends, and she winks at Carlos not so subtly as she leaves. Now, left with a mountain of dishes, Junpei says they should clean up later and the four of them end up crammed together on Carlos’ couch.

Carlos ends up exactly where he does not want to be, stuck between Akane and Aoi. Akane curls into him at once and Aoi slings an arm around him.

“Of course, I’m on the end,” Junpei mutters as he makes himself comfortable on Aoi’s other side.

“Quit whining, you’re going to have to learn to share this solid asshole.” Aoi pats Carlos’ shoulder appreciatively. “You two have really been holding out on me.”

“I knew something happened when you both disappeared,” Akane says, looking up at Carlos brightly. He’s trying very hard not to look flustered. “You have my full support. Jumpy? Tell him you support him.”

“What? Hell no. I can’t let Carlos date this… this degenerate.”

Aoi swiftly elbows Junpei in the stomach and Junpei starts swearing at him and Carlos can only watch in mild horror as the two of them start wrestling on the couch, right there next to him. Akane puts a hand on his cheek and gently guides his gaze to her.

“Jumpy’s joking. It’s alright. We’re both happy for you. I know it seems like too much, but you don’t have to worry.” She smiles at him and her eyes are so soft and gentle as she leans forward to give him a chaste peck on the lips.

As Akane pulls away, Carlos is smiling. “Uh, thanks, Akane. Guess it’s too much to ask for a normal Christmas, huh?”

Akane grins back him and puts a hand on his chest as he slips an arm around her. “Don’t worry. This is as normal as it gets.”

After a moment, Aoi settles back against Carlos, apparently done wrestling with Junpei.

“You see what he’s like?” Junpei grumbles, resting his head on Aoi’s shoulder and closing his eyes. “But if you must… I guess I support you.”

“Didn’t need your approval, asshole,” Aoi breathes into Carlos’ neck.

“Hey, guys.”

“Hi Carlos!” Akane chirped.

“Hey,” greeted Junpei with a crooked grin.

“You know, my place is pretty far for you two,” Carlos pointed out, quirking a brow as he leaned against the doorjamb. “Why did we do this here and not at one of your apartments, again?”

“Think of it like… A test run!” Akane said pleasantly, her arms piled high with bags of Hershey kisses.

Carlos laughed.

“What, so if you guys like my kitchen enough you’ll finally move in with me?” he joked as he held the door open for her.

“Pretty much,” agreed Junpei, sweeping past with a massive bowl of chilled cookie dough cradled to his chest.

A glance out at the street revealed that Junpei’s junky red car was still stuffed to bursting with baking supplies. And so, after dropping his sack of flour onto the kitchen table and dropping a kiss on each of his partners’ foreheads, Carlos headed down to the car to help transfer things to his kitchen. Even with all three of them, it took two round trips to get everything. The kitchen was overtaken, and the less messy ingredients like bagged candy, pretzels, and nuts were tossed onto Carlos’s bed to make room. Then the three of them washed their hands carefully.

“You couldn’t convince Maria to join us?” Akane asked as she cleared a space on the table to roll out cookie dough.

Carlos shook his head.

“No. Apparently the Klim family is doing a little holiday baking today too, and Phi invited her over. Can’t compete with that,” he explained with a wink.

“Are they actually dating yet, or are they still fucking around ‘not labeling things’?” wondered Junpei.

“Between you and me, I think Phi might ask her out today,” Carlos said. “With any luck. I’m sure we can trust Sigma to be pushy and embarrassing in our place.”

Then he picked up his bag of flour from before and opened it and began ladling flour onto the table with a measuring cup. Junpei pulled the cookie dough out of Carlos’s fridge and began peeling off the Saran wrap covering it. Meanwhile, Akane dug through one of the boxes and produced a plastic bag of metal cookie cutters.

She unsealed the bag and dumped them on a corner of the table that wasn’t covered in flour.

“That’s quite the collection,” Carlos noted, sifting through the pile. “Bells, wreaths, snowflakes… Are these gingerbread people?”

Side-by -side sat two vaguely humanoid cookie cutters, one of which seemed to be wearing a dress.

“It’ll be great!” Akane enthused. “We can make little cookie people that look like us!” “I dunno,” said Junpei, studying the cookie cutter critically. “Don’t you think it’s a little disingenuous to make gingerbread people out of sugar cookie dough?”

“What I think is that you two are putting way too much thought into this,” Carlos said with a laugh.

That seemed to end the discussion. With the cookie dough unwrapped, Junpei went to lift it out and onto the table, but when he tried to release it globs stuck stubbornly to his palms.

“Ah, jeez, just—!”

Junpei flailed his hands, trying to shake the dough off.

“And that’s why we use flour, Jumpy,” Akane said primly, her palms already caked in a layer of it.

She carefully took the majority of the dough out of his hands. Though the dough didn’t come off onto her palms in big chunks like it had for Junpei, it still seemed to want to stick to her. Carlos dipped up another half-cup of flour and sprinkled it over the dough. Akane shot him a grateful smile. After coating the rolling pin in flour too, Akane began rolling out the cookie dough.

“Why don’t you two work on the cookies while I start some of the other things?” Carlos suggested.

Then he detoured into his rooms to grab two bags of pretzel rings and two bags of Hershey kisses. While Akane and Junpei cut out sugar cookies and placed them on baking sheets, Carlos set to work filling another with pretzel rings in careful rows. Then he unwrapped the Hershey kisses and set each one in the center of a pretzel. Almost the moment he had filled the tray, the oven dinged to alert him it was preheated.

Popping on a pair of oven mitts, Carlos slid his tray and one of the trays of cookies into the oven. When he turned back to start filling another tray with chocolate and pretzels, he caught sight of a head of brown hair coated liberally in white.

“Junpei,” Carlos said with a fond sigh, “you’ve got flour in your hair.”

“Ughhhh! It’s not my fault it gets everywhere!” complained Junpei, trying and failing to brush it out with his equally floury hand.

After a few seconds of his flailing, Carlos finally took pity on his boyfriend and, from his higher vantage point, ruffled Junpei’s hair until all the flour was out – or at least, as much as would be dislodged without a shower. There was still a faint stain of whiteness in his hair that reminded Carlos of snowflakes.

Smiling softly, Carlos set the microwave timer for two minutes and an egg timer for twenty, and set back to work filling a baking sheet. Two minutes later, the microwave beeped at him insistently and he turned it off, slipping on his oven mitts again.

“Could someone get the M&Ms?” he asked, pulling open the oven door.

“Got it!” cried Akane, wiping her floury hands on her jeans and leaving stark white handprints behind.

She hurried into the bedroom and returned, ripping off a corner of the M&M bag in her hands. Carlos slid the tray from the oven and held it out for Akane, who carefully pressed one M&M into the center of each melted Hershey’s kiss, squishing them flat and filling the small pretzel rings. After the final one was finished, before Carlos could turn away to set the pan on a cooling rack, Akane stretched up and pressed a kiss to the tip of his nose.

Despite himself, Carlos could feel his ears burn with heat at the unexpected kiss. He was comfortable with them, certainly, but having spent so much of his life single and not interested in more, he was still sometimes startled by such displays. While he was distracted, Akane drew a little heart on his cheek with the flour coating her finger. Then she danced away to do the same to Junpei, though he protested halfheartedly while cutting out a sleigh-shaped cookie.

Their morning continued in such a manner, filled with flour and silly kisses and the ding of timers, until at last the dough had all been used up. The chocolate pretzel rings were cooling on the counters, and Carlos was cooking a pot of caramel to coat their homemade Chex mix. Akane had rolled their dough for thumbprint cookies into evenly sized little balls.

It was only then, as Junpei went to gather supplies to mix up frosting for the cookies, that they realized something was missing.

“We forgot the powdered sugar?” groaned Junpei. “No way, I double-checked everything!”

“I don’t have any in the house either,” Carlos added sheepishly from the stove. “And with this much cooking at once I don’t know if we can afford to send someone out to buy more without burning something.”

The three of them fell silent.

“Two choices lie before us,” Akane said solemnly, her eyes closed, though neither of her boyfriends knew if she was truly consulting the morphogenetic field or not. “We could call Aoi for help and potentially invite disaster, or we could not call for help, in which case we will definitely invite disaster.”

Junpei and Carlos glanced at each other, and then back at Akane.

“Uh… I’m going to go with my gut and pick potential disaster over certain disaster,” Carlos replied.

“Ditto,” agreed Junpei.

Akane’s shoulders slumped.

Ten minutes and one embarrassing phone call later, there was a knock on Carlos’s front door.

But when Junpei opened it, instead of Aoi Kurashiki, in through the door stepped Santa Claus with a gray Wal-Mart sack slung over his shoulder.

“Uhhhhhhh…”

Junpei glanced from the Santa Claus in the doorway back to Akane and Carlos to see if they were seeing what he was. By their expressions, they were.

“I heard there was a good little girl around here who needed some baking supplies?” the red-clad stranger asked in a false-deep voice, and Junpei realized that they weren’t dealing with Santa Claus at all, but another Santa entirely.

There was a smack, and Junpei’s eyes darted to Akane again to find her hand pressed to her forehead.

“Ugh, please tell me you didn’t go to the grocery store dressed like that,” she muttered.

Aoi smirked back, though his sister wasn’t even looking at him.

“How else would I go?”

“It’s December fifth, Aoi!”

“I think you mean Christmas fifth,” he retorted, handing off his shopping bag to Carlos.

The bag was rifled through quickly to make sure it contained what they needed, and then set in the kitchen. Instead of rejoining the group, though, Carlos moved past them into his bedroom.

“I do not mean Christmas fifth,” Akane complained, making her way back into the kitchen with Aoi and Junpei on her heels. “Why do you have to be so embarrassing? I’m grown up now, you don’t have to pretend to be Santa anymore, you weirdo.”

“You know, Akane,” said Aoi, “insulting Santa Claus is a good way to get coal in your stocking. You might have to shift to a different timeline to get any presents.”

“How about I shift to a timeline where you’re not so annoying?” Akane huffed.

“Good luck finding one.”

Aoi and Junpei startled at having spoken in unison, then shared a quick fistbump. Akane groaned piteously.

“Please just take the beard off,” she said to Aoi. “I’m begging you. God is begging you. The entire morphogenetic field is begging you.”

“It’s not in the spirit of Christmas to ask Santa to take off his beard.”

“Aoi…!”

“No, no,” he protested. “Call me Santa!”

“You are the worst!”

Aoi planted his hands on his hips.

“If I was the worst, would I have brought you that powdered sugar you needed?” he asked, taunting his sister by shaking his head to wave his fake beard at her.

Akane puffed her cheeks out angrily. And then she shoved him.

“Whoa—!”

Aoi toppled backwards with a yelp.

Luckily for him, Carlos stepped back into the kitchen just in time to catch him under the arms.

“Hi Carlos,” Aoi said, looking up at Carlos with a grin that even the floofy fake beard couldn’t hide.

“Hey!” Akane protested. “No flirting with my boyfriends! I never flirt with your dates!”

Aoi didn’t deign to give that claim a verbal response. Instead, he leveled Akane with the flattest stare he could manage while wearing a Santa costume and still half-draped against Carlos. Akane glanced away, and had the decency to look a bit ashamed of herself.

A loud beep filled the kitchen.

“That was one time,” she muttered, turning back to get the paper bag of caramel Chex mix out of the microwave. “And she was really cute.”

Akane shook the bag violently, pretending it was her brother. Setting Aoi upright, Carlos cleared his throat and placed the bag of pecans he’d gone to get on the counter. As he did, his eyes glanced over the microwave’s digital clock, and he did a double-take. It read 1:03pm.

“It’s that late already?” he murmured.

Then Junpei was at his shoulder looking too.

“No wonder I’m starving. We should break for lunch.”

On cue, Akane and Aoi’s stomachs growled loudly. Junpei laughed.

“Want to join us for lunch, Aoi?” offered Carlos.

He shrugged in response.

“What’re you guys having?” he asked.

A glance around the kitchen told them all that, whatever it was, it wouldn’t be homemade.

“We can just order something from that burger place downtown,” suggested Junpei. “Cheap, quick, convenient. I don’t really care as long as I get food.”

“Oh, I want their crispy chicken sandwich!” Akane said. “But no tomato. And a small order of French fries?”

“They got wraps there, right? I’ll just take one of those with chicken in it, I guess,” Aoi added.

“Double cheeseburger and fries,” said Junpei.

Carlos nodded, rubbing his chin.

“They still have that burger with the swiss cheese and the mushrooms, don’t they? That sounds good to me, so I guess we’re all in agreement. But who should go order?”

“I’ll go get it, you lovebirds keep cooking,” Aoi insisted.

“No!” Akane raced past him and blocked the door, her arms spread wide. “No way! You’re not going out there dressed like that again!”

“And are you going to stop me, little sister?”

“Yes!”

The argument only devolved from there, into childish insults and mocking nicknames. Junpei watched with interest, nibbling on a leftover pretzel stick that hadn’t made it into the Chex mix. He didn’t seem to be in any hurry to intervene. Which, Carlos realized, meant it was up to him.

“I’ll go,” he said, then louder when the bickering siblings didn’t hear him. “Hey! I’ll go.”

“I will take the ring to Mordor,” Junpei stage-whispered in falsetto.

Carlos bit his lip to cover up a smile.

“Seriously. I’ll get the food, you two,” he said, placing a hand on each of the Kurashikis’ shoulders. “Just keep going with the thumbprint cookies for me, alright?”

Twenty minutes of work later, the caramel Chex mix was drying on wax paper, the small batch of thumbprint cookies had all been baked and thumbprinted, and the chocolate pretzel rings were boxed up in the fridge. Aoi had just finished pulling a tray of sugar cookies out of the oven when Carlos returned with a huge paper bag in his arms.

“Sorry I took so long,” he apologized. “The line was huge.”

“Just gimme the food,” Junpei replied, making grabby hands.

Aoi stripped off the Santa Claus beard at last, so he didn’t end up getting food in it.

“Let’s see…” said Carlos, digging through the massive paper sack and pulling out meals. “A crispy chicken sandwich for Akane, hold the tomato. A double cheeseburger for Junpei. A chicken salad wrap for Aoi… And a mushroom swiss burger for me.”

Akane went up on her tiptoes, peering into the bag.

“And one, two, three orders of fries,” she counted, pulling out her own little box of French fries. “That’s everything.”

Satisfied that everything was as it should be, they settled in to eat.

“Trade you a bite of my sandwich for a bite of yours,” Akane bartered five minutes into lunch, holding out her half-eaten chicken sandwich.

“Tempting,” Junpei replied sarcastically. “Unfortunately, I am already too… Chicken.”

The pun, paired with Junpei’s deadpan expression, caught Carlos so off guard that he snorted soda up his nose and started coughing.

Thankfully that was the only mishap, and once they had all finished eating and thrown their trash in the garbage can, Akane lugged Carlos’s mixer onto the table and started mixing up the frosting. It took several adjustments to get the balance of powdered sugar and milk right for the perfect frosting consistency, but in the end everyone was satisfied with it.

“And now,” declared Akane as she lifted the spatula in the air, “we frost!”

“What colors should we do?” Carlos asked.

“We have to have red and green!”

“Blue,” suggested Junpei, digging through the tiny box of food coloring for Akane’s picks and his own. “And yellow.”

“White,” Aoi said. “You should just leave some plain.”

Carlos nodded, accepting the little bottles from Junpei.

“And what about brown?” he asked.

The other three paused, and then looked at him with equally skeptical expressions.

“Who wants to eat brown frosting?” Junpei demanded, sticking out his tongue.

“But, you know it… I mean… For reindeer and tree trunks and stuff…?” fumbled Carlos.

Akane squinted at him. There was definitely something weird… Carlos could be a hell of an actor, but he also wasn’t good at keeping secrets from the people closest to him. What kind of secret he could have involving the color of frosting was beyond her, but something told her it would be a good surprise so she didn’t ruin it by trying to take a glance downstream in the timeline.

“That makes sense!” she chirped instead.

There was no brown food coloring, of course, so in the end they mixed a few different colors to get it. Carlos was oddly specific about the shade he wanted, and Akane reminded herself very firmly not to cheat with her ESPer powers.

Once five bowls of frosting had been mixed with color and the sixth left plain, Carlos rummaged around in his lower cupboards and pulled out a box filled with white piping bags, plastic rings, and metal tips. Quickly and efficiently, Carlos fitted six bags with the icing tips and secured them with the plastic couplers.

“Wait, you actually have piping bags?” Junpei asked. “What are you, a cooking channel chef?”

“How do you think I frosted Maria’s birthday cake?” retorted Carlos, spooning a glop of red frosting into the bag.

“Uh, I thought you bought it, like a normal person.”

Nonetheless, Junpei pitched in by filling another bag with green frosting. Akane grabbed a spoon and helped out with blue, while Aoi, predictably, filled another piping bag with white frosting. With all four of them working, all six colors were soon bagged and ready to frost with.

“Gonna help us frost cookies, Santa?” Junpei asked with a smirk.

Aoi snorted.

“No way in hell, I’m out. Santa eats cookies, he doesn’t make ‘em. I did my part and now I’m gonna go home and hibernate.”

With a quick half-hug around Akane’s shoulders and a wave for her boyfriends, Aoi was out the door with his Santa Claus beard in hand.

“I’d file that under not-disaster, I think,” Carlos said optimistically.

Akane gave an irritated huff, but made no verbal protest. Then she, Junpei, and Carlos sat down to begin frosting the sugar cookies.

Only a few minutes in, it was clear that the task would not be as easy as it sounded.

“Will it just…! Oh, come on!” Akane muttered, swiping another glob of yellow frosting off the tip of the icing bag with a finger after it refused to stick to the cookie.

Moodily, she stuck the finger in her mouth and ate the frosting off so it didn’t go to waste or make a mess. Junpei, sitting across from her, wasn’t doing much better. But instead of trying to get his designs as pretty as possible like Akane, he had embraced his lack of icing skill and just scribbled lines of blue across several of the cookies nearest him. Carlos, of course, was completely in his element, which Akane found particularly unfair. Still, even he had to occasionally scrape clumping frosting off the tip of his piping bag.

“We definitely made too many cookies,” Junpei groaned after a full hour, massaging his cramping hand. “We’ll never finish frosting them all.”

“If you need a break, you could take the red and start filling the thumbprints,” suggested Carlos. “The red frosting is kind of thin,” he gestured at the cookies with red frosting oozing off them and onto the plastic tablecloth, “so it should be the easiest to use.”

With a worn-out sigh, Junpei got to his feet and picked up the piping bag with the red frosting. But he didn’t complain as he started to fill the divots in the pecan-speckled cookies – Carlos had been right, it was easier. His fingers were still sore from trying to squeeze the blue frosting onto the sugar cookies earlier, but the ache started to ebb. And standing at the counter with the cooling rack full of thumbprint cookies gave him the perfect vantage for looking at his boyfriend and girlfriend. Akane, who faced him straight on, had a cute and familiar concentrated look on her face, the tip of her tongue peeking out of the corner of her mouth. And from the side he got a view of Carlos’s forearms, bared by his rolled-up sleeves and flexing as he worked. Junpei grinned.

Ok, he thought, maybe this was worth a little ache in his hands.

It didn’t take long to finish up with the thumbprint cookies, and Junpei settled back down between Carlos and Akane and dutifully continued frosting sugar cookies.

The next time any of them looked at a clock, it was after 7:00pm.

Carlos sighed, leaning back from the table.

“We should eat supper,” he murmured.

“Ehh, I’m not really hungry,” Junpei admitted.

“Me either,” said Akane. “I guess we’ve been snacking all evening, so…”

In truth, they all just wanted to be done. Seeming to realize this, everyone returned to frosting – this time with a little less creativity and finesse. Carlos even ate a few unfrosted cookies as he worked just to trim down the number they had to finish.

When the final cookie, a bell, was frosted, all three let out a sigh of relief and stood to stretch.

“That… Was a lot of cookies,” Junpei sighed.

Carlos nodded in agreement.

“Maybe next year we only need a half batch of dough.”

“But we did such a good job!” offered Akane. “We should at least take some time to admire them and show each other our favorites.”

Junpei smiled indulgently, leaning back into Carlos’s chest as the blond slung an arm around his shoulders.

“Why don’t you go first then, Kanny? Since it’s your idea.”

Akane gestured to a small forest of green tree cookies in one corner of the table, covered in red and blue garlands and yellow stars.

“Look how good they got!” she said proudly.

“That’s really something,” agreed Junpei, looking impressed.

“Yeah, they’re great!” Carlos said with a smile. “You picked up icing pretty quick, Akane.”

She beamed at them both.

“How about you, Jumpy?”

In reply, he leaned forward and pulled out a cookie from the lineup with a flourish. It was splattered with blue and white frosting in a seemingly random pattern.

“Uh… What is that?” Akane wondered.

“It’s a Funyarinpa, Kanny,” Junpei explained impatiently.

Akane squinted and tilted her head, trying to find any familiarity in the scribbles of icing.

“If you say so Jumpy,” she said at last.

“I think I can see it,” Carlos told them. “It looks good, Junpei. The frosting is really even.”

They all stared down at the Funyarinpa cookie for a few more seconds, thoughtfully.

“And which ones are your favorites, Carlos?” asked Akane.

At that, he moved closer to the table, blocking the cookies from view. After a little bit of shuffling, Carlos stepped out of the way to show the other two.

“Taadaa?” he said with a shrug, splaying his hands.

“Ohhhh, Carlos, they’re so cute!” exclaimed Akane, clapping and bouncing on her toes.

There, in a line, sat three gingerbread-person sugar cookies, carefully frosted. The first had several streaks of brown hair and a grumpy face; it wore a red shirt with a blue vest and blue pants. The second cookie-person was the kind wearing a dress. It also had brown hair, though it fell over the front of its little cookie shoulder in a ponytail, and its face was neutral, almost thoughtful. It wore a white dress with a brown belt, and blue pants underneath. The last cookie had yellow hair, a smiling face, and a simple green shirt with blue pants.

“Of course you blew the rest of us out of the water,” Junpei scoffed, but he was smiling too.

Together they packed up all the cookies into Tupperware and put them into the fridge so they wouldn’t get stale, then bagged the Chex mix. Though there were still plenty of baking supplies and tools scattered around, the kitchen looked kind of empty without the results of their work laid out everywhere.

The glowing numbers on the microwave clock told them it was 9:35pm.

“You can go, if you want to,” Carlos said, suddenly a little hesitant. “I’ll clean this up in the morning, it shouldn’t take too long, so you don’t have to stay if—”

“There’s no way in hell I’m driving home tonight,” Junpei declared.

And so, with floury stains all over their clothes and hands tinted by smears of colorful frosting, the three of them piled into Carlos’s bed for a good night’s sleep.

“… Love you,” Carlos said quietly, in lieu of a goodnight.

A soft yawn filled the air.

“We’re gonna move in,” Akane answered.

“Mmm,” agreed Junpei. “Yeah. But you have to cook breakfast. That’s what firefighters do.”

Too tired to laugh fully, Carlos just let out an amused whuff of air, smiling.

The house is quiet around him as he stands in the hall bathroom, eyes half lidded and toothbrush sweeping lazily across his teeth. His reflection stares blankly out at him from the mirror and he’s just awake enough to notice a new pimple on his chin. He’s running a finger over the angry red bump when the first shrill siren pierces the house.

The toothbrush falls from his lips as he starts. It leaves a line of white foam down the front of his shirt as it clatters into the sink.

He groans in annoyance as he retrieves his toothbrush. All he wants to do is go to sleep and now he has to investigate the faulty fire alarm. He’s been telling Maria to change the battery for weeks now.

The smoke hits his nose as he’s rinsing his mouth.

The smell stops him so abruptly he nearly chokes. He whips his head up and is met with his own panicked expression in the mirror.

It’s not a false alarm.

The beeping tears through his ears as he yanks the door open. The hallway is already thick with black smoke. The onset of it is so sudden and so forceful that he stumbles back a few steps. The smoke floods into his mouth and eyes. He coughs and coughs as his mouth tries to form words.

And then the screaming starts.

It’s coming from all around him. He can’t pick out the sounds. He’s dizzy. He can’t see. Suddenly his house, the house he grew up in, is alien to him. He sputters and waves a hand in front of his face, trying to clear the black clouds and the heat, but it’s too much.

And then, loud and clear, as if she were standing right next to him, Maria’s voice fills his head.

“Carlos!”

He takes a step forward, into the black. “Maria!” he manages to choke out.

“I’m in my room! The closet!”

Even though the air is dark and thick and he’s forgotten which way is up, Carlos is drawn like a magnet to Maria’s room. He’s on autopilot when he throws open the door. The smoke pours out thick and fast and the heat licks at his clothes.

Here are the flames.

The bed has been consumed by the fire. The posters on the wall are peeling and cracking. The dresser is a tower of red and black. He can’t imagine how it’s gotten this bad this fast.

“Maria!”

His heart is painful in his ears as he hugs the wall to get past the flames and to the closet. He reaches for the knob without thinking and the metal burns his palm. But the door opens as he yanks his hand away with a shout.

There’s Maria, curled up into herself on the floor, her shirt pulled over her mouth. She looks so small there, alone and vulnerable.

She locks eyes with him and he doesn’t hesitate to scoop her up. She weighs nothing in his arms. The rest of the world blinks out as Carlos turns back to the fire creeping in around them.

The flames lap at him as he rushes from the room and back into the smoke filled hall. Maria clings to him, her arms tight around his neck and her heart beating too fast against his chest. The heat of the house is dizzying and the blackened air is suffocating him but a strange calm presses into him.

It’s this calm that forces him to run.

The hall passes by in a blur. The whole house is burning now. The roof is crumbling above him and the linoleum is melting under his feet. But he presses on until suddenly he’s outside in the cool night air and the shock nearly knocks him over. He sinks to his knees and releases Maria, who coughs and sputters and sobs.

“Mom and Dad!”

Carlos is on his feet the moment he registers those words. They’re still in the house.

He bolts for the door. Maria is screaming behind him. Sirens rip through the neighborhood.

The house folds in on itself before he can reach it.

He stares as the flames consume it. The debris falls all around him but he can’t move. He’s rooted to the spot. This can’t be happening. There’s no way the fire could have moved that fast.

Out of the corner of his eye he sees movement. He turns quick, thinking it’s his parents. Thinking they made it out alive. But standing there, illuminated by the fire, is a man in a long black robe. His hood is up, but he puts it down slowly.

The man has Carlos’ face.

His hair is longer, but he has the same eyes, the same curve of his lips. The same face he just found a new pimple on.

Something flickers into his memory, something vague and sharp that makes him recoil.

A stay board breaks off the house and smacks him across the forehead. The man’s face, his face, is burned into his mind as he passes out.

He’s ten years old.

The air around him is stale and oppressive. The heat has crept into the warehouse and the old air conditioning system is wheezing out its last breaths. The eyes of the adults don’t help.

He’s standing in the middle of the bare floor, dressed in a plain black robe. Clutched in his fist is a short but wickedly sharp blade. His pulse thrums around it.

He’s not ready.

The adults are arranged in a wide circle around him. There are seven, but the spaces between them make it seem like more. Each is wearing the full Free the Soul robes with various tassels and emblems to show their ranks. Those are what he should aspire too. Those are why he is standing here now, in the flickering light of dozens of candles.

“Alright, Left,” one of the adults says. “Are you ready?”

There’s a strange sort of satisfaction in being called Left here and now. It’s his name, of course, but it is all of their names. All of his peers are also called Left. The adults are called Left. If their hoods were down, he could have seen that they all had the same face. The face he will one day grow into. But usually he is called “you” or “that one” or, sometimes, “C.”

His batch had been five babies, each labeled after a letter of the alphabet. He was C. They are not supposed to be individuals, but it can get confusing.

He nods. His hands are trembling.

One of the adults is holding something. He steps forward and pulls back the blanket covering it.

C inhales sharply.

There, under the blanket, is a human baby.

The adult steps forward and places the child at C’s feet before he rejoins the circle. C stares at the small face. His face, from long ago.

The baby is wriggling but not fussy. It stares at C and he has to look away quick. The knife burns into his palm.

“This one is defective,” one of the adults says. He doesn’t look up to see which one. It doesn’t matter. They are all the same. They must be all the same for society to function.

“A bad heart,” another one says. “It happens. But you know how this works, don’t you, Left?”

“Only the strong survive,” the adults say as a group. The sentiment echoes off the empty walls of the warehouse.

“Only the strong survive,” he echoes. The baby is still staring. He raises a chubby fist towards C.

C grips the knife tight, so he won’t drop it.

“Do it quick, Left.”

“Don’t hesitate. Don’t feel sorry for it. It is a mistake.”

“Only the strong survive.”

He can’t breathe. He’s shaking. His heart is stuttering so fast and so loud he thinks the whole warehouse can hear it. The wheezing air conditioner fills his ears. The candlelight magnifies the shadows.

Only the strong survive.

The baby coos.

C kneels. Around him the adults are shifting in close for a better look. He pulls the knife back. He swears he can feel everyone’s breath. The heat is closing in on him like fire. The sweat is beading on his brows.

He swings the knife down and misses wildly. He lets it clatter next to the baby and shoves his face into his hands. Hot tears trickle down his face and he can’t breathe. He’s trembling and crying and his chest is burning.

“Disgraceful,” one of the adults says.

“A pity.”

“He was never the best student.”

“Having to cull one at this age…. Should we let him try again?”

He doesn’t want to hear it but he can’t block it out. He sits back, away from the baby, and curls into himself, knees pressed to his chest.

“Only the strong survive.”

“Only the strong survive,” the rest agree in unison.

Carlos wakes with a start. He is drenched in a cold sweat and his lungs are on fire. He coughs several times and clutches at his chest. He struggles to sit up but he’s dizzy and weak and there are tubes in his nose and he gives up. He lies there, staring at the white blank ceiling as the frantic beeping in the room calms. Even though his brain is fuzzy, he’s aware enough to know he’s in the hospital.

The memory swirls in his brain, clear as if it were yesterday. But he knows he was younger. He doesn’t know how, but he knows he was ten years old.

And there are others like that man. Others wearing his face.

But he can’t think about it right now. The only thing he can think about now is Maria.

He manages to sit up enough to find the call button on the side of his bed and presses it several times until a nurse comes in. She’s tall and impatient with her hair drawn up into a bun.

“Maria,” he sputters, his voice rough and painful. “My sister. Where?”

The nurse adjusts her glasses and clears her throat. “She is alright. I’ll allow you to see her after I run some tests.”

“And my parents?”

She looks uncomfortable and the dread in Carlos’ chest overwhelms him. He knew. He knew they hadn’t survived, but he had to be sure. Her face is all he needs.

Of course, she tells him how they didn’t make it. She tries to be sympathetic, but she’s not good at that. He lets her run the tests while he puts on a brave face. His mind is a buzzing mess, his body is exhausted and all he wants to do is see Maria. He can’t let himself grieve right now, no matter how tight his throat is and no matter how much he wants to fall back into the hospital bed and sob. He needs to be strong when he sees Maria.

Only the strong survive.

The memory haunts him.

Finally, Carlos is deemed fit enough to leave his room. He can’t walk; his body is too weak. Everything hurts, he hasn’t had a chance to catalog his injuries, but he knows they are numerous. The nurse helps him into a wheelchair and pushes him down the hall to another room, smaller than his with only one bed. The curtain is drawn around it.

The nurse wheels him close and then leaves him to it. He draws back the curtain and there’s Maria, asleep. He watches her chest rise and fall and breathes a sigh of relief. She’s alive, she’s okay.

He hates to wake her, so he takes her hand and waits. Without any distractions, the thoughts start creeping up on him almost immediately. He spends a good few minutes staring at the heart monitor, looking at the steady beat of Maria’s heart, but it isn’t long before his mind wanders and the memory slams into him.

“Wake up.”

It’s a woman’s voice. He isn’t used to hearing women. Since he was born, he has been surrounded by the men with his face. The women are there, at the edges, but he rarely speaks to them. All except…

Rebecca. It’s her voice. C opens his eyes and there she is, hovering over him. He startles and shrinks back into the rough sheets. He’s been on edge since the ceremony.

“It’s alright,” she whispers. “We need to leave. Get up.”

He stares at her for a second too long and she grabs him by the shoulders. “Now, boy!”

His face heats up and he nods. He slips out of bed and notices the other boys in the room aren’t stirring. He looks at Rebecca with a question in his eyes and she puts a finger to her lips.

“Hurry, it won’t last long. Get your shoes.”

He doesn’t question her. He rushes to the closet and grabs a pair of shoes at random. They all share the same shoe size. Personal possessions mean nothing to them. He shoves them onto his feet and grabs his coat. For a moment he wonders if he should change, but Rebecca is already shoving him out the door.

“What–?”

“No questions!” she snaps. “Don’t speak.”

He shuts his mouth as she grabs him by the wrist. Out the hallway, the lights are dimmed, casting whispery shadows on the plain grey walls. Everything about the structure is industrial.

Rebecca pulls him down the hall and he’s shivering. He can’t stop thinking about the baby. The baby who is probably dead. The baby who he used to be.

There’s a bend in the hall up ahead that leads to the outside. They’re almost there when Left steps out from around the corner.

Rebecca curses under her breath.

“Rebecca,” the adult says. He looks surprised.

C shivers. Left doesn’t know about their outing. Rebecca is breaking the rules.

“Left,” Rebecca says, bowing her head. “Sorry, was I making too much noise?” Her grip on C’s wrist has gone tighter, a warning to keep quiet.

“No.” Left still looks confused. “Where are you taking that boy?”

Rebecca sighs. “It’s the failure,” she drops her voice on the last word, but C hears. “Delta wanted me to collect him. It’s so rare for them to fail at this age. He wanted to speak with him personally before we disposed of him.”

C swallows. He thinks Rebecca is lying. She must be lying, because if that were the case, she wouldn’t have been sneaking. She would not have knocked out the other boys. But still, the lie scares him. It’s still possible. There is a good chance he will die this day.

The thought turns his stomach.

“Did he?” Left looks doubtful. He looks at his wrist, as if his watch has the answers. It’s in that moment that Rebecca moves.

She lets go of C’s wrist and in the same instant, is on top of Left. She swiftly punches him in the chest with one hand and presses something to his mouth with the other. He struggles in surprise for a fraction of a second before he crumples against the wall. C stares in horror, mouth slightly open.

“Is he–”

Rebecca snatches his hand and she’s dragging him away before he can say anything else.

He hurries to keep up with her fast strides. The door is in reach now. His heart is painful against his ribs and the blood is rushing in his ears. He’s still shivering.

Rebecca pushes the door open and the darkness swallows them. It takes a moment for his eyes to adjust, but he doesn’t have the time. Rebecca is already pulling him forward.

Outside is jarring. C has never been outside at night. He knows the moon exists but he has never seen the yellow orb hanging in the sky. It’s full and beautiful and bright and he could stare at it all night if Rebecca wasn’t pulling him. And the stars… the stars are shining in full force. He has never seen anything so beautiful.

The docks are fresh with the smell of the sea and rotten fish. The wood squeaks under their shoes. Everything is amplified in the dark.

Rebecca stops suddenly and C slams into her. She curses and elbows him away. “Get down!”

C throws himself to the floor as the cry rings out. “Stop right there!”

Several things happen at once. A shot rings out. Rebecca screams, and C is kicked off the docks and into the ocean.

The water is a cold shock. He goes all the way under and its a moment before he surfaces, coughing and sputtering. Luckily, he knows how to swim. Of course he knows how to swim. He has been trained to be a solider.

And he swims for his life. It’s cold and the salt is burning in his eyes and he can’t stop shaking but he swims and swims until his limbs give out and he can’t swim any longer….

“Carlos?”

He snaps out of his memory. He’s drenched with sweat. He feels as if he’s just run for miles. He takes a shuddering breath and looks down at Maria, who’s squinting up at him with concern. He exhales and realizes he’s holding her hand too tight. He relaxes his grip and covers her hand with his other hand.

“Hey, kiddo,” he says, his voice rough. He clears his throat. “How are you feeling?”

Maria blinks vaguely. “Okay I guess,” she says. She seems a little out of it. Carlos doesn’t blame her. The nurse told him that she inhaled a lot of smoke. Luckily, she didn’t sustain many injuries aside from cuts and bruises. “You were spacing out.”

“Oh.” Carlos pushes back his hair and forces a smile. “No, I’m fine, don’t worry about it.” Though he tries to appear casual, his mind is racing. He has never remembered a thing from before he was ten years old. His earliest memories are of being found on a beach, then shortly after being adopted. He was lucky.

She coughs but when Carlos leans towards her, she waves him off. When she finishes, she looks at him with surprising intensity.

“Mom and Dad?”

His heart breaks all over again. He opens his mouth but he can’t bring himself to say it. He must be making a face because Maria nods. Her lower lip is trembling and her eyes are shining.

“I… I knew it.”

He doesn’t cry. He feels like he can’t cry now. He comforts Maria until she gets too tired to keep her eyes open. Before he leaves, he promises to come back and see her as soon as he can.

It’s a few days before Carlos is cleared to leave the hospital and a week before Maria can go home. Well, not exactly home.

They lost everything in the fire. The moment Carlos is released, he starts looking for somewhere to live. He needs to make sure Maria has somewhere to go home to.

He collects the insurance money. What his parents have left them is enough rent for maybe a year if he’s really careful. It’s hard to find an apartment complex that will rent to an 18 year old with no one to co-sign for him, but he manages to find a rundown building that takes him, no questions asked.

Even though Maria protests, Carlos drops out of University. He tells her over and over not to worry about it. He insists he wasn’t good at it anyway, for her sake. But in reality it’s too expensive to even consider, even with the job at the coffee shop he’s picked up. But he knows he needs something that makes more money, so he spends all his free time filling out job applications.

Anything to make sure Maria has a normal life. Anything to distract him from the memories.

They’ve been trickling in little by little. He’ll be making a latte for a sleepy eyed salaryman when suddenly he’ll be surrounded by a sea of his own face. Most snatches are vauge. Learning to swim, running with his peers, eating in the mess hall. There’s nothing as concrete as his first memories.

And then there’s the fire.

Flames fill his dreams. He smells the smoke during his idle moments. It gets to the point where the open flame on his stove makes him nervous.

It takes Carlos a year to get his certificate in Fire Science.

It annoys him that the fire scares him so much. He hates that he’s constantly paranoid, so he takes control of it. He learns to fight it.

There is no formal graduation. He’s taken all the classes online and now he’s just done and it feels like a weight has been lifted. Maria, of course, insists on celebrating.

The two of them are at the diner a few blocks from their apartment. It’s a tiny, stereotypical American diner complete with neon lights and checkered floors. They’re tucked into a corner booth with burgers and fries.

“What’s that dog that lives at the firehouse?” Maria asks as she dips a french fry into her milkshake. “With the spots.”

Carlos smiles, but he’s a little wary. Lately he’s been noticing she’s been spacey. He hopes it’s because she’s working so hard in school.“A dalmatian.”

“Oh, yeah, duh,” Maria says brightly. “And do all a hundred and one live there?”

“Um.” He scans her expression for the joke, but she’s totally serious. “No?” He sets down his hamburger and watches her a little more closely.

If Maria notices the scrutiny, she doesn’t mention it. “That’s too bad. I wonder if they ever found homes for all those dogs?”

A bad feeling creeps into Carlos’ stomach. Suddenly he doesn’t feel so hungry anymore. “Maria, what are you talking about?”

She frowns at him. “All the dogs! There were so many. All of the little white ones with the black spots. The lady wanted to hurt them.”

“Maria,” Carlos tries to keep the panic from his voice but her name comes out too sharp. “Are you feeling okay?”

He reaches across the table for her but she pulls into herself. “I’m fine! I just want to know about the dogs!”

She’s too loud. He can feel the diners around them staring now, but he doesn’t care. He opens his mouth to tell her to calm down, but his voice drops off abruptly as she freezes in place.

Maria is unnaturally still for a moment. Her eyes roll back into her head and then her body collapses onto the seat of the booth with a soft thud.

Later, he thinks that incident might have been as terrifying as the fire.

Maria stays in the hospital for a few hours before the doctors release her. Dehydration, they suggest, but they’re not certain. Carlos orders her to drink more water and monitors her intake until she gets annoyed with him.

She’s fine for months and months until it happens again. This time Maria stays overnight. The doctors run more tests. They say maybe its a side effect from the carbon monoxide poisoning from two years ago.

In the meantime, Carlos gets a job at the fire station. He’s in training and it’s hard but he feels good about it. At least something in his life is going right.

Maria has good days and bad days. Sometimes she is her normal self and other days gets lost on the way home from school. Sometimes Carlos will walk into a room and catch her staring at a wall, totally unresponsive.

Years pass like this. Maria goes to specialist after specialist but no one has concrete answers.

Eventually, the bad days start outnumbering the good days and Maria hits her head fainting at school. This time, the hospital suggests she stays for a few days, which turns to a few weeks, and then, indefinitely. But she does well in the hospital. Carlos almost feels better with her being in the hospital, as much as she hates it. Maybe this will make her better, finally.

But it doesn’t. Maria slips further and further away until one day she’s comatose.

It’s 3am when Carlos comes home from his shift.

He can’t remember the last time he came home. He’s been picking up all the extra shifts he can, desperately trying to get extra money, desperately trying to be able to afford Maria’s treatment. The only reason he left work at all was because his boss had realized just how long he’d been on the clock for and ordered him to go home.

The keys scrape against the lock as he struggles to shove the right one in. All the coffee he’s been drinking has worn off, leaving him listless and half asleep standing up. Finally, the lock clicks and he pushes the door open. As he moves to shut it behind him, a boot wedges between the door and the frame.

Carlos stumbles back and swears in surprise as the door slips open to reveal a hooded man in a black robe. The sight knocks the breath from his lungs. It’s been years since he had the first memory, years since he’s seen any sign of the hooded figures and seeing one here, while he’s so sleep deprived, throws him.

It’s been long enough for him to dismiss it all as an illusion, a side effect from inhaling so much smoke. But here and now, as this man lowers his hood, Carlos knows its all true.

The man is older than he is. His face is lined and his hair is graying, but it’s unmistakably his own face staring out at him.

“What are you doing here?” Carlos straightens himself up, adopts a defensive posture. This version of himself looks leaner, less muscled. Carlos has the advantage.

“You’re needed now.”

His voice chills Carlos from the inside out. It sounds like his answering machine recording, the sound of his voice from another source.

“Wha–”

The man closes the door behind him and the click startles Carlos.

“You need money for your ‘sister’, do you not?”

The way he says the word 'sister’ is a curse that makes Carlos narrow his eyes. How does this man know so much about him? Have they been watching all this time?

They’ve been real all this time.

“Yes,” Carlos says, cautiously. “Have you–”

“Of course.” The man waves him off impatiently. “Did you really think we had just forgotten about you the way you’ve forgotten about us?”

A shiver goes through Carlos. He swallows. “How–”

The man (Left, Carlos know his name to be Left) clears his throat loudly. “Please, your questions are pointless. We can get you the money you need. All you have to do is follow our instructions exactly.”

“My parents,” Carlos says, his voice low. He will not be interrupted this time. “It was you who set the fire. You’re the whole reason Maria is sick.”

“Not me personally.” Left doesn’t even look ruffled. “But that was us, yes. All of this has been for a reason, Left. And now the reason is unfolding.”

“Don’t call me that!” Carlos is breathing too hard now. The anxiety is racing through his body, making him feel trapped in his own skin. “Why should I trust you?! You killed them! You… You wanted me to to kill for you! A baby!”

Left is looking at him with a mixture of pity and disgust. He doesn’t flinch as Carlos draws nearer, a wall of hostility. “Yes,” he drawls. “Again. It was not me personally. I am merely the messenger.”

It only makes Carlos angrier that this man isn’t reacting. That he has no remorse, not an ounce of care for the pain he has caused Carlos. He wants to punch Left, but it wouldn’t bring him any pleasure.

Finally, he exhales. He thinks of Maria lying in the hospital bed, he thinks about how exhausted he is, how he hasn’t slept properly in God knows how long, how he can’t keep going like this.

But mostly he thinks about Maria.

“Alright. I’m listening.”

Before he goes to Nevada, Carlos visits Maria in the hospital.

She’s been in a coma for almost a year and he can’t remember the last conversation he had with her. He wishes he could say he did, but it was probably something innocuous and she was probably only half conscious at the time. It hurts him to think of those days when she was so far away from him. And now, lying here, she’s further than she’s ever been.

Leaving her now feels final. He doesn’t know what to expect in what he’s signed up for and, frankly, he’s expecting to not make it back. Anything that Free the Soul wants him to do must be a trap, but as long as Maria gets the money she needs, Carlos is willing to walk right into it.

The room is as blank and white as ever as Carlos takes his seat. He’s given up on trying to brighten the room. It only depresses him.

He takes Maria’s hand and watches her gaunt face, the rise and fall of her chest. And then he starts talking.

He tells her everything, about his past, about how Free the Soul is sending him to Nevada to participate in some experiment. It feels good to tell her when she’s like this, when she’s not awake to worry about it. When it’s all over and he has to leave, he kisses her forehead and promises her she’ll wake up soon.

When he leaves, he doesn’t want to look back, doesn’t want to carry that image of her, alone with him to Nevada, but he does look and it breaks his heart.

DCOM is worse than Carlos could have ever imagined. The whole ordeal simultaneously takes months and mere hours. Death and despair plays out over and over until, somehow, it ends with him standing in the desert, pointing a gun at a man he thinks he half remembers.

“It was always meant to be your choice, Left.”

The name courses through him like an electric shock. Suddenly Carlos remembers where he knows this man from. A memory surges to the front of his mind, so powerful that he can’t push it back. It’s been years since this has happened to him.

“You’ll do great things one day, Left.” They’re in an office. Delta is sitting at the desk, swathed in shadow.

Carlos shakes it off, focuses on the cold metal in his hands. All around him, he can feel the group’s eyes. The eight people he’s been through hell with.

“I trust you, my brother. I trust you to use your best judgment.” Delta spreads his arms wide. His expression is unreadable.

“One day, you will decide my fate.”

The heat is oppressive. Carlos remembers the warehouse. He’s three places at once. The desert, the warehouse, Delta’s office.

“Only the strong survive.”

His hands are shaking around the gun. He tries to think about the pros and cons but he’s sweating and shivering so badly. All eyes are on him. He’s in the warehouse. It isn’t Delta in front of him, it’s a child. It’s a baby, small and defenseless. A living thing.

This is different. This is someone who hurt them over and over. Someone who hurt Carlos as child. Someone who killed children without remorse.

Still, Carlos lowers the gun.

Behind him, the sharp inhales from the others. There’s a small hand on his back and he doesn’t have to turn around to know it’s Akane.

“You’re right, only the strong survive,” Carlos says, turning his back on Delta. He looks out the others standing before him. Akane, Junpei, Sigma, Diana, Phi, Eric, Mira, Sean…

“And that’s us.”

Life after that is completely different. Junpei and Akane help Maria out of her coma and suddenly Carlos has his sister back.

“I remember what you told me,” Maria says one day after she’s finally left the hospital. She’s curled up on his couch, a cup of hot chocolate in her hands. She had been watching TV but now her eyes shift to him. “In the hospital.”

Carlos frowns as he looks up from his phone. “What?”

Maria sets down her mug and looks to Carlos with the ghost of a smile. “About your past. I didn’t understand it at first, but now, being with you, I… I started picking it up. Through, you know.” She motions to her forehead and waggles her finger between them. “I think I get it.”

Carlos swallows. “I didn’t want to tell you. I thought it would be too much.”

She frowns and punches him in the shoulder lightly. “Hey, what did I say about doing that? I know you love acting like everything’s fine, but I can tell when it’s not.”

Despite himself, Carlos smiles. “Watch it.” He rubs the spot where she hit him. “I didn’t… I just wanted to forget about it.”

“But you can’t.” Maria taps her forehead. “You forget I’m really good at doing this now.”

It’s true, ever since Maria has learned to control her powers, she’s been unusually perceptive to his moods. He supposes he should feel violated in some way, but he knows she’s not doing it to be malicious.

“You don’t let me forget,” he teases. He looks away from her for a moment and sighs. “But you’re right. I can’t forget. I’m… Well, I’m one of them. They raised me and put all of that stuff in my head. I’m just… I’m afraid I’m gonna just snap one day or something, you know?”

Maria puts a hand on his shoulder. “You’re not one of them. If you were one of them you wouldn’t have gotten away.”

“That wasn’t even my choice.” Now that they’re talking, Carlos can’t stop. “They were gonna kill me, and that woman saved me.”

She goes quiet for a moment, as if she’s thinking. “But you had to kill someone and you couldn’t.” She screws up her face and Carlos can feel her energy buzzing around him. “Oh God, it was a baby.”

“Don’t do that,” Carlos says, suddenly feeling sharp and edgy. He doesn’t want her to see that. She doesn’t need to.

“Sorry…” Maria tucks some dark hair behind her ear and looks sheepish. “But that was your decision not to kill.”

Carlos appreciates the thought but he shakes his head. “No, that was my weakness. I was scared, I wasn’t concerned about doing the right thing…”

“What about in the desert?”

This, he’s told her about. He couldn’t not tell her about that. But he hasn’t told her his feelings about it. His recounting of the game had been pretty brief and spared her most of the horrors.

His hands curl into fists. He can feel the metal burning in his palms. “I don’t… I don’t know if that was me either. Delta was the Leader of Free the Soul. What if it’s in my DNA that I can’t kill him? What if he’s out there, making more clones and killing the weak ones…?”

“Carlos…” Maria squeezes his shoulder. “This is why you gotta tell me things.”

Carlos snorts and takes her hand.

“Listen. The reason you didn’t kill Delta or that baby is because you’re a good person. Not because you’re weak or your DNA is messed up, or whatever else you think is wrong with you. Nothing is wrong with you.”

Something catches in his chest and he has to swallow it back. Maria is watching him intently but he doesn’t feel her energy probing at him.

“You’re my brother and not anyone else’s okay?”

“Yeah…, okay.”

Maria hugs him and he holds her for a few moments too long as he composes himself. When they pull apart, Maria’s still looking at him with concern.

“You’re not satisfied, but I’m saying that because of your face and not because I’m invading your privacy.”

“Sure,” Carlos says lightly.

“I swear!” Maria rubs the back her neck as she stares off into space for a moment. “What if we stop them?”

“What?”

“Free the Soul. I know they’re not a world ending threat or anything, but they’re still not good, right? You’ve got important friends now, friends that can help.”

“I guess.” Carlos considers this and feels a little stupid for not thinking of it earlier. He’s been so wrapped up in Maria’s recovery and getting updates from Akane about her investigation of the terrorist that he hasn’t even thought about doing something about Free the Soul.

“And you’ve got me. You know I’ll help.”

His first instinct is to tell her no, to keep her as far away as he can from even the slightest bit of danger, but when she looks at him, her eyes are fire and her mouth is set.

“I know you will.”

“Are you sure there’s no one in there?” Carlos says into his phone.

“Positive.” Junpei’s annoyed on the other end. “You have five minutes.”

The line goes dead and Carlos lets his hand drop away from his face. The night air bites at his skin and the salt of the ocean burns his eyes.

He’s back here at the docks, where it all started.

A hand fits into his. “Are you ready?”

At first he had objected to Maria coming with him. Sure, she helped him do the research but this is different. He didn’t want her anywhere near any potential danger. But, somehow, she had talked him into it. She had convinced him it was low risk and that she could handle it.

They’re standing outside the warehouse, the one from the memories he has to live with now. The one where he spent his first ten years learning to be just the same as everyone else. Now he’s here with his sister and a pocket full of matches.

Junpei and Akane have assured him Free the Soul have left this warehouse. After the game, after they let Delta live, the whole cult just vanished. They left everything behind. Beds unmade, food left in the refrigerator, labs still full of Left’s DNA.

It feels too good to be true, it feels like a trap, but Carlos has a good feeling about it. Somehow, he thinks this is Delta’s thanks for letting him live. Of course, he doesn’t let himself think this is the end. He still needs to keep tabs on Free the Soul, but this feels good, it feels like a start.

Maria squeezes his hand before letting go. He nods at her as he dips a hand into his pocket. Everything’s set. There’s a line of gasoline leading right up to the point where they’re standing. The wood of the docks will go first, so they can’t hesitate once it’s alight.

“It’s okay,” Maria says quietly. “I’m right here.”

It’s still odd that she’s comforting him, when he’s so used to it being the other way around, but he appreciates it all the same. His hands are trembling as he removes a match from the box and holds it between his fingers.

He strikes the match against the box and the flame springs to life. He stares into it for a moment, remembering the fire that took his parents, the candles during his ceremony, even the heat of the Nevada desert. All of it, burning in his hands, under his control.

Finally, he looks to Maria. “Ready to run?”

Maria smiles at him. “Yeah.”

Carlos drops the match and takes Maria’s hand in the same instant. He doesn’t stop to watch the gas ignite. The warmth blossoms behind them as they pelt into the night. Maria’s laughing and whooping and Carlos feels so light that he joins her. They don’t stop running until they get to the waiting car. Akane’s behind the driver’s seat and Junpei’s waving them in from the passenger side window.

Carlos slides into the back seat, pulling Maria behind him. She barely has a chance to close the door before the car peels off.

No one says anything as they speed away from the blaze. Carlos doesn’t look back, he doesn’t have to. He knows behind him he will find a swirl of red and orange heat, the literal ashes of his old life. A life that was never his.