#request fulfilled

Tsukasa rests his head on Amane’s shoulder. “Did you miss me, Amane?” His voice is quiet, too low for their parents and the police officer who are chatting nearby to overhear. 

“Of course I did!” He says instantly. What a silly question! There hasn’t been a day that passed that Amane hasn’t cried his eyes out, wondering if it was all his fault Tsukasa had been lost or worse, taken. 

Tsukasa squeezes him tighter - if such a thing is possible - and giggles again, the sound playing right up against his ear. It’s familiar. It should be familiar, but all he feels is cold, dark dread. The type someone feels before entering a pitch-black room or plunging into an inky black abyss. But his brother is back, and Amane refuses to dwell on that feeling any longer. 

He holds his brother’s hand the whole way home, stopping only once so Tsukasa can pick up (what he seems to think is) a fairly cool rock. 

“Amane?” Tsukasa asks that night, changed from the birthday outfit he’s been stuck in for the past six months by their mom into a matching pajama set with Amane. 

“Hm?” He hums, rolling onto his elbow. 

Tsukasa still has his own room, just as Amane still has his. But these last few months have left Amane uncertain and anxious, and the moment his mom started to pull his brother away to put him to bed, he broke down crying. 

Tsukasa doesn’t seem to mind for his part. He stretches out on the old futon like a cat in a sunbeam, a smile cracking his face. “Is Amane still a crybaby?”

A look of pure annoyance crosses his face before he can stop it. “No….I…I just missed you is all.” Except, once again, Amane doesn’t say anything at all after ‘no’ because the words get caught in his throat, so he rolls over instead. “Goodnight, Tsukasa,” he mumbles, facing the door. The window is locked - he already made sure of that. If anyone was coming to take his little brother away again, he’d know. 

“‘Night, Amane!” 

-x-x-x-

#2: Back From “Time Out.” (Or the first time Tsukasa sees his brother in forty-six years)

It’s been forty-six years, six months, and ten days since Tsukasa’s last seen or heard from his older brother. Well, that’s not totally accurate. He’s heard Amane once or twice before, but it’s always been faint, barely there, like the last flickers of candle light on a moonless night. He always finds himself reaching for it, desperate for attention, for the care his brother used to show him (even if it was fake), for the love he’s always wanted. 

But Amane’s voice is so much clearer now, happy in a way it hadn’t been in life, and Tsukasa cannot contain himself any longer. He unfurls, the bag of donuts he hitched a ride in, shakes horribly. The contents breaking up into chunks on the picnic blanket Nene-Chan must have painstakingly laid out to have a picnic with Amane. 

He feels a bit bad - well, he thinks he might feel a bit bad, which is close enough - about ruining their date, but he misses his brother terribly. Four decades is a long time, understand. It’s nearly a lifetime (or two). 

He takes shape, feeling his brother’s mounting horror as he slowly reveals himself fully. Tsukasa is the one without a knife or weapon, and yet, his brother feels threatened enough to hold the kitchen knife he killed him with, out in front of him, his hands shaking imperceptibly. 

But he isn’t perturbed one little bit. The worst is over anyway, and what is one little skirmish in the grand scheme of things? Sure, it finally unveiled how much his brother hates him, and sure it led to his untimely end, but Amane is his brother and he will always love his brother - terrified look on his face and knife in his hand and all. 

He touches his brother’s face. A hidden part of him hopes his touch might soothe his brother’s terrified expression, and make him realize that maybe, just maybe he missed Tsukasa just as much too. 

His skin is soft, unmarred by the cruelty of life, but so, so cold. It’s just like his. Even in death, it seems, they remain the same. 

He’s splashed with a thermos full of liquid by Nene-Chan, and all he can think before falling to pieces like wet construction paper is, Amane sure is a good actor. 

-x-x-x-

#3: A Return to Normalcy

Time resumes in the clockkeepers' boundary, and instantly Hanako feels himself shake all over. 

The weird thing that no one tells you about messing with time is that the lingering feelings of all previous timelines converge, pressing down on you from all sides. 

He doesn’t know what conspired in those timelines, or how many there were, but he knows something must have shifted or changed when time froze. He feels it in his chest, in the way Yashiro stares at the back of his head, and most pressingly, he feels it in how his brother stares up at him with uncharacteristically soft eyes. It makes something in him splinter then crack. 

He doesn’t deserve to be looked at that way. Not when everything in him is telling Hanako he’s a monster - far worse than he ever was before - whatever occurred in the other timelines feels less like something that was forced on him, and more like something that was always meant to happen. He’s meant to take and destroy and hurt everyone he loves in every timeline, and saving them was a fever dream he had always been chasing but could never quite reach. And maybe a monster like him shouldn’t be saving anyone. It makes more sense (and feels a bit better) than saying he couldn’t save anyone. Like it was out of his control. 

(But if he just tried a little harder or did something a little different or didn’t talk back to their mom or left the house on time that one morning or was a little nicer to his brother despite his oddities….maybe just maybe none of this would be happening. Maybe he wouldn’t be a monster, and he would be able to pretend that his brother and him were nestled under blankets, giggling as they talked in hushed voices).

“Amane?” His brother mumbles, continuing to lay on the ground where Hanako left him. He feels sick, looking down at his little brother on the ground. He tears his eyes away, looking to the side. A few tears escape the corners of his eyes. He’s never been good at pretending. 

“Amane?” His brother asks again, a little more impatient. Hanako watches his brother stand up out of his peripheral vision, but he remains unmoved. The last person he wants to see him break apart is the one person that’s seen him do so again and again. “Amane!” Tsukasa is persistent - somehow more persistent than he had been in life - and his presence is both suffocating and comforting and Hanako can’t decide whether to indulge himself a little by leaning closer or ignoring his brother entirely and seeing what the others are doing about two out of the three clockkeepers. 

“I have to go-”

“Why?” His brother’s voice cracks, and the piece in Hanako that had splintered and cracked breaks clean in two. He thinks right then of a boy half his brother’s current size that brought him pinecones and rocks and would replace the cold compress over his forehead when it got uncomfortably warm before mom even knew something was wrong. He thinks of a boy with clear amber eyes, wide like saucers, that would hold his hand whenever he got scared; of a boy that cared deeply and didn’t care who knew.

“I-I,” he sputters out. “I don’t know,” he finally admits in a whisper. He bows his head in shame. He doesn’t know why he runs away all the time or why he can’t say what he’s thinking or why he just has to ruin everything all the time. 

“Why….why do you hate me so much, Amane?” Tsukasa asks, and Hanako feels himself react as if he’s been slapped clean across the face. Let the record show that outside of killing his brother, he has never said the words to the aforementioned brother “I hate you.” Nor has he ever indicated anything but the opposite, at least, he thinks he hasn’t. 

Sometimes he means to convey one thing but the opposite happens instead. He’s never been good at expressing himself and sadly that trait has only gotten worse the longer he’s been dead. But he feels a pull right then to comfort his brother, to say something, anything to reassure Tsukasa that he’s got it all wrong. He loves him. 

“Tsukasa,” he says, “I…I love you. So much. And I know how hard-headed I am, and how apathetic I can seem towards you, but I do love and miss you a lot. I just….I guess I miss my little brother.”

Except Hanako only gets out the first ‘I’ before his throat locks up and the words are lost somewhere in his throat. He tries again, because his brother’s eyes are pleading with him in a way they never have before.

He feels his bottom lip quiver before he even starts speaking. Another tear escapes, sliding down his cheek. “I-I miss my little brother,” he admits sheepishly. “And I know, I know, you’re standing right in front of me, but for the longest time I thought you weren’t you. That you were an imposter with my brother’s face. And that led me down a pretty dark road. I….I don’t know if you are the real Tsukasa or not, but I don’t care.” He does care. He’s always cared, but maybe he can love this fake Tsukasa anyway. He grew up with this Tsukasa, held hands with this Tsukasa, protected and cared for and told all his deepest secrets to this Tsukasa. Imposter or not, this is the version of his brother that he’s most familiar with. Maybe his real brother would forgive him for that, for giving in after half-a-century of tug-of-war. 

“But I am real, silly Amane.”

Something in the way he says “silly Amane” makes Hanako nearly fall to his knees, because that, that is his brother. His real brother. Tsukasa. 

Maybe it’s the inflection in his brother’s voice or the impatience or the words themselves, but it sounds more like Tsukasa than Tsukasa’s sounded in decades. He sounds just like his brother, and the implication of that breaks Hanako’s heart into a million little pieces. 

He crumples to the floor, and his brother reaches out to steady him before he can crash down too hard. Tsukasa follows him to the floor, clinging to him like a baby koala bear. “Amane, Amane, Amane!” He repeats over and over, nuzzling the side of his face against Hanako’s, and it feels less like a reminder of all his past misdeeds or a punishment and more like forgiveness. A homecoming nearly fifty years in the making. 

“I love you, Tsukasa,” he murmurs, holding just as tightly to his little brother. “And I’m so, so sorry.”