The house was never quiet. Not really. Not in the way that mattered. Even when their parents were gone—especially when they were gone—the air hummed with the restless, crackling energy of two boys who didn't yet know how to exist in a world that didn't revolve entirely around them. The walls thrummed with the echoes of their footsteps, the creak of floorboards under impatient weight, the constant murmur of their voices bouncing off empty spaces where adult supervision should have been. It was a house that had forgotten how to be still, how to hold silence in its bones.

You weren't supposed to be the one holding it all together. You were just a kid yourself, really. Your hands were too small for this, your shoulders too narrow to carry the weight of two growing boys who burned brighter and hotter than the sun. But someone had to. Someone had to remember when the bills were due, to make sure there was food in the fridge that wasn't just snacks, to stand between them when their tempers flared like wildfires. So you did. You learned how to stretch pocket money into meals, how to bandage scraped knees with hands that barely knew how to be gentle, how to be the steady thing they could crash against when the world became too much.

Sae was the first to figure it out—that the world wasn't fair, that adults could be unreliable ghosts who came and went as they pleased, that rules were just suggestions unless someone was there to enforce them. He moved through life like a blade: sharp, precise, utterly uninterested in anything that didn't serve his immediate purpose. His words were clipped, his expressions carefully schooled into something unreadable. But even blades could be sheathed. Sometimes, when he thought you weren't looking, he'd hover near the doorway as you chopped vegetables for dinner, his presence a silent but undeniable weight against your back. He never offered to help, never said a word, but he was there, as if making sure you wouldn't vanish like everyone else seemed to.

Rin was louder in every way. Bright-eyed and brash, he worshipped sae with the kind of single-minded devotion only little brothers could muster—mimicking his stance, his frown, even the way he tied his laces with precise, practiced motions. But where sae was ice, rin was all sparks and kindling. He broke things not out of malice, but an insatiable curiosity that burned through him: "what happens if i push harder? if i throw it? if i tear it apart just to see what's inside?" you'd find him clutching the remains of a snapped toy truck or a disemboweled clock radio, scowling like the world had personally betrayed him by not bending to his will. His anger was always hot, always immediate, a flashfire that burned out as quickly as it ignited.

You learned to mend things—not just the physical, like toys with broken parts or scraped knees that needed cleaning, but the fragile, trembling tension between two boys who didn't know how to say "I need you" in any language other than violence or silence. You became the translator of their unspoken fears, the bridge between their jagged edges.

That night, they found you slumped at the kotatsu, cheek smushed against homework you'd sworn you'd finish before passing out. The tv flickered silently in the corner, casting eerie blue shadows over your exhausted frame. Your pencil had rolled away at some point, leaving a faint gray smudge across the page where your hand had dragged. You didn't hear them approach, too far gone in the hazy space between sleep and waking.

A huff. The rustle of fabric against fabric. Then—thud.

You stirred just enough to feel the sudden weight of a blanket being draped over your shoulders, the fabric still warm from someone's body heat. Through half-lidded eyes, you caught sae's retreating back, his shoulders stiff with the effort of pretending he hadn't done anything at all, like kindness was something to be ashamed of. Behind him, rin peered over his shoulder, clutching a stuffed animal he'd definitely claimed to hate just that morning, his expression caught between concern and embarrassment. The toy was pressed tight to his chest, its threadbare ears flopping over his arm.

"...dumb," sae muttered, but the light stayed on in the hallway long after they'd disappeared into their rooms. Just in case. Just so you wouldn't wake up alone in the dark.