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When Rinne leaves in the summer, Hiiro waits for him.
Rinne had disappeared before, after all - Hiiro had seen those cracks before, even if everyone thought he couldn’t, Rinne slipping through the carefully-made mold he’d been put into like water through cupped fingers. He’d always come back, though, always, always, and why wouldn’t he? He belonged here, was made to be here, revered and built to stand at the top. Where else could he go?
So Hiiro waits. He sleeps outside, wrapped in robes Rinne outgrew years ago, and for once, he is not expected to obey. No one talks to him - they talk around him in hushed whispers, as if he can’t understand, and he’s fine to pretend he can’t. It doesn’t matter if he does or doesn’t, in the end.
He is nothing without Rinne’s guidance, after all.
There are fireflies in the field behind their house, and Hiiro wonders if they could lead Rinne home if he got lost. Lost, because he must be - Hiiro is just past twelve, and he knows this about his brother. Rinne is loyal if nothing else, even if he can never see Rinne’s feelings, and he will surely come home. His brother will catch fireflies again with a mischievous smile, and Hiiro will hold those small lights like a precious gift, and he will have someone to follow again.
(They don’t lead Rinne home.)
The haze of summer breaks into falling leaves, the autumn bringing with it chilled winds and a sense of loneliness, and Hiiro begins to think something must have happened to Rinne. Must have, because Rinne would never abandon him - abandon their village, he corrects the selfish thought. He doesn’t sleep outside, not anymore - not when people speak about him and Rinne as if it’s all Hiiro’s fault. It’s too cold to wait on the steps anyway, he argues to himself, but he feels as if he’s betraying Rinne every night he isn’t struggling to stay awake to greet his brother upon his triumphant return.
Rinne’s old robes are starting to fit him, but he can’t bear to wear them. They aren’t made for him. He is not a chief - he is not made to choose. He still sleeps with them, though, rolled up over his pillow, and he wonders what he’ll do if Rinne is dead. Rinne, who had carried him home when he twisted his ankle and couldn’t stand, who let him crawl into his bed when he had nightmares, who held his hand when they buried their mother and Hiiro couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t get to see her anymore. If Rinne was dead - if Rinne was hurt - then he had failed.
Winter is painful, colder than most, and Hiiro finds himself burying his hands in snow drifts until he can’t feel them anymore.
He is looking for something, something he can never dig up under the surface, but he tries, anyway. The adults no longer know what to do with him - he sits obediently, still, follows every order, but he is a shadow, a phantom. He misses when people looked at him, even if it was an accessory to Rinne - the chief and his shield. It’s a selfish thought, but he has nothing else to hold when he can’t sleep at night, listening to the wind and thinking that maybe, maybe, Rinne really did leave them all behind, a ship without a captain, adrift at sea.
The cold makes his scars ache, and he traces them in his reflection - a cut across his hand, where he’d fallen in a river, his hand flayed by a stone. The water had turned red and he had wailed, just once, and Rinne had had fear flash in his eyes. A line of gashes over his hip, from a mother bear whose territory they’d accidentally stumbled into, when all Hiiro could think was that he had to protect Rinne. He’s made of bits and pieces of Rinne, fragments of his brother glued together to make a shadow, a shield, a lesser copy.
He never thinks to hate Rinne for this, not this winter, but he does wish he could be him, sometimes - to make the world carry on like normal.
(But he can’t be Rinne, and their father never looks at Hiiro.)
When winter breaks to spring and spring turns to summer and back to autumn, the village shifts. Their father grows frantic as seasons spin into years, and through it all Hiiro stands numbly at his side, slotting awkwardly into a position that he doesn’t sit quite right in. He learns what resentment feels like, on bitter nights when his teenage emotions flood over him and he bites his lip to keep from tears. Even now, everyone waits for Rinne, faded into an ideal more than a person.
Or maybe he always was more of an ideal than anything else, a concept of the perfect person.
As Hiiro hits his growth spurt, turning gangly and uncomfortable in his own body, he wonders if Rinne ever misses him. If Rinne thinks of him, does he think of him when they were little, fuzzy days Hiiro could just barely remember? Does he imagine him grown up? It’s selfish to hope Rinne thinks of him at all, but he hopes it anyway, when he catches glimpses of himself in river water and sees Rinne staring back at him, with foreign tired eyes and hair that’s too long for him to feel comfortable.
He is too old to be waiting. He is too young to know anything else.
(When he cuts his hair short again, no one asks him why. No one asks Hiiro anything. It’s uneven and choppy, but it’s the first thing he’s chosen for himself. )
Their father finally looks at Hiiro when he turns sixteen - finally, and his face is harrowed and tired, and he can barely stumble through a sentence without coughing. Hiiro is not unfamiliar with death - he has seen people die, felt animals bleed out beneath his hands, and he understands intimately when he’s summoned - his father is dying.
He thinks it should hurt somewhere, a little - and it does, because Hiiro has always respected every life as best as he could - but it doesn’t feel like he imagines it should, doesn’t feel the way it did when he wailed as Rinne held him back from following his mother into the dirt. He stands solemnly as his father talks at him, never to him, still looking past him.
Bring Rinne home.
It’s always about Rinne - always, always, even four years in his wake. His things had never been thrown away, his presence still filling every nook and cranny of the village. His room had been closed off, preserved in time, and the moment his father speaks his brother’s name to him, Hiiro feels that time begins turning again.
He can fulfill this - being Rinne’s tether, his lifelong duty.
(Maybe, maybe, if he can bring Rinne home - it can be like it used to be, his hand wrapped around one of Rinne’s fingers, the sky bright with stars, and the world consisting of just the two of them.)