Chapter 18
On the way to Tadashi’s house, Hiro kept his head low. People would sit next to him, only to move away a few seconds later. But he didn’t care if he was making them uncomfortable. The only thing he could think to do to keep sane was to nip at the sensitive skin on his palms with his fingernails, on one hand and then the other. It was painful, but the distraction brought a kind of… relief. A strange reassurance, when nothing else could reassure him.
By the time he’d ridden the tram all the way to his brother’s home, the flesh of his palms were covered in an angry red pincer-marks. Large rashes enveloped them. Like stigmata, kind of. Pain just radiated out from them, hot and tingly and numb. His hands felt a thousand times bigger than they really were, slicing through the cool air of the afternoon.
He approached his brother’s front door. He didn’t bother to knock; he already knew it was open and waiting for his arrival. His hand burned on the door handle as he twisted it open and pushed...
The second he walked over the threshold, there was a blur in front of his teary eyes and then there were warm arms around him, his face pressed gentle into a merino shirt that just smelled like Tadashi. It was enough to push a few more weak sobs out of him as he clung to his brother in a desperate, helpless way he hadn’t done in a long time, and it was all Tadashi could do to murmur his name over and over again, between small shushes and sorrowful little moans.
I’m that bad, huh.
Some part of Tadashi must’ve loved it, surely. He must’ve loved being there for his inconsolable little brother when he needed him most. He must’ve. He never got sick of this, no matter how old they both got. They could’ve been spending their days in the same retirement village and it still would’ve happened every few years or so.
Of course, they’d probably still get into stupid fights too.
For now Tadashi seemed to have forgotten all about their latest one. He didn’t hold anything back, just as Hiro wasn’t holding anything back. He brought Hiro out from his shirt, holding either side of his face, and just looked at him. He grimaced, he made more saddened noises. It occurred to Hiro that his older brother probably hadn’t seen him look this upset in a while, which was kind of funny considering Hiro cried like this at least once every week now.
“You should’ve let me pick you up,” Tadashi insisted, almost like he was telling him off, but there was no heart behind it. Just overwhelming concern. “I would’ve done it in a heartbeat.”
Hiro raised a hand to hold it over one of his brother’s, a tiny smile on his face. He felt so cared for. A part of him wanted to say, enjoy it while it lasts.
“Did someone hurt you?” Tadashi asked, and Hiro felt his face fall. “D-Did I mishear you, on the phone? It sounded like you said… you’d done something horrible.”
Hiro nodded. Tadashi made a face like he wished it wasn’t true. Like this wasn’t his baby brother standing before him.
“What did you do?”
Hiro rubbed the wet wobble out of his eyes so he could better see his surroundings. There was no sign of Tadashi’s live-in partner but still he asked, “Mei?”
“She’s at work.” Tadashi gently turned Hiro’s face so it was back on him. “She won’t be home until later tonight. OK?” He moved his thumb just under his younger brother’s eye as he shed another tear. His voice was a sincere promise. “No one will interrupt us. You can tell me what happened.”
It took Hiro a long time to start moving again. Tadashi had to be the one to lead him across the living room and sit him down on the couch. He kept softly insisting, “You can tell me, Hiro,” and, “I’ll still love you, Hiro,” and, “It’s just me here, Hiro,” as if these things were supposed to coax the truth out of him any faster. But he needed time. He’d had over a month to say something– anything, and still he needed more time.
Eventually Tadashi got tired of waiting and attempted to read him. To guess what kind of occurrence would merit this kind of reaction, from someone he’d known his entire life.
He was in the ballpark from the very first tentative question. “Did you hurt someone?”
Hiro shrugged. He didn’t want to play twenty questions like this; he didn’t want to draw it out. He just wanted to say it, and get it over and done with, and make his brother understand that it wasn’t his fault–
“What does that shrug mean,” Tadashi asked quietly. “You don’t know if you hurt someone?”
“Y-Yeah,” Hiro breathed. His heart was pounding. He stared dead ahead of himself, at anything but his brother’s careful, unyielding gaze. “But… not recently.”
“Not recently?” His brother titled his head with a jerk, confused. “In the past?”
“Yeah…” He sniffed. “E-Eight… or nine years ago?”
Hiro peeked at his brother, just out the corner of his eye. That specific length of time ago didn’t seem to ring any bells. Not in the same way it did for Hiro.
“So what happened eight or nine years ago?” Tadashi asked. “Who did you hurt?”
Hiro stayed silent and still. His mind tried to bail, it was screaming, No – I can’t do this, I can’t do it, not like this, I can’t just SAY IT like that, he wouldn’t understand, he wouldn’t–
“Hiro?”
“Look, b-before I say anything else,” Hiro croaked, his voice competing with tears, “You have to know that… ‘Dashi,” he begged for his understanding, “everything was shit and this was the worsttime of my fuckinglife, I– I’d never felt so… even back when Cass was doing all those things, like… this wasn’t…” He couldn’t find the words. He couldn’t find the words to describe how just little he had once cared whether he lived or died.
He breathed shakily and his brother’s hand came up to rub his back, slow and soothing. “It’s OK, Hiro,” he promised. “It’s OK… Take your time.”
If Hiro did that then they’d never get anywhere. He’d never say anything. He had to go on.
“I-I… I was eighteen. Right? I’d just turned eighteen back then, and… Cass was just...” He gave a helpless little shrug, “back. Y-You pushed me into seeing her, and I didn’t like it, and I moved away for a while… I was on my own– really on my own, for the first time. And I thought it would be OK but, my life just seemed to fall apart. You didn’t see how bad I was until I…” He stared at his hands. They still bore red blotches in the centre of his palms. He laughed haltingly, “Y-Yeah, wasn’t that just great – a-as if one rapist wasn’t fucking enough, r-right? Hah.”
He paused, like he were actually expecting his brother to respond, but of course he didn’t. The only response Tadashi gave was an even slower, more melancholic back rub.
“And…” He sniffed. Tadashi handed him some tissues and Hiro accepted some. “And… That night, I…” Hiro looked down at the tissue in his hands and squeezed it into a tight ball. “Well, I went to your place, didn’t I… but not to see you.”
Pressed into his side, Hiro could feel Tadashi’s body tighten. Like he had some sort of an idea now. Like he could see where this was all heading.
The hand on Hiro’s back had stopped moving. The urge to cry wrecked right through him.
“Takahiro was there,” he forced the words out, as clear as he could, and he just had to hope they were clear enough that Tadashi would never ask him to repeat himself. “He w-was staying with you, remember? In my old bed… A-And-d, I-I snuck in, an’…” He broke out in tears and blubbers again. His body and his heart and his head ached with them. He felt dizzy and sick and guilty as he finally said, “I think I molested him.”
Tadashi made no move to console him. The hand on Hiro’s back fell away.
“But,” he murmured after a few long moments, low and uncertain, “You told me that… I asked you, back then, and you said that… nothing had happened…”
Hiro felt Tadashi shift – to shuffle away, to take back his arm, to adjust his legs – and Hiro fell forward into his hands, wretched and worthless. His eyes were covered but his mouth wasn’t as he cried, “I don’t know, ‘Dashi. I-I didn’t think that anything had happened at the time, but… He… He thinks something happened to him.”
There was a tremor to Tadashi’s voice now too. “H-He thinks you…?”
Hiro shook his head. “Not me,” he gasped, snivelling. God, where were the tissues. “He doesn’t remember who… He thinks Cass did it. Because he’s been to my seminars, because… because of all the shit I said about her, and he thinks it’s her, and– it fucking could be her, that’s the thing, but…” He whimpered. “I don’t know, ‘Dash, I… this is all so fucked up and, I couldn’t keep doing it – I couldn’t keep seeing him and pretending nothing was wrong and– please, I need…” He breathed hard. His fingers curled into his hair and just pulled. “I-I don’t know what to do…”
He stayed there for as long as he needed to, for as long as it took Tadashi to come out of his shock. He didn’t know exactly how long that was. To Hiro, it was a small and torturous eternity, but it may well have only been a couple of minutes. Eventually he felt his brother stand up from the couch and Hiro just crumbled, thinking, yeah, I fucking deserved that – I deserve all of it, I don’t deserve to be helped, I don’t ever recover from this, I’m never going to be the same again, I ruined it all and now it’s over – everything normal I ever had is now over and it’s my fault.
Tadashi was still there, hovering over him. Hiro wondered if his brother was going to hurt him, and a sick part of him wished that he just would, but Tadashi didn’t even sound mad when he at last uttered his name – instead it was doleful, it was grieving. Hiro flinched as something touched the top of his head and it slowly turned into the soft pressure of his brother’s pitying hand.
“Oh Hiro,” Tadashi said. His voice was so small. “How do you know if you did it?”
Hiro shook his head, still hidden beneath his hands. “It feels real,” he grated out. “It feels so… me and Taka, we…” It feels real.
“But I don’t understand… you brought him to me,” Tadashi protested lightly, “when you wanted him to say that Aunt Cass had abused him… He’d said that nothing had happened. I don’t…?”
“He told me later,” Hiro admitted. “He told me that he rememberedth-things – he remembered me, only he doesn’t know it’s me, and… fuck, just– the way he described everything, ‘Dashi,” he sobbed. “It’s like… I’m this beast from his nightmares. I’m a monster. O-Oh God.” The realisation just crushed him, heightening his cries, quaking right through him. “I’m like her.”
“Who?”
“Who else?” he choked, “I’m just like Cass.”
The fingers on Hiro’s head pressed down a little. “Hiro, no,” Tadashi murmured. “No, you’re not.”
“I am – I fucking am.”
Tadashi was kneeling in front of him now, his hands on Hiro’s head, gently trying to pull him up, but Hiro couldn’t help him. He couldn’t come out ever again. “Hiro, you don’t even know if it happened,” Tadashi insisted with a desperate edge. “Maybe nothing happened. M-Maybe you’re just… supposing things, without sufficient evidence–”
“’Dashi…” Hiro dropped one shaking hand from his face to fist in Tadashi’s shirt, the other moving to compensate for the lost cover. He sniffed. “Y-You don’t understand… He… He told me that he thought something had happened to him, and I… I told him it wasn’t real.”
And there it was. His ultimate unforgiveable mistake.
“I-I told him to forget about it, o-or I blamed it on Cass, or I said that it wasn’t worth telling anyone… Not worth talking about it… That it was just false memories… And, you know what it did? It made him… so much fucking worse. I still see him and talk to him he’s so…” He shook his head. He couldn’t even begin to describe it. “He’s not himself. He’s different. I… I messed him up, just like Cass did to me, a-and I can’t fucking take it anymore. I don’t wanna be like her.”
It was a miracle he and his brother were still having this conversation. He was crying so hard that it hurt just to breathe, and Tadashi still seemed like he could only respond in short bursts between large pauses, like the shock had yet to wear off. Neither of them were doing too good. They’d been through a lot together, the two of them. But this was…
This was very different.
“You should tell him,” Tadashi finally breathed. “You have to tell Takahiro about this.”
The mere thought made Hiro’s insides squirm; he felt like his stomach were crawling with big, fat worms, and it made him feel like he was gonna be sick. Tell Takahiro, come clean, clear your conscience…
“He’ll hate me,” Hiro whimpered, and it wasn’t a protest or an excuse – it was just a supposition. An indisputably probable one. “He says we’re friends, and he trusts me, and–“
Tadashi wasn’t so kind this time; his hands were rough as he pulled Hiro’s head up to look him in the eye. It broke Hiro’s heart to see that there were little tears there too, and again the thought ran marathons through his head: I’veruined everything, I’ve ruined everything, I’ve ruined everything.
“You have to do it,” his older brother said, and it was so stern. So convinced. “Maybe it’ll jog his memory. Maybe you’ll both find an answer.”
That’s what I want.
That’s what I’m afraid of…
All of those underlying emotions – all of the anxiety and the guilt and the fear and the confusion and the disgust and the self-hate that he tried to repress – they were all bubbling to the surface. The crushing weight was lifting. The rot was getting cut out in the most excruciating way, and his brother was right there with him, holding him still, wiping his tears, telling him in calming, firm tones exactly what he needed to do to be whole again. To feel like a decent human being. To make Takahiro better.
“Listen to me,” Tadashi said, his eyes never leaving his younger brother’s. They seemed to say, I’m not giving up on you. I’m not walking out. You’re not alone. “What you did was… wrong. Whether you abused that boy or not… denying that anything had happened, when he told you he thought something did… That was wrong.It had consequences… But, you’re already so different to Aunt Cass, Hiro, because you recognised that,” he insisted, soothing hands working their way down Hiro’s tear-stained cheeks. “You saw that your actions were hurting Takahiro and now you’re going to stop. You’re going to change, aren’t you?You’re not a bad person, Hiro. People can do bad things but that doesn’t necessarily make them bad people… They can be redeemed, if they try. It’s possible. It’s not too late.”
Hiro so wanted to believe everything Tadashi was telling him. But it all sounded far too good to be true. He’d half-expected right from the start for Tadashi to just agree with him that he was a monster, and proceed to break off all further contact with him immediately. To shut him out forever. And then what would Hiro have done?
Something in his face must’ve betrayed his thoughts because the next thing he knew, Tadashi was leaning forward and curling his arms around his younger brother.
Hiro clutched him back, holding onto him for dear life. “I’m sorry,” he sobbed. “I’m… m’so sorry.”
He felt his older brother swallow against his shoulder, where his neck was resting. Tadashi uttered into the quiet room, “I’m not the one you need to apologise to…”
There was something about those words that just chilled him.