Chapter Text
“You bring those books back any ol’ time you’re done with ‘em, dear. Don’t fret about the deadline stamped on the back there.”
“Thank you, miss.”
“Now you and your brother have yourselves a wonderful thanksgiving break. And make sure to eat as much as you can. Put some meat on those poor bones!”
Bobbing his head agreeably, praying to avert any further small talk, Kid tucked his newest book haul beneath one arm and hurried for the door.
He was never a fan of having too much attention put on him at once, but he had to admit, it was nice sometimes: to be recognized by the old lady librarian and her well-meaning overbearingness. She and the books made the county library his favorite place to go whenever Asura wanted alone time back home—home being the tent they’d lived in for the past five years.
In their time as unsheltered youth, Kid had never managed to cultivate lasting friendships with children his age. His peers asked too many nosy questions, and they were all big-mouthed tattletales whenever they found out about his living situation. But older folk were pleasant company. The librarian lady was the only person in Brooklyn he might have considered a true friend.
He’d grown to like her a lot, actually. She never asked pressing questions about where he lived. She never scolded him for taking things without paying. And she indulged his symmetry obsession whenever she could, gifting him random knick-knacks she stumbled across in her day-to-day (such as a symmetrical keyring he still wore on his backpack).
More importantly, she was the one who provided him with some semblance of an education, at least enough to save his developing mind from paralyzing boredom on the streets. She lent him books about math, science, history, geography—everything normal kids learned about in school. Whatever he wanted, she could procure. There were even whole books about symmetry.
So he very much valued time with his elderly friend. She was a cornucopia of knowledge he could never access alone. She was way smarter than Asura, who hadn’t bothered to remember anything past fifth grade.
Speaking of his older brother, Kid was thoroughly excited to tell Asura all about what he learned today. With the librarian’s guidance, he had checked out several books about the pyramids in Ancient Egypt—specifically the Pyramid of Anubis, constructed in perfect symmetry in a society where balance was valued above all else.
Such beautiful architecture! He’d be lucky enough to visit the pyramids in person someday.
When he returned home, a complete stranger was making her way out of the tent, and it gave Kid a start.
Upon second glance, she wasn’t actually so strange. She was simply one of Asura’s smoking buddies, a grizzled woman who often kicked Kid out of the tent so that she and his brother could play with each other.
“Hello there. Nice weather we are having,” Kid said, as politely as he could manage—not because he wanted to be nice, but because that was how he’d seen other adults address one another.
She flashed a toothless grin at him, and the very air turned rancid with her breath.
“Hey, sugar,” she said. “Your brother said you’d be in school right ‘bout now.”
“I haven’t been there in years.”
“Ya playin’ hooky?”
“I don’t play any sports.”
She honked an ugly laugh at this, a reaction which he neither understood nor appreciated, though he could tell he was somehow the butt of the joke. Once she finally stopped cackling, he cut in irritably, “Do you need something from us?”
“Oh, it don’t matter, kid,” she sighed. “Your brother’s in one of his moods, and I ain’t got the patience for it.”
Kid peered suspiciously over her shoulder, craning to see if Asura was home, and if so, whether he was wearing all his clothes. Kid was plenty aware that his unexpected return from the library could be interrupting some…private activities.
He gave her a tired look.
“Well, Ash has been sick for a few days now,” he said, “so I don’t think he’s in the mood to talk much or get out of his bed. But I can leave, if you guys still want to see each other naked.”
Again, she burst into raucous laughter, amused by such childish straightforwardness, and again Kid could not find anything comical about possibly being sexiled by his horndog of a brother. He stood his ground until she realized he wasn’t being rhetorical.
“Nah, I’m done tryna get anythin’ outta of him,” she replied. “I’ll come back when he’s not bein’ a dickhead. Catch you later.”
She turned away, leaving behind the unpleasant stink of someone who hadn’t washed their hair in weeks.
Shaking off this icky interaction with a shudder, Kid crawled through the rotting tent flaps and began carefully stacking his library books beside his bedspread. He wanted to sort them by personal relevance while also maintaining a balanced aesthetic. It was a task demanding total concentration, so several minutes passed before he remembered to check on his ailing meister.
In the far corner of their tent, Asura laid on his side, lifeless beneath a pile of dirty clothes and tattered blankets. The powerful odor of mildew and marijuana indicated that he hadn’t moved all day from his makeshift bed, much less the tent itself.
Kid had witnessed countless hangovers of monstrous proportions, but this was altogether different. His brother had spent the entire week nearly catatonic. His eyes were dull and lifeless, fixed on the tarp wall, as if he couldn’t hear anything outside of his own head, and his teeth chattered in the chill of the stale autumn air.
Kid gently shook him by the shoulder. “I’m home, Ash. You feeling any better?”
There came no response, only a low, constant rumbling under his brother’s breath as he continued to mumble to himself.
Kid had no idea what could possibly be wrong. There was no fever, no cough, no visible symptom that indicated a physical condition. His only recourse was to wait out this undiagnosed bout of psychosomatic illness. If he went to the library everyday, maybe he’d come back to find Asura had magically popped out of bed and started acting like his old self again.
But that hadn’t happened yet, and the way things were looking, things would have to get worse first.
“Your ugly friend stopped by just now,” Kid informed. “She left already. I’ve never seen you say no to making out with an ugly girl.”
He’d hoped to stir the pot, as poking fun at Asura’s hookups usually did, but nothing happened.
“Do you want a cigarette?”
Asura stirred and shook his head weakly, which was a step up from the silent treatment. Kid was encouraged.
“No cigarette? That’s okay. How about…” Kid crouched down, scanning the heap of garbage until he uncovered a dirty Ziploc bag packed with peach-flavored gummy rings. It was one of his brother’s favorite snacks, an expensive brand of candy that he never seemed willing to share with anyone else (not that Kid wanted any; it tasted like a skunk and made him incredibly nauseous).
“Peachy-O’s might cheer you up,” he said, flapping the bag. “Want some?”
Asura grunted disinterestedly.
Kid rummaged further through his brother’s belongings, locating yet another Ziploc bag, this one filled with soft white powder resembling flour or baby powder. It also came with a doctor’s needle. He peeled open the plastic and removed the syringe carefully.
“What about your medicine?” he asked. “Did you remember to take it today? I can help you do the needle, and that way you won’t have to get up.”
Asura closed his eyes and groaned, but complied nonetheless. He extended a wobbly arm. Kid rolled up the sleeve, tied the tourniquet like he’d been taught, and released the plunger. By the look on Asura’s face, the painkillers worked almost immediately.
Even so, the silence was suffocating. He awkwardly returned the needle to its bag. Then he hopped to his feet.
The convenience store was just around the corner. Most things were five bucks or less, and Asura was friends with some of the employees, who would often sell alcohol and cigarettes to customers without a valid form of ID. Kid was going there now.
He confidently slapped Asura’s drivers license onto the countertop, along with a five dollar bill that he had kept in his jacket for emergencies like these. He was barely tall enough to see over the counter, but he tried to look as tough as he could.
“Uhh, can I do somethin’ for you, kid?” the cashier asked.
Kid cleared his throat. “Yes, actually,” he said, in his best important adult voice, “I would like to purchase one case of beer, please.”
The cashier stared blankly. Kid nudged the driver’s license, just in case they didn’t see it the first time.
“It’s not a fake. You can ask the manager,” he said in a normal voice. He pushed the money a bit closer as well. When the cashier ignored both prompts, he went on: “I won’t drink any, I promise. I’m just doing the shopping today for my older brother. He’s twenty-three, like it says on the card. See? His name is Asura. We come by a lot. Maybe you recognize us.”
“Kid,” the cashier said, “I don’t care who you or your brother is. I ain’t sellin’ beer to a child.”
“I’m ten,” Kid said, hurt.
“Get the hell outta here before I call the cops.”
Kid slipped away from the counter as quietly as he’d come. He could tell that he’d unsettled the cashier somewhat, and he felt guilty for the unnecessary scare; it wasn’t his intention to mug every single person he encountered, and he wished shopkeepers would stop assuming the worst of him.
Maybe something to eat would be suitable instead.
He had the perfect target in mind: the Japanese mini-mart down the street, a hole in the wall that saw little business on its busiest days, making it possible to shoplift without witnesses.
As an added bonus, the old lady running the store was kind of his friend, similar to the librarian. She always gifted him extra candy with the few legal purchases he did make, and she would heat up a bowl of yakisoba for him—for free —if it was ever cold out.
Today the old woman stood at the counter, carefully organizing coins and dollar bills in the cash register. She smiled warmly when he walked through the door. It flooded Kid with overwhelming shame at the thought of what he was about to do. He bowed his head at her timidly before ducking behind shelves of processed snacks and fruit-flavored sodas.
Rules were rules. All cash was to be strictly budgeted toward Asura’s needs first (cigarettes, alcohol, marijauha, and the like), while food took second priority. It was ideal if they didn’t spend money on food at all. It was one of the easiest things to steal.
Once the cashier averted her eye, Kid set to work. He slit open the plastic packaging on a tray of pre-cooked pork buns, tucking as many as he could into the his jacket. Everything else fit nicely inside his Jansport bag. Two cans of lychee-flavored soda. Spicy ramen noodle crackers. Hard guava candies. Mini seaweed sheets. Chocolate Pocky. Aloe water.
These were the comfort foods of his early childhood: cheap, processed snacks that Asura used to pack in his kindergarten sack lunch. Things that weren’t particularly nutritious, but were easy to consume, even when he was sick or sad. He hoped Asura would find the flavors and textures equally soothing.
At the counter, he reached for a box of orange-flavored bubblegum and slid it toward the register.
“Good afternoon,” he greeted, speaking in clumsy Japanese that he had picked up not from a proper textbook or older relative, but rather, from repeatedly watching Studio Ghibli films as a younger child.
She acknowledged his greeting with much more fluent Japanese, though her gentle smile implied that she did not mind his limited knowledge of the language.
His single purchase rang up to less than a dollar. She handed him his change and an extra two boxes of bubblegum.
“Oh, you don’t have to, miss,” he said.
“This is yours,” she said firmly. “Say hello and give good wishes to your big brother for me.”
He bowed his head hastily and promptly got the hell out of there, running as fast as he could without making the plastic in his backpack crinkle.
“Hey, Ash. I’m back. And look what I have. Pork buns.”
He squatted down and laid the buns in a meticulous three-by-two array on the ground. He set the chips, candies, and drinks neatly in a row, allowing his brother full view of such generous selection.
“Look,” he insisted. “All this great stuff, and I didn’t spend any of your money on it. Not a single dime. Just like you taught me. See?”
Asura sat up and turned to face Kid, interest mildly piqued by the mini-heist his little brother had successfully pulled off alone. Kid felt a pang of excitement at the sight of his brother’s movement.
Even so, Asura did not look good at all. His dark circles were so prominent he looked like a Tim Burton caricature, the whites of his eyes bloodshot and his cheeks sunken. His breathing came in ragged whistles. Purple splotches and sickly green bruises ran up and down both of his arms, but when he caught Kid staring, he quickly pulled his coat on, concealing the needle tracks beneath baggy sleeves.
“Are…are you sure you’re okay?”
Asura nodded and rolled his neck. His eyes flitted about the room as if listening for a sound that was not there. Then he reached for the groceries, accepting the gift without thanks.
Kid tried not to look upset when Asura opened the cracker bag upside-down. Or when he sloppily wolfed down the pork buns. If he pointed it out, Asura would just tell him to shut up and read the room. At least he would’ve, if he’d been feeling well.
In an attempt to divert his compulsions, Kid wiggled out of his jacket and draped it around his shaking meister’s shoulders. Then he sat there, at a loss for words, knowing that he needed to stay in close proximity but otherwise utterly helpless in such a predicament.
Asura was noticeably out of breath from eating so quickly. He reclined again and pulled the jacket further over his bony frame.
Kid lowered himself onto the ground. He rolled Asura onto his side—a practice he’d been trained to follow religiously, especially after his brother had taken his medicine—then pressed the bridge of his nose between Asura’s shoulder blades. It was his favorite hiding spot in the whole world. He hoped his presence would contribute body heat in addition to the layers of raggedy blankets.
Asura’s breathing continued to wobble and crackle, like he was dry-heaving after one drink too many. It was hard to ignore. And it was really hard to just lay there in silence. Kid had a million questions he wanted to ask, but he needed to work on becoming “less of a nuisance.”
Maybe he could be helpful still. Maybe he could find some leftover cigarettes in Asura’s depression nest—at least one more, enough to ease his remaining pain through the evening. Kid began to clamber to his feet.
Asura jolted upright.
“You!” he cried.
Kid froze, neither sitting nor fully standing, shocked by this unexpected recovery of speech. Asura looked utterly scandalized, as if Kid had just committed a deadly sin right before his very eyes.
“Me?”
“You! Yes, you! Where do you think you’re going?”
“I’m just looking for a cigarette.”
“I told you I don’t want you to go out today. It’s too cold. It’s going to snow.”
“It isn’t snowing until December, and I’m not going out.” Kid caught his brother by the wrist and gently pushed him back into resting position. “You’re sick. Lay down.”
“I’m not sick. I can’t remember the last time I got sick. Hey, you! Listen to me when I talk to you. You’re making Mom upset with that kind of talk, you hear?”
“Mom isn’t here right now,” Kid said. The knot in his stomach tightened when Asura continued to talk over him with intensified volume and speed:
“Goddamn you, Kid, goddamn you! You make me so mad. We’re in trouble if the school calls home. Again. Again!”
“Okay, Ash, I hear ya. Here’s a cigarette. Where’s your lighter?”
“Cigarette-schmigarette. The end! Fairy tales have happy ends, but I don’t.”
“Yes, you do, Ash, you just have to wait for it.”
“I’m sick of waiting. Waiting tables. Tabletop tennis.”
“Lay down, please—”
“You can’t make me do anything I don’t want to do!” Asura howled. He lunged forward to seize Kid by the sleeve, yanking so violently that the seams in the fabric popped.
Kid whined nervously. He couldn’t bear to have his shirt ripped at only one sleeve; this sweatshirt was the only one comfortable enough to sleep in overnight, and the logo on the front was perfectly centered. His eyes welled up at the thought of needing to replace such a precious belonging.
Asura gnashed his teeth in the sort of way that dared him to throw a tantrum. “You come back here,” he snarled. “I’m not asking again, Kid. Don’t make me count to three! One, two…!”
“Ash, stop! You’re scaring me!”
“Awww, ‘you’re scaring me,’ he cries! Wah, wah. I barely fuckin’ touched you. Are you gonna cry about symmetry now? Fucking retard. Fucking reta—”
“I told you not to call me that! Ow, ow!”
“I said come back here, you stupid—fucking—retard—! ”
His voice cracked toward the end of his sentence, as if expressing his desire for Kid’s company was the only thing humiliating enough to snap him out of his incoherent tirade. He released his grasp abruptly. Kid stumbled backward, panting, choking on panicked tears.
The two stared at each other in a daze.
Asura looked away first. And then his shoulders began to shake. First only a few times. Then enough that it became concerning.
It was hard to believe at first, especially in concert with his glassy-eyed features and thousand-yard stare, but it was true.
Asura was crying.
Kid obediently sank to the ground, hoping that’d make the tears stop.
It didn’t. His hands hovered uncertainly over his brother. He wanted to be of comfort, but the massive pain in his own chest and the stinging in his own eyes made him wish someone would have thought to comfort him first.
“I’m sorry,” Kid squeaked. “I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry, Ash. Don’t cry. Don’t cry…”
Asura wept softly, unlike Kid, who seemed to experience his emotions with every fiber in his body. But somehow, silent tears were more alarming than loud ones. Kid almost wished he would just let it all out.
He watched uselessly as Asura’s hot tears soaked through the moldy pillowcase. His lungs crinkled like cellophane, bronchioles giving way after years of relentless smoking.
Well, one of them had to pull it together. Kid sucked in a calming breath and reached out to hold his brother’s hand.
“It’s going to be okay, Ash. There’s no reason for us to cry.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Asura rasped. “Fuck up. Fuck up. You weren’t ever supposed to be born.”
Kid gave his brother an apologetic squeeze.
As he waited for the episode to pass, he stared at the tattoos on the back of Asura’s withered hands. The designs seemed, to most people, satanic in nature: three vertical eyes on each hand, mottled black pupils staring straight into the soul.
Kid himself had never found it creepy. It was the one symmetrical thing about Asura. He could understand perfectly why someone might want perfect balance etched into their skin.
Kid traced the outline of the tattoo with his finger. He did it over and over, soon losing himself completely in loops of perfect balance, counting all the while in his head—one, two, three…He needed to count to eight. Eight times on both hands, just to be even.
One, two, three…
Kid’s body and soul relaxed in unison. He began to unconsciously extend his wavelength outward.
The signals were shaky, unstable, and characteristic of a Weapon that had not yet fully matured, but his soul was determined enough to establish a rudimentary connection with Asura’s.
Over the years, his meister’s soul had turned from pale pink to blood red, rotten scabs hanging off the edges and corrosive stains like plaque pockmarking its surface. It burned with rage and threatened to consume anything that crossed its path. At the same time, it was scared, fragile, and weak-willed.
But it was still a good soul. Kid knew where to find all of its soft spots.
Kid approached one of those spots now. His brother would normally balk at any act of emotional vulnerability, but today, his anguished wavelength nearly pulled Kid’s entire soul in on itself.
It hurt to establish the link. Kid told himself the pain was simply something he had to bear. He could deal with the strain. He would leave his soul wide-open any day if it meant that he could help the person he loved.
All at once, the effects of the soul resonance swept over them, and the two brothers were whisked away to another realm entirely. It was not a real, physical place, but a hidden landscape within Asura’s soul itself, impermeable to the rest of the world. It occurred to Kid that he was likely the first person to ever venture here.
As flattered as he was to be deemed trustworthy, his brother’s soulscape didn’t appear to be a particularly hospitable terrain. It was frigid and dark, full of creaking shadows. Emptiness yawned as far as the eye could see. In the distance, a low whisper of overlapping voices murmured like the constant rush of a foreboding mountain river.
The voices crawled in Kid’s ears like centipedes in mud, sending cold shivers through his body. They were mumbling all kinds of nonsense. He strained to pick them out from one another—
You!
Whallywoop. Whallywoop.
Who’s takin’ the dog to school?
Fuck it.
I slept for a buck and a half.
Despite it all, Kid wasn’t afraid. He couldn’t be if he tried. This space belonged to his brother, his only brother, and his brother would never hurt him.
“Ash? Can you hear me?”
His words barely cut through the growing cacophony of blurry white noise.
Asura’s voice came to him in a similar fashion, disembodied from his body and echoing eerily in ripples. It bounced throughout the space until it was inevitably consumed by the endless stretch of darkness before them:
“Hey, Kid. I didn’t think I’d ever find you here.”
“Ash…? Where are you?”
“I’m right here.”
Kid spun around, squinting, although of course, there wasn’t anything to see except more darkness, and it wasn’t as if Asura could see him either.
“Why can’t I see you?”
“The hell do you need to see me for? You know what I look like already.”
“Oh. That’s a good point,” Kid said. “Is it like this all the time?”
“What do you mean, ‘like this’? You got a problem?”
“It’s just lonely and creepy.”
Asura snapped. “I didn’t choose for it to be, okay, Kid? I don’t want it to be like this. I’d change it if I knew how. But it’s not that fucking easy.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it.”
A ripple of heat washed through the space, pushing Kid backward for a brief moment. Amidst the darkness, the image of Asura emerged and crackled into clarity. His features were obscured by the shadows, but still distinct in shape, and with a little light it became clear that he’d been standing less than five feet away all along.
He looked as pale and sickly as he did in real life. But here, he wasn’t cowering beneath countless layers of clothing. He wore nothing but the dirty black cargo pants that he’d taken with them the day Mama told them to leave the apartment, and the scuffed brown sneakers he refused to ever take off.
“I didn’t let you in here so you could feel sorry for me,” Asura growled.
“I know. I’m sorry,” Kid said. “I mean, I’m not pitying you, if that makes sense.”
“Why did you come here?”
Kid thought about this carefully. There were a lot of reasons, but he had to be honest. He looked up at his brother with resolution.
“Because I don’t know how to help you anymore,” he said.
If there was a correct answer to the question, that certainly wasn’t it. Asura backed away, moving slowly as if the both of them were trapped within a layer of gelatin.
“So you do feel sorry for me.”
“I feel worried when you aren’t doing good,” Kid relented. “Like when you get sick.”
“I’ve always been fine, haven’t I?”
“But I don’t even know what’s wrong. What if you have a deadly disease? Like cholera? Or…”
“I’m not sick like that,” Asura interrupted. “I’m just losing my mind, I think.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“I’ve been feeling it coming for a while now. It’s like I’m losing control of a car, but I don’t remember how to hit the brakes. Maybe this car doesn’t have any brakes at all.” He scratched his chin, realizing he’d found the perfect analogy to describe how he felt. “And maybe it’s not a car, it’s a bus, and nobody taught me how to drive something so big, and my little brother is in the bus with me.”
“We can figure out a way to stop the bus,” Kid said earnestly. “Buses come with emergency brakes. And even without brakes, the bus won’t stay in motion forever, ‘cause of something called friction. You could even crash it into something soft, such as—”
“That’s not the point, smartass. Why the hell am I even driving the bus? When did I get here? Who put me here? I don’t know. Nobody knows! It’s a miracle I didn’t wreck the bus sooner!”
“I’ll help you drive it, Ash. Just tell me how.”
“I never wanted to drive a bus! I can’t drive a bus! I deserve to crash and die!”
“Ash, stop,” Kid said, fighting to keep a level voice. “Don’t talk about yourself that way. You’re not going crazy. Let’s…let’s think about our options here.”
But he didn’t have a feasible proposal ready. What was there to say? When he thought of ‘crazy’, he envisioned the type of homeless people who walked around cussing at the air and ranting to themselves. Asura wasn’t like that. Well, maybe a little—but not until today!
Who was to define crazy, anyhow? That was just a mean word kids threw at each other on the playground. It was what people called him when he talked about symmetry or cried about something that others didn’t consider a big deal. The word crazy didn’t actually signify anything.
But it did. It signified something was going very, very wrong in Asura’s mind and soul, and Kid was doomed in watching his brother succumb to it.
“We can always go to a hospital,” Kid said desperately. “Right? The doctors, they can give you more medicine to take home, even if we’re poor. They can help you. They—”
“Kid, if they keep me in the hospital, then what happens to you?”
“I’ll just wait for you to get better! I can take care of myself.”
“I know you can, but CPS won’t agree. They’ll put you in a foster home who knows where.”
Kid felt himself tearing up, which was especially frustrating because he knew Asura was the one who had every right to cry. This wasn’t about Kid. But he was so overwhelmed.
“Don’t have a cow, Kid,” Asura sighed. It was surreal how quickly he had snapped out of his downward spiral, if only to criticize Kid’s own. “Let’s talk about something else if you’re gonna be that way. Can you tell me about the books you read at the library today?”
“I dunno,” Kid sniffled.
“What do you mean, you ‘dunno?’ You were so excited to tell me about it this afternoon. C’mon now. I wanna hear all about the Ancient Egyptians.”
“H-how did you…?”
Asura smiled slightly. “I can read your soul just as much as you’re reading mine right now, Kiddo. Also, I can read in general. You left the books right between our beds.”
“Oh. Right. Y-yeah, it’s about Ancient Egypt,” Kid laughed, wiping his running nose with the back of each hand. “I read…that…the Ancient Egyptians worshiped Anubis, the god of death, and to thank him for taking care of their dead, they built him a perfectly symmetrical pyramid. Everything in it is symmetrical. The arches, the wall art, the tomb, the caskets of mummies buried there.”
“That sounds lame.”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “I’ll show you pictures later. It’s beautiful.”
“Beautiful or whatever, but worshipping death is pointless. We don’t have any proof that gods exist, either. ‘Specially not death gods with silly dog heads.”
“Anubis has a jackal head, actually,” Kid said. “Jackals are in the canid family but look more like a mix between fox and coyote.”
“Same thing, nerd.”
“I’m just saying—”
“What I’m saying is that if Anubis exists, what happens to the death gods in other cultures and religions? Do Hades and Thanatos coexist with Anubis? Who makes up these rules? Certainly not the mortal men who invented religion in the first place?”
“Good questions,” Kid nodded. “…Surprisingly. I’m impressed you have the brain matter left to come up with all that. Does Asura actually remember something from his world civilizations class?”
“Ha-ha,” Asura said. “I’m not as brainless as you think I am.”
“I guess you don’t exactly need Harvard talent to read Percy Jackson.”
“Who the fuck is—no, I just think it’s stupid how quickly some people believe in religious garbage! If death gods were real, you think we’d have fucking seen one by now.”
They marinated in reflective silence.
“Maybe the death gods just don’t live in New York,” Kid suggested.
Asura laughed heartily at this. Kid wasn’t trying to be funny, but he didn’t mind being a laughing stock when it came to his brother; it was simply a relief to hear him make any sound pertaining to joy.
The murmuring background voices had quieted down just a little bit.
“Ash,” Kid said, wiping his eyes, “I…I still don’t know what to do. When we go back to real life. How do I help you…?”
“You worry so much for a kid your size!” Asura draped his arms around him, squeezing Kid’s skull against his chest with just the right amount of pressure. “Just fuckin’ relax, bud. Everything will work itself out.”
“How can you know for sure, though?” he snuffled.
“When you become an adult, sometimes you just know things like that.”
“But you said you can’t drive the bus.”
“That was just a stupid metaphor, Kid. Don’t overthink it.”
As much as Kid wanted to hold on longer, his eyelids were growing heavier by the second. His mind, body and soul were thoroughly taxed from sustaining amateur resonance at such an emotionally trying time.
“Yeah. You’re a good driver,” Kid murmured. “I’m…really tired.”
“Go to sleep. I’ll keep watch.”
“I’m gonna figure something out soon.”
“I’m sure you will,” Asura said, kissing him on the stripe in his hair—or maybe he imagined that part.