Chapter Text
Hiro doesn't know what he expected from Taka's place after nearly six years of not knowing anything about his brother's life and whereabouts, but it definitely isn’t this old concrete building with rusted mailboxes and a broken intercom, with the entrance tucked behind a cracked wall overgrown with wild ivy. The first floor's hallway smells of mold and old garbage, and the stairwell leading up to the upper floors is gloomy even in the middle of the day. Hiro's steps echo too loudly, like he doesn’t belong here - and maybe he doesn't.
Is this even Tokyo? he wonders, thinking about the posh Shibuya neighborhood where he and his brothers had grown up. How can his brother stand living in this shithole?
Still, he's pretty sure this is the right place. The address was tucked away in his mom's contact list, easy to find once he figured out her password, and he knows she has been keeping tabs on Taka's whereabouts, even if she's always refused to tell Hiro.
Now he’s standing in front of apartment 210, tucked into the far corner of the second floor. His heart is pounding like it’s trying to claw its way out of his chest, and the longer he waits, the more the doubts crowd in, tripping over one another in his head.
He knocks, but there's no answer, so he knocks again, this time harder. The sound echoes down the stairwell, loud as a gunshot.
“Takahiro Moriuchi?” he calls out, trying to sound more confident and adult than he feels. His fingers hurt from the cold.
“Hello—I'm looking for Takahiro Moriuchi? I think this is the right place?”
Nothing. Maybe his brother's not at home, or maybe this really isn't the right place.
It's almost dark outside. If he doesn’t find somewhere to stay soon, his options will shrink to two equally miserable choices - crash in a net café for the night, or swallow his pride and go back home. He hates both, but the thought of stepping back into that apartment, and into his mother's suffocating presence, makes him feel queasy. So he knocks again, more insistently.
“It's Hiroki! I just want to talk! Aniki!”
There's a whisper of movement inside, and then a pause, long enough to feel deliberate, as if the person inside were weighing whether to answer at all.
Then, after what feels like an eternity, the sound of the key turning, and a bolt sliding open.
The door opens two inches, and a sliver of a face appears in the narrow gap.
For one awful moment, Hiro’s stomach drops. Maybe it is the wrong place. Maybe he’s about to embarrass himself in front of some stranger who just wants him to go away. Because this man - this guarded figure half-hidden behind the door – doesn’t look like the brother he remembers. The hair is longer, messier. He even has a goatee, of all things.
“Hiroki?” the man says, and the sound of his voice slices straight through Hiro’s doubt. The voice is older, rougher, but he'd recognize it anywhere.
The door opens a little more, letting the dim hallway light spill across the man’s face, and finally Hiro gets a proper look at the person who’s supposed to be his brother.
He looks like the same person and a total stranger at once. The lines of his face are sharper now, every angle more defined, with a kind of beauty Hiro’s younger self would never have noticed, but that the current Hiro can’t help but see.
But it’s not the changes in his features that startle Hiro, but rather his eyes – haunted, strange, holding a cold, dark stillness that feels unnatural. It’s unsettling enough to make Hiro’s pulse skitter like a frightened animal.
Taka is staring at Hiro like he’s not entirely sure he’s real, or possibly like he wishes he weren’t.
“…What the fuck?” Taka says, voice rougher and older than Hiro remembers.
“Hi,” Hiro manages, even if he feels like he's about to pass out from nerves. His voice cracks, humiliatingly. “It’s, um… me. Hiroki. Your brother.”
Taka’s gaze rakes down and back up to his eyes – disbelief mingling with a touch of suspicion.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
Hiro bristles, trying to mask the sting. “Hello to you, too.”
“You must be kidding me,” Taka mutters.
Hiro shifts his weight from foot to foot, trying to appear casual, as if his heart weren't hammering against his ribs like it wants to explode out of his chest. "Surprise...?"
“Are you out of your mind?” Taka says, cold as ice. “You’re not supposed to be here.”
Hiro forces out a grin. “And yet. Here I am.”
Taka’s eyes narrow. “You’re telling me Mom actually let you—”
“No.” Hiro cuts him off quickly. “I didn’t tell her. I… ran away from home.” He says it like it should be obvious, like it explains everything, even though it doesn’t. “I didn’t know where else to go.”
Taka stares, unreadable, and the silence stretches until Hiro can’t stand it. The words start tumbling out faster, the way they always do when he’s trying to fill a void.
“Mom’s been acting weird. I mean, not— like, not screaming or throwing things or whatever. Just… she's getting stricter and more controlling. More than before, I mean. Saying stuff like, ‘You’re eighteen now, you need to be responsible and start supporting yourself,’ and then the next minute treating me like I’m five. And it’s like— she keeps dropping these hints that I should start looking for a place of my own, but then if I bring it up she gets all cold, like I’m abandoning her.”
He rubs his hands together, trying to warm his cold fingers but mostly just to give an outlet to his restless anxiety.
“It’s like… no matter what I do, it’s wrong,” he says, his voice picking up heat. “If I’m home too much, she says I’m lazy. If I go out, I’m irresponsible. If I try to help, I’m doing it wrong. If I tell her what I want, I’m being selfish. Nothing is ever enough – It’s like she wants me gone, but also wants me chained to her forever, so she can keep telling me exactly how I’m failing.”
He looks away, jaw tight. “I couldn’t breathe in that house anymore. So I left.”
Taka leans heavily against the doorframe, heaving a sigh. “So you ran away, and thought it was a good idea to come to me. After six years?”
“Well, I figured that maybe my brother wouldn’t slam the door in my face and tell me to fuck off the moment he saw me,” Hiro snaps, voice dangerously brittle. He can feel he's moments away from crying, and he tells himself he can't break down in front of this stranger of a brother. It would be too humiliating.
Taka stares at him for a long moment with cold, unreadable eyes. But there’s something else there too – tension, barely hidden, and fear, although Hiro can't understand what he could possibly be afraid of.
“You need to leave. Go home. Now," his brother says.
“I can’t go home,” Hiro says, and hates how small his voice sounds. “And I have nowhere else to go.”
Taka’s eyes narrow. “What about Dad?”
“Things with him are… not great either.” Hiro exhales shakily. “He’s on my ass about university. He wants me to be like Tomo. But I... I don’t know what I want yet. And he won’t even let me figure it out. I wanted to take a year off and find out what I want to do, but he got so angry at me."
Taka stares at him for a long time. For a moment, something flickers in his face – understanding, maybe, but it vanishes just as quickly.
“I'm sorry, but I don’t want to get involved in this,” he says. “You can’t stay.”
The door begins to swing shut, but Hiro shoves his foot in the gap before it closes.
“Are you seriously going to let your little brother freeze to death out here?” he whines. He knows he sounds absolutely pathetic, but he doesn't care anymore. He'll be as pathetic as he needs to be.
“I mean it,” Taka mutters, but the resolve in his voice is fraying, and Hiro sees an opening.
“If you don't let me in I’ll— I'll scream. I’ll make noise until someone calls the cops. You want that kind of attention?” Hiro wedges himself between the door and the doorframe, eyes locked onto his brother’s. “Let me in or I’ll make sure your neighbours start complaining.”
Taka presses a hand to his forehead like he’s in pain. After a long, loaded pause, he opens the door just wide enough for Hiro to squeeze through.
Hiro steps inside, feeling triumphant, and then shivers. The apartment is cold, almost colder than outside. Shadows crowd every corner, thick curtains choking out the last of the day's light almost entirely. The place feels less like a home and more like a den.
“Why is it so cold and dark? It's a bit depressing,” Hiro says, trying weakly to joke.
Taka shrugs. “Nobody asked you to come here.”
Wow, Hiro thinks. Is this asshole really my brother?
Taka gestures at the couch. “I don't have an extra futon. There's only the couch.”
“It's fine,” Hiro murmurs, setting his bag down and collapsing onto the couch with a sigh. It sags beneath him with a tired groan.
Silence again.
Then Hiro says, unable to stop himself, “Seriously though. The curtains. Are you okay? Do you have like, light sensitivity or something?”
“The first rule if you want to stay here is,” Taka snaps, “don’t ask questions. The second is, don’t touch the curtains.”
The sharpness in his voice is almost alarming; it sounds less like annoyance and more like fear.
“Okay,” Hiro says in a placating tone, while his brain goes what the fuck again. “Got it. No curtain-touching.”
The silence returns, heavier and more uncomfortable than before, so Hiro surreptitiously takes in his surroundings. The apartment is old and small, almost claustrophobically so for someone used to living in much larger houses. It's basically one single room, with a separate bathroom and a tiny kitchen near the entrance. At the same time, there’s a kind of severe neatness to the space: sparse furniture, books and magazines stacked neatly, a rack of CDs near a guitar. The only part that looks a bit messy is the low table at the center of the room, with a laptop and a notebook cracked open next to it, and a few crumpled, balled-up pieces of paper scattered about.
And then there’s his brother himself, who is pacing back and forth like a caged animal, shoulders set, fists clenched, the flicker of something wild behind his eyes. It’s not just that he looks different because he's grown from the teenager Hiro remembered – something seems wrong with him.
Something – actually, everything – about him feels coiled and strained, like a predator ready to pounce. Hiro has the sudden, vivid instinct that he’s not safe here with his brother, that he’s stepped into the cage of something that might attack him at any moment.
Still, the silence feels even worse.
“It’s been a long time,” he says, voice small and uncertain. It comes out more plaintive than he intended, because he needs something from Taka – any sign at all that his brother doesn’t hate him the way he seems to.
Taka doesn’t answer. Doesn’t even glance at him.
“I thought something had happened to you," Hiro continues, with an edge of desperation. "I know you were in a band and it was doing well, but then you guys went on hiatus and I couldn't find any information anymore."
Taka's expression hardens. “Yeah, well. Things happened.”
“What happened?” Hiro asks.
“Nothing that you need to know," Taka replies.
Hiro folds his arms, feeling increasingly annoyed, and somehow that eases some of his tension and turns it into stubbornness.
“It can't be that bad, right? It's not like you're in jail or anything.”
Taka shoots him another hard look.
“I said no questions.”
“You are my brother and I haven’t seen you in six years,” Hiro bursts out. “Don’t I deserve to know what's going on with you? Or should I just pretend it's okay that you just vanished off the face of the earth?”
Taka exhales harshly through his nose. His hands fist at his sides like he’s trying not to throw something. Or break something. That something very possibly being Hiro.
“You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Then tell me!” Hiro is almost shouting now. He hates how shrill his voice sounds.
“You want the truth?” Taka’s voice drops, low and dangerous. “I'm not the same person you remember. I’m not someone you should be messing with.”
“Then tell me who you are, then, and I’ll decide for myself," Hiro demands, even if his voice sounds on the edge of breaking.
For a long moment, Taka just stares at him like he’s trying to incinerate him out of existence with his eyes. Then, abruptly, he turns away.
“Someone you shouldn't stay with,” he says again, with finality.
Hiro tells himself firmly he’s not going to cry, even if the person he wanted to meet the most keeps pushing him away. He puts his feet on the couch and pulls his knees to his chest like he used to do when he was small and was trying to hide from nightmares, only this time he’s glaring at his brother.
“Well, too late. You let me in. I'm staying," he says defiantly.
"Fuck," Taka says, running a hand through his mess of dark hair. Then, without another word, he grabs his coat and storms out the door, leaving Hiro sitting there in the cold, dark apartment, stunned and alone.