𝗙𝗢𝗨𝗥𝗧𝗛 𝗦𝗖𝗘𝗡𝗘 — 𝗞𝗔𝗠𝗜𝗚𝗔𝗞𝗨𝗥𝗘 𝗩𝗜𝗟𝗟𝗔𝗚𝗘
𝗠𝗥. 𝗛𝗢𝗧𝗔𝗥𝗨'𝗦 𝗛𝗢𝗨𝗦𝗘 ─ 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗚𝗔𝗥𝗗𝗘𝗡𝗦
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"I want to know more about your family but… Li… Liriel?"
A pause. "Can I just keep calling you Hoshiyuki until I'm comfortable with your real name?"
Hoshiyuki smiled softly and said nothing. With a graceful wave of his hand, the garden exhaled back into stillness—blooming flowers folding inward one by one, colors dimming like a lantern losing its flame, petals settling as though they had only ever been dreaming.
"Well… your sister is coming out. I'll leave for now."
He began to fade at the edges, the way smoke does in still air.
"You don't have to go."
Shiharu said it too quickly. He looked away.
"I mean… she won't see you anyway. So. Stay."
Before Hoshiyuki could answer, a voice cut through the quiet like a bell.
"*Onii-saaan!!* Where are you?"
Reika appeared in the garden doorway, spotted him, and descended the wooden steps at a skip. Her eyes landed immediately on the white cat draped lazily in his arms, and her face lit up the way only younger sisters' faces can.
"*Onii-san,* were you talking to someone just now?" She tilted her head, glancing sideways at nothing she could see.
"No," Shiharu said. "I wasn't speaking to anyone."
"Hmm. I thought I heard your voice." She shrugged it away with the ease of someone who trusted her brother completely—then dove her face straight into the cat's pale Persian fur. "*Fuwa fuwa…* When did you get a cat? She's so soft…"
Shiharu and Hoshiyuki exchanged a glance over her head. A silent conversation.
"I… found her. Somewhere. Brought her back."
"Can I name her?"
"Go ahead." He exhaled. "…Was there a reason you came looking for me?"
"Oh—!" Rei straightened up so fast the cat made an undignified sound. "*Sou da,* I almost forgot. *Onii-san,* it's time for evening dinner."
Shiharu blinked. "It isn't even late yet."
He said it without thinking. Then immediately said nothing else.
Coming from where he did—from that house, those rooms, those silences—he could barely remember the last time anyone had called him to a table. Meals had not been a kindness there. They had been a reward he rarely earned.
Rei laughed, soft and unbothered, still rubbing the cat's ears.
"It's just a light refreshment before the main dinner. Come whenever you're ready—I'll keep yours warm in your room." A grin crept onto her face. Mischievous. Familiar.
"Anyway. *Moratta.* She's mine now."
"Wait—hey—"
But she was already halfway to the door, the white cat purring against her chest like it had always belonged there.
"Let her take the cat," Hoshiyuki said gently.
Shiharu watched Rei's figure disappear behind the sliding door and let out a long, defeated breath.
A comfortable silence returned to the garden.
"Shiharu."
"Hm."
"Do you like your new family?"
"We're not family yet."
Hoshiyuki was quiet. He studied him the way one studies something rare and uncertain—something that might break if named too quickly.
"I don't like them," Shiharu muttered, leaning back against the garden stones. Above him, Hoshiyuki's form drifted, weightless.
"I love them."
A real smile. Quiet and unhurried, the kind that doesn't perform itself.
"I love your new personality," Hoshiyuki said. "You don't go around begging for attention anymore. Trying so hard to become what someone else needs. It looks good on you—this version of yourself."
He drifted closer, voice dropping the way voices do when they mean something.
"If you're trying to win someone's love and it isn't working… that's your answer. Those people were never meant for you. Just because it's taking time doesn't mean it isn't happening. You are not the problem." A pause, deliberate and soft. "Most of the things you're afraid of will never happen anyway. So don't let your loneliness lead you back to people who would have broken you again. They would have judged you regardless. They always do."
He reached out to place a flower in Shiharu's hair.
But when Shiharu looked up—
His eyes were glistening. Not yet fallen. The kind of tears that have been waiting a very long time for permission.
Someone had finally said it. The exact thing he had pressed down for years beneath silence and obedience and *I'm fine, really.*
Hoshiyuki panicked immediately.
"Wha— What? I—I'm sorry. I didn't mean to make you—I shouldn't have said anything—"
A flick of his fingers. Then another. Golden stars dripped light around them in soft cascades. Butterflies appeared from nowhere and spiraled in slow, luminous circles—surrounding Shiharu in something that looked almost like a halo, if halos were made of apology and mild desperation.
"Don't ruin your beautiful face for people who weren't worth it— I thought you needed to hear it, but maybe I was wrong, I'm sorry, I'm really—"
"*Hoshi.*"
Shiharu wiped his eyes.
Then he looked at Hoshiyuki's face—pouting, flustered, worried in a way that reminded him so completely of little Yuki that something in his chest cracked open into laughter instead.
He laughed until his shoulders shook.
"I'm okay," he managed, smiling wide. Wider than he had in a long time. "I'm okay."
Hoshiyuki exhaled like he had been holding his breath since the beginning of time.
"…Can I try touching you?"
Hoshiyuki nodded. Almost immediately.
They raised their hands at the same moment. Palm toward palm, slow—
Shiharu's fingers passed straight through.
Neither of them moved away.
A single butterfly descended and landed, very gently, on the tip of Shiharu's nose.
"Let's do this every day," Shiharu said.
"…Is that your indirect way of saying you want to see me every day?"
The laughter that came after was easy. Unguarded. The kind neither of them had expected to have again.
Between their fingers, red threads caught the last of the evening light—thin as silk, faint as a half-remembered dream—and disappeared before either of them could notice.
In that moment, they were simply two souls who had found something in each other that felt like safety.
They did not yet know that safety, too, can be taken.