The memory of her brother's voice never left her.
Sometimes, in the stillness of night, Rumane Yasahute swore she could still hear it echoing through the walls of her room: the scratch of his pen, the faint hum of his breath as he mouthed complicated words from his textbooks, the chuckled laugh he gave when she asked one of her endless questions.
Renji Yasahute had been her lighthouse. She was about to transfer the next year to high school the year he died, and before then, she had not understood what it meant to live without light.
Before the Fall
Rumane's childhood had been an ordinary one—ordinary in the way a story feels like it can stretch forever, endless afternoons that seemed immune to endings. Her family lived in a modest house in the outskirts of Kyoto. The smell of her mother's cooking always seeped into the tatami mats, and the yard held a crooked persimmon tree where cicadas screamed through the summers.
But Rumane rarely played outside. She wanted to sit in her brother's room, where the world felt mysterious and alive.
Renji was older by eight years, already standing on the edge of adulthood when she was still losing teeth. His room was a temple of knowledge: rows of pharmacy manuals, glass beakers cleaned and left to dry on the desk, stacks of notebooks full of his cramped, impatient handwriting. Rumane wasn't supposed to be in there—her parents had warned her not to bother him while he studied—but Renji always waved her in anyway.
"Come on," he'd say, pushing his glasses up, "what's the point of learning if I can't share it with my little sister?"
She would sit on his bed, clutching a stuffed rabbit to herself, and watch him scribble formulas. Sometimes he explained what he was doing. Sometimes he just let her sit in silence. For Rumane, the silence wasn't empty. It was the sound of her life taking shape.
One night, as the cicadas screamed through the half-open window, she asked:
"Renji... when you grow up and make medicine, will you let me help?"
He glanced at her, his pen pausing. Then he smiled in that tired way of his. "If you stay curious, you'll help me more than you think."
The Accident
And then curiosity was crushed.
It was late winter when it happened. The world outside was brittle with frost. Rumane remembered the day not for its details but for the way time bent around it. One moment she was eating miso soup too hot for her tongue, and the next there were sirens splitting the sky.
Her brother had been at the university lab, where he was volunteering in the pharmacy research wing. A break-in, they said later. A robbery gone wrong. Shelves collapsed, medicines and solvents raining down like glassy knives. By the time they pulled him out, his body was broken in a way no medicine could repair.
Rumane wasn't allowed to see him. She only saw her mother's trembling hands, her father's face gone blank with shock, and the way the doctor's mouth moved without sound, like the world had suddenly been plunged underwater.
The wake was quiet, suffocating. Candles burned until the air stank of wax. Rumane stared at the photograph on the altar: Renji's smile frozen forever. She wanted to scream, but the scream lodged in herself, solid and immovable.
That night she curled under her blankets, whispering into the dark:
"Renji... are you still watching me?"
Silence answered. A silence so thick it felt alive, pressing against her ears. In that silence, something shifted. The world wasn't safe anymore. Knowledge wasn't safe. Curiosity wasn't safe.
The Ghost Years
Thus ended that winter.
Rumane carried her brother's ghost like a weight strapped to her heart. In the beggining of high school, when children laughed and shared snacks, she stayed quiet. She walked home alone. The stuffed rabbit her brother gave her was left on her bed and collected dust over time.
Overtime, her silence deepened. Teachers praised her for good grades, but she took no joy in them. The friends she had drifted away, unable to understand why she sat by herself at lunch, why she flinched when laughter grew too loud, why she stared too long at the empty seat beside her at home.
At night she dreamed of shelves collapsing, glass cutting through skin, red blooming across a white lab coat. She dreamed of reaching out for Renji's hand only to see it dissolve into powder. She woke with her throat raw, though she hadn't screamed.
Her parents tried to carry on. Her mother prayed at the altar every morning. Her father buried himself in work. But Rumane noticed the way they avoided Renji's name, as though speaking it might tear the scab off their wounds. She now grew up in a house where grief hung like a chemical gas—colorless, tasteless, invisible, but always poisoning the air.
High School Soon...
By the time Rumane entered the 3rd month of high school, she was adept at vanishing. She chose the window seat in class, the one where the teacher's gaze seldom lingered. Her notebooks were neat, her answers correct, but her voice was faint, like an echo fading before it reached the listener.
Her classmates made efforts at first. A student invited her to karaoke. Another offered to share notes. Rumane smiled politely, declined gently, and the invitations stopped. Soon she was "the quiet one," the shadow in the classroom.
Yet the dream her brother left behind never entirely died. On some days she would sneak into the library, pull a pharmacy manual from the shelf, and flip through the pages. She told herself it was pointless—that she'd never be strong enough to follow Renji's path. But her hands trembled as if they knew a different truth: that curiosity still burned, faint and stubborn, no matter how much she tried to smother it.
Autumn Encounter
It was in the middle of her first high school year that the walls of her silence cracked.
The season had shifted; summer's sweat was gone, replaced by autumn's sharp winds. Leaves rattled like dry bones outside the windows.
Rumane sat in her usual spot during lunch, unwrapping a plain sandwich. The chatter around her felt like static. She chewed slowly, eyes fixed on the swaying trees outside, when a shadow fell across her desk.
"You're Rumane, right?"
She looked up, startled. A kid stood there—messy blue hair, sharp purple eyes softened by something unspoken. His name was Akio Hukitaske.
Behind him stood two others: Hikata, whose grin looked permanent, and Riki, tall with an aura of delinquent menace that cracked whenever he scratched the back of his head like an embarrassed child.
Rumane's throat tightened. She lowered her gaze back to her sandwich.
Hikata leaned forward. "Hey, don't ignore him! He's harmless. Just looks intense all the time."
Akio sighed, brushing Hikata back. His voice was calm, quiet. "I noticed you're always reading pharmacy books. I... know a little about that."
The word pharmacy pierced her like a shard of glass. Slowly, she lifted her eyes. "You... know about that?"
Akio hesitated. "Not everything. It's strange. Sometimes I forget, like the knowledge is sealed away. But when I'm pushed, when I face it directly... it comes back. It's the only time I feel whole. Like my brain wakes up."
Rumane's heart pounded. His words struck a place she thought was dead. The dam inside her cracked. Before she could stop herself, the words slipped out through the echo of the libary:
"My brother wanted to be a pharmacist too."
The world blurred. The classroom noise dulled, as if all sound had been drawn into herself. She swallowed hard, voice trembling.
"He... he died. In a lab accident. I followed him everywhere. I thought... if I did, I could grow up to be like him. But when he was gone... it felt like the world ended. I stopped... everything. I thought if I talked about him, it would hurt too much. But..."
Her voice faltered. Her hands shook. For years she had buried this confession. And now, with a stranger, it spilled out.
Akio didn't rush to answer. He didn't fill the silence with pity. He simply sat down across from her, meeting her gaze. His eyes were steady, carrying a kind of heaviness she recognized.
"Then maybe," he said quietly, "you're not as alone as you think."
The words lingered. Rumane's heart ached, but for the first time in years, the ache wasn't suffocation—it was release.
Outside, the wind howled. Leaves tore free from the branches, spinning violently through the schoolyard. The sky darkened with the weight of autumn.
And for the first time since her brother's death, Rumane felt the faintest possibility that her story wasn't over.
TO BE CONTINUED...