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When Yukio was young, he told himself stories. They were short tales, childish and mundane, starring two little boys with dark hair and light eyes who lived in a thatched cottage backed by a glorious garden and went on all sorts of adventures. They bought candy and rode bikes and climbed trees, taught their dog to do tricks. Their days were long and bright; their nights were quiet and warm.
Rin said they were boring.
"But then what?" He would ask, sprawled out on Yukio's bed with his bare feet hung out over the edge in a way Yukio couldn't stand, but had stopped complaining about. Monsters danced around his toes, scattered like galaxies expanding whenever he kicked his feet. "Aren’t they ever going to do something?”
“What do you mean?” Yukio asked, “They do things all the time! They weeded the garden, remember? A-and picked up the groceries and got rid of the snails. They even s-saved that snake, remember?”
“Baby stuff.” Rin declared and reached up a hand to trace his name on the ceiling. Yukio never did that. There were faces there, sleeping in the wood grain; if you woke them they would whisper and moan.
“They should do something cool! Like, um, hmm…" Rin's finger circled an eye, swept a jawline, tripped over a nose. Yukio hid a grimace in the crook of his elbow. "I got it! They can go on an adventure and find a lion that’s caught in a trap and they save it and make friends. And, uh… And it goes home with them! Then they join the circus and they're super famous and travel everywhere on a big old train! Wouldn’t that be great?”
Yukio frowned.
There were no lions in town, only the snake and the snails and a big mean toad. The boys would have to travel to the outlying mountains, which were far and cold and dangerous.
Rin didn’t care. “What’s some mountains? Just dirt and rocks, we can handle dirt and rocks, c’mon.”
“But their mommy and daddy would miss them.” Yukio argued, and Rin rolled his eyes theatrically.
“Probably they won’t even notice. Probably they’ll be glad for a break.”
“They'd miss them,” Yukio insisted, “and they would be worried, because they love them.”
"Hmph. Only 'cause they're dumb little goody-goodies who always follow the rules and never do anything cool." Rin pressed his knuckles against the ceiling. One of the faces, half awake, licked at his fingers. "They should at least save people or fight monsters or something.”
"There’s no such thing as monsters," Yukio said reflexively, the lie so well-practiced it didn't even feel like a lie.
“Uh-huh, then why are you always jumping at shadows?” Rin scrubbed his hand against the rough wood, breaking old scabs, and more of the faces came awake. Their pale papery tongues lolled from their mouths, lapping at the blood.
"I don't know." Yukio said, and it was the truth. Seeing monsters hadn't made him a coward, it just made it more obvious. If it were Rin who saw them, he wouldn’t be afraid. He'd probably stay up all night talking to the ceiling, feeding it peanut butter crackers and mochi. “Guess I’m just a scaredy-cat, like you say." And then: "Why do you always get into fights?”
Rin winced. "I dunno." He dropped his hand, dragged it across his chest to twist into the fabric of his pajama shirt. The tongues followed, hanging down like streamers, not quite long enough to reach. "It just happens. I get mad, everything goes white, and then…” he sighed, the breath gusting out of him, “Well, you know.”
“Yes,” Yukio echoed, and reached for his brother's bleeding hand, suddenly sorry, “I know.”
About the only stories they could agree on were the ones about the dog. Rin still asked too many questions: What kind of dog? What color? Did it fetch? Did it bark all night and dig up the garden like Dad said dogs did? Could it pull a sled?
But these were questions Yukio was prepared to answer: a shiba-inu, orange and white and cream, and he could fetch anything and everything. He never barked, unless it was an emergency, and he didn't dig, unless he saw a gopher, and he wasn't big enough to pull a sled, but he could haul a wagon all day long. His name was Coco.
He had the softest ears and the sweetest eyes and he slept on their bed, laid across the boys’ legs like a second blanket and then licked them awake in the morning.
The three of them went on children’s adventures together - the sort Yukio liked best, nothing scary, nothing strange - delivering newspapers and flying kites and playing in the sprawling garden Yukio sometimes saw in his dreams. Rin seasoned them with excitement - sudden storms and wild animals, strange favors from old ladies and talking beasts that always made Yukio a little uncomfortable.
“We shouldn’t, Rin, they’re strangers!”
“Only 'til we get to know them!”
But time ran on. Christmas came and went, another year with no puppy beneath the tree, and now the boys were old enough to know there never would be. Santa wasn’t real - of course not, thought Yukio, didn't that just figure? - and a poor monastery was no place for a dog. The adventures of Coco became first too painful, and then too frivolous. Yukio began training to be an exorcist, Rin’s Bs turned to Cs and then D's. They learned to sleep the night through in their own beds. They grew up and apart.
By the time he was nine, Yukio’s bedtime stories weren’t about two boys anymore. Instead one child - dark hair, light eyes- trained and studied and learned magic in a sprawling backyard garden full of dark spaces. The odd grandmothers he and Rin used to do odd jobs for needed a different kind of help now. Storybook Yukio drove demons from their pantries, exorcized haunted sewing machines, fixed the occasional squeaky door - sometimes ghosts were nothing more than rusty hinges. He stopped talking to the raccoons and the foxes and the snakes. Talking animals were possessed. Making conversation with them was dangerous.
Then they weren't even stories - just half-remembered dreams and midnight conversations where Yukio did all the voices. “Crybaby, four-eyes, chicken, scaredy-cat, wimp,” he would repeat, first as Shura, then his brother, then a classmate or one of his tutors, a stranger on the bus, the lady at the grocery store. It let him practice grace, patience, restraint, and helped him learn not to cry. He stopped flinching. He stopped apologizing. He got older and stronger and slept less and less.
But in every epic there are set-backs. Yukio’s first came shortly after his thirteenth birthday. He had passed his certification exam. He had officially become an exorcist. And then he met Shiemi Moriyama.
Until her, his world had boiled down to Rin, his father, the monks, and demons. Everything else was background noise. But Shiemi was different. She made him feel different. He wanted her to like him. He wanted to impress her. He wanted.
He dreamt that night, in the brilliant sort of technicolor he associated with Rin, but he knew it was the girl’s fault.
He found himself in the cottage of his childhood stories, it's ridiculous thatched roof fresh and sweet smelling. His bicycle, candy apple red, sat by the back door. His jacket hung on a coat rack. Somewhere in the background he heard the echo of his twin puttering around - rattling pots and pans like a poltergeist. He wondered if his father was home, here in his simulacrum of a perfect life, or the mystery mother he had imagined, but never been able to see.
He slipped out the back door before he could find out, waded through the tall grass and out past the pond - full of fat whiskered koi that he had always been afraid of. He remembered Rin asking if they granted wishes, but not how he answered. The sun warmed his back. The wind whispered through the grass. A voice called his name. Beneath the surface of the water, a koi fish twisted and spun.
From the house, he heard Coco bark, and it hurt in a way he had never felt before - worse than banged shins, scraped palms, bruised pride. He sank to his knees in the long grass and put his hands over his ears.
When he finally woke, the horizon glowed with early morning sun and his eyes were wet.
It hit him like opioid withdrawal.
Feelings blunted by years of carefully cultivated neglect were suddenly back online.
He was afraid again: of making a mistake, of looking foolish, of falling short of his own expectations. He was lonely, uncertain, nostalgic. His chest hurt at odd intervals, and more than once he woke from a sound sleep sweat soaked and gasping, while his heart raced.
For the first time in his life he understood why people killed themselves. The thrill of Shiemi’s company, the comfortable warmth of his brother’s side, the spark of satisfaction he felt whenever he managed to do something better than Shura, weren’t worth the clammy hands and panic attacks, the sleepless nights and unrelenting anxiety.
In the end, he had to rebuild himself piece by piece. He wasn't a little boy anymore, afraid of the darkness at the edge of his bed - head full of a person he couldn't be, a life he didn't have, a place that didn't exist. There were no stories this time. Instead, he tackled it like an exorcist and wrung the weakness out bare-handed. He replaced love with resentment, fear with duty, feelings with manners, and met pain with pain. If he couldn’t make it stop, then he would learn to like it. “Stand up, four-eyes,” he told himself, in all the voices that he knew, “look forward, do better, you sniveling little chicken-shit.”
Yukio the Exorcist did not dream, or tell stories, or make wishes on make-believe goldfish. He made good grades, instead. He was dependable and considerate and reliably boring. He was friendly, though he didn’t have friends, and he was fit, if not handsome. He wasn’t cool, but he was better than nearly everyone at nearly everything and that was almost as good. He could breathe evenly and control the pounding of his heart and lie with a straight face.
He aced the True Cross entrance exam. He earned a scholarship. He packed up his side of the room. Meanwhile, his brother the not-demon made breakfast and dinner between fist fights and detention, gave up on the idea of a higher education, and roundly failed to apply himself. They were less like twins and more like roommates.
Yukio the Exorcist didn’t mind.
Then Shiro died.
Setbacks.
The really frustrating thing was that Yukio could have weathered the death of his father. He loved the man, but Yukio had been practicing compartmentalization for the better part of a decade. He knew how to put pain in a box and shelve it. The problem was that every time he looked up there was One. More. Thing.
Rin had awakened as a demon. Shiemi joined True Cross Academy. Yukio was suddenly a teacher, with lesson plans and grading and constant unwanted interaction with people his own age. Rin was in very real danger from too many sides to count, a fact his older brother seemed utterly oblivious to. Shura was back, looking over Yukio’s shoulder. His eyes went funny. The Illuminati was a thing. Misumi died.
It upset his fragile equilibrium. He began to leak around the edges.
He tried to fix it. Really he did, but nothing seemed to do the trick. Discipline didn’t work; lies didn’t work; work didn’t work, and when he had tried to talk himself around… he said strange things.
"They're trying to make you look like a fool," he ended up muttering to himself over his reports at night, sitting at his desk in the dark, "they want you to fail. They're all laughing at you. Everyone knows there's something wrong with you, they just aren't sure what."
Then he went and jumped off a building, nearly shot himself in the head. So it seemed the illustrious “they” were right on that score. There was definitely something wrong with him.
He just didn't know what to do about it. It had been such a gradual erosion, he couldn't even say when it started. After Kyoto? Before Inari? There was no one to ask. The only person who understood him was a monster, and dead now besides.
As for his coworkers, his friends and family, they didn't even know him. It wasn’t their fault. They had tried. It was just that there just wasn’t anyone to know.
Yukio didn’t exist. He was all made up: a storybook hero. A child's idea of the perfect exorcist.
And now even that was breaking down, his binding snapped, his pages falling out every which way. He could feel them, crinkling and cracking and coming off in his hands, like that dream everyone has about their teeth falling out.
It didn’t matter. He didn’t need to last much longer.
The engines of the Dominus Liminis sputtered. Sirens began to wail. Yukio picked up a length of rebar - no, it was an enormous eye bolt, how fitting, how apropos - and settled the flat end against his cheek.
“It’s your own fault.” He reminded himself, in a voice that was just his own, “You knew better than to talk to demons.”
He was the only one he had ever really listened to anyway.