Chapter Text
Shiyuu and Touya. Touya and Shiyuu. It’s always been just the two of them.
“‘Ya.” Shiyuu lisps, holding up a small white flower, bent at the stem.
“Thanks, ‘Yu.” Touya chirps back, accepting the flower and clumsily weaving it into a small flower crown.
Shiyuu nods, and turns around to continue looking for a nice flower to add to the crown.
Touya focuses on the flower crown, small pudgy hands shoving the stem of the flower into the mess of knots.
He leans back to appreciate his work. A cluster of flowers, half white, half blue.
“‘Ya.” Shiyuu hands Touya a blue flower, and Touya gets right back to work.
It’s a group effort, just as it’s always been.
--*--
Shiyuu pads down the quiet compound halls. It’s in the dark of night and they were hungry. Since Touya was the one who went for food last time, this time is Shiyuu’s turn.
Carefully hidden in the folds of his sleep jinbei is an onigiri wrapped in bamboo leaves. It’s still lukewarm, Shiyuu couldn’t believe his luck when he found it in the kitchen.
He turns the corner--
“What are you doing here?”
Shiyuu stares, horrified at the slippered feet in front of him. A deep voice, withered by smoking. It’s their clan leader.
The clan leader is silent for a moment, before taking a deep breath of his cigarette, Shiyuu can smell the rancid smell when the clan leader breathes out.
“Whatever, go back to your brother.”
Without another prompt, Shiyuu darts down the hallway, nearly slipping with extent of his nerves.
He takes a sneaking glimpse at their clan leader when he turns around another corner.
Eye bags dragging at skin, hair greyed and back bowed. His white eyes were sightless, yet he moved with a certainty that made one doubt his blindness. The Miraiyochi clan leader is 74 this year, the only user of their clan’s Gyokugan in a century. Supposedly, he will be reaching his limit soon, therefore causing the entire clan’s attempts to create another Gyokugan user to become even more frantic.
“What took you so long?” Touya whispers when Shiyuu slides open the door.
“I ran into the clan leader…” Shiyuu hisses, sliding the onigiri out of his jinbei.
“Oh onigiri!” Touya cheers, then pauses halfway in his reaching for the onigiri, “wait clan leader? Are you ok?”
Shiyuu grins, “of course I am, I'm your older brother.”
“Only by 2 minutes.”
“Meaning I'm older.”
“Nuh uh.”
“Yuh uh.”
“Nuh--”
Shiyuu throws the onigiri into Touya’s face, declaring, “I'm the older brother.”
--*--
Shiyuu and Touya, being young children without cursed techniques and therefore not of use to the clan, live in a small hut separated from the main clan compound. They were given a nanny, one with sparse dark hair and timid blue eyes. Her head would lower every time she caught sight of the twins, hands trembling almost imperciably.
Occasionally, a man who called himself their father would come to fetch the woman, and she would return the next day with dark dark eyes.
But she was kind, despite it all. Shiyuu and Touya’s nanny made them food when they were hungry, taught them how to read and write, how to count on their fingers. They still remembered when lightning streaked across the sky and thunder rocked the earth, they trembled beneath their blanket, clutching each other's hands. Nanny would come into their room, voice flat yet gentle, and read them a story about the gods above the sky.
Nanny taught Shiyuu and Touya everything they knew. Even when she flinched when the twins caught her unaware, even when she would occasionally look at their faces with a disgusted gleam in her eyes, she tried desperately.
They gave her one of their carefully crafted flower bracelets. She was kind.
And then she was dead.
Their father moved them closer into the clan compound, a small room in a quiet corner of the estate. One dark night, Shiyuu and Touya sneaked out from their room in search of their missing nanny. How could she be dead, she was kind and gentle, she was… she was their nanny.
They found a corpse, beginning to rot, dumped into a pit of other corpses. She still had a flower bracelet around her wrist, wilted white and purple flowers with blood staining soft petals.
Shiyuu and Touya’s nanny was no longer their nanny. Touya gripped onto his twin’s small hand, feeling a responding grip.
“Let's go back.” Shiyuu said.
And they did.
The corpse stared up at the dark sky, dried tears at the corners of its eyes. Yet it had a smile on its face, a wretched smile of relief.
--*--
The day everything changed was a normal one. Touya and Shiyuu were together, in the estate garden, watching the koi fish.
They had just turned 5 the week before, and the clan had held a big celebration in preparation for their jujutsu techniques to activate. Whether it be the next day or the next year, the Miraiyochi clan cared not, only if they could have an heir.
Touya splashed his feet in the pond, watching the koi fish scutter away from the vibrations of his movement.
There was a white koi fish somewhere in this pond, Shiyuu said he’d seen it once. But Touya hadn’t seen it before, and he really wanted to.
He’s leaning forward on the stone, eyes squinted to see that flash of white--
Everything flashes with a lightning bright light. Pain erupts in his eyes, and Touya screams.
He hears Shiyuu scramble to get to him, but someone else gets there first.
“Touya, hands off. Let me see.” Touya’s absent father orders, hands firm on Touya’s own hands that he’s reached up to try and take the pain away.
He obeys, but he doesn’t open his eyes. There’s a blinding pain, it feels like fire and acid.
“Open.” father orders again, but this time Shiyuu wails.
“Touya is hurt!”
Father ignores Shiyuu in favour of prying Touya’s eyelids open. Touya feels like it’s ripping his skin apart.
Yet father doesn’t care for Touya’s pain, he laughs, elated at the sight he sees. The whites of Touya's eyes were bloodshot, tears streaming down his face. Yet his eyes had turned pure white, and clearly could not track his father’s expressions nor movements. Touya had become blind.
He had gained the Gyokugan.
“Gyokugan.” he whispers the revered word, brushing his calloused fingertips underneath Touya’s eyes.
Then father pauses, hands firming around Touya’s cheeks, “your cursed energy… is too low. This doesn’t make sense… I clearly…”
Shiyuu flinches when father whirls around to stare at him, “... father?”
“Ah,” father says in realisation, “I see. That’s why. I should’ve known. Twins are a curse in our world after all.”
“Tou--!”
Touya reaches forward at the sound of his twin’s distraught voice, but only falls forward and face plants into the grass. He can’t see.
“Shiyuu?” he cries out.
Nobody replies.
Father picks him up, there’s something warm and sticky sticking to Touya’s arms, “come, Touya. The clan will be delighted to see your new technique.”
“What about Shiyuu?”
“You don’t need a brother, Touya. Forget about him.”
And that was that. A heavy weight settles in his core, a weight so terribly unsettling it had to be foreign. An energy that seeps into the pit of his stomach. It makes Touya feel ill, and he wonders what it could be.
He thinks of Shiyuu in his fear.