The morning light came through the window in slow, golden strips.

  I was still holding him.

  I don't know how many minutes had passed. I didn't care. Time had stopped meaning what it usually meant the moment he stepped through that door, and I had no interest in asking it to start again.

  I will never let go.

  The thought arrived with the particur certainty of something that had always been true and was only now being acknowledged out loud, inside, where no one could hear it but me.

  I will never let go of this.

  "It hurts." His voice was small. A subtle shift in his posture, a slight tightening, reminding me of how little of him was left.

  I loosened my grip. Just slightly. Just enough.

  "It's okay." I pressed my cheek against the top of his head. "Noona will take care of you."

  A warmth moved through me like something coming home after a very long absence. Like a room that had been cold for months finally finding its heat again.

  I will turn this.

  Slowly. Gently. I will make him see what I already know.

  That there is no one in this world more suited to him than me.

  That I am the answer to every question his life has ever asked.

  That he doesn't need to look anywhere else because I have always been here and I will always be here and no one will ever love him the way I love him.

  No one.

  Or so I thought.

  The scar in him was deeper than I had understood.

  I watched it reveal itself over the weeks that followed, slowly, the way damage reveals itself in things, not all at once but piece by piece, each new piece worse than the st.

  The fear had taken root somewhere deep inside him and grown in every direction.

  Girls at the grocery store. Girls in the hallway at school. His teachers. The neighbor's daughter who had never done anything to anyone.

  And me.

  The flinching was the worst part.

  The way his body would register my presence before his mind did, pulling slightly away, tightening, going somewhere internal and defended.

  The way he looked at me sometimes with that careful, watchful stillness, as if he was trying to determine whether I was safe.

  As if the question was still open.

  I told myself it wasn't personal. I told myself it was the fear, just the fear, indiscriminate and cruel, applying itself to everything without distinction.

  I told myself that every day for weeks.

  And then one morning I couldn't tell myself anymore.

  "Why are you so fearful of me, Rio?"

  The words came out before I could stop them.

  We were sitting on the sofa, the te morning light filling the room, and he had flinched when I reached past him for the remote and something in me just couldn't hold it anymore.

  Couldn't carry it quietly for one more day.

  "Why do you always pretend I'm not here?" My voice was shaking. I hadn't meant for it to shake. "Do I really not matter to you anymore? After everything. After all of it."

  He looked at me. Something moved through his expression, something complicated and pained, and he pulled his knees slightly toward himself.

  "I'm sorry." His voice was barely there. "I don't know what's happening to me. I'm trying. I promise I'm trying. It's just. I can't control it. I can't."

  "Rio—"

  "Every day I try to be better." He was looking at his hands.

  "But that night just doesn't go away. Those girls." He stopped. Swallowed.

  "They killed Ar—" The name caught in his throat. He had to push past it

  . "Arya. And I couldn't do anything. She was screaming. Even at the end she was begging them to let me go. And I was just." His voice dropped to almost nothing.

  "I was just lying there. Like a coward. Like I was nothing."

  "Rio, stop—"

  "They didn't spare her." The words came out like something bleeding.

  "They didn't. They took." He stopped again. A long silence. The kind that contains something too rge for nguage.

  "They took the st thing I had that was clean. And I've felt dirty every day since. Like something that should be thrown away."

  I crossed the distance between us without thinking.

  My arms around him. My fingers moving through his hair, slow and steady, the way you touch something you're afraid of losing. The way you try to pull grief out of a person through your hands.

  "No." The word came out firm. Final.

  "You are not dirty. You are my Rio. Whatever happened to you, whatever they did, you are still my Rio. You will always be my Rio."

  My voice cracked somewhere in the middle and I let it.

  "I will never leave you. Do you understand that? You are my everything. My only thing. I cannot live in a world where you are not okay."

  He didn't say anything. He let me hold him, which was something, which was more than he had given me in weeks, and I held on with everything I had.

  And then, in the warm quiet of that morning, with the light sitting golden on the floor and his breathing slow against my shoulder, the thing I had been holding inside me for years simply came open.

  Not a decision. Not a choice. Just a door that had been holding for a very long time finally giving way.

  "I love you, Rio."

  The words fell into the quiet of the room and didn't come back.

  "Not like a sister."

  I pulled back just enough to see his face, needing him to understand, needing him to hear exactly what I was saying.

  "I love you with every part of me. Every single part. I want to grow old with you. I want every morning and every evening and everything in between. I want a life with you. I want to build something with you that belongs only to us."

  Silence.

  The sunlight held its position on the floor. The room didn't move.

  "I can't hold it anymore. I've been holding it for so long and I can't. Please don't push me away. Please."

  Rio was looking at me.

  His face had gone through several things in the space of a few seconds, I watched each one arrive and leave. Fear. Confusion. Something distant and retreating. All the things I had been dreading and none of them surprised me and all of them hurt anyway.

  He shifted. Pulling himself out of my arms, creating distance, putting space between us with the deliberate careful movement of someone who is trying very hard not to hurt someone while also not being able to give them what they want.

  No. Please. Not this.

  "Sia." His voice was gentle in the specific way that gentleness is sometimes the hardest thing to receive. "I don't know what to say. But I'm your brother. I can't. I just. I don't know how to."

  His face had gone red. The blush moving up from his neck, his eyes unable to quite meet mine.

  "I know what you're thinking."

  The words came out faster now, falling over themselves.

  "Mom will protest. The world will say what it says. But if we go away, somewhere no one knows us, I will protect you from everything. I promise. I will never let anyone come near you. We could just. We could just be us. Couldn't we just be us."

  "Please, Sia." His voice was quiet. "I can't do this."

  "Why?" The word came out louder than I intended.

  He flinched.

  The flinch hit me somewhere I didn't have armor.

  "Do you like someone else? Am I not enough? After everything, after my whole life, am I still not enough for you?"

  He had pulled himself to the other end of the sofa. His body small and closed, arms wrapped around himself, the posture of someone who is trying to take up less space.

  I moved toward him.

  "Please, Sia." His voice was very quiet now. Very careful. "I love you. But as my sister. I don't have those feelings. I can't. You are my sister."

  "Why." I was crying now, fully, without hiding it. "You talk to other girls. You smile at them. You care about them. But I have been here. My whole life I have been here. I have given you everything. Everything I had."

  Something broke loose inside me.

  "You are mine."

  The words came out from somewhere beneath rational thought, from somewhere that had been building for years without my permission.

  "I won't lose you again. Not like st time. Not like that night. You are mine and I will not let you go. You have to love me. You have to. You will."

  I don't remember the exact moment.

  I remember reaching for him. I remember his shoulders under my hands. I remember the distance between us colpsing and then there was no distance and my lips found his and the world on the other side of that moment ceased to exist entirely.

  Finally.

  The word moved through me like the first breath after being underwater too long.

  Finally finally finally

  He was resisting. I felt it. The tension in his body, the muffled sound against my mouth, his hands trying to find purchase against me.

  Why are you resisting.

  Don't you feel this.

  Don't you feel what I feel

  You will. I know you will. Just give it time.

  just let it happen. Just stop fighting what we already are.

  I pressed closer. His chest against mine. His breathing short and broken and his hands pushing and his body saying everything I was refusing to hear.

  "Don't," he managed. Just the one word. Muffled. Barely there.

  I pulled back from his mouth. Kept everything else close.

  "Don't resist." My voice came out softer than I expected. Almost gentle. "I promise you'll understand. You're confused. That's all. Those girls, the ones who hurt you, they think they can cim you. They can't. No one can cim you. You are mine to cim. You have always been mine."

  "Please, Sia." His voice broke completely. A thin, fractured thing. "Please don't do this. You and Mom are the only thing I have left. The only thing. Please don't take that from me. Please don't destroy it. I'm begging you."

  His tears arrived warm against my skin.

  I felt them.

  I felt them and I held the feeling of them and I told myself it was necessary. That he would understand ter. That this was for us, for the life I had already decided we were going to have, and that the pain of now would dissolve into something else once he understood.

  I told myself that.

  "Don't worry." I pressed my lips to his temple. His cheek. The corner of his jaw. "We'll go far away. Somewhere no one knows our names. And we'll be happy. I promise you we'll be happy. I have enough happiness for both of us."

  He wanted to say something more.

  I didn't let him.

  I don't know how many hours passed.

  Time had stopped moving in any direction I could track. The room existed. The light changed across the floor, shifting from morning gold to the ft pale of afternoon, telling its own story about how long we had been here that I wasn't paying attention to.

  At some point I became aware of the clock.

  Five p.m.

  I surfaced from wherever I had been and looked at it and the number sat in my mind for a moment before meaning anything.

  Five.

  I looked at Rio.

  He had gone still at some point without me noticing.

  His eyes were closed.

  His breathing slow and even, the breathing of someone whose body had simply given out, too exhausted to remain conscious, sleep arriving not as rest but as escape.

  His face in sleep had a quality I couldn't look away from. Something that still resembled the boy I had grown up with, something that hadn't been ruined yet, something that was still soft under everything that had hardened.

  Mine, something said, from the pce inside me that never stopped saying it.

  Look at you. Still mine. Whatever happens, still mine.

  I watched him sleep.

  The afternoon light moved across him slowly, touched his face and left it, moved on.

  The room was very quiet. The house was very quiet.

  Everything was quiet except the thing inside me that was never quiet, that had never once in my life been quiet, that had been saying his name since before I understood what I was saying.

  I won't push further today.

  The thought arrived with a patience I didn't know I possessed until this moment.

  I'll wait. I know how to wait.

  I have been waiting for years and I can wait longer.

  I'll cim you slowly.

  The way seasons cim things. The way water cims stone. Without asking. Without hurrying. Until there's nothing left of you that doesn't carry the shape of me.

  No one will come between us.

  Not Mom.

  Not the world.

  Not the girl in his dreams whose face I haven't seen yet but whose existence I have felt for years like a splinter under my skin.

  No one.

  I reached out and moved a strand of hair from his face.

  He didn't stir.

  And you will be mine.

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  AnnouncementHere's an illustration of Sia. If you wanna see more illustrations you can unlock the chapters in the following link. I will be posting illustrations with every chapter there

  Link to the story