dancing on bones (our souls of iolites and emeralds)

Chapter 7

"Even when I detach, I care. You can be separate from a thing and still care about it."

― David Levithan

//

Kusuo has always hated the way he loves.

It's always been all or nothing with him; polite apathy or the willingness to burn the world down to keep a select few people smiling. There's no middle ground with him, as much as he'd like to pretend otherwise.

(He has tried so hard, for so long, to pretend otherwise. He longs for that earlier apathy.)

Kusuo loves the Potter family. He has since...well, maybe not the beginning, but for a while now, and it hurts, because no matter how well things seem to be progressing, no matter how much he watches Sirius reinforce the wards, he knows what is going to happen. From the moment of (not) his body's first birthday, a stopwatch starts ticking in his head, like a ticking time bomb on the verge of going off. And with his existence here throwing off the timeline, he doesn't know if Voldemort will come earlier or later, if he's more paranoid because now there are two of them. They could be dead tomorrow, or in a year, and Kusuo just has to sit with his painful love in his chest, knowing that he might lose them any day now.

(Kusuo loved his siblings, from Before. He only shared parents with one of them, but they were more important to him than any of his blood relations.)

(he misses them he wants to go back he wants to go home -)

His love has always been a wretched thing. Clinging and cloying, always on a knife's edge between devotion and codependency. When he finds something he loves, he wants to dig his fingers in so that it can never be taken from him, because everything was always taken from him Before.

His chance at normalcy.

His childhood friend (that being Akechi).

His self-love.

His life.

It's a song and dance he knows and fears. Looking at his new parents, at Black and Lupin, at his little brother whose power is so similar yet different from his own, there is a possessive sort of love that builds and burns. Kusuo wants to burn the world down preemptively because he can see the axe sitting above each of their heads, waiting for the say-so of some invisible executioner. He wants to douse it all in gasoline and light the match himself before anything can even think of harming what he cares about.

(Kusuo has always hated the way he loves, because love always leaves him empty handed. Polite apathy hurts so much less than the fire that sits in his ribcage.)

//

"Happy birthday, boys! You're a whole year old today, you're getting so big, Lily, our babies are growing up-" And Lily is laughing as her husband starts tearing up. He snaps at her that he's made of stone. She calls him a crybaby. It sounds like Love.

And the day is spent with all of them, Lily and James and Black and Lupin, carrying them all over Godric's Hollow, with its limitless magic on every surface and ocean of pointed hats and birthday wishes on every tongue. They take the twins, to see all of the biggest and most impressive monuments in the village, darting around with speed only mages can achieve, and Harry is giggling and grinning with the kind of vigor that makes Kusuo want to hug him and crush him all at once.

Huh, was that what cuteness aggression felt like? He'd never experienced that before.

And Kusuo misses Before like he's missing all of his organs, but it's not quite agony. He can move past the emptiness in his lungs, because he's enjoying Lupin's dry humor. He can live with the hole in his heart, because Sirius looks so happy every time Kusuo says anything that it spills out and fills him up too.