My Brother, My Keeper

Goodbye, see you later

Astra isn't doing great, Touya had deconstructed the bed into a fort of sorts and kept an ice chest with cool but not too cold washcloths in their room. In addition to that he has just resigned himself to skipping school he told the teachers that his little sister was sick, so his assignments get dropped off at the house for him to do. But even with constant attention, there's no getting around the nasty scars the burns are going to leave or the mental problems she hasn't seen Shoto in over a week and it shows.

 She's also very prone to randomly getting overstimulated he's tried to bring it up to Mom only to be met with willful ignorance and her saying it'll be fine, bringing it up with the old man only brings shouts of worthless, useless, and threats of being disowned. But this can't keep going much longer it's not healthy staying in the same room for nearly two weeks checked out of reality to make matters even worse she will occasionally flinch as if she's been struck and Touya just isn't sure what to do. He'd gone to shower and then walked back into the room.

"Hey, Astra I'm back, you hungry?" There isn't a response, so he walks over kneeling and gently grabbing her hand to get her attention. Astra looks up at him and he repeats his question.

"You hungry?" Astra shakes her hand from side to side in a gesture that indicates sort of.

"Hmm, you wanna tell me what sort of means or do I need to guess?" Astra pauses momentarily then clears off a patch of floor for her to tap on tapping out what she wants to say.

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"So solids are a no, if I make you a smoothie will you drink it?" Another pause before she nods shifting around and wincing Touya looks at the time realizing why she seems so uncomfortable.

"Oh shit, I'm so sorry I forgot pain meds that can't feel good I'll make a smoothie and get some pain meds for you how is the pain by the way? On a scale of one to ten." Astra closes her eyes for a moment then taps out her answer.

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"Well, I'm glad it's gone down just try and relax as much as you can I'll be back soon." Touya slips out of the room. As Touya leaves the room Astra does her best to stay calm but it's impossible that second pounding heartbeat refuses to go away and it's thudding loudly once more accompanied by the smell of fire and the sounds of heavy breathing it's getting to be too much again, so she uses the trick Touya had taught her to ground herself pressing each finger to her thumb methodically luckily it works.

When she's fully grounded Touya is sitting looking at her holding a smoothie and two pills. When did he get back? She glances around eyes landing on the clock it had been almost an hour, but there's no way that much time had passed right? She doesn't like losing time. She absolutely hates blinking only to find that a significant chunk of time has passed it's not fair! Why can't she just be normal?! Astra shakes her head to clear her thoughts, that's a bad rabbit hole to go down she scolds herself mentally. She taps out a careful pattern on the floor.

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"Yeah, you were pretty out of it, more of the weird flashes I'm guessing?" Astra nods and reaches out for him to hand her the smoothie and pills Touya carefully watches and hands her a napkin when a bit of the smoothie lands in her lap. She's messy getting a large amount of the viscous liquid on her face which makes Touya laugh.