All right! Fine! I will take you!—Komachi’s acceptance—Omake

All right! Fine! I will take you!—Komachi’s acceptance—Omake

Warning: Spoilers for chapter seven.

I wake up numb, which isn’t that unusual. Not being able to lift my arms? That catches my attention.

“Finally awake, brother?” The voice is soft, almost cheerful, and I would recognize it anywhere, no matter how much my thoughts seem to be pushing through molasses.

“Sis?” My mouth feels dry, and a spark of effort summons the memory it is associated with: the hospital. Waking up from anesthesia after the accident.

“Yes, it is your loving little sister. Who else would be by your side in the middle of the night?” And there’s sadness there, but I don’t know why—

Oh.

“It was bound to happen, sooner or later.”

“Was it? You are gross, onii-chan. So gross. But that’s always been all right, because your loving little sister would have accepted you no matter what. Ah, I think that earned me a lot of points.”

“You don’t get to win points by insulting me,” I retort, almost automatically, still barely processing the world around me. We are in my room, in the middle of the night, but, beyond that…

“No. No, I guess I don’t… not anymore.” And there goes the sadness again.

“What’s wrong? You can tell your older brother whatever it is.”

Something shifts in the bed and her face appears over mine. Her eyes are blank, drained of that cheerful spark she always shows me, and her mouth is a thin line that bears little resemblance to her expressive, wide smile. It is the first time I have seen my little sister like this, not overflowing with some kind of intense emotion. It is unsettling, completely unlike her, but at the same time, in some distorted way, I can’t help but feel it is…

Genuine.

“Komachi.”

“Onii-chan.”

She leans down and kisses my brow with those lips that lack her warmth and softness. I can’t even comment on it, on the sheer wrongness, because she then slides down and kisses my lips, and anything I would have said is taken away.

“You are so gross, onii-chan. Barely a few days, and you are already two-timing her.”

I can’t even protest my innocence. Her eyes hold me still, a spark of something finally awakening in them.

“But I guess that’s proof she didn’t matter after all. So, I did you a favor.”

And warning alarms that the aftertaste of anesthesia and being unable to move hadn’t yet triggered finally shock me awake at that.

“What have you done?!”

“I got rid of a pest that was sniffing around what is mine,” she says, and something drops down beside my pillow.

Her eyes are closed, her long hair messily covering half her face, and I could almost trick myself into thinking this is what sleeping beside her would have been like: to wake up beside her, to see her restful, sleeping expression. Maybe it would have been.

But my beautiful, older teacher is lacking a certain something at the moment. Namely, everything under the neck.

I start to scream before my little sister covers my mouth with a rag that smells like sterile chemistry and the strength I had been gathering vanishes once more as my thoughts slow down.

“I had to do it, onii-chan. I always thought… always thought if you were happy I could stand being apart from you, but after everything I went through, after everything I did just to be by your side one more year, to have her sweep in just like that and take your innocence away from me… I knew then, onii-chan. I just knew.”

And she kisses me once more, and her lips mix with the drug in numbing my panic and horror.

“So I thought, and thought and thought, but your little sister is a bit dumb, onii-chan, so it took me some time to come to the solution, and when I did… I had to prepare.”

She shifts over me once more and I can feel her weight over my body even as her face disappears from my side and I am left to choose between staring at the ceiling or the severed head of my lover.

“And then I… Well, you have always been gross, onii-chan, even if I never thought it mattered, so… so I thought I could show you. I could show you how much, how utterly your little sister accepts you. And when I did, nothing could ever come between us ever again.”

“You are… You are not well, sis, I never would have abandoned you. I would always have stayed by your side.” And even through the horror, through the numb haze, I know that I am telling the truth. That I would have never parted from my sister. Never.

Not until… this.

“That’s sweet of you to say, onii-chan, but how could your little sister believe you after this? No, no, I had to do it, to make sure. I had to take my onii-chan for myself,. No matter how gross it is.” And the bed shifts once more, as she moves over me, and I can barely feel the ghost of her hands grabbing at my body, moving, taking, for I don’t know how long as I drift in and out of the nightmare and into unconsciousness.

“And now, it is done,” she says, and I can hear the echo of her cheer, of her joy, as her weight rests on me and her face once more appears over mine.

And I see the blood dripping down her chin.

“Ko… Komachi?” And I think… I think it’s not just because of the drugs that I feel so weak, that I feel as though my mind can barely hold on to my last thread of conscious, deliberate thought.

“See, brother? Gross. So utterly gross. The grossest thing you have in your insides. Bur your loving little sister is ready to swallow it, to take you inside her and make you a part of her. Aren’t you happy, onii-chan? Aren’t you glad you will never be apart from me?”

And, as I feel myself drift away for the last time, as I feel the shadows at the edge of my eyes closing in, I don’t look at the head of my lover or at the uninteresting ceiling. No, I look at the sad, little smile of my loving, little sister. I look at usually wide and cheerful lips marred by my blood.

And I am glad.

I am glad, because, even though I will be gone, she won’t be alone.

BAD END

***

“No,” I say, my hands not trembling only because of a titanic (in the sense of giant cannibals) effort of sheer will.

“What? But Komachi worked so hard on this, brother!” she claims, indignation thick in her voice, as if she doesn’t know what she has done wrong.

“Komachi, I am going to burn this.”

“If you want to… But I wrote it on my computer, so it is kind of pointless.”

“Then I am going to burn this, and then I am going to burn your computer.”

“No! It’s saved to the cloud!”

“Are you trying to make this your brother’s supervillain origin story? Is this what you want? To have me devote the rest of my life to destroying every vestige of the information age just so I can rid the world of this abomination?”

“It’s just a composition for my Japanese class! I don’t see why you are taking it so seriously!”

“The little sister character is named Komachi!”

“No, I made sure to edit—I mean, of course she isn’t, there are no names in there.”

“Here, right after the ‘genuine’ line.”

“Oh…” she has the decency to look embarrassed. “Komachi is so sorry, brother, she won’t ever use her name on any self-insert fantasies ever again.”

“So it is a self-insert fantasy!”

“Tee-hee.”

Oh, no, you won’t get out of this just by acting cheekily cute with that biting the tip of your tongue thing and…

What was I so angry about?

Oh, right, the loss of sanity deliberately inflicted on me by these soon-to-be ashes in my hand. I will find the ancestors of the tress you came from and eradicate them. I will inflict such devastation on the eco-sphere as could have only been dreamed by preachy cartoons in the nineties! I will have my vengeance, and it shan’t be eco-friendly!

“Onii-chan, stop staring at my poor composition like that. It’s gross.”

With as grave a calm as I definitely don’t feel (and a full-body shudder I am trying to repress as much as the memory of the past few minutes), I lift my eyes and look straight at Komachi.

“What did you just say?”

“Tee-hee.”

…

Damn. She wins. Again.