Chips And Lies

The white bandage hid Aoi's swollen left eye, but her good one looked straight down into Ren's hollow unblinking face.

She looked at the sharp line of his jaw, the jaw he'd gotten from their father, the same face that used to grin at her across the tatami in their grandmother's house in Kyoto before the world burned away. 

She looked at the pomade still holding his hair in place even now, and the tailored collar of his tunic soaked black, and the hand flung out beside him with its fingers curled around nothing.

The tears she'd shed on the deck of the Wanderer-7 had all been cried out of her. 

What was left was dry and cold, burned down to the bitter truth of what the two of them had built between them over ten years of neglect and guilt and pride.

'You were my little brother,' she thought. 'And you would have sold every one of us…'