The slums drowned in dusk again, the air thick with smoke and rot.
Shiro sat hunched over his carvings, chisel biting into the plank, when the scrape of boots broke the silence. He didn't flinch this time. He knew the rhythm.
Kuro strolled in, storm grey eyes sweeping the shack with that same brittle smirk. Valeria followed, but tonight she carried more than parchment. A satchel bulged with jars, salves, and cloth.
Shiro blinked.
"What's all that?"
Valeria's calm voice answered.
"Medicine. Supplies. Things your sister needs."
Aki pushed herself upright, coughing, her mask firmly in place. Outwardly calm, even faintly courteous. But her eyes sharpened, iron beneath the frailty.
"Why?" she rasped. "I don't need your pity. This is a trinket to a chain. I take it, and I'll be chained."
Valeria froze, the words striking deep. She had heard them before, from Kuro. Everything to him had a price. Every kindness was a favour, every favour a debt. Aki's suspicion mirrored his own scars. Ignoring her resistance, Valeria pressed forward. She applied the salve to Aki's back. Her breath hitched. Beneath the ragged cloth, Aki's skin bore stars scars, constellations sprawling across her shoulders. And in the centre, Polaris, the pole star, dominating, guiding. Valeria's hand lingered, but she said nothing. She pressed the salve gently, deciding against questions.
Aki hissed, trying to pull away.
"I refuse. I won't owe you. You think you can buy your way into this shack?" Aki's voice didn't rise, it sharpened, a blade drawn in the dark. The courtesy was gone, stripped away by a surge of raw, defensive fury. She shoved Valeria's hand away, the jar of salve clattering to the floor. "You bring your oils and your cloth and your noble pity into my home and think it makes you good? It makes you arrogant."
Valeria didn't recoil. She stood her ground, her calm a wall against the storm.
"It is not pity."
"It's always pity!" Aki spat, her body trembling not from weakness now, but from rage. "Or it's debt. Or it's a trap. Nothing is free. Not here. Not from people who smell of soap and wear boots that don't leak. You walk in here with your clean hands and your full belly and you think you're sharing? You're performing. For him." She jerked her chin toward Kuro, who had fallen silent, his storm grey eyes wide. "So he can play at being kind. So he can feel less guilty about his silk shirt while my brother's ribs show through his skin."
"Aki" Shiro started, but she cut him off with a look that could freeze fire.
"You stay out of this! You don't know what this is!" She turned back to Valeria, her breath coming in sharp, painful gasps. "I've seen your kind. You come with gifts and leave with pieces of people. You take their dignity, their secrets, their silence. You wrap a chain in wool and call it a blanket. Well I don't want your wool. I don't want your medicine. I want you to take your pretty boy and your clean conscience and get out of my house."
The shack rang with the echo of her words. Valeria slowly bent and picked up the jar, her movements deliberate. When she spoke, her voice was low, stripped of all warmth.
"I have buried children," she said, each word a nail driven into the silence. "In grounds far from here, under skies you've never seen. I have held the hands of boys like your brother while they bled out from cuts given to them by men like the one who rules this city. I do not perform kindness. I remember it. It is a ghost I carry. And when I see a ghost of it in others, in a boy who carves stars wrong, in a girl who fights to breathe, I feed it. Not for debt. Not for guilt. Because if I don't, the ghost dies. And then I am just a woman with clean hands and a hollow chest. Is that what you want? For me to be hollow? It would certainly be easier for you."
Aki stared at her, the fire in her gut guttering against the cold, stark truth in Valeria's eyes. The anger didn't leave, but it morphed, twisting into something more complex, a recognition of a different kind of survival.
"Let me apply the salve," Valeria said, not asking this time. "Let the ghost breathe. Just for tonight."
The words cut through Aki's mask. Reluctantly, she let the salve sink into her skin. Her breath eased. For the first time in cycles, her voice came clear.
Hours bled away. The candle guttered, shadows stretched. Shiro and Kuro argued over Altair's tilt, over Alcyone's crown, their passion raw and childish, but real. For the first time in forever, Shiro felt like he had a friend. Not someone who mocked him for being different, but someone who shared the same obsession. He clung to it, and Kuro did too, both boys carving crooked stars as if they were lifelines.
"Your line's still crooked," Kuro muttered, not looking up from the plank where Shiro was etching Cygnus.
"Says the boy who called Polaris a traitor," Shiro shot back, but there was no heat in it. "Why do you even care if my stars are wrong?"
Kuro was quiet for a long moment, his chisel hovering.
"Because yours are allowed to be wrong," he finally said, his voice barely above the whisper of the candle. "Mine have to be perfect. Always. Perfect angles, perfect alignments, perfect meaning. A perfect little map of a perfect little cage."
Shiro paused, studying him.
"You keep calling it a cage. You have food. Walls. A roof that doesn't leak."
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
"A roof that listens," Kuro corrected, his storm grey eyes flicking up. "Walls that report. Food that comes with a list of expectations longer than my arm." He set his chisel down with a sharp click. "You carved Altair wrong because you didn't know better. I have to carve it wrong on purpose just to feel like I chose the mistake. Do you understand how pathetic that is? To have to rebel against your own star charts?"
Shiro didn't. The concept was alien. His rebellions were concrete: stealing an extra crust, staying out past curfew, carving stars instead of sleeping.
"So... you come here to carve wrong stars with me?"
"I come here," Kuro said, leaning forward, "to remember what it's like before they tell you what the stars mean. Before they turn the sky into a ledger. You look up and you see... possibilities. Even if they're scary. I look up and I see... instructions." He picked up Shiro's misshapen Cygnus carving. "This is ugly. It's unbalanced. The wings are lopsided. It's the most beautiful thing I've seen all week."
Shiro blinked, thrown.
"You're cracked broken."
"Probably," Kuro agreed, a real, unguarded smile touching his lips for a fraction of a second. "But I'm cracked in a room where no one is going to measure the cracks and tell me how to fill them. That's... that's something."
They fell into silence, the only sound the scratch of chisels. After a while, Shiro asked, "Do you have friends? Where you live?"
Kuro's smirk returned, brittle as glass.
"I have acquaintances. I have allies. I have rivals. I have servants. I have a tutor who counts my breaths to make sure I'm not wasting them." He looked at Shiro. "I don't have anyone who argues with me about the bend in a star's tail just for the sake of arguing. Until now."
Shiro felt that strange warmth in his chest again. It was uncomfortable, like a muscle he'd never used.
"Well," he grumbled, "your Alcyone still looks like a squashed spider."
Kuro's laugh was short, genuine.
"And your Polaris looks like it's drunk. We're a pair, aren't we?"
"It seems so"
As time droned into the day Valeria teased Kuro constantly, tugging his cheek when his tongue slipped into curses.
"That's no way for a noble to speak," she scolded, laughing softly.
Kuro elbowed her, muttering about his dignity, but his storm grey eyes softened under her correction. Aki and Valeria spoke in low tones, testing each other. Aki's suspicion was iron, but Valeria's calm was unyielding. Slowly, the conversation shifted. Not trust, not yet, but something closer to recognition.
As night fell, Valeria packed her satchel. She left a jar of salve and a vial of medicine with Shiro, showing him how to apply it. He catalogued every step, memorising the motions.
"Your sister needs this," Valeria said firmly. "Remember."
She placed a thick woollen blanket across Aki and Shiro's pallets.
"So you aren't dead by tomorrow," she joked, laughing.
Kuro joined in, his brittle smirk cracking into something warmer, before his tongue slipped again in a curse. Valeria pinched his cheek once more, correcting him with affectionate irritation.
At the door, Valeria bowed.
"We'll be back. Possibly tomorrow."
Aki gave her thanks, voice hesitant.
Valeria shook her head.
"No need to thank me. Thank you, for giving us a place that isn't suffocating, a place not watched by judging eyes."
With that, she led Kuro into the shadows. The door shut. The silence they left behind was different, charged, fragile.
Shiro turned on Aki, the warm feeling curdling into defiance.
"You didn't have to shout at her."
Aki didn't look at him. She was tracing the edge of the new blanket.
"Yes, I did."
"Why? She was helping. Kuro was... he was just being here."
"Being here is the most dangerous thing they can do!" Aki's head snapped up, her eyes fierce. "Don't you see? Every visit is a footprint. Every kindness is a marker. They are marked, Shiro. Not by us, by something else. Something that has enemies in high places. Enemies with long knives and short tempers."
"That's not true," Shiro insisted, but his voice wavered. "Valeria hates the King. She said so. She's protecting Kuro from someone."
"And what do you think happens when that someone finds out where his property has been wandering? Where he's been leaking secrets and making friends?" Aki's laugh was bitter. "Powerful men don't send polite notes. They send men with hammers. And they don't just break the thing that wandered off, they burn the whole neighbourhood to send a message. We are not people in that story. We are kindling. And kindling gets burned."
"You're wrong about Kuro," Shiro said, stubborn, his fists clenched. "He's not property. He's not a thing. He's... he listens. He argues with me, not at me. He doesn't look at me like I'm dirt or a rat or a tool. He looks at me like I'm... a person. When has anyone my age here ever done that?"
The question hung in the air, stark and undeniable. In Higaru, Shiro was a body to be used, a pair of hands, a potential thief, a drain on resources. He was never just a boy. Aki's expression softened, but it was the softness of a grave.
"Oh, little brother," she sighed, the fight leaving her. "That's what makes it so cruel. The most dangerous cages are the ones that feel like friendship. When he's gone, and he will be gone, pulled back into whatever storm follows him, you'll be left here. With a handful of wrong stars and a heart that's learned how to ache for something it can't keep."
Shiro felt her words like physical blows, each one landing on a fear he'd been smothering with hope.
"It's not a fake, it can't be..." he whispered, more to himself, clinging to the memory of Kuro's focused frown, his genuine laugh.
Aki looked at him, her eyes full of a sadness too old for her face.
"That's exactly what makes you na?ve. The most convincing traps aren't built with lies. They're built with truths you're starving for."
Shiro sat beside her, parchment heavy at his hip, carvings jagged on the plank. He didn't care. For the first time, he felt something real. Something that wasn't cold. And he hoped his sister would accept it too.
The candle finally died. Moonlight, thin and grudging, filtered through the cracks in the wall, painting silver lines on the floor like fallen starlight. Aki lay under the new blanket. It was heavy. It was warm. It smelled faintly of herbs and a wood fire, a scent that had no place in Higaru. It was the most tangible lie she'd ever been told.
"Shiro," she whispered into the dark.
"Hm?"
"The salve... it helps."
He didn't answer for a long time.
"I know."
"It doesn't mean I trust her."
"I know that, too."
Another silence, filled with the distant, ever present groan of the slums.
"The boy," Aki said, the words dragged out of her. "Kuro. He looks at you... like you're a puzzle he can't solve. Not like you're dirt."
Shiro rolled onto his side, facing her pallet.
"Is that bad?"
"It's dangerous," she said automatically, but the edge was gone. It was just a fact now, hanging in the cold air. "Puzzles get solved. Or they get thrown away."
"Maybe he won't," Shiro murmured, his voice thick with sleep and stubborn hope.
Aki didn't argue. She pulled the foreign blanket up to her chin. The warmth was a traitor, seeping into her bones, easing the constant ache. It felt like a memory of a mother she'd lost. A ghost, just as Valeria had said. She thought of Valeria's hands, steady, capable, scarred. Not a noble's hands. A soldier's hands. Hands that buried children. The hatred in her voice when she spoke of the King was too old, too worn, to be fake. It was a hatred carved into the spine.
Maybe, Aki thought, the concession feeling like a defeat and a relief all at once, maybe the chain is already around their necks too. And they're just sharing the weight.
It wasn't trust. It was a calculation. A risk assessed in the dark. The blanket was warm. Her breath came easier. For tonight, the ghost could stay.
"Go to sleep, Shiro," she whispered.
And for the first time in a long time, she did not dream of stars as anchors, but of a heavy, woollen sky, holding the cold at bay, if only for a night.
Will Aki Warmup To Kuro and Valeria?
