From the moment they named him, his family had known, through some kind of blood-related intuition, that he was different. He was not named for his father, the way his brother was; he was named for his grandfather, a calm man who had, according to what he gleaned later from his mother, been a perpetual cause of irritation in his father. His name was indistinguishable as having arisen from his father, its origins buried in the dirtied roots of the family tree. He had no real ties to any of their names, their blood by one name - surname - alone. For while he did indeed look like them, with the strangely light eyes of his mother and the strangely pale, pale skin inherited from both of them, he was nothing like them in temperament. He was not their child.

He bred into a Sakakibara; unlike his brother, the glorious child who did no wrong, not ever, he didn't start out in life with the will to fight, to be greater than all others. He wanted simply to stay at home and arrange flowers with the same delicate grace of his mother. Her white fingers, small and slender but nonetheless larger than his, manipulated stems lovingly, stroking along them with the pads of her fingers once they were properly placed.

How he envied her.

Instead of a fragile flower stem, his father thrust a sword into his hands and bade him go with Yoshihiro to learn how it was done. Obediently, he tagged along after his brother and had the first painful lesson of his life. When Yoshihiro beat his tiny, delicate hands into a mass of dark bruises, striking his knuckles again and again till he dropped his sword, he slumped on the ground to cry. Great sobs racked his body, plenty smaller than Yoshihiro's. His brother was ten years old and big for his age, taller than all the boys in the nearby town. Kyo was small and thin, pretty and with the willowy curvature of a girl.

He came to hate looking at his body. Kyo hated himself so deeply that he would run from Yoshihiro whenever it was time for his brother to attempt to teach him with his sharp words. In the beginning, Yoshihiro tried to be kind, quickly losing his patience and beating Kyo into a mottled purple bruise on two staggering feet. Kyo was adequately talented with his sword. Hating it so much as he did, he could never attain more than that.

His second painful lesson, one of the worst of his life, came when he was ten years old. Over the years, his body had not grown more than the barest minimum. Yoshihiro was big, a man. Yoshihiro was tanned and trim, though bulkier than Kyo, with his well-honed muscles. Yoshihiro was always a leap and a bound ahead of him. Kyo, hating himself and resenting his family, tried to run, thinking they would never find him if he escaped. He ran from the house, fumbling his way out the front gates and stumbling into the forest nearby, as yet untamed by the town not far from their house. He tripped over newly sprouting roots, thin and untried as he was. The March rain was coming, pressing him to run on till his legs gave out and he fell panting to his knees, momentarily forgetting that his clothes would be soiled by the forest floor, no longer protected by fallen leaves. Kyo hated to be dirty, and for smudging his clothes with dirt newly dampened by the first droplets of rain, he hated himself more.

A matter of hours later, Yoshihiro found him, huddled against a tree to ward off the rainstorm. He hefted Kyo over his shoulder, kicking and screaming and begging to leave him there, and carried him home to throw him at their father's feet. All the way back, he would pinch and squeeze Kyo's bottom where it was bent over his shoulder, bruised from falling too many times and now bruised from his brother's attention. When he hit the floor before his father, Kyo bit his lip to keep from yelping.

That was the end.

"Where were you? Why did you dare to think, even for a second, that you would be able to get away from here? This is your home! Are you telling your father that you're ungrateful?!"

A foot flew from nowhere, colliding with his jaw. Sprawled across the floor with his wet hair soaking his skin and what little of his clothes had not yet been wet with chilling rain, he began to cry. Really, he should have known better. His father ordered Yoshihiro to do him a favor.

"The cane, boy. I'm going to teach your bitch of a brother a lesson."

Bitch.

Yoshihiro, the good son, the perfect son, fetched the cane and placed the hateful piece of wood in their father's shaking hand. First continuing to jitter with fury, he grabbed Kyo by his long hair to hold him and began to slam the cane down on his stomach and hips. In the haze of his pained unconsciousness, Kyo heard a snap and he fell immediately. He clutched his ruined hip as if it would stop the pain, screaming and begging his father why ("Please, God, why -?") he had done such a thing. It was the first and last time all at once. The answer, frightening as it was to him then and continues to be now, makes perfect sense to explain that temporary lapse in his father's usual feigned ignorance of his presence.

"Justice, Kyotaka. You stupid little cunt."

Cunt. Whore. Slut.

There it was, that name again, combined with the echoes in his mind that are never going to leave him be. Not for the rest of his life. Mysteriously, he wants to hold onto them, pulling them close to remind him why he left. He has to justify everything he has done, and if he does it through them, so be it. He reins in the echoes and lets them hurt him, perhaps more than the beatings and the swearing ever did in the blistering heat of the moment. He knows he deserves it; it is, as his father put it, justice.