Gina pulled him inside and shut the door behind them with the kind of finality that meant she had things to say and had every intention of saying all of them.

She turned to face him.

Four years. That was how long they had been doing this, patching together a life from whatever was available. Two orphans who had found each other at the age when finding someone who didn’t leave felt like the most important thing in the world. They had grown up side by side and learned to fend for themselves side by side and eventually scraped together enough between them to afford this house, which was structurally questionable but theirs, and a life that was meager but functioning.

Gina had been the one who kept things organised. Who set the rules and enforced them, who made sure Yuto ate when he forgot, who made the fragile architecture of their arrangement hold together through sheer consistency. She was younger than him and had never once behaved like it.

He thought of her as a little sister.

That was what he told himself, reliably and often, every time she stood close enough that he could feel the warmth of her, every time she laughed and the sound of it rearranged his thoughts without his permission, every time she looked at him and he had to find something else to look at quickly. Little sister. He applied the label carefully and consistently.

It didn’t really work. But he kept trying.

"You went into the Astral Realm," she said, and her voice had the particular quality it got when she was managing something stronger than she wanted to show. "With no preparation. No rest. On the day you awakened."

She looked at him steadily. "What if something had happened?"

"I knew nothing would happen," Yuto said.

"You knew." She breathed. "How could you possibly have known that?"

"Because of him," Yuto said, and summoned Shiny.

The air shifted and then Shiny was simply there, standing in the middle of their small front room with his usual expression, which was no expression at all, occupying the space with the same quiet absolute presence he always carried.

Gina made a sound and stepped back. "Why is there another person in our house?"

"He’s not a... he is a person, but." Yuto ran a hand through his hair. "My awakening was unusual. I got blessed by the Summoner God. Which means instead of beasts I summon humans. Or people like him." He nodded at Shiny. "And he’s considerably stronger than me, so I felt confident going in. I wasn’t being reckless. I had a very capable escort."

Gina looked at Shiny for a long moment. Then she looked back at Yuto. Her expression moved through several positions before settling somewhere that was reluctant but marginally satisfied.

"Fine," she said. "You’re off the hook."

Yuto accepted this with appropriate gravity.

She had already turned toward Shiny, moving closer with the particular focused curiosity she brought to things that genuinely interested her. She looked him over carefully, his face, his bearing, the quality of his stillness, and reached out to touch his arm the way you’d check whether something was real.

"So this is a summon," she said, mostly to herself. Then, with complete sincerity: "He’s quite beautiful, isn’t he. And so expressionless." She tilted her head slightly. "What’s his name?"

Something moved in Yuto’s chest. Jealousy. Plain and embarrassing.

"Shiny," he said.

Gina turned. "Sorry?"

"Shiny. That’s his name."

She stared at him. Then at Shiny. Then back at Yuto, with the expression of someone reassessing a situation they thought they understood. "You couldn’t have given him something better than Shiny?"

"What’s wrong with it?" Yuto said.

She produced the particular sigh she reserved for things she had decided not to fully engage with, and let it go.

Yuto reached into the bundle and held out the clothes and the fragrance. "These are for you," he said.

Gina’s expression changed completely. She looked at what he was holding, then at him, and then she made a sound of pure delight and closed the distance between them so fast he barely registered it before her arms were around him and her face was pressed against his shoulder.

The warmth of her went through him like something lit.

He stood very still and felt his face do things he was glad she couldn’t currently see. Her hair was near his jaw and she was soft against him in ways that his brain kept insisting on cataloguing despite his repeated instructions to stop, and he thought with some desperation that she had to know. She had to know what she did to him. There was no version of reality in which she was unaware of this.

She pulled back, eyes bright, already examining the fabric.

Does she actually not know she’s tormenting me?

He genuinely couldn’t tell. That was the worst part.

"I want to try it on," she said, and her hands went to the hem of her current dress with the casual efficiency of someone about to simply resolve the situation immediately.

Every thought Yuto had evaporated at once.

"Will you not —" His voice came out slightly higher than intended. He cleared his throat. "Could you not go somewhere private to change?"

Gina looked up at him. There was a small smile at the corner of her mouth that he didn’t entirely trust. "Oh," she said. "It just slipped my mind."

She disappeared into the bedroom.

Yuto stood in the middle of the room for a moment. Then he exhaled, picked up the food, and went to the kitchen to put it away, which gave him something to do with his hands and his face and his general situation.

When he came back out, she was already there.

He stopped.

The clothes fit her the way he’d hoped they would, which was to say well, but imagining it in the shop and seeing her in them were genuinely different experiences. She stood in the soft light of the room and she was, he didn’t have a better word for it, radiant. Like something that had always been there had finally been given the conditions it needed to be fully visible.

He felt two things at the same time.

The first was happiness. Clean and simple and warm, the kind that came from doing something right for someone who deserved it.

The second was quieter and more complicated. The understanding that she had always looked like this. That the girl he came home to every evening, who scolded him and fed him and kept this whole fragile arrangement running, had always been this beautiful, and the only thing that had dimmed it was that neither of them had ever had enough.

He made himself a promise standing there in the doorway. That he was going to fix that. That he was going to make sure she never lacked again. That this was the last time he would look at her and feel the shadow of what they couldn’t afford.

"Can you smell it?" she asked, meaning the fragrance.

"You smell good," he said.

She smiled, pleased. Then she looked at him more critically, nostrils flaring in a way that was slightly theatrical. "You, on the other hand," she said, "smell like the Astral Realm. And sweat." She tilted her head toward Shiny. "Don’t you think?"

Shiny considered this. Then he shrugged.

But Yuto caught it, the barely-there shift at the corner of Shiny’s eyes. The ghost of something that on anyone else would have been amusement.

Traitor, Yuto thought, with feeling.

He bathed, changed into the clothes he’d bought for himself, and came back out running a hand through his hair. "Do I look alright?" he asked.

Gina turned.

Her face went red. Not gradually, suddenly, completely, like a switch had been thrown. She made a sound that was somewhere between a gasp and the beginning of a word and then she turned away with a speed that was almost suspicious.

"What’s wrong?" Yuto asked hastily.

"Nothing," she said, to the wall. "Nothing is wrong."

Yuto looked at the back of her head. Weird, he thought, and sat down to eat.

Dinner was loud on his end and complicated on hers.

Yuto ate with the focused enthusiasm of someone who had spent a long day earning it, working through his bowl efficiently, entirely occupied by the food. He was hungry and it was good and that was the whole of his attention.

Gina could not focus on her food.

She tried. She made the attempt, repeatedly, picking up her spoon and directing her eyes at her bowl and performing the actions of a person eating dinner. But her gaze kept sliding sideways across the table without her permission, and each time it landed somewhere new she had to quickly look away from it.

His hair, dark and swept back in a way she wasn’t used to, showed his face fully for what felt like the first time in years. And his face, without the constant low-level worry she had grown so accustomed to seeing on it that she’d stopped registering it as an addition, was pretty. She hadn’t realised. She had known he wasn’t unpleasant to look at in some distant, unexamined way, the way you know a fact without it meaning anything. But the haggard, perpetually tired version of Yuto she had catalogued without thinking was gone, and what remained in its place was clean-lined and confident and,

His mouth.

She looked down at her bowl fast enough to be embarrassing.

She was picking up her spoon and making a serious effort at soup when he looked up.

"Is something wrong?" he asked.

She inhaled the soup.

The coughing started immediately, the kind that took over the whole body and didn’t leave room for dignity, and she heard him move before she saw him, felt the rush of displaced air, and then he was beside her, close, one hand on her back, one on her arm, patting and saying something concerned that she couldn’t fully hear because she was choking, and also because he was touching her, and he smelled like new soap and new fabric and she could feel the warmth of his hand through the cloth...

And She choked harder.