Shoulders sagging, the boy held a piece of sword in each hand, letting it drag on the ground as he made his way back to his bedroom. He displaced dirt and grass as he went, head hanging unhappily. He trudged back inside without enthusiasm, neglecting to put his slippers on, and walked down the hallway like a man walking to the execution block. The shattered sword halves dragged behind the boy, leaving scratches on the smooth floorboards. He pushed roughly past people who were merely guilty of trying to do their jobs, his head down and elbows out to jab fiercely at anything that they came in to contact with. One woman had to spend twenty minutes gathering dirty laundry back into its basket after the boy’s elbow met rather painfully with a sensitive area of skin and muscle slightly above the back of her knee. Her few, sharp cries did nothing to draw the boy out of his misery.

By the time he was in the hallway where his room was located, he was running. He hauled the door open, ran inside, and pushed it shut, trying to get it to make as much noise as possible in the process. He threw the remains of the wooden sword at the wall, where they thudded heavily before sliding to the ground, lying peacefully among the disorderly heaps of stuffed toys, wooden blocks, and clothing.

The boy dealt a violent kick to the wall before throwing his small body onto his mattress, punching the pillows until he had no energy left, and he curled up, sobbing, pressing his face into the curve of one the beaten collections of cloth and feathers.

He shoved at the door that lay parallel to the one into the hallway. It opened on a section of the garden directly outside his room. He sat petulantly on the floor, letting his bare feet dangle in the overgrowth and bugs crawl over his dirty toes. He coughed once or twice, the hollow, slightly damp cough of a child who had cried out everything possible in his tiny soul, and whose body still hadn’t caught up to the fact that there wasn’t anything left to cry with. He wiped his wrist across his nose and sniffed deeply, scrunching red-rimmed eyes shut.

Sitting there, snuffling quietly, he tried not to listen to his father’s voice. He was well out of sight, but his voice carried like nothing else did. The boy lay his head against the door, listening quietly. His father was yelling, but it wasn’t the angry, frustrated, I’m-going-to-spontaneously-combust yelling his father always seemed to employ when he talked to the boy. It was enthusiastic, full of life and eagerness. Energetic. Happy. Someone was doing something right, and it certainly wasn’t the boy. His father was never that insanely cheerful over anything the real soldiers did. Which only left one other person it could be.

He stared down at the ground outside his room and held back another wave of tears, scrunching his face up fiercely.

The door to the garden was pulled shut as violently as possible, and the boy threw himself back on his bed, curling up and beating the pillows and blankets with fierce, renewed energy.

Later in the day, when a maid came to get him for supper, the boy had piled everything in his room in front of both doors, refusing to come out under any circumstances.

He sat on an overturned pile of pillows, staring at the shadows on the floor made by the setting sun. He was hungry and had moved the things away from the door and put them back roughly where they were supposed to be, but no one had come to offer him a substitute meal.

No one had come to check on him at all.

It was not a pleasant experience to be five-years-old, hungry, sticky with salt and sweat, and apparently abandoned by everyone in the entire world.

He chewed on his lower lip and began building a tower out of his blocks with the single-minded determination of one who had no intention of thinking of upsetting things and having a tantrum because of them if no one was around to watch it. After using up all the blocks to make a wobbling, unstable tower of multicoloured wood, he dashed it to the ground in a fit of vindictiveness, making noises under his breath that he imagined sounded like the screams of the dying and injured. Then, he began to build a wall around his little heap of cushions.

When the other boy entered he was nowhere near being halfway around the little pile, and almost out of blocks.

The other boy entered with unnatural silence, pushing the door open and shutting it again, carefully avoiding the small pile of toys that still littered the floor near the door, although in less concentrated amounts than before. He walked, slowly and carefully, as though any wrong step might result in the triggering of a deadly trap. Gently, he balanced a wooden cup and bowl on the low, narrow wall of blocks, and crouched in front of it, balancing on the balls of his feet and managing to wobble less than the dishes on the uneven wall.

The boy looked up and over his shoulder as he reached for the second-to-last block, and stared at the other in silence. His fingers curled around the block, looking like bits of toffee lying on garish green paper. He held it tightly, the sharp wooden corners digging into his fingers and palm. The combined power of childish pride and unhappiness warred violently for several minutes with childish hunger. Then, he dropped the block onto its painfully orange counterpart and scuttled, crabwise, to the beginning of the wall so he could look at the other.

Small fingers wrapped around the handleless wooden cup, and the boy sat down heavily, knocking a section of the wall over. He drained the small cup quickly and set it down on the section of blocks next to the gap, where it promptly fell over and rolled off into a corner with surprising force, leaving a few drops of milk that the boy hadn’t been able to suck out of the bottom in its wake. The fingers dug into the bowl with less urgency, bringing a fistful of dangling, slightly dry noodles and cold shrimp to the milk-rimmed mouth. The other watched, bare elbows resting on clean, if slightly scuffed up knees, as the first ate.

When the bowl had been licked clean of every last molecule of taste and nourishment by the boy’s probing little pink tongue, and set on the floor, he said, very quietly, “Thanks, Ju-chan.”

The other shrugged, and smiled softly, averting his eyes almost-guiltily. “Welcome, Oniichan.”