Little Light

The Things We Don’t Say

Three days passed without another emergency.

That should have been a relief. It wasn’t.

The apartment had grown quieter in a way that felt deliberate, as if the walls themselves were listening. Leo moved through the rooms more carefully than before. He no longer reached for people on the street when he felt their pain. When a child fell and scraped his knee outside the building, Leo only watched from the window, hands curled tightly at his sides, until someone else helped the boy up.

Cain noticed.

He noticed everything now. The way Leo’s shoulders tensed whenever raised voices drifted up from lower floors. The way his brother stared at his own hands sometimes, as if they had become dangerous. The soft gold that used to live just beneath Leo’s skin seemed banked, like a fire someone was afraid to feed.

Cain told himself this was good. Caution was safer.

The whisper disagreed.

He’s already afraid of what he is, it said on the second night, while Cain stood alone in the kitchen after Leo had gone to bed. How long before he’s afraid of you too?

Cain didn’t answer it. He had stopped answering out loud. That felt like a victory, even if the voice only laughed softly and settled deeper.

On the fourth morning, the irritation began to surface in small, ugly ways.

Leo left the cupboard open. Cain closed it hard enough to rattle the dishes.

Leo asked if he wanted tea. Cain said he wasn’t a child who needed to be taken care of.

Leo flinched, just slightly, and the guilt that followed was almost worse than the anger.

Cain muttered an apology and left the apartment before he could say anything else.

He walked with no destination. The city felt louder than usual—every argument, every sharp glance between strangers, every tight-lipped silence in the market pressed against the edges of his power. He kept his hands in his pockets and his jaw locked, refusing to take any of it.

By the time he returned, the sun had started to drop and the apartment was filled with the smell of rice and the cheap vegetables they had bought two days earlier. Leo had cooked. He always cooked when he was trying to make peace.

Cain stood in the doorway longer than necessary.

Leo looked up from the stove. “I saved you some.”

“I’m not hungry.”

The words came out flatter than he intended. Leo’s face fell for half a second before he smoothed it over.

“Okay,” he said quietly. “It’ll keep.”

They ate separately. Leo at the table, Cain standing by the window with a bowl he barely touched. The silence between them was no longer comfortable. It had edges now.

Night came early.

Leo went to his room with a soft “Good night” that Cain almost didn’t return. When the door clicked shut, Cain remained by the window, staring at the brick wall until the last of the gray light died.

That was when the knock came.

Three sharp raps. Urgent.

Cain opened the door to find a man he half-recognized from the warehouse fire—the older one who had been cradling someone who wasn’t moving. His eyes were bloodshot. His hands shook.

“Please,” the man said. “My wife. She won’t stop. Ever since that day… she looks at me like I’m something she wants to erase. Tonight she locked herself in the bathroom with a knife and she’s talking to someone who isn’t there.”

Leo appeared behind Cain almost instantly, drawn by the raw panic in the man’s voice.

Cain felt the situation settle over him like a familiar coat. Another crisis. Another chance for Leo to shine and for the cost to land on both of them afterward.

He almost said no.

The word rose in his throat, unexpected and sharp. No. Not again. Not tonight.

But Leo was already reaching for his jacket.

“We’ll come,” Leo said.

Cain caught his brother’s wrist. “Leo.”

Leo looked at him, eyes wide and already glowing faintly at the edges. “Someone’s going to get hurt.”

“Someone always is.”

The silence that followed was brief and heavy. Then Leo pulled his wrist free—not hard, but firm—and stepped past him.

Cain followed because he always followed.

The man’s apartment was three buildings over and one floor higher. The door was unlocked. Inside, the air felt wrong—charged, tight, full of the same causeless hatred they had been tasting for days. From the bathroom came a woman’s voice, low and venomous, speaking to someone only she could hear.

“She won’t open the door,” the man whispered. “I tried.”

Leo moved down the short hallway without hesitation. Cain stayed close, every nerve alert. The whisper in his mind had gone very still, like a predator watching.

Leo stopped outside the bathroom and spoke softly through the door. The same gentle tone he always used. The same quiet promise that everything could be lighter if she just let him help.

For a moment, nothing happened.

Then the woman laughed—a short, broken sound—and the lock clicked.

The door opened a few inches. A pale hand held a kitchen knife loosely at her side. Her eyes found Leo and something in them flickered, recognition mixed with a deep, irrational loathing.

“You,” she said. “You’re the one who put it in me.”

Leo raised both hands, palms open, the first threads of gold already gathering. “I’m here to take it out.”

Cain saw the moment her expression shifted from hatred to something sharper. Hunger.

She moved faster than either of them expected.

The knife came up. Leo barely had time to step back. Cain lunged, catching her wrist and twisting until the blade clattered to the floor. She fought him with a strength that didn’t belong to a woman who had been locked in a bathroom for hours. Her free hand clawed at his face, and with the contact came a flood of emotion so concentrated it nearly dropped him—rage, betrayal, a bottomless sense of having been stolen from.

He had no choice.

He took it.

The pain slammed into the already crowded space inside him and kept coming. His vision whited out at the edges. Somewhere far away Leo was calling his name. The woman’s body went slack as the worst of the poison left her. She sagged against the wall, sobbing now, human again.

Cain stayed on his knees in the hallway, breathing through the new density that had just been added to everything else he carried. His hands were trembling badly. The whisper was laughing, low and delighted.

Every time, it said. Every single time you save him, you feed me more.

Leo crouched in front of him, hands hovering but not quite touching. Gold light trembled at his fingertips, desperate to help.

“Don’t,” Cain rasped. “Not you. Not now.”

Leo’s face crumpled, but he let the light die.

Behind them, the woman was still crying. Her husband was trying to hold her. Outside, somewhere in the building, another argument was already starting—sharp voices rising in the same sudden, directionless fury.

Cain lifted his head and met his brother’s eyes.

In that moment he saw it clearly: the fear in Leo, the guilt, the love that still refused to quit. And underneath his own exhaustion, something colder was beginning to look back.

The whisper leaned close, almost tender.

Soon, it promised. You won’t even need me to suggest it.

Cain forced himself to his feet. His legs felt distant.

“We’re leaving,” he told Leo.

But as they stepped out into the hallway, the lights above them flickered once, then died, plunging the corridor into thick, waiting dark.

And in that darkness, for the first time, Cain could not tell where his own thoughts ended and the other voice began.