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Exactly three months and seven days after Aki’s resignation, Denji and Power set his kitchen on fire.
Aki’s just surprised that it takes them this long. Only the fact that he’s semi-prepared for it saves him his sanity this time, so when Power starts shrieking against the frantic blaring of the smoke detector, and that combined with Denji spluttering every swear word under the sun wakes Aki up faster than any alarm clock possibly could, Aki’s not so much distraught as he’s just—tired.
As of late, it seems to be the only thing he’s able to feel at all. Relief sweeps through him when he feels the sharp beginnings of urgency work its way back into his limbs again, sleep-fog receding enough that he can figure out the gist of what’s happening in the pitch darkness. A reminder that he can, in fact, still experience more than the exhaustion beneath his skin that’s plagued him since—
“No, dumbass, don’t—ow, fuck! Hayakawa! Wake up, Power’s gonna burn down your ki—”
“Me? How dare you—you were the one who poured all the—”
From outside, Nyako has started yowling in tandem with the alarm. Aki sighs, gets up and gets his slippers on, then pushes past Power and Denji’s flailing limbs once he feels his way into the hallway.
Grease fire. Not the worst possible situation, then. Aki’s made similar mistakes back when he’d first started living on his own all those years ago. Keep your eyes on the stove, don’t burn the oil, and so it goes. Really, it doesn’t make him pop a vein as much as it wakes him up fully when he catches sight of the flame, roaring high and vicious over a pan of— something. Charred to utter unrecognition, though given those two’s culinary skills Aki’s not sure he would’ve been able to tell either way. He gets close enough to the side of the stovetop, turns off the burner, then slams a random pot lid he grabs off of the drying rack over the open heat. The fire writhes, contained. He keeps the weight of his arm over the lid.
After a few minutes, blue morning edges back into the kitchen, hesitant. Aki lets out a breath and leans his elbows on the counter. Turns to Denji and Power, shoulder to shoulder in the hallway and staring back at him as though the last ten minutes were but a particularly chaotic dream.
“What…” Aki’s almost afraid to ask. “What were you trying to make?”
Proud and brash as ever, Power tips up her chin. “You’ve been acting all weird recently, so Denji and I thought we would make you breakfast!”
“At—” Aki fishes his phone out from his pocket, then balks, “—five in the morning? I get up at eight!”
“Yeah, well.” Looking vaguely sheepish, already an impressive feat in and of itself, Denji cups the back of his nape with a palm. His frayed white shirt, formerly Aki’s, is stained with what resembles—as best as anything can resemble another in the dark—traces of flour and egg, and—is that grease or drool? Actually, Aki doesn’t want to know. “Couldn’t sleep. Power woke me up at, like, ass o’clock, and started pinching me and it hurt, and she wouldn’t stop until I said we could—oh!” His expression goes bright with purpose. Oh, no.
“What,” says Aki, warily. He knows that look. “Don’t tell m—”
“We wanna go on a trip!” Power announces shrilly. “To—to—what was it? Oka, Okani—?”
“Okinawa!”
“Yeah, yeah!” Twin gazes, equally emphatic now, both leveled at Aki. “We wanna go to Okinawa! Take us there, Aki!”
“What? No, actually, what? Slow down.” Holding up his hands, Aki tries to summon the calmest voice anyone can possibly muster after waking up at five A.M. to put out a grease fire in the kitchen. “What does Okinawa have to do with making breakfast—how did you even come up with that?”
Denji shrugs. “I saw it in a magazine yesterday. Pretty pictures, hot women, all that good stuff, so I had Reze read it to me when I was at the cafe. I told Power and she said you were too boring and definitely wouldn’t wanna go, so I said we should do something to convince you.” Then, lower, his gaze drifting: “You’ve been down lately, Hayakawa. Don’t think we haven’t noticed. You barely go with us to the arcade anymore, or play Mario Kart with us. I beat Power three times in a row yesterday—”
“—Did not!”
“Did too—you should’ve been there, Hayakawa, she keeps bitching about it but I know I won, the screen said so—ow, stop biting me, will ya!”
“Oh,” says Aki, barely registering their bickering. His chest constricts.
And—it’s not that Aki hasn’t noticed how he's closed up. He knows it more than anyone: the way he lives like a chore now, watches the days repeat, circular. An endless time loop. Wake up, march through the routines of the day, and go to sleep.
Even that has changed, sleeping. At first he couldn’t. Wouldn't. At first Aki would force his eyes open and stare like he was trying to make sense of the dark, wait until sleep grew impatient and wouldn’t coax, but push him into unconsciousness lest he close his eyes to the darkness and conjure Himeno’s face in the space between eye and eyelid, peering up at him again, pained and half-smiling, one single line of blood trailing starkly from the corner of her mouth to pool onto the concrete. The memory of a whisper, of Aki, Aki, Aki. I'm sorry. Please live. Promise me you'll live. He doesn’t dream of her—he doesn’t dream at all. Whether to be grateful for this development or not, Aki hasn’t yet decided.
The cigarettes don’t pile, but he knows he’s been going through more packs than is good for the budget they’re on, and though he tries to limit his habit to the balcony, they’re all already feeling the shift in seasons, temperatures plunging as November descends upon them all, colorless and quiet, like going to sleep. Smoke-scent clings to him now no matter what, and Power hates it. She won’t hug him after he’s just come back in. Only scrunches up her nose and silently retreats back into her and Denji’s room, or declares that she’s going out, just a notch louder than usual to make up for Aki’s damning quiet. She never tells him to stop, but sometimes, when Aki bothers to look, her gaze seems to go still, as if it weighs on her. It’s always then that the guilt bites through to his skin, always fresh, always stinging. Then and now.
“It’s winter,” he says. “Everyone goes to Okinawa when it’s spring, you know. By then it’ll be warm and you can actually go swimming, take nice pictures. You can’t do that now. It’s way too cold to try anything.”
“Who says?” Power demands, hands on her hips. Denji crosses his arms in obvious agreement.
“Who cares?” he says. “That means there’ll be less people, right? Sucks that I won’t get to see tons of beach babes, but we’ll basically get the whole place to ourselves!”
“That’s not how it works,” Aki tries, weakly, but it’s too late. Despite it all, he’s already putting together a mental list of things they’ll need to bring, estimating how much a trip would cost. Train fares, hotel fees. How long they’ll be staying. How on earth he’s going to keep Denji and Power in his sight at all times—they’ve never traveled freely before, and they’ll have to book a room with two beds, at the very least, and if worse comes to worst he could always bring a sleeping bag, and—
“Just the three of us!” Power cheers, remorselessly stomping through his thought spiral. “And Nyako!”
“Power, I’m not sure if the hotels will allow pets.”
She sniffs. “It’s fine, we can just sneak Nyako in.” Eyes glinting gold, she takes two steps forward and leans in close. “Hey, does that mean you’ll take us? Does it, Aki, does it?”
“C’mon, Hayakawa.” Denji mirrors her. “You can’t keep going on like this till the day you die. No way we’re gonna let you do that.”
If he were half as cruel and blunt as he pretends to be sometimes, Aki would tell them that it’s fine. That he’s stopped caring, made his peace with becoming driftwood in this murky limbo space, neither motivated enough to live his life to the fullest—whatever lingering meaning can be forced out of that dry phrase—nor really wanting to die, either. Death is only the final station, Aki’s train not quite rushing up to meet it, but simply making its way over, one day at a time, down the line of his life. One day, two. A week, a month, a year. Eventually. He won’t desire death and he won’t fight it. He’s just alive now, an audience member in the theater watching the film of his life right along with everyone else. Living indefinitely until it’s taken away from him.
Denji and Power, though. They’re younger, vibrant with life and so full of color that they can’t keep it all to themselves. Can’t bear to. They leave stains everywhere they go. Staining Aki, too, even though he went monochrome a long time ago. He’s sure that to have ended up being handed over to him back at his old job, to have ended up in that crowd at all, that they’ve already seen more than enough carnage in the world, and yet.
Summer’s end, he remembers. A day after being discharged from the hospital he’d gotten called into Makima’s office, her ringed eyes holding him in place, fingers laced over the perfect unmarked wood of her desk. Introductions proceeding: Denji, unkempt as they come, muttering unashamedly about touching boobs and other hormonal nonsense of the sort. Teenage boy through and through. To his right had been Power, feral-sharp, the only soft thing about her the cat that lounged scarflike over her shoulder. Both pairs of eyes, still clear and unclouded, not yet touched by disillusionment. So unlike Aki. So breakable, that fleeting kind of optimism.
I’m leaving them in your capable hands, Hayakawa-kun, Makima had said in her soft, even voice. Take good care of them.
Makima had known, surely, because she always did. Five years Aki’d worked for her, lulled in by her perfection and demand for perfection. Five years and he hadn’t changed when he should’ve, had loved too fast, too hard, too fatal.
Then—Himeno, brilliant. Then—a boy with hair like wildfire, a boy Aki never got to touch, or know. Before he was gone, just like that. Both of them now nothing but headstones in grass.
It’s why he’d left. Aki, still miserably soft, had taken one look at the two rookies now placed under his care buzzing kaleidoscopic in a sea of gray, and premature grief had welled up in his throat. Mourning that they could die just like the others, even if they weren’t fragile. Himeno certainly hadn’t been.
So he’d taken them away as fast as he could manage, brought them back into his own home, the only protection he could offer. Had done everything he could to preserve that color, even if he himself was—still is—a canvas past use.
Aki pinches the bridge of his nose, breathes in slowly. “Promise me,” he says, tone severe enough that hopefully at least ten percent of what he is about to say will force its way through their iron skulls. “Swear on everything you love that you’ll tell me where you’re going before you run off anywhere, and that you won’t go near the water without me.” When Power opens her mouth, he quickly adds, “We can go, but only if you both swear. And mean it.”
“Oh, hell yeah! We swear,” Denji says immediately, then nudges Power with his shoulder, grinning. “Right, Power?”
“Fine,” she says, petulant, then spins and scoops up Nyako from where it’s decided to venture back into the kitchen, the creature meowing and altogether seeming rather untraumatized by the earlier commotion. Power bares her teeth at Aki playfully. “Can we go now?”
“No. You two should figure out what things you want to bring, and I still need to clean up this mess and look at train tickets. We’ll go tomorrow.”
Denji raises his hand. “Can we bring our consoles?”
“You might lose them, so, no.”
“Then the TV—”
“Hotels have TVs, Power.”
“Okay, fine. But Nyako’s coming no matter what!”
ZERO
To achieve some semblance of balance between Aki’s gnawing need to write out each minute detail of every decision and Power and Denji’s combined impulsivity, they take the shinkansen at ten the next day.
Aki had hoped, rather foolishly, that by forcing Denji and Power to rise early, the two idiots would be sleep-addled enough to allow him a decent half-hour of peace on the train. He’d smothered that within the first few seconds of waking up—after he’d made out the noise of them banging around in the kitchen and spent a minute yelling into his pillow before getting out of bed to make sure they hadn’t found a way to build explosives out of fridge ingredients. Breakfast at eight, and then he’d checked over their suitcases just to confirm Denji and Power hadn’t packed anything that would get them all thrown out of the train, or the hotel. They hadn’t—aside from Nyako, of course. Denji’d packed a jar of peanut butter with his clothes, though, but by then Aki had been so surprised by their lack of conspicuous luggage that he’d ended up saying nothing about it aside from an offhand, if that spills and gets on your clothes, I’m not washing them for you.
But anyway—they take the shinkansen at ten. Clouded-over sky, huge coats, Aki wrestling a scarf onto Power while dodging the snap of her teeth, the swipe of her untrimmed nails more vicious than a cat’s. She hides Nyako under the puff of her jacket.
“You’ll sweat the whole way there,” Aki warns her.
“Won’t,” she retorts, entirely confident.
Within the first twenty minutes they’re watching her struggle to not eat her words. She holds up anyway; does it proudly, too, chin held high and mouth pursed like royalty even as her forehead begins to glisten and her cheeks go pink. Denji snorts at the sight of her more than once when Nyako starts wriggling. Aki, with half a mind to say I told you so and the other to shake his head, smothers both and gets her a glass of ice water.
Each of them gets an ekiben at noon, sesame rice under glistening golden tempura, sashimi and maki rolls tucked into neat rows. Geometrical as it gets. Denji uses his box as a lap warmer. Power steals everyone’s tempura for herself, then feeds Nyako her sashimi by shamelessly sticking her hand under her jacket and coaxing Nyako toward it with soft clicks of her tongue. No one falls asleep and no one quiets down, because Aki has never gotten so lucky in his life, but he does make them promise, promise, not to cause a scene in the few minutes it’ll take for him to go use the restroom and return. It’s both a miracle and not. Miracle, in that yes, Denji and Power do promise, and Aki does not come back to his seat with another mess to clean up. Not, in that—
“Ah—excuse me.”
Aki blinks. The stranger who’d bumped into him turns sideways, clears out space in the aisle for Aki to move through. Then he straightens up and Aki gets a full view of his face.
“Didn’t see you there. Sorry about that.”
The casual curve of a smile he throws Aki is ink. All of him is ink, in fact: dark and unknown and gleaming, from the way-too-fucking-many piercings on one ear to the matte black of his unbuttoned jacket to the way he’d moved, fluid, far too self-assured to have Aki feeling anything but wary. Schoolboy uniform, so he can’t be more than eighteen; Aki’d wager sixteen or seventeen at most. High collar, hands in pockets, every inch of moon-pale skin hidden from the world apart from his face—as if he hadn’t checked the weather before stepping out today and is now trying to fit all of himself into his loose school clothes.
His eyes are dark and darker. Fixed on Aki, brighter than the steel barrel of a gun. Aki resists the urge to back away and backtracks with his mind instead.
They’d knocked shoulders on his way back from the restroom. Why the boy had been standing, he doesn’t know. Only knows that he’d been glued to his phone, head bent, moving toward Aki without so much as a glance upward. Didn’t see you there. So transparent a lie it has to be on purpose. Aki has spent years of his life doing nothing but analyzing motion—he knows intention when he sees it. Caution had coiled around the tightening muscles of his limbs like adrenaline, like a guard, the kind Aki can’t shake off now after years of doing what he’d done. Instinct and intuition. Every part of this encounter pulling bowstring-taut, suddenly on the brink of snapping.
Do I know you, he wants to ask. Have I seen you somewhere? Because the boy is familiar, but it’s not him, really; not his face, eye-catching as it might be, dark and light set against each other without a single transitionary color. No, not the face that Aki’s memory is stirring at, but the feeling, a distinct emotion that rises at the sight of him. Cut from the same bloodied cloth as Aki. As if instead, he could ask: You ever killed someone? —and the guy would just throw back his head and give Aki that laugh, the one people like them all recognize. He’d gotten it from Himeno, who’d gotten it somewhere in the process of losing every single partner of hers before Aki had come along. He can’t put words to the sound, but he knows it deep in his bones the way a wolf knows a hunting call, or a deer knows the danger of the wolf at the first snapped twig. The way loss shapes a person—he would know. This stranger, too, is like him. Irreversible.
“It’s fine,” Aki says, and forces his gaze away. Stares hard at nothing. His chest burns, the nicotine buildup in his lungs seeming to light afire as if trying to escape out his mouth. If he looks at any part of this boy for a moment longer he might crack, might do something horribly impulsive like haul him in by the collar and shake him and ask, Why are you here? Do you work for Makima? Stay away from me—stay away from us. “Didn’t see you either.”
༄
“Who was that?”
Aki maintains a blank expression. “Who was who?”
“That boy,” Power says, jerking her chin toward their left. Stupidly, stupider than he should be, Aki follows, and—there he is, God, only four rows ahead and sitting diagonally across the aisle from them, head turning back and gaze immediately locking with Aki’s. As if he’d heard Power and just—known. Known to look the moment Aki did.
Aki doesn’t want him to be four rows ahead. Aki wants him to be gone. Wants to call over the attendant and ask to switch cars, or smash open the window with his elbow and toss himself out, or just—
There’s a smirk making its way into the line of that mouth. The sweep of his fringe obscures one of his eyes from view, which still doesn’t lessen the effect of his gaze at all. He’s—the boy is irredeemably handsome, and it’s absolutely awful, and, unfortunately, these two truths do not cancel out when put together.
What the hell is his problem? Unthinkingly, Aki tries to jolt away from him, from everything, despite being strapped down to his seat with nowhere to go, which is a reasonable knee-jerk reaction to whatever has just transpired in the last five seconds of his life. He doesn’t know what expression he’s just made, but Power’s eyebrows are raised high, lips curling up with undisguised amusement.
Denji shoves a sushi roll into his mouth. “Dude, you okay?”
“Is he that scary?” Power asks, with only a little malice.
Slowly, forcefully, Aki breathes in through his nose and turns back toward them. Wills away all thoughts of that face. “I’m fine,” he says. Then, to Power: “No one. He’s no one. So don’t look at him, don’t talk to him, even if he tries to talk to you. Just pretend he’s not there at all.”
༄
The island, when they step off the train and past the station and back into open space and sky, is not winter gray, or winter at all. Where the color has began to recede in other places to make room for the frost, Okinawa is relievingly full of rich earth, still warmed by sun, the barest hint of cold found only in the quick breeze that catches them and flutters through their sleeves.
It puts Aki in a good mood, good enough that he allows himself to be more indulgent than usual and buys Power and Denji soft serve on the way to the bus station. Might as well, when this whole damned trip is an indulgence in itself.
Still, stubbornly, he finds it impossible to tamp down his vigilance. A lone boy out of school on a Tuesday —Aki had checked—taking a three hour train to Naha with only a backpack and exactly no luggage to speak of. Carrying with him, instead, a too-knowing gaze and the precise, knifelike way he’d done everything, from the shifting of his body to that terrible, near-offensive smirk. Methodically casual, the way Aki had seen some of his old colleagues act on the job. Kishibe, over thirty years of it under his belt, and Makima, of course, though rarely—she’d seldom needed to be visibly methodical about anything, so piercingly authoritative had her presence been alone that a mere breath of her name had been enough to keep people in line.
People like them—like Kishibe and Makima—had stopped mattering the moment Aki’d decided to leave his old life behind. Aki has not been reborn, is not looking for redemption, or a do-over. All he has done is remove himself. For his own sake as much as Denji and Power’s, sparing them their lives and himself his grief. People like them, like that unknown boy—Aki wants away from those things now. Thinks of Himeno and Angel, the memory of them heavy, as if waterlogged. What matters to him will always matter too much, and the people he gets to keep are few and far between and therefore precious. So—no more. No more.
Ultimately, despite all of Aki’s agonizing, nothing had happened. The boy hadn’t tried to catch Aki’s eye, or approach him, or even move closer to where they’d been sitting. In the end, he’d only reached into the backpack at his feet and pulled out a book, a fairly small and thin blue paperback. Had held it open with one hand and kept his eyes on it for all of the remaining hour and a half of the train ride. Aki had checked a few times, trying to be tactful. When they’d been given permission to stand and gather their things, he’d checked again, but the boy had only slung his backpack over one shoulder, stepped into the aisle, and out of the train. Not a single part of his body had indicated interest in their direction. By the time Aki and Power and Denji had disembarked, he’d been nowhere in sight.
ONE
“Fuck off, ” Denji groans.
“Get up,” Aki says, drawing open the curtains wider without sympathy, then reaching back over the bed and wrestling the sheets away from Denji’s bony limbs. “It’s past nine-thirty and we haven’t had breakfast. Get up, both of you.”
Last night, in the end, they’d all ended up squeezing into the same bed, Nyako curled up at their feet. Power had sandwiched herself between Aki and Denji, strands of long, sandy hair prickling up against Aki’s nose, his cheek, her arms locked tight around Denji’s and legs hooking around Aki’s, chaining, as if she were afraid of being left alone in sleep. It’d gotten cooler, then too hot for all three of them to be sleeping under one cover, and when he couldn’t tolerate it anymore Aki’d kicked away the sheets and tried to free his legs from Power’s grip, iron-firm even in sleep.
To no avail. She’d held on to him, possessive and unrelenting the way infants hold their mother’s finger in their fist, and something about that had made him pause, then give up.
Their hotel room, though small, compensates in cleanliness and a general absence of questionable smells and stains, the best deal their budget could have afforded them. Aki’ll have to look into job offers soon; the money he’d saved up from working under Makima will likely only last them another half a year and then some. Probably not even half, now that this trip is also burning through his savings.
For breakfast, they stop at a cafe a little ways out past the hotel and closer to the shoreline, close enough that the wind carries a beckoning salt-smell when it combs through their lax figures, warm as if this is the way the weather makes up for the sky’s lack of blue today. Before they left, Aki’d drawn out an itinerary for them on the back of a map, and he lays it out over the table now, careful to keep the paper a safe distance from Denji’s soda and Power’s milkshake. Goes over it as they eat: they’ll be staying a week, no more and no less. There’ll be plenty of places to go and sights to see, bustling markets and tours on boats and Churaumi Aquarium, a must-see. They’ll be going around the Kerama islands starting tomorrow, and Aki has allowed more flexibility in the scheduling in consideration of Denji and Power’s unpredictability, so—
“Are you two even listening?”
“No,” Denji replies. “Stop stealing my shrimp, Powy, I’m gonna kill you—”
“—Both of you stop —Power, eat your own fucking food—”
“Hey!” Power stands abruptly, the legs of her chair immediately scraping a hair-raising shriek against the concrete. “It’s the weird guy from yesterday!”
Alarmed, Aki looks up. “What?”
“That’s him, right? Right? That one, with the book!”
“Don’t point, ” Aki hisses frantically, reaching across the table in a fruitless attempt to grab at Power.
Too late. As always, her volume pitches past the conversational point and right into alarm bell levels, attracting the collective attention of no less than every person within a ten-meter radius of their table. Which, tragically, includes the boy from the train, who looks up from his book, stops, and—as though compelled by a particularly sadistic form of magnetism—catches Aki’s gaze the moment it lands on him.
And—Aki should’ve run. Should’ve dragged the two idiots up by their collars and just bolted the hell out of there.
“Hi,” the boy says. Politely, but nevertheless with open amusement.
“Hello,” Aki replies, because he can do nothing else. “Sorry about her.”
The barest upturn of the mouth. “Don’t worry about it. I was surprised, that’s all.”
He’s closed his book. Holds it in one hand as he walks toward them, the other snug in his trouser pocket, and Aki can’t stop him, can only sit rigid and upright in his chair, trapped here with this front-row view of the direction his life is rapidly toppling toward.
This time it’s a white jacket instead of black—not his school uniform, then. Stainless and stark, as if he’d chosen it to further emphasize the already-overemphasized sheer black of his hair, his eyes. Those stupid gleaming piercings. Aki wants so badly to lurch away from him. He wants—he doesn’t want to be stained. He’s already resigned himself to Power and Denji. This boy, with all his darks and lights, looks like he’d been born to leave a trail of ink in his wake.
“Oh,” says Denji. He blinks at the boy, eyes shuttered in disinterest. “You’re that guy Hayakawa ran into yesterday.”
“Hayakawa.” Oh, God. Dark eyes turn right back to Aki. “That’s you?”
“Yes,” Aki says stiffly. With as much subtlety as he can manage, he kicks Denji’s shin under the table, hard. Denji yelps. “Hayakawa Aki. Nice to meet you.”
“Yoshida Hirofumi,” the boy says easily. Grins, eyes curving with it. “It’s a pleasure.”
Before Aki can begin forming thoughts on that grin, Yoshida is turning to Denji and Power. “And you guys are…”
“Denji.”
“I’m Power!”
“Power, sit down,” Aki says. She sticks out her tongue at him and does as told.
“Interesting names,” says Yoshida, still grinning, in a tone that hovers right in between mocking and genuine. “You guys here on vacation?”
Denji snorts. “Nah.”
“We‘re here just because.” Power tilts her head sideways, like Yoshida is a puzzle that might make more sense if she changes the angle. “Are you?”
Yoshida’s mouth quirks, and he raises his eyebrows at her, the movement visible even from under his fringe. That, too, is an expression Aki will be setting aside time to form thoughts on later. “Guess.”
Immediately she frowns. Aki neatly folds the itinerary back up according to the paper's creases, then asks, a little daringly, “Don’t you have school?”
“Nope.” Then, like he’s read Aki’s mind: “That uniform’s old. I wear it because it’s comfortable, not because it’s necessary.”
“I see.” Aki can’t help it now. “Then, why—?”
Yoshida smiles at him, close-lipped, mysterious in a purposely inviting fashion, as if he’s asking Aki to come closer for the answer. When Aki doesn’t prod, just watches him evenly, Yoshida only laughs, soft and light and far too casual to be entirely genuine.
“I got bored of where I lived,” he says. Something in his expression sharpens, then, the way some people’s faces do on a concentrated lie, as if throwing up spikes to prevent possible prodding. Aki’s teeth ache at the familiarity. “Came here to relax, just like you guys, except I’m doing it alone. I know. Who visits Okinawa by themselves, right?”
“If you went and got a girlfriend you could take her here,” Denji advises him.
“I could.” Yoshida’s amusement is outright, now. “Don’t really feel like having a girlfriend right now, though. Do you need one to have fun? Looks to me like you guys are doing fine, and you don’t look like you’re dating each other. Unless I’m wrong.”
“We’re not,” says Aki, hyper-aware of Yoshida’s gaze on him. He keeps his own firmly on the folded itinerary clasped in his hands. “They’re my housemates.”
“See?” Yoshida turns back to Denji. “No girlfriends, and you all seem to be doing great.”
“Okay, but if I had a choice I would want to bring—”
“Denji, Power,” Aki says, seizing the fact that he no longer has to participate in this conversation by directly addressing Yoshida. “Want to go down to the beach now?”
It works. Denji’s face lights up in boyish excitement, and Power shrieks, nearly knocking Denji’s soda clear off the table, which—it’s Yoshida who reaches out with his other hand, the one that’d been in his pocket, and, quick and silent, pulls the glass away and out of her reach before it can topple over. Some seconds later, Aki realizes that the drink, given its position, would’ve almost certainly gotten on his sleeve had it spilled.
“Thank you,” he says.
Yoshida slides a glance at him, too brief for Aki to read the look in his eyes, then sets the glass down on the side of the table furthest from Aki.
“If you’re going to go, you should do it now,” he says. “By afternoon the beaches will all be crowded. It’s usually quieter the higher up you go, too, because there aren’t as many tourist-populated spots.” He tips his chin toward where the shoreline stretches up north.
Aki regards him curiously. “You talk like you live here.”
“Just making sure you guys get the most out of your trip.” Yoshida smiles at him, visibly pleased, as if Aki has just greatly praised his intellect. He holds up his book and waves it. “You can pick up lots of great tips from what you overhear when you’re reading in public.”
“Seems like it.” Aki pauses, awkward. “I—we should really—”
“Have fun,” Yoshida says. Already he’s opening his book again, though his eyes are still on Aki as his hands flip through the pages. For courtesy’s sake, Aki meets his gaze.
“It was nice meeting you, Yoshida-san.”
“Likewise,” says Yoshida, and then, with slightly more weight, “I’m sure we’ll see each other around, Hayakawa-san.”
“Hayakawa is fine,” Aki says, even though he shouldn’t be saying that to someone he has no plans to know. Even though it’s clear that Yoshida has skeletons tucked away just like everyone else, just like Aki. Like him, but with none of the deadweight.
Yoshida dog-ears his pages instead of using a bookmark, Aki notices—how terrible. How blasphemous; see, he shouldn’t be letting Yoshida Hirofumi into any part of his life. Shouldn’t do anything experimental just to see if Yoshida is the “give an inch, take a mile” kind of person. He absolutely shouldn’t.
Yoshida raises an eyebrow. “Okay, but you’re definitely older than me. I’m gonna feel like I’m overstepping if you call me Yoshida-san while I only refer to you as Hayakawa.”
“I’m only nineteen,” Aki says, trying not to feel strange about fitting the word “only” before his age. Because he is nineteen, and at nineteen he is still fully allowed to tack on an “only” before saying so, but he certainly doesn’t feel nineteen. Nineteen-year-olds, he thinks, shouldn’t be so world-weary. Shouldn’t be carrying themselves like they don’t own their body.
“I’ll be seventeen next month, so we’re a little more than two years apart, I’d guess. Just call me Yoshida, then. Or Hirofumi, if you feel like it.” His eyes glint, smooth obsidian against the light. “That’s fine too, but I have a feeling you’re the type of guy who’s too stiff and formal to do that just yet.”
“No—just Yoshida is fine for me.” Aki’s mouth has gone a little dry. He swallows and resolutely ignores the “just yet” at the end of Yoshida’s words swinging heavily like a promise, like a truth made out of metal. Sixteen-year-olds who are a month away from turning seventeen should not be so bold when it comes to being interested in someone two years older than them—particularly when it comes to Aki, who, despite himself, is trying to keep the doors of his heart shut firm, crackless. Trying to deter this boy who looks at Aki like he wants to pry them right open.
He stands, gathers their things, then slings his bag with the itinerary and other necessities in it over one shoulder and begins to walk away. It feels rather like he’s escaping. His body is impatient, desperate to put distance between himself and this danger. “Goodbye, Yoshida.”
At the very least, Yoshida doesn’t try to stop him. Doesn’t ask anything like, Leaving so soon? Or, Already? We’ve only just met. Or, Come on, I already know your name, Hayakawa, how about a phone contact? He only looks at Aki, steady even though Aki directs his gaze somewhere behind Yoshida’s shoulder, and says, “See you, Hayakawa.”
“Bye!” Power yells over her shoulder as they make their leave. She tosses her empty milkshake cup toward the mouth of a trash bin and gains the expression of a very smug cat when she makes it in.
Denji raises a hand. “See you, man.”
“It was fun meeting you people.” Yoshida draws his slow gaze over them, lingering on Aki one final time. “Enjoy the beach.”
“We will," Aki says. "Thanks.”
He keeps his eyes staunchly ahead and doesn’t look back, not once. Keeps them forward, resolute, until his feet sink into sand, until he’s walked over so many warm, rolling mounds of it that his soles have adjusted to each step, the dip before solidity; until Power and Denji are rushing past him, flinging off their shoes, to meet the water. Only then does Aki look back, just once, only the cityscape in view. So far from the streets now that he has nothing to fear.
TWO
There’s a certain awareness that always follows after meeting someone but not keeping them, not keeping any part of them aside from the brief moment exchanged, and Aki is experiencing it now. Knowing nothing but a face, a figure, a voice. Chatting with someone in the park who lets you pet their enormous white husky dog, then spotting them a week later near the local shopping mall. Teaming up with a same-hearted stranger to quell a bar fight and keeping an eye out for them the next weekend. Walking around a bright, busy island surrounded by one million faces that don’t matter, and watching out for the one that does.
Rarely does Aki do it consciously, but still it prints itself in the very back of his mind like a poor wallpaper choice that cannot go unnoticed, no matter how exciting the rest of the happenings in the house. What’s done is done; you can’t unintroduce yourself to someone once you’ve met them. Yoshida knows Aki’s name as Aki knows his, and there’s no stopping it now. The possibility of running into Yoshida again is not so exceptionally high as to be a certainty, but the possibility of Yoshida approaching them upon sight might as well be—the possibility of Aki rounding the next street and hearing his voice, crisp and slow like snowfall: Hey, Hayakawa. What are the chances, right?
A day goes by, roughly. After leaving food and a litterbox in the bathroom, enough to sustain Nyako before their return, they ferry to Tokashikijima in the morning, the island shimmering mirage-like under the slow return of the sun, and exhaust themselves—Aki with the old camera he’d dug out of a box in his closet, an umbrella despite the reassuring forecast, and five rolls of film. He’ll want to keep this, he knows. Every picture a sight between two layers of infinite blue, sky and sea, one reflecting the other back at itself. Everything so azure it hurts to look at. Picturesque and perfect, up until the inevitable moment Power shoves Denji into the waves and Denji takes her down under with him.
“Aki! Join us!” Power commands when she finally emerges again, hair shiny-wet and splayed over her face in tangles. Give it some minutes under the sun and it’ll start to crust, Aki already knows. He’ll have to force her into the shower later—make her scrub all the salt out.
Power aims a kick at Denji’s crotch without looking when he tries to grab at her again. He stiffens, then goes right back down like a sinking ship.
“I’m fine here,” Aki says.
“You’re not having fun, though. Have fun with us, Aki! Or…” She bends, scoops out two handfuls of wet, glistening sand, and beams at Aki, two rows of razor-edge teeth.
He raises his eyebrows back at her. “Who’s gonna take pictures of you, then? I got a good one of you pushing Denji; you’ll only get to see it if you don’t throw sand at me and the camera, though.”
For just a moment, Power looks considering. Then she grins, eyes flashing, and opens her mouth again.
“Ha!” Denji bursts forward and splashes her directly in her eyes. She screeches.
The thrashing lasts at least ten minutes. Every now and then one of their heads will surface in a glittering spray, gasping for air before they’re dragged back in by the other again. Denji breaks away once and gets a few clumsy strides away before Power charges up behind him and throws herself at his back, slamming into him so hard Aki actually finds it in himself to wince in sympathy.
The air is clear and clean, and when he sucks it into his lungs it pushes the life back into him, the tide, the scent of it. Then leaving on the exhale. Expelling from him, from this weary body of his, as though he can no longer hold it inside himself. Aki does it again and again. Inhales so deep his chest twinges with it, then lets it all rush back out. Does it until every breath feels like a chore, until he’s made himself as tired as Denji and Power are when the water’s chill finally seeps in and they return to Aki, shivering and wet to the bone.
“Done, you two?”
Denji sneezes. Aki throws him the bag of towels, then starts putting away his camera.
“Done,” Power mutters. “I’m hungry.”
“So hungry. Hayakawa—”
“Yeah,” says Aki, sighing. “Dry yourselves. We’ll go back to shower first.”
For once, Power goes willingly into the bathtub, coaxed in by the warm water raising clouded steam up against the mirror of the bathroom, her eagerness the direct result of an hour spent burrowing into her towel on the ferry ride back to Naha as though wishing it’d swallow her up. Aki doesn’t even have to wash her hair for her this time. He counts it as a noteworthy achievement.
Yoshida finds them after lunch and another ferry—or, rather, he finds Aki. Here the winds blow stronger, clouds gathering gently over the sun and thinning the dark cuts of shadows cast against the ground, the port of Akajima quieter this time of year. Aki, idling at the end of the stretch of concrete bridge arcing out from the edge of the land, doesn’t spot Yoshida until he’s close enough to call out.
“Yo, Hayakawa. Here by yourself today?”
Aki glances up from his phone, on which he’d been scrolling through a website detailing the Kerama islands’ most tourist-heavy areas. In another breath, Yoshida comes within an arm’s length, hands in pockets, as per usual. Another unzipped jacket today, aviator style with the wool-lined collar turned outward. No doubt to combat the stronger winds today. It suits him—surprisingly. Or maybe everything does—maybe having a face like Yoshida’s just comes with the guarantee that every and any outfit will work, no matter what, which is a small but convenient superpower to possess. Or maybe it’s simply too early for Aki to make judgments.
“No, just waiting. Power and Denji went to the bathroom.” Aki looks at him. “No book today?”
Surprise drops like a stagelight into Yoshida’s cool, cavalier expression, though it disappears quick enough to afford deniability—as though Yoshida hadn’t expected Aki to ask, or remember the book at all.
“Finished it and got bored,” he says.
Denji and Power’s inevitable reappearance doesn’t seem to discourage Yoshida in the least. He’s smart, Aki thinks, and understands boundaries. Doesn’t step close, knows it’d make Aki back off; he does everything with his eyes instead, because he must know that the eyes cannot be accused so easily as most parts of the body. So Yoshida only looks. Right at Aki, bright with intent, bright enough to bring about guilt. Beneath the sun his hair is so black it reflects violet in the light. Aki’s hand nearly twitches then, arrested by the sudden urge to reach out and brush Yoshida’s hair from his eyes. He doesn’t. He stays perfectly, blamelessly still.
After a moment, Yoshida speaks again. “Have you seen the dog statue yet?”
“The—dog statue?”
“On Nishibama beach. You haven’t heard of it?” Yoshida leans in; Aki can smell the wind on him. “Want to see?”
“How do you know these things?” Aki is caught between feeling startled, then unwillingly endeared.
Yoshida shrugs. “I read. You know that already. So how about it, Hayakawa? I can be your tour guide for the day.”
“I—” Aki takes a step back, if only because Yoshida is far too close now for Aki to be focusing on anything that’s not him and the impossible things coming out of his mouth. “I have to wait,” he says. “For Denji and Power.”
“That's fine. We can still go after they come back.”
Aki wrings his hands. “You don’t have to do that.”
“Do what?”
Wait. Stick around, trying to get to me. I can spot your intentions from a mile away. Aki doesn’t want this—doesn’t want one bit of Yoshida, the way he is like permanent ink in its entirety, or acrylic, the kind of medium that gets into the thin fibers of clothes and never washes out. Years later, fishing out the old shirt and still finding the stains. Unfading. Aki doesn’t want to know if Yoshida is like that, if Yoshida can pick the lock on his door. Doesn’t want to think about coming up with solution methods to that if Yoshida gets in.
“You don’t have to stay here. You—” Aki’s exasperation comes through unbidden—“Don’t you have better things to do?”
Yoshida tips his head to one side. Then smiles, all teeth, his face breaking open on a grin. “Nope,” he says. “I finished the book and got bored again, remember? And you’re interesting, Hayakawa. I wanna hang around you some more.”
“You don’t even know me,” Aki points out. Knows it sounds cold and says it anyway, some part of him wanting, wishing, hoping that Yoshida will take the hint and leave him alone. But—that’s already hopeless, he knows. Yoshida always takes the hint. Then ignores it. Aki can do nothing about that.
“Exactly,” says Yoshida. He takes a step forward, puts them right back where they were before Aki’d taken that step back. “This is me trying to know you.”
How can so much surety fit into so young a person? Aki’s certain he’d never been like that when he was sixteen-going-on-seventeen, when all he’d known was how to turn himself into a loom, spinning grief into revenge into survival.
For the first time, he reaches out and takes hold of Denji and Power’s absence. Utilizes it. Draws himself up, straight-backed, almost formal, and looks at Yoshida, and asks, “Who are you?”
Yoshida smiles a guileless smile. “I’m Yoshida Hirofu—”
“Don’t give me that. Are you here for something? Working for a particular group, or person?”
Because—Yoshida is too young to be so old. And he’s not really old, because then he would be like Aki, nineteen and withering down inside of himself, inside his perfect shell of aliveness. No, Yoshida only acts old. Out of necessity, Aki can guess. Out of survival.
Yoshida’s expression shutters, then goes wry. As if trying to say: Oh, we’re doing this now, are we? As if he’d known all along that they’d get to it.
Leave, Aki’s thoughts beg him. Leave me alone. Haven’t I ruined your plans? Don’t you want to stalk away from me now?
“One,” Yoshida says, “I’ve already told you—I’m here because you’re interesting to me, Hayakawa Aki.” Suddenly solemn, his amusement blown away by the direct confrontation of it. “Two, I’m self-employed. Organizations are all shit, as I’m sure you know. Either you leave, or you throw your whole self away and turn into a dog for them, taking orders all day for the rest of your life.” He raises his hand, presses his middle and ring fingers to his thumb, keeping the other two raised. Parts his thumb from the fingers. “Woof.”
Aki blinks. Once, twice. “Did you just—?”
“Hm?”
“Never mind.”
For a brief second, Yoshida’s expression twitches, and he looks like he might laugh. Suddenly he looks like how he'd been yesterday morning, when Denji had said, if you went and got a girlfriend you could take her here. “So, once again, I’m Yoshida. Like how you’re just Hayakawa Aki, I’m just Yoshida. Okay? Are you done interrogating me to see if I was sent here by some shady crime syndicate?”
A trace of humor peeks through in his voice. Skeletons shoved so far back in you’d have to dig for them. Or maybe his door has a passcode, and his closet is not a closet, but a safe. Either way, Aki’ll take it. He’ll be gone in a week, will never see Yoshida again in a week. Five more days of fending him off, and then he’ll be hauling Denji and Power back into their apartment in the city, shutting the door before the first beginnings of December catch up to them inside. No more strange boys with faces like winter, pale and pretty and impermanent.
“Just Yoshida,” he repeats. “Okay.”
“Do you want to see the statue now?”
“After—”
“—After Denji and Power come back from the bathroom, right?” The smile returns. Aki looks away from it.
“Yes,” he says.
༄
“A statue?” Power makes a face like Aki’s just force-fed celery to her. “How boring. Denji, we should chase the seagulls by the docks.”
“What?” Aki says. “Absolutely not. If you fall in—”
“We won’t. We won’t, Aki, I’m so serious right now—”
“Hayakawa,” says Yoshida. Aki turns and looks at him, at his appallingly calm face, the casual lean of his weight onto one long leg. “It’s fine if you need to go.”
“But—” But courtesy. But they’ve made plans, in essence, and some part of Aki—though he names it the stupid, eternally soft part of himself—some part of him feels a guilt beyond the act of letting someone down so fast and so suddenly. But what? He wants away from Yoshida, yes, but—is it fear, then? Fear of lock-picking? Fear of one more thing to lose?
For Yoshida, it's the look on Aki's face; Aki already knows. Back then, people—Himeno and Makima and even Kishibe—had remarked on it to him. Disapproving in that offhanded, patronizing sort of way, back when he'd been a fresh young face whose hands still trembled too hard after shooting a gun. Once, Himeno had made him look in a mirror when he was upset, showed him the prominent creases of his face as it tensed in stress, the steely set of his mouth.
That's your giveaway, she'd said, tapping a finger to his locked jaw. You're trying too hard to hide it, so you end up doing the opposite. Relax, Aki.
“It’s fine,” Yoshida repeats, this time more insistently, as if he already knows Aki’s the kind of person who habitually lets this kind of thing weigh on him for days. Which, if he does, Aki doesn’t know how well he’ll be able to keep this going, the not-knowing. Practicing being a firmly-closed book, trying to keep Yoshida away. “I shouldn’t keep you from your friends.”
“Yoshida,” Aki begins, with no idea what to follow that up with. And doesn’t need to, anyway, because Power beats him to it.
“Wait," she says. "Weren’t you gonna go see that boring statue with him? Why’re you fussing over us, then?”
“Because we agreed before we came here that you two aren’t allowed near the water without me, remember? What if something happens?”
“Like what?” Denji asks. “Power knows how to swim; if anything happens she’ll—”
“And what if something happens to her ; then what will you—”
Power cuts him off, eyes wide and golden and pinning him in place. “Don’t you trust us, Aki?”
Aki startles. “What? I—”
Without meaning to, he glances at Yoshida, who’s still watching him, expression settled into one of complete neutrality. Hands in pockets, saying nothing.
“I do, ” he says, but the doubt is already pressing in. Aki inhales then, slowly, and opts to not overthink it in the moment. He’ll set that aside for another time. “It’s not a matter of trust; it's about safety. Really. For once in your lives, please be careful. Don’t run where there are no railings, and keep an eye on each other, and don’t steal shit just because you see it lying around, and—”
“Yeah, yeah, we got it,” Denji says, though at the look on Aki’s face he makes one back and adds, “We promise, all right?”
They leave toward the dock, toward the ocean; Aki watches them do it. Lets them go. Then turns back to Yoshida, dreading the awkwardness.
“It’s not that I didn’t—you know,” he says, and no, Yoshida definitely doesn’t know, not when Aki has no idea what he’s trying to say himself. But he’s glad that Yoshida doesn’t interrupt him, because he’s already been cut off one too many times today and if Yoshida had done it too Aki would have—he doesn’t know. Would’ve lost his mind, maybe. Sat down and pulled out a cigarette, which, he’s not sure what Yoshida would do if he saw Aki smoke. The thought tugs at him lightly, suggestively. Aki shuts his eyes and hand-waves it, and opens them again to Yoshida, who hasn’t moved. Hasn’t said a word in so long—only looks at him, quiet and so nonjudgmental Aki thinks he could’ve called it clinical if he didn’t know better.
“Do you know anything else about the dog statue?” he asks, and holds back a wince at how clumsy it sounds.
“Not as much as the locals,” Yoshida says, “but I know the textbook stuff, yeah. I’ll tell you when we actually see it.”
Then he smiles again, and Aki’s throat unclogs itself with something akin to relief. “Hayakawa, you worry a lot.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you always do that?”
“…Yes.”
“Can you—” Yoshida pauses, looks like he’s considering something for a moment. His eyes drift upward when he’s thinking, Aki notices, ever-sharp and assessing, even when it looks like he could be daydreaming, watching seagulls soar against the watercolor clouds. Then he drops his gaze back to Aki. “Never mind. Let’s go.”
And—it’s a little unfair of him to leave Aki wondering like that, but then again, Aki shouldn’t be so invested anyway. In all of this, any of it. Shouldn’t be thinking so hard about someone he’ll never see again in five days. All of his shouldn’ts piling up in front of his door, bricking up a defense against the rest of the world but also himself.
It’s not about the statue, really. When they get there, it isn’t even all that large or imposing. By way of being a statue, the dog has been sculpted to be a few sizes larger than what it had probably been in real life. The plaque at the center of the white porous stone reads—
“Statue of Shiro,” says Yoshida. Then looks at Aki, expectant, all of a sudden so very much a sixteen-year-old, even though he’ll be seventeen next month, eager to impress and waiting for an invitation to do so, as if he thinks it politer somehow with the wait. Aki is the someone in this scenario, he knows. Someone to impress, someone to wait for. The sole audience to this performance.
“I can’t see anything else on the plaque,” he says. “Why did they make a statue of him?”
Yoshida takes a breath. Grins, and opens his mouth.
恋人マリリンに逢うため、阿嘉島から座間味島までの３キロの海峡を、泳いで渡った雄犬シロの恋物語は、多くの人々の心に愛と感動を与え、１９８８年、映画”マリリンに逢いたい”を通して座間味村の海と自然を全国に広めました。２０００年１１月２６日、１７歳（人間だと８０歳以上）で亡くなったソロの志を慎み、その功績を永遠に残すために、全国から寄付を募りこの記念碑を建立いたしました。
(The love story of Shiro, the dog who swam across 3 km of sea from Aka Island to Zamami Island to meet his girlfriend Marilyn, struck the hearts of many people, and in 1988, knowledge of the sea and nature of Zamami village spread throughout Japan thanks to the film ‘Marilyn ni aitai’. When Shiro died at the age of 17 (over 80 in human years) on the 26th of November, 2000, we collected contributions from all over the country and built this memorial statue to honor the will of Shiro and to leave a permanent reminder of his achievements.)
When Yoshida finishes, he turns back to Aki, clearly expectant. The way he holds himself is a dead giveaway—Aki recognizes it as if it's his own reflection. And in a way, it is. He'd looked exactly the same, once, whenever he stepped foot into Makima's office, none of him really changing, but all of him wanting to change—wanting to seem better, look better, be better.
"It's a wholesome story," he says, because it is. Wholesome, as the kind of love a dog has for anyone and anything is. Struck with a peculiar impulse, he asks, “Do you think Marilyn ever had an idea of how far he was swimming just to visit her?”
Yoshida looks at him curiously. “Even if we had a way of confirming that, why would it matter?”
Aki might be overthinking this. “I mean—if she didn’t know—doesn’t that make it more depressing?”
“I think dogs are less transactional than people,” Yoshida says, amused. “Shiro wanted to see Marilyn, and in order to do that he needed to swim across the ocean, so he did. Seems pretty simple to me.”
Then, suddenly bolder, he adds, "If I cared about someone why would it matter if they didn’t know what I’d do for them as long as I’m doing it willingly? It’s not like I’m loaning them money. They don’t need to pay me back."
"So—" and Aki's definitely overthinking this, "—it wouldn't matter to you if they didn't reciprocate? If they didn't know?" Is it possible for things to be that easy, ever? Is unconditionality something we've made up, or does it really exist out there, for some people, without exception?
"Not at all," Yoshida says easily. When he turns to Aki, then, his earrings wink against the light of the sun. “Well, not for me, at least. Simple, right?”
༄
By the time they’ve walked back to the docks, it’s nearly sundown, rosy gold wisping into the blue of the sky before the blue will darken and crowd out all the light, take its place with nightfall. Aki is quick to spot Power and Denji; there are no two other people on earth who cut such knowing silhouettes against the harbor, cause such a ruckus at such a place during such a time. Both of them catch sight of Aki and Yoshida at the same time and immediately break into a run.
“Hey!” Aki shouts as they hurtle toward him. “What did I say about running on— oof!”
“Aki! Aki, Aki! Guess what!”
He pats her frantically. “Can’t breathe. Get off.”
Power gets off, with no respect whatsoever for personal space. She puts both of her hands on each side of Aki's face, locks him into place, and says, “A seagull tried to eat Denji’s foot. I got a video, wanna see?”
“What? No, I really don’t want to see. Are you two done yet?”
“We were done, like, over an hour ago,” Denji says. “Almost fell asleep waiting for you. Can we get dinner now?”
Aki opens his mouth, then realizes that Power's still hanging on to his face. He makes to pry her hands off, careful to avoid her nails, when she peers behind him and says, "Is he coming too?"
"Not today," Yoshida replies as Aki finally frees himself from Power's death grip. "I've taken up enough of Hayakawa's time. If I dare take up any more he might really get sick of me and chase me off, so." His eyes curve when they catch Aki's. "This is it for now."
There's a catch. There must be, because the way Yoshida is lifting the corner of his mouth now is not so much humorous as it is sly. Such expressions he always wears openly, and Aki knows this after knowing him for less than a day's worth of time. The deceptive open-book-ness of it all. Yoshida isn't quite one, doesn't wear his heart on his sleeve, but shows people exactly what they want to see. Handsome, smiling schoolboy. Always carrying books with him, so he must enjoy reading in his spare time; how becoming. The only remotely improper thing about him seems to be the abominable number of helix piercings, and even so.
"Do you have money for the ferry?" Aki asks.
"Yes. I'll be fine, Hayakawa." And his voice shifts, lilting—here it comes, Aki thinks, the catch—"If you're worried, we can exchange LINE contacts. That way I can text you when I've gotten back safely."
Yes, even so—Yoshida Hirofumi is smart. Dangerously so, but only to those like Aki who know enough to see past the few pages of the book he's laid out for everyone to read. This is Yoshida, knowing exactly how his words land and exactly how to say them, doing things like this, careful, clever. Weighted dice in his hands.
But even so. Even so—
Aki holds out his phone. "Sure. Put your number in."
Surprise makes Yoshida look his age for once. Younger and sweeter, like any other schoolboy. Makes him look less like Aki. Yoshida blinks, then laughs, this brisk, breathy escape of air leaping from his mouth, light as birdsong. Pleased. Like this, he is suddenly ten times more bearable, and the thought startles Aki so hard he has to make a conscious effort to not let it show on his face.
Yoshida laughs only once, then gets out his own phone from his pocket and reaches for Aki's as it's handed over. They enter their numbers, trade back, and finally part ways. Not once during this exchange do their fingers brush, but Aki's lungs fill up with tidewater anyway, rushing into him cold and fierce and ever-larger than his own body.
THREE
The first text Yoshida ever sends him is the one from last night, a single white bubble popping up against the default blue background: made it back. goodnight, hayakawa. That one Aki had responded to the moment he saw the notification, which was while he and Power and Denji were boarding the ferry back to Naha, and he had typed back an equally formal goodnight, seeing no reason to say more.
The second text from Yoshida he receives at the same time the electric kettle finishes boiling, so Aki goes to make tea first without waking the two sleeping lumps on the bed. Pets Nyako as it weaves lazily around his ankles, then takes his tea over to the small table and sits, opening his phone.
i'm free today, the text reads. what's your plan?
tokashikison, Aki sends back, after a moment of thought. we were at the beaches yesterday, but we'll go further inland today up the mountains.
i can come along, comes the immediate, unsurprising reply. hiking is tiring, you know. worse when you have to watch 2 other people by yourself.
Aki hovers his thumbs over the screen, hesitant.
you don't have to.
i know. i want to.
but i won't overstep, so it's up to you, hayakawa. you can say no.
And—Yoshida means it, Aki knows he does. Means it just like he'd meant it yesterday, when Aki'd fretted over leaving Power and Denji alone near the water and Yoshida had said, Hayakawa, it's fine if you need to go, because he'd seen the worry write itself clear across Aki's features.
So the present danger is not entirely Yoshida's fault—or even at all. The danger now, of all things, is the slow curiosity that takes Aki by his wrist, tempts him forward and in the direction of the door labeled Yoshida Hirofumi . Curiosity when he should have none at all, should tell Yoshida no and be done with it, but even before he finishes that thought he's already nearing hopelessness, is going half-willingly. Because Yoshida, as he is, will surely find another way. Even if not today, Aki will run into Yoshida again, whether by Yoshida's volition or his own. Or by elusive luck. But that, too, has started to slip through the grasp of his fingers like underwater sand. Everyday luck rarely stands a chance against the human will.
it's fine. you can come.
This time, the pause between responses stretches longer, until it is no longer a pause and Aki has been watching his screen for the better half of a minute. what time?
ten, Aki replies. This is a terrible idea, and the keener part of his mind quickly warns him of this, but his fingers are moving to type at a speed faster than he can summon the self-discipline to stop them.
we'll be ferrying from tomari port.
do you need me to bring anything?
No, Aki does not. The image of cool, casual Yoshida hauling an enormous, heaving backpack with him to Tokashiki-son for their hike sneaks its way into his mind unprompted. He sucks his cheeks in and doesn't laugh, squeezes his eyes shut as if doing it hard enough will block out his own imagination.
that won't be necessary.
all right. see you at ten, hayakawa.
see you.
Aki sets his phone next to his tea. Begins to feel it sink into him: the slow, trepid feeling that he's just done something terribly irreversible. Oh, God.
༄
The phrase what have I done doesn't immediately assault Aki upon doing the thing he'd done, which was invite Yoshida to come nature-hiking with them without fully considering the consequences of this decision. It doesn't even assault him three hours later on the island, when Yoshida throws up a hand in his direction and calls, "Hayakawa!", his name carrying clear and calm as a gull in flight over the white noise of distant sea-sound, and smiles upon Aki sighting him.
Yoshida's hands are empty, per Aki's request. His windbreaker is a color that reminds Aki of the coffee Denji'll drink sometimes, so overladen with cream and sugar that it might as well be an entirely different drink altogether. For once, he's made use of the jacket zipper. It'll only get colder the higher they go.
After greeting Denji and Power, Yoshida turns back to Aki, inscrutable gaze passing over the backpack, the camera around his neck, then his hand holding the canvas bag stuffed full of water bottles—mostly for Power and Denji, who have already started running ahead, caught up in their tendency to let excitement get the better of them during walks only to end up exhausting themselves out in half the amount of time it takes for everyone else.
"Let me," Yoshida says, fingers outstretched.
"Let you what?" Aki asks. He looks down at his bag. Jostles it a little, just to remind himself of its weight. "Oh. No, you don't have to—"
“Not this again,” Yoshida laughs quietly. Fondly, but Aki refuses to think harder about that lest it accidentally cracks something open in himself. "Hayakawa, I want to. Stop worrying about overstepping. Give me the bag, I'll carry it."
Carry it he does. They take the widest trail through the thick of the forest, trees overhead still proudly lush and green and deep in the middle of winter, and not once in all the times Aki glances at him does Yoshida show a hint of fatigue. Only carries the bag in one hand, the other always hidden in his pocket, and only stops when Denji and Power come rushing back to switch out their empty plastic bottles with new ones, which they do about three times in half an hour before the sky opens up ahead of them.
The forest parts, and Aki stops, uncaps a water bottle. Squints through the sudden burst of sunlight and sees it. As the trees fall away, they give way to a cerulean ahead that sucks down into the horizon of the sea like paint, or a blue road well-traveled. Clouds sweeping over the sky, pulled so thin and smokelike by the winds Aki thinks he could simply reach up and dissipate them with one wave. Everything shrinking and shrinking toward that invisible line, then disappearing, as if the world between ground and sky were a cube and they have discovered one of its corners. Yellow gravel beneath their feet, brilliant blue infinity beyond.
It is a warmer, brighter day at the end of November. Sun presses sweetly down their backs. Aki raises a hand against it, then gives up and raises his camera instead. He has three rolls of film today. Snaps his first shot of the horizon, then of Denji and Power, then—
"Hayakawa," says Yoshida. "You don't want to be in the pictures? I can take some."
Aki lowers the camera to look at him. "You're holding the bag already."
"I won't drop it, if that's your concern. Here.” He holds out his hands, canvas bag full of bottles hanging from the crook of his arm, and Aki, compelled by some unknowable force, gives the camera to him. “You don't have to pose."
"All right," says Aki, left with no choice but to go on ahead, even if he’s all too aware of the way Yoshida must be watching him now. Catches up to Power and Denji, hauls them away from the edge of the trail by the backs of their collars. Immediately Power throws an arm around him, maneuvering him around so that she can lock in Denji with her other elbow, grin so wide and bright Aki has to narrow his eyes when she aims it at him.
“You’re sweaty,” Denji tells her, an edge of complaint to it.
“Then let go.”
“I can’t, you’re holding on too tight.”
Power sniffs. “Too bad, then.” She holds on tighter, drags them farther along until they've been manhandled to the edge of the sloping cliffs, Aki determinedly anchoring them just far away enough that one wrong step won't send them all rolling. God knows it's difficult, attached to Power, who is attached to Denji, who is trying to wrestle away from her with—half his might, maybe. Then one of them steps on the other’s foot, and things devolve into all-out war.
"Hey," Aki starts, the beginnings of panic leaking in as he goes to move between them. "Denji, stop pushing— Power, you too, just let him go—"
The rest of the world has no such patience for damage control. Aki’s just caught a limb in each hand when the wind cuts through, stinging sharper and colder at this altitude. No pity when it hits Aki full in the face, knocks the words from him, makes him stop. And they all stop.
Yoshida's the first to react. "Don't move," he says, and when Aki glances back at him, he sees the shutter first, then that default-setting smile, the only part of Yoshida's face unobscured by Aki’s camera. "Hayakawa, that means you too."
So Aki turns back, but it doesn't save him from the hot prickle that runs up his neck at having been instructed in a tone that makes him feel faintly scolded, like a child at a family photoshoot who's just been told to behave. Then he thinks about family, and the two other people in their little arm chain, and resolves to stop thinking altogether. Resolves to look ahead, up at the unthreading clouds, the dark cut of land against shallow blue water, and how that, too, becomes a gradient disappearing into the gentle ripple of islands in the distance. Takes a breath, then another.
Behind them, there's the crisp click of the shutter going off a couple times, Yoshida taking pictures in rapid succession. So he’s that kind of person behind the camera, Aki thinks—one who’ll take fifty shots and delete all but the most perfect. Already it sounds like Yoshida’s gotten a dozen of them.
All of a sudden, the realization emerges that Aki is going to be in them, the shots. That when he, or anyone, looks back on these photos from today, it will only be proof. Proof that he had been here, that he had gone on the trip with Power and Denji. Climbed a mountain with them, stood here together on the edge watching sky flood into sea with them. Proof of his being alive and here, right now. The thought slides through him, slow and stark like an ice chip melting on skin, and he sucks in an inhale to steady himself just as the wind, merciless, gusts into his face, makes him cough.
"You can move now," Yoshida announces, as if on cue. “Hayakawa, are you cold?”
Belatedly, Aki notices that Power has let go of him. And Denji, for that matter, the both of them drawing safely away from the edge now and falling into another heated verbal match, going on about some nonsense about crabs and lobsters and which crustacean tastes better. Aki knows from exhaustive experience that one topic of debate can last them hours. He also knows neither Power nor Denji have ever had lobster. That they'd held still enough for Yoshida to take pictures is a feat in and of itself, so Aki lets them keep at it for now.
“I’m fine,” he says, and swallows to stall the dryness in his throat. Steps back from the drop and closes his eyes, breathes in with the white rush of air around him. Focuses on—that, yes, and the lingering buzz where Power had squeezed his arm hard enough for it to go a little numb. The breeze is only as forgiving as the ocean that brings it, but Aki's trying to make something of this anyway, so it's with minimal hesitation that he reaches up and tugs the hair tie from his topknot. Exhales as the tension dispels immediately from his skull, scalp immediately beginning to throb now that it can feel the soreness. Aki runs a hand through his hair to soothe as the wind combs through it, flicks strands over and into his eyes, the corners of his mouth.
Footsteps beside him, faultlessly careful and controlled in their softness—and it's almost funny, when Aki opens his eyes again, that Yoshida makes a point to be so supremely casual from the waist up when everything else about him speaks of endless gears, renders his acting fruitless. Though, fruitless might be harsher than necessary, if Aki wants to be a little less mean about it.
"What?" he says. Yoshida's staring, silent, eyes widened a fraction like he's never seen another human before. As if all this time he's never actually looked at Aki before, which is a suggestion Aki knows to be absolutely false. It makes him look young all over again, but not childlike, no. That exposed innocence vanishes with the next blink, and then it's only the hunger that's left, as though Yoshida is trying to burn his eyes into Aki, burn Aki into his eyes.
"What is it?" Aki repeats, growing increasingly self-conscious by the second.
"Nothing," Yoshida says. Gaze so dark and deep, glimmering with restraint. So clear on his face, the restraint, that Aki can only laugh—something dangerously delighted lancing through his voice—at how it betrays him.
"What? You can say it."
"It's—" Yoshida breaks eye contact first, a rarity. Then continues, so quiet it's almost a mumble, "You should let your hair down more often. It's a good look for you."
Steeped in disbelief, Aki watches as the faintest rosy dusting touches Yoshida's pale, pale face. Still, it is just visible enough as to be impossible to deny as a trick of the light.
Oh, hell. There’s not a chance.
Though, of course, that can only be a lie when the evidence is directly in his eyes. That being, Yoshida's gone a little red. Yoshida is blushing, and Aki—oh, God. Aki, then, is abruptly overcome with the urge to reach out, touch a hand to his cheek. Feel for himself if it's as warm as it is pink. Watch surprise jolt into Yoshida, watch his face go charmingly slack the way it had yesterday when Aki’d said sure, put your number in, because a Yoshida thrown off his rhythm is a Yoshida Aki can look at.
Years of self-control save him. He doesn't touch Yoshida, not with his hands, but reaches into the canvas bag still hanging from Yoshida's arm instead and taps the cold end of an unopened water bottle to his cheek, right over the blush, light as anything. Says, in lieu of something far more catastrophic, "Drink."
"It's fine, I'm not thirsty," Yoshida replies immediately.
"You haven't drank anything since we started up the mountain," Aki says. "Drink, Yoshida."
And, like before, the phrase what have I done does not find its landing point when Yoshida meets Aki's eyes, sighs in defeat, and finally accepts the bottle. Instead, as realizations are wont to do, it catches Aki only after it has reached its highest point of lethality. That being some stretch of time later, after Aki's long turned away and back toward the bigger view, Yoshida speaks again. Saying, voice unreadable, "Aki. Look at me for just a second."
"Hm?" Aki turns. “What’s—”
Snap.
Yoshida, impossibly smug, lowers the camera. Aki blinks. "Yoshida."
But Yoshida's grinning again, immune to it and absurdly pleased with himself, the flush glowing high and sun-steady upon his cheeks a damning reminder of his boyishness. "Sorry," he says, no honesty in it at all, and adds, "Keep it, you look good in it," silvery-sweet as if he thinks flattery can get him anywhere with Aki. Though even so, Aki's annoyance retreats like the tide. Folds back up into himself, almost awkward at having emerged in the first place.
Time and place, pinpointed. The uncoiling of it—Aki looks, and Yoshida looks back, and Aki thinks to himself, wretchedly: Good lord, what have I done. Already forgiving Yoshida through the impending lurch of doom in his chest. Already forgiving him before there'd been anything to forgive. Already forgiving him, because there's no returning from it now, and because Aki, despite himself, has started to smile. Good lord, indeed.
FOUR
It's Power who gets the idea of whale-watching. Aki's itinerary had said something about marketplaces in Naha, but then Denji had dug out a handful of dusty brochures left in the hotel closet by previous guests and showed them to her, and she'd instantly become impossible to argue with. Why look at dead fish when you could look at living ones, she'd said, and Aki'd had to tell her that whales weren't fish, to which she said he was lying, to which he said he wasn't, and had started to get out his phone to pull up proof before realizing the sheer pointlessness of it all.
So they go to Zamamijima. They go whale-watching. Except there are nothing but gulls and waves for about twenty minutes after they board the boat and clip on their lifejackets because—and Aki only finds this out after he bothers to ask their guide, a young woman with a crooked smile and cherry-highlighter hair who'd introduced herself to them as Taira—they're actually a bit early for whale season.
"Which doesn't mean they're not here at all," Taira explains quickly, before the pinch of outrage on Power's face can build itself into a capsizing disaster. "Just that there are fewer of them. We saw a couple yesterday once we went out far enough, so don't be discouraged just yet."
"If I paid for nothing, I'm putting you on cleaning duty for a month when we get back," Aki says to Power after Taira disappears to the helm again.
Power crosses her arms, blinks through her lashes at him all faux-innocent in that way she does when she's trying to be threatening. "I could throw you overboard right now."
"Sure," Aki says. "If you do that it'll be bathroom duty for a month."
She bares her teeth at him and wisely keeps silent.
The threat does not follow through, though Aki hadn’t put heart into it anyway. Because they do, in fact, end up seeing whales. A pair spotted in the distance, humpbacks, cleaving through the water as sunlight sluices off their wet backs like a thousand glittering pearls. Visible and moving, and coming closer still, surfacing every half a minute with a spray of white foam. Coming so close, eventually, that even Denji pockets his phone—Aki's phone, which he'd opened Subway Surfers on—to drape himself over Power's back for a better view.
Power shouts something that's lost to Aki over the steady whirring of the engine, pointing with so much vigor she almost tumbles clean out of her seat before Aki’s reflexes kick in, hand shooting out to grab the hem of her shirt and pull her back down. Multitasking comes easier now that he lives with two typhoons for housemates; he flips open his camera one-handedly, then lifts it to eye level, then lets go of Power, because the lens needs adjusting and he hasn’t yet figured out how to do that with only one hand.
Then there are hands on his camera—Power, goddammit, and Denji, too, the two of them moving as if they'd planned the whole thing—and Aki's only gotten three shots, and only one of which he's sure isn't indisputably blurry, before the whole thing is gone from his grip and Denji's looping it around his neck instead, as if he has even half an inkling as to how a DSLR works.
"What in the world are you—"
"Look," Power says. Commands, seizing Aki's face and cranking it away from Denji, back to the water. "Look, for real. That thing is tiny, how are you supposed to see anything through it?"
"It has a screen," Aki retorts, as if that’ll win him the argument. He won't win this, knows he won't when Power and Denji only stare back at him, counter his stubbornness with their own. "If the lens gets wet, I'll kill you both."
"Uh huh," Denji says, but in a moment he rolls his eyes and shields the lens with a hand, and that's that.
For as long as he's lived, Aki has never gone out to sea. Hadn't gone with his parents—and, of course, the opportunity never arose back when he was still earning paychecks by playing hard and fast with death, though he'd learned how to swim years ago, back when his family, his old family, had gone to the Izu peninsula one summer.
Still, those memories fall too far back in the past, and everything between that and now has been clouded over with murk. The body remembers, though, even when the mind does not, so Aki does know that he's never been out on a boat like this because it is entirely new, unlike the sea-scent that is an old memory come alive, salt stinging on his tongue when he opens his mouth to suck in the breeze.
And he's never been—well, he's just never been, because then one of the humpbacks breaks the surface, shatters it, splits it open. Soars belly-up against the open sky, so enormous and free Aki can make no room for envy for something like that, something near-terrifying in its existence. His heart's in his throat for all of that moment—the whale's white shock of underbelly, their boat suddenly mortifyingly dwarfed, Denji and Power screaming and screaming right next to him like they've forgotten themselves. And if they have, then Aki has, too. Out of breath, out of his mind. No words would've fit, then, the unnameable surge in his chest, bursting into him like a gift of breath, as though he were being born anew, thrust out and into the world again knowing nothing of the world at all. Nothing but wonder in its most original form. And wonder leaves only looking, and looking, and looking again. So Aki hangs on, hangs on tight to his seat, and looks. Up at the humpback whale, the slap of its tail, the sheets of white foam that explode forth in its wake. At Power's eyes, Denji's slack face. All wonder, like birth. Like breaking the surface of the water, remembering the taste of air. Like momentous spectacles that push you out of your body, then put you back, making you cling tighter to yourself in the shock of self-awareness. Like those two, three seconds, and Aki in them; Aki in them. The most alive he’s ever been.
༄
"Hayakawa, you look different," Yoshida says when he sits down. Doesn't even wait for a better time to bring it up—just flings that out the moment he ducks through the low-cut entrance of the restaurant and locates the table Aki and Denji and Power are at. He follows it up with nothing. If this is his way of greeting them today, Aki truly has no idea what to expect from it. He had forgotten for a little while that Yoshida, too, is like sand, ever-shifting in his forms, never exactly as he'd been the day before, the last time Aki'd seen him. A hectagon in motion, always a new side of him turned toward the light. Always looking for newer ways to surprise, to charm. And, as it seems, today he has chosen abruptness as his trait to put on display.
"What do you mean?" Aki asks, bewildered. He lifts a hand to his hair just to make sure his topknot is in place, then touches his face. Nothing strange, nothing out of place. "Do I have something on my face?"
For someone who'd made such a brazen lightning-judgment upon arrival, Yoshida takes an insultingly long time letting that obscurity boil between them. It's only after he orders a bowl of sōki soba and a plate of takoyaki—with the practiced ease of a returning client, no less—and after the dark polish of their table risks disappearing entirely under all the dishes they pile onto it, and after they're about halfway through their meal—that he finally speaks up again.
"It's like there was only forty-percent of you yesterday," he explains, the hand not holding his chopsticks gesturing along with his point. Thumb and index finger pulled apart to mimic holding a segment of something. "And there's sixty-percent today. Maybe even seventy. You're more here, is what I mean."
"I get it!" Power says, butting in before Aki can open his mouth again and say something like that doesn't make any sense, can you explain it again with less percentages? Within the next two seconds she shoves an entire gyoza in her mouth and swallows it down. Aki thinks he sees her chew twice.
Then, with a sudden, serious weight to her expression, she turns to Aki. Leans in. "I can see you today," she says. "You were really transparent before, but right now—" she presses a finger to the center of his forehead, making him blink, "—it feels like there's more of you. I like it, 'cause now I don't have to keep grabbing you to make sure you're here."
"Is that what you've been doing?" Aki keeps his tone light. "Always clinging to me because you were scared I was a ghost, or something?"
Power shoves another gyoza in her mouth. They're Denji's, Aki realizes, but he's been stealing her yashigani all evening, so. "I touch you because I like you," she says. An easiness to her words that he's almost jealous of—and would be jealous of—if he knew even a little bit less about the world and what it can do to people like her. "But you always feel farther away than Denji. I gotta grab on harder to make sure you stay, 'cause if I'm not careful, one day you might really be gone." A pause, and she adds, a touch softer, "It's not like that today."
And, well, Aki has nothing to say to that. Nothing that won't be interrupted halfway by immediate tears, nothing that can hold up against the strange, sweet emotion Power has brought down upon him like it'd been nothing for her and simultaneously everything. Like she'd been thinking about it forever, but hadn't actually found the words for it until she'd been prompted. And Aki's not quite on her level yet; he's not even close. He could spend another hour doing nothing but pondering an acceptable response, and he'd come up with plenty, yes, but nothing he could say out loud. Nothing that'd suffice in the face of something as profound as—
"I see," Aki mumbles, straightening up. "That’s—good. Sorry, excuse me for a few minutes."
When he's back out in the dark, in the cold, he laughs first. Quietly, not the clear, jubilant kind, but muffled into his jacket sleeve by way of being too private to broadcast. Then when he’s run out of that, he cries, silent and clean, another thing he's learned to do after he started living with Denji and Power. Gives himself a minute. Wipes his tears on his sleeve and rubs at them for good measure until the dampness looks no different from an oil stain.
The night is a shade of diluted ink. Light peels into it like a knife taken to plumskin when the door of the restaurant opens again, Yoshida slicing a lean shadow through that bright orange spill.
"Hayakawa," he says, expression hard to make out when Aki turns to him. "Let me see you guys back to your hotel."
༄
Which is abruptness, all right. They call a cab back; Yoshida pays for his own fee and determinedly sends them all the way to the building's entrance, doesn't let up a single time the whole ride back despite Aki's halfhearted protesting until Denji and Power have gotten safely inside and Aki is but a few steps away from the glass doors.
It's not until then that Aki registers just how quiet he'd been through all of dinner earlier, how it'd instantly fallen to Power and Denji to carry most of the conversation until Yoshida had decided to elaborate on his cryptic greeting. How he's only been candid today, as much as someone like Yoshida can manage candidness. How he'd looked when he'd stepped out and into the dark to get Aki, half of him submerged in unseeing shadow, the look on his face frighteningly inscrutable, even as he'd spoken.
Everything stays perfectly still for one small eternity. Aki, twisted away from the light of the entrance to look at Yoshida, and Yoshida, a pace away, turned towards it. Some kind of poetic fascination to it. Some kind of irony, hovering just in the space between them, hidden but not for long.
"We went whale-watching," Aki blurts without preamble. Then, still looking at Yoshida, as though spurred by a desire greater than logic, than self-preservation, "I'll tell you about it tomorrow, if you're free."
And—there is no hesitation. No tense beat to listen for. Relief settles back down over Aki's shoulders, sags into him like sleep when Yoshida grins.
"Then I'll see you tomorrow, Hayakawa."
FIVE
Like always, Aki rises early enough to catch the morning chill before it can be warmed away by the incoming sun. He goes out to buy breakfast for Denji and Power, except he's barely two strides out the door, phone opened and ready to book a cab, when he hears a voice from behind him call, "Yo, Hayakawa, over here."
Yoshida's leaning against a streetlamp, backpack slung over his shoulders like he's going to school. Denim jacket a poppy-red flare out of nowhere, magnetically vibrant against the soft grays and whites of a nine A.M. morning. He's brought a bike. "Wanna go somewhere?"
"You have a bike?" Aki asks.
"Just bought it. I'm a good cycler, I promise. I won't get us into any accidents." His smile hangs off his mouth crookedly, playfully. There's a certain fashion to how the zealously bright red reflects up against the underside of his jaw and turns it flush-pink that makes Aki feel things he refuses to name. "I did say I'd see you today, Hayakawa. You know I always mean what I say, don't you?"
Do I? Do you? Oh, it's happening now, isn't it?
"Yeah, I know," Aki says, defeated. "Where are we going, Yoshida?"
Yoshida's smile grows wider, shows a flash of teeth. "I'm still deciding between three options. Ask me again later."
༄
All three must be out of Naha, because once they get going, Yoshida doesn't stop once until they're well past the outskirts of the city. When Aki raises his head, ears numb from the constant blast of wind, he watches as the maw of the sky finally opens up without skyscrapers to crowd it out. The blue of it is cloudless and immeasurable. Under it, Aki can only tighten his arms around Yoshida's waist as they zip past cars, through narrow roads, over bridges, fast as flying.
Then the road transitions from bleached asphalt to gravel, and the wind starts dropping, and Yoshida's pulling up to a small, nondescript convenience store.
"Let's take a break," he says. "You like onigiri, right?"
They eat outside, joined by a kind of quiet that hasn't accompanied Aki since he moved to the city years ago. They're far from the highway now, far from any big roads. No cars at all, the breeze slower and the sunlight stronger today, casting everything in a glowing gold so rarely seen this late into the year. Aki'd forgotten how it had felt, surrounded by reassuring eyefuls of green and more green, even the houses colored in by decades of weather, old and rural enough that they'd escaped the monotones of minimalist architecture before it'd taken over cities at a time.
He swallows past the sudden ache of nostalgia in his heart and finishes his onigiri. Turns to Yoshida, who's been quiet all the while as he pops the marble in his ramune. "So," says Aki, "where are we going?"
Yoshida smiles around the lip of his drink. His throat works once, twice, sweat-sheen illuminated over his skin all glittery and harder to look away from by the second.
"Ojima," he says.
༄
It's another hour by bike before they arrive on the island, this tiny, flat circle of land wreathed by signature Okinawan-blue waters, and it's another ten minutes of navigating before they reach the marketplace. And—this isn't Tashirojima, but Aki loses count of the number of stray cats he sees within minutes of crossing the bridge into the island, and counts at least fifteen more upon stepping foot into the fish market. One of them, sleek and tuxedo-patterned, comes sniffing up to them as Yoshida locks his bike to a railing. When Yoshida leans down, though, offers his hand, it brushes right past him in that unmistakeably haughty way that cats have about them.
Aki can't help it—he laughs at that, bizarrely charmed. Immediately Yoshida's eyes flick up to him. "You try," he says.
Aki does. Gets into a crouching position and extends a hand, closed fist the way he'd learned back when Nyako used to swipe at him whenever he got too close, and after a week of back-and-forths he'd given up and finally asked Power about it, and she'd looked at him and said, Humans are like giants, Aki. Just make yourself less scary. So he makes himself small instead, directs his eyes to the back wheel of Yoshida's bike. Like magic, the cat comes right up to him, bumps its cheek against his knuckles, then dashes right off.
"Power has a cat," he explains, straightening up and catching Yoshida's gaze. "I have—experience, kind of."
For a pause Aki thinks he might be sulking, but then Yoshida's eyes curve with something not quite amusement, not quite gratification. An in-between thing he's never seen before. "That was cute," Yoshida says, almost too lightly, and then he turns away and toward the entrance so that Aki can't see his expression. "Okay, now come on. We don't have all day."
Even in winter the marketplace is full and lively, packed to the brim, the majority of them middle-aged to elderly shoppers with a handful of children weaving in and about throughout. And because it is relatively small, it is swimming with sights. Something new to see with every slight glance, every sideways tilt of the head. Two schoolgirls swinging their legs from their stools, bent over their books together and conversing too quickly and quietly to catch. A group of grown men around a table, all of them sporting white hair and sun-loved skin, all of them heads-deep in a game of riichi mahjong. Shop owners with busy hands, shop owners half-asleep at their counters. So many people it'd have overwhelmed Aki in minutes if not for the fact that, even so, the place sports such a contained chaos that its hectic nature seems implicitly familiar rather than foreign.
Eventually, he, too, gets caught up in the ebb and flow. Buys sashimi for Power and Nyako and butter-sweet rolls for Denji, and gets talked into trying a local squid dish by the tiny, thin-boned woman manning the front of her store, who'd caught him struggling to read the black marker scribbling on the menu and immediately clocked him as a first-timer. Yoshida leads him around to one of the sweets stands and gets matcha ice cream, while Aki orders an ice slush. Which turns out to be one of the less intelligent decisions he's made in his life when his fingers start to go numb around the cup by the time they've grabbed a table to sit at. No more than half a minute later, as Aki's trying to massage the warmth back into his hand, does Yoshida take notice and procure a napkin from his backpack, presenting it to Aki across the table.
"For your hands," he says.
"Ah—thanks."
Aki accepts the napkin, but he's feeling faintly intimidated by it all. It's not about the napkin, or how far they are from Naha, or how he'd just—gotten on the bike, put his arms around Yoshida, and hadn't given it a second thought for hours and hours. How he'd only let that happen because he's been compartmentalizing all his thoughts about Yoshida, compartmentalizing Yoshida. It's about—well, it's always about Yoshida when Yoshida's around, and sometimes even when he's not, but. How can he be like this? Attentiveness at the ready, a full cartridge of it—how can he do that? Aki had known it already, but to sit on the receiving end of that kind of inescapable focus makes him want to climb out a window, clamber out of his own skin.
And he knows why they're here today. Knows why Yoshida hadn't asked before showing up at the hotel, knows why he's so frugal with his words today, like he's trying to save them up for a better time. And, yes, that time being now. Here. Aki knows why.
"We saw humpbacks yesterday," he begins. Watches Yoshida set down his ice cream with an anticipated swiftness. Like, oh, finally. You remembered. Almost petulant, but Yoshida is still young, and Aki pretends to not see how his impatience wins out in the end. Simply continues, "They were beautiful. Actually, beautiful isn't the right word, but I don't know another way to describe what I saw. Have you ever seen a whale flip out of the water?"
Yoshida's not eating anymore. He shakes his head.
"It's like—if I didn't know any better I'd think they could just rise up into the air. Gravity be damned and all that. They're so big, and you know that—you can feel it the moment you see them, how much bigger they are than the boat. But then they jump and it's like physics isn't real for a moment. It is, but you don't believe it until they splash back down. One of them came really close to the boat yesterday, and it leapt up, and I—" He pauses. "I don't think I've ever felt like that. Like I was actually alive in my body. But I think I remembered it right then, when I saw that whale." The embarrassment creeps up on him as he's saying it, and Aki laughs. "It's kinda stupid, right?"
"No, not at all." Yoshida's completely serious. He doesn't lie—Aki knows that now. Not to Aki, at least, and that—that is a dangerous thought. That Aki is special enough for Yoshida to be honest with. Or, at least, to not be directly dishonest with. But the truth stands regardless: Yoshida is being honest right now, and Aki knows this because everyone has tells, and Yoshida hasn't gone sharp once, not in the way Aki's seen him go before.
"Can I ask you something, Hayakawa?"
Aki hesitates. "What is it?"
Yoshida meets his gaze. "Why did you come to Okinawa?"
Ah. Aki hopes his relief isn't visible. "It was Power and Denji who wanted to come, not me. But I brought them here, yeah. I've been trying to supervise them ever since." And what a funny thing to say now when he's away on an island off the coast, a two-hour bike ride from the hotel, from the two people he'd sworn to not let out of his sight since arriving. What a funny thing now that he's with Yoshida only, who is not his to supervise.
"And now?" Yoshida asks.
It takes a moment for Aki to understand. And then he looks at Yoshida, really looks —the sheer volume of his concentration, his expression stone-still, as if Aki's next words will make or break something—and he understands. Laughs, leans his head against the wall. It comes easier to him than he expects.
"Now? I guess I'm having fun."
༄
They get lunch at the fish market and begin to bike back in the early afternoon. A would-be two hour trip, but they take a different route this time because Yoshida's determined to go slower wherever there are scenic views to be seen, so they end up stopping at a konbini again for bento boxes by the time the sky shows the beginnings of a flush. The approaching evening hasn't yet chased away the heat of the day, and they sit outside with their bentos, backs pressed up against the chipped beige side of the building, resting.
Yoshida is a fast eater, Aki learns. They both are. He doesn't want to let himself linger on the possible implications of that shared habit, so instead he says, gripped by that nameless urge that'd gotten him on the bike today and out of the city, "Power was right, yesterday. When she said she's never seen me like this before."
Both of their bentos sit empty on their laps. Slowly, Yoshida sets his to the side, then uncrosses his legs and turns his body toward Aki. Saying nothing, only regarding him, patient and still. Waiting, because Aki's going to say it; he's made up his mind; he just needs a second, first.
༄
"I don't remember my family that much. My first family, I mean—my parents and brother and me. Not because I was too young for it when they all died, because for a few years they were all I could remember, and I remembered them so clearly, the way they died. One day I came home from school and they were all in the kitchen, shot dead. Cops at the scene, yellow tape, everything."
This part is easy to talk about, because he's told people about it before. This hurt he knows too well for it to cut sharp. "Anyway, I never learned all the details, but I know they were killed because of someone else. Some person my parents knew—he was well-off, dabbled in some crime. So it wasn't even about them, it was about him. They were collateral damage. Some shady fucker they got just a little too close to, and they died for it.
"I was fourteen. They tried to put me in the system later, but Makima found me first. She pulled some strings and said I could come and work for her, get my revenge on the killers, revenge on the man they'd died for. Told me I'd be fed and taken care of, and that there were people like me where she worked. And I believed her. Or—it's more like I wanted to believe her. I was old enough to be suspicious of what she was promising me, but I didn't care, I wanted so badly for it to be the perfect answer. The perfect life for me after I’d lost everything I had. So I went with her. I joined her group of vigilante revenge-chasers, except I didn't know back then that we were being trained into professional hitmen, and that revenge was never where it was gonna end for me.
"As soon as I arrived, they paired me with someone older, more experienced. Said she could show me the ropes, kind of like a mentor. That fell through fast, though. As soon as I started treating her like one she got pissed, told me not to get my hopes up, so I stopped. But—for the longest time I thought she was unbeatable because I met her when she was eighteen, and smoked and drank all the time, and never made stupid mistakes on the job, and never cried. She wasn't. Four months ago, she—"
Aki stops, swallowing. This is the hard part. This is where everything knots together in his mind and won't come loose, not a single thread. Himeno hadn't been—whatever she'd been to him in his mind until she was losing blood faster than Aki'd ever thought possible. How could she have been, when all she did was drink away her grief? And how could he have not known until he was staring it in the face? All that blood and he'd only realized it then, when she was so beyond saving nothing in the last five years could've made up for it. Nothing Aki could do, and nothing he could've done.
"It was so fucking stupid. We were on an assignment, and I got shot in the leg, and then she got shot trying to drag me to safety. She wasn't supposed to do that—we were taught not to do that, but—"
He sucks in another breath, chest twinging with the effort. If he doesn't say it all now he'll never say it again. He'll keep it folded inside himself forever, keep it in the fridge until it becomes unsalvageable along with the rest of the stuff back there, months-old and wasting. He'll go rotten with it otherwise.
A hand touches his, cool and smooth. Aki closes his eyes.
"She wouldn't let me die, so she crawled on top of me and just. Laid there. And somehow the bullets got some of her, but none of me. I was able to reach my handgun and shoot them all down, but there was nothing I could do for her by then. Nothing anyone could do. I was the only one there to watch her go."
The quiet doesn't become silence, even when Aki stops again, stops to catch himself, to breathe. There are discernable sounds of traffic drifting in from the distance, from the roads they can't see in the growing dark. A car honks, then another. In this instant the present is a blade, one that carves a stark line between itself and the past. Right now, Aki is alive, and his memories do not exist anywhere but inside of him, as memories do. Right now, he is not back in Makima's office, not in the hospital, not on the rooftop watching blood pool steadily beneath Himeno, wishing there had been enough of it for him to drown in.
"I was there for five years, but I only ever loved three people for certain. She—Himeno—was one of them. And Makima. And the only other partner I had besides Himeno—someone named Angel. I got paired with him after Himeno died, and he was so different from all the people I'd worked with that I hated him for it. And then I loved him because he was lonely, like me. We'd worked together for just two weeks before he was gone, too.
"And then there were Denji and Power. After Angel, Makima brought them to me. I looked at them, then, and I—I thought of my old family. Realized I could barely remember their faces right anymore; I'd been killing and killing for so long that all the dead bodies looked the same. Realized I couldn't do it again. Couldn't keep them there. They would've died, and it was all I could think about when I first saw them—how I'd have to bury them." His voice gives beneath him, suddenly, the bridge of it going straight to splinters. When he speaks again he can barely make out his own words through the hoarse rip in his throat. "I kept picturing their headstones next to Himeno's, next to Angel's. I couldn't go through with it again, so I took them. I ran. And now I'm here, Yoshida." His laugh pulls out of him in ragged shards. "Now I'm here."
For an immeasurable amount of time, Yoshida says nothing at all. As Aki had talked he'd also begun to tremble, and upon that, Yoshida had slid his fingers around Aki's palm, gripped him there, held him steady through it. As if a wordless reassurance: yes, this is the present. Aki is here, and with every breath he takes he shall stay here.
Aki closes his eyes again, then opens them. Meets Yoshida's gaze. And Yoshida says nothing, still, but his eyes have caught the streetlight, shimmering down on Aki strangely, something so serious and profound in them that for just one moment, Aki is afraid. Afraid of their depths, afraid of what he's done. Afraid of what could emerge.
Then Yoshida blinks, and opens his mouth, and says, "Hayakawa. Hayakawa, come here, you're shaking." Voice also patched up with fear, only lacking Aki’s hysterical tremor. A frightened urgency to it when he opens his arms and repeats, voice no louder, "Hayakawa."
And Aki, nineteen and shaking apart and no longer able to hold back tears, can only reach out. For him, for his hands that anchor Aki's as if Yoshida, too, is afraid that Aki will run away now after spilling his heart out. Such soft-skinned hands he has—boyish hands, just precise enough that Aki can imagine a knife in them, but nonetheless soft, as though he has not held one long enough for calluses to form. Aki's own hands are faintly scarred, dry in a way no hand cream can save. Yoshida is holding both of them, one in each of his own, as if it's the only chance he'll ever get, and he's whispering things as Aki releases a sob into his shoulder, it's okay, it's okay, even though he has no way of knowing that. It's okay, Hayakawa. Deep breaths. You're here. Okay? You're right here.
They sit like that for a long while, cross-legged on the pavement next to the store, breathing each other in slowly, surely, until the evening finally settles all the way to the ground and begins to spread around them. Yoshida disentangles one of their hands, slides it up to Aki's bare forearm instead. Draws invisible shapes into his skin as Aki wipes his face, pulls away a little, and says rather helplessly, "I got your jacket wet."
"Oh, fuck that," Yoshida says immediately. Almost angry. So suddenly and childishly brusque that it startles a half-dazed laugh from Aki, which in turn makes Yoshida look at him again, something careful and strategic in his gaze. "Do you want to go back anytime soon, or do you want to stay here a little longer? Whatever you want."
"I—" Aki stops, takes a moment. He wants—"Tomorrow. Tell me about yourself. Let's go back now, but tomorrow I want the truth. Just some of it," he adds, because Yoshida's eyes have begun to shutter. "It's only fair, right? Now that you know everything about me."
Yoshida stays quiet for a beat. Then: "All right," he says. "But I don't know everything about you. I really don't."
And—one look is all it takes. If Aki'd had even the most translucent shadow of a doubt before, it's gone with the wind now. One look and he knows; it's right in his face. Sees it more plainly than ever, Yoshida's gaze so willing, so full of want, as if Aki could tell him anything right now and he'd write it down, keep it forever.
"I don't know your favorite season," Yoshida says, "or your favorite time of day, or what kind of movies you like. I don't know anything."
"There's not much to know," Aki says. "Really. I've told you most of it in the last hour."
"You mean your past? That's not all there is to you, though, Hayakawa. You know that, right?"
Yoshida sounds—offended. No, that's not quite right. Far gentler, far more insistent. He's upset, Aki realizes. Yoshida is upset with him.
All of a sudden the hand gripping his is much too tight, and Aki's forearm burns where Yoshida's palm presses an invisible brand into the skin. All of a sudden Aki is much too old for this. Too jaded in the face of such willful youth.
"I'm tired," he says. Pulls away and makes to stand, and keeps his eyes away from Yoshida's face. Knows too well how it must look. "Can we go back?"
༄
Another hour of pedaling through the city does absolutely nothing to Yoshida, though Aki hadn't expected it to, even in the dark. He hasn't let up one inch; Aki reads it right off his face as soon as they're close enough to the light of the hotel. That look on his face, stubborn as anything and so terribly, endearingly impressive.
"Goodnight, Hayakawa," he says. "I'll see you tomorrow."
"Okay," Aki says, soft. Then, because Yoshida's expression hasn't shifted one bit, and because there is nothing else he can say: "Go home, Yoshida. Get some sleep. We'll talk tomorrow."
༄
That the hotel itself hadn't burned down while Aki had been gone should singlehandedly prove the existence of miracles. Denji and Power are both in bed when Aki opens the door, and neither of them are asleep. Power is tapping away at what sounds like a rhythm game so hard Aki imagines that if her nails don't break soon, the screen will, and Denji is dangling one of Power's shoelaces in front of a very disinterested-looking Nyako. Both of them glance up the moment Aki enters, and the sight of them there on the bed, everything about them so relievingly young and unscarred, kept safe and whole and far away from all that old violence, cracks something open in Aki. Something impossibly tender under layers and layers of bricked-up defenses as if, in looking at them after a long day away, he's accidentally discovered a direct doorway to his heart.
"Hi," he says, the exhaustion of an entire day unloading and liquifying his bones immediately as he puts down his things. He moves to flop down on the bed. "You two survived. I bought—"
"You're back!" Power shrieks.
They both lunge for him at the same time, which is the comedic doom of it, because Aki, tall as he is, had not been built to hold the weight of two more people, and so the three of them go toppling right back down onto the mattress like a skyscraper from Godzilla . Only by drawing on months of experience does Aki manage to extract himself from the pile without breaking anything, theirs or his own, but he’s beaten out by Power, who proves to be equally efficient in wrapping back around him like a baby monkey. Which then, burden as it is, leaves Aki no choice but to accept his role as the tree.
"You look alive!" she tells him breathlessly.
“Do I?” Aki says, drained.
"You think so?" says Denji. Freed from their tangle, he starts to make his way over on his knees, shuffles across the bed toward their jungle display. Leans in with his whole weight and fits his arms around them both. "I dunno, Powy, he looks like shit to me."
That gets a laugh out of Aki, overbold and way too loud. He's far too tired to care about how crazy it must sound. And it must, because then Denji is pulling out of the hug to stare at him like he's grown wings, mouth agape.
"Never mind," he says. "I think that's the first time I've ever heard you laugh like that. Now you've gotta tell us where you went, Hayakawa, c'mon. Are you drunk?"
"Definitely not," Aki snorts. "I was out with Yoshida. What did you two get up to?"
Identical grins slide up Power and Denji's faces, so in sync it would land both of them on the thin edge of terrifying if Aki didn't know them as he does. Didn't love them as he does. What a danger it'd been, to say all that earlier, to give it shape and sound and space to move through. Because words, once spoken out loud, will become memory. Love, he had said, and now it's all he can think of. All he knows, even as his body is now truly minutes away from giving out and knocking him into sleep.
"We'll tell you our adventures if you tell us yours," Denji says as Power smirks up at him, and Aki thinks, I love them, I love them, I love them. Over and over, as if it's as vital as breathing. A surge of affection that overtakes him in its entirety, as though he’s found himself out at sea all over again.
"Deal," he says. "But if I fall asleep during any of it, do not wake me. I've had a hell of a day."
SIX
The miracle, Aki discovers, is not the hotel not burning down, nor the fact that Denji and Power had gone out to the sea and ordered lunch without getting into a single fight, nor the fact that they'd managed to find their way back to the hotel by sundown after getting absolutely lost in the city for two hours straight. Because here's the thing: Power and Denji are not useless. Stupid, yes. A pair of idiots forever and always, two twin pains in Aki's neck for as long as he'll live, yes. But Aki's been overdoing it. Should've known sooner, should've known that first five A.M. morning when he woke up to the fire alarm and all hell breaking loose in his kitchen that Power and Denji were not his in the way he'd thought they needed to be.
But Aki's a hell of an idiot sometimes, so that goes over his head, and now it's come back with better aim to hit him square in the face at eight in the morning, watching Denji rise quietly alongside him and peer at the itinerary in his hands.
"Su-i-zo-ku-kan," he reads, sounding out all five syllables slow and unsure, as though reading foreign text. Then glances up at Aki. "That's ‘aquarium’, right? Like the one we're going to today."
When Aki just blinks at him, stunned, Denji scratches his neck and rolls his eyes at him. "What? Reze helped me learn some kanji. Gotta learn how to read if I'm gonna go to school, get a good job."
"You—" Aki pauses. Thinks about it, then starts over. "Does… does Power want to go, too?"
"Maybe. She said she'd go if I go, so I guess, yeah." Denji frowns. "Shit, don't ask her about it, though. It's supposed to be a secret for now."
And that, well. Aki thinks of Denji and Power discussing this behind his back the way they'd talked about going on a trip, about bribing Aki for it, and feels—absurdly stupid. Pan-in-the-face kind of stupid, concussive kind of stupid. Unbelievably so, for missing it—for missing them. The way they're pulling away, climbing, wild and fast like vine-growth. And here Aki is, stuck in the past, always stuck in the past. Thinking they were only his because they were brought to him, because they couldn't leave him. Treating them like children, treating them with more frenzy than they deserve. Don't you trust us, Aki?
He doesn't. Or—he hadn't, and now is the point of change, the point of realization. Because there had been no miracle; it had all been Aki. The violent embarrassment of it smacks into him now, how little trust he's awarded them, how afraid for them he's been when all they've ever done is be true to themselves, strange and silly and colorful as they are. And they'll earn no merit in the world for that, he knows. There is no preexisting place for people like them to be safe in, but they'll go out into the world anyway, and what can he do about that? Who is he to deny them of the world, and the world of them? Such is living.
"If you two ever want—some help," he begins, awkward. "With studying kanji. You can ask me."
Denji looks at him curiously, forehead creasing, as if he, too, has no idea what to make of the indescribable weight of this conversation. "Thanks, man. Uh, I'm gonna go wake Power now, 'kay? And don't say anything about this to her."
"Yeah, all right. Hey, Denji?"
"Yeah?"
"I'm gonna ask Yoshida to come, too."
No reaction to that—Denji's brows only crease deeper. "Yeah? Am I supposed to say something to that?"
"No, no." Laughing, Aki turns away, goes to draw the curtains open. "You don't have to say anything."
༄
Kaiyohaku Park is far too enormous and full every day of the year for a rendezvous, and despite the overcast, today is no exception, though that is perhaps spurred by the fact that it is much too dry for the clouds to muster rain this time of the year. In any sense, none of them are here for the weather: Denji and Power's priorities lie with the promise of sharks and a lunch buffet, and Aki—well. Aki spots Yoshida under the whale shark statue and calls out to him. Keeps perfectly steady, keeps going. Teetering just on the edge of nauseous about the whole thing, stomach doing swoops and propelling him back into his schoolboy self, those days so long ago that it feels almost wrong for these nerves to be returning to him now, five years later and so far removed from that life.
But they're real, and the old emotion, too, is real. It returns bolder, blooms bigger now that he is older. When Yoshida throws him a smile, a flash so fleeting it can be nothing but private, then turns to bump his fist to Denji's, Aki feels—he just feels. Some inexpressible tangle in him pulling wire-tight. No words for it. And that's all sorts of awful and terrifying; already he's starting to fear that he won't make it through the day when it's barely begun. That already he's done, he's gone, he's irretrievable.
He is not. He gets a map of the place and gets his camera around his neck, and they end up making it through the entire coral reef exhibit as a group before Power spots the Kuroshio sign, grabs Denji, who grabs Aki because his kanji is still subpar, who then reads it aloud for them with a resigned tone that is properly warranted as he watches them dash off toward the direction of the acrylic panel.
"No lecture today?" Yoshida's watching him, as usual.
"I trust them," Aki says. Without turning his head he can see how Yoshida's eyebrows go up at that, which only informs Aki, more than anything, of exactly how obvious his unneeded fretting has been for all of them. "I predicted they'd be like this, so I told them earlier to call me whenever they need me, or when they feel like they're done for the day." And, because he'd seen the look in Yoshida's eyes earlier, Aki adds, "Let's go downstairs first, okay? Then we can talk about it."
༄
The ocean planetarium, when they walk in, is filled from wall to wall with tiny sea creatures, all of them glowing lamplike, all of them moving meditatively slow, as if a strange mimicry of constellations—gather enough of them and you'd get a galaxy at the bottom of the ocean. The room is not so darkly lit as to be accident-inducing, but dark enough that Aki only knows the ground is there because he is walking on it. Large enough that it to be alone in it would be nigh-impossible, except—
"We're the only ones, I think," says Yoshida. At that, he sits down on the floor. Albeit with more reluctance, after another scan around the room Aki does too, an unsubtle recreation of how they'd composed themselves yesterday by the konbini. He finds himself flailing a little again, unsure of how to breach the topic of—Yoshida. Yoshida Hirofumi in his entirety. How even to begin? How to condense sixteen, almost seventeen years of life lived to only a known handful of words in a single language? And there is no language that can, no language so universal. So Aki can only open his mouth, then close it. Sit in stunted silence as the soft blue-green light of the water ripples over Yoshida's unreasonably perfect profile.
"Did you know, Hayakawa—once I read in a philosophy book that essentially, our existence is meaningless."
Alarmed, Aki glances at him. Now, it seems, he can say he knows what clinical looks like on Yoshida, who is only watching the fish as they swim, expression lax and unconcerned, as though he is only reading from memory. "That's depressing," he says.
"Right?" Yoshida looks over at him, and immediately his detachedness switches out for something brighter. Not the first time it has happened, but the first time Aki catches the shift with his own eyes. "I read it back when I was still working for some people. For a while I believed it. Now I think it's dumb, because on the positive side—doesn't that give us more freedom? Because if nothing in existence has inherent meaning, we can simply give it to anything we want. We make the choice."
Aki hadn't expected him to start with this. "What do you mean?"
"Remember the dog statue? Shiro. I mean this: there is meaning to him because he has a story, and that story was given meaning by the people who first told it. You could pick up a pebble from anywhere and put it in your pocket, and then it’d have meaning to you, because you found it, then chose to keep it. Actually, you don't even have to keep it. Point to any of the fish here and decide one of them is your favorite, and there you go." Yoshida spreads his hands, gestures to the exhibit, as if he really is suggesting that Aki pick a fish, any fish.
"Things can lose meaning too," Aki says instead of pointing to a fish. "Maybe not now, but people will forget about Shiro one day. The statue isn't permanent. If all the people that gave something meaning disappear, then that thing goes back to being meaningless, doesn't it?"
Yoshida hums, looks toward the dark space above that is the ceiling. "That shouldn't be a reason stop building statues or telling stories, though, all because they won't last forever. Otherwise no one would ever do anything, because everything is impermanent.”
“Is it so bad, though? To live believing that nothing matters because nothing is permanent?” Aki thinks of Himeno, of Angel. Of bodies sprawled across the floor. Then no bodies at all, just the blood. Rooms full of it.
“I mean, I don’t think there's a right or wrong to it. To me, though, living like that sounds unhappy.”
“So we give meaning to things because it makes us happy?”
Yoshida smiles at him, as if he finds Aki funny for asking such a question. “Isn’t that human nature?”
“What, happiness?”
“Reason-searching, Hayakawa. Trying to make sense of the world, of living. And happiness, yes. Isn’t that what we’re all looking for?”
༄
It ends there, the conversation, though not by their choice. Aki is drawing a blank on how to refute that, the way Yoshida is looking at him, then, with more affection to his gaze than he should have, considering the fact that they've accidentally entered into a philosophical debate. Considering the differences in their principles—or, at least, the principles they'd sided with for the purpose of this talk.
And then a family walks in, and the atmosphere sewn into the room snaps like a too-taut thread. There's a distinct sort of guilt rolling around in Aki's gut as he follows Yoshida out, as though they'd been caught doing something terrible. Being unappreciative of the exhibitions, perhaps, and too caught up in themselves to care.
But they're not done. Yoshida makes this clear first by leading Aki up to the restaurant on the fourth floor, and then—when they've both settled into chairs by the glass overlooking the oceanfront view—by crossing his fingers and saying, "I mentioned this earlier, but I worked for an organization. Like you. There's not much to say, but I can talk about that, if you want to know."
Aki does, so they push the menus to the side and order nothing. Sit in momentary silence until Yoshida, on a soundless inhale, begins.
"First, I need to clarify that I left them a year ago. I haven't killed anyone since." And that—the confirmation of it—finally, finally surfaces. The easy way it leaves his mouth, clinical. The way Yoshida is turned toward the glass, watching the clouds, clinical. Though Aki has no room for hypocrisy in him.
"I left because I realized I could. By then they'd paid me enough money to last me—a couple of years, probably, if I spent it smartly. The group that'd hired me was beginning to crumble anyway. There was no reason for me to stay, so I left.
"Then I went to school for a while, because I thought: why not actually learn some things? And I like to read, you know, so I thought I'd like school." He grins wryly. "I left last week—the same time you guys came here. I realized that I liked learning, but I didn't really care for school."
"Why come to Okinawa, though?" Aki asks. "Of all places."
"The weather," Yoshida answers immediately, and—yes. All those jackets, Aki thinks. "Also, I lived here once, for about a year. Way back before I was being recruited into anything. It was my favorite place out of all the places I'd ever lived in. Still is."
He takes a breath, smiles again, though it's just on the side of too-fast. "My life before I started committing crimes for money was… complicated. I'll save that for another day, yeah? How long are you staying here, Hayakawa? I don't think you ever told me."
"Oh," says Aki. Dread dropping into his stomach, sharper and colder than any blade. Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no.
And—looking back, eventually, perhaps he'd be able to find some humor in this. In the suddenness of it, maybe, or the way he'd frozen up worse than a prey animal, than a murderer caught in the act. Looking back, he'd laugh. Say, look how much of an idiot I was. Look at that. A whole week and I never said a thing—how dumb can you get?
But any laughter, if possible, is for much later. Right now, Aki exists in the present, because he can only ever exist in the present, can never escape it. And it has never been as damning as it is now. Because that's the test, he knows—recognizes it like he'd recognize the sky, or the smell of his apartment: Yoshida looking at him, almost hesitant. I'll save that for another day, yeah? How long are you staying here, Hayakawa?
Another day. Another day. Oh, Aki must be the most terrible person alive.
"I can't," he says, and the admittance splits open a chasm of fear he's never known. Different from every other instance it'd swallowed him—his family, dead, Himeno, dead, Angel, dead. Denji and Power in Makima's spotless office, and Aki in the doorway. "There won't be another day."
Yoshida frowns. It hasn't dawned on him yet. "What do you mean?"
It's all rushing up to meet them now, the end. Aki is leaving tomorrow morning on the shinkansen. Is going back to his apartment, back to a freezing, snowless city. And he has Yoshida's number now, has his LINE, but they'll be so far apart, and distance is so much more challenging than one would expect.
"I'm leaving tomorrow, Yoshida," he says. Nearly bolts, then, when he sees Yoshida process it, which is immediately, the way he always does when it comes to anything about Aki. "I don't—we only booked a week—I'm sorry. It's so far, and we're too low on money to travel again because I haven't found another job yet, and—"
And he can't, he can't, he's terrified. Can't ask Yoshida to leave this place when he loves it so. Can't ask him to follow Aki back to the city where he lost Himeno, lost Angel. Can't ask him to step out of the dream and ruin it all.
Because that's what all of this is, in the end. A dream. Lovely, wonderful, perfect. Compartmentalized.
"I don't know when I can come back," Aki whispers. Looks at his hands, then, and for a flash of a moment they're inked all the way up to his forearms. Gone in an instant. Which—there's nothing he can do about that now. Nothing he can undo, and, despite it all, nothing he wants to undo, except for the fact that now it will end in grief even if no one is dying, because it was always going to be like this. Always going to end like this. Aki, only here for a week, and Yoshida, trying and trying to catch his indefinite existence all this time. Trying to get him to talk, to laugh, to remember he's real.
"I can't ask you to stay," Yoshida says. Half-question, half-statement. A statement that hopes it's a question. When Aki nods, his whole face closes up in a way Aki's never seen before. No anger in it, which is the worst part. If Yoshida would be angry with him then perhaps Aki could feel more right about all of this. More justified.
Still, the truth is no more or less than itself: that Yoshida is not angry with him, even if he should be, and that Aki has only ever been good at leaving.
"I'm so sorry," he says, feeling wrong and cruel and careless. Stuck in his seat, because getting up would be cruel, but staying equally so. Yoshida is looking at him still, hasn't moved his eyes away since Aki started speaking, and he's opening his mouth—
—and Aki's phone buzzes where it lies on the table—Power and Denji, calling. The merciless timing of it, as though signifying that their time is really and truly up. So Aki—looks away, finally, from the boy whose heart he has dropped, and picks up.
༄
The cab ride back to the hotel is filled by the kind of silence Aki never wants to experience again now that he knows it. Power doesn't stop darting glances at him, elbowing Denji and nearly climbing into his lap—seatbelts be damned—in order to whisper things in his ear, and Denji doesn't stop making that face, the only face he can probably make in such a circumstance. Glancing back and forth between Aki and Power, then turning his hands palm-up, as if to say, What the hell are we supposed to do about that?
What the hell, indeed. For once, Aki's at a total, utter loss. Something growing in him, gnawing his heart to down to the bone, so heavy and horrible he thinks it could kill him any moment. He can only press his head against the window, watching-not-watching the red-yellow blur of signs and lights and cars. Can only wish, furiously, for the sky to open up and for rain to fall.
(Two hours ago, after Aki had gotten the call, he'd nearly ran—nearly sprung out of his chair the moment Power said we're outside under the statue. He'd maneuvered his way through every moving crowd, and Yoshida had followed him right out, refusing to be shaken off so easily, and caught up to Aki just before he'd really broken into a run toward the exit. Caught him there and said, "What now? Are you just going to give up?"
If there were ever a chance that Aki had not been the worst person in the world earlier, then it was here that he solidified the title. That he became, for one moment, exactly that.
"What's there to give up on?" he'd retorted. In all his panic, in all his fear. Terrified, then, that Yoshida was going to make a good point, so he'd flung out the sharpest reply he could think of, one he'd known would work.
It had. God, it had worked, and he'd regretted it even before it'd fully left his mouth. Because Yoshida—the look on his face, Aki'd thought, would surely haunt him to his grave. Not crumpling, nor fracturing, but stone-smooth and passive and utterly unrevealing. Even the betrayal that must have surged in him then—invisible to all. That, out of all the faces Yoshida had ever made, Aki had known, would only leave him in death. That face, only. Of being hurt, and of being hurt so deeply in such a public place. Of being robbed of the privacy to cry. Of being left by Aki, just like that.
Still, Yoshida hadn't moved, and hadn't let Aki move, yet. Had grabbed Aki's hand before he could anything else and dropped something in his palm. Had only pulled away then, drawing his arms tightly to his sides as if that would be the last time.
"This is—" A fridge magnet. A fridge magnet in the shape of the island, two tiny white stars printed on it for Naha and the aquarium. So silly, so perfectly innocuous. Aki would never be able to look at it without guilt crushing up his windpipe.
"Yoshida," he'd said, and then stopped, because it would have been cruel to continue. Cruel to say anything more to Yoshida when Aki had already done enough.
"Because I know you haven't bought a single thing for yourself to keep since you got here," Yoshida had said. Tone so civil, composure so flawless, that it'd broken Aki's heart to look at him. "Goodbye, Hayakawa. I hope you have a safe trip home.")
SEVEN
It is far too early for anything when Aki wakes, but he rises anyway. Sleep had come to him so slowly the previous night he'd thought it wouldn't come to him at all, but then it had, the way sleep always did, even during those nights months ago when he'd refused it over and over, dreading the nightmares, the limbo space of unreality. Succumbing to it in the end, like anyone else. Like that, sleep had come and gone, and left Aki alone with his thoughts once again.
He tries to be still. Tries to lie back down, and when that yields none of the desired results, tries to browse through his phone. Which is manageable for a bit until the glare of the screen begins to stab at his eyes, thunk at his skull. So he puts that down, too, and gets out of bed.
With nothing to do, he falls back into habits. Gets dressed, then slides open the door to their room's balcony, slipping into the early blue-gray of a morning with one leg still in night. His phone reads five-twenty. His chest feels plated with metal from the inside, so much of it, so heavy he can barely manage to walk straight.
God, he needs a smoke. He's not sure how long ago his last cigarette was, but it certainly feels like it's been forever since he's had one. Just one, and then he'll be fine. Fog out his mind and he'll be fine, eventually.
Out of sheer habit, Aki sticks his hand into his trouser pocket, and—stops. His fingers close around nothing. Huh. He turns around on impulse, then, ready to go back in, ready to rummage through his things until he digs up a pack, because he should have some; he always has some. Then stops there, too. Stops before he can get to the door. Realizes then, the first few tremors going through his hands like tiny electric shocks, that he hasn't smoked since he got on the train a week ago. Hasn't been carrying cigarettes on him since the day of the hike.
Staggered, he leans back, anchors himself to the railing. Covers his mouth with a hand. And—it's so stupid, such a ridiculous string of details leading up to this—what he can only call a realization that’s been a hell of a long time coming that rips through him, tears into him more viciously than any bullet, any blade.
And he's right to cover his mouth, then. A laugh bursts out of him, so sudden and powerful it scares him to full consciousness. Scares him clean out of his skin, then pushes him right back into it, full-body awareness. Once he starts he can't stop. Just laughs and laughs, the precursor to something far deeper, far more acute. Laughs until his abdomen is sore with it. Until the muscles of his face are aching something fierce, until he’s mere seconds from tears. Until those seconds rush past and he’s crying into his hands.
Aki, driftwood, who no longer wants to drift. Is climbing out now—crawling his way out of limbo, voice scraped raw, calling out. Aki, who has to live now because people love him, and needs to live if he wants to figure out the whys, and hows, and see more of the world like this. See more, open himself up to more. Let in more Yoshida Hirofumis, except—no, Aki thinks, that's not quite right—there will never be another Yoshida Hirofumi.
There is a direct pathway to his heart now, hammered out messily through brick and concrete and all the other things that'd gone there before, hardened up into a wall that'd achieved nothing but isolation. There is a direct pathway, and he doesn't know who'd first discovered it—Denji, or Power, or Yoshida, or Aki himself. A pathway to Aki, who needs to live not because he'd promised it to Himeno, but because he needs to go whale-watching again, this time with Yoshida. Needs to play Mario Kart with Power and Denji, help them study kanji. Find out what kind of books Yoshida likes to read most, what kind of books he hates. Find every color he can dye himself in.
Because Aki is—full of love, overflowing with it, and cannot change. Because he has been running from being alive for so long, and to be alive is to make meaning of yourself, and to make meaning out of yourself is to make room for love. For your own, and the love you are given. This, of all the things in the world, is one that cannot change.
༄
Impatience keeps him alive for the next hour. It's with horrified clarity that Aki understands, now, why Yoshida had been like that. Had looked at him, and spoken to him, and touched him so. Waiting and waiting for the next green light, a ceaseless duel with the double-edged blade of impatience.
It is agonizing, the waiting, but it is not the worst thing he has ever suffered, even though Aki's mind does all it can to convince him of this in the moment. He makes himself coffee with the room-provided kettle. He checks the weather. He placates Nyako with treats after it yawns its way out of the bed, visibly displeased with having been woken. He leaves his hair down.
Then, as the skyline begins to sharpen itself against the first trickle of daylight, a pink that opens up like a rose on the horizon, Aki breathes in deep and picks up his phone. Makes the call.
Yoshida answers immediately, which. Either he, too, must have woken early, or he hadn't slept at all.
"Hi," Aki says, and then, rushing before Yoshida can speak, "Where are you right now?"
After a pause, Yoshida answers, "At the apartment I'm renting." He sounds entirely awake. The inflection of his voice cannot be counted as cold, but Aki hears the careful detachment in it, defensive in a way he knows all too well.
"Can I—" Aki swallows, then pinches himself on the arm. There is no room for fear, here; he cannot afford it. "This is going to sound horrible, and I know I'm beyond horrible for saying this, but—can I come see you? Right now?"
Silence, tense and pounding. One beat. Then two, then five.
Just when the urge to flee begins to creep back into Aki's resolve, Yoshida says, quiet, "I'll send you the address."
༄
Half an hour later, Yoshida opens the door, and Aki asks, "Will you let me explain myself?"
༄
They have approximately four hours before the train arrives, and three before Aki must pack his things and check out of the hotel, so Yoshida points to where Aki can put his shoes and, unpredictably reserved in his quietness, disappears into the kitchen without another word.
Left without instruction, Aki can only take a seat at the chabudai, look around. All at once, the emptiness of the place strikes deep into him like a gong sound—how new and blank it is, how unlived in. How closely it resembles the way Aki's apartment had looked when he'd first moved into it, only fourteen, furious with the world and himself. Furious with everything beyond his control, and, oh, there had been so much of it. An unfurnished apartment for an unfurnished person.
Himeno had nagged him, back then, to fill it up. Had brought along her shitty video games and distasteful magazines, scattering some of herself around every time she came over, and when she had been gone, truly gone, Aki had found himself staring at the pile he'd amassed, unable to clear out any of it.
Angel, on the other hand, had only been there once. Had toed off his shoes at the entrance and glanced around, razor-edged the way his eyes had always seemed to be—something far too vivid in them to be soft. It's boring, I know, Aki had said. But Angel had only blinked at him, tilted his head. Said, It's practical. Like you. Never certain how much it's allowed to keep.
And he'd been right, and then he'd been gone. After him, Denji and Power had streaked through, and now Aki can hardly keep track of what they bring back into the apartment every time they go out.
Yoshida returns, then, with a tray of tea. Sets a cup down in front of Aki, then sits down across from him. So formal as to be painful. So shuttered, the way he lifts his eyes to Aki's in a silent cue. Well?
Aki takes a breath. "I shouldn't have said that yesterday. Any of it." Shouldn't have wounded so severely with his thoughtlessness, lashed out in terror. Shouldn't have hurt someone who had only ever spoken to him gently through the crack in his door. Had only been waiting for him to open it, waiting for him to reach out.
"I was stupid, and I was scared, and I didn't realize that I didn't tell you when I'd be leaving until you—" He cuts himself off, skims a hand through his hair, still untied and draped over the back of his neck. "Until I realized, when you said that, that I'd forgotten to, and that I had to tell you, and that—there was no way to tell you in a way that wouldn't hurt you."
His fingers press hard against each other around the ceramic of the teacup, the heat of it not quite enough to scald, but enough to ground him as he brings it up to his lips. Yoshida is entirely silent, his gaze entirely steady. So still that he seems to not be breathing.
"And then you—you asked if I was running away, and—you were right. I was running away, and I was terrified that you would say something that would make me reconsider, so I—"
The cup clatters louder than Aki expects when he sets it back down on the table, hard, but neither of them flinch at it. Neither of them move, save for when Aki looks right up, then, right up at Yoshida. His eyes are shifting, shifting. So dark Aki can't see a single thing in them, can't see where his pupils end and his irises begin.
"I'm so sorry, Yoshida. I never meant to hurt you so badly." And he means it, he does. Truth in its entirety, in its simplicity, the rawest thing he's dared to say in months. "I didn't come here to ask for your forgiveness; I just wanted—"
"I do."
Aki stops. Shuts up. Looks up, something tentative and slow coming undone in his chest.
"I forgive you," Yoshida says. The words leaving his mouth like water, like winter breath. So easily that Aki would suspect it to be rehearsed if not for the way Yoshida's mouth is thinning, as if displeased with himself, almost. "I forgave you the moment I came home and gave myself some time to think about it."
His tone gentles. "I know you're scared, Hayakawa. I've known since the first day I met you. You worry so much, and allow yourself so little, and once I knew those things I thought—I wanted to change that. I want to help you change that. So," and now he, too, is setting down his teacup, the touch of it to the wood near-soundless. Putting his elbows on the chabudai, leaning across it. "Reconsider, Aki. Reconsider running away."
The dip between his brows is faint, as is the downturn of his mouth, but—Aki recognizes it for what it is. Yoshida is angry, he realizes. Angry with Aki. Yoshida is right here, looking across the table to him, lovely and forgiving and angry. As he has never been, not even yesterday, when Aki'd pulled away so hard he'd thought he would tear skin, shatter bone. This is a first, and what a first it is. What a thing to see on Yoshida. Anger, an emotion so rarely desirable, but every hint of it that exudes from Yoshida pulls such a raging torrent of affection from Aki's throat that he can only laugh it out. Laugh at himself, at how much of a fool he's been to have missed the sheer immensity of his feelings for so long, and is only now discovering that he is capable of such depth, such desire.
"I have reconsidered," he says. Lets himself go tender, like earth after rain. "That's why I'm here. I came to ask—Hirofumi, would you come back with me?"
Would he accompany Aki on the train, follow him into the city? Walk through that front door and put his shoes on the rack, then look at Aki's apartment and say something about it? Aki wants to know what he'd say. The look on his face before he'd speak. The look on his face if Aki were to reach out, press palm to cheek, and not let him speak.
"Yes," Yoshida says. He's staring. Then repeats, angry and incredulous, "Yes, what the fuck, Aki? Of course I would, I will, I—" and he's unraveling now, more uncomposed than Aki's ever seen him, and it's magical. Face not twisting, not tearful. Only relief. A worldful of relief collapsing down around them. First Yoshida only looks winded by it, but then he stands up at the same time Aki does. Is faster, crossing around the chabudai in one stride, then going right down on his knees and grabbing Aki by the shoulders, pushing him back down onto the seat of his cushion. Goes about it way too harsh, too desperate, both of them nearly tipping over with it. Clambers over Aki's legs, and then, suspended like that—no. No, this is where Aki is faster. Beats him to it, wraps both hands around Yoshida's forearms and hauls him in as if he weighs nothing at all, and kisses him.
Immediately there are arms hooking around his neck, Yoshida dropping all pretenses of restraint so fast Aki would be laughing at him if he weren't so preoccupied with kissing him. And kiss him Aki does. Kiss they do. Wild and directionless, as though it has been years in the making and not seven days. As though they've both waited their whole entire lives for it. For this, Aki leaning back and Yoshida curling over him, into him, solid and breathless and giddy. The apartment too cold, the tea too hot, and the two of them the only warm things in it. Aki breaks away for but a moment to catch his breath, press their foreheads together hard enough to hurt. Whispers, "Are you still mad at me?"
"Yeah," Yoshida replies, voice hushed, as if he, too, is afraid that one loud noise will break the spell. The magic of the only first. Because there will be others to come, but never one like this again. Only ever one first. "I forgive you, and I'm also still pissed at you."
Aki laughs at that. "How can I get you to stop being pissed?"
For a moment, Yoshida pauses. Then gets a look on his face that Aki knows.
"Do more of this," he says, and tightens his arms around Aki's neck even though they're already pressed so close, inhaling each other's exhales. Puppy-possessive.
And Aki, holding this boy in his arms, the only one he wants like this, has no choice but to marvel. At his almost-seventeen-ness, at the way he is both like Aki and not, at his youth that is not guileless enough to be dazzling, but endearing nonetheless, which is something Aki loves about him. Has no choice but to do more of it. Set his lips against mouth and cheekbone and brow, all soft, all ink. Again and again, until he finds himself grinning too much to keep going, and Yoshida is grinning back, and the first painful clack of teeth finally gets them to stop. Then they are only in each other's arms, letting the tea go cold. Laughing and laughing, alive and alive.
It looks like a world. Like a cleared space. Like everything that’s left when the trees soften and come, at last, crashing.
— Beaver Moon, Franny Choi
"I knew it," Denji says.
"No you didn't," Power says immediately. "I figured it out first, with my brilliant brain," she tells Aki and Yoshida, more than a hint of pride to it. "Denji didn't know anything until I told him. He was like, why is the Yoshida guy always here, and I was like, obviously it's 'cause he's got a thing for Aki, and Denji was like, how do you know, and I was like, just look at the way that Yoshida boy is always staring at Aki like he wants to —"
"Go pack," Aki sighs, and flings a bath towel at her for good measure. Yoshida laughs.
༄
"Is that really everything?" Aki asks doubtfully, peering at the sequinless black backpack as though that will activate some kind of secret mechanism from within it and make it expand into a suitcase.
"You've asked that at least four times already," Yoshida replies, amused. "Yes, everything I need. What were you planning to do if I said no? We're already on the train, Aki."
"I know," Aki grumbles as Yoshida's smile just widens. "What sort of things did you bring?"
"Books. And my clothes, but mostly books. They're the only things I own—scarce, I know. There's not much to me as I am now."
Though—there's a practiced lightness to the way he says all of it that orders Aki to shelve away his own thoughts, watch Yoshida carefully. Yoshida, who isn't looking at him, but at—nothing. Eyes turned away toward the window, yes, but seeing nothing, as their current purpose is not to follow the clouds, but to avoid Aki's gaze. In a few days he'll be seventeen. He is old enough to try for tact, but young enough that his tact is foiled by nerves.
"No," says Aki, firm. "There will be. Hirofumi, listen—we'll go shopping when we get back. All of us." His gaze catches on Denji, then Power. "And then we can move out, get a larger place that fits all of us. I'll find a job that pays well so that we can do it. I'm sick of living somewhere I've only ever been sad in."
It takes a moment, and then he realizes that all of them are staring at him, wide-eyed, Power and Denji having looked up from the game of Cup Pong they'd been playing on their phones. A prickle runs up his nape. "What?"
Another beat. Then Yoshida says, slow and considering, "Would you want to come back here?"
"Here?" To—Naha? To Okinawa?
"Yeah. After figuring things out, would you want to move here, with Power and Denji and me?"
Would Aki? The idea of it seems every kind of unreal and impossible, but then again, so had this week. So had Yoshida, less than four hours ago, burning a line clean through him with only his eyes. Reconsider, Aki. Reconsider running away. Because so long as Aki reconsiders—so long as he allows himself, and remembers to allow himself, then—
"Yes!" Power says. "Yes, yes, yes! Aki let's move here." She turns to him, beaming with every tooth visible. "Denji, Denji! You wanna move to Okinawa, right?"
"There are more girls in the summer," Yoshida says.
Denji blinks at him, gives both Aki and Power a look. "Girls or no girls, why the hell would I wanna stay in the city without you guys?" Then he turns back to Yoshida, frowning. "You're not messing with me, right?"
"Of course not," Yoshida says. Looks back at Aki, triumphant and so smug he has Aki shaking his head, as exasperated as he is endeared.
"What am I supposed to do with all of you," he says, addressing all of them, Yoshida most of all. "Yes, yes, we'll figure something out. We'll come back. I promise. Now come here, Hirofumi."
Laughter skips out of Yoshida in bright, bending waves as Aki reaches for him, pulls him close, takes him in. Full of life and light, even if all of him is ink. And they both are, now. Aki's never going to get it out of his clothes, out of his skin. Out of his heart.
"You," he tells Yoshida, "are a headache. And absolutely impossible. I hope you know that."
"But you want to know me anyway," Yoshida retorts, confident, and Aki tries to frown, he does, but he's betrayed by the thrum in his chest. Grins instead, helpless.
"I do," he says. "I want to know everything. Tell me everything."
"No chance. Not until you tell me everything about yourself, first."
Aki hangs on when Yoshida tries to wriggle away back toward the window. "Okay, then how about taking turns? One thing at a time, one for each of us?"
"That works," Yoshida says immediately. "One thing you should know about me is that I like to be kissed, but only by one person."
"Oh? And who is that?"
And—Aki's trying, really trying to keep a straight face. He is. Maintains it for all of five seconds before he gives up, shoves that act aside with a laugh, and draws Yoshida close. Traps him in, traps this gleaming, gorgeous boy in his arms, no longer so unknown to him. "Who do you want to kiss you, Yoshida Hirofumi?"
Yoshida beams at him. Like this, all of him golden in daylight and bending toward Aki as a flower toward the sun, his joy—their joy—is tangible. Is full of radiance. Is sweet as the sunrise.
"Guess," he says.