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Three years and too many lost connections later, Kuji Tooi finds himself standing once more on the bridge where it all began.
This is where your life begins , the warden had said to him earlier that day, just moments before he was released. Maybe in another life, this is true. Maybe in another life, there is something for Tooi to live for.
After all, this is where it all ends, too. Three years ago, on this bridge, he walked away from Enta, from Kazuki , and into the back of a police car. He hasn’t seen them since. He used to think it was a cruel fate; that they should save him from following his brother into the void only to leave him stranded in another. But back then he had been young and angry and alone—now, he is just alone. Always alone.
(If only his brother could see him now.)
Now, Toi is seventeen, and he’s climbing over the railing of the bridge where it all began, red paint chipping under his grip and sticking. He looks to the skies—the koi banners are streaming, proud and triumphant, and Tooi laughs because he is seventeen and alone and he is not a child anymore. He is not proud, nor triumphant. The koi do not fly for him.
His brother’s words ring loud and clear in his mind, and Tooi can almost see him. Can smell the smoke in the air; can feel his hand held tight over his mouth. Bad people are the ones who survive in this world.
Tooi doesn’t want to be a bad person anymore.
The water sparkles like a dream underneath him. The koi swim; Tooi jumps. He doesn’t expect anyone to save him.
(They saved him once, three years ago. Naturally, they save him again.)
-
Tooi is nineteen when he moves in with Kazuki and Enta.
They’re in college, now—Kazuki and Enta, that is. Tooi is not so ambitious. Instead, he works at the auto shop where Kazuki caught him trying to steal a car five years ago, conveniently located just around the corner from their new apartment. There, he spends his days washing cars and learning how to fix them. It feels good, knowing that his hands can do something other than destroy. That there is mercy in the press of his fingertips, and not just bullets.
It is with his hands and newly learned knowledge that Tooi builds himself a motorcycle from the scraps of a bike once was. It’s black and big and purrs like a dream, and it looks more than a little rough but Tooi loves it anyway. It is this motorcycle that Tooi uses to pick up Kazuki from work sometimes. Today is one of those times. It is exactly two minutes past ten when Tooi leaves; it will be exactly thirteen past ten when he gets there. He will let the engine idle for two minutes, then Kazuki will stumble out of the back door.
Tooi isn’t completely sure what will happen next. Maybe, if he’s lucky, the customers will have all been very sweet and Kazuki will regard Tooi cheerily. Maybe, if he isn’t so lucky, the customers will have been as customers are to be and Kazuki will still regard Tooi cheerily. Or he will try, and Tooi will feel his throat fill with sorrow and he will choke on all the things he doesn’t know how to say.
The air is heavy with possibility as Tooi pulls the helmet over his head and climbs onto the black metal suicide machine (that’s what Kazuki calls it, anyway). He turns the engine, and it lurches into motion. The air rushes past Tooi’s face, and it doesn’t feel so heavy anymore.
He gets there thirteen minutes past ten. He lets the engine idle for two minutes.
Tooi is lucky, today. Kazuki smiles cheerily and the smile reaches his eyes, which crinkle softly in the waning light. There is no sorrow today. Still, something catches in the back of Tooi’s throat, and he thinks that maybe he isn’t so lucky after all. Not when Kazuki looks at the motorcycle with disdain, and mutters something about how the black metal suicide machine is going to kill Tooi one day if not the both of them, and Tooi’s heart skips a beat.
“Just get on,” he says to Kazuki, and with one last curse, he does.
-
Kazuki holds on to Tooi’s waist tighter than he has to, and Tooi doesn’t know if it’s because he’s still scared Tooi might try to jump off a bridge again or if it’s just because they’re currently going eighty kilometers an hour on a black metal suicide machine.
(Somewhere down the line, Tooi will realize it is neither. In those days, Kazuki still holds on to Tooi’s waist tighter than he has to, and Tooi knows exactly why.)
-
“How was your day?” Kazuki asks, sitting down at the counter of the soba shop.
Tooi glances at the clock—Enta is late. He slides into the seat next to Kazuki, and the motion feels like home.
He thinks of Kazuki’s smile, his arm around him. “It was alright.”
“That’s good.” Kazuki taps the green tea powder into a tea mug; flushes it with boiling water. Tooi watches him, and thinks of waterfalls.
“Enta is late,” Tooi announces, and at that moment the doorbell chimes and a gust of late spring caresses the side of his face. It’s heavy with possibility. Possibility that Kazuki quickly turns into a tender sort of certainty when he lifts an arm in greeting.
“Sorry I’m late,” Enta says, and slides into the seat next to Tooi.
Kazuki smiles; Tooi taps green tea powder into his mug. “You’re right on time.”
-
Tooi is fourteen and he’s standing on Azumabashi with a gun in his hand.
Chikai is dead, and Tooi’s just killed a person for the second time. Tooi remembers the first time he picked up the gun it had felt overwhelmingly heavy in his hand. As if there were a magnet on the other side of the world trying to pull the gun straight through Tooi’s hand and into the depths of the Earth, never to be seen again. It would have been better, Tooi thinks, if that is what happened. Because this time, the gun is not heavy anymore. This time, the gun fits perfectly in his hand.
This is where it began; this is where it all ends.
And Tooi doesn’t want it to end—not really. But everything is already said and done, and the water sparkles like a dream. He doesn’t hear Kazuki and Enta dive in after him—he’s too busy trying to ignore the blood rushing in his ears as he points the gun at himself from just a couple days ago, frozen in time and monochrome.
Looking back on it now, he thinks he almost looked happy then. They’re at their little court under the bridge, and Tooi’s juggling a soccer ball for the first time in four years. He’s smiling. Kazuki and Enta—they’re smiling, too, and Tooi’s heart clenches. They looked happy. He was happy, or something adjacent, and he’d left them behind.
But his brother is dead, and the air is heavy with possibility.
He pulls the trigger.
It doesn’t hurt the way Tooi expects it to. If anything, the tightness in his chest relaxes incrementally with every shot he fires, and then he can’t stop firing. A boy with a cigarette stuck between his teeth. A boy with a faraway look in his eyes as he walks in a park far away from home. A boy that’s already dead. He murders them all, and lets the aching in his heart dull to a numb tingle. Lets the blood rushing in his ears ease to a steady trickle. There is no beginning, there is no end, there are no connections.
Before long, he’s back to where it all started. Here, he’s ten years old, and sacrifice feels like gratitude in the face of his brother’s knowing smirk. He knows nothing of the future. Maybe that’s why he throws the miçanga at the strange boy and calls it freedom, because crying revolution at himself is the only way he knows how to rebel.
Distantly, he wonders if this is still a rebellion or if somewhere along the way it became an execution. (He is tired of rebelling.)
“What’s the matter now?” his brother asks, and Tooi hates him for it. “Are you clinging to your connections now? After you’ve come so far?”
Tooi looks at himself four years ago, and thinks he never should have followed his brother anywhere.
“This is a connection that I chose for myself,” he admits, and it’s true—he’d wanted to let himself have just a little of what he gave up all those years ago when he threw his dreams away. And he still does. But for people like him, fearful and formidable and fated, there is no beginning. There is no end. There are no connections.
He pulls the trigger.
-
Tooi is nineteen, and he is not alone.
He’s sitting at the counter of his family’s soba shop, between Kazuki and Enta—Kazuki to his left, Enta to his right. They’re talking about something—Golden Week is coming up soon—but Tooi isn’t really listening. He’s too lost in the steam that wafts from his bowl of soba; the lights that flicker intermittently above them; and the fact that he is not alone.
It’s not a particularly earth shattering realization. Life goes on; Kazuki and Enta keep talking, and Tooi slurps his soba a little too loudly. It’s like any other Wednesday night, yet entirely different still. Because someday, Tooi thinks, when he is not young or angry or alone anymore, he might look back on this night and realize that this is what happiness feels like.
“What do you want to do, Tooi?” he hears Kazuki ask, and Tooi looks at him. He’s got a chopstick full of soba halfway to his mouth, and Kazuki’s blinking expectantly at him.
Tooi swallows. He’s not sure what Kazuki’s talking about. “For what?”
“Golden Week. Weren’t you listening?” Kazuki asks, and his eyebrows furrow in concern, or maybe disappointment. Either way, Tooi can’t stand it. He looks away.
“No,” Enta answers for him through the soba in his mouth. Tooi shoots him an unimpressed glare. “What? Am I wrong?”
Tooi rolls his eyes. “Don’t speak with your mouth full, dumbass,” he chides, but it’s fond in a way he never would’ve imagined it could be. Enta sticks out his tongue anyway.
“Anyway,” Kazuki interjects sternly, before Tooi can retaliate. “Did you have any plans?”
Tooi shrugs. “I haven’t really thought about it,” he confesses, and it’s true. He hasn’t thought about it, because he hadn’t even realized Golden Week was coming up soon. There’s nothing to think about, really—Tooi will still be here, in the soba shop, or at work, at the auto shop. It doesn’t really matter.
Kazuki and Enta share a look. Tooi slurps his noodles just the right amount.
-
Tooi is seventeen and he’s fresh out of juvie, and he hasn’t left his room in nearly a week.
Asakusa’s skyline sparkles like a dream from outside his window, and Tooi counts on his fingers the number of times he’d dreamed of Asakusa from behind cold concrete walls. He doesn’t have enough fingers. It looks the same as he remembers, and for a moment it’s like he’s still there, curled up on the rough canvas cot, dreaming about freedom.
But his sheets are too soft to the touch, and the baby blue walls spell a childhood he never got to live. A set of painted plastic planets hang precariously from the ceiling above his bed, and Tooi can’t remember the last time he touched the astronomy book his parents once gave him, lifetimes ago. It sits at the bottom of a cardboard box shoved into the closet, but Tooi doesn’t know this. He thinks he must have left it behind when his parents left him.
(It won’t be until two years from now when he moves in with his best friends that he finds the book again, its pages worn like a dream well loved. I never knew you were into space stuff, Kazuki will say off-handedly, and Tooi will admit that he forgot that he was.)
Tooi closes his eyes. It’s easier to dream than to live.
In the hallway, the floorboards creak. “Tooi?”
Tooi sighs, and doesn’t respond.
“Enta-kun is here,” his aunt announces, and that’s all the warning Tooi gets before his door swings open.
Tooi opens his eyes just in time to watch Enta pad gently into the room. He’s in his soccer clothes, jersey clinging to his collar bones, wet with sweat. His socks are pulled high onto his calves, the hems riding the edge of the tan lines Tooi cannot see but knows are there.
“Why are you here,” Tooi says flatly, and Enta frowns. Tooi watches Enta’s hands curl into fists at his side, and pretends he doesn’t notice.
“Why haven’t you been coming to play soccer with us?”
It’s more or less the question Tooi was expecting, but no amount of anticipation can lessen his irritation. “I don’t want to play soccer with you guys,” he says, like it’s that easy. And it is easy—rejection is always that easy.
Enta’s eyes flash with something like anger. “Why not?” he asks, and it’s accusing, and Tooi knows why.
Tooi lets his gaze skate over Enta and back toward the window. “I just don’t.” In truth, Tooi doesn’t know why either. There’s something about the idea that makes his heart ache in weird ways, like the ghost of happiness past pulling, taunting.
“It’s been a week.”
Tooi lets his eyes flick to where Enta’s standing without turning his face. It’s as close to a so what? as Tooi can manage.
Enta sighs, fists unfurling. “You’re allowed to have fun, you know,” he says, with a gentility Tooi expects from Kazuki but not him, and it makes Tooi’s blood boil. He wants to punch him.
Instead, Tooi scoffs. “I’m not a child anymore, Enta.”
“But you are, ” Enta insists, stepping towards Tooi with determination. “You are. This is our last year of high school—we get to be children for one more year. Play with us. I know things have been really shitty for you the past couple of years, but you have us now—Kazuki and me. You can be a child with us.” His eyes flash, a little wildly, and Tooi likes this a lot better than whatever kindness he was going for, earlier. “We can make up for lost time, together.”
Oh . His throat fills with sand, and it scrapes when he speaks.“What if,” he starts, eyes watering, “what if I can’t have fun anymore?”
Enta tilts his head, and Tooi swallows his tears. He doesn’t know what he’ll do if Enta doesn’t understand.
“Then we’ll just have to try harder,” Enta decides, with a finality Tooi has only ever heard come from Enta’s mouth once before. “We’ll just have to try harder.”
Tooi believed him the first time; Tooi can’t help but believe him now. He doesn’t trust himself to speak, so he just nods, and Enta understands.
-
The rest of Tooi’s childhood is spent like this: he goes to school, stares out the window like an anime protagonist for seven hours, then plays soccer with Kazuki and Enta for the rest of the afternoon until he’s bone tired. He starts working at his family’s soba shop in the evenings, because it’s hard to make money when you’ve killed a person or two, and selling weed isn’t really an option anymore. Or at least, that is what Kazuki tells him, and Tooi listens because Kazuki has gotten scarier in the three years Tooi has been away.
He spends his evenings boiling soba and chopping scallions and munching on cucumbers when he thinks no one is looking. He doesn’t get much sleep, but when he does he sleeps like the dead.
He doesn’t try to jump off any more bridges.
He doesn’t try to jump off any more bridges, but sometimes he still catches Kazuki looking at him like he’s worried he might. It’s annoying. It’s so annoying that Tooi avoids Kazuki for a solid month, until Enta decides he’s had enough and sits them down to talk about their feelings, or something. Kazuki does most of the talking. Tooi promises not to jump off any more bridges. They leave it at that.
(Even then, Kazuki still looks at him sometimes, expression unreadable. Tooi pretends he doesn’t notice.)
He’s seventeen and fresh out of juvie and he doesn’t try to jump off any more bridges, but soccer and soba can only do so much. He doesn’t have to jump off any bridges to drown himself. He discovers this the hard way when he breaks his ankle halfway through the season, and suddenly there is no soccer, no soba. Just himself and all the ghosts at the other end of his brother’s gun.
This is when his aunt starts taking him to therapy on Sundays. Tooi tells himself it’s just until he can play soccer again. And so, every Sunday, Tooi takes the train to Inaricho and talks to a sweet looking woman about his week. He doesn’t talk about what he’s done, or what happened to him, but maybe someday he will. She doesn’t press. And when his ankle heals, he keeps going.
And six months later, Tooi turns eighteen. He turns eighteen, and he still plays soccer, makes soba, goes to therapy. He’s eighteen, and he’s not so fresh out of juvie, and he doesn’t try to jump off any more bridges.
Somewhere along the way, Kazuki stops looking at him like he might.
-
Tooi wakes up everyday to the same chirping bird who won’t shut the fuck up.
It’s better than an alarm, honestly; Tooi rolls over and instinctively slams his hand down on the nightstand, but the bird is not so easily defeated. If anything, it chirps louder. Groaning, Tooi pulls the spare pillow at his side over his ears, and tries to ignore the bird for just a couple more minutes.
Barely ten seconds later, Tooi is wide awake.
He pads into the kitchen—Kazuki and Enta are both still asleep. They have the luxury of sleeping like fools—snoring and drooling and the whole shebang . Perhaps in a different life Tooi would envy them, but Tooi can’t help the creeping feeling that everytime he goes to sleep he won’t wake up in the morning. So he settles for a precarious slumber, or doesn’t sleep at all.
His therapist says it’ll get better, with time. That was two years ago.
He makes himself a bowl of cereal, and sips at a bottle of Ito En Oi tea. He turns on the TV, and the bird stops chirping. Azuma Sara greets Asakusa, announces the item of the day. Koi. He flips the channel. It’s a commercial for some kappa product or another.
Tooi finds a fresh cucumber in the fridge, and leaves for work.
-
Tooi is seven when Chikai takes him to the park at the edge of the city.
His parents are still alive, but Chikai is already dressed in smoked leather and fingerless gloves that hide bruised knuckles. Tooi can still hear his mother’s whispers to his father when they think no one can hear— Chikai has always been a troublemaker . Tooi thinks Chikai is cool, because he doesn’t know any better. After all, Chikai’s got dark circles under his eyes, but his eyes still shine for Tooi.
Tooi is too young to understand that they won’t shine for much longer.
It’s a blind sort of naivete, but Tooi is too distracted by the rocky stream that sounds like the run of broth into soba to think about it too much. Unlike soba broth, the stream is clear as the jewels his mother treasures, and sparkles like a dream. The fish, scales gleaming, swim upstream.
Chikai lets go of Tooi’s hand to roll up his jeans, then wades into the water.
“Nii-san?” Tooi calls, brows furrowed. His hands grasp at empty air, and he feels exposed.
Chikai turns, slowly, as if weighed down by the stream’s density. “Come on. The water’s cold.” It’s not the explanation Tooi was looking for.
Tooi shakes his head, and Chikai’s smile turns mean. “Don’t be a baby.”
“I’m not ,” Tooi says, and Chikai’s words must have hit something bruised and sore because Tooi pulls off his shoes with a childish sort of vengeance. It’s lost on Chikai, who insists he is not a child anymore.
The water is cold—almost unbearably so—but Chikai’s eyes follow Tooi pointedly, like a threat, so Tooi bites his lip and wades to his brother’s side. He displaces some of the fish—koi, Tooi notices—from their neat formations, their slithering bodies swimming aside to allow him a wide berth, as if he were something more than human, or perhaps something less so.
“Most of these fish will die before they get where they’re going,” Chikai comments, tone conversational. Tooi flinches, but turns his face before Chikai can see.
“Where are they going?”
“Doesn’t matter. They’ll never get there anyway.”
-
Tooi goes on lunch break at fifteen past noon. The late spring sun is starting to poison, and Tooi can feel his skin cells turning to cancer. Or at least, he thinks he feels them turning to cancer. It’s hard to tell when he’s sweating buckets and Nyantaro won’t leave him alone.
“Fuck, go away,” Tooi says, throwing a packet of fish flakes that are actually fish flakes at the cat. Nyantaro sniffs at them as if it might be something else—as if Tooi doesn’t do this every damn day. After a moment, it seems to find the fish flakes acceptable, and drags the packet away, leaving Tooi to munch on his cucumber in peace.
It’s gone in a flash. (He wonders if Kazuki still eats cucumbers this way.)
Tooi flicks his lighter—colored pink and purple, some sort of Azuma Sara theme—and lights a cigarette. The motion is familiar but young in what’s surely an unconscious imitation of his brother. It’s slow to burn, the flame briefly flowering at the edges of the paper before subsiding. It blooms again with each lazy drag, and Tooi breathes out cancer and ash.
The burn of death in his lungs is just as addicting as nicotine.
-
This time, when Tooi goes to pick up Kazuki from work, he is neither lucky nor unlucky. Rather, he is bewildered. Because Kazuki has two koi fish swimming lazily around in a plastic bag, and Tooi does not know why.
“Why the fuck do you have a bag full of koi,” Tooi says, and it comes out less like a question and more like a statement, as questions often do when he is caught off-guard.
“They were just sort of floating around and I ran into them and realized they were going to die because of, you know,” Kazuki waves his hands around in the air. Tooi does not know. “The lack of water and stuff. And it’s not like I could just leave them.”
Tooi thinks back to Azuma Sara’s daily item, which also happens to be the weather forecast more often than not. Koi . Of course. Tooi drives them back to the apartment, because he cannot deal with Kazuki’s koi problem alone. Which is to say, Enta will deal with Kazuki’s koi problem when they get home.
Which, perhaps Tooi overestimated Enta’s koi problem-solving abilities, because much like himself, Enta just stares at the fish in Kazuki’s hands and radiates regret.
Tooi sighs. “Where are we going to put them.” He has not yet gotten over the initial shock.
“We could run to the pet store to get a tank for them?” Enta suggests, tapping his lower lip with a blunt fingernail.
“Or we could just flush them down the toilet.”
Kazuki is quick to shoot down that particular idea. “We are not flushing them down the toilet,” he says, predictably. Tooi rolls his eyes.
“The nearest pet store closes at eight,” Enta offers without looking up from his phone. Two seconds later, Tooi and Kazuki’s phones ring, twin drumrolls announcing the arrival of a message from Enta detailing directions to aforementioned pet store.
Google Maps says it’ll take 23 minutes to get there.
“It’s 7:42,” Tooi points out, even though he knows Kazuki’s already made up his mind.
Kazuki checks his watch anyway, as if Tooi might be lying. He is not. “We’ll get there faster if we take the bike,” he decides, and then he’s grabbing Tooi’s wrist on the way out.
“What happened to black metal suicide machine?” Enta asks, at the same time Tooi thinks it.
Kazuki laughs. Calls back from the hallway, “For the fish, Enta! Think of the fish!”
-
Tooi kisses Kazuki, once, when he’s freshly eighteen and they’ve just won nationals. He doesn’t think about it when he does it—doesn’t think about it as he does it. Just closes his eyes and presses his lips against Kazuki’s. It’s innocent. It says things like, thank you and I’m happy for you and I love you. It makes sense, somehow, in the moment.
Tooi kisses Kazuki, and Kazuki kisses him, and the lights in the stadium are too bright and it shines daggers off too many ads for POCARI SWEAT, but Tooi is kissing Kazuki and Kazuki kisses him back. It makes sense, however briefly, and when Tooi pulls away Kazuki looks dazed. His mouth falls open, as if he can’t quite comprehend what had just happened, and Tooi isn’t sure if it’s because of the kiss or the whole winning nationals ordeal. He says sorry anyway, just in case. Kazuki doesn’t say anything, and Tooi doesn’t expect him to. Enta sweeps them into a group hug; they forget about the kiss. (Tooi could never forget about the kiss.)
They celebrate their win at the soba shop. Enta brings up the kiss in what he must think is an innocuous way, to which Tooi responds by kissing Enta too. Unsurprisingly, it turns Enta into a blushing mess. Tooi would be lying if he said he thought the outcome would be any different. Enta tells him not to do it again, and Tooi shrugs; whatever you say .
Kazuki watches this unfold with an unreadable expression, but doesn’t comment on either kiss. Tooi doesn’t say anything because he’s already said everything he has to say. Has already said more than he’s ever said. It’s fine, Tooi thinks, and slurps his soba a little too loudly.
It doesn’t happen again. Tooi gets it. You only win nationals once; you only kiss Yasaka Kazuki once. (Unless you count Enta’s zealously executed flute kiss, which Tooi doesn’t.) It’s like, a law of the universe. Physics. He gets it.
-
The pet shop is already closed by the time Tooi pulls in by the curb. It’s not the most tragic thing that’s happened before, but he can feel the want in the press of Kazuki’s hand and so Tooi cuts the engine before Kazuki can form the words to ask. If Kazuki is surprised, he doesn’t show it—just says thanks and slides off the seat to go check the window anyway, because Kazuki has always been stubborn that way.
Tooi pulls off his helmet, lights a cigarette, then puts it out not two seconds later when Kazuki turns back around.
Tooi grinds the cigarette into the ground and Kazuki swings a leg over the bike.“It’s closed,” he says into Tooi’s shoulder, and Tooi already knows but he still nods and turns to face Kazuki.
“What do you want to do now?”
“Maybe we should just go to a pond or a stream somewhere and let them go.”
“Okay,” Tooi says, as he turns the key in the ignition. “Okay.”
-
Tooi kisses Kazuki a second time when they’re twenty-two and this time, there are no cheers or lights or POCARI SWEAT ads. Instead, there is just Tooi and Kazuki and a world beyond. A world that Tooi is sure must be shattering into incomprehensibility, because you only win nationals once. You only kiss Yasaka Kazuki once. And yet here he is, kissing him again, and when Tooi pulls away the world is still intact in a strange sort of pieced-together way. The same way Tooi’s world has always been since his parents died when he was ten.
Tooi pulls away, and Kazuki just smiles. Tooi stares, because he’s just kissed Yasaka Kazuki a second time. He has to resist the urge to pinch himself, and instead settles for slipping his hand into Kazuki’s and hopes that he won’t let go.
Kazuki responds by sliding his fingers in between Tooi’s and squeezing, and somewhere, a dragon is born.
-
In hindsight, Tooi isn’t sure why he takes Kazuki to the park at the edge of the city.
The last time he was here, Chikai told him that only fools believe in legends. Still, there is something in him that aches for the kind of hope only children with stars in their eyes can find. Maybe that’s why he leads Kazuki, feet pressed against familiar ground, to the rocky stream where koi go to become dragons.
There are no koi floating helplessly through the skies here, but paper painted carp writhe like dragons in the breeze; proud and triumphant. The sun has long since dripped past the horizon, and Tooi leads Kazuki to the rocky stream with only the light on his phone as a guide. It’s a little different from how he remembers it. It seems smaller now, somehow, as if the landscape had shrunk in the years he wasn’t looking. Perhaps it’s the darkness; it encompasses them on all sides like invisible walls, pressing them into each other until Kazuki’s shoulder is brushing against Tooi’s with every step. The only indication of a world beyond is the filtered moonlight that drips through the thin canopy of the trees like a light at the mouth of a well.
“I used to come here when I was a child,” Tooi explains, even though Kazuki didn’t ask. He comes to a stop at the edge of the stream, and dips the toe of his boot in the trickling water.
Kazuki holds up the bag of koi. “Well, it is Children’s Day,” he says, as if Tooi might have missed all the koi banners on the way. “I didn’t realize until I saw the banners. Did you know?”
“I didn’t realize either.” It’s the truth. Childhood seems so far away.
Kazuki squats down. Tooi flicks the flashlight toward him. The koi in the bag swim in tight circles, anticipating. After a moment, Tooi squats down next to him and watches Kazuki cradle the bag like it’s full of gold. It takes years for Kazuki to pour its contents into the stream, eyes brimming with reluctance. They watch the koi get carried downstream by the current and neither of them breathe until they see the two fish slither back up and away.
“They say the koi swim upstream in hopes of turning into dragons,” Kazuki says, and Tooi remembers Chikai saying the exact same thing years ago, except he’d sounded tragic and miserable and Tooi thought there must not have been anything on the other side of misery, of existence.
Kazuki stands; Tooi doesn’t. Tooi tries not to look at him, and wonders. “Do you think they ever do?”
“I hope so,” Kazuki says into the dark. “I hope they do.”
Tooi gives in. He’s looking up at Kazuki when he says, “Even if it’s impossible?”
Kazuki holds out a hand. “Especially if it’s impossible.”
Tooi spares one last glance at the stream, then takes Kazuki’s hand in his own and stands up.