Archive of Our Own

They say everything happens for a reason— but I can’t tell you why the dead always outnumber the living.

- Ocean Vuong

Some things cannot be fixed; they can only be carried.

- Megan Divine

What is the good of writing this down? You’re dead, and you’re never going to read it.

But you held me to account, that night at the apartment, when your sister made hot pot and you hated me. We were mirrors of each other, glaring and trading barbs, while Sera and your sister tried to play peacemaker. They’re mirrors of each other too; they’re gentle people who’ve done terrible things, and they miss you. 

There are nights when I can’t sleep, thinking of all the dead people that I’ve failed. My mother. Everyone who died that night in the church: Yanagi, Enomoto, Okazaki, Shiraishi. You.  

I think of your sister, and I think that you would hate that most of all — that there is a tiny Ichika who lives in my head, her gloved hands curled into fists, pale against her dark green uniform skirt.

She doesn’t wear that uniform anymore, though. And she cut her hair while she was in Adonis. She looks more like you, now. Especially when she glares. 

You’re dead, but your sister is still here, trying to navigate what this world looks without you. I’m writing this to you, but for her, to figure this all out. 

I don’t know what I’m doing.

~

I tried to stop her from going to Adonis.

It was freezing day the day that your sister quit the force. The sun was so bright, I had to keep blinking. Your sister looked like shit, all bloodburst eyes and shaking hands.

She was going to Saeki, she said. She was going to bring down Adonis and kill him.

I should’ve told her to go home and get a good night’s sleep. I should’ve asked her the last time she ate. I should’ve said, You don’t have to dance in Saeki’s palm. This is exactly what he wants you to do. I’ll help you get your revenge, from here.

I should’ve tackled her to keep her from going. I should’ve gone right back to the station and told her superior officer, or called Minegishi, and made them put your sister in lock up.

But I didn’t.

Because there was a part of me that thought she deserved her revenge.

And I thought that I couldn’t convince her otherwise. Because when I looked into myself, I saw my own need for revenge. I knew I could never be talked out of it. 

She was just choosing a slower form of suicide. Saeki was invested in toying with her, which meant he needed her alive. All of his games with the collar proved that. But Mikuni Rei, and the rest of Adonis - they weren’t as endlessly charmed by your sister as Saeki was.

I never should’ve let her walk away.

But in the end, your sister always did what she wanted to do. I felt jealous that she loved you so much, that she would go to such lengths to avenge you. I wondered what it would be like, to be that loved.  

~

I didn’t see her again for two years.

By that time, I was sure that she’d been found out by Saeki or someone else and that her body was floating in a river somewhere.

I wasn’t at Shinjuku, at that point. I was back at Metropolitan PD, in Tokyo, constantly feeling like I was bashing my head against a brick wall trying to keep up with Sera; he always kept Adonis three steps ahead. But Minegishi’s assistant summoned me from the Cyber Crimes bullpen and stuck me in a cab to Shinjuku and I had no idea why.

They shoved me into an interrogation room — and there she was.  Your sister.

Her hair was short and her eyes were dead and she was dressed in black like a soldier or a spy. They’d handcuffed her to a table. Minegishi told me she brought in Saeki in a cab, and delivered him at Shinjuku Station, tranq’d and trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey. 

She told me that she had intel that would help prevent X-Day, but that she needed immunity for three former Adonis members: a brother and sister, Uno Shion and Uno Suzune, and Sera Akito. I thought that would make you feel a way, to know that your sister was still trying to protect Sera.

I felt like a Ping Pong ball going back and forth between your sister and Minegishi, Morioka, and Takeda, the Chief of Police. Morioka hated the idea of granting immunity to terrorists but Takeda needed to cover his ass. Well, the force’s ass.

So they spun this deal: the Uno twins were still minors at the time they committed their X-Day crimes, so they were able to slide into a juvenile offenders program similar to what Yanagi went through. Akito’s sentence was lightened; he’s on house arrest and works for Cyber Crimes. I’m usually the one holding his leash.

And your sister? They pinned a medal on her. They spread the story that her resignation was just a cover. That she went undercover to Adonis as part of a secret op, and that her goal was to take down Adonis from within.

Of course it was disgusting. Of course it was political. Of course it was about the optics. This is the police, remember.

But instead of your sister rotting in a jail cell for the rest of her life, she got an honourable discharge. It was the best possible outcome. 

You’re still dead, though.

~

She moved in with me. We weren’t together or anything like that, but she’d been evicted from her (your) old apartment, and her (your) things had been shipped back to your parents’, in Niigata.

I worried about her a lot. Constantly. I mean, I still do, but those early days were rough. I thought I’d got to know her so well during that December when we were investigating X-Day, but death makes people into strangers.

She slept a lot. Slept and slept and slept, like a cat. Sometimes, she went running, or she went to the gym in my apartment building. She got a membership at a shooting range, which gave me a whole other list of things to worry about. She didn’t have a job and she didn’t need to think about working for a while, since she could draw from her pension. She was a twenty-four-year old retiree.

She didn’t cook. It was weird. I’d braced myself to buy pots and pans and cooking tools and real groceries, but she didn’t bring it up. We went to the convenience store and ordered take out and had dinner at restaurants and bars.

She told me, later — a lot later — that she couldn’t cook without thinking of you.

~

I felt useless.

She was living with me, but it was like having a ghost for a roommate. I wanted to yell at her to just do something: cry, scream, hit me, get it all out, get it over with. Anything. 

She started seeing a therapist. I think it was a condition of her honourable discharge. But I didn’t know if she really said anything during her sessions; she didn’t talk about them with me. I barely knew anything about her time at Adonis, so I was constantly imagining the worst.

I had no idea what the fuck to do. So I did something I’d never done before, and I called my dad for advice.

I know that doesn’t sound like much. But my dad and I hadn’t really talked much ever since my mother died. It was like we couldn’t look at each other dead on, like we had to avoid each other’s shipwrecks, or else we’d both drown.

But I called him, for your sister. And I asked, basically, How did you deal with me after we lost Mom?

He didn’t really have any useful answers either. But it was good to talk about it all with someone who was outside of things.

And he told me, Don’t try to fix things. This isn’t a thing that can be fixed.

~

And then out of the blue, my dad showed up in Japan.

He had a suitcase full of American candy bars and a laptop and not much else. He said he was in the country for a job, but it was clear that he just wanted to meet Ichika.

My dad’s Japanese is so-so, since he mostly lives in the States. He moved to Kanagawa for my mom, but he was never really comfortable there, or with spoken Japanese.

But by God, he really tried when it came your sister, and she tried her best too, with her high school English. I’d step back and watch them and it was a marvel. They were generous with each other, using a lot of hand gestures and translation apps on their phones and they would burst into laughter at weird times, like a pair of little kids.

Of course I was annoyed. My dad got through to Ichika in a way I hadn’t. But at the same time, I was glad that she was talking to someone, anyone.

They got along well and I think it was because he was meeting her as she was, right at that moment.  He wasn’t comparing her to some earlier version of herself, before she lost you.

~

I don’t know if you ever met Sakuragawa, but she works in Forensics at Shinjuku PD. Good drinking buddy, obsessed with meat. She was friends with your sister, and kept trying to get together for drinks. One time, my dad convinced your sister to go.

I was getting off a late shift at work when your sister drunk-dialled me. I mean, it sounded like a drunk dial. I could hear all the bar sounds in the background, people laughing, talking, music. I asked if everything was okay, and she said, I want to see you.

Don’t look at me like that. This isn’t that kind of story. Or if it was, I wouldn’t be telling it to you, because you’d deck me.

So I went, and my dad tagged along. Ichika had told him stories about Sakuragawa and he was curious to see if they were true. We went to that izakaya in Kabukicho, where I used to go with your sister after work.

Sakuragawa was obnoxiously cheerful and your sister was already so drunk she had her head folded up in her arms, but she looked up and smiled at me. It felt like a lifetime since she had smiled at me with any kind of warmth, or fondness, or recognition. She looked… happy to see me, and -

Anyway.

She was drinking whiskey on the rocks, which I found odd - I remembered that she used to drink sours or beers, but she said that she’d been thinking of Yanagi. I was surprised she said his name. We had a habit of talking around them, the people that we lost, but - I don’t know, she was very open that night. Maybe it was Sakuragawa, but more likely it was the booze.

We ordered food and drinks, and my dad and Sakuragawa seemed to be getting along, and it was - nice, honestly. It felt like the first time that I actually got to spend time with Ichika, in any kind of meaningful way. We’d shared the apartment for four months, at that point.

Sakuragawa and my dad wanted to go to this all-night, all-you-can-eat yakiniku place, but your sister wanted to go home. So I called a cab and that was nice too, just to sit there in the dark of the cab together.

Partway through, she told the cab driver to stop at a random intersection and to wait for her. She ran out and came back about five minutes later with two bags of cream puffs, and she shoved one at me.

She said, “Kazuki loved these cream puffs. Whenever I brought them home, they disappeared right away.”

It was the first time I heard her say your name since you died.

~

Back at the apartment, she told me a lot of stories that night. We just laid down on my bed, side by side - fully clothed, so you can get that look off your face - in the dark, and she talked, and talked, and talked, and I listened, and listened, and listened. I didn’t know if this would ever happen again so I tried to remember as hard as I could, listening not only with my ears, but with my whole body.

She talked about Adonis, what it was like living in “the Bunker,” as she called it. She said living there was comforting. It was a place that you had never been, that held no memories of you.

She fell into the simplicity of that life. She had a routine, clear orders, a purpose. She spent all her time learning about weapons, stuffing her brain full of new information as if it could shove out all the bad things that had happened.

She became obsessed with weapons, with objects that hurt, that incapacitated, that ended lives, as if knowledge would give her power over them. As if with her own two hands, she could slide the knife out of your body, and make you whole again, unhurt.

~

She talked about the executors, the people who carried out the X-Day Crimes. How she hadn’t wanted to get to know them, didn’t want to think about them as people, but she’d been forced to, by an assignment from Zero. That was another thing - she always called Saeki “Zero,” as if they really were two separate people. As if she needed them to be two separate people.

She used to go out drinking with Ogata and Sanjou. You’d know Ogata as the perpetrator from the July case, the one who murdered that stalker in what he claimed was self-defence, but was actually pre-meditated revenge. He had a young daughter that he’d wanted to write to from the Bunker, but he was ashamed. Ogata was a lightweight, and once he had a few beers in him, he’d start waxing poetic about how they were creating a just and better world.

Sanjou was the shooter of the July incidents - he murdered all those people involved  in that online bullying incident. He was a former cop, like your sister, and he said it was like being from the same small town. After drinking, he always wanted to eat something salty, usually ramen. He’d drag your sister out to ramen booths at all hours of the day.  

It was surreal to imagine the three of them, terrorists and murderers, sitting together at a bar, crowded shoulder to shoulder, like any trio of co-workers on a Friday night. Ogata and Sanjou. They got to spend time with the Ichika in Adonis, the one I barely knew at all. 

~

Your sister said that her favourite place in the Bunker was the munitions locker. She visited it at least once a day - cleaning weapons, maintaining them, getting to know them by touch and feel and use.

She was at the shooting range every day too, and her aim, her focus, her discipline, had only gotten sharper since she left the force. She would time herself until she could take a gun apart and put it back together again with her eyes closed in less than a minute.

She did that sometimes, in her sleep. I’d see your sister’s hands moving in the darkness, as if she was playing piano, or folding origami, or making shadow puppets for the child that you had ceased to be.

~

She said that one of the worst parts was that she missed Saeki. Not Zero, but Saeki. 

She would never forgive him for your death. She never blamed the kid who actually stabbed you - she just saw him as a puppet, on a long leash jerked around by Adonis. It was as if Saeki had taken the knife and stabbed you himself.

But Saeki had been her friend, once. Along with everyone else she was grieving, she was grieving him, too - the loss of that friendship that had sustained her through so many years. Realizing that Saeki had been Zero all along had forced her to re-examine everyone else too. To wonder what everyone else was hiding. Who every single person had the potential to be.

He collared your sister because he wanted to see how she would react. He killed you because he wanted to see who she would become, transformed by loss.

She knew that. She knew that your death had nothing to do with you, not really. You were killed because you were her brother. Because she loved you.

~

The next day, I wondered if she’d go back to being the stoic Ichika, the one with the face that I couldn’t read anymore. The heart that was a secret garden, the gates locked tight.

But we woke up together, in the morning, and she looked back at me, and I could see here, there, underneath it all. Ichika.

She’d told me, in not so many words, that she had lived to destroy Adonis, to destroy Saeki. 

There was a question on the table, in the silence between us:

Now what?

~

Last December, when you were still alive, your sister and I argued about Thomas Ken Nagata. It was on one of those blurry late nights, fuelled by Mister Donut and too much coffee, that she had tried to talk me out of revenge.

She said, Doing this won’t bring your mother back.

That was the dumbest, most obvious thing she could have said. I knew it would never bring my mother back. But it would feel good, like the universe re-aligning itself. It would feel like justice.

The day your sister quit the police force, I wanted to shout at her: Bringing down Adonis won’t bring your brother back.

But it would have been stupid to say it, then. It wouldn’t have made a difference. Because she wasn’t so much trying to bring you back as trying to join you.

~

Isshiki Hiro invited us to a live.

He’d been shattered by your death like the rest of us. It was like what had happened to him before, magnified by a thousand - he was about to make his big comeback, and then you were ripped out of the world. You and Sera were so much a part of the music that he wanted to create.

I remember the show that your sister and I went to before. The packed theatre, the girls with glitter on their faces just like Isshiki, the raw charge and energy that swept through the crowd. Your sister’s face, awed and proud, when she saw the wonder you had become.

This wasn’t like that. It was Isshiki at a small cafe and bookstore, in the middle of a Thursday. He wasn’t in one of his flashy stage gets up, just jeans and a pale lavender sweater, his hair tucked into a ponytail. No guitarist or bassist or drummer, just him and a keyboard. He introduced himself briefly. There was barely a ripple in the conversation.

“This song is for a friend of mine,” Isshiki said, and he started to play.

Your sister only made it through the first minute or so. She excused herself, and I went after her. She hid herself among the bookshelves on the second floor and she wasn’t quite crying, but her shoulders were hunched over, her hands covering her face.

The moon is a graveyard, Isshiki sang, his words floating to the rafters. It doesn’t have a fragrance at all. But still, I hope, I hope, I hope I will see you there.

I just held her, until she stopped shaking and her breathing and her heartbeat slowed back to normal. Isshiki’s song continued, all of that grief and anger and beauty hitting us, like light passing through our bodies.

~

One day we were at a park, taking my dad to this new ice cream parlour he wanted to try out. Your sister had had a rough night; I’d heard her tossing and turning, and she was quieter than usual.

Partway through our walk in the park, she just doubled over, wheezing, fighting to  breathe. I had no idea what the hell to do, but my dad did.

He knelt beside her and put his hand on her back, and he said quietly, over and over again, “Breathe, Ichika-san. Breathe.”

He straightened up and said to me, in English, “Can you translate this for me? I don’t want to fuck it up.” He screwed up his face and said, “You’re not crazy. This is just as bad as you think it is. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a shitty liar.”

I couldn’t believe it, but I translated. Your sister sucked in a gasp, and then she laughed. She was still crying, but laughing too.

We sat on a park bench. My dad sat on one side of Ichika, and I sat on the other, and we just waited until she caught her breath.

She said, “I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me. We should get ice cream.”

So we went, but I couldn’t stop thinking of what my dad said, how his words sounded like a lyric that Sera or Isshiki might have composed.

This is just as bad as you think it is. 

~

My dad had to return to Houston eventually. I asked him if he would stay longer - Ichika was better, when he was around. He knew how to walk in the same spaces as her grief, how to make room for it. But no, he’d pushed things as far back as he could, and he needed to go.

We saw him off at the airport. Ichika waved goodbye, and it was the sorriest I ever felt to see him go.

~

One weekend your sister texted me that she needed me to buy groceries. Soft white bread, boneless pork, panko, eggs, vegetable oil. Cabbage and cherry tomatoes. 

When I got home, I saw she had cleaned the kitchen and gotten herself cooking equipment: a dark red apron, a gleaming chef’s knife, a whetstone, and two black lacquered bento boxes.

“I’m making pork cutlet sandwiches,” she said. It seemed like she had asked for a massive amount of pork for just the two of us, even if one of them was me. I asked her if she wanted help and she said no, it was fine, she wanted to do this herself.

I pretended to do things around the apartment, but really, I mostly just watched her. She played some classical music on her phone, and it was fascinating to watch her sink into the rhythms of cooking, like a dancer slipping back into an old, beloved routine.

She breaded and fried the pork cutlets, twice, and pressed them into the soft white pillows of bread with finely shredded cabbage and Kewpie mayo. She trimmed the crusts and sliced the sandwiches into perfect triangles and I thought that if she wanted another career after being a cop, she could always open up a restaurant.

She arranged the sandwiches perfectly in the bento boxes, surrounding them with fans of more cabbage, and tucking in bright cherry tomatoes, cut like tulips, for garnish. She filled two little pig-shaped plastic containers with Tonkatsu sauce. She wrapped up both boxes in furoshiki, one indigo with white flowers on it, the other cloth white with indigo flowers. She even made two tall canisters of barley tea, and topped them with paper cups.

She asked, “Will you come with me? I have to deliver one of these, but the other one, we can share.”

We caught a cab, and eventually we pulled up to a massive building that loomed over all the buildings in the area. One whole side of it was covered in blinding windows that bounced back light, and that was when I recognized it, even though I’d never been there before: Tokyo Detention House.  

Your sister paid the cab driver and we went into the prison. There were guards, there were questions; I flashed my badge. Ichika handed the bento to a guard, and said, “This is for Saeki Yuzuru.”

~

We got another cab. Ichika gave directions to drop us off at Kansen-en Park, one of those little parks tucked away in Shinjuku, not far from the river. We sat under some trees. 

She poured barley tea into a paper cup and held it out to me. I felt, for once, like I didn’t have much of an appetite.

“Why?” I asked.

Her gaze drifted away - passing over the trees, the grass, the park, the small Shinto shrine in the distance.

“It was his request,” she said. “For his last meal. He asked for 'anything cooked by Hoshino Ichika.'” She propped her chin on her hand. “I could’ve said no. I thought about it.”

“Then why?” I asked again.  

She looked down at her hands. “I don’t know,” she said. “But I’m so tired, and I’m sick of feeling this way. I thought maybe this would help me at least feel something different.”

“Did it?”

“I don’t know.”

We drank the barley tea and ate the sandwiches and like everything your sister made, it was delicious.

I’m sure Saeki thought so too.

They hanged him later that day.

~

A few weeks later, Ichika went out late at night.

I tried texting her, but got no response. I got worried, then irritated that I was worried. I had never imagined she wouldn’t come back to the apartment, not since those early days when she seemed like a feral cat that was just learning how to live indoors.

She came back, smelling like spilled whiskey and cigarettes, like gunpowder and garlicky ramen. I’m sure you would’ve been furious and given her a tongue lashing - which would’ve been pretty rich, coming from a rock star.

But she was so sad. I think most of the time, she probably was sad, but she hid it behind other things - that blank, neutral mask that had become her default expression since Adonis.

This one night, her hurt and her sadness were so vivid on her face, her mask stripped away.

I tried her to get her drink some water, to take some Advil, to take off her leather jacket. We ended up sitting on the floor of my apartment, our backs against my bed.

“Why am I still here?” I remember her saying, mumbling it more to herself than to me. “I’m not supposed to be here anymore. So why am I still here?”

~

She explained it like this:

After you died, her goal had been to destroy Adonis. She would kill all of their members, then Saeki, then herself. That was the plan. Simple. Neat. 

But then somewhere along the way, things changed. I think the executors changed it for her. Talking to Sera, again, and the Uno twins. I think despite herself, she cared for them. She didn’t want to destroy them too. Maybe they reminded her too much of you.

And also — she realized that in some strange way, Saeki wanted her to kill him. Wanted her to get her revenge, to see how she enacted her form of justice.

So she took that away from him. She didn’t give him the grand, bloody finale that he wanted, Romeo and Juliet among the bombed out ruins.

She settled for something less, or something more, depending on how you look at it. She brought in Saeki. She let the police dismantle Adonis and administer their own justice, no matter how flawed or imperfect. And she was, peskily, left alive. A loose thread.

She thought her fate was tied to Saeki's. She thought that once Saeki died, once her reason for existence was gone, that she would die too.

“It’s not that I was planning on killing myself,” she said. “It’s just - I didn’t expect to keep living, beyond Zero. I hadn’t planned for it.”

You would’ve been furious, I think.

~

The next morning, I called Sera.

“I’m not sure I should be talking to you about all this,” Sera said, clearly sounding uncomfortable.

“If Ichika is going to harm herself, I want to know.” And then, because I actually was pretty desperate, I tacked on, "Please." 

Sera paused. I wondered if he was thinking of his little sister.

“I asked her not to kill herself,” Sera said, finally. “I made her promise me, on Kazuki’s memory.”

Damn. Sera really knew what he was doing.

“It wasn’t for any noble reason,” Sera said, and he sounded like he was trying not to cry. “I just told her - I lost my sister. I lost Kazuki. I don’t want to lose you too.” 

~

Your sister looked up at me, a blanket around her shoulders, clutching a cup of tea.

And she said, “I don’t know what to do, now.”

“I don’t know either,” I said. And then, “Do you want to get donuts?”

She said, “Yes.” 

~

We went to Niigata for Obon. Your sister was quiet, on the way over. I worked on my laptop, cursed the temperamental train Wi-Fi, and tried not to make it obvious how much I was checking on her.

We got to your parents’ inn, and I don’t know what I was expecting, but they were just - ordinary. You and your sister both have your mother’s eyes, that same shade of green, just like a cat’s. But beyond that, your parents looked boring and respectable and I could barely believe it, that you and Ichika had come from them. 

They didn’t seem happy to see Ichika, which I thought was odd, since they had lost one child - wouldn’t they be happy to see the other? They were polite to me. Your sister said we were friends and roommates, but I think they still thought I was her boyfriend.

We didn’t eat dinner with your parents that night, but with other guests at the inn. There were plenty of people returning to Niigata just for Obon. There were people that recognized Ichika, and it was strange to see them call out to her. She’d acknowledge them briefly, talk about nothing, politely deflect.

A man around our age hesitated before he said, “I heard about what happened to your brother. I’m so sorry.”

Your sister paused. “Thank you, Yuu-kun.”

He backed away after that, awkward, and I asked, after he returned to his table, “Who was that?”

“My high school boyfriend,” your sister said, already going back to her gyudon and spring rolls. “We broke up when I went to the police academy.”

“Ah,” I said.

My mind got caught on his phrasing. “What happened to your brother.” What happened to you. As if the knife just happened to your body, like Zero sliding a love letter into an envelope.

~

We went to the cemetery with your parents. We did what everyone else was doing, dousing the headstone with water, clearing away dead flowers and leaves, lighting fresh incense. Ichika and your parents didn’t talk much throughout this, except to pass things to each other.

We stared at the grave, afterwards. Your father had a hand on your mother’s shoulder. Her face was pinched tight. Ichika touched my side, and said, quietly, “Let’s give them a moment.”

So the two of us wandered away from the hillside cemetery, and went down to the river. Your sister tipped her head back, her eyes closed as she leaned into the wind. There was a summer storm building up far in the distance, but it hadn’t touched Niigata yet.

“It would’ve been easier if it was me,” she said.

“Hmm?” I wasn’t following at all. I was thinking about summer storms.

“If I had died,” she said, “instead of Kazuki. It would’ve been easier on them. They gave up on me when I left, but they pinned all their hopes and dreams on Kazuki.”

It was astonishingly awful to hear your sister write off her own life.

“I’m not saying this in any self-pitying way, or anything,” she said, opening her eyes to look at me. “It’s just… true.”

“Your parents are idiots,” I said, finally.

I mean no offence to you, Kazuki. You were great - charismatic, intelligent, sharp, protective of the people you loved. You touched people with your music, and you reached them in a way that mere words never could.

But your sister is special, and your parents are idiots for not seeing that. I know you know it, too.

Your father started calling your sister’s name, so went back, and we all walked back to the inn. We had dinner that night with your parents. The conversation was surface-level, dead civil.

And then your sister asked if she could have your guitar.

Your mother was taken back. “Why on earth would you want that?”

Ichika said, “Kazuki loved that guitar.” As if it wasn’t the most obvious thing about you; I figured it out after talking with you for less than five minutes.

Your father’s hands tightened on his chopsticks. “I should burn it,” he said. “He never would’ve went to Tokyo if it wasn’t for that thing.”

“Dear,” your mother said quietly, putting a hand on his elbow, but he shrugged it off.

He looked your sister right in the eye and said, “We never should have let him go to you. It was your job to protect him, and look what happened.”

I stood up then. I yelled a lot. I don’t remember what I yelled. I’m not exactly proud of that moment.

We took the next train back to Tokyo.

~

On the train, she stared out the window, listening to music, her fingers tapping on her knee. Something fast. Maybe rock. Maybe your music. Maybe she was listening to you as you played guitar, as you sang with Isshiki about how light goes onward, ever onward.

She reached out and took my hand. She didn’t look at me. She was still staring out the window. But she squeezed my hand, just once, and didn’t let go.

I didn’t let go either.

~

“I don’t know what to do for you,” I said, that night in bed.

We were sharing a bed. I don’t know why. I don’t think we ever talked about it. We just unpacked and got ready for bed and then she crawled in next to me as if it was something we’d always done.

“I don’t know either,” she said. We said that to each other a lot. “I should tell you to kick me out, but I don’t want you to.”

“I don’t want to kick you out.”

“Okay,” she said. She reached up and touched my face. She had callouses on her hands, from shooting practice. Her eyes were clearer than I’d seen them in ages. “Okay, then.”

~

We met Isshiki for coffee and bought tickets to another one of his shows. Ichika started cooking again, and now she gives me bento for Sera, when I visit him at home. We visited Yoshinari, who’d aged a thousand years since Okazaki’s death, and who seemed like he’d like nothing better than to be your sister’s bodyguard, 24/7. We visited her old supervisor, Mochida, and his wife and kids, but we had to leave in a hurry. I think the little boy reminded her of you.

We visited Yanagi’s brother, whose tears broke through his stiff and formal façade, just once. We visited Enomoto’s family; I’d always thought he dyed his hair, like a yankee, but his sister had the same red, red hair. Ichika introduced me to someone named Mukai, who took us on a tour of all the stray cats in Shinjuku.

“They miss the Director,” she said, as a grey-striped cat came up to her and twined around her calves. “Even though he was a stupid man. Does that make them stupid too?”

“I don’t think so,” Ichika said. She kneeled to pet the cat with gloved hands. “Just human. Or, just animal, I guess.”

“Hn,” Mukai said.

We visited the Uno twins. Their little apartment was lovingly decorated, the brother’s artwork on the wall, the sister’s dressmaking dummy in a corner wearing a bright scarlet gown. They bought a chocolate cake, and they watched Ichika anxiously as she took the first bite.

“It’s good,” she said, and the twins relaxed, relieved.

“It really is good, isn’t it, Ichika-neesan?” the sister said, finally picking up her fork.

There was a look on your sister’s face - almost a smile, not quite tears.

“It is,” she said, taking another bite. “It is.”

~

Ichika kept sleeping in my bed. We hold hands all the time now. She started teaching me how to cook and sometimes, when I’m washing dishes or chopping vegetables, she’ll come up behind me, and just lay her head against my shoulder, like she really is a cat. One time, after we went out for ice cream, she turned and kissed me. She tasted of strawberries, of springtime, of cold, sweet cream.

We’ve got a picture of you in our living room, along with your albums, your guitar; we did go back to Niigata to get it, after all. There’s a red bowl of incense in front of your picture, and sometimes we put out some mandarins for you. But more often, it’s cream puffs.

And I wonder sometimes: is this enough? Is this what you would have wanted for your sister? If your ghost is kicking around, are you at peace, seeing where she is right now?

I don’t know. I can’t know. The same way I can’t know how my own mother would feel, seeing what I’ve become. What my life is like right now.

All I do know is that I am going to be right here, next to your sister, for as long as she wants me to be here. I like to joke that she’s a stray cat that I adopted, when really, it’s more like we adopted each other. We’re fucked up in ways that match.

“Takeru?” I can hear your sister calling, from the kitchen. “Takeru, your dad’s on the phone. He wants to say hi.”

“Coming,” I say.

I’m going to stop writing here, for now. But I’m sure I’ll write you again, Kazuki.

Take care.