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Sunday is shadow-stepping day. Daiya wakes up early to relive her favorites of the memories she’s borrowed that week. Only her father gets up as early as she does; everyone else likes to sleep in. He makes them both tea and reads the newspaper, and doesn’t ask what she’s doing with those chess pieces.
She darts around her family members in a circle to give them a too-tight morning hug as they shuffle in for breakfast. Wherever their shadows land, she’ll step on them, and their memories will be returned.
They don’t know what she’s doing, of course. They just think she's being cute, as usual. People can't feel it when their memories return to them; it's common to forget about a memory for a while. For all Daiya knows, they might not have thought of that memory in the past week anyway, so it's really like she's done nothing at all. She makes sure not to take anything too important. People make so many memories in a lifetime that not being able to recall one for a week or so is no big deal.
She has rules, so that makes the whole thing proper. One memory per person. Nothing so important or conceptual that it would interfere with their daily life. Returned within a week, no matter what, even if it’s a good one. One month to return memories from friends and classmates. It shouldn’t hurt anyone, and she’s giving them back anyway, so it’s not stealing. It’s like a library. So as long as she follows her rules she doesn’t have to worry about feeling bad.
She got the idea from Jobin. Even though he owns all those expensive beetles, he goes out every week on the Higashikata family grounds with his bug-catching gear. He finds an interesting beetle, puts it in a little tank, and keeps it in a special spot in his beetle room. Then he lets it go the next week, no matter how much he likes it.
“It’s so I have a reason to catch a new one every week," he explains when Daiya asks why. "Otherwise my collection will go stale, and I’ll forget to appreciate what I have. Plus, it’s the perfect summer vacation activity!” He has some beetles in his permanent collection that he’ll let Daiya hold and pet. She likes to feel them crawl on her hands, and to run her fingers down the smooth shells on their backs. She asks Jobin why he doesn’t let the others go, too.
“They’re expensive, and I had to go to a lot more trouble to get them,” he shrugs. “And they’re not native to this environment. For some, I wouldn’t even know where to return them to.”
California King Bed, her stand, has its own rules. First, the target has to fuss over her. It can be a little bit of a pain to get that to happen, but Daiya likes that the challenge of it. It's a fun little game, every time. The rules are vague enough that all sorts of things count as fussing. And it’s so easy to get people to do it.
Her family knows not to fuss over her, that she hates it and doesn’t need it anyway. But most people are polite on instinct, even obnoxious older siblings. If she drops something and gropes around for it, they’ll pick it up and hand it to her. If she puts her mug of tea too close to the edge of the table, they’ll nudge it back. If she’s carrying too many things and lets one slip so that it’s almost falling, they’ll pluck it from her arms and help her.
Even though she’s doing it on purpose, it still makes her a little angry. She doesn’t need their help, she can do everything on her own. That’s why it’s okay to take something from them, as recompense for babying her. That’s the biggest reason why she likes her stand’s rules - it means that whoever she’s stealing memories from already deserves it.
And she’s putting those memories to good use, savoring them as if they were new. They were probably just gathering dust in the back of the brains they belonged to. She likes to imagine that people appreciate a memory more once she puts it back in there, all polished and shiny and loved, even if they never knew it was gone.
Daiya's experience of the chess piece memories isn’t the same as being there. It’s like something between a vivid flashback and a dream.
She jumps along to the music from Hato’s memory of a concert. She marvels at the fish Jobin saw on a snorkeling trip. She can almost, almost feel the rush of the rollercoaster from one of Joshu’s visits to an amusement park.
...Or was that her own memory? She thought she took it from Joshu weeks ago, but now she's not sure if it really was his. She’s been to amusement parks, after all. She tries to recall how clear the view was - if it’s clearer than she can see, can she be certain that it wasn’t her own? Or was she imagining the extra details, her mind filling in the blanks? After so many years with her stand, she can’t remember which memories are her own, and which are memories of other people’s memories. Which are dreams, or memories of other people’s dreams.
Daiya doesn’t know how far back her own memories go. When she was three years old, her family spent a day the beach. She’s heard them talk about it. She has memories, too - flashes of packing sand into a bucket, picking up a shell, splashing the cold water with her hands. Those would be her earliest real memories, if they were hers. But she has no idea if her mind made them up from the stories, or if she dreamed it, or if she borrowed those memories from someone, or several someones, over the years. Maybe that memory is all of those cobbled together into one.
She was there anyway, wasn’t she? So it doesn’t matter where the memory came from.
But maybe it doesn’t even matter if she wasn’t there, as long as she can remember it. The whole reason people do anything is to make memories, isn't it? If the memory is in her mind - even after she's given it back - it’s hers forever.
Daiya has another collection of memories, hidden in a little lockbox in her room behind the books on her bookshelf, chess pieces jumbled together. These are shameful: they’re memories she’s taken from strangers.
If one of those strangers died, would their memory disappear, or remain, encased in a chess piece for eternity? She’s never knowingly tested what her stand would do in such a case. Is she already in possession of memories from the dead, forever unable to return them? Once laid to rest, the dead cast no shadows. Memories borrowed become memories stolen .
She tries not to think about it.
Most of them were taken years ago, back when she first had gotten a handle on her stand, barely thirteen and drunk with power. Back then, her heart was a maelstrom of undirected rage, jealousy, and yearning. Yearning for experiences she could never have - or might never have - or wouldn’t get to have for a long time. Experiences she suddenly had the power to take.
She’d lie, shamelessly, sweetly, in her cute little hoodie with its cute little ears, and if her targets assumed she was harmless, that was their fault. “Hey, mister! I’m doing a project for school. We’re supposed to interview strangers. What’s the prettiest place you’ve ever been? What’s the most exciting thing you’ve ever done? What's the most fun day you've ever had? Oh, that sounds wonderful...I think that’s all...Oh no, I’ve dropped my pen! That was my favorite pen, I don't know where it went...oh, thank you, thank you so much, you didn’t have to do that, you know, I could have picked it up myself…but I have to go now...”
She’d palm the chess piece, let her fingers brush the smooth glass sphere that housed the memory, just for a glimpse - a flash of stolen warmth, excitement, joy. The thrill of thievery, the addicting rush of power, knowing that she could get away with it because nobody could even comprehend what she was doing.
And the guilt, more each time.
She had stopped when she reached 32 memories, a full set of chess pieces. She doesn't consciously choose which piece each memory takes form in, but somehow this collection made a complete set. Sometimes she locks her door and arranges them on a board. She plays against her stand, feeling flashes of memory as she touches each piece. She doesn’t care who wins - she’s only playing against herself.
She can’t give them back, because she doesn’t know who they belong to. She’s long since searched for and returned all the ones she could. Every time she comes home from an outing, she counts them, in case she’s accidentally stepped through one of their shadows, absolved by a chance passing on the streets of Morioh. It happens only once in a very rare while, and when she comes home to find one missing, she feels relief and loss in equal measure. At least she can still remember the memory. But it’s not the same.
She’s down to 24 pieces now. She still plays chess with her stand with the pieces she has left. And since she’s down to 24 pieces, it isn’t so bad if she takes up to eight more. That’s the rule she set: a limit of 32. It’s fine if there’s a rule.
But that shouldn't happen. Because when she first hit 32, she had also set herself a rule to only take memories from people she knows. Her classmates, neighbors, family. Not strangers. She doesn't have to feel so bad about those chess pieces anymore, because she set a rule to fix it. The 32-limit rule is a hard rule just to make sure.
Because some rules are more difficult to keep than others.
Daiya took a stranger's memory three months ago, the first time in a whole year, breaking her longest streak, almost without thinking. It's a sunny memory in the simple form of a white pawn, snatched in late February, the time of year when all of the joy and thrill of winter has leached out and frozen onto dirty piles of snow. She doesn’t know why she did it, other than that she wanted to, and whatever usually stopped her just...didn’t.
She’s sorry about it now that the days are long and the memory sits untouched, but she knows she’ll be grateful for it when the seasons change, when it’s cold again and dark before dinnertime, and she can keep a summer day in her pocket.
Besides, a memory of a summer day isn’t a big deal. People live thousands of summer days over their lives. Who would notice if they lost just one?
It’s the first shadow-stepping day after Josuke arrived. He wakes up early, too. Daiya likes that about him. It’s still a peaceful morning as any - Josuke sits on the opposite side of the couch from Norisuke, drinking tea and quietly flipping through a magazine.
Daiya can sense that he’s watching her when she circles her half-asleep siblings. She’s in an optimistic mood; maybe he’s checking her out.
After breakfast, everyone starts going their separate ways. Josuke pulls her to the side, and they're alone. “Daiya,” he begins, and his voice is low and serious and she thinks that this is just like what it would be like if he was going to kiss her. “I need to ask you something very serious. You’ll tell me the truth, won’t you?”
Daiya calms her breathing. He’s probably just asking her to help him find something out like he usually does, always focused on his own strange mystery instead of on her. “Of course I will. I promised to never lie to you.”
He leans in. “You were very cute this morning, the way you ran around everyone in a little circle before hugging them.”
Oh my god. He really is going to kiss me. I didn’t think it would happen so soon! “You noticed?” she asked, trying to sound coy and sultry instead of desperate and inexperienced. It had taken enormous levels of self control, but she’d never stolen memories of kissing before. She wanted her first to be hers .
“I did notice. And I also noticed how some chess pieces on the side table disappeared at the same time. You were stepping into their shadows.” he accuses, his voice becoming stern. All of Daiya’s excitement curdles at once. She’s suddenly reminded of a memory of her own, when they’d refilled their pool on a hot summer day and Joshu had pushed her into it while it was still ice cold. She scowls at the memory, and at the current circumstances.
“They were only little ones,” she immediately defends herself. “Just for fun! It’s not like what I did with you, and I’m still really sorry for that by the way, but most people have tons more memories than you so it wouldn’t even affect them and they weren’t even important and I only had them for a week!”
“There were other chess pieces on that table that didn’t disappear. Who do those ones belong to?”
“None of them are yours, I never took a single memory from you after that one time, I promised you! I'll step into your shadow right now to prove it if you don't believe me. They’re just from random classmates of mine, and they’re also small ones, like really tiny ones, and I never keep them more than a month-”
“You take people’s memories and keep them around for fun? You do this all the time?” His tone is incredulous.
Daiya stomps a foot. He’s not listening to her, because if he was then he wouldn’t still be mad. “I’ve seen you use your stand for fun! Why can’t I have fun with mine?”
“What if they move away before you give them back?”
“That literally only happened once! And I said they’re not like important memories, they won’t even notice. It won’t change anything for them.”
Josuke sighs in frustration. “It does change things. They used to have the memory and now they don’t. It doesn’t matter that they don’t know. In fact, it’s worse.”
Daiya throws up her hands. “Fine, I’ll give them back tomorrow. I was going to do that anyway. And…you know, I really care about your happiness. So I won’t take any more, okay? I’ve already seen the good ones from them anyway. I’ll do it for you, Jo~~~~suke,” she adds with a lilt, trying to salvage the conversation from being entirely a disaster. It’s a big sacrifice, and she regrets saying it almost immediately, but it’ll be worth it if it makes him like her more.
“Are they all the ones you have?”
Josuke always asks too many questions. He hasn’t yet learned that if you keep asking questions, you’ll get to the ones with bad answers. She promised not to lie to him, and she loves him, and breaking rules against someone you love is even worse than breaking rules normally.
So she takes a deep breath, then tells him the truth. All of it, about the strangers and the secret pieces, and the rules. She waits for judgment. She’s sure he’s going to lecture her, or tell her he hates her again.
But all he says is, simply: “Give them back.”
Daiya waits a few seconds, but he says nothing more. “They’re from strangers, Josuke. I tried so hard back then to find them, these ones are impossible to track down.”
He puts a hand on her shoulder. “You’re incredibly clever, Daiya. More than anyone knows. Try again. I believe you could find a way to do anything, if you really wanted to.”
It’s cruel of him to give her such a wonderful compliment and follow it up with such an impossible task. “Will you think I’m a terrible awful person forever and ever if I don’t?” she asks, making her expression as innocent and sad as she possibly can.
“Yes.”
Her eyes narrow. Now he’s just being unreasonable. “I was thirteen when I took almost all of them, you can’t count that against me!”
“You’re sixteen now and you’re not trying to give them back. That’s not then, that’s now .” He’s immovable.
She wants to tell him more about how impossible the task is. She wants to tell him about how bad she feels about the whole thing. She wants to tell him about all the ones that she did manage to give back, and how much work some of those were. But none of that would make him love her. None of that would make him proud of her. And none of that would shut down the new and very scary thought that Josuke might be right. There’s only one thing that will.
Daiya clenches her hands into fists. “Will you believe me if - when I tell you when I’ve returned them all?”
“Of course. I still trust you to tell the truth. Or you would have lied to me about all this, or taken my memory of this whole conversation.”
“Well, I didn’t,” Daiya affirms, lifting her chin. She doesn’t say she didn’t think about it because that would be a lie.
She also doesn’t say that she doesn’t think she can succeed, even though it would be the truth. She can’t even say it to herself all the way, because that would mean that she’d have to give up having a chance with Josuke.
Daiya goes to her room and luxuriates in all the memories one last time. Then she locks the box with her little key, and puts them in her backpack. She wishes she had plans for today, so she could put this off, but her schedule is free and clear.
She’ll have to swallow every last bit of her pride for what she’ll have to do next.
She holds her head high and makes her way to the other side of town. She steels herself, then knocks on Yasuho Hirose’s door.
Yasuho makes a little noise of surprise and confusion when she opens the door. “Daiya? What are you doing here?” she asks warily. Daiya shifts on her feet uneasily. She’s known Yasuho practically all her life, even if from a distance, the kindest of her siblings’ friends.
But it strikes Daiya just then that Josuke must have told her all about what she’d done to him - her attempt to steal him away, taking his memory of Yasuho altogether, culminating in an embarrassing failure. If she’d realized Yasuho knew about all that, the white-hot shame might have kept her away. But it’s too late to turn back now.
She blurts out her explanation, worried that if she takes too long that Yasuho will slam the door in her face. “Tsurugi told me about your Paisley Park and how it can find things. I did some bad stuff a long time ago and I couldn’t fix it then. But I think you can help me fix it now.” Tears prick at her eyes. She squares her shoulders, trying to appear confident. “I know you and I are romantic rivals, but I’m prepared to set that aside for the time being.”
“Rivals…? Um, not really...” Yasuho mutters. “But okay. I don’t know if I can help with whatever it is, but I can try. I’ll try. What do you need to fix?”
Daiya reveals the chess box she’d been keeping hidden behind her back. She opens the latch to show Yasuho what's inside. Before, Daiya had perceived the box as not having very many pieces at all; it was practically half empty. But the second it was in front of Yasuho, it seemed to become heavy, and the sound of the pieces rattling together was thunderous. She feels new shame about how many there are.
“...Chess pieces? What’s the matter with them?”
So Yasuho doesn’t know all the details of how her stand works. Telling her would be to reveal a weak spot. But she has no choice but to trust Yasuho with this - not if she wants to do the right thing. She huffs, frustrated that she has to explain her shame in words. Again. “When my stand steals people’s memories, they go in pieces like this,” she rattles off quickly, to get it over with. “These ones are all from different strangers. I don’t know who they are so I can't give them back because I have to step into their shadows to do it. And also I took most of these years ago so it’s basically impossible. But Josuke’s really upset about it.”
“Did Josuke really send you to me about this?” her tone is disbelieving. More salt in the wound.
“Of course not! And you can’t tell him I’m coming to you for help! If you want to slam the door in my face go ahead, but please don’t tell Josuke!” She could hardly imagine anything more embarrassing.
“Okay, sure, if you really don’t want me to tell him. But why?”
You know why . They’re rivals. Daiya shakes her head. “Are you going to help or not?”
“I guess, if I can. I think…I really think I can, actually. I’m still pretty new to this whole stand business, but finding stuff is the sort of thing I’m good at.”
Yasuho doesn’t invite Daiya in, which is fair. They sit at an empty picnic table in the park nearby, and Daiya sets the box on the table.
Yasuho opens the box and looks at the pieces, rummaging through them like they were some regular cheap plastic set. It felt invasive. “They just seem like ordinary chess pieces to me. What are they memories of?”
“Just random little memories I took for fun. Stuff they wouldn’t even miss. Like one summer day, that’s it. One of them is a meal at a fancy restaurant, one is skiing...” It sounds worse when she says it out loud. Nobody would want to forget nice things like that.
“You can just take that stuff out of someone?" There's fear in her tone. Daiya doesn't know why; what she did to Josuke was a lot worse. "Just like that? For...fun?"
Daiya nods. She knows better than anyone that there’s power to being overlooked, underestimated. But deep inside, she’d always had an idle, shameful wish for people to fear her. To know how terrifying her power is. Yasuho’s fear should make her feel especially good. But she feels smaller than ever now, small and ashamed.
“How long have you had these?”
“The newest one is from this winter," she admits. "But most of them are from about three years ago, when I was way younger,” she adds quickly, because she figures that makes it sound much better.
“Oh my god, they’ve been missing these for years ?” Yasuho exclaims. Daiya wants to be mad, but she can tell Yasuho isn’t trying to be petty or guilt her.
To Daiya’s shame, she bursts into tears. “I didn’t mean to!” she sobs, even though she did, she did. She meant to take them and hadn’t thought or cared about the consequences. “I was gonna keep them at first but then I decided to give them back, but I couldn’t find them - I couldn’t and I really tried but then I gave up - Please, Yasuho, I’m sorry about the thing with Josuke -”
“I’ll help! It’s alright, it’s alright.” Yasuho gathers her into an awkward hug from across the table and lets Daiya cry on her shoulder. “But I’m not helping for your sake,” she adds sternly.
“I know. It’s for Josuke.” Daiya pulls back, wiping her nose on her arm.
“No. I’m helping for them,” Yasuho says, tapping a chess piece against Daiya’s palm. “The people you took these from."
Yasuho is very good at making feel Daiya ashamed without even trying. Daiya wants to hate her for it, but she can't. It's incredibly annoying. "Thank you," she says with great difficulty.
"Since I'm helping you out, you have to promise not to take any more memories from Josuke. Or me," she adds, as an afterthought.
"Josuke already made me promise that, like, a million times. And I'd never break a promise to him. But yeah, fine, I promise again."
"Good." Yasuho drums her fingers on the table. "To be honest, I think this might be kind of fun. It's nice to be able to actually fix something instead of uncovering more secrets that just get worse. How many of these things are there?”
Daiya shifts uncomfortably. “24.”
Yasuho gasps again.
“I get it if it’s too much work. I could just pick the most important-seeming ones and try the rest on my own.”
“No. We’ll return them all,” Yasuho says with conviction. “If we do one a week, that’s a little over half a year for all of them. If you don’t take more.”
“I’m not going to,” Daiya says tersely. “I took all of those a long time ago, mostly. I’m a different person now.”
“I’m glad to hear it.” Yasuho is kind enough to not point out what she very recently did to Josuke.
“Are we going to start today?” Daiya asks nervously, mostly hoping the answer is no.
“Sure. How about later this afternoon? I have to go to a lunch date with Josuke first,” Yasuho says, too innocently. Daiya knows this is a test. It’s unfair of Yasuho to kick her while she’s down. But maybe she needs to be tested.
“This afternoon is fine,” she says, and her voice is barely strained.
Daiya takes the box with her and goes to the fruit parlor to wait, knowing that Yasuho and Josuke are probably holding hands and being gross and cutesy somewhere close by. She sits at a little corner table and cries into a melon parfait for two, and relives all those memories one more time. When the parfait is done, she feels better. A lot better, in fact. She thought she'd have to feel ashamed of those pieces for the rest of her life. But now she feels a weight lifted already, just for the fact that she's trying something.
Maybe it’s okay that Josuke has chosen Yasuho, as long as Daiya can get him to like her as a person. Besides, Josuke could always change his mind and fall for her later. And if not…she can find someone else.
She’s proud of herself for being so mature about this whole thing.
She thinks she really will take a break from borrowing any more memories for a while, unless she really has to. And no more taking stranger’s memories for fun ever, even if she does manage to give back all the ones she has now. Once she empties that box, she'll make sure it stays empty forever.
...Well, maybe she can still do it if she gives it right back to them without leaving the premises. Like, within seconds. Jobin calls this “catch and release”, and Daiya’s pretty sure this doesn’t count as stealing at all, or even borrowing. It's just like picking something up and putting it right back down. That will be her new rule. But she’ll wait until she returns all of the memories she has until she starts letting herself do that.
Things will be pretty boring until then. Maybe she can read memoirs, or ask people to tell her stories or something. She’ll have to find something new to collect, and work on making her own memories. Boring.
She’ll have to come up with something new to do on Sunday mornings, too. Maybe if she helps Josuke out even more, he’ll find out he has some long-lost brother who’s super cute. Maybe two of them, and they both fight over her. Something like that. That would be way better than other people’s memories. She daydreams about all the memories she might one day make for herself.