Chapter Text
When they first leave Tokyo, it’s with a whimper.
There’s no grand explosion, no screaming declarations of freedom, no red violence anger kill that he’d dreamt of for years and years and years. There’s no Chuuoku, no Ichijuku or Rei or another soul for miles besides them.
Of course, it’s not Ramuda’s first time leaving Tokyo, not really. He’s been all over the world, to France and Germany and Egypt and America and every single country on the Earth. (Or maybe he hasn’t. He doesn’t really know. They told him that he had.) But it’s the first time he leaves Tokyo for good, leaves behind Shibuya and his workroom and all of the onee-sans and the feeling he got when he looked up at all of the flashing signs smack-dab in the middle of Shibuya Crossing and relished for just a moment in the feeling that nobody cared about him at all. He loved that feeling, that fleeting moment where he felt like another face in the crowd and nobody cared about his goals or complicated political maneuvers or about the fact that he wasn’t really part of them.
“He used to love feeling like a nobody,” a voice gently nudges him from the backseat. “Imagine that, Dice. Our Ramuda, loving to feel like nobody looked at him at all.” There’s a hint of a smile in the tone.
They’re in a little convertible, an old gray model of some car he doesn’t know the name of. (Gentaro had insisted on the convertible. He wanted to see the stars.) Dice’s hands are steady on the wheel, and he doesn’t take his eyes off the road for a second as he responds. “I mean, sometimes you just wanna disappear, y’know? Wanna start new and all that. No baggage. No debts.”
“The ‘no debts’ portion of that agreement sounds particularly appealing to you, I’ll bet,” teases Gentaro, and Dice sighs.
“Ramuda, say something funny so Gentaro forgets about how much I owe him,” Dice says, and it’s almost impressive how his hands stay at 10 and 2 the entire time.
“Gen-ta-ro!” Ramuda whines, and Gentaro cranes his neck to stare at Ramuda in the rearview mirror. “What’s the name of the place we’re going again?”
Gentaro just shakes his head in incredulity, pulls out a map (paper!) from his sleeve, and starts talking in that sleepy storytelling voice. “Really, Ramuda, again?” A fond sigh. “Well, hundredth time’s the charm, I suppose. Our final destination is a little sleepy seaside town off the coast of … known to the locals as … and it’s got such features as…”
His voice fades smoothly into white noise, and Ramuda tugs Dice’s coat a little tighter around him to better curl up in the passenger’s seat. He doesn’t think he could answer Gentaro’s question, not really. Why do you keep forgetting, Gentaro teases, and to that Ramuda answers: I don’t want to know. He doesn’t get it either, doesn’t really understand why it feels so scary to know something as simple as their destination. Gentaro doesn’t know about all that, he’d back off in a heartbeat if Ramuda asked him, but he doesn’t want to say anything just because he’s scared it’ll come real the instant he says it, like everything he’s got will be revealed to just be another test the instant he takes a wrong step. And besides, he wants to hear it again, wants to hear Gentaro’s voice tell him all the little details and the ice cream shop by the beach and the idyllic waves crashing, because of course his Gentaro can’t resist turning it into a little bit of a story.
A telephone line swoops by. Maybe it’s because he’s scared that all of this is just another false memory.
Swoop. He doesn’t really remember a lot of things. He’s a defective product.
Swoop. If they could control his memory like that, then maybe they could still access it now.
Swoop. If he knows the name of the town, if he thinks it out loud, Chuuoku can see. And if they can see, they can come fetch him.
A bird flutters by, silhouetted black in the dusk of evening. He’d rather die than see his Posse forced to fight for his miserable life again. He’d go peacefully, he’d do whatever it’d take, anything as long as—
“Ramuda.” He gasps.
There’s a cold bottle of Ramune pressed to his cheek. “Earth to Ramuda,” Gentaro says, and leans back again after handing it off. “Did you know the town’s summer festival has a stellar reputation? Perhaps we’ll have the opportunity to attend, should we arrive as scheduled.” His eye twinkles like the marble bouncing in the bottle. “Can I be correct in my assumption that we should not want for yukatas in the event that we do?”
“Make mine not too fancy,” Dice hollers, and Ramuda giggles. “If you hafta make it ugly, I’ll wear the uglyass yukata with pride.”
“I’ll make them the best ever,” he declares. “Only the best for my Posse!”
After the laughter dies down, Ramuda goes back to leaning against the window, but all that remains in his mind are yukata patterns and whether it would be too obvious to try to include their symbol as an accent piece. Royal blue for Dice, he muses. Or maybe something similar to his normal coat. Either way, the drape has to be loose enough to…
—
They stop for a little while next to a little stretch of beach. The convertible top is down, wind blows in Ramuda’s face, and the stars are singing to them.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” Gentaro sighs.
“What is?” Dice responds, curious.
“The stars. They’re a mass graveyard, did you know? Light takes so long to travel to us that by the time we see a star blink out, it’s been dead for eons.”
Dice chokes. “Wh—How’s that wonderful? What the hell?”
Gentaro’s eyes reflect the Milky Way. “Isn’t it wonderful to think that even after they die, they still shine bright for us to see? It’s a macabre cosmic dance. The stars are dead, the solar systems they formed have long since ceased to exist, yet to us in this exact moment, they matter.”
“Whatever, man,” Dice shrugs. “They’re pretty to me right now, that’s all I care about.”
Ramuda says nothing but perches on the hood of the car, and watches the dead stars wink merrily away to him.
—
Their house is next to the sea. It’s rickety and Ramuda can see the places where the salt has seeped through the boards, but Gentaro bustles about and soon the place is near-presentable by sunset, enough to where Ramuda cautiously tries the stove and is delighted to see a flame spark. “Dice, look! Fire!”
Dice looks, worried, and reaches to shut it off. “It’s hella scary to see you yell fire while you got that crazed look in your eyes, y’know,” he mutters, and Ramuda laughs.
Gentaro’s sorting through the meager groceries they bought earlier that evening, pulling out a packet of cheap pork belly and some vegetables, and gestures at Ramuda to get the rice started. He fumbles around for a bit before deciding, hey! It’s an adventure, why not try to experiment a little!
Unfortunately, Gentaro notices when his rice starts to burn, and frantically rushes to shut the fire off. “Dice, help our poor riceless leader out,” he says, and starts to move the pork belly around on a simple frying pan, adding some sort of spicy paste and soy sauce and the rest of the vegetables.
Dice shows him the proper way to do it, to take the pot and wash the rice until it runs near-clear and leave enough water to cover his knuckles, and as he watches the pot of rice let off wisps of steam on the stove, he feels a sense of pride wash over him. It smells good in the house, especially good if he leans over Gentaro’s frypan or his rice pot, and he busies himself with setting the table, laying out disposable chopsticks and spoons like they were utensils fit for a king.
It’s terrifyingly domestic, he thinks in a flash, and for a second his hands still. Dice, ever-perceptive, gives him a look, and Ramuda waves him off. It’s nothing, he tries to say with his eyes, and he wants it to be nothing so badly.
It’s not nothing, though. It’s not nothing for him to make rice for the first time, to have a substantial meal like this for the first time, to sit down at a cheap furniture set and smile blankly at Gentaro and Dice as they sat down with him and they played pretend at being a well-adjusted group of people who were not wanted by the government. He wants it to be easy. He wants every day for the rest of his life to be this easy.
His spoon stops.
He ducks his head down, just to gather himself for a second, and Dice finally asks, “What’s wrong?”
Nothing’s wrong, he wants to say, but instead he asks, “Doesn’t it bother you?”
“What does?” Gentaro says quizzically.
“I mean, doesn’t it bother you that we’re pretending like this? Pretending to be normal people, who can have a normal meal and make rice normally at the age of twenty-four without needing help? Is it better just to pretend like everything never happened, and we grew up next to the sea, and we had an easy life with a loving family and had an easy job and had an easy death?” He stares at a hole in one of the placement mats he’d dug out of a closet somewhere.
There’s a moment of silence.
“I’m not pretending,” Gentaro finally says. “Are you?”
Dice chimes in. “Neither am I.”
“Then what are you doing?” he asks, and it whispers out small and curled up into the salty air.
“I’d say we’re having a nice dinner after a hard day, nothing more,” Gentaro says. Ramuda can feel his gaze softening. “It doesn’t have to be hard, Ramuda.”
Dice speaks. “One day at a time, man. Sometimes a meal is just a meal. Change is always scary, but we’re Fling Posse, aren’t we? What’s one more change in the grand scheme of life? It’s not pretending, it’s just us, as always, trying something new. And if we don’t like it, we’ll try something else. Whatever you want, man.” An easy shrug. “Eat dinner, it’s really good.”
Ramuda takes a bite of Gentaro’s mystery stir-fry. It’s as good as Dice promised.
—
Summer swings into full heat, and Ramuda’s grateful for the location of their house. If he looks far enough out into the sand, he can see the wavering lines of a mirage, and he waits patiently for Gentaro to get home from grocery shopping with Dice that day to make some sort of awful joke about his former MC name.
“We’re home,” he hears Dice’s voice echo from the hallway, and he slowly peels himself away from the tatami mats he’s spread on the floor in an attempt to stay cool to plod into the hallway. “Look what we got!”
Dice proudly presents their spoils of war, thrusting the shopping bag into Ramuda’s hands. As he opens the (reusable, as Gentaro had insisted) bag, his face lights up: they’d brought home his favorite ice cream. “Took me forever to get it, too,” Dice complains. “How come you share the same taste as all of the vicious old ladies who treat shopping like it’s a competitive sport?”
Gentaro smiles. “Help us put these away, and we can all have some.”
The ice cream is a unique flavor, tartly sweet and mouth-watering in a strange way for something that melted down into a liquid. He thought it might be tamarind flavor, but wasn’t sure—it was locally made, and the man who came by every other Tuesday to sell some didn’t bother with an ingredients list. If you happened to be allergic to whatever he put in, that was your fault! As he licks and licks and licks, Ramuda bounces ideas for the true identity of the ice cream salesman around the sweltering kitchen. Salaryman? No, too mundane. Fisherman? Nah, fishing guys always talked about it nonstop. Wanted criminal at large? “I’d hope not,” Gentaro laughs. Affects a fake Spaghetti Western accent. “There’s not enough room in this town for two—no, four—of us.”
Ramuda’s sent into a peal of laughter, and laughs again as Gentaro panics at the ice cream dripping down his wrist after he spends a little too long talking instead of licking. It’s hot out, and the ice cream is cold, and he’s happy.
—
Dice was actually kinda loaded once he did some weird mumbo-jumbo with the stock market, and they’d been living off of that for a while, but one day they sit at the table, and they all share a look, and mutually agree: they absolutely, 100%, totally, had to get jobs.
The very concept of job searching is strange to both Ramuda and Dice; they’d both been trained by Chuuoku since childhood to fulfill their role. Sure, Dice had rebelled, but he’d swung to the opposite extreme—absolutely no jobs at all. So, it falls upon Gentaro, who had spent many long hours searching through job listings and screening editors before his writing career took off, to teach the two how to obtain jobs.
“Search the newspaper,” he dictates. “In smaller places like these, they tend to post listings there frequently.” Dice and Gentaro and Ramuda all spend hours poring over the tiny text in the advertisements section, wondering why they don’t make the text larger when so much of the population is elderly.
They worry their way through the newspaper searchings, interviews, screenings, and eventually land on some jobs that they think they can enjoy (because Dice refuses to trade stocks again, meanie!). Gentaro gets a job at the local newspaper, Dice ends up with an entry-level seat at the city council, and Ramuda finds himself a kimono shop run by this elderly couple he once got into a fight with at the grocery store. (They check if the city council seat bothers Dice. He likes to act unbothered, but there’s no way all that history goes away so fast. Dice says it’s okay though, says it in that sincere way that has them both ready to believe any word that comes out of his mouth, and says that he’ll let them know if it’s too much.)
None of their jobs make much (except Dice’s, where he expects a raise soon), but they’re happy enough, and Ramuda gets on with the kimono shop couple better than he expected. It starts when he calls the old lady onee-san just once, out of habit after her name slips his mind, and she beams back at him and calls him a sweet boy and he feels a little rush of fondness for this lady who called him sweet. It’s different than when the women in Shibuya called him sweet. Way different, other than just the difference in age.
He reports back of the development at dinner, that first time, and Gentaro puts a finger to his chin. “I certainly don’t mean to psychoanalyze you, Ramuda, but is it possible that the difference lies in her descriptor stemming from a maternal fondness rather than simple idol-like adoration?” Dice nods along, busy ladling more soup into his bowl.
“Ehhhh, maybe!” He stretches a little. “I dunno, I guess I wouldn’t really know? Having a mom would be cool!” There’s a beat of silence before he realizes what he said, and he flinches a little. “I mean…I guess I don’t…”
Dice shrugs. “Not like the rest of us really have a normal family life either. ‘S cool. Maybe you can call her Mom, like how schoolkids do to their teacher sometimes, and see if she smacks you.” His eyes light up for a second. “Hey, let’s gamble on it, huh? I put 5 on her smacking him.”
Gentaro sighs. “5 what, Dice? You’re gambling shared income.”
There’s only a moment of confusion before he returns to his normal cheerfulness. “5 ice creams then. I want you to stop buying that weird bitter flavor that you like so much.”
Ramuda feels the smile sliding back onto his face. “I’ll pitch in! 5 from me too! No more bitter ice cream!” Gentaro smiles, then nods to seal the deal, and Ramuda basks in the happiness that the normalcy of arguing over groceries gives him.
—
Actually, Ramuda finds that he likes working at the kimono shop a lot.
He called the old lady mom once, got smacked (and had to eat bitter ice cream for a couple weeks, boo!) but she’d been very kind to him, and liked it when he continued to call her onee-san. Made her feel young, she said. They’d started out with him just running errands and delivering orders, but soon they’d seen him fingering some of the fabrics and staring intently at the sewing machine, and they’d decided to give him a chance with a bit of kimono-making.
He hadn’t been able to design anything in forever, and went a little overboard—fancy hemming, a specific kind of flipped design for the bow that would add a modern touch, and he’d tailored it specifically to fit the shop’s onee-san. He hadn’t lost his touch, after all! His designs had sold for thousands in Shibuya!
Still, seeing onee-san’s face light up as she turned this way and that in her new kimono is worth a lot more. She smiles at him and says how beautiful she feels, and her husband quickly agrees, eyes shining like glass marbles as he looks her over shamelessly. “Onee-san looks so beautiful! Just like a princess!” Ramuda claps his hands happily and asks her to pose, grabbing at the disposable camera he’d picked up recently. She turns this way and that, smiling demurely with a flush, and Ramuda gets plenty of pictures, but he thinks his favorite is the one where she’s batting away her husband’s hands, caught mid-laugh.
One day, she presents him with his own shiny new sewing machine and a little chair and a desk, and he nearly cries. “For you, Ramuda-kun,” she says. “I think you’ve earned it.” She sees his body still and notices how he goes quiet, and rushes to pat him on the shoulder. “Think of it as insurance—this way, you’ll still work for us, I don’t want to go out of business now!” She jokes, and Ramuda turns his head up, gratefulness frank in his face.
Nobody besides his Posse has ever told him he’s earned anything before.
The first thing he sews, of course, is for her. The simple hairtie he sews has a little flower pattern and a pocket where she can put bobby pins. She tries it on, and Ramuda thinks that she looks prettier than any onee-san he’s ever met in Tokyo, with her salt-and-pepper hair that’s slowly thinning.
He takes on more and more responsibilities in the shop, and Ramuda finds that he enjoys it very much.