Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Aki hated running in front of other people, but at the very least this time he was running towards something instead of running away. 

He was never an athlete in high school; that much was immediately obvious to anyone who spoke to him for more than three consecutive minutes. He had been told by many a coach that he could’ve been a track star if only he put in a smidge more effort, that he had the build for it, whatever that meant. All signs pointed to it being a commentary on his lankiness— which was ironic, because Aki had always despised the spindles of his legs, the sinew of his torso that refused to build on more muscle no matter how hard he tried. 

Maybe he should’ve listened to all those coaches, he thought as he pumped his arms harder, hiked his bag further up his shoulder. Those ridiculous long legs sure came in handy for something, even if it was running to make the train instead of five hundred meter dashes. 

“Pardon me,” Aki said, when he almost careened into a woman on the staircase. He stifled the urge to nod his head towards her, reminding himself that these were Northerners, that they didn’t give two shits or a fuck about arbitrary displays of silly concepts like politeness and respect. Indeed, the woman just scoffed, jerked her head towards him and jabbered something to her friend that Aki couldn’t hear, but assumed was less than complimentary. 

It didn’t matter. Jeers and jives be damned, he was going to make that train if it killed him. It had been one of the longest days of his life since he moved to that godforsaken city, and he didn’t intend to waste a second more than he had to in the grimy underbelly of the subway station. 

Unfortunately, the fellow citizens of Boston didn’t seem to have received this memo, seeing as they were still congregating in massive heaps scattered across the platform. When Aki was a kid, he used to imagine that he had telepathic powers, that he and he alone could blast a message directly into the neurons of every man, woman, and child on earth. He couldn’t remember what it was he wanted to say so badly when he was little, but on rare occasions as an adult, he allowed himself to indulge the fantasy once more. He visualized it as he sprinted, chest burning: Attention, please, fellow passengers of the Green Line! I’ve had an extraordinarily shitty day at my extraordinarily difficult program, so I would really appreciate it if you could move your asses out of my way before me and my skinny legs bowl you over entirely. Thank you kindly!

No, he thought, panting. That wouldn’t do him any good, anyway. Sure, he could omnipotently bitch at everybody to get out of his way, and then what would that make him? A larger-than-life asshole with a bloated ego and a primo seat on the T. A fat lot of good all that power would do him then, self-righteous and obnoxious and just as alone as he was when he started. 

Above him, a flickering lightboard announced that the B line train to B.C. was departing now, an accompanying announcement chirping over the loudspeakers in that sing-song tone that always sounded like it was mocking him. “Fuck me upside down,” Aki mumbled, a phrase lifted from Power that had once made him flush at the vulgarity but now rolled off his tongue as smoothly as anything else. 

Finally, finally, when Aki was about halfway certain that the muscles in his legs were going to straight up give out, the train came into view, screeching up to the platform with jerky determination. He turned sideways to wriggle between two people in the crowd, stretching his hand out as if it could somehow bring him closer to the open doors. Just a few more feet, he repeated, over and over in his mind like a mantra. Just a few more feet until he was inside, and then it’d be just a few miles until he was home, and then— 

The doors hissed close, Aki fumbling for them like an idiot, and the train bulleted away from the station just as he pushed his way through the throng of human beings. 

Because why wouldn’t it, right?

Why wouldn’t the universe throw him a bone, try to make his life a fraction of a percentage point easier after the complete and utter shitstorm of a day he’d had? Aki sighed, ran his hands through his hair to brush back the sweaty bits from his face. After all the trouble he’d gone through to make it here: to this graduate program, to this country, even to this godforsaken train station, he’d expected a few more kickbacks in return.  

He pitched forward for a moment, slouching to let the tension in his spine go slack, resting his elbows on top of his knees. Ordinarily, he’d be self-conscious, worried that the other passengers around would think that he was insane, or crazy, or plain old cracked out, but after a few years in Boston, he’d come to understand that on the T, up was down and down was up. In other words: weird was normal, and normal was weird. 

Aki drew himself back up to stand, rubbed slow circles on the back of his neck, trying mostly unsuccessfully to relieve the ache from long hours hunched in front of anatomy textbooks and NCLEX prep books. He was on his way back from pharmacology class, and it had felt even longer than it usually did. The professor had droned on and on about pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics, never mind the fact that Aki still wasn’t exactly an expert on either of them. The class had gone on so long that dose response curves shimmered in his vision when he closed his eyes— either encouraging him or haunting him, but it was too soon in his fledgling career to determine which one with any sort of certainty. 

That didn’t matter, either. He’d understand it eventually— he always did. No matter how hard a class was, or how much he struggled to keep up with the professor’s quick stream of jabbered English, he’d find some way to figure it the eff out. Not only that, but to come out on top. He had to, or else everything that had been sacrificed to get him to this point would be for absolutely nothing. 

Aki’s phone rang, snapping him out of his self-induced fog of misery. When he slid it out of the side pocket of his bag, it jittered with an excited chirp. The screen glowed with the name Denji, accompanied by a myriad of flexing-muscle emojis and little red 100s. (His doing, of course; if Aki were the type to include emoticons next to his contact names, which he isn’t, they would be much cuter than the hardo macho-man symbols Denji’s picked out for himself.) 

“Hi,” he said, swiping the accept call bar and sandwiching the phone between his shoulder and his ear. 

“Where are you?” In typical Denji fashion, he didn’t even bother to return the greeting. Again, if Aki were the type to fancy cute emoticons, he’d probably also be the type to get offended by this type of snub, but in his almost-third year of living with Denji, he’s grown accustomed to both quirks. “Sounds loud in there.” 

“That would be the T station,” Aki said. He held the phone away from his face for a brief moment, then pressed it back. “Hear that? That’s the sound of the common people, Denji, who don’t have the luxury of staying out all night and taking blow-off classes in the morning.” 

“Sucks for them,” Denji said, laughing. “College rocks when you do it like me.” 

“Oh, I’m sure.” Denji’s parents were more than comfortable— from what Aki’s heard, seeing as he’s never actually met them for himself. Aki was good enough at navigating the nuances of the English language to know that comfortable is shorthand for super rich, and in this city, super rich meant they had money practically out the wazoo. It always struck Aki as odd that Denji’s parents cared enough to stick their son in an all-expenses-paid apartment and register him for four years of tuition in whatever subject he wanted, but not enough to drop by for a visit anytime within the last two years. 

“Anyway,” he continued, seemingly undeterred by Aki’s silence. “As much as I’d love to chitchat, I’m calling because I need your help with something.” 

“Perfect,” Aki said, through gritted back teeth. “Awesome, Denji, sure. What is it now? Did you pour toilet cleaner in the laundry machine again?” 

“Okay, that was one time, ” he shot back. “And no. I can’t figure out how to—” Next to Aki, a man and two of his friends break out into peals of laughter, and Denji’s voice is swallowed up by the hum of the crowd. 

“I can’t hear a word you’re saying, buddy.” 

“Stats,” Denji groaned, and Aki nodded. He should’ve known, really. Denji had been hounding him all semester for help with frequency distributions, and now that the end of year was rearing its head at last, finals were a more imminent threat than ever. “Can’t. Need your help. Gonna fail.” 

“What’s it matter if you fail?” It was obnoxious, and Aki was well aware, but at that point any mouth-to-brain filter had dissipated, and he couldn’t stop himself from saying it even if he wanted to. “Your parents will pay for you to retake the class, yeah?” 

“Sure, but that’s not the point here.” Denji’s voice sounded a little sadder than Aki expected; it sent a pang of guilt through his chest. “The point was me doing something for myself for once. You know, working at it and learning it and figuring it out or whatever. Like you do.” 

The way he said the last phrase— like you do — sounded so small and admirable, the way that Taiyo used to back when he was little enough to still think his big brother was the coolest human being on the planet. Back when Aki was still in the running for greatest big brother in the world. 

“Fine,” Aki said. “But only if you promise to actually clean the bathroom this time. It’s your turn.” 

“Cross my heart,” Denji said. He was only three years younger than Aki, who’d be (horrifyingly enough) twenty-four in the winter, but moments like this made him seem much younger. Aki probably should’ve moved out when he had the chance, after finishing undergrad and starting on his Master’s, but something kept him tied to their shitty little apartment in Rat City, and even more so to his ragtag roommates. “Are you gonna be home soon?” 

Aki glanced up at the screen announcing the arrivals, not really already on the tip of his tongue, but instead it seemed that his train would be arriving shortly, whatever that meant. “Soon,” he said, the telltale rumbling already vibrating throughout the platform. “I’ll see you in a few minutes, I promise.” 

“See you,” Denji said, but Aki barely heard over the roar of the subway pulling into the station. The hot puff of air it released blasted his face, nearly steamed across his glasses. He pulled them off to swipe the lenses clean on the hem of his scrubs, shoved them back up his nose with one finger. 

With rush hour fast approaching, there was no hope of him snagging a seat for himself, so Aki made do with a pull handle and a spot wedged between two other youngish-looking guys. All three of them swayed a little as the train turned, bumping into each other with their bags. It could be worse, he reminded himself. At least he was on the train. 

Raising his phone, he swiped through the latest barrage of unread text messages. The little red notification at the corner of the app bothered him like a boil on a face, just as disgusting and in need of rectification in his eyes. 

From Denji, a blurry photo of a stats textbook, the phone clearly held way too high, casting a shadow over the page that made it almost illegible. From Michiko, an emoji-laden how’s lab going? --- Aki made a mental note to respond. From Himeno, a reminder that they had placement tomorrow (unnecessary considering they’ve had the same schedule for the entire semester, never mind the fact that Aki was about as punctual as a human being can get without crossing the line into robotic.) From Power, a plea to get Denji off her ass, whatever that was specifically referring to, and a promise to show him how to make that drink special she’d been mixing last time he went to visit her at the bar. 

Aki closed his eyes, willing himself to escape his body for even a millisecond. Sure, it had carried him through nursing school this far, but it was starting to break down far quicker than it should. Twenty-three was too young to wince whenever he stood up too quickly, for his back to jostle him awake at night in a fit of white-hot pain. Logically, he knew that there was probably nothing wrong with him— he’d seen plenty of hypochondriacs in his day, and he sure as hell wasn’t one of them. Still, though, he couldn’t shake the pervasive feeling that one day, when he least expected it to, his body would simply give out, and that’d be a wrap on Aki Hayakawa. 

Just like it was for the rest of his family. 

Across the train car, a man doubled over, a ragged cough tearing from his throat that ricocheted off the metal walls. People next to him wriggled away, covering their faces, scrunching their eyes closed as if that would make it go away. He clapped his hands over his mouth, maybe trying to force the coughs back in, maybe to simply suffocate them so as not to disturb those around him. Either way, whatever he was trying to do wasn’t working very well, because he continued to shake, the horrible grating sound only crescendoing, his body only jerking more violently. 

Aki narrowed his eyes. If he kept on going like this, someone was going to have to pull the emergency stop, would have to yell out is there a doctor or a nurse on the train? like they did in those cheesy medical soaps. He really, really didn’t want to have to raise his hand, much less qualify it with not yet, but kind of, least of all actually pull some medical training out of his ass to save somebody’s life. He listened for any nuance he could detect in the sound, recalling his lectures: was the cough wet or dry; did it spray blood or phlegm; was the patient burning to the touch or shivering cold. 

“Oh, my God,” a small voice piped behind him, before he could get very far. “Oh, my God, this cannot be happening.” 

Part of Aki didn’t want to turn around. Part of him was perfectly content to stay where he was, bobbing up and down on the tsunami of the T, blissfully oblivious to whatever tragedy was unfolding around him. Part of him couldn’t bear to see the face of this person, whoever they were, childlike and glassy-eyed at the sight of someone in pain. 

Part of him, though, knew that they might be in pain themselves, and part of him wouldn’t be able to get to sleep at night if he let them go by without at least making an attempt to alleviate it. As usual — dammit — that part won out. Aki rotated as best he could. 

The speaker wasn’t, as he’d thought for a second, a child. It was a young woman— slender-bodied and a good foot and change shorter than him, but a woman nonetheless. Something about her seemed much younger, though, and not just her stature: the high, wobbly tone of her voice; the tremble of her bottom lip; the little-girl plastic clips that held back her bangs. He’d only ever seen Michiko wear those when they were kids, back in Japan where she’d buy them by the dozen at Daiso in every imaginable shade of the rainbow. 

“This is what they warned us about, oh, God,” she cried, burying her face into the chest of a freakishly tall man standing beside her— and coming from Aki, that descriptor was nothing shy of significant. 

“It’s okay, Kobeni,” he said, smoothing down the flyaways that had burst from her clips. “Compared to everything we’ve dealt with the last few years, this is light work. You’re going to be fine, I promise.” 

“Everything’s fine,” Aki agreed, although the nosy side of him couldn’t help but wonder what exactly the two of them could be going through that was so terrifying. He crouched down as much as he could without toppling over, trying his best to meet her gaze. “Your name’s Kobeni?” 

“Uh—” She froze, shooting a panicked look at her companion, who nodded firmly, mouthed it’s okay again. “Mmhm,” she said, and swiped underneath her eyes.

“Okay, Kobeni.” Aki ran through the checklist that had been ingrained into him for the past two years: symptoms, responsiveness, vital signs. She appeared to be breathing fine, if a little quickly; a fine sheen of sweat glossed over her forehead, but that could just as easily be attributed to the late spring Massachusetts heat. In Nurse Hayakawa’s pre-professional opinion, she was suffering a minor anxiety attack— nothing more, nothing less. He knew from personal experience, though, that in the thick of it it felt anything but minor, so he resolved to avoid the phrase. “I know you’re anxious right now, but there’s no danger to you anymore.” The man had stopped coughing by then, but the other passengers on the train were still avoiding him like— well, the plague. 

“They told us something like this would happen,” she murmured. “I didn’t think it would be so soon— violence—” 

“Shh,” the man said, grabbing ahold of her hand and stroking his thumb over it in lazy circles. Kobeni leaned into his touch, sighing like it was cool and relieving against her skin. “We’re in it together. You don’t have to worry about that anymore.” 

“Violence,” she said again, and sniffled, tears collecting in the web of her eyelashes. 

Aki stole a quick glance behind him at the man who had been coughing. He now appeared just as normal as anybody else on the train, scrolling though his Twitter timeline or catching up on TikToks like nothing had ever happened. He wasn’t sure, in that case, why this woman insisted on using that word— violence — over and over again. It seemed a little screwed up to him, almost as if she were inviting it just by invoking the phrase. 

“Kobeni,” the man said, lowering his voice a bit, but not enough so that Aki couldn’t hear it. “When it happens, we’ll be ready for it. I won’t let anything happen to you. You know that.” 

Kobeni squeaked a little, squeezed his hand tighter. Aki looked away, suddenly under the impression that he was interrupting a little pocket of privacy in the cesspool that is public transportation. 

So clearly these two characters were nutjobs— the woman seeing things that weren’t there, the man just as certain in their existence. If they presented into the hospital while Aki was at his practicum, he’d recommend a psych eval yesterday . Still, there was something a little romantic about their commitment to each other in the midst of their delirium. Even though she was crazy, at least she had somebody who cared about her enough to delve into the crazy right alongside her. The situation diffused, Aki decided to let it be.

“You’re a doctor, aren’t you?” Kobeni said just as he started to turn back around, yanking on the edge of his scrubs. 

“No,” he said, “a nurse. Well, I’m still in grad school, so not quite yet, I suppose, but almost a nurse.” 

Kobeni nodded, seemingly accepting this position as equally legitimate. “So do you know what’s going on?” she said. “With him?” 

“If you’re talking about the man over there, I don’t,” Aki said. “But it’s probably just a small coughing fit, maybe an irritant in his lungs or something. Nothing to be scared of. It happens to the best of us.” 

“You know what it is,” Kobeni said, more firm than anything else she’s spoken so far. 

Aki blanched. “Excuse me?” 

“You know what it is,” she said, even more forcefully. “You know as well as I do. Ignoring it doesn’t make it go away, you know. It just makes it worse when it finally gets you.” 

That was it. Aki could handle blood, vomit, feces, the whole shebang, but delusions? Grandiosity? Complete and utter detachment from reality? That was the one thing that refused to go down, no matter how hard he tried to swallow. 

“You’re insane,” he said, knowing that he shouldn’t. “Find somebody else to bother. I don’t want to play this game anymore.” 

Kobeni chuckled, pressed the heels of her palms into her eyes. “You think I do?” she said, and then the doors inched open and she was gone, consumed by the rush-hour crowd. 

At the back of the train, a woman keeled over, braying a loud, rattling cough into the closed mouth of her fist. 

“I survived,” Aki yelled when he stepped through the doorway, the same way he’d done for the better part of the last three years. It started as a quasi-joke, Power always getting on his case saying he was too quiet when he got home, didn’t make enough sound to announce his presence and ended up startling her. It was true enough that he had been trying to make himself as small as possible. Back then, Aki had been desperate not to present himself with any other reason why he was different besides the obvious, and Power had been just another intimidating stranger with a bad attitude and a weird nickname. 

“About time,” Denji called back. He was slouched in his chair at their triple-duty dining room/common area/workspace table, laptop open to his class assignment with a decade-old episode of South Park buzzing in the background. “Thought you’d forgotten your way home or something.” 

“Something like that,” Aki said, all but collapsing into the chair next to him. Somehow the ache in his joints screamed even louder when he slipped his bag off his shoulder; he dug his nails into the soft flesh of his palms to try to distract himself. Normally, he’d tell Denji off about the trials and tribulations that come with being a T commuter, but when he thought about that young woman and the pure, unbridled fear in her eyes, it felt like something that should be kept private. 

“Glad you made it,” Denji said, quietly. From his computer screen, Stan and Kyle’s earsplitting voices blared, poking like a syringe into Aki’s brain. The two of them were bickering over god knows what, throwing around a few expletives that he’d never even heard before, let alone ever thought to use himself. 

“I don’t know how you expect to get any work done with that crap droning on in the background.” Aki reached over his computer, flicked over to the offending page and executed it with a swift click to the red X. 

“Hey!” Denji whined, starting to sound like those little devil kids himself. “Don’t harsh my vibe ‘cause you don’t know how to multitask.” 

Aki tsk ed. “Yeah, right. There’s a difference between multitasking and wasting your time on drivel.” 

“It’s hysterical!” 

“It’s tawdry.” 

“Just because you make up a fancy-sounding word doesn’t mean you automatically win the argument,” Denji said. 

“I— you know what, I’m actually going to let that one slide.” Aki drummed the fingertips of his left hand onto the table, tapping out a strange rhythm without really thinking much about it. “Have you eaten yet?” 

Aki hated himself a little bit for constantly playing caretaker to everyone in the household except for himself, but Denji was the kind of person that warranted it. Seriously. Aki could testify with total and utter conviction that he would lose his head if it wasn’t attached to his body. Or else forget to eat for days on end, or else skip class all day to watch cartoons and eat cereal from the box, or else burn the whole apartment to a crisp because he forgot to put water in his Easy Mac before microwaving it (yes, he had personal experience with this particular little mishap.) 

“Oh, shit,” Denji said, scratching the back of his head. He’d recently bleached it to an almost white-blond after yet another romantic frustration with his crush, and the shade made the painted black of his fingernails stand out like blood against cotton. “Totally slipped my mind, dude.” 

“You really have to start being better about this, you know. If you keep forgetting to eat regularly, your metabolism will get all out of whack. It’s the thermic effect of food. The more you eat—” 

“The more you digest, yes, yes. I did, in fact, pass fifth grade science.” Denji rolled his eyes, but Aki caught a glimpse of a slight smile. “Thank you for the lecture, Nurse Hayakawa.” 

“Consider yourself lucky it wasn’t one,” he said. As much as he wished Denji would actually listen to his advice for once in his life, Aki couldn’t deny the way the title made something in his chest swell. 

“Speaking of lectures, I still need help with this problem set,” Denji said, and swiveled his laptop to show Aki the offending worksheet. 

He shoved his glasses further up his nose, pulled his hair off his shoulders and into a sort of half-updo. The textbook page swum in front of his eyes, the chart reduced to a mishmosh of lines and dots, the words swirled into nonsense on the screen. It was evident that there was no earthly chance of him being able to sleuth his way around a stats problem within the next twelve hours; he was in serious need of a hard-drive reboot, stat.

“Tell you what,” he said, leaning closer to Denji like he was about to let him in on the world’s best-kept secret. “If you let me off the hook for stats duty tonight, I’ll make you something to eat and won’t even complain while I do it.” 

“Done,” Denji said, and slammed his laptop shut with a slightly concerning level of enthusiasm. 

Aki scanned his mental log of their refrigerator contents, trying to think of something he could throw together to form a semi-legitimate meal. “How’s omelets sound?” he said, landing on the old tried-and-true classic. 

“Sounds baller,” Denji said. 

“Baller indeed,” Aki echoed, padding over to the kitchen and pulling the ingredients out to lay in a neat row on the countertop. When he lived with the likes of Denji and Power, there was no need for an English dictionary; they provided him with an inexhaustible stream of slang words to sink his teeth into. 

“Somehow it sounds so much lamer when you say it.” 

“If I were you, I’d be more careful about shit-talking the guy that’s making my food.” 

“Good point,” Denji said, and scratched his cheek. “I’ll be sure to shift into a more pleasant conversation topic right away.” 

“That’s more like it,” Aki said, and hummed to himself as he whisked pale clouds of milk into the bowl of eggs. Fatigue was already tugging on the bottoms of his eyelids, heavy as cement shoes and just as deadly. “What’s new with you, then?” 

Denji shrugged. “Like school-wise, or what?” 

“Anything, really, as long as it’s interesting enough to distract me from how goddamn exhausted I am.” 

“Fair enough, dude, jeez,” Denji said. “Uh. Well, I guess I could tell you about— no, hang on, that’s dumb. Oh, okay, there was that thing the other day, but I can’t remember what ended up happening with that, really…” 

“Jesus Christ, Denji, you’re telling me that you run your mouth off all day and night but can’t find something to talk about the one time I actually need you to?” 

“Okay, okay!” Denji threw up his hands. “I talked to Yoshida today, does that count for anything?”

“Oh,” Aki said, faltering a little in his wrist rotation. “Yeah. That definitely does.” Yoshida was Denji’s latest love interest du jour, as Aki had been subjected to hear about in many a late-night drunken complaint fest. The last he’d heard of the saga had been the two of them finally hooking up at a mutual friend’s party, how life-changingly fantastic it had been, and how mind-bogglingly confusing their relationship was now that the two of them were interacting sober. 

Denji nodded. “You’re telling me, man. Okay, so we got together at Asa’s thing a few weeks ago, right? And dude, when I tell you we got together, I mean we got together. For real. I was expecting that it’d be awesome, but that shit was on a whole nother level.” 

“I think I got that, thank you.” Aki wasn’t by any means a prude, much less a homophobe, but something about how open Denji was about his sex life still made him squirm a little. 

“Anyway, we’ve been hanging out since then, like getting coffee and studying together and going on these weird little walks around campus where we talk about our feelings and shit, but the other day he called me, get this ”— Denji inhaled sharply, steeling his posture and looking Aki straight in the eye— “his best friend.” 

Aki blinked. The milk was completely emulsified into the eggs by then, blended into a smooth, vaguely sunny-colored liquid. “And this is a problem because…?”

Denji groaned, a small, strangled sound from the back of his throat. “God, Aki, for someone who’s such a genius you can be really stupid sometimes.” 

“Well, gee, thanks for the high praise.” 

“It is a problem,” he continued, overemphasizing the word like Aki had chosen the worst one possible for the situation, “because I do not want to be his best friend. That’s what you call your straight buddy when he picks you up from the airport or waters your plants or something. I wanna be his— you know.” 

“Sorry, his what?” 

“His boy—” Denji’s voice dropped at the end of the sentence, dissolving the word right down the middle. “Uh, I wanna be—” 

“Speak up,” Aki said. He swung open the fridge door, looking for any leftovers that might be good candidates for a second-chance omelet revival, settling on spinach and red peppers. “Couldn’t quite hear you there.” 

“His boyfriend!” Denji’s cheeks blazed Jolly Rancher red —or maybe they just seemed that way to Aki, offset against the pale skin of his face and the stark platinum of his hair. “God, you really don’t know how to quit, do you, Aki?” 

“Sure don’t,” he said. It was one of the largest sources of pride in his life, too, although he’d never say that to his roommates. 

“What should I do, then?” 

Aki’s hand stilled where it was fileting the vegetables into bite-size pieces, almost subconsciously. “You’re asking me?” 

“You see anybody else in the room?” Denji made a big show of whipping his head from side to side, ducking underneath the table to check if any imaginary friends were lurking underneath. 

It was probably a poor decision on his part to look to Aki in the way of romantic guidance, but somehow it still felt like an honor being bestowed upon him. He could visualize it, even: a grand ribbon ceremony, a medal lowered around his neck, a triumphant speech. You, Aki Hayakawa, after years of meddling in the lives of your two neer-do-well roommates, have officially earned the responsibility of Being Privy to Denji’s Personal Life. Congratu-fuckin’-lations, man. 

“Well,” Aki started, deliberate in the choosing of his words. He’d never had a real partner before, aside from a few junior-high Pocky kisses and a couple dance-floor makeouts back in undergrad. None of which were his finest moment, seeing as he couldn’t recall the names of any of them. “I say you should tell him how you feel.” 

“Eeuuuugh,” Denji moaned, and thumped his head on the table in what was (in Aki’s opinion) a gross overreaction to his statement. “I should’ve known you were gonna give me some lame-ass advice like that.”
“Excuse me!” Aki flicked the gas on their stove; the burner flame sputtered into life, announced its existence with a steady tick-tick-tick. “I’ll have you know that I’m nothing less than an expert advice-giver, thanks for asking. If you don’t like it, you can figure out some other way to get this guy to fall in love with you.” 

“All right, all right,” Denji said, drawing himself up. “I get it. I guess you are a whole lot older than me, anyway.” 

“That wasn’t quite the point I was trying to make, but again, thank you for pointing that out.” 

“What do you suggest, then?” 

“Hmm.” It was moments such as these where Aki’s complete and utter lack of romantic experience was painfully evident, but he was determined not to let Denji see that particular flaw in his character. So maybe he’d never had a real girlfriend, much less a boyfriend, but he’d accomplished plenty just the same. He was too busy making something of himself to waste time on silly relationships— or at least that was what he comforted himself with. “Take him out to dinner or something. Be direct. Kids your age are always complicating things beyond necessity.” 

“Yeah, ‘cause taking someone out to dinner is basically a marriage proposal,” Denji said, wrinkling his nose. 

“Feel free to come up with something better, then.” Aki poured the egg mixture into their frying pan, watched it bubble up at the edges in steady pops. 

“I could take him to the next house party I go to.” Denji’s face brightened a little; he sat up straighter in his chair. “Yeah. That way he would have to dance with me, right? It’s brilliant.” 

“You’d probably be too drunk to remember which way is up,” Aki said. “I’ve seen how trashed you get on Friday nights. Nowhere near eloquent enough for a love confession.” 

“Stop using big words to try and confuse me,” Denji mumbled. “And it’s not a love confession! It’s just a dude expressing his feelings for another dude. Nothing lovey about that.” 

“Whatever you say.” Aki bit his tongue to keep from making another dig at Denji’s extracurricular activities, so to speak. Denji drank too much on the weekends, and Aki hated seeing him stumble home after parties, giggling and flushed and foul-mouthed. He’d been tempted many a time to sit him down and tell him he was wasting his potential, but he knew that’d only end in slamming doors and shouts of you’re not in charge of me. 

Which, okay, fine, Aki wasn’t. But still. He didn’t appreciate being demonized for the radical act of caring about Denji. Michiko used to say that he was too bossy for being the younger cousin, and maybe she had a point. Even so, Aki held firm to the belief that somebody needed to knock some sense into Denji about his lifestyle. If Aki had a family a quarter as rich as Denji’s — hell, if he even had much of a family left at all– he certainly wouldn’t waste the opportunity dicking around and doing Jell-O shots in some frat basement. He’d probably have four degrees by now if he hadn’t had to work his way through the first one. Maybe he’d even have more friends, a relationship. Free time to sit around the house watching cartoons or drink himself off his ass if he felt like it.

In either case, Denji said it made him happy, and Aki wasn’t in any type of position to knock that. Nor was there any use being jealous of it, so he nodded, focused his energy on their omelets. 

“What about you then, huh?” Denji was leaning forward to rest his chin on his hand, a sly smile spreading across his face. “Nobody special in old Aki’s life?” 

“That’s none of your business,” Aki said, sniffing.

“Pleeease? I told you all my business,” Denji said. 

“Yeah, but you tell everybody your business. That’s not exactly a measure of trust in your book.”  

“Don’t be like that, man. There’s gotta be somebody. Back home, maybe?” 

“There’s nothing back home,” Aki said, “but snow and sheep. Not exactly the most fitting backdrop for a romantic comedy.” 

“Damn.” Denji whistled under his breath. “There’s gotta be something, though. I mean, I’m sure your family would still be happy to see you if you went back, right?” 

Aki froze over the stovetop, clutching the handle of the frying pan. It’d been six years since, but the thought of them still made something inside of him twist into an ugly knot, from the depths of his guts all the way up into his throat. He swallowed hard against the pressure, coughed, took a deep breath in just to prove that he still could. “My parents traveled a lot for work,” he said, truthfully. “And my little brother was— unwell, most of the time. They say that kind of thing brings some families closer together, but let’s just say that wasn’t the case for us.” 

“That sounds so sad.” Denji’s brows were furrowed, “Don’t you miss them, though?” 

Aki made a tight fist, letting the sting of his nails distract himself from the awful, rashy feeling that was starting to spread through his chest. “They’re not around much anymore for me to miss,” he said, and left it at that, the edge of the omelet starting to char to ash in the pan. 

Aki didn’t realize he’d fallen asleep over his homework for the umpteenth time until Power burst through the front door, shaking sweat out from her ponytail and wringing beer from her shirtsleeves. 

It was a bad habit, he knew. Not only for the wasted time — he could only imagine how much he could’ve gotten done if he’d actually used the few hours to brush up on last week’s lab notes instead of dozing off– but for the horrible effects on his sleep cycle. Fragmented sleep, his professor had said, was one of the most recognized contributors to excessive daytime sleepiness, meaning that Aki avoided it at all costs. Power, however, was evidently unaware of or unyielding to such a concept.

“I fucking hate human beings,” she shrieked, slamming the door shut behind her with a resounding bang. Aki would be worried about Denji waking up if he didn’t sleep soundly enough to completely miss the inception of World War III. He, on the other hand, was not so blessed (cursed?), jostling awake with a stifled gasp. 

“Hello to you, too,” Aki groaned, peeling himself away from the soft plush of the couch. “So nice of you to be considerate of our REM cycles at”—  he glanced at his phone— “two eighteen in the morning.” 

“Yeah, well.” Power strode over to the couch, lifting Aki’s legs with one hand and dumping them onto the carpet so she could sit in their place. “People aren’t considerate of me, so I feel no need to be considerate back.” 

“People,” Aki repeated, the word fuzzy in his brain, mushy with missed sleep. “You keep saying that like you’re not one of them.” 

“How do you know I’m not?” she said, wiggling her eyebrows. 

“Ha, ha.” Aki yawned, sat up all the way on the couch. Power was somewhat obsessed with being a contrarian, fancying herself a kind of iconoclast. They’d met for the first time when they’d both moved in. Denji had put up a Facebook ad after finding himself unbearably lonely in the apartment his parents had set him up in, and Aki had been desperate enough for a place to stay for the school year that he would’ve roomed with just about anybody. She had introduced herself without offering her hand, calling herself Power and insisting that anyone who dared to utter her real name would die. Aki had wondered if everyone in Boston was this serious about their nicknames until Denji had explained that she had a particular stick up her ass about it. To that day he still didn’t know what it said on her birth certificate, and at that point any desire had been squashed. 

“Long-ass shift,” she said, sighing. 

“You can say that again.” 

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Power said. “Did you spend the last ten hours getting screamed at, spit at, and puked on by rowdy middle-aged men calling you sweetheart?” 

“No, I spent them learning how to save lives.” 

“Alcohol saves lives.” 

“On the contrary,” Aki said. “Did you know that long-term alcohol abuse can actually alter the metabolism of the brain? Alcoholics will metabolize acetate faster and glucose slower—” 

“No way,” Power said, eyes widening. “When?” 

“Um, whenever, really. Anytime you drink, when you’ve fallen that far down the path.” 

“When did I ask?” Her mouth was drawn into a hard line, her face pinched from the effort of holding in the peals of laughter that were clearly fighting to escape. 

Aki remained motionless, unwilling to give her the satisfaction of even the slightest of smiles. “Hysterical.” 

“Aw, c’mon. Lighten up. I’m a bartender, not a mad scientist.” Power yanked the hair elastic from her ponytail, her hair falling greasy and lank around her shoulders. She’d bleached it together with Denji, except she’d thrown on a temporary fire-engine-red dye, making the bathroom look like a Wes Craven movie set. It’d all but washed out, leaving only the faintest sheen of pink over the blonde. “Just ‘cause something’s true doesn’t mean everybody needs to know about it.” 

“Maybe there are some things people wanna know about,” Aki said, rubbing his eyes. “For example: what made your shift so long-ass?” 

She shot him a side-eye glance, snickered a little into the palm of her hand. “First of all, I’m pretty sure it’s a sin against the English language to end a sentence with long-ass,” she said. “Secondly, nothing in particular. Just— customers.” She waved one hand in the air to encapsulate the nebulous nature of such a concept. 

“And who could’ve expected those,” Aki said. “Any one in particular?” He’d tried to shed himself of the desire once he reached adulthood, but he never could quite give up his penchant for a good piece of dirt. 

Power leaned forward off the couch, revitalized. “You wouldn’t believe it,” she said, her eyes gleaming with intent. “These two chucklefucks got in a huge fight over I don’t-even-know-what. Started punching each other out right in the middle of the bar.” 

“That’s crazy,” Aki mumbled. He tried not to show his disappointment, but in all honesty the story had been much less juicy than he’d hoped— lukewarm gossip, really, where he’d been gunning for hot. 

He filtered in and out of attentiveness as Power prattled on, moving from gross, leery old men staring at her chest to obnoxious college girls demanding vodka cranberries to failed pickup lines to just plain rudeness. He wanted to listen to what she was saying, honestly, but his muscles were so worn down and his brain was reduced to a pile of goo that made it damn near impossible. 

Something caught his eye, though, when Power flailed her arms in an animated play-by-play of the bar fight. Something rust-brown and splotchy and congealed to a thin crust on the edge of her T-shirt. 

“Do you—” Aki squinted, scooching closer to Power to grab ahold of her sleeve. She yowled and attempted to squirm away, but he held her there by the fabric. “Is this blood on your sleeve?” 

“Jesus Christ, no!” Power yelped, snatching her sleeve away. “No! What do you think I do all day, sling out espresso martinis with a side of knuckle sandwiches?” 

“How would I know?” Aki shot back. “Every time I try to visit you at work, you either bully me out of it until I give up trying.” 

“Exactly as it should be,” she said. “No need to mix our work and personal lives. It’s cleaner that way.” 

Aki flicked her on the shoulder. “Funny you’re talking about clean when you’ve got dried blood caked to your work T-shirt.” 

“Chill out, germaphobe, jeez. It’s my own blood.” 

“That doesn’t make it less disgusting when you work in food service, you know.” 

“It happened at the end of my shift,” Power said. “I dropped a bottle while I was putting it on the shelf and it cut me the fuck up on its way down. Got me pretty good, too.” 

She didn’t meet his eyes as she said it, picking at the grime underneath her fingernails. Aki’s bullshit meter was finely-tuned enough to be ringing off the hook at Power’s little white lie, but his resolve wasn’t strong enough to actually call her out on it. Power had been tending bar for all three years they’d known each other, explaining that she’d started at BU like Denji but quickly dropped out after being forced to choose a major. Aki found it more than difficult to believe that she could make such a careless mistake after being at the same job for so long, but just for that night, he decided to let it go. 

“Do you need me to clean it for you?” he said, allowing himself just that one indulgence. “I have my first aid kit here. I could take a look if you wanted me to.” 

“God, no.” Power yanked her sleeve further down her arm, exposing a flash of a bare shoulder. “I’m fine, Mom, seriously. Stop worrying so much. You’ll give yourself wrinkles.” 

While it was technically the stress-induced hormone cortisol that caused wrinkles, Aki let her have that one, too. “I worry about you, you know,” he said. 

“Ew.” Power mimed sticking her finger down her throat. “Gag me with a spoon.” 

“I— you want me to do what with what?” 

“Never mind,” she said, huffing. The halfway-grown-out bangs fluttered off her forehead when she did, settling back around her face in bright little wispies. When she shoved a hand down her cleavage, Aki turned away instinctively, but she pulled it back clutching a wad of dollar bills. “In more important news, a couple of drunk dudes were feeling pretty damn generous tonight. Check it out.” She fanned out the cash into a semi-circle, like the green plumes that dripped off a peacock’s tail. 

“I hate myself for even thinking it, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask if you put those there yourself or if—” Aki cut himself off, pursed his lips as tight as he could to seal the faucet of bullshit spouting from his mouth. “Actually, scratch that. I don’t even want to know.” 

“You’re just jealous your job doesn’t let you make extra cash for sitting there and looking pretty,” Power said. She tossed the money onto the coffee table, where it fluttered a bit, dog-earing in on itself before settling in a heap. 

“Says you,” Aki said. “There are plenty of people out there who’d pay top dollar to be treated by a nurse as good-looking as yours truly.” 

“Uh-huh. Keep dreaming, buddy, and let me know how far that gets ya.” Power stretched her arms above her head in a catlike yawn, plucked a stray dollar out of the cup of her bra. 

The exhaustion was palpable in the room and just as contagious; Aki stifled the urge to mirror her, instead biting down on the inside of his lip. “What are you saving up for, anyway? Doesn’t seem like you to partake in responsible financial habits.” Now that he thought about it, Power had been squirreling away cash for the past few months, rolling up her tips at the end of each night and rubber-banding them in neat stacks. He’d never seen her save up for anything besides goth-chick makeup palettes and new first-person-shooters to play with Denji. 

She opened her mouth to speak, closed it again, a deer-in-the-headlights deflection move he used to employ all the time as a kid. Close your mouth, his mother would say, tugging on his earlobe, or else a mosquito will fly right in. Looking back, it was totally ridiculous: mosquitoes weren’t so much of a threat during the cold winter months in Hokkaido, and the odds of one taking a kamikaze dive straight down his gullet seemed slim to none. His little-boy brain had bought it with certainty, taking it to heart so that he never spoke without being completely and indisputably confident in his conviction. 

“Have you ever thought about— moving?” Power said, when the gears in her brain finally kicked into overdrive to spit out a sentence. She was hesitant, testing out the waters of the conversation; Aki could count the amount of times he recalled her ever making this move on one hand. 

“Like, back to Japan?” This was a frequently asked question on the subject of Aki Hayakawa. It started with the vaguely innocent where are you from?, then progressed to the obligatory I thought I heard an accent comment, finally settling on so do you think you’ll ever move back? The answer was about as uncomplicated as it was unsatisfying for those who asked it: no way, José. Aki had moved to Boston for two reasons: one, to attend an incredibly prestigious university in one of the biggest medical hubs in the world; and two, to get as far away as physically possible from the city where his whole life had gone kaput over the course of a single afternoon. 

“Japan?” Power scrunched up her face, as if the very thought of it was ridiculous. “No. Somewhere else, maybe. Like on a trip or something, I dunno.” 

“I don’t concern myself daydreaming about the implausible,” Aki said. Between the demands of school and the shoestring budget he was living off of, a vacation hadn’t crossed his mind in years. 

“Not everything has to be so literal, Aki. I’m not asking you to book a ticket tomorrow. I’m just asking if you could. Paris, Shanghai, wherever. Sky’s the limit.” 

Aki stopped, considered. 

“I miss my cousin in Hokkaido,” he said. “But that whole place is tainted for me now. I don’t think I could go back even if I wanted to. It almost feels like when I left, a forcefield went up around it or something, and I’d get spat right back out the way I came if I ever tried to cross it again.” 

“That’s kinda dumb,” Power said, and tilted her head. “Why?” 

He slumped his shoulders, letting his head loll backwards onto the couch so he wasn’t looking at her anymore. “It doesn’t matter,” he said, whisper-quiet. “I don’t see the point in telling you if you’re just going to make fun of everything I say.” 

Power laughed, exposing the sharp points of her canines. Somehow, even after the self-proclaimed longest shift ever, her lipstick was still immaculate, bright red and glossy. “You got that one right.”

“Yeah,” he whispered, staring down at his feet, white-socked against the dark grain of the hardwood. He wasn’t justified to get upset. People like him— people who’d worked so hard to become someone unfazeable, unflappable, undefeatable— people like him didn’t need to be upset. They knew who they were and they knew what they wanted to be and exactly what they had to do to make it there, and that was all they needed. It was his fault, anyway, for expecting anything less than a big ol’ bucket of snark from Power. 

Was it so wrong to want it, though? Was it so wrong to crave that sort of comfort, companionship? Did it make him so evil for wanting a hug or a condolence instead of a not-so-subtle dig at him— just one goddamn time? 

Aki squeezed his eyes shut. No. Those were the kinds of things one expected from siblings, parents, best friends, none of which Aki had in his inventory. People like him didn’t need those kinds of things, and more importantly, they didn’t deserve them. 

“Well, then,” Power said breezily, hopping to her feet and gliding to her bedroom without waiting for Aki to respond. “I’d say good night, but it hasn’t been, not to mention the fact that it’s already morning. So. That’s it, I guess.” 

She swung the door closed behind her, either forgetting or just not giving a damn about the fact that Denji was asleep across the hall. Aki opened his eyes, let them adjust to the fluorescent living-room lighting, little squiggles and fuzzies dancing across his line of vision.

“I’m afraid of it happening again,” he whispered. Not to Power, not to the God he’d stopped believing in years ago. Maybe to the walls, maybe to the universe, maybe just to himself, to the man he’d become and to the little boy he’d never really stopped being. “I know it’s dumb. I guess I just always had the feeling that I was sort of cursed or something. Like it was my fault that everything happened the way it did. Maybe if I’d done something differently— maybe if I’d gotten there earlier, or seen the signs of it— I could’ve fixed it.” His voice wobbled a bit on the last phrase; he leaned forward, let his head fall heavy between his legs. “Do you think I’m crazy?” 

Pathetically enough, Aki actually waited for an answer. Lifted his head up and everything, quirked his ears towards the bedroom just in case the spirits above had selected Power as the vessel with which to communicate with him. This was another thing he used to imagine as a kid: God or a ghostly entity or goddamn Superman blaring their voice directly into his skull, telling him that he was the chosen specimen of humanity, blessed to become a prophet or ruler or full-blown hero. Different from every other run-of-the-mill homo sapiens. Venerated. Chosen. 

Unsurprisingly, no response came. That was okay, he told himself, as he settled back into the seat of the couch, let the secondhand cushions pillow his aching joints. He wasn’t nine years old anymore. He knew that there was nothing that made him special or different from anybody else. There was nothing particularly grandiose or enlightened about him, either, however much he acted like it. When it really came down to it, when you stripped off the postgraduate degree and the departmental honors and the flimsy, Goodwill-issued scrubs, Aki was nothing more than a scared little kid trying in vain to postpone the inevitable.

Aki fell under the current of exhaustion again, still splayed out on the couch, the seam of his scrubs carving a harsh line into his cheek. When he dreamed, it was of snowball fights and blood-spattered tissues and the piercing rattle of a sharp, resounding cough.

Chapter Text

It took Aki a long time to stop being afraid of Mr. Kishibe, but every so often he slipped back into old habits. 

Secretly, clinicals still scared the chickenshit out of him, even all this time later. He put on a brave front at his pre- and post-conferences— well, if totally blank was the same thing as brave — to hide the fact that he was mentally calculating how deep he’d be in the hole if he dropped everything right then and booked it back to Hokkaido. 

Logically, though, he knew that he didn’t have it half bad, that he could’ve done much, much worse than Kishibe as a clinical supervisor. The only other guy in his cohort had told him stories about his supervisors in undergrad, how they’d given him the third degree simply on account of his gender. Aki was glad, in any case, that Kishibe didn’t give a crap what was in your pants as long as you could sit down, shut up, and do your job correctly. 

Even so, it was hard for Aki to convince himself that he belonged in any given situation. Sure, he deserved what he had, and sure, he’d worked hard to get himself this far in his life. His insecurity didn’t stem from his being some kind of med school nepo baby or a trust fund kid whose parents had bought their way into university— which, by the way, he was convinced was the case for several of his cohorts. 

Even Himeno, the closest thing he had to a friend here, came from a nebulous background that Aki didn’t have the full story on. She’d sprinkled a few tidbits of backstory into their conversations over the past year-ish. He recalled mentions of a Fenway-area private school, a brownstone near Brookline or Back Bay or Boylston— somewhere with a B. 

Aki searched for her when he walked into the meeting room. Sure, he could sit next to someone new — as much as his brain tried to convince him otherwise, it most likely wouldn’t kill him — but he didn’t feel the need nor possess a desire to. He’d been sitting next to Himeno all semester, ever since she’d stopped him on their walk back to campus and asked him if he wanted a cigarette. He told her he hadn’t realized that nurses smoked, and she’d winked and replied that she wasn’t technically a nurse yet, so she might as well make the most out of the time she had left. Aki couldn’t much argue with that. 

He wasn’t the first one to arrive for their clinical shift, nor was he the last. As per usual. He took his seat with his head down, slinging his bag over the back of the chair and adjusting his glasses up the bridge of his nose. He ran through the mental checklist of duties he needed to complete to shift from Regular Aki into Nurse Aki: scrubs on, hair tied back, earrings (regretfully and temporarily) removed. Ready.

Mr. Kishibe didn’t say good morning. He didn’t even say hello. He always started his pre-conferences with the same gravelly, throat-clearing ahem, and then he grunted, “Right,” before launching into their agenda for the day. 

Aki thought it was sort of demeaning when he first heard it, like he thought that they needed constant reassurance that their presence was acceptable, but Himeno had explained to him that he was just like that, in her words, so he grinned and bore it. 

Seated next to Aki now, she caught his eye in a sideways glance when Mr. Kishibe shuffled in. Right, she mouthed silently, perfectly in time with his speech. 

He rolled his eyes and pretended that he didn’t find it funny.

“We had an interesting case arrive yesterday,” Kishibe said, by way of greeting. 

“Oh?” Himeno was practically out of her seat in her enthusiasm. “Weird like how?” 

“Weird like whoever was on call last night couldn’t understand it.” Aki narrowed his eyes, pulled his notebook out of his bag and added an asterisk around the top heading. “Couple of N.E.U. kids came in last night. Said they’d all gotten sick a few nights ago, then woke up the next morning right as rain. What do you know, last night rolls around, and they all break out in hives at the exact same moment. Trouble breathing, high fevers, delirium. The whole shebang, really.” 

Time continued on around him— logically, he knew that, knew that it must— but Aki’s perception of it slowed. Next to him, Himeno was rattling off at the mouth, spitballing question after question at Kishibe that he could only catch the front and tail ends of: how long, expected, risk of mortality. 

And even though he should have been thinking of assignment dates and dosage calculation problems, the only things he could think of were snowy afternoons in Hokkaido and empty dorm rooms in Boston without any family to move him in. 

Aki excused himself to go to the bathroom, making his way down the linoleum hallway with quick, hurried steps. When he went inside, he turned to lock the door behind him, then stood with his back pressed against it, breathing heavily. 

This was unprofessional to the nth degree. He was supposed to be a nurse, for crying out loud, and this was how he reacted at the first sign of trouble? Get yourself together, he scolded himself. Things are only going to get tougher from here. If this is all it takes to break you down, you might as well quit while you’re ahead. 

He took a deep breath, ignoring the shallow vibrations shooting through his arms and legs. It was going to be okay. Nobody was dead, or going to die, or remotely in danger of anything bad happening. He wasn’t a doctor or a surgeon or the chief executive officer. He was just a strange person in a strange city, trying to scrape together enough scholarship money for both a ride on the Green Line and a postgraduate degree. 

But there was still that what if . That worm of doubt in the back of Aki’s mind that had been there since forever and didn’t show any sign of leaving anytime soon. 

It was the same doubt that plagued his mind while he lay in bed at night, thinking over the Last Day, as he called it. The last day where everything was normal, where he was still a big brother and a son, the only two roles he’d imagined would be assigned to him for life. 

“Hey,” a voice came, accompanied by a sharp rapping on the door. “Either you’re freaking out in there or you’re coming down with an acute case of shit-your-brains-out syndrome. Any way you slice it, if anything happens to you, I have to report it to Kishibe. Seeing as I’m not particularly keen on doing that, I’d suggest you get your ass out here before he loses it on both of us.” 

Aki leaned over the sink, stretched his arms out against the countertop so he could stretch the vertebrae in his spine even the slightest bit. Of course Himeno would take it upon herself to check up on his whereabouts. He couldn’t decide whether he found it sweet or overbearing. On one hand, he was used to being the one looking out for other people, whether it was Denji, Power, or even Michiko, back in the day. On the other, he resented the implication that if he was suffering from the runs, Himeno would still stick her nose into his business anyway. “None of the above,” he called. “I just needed a second. I’ll be right out.” 

“That’s bullshit,” she said, and before he could say anything back, she was shoving through the door, letting it swing behind her with a mechanized swish. 

“What the hell are you doing?” Aki flinched, jumped back from the sink like she’d somehow caught him in a compromising position. 

Himeno shrugged. Her eye was wide and clear, smudged around the edges with a light brown shimmer and long, doe-eyed lashes. “It’s a free country, isn’t it?” she said. “Gender binaries are dead, Aki. Get with the program.” 

“I’m less concerned with the issue of gender binaries and more concerned with the issue of you barging in on me in a private moment.” 

She tossed her hand. “Ah, relax, would you?” she said, and grinned. “Didn’t seem like you were doing anything too private to me. That is, unless you keep it behind closed doors—” 

“Stop that,” Aki said, and slammed his palm down on the countertop. He hadn’t meant to, and certainly didn’t mean to make a sound as loud as it was, but he did; the hollow thump ricocheted off the linoleum walls. Himeno nodded slightly, took a baby step back from Aki. 

“Oh,” he said, because her posture was slumped at the top like a stray comma, head bent. “Oh, Himeno, I acted out. I’m sorry.” He brought his fingers to his temples, rubbing slow circles where the germ of a headache bloomed. Nice going, Aki. First he was losing his mind at the hospital— his place of future employment, for God’s sakes — then he was snapping at one of the very few members of his support circle for trying to offer help in the only way she knew how. 

“I can see that.” Himeno came closer, rocking her head from side to side as she squinted. She executed this move when she needed to see something clearer; Aki assumed it was something to do with her minimized depth perception. “What’s going on, man? You hungover or something?” 

Aki sighed. “Have you ever seen me drink on a work night?” 

“Yes,” she said matter-of-factly. 

“God, I can’t believe you even remember that. That was one time a year ago and you’re never going to let me live it down.” He’d forgotten about that night until she brought it up, and he wouldn’t have used it as argumentative evidence if he’d remembered. Still, though. He’d had two drinks, maybe three if he was being really liberal with his estimation, on the anniversary of his life as he knew it functionally coming to an abrupt close. Aki felt that he was more than entitled to a drink or two in that case, work night be damned. 

“I remember everything,” Himeno said, “especially the stuff you wish I would forget.” 

“Charming.” Aki covered his face with his hands, took a deep breath inwards to reset an unseen internal system. 

“Hey.” She closed her hands over Aki’s wrists; the warmth from her fingers splayed out over his forearms. “You’re okay, dude. I know you’re all stressed out about the class or whatever—”
“It’s not about the class.” 

“-- or whatever other shit you have going on,” she finished. “And I know it might not feel like it now, but you’re actually the luckiest duck out of this whole damn class.” 

He lowered his hands from his face, which in turn lowered Himeno’s wrists. He hadn’t realized she’d still been holding onto him, and when he looked down at the place where their skin touched, Himeno let go all of a sudden, springing back from him like a child from a hot stovetop. “I’m not a duck,” he said. 

“It’s an expression. Don’t worry about it.” 

“Okay. How am I the luckiest anything here, then?” 

“You wanna know why?” Himeno pulled back from him a little, so he could see the intent in her face, the new hardness in her features. “Because you’ve got me as your friend, and Kishibe as your supervisor— don’t give me that look, you know damn well he’s the most seasoned in this building — and we’re gonna finish this practicum and then get the fuck out of here and get blasted.”

Aki scoffed a little, scratched the side of his neck. “Thanks,” he said, “but no thanks to that last part.” He was infinitely grateful for Himeno’s offering, really— although the effort may have been slightly misplaced, he didn’t have anyone else in his life who would care enough to go to such a length. 

“Live a little, Aki. You’re so dang tense all the time. Loosen up every once in a while, you know? It’s not gonna kill you.” 

“Of course not.” He nodded, swallowed back the protest that rose in his throat: but it might. 

That protest made an appearance quite a bit in his day to day life, simultaneously more and less so than it did in the past. When he walked to the grocery store to buy bread and milk for French toast: it might kill you. When he looked both ways before he crossed the street. When he washed his hands in the morning before his clinicals, when he stepped onto the T at night, when he played video games with Denji and watched reality TV with Power: you never know. Maybe this time is it. It might, it might, it might. 

“Whatever.” Himeno cleared her throat. “I’m not taking no as an answer, so call it a rain check. At some point, I’m getting you out of these four walls and into some sunshine. You look like a vampire.” Actually, with his dark hair and pale skin combined with his off-hours style, it wasn’t the first time the comparison had been made. “And maybe” — she fingered the edge of his scrub top with the tip of her fingernail — “it’d do you some good to get you out of these scrubs every once in a while. Hm?” 

It probably would, and Power had told him so no less than three dozen times this week, but for a second Aki was frozen in place. 

Himeno had touched him before, sure. A quick brush on the shoulder, a handshake, maybe the odd celebratory hug when he’d had a particularly successful day or aced a test he’d nearly broken his back studying for. Those were all friendly, however, firmly within the boundaries of Acceptable Platonic Touch that he’d laid out for himself years back. 

This, though. This was a little different than anything she’d done before. He considered for a moment saying something, but what could he possibly have said? Hey, thanks a million for helping me through my dead-family-induced anxiety attack back there. Really owe you one. By the way, you didn’t happen to be hitting on me at any point, did you? 

No. He’d rather bite his tongue and harbor a what-if than speak too loud and ruin the one real friend he’d made since he’d gotten to Boston. He breathed a sigh of relief or distress or a combination of the two, and Himeno must have gotten the hint, because she let go of his shirt hem and smoothed down her own with both hands. 

“Objectively speaking, is all,” she said, and then Aki’s hand was in hers and she was dragging him out of the bathroom, to confront face-to-face the thing he least wanted to think about in the eleven thousand kilometers of Earth he’d seen so far. 

“I want to talk to you,” Aki said at the end of the morning, after the meetings had wrapped up, the care plans had been graded, and the evaluation forms neatly filled out and filed away. 

Kishibe looked surprised, but he wasn’t sure if it was because of his request or the fact that he was speaking so boldly to his supervisor at all. “Shoot,” he said, and waved him into an empty conference room. The door closed behind them with a click that Aki felt in his bones. “Sit.” 

He did. Folding his hands in his lap, he took a deep breath and steadied himself to explain himself the best he could without turning himself into a total conspiracy theorist. “I want to talk to you,” he repeated, “about the group of patients that came in today.”
“You and everybody else.” Kishibe didn’t seem particularly stressed. He was either great at hiding it or so grizzled by his years in the field that this kind of thing didn’t faze him anymore. 

Fortunately, Aki was a meticulous note-taker and wasn’t one to let a single detail slip past his radar. He flipped open his notebook to the page carefully labeled with the date in kanji; underneath, the word coincidence in English was underlined twice. “You said all the victims were— related in some way, is that correct?”

“Don’t make it a habit of telling you information that isn’t correct,” he said, “so I’d say so.” 

“Okay.” Aki swallowed back the miniature spike of apprehension he always felt when Kishibe got sassy. “You didn’t mention this, because I don’t have it written down, so let me ask you this: how close, exactly? Sir?” He decided to tack the honorific on there for good measure after only the slightest pause.

He pursed his lips. “Roommates,” he said, dragging out the word like he wasn’t sure if Aki would understand the implication. “Close friends, apparently. Said they’d lived together since freshman year.”

Unexpectedly, he thought not of the close friends he’d had back in Hokkaido but of Denji and Power. He’d held Power’s hair back for her once or twice when she came home from the bar almost too plastered to stand up, and made Denji rice porridge after a particularly nasty bout of freshman flu. But what would he do if one of them got sick— really sick, beyond hangovers and stuffy noses? Would he put himself in danger to protect the two of them? 

Would he risk ending up like the rest of his family?
“I understand,” he said. “So we’re dealing with some sort of contagion here.” 

“Maybe so,” Kishibe replied, and Aki blinked. “Might be less contagious than you think and more psychosomatic than somatic.” 

“How could that be?” No. No, no no. This whole thing was totally wrong. He knew what kind of illness this was— he’d seen it — and there was no possible earthly way that it could’ve been all in their minds. He saw it, saw the sweat bead on Taiyo’s flushed cheeks, saw pain twist his mother’s expression. All these years later, he still remembered it, could still smell the stench of illness in the air, vomit-soured and thick. 

Kishibe sighed, clicked his tongue at the back of his mouth. “It’s a Salem witch trial,” he said, staring at Aki as if this was supposed to make perfect sense. 

“Come again?” He knew what a witch was, of course, but he didn’t see why they should have to be put on trial, and he certainly didn’t know what— or who — a Salem was. 

“You know. With the iron stakes and the piss cakes and all that woo-woo mumbo-jumbo?” 

He understood most of those words in an isolated context, but evidently not enough to squeeze any coherent meaning out of Kishibe’s speech. “I’m sorry?”

Kishibe kept his expression set. “What, you’ve never been to Salem? It’s forty-five minutes away, kid. Take I-95.” 

“I can’t say I have, sir.” He mulled the phrase over and over in his mind, seeing if repeating it would dislodge any scrap of recognition; when it didn’t, he made a note to Google it as soon as he got out of the meeting. 

“Boy,” he grumbled, “I don’t know what kind of shit they’re teaching you around here these days, but it ain’t the same as what it used to be, I’ll tell you that for free.” 

“I’m not from around here, sir.” Aki probably should’ve bit his tongue, but after a few years’ worth of corrections and reminders and sideways glances, it wore him down. He doesn’t know if he’s grateful for Kishibe not having made the assumption or annoyed that he didn’t remember that kind of thing about his charges. 

“So you’re not,” he said, after the slightest of pauses. “Anyway. Long time ago— 1700s, maybe? — couple of kids went off their rocker. And this is beyond the normal kid stuff: eyes rolling back, head spinning around, pea-soup vomit, probably. Real Exorcist type of thing.” 

“I see.” Aki was fairly sure he understood the reference. 

“Doctor can’t find anything wrong with them, though. And all of a sudden every girl in Salem is saying the same thing. So they figure the only logical explanation is a mass devil possession and start stringing up the poor bastards they called witches left and right.” 

“Jesus,” he said. It was hundreds of years ago by then, but the thought of it still made something slimy and uncertain squirm underneath his skin. 

Kishibe shrugged. “That’s all there is to it,” he said. “Seriously. Those patients were all from the same workplace, right? Same college? Something like that?” 

“Yes. They were all Northeastern students, yes.” 

“There you have it, then. Exam season’s coming up, you know. Pressure probably got to their heads.” 

“Pressure,” Aki repeated, toying with the word. It would make sense in the context of the university students, sure, but he couldn’t help but apply the theory back to his parents. As a now-adult, he understands that they must have been suffering from more pressure than he could ever have imagined as a child just by virtue of raising him and his brother. 

Taiyo, though, was the missing link that posed a problem. He was a kid when the whole thing happened— when he died, Aki corrected himself mentally. He had to get into the habit of thinking it, even if he couldn’t say it. He was a kid when he died. 

What could possibly have been pressuring him enough to work himself into a psychosomatic sickness?
“Something you wanted to add?” Kishibe said. It didn’t sound so much like an open invitation. 

“No,” Aki said. “Thank you.” 

“C’mon.” Kishibe drummed his fingers on the table. “Clearly you got something you want to say, so say it instead of sitting there and looking sad.”
It wasn’t so much that he wanted to say something to Kishibe, and more so that he felt like he had to say it or either the ghosts of his family or Kishibe would smite him into a thousand pieces. “I wouldn’t want to speak out of turn, sir.” 

Kishibe snorted. “Please. Always so worried about being polite. It’s okay, kid. Speak. I’m not gonna bite.” 

“Well, okay,” he said, even though he wouldn’t be altogether shocked if he did. “I could be wrong. It’s just that— I think I’ve seen a case like this before. Several of them, actually.” 

“That so?” he said. His face didn’t give away any underlying emotion. 

“Yes.” Aki was slowly gaining confidence the longer the conversation went on. “Not recently, and not even in the country, actually. This was several years ago, in Japan. My family….” He trailed off, unsure of an English word that would be sufficient to capture everything that happened with them. “They got sick. All of them. I did too, but only for a few hours, maybe. Nothing significant. I got better right away. They didn’t, though.” 

“Hmm.” Kishibe didn’t offer him any condolences, or even look sad about it. Good. Aki much preferred that to the fake, saccharine voices people put on when they heard, as if talking to a dog or a very small child: I’m so sorry to hear that. You poor thing. You must be so, so brave. 

“It’s in the past,” Aki said, brushing over it as quickly as he could. “Five years ago. I’m sure it’s not related at all, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least mention the fact that—” 

“The fact that what?” 

“The fact that their symptoms sound exactly the same.” 

“It’s commonplace.”
“Is it?” Aki hadn’t meant to talk back, but before he knew what he was saying, he was saying it. It wasn’t an expression of disbelief, but more so something pleading: please say it is. Please say this isn’t the same thing. “Sure, fevers or shortness of breath or whatnot, but— that brief, universal period of recovery before the worsening? I can’t help but be concerned about it. I’m sorry.” 

 “You don’t have to be sorry,” he said, “but in this line of work, you can help but be concerned. Because if you spend your whole time being worried about everybody else, you’ll never get your own shit together enough to help them at all.”

It’s true, and he knows it, but he chose not to deal with it at that moment. He’d spent his whole life caring for and about other people— it was what led him to Boston in the first place, to nursing school, to this very hospital. He couldn’t stop worrying about other people, because that would mean he’d have to start thinking about himself, and then the whole operation that was his daily life would grind to a screeching, fiery halt. “I’m not worried. I just want to know as much as I can, so I can help as best as I can.”

This seemed to be a sufficient explanation. “One of them— the one that got sick first, apparently— they said he works at a nightclub or a concert hall or something like that. If it is some kind of virus, it’s probably something he picked up from one of those shiesters and brought home to his buddies. Nothing for you to worry about after you leave these doors.” 

Part of him felt a little better at that. This was a rational explanation, the kind with a clear purpose and origin. His brain liked those. It thrived off of them. It could chew it up and metabolize it and use it to soothe a little bit of his worry. He didn’t work at a nightclub, and neither did Denji or Power, so—

Wait. 

“Did you say nightclub?” Aki asked. 

“Mmm.” Kishibe was glancing at the clock in the corner of the room; it was only a few minutes past their scheduled time, but he bounced his leg like a kid stuck in detention. “Don’t know if it was that exactly. One of those night shift type of jobs that kids get sometimes. Bar, club, whatever you wanna call it.” 

“Power works at a bar,” he muttered, more for the clarity of saying out loud than for the sake of actual communication. 

“What’d you say?” 

Power worked at a bar, and she worked the night shift, and she more likely than not spent a considerable amount of time exchanging bodily fluids with strangers. Something could have been going around within the industry— maybe at the bar itself? Oh, God. His head was starting to spin by then with all the different ways everything could go south. For a minute, he pictured a Boston past the brink of collapse: the T cemented on its tracks; sold-out flights back to Hokkaido at Logan; a Common fallen empty, roses disintegrated into a fine powder. 

“I said thank you for your time,” he said. Once he left the room, his thumbs twitched towards his phone in his pocket, where he opened Instagram for the first time in months and flicked through Power’s story, just to make sure it was still there.  

Aki was more exhausted than he usually was, if that was possible, and by the time his afternoon break rolled around, he was in dire need of a caffeine transfusion. Stat. 

He would call up both his roommates — as sad as it was, they were the closest thing he had to a social circle — but he figured Denji would be in class. Through either a stroke of immense effort or sheer dumb luck, he was still enrolled at university despite his transcript of blow-off classes and withdrawal grades. He flitted back and forth between majors so often that Aki couldn’t keep up, didn’t know what to tell Michiko when she asked what his roommates were up to. 

Power, at least, was a surer bet. She’d declared that she wasn’t meant to be restrained by the confines of academia ages ago. In doing so, however, she’d confined herself to a life of late-night shifts and nocturnal sleeping schedules. In this case, it benefitted Aki, because he knew she’d be around and in no position to turn down a free coffee. 

Besides, after what him and Kishibe had talked about, he figured he was due for a good sit-down conversation with his messiest roommate. 

Aki slumped against the side of the building, watched the nurses and doctors and meth heads filter in and out of the oscillating glass doorway. He flicked over to his emergency contacts, selected Power’s name at the top, and waited for the telephone drone to change to her voice. 

“What,” she said, when she finally picked up. She’d never been one for pleasantries. 

“Hi,” Aki said anyway. “What are you doing right now?” 

Silence, and then a telltale crunch crunch crunch across the line that prickled his ears. Cape Cod chips, no doubt. He winced, reminding himself to run the vacuum over the couch cushions when he got home that evening. “What’s it to you?” 

“It’s nothing to me,” he said, “except I have an iced latte with your name on it if you get your ass off the couch and meet me by the hospital.” 

Power sighed, spoke around a mushy mouthful of potato chip: “Will whipped cream be factored into the equation?” 

That girl and her sweet tooth. Aki had had the your metabolism can only hold out on you for so long chat with her many a time, but she still insisted on avoiding veggies like the plague and lauding sugar as its cure. “Sure, Power. Whipped cream can be included.” 

“Hmm,” she said, and Aki heard the sound of fabric rustling; he imagined her rolling over on the couch, extending her legs in a feline stretch. “I don’t know. I just started a new episode of Real Housewives, and things are heating up pretty quickly. If I leave now, I won’t be able to live-tweet my reaction.” 

 “I’m sure your Twitter followers will understand.” Aki was starting to grow frustrated. Sure, Power might not have been his first choice in terms of companionship either, but she was the only one he had, and that meant something. Besides, he was in such desperate need of human connection he’d be more than happy to have a gab sesh with Mr. Kishibe himself. “Tamra and Vicki will still be at each other’s throats when you get back.” 

“It’s Shannon and Tamra that are fighting, Aki, God! Sometimes I think you don’t pay any attention to what’s going on around you at all.” 

“Find it in your heart to forgive me.” His patience was wearing, an ever-thinning filament that Power insisted on playing tug-of-war with. Soon, it was going to snap altogether in a flurry of broken knots and frayed string, and then Power would really have something to complain about. “Free coffee, going once.” 

“Sold,” she grumbled, and gave a grunt that told Aki she was peeling herself off of the couch. “Meet you at Dunks, then?” 

“Fine,” he said, although he still didn’t fully understand the Boston obsession with the franchise. Their coffee always tasted fresh out of the Charles River to him. 

Aki dipped out of the hospital, doing his best to avoid making contact with either HImeno or Kishibe as he Irish-exited. Walking alongside the building, an invisible hand seemed to jerk him to a stop, so he acquiesced. Looked up at the rows and rows of windows, each no more than the tiniest flicker in the sea of glass panes. Remembered that each one contained a person, a family, a whole ecosystem that would be shattered by that person’s absence. Remembered that his parents didn’t even make it through to stay in their hospital beds a single night. 

For once, he was grateful for the Massachusetts amenity of a Dunkin’ Donuts on every corner— it meant he didn’t have to walk far before he was there. All there was left to do was wait for Power to show up, which could be anywhere between five and forty-five minutes. 

“Oi,” she called, after a respectable fifteen. Aki perked his head up from his phone; he’d been buried eyeball-deep in an onslaught of Twitter doom-reporting about the latest global calamities. “You didn’t have to wait for me outside, you know.” Power had on a strappy tank top that crisscrossed over her collarbones, a baseball cap that looked like it hadn’t been washed since the nineties, scrappy jean shorts, and open-toed shoes that revealed long, unpainted toes. 

“It’s summer,” he said blankly, geturing to her outfit. “You can sit inside when it’s cold and yucky and there’s thirty feet of snow on the ground.” 

“We only got thirty inches last year,” she said, but she slid into the thin metal chair across from him and dumped her phone, keys, and wallet unceremoniously onto the table. “So. I was promised a free drink.” 

“So you were.” Aki was beginning to regret the choice. He fished a ten-dollar bill out of the depths of his wallet, slid it across the table into Power’s eager hand. 

“Sweet,” she said, folding it into her back pocket. “If it comes out to less, can I keep the change?” 

“No.” 

“Lame.” 

Aki was perfectly okay with being lame if it meant being a couple dollars richer. “Get me a black coffee with milk,” he called as she headed towards the front doors. 

“If you want milk in it, it’s not a black coffee.” 

“You know what I’m talking about,” he said, and Power did, so she disappeared inside the Dunkin’ with a long swish of strawberry-pink. 

He understood that she didn’t mean any harm by it, but part of him got a little pissed off at her casual mockery of his command of the English language. Sure, he wasn’t perfect. Yeah, he still had the last dredges of an accent that he hadn’t been able to shake, no matter how many classes he’d taken and seminars he’d attended. But he thought he’d done pretty well for someone who’d grown up on the complete opposite side of the globe; besides, he’d like to see Power speak Japanese and see how quickly she got laughed at. 

For a long moment there was peace and quiet and the rush of cars and the chit-chatter of pedestrians on the sidewalk, and Aki was grateful for it. He’d called Power there himself, that much was true, but sometimes her constant stream of babbling got to be too damn much. Of course, he’d learned from experience that stewing in his own thoughts for too long was also more than damaging to his psyche, so maybe her distraction was warranted. 

When Power came back, two drinks wedged precariously in one hand and her cell phone in the other, Aki was surprised to find that he was a little excited. 

“Here,” she said, and tossed a quarter onto the table. 

“I’m better at math than you, Power, and I know this isn’t the amount you owe me.” 

She shifted a little in her seat. “I guess I dropped the rest on the way back.”

Aki didn’t feel like arguing more with her, so he decided to cash in a few karma points with the universe and let it slide. Instead, he took his coffee from her outstretched hand and watched as she shook the ice in her drink like a maraca. 

“You have to dislodge the flavor,” she said, by way of explanation. 

“Right.” He cleared his throat. “So, um. Everything okay at work?” Aki had never been one for small talk, nor was he particularly skilled in it. 

Power squinted. “Duh,” she said, swirling the straw around her coffee to dislodge miniature clouds of creamer. “You’re talking to a two-time Employee of the Month here.” 

“How could I forget.” He hadn’t, but he didn’t see it as so much of an accomplishment that it had to be brought up in nearly every single conversation relating to the bar. “Any interesting customers lately?” 

“Hmm.” She drummed her fingers on the table; unlike her toes, she always made it a point to keep their nails cleaned, long, and sharp as talons. “Not unless you count the B.U. trust fund dorks trying to flirt their way into a discount. Or the Southie townies flirting just for the fuck of it.” 

He’d been hoping she’d bring up something relating to this apparent outbreak, lean back and say you know what, Aki, I have in fact noticed something unusual going around lately. He realized in hindsight that expecting Power to possess this level of introspection was about as intelligent as expecting their goldfish, Pochita, to sprout hind legs and bark like a dog. 

“Power,” he said. “Have you ever heard of the Salem witch trials?” 

She paused for a second, narrowed her eyes at him. Kept her hand wrapped firmly around her drink. “Me and every other kid in Massachusetts. Why?” 

Aki shrugged. “It came up today at clinicals, is all.” 

“Oh?” For once Power didn’t laugh or jeer or mock him right off the bat. “What were they, uh, talking about that for? You guys need inspiration for new ways to get rid of the stiffs, or what?” 

It was a hollow, half-baked joke that even Power didn’t seem to buy into, so Aki didn’t bother to muster up a response. “Something like that,” he muttered, and her eyes widened. “Not like the way you’re thinking, but. Something kind of weird was going on today, and my supervisor brought it up. That’s all.” 

“Oh, yeah,” she said, leaning back and nodding her head sagely. “Yeah. I’ve heard of it. And if you want to know something really crazy”--- she made a show of looking around and cupping her hands around her mouth — “I’ve even seen it myself.” 

Aki scoffed. “No, you haven’t.” 

“Yes, I have!” Power took an indignant sip from her iced coffee; it was nearly drained, so her attempt culminated in an obnoxious sucking sound that made Aki wince. “With my own two eyes. Saw Giles Corey’s dumbass squashed under two stones like a human lasagna.”

“Thanks. Now I’m never eating lasagna again.” 

“Welcome,” she said, teeth flashing. “I’m a time traveler, you see. I’m surprised you didn’t catch onto it earlier. I wasn’t exactly trying to hide it from you.” 

“Can’t believe I missed it.” If Power were a time traveler, Aki was certain that she wouldn’t waste another second in the present day. She’d be constantly zipping around between eras, popping by to hang out with the dinosaurs in the morning and then swinging by Ancient Greece by lunch. She would probably try to mess with the timeline, too, murdering dictators or smacking her three-year-old self in the face. “So out of everywhere you could possibly be, you choose to be here with me? Gee, thanks. You must like me a whole lot, huh?” 

“Ugh, no.” She pulled a face. “Okay, maybe not a time traveler. But I am a world traveler.” 

That much, Aki had heard before. Ever since he’d moved in, Power had regaled him and Denji with stories of her so-called “gap years”. (He didn’t think it counted as a gap year if there was no college in store at the end of it, but he let it slide.) Denji would sit enraptured on the edge of the couch as Power regaled him with stories of backpacking through Copenhagen, swimming through the glacier pools in Iceland, and even strolling through Hokkaido farmland. It was impossible to know exactly how much of these stories were real and how much were made up, but judging by how intensely Power fed off of Denji’s encouragement, Aki was skeptical. 

Her myriad of travel stories did beg another question, however: where was all this money coming from? Power didn’t talk much about her family at all. Aki knew she was from the state because she made fun of him for mispronouncing names like Leominster and Worcester, even though it most definitely was not his fault that some town planner had forgotten which letters make what sounds in the English language. He didn’t think that she was a child of neglectful parents with deep pockets like Denji was, because she’d probably be six years into a four-year degree if that was the case. Still, she seemed to have near-endless resources and opportunities for someone that made a living mixing drinks. Not that Aki was judging.

“You ever seen something weird like that before?” he asked. His coffee was going stale and bitter at the bottom of the cup; he swirled it around with two quick flicks of his wrist. “Something that you couldn’t explain with logic?” 

Power tapped her nails on the side of her straw. “I guess,” she said, shrugging. “Probably just, like, algebra problems and stuff. I’m not stupid enough to believe in ghosts.” 

“Of course not.” She was right. Aki was too intelligent to get wrapped up in delusional little fantasies of ghosts and goblins. He was someone who abided by logic, who staunchly believed that every action could be explained by way of reason, not emotion. This whole thing was nothing more than a blip in his consciousness. Maybe he was working too hard, or maybe he wasn’t working hard enough to distract himself. 

The facts of the case didn’t lie, though. Those patients had seemed eerily similar to his family— the timeline, the symptoms, the severity. All of it rang so familiar, a repeat of the same scenario that had haunted his waking and sleeping hours for the past forty-some thousand of them. 

He’d thought of calling Michiko to make sure he wasn’t going crazy, even though he hadn’t spoken to her in a while. But she worked so much these days that he felt bothersome reaching out to her. Part of him sometimes didn’t feel like he was welcome, even, ever since he’d left Japan. He told her he’d left for a better opportunity, for the chance to pursue a top-tier education, but she’d known the truth: he was running away from the family. And that included her. 

“I think,” Aki began, slowly, “that there might be something else going on.”
Power cocked her head. “I don’t follow.” 

“That’s okay,” he said. “I don’t know. I can’t prove anything one way or the other. I just have this feeling that there’s something else going on here. Like, the whole Slalom thing—” 

“ Salem, Aki. Salem.” 

“Salem, sorry. The explanation makes sense, but it feels too convenient. Like all of a sudden everything just fell into place around the story. Do you know what I’m talking about?” 

It was difficult to pinpoint the exact moment in which Power had shifted on him, the specific word that made her expression drop and her shoulders rise, but it had indisputably occurred. Her face was so blank that Aki considered apologizing for the offense, although he wouldn’t have known what to say. 

“Stop meddling,” Power finally said, face stony, and something inside Aki crumbled a little bit. 

“What?” 

“You gotta learn to stop sticking your nose in things that have nothing to do with you. Sooner or later, it’s gonna bite you in the ass.” 

Aki’s heart felt like it was splitting in two. He’d never heard Power speak to him like that before in a context as serious as this. She didn’t know the whole story of him and his family, and he didn’t want her to, but part of him was still hurt at this level of indignation. “I’m not sticking my nose in anything,” he said, “because this is my job. And my supervisor even said himself—”

“Your supervisor,” she said. “Exactly. I think you should listen to the dude with, like, thirty plus years of experience on you. Or do you think that you’re just so special that your undergrad capabilities carry you further than him?” 

“Wait, what the hell?” He reached across the table to grab one of Power’s hands; she snatched it back, folded both of them in her lap. “When have I ever said anything remotely along those—” 

“I’m late to my shift.” She scooped her bag off the back of the chair, dumped her keys and wallet and phone into it without ceremony. “I gotta go,” she said, scraping back her hair into the hasty ponytail Aki always associated with her exits and arrivals. 

“Wait,” he said, again, but it didn’t sound decisive– just sad and hollow. He didn’t understand it. He didn’t understand why Power had all of a sudden flipped a switch on him— dashed out like the place was on fire, not even bothering to say a real goodbye or look him in the eyes. 

“You’ll figure it out,” she called, and she was gone in a swish of pink-tipped hair and work-approved sneakers. 

Aki put his head down on the disgusting Dunkin’ Donuts table and tried not to think about the billions of germs crawling over his skin. What did it matter at that point, anyway? Everyone who might have cared what happened to him was gone, preoccupied, or dead in the ground for the previous five years and counting. 

Chapter Text

The day eventually came to an end— as all things do —- and Aki was looking forward to going home, locking his door, and passing out for the next seven hours. 

But they still had one meeting to go before that happened, and Himeno kept glancing over at him all throughout it; his attention slipped from Mr. Kishibe’s joint lecture-slash-roast-session to the flicker of her eye in his peripheral vision. She’d been blind in one eye since she was a child— juvenile glaucoma, the pressure in her eye so great that it had trampled the optic nerve like a bug beneath its heel. The now-defunct eye was muddled over, little swirls and blurs in the iris. Aki caught glimpses of it when she turned her head to look at him. Part of him wanted to grab one side of her face and hold it still so he could examine, pull her lash line down and map the trajectory of the clouds in her eye. 

When the clock struck the hour, the room disbanded into a hum of conversation, scrubs shuffling, bags being shifted to higher points on shoulders. Snippets of conversation that could have been said by movie characters from any point in the last fifty or so years: crazy weather we’re having, did you catch the end of the game last night, I swear I thought it was Saturday when I woke up this morning.

“Psst,” Himeno said, and flicked the top of his shoulder. Aki jumped a little when she did it; he’d let his thoughts dissolve into the noise and hadn’t been paying attention. “What’s the word for tonight, then?” 

“Home.” He kept walking, out of their meeting room and down the hallway, narrowly avoiding the crush of the other students. “I feel like I could sleep for a thousand years.” 

“Wait, wait, wait, wait.” Her legs were shorter than Aki’s— most people’s were, admittedly— and she broke into a shuffle to keep up with him. “You’re not seriously going home and going to bed, are you?” 

“Yes,” he said, “I seriously am.” 

“Woof. Could you be any more boring?” 

“I could. Be glad that I choose not to be.” 

“Aki.” Himeno put a hand on his shoulder. “You spent the whole shift freaking out ” — she dropped her voice — “and you’re not even going to let me buy you a drink to take your mind off it?” 

“No.” Aki pushed past the double doors of the hospital entrance, nodded goodbye to the security guard. It was dark outside, but still early enough that the drinkers hadn’t gone home for the night. They milled about on patios and street corners, holding long-necked bottles and aluminum cans. A slight northeastern chill was beginning to settle in, draping itself across their shoulders like an old blanket. “I should get back to the apartment, anyway. God knows Denji and Power haven’t fed Pochita yet, and if I don’t do it, that stupid fish is going belly-up within a matter of hours.” 

Himeno rolled her eye. “I’m sure one night away won’t kill him.” 

“Oh, it very well might.” 

“Hmpf.” Aki still hadn’t invited her over to the apartment yet. He could tell she wanted him to— he wasn’t completely brain-dead, after all— but something held him back. There was an invisible line in their relationship, that delineation between person in my cohort with whom I happen to spend a lot of time and friend. Denji had needled him about it enough, but Aki waved him off every time he asked. Of course, in Denji’s mind, his coyness was a cover-up for a passionate and forbidden love affair, which couldn’t be further from the truth. Even if Himeno was sort of pretty, if you were into the bossy type. 

Maybe it had something to do with the fact that Himeno had assumed that Denji and Power were his little siblings for the first several months of their knowing each other. She’d done a double take the first time he’d mentioned Denji’s parents, incredulous that they didn’t share the same ones. After he’d explained their lack of relation, she’d laughed and said that he talked about them like they’d grown up together, and then asked if he had any siblings after all. No , he’d said, and shook his head. Just me. 

“I’m sorry,” he said to her, even though he wasn’t, really. Exhaustion was weighing so heavily on his shoulders, his head, the straight muscles of his back, that he couldn’t bring himself to care about a social snub hurting her feelings. 

“You should be.” It sounded like only half a joke. “You’re walking with me to the T, then. It’s the least you can do after blowing me off for a goldfish.” 

“Deal,” Aki said, and Himeno folded her hands underneath her chin. 

The walk to the train station always felt longer with someone else next to him. Even longer cloaked in the gray light after the sun had set. 

Luckily, the summer’s rapid approach meant more hours of sunlight, longer days where time melted lazily like butter. When Aki had first moved to Boston, he’d been surprised at how hot it was during the summer, where the temperature oftentime spiked into the upper twenties— eighties, he reminded himself, mentally performing the calculation from Celcius to Fahrenheit. Multiply by nine fifths and add thirty-two. Simple. 

Back in Hokkaido, summer meant throngs of tourists in the city and quiet, breezy days in the countryside. It was him and Taiyo holding out their hands to let the mosquitos suckle at their blood, waiting for their stomachs to bloat before they swatted them into a crimson splat. It was pooling their change to buy ice-cream cones that coated their tongues and left a grainy cast on their lips. It was staying out too late, getting scolded by their parents when they returned home sticky-handed. 

Boston summer wasn’t anything like that. It was stifling, and filthy, and grimy; thousands of strangers’ sweat congealed on the metal poles on the subway and dripped onto Aki’s hands. It was the time of year where heat shimmered incandescent above the pavements, where every time you thought the city couldn’t possibly get more crowded than it already was, a throng of Bostonians would emerge from the woodwork to pack in next to you. He didn’t know how people had done it every single year for as long as they’d been alive. Or how long he would be expected to continue the pattern. 

“Do you ever think,” Himeno said, “that you take care of them a little too much?” 

“Take care of whom?” 

“You know.” She pursed her lips like she was wrestling with the right word to say. “Your siblings .” 

The way she emphasized it made it clear that she was joking. She’d laid the sarcasm on so thick that it was practically dripping, verbal scare quotes placed around the word. It still rubbed him the wrong way, made his jaw clench and his throat seem to close up a little. “And how do you mean, exactly?” 

“Oh, I don’t know.” She definitely did, but was making a poor attempt to walk the line between nonchalant and overbearing. “They’re adults, aren’t they?” 

“They are,” Aki said. A stray pebble was lodged in the crack between the sidewalk blocks; he nosed it out of the way with his toe and watched it skitter into the street gutter. 

“That’s what I thought.” She knew the answer already. Aki had explained the nature of their relationship to her in detail when she’d first discovered that they were roommates rather than siblings, including their ages down to the date of birth. He was starting to wish that Himeno would stop badgering him about the subject and just let it drop once and for all. “So, let me get this straight: they’re all fully grown, independent, able-bodied adults—- yet somehow the responsibility to keep everything in order falls to you?” She adopted a mock-thinking face. “Why is that?” 

“Nothing falls to anybody. I have a certain way I like a household to be run, and I believe that it’s up to me to uphold it. Why is that so surprising?” 

“It’s not,” she said, tugging at her sleeves. “If that’s really the way you want to live your life, then by all means. Go on ahead.” Himeno leaned her body to the side so that it nudged Aki’s, making him startle. “But I have a feeling that Fun Aki’s in there somewhere. Deep down. Trapped and just begging to escape. Is that right?” 

He stopped walking. “No,” he said, “it’s not.” Fun was not a word that had ever been ascribed in front of his name. He didn’t even know what that would look like. He’d never been the type to while the night away drinking, or squirrel away every spare dollar for a weekend trip to the club— both of which were Himeno’s idea of fun. Fun stopped being a priority the second he stopped being a child. Fun Aki died with his family in a tiny town a million years away. 

“Aw,” Himeno said, and made a face. “Bummer. I was hoping I could—” 

“Himeno, would you just shut the fuck up already?” 

He saw her blink, even though he wasn’t looking at her, heard her sharp intake of air even though he wasn’t listening. “Wow,” she said, forcing out a chuckle between gritted teeth. “Awesome. I’m the one person who’s nice to you in this whole goddamn cohort and you want me to shut the fuck up?” 

Aki wanted to say no. These moments happened to him sometimes— where his mouth opened before his brain could process long enough to stop it, and he said what he thought instead of how he felt. He’d never stopped hating them, never stopped hating himself for it, but hadn’t been able to find a solution for it. The only thing he could do was sit and wait and simmer in it and hope whoever was on the receiving end wouldn’t hate him forever. 

“Whatever,” Himeno said, without waiting for an answer. “I was being nice by offering to walk with you anyway. I don’t even live on the Green Line.” 

She stormed away from him and turned down the opposite cross-street without saying anything else; Aki didn’t, either. He’d always imagined himself as the type of person who would reach out in a situation like this, who would extend his hand and call wait just in time for them to turn around. The knowledge that he wasn’t left a sour taste in his mouth. 

If he were a different person, maybe he’d feel more upset. Maybe he’d run after her, even let his bag fall to the sidewalk if he were really in the theatrical mood. Something in him froze when he tried to force himself, though, so eventually he gave up and kept walking towards the gaping maw of the train station by himself. 

There were still a couple blocks to go, so Aki began drafting an apology text in his notes app as he walked. (Utterly irresponsible and practically asking to be involved in a sidewalk face-plant, but a necessary exemption under these circumstances.)
Himeno, he wrote. No Dear, but important to begin with the first name nonetheless. I’m sorry about what I said to you when we were walking home. I’ve been under a lot of stress lately. It wasn’t your fault. 

He paused over these last two lines. Had he been under a lot of stress? Yes— if his aching muscles and permanently clenched jaw were any indicators. But he’d been like that for as long as he could remember, and definitely all of his adult life. Was stress really a valid excuse, then, if it wasn’t newfound and wasn’t any more intense than it usually was? Moving onto the next point of contention: was it Himeno’s fault? When he was little, his mother had told him to always look people in the eye when he apologized, to take full responsibility for his mistakes. But it was more straightforward when he was talking about stolen crayons and who pushed whom on the playground. 

Himeno had been pushing his buttons— that much was indisputable. She’d gone for cheap shots, too, about his roommates when she knew they were about the only people he had in the city. So he didn’t think it was entirely fair for all the blame to be pinned on himself. If he really wanted to make her feel bad, he could pull the dead family card, that perfect get out of jail free pass for any given situation. 

But he respected her, for one, and for another, he’d never tell her about his family if he had any say in the matter. He didn’t think she’d be one to give him the poor you eyes, to make him feel so pathetic that he regretted saying anything in the first place, but still. Michiko always told him that he was too closed-off, that he needed to open up more to people who were trying to help him. He didn’t think, however, that this sort of situation counted. Himeno wasn’t trying to help anything. All she was trying to do was poke and prod at him until something juicy fell out, like a vending machine of personal traumas. 

No fucking chance. 

When Aki rounded the corner onto the next street, something caught his eye amidst the darkness. A flash of silver, maybe, the street light glinting off of something metallic as he passed by. A bolt on the sidewalk? A nail?
A necklace, he realized when he stepped closer, which was attached to the neck of a woman who was slumped almost backwards across the curb, hair falling undone from its tortoiseshell clip. She was well dressed, collared shirt crinkled around her neck, brown oxfords dangling off her feet. Aki had the horrible thought that if she hadn’t been, he wouldn’t have stopped at all. 

He should have just kept walking. 

“Excuse me?” Softly at first, just testing the waters. “Ma’am?” 

Silence— except for the rush of cars on the opposite side of the street, the clang of subways underneath the sidewalk grate. Her chest was still rising and falling. He could see that even from this far away. It only afforded him a small amount of relief. 

He took another step closer. 

The necklace that he’d noticed before was askew, the charm halfway snapped off the chain. It had an engraving on it that he hadn’t been able to read before, something that looked like a date, or else a string of numbers that somewhat resembled one. Her arms and legs were akimbo, elbow bent wickedly, like she’d fallen and hadn’t had the strength to peel herself up from the sidewalk. 

“Ma’am,” he said, more forcefully. “Can you hear me?” 

Still nothing. Aki sighed, pulled out his phone. He was debating between calling 911 and throwing in the towel for the evening, wrestling between the angel and devil on his shoulder. Selfishly— he knew how selfish it was, and it made his stomach turn, hate himself even more — he was trying to measure out if he’d be able to sleep tonight, if the guilt he’d feel from walking away would encroach upon his precious few hours of rest. 

He stepped back. The woman’s eyes opened. 

And then everything made sense. 

He’d seen those eyes before— not exactly, maybe, but the same in every way that mattered. He recognized the spindly red lines stretching across white, like stray marks on clean paper from a shaky hand. He knew that sickly yellow of the iris, the dark swirl of the pupil into the light, that impossible pattern that stunned you for just a second before you floated back into your senses again. 

The kind of look you could never forget in your little brother’s eyes. 

By the time Aki started to run it was already too late. The woman was moving, but not in a way that any human should have been able to— her legs clicking as she unfolded them, vertebrae and tendons snapping and crackling as she drew herself up. When she lunged at Aki, the unexpected force of her own strength knocked him to the ground, where he wriggled underneath her unnatural grip, trying to look anywhere, at anything other than those eyes. 

Scream, a voice in the faraway corner of his brain said. You should scream. So he tried to, but the air he could draw into his lungs was tight and clipped by the squeeze of another body on top of his, and the only sound that came out was a pitiful sort of squeak, the way a dog squeals when you accidentally step on its tail. The woman swiped at his face, long nails scraping at the tip of his nose. His heart was beating faster. Too fast. It must have been his hypothalamus: releasing the epinephrine that made the blood rush quicker, the gasps for air come shorter. His body was trying its best to keep him alive, protected. Was this what had happened to his parents on that day? To Taiyo? Aki closed his eyes, braced his arms against the thrashing mess of a human being. If this was his comeuppance for leaving, for everything he’d done up until this point, he would take it. A glob of something wet and sticky rolled down his cheek; the woman had spit on him. He didn’t wipe it away. 

As his body weakened, he thought of Taiyo. How small and feeble he looked wrapped in bedsheets with cool cloths pressed to his forehead, the edge of frustration in his voice as he explained the difference between ground- and grass-type Pokemon for the umpteenth time. The innocence he’d had to not realize that Aki was the one who handed him down his old DS, and he’d understood it for years before he was even born. 

Maybe it was him that snapped Aki back, that made him steel his body and hit another human being as hard as he possibly could. Maybe it was him, too, that made him turn around before the body hit the ground, to race away before it got up again. 

On the train, Aki’s hands shook so badly he couldn’t grab the handle. 

Not for the first time, he cursed his circumstance: too poor to buy a car, too Japanese to get an American license, too clueless to have seen this coming earlier and take the precautions. He forced himself to keep breathing, to count the breaths as the recycled air circulated through his system. Forced himself not to think about the amount of times that air had been through someone else’s body, the amount of microbes it had picked up on its journey throughout the train car. 

No. It wasn’t his fault that something as batshit crazy as this had broken out. The universe may have had insanely horrible timing, but it wasn’t anything that he could control. Or anything that he needed to feel bad about. This whole thing was going to blow over— even if it took a year, or two years, or a whole goddamn decade. It would end, and then life would go back to normal, and they’d all be better for having gone through it. He was going to find a way, whether it was in Boston or Hokkaido or goddamn Timbuktu. 

The only thing that mattered right now was getting to Power and Denji. Everything else could wait. The hospital, the university, the apartment—- all of those were just objects, concepts in his mind. They were the only things that really mattered enough to protect. 

“Are you okay?” A woman with light eyes and colorless hair was staring at him, clutching the straps of her purse tight to her shoulder. 

“I’m fine,” he said. He couldn’t tell her what he knew. She probably assumed that he was stressed about work, finally breaking down after a long shift of saving lives and preventing disasters. She’d be right about the disaster, in a roundabout sort of way. 

He pictured himself jumping up, making a broad announcement to the entire train and all its passengers. What would he even say? There’s been a security breach? That was way too science-fictiony, not to mention it made him sound like a mall cop. Danger is imminent? More doomsday cult-leader than qualified medical professional. No one would believe him, anyway. There were enough meth- and crackheads roaming the area that your average Bostonian wouldn’t bat an eye at his we’re-all-gonna-die spiel. 

Aki forced his fingers to close around the handle, focused on the sway of his body back and forth in time with the train. 

The house was quiet when he burst through the front door. 

Normally, he was glad for it after a long day of clinicals, but today he would’ve given his right arm to hear Denji’s blaring phone calls with his not-boyfriend or Power’s Bravo marathons blasting through the TV speakers. The silence was too thick, too sour in his mouth. 

“Denji?” His voice sounded off to his own ears, shrill and tinny and too-loud in the small apartment. “Denji?” Please be here, he thought. Please don’t let this be the one day you decide to finally take my advice and go to class. Please keep being the lazy bum you’ve been for the past couple of years. Please. 

“Hello?” The voice was faint, but real— alive —- and it sent a rush of relief through Aki’s tensed muscles. 

“Denji!” Aki didn’t bother to knock, kicking the door to his bedroom open with the little force he had left. 

“What the hell, man!” Denji was wrapped up in a cocoon of blankets, lying on his side with vague electro music emanating from his phone speaker. “At least knock if you’re gonna barge in like that. You’re lucky you didn’t walk in on me and a lady friend.” 

“Uh huh.” There wasn’t enough time to point out that Denji hadn’t been in a position of having any sort of special friend in a while, much less one of the lady categorization. “Listen, I know it’s sudden but we have to leave.” He swallowed. “Tonight, I think.” 

“Huh?” Denji flicked off his music. “You mean you wanna go out or something? I guess we could, but you gotta give me a second to get out of my PJs and shit.” 

“Not out of this house. Out of this city. Out of the country, even, if we can.” 

He raised his head off the pillow to stare at him. “Did Power miss her rent or something?” 

“Jesus Christ, would you listen to what I’m saying for once in your life?” It was harsh, and Aki wished after he said it that he could’ve phrased it more kindly for his sake, but if it got the message across, he couldn’t afford to waste time fiddling around with pleasantries. “This isn’t one of your little cartoons or your stupid video games. This is serious.” 

“Okay, okay. Don’t get all bent out of shape about it, dude.” He stretched, threw a lazy arm across his body to scratch the side of his chest. 

“Denji, I’m not— I’m not fucking around,” Aki said. He saw Denji’s eyes widen at the sudden profanity—- he’d stumbled over it a little himself, but if now wasn’t the right time, there never would be. “Something really horrible is going on. I can’t prove it, but I need you to trust me.” 

The whole thing was ridiculous. He knew it. Denji knew it. There was nothing he could say to bridge that gap, not unless he thought of a different angle, and thought of it quickly. “Scale of one to ten, how bad are we talking?” Denji yawned into the cupped palm of his hand. 

“Ten,” Aki said. “Eleven. Fifty-three. One million. Get. Up.” 

“Jesus,” he said, throwing the covers back and rolling out of bed to stand and face Aki. He still had his jeans on from the day, which Aki found utterly, whole-heartedly, and stomach-churningly disgusting. Not to mention an incredibly effective way of transmitting the germs which were currently spreading across the entire city. “Okay. More information, please. But not too much, or my head is gonna start to hurt.” 

“I was walking home from the hospital.” He figured it was best to leave out the whole mess with Himeno, even if Denji would have been more than thrilled to offer up advice. “By myself. Which isn’t to say that’s unusual, but. Some woman was lying on the ground like she was hurt, so I tried to see if I couldn’t help her and then she started—” He paused. How best to explain it? Attacking? That was probably the closest literal definition, but somehow it didn’t feel right to attribute to himself. “Running up at me,” he finished. “Like, trying to shove me and kick me and bite me and all that.” 

“Holy shit.” Denji’s voice cracked. “You mean you got jumped by a chick? Did she tell you to hand over your wallet, or what?” He sounded a little more excited than he should have been. 

“That’s just it. She didn’t tell me to do anything. She couldn’t speak, really. Just kind of groaned.” He stiffened. “Like I’d give anyone my wallet, anyway.” 

“Groaned how?” 

“It’s groaning, Denji. Do you need me to give you a dramatic reenactment?” 

“Yeah, actually,” he said. He wasn’t trying to hide his delight, now, reveling in the off-the-wallness of the whole thing. “I think that would really help me to understand.” 

Aki had the instinct to grab him, to wrap his fingers around the hollows of his bony shoulders and shake him. He pushed it back. "I can't explain it right now, but I've seen this before, and it didn't end well. It ended really, really badly, in fact. Everything around you could be totally upheaved." 

Denji leaned back on his heels. "Creepy," he said. "Fine. If— and that’s, like, the biggest if in the history of ifs — you’re onto something, what exactly are you suggesting we do here?” 

He hadn’t gotten so far in his shit-hits-the-fan plan as to figure out exactly where they could go. They could hole up in the apartment, but there was no way of knowing how long this storm would take to blow over. If whatever this was ravaged the whole city, was there any guarantee of them being safe? 

“I think we should get out of here,” he said, speaking quickly so Denji couldn’t butt in to protest. “I still have family in Japan. Maybe if we leave quickly enough, we can get out before the worst—” 

“Aki.” Denji’s eyes were still bleary, shot through with red spiderwebs. “Not that I don’t trust you, man, because I totally do. You know, ride or die and all that. I just— you’re, like, absolutely positive? There’s no chance this could be a huge mistake?” 

Not for the first time that day, Aki thought that if he was capable of it, he would have burst into tears on the spot. Yes, the whole thing was insane; yes, it sounded more like a premise from a science fiction B-movie than an actual news report. No, Aki couldn’t prove it. Yes, it made him sound absolutely insane. But if there was anyone that he thought would’ve believed him— anyone who had no ground to stand on when it came to rational ideas and logical thinking— he would have thought it would be Denji. 

“I’m sure,” Aki said. “You didn’t see what I saw. I swear it. I know it sounds insane, but they really did look like—” His tongue formed around the word zombie, let it dissolve just as quickly. It was still too new to call it that. That was a word from a schlocky, C-list movie, not from an actual medical diagnosis. “People are getting sick,” he tried again. 

“How sick?” 

“Really sick,” he said. “Like, um, forget who you are as a person and slowly lose all your functioning until your body gives up on itself type of sick.” 

“Oh.” Denji looked like he was halfway between offering Aki sympathy and dialing into the McLean psychiatric unit. “Well, how do you—” 

“I’m not crazy.” Aki didn’t look him in the eye when he said it. “If that’s what you were thinking.” 

“It wasn’t,” Denji said, but he didn’t sound sure. “Maybe I’m the crazy one for entertaining the idea of flying across the world with my roommate on about a thirty-second notice.”

“Your roommate just happens to be a nurse at the best teaching hospital in the country, before you go down that road.” 

“Nurse in training.” 

“And where are you doing your medical residency?” 

“Touché.” Denji nodded, brushing back the hair from his eyes. “Okay. Okay. Okay. So just me and you, then? A spontaneous trip? I guess I could swing it. I’ve always wanted to visit Japan.” 

That was right— Aki had almost forgotten that his slack-off lifestyle was entirely funded by his conveniently wealthy and conveniently absent parents. A one-way ticket to Hokkaido was chump change for him, whereas Aki wasn’t even sure if he had enough in his emergency funds to scrape one together. “Think of it that way,” he said, “if that helps you get on board. Yeah. A spontaneous trip.” 

“I’m down,” he chirped. “Let me put on some real pants.” He still had his boxers on, his pale white chest exposed. He was so skinny that the hollows between his ribs flashed when he moved. It made Aki worried sometimes that he wasn’t taking care of himself, or that he wasn’t taking care of him as well as he should be. They had no blood relation— evidently, or else Denji would be a front-row, A-plus student— but Aki still felt a strange stirring in his chest in moments like these. Denji had his own family, one with much more resources with which to provide him, but he still worried about him when he came home too late, when he spent the whole weekend partying and missed an assignment date. 

“Are we stopping to pick up Power, or what?” Denji said, and Aki stopped. 

He always assumed that Power was more self-sufficient than their youngest roommate, to some degree of guilt. It was just that she acted so indignantly, and always brushed him off when he tried to extend an act of courtesy or politeness. He acted like it didn’t bother him, but sometimes her quips got under his skin. He would’ve done just about anything for her if she needed it, if she really swallowed her pride and asked him for it, but he wasn’t holding his breath waiting for it. “Is she at work?” 

“She said she was,” Denji said, shucking on a pair of jeans from the floor. Aki tried not to think about how many times they’d been worn without being washed, or what the dubious dark stain on the upper thigh consisted of. “She usually doesn’t come back until the early morning. Unless she suddenly decided to become a vigilante of the night, she should be there.” 

“Ha.” Leave it to Denji to inject his fantasies into the narrative even at the most impractical of moments. If Power really was a superhero, this whole thing would blow over about a million times easier, and Aki could go back to the warm, cozy bed he’d been yearning for all day. “Pack up your shit and meet me in the living room. We’ll figure it out then.” 

When he emerged from his bedroom with a suspiciously light backpack, Aki was scrolling the Uber app in aimless search of a driver. “Hey,” he called. “What day are we gonna be back?” 

“Why?” He barely went to class anyway, and his parents were far enough away not to notice for a while. Maybe he was concerned about the sick parties that would be thrown the upcoming weekend, or the dope ragers he’d miss out on in his impromptu sabbatical. 

“Need to text someone.” His fingers were flying over his own keyboard double time, tapping out an egregious paragraph to some poor soul on the other line. Aki craned his neck to peek at the screen, but Denji flipped it over when he got too close. “Hey!” 

“Who is it?” 

“Nunya.” He snickered a little to himself. 

“I don’t know who that is.”

“Nunya business,” Denji said, and crowed a peal of laughter, satisfied with himself for his own cleverness. “No, seriously. I need to tell— someone when I’m gonna be back.” 

Ah. He understood it now, the soft smile while he typed, the giddy flush across his cheeks while he answered questions. The boy Denji was seeing — Yoshida, he was pretty sure his name was — would be wondering where he went. Why he didn’t take him to the parties he promised he would, why he wasn’t there to walk him home and kiss him on the cheek and hold his hand while they watched Denji’s stupid cartoons. All the things that tied Denji here that didn’t so much as graze Aki. “Two weeks,” he said. He hadn’t thought about it beforehand, but after he said it, he resolved to put it into action. He could call it a vacation, a mental health break, and no one would have to be the wiser that he couldn’t stand to step foot in a hospital until he made things right back home. After those fourteen days — a recommended quarantine period — all this illness business would blow over, and the city would be safe again. 

“Cool.” Denji reignited his blaze of texting, and this time, he didn’t pull his phone away when Aki leaned over. ill see u in 2 wks !! dont have too much fun w/o me hahah. Yoshida’s quick response, his contact labeled HIRO <3 in Denji’s phone: Can’t promise anything. I’ll miss you a lot, Denji. Make sure you call me a lot. I’ll pay you back for the long distance charge. 

The sight of it made Aki’s stomach seize. He shifted his attention back to the Uber and left Denji to sort out his Romeo and Romeo business. 

He barely had enough money in his account to cover the cost of the ride and a hypothetical plane ticket, but he’d already put his safety in jeopardy once that day, and he wasn’t intending on risking it again on public transportation. He hadn’t used the app in so long that he’d almost forgotten how to navigate the interface: pickup location was easy, their Rat City address, but drop-off was something more complicated altogether. “Denji,” Aki said, flicking his arm. “Hey. What’s the name of the bar Power works at?” 

“Huh?” Denji still had that bleary-eyed, just-woken-up look about him, even though he’d had more than enough time, in Aki’s opinion, both to wake up and adjust to the fact. “How should I know? She’s your roommate, man.” 

Peaceful thoughts, he reminded himself. Denji is your friend— ish. Sort of. Maybe. ”She’s your roommate too, idiot.” 

He shrugged. “Whatever you say.” Pulling out his phone, he swiped over to Power’s Instagram profile, shoving it into Aki’s hand. “She’s on this thing, like, twenty-four seven. She has to have posted from work at least once, right?” 

As much as he hated to acknowledge it, it was good thinking, and an idea that he’d been too preoccupied to consider himself. “Fair enough,” he said, and started to comb through her stories, compiled under a highlight reel labelled good timez. 

Said good timez appeared to involve whooping Denji’s ass in Call of Duty, kissing a dark-haired girl on the cheek, and digging into a plate of homemade curry that Aki had made on a cold night. He felt a swell of pride looking at the photo, slightly blurry around the edges from where Power had shook the phone. His elbow was visible at the top edge of the frame, where he was reaching over to put water glasses on the table. He was surprised to see that power had deemed this time satisfactory enough to qualify as good, even more so that she’d deemed it worthy of sharing with her thousand-some followers. 

None of this, however, was instrumental in discovering which bar she worked at. Aki sighed, clicked through the other highlights on her page, only to find himself in the DMs page with no knowledge of how he got there. “Denji, help,” he said. “How do I see more of those little story things she puts up?” 

Denji groaned. “Seriously, Aki? First you need my help fixing the WiFi router, now you don’t know how Instagram works? You’re, like, a thousand years old, dude. Here.” 

“I’m twenty-three,” he said quietly as he gave the phone back to Denji. “I’m not that much older than you.” 

He actually burst out laughing again at that, which kind of made Aki feel personally targeted. “Good one,” he said between giggles, grabbing him by the arm and shaking him. “I forget how funny you are sometimes when you take the stick out of your ass.” 

“When I take what out of where?” 

“It’s an expression, dude, jeez. It can’t be the first time you’ve heard it, what with the way you walk around.” Denji still didn’t seem to be taking the situation very seriously; he found his own jokes very funny and didn’t make an attempt to hide it. “Let me see.” 

He began to flick through a myriad of flashing images and GIFs, from accounts that Aki had never seen before, Power tagged in a background shot or a blurry selfie. “Here you go,” he said, finally. In a story from a few months back, the same dark-haired girl had her hand on Power’s shoulder, eyes closed and tongues sticking out over margarita glasses. Workin hard or hardly workin?? :p Power had written, along with the geotag to Mack’s downtown. “This ringing any bells?” 

“I don’t know.” He tried to scrape up any memory of the name, but no dice. Power was so protective over her “work life”, as she called it, that she didn’t much talk about the specifics at all. “It’s worth a shot. Thanks, anyway.” 

“No problem,” he said, handing the phone back. “And I already Venmo’d you for the Uber.”

“Oh, I couldn’t.” While he understood that little things like Ubers, takeout, T passes were no skin off Denji’s back, a sticky, guilty feeling still crawled its way up his throat every time he offered money. It made him feel like a charity case, brought him back to the first few weeks after That Day: relatives dropping food outside the door, bringing him toys he didn’t want and didn’t deserve, pouting their sad little faces at him in their sad little funeral clothes. 

Denji frowned. “You could, and you will, and you’re not going to complain about it.” 

“No promises,” Aki said, but he was grateful. 

When the driver screeched into their parking spot, Denji didn’t bother to verify the name, bounding across the street and into the backseat in one fluid motion. Aki hovered around the outside, leaning his head across the passenger seat to ask who he was here to pick up. 

“Akira,” the guy said, pronouncing it all wrong, that American emphasis on the ki that led him towards his nickname when speaking English. 

“That’s me.” 

“A-ki-ra.” Denji mirrored his pronunciation, snickering a little to himself as he toyed with the word. “It’s a little try-hard, man. What, you’re too fancy for a regular name like everybody else? You have to sound like an anime hero or something?” 

“That’s offensive,” Aki muttered, but didn’t entertain the line of conversation further. “It’s the name my parents gave me. And it’s pronounced Akira. If you must know.” 

He repeated it correctly, this time in a quieter, gentler tone. It struck him in a way he hadn’t expected; he paused to listen to him say it again. He hadn’t been called that name in several years now, after he’d shifted to the three-letter nickname of his childhood that fit more cleanly on Starbucks cups, that flowed off the tongues of professors more smoothly. When they called his name — his full name — at his undergrad graduation, several of his classmates had remarked that they had no idea it wasn’t Aki. This had made him feel equal parts incensed and disappointed in himself: that he had put his past life behind him enough to become someone new altogether, and that he had functionally erased the memories of his life before. 

The driver was swerving as he went, yanking the steering wheel all the way to one side, then using the heel of his hand to rotate it all the way around the other. It was making Aki sick to his stomach. He shifted his focus on a fixed point out the window, the very top of a skyscraper, and watched it go by. It was just an imbalance of the equilibrium, a disconnect between his inner-ear fluid and the visual input of the drive that caused a lag. The equivalent of a video game glitch, like when Denji’s character kicked himself around in circles instead of shooting the bad guys. 

When his stomach settled a little and he could actually stand to look at a screen without yacking, Aki opened Twitter. 

Yes, he knew the dangers of entrusting social media with medical advice— he wasn’t a nurse for nothing, after all— but he needed real-time information, quick updates that he could read in a few seconds. Unverified information actually could end up being the most valuable, as it could be hours until a major news network began a broadcast. Or before the major news networks went bust altogether. 

But what to type into the search bar? Boston was too nebulous, would instantly conjure up snapshots of girls’ nights out and bachelor parties and other things he didn’t know or care about. Hospital and sick felt too juvenile, rudimentary. Besides, it would no doubt bring up a whole slew of anti-vax conspiracy nuts, and Aki wasn’t strong enough to begin weeding those out. 

There was one word, though, that seemed to describe the situation perfectly, one that Aki knew Denji would utter incredulously the minute he got the full story: zombie. He could barely bring himself to type it, let alone say it; it still felt so infantilizingly ridiculous that it made him want to burst out laughing instead of take the whole expedition seriously. Zombies were creatures from teen movies who hung out with vampires and werewolves and fell in love with pale-faced young women. Zombies wanted your brains, your guts, your hot, beating heart, and you laughed at them for their audacity to hunger after what was yours. 

He cupped his hand around the phone screen, tilted it away from Denji, and typed the word into the search bar anyway. 

JB (@lavenderhatch13): Zombies on the methadone mile going crazy tonight lmao. 

Mason (@oatmilkhotel): Ummm does someone want to let me know why I just got run up on by a dude with no teeth @ MGH ?? 

mat (@mikoriin): @oatmilkhotel Most normal day in Boston fr

Aki noted the timestamps on the first two: somewhere around when he was walking home. This correlation could be significant, but wasn’t concrete enough to prove anything yet. He bookmarked it, tried to memorize as many of the usernames as he could. He wasn’t sure whether to be glad that people didn’t seem to be freaking out as much as he was or afraid that his extremity wasn’t corroborated by any other living soul.

Denji nudged his shoulder. “Psst. Hey, Aki.”

“Not now,” he said, biting back the urge to tack on a kid or buddy. “Give me a few minutes to do some more research, okay?” 

“Research is boring,” he whined, “and you’re stressing me out just looking at you.” 

Was Aki supposed to be upset that his entire world crashing down on him had negative consequences on Denji? “That’s too bad, then.” He turned his attention back to his phone.

“Seriously, dude, you’re a basket case, and I have questions about Japan. If you’re going to drag me, like, a thousand miles across the world, the least you could do is answer them.” 

“Six thousand,” Aki corrected, but he acquiesced and closed the Twitter search for the time being. “All right. Let’s hear them. Quickly, though.” The Uber driver had his phone mounted on a little clip in the air vents; it displayed an ETA in around fifteen minutes. 

“Okay.” He took a deep breath like he was preparing for a recitation. “Are we gonna stay in one of those hotels? You know, with the mats and the sliding doors and the pillows on the ground?” 

“ Ryokan?” Aki wrinkled his nose. “God, no, Denji, how rich do you think I am?” 

Denji hunched his shoulders and thrust his palms outward. “I don’t know!” he said. “Maybe you’re a secret J-Pop idol and you had to leave your fortune behind and move here to escape your insane fans.”
“Because I’d look so amazing as a bleached blond.” Denji tugged on his own hair, bleached so brightly it turned to straw when he forgot to condition it. “No. We’ll be staying with my cousin, actually. I think.” In all the excitement, he’d forgotten to actually send the text to Michiko, but he was sure it would be fine. They still talked from time to time, even if he sometimes forgot to return her calls. 

“Okay,” Denji said. Aki didn’t know how he managed to keep up that air of excitement even throughout this whole mess. He supposed he was just that kind of person. Part of him wished that he’d been born as that kind of person, too. “Are we gonna be meeting your parents and stuff once we get there, too?” 

Aki tensed. It seemed impossible that Denji and Power still didn’t know anything about his life before he’d moved there— but why would he tell them? So they could pity him? So Power could make fun of him? “Yeah,” he said. “Once we get there. You’ll meet them.” 

“Awesome.” Denji was undeterred. “Do you have siblings, too? Oh, man, I’d love to see how another Hayakawa turned out. How many are there? Are they as stuck-up as you, or does the gene skip a generation?” 

He didn’t bother to explain to Denji that that was really, really not how genetics— or generations, for that matter— worked. “I’m an only child. Sorry.” 

“Aw, man. That’s such a bummer. I guess it does explain why you’re such a control freak, though. You didn’t grow up having to fight for everything you have with a bunch of other weirdos your parents just happened to saddle you with.” Aki was half-listening by that point; he focused his attention at one point on the cityscape horizon, feeling a little sick to his stomach, like he was on a sailboat instead of in an Uber X. “Yoshida has sisters, too, Kuniko and Chiaki. And it explains a lot about him, I think. I forgot that you haven’t met him yet. You’d like him, I promise. Hey, maybe he could come—” 

“No,” Aki said. The plan was already crappy enough without involving innocents in it, especially innocents whose relationship to them was tentative and fragile at best. “It’s bad enough having to be responsible for you and Power. I’m not adding one more variable into this plan.” 

“You don’t have to be responsible for us,” Denji said, crossing his arms. 

“Obviously not. I’m not your brother.” 

“I know that.” There was a knife-point of anger to his tone. “You were the one that said you were.” 

“I did not,” Aki said. 

He scoffed. “You did too!” 

“When?” 

“Just now?” 

“I don’t remember it,” Aki said. His head was pounding hard enough that it was hard to focus on Denji’s speaking at all, let alone the specifics of his responses. “Speaking of. We should probably call ahead to Power’s bar to let her know we’re coming.” 

A man’s voice picked up after about three rings and a half, long enough that he had to wonder whether he was going to answer at all. “Hey.” No greeting. A low hum of chatter pulsed in the background. 

“Hello,” Aki said. “I’m wondering if it would be possible to speak to an employee of yours. I’m her roommate.” 

“Who?” 

“That would be Power—ah, shit.” He slapped his hand over the speaker, mouthed what’s her name? to Denji, who only stared at him blank-faced and slack-jawed. 

“Her name,” Aki whispered. “I can’t remember what her real name is.” 

Denji snickered. “You can remember our cleaning schedule for the next five weeks, but you can’t remember Power’s name?” 

“Shut the hell up.” He shoved the phone into his hand, muttering tell him tell him tell him. 

“Hello?” Denji said. Like the person on the other end of the line might have changed within the last ten seconds. “Yeah. We’re looking for”--- he suppressed a snicker with the back of his hand— “ Karen.” 

“Karen?” Aki whispered back. “We don’t have time for joking around right now.” 

“I’m not.” He was beaming. “Her parents actually named her Karen. In this day and age. Don’t tell her I told you.” 

“I won’t.” He supposed he was in no position to make fun of anyone’s name, what with the way Americans were constantly butchering his own, but still. Of all things. No wonder she got so defensive whenever he tried to ask her about her actual name. 

Denji’s smile dropped as he kept listening to the man on the other end. “He says there’s no Karen,” he said. “Maybe she only goes by Power at work?” 

“No, if he hired her, he’d have to know her legal name anyway.” He stuck out his hand. “Here. Give it back.”

“Hello?” The bar guy was yelling louder now, either to be heard over the hubbub or to regain someone’s attention during their hot-potato phone shuffle. “Listen, did you have an actual question?” 

“Yes, sorry.” Aki squeezed the sides of the phone tighter. “Are you positive that there’s no one under that name present? No Power, or— or Karen, either?” 

“Would have remembered somebody calling themselves Power.”

“That’s impossible,” Aki said. The climate control inside the car was suddenly way too hot, burning his skin and making beads of sweat drip down his temples onto his cheeks. 

“Don’t know what to tell you, man. We close at two.” 

The cold, hard click of a disconnected line. He nodded, hung up. Let the phone slide between them onto the middle seat. 

“She’s not there,” he said to Denji. 

“Who?” He twisted his lip into a sneer. “ Karen ?” 

“Shut up, Denji.” 

“Try calling her,” he suggested. “Bust her ass on speakerphone so we can all hear it.” 

“It’s just you and me in the car,” Aki said, but dialed anyway. 

No answer. 

“Try again,” Denji prodded, somewhat unhelpfully.
“Thanks for the genius plan, Sherlock.” 

“You’re welcome,” he said, smiling brightly. 

Aki redialed, swiped over to his emergency contacts section and highlighted Power’s name. It was right at the top, followed by Denji, Michiko, and finally Himeno. (Michiko was more of a sentimental thing rather than functional, hence her place in the bottom half; Himeno had been thrown in there as a last-second fear of a what-if situation.) 

The phone rang for a long time. Too long, he thought. If it were him considering whether or not to answer his phone, he would’ve made the decision ages ago. Within the first two or three rings, for sure. He hadn’t been counting— why hadn’t he started counting? — but he estimated that he was on the sixth ring by now. Seventh. Eighth. How long did phones ring for, anyway? Were American phones different? Had Power downloaded some sort of jailbreak that had extended her phone ringing capacity to infinity? 

“Aki?” Her voice crackled along the line, forgoing a hello as per usual. She sounded quieter than she normally did—  or maybe he was imagining things. Either way, there was definitely a large congregation of people in the background, a thick layer of chatter driving a wall between Power’s speech and Aki’s ear. 

“Power,” he said, and he was surprised to hear the slight crack on the first syllable, like he was saying his first word after going the entire day without speaking. “Power, thank God.” 

“Huh?” Someone in the background let out an odd little yelp, like a dog getting its tail stepped on. “I know you miss me when I’m gone, but there’s no need to bring Him into it.” 

“No—” Aki fumbled for the right words. Denji had been relatively easy to convince. He didn’t have much tying him to the city anyway, not much to leave behind if he got up and left. Power, however, was different, not to mention her insane streak of stubbornness that led to them butting heads on more than a few occasions. “I’m not happy to hear from you. I just need you to do something for me, if you can.” 

A sigh blown out between teeth, a half-hearted, self-deprecating chuckle. “Jeez. And here I was thinking I was so special, huh?” 

You are, he wanted to say, somehow, you find a way. “You’re not.” 

This time, the voice was colder, the tone stretched a little thinner. “Can I help you? In case you weren’t aware, I actually have to work for a living. At least one of us in the house has to have a real job.” 

Everything was a game with Power, a tiptoeing, trapeze-walking balancing act. If he came on too strong in the front half, she’d laugh in his face and hang up the phone without a second thought. If he waited too long to address the issue, she’d grow bored and suspicious and disregard him altogether. He decided to let the work issue drop for the moment. “Have you heard of anything strange happening in the city lately? On the news, or on social media or anything?” 

“Aki, I’ve been mixing drinks for the past four hours. No, I haven’t had a chance to catch up with the latest Twitter hashtags.” 

“Right.” He sniffed a little, wiped his face with the back of his hand. “And where would that happen to be?” 

“Twitter?” 

“The drinks.” 

“At work,” she said. “Same place I’ve always been. For the past few years. As long as you’ve known me.” Her sentences were starting to creep up at the ends, curling all her statements into questions: am I at the same place? Have I always been?

Aki was starting to feel like he was the one who was crazy, like he was the one who’d made a huge mistake by calling her in the first place. Denji was leaning in to hear her voice over the speakerphone; he raised his fist and mimed twisting a knife into someone’s side. He nodded, steeled himself to deliver the wham line, the blow that would bring all her lying to its knees. “I know you don’t like me, Power,” is what came out instead. 

Well. That was one way to do it. 

`Denji tsk ed, raked his fingers across one side of his face. Power went quiet altogether. That group of people, whoever they were, still blabbered away in the background, all of them in hushed tones, none of them laughing. “Have I said that.” 

“No.” (Yes, actually, in many sardonic iterations of I hate you, but he figured she wouldn’t see those as fit.) “You don’t have to. It’s obvious in the way you act. The way you behave towards me. The way you only give me the time of day if I’m doing something for you in return.” He exhaled. “That’s not how these types of things are supposed to work, Power. We’re supposed to be equals. And because of you and your high horse, we’re not.” 

Power started to respond but aborted the sentence, the half-spoken word caught in her throat. “And you called to tell me this?” 

“I called to tell you that I know.” Aki’s hands were starting to shake again; he tucked them underneath his thighs so Denji wouldn’t see. “I know you’re not a bartender. I know you’ve been lying to us for years about where you go every day.” 

She laughed, but it was hollow and quiet, not the way she usually did, so damn loud that it woke Aki up while he was trying to sleep. “Are you and Denji smoking crack over there? Did you swipe a couple Xannys from work to take the edge off? I’m not even mad or anything. I’m just asking for you to deal me in next time, you know?”
“I’m not— we’re not junkies any more than you’re a bartender,” Aki said. “Seriously. It’s not even about the lying anymore. You need to tell us where the hell you are so we can come by, because something really, really bad is about to happen here and I don’t want you to—” He stopped himself. What was he so afraid of, really? Power being hurt? Power suffering? The sentiment only went one way, but he couldn’t stop himself from feeling it nonetheless. “Just tell us the truth so we can put it into Maps. Jesus.” 

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. One, I am a bartender, so watch your tone of voice. Two, I don’t have to tell you shit, because you’re not the boss of me, Aki.”

“We’re coming to get you,” he said. “Sorry.”

“Oh, my God, Aki, you could not be more of a control freak.” She scoffed; Aki could visualize the flick of hair over her shoulders, the pink-glossed mouth falling open indignantly. “You want to uproot everyone’s life because, what, you saw a sick person? At the hospital? Wow, Aki. Wow. Call the presses. This is never-before-seen information right here.”

He paused. “Who told you that?” 

“Told me what?” 

“That people were getting sick.” He still felt oddly light-headed, probably because he was breathing too much. 

“I can scroll on Twitter while I talk to you,” she said. “Believe it or not, I am actually capable of having two thoughts in my brain at the same time.” 

“You think you’re so goddamn funny? Is that it?” He was yelling and he shouldn’t have been. Denji made eye contact with him, nodded his head silently: keep going. In his expression, though, something tense and afraid looked back at him. “Because I’m getting really sick and tired of your shit, Power. This isn’t just a common cold I’m talking about here. I’m talking about people dying. Suffering for days and days on end until their organs can’t take it and they give out. Okay?” 

“How do you know this?” Her tone is flat. “Who told you?” 

“Nobody had to tell me,” he spat. “I saw it myself.” 

A pause where neither of them said anything at all. 

“You saw it.” 

“Yeah.” Aki’s face was going hot; he turned so he wouldn’t have to look Denji in the eye. “A long time ago. But I remember. I couldn’t forget something like that. Not ever.” 

“Where?” 

“It’s none of your fucking business, Power, how about that?” 

“No. No, you don’t get to scream at me, not when you’re calling me at work to berate me about some stupid SyFy channel bullshit that you don’t even know for a fact exists—” 

“You lied to me,” Aki said. “My trust isn’t something I hand out like candy, you know. It’s something you have to earn, and you took advantage of that.” 

“Oh, big fucking whoop. Cry me a river, Aki, seriously.” 

He couldn’t help himself from pushing deeper, from twisting the knife further. In for a penny, in for a pound, he’d once heard Himeno say. “I don’t know how you expect me to believe a word you say,” he said. “I don’t care anymore. Meet us at Logan or don’t. Goodbye.” 

Denji didn’t ask where he’d seen this happen before, nor did he ask him to call Power back and apologize, and Aki was grateful for both. 

When they arrived at the airport, it was crawling with people, but it was hard to tell whether that was because of the situation or because it was Boston Logan in the middle of the night. 

Businesspeople in suits and ties barking into cell phones, moms ushering sleep-drunk toddlers to the next gate, college kids tapping at laptops and pulling at the strings of their hoodies, custodians with tired eyes and slouched spines. Tourists in I <3 Boston shirts, locals in Red Sox jerseys that hadn’t been washed since they’d won the World Series. 

He’d half expected to walk into— well, a SyFy movie set, just like Power said. He was bracing himself for a post-apocalyptic hellscape when they walked in, zombies crawling all over each other to rip out spinal cords and dash brains out against the TSA machines. What he’d actually do in that situation, he had no idea, but it couldn’t hurt to mentally prepare himself anyways. 

But the airport was surprisingly calm, almost eerily so. He didn’t get the chance to travel much, having been to Logan Airport actually only one time, for a tour of another nursing school he’d attended down in Washington, D.C. He’d remembered the airport as much warmer, the people inside buzzing with something closer to excitement than fear or even monotony. The murals bright, the high ceilings airy and welcoming instead of ominous. Six-dollar bottles of water and miniature pretzels in bite-size bags. 

“Hello,” Aki said to the young woman behind the counter. She looked a little squirrely in her movements, tying and untying a paper luggage tag by its strings. 

“Hi there.” Her eyes narrowed in what was probably an expression of suspicion. Aki didn’t blame her; most people either came to customer service desks to complain, scream, whine, or all of the above. Waltzing up to a real life human being in the airport to buy a ticket hadn’t been commonplace since the early aughts. 

“We’re looking to purchase tickets.” 

“Oh,” she said. “All right. Yes. What can I help you with, then?” 

“We’re trying to fly into New Chitose,” Aki said, “but Asahikawa would be fine, too, if you can’t make that happen. Or even Hakodate. We’re not picky.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, in that saccharine customer-service tone that was meant to placate them from going into a blind rage. “All outgoing flights have been canceled due to the incoming inclement weather.” 

Denji tilted his head. “Weather looked fine on the way over here.” 

“There’s a storm coming in.” The woman tugged at her lapel pin, which was an enamel cast of a tiny airplane. The wings were starting to tilt down, the flight headed for a nosedive. “Thunder and lightning has already started further down the coast. It’s headed towards the city right now.” 

“You’re not serious.” 

“Unfortunately so,” she said. Her eyebrows were pinched at the middle in a display of remorse that Aki didn’t buy as being real. “If you’d like, I can arrange for an alternative—” 

He didn’t stick around long enough to hear the end of her spiel. The important part was that they weren’t going to be able to leave, at least not tonight, anyway, and that meant that he needed to formulate a new plan in about three seconds before the earth imploded or something. 

“Maybe it’s a good thing,” Denji said— god bless him, and all his unbridled optimism. “We could go home and play Super Smash until we’re too tired to stay awake.” 

“No.” Aki didn’t want to do either of those things. He wanted to go home, but home home, to a place that Denji had never seen and he hadn’t allowed himself to imagine in years. “I’m calling my cousin. Wait here.” 

Denji nodded, pulled out his phone and started his rotation through his TikTok feed. Aki swiped over to WhatsApp, pinged Michiko, at the top. It should still have been late morning or early afternoon in Hokkaido. If she was at work, she’d have her phone close by enough to hear it ring. It would only be a few more moment until he could talk to her, tell her everything, get some answers or some advice on where to direct this train wreck of a situation next. 

The dial tone faded into silence, then crackled to life with her voice mail inbox. 

“Fuck,” Aki said, in English, even though he’d been thinking in Japanese. 

You’ve reached Michiko, her voice said, high-pitched and a little more sing-song than she sounded when she spoke to him in real life. Tell me what’s going on and I’ll call you back. Promise!

“Hey, Michiko.” It felt good to speak in Japanese— he didn’t get the chance as often as he’d like to, and most people who claimed they could didn’t know anything beyond an anime-level vocabulary. “I’m sorry to bother you while you’re at work.” 

It’s okay, he imagined her saying. I’m glad to hear from you. 

“Something happened,” he went on, then clarified. “Something weird is going on. I don’t know exactly what. A few patients came into the hospital the other day and they looked exactly like— like Taiyo and Mom and Dad. You know me, Michiko, you know I’m not one for hyperbole. When I say exactly, I mean exactly. Down to the exact shade of their skin and everything.” He coughed. “And then when I was coming home today, some crazy person jumped out at me from the sidewalk and started—- wrestling with me? Biting me? I don’t know what he was trying to do, to be honest with you. You’re probably thinking that it was just a junkie, a homeless guy off his rocker, and normally I’d agree with you. Maybe not in those exact words, but still. I could see it in his eyes. Do you remember? How they looked at the end?” 

He wasn’t sure if she did. It had been a long time. He hadn’t really ever discussed what happened with her after the fact. “It was their eyes, Michiko. Their eyes were all the same. That shade of yellow, the iris all mottled and swirled in the middle, the whites so bloodshot it looked like something had burst inside of them. That’s the only reason I know— well, that I’m pretty sure I’m not crazy. I remember those eyes. I remember the first time Taiyo opened his.” He ran his fingers through his hair, tugging at the ends before tucking them behind his ears. Denji was wandering nearby, kicking stray pieces of lint along the carpets. He couldn’t understand him, clearly, but Aki was still on edge even speaking the words out loud in his vicinity. 

“It scared me, Michiko,” he said, softer. “I still see it all the time. When I’m on the train to work, when I close my eyes at night—” He took a shaky breath, exhaled it slowly. It was just his brain. Sending signals to the rest of his body to freak the fuck out without taking into consideration the fact that he had things to get done. He was breathing too much, which meant that the ratio of carbon dioxide to oxygen in his blood stream was getting skewed, making him dizzy. In, out. It was okay. He could regulate it. 

“I can’t take it if that happens to one of them. I don’t think I’m strong enough to do it.” Aki paused, the least rational part of himself waiting for a response that he knew would never arrive. Don’t get so down on yourself, he could imagine her saying, laughing the way she always did when she ragged on him. If you keep sitting around and sulking, you’ll never find out for sure, will you? “I’m doing what I can,” he said. “Hopefully I’ll see you soon.” 

“You done?” Denji said when his stream of chatter dried up and he stabbed the big red END CALL button. 

“For now.” Aki sat down in one of a pair of chairs facing the doorway. Denji took the other, kicking his feet back and forth like a child on an amusement park ride.

“What are we gonna do?” he asked. 

“I’m figuring it out.” Aki sank further into the shitty airport-issue seats. The material was smooth and sticky, clinging to the backs of his thighs through his clothing. He wished, not for the first time that day, that an unlimited supply of Purell would drop out of the sky. 

What would they do? Denji’s question had irked him, but it wasn’t an altogether unreasonable one. Plan A was shot to death by an unforeseen disaster that hadn’t even been on his radar. Power was nowhere to be found, he still couldn’t get through to his cousin, and Denji, god bless him, was no help in the plan-formulating department. It would take some kind of a miracle to get them through this. 

“Look,” Denji said, and gestured out the window— someone was hauling a duffel bag across their skinny frame, stomping a heavy gait towards the doors. Someone with a shock of pink hair and a tough-chick attitude he could spot from a mile away. 

“We’re going outside,” Aki said, and Denji nodded, trailing a few steps behind him. 

“Power,” he said when they stepped through the sliding doors, and she whipped her head around, pressed an indignant finger to her lips. 

“Shut the hell up, the both of you.” 

“What are you doing here?”

She shrugged a hulking backpack off her shoulders that he hadn’t noticed she’d been carrying, heaved a great sigh as it clattered onto the concrete. “Coming to you,” she said. “Since you obviously weren’t concerned enough to come to me.” 

“Are you serious?” Aki said. “Because we didn’t try hard enough to bust you in a lie?” 

“If you really wanted to, you would.” She smoothed her hair, picked at a speck of dirt underneath her nail. “Anyway. I brought sustenance. Just a little, though. Don’t get too excited.” 

“Sweet,” Denji said, rushing forward to rifle through the back. “Did you bring Sour Patch Kids? Those are my favorite to eat on planes.” 

Power rolled her eyes. “No, I didn’t bring Sour Patch Kids, you imbecile. I’m not a Dollar Tree. You want some, get ‘em yourself.” She unzipped a side pocket, pulled out a long-toothed hammer, pressed a heavy knife into Aki’s hand. 

“Jesus,” he said, startling backwards. He had never held a weapon like that before— at least not one that was intended to hurt other human beings, not just animals or slabs of meat already spliced out on a countertop. “What is all this? I thought you said I was overreacting.” 

“I say a lot of things.” She tapped the hammer against the softer flesh of her palm. “Be grateful I showed up at all.” 

He was, in his own odd way. “Hey,” Denji complained. “Nothing for me? What am I, chopped liver?” 

“You’re the baby,” Power said, to which he crossed his arms, made a face. “Show me why I should trust you enough and I’ll think about it.” 

“Actually, just FYI, I’m not even five full years younger than both of you guys, which when you think about it puts us in the exact same age bracket, which makes me just as responsible—” 

“Wait.” Something far off in the distance rustled; Aki held up a singular finger, shhh. “Do you two hear anything?”

“No?” Denji tilted his head. “It’s the middle of the night.” 

“There,” Power said, nodding. Aki looked up in her direction: she was right. A few paces away, a figure shifted its weight back and forth on shaky legs. Their face was shrouded by darkness, only a flash of pale leg illuminated by the street lights. 

“They’re coming towards us.” He dug his nails into the handle of the knife, then felt stupid for doing so. What skill set, exactly, did he think he had in terms of hand to hand combat? There was no magic enchantment here that would instantly turn him into an action hero. Not that he’d be qualified to be one, anyway: he was just a skinny kid from the countryside with a couple of track-and-field credits under his belt. Nothing more. 

“There’s two of them,” Denji said. One right behind the other, they shuffled along in perfect synchronization, as if being commanded by an unseen puppeteer. 

“Run,” Power said— and Aki started to, but the two of them ran faster. 

He braced himself a little sooner this time, but the man’s body weight was heavier than the woman’s had been, and it was harder to keep a barrier of separation in between them, especially not with the growling and moaning and squealing sounds he was making. The sound was the worst part: animalistic with the shadow of a human voice underneath, like someone screaming for help from inside a locked box. Aki threw a punch against the side of his jaw; his head reeled back unnaturally and then popped back up again, bones crunching.
A few paces away, Power was slamming her hammer against the temples of the other man, bits of skull flying off in all directions. A fine spray of blood soaked her collar; she wiped the hammer on the hem of her shirt and kept going. 

“Kill it, Aki,” Power roared, but her voice was fuzzy and faraway in his head. “Fucking kill it!” 

He wanted to ask why she used that word. Why this person, this human being with Nantucket reds and a sloppy haircut and a name and a face and a life, was so insignificant in her mind to be reduced to an it. Yes, his gnashing teeth were in Aki’s face and his yellow eyes were gleaming, but he didn’t exist any less than him. He didn’t deserve to be killed any more than Aki did.

But he was getting closer. The strength in Aki’s forearms was weakening little by little as he braced the man away from his head, turned his cheek so that he was snapping towards his ponytail instead of his nose. His teeth caught in the mess of his hair and snagged it towards him, ripping off a few strands and gulping them down, the little pink slug of his tongue darting in and out of his jaw. 

He was still a person; Aki recognized that. He gripped the handle of the knife tighter, raised his left hand to bring it down. It was shaking so much that it threw kaleidoscopes against the glass doors of the airport, tossing the light back and forth as he trembled. 

Power raised her hammer— he couldn’t see it, but he could tell by the soft clang it made as she lifted it back over her shoulder. He pictured it colliding with the man’s skull, mincing the flesh of his brain, shards of bone and brain and blood splintering off from the site of impact. He pictured his wife-father-bestfriend-daughter collapsing into their hands after seeing his face on the news. The choked gag they would make as they were called into the morgue to identify him and were met only with his bottom half. “Today, Aki,” she yelled. He lifted the knife higher. 

“I can’t,” he whispered, and then his skull detonated into a fine mist of pink and red, the crack of metal against bone so loud that it reverberated through his muscles like a gunshot. The body— his body — swayed a bit before slumping over, relieving the pressure on Aki’s chest. He took a full inhale for the first time in what felt like hours. When he slowly scraped himself back on his feet, his limbs felt new and foreign to him, a baby taking its first steps. 

In the fetal position on the sidewalk, the man looked more like one of his patients than ever. Little girls and college bros and grandmas and CEOs all slouched into that same stance eventually. Not when the pain got to be too much to handle, like you would think. It was later, when the worst of the pain had worn off, when all the visitors had gone home and the flowers were wilting on the bedside table. When they were alone for the first time, and the hallways were too long and too dark to see all the way down without flicking on a stuttering light. 

“Lesson one,” Power said, breathing hard. “Learn to fight your own battles, because that’s the first and last time I cut you a break like that.” 

Aki pitched forward, planted his hands on both his knees, seasick. “You killed him,” he said, caught between that and you saved my life. 

“Just doing my job.” Power stood up to flick the bloodstains off of her forearms. “Huh. I’ve always wanted to use that line. Kinda makes me sound like an action hero, don’t you think?” 

Aki’s mind was reeling way too fast to think about action movies or superheroes or words in general, outside from the ones he was trying and failing to force out. “What—” 

She waved her hand. “Don’t sweat it.” 

Don’t sweat it? Don’t sweat it? Power had just single-handedly taken out what could only be described as a zombie straight from the pages of The Walking Dead, and her word of wisdom was not to sweat it. “I’m going to sweat it,” he said, planting his feet firmer into the concrete. “I’m going to sweat it hard, actually. I’m going to be doing nothing but sweating until you tell me what the actual fuck is going on here—” 

“People are leaving,” she said. Her face was calm and blank, her eyes pointed in Aki’s direction but vague and unfocused. “Because of the storm. It’s gonna empty out pretty soon. You might as well just stay here.” 

“Stay here?” His hands were shaking. He shoved them in his pocket, rocked back and forth to redirect his energy. “For how long?” 

Power sighed, held up one finger while she tapped out a frantic message on her phone. Aki heard the ping ping of her messenger app, the click click click of her response. “We don’t know yet. Could be hours, could be days. Can’t make any promises.” 

He nodded, turned to face the unyielding steel doors of the airport. Something pervasive in his gut told him that if he walked through them now, the world would be very, very different the next time he walked out. 

Close by, Aki could hear Denji’s breath catching in the back of his throat, the way he was trying to disguise it with ill-timed coughs. The puddle of blood was blooming wider, so dark against the anemic concrete. Seeping into the cracks and gaps between the tiles— Aki took a step back to avoid it staining the tips of his shoes. 

“Power,” he said. “Who the hell is we?” 

Chapter Text

Aki didn’t understand how Denji could stand to sleep through the whole night. 

Maybe he shouldn’t have been surprised. This was the kid, after all, that conked out through house parties, through lectures, through that one time when a storm not unlike this one shook the apartment building so hard he’d worried it would fall down. Even so. It seemed impossible for him to sleep at all, let alone sleep like a baby, but there he was: head curled against the arm of the airport chair, sneakered feet dangling off the side. A light snore ripped from his small body, in time with the rise and fall of his chest, in and out. Normally, it bothered Aki, but this time he was glad to hear it. He would listen to it all night long if it meant that Denji was breathing. 

Aki hadn’t slept at all. He’d tried to, sure, but every time he closed his eyes he saw red splatters on cold linoleum and yellowing, marbled eyes. Normally, he’d be concerned about this effect on his nervous system, the slow delay that would erode his decision-making skills. But he’d been a nurse— in training, at least— for longer than he’d been an apocalypse survivor, and restless nights were no stranger to him. At the very least, this time he didn’t have piles of paperwork to file or a thesis paper to chip away at. 

Power was at the opposite side of the gate, lying on her back with her feet pressed parallel against the glass wall. Her hair was undone, swirling out onto the grimy carpet in a mess of pink and blonde. She was awake— that was the main thing that jumped out at him as unusual. With all the horn-tooting and chest-puffing she’d done yesterday about being able to weather her way through any storm, he’d expected her to be sleeping like a baby by now. Instead, she was fiddling with something in her pocket, tapping her feet one-two-three-four against the glass. 

Aki would’ve tsk ed at her and told her to get up, that she didn’t know where people’s feet had been, that their germs would mat up her nice, pretty hair. Aki would have. On any other day. 

Right now, he was more focused on the crust of blood against his collar, the dark splatters against his chest. It made his stomach lurch every time he looked down and happened to catch a glimpse of it, like the big drop on a roller coaster ride that he’d never signed up to go on. 

It wasn’t his first time being covered in blood— of course. It was his first time, however, being covered by the blood of someone whom he’d considered a friend. Or someone who’d spilled their own blood in order to protect his. 

It felt about a million times worse than it would have were it a stranger’s. 

He decided, after a very brief deliberation, that it was okay to leave Power and Denji by themselves for a few minutes, given that Power was not only awake but a professional zombie-killer in disguise. And that, since he was the de facto provider and organizer of the group, it was okay for him to take a few minutes to recuperate, since the benefit to all of them would far outweigh the overall cost. 

It took a few minutes of poking around to find the nearest men’s room— down the hallway of the gate, around the corner, past the now-shuttered Starbucks and the gift shop with its to-go sachets of Dramamine locked behind metal bars. People were sleeping in various positions across the gate, which appeared to provide various levels of comfort. One man was curled up with his knees almost to his shoulders in a leather chair; a woman with a small, round face lay on her stomach like a starfish, her head turned to one side. 

Inside the bathroom, he braced his hands against the sink and raised his head to catch his own reflection in the mirror. 

He looked fucking terrible. Unsurprisingly, considering the last ten-ish hours had consisted of him being drafted into an action movie without his consent, but it still jarred him a little to see that version of himself that he didn’t recognize. His eyes were the worst part of it all. Sunken in and hollowed around the edges, ringed in purple-black circles that almost looked like he’d been sucker-punched. His hair was undone, falling in loose tangles around his shoulders. Aki leaned forward, partially to rinse the grime off of his face, and partially so he wouldn’t have to look at himself anymore. Once his face was somewhat cleaner, he started working on the bloodstains. 

It wasn’t easy to scrub them out while avoiding looking at them, but he was trying his best to do the impossible. Cold water— any nurse worth his salt could tell you that— but the trickle from the faucet was barely enough to gather in the cupped basin of his palms. A cold sweat trickled down the back of his neck. Blood— there was so much blood, splattered all across his collar, caked on the hem of his shirt— too much for him to scrub out with just his hands, too much for anyone to clean. There had to be way—- there had to be a way to stay clean, even in a time like this, untouched and pure of the chaos. There was always a way; he would always find it. This was who Aki Hayakawa was. He exhaled, scooped up another dribble of water. Tried again.

“Hey.” Power didn’t bother to knock, or announce her presence beyond that simple word. 

“Power,” Aki said. “What brings you to the men’s room on this fine morning.” 

“Ha, ha.” She winced at her own reflection, dipped her finger underneath the faucet and swiped away stray mascara underneath her eyes. “I could ask you the same thing.” 

“Got something on me,” he said lamely, pulling the hem at the bottom to stretch the fabric thin. Where it before had been riddled with blood spots, pools of sink water collected in their place. He was trying his best— cold water, as any self-respecting medical professional would know — but they’d congealed into a rust-colored powder, seeping into the fibers. At the very least, he could appreciate the fact that they’d turned brown instead of bright red. It still turned his stomach, but a little less so than it had before. 

Power rolled her eyes, smoothed her hair back into a tighter ponytail. “I thought nurses were supposed to be good with blood.” 

“We are. It’s mostly the unexpected and particularly gruesome deaths that we struggle with.” 

“Ah.” She nodded her head, pulled a few strands out of the ponytail to float beside her face. “I’d think that someone like you would be more accustomed to that, but I guess people surprise you.” 

Aki stopped. Stood up taller, looked Power in the eye. “Someone like me?” 

“Yeah,” she said, voice solid. “You know. Somebody that’s seen what you’ve seen. Lost the people you’ve lost.” 

He was breathing faster now, even though he had no reason to be. Power didn’t know anything— she was just talking nonsense, throwing things against the wall and seeing what stuck. She didn’t know his family, she didn’t know where he came from, and she didn’t know anything about the person he was before he came to Boston. “People I’ve lost?” 

“Mmhmm.” Power leaned back to stretch her hamstrings. “There’s been no small amount of them, I’d say.” 

“What the hell are you talking about?” 

“I think you know what I mean, Aki.” 

“Say it.” His breath caught. 

She shrugged, grunting as she released the stretch. “It’s too bad, actually. Although don’t think that you were the only one who was saddened by the loss. Even I have to admit he was such a good kid, you know,” she said. “Taiyo.”

The sound went out of the room, then, like a vacuum stunning everything into silence, like being catapulted without a helmet into outer space. 

“Where’d you hear that name?” Aki asked, quietly. 

“Same place you heard it,” she said. 

“I cannot fucking believe you.” Stalking his LinkedIn account to poke fun at his headshot was one thing. Searching up his high school on Google images and walking him through the virtual hallways was another. Spam-liking his sparsely populated Instagram account, forwarding chain emails to his work email, setting up a D.O.A. Tinder profile without his permission— fine. All of it was fine. Scouring the depths of his family’s online presence for his brother’s name? Worse— finding out what happened to him? Very, very much the opposite of fine. And for the cherry on top of the glorious shit sundae: lying about it to his face for the entire time they’d known each other. “I— Jesus.” He chuckled, leaned forward to scrub his face in his hands. “And I actually thought I was getting somewhere with you.” 

She tilted her head. “Isn’t this what people are supposed to do when they get to know each other? Share secrets? Swap stories? When you think about it, it’s really your fault for not telling me. Like I wasn’t gonna find out anyway.” 

“Now it’s my fault.” Typical. He should’ve expected something like this from Power. Power who blamed him for her dirty clothes strewn around the apartment, Power who would do anything to shirk her chores onto either one of them. Power of missed rents and uninvited guests. 

“Yeah, actually. It kind of is.” Power sniffed. “But I think you knew that already.” 

“You know,” Aki said, “even for you, Power, this is low. I never— I never told you that, you had absolutely zero right to stalk me until you found something—” 

“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” She held up a hand, the palm somehow entirely pink, pristine. “I wasn’t stalking you, dude. I actually told you pretty explicitly where I heard it from. Not my fault if you don’t believe me.” 

“You don’t know me.” He gripped the edge of the sink tighter, the blood splatters coalescing with the airport grime to slide down in a graying sludge. 

“I think we both know that isn’t true.” 

“From now on,” Aki said, “keep his name out of your fucking mouth. I mean it.” He realized, disconnectedly, that his body was shaking with the effort. Speaking felt like dragging a line of small rocks up the length of his throat; with each breath, their jagged edges dug deeper into the soft flesh. 

“They say it helps to talk about it,” Power said. “Maybe that’s what’s been holding you back all these years. You’re stingy.” 

“Stingy?” 

“Yeah. With your feelings. With your information.” 

He scoffed. “You couldn’t give two shits about my feelings one way or the other.” 

“You’re probably right,” she said, stifling the germ of a yawn. When she closed her mouth around it, her cheeks bulged with the effort of holding it back. “If it keeps you from getting all pissy about something as insignificant as your brother’s name, though, then it’s for the better. Seriously. I can’t deal with all your moods.” 

“They’re not moods,” he said, “and my brother is not insignificant.”

“I didn’t say he was.” She clicked her tongue against the back of her teeth. “Sheesh. Touchy, touchy.” 

Blood rushed hot and thick past Aki’s ears. “You violated me,” he said, searching for the correct word, still not being sure if he’d found it. “You took something that wasn’t yours to take. I knew you were a liar, Power. Now you’re a thief, too.”

“Trust me, Aki,” she said, “it’s not what you think it is.” 

“No.” He caught her wrist between two of her fingers; she thrashed and wiggled and squirmed around until he let go, like a fish stuck through with a big metal hook. “No more trust me, Power. You don’t get to use trust me anymore. I trusted that you were at work, that you were a bartender, that you actually gave half a shit about me, and as it turns out, none of those things were true. That’s the last time I make that mistake.” 

Aki realized, with a slightly guilty twinge, that he wanted Power to feel bad. He wanted to see her face crumple, her smile fade. He wanted to see tears well in her eyes— drip down her cheeks, even, which would be the real cherry on top of the shit sundae. Anything, really, other than her screaming and yelling and calling him a bitch or some other cuss word that he’d never learned in his high school English classes. “That’s cute,” she said, and it made him want to slap her across the face. “You still think this is about sides. You still think we’re going to get anywhere by teaming up and taking care of our neighbors. How adorable.” She laughed. “Did you want us to hold hands in a circle and sing Kumbaya, too?” 

“Shut the hell up.” His patience was wearing thin. 

“You see, Aki,” she said, doing just the opposite of shutting the hell up, “as you’ve so astutely noticed, we’re officially past the point of normalcy. The point of no return, if you will.” The phrase sent a little bit of a chill down his spine, even though he reminded himself that it was Power saying it, not the CDC. “You did a pretty good job of picking the airport, though. Not a bad place to hide out, all things considered. Bathrooms, running water, secured rooms. Appreciate the forward thinking.” 

“I wasn’t forward thinking of anything,” he said. “And I’m not hiding out. We’re waiting here until the storm blows over, and then we’re getting out of here. Denji and me.” 

“Aw.” She twisted her bottom lip into a mock pout, Betty Boop exaggerated. “No more room for me in your little plan?” 

“I told you to be quiet.” 

“You know as well as I do that all it takes is one of those bastards to get through here, and then we’re fucked. Upside down, sideways, ass over ankles. Fucked.” She stepped closer, intimidating even though Aki towered several inches above her. “You understand what I’m saying?” 

“I know what fucked means,” he snapped. “I’m foreign, not stupid. Try and remember that.” 

He also knew that it was more than possible that whatever infection was already present in the airport. If it really was the same one that his parents had had, the germ already existed in Asia, at the very least. Logan saw 1,000 planes a day, which meant hundreds of thousands of individuals flying in and out in a twenty-four hour period. Tracking the exact amount was a Sisyphean task that would be better suited as an eternal punishment than a feasible goal— okay, he told himself, okay, scratch that. Scratch it all. Assume that at the very least, there’s been thousands of people coming from Asia, hundreds from Japan, maybe even several from Hokkaido, from his parents’ town, from the house he grew up in. At the very least, he had to assume that they were already done for. 

“We’re on the same team now,” he said slowly. “We’re both in the same boat if this thing goes south. That’s what you’re saying?” 

“Yes,” Power said, her expression going slack, her voice dropping into an exasperated breathy register. “Yes, genius, that’s been exactly what I’ve been saying to you this whole time. So nice of you to finally decide to listen.” 

Oh, my God. The only thing standing between him and certain death was Power. Not God, not any kind of zombie, not even himself— Power held the keys to the proverbial kingdom here. A few days ago, the thought would’ve filled Aki with a feeling not entirely unlike relief, but not exactly identical, either. At the very least, he would have appreciated the opportunity to share the burden with someone else, to take turns being the parent for once. 

That was a different Power, though. That was the Power that stole his chips and lounged around on the couch and yelled at him about reality TV shows over the phone. That was a Power that was honest to a fault. That was a Power that wouldn’t have lied to him, and definitely not about something like this. 

This Power, however, was someone entirely different. Aki didn’t recognize her at all. 

Which meant that she would have no qualms about tossing him into the line of fire if it meant that she could get away clean. 

Oh, God. 

What was he going to do? 

Travel was out. Officially. If the iota of a chance existed before, it was completely nullified by this point, which meant that any semblance of a support system was nuked. He hadn’t been able to reach Michiko, which meant that she could be anywhere, doing anything: dead asleep in the middle of the night, running for her life along a dirt path, chopped up into pieces and dangling from the cracked lips of a killer. 

God help him. 

There was nothing left. 

“Aki.” The word was mumbled, faraway, like it was filtered through water, like being at the bottom of a swimming pool and hearing the splash of kids’ cannonballs and feeling the swish of your swim trunks around your thighs, but lacking the capability to respond for yourself. “Aki, come on.”
I’m fine, he said, except the sound didn’t come out. 

It was a strange feeling. His brain was consciously processing the fact that he was speaking— this was good, he remarked, it meant he still had some semblance of cognition. If his neurons had already been degenerated, he wouldn’t have been able to follow the train of thought at all. Wouldn’t have recognized words in any form. Even if he couldn’t physically parse them out, couldn’t make his way from thought to reality, at least they existed in his mind. The thought was morbidly comforting. 

“Aki, dude.” Power. “Come on, man, you’re freaking the fuck out on me. Get it together.” 

It was together. He was together. His limbs were still attached to the trunk of his body, the cells of his brain tucked neatly inside his skull. His fingers were not dangling by gory filaments, his lungs not spliced open like angel’s wings, the soft fiber of his muscle was not dangling from the maw of someone who looked just like him. He tapped against his palm, counting out the fingers on his left hand: one, two, three, four, five. All there. 

“I’m okay,” he said, choking around the lump lodged in his throat. “I’m okay. Everything’s fine.” 

“Dude, you gotta breathe. I can hear you strangling yourself half to death over there. Take a deep breath. You’re alive.” 

She was right about that much, but for how longer? He’d known from the start that his time was limited— that was the driving factor in his moving here, in his packing up everything he owned and moving halfway around the world to a country where he knew no one. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen someone die, even, but it was the first time that he’d personally come so close, brushing up against it, clinging onto someone else just to keep from drowning. 

“I know,” he said. “I know. We’re alive. It’s fine.”

“Aki,” she said, and it was different that time. “Aki, it’s going to be fine. We’re all still here.” 

Maybe that was the wrongest part of all— the fact that she had stayed there despite, despite, despite. A regular person would’ve been long gone by now, would’ve turned tail and ran the second he moved to cover his eyes. 

“For now.” He couldn’t help himself from saying it. “I don’t know how long, Power. I’m sorry.” He wished he could tell her that it would all be okay, that by the end of the night they’d be cracking jokes and watching bad reality TV over bowls of ice cream. It was both a strength and a weakness of his, this absence of ability to lie. When patients asked him if they were going to be okay, he found himself unable to look into their eyes and offer empty platitudes; it would feel as pervasive as pulling the plug himself. 

“You do know. We’re all here. Don’t act like you’re dead in the water before you even try.” 

“I am. We are.” 

“We’re not dead, Aki.” 

“We will be.” 

“Aki, I swear to fucking Christ I will fucking hurt you,” Power screamed, and Aki froze. 

He’d heard her yell before. More than a few times, actually. Mostly at Denji for some domestic dispute that couldn’t possibly be settled with calm words like rational adults, or at her manager for screwing up her schedule, or at him for moving the dirty laundry she was “saving for later”. He’d heard her use harsher language than this; that much was certain. Something about it felt different, though. There was a rough undercurrent to her voice that hadn’t been there before, that gravel at the back of her throat pebbling the syllables. It was deeper, richer. Truthful. 

And then her open palm connected with Aki’s face, and he didn’t think about it any more. 

It was like blood flowing backwards into his veins, like carbon dioxide screaming down his esophagus and oxygen huffing out. Her skin cool and crisp against the edge of his jawline. A spark of pain from the point of contact, fading almost as quickly as it arrived. Energy exchange. He’d read about that once in a particularly woo-woo reading assignment from an old professor. Environment to person. Person to person. Person back to environment. 

“Don’t touch me,” he said, stupidly. 

“Your hair’s coming undone,” she said plainly, pointing a finger at the offending hairstyle. 

Aki blinked at her, still panting slightly. “What?” 

“I said your hair’s coming undone. Falling in your face like a crazy person. You gotta fix it, like, right now.” 

He swatted her hand away. “I didn’t realize the zombie apocalypse came with a fashion show.” 

“Maybe it does,” she said. “But it’s gonna be a hell of a lot harder to fight them with your hair hanging in your face like the girl from The Ring.” 

He huffed, fumbled at his left wrist with the fingers of his right hand— the same place he always kept his hair tie. The groove between the base of his thumb and the knob of his wrist bone was suspiciously and surprisingly bare, the skin gone smooth and pale. 

“Need something?” Power’s voice was light, almost sing-song. 

“Did you really steal my—-” 

“Nope,” she said, and pressed something small and stretchy into his palm. “Here you go.” 

When he unfurled it, he was holding onto a hair tie, bright pink and bedazzled, with little plastic stars hugging the elastic. “It’s pink.”

“Good observation.” 

“Have you ever seen me wear anything that could be described as remotely close to pink? Ever in my life?” 

“Have you ever seen me kill a zombie before?” 

Any argument he might have had was exhausted. He thanked her, crisscrossed the hair tie around his fingers so he could corral his hair back into its ponytail. Aki was suddenly exhausted, the light extinguished from behind his eyes. He thought of his bed back at the Rat City place, the room that he paid an exorbitant price for the privilege of occupying every night. He thought of regular alarms and loud neighbors. Midnight ambulances and early-morning karaoke. He’d never missed something he hated so much. 

A sudden buzz in his left back pocket. Himeno, coming in hot with just one word: dude. He almost had to laugh at its absurdity— they had no clue how much longer their phones, or even the internet in general, would last, and she was using her precious remaining moments to text him dude. 

Hello? he sent back. 

Shits rlyyy hitting the fan lol

Aki didn’t see what exactly was so laugh-out-loud worthy about this situation. But Himeno had been there for him when the rest of the cohort shut him out, had stayed late with him after work and walked with him to the Green Line even though, no, she didn’t actually live on it. Are you safe 

Course, she wrote. Why wouldnt I be

I don’t know. I don’t suppose it would have anything to do with the impending zombi apocalypse outside?

in english its called a ZOMBIE and idk im still texting u so im alive arent i hahah

Fair enough, Himeno. Sorry for trying to be nice. 

ok waitwaitwait im sorry. Yes im ok. 

Aki exhaled, rubbing the hard plate of his sternum with the palm of his hand. One of his supervisors had told him to do this in the first week of nursing school, noticing his tense jaw, his sweaty temples. The heat of your skin, she’d said, is more comforting than you think. It’s regulating. Grounding. Feeling the swell of your own heartbeat in your chest, muscle rattling against bone. I’m glad to hear you’re safe, he wrote. I was worried 

Aaaaweee, she texted back. so he does have feelings after all 

I’m not really in the mood for jokes right now, Himeno. 

Where are u guys?? 

He hesitated. (Why did he hesitate? He wasn’t sure. Something inside of him just gave that sticky little twinge of caution, the check-engine light blinking on in his peripheral.) Logan 

Himeno sent back a flurry of punctuation, one after the other: little curlicue tails of the ??? bumping into the solid !!! lines. Why would you be there of all places!

Tried to get out. Couldn’t. Waiting

Ur gonna be waiting 4ever

Thanks. Wasn’t aware of that before

She had that sort of tendency— to twist even acts of compassion into something tough and gnarled. Sometimes, when the two of them were walking to the train station, or ducked into a bar for a couple of shitty Sam Adams, he could feel the shift. If the conversation veered too closely into something resembling a personal revelation, something deeper about themselves that couldn’t be gleaned from a LinkedIn sweep or an email signature, she would change. Everything had to be funny, then, every answer to his questions a snappy quip. She couldn’t speak to him like an equal. Everything about their relationship was cloaked in performance.

What exactly are u waiting FOR?

Another valid question, another answer that she more likely than not would laugh off, wouldn’t be able to wrap her mind around the implications of. The original response would be a plane to Japan, but, seeing as several hours had passed without the low thrum of a jet engine on the tarmac, that was seeming less and less viable by the second. So his goal progressed from that into a plane to anywhere, which was also devolving into a pipe dream. He was waiting for a sign. Something from someone greater than himself to tell him what he was supposed to be doing. 

Something to make me stay, he found himself sending. Or something to make me leave. Either one would be fine, really. 

Keep your eyes peeled, she sent back. 

***

Power had sent him to wake Denji up. It was for the best. Seemingly, without interference from one of the two of them, he would sleep for hours, torching any of his remaining energy into lethargic, post-nap grogginess. Aki was simultaneously jealous and resentful. He pictured laying down next to Denji on the grimy carpet, not worrying about the germs permeating through the fibers and onto his skin. His body would be warm enough, because Denji would be close by. If, in the middle of the night, one of them happened to be frightened, they would reach out and brush the tips of one another’s fingers, close enough to say I’m here, far enough not to have to say anything more. 

He had chosen his spot at least somewhat wisely, crumpled at the underside of a row of seats. (Aki had a sneaking suspicion that this spot was chosen less in part to its survival plausibility and more because of its comfortability.) The white-blond tuft of his head peeked between metal legs, twitching as he squirmed and shifted. Once Aki was close enough, he reached out to touch it. Fingered the strands as the light filtered through them, gossamer-thin and brittle from too many rounds of bleach. He watched his chest rise and fall, counted the soft rhythm of his snoring like a symphony. The sun had not yet risen fully from its slumber, and the day was new. 

“Denji,” he whispered. “Denji.” 

“Hm?” 

“Denji, we have to get up.” Aki had the strange urge to cry when he spoke. For the first time, he noticed how beautiful Denji looked when he slept, how peaceful the expression across his face. He began to reach for his phone to take a picture, but thought better of it— in a few days, the cell towers would overload for good, and the whole thing would be kaput anyway. If the electricity shut down, too, he would only have the battery currently stored until it gave out.

“‘M tired,” Denji said. “Five more minutes, ‘kay?” 

“This isn’t the first day of junior high. There’s no alarm clock to snooze anymore.” 

“Uuuugh.” He hated when Aki was right about something. “Leave me alone, man.” 

“I can’t.” On an impulse, he swiped the back of his hand over Denji’s forehead, the way his mother used to do when he was sick, the way he’d learned to do to his little brother. His roommate shot up, then, startled by the sudden display of affection, bursting out of Aki like vomit, disgusting and sour and uncontrollable. “It’s not safe here, okay? We have to figure out what to do.” 

“I told you guys what to do,” he grumbled. “We’re gonna get out of here and we’re gonna find Yoshida and then we’re all gonna hole up inside until this thing blows over.” 

Aki nodded. “I know.” He tried not to think about whether or not Yoshida was still alive. 

He tried not to think about Michiko, somewhere thousands of miles across the universe. He tried not to think at all, actually, besides the strictly necessary brain function to keep the three of them alive.

They split breakfast in the Terminal B gate. Above them, a darkened sign advertised the correct boarding columns for groups A through B, B through C, the C+ castoffs relegated to the farthest corner. The tinny airport music had stopped broadcasting— but when exactly? At what point was it deemed superfluous, the audio engineer allowed to pack up his things and brave the Blue Line home? The thick quiet was the worst part of it, Aki thought. That way, you could hear the sniffles and groans and muffled sobs as if they were coming from inside your own head. 

“Holy fuck,” Denji groaned around a bite of a stale Twinkie. “I haven’t had one of these since junior high. I forgot how hard they slap.” 

“Aki would know a little something about a hard slap,” Power said. She’d apparently been scavenging the previous night, gathering up plastic sleeves of Ritz crackers, Hostess cakes, overpriced bottles of water containing no more than a few gulps. When she bounded back to their little group, supplies gathered in the pouch of her shirt, Aki tapped the bundle of ones in her back pocket and tilted his head. Good tips night, she’d said, and winked. 

Seemingly ignoring her, Denji slid a pack of chips towards Aki. “You should eat something, man. We’re gonna need your strength on our side if this thing keeps up.” 

“It’s not a thing,” he said, gingerly peeling the bag off the carpet. The plastic crinkled and shrunk around his fingers. “It’s an epidemic, and it’s not letting up anytime soon. I’d get comfortable if I were you.” 

Denji leaned forward, bringing his legs together in a criss-cross formation. “I think I’m pretty comfortable,” he said, fingering the rough surface of the airport gate carpet. 

“Well, I’m not.” Power raised her arms above her head, tugging on her elbows in a deep stretch. “I don’t understand how you can stand to sleep on the ground like a dog.” 

“Like this,” he said, and flopped over onto the carpet, chest rising and falling into an exaggerated honk-shoo. 

Weathered foil between his hands, Aki cracked open the decaying seal. A sad mound of chips huddled in the corner of the bag, pile of seasoning neglected and knocked-off at the bottom. He couldn’t tell what flavor they were, or meant to be, or maybe had been at one point but were now long past the threshold of recognition. 

“Oh, man,” Denji said, watching him from the corner of his eye. “Lucky. You got the best flavor.” 

“Flavor is a strong word,” Aki responded. He couldn’t have guessed what exactly the chips were supposed to taste like if he’d had a gun to his head. Which, he realized belatedly, might not be as hyperbolic a scenario as he’d imagined. 

“I’ll trade you. C’mon.”

Aki picked at a corner of the chip. “Depends on what you got.” 

“Well—” Two packages dangling from each of his hands, one squishy and dark, one long and thin. “Trail mix or a frosted brownie. Your pick.” 

“Pick your poison, Nurse Hayakawa,” Power drawled. 

“It’s the zombie apocalypse. I think I’m allowed to bend the rules.” 

“Not an apocalypse,” she corrected. 

“All right. Thanks for that, Power. What would you call it, then? Now that we’re in the business of correcting each other, of course.” 

She thought, closing her eyes and tilting her face up to the ceiling. “A conundrum?” she suggested, and then upon seeing Aki’s face, “A snafu? A real pickle of a situation?” 

“Pickle,” Denji repeated, laughing through his mouthful of overprocessed carbohydrates. “Get it? ‘Cause we’re eating chips and stuff?” 

“Not what she meant, bud.” Aki wiped the grease on his fingers against the hem of his shirt. 

“Speaking of which,” Power said, “when are you guys thinking of hitting the road?” 

Aki balked. “What?”

“Well.” Power gestured behind herself, as if something in the atmosphere made the position obvious. “We clearly can’t stay here.”

“And why is that?” Aki would be content to stay there for as long as they needed— for as long as it made sense, anyway. With the way things were headed, it didn’t seem likely that anything would be changing soon, which was all the more reason to quit while they were ahead. From the minimal amount of knowledge he possessed about gambling— casino betting was illegal in Japan, and he’d never cared enough about it to seek out the online black-market version– it was better to walk away while your chips were up, rather than wait around for your luck to falter. The other shoe would always be poised to drop, the proverbial sword of Damocles dangling above your head, but if you stopped walking forward for a while, you could soothe its swaying, if only for a little while. 

“Because the zombie apocalypse is coming,” Power said, snarling the phrase into a grotesque imitation of Aki’s voice. 

“I do not talk like that.” 

“You kinda do, man.” Denji swiped mystery-flavored crumbs from the corner of his mouth. “Sorry.” 

“Point being.” He cleared his throat. “Let’s assess the risks and benefits here, shall we?” 

A chorus of groans from both Denji and Power. “Oh, Jesus,” Denji said. “Not again.”

“Not the risks and benefits assessment,” Power singsonged, clutching her chest and diving dramatically to the ground. She plucked an invisible sword from beside her and jammed it into her chest, limbs jerking, eyes rolling back in her head for dramatic effect. “Kill me now.” 

“You laugh,” Aki said, “but how many times have I saved your asses when you’re moaning about which outfit to pick for the party, or whether to fail the class or take the W?” 

“One time,” Denji mumbled, but stayed mostly quiet after that.

“All right.” Aki furrowed a line in the carpet with his finger, for reasons that, in retrospect, were totally unnecessary but felt like a tiny gesture of normalcy in the moment. “Left side,” he said, tapping his palm to the ground, “benefits, right side risks.” 

“Getting our heads chewed up into Big Macs by a bunch of zombie dudes,” Denji said. 

“Sure.” Aki traced the letters into the right segment: chewed heads. “Anything else?” 

“Rotting to death in the middle of Logan Airport because somebody was too pussy to go outside,” Power added. 

He swallowed. “Sure. That, too.” Underneath: rot to death. 

“Pros,” Denji said, looking thoughtful. “Find better food outside.” 

Additional sustenance. 

“Cons, find out that there’s no more food left on the planet,” Power snapped. 

Starvation risk. 

“Pro. We team up with a gang of other survivors and look really fuckin’ badass. Like The Walking Dead. ”

“Con, The Walking Dead is a TV show, dipshit. As in, fake as hell.” 

“Pro, fresh air.” 

“Con, I’ve seen you spend three days without leaving your bed. Miss me with that.” 

“Powy, come on. Maybe this whole thing has already blown over and there won’t be any more lines at Six Flags.” 

“Denji. There’ll be nobody alive to operate the Six Flags.” 

“You don’t know that,” he whined. “I wanna ride the Kingda Ka.” 

“For the last time, you troglodyte, there won’t be any—” 

“Okay, okay, okay. My ears are about to start bleeding.” Aki’s finger was sore from scratching against the carpet so rapid-fire; he’d forgotten what he’d written down about four bullet points ago, anyway. 

“Power’s making up words again,” Denji muttered, crossing his arms. “Here’s your pro.” He leaned over to trace the word YOSHIDA into the carpet in block capitals, big and slow enough so the two of them could see it. 

Neither of them knew what to say to counter that. He knew what it was like to miss someone to the point of delusion. 

Behind them, a woman screamed— Aki’s first thought, disgustingly, was better her than them, followed by, Jesus, that sounds familiar. 

“Aki!”

He looked up. Someone was calling his name in a voice that betrayed equal parts fear and intrigue. The very prospect of it made him nervous. Everyone who should know who he was and where he was was beside him. 

“Aki.” Himeno forced her way through whatever meandering crowd was still remaining in front of the terminal, waving her hand frantically as she jogged over. She was wearing a slouch-necked T-shirt advertising her alma mater and cuffed sweatpants— she must have changed into pajamas right when she got home after their clinicals. 

“Give me one second,” he said to Denji and Power, then strode over to meet her. She was panting a little, doubled over to place one hand on her knee. Her eye was closed; he couldn’t see if it was bloodshot or teary. “What’s happening here, exactly?” 

She blinked once. “Well, it’s great to see you too, Aki. Glad to know you’re alive and all, yeah?"

“Yeah,” he said, “yeah, of course. Sorry.” He’d forgotten again. Manners. Common courtesy. Whatever you wanted to call it. These types of things were the first to go out the window when he was placed under any microscopic iota of pressure. 

“If you must know, I’m getting you out of here, is what I’m doing.” She craned her neck to glance at Power and Denji, who were huddled together, making goggle eyes and pinched faces at the two of them. “Well. I was assuming it would be just you, anyway. These must be the famous roommates.” 

“That’s Denji,” he said, nodding, “and that’s Power.”
“I hate when people give themselves stupid names like that,” Himeno said. “Like when guys name themselves Bruiser or something so everyone knows how tough they are. It just makes you look like a tryhard.” 

“Her real name’s Karen.” Aki clamped a hand over his mouth. He’d let it slip without thinking. 

“Ha!” Her eye widened, darting back and forth in a rapid-fire flickering. “I think that’s the best thing I’ve heard all day. Not that there was much competition there, but still.” 

“Of course.” He cleared his throat. 

“Anyway, I think my car can still fit all of you guys. It might get a little tight in the backseat, but we’re all friends here, huh?” 

Were they? This had certainly been the first time she’d referred to the likes of Denji and Power as friends, or even much acknowledged their existence at all. When he thought about it, it may have been the first time she referred to Aki as a friend at all. Their relationship had always sort of gone without saying— the two of them existed as a sort of implication. He couldn’t quite put his finger on when the two of them became certain. When he could walk into class and know that she would be sitting next to him without having to look. It was as if their names had been drawn out of a hat and thus bound together; they gravitated towards each other without tangible reason, without conscious thought. Aki didn’t think he could escape it if he tried. Everywhere he went, she would be there, nagging at him in the back of his mind, holding his hand while his body shook from stress. 

So everywhere she went, there he would be, too. Regardless of the location of his physical form. “I can’t let you take us back,” he said. 

“You can.” She sighed. “C’mon, Aki, seriously. My car is probably getting slathered in zombie guts as we speak. Let’s go.” 

Aki looked backwards. Denji and power were huddled together over their horde of snacks, their dispute momentarily forgotten in the name of espionage. Power was covering her face with her hands, blocking Aki from reading his lips. Denji was listening intently, scrunching up his nose and nodding along to the tune of her story. 

“I can’t leave them.” It came quiet when he said it, like a confession. 

Himeno sagged her head backwards. “Oh, my God, dude. I told you. If you’re so worried about your little friends here, then yeah, you can take them, too. Come. On.” 

Power’s nails poking into Denji’s arm, her face tipping forward to rest on Denji’s shoulder as the two of them laughed. Aki’s solar plexus ached a little to watch. Especially from where he was standing so far away. 

“We’re not going home,” he said. 

“What?” 

“I can’t go with you. I’m sorry.” 

“Unless you plan on living out the rest of your days in this metal box, then yes, I’m taking you back home.” 

“We’re just fine here,” Aki said, crossing his arms. “I don’t know what metal box you’re referring to, but it’s not this one.” 

“Aki. You can’t be serious.” 

“Can’t I?” 

“You’re going to die here,” she said, and her voice was blackened with a severity he hadn’t noticed before. The word sent a cold finger of fear tracing down his spine, tightened its fist around his windpipe, but he pressed forward. Swallowed hard against it. “You saw the patient today, didn’t you, Himeno?” 

“You’re gonna have to be a little bit more specific than that.” 

“Just— you know what I’m talking about. The patients. The kids from Northeastern that came in all comatose and— and deflated.”
“They probably had a few too many Long Island Ice Teas at T.I.T.S. and stumbled their way into the emergency bay. Happens to the best of us,” she said. 

“No, actually. It does not happen to the best of us.”

“Because you’d know?” 

He ignored her. “They’re sick, Himeno. Just like— just like we’re all about to be.” 

“You, my friend,” she said, “watch too many apocalypse movies.” 

“Not enough, actually, if things keep going the way they’re going.” Aki crouched down grip her shoulder in his left hand, her collarbones giving underneath his fingers. “Did you happen to notice the state of things driving over here? Be straight with me. I know you’re smart enough to observe your surroundings. I’ve seen you do it plenty of times during clinicals.” 

“It wasn’t that bad.” Her tongue flicked out to tap the corner of her lip when she spoke, the same way it did when she got a good hand in blackjack, when she set the curve for their anatomy exams. “Seen worse.” 

The current state of things. Aki wished for a news report, a Twitter timeline update more useful than uncensored gore pictures and end-of-times prophesying. An old-fashioned newspaper spread across the kitchen table, a fucking radio broadcast— anything to tell him the truth. Not knowing was worse than seeing it for himself; in his head, the carnage was always tenfold, bodies strewn useless in the streets, earlobes and fingertips clogging the sewer drains. Lips torn free from teeth, permanent smiles glowing from the skulls of the deceased. 

Was the university still standing? He almost had to laugh at how desperately his thoughts flicked to the practicalities. Was there some kind of worst case scenario policy in place? Would his credits transfer past the apocalypse? Would he still be awarded his diploma, he wondered, despite the clinical hours he was missing to be there? 

And their apartment— would they even be able to make it to the front door? Up the steps? Had the other tenants of the building made it out, or were they hunkering down and praying that their measly Home Depot locks would hold? Would they return— if they returned— to a pile of bodies decorating the doorstep? Would the area be alive and crawling or still and silent?

“Life has changed.” Aki swallowed. “Things aren’t the same anymore. You want to go back to something that doesn’t exist.” 

“I don’t think you understand,” Himeno said. “I risked my life to come over here, Aki. Like, drove through fucking massacres just to get to you. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?” 

Did it? Aki had always been in the business of servicing other people. The big brother. Nurse Hayakawa. The mom roommate, the responsible friend, the grown-up. The one who held Power’s hair back and carried Denji up the stairs. Always John Cusack holding up the boombox, his shoulder muscles shrieking under the weight. (Denji had showed him the movie a few months into their living together, explaining that his parents insisted on showing him the entire John Hughes catalog. He claimed to find it mind-numbingly boring, but Aki caught him sneaking peeks at the screen above his DS.) 

And if he couldn’t formulate in words what something meant, couldn’t speak it or scream it or write it down in a closed-mouth notebook, did it really mean anything at all?

“I don’t know,” he said. It was truthful. 

“Jesus fucking Christ.” She spluttered a halfway-laugh that didn’t reach her eye. “I actually don’t even know why I keep trying with you. God.” 

“Keep trying? What exactly are you trying to do here?” 

She didn’t say anything. Maybe she assumed that he already knew. Maybe she was right. 

“Is there something more I have to do?” Himeno wasn’t meeting his eyes, darting around the grimy floor, the TV screens flicking through their carousel of advertisements. “Something about me that isn’t enough for you?”

“It’s not about that.” How could he explain to her? That he wasn’t rejecting her, wasn’t trying to push her aside from his life– he just wasn’t sure if there was enough room for anyone else in it? 

“You know, you think you’re hot fucking shit. You think your shit don’t fucking stink.” 

He wasn’t sure where to begin to refute either one of those claims. “It would seem so.” The angrier Himeno got, the more expletives she tossed around, lobbing them like grenades from her back pocket. It was less about where they landed or whom they killed, Aki thought, and more about the control that came with launching them at all. 

“Well, you’re not better than me. We’re the same.” She pressed her knuckles into her eye— don’t do that, Aki wanted to yell, imagining a microscopic flood of germs into the orifice. “Now especially. We’re all the fucking same.” 

“What are you asking me?” He focused on the soft intake of his breath, the warm flood of the exhale. Synchronized. 

“I’m asking you to wise up.” Himeno shifted, scratching the knob of her left ankle with her right foot. “I’m asking you to make a decision for once in your life.”

Ah. Aki tensed with the realization that this was perhaps the first time in her life wherein she had needed to choose the direction of her life without any outside influence, no parents scrawling out checks, no junior high career quiz to help her now. She wanted a rise out of him; this much he understood without her saying it. He understood tangentially that the worst possible thing he could do would be to give it to her. 

“Are you honestly asking me,” he said, “to check off a little box on a piece of paper? Do you like me, yes or no? ” 

“Do I look like an idiot to you?” Her skin was flushing to her hairline, mascara smudging into a blur on her cheekbone. Aki thought about swiping it away with the pad of his thumb, but pictured the myriad of surfaces that he’d touched that day, each one more dangerous than the last, and thought better of it. “We’re not in junior fucking high anymore, okay? Grow the hell up.” 

“Listen.” He cleared his throat. “Himeno. I’ve made a lot of decisions in my life, okay? Moving three thousand miles across the world with no money, no family, no nothing to fall back on was one of them. Not that you’d know anything about what that’s like.” 

“Oh, boo hoo, Aki. Honestly.” She swiped the back of her hand against her nose. “I’m telling you something about myself and you find a way to make it about you. Seriously. You at least owe me that much.” 

In a certain sense, Aki had always known. Not because he had experience with the topic, or because he had any sort of innate ability to determine this sort of thing for himself. Girls didn’t pay attention to him in school, and he didn’t pay attention to them. It worked out wonderfully that way. While his classmates blushed behind paper cards on Valentine’s Day and boxes of chocolates on White Day, he lay his head on his desk and listened to the stuttering confessions, the shuffling sound of an awkward first hug. No girl in his class had ever tried to offer him anything in the way of a romantic confession. He was weird and tall and too skinny in the wrong places, spending all his time after school pacing laps around the track instead of taking girls on dates. It didn’t bother him. One of his friends had asked, once, if there was a reason why he didn’t pay attention to the girl in his class that was obviously hitting on him. He hadn’t seen what was so obvious about it. When he punched it into the computer at home, a myriad of articles popped up, most of them targeted towards teenage girls: pink and purple home screens decorated with cartoonish hearts and stars. Does he like you back? Take this quick quiz! The questions asked about things like brushing against your arm, offering to carry your books for you, staring at you and not flinching when you stared back. Aki killed the page with a jab to the little red X. None of that applied to him. He was safe. 

Power had met him at the hospital once, after his shift. She hadn’t come up to the building to link with him (too much work to get a guest past, or so she said); instead, she loitered at the corner across the street and watched him. Later on, she asked him why he was being so cruel to Himeno, who was “clearly in love with him”, as per Power. What’s so clear about it, he’d asked, and Power had rolled her eyes. Duh, she’s practically hanging off of your arm when the two of you walk out. She was gathering all her courage just to ask you to hang out with her tomorrow night, and you blew her off. Why? 

I have plans with you guys, he’d said, and had blocked the thought from his mind.  

“I can’t go with you,” Aki said, the same as he said every time she asked him for drinks, for sushi, for karaoke at the place by his apartment in Allston. 

Himeno nodded. “You’re really gonna stay with them?” 

Aki turned. Looked at Denji and Power, their heads together in intent discussion. “It was never my choice,” he said. 

“Okay.” She pursed her lips into a thin line, shaking her head so wildly that her hair fell out of its bobby pins. “Okay. Cool. Gotcha. I’ll just risk my life yetagain to go home and probably die all by myself. Awesome.” 

“Himeno,” he said. He didn’t know what else there was left to tell her.

“No, no. Don’t even worry about it.” She shuffled backwards, waving her hand in front of her face like she was swatting away a cloud of gnats. “It’s not like it’s a big deal or anything. I’ll  be fine. Go ahead. I’m sure the kids will be calling you soon.” 

She resented them. The sharp barbs around the word made that evidently clear to Aki. He couldn’t understand why someone like Himeno could ever be jealous of people like Power and Denji, what they could ever have that she couldn’t. He resented, too, the implication that his affection was a finite resource, rare and valuable enough to covet like gold or oil. His love belonged to him foremost. Whomever he chose to bestow it upon was free to do with it what they wished. 

And if he was the protector for their little group? Did that make him such a horrible person? They needed someone to rely upon. They needed someone older, smarter, experienced, more well-adjusted. Someone like him. He balanced the dynamic, uplifted the two of them in a fragile equilibrium. Without him, Power and Denji would undoubtedly be at each other’s throats, clawing and scratching for foothold. They needed him to tell them who was right, to call the fight. Pry them off each other and sit them down at the dinner table instead, where something warm and more substantial than a Cup Ramen would be waiting for them. He didn’t ask too many questions, wasn’t there to dole out punishments or retribution. He was just there, and they knew he would be, day after day after day. It was his birthright. 

Denji was standing, starting to make his way over to the two of them. “Hey,” he called, jogging slightly. “You joining our party?” 

Power, of course, trailing him. “This isn’t Dungeons and fucking Dragons. It’s just called a group of people.” 

Himeno kept her head down. She didn’t look either of them in the face. “I’m leaving,” she said. “Bye, Aki.” 

“You piss her off or something?” Power said, well before she was out of earshot. 

“Or something.” He didn’t feel it necessary to divulge the particulars. 

“Remember when Power gave me the silent treatment for, like, three whole days after I used the last of her nail polish?” Denji scratched at his cheek. “ That was pissed off. For real. I thought I was going to have to light your pillow on fire to get you to make a sound.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Power spat. “You can navigate the turmoils of your wannabe-emo teenage angst on your own dime.” 

“And you can buy your own snacks from now on,” he said. “Or did you prefer to keep raiding mine whenever you feel like it?”

“Be quiet,” Aki said. 

“At least I have an actual job, you miscreant—” 

“I mean it. Shut up.” The times in which Aki deployed a phrase this grating were few and far between. All three of them fell silent. A few paces away, Himeno stopped mid-stride. 

Somewhere in the annexes of the building, man screamed, high-pitched and quivering; the tips of Power’s ears wiggled. “I’d expected this sooner, to be honest,” she said, reaching for her knife. She’d started carrying it in her pocket ever since they got to the airport. It made Aki nervous whenever he caught a glimpse of silver in the light. 

“Again?” Denji was shaking his head, looking incredulous. “I kinda thought that after that whole shitshow the last time, we’d be done with this.” 

“Last time?” Himeno asked. 

Aki said, “Don’t worry about it.” 

She looked over her shoulder, turning her whole body around so she could get a solid glance down the hallway. It was quiet, for the most part, a few panicked would-be travelers starting to shift around, the low hum of the radiators and the electronic scanners. “I mean. I’m gonna be a little worried about it, yeah.” 

“Both of you shut the hell up.” Power drew the knife from her jeans pocket, twisting it so squinted eye of the point faced them. “Listen. I’m not getting run up on just so you two could finish out your little banter session. This isn’t Love Island .” 

“You’d know,” Aki muttered. 

The hallway was still. Paralyzed. The fluorescence from the overhead lights danced off the linoleum, the noise of their breathing amplified tenfold in the quiet. 

A figure rounding the corner. A woman. Something that looked like one, anyway. Hair limp and dangling down the small of her back. Matted with something dark and sticky and long past congealed. Her breath laborious, ribs pressing against her tissue-paper skin through the rip in her top. 

“What the fuck,” Denji muttered. Aki didn’t say anything. Couldn’t, maybe.

“Goddamn it.” Power swiped the loose strands of hair behind her ears. “Both of you, get the fuck out of here. Find a door or a room or a damn toilet stall and don’t come out of it until I come and get you.” 

Denji nodded, pulled his lips into a thin line. “C’mon,” he said, grabbing Aki’s hand. The softness of his touch was more shocking than the harshness of Power’s words.

“I—” He craned his head backwards. Himeno was still in the same position, her back to the three of them; if he squinted his eyes, he could tell by the tremble of her back muscles that she was afraid. “You go, Denji. I’ll catch up with you.”

“You’re not fucking serious,” Power said. 

“I guess not.” Without him thinking about it, Aki’s hand on Himeno’s shoulder, her skin clammy through her clothing. “Hey.” 

“Hey,” she said, with her eye still closed. 

“I think you should stay here.”

“I think I should go.” 

He sighed. “I’m sorry about—” Here he fumbled, racking his brain for one word to effectively summarize the span of his wrongdoings. “Before. Everything.” 

“It’s fine,” she whispered. “I can take it.” 

“I’d feel better if you stayed,” Aki said. 

Himeno looked at him. “Do you need me here?” 

Did he need her? Did he need anyone? “Yes,” he said. “I need you.” 

A groan. The woman was shunting her way across the hall, stumbling over discarded backpacks and garbage cans overflowing with Starbucks cups and Dunkin’ wrappers. “What are we standing around for, then,” Himeno whispered. Power and Denji were at her side— they must’ve slinked their way over in the brief moment of their conversation— and each grabbed onto her elbow, steering her in the opposite direction of the woman. Zombie. Person.

“No. Down here.” A tug at the back of his collar; Himeno had yanked the three of them down underneath the row of seats. A dull ache bloomed across Aki’s ribs where he’d hit the ground; he blinked slowly, his eyes adjusting to the newfound darkness. 

“How long are we planning on staying like this?” Denji said. 

“Don’t move,” Himeno whispered. Aki felt the frisson of her voice work down his spine in a smooth ripple. “You’re going to be fine. Don’t move.” 

Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Aki wanted to say. Kishibe had told them that the first day of clinicals, when Himeno had told the mock patient that they’d be in tip-top shape in no time. There’s no guarantees in life, he’d said. Last thing you need is to make yourself liable. 

With his vision blocked, it was nearly impossible to determine the zombie’s — if they were in it this far, he figured he might as well lean into the terminology—  location. He would need to conduct more experiments in the field to determine the range of their capabilities. If their vision was similarly dulled, he could start training to lower the sounds his breathing, walk on the edges of his feet so as not to make noise. If their vision was sharp and their hearing wasn’t, they’d have to stay quick on their feet, learn to contort themselves behind bookshelves and underneath sinks. 

Denji made a small sobbing sound from the back of his throat. Aki reached to interlace their fingers; his pulse point was throbbing so hard that he could feel it where their skin touched. Denji didn’t look him in the eye. He was embarrassed, clearly, at the vulnerability of it all, to accept this small act of compassion even when their lives were at stake. Aki held a finger to his lips. Denji nodded with his eyes closed. 

It was getting closer. He could smell the stale sweat on its skin, sharp and heady, the unmistakable tang of old blood. None of theirs. Against his palm, Denji’s heartbeat thudded hot in the tips of his fingers. Someone was crying across the hallway. 

We’re never going to get out of this, Aki thought, and Himeno pinched the skin of his hand. “Shut the hell up.” He hadn’t realized he’d spoken out loud. 

The woman whipped her head towards them. Someone had made a sound. 

Aki couldn’t tell who it had been. With the blood pounding in his ears, his breath rattling, Himeno’s quiet scuffling next to him, it could have been anyone. It only took one second of relaxation for a breath to come too quickly, a whimper, a grimace. When his patients came in with gritted teeth and shaking limbs, so agonized they couldn’t speak to him, he always told them stories. Stories about himself as a kid, the pranks he and his cousin would pull against their parents, whatever stupid fight Denji and Power had gotten themselves into that week. He knew pain was dangerous. If you let yourself focus on it, even for a second, it’d eat you alive. 

The woman heard it. Aki couldn’t see her, but he knew it in the shift of her body, her pause right in front of their row of seats. She made a choked noise in the back of her throat, a kicked dog, a sick stray.

She came closer. 

Denji clapped both his hands over his mouth. Oh my God, Himeno mouthed, and Aki shook his head. It was too late. Both of them knew it. 

Don’t move, he told her without speaking, spamming the message over and over in his brain like somehow, some way if he thought about it hard enough it’d make its way back to her. Stay quiet. 

He’d never seen her shake so much. Himeno was always the one he asked to hold the patient’s hand, to write out the prescriptions in neat, unflinching print. Once, she even painted a little girl’s nails because she asked her to, pink sparkles in solid strokes. Not a single blemish on her skin. 

The woman shuffled one step closer, her shadow looming over her like an omen, and Himeno let out a whimper. 

Aki could barely process the sound before she was on top of her. 

He couldn’t decide if the woman had lunged in supersonic speed or in slow motion; either way, his gaze lingered across the whirl of her limbs in motion, the soft blur of her hair as it screened Himeno’s face. Her fingers wrapped around her neck, a thread of blood at the jugular, Himeno lolling backwards like a doll. Legs flailing uselessly against linoleum, nails skittering against the tile. 

“Oh, God,” Denji said, and turned his face into Aki’s shoulder. “Aki, please. Oh, my God. Aki, please make it stop.” 

Everything else, Aki could help. When Denji got wasted on Tuesday nights and cried about missing his exam the next day, Aki could always wrestle him into a tutoring session, lecture him about the negative consequences of underage drinking. When he hibernated in his bedroom after an electrified phone conversation with his parents, Aki could knock on his bedroom door, leave the TV tray of curry and tea outside. When he cried about girls or boys who didn’t like him back, Aki could pat his shoulder once, sit beside him on the couch while South Park droned on. Everything in their world had been so small before. It was as if within the past day the universe had been gored open, and Aki was no longer at its center, dwarfed by everything he could do nothing to fix. Himeno wrenched her jaw open as if to dislodge the parasite from her neck; the breath caught in the back of her throat, gurgling. 

“Power, help me,” Aki whispered, voice breaking. She rolled her eyes; she was right that he’d promised he wouldn’t ask her for her protection anymore, that he wouldn’t expect anything greater than her presence. The word was spiky and hard in his mouth. It tasted bitter when he swallowed it. He would rather have said anything else, and this Power seemed to understand. She choked her fingers up on the knife. 

Power buried the knife into the base of skull, her knuckles gone white around the hilt; it slid through the skin and the thin, bird-like bones with a crack. The woman stiffened for a second, her eyes blown wide with something that seemed to Aki like recognition, or else remorse. Then the moment was over and they glazed over dead and unfeeling again. She slumped to the ground. Power stepped over her fingers as she walked, the pinky snapping off underneath her sneaker. 

“Thank God,” Denji said. Aki saw the slope of his shoulders relax. Good. Power had saved them, again, even though she said she wasn’t going to. The zombie was dead. Everyone was safe. They could relax again, go back to splitting chips and candy on the disgusting floor, arguing about where they were going to sleep and when this thing was going to end. 

Power was staring forward. Aki hadn’t moved. From where he was standing, he could see the door to the tarmac, the dark spill of blood across the linoleum. 

And again. Aki had been many things, and he’d never been an idiot. 

Maybe he already knew. Maybe he didn’t have to look to know it for certain. Maybe when he heard the dull wet thump of a body against the ground, he already knew it was hers. That the blood cooling against his skin wasn’t his. The spray of her dark hair on the floor, the clack of teeth against teeth. A breath that could’ve been halfway to a scream. 

He made a sound in the back of his throat that could’ve been somewhat like a gasp, or a sob. He looked away and then Power was between him and the body and her face was different, softer, the harsh lines between her eyebrows ironed out, her hands cold. “Don’t look,” she was saying. “Look at me. Keep looking at me.”
“Okay,” Aki said. He felt at once very small and too large for his own skin. He thought of breaking his leg at a track meet in the seventh grade, his mother chastising him the whole way to the hospital about how foolish he’d been, reaching behind to hold his hand in the backseat. He had never seen Power like this before, bent over in front of him, her hands on either side of his neck. He touched her wrists, wrapped his fingers around them so she couldn’t pull away. 

She looked behind herself. “Don’t,” she said again. “There’s nothing you can do. I’m sorry. We just have to wait.” 

“So she’s alive.” He drew himself away from her touch, straightening his spine. “She’s breathing.” 

“Well—” 

“I can fix this.” All his training, those years of slaving over textbooks and staring at laptop screens until his eyes burned— what was it all for if not for this? He knew this. He’d memorized every joint in the human body his junior year of undergrad, bent double over the GRE test until his hands burned and his stomach ached, but it was done. They’d completed their clinicals together, racking up hours and reflection logs and internship credits under hot lights and loud clipboards. 

“You can’t—” 

“I can.” He moved to hold her. 

When he first saw her face he was relieved. Oh— everything in this world is fixable. There is nothing that has been done that can’t be undone. Her expression was plain and flat, the same moony eyes as the practice dummies they used in class, the ones he and Himeno used to give names and tragic backstories to pass the time. Something red and thick and bloodlike crusted along the side of her face, her neck. Cornstarch and food coloring, maybe. Chocolate syrup. Strawberry sauce. Something sweet and light and calm in his stomach. He ran his finger through the mess. Tapped it against the closed line of his lips. Swallowed sour and coppery at the back of his throat.

When he looked the second time, it was Himeno again. 
“Fuck.” The blood was running fast and hot over Aki’s joined fingers; Himeno’s eye lolled back in her head so it pointed everywhere and nowhere at the same time. “Fuck. It’s too much.” He pressed the edge of his shirt to the wound, which was difficult to determine— it soaked through in a matter of seconds, dripping off the fabric, saturated. 

“We have to go.” Power tapped Aki’s shoulder with one finger. “Let’s go.” 

“No.” He couldn’t feel his hands— were they still pressed against the wound like a tourniquet, blood gushing between the gaps in his fingers? Was there something more he could’ve done? “Himeno.” He shook her, gently, half-expecting her to pop up and wipe the blood from her neck herself. “Himeno. Come on.” 

“You’re not stupid, Aki.” Power. “I know we don’t have to explain to you how this goes.” 

Like he told her. He’d seen blood before. It wasn’t that he was squeamish, or uneducated, or that he wasn’t sure how to handle himself. It was the showing up that mattered, his presence alone enough to mitigate the onslaught of further damage. If he stayed there long enough, he could make it go away. He could turn back the clock, reversing time so blood flowed into her jugular like a transfusion, her skin reattached itself together from the fine shreds littering the ground. The muscle of her neck, like rotting meat, would knit back to its original form, zipping the skin closed around the wound. 

“Say something,” he found himself whispering, slapping the cool flesh of her cheek, pulling at the root of her hair. Anything to make her open her eye. When kids came into the E.R. strung out on speed and whatever else, he’d seen Kishibe rub his knuckles against their sternums, their eyes flutter open, their hands clench around invisible syringes. He tried it with Himeno, digging the hard ridges of his fingers into the bone, but her head only flopped backwards more violently, drops of blood splattering across her nose. 

“She’s not going to say anything.” Power’s lips twitched. Aki could feel the germ of a snarky comment ruminating beneath— do it, he wanted to say, fucking do it. I dare you. 

“Aki.” Denji’s voice was breaking; he sounded like he was starting to cry, or close to it. “Aki, I’m so scared. Let’s just go. I’m really sorry.” 

No one else needed to be sorry. No one else had led them to the airport in the first place, under false promises of flights to Japan, pseudo-vacations spent on Hokkaido with his cousin. No one else had ignored Himeno until it was too late. No one else had made her feel like the only way to get through to him was under the pretense of violence. 

It was then that the body underneath him transformed from someone real and breathing and alive into a dummy, those hairless, boneless creatures they used to test automobiles and roller coaster rides. He wasn’t holding onto Himeno anymore. She was just the same as the woman that had attacked her. Bones, meat, blood, skin. Nothing more, nothing less. The bodies stacked on top of each other in the morgue, their outlines singed into blood-soaked stretchers. 

Everything made sense. Aki’s throat was clear and dry. His eyes were fresh. His bones hummed with new energy, springing to life underneath his skin. He let the body go. It thumped to the ground with a wet, hollow sound. 

Without speaking, Power slid him her knife.