Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

•••

Once upon a time, there lived a boy.

Objectively, he held nary a thing of interest to anyone with a working eye. His only admirable trait was his obedience.

There was little else to do in a life as dull as this, besides sitting in the dark of the night, all on his lonesome, waiting for the sun, a knight, a friend, anything. Time moved slow like molasses and river water all at once, and the days bled into each other like an open wound in bathwater. Such a life—dull as rocks, gray as rain—fit the little boy as a burial shroud did: sweetly and neatly.

Fortunately, dawn was soon to come.

•••

INTERLUDE:

The social worker just wouldn't shut up.

"Aren't you happy as a flea in a doghouse? You're finally getting a family! Or, well... fostered in one. But I suppose that's all the same to you, isn't it?"

Goro would have thought her ability to blather out four backhanded comments—six, if he over-analyzed it (which he always did)—in the span of twenty-nine words to be, at most, mildly impressive if he hadn't been so intimately acquainted with himself. He could have done vastly better than her pathetic attempt. With a smaller word count, too.

Besides, the peppy idiot likely hadn't intended a whiff of ill-will. She was simply that stupid.

Said peppy idiot turned around to assault him with a truly hideous smile—she was driving a car, for god's sake, keep your eyes on the road, what are you doing?!—and he didn't squander a second in smiling back, in the sort of way that didn't have people immediately thinking of words like scary and sociopath. "Of course! I'm beyond excited to meet my new guardians. I really hope they're nice."

"Oh, I'm sure they are." She finally twisted her face in the right direction. Towards the road. Small mercies. "They must be, to be fostering an older child. There's this stigma, you know—that the older they are, the more unruly. Rather like what they say about Christmas cake: an unmarried woman past twenty-five and due for her expiration date." There was a pregnant pause, as she let the obvious insinuation hang in the air like a snot-filled sneeze.

Goro spent the silence imagining various methods of shutting her up. Hot-gluing her lips closed was looking to be the third most appealing.

"I know you've had... troubles in past homes, but I trust you'll behave in this one," the social worker said sternly, in a manner indicating that she didn't trust him to even breathe normally.

"I'll be on my best behavior." The car seats were itchy. Goro fantasized her car exploding in a freak accident, with her stuck inside, struggling against a hot-glued seatbelt. "Rest assured." Wait, that doesn't sound in-character. "Promise!" Adequate.

"You ought to be thankful that this nice couple's willing to take you in, even after reading your profile. You've got quite the thick folder, did you know that? Possibly the thickest one in the institution's cabinet!"

Hmph. It was only natural that he'd come out on top for any and every competition, disciplinary warnings included. As if he'd settle for second best. "So, I'm first."

"This isn't something you should be trying to win at, Akechi-kun."

A lot of the misconducts in his file could be chalked up as instances of self-defense—not just could but should, honestly, since that was what they were—but of course cretins would rather side with other cretins and their cretinous cries of wolf—"Birds of a feather die together!" as they say—so, in the end, he'd been the one to be saddled with the blame. And Goro hadn't even been trying to break that one whelp's leg. He'd meant to stop at the arms. It was hardly his fault that other people had obviously biologically inferior bodies unable to withstand getting bludgeoned by a baseball bat.

Get better. ...At not breaking bones.

As a general rule of thumb, he had brought with him little luggage. Besides the barebones clothes and other necessities, the only personal memento he'd packed was a carefully taped together photo of him and his mother. Getting attached to things was always a mistake, but surely one attachment didn't mean the end of the world.

He didn't like looking at his oblivious younger self very much, but his mother was a resplendent beauty as always, even with the dark circles smudging her eyes and the faint, week-old bruise staining her cheek. He'd tenderly hidden the photo within the pages of some mediocre murder mystery.

The book had ended with the reveal of the narrator being the killer, which was ever the half-baked fake-out. Every respectable author knew that the narrator couldn't be the culprit, not unless they wanted to sacrifice any remaining interest or trust their readers had in them and their soft-boiled story. S.S. Van Dine had even explicitly warned against it in Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories: "The detective himself should never turn out to be the culprit." The detective was the hero, and heroes were never culprits.

"Wow, it's sunny today, huh?"

Shut up.

The first few rundown buildings rose into view with the peaks of their gray-tiled roofs. Snaking in through the open car windows, the stench of wet earth and fresh grass itched his nose. To his simultaneous relief (because he would be free of this woman soon) and horror (because he would be trapped in the boonies soon), they were approaching the town. His new place of residence. His new prison.

"My, isn't this place just quaint! Aren't these buildings beautiful?"

They're ugly as hell. And everybody knew that one only used quaint as a synonym for pitiful and subpar. Like this town. "Oh, yes! It's all so colonial."

"Colonial! That's a big word, isn't it?" Just say you don't know what I meant.

He was starting to get a little antsy—antsier than he already was thanks to the car seat's itchy faux fuzz. (Which muddle-headed designer had decided pinprickly fabric made for the perfect seats? Sack the fool.) Goro had heard stories about countryside bumpkins: that they all spoke in unbearable accents, that most had never seen a book in their life, and that they bathed in ponds once a month. Obviously, he knew that the last part was blatantly untrue—they had troughs and buckets to marinate their filth in, alongside their farm animals/family members—but what about the other two? Accents he could tolerate, because he was magnanimous like that, but illiteracy? In this day and age? Gag.

Would there be a library? A bookstore? Would there be any books at all?

No wonder those wretched institution workers had been so eager to send him off! Besides the relief of no longer having to deal with a child who actually defended himself against idiot bullies and idiot adults, they were probably laughing themselves sick over the comedy of him, known book hoarder, living in a book-less hell. Those assholes!

Goro was going to figure out a way to mail them a pipe bomb.

"Here we are! That's your new family right there. See them?" The social worker pointed out the window, the same way a baby would point at thin air, and he obligingly looked to where she indicated, the same way a half-dead babysitter would appease a baby on the verge of a temper tantrum. "There, right there."

"Yes—yeah, I see them, thank you." There were two people standing stiffly together with even stiffer smiles plastered on their face, like hostages on camera. An extra woman, clearly not of blood relation, buzzing behind them and mouth moving a mile a minute, was trying her damndest to sneak an early peek by teetering on her tippy-toes.

A tag-along to applaud the stars for a satisfactory show? So they were those types of foster guardians. Goro could work with that.

He was ushered out of the car, talked at, and spoken about. The social worker had been a chatty enough twit on her own; now sandwiched between two equally chatty twits and their tag-along twitty chatterbox, the amount of meaningless twitters being tossed around had only worsened incomparably. He tuned them out and focused on inspecting the male foster guardian's ever so slightly receding hairline. A sore spot and a weakness to remember.

Goro supposed this situation—the relocation to a hicktown, not the premature balding—wasn't all bad, if he were to look at it through the rose-tinted lens of an optimist. But optimists were morons. He was a realist.

At the very least, he reasoned to himself, this year can be a trial run. An experimental grounds to cultivate a persona, in preparation of his fifteenth year, when he'd become a real, stale Christmas cake, too old to be classified as an orphan, too old for charity, and just old enough to be kicked to the curb without a care in the world. Come fifteen years old, he'd be really, truly on his own. It hardly mattered if he already felt alone enough. Practically speaking, he needed to spend these dwindling years beforehand wisely. The world would only grow crueller.

After all, in the eyes of the blind, he would always be his label: tainted, cursed, gutter trash.

However, the blind made remarkably easy victims for smoke and mirrors. And Goro had always been exceptional at stage tricks.

It would simply take a little preparation to fool the foolish, was all.

He bowed at a perfect ninety-degree angle. "Please take care of me."

Goro hated this town already.

END.

•••

Akira woke up.

He blinked his eyes open, squinted, then blinked once more, just to check that they really were open. The room was dark. Like, pitch-black, void dark. Was he still dreaming?

Oh, he thought as he finally registered the feeling of soft cotton on skin, there's something on my face.

He made to grab at it, only to clumsily slap it and tumble it off the bed. Oops. A plushie—a little black cat with an even littler yellow bowtie—once on his face and now on the floor. It stared forlornly up at him, betrayal stained in its stitched-on kitty smile.

Sorry, kitty.

The room was still dark. At least he could see now (if he squinted hard enough), although drawing the blinds would probably help immensely. Either way, he made no move to do so, just reached up and twisted a curly lock in consternation as his head ached in that dull way it always did. Everything felt oddly foggy, his thoughts were hidden high up in the clouds.

Trying to wade through the fog proved to be a failure, and the ceiling wasn't getting any more interesting, so...

With nothing else to do, Akira had no choice but to give up and settle for digging himself out of the mountain of cat plushies he had squirreled himself away in during his sleep. Another plush smacked onto his head and he faceplanted back into the pile. Seriously, why did he have so many?

"Finally awake?"

His eyes wandered down to the source of that bell-like voice. On the floor, Mona shook out his fur and sprung up like a picture book illustration come to life, if picture book illustrations eyed people's poofed up, birdnest bedheads as condescendingly as a food critic on television.

It wasn't like Akira could help it! His hair was just like that.

"You were totally conked out!" Mona's tail lashed to and fro, sharp as a whip. "I yelled and poked and scratched and everything. It got to the point where I just gave up and slept on your face."

So that was why Mona had been on his face. And now he was on the floor. Akira's heart was suitably moved by his friend's plight.

Mona stuck his nose up into the air with an emperor's authority. "I'll forgive you just this once, 'kay? But if you whack me off the bed again, I'm gonna go ahead and scratch your nose off!"

Not good. Noses were important. People used those to smell when flowers bloomed and food was burnt.

Akira slipped out from under the blankets and plushies, shaking his head in a vain attempt to dispel the grogginess like a dog shaking off water. Mona tangled himself around his ankles, yellow bowtie a stark contrast against his black fur, all the while meowing in that loud-mouthed way of his.

"Don't do that! You'll give yourself a headache, and you're just making your bed head worse, sure as eggs," Mona nagged, then accidentally tripped Akira. "Ow, ow! Watch the paws!"

Akira steadied himself against the doorframe as he tried his best to reorient himself after his near death encounter, courtesy of one chatty cat. His head ached and, weirdly enough, so did his stomach. He felt... empty, like there was a bottomless pit carved into his sternum.

"That's the hunger, 'Kira," stated Mona point-blank.

Oh.

He scaled Akira's pajamas like an overgrown squirrel and curled around his shoulders, meowing directly into his ears. "I'm hungry too, 'specially since you forgot to eat dinner last night. Seriously, you need to get better habits! And you mostly eat Junes-packaged stuff! What's up with that?!"

Smiling softly, Akira scratched behind Mona's ears in response, cutting off his "The vitamins, 'Kira! Where are the vitamins?!" mid-complaint. His smile only widened further when his friend couldn't help but purr involuntarily and lean into his touch.

"Okay, fine. I'll stop—for now." Mona leapt down from his shoulders, danced beyond petting-range, and bounded out into the hallway. He stopped to cast one capricious glance behind him. "C'mon Akira, let's eat breakfast! I want you to eat at least six slices of apple!"

"That's too much," Akira mumbled, his mouth dry and his throat strained from lack of use.

Mona sniffed haughtily. "Five slices, then."

"Two."

"Five!"

"One."

"That's not how bartering works!" screeched Mona, fur shooting up like a porcupine. Akira had to hide his giggle behind his hand for fear of getting bitten in retribution. "You're eating five, and that's that!"

And with that, Mona took off, a black and white and yellow blur disappearing around the bend.

All Akira could do was follow after his best friend.

•••

ITEM GET!! Apple Slices x5

★★★☆☆

A pretty terrible breakfast in general. You eat like a bird. Maybe even worse. This isn't a compliment, by the by.

•••

Inaba was a grayscale purgatory.

The early morning sky was bleaker than usual, the sun a hazy imprint behind the clouds, the atmosphere less summer and more gray. The monochrome tint bled into everything below: the shambling, run-down stores, the sleepy townsfolk dragging their feet like listless ghosts, the sun-bleached pavement that stretched for what felt like miles on end, and the washed-out weeds that swayed lazily in the breeze in tandem to the telephone wires. There was a sluggishness in the air, an aimless sense of mundanity settling in with the heat. A half-hearted mimicry of a dream.

Akira wasn't really sure why he was out here. He'd been eating breakfast—five apple slices, as per instructed—then blinked and found himself wandering the neighborhoods. That had always been a common occurrence of his—blinking and teleporting, with no recollection of what may have happened in between. Was that a good thing or bad thing? He couldn't tell.

Maybe he was magic. That was definitely a good thing.

A white mound dotted brown and black caught his eye. His heart rate skyrocketed in delight.

A cat!

Inaba was absolutely teeming with cats—its sole positive feature. ...Maybe there was some other stuff too, but the cats were by far the most important part. The importantest.

Excited, Akira bounded over and bent down to stroke the feline, remembering only at the last moment to be as gentle as possible or else he'd disturb its peaceful slumber and receive a new scratch mark to add to his extensive collection in return. She was a round, white thing. A dollop of cream on an otherwise boring backdrop.

The cat mrrp-ed sleepily and rolled onto its back, exposing soft, snowy fur. Akira's heart nearly burst from the sheer volume of his mental coo. His hand touched fur so soft, so heavenly to touch, that it only further affirmed one of his long-held beliefs: angel wings were made of cat fur. Why else would cats be so divine?

Nearby, a pair of housewives chattered conspiratorially to one another. While he buried his hands in pseudo-angel feathers, Akira seamlessly slipped into one of his favorite hobbies: eavesdropping.

"...heard it was today. Odd timing, wouldn't you agree?"

"Oh, without question. Not to mention, it would make transferring to school rather inconvenient for the children and staff."

"You're right! I hadn't even thought of that! How troublesome... Already causing a disturbance on the first day here."

"And sure to cause more, if you know what I mean."

"Hm? How so?"

"You mean to say that you haven't heard?"

"Ah, ahem—of course not! It's just, I've heard so much news as of late, I've gotten a tad mixed up, is all."

"Hmph. Is that so...? Well, I heard from Fukumoto-san that she heard from Kimoto-san that she heard from Imamaru-san that her new ward has a bit of a... you know... record. There's been word that he's cursed."

"Oh my!"

"And you knew that?"

"I-I knew that!"

"Really..."

The pair shuffled away into the front gate of a house, taking their gossip with them. "Transfer"...? Was there someone new coming to Inaba? Who? And why Inaba of all places? Why not somewhere more exciting, like Okinawa or Osaka or Tokyo? Hmm, Tokyo... So many arcades there.

Akira ran his fingers through downy fur in the wrong direction, causing it to stick up like cupcake frosting. Still snoozing away, the cat squirmed all wormy and flicked its tail against his hand. Hehe.

In the distance, there was a great deal of commotion and a swell of chatter, underscored by the rumble of a car drawing near. Akira looked up from his tender cat harassment to see a mob of sorts congregating at the end of the neighborhood street. People were murmuring to one another and doggedly honing in at one house in particular, like flies buzzing after honey.

Something exciting's happening!

"Exciting" and Inaba didn't exactly mix. Possibly the only exciting things that had ever happened in the monotonous suburbs of Inaba were the freaky murders and even freakier fog, though it seemed in bad faith to call those events something as insensitive as simply "exciting". First, there had been the bodies strewn about like drying laundry on the telephone wires, then the fog had crept in like a bad omen, blanketing itself over Inaba as the townsfolk began dropping one by one then by the masses.

Thankfully, Akira's parents had been spared from everything. They'd missed the widespread collapses by simply forgetting to step foot in town altogether, though that had meant that Akira himself had been all alone when the fog inevitably got to him too.

Nonetheless, Akira couldn't possibly pass up the chance to check out the new, hopefully non-murder-related attraction—his nosy nature wouldn't allow it. And so, with equal parts great reluctance and anticipation, he left the cat there as it basked in the morning sun and warm pavement. He waved it goodbye, then took off down the street.

Before anybody in the mob could spot him, Akira ducked behind the nearest stone pillar of someone's front gate and peeked out at the commotion.

Perimeter check. Nobody had noticed him. Good!

People—adults especially—tended to get weird when they saw him—all strained smiles and gritted teeth and artificial sugar. Something something about his parents, they would always say. The effect, in general, was unnerving and enough of a deterrent to stave off any future social interaction for Akira. It simply was easier for everybody to remain unseen—and he preferred it that way.

Besides, constantly sneaking around, sticking to shadows, all-around being super stealthy—that was totally just like a phantom thief!

"Do you see them?"

"Here they are!"

"They're back!"

The murmuring had escalated to outright clamoring. Everybody was buzzing with excitement, as if a circus had come to town—except when a real circus had come to town, everybody had treated it with suspicion and disdain and had run the troupe right back out. Try as he might, Akira couldn't spot whatever circus act had them so stirred up in a frenzy. The mob was just too tall. (It definitely wasn't because he was short, no way.)

"Oh, oh! I think I see him!"

"Really? Does he look normal?"

"Well, I don't think he has horns, if that's what you're worried about."

"Wh—I wasn't!"

Akira ended up scaling the pillar, fighting for space with the light fixture on top and ultimately grabbing onto it so that he could lean forward to a dangerously horizontal extent.

...Nope. Still couldn't see.

Not only was the mob tall but numerous in number, their bodies completely blocking whatever it was as they swarmed around it. At most, he could make out the shiny roof of a car amidst a sea of bobbing heads, but not much else.

"Imamaru-san!"

"Good morning, Imamaru-san, Imamaru-kun. What do you two have there?"

"Oooh, is that him?"

"Imamaru-chan, we're friends, aren't we? What's that?"

At the epicenter of the babbling, Akira could just barely make out two voices clamoring to answer everybody, but the volume of it all was so deafening that they were essentially drowned out. The excited exclamations of those in the center petered into rapidfire whispers of vitriol and suspicion nearing the edge of the crowd. Neither of these things particularly helped with the volume.

Akira shifted uncomfortably as the sun's rays increased in intensity and the light fixture began to heat up under his hands. It was like gripping a hot potato. Ouch.

"Aww, he's cuter than I thought he'd be!"

"Adorable, but a fair bit on the scrawny side, isn't he?"

"I'll admit, I was expecting much worse."

As the morning had progressed, summer had swung back into full force, and Akira was bearing the brunt of the heat. His back felt like it was getting slow-baked in an oven like a rotisserie chicken, and the light fixture had speedrun evolution from hot potato to potato on fire.

It's too hot for this, he thought grumpily, and I don't really care about whatever zoo animal they have.

If the animal turned out to be something immensely, impossibly cool—like a lion or a tiger or a panther—then sure he'd come running back, but, right now, the heat was sapping him of any possible interest. He was feeling about as enthusiastic as a dehydrated fish.

"Do you really think a year is long enough to reform him?"

"Sure, he looks innocent now, but who knows when he'll snap..."

"Shhh, don't say that so loud. Do you want your pet to be the first to 'mysteriously disappear'?"

They could continue to have fun with whatever gazelle or python they had bought, and Akira could have fun far away from a swarm of people while holed up somewhere with air conditioning. Win-win.

"Settle down now! Everybody, I'd like you to meet our newest ward..."

With that thought in mind, he hopped down from the pillar, blew on his hands to soothe any burns he had gotten from the flaming potato, and slunk back to the house.

•••

ITEM GET!! A New Addition to the Town

★★★☆☆

The Imamarus have bought a zoo animal. What kind? Unclear. What for? Also unclear. They're always pulling crazy stunts for attention, so there's that. Anyways, there are more important things to focus on. Like eating that sixth apple slice. Seriously, what's up with your diet?

Delete item?

Yes          > No

•••

"Akiraaa—! I can't believe you left me here!"

The second Akira opened the front door, he was met with a face full of yowling black-and-white fur, then was nearly sent careening right back out. There was fur in his mouth, caterwauling in his ears, and a collar digging indents in his face. It was the best kind of welcome anybody could ask for.

"You always do this! You up and leave me behind for no reason, completely out of the blue! And I hate it! I hate it a lot!"

Mona was distressed. Akira could recognize that. Like, super distressed, now that he thought about it some more.

"'m sorry," he mumbled into the furry pelt latched on his face. "Can you let me breathe? I won't do it again."

Not on purpose, anyways.

"That's what you always say," sniffled Mona, but he detached himself obediently and scurried onto Akira's shoulders. "You're so airheaded! It's like you live in your own world!"

"I do not," protested Akira, who had once managed to convince himself that he was an 18th century burglar displaced in both time and geolocation, then had made a whole ruckus about it around town and inconvenienced a great many people.

The workers at Junes still eyed him suspiciously whenever he turned up for groceries. Also, he was 50% sure Teddie only talked to him because he had been specifically instructed to tail him. (Then again, it was always sort of difficult to tell what was going on with that guy.)

Akira—plus one furry passenger—crossed the threshold of the mudroom, deftly dodging the landmines that took the shape of shoes scattered about the floor like petals. If he strained his ears past Mona's mews, he could hear the faint echo of his footsteps reverberating through the empty entrance hall. Idly noting the pair of black high heels kicked across the room, he swapped out his worn-down sneakers for slippers. One of the heels had landed in a potted plant.

Oblivious, Mona continued to chitter an endless stream into his ear.

"...so many moths in the downstairs closet, you wouldn't believe it! A whole nest, like they've taken over the entire room! It's not your closet anymore, it's theirs now. What do you think, 'Kira?"

Akira thought about it. "Nobody really uses that one, so it doesn't matter." Akira was done thinking about it.

Mona flicked his tail, tickling Akira's nose. "Not true! Your mom stuffs all those ski jackets she keeps buying in there."

"Mm."

"I still don't know why she buys them—and so many too."

Akira didn't know either. He was relatively sure there were only three (human) people in his immediate family, not twenty-seven (and counting), so why they needed twenty-seven ski jackets (and counting) was a complete mystery. He'd tried asking his mother once, and all she'd done was look at him funny then proceeded to buy another jacket.

"Not to mention, you and your parents have never even gone skiing befo—"

Silence abruptly surged in when the dining room came into view.

"Mona...?" Akira whipped his head around. His friend had vanished from his shoulders with naught a trace, like a ghost—like he'd never been there in the first place. Something cold and sickly slithered into his veins. Mona was gone. Gone. He had been here just a second ago, so how—

There was a woman sitting at the dining room table.

The chairs around her, previously neatly arranged, had been knocked down and scattered everywhere as if a hurricane had swept in, then departed just as abruptly as its arrival. In the middle of the mess, next to a tipped-over vase of stark white lilies, the woman was slumped over facedown, her hands tangled in her red-tinted hair that spilled onto the tabletop like a toxic oil spill. Her skin was paper-pale; her black cocktail dress looked like a rumpled funeral get-up; overall, in all aspects except physical, she was a corpse.

"Good morning, mom!" Akira greeted cheerfully, pulling out the chair opposite of her and sitting down. He kicked his feet, slippers just a good inch or two away from brushing the floor.

He saw his mother so rarely that he was happy enough with simply sitting near her, hangover or not. Or whatever was afflicting her this time. Sleep deprivation, maybe? Whenever she was moody or depressed, she would make sure everybody around her knew about her moodiness and depression by making herself a public spectacle to be gawked at and uncomfortably ignored. So it really could just be regular, old sadness.

She must have entered the house late last night. Any earlier and he for sure would have heard her arrival and come out to greet her. His mother had the unfortunate tendency of slamming doors open and loudly announcing her presence before honing in on the nearest person to mercilessly pester them for attention.

"Ughhh," groaned the woman in question, still facedown and eloquent as ever. She slapped a manicured hand somewhere next to her head. "My... head..."

Akira hesitated. He wasn't sure how big she was on hearing him talk at the moment. "Do you want water?"

"What do I want..." His mother sounded half-dead. Like a zombie. "I want..." Her moaning and groaning certainly fit the part. "...the time. What time is it?"

Akira glanced at the slightly skewed clock right above his mother's head. Somehow, the hurricane had gotten to that, too. "It's 8:27."

"In the morning?"

"Mm."

"Why am I up so early?!" she lamented to no one in particular—at least, that was what Akira assumed since she had yet to lift up her head or actually acknowledge his existence. She might as well have been talking to herself this whole time and figured Akira was some benevolent figment of her imagination. "Oh, that's right. I've got approximately... an hour until that board meeting all the way in Okinawa, then that dye-job, and, and... afterwards... I'll have to hunt down that man and force him to have lunch with me. He'll probably decline again, with how wicked he is. A soulless heathen, he is."

A fist banged onto the table, making Akira jump a little.

"Sacrimony."

Sacrimony! Akira mimed banging a fist with exaggerated gusto. ...What does that mean?

His mother finally lifted her head, fighting gravity and air heavy with melodrama. She tilted her chair backwards on its legs. If Akira were to do that, she'd gripe about falling and cracking open his skull, but evidently adults were immune to skull-cracking. "Another one of life's endless trials, I suppose."

Even though she couldn't see him, Akira nodded silently in support and kicked his feet a little harder. She always said the funniest things.

"That man" was most definitely his father. It wasn't exactly hard to figure out. His mother's entire schedule—her life, even—basically revolved around him, like a wayward moon entangled in a planet's orbit. She came home about twice a month, after she grew tired of working and networking and chasing after his father for affection. She'd usually stumble in at the middle of the night, barge into her room with all the grace of a tropical storm, pass out, then wake up just in time for Akira to cook her breakfast. Afterwards, an appointment or meeting or gala would snap her attention back to the city and off she'd go, a hot-and-cold whirlwind of clinical professionalism and girlish clinginess, all the more ready to chase after his father once more.

It was a pretty fascinating game of cat-and-mouse to watch, captivating in the way you couldn't tear your eyes away from two cars running the light and speeding straight towards each other for an explosive collision. Although, he had a feeling that it'd be a lot more fascinating to watch if he, the sole spectator, wasn't the players' own child—but that was trivial; it was a fact of life that simply had to be accepted.

"What a piece of work is a man..."

One particularly high kick and he accidentally thumped the underside of the table.

His mother jolted and nearly fell out of her seat. "Mon di—Oh, Akira-honey, when did you get here?" The legs of her chair struck the floor with a resounding thunk! as she settled her elbows on the table, crossing one leg over the other.

Fixed with her piercing gray eyes, he couldn't help but wilt a little. He fixed his gaze to the table. Mahogany sure had an interesting texture. "...I've been here the whole time."

His mother didn't quite seem to hear him. "Don't kick your feet, poupette, it's bad etiquette. And sit up straight, will you? Bad posture will lead to scoliosis and, eventually, painful, painful surgery."

Akira straightened accordingly. "Sorry."

"Now," Like a hummingbird flitting from flower to flower, her focus flew to another topic at breakneck speeds, "here's something much more pressing." A brilliant red lock twined itself around a finger. "My hair. What do you think? Should I go with a bun today? For an air of elegant sophistication—not that I'm lacking in anything."

Akira opened his mouth to reply then was immediately cut off.

"Actually—why stop at a mere bun? Perhaps I ought to go the extra mile and get straight-cut bangs!" She peered at her reflection in the patio door. "Would that look nice? Some people look unquestionably horrendous with bangs—they haven't got the forehead width or height necessary for the look, which doesn't exactly stop them from wandering about and inflicting their presence on innocents—and I fear I may be one of them. The bangs, you know, not the terrible presence. Quite the contrary on that aspect when it comes to me, wouldn't you agree?"

"Umm..." Forehead width. He had gotten lost about six words in. "Ye...ah...?"

"I'm glad you're able to discern authenticity, honey." She smiled approvingly at his general direction. "So? Bangs or no?"

Why was she asking him about styling hair? Akira was absolutely hopeless when it came to this subject. He knew this. She knew this. Practically anybody who laid eyes on his horrifying birdnest knew this. He was a hair stylist's worst, eldritch nightmare, packaged and topped with a bow on the head of an apocalyptic little boy. His mother's previous stylist had told him as such—albeit, that was after she had broken three combs and two brushes in his hair, then, at her wit's end, had hysterically threatened to shave it all off, to the consternation of his mother. They hadn't gone back since.

"You look nice in any hairstyle," was what Akira eventually offered. Non-answers disguised as compliments were an easy escape route. Everybody liked them.

"That I do!" brightened his mother, and the conundrum was dropped just like that. Her gaze swiveled back to him like a prison searchlight and he had to physically restrain himself from sinking into his seat, especially after a frown crossed her features. "Akira..."

He fiddled with his curls as he waited patiently, very carefully not kicking his feet no matter how much he wanted to.

"You..." The frown deepened even more, except it exuded confusion more so than anger, which was—preferable. "Akira-honey, what are you still doing here?"

Here?

Now just as confused as his mother, Akira waited a little longer for her to elaborate. Typically, he had to be very patient when dealing with his mother. In contrast to Akira, her mouth worked at a faster rate than her brain, so it took a while for her thoughts to catch up and for her words to actually make any sense. As a result, she mostly just spewed gibberish that she herself didn't even know the meaning of—admittedly, very fancy, eloquent-sounding gibberish, but gibberish nonetheless. It was as if she had read a dictionary only once, then had forthwith made it her life's goal to run through all the words in the Japanese language every single day, ad infinitum.

His right foot was starting to sway back and forth. Oops.

"Akira..." his mother began again, though this time she actually finished the thought, "shouldn't you be getting ready for school?"

Oh. So that was what had been troubling her so immensely. "School ended yesterday. Today's the first day of summer vacation."

His mother was forgetful like that.

She blinked, bewildered. "Wha—? I thought middle school got off a tad later this month?"

"I'm still in elementary school."

Like, really forgetful.

"And you're in... fifth... grade?"

"Sixth."

Really, really forgetful.

"...Are you sure?" His nod was met with a suspicious squint. "Hm. Odd."

She flipped a cascade of hair behind her shoulder. Shiny. "I suppose I'll have to take your word for it. Do know that if you're lying, however, the authorities will have no choice but to arrest you and sentence you to life in prison—maybe even the death penalty! And prison will doubtlessly be drab and awful with their appalling uniforms—not to mention the impossibility of anybody liking you after that."

Huh. Pretty insane punishment for lying.

"Oh, and—don't kick your feet, poupette. It's bad etiquette."

Startled, Akira looked down at his traitorous feet, which had resumed their back-and-forth against his will. He guessed he was sort of forgetful, too.

Sitting still didn't seem to be his forté. He watched as his mother's gaze meandered to the overturned vase of flora on the table, then, sensing that his presence had been dropped from her radar like a sack of rocks, he hopped out of his chair and went off to make her breakfast. The distinct sound of a vase shattering on the floor echoed behind him.

That had been a nice interaction.

•••

"What are you gonna make for your mom's breakfast?"

Akira glanced up at Mona, who had settled in on the ledge of the window before the sink, his long yellow scarf swaying lazily in the breeze. The faint notes of a strawberry-sweet love song floated in the background. "Mona! You're back."

His friend puffed out his chest. "'Course I am! I could never stay away from you for too long."

Akira smiled warmly to himself, pleased as punch. It had been awfully lonely without him.

"Sooo? Whatcha you making?"

He looked down at the eggs he had placed on the table, one of which was slowly rolling its escape off the table. He nudged it back towards safety. "Mmm... rolled omelettes."

"Oooh, good choice!" Mona's tail curled appreciatively. "Adults eat a lot, right? Maybe you should add some sausage slices to the side. They've got big stomachs, you know—Oh, but don't say that to your mom. She'd kill us for sure."

"'kay." Akira dutifully retrieved the sausage links from the fridge, snipping one off and setting it on a plate beside the eggs. They were sliced into neat, flat circles. The tea kettle whistled cheerily, a merry tune in the background.

Mona evaluated the arrangement. "Your mom's pretty big on eating healthy, isn't she? At least, that's what she says, but she's always so picky about vegetables."

He was right about that.

"You should add some greens to the omelettes—like spinach. It'll help balance out all the protein you got going on."

Setting aside the tea set with a clink, Akira twirled a lock around his finger while he thought. "Do you think I'll have time to boil the spinach?"

"Definitely," nodded Mona with the utmost confidence. "It'll take a while, but your mom won't notice. Her perception of time is basically nonexistent."

He was also right about that.

Akira took out the biggest kitchen knife he could hold—which was to say, not very big at all—and set about completing the rest of breakfast, hopping on and off assorted stools to reach sinks and stovetops while Mona chimed in here and there, his own little sous chef on the windowsill.

"Don't forget the salt! And make sure not to put as much as that one time! You know the one."

"Mm."

"'Kira, I think the tea's done steeping. Oooh, is this Earl Grey? Smells sorta citrus-y."

"Yeah."

"Yuck, there's a black speck on this plate! I know you're not using it right now, but you should still wash it off. Sanitation is important, you know!"

"'kay."

Stuff like that.

At one point, Mona managed to locate the sixth apple slice that had been very suspiciously and conveniently hidden away where cats usually wouldn't look, then proceeded to strong-arm a very sullen Akira into eating it—quite the impressive feat, considering how cats weren't exactly the most well-known for their dexterous paws and opposable thumbs, but Mona, in typical Mona fashion, got his way. Akira sulked for the entirety of thirty seconds before becoming thoroughly distracted with the omelettes, which required some finicky handling in order to roll them up neat and nice without any wear or tear.

The end result was happy yellow rolls dotted with spinach greens, along with one equally happy cook. Cooking was a joy.

Mona's smugness was a lot less fleeting than Akira's apple-induced moping, though. When Akira went to deliver breakfast to his mother (who had taken to viciously tearing off petals with a manic sort of glee), Mona came with, still oozing satisfaction over his victory.

The smugness ebbed when he caught sight of Akira's mother.

"She's making a mess," his friend complained, then sneezed after one wayward petal smacked him on the nose. "Actually, seems like she's already made a mess, and is dead set on making it worse."

Busy with balancing everything in his arms, Akira made a noncommittal noise, grappling with the teetering tea set and trying to prevent a box of color pencils from slipping into the void. The tea went next to his mother's omelette and the color pencils to his spot, and not a single drop was spilled, nor a pencil dropped into oblivion. Hurray!

"Who does she think is gonna clean all this up later? Seriously..."

Now that success had been secured, he hoisted himself into his seat as Mona leapt onto the table to complain eye-to-eye.

"I don't like this," he declared imperiously, that emperor-like authority back once more. His tail lashed in irritation. "Can't you make her stop? She's in a good mood today, so maybe she'll listen for once."

Akira shrugged. His mother's default state was a category ten hurricane with all the horsepower of the gods' collective wrath. Trying to oppose her would be like throwing yourself headfirst into a tropical storm armed with nothing but a deflated swimming tube.

At the very least, the shattered remains of the vase had been cleared. That was surprisingly nice of her. Though it was highly likely that she had tossed them outside onto the patio as some sort of shortcut.

Akira leaned around in his seat and looked beyond the glass doors behind her. A shiny pile, distinctly shard-like, twinkled in the sun.

There they are.

"For real...?" It was thanks to Mona's feline instincts that he managed to sidestep another petal shot his way like a bullet. "Ack! Y-Yeah, I'm not sure what I expected."

Akira hummed as he carefully took out black, blue, and yellow pencils and began scribbling away, tongue poking out in concentration.

Mona twisted his head this way and that in an attempt to make out the blobby shape being scribbled into existence. "What's that? What're you drawing? Looks abstract. I bet it's a cat."

Akira always drew cats.

"Told you."

It wasn't a particularly difficult thing to guess, though.

"You only say that 'cuz you were found out so easily. Acknowledge my genius already!"

Sure.

"Thank you."

An abrupt sigh tore through the air with all the severity of a knife flung into a paper canvas.

"A dozen of these wretched flowers, and not a single one bearing the fortune that I want!" His mother was waving around the de-petaled stem of a lily in erratic arcs, looking a little bit loony. Her eyes were wild, her face was aghast, and her hair was frizzy—something she would likely throw a fit over later. "Every one of these plants, all telling me that he loves me not!"

"Ohhh," Mona's head was following the stem-waving, to and fro, like an especially cute bobble head, "so that's what this was about. She really believes in a children's game? Pshh—even I know it's fake!" A beat. "...Is it?"

Actually, last month one of Akira's classmates had performed this same game in the name of her beloved boyfriend, for whom every morning she'd plop a big kiss on his cheek. They were the class couple: they drew their initials in hearts on desks, on fences, on trees, and on detention slips given to them because of the vandalized desks.

The last petal plucked by the girl had decreed that—woe!—he loved her not. This had been a divination so horrifying that she'd broken up with him on the spot, loudly, grandly, in front of the whole class, teacher included. For someone who'd gone through many detentions for the sake of true love, the boy had taken the break-up like a champ. Not even three days had passed before he'd come walking into class with a new girlfriend on his arm. So it was pretty clear that whatever he'd felt for her hadn't been love.

In the end, the flower had been right.

"Geez," whispered Mona in horror. "I guess this thing really does tell the truth."

"It tells lies!" thundered his mother. She threw the stem at the decorative fireplace they never used, where it fluttered pathetically to the ground, a good half meter away from its intended destination. After huffing her displeasure as loudly as possible, she looked down at the table. "Oh. Breakfast." And then she sat down and began eating without much ado.

"She's sorta silly, isn't she." Mona redirected his attention to Akira's drawing. "Hey, hey! That's really good!"

In his excitement, he hopped around and all over the paper while Akira tried his best to dodge and draw in the places Mona's paws currently weren't tap-dancing on.

"This is the most tremendous thing! I like the eyes and the ears and the pouches and—Oooh, is that a bandana? It is a bandana! Pretty striking against the black and white, I must say." He nodded approvingly, prim and proper, then promptly shot up like a pogo stick. "And, and—the silhouette! It's very cool, very stylish!" At this, Mona got all squint-y. "...Why's it look like a bobble head, though?"

"That's you," said Akira.

"That's me?" echoed Mona.

"That's who?" asked his mother. She glanced up from picking at her breakfast to level Akira with a suspicious stare.

He tried his best to shake off the weight of her eyes, which were as heavy as bricks strapped to a person pushed overboard. "That's what you'd look like as a thief. I think."

There was a scandalized "Thievery?" that was unanimously ignored by everybody else.

Mona slunk around the paper in slow, appraising circles. "Hmm... Hm. Hmmm..." Suddenly, he became so excited that he couldn't resist launching into a second round of his kitty tap dance. "I love it! I look totally amazing! A real phantom thief! You even managed to capture my debonair charm!"

Akira watched his friend bounce all over the place with a small quirk of a smile, something warm and floaty bubbling up inside him. "I'm glad."

His mother was still staring at him. "Akira-honey, who are you talking to? You haven't smuggled in another vermin, have you? How many times must I tell you—they're filthy. They've got rabies and fleas and, worst of all, they clash with the house decor." She shuddered, the perfect picture of agony. "Besides, I thought you'd learned your lesson with that last rat."

"I didn't smuggle in anything," Akira mumbled sullenly. And Taffy-chan hadn't been a rat. She'd been a garden snake. There was at least one major difference between the two. Say, for example: the dull, grayish fur of rats, in contrast to Taffy-chan's much prettier red, yellow, and black stripes. She had also bitten a bird and killed it instantly, and he was relatively sure rats couldn't do that. So, in total, two differences.

His mother narrowed her eyes. "Are you telling the truth? Remember what I told you, about what they do to liars..." Her voice trailed off, tellingly ominous.

"Mm." He scribbled a yellow sun next to the bobble-headed Mona while the real Mona nodded merrily, bobbing his head in the cat equivalent of two enthusiastic thumbs-up. "Liars get arrested for life and sentenced to death row and also don't go to college."

"What? No. Liars get their vocal cords ripped out and mouths stitched shut, so that they might never tell another lie again."

"Oh."

"And then they have their college-bound opportunities ruined."

"Okay."

"Do pay more attention, honey."

"..."

"Was that what she said before?" Mona's kitty face was screwed up as much as possible to convey the true brevity of his skepticism. "I don't think that's right. I'm sure there was a prison scenario tossed in there somewhere."

Akira shrugged. There were more pressing matters to attend to—like Mona's thief design. He fiddled the tip of his pencil against the paper—tap-tap-tap—dotting its white surface with little black specks. "What else do you think I should add? A weapon?"

"Oh! Oh! A cutlass!" Mona exclaimed, right as his mother burst out, "Really, who are you talking to?"

Mona rolled his eyes. "Hoo boy, here we go again."

"Yourself? Are you talking to yourself? If so, refrain from doing that in front of others. They'll think you've gone insane, gone mental, that you have to be shipped to the nearest mental institution—and that's not the sort of stain that washes away easily on one's reputation."

His mother was remarkably disdainful of something that she practiced on a day-to-day basis—monologuing great soliloquies and re-enacting theatrical dramaturgy to an audience composed of only one member: herself.

"Silly." Mona looked unimpressed.

"Plus, it's annoying. If you really must express your ailing mental state, do that somewhere alone. Preferably in your room. Quietly."

Akira stayed silent and waited a few more seconds, to check if she had finally ended her tirade or if she might have anything else she might wish to tack on—

"It's common courtesy. Etiquette, honey."

—then waited a few more, before speaking slowly, as one might do to a three-year-old missing their frontal lobe. "I'm not talking to myself. I'm talking to Mona."

"That's me!" Mona said.

"Mona," his mother parroted. "The—your cat, you mean."

"That's also me!" Mona said, except he didn't sound so proud this time.

By all accounts, Mona was a cat, and technically Akira's too, granted he was more of a dear friend than a mere pet, and—if he were to swap that last bit with "owner"—it was vice versa for Mona. It was an outrageous concept, owning Mona; to own Mona would be like claiming you owned the Earth and the entirety of the solar system, plus the distant stars, too. It was insanity, an impossibility—something that would be laughable were it not for its wholly blasphemous nature that, rather than amusement, evoked a deep, stirring sense of unease. Mona was an un-ownable being, miles above the very concept of ownership—to suggest otherwise would be, like, super-duper dumb.

But that was too much of a mouthful to garble in one setting, so Akira settled for, "Yeah. That's him."

"Me!" Mona added helpfully.

His mother gave Mona a look that was commonly reserved for rotting roadkill. "...So. As I was saying, keep your little chats away from the public eye."

"But that's not fair!" Mona whined. Akira only nodded numbly.

"You're a good girl, Akira," his mother said kindly, "but as your mother, all I want is for you to become better. Someone that has done enough good to earn love and respect. Someone unlike your awful father." With an alarming twist of her smile, her gentleness decayed into sour mildew. "He hasn't returned any of my one-hundred and eighty-five voicemails yet! What outrage! That wolf never listens to me. Isn't he just awful, Akira-honey?"

Another nod.

His mother regarded him approvingly. "At least someone listens to me. Anyways, I've wasted enough time. I must get to grooming myself." She stood up in one smooth motion and strode out of the room, glancing back briefly to say, "You go and do whatever it is children do for fun. Eat bugs? Climb a tree? Whatever it is—shoo." She flipped her hair one last time, sparkling blood-red in the sunlight—"Ta-ta, kitty-cat!"—and left.

There was static and silence and the faintest whiff of lilies for a while, and then there was the soft, distant meow of Mona, "Y-You don't have to listen to her..." But Akira was already getting up and leaving, too.

•••

ITEM GET!! Mona Portrait

★★★★★

Color pencil, 8.5" x 11" canvas; a drawing depicting a black-furred, blue-eyed cat with an amorphous yellow accessory. It's a masterpiece! Hey, you should totally frame this!

...And I hope you feel better soon.

Delete item?

Yes          > No

•••

"He's my darling-honey, and you're my Akira-honey," his mother would giggle during those times when she had rendered herself spectacularly drunk on whatever secret caches of champagne she had unearthed from the shadows of the house. And it was those very times that Akira would find himself on the receiving end of physical affection so unnatural that it was jarring, wrapped up in his mother's warm arms a tad too tightly and smothered in the scent of her floral perfume, all the while he was swayed back and forth dizzyingly due to her inebriated inability to sit up straight. Hugs were wonderful things.

"You're both my precious honey-things, but I'll tell you a little secret—" She would whisper loudly into his ear—or, somewhere within a foot of the location of his ear: "You're my favorite. Don't tell your father!"

And then she would drop him onto the floor and wander off to fuss over her hair.

To tell the truth, the only things he knew about his father were the occasional scraps his mother tossed to him: that his father worked at some high-end, high-stress job in the city, that the only worthwhile thing he had ever given Akira was his quiet, servile personality, that he was a wretched, wicked, terrible, twisted husk of a man with no soul and a whole harem of mistresses, and that he took his coffee black.

"He cares sooo much about his beloved work, so, so much, to the point of heroic, selfless martyrdom," his mother would coo, then her pitch would slip into something lethal. "So, so much, that there are no more scraps left for me."

And then she would down an entire bottle of wine or hurl a glass sculpture she had impulse-bought or simply pass out on the floor.

Other times, in her much more abnormal moments, his mother would act odd—completely unlike herself, like an entirely different person. She'd almost seem genuinely happy.

"The day I met your father, the gods surely must have been smiling down upon me! Blessing me—me!—with the privilege, the luck, the utter miracle of marrying that man. Our love was fait accompli—c'était le destin! I couldn't have been given a better keeper—someone with vaults of wealth and love to give, all for me. Always so thoughtful, so generous, so willing to spoil me, indulge me on my every whim, so that I might never leave him! How adorable! Isn't he adorable, Akira?"

And then she would impulse-buy another dozen few glass sculptures to later throw in a fit of hysteria.

For all her destructive tendencies—whether they be detrimental to her environment or herself—Akira liked it best when his mother was drunk, because those were the only times he'd find himself in the warm embrace of someone's arms. Safe and secure, albeit some champagne might spill into his hair or some tears might drip onto his clothes or breathing might become a bit hard to achieve.

It was more of an illusion of security, anyhow—his mother wasn't exactly a safe-for-work entity. She was going to hurt someone irreparably one of these days. Akira would rather it be him than herself.

Nonetheless, hugs were wonderful things.

•••

It wasn't until the amiable boom of "Welco—Oh, it's you, kid!" hit him like a sledgehammer when Akira finally woke up.

"Kanji!" With a sudden burst of jubilation, he shucked off his sneakers and hopped up onto the tatami mats, skidding to a stop in front of one of his favorite people ever.

Kanji was an all-time favorite for two very important reasons: 1) He was nice. 2) He wasn't an adult.

Sure, there probably existed out there adults who were nice, but that didn't discount the fact that no matter how nice they were, they would always remain an adult, adult-like and adult-wise, which was quite the unfortunate warning label to have stapled to your forehead. Luckily for Kanji, despite what his towering stature and grumpy-on-a-good-day-and-murderous-on-an-off-day face might suggest, he wasn't an adult. He was simply an especially mature-looking teenager—and especially kind!—so he was basically the messiah in Akira's eyes.

"Hey there kid, what're you loiterin' around for?" Kanji's voice was low and gruff, like that of a black bear. He reminded Akira of one, too, with his toughness and bigness and black-hair-ness. Akira liked bears.

According to the Tastumi matriarch, Kanji actually used to have blonde hair, but that was absurd. Black looked as natural on him as his bookish glasses. So maybe she had been joking.

"You here for something?"

"I dunno," said Akira, truthfully, because he really didn't know why he was here.

Kanji took his vagueness in stride. "Huh." He set down the current dapper-looking bunny plushie he had been methodically poking at with a felt needle. It had a bowler hat, a black umbrella, a pinstripe suit, and was overall exceptionally handsome for a bunny. "Well, wanna check out the progress on your newest cat?"

"Yes!" Akira eagerly followed him into the backroom, where he was met with a colorful array of plushies of all kinds—adorable woodland animals clothed in dashing and intricate formal wear, posing alongside some not-so woodland but still very adorable other animals, such as crocodiles in tutus and sharks with soccer balls and snakes with bowties and—Was that Godzilla in a frilly dress? Wicked.

"Special request from a li'l pipsqueak," Kanji mumbled and scratched the back of his head, embarrassed after having had heaps and heaps of oooh's and ahhh's dumped onto him by a very excited Akira. "She's been real into monster movies lately, so I thought, what the hell, why not?"

"Is Godzilla holding a parasol?" Akira pointed at the lacy pink thing sticking out of the lizard's hand before he was quickly steered away.

"I-It's a work in progress! So quit peepin' at it!"

He was eventually led to a low, round table, on top of which lay his cat—his cat, who was looking distinctly un-cat-like, with his missing tail and eyes and feet, flopped over on his side like the carcass of a squirrel. Akira was immeasurably pleased, anyhow. "He looks very nice."

Mellow as it was, his compliment was still enough to ruffle Kanji the wrong way. "You don't hafta say that kinda sh—trash just to be polite, y'know."

Compliments always brought about a strange mix of emotions for Kanji—like mixing honey and pepper together in cake batter, with the honey being bashful pride at having his hard work recognized, and the pepper being volcanic rage at having his hard work recognized. Kanji was funny like that.

"I mean it, though..." Akira poked at his cat. It didn't explode or spontaneously combust, so that meant it was a high-quality kind of cat. There was the cutest upturned smile stitched onto the kitty's fuzzy, white muzzle. Even as an eyeless, tailless, legless creature incapable of any tap-dancing or basic motor functions, the cat still looked happy as can be. "He has a nice smile. I like him lots! Thank you for making him."

Kanji appeared to believe him but also didn't seem to feel any better. "F-Fine! Fine. It's still unfinished—gotta redo the stitching on the left ear, too—so you can quit looking at it! Shoo! Scram! Get outta here!"

Akira was hounded to the entrance of the shop by a red-faced Kanji, who steadfastly and mercilessly shot down every single one of his offers of compensation—"I got no need for some punk slaving 'round the shop! Child labor ain't cool!"—and was currently trying his absolute best to shove Akira out of the door.

"I wanna help," whined Akira, clinging onto the door frame with all his might.

"Jeez, alright! So damn stubborn." Kanji gave up on prying his surprisingly resilient fingers off the wooden frame. "If you're so dead set on helping, why don't you, uh... um..." His deep frown suddenly lifted by a revelation. "Hey, you know the kid who just moved here?"

Weird change of subject. "Oh! The zoo animal?"

"The hell?" Kanji scratched his head, scrounged through his thoughts in search of some semblance of comprehension, then breezed past his confusion altogether. "Uhhh, I'm ignorin' that. Anyways, for the compensation that you just won't shut up about—" Akira perked up. "—I want you to go up to this kid—"

And menace them! Deliver a doll! Join them on a quest! Extort them!

"—and be their friend."

What?

"What?" asked Akira, because, seriously, huh? What?

"Be their friend, kid," repeated Kanji. "With all the gossip the old hags have been spreadin' 'round town, I got no doubt that the kid's gonna be... lonely. And you're a decent kid, you could do with a friend—er, a human one, not your cat. You get it, don't ya?"

Akira opened his mouth to reply that sure, he got it, but what exactly was he supposed to be getting? before he was cut off by a deafening SLAM!

The explosion of noise had been Kanji's fist hitting the door frame, shaking the structure with his thunderous rage like the rumbles of a monsoon. "Shit pisses me off!" Oh, he was angry. "Shit-talked and called cursed for something outta their control!" Oh, really angry. "No kid deserves to have that kinda rep slapped onto them! Dammit!" Really, really angry. Fuming, he stomped away and into the back room, muttering all the way, "These damn people..."

Okay, then. Akira waved goodbye at Kanji's furiously retreating backside, then slipped out of the shop, hopping from the top of the stairs all the way to the bottom.

The afternoon sun was an overbearing beacon in the sky, beaming down at the already-dry earth with a white-hot glare. Weeds and flora no longer swayed in the morning's dewy breeze. Now, they drooped pitifully under the weight of the air—hot and humid and heavy like a fleece blanket—as if the heat of it all was sapping them of their vitality and slowly crushing them flat. There was the distant buzz of cicadas and the silence of empty streets and the stillness of heavy heat. Inaba was a hollow backdrop.

Even the cats, who usually loved lounging on the sidewalks and soaking in the sun's warmth, had escaped elsewhere to avoid getting fried into crispy bits. Akira felt a twinge of sadness at their absence.

The cabbage butterflies, too, were gone, having left for cooler cabbages. Or something. Why were they called cabbage? The butterflies. They're white.

Cabbages were green.

Making friends with someone... What kind of compensation was that? It didn't seem fair to Kanji in the slightest, who had put in so much hard work making all those wonderful kitty plushies that Akira hoarded in his room and strategically scattered around hallways and living rooms and bedrooms, all part of some subconscious ploy to populate the caverns of the house. Kanji wouldn't receive real compensation, wouldn't directly benefit from this—friendship.

There wasn't even a guarantee that there would be any friendship at all. Akira was notoriously horrendous at making friends—or merely meaningful connections in general—disconnected from the flow as he was. It was hard to insert yourself into the life of others when they didn't seem very keen on making room and you didn't particularly wish to do so anyways.

There was Mona, of course—his best friend!—but, even then, he couldn't remember how they'd become friends. One day he'd been floating downstream in dull, murky waters, then the next he'd gotten anchored down to reality with the help of his new kitty best friend. A splash of sunshine-yellow and sunny sky-blue in an overcast sea of gray.

It had been awfully lonely without him.

However, Akira supposed compensation was compensation. If that was what Kanji really, really wanted... He'd try his best!

He couldn't quite recall how exactly they had begun this exchange: Akira receiving a kitty plushie, and Kanji receiving an argument bartering for him to be paid back in whatever way possible. The origins were foggy. Akira's memory could become remarkably blurry when it was trying to forget something frightful. There were incorporeal wisps of a rainy day—although the rain might've merely been tears from hard, body-wracking sobs—and a dead cat—although the cat might've merely been a torn plush, or an actual corpse (even so, there had been a whole lot of cat-mutilation)—and Kanji materializing out of nowhere with a kitty plushie in hand.

Kanji was good at that—materializing out of nowhere, like a warm sunny day when the weather lady had only predicted gloom and doom but then had suddenly retracted her statement to declare that today had to be perfect for the return of her special someone, and can't have it rain while he's here! I'm gonna keep it sunny for a while.

And she really did. Record temperatures the whole week through. Akira liked the weather lady. So comically and cosmically bonkers.

Either that, or Akira had terrible situational awareness. And now, he was supposed to use that terrible situational awareness to find a random kid, apparently.

The faint notes of a strawberry-sweet love song floated through the air. Meandering along the cracked grayscale cement that stretched into the neatly paved grounds of the local shrine—where a fox and its little pups were known to nest at—Akira wondered to himself how to hunt down someone he had never met, had barely even heard of.

Maybe he could go around town asking people regarding the kid's whereabouts? But talking to people was tedious and tiring and a total bore—things that most people evidently thought the same when it came to him, seeing how shifty and shuffle-y they always became whenever he came near. Like how you'd see a wasp and go perfectly still out of fear, praying fervently for it to pass you by while it buzzed closer and closer and closer.

So that idea was out.

Akira hopped over sprouts and sprigs alike, stubbornly persevering in suburban soil, while he made extra sure to avoid stepping on any stray cracks. Wouldn't want to break his mother's back.

Oooh, shiny! Oh. Just a candy wrapper.

He picked it up and wandered over to the trash can on the far side of the pavilion, where civilization petered out into the raw greenery of the woods. He watched the wrapper float down, down, down into the trash can. Littering was bad.

Now. Where was he supposed to find some lonely kid, new to town and wary of crowds...?

His eyes caught the woods just beyond the edge of the shrine.

That works.

•••

There was a boy in the woods.

"Hi! What're you doing?"

He was sitting on a rock, looking spectacularly bored and mildly angry all at once, staring at the ground with a dull sort of interest. At least, he had been staring at the ground until Akira had burst out of the foliage with all the grace of a deer crazy from rabies, startling the boy so badly he'd nearly toppled off his rock. And now, he was leveling Akira with a spectacularly angry and mildly bored glare.

Facial expressions were rather difficult with this one, it seemed.

"Who are you? Where did you come from? What do you want?" The boy shot out question after question—as rapidfire as a machine gun—with a frankly fascinating amount of suspicion. Up until this very moment, Akira had had no idea the human voice could drip that much toxic acidity without melting any vocal cords. "If you try anything, I'll smash your head on this rock and crack your skull open. And then you'll never try anything again, since all your brains'll have spilled out."

"That sounds fun," Akira said cheerfully, because it really did sound fun, hitting things with rocks like chimpanzees, "but sorta counterproductive to what I'm supposed to do."

"What you're supposed to do?" If possible, the boy became even more suspicious. Not the type to feel things halfway, huh? "And what is that? Bothering me, specifically? Did someone send you?"

"Depends on who you are."

"What?"

Wooow, he was now spectacularly, stupendously tense. And angrier. It was as if the mild boredom from before had completely evaporated into nothingness—or it had been transformed into even more anger. The latter seemed likelier.

"Explain. Now."

Nevermind, it was definitely the latter. Angry and suspicious. What a combo.

"Ummm..." How was Akira supposed to go about asking this... Might as well just get straight to the point. "Are you lonely?"

"No." the boy deadpanned.

"Okay. Are you from the zoo?"

"No." This time, his voice was even flatter.

Akira nodded conclusively. So. He had managed to find a kid. Not exactly the lonely one, but, rest assured, a very angry one. That was a... start...?

He was suddenly struck with a desperate longing for Mona, who usually told him what to do and what to say and didn't expect much other than mindless compliance. Mona always made daily life so much easier.

Either way, he was still getting glared daggers at, so he told the not-lonely-but-undeniably-very-angry boy, "You're not the one I'm supposed to be bothering."

"Wonderful," the boy pronounced in a tone that indicated things were not wonderful in the slightest. "Leave immediately."

Akira didn't, in fact, leave immediately. "Why? So you can go back to staring at the ground?"

"Wh—I wasn't staring at the ground."

"You were," he said matter-of-factly. "You were looking at the dirt—" Which is on the ground. "—and you weren't doing anything else, so I think that counts as staring. At the ground."

"I was staring at ants," the boy hissed, his suspicion now evaporating into anger, just as his previous boredom had done. "I was ant-watching, you little mongrel."

Ants. "That isn't much better than staring at dirt."

"Oh, and of course you'd know, Mister Minister of Dirt, hmm?"

At that, Akira couldn't help the loud shock of laughter that escaped him. "Minis—Minister of Dirt! What—!"

"Are you well," the boy asked in that flat voice again. "Mentally." He was squinting at Akira as if he couldn't quite believe what he was seeing, like how you'd stare at three caribou stacked on top of each other out in the wild.

"I'm not—Mister Minister of Dirt," Akira managed to force out, after he had calmed down from his out-of-the-blue mirth.

"Could have fooled me."

"I'm Akira." He'd made the deliberate decision to omit his last name, in case it had the same effect on this very angry boy as it did on others: sending them into nervous titters and inspiring the intense need to vacate his proximity. It was odd how much impact a single name could hold, almost like some kind of curse.

Thankfully, no nervous titters or running away happened here. Instead, the boy scowled at him—which was a good sign, actually. "Did it sound like I was asking for a name? No. It sounded more like I was telling you to go away."

"I don't think I will," Akira announced, plopping criss-cross applesauce onto the grass beside the rock the boy was perched on. The grass was nice and spiky. These were very important things to note. "You're much more fun to talk to," and he didn't really feel like searching for some lonely kid at this moment... "It's too hot for that." Sorry, Kanji!

"I think I really will smash your head on this rock," the boy declared.

He had the oddest eye color Akira had ever seen: shadowed, his eyes were a burnt umber, scorched earth after a forest fire had swept its way through. When they caught the sunlight filtering through the canopy, however, his eyes sparkled a red as bloody as his mother's hair—except on him, the color looked markedly more natural and much prettier. Rubies twinkling in an inferno.

Pretty.

"I've given you more than enough chances to leave, but you're apparently too stupid to comprehend that, not to mention you've pestered me immensely, so I think I'll just kill you and be done with it."

He had a pretty voice too, melodic despite its biting sourness. "Are you a wood sprite?"

Those blood-red rubies lit up with wild bewilderment. "Pardon?"

"I was gonna guess a vampire 'cuz of the red eyes," shrugged Akira, "but you're sitting in the sun and not melting into dust, so probably not. Wood sprite is my second guess."

The boy muttered something that sounded distinctly like "You're definitely not mentally well."

"A fairy then," Akira decided. "You're pretty enough to be one."

There was a great deal of staring and shock and sluggish blinking, and then the boy was speaking in a slow, low voice, as one would to an intellectually impaired infant missing half of its neurons, "Flattery will not save you from imminent murder."

Akira frowned. "This isn't flattery. It's the truth. I've never seen you around town before, so you must live in the woods." And normal humans wouldn't live in the woods when there's a town so close nearby, "so you're a wood hermit." Or not human. "Or not human." Even though this boy was terribly hung up on being alone, "you don't seem like a hermit. So you must be a fairy."

"Fuck's sake," sighed the boy.

"I didn't know fairies cursed like that."

"Idiot," he hissed, "I'm not a fairy nor a hell-forsaken hermit. I'm a human, too—not that I'm entirely sure you're all human, seeing how you possess the intelligence of a goldfish. And the reason you've never seen me around town was because I only just moved here today—against my will, might I add. You met me in the woods because I came here for peace and quiet, away from all those brainless adults and their brainless chatter, only to have some brainless little dolt stumble upon me like the plague and disturb any semblance of decency present in this stupid hicktown. So. There."

"You're very chatty," Akira commented absently. During the boy's impressive tirade, Akira had shifted restlessly left and right 'til something had crinkled in his pocket and he'd taken it out. It'd been his drawing of Mona. Now, he was trying his best to smooth out the wrinkles against the grass, which was proving to be a fruitless endeavor.

"Hey. Are you listening? I don't think you are, with how taken you are with your—What is that? Is that a cat? My god, is it deformed."

"I always draw cats," Akira recited.

The boy leaned on his rock to judge the drawing from a more critical angle. "Why's its head so big, and its body so small?"

"That's Mona."

"Mona? Who's that? Your imaginary monster under the bed? It certainly looks like one."

"He's my partner-in-crime," Akira supplied, not even bothering to address that monster bit. It was so dazzlingly offensive that everybody would be better off if they pretended it had never been spoken into existence. "He doesn't usually look like this. It's just his thief outfit."

"You have a deformed, bobble-headed cat as your partner-in-crime." Disbelief was rife in the boy's tone.

That was maybe oversimplifying things a trifle too much but also pretty much right, so Akira nodded. "Mm. We're both phantom thieves, him and me."

"Phantom thieves?" The boy's voice might as well have been classified as an evolution of incredulity in real-time. "The felons? The showy ones who prioritize style over literally everything else? Flair over function?" It was like an exhibit straight out of a museum. "Those criminals?"

"Yes!" Akira liked museums. They always looked so shiny and grand on TV—when their insides weren't being trashed by the villain of the week or haunted by some vengeful ghoul or getting blown up as a fiery spectacle. Huh. Television had a surprisingly vicious vendetta against museums. "Like the ones in shows and comics and books."

"Hmm." The boy regarded Akira with slightly approving but still critically cutthroat eyes. "Like, say... Lupin?"

"Exactly! Arsène Lupin and Arsène Lupin the Third!"

"So you know both," concluded the boy with an air of finality, now definitely leaning more towards lukewarm approval and much farther away from the sort of disgust evoked by stepping barefoot on a worm. "That's good—better than expected, honestly. I got the impression that you're simple, so I wasn't sure if you knew how to read."

Akira felt like he was supposed to feel massively insulted, but all he could really feel right now was massive excitement. "You know how to read, too!"

"Of course I do, idio—Actually, ah, I suppose it was only fair for you to turn that on me, considering my behavior so far..." Mutter, mutter. "This is annoying. I don't understand what's happening at all. Why do I have to deal with this? Annoying. It's nice enough as of yet... but—but people are all the same. He's definitely going to..."

Suddenly, the boy laser-focused onto Akira, who had been watching him mumble and hiss to himself while politely pretending said mumbling and hissing weren't being mumbled and hissed, then delivered in a no-nonsense tone, the same kind one would use on an unleashed dog that had just caught wind of the mailman's truck pulling up, "You didn't hear any of that."

Akira smiled blandly in response.

However vanilla his face was, the boy still eyed it with the sort of wariness customarily reserved for sleeping cobras. "...Back to the point. I do know how to read."

A pause, as the boy very visibly restrained himself from the instinctual idiot! from escaping his mouth. It was very considerate of him. Akira was appropriately impressed.

"Because I'm twelve."

Akira was now double impressed. "You are?!"

The boy puffed up, peacock-proud. "Yeah! Er, um—yes. Twelve and one-sixth—practically a teenager already."

One-sixth. He had to be that specific? "You talk so fancy, though!"

The boy puffed up even more. "I do!"

"Like a grandpa!"

He puffed down. "I do not."

"No, no, totally," Akira said cheerily, oblivious to the withering scowl drilling holes into his head. "Your language, the way you speak—it's all very weird."

"Excuse me!"

"You're twelve—"

"And one-sixth."

"—and one-sixth, but you use words like degenerate and deformed and fuck's sake."

The glare devolved into a disturbed stare. "...Why does it sound so unnatural when you swear?"

"Weird. No other kid talks like that. Like you eat dictionaries for breakfast and novels for snacks. Your brain must be huge. Very weird."

The boy had finally had enough. "Oh yeah? Fine. It's weird. Fine. Maybe I do eat books on a daily basis. Maybe my brain is disproportionately sized. None of your business. The real question is, why do you talk like that?"

"Like that," Akira repeated thoughtfully.

"A three-year-old," the boy clarified helpfully.

Ah. "It's like... If I talked as fancy as you did..."

"Take your time," drawled the boy. He was proving himself to be a very considerate individual, despite all his initial crudeness and crankiness and cursing. Akira had entered the forest looking for a lonely boy and had instead found a walking, talking grump of a paradox. And wasn't that infinitely better?

Nevertheless, he had finished taking his time.

"If I talked as fancy as you did, then every conversation would take about a hundred more words than normal and twice—thrice!—as long." And there was no way his dusty-from-disuse vocal cords could possibly manage that. They were already shredding themselves into smithereens as he spoke. Yowch. "It just makes life easier. Plus, people typically like it better this way. When I talk as little as possible."

That was only one side of the coin, though. The thing was: adults always harbored some innate preconception of what a child ought to be—how they walked, how they talked, how they didn't backtalk—and if you stepped even a teensy-weensy toe outside that box, you were no longer a child but chucked into a whole other category altogether. An abnormality. Something other. And then people would look at you funny, like they were experiencing a sudden bout of indigestion and were choosing to blame you for their bowel problems. But the boxes people enjoyed categorically packing away children in were very small and very stifling and Akira had gotten used to the constipated looks, anyhow.

Either way, it was simply safer to say the bare minimum. Less chance of slipping up.

Akira took an extra smidgen of time to add one last thing: "Also, I'm eleven. Not three." He rocked backwards and rubbed at his throat, grimacing. It was sore. Yowch times two.

"So, you're conforming to societal expectations and peer pressure, huh...? Surprisingly intelligent move on your part, I'll admit that..." The boy was muttering again. A mutterer! How cute. His eyes snapped up. "Wait, you're eleven?"

"Eleven and three-fourths," Akira said, a little nervous. He hoped dearly that his answer had been specific enough.

"Three-fourths," considered the boy with a worryingly blank face. Maybe Akira ought to have used decimals instead? He'd had no idea age was such a brutal beast of a conversational topic. "Hm. So that's how it is."

His murmur plucked at Akira's curiosity like the out-of-tune twang of a guitar string. "Hm what?"

In a voice radiating triumph of the highest order, as if he was an angel heralding the grand opening of heaven's pearly gates accompanied by the fanfare of trumpets, the boy declared, "I'm older than you! I'm your elder!"

And then he laughed, a most wonderful, phenomenal symphony of overtures, from the whimsical lilts of a silver flute to the bloody screech of a violin knitted from bone and sinew. A musical amalgamation and Akira's new favorite song.

Everything about this boy was so wonderfully, wondrously pretty—sidewalk chalk and crystal pebbles, a treasure to squirrel away, to covet and cherish. Locked and loved.

"You know what that means?"

"Wha?" The boy was still talking. Right. Words.

"You've got to listen to what I say, do as I say, and deal with the misery. How does that sound? Appalling, isn't it?" Another crow-like cackle. Akira had half a mind to ask for an encore. "Revel before me, peon!"

"Old man," Akira said immediately.

"No," the boy said, also immediately.

"Grandpa," Akira tried again.

"Okay, you know what—first order as your elder is to stop comparing me to ancient coots on life support."

Were they playing this game now? "My first order is for you to stop ordering me around."

"What the—" The boy reeled backwards from the sheer offense. "You have no right to order me around. You're a baby! An infant! Imagine if people took orders from infants all the time. Society would collapse in a heartbeat."

"That sounds fun," Akira said cheerfully.

The boy narrowed his eyes, inspiring a peculiar sensation within Akira, the same sensation a mouse would feel under the bright fluorescent lights of a laboratory and an incoming syringe. "Fun. You're weirdly hung up on that. It's the second time you've said that exact same sentence in the exact same tone with the exact same cadence. What's with that? Are you really three years-old?"

"Eleven," Akira reminded him.

Ignored. "No, I guess this is just the natural idiocy of your kind."

"And three-fourths," Akira added.

Double ignored. "Your kind being stupid-idiot-asshole children."

"Aren't you a child, too?"

"I'm twelve and one-sixth!"

"That's a child."

"Fine! But am I a stupid-idiot-asshole child?"

Akira contemplated this.

Evidently fed up, the boy took the liberty of answering for him, glacier-slow and crystal-clear in enunciation: "No."

"Oh, okay then," Akira said easily, "then neither am I."

"That's not how this works!"

Companionship had too many finicky rules. Akira was as stumped as a log. "Why? What's so different?" And then, feeling the need to add: "You've got a lot of finicky rules."

The boy raged. He seethed. He fumed. He snarled out complaints, accompanied by vicious hand gestures that slashed through the air like a knife through an eye. He howled. He sat on his rock with his back to Akira, stubbornly trying to convince himself that Akira was nothing more than an abnormally tall patch of grass. He sulked.

Akira watched all of this with the vigor of a TV show fan during the season finale. The boy was utterly bewitching in his hemorrhage. As breathtaking as a landmark bombing.

A silence fell, spurred in part by the boy's determination to convince himself of Akira's deletion from reality out of sheer, steely will, aided and abetted by Akira's natural propensity of being so quiet he might as well have never set foot on this plane of existence.

It was just as well for this silence, as Akira's throat really was quite dreadfully dry, and there was that curious pounding at the sides of his head like twin jackhammers, not to mention how perilously shy he was of falling asleep: one foot off the ledge and the other ready to plummet him into blissful oblivion. The headache and sleepiness were business as usual—he couldn't go a day without being plagued with perpetual exhaustion—but the throat part was an experience.

His head drooped dangerously low like a weeping willow, before he snapped himself back to alertness. And then it drooped once more and he nearly droop-dropped off right then and there. He ruffled himself awake, the same manner he'd seen pigeons shake off drizzle, and refocused on what he ought to say to the boy, who still seemed impressively keen on his self-imposed time-out.

He opened his mouth right as the boy whipped around.

"Want to hear more about phantom thieves?"

"What's so great about some dirty thieves?"

They blinked at each other.

The boy took in the burgeoning excitement slowly yet steadily consuming Akira's face and made the split-instant decision to back out. "N-Nevermind! Forget I asked. I don't need to know, anyways. I already know everything there is to know about their better half."

Akira abruptly halted in his word-vomit build-up. "Better half? Of phantom thieves?"

"That's what I said, yes."

Embodying both confidence and confusion—Confision? Confusiodence?—he said, very slowly, "That doesn't exist."

"It does too!" exploded the boy. "Hasn't your pea brain ever heard of a detective?"

The pea brain comment was accepted without fanfare. "'Course it has. But I don't see how that relates to this."

"You're blind," came the hiss, "you blind, foolish fool. How can a blind fool see? Even when he looks at a fact, he can't see it for what it is. He's a husk. A waste of eyes."

Funny words from a funny boy. "Say more."

"Don't tell me what to do!" In spite of his best efforts to clam up, the boy couldn't help the "Shitlord!" from exploding out of his mouth. Catching himself, he slapped a hand to his mouth and began brooding in mute frustration.

Shitlord. Akira's body trembled from his ill-concealed giggles. He rested his head in his arms against the slope of the boy's stone seat and smiled sleepily up at him. What he got in return was a hand in his face. Ow. "I've seen lots of detectives. But most of them look too tired and gray for my taste."

The ones at the police station always seemed to have ten years shaved off their life span every time his mother was brought around for some routine scolding. It must be trying, admonishing someone who would inevitably crash her car into yet another public building come a couple months' time.

"Tired and gray?" repeated the boy with a mortally offended sneer. He had withdrawn his hand to make a show of wiping it and Akira's face-germs on his shirt. "Have you been seeing anything at all? Detectives are more charming and... and... beige."

"Beige."

"And lots of other colors, too!" Akira made to ask about those other colors when he was hastily cut off. "I suppose you would find the usual sophisticated coffee tones and sleek monochrome to be boring, with how flashy and gaudy a phantom thief can get."

"Black's not gaudy!" Mona was 95% black and he was the sleekest, most sophisticated phantom thief Akira knew.

"Oh no," the boy said in a sweet, simpering voice, "but it's all about the sparkles of stolen jewelry and the spectacle of a crime." Thankfully, the sweetness was exchanged for much more authentic acidity. "For something so meant for the shadows, they seem remarkably keen on hogging the spotlight."

"Have you ever seen a phantom thief?"

"No. Seeing a thing relies on that thing actually existing. Are you finally recognizing the inherent superiority of the detective? After all, you've at least seen some before. I doubt you've ever even laid eyes upon a phantom thief—outside of cartoons and your delusions, of course."

"I haven't."

"Ha!"

"They're too sneaky."

"Ugh."

"'sides," Akira shrugged amiably, "if they don't exist yet, I guess I'll be the first."

The boy chuckled, lowly and derisively—the warning growl of a predator. Akira quite liked it. "You? The first? The first phantom thief? Irregardless of how dimwitted and empty-headed you are? I know thieves already don't have much substance in lieu of style, but you're breaking boundaries here."

Akira's smile was luminescent with pride. "Thank you! I don't think I've ever broken a boundary before. Is it like a record?" People broke those all the time.

"That isn't—I didn't mean it that way—" Being smiled at evidently wasn't a pastime the boy enjoyed very much, with how jittery he was getting.

"What boundary will you break?" asked Akira, deciding to cut him some slack. "Something detective-y, I bet."

"How did you know that!" exclaimed the boy.

"You talk about them a lot. Detectives."

"Oh." He shook the jitters from his shoulders. "I do, I guess. I just didn't think you had the mental strength to form inferences of any kind. You don't seem to be the type to think."

Akira was really at a loss here.

The boy continued, "I'll be a detective in the future. An ace detective—of justice!" He was puffing up again, so proud and pretty and perfectly identical to a peacock.

"Then you'll be my enemy," Akira said casually.

He received a glare aflame with aggression. "Pardon."

"You'll be a detective, and I'm a phantom thief. Those two don't really mesh well, 'specially according to movies and TV shows. One's always chasing the other, or getting tricked, or getting bamboozled—"

"I got it, I got it. Phantom thieves are lawless tramps. It's what's written on the tin—thief. And detectives are executioners of justice, so naturally they'd hunt down evaders of justice."

"Phantom thieves have their own brand of justice. Most of them. Maybe."

"What a rousing exhibition of confidence."

Akira tried to think of a morally righteous phantom thief. Pretty much all of them played fast and loose with the law—it was what made up a huge fraction of their cool factor, naturally. But then again, the law didn't necessarily mean "moral"... "Robin Hood would count as a phantom thief."

The boy's teeth were bared; his hands were shaking; he was on the verge of doing something awfully unlawful. "He would not."

"But he—"

"No."

"R—"

"No."

"Oookay," Akira relented, because he wasn't entirely certain he'd like to see nor experience what unlawful crime was about to be committed.

"Good." This calmed the boy down considerably. He switched moods as speedily as a spinning slot machine. "And surely it's the detective who's bamboozling the thief."

"No. It's the detective who's getting bamboozled."

"The other way around," countered the boy.

"The other-other way around," counter-countered Akira.

"I can see that you're already doing a bang-up job of being my enemy."

"Hurray!" Akira stopped to contemplate if this was something to hurray at. "I think?"

The boy's nose scrunched in the most darling manner. "I already have enough enemies. Must I tack on another?"

Akira had to agree. "Hmm. Calling you my enemy doesn't sound very nice either... It's a bit hateful."

"You're my enemy."

"Technically, we're both each other's enemy."

"Yes, yes," the boy waved a hand flippantly, "technicalities would dictate that. But you're more my enemy than I'm yours."

Cocking his head to the side, Akira struggled to puzzle out the logistics. "How's that work...? Is it because you're so much angrier than me?"

"I'm not angry," said the boy, angrily, "I'm just—Look, the fact is..." He took a deep breath. Akira leaned forward in anticipation. "Everybody's my enemy. The whole world is."

After puzzling over this new development, Akira leaned back with no new revelations. "Well, that just seems to work even less."

"It's hardly my fault that you're too incompetent to understand!"

"How can everybody in the world be your enemy? What about the people on the other side of the planet? They don't know who you are." They couldn't oppose the boy if he didn't exist to them. Do animals count? "I don't think a slug would consider you its enemy." Unless he stomped on it. "But there are a lot of slugs out there, and you can't have stomped on them all. Have you?"

The boy stared at him. "Has anyone ever informed you of how horribly incoherent your speech is?"

"Not 'til now. You must've stomped on so many slugs."

"I haven't stomped on any slugs. That's disgusting."

"No slugs?"

With a tone of finality: "None."

With the same tone of finality: "So. The whole world isn't your enemy."

"You're hinging your entire argument on slugs."

"And I'm winning."

"No, you aren't!" shouted the boy hotly. "As if I'd ever lose to anybody, let alone you!"

Akira regarded him with smiling eyes. "What's so wrong with me?"

"Literally everything." His voice was as flat as paper. "I can't even begin to compile a list of all your crapped up deformities. You're a catastrophe-level disaster. A nuclear fallout just waiting to implode in on itself. A regular horror. Fitting that you're my enemy."

"Like a slug?" suggested Akira.

"Worse than a slug," concluded the boy. "You're below one, actually. In terms of inferiority, you're not even on a single slug's level, and—Stop bringing up slugs!"

"But you said the whole world was your enemy."

"And you automatically jumped to soft-bodied mollusks?"

Akira mused to himself, "But it turns out it isn't the whole world. Maybe it's all in his head."

"I'm still right here, you know."

"That's true," he talked over a huffy, haughty sigh. "I know I didn't know you, before you turned up in this forest, so I couldn't have opposed you. I still don't."

The boy gaped. "You—don't?!" Akira didn't think he'd ever seen a human being more aghast. He was breaking boundaries even now! Records abound! "The entire time we've known each other, all I've said were insults!"

"You're very creative," admired Akira. "I've learned so many new words from you."

"Conversely, I've lost so many neurons to you," disparaged the boy. "Just being in your presence is like sticking a vacuum into my skull and sucking up my brain matter."

Akira nodded solemnly. "Like jello through a straw."

"You're only further illustrating my point."

Illustrating... Akira glanced down at his wrinkly Mona drawing. "Hmm..."

A noise of disgust. "Don't tell me you just lost another neuron."

"I gotta go, Mister Detective. I'll be back."

"Hey? Where—"

And then he was gone.

•••

After weeks of scrounging up meager, minor scraps of courage (most of which he'd collected from Mona's pep talks, and the amount of which could be held easily in one hand, like five small pebbles), Akira had walked, trembling and tentatively, into the local hair salon and, holding up a shiny black card, requested his overly well-rehearsed, "I'd like one short hair, please."

The women inside had immediately launched into coos here and there. "How precious!" The head honcho—a severe-looking woman wearing an apron bedecked with combs, scissors, and spray bottles, and flaunting a stylish bob whose structural support consisted of nothing but hair spray and prayers—had been the one to approach him.

"Aww, that's cute." Laughing good-naturedly, the hair stylist had handed the card back, leaving Akira to stare at it, whale-eyed. He'd been at least 30% sure transactions had more going on than that. A swipe. Cards were to be swiped. Weren't they? The hair stylist had crouched down to smile at him face-to-face, crinkling the laugh lines at the corners of her eyes. "Little lady, where's your mom? Does she know you're here?"

Confused—Since when did mothers need to know where their children were?—Akira had stuttered out, "N-No...?"

The hair stylist had tutted disapprovingly. "Well then, you'd best be going on back to her, lickety-split. Wouldn't want to make her worry, now do you?"

"It's okay..." Akira's initial nervousness had only tripled, but he'd still adamantly stood his ground. "She doesn't worry. About me."

"What's that?" the hair stylist had asked, straining to hear him.

He'd announced as loudly as he'd could and as shakily as he hadn't wanted, "O-One short hair—p-please."

She'd given him a cryptic look that'd had him sweating bullets. Then she'd laughed again and ushered him onto one of those black swivel-y chairs. He'd needed a boost up, having been so small back then. "I suppose a bit of a trim won't hurt."

A terrifying sheet of darkness had been whisked over Akira's face. After he'd suffered a quick but suffocating swell of panic and wriggled his head free, he'd realized it'd just been one of those wizard cloaks hair stylists liked their clients to wear. Something about fashion. And magical auras.

"Although, it'll be a real shame," the hair stylist had tutted, grabbing at his hair, "with these long, beautiful—matted?—locks. Oh my, these are—When was the last time you brushed your hair, hon? With a comb?"

Akira had, at that point, practically been on the verge of hyperventilating from the hair-touching, hair-talk, and talk in general—novelties he'd all neglected to practice this whole month. "Um, um... I need that? A comb."

He'd watched his mother during her grooming sessions, when she'd set him on the bed then immediately forgotten about his presence in favor of hemming and hawwing over her hair. Her vanity table, usually neat and nice from Akira's chronic drawer-arrangements, would be swiftly trashed. Bottles and brushes and all sorts of bling would be yanked out, spritzed or glitzed on, then subsequently flung across the vanity. Once done, she'd be gone, as loudly and explosively as her entrance, and Akira would be left all on his lonesome, to reorganize the drawers and return to dull nauseam. Just like always.

To this day, he still had little to no inkling of what necessitated taking care of one's hair—certainly a great deal of spraying and shrieking—but it had all seemed very troublesome to deal with, not to mention clean up. So he'd foregone the matter entirely.

Thanks to that, his hair had gotten sorta... icky. Whoops.

"Ah." There'd been a long pause. "I see why you want your hair cut, hon. Are you brushing everyday?" This time a tad more forcefully, she'd said again, "With a comb?"

"I need to do that?"

"Yes. Haven't your parents taught you this?"

"Why?" Akira had asked with genuine curiosity.

"Well," she'd kissed her teeth in contemplation, "teaching children is what parents do."

His mother had taught him plenty, most of which had nothing to do with hair and everything to do with ruining the businesses of your enemies and potentially traumatizing their bloodline. "Parents teach hair?"

"Ideally, yes."

Then he'd supposed that it had been his fault for not learning enough from his mother... whatever it was about hair she'd been teaching all those times she'd practically split the vanity in half from her hair-induced rage. Most things were his fault, anyways. "I'm very sorry."

"What? What for?"

Hair negotiations had resumed shortly thereafter.

"But wouldn't you rather I detangle this—these clumps, instead of lopping it all off?"

Akira had said confidently, "No."

The hair stylist had asked, disapprovingly, "Really?"

Akira had said, not so confidently, "...No?"

"But it really would be such a shame, and your hair's so thick, with the sort of curliness other girls would kill for, so—"

Aw, rats. He'd been worried out of his mind that a setback like this would happen, so he'd come prepared. Time to whip out the card up my sleeve. Literally.

Akira had handed her two credit cards. "One short hair, please."

This time, the pause had been so agonizingly long that he'd nearly given up, right then and there. And then the hair stylist had sighed and mustered up some cheer. "Alright, alright, let's get to it then. How short do you want it? Perhaps just a couple inches, just a trim?"

He'd pointed at a nearby man sitting in the waiting area. "That."

"...That."

"Short."

"That's... that's rather extreme, don't you think, hon? A dash more than a trim, right?"

Akira had started getting shaky again. "P-Please and thank you."

Seeing that, the hair stylist had visibly given up. "Aish, alright then. One 'short hair'. Coming right up."

•••

ITEM GET!! Short Hair x1

★★★★☆

Whoa, whoa, whoa! You look so dashing! Although it's not nearly short enough, is it? The hairdresser chickened out.

•••

At the sound of rustling leaves and crunching grass, the boy looked up. His face flipped rapidly through a picture book of expressions: shock, confusion, annoyance, confusion again, then finally: disgruntlement. "You're back."

And you're still here, thought Akira, as he returned to his spot beside the boy's rock. "I was worried you might've gone home."

The boy scoffed with more disgust than he'd expressed by far, which was quite the record-breaker. Was what Akira had said really that icky? "Home. What a laughable work of fiction."

"I don't know. It sounds like a dream."

The boy shook his head condescendingly. "Precisely. Anyways, what inspired you to suddenly make a break like that? Running off like a headless chicken? Most people don't just bolt in the middle of a conversation, you know."

Is that right? "Sorry. I've never had a conversation this long."

"You only have yourself to blame." True enough. "Well? Why'd you run?"

"Something you said," Akira hummed. "It made me remember..."

That was, to hang up the drawing of Mona on the fridge. Every household required alphabet magnets and scribble-scrabble on their refrigerators, but the people who were meant to be putting up such bric-a-brac were sadly... preoccupied. So, it was up to Akira to populate their fridge. He had been doing so splendidly for many, many years. When he ran out of magnets, he'd use tape. When he ran out of tape, stickers. After stickers, glue. His fridge was 110% Mona Approved!

"Something I said?" asked the boy, sounding noticeably more strained. "What exactly was it that I made you remember?"

Akira was too busy trying to force a bottle into the boy's hands to pay his words any attention. "Here. I was also thirsty, so I got juice." The boy, who hadn't seemed to have moved even an inch from his beloved ant-watching rock during the entirety of Akira's departure, was probably thirsty too. "Orange juice." An important distinction. "You've been sitting." Another important distinction.

His bottle of orange juice was met with a wary eye. "So I have. How... thoughtful of you. And not at all deceitful or malicious."

"Umm, yeah. I hope so?" Akira twisted open his own bottle—crack!—and took a refreshing sip. He'd wanted desperately to drink it sooner, but had wanted even more desperately to drink it with the boy. His sandpaper throat had been most displeased with this decision.

"It's unopened," muttered the boy, turning the bottle 'round and 'round in the air, "no holes or signs of glue... Doesn't appear to be tampered with..."

Akira frowned. "Aw, someone's been tampering with the vending machine drinks?"

The boy looked at him with indescribable emotion. "Not. Yet."

Akira un-frowned. "Oh, goody."

"You know what," announced the boy, "I don't trust this in the slightest. Give me your juice, and you get mine. You can't possibly have poisoned your own juice and then been dumb enough to drink it."

"Wha—Okay." Akira watched his juice get brutally revoked. "Do that. If you want." And where was this talk of poison coming from? His detective instincts, perhaps?

"But, wait..." The boy inspected his newly acquired bottle just as sharply as he'd done to his old one. "What if you'd anticipated this?"

Spontaneous juice-swapping? "I don't think anybody could've anticipated this."

"What if you'd predicted I'd see through the surface layer of your act, and you'd administered the poison deep enough into the bottle that it'd be safe to take a small sip? Or what if you hadn't taken a sip at all, and had only been faking it as a pretense?"

"He's talking about poison again," Akira mused to himself.

The boy's nose was doing that darling scrunchy thing it did. "Also, gross. Your mouth touched this. I don't want your diseases."

Akira nodded. "It does seem sorta unfair that you get less juice than I do."

"We're not focusing on that. Quit trying to play nice."

"You want me to play mean?" An odd request, but he would try his best! What was something vividly, viciously, violently mean? The cruelest, most awfulest insult a human being could mutilate another with? Akira opened his mouth, buffered like a DVD player, then lilted out more as a question than an insult, "Your bangs don't fit your face?"

The boy gasped and sputtered and began hurriedly checking his hair. Nailed it.

Akira tried to return the unopened bottle, but it was coldly ignored in the flurry of grooming. "Here's your juice back. You can have both, if you want. Was that mean enough?"

"How dare you—how fucking dare you—the audacity—the appalling audacity you have—"

He was still holding the bottle, blankly. "Juice."

It was slapped out of his hand. "I don't want your trash! I don't want your pity! I don't want any of this god-awful deception!" To go the extra mile, the boy hurled his—Akira's, actually—open bottle into the air. It twirled and whirled, orange juice sluicing through the sky, elegant as a prima ballerina, then careened into the bushes with a rattling CRASH! "Do you really think I'm that stupid?!"

"Littering is bad," Akira admonished disapprovingly.

By now, the boy was quite clearly losing it. "Is that all you have to say? That's it? Those are your true, honest feelings to putting up with all of this? Litter?!"

"Well..." Akira fiddled with a curl in thought, flattered and flustered to have landed himself in quite the fender-bender of a position. He'd never been asked to share so many of his thoughts. The closest anybody had ever gotten to doing so was when his teacher had asked him the mandatory Monday question of "What did you do over the weekend?" and then followed it up with a lackluster, "Oh. Great." when she'd failed to understand Akira's frightened squeak even a little bit. She'd moved onto the next student pretty quickly.

This was different. The boy's attention was enormously enjoyable, and Akira's voice was actually audible. "I guess I'm a bit bummed you don't like orange juice."

The boy dropped his head into his hands, defeat stitched into his pose. His voice was muffled. "I don't understand you. I really don't."

Okay, so not that different.

That was fine. Nobody else does.

Some things stayed the same.

Akira went to retrieve the two unfortunate bottles: one still in pristine, albeit grassier condition, and the other now half-empty, having lost most of its innards in the bush. Good fertilizer. He returned to his spot by the rock and set the grassy, full bottle next to the boy. When it wasn't immediately ricocheted into the great beyond—or into another bush—he took a small sip from the half-empty one, and waited.

It was a grueling process.

Belatedly, the boy spoke up, voice deader than ever. "Oi. You. What's wrong with you?"

Loads of things, Akira thought to himself, but aloud he asked, "Which part do you want to know?"

"What's with all the..." The boy narrowed his eyes and wagged his fingers. "...wriggling?"

Wriggly from guilt, Akira squirmed in his criss-cross applesauce uncomfortably. "Mister Detective—"

"Don't call me that."

"—I really am sorry about what I said. The mean thing."

Incredulously, in a comatose sort of way: "You're sorry."

"Uh-huh," Akira nodded vigorously, nearly spilling his juice some more. "It was a total lie. Sorry I made you worry about your hair."

"I wasn't worried," retorted the boy, some life returning to his voice. "As if I could be worried." But his hands still shot up to fidget with his locks, and he was looking massively put out, like a newly shaved dog. "What's there to worry about hair?"

"Right! I think your bangs fit your face nicely." Akira traced the air with his fingers, following how his bangs framed his face. "Sorta heart-shaped."

The boy laughed, his voice spoiled by a mocking undercurrent. It wasn't as breathtakingly beautiful as the laugh from earlier. "Don't bother. I'm well aware—it's impossible to cut suitable bangs when all you've got is some shitty scissors and the memory of what her hairstyle looked like."

Akira's eyes gleamed. "You cut your own hair? Me too!"

"You... too?"

"Yeah! The hair stylist started to ask too many questions, so I ended up just doing it on my own."

Studying him with an indescribable expression fixed on his face, the boy said simply, "Hm. Is that so."

"It is so," agreed Akira. "Are we enemies now? I hope not, but—" He drooped in on himself. "I was mean."

"You were mean? That's preposterous, that's... Is this your way of indirectly accusing me?"

"Accuse you of what?"

"I—You—" The boy sighed sullenly, voice empty again, "No. We're not enemies. You're not my enemy. You couldn't even try to be."

Akira sat up straight, a daisy rejuvenated by sunshine. "Neat! Mister Detective—"

"I said don't call me that."

"—if I'm not your enemy, what am I?"

"Well." A hand traveled up to tap against the boy's chin. He looked spectacularly detective-y this way. "Common sense rules that, in order to be classified as enemies, there'd have to be a reciprocation of hate getting passed back and forth—which isn't happening here." He narrowed his eyes venomously. "You disappointment."

So, Akira was a disappointment. "My bad!"

"But you still annoy me to death, which is extremely enemy-like behavior. Just looking at you inspires a special sort of fury in me." To punctuate his point, the boy looked at him and instantly frowned.

Akira looked back and instantly smiled. "Just looking at you makes my heart dance."

"And you say stupid trash, too," complained the boy. "Certified dumpster variety. Everything about you pisses me off to no end."

Yeah, he'd proven that part more than enough. "'sides a disappointment, would I be a nemesis?"

"That's more of an evolution or a step-up from an enemy. The connotation fits even less than the previous one."

"We'd need a step-down, then."

"Correct," nodded the boy. He scrunched his nose. "Agreeing with you leaves a slimy aftertaste on my tongue. Don't bring up the slugs again." Akira closed his mouth. After some rumination, the boy lit up like a solar flare. "Wait, wait, I've got it!"

"You've got it!" Akira cheered.

A triumphant finger was pointed at him, square in the face. "A rival! That's what you are! Not hateful enough to be a nemesis, but annoying enough to be competition. Or, at minimum, a bug."

Akira clapped his hands together. "A rival! How dandy! Does this mean we get to duel? With tricks and traps and guns?"

"Dueling, yes. A gun? How weirdly bloodthirsty of you." The boy looked him up and down severely. Akira felt himself getting wriggly again. "You don't strike me as the type."

"Would a detective prefer poison? Like arsenic and walnuts!"

"No, no, that's far too under-handed and cowardly. Plus, it's not walnuts, it's almonds. And not arsenic, but cyanide. It's said to taste like bitter almonds. Anyways, I'd duel you to your face, after an official declaration of war."

"War's bad," Akira said crossly.

The boy rolled his eyes. "An official declaration of killing intent. There. Better?"

"Very much!"

"Odd standards you got there. I don't know about a gun, though. It's standard, basic, expected of a detective. Not much sophistication in following a trend. No finesse, none at all. Unless it's a ray gun, but—Those are childish."

"I'll take the gun, then. Maybe you'd like a..." Akira thought back to his Mona drawing, where it was now glued splendiferously to the fridge. "A sword?"

The boy's face lit up in surprise. "A sword! That's ten kinds of finesse." He admitted to Akira, reluctantly: "You know, for a cotton-brained shithead, even you can make the occasional blunder into genius."

"Thanks!" Akira was positively glowing from such high praise. "I've never seen a detective with a sword before."

"I'll be the first," said the boy flippantly. "Now we're on equal footing, as two firsts of our kinds. That's how rivalries function, by the by. If you weren't aware."

"I appreciate the reminder."

He reached out to knock Akira on the head. "See to it that it stays in there. Cotton brains."

It was as if that knock had cemented their rivalry; the boy now trusted Akira enough to drink some juice. He opened the bottle slowly and carefully, as one would to the casing of a live bomb, then, after eyeing and sniffing the liquid, he took a teeny-tiny, tentative sip.

"I'm not dead," was his diagnosis.

Needless to say, Akira was doing victory air pumps.

Shitlord, shithead, cotton brains, cotton head... There was a pattern here. And Akira did so love when things fell into place, as sweetly and neatly as a rhyme or reason. He plucked and picked at the puzzle pieces until they clicked together into a seamless picture. In the midst of this puzzle pick-plucking, he redirected an ant off his leg and back onto a blade of grass, gently and politely, as gentleman thieves did.

The boy was watching him. "You are such a tedious person." Thank you.

It suddenly clicked into place. Akira gasped as dramatically as someone with his limited emotional capabilities could.

His rival asked tiredly, "What now."

Akira had been getting all these wonderfully funny nicknames, but all he'd given the boy was a "Mister Detective." It was awfully selfish behavior. Rectifications had to be kickstarted. "I just realized I don't know your name!"

"That's it?"

"Rivals should know each other's names, I think."

"You don't know?" asked the boy incredulously. "How is that even possible? I'm positive those fools have already broadcasted my social security number for the entire town to stick their noses into. Do you live under a rock?"

"Are you famous?" asked Akira instead of responding to the rock question, because it seemed like one of those—What are they called?—rhetorical questions. His mother loved orating those to herself and Akira and anybody unfortunate enough to have gotten caught in a conversation with her.

"Famous, sure," the boy muttered more to himself than to Akira. "Famous in a rotten sort of way. Infamous is more like it."

"Infamous, not famous?"

The boy heaved a monumental sigh, like talking to Akira was some massive inconvenience, but still dutifully responded, "Infamous casts a much more negative context on what it's describing. Like how you might call a popstar famous, but you'd refer to someone responsible for a double homicide as infamous."

"Double homicide," Akira repeated thoughtfully.

"Do you need me to explain what a double homicide is? Because I won't. I'm hardly a preschool teacher. Or a daycare attendant. Or a wet nurse."

He was getting de-aged by the second. "I know what a double homicide is."

Annoyance overtook the boy's expression. "Then why'd you mumble it like some maladaptive vagrant?"

Akira considered asking what a maladaptive vagrant was, but ultimately decided against it, in case the boy might downgrade him to single-celled bacteria or something. "I was just wondering..."

"Wondering what? Finish your sentences." But asking for explanations instead of smiling passively and blanking out was hard. He'd practically already reached his limit—shot past it by a million miles and still going strong.

Akira recollected his wonderings and balled them up into words. "I was wondering... why you're so infamous to the point of everybody already knowing your name." Except Akira, apparently. "Were you responsible for a double homicide?"

"Goodness no, nothing as benign as that." The boy sounded affronted, as if killing two people in cold blood was a horribly gaudy crime to be blamed for. "I was simply made the way I am by extenuating circumstances beyond my control, and these townsfolk dislike me for that. And since they're townsfolk and all, simple-minded mob mentality dictates that I am to blame for my existence, which—sure, why not. Cursed. Whatever."

Cursed? It sounded oddly familiar, as if someone had specifically said that word before—and fairly recently, too. Like if you had been instructed to buy apples at the grocery store, but, by the time you arrived there, you had remembered to buy everything but the apples and were now very cross with your apple-less self.

"You look confused," the boy said in an outlandishly gentle tone, but his words were as caustic as ever, "Was I speaking too fast? Did your caveman brain short circuit? Blew a blood vessel? Had a stroke? Here, I can talk with only one-syllable words, if you'd like. You're. An. I-di-o—"

"I was thinking about apples," Akira cut in.

"What."

"But thank you for the consideration."

The boy was back to squinting incredulously at him. "I was being deliberately cruel."

"Oh." Akira cast about in his mind for something to say to that. "...Thank you anyways...?" Evidently, he hadn't cast far enough.

The squinting had evolved into full-on scrutiny. "What—What is this. Are you acting? Are you for real? No human being is as odd as you are right now—you do know that, right?"

Okay. This isn't working out. "If you don't want to tell me your name, that's fine." It really was fine. Akira could keep calling him "The Boy" forever and ever 'til the end of time and their rivalry would still turn out top-notch. Maybe. Possibly? He'd never had a rival before.

What a conundrum. Mona would know what to do. Mona knew everything.

There was a fleeting interlude of further squinting-scrutiny, and then the boy was diverting his eyes to the grass, biting out in a strained hiss, "...It's Goro."

No Mona necessary! Conundrum dropped!

"Oh!" Akira clapped his hands in uninhibited delight. "Hurray! Goro!" He lolled the syllables around in his mouth like a peppermint. "Go-ro." They tasted nice and pleasant and the faintest bit minty, though the latter bit could probably be attributed to his overactive imagination. The gazelle eff—The gazebo effect. "Gorororo."

Gorororo began to turn bright red, precisely like a peppermint. Just peppermints all around today. "Oh hell, has your last neuron finally degraded into nothing?"

"My name's Akira," chirped Akira, who was most assuredly Akira.

"You already told me that," said Goro, who was confused but still most assuredly Goro.

"I thought you might've forgotten."

"How could I have forgotten so quickly?"

"Most people do."

"Huh?"

"It's a fact of life," Akira said solemnly—"Huh?!"—and then he coughed, faint like an asthmatic kitten but nonetheless horrendous enough to compel Goro to immediately recoil like he was spraying radioactive sewage waste.

"Ew. Are you sick?"

"No." Akira coughed one last time, throat dreadfully dry. "Today's a special day, I think."

"For... coughing...?"

"No," he said again. "I met you today." Before Goro, he had never spoken so much in a single sitting—not even when he was with Mona, who usually prattled and chattered and chittered enough for three people in a conversation. Akira's body was sadly unaccustomed to that pratter and chatter and chitter coming from him for a change. He took another sip of orange juice and rejoiced in the orange-y juice. "That's what makes it special."

Goro's response to that was to launch into an utter oddity of a reaction: his rosy cheeks reddened even more, his mouth fell open, and a comically flabbergasted expression conquered his face. "...?"

No sound came out. It was like someone had slapped the mute button over Goro's mouth. It was a real-life, real-time case of media censorship. It was all very novel.

"You look confused," Akira said delicately, only he didn't follow it up with a caveman insult because he didn't think Goro deserved a second slap to the mouth. "Are you feeling lightheaded? Maybe you should lie down for a bit. Being horizontal always helps with dizziness."

A heated glare was menaced at him, as scorching as a stove fire. And then that glare was ripped to the left, then the right, as Goro spontaneously became incapable of looking straight at Akira.

"Shut up!" Goro finally retorted, even though Akira hadn't said a thing while watching him sizzle the grass with the mere heat of his eyes. He still wasn't looking at him. "I'm not dizzy. Or confused. You're delusional. And still an idiot snooper." Being momentarily mute had allowed his usual temper to bubble up inside of him like a volcano that had been corked shut mid-eruption. Thankfully, his volcano was short-lived. "...Maybe I'm a little confused."

Akira sat up straight. "I can help with that!" He loved loved loved helping. It always made him feel a little less sick with himself. "What're you confused about?"

"So much," Goro despaired with such genuine, heartfelt despondency that a rush of pity and the desire to comfort him hit Akira like two baseball bats to the gut.

He patted Goro's head—twice, for each baseball bat. Pat, pat. His hair was marvelously soft. Like dog fur.

Goro didn't take the pats very well.

"What're you—?! H-Hey! Sto—Stop that!" He whacked at Akira's hand like it was a fly and Goro was an especially violent flyswatter, face still peppermint-red. "You're making it worse!"

"Sorry." Akira withdrew his slanderous hand. In Mesopotamia, they punished their criminals by cutting off a hand. "Did that help?"

"Not at all."

"Sorry," he said again. Apologies always helped, didn't they?

"Stop the apologies, too."

...Ah.

Akira dutifully said nothing. Maybe that would help...? Except Goro was growling something frustrated and Akira was officially a failure. He opened his mouth to say something, realized that this something was taking form as the beginnings of yet another apology, and closed his mouth, now feeling just like Goro: miserably confused.

Rivalry was hard work. Even more finicky than cut-and-dry companionship. Akira was as stumped as the deforested Amazon.

Goro, in what was seemingly a rare show of empathy, took pity on Akira. "It's okay. I'll figure you out soon enough." And then he patted Akira on the head—twice, each one awkward and stilted and more of a wooden whack to his hair than an actual pat, but a successful mimicry (if he'd been mimicking Akira's baseball bat), all things considered.

Pat, pat.

Akira stared. It was a harmless, blank stare, but Goro took offense anyhow.

"D-Don't think too hard, A-kira," he snapped, cradling his hand like he had retracted lice from his brief brush with Akira's hair, "or you'll pop your brain like a blood vessel. Nothing would really change, actually, but the cotton mess leaking out of your ears would be a hassle to deal with."

"Wha...?"

"Just drop it."

Following Goro's advice was looking to be the more convenient route, so Akira obligingly dropped the oddity that had just occurred and latched onto an entirely different route.

His knees felt stiff. Like jeans. With a rustle of grass, Akira hopped up from his criss-cross applesauce. Goro reacted as if Akira had just pulled out a grenade.

"Are you leaving again? Why? Where are you going? I—I mean—" He harrumph-ed and turned his head away from Akira. "—it's about time you left. For good. You're a bug."

"I'm not leaving," Akira said. "Do you want me to leave? Because I won't." He was feeling stubborn today.

"A bug," Goro hissed.

Alright. "Mona says that you shouldn't sit still in one position for too long. Or else your body'll freeze into an ugly pretzel. My mom said that part, not Mona."

"Don't tell me what to do." Goro had upgraded from hissing to straight-up snarling. He was rather rabid in this aspect. Awfully akin to something... Something equally pissy and hissy and stuffed full with rabies... What is it again...?

"A possum!"

Goro seethed. "I'll skin you."

Delighted, Akira laughed and rocked back onto his heels. "You're very mean. But not in the way I tried to be."

"Yes," Goro agreed sardonically, "I've been known to be that way to idiots and snoopers. Naturally, that applies to you."

"I like it!"

That earned him quite the befuddled look. "What, being an idiot and a snooper?"

"No. Your meanness."

"The hell."

"Most people are mean, but they're boring in how they go about it. Not like you. You're funny. Talking fancy, using weird language like degenerate and deformed and fu—"

"Don't say it! I'm allowed to say it, but you're not!"

"—ck's sake."

Goro had his hands clamped over his ears. "I'm not listening!"

"Other people just repeat what everybody else says. Not unique at all." Akira sighed at the boredom that was other people, before perking up at the entertainment that was Goro! "But you are! Unique, that is. I like it."

The hands came off Goro's ears ever so slowly. "...You really are an idiot. A unique idiot, too. The most idiotic idiot I've ever had the bad luck to meet."

"See? Funny!"

A frown, but a confused one, as if the frown wasn't quite sure what it was meant to be frowning at. Goro's prior heartfelt despondency had boomeranged its way back 'round to smack him into a pit of misery. "...I'm not sure I like you very much."

"That's alright," Akira said happily, "I'm just surprised it took you so long to say that."

•••

To tell the truth, Akira hadn't always been so detached from the world. He'd tried to reach out to others, once—before he had realized the absolute futility of it all and wisely settled for melting into the background haze. In retrospect, maybe that one time he had chosen to target the neighborhood grannies as potential friend-victims hadn't been his brightest idea, but he'd been nothing but determined.

Besides, Mona had approved.

"I don't approve of this," Mona had said. "Never did, never will. But I can tell nothing I say will change your mind, so... go for it! Yeah!" He'd sounded as enthusiastic as a parent in a hazmat suit would, watching their child mix ammonia with bleach for the sake of a "life lesson."

Akira's game plan had been something like this:

He had to connect with his victims through their interests. Young or old, people liked it when things were about themselves. The neighborhood grannies had lots and lots of interests: sitting around in cultish circles, staring down nervous passerby like stone-faced gargoyles, making too much food none of them could eat—some of them hadn't the teeth for chewing, others hadn't the health for sodium, and one or two hadn't teeth nor health, which must've made for a pretty miserable life—and, most significantly, talking about bones. They talked about bones a lot. A frankly alarming amount, really, but Akira understood that they possessed loads and loads of bones, and people liked it when things were about themselves.

"Slow down," they'd say, "these old bones aren't what they used to be."

"It'll rain soon," they'd say, "I can feel it in my bones."

"Have another dish," they'd say, "you're all skin and bones!"

Again, alarming.

To reiterate, Akira's game plan had been something like this:

"Hi, aunties," he had said, ever so polite, after their gazes had swiveled to him in unison because he was a passerby who had to be stared at.

There was an instant uproar of chatter. Grannies were talkative things.

"What was that? Eh?"

"'Aunties'! Do I look that young? How precious."

"Hello there, Fubuki-chan!"

"That's not Fubuki. Fubuki's got brown hair."

"Hello! Would you like some snickerdoodles I made?"

"Oh, oh, could it be Shin-kun, then?"

"Shin doesn't even have hair."

"I also have some candied fruits!"

Snickerdoodles and candied fruits were all nice and dandy, but Akira'd had a mission—a game plan. A Mona-approved plan. "Thank... you. No. I have something to say."

(Believe it or not, his linguistic skills, barebones as they were now, had been even worse in the past, comparable to the eloquence of a rock. A socially stunted rock.)

"What'd he say? I didn't hear. What did you say?"

"Eh? She said something?"

"Candied mangos!"

Communications were at an all-time low. Well... Akira had supposed that there was no time like the present. "I have an announcement to make. About bones."

"Bones?"

"Bones?"

"Bones?"

"Candied pears."

"Bones?"

People liked it when things were about themselves, was what he'd understood. The only real time people liked it when things weren't about themselves was when it involved sticking their nose into other people's drama. In short, people liked drama. So, what he'd understood presently was that he had to make this announcement real, real dramatic. While still connecting it to bones. According to empirical data, this ought to double the like.

"I snapped my spine."

"""""What?!"""""

Akira had been hounded to the hospital after that.

Obviously his spine had been perfectly fine—if one happened to ignore that insignificant diagnosis about potential reduction in spine number and stunted growth and whatever the doctor had been jabbering endlessly about, which was precisely what Akira had done. He was very good at ignoring what he didn't like.

"—severe iron, vitamin B and A deficiency, hairline fractures in the right arm, possibly compromised immune system—we'll need to test further for tha—Please stop trying to mess with the computer."

Akira had settled back onto the examination table, as he had been trying to mess with the computer a little.

"Low blood pressure, low heart rate, low white blood cell count—Are you aware that you've got a serious case of malnutrition going on?"

He'd had no idea what that load of phooey had meant, but he had known that it probably didn't concern him in the slightest. The doctor had also kept asking him where his parents were—another load of phooey he hadn't cared enough to stomach—and he'd given increasingly bewildering answers like "the city", "the big city", and, finally, "the African savannah".

She had stopped asking after that last one.

While the doctor had been lecturing him about "sunlight, and why you should try going outside every once in a while", he'd taken her advice and snuck out of the hospital as soon as possible. When he'd slipped out of his waiting room, the grannies had been there, ready for ambush. They'd swarmed around him with coos of "You poor dear!", which had miffed him even more than the lecture on rocks and minerals and the flabbergasted looks regarding his parents. So he'd also snuck out of that as soon as possible.

The grannies had forgotten about him shortly afterward, fickle creatures as they were, what with their debilitating dementia and all. Thus, he was left as he was before—regrettably friendless but slightly more knowledgeable on rocks and how the sun grows them in your body, or something.

"What kind of rocks?" Mona had inquired hungrily. "Like diamonds? Hey, hey, can you grow diamonds? I'd love some diamonds right now. That's a staple phantom thief treasure. Shiny, shiny!"

"A mineral looks a lot like a diamond, right?"

"Maybe...? Is it shiny? I want a shiny rock."

It was probably shiny.

"Awesome! Go stand outside in the sun and photosynthesize some rocks right now."

So, Akira had concluded to himself as he'd drooped under the autumn sun, my game plan failed.

"Big deal!" Mona had scoffed.

Big deal! Akira had parroted in his head.

What number did this failure make? Number twenty-seven? Twenty-eight? Unimportant. For number twenty-nine, he'd switch targets to something less naggy, less bone-obsessed. Maybe a bird. A goose?

Oh! Or one of those crows that milled about in the telephone wire murder spot, like vengeful ghosts of bygone victims, spooking passerby with their urban legend status and colonizing the pole that everybody gave a wide berth, like it really was haunted. But ghosts didn't exist—a fact of life that he'd learned himself. (Number thirteen had been a rather lackluster séance.)

This game plan, though—This one would succeed for sure. After all, he was nothing if not determined.

•••

Akira woke up.

He blinked his eyes open, squinted, then blinked once more, just to check that they really were open. Because it was bright—blindingly so.

This time, he hadn't opened his eyes to empty blackness. Instead, he had been assaulted with the full-frontal force of the sun and sun incarnate, Goro, who was... staring down at Akira with wide eyes and a pale face—and then all signs of worry were wiped clean.

"Oh," he said, tone apathetic, "are you not dead? I really did think you dropped dead, when you passed out like that. One second you were pretending to listen to my lecture on the essential rules to being or writing detectives, and the next, you were gone from this mortal realm. I was just thinking about how inconvenient it'd be, to have to move a corpse away from my rock."

Goro rambles when he's nervous. Akira considered this as best as he could, his brain so sluggish it could barely process a single word every few seconds. It was very important information, so he filed it neatly away, into the mental folder with all of his mother's life lessons and Mona's lifelong nagging.

"Hey." The poor grass clenched in Goro's fingers went crinkle-crackle. "A-kira." He pronounced Akira's name so wonderfully, like it was curdled milk and he was lactose intolerant. "Hey. Have you gone vegetative? Not that it'd make much of a difference. You were already dismally brain-dead."

Oh. A response—that was what he wanted, wasn't it?

"Heat exhaustion," Akira choked out. This phenomenon was no stranger. His body was, unfortunately, one of the weaker ones, probably because of the minerals or rocks or whatever phooey the doctor had been yapping about. He tried to swing himself up. What he actually achieved was bludgeoning his forehead with Goro's chin and nearly conking himself out again.

"IDIOT!" Goro howled while Akira melted into a puddle of pure pain.

It took a long, long while for the two of them to recover to some semblance of functionality.

"You know," Akira said suddenly, while Goro rubbed his chin and a vendetta gleamed in his eyes, "now that we're rivals, we should have a duel soon."

Goro perked up.

And so, they dueled. The premier duel of their incredibly important rivalry took place right there, right now, fought over the very rock Goro had been using as a makeshift stool. The bloody battle began with an explosive start when Goro looked Akira up and down then huffed out a laugh.

Akira laughed, too. "What are we laughing about?"

"Your unfortunate height," smiled Goro, the type of smile that showcased his pointy vampire fangs and slightly squinted his pretty vampire eyes. "I'm nearly half a foot taller than you. See?" Using a stick he had picked up from the ground by means of measurement, he leveled it from the top of Akira's head and to his own forehead, comparing the two.

Akira was no longer laughing. "That's not a half a foot. That's like, three inches."

"Half a foot," Goro said firmly.

"Two inches," Akira bartered.

"No. You just reduced your own faulty measurement. You can't magnify yourself like that, A-kira."

"I'm not magnifying myself. I'm shrinking you."

Goro's mouth dropped open in outrage. "You can't bend the rules of reality like that either!"

"Okaaay," said Akira, slowly stretching out that last vowel in a way that he could tell was majorly grinding on Goro's nerves, judging by the other boy's increasing twitchiness and rising murderous intent. Still drawing it out—"Okaaaaay"—he climbed on top of the rock, where he finally cut himself off to crow victoriously down to Goro, "Now I'm half a foot taller!"

"You—!" The outrage, mighty as it was already, was multiplied tenfold and sprinkled with a heaping topping of even more outrage. "You jackass! How dare you use my own rock against me!"

"I dare," challenged Akira. He was promptly shoved off the rock. "Oof!"

Thankfully, grass existed and just so happened to exist right beneath him, so his fall was cushioned by its surprising thickness and volume and not-so surprising spikiness. Thank you, grass.

It was a savage kind of dethronement, witnessing his past triumph usurped by his rival, who bared his teeth winningly down at Akira. "Ha! Now I'm an entire foot taller."

Not for long.

Goro's already false claim was proven to be even more false when Akira grabbed his ankle. He went down as gracefully as one could when getting yanked off a rock—with a squawk.

"What the hell, Akira?!"

"Ow, ow, ow! What're you doing?"

"Ripping your skin off."

"You're pinching, Goro. That's a pinch."

"Fine. I can settle for pinching your skin off."

"Oh—ouch! Fine. I'll pinch you too!"

"Wait—Ow?!"

There in the grass, fighting and feuding and pinching each other in a ferocious duel for their lives and heights—all the while steadily coating themselves in grassy bits—neither of them were half a foot taller.

At the very least, Goro had been set back in character. And what a relief that was!

•••

The aftermath of the Great Duel of Mount Rock—that was what Akira was calling it, no matter how much Goro protested that it was stupid and meaningless and stupid and did he forget to mention stupid?—went a little like this:

Tired and thoroughly pinched, Akira lay sprawled out in the grass—He made a swell starfish!—with one arm flopped on top of Goro's. "Hey, d'you want free popsicles?"

"What'd you say?" Equally tired and pinched-out, Goro turned his head to level Akira with a skeptical squint. Grass littered itself so bounteously in his chestnut-brown hair that it looked like he was sprouting a meadow in there.

Hehe. Akira pointed.

"Stop that."

His point was mercilessly smacked away. Boo.

(Not to mention, Akira's hair was maybe-probably-definitely in an even worse, grassier state. Compared to Goro's meadow, his must have been an entire continent's worth of greens.)

"Come on, Gorororo—"

"Quit calling me that!"

"—it's hot and I want popsicles. Don't you?"

"And where in the world would you expect to just magically find free food?"

Akira shot him a smile so sunny that it could rival the noon sun hanging in the sky above them. Goro stared at it, looking a little star-struck.

"Junes, of course!"

•••

ITEM GET!! Heatstroke

★★★☆☆

Umm... that can't be good. But popsicles sure are!

Delete item?

> Yes          No

•••

The second duel of their incredibly important rivalry took place immediately afterwards, localized entirely within the Junes food square.

Some things happened beforehand, though. Namely: popsicles and Teddie.

"Look," Akira whispered, tugging on Goro's sleeve and getting brutally rebuffed for that audacious tug, "there he is!"

Their bottles of orange juice set to the side, the two of them were crouched behind the bushes that dotted the fringes of the Junes food court, peeking past leaves and acting super covert and not suspicious at all. It was late noon, a time when the sun had already passed its zenith and was now skulking in the sky like an egg yolk with evil intentions (those intentions were UV radiation), chasing bystanders into the air-conditioned retreat of their homes. Only the really crazy people were still out and about—AKA Akira, Goro, and the retail workers. For retail workers, insanity was a job requirement.

"Is that him? The target?" Goro whispered back. He had a leaf in his hair. Akira reached up to pluck it out, but was once more brutally rebuffed, directly into the bushes. Goro was what the people called the "hard-to-get" type.

"Ow." Akira recovered quickly from his tumble in the bushes. "You don't have to call him that, but yeah. Isn't he funny-looking?"

Teddie was bright blue, yellow, and red, and also a bear. There was no other animal in Japan like him. Not even the circus' colorful, acrobatic menagerie could compare. He could outshine an elephant.

Goro grew tired of enduring the ache in his knees and the burn of the sun against his back. "Are we going to jump him or what?"

Jump...? "Are we... mugging him?" Wanting to mug an innocent creature didn't seem right. This was, in fact, criminal behavior. Wasn't Goro a detective? "Not even phantom thieves mug people."

"Think of it this way: you're my accomplice—not in a crime, but in a case, don't jolt like that!—and we're currently conducting a stakeout mission, waiting for the target to settle into an optimal position before taking him down. This situation can be interpreted either way: detective or phantom thief. Is that better for your sensitive little brain?"

"Oh." Sensitive little brain soothed, Akira nodded without reservation. "Yes. I feel great. Let's mug him now."

"I told you, we're not—"

With a leafy explosion of noise and a startled hiss from Goro, Akira darted across the food court. He lunged ferociously at the target. "Teddie!"

"Wah!" Teddie was bowled over with all the grace of ten bowling pins, flailing on the ground as if he was making a summer snow angel while simultaneously having a stroke.

Throughout all the spasming and seizuring, Akira hung on for dear life. It was like a mechanical bull trying to buck its rider into hell. He was nearly crushed under Teddie's weight.

"An attack! An attack! I'm being mauled! I'm—Oh, it's Aki-chan! How're you doing, cub?"

"I'm mugging you," Akira informed him cheerfully.

Teddie responded with tenfold cheer. "Wooow, how bear-aculously clawsome! I don't even know what a mugging is! Where are the mugs? Mug, mug, mug!" He tossed Akira up and down in the air with the ease of someone flinging a feather-light plushie around.

Akira laughed joyously, enjoying the swooping sensation in his stomach as he was momentarily airborne, before he sobered into deathly seriousness. He was on a mission.

"Teddie," Akira began gravely, hands on the bear's plush, ever-smiling face, "we want popsicles."

"'We'?" Halting his mug-chant, Teddie rolled himself upright and set Akira down gently like he was a mug. "Oh-ho, where's your Mona? He's always got the beary best advice! I set something on fire yesterday, so maybe he'll know how to get rid of the evidence."

Teddie committed murder. Alarming, but not exactly surprising. Akira mentally labeled that with a sticky note—bright yellow for Teddie!—and filed it away for later examination, returning his focus to the mission at hand. "Mona's not here. He's staying indoors today. I came here with Goro." He pointed at the bushes, which rustled a little.

Teddie rumbled something like a purr. "Aki-chan, you've made friends with the bushes! And you named them, too. Goro's a bear-nomenal name!"

The bushes rustled even more.

"Yes," Akira agreed slowly, absorbing the realization that had just hit him like a meteorite, "Goro is a phenomenal name, isn't it? Go-ro. Teddie's always right about these sorta things."

If possible, the bushes were now radiating severe malevolent intent.

"Getting some beary funky vibes from those bushes," Teddie commented casually.

"Gorororo," Akira was still murmuring to himself.

There erupted a sudden roar of "Oh, enough!" and then the star of the show—bush—came bursting out of the bush—star—before he promptly skittered to a stop. "Ah." Goro stared wide-eyed at Teddie, seemingly unsure of what to make of the bear now that Teddie could see him. He began not-so-subtly scooting towards Akira. "...Hello."

"Hello!" parroted Teddie.

"Hello," added Akira, not wanting to be left out.

Now standing rigidly next to Akira, Goro tightened his grip on the wicked sharp stick in his left hand.

"Whoa." Akira pointed at it.

"It's for self-defense," Goro claimed, defensively.

"Against what?"

He gestured with his stick at everything.

"That explains a lot." It does not.

Teddie said cheerfully, "I'm sure there's a saying out there about poking bears with pointy sticks!"

Goro was still acting awfully awkward—standing rigidly, like he'd swapped his right foot for his left—so Akira took the initiative to formally introduce him. "Teddie, that's the Goro I was talking about."

"The bushes," Teddie said sagely.

"Goro, that's the Teddie."

"...A mascot," Goro said warily.

Things were going splendidly.

"Aren't you hot?" Despite being shorter, Goro managed to look down at Teddie as though the bear was nothing more than a bundle of sewer rats tangled together. Goro's tone, though, was plasticky-polite. "I can only imagine it's practically an oven in that suit for you."

A suit...? Akira poked his head out from behind Goro—since when had Goro stepped in front of him?—to declare, backed by an entire lifetime's worth of confidence, "Teddie is a bear."

Teddie's bear face was as smiley as ever. "Oh-ho! Don't worry about me, Go-chan—"

Go-chan twitched.

"—I'm basically bear-naked in here!"

"You're what."

Ahhh, not a good sign.

Goro was leveling Teddie with a stare so viscerally vile that Akira had to hurriedly intercept his line of sight before he could incinerate Teddie on the spot. Akira quite liked Teddie. He didn't think he would like him as much as a pile of cinders.

Akira's sudden emergence in his line of vision prompted Goro to grab him. By both arms. Was Akira a hamster to be squeezed? "Akira, this person is obviously suspicious and untrustworthy. We should leave."

"Wah—! How unbearably cruel of you, Go-chan!"

"Now."

Akira slipped out of Goro's grip (with much effort) before he could be dragged back into the forest. "Huh? But that's just Teddie. He's always like that."

In a dark and manic voice: "Is he?"

Teddie's typically lax laugh was tight with nervousness. "I'm sensing some ominous energy from you...! Here—" He stuck a paw out to Goro, who recoiled from it like it was one of the sewer rats. "—take this and calm down a little."

"This is..." Taking care not to touch any part of Teddie's paw, Goro picked up the gift the same way one would pick up dog dookie. "...a marble."

"I found it by the front doors! It's a bear-uty, isn't it?"

"Did you seriously just shove 'bear' into 'beauty'?"

Goro quit trying to act civil towards Teddie after that.

Akira peered at the marble pinched between Goro's thumb and index finger. Striped with blues and greens and blacks, it twinkled this way and that like a mini Milky Way. A galaxy condensed into a snow globe. Pretty. "If you don't want the marble, I can take it." He'd already accumulated quite the marble collection thanks to Teddie (he had no clue from where the bear was harvesting them). Another marble would be like a raindrop in a swimming pool. Although, he'd treasure it all the same.

Goro snarled and clenched his marble in a protective fist. "No way! This is mine."

"Okay," Akira conceded easily. "Goro's marble."

"I'm paw-leased you like it!" Teddie chimed in.

"I don't."

"Go-chan, you're growing bushes in your hair." He made to grab the leaf in Goro's hair, the one Akira had failed to remove on account of Goro's incredible propensity for biting. Goro, of course, tried to bite Teddie.

"Don't—Don't call me that! Only she can—could call me... Just, shut up already!" He gnashed his teeth menacingly.

Latent survival instincts activating, Teddie skittered backwards out of biting range. "Okie-dokie, Goro-chan!"

"And quit with the shitty puns! The horrendous character voice! Are you trying to sound like a bootleg Mickey Mouse?"

"That's just his accent," Akira supplied helpfully.

Goro whipped around to glower at him with wild eyes. "The hell kind of accent is that?!"

"I'll have you know," Teddie puffed himself up sternly, "this accent has allowed me to score with the ladies many, many times."

"He's talking about video games," Akira supplied helpfully.

"Aki-chan, my scores are beary much real!"

"Oh. Right. Sorry." He whispered to Goro, "Teddie likes to roleplay. He's real dedicated."

If this was someone's first time looking at Goro, they might have thought his face was permanently stuck like that: deep, dark, abyssal disgust. "Akira. We really should leave. Remember the maladaptive vagrant I was talking about?"

"I thought you said that was me?"

"Some concepts are applicable to more than one thing."

"Sounds smart." If Akira couldn't understand something, it was usually because it was too smart for his not-so smart brain to handle.

Goro's face wore a mocking smile. "Okay, great! Glad we're on the same page. Let's leave now."

"Wait, but, but—" Tugging uselessly, Akira found his arm held hostage by Goro, who had learned from his previously foiled attempt and had doubled his grip strength as compensation. He had... such a terrifyingly strong rival. "—what about our popsicles?"

Teddie hopped a full foot into the air. "Oh! Right, right! Aki-chan and Mona-chan's popsicles!"

"Mona's not here today." Akira dug his heels into one of the grooves of the stone pavement while Goro growled lowly at him.

Teddie did another gravity-defying hop. "Right, right! Aki-chan and Goro-chan's popsicles!" He shot off into Junes, surprisingly fast for someone whose walk was more of a waddle. He abruptly heel-turned to waddle back to them. "What flavors do you two bear-fer?"

"I can't even tell what word that was meant to be," Goro griped. He had given up on Akira's arm and was now holding Akira's entire body hostage, struggling to lift him up.

"Strawberry!" Akira chirped, half-slumped on the ground to make Goro's hostage situation all the more difficult. Akira liked strawberries.

"And Goro-chan?"

"I—" Goro paused in his attempted kidnapping. He gnawed his bottom lip contemplatively as Akira continued his gradual downward slump towards the ground. "I... am not... very familiar with popsicle flavors. Which flavor do you recommend?"

"Blue-beary!"

"I was asking Akira."

"Me?" By now, Akira had completely slipped out of Goro's chokehold. Head against Goro's legs, he looked up at his sun-haloed rival, who looked back down at him like he was gum beneath his shoe. From up there, he reminded Akira of an angel—the biblically accurate kind. Fire and brimstone! "Ehm..."

"Blue-beary!" Teddie repeated.

"A-kira."

Akira was beginning to panic a little. He'd never given suggestions to anybody before. Usually, he recited what people wanted to hear or people just didn't ask him anything at all in the first place. "W-What flavor does Goro like best?"

"I don't know," Goro said incredulously. "Bread?"

"That's not a popsicle flavor."

"I told you I don't know."

"How about I just bring the entire box?" Teddie cut in. "Goro-chan can try a little of each popsicle."

Akira cheered, grateful that he'd been given an easy way out of formulating his own opinion. "Teddie's a genius!"

"That's wasteful," sneered Goro.

"Teddie, that's a waste."

As a bear with exceptional hearing of the exceptionally selective kind, Teddie had always been one to listen to nobody but himself. "Box retrieval time! Righty-ho!" He shot off once more into the store, at warp-speed waddle.

With a sigh of relief, Goro stepped back from Akira. "Thank goodness. The freak's gone. Can we leave now?"

Akira puffed out his cheeks and grabbed Goro's leg as his hostages.

When Teddie waddled his way back, box in paw, he was met with two children duking it out on the ground. Judging by his nonreaction, this was a common sight. "Bear-hold—popsicles! Hey, you guys are having fun!"

Akira detached from Goro so quickly his rival nearly toppled backwards. "Popsicles!"

"Ugh," came the conclusion to Goro's hissy fit. "I want this town obliterated."

Teddie wagged a finger chidingly, as best as he could with mittens for paws. "That's not a popsicle attitude, Goro-chan."

"Don't just make up weird terms!"

The box was thunk-ed onto the ground for Akira and Goro to rifle through.

After Akira made quick work of extracting his anticipated strawberry, it was Goro's turn to peer through the variety of flavors. "And this is for free? All of this? Is that allowed?"

Teddie proclaimed with pride, "Nope!"

"To the first or the second question?"

"..." Teddie's exceptionally selective hearing took now as a fine time to kick in.

"Teddie's a year-round Santa Claws," Akira told Goro. Teddie had called himself that once—"I'm a year-round Santa Claws!" He could be right about things when he tried hard enough. "Teddie, will you let me help you take stock later?" Akira looked up at the bear with big, pleading eyes. "Kanji wouldn't let me. He hates me."

This, Teddie seemed to hear. "That's bearly correct at all! Absolutely wrong, to be bear-cise! Bear-posterous! Kanji-chan thinks you're swell! Sweller than swell! But—" He jolted out of the tizzy he'd worked himself into. "—sure, cub, that'd make me a beary merry ursine."

"Hurray!" With that itch scratched, Akira unwrapped his popsicle, wafting wisps of frosty fog, and stuck it into his mouth, pleased as pleased can be. Goro took a break from glaring at the flavors listed on the box to glare at Akira instead. Why?

After Goro finally, finally chose a popsicle—bright, light lemon, ever so fitting for his sun-like appearance and sour personality—he shooed Teddie away. "You can go now."

"Oh, boy!" exclaimed Teddie. He waddled a few steps away and stood there.

"...He's touched in the head, isn't he?"

Akira hummed around the strawberry sweetness saturating his mouth. "Teddie's just monitoring me, since I'm at Junes and all."

Goro hadn't yet touched his popsicle. "What? That's abnormal."

"Mm. Guess I am."

Akira received a roll of Goro's pretty eyes. With sparkles of sunlight pirouetting across those auburn depths, they glowed like enchanted rubies. "Anyways, why did you do that? Offer yourself up for manual labor? That creature was more than happy to give away free food. It's nothing more than a fool. A simpleton. You should've capitalized on its idiocy and left it at that."

"But that's hardly fair!" exploded Akira in indignation. "Everything's a trade, you see. Teddie's so nice that he wastes his time on me, so I give him what I have—which isn't very much, so I feel bad sometimes." All the time.

Goro's reply had no mercy and a great deal of ruthlessness. "Sounds stupid."

"Doesn't it?" sighed Akira. "I wish I was more useful."

"That's not what I mea—" Goro squawked when his drippy popsicle drip-dropped onto his hand. He switched hands to try and fling the droplets off. "Oh, whatever. I still can't tell if you're acting or not. If you are, you're laying it on rather thick. This sweetness is gag-inducingly cloying."

Akira smiled ambivalently. "You think I'm sweet?" A lemon droplet hit his nose.

"Gag. I hope you don't expect recompense for this popsicle—" Goro waved it at Akira, splattering droplets onto various surfaces, Akira's face being one of them. "—and the orange juice." Lemon in the eye. Yowch. "I never asked for them. Forcing trash onto someone and demanding that they pay for it is what scammers in the city do." Goro had learned to weaponize popsicles at an awe-inspiring speed. "You'd be no different from a scammer."

"Huh?" What were they talking about now? Scammers? No, before that...? He'd mentioned recompense? "Why would I expect re—recom... pense?"

"Recompense."

"Recompense!" parroted Akira joyfully, then stumbled on belated confusion. "Um—what's that for? I don't need it."

Goro paused in his popsicle warfare to boggle at him. "...I don't think you know what a trade is."

He went on to ignore Akira's indignant complaints of sure I do! Go-ro, I do! so he could actually, at long last, try his popsicle. By now, it had lost a sixth of its body mass from all the flinging and splattering and drip-dropping. If popsicles could, they'd declare him an enemy of the people. Popsicle. People. Peopsicle.

"It's... sweet." Goro sounded disappointed. Yet another reason to be reviled by the peopsicles. "I thought lemons were sour? Why is this so sweet? It doesn't even taste like a lemon. I would know. I've drunk lemonade, like, three times before."

"Maybe you'd like coffee flavor?" Akira suggested.

"I wasn't aware there were coffee-flavored popsicles."

"There aren't."

"Then why did you bring it up?"

"It isn't sweet."

"It also doesn't exist."

Amazing! admired Akira, putting up his hands as both a peace offering and a buffer between the Imminent Rage approaching him at menacing light speed. Goro really was too easy to rile up. Too, too easy. Amazing. "Do you want to try my strawberry instead?"

Goro curled his lip like he'd just been offered a hunk of horse manure. And a sewer rat. "Gross. It's covered in your slobber."

Akira had only taken two tiny bites from the tip. "I'll let you try mine if I can try yours." See? A trade. A real, honest trade, right there! Recompense abound!

"..." Goro's narrow-eyed hesitation reminded Akira an awful lot of holding out a biscuit for a street cat, invigorated by only the kindest intentions yet inadvertently flinging the poor animal into a bitter internal struggle wherein appetite warred against morals, its soul torn between lowering itself for a tasty treat or protecting its dignity from human garbage. Akira usually felt bad for inflicting this sort of moral quandary on the street cats, but on Goro, it was simply amusing. In the end, treats trumped trash. "Okay, fine! Only a little bit."

The trade was a success; the popsicles were swapped; treats were tasted.

"Tastes lemon-y," remarked Akira.

"Tastes even sweeter," groused Goro. "Ugh."

Akira traded his lightly tasted popsicle back. By now, this thing had passed from one boy to another and back to the first, yet it hardly had a dent. "Goro doesn't like sweet things?"

"Why would I?" Goro regarded his lemon popsicle with resigned mulishness, now that he knew none of the other flavors would be any less nasty for him. "Sweetness is the same as a brightly colored pattern on, say, a frog or a snake."

Akira liked frogs and snakes. Frogs used their eyeballs to push food down their throat. "Really?"

"Yes," Goro said sagely. "Sweetness warns of danger."

"What kind of danger?"

"Diabetes."

"Ohhh."

A brown-haired teenager had come wandering over while they'd been conducting that illuminating discussion, and he was now gesticulating exasperatedly at Teddie. Akira recognized the gesticulations, the exasperation, and the brown hair. It was the manager's son.

The manager's son was one of the most handsome, most prettiest people in town, and he might have been even more handsome and more prettier if it weren't for his unfortunate habit of freaking out so much. He was pretty enough to be a prince, but he certainly didn't live up to a princely attitude, so he could only settle for being a grocery store prince.

As the resident fuddy-duddy, he liked freaking out over mundane and major things in equal proportions, from whatever that came out of Teddie's mouth to that one time Akira had gotten temporarily banned from Junes for mass destruction of wares. He also moved like a cartoon character and talked like he was the comedic relief in a chick flick—an entertaining figure to watch from afar, but pitiable to directly interact with. He inspired in people the impression of someone who tried his darndest to please anybody and everybody, and to deny him in any way was akin to punting a puppy across the room.

Currently, the manager's son was freaking out about his most common freak-out topic: Teddie. "Teddie, dude! You can't keep eating whatever you want—that comes out of my salary, you know?! And why's this box of popsicles just sitting in the sun? Man, come on! And don't bother little kids. Remember that kid last week, who screamed when he saw you...? You're creepy-looking, Ted."

Surely the manager's son, the grocery store prince, next-in-line to rule over Junes, would know of Teddie's assignment of chaperoning Akira? Why did he bother asking this? Did that mean Teddie wasn't hanging around out of obligation...?

It was an odd thought, and it made Akira feel odd, so he dropped it without hesitation.

Teddie, as always, accepted the freak-out getting gesticulated in his face with admirable amiability. "Psh, that kid knows good looks when he sees it. And by it I mean me. Screaming at the sight of cele-bear-ties is what fangirls are all about nowadays!"

"Dude, that kid was like three. And also a boy."

"There are no barriers to fangirlism!"

"...Somehow, I doubt that."

"Awful," Goro announced, but it was unclear if that was directed towards the pair over there, or to the popsicle he was gnawing on. He treated his popsicle like it was a hunk of wood and he was a beaver: unhinging his jaw, biting it, gagging, then biting it again. Surely some improvements could be made to this process.

"You have to lick it," Akira advised.

"No way! That'd be too time-consuming."

Did he really not know how to eat a popsicle? "Some things are meant to be enjoyed slowly."

"That's nonsense. If you're slow in life, you'll fall behind others and never catch up. And where will that leave you? Evicted and living in the gutters."

Bleak.

Paff! Two plush paws smacked together in a pseudo clap. "Right, kids! Remem-bear to stay hydrated! It's bear-sically a heat wave today. Wouldn't want you passing out!"

"Oops," Akira mumbled to himself, while Goro side-eyed him knowingly.

"Drink some water! Eat some grass! Stay fresh! Or I'll chomp ya like a bear-acuda—raaawr!" Teddie waved his soft, squishy paws in the air. Menacingly.

"What's a barracuda?" Akira asked Goro.

"A piece of shit."

Oh.

"Teddie, dude!" despaired the manager's son, "Come on!"

"One last thing, before I bid you two au revoir." Teddie, in typical Teddie fashion, enveloped Goro in one of his Teddie glomps. Goro, in typical Goro fashion, bit him.

This was called "friendship".

"I'm glad you two are friends now," Akira said, while Teddie cheerfully tried and failed to dislodge Goro from his flailing arm. The manager's son could only look on in a mixture of horror and entertainment.

After he managed to free himself and glomp Akira, Teddie hastily ran off with the box and for his life, because Goro had tried to lunge for him again.

"The nerve of that thing," spat Goro. "Attacking you like that."

"Goro..." Akira was so touched that he thought he might tear up. "It's sweet that you're worried for me."

"Who's worried?!"

"Sorry if Teddie's been bothering you two..." Ah. The manager's son was still here. One could call it loitering, had it not been for his claim over Junes through the easy, elementary, nine-out-of-ten-doctors-recommend-you-try-this! hack: being born into the right family. "Hey, it's you! You, uh—you're not here to tip over any more shelves, are you?"

Goro turned intrigued eyes to Akira. "What did you do?"

Ouch. Mister Prince, could you please, please, please stop tossing Akira's dirty laundry all over Goro's impression of him? Although, Akira supposed it'd be hard-pressed for that abysmally ground-deep impression to sink any lower. He muttered sullenly, "I didn't know the shelves would be that easy to knock down..."

"That clarifies nothing, Akira." Oh, no. Looked like it had sunk even lower.

A little too late, the manager's son decided to repent for his crime of digging a deeper hole for Akira's reputation by changing the subject. "You're the new kid, right?"

It took a second for Goro, who had proven himself on countless occasions to be quick-witted and even quicker to snap at people, to snap at the manager's son. His eyes darted from Akira's passive face to the grocery store prince's inquisitive one, back to Akira, then back to the grocery store prince with sudden clarity. He'd realized that he was the recipient of that question. "Me? New? Yes—Yeah." Why is he talking like that? "Did you want something?"

"Nah, it's just..." The grocery store prince ran a hand all over his hair—through it, on top of it, under it, sideways, that ways—and didn't stop 'til he looked like a fuzzball. "Word of advice: don't let the rumors get to you."

Suspicious and hostile (not that this was a new development), Goro asked slowly, "What do you mean?"

"The people here love to gossip. Can you blame them? The only thing to do besides gossiping is, like, staring at crops and getting murdered sometimes. Oh, crud. Forget I said that last part! A-Anyways—gossip. Take what they say with a grain of salt. Lemme tell you, from one city kid to another, it's just housewives and grandpas with way too much time on their hands. You feel me?"

Goro let out an indifferent, "Hm." And then his eyes widened a fraction as the indifference was quickly shoved behind a veneer of friendly interest. "I—feel you. Thank you for the insight!"

Akira wondered why he was bothering with the polite act. If Akira were to open a dictionary to "polite", he'd find Goro listed as number one in the antonym section. Also, he looked horribly unhinged. Like a mannequin that had drawn itself a face and gone to blend in with a crowd of people.

The manager's son didn't notice a thing. He probably regularly mistook mannequins for real people. "No biggie. 'Sides, you've got that guy there—it's pretty cool that you've already made a friend!"

Goro's immediate response: "We're not friends."

"Uh, what?"

In a blink of an eye, they were holding hands. The hand in Akira's grasp was so very warm. It felt like he was cupping a drop of the sun in his palms. Bolstered by this solar support, Akira announced, "We're rivals."

"Uhhh? I—O-Okaaay...?" Things didn't sound okay. "That's... that's cool, too..." Things didn't sound cool either.

"This is my greatest enemy," declared Goro solemnly.

Akira nodded. "I'm worse than a slug."

Goro yanked on his hand. "Shut up about the slugs."

The grocery store prince skedaddled quickly after that. Funny guy.

Goro turned on Akira with such zeal that even a mole could see how he'd been dying to confront him this whole time. "Why are you touching me?"

"I can stop if you want?"

Goro's need for confrontation intensified. Not just a mole—even a worm could see it. "I didn't say that! I just wanted to know why."

Akira swung their hands leisurely. "It's a rival handshake, remember?"

"This isn't a handshake, this is just hand-holding."

"Is not."

"Is too!"

Perhaps confrontation ought to be resolved using another way. "Rock, paper, scissors. Winner is right."

Goro huffed. "Fine!"

Akira huffed just to match with him. "Fine."

"..."

"..." He looked at one hand, busy gripping a pink-tinted popsicle stick, then at another, busy being gripped into a pulp. "We have to let go to play, y'know."

Goro looked about ready to die from anger. "I knew that!"

During the few seconds it took to chant "Rock, paper, scissors", Goro's face once again flipped through a picture book of expressions: concentration, super concentration, anger, despair, anger again, then finally: victory. His face was truly a work of art, especially when he was over-analyzing his opponent to the seven seas and back.

In contrast to the hellish hurricane of emotions his rival rocketed himself through, Akira didn't spare a single thought about his choice: he simply let his hand choose whatever it wanted.

As it turned out, that was scissors.

"NO!" exploded Goro in the closest thing to a wail, flinging his paper and popsicle up into the air. "Scissors was my first guess—but then I thought paper might suit you better, with how flimsy and plain it is, but rock also seemed to work, too, with how bull-headed and stubborn you are, but—Argh!"

Akira was smug.

"Quit with that face."

Akira did not quit with that face.

"Horrible."

"I guess I'm right then," he said smugly, "since I won."

Goro waved his popsicle around dismissively. "Yeah, yeah, you won. You're the winner. Great."

"As the winner—"

"Stop."

"—I decree that this is now our official rival handshake." And then Akira stuck out his hand again, for Goro to shake indefinitely.

Goro stared at it briefly, blankly, and then slapped it down like a uniquely vertical, uniquely violent high-five. "Rock, paper, scissors—round two. Do it or you're a pansy."

"They're nice flowers," Akira protested, but obediently launched into round two anyhow.

They faced off against each other over and over again, up until round fifty-three—with Goro in the lead by one point—when the manager's son had to drop by and awkwardly shoo them away, on account of being "a noise disturbance".

"If you guys could just tone down the volume," he tried in vain. "Maybe cut back on the yelling?"

He hadn't even exited the food court when Goro had lost his one-point lead and started yelling again.

At long last, the Great Duel of Junes had finished with a flourish—in a tie. And a gentle suggestion to stay away from the food court for a while.

"I'm probably expected to report back by now," Goro said sourly. His cheeks were still flushed from the exertion of howling animalistically over defeat. "Running away was pushing it already, but staying out for so long..."

After a brief struggle, Akira successfully nabbed Goro's popsicle stick and disposed of both sticks in the nearby trash can. Littering was bad. However sweet their treats had been, there was now something heavy and bitter clinging to his tongue, like sticky soda coating a kitchen countertop. He tried swallowing but found it tiresome. "Are you going back to your detective bureau?"

"Ha!" Goro barked out a scoff. He sounded just as bitter as Akira felt. "As if. It's hardly something as fanciful as that. More like a prison, really."

"That's awful," Akira said earnestly. "Would you like to live with me instead?"

That earned him a strange, sideways slash of a smile. "I'm not some wild animal you can just take home, Akira."

"Oh."

Disappointment.

He'd forgotten what that tasted like.

"Rival handshake," Akira demanded, sticking out his hand. Goro grabbed it slowly, looking wildly unsure of what was happening.

They stood there for some scant seconds, Goro's palm heating up Akira's perpetually cold one, the evening breeze brushing gentle fingers through their hair, before Goro announced, "Wow. Fascinating. I have to leave now." He let go of Akira's hand as slowly as he'd grabbed it, then, studying his face, huffed out half of a laugh, as humorous as a funeral hymn. "You're weird. A-kira."

And then he was gone.

Akira waved goodbye to his retreating form, his hand tingly with a warmth he'd never quite felt before in his life. His rival was such a delightfully funny thing. A super-duper-iffic new toy! He couldn't wait to tell Mona.

•••

RIVAL GET!! Detective of Justice

★★★★★

Congrats on advancing to the most momentous step of becoming a full-fledged, gem-stealing, casino-looting gentleman burglar: getting a rival! Nyahaha! You're a bonafide phantom thief now!

Did you really have to choose this one, though?

•••

There was a lonely cricket singing outside his bedroom window.

"Did you have fun today?"

"Hm?" Akira's hand paused mid-motion where it had been smoothing back Mona's sleek and silky fur. His eyelids were heavy with drowsiness, but, as usual, he couldn't quite grasp sleep as it danced at his fingertips. And, as usual, Mona was here to make things better.

"Today," his friend repeated impatiently, pinning Akira with bellflower-blue eyes that shone with moonlight in the darkness of his room, inordinately intense in their sheer focus, "did you have fun?"

Akira must have, with how lightning-quick the answer escaped him without a sliver of hesitation. "Yes."

And just like that, Mona's impatience melted away like strawberry ice cream under the stifling summer sun. Purring with contentment, he curled into a happy little ball on Akira's lap, a bundle of peaceful joy radiating warmth and affection—Akira's personal midnight sun.

Outside, beneath the star-smattered sky, a second cricket joined the song. They trilled in melodious harmony together, voices fading into the ambience of the night.

"I'm glad."

•••