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Kouta remembers being small.
Small enough that his fists could barely make a sound when he punched the air; small enough that his voice never carried far; small enough that the older boys could corner him at the back of the schoolyard and laugh when he trembled. He remembers choking on air, remembers the taste of metal in his mouth, remembers wondering if this was what the rest of his life would feel like.
Then a shadow fell over them.
At first, he thought another boy had come to join in—someone taller, stronger, someone who would shove him back down the moment he tried to stand. But when he blinked up through the sting in his eyes, the figure didn’t look cruel. Just… resolute. Calm in a way Kouta couldn’t understand.
A boy stood there with his hands in his pockets, expression unreadable, as if he’d wandered by accident into a place he had no business being, but somehow still knew exactly what to do.
“Let him go.”
His voice wasn’t loud. It didn’t need to be. The other boys stiffened all the same, glancing at one another as if deciding whether this interruption was worth confronting. Kouta saw the exact moment one of them decided it was. He lunged forward, fist cocked back.
The boy moved first.
There was nothing dramatic about it, nothing flashy—just a clean, fast step and a strike to the chest that sent the boy stumbling back. The others followed, more out of anger than strategy, but he handled them with the same quiet precision. A shift of weight, a sharp block, a sweep to the legs. He didn’t yell. He didn’t threaten. He didn’t even look any angrier than he already had been.
When the last boy fled, cursing under his breath, the boy exhaled once, slow and steady, as though brushing off what had been a minor inconvenience.
Then he turned to Kouta.
“You should get up,” he said. “If you stay on the ground, you’ll start believing you belong there.”
Kouta swallowed, throat tight and raw. He pushed himself upright, swaying a little, and brushed dirt from his knees with hands that wouldn’t stop shaking. His savior didn’t comment. He just stood there, steady as a post, like the fighting hadn’t winded him at all.
Kouta’s breath hitched.
He didn’t know what words were appropriate here. Thank you felt too small. Sorry felt wrong. And asking why felt dangerous—as if naming the question aloud would make all of this vanish, revealing that the safety he felt was only imagined.
So he said neither.
Instead, he blurted out the only thing that mattered.
“C–can you… teach me?”
The boy blinked at him, taken by surprise for the first time since Kouta had met him.
A faint shift in his expression—not shock, not annoyance, but something quieter. Something assessing. As though no one had ever asked him that before, and he wasn’t sure what answer he was supposed to give.
Kouta swallowed hard. His throat still ached from being shoved against the dirt, and his palms stung where gravel had bitten into them, but none of that mattered. Not compared to this.
“Please,” he added, voice cracking. “I… I want to learn. I don’t want to be like this anymore.”
The boy seemed to make a decision. His posture eased, the hard line of his shoulders softening just enough that Kouta could breathe again.
“Sure,” he said. A simple word, steady and certain. Then, after a heartbeat: “But why don’t we start with introductions?”
He stepped closer—not enough to be threatening, just enough to make the distance between them feel intentional rather than accidental.
“I’m Hiragi Touma.”
—
At one point, Kouta thought his life could be split neatly into two parts: before and after Hiragi.
Before was smallness—the kind that hollowed him out, that made him flinch at footsteps behind him and swallow words before they ever reached his tongue. Before was a world where nothing belonged to him, not even the shape of his own shadow.
After was Hiragi.
Hiragi looked at him once—really looked at him—and didn’t see something pathetic or weak or useless.
He saw someone who could stand.
And once Hiragi made that decision about him, it was as though Kouta had been handed a new spine.
Training followed, but the details blur when Kouta looks back: the sting of scraped knuckles, the ache in his arms, the way his lungs burned, the way he fell again and again and again. What remains instead is Hiragi’s steadiness. His patience. His silence. His expectation that Kouta would get back up—not because he pitied him, but because he believed he could.
That belief became something Kouta couldn’t help but cling to.
He followed Hiragi everywhere, at first because he didn’t know how not to, and later because he didn’t want to be anywhere else. Hiragi never told him to stay close, never ordered him to keep up, never asked for company—but Kouta kept pace anyway. Half a step behind. Always where he could see Hiragi’s back, always where he could reach him if the world suddenly tilted again.
In time, it became instinct.
When Hiragi stood, Kouta straightened.
When Hiragi walked, Kouta matched his stride.
When Hiragi fought, Kouta watched with the kind of attention that bordered on worship.
He learned Hiragi’s rhythms before he learned his own: the way his breath steadied before a strike, the way his stance shifted before committing to movement, the way he carried himself as if gravity bent more gently around him.
Kouta hadn’t meant to let Hiragi shape him so completely.
But Hiragi became the anchor point everything else revolved around—school, routine, fights, friendships.
Sometimes he wondered if Hiragi noticed—the way Kouta’s gaze always drifted to him first, the way he listened more intently to him than to his teachers, the way his shoulders loosened only when Hiragi was nearby.
But Hiragi was Hiragi: calm, collected, untouched by the weight of anyone else’s devotion. He accepted Kouta’s presence the way he accepted weather—sometimes inconvenient, often unremarkable, never something to interrogate too deeply.
And Kouta never asked for more.
Being near Hiragi was enough.
Being seen by him—truly seen, even once—had been enough to rewrite the map of Kouta’s world.
All Kouta knew was that Hiragi was the first person who ever made him feel like he could become something other than a boy on the ground.
And Kouta, who had learned early that nothing stayed, held onto that with both hands.
Held on so tightly that when the day came that Hiragi gently pried his fingers loose and told him to walk a different path, Kouta felt something inside him tear.
But years later—after the anger and the confusion and all the quiet grief in between—he still remembers this part clearly:
The very first time Hiragi pulled him off the ground… Kouta never wanted to fall again unless Hiragi was there to lift him.
And that single truth, simple and small as it was, shaped everything that followed.
—
Kouta remembered the afternoon too clearly: the way the sun dipped low enough to stain the river red, the way the metal railing of the bridge glowed warm under his palm, the way Hiragi walked just a half-step ahead of him, steady and familiar—the outline Kouta had followed for years.
They had finished training not long before. Kouta’s shirt still clung damp to his back, and he could feel the ghost of Hiragi’s thumb between his shoulder blades—adjusting his stance, grounding him, steadying him.
“You’re improving,” Hiragi had said earlier. “Your center of gravity isn’t drifting anymore.”
Kouta had tried not to look too pleased, but the warmth in his chest betrayed him. Hiragi rarely praised without reason. Every word felt earned.
Now they walked together across the bridge, the river whispering below. Dust from the training yard still clung to their shoes, drying into pale smudges.
Hiragi slowed. Just enough for Kouta to know something was coming.
“There’s something I should tell you,” he said.
Kouta straightened without thinking.
“I’m going to enroll at Furin High.”
For a moment the world tilted—the slow lean of sunset, the hush of wind across the water, the warmth under his palm all breaking at once.
Furin.
The school people whispered about.
The place kids with good futures avoided.
The place people ended up, not chose.
“But why?” Kouta asked, voice hoarse before he could catch it.
Hiragi didn’t look bothered. He never did. He turned to him fully, the red-gold light catching on his profile—calm and resolute in a way that always made Kouta feel both exposed and steadied.
“Because I want to help Umemiya fix it,” he said. “I believe in what he’s trying to do.”
Of course.
A noble reason.
A Hiragi reason.
Kouta swallowed past the knot rising in his throat.
“Then… I’ll go too.”
Hiragi’s expression shifted—not sharply, but gently. Too gently. A softening that felt like regret.
“Sako… you don’t have to follow me.”
The wind rippled across the river. Kouta didn’t feel it.
“You’re capable,” Hiragi continued, voice low but steady. “More than you think. You should pick a school that gives you the best shot. Not just the one I choose.”
Kouta’s fingers curled reflexively around the bridge railing. The metal bit into his palm.
He didn’t hear capable.
He didn’t hear more than you think.
He heard only: I don’t want you to come with me.
Hiragi, misreading his silence—as he always did, because Kouta had never taught him how to read anything else—kept speaking.
“You’ve grown a lot,” he said. “You don’t need to walk behind me anymore. You should build something for yourself.”
Not beside you? Kouta wondered, throat closing.
Not with you?
A bike rattled past them on the far side of the bridge, its sound distant and hollow. Hiragi didn’t notice. He was looking out over the water now, confidence in Kouta’s understanding clear in his posture.
He had no idea what he’d just taken away.
Kouta forced himself to nod—because he always nodded, because disobeying Hiragi felt like stepping off the bridge entirely.
“Yeah,” he managed. “Makes sense.”
It didn’t.
It tore.
They continued walking, the space between them newly unfamiliar. Kouta kept his eyes on the river—not because it was interesting, but because looking at Hiragi felt suddenly, impossibly painful.
He wondered, absurdly, if Hiragi could hear the sound of something breaking beside him.
He wondered if Hiragi even knew it was Kouta’s.
—
The next year passed like walking through fog.
Kouta got into one of the best schools in the region—of course he did. Hiragi had been right. He could excel. He did excel.
But every day felt wrong.
The hallways were polite and silent. The uniforms crisp. The expectations high. Sako met all of them. But no one knew him.
He didn’t blame Hiragi for choosing his path.
But he couldn’t understand why he hadn’t been allowed to walk it with him.
Anger grew slowly. Quietly.
Not a burning fire—a cold current beneath everything.
When he heard about the reform efforts at Furin—fighting, negotiating, pushing for change—something inside Sako twisted tight.
So that’s where he wanted to build a future.
And he didn’t want Sako there.
The thought lodged under his ribs like a shard of glass.
He watched news of Furin spread—rumors, whispers, incidents, victories. He heard Hiragi’s name said with admiration, with awe, with disbelief. People spoke of Hiragi like he was someone rising, someone becoming more than a boy from their neighborhood.
And Sako, at his pristine desk in his pristine classroom, realized he didn’t even know what Hiragi’s face looked like when he smiled anymore.
The distance felt unbearable.
And somehow, Sako had to pretend it didn’t.
He did his homework.
He aced his exams.
He stayed late for clubs and arrived early for study groups.
He built the future Hiragi had wanted for him.
But every night, when he lay in bed staring at the ceiling, a single question returned like a bruise he couldn’t stop pressing:
Why wasn’t I good enough to stand beside you there?
—
He stopped fighting for a while after his path diverged from Hiragi’s.
It wasn’t intentional.
He didn’t wake one morning and decide, I’ll stop.
It was more like the part of him that knew how to throw a punch had gone numb.
Training without Hiragi felt wrong—unbalanced, unfinished, like trying to land on a foot that wasn’t there anymore.
And fighting… fighting had always been something Hiragi taught him to do with purpose.
Without Hiragi, the purpose vanished.
So he kept his head down at school, kept his hands in his pockets, kept his breathing steady the way Hiragi taught him. He tried to meet expectations, tried to live the life Hiragi insisted belonged to him.
He tried to be good.
But trying made the ache worse.
He still woke up expecting to walk to the station with Hiragi.
Still found himself glancing at his phone like he was waiting for a message that never came.
Still looked for Hiragi’s back in the crowd without meaning to.
The distance between them was supposed to be healthy.
Supposed to help him grow.
All it did was leave space for something darker to settle.
He held it together for a few months—enough time for teachers to praise his focus, enough time for classmates to think he was quiet by nature, enough time for his mother to say he seemed more mature lately.
But emptiness can disguise itself as discipline only for so long.
The first crack came from something as petty as a hallway shove.
Not hard—not anything like the boys who used to corner him.
Just a careless bump.
Notebooks spilling.
A muttered apology.
And yet—
When Kouta crouched to gather his papers, there it was.
A flicker.
A cold spark deep in his chest.
A quiet, steady whisper:
You don’t have to take that anymore.
He stared down at his own hands—steady, capable, trained—and realized he hadn’t used them in months. Not really. Not in the way Hiragi taught him. Not in the way that made him feel alive.
He didn’t act then.
Not that time.
He simply swallowed, stood, nodded stiffly, and walked away.
But something had woken.
Something he’d been trying to smother since the bridge.
The next time it happened—a shoulder bump, a careless insult—the flicker became movement.
Before he even processed the decision, he had someone pinned against a locker.
The sound was sharp. Echoing.
The boy paled.
Kouta’s heartbeat didn’t even rise.
He apologized—because he was still that boy somewhere: the one who tried to be good, the one who wanted to make Hiragi proud.
But the damage was done.
A line crossed.
Rumors born.
And instead of guilt, Kouta felt relief.
Because being feared was easier than being forgotten.
Because a bruise was simpler than heartbreak.
Because a fight gave him weight when everything else felt airless.
—
After that day, something subtle in Kouta’s world tilted.
He didn’t fight constantly.
He didn’t suddenly become reckless or wild.
If anything, he grew more composed.
But the composure felt… sharp.
Like a blade laid flat beneath his skin.
The first real fight happened a week later.
Sako had been walking home after cram school, twilight stretching long across the pavement, when he saw a group of guys crowding around a younger student by the vending machines. Their voices were low, threatening. The kid’s shoulders shook.
Sako told himself to walk past.
He wasn’t Hiragi.
He wasn’t supposed to get involved.
But then one of the boys shoved the kid backward, hard, and Sako’s body moved before thought could catch up.
His bag hit the ground.
His footwork settled.
His eyes narrowed.
He stepped between them in a motion so smooth it didn’t feel like a choice.
“Back off,” he said.
The other boys laughed. “Or what? You gonna lecture us?” one jeered.
Sako didn’t answer with words.
His fist found the boy’s sternum in a clean, efficient strike Hiragi had drilled into him over and over. The kid crumpled with a wheeze. The others lunged, but Sako’s body was already moving—blocks, parries, a knee to the ribs, a sweep of the leg.
All technique.
No heat.
No hesitation.
When it was over, the air felt still.
The younger student stared at him with wide, frightened eyes.
“Th-thank—”
“It’s fine,” Sako muttered, not looking at him. “Go.”
The boy bolted.
And Sako was left alone on the quiet street, chest rising and falling steadily, hands shaking only when he realized the fight was finished.
The relief crashed into him first—sudden, overwhelming.
Then the guilt, muted but present.
Then the ache—always the ache.
But beneath everything else, beneath the swirl of emotion he couldn’t untangle, one truth sat heavily in his chest:
He’d felt more real in those thirty seconds than he had in months.
—
Word spread faster than he expected.
A smart kid with perfect grades who fights like he’s been doing it his whole life.
A quiet boy who doesn’t start trouble but ends it efficiently.
Someone who looks harmless until the moment he isn’t.
It was enough to draw the attention of people who were always looking for talent.
Shishitoren didn’t show up as a gang—not at first.
Just a pair of upperclassmen leaning against a wall outside his cram school.
“Hey,” one of them said, giving Sako a once-over. “You’re the kid from the vending machine thing, right?”
Sako’s shoulders tensed. “What about it?”
“Nothing bad.”
A smirk. A nod toward his stance, his posture, the tension he didn’t realize he was holding.
“You’ve got skill. And power. We could use someone like you.”
Sako’s pulse stuttered. “I’m not interested.”
“Didn’t ask if you were.”
The taller one shrugged.
“Just saying—if you ever want a place where strength isn’t a problem, Shishitoren’s the place.”
Then they walked away like the conversation didn’t matter.
But it echoed in Sako’s chest all night.
—
Something had shifted by the time Tomiyama and Togame found him.
Kouta hadn’t thought about Shishitoren for months.
But he had thought about Hiragi.
Not the way he used to—with warmth, admiration, hope.
Now he thought about him the way a wound thinks about the blade that made it.
Every fight Kouta got into felt like training for something he hadn’t admitted yet.
Every bruise felt like preparation.
Every victory felt like proof.
Proof that he had changed.
Proof that he could stand alone.
He replayed their last conversation on the bridge more than he replayed any sparring drill.
You don’t need to follow me anymore.
You should build something for yourself.
At the time, those words shattered him.
Now they lit something sharp under his ribs.
Because Hiragi had seen him as someone who was better off taking a different road.
And Kouta wanted to prove him wrong.
He wanted to face Hiragi again one day—not as the boy who trailed after him, not as the kid he once lifted off the ground, but as someone who could defeat him.
As an equal.
As someone impossible to overlook.
It lived inside him—coiled and patient—a quiet, relentless pressure driving every punch, every block, every clean takedown.
He no longer fought to escape the ache.
He fought because every strike, every block, every clean takedown brought him one inch closer to the day he could face Hiragi without breaking.
So when Tomiyama and Togame stepped out of the shadows that night, assessing him with eyes that saw everything he worked so hard to hide—something clicked into place.
Shishitoren was where Kouta would get to face Hiragi someday.
—
Kouta couldn’t beat Hiragi.
He’d been a fool to think he could.
The moment Hiragi’s fist connected—clean, precise, heartbreakingly familiar—Kouta understood just how wide the gulf between them still was. All his years of rage, all the bruises he’d earned, all the hollow victories in the shadows… none of it mattered here.
Not against the person who had taught him how to stand in the first place.
Bofurin won all five fights against Shishitoren that day.
It should have felt like background noise, a distant humiliation shared by a gang he’d never truly belonged to.
Instead, every victory felt like another reminder:
Hiragi wasn’t just ahead of him.
Hiragi was surrounded by people who matched him.
Kouta stayed in the stadium long after the other members left, long after Tomiyama and Togame and the Furin boys and Hiragi went up to the roof.
Silence spread across the floor like dust.
Discarded towels.
Empty water bottles.
Streaks of blood on the floor.
He sat in a chair in the front row, elbows on his knees, staring at his hands.
Hands that had thrown everything he had.
Hands that still hadn’t come close.
Above him, faint through the echoes, he could hear laughter from the roof.
The kind of laughter Hiragi shared with people who understood him now—Umemiya’s booming voice, Sakura’s complaints, the unmistakable sound of half a dozen boys eating, teasing, healing.
A world that moved on without him.
A world Hiragi belonged to.
Kouta closed his eyes.
He wasn’t jealous of Bofurin’s victories.
He wasn’t jealous of their strength.
He was jealous of their place in Hiragi’s life.
They were beside him now.
He wasn’t.
Maybe he never had been.
A soft shuffle of footsteps broke the quiet.
“Sako?”
Hiragi’s voice.
Of course it was.
Kouta didn’t turn. His jaw tightened, breath catching in something halfway between shame and stubbornness.
“You didn’t have to come down,” he said.
“No,” Hiragi replied. “I didn’t.”
Kouta let out a shaky breath, bitterness threatening to spill over.
“Go back to them,” he muttered. “They’re your people now.”
Hiragi didn’t move.
He didn’t step closer, didn’t speak, didn’t even shift his weight to signal frustration or impatience.
“They’re not why I came,” he said at last.
Kouta’s fingers curled against his knees.
He hated how badly he wanted that to be true.
“Sure,” he said, voice thin. “You just… noticed I wasn’t celebrating and decided to check on me. Like old times.”
“That’s not it either.”
Kouta let out a humorless laugh.
“Then what, Hiragi? What do you want me to say?”
Hiragi exhaled softly—not in annoyance, but like someone bracing for something delicate, something long overdue.
“I came,” Hiragi said quietly, “because you fought me like someone who’s been hurting for a long time. And because I realized I should have seen that sooner.”
Kouta froze.
His throat went tight, his chest constricting like a fist closing slowly around his lungs.
He didn’t want to hear this.
He wanted to hear anything but this.
“You don’t know what I’ve been doing,” he snapped. “You don’t know anything about me anymore. That was kind of the point.”
Hiragi didn’t flinch at the bite in his voice.
“I don’t know everything,” he admitted. “But I know enough to see you weren’t just angry during that fight. You were hurting.”
Kouta’s jaw clenched.
“Don’t—” he began, but Hiragi kept going, quiet but steady.
“And I know you didn’t get that way on your own.”
Kouta turned away sharply, nails digging into his palms.
“Don’t pretend this is about you,” he hissed. “Shishitoren, school, everything—I made those choices. Not you.”
“Maybe,” Hiragi said. “But you made them alone. And I shouldn’t have let that happen.”
Kouta whipped around, anger sparking hot and sudden.
“You did let it happen,” he snapped. “You told me to go my own way. You told me not to follow you. What else was I supposed to do with that?”
Hiragi didn’t retreat from the force of it.
His voice stayed maddeningly calm, heartbreakingly sincere.
“I wanted you to choose for yourself,” he said. “Not disappear from my life.”
Kouta’s breath stuttered.
The words hit too deeply, too cleanly.
Hiragi stepped a little closer—carefully, like approaching a wounded animal that might bolt again.
“I thought giving you space would help you grow,” he said. “I didn’t realize it would make you think you weren’t wanted.”
Kouta blinked hard, something hot and humiliating rising in his chest.
He swallowed, but it didn’t go down.
“Then what was I supposed to think?” he whispered.
It came out thinner than he meant, stripped bare of anger, leaving only the wound beneath.
Hiragi’s expression tightened—not in frustration, but in something quieter.
Regret.
Recognition.
The late understanding of someone who hadn’t realized the damage his words could do.
“I should have said it better,” Hiragi murmured. “Or… said more.”
Kouta laughed once, a short, cracked sound.
“You don’t say much to begin with.”
“I know,” Hiragi admitted. “That’s part of the problem.”
His honesty cut deeper than any blow in their fight.
Kouta looked away, jaw working.
He could feel the emotion building behind his ribs—the years of resentment, the nights he trained until his knuckles split, the bitterness he’d fed until it hardened into resolve.
And beneath all of it, something he hated acknowledging:
He had missed Hiragi.
He had missed him so much it twisted into something sharp.
The realization made his breath stutter, made something hot burn against the back of his eyes.
He clenched his teeth, swallowed hard, tried to force the feeling down—but it rose anyway, uncoiling from the place he’d buried it for years.
“You don’t get it,” Kouta said quietly, voice unsteady in a way that terrified him.
“It wasn’t just that you went to Furin. It wasn’t just that you didn’t want me to follow.”
His fingers curled, nails digging into his palms.
“It was waking up the next day and realizing I didn’t know where you stood anymore. What you wanted. If you even remembered I existed.”
Hiragi flinched—small, but real.
“And every time I saw your name somewhere,” Kouta continued, words trembling, “it was like… like I was looking at someone I didn’t have the right to talk to anymore.”
The honesty hurt.
It hurt more than losing.
More than the bruises blooming across his ribs.
“I kept thinking that if I got stronger,” he whispered, “if I just pushed harder… maybe I could reach you again.”
Hiragi’s breath hitched, barely audible.
“Sako…”
“But I couldn’t.”
“Sako, you don’t have to earn anything. Not with me.”
Kouta’s breath wavered.
“Then why didn’t you say something?”
A whisper, a plea.
“Why did you let me think I wasn’t wanted?”
A long silence followed.
“Because I was wrong,” Hiragi finally said. “Because I didn’t know how to be close to someone without worrying I’d hold them back. And because I didn’t realize losing me would hurt you more than following me ever would’ve.”
Kouta closed his eyes.
For a moment, it felt like the ground under him shifted—not violently, not the way it had on the bridge years ago, but slowly, as if something long frozen had begun to thaw.
He didn’t want it to.
He didn’t trust it.
“Don’t say things like that,” he muttered, his voice barely audible. “Not now.”
“I’m not saying it to make you feel better,” Hiragi said quietly. “I’m saying it because it’s true.”
Kouta let out a breath that wasn’t quite a laugh and wasn’t quite a sob.
“Yeah? And what am I supposed to do with that? You think hearing you were ‘wrong’ fixes anything?”
“No,” Hiragi answered, calm but earnest. “It doesn’t fix it. But it’s where I should have started.”
Kouta’s hands curled into fists.
He wanted to stay angry.
He needed to stay angry.
Anger was simple.
Anger kept the ache at arm’s length.
But Hiragi’s voice—steady, sincere, unbearably gentle—kept cutting through the armor he’d spent years building.
“Stop,” Kouta whispered, shaking his head. “Just… stop saying things that make it sound like you care.”
Hiragi stepped closer, close enough that Sako could hear the quiet catch of his breath.
“I do care.”
The words hit him harder than any punch Hiragi had ever thrown.
Kouta’s eyes opened, slow and reluctant, as if lifting a weight.
Hiragi stood there, posture still, expression steady—no pity, no condescension, just that calm certainty Kouta had once built his entire world around.
“It doesn’t change what happened,” Kouta said, voice raw.
“No,” Hiragi agreed. “But it changes what happens now.”
Something in Kouta’s chest pulled tight, then looser, then tight again, caught between breaking and finally being allowed to breathe.
He looked away first.
“…I don’t know how to do this,” he admitted, the words small but honest. “I don’t know how to just… stand next to you anymore without feeling like I’m going to fall apart.”
Hiragi’s reply was soft but unwavering.
“Then don’t stand next to me,” he said. “Just stand.”
Just stand, Kouta thinks, hours later, in the safety of his own room.
Just stand.
He can do that.