Chapter Text
Your therapist, who you’ve been seeing weekly since the last one stopped replying to your emails, says you have PTSD. You hate your therapist.
You’ve tried to rationalize this hatred in many ways. Maybe you really can smell his smoldering lack of sincerity. Maybe he’s been plotting against you all this time, trying to find a way to get you institutionalized as soon as you say the wrong thing. (He wouldn’t be the first therapist to attempt it.) More likely, he probably just reminds you a bit too much of that school counselor — but that feels trite, almost too obvious. If it were the truth, it would mean that your therapist was right about you. And, of course, he is, but you sure as hell aren’t going to admit that.
The hatred remains, but you keep going. You attend every session, beginning to end, treating the sterile gray sofa like a church pew. You answer every question with just enough honesty to avoid a lecture. You complete the worksheets he sends you home with. You hate him, despise him, wish he were dead, and yet nothing can stop you from walking into his office every Monday without fail. If you stopped going, Akira would know. He wouldn’t chastise you — he’s not that kind of man — but he would want to know why, and you don’t know why clearly enough to formulate an answer that you’re willing to give him.
Regardless, PTSD is for good people. It’s not for the likes of you.
You’re in your twenties now. Twenty-two, to be exact. You never envisioned your twenty-second birthday as a child; in fact, you stopped looking forward to your birthday altogether after your mother died. You certainly never imagined that your twenty-second would be spent with friends. It had been a modest birthday, consisting of dinner with Akira, Yoshizawa, Sakamoto and Kitagawa. You’d enjoyed yourself, and you’d eaten a little bit of food, and when you got back to your apartment you ground your teeth until you got a headache. You took a hot shower before bed, and in the seconds between wiping the fog from the mirror and wrapping the towel around your chest, you briefly glimpsed the wells of shadow between your ribs.
It’s been years since the thing that should have killed you. Sometimes you wonder if you’re still caught in the false-reality nightmare of several Januarys ago. After all, there’s no logical reason for you to still be here, breathing. It would have been easier to die. Simpler. Less rife with fucking complication.
But here you are. You’re alive. You still have to get groceries.
You walk through the produce section and pretend not to notice a pair of girls about your age whispering to each other. Their eyes are locked on you, wide with recognition, but neither approaches you. You prefer it this way, mostly, with your reputation ruined and your old facade buried in the ground. It’s certainly less draining than constantly faking it — or, at least, it would be if that feeling of performance had ever truly gone away. Either way, you don’t look at them, and eventually their whispering fades. You don’t relax. You never relax.
An apple’s shiny, red skin reflects the warped distortion of a stranger. You put the apple in your basket.
You don’t get much from the other aisles. The basket only has a little bit of weight when you approach the checkout; a typical grocery run for you, someone who survives on the bare minimum. You can feel eyes on your back as your items are scanned. You don’t turn around. You don’t look up. You pay for your items, and you take your bags, and you head for the front door, and—
“Akechi-kun! Akechi-kun, it’s me!”
The familiarity of the voice takes you off guard. Usually your name is only muttered in public. You look over your shoulder, and in one of the checkout lanes, a blonde girl is standing on her toes and waving at you while her groceries are bagged.
Takamaki smiles widely as you pause and wait for her, and as soon as she’s paid, she jogs over to you with her items. “Hey! It’s so good to see you,” she says with a little laugh. “Happy belated birthday. I’m sorry I couldn’t make it to the party.”
You hum. “It wasn’t a party.”
“Aw, Ryuji made it sound like one,” Takamaki says. “He says you all had a good time. Did you have a good time?”
“I did,” you say, and it’s true, you did. You step through the sliding doors into the cloudy June humidity, and Takamaki follows you, seemingly unaware that you just want to go home and not talk to anybody.
“That’s good,” she replies with a bob of her head. “Are you headed to the station? I think we take the same line from here, if you want me to walk with you.”
You cycle through several different refusals in your head before stopping with your mouth open, inhaling, and saying, “I don’t mind”.
Takamaki smiles. “Great.”
You aren’t sure why you said yes. But you haven’t seen Takamaki in a while, and you don’t dislike her company, so you suppose it’s too late to change your mind. You start off toward the station, and she sticks to your side, a little closer than you’d like on the crowded Tokyo streets.
“This weather doesn’t look promising, huh?” Takamaki says after a moment.
You shake your head. “It’s supposed to rain.”
“Ah, I picked a bad day to leave my umbrella at home, then…” Takamaki pokes out her tongue. “Why don’t you have one? I always thought you were usually… prepared.”
You shrug. “I’m only human, Takamaki,” you say, and it feels like a cold, slithering lie in your mouth.
Takamaki tells you about her life as you approach the station together — you’ve kept in touch, and she lives close by, but you hardly seek her out. She’s still effortlessly talkative, it seems. She says she’s still been working as a model and going to school, with a graduation date set for the following year. An independent fashion line might be in the cards for her. You remember that Suzui has been pursuing a profession as a social worker — Takamaki speaks about her with the glowing warmth of a maturing teenage romance. They’re happy together. They have prospects. Things are going well.
That’s good. You’re glad for her, and silently, seethingly jealous.
It’s not a long ride to your shared stop. As soon as you exit the train together, though, you notice something — a thrumming sound in the distance, the staticky fuzz of an old, aboveground television set. You’re familiar enough with the noise. You turn to Takamaki.
“It’s raining,” you say, and she groans.
“My hair’s going to be a mess…” she mumbles. “Well… Okay. My and Shiho’s apartment is right across the street… She’s in class, I think, but I know she won’t mind if you stop by. Do you want to wait out the rain at my place?”
You stare at her, and open your mouth to refuse, but she crosses her arms and huffs before you can get a word out.
“Come on, Akechi-kun,” she says, “you’ll get sick if you walk all the way home in the rain.”
“It’s only five minutes.”
“As opposed to thirty seconds.”
“Takamaki, I—”
“Don’t,” Takamaki says. “I insist. Now come on.”
You grit your teeth, and plan to decline once more as soon as you’re on the sidewalk. However, a quick walk up the stairs shows you that the rain is pouring far harder than you’d imagined, and that telling Takamaki no would not only be stupid, it would be piteous. You can almost hear Akira asking you why on earth you decided to walk home in that weather, and you envision him drying your hair, and your chest tightens with your fists as you look through the haze of rain at the adjacent apartment building.
“Fine,” you say, and Takamaki leads you at a hurried pace along the crosswalk.
Thirty seconds, it turns out, is plenty of time to get completely soaked through in that kind of downpour. You find the sense to be thankful that it’s summer and not winter, that you’re not freezing through a December rainfall, but you still shiver as the drops hit you. Thankfully, Takamaki lives on the first floor. A necessity for Suzui’s limited mobility, you suppose. Takamaki unlocks the door, and you leave your shoes by the entryway, a few inches from her own, when she closes it behind you.
“Ugh, what a gross day…” Takamaki says as she peels off her socks. “I don’t want to make you stay in wet clothes… Do you want to borrow something of mine until yours are dry? We can hang yours in the bathroom for now.”
You instinctively shake your head. “No, that’s fine.”
Takamaki puffs her cheeks out in indignation. “Now I know you’re messing with me,” she says. “Seriously, you look like a sad wet cat. Let me find you something to wear.”
You open your mouth to refuse again, to say you should really just head home after all, but she’s already gone, having rushed to her bedroom to find you something. You remember only then that you’re carrying groceries, and you awkwardly set them on her meager kitchen counter.
A few moments later, Takamaki emerges. She holds a pile of fabric out toward you, which appears, on further inspection, to be a red t-shirt and black sweatpants.
“Here,” she says. “Sorry, everything I own is pretty girly. This is as neutral as it gets.”
You stare for a moment at the clothes, then feel another shiver run through you. Your wet hair sticks to your forehead and your neck. You can feel your button-down shirt clinging to your bones.
You take the clothes. Takamaki offers a little smile.
“You can change in the bathroom,” she says. “Just lay your clothes by the sink and I’ll hang them up for you when you’re done.”
You nod. “Thank you.”
Takamaki’s grin widens. “Hey, what are friends for?”
Friends. The word rests on nebulously uncertain ground. You duck past Takamaki and close the bathroom door behind you.
You change swiftly, like too much exposure will kill you. The clothes are comfortable and about your size, if a tiny bit big, so you don’t have a reason to complain. The short sleeves on the shirt aren’t your usual style, though, and a quick glance in the mirror tells you that most of the scars that decorate your arms are plainly visible. You clench your jaw, but elect not to give into the sudden pounding in your chest that’s telling you to crawl out a window. Takamaki’s too polite to point something like that out. Besides, asking for a different shirt would just draw attention to you.
You lay your wet clothes on the sink and set about searching for a clean towel with which to dry your hair. The cabinet under the sink reveals only cleaning supplies, and beside that is a washing machine. You turn your attention to the cupboard beside the sink, then, and upon opening the door on top, you don’t see towels. Instead, there are pill bottles, bandages, cotton swabs, and several little glass vials lined up along one side. The labels are cast in shadow, but you can make out the katakana forming one word — estradiol.
Something inside of you twists. You quickly close the cupboard and leave the bathroom without drying your hair.
Takamaki’s also changed into dry clothes. When she sees you, her eyes flit briefly along the scars. Predictably, she doesn’t say a word about them when her gaze meets yours half a second later.
“I’ll make some coffee for us,” she says. “Are you hungry?”
“No, I’m not.”
She looks at you for a moment, but doesn’t protest before stepping over to the kitchen.
You spend about three hours at Takamaki’s apartment, waiting for the rain to stop. The coffee is nothing like what Akira makes you, but you drink about half of it anyway, taking tiny sips until it gets unappetizingly cold. She asks you about your life, about what you’ve been doing, and you tell her. She already knows that you’ve put a pause on detective work for now, and that you’ve been working a quiet administrative job to pay bills while you try to decide what you want your life to be — but you reiterate it anyway, for convenience’s sake. She seems to sense that there’s more to it all, but she doesn’t push. You appreciate that. She’s not like your therapist. She’s not like Akira.
When the rain finally ceases, you put your half-dry clothes back on and return Takamaki’s garments. She offers several times to let you stay longer, but no, no, you insist that you have to get back. She tells you to say hello to Akira for her, and you say you will. You slip your shoes back on and take your groceries. You leave the apartment.
You think about Takamaki as you walk home. You think about her soft skin, her styled hair, her delicate hands. You think about all the ways she is petite and dainty and beautiful. You think about all the ways she’s different from you.
When you get home, you put away the groceries, leaving out only the apple, which will be your dinner. You carve your teeth through its white flesh, and the shiny red mirror is demolished, leaving the stranger’s reflection in your stomach where nobody can see it.