Work Text:
The internet café in downtown Kaizen smelled horrible, and was run by the staff, which was a staff of one, a man named Ota-san who was very interested in his crossword puzzle and nothing else.
Kusuri sat in the corner booth, furthest from the door, with his hood up despite the warmth of the room. The dark web was not the dramatic and sinister thing the news programs made it out to be. It was ugly and barebones, like a public bathroom in the seedier parts of the city. Text, broken formatting, blurry pictures that he made a point not to examine. He had found the right forum through three degrees of careful separation, the kind of digital trail that Noriko-obasan, bless her, would never have known to look for, and Noriko was smart. She was the smartest adult who had ever tried to protect him. That was a short list but she was at the top of it and he still felt a small, sour twist of something while he typed.
He was skimming the funds carefully. His parents' account, the one nominally set up for his ongoing medical expenses, which was a rich little irony he did not let himself sit in for too long. He took amounts small enough that each individual withdrawal looked like a rounding error. Noriko had him for two years by then and he had spent those two years attending the local highschool, learning to eat meals that were warm and intended for him, and learning everything he could about digital money and how to make some of it invisible.
He was very good at being methodical. He had grown up surrounded by people who treated his body as a series of line items. The math had been in his blood before he understood it was math.
He read the post one final time. Then he replied.
His hands did not shake. He noticed that about himself distantly. His hands did not shake. His pulse was elevated, probably, the remaining lung working a little harder than usual, but his hands were perfectly still on the keys as he typed his response, hit send, closed the window, paid Ota-san six hundred yen and walked home through streets that smelled like rain.
He slept fine that night. He would revisit this fact about himself with varying degrees of alarm and acceptance over the following decade and a half. He slept fine, just fine.
☤℞ـــــــــﮩ٨ـ
Mitsuki Sato had been Kusuri's first real friend when ge had arrived in Kaizen like something that had washed up on the shore. Functional, technically, but clearly from somewhere else, waterlogged with experiences that other kids their age had no frame of reference for.
Mitsuki had found this interesting rather than alarming. This was the first thing Kusuri had liked about her.
She was small and unhurried. She didn't take up space loudly. She was the kind of person you could sit next to in silence for an hour and feel, at the end of it, that a conversation had taken place. Her family had moved to Kaizen from Osaka when she was seven, following some paternal business venture that had apparently gone interestingly sideways, details never elaborated on.
When Kusuri had, three months into their friendship, explained in careful and complete terms what had been done to him and by whom (the lung at nine, the kidney at fourteen, the years of being told his name meant medicine because that was what he was for), Mitsuki had been quiet for a long time. Then she had said, "That is the most contemptible thing I have ever heard."
Not I'm sorry, not that's awful. Not pity, which Kusuri had learned to recognize and hate on sight, the pity that made people feel better about themselves and made him feel like a walking cautionary tale.
Just, that is contemptible.
He had liked her very much from that moment forward.
He did not, initially, tell her about the forum post. He did not tell anyone. The waiting was a private thing.
Three weeks after the post, she told him herself.
☤℞ـــــــــﮩ٨ـ
She sat down across from him at lunch, placed her chopsticks on the edge of her tray with a precise little click, and said, "I saw your post."
Kusuri stopped eating. He processed what she had said and then what it meant that she had said it so flatly.
"You—"
"Yeah, I saw it," she said. "The phrasing was yours. The account wasn't, but the phrasing." She tilted her head a few degrees. "I know how you write."
Kusuri, who had constructed what he privately considered an excellent and untraceable post, felt something in him go very still. "Mitsuki—"
"I'm going to take it," she said. Just like that. Just that simply. "The contract. I'm going to take it."
"You're not—" He stopped. Started again. "That's not— you don't have to— we're only seniors—"
"I know." She picked her chopsticks back up. "I know I don't have to. I want to." She looked at him across the table. "Akemi took things from you that people are not supposed to take from each other, and I have strong feelings about that."
Kusuri opened his mouth and nothing came out, which was unusual for him. He was not typically a person who ran out of things to say.
"The money—" he started.
"I'll take the contract rate," she said. "Put the rest somewhere useful. You'll figure it out." She ate a bite of rice. "Oh, Kusu, don't look at me like that. It's not charity. I have my own reasons."
He did not ask what her own reasons were. He knew the shape of them from the pauses between her sentences when certain topics came up. He didn't press. She didn't press with him. That was a part of what made them work as friends.
He looked at his lunch. He looked at her. He said, very quietly, "Okay."
She nodded, once, and went back to eating, and that was that. Kusuri felt something strange and uncomfortable coalescing in the pit of his stomach.
☤℞ـــــــــﮩ٨ـ
The package arrived on a Tuesday.
Noriko's job took her across town on Tuesdays, so Kusuri was home alone. The delivery notice was in his name, pickup at the local convenience store, and when he signed for it the clerk didn't comment on anything because it was a sealed cardboard box with the appropriate postage and why would anyone bother to comment? Kusuri carried it home in a bag, sat with it on the floor of his room for eleven minutes by the clock, and then opened it.
It had a funeral parlor box, and inside that, a gray ceramic urn, and a short note on plain paper. It had Mitsuki's handwriting.
Kaizen-jin origami paper included for the cremation wrapping.
And underneath the urn, folded flat, a single sheet of soft blue paper with a crane half-completed in pencil lines.
Kusuri sat on his floor with the urn in his lap for a while. His room was quiet. Down the street, a neighbor's dog was barking at something. The afternoon light came in at a low angle through the window and made a long rectangle across the tatami.
He registered his shock clinically. Underneath the shock, though, was something that took him longer to identify because he had never felt it before. It was relief, bone-deep relief, not the happy kind. It was the sudden absence of a sound you'd been hearing so long you'd stopped noticing it. A machine ceasing to hum and only in the silence do you understand how constant the noise had been.
He sat with both feelings for a long time. Neither one fought the other particularly hard.
Then he finished the paper crane, placed it gently inside the urn, replaced the lid, and put the whole thing in the back of his closet wrapped in a school uniform he'd outgrown, and went to make dinner before Noriko-obasan got home.
☤℞ـــــــــﮩ٨ـ
The school field trip to the Fuji Five Lakes region was announced three weeks later.
Kusuri didn't believe in fate. He never had, even later when the shape of his life would start to seem, in retrospect, like something that had been arranged. He was a medical man at heart, but he was willing to grant the universe points for timing.
He carried the urn in his bag. It fit neatly between his lunch box and his extra layer jacket.
Aokigahara lay at the northwest foot of Fuji. The class was there for the ice caves and the wind caves, Fujin-ketsu and Saiko Bat Cave, explained by their teacher. Kusuri listened attentively. He was always attentive. He was the kid who took good notes and asked precise questions and was not visibly troubled by anything because visible trouble invited commentary and commentary invited a kind of attention he had no patience for.
He slipped away at the bathroom break. Seven minutes. Not long, but enough.
The forest at the edges of the trail was dense. The hardened lava beneath the soil made roots grow strange and horizontal, trees twisted at odd angles, everything a slightly deeper green than it felt like it should be. It muffled sound. You stepped off the path and the sound of the group receded faster than seemed possible.
He found a place where two old roots made a natural hollow, packed enough that it didn't read as recently disturbed from any reasonable distance. He dug with the compact trowel he'd bought at the hardware store three weeks ago and paid cash for. He placed the urn. He filled in the space.
He pressed his hands flat against the earth for a moment. Not in prayer. He was not a person who prayed, then or ever. It was more that he needed to close the gesture with something physical, something that felt like a period at the end of a sentence.
The earth said nothing back. The forest said nothing back. Far away, his classmates were probably finishing the bathroom break and somebody was definitely losing a snack to an opportunistic crow.
Kusuri stood up, brushed the soil off his hands, and walked back to the path.
☤℞ـــــــــﮩ٨ـ
She was declared missing eight days later. The announcement made the local news, not the national news, not like before, because children always went missing, as was the sad reality of the nation. Just the local news. A brief paragraph. An old photograph.
Kusuri read it at breakfast, folded the paper back into its original configuration, placed it exactly where he'd found it, and ate the rest of his tamago gohan.
Noriko came in from the hallway, still straightening her jacket. "Anything in the news?"
"Not much, obasan," Kusuri said. "Weather's supposed to turn this week."
"Mm." She poured her coffee. "Don't forget your umbrella."
Kusuri Jinja, who was not yet Martyr, who would not be Martyr for another seven years, who was just a teenager in a school uniform, finished breakfast, picked up his bag, and went to school. He did not forget his umbrella.
The morning light was very clean. The walk was short. He passed a vending machine and, on impulse, bought a can of cold green tea, because he was free to do that now, he realized. He was free to buy things, make small choices for himself, and not have to worry about whether the calories in this can of green tea would make some part of him unviable for transplantation.
He noticed all of this.
He kept walking.