Chapter Text
The day Giyuu Tomioka learned that a house could split in half without the walls moving, he was ten years old and sitting at the kitchen table with a half-finished bowl of rice gone cold in front of him. The kitchen looked the same as it always did, cramped and pale under the morning light, with the old calendar still hanging crooked near the refrigerator and one of his sister’s hair ties abandoned on the counter, but everything inside it felt wrong. His mother stood by the sink with her arms crossed tightly over her chest, her nails digging into the sleeves of her sweater, while his father sat across from Giyuu with both hands folded like he was trying very hard not to reach for something. Tsutako was there too, seventeen and already looking older than both their parents in the strange, exhausted way she held herself, one hand resting on the back of Giyuu’s chair as if she had planted herself there to keep him from floating away. No one was yelling anymore. That was the worst part. The shouting had filled the house for months, squeezing under doors and traveling through floorboards at night, but silence was heavier. Silence meant something had finally broken badly enough that nobody was pretending they could fix it.
His father was the one who said it. He did it gently, which somehow made it worse. He told Giyuu that sometimes adults tried their best and still could not make a marriage work. He told him that none of it was Giyuu’s fault, that he was loved, that both of his parents wanted what was best for him. He said those things carefully, like he had practiced them, but Giyuu did not believe any of it. Not because his father was lying exactly, but because adults had a way of saying soft things while the world underneath them collapsed. His mother did not look at him when his father said he was loved. She stared at the sink, at one little spoon sitting at the bottom of it, and her face was hard and flat like she was forcing herself not to laugh at something bitter. Giyuu looked from one parent to the other, waiting for the real sentence. He understood, even then, that grown-ups always put cushions around the thing they were actually trying to say.
Tsutako’s hand tightened on his chair.
His father breathed in and said that Giyuu would be living with his mother.
That was the first cut.
The second came right after.
Tsutako would be living with their father.
Giyuu’s head lifted so quickly that the room blurred at the edges. He looked back at his sister, expecting her to say no, expecting her to argue the way she argued with their mother when their mother snapped too sharply or accused Giyuu of doing things he had not done. Tsutako always stepped between him and the worst parts of the house. She always had. When he forgot his homework, she helped him before their mother could call him useless. When he got scared during thunderstorms, she let him sleep on the floor beside her futon and pretended she did not notice him shaking. When their parents fought, she turned on the television too loudly and told him what was happening in the show even if neither of them cared. Tsutako was not just his sister. She was the person who made the world understandable. She was the person who knew when he was hungry without asking. She was the person who remembered that he hated the bitter pickled things their mother bought because she said they were healthy. She was the person who tied his scarf properly in winter, even when he swatted at her hands and told her he was old enough to do it himself.
So when his father said she would not be coming with him, Giyuu did not understand the sentence as a fact. He understood it as a mistake.
“No,” he said.
His voice was small, but it made everyone look at him except his mother.
“Giyuu,” his father began.
“No,” Giyuu repeated, louder this time, pushing away from the table so hard the bowl rattled. “Tsutako stays with me.”
Tsutako bent beside him immediately, her face trying to be calm and failing. “Giyuu—”
“You said it wasn’t my fault,” he said, looking at his father like the betrayal had a shape and his father was holding it. “So why am I being punished?”
His mother finally turned. “Don’t be dramatic.”
The words hit him with the dull familiarity of something thrown often. Don’t be dramatic. Don’t make that face. Don’t embarrass me. Don’t act like you’re the only person who suffers. His mother had a talent for making pain sound like bad manners. Giyuu’s mouth closed because he had learned that sometimes words made things worse. Tsutako’s eyes flashed, and for one second she looked like she might turn on their mother with all the fury she had swallowed for years, but their father said her name quietly, and she stopped. That was when Giyuu truly began to understand. The decision had already been made somewhere without him. Everyone had walked into the kitchen knowing what would happen, and he had only been invited to hear it.
His father moved out the following week. Or maybe Giyuu and his mother moved out; later, the details blurred into the same wound. What he remembered clearly was Tsutako packing her things in a neat way that made him angry. She folded her clothes like this was just a school trip, lined her books along the bottom of a box, wrapped a cracked ceramic rabbit their father had given her when she was little in newspaper so carefully that Giyuu wanted to snatch it from her hands and smash it just to make her stop being calm. He sat on her floor while she packed and refused to help. He wanted her to ask. He wanted her to beg him not to hate her for leaving. He wanted her to say she was not going. Instead she talked about practical things. She told him where she had hidden the spare key for the little lockbox with his school certificates. She reminded him to rinse his cup after drinking milk because their mother hated the smell. She told him to call her whenever he wanted, even if it was late. She promised she would see him all the time.
“All the time isn’t every day,” Giyuu said.
Tsutako paused with a sweater half-folded in her lap. Then she set it down and came to sit beside him. “No,” she admitted. “It’s not.”
“Then don’t say it like it is.”
Her face crumpled for half a second. He saw it, and because he was ten and hurt and did not know what to do with how much he loved her, he looked away instead of comforting her. Tsutako touched his hair gently. He tried not to lean into it. She knew him too well and smiled sadly when he failed.
“I’m not choosing to leave you,” she said.
“But you are.”
“No.” Her voice shook, but she forced it steady. “I’m trying to make sure Dad isn’t alone. And you’re with Mom because…” She stopped there. Even at seventeen, Tsutako knew there were some lies too ugly to dress up. Their mother had wanted Giyuu because Giyuu was younger, easier to claim, easier to use as proof that she was still a proper mother. Their father had wanted both of them, Giyuu knew that, but the adults had spoken in low voices about schools, money, work schedules, who could handle what, who was closer to which child, which parent had been more “stable” on paper. On paper, his mother looked fine. In the house, when the doors were closed and no neighbors could hear, she was made of sharp edges.
Tsutako pulled him closer, and he let himself fold into her for a moment because he hated her and loved her and feared missing her so intensely that it felt like being sick. She smelled like clean laundry and the peach hand cream she kept by her bed. For years afterward, the smell of peaches would make his throat close.
“Listen to me,” she whispered against his hair. “You are not alone. I don’t care what changes. You call me. I will come.”
He believed her. That was the cruelest part. He believed her completely.
For a while, she kept the promise as best as she could. Their parents lived in separate places, separate neighborhoods, separate routines that did not fit together cleanly, but Tsutako visited every weekend she could. She arrived with convenience store snacks hidden in her bag and new stories about her classes, their father, stray cats she saw near the station. She asked Giyuu questions and waited through his silences until he answered. She noticed when he got thinner. She noticed when his school uniform sleeves went unwashed too long. She noticed when their mother’s mood had been bad before Giyuu said a word. Sometimes she stayed late enough that their mother began making comments about “interference,” and Tsutako would smile politely in that dangerous way she had learned from surviving the same house. Their mother hated that smile. Giyuu loved it.
His father called too. Not every day, because adults had jobs and schedules and excuses, but often enough that Giyuu memorized the sound of his phone vibrating on the low table after dinner. His father asked about school. His father asked if he was eating. His father spoke carefully, never saying anything cruel about their mother even when Giyuu wanted him to. Sometimes Giyuu got angry at him for that. He wanted his father to name the monster properly. He wanted him to say, Your mother is hurting you. He wanted permission to hate her without feeling guilty. But his father always circled the truth instead of landing on it. Maybe he thought he was protecting Giyuu. Maybe he was afraid that if he pushed too hard, their mother would cut off contact entirely. Maybe he was tired. Adults were always tired in ways children were expected to understand too early.
The two years after the divorce stretched like a hallway with too many locked doors. Giyuu grew quieter, then quieter still. At school, teachers called him well-behaved, which only meant he had learned not to ask for anything. He did his work. He came home. He cleaned what his mother told him to clean. He learned which footsteps meant irritation, which cabinet door slam meant anger, which soft sigh meant she was about to cry and accuse him of being ungrateful. His mother’s neglect did not always look like empty rooms and missed meals, though sometimes it was exactly that. Sometimes it looked like her forgetting to buy him winter gloves and then scolding him for having chapped hands. Sometimes it looked like leaving him alone until late at night, then getting furious because he had eaten the wrong leftovers. Sometimes it looked like telling other adults that Giyuu was “difficult” while rubbing his shoulder in public like she was tender. Sometimes it looked like pretending not to hear him when he spoke. That was her favorite punishment because it cost her nothing and made him disappear while still standing in front of her.
By eleven, he had learned to make himself useful without being seen. By twelve, he had learned that hunger passed if you ignored it long enough. By thirteen, he had learned that loneliness was safer than disappointment.
His sister died before he turned thirteen.
The sentence remained impossible no matter how many times adults said it.
Tsutako had been walking home in the evening. There had been rain earlier, not a storm, just steady rain that made the streets shine under headlights. A drunk driver ran a red light. People later told Giyuu it happened quickly, as if speed made death kinder. He hated them for saying that. He hated everyone who tried to soften it. Quickly did not change the fact that his sister had left that morning alive. Quickly did not change the fact that she had probably had plans for the next day, probably had a snack in her bag, probably had some half-finished message she meant to send him later. Quickly did not change the shape of her absence. Quickly did not change the way his father sounded on the phone when he called.
Giyuu remembered standing in the hallway outside the bathroom because his mother had locked herself in there after screaming at him for asking what was wrong. His phone buzzed in his hand. His father’s name lit the screen. For one strange second, Giyuu thought maybe Tsutako was with him and wanted to talk. Maybe she had bought him something. Maybe she was going to complain about their mother in a whisper like she sometimes did when she wanted to make him laugh. He answered, and his father said his name. Only his name. Nothing else. The grief was already there, filling the line before the words arrived.
Afterward, people moved around Giyuu like he was furniture in the way. There were relatives he barely knew. There were black clothes. There was incense and bowed heads and murmured apologies. His mother cried loudly at the funeral, so loudly that people touched her arms and told her how terrible it was for a mother to lose a daughter, even though Tsutako had not lived with her for years. Giyuu watched her perform grief and felt something inside him go cold. She cried into tissues and accepted sympathy while Giyuu stood beside the framed photograph of his sister and could not produce a single tear where anyone could see it. People looked at him with concern. One aunt whispered that he was in shock. Another said boys sometimes took longer to process these things. Nobody guessed that he was using every bit of strength he had not to lunge at his mother and tear the grief out of her hands because it did not belong to her in that way. She had not earned the right to be the center of Tsutako’s death.
His father looked ruined. That was the only word Giyuu had. Ruined. He stood beside Tsutako’s photograph as if someone had carved out the middle of him and left only the outline. When he saw Giyuu, he hugged him so tightly Giyuu could barely breathe, and for the first time since the divorce, Giyuu felt his father shake. Not tremble politely. Shake. Like the whole world had turned liquid beneath him. Giyuu stood stiff at first, but then his hands gripped the back of his father’s jacket and he held on with a desperation that made his fingers ache.
“I’m sorry,” his father whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
Giyuu did not know what he was apologizing for. The driver. The divorce. The fact that Tsutako had been with him and not with Giyuu. The fact that he had failed to keep either of his children safe. Maybe all of it. Maybe none of it mattered. Giyuu wanted to say something. He wanted to tell his father that he hated him. He wanted to tell him not to leave. He wanted to ask who was supposed to come now when he called. Instead he said nothing, because his voice had become a stone in his throat.
His mother took him home after the funeral and acted like grief was an inconvenience she had to organize around. For three days she cried whenever someone called. On the fourth day she snapped at Giyuu for leaving his school shoes crooked by the door. On the fifth she told him his sister would not want him “moping around like a ghost.” On the sixth she complained that everyone cared about his father more because Tsutako had been living with him. By the seventh, Giyuu understood that Tsutako’s death had not made his mother softer. It had made her worse. Grief gave her a new language for cruelty. Whenever Giyuu was too quiet, he was punishing her. Whenever he looked sad, he was trying to make her feel guilty. Whenever he mentioned his sister, he was throwing the past in her face. If he did not mention his sister, he was cold. There was no correct way to mourn in that apartment. There was only his mother’s version and the punishments that followed when he failed to match it.
His father lasted less than a year after Tsutako died.
Cancer was a different kind of violence. It did not arrive in one bright crash. It crept. It thinned his father’s voice over the phone. It turned visits into hospital rooms that smelled too clean and too sour at once. It made adults use phrases like treatment plan and aggressive and we’re hopeful while avoiding Giyuu’s eyes. When Giyuu first learned his father was sick, he felt something horrible and selfish bloom in his chest: anger. Not sadness. Not fear. Anger. How dare he? How dare his father leave too? How dare his body betray him when Giyuu had already lost Tsutako? He sat beside his father’s bed one afternoon while winter light pressed gray against the window and refused to look at the IV line in his arm.
His father smiled when he saw him. “You’ve gotten taller.”
Giyuu stared at his hands. “No, I haven’t.”
“A little.”
“You don’t know. You don’t see me enough.”
The words came out sharper than he expected. His father closed his eyes briefly, accepting the hit like he deserved it. That made Giyuu angrier.
“I wanted to,” his father said.
“Then you should have.”
“I know.”
“You let me live with her.”
His father’s face changed. Pain passed over it, deeper than the sickness. “Giyuu…”
“You knew,” Giyuu said. His voice was quiet, but his hands were shaking in his lap. “You knew what she was like.”
His father did not defend himself. That was somehow worse than if he had. He looked at Giyuu with wet eyes and said, “I thought I could keep watching. I thought if anything got worse, I could… I could fix it before—”
“Before what?”
Before your sister died. Before I got sick. Before I ran out of time. The unfinished sentences filled the room.
Giyuu stood up so fast the chair scraped the floor. His father reached for him, but he was too weak, and his hand fell short.
“I hate you,” Giyuu said.
He did not mean it. He meant it completely. Both things were true, and that was unbearable.
His father nodded once, like he had been expecting it. “I love you,” he replied.
Giyuu walked out before he could cry. He went to the bathroom down the hall, locked himself in a stall, pressed his fist against his mouth, and made no sound at all. When he returned to the hospital room, his father was asleep. Giyuu sat beside him until evening. He did not apologize. His father did not ask him to. That became one of the many things Giyuu would carry later, a small jagged object lodged somewhere too deep to remove: the last cruel thing he said to his father was not the last thing his father heard from him, but it was close enough to hurt forever.
His father died on a cloudy morning when Giyuu was twelve. The adults told him gently. Everyone was always gentle after it was too late.
After that, Giyuu stopped expecting anyone to stay.
His mother did not attend to his grief. She resented it. She resented his father’s death because people called, because arrangements had to be made, because Giyuu looked hollow and teachers noticed. She resented anything that made her look like less than a devoted mother. She wore black and complained about expenses. She told a neighbor that Giyuu was “not expressive,” as though his silence embarrassed her. At home, she forgot to buy groceries more often. She left for hours, then entire nights. She drank sometimes, not enough for people outside to immediately call it a problem, but enough for her words to blur into something meaner when she came home. She told Giyuu he looked like his father when she wanted to wound him. She told him he acted like Tsutako when she wanted to wound him worse.
At thirteen, Giyuu became very good at being invisible.
He kept his school uniform as clean as he could by washing parts of it in the sink when the laundry piled up. He learned which convenience stores had discounted food near closing. He learned not to tell teachers too much because concern had consequences. Once, when his homeroom teacher asked whether everything was okay at home, Giyuu said yes so quickly the teacher frowned. That afternoon his mother received a call. That night she slapped him hard enough that his ear rang and told him if he wanted to ruin her life, he could at least have the decency to be honest about it. The next day, he told his teacher he had misunderstood and that his mother was just busy. He did not look the teacher in the eye. The teacher looked at him too long, and Giyuu knew then that adults could suspect the truth and still fail to save you from it.
The saving happened because of a neighbor he barely knew.
Her name was Mrs. Miyahara, and she lived two doors down. She was older, with silver hair she pinned neatly every morning and a tiny dog that barked at shadows. Giyuu had carried her groceries once when he was eleven, not because he was especially kind, but because Tsutako had been visiting and nudged him until he offered. After that, Mrs. Miyahara greeted him whenever she saw him. He usually nodded and kept walking. He did not know she had been watching the apartment. He did not know she noticed when the lights stayed off too many nights in a row, when Giyuu left early and came home late, when his mother’s voice cracked through the walls in ugly bursts, when the smell of trash built up near their door because no one had taken it out. He did not know that rescue could begin with something as ordinary as an old woman deciding she had seen enough.
CPS came on a Thursday.
Giyuu remembered the knock first. Firm. Repeated. His mother was asleep on the couch in yesterday’s clothes with an empty can on the floor beside her. Giyuu stood in the hallway, frozen, holding a school worksheet he had been pretending to read. The knock came again. His mother woke with a curse and stumbled to the door, irritation already sharpened in her mouth. Then she saw the two people standing outside and changed. Not completely. Not enough. But he watched her pull a different face over her own, watched her voice lift into something confused and wounded.
“Is there a problem?” she asked.
The woman at the door introduced herself. There was a man with her, and behind them, Mrs. Miyahara stood in the hall with her hands clasped around her purse. She did not look away when Giyuu saw her. That made him hate her and trust her at the same time.
The apartment betrayed his mother immediately. The sink smelled. The refrigerator was nearly empty. There were clothes on the floor, unpaid bills on the table, old takeout containers hidden badly in the trash. His mother talked and talked. She said she was overwhelmed. She said she had lost a daughter and an ex-husband, could they imagine the stress? She said Giyuu was quiet, difficult, secretive. She said he refused meals. She said he exaggerated. She said teenage boys were hard to manage. Giyuu stood near the wall and listened to her try to turn his neglect into her tragedy. He felt very far from his own body.
When the woman asked to speak with him alone, his mother’s eyes snapped toward him with a warning so clear he could almost hear it. Don’t you dare.
In his room, the woman sat on the floor instead of taking his chair, like she was trying not to tower over him. She asked simple questions at first. His name. His age. His school. When he had last eaten. Whether he felt safe. Whether his mother left him alone overnight. Whether anyone had hurt him. Giyuu answered as little as possible. He had spent years learning that truth was dangerous. The woman did not push at first. She just waited, and the waiting did not feel like his mother’s silence. It felt like space.
Finally she asked, “Is there someone you would want us to call?”
The answer rose before he could stop it.
“Tsutako,” he said.
Then he remembered.
His face did not change. He had gotten good at that. But the woman’s expression softened in a way that made him furious. Pity was unbearable because it wanted something from him. It wanted proof of pain. It wanted tears, trembling, a story neat enough for someone else to understand. Giyuu gave her none of it.
“She’s dead,” he said flatly.
“I’m sorry.”
“Everyone is.”
The woman did not flinch. “Anyone else?”
He looked at the floor. There was a sock under his bed he had forgotten to wash. A thin line of dust along the wall. A small blue thread from his old scarf. His sister had given him that scarf. He had hidden it in his closet after she died because wearing it felt like letting the world touch something sacred.
“My uncle,” he said eventually, though Urokodaki was not really his uncle in the simple way people used the word. He was distant family on his father’s side, someone who had appeared at funerals and sent New Year cards and once brought Giyuu a wooden charm from a shrine. “Sakonji Urokodaki.”
That was how his life changed again.
His mother was arrested for child neglect. The phrase sounded official and distant, too small for the years it was meant to hold. She screamed when they took her. Not from remorse. From humiliation. She screamed that Giyuu had done this to her, that he was ungrateful, that he had always been cold, always been strange, always been just like his father. He stood in the hallway while neighbors watched through cracked doors, and for one wild second he almost apologized. Not because he was sorry, but because apology was the shape his body knew how to make when her anger filled a room. Then Mrs. Miyahara stepped closer, not touching him, just standing beside him like a wall. His mother’s voice faded down the stairs.
Giyuu left the apartment with one bag.
He did not say goodbye to the rooms. He did not look back.
Urokodaki’s house was quieter than any place Giyuu had ever lived, but it was not empty quiet. It was mountain quiet, tree quiet, the kind of quiet that had breathing inside it. The house sat a little outside the busiest part of town, close enough to neighbors that there were other rooftops nearby, far enough that the nights turned dark in a way Giyuu was not used to. The first time he arrived, the air smelled like wet leaves and woodsmoke. Urokodaki met him at the entrance wearing a dark jinbei and a face Giyuu could not read. He was an older man, broad-shouldered despite his age, with silver hair and a gaze that did not slide away from difficult things. Giyuu expected questions. He expected pity. He expected the polite discomfort adults wore when presented with a child too damaged to be charming.
Urokodaki only said, “You’re here.”
Giyuu nodded once.
“Come in. Food is ready.”
That was all.
For the first few weeks, Giyuu lived like someone waiting to be returned. He unpacked only what he needed. He kept his bag under the bed. He woke before dawn and listened for danger. He washed dishes immediately after meals, folded blankets with sharp corners, apologized for taking too long in the bath, apologized for using too much rice, apologized when Urokodaki entered a room and Giyuu happened to be standing in the way. Urokodaki never told him to stop apologizing. He also never accepted the apologies like they were necessary. He would grunt, redirect him, hand him a chore, or place more food in his bowl without comment. It took Giyuu longer than it should have to understand that being fed was not a favor he would be punished for later.
The room Urokodaki gave him had clean bedding and a window facing the side yard. At night, wind moved through the trees with a sound like distant water. Giyuu hated how peaceful it was. Peace gave memories room to speak. In his mother’s apartment, survival had kept him occupied. There was always something to brace for, something to prevent, something to endure. At Urokodaki’s, nobody screamed. Nobody forgot him. Nobody turned his grief into an accusation. So grief arrived properly, without warning, and tore through him when he least expected it. He would be putting away a cup and suddenly remember Tsutako’s hand around his, guiding him across a busy street. He would be sharpening a pencil and remember his father in the hospital, smiling weakly and saying he had gotten taller. He would see a girl with long dark hair near the station and feel the world tilt violently beneath him. He never cried where Urokodaki could see. He saved it for the bath, where water could disguise the sound if he kept his teeth clenched.
Urokodaki noticed anyway.
One evening, after Giyuu had gone quiet through dinner and barely touched the grilled fish, Urokodaki set down his chopsticks and said, “Grief doesn’t leave because you starve it.”
Giyuu stared at his bowl.
Urokodaki continued, “Eat.”
It was not gentle, but it was kind in a way Giyuu did not yet know how to receive. He ate. Urokodaki did not say anything else. That made it possible.
School near Urokodaki’s house was different only because Giyuu was different inside it. He entered midway through the year with the invisible label of troubled child attached to his back. Teachers had been told some version of what happened, and they treated him carefully. Careful was almost as bad as cruel. Students stared for a week, whispered for two, then mostly lost interest. Giyuu did not try to make friends. Friendship seemed like an agreement with the universe to eventually be punished. He sat alone, answered when called on, kept his grades steady, and learned the paths through school that required the fewest conversations. If anyone invited him anywhere, he said no. If anyone asked personal questions, he said nothing until they became uncomfortable and left. He was not trying to be mysterious. He was trying to be untouched.
Then Sabito moved in next door.
Or rather, Sabito had always lived next door, but Giyuu only truly noticed him after Urokodaki sent him outside one Saturday morning to sweep the front path. Giyuu was moving the broom half-heartedly over fallen leaves when a boy his age hopped the low fence between the yards like it was nothing and landed in front of him with a paper bag in one hand. He had peach-colored hair, a scar across his cheek, and the kind of confidence that made Giyuu immediately suspicious. He looked Giyuu up and down, not unkindly, but directly enough to be rude.
“You’re Tomioka,” the boy said.
Giyuu held the broom tighter. “Yes.”
“I’m Sabito.”
Giyuu said nothing.
Sabito lifted the bag. “My grandma made too many sweet potatoes. She said to bring some over because old man Urokodaki eats like a bear and you look like you’d disappear in strong wind.”
Giyuu blinked. “That’s rude.”
“That’s what I said.” Sabito grinned. “She told me to be quiet.”
“I don’t want any.”
“You haven’t tried them.”
“I still don’t want any.”
Sabito studied him for a second, then set the bag on the porch. “Fine. Don’t eat them. I fulfilled my mission.”
“Mission?”
“My grandma gives missions. Refusing is dangerous.”
Despite himself, Giyuu almost asked why. He stopped the question before it could make him sound interested. Sabito seemed to notice anyway. His grin widened. Giyuu disliked him immediately.
Unfortunately, Sabito was difficult to get rid of. He appeared often, sometimes with food, sometimes with a soccer ball, sometimes with homework he claimed not to understand even though Giyuu quickly realized he understood it fine. He talked at Giyuu even when Giyuu gave him nothing back. He sat beside him on the low wall between their houses and commented on the weather, neighborhood dogs, teachers, vending machine drinks, the terrible haircut of a boy in their class, anything at all. Giyuu suspected at first that Urokodaki had asked him to do it. When he accused him of that, Sabito looked offended.
“Old man Urokodaki can’t make me do anything.”
“He’s not old.”
“He is absolutely old.”
“He’s your neighbor.”
“And? I’m brave enough to tell the truth.”
“You’re annoying.”
Sabito brightened. “That’s better than silent.”
Giyuu frowned. “No, it isn’t.”
“It is for you.”
Giyuu should have hated him. He tried to. For weeks, he treated Sabito’s presence like bad weather: unpleasant, unavoidable, something to endure until it passed. But Sabito did not pass. He stayed. He stayed through Giyuu’s silences, through his clipped answers, through the cold looks meant to push him away. He stayed without acting wounded by the pushing. That was what confused Giyuu most. Most people wanted something in exchange for kindness. Gratitude. Warmth. Proof they had helped. Sabito wanted those things sometimes, probably, but he did not demand them. If Giyuu refused to talk, Sabito talked enough for both of them. If Giyuu said something mean, Sabito called him out instead of leaving. If Giyuu flinched at sudden noises, Sabito noticed and then made sure to stomp louder when approaching so Giyuu would hear him coming. He was careless with some things and careful with others in a way that made no sense until it did.
Their friendship happened so slowly that Giyuu could pretend it had not happened at all.
By the end of middle school, Sabito was everywhere in his life. He walked with Giyuu to school even when Giyuu said he did not need company. He came over to study and ended up sprawled on Giyuu’s floor, complaining dramatically about math while Giyuu corrected his mistakes. He dragged Giyuu to the river in summer and laughed when Giyuu refused to swim, then sat beside him on the bank anyway. He learned that Giyuu liked simmered salmon with daikon and teased him mercilessly for having “old man taste.” Giyuu learned that Sabito hated being underestimated, loved his grandmother fiercely, and got angry on behalf of people who did not know how to be angry for themselves. Sabito was bright, but not soft. He was kind, but not harmless. He had a way of looking at Giyuu’s worst defenses and refusing to mistake them for strength.
“You think if you don’t care about anyone, nothing can hurt you,” Sabito said once.
They were fifteen, sitting on the roof of Sabito’s house because Sabito claimed the view improved his thinking. The evening was warm, cicadas screaming in the trees. Giyuu lay on his back with one arm over his eyes.
“I didn’t ask for analysis.”
“You need it.”
“I don’t.”
“You do.” Sabito nudged him with his foot. “It’s stupid, by the way.”
Giyuu moved his arm just enough to glare. “What is?”
“Your plan.”
“I don’t have a plan.”
“Yes, you do. Stay far away from everyone. Never need anything. Never lose anyone again.” Sabito leaned back on his hands and looked out at the darkening sky. “Very dramatic. Very tragic. Also stupid.”
Giyuu sat up. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Sabito’s expression changed, the teasing falling away. “I know enough.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Then tell me.”
The offer sat between them. Simple. Impossible. Giyuu’s chest tightened. He could have told him. About Tsutako’s hand on the back of his chair. About his father’s hospital room. About his mother screaming in the hallway. About the apartment that smelled like neglect and old food. Sabito knew pieces, because everyone in small neighborhoods knew pieces, but he had never forced Giyuu to give him the whole ugly shape. For a moment, Giyuu wanted to. The desire frightened him more than silence ever had.
Instead he said, “Don’t act like you’re special.”
Sabito stared at him.
Giyuu knew he had struck something tender. He saw it in the brief hurt that crossed Sabito’s face before anger replaced it. Good, some vicious part of him thought. Leave, then. Prove me right. Sabito stood. Giyuu expected him to climb down, to call him a bastard, to vanish for a day or a week.
Instead Sabito grabbed the front of his shirt and yanked him close enough that Giyuu’s breath caught.
“You don’t get to do that,” Sabito said, voice low and furious. “You don’t get to cut people just because you’re scared they’ll matter. I’m your friend whether you admit it or not, and if you want me gone, say that. Say it honestly. Don’t be a coward and make me leave for you.”
Giyuu froze.
Sabito let go. “Well?”
The cicadas screamed. The sky turned purple. Somewhere below, Sabito’s grandmother called for them to stop being idiots and come down before they broke their necks.
Giyuu looked away first. “I don’t want you gone.”
It came out barely louder than breath, but Sabito heard it.
“Good,” he said. Then, after a pause, “You’re still an ass.”
Giyuu nodded once. “I know.”
That was the closest he came to confession for a long time.
For a while, life became almost bearable. Not happy exactly. Giyuu did not trust happiness. Happiness felt like something that attracted punishment if held too visibly. But there were days when the house smelled like miso soup, Urokodaki’s quiet presence filling the rooms without suffocating them, and Sabito’s laughter came through the open window from next door, and Giyuu felt something inside him loosen. He grew taller. His face sharpened. His silences became less like empty rooms and more like closed doors someone patient could knock on. He still kept people at a distance, but Sabito stood close enough to cast a shadow beside his. Urokodaki watched it happen without comment, though once, when Sabito left after dinner and Giyuu began clearing dishes, the old man said, “That boy is good for you.”
Giyuu rinsed a bowl. “He’s loud.”
“Yes.”
“He’s nosy.”
“Yes.”
“He thinks he’s always right.”
“He often is.”
Giyuu looked over his shoulder, betrayed. Urokodaki’s mouth twitched like he was hiding a smile.
Giyuu turned back to the sink. “He’s annoying.”
Urokodaki hummed. “And yet you set aside the last sweet potato for him.”
Giyuu said nothing. Urokodaki did not push. That was his way.
The second time Giyuu lost everything, it began with Sabito not showing up.
He was sixteen. The afternoon had been ordinary in the insulting way terrible days sometimes were before they revealed themselves. School ended. The sky was clear. Giyuu waited by the gate because Sabito had detention for arguing with a teacher about something that was probably both noble and unnecessary. Giyuu waited ten minutes, then twenty, then checked his phone. No message. That was unusual but not alarming. Sabito forgot things. Sabito got dragged into conversations. Sabito helped people carry boxes and pretended it was no big deal. Giyuu texted him once: Where are you?
No answer.
He went home alone, irritated enough to tell himself he was not worried. By evening, Sabito’s grandmother called Urokodaki. Giyuu knew something was wrong the moment Urokodaki’s face changed. The old man became still in a way that turned the air cold. Sabito had not come home. He was not answering his phone. His friends had not seen him after detention. The teacher said he left school around four.
At first, everyone spoke in practical tones. They checked routes. They called classmates. They searched near the river because Sabito sometimes went there to clear his head. They contacted police. Giyuu moved through those first hours like a machine, following instructions, answering questions, retracing paths. He did not panic because panic would mean believing there was a reason to panic. Sabito was not dead. Sabito was not gone. Sabito was late, injured maybe, angry maybe, doing something stupid maybe. Sabito was many things, but he was not gone.
Night came.
Then morning.
Then another night.
The neighborhood changed around the absence. Posters appeared. Adults gathered in low-voiced clusters. Police cars moved through streets that had once seemed too quiet for anything bad to happen. Sabito’s grandmother aged ten years in two days. Urokodaki joined search groups and came home with mud on his boots, his face carved from stone. Giyuu searched too. He searched with classmates, with strangers, alone when people told him to rest. He checked places Sabito liked, places Sabito hated, shortcuts, riverbanks, empty lots, the narrow path behind the old shrine. He called Sabito’s phone until it went straight to voicemail. He listened to Sabito’s recorded voice say he was probably busy and to stop being impatient, and every time, something inside Giyuu cracked louder.
On the fourth day, they found him.
Not alive.
Giyuu was not there when they found the body. Later, he would be grateful and furious about that. Grateful because there were images he did not need. Furious because it meant Sabito had been alone at the end and Giyuu had not been there, again, always not there, always surviving while someone else vanished. The details came fractured through adults who thought whispers were kindness. There had been an accident near an old drainage area after heavy rain loosened part of the ground. Sabito had fallen, hit his head, been trapped out of sight. It was senseless. That word came back again and again. Senseless accident. Terrible accident. No one’s fault.
No one’s fault was a useless phrase. Giyuu hated it more than quickly.
At the funeral, Sabito’s photograph smiled like an insult. Bright-eyed, scarred, alive forever in one frozen second while his body lay somewhere Giyuu could not bear to imagine. People cried openly. His grandmother nearly collapsed. Urokodaki held her upright with one arm and kept his gaze fixed ahead, but Giyuu saw the grief in the set of his shoulders. It was everywhere, thick as smoke. Giyuu stood in black clothes and felt nothing at first. Nothing at all. His mind had gone white and distant. He stared at Sabito’s picture and waited for the moment when the lie would end, when Sabito would burst through the doors late and loud, calling them all dramatic for believing the worst.
He did not.
After the service, someone touched Giyuu’s shoulder. He turned and saw a classmate. She was crying so hard her eyes were swollen.
“You were his best friend,” she said.
Giyuu looked at her. The sentence had no mercy in it.
His best friend.
Were.
He walked away before she could say anything else. He left the building, crossed the courtyard, and kept walking until the voices faded behind him. He ended up behind a storage shed near the edge of the property, where no one could see him unless they came looking. The air smelled like damp wood and incense smoke carried faintly from inside. Giyuu stood there with his hands at his sides, breathing through his nose, trying to swallow the sound rising in his chest.
He failed.
The first sob tore out of him so violently it scared him. He clapped a hand over his mouth, but the next one came, and the next, and then he was folding in half like his body had finally understood what his mind refused to hold. Tsutako. His father. Sabito. Names became wounds layered on wounds. Everyone he loved became a place where the world could enter and destroy him. Everyone he reached for disappeared. Everyone who promised, everyone who stayed, everyone who mattered. Gone. Gone. Gone.
He cried until he could not stand. He sank to the ground and pressed his forehead against his knees, biting the inside of his cheek hard enough to taste blood. He wanted Sabito there to insult him for hiding. He wanted Tsutako’s hand in his hair. He wanted his father’s arms around him. He wanted Urokodaki, but he also could not bear to be seen. Grief made him feel monstrous. It made him feel like a child again, helpless in a kitchen where adults decided who would leave.
That was where Urokodaki found him.
The old man did not speak at first. He lowered himself onto the ground beside Giyuu with a slow, painful movement and sat close enough that their shoulders almost touched. For a long time, they stayed like that. Giyuu tried to stop crying and could not. Urokodaki looked ahead, giving him the dignity of not being watched.
Eventually Giyuu said, “It keeps happening.”
His voice sounded ruined.
Urokodaki’s answer was quiet. “Yes.”
“I can’t do it again.”
Urokodaki did not lie to him. He did not say it would never happen again. He did not say loss was finished with him now, as if pain followed fairness. He only said, “I know.”
“No,” Giyuu said, lifting his head. His face was wet and ugly with grief, and he hated that Urokodaki could see it now. “I mean I won’t. I won’t do it again.”
Urokodaki looked at him then.
“I won’t care about anyone like that again,” Giyuu said, and the words came out with the clarity of a vow. “I won’t let anyone get close. I won’t need anyone. I won’t—” His voice broke, and rage rushed in to cover it. “I won’t keep giving people a place to hurt me.”
Urokodaki’s face tightened. Not in anger. In sorrow.
“That will not save you,” he said.
Giyuu wiped at his face with his sleeve. “You don’t know that.”
“I do.”
“You don’t.”
“I have buried people too.”
Giyuu looked away.
Urokodaki sighed, a deep, tired sound. “Keeping distance may stop some pain. It will also stop other things.”
“Good.”
“No. Not good. Empty.”
“Empty is better.”
“At sixteen, it may feel that way.”
“I’m not a child.”
“No,” Urokodaki said. “You are a boy who has been forced to carry too much.”
Giyuu hated the gentleness in that more than he would have hated a slap. He stood abruptly, unsteady, and backed away. “Don’t.”
Urokodaki did not stand. “Giyuu.”
“I said don’t.”
The old man went quiet.
Giyuu turned and looked toward the building where Sabito’s funeral continued without him. People were still inside loving someone who could not come back. It seemed obscene. It seemed brave. He wanted no part of bravery if this was what it cost.
“I’m done,” he said.
And something in him meant it.
After Sabito’s death, Giyuu perfected the art of being present without being available. He went to school. He passed exams. He helped Urokodaki with chores. He bowed when spoken to. He answered direct questions with as few words as possible. He did not break down again where anyone could see. People tried at first. Classmates invited him to sit with them because Sabito had been loved, and loving Sabito made them feel responsible for the boy he left behind. Giyuu rejected them so coldly they stopped trying. Teachers expressed concern. He improved his grades until concern became harder to justify. Urokodaki watched him retreat behind his own face and did not force the door open, but sometimes Giyuu caught the old man looking at him with a grief that felt almost like accusation.
He kept Sabito’s things in a box. A cheap mechanical pencil Sabito had left at his desk. A keychain from a vending machine capsule. A folded note that said old man taste with a badly drawn salmon. Giyuu told himself he kept them because throwing them away would be disrespectful. The truth was that he touched them sometimes at night, when the house was quiet, and let himself remember for exactly as long as he could bear before locking the box again.
By the time high school entrance came, Giyuu had become someone other people described with simple words because they did not know what else to do with him. Quiet. Serious. Cold. Polite. Difficult to read. He allowed those words to gather around him like armor. None of them were entirely wrong, and none of them came close to the truth. The truth was that Giyuu was not empty. He was full of ghosts. Tsutako lived in the way he still folded clothes carefully because she had taught him. His father lived in the guilt that rose whenever someone said they loved him and he did not know how to answer. Sabito lived in every almost-smile Giyuu swallowed before it could reach his face. Even his mother lived in him, in uglier ways, in the sharp instinct to wound before he could be wounded, in the suspicion that affection was a trap, in the cold satisfaction he felt when he made someone step back first.
That frightened him. Not enough to stop. Enough to make him hate himself quietly.
Urokodaki tried, in his own rough way, to keep him connected to the world. He made Giyuu eat breakfast even when Giyuu claimed he was not hungry. He gave him chores that required leaving the house. He asked about school without expecting long answers. Sometimes he told stories about Giyuu’s father as a boy, not sentimental ones, just plain memories: how he once broke a window with a baseball and tried to blame the wind, how he hated mushrooms, how nervous he had been the day Giyuu was born. Giyuu pretended not to care. He remembered every word.
One evening, near the end of middle school, Urokodaki placed a high school brochure on the table. Giyuu recognized the name. It was a decent school, not too far, with strong academics and enough students that disappearing into the background would be easy.
“You should apply here,” Urokodaki said.
Giyuu looked at the brochure. “Fine.”
“That is all?”
“What else?”
Urokodaki sat across from him. “You might like it.”
“I won’t.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know enough.”
The old man studied him. “Sabito would tell you that you are being stupid.”
Giyuu’s entire body went still.
Urokodaki did not take the words back.
For a moment, Giyuu felt so angry he could barely see. It was a clean, hot rage, easier than the ache underneath. “Don’t use him.”
“I am not using him.”
“You don’t get to say what he would do.”
“I knew him too.”
“Not like I did.”
“No,” Urokodaki said. “Not like you did.”
The agreement stole some of the force from Giyuu’s anger. He looked down at the brochure, jaw tight.
Urokodaki continued, “But I know he would not want you to bury yourself with him.”
Giyuu’s fingers curled against the table.
“He’s already buried,” he said.
The sentence was cruel. He knew it the moment it left his mouth. Urokodaki’s eyes closed briefly, and Giyuu saw the pain land. There it was again, that cold satisfaction, followed immediately by disgust. His mother’s voice lived somewhere in him. He hated that most of all. He stood up, knocking the chair back slightly.
“I’ll apply,” he said. “That’s what you want, right?”
“I want you to live.”
Giyuu laughed once, humorless. “That’s dramatic.”
Urokodaki looked at him steadily. “Yes.”
Giyuu left the room because if he stayed, he might have apologized, and apology felt too close to begging.
He got into the school.
The acceptance letter arrived on a clear day in early spring. Urokodaki set it on the table without ceremony. Giyuu opened it, read the result, and felt nothing dramatic. No relief. No joy. Just the quiet shift of another door opening. He would go. He would study. He would keep his head down. He would not join clubs that asked for too much of him. He would not make promises. He would not let anyone mistake his silence for an invitation to try harder. He would get through three years untouched.
That was the plan.
On the morning of his high school entrance ceremony, Giyuu stood in front of the mirror wearing his new uniform. He was fifteen then, nearly sixteen, taller than he used to be, his face calm in a way that made him look older from a distance and younger up close. Urokodaki had trimmed his hair the night before, unevenly at first, then with annoyed precision after Giyuu silently handed him the scissors again. The uniform fit well enough. The dark fabric made him look even paler. He stared at his reflection and tried to find the child from the kitchen table, the boy from the hospital, the friend from the rooftop. They were all there and not there.
Urokodaki called from the entrance, “You’ll be late.”
Giyuu picked up his bag.
Near the door, Urokodaki waited with a small wrapped lunch. Giyuu looked at it, then at him.
“You don’t have to make that,” Giyuu said.
“I know.”
“I can buy something.”
“I know.”
Giyuu took the lunch. Their fingers brushed briefly. He wanted to say thank you. The words stuck, as they often did, caught behind years of learning that gratitude could be used against him. Urokodaki seemed to hear them anyway.
“Come home after school,” he said.
It was not a command exactly. It was a reminder. A promise. A place to return.
Giyuu nodded once and stepped outside.
The morning air was cool. Cherry blossoms had begun to loosen from branches, drifting down in soft, useless beauty. He hated that they were beautiful. He hated that the world kept offering pretty things after proving how easily it could rot underneath them. Students moved along the street in clusters, laughing too loudly, nervous in bright ways. Giyuu walked alone, his bag strap gripped in one hand, Urokodaki’s lunch warm against his side.
At the school gate, he paused.
For one second, he imagined Sabito beside him, hands behind his head, grin sharp and alive. Don’t make that face, Sabito would have said. You look like you’re attending your own funeral.
Giyuu looked forward.
Maybe he was.
Then he stepped through the gate, carrying every loss with him, already certain that whatever waited inside those halls would not be allowed to matter.