Chapter Text
The first time Ryusui Nanami understood he was not welcome in the world, he was six years old.
It was not a tragic revelation. There was no shouting or slamming of doors. Simply, one winter morning, a black car picked him up from the Nanami residence in Tokyo and drove him for four hours along coastal roads to an old mansion tucked between cliffs and pines. Inside the car sat an older man who did not address a single word to him the entire journey. Outside, the sea appeared and disappeared between the curves like a gray animal breathing.
"Are we going on a trip?" Ryusui asked.
The man did not answer.
"Is my mother coming back?"
Silence.
Ryusui asked no more. He was six years old, but he had already learned that unanswered questions were like sails without wind: useless.
---
The mansion belonged to his uncle, his father's younger brother. A tall, thin man, with manicured hands and a perpetually dissatisfied expression. He collected nautical charts, model ships, antique navigational instruments, and objects he never used. The house smelled of old wood, salt, and something vaguely chemical that came from the hangar, where a small plane rested under a dusty tarpaulin.
The uncle received him in the vestibule without bowing, without smiling, without offering a single gesture of welcome.
"So you're my brother's bastard."
It was not a question. Ryusui did not know exactly what "bastard" meant, but he understood the tone.
"My name is Ryusui."
"I don't care what your name is. You're here because the matriarch doesn't want you in the main house and my brother obeys her in everything. I didn't ask for this. I don't like having problems dumped on my doorstep."
He paused. He looked Ryusui up and down, assessing him like defective merchandise.
"There's a room at the end of the hallway. Don't touch my things. Don't enter my workshop without permission. Don't bother me. Meals are served at seven. If you're late, you don't eat."
He left without waiting for an answer.
That was the entire welcome Ryusui Nanami received in what would be his home for the next twelve years.
---
The room was small, with a window overlooking the dock. That night, Ryusui sat on the windowsill and looked at the sea. He didn't cry. He didn't quite know why, but the tears wouldn't come. Instead, he pressed his fists against his knees and thought: *If they don't want me here, I'll belong somewhere else.*
He didn't yet know where.
The next morning, he went down to the dock for the first time. The sea smelled of salt and rotten fish, but also of something clean and vast. There was a sailboat tied at the end, swaying with the waves. An old sailor was mending a net, sitting on a barrel.
"What are you doing?" Ryusui asked.
"Mending."
"What for?"
"To fish."
"Will you teach me?"
The sailor looked at him with suspicion. Then he shrugged. He wasn't paid to be a nanny, but he wasn't paid not to be one either. He taught him how to tie knots. Then how to row a small boat. Then how to read the clouds.
The uncle showed no interest in any of this. For weeks, they barely crossed paths. When they did, the uncle ignored him or directed short, dry phrases at him: "Don't run in the hallway." "Don't touch the maps." "Don't speak at the table."
He was a cold man, but not cruel. He simply didn't want a child in his house. He treated him like an inherited piece of furniture that didn't match the décor but couldn't be thrown away.
Ryusui learned not to expect anything from him.
And he learned, too, to seek what he needed elsewhere.
---
The house was full of things the uncle owned but didn't use. The nautical library, for example: hundreds of books on sailboats, currents, cartography, explorers. The uncle collected them; he didn't read them. But Ryusui did.
At seven years old, he would sit on the library floor for hours, with books three times his size, deciphering maps of ocean currents and names of distant capes. No one watched over him. No one told him what to read. It was the first freedom he had ever known.
One afternoon he found a book about trade winds. He read it cover to cover. Then he looked for another about storms in the Pacific. Then another about celestial navigation. When he finished with the nautical library, he moved on to history. Then to mechanics. Then to economics.
"The boy reads too much," he heard a servant say to Francois.
"The boy," Francois replied, in their impeccably neutral tone, "is learning."
---
Francois arrived at the mansion a week after Ryusui. They were still young, with an elegant bearing and an expression impossible to decipher. The uncle hired them as a butler because "a bastard needs someone to watch over him, and I'm not going to do it."
From the very first day, Francois took care of Ryusui without questions, without praise, and without a single explicit display of affection. But they appeared when Ryusui was hungry, when he was cold, when he was sick. They prepared his clothes, reminded him of meal times, left warm milk on his nightstand without anyone asking.
One night, at eight years old, Ryusui refused to eat dinner. Not out of a tantrum, but out of pride: he had decided that if no one in that house wanted him, he wanted nothing from anyone.
Francois placed the plate on the table.
"The young master may fast if he wishes. I will leave dinner here. The young master will decide whether he wants to eat or not."
"I'm not hungry."
"Very well."
They withdrew. Ryusui held out for an hour. Then two. By the third, his stomach was growling so loudly he couldn't read. He looked at the plate. He looked at the door. Francois was not there.
He ate. Francois said nothing the next day. They simply served breakfast as if nothing had happened.
That was the first lesson Ryusui learned from them: Francois did not force. Nor did they yield. They were simply there, constant as the tide.
Over the years, they became the only person Ryusui trusted completely.
---
At ten years old, he still didn't know who his mother was.
He had asked once, at seven, to a servant from the main house during a brief visit.
"Your mother isn't here," they told him.
"Where is she?"
"She's not here. Don't ask."
He asked no more. At nine, he understood the word "illegitimate" and knew why the matriarch had cast him out. He didn't feel rage, exactly. He felt something more useful: hunger.
*If they don't want me for what I am, I'll have something they can't ignore.*
He didn't yet know what. But the sea was there, patient, waiting.
---
At ten years old he also met Sai.
Not at his uncle's mansion, but at a secondary Nanami residence, on the outskirts of Yokohama. One of those rare occasions when the family's bastards were summoned for some administrative procedure. They were seated in separate rooms, far from the legitimate children, and treated with a glacial courtesy that made their place clear.
Ryusui was bored, doodling ocean currents on a napkin, when he saw an older boy sitting alone in a corner. He was pale, with soft gestures, and a kind but absent expression. He spoke to no one. No one spoke to him. He looked out the window as if waiting for something that would not come.
Something about that boy appealed to Ryusui. He didn't know what. Perhaps the loneliness he emanated, so similar to his own. He got up and went over to him.
"I'm Ryusui," he said, planting himself in front of him.
The boy blinked, surprised that someone would address him.
"Sai," he answered in a low voice, almost a murmur.
"Are you my father's son?"
"So it seems."
"Then you're my brother."
Sai's eyes opened a little wider. The word seemed strange to his ears.
"I suppose," he said, with a shy smile that never quite fully formed.
Ryusui sat down beside him and began to talk. About the sea, about boats, about currents, about everything he had read. Sai didn't answer much, but he listened. He truly listened. And when Ryusui asked him what he liked, Sai took a moment to answer.
"Mathematics," he said finally. "Well, no. My tutor says I must be a mathematician. But what I like is programming. Games. Codes. Artificial intelligences."
"That's incredible!" Ryusui exclaimed, eyes shining. "Will you teach me?"
Sai looked at him with bewilderment. No one had ever asked him to teach anything.
"I don't know if..."
"Please. I want to learn. I want to know everything."
That day, sitting in a dusty room while the adults discussed things that didn't matter to them, two Nanami bastards found each other. And, without quite knowing how, they recognized each other.
---
Sai lived with a stern tutor who forced him to study mathematics from dawn until night. He was a genius, but not a happy genius: a forced genius. Mathematics was his gilded cage; what he secretly loved was programming, video games, artificial intelligence.
He was shy, kind, introverted. He didn't seek anyone out. But Ryusui sought him out.
Whenever they could, Ryusui found a way to see him. At family gatherings, in arranged visits, in letters sent in secret. It was Ryusui who pulled Sai along, who drew him out of his shell, who filled the silences with his monologues about boats and currents and everything he wanted to conquer.
Sai listened. He smiled sometimes, with that shy smile that never quite burst forth. He taught him basic algorithms. He explained how code worked, the logic of machines. They were happy, in their clumsy way.
But Ryusui, in his voracious enthusiasm, did something without realizing it: he asked things of him. "Sai, I need an algorithm for this," "Sai, analyze this data," "Sai, optimize this route." He didn't do it out of self-interest; he did it because Ryusui's way of connecting with someone was to ask them to be part of his projects. If you mattered to him, he asked for your help. It was his only language.
What Ryusui failed to see, what his ten, eleven, twelve years didn't allow him to understand, was that Sai didn't interpret it as affection. He interpreted it as being used.
Every request was, for Sai, a confirmation that he was only valuable for what he could do. And Ryusui, blind in his enthusiasm, didn't notice.
---
One afternoon, two years after they had met, Ryusui went looking for Sai in his room at the residence where he lived with his tutor.
He carried a chessboard under his arm. He had read that chess was good for the strategic mind, and he wanted Sai to teach him. It had been his favorite excuse for months: "Sai, teach me this. Sai, teach me that." The word "teach" was his way of saying "I want to spend time with you."
The door was ajar.
"Sai?"
There was no answer.
He pushed the door fully open. The room was empty. Not just empty of Sai: empty of his things. The desk clear. The bed made. The books stacked in a box. The wardrobe open, with no clothes.
Ryusui stood motionless in the doorway. The chessboard felt heavy in his hands.
"Sai?"
He called again, softer. As if Sai might be hiding in some corner, as if it were a joke, as if his older brother—the only one who listened to him, the only one who followed him—hadn't left without saying goodbye.
No one answered.
He went downstairs. He found a servant.
"Where is Sai?"
"He's gone, young Ryusui."
"Gone where?"
"I don't know. The tutor said he ran away. There is no further information."
There was no further information. For the Nanami family, one less bastard to worry about. For the tutor, a failure to forget. For Ryusui, a slab that crushed his chest.
He left the residence. He walked to the dock of his uncle's mansion, where he always went when he didn't know what to do. He sat on the edge, feet dangling, and stared at the sea.
He didn't cry. Not yet. The tears still wouldn't come, as if his body had never learned to produce them.
Hours later, after nightfall, Francois appeared behind him.
"The young master should eat dinner."
"I'm not hungry."
Francois didn't insist. They placed a cup of warm milk on the edge of the dock and remained standing, in silence.
Several minutes passed.
"Young Sai has been located," they said at last. "He is in India. Apparently, he took a flight two days ago. He has left no way to contact him."
"India?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"I don't know. And I suspect young Sai doesn't want us to know either."
Ryusui gripped the cup with both hands. The milk was warm. The sea was still there, unfeeling, eternal.
"Francois."
"Yes, young master."
"Did I do something wrong?"
Francois was silent for a moment.
"I don't know. But perhaps young Sai needed to leave for reasons that do not depend on young Ryusui."
It wasn't comfort. It wasn't meant to be. Francois didn't lie, and that was the only thing Ryusui needed in that moment.
---
That night, Ryusui went up to the attic.
It was a space he had discovered recently: an abandoned workshop where his uncle kept old tools and blown glass bottles. It had become his secret refuge. There, far from everyone, he tried to learn how to make model ships in bottles, a technique he had seen a craftsman do at the port market.
It was the only thing that managed to quiet his mind.
But that night, with Sai gone and the world weighing on his shoulders, his hands trembled. He had the tweezers in his hand, the sailboat half-assembled, the bottle waiting. The thread tangled. The mast snapped. He squeezed the bottle too hard.
The glass creaked. It didn't break completely, but a white crack ran along the body of the bottle.
He set it down on the table. He turned off the light. He lay down on the floor, among wood shavings, and fell asleep with his eyes finally swollen.
Francois found him at dawn. They picked up the cracked bottle, wrapped it in a cloth, and placed it on a separate shelf, apart from the others. They mentioned nothing. They never would.
---
At twelve years old, shortly after the business with Sai, the letter arrived.
It was an autumn night. Francois handed it to him at the dock, with no further comment than "From the main family, young Ryusui."
Golden seal. Expensive paper. A secretary's handwriting.
He read it under the glow of the lantern. His father informed him that, starting the following month, he would receive a monthly allowance of three hundred thousand yen. Nothing more. No inheritance. No surname in the businesses. No future in the Nanami conglomerate.
It was a polite way of saying: "You are nobody. You will be nobody. Go away."
Ryusui folded the letter carefully and put it in his pocket.
He looked at the horizon. The sea and the sky were the same black stain.
"Three hundred thousand yen," he said, in a low voice. "That's not enough."
He snapped his fingers. The sound resonated, sharp in the night.
"Ha, ha! I want it all. And I'm going to get it."
He said it to no one. He didn't need an audience. It was a promise between him and the sea.
---
At fourteen, Ryusui had tripled the capital of his allowance.
It wasn't his idea, at first. It was Mr. Tanaka's, a former advisor to the Nanamis who lived in a modest house near the port. He had worked for the family before falling into disgrace over a financial scandal that was never clarified. Now he scraped by on minor consultancies, smoked too much, and drank cheap sake.
Ryusui met him one afternoon at the port. Tanaka was arguing with a fishmonger about the price of tuna, and something in his way of haggling—precise, ruthless, mathematical—caught Ryusui's attention.
"You know numbers," he said, when the fishmonger left.
"I know numbers, markets, and how to lose everything," Tanaka replied, lighting a cigarette. "What does the Nanami bastard want?"
"To learn."
Tanaka let out a dry laugh.
"Learn what?"
"Everything you know."
It wasn't formal learning. It was chats at the port, napkins full of numbers, borrowed books. Tanaka taught him markets, currencies, commodities. Futures, options, how to read a balance sheet. "Money standing still rots," he would say. "If it doesn't grow, it dies."
Ryusui absorbed everything. Not out of ambition, at first. Out of hunger. Out of the desire to fill something he couldn't name.
"You're a predator," Tanaka told him one afternoon, watching him sketch out an acquisition plan. "A damn fourteen-year-old predator."
"I only want what's mine."
"None of this is yours, kid."
"I'm building it from scratch. When it's finished, it will be mine because I will have created it."
Tanaka shook his head, but he was smiling.
"Your father doesn't know what he lost."
"He will."
---
At fifteen, Ryusui presented.
In the universe of alphas, betas, and omegas, presentation marked a person's social destiny. Most awaited the result with anxiety. Ryusui awaited it with curiosity, like someone awaiting the result of an experiment.
It happened one morning. High fever. A sensation of power coursing through his body like an electric shock. His senses sharpened: the smell of sea salt, of old wood, of book ink, of hot metal from the hangar. Everything was more intense, more his.
The doctor confirmed it: alpha. Not just alpha: elite alpha. The highest caste, the rarest, the most feared and desired.
Ryusui received the news without fuss. He looked at his hands, as if expecting to see something different. There was nothing.
"Good," he said. "Another tool."
Francois, who was present, noted something in their mental notebook. They made no comment.
The main family didn't find out. The uncle didn't care. To the outside world, Ryusui Nanami would remain just any beta until he decided to reveal it. And he decided not to reveal it.
An elite alpha was powerful. But they were also watched. He preferred to keep it secret, like everything else.
---
At sixteen he learned to fly.
It wasn't his uncle who taught him. His uncle barely spoke to him. It was one of the hangar employees, a retired pilot who looked after the old plane and who, in his spare time, explained the controls to him.
"If you know how to read the wind at sea, the sky is the same," he told him one day. "Only in three dimensions."
He got his private pilot's license before his driver's license. The first time he flew solo he felt something he hadn't felt in years: the hum of the engine, the horizon curving at the edges, the Pacific below like an infinite sheet. Peace. Mental silence. Freedom.
He learned to pilot everything. Helicopters, jet skis, race cars. His philosophy forged itself: "If there's a machine that goes fast, I want to pilot it. If there's a skill that's useful, I want to learn it. If there's something I don't know how to do, I want to know how to do it."
He learned to cook from a retired chef in the village. He learned sewing from an old seamstress because "a sailor who doesn't know how to mend a sail is no sailor," a phrase he had read in a book from his uncle's library. He learned carpentry watching the craftsmen at the port, and model ships in bottles from an old man who sold them to tourists at the market.
His uncle taught him nothing. His uncle ignored him, and Ryusui was fine with that. The less he was watched, the freer he was.
---
At eighteen, Ryusui was a millionaire in his own right. And then the modeling offer arrived.
A talent scout had seen his photos in a nautical magazine. They wanted a fresh face for Rolex. Someone who knew how to sail for real, not just pose. Someone with presence.
Ryusui accepted on the spot.
Not for the money—he already had enough—but because it was the perfect façade. Triple purpose.
First: the main family, and especially the matriarch, would see him as a decorative vase. "A model? Perfect. As long as he pos
es for cameras and stays out of business, he's not a danger."
Second: the ordinary people around him would never suspect he came from a wealthy family. His surname was Nanami, yes, but it was an incredibly common surname in Japan. No one would ever connect him to the Nanami conglomerate. He would just be "Ryusui, the model," not "Ryusui, the bastard heir of the Nanamis."
Third: it gave him visibility. And visibility was another form of power.
He left his uncle's mansion without looking back. The uncle didn't say goodbye. Francois accompanied him, of course. They didn't need to ask.
He soon expanded his portfolio: after Rolex came high-fashion clothing brands—Italian suits, cashmere coats, handmade shoes—. Then colognes. Then international campaigns. His face appeared on billboards in Ginza, in European fashion magazines, in YouTube ads.
No one suspected that, while he posed for the cameras, his shell companies were quietly buying up the businesses the Nanami conglomerate needed to expand.
Surgical patience. Nothing aggressive. Everything silent. Everything inevitable.
----
At twenty-two, Ryusui Nanami was a puzzle of identities.
To the world, a luxury model who captained a yacht and smiled on magazine covers. An eccentric sailor who spent money joyfully and who, if anyone asked, said it was "all a friend's."
To the Nanami family, a useless bastard who entertained himself with boats and photos. Someone who no longer needed to be watched.
To his secret advisors, an implacable strategist who devoured markets without his name appearing on any register.
To Francois, a child who had never stopped being alone.
To Sai, if he ever thought of him, a brother who only knew how to ask and never to give.
And to himself, someone who had everything, wanted everything, and still didn't know what he was missing.
That night, on the deck of the yacht, with the ocean stretching in all directions and the stars reflected in the water like shavings of light, Ryusui snapped his fingers.
"Ha, ha! I desire..." He stopped. He couldn't find the word. It was strange. He always knew what he desired. Always. "I desire something. Whatever it is that's missing. I desire that too."
The sea didn't answer. But it didn't contradict him either.
---
Somewhere in Tokyo, under fluorescent lights and surrounded by test tubes, a nineteen-year-old boy with white hair and red eyes was bent over a centrifuge, murmuring something about the inefficiency of solid fuels. He hadn't eaten in fourteen hours. He hadn't slept in twenty. Outside, the city went on its way, oblivious to the fact that two minds destined to fit together were about to collide.
But that's another story.
Or rather: it is this story.
It just hasn't started yet.