Part 1 is here

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It took approximately fifteen Saran-wrapped, home cooked dinners, two discoveries of the apartment’s born-again carpet and three and a half more weeks of coexistence for Kazama to finally figure it out.

Those things, among other weird, twilight zone-esque occurrences, had been mysteriously popping up over the past little while - or so Kazama reckoned, he hadn’t religiously been keeping track. He was pretty sure it started a couple weeks back, when Kazama nearly brained himself on an errant shower shelf in the bathroom. A shower shelf.

"Hey," he piped up suddenly, looking at the pristine couch beneath him. "Is it just me, or are my socks white again?"

Shinogu innocently looked up from the table. "Oh, I…um… washed them for you."

"I… see."

Shinogu, once again metaphorically flashing his membership card to the Perfect, Domestic, Brilliant Little Johnny Son-of-a-Bitch club for the entire world to see. No, Kazama reasoned, quashing the five-year-old inside of him that totally seethed with jealousy, that wasn’t fair. Shinogu didn’t mean to be that way… he just was.

"It was kind of on my way," Shinogu apologized (vaguely wondering why that uber-perplexed look gracing Kazama’s features prompted him to feel guilty). "And they were dirty, so…"

Predictably, there was just no living with him after that.

Kazama vacillated between feelings of guilt (for not helping out around the apartment, of all things - a feeling he had hoped to court solely after marriage) and slack-jawed confusion. So Shinogu thought he’d put his roommate out of his apparent misery, constantly sent him out on various pointless missions while he committed himself to keeping the home base vaguely livable.

This time it had been strawberries.

So, in a not-so-pleasant turn of events, Kazama had wound up wasting time on the curb near the unopened grocery store - a sign with large, black letters proclaiming BACK IN 5 MINUTES was hastily shoved in the window - watching with a sort of distant fascination as the gutterside sewers swallowed up runoff from last night’s sudden rainshower, little rivulets running together into wavy-lined streams. Something about it was all so terribly Zen.

Running into Akane, however, was apparently not.

"God," she spluttered, fanning at the goopy mess that had up until that moment inhabited her drink cup. "Have you ever considered possibly not sitting in a place that people walk through?"

And since she had so unceremoniously stomped all over his little patch of Earth-won Nirvana like an elephant toting an elevated blood alcohol level, (current) love of his life or not, that so did not fly. Kazama turned around and gave her a look that would have melted lesser beings.

"Oh," Akane said, sounding equal parts unmoved and mildly bemused. "You’re Shinogu’s roommate."

"Kazama," he grit out somewhat painfully, because Akane up close was like a lesson in perfect symmetry: all slender compact curves and defiant eyes and lips, and it was way harder to sound reproachful when she looked like that.

Well, what else could he do?

"And where do you think you’re off to?" He said, mock-chastising, standing up and brushing the sloppy milkshake-based remains from his sweater. "If I’m not mistaken, high-schools don’t have Reading Weeks, unless things have changed since I’ve been gone. And it hasn’t been that long."

She did give an uncomfortable look around her, but remained stiffly unabashed. "No. I’m… I was just feeling a little sick, that’s all."

He grinned at her thoughtfully. "Just walking it off, huh." Then felt strange because he sounded like a persnickety old bastard and that wasn’t what he meant at all.

"Yup," replied Akane, a little too cheerily, a little too light, and moved to duck around him. "Our secret, okay? Oh, and a word of advice: try not to sit in the middle of the sidewalk."

And later - Kazama would always remember the distinct cut and sway of her small form on that sidewalk, dark hair bouncing, backpack thumping a light staccato against her uniform coat, oddly graceful in the light of empty day. Kazama lamented the fact that his anger was futile any way you looked at it. Akane and free will: mutually inclusive? Ha, maybe in another life. Kazama hunched his sweater closer around his shoulders, reaching for his car keys in deep pockets. A glob of her milk-based ex-drink slopped messily off one shoulder onto the pristine pavement and he glanced at it, reluctant.

Strawberry. He pensively considered her receding back.

It was his name, right? It had to be his name.

 

///

 

Home, Shinogu figured, was the indisputably inimitable feeling of having the door swing open before you’ve even reached for the keys in your back pocket, your mother preempting your early presence and arrival in the mysterious way that mothers - biological or not - only can.

He grinned at her from the doorway. "Hey Mom."

"Shinogu! You’re here early."

"Yeah." He knew there was no ignoring the boisterous bundle of boy and blanket that came trundling at his knees, abortively bleating a few plaintive "Shinogu!"s. So Shinogu bent down and scooped Hikaru up. "I finished work early, so I figured I’d get over here and let you guys get an early start. Hey Hikaru, how’re you?"

"Akira came home today and we pwayed with him and his new twuck and- "

"Now Hikaru, let your brother sit down before you talk his ears off." She turned away towards their tiny living room. "Thanks so much for doing this, Shinogu. I know it’s unfair to ask you to give up your reading week, but Hatsumi couldn’t do it. And Akane - " Well, Akane. Didn’t babysit. Ever.

So before his mother could start tossing out the white-lipped apologies for Akane’s extremely deficient child-rearing skills (and thereby causing Shinogu to wince in painful retrospect at coming home to one of Akane’s first attempts, the house a warzone of crayon, chocolate and wailing child, the former two gracing the walls like some testament to what couldn’t have been called anything but a contained atomic blast. And his little sister shoving a crumpled bib at him with a dark and surly don’t ask, storming out, all five-foot-one of thunder and lightning). Shinogu decided to move on to less traumatic topics.

"Oh, don’t worry about it, Mom," he shrugged with embarrassed candor. "I’ll be fine with the studying."

She blinked at him, chastising fondly: "Oh, Shinogu. That’s not what I meant. I mean you should be with your friends on your week off, don’t you think?"

Well, yes, he knew what she meant. But he neglected to mention the various offers of camaraderie over what he had been very fervently assured would be a long and lonely week of pseudo-freedom, which - knowing him - Shinogu would definitely squander away on things like: a) babysitting, b) studying, c) work or d) a psychotic amalgamation of all of the above ("You know," Takuya had offered soothingly. "No offense or anything."). He had just been surprised that people knew him so well.

But he’d eventually have to tell her that he somehow agreed to the least of it.

"Well, I guess it’s kind of funny you should mention that, because I was kind of thinking of taking Hikaru and heading out to ocean."

She looked faintly perplexed. "The beach?"

"Yeah." Shinogu glanced over to where Hikaru was impatiently grinding his chin into the ancient upholstery of their couch and figured his (somewhat unwilling) acquiescence to Ai’s pushy invitation might not be so bad after all. "If it’s okay with you."

She smiled and shook her head, saying: "Of course it’s okay, Shinogu. But isn’t that a little far for a daytrip?" And he came to the horrifying conclusion that, in some ingeniously cruel effect of evolution, his mother’s cheek possessed a line and cut that resounded with somewhat painful similarity. Hikaru’s cheek. Hatsumi’s cheek.

Anyway.

It was far, relatively speaking. But then again, Japan was pretty much one big city these days anyway; any imaginable domestic destination available on the other side of a bus line. And Shinogu wouldn’t mind the trip. "Well, we’d be up there for a few days, I guess. A friend of mine invited me up to her cottage. She’s got a big guest house, so she said I could bring a friend." He smiled warmly at Hikaru, now heavily asleep against Shinogu’s left arm.

Catching his mother’s difficult eyeroll suppression at ‘she’ and ‘bring a friend’, Shinogu blinked in confusion, not aware that his mother knew full well what his female acquaintance’s true intentions had been. And the poor girl would likely be expecting her son and his good-looking roommate to show up rather than a hyperactive five-year-old but this, like so many other things, was entirely overhead logic to Shinogu - the kind of thing her oldest son wouldn’t be able to parse even if you shoved it down his throat. More audibly, and to assuage his visible confusion, she said: "Of course it’s fine. If it’s alright with her." And contented herself with knowing that he would be away from the usual grind for even a few precious days.

He smiled his inward smile, leaving her to wonder why until he said: "It’s been so long since I’ve been there. Kind of… funny timing, huh?"

And she said soothingly, like mothers - biological or not - will tend do: "Well, I know you’ll be safe. Go have fun. You’re both good boys." Not bothering to mention that yes, it had been a long time, so long she had thought it existed outside the realm of his long-term memory, but inevitably not hers. That she remembered all those years ago, following the adoption and its associated mess, remembered bringing her two beautiful children to the ocean in some attempt to - what? Forge a family on its tidewashed shores? Maybe. It all sounded so terribly romantic in hindsight: sky empty, sea snapping, wrathful, mercury-blue and her newest and eldest son, their simultaneous blessing and curse.

Unknown was that fact that he remembered that trip even better than she ever could: the granular tread of wet sand beneath his broken toe, the echoing, gutsy crack of white waves in the distance. Like retrograde sight: each image clear as proverbial day, scintillating almost, washed a soulful, manic blue - Hatsumi’s ten little fingers, prodding carefully, curiously at his aching foot-splint.

Shinogu knew that some part of him would always be standing there on that beach, left behind at the edge of the world; the sea like a churned-up, frantic mess of sky - heaving turns of blue and white, blue and white, recklessly razoring sparse light. And somewhere in between the roiling crack of anguished water, he discovered that touch didn’t need to hurt as bad as it did. As bad as it used to.

His mother thought it had been long. To Shinogu, it had been longer than anyone could ever imagine.

 

 ///

  

It took four empty blocks, one newly purchased strawberry smoothie and twenty-four minutes of comfortable, companiable silence before Akane went and brought it out into the open.

"So, you’re not going to snitch on me, are you?" She was watching him suspiciously, the stomachache ruse having fooled no one. "Because that would be really, really sucky of you."

The roads were desolately empty then, eleven a lonely hour; soon these streets would be flooded with lunch-goes like some flip-mirror version of itself: the undistorted, populated optic. He scowled in distaste at her cynicism, caught his own look in the reflective window of a florist’s. Kazama had skipped class more time than he could possibly count on both hands. And that was within a fortnight. "You wound me, you know that? What exactly makes you think I’d do something like that?"

"Well, you’re following me," it was less a statement of affront than a question, like a cautious toe-dip to gauge frigidity before a plunge. She took a long sip of her smoothie, considering.

Seeing as this wasn’t even a decent explanation, Kazama didn’t bother gracing it with a decent answer, instead locating where he had parked his tiny blue car a godforsaken distance from the green grocer’s, thumping lightly on the hood to semaphore an invitation at her. He pulled open a door and got in.

Now any normal person would have stuck to their guns, but Akane, ever the entrepreneur, took this as explanation enough and flashed him a dazzling, million-watt smile before happily sliding in, shot-gun.

"Oh," Kazama remarked over the sound of the engine whirring to life. "And why the sudden change of heart?"

Casting him a darkly despairing look, she crossed her arms stubbornly over her chest, contemplatively sounding: "Let’s hit the arcade," like she was deciding between a low-fat taquito or chicken burger at the local fast food digs. Usually, this would have had Kazama marginally minding, but given that he started off the day pavement-sitting to wait out fresh strawberries in an attempt to dodge his domestic duties and then finished with a milkshake bath, dignity was so clearly not even an issue anymore, it wasn’t funny.

He just raised an eyebrow and pulled out of the parking space, saying: "Arcade?" Like she had been joking.

"Yup."

"Wow," Kazama replied, looking both amused and appropriately puzzled. "How elementary school is this?"

Outside, lunch had almost started, disenchanted civil servants singly flooding out delis and cafes alike for a brief personal respite in their long workday. Akane didn’t look forward to being a part of it. Distractedly, she rubbed a sleeve hem against her scuffed window, tracing out slow, even letters with a smoothie-sticky finger: A - K - A - N. "Are you saying you used to skip class in elementary school, then?"

"Now that’s strictly need to know," Kazama laughed. Akane couldn’t help noticing the way his low chuckle slipped out under his narrow, easy smile, the kind of laugh that filled up space and shook his shoulders, sloppy and pink-covered though they were. A cigarette-cough laugh, and she wondered whether he had smoked before. Akane deliberately turned to face the window and resumed her strokes.

"Shut up." She shot back, grinning at her hand. Swipe, swipe, swipe: - A - N - E - "Let’s just say I’m feeling lucky."

  

///

  

The funny thing about apartment-complex life, Shinogu learned very early on, was not the strange, cubicle-esque existence nor the creepy pseudo-caste system ruling the floors. Rather, it was one of the very first things Shinogu had learned from living in the complex: that many windows did not equal many eyes.

This wasn’t a really literal truth - there was likely no other place on Earth where you could guarantee first-row seats for anyone’s personal dissection and downfall - but if eyes were really the windows to the soul, and Shinogu had unknowingly subscribed to this credo at some indeterminable point in his life, then he figured there were probably none at any sill, seeing rather than simply watching. Actually vigilant.

Like being holed up in some empty cave; waiting, watching. It was this strand of reasoning that made this place the loneliest one on earth.

So when he made the long downward trip, trying not to wince in distressing memory at the sight of the elevator’s interior, buckled Hikaru snugly into the back seat and slid his keys into the ignition, Shinogu didn’t acknowledge the sheer lifetime lost to prying eyes here - a fact that would have made him nostalgic and sad in even turns. Shinogu had spent most of his life trying not to watch, cracking apart bit-sized images to force a long-lasting fugue and no matter what anyone’s opinion on chosen ignorance, it had been his long-time refuge. Depressing, but true.

So he hadn’t been watching during Mrs. Tachibana’s famous fall from grace, typically spectacular, a final grandstand personal exodus before her fang-lickers, utterly unrepentant like a final sob of flame before the candlefire dwindles to desolate, razored light and dies. Nor the subsequent ups and downs of Hatsumi and Ryoki’s tumultuous relationship (no matter how much he wanted, didn’t want, wanted to). He would have stayed strictly hands-off on Azusa’s righteous fumbling for justice if fate hadn’t crossed any paths there.

So when Hatsumi exited the building at a companionable distance from Azusa, spotted Ryoki and looked down at his cold lack of hello, despite the fact that it brought back the terrible, familiar imbalance in Shinogu’s chest like some vestigial organ gone major, situated between the heart and head. Like his neighboring lungs, the wheezing currents of air ushering his body into life, weren’t sufficient to counter the burning weight. Never equal mass enough. He wasn’t watching. Despite the fact that it meant something had gone wrong with them again. Despite the fact that the look in her eyes was enough to break his heart.

Shinogu wasn’t (was, was not) watching. Hands on the steering wheel, trying to look away.

 

 ///

  

"You know, I’ve heard of couples picking up each others’ habits before, but we’re - oh - four hours and thirty-five dollars in, and this is getting kind of ridiculous."

Akane had stopped answering him about half hour ago, which strangely coincided with the time he started peppering his prose with shameless references to nerds and selling one’s soul; on his last mention of an epileptic fit, she only rolled her eyes, deeming the saving of a digital Japan vastly superior to his infernal ribbing.

He didn’t mean it, anyway. The teasing.

In between his colossal defeat at Nascar racing and her current gun-toting heroic run through Asia, he had managed to glean a few choice facts from her distracted half-answers:

1) (The most important bit being) that she and Subaru had broken up. Shinogu had not known this, meaning Kazama had subsequently not known as well; Kazama made a mental note to thrash (read: nag) his roommate for his appallingly lacking brotherly skills at his earliest convenience.

2) To blame was the traditional high-school romance clincher: post-secondary education. Subaru had moved a little ways from Tokyo to pursue his dreams of entering the upper echelons of video gaming, assuring her things would stay the same, but they didn’t. This was likely not a conscious decision on either his or her part; they almost never did. So it had been two weeks and counting and Akane hadn’t heard from him at all - Kazama shrugged inwardly. Objectively speaking, it hadn’t been that long. Not-so-objectively speaking, it hadn’t been long enough for Kazama to feel the slightest bit of turf-related safety.

No, that wasn’t true. Because if Kazama knew anything about these delicate matters, or at least about pretty, angry, fiery girls (and this was nebulous territory indeed, because more realistic people would attest that such a proclamation was a lie of the nth degree), then he knew that Akane wouldn’t wait. She just wouldn’t.

It wasn’t as if he could blame her. Waiting was the worst part: this painful, static kind of limbo that washed away at you like a hungry, brackish tide, knowing and not knowing knitted together into a tolerant kind of stigmata. Akane wouldn’t wait.

And so by that strand of logic, this was really some sort of limbo too, because Akane standing here, shooting up badly animated villains was like some last-ditch effort at stretching time, at hoping, and none of this could really last. Personal amateur psychology or not, Kazama knew it was true.

So he’d help her, at least until she gave up the languishing hold and leave the way he figured she did everything: explosively. He was always one for wasting time anyway.

"Huh," he noted from her shoulder. "You’re fighting giant vegetables. What is this, like the newest subliminal message from Konami?"

Akane just laughed, rolled her eyes. Akane had the kind of laugh that could put broken glass back together.

"Fruit. Giant fruit," she corrected pompously.

He made a big show of squinting scrutinizingly at the screen, and replied: "No, that looks like a tomato to me."

"Fruit, it has seeds." And when she added the less audible: "Subaru told me so," Kazama turned and considered her profile thoughtfully.

Akane blinked once, twice, decimated an overgrown strawberry and said, distracted: "It’s your name, you know."

"Huh?"

"The reason why people can’t remember your name. You have a hard name. It doesn’t suit you."

Kazama didn’t get defensive, didn’t whip out the whole backstory on how he was named after his great-grandfather, who managed to marry his grandmother (the prettiest girl on the island) because of a name-related mixup, after which point he was convinced it was supremely lucky and would have named every one of his children Kazama (including the girls) had his wife not threatened to leave him. Instead he mulled this over carefully, which was admittedly really, really hard in the midst of a Technicolor jungle the likes of which they were currently standing in, and Kazama came to the conclusion that greater meaning was for suckers anyway.

"Hey," he mumbled then. Sounds, lights and colors and really, this place was one extended Tokyo-set, coin-operated acid trip. "What do you think about dancing?"

Akane didn’t blink, whirling colours reflected in her wide eyes. "Huh?"

"Well," drawled Kazama, contemplating her with mild amusement. "I meant dancing. You know. Painting the town red. Boogieing? Tripping the light fantastic?"

"You’re so weird, you know that?" And turning back to appraise the state of her digital Japan with feigned indifference, Akane rolled her eyes so hard she almost gave herself a headache.

But she went along anyway.
  

///

Four minutes into their painful escape and they were thwarted. Shinogu should have known it wouldn’t last.

"Oh, hey Shinogu!" Azusa called out, vigorously waving one arm. "Wait! Wait. You guys look like you’re going somewhere. Can Hatsumi come with you?" He gave her a fang-licking kind of shove towards the car and opened the door, not waiting for Shinogu’s answer or listening to Hatsumi’s abortive protests. "Thanks man. Hey there, Superman!"

Hikaru opened an eye at Azusa’s bombastic hello, waving a tiny hand before sleepily sidling over to make room. "Hi ‘Zusa… Hello Hami-chan," he muttered, half-awake and drowsy.

"Hi sweetie," Hatsumi answered mistily. God, she sounded sad.

So Shinogu said nothing, just gave Azusa one meaningful look in the side-view reflectors, pulled out on his roguish, unaffected wave and started driving, counting forty-five slow breaths before tossing her a concerned glance in the mirror. She was careful not to meet it.

And Shinogu didn’t press.

Instead, Hatsumi was watching the little curl of her youngest brother’s fingers backseat, characteristically unconcerned with the obvious logical corollaries between her apparent snub from Ryoki, Azusa’s fervent efforts at consolation. Truthfully, she had sort of reached a point where worrying or subsequently the effort required thereof was just a little more than she could afford to give, a little more taxing than it had been, say, two or three months ago. Maybe that meant things were different now.

Maybe that meant things were over.

And maybe it was something about the weather, the distinct hue of bruised, mackerel sky hovering above rainy Tokyo, that made her feel the way she did right then - shipwrecked, for lack of a better term; run aground and hopeless, a hundred miles from any landmass.

"You know, I just realized," Hatsumi remarked softly, giving him a smile through the rearview mirror that didn’t quite reach her eyes. "It’s been a long time since we’ve been to the ocean."

"Yeah," Shinogu agreed, and figured if there was any promise of stormy hearts to safe haven, they should have been miles from here by now. "A really long time."

 ///

 

 

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