Chapter Text
Chapter V
I lay in bed, Kunikazu tucked in for the night and Morgana with him, maybe asleep, maybe sneaking in some game time, I couldn’t be sure, and either way I didn’t mind. The kid was smart enough to know how to regulate himself.
Haru had been running the shower for a long while now. It’s muffled white noise from beyond the bathroom door started to put me into a sort of a trance, like the hypnotic darkness of the bedroom was whispering a wall of words to me, none of which I could make out.
After another few minutes, the bathroom door cracked open, a brilliant beam of gold slicing through my hallucinations and from a cloud of steam emerged my wife, the grey light of the moon shining in the tears that welled up in her eyes. With a blink, they fell to her white shirt, dotting it with little puddles. She came to me and rested her head on my chest, beginning to cry quietly, her breaths panicked little gasps as her heart broke more and more, the tears now rivulets from her hazel pools.
I gently held her. I wanted to ask her what was wrong, but it didn’t feel right. I knew she’d tell me in good time, and somewhere in the back of my mind I already knew, although I couldn’t put it into words.
Her fingers held onto my arms as I felt her tears seep through my shirt and onto my skin, each little gasp between sobs trying to form a word but failing. So I didn’t say a word, just as she couldn’t, and I let her cry, long and hard, into my chest.
After a long time, she started to calm herself. Each breath seemed less urgent, the rivers of her tears turned to raindrops, her back stopped rising and falling with each long sob and she just held herself to me, and for a moment I thought she might’ve fallen asleep, but then she looked up at me slowly, her breathing calm and her eyes wet, and spoke.
“Akira?” she asked. “Do you think that, maybe, sometimes the idea of something is better than the real thing?”
“I think that can be true,” I said, combing my fingers through her hair.
She looked into my eyes for a long while. “Makoto didn’t seem very happy, did she?”
“She seemed stressed out,” I agreed.
“And Yusuke- he said the world didn’t care about his art.”
“He seemed to have reason to believe that.”
She looked down and played with the sheets in her fingers. “I didn’t talk very much last night, and I think it’s because I knew I’d have to put it into reality if I said it. Like… if I’d told them all about how I felt, those feelings would become real, and I couldn’t keep them floating around in my head anymore.”
I wasn’t sure what to say. I just held her.
“You didn’t say much either,” she continued. “Is it maybe because you felt that same way?”
I thought about it.
“It might’ve been,” I told her. “But I don’t know.”
She turned the tuft of sheets between each of her dainty fingers, her eyes searching the shadowy hills and valleys of the bedsheets for the right words. “It’s hard to say it in exact terms.” her voice started to shake a bit, but she steadied it. “It feels like I’ve locked myself in a room and lost the key.”
She shook her head.
“I don’t think I realized how deeply I’d buried it until last night. I mean, do you remember what brought us together in the first place? When that crush turned into something more? Everything that happened- with my father, and the company, and all of that?”
“I remember it.”
“ You were what I had to hold onto, but I wasn’t sure if you’d feel the same way as I did, and so I had this other place I went to in my head- a place where Dad wasn’t dead, a place where Sugimura didn’t even exist, a place where the world was just calm and regal and serene. A quaint little cafe. With coffee served from homegrown ingredients. Where everyone would be at peace.”
“You were in love with that idea.”
She nodded. “I was. And you, and that idea, got me through it all- you and a quaint little coffee shop were the last things that ran through my mind that day when… well, everything happened. When I was watching my own hands disappear… that’s what I was worried I’d miss.”
The room was hushed as I remembered it, how I’d watched each of them fade into nothing. It reminded me of how I’d felt when that fireman told me how close the fire had been to the gas line, like everything I had in this moment was suspended on a tightrope over a black void.
“When Futaba was explaining all that she went through,” she continued. “I couldn’t help but empathize. That idea of what she was doing being linked to some past trauma was something I’d never considered before. And I think…”
The words caught in her throat.
“I think I hate this.”
I just watched as she searched my eyes for a reaction. I myself wasn’t even sure what to feel. I didn’t care about the cafe, or the house, or any of it. But I did care about her, and our son, and what we’d built together.
She wiped away a stray tear and steeled herself. “Dad ran his business like a prison camp. He leased me out to some pervert like I was a used car. And so when I was a girl, I thought I’d combat all that exploitation and disingenuousness with purity- homegrown coffee beans and heart-filled brews, some intimate place where all of that impurity existed only on the outside.”
“Do you think you didn’t do that?”
“No, I did. For a while, we had just that. Before we moved, back in Shibuya, things were still small enough that it met my expectations. Even then,” she choked on the words. “Even then, though, I knew it wasn’t what I really wanted. Even then, the business of it all and the way I had to be to make it work- I could feel that creeping up on me. But it was all I’d ever really wanted to do, and there was no other dream to cling onto. And you were so supportive… so I carried on.”
“That long ago?” I asked her.
She nodded slowly. “I think so. Not consciously- it wasn’t a fully formed thought, but I can see the shadow of it now.”
“Things aren’t so big here, though.”
“I know,” she replied. “But the seed of all of this was the idea of creating a space of kindness, and understanding and… peace. But for as long as I can remember now, we’ve just been letting people into our home, people who we don’t know and who we don’t care for, who order something they themselves hardly care about and leave. It’s not that I don’t want that serenity for us- it’s that nobody else seems to care about serenity. Or that it doesn’t exist.”
Tears started to fall onto my chest again.
“And so here I am, my ‘dream’ the only thing supporting us as a family. So I can’t give it up, or even find the words to tell you. All you’ve ever been is caring. There’s no reason for me to be this unhappy.”
I reached for her hand, and held it in mine. “It’s not anyone’s fault,” I told her.
“The fire made me happy,” she said. “Isn’t that sick? In one moment, all of that confusion and self-deceit and apathy was burned away. I didn’t have to worry about the me of the past or how I could justify throwing away my own dreams, or ten years of my life- it was just gone.”
She blinked a few times, calming herself.
“But then you were there, and so were the firemen, and it’s like the world couldn’t let me have that release, like it said ‘No, Haru. You’re going to have to get free of this on your own’ . But I don’t know how, Akira. I just don’t know how to do something like that. Futaba just did it . And I’m just not that sort of person.”
She sat up slowly, and moved herself to hold me in her arms, her legs intertwined with mine.
“So did you feel that way?” she asked me. “Did you feel a hint of that last night? Is that why you weren’t so talkative, too?”
“I’m not sure,” I said honestly. “I think I was having trouble seeing us for what we were.”
“Like their lives were more whole than ours.”
“Some of them seemed that way.”
She breathed slowly, the night settling in around us, all warm and sent from over the pacific ocean.
She spoke groggily now. “I don’t want to lose any of you. I’m sorry. I think I might just be too hungover.”
“You know I’m here to support you,” I told her.
“I don’t want that. I just… want you to know if you felt it, too.”
Tomorrow I would go downstairs in the morning, and walk Kunikazu to school. Then I’d return to the cafe and help in the new kitchen, or seat customers at booths. I’d watch her spend time and energy on each of them, some idea of what our world should be like reflected in her eyes but unreflected in reality, lost in some idealized space far away, unseeable, inescapable, the monster that lashed and lurked beneath the sewers of Tokyo, the beast Futaba had said we’d never slain, the desperate thing called time.
I had something else I wanted to say, but she’d already turned away on her pillow and drifted off to sleep. I closed my own eyes, but no rest came. I stared at the grey ceiling for hours and listened to the car horns outside. I thought it was strange how they never stopped honking, even at night.
I turned to watch her sleeping next to me on her tear-stained pillow, restless, eyes shooting back and forth behind her closed eyelids, her mind conflicted even in sleep. She clutched her hands close to her chest.
I remembered so clearly her hat with the feather.
The moment that the Metaverse crumbled, my life had still only just begun. I remembered the day we left Shibuya and the way the wind had roared in my ears as I let myself through the sunroof. In that moment, everything felt so simple. My purpose had been so concrete and so fully realized that I didn’t think for a moment think that eventually, I would have to find another one. I didn’t think for a moment that while the world had been saved, it hadn’t been changed, that my hour of action was over and now I would just have to live, the same way everyone else did. My girlfriend became my wife and my friends became adults and now, like only seconds had gone by, I was lying awake and realizing that I’d lost whatever spirit had earned me that bliss in the first place.
I got out of bed silently and dressed myself in a white tee and joggers, then I left the bedroom, making sure to close the door gently. It was two in the morning. I made my way through the black kitchen, so silent you could hear the car horns still, and descended the creaking stairs, each step careful and deliberate.
Down in the cafe, Toru and a couple other contractors were still working on the kitchen. He looked up, surprised to see me.
“Mr. Kurusu- I wasn’t expecting you’d be awake.”
“Is the work done?” I asked.
“No,” he replied. “The power situation turned out to be more complicated than we’d thought. The stove still isn’t hooked up, and the entire cafe is out of power while we try to fix the electrical infrastructure.”
“Perfect,” I told him. “You can all go home.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Go on home. We’ll pay you for everything, but we don’t want this fixed.”
He looked shocked for a moment, but nodded and took out his pack of cigarettes. “Your house, your rules, I suppose. We’ll have the company give you both a call later in the week. I hope we didn’t do anything to offend.”
“Not in the least,” I told him. “It was done faster than we’d anticipated. Maybe a little too fast.”
He clearly didn’t understand what I was on about, but he took a quick drag of his cigarette and waved his crew out the door. “Have a good night, Mr. Kurusu,” he said. They filed out the door, leaving the cafe powerless and kitchenless.
It was just gone. I thought. That’s what Haru had said made her feel relief, and I couldn’t deny that in that moment, I felt it too.
I took one last look at the booths and how they reminded me of the ones in LeBlanc. I couldn’t cling to that forever, though. I opened the door and left.
The streets were close to empty, but nothing was ever empty in Tokyo. Businessmen walked up and down the sidewalks like confused robots, their faces tired and all the same. I made my way through the canyon of black to the subway station and descended the stairs, one foot briskly after the other, listening as the roar of the trains below echoed from the cave.
I waited for one of them, my heart bubbling and my feet antsy to move. Eventually, one pulled in and the people around me got up from their benches and looked up from their phones and followed me inside. I found a seat and watched my ghost in the window. I was older now, but I wasn’t too old yet.
I sent a text to Ryuji.
You awake?
“Where’s the fertilizer?” I asked the bored supermarket attendant. She pointed towards the back of the store without looking up from her phone.
“Far wall,” she said.
The store was bright, garish, and empty. I was alone there, making my way between the aisles of uselessly cheap home decor and cosmetics. I found the back wall without much effort, and heaved two large bags of fertilizer over my shoulder, bringing them over the register. The attendant scanned them without even really looking at what they were. I payed her and left, carrying the bags out onto the street like some traveling merchant out of his mind. Ryuji was waiting in his car on the curb. He opened the trunk for me so that I could put the fertilizer in, next to the planks of wood. I got into the passenger seat and we sped off into the night.
The roof of Shujin academy looked haunted now. There was trash and broken glass everywhere. A stack of old and mangled desks in the far corner formed a monstrous silhouette in the darkness. It was even more dilapidated than I’d remembered it- I suppose the school had opted to simply forget that it existed, rather than put forth the effort to restore it to something useful. Oh well. All the better for us.
We turned on the flashlights on our phones and got to work, setting down the planks and fertilizer and clearing away the debris. Glass and metal shards went into a plastic container, the desks were moved into an orderly stack by the door, and the rotting pieces of food kids had thrown up here were thrown back down into the garbage below.
Creeping around in the dead of night brought back memories of my days as a thief. I mentioned this to Ryuji, and the sound of his laughter bounced off the classroom windows into the sky.
When we were done, we drove back. It was around six in the morning when we took the exit that would lead us back to the house. Ryuji rolled the windows down, the dark early morning air fresh in my lungs, smelling of hydrangea and cherry blossom.
“You’re going all out with this, aren’t you?” he asked.
“It’s long overdue.”
He puffed out his chest a bit. “I guess somebody was inspired by my perfect relationship.”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” I said.
We pulled up to the house around twenty minutes later. The morning rush was beginning to stir, the road peppered with more and more people with each passing moment. Ryuji pulled up to the curb.
“I’ll wait here,” he said. “Just don’t take too long. Traffic’ll get bad soon.”
I dusted my dirty hands on my joggers and stepped out onto the sidewalk. I unlocked the cafe door and went inside, making sure to lock it back on my way in, and that the ornate window sign still read “closed”.
On my way upstairs, I felt my chest fill with helium and anticipation and nervousness and everything else. The door opened with a sleepy whine. It seemed like everyone was still asleep, which was what I’d been hoping for. In the bedroom, Haru was still slumbering restlessly, clutching the pillow in her arms, her hair a messy cloud of hazel. I put my hand on her small shoulder.
“Hey,” I whispered. “Wake up.”
Her eyes fluttered open, taking a brief moment to catch her bearings and focus on me. “Oh, good morning.”
“I have something to show you,” I told her, kissing her lips hard. She returned the kiss and came away from it grinning sheepishly.
“Something to show me?” she asked. “What do you mean?”
“Come on,” I told her, taking her hand and coaxing her out of the bed. “You’ll see.”
She got herself dressed quickly, a look of skepticism on her face. “I’m sorry about last night, Akira. It wasn’t a fair way for me to approach all this. I realize I put you in a rough spot.”
“Don’t apologize,” I said. “And don’t worry. Just get dressed, and bring your hat.”
She ruffled her brow. “My beach hat?” she asked.
I nodded. She glanced at me with suspicion but did as she was told, donning a bright yellow sundress and her broad hat with the pink ribbon on top. “Okay,” she said. “I’m ready. I think.”
Next was Kunikazu. I knocked on his door and went in, finding he and Morgana snoring loudly.
“Wake up,” I told them.
Morgana woke with a startled mewl, and Kunikazu covered himself with the bedspread.
“It’s too early!” he protested.
“You don’t have to go to school today if you wake up.”
“Really?” he asked, beaming.
“Just get dressed as fast as you can.”
He threw the covers off his bed and ran to the closet, pulling over a t-shirt and a pair of gym shorts. “Where are we going?” he asked.
“You’ll like it,” I said simply.
“What’re you on about, Akira?” Morgana groaned, still sleepy and irritated by his rude awakening.
“Come on, come to the kitchen.”
They followed me out of the room, confused and curious. Haru was rummaging through the pantry.
“Do we have time to get breakfast?” she asked.
“Grab a pastry,” I said.
She took one for each of us from the pantry and asked hesitantly: “Is everything okay?”
I told her not to worry and I held her hand as I led them all down the stairs to the cafe. She still seemed confused. Ryuji honked when he saw us through the window.
“Ryuji!” Kunikazu exclaimed, bolting out of the door and to the car.
“Oh, great,” Morgana bemoaned.
Haru gave me an inquisitive glance. “What about the shop?”
“They couldn’t fix it in time. There’s no power and no stove.”
She cocked her head, eyes searching mine for any clue as to what was going on. “Why would that be?”
“Let’s go,” I said.
We went out onto the sidewalk to find that Ryuji’s parking job on the curb had started to seriously impact traffic. A long line of honking cars was beginning to form behind him. One rolled down a window and from it a man screamed “Move it, jackass!”
“We’d better go,” Haru said, worried.
I opened the back door for Kunikazu and Mona- one of them nearly bursting at the seams with excitement to see Ryuji and the other clearly a little frazzled at finding his long lost love’s boyfriend parked in front of his home at seven in the morning- and they each leaped inside. Haru went in last, holding her hat to her head against a brisk morning breeze and ducking down into the back seat.
Ryuji put a fistbump behind his seat for Kunikazu. “How’re ya doing, kid?”
My son returned the fistbump with a beaming smile. “Pretty awesome!”
“That’s the spirit. Maybe they raised you alright after all.”
He started the engine and pulled off the curb, ending the torrential wall of honking from behind us.
“Where are we going, Ryuji?” Haru asked him. “Akira won’t say.”
He mimed locking his lips and throwing away the key. “Sorry ma’am. I can’t either.”
We pulled off the surface streets and onto the freeway. I rolled down the windows and let the summer air rush in as we picked up speed to merge and I could smell the blooming world on the wind. The sun shone on the street signs and cars with a polished silver glimmer.
On the drive Kunikazu and Ryuji talked about their favorite animes and Morgana inquisitively probed into ‘how things were going’ with Ann. Haru and I stayed mostly silent, enjoying the breeze and the sun as the rest chatted away. When we took the exit, though, she asked one thing.
“Shibuya?”
I nodded.
We took a couple more streets, and pulled into the parking lot behind Shujin academy.
“Here?” Morgana asked, confused. “Why here, Akira?”
“Are we helping Ryuji with track?” Haru wondered.
I shrugged. “Not a bad guess.”
We got out of the car and headed inside through the back- Ryuji had the keys- and before long we were at the bottom of the tucked away stairwell that gave access to the roof.
“Can we be here?” she asked.
Ryuji waved his hand. “It’s fine, it’s fine.”
We climbed the stairs, Kunikazu’s little footsteps excited and urgent to see whatever was in store for him, Morgana slinking from step to step, and Haru and I completely aligned. She held my hand tenderly.
Ryuji unlocked the rooftop access door and swung it open. “Ta-da!” he exclaimed theatrically.
Haru looked out at the scene and held her hand to her mouth as happy tears welled in her eyes. Fertilizer beds covered the middle of the roof, lined in even rows and cleanly separated with wooden planks, breaking up the weathered concrete plane with a brilliant swath of loamy, rich soil that soaked the sunlight and smelled of earth. On a small, unused desk we’d arranged an array of tools and seeds- gardening forks and hand trowels that shimmered brightly in the sun, packages of seeds for dandelion and kai-lan, and a few sets of gloves and aprons.
She walked out onto the roof, still wordless and shocked. Kunikazu and Morgana both went to examine the setup curiously while she simply stood and looked at it all, the shade from her hat hiding her watery eyes. She stood there for a long while and examined the scene, unmoving, her hands clasped over her mouth, the gentle morning breeze blessing her hair and dress with colorful movement.
“I’ll let you guys enjoy it,” Ryuji said, motioning to head back downstairs. “Just text me if you need anything.”
“Thank you, Ryuji.” I said. “Sincerely.”
“Don’t mention it, man.”
I went to Kunikazu and showed him how to use one of the handheld forks to break up the soil. “You mother showed me this,” I said, guiding his hand to gently push and pull the dirt into finely groomed lines. He didn’t really get it, but that was okay. I could tell he was enjoying it.
Morgana examined the scene. “This is a cool thing you did, Akira. I can’t lie.”
As the two of them started messing around with the soil, experimenting with it’s feel and quality, I went back to Haru, still standing wordlessly, her eyes seemingly unable to focus on just one thing, running over every aspect of our modest setup time and time again.
Then, she spread her arms widely and wrapped me in a hug, her embrace warm in the hot sun, her cheek pressed into my chest, her voice cracking with joy.
“I can’t believe it,” she said. “I love it, so much. You have no idea how much I love it.”
I held her too, and closed my eyes, just embracing her, feeling the pollen in the winds that blew over from the sea and her breathing, real and alive and present, awoken from whatever slumber we’d been stuck in.
She looked at me and kissed me softly, like the tickle of a flower on my lips.
“Thank you,” she said, fighting back tears.
“I needed this, too. We both did.”
She sniffled and smiled. “I love you, Akira.”
I brought her close to me again and felt her breathing and my breathing align, like the push and pull of the tides.
“I love you, too.”
She donned a pair of gloves and her apron, adjusting her big hat to shield her from the sun, and got to work, instructing me on what sorts of plants could grow in what conditions, and which could be close to one another and which couldn’t- how to use the tools I was unfamiliar with and how far to space out the seeds. We were going to be growing carrots in one of the beds and Chrysanthemum in the other.
I felt like I was a kid again, coming up here nearly every day to have an excuse to talk to her, gardening with her diligently, pretending I knew what the hell I was doing when I didn’t. And now, with the cafe miles away, I tilled another row beneath the royal blue sky. She gave me a handful of seeds with her soft hand, bearing the ring I’d given to her so very long ago. Here, under the sun, there was only us. The world below was but a matte painting.
I dug a small hole with my trowel and set a seed inside. There it would stay, in the dark, until it would be ready to sprout- when the heat from the summer would spur a bursting chemical reaction that would send it rocketing upwards, out of the black soil, to bloom in the light as a pinpoint of brilliant color.
Far away, the wind rolled itself through the dead streets of the city and split into deltas to glide across the flatlands, brimming over the world, unconstrained.