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“Christ, kid, you don’t do anything by halves, do you?”
Noriaki kept his gaze fixed on his own fingers, staunchly refusing to acknowledge the other person in the room.
He expected the exasperation in Joseph’s voice, maybe even a bit of anger, but he wasn’t ready for the sheer amount of exhaustion he heard in Joseph’s sigh.
“Look, like it or not, we can’t just let you loose once we know you’re not gonna bleed out the second you’re out the door,” he said.
“Why not?” Noriaki knew he was being petulant, but he couldn’t hold back the sharp bite to his tone. “I’m more than capable of making my way back on my own. I don’t need a discharge plan.”
Joseph only raised his eyebrows.
“Alright,” he said. “So what’re you gonna do then?”
Noriaki blinked.
“What?”
“What’re you gonna do?” Joseph repeated, as nonplussed as he was the first time around. “Say you’re all healed up and free to go. What’s the grand plan to get yourself all the way back home?”
A sharp pang of silence struck the room, jolting Noriaki’s shoulders up to a defensive curl before he even realized what had happened. His heart caught in his throat, leaving a terrifying moment where he had no way to breathe before Joseph’s face slackened with realization.
“You’re not gonna go back.”
Noriaki didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t like he could argue when Joseph was right.
When he didn’t offer a reply in time, Joseph clasped his hands together and leaned forward, elbows resting over his knees as the flimsy plastic chair creaked in protest.
“Come on, help me out here kid,” he said. “You’re gonna have to walk me through this one.”
Noriaki shook his head.
“It’s fine. I told you, I’ll figure it out.”
“And that’s what I’m trying to tell you.” Joseph’s voice hadn’t quite softened, but it had mellowed considerably nonetheless. “This isn’t an I situation. You’ve got a proper address, two emergency contacts, and a whole goddamn medical team working with you. As far as I’m concerned, you couldn’t have a smoother way out than that.”
When Noriaki risked a glance up, he was struck by the knowing look on Joseph’s face, quietly keen in a way that he had only seen a handful of times before.
“But you know, I’m not the patient here,” he continued. “So if there’s a problem I’m not seeing, you gotta tell me. What’s between you and getting you back home?”
Frustration slowly simmered in Noriaki’s stomach, a burning coil that crawled between his ribs and cinched taut around his head.
“Nothing,” he snapped. “There’s nothing! That’s the problem! There’s no way I can go back after this!”
The words burned as the poured out of his mouth, spat out like they would burn his tongue if he let them linger.
“You just want me to show up back home like everything’s fine? Like I just wanted to act like a stupid teenager for a few months? How am I supposed to sell that to my parents? They don’t know about Stands, or this trip, or—” The name that he wanted to say cinched itself around his throat, letting only a sharp exhale escape. “How do I even begin to explain that? Any of it? There’s no way they’d believe me. I can’t—I can’t just go back like nothing ever happened.”
Noriaki’s hands shook, tremors curling through his fingertips as he clenched his sheets in a white-knuckle grip.
“None of this was supposed to happen,” he said. “I wasn’t supposed to deal with any of this.”
“Why not?”
“Because I should be dead!”
Noriaki’s chest heaved as he gasped for air, face contorting into a snarl. But as he looked at Joseph, he saw only a quiet resignation looking back at him, and finally, he realized what he had just said.
“I—” Rage had frozen over into dread. “I didn’t—”
He didn’t know what to say.
“I didn’t mean—”
“You did,” Joseph said quietly.
He leaned back into his chair with a sigh, as if that single phrase had managed to age him well beyond his years, and for the first time, Noriaki realized that Joseph was genuinely at a loss for words.
Noriaki fumbled through the words he could say next, something along the lines of an apology, when Joseph finally spoke.
“Did I ever tell you about how I lost my arm?”
Noriaki blinked, the question startling him straight out of his own head. It took him a minute before he remembered to respond, slowly shaking his head.
Joseph hummed along, as if that had been what he was expecting.
“It’s a long story, and I’d have to keep you here for another month if I wanted to get through it all,” he said. “But it ended with me in the same spot that you’re in right now.”
Even though he was looking up, Joseph’s gaze seemed to be a thousand miles away.
“I was in a fight, a real serious one, when I was around your age. Had my arm blown off and then shattered just about every bone in my body.” He didn’t even seem to notice Noriaki’s wide-eyed stare. “By all means, I should have died right then and there. But somehow, I made it, and once it was all over, I didn’t even know what to do with myself.”
He smiled, in what had to have been a reflexive response.
“I was pretty much strapped to my bed for a long while after that, and I had a lot of time to think then. So I started thinking, why did I get to live at all? It’s not like I deserved it, really. I mean, if I died, then I would have just gotten what I had coming for me.”
Joseph’s eyes snapped back into focus, locking in on Noriaki with quietly urgent acceptance.
“But you know what? Sometimes there isn’t a reason,” he said. “Life isn’t fair, kid, and we don’t always get what we deserve.”
A glimpse of something pained flashed across his face.
“Sometimes the people who should have died keep on living, and sometimes the people who should have lived end up dead. There’s no scale to keep things in balance. That’s just the way it goes.”
Joseph met Noriaki’s stare on even ground.
“So you can go on about what should have happened and all, but at the end of the day, you’re still here with us,” he said. “And all you can really do is keep on going and try to make it up to the people who stuck it out with you.”
Silence settled over the room, as tender to the touch as a raw nerve. It didn’t seem as if Joseph expected an answer, but Noriaki still struggled to find one. It didn’t make sense.
It hurt.
A quiver of movement caught Noriaki’s eye, and when he looked down, he realized that his hands had started to shake again, blurry enough to become nothing more than a pale splotch of color against the off-white sheets.
He started to wonder how he had managed to move fast enough to trick his eyes when he felt something wet trailing down his cheeks.
Joseph’s face softened as Noriaki brought a hand up to try and wipe at his face, a quiet hiccup escaping him before he could stifle it.
“Aw hell, come here, kid.”
With a grating screech, Joseph pulled his chair over so that the legs were firmly connected to his bedframe, leaning over with one arm to pull him in for a hug. He gently squeezed Noriaki’s shoulders, and as if that were the switch, Noriaki let out a keening wail.
The sound grated painfully against his own ears. It was childish, and shame soon reared its ugly head at how quickly he had managed to lose his composure, but Joseph didn’t so much as flinch at the pitiful whines that escaped him.
“Yeah,” he said, “you’ll be alright.”
Noriaki brought his hands up to cover his face, his own labored breathing and messy cries muffled by his palms, a last-ditch effort at holding himself together. Despite it all though, Joseph stayed, rubbing broad circles into Noriaki’s shoulder as he heaved for air between gasping sobs.
“You’ll be alright, kid. I promise.”
He couldn’t believe that yet. He wouldn’t be able to believe that he would be alright as long as he was confined to a hospital bed and cobbled together by fine-point surgeries and aimless prayers.
But for now, with the cold metal of a prosthetic arm wrapped firmly around him, Noriaki dared to think that maybe one day, he could be.