Chapter Text
Aki hated running in front of other people, but at the very least this time he was running towards something instead of running away.
He was never an athlete in high school; that much was immediately obvious to anyone who spoke to him for more than three consecutive minutes. He had been told by many a coach that he could’ve been a track star if only he put in a smidge more effort, that he had the build for it, whatever that meant. All signs pointed to it being a commentary on his lankiness— which was ironic, because Aki had always despised the spindles of his legs, the sinew of his torso that refused to build on more muscle no matter how hard he tried.
Maybe he should’ve listened to all those coaches, he thought as he pumped his arms harder, hiked his bag further up his shoulder. Those ridiculous long legs sure came in handy for something, even if it was running to make the train instead of five hundred meter dashes.
“Pardon me,” Aki said, when he almost careened into a woman on the staircase. He stifled the urge to nod his head towards her, reminding himself that these were Northerners, that they didn’t give two shits or a fuck about arbitrary displays of silly concepts like politeness and respect. Indeed, the woman just scoffed, jerked her head towards him and jabbered something to her friend that Aki couldn’t hear, but assumed was less than complimentary.
It didn’t matter. Jeers and jives be damned, he was going to make that train if it killed him. It had been one of the longest days of his life since he moved to that godforsaken city, and he didn’t intend to waste a second more than he had to in the grimy underbelly of the subway station.
Unfortunately, the fellow citizens of Boston didn’t seem to have received this memo, seeing as they were still congregating in massive heaps scattered across the platform. When Aki was a kid, he used to imagine that he had telepathic powers, that he and he alone could blast a message directly into the neurons of every man, woman, and child on earth. He couldn’t remember what it was he wanted to say so badly when he was little, but on rare occasions as an adult, he allowed himself to indulge the fantasy once more. He visualized it as he sprinted, chest burning: Attention, please, fellow passengers of the Green Line! I’ve had an extraordinarily shitty day at my extraordinarily difficult program, so I would really appreciate it if you could move your asses out of my way before me and my skinny legs bowl you over entirely. Thank you kindly!
No, he thought, panting. That wouldn’t do him any good, anyway. Sure, he could omnipotently bitch at everybody to get out of his way, and then what would that make him? A larger-than-life asshole with a bloated ego and a primo seat on the T. A fat lot of good all that power would do him then, self-righteous and obnoxious and just as alone as he was when he started.
Above him, a flickering lightboard announced that the B line train to B.C. was departing now, an accompanying announcement chirping over the loudspeakers in that sing-song tone that always sounded like it was mocking him. “Fuck me upside down,” Aki mumbled, a phrase lifted from Power that had once made him flush at the vulgarity but now rolled off his tongue as smoothly as anything else.
Finally, finally, when Aki was about halfway certain that the muscles in his legs were going to straight up give out, the train came into view, screeching up to the platform with jerky determination. He turned sideways to wriggle between two people in the crowd, stretching his hand out as if it could somehow bring him closer to the open doors. Just a few more feet, he repeated, over and over in his mind like a mantra. Just a few more feet until he was inside, and then it’d be just a few miles until he was home, and then—
The doors hissed close, Aki fumbling for them like an idiot, and the train bulleted away from the station just as he pushed his way through the throng of human beings.
Because why wouldn’t it, right?
Why wouldn’t the universe throw him a bone, try to make his life a fraction of a percentage point easier after the complete and utter shitstorm of a day he’d had? Aki sighed, ran his hands through his hair to brush back the sweaty bits from his face. After all the trouble he’d gone through to make it here: to this graduate program, to this country, even to this godforsaken train station, he’d expected a few more kickbacks in return.
He pitched forward for a moment, slouching to let the tension in his spine go slack, resting his elbows on top of his knees. Ordinarily, he’d be self-conscious, worried that the other passengers around would think that he was insane, or crazy, or plain old cracked out, but after a few years in Boston, he’d come to understand that on the T, up was down and down was up. In other words: weird was normal, and normal was weird.
Aki drew himself back up to stand, rubbed slow circles on the back of his neck, trying mostly unsuccessfully to relieve the ache from long hours hunched in front of anatomy textbooks and NCLEX prep books. He was on his way back from pharmacology class, and it had felt even longer than it usually did. The professor had droned on and on about pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics, never mind the fact that Aki still wasn’t exactly an expert on either of them. The class had gone on so long that dose response curves shimmered in his vision when he closed his eyes— either encouraging him or haunting him, but it was too soon in his fledgling career to determine which one with any sort of certainty.
That didn’t matter, either. He’d understand it eventually— he always did. No matter how hard a class was, or how much he struggled to keep up with the professor’s quick stream of jabbered English, he’d find some way to figure it the eff out. Not only that, but to come out on top. He had to, or else everything that had been sacrificed to get him to this point would be for absolutely nothing.
Aki’s phone rang, snapping him out of his self-induced fog of misery. When he slid it out of the side pocket of his bag, it jittered with an excited chirp. The screen glowed with the name Denji, accompanied by a myriad of flexing-muscle emojis and little red 100s. (His doing, of course; if Aki were the type to include emoticons next to his contact names, which he isn’t, they would be much cuter than the hardo macho-man symbols Denji’s picked out for himself.)
“Hi,” he said, swiping the accept call bar and sandwiching the phone between his shoulder and his ear.
“Where are you?” In typical Denji fashion, he didn’t even bother to return the greeting. Again, if Aki were the type to fancy cute emoticons, he’d probably also be the type to get offended by this type of snub, but in his almost-third year of living with Denji, he’s grown accustomed to both quirks. “Sounds loud in there.”
“That would be the T station,” Aki said. He held the phone away from his face for a brief moment, then pressed it back. “Hear that? That’s the sound of the common people, Denji, who don’t have the luxury of staying out all night and taking blow-off classes in the morning.”
“Sucks for them,” Denji said, laughing. “College rocks when you do it like me.”
“Oh, I’m sure.” Denji’s parents were more than comfortable— from what Aki’s heard, seeing as he’s never actually met them for himself. Aki was good enough at navigating the nuances of the English language to know that comfortable is shorthand for super rich, and in this city, super rich meant they had money practically out the wazoo. It always struck Aki as odd that Denji’s parents cared enough to stick their son in an all-expenses-paid apartment and register him for four years of tuition in whatever subject he wanted, but not enough to drop by for a visit anytime within the last two years.
“Anyway,” he continued, seemingly undeterred by Aki’s silence. “As much as I’d love to chitchat, I’m calling because I need your help with something.”
“Perfect,” Aki said, through gritted back teeth. “Awesome, Denji, sure. What is it now? Did you pour toilet cleaner in the laundry machine again?”
“Okay, that was one time, ” he shot back. “And no. I can’t figure out how to—” Next to Aki, a man and two of his friends break out into peals of laughter, and Denji’s voice is swallowed up by the hum of the crowd.
“I can’t hear a word you’re saying, buddy.”
“Stats,” Denji groaned, and Aki nodded. He should’ve known, really. Denji had been hounding him all semester for help with frequency distributions, and now that the end of year was rearing its head at last, finals were a more imminent threat than ever. “Can’t. Need your help. Gonna fail.”
“What’s it matter if you fail?” It was obnoxious, and Aki was well aware, but at that point any mouth-to-brain filter had dissipated, and he couldn’t stop himself from saying it even if he wanted to. “Your parents will pay for you to retake the class, yeah?”
“Sure, but that’s not the point here.” Denji’s voice sounded a little sadder than Aki expected; it sent a pang of guilt through his chest. “The point was me doing something for myself for once. You know, working at it and learning it and figuring it out or whatever. Like you do.”
The way he said the last phrase— like you do — sounded so small and admirable, the way that Taiyo used to back when he was little enough to still think his big brother was the coolest human being on the planet. Back when Aki was still in the running for greatest big brother in the world.
“Fine,” Aki said. “But only if you promise to actually clean the bathroom this time. It’s your turn.”
“Cross my heart,” Denji said. He was only three years younger than Aki, who’d be (horrifyingly enough) twenty-four in the winter, but moments like this made him seem much younger. Aki probably should’ve moved out when he had the chance, after finishing undergrad and starting on his Master’s, but something kept him tied to their shitty little apartment in Rat City, and even more so to his ragtag roommates. “Are you gonna be home soon?”
Aki glanced up at the screen announcing the arrivals, not really already on the tip of his tongue, but instead it seemed that his train would be arriving shortly, whatever that meant. “Soon,” he said, the telltale rumbling already vibrating throughout the platform. “I’ll see you in a few minutes, I promise.”
“See you,” Denji said, but Aki barely heard over the roar of the subway pulling into the station. The hot puff of air it released blasted his face, nearly steamed across his glasses. He pulled them off to swipe the lenses clean on the hem of his scrubs, shoved them back up his nose with one finger.
With rush hour fast approaching, there was no hope of him snagging a seat for himself, so Aki made do with a pull handle and a spot wedged between two other youngish-looking guys. All three of them swayed a little as the train turned, bumping into each other with their bags. It could be worse, he reminded himself. At least he was on the train.
Raising his phone, he swiped through the latest barrage of unread text messages. The little red notification at the corner of the app bothered him like a boil on a face, just as disgusting and in need of rectification in his eyes.
From Denji, a blurry photo of a stats textbook, the phone clearly held way too high, casting a shadow over the page that made it almost illegible. From Michiko, an emoji-laden how’s lab going? --- Aki made a mental note to respond. From Himeno, a reminder that they had placement tomorrow (unnecessary considering they’ve had the same schedule for the entire semester, never mind the fact that Aki was about as punctual as a human being can get without crossing the line into robotic.) From Power, a plea to get Denji off her ass, whatever that was specifically referring to, and a promise to show him how to make that drink special she’d been mixing last time he went to visit her at the bar.
Aki closed his eyes, willing himself to escape his body for even a millisecond. Sure, it had carried him through nursing school this far, but it was starting to break down far quicker than it should. Twenty-three was too young to wince whenever he stood up too quickly, for his back to jostle him awake at night in a fit of white-hot pain. Logically, he knew that there was probably nothing wrong with him— he’d seen plenty of hypochondriacs in his day, and he sure as hell wasn’t one of them. Still, though, he couldn’t shake the pervasive feeling that one day, when he least expected it to, his body would simply give out, and that’d be a wrap on Aki Hayakawa.
Just like it was for the rest of his family.
Across the train car, a man doubled over, a ragged cough tearing from his throat that ricocheted off the metal walls. People next to him wriggled away, covering their faces, scrunching their eyes closed as if that would make it go away. He clapped his hands over his mouth, maybe trying to force the coughs back in, maybe to simply suffocate them so as not to disturb those around him. Either way, whatever he was trying to do wasn’t working very well, because he continued to shake, the horrible grating sound only crescendoing, his body only jerking more violently.
Aki narrowed his eyes. If he kept on going like this, someone was going to have to pull the emergency stop, would have to yell out is there a doctor or a nurse on the train? like they did in those cheesy medical soaps. He really, really didn’t want to have to raise his hand, much less qualify it with not yet, but kind of, least of all actually pull some medical training out of his ass to save somebody’s life. He listened for any nuance he could detect in the sound, recalling his lectures: was the cough wet or dry; did it spray blood or phlegm; was the patient burning to the touch or shivering cold.
“Oh, my God,” a small voice piped behind him, before he could get very far. “Oh, my God, this cannot be happening.”
Part of Aki didn’t want to turn around. Part of him was perfectly content to stay where he was, bobbing up and down on the tsunami of the T, blissfully oblivious to whatever tragedy was unfolding around him. Part of him couldn’t bear to see the face of this person, whoever they were, childlike and glassy-eyed at the sight of someone in pain.
Part of him, though, knew that they might be in pain themselves, and part of him wouldn’t be able to get to sleep at night if he let them go by without at least making an attempt to alleviate it. As usual — dammit — that part won out. Aki rotated as best he could.
The speaker wasn’t, as he’d thought for a second, a child. It was a young woman— slender-bodied and a good foot and change shorter than him, but a woman nonetheless. Something about her seemed much younger, though, and not just her stature: the high, wobbly tone of her voice; the tremble of her bottom lip; the little-girl plastic clips that held back her bangs. He’d only ever seen Michiko wear those when they were kids, back in Japan where she’d buy them by the dozen at Daiso in every imaginable shade of the rainbow.
“This is what they warned us about, oh, God,” she cried, burying her face into the chest of a freakishly tall man standing beside her— and coming from Aki, that descriptor was nothing shy of significant.
“It’s okay, Kobeni,” he said, smoothing down the flyaways that had burst from her clips. “Compared to everything we’ve dealt with the last few years, this is light work. You’re going to be fine, I promise.”
“Everything’s fine,” Aki agreed, although the nosy side of him couldn’t help but wonder what exactly the two of them could be going through that was so terrifying. He crouched down as much as he could without toppling over, trying his best to meet her gaze. “Your name’s Kobeni?”
“Uh—” She froze, shooting a panicked look at her companion, who nodded firmly, mouthed it’s okay again. “Mmhm,” she said, and swiped underneath her eyes.
“Okay, Kobeni.” Aki ran through the checklist that had been ingrained into him for the past two years: symptoms, responsiveness, vital signs. She appeared to be breathing fine, if a little quickly; a fine sheen of sweat glossed over her forehead, but that could just as easily be attributed to the late spring Massachusetts heat. In Nurse Hayakawa’s pre-professional opinion, she was suffering a minor anxiety attack— nothing more, nothing less. He knew from personal experience, though, that in the thick of it it felt anything but minor, so he resolved to avoid the phrase. “I know you’re anxious right now, but there’s no danger to you anymore.” The man had stopped coughing by then, but the other passengers on the train were still avoiding him like— well, the plague.
“They told us something like this would happen,” she murmured. “I didn’t think it would be so soon— violence—”
“Shh,” the man said, grabbing ahold of her hand and stroking his thumb over it in lazy circles. Kobeni leaned into his touch, sighing like it was cool and relieving against her skin. “We’re in it together. You don’t have to worry about that anymore.”
“Violence,” she said again, and sniffled, tears collecting in the web of her eyelashes.
Aki stole a quick glance behind him at the man who had been coughing. He now appeared just as normal as anybody else on the train, scrolling though his Twitter timeline or catching up on TikToks like nothing had ever happened. He wasn’t sure, in that case, why this woman insisted on using that word— violence — over and over again. It seemed a little screwed up to him, almost as if she were inviting it just by invoking the phrase.
“Kobeni,” the man said, lowering his voice a bit, but not enough so that Aki couldn’t hear it. “When it happens, we’ll be ready for it. I won’t let anything happen to you. You know that.”
Kobeni squeaked a little, squeezed his hand tighter. Aki looked away, suddenly under the impression that he was interrupting a little pocket of privacy in the cesspool that is public transportation.
So clearly these two characters were nutjobs— the woman seeing things that weren’t there, the man just as certain in their existence. If they presented into the hospital while Aki was at his practicum, he’d recommend a psych eval yesterday . Still, there was something a little romantic about their commitment to each other in the midst of their delirium. Even though she was crazy, at least she had somebody who cared about her enough to delve into the crazy right alongside her. The situation diffused, Aki decided to let it be.
“You’re a doctor, aren’t you?” Kobeni said just as he started to turn back around, yanking on the edge of his scrubs.
“No,” he said, “a nurse. Well, I’m still in grad school, so not quite yet, I suppose, but almost a nurse.”
Kobeni nodded, seemingly accepting this position as equally legitimate. “So do you know what’s going on?” she said. “With him?”
“If you’re talking about the man over there, I don’t,” Aki said. “But it’s probably just a small coughing fit, maybe an irritant in his lungs or something. Nothing to be scared of. It happens to the best of us.”
“You know what it is,” Kobeni said, more firm than anything else she’s spoken so far.
Aki blanched. “Excuse me?”
“You know what it is,” she said, even more forcefully. “You know as well as I do. Ignoring it doesn’t make it go away, you know. It just makes it worse when it finally gets you.”
That was it. Aki could handle blood, vomit, feces, the whole shebang, but delusions? Grandiosity? Complete and utter detachment from reality? That was the one thing that refused to go down, no matter how hard he tried to swallow.
“You’re insane,” he said, knowing that he shouldn’t. “Find somebody else to bother. I don’t want to play this game anymore.”
Kobeni chuckled, pressed the heels of her palms into her eyes. “You think I do?” she said, and then the doors inched open and she was gone, consumed by the rush-hour crowd.
At the back of the train, a woman keeled over, braying a loud, rattling cough into the closed mouth of her fist.
“I survived,” Aki yelled when he stepped through the doorway, the same way he’d done for the better part of the last three years. It started as a quasi-joke, Power always getting on his case saying he was too quiet when he got home, didn’t make enough sound to announce his presence and ended up startling her. It was true enough that he had been trying to make himself as small as possible. Back then, Aki had been desperate not to present himself with any other reason why he was different besides the obvious, and Power had been just another intimidating stranger with a bad attitude and a weird nickname.
“About time,” Denji called back. He was slouched in his chair at their triple-duty dining room/common area/workspace table, laptop open to his class assignment with a decade-old episode of South Park buzzing in the background. “Thought you’d forgotten your way home or something.”
“Something like that,” Aki said, all but collapsing into the chair next to him. Somehow the ache in his joints screamed even louder when he slipped his bag off his shoulder; he dug his nails into the soft flesh of his palms to try to distract himself. Normally, he’d tell Denji off about the trials and tribulations that come with being a T commuter, but when he thought about that young woman and the pure, unbridled fear in her eyes, it felt like something that should be kept private.
“Glad you made it,” Denji said, quietly. From his computer screen, Stan and Kyle’s earsplitting voices blared, poking like a syringe into Aki’s brain. The two of them were bickering over god knows what, throwing around a few expletives that he’d never even heard before, let alone ever thought to use himself.
“I don’t know how you expect to get any work done with that crap droning on in the background.” Aki reached over his computer, flicked over to the offending page and executed it with a swift click to the red X.
“Hey!” Denji whined, starting to sound like those little devil kids himself. “Don’t harsh my vibe ‘cause you don’t know how to multitask.”
Aki tsk ed. “Yeah, right. There’s a difference between multitasking and wasting your time on drivel.”
“It’s hysterical!”
“It’s tawdry.”
“Just because you make up a fancy-sounding word doesn’t mean you automatically win the argument,” Denji said.
“I— you know what, I’m actually going to let that one slide.” Aki drummed the fingertips of his left hand onto the table, tapping out a strange rhythm without really thinking much about it. “Have you eaten yet?”
Aki hated himself a little bit for constantly playing caretaker to everyone in the household except for himself, but Denji was the kind of person that warranted it. Seriously. Aki could testify with total and utter conviction that he would lose his head if it wasn’t attached to his body. Or else forget to eat for days on end, or else skip class all day to watch cartoons and eat cereal from the box, or else burn the whole apartment to a crisp because he forgot to put water in his Easy Mac before microwaving it (yes, he had personal experience with this particular little mishap.)
“Oh, shit,” Denji said, scratching the back of his head. He’d recently bleached it to an almost white-blond after yet another romantic frustration with his crush, and the shade made the painted black of his fingernails stand out like blood against cotton. “Totally slipped my mind, dude.”
“You really have to start being better about this, you know. If you keep forgetting to eat regularly, your metabolism will get all out of whack. It’s the thermic effect of food. The more you eat—”
“The more you digest, yes, yes. I did, in fact, pass fifth grade science.” Denji rolled his eyes, but Aki caught a glimpse of a slight smile. “Thank you for the lecture, Nurse Hayakawa.”
“Consider yourself lucky it wasn’t one,” he said. As much as he wished Denji would actually listen to his advice for once in his life, Aki couldn’t deny the way the title made something in his chest swell.
“Speaking of lectures, I still need help with this problem set,” Denji said, and swiveled his laptop to show Aki the offending worksheet.
He shoved his glasses further up his nose, pulled his hair off his shoulders and into a sort of half-updo. The textbook page swum in front of his eyes, the chart reduced to a mishmosh of lines and dots, the words swirled into nonsense on the screen. It was evident that there was no earthly chance of him being able to sleuth his way around a stats problem within the next twelve hours; he was in serious need of a hard-drive reboot, stat.
“Tell you what,” he said, leaning closer to Denji like he was about to let him in on the world’s best-kept secret. “If you let me off the hook for stats duty tonight, I’ll make you something to eat and won’t even complain while I do it.”
“Done,” Denji said, and slammed his laptop shut with a slightly concerning level of enthusiasm.
Aki scanned his mental log of their refrigerator contents, trying to think of something he could throw together to form a semi-legitimate meal. “How’s omelets sound?” he said, landing on the old tried-and-true classic.
“Sounds baller,” Denji said.
“Baller indeed,” Aki echoed, padding over to the kitchen and pulling the ingredients out to lay in a neat row on the countertop. When he lived with the likes of Denji and Power, there was no need for an English dictionary; they provided him with an inexhaustible stream of slang words to sink his teeth into.
“Somehow it sounds so much lamer when you say it.”
“If I were you, I’d be more careful about shit-talking the guy that’s making my food.”
“Good point,” Denji said, and scratched his cheek. “I’ll be sure to shift into a more pleasant conversation topic right away.”
“That’s more like it,” Aki said, and hummed to himself as he whisked pale clouds of milk into the bowl of eggs. Fatigue was already tugging on the bottoms of his eyelids, heavy as cement shoes and just as deadly. “What’s new with you, then?”
Denji shrugged. “Like school-wise, or what?”
“Anything, really, as long as it’s interesting enough to distract me from how goddamn exhausted I am.”
“Fair enough, dude, jeez,” Denji said. “Uh. Well, I guess I could tell you about— no, hang on, that’s dumb. Oh, okay, there was that thing the other day, but I can’t remember what ended up happening with that, really…”
“Jesus Christ, Denji, you’re telling me that you run your mouth off all day and night but can’t find something to talk about the one time I actually need you to?”
“Okay, okay!” Denji threw up his hands. “I talked to Yoshida today, does that count for anything?”
“Oh,” Aki said, faltering a little in his wrist rotation. “Yeah. That definitely does.” Yoshida was Denji’s latest love interest du jour, as Aki had been subjected to hear about in many a late-night drunken complaint fest. The last he’d heard of the saga had been the two of them finally hooking up at a mutual friend’s party, how life-changingly fantastic it had been, and how mind-bogglingly confusing their relationship was now that the two of them were interacting sober.
Denji nodded. “You’re telling me, man. Okay, so we got together at Asa’s thing a few weeks ago, right? And dude, when I tell you we got together, I mean we got together. For real. I was expecting that it’d be awesome, but that shit was on a whole nother level.”
“I think I got that, thank you.” Aki wasn’t by any means a prude, much less a homophobe, but something about how open Denji was about his sex life still made him squirm a little.
“Anyway, we’ve been hanging out since then, like getting coffee and studying together and going on these weird little walks around campus where we talk about our feelings and shit, but the other day he called me, get this ”— Denji inhaled sharply, steeling his posture and looking Aki straight in the eye— “his best friend.”
Aki blinked. The milk was completely emulsified into the eggs by then, blended into a smooth, vaguely sunny-colored liquid. “And this is a problem because…?”
Denji groaned, a small, strangled sound from the back of his throat. “God, Aki, for someone who’s such a genius you can be really stupid sometimes.”
“Well, gee, thanks for the high praise.”
“It is a problem,” he continued, overemphasizing the word like Aki had chosen the worst one possible for the situation, “because I do not want to be his best friend. That’s what you call your straight buddy when he picks you up from the airport or waters your plants or something. I wanna be his— you know.”
“Sorry, his what?”
“His boy—” Denji’s voice dropped at the end of the sentence, dissolving the word right down the middle. “Uh, I wanna be—”
“Speak up,” Aki said. He swung open the fridge door, looking for any leftovers that might be good candidates for a second-chance omelet revival, settling on spinach and red peppers. “Couldn’t quite hear you there.”
“His boyfriend!” Denji’s cheeks blazed Jolly Rancher red —or maybe they just seemed that way to Aki, offset against the pale skin of his face and the stark platinum of his hair. “God, you really don’t know how to quit, do you, Aki?”
“Sure don’t,” he said. It was one of the largest sources of pride in his life, too, although he’d never say that to his roommates.
“What should I do, then?”
Aki’s hand stilled where it was fileting the vegetables into bite-size pieces, almost subconsciously. “You’re asking me?”
“You see anybody else in the room?” Denji made a big show of whipping his head from side to side, ducking underneath the table to check if any imaginary friends were lurking underneath.
It was probably a poor decision on his part to look to Aki in the way of romantic guidance, but somehow it still felt like an honor being bestowed upon him. He could visualize it, even: a grand ribbon ceremony, a medal lowered around his neck, a triumphant speech. You, Aki Hayakawa, after years of meddling in the lives of your two neer-do-well roommates, have officially earned the responsibility of Being Privy to Denji’s Personal Life. Congratu-fuckin’-lations, man.
“Well,” Aki started, deliberate in the choosing of his words. He’d never had a real partner before, aside from a few junior-high Pocky kisses and a couple dance-floor makeouts back in undergrad. None of which were his finest moment, seeing as he couldn’t recall the names of any of them. “I say you should tell him how you feel.”
“Eeuuuugh,” Denji moaned, and thumped his head on the table in what was (in Aki’s opinion) a gross overreaction to his statement. “I should’ve known you were gonna give me some lame-ass advice like that.”
“Excuse me!” Aki flicked the gas on their stove; the burner flame sputtered into life, announced its existence with a steady tick-tick-tick. “I’ll have you know that I’m nothing less than an expert advice-giver, thanks for asking. If you don’t like it, you can figure out some other way to get this guy to fall in love with you.”
“All right, all right,” Denji said, drawing himself up. “I get it. I guess you are a whole lot older than me, anyway.”
“That wasn’t quite the point I was trying to make, but again, thank you for pointing that out.”
“What do you suggest, then?”
“Hmm.” It was moments such as these where Aki’s complete and utter lack of romantic experience was painfully evident, but he was determined not to let Denji see that particular flaw in his character. So maybe he’d never had a real girlfriend, much less a boyfriend, but he’d accomplished plenty just the same. He was too busy making something of himself to waste time on silly relationships— or at least that was what he comforted himself with. “Take him out to dinner or something. Be direct. Kids your age are always complicating things beyond necessity.”
“Yeah, ‘cause taking someone out to dinner is basically a marriage proposal,” Denji said, wrinkling his nose.
“Feel free to come up with something better, then.” Aki poured the egg mixture into their frying pan, watched it bubble up at the edges in steady pops.
“I could take him to the next house party I go to.” Denji’s face brightened a little; he sat up straighter in his chair. “Yeah. That way he would have to dance with me, right? It’s brilliant.”
“You’d probably be too drunk to remember which way is up,” Aki said. “I’ve seen how trashed you get on Friday nights. Nowhere near eloquent enough for a love confession.”
“Stop using big words to try and confuse me,” Denji mumbled. “And it’s not a love confession! It’s just a dude expressing his feelings for another dude. Nothing lovey about that.”
“Whatever you say.” Aki bit his tongue to keep from making another dig at Denji’s extracurricular activities, so to speak. Denji drank too much on the weekends, and Aki hated seeing him stumble home after parties, giggling and flushed and foul-mouthed. He’d been tempted many a time to sit him down and tell him he was wasting his potential, but he knew that’d only end in slamming doors and shouts of you’re not in charge of me.
Which, okay, fine, Aki wasn’t. But still. He didn’t appreciate being demonized for the radical act of caring about Denji. Michiko used to say that he was too bossy for being the younger cousin, and maybe she had a point. Even so, Aki held firm to the belief that somebody needed to knock some sense into Denji about his lifestyle. If Aki had a family a quarter as rich as Denji’s — hell, if he even had much of a family left at all– he certainly wouldn’t waste the opportunity dicking around and doing Jell-O shots in some frat basement. He’d probably have four degrees by now if he hadn’t had to work his way through the first one. Maybe he’d even have more friends, a relationship. Free time to sit around the house watching cartoons or drink himself off his ass if he felt like it.
In either case, Denji said it made him happy, and Aki wasn’t in any type of position to knock that. Nor was there any use being jealous of it, so he nodded, focused his energy on their omelets.
“What about you then, huh?” Denji was leaning forward to rest his chin on his hand, a sly smile spreading across his face. “Nobody special in old Aki’s life?”
“That’s none of your business,” Aki said, sniffing.
“Pleeease? I told you all my business,” Denji said.
“Yeah, but you tell everybody your business. That’s not exactly a measure of trust in your book.”
“Don’t be like that, man. There’s gotta be somebody. Back home, maybe?”
“There’s nothing back home,” Aki said, “but snow and sheep. Not exactly the most fitting backdrop for a romantic comedy.”
“Damn.” Denji whistled under his breath. “There’s gotta be something, though. I mean, I’m sure your family would still be happy to see you if you went back, right?”
Aki froze over the stovetop, clutching the handle of the frying pan. It’d been six years since, but the thought of them still made something inside of him twist into an ugly knot, from the depths of his guts all the way up into his throat. He swallowed hard against the pressure, coughed, took a deep breath in just to prove that he still could. “My parents traveled a lot for work,” he said, truthfully. “And my little brother was— unwell, most of the time. They say that kind of thing brings some families closer together, but let’s just say that wasn’t the case for us.”
“That sounds so sad.” Denji’s brows were furrowed, “Don’t you miss them, though?”
Aki made a tight fist, letting the sting of his nails distract himself from the awful, rashy feeling that was starting to spread through his chest. “They’re not around much anymore for me to miss,” he said, and left it at that, the edge of the omelet starting to char to ash in the pan.
Aki didn’t realize he’d fallen asleep over his homework for the umpteenth time until Power burst through the front door, shaking sweat out from her ponytail and wringing beer from her shirtsleeves.
It was a bad habit, he knew. Not only for the wasted time — he could only imagine how much he could’ve gotten done if he’d actually used the few hours to brush up on last week’s lab notes instead of dozing off– but for the horrible effects on his sleep cycle. Fragmented sleep, his professor had said, was one of the most recognized contributors to excessive daytime sleepiness, meaning that Aki avoided it at all costs. Power, however, was evidently unaware of or unyielding to such a concept.
“I fucking hate human beings,” she shrieked, slamming the door shut behind her with a resounding bang. Aki would be worried about Denji waking up if he didn’t sleep soundly enough to completely miss the inception of World War III. He, on the other hand, was not so blessed (cursed?), jostling awake with a stifled gasp.
“Hello to you, too,” Aki groaned, peeling himself away from the soft plush of the couch. “So nice of you to be considerate of our REM cycles at”— he glanced at his phone— “two eighteen in the morning.”
“Yeah, well.” Power strode over to the couch, lifting Aki’s legs with one hand and dumping them onto the carpet so she could sit in their place. “People aren’t considerate of me, so I feel no need to be considerate back.”
“People,” Aki repeated, the word fuzzy in his brain, mushy with missed sleep. “You keep saying that like you’re not one of them.”
“How do you know I’m not?” she said, wiggling her eyebrows.
“Ha, ha.” Aki yawned, sat up all the way on the couch. Power was somewhat obsessed with being a contrarian, fancying herself a kind of iconoclast. They’d met for the first time when they’d both moved in. Denji had put up a Facebook ad after finding himself unbearably lonely in the apartment his parents had set him up in, and Aki had been desperate enough for a place to stay for the school year that he would’ve roomed with just about anybody. She had introduced herself without offering her hand, calling herself Power and insisting that anyone who dared to utter her real name would die. Aki had wondered if everyone in Boston was this serious about their nicknames until Denji had explained that she had a particular stick up her ass about it. To that day he still didn’t know what it said on her birth certificate, and at that point any desire had been squashed.
“Long-ass shift,” she said, sighing.
“You can say that again.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Power said. “Did you spend the last ten hours getting screamed at, spit at, and puked on by rowdy middle-aged men calling you sweetheart?”
“No, I spent them learning how to save lives.”
“Alcohol saves lives.”
“On the contrary,” Aki said. “Did you know that long-term alcohol abuse can actually alter the metabolism of the brain? Alcoholics will metabolize acetate faster and glucose slower—”
“No way,” Power said, eyes widening. “When?”
“Um, whenever, really. Anytime you drink, when you’ve fallen that far down the path.”
“When did I ask?” Her mouth was drawn into a hard line, her face pinched from the effort of holding in the peals of laughter that were clearly fighting to escape.
Aki remained motionless, unwilling to give her the satisfaction of even the slightest of smiles. “Hysterical.”
“Aw, c’mon. Lighten up. I’m a bartender, not a mad scientist.” Power yanked the hair elastic from her ponytail, her hair falling greasy and lank around her shoulders. She’d bleached it together with Denji, except she’d thrown on a temporary fire-engine-red dye, making the bathroom look like a Wes Craven movie set. It’d all but washed out, leaving only the faintest sheen of pink over the blonde. “Just ‘cause something’s true doesn’t mean everybody needs to know about it.”
“Maybe there are some things people wanna know about,” Aki said, rubbing his eyes. “For example: what made your shift so long-ass?”
She shot him a side-eye glance, snickered a little into the palm of her hand. “First of all, I’m pretty sure it’s a sin against the English language to end a sentence with long-ass,” she said. “Secondly, nothing in particular. Just— customers.” She waved one hand in the air to encapsulate the nebulous nature of such a concept.
“And who could’ve expected those,” Aki said. “Any one in particular?” He’d tried to shed himself of the desire once he reached adulthood, but he never could quite give up his penchant for a good piece of dirt.
Power leaned forward off the couch, revitalized. “You wouldn’t believe it,” she said, her eyes gleaming with intent. “These two chucklefucks got in a huge fight over I don’t-even-know-what. Started punching each other out right in the middle of the bar.”
“That’s crazy,” Aki mumbled. He tried not to show his disappointment, but in all honesty the story had been much less juicy than he’d hoped— lukewarm gossip, really, where he’d been gunning for hot.
He filtered in and out of attentiveness as Power prattled on, moving from gross, leery old men staring at her chest to obnoxious college girls demanding vodka cranberries to failed pickup lines to just plain rudeness. He wanted to listen to what she was saying, honestly, but his muscles were so worn down and his brain was reduced to a pile of goo that made it damn near impossible.
Something caught his eye, though, when Power flailed her arms in an animated play-by-play of the bar fight. Something rust-brown and splotchy and congealed to a thin crust on the edge of her T-shirt.
“Do you—” Aki squinted, scooching closer to Power to grab ahold of her sleeve. She yowled and attempted to squirm away, but he held her there by the fabric. “Is this blood on your sleeve?”
“Jesus Christ, no!” Power yelped, snatching her sleeve away. “No! What do you think I do all day, sling out espresso martinis with a side of knuckle sandwiches?”
“How would I know?” Aki shot back. “Every time I try to visit you at work, you either bully me out of it until I give up trying.”
“Exactly as it should be,” she said. “No need to mix our work and personal lives. It’s cleaner that way.”
Aki flicked her on the shoulder. “Funny you’re talking about clean when you’ve got dried blood caked to your work T-shirt.”
“Chill out, germaphobe, jeez. It’s my own blood.”
“That doesn’t make it less disgusting when you work in food service, you know.”
“It happened at the end of my shift,” Power said. “I dropped a bottle while I was putting it on the shelf and it cut me the fuck up on its way down. Got me pretty good, too.”
She didn’t meet his eyes as she said it, picking at the grime underneath her fingernails. Aki’s bullshit meter was finely-tuned enough to be ringing off the hook at Power’s little white lie, but his resolve wasn’t strong enough to actually call her out on it. Power had been tending bar for all three years they’d known each other, explaining that she’d started at BU like Denji but quickly dropped out after being forced to choose a major. Aki found it more than difficult to believe that she could make such a careless mistake after being at the same job for so long, but just for that night, he decided to let it go.
“Do you need me to clean it for you?” he said, allowing himself just that one indulgence. “I have my first aid kit here. I could take a look if you wanted me to.”
“God, no.” Power yanked her sleeve further down her arm, exposing a flash of a bare shoulder. “I’m fine, Mom, seriously. Stop worrying so much. You’ll give yourself wrinkles.”
While it was technically the stress-induced hormone cortisol that caused wrinkles, Aki let her have that one, too. “I worry about you, you know,” he said.
“Ew.” Power mimed sticking her finger down her throat. “Gag me with a spoon.”
“I— you want me to do what with what?”
“Never mind,” she said, huffing. The halfway-grown-out bangs fluttered off her forehead when she did, settling back around her face in bright little wispies. When she shoved a hand down her cleavage, Aki turned away instinctively, but she pulled it back clutching a wad of dollar bills. “In more important news, a couple of drunk dudes were feeling pretty damn generous tonight. Check it out.” She fanned out the cash into a semi-circle, like the green plumes that dripped off a peacock’s tail.
“I hate myself for even thinking it, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask if you put those there yourself or if—” Aki cut himself off, pursed his lips as tight as he could to seal the faucet of bullshit spouting from his mouth. “Actually, scratch that. I don’t even want to know.”
“You’re just jealous your job doesn’t let you make extra cash for sitting there and looking pretty,” Power said. She tossed the money onto the coffee table, where it fluttered a bit, dog-earing in on itself before settling in a heap.
“Says you,” Aki said. “There are plenty of people out there who’d pay top dollar to be treated by a nurse as good-looking as yours truly.”
“Uh-huh. Keep dreaming, buddy, and let me know how far that gets ya.” Power stretched her arms above her head in a catlike yawn, plucked a stray dollar out of the cup of her bra.
The exhaustion was palpable in the room and just as contagious; Aki stifled the urge to mirror her, instead biting down on the inside of his lip. “What are you saving up for, anyway? Doesn’t seem like you to partake in responsible financial habits.” Now that he thought about it, Power had been squirreling away cash for the past few months, rolling up her tips at the end of each night and rubber-banding them in neat stacks. He’d never seen her save up for anything besides goth-chick makeup palettes and new first-person-shooters to play with Denji.
She opened her mouth to speak, closed it again, a deer-in-the-headlights deflection move he used to employ all the time as a kid. Close your mouth, his mother would say, tugging on his earlobe, or else a mosquito will fly right in. Looking back, it was totally ridiculous: mosquitoes weren’t so much of a threat during the cold winter months in Hokkaido, and the odds of one taking a kamikaze dive straight down his gullet seemed slim to none. His little-boy brain had bought it with certainty, taking it to heart so that he never spoke without being completely and indisputably confident in his conviction.
“Have you ever thought about— moving?” Power said, when the gears in her brain finally kicked into overdrive to spit out a sentence. She was hesitant, testing out the waters of the conversation; Aki could count the amount of times he recalled her ever making this move on one hand.
“Like, back to Japan?” This was a frequently asked question on the subject of Aki Hayakawa. It started with the vaguely innocent where are you from?, then progressed to the obligatory I thought I heard an accent comment, finally settling on so do you think you’ll ever move back? The answer was about as uncomplicated as it was unsatisfying for those who asked it: no way, José. Aki had moved to Boston for two reasons: one, to attend an incredibly prestigious university in one of the biggest medical hubs in the world; and two, to get as far away as physically possible from the city where his whole life had gone kaput over the course of a single afternoon.
“Japan?” Power scrunched up her face, as if the very thought of it was ridiculous. “No. Somewhere else, maybe. Like on a trip or something, I dunno.”
“I don’t concern myself daydreaming about the implausible,” Aki said. Between the demands of school and the shoestring budget he was living off of, a vacation hadn’t crossed his mind in years.
“Not everything has to be so literal, Aki. I’m not asking you to book a ticket tomorrow. I’m just asking if you could. Paris, Shanghai, wherever. Sky’s the limit.”
Aki stopped, considered.
“I miss my cousin in Hokkaido,” he said. “But that whole place is tainted for me now. I don’t think I could go back even if I wanted to. It almost feels like when I left, a forcefield went up around it or something, and I’d get spat right back out the way I came if I ever tried to cross it again.”
“That’s kinda dumb,” Power said, and tilted her head. “Why?”
He slumped his shoulders, letting his head loll backwards onto the couch so he wasn’t looking at her anymore. “It doesn’t matter,” he said, whisper-quiet. “I don’t see the point in telling you if you’re just going to make fun of everything I say.”
Power laughed, exposing the sharp points of her canines. Somehow, even after the self-proclaimed longest shift ever, her lipstick was still immaculate, bright red and glossy. “You got that one right.”
“Yeah,” he whispered, staring down at his feet, white-socked against the dark grain of the hardwood. He wasn’t justified to get upset. People like him— people who’d worked so hard to become someone unfazeable, unflappable, undefeatable— people like him didn’t need to be upset. They knew who they were and they knew what they wanted to be and exactly what they had to do to make it there, and that was all they needed. It was his fault, anyway, for expecting anything less than a big ol’ bucket of snark from Power.
Was it so wrong to want it, though? Was it so wrong to crave that sort of comfort, companionship? Did it make him so evil for wanting a hug or a condolence instead of a not-so-subtle dig at him— just one goddamn time?
Aki squeezed his eyes shut. No. Those were the kinds of things one expected from siblings, parents, best friends, none of which Aki had in his inventory. People like him didn’t need those kinds of things, and more importantly, they didn’t deserve them.
“Well, then,” Power said breezily, hopping to her feet and gliding to her bedroom without waiting for Aki to respond. “I’d say good night, but it hasn’t been, not to mention the fact that it’s already morning. So. That’s it, I guess.”
She swung the door closed behind her, either forgetting or just not giving a damn about the fact that Denji was asleep across the hall. Aki opened his eyes, let them adjust to the fluorescent living-room lighting, little squiggles and fuzzies dancing across his line of vision.
“I’m afraid of it happening again,” he whispered. Not to Power, not to the God he’d stopped believing in years ago. Maybe to the walls, maybe to the universe, maybe just to himself, to the man he’d become and to the little boy he’d never really stopped being. “I know it’s dumb. I guess I just always had the feeling that I was sort of cursed or something. Like it was my fault that everything happened the way it did. Maybe if I’d done something differently— maybe if I’d gotten there earlier, or seen the signs of it— I could’ve fixed it.” His voice wobbled a bit on the last phrase; he leaned forward, let his head fall heavy between his legs. “Do you think I’m crazy?”
Pathetically enough, Aki actually waited for an answer. Lifted his head up and everything, quirked his ears towards the bedroom just in case the spirits above had selected Power as the vessel with which to communicate with him. This was another thing he used to imagine as a kid: God or a ghostly entity or goddamn Superman blaring their voice directly into his skull, telling him that he was the chosen specimen of humanity, blessed to become a prophet or ruler or full-blown hero. Different from every other run-of-the-mill homo sapiens. Venerated. Chosen.
Unsurprisingly, no response came. That was okay, he told himself, as he settled back into the seat of the couch, let the secondhand cushions pillow his aching joints. He wasn’t nine years old anymore. He knew that there was nothing that made him special or different from anybody else. There was nothing particularly grandiose or enlightened about him, either, however much he acted like it. When it really came down to it, when you stripped off the postgraduate degree and the departmental honors and the flimsy, Goodwill-issued scrubs, Aki was nothing more than a scared little kid trying in vain to postpone the inevitable.
Aki fell under the current of exhaustion again, still splayed out on the couch, the seam of his scrubs carving a harsh line into his cheek. When he dreamed, it was of snowball fights and blood-spattered tissues and the piercing rattle of a sharp, resounding cough.