Chapter Text
The conveyor belt hums a low, mechanical growl that drags itself around in a tired circle, silver panels gleaming under fluorescent light. The sound fills the space between people and settles into Suguru's skull until it feels like part of his bloodstream. He leans against the railing, the fabric of his coat brushing against cold steel, and watches the suitcases crawl past. Black, navy, gray, all sharp edges and plastic sheen. Each one a small, sealed world. Each one the sum of someone’s life packed down to its lightest, most transportable form. He wonders, idly, how many times he’s done the same. How many lives he’s left folded behind him, zipped shut and abandoned at the next departure gate.
A man in a gray suit bows slightly as he squeezes past him to reach the carousel. A group of student tourists chatter softly in a corner, their laughter muffled by surgical masks. An elderly couple argues about whether the suitcase with the red ribbon is theirs. Suguru’s Japanese feels stiff in his head just listening to them, like muscles unused for too long. The terminal is crowded, but it's orderly. The passengers stand in neat lines around the carousel even when they’re tired, everyone seeming to know instinctively where to stop and how far apart to stand. He feels large in it, unaligned, like he’s been away too long and forgotten the choreography. In a way, he has. He hasn't been a part of this stage for a while.
It's May; Suguru left Japan, left his life, everything behind, exactly seven years ago.
He looks down at his reflection in the metal panels: tall, dark haired, his once careful posture now replaced by a rickety composure that comes from airports and train stations and temporary beds. His hair’s tied back, a few strands falling loose against his jaw. He used to wear it neater. He used to wear everything neater. Pressed shirts, ironed collars. Now he’s just clean enough not to attract stares. His coat is dark and a little too heavy for late spring, but he likes the heft of it; it makes him feel shrouded, partway hidden from sidelong glances that always inevitably come his way. There’s a travel pillow slung through one strap of his duffel, and his shoes are eaten through at the heel.
The overhead lights are sterile and bright, but it’s the smell that gets him. Antiseptic, metal, the faint sharpness of jet fuel bleeding through the recycled air. He’s smelled it in every airport he’s ever passed through, Dubai, Frankfurt, Buenos Aires, Bangkok. The scent of movement, of nowhere. It’s the closest thing he has to a constant now.
His suitcase finally appears, a battered graphite Samsonite, scuffed at the corners, a strip of green tape clinging to the handle. He recognizes it instantly; it’s the only thing that’s lasted longer than his convictions. He grips the handle, the plastic warm from the carousel’s friction, and for a brief moment, he feels the ghost of motion slip out of his fingers.
When he straightens, his shoulders protest. The muscles along his back pull tight, as if they’ve forgotten how to let go. His body feels poorly stitched together, joints creaking from hours of stillness and shallow, disturbed sleep. The stale air of the cabin still clings to his skin, and the exhaustion behind his eyes feels like a pulse. He’s been awake for nearly twenty six hours. London drifts somewhere at the edge of his memory as a blur of rain on taxi windows, the burnt smell of airport espresso, the clatter of coins he didn’t bother exchanging back to yen. The flight had passed in brief snatches of consciousness, tray tables rattling, a seatmate’s elbow nudging his ribs. Even now he can taste the plastic tang of the meal he didn’t finish, and his stomach turns in faint protest. Rest never came. Only the strange stillness that follows movement, when his body had refused to believe it’d stopped, cramped into a 19-inch economy seat.
He stands there in the arrivals hall, too aware of the weight pushing his eyelids down, the dull buzz of caffeine fading from his veins. His mouth feels dry, his mind louder than it should be. He keeps waiting for his thoughts to arrange themselves into something coherent, but they just spool endlessly, old scenes replaying behind his eyes, dusted over like the conveyor belt he's staring at. Haneda has always unsettled him, it always looked like someone scrubbed the life out of it and replaced it with chrome and advertisements. The floors gleam under the light, but the gloss never quite hides the cracks in the tile. Somewhere overhead, a high pitched jingle repeats on a loop, worming its way into Suguru's brain.
He’s been here before. Too many times.
Once, he sat in the departure lounge at two in the morning, the rain streaking down the windows like static, a stack of manuscripts shoved into his carry on. Back then, he’d been an editor at a small Tokyo publishing house that printed short-run poetry anthologies and doomed debut novels. The pay was terrible, the hours worse, but he’d loved the process of it: the smell of ink and paper, the late night edits, the endless negotiation between art and commerce, the places and people he met as a result of it. He’d flown out to Singapore once for a literary conference, to Hong Kong another time to chase down a reclusive author who refused to answer emails, it was always something or the other, but he didn't mind that. The work had made him feel like part of something, or maybe that’s just what he told himself back then. The job had eaten his hours whole, pages bleeding into deadlines, the edges of his life worn down to pencil dust and coffee rings. He can still see the glow of his laptop in that dimly lit room, his reflection pale in the screen, the taste of burnt coffee thick on his tongue.
And then there was the glass. The window by the gate that turned the whole runway into a mirror. He’d stood there for a long time, watching planes taxi across the tarmac, the orange wash of sunset catching on their wings. The last time he was here, seven years ago, the light had been the same. That dull, metallic wash of evening pressing through the glass, but the world had already thinned around the edges. He’d packed without thinking, walked through security in a daze, and kept walking long after the gate had swallowed him. Seoul was supposed to be a breath. A release valve. A week at most. Suguru never packed enough for longer than that; a few shirts, his passport, thinking that he would come back when the air in his lungs stopped burning. But a week became a month. A month became the world.
He can still recall the taste of that day. The coffee from a vending machine cooling untouched beside him, the hum of the announcements blurring into noise. He’d stared at the glass wall of the departures lounge instead, at his own reflection dissolving into the runway lights.
The carousel clicks forward, and the sound tugs him back into the present, where nothing has changed except the man standing in it. Around him, people murmur in soft voices, the susurrations slicing cleanly through the drone of the conveyor belt. Apologies whispered, laughter tucked behind hands. The cadence of Japanese wraps around him, strangely dissonant, as if he’s overhearing a song he once knew by heart and no longer remembers the words to.
It takes him a moment to realize what feels wrong: it's the quiet. The absence of friction. Everywhere else, people collided, noise spilling from their mouths, tempers rising and fading in the same breath. Here, everything runs smooth and practiced. He rubs a hand over his face and feels the roughness of stubble, the skin tight from dehydration. His body aches for a shower, a real meal, a bed that isn’t moving. His mind wants nothing at all, a blank surface, an erasure. But blankness isn’t something he’s had in years, and Tokyo isn’t a city that allows it.
He adjusts the strap of his bag, exhales slowly, and forces himself to step forward.
He’s home.
Tokyo blinks at him through glass and steel, a pulse of neon stacked like scaffolding against the orange sky. Rain has left puddles in the gutters, and traffic lights reflect crimson and green in liquid shards on the asphalt. Suguru drags his suitcase to the curb, leather handle damp from his grip, and pauses. People move around him in patterns he once knew, weaving through streets and crosswalks like nylon threads. He used to move like that too, quick, full of intent, almost invisible in the rhythm of the city. Now he hesitates, an outsider, a shadow brushing past his own memories.
A line of taxis waits, engines idling, lights flickering orange. He steps forward and lifts his hand. A black sedan glides toward him, tires hissing against the wet pavement. The driver lowers the window and clicks at him to get in, humming an enka tune under his breath. Suguru nods, murmuring the address for Hotel Keihan, the syllables stiff in his mouth after years abroad. The door clicks shut behind him; the car moves, and the city begins to roll past in a stream of reflections and light.
He leans against the seat, suitcase resting against his knees, and lets his eyes roam. Shinjuku stretches out in sprawling lines that feel slightly alien. The intersection near the station where he and Satoru had once argued quietly over umbrellas, a ramen shop that always smelled of garlic and pork broth, a pachinko parlor with lights flashing too bright for the late hour. Every detail is intact and yet warped by memory, as if the city remembers him but he no longer belongs in the frame. But he's back in the picture again, called back to Japan with just one short text from Nanami. He thinks back to when the message first arrived, London still dark outside his window. He had been hunched over a stack of proofs in his tiny short-stay flat, the warm glow of a desk lamp casting long shadows over manuscripts like insect legs. The kettle had been boiling, steam curling into the cool night air, and a half empty cup of tea grew cold at his elbow. He’d read the notification once, twice, the words terse and clinical, and set the phone down without replying.
Shoko's been sick. You should come back.
-Nanami.
He had stared at the text longer than he admitted to himself. Shoko has been sick. Come. Not please, not help, just come. The bluntness of it had unsettled him more than any explanation could have. He hadn’t moved for a long moment, letting the stillness of the London night press into him, letting the city outside his window carry the first flash of urgency. Then he had booked the ticket. Almost without thought.
The taxi hums beneath him, tires hissing against streets slick with Tokyo's spring drizzles. He lets his gaze drift to the neon reflections, to puddles refracting red, green, and yellow like scattered glass. He notices the throngs of people moving around each other without contact, brushing past yet somehow connected in motion. He sees a young man standing beneath a streetlamp, phone pressed to his ear, jacket collar turned up against the chill. The gesture is mundane, but Suguru feels a pang. He remembers having done the same with Satoru, leaning on a lamppost outside a late-night café, waiting, anxious, pretending to be calm. The taxi revs on, the windshield wipers swishing in a monotonous cadence, each stroke smoothing over the reflections until the lights break into long, watery streaks.
He lets the memory of the text surface again. Shoko’s been sick. You should come. He thinks of Nanami’s clipped tone, unsure if he remembers his voice all that well anymore, but even he could see the urgency behind the words. The story came later, after he had booked the flight and texted Nanami back, in drips, like cold water spilling over his hands: three months ago, Shoko had been diagnosed with cancer. Small cell carcinoma, stage 3A. Chemotherapy every other week. The words had sunk in slowly, each one dragging him back through years of nights he convinced himself he forgot, of quiet rooms where cancer had moved through Riko, swift and relentless, where he had felt helpless in ways that never quite left him. Memories of hospital corridors, antiseptic air, the faint, fragile rise and fall of a body under sheets.
He had spent years moving across continents, trying to outrun that ache, trying to outrun the memory of the helplessness that had rooted itself inside him, the terror of loss that had taken everything from him when he was thirty. And now it's taking Shoko. Another person he loves, caught in that same slow, merciless current.
He exhales slowly and leans back in the seat. The city moves around him, and he moves with it, a ghost in a world he knows intimately yet can no longer fully inhabit. Shinjuku is unchanged, yet he is not the same man who left it. He feels the edges of that old self unwind. A careful, meticulous man, dependent on his rituals and routines, but there's also a strange elasticity in the hollow spaces he carries now. Every street, every light, every sound seems coded with memory, and he is deciphering it all at once, uncertain which pieces belong to the life he lost and which to the life he has cobbled together since.
He hadn’t hesitated to book the ticket, and he still doesn’t understand why. Guilt? Longing? Habit of rushing toward what he can’t keep? He hadn't even had a sustained conversation with Shoko in years. Perhaps all three. Perhaps none. The taxi turns into the exit for Shinanomachi, and he lets himself sink into the low thrum of the engine, the swish of wipers slicing across the windshield.
The taxi slows at the hotel entrance. Suguru grips his suitcase handle again, the leather familiar under his fingers, and counts down to one in his head. The enka tune has faded behind the glass. Outside, the city continues to pulse, alive and indifferent, as if to remind him that Tokyo has always gone on without him.
The hotel room is a perfect box. Minimalist, impersonal, quiet. Pale walls, geometric lines, the faint hum of air conditioning. It smells faintly of disinfectant and something else, a neutral odor meant to erase all traces of the people who came before. The furniture is functional, the bed made with stiff hospital corners, the sheets taut and unyielding. The kind of place designed for people who don’t plan to stay long.
Suguru unpacks just enough to pretend he might. A shirt draped over a hanger, the edges touching nothing, just to fill the empty wardrobe. Toiletries lined up along the sink. He brushes his fingers over the bottles and toothbrushes, over the condensation fogging the mirror, and thinks, I could stay here forever and never notice. But the thought has no warmth, no comfort. It is only a reminder that he has been moving too long, too far, to ever belong in any place.
The shower is hot, scalding at first, and he lets the water drum over his shoulders. It smells of chlorine and the faint copper tang of the pipes. He scrubs at his skin, at the memory of recycled airplane air, the dust of every city he’s passed through, at the subtle grime of years spent running. Water streams over him, carrying away sweat and jet lag, but not the residue of guilt, stuck to him like an oil spill.
He stares at himself in the fogged mirror. He looks older, but not grown. He looks unfinished, incomplete, as if the person he was when he left Japan never had the chance to arrive anywhere at all. His hair still falls loose in strands, tied back haphazardly, like it can't be contained into the neat bun he once wore everyday; dark circles under his eyes are carved deep, souvenirs he never wanted to collect, and while he's still broad enough to engulf most of the Japanese population, he's narrowed down over the years from what he was once, sinewy and lean now. He wonders if he can do this. See Shoko, see everything that’s left of what they all were, what he has left of himself.
He scrolls through apartment listings on his phone while he waits for his hair to dry, the glow illuminating his pale face, thumb scrolling past familiar words and addresses. Renting in Tokyo is a procedure of proof: guarantors, deposits, key money, non-refundable fees. The listings feel like reminders that he is no longer part of the system, that to exist here now, he must declare himself, stake a claim. The shower steam has long dissipated, leaving a mirror smudged with condensation and fingerprints. He stares again, and sees the same man who left seven years ago, just weathered, just beaten and bruised, who has been everywhere and nowhere, who has collected miles but nothing else, no memories, who has survived, but barely.
Eventually he stops. He leaves the phone on the nightstand. He doesn’t bother unpacking further. He doesn’t plan at all. He doesn’t consider the consequences of staying. Every small ritual he performs, the hanging of a shirt, the lining up of bottles, the flushing away of airplane dust, is a distraction from what he flew here to do. The hospital Shoko is admitted into is a 30 minute ride away. It's 30 minutes. He can do it.
He leaves the room before he can talk himself out of it, before he can convince himself to retreat back into the life of a traveler. The door clicks shut behind him, and the hallway smells faintly of carpet cleaner and stale air, a corridor stretching into anonymity.
Hotel corridors turn people into ghosts. He's watched it happen in Prague, in a hotel with velvet curtains and a lift that groaned between floors, where a man in a rumpled suit stood frozen outside room 412 for ten minutes, key card in hand, unable or unwilling to go in. In Brussels, in a capsule hotel so small he could touch both walls with his elbows bent, where he'd climbed into his pod and listened to the man in the next compartment cry himself to sleep, quietly, every night. In Marseille, in a hostel that smelled of mildew and cheap wine, where a girl with a shaved head had looked at him across the communal kitchen and said, you have the saddest eyes I've ever seen, thinking she was being romantic and he'd laughed and told her she was drunk and thought about that sentence for six months afterward. No one looks at anyone in these spaces. That's the rule. But sometimes they do, and what they see is worse than invisibility, it's being caught, it's the damning knowledge that someone else can tell you're not okay. Suguru has spent seven years perfecting how to avoid that, by moving through spaces without leaving a trace, and he used to think it was a skill, a talent even, this ability to become nothing in a room full of nothing. He's less sure now.
The one outside his room is narrow and airless, lit in sterile gold. He presses the button without thinking. The mirrored walls throw his reflection back at him from every angle. He catches sight of the tired man looking back and looks away before the doors open.
By the time he steps outside, late evening has already settled over Yotsuya. Tokyo after sunset is a living organism, light cascading down glass towers, traffic moving in steady arterial lines, signs blinking in pale blue and red. He walks toward Yotsuya Station, his hands buried deep in his coat pockets, the city unfurling around him in a wash of sodium yellow, streetlights flickering on in unison. Yotsuya’s rhythm feels quieter than he remembers with orderly rows of convenience stores and ramen shops, the faint whine of cicadas fading into traffic. The Marunouchi Line yawns open beneath the street, the stairs descending into an underground drone, with the smell of dust, hot metal, and soft, stale air that never quite refreshes. Salarymen in pressed suits file toward the turnstiles, the soft rhythm of footsteps folding into a single, collective sound.
Inside the station, the air is warmer, tinged with metallic dust and the faint sweetness of baked bread from a kiosk he used to stop at years ago. The familiar beep of Suica cards, the automated voice calling out departures. It all presses against him like a wall slowly closing in. He hesitates for a heartbeat at the ticket gates, the small act of scanning his pass feeling heavier than it should. Then he’s through, descending the stairs into the belly of the city.
The subway platform is almost empty. An old man in a beige cap sits reading a folded newspaper, a pair of students share earphones, shoulders pressed together, laughter dissolving into the mechanical hum. When the train arrives, its doors open with a sigh, like a lung exhaling. Suguru steps in, gripping the handrail, and the world begins to move.
The seats are upholstered in that same deep red he remembers, a color meant to disguise years of use. Across from him, a woman applies lipstick using her phone camera. A child tugs at his father’s sleeve. The doors shut with a soft, hydraulic swoop. It’s strange, how quickly muscle memory returns. The subtle sway as the train moves, the faint lurch before each stop, the instinct to look down rather than meet anyone’s eyes. It feels intimate and distant all at once, like inhabiting an old photograph. His reflection flashes faintly in the darkened window, the blur of tunnel lights tracing across his face. The overhead lights hum, harsh and indifferent. People sway in practiced synchrony, bodies drawn together by the mechanics of motion.
He finds himself studying their faces, searching for a trace of something, anything at all, a notch in the plastic. The small silences between them. The exhaustion pressed into their posture. As the train glides from stop to stop, he drifts. His mind slips elsewhere, to other nights, other cities: the wet shimmer of streetlight on cobblestone in Madrid, where buskers played sad flamenco at midnight. The narrow alley behind his rented flat in Seoul that always smelled faintly of frying oil, and its rain-slick streets where language rolled past him like wind. The riverbank in Prague where the lamps burned a dull amber against the water. He’d thought constant movement would dull the ache, moving through them all with practiced dislocation.
And yet, Japan is different, like a dream he’s slipped back into after years of drifting through borrowed lives. Other places had been temporary skins, comfortable only until they started to chafe. He’d learned how to disappear in foreign streets, how to mimic ease in cafés where no one knew his name, but belonging had always been an act of translation. Here, though, for a time, he hadn’t needed to translate. A puzzle piece slipping back into place. There are ghosts tucked into every corner of this city, and flying halfway across the world didn't stop them from haunting Suguru: laughter echoing up the steps outside their old university, Shoko leaning against a vending machine with a cigarette, Satoru throwing his arm around him with a blinding, careless grin, the two of them walking home past closing ramen stalls, arguing about nothing at all. He remembers the smell of wet asphalt after summer rain, the hum of cicadas bleeding into late evening, the light spilling through the shoji screens of the apartment they once shared. The memories settle like light against glass. He tries to shield his eyes.
By the time he reaches Ginza Station, the world outside has careened into night. He exits through A3, merging into the pulse of Ginza 4-chome Crossing. The intersection blooms before him in glass and chrome, department stores towering like monuments, LED screens strobe across mirrored facades, endlessly slipping into each other, washing everything in artificial daylight. People cross the intersection like particles of light, heads down, coats drawn tight, their shadows briefly touching before parting again. Even the puddles look curated, capturing the signs above in neat, symmetrical frames.
Suguru keeps his head down and walks. Past the clock tower, past the shop windows lined with displays that look more like galleries than stores. A mannequin in a blue dress catches his eye for no reason at all and he looks away quickly. The sound of heels and chatter fills the air.
When the National Cancer Center comes into view, with its white paint and glass panels gleaming like ice, his stomach knots. The building rises from the street with a kind of sterile grace. The automatic doors part with a soft hiss, releasing a wave of cool, conditioned air.
Inside, the waiting room hums with restrained noise. There's a television murmuring in the corner, a nurse calling names in polite tones, the whisper of slippers against linoleum. Everyone here seems suspended in the same fragile rhythm of waiting; eyes on phones, hands folded around paper cups of vending machine coffee. Suguru waits for the nurse to pull up Shoko's room number, his coat gathered loosely around him, as he watches the light shift through the window. He thinks, absurdly, of the hospital in Koto where Riko had stayed. It had the same relentless brightness, the same hum of machines that kept time in place of a clock. The memory creeps up uninvited, a sudden tightness at the back of his throat. His body remembers before his mind does: the way grief lives in the throat, in the back of the eyes. The nurse tells him Shoko is in Room 75. He blinks hard, swallows once, and starts walking.
A nurse directs him down another corridor, longer and narrower than the last. The lights above hum faintly, a rhythm that syncs with his pulse. He wonders how many people have walked this same hallway in dread and in love, how many have rehearsed their faces at the threshold of a room.
When he reaches Shoko’s door, he pauses. The nameplate catches the light, her name written in small, precise letters. He knocks once, softly, then pushes the door open.
When he sees Shoko, she looks almost exactly the same, and that throws him off far more than it would have if she looked completely unrecognizable, if she looked just as much of a stranger in appearance as she's become in his head. But no, she looks exactly like the Shoko he's been carrying in his mind all these years. A lot thinner, perhaps, and her scalp is hidden with a beanie. Her skin is slightly waxen in exhaustion and discomfort, no doubt. But in her eyes, there's still that sharp, sardonic look, the faint curve of amusement that never fully leaves her face.
"You look like shit," Shoko speaks first.
He lets out a laugh he didn’t know he’d been holding. “Hello to you too, Shoko.”
“Hi, Suguru.”
He crosses the room, stops short of touching the chair beside her. She gestures with her chin. “Sit down. Make yourself comfortable but it's gonna be a hard task on that chair.”
Shoko shifts slightly, the IV line catching the light. The room is private, softly lit, a vase of lilies wilting gracefully on the windowsill. She’s propped up against the pillows, the sleeve of her shirt rolled up. There’s an IV line running into her wrist, a medical monitor blinking at a measured rhythm beside her.
“I didn’t actually think I’d see you,” she says, lips quirking. “Nanami said you were impossible to reach, you need to thank him for the effort he went through tracking your number down.”
Suguru laughs resignedly. “Guess I wasn’t trying very hard to be found.”
“Typical.” There are faint lines by her eyes when she smiles now, the beginnings of webbing by her temples. “How long has it been?”
“Seven years,” he says softly.
"That's a long time," she sighs, "Did it help?"
"Does it look like it has?"
Shoko chuckles, a small sound that dissolves into a cough. “Nanami said you were back for good. Is that true?”
“I think so,” he says, “For now.”
“That's a start.”
Suguru looks at her, and his heart breaks all over again.
“I’m not dying,” she says.
“I didn’t say you were.”
“No, but you’re thinking it.”
She's right. He is thinking it, he can't help it. He's seen too many people lose to this tide. The air smells strongly of ethanol and lilies, an incongruous combination that makes him dizzy.
“It’s not as bad as it looks really,” she says after a while, nodding toward the IV in her wrist. “They call it the ‘light’ cycle. Which is bullshit, by the way.”
He nods, though the phrase 'not as bad as it looks' feels slippery, as if it might fall apart in his hands. “When did you find out?”
“A few months ago.” She shrugs one shoulder. “Caught it because Utahime forced me into a full check up after I fainted during my rounds. I was just dehydrated. At least, that’s what I told her.”
Suguru doesn’t say anything, but she catches the flit of concern in his eyes. “Don’t look at me like that,” she says, rolling her eyes. “It’s controllable. Boring word, I know, but the oncologist seemed very proud of it.”
Suguru notices how she doesn't say curable.
“Boring’s good.”
“Tell that to my stomach,” she mutters, reaching for the cup of water on her bedside table. Her fingers tremble slightly, but she doesn’t acknowledge it. “Round one was hell. Nausea, bone pain, the whole drama. They tell you to rest, but you can’t sleep when your body’s screaming mutiny.”
He doesn’t know what to say through the knot in his throat, so she spares him the trouble. “It’s manageable now,” she adds, “They’ve got me on something that keeps the nausea down. And I’m off-duty for the next few months. Hospital policy. I hate it.”
“You hate having some time off, huh? ”
“I hate being benched,” she corrects, but her mouth softens. “But it’s fine. I'll be back in the OR soon. This gives me time to read, make the interns uncomfortable. You know, the usual.” Then Shoko looks at him carefully, like she’s measuring how much of the past still lives behind his eyes. “You thought of her, didn’t you?”
He doesn’t ask who her is. He only looks down at his hands, water bottle cold in his palm, condensation seeping into his skin.
“Yeah,” he says quietly, “I did.” He doesn't say how he always does. "How have you been? Truly?"
Shoko adjusts her pillow slightly, an IV tube shifting with her movement. “You’d think being on the other side of the bed would be humbling,” she says, tone dry, “But mostly it’s just boring. Endless fluorescent lights and nurses who think they’re being subtle when they whisper about me in the hallway.”
“You’d do the same if one of your patients was a neurosurgeon.”
“Of course I would,” she admits, “I’d do it better, though. They all look at me like I’m about to critique their technique mid–blood draw. I almost respect the paranoia.”
“Have you?”
She arches a penciled-in eyebrow. “Once or twice.”
That makes him smile. “Still keeping people terrified, I see.”
“Some things don’t change,” she says, eyes glinting. Then, softer: “Some things do.”
He looks at the thinness of her wrists, the faint bruise where the IV enters her skin. “Does Utahime come by during your appointments?”
She exhales, gaze tipping toward the window. “She does, she's always there. But sometimes I'd rather just be alone, y'know, chemo’s a trip. Feels like being hit by a truck, then having the truck reverse just to make sure you got the message.”
He winces, but she smiles faintly at his expression. “They’ve got me on a good regimen. I know the numbers. I know how bad it could be, and how not-bad it is. I can diagnose my own denial in real time.”
He studies her face, the pale cast of her skin under the sterile light. “And you’re okay with that?”
Shoko's smile is small, private. Something shutters closed behind her eyes, but she blinks it away before he can examine it too closely. "Okay's a big word. But I'm here. I get to make the residents panic by pretending I'm grading them from my hospital bed. It's something."
The image draws another laugh from him. "You would."
"I did," she corrects, mock indignation softening into a sigh. She looks down at her wrist, at the IV line, at the small bruise blooming beneath the tape. Her thumb traces the edge of it absently. "They brought me flowers the next time. Probably out of guilt."
She doesn't tell him that the flowers weren't just for grading residents. She doesn't tell him that Dr. Yaga had sat in the chair Suguru's occupying now, just two weeks ago, and explained very carefully what the latest scans had shown. That the cancer had already sent scouts ahead, microscopic insurgents that had seeded themselves in places the first round of imaging had missed.
She doesn't tell him because he just got here, and he's already carrying enough of a burden that she can see it in the slump of his shoulders, in the dark circles under his eyes that speak of years spent running from this very same grief. If she tells him now, he'll feel obligated to stay out of guilt rather than choice, and she wants better than that for both of them. So she lets him believe what the doctors believed three months ago. Lets him think she's sick but fighting, tired but surviving. There will be time to tell him the truth. She comfortably has close to two years or so, Yaga had been clear about that much. And she'd rather spend that year with Suguru actually present, actually here, than with him dawdling around in obligation-soaked guilt.
Suguru leans back, fingers absently tracing condensation along the plastic bottle. “You sound like you’ve been handling it.”
“I am, I think,” she says. Suguru doesn't notice the lie she's just told him. He doesn't notice because she's very good at lying, she has spent two decades learning how to deliver bad news to other people without flinching, and that skill works just as well in reverse. “I'm mostly surprised it's taken this long."
Suguru winces again. "You're thirty seven, Shoko. You're—"
"Still young?" she looks at her wristband with a wry smile. "I know. But I've spent my entire career trying to save people younger than me, healthier than me, the whole parade. The odds were bound to catch up eventually. They’ll kick me out of here soon if my counts hold up,” she says, “This is just for a little while. I might actually sleep in my own bed tonight, assuming Tama-chan hasn’t claimed it.”
“Tama-chan's still alive?”
She scoffs. “Rude. Of course he's alive. You think he'd go out that easily? He’s the feistiest tabby cat I know.”
"That's one word for him."
“You know,” she says after a while, tilting her head toward him, “Satoru was here just fifteen minutes ago.”
The mention lands like a shock, clean and immediate. For a moment, he forgets how to breathe. It’s as if someone’s tipped a bucket of ice down his spine, and every nerve has drawn tight in reflex.
He looks at her, then away. “Satoru,” he repeats, the name catching in his throat, brittle from disuse. He can't remember the last time he said his name, allowed himself to speak it out loud, to let his mouth curl around a sound so precious. He can't bear it.
Shoko hums in confirmation, studying him over the rim of her paper cup. “He didn’t stay long. Just enough to make the nurses nervous. You know how he is.”
“Right,” Suguru says quietly. His voice sounds wrong in his own mouth. “Is he—” He stops, exhales harshly. "How is he?"
Shoko gives a half-smile, faint as smoke. "Why don't you find out for yourself?"
"I don't think he'd want to see me," Suguru mumbles.
"You know that for sure? Did you talk to him at all since you left?" Shoko doesn't say it cruelly, but the question lands like gravel in his mouth. Just subtly, he can almost see what she’s alluding to, to the long stretch of silence that began the day he boarded that flight to Seoul. The image unfurls easily: their apartment caught in the stillness of a morning he never returned to. The smell of Satoru’s cologne lingering on the doorframe. A mug left too close to the edge of the counter, waiting to fall.
He imagines the days that followed: the gradual fading of his presence, the space he’d carved into that life collapsing in on itself. He imagines Satoru coming home to find everything exactly as it was, except for him being there, him not coming back.
Shoko had been there for all of it, he can see that now, in the way her expression tightens almost imperceptibly at the sound of Satoru’s name. She carries the memory of what he left behind like a bystander who’s had to patch his wound closed herself. And she probably did, she probably sorted through his things and threw them away when Satoru couldn't, probably kept him company during lonely evenings while Suguru was on another continent, unaware. The loyalty in her eyes is unmistakable, and it tells him more than any answer she could give. And what right does he have, really, to ask? To want to know how Satoru has been? He was the one who walked away, who let absence do the talking.
He’s surprised Shoko's allowing him to be here, sitting across from her, speaking to him like she just saw him a week ago. He hadn’t only left Satoru; he’d left Shoko too, all his friends, the fragile constellation of people who’d once known him best.
He exhales, the words chapped by disbelief, guilt. “Tell me, Shoko,” he says quietly, “How is it that you're even talking to me right now? Weren't you angry?”
"I sure as shit was. I still am, actually. Don't get me wrong," Shoko smiles up at him like she's expecting him to laugh along, but the expression on his face is stitched all wrong. He can only wince, yet again. She clears her throat, "But you came back. You came back once you found out about—," she looks down again. At her wrist, where the band-aid above the IV needle is peeling up. "That counts for something in my books."
"That's kind of you."
"Also," she grins, teeth-bared and crescent eyes, "I missed you more than I'm mad at you."
Suguru laughs, heart bursting with relief. "I missed you too, Shoko. So much."
"Can't imagine otherwise, must've been hard alone all this while."
He smiles, weak and watery. He knows a thing or two about being alone. He’d like to think he learned how to do it well over the last few years, how to fold silence into something livable, how to treat solitude as a choice and not an imposition. But it wasn’t grace that taught him that skill. It was movement. It was the incessant stockpile of nights spent in places that weren’t home.
After Tokyo, the world unfolded for him in a blur of transit and translation. He learned the weight of unfamiliar currencies, the exact copper tang of filtered water in hostels that promised “Western plumbing,” the sound of someone else’s television through thin apartment walls. He lived in a dozen cities, spoke a handful of languages just well enough to order breakfast and apologize for the noise. There was Bangkok in the wet heat of July, Athens in its off-season quiet, a few months in a rented room in Amsterdam where he learned to fall asleep to trams creaking through the winter fog.
In Phuket, he shared a dorm with twelve others, mostly backpackers and bartenders. He taught English three days a week to keep his coffers afloat but that was it, the extent of his social interaction there. Even in the crowded dark of his greasy little dormroom, he’d felt himself sealed off. The room smelled of sunscreen, beer, and salt, conversations fluttered between beds like moths. Someone’s laughter always carried too late into the night. He’d turn on his side, listening, wishing he could join in, glad he couldn’t.
He kept notebooks then. Thin, suede-covered things bought in stations and corner stores sporadically whenever he thought words might be easier to produce if he wrote them down instead. For as long as he could remember, he’d wanted to write. Not essays or headlines or the kinds of words that needed to sell something, but sentences that could hold a moment still, that could make sense of the noise in his head. He just never trusted himself to do it right. Even at university, when Shoko would joke about him being the “resident philosopher,” or when Satoru would nudge him about the incomplete stories in his drawer, he’d shrugged it off. That was why he’d taken the editor job in the first place, it was easier to polish someone else’s words than to confront his own. But on the road, something changed. There were nights when he’d wake to the sound of rain on glass and feel an ache so nebulous it demanded to be given form. So he started again, quietly, without any promise that it meant something. They filled up with bits and pieces: overheard words, sketches of strangers, the colors of evening skies that never quite looked the same twice. He didn’t write about himself. He didn’t write about Tokyo. But sometimes, without meaning to, the entries would drift toward memory; the angle of Satoru’s grin, the sound of Shoko’s lighter clicking on, the acrid scent of smoke and shouga in their old dorm hallways. They slipped in like smudges he couldn’t quite erase. The only constants in his constantly tilting world.
The thing about moving constantly, he realized, was that it taught him to vanish efficiently, how to diffuse into a crowd like smoke. No one knew who he’d been before; no one asked. In those early months, that anonymity was a mercy. No one knew why he carried a chipped bunny keychain on his backpack, why he flinched at hospital corridors in foreign cities, why he sometimes stopped mid-sentence as though something invisible had cut through him. No one saw the seams of his grief. He could just be another traveler, another foreign name scribbled on a check-in form. It was a relief, almost intoxicating, how strangers looked at him without pity, without expectation.
After Riko’s death, everything had shrunk. Life turned into a bubble of prescribed steps; check-ins from the hospital and friends, whispered condolences that never quite reached him, scheduled therapy sessions he stopped attending after the first. People treated him like he was fragile glass, an empty vase with a large fracture running down its body.
At first, Satoru had tried to hold the pieces together. Their apartment filled with noise, with takeout containers stacked on the counter, with the smell of coffee Suguru never drank. He filled the space the way he always had, brightly, insistently, with chatter strung together like lifelines: gossip from his gallery, half-formed ideas for new exhibitions. “Maybe for Riko,” he’d said once, almost shyly. “Do you think she’d have liked that?” Suguru hadn’t answered. He couldn’t. The question had cracked something open, and all he could do was let silence answer for him, the fracture widening with every breath.
It wasn’t that Satoru was careless, he was anything but. He was trying, with every word and gesture, to rebuild a world that had burned when Riko died. His optimism, once something Suguru had found almost holy, began to feel unbearable, like sunlight in a room that no longer belonged to them. Satoru thought he could will them back to life through motion alone. More laughter, more work, more light. But grief was a different kind of gravity; it dragged inward, devoured language, hollowed out everything that had once been easy.
Suguru could see how Satoru’s brightness strained under its own weight, how his voice faltered in the quiet after laughter, how his eyes flicked toward him with that same, unbearable tenderness, like he was afraid Suguru might vanish if he looked away. And he was right. He did vanish. When he left, it wasn’t out of anger. It was out of mercy, or what he told himself was mercy. He couldn’t stand the thought of Satoru tying himself to a rock balanced on the edge of a cliff. He thought distance might spare them both from the eventual crash, that leaving would keep what was still intact from curdling into resentment. But now, sitting here in Shoko’s hospital room, hearing that Satoru had been here just a while ago, that old reasoning feels paper-thin. The air still hums with his name, like he’s only just stepped out. And Suguru feels it all over again, that small, shattering truth: he had left to save them, and in doing so, had only made the loss complete.
There were moments, in airports especially, when it hit him all at once; the ache of impermanence, of being nobody’s destination, nobody's friend, nobody's lover. He’d stand at a gate surrounded by people reuniting, people whose names were called out in warm relief, and feel that faint, immutable pressure in his chest. He learned to ignore it, to bury it under the easy rhythm of transit. But there were nights when the loneliness came alive as noise, the ringing hum of everything he’d left behind, steady like claps. In Morocco, he rented a small flat above a bakery. The mornings smelled of yeast and dust, the afternoons of exhaust and sea air. He’d sit on the balcony and watch the streets move below him: children chasing stray cats, vendors shouting prices in voices raw from use. And yet sometimes, when dusk arrived and the call to prayer spilled over the rooftops, it felt like the whole world had found something to answer to except him.
He tried connection in fleeting, manageable doses. A conversation shared over cheap beer, a body in his bed for a week, a name he didn’t ask to remember. It was easier that way, to want without the risk of being wanted back. He built a life of soft departures, never saying goodbye because it implied that someone would miss him. But sometimes, the smallest things would undo him. Once, he heard a song drifting through a café in Lisbon, something Satoru used to hum under his breath while they rummaged through records together as young adults, always offbeat, always too loud. It caught him off guard, turned his gut to stone, until he had to leave his coffee half-finished on the table. Or a woman at a bus stop in Vienna, lighting her cigarette with that same slow, practiced indifference Shoko had mastered. The faint scratch of the lighter had sent a chill down his spine.
And then there were the nights in Manila, when the rain came hard and sudden, drumming against tin roofs with the same relentless rhythm as those summer storms that once swallowed Tokyo whole. He would lie awake listening, feeling the past leak in through the seams. Dorm windows fogged with laughter, the scent of smoke and wet pavement, Satoru’s voice echoing faintly from the hall. Each moment arrived like the universe pressing a thumb against a bruise he’d long stopped admitting to. He became fluent in loneliness the way others became fluent in language, through immersion, repetition, necessity. It was a currency he knew the value of, a terrain he could navigate blindfolded. Some nights, he even mistook it for peace. But it was never peace, only quiet.
He’d lie awake, tracing the whir of ceiling fans, thinking of Tokyo the way one thinks of a childhood home that’s long been demolished, something that exists only in memory, impossible to return to, yet still casting its shadow over everything that followed. But now, he feels all those years collapse into the space between them. It startles him, how easily the sound of her voice fills the silence he’s carried for so long.
"Yeah," he smiles like he's just admitted to a secret, "it was rough sometimes."
Shoko nods like she understands, like she reached into his heart, cut out the part that bled loneliness and examined it under a microscope. She only smiles and says, “Satoru asked about you too.”
Suguru stills. “When?”
“Earlier. Before he left.” She shrugs, like it’s nothing. “Didn’t say much, just wanted to know if I’d heard from you.”
He lets out a breath that sounds too much like a laugh. “And you told him?”
“That you’d probably show up when it was too late for anyone to yell at you.”
He sighs quietly, rubbing a hand over his face. “That sounds like something you’d say.”
“It was. And it sounds like something you'd do,” she admits. A small smile ghosts across her mouth. “But I think he was glad to hear your name, you know? Even if he didn’t say it.”
“Is he still around?” he asks, finally.
Shoko shrugs again. “Maybe. You know how he is,” she says again, Like he still does know. Like seven years haven’t made strangers of them. But Suguru doesn’t. Not really. He doesn’t know what Satoru’s like anymore; what his laugh sounds like, how he takes his coffee, whether he still leaves the lights on when he falls asleep. The familiarity Shoko speaks from feels distant, unreachable, like a life he once tried on and outgrew without meaning to.
He nods. His throat feels all choked up.
Outside, a siren wails somewhere down the street, fading into the rhythm of the city. The sound fills the space between them, and for a moment, it feels like they’re both listening to something completely inaudible to everyone but them.
Then Shoko speaks again, quieter this time. “You could still catch him, if you wanted to.”
Suguru’s eyes flick up, startled.
“I’m just saying,” she adds, like it’s nothing again. “He didn’t go far.”
He studies her for a long moment, searching for something in her face, permission, maybe, or forgiveness. But she’s already looking past him, toward the window, at the thin slats letting in Tokyo's neon glow.
𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝
Suguru had imagined this moment a million times over the last seven years. Eighty four months, two thousand five hundred fifty seven days, and every single one was tinged with Satoru’s absence. Like the Earth kept spinning incomplete days, reeling into nothing and nothing and nothing. In his mind, he lived through conversations with Satoru endlessly: the tilt of his head as he looks at him, the sound of his laugh breaking through some invisible tension, the precise way he moved when he wasn’t thinking about anyone else.
He sketched him too, countless times, freehand and messy, capturing angles and expressions he remembered but could never quite hold onto. A furrowed brow from a rainy afternoon in Tokyo, the way sunlight had caught in Satoru’s hair on the balcony, the subtle twitch of his fingers when he was restless. These sketches were just pieces, evidence of memory made material, yet none of them felt real enough. None of them could hold the warmth of a presence, the way a body occupies a space, the imperceptible movements that make a person undeniably themselves. Especially when it came to Satoru, the infinity of his character.
He tried to capture it in words wherever he went, when it didn't hurt too much to flip through the reels of his life with Satoru. Everything reminded him of Satoru, yet kept him completely insulated. The sway of mango trees along the streets of Saigon, the tang of salt air on early mornings in a quiet Faro harbor, the smell of burning incense drifting through a temple in Chiang Mai. The sharp clang of the metro in Barcelona, the soft hum of electricity in a hostel dorm in Reykjavik, the sudden laughter of strangers spilling into narrow alleys in Porto, all of it became shorthand for memory, little anchors in cities that weren’t home. Satoru was always there, hovering in the periphery. He remembered him in bursts; laughing too loudly at some minor absurdity, lingering over a cup of coffee, the sharp slice of his eyebrows when listening intently. Even the silences were a kind of proof. Suguru could feel them across oceans, an ache that never quite dissipated.
And yet, all of it, every sketch, every thought, every imagined conversation, collapsed the moment he saw him now. There was no rehearsal for the weight of the real, no way to prepare for the living presence of Satoru in the same space, breathing, moving, existing in a way that paper and memory could never hold. Nothing— nothing—had prepared him for the immediacy of Satoru before him: alive, beautiful, and entirely, achingly real.
Satoru is sitting at a corner table in the hospital cafeteria, the wan glow of the overhead lights catching the edges of his hair, a melon pan in hand.
Suguru freezes. For a moment, he allows himself to just watch, to study Satoru the way he had so many years ago. The figure bent slightly over the pastry, the faint curve of a smile tugging at lips Suguru had memorized. His eyes wide open as he considered the bread before him, the delicate curve of his mouth, the habitual adjustments of his sleeve. It was so painfully ordinary, so entirely becoming of Satoru, that the first time Suguru sees him after close to a decade, he's absorbed by a melon pan.
He notices the faint crease of Satoru's eyelids as he blinks against the harsh lights, the small way his shoulders shift when he leans back just slightly, balancing the weight of his chair on the back legs. Suguru almost wants to reach out, to steady him, but the impulse is immediately swallowed down. Satoru hums softly to himself, a sound so familiar it makes his chest tighten, then pauses mid-note, as if sensing the air shift. Suguru is suddenly aware of every ordinary detail: the fraying edge of Satoru’s sweater, the hangnails on his thumb, the rhythm of his fingers tapping against the table as if keeping time with a song only he can hear.
And then, finally, the universe seems to tilt on itself, when Satoru looks up.
Satoru blinks, slowly, as if shaking off some small reverie. He looks around the cafeteria, and then, like a shutter snapping into focus, his eyes land on Suguru.
The world seems to pause. The fluorescent lights hum faintly above, the low murmur of other patients and staff becomes distant noise, and all that exists is the curve of Satoru’s lips, the slope of his nose, the quiet disbelief in his eyes.
Suguru swallows, forcing air into his lungs, letting the tension bleed from his shoulders. He moves, almost mechanically at first, each step measured, rehearsed in the invisible theater of his imagination over the years. Closer, closer, until the space between them is neither too far nor comfortably close.
Satoru straightens slightly, setting the melon pan down on the table. His hand lingers over it, as if unsure whether to eat or to reach. And then, finally, he speaks, careful, a little tremulous:
“Suguru.”
Suguru stops, letting the word wash over him. It’s not an accusation, not a question. Just his name, full of history, of absence, of longing and anger folded into a single syllable. The years condense into that sound: the silences, the sketches, the flights, the empty hotel rooms. It’s too much and not enough all at once. It's just that one sound. His name, from Satoru's mouth. This is more than enough, he thinks, this is more than I could've ever hoped for. He nods slightly, his own voice catching when he finally says it:
“Satoru.”
Satoru doesn’t move still. He just sits there, hands still hovering over the melon pan. The crumbs catch in the light, tiny sparks that feel impossibly loud in the quiet of Suguru’s chest.
Suguru doesn’t reach for the table either. He doesn’t step closer. For a long moment, they simply exist in the same space, separated by a single chair and seven years. Suguru notices the changes slowly, as if the space between them allows each detail to surface one by one. Satoru’s shoulders have narrowed slightly, the easy width of his frame tempered by time or perhaps by seven years without the kind of reckless nights and constant motion they once shared. His face carries traces of lines that weren’t there before. There are faint crow's feet webbing near his eyes, the shadowed hollows under them that look like they've found a permanent home there. There’s a subtle softening at the edges of his jaw, less sharp than Suguru remembered, but heavier, as if life has pressed against him in ways he never let show. Stupidly, he wants to ask what he's missed.
“You’re here,” Satoru finally says. Its simplicity nearly knocks Suguru sideways.
“I am,” Suguru replies, and it comes out sadder than he wants, craggly at the edges. His hands curl into fists at his sides.
Satoru shifts, as if settling into a jaunty lifeboat. “I didn’t think you’d actually come back.”
"You know, Shoko said something similar."
Satoru blinks at him, a dry laugh catching in his throat. "Hah, I wonder why," Now, he does pick up his melon pan and take a bite, tearing it apart with his teeth with a force that only convinces Suguru he wishes he was tearing out his jugular instead. And yet, beneath it all, the incredulity of this situation hits Suguru hard. The old familiarity of Satoru’s voice, his sharp cadence, and the memory of how it used to cut through everything. That same voice had haunted empty hotel rooms, airport lounges, and hostel dorms for years, a reminder of everything he left behind and every door he closed when he ran. Pain twists in his chest at the memory of what he’d taken from Satoru: trust, presence, certainty. And yet, that tiny laugh, the crack of it, it softens a part of him he thought had hardened forever.
Satoru leans back, studying him. "Are you back for good?”
Suguru swallows, voice catching. “Shoko asked me that too. I am. I think so.”
Satoru’s face shifts imperceptibly, first a tightening around the jaw, then a slow, almost painful exhale, and finally—
“Had enough of being a coward, huh?” Satoru says, his face giving way to a subtle shade of anger. Light enough that it almost gets washed out under the hospital’s fluorescent tube lights, but Suguru catches it, to his surprise. The years had made him rusty, he thought. He had convinced himself that time and distance could dull the acuity he once had for Satoru’s infinitesimal shifts, but there it was: the knife edge of his eyebrows furrowed, the too-cloying curve of his lips that never fully reached his eyes, the faint tension in the line of his jaw. It was careful, almost invisible to anyone else, but to Suguru, it read like a ledger of every mistake he had committed.
He swallows. Of course this wasn't going to be easy. It shouldn't be. “Yeah,” he says quietly, almost to himself, “I've had enough.”
Satoru’s eyes narrow fractionally, a spark of that old intensity passing through the irises, and then he lets it go, or at least tries to. He leans forward slightly, resting an elbow on the table, letting the melon-pan sit forgotten. “Seven years,” he says, the words lighter than the weight they carry. “Seven years and not a word from you, and now you're back?”
Suguru meets his gaze. He pulls his jacket closer to himself, as if it could hide the fracture ripping through him. “I know,” he admits, voice scrambling. “I— there were reasons. It's not an excuse, not a good one. But I couldn't continue staying here.”
Satoru knows there were reasons. He also knew they were valid ones. He couldn't admit it to himself for months after Suguru left, but he would've had to escape after something like that too. Riko had been a brief moment in the longer span of their life together, but she had been a flicker so bright it washed everything else in gray after. She had only been in their lives a few, fleeting, wonderful years. After she was gone. it had taken just months for them to unravel; eight long, arduous months. Sure, there were reasons. How long could two people last before they fractured? Suguru remembered it in puzzle pieces that don't fit quite right in any configuration. The smell of turpentine and stale coffee in their apartment, the wet hum of rain against the windows, the screech of Satoru's easel on their marble floors. He had been incessantly irritated, by everything and nothing. By the way Satoru left mugs still nearly full on the counter, by his too-bright laughter that seemed to slice through his art gallery on its gala nights, by his impossible insistence that things could go back to normal. He had been too bright, his light too scorching, too sharp, eclipsing everything but their shared grief.
They argued often then. Mundane things, stupid things. Whether the balcony door should be left open during the afternoons; Satoru loved the sunlight that washed into the living room turned de-facto home studio, said he could see pigments best that way. Suguru hated the swarm of mosquitoes and hornets that spewed in, and Satoru refused to compromise on a mosquito net. They argued over whether the laundry could wait another day, whether Satoru was listening when Suguru said he was tired, whether Suguru was listening when Satoru said he was stressed out. He doesn’t even remember most of them now, but he remembers how Satoru got when he was irritated. The slight shift in tone, the way he’d go quiet before the edge came out, polished and precise where it cut. When Suguru crossed a line he hadn’t known was there, Satoru would sharpen up, his words slicing cleanly through every defense Suguru could raise. He was good at it too, incredibly good. The recent years of interviews and articles and art exhibitions had made him a practiced orator. Every sentence landed exactly where he wanted it to. Gone was the boy who used to talk in half-finished thoughts, who stumbled over his own passion. In his place stood someone who could conduct an argument like a performance.
And Suguru, already fraying at the seams, was helpless to the tide of Satoru's command of the stage. Satoru would say something reasonable, measured, and Suguru would want to tear it apart just to see if there was still something raw underneath. Out of spite, perhaps, or just plain curiosity. To see if he could make the pain go outward. Their fights were small fires, sparked and smothered before they could burn too long, fought across dinner tables, through pillow covers, beneath the background noise of late night television. They’d always circle back somehow, exhaustion tasting nearly like forgiveness on each other's mouths.
But then there were the big ones. The kind that left a chill in their wake, thick and suffocating. The ones where Satoru’s irritation cracked open into something electric and furious, and Suguru, so tired of holding himself together, wanted nothing more than to burn in the aftermath. Those fights were rare. Only three of them, he thinks now. All three of them happened after Riko's death. And the very last one, the one that split everything open, had been about him leaving.
It started over something stupid. It always did.
Satoru had been painting, a loose abstract figure, as had become so nominative with Satoru's work. The apartment smelled faintly of oil and thinner, that acrid scent that clung to everything. He’d called Suguru over, brush still in hand, eyes bright, almost boyish in his excitement. “What do you think?” he’d asked, and Suguru, who hadn’t slept in two nights and had spent the morning pacing, had just said, “It’s fine.”
“Fine?” Satoru repeated, a faint, incredulous laugh escaping him. “That’s it? Just fine?”
Suguru blinked, already too tired for this. “Yeah. It’s— it’s good, Satoru.”
“Good,” Satoru said, quieter now. He put the brush down, the sound of it clattering against the edge of the table sharper than it should’ve been. “You don’t even mean that.”
“I’m saying it’s good,” Suguru said, trying again, softer this time, but the irritation bled through anyway.
“You’re not even looking at it,” Satoru snapped.
“I am looking at it,” Suguru bit back. “I just— I don’t know, I don’t have it in me to pretend to care about some painting right now.”
And that was it. The line. The funny thing was, he hadn't even meant it. Not really, but as it was with grief; it mangles your senses. Everything from his brain to his tongue and the comprehension in between. He didn’t even realize he’d crossed it until Satoru froze. His expression barely changed, but Suguru could feel the air tighten, see the faint tremor in the way Satoru’s jaw set.
“Right,” Satoru said finally, voice low, too calm. “Because everything you do is just pretending, right? It's okay because I’m still functioning, still breathing, still—” He stopped himself, exhaling sharply through his nose. “You think you’re the only one who lost something?”
Suguru winced. “That’s not what I—”
“Isn’t it?” Satoru cut in, and this time his voice wasn’t calm at all. “You’ve been walking around like a ghost for weeks, and every time I try to reach you, you just—” He made a vague motion with his hand, trying to reach into this rift between them to pull something out. All that come out are exasperation and helplessness. “You just shut down. You look at me like I’m the problem.”
And Suguru, so helpless, succumbing to the tide, said, “Maybe you are.”
Silence.
Both of them knew it wasn’t true. Suguru especially, when he’d always been the one who splintered first, who recoiled when things got too sharp. Satoru wasn’t the problem. They knew that. But Suguru wasn’t either. That was the thing about grief again: it scrambled the wiring, distorted simple truths into accusations. You couldn’t blame the dead for dying, so your mind went looking for somewhere else to put the ache. And the person closest to you, the one who kept showing up with warm hands and kind eyes, became the easiest place to push against. Suguru wasn’t angry at Satoru; he was angry that the world had kept going, that mornings still came, that people laughed on trains and shops opened on time and Satoru could wake up and squeeze out paint from a tube like there wasn’t a crater in both their lives. Satoru’s relentless need to keep moving made Suguru feel like he was drifting, like he was failing at something he didn’t know how to do. And Satoru, in turn, kept reading every flinch as rejection, every quiet moment as a verdict.
For a moment neither of them moved. Satoru’s face went still, then he laughed, a short, breathless sound, like something cracked open inside him.
“Okay,” he said finally. “Then what the hell are you doing here, Suguru? If I’m the problem, why are you still here?”
Suguru opened his mouth, then closed it. He didn’t have an answer. He wanted to say because 'I don’t know where else to go, I don't know what to do with this, I don't know what's happening to us' but the words stayed lodged somewhere deep in his throat.
Satoru’s tone softened, but it was worse that way. “Do you even want to be here?”
Suguru froze.
That question felt like the first real thing either of them had said in weeks. And in that second, Suguru’s chest buckled. He looked at Satoru, really truly looked at him for the first time since Riko's death, saw the red at the corners of his eyes, the way his hands trembled slightly where they rested on the easel. He thought about how easy it had once been between them, the lightness that used to exist before everything had turned to ash. They’d been only nineteen when they met, stupid and earnest and too ambitious for their own good. Suguru remembered the version of Satoru who used to crowd every doorway he walked through because he hadn’t learned yet how to shrink for anyone; he always looked like he was ready to eat the world whole. He tried to look for any traces of that in the thirty year old man in front of him, in the thinning light of their apartment. He tried to look for the Satoru who laughed too loud in libraries, who dragged Suguru to late-night cafés to argue about books neither of them had actually finished, but they wanted to impress each other anyway. The one who painted with his fingers because brushes were “too formal” but went back to brushes eventually when he realized he couldn't paint Suguru's eyes quite right with the curve of his thumbnail. He tried to look for the man who kissed like he was discovering a language they could both speak. That version of them had felt inevitable, like gravity, like infinity spooling on forever. Where did those versions of them go? How could he think of abandoning them? He wanted to say something, to mean it, but the words wouldn’t come. That had become a recurring pattern.
Satoru waited, eyes searching his face, and when Suguru didn’t answer quickly enough, something in him shut down too.
“You do want to leave,” Satoru said. It wasn’t a question.
“No,” Suguru said, his voice finally finding him, small and desperate. “No, I don’t. I just— I didn’t sleep. I didn’t mean it. The painting’s— it’s lovely.”
Satoru just stared at him for a long moment, then looked away, wiping a bit of yellow paint from his thumb with the hem of his shirt. “Yeah,” he said finally. “Sure.”
Thorough dismissal. It's that same dismissal Suguru's faces in the National Cancer Center's cafeteria seven years later, across the scratchy polyvinyl table.
Satoru studies him then, for a long moment, the flash of anger softening into something almost like defeat. “You had to leave,” he repeats, testing the sound. Sounding it out within the room until he hears something back. Then, almost casually, he picks up the melon-pan again, tearing off a small piece and holding it between thumb and forefinger. He chews, carefully, deliberately. "Well, I'm glad you could do that for yourself, Suguru."
“I didn’t know how to—” he starts, but Satoru cuts him off with a faint, ironic smile.
“Yeah, I bet you didn’t,” Satoru murmurs, taking another careful bite of the melon pan, like it’s a shield, a buffer against what’s really being said.
Suguru's heart breaks a little. "I'm sorry, Satoru."
"I don't want an apology from you."
"What do you want from me?"
"Nothing. I want nothing to do with you. Don’t think you can just walk back in,” he says, eyes not leaving Suguru, “And pretend it didn’t matter.”
Suguru nods, shoulders stiff. “I’m not pretending,” he says. “I know it’s a lot.”
“Fuckin' understatement of the century,” he lets out a mirthless laugh.
Suguru swallows, the knot in his chest tightening. He wants to say something, to explain, to justify, to apologize, but the words feel fragile, hollow against the gravity in Satoru’s gaze. Nothing fits right in his head, and the words don't get the chance to rearrange themselves into a sentence in his mouth. He wonders if the shackles holding his throat captive will ever break, if time could rust away the bolts or if he'd have to go at it with bolt-cutters himself. If only he could say something. If only he could've said something.
Satoru leans back in his chair, the legs scraping against the linoleum with a sound that feels intentional, punishing in its smallness. “Well,” he says, “this is great. Really. I’m glad you’ve discovered hindsight.” His voice cracks around the edges.
Before Suguru can muster a response, a nurse approaches their table with a clipboard pressed to her chest.
“Gojo-san? Shoko-san said she'd like you to look through her discharge papers.”
Satoru turns to her instantly, relief zipping across his face so quickly Suguru wonders if he imagined it. “Yeah,” he says, standing up. “Coming.”
He doesn’t look back at Suguru when he stands, dusting crumbs off his palms with a sharp shake like he wants every molecule of sugar gone before it settles into his skin. He reaches for his jacket, slips an arm through the sleeve, adjusts the collar with a practiced tug. It's a strange thought for Suguru to have in the moment, but had Satoru always looked so small? The broad confidence he remembered somehow compressed into the frame of his body, frail in that winter jacket. Quilted, sky blue, lined with soft fleece. Suguru remembered giving it to him in January, seventeen years ago. Meant to guard him against the biting early-morning winds on his newspaper delivery bike rides, a gig he had taken up during university for extra change to buy better quality oil paint. Suguru had admired him for it, which quickly turned into horror when he found out Satoru rode with just a windbreaker. He had watched Satoru shrug into it with a shy grin, cheeks pink from the dawn cold and the sweetness of the surprise gesture— he was in love. He was in love. Now, Suguru thought helplessly, stupidly, Satoru could buy a hundred winter coats if he wanted to now; there was no dearth of closet space or money stopping him the way it was all those years ago. He was half-sure the fleece lining in this one had thinned to nothing by now. Yet, Satoru kept it. Yet, he wears it still.
Only when Satoru is three steps away does he glance over his shoulder. Not fully, just enough that Suguru catches the shape of his profile.
“Good seeing you,” Satoru says. The words land like a door shutting in Suguru’s face.
And then he’s gone, walking toward the hallway, the nurse trailing behind his furious steps. Suguru sits there, pulse loud in his ears, throat tightening around everything he still cannot say.
The empty chair between them feels exactly like seven years.