“It hurts! Mom, it hurts...”
He ran crying to his mother where she sat on the beach making a sand-dune, holding out his injured index finger. It was bleeding where he had cut it on a mollusk shell. Sawako smiled into his tear-streaked face, murmuring, “Does it hurt?”
Fighting back fresh tears, he nodded “yeah.” Sawako nodded back and kissed his finger. Then she smiled gently.
“There. All better...”
It was like magic.
When he’d been little, he had truly believed that his mother’s kiss could heal wounds. Because when she kissed him, the pain somehow just went away.
He could still hear the waves. His entire family had gone to the beach that day so long ago, the only time all four of them had gone together, both before and after. Miya had still been a toddler then, and the ocean had scared both of them when they laid eyes on it for the first time. But their father had laughed and called them onto the beach. And there the four of them had built a sand castle together, laughing all the way.
By the time they were getting ready to go home, the rising tide was already starting to wash away the castle they had worked so hard to build. Takaya desperately tried to protect it from the waves, but he couldn’t stop the sand from crumbling apart, little by little... He was powerless against the inexorable waves, and he had cried in angry frustration...
“There is nothing we can do, Takaya,” his mother had coaxed, trying to comfort him.
There had been so much sadness in his mother’s smile that day as she had turned back at his sobbing cry—“Why are you leaving?”
“There is nothing else I can do, Takaya.”
No, there was. There had to be...! If he tried hard enough, there had to be something. He would be able to save the sand castle from crumbling. He would protect it from the waves!
(It hurts...)
His entire body ached from the adults’ punches and kicks. From the bruises and lacerations. He felt feverish. I don’t know how to heal myself. I don’t know how to stop this pain, Mom!
But his mother was no longer with him. There was no one to heal his wounds. Why did he have to be here alone in this cold, cold room? He ached.
He had no one. Not Miya, not his mother...
Then suddenly, the memory of a smile floated into his mind. Where had it come from? Why did he long for it so?
The room was so cold... He was turning to ice.
Was there nothing to be done about anything? Did he have no choice but to resign himself to everything? Was that all that the future held? Would he never be able to stop the ravaging waves? To keep himself from being worn away?
Oh please, someone, please protect me...
Please save me before I crumble completely away.
Be with me always, share your warmth with me...
This small existence cowering in a jail cell.
Someone, save me...
This room is so cold...
I hurt so much...
Tears overflowed.
(Mom...)
Morning sunlight slanted through the tiny window.
Takaya, wrapped in a blanket, awoke at the sound of the door opening.
“...?”
The detective from yesterday was standing in front of him with the guard. He leveraged himself upright as the detective inhaled slightly and told him, “You can come out, Ougi.”
“...”
“You’re free to go. You’ve been cleared of all charges.”
Takaya’s eyes widened. The middle-aged detective tossed Takaya his coat and hurried him out. Hugging his aching body, still half in doubt, he put on the coat and walked out of the cell with both adults accompanying him. He noticed that Mitsui had disappeared from the cell next to his.
Takaya stopped abruptly.
Mid-way to the entrance, he saw Mitsui coming out of an interrogation room. He scratched his cheek lightly with a cuffed hand and gave Takaya a small smile.
“Yo.”
For a moment Takaya was struck dumb. He knew why his charges had been cleared: Mitsui had confessed the name of the last person.
“I blundered. The cops caught me selling drugs.”
“You...then...”
“You idiot, don’t get me wrong. We only had one bag, and it was hallucinogens. Well whatever; six of one and a half dozen of the other, I guess...”
Takaya’s eyes widened. There was a small smile in Mitsui’s eyes. The officers led him forward. As they passed each other, he murmured, “...Don’t fall...”
Takaya stopped and turned around. The officers led Mitsui down the corridor into the jail. Takaya looked after him wordlessly until he disappeared down the stairs.
In the back portion of the first floor, a section labeled “juvenile department,” several young men were receiving a blistering tongue-lashing. A closer look revealed them to be Yokomori and his buddies.
“Why are they...”
“Onii-chan!”
He turned to see Miya flying towards him like a shot from the opposite end of the floor. She threw herself at Takaya and clung to him, as if to declare that she would never be letting him go again. She started crying.
“Miya. I made you worry, didn’t I. Sorry.”
Miya sobbed, not loosening her hold. He looked up to see Narita Yuzuru standing with Kasai from the Family Court.
“Yokomori and his friends lied to the police. They thought the beating they got was because you told Mitsui. They wanted some revenge too, but I think they did it more as a sort of a prank. But now, see? They’ve been really getting it for a while over there.”
“Narita—...”
Kasai walked up to him, saying, “Your father is talking to the department chief right now. You can head on home.”
“Kasai-san, you came too...”
“You should go home and get those wounds treated. These two didn’t sleep a wink last night.”
There were bruises on Yuzuru’s face as if he’d been punched. Yuzuru noticed him looking and grinned back at him cheerfully. “Oh, this? When I was talking to Yokomori to get him to confess, things got a little of out hand... Nothing major.”
“Then you...”
Yuzuru looked down, smiling bashfully, then resolutely looked up again. “Will you go home now? You didn’t get to celebrate Christmas Eve at all. Miya-chan waited all night for you to come back.”
“Onii-chan, Yuzuru-san is really amazing! Those bad people were really afraid of him. He’s really strong! They gave in to him without a fight!”
“...”
Yuzuru smiled at Takaya’s surprise. “I’m not that amazing. I just threatened them a little like you do. It worked really well.”
If he asked Yokomori and the others they’d probably deny being scared of Yuzuru, so Takaya would never know how terrifying Yuzuru’s questioning had been.
For Yuzuru had been the one to persuade Yokomori and the others to tell the police the truth. They had violently resisted, but in the end had finally admitted that the accusations had been groundless. That, along with Mitsui’s confession, had cleared Takaya of all charges.
Kasai clapped the Ougi siblings on the shoulders and asked Takaya gravely, “You got those wounds on your face during the interrogation, didn’t you? We can press charges against those detectives. Would you like to?”
Takaya looked at Kasai, then past him at the detective from yesterday. He was silent for a moment.
“Let me...go home first and think about it for a little bit.”
Miya pulled on Takaya’s arm to hurry him along. Yuzuru smiled brightly.
“It’s still not too late to celebrate. Today’s Christmas, after all. Once we get home, we need to have cake.”
Takaya felt his face relaxing out of its stiffness at Yuzuru’s guileless smile. A small answering smile appeared at the corners of his bruised lips.
“...Yeah.”
The case was finally resolved with the capture of the last dealer on the next day, though the facts coming to light, of drugs being sold to junior high kids, shocked the community and caused a huge uproar within the Board of Education and PTA of every school. But that would come later. The seriousness of the situation, however, perhaps explained the police agency’s desperation.
The last person Mitsui had been so desperately protecting had been a man with direct ties to the mafia, an adult who was senior to him in the organization and the only person he would never disobey. Though he would have been flushed out sooner or later, Mitsui’s confession had sealed his fate. The others had also been warned not to say anything.
“They refused to tell because they’re afraid of what he’ll do to them later, right?” Kasai asked Mitsui. They were speaking alone in a room in the juvenile detention center. This was the fifth time he had taken charge of Mitsui, and he was visiting to find about more about the particulars of the case.
“But if you had wanted to, you could have pinned the blame on Takaya-kun to protect him. Why did you confess? You’ve put yourself in harm’s way, haven’t you?”
It was a dreary room empty of all but a single chair and desk. Mitsui answered Kasai haltingly, “... I...didn’t want him to be involved.”
“Takaya-kun?”
“Yeah,” Mitsui replied, relief on his face as he gazed towards the window. “In the beginning, I was planning to drag him along with me right to the end. He gave me this cut with his knife when we first met, you know. Nobody had ever touched my face before. Dammit, that pissed me off. That was when I decided I would take him down with me, no matter what.”
Mitsui brushed gently against the scar above his eye.
“The more I was around him, the more I wanted to thrust him down so deep, stain him with so much evil that he would never be able to stand up again. I’m not joking.”
“... Why?”
Mitsui, leaning back in the pipe chair, suddenly smiled. “Because he reminded me of myself.”
“What...?”
“Of the me from a long time ago.” Mitsui answered. There was no trace of malice in his smile. “That’s why I wanted to drag him down. Make him walk the same road I did, make him fall until he hits rock bottom and there’s no place left to fall. Take him down with me. I resented that even though we’re so alike, he could stand again.”
Kasai looked at him gently.
“But...you didn’t.”
Mitsui nodded, murmuring, “Not because I didn’t want to, but because I couldn’t. Because he reminded me of myself too much... When his eyes flashed like that, he was so like me as a kid. I didn’t want to run from myself anymore.”
“...”
“He is ‘me’. That’s why...” —he recalled again the look of Takaya’s eyes. “I don’t want him to become me,” Mitsui concluded, smiling with resignation and mockery at the self which had not been able to stand again after falling, which had fallen deeper and deeper until it had descended to a place without a way back. Perhaps the truth was simply that he wanted to entrust the self he truly wanted to be to Takaya.
Gazing at him, Kasai said gently, “It’s certainly not too late for you.”
Mitsui looked up abruptly.
There was a quiet smile in the depths of Kasai’s eyes.
“It’s not too late to change yourself. Stand up again as many times as you need to. Don’t give up even if your weakness makes you fall. If that’s what you truly want, I guarantee you’ll become the person you want to be one day if you put in the effort. Challenge me as many times as you want to, if you think I’m lying to you.”
“...”
“It’s much too early for you to give up on yourself or your future.”
Mitsui’s eyes widened at the sincerity in Kasai’s.
“Geez. It always sounds like a lie when people say stuff like that to me,” he muttered in confusion, grimacing.
“We’re not lying to you,” Kasai told the young man straightforwardly. “I do...believe in you.”
One day near the end of winter break, Narita Yuzuru looked out his window to see a figure wandering aimlessly back and forth on the road in front of his house. It was a familiar-looking young man wearing a white coat and a hat. Yuzuru immediately sprinted down the stairs and out the house.
“Ougi!”
The young man responded with a curt “Yo.” Yuzuru didn’t know how long he had been loitering outside the house, but he seemed to have been waiting for Yuzuru to notice him.
“If you’re coming to visit, you should just ring the doorbell, geez!”
“Mnn... Actually, I was just passing by,” Takaya said, though in fact he’d been in front of the house for close to forty minutes. Yuzuru, more familiar now with Takaya’s deposition, declined to comment. But he was rather tempted to test how long Takaya would walk around in front of the house if he didn’t come down—next time, maybe?
“Come in. It’s cold.”
“Ah... No, it’s okay...” Takaya hesitated for a moment, then muttered softly, “If was wondering if you’d let me pray at your bird’s grave.”
Yuzuru’s eyes widened. Then he grinned in understanding.
“Sure.”
Yuzuru smiled down at Takaya kneeling in front of the small grave in the garden. With his hands pressed together, Takaya asked, “What was her name?”
“Name?” Yuzuru answered, thinking for a moment. “Well, now that you mention it, I guess I never really gave her a name. I just called her Bird-san.”
“Idiot! You should’ve at least given her a name! She was your pet, wasn’t she?”
“Sorry,” Yuzuru apologized, and Takaya scowled at the blank wooden plaque in annoyance. Both were silent for a moment. Yuzuru suddenly noticed the burn scars on Takaya’s left hand.
“It looks like your hand’s pretty much healed.”
“This?”
“Do they mean something? Those round burns...”
“Idiot. These are tests of courage. You hold a cigarette against your skin and see if you can take it. Don’t you even know something like that?!”
Apparently Yuzuru didn’t. Nor did he understand why Takaya would want to, but to him the burns seemed like badges of honor.
“You wanna try it?”
“No way. Doesn’t it hurt?”
Takaya glared at Yuzuru crossly. “That’s why it’s called a test of courage!”
Yuzuru started. Now I’ve made him mad, he thought, gazing at Takaya’s back. He let Takaya sulk for a moment, waiting for him to speak.
“I was wondering... why did you chase after me that night?”
That night— Yuzuru knew exactly which. He thought for a moment before answering with a smile. “I guess because I couldn’t leave you like that...”
“Why? Did you know that I was gonna take a knife to my old man?”
There was surprise on Yuzuru’s face. But his expression softened again, and he finally murmured gently, “No, I didn’t know. But...”
“...?”
“But I just can’t just leave a wounded creature, I guess?”
Takaya’s eyes widened this time. So that was how Yuzuru had seen him that night. Yuzuru smiled innocently and stood. “Aaaah, geez, my foot’s asleep.”
“Oh, sorry. See you.”
“‘See you’? Er, you’re going home already?”
“Of course.”
“So, so then why’d you come?”
“To visit the grave, obviously.”
Scowling at the standoffish Takaya, Yuzuru declared, “There’s an entrance fee for viewing this grave.”
“F-fee—?! What the heck?”
“The rule is that anyone who comes to worship at this grave must have some tea inside. Sorry.”
“Y-y-y-you! Dammit, Naritaaa!”
“Come on. Come in, Takaya.”
Takaya, startled by such familiarity, looked irritated enough to punch him. This was the first time anyone had ever called him by his first name without an honorific. But Yuzuru seemed to have made up his mind.
“I can have the privilege, can’t I?” he asked, smiling brightly.
Takaya had no resistance left, and felt as if he were getting used to it... He sighed in resignation, but beneath the sigh was a tiny smile.
“Who said you could, idiot?”
Something white landed on his shoulder. Snow was starting to fall again. The snowy season seemed to have arrived in full.
“...It’s going to get cold again, hmm?”
They looked up together at the powdered whiteness drifting from the sky, muffling the sounds of the city and melting as it touched the ground.
Though frozen white clouds covered the sky, neither felt cold.
END