For You

(Akane's PoV)

—

I waited until Shin's silhouette disappeared behind the gym wall before I turned around.

Kenji was standing in the middle of the field where I'd left him, hands back in his pockets, with the noon sun flattening his shadow into a small dark pool at his feet, watching me come with the patient, settled stillness of a man whose appointment has finally arrived.

And I was angry. 

I need to be precise about this, because I have been angry before. I have been angry my whole life.

Anger is the country I grew up in; I speak it without an accent. But what was moving through me as I crossed that grass was something even worse.

Because I had connected the pieces. All of them, in the time it took Shin to walk off the field.

The stairwell performance. The gyaru bitch testing my patience, her photographs, aimed and lit and timed.

Every strange event, every bait I had cataloged and filed and told Shin about on his couch — 'He's probably trying to force a reaction out of me, Shin. I think he knows the only way he'll ever get me to talk to him again is by escalating something into my line of sight that I can't ignore.'— And judging from the situation, I was completely right.

He had stopped using props.

Kenji had reached into my life and picked up Shin, the one human being on this planet whose peace I would trade my own for, and he had used him as the doorbell.

I already understood the whole situation and how he managed to take Shin here. The blood in his eyes was speaking for him.

What Kenji had done had worked. That was the unbearable part. It had worked, because in the end, here I was.

I stopped three meters from him.

"Good job, you bastard. You finally managed to get my attention," I said. My voice came out low and menacing, and it frightened even me. "And this one, Kenji— I don't think I'm ever going to forgive you for."

Kenji looked at me for a moment.

"It was necessary," he said.

Necessary.

"Kenji." I felt my nails find my palms. "Before I break that face you're so proud of, tell me what you want. And make it good. Because ruining my life once apparently wasn't enough for you."

Something happened to his hands.

It was small. His fists closed inside the frame of his stance, with a tightening that ran up through his forearms and vanished before it reached his face. Of course I noticed it. Whatever that sentence had touched, it had touched something real.

And then he buried it, and smiled, and went on the attack.

"I imagine you already know why your beloved boyfriend was on my field, don't you?" His voice slid into that pleasant, reasonable register that I have hated since I first saw him. "Quite a display. All that fire, over another girl's honor." He tilted his head. "Seems his feelings aren't entirely pointed at you after all."

My eyes widened before I could stop them.

I hated that they did. I hated it with everything in me, because I watched him see it, and I understood that he had aimed for exactly this spot with exactly this blade, because he has known where all my soft places are since before I knew I had them.

Because it had landed. Somewhere down in the oldest, ugliest sediment of me — in the place where the possessive blood lives, the place I fight every day, the place that counted five minutes of lateness like a crime — a voice I despised whispered: 'he's right. Look how Shin burned for her. Has he ever burned like that for you?'

"Has he ever reacted that way for you, Akane?" Kenji said softly, echoing the poison back to me almost word for word, and then he let out a small laugh. "Are you sure you're loving the right person?"

And the laugh saved me.

Because the laugh was a tell, the laugh was him admiring his own marksmanship, and the moment I heard it, the calculating Kenji returned to his normal self.

This was surgery, not truth. And every hour I had spent this period dragging my own jealousy into the light had been building toward exactly this moment, the moment where the poison arrives from outside and finds the wound already cleaned.

I perfectly knew that Shin had walked onto this field for Kurone not because he loves her, but because he is incapable of looking away from a broken person.

It's the exact quality that is saving my life every day. Kenji was trying to weaponize the best thing about him. 

And I hated that a small part of me was scared.

I unclenched my jaw.

"Kenji," I said. "Kurone is a victim. Nobody deserves what you've done to her, and anyone with a functioning soul would have reacted the way he did. Anyone." I took one step closer. "And you — you are filth. You are filth in exactly the shape of our father. Same hands, same mouth, same way of turning people into furniture. It doesn't surprise me at all that you're his favorite. You're his disgusting masterpiece. 100% his blood."

For a moment, the field was silent.

Then Kenji did the thing I should have expected, the thing that is more Kenji than any other thing he does.

He accepted the hit, and converted it.

"You should thank me," he said, "that you're standing here able to say any of this."

"Excuse me?" My eyes widened again.

"Look at your life, Akane." He spread his hands slightly, palms open, the reasonable man presenting the evidence. "Look at where you're standing. You're happy. Genuinely, visibly happy — I've been watching you. And every step of the road that brought you there runs through me. If I hadn't done what I did — all of it — your precious boyfriend would still be that whore's little dog. Still trotting after her with flowers. Still waiting for scraps. He'd have wasted his whole life at her heel, and you'd have spent yours watching him do it from across a classroom, too armored to ever say a word."

My fists closed.

Because — and I will only ever admit this here, inside my own skull, where he can't reach — there was a bone of truth buried in it. There was.

The horrible logic was right: the collapse of Valentine's Day was the meteor that broke Shin out of orbit, and I was the one who found him in the crater.

If the worst day of Shin's life had never happened, the best moments of mine and his wouldn't have either. I have thought about that thing at two in the morning more than once, and hated it every time.

But... that was not a gift. And a man who engineers ruin doesn't get to invoice you for what you built in the wreckage.

"I don't care, Kenji." My voice came out flat and hard. "Run the math however you want. What you did to Kurone is unforgivable. There's no ledger where it comes out clean."

"I haven't done anything I regret," he said. "If you really want to know. Nothing, sister."

The wind moved across the field.

"You don't regret it," I said slowly. Something cold was crawling up the back of my neck. "What you did to her. You feel nothing."

Just like our father. No regrets.

"No." His eyes held mine, flat and calm and absolutely steady. "I did it for you."

The world stopped.

"...What?"

"I did it," Kenji repeated, without hurry, without heat, "for you."

"You violated an innocent girl—" my voice cracked on it, and I heard myself sounding young, sounding like the kitchen doorway, and I couldn't stop it "—for me?"

"Akane." He took a step toward me, and his voice dropped, and for the first time in the whole conversation the performance drained out of it — and what replaced it was worse, because it sounded like belief. "If Shin loves you today, you owe it to me. If you kept yourself alive these past years, alone, in that apartment — that was me. If you became what you are — the armor, the grades, the girl nobody could touch — that was me, pushing you, every year, in the only way that house allowed me to push. Everything, Akane. Every single thing I have done since I walked into that family, including the ugliest of it — I did for you."

I stood there in the noon light with my nails cutting half-moons into my palms, and I did not hit him.

"Who do you think made your mother send you that message?" he went on, quieter now, and the awful thing — the thing that made the cold crawl further up my neck — was that he no longer sounded like a man playing a hand. He sounded sincere. He sounded more sincere than I had ever heard him in my life.

"Who do you think has been protecting you from the shadows all this time, letting you hate him because hating him kept you safe? Who do you think has been stealing money out of our father's accounts, every month, for four years, and carrying it to you with his own hands?"

The field tilted very slowly under my boots.

'Akane, did you receive the money this month?'

'This time Kenji insisted on bringing it in person.'

The envelope. The transfers. Four years of the sixth of every month. The box I had buried so deep I'd stopped feeling its edges — and here was my half-brother, standing in the sun, prying it open with his bare hands and telling me that everything inside it had his fingerprints on it.

It could be a lie. Every instinct I owned screamed that it had to be a lie, that this was the deepest manipulation of all, the claim too large to verify and too heavy to ignore.

But the message was real. The envelope was real. The money, every month, was real. And lies, in my experience, are rarely built on such expensive foundations.

Until now, I believed that the money was an automatic payment, like a subscription. 

After his words, I didn't know what to believe. Everything was... strange.

"And now," Kenji said, and the sincerity folded itself away as neatly as it had appeared, and the blade came back out, "imagine something with me. Imagine what Shin will think — your honest, transparent, no-secrets Shin — when he finds out that you knew about Kurone before he did. That you sat with it. That you looked him in the eyes, with that information behind your teeth, and chose to say nothing." He tilted his head. "I don't think he expects lies from you, Akane. I think you might be the one person on earth he'd never brace for after all the lies he had received from Kurone."

The cold in my neck turned to fire.

"Don't you dare say his name." My voice came out shaking, and I no longer cared. "You disgusting piece of shit. You don't get to put his name in your mouth. And you're spouting a mountain of bullshit dressed up as devotion, and I'm not buying a single word—"

"Akane."

He cut across me quietly. Not loudly. Quietly. And it worked, the way quiet always worked in that house, and I hated my own nervous system for obeying it.

"That day I brought the money to your door," he said. "I didn't come for the delivery. I came because I needed to talk to you about something important. Something I've been building for a long time." His eyes didn't move from mine. "It's about that bastard we call a father."

My eyes went wide again — the second time, the second crack, and this time I didn't even fight it.

"That man doesn't exist for me anymore," I said. My voice dropped low. "He is not my father, Kenji. He's a monster who happens to share my blood, and I burned that bridge with everything on it four years ago. And I am tired — " it came out through my teeth " — I am tired of your riddles, your baits, your speeches, your entire existence. You still haven't told me what you actually want from me. So say it. Now. Fast. Before I put my fist through that face and take the suspension as a souvenir."

Kenji looked at me for a long moment.

And then he said the only thing he had ever intended to say, the sentence this entire month of engineering had existed to deliver:

"Not here."

He tipped his chin toward the school building, toward the corridors, toward all of it.

"After school. Wait for me outside the front gates." A beat. "And Akane — I'd advise you to come."

"SENPAI!"

The voice came from the far end of the field.

The athletics club was drifting back, jogging in loose clusters across the grass with their water bottles, and behind them, along the courtyard fence, I saw what the last twenty minutes had grown while nobody was watching.

Students. A scattered line of them at the wire, lunch bread forgotten in their hands, faces turned toward the field. Phones. The particular leaning-together posture of people trading a story — and I could hear the shape of it already, mutating as it moved down the fence line, 'did you see it, Ishikawa threw him, Ishikawa from the committee, threw YAMADA, he was going to beat him into the ground' — the rumor machine of a school in full production, grinding Shin's name between its teeth, and by fifth period there would be nine versions of it and by tomorrow there would be twenty.

And there was nothing I could do about any of it.

That was the moment I understood that I had lost.

Not the argument. Arguments don't matter to Kenji. The game.

He had wanted my attention, and he had it.

He had wanted me waiting outside the school gates after class.

And judging from the whispers already spreading across the fence line, he had wanted an audience too.

Every road out of this field ran through him.

My fists closed at my sides until my knuckles went white.

I looked at my brother, the golden boy standing easy in the noon light while his teammates jogged home to him, at the flat eyes and the patient mouth and the four years of envelopes and the poison and the 'I did it for you', and I put every gram of what I felt into my eyes, because my eyes were the only weapon left that wouldn't cost Shin anything.

Hatred. Whole, and old, and absolutely clear.

Kenji received it without blinking.

And my eyes burned with tears of pure, compressed rage with nowhere to go.

I would not give him that. Not that. Not if it killed me.

So I turned.

I turned my back on him, on the field, on the fence line and its whispers, and I walked — spine straight, chin level, boots hitting the grass in a rhythmic step by step — toward the building, toward the stairs, toward a rooftop where the boy I loved was waiting with shaking hands, counting minutes.

Carrying his parents in one pocket. Carrying this in the other.

I didn't look back.

I didn't blink until I was inside.

But I could feel Kenji's eyes and satisfaction.

"I'm gonna make him pay with blood," I repeated to myself, biting my lower lip.

But... every step I took towards the rooftop was filled with fear.

Fear of Shin's reaction. 

I lied to him. I lied to us.

But... Kurone asked me not to say anything.

"I just hope that he will understand..."

—

Author's note: That chapter was really difficult to write (emotionally, also). Hope you liked it. ❤️

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