Golden Eyes

(Akane's PoV)

—

Kenji was already at the gates when I came down.

He was leaning against the wall a little apart from the streaming crowd of students, out of the flow of it, his bag over one shoulder, watching the doors, and when he saw me come through them, something moved across his face that I couldn't fully read.

"I didn't think you'd actually come," he said.

"Walk ahead of me." I kept my voice low and my eyes flat. "I don't want stupid rumors starting up because someone saw the two of us leaving together. I've had enough of the school talking today."

"I've thought of that too. Don't worry." He pushed off the wall. "I'm not here to sabotage your relationship, little sister."

He leaned on the last two words—little sister. Set them down deliberately, the way you'd set a coin on a table to watch it spin, and a 'strange' desire to punch him appeared.

He saw it. Of course he saw it. He read the whole thing off my face, but instead of pressing, he stepped back from it.

"I won't take much of your time, I promise," he said, quieter. "Follow me."

And he walked.

I kept a careful distance behind him — three steps, four, the space I keep from things I don't trust — and my phone stayed clenched in my hand the entire way, screen out, exactly the way I'd promised Shin on the rooftop.

I knew that somewhere behind me in the afternoon, there was a boy in a hood with his eyes on my back.

I didn't look for him, because I made myself not look for him, but I felt the warmth of his presence.

We walked for about ten minutes. Away from the school, away from every ear and eye that could see us.

Kenji never once looked back to check I was following. He knew I was. That was almost the worst thing about him: the certainty.

Eventually the street opened onto a small bus shelter and a konbini,  far from anyone who'd know either of our faces.

Kenji stopped, turned, and I stopped a good twenty feet short of him, keeping some distance and the phone in my hand.

"All right," he said. He drew in a long breath, the kind you take before lifting something heavy. "Good."

Then he started speaking.

He told me he'd been collecting evidence for the better part of a year, quietly, through channels our father didn't audit.

He'd gotten into the house's camera archives, the old footage nobody thought still existed, pulled recordings from years back, with all the abuses my mother had to go through.

He had financial records. The kind that doesn't come out in one clean piece but assembles into something that ends a man. He said the family company itself was salvageable, that the thing underneath the rot was still worth saving, but the man at the center of it had to go. Completely. 

Kenji had enough proof to ruin him.

I listened to all of it with my face flat and my heart doing something I didn't authorize, and when he finished, I gave him the only answer I had.

"I'm done with them, Kenji." My voice came out flat. "You know that better than anyone. I'm not part of that family anymore. I changed my surname, and you know that monster we call a father's own forger helped me do it, actually, one of the last useful things his money ever bought me. Legally, on paper, I don't exist as his daughter. So, hypothetically, if I stood up in a courtroom and testified, the first thing that would happen is I'd go to prison, for the documents alone."

"I have proof you were a member of the family," Kenji said, without missing a beat. "The photographs. The birth records. The original register... or rather, she kept all of it."

She.

He didn't have to say the name. I already knew.

"I don't care," I said, and heard my own voice harden. "She had an entire lifetime to stand against that man. A whole life. She never did it once. Not one time. She chose to abandon me, and she chose him, over and over, until the day she told me I wasn't her daughter anymore. So, I don't give a shit anymore."

"No, Akane." Kenji's voice stayed quiet. "You're wrong about her. She loves you."

It hit me somewhere under the ribs, and my fists closed so hard the phone case creaked in my grip.

He couldn't be serious.

I looked at his face and noticed he was very convinced of his words. But... that hurt.

He knew. Everything.

"How can you say something that cruel to me, Kenji?" I said, and I hated that it came out unsteady. "How dare you say something like that even though you knew all the disgusting things she said to me? Do you have a fucking death wish?"

"I know you don't want to hear it, and I know you won't believe it," Kenji said. "But she told me everything. And I know I'm not the person you should be hearing this from. Believe me, I know that. But that message she sent you?" He held my eyes. "She sent it after crying. Over you. Over your absence. That's the truth of it, whether you take it or not."

I felt a knot in my stomach, and breathing was becoming harder.

"Stop." That's all I whispered.

"If you don't believe me, I'll put you in a room with her, and you can hear it yourself. She and I are the reason the money reached you at all, every year. A portion of what was hers, what she was entitled to under his roof — she took it, and she used it to make sure you had everything you needed to survive. Every month. For four years."

My eyes went wide before I could stop them.

"No," I said. The word came out small. "No. That's not — she said — she said—"

"Yes." Kenji watched me. "I know exactly what she said to you. And I know she regrets it. I assure you." He paused. "But that isn't why I called you here. And it isn't the moment for you to learn all of it. If you want to speak with your mother... just tell me. That door is open whenever you decide."

I stood there in the fading afternoon with the vending machine humming, unsure of what to feel.

But in the end, I got angry. That was the only logical response.

"What do you want, Kenji?" My voice climbed. "Is this it? Is this the game? Torture me psychologically the way you've done since you stepped into my life? Dangle my mother in front of me, dig up the one thing I buried so I could keep breathing? You want to ruin the only stretch of my life where I finally have someone who actually loves me, someone who's mine?" My throat was tightening. "You're a disgusting man. I am ashamed to share your blood. I'm truly ashamed, especially after what you did to an innocent girl. So make it quick. I can't stand another second of your bullshit."

He must have seen how close to the edge I was, because he dropped the circling and went straight to it.

He looked at me for a few instants before speaking, his expression almost unreadable.

"I want you to testify against him, Akane. Only this."

The street went quiet.

"Your mother has already promised she will. And I want you to do the same, if this goes to trial. That's what all of it was for. Every single thing I've done, including the worst of it, I did to reach this one moment, Akane."

My jaw locked. My fists shook.

I couldn't believe his words.

"You know better than me that he deserves hell for everything he has done," Kenji said, crossing his arms.

I stood silent for a few instants, looking at the floor, before looking straight into his eyes.

"You want me to risk my entire life," I said slowly, "to put that man in a cell. After I finally got rid of him. After years of clawing my way out from under that name. And you're serious." I let out a breath that had no laugh in it at all. "And you expect me to believe this... this sudden kindness, this concern... is real? You expect me to trust you? Kenji Yamada?"

Kenji nodded, and there was no performance in it. That was what frightened me.

"Yes. I wouldn't have come to speak to you otherwise." He held my gaze. "And you should know... I have a lot of things to say, too. You're not the only person in the world who suffered, Akane."

Something in me snapped.

"I'm not the only—" I took a step toward him before I knew I was doing it. "You had everything, Kenji. Everything. A family. Friends. A whole school full of people who worshipped you, even though you were beneath me in every single subject that was ever put in front of us. And I was alone. I was destroyed. I was so starved for one person to talk to that I dressed as a boy to make it happen. I erased myself to be tolerable to a house that wanted a son. And you stand here and tell me yousuffered?" My breath was ragged. "Give me one reason I shouldn't put my fist through your face right now. Just one."

Kenji closed his eyes for a moment.

When he spoke, his voice had gone flat and low, stripped of everything.

"I never had a single person to actually talk to, Akane. Not one." He opened his eyes. "Every scrap of love I was ever given came with conditions attached. I was the chosen one—the direct heir to the Yamada estate, the prize, the future of the whole rotten empire. And I never had anyone. Not one person who wanted me and not the thing I was supposed to become."

I didn't answer. I made myself breathe, and then listen, even as some part of me recoiled from it.

"Don't mock me, Kenji," I whispered. "Don't you fucking dare."

"I always wanted to be your good brother," he said, and the words came out of him differently than any words I'd ever heard him speak. "I tried, when we were small. I tried to talk to you, more than once. And all I ever got back was hatred, because our father turned us against each other. He never once allowed us to have anything real between us, and you know that's true. You know it. So the only thing left that I could do was make you hate me on purpose. Make myself into the thing you had to overcome. Because if you spent your childhood learning to beat me, to outrun me, to survive being second to no one... then that monster in that house would never be able to break you. And he didn't. He never broke you, Akane. You're the only thing in that family he failed to break."

My eyes widened, and a tear escaped before I could stop it. I hated it, and I couldn't call it back. 

"..." I didn't reply. I couldn't.

"It's true," Kenji went on, quieter still. "I am, and I always will be, beneath you. I'm a monster. I look at women, and I see objects; I look at people, and I see pieces to move, because that is precisely what I was taught, in that house, before I was old enough to know it was being done to me. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But I wanted—" his voice caught, actually caught, the first crack I had ever seen run through him "—I wanted a real family too. That's all. That's the whole ugly truth about it." He stopped for an instant. "...So this... it's the only way I know how to say I'm sorry. Believe it or not. It doesn't change what I'm going to do. I am going to bring that man down, and I am going to put him in a cell, with or without your help."

And Kenji's eyes were wide, and for the first time in the entire span of my life, I watched something human move behind them.

I couldn't believe it. That was the problem. I couldn't, and I didn't want to, and it was happening anyway, and it was tearing me in half.

"Stop, Kenji," I said, and my voice broke on his name. "Stop it. Please. Don't do this to me. Don't ruin the only piece of happiness I've ever had if you really care about me, please. Leave Shin and me out of it. We just want to be left alone. That's all I've ever wanted. Just the two of us, and nothing from that house, ever again. I waited all these years just to feel a glimpse of love."

I dragged in a breath and gripped the phone in both hands until my knuckles went white.

"I don't want to lose him. I can't afford to." I said, my voice almost a sob.

Kenji stood silent for a few instants.

"Once it's over," he said, "I'll properly apologize to Kurone myself. In person. And if that isn't enough — I'll turn myself in."

And that was the sentence that broke it.

Because he said it so evenly. Like an item on a list. Like a cost he'd already priced.

"These things mean nothing to you, do they?" I said, and I started walking toward him, slow, and he didn't step back. "You raped Kurone. You traumatized an innocent girl for the rest of her life for your twisted logic. I watched her crying desperately, Kenji. I've seen it happen to people, and I know exactly what it looks like from the inside. And you think it balances. You think a girl's entire future gets squared away with a sorry."

I stopped a step from him. Close enough to see them clearly now.

His eyes.

Golden. The exact shade of gold I have spent my whole life trying to scrub out of my own reflection.

Our father's eyes, sitting in my brother's face, sitting in mine too.

"Life is not that simple, Kenji," I said quietly. "You have so, so much left to learn."

And then, without thinking twice, I slapped him.

Hard, open-palmed, across the face, the crack of it splitting the quiet street, and Kenji took it.

He didn't flinch, didn't turn away, and he didn't lift a hand.

He just took it, his golden eyes going wide, and let his head stay where the blow put it.

I was breathing hard. My hand stung, and somewhere behind me, I knew, a boy in a hood had gone rigid and was fighting every instinct in his body to stay hidden. I trusted him to win that fight, and he did.

"If you actually want to start doing something good," I said, my voice shaking, "then start by purging his blood out of your soul. All of it. And until you've managed that — don't you dare put your nose in my life again. Please."

Then I turned and walked away. I had enough of him, his words, and his bullshit. I needed to stay away from that poison.

Behind me, I heard him touch his own cheek. And then, as I went, his voice, quiet and unhurried, followed me down the empty street:

"I don't care whether you forgive me or not, Akane. I never expected you to." A pause. "But please. Think about what I said."

I didn't turn around.

I walked, phone still crushed in my fist, tears drying cold on my face in the afternoon air, toward the corner where I knew a hooded shadow would peel off a wall and fall into step beside me without a word.

I needed to see him. I needed him to hold me and tell me that he would never leave me. I needed his warmth. I wanted him. 

'I don't want to lose you, Shin. I would rather die.'

I kept my eyes forward, left my brother standing alone at a bus stop with a red mark on his face, and did not look back once.

Suddenly, my phone rang, and I saw a call from Shin.

My heart softened. 

I immediately answered. 

"Shin... where are you?" I asked, anxious.

"I'm inside the konbini, Akane. Come, I'm waiting here." He said.

Without thinking twice, I immediately ended the call and ran towards the small konbini...