Not Worth It

(Shin's PoV)

—

My fist hung in the air above his face.

And Kenji lay there in the dirt with my knuckles' shadow across his cheekbone, smiling up at me, comfortably waiting, and Akane's name sat in the air between us where he had placed it.

"She'll love that. It'll fit so nicely with everything else she knows about the men in her family."

That was the poison, and it was working. Such a low blow.

I could feel it working because he was right about the shape of it: a raised fist over a body on the ground, in a hidden place where no one could see. I knew whose silhouette that was. I had heard it described to me at night, in the dark, in a shaky voice, by a girl who grew up watching it from a kitchen doorway.

My arm was trembling.

Not from restraint, but from the war between two things that both felt like love: the part of me that wanted to break his face for what he'd done, and the part that refused to become one more man in Akane's life whose fists made the decisions. Moreover, he was also 'right' about another thing: this was none of my business, and I didn't know how Akane would've reacted if she saw me defending Kurone.

I didn't swing.

But I want to be honest about what that was, because it wasn't victory.

There was no clean moment of clarity, no cold triumph of principle. I simply hung there, shaking, caught between two impossibilities, until my fingers opened on their own and released his collar, and I pushed myself up off him and took one step back on legs that didn't feel like mine.

Kenji looked up at me from the grass for a moment.

Then he laughed. Quietly. Two breaths of it, through his nose.

"That's what I thought, you're still a doormat," he said.

He got to his feet unhurried and brushed the grass off his sleeve with two precise strokes, putting himself back in order piece by piece, and the whole time his eyes never left my face.

"All that walking," he said. "All that fire in your eyes, the whole team stepping back from you like you were something dangerous. And this is where it ends. A trembling fist and a step backward." He tugged his collar straight. "You know what your problem is, Ishikawa? You've spent your whole life half a second away from mattering, and every single time, you flinch. On the field just now. In your life with Kurone, for seven years. You flinch, and then you tell yourself it was a choice."

"Shut your mouth," I said, trying to suppress my emotions.

"She used to talk about it, you know." His voice stayed flat, pleasant, unbearable. "How easy you were. How you'd come running for scraps. Even at the end she wasn't crying over losing you — she was crying because the audience left. No more validation." He tilted his head. "Ah, and in that Karaoke, well... her tears made everything much better."

The cold went out of me all at once, and the fire came back in its place.

I didn't decide to move. My body turned on its own, my fist already closing, the distance between us already dying—

"Shin."

The voice came from the corner of the shed and stopped the world.

"Don't."

I turned my head.

Akane stood at the edge of the shadow with the noon light behind her, and I would spend a long time afterward trying to describe what was in her face, because it was two things at once and both were at full strength.

The top layer was rage: the flat, banked, dangerous stillness I'd seen aimed at other people and never wanted aimed at me. Her eyes went across the scene once, taking it all: the grass stains on Kenji's back, my knuckles, the two meters of charged air between us.

But underneath the rage, just for a second, I saw the other thing.

Fear.

Not of the scene, but of what the scene meant. 

A million different thoughts crossed my mind in a single instant, and then a question arrived out of nowhere.

'Did she know about Kurone?'

In that moment, I didn't really care, because my entire body was a total mess of anger. I didn't even care about how she knew I was there. 

The only certain thing was that she was there, furious, and probably scared about seeing such this side of me.

"Don't do it," she said, walking toward me across the grass, boots unhurried. "It's exactly what he wants."

"I know." My voice came out low and shredded. "And it's exactly what he deserves."

"Yes," Akane said. "It is."

She arrived beside me and stopped, and she looked at Kenji, for real, and Kenji looked back at her, and something happened in his face that I had never seen there before.

Surprise.

Real surprise, unmanaged, uncurated — a crack of it, wide enough to see through, before he caught it and closed it.

Whatever script he had been running since I walked onto his field, whatever outcomes he had built contingencies for, her walking out of the noon light and standing at my shoulder with that voice and that calmness had surely not been among them.

"If this weren't our last year at this school," Akane said to me, her eyes still on him, her voice conversational, almost light, "I'd be right there next to you, smashing his face. Believe me. I've thought about it more than once." A pause, a single beat, surgical. "But no. Not here. He's not worth it."

He's not worth it.

She said it the way you'd price a piece of furniture. And I watched it land on Kenji, watched it go in under the armor at an angle no fist could have reached, because fists were a currency he understood and had already discounted, but that, from her, was something that probably shattered him.

His jaw set, but the smile stayed up. It cost him something to keep it there, and for the first time all day, I could see the cost.

Akane's hand then closed around my arm.

"Come on," she said, and pulled.

I let her turn me. My whole body was still burning, my fists still wouldn't fully open, and the words Kenji had said about Kurone were still crawling around inside my skull looking for something to break.

But Akane's grip was firm and warm through my sleeve and my feet followed it, three steps away from him, out of the shed's shadow and into the light of the field.

The sun was higher than it should have been, and somewhere in the middle of all of it — the classroom, the corridors, the shed — the lunch bell had come and gone without either of us hearing it, and the far end of the field was scattered with athletics club members pretending very hard to be stretching, and beyond the fence the courtyard was full of students with bread and juice boxes, the whole ordinary machinery of a school lunch grinding on, completely unaware that the ground had shifted somewhere behind the equipment shed.

Akane walked me ten meters into the grass and stopped. She turned to face me, and her hand stayed on my arm.

"Sora's waiting for us on the rooftop," she said. Her voice had changed for me. The flatness gone, something steadier underneath. "Go up to her. I'll come in a little while."

I stared at her.

"Akane—" I tried to protest.

"Go, Shin." She said, leaving no room for argument.

"I'm not leaving you here with—" My voice cracked on it. "I can't."

Something moved through her face, and for a second her grip on my arm tightened, and I thought she'd fold. But she didn't.

"Please, Shin. Listen to me just this time," she said quietly. "Ten minutes, and then I'm up those stairs to eat our bento. I promise you." Her eyes held mine, dark and absolutely steady. "Trust me. Go."

Everything in me said no.

Everything in me said 'do not leave her on this field with him.' And she watched me have all of it, watched the whole war cross my face, and she didn't argue, and she didn't soften.

She just stood there with her hand on my arm and waited for me to do the thing we'd been teaching each other since Valentine's Day.

Trust.

I exhaled. It came out ragged.

"Ten minutes," I said.

"Ten minutes." She repeated. "Trust me, Shin."

"If it's eleven, I'm coming back down, and I'm not going to be reasonable."

"If it's eleven," Akane said, and one corner of her mouth moved a millimeter, "you have my full permission to be exactly as unreasonable as you want."

Then, her hand slid off my arm, and I turned and made myself walk across the grass, over the white line, onto the gravel path, and each step felt like it was being performed against gravity.

My hands were still shaking because the rage hadn't gone anywhere; it had just been handed a leash and told to back off, and it pulled the whole way.

At the edge of the courtyard, where the path bends around the gym wall, I stopped and looked back.

They were facing each other in the middle of the field.

Two figures in the noon light, three meters apart: the wolf and the golden boy, still and squared, with a million things to say to each other.

Kenji's back was to me. I couldn't see his face.

But I could see his posture, and the surprise was gone from it. All of it.

The line of his shoulders had settled into something composed and unhurried and satisfied, and even from a certain distance, even through everything still burning in my skull, I could still realize one single thing:

'He's not surprised anymore. He's exactly where he wanted to be.'

It looked like every single event from the week had happened because of him. I didn't know why, but that was the only thing I could think about. I remembered Akane's words, and she was probably right.

In the end, she had arrived to talk to him, despite all her attempts to avoid him at all costs. Kenji had finally gained a reaction from her.

The only thing I could do was to wait for Akane on the rooftop. I had to trust her.

My fists closed again, nails finding the same grooves in my palms, and for one long second I stood at the bend of the path fighting the animal urge to walk back —

'Ten minutes. Trust me. Go.'

I turned, and I climbed the stairs toward the rooftop, and I didn't look back again, because if I had, I wouldn't have kept going.

-

Author's note: There has been a really bad earthquake in my hometown, but I'm alive. The story will progress. 😙