Reunion

(Akane's PoV)

—

As soon as I ended the call, I ran.

My feet knew the way before my head caught up, and I pushed through the door with its stupid cheerful chime, and there he was — in the corner by the magazine rack, watching the door for me the way he'd been watching me all the time from a distance I couldn't see.

I didn't say anything.

I crossed the shop and put my arms around him and held on as hard as my body would let me — face pressed into his collar, fists knotted in the back of his jacket, all of my weight tipped into him at once.

Shin caught it, all of it, and folded both arms around me and held on back.

He didn't ask. He didn't say 'what happened?' or 'are you okay?' Or any of the things a person is supposed to say.

He just took my weight and stood there in the fluorescent light of a convenience store and let me hold onto him like he was the last fixed point on a tilting floor.

"Let's go home," I said into his collar. "Please. Our home. Now."

"Okay," he said.

That was all. Okay.

I took his hand and pulled him out of the shop, and we walked.

The cashier looked at us in a very confused way.

The evening had come down cool and blue over the district, the first neon flickering awake along the strip, and I held his hand the whole way, and I didn't say one word, and neither did he.

I couldn't. My chest was too full... of my mother, of the money, of golden eyes taking a slap without flinching, of 'I did it for you' and 'she loves you', and every certainty I'd spent four years building sliding around loose inside me like broken furniture in a moving truck.

If I opened my mouth on that walk, it was all going to come out in the wrong order, just in pieces.

So I held his hand, walking slowly, letting the silence carry me, and Shin — who understands silences the way other people understand words — matched his steps to mine and asked me nothing.

All I needed was to feel his presence. Nothing more.

When we arrived, his house was dark and quiet. I toed off my boots without a word, and didn't turn the main lights on for some reason.

And the second the door clicked shut behind us, I turned around and pushed him down onto the couch, and then I climbed on top of him and pressed myself against his chest and let go.

I'd been holding it since the field. Since the bathroom, really.

It all came out at once, silent and shaking, my whole body trembling against his, tears I didn't plan soaking into the front of his shirt while I gripped fistfuls of the fabric and just — shook.

Shin didn't try to stop it.

He remained silent, wrapping both arms around me and holding me down against him, and one of his hands came up into my hair and started moving, slow, and the other spread flat and steady between my shoulder blades, and he let me come on top of him in the dark for as long as I needed to.

I felt like that little girl of many years ago, with the difference that I could finally cry without the fear of being judged and left alone.

I don't know how long it was. Long enough that the light through the window went from blue to nearly black. Long enough that the front of his shirt was soaked through and neither of us cared.

And through all of it — the whole time — he never once asked me to hurry. He never once needed me to be done.

He just held on, and breathed slowly so I'd have a rhythm to borrow, and let me be exactly as broken as I was, on his chest, in his house, with the door shut.

I didn't even realize that I was hiding myself from the world.

Eventually the tears ran out.

I lay there for another minute in the wrung-out quiet, my ear over his heartbeat, his hand still moving through my hair, the tremor finally gone out of me.

Then I pushed myself up onto my elbows on his chest, and I looked down at him, his eyes soft and patient and worried in the dim, watching me, waiting, having waited without complaint through all of it, before I wiped my face with the heel of my hand, once, hard.

"Okay," I said. My voice came out hoarse and small but steady. "Now I can talk to you."

Shin then reached up and tucked a wet strand of hair back from my cheek.

"Take your time," he said quietly. "We've got all night. I'll never leave you, Akane."

"Y-Yeah." I let out a shaky breath and sat up the rest of the way, folding my legs under me on the couch beside him, and he sat up too, turning to face me, close, his knee against mine. "You first. Please. I need to hear your 'adventure' before I tell you mine. What happened after lunch break?"

Shin was quiet for a second.

"They called me to the staff room in fourth period," he said.

Something in me went cold. "They—"

"It's fine. It's—" he made a small, tired, complicated face. "That's actually part of what I have to tell you. Because it's not fine, but not the way you're thinking." He looked down at his own hands for a moment, at the faint marks still on his palm. "Kenji got there first."

And he told me.

He told me about Takaneda-sensei and the single sheet of paper and 'three years without a problem.'

He told me about the judo drill, the throw that went wrong, Kenji walking into that office before the story even started spreading and lying and taking the whole blame so that not one mark would touch Shin's record.

He even told me how he'd walked in ready to confess and walked out spotless, and how he'd stopped in the corridor afterward and understood what had actually been done to him.

"He didn't protect me," Shin said, and his voice went flat in a way I recognized, because it was the flatness I use myself. "He bought me, turning me into someone who owes him something. And there's nothing I can do to hand it back. I can't march in and demand my own suspension. I can't undo a favor." He looked up at me. "I've never felt more humiliated in my life, Akane. And I couldn't even be angry about it out loud, because from the outside he helped me."

I closed my eyes.

Because I knew that strategy.

It was the same move — 'I stole the money for you, I protected you from the shadows, I made your mother send that message' — the same conversion of every act into a debt, the same trap of gratitude you never asked to owe. He'd run it on both of us in the same afternoon, from opposite ends.

'Disgusting man. Just like that monster.'

"That's him," I said quietly. "That's the whole of him, Shin. He makes you owe him. It's the only language that house ever taught him: turning love into a ledger." I opened my eyes. "I'm so sorry. I sent you up those stairs, and he got to you anyway, from a different angle."

"There's more." Shin's jaw worked. "Between fifth and sixth, in the corridor. I ran into Kurone."

My whole body went still.

He told me that part carefully, watching my face the whole time.

Kurone barely able to walk, one hand on the wall and one on her stomach, heading for the infirmary and not making it.

How he hadn't thought about it, just moved, got her arm over his shoulder. How she'd flinched at his touch and then gone boneless with relief when she saw it was him.

Tanaka-sensei taking her the rest of the way. And her hand, staying fisted in his sleeve one second too long, not wanting to let him go.

Shin didn't hide anything, and he didn't even try to. He just told me, plainly, the way he'd promised, and watched me to see what it did.

I sat with it.

And the old thing stirred — of course it did, the possessive blood, the wire, the voice that sounded like my father counting minutes — she held onto him, she went soft when she saw him, she doesn't want to let him go. It stirred. I felt it stir. 

And that feeling was not good. Not at all.

She had suffered from a severe trauma. I held her, I saw her crying, and yet... the fact that she interacted with Shin so... normally... actually made me feel a sense of twisted jealousy. And I felt bad.

But then I looked at the boy in front of me, at his exhausted face and his soaked shirt and the way he'd told me the hardest part without being asked, holding nothing back, because it was hard, and the wire went quiet.

Because he'd just handed me the exact knife I could have used to hurt myself with, handle first, on purpose, so I wouldn't find it later and think he'd hidden it.

I took a deep breath before speaking, suppressing all my 'bad' emotions.

"Y-You did the right thing," I said. My voice came out rough. "Helping her. She's... Shin, she's a wreck. She's a wreck because of things I need to tell you tonight, and no, the jealousy didn't win, in case you're watching for it. It lost." I reached over and took his hand, the marked one, and folded my fingers around his palm. "You told me the part you didn't have to tell me. That's... that's the whole reason it lost. Thank you."

Something eased in his shoulders.

"That's my day," he said quietly. "Debt to Kenji I can't repay, and Kurone falling apart in a hallway. That's the whole table, my side." He turned his hand under mine so our fingers laced. "Your turn. And Akane, whatever it is, whatever he said to you, however big your word 'big' was on the rooftop... I'm not going anywhere. So, take as long as you need."

I looked at our hands.

And I understood that I'd reached the edge of it — the real one, the thing I'd been carrying since a cold bathroom this morning, before Kenji, before the field, before any of the rest.

The thing that had nothing to do with my family and everything to do with his.

The thing that was going to pull the floor out from under four years of his life the way Kenji had just pulled it out from under mine.

'They didn't abandon you. They were broke and broken. And what you call a utility bill is the last thing two shattered people had left to give you.'

I had it. It was right there. I just had to open my mouth.

"Mine has two parts," I said slowly, and my voice was steadier now, because his hand was in mine and the door was shut and I was finally, finally in the one place where I could do this. "The first part is about my family. My mother, the money, Kenji — what he wants from me, all of it. And I'll tell you every word of it, I promise."

I took a breath.

"But I need to start with the second part. Because it's not about me at all, Shin, it's about you. And it's the biggest thing anyone's ever going to say to you, and I've been carrying it since this morning, and I need you to look at me while I say it."

His face went very still.

"Okay," he said quietly. "I'm looking."

I held his hand tighter, gathered every gentle thing I had, and got ready to talk about his parents.