The Second Floor Bathroom

(Akane's PoV)

—

Once Shin and I finished another round in the shower, dressed up, and walked out of his house to go to school, I immediately called a Taxi, and it showed up in less than 10 minutes.

"That was pretty fast, wasn't it?" Shin said, adjusting his school bag.

"Guess so," I replied, stretching my arms. "On the way back, you'll carry me like a princess, okay?" I smiled.

Shin giggled. "I'll try."

The ride to school was pretty 'peaceful'.

The corridors were normal, and the whole building had that specific low hum it gets during the preparation of the spring festival, with half the students carrying rolled banners and cardboard, and the other half pretending to study. At the same time, the committee shouted about the second-floor allocation.

Near the lockers, Sora was waiting for us with a warm smile on her face, holding a lot of paperwork in her hands.

"Good morning, you two!" She said, her voice cheerful.

"Oh, Good morning, you beautiful idol," I said, waving my hand. 

"Good morning, So-" I shut his mouth and leaned close to his ear. "Don't call her by her name here at school, dumbhead."

"Right," He replied, before clearing his throat. "G-Good morning, Fujimoto-san." 

Sora giggled and said, "Good morning, Ishikawa-kun. Are you ready for today? We have a special meeting with the student committee today, and Takaneda-sensei personally asked me for you to be my assistant. I don't think it will take long." 

"Uh," Shin looked at me for an instant before returning his gaze to Sora. "It's fine for me. What is the reason for this meeting?" 

"Food stalls, materials for the bonfire, and logistics stuff. It should be a short meeting, and I need some support," Sora said, but I saw a little blush on her cheeks.

Shin moved his gaze towards me, like he was searching for some approval.

"Mh? What's wrong, Ghost Boy?" I said, crossing my arms. "Don't mind me, just go. I trust this little angel."

For some reason, I felt no jealousy.

I saw a small sigh of relief coming out of his mouth.

"Okay," he said, smiling. "Rooftop, later?" 

I nodded. "Yep." I then moved my gaze to Sora. "You should come too, so that I can keep an eye on your safety." 

Sora's eyes widened a little before she smiled. "Yeah. I'll try my best to come." She said.

And then, I waved at both of them and saw them disappear into the corridors.

'Jeez... two days ago I would've gotten angry, that's for sure.' I smiled. 'Guess that Shin was right, I'm making progress.'

But without realizing it, my fists were clenched. That was probably a normal remaining side effect. 

'Well... guess that I still can't 100% lower my guard after all...'

And then, a message arrived from her.

"KURONE:Second floor bathroom. The one by the old music room. Whenever you can."

Of course she'd picked that one. Nobody uses it. There's a window that doesn't close properly, and the whole room stays about four degrees colder than the rest of the building, which is why every girl in this school walks the extra thirty seconds to the one by the stairs instead.

"Akane: Coming right now."

I texted back, starting to walk.

As soon as I arrived, the door swung inward with that dragging scrape it's had for years, and the cold came out to meet me, and there she was.

Kurone was standing at the far end by the window with her arms wrapped around herself, and I stopped in the doorway for a second because my brain needed a moment to reconcile what I was looking at.

She'd stopped doing her hair. That was the first thing.

The school diva Kurone Tsugikawa had spent every school day of her life with her hair arranged as if a photographer might arrive without warning, and now it was pulled back into something functional and slightly crooked, done fast, done by someone who didn't care how it landed.

No makeup either. Without it her face looked younger and much more tired, and there were shadows under her eyes that she hadn't tried to hide.

Her uniform was buttoned all the way to the collar. In February, she used to leave the top two open by default.

Moreover, she wasn't wearing Shin's ribbon she always wore even when she used to sneak into Kenji's bed. That had to mean something.

She saw me and straightened up off the wall.

"Hi, Akane... Sorry for texting you," she said, looking away.

"Hi, Kuro. Don't worry about it. I asked you to." I replied, trying to keep my voice calm.

The sink dripped. Neither of us said anything for a moment.

"H-how is Shin?" she asked.

It came out fast, like she'd been holding it in her mouth since before I opened the door and couldn't stand to keep it there any longer.

Well, if she'd asked me this question in a situation where she was still the narcissistic girl who used to mock Shin for his promise, I would've replied, 'He's doing way too fine. We are living together and having sex five times a day.' Just to hurt her ego.

But after seeing what she had become, I considered a few answers and picked the shortest one. 

"He's fine," I said.

Then, something in her shoulders let go.

"That's good," she said quietly. "That's — good. I'm glad."

Then she looked down at the tiles, and I saw her hands.

She had them clasped in front of her, one wrapped around the other, and both of them were trembling with the kind of tremor that runs up from somewhere deeper than cold and doesn't stop when you tell it to.

I've had that tremor. I know what it looks like from the inside.

"Are you okay, Kuro?" I asked.

Kurone's head came up fast, and she pulled the smile on the way you'd pull on a coat.

"Y-Yeah. Yes. I'm fine." The smile lasted about a second and a half before it slipped off. She looked at her own hands like they'd betrayed her. "It's stupid. I'm just... I get a bit scared walking around by myself now. That's all. It's stupid."

My body reacted to her words.

"Where are your friends, Kuro? Weren't you part of a group?" I asked.

"Busy." She said it lightly. "They're all busy. They always are."

'Busy'.

That word did a lot of work. I let it sit there between us and watched her decide not to explain it, and I understood the whole shape of the last period of her life without needing a single additional sentence.

Kurone had built her entire social status on being on a stage, and this reached its peak when she became my brother's Girlfriend.

Now that they broke up after the horrible thing he had done, every girl who had been orbiting her for four years had quietly recalculated her position.

She was completely alone, possibly for the first time in her life.

I know exactly what that costs, and I know exactly how long it takes to learn to carry it, and she hasn't had anywhere near enough time.

"You could have texted me sooner, Kuro. Why didn't you do it?" I asked, feeling conflicting emotions.

Kurone's face did something complicated. She pressed her lips together hard and looked at the window.

"I... didn't want to take away important moments with him," she said to the glass. "I know how important he is to you. And... I know I always denied you the chance to ask him out. So... I didn't want to disturb you." She spoke, not looking at me, while gripping her arm tightly.

My eyes widened.

There it was.

Not an apology, because she doesn't know how to make one that isn't also a request. But that was he'something.

A small, ugly, honest thing offered up with her eyes pointed anywhere but at me, from a girl who spent years taking things from people and had apparently spent the last days doing nothing but subtracting herself from every room she could.

I let out a breath.

"So," I said, and dropped my bag against the wall. "Why here? Why the bathroom?"

Kurone finally turned to look at me properly.

"Because nobody comes here, you should know," she said. "And because I need to talk to you about Shin's parents."

The cold in that room went straight through me.

"What?"

My voice came out wrong. Too fast, too thin, and I heard it happen and couldn't stop it.

Because Shin had told me about his parents exactly once, at the cemetery, standing in front of his grandparents' grave on the day we skipped school together.

He'd told me all of it. That they'd been good once, before, that they'd loved him, that they'd sat through his piano practice, that the house had been warm.

And then his grandparents died, and his parents couldn't carry it. His father vanished into work and endless trips abroad. His mother lay in bed for months and then started disappearing for days at a time.

He learned to buy groceries and pay the electric bill at eleven so the lights wouldn't get cut. And at thirteen, when his father took a permanent posting in Italy, and they asked him to come start over with them in Europe, he refused because he wouldn't leave the country, wouldn't leave the grave, wouldn't leave Kurone and the pinky promise they had made.

So after one last screaming fight in the living room, they left him a bank account and the house keys and got into a taxi, and they never came back, never wrote, never called. Just the bank transfer. Every month. He called the house a tomb, and he was right.

'I was truly a ghost, after all,' he'd said.

No version of me hears the words Shin's parents and stays calm.

"I found out they left him," Kurone said. "That he's been living in that house alone since he was thirteen. I only found out recently." Her hands twisted around each other. "Akane, I didn't know. For four years... I was constantly in and out of that house. I sat at that table. And I never once asked where they were. I never even noticed there was a question to ask."

"You're saying that you didn't notice a house with no adults in it," I said, my eyes sharpening.

"I noticed nobody was telling us what to do and I thought it was convenient." Her voice cracked on the last word. "That's what I thought. That's all I thought."

She pressed the heel of her hand against one eye, hard.

"And then on Valentine's Day I finished him," she said. "That's what I did. I took a boy whose parents had walked away from him, and I stood in that courtyard and I—" She stopped. Swallowed. "I gave him the last hit. On top of everything else, I was the one who gave him the very last one."

The sink dripped four times.

"I know he'll never forgive me for every time I denied him the chance to live," Kurone said. "I've stopped expecting that. I'm not here for that." She lowered her hand and looked at me directly, and her eyes were red but very steady. "But I want to do something for him anyway. Something real. And I need your help, because you're the only one who can help me."

Every alarm I own started going off simultaneously.

Because that sentence, 'I want to do something for him,' is exactly the shape of every manipulation Kurone Tsugikawa has ever performed.

She has never in her life done anything for anyone without a hook buried somewhere in the meat of it.

She kept Shin in her orbit for a lot of years only to have his validation. She stole his first kiss to mark a boy she didn't even want. She's a person who gives things to be owed.

The wolf in my chest came all the way up on its feet.

"Kuro," I said, and my voice had gone flat and cold and careful. "What exactly do you have in mind? Because I'm perfectly sure that he won't like it."

She heard the change. Of course she did. I've been her best friend for years.

"Please, listen to me, Akane. It's not what you think," she said quickly. "I'm not — Akane, I'm not trying to get back into anything. I know what you're thinking, and I'd think it too." She took a breath. "This is information. That's all it is. I found this out and don't know what to do with it. You're the only person who can decide whether he should have it."

"What?" My voice came out thin. "Kuro, he told me about his parents. I know what happened. The grandparents, the collapse, the fight, the plane. I know all of it."

"You don't know this part," Kurone said. "Nobody does. Not even him."

The window rattled in its frame.

"My mother told me. In the kitchen, in the middle of the night." Kurone wrapped both arms around herself. "You know his grandparents were artisans? Real ones. Legendary, apparently... that's where all the family's money came from, for generations. But his parents never had a scrap of that talent, and they had no idea how to handle money either. As long as the grandparents were alive, it didn't matter. And then the grandparents were gone, both of them, only ninety days apart from each other, and everything collapsed at once."

I said nothing.

"My mother said they worked themselves into the ground trying to keep it afloat. Eighteen-hour days. Both of them, for months, destroying their own bodies to survive." Her voice was thin and careful, reciting. "And it didn't work, and the pressure just... broke their minds. That's how she put it. It broke their minds. By the end, neither of them was a real person anymore. That's why they left."

"He thinks they chose it," I said quietly. "He thinks they just... left."

"I know. And here's the part that's going to matter." Kurone took a breath. "My mother is the reason they went to Italy."

The cold in that room went all the way through me, again.

"She does corporate placement. Executive relocations, international contracts. That's her whole job." Kurone's hands twisted. "She used her contacts, and she built the whole thing. A real contract, a good one, an Italian firm that needed exactly their background. Salaries far higher than anything they could earn here in the state they were in. She did the visas, the paperwork, all of it, and she made one condition when she structured it." Kurone took a deep breath. "That the terms leave enough to keep Shin in that house. That's the entire reason it had to be that job. So there'd be enough to send back every month, on time, so he could stay in his school, in his country, in the house his grandparents built, and finish growing up without losing everything."

"Why would she do that?"

Kurone's mouth twisted into something that wasn't a smile.

"That's what I asked her." She looked at the floor. "She said she did it because Shin had spent years quietly watching over my safety. She'd noticed. Of course she had... nothing in this city gets past her. She said she owed him for it. Ironic... she really expected us to marry." A small tear fell.

She pressed the heel of her hand against one eye.

"And then... she said something worse," Kurone went on, her voice cracking. "She said the ugliest, truest thing. She said that I was the reason he survived those years. That for all my selfishness, for all of it, like the way I used him, the way I kept him close because it was convenient... that stupid childish love of mine gave him a routine. A reason to get up. Something to hold onto so he didn't disappear into the dark of that house after his family walked out." Her breath hitched. "She said I saved him without ever meaning to, and I ruined him on purpose on Valentine's Day, and both of those things are true at the same time."

The sink dripped.

"She knew about Kenji, too," Kurone said, almost to herself now. "The whole time. She said she always knew. She said she let it happen on purpose. That she wanted me to hit the stone floor hard enough to finally learn something, that the world wasn't a playground for my vanity, and that maybe if I lost everything I'd finally understand what real things were worth." She laughed, wet and awful. "So she watched me walk into all of it, as a lesson. But... I didn't tell her about what Kenji did to me; otherwise, there would be a legal war... and I have no proof."

I stood very still with my hand on the edge of the sink.

"He doesn't know any of this," I said quietly.

"No."

"He thinks the transfer is the opposite of love. He calls it administrative. He said it to me in the dark — he said they treat him like a utility bill, and then he laughed, Kuro. He laughed." My throat tightened. "He built his whole self around the idea that they chose to throw him away. That's the floor he's been standing on for four years."

Kurone was crying without any sound at all, her arms wrapped around herself against the cold tiles.

I let a breath out slowly, and then I asked the question I should have led with.

"So why," I said. "Why are you telling me all of this? What is it you actually want?"

Kurone lowered her hand from her eye and looked at me, and for the first time since I'd walked in, her voice came out steady.

"Because I want Shin to reunite with his family, Akane."

The room went silent.

"I want him to be happy. I want him to have the thing he's been missing this whole time — a mother, a father, a home with people in it. He'd spent his whole life alone in a tomb because he thinks nobody wanted him, and none of it is true. His parents are alive. They're broken, but they're alive, and they sacrificed everything they had left to make sure he could keep his life." Her eyes were wet and bright and completely earnest, which was the worst part. "He deserves to know that. He deserves to have them back. And I want to help make that happen. For once in my life, I want to give him something instead of just taking."

I froze.

Because Kurone was looking at me like she'd just handed me something beautiful.

And all I could feel was the floor tilting under my feet, because she had no idea what she was actually asking me to do. And I didn't know what to think about it either. Because I was his family now, and he was mine...