Things Worth Keeping

(Akane's PoV)

—

The super extra spicy delivery arrived forty minutes later, and I even argued with Shin because he wanted to be the one to pay.

By then I had made my decision.

I made it while I was scrolling through noodle options with Mordecai wedged under my chin, and I made it fully, the way I make things.

His parents said that they'd be willing to come back to Japan because they miss him. And we renewed our promise of 'no secrets.'

But still, I had decided that I wasn't going to tell him about his parents' will.

Not yet. Not tonight, not tomorrow, not until it was real enough to hold in two hands. Because I knew exactly how he would've reacted to such a bomb.

He would probably be super shocked and then take that sentence, build a house inside it, and then he'd spend every day between now and whenever waiting, checking his phone, flinching at the doorbell… literally living just for the moment he'd meet them.

He'd already been made to wait four years for people who never came. I wasn't going to make him wait again on my word. He doesn't need to live on a possible illusion.

I wanted to see him smile for real, and hold that smile forever.

So I'd hold it. I'd watch him. I'd help Kurone with whatever she needed and let her mother finish the work she'd started, and when everything will be certain, I will make the best surprise for him ever.

On the festival day, maybe. With everything already arranged, so that all he had to do was look up and find them standing there.

That was the plan and it was a good plan, maybe. It was made of love, from the top down.

And underneath it, in the basement of my soul, that small cold, insecure creature was very quiet and very still, and did not object at all, luckily.

'Maybe, I am not that monster's daughter.'

A few minutes after the food had arrived and our little but absolutely cute argument, Shin brought the food to the low table, and we ate on the floor with our backs against the couch and something Korean and low-budget playing on the television with the subtitles on.

He got about four minutes into the extra spicy before the trouble started.

"It's fine," he said. "Everything's going well."

"Mm." I smirked mischievously.

"It's actually — it has a nice heat to it." He added, his lips half parted like he was gasping for air.

"Mm-hm." I was about to laugh.

"It's a pleasant warmth-" he spoke, but his eyes had begun to water. I watched him take another deliberate mouthful, chew with the composure of a man being interrogated, swallow, and then sit very still while a slow flush climbed up his neck and into his ears.

"You're crying, ghost boy," I observed, teasing him.

"I am not crying. My eyes are — it's the steam." He blushed.

"There's no steam. That bowl's been ten minutes open," I said, continuing to eat like nothing was happening.

"Residual steam." He said, trying to cool down his mouth with his hand.

I couldn't help but giggle. He was both so adorable and pathetic, I swear.

Then, I reached over, extremely graciously, and pushed my water glass across the table toward him.

"Take it, darling. It will help you." I said, smiling.

He ignored it out of pride for another eleven seconds and then drained half of it in one go, and I laughed at him with my whole chest.

He then glared at me over the rim with his ears pulsing red, and something in the room that had been clenched finally let go. We were returning to our normal selves.

Suddenly, a girl on screen crawled up a wall backwards, probably scared by some monsters, and we both said "there it is" at the same time, and the evening became almost aggressively ordinary.

I was glad that we could finally have a peaceful moment for ourselves after the emotional rollercoaster of today.

I kept watching him with love in my eyes while I let him finish his noodles and surrender the last third of the spicy portion to me without comment. I let the movie do its stupid predictable thing.

And then, when the credits started rolling on something neither of us had really watched, I set my chopsticks down and turned so I was facing him, cross-legged, with Mordecai in my lap.

"Shin." I called, my voice soft.

"Mm?" He turned to me, his eyes still wet.

"I want you to tell me something."

He raised his right eyebrow after my innocent request. "That's a dangerous opener from you."

"It's not a bad thing, don't worry. I don't want to hear about that gyaru slut." I rested my chin on the plush's flattened hood. "Tell me about them. Your parents. Back when the house was full of smiles."

After my words, he went still.

That was the most obvious reaction.

"Akane-"

"I don't want to hear the sad things this time," I said quickly. "I don't want them. You gave them to me at the cemetery, and you don't owe it to me again." I nudged his knee with mine. "I want the stupid stuff. The funny stuff. Something that made you laugh when you were eight."

Shin looked at me like he saw an unknown species of alien.

"Why?" He asked.

And there it was. The honest question.

"Because for four years the only version of them you've been allowed to keep is the one that walked out," I said. "That's the whole file. Two people who left. But after you've known everything, I think you finally realized that they are just people. People whom you once loved. Who did dumb things at breakfast." I shrugged one shoulder. "I know that you've got a bunch of good years in your head that you locked up because the bad ones made them too costly to revisit. I'd like you to revisit one, and maybe smile. That's all."

Shin looked at me for a long moment.

Then he leaned back against the couch, and let out a breath, and stared up at the ceiling.

"My mother," he said slowly, "could not cook."

I sat up straighter. "What?"

"She was terrible. Nah… even worse than that. But… she was good at everything else. She ran this whole house in some ways: she could fix a washing machine, she did the accounts for my grandfather's workshop in her head… but you put her near a stove and something went wrong on a molecular level." A small smile started at the corner of his mouth without his permission. "She once set water on fire."

"That's not possible." I said, giggling.

"There was oil involved. Technically the oil was on fire. But she insists- insisted-" the correction caught him for half a second, and then he pushed through it "-that it was the water."

I laughed, and he glanced over at the sound, and the smile got a fraction wider.

"So my father did the cooking, mostly. And he was fine, he was competent, but he had this thing where he had to narrate it. Every meal was like a television program. Full commentary with dramatic pauses like: 'And now… the garlic! Voilà!'"

"No. You can't be serious," I covered my mouth.

"With voices, Akane. He did voices. The garlic had a voice, you know?" He pinched The bridge of his nose.

"What did the garlic sound like?" I asked, leaning closer to him.

"No, Akane. I'm not doing the garlic voice."

"Shin."

"I'm not."

"Shin. I have suffered greatly this week. I've earned the garlic voice. Be a man and spoil your girlfriend, that's an order." My voice left no room for argument.

He put his hands over his face, and through his fingers, in a deep and utterly ridiculous baritone, said, "I am the garlic. I have arrived."

I silently stared at him for a few instants before I laughed so hard I fell sideways into the couch cushions and had to be helped upright by the armrest.

"There was a whole cast," he went on, once I'd recovered, and he was properly smiling now, the shutter all the way up. "The onion was nervous about everything. The rice was very formal. My mother used to eat with her hand over her eyes going, 'his colleagues must think he's insane,' and he'd say, 'I don't do it at work,' and she'd say, 'you absolutely do it at work, considering how childish you and your friends are.'"

"Did he do it at work?" I asked.

"He definitely did it at work. I'm pretty sure about it. He was a funny man." He smiled.

I hugged the plush against my chest and watched him. He had turned toward me at some point without noticing, one knee up, his hand moving while he talked. He looked younger than he was.

"Now… tell me another one. I'm really enjoying this." I said.

I was actually enjoying to see him smiling. 

Little by little, he was talking of his parents more freely, and that was exactly what I wanted.

'You have no idea of how beautiful you look right now, Shin.' That's it. My beloved boyfriend.

"The piano," he then said, like it had been waiting.

"Go." I smiled warmly.

"You already know when my father bought it to me, saying that music was the only thing that would've never left me alone, right?" He asked.

"Yeah. I remember that. I'm not stupid, I always listen to you when you speak, moron." I giggled.

"Good. The problem was that I was… awful. Not the beginner kind of awful. I remained bad for years. Listening to me playing was a literal torture." A breath. "But my father would come home at seven, dead on his feet, and instead of going to bed he'd sit in that chair by the door and listen to me destroy the same eight bars for two hours." His voice went quieter. "He always listened to me. There wasn't a single time he didn't. And at the end he'd clap like I'd played a concert hall."

"That's not funny," I said. "That's the opposite of funny."

"The funny part is that he was tone deaf."

I blinked. "What?"

"Completely. Couldn't hold a note, couldn't tell if I'd played the right one. He had no idea whether any of it was good." Shin laughed, and it came out cracked in the middle. "He sat there for years applauding sounds he couldn't evaluate. My mother told me once he asked her, privately, whether I was actually improving, because he genuinely couldn't hear a difference. And she said, 'no, not really,' and he said, 'well, don't tell him,' and he kept coming home and sitting in that chair. But I was still happy to have him to support me in his clumsy way, you know?"

I couldn't say anything for a second.

"On the other hand, my mother hummed," he said, softer. "Constantly. She had one song which I have no idea what it was because I've never heard it anywhere else in my life, and she hummed it while she did literally everything. You always knew where she was in the house. That's-" he stopped. Swallowed. "That's the thing I forgot I remembered. That you could stand anywhere in this house and know exactly where my mother was. The song you've heard me playing… that was my mother's song."

I felt a shiver down my spine despite the living room was very quiet. In the end, he always cared about them.

He was staring at nothing, and his eyes had gone bright, but nothing came down his face.

I moved over and leaned against his shoulder, and he put his arm around me without looking.

"There are a lot of things I wanted to bury," he said eventually. "But in the end, they always come out, no matter what."

"But you're smiling now, at least" I said.

"I kept thinking that if I remembered the positive part, the pain would've been more. Like the happy stuff was evidence against me. Proof that I'd lost more than I was admitting to. That's why pretending to hate them was easier."

"And now? What do you feel?" I whispered, my voice soft.

Shin was quiet for a moment.

"I feel… lighter, like I got a weight off my shoulders," he said, sounding almost surprised. "Now it feels like they used to be here."

I closed my eyes and pressed my forehead into his shoulder.

'Good,' I thought. 'Good. Keep that one. Think about it every day this week if you can, because you're going to need somewhere warm to stand.'

Because whenever Kurone's mother finished stitching things together, two people were going to step off a plane and walk back into this house, and the boy sitting next to me was going to have to decide, in real time, in front of them, what he felt. And I could not do that part for him.

The only thing I could do was to make sure that when the moment came, the version of them he had in his hands wasn't only the taxi and the silence of the bank transfer.

That was worth a secret. I decided that it was. No doubts.

"Hey," Shin murmured above me. "Thank you."

"For what?"

"For asking, Akane." His hand moved slowly through my hair. "You're the first person who asked what they were like when I loved them. And I didn't expect to answer the way I did. It's all thanks to you."

Something twisted under my ribs, sharp and hot and not entirely clean, and I buried it in the side of his shirt where he couldn't see my face.

"Well," I said. "Somebody had to. And it had to be your beloved girlfriend, of course."

We stayed like that a while. Outside, the world fell into night. The television offered us another movie and neither of us reached for the remote.

"Akane."

"Mm."

"What are you thinking about?"

A truly unexpected question. Not predictable at all.

I lifted my head and gave him a flat look and said, "I'm thinking that the garlic voice is going to live in my head forever and I've forgotten what peace feels like."

Shin laughed, pulling me in tighter, and then reached for the remote with his other hand, before starting the next movie.

And I let him.

My choice of staying silent wasn't a lie. Not technically. Not really.

I told myself that twice, and it worked both times, and I sat there in his arm with a plush necromancer in my lap and a phone in my pocket holding the best news of his life, and I watched a girl on a television screen walk into a basement she'd been warned about.

I didn't care about tomorrow.

In this moment, I only wanted to stay with him…