What Was Left To Give

(Akane's PoV)

—

I took a long breath.

And then I didn't say it.

Because sitting there with his hand in mine, the words right on the tip of my tongue, I realized I couldn't just drop something like this on him, not like this.

You don't hand someone the ground back without first checking where they're standing.

I'd had a whole morning to think about what to say, and I'd still ended up sobbing on his chest in the dark. 

Dropping a bomb like that... would've been too much for him.

So instead of telling him, I asked him.

"Shin." My voice came out quiet. "Before anything else... I need you to tell me what you think of your parents."

He blinked, like he was expecting something else.

"My parents," he repeated.

"Honestly. I need to hear it before I can say what I have to say." I said, my voice softening.

He was quiet for a moment. His thumb moved once, absently, across my knuckles, and his eyes went somewhere I couldn't follow — down the hallway of that house, maybe, through four years of silent rooms.

"I... hate them," he said.

Then, before the words had even finished landing, his face did something complicated, and he shook his head slowly.

"Or at least... I'd like to. I've wanted to since they left. But I can't, Akane. I've never once managed it." His voice was unreadable.

"Go on," I said.

He took a breath.

"I hate what they did." His voice stayed flat, but it was the level of something being held. "The leaving. The silence. The transfers... I hate all of that — I can hate the acts. But them?" He shook his head again. "There was a time when this house was full of smiles. That's the problem. I remember it. My mother humming in the kitchen. My father sitting through two hours of me butchering the same piano piece and clapping at the end like it was a concert. Every single time I've tried to hate them, that house full of smiles gets in the way, and the hate falls apart in my hands. So what I'm left with isn't hate at all." He looked down at our fingers. "It's just sadness. A really deep one. That's it."

And there it was.

Everything I needed to know, in his own words, before I'd told him anything. Not hate, but grief. Not a burned bridge, but a bridge he'd been standing on alone for years, waiting for footsteps from the other side.

Then, I asked the second question.

"And if... they came back here." I watched his face. "How would you react?"

His eyes went wide.

For a few seconds, he didn't say anything at all. The question just sat on him.

"I..." He exhaled. "I don't know, Akane. I honestly don't. At first I'd be angry — that part I'm sure of; I'd be so angry I can't even —" his jaw tightened, released. "But past that? I can't know. It's like asking me how I'd react to snow in July. It's not a thing that happens. I stopped building answers for it years ago because the question never came."

And then, there was one more question I had to ask. The last one.

"Would you want them to come back?" I said, my voice softening even more.

And that one broke his face open.

His mouth came half apart, and nothing came out of it.

I watched him reach for an answer and find the shelf empty — watched a seventeen-year-old boy who runs a household alone, who irons his own uniforms and pays his own bills and taught himself to be a whole family in one body, get asked the only question he'd never allowed himself, and not have anything.

"I... don't know, Akane." His voice had gone smaller. "I really don't know. I only know one thing for sure, and it's that the only place I want to be is right here. With you. Everything else is—" his hand made a small, lost gesture "—fog."

Something jumped in my chest, hard.

And I could see it starting in him: the agitation, the fine tremor coming up through his shoulders, the breath going shallow.

So, I moved before the situation would've gotten worse.

I leaned in, wrapped my arms around him, and pulled him against me, one hand going up into his hair, and I held him the way he'd held me an hour earlier, steady and wordless, until I felt his breathing find mine and slow down to match it.

"Okay," I murmured against his temple. "Okay. That's all I needed. You did good. It's alright now..."

"Akane." His voice was muffled against my shoulder. "Why are you asking me these things?"

I closed my eyes.

There was no coming back.

"Shin," I said quietly. "I have things to tell you about them. About your parents."

He went very still in my arms.

Then he sat back, slowly enough to see my face, and his eyes searched mine—and whatever he found there made his jaw set, the way you set your feet before a wave.

"Go ahead," he said.

I kept hold of both his hands. And I told him.

"This morning, Kurone asked to meet me. The second-floor bathroom, the cold one nobody uses." His fingers twitched in mine at the name, but he didn't interrupt. "She didn't call me there to apologize, or to cause trouble. She called me there because she found out something that broke her."

I felt Shin's body reacting to my words. 

"And... what was it?" He asked, his voice shaky.

"She said that she had no idea, Shin. Four years of walking in and out of your front door, and she never once asked herself where the adults were. She told me she'd thought of it as a convenience. Her word. She could barely say it out loud." I said, still holding him close.

Shin's face didn't move. His hands had gone cold in mine.

"So... she talked with her mother, who had returned from a business trip." I took a breath. "And then she told her everything."

"Everything," Shin repeated. His voice had no color in it at all. "What do you mean...?"

"Everything, Shin," I said gently. "Your grandparents died ninety days apart, and everything your family had — the house, the name, the money — all of it stood on them. On their hands, their craft, their reputation. Your parents inherited the house's mortgage, the workshop and the whole weight of it overnight, and they had none of the talent it ran on. None. They weren't artisans. They were two ordinary people standing under a legacy that needed masters to hold it up."

His breathing had changed. I kept going, slow, watching him the whole way.

"So... they worked. That's what happened in those years, the ones where your parents disappeared. They were working eighteen-hour days trying to keep their house from being taken. Both of them, for months, destroying their own bodies to stay above water. And it wasn't enough, and the pressure—"I steadied my voice"—Kurone's mother said it broke their minds, Shin. Not their will. Their minds. By the end, neither of them was a person anymore. They weren't capable of staying in Japan. Not wouldn't. Couldn't."

"Akane—"

"I know it's hard... but there's more. Let me get through it, please. Resist." I gripped his hands tighter. "The moving to Italy. It wasn't luck, and it wasn't your father's company. It was Kurone's mother. Corporate placements, international relocation... that's her whole profession. She saw two people drowning, used her network, and she built them a way out. A real contract, abroad, arranged down to the last paper."

I watched him start to shake his head — the automatic no of a mind protecting its own foundations — and I delivered the last of it before the no could take hold.

"And she attached one condition, Shin. Only one." My voice dropped. "The salary had to be high enough that a large transfer could come back to Japan every single month. Guaranteed. Automatic. Forever. So that a thirteen-year-old boy could stay in his grandparents' house, and keep going to his school, and grow up without losing every last thing he had left."

The room was completely silent.

"That's what the transfers are," I whispered. "That's what they've always been. The whole contract exists because of them. And Kurone's mother did all of it because she'd spent years watching a quiet boy stand guard over her daughter, and she felt she owed him. That's the reason, Shin. You. It was always you."

For a long moment, Shin didn't move at all.

He sat there with his hands in mine and his eyes fixed on a point somewhere in the middle of the coffee table. I watched four years of architecture come down behind his face — the way a building comes down in slow footage, floor folding into floor, the certainty he had lived inside since he was thirteen — 'they chose to leave me, I was a utility bill'— collapsing level by level into the truth underneath it.

Then... his eyes filled. That was the most normal reaction I could expect from him.

"All of this..." His voice came out wrecked, barely voiced. "It's so... fucked up, Akane. I was... I was old enough. I was old enough to understand. If they'd sat down with me at that table and told me about the mortgage, the workshop, any of it... I would have understood. I was already doing the shopping. I was already paying the electricity bill so the lights wouldn't go out. I was already half-raising myself, and they never said one word—" the tears went over, and he didn't wipe them "—they just carried all of it alone, the whole time, and then they broke, and they left, and they let me spend four years thinking I was garbage to them, when the truth is they—"

His voice gave out.

"They erased themselves," he whispered. "For me. They erased themselves, and they never even let me see it."

And he came apart.

I pulled him in.

We shifted without words.

I sat back against the arm of the couch and drew him down to me, and Shin folded into my arms with his head against my chest, and I held him the way nobody in that enormous silent house had held him in four years.

One arm wrapped around his shoulders, and one hand moving slowly through his hair, over and over, the same patient rhythm he'd given me an hour ago, given back now with everything I had.

His tears streamed warm through my hoodie, and I let them, and I pressed my lips to the top of his head and kept my hand moving and said nothing at all, because there was nothing to say that my arms weren't already saying.

"Let it out, Shin. I'm here. And I won't go away." I whispered, still holding him. "It's your turn now..." I tried to joke.

He cried for a long time, holding onto me like a lifeline.

His cry was different from mine. He cried openly. Wrung out. Thirteen years old and seventeen at the same time.

And I held him through all of it, cradling him against me like something I'd been trusted with, and outside the window, the sky went from dusk to dark, and neither of us reached for a light.

Eventually — a long time later — the shaking eased.

His breathing stretched out, ragged edges smoothing. He stayed where he was, heavy against my chest, with my fingers still moving through his hair.

"Shin," I said softly, into the quiet. "Can I ask you something?"

"Mm."

"Would you want to see them? Someday. Not now or tomorrow, just... someday." My hand kept its rhythm. "I'm not asking to push you anywhere. I'm asking because I told you there would never be secrets between us. Not one, not ever, in either direction. That's the only reason I told you all of this tonight instead of carrying it for you. It's yours. It was always yours to know."

He was still for a moment.

Then he pushed himself up off my chest — slowly, his eyes swollen, his face wrecked and open in a way I'd never seen it — and he looked at me.

After that, he wrapped both arms around me and pulled me into him and held on hard enough to press the air out of me.

"Thank you, Akane," he said against my hair, and his voice cracked clean through the middle of it. "Thank you. You really are the love of my life."

My eyes went hot instantly, and I fought it, and mostly lost.

He didn't answer my question but... it made me happy.

"Shh." I got it out steady, barely, the joke arriving just in time to save me. "Careful, ghost boy. Keep saying it, and you'll start actually believing it."

A broken sound came out of him that was half a laugh, and he held on tighter.

"You should, Akane." He said, holding me even tighter.

I couldn't help but smile.

We stayed like that for a while. Then I eased him back just far enough to see his face, and I took it in both my hands — my thumbs at his cheekbones, wiping what was there — and I asked him again.

Softly. With everything I had in my eyes and none of the armor.

"So? Now that you know all of it." My thumbs stilled. "Would you want to see them?"

Shin looked at me.

I watched him actually think about it, and I waited, with my hands on his face and my heart holding still.

"...Yes," he said, after a few instants of silence.

After his words, I smiled warmly at him and pulled his forehead down against mine, closed my eyes, and held him there. It was true, all of it, the warmth and the pride and the love. Everything of it was true.

And underneath it, in the deepest room I have, in the place where the cold things live that I will never let him see —

a small, quiet, ugly fear lit itself like a pilot flame.

'If Shin gets his family back...

...what happens to me?'