Reminiscence
Cover art belongs to ake cpflqlf1
Six months after he had graduated from his physical therapy following the arrest, Satoru had tried to make good on the debt he could never repay to his mother who cared for him all those years. To her, he had miraculously matured despite not being conscious since he was an 11-year-old child. Their entire adult relationship was just… gone. And yet, he kept it alive in his memory. He could never forgive Yashiro for what he had done to Hinazuki, Hiromi, his mother, and all of his past victims who remained murdered.
He couldn't be sure but he thought his friends… pitied him, seeing him as their childhood friend who never grew up. To them he was still stuck in the ice. Probably because of their own self-imposed guilt he assumed, speaking with them was awkward.
After publishing his first manga volume however, he was suffering from writer's block and flew back to his hometown: Tomakomai. His childhood had abruptly cut off like a solved revival, leaving him with a profound sense of anticlimax. In his sourceless melancholy Satoru's mind began to wander and his listless sketches turned to Hinazuki... to Kayo and the woman she had become. He selfishly wished he could have seen more of her, that they could have shared a normal youth in the same lifetime… His thoughts then turned to less self-obsessed things and he pulled up Yashiro's confession again, the part about his first victim… Maybe it wouldn't be too much to ask to play hero one last time.
Weeks later he returned to his neglected sketchbook, tracing the lines of Kayo's face almost perfectly from memory. Flashes of a snow-drenched city crossed his mind, Sapporo. Of the forlorn bones that comprised the city, hidden under stark white.
"You were the first. There's nothing I can do for you, not like Akko-nee," he darkly mused.
His sketches turned to a place, a school, lively students, Hinazuki's kindly grandmother. He had learned all he needed to know, all that was left was to see what more fate would spare him. If he could try one final time… Return further back than he had ever gone to perfect things for him, and for all of the others. To the very root of this spreading bane. Leave no room for regrets. ...Please, could he just go back? No, that wasn't right. He demanded that fate cede all its evils to him. He envisioned his past, the very moment he would reprise. As his pencil stroke spiraled around in the curve of his final addition to the scene – her eyes – his vision seemed to draw into the page, flooding his sight with white as the line spooled out, turning to frames of film...
"But I will make you the last."
Satoru had drug his mother deep into the twisting industrial warrens of Sapporo promising her a story – and testing her generous patience. He had even ran away from her, forcing her to chase him. His 9-year-old body was even more exhausted than he usually was in his 20s. "Just a bit further," his rasping breath compelled him on. Just like going through physical therapy, he wouldn't let his weakened body limit him. A door under a red light. The same red light. Frantically picking the lock like he'd practiced, ripping open crates one after the other, that was where he found it: The dead body of a young girl.
"Satoru, why are you running in there!?"
Where was it…! This would all be for nothing if he couldn't–
"Oh my god, Satoru, don't look!" his mother yelled, pulling him back into her protective arms and trying to cover his eyes.
"Mom!" he looked straight up at her with a face of determination beyond his years. "I know she's not alive. Does she have anything you can give to the police?"
"...Stay back," Sachiko warned him, edging closer to the box he had torn open. She found a spilling pencil case labeled "Konoha Kawai." Cast away from it, a black pen that had trailed ink down the side of the crate "Yashiro-sen–"
"Satoru, this is… your new teacher's…!"
After Keion Elementary teacher Shuuji Oogawara was spared from being framed, the investigation focused upon Gaku Yashiro, his coworker. He was arrested for the attempted murder of his fiance, who later agreed to testify, and never began teaching at Mikoto Elementary. Satoru, Kenya, Hiromi, and Sachiko once again delivered Hinazuki to child protective services and her grandmother. She was able to finish elementary school with her friends by bussing to Mikoto. But ironically, without the silver-tongued Yashiro as her teacher and murderous stalker, Tomakomai's board of education decided that she couldn't commute so far to enter a middle school. So she left.
By the time the trial had concluded Satoru had graduated from middle school – this time with all of his friends. Just one who was far from him. He had also, somehow, convinced his mother to move to Furano, a quaint vacation spot and skiing town up in the mountains of Hokkaido where Hinazuki's grandmother lived. Come to think of it, it was his mother who first dredged up his buried memories of her, told him not to abandon her, and confronted Akemi Hinazuki. Maybe she felt protective of Hinazuki... just as she did of him.
It wasn't the most painful move given her newfound prominence among investigative journalists in the prefecture, but she did have her suspicions about her inexplicable discovery. Still that was hardly enough to drive a wedge between the Fujinumas, especially given Sachiko's unflagging loyalty and Satoru's effort to appreciate his time with his mother and be a more thoughtful son.