Author's notes

Reviewer's corner

First of all, thanks to everybody who reviewed! (in reverse order) RNSaga, Napster, really-great-noodles1, Owaranai Destiny, Keikun4283, idiot564, RedPBass, hopeless, Crain, Endless Sky, Sherwin, and Al! Ooh-fuckin-rah, and rock the fuck out, and all them other vulgar variations on a theme.

Nigakki is now officially over, and it's pretty apparent to me that there will be a sangakki, so I guess I'm not breaking anybody's canon yet. Which is good.

Special thanks go to RedPBass for his help identifying some areas where my sentence structure could use some … structuring.

Owaranai Destiny: I'm actually a fairly meticulous planner; in my subconscious, anyway. Worry not, Karen isn't gratuitous. (Can you call somebody gratuitous? Even if they're not a token character? I'm totally taking gratuitous back).

really-great-noodles1 (I really like that name): Harima hasn't changed much, eh? I hope to convince you otherwise; but all in good time.

Sherwin: Let me know what you think of Eri's "what-happened-the-last-few-years story" :)

I don't know if you've noticed, but (as in all of my fiction) each of my chapters are titled after songs that I feel fit the chapter. Guess the artist (google is cheating) and get a gold star!

Some people carry on / some just stay right where they are / our worlds divide the sight

I'm afraid that our stories will never be told

Chapter three

Worlds divide

"My…dog?"

Nishido gaped at one, then the other. When he'd done that, he started the process over from the beginning; this went on for quite some time, but he wasn't the only one struck near-dumb from the surprise. Harima's deductive logic hadn't really undergone any advances in something like twelve years, but his wit had sharpened—this was almost a requirement for professional writing, really, and at the same time, a by-product of the career—and he knew well enough, at least, when he was wrong. Unless he and Yakumo had both acquired some incredible precognitive gift, there was nothing wrong with Nishido's dog.

Maybe it was Harima's innocence that had been left in the dust by the rest of his brain. That childish, naïve trust, in spite of all circumstance. How could daddy be gone? He said he was only going out for a pack of cigarettes. Yakumo had said she was going to do something with animals. Then, what was she doing standing in the office of Shakodan Publications' head editor? What was Nishido doing introducing her as his new editor?

And why the hell couldn't he think of anything to say? That wasn't him.

"You're…working here, imouto-san?" he said, lacking anything more substantial to say on the matter. Maybe it was the surprise, or his brain struggling with the two perceived opposites—Yakumo's career path as she had explained it to him over half a decade ago, and the reality of what he was seeing in front of him; or maybe it was simply a lack of sleep, taking its toll on his waterlogged brain.

Or maybe it was that she was laughing. While two of the most important men at Shakodan Publications stared at her each other in apish confusion, she held her hand over her mouth politely and seemed to positively shake with mirth.

"What's wrong with my dog?" Nishido said at last, which only seemed to add to Yakumo's amusement. "When I left, he was fine."

"Nothing's wrong with your dog," Harima said after a brief pause. "I think." For some reason he couldn't quite orate, he looked at Yakumo, as though searching for confirmation. This sent her into a fresh bout of giggles, and for the moment, it seemed that the two men could do nothing but wait for them to subside—Nishido, nowhere near as thick as Kenji, had discerned that maybe the artist was blowing smoke out of his ass. It wouldn't have been the first time he'd done it.

No, that wasn't right, either. As the pretty girl giggled over something he didn't quite understand, he studied Harima. Studied his expression, somewhere between pensive and…something else; something he could see in the worried jilt in his eyes, the crease in the bridge of his nose, in his eyes, wide open. It was the eyes that caught him; they were wild and frightened, like those of a child not quite sure where his mother was, lost in a mall but not yet at the point where he would become a screaming wreck. On the way, no doubt, but not there yet.

It reminded him a little bit of a helpless kid. It reminded him a little more of a story Yoshida had once told him.

Somewhere near the beginning of Harima's career, before he'd quit drinking and started to make it big, Yoshida had said—after putting a few back, of course; the man made a clam look chatty until he'd put a few back—and before he'd really gotten to know anybody at the office, he'd apparently been out getting shit-hammered (people like Harima, Yoshida said, didn't go drinking. They went to get shit-faced or they didn't go at all) at a local dive during the Winter Olympics. A few minutes before midnight, Yoshida had gotten a call on his work cell—it had scared both him and his wife plenty cute, because they had both been ankle-deep in a horror movie, since neither of them ever gave two shits about the Olympics—and when he answered it, Harima had been bawling. Yoshida took it in the kitchen, he said, since he had a feeling it would spoil his horror-movie mood and he didn't want his wife to lose it too, and a good thing too. Kenji told him to turn the Olympics on. He did, and didn't see anything special—a skier named…Tsukimo or Yukamoto or something, (at this point, something niggled at Nishido, but he put it out of his head for the moment) beating the Americans and the Russians at what was apparently their own game. Harima hadn't been particularly coherent after that, so Yoshida told him to stay where he was, that he would come pick him up.

By that point, he'd put more than a few back, so his descriptive talents were typically fairly limited, but he managed to get the point across: Harima was an absolute trash heap by the time he picked him up. He couldn't quite get the words straight in his mouth to describe precisely what the man looked like at that moment—maybe that was why he was editing and not writing professionally—but the gist was this: It was the eyes. Not because they were bloodshot from the tears and cigarette smoke; not because of the twin chalky streaks tracing down his cheeks; not because of the way his eyebrows were ruffled and matted, or the way his pupils didn't seem to quite dilate properly. It was the way they were wide-open and inviting, pleading. Come back, Mommy. Don't leave me. Don't make me do that again.

Like a child's.

Like a child's. Tsu. Tsu.

Tsukimo? Tsukamo? Tsumako?

No, there was another syllable.

"Do you two know each other?" At this point, Nishido felt that he was essentially pointing out that, holy shit, this room was filled with air, but he felt it needed to be clarified.

"Eh…" Harima shook his head once, closed his eyes, and when he opened them, he looked a couple of worlds better. "Yeah, we did. We were friends back in high school. I…did a lot of my first work with her as my assistant."

This surprised Nishido. Wasn't Harima the one who always refused any kind of assistance in the rough stages of his work? The one who penned and inked all of his own pages because, as he said, "it was all he had to do"?

"Harima was the person who got me interested in manga," Yakumo said politely, seemingly now more or less under her own power, "but I could never draw as well as my sister, Tenma."

Nishido thought that maybe Harima's eyes widened a little bit at that, but he couldn't prove it in a court of law.

"So you pursued a career in editing instead?" Nishido found himself saying this as though they were interviewing her all over again, screening her to see if she would find herself separated from the trash that liked to float around the lower levels of the building, trying to "network." Maybe they were.

"Yes, but I also…I like working with the artists. I like helping them. It makes me feel as though…" she trailed off, and Harima frowned, and then, again, his eyes widened a little bit. Maybe, anyway.

"What is this, Nishido? Another interview? Haven't you already hired her?" Harima was quickly regaining whatever it was he'd lost when he recognized Yakumo, and not all of them were pleasant—in fact, Nishido was relatively surprised by how utterly exhausted the man looked; between the bags under his eyes, nearly purple from several nights of restless sleep, and the way his shoulders sagged, seemingly ready to crumple from the force of gravity, Nishido found it a small wonder that the man didn't just collapse on the spot. Yoshida had told him a few times that he needed to watch Harima pretty closely, because if he didn't the kid would overwork himself. Difference was, Kenji tended to overdo it even when he was overdoing it; apparently, he had once fallen asleep at a publicity stunt, because he hadn't slept in half a week. Funny thing about it was, he hadn't drawn in half a week either; Nishido had wondered what, then, he overworked himself at, but Yoshida had told him not to ask, just to be careful, and to watch him closely. Nishido had promised to do that.

Apparently, he had slacked on keeping that promise.

"No, nothing like that," Nishido said. "I'm very sorry, Miss Tsuka—" he stopped dead.

Tsukamoto.

That was the skier's name. He knew it without a doubt.