They're safe for a while, but Nat-chan doesn't show up to school the following Wednesday. Or the next. For days and days. He walks home by himself and it's so lonely, too quiet and he realizes in the back of his mind that he's never felt this way before.
"Hello there."
The voice that stops him sounds like oil and weighs like his mother's old textbooks. A man with green hair is blocking his way. His eyes are darting about the streets. "She's not out here," he says, voice lightning crackles and hailstones.
"Who?" Akihiro can't play dumb and he knows it. He's never been good at being stupid. He knows, though. Somehow his stomach curdles and tells him.
"My daughter." He says the words the same way Akihiro thinks his father would have said 'my wife'. There's fondness, exasperation, uncertainty. There's also an awful sort of detachment, cruelty for the sake of progress.
He's clinical.
(In the future, he knows this well.)
"Who?" Akihiro repeats anyway, like a cartoon owl.
The darting eyes rest on him, and they are rings of red and blue and green and oh-so-cold. "Don't fit the stereotype, little human child," he says and he thinks that the older man would sneer if it wasn't beneath him. "I have no reason to kill you yet. I can still change my mind. Where is Rhythm?"
"What will you do if I tell you?" Akihiro cranes his neck to lock eyes with the man, realizing that Nat-chan has a very good reason not to like her name. He feels small in regards to him, nearly insignificant.
The man smiles, rows and rows of sharp teeth like monsters under the bed and impossible in that mouth. "Take her home where she belongs."
Something rotten runs down Akihiro's spine.