Saturday, 9/10

"Ma'am, do you need somewhere to sit?"

Yoshiro got out of his previously occupied chair, gesturing for the elderly lady to take his seat. She feebly sat down, offering him a kind smile in return for his sacrifice. Yoshiro smiled down at her as he gripped the steel pole. He swayed a little as the train began moving, but he barely moved.

"Thank you, young man," the woman croaked. "The youth of these days don't care about us old folk anymore, you know. I truly appreciate your manners."

Yoshiro chuckled. "Of course. Standing kinda gives me a workout from how I have to hold onto the pole, so I guess things worked for the both of us."

The old woman laughed. "Are you still in high school, young man?"

"Yep," Yoshiro said. He turned his body so that she could see the Shujin patch on his white T-shirt. "Third-year."

"Ah, so you'll be graduating soon…" The woman momentarily lost herself in reminiscence, her eyes longingly gazing into the floor of the train. "What are you planning on doing after high school ends?"

Yoshiro thought about that a lot. He had one plan in place, assuming he got into the college of his choice. His grades needed a bit of work, but an exemplary fall semester would help him quite a bit. Yoshiro spent his summer studying in-between therapy sessions with the school counselor, so he was ready to go full-steam ahead on his academics. Maruki helped Yoshiro maintain optimism for what they both knew would be a difficult time.

"I'm applying to Tohoku for business, but I'm not guaranteed to get in. There are a few other schools I'm interested in, but…" Yoshiro trailed off.

"But Tohoku University is the college for you, isn't it?"

Yoshiro was beginning to like this woman quite a bit. Her natural friendliness was admirable. "It seems like that sometimes. It really does," Yoshiro said. With his free hand, he prevented his backpack from slipping off his left shoulder by pulling it tight. "If I don't get in, I don't know... I'm sure I'll figure something out."

"That's the beauty of being young, though," the woman countered. "You have your whole life ahead of you to decide."

"I guess that's true."

The woman continued in her reassurance of Yoshiro. "And there's plenty of time to figure things out. You could be climbing Everest in twenty years, or you could be a police officer chasing bōryokudan. You could really do anything."

Yoshiro disagreed. His life had grown quite limited over the past several months. He didn't have any friends to speak of, as each former member of the volleyball team had withdrawn into their own forms of seclusion and solitude. Yoshiro was among them, spending his time with his mom, Maruki, or at his part-time job at the flower shop in the Shibuya Station underground mall.

But all of that was beside the point. Yoshiro had met someone nice, and he didn't want to burden them with his concerns. He would save them for Maruki, and the counselor would help just like he always did.

Eager to move the conversation to a subject that didn't involve his life, Yoshiro flipped the woman's questions on her. "What did you do?" Yoshiro quickly realized that he didn't know if this woman was in retirement and he may have unintentionally insulted her. "I mean, um, what do you do?"

The woman let out a soft, easy-going chuckle at Yoshiro's correction. "Relax, I'm retired." Her aged, withering grin faded as she stepped back however many years in her past. "I was a school teacher for kids. All of them are grown up now, probably as old as your parents!" She cackled at that, getting a few looks from other passengers, but not caring because of her own joy. Yoshiro admired that.

"When did you decide you wanted to be a teacher?"

"When my father told me to marry this snob, I said no. He told me to get a job, so I decided on being a teacher."

Marriage was a nice thing to think about for Yoshiro, but a realistic thing? Absolutely not. He didn't think he would ever reach that point in life, even with the unending hope and optimism that Maruki usually provided.

Sure, Yoshiro had gotten a girlfriend with relative ease a few months prior, even if for all the wrong reasons. However, he felt such intense regret towards that sequence of events that he shied away from girls at school out of fear of making them uncomfortable. He knew the effect that his presence had on others at Shujin, as the whispers about him never really stopped.

"Did you ever get married?"

"I did, and to someone who I loved, too," the woman smiled. Yoshiro could see her eyes spiting her father who had likely passed on years ago. "You know, you remind me of my husband in his younger years. Short hair, big muscles, and very tall."

Yoshiro laughed off the compliment. "Thank you."

"Do you have a girlfriend, young man?"

"Not at the moment, no."

"Then I'll have to introduce you to my granddaughter. She's about your age, a second-year at Seven Sisters." The woman held a playful, teasing smile. It was surprising for someone of her age, but Yoshiro liked it. "She's already got all the boys chasing after her with flowers, chocolate, and the like."

"If she doesn't like flowers, I don't know how far I'll get with her," Yoshiro joked.

"Nonsense! Who needs petty gifts when you have a grandmother's blessing?" They both laughed as the train rumbled on.

"And what is the derivative of this ?" Higashi-sensei asked the class, pointing at the function written on the blackboard.

The first week or two after summer was always spent reviewing old concepts. Most students didn't do a single bit of math over the summer, and their skills had faded, but Yoshiro was on top of things. In his head, he quickly used the product rule to find the first derivative.

Yoshiro raised his hand, and the teacher nodded for him to answer. "Takata-kun?"

"Eighty-four X to the third minus thirty-six X squared." It was an easy problem that anyone in the class should've been able to get, but some brains needed to be jogged, and others were just too lazy to try. Not Yoshiro, though. Since he'd started working on himself with Maruki, he'd become a teacher's ideal student, answering nearly every question asked to the class.

"Correct," Higashi-sensei said, writing Yoshiro's answer on the board. He continued his lecture on reintroducing derivatives and antiderivatives to the class. Most of the class had grown sick of calculus, but Yoshiro always paid attention. He didn't know exactly why he was so attentive, but something inside him forced him to keep his eyes and ears focused on the teacher at almost all times.

Even when distractions found their way to him. "Try-hard," a nasal voice remarked from behind Yoshiro. Tetsuo Uchida was the usual suspect for the words that went Yoshiro's way, not letting the former volleyball player forget any misstep.

Yoshiro kept quiet and focused on Higashi-sensei. He no longer had a reactionary bone in his body and stuck to pacifism no matter the provocation. Silence only brought more hate in his direction, but Yoshiro had grown used to it, while still doing his best to find the good in the people who hated him so much.

Uchida persisted in his harsh whispers behind Yoshiro. "C'mon, not going to say anything?" As great of a teacher as Higashi-sensei was, he lacked awareness and command over his classroom, never catching any of the hate that came Yoshiro's way. "You know, I'm friends with the delinquent. I could bring him in here and he could beat you into talking."

The same old jokes just didn't get to Yoshiro like they once had. The one time he had reacted, the first time that he'd been made fun of, he had politely told Uchida to stop. Obviously, Uchida didn't care. Yoshiro took the issue to Maruki, and the counselor helped him remove the conviction from anything Uchida said. At this point, it had been too long since Yoshiro cared about the awful things people had to say about him because he'd simply been told not to care by the counselor.

Yoshiro knew that Uchida's words were hollow. Amamiya wouldn't be friends with someone like Uchida. Yoshiro rarely saw Amamiya anymore, though this was intentional and at Maruki's request. Amamiya had all the reasons in the world to hate Yoshiro, and the volleyball player did his best not to upset anyone these days. The same was true for the student council president or any of the people from that club. The rest of the volleyball team had also kept their distance from the gardening club, but Yoshiro didn't know why. Perhaps their sessions with Maruki were similar to his.

"If you're not gonna respond, I could just reintroduce your face to the lockers," Uchida quipped. Yoshiro wouldn't dare act violently, but he knew that he had a significant advantage over Uchida. Sure, Amamiya had been a mismatch on paper, but Uchida was shorter and skinnier than Amamiya.

But it would never come to that because fighting and violence were against school rules, and Yoshiro would never disobey, even if he was able to.

"How was your day today, Yoshiro?"

That's how every afternoon began for Yoshiro for the past three months, summer vacation included. Yoshiro would visit the nurse's office for his daily counseling session, coming into the almost empty practice building over vacation. It felt a little strange at first, but Maruki quickly eased any concerns that Yoshiro had. The counselor had a way with words that Yoshiro couldn't describe, but could easily recognize as a natural talent.

"I met a woman on the train this morning. We talked about what I was going to do after I graduate."

Maruki expectantly tapped his pen against the edge of his clipboard of notes.

"Any issues with that?" Maruki asked.

"She joked that I looked like her husband and that her granddaughter is single."

"And that reminded you of marriage?" Yoshiro nodded, so Maruki promptly adjusted his glasses and did what he did best. "Yoshiro, after our time together, I think we both know that your biggest issue is worrying about things that don't matter right now."

"Well…" Yoshiro thought to himself if that was really true. He couldn't remember any instances where he'd brought something to Maruki that didn't matter at that very moment in time. Then again, memory was becoming an issue. Things felt fuzzy when Yoshiro tried to reminisce back to specific days in the past months, finding nothing but gaps at times.

"Don't worry about marriage. Everyone finds someone for them at some point," Maruki continued. "For now, keep your head in some textbooks and you'll be on a great path."

"But what if I don't get into Tohoku?"

"Life will go on. You don't need to go to one specific school, Yoshiro. You don't even have to go to school." Maruki relaxed in his chair and broke eye contact, a rarity in the sessions. "If I hadn't spent years on my degree, I could've helped hundreds, maybe even thousands, more people by now."

"Wouldn't you not be employed as a counselor if you didn't go to school?"

Maruki ended his comfort and sat forward in his chair, meeting Yoshiro with eye contact yet again. "I wouldn't be at Shujin, but I don't need my profession to be listed as a counselor. For example, take our sessions. We just talk to each other."

"But isn't what you say informed by the knowledge you have from your degree?"

"Maybe. I try to offer advice to you and talk to you based on what I think is best for you and your happiness."

It was fair for Maruki to take the moral high ground. Yoshiro had no claim to such a thing, given what he'd done, but Maruki did confuse him at points. As much as Yoshiro poured into these sessions, telling the counselor exactly what he'd done that day and how it felt, he knew very little about Maruki. He remembered asking something about the counselor's past at one point, but his memory had a gap in place of an answer.

Yoshiro went to the fridge as soon as he got home from working at the flower shop. The shop was never too busy and the work was easy, but his shifts always left him hungry by the end. Unfortunately, the fridge was empty of anything that could serve as dinner. This was a common occurrence, as Yoshiro's mother didn't go to the grocery store too often.

Yoshiro opened the cupboard next to the fridge to his stock of instant ramen cups. He had little to no cooking ability, so instant ramen remained a common theme through his evenings when the fridge was lacking. Yoshiro poured the necessary water into a cup before sticking it in the microwave for a few minutes.

Lonely dinners were a near-nightly event. Ayumi Takata had semi-distanced herself quite a bit from Yoshiro following the incident. They still spoke every day and sometimes ate dinner together, but it wasn't the same as it had been half a year prior. Yoshiro didn't blame his mother; only himself.

Tonight would be another solitary dinner. Yoshiro hadn't seen his mother yet that day, but since she hadn't already come downstairs from her room to prepare dinner, he would probably end up not seeing her at all.

Yoshiro finished preparing his ramen and set it down on the table to cool. In the meantime, he got his calculus textbook out of his bed and reviewed the new material from class. It had become a habit to squeeze studying into any free time that Yoshiro had, as there wasn't anything else to do.

The book softly hit the wooden surface of the table as Yoshiro shifted his focus. He slowly ate his ramen, chewing with perfect pace and composure. Yoshiro blankly stared ahead at the wall of him in the Takata home, recapping his day in his head and thinking of ways to improve himself.

But, as usual, Yoshiro's day had been perfectly normal with no speed bumps. He was kind to strangers on the subway and at the flower shop, he had a productive session with Maruki, and kept up with his studying. All of it had been done before and the cycle had been locked in for a long time. Yoshiro didn't mind the tedium because it simply didn't bother him, almost like it literally couldn't get to him.

Satisfied, Yoshiro tossed his now-empty ramen cup into the trash and cleaned up the spot he'd used at the dining table. No matter what his mother thought of him, the least he could do was clean up after himself. In his mind, Yoshiro owed her for tolerating him and giving him a place to sleep after everything that transpired.

After another day of enthusiastically wasting away, Yoshiro retired to his room. Sleep never eluded him when needed it, and he closed his books by the time his digital alarm clock struck ten. Yoshiro settled under the covers for the night, closing his eyes as the fan resting on his window sill blew cool air in.

With closed eyes and attentive ears, Yoshiro heard someone walking around the house. The thin floors and walls kept all footsteps within earshot. A door opened in the hallway outside of Yoshiro's room, but he remained undeterred from his destination of sleep.

The walking grew louder. Yoshiro assumed it was his mother and persevered in his usually straightforward task of sleeping. Ayumi being awake at this hour was an entirely new thing, as she was usually in bed an hour or two before Yoshiro. At that point, the only thing blocking Yoshiro from his goal was the sheer confusion of trying to think of what his mother was up to.

Nonetheless, he kept his eyes closed and his breathing steady. It probably didn't matter, and Yoshiro would just move on to the next day. Then the day after that, then the day after that, and the day after that, etc.

The thumping rhythm of the walk halted just as it reached the other side of Yoshiro's door, making him realize that she was coming in. He had a strict sleeping schedule that Ayumi knew he adhered to, so Yoshiro kept his eyes closed out of fear of disappointing his mother with him not being asleep.

Strangely, Yoshiro didn't notice the lights turn on in the room. While his closed eyelids blocked his vision from any such thing, he could tell that his mother left things dark in the room as she walked through it. Her soft, steady footsteps inched towards Yoshiro in his bed until they suddenly stopped, leaving only the electric fan at Yoshiro's window to buzz in the background.

Yoshiro did his best to pretend he was sleeping, but he doubted his acting abilities when he felt a hand on his mouth. He initially questioned how she'd noticed that he wasn't asleep so easily until a more immediate question came to mind: why was her hand still covering his mouth?

Yoshiro opened his eyes to question his mother's strange action, but the hand didn't relent and Yoshiro was only met with a nightmare in his waking life. Stiff fingers pressed into Yoshiro's cheeks as a pair of cold, empty white eyes stared down at him. Something resembling blood trickled down Ayumi's face, with her hair in wavy, misdirected strands as well. Yoshiro screamed into his mother's hand but stopped as his mother stood still. She kept her hand at his mouth but did nothing.

This was Yoshiro's chance. He could easily sit up, push Ayumi away, and get out of the room, but he didn't. He couldn't. He didn't know why, but he just couldn't. Yoshiro recognized the danger that he was in, but his own brain wouldn't let him raise even just a finger to save himself.

Even when Ayumi's other hand emerged from the bedside to hold something over Yoshiro's face, he did nothing. Even as she lowered the knife to Yoshiro's throat, he did nothing. Even as the cold steel pressed to his quivering throat, he did nothing. Even as she dragged it across his flesh, he did nothing.

When she finally lifted the knife and dropped it to the carpet, realization finally kicked in for Yoshiro. He tried to scream, but only muffled gargles came through the hand that death gripped his face. Yoshiro's throat warmed from the outside as more and more blood oozed.

He would've begun to feel it soaking into his bedsheets if things weren't rapidly fading. Panicked, gurgled breaths slowed, limbs stopped spasming, and two eyelids stopped fluttering. As he bled out in his own bed, with his own mother as the culprit, Yoshiro couldn't help but feel elated as life slipped out of his grasp.

He loved every second of it.

A/N: Surprise... here's the actual end of the second act. I originally wanted to get this out within a few days of finishing the last chapter to surprise people, but I ended up pretty burnt out after completing 60.

Even though this chapter is out, I'm still on break. I'm going to start the September outline within the next few days, then do a chapter for my other fic, and then I'll be done with the break when I finish editing the September outline. Until then, thank you guys for reading and I hope that you guys have a great March!