By the time Takeru arrives at his restaurant, Daisuke is ready to punch his teeth in. Withholds the impulse and instead says, "Look what shows its face," breathing harshly through his nose. Kicks the swing door open by its hinges behind him. "Get in here and eat something, for fuck's sake."
Takeru takes off his knit wool hat as he steps inside, and Daisuke finds something else to complain about. "I'll wash it later," he tells him, cutting off the tirade before it can begin.
"How? You've got roots now?" The running joke among them being that by the time you answered the postcard Takeru finally remembered to send you in reply to the one you'd mailed to his last place, he'd already have wandered off to another address, as though his distance from them would ever be anything more than dismissively funny as a concept. The very idea.
"You've got a sink." Tosses his jacket along with the hat onto an empty stool, and takes a seat on the one next to it. Puts his hands on the counter, palms open like a begging, orphaned literary child. "Feed me, please."
Daisuke grumbles some more, but it's not without a sense of real pride that he serves him a bowl of tsukemen with the fresh cold soba he'd been practicing all week. Daisuke could roll noodles in his sleep, but he had never taken to perfectionism as he did when he was in the kitchen, studying with a manic devotion that would have made Jou look like a delinquent. And what a payoff. Takeru scarfs the meal down like he hadn't eaten a thing in days, because he hadn't, really, currently living off of chewing gum, coffee, and cigarettes. The lingering scent of the latter makes Daisuke look on in displeasure, making a show of sniffing the air around his stool. "Why do you live like this?" and Takeru swallows several noodles whole, because Daisuke has never filtered a thought in his life.
Turns to him across the bar counter to make a joking reply, recovered from the initial embarrassment, but decides against it when he sees the begrudgingly soft way Daisuke looks at him. One nice thing about Daisuke, actually, is that he doesn't pity anyone. This might appear as arrogance or insensitivity on someone with less of a noble steak to their character, but on Daisuke it just means that he doesn't judge people for the choices they make to survive the day. It's simply not his business.
It's also why Takeru's here instead of at Yamato's, though he'd promised otherwise, stalling the return home. He'd gone to see his father, then to Iori, and now Daisuke's ramen joint, all in the days after Hikari'd left their motel room. He's running out of excuses now, uncomfortable with all of it. His brother had only very recently made it to the list of people he can't stomach facing at the moment, because that would mean facing Sora, too, and thereafter Jou, then Mimi, then Koushiro, and then Taichi. This chain reaction is still somehow less a problem than a conversation with Yamato, who might judge like he breathes but nonetheless will invent second chances wherever there shouldn't be when it comes to Takeru. It's the kind of love that is diagnosably insane, and Takeru also wishes he had grown into the kind of man who could deserve a brother who loved him like an insane person. As it is, he can't even handle answering his friends' postcards.
Daisuke is watching him openly, contemplating his own question to him. "I mean, do you like it that much?"
"Being a journalist?" Takeru shrugs. "I'm good at it." An understatement. His father collected everything from his participation certificates for joining literature clubs in school to the framed article for Reuters with his contributing byline that had won the international reporting team a Pulitzer, clippings of which Sora kept proudly displayed in the family album.
"I guess," concedes Daisuke with a frown. "I don't know why you still do it though. Aren't you supposed to be writing children's books?"
"I am a man of many talents."
Grunts a bit at that, a nonverbal and noncommittal retort. Takeru grins at him, wipes broth off of his mouth with the back of his sleeve. Daisuke grimaces again. "You're gross. You can shower at mine first, have a beer before you go home."
He could use one, steel himself before he has to see Yamato later, but he doesn't want to take up more of Daisuke's time. Plus, he's almost certain Wallace hates him.
"And don't worry, Wallace doesn't hate you," Daisuke is saying now, yelling from the back room where he'd taken Takeru's empty dishes.
Takeru shivers, spooked. "He definitely doesn't like me." Had come to this conclusion the night before Shin's first wedding, after the worst fight he had ever had with Hikari, Wallace the only unintended witness to the things he'd said to her.
"You don't even like you," Daisuke's next perceptive arrow, right through the head and the heart. It's the kind of sting that feels a little good in this disturbing way, and confirms Takeru's self diagnosis of being a secret masochist. That'd explain so much, honestly, even though his therapist disagrees. Daisuke comes back to the bar counter, his apron already unraveling at the waist. Hangs it neatly by the other staff's on the wall behind the bar. "So what's that matter?"
He swallows to hide the surprise at Daisuke's easy summation of his darkest problems. Takeru could not remember ever liking anything about himself. He didn't know that wasn't normal, for a very long time. "Well, you got me there."
Daisuke beams, unable to discern sarcasm in the wild. "I don't have anything at home, though, so if you want seconds, now's your chance."
"A chef with an empty fridge?" Raises an eyebrow for the drama.
His nose pinches, finally a little haughty. "Only the professionals ones."
"Poor Wallace," sighs Takeru.
Clucks his tongue. "Never 'poor Daisuke' with you, is it?"
Takeru laughs. "What do you need my sympathy for? You've got the best life out of all of us."
He doesn't bother being humble about it. "I really fucking do, don't I?" Grins at him, this obnoxiously honest smile, as bright as sunlight. "How the hell did that happen?"
Takeru has a couple of theories, but out of all of them, Daisuke has always had the least amount of patience for his tendency to read people like they were characters in a novel. "You need to live in the moment more," he'd told him off once, back in school, caught up in the next mystery he had to unearth, uncover, shed writerly light upon. Their worlds kept getting more and more complicated, the tensions between them, and Takeru wanted to know everything, a compulsive impulse Daisuke made a point to vocally suspect, and often, because what good could it really do? He had been so adamant, so convicted by this simple philosophy, that Takeru hadn't bothered to counter it. Besides, it was good advice. He even follows it too well sometimes, when it comes to Hikari.
Every person he's dated knows about Hikari. The words he would use to describe her, or in some cases dismiss worries about her, changed from situation to situation, but they never came close to what he believes she really is to him. Takeru would rather not put that into words. Even then, a few partners would fill them out for him, and then get upset if he wouldn't immediately agree with the labels they'd use.
Takeru had no defense for this, or for his reactions. His girlfriend before Maria had even called Hikari his soulmate, and he had actually laughed out loud at that, flinching like she'd cursed him, because fate had really nothing to do with it. He doesn't know how to explain it. He simply doesn't believe his life is his own. Instead, Takeru lives in two realities simultaneously. One is lived alongside the people who believe he is a good person with a promising future and something meaningful to contribute to the world, and the other is lived with Hikari.
He hadn't discovered these words on his own. It occurred to him during the winter he'd visited his mother in Portugal, Yamato refusing to go with him, vindictive only when it came to her. Takeru had brought back the small knit hat and jumper kit that Natsuko had made for Yamato's youngest, whose birth she'd missed for the same reason she'd missed his first, traveling two worlds on her journey of self discovery. Sora wrote a thank you card and signed it from the four of them, tucking a new family photograph in the envelope, made sure the baby wore the hat at least, the jumper still too large. She had to call Takeru when the card came back, returned to sender on account of the recipient address no longer being deliverable, so that he could stay up with Yamato at their dining table, not saying a word to each other as they went through the case of beer he'd brought along, enough just to be in the same room.
Takeru sympathizes with his mother and brother both, but even then knew better than to let Yamato know this. Instead, he had waited all night until Yamato, finally speaking as the sun began to rise, asked Takeru how he could keep forgiving Natsuko every time she did this to them. "The same way you forgive me," he'd said, making Yamato look at him funny, the connection drawing later than it normally would have if his head hadn't been so crowded in grief. When it clicked, Yamato had stood up, pausing behind Takeru's chair to touch the back of his knuckles to his temple, a rough affection. "You're nothing like her."
He wasn't convinced then, and he still isn't. Their parallel realities are too troubling for him, even if he weren't so charmed by a life lived as metaphor. Natsuko and Hiroaki even had the same age difference, nearly, as Hikari and Shin. They'd met at Hiroaki's college reunion, her the girlfriend of a classmate's younger sibling, having moved to the country to be with him, not knowing a word of the language. Attended with her perhaps-to-be and perhaps-brother-in-law-to-be with the hope of meeting some friends outside of this small circle, and left the next morning with Hiroaki's phone number written on the back of the hand he'd put his own ring on less than a year later, Yamato already on the way. When Takeru had been old enough to understand the complexity of this history, to begin to see the reality of his parents as nothing more than mere humans, his perspective hadn't changed all that much. It only confirmed what he had grown up believing, watching Natsuko and Hiroaki fall out over each other as quick as they had fallen in, and calling that a love story. Love is just the thing that wrecks you.
Koushiro smiles wide when he sees her, stepping from behind his standing desk. Hikari doesn't get more than almost to her tiptoes to hug him, careful with her reach. "Are you doing okay?"
"I should be asking you that," he says, drawing back to look her over, like he were checking for scrapes and bruises. Awkward with the brotherly doting, even if quite pleased to take up this role. An only son, he had grown up visiting the Yagami family apartment so often Susumu referred to him as his third child, and Yuuko would make him a birthday cake every year while still getting the date wrong every single time, always off by a day or five, Koushiro too polite to ever say so.
"I'm all right." Lets him go, but stays on her toes to look at the dozing baby held in the sling around Koushiro's back. She tucks a thick brown curl behind a small ear. "When did he go down?"
"An hour ago. He sleeps better when he's held," an observation delivered after several experiments on the matter, if the state of Koushiro's home office is any indication. Blankets, nappies, and soft toys are strewn everywhere, along with board books whose damp corners had been chewed down with enthusiasm. He takes after his uncle , Mimi beamed, such a good student already , which Jou had only been too eager to claim as fact, despite their lack of relation. Uncles and aunties made everywhere and overtime, in their group.
Hikari smiles when Keitaro cuddles his cheek into her palm in his sleep, sighing to himself. An overly affectionate child, drawn to everyone, accepting of all worlds. "Thanks for looking after him so long. I couldn't get here any sooner." Another classroom mediation, the number of incidents spiking as they always did, after shocking news like that bulletin and its aftermath.
"I like having him," says Koushiro, who makes it a point to not say untrue words around Keitaro, waking or not. Her nephew made you never want to lie to him, trusting doe eyes wide and open like his mother, curious and laughing like his father. Even came out smiling with a giggling red face, Mimi swore, though Taichi said the nurses decided it was just gas. Still, Hikari can't remember a happier baby of all the children her profession had brought to her, bias be damned. She doesn't know where he gets it from, isn't as sure as she might have been before that it's a Yagami trait. Taichi still smiles like he means it when she calls him for a video chat to see his son, but she knows he doesn't sleep through the night much anymore.
She checks the time off the clock on Koushiro's desk, though he's read her mind already. "I'll put him in his crib, if you want to use this set up," he says, gesturing to the monitor on the side. "It's got a sat link, and I already encrypted it."
"That's not excessive?" She says this mostly as an aside, knowing the answer; Koushiro couldn't do anything halfway. Kisses Keitaro's head, which lolls around in his sleep, curled closer to Koushiro's back in his sling, another contented sigh. Hikari waits for them to leave the room, working slowly around the maze of baby toys strewn over the floor. She puts down her schoolbag, picks up the headset, opens the same video channel Koushiro last had online, about four hours past.
He looks awful, and does his best to hide it from her. "How is he, and how are you?"
Hikari puts her mouth behind her hand, elbow on the table. Talking through her fingers, but makes sure the corners of her lips stay upturned. The pair of them had always been very good at looking like they could hold it together. She's not sure which of their parents they get this from more. "Should I take offense to that order?"
Taichi laughs, his voice hoarse. Rubs his eyes with the back of his wrist. "Entirely."
"Sleeping, and tired," answering his first set of questions with a matching smile. She doesn't pretend she's not studying every line on his face. "You?"
He sighs, nodding. "I'll feel better when Mimi's out of quarantine." Shuts his eyes a bit longer than needed, to clear them. "I really want to see her."
"What's taking so long?" Hikari had never been this frustrated with bureaucratic redlines, even working in the prefectural education system. Mimi had left after keeping Keitaro with their parents days back, only to be held up at every step. Even Yamato's clearance hadn't helped, Michael's pulled strings, Koushiro's connections. Politics changed slowly, but retribution is always swift.
"It's why I told her not to come at first." A weakly delivered explanation, with no belief behind it, his wants too strong for once. Hikari hopes it was a weakly delivered excuse at the time, too. She can picture how that conversation went, or probably didn't, because Mimi can be just as stubborn as her brother on his worst days.
The idea that they'd gotten together hadn't come to a surprise to Hikari, late and quick though it had been, like they'd woken up one day as lifelong friends living on either ends of the world and decided that was no longer tolerable. Mimi had always been outgoing, kind, honest, with that mischievous streak you didn't always see coming; Taichi had always been drawn to adventure. Neither of them had made a big deal out of being just friends growing up, or out of the fact that there could be something else between them now, slipping into what had merely become more comfortable over time. He didn't use words like fate or kismet to describe the moment he began looking at her differently, and she still said she'd never get married again, her first not a mistake but also not the one for her, as she'd told Hikari. She didn't say Taichi was, when Hikari'd asked how she knew. We could exist without each other , she'd said to her with a dreamy smile. They simply chose not to anymore.
"You need someone," says Hikari. "Around you, now."
"Sort of the point," as he rolls his eyes, then rubs them again. They're shot red, even if his smile reaches all the way to them when he looks at her face on the video link. "After this hearing, I'll be career poison in the well water, for sure." She gets very quiet at that, and Taichi runs the side of his thumb over his bottom lip, chapped and bit down to the softest flesh. He stays calm as he tells her, "I know you want to ask me. I'd rather you not, but you should, if you want to."
Hikari breathes in a sigh. Her voice sounds wet to her ears, though her throat is dried up. "Why?"
Taichi turns his chin in his palm, looking somewhere off video. "I don't know. Probably because it had to be someone, I guess."
She'd come with a lot more to say, to ask. Leaves it off for a time when he can bring himself to look back at her. The part of herself she likes the least searches for somewhere else to put the hurt down. "I'm never going to forgive him for leaking it." Doing this to you, she leaves out, because she's not altogether certain it's true, or how to feel about what her brother had done. Another day, she tells herself. Another and another.
He turns back to her at that. The calmness of his manner makes her wonder what else he keeps from them, how much he puts himself away to make the decisions the rest of them tell themselves they never would. "It wasn't Takeru."
Hikari blinks quickly, sitting up straight. Her hands in her lap like little fists. "He—,"
"It wasn't," Taichi says again. "I know, because he's the one who tipped me off."
He'd gone to the lobby to make a call. She grits her teeth together tight, at the memory. "That could—,"
"No, Hikari." Smiles when he says her name. A good brother, a kind man. He doesn't know how much fight he has left in him anymore, is what the slouch to his spirit tells her then. The sort of defeat that brings only simple clarity. "Come on. You know him."
She can't hear it, so she won't. "I know love doesn't do things like this." All their bad decisions.
"Yes, it does." He murmurs, thinking it over. "I think that's all it ever does."
They make up excuses where they don't need any, sheer habit. He'll say he's going to hers first after coming home from another assignment, then stay after the rest of their friends have gone home, like he would have before, too. She'll bring them lunch at the paper, then turn to close his office door to avoid the chatter of the newsroom while they catch up, like she would since he started his post after college. Goes on for years like this, since it had never been hard to spend time with each other, because they always had. It's why this game of play pretend is so important, prove everyone got them wrong, and only they knew it. Isn't sure where this comes from, but they at least agree there isn't anything inevitable about it, which he says wouldn't have been the interesting version of the story anyway.
This, she takes issue with, unable to pinpoint why. "Can't you ever let things happen to you without rewriting them?" She's lounging in just one of his shirts on his sofa, eating crisps out of the foil packet. Just below her Takeru's sat on the floor, back to the couch, her legs over his bare shoulders so he can paint her toenails neon blue. It's a color she's borrowing off of Miyako. She's not sure she likes it, but she likes looking at him look after her, and this last reporting assignment had been the longest he'd been away from her since they began all this, and they might not have another moment with Jou's eldest brother's wedding that weekend, and her head's still pleasantly fuzzy from the good work his mouth had gotten up to earlier, so she lets him add a second coat, sealing it in.
"How would that be any fun?" Cups her left ankle closer, concentrating on a clean application.
Hikari smiles through a full mouth. "You don't think your life is very fun?"
"Mm, I'm here with you." Shrugs his shoulders as he says it, so her thighs graze his ears.
"Yes," she sighs. "How miserable for you."
Pinches the skin at the base of her foot, her most ticklish part. Her leg spasms in a gasp, her knees in his ears. The crisps spilling everywhere, nail polish bottle upturned, staining his arm, the rug. Twists around to catch her before her body pitches forward, pulls her down, takes the whole of her laugh right into his mouth.
She kisses him back, an eager, willing thing, threading her fingers through his hair and grasping tight, scratching just enough to make it hurt a little, the way he likes. "Please," she asks him, legs already opening. Only a little embarrassed by how close to begging it sounds, but she'd never known her body to ache like this before him, like he'd unlocked something else inside her she couldn't fill with anyone else. She rarely has to tell him how she likes it, what she needs to like it. If this is what they'd meant when everyone said they were inevitable, she doesn't think she'd have been so bothered by it, before.
"Please," breathless, needy. Impatient, always, when he's this close. Teasing her by taking his time, showing off how well his body knows hers. "Takeru, Takeru, please—I," and the rest in silence, her back arched, hips stuttering into the wood paneling. Kisses her through it, soft and tender, one hand holding her open under a thigh, the other flat to the floor next to her head, bracing himself by an outstretched arm. Needs more and more and more, so she brings her hand down between her legs and he finds the angle that has her coming apart the moment he does, chasing his orgasm with hers.
When she locks her ankles around his lower back, holds him in place, curls her fingers between his high up by her temple, he kisses her again, between slow, soft words. "I'm mad about how much I missed you this time."
"This time." Hikari smiles into his mouth, returning each light kiss. "What about the others?"
"You didn't even cross my mind," pressing his nose into the hollow behind her ear, breathes her in.
She turns her head, lengthens the slope of her neck, so he can kiss his way down it. Sighs at the lightest touch, her legs aching from the stretch of him. This is her favorite part about what they do, because she believes she's the only one who knows how it feels, how he feels, held inside her. "Oh, you do have a miserable life then."
Feels his laugh press into the flesh of her throat, and then that's all she wants, hard enough to break the skin. She wants him always on her, a mark to carry around when he's gone. She would rather ask him to do this to her than to tell him why, admit it could all been so simple, so easy. Hikari is not sure what this says about her, so she puts off saying it another day. That's the easiest part to this, what she likes best. Another and another day. It's why she doesn't say it back, when he tells her again. "I'm not missing you next time, so come with me." Her thumb runs across his left brow, but he keeps his head lowered, nervous to look at her. Fills her silence with more of his thoughts about it, the ideas he has, how the story could go, what he'd write between them. "Won't be a long trip, but it'll be beautiful. Bring your old camera, even."
She hums, no harm in it imagining it. "My contract's over soon. They'll probably send me to another prefecture."
"Perfect timing."
She stays quiet, and he lets her. They hadn't gotten past this part yet.
"Hikari." Winces with her, just a little, when he finally parts from her. Stays close though, pulling the weight of himself over her, as much as she can bear. She wants more, but she doesn't know how to ask him this. "What are you thinking?"
It's a while before she answers. "I think I like us how we are. Our own way in these worlds." Her voice grows thick, so she speaks softer, like she wants herself to hear this, too. Somewhere deep down. "I think I like that we can be separate from all of it. Just us."
Takeru frowns. She's not wrong. "Can we?"
He'd meant it as a question, a for how much longer, so she answers it like one.
He could read her shrug as careless, if he were anyone else. "I know I'm a full person, all on my own, and I know that without you, my body is empty." She pauses there, a fingertip tapping at his bottom lip. He'd worn the skin down like paper, biting it. Looks right up at him, because she's starting to understand it now, why he looks at her like this sometimes, like he wants her to fill him up. "That's not how this is for you."
She'd meant this as a question, so he answers it like it were one.
"No," he says. It couldn't be. He's neither full nor empty of her. Takeru has lived and read and felt enough to know two things only: that he no longer believes in great loves, and that Hikari would always be the great loss of his life.
The second night home isn't as bad as the first, but worse in its own way, because it's the night that Maria breaks the no contact rule she'd sworn to herself and sends him an email. It's one picture and one message. I moved back to my parents' house, so we won't need anything from you, but I wanted you to know. He can't read the grainy sonogram through the pounding in his ears, so Sora helps him, her hand on his shoulder where she stands next to his chair at their dining room table, the other reaching out to point at each clump of pixels as she explains. When Takeru looks at them, he feels his two realities merging together.
Yamato doesn't say anything until Sora leaves them a moment, and when he does, it isn't anything particularly profound, or monumentous, marking the occasion. He only reaches around the table to kiss the top of his brother's head, his hand holding the back of his neck, "You know the best thing about becoming a parent? You can choose not to become yours."
Takeru is still at the table in the morning, the screen of his phone smudged with the oil off his thumbprints, from how often he'd traced over the picture still opened there. The kids are up by then also, fed his poor approximation of scrambled eggs and burnt toast, amused by his efforts, thinking it to be a game. Letting them walk around with bits of toast clutched in grubby fists, snacking as they prowled about the living room while he gave the dog her breakfast, too, Yamato and Sora still asleep in their bedroom down the hall.
He watches as his niece discovers the butter on her bread can make greasy stamps on their tiled floors. She squishes a large, oblong circle, uses a little finger to draw a big heart, this deflated triangle. Beams at him, when she sees him looking, stuffs the rest of the spoilt bread into her mouth, giggly and pleased. Takeru wets a hand towel and wipes her face, then her hands, leaves the heart on the floor.
After he sets both children onto the living room mat with markers and notepads and a drawing puzzle he makes up entirely on the spot, he returns to the kitchen to wash the dishes, clean the countertops, and put away the used groceries, then leans against the closed fridge door to call Maria back, calculating for the time difference.
The line beeps on the fourth ring, not because the connection's wrong, but because Hikari's calling. Takeru looks at her name for a long time.
He calls her back.