Tokyo's nights never truly slept—they merely transformed, shedding their skin of daylight responsibility to reveal something rawer underneath. The darkness didn't erase the city; it just changed the color of its lies, painting them in neon blues and electric pinks that promised escape but delivered only distraction.
Riki Yamade understood this better than most. After all, he'd become a creature of these in-between hours, these moments when the world pretended to be something other than what it was.
Bar Gomi sat at the end of an alleyway so narrow that most people walked past without noticing—a fortunate accident of urban planning that suited everyone involved. The sign outside still flickered its half-hearted promise: "CASINO BAR," though the roulette tables had been sold for scrap years before Riki ever arrived. What remained was atmosphere—the peculiar weight of a place where people came not to be found but to be forgotten. Broken pachinko machines lined one wall like tombstones. The air hung thick with the ghost of cheap whiskey and cheaper dreams. And behind the counter, moving with the mechanical precision of someone who'd stopped expecting anything to change, sat Riki.
His breathing was rhythmic, almost meditative in its steadiness—the one thing, perhaps, he could still control in a life that had long ago slipped through his fingers like smoke.
He'd found Bar Gomi six months after everything fell apart. Six months after Hokurine. After the final betrayal. After he'd stopped believing in the possibility of anything resembling redemption. The owner, an ancient woman with eyes like burnt paper, had taken one look at him and said, "You'll do." She'd never asked about his past. Never commented on the bruises. Never questioned why someone his age moved through the world like he was already haunting it.
He fit right in.
But tonight—tonight wasn't quiet.
Because he showed up again.
"Yo, Yamade!" The voice cut through the darkness like sunlight through fog—too bright, too warm, fundamentally incompatible with this place and everything it represented. "You hiding from the world or just allergic to sunlight?"
Riki didn't look up, didn't acknowledge the intrusion with anything more than a weary sigh that seemed to carry the weight of centuries. "Didn't I tell you to piss off yesterday?"
"You did," Akio Hukitaske replied with that particular brand of cheerfulness that suggested he'd either missed the point entirely or understood it perfectly and chose to ignore it anyway. He dragged a stool across the floor until it produced a sound like a dying crow—piercing, uncomfortable, impossible to ignore. "But I didn't promise to listen."
Riki finally glanced up, his amber eyes catching the dim light in a way that made them look almost golden, almost alive. Akio stood there in his disheveled school uniform—shirt untucked, tie missing, backpack bearing what appeared to be teeth marks from some unfortunate encounter with either an animal or a particularly aggressive locker. His smile was too wide for his face, as if he'd been born with an expression meant for a completely different kind of world.
"Bar's closed," Riki muttered, returning his attention to the lighter he'd been flicking open and shut, watching the flame dance and die, dance and die, in an endless rhythm that felt like a metaphor for something he didn't want to examine too closely.
"Try again in hell."
Akio leaned forward, propping his elbows on the counter with the casual familiarity of someone who'd decided they belonged here and dared the universe to disagree. "Funny, I thought this was hell."
Something flickered across Riki's face—not quite amusement, but adjacent to it, a distant cousin of the emotion that lived in exile. His fingers stilled on the lighter.
"Why are you here?" The question emerged quieter than he'd intended, almost vulnerable.
"To hang out." Akio shrugged as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. Then, with the timing of someone who'd been waiting to deliver this line: "And you know, Riki—smoking's bad for ya."
"I'm not hanging."
"Then I'll sit."
"I'm not sitting either."
"Then I'll stand," Akio said, his grin somehow widening further. "I'm flexible."
Riki pressed his palms against his temples, a gesture of exhausted surrender. "You're gonna drive me insane."
"Already been there. Rent's terrible." Akio settled onto the stool with the air of someone claiming territory. "I also got this humor thing from my best friend... Hikata. And when you kept annoying me at school, I figured turnabout's fair play. Funny, right? I'm not usually this type of person, so that means I'm bad at it, but that's fine. Alright."
That earned something—not quite a laugh, more like an exhale that had forgotten how to be anything else. A sigh that carried in it the ghost of genuine humor, dead but not entirely forgotten.
It was something.
The night before, Riki had dreamed again.
The dreams always followed the same architecture—first the fire, consuming everything, turning the world into a cathedral of flame and ash. Then the screams, layered like music, each voice distinct in its agony. His mother's cough. His father's labored breathing. The wild dogs howling as their world ended. And always, always, his sister's voice calling his name—soft at first, almost tender, the way she used to wake him for school. Then sharper, twisted by the years and whatever poison had transformed her into someone who could laugh while killing.
He saw the alleyways painted in arterial spray. The bodies that had once been friends, now just cooling meat and shattered promises. Farina's eyes, wide with regret and resignation, blood pooling around her like spilled paint.
When he woke, the sheets were damp with sweat that felt like guilt made liquid. His fists had been clenched so hard his nails had drawn crescents of blood from his palms. He'd stared at the empty glass on his bedside table—the one he kept meaning to fill with water but somehow always remained empty, like a promise he couldn't quite keep—and whispered to the darkness:
"Don't get close. Please, Akio."
It had become his mantra. His armor. His curse. The words he repeated until they lost meaning, until they were just sounds that might protect him from the unbearable possibility of caring again.
And now this idiot—this bright, loud, relentlessly optimistic idiot—was trying to dismantle everything Riki had built, one stupid grin at a time.
At school, Akio had somehow appointed himself Riki's personal shadow.
Riki would retreat to his usual sanctuary beneath the cherry trees behind the gymnasium, the one place where the noise of teenage normalcy couldn't quite reach, where he could pretend to nap and actually just exist in the closest approximation to peace he could manage. Without fail, Akio would materialize like a particularly persistent ghost, always carrying two cans of coffee, one already half-empty because he couldn't resist drinking on the way over.
"Hey, delinquent," Akio said one morning, dropping beside him with all the grace of a falling boulder. "You always sit here? You got, like, a personal relationship with this tree?"
"Yeah. We dated once," Riki replied without opening his eyes, his voice carrying the flat affect of someone who'd perfected the art of sounding dead inside. "Didn't work out."
Akio snorted—an undignified sound that shouldn't have been endearing but somehow was. "Bet you dumped them."
"They dumped me," Riki corrected, the corner of his mouth twitching traitorously. "Said I was too emotionally unavailable."
The laugh that erupted from Akio was too loud for the tranquil morning, genuine and unrestrained in a way that made other students glance over curiously. He laughed so hard he spilled his coffee, the liquid splashing across the grass in a pattern that looked almost deliberate, almost artistic.
For a second—just a second—Riki's lips twitched into something that might have been the skeleton of a smile. He caught himself immediately, turning his face away as if Akio might somehow see the weakness, the crack in the foundation.
"Stop laughing," Riki muttered, but there was no heat in it.
"Can't help it. You're funny, Riki."
"I'm not your pal."
"Not yet," Akio said, and somehow managed to make it sound less like a threat and more like a promise.
Riki threw the empty can at him. Akio caught it, still grinning, and added it to his collection as if it were treasure.
At lunch, Akio would appear with food—sometimes store-bought convenience store bentos, sometimes suspiciously homemade creations that defied several laws of physics and possibly taste.
"You made this?" Riki asked one day, poking suspiciously at what appeared to be a rice ball that had suffered some kind of catastrophic structural failure. The rice was charred in places, raw in others, achieving a spectrum of doneness that shouldn't have been possible in a single object.
"Yup. Tried to add love, but I think it evaporated."
"It exploded," Riki corrected, continuing his forensic examination of the failed cuisine.
Akio's grin never wavered. "You ate it though."
Riki blinked, suddenly aware that his fingers were greasy and there were significantly fewer rice balls than there had been moments ago. "I didn't."
"Your eyes say otherwise."
"Shut up."
But he was eating another one even as he protested, and they both knew it, and somehow that made it funnier—this small, absurd moment of normalcy in a life that had forgotten what normal felt like.
By the third week, Akio had somehow discovered Bar Gomi.
Riki never asked how. Didn't want to know if Akio had followed him or simply possessed some uncanny ability to find people who didn't want to be found. What mattered was that now, with disturbing regularity, Akio would show up at closing time, slide onto that same screeching stool, order cola instead of whiskey (always cola, never anything stronger, as if he understood some line he wouldn't cross), and talk.
He talked about nothing. About everything. About the space between those two things where life actually happened.
He talked about wanting to be a pharmacist someday—how he believed medicine could fix what people couldn't fix themselves, how he thought pain didn't have to be permanent, how chemistry was just hope rendered into molecular form.
"Sounds stupid, right?" Akio had said one night, spinning his cola can on the counter, watching the condensation leave wet circles on the wood. "Thinking you can cure what's wrong with people by mixing the right chemicals?"
Riki had been polishing a glass that was already clean, a meditative action that gave his hands something to do while his mind processed words that felt too honest, too raw. "Stupider things have worked."
"Yeah?" Akio looked up, genuinely curious. "Like what?"
"Dunno. Haven't seen any yet."
Akio had laughed at that—not mocking, just delighted by the bleakness of it, by Riki's inability to offer even false comfort.
Another night, Akio asked quietly, staring into his cola as if it might contain answers: "You ever think people like us can change?"
Riki didn't answer immediately. He stared at the flame of his lighter, watching it dance in the draft from the broken air conditioner, thinking about fire and how it transformed everything it touched, how change was just another word for destruction dressed in hope's clothing.
"Change's a word people use when they're scared of reality." He paused, then added: "And wait—you never told me you were like me."
Akio looked at him for a long time, his expression unusually serious, stripped of its customary humor. "Maybe. Or maybe change is what happens when someone stops running." He smiled, but it was softer now, tinged with something that looked like understanding. "And yeah, I am. Not a street kid like you. I mean... with despair. You know."
"Running keeps you alive," Riki whispered, and hated how much it sounded like a confession.
"Living keeps you human," Akio replied, and somehow made it sound not like a contradiction but like a different kind of survival.
Riki said nothing. What was there to say?
Later that night, walking home through rain that fell like the city crying, Riki splashed through puddles that reflected the neon advertisements—pinks and greens and electric blues that promised everything and delivered nothing. His thoughts replayed Akio's words on an endless loop, static he couldn't tune out no matter how hard he tried.
Living keeps you human.
He hated how right it sounded. Hated that it resonated with something deep inside him, some part that had refused to die no matter how much he'd tried to bury it.
He stopped under a streetlight, rain streaming down his face, eyes closed, breathing uneven. The water mixed with something that might have been tears but could just as easily have been the weather. He wanted to yell—to scream at the sky, to hit something until his knuckles split and the pain outside matched the pain inside.
Instead, he whispered to the rain, to himself, to whatever god might still be listening: "Don't get close."
But for the first time, it didn't sound like a warning.
It sounded like a plea. Like please don't make me care again because I don't know if I can survive losing anyone else.
The next day, Akio cornered him in the hallway between classes—that liminal space where the crowd thinned enough for conversation but remained thick enough for anonymity.
"Yo, Riki! You coming to class for once?"
Riki frowned, adjusting the bag on his shoulder with the careful movements of someone buying time to formulate a response. "Why would I?"
"Because I'm failing chemistry and I need someone worse than me to sit beside for moral support and chaos."
"That's not how grades work."
"Morally it is," Akio said with the confidence of someone who'd constructed an entire philosophical framework to justify poor academic performance.
"Piss off."
Akio grinned, stepping backward as Riki tried to walk away, matching his pace like a mirror. "You say that like it's my name."
"Maybe it should be."
"Then you'd be calling me all the time."
Riki stopped mid-step, the words hitting him harder than they should have. He turned, and something in his expression must have shifted because the hallway seemed to quiet, other students giving them a wider berth, sensing the change in atmosphere.
"Why the hell do you care?"
The question came out harsher than intended—not quite angry, but frayed at the edges, worn thin by too many years of not understanding why anyone would bother.
The hallway went silent for a moment. Akio's smile faded, not into sadness but into something more honest, more real. Just a teenage boy looking at another teenage boy, trying to bridge a gap that felt oceanic.
"Because you look like someone who forgot what it feels like to be cared about."
Riki froze. The words hit like a physical blow—not because they were cruel, but because they were true, and truth had a way of cutting deeper than any knife.
"Don't—" His voice shook, betraying him. "Don't talk like you know me."
"I don't," Akio said softly, and the gentleness was somehow worse than anger would have been. "But I want to. Because at first, you wanted to know me, remember? Before you decided being alone was safer."
That was it. The final straw. The words that broke through every defense Riki had spent years constructing.
That night, Riki sat alone at Bar Gomi again, the neon sign buzzing overhead like a dying insect, casting everything in shades of red and shadow. He poured himself a glass—whiskey, the cheap kind that burned going down—but didn't drink it. Just stared at the reflection in the liquid, seeing a stranger looking back. A kid with tired eyes and bruised knuckles and a heart that had been stitched together so many times the scars had scars.
He remembered Akio's face. That ridiculous grin. Those impossibly earnest words.
I want to.
Something inside him—something old and fragile, something he'd thought he'd successfully buried beneath layers of anger and apathy—started to ache. Not the sharp pain of injury but the dull throb of something waking up after long dormancy, something that had atrophied from disuse.
He slammed his fist down on the counter. The glass shattered, spraying fragments across the wood like stars, like broken promises.
"Damn it..."
Blood dripped from his palm, thin streams of red against the scarred wood, and he watched it with a detached fascination, like it was happening to someone else. His stomach clenched—not from pain, but from something harder to name. Grief, maybe. Or fear of its opposite.
That's when the door creaked open.
"You really should stop breaking things," said a familiar voice, and of course it was Akio, because who else would it be? Who else would show up exactly when Riki least wanted and most needed someone to?
Riki didn't turn around, didn't give him the satisfaction of acknowledgment. "What the hell do you want, Hukitaske?"
"To make sure you don't bleed out," Akio said lightly, stepping inside with a small first-aid kit that he produced from his ever-present backpack. "Wouldn't look good on your Yelp reviews. Honestly, I knew you might hurt yourself again. You've got a pattern."
"Didn't ask."
"Didn't need to." Akio settled onto the stool across from him, opening the kit with practiced efficiency. "You've got this whole self-destructive thing down to a science. Very predictable."
Riki's shoulders stiffened, muscles coiling like springs. "Why are you doing this?"
Akio shrugged, pulling out antiseptic and bandages. "Because you'd do the same."
"I wouldn't."
"Yeah, you would," Akio said simply, reaching for Riki's bleeding hand without asking permission. "You just forgot how."
Riki didn't reply. Didn't pull away. He let Akio clean the wound in silence—the sting of antiseptic, the careful pressure of bandages, the gentleness that somehow hurt worse than the glass had. His hands trembled, and not from pain. From the unbearable weight of being cared for, of being seen as something worth fixing.
Finally, barely above a whisper: "You really don't get it, do you?"
Akio tilted his head, genuinely curious. "Get what?"
Riki's voice broke, fracturing around the edges like thin ice. "People close to me die. They get hurt. I hurt them. That's how it goes. That's always how it goes."
Akio didn't flinch, didn't offer platitudes or false comfort. "So what? You think pushing everyone away will stop that?"
Riki's fists clenched, the fresh bandages already showing spots of red. "It's better than watching it happen again."
"No," Akio said, and his voice was firm now, steady in a way that demanded to be heard. "It's just slower. Just a different kind of death."
Riki glared, but Akio kept talking, words tumbling out like he'd been holding them back for weeks.
"You think being alone protects you? It doesn't. It just kills you from the inside. Bit by bit. And you're too stubborn to notice. You're dying, Riki. Right now. Not from anything external. From yourself. From this idea that caring is weakness, that love is dangerous, that being human is somehow a betrayal."
"Shut up," Riki hissed, but there was no strength behind it.
"No," Akio said. "Not until you listen."
Riki stood abruptly, the stool clattering backward. "You don't know anything about me!"
"I know enough," Akio said quietly, not moving, not backing down. "You're scared."
That was it. That was the line, the boundary that shouldn't be crossed, the truth that shouldn't be spoken.
Riki grabbed Akio by the collar, shoving him against the counter hard enough to rattle bottles, his face inches away, breathing ragged. "Say that again. Tough guy."
Akio looked directly into his eyes—amber meeting brown, anger meeting understanding—and didn't blink. "You're scared, Riki."
Riki's grip trembled. Not from rage. From something he couldn't name, something that felt like drowning and surfacing at the same time. The kind of shaking that came when someone said exactly what you'd been running from, when someone held up a mirror and forced you to see what you'd become.
He released Akio and stepped back, his stomach heaving, his whole body feeling like it might come apart. "Piss off," Riki whispered, and his voice was so broken it barely qualified as sound. "Just... piss the hell off."
He grabbed his raincoat from the hook, movements jerky and uncoordinated, and headed for the door.
Akio didn't move. Didn't argue. Didn't chase him or try to stop him. Just watched as Riki stumbled toward the exit, shoulders hunched, voice breaking around words he couldn't quite say.
The door slammed. The bottles rattled. Silence returned like water filling a vacuum.
And then—slowly—Akio smiled.
Not a grin this time. Something smaller, sadder, wiser. Not mockery but understanding. The smile of someone who'd just seen beneath the armor, who'd glimpsed the scared child hiding behind the angry teenager, who'd found the thing Riki had been trying so desperately to conceal.
He whispered to the empty room, to the broken glass and bloodstained counter: "Yeah. I see you, Riki."
Then, softer—almost fondly, almost like a promise: "And I'm not going anywhere."
That night, walking through alleys that smelled like rain and garbage and something indefinably Tokyo, Riki didn't realize that something inside him had shifted.
His heart felt different. Heavy, yes—but also strangely warm, like a weight he couldn't quite hate. Like carrying something precious that was also terrifying, that could destroy him or save him and he wouldn't know which until it was too late.
Maybe it was anger. Maybe it was fear.
Maybe—and this was the most terrifying possibility—it was hope.
Whatever it was, it stayed with him as he walked, as the neon lights painted everything in false colors, as the city breathed around him like a living thing.
And miles away, back at the bar, Akio sat alone in the darkness, finishing his cola in one long drink, smiling at nothing and everything. Because he knew. He could see through Riki's armor to the person underneath—the scared child, the grieving brother, the boy who'd forgotten how to be human.
And that was exactly why he wouldn't give up.
Not today. Not tomorrow. Not until Riki remembered that being alive wasn't the same as living, that surviving wasn't the same as healing, that fear of loss was just love that hadn't found its courage yet.
The neon sign buzzed overhead, painting everything in shades of red.
And somewhere in the space between heartbeats, between the dying of one day and the birth of another, something began to change.
TO BE CONTINUED...