December 20th arrives the way all inevitable things do—slowly, then all at once.
Akio spends the morning reorganizing the pharmacy's inventory with a precision that borders on obsessive. Each bottle aligned perfectly. Each label facing forward. Each medication counted twice, then three times, because if he focuses on the numbers—the dosages and more—then he doesn't have to think about the decision he still hasn't made.
The light. The window. Seven PM. Three words that contain an entire universe of possibility and terror.
Outside, Tokyo moves through its daily choreography. Schoolchildren pass by with their heavy backpacks, breath visible in the cold. A business worker buys aspirin for a headache that won't quit. An elderly granny picks up heart medication and thanks Akio with a smile that reminds him, painfully, of why he wanted to do this in the first place.
To help people. To heal. To be the bridge between suffering and relief. But who helps the helpers? Who heals the healers? At 3 PM, his phone buzzes. Hikata: "so did you decide? light on or light off? need to know if i should prepare emotional support or emotional burial"
Akio stares at the message for a full minute before typing: "Still deciding."
"akio ma friend it's literally in 4 hours"
"I know."
"ok real talk: what's the worst that can happen?"
The worst that can happen. Where does Akio even start? The worst is that Yazumira sees him—really sees him—and realizes that the cousin from the garden is gone. That what's left is just scar tissue and regret wearing a fourteen-year-old's face. The worst is that the memory dies, replaced by disappointing reality. The worst is that Yazumira looks at him with pity, or confusion, or the particular kind of sadness that comes from realizing someone you loved has been replaced by a stranger.
The worst is that Akio has to admit, out loud, that he failed. That thirty-two years of living amounted to nothing. That the second chance he's been given still might not be enough.
"He might be disappointed," Akio types finally.
"or" Hikata responds immediately, "he might be relieved. that you're real. that you're trying. that you're not just some perfect memory that makes him feel bad about being human"
"also natsuko says to tell you that memories are just stories we tell ourselves about the past. and the best stories are the ones that keep getting rewritten. whatever that means. she's being all philosophical again"
Despite everything, Akio smiles slightly. He can picture them—Hikata sprawled across Natsuko's floor, probably eating her snacks without permission, while she reads in the corner and occasionally dispenses wisdom like medicine, in careful doses, precisely when needed.
"Tell her thank you," Akio types.
"she says you're welcome and also you should eat something. when's the last time you ate?"
Akio looks at the clock. 3:15 PM. He can't remember eating breakfast. Or lunch. Time has a way of slipping past when you're trying not to think about it.
"I'll eat," he lies.
"LIAR" Hikata responds. "ok we're coming over. you're not doing this alone. we'll be at the cafe across the street at 6:30. not to spy. just to be there. in case you need us"
"You don't have to—"
"we know we don't HAVE to. we WANT to. there's a difference. see you at 6:30. wear something nice. first impressions matter even for people who already know you"
The conversation ends. Akio sets down his phone and looks around the empty pharmacy. In four hours, Yazumira will arrive—or he won't, if Akio doesn't turn on the light. In four hours, the past and present will collide, and Akio will have to stand in the wreckage and pretend he knows how to navigate it.
Four hours to decide if he's brave enough. Four hours to remember what courage even looks like.
At 5 PM, Akio closes the pharmacy early and goes upstairs to his small apartment. The space is sparse—a bed, a desk, a small kitchen area, shelves lined with medical textbooks and journals that belonged to Grandpa Toshirou. There are no photos on the walls. No decorations. Nothing that speaks of personality or history or a life being actively lived.
It's a place to exist, not a place to live.
Akio stands in front of the bathroom mirror and studies his reflection with clinical detachment. Blue hair, slightly messy. Violet eyes that carry too much knowledge for a youthful face.
He remembers being thirty-two. Remembers the exhaustion that lived in his bones, the way mirrors became things to avoid because seeing himself meant confronting failure. Remembers the night in the alley when a stranger offered him a needle and a chance to rewrite everything.
The regression was supposed to fix him by force somehow. Give him youth, time, opportunity to make different choices. But you can't escape yourself. Not really. The same fears that paralyzed him at thirty-two are here at youth, just wearing different clothes.
What if I fail again? What if I'm not good enough? What if trying isn't enough? What if Yazumira sees the truth and wishes he'd stayed in Osaka?
Akio forces himself to be clean, to be in clean clothes—a simple sweater Natsuko had insisted he buy because "you can't live in that pharmacy coat forever." He combs his hair. Brushes his teeth. Goes through the motions of preparing to be seen.
At 6:15, he goes back downstairs to the pharmacy. The window faces the street, large and clear. The lamp sits on the windowsill, unplugged, waiting. Akio stands in front of it for a long time.
His phone buzzes. A message from an unknown number—Osaka area code.
"Akio, it's Yazumira. I'm at Tokyo Station. I'll be there at 7 PM. I understand if you're not ready. I understand if the light's not on. I just wanted you to know I'm here. I came. Because even if you don't want to see me, I wanted you to know that I remembered. That I kept the promise, even if we're not seven anymore. Even if everything's different."
The message ends. Akio reads it three times, each word landing like a stone in still water, sending ripples outward into places he'd tried to keep frozen. I kept the promise.
Akio looks at the photograph on the counter—two children in a garden, summer eternal, dreams still intact. He thinks about seven-year-old Yazumira making him promise to heal people, to not carry the weight alone. He thinks about thirty-two-year-old Akio, isolated and exhausted, who'd forgotten what promises even felt like.
He thinks about the person he is now—fourteen and thirty-two, young and old, broken and trying to piece himself back together with trembling hands and uncertain hope.
And he realizes: the question isn't whether he's brave enough to be seen.
The question is whether he's brave enough to see Yazumira. To witness what distance and time have done to both of them. To face the fact that they're both different now, both carrying weight, both struggling with versions of themselves that don't match the memories.
Separation isn't just physical distance. It's temporal. Emotional. It's the way people grow in different directions, shaped by different experiences, becoming strangers who share a history but not a present.
But maybe—maybe—separation doesn't have to be permanent. Maybe bridges can be built across the distance.
Maybe the light in the window is less about being brave and more about being willing. Willing to try. Willing to fail. Willing to stand in the uncertainty and see what happens.
At 6:45, Akio plugs in the lamp. At 6:46, he turns it on. The light spills onto the snowy sidewalk—warm, yellow, visible. A signal. A promise. A small act of courage that feels monumental.
Akio steps back and looks at what he's done. His hands are shaking. His heart is beating too fast. But the light is on. The light is on.
At 6:50, Hikata and Natsuko appear at the cafe across the street. Akio can see them through the window—Hikata waving dramatically, Natsuko raising her book in a subtle gesture of support. They don't come to the pharmacy. They're keeping their promise. Not spying. Just being there.
Just in case.
At 6:55, snow begins to fall heavier. Tokyo transforms into something softer, quieter, almost gentle. Christmas lights from neighboring shops blur into halos of red and green and gold. Somewhere, a family is laughing. Somewhere, a train is arriving. Somewhere, Yazumira is walking through winter toward a cousin he hasn't seen in years.
At 6:58, Akio sees a figure approaching through the snow.
Tall. Dark hair dusted with snowflakes. A winter coat that looks worn but cared for. And a walk that's familiar in a way that makes Akio's heart tighten—muscle memory rising from depths he'd thought frozen.
The figure stops outside the pharmacy. Looks up at the lit window. Takes a breath so deep that Akio can see his shoulders rise and fall even from inside.
Then Yazumira opens the door. The bell chimes—bright, clear, cutting through the moment like the sound of something beginning or ending or both at once.
They stare at each other.
Akio sees his cousin for the first time in nearly a decade and realizes: Yazumira has changed. Of course he has. He's taller now—much taller, probably close to six feet. His face has lost the roundness of childhood, sharpened into angles that speak of adolescence and the approach of adulthood. His eyes are darker than Akio remembers, carrying their own weight, their own stories.
But the smile—hesitant, uncertain, but genuine—that's the same. "Akio," Yazumira says, and his voice breaks slightly on the name. "You're here. The light's on. You're actually here."
"Yeah," Akio says, and his own voice sounds strange—thin, stretched across the distance between who he was and who he is. "I'm here." "You now have blue hair," Yazumira says, almost wonderingly.
"You're still taller than me," Akio responds, and it's absurd but it's also perfect, this return to childhood banter, this familiar rhythm. "I'm older than you." "By three months."
"Three months counts."
They stand in silence that should be awkward but somehow isn't. The snow falls outside. The Christmas lights blur. The city breathes around them, indifferent and eternal.
"Can I—" Yazumira starts, then stops. "Can I hug you? Is that weird? It's weird, isn't it. We haven't seen each other in years and—" "It's not weird," Akio says quietly.
And then they're hugging, and Yazumira is holding him like he's afraid Akio might disappear if he lets go, and something inside Akio's heart that's been frozen for years—maybe decades, if you count both lives—starts to crack.
Not breaking. Thawing.
When they pull apart, both of them are crying. Just a little. Just enough to be honest. "I missed you," Yazumira says. "I didn't realize how much until right now. I missed you so much, Akio."
"I missed you too," Akio admits, and it's true. He'd buried it, hidden it beneath years and regret and the weight of adult disappointment, but it's true. "I thought about you. Wondered if you were okay. If you were happy. If Osaka was good to you."
"It was fine," Yazumira says. "Quiet. Peaceful, mostly. But I thought about Tokyo constantly. About you. About that summer. About the garden and the cicadas and the promises we made."
He pauses, studies Akio with an intensity that makes Akio want to look away but forces himself to maintain eye contact. "Are you okay?" Yazumira asks. "Really okay?"
The question is simple. Direct. Yet it lands with the weight of everything Yazumira doesn't know—can't know. Thirty-two years of failure. Of regression. Of the slow, painful process of learning how to want things again.
He looks mostly the same, and yet not at all. There's something off about him, something that makes it hard for Yazumira to place his age. He could be seventeen again—or he could be just past thirty-two, wearing a youthfulness that doesn't belong to time so much as to what he's survived.
So Yazumira doesn't question his age. He assumes he's still roughly the same age as himself, close enough that it doesn't seem worth asking. Whatever youthfulness he carries feels incidental—nothing that demands explanation, nothing that raises suspicion.
Akio could lie. Could say "I'm fine" the way he's trained himself to say it, automatic and convincing. Could maintain the performance, keep the mask in place, preserve the memory of who he used to be.
But Yazumira traveled four hundred kilometers through winter to be here. Kept a promise made by a seven-year-old. Had the courage to reach out, to risk rejection, to see if Akio was still the child from the garden.
The least Akio can do is be honest.
"I'm trying to be okay," he says carefully. "It's been... hard. Life hasn't been what I thought it would be. I've made mistakes. I've failed at things. I've had to learn how to keep going even when I wanted to stop. But I'm here. I'm trying. I think that's the best I can do right now."
Yazumira's expression does something complicated—flickers through surprise, recognition, relief, sadness—before settling on understanding. "Yeah," he says softly. "Me too."
And somehow, impossibly, that's enough. Two people who haven't seen each other in years, who've lived separate lives in separate cities, who carry their own weight and scars—and it's enough.
"Do you want tea?" Akio asks. "I was just about to make some. The kind Grandpa used to make. Tastes like dirt and flowers." "Medicine," Yazumira corrects, smiling wider now. "Tastes like medicine. He always said if it didn't taste bad, it wasn't working."
"I remember."
They move to the back room together, and Akio fills the kettle while Yazumira looks around the pharmacy with the careful attention of someone trying to reconcile memory with reality.
"It's different," Yazumira says. "Smaller than I remembered. But also exactly the same. Does that make sense?" "Perfect sense," Akio says, because he understands completely. Everything is different and the same. Including them.
As the water heats, as the snow continues outside, as Christmas approaches with all its weight and warmth, Akio realizes something: separation isn't just about distance. It's about the gap between who we were and who we've become. It's about the years that pass and change us in ways we can't control.
But reunion—reunion is about choosing to bridge that gap. About saying: I see you're different. I'm different too. And maybe we can learn to know each other again, not as memories, but as the people we actually are.
The kettle whistles. Akio prepares the tea exactly the way Grandpa Toshirou taught him—precise measurements, specific temperature, patience.
They sit across from each other at the small table, hands wrapped around warm cups, and begin the slow, careful process of reconnection. And outside, in the window, the light burns on.
TO BE CONTINUED...