RATED: MA21+This episode contains depictions of violence, and the psychological aftermath of suicidal ideation.
He wakes before the house does.
This is the third morning in a row, which means it is becoming a pattern. He lies on the narrow bed in the small room at the back of the house and stares at the ceiling — wood-planked, low, nothing like the water stain in Tokyo — and takes inventory of what is real.
The room is real. The scratchy weight of the wool blanket is real. The sound of the prairie wind against the outer wall, constant and low and entirely without mercy, is real. Somewhere outside, one of the horses shifts in the stable and the wood groans under its weight. Somewhere inside, his mother is still asleep, because the house has the specific quality of stillness that only exists before anyone in it has decided to begin.
He sits up. His hands — the new ones — press flat on the beds edge and he looks at them in the dark the way he has been looking at them every morning. Just checking. Just confirming. Yes. Still here. Still this.
He gets up before the cold fully settles into his bones and puts on the clothes left on the chair — rough cotton, practical, nothing in them that belongs to a world with synthetic fibers — and goes to the window.
The plains in the dark before dawn are something he does not have adequate language for yet. In Tokyo, darkness had a texture — the orange-grey of light pollution softened by rain, the specific near-dark that is never fully dark because eight million people are still burning electricity inside it. Out here, darkness is a serious thing. It means what it says. The sky above the plains is enormous and dense with stars in a quantity that the Osaka of his childhood never permitted and the Tokyo of his adulthood actively prevented, and he stands at the window and looks at it and feels, in the place where Utsu Enzu kept his exhaustion, something that hasn't lived there before.
He doesn't have a name for it yet. He files it carefully and leaves it alone. His father is at the fence line by six.
Yasei watches him from the porch step — sits with his knees pulled up and his chin resting on them and watches the clumsy fool work with the focused observational attention of someone who has spent years reading rooms, reading people, cataloguing the small behavioral tells that indicate who a person is when they think nobody is tracking. His father's name is Thomas. Big, quiet Thomas Nishi, who is half-Japanese by parentage and entirely frontier by everything else, who works the fence line with a thoroughness that is not perfectionism but simply the understanding of a person who knows that in this land, the things you don't fix now fix themselves later in ways that cost more.
He doesn't talk much. This is something Yasei clocked immediately and filed as the most comfortable thing about him.
After a while, Thomas looks up from the post he is resetting and finds Yasei on the step and says, "You going to watch all morning or you going to come help?"
Yasei gets up and goes.
He tries to hold the post steady while his father resets the base and his arms shake with the effort and Thomas says nothing about this, just adjusts his own grip to compensate, which is somehow worse than being told to try harder.
"You're quiet," Thomas says, after a while. "I know." "That a problem?" Yasei looks up at him. "Is it?" Thomas considers this with the same practical thoroughness he applies to fence posts. "Nope," he says, and goes back to work.
They work the fence line until the sun is fully up and the prairie is lit gold and flat all the way to where it meets the sky. Yasei's arms ache. His hands have new cuts on them from the wire — small, stinging.
He looks at them while his father gathers the tools. You're hurt, says the part of him that is still Utsu Enzu. I know, says the part that is learning to be Yasei Nishi. Good, says neither part, and both. His mother's name is Sayo.
She is from Kyoto originally — he learns this in fragments across the day. She married Thomas eleven years ago and married him in the west with a personality that she wears the same way she wears everything: without decoration, without complaint, as simply the shape of the life she chose. She grows vegetables along the eastern wall of the house. She knows the Latin names for three of the prairie grasses and told him this over breakfast with the flat satisfaction of someone who learned a thing and is not embarrassed to have kept it.
She is the one he cannot look at directly for too long. Not because she is difficult — the opposite. Because she is not.
"Sit still," she tells him at the kitchen table in the afternoon, when she is cutting his hair with the careful scissors she keeps in the sewing tin. "You're worse than your dad."
"Dad has never properly sat for haircuts," Yasei says.
She laughs. Actually laughs, a short sound that surprises him enough somehow that something moves in his face that might be the beginning of a smile. "Where did you pick that up?"
"I don't know."
"Smart mouth." But she is not annoyed. Her hands move through his hair with the practiced ease of someone who has done this many times, and she is humming something low and without melody and the scissors make their small clean sound, and the afternoon light comes through the kitchen window and makes the dust in the air visible and golden.
Utsu Enzu spent twenty-three years stepping backward from rooms that looked like this one. He sits still. He lets her finish. After supper, Thomas spreads a map across the table.
Not a refined map — hand-drawn on brown paper, edges soft from handling, the kind of document that has been unfolded and refolded so many times it knows its own creases. He traces a boundary with one finger and says to Sayo, without particular alarm, "Haggerty's people came by the south edge again today. Third time this month."
Sayo sets down her cup. "How close?"
"Close enough." Thomas doesn't look up from the map. "He's measuring something. I don't know what yet. But others who measure other people's land aren't doing it for their health."
"Did you speak to him?" "He rode off before I got within range." A pause. "Of speaking."
Sayo looks at him. He looks at her. Some wordless thing passes between them that Yasei, sitting at the far end of the table pretending to look at nothing, files carefully and completely.
"We'll be fine," Thomas says, which is the specific tone of a person saying a thing he is not certain of because the alternative is saying the thing he is.
"Of course we will," Sayo says, which is the specific tone of a mother who has decided to believe her husband because the alternative costs too much to carry.
Yasei looks at the map. The boundary. The name Haggerty written in someone else's handwriting near their property line like a question that hasn't been asked yet out loud.
In Osaka, at eleven years old, he had watched his family come apart in increments so small each one was deniable. The absence replacing the warmth in the same shape. The thing wrong before it was ever named as wrong. He knows the texture of an unspoken threat by now. He has known it in two different lives.
He does not say anything. He is six years old and he cannot do anything with what he knows yet. He just files it. He waits.
The night is cold in the way the frontier nights are cold — completely, with conviction, the temperature dropping the moment the sun goes and the wind coming up to make sure you understand the difference between day and dark out here.
He is on the porch again. He cannot sleep. This has been true for most of his adult life. Sayo comes out with a blanket and drops it over his shoulders without ceremony and sits on the step beside him.
"You do this every night," she says. "I can't sleep." "What are you thinking about?" He considers the honest answer to the question: I died in a Tokyo apartment three days ago, and now I am someone else in 1865.
Reincarnation would be easier to accept if the world were simply the past. And at first glance, it is—wooden streets, old clothes, the slow breath of a country that has not yet become modern.
But the detail that bothers him is smaller than that. The kanji.
When he looks at signs, letters, and boards, the characters are familiar—but slightly wrong. The strokes follow older forms he only ever saw in historical notes and academic footnotes. Not mistakes. Not sloppy writing. Deliberate, standardized characters that never survived into the future he came from.
An entire writing system that branched differently. Which means this is not the past. It is a world that only looks like it. He considers this, like some alternate reality he's in. Then quietly puts the thought away.
"The stars," he says.
She looks up. The sky is unreasonable with them — thick and layered, the kind of sky that makes you feel the distance between yourself and everything as a physical fact rather than an abstraction.
"Your grandfather," she says, after a moment, "used to say that every star was a person who'd finished their time here and gone somewhere quieter." She pauses. "I used to think that was sad. Now I think maybe quiet is something you have to earn."
Yasei looks at the sky. Finds nothing to say. "You're a strange kid," Sayo tells him, not unkindly. "You've always been a strange child. But you're my son and plus I don't mind strange."
The blanket is warm. Her shoulder is close. The wind is doing what the wind does out here — moving through everything without asking — and the stars are doing what the stars do, which is exist at a distance that makes every human thing feel brief and very small.
He is brief. He has been very small. In two lives now he has been the stone at the bottom of the river, the person in the room that the room continues without. He sits with his mother on the porch step in the dark and does not step backward.
"Sayo," he says. The word for her. The first time he has used it directly. She looks at him. "Thank you," he says. "For the blanket."
She looks at him for a moment longer than the words require. Then she puts her arm around him — solid, warm, the arm of someone who is not handling something wrong but simply holding what is close — and says, "Always."
They sit until the cold makes it impractical and then go inside. He sleeps that night and does not dream about the ceiling or the water stain or the particular darkness of a Thursday in November.
Outside, the plains continue. The fence line his father reset in the morning holds against the wind. In the south field, at the edge of the property, there is a mark in the dirt where a stranger measured something and rode away.
The house does not know this yet. But the morning is coming, and the frontier does not wait.
TO BE CONTINUED...