KAKERU
The dream begins the way the others begin: white space, the frequency beneath music, the note before the note.
But tonight it is more vivid. More present. Tonight it has weight.
Hana is standing at the far end of the white space. Yellow dress. Uneven pigtails. She says his name — Onii-chan — and the accuracy of it is the most devastating thing he has ever experienced. Not approximate. Not the shape of it. The actual sound. As if the frequency has finally folded the distance and made the far thing close.
"Hana," he says.
He walks toward her. The distance keeps being wrong.
Behind her, his parents. His mother's way of standing — weight slightly forward, about to say something. His father's shoulders. Both of them looking at him with the expression of people who have something to say and know he is not ready to hear it.
He keeps walking. He cannot close the distance no matter how he moves.
Then something speaks from beside him — not behind, not in front, beside, the way a companion speaks. A voice like cold water in a deep place, coming from a direction that does not make spatial sense.
"The lake in the forest," it says. "The water is older than the trees. Older than the town. It remembers what time forgets. It opens the fabric. It can take you to 2001. To before."
He looks at Hana. At the uneven pigtails. The amber light that is not quite the forest light and not quite the room light, something in between.
He reaches for her.
The distance collapses.
His hands close on her shoulders and she is warm and real and exactly the weight he remembered, and he cannot breathe—
✦
He wakes.
The apartment is dark. He is on the couch and he is drenched and his hands are shaking and there is a sound in the room that it takes him a moment to locate as himself — a sound he has not made since he was seven years old, sitting on a curb in 2001 with an empty hand.
He cannot stop it.
He tries. He is good at not showing things. Ten years of practice. But the dream was too accurate — the pitch of Hana's voice, the specific weight of her shoulders — and his body has apparently decided that ten years is exactly enough practice and not one moment more.
The door opens.
Nijika stands in the hallway in her sleep clothes, her hair loose, blinking in the dark. She takes in the scene — him on the couch, the shaking, the sound — and she does not hesitate or ask. She crosses the room and sits on the floor beside the couch, close enough that her shoulder presses against the cushion near his arm.
"I'm here," she says. That is all.
He tries to speak. What comes out is not words.
She reaches up without looking and takes his hand. Both of hers around his one, the way you hold something shaking to give it something to push against. He grips back harder than he means to. She says nothing about the force of it.
He cries.
He has not cried since he was seven years old. He is seventeen and he has not cried in ten years and tonight, in a girl's apartment on a couch that smells like old paper and her specific fabric softener, with both her hands around his one hand, the ten years come out all at once. It is not graceful. It is not composed. It is the specific ugliness of grief that has been held past the point of holding — moving finally, the way something moves when it has no more room to be still.
He talks. He did not plan to. The words come the way the crying came — after enough pressure, without asking permission. He tells her about the dream. Hana's voice and the accuracy of it. His mother behind her. The voice from beside him and the lake and what it said. He tells her what the lake is. What it is for.
She listens. Her hands do not let go.
When the words run out and the crying has come down to just breathing heavily in the dark, the apartment is very quiet. Outside, Yamanashi makes its small sounds. The river. Distant traffic. The tree near the building moving in the wind.
"The voice beside you in the dream," she says, quietly.
"Yes."
"I've read about the lake. In the prefecture archives. An account — not quite history, not quite folklore — that describes it as a threshold. A place where time is thin."
He turns his head to look at her. She is very close. In the dark her face is tilted slightly upward toward him and there is something in her expression — not fear, not excitement — something in the register of understanding arriving at its final form, something that has been assembling itself for a while and is now complete.
"You knew," he says.
"I suspected. I didn't say anything because—" She stops.
"Because?"
"Because I didn't want it to be real yet. I wanted the theory to stay theory a little longer."
He looks at her. She looks at him.
"Don't go there alone," she says. "Promise me."
"Nijika—"
"Promise."
"Okay," he says. "I promise."
She nods. She does not let go of his hand. They are close enough that he can hear her breathing and she can hear his and the inch between their faces has been the same inch for several minutes now and neither of them has moved.
He does not know who moves first. Maybe neither of them does. Maybe it is only the specific gravity of the moment — the late hour, the dark, the crying, her hands around his — everything stripped of the ordinary social architecture that usually keeps two people at the appropriate distance. Maybe the proximity was already too much and the movement is just the acknowledgment of something that was already true.
Her face turns up. His turns toward her.
She kisses him. Or he kisses her. It is brief and soft and the kind of thing that happens out of something that is not a decision — out of the same instinct that makes you reach for a hand in the dark, out of the part of you that acts before the thinking part catches up.
Then they are both very still.
The only thing they felt was a warm sensation.
The apartment is extremely quiet.
She pulls back slightly. He lets her. There is an inch of space between them and it is significant.
"I—" she starts.
"You don't—"
"I know."
Neither of them finishes a sentence.
She looks at the floor. He looks at their hands, still connected.
"You should sleep," she says. Her voice is even — the specific evenness of someone applying all their composure to keeping their voice even.
"Yes," he says.
She stands. She goes to her room without looking back. He lies down and looks at the ceiling and his heart is doing something complicated and he does not sleep for a long time.
✦
NIJIKA
She is in her room looking at the ceiling.
She kissed him. She is fully, precisely aware of this — the specific action, the specific moment, the specific reason, which was: she was holding his hands and he was looking at her and something in her moved, without consultation, without the careful weighing of variables she applies to most decisions.
She checks: do I regret it. The answer is clear. No.
She checks: do I know what it means. The answer is not clear at all.
She thinks about his face in the moment after — the stillness, the careful distance manufactured by both of them, the sentences started and stopped. You don't — what? She has been finishing that sentence in different ways for the last ten minutes. You don't have to mean it. You don't have to say anything. You don't have to—
She closes her eyes. She breathes.
She has been alone with this apartment and these theories and this carefully constructed life for three years. She has been very good at it. So good at it that she had stopped noticing what it cost.
He was crying and she held his hands and she kissed him and she does not regret it and she does not know what to do with that.
Tomorrow, she thinks, will be extremely specific.
She does not sleep for a long time either.