The nightmares have always been there.
This is the thing people do not understand about trauma — they imagine it as something that visits, something that comes and goes, a weather system that passes through and leaves damage and then moves on. They do not understand that for some people it never left in the first place. That it took up residence at three years old and has been paying rent in the form of sleep ever since, has redecorated the interior of every night with the same furniture arranged in the same positions, has made itself so completely at home that the person carrying it has stopped being able to identify where the trauma ends and where they begin.
Kisuno has had nightmares every night for eleven years.
He has managed them the way you manage a chronic condition that medicine cannot reach — with systems, with preparation, with the accumulated knowledge of what helps fractionally and what doesn't help at all. He sleeps on his side facing the door, always. He keeps the window cracked regardless of temperature because the cold air is a tether to the present, something immediate and sensory to return to when the past becomes more geographically real than the room around him.
He has been doing this for eleven years. He has it managed. Until Kurosawa decides otherwise. The first bad episode happens on a Thursday in the fourth week, at 2:17 AM.
He is in the apartment. He is always in the apartment. This is the geography his sleeping mind returns to with the fidelity of a homing device that has been broken and repaired so many times it now only knows one direction — the small kitchen, the table with three bowls, the pot of omurice on the stove, the overhead light casting everything in that particular domestic warmth that exists now only inside him, preserved in the amber of his worst memories, nowhere else in the physical world.
In the dream it always begins the same way: he is six years old, sitting on the floor between Hazuno and Josu while they argue about something inconsequential, something warm. Josu is saying Hazuno's portions are too small and Hazuno is saying that Josu eats like he's still fighting street battles and Kisuno is drawing in his sketchbook — two older kids and one smaller one, always holding hands, he is drawing and they are arguing and the omurice is warm and the room smells like the closest thing to home he has ever inhabited.
This part of the dream is accurate. This part actually happened, and the dream renders it in high definition, in sensory detail so complete that his sleeping body creates the specific warmth of being between them, of being small enough to fit in the space two people create when they are present and alive and choosing to be there.
Then the door.
In reality the door exploded inward. In the dream it opens slowly, which is worse, because the slowness contains anticipation — contains the suspended horrible moment between before and after where you understand completely what is coming and are given all the time in the world to understand it and none to prevent it.
The figures enter. Three of them. What the dream clarifies with merciless precision: the gun, the suppressor, the specific quality of the lead figure's movement — not aggressive, not emotional, simply functional, the movement of someone completing a task. The kitchen fills with the particular atmosphere of inevitability that Kisuno has breathed every night for eleven years.
In the dream he cannot move. His body has become something denser than flesh, rooted through the floor, pinned to the moment, present for everything and capable of nothing.
The first shot.
In reality muffled by the suppressor — a sound like a book dropped on wooden floors. In the dream enormous, filling every available space, the loudest thing that has ever existed, the sound the universe makes when it decides to break something it has no intention of repairing.
Josu goes down. Then Hazuno. The dream shows him everything with the fidelity that only trauma achieves — not the selective editing of voluntary memory but the complete unfiltered recording of a persons witnessing, played back at full resolution, nothing softened, nothing omitted.
And then Hazuno's mouth moves.
In reality those final words were spoken once, at the end of everything, with the effort of a body that had already decided. In the dream the mouth keeps moving after the eyes have gone the way eyes go — after that specific extinguishing, that particular subtraction of presence from a face that had contained it — and what comes out is not what he said. It is what the dream has spent eight years constructing in his voice. The words Kisuno's sleeping mind has assembled from guilt and grief and the raw unprocessed material of surviving when survival was not the plan:
Why couldn't you save us.
The words come quietly. Conversationally, almost. In Hazuno's actual voice — not approximated, not distorted, but exact, the voice that called him a good kid, that said still together, that read him to sleep once in the warehouse when the nightmares were bad and Kisuno was six and afraid of the dark.
Why couldn't you save us, Kisuno.
Then from the floor, from Josu's direction, the same question shaped differently, delivered in Josu's register — that particular flat certainty that had made him untrustworthy and then, once Kisuno understood what it concealed, had made him the safest person in any room:
We came back for you. Every time. We came back. Why didn't you come back for us. And then they rise.
This is the part that is new. This is what Kurosawa has added to eleven years of established nightmare — this is what the new city, the new house, the new accumulated weight of two months without visiting the graves has created in the laboratory of his sleeping mind.
They rise from the kitchen floor and they are not Hazuno and Josu. They are made of something that wears Hazuno and Josu the way a costume is worn — the shapes correct, the faces accurate, the specific way Hazuno held his shoulders and the specific way Josu stood with his weight slightly forward, all of it rendered with horrible precision. But the eyes are wrong. The eyes are the tell. The eyes are the flat, lightless quality of something that has been dead for eight years and has spent those eight years accumulating things to say.
They stand in front of him and they look at him and they do not blink.
You were six, the thing wearing Hazuno says, in Hazuno's voice. You couldn't have done anything. We know that. A pause. But you've been fourteen for three weeks now. And you haven't visited. You haven't brought flowers. The chrysanthemums are brown and the holders are empty and we're in the ground and you're in Kurosawa eating dinner at a table with people who don't know our names.
Do you still know our names, the thing wearing Josu says. Or are you forgetting. You're forgetting, aren't you. The edges first. Then the middle. Then one day you'll wake up and we'll be a feeling without a face and then nothing at all.
Is that what we died for. Kisuno tries to speak in the dream. His mouth opens. Nothing comes.
We protected you, Hazuno's shape says, and now it moves closer, crossing the kitchen floor with a movement that is wrong in the specific way that things are wrong in dreams — too smooth, too continuous, no weight in the steps. We put our bodies between you and the thing that wanted to kill you. Josu took a boot to the head. I took three bullets. Three. And you can't take a train to Tokyo twice a month to put flowers on our graves.
We're cold, Josu's shape says, from behind him now — he didn't see it move, it was simply in front and now it is behind and the dream has no obligation to obey the physics of the waking world. The ground is cold. It's been cold for eight years. And you're in a warm house with a person who makes you breakfast and you're eating the rolled egg now, we saw that, we see everything, and you're alive and warm and eating rolled eggs while we're cold in the ground and nobody visits and nobody remembers and in ten years nobody will even know our names.
Was it worth it, Hazuno's shape says, directly in front of him now, close enough that if it were real, if this were the living Hazuno, he could reach out and hold him. Close enough that the wrongness of the eyes is the only thing that confirms what this is. Tell me it was worth it. Tell me you're doing something with what we gave you. Tell me you're living. Actually living, not just occupying space and waiting for something to happen.
You're not living, Josu's shape says. We can see you. We see the rooftop. We see the calculation you do when you stand at the edge. We died so you'd have a future and you're standing on rooftops doing mathematics about whether the drop is sufficient.
Why couldn't you save us, they say together, in unison, in both voices simultaneously, and the sound of it — Hazuno and Josu speaking the same words at the same time in the same register — is the most horrifying sound the dream has ever produced, more horrifying than the gunshots, more horrifying than the silence after, because it is their voices used against him and they are right and he knows they are right and he has no answer.
Why couldn't you save us. Why couldn't you save us. Why couldn't you save us.
The kitchen floor is changing beneath him, warm and spreading, and the omurice ketchup smiley face is dissolving as the food cools into something that is no longer a face, and the overhead light flickers once, twice — and in the flickering dark between each flash he sees them as they were, alive and whole and arguing about portion sizes, and in the light he sees what the apartment made them, and they are looking at him from both states simultaneously, from the living and from what came after, and their mouths are still moving, still forming the same question in rotation, and the question has no answer and has never had an answer and will never have one —
He opens his mouth — he wakes up screaming.
Not the contained manageable sound he has trained himself toward over eleven years of system-building. Not the truncated gasp that he cuts off before it becomes something that travels. A scream that comes from somewhere below every layer of management he has constructed — originating in the six-year-old who has been living inside him since that night and who has, in this grey city in this unfamiliar house, broken through everything.
It fills the Kanemori house completely.
He is sitting upright, his father's cloak twisted around him, both hands pressed to his mouth — too late, the sound already traveled, already moved through walls, already woken things that will take time to return to sleep. His body is not his body. His hands shake with a violence disconnected from any intention to shake. His lungs performs something that is not breathing — rapid, shallow, dysfunctional, his diaphragm overridden by a nervous system that has assessed lethal threat and responded accordingly. The room is dark and his eyes cannot process the darkness as safe. Every shadow resolves briefly into the geometry of that kitchen before his vision clears it back into the Kanemori house, and the clearing takes longer each time, and the in-between is its own specific terror.
The clock says 2:17 AM.
He presses his back against the headboard. Pulls his knees to his stomach. Focuses on the open window — cold April air, Kurosawa's rain, present and real and now. He counts his breaths. Loses the count. Starts again. Loses it again.
His door opens.
Reiko in the doorway. Hair undone. Face carrying the expression of someone pulled from sleep by a sound that frightened them in a way ordinary sounds don't. Behind her, further down the hallway, Daisuke's silhouette. Still. Watching.
"Kisuno." Soft. Careful. "You're in the house. You're safe."
He looks at her from across the room. His hands are still shaking. She is not coming closer. She is staying in the doorway. She has calibrated the distance correctly without being told how, which surprises him enough to register even through the noise of his still-flooded nervous system.
"I'm sorry," he says. Wrecked. Unrecognizable. "I woke you up. I'm sorry." "Don't apologize." Steady. "Do you need anything? I can stay in the doorway. I don't have to come in."
"Water."
She disappears. Returns in under a minute. Sets the glass on the floor just inside the doorway — not bringing it to him, not requiring gratitude at close range — and steps back. He crosses the room and picks it up and drinks half of it and the cold of it is real and present and now.
"I'm okay," he says. "Okay," she says. She knows it isn't true. She accepts it anyway. She stays in the doorway for two more minutes, just present, just a person, not requiring anything, and then she says goodnight and closes the door softly and her footsteps move down the hallway.
He does not lie back down. He sits with the open window and waits for morning, which he will do every night this week and most nights after, the particular patient waiting of someone who stopped expecting sleep to be safe somewhere around the age of three and has never fully revised that assessment.
The line of yellow light under Shou's door at 3 AM says everything the house isn't saying aloud.
Kisuno stands in the hallway looking at it. The scream went through the wall between their rooms. Shou has been awake since 2:17 AM and is still awake now, the light confirming what the silence won't. Kisuno stands there long enough to register this and then continues to the kitchen and runs cold water over his wrists — pulse points, physiological regulation, something a therapist taught him in his third placement that works or works enough — and looks at himself in the cabinet mirror right above the one and only kitchen sink.
The face that looks back is the face of someone from whom something has been extracted. Pale. Eyes red at the edges. The specific hollowness that settles in after a full episode, the look of a person who has just spent an indeterminate amount of time being six years old and alone on a kitchen floor while the shapes of the people he loved most asked him questions he cannot answer.
He goes back to his room. The light under Shou's door is still on.
At breakfast Daisuke does not mention the night. He reads his tablet with the deliberate non-looking of someone who has made a conscious choice about where to direct his eyes. Reiko makes rice and miso and sets it in front of Kisuno without comment. She doesn't ask how he slept. She doesn't make the face adults make when they are performing concern while actually processing discomfort.
He eats everything. Including the rolled egg.
She notices. She says nothing. But when she turns to clear the table there is something in her shoulders that he reads as relief, the specific physical expression of a person who has been carrying a fear and has been given small reason to set it down temporarily.
Shou comes down late, uniform half-buttoned, with the face of someone who has been awake thinking about something that didn't resolve. He sits across from Kisuno and pours tea and looks at the table.
Then: "Do you want me to walk with you today."
Not quite an offer. More like something that had been building toward articulation and arrived less shaped than intended. The tips of his ears are slightly red. The redness is the physiological cost of asking, visible and involuntary and therefore honest in a way that deliberate expressions aren't.
Kisuno looks at him. "Okay."
Shou nods. Finishes buttoning his uniform. They leave the house together, and the distance between them is six minutes less than it was yesterday, and that is small and it is not nothing.
The school excursion to Mukaiyama Shrine happens on a Friday in the third week of May and it is there, standing on stone pavement with cedar smell in the air, that the second episode arrives without warning and without negotiation.
A car backfires on the road beyond the shrine's perimeter wall. One sharp crack. Carried by air that does not soften it. The present moment ceases to be the present moment.
He is on the ground before he knows he has moved. Knees against shrine pavement, hands pressing flat against stone — cold, textured, real — pressing hard enough that the surface pattern imprints into his palms. His breathing has stopped being breathing. Something faster, shallower, less functional. His vision has partially left the shrine and partially arrived somewhere else and the somewhere else is a kitchen and the kitchen has a specific smell and the smell is the thing that makes his stomach turn completely over.
He is not screaming. He is making something worse than screaming — a compressed, involuntary sound, the vocalization of a system in complete override. Then Yua is there.
She sits on the pavement directly in front of him. Not crouching beside him, not reaching for him — sitting, both hands flat on the stone between them, placed in his field of vision like coordinates. Something present. Something now.
"Stone," she says. Flat. Practical. "Cold. Real." He looks at her hands. He presses his palms harder into the pavement. "Count the cedar trees."
He looks up. One. Two. Three. Four beyond the main hall. Five at the perimeter wall. He counts twice. The breathing begins finding something resembling its shape.
"Five," he says. "Okay."
Four minutes. Her hands on the stone. His palms against the pavement. The cedar smell slowly separating from the other smell, the present moment slowly becoming more real than the one that lives inside him. When he can stand, he stands. She brushes stone dust from her clothes and turns back toward the group with the performance of normalcy so deliberate it functions as cover for both of them simultaneously.
He follows. His hands still shake. The stone pattern is pressed into his palms and he closes his fingers around it — physical evidence, specific and real, proof of the present moment's existence.
Two months since the graves. Two months since chrysanthemums. Two months of the holders sitting empty while the ground stays cold and the zelkova tree moves through its seasons above two stones that bear names he is beginning, at the edges, to feel slipping.
He closes his fist tighter around the stone's impression.
He is still here. That is the only thing he can confirm with certainty. That is what tonight will cost him again, what tomorrow will cost, what every day in this grey city extracts from the place where he keeps whatever remains of himself.
Still here. Still here. Still here.
TO BE CONTINUED...