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“Sojiro! He’s up. First aid kit!”
Sojiro jumps at the sudden high-pitched shout, nearly dropping the coffee mug he’s been drying slowly for the last five minutes. Shaking his head, he picks up the dusty white box that lives under the sink. He’s never used it past the occasional burn cream for a hot water spill, but it’s still well within the expiration date.
The first thing he sees upon climbing up the stairs is Futaba perching owl-like on the desk chair, the moonlight reflecting off her glasses, obscuring her eyes. The same shaft of moonlight shines on the bed in the corner. Akira isn’t so much “up” as “groaning mildly, with an arm over his face”, but he’s awake, which is something. The cat is still curled up in the crook of his legs, purring softly. An hour or so after the kid had been dumped on his doorstep, Futaba and Morgana had marched through the front door, looking like… well, like the cat who got the cream. Neither of them had looked quite so smug when they saw him, though, and Sojiro had relinquished bedside observation to Futaba when it was clear she had no plans of leaving.
“Good morning,” he says, seeing Akira’s eyes blearily open. “Rough night?”
Akira snorts, and Sojiro hands the first aid kit to Futaba. Or tries, anyway. She looks at it, then shoots him a withering look. “I don’t know how to use that.”
“Move, then.” She scampers off the chair and takes a seat on the sofa; Sojiro pulls the chair over to the bedside.
Akira swings his legs over the side of the bed and sits up with a groan, clutching his side and dislodging the cat. Sojiro had seen a spreading bruise there, purple and blue and shaped like the sole of a boot, when he’d manhandled the semi-conscious teenager into sweatpants and a t-shirt earlier. “A couple of cracked ribs, that’s my guess. Shame we can’t take you to a hospital, but there’s nothing much a doctor could do for them anyway.”
“Takemi,” Akira grunts.
“Who… oh, that clinic doctor?” A nod. “You trust her?” Another nod. “I’ll get her over here tomorrow, then. For now, let’s just get you cleaned up.”
He opens the first aid kit onto his lap and eyes Akira out of the corner of his eye as he unscrews the bottle of antiseptic liquid. The kid’s eyes are more focused than they had been earlier; that Niijima woman had at least had time to tell him that he didn’t have to do much about the amobarbital besides let him sleep, before she rushed off to do God knows what. He’s clearly still somewhat sedated, though. His hands lie limply in his lap, and Sojiro can’t remember the last time he’d seen that. Akira was usually a bundle of tics: adjusting his bangs, spinning a pencil, checking his phone, shifting his weight back and forth, tapping a foot on the ground; micro-adjustments, less nervous energy and more as if he were trying to settle his body into a shape that fit into the place he was standing.
“Did we do it?” Akira says with a wince as Sojiro applies antiseptic to a graze on his temple. It’s directed towards Futaba, but Sojiro cuts her off before she can reply.
“Did you do what, that’s what I want to know. You explain this in a way I can understand too, Futaba, or…” Or what, he’d ground her? Not only would that barely be a punishment, this had gone far beyond what a parent could do. “Just do it, okay?” Anything to relieve him of the gut-clenching terror he’d felt when the emergency news broadcast had cut in.
“We did,” Futaba says with a nod, ignoring him. “Everyone is completely and utterly convinc—“ The rest of the word is cut off in a great yawn, after which she pushes up her glasses with a slightly trembling finger. The cat jumps up on her lap and settles down, giving a chattering meow and watching Sojiro for all the world like he’s attending to the conversation. Sojiro looks from his exhausted daughter to his still slightly drugged ward, and relents. This isn’t the time for a fight.
“All right, an explanation tomorrow is fine,” he says, turning his attention to Akira’s wrists. They aren’t actively bleeding, not like they had been when he had first arrived, so Sojiro applies antibiotic cream and begins to bandage them up.
“Sorry, Sojiro.” Akira pauses for a moment, looking into the middle distance vaguely. One of his pupils twitches briefly, before he closes both eyes and shakes his head firmly, continuing. “Everyone got out okay?”
“Oh yeah, easy peasy.” Futaba has an airy tone in her voice that doesn’t match how she had looked yesterday, when she’d arrived home late in the evening, escorted by Makoto, deflecting his questions with grunts. She’d shut herself and the cat up in her room, and when Sojiro had gotten up at five in the morning to brew the day’s first batch of coffee, the light had still been on under her door. “We’re a pretty well-oiled machine even without you around, you know!”
Without him around. Sojiro wonders if his charge knows that his friends, more often than not, stop by Leblanc even when he isn’t there. Yusuke and Futaba had spent what seemed to be a productive afternoon just last week in one of the booths, a sheaf of A4 paper spread out in front of them and their heads together in pensive contemplation of something called “Comiket”. Ann was always stopping by in between shoots, claiming she was “in the neighborhood”, not that Yoncha was near anything at all. Makoto had a monthly shoujo manga magazine mailed to the cafe’s address, to get the discount subscription price without her sister questioning her wasting time and money. Even the new girl, the well-bred one who grew vegetables that tasted like mouthwash, had asked him a question about managing inventory the other day; when in response, he’d gestured towards the kitchen with a shrug, her smile had become pained, and she’d showed up the next day with a fast-looking laptop and a freshman business textbook and printed off some custom spreadsheets. (“Oh, it’s nothing, really,” she’d said when he’d protested. “You don’t have to use them, I just felt like I should try and understand the process of a small business from the ground up.”) Waifs and strays, waifs and goddamn strays, every one of them. You show weakness to one, you end up saddled with a whole gang of teenagers with time on their hands and nowhere to go.
He’d never seen much value in going out of his way to be supportive. All that hooey about open discussions of feelings and frank heart-to-hearts seemed like so much hippie nonsense to him. But he listened, and he watched, and over time, he learned. On Thursday evenings when Akira was (unbelievably) interning with some politician, he always left a pile of dishes in the sink so that Yusuke would have a chore to offer to do in exchange for some curry. (If it wasn’t his own idea, the boy was always too proud to accept, and Sojiro would rather he didn’t collapse with anemia in the cafe and stick him with the ambulance bill.) Ryuji had bummed around and hemmed and hawed and read comic books in the corner booth for a week before Sojiro had told him to spit it out already; he’d stood puffed-up and defensive while he admitted his toilet at home had been running for a while now, and his ma couldn’t afford a plumber unless it was an emergency, and he was the man of the house now, so shouldn’t he learn how to fix a fu—a damn toilet already? (Sojiro gave him some tips and lent him some tools; he has a drinking buddy with a plumbing business who probably would have done him a favor, but sometimes a man needs the pride of doing something with his own two hands.) And when Futaba had arrived on his doorstep with the social worker, tight-lipped and large-eyed, clutching a single duffel bag, so different from the cheeky, precocious child he’d known for years, he hadn’t asked her anything. He’d ordered them takeout from her favorite Chinese place, and he’d stayed up until two in the morning with her watching reruns of some old sci-fi show, and when she’d said quietly “I miss her,” he’d replied “I miss her too,” and that was the last they spoke of it. (That one he’d always regard as his biggest failure, the reticence of a standoffish man getting in the way of the need of a young girl to be told she was worthy of love. Maybe, now that he thought about it, that was what the rest of it was trying to make up for.)
“It’s okay,” Akira says to him as he turns the boy’s head this way and that, looking for any contusions under that mop of hair that would point towards a concussion, or worse. “I have a headache, but you don’t have to…”
“Wiggle your toes,” Sojiro orders, ignoring him. Akira complies, although out of the corner of his eye Sojiro can see the boy had let his eyelids flutter shut as soon as he thought his face wasn’t under scrutiny. “Good. Nothing looks broken. I’ve heard they go for the feet, you know. A broken toe or two is less obvious than a broken finger.”
“Doc, will I ever play piano again?”
Sojiro pauses, momentarily nonplussed. “What?”
“It’s an old joke. Isn’t it?” Akira opens his eyes, scratching at a scab on his forearm that tells of an IV hastily pulled out and a wound left undressed. “You know. A man goes to the doctor with broken fingers, asks if he can play piano, you know, after they’re better, and the doctor says yes, and he says great, I couldn’t before…” He trails off, then shows a shadow of a grin that looks more like a rictus. “The cops didn’t think it was funny either.”
It’s the longest sentence he’s come out with since he woke up, and like many other things about Akira, it’s equal parts baffling and infuriating. He showed up acting like he didn’t care about anyone or anything, then brought home an abandoned cat with a mulish set of his jaw that wouldn’t take no for an answer. He deflected Sojiro’s questions when he came home with a scowl, but half the time he deflected his questions when he came home with a grin, too. He was a cocksure brat with a surprising willingness to learn, and a social butterfly who never seemed like he needed anyone, not like most people needed people. He spent days on end going on jaunts with his friends, and while you’d never find a bigger bunch of misfits, they all clearly cared about one another with a genuine warmth that was rare to find in teenagers. At the same time, there was some core of him that seemed untouchable, aloof from the world, and when he didn’t want to talk, Sojiro couldn’t tell if he or the cat was more self-possessed and inscrutable.
Some of that had to be because of all this phantom thief nonsense, but not all of it. He wonders how much of it is even on purpose.
He wonders if it bothers the kid that his parents have only called him twice in seven months.
He sure as hell knows it bothers him. He made a point of not poking his nose anywhere it didn’t belong (if people liked to tell him things of their own volition, that was just an occupational hazard of owning a coffee shop), and at first he hadn’t expected Akira’s parents to be in contact much at all. He had imagined the kid they were sending would have a rap sheet as long as his arm, a swagger in his step and a chip on his shoulder. Anyone would want to get a kid like that off their hands, and anyone desperate enough to pawn him off on a total stranger sure as hell wouldn’t be calling for weekly updates. (He could still remember the absurd way Yamaguchi, an old government contractor buddy turned customer, had awkwardly steered that conversation. “Hey, how’s your foster daughter doing? What is she now, third year in middle school? Boy, time flies. She must be taking her high school entrance exams around now. Hey, so, speaking of high school, an old university classmate of mine, lives up in Miyagi prefecture now, I guess there was some incident with his kid, he got kicked out of school. There’s a place down here that will accept him, but they need to find a foster placement for him first, and I kinda gave your number to their lawyer, seeing as how you know the system and all…”)
But as time went on, and Akira followed the rules without argument, helped around the shop with good humor, got good grades and a part-time job, Sojiro started to wonder. Hell, he’d had his days, back in college, when he’d had a bee in his bonnet and wanted to throw down with whoever looked at him the wrong way. Couldn’t it have been a one-off? A misunderstanding? And if he was a typical cocky teenage boy with a hot head every now and again who thought he knew what justice was, was all he deserved really a five-minute call in April and a ten-minute one in July?
And so Sojiro threw him an apron and taught him what he could. A place to stay, chores to do, a lecture every now and then and someone to care when he came home; it wasn’t much, but it was all a crotchety loner like him could do.
Here he sits, dried blood on his bottom lip, still swaying and blinking under the effect of barbiturates, cracked ribs and bruises brought on by the brutality of a system that had written him off once and then again for good measure.
And he’s still trying to joke about it.
And he’s still more worried about his friends than himself.
“Well, that’s about all a layman like me can do,” Sojiro says gruffly, closing the first-aid kit with a snap. Akira’s color is bad and his mind is probably worse, but his myriad cuts and scrapes are bandaged. “You’re not in immediate danger of exsanguination, so get some sleep. That drug should wear off fully by morning, so I hear. Futaba, let’s get going.”
Akira nods toward the sofa and smiles. Sojiro turns and realizes why Futaba hasn’t said anything in the last few minutes. She’s fallen sideways and curled up on the couch, breathing deeply and steadily, head pillowed on her jacket’s hood and Morgana, the most patient cat in the world, in her arms like a teddy bear.
“C’mon, Futaba,” he says softly, walking over and putting a hand on her shoulder. She jerks and sits up with a start, making the cat yowl in protest, pulling a stray strand of hair out of her mouth. “Let’s go home and let him sleep.”
“But his HP is still critical!” she says, looking at Akira anxiously as he slowly eases himself back into a lying position. “What if his respiratory rate drops in his sleep?”
“You can’t stay up all night and watch him, you know,” Sojiro says sternly. “You’ll be fine, won’t you? You got your phone back, so call if you need anything.”
Akira raises a wobbly thumbs-up from the bed. The cat meows, and fixes Sojiro with beady eyes as Futaba grumbles and says “Yes, he is always such a stickler.”
Sojiro shoos her towards the stairs, following behind her. He takes his glasses off and cleans them on his shirt, muttering about the dust in the attic. He shoves a cardboard box with his foot, pushing it back onto the shelf it’s started to fall off of. He puts his hand into his back pocket, making sure he has his keys.
He snorts, and turns around.
“Look, I know you must like being Mr. Big Shot and all, big attic bedroom, no supervision. Don’t think I don’t know how it is for a teenage boy. But we’re supposed to get the first frost this week, and I’m not breaking my back dragging the space heater out of storage at three in the morning just for you. Are you coming, or what?”
---
Between the two of them, he and Futaba manage to drag Akira down the block to the house. Akira is deposited in Sojiro’s bedroom, and Sojiro makes up the couch for himself.
After he’s sure Futaba is in bed and he’s not being watched, he feeds the cat some shredded chicken on the counter, and gives it some milk in a saucer.
He lights a cigarette, and thinks about Wakaba.
“You’re good with kids,” she’d remarked, once, after he’d had a long discussion with the then seven-year-old Futaba about the moon landing.
“Bullshit. I don’t know jack about kids.”
“Exactly.” They had been sitting on the steps outside her apartment; Wakaba took a long drink of her lemonade, looking up at something in the twilight sky only she could see. “You don’t modulate yourself. You don’t talk down to them. You don’t even like them, particularly, so you don’t care if they like you.”
“What’s your point?”
“Give me that.” She’d tweaked his ever-present cigarette out of his mouth, taking a long drag before continuing. “Kids are smart enough to know the world is looking down on them. Even if you’re a grouch, you’re an honest one. That’s all kids need, you know.” Another drag; a speculative look at the slowly rising moon. “Someone they can believe in.”
“Maybe you were right,” he says now, softly, scratching the cat between its ears. “Or maybe I’m just going soft. What do you think, huh?”
Morgana meows. Sojiro chuckles.
He sits in the kitchen for a long time, smoking his cigarette, staring out into the night.