"Peek-a-boo!!"
Hiyori was going to lose her balance and tumble backward into the rushing river when, in the most unexpected manner possible, the damn penguin materialized, poking its head out from behind a half-burned bus stop that had better days ahead of it. Her heart was racing wildly within her breast, her fists were clenched tightly in response to shock, and her body was still partially numb, a remnant of the last explosion of pain she'd just gone through—but the fury? Ah, that came swiftly and in force.
"MUGYIWARA!!" She cried in a creaking voice, full of incredulity, fear, and a raw, overwhelming fury that could not be contained. "You—you actually MOLESTED me—in a penguin costume of all things!"
He blinked in a cartoonish manner. The beak of the costume shifted slightly.
"Hello," he said with a voice that was as if he was announcing his blood type. "I actually sleep in these."
What?
"I could hear your voice ringing all the way from the floor of my room, okay? I didn't have even a second to spare to get dressed in something a little bit more suitable. I just blurted out of there. I ran straight from the chaotic environment of the red-light district." He adjusted the head of the costume, holding it as if it were a heavy helmet, more annoyed at the hassle of the situation than anything.
"To what?" she sneered. "To rape me? Is that as low as you hate my mom?"
The bitter words had a stinging taste, nigh on venomous, but he did not so much as bat an eyelid in reaction. In fact, he did not even flash a suggestion of guilt on his lips. Rather, he looked—outraged. His face was offended, too. He looked as though he was being accused of stealing lunch money when, in fact, he thought he was engaging in the much more righteous act of paying off the national debt.
"Rape you?" he asked, his voice rising slightly to express a tone just sufficient to be slightly offended. "Why on earth would I ever think about raping you? What made you think that I would ever want to do something like that?"
"You grabbed my crotch!" she yelled.
"I STOLE YOUR DAMN PAIN."
The words are like thunder in the air, heavy and absurd all at once.
"I ran all the way here in a completely absurd penguin costume, then proceeded to steal that poor boy's bike without permission, and then stumbled right into a river in attempting to relieve the agonizing pain that you were about to lose consciousness from." He pointed at her belly. "The same pain."
She blinked her eyes, briefly shocked by the torrent of sensations. Her hands reflexively went to her belly, as if searching for some type of reassurance or comprehension. The cramps were constant and persistent. The bleeding was frightening. The agonizing, white-hot, searing pain she had been immersed in—
Gone.
No, it isn't entirely accurate to say that it has disappeared altogether. Rather, it has dissolved. It has been watered down significantly. It has taken on a dull color. And also, the bleeding had ceased too, soaked into her skirt in a manner that was akin to a memory that she was not yet prepared to confront.
"Why is that?" She breathed, her tone not accusatory this time—she was merely trying to understand the situation more clearly.
"You asked," he replied, absently wiping some dirt from his sleeve as if it was just an ordinary Tuesday, just any Tuesday of the week.
"I don't remember asking."
"I hear things," Shotaro muttered to himself, quietly. "Not voices, not words, anyway. What I hear are wounds. I hear them loud and clear. Deep in the middle of my skull. Behind my eyes. In the very center of my damn spine. It's everyone who needs me, whether they want me to or not."
Hiyori just stared. Her mouth was slightly open. Her hands trembled. The wind tugged at her hair, cold and cruel, and for the first time she saw how young he looked beneath the absurdity—just a boy too big for his own world, trying to keep it from falling apart with duct tape and divinity.
She gazed at him—actually looked—and for an instant saw the weariness behind the sarcasm. The pain of a thousand unspoken rescues. The isolation of a savior no one requested.
Then, once more, her voice wavered and cracked, but this time it was smaller and more attenuated, as though it was splitting down the fine edge of a truth she had not yet fully accepted or chosen to believe and accept.
"I felt like you were hurting me."
Shotaro remained firm, neither recoiling nor giving ground. For a moment, he looked at her—not as if he were a young boy who had committed some atrocities, nor as if he were a divine guardian standing firm in protection—but as if he were a person who was just tired of the world misinterpreting him and trying to understand the nuances of a beautiful painting explained to a person who can only see the outlines of the frame that holds it.
"Point of view," he said softly, his voice now free of any sarcasm, "is like a kaleidoscope. The truth is that we never actually know what hurts us and what does not. Rather, we only sense them. We interpret them in our own way. We respond based on those interpretations."
His gaze locked into hers—not in the way that implied cajoling or defensiveness, but one that wanted to find the part of her that could still understand the basic distinction that lies between hurt and the act of rescue.
"Though," he said with a careless shrug of his shoulders, his silver hair now dripping with river water down the back of his neck from being wet, "I know it's my fault for not taking the time to get permission before I moved. I really should have done that. I fully understand where you're coming from. It's just…" He cast another glance in her direction, his eyes drinking in the dark stains that discolored her skirt, the pallor that had settled into her cheeks, and the slight shiver that accompanied her breath as she spoke. "You were in the process of running. You were bleeding too much. I simply didn't have time for words or explanations. I had to act." He had a tone that suggested a sense of guilt, but not the type one hears from those who have been caught or caught in the process of their wrongdoing. This was not the type one hears from those who are attempting to avoid responsibility, escape shame, and step out of the way of punishment for their actions. Rather, it was an older and deeper type of guilt, one that clung in the darkest places of the soul. This type of guilt was heavy, as though it had made itself a home within him, burrowed into his very existence like an old coat wrapped around weary bones. It was a resigned acceptance that he had crossed certain lines—not out of a desire to hurt or cause pain, but out of a sense of duty and need instead. He was the type of individual who fully knew the stakes of dipping into another's fire, fully aware of the risks involved, and still willing to take the heat, even if it was to be burned in the process, all for the sake of attempting to save someone else from their own destruction.
And all Hiyori was able to do was sit there, on that ripped edge of abandoned road, where river met dirt and quiet met the remnants of her pride. Concrete was hard and unyielding under her, sharp against the pads of her palms. Blood had dried in crooked lines down her legs, staining her like a failed martyr from some discarded myth, a product of suffering too forgotten for saints to worship. Her mind was knotted, rough, and unpolished, but she couldn't speak. Not yet. It caught in her throat like half-hiccuped sobs, dense as humiliation, denser than reality. And amidst it all, the wind continued to blow—not gently, not malevolently, simply apathetically—teasing her hair back as if the world itself had finally breathed out.
He did not say anything. He did not even apologize. He did not kneel to her suffering or stand up loudly to justify his behavior. He simply stood—this gangling, ridiculous boy in that wet penguin suit, his feet bare and covered in river mud, his silly flipper-hands hung loose at his sides. If gods ever came down in idiocy rather than thunder, they would be such as these. He stood like a man who did not hope for pardon, only comprehending. An odd saint in pilfered polyester, too exhausted to explain why he continues to arrive.
She slowly stood up. Her legs ached, her head reeled, and her balance was off. She used the back of her sleeve to wipe her nose and gave him a look that was less hate and more resignation.
"I still hate you for what you did," she said, low voice, shaking not with fear but the strange spot where anger breaks down into reluctant gratitude. "But… thanks. I guess."
He squinted, blinking. "I did what?"
"You know," she snappily flashed, annoyance raw like a sore spot. "Don't play dumb—remember that time you kebabed me?"
His face winced-smirked. "You mean when you were hassling Mazino?"
Her cheeks turned hot pink as she chattered. "And you tore up my uniform and heat-visioned my bare flesh. I could smell my own flesh burning!
"I admit it," he stated, folding his arms across his chest, the damp penguin flipper groaning against his ribcage. "There are sadistic twinges left in me. Residues of something older. Something darker. I don't enjoy them. But when I see people all puffed up—too proud, too cruel—I feel them awaken. These twinges." He paused, looking into the trees, then back at her. "And I start doing… things."
She glared at him. "Things."
He nodded solemnly. "Things I shouldn't."
"Things like setting teenage girls on fire?"
"Tame," he said.
"TAME?!"
"I mean, compared to what I wanted to do," he shrugged. "But I'm trying not to go too far. I'm working on it."
It wasn't an apology. It wasn't even regret. But it was real. Ridiculously, brutally sincere. And for the first time in a long, long life of sorrows she never had a chance to mourn, Hiyori didn't scream. Didn't cry. Didn't punch and slammed doors. She just remained precisely where she was—blood drying like broken ink on her thighs, wind seeping under her ripped shirt, weariness penetrating the marrow of her bones—while the boy in a drooping, river-soaked penguin suit informed her, without wincing, that he was filled with longings he despised and wrestled anyway, for her.
And then, unceremoniously, without compassion, he grasped her hand and stood her up.
His hold was sure but not cruel. Her legs trembled like weeds in the stream, but she stood, anchored to him for a fraction longer than she'd care to acknowledge. And in that one weak instant—where her body was still sore and her head hadn't caught up with the clemency just given—she gazed up at him, that same boy who had etched heat into her flesh and caused her to weep in public, and experienced a shiver of something she loathed more than pain: confusion.
"Why are you being so nice to me all of a sudden?" she hissed, the words hard and protective, because gentleness always terrified her more than brutality. "I'm still the same. A control freak with a temper. A bad guy."
Shotaro's face contorted—not with anger, but with something softer. Something denser. Like he'd heard those words too many times in too many mouths that weren't hers.
"Bad person?" he repeated, tone infused with a frustration that did not boil over, but seethed. "You believe that's what this is about? Good and evil? Heroes and villains? You still hanging on to that kindergarten crap?"
She blinked, wondering if she should be offended or impressed.
"There are no bad people," he told her, "and there are no good people. There are just choices. Day after day, hour after hour, one fucking decision at a time. You made a bad choice? I stopped you. Now you're bleeding and scared, and I'm assisting you. That's it."
His voice turned as hard as stone compressed—no screaming, no drama. Just steel.
You crave some neat label? A halo or a pitchfork? Grow the fuck up. If a hero incinerates a village into nothingness, is he still the hero? If a demon king preserves it from an army, is he still the villain? Morality doesn't wear uniforms, Hiyori. Humans do. And they change them according to seasons.
She gazed down, her hand still gently pressed against his, as if the warmth of his palm would account for everything. As if the touch would be able to decipher the paradox. But there was nothing but skin—actual, human, marred—and something beneath it: not perfection. Just striving.
"What you did to me…" she started, unsure whether it was inquiry or blame.
"I did," he replied, "because I had to. to make you learn something to punish you. to stop you."
"And now?"
"And now," he said, with a movement that seemed to bear the burdens of entire conflicts, "you're hurt. So I assist. Because that's what you do."
Not because she was pretty. Not because he forgave her. But because in that instant—where pain screamed louder than sense and the world continued to turn despite blood and trauma and smashed-up memories—a decision had to be made. And Shotaro Mugyiwara, ridiculous, huge, barefoot and dripping river water in a crumpled penguin costume, did it with no particular fanfare.
Because everybody in this world was immoral, he had once argued. Morality was an act most people forgot they were performing. Everybody was just making choices—badly or courageously, fatally or lovingly—but always, always choosing.
And as the wind changed like the turn of a page, and her legs discovered the earth under them once more, Hiyori cocked her head with a tired scowl and asked, "And what the devil is with that penguin suit?"
Her tone contained no venom anymore, only the thorny curiosity of one so exhausted at being perplexed they'd rather just be irked.
Shotaro, always the paradox, flashed her this sheepish little face—eyebrows raised, cheeks puffed up, a preposterous cartoon (-w-) look that didn't fit in this heavy-gravity situation—and mumbled flatly, "I told you. It's my night dress."
She blinked, attempting to calculate the ridiculousness.
"Women have night dresses," she shot back, her eyes narrowing. "That's pajamas. That's… that's not an answer. Why a penguin?
Her voice broke at the end, as if the tension of the past hour was attempting to seep out on laughter and confusion and something perilously close to trust.
Shotaro didn't blink.
"Because penguin is my favorite animal," he declared, utterly serious, as if that solved anything whatsoever.
She scowled. "Penguin is a bird.
"That's a sheep's philosophy," Shotaro retorted with due urgency, his tone as dry as sandpaper and as relaxed as sin, the sort only a man who had apparently spent too many nights debating rubbish with himself—and somehow always coming out on top was capable of. It wasn't sarcasm. It was philosophy. Or at least his interpretation of it.".
Hiyori was there, bleeding through her leggings, knees scraped and sore, pride held together with bruises and habit. She gazed at him, at this lanky ridiculousness of a boy in a half-inflated penguin suit, dripping water from the river and indignation, with a mouth full of things she didn't even know how to question anymore.
Then, as if none of this had ever happened—no crotch pain sorcery, no cartoonish chase scene, no existential breakdowns in the mud—Shotaro looked at her watchless wrist and said, casually, "School starts in twenty minutes. It's a half day. summer break begins."
Hiyori's eyes widened as if slapped. "WHAT?!"
She gazed down at herself—blood, grime, emotional scarring, and a tracksuit that resembled a war zone—scared. "Jesus fucking Christ," she swore. "In all this penguin chase rubbish I remembered—why didn't you tell me!?"
He shrugged. "I mean. I can fly, teleport, open portals. Time's kind of optional for me. You, however, can do none of those. And your tracksuit's destroyed. You'll look like someone who lost a fight with the Devil and didn't fill out the paperwork."
And then, suddenly, as if he was getting the soup, his demeanor changed.
"But also…" he continued, taking just a step or two closer, his eyes now narrowing with something slower, heavier, older. "Not the primary topic, but I hear you were thinking of forming another gang. Defy me?"
The question fell like a brick hurled through glass.
Hiyori stilled. All the color in her face leeched away before your eyes, her back rigid as if it were attempting to contain the transgressions of adolescence all at once.
The chilled concrete beneath her suddenly seemed warmer than the air that lingered between them.