The Echo of a Kinder Voice
The fluorescent lights of Seiho High School seemed to hum louder in the wake of Akio Hukitaske's words. For the rest of the school day, the noise of the classrooms—the scratching pens, the droning teacher, the casual chatter—was distant to Hikata Yakasuke. All he could hear was the low, steady voice in the storage closet: "Every joke is an apology for the weight you carry."
Akio, the spectral transfer student, hadn't just pierced Hikata's defenses; he had unlocked a rusted door inside Hikata's memory. And through that gap, a ghost of his older brother, Hakurage, walked out.
Hikata remembered a time when Hakurage was his anchor. Before the crushing weight of their family's debt—before Hikata had even reached his teenage years—Hakurage was fiercely protective and genuinely kind. Hikata would stumble on his jokes, and Hakurage, four years his senior, would laugh not with mockery, but with sincere delight.
He remembered being about ten years old. They lived in a tiny, cramped apartment then, but it was filled with warmth. Hakurage had just saved up enough money from a paper route to buy Hikata a cheap, colorful toy robot. Hikata, in his excitement, had tripped, sending the robot flying and shattering a cheap ceramic vase his mother treasured.
Hikata, already sensitive to his parents' struggles, had braced himself for the inevitable explosion of disappointment. But Hakurage had simply knelt beside him, picking up the pieces of the vase and putting a reassuring, calloused hand on Hikata's shoulder.
"Hey, little brother," Hakurage had said, his voice soft, an echo of the kindness Akio now possessed. "Don't worry about the vase. Things can be replaced. Laughing is much harder to replace."
He'd winked. "Now, give me a joke. A good one. Make me forget about this mess."
Hikata had fumbled out the silliest joke he knew, and Hakurage had roared with genuine laughter, the sound warm and strong, drowning out the tension in the room. In that moment, the joke wasn't an apology; it was a shield, a shared secret of resilience.
But that Hakurage—the protector, the kind-hearted brother—had begun to crack when Hikata was around ten, and by the time Hikata was fourteen, he was gone entirely. The financial pressures, the constant shame, the failed schemes of their father, had curdled Hakurage's spirit into something hard, resentful, and utterly sinister.
The Crushing Shift
The transformation had been brutal, swift, and gruesome. Hakurage, unable to bear their poverty and the constant, heartbreaking exhaustion of their mother, had begun to turn desperate. He fell in with local thugs, his hands, once deft and caring, becoming instruments of petty crime.
Hikata remembered the slow, sinking horror of watching his hero decompose. The genuine laughter was replaced by a heartless, guttural sneer. The gentle hands became fists.
One afternoon, Hikata—then around nine—had failed to properly clean a mess Kenji had left after a shady meeting in their small living room. Hakurage, already stewing in failure and self-loathing, had exploded. He didn't just yell. He punched and beat Hikata with a cold, shocking detachment, treating his own brother like a slave who dared disobey.
Hikata had been left on the floor, breathless, blood smeared on his cheek, feeling the agonizing crunch of a broken rib, holding onto consciousness by a thread. He wasn't crying; he was simply waiting to die.
But through the haze of pain, the words of his mother echoed—bedtime stories she'd whisper about a hero that saves others. Not a hero of grand deeds, but a hero of simple persistence.
"Never tell the hero you're grateful for saving you, Hikata," she'd always told him, tucking him in. "Being grateful will lead you nowhere. The best way to cover up interruptions is to joke, because jokes always make people laugh. They give people hope without them realizing they're being saved."
Holding onto that desperate dream, Hikata had survived. He'd learned that laughter was his only viable currency, his ultimate mask, his final, desperate act of heroism. He tried to save Hakurage with his jokes, to pierce the darkness, but his brother had simply punched harder, the sneer deepening.
The Night of Ash and Screams
The true, horrifying breaking point came a few years later.
Hikata was sixteen. The debt was suffocating. His father, in a final, frantic attempt to escape their ruin, had tried to sell one of his half-finished, volatile inventions to the wrong people.
Hakurage, now fully changed, fully immersed in the local criminal underbelly, saw his father as the source of their endless shame.
The memory was a relentless loop of sensory overload:
The Thud: The sickening, muffled thud of his father's body hitting the cheap tatami floor. Kenji had acted with a cold, brutal efficiency, using a heavy, rusted tool to silence the father who had failed them all.
The Scream: His mother's primal, heartbroken scream, instantly cut short as Hakurage, crazed and fueled by two years of pent-up resentment, turned on her. He didn't want her weakness, her endless, silent suffering, to follow them. And then at nine. When their mother was dying from hunger.
The Smell: The metallic, thick smell of fresh blood mixing with the stale dust and cheap cleaning products.
The Cold Truth: Hakurage had stood over his mother, a dead corpse now, and smiled. A wide, vacant, horrifying smile of absolute, heartless relief. Laughing like a maniac.
He hadn't hesitated. He grabbed the terrified, near-catatonic Hikata and dragged him toward the back door. "We're leaving her, Hikata. No longer useful. Now clean yourself up, moron, we have chores to do."
They hadn't made it far. The noise, the sudden silence, the volatile compounds of Hakurage's recent activities—the police had descended quickly.
The Gunfire and Footsteps: The thud and scream of police officers, gunshots, echoing in the narrow street. Hakurage, realizing the full scope of his failure, hadn't cared. He just kept punching and dragging Hikata, forcing him to keep moving, forcing him to do "chores" even as sirens wailed.
At ten years old by then overall Hikata was nothing more than an almost-corpse, beaten and traumatized. But as he heard the desperate shouts of the police closing in, something broke free inside him. He did not love his brother anymore. He looked at the monster Hakurage had become, the smile that desecrated their mother's memory, and the hero mantra kicked in.
He used his last reserves of strength, twisting free, shoving Hakurage backward toward the flashing lights and shouts. Then, Hikata ran. He ran and ran, not toward safety, but away from his blood-soaked past, leaving his murderous brother to finally rot. Hakurage was arrested, sentenced to a month in prison—a sentence shockingly light due to questionable legal maneuvers—but the brief time in the cell only changed him into an even more refined, heartless freak. Hikata didn't stay to witness it.
The Hero's Mirror
Hikata had eventually been found, hospitalized, and then shuffled through a series of cold, well-meaning adoptive guardians, all of whom he eventually ran away from. His real parents, in his eyes, were the hero and the victim who had given him the only true lesson: laughter saves.
He had landed at Seiho High under a program for displaced youth, a ghost trying to blend in. He was a master of forced smiles, a veteran of grief disguised as punchlines. He even tricked his peers, but never himself. He carried the belief that if he ever let the truth out—the truth about his father's murder, his mother's abandonment, his brother's monstrousness—no one, especially a hero, would want to be near him.
Then came Akio.
The next day, Hikata spotted Akio in the bustling schoolyard. Akio was sitting alone under a ginkgo tree, his nose buried in the same worn leather notebook. Hikata approached, his heart pounding, his familiar mask sliding into place.
"Yo, Doctor Doom!" Hikata called out, his voice loud and artificially cheerful. "Decided to trade the closet for the open air, huh? Don't worry, my jokes are biodegradable! They won't hurt the local ecosystem!"
Akio looked up, his violet eyes meeting Hikata's—and for a split second, the air between them felt thin, electric. It was like Akio knew everything. Hikata saw not judgment, but a profound, almost aching recognition, like looking into a mirror that showed a possible, better past.
Akio didn't laugh, didn't joke. He simply looked at Hikata, and the look was that of an older brother who had finally found his lost sibling. A brother from the past, the good one, the one who saw the pain and just wanted to heal it.
Hikata's careful smile wavered. He felt the impulse to confess, to unleash the terrible truth about Hakurage Holtsuko Yakasuke and the blood-soaked apartment, but the fear of Akio's inevitable recoil—the fear of losing this inexplicable, grounding connection—was too strong. He kept the mask on, launching into a rapid-fire string of observations about the cafeteria food and a teacher's bad toupee, layering the lies thicker and thicker.
Akio listened until Hikata's frantic voice trailed off, his own eyes never leaving Hikata's. He reached out slowly, deliberately, and did the only thing Hikata's brother had done years ago that had brought him comfort.
Akio didn't say a word. He simply hugged Hikata.
It wasn't a passionate hug; it was a simple, firm, and grounding embrace. Akio was slender, but his arms were strong, and the sudden, physical contact felt like a shockwave. Hikata stiffened, the physical touch burning through his defenses. He felt Akio's palm pat his back twice, slow and steady, like an older brother assuring him everything was alright.
"You don't have to apologize for existing, Hikata," Akio murmured into his ear, his voice low and private. "Just move forward. The formula for healing starts with the courage to stop running."
Then, just as suddenly, Akio pulled back, his expression returning to his usual detached intensity. He picked up his notebook and walked away, leaving Hikata standing alone, stunned, amidst the indifferent crowd of students.
Hikata stood there for a long time, the warmth of the embrace fading, replaced by a cold, hard resolve. Akio had given him the antidote—a moment of pure, unadulterated acceptance. But Hikata's mind screamed the hero's rule: Don't involve the hero.
Akio was his hero, the first person since his mother and father and old version of his older brother, the kind version, to give him genuine, non-judgmental hope. Hikata could not, would not, drag that clean spirit into his own volatile chaos.
From that day on, Hikata avoided Akio. He would see him in the halls, under the ginkgo tree, or sometimes near the abandoned pharmacy, and he would turn the other way. He maintained his loud, relentless comedic performance, but now, the laughter had a new, sharper edge of purpose: to keep his hero safe, distant, and untainted by the gruesome, unhealable wound of the Yakasuke family.
Hikata knew that Akio wasn't fooled. But the hero had to be protected. And a true hero doesn't demand gratitude or expect a confession. They just save you, whether you ask them to or not.
TO BE CONTINUED...