Shinji finishes the paper boat painting on a night when his father doesn't come home at all.
It's better this way. The apartment breathes differently without him—less tension in the walls, less weight in the air. His mother works until midnight, and Shinji sits at the kitchen table with his watercolors spread around him like talismans, adding the final touches to the red boat.
The second vessel has emerged exactly as his hand remembered it, though his mind holds no conscious knowledge of why these particular folds matter, why this specific shade of red feels right. Crimson mixed with just enough orange to make it warm. A child's boat, made with more heart than skill.
He signs the bottom corner—his name in small characters—and sits back to study the complete piece.
Two paper boats among blue hydrangeas, rain falling around them, white and red together against the drowning. Something about it makes his stomach ache with a feeling that has no name. Not quite sadness. Not quite longing. Something between memory and prophecy.
His phone shows 1:34 AM. The painting is dry enough to wrap. Outside, the city sleeps its half-sleep, Tokyo's endless insomnia reflected in the scattered lights of distant buildings.
Shinji packs the painting carefully, then pulls out his homework—three days late now, the math problems swimming incomprehensibly across the page. Numbers have never made sense to him the way images do. His teacher's red ink from the last assignment screams across the top: See me after class. This is unacceptable.
He hasn't gone to see her. Doesn't know what he'd say. That he works until two AM most nights? That his father's fists teach lessons textbooks can't? That he's failing because survival takes more energy than learning?
The apartment door opens, and Shinji's body tenses automatically before he recognizes his mother's tired footsteps.
She appears in the kitchen doorway, still in her uniform from the cleaning company, her hair coming loose from its bun. She looks ten years older than she is. Thirty-eight going on sixty.
"You're still up," she says, noticing the painting. She comes closer, studying it with exhausted eyes that still manage to see. "Another commission?"
"Yeah. Final piece for the series." "Series?"
"The garden memories. That's what the collector called them." The lie builds itself, layered and careful. "Three paintings of different parts of an old garden. This is the last one."
His mother touches the edge of the paper with one damaged finger. "They're beautiful, Shinji. But they're so sad. Everything you paint lately is sad." "I paint what I see."
"Maybe you need to look at different things." Maybe different things need to exist, he thinks but doesn't say. She pulls out a chair, sits heavily. "Your father didn't come home." "I know." "He called from a bar. Said he's staying with a friend from work."
They both know he doesn't have friends from work. That "friend" means he's passed out somewhere, drunk enough that even he recognized he shouldn't come home.
"Are you okay?" his mother asks, and the question is so vast, so impossibly large, that Shinji almost laughs.
Is he okay? He's fourteen and works nights to help pay rent. He's failing school. His father uses him as a punching bag. He paints memories that aren't his for a person he barely knows in a garden that feels more like home than this apartment ever has.
"I'm fine, Mom," he says. "You should sleep." She reaches across the table, takes his hand. Her palm is rough and cold. "I'm proud of you. I know I don't say it enough. But I'm proud."
Something enormous swells in his throat. He swallows it down hard, along with everything else he can't say. "Thanks, Mom."
She squeezes his hand once, then releases. Stands. Pauses at the kitchen doorway. "The rain is supposed to be heavy tomorrow. You'll go to the garden, won't you?"
He startles. "How did you—"
"I'm your mother, Shinji. I notice things." She's quiet for a moment. "Whoever they are, the person at the garden. They're helping you. I can see it. You're different when you come back. A little less broken."
She leaves before he can respond, her footsteps disappearing down the hall. Shinji sits alone in the kitchen, staring at the painting of two paper boats, and thinks about how mothers always know more than they say.
The forecast predicts heavy rain starting at dawn, but it begins two hours early, at 4 AM, waking Shinji from dreams he won't remember.
He lies in the dark, listening to water hammer against the window, and feels something pull in his stomach—anticipation or dread or both. The painting sits wrapped on his desk. His school uniform hangs over his chair, clean for once. His mother washed it yesterday, the fabric still smelling faintly of cheap detergent.
He should sleep. Needs to sleep. But his mind is already in the garden, wondering if Hakurage is awake too, if he can hear the rain, if he's thinking about Shinji the way Shinji is thinking about him.
The thought startles him. When did Hakurage become a constant presence in his mind? When did someone he's only known for a few weeks become the most important person in his world?
You've known him longer than a few weeks, something whispers in his mind. You just don't remember. The thought is nonsense. Paranoid. The kind of thing you think at 4 AM when sleep deprivation makes reality soft at the edges.
But it persists.
Shinji gets up, dresses quietly, packs his bag. The apartment is silent except for his mother's soft breathing from her bedroom. His father still hasn't returned. The living room couch sits empty, accusatory in its absence.
He leaves at 5:15 AM, walking into rain that feels less like weather and more like intent. The garden gate hangs open, broken off one hinge, swinging slowly in the wind.
Shinji stops, alarmed. Last time he was here, the gate was damaged but functional. Now it looks like something slammed into it—or someone. The wood is splintered, gouged, hanging at an angle that makes the entrance look like a wounded mouth.
He steps through carefully, and the garden beyond is chaos.
The storm has ravaged everything. Branches litter the paths. The pavilion roof has partially collapsed on one side. The pond has overflowed its banks, flooding the entire lower section. Flowers lie trampled and broken, their petals scattered like evidence of violence.
"Hakurage?" Shinji calls, his voice swallowed by rain and wind. No answer.
He runs toward the greenhouse, feet slipping in mud. The structure looms through the rain, its glass panels catching gray light, and as he gets closer, he sees it—the door hanging open, one panel completely shattered, glass scattered across the entrance.
"Hakurage!" He's inside before caution can stop him, and finds him immediately.
Hakurage sits on the floor beside an overturned planting table, surrounded by broken pots and spilled soil. His hands are bleeding—not from the garden work kind of bleeding, but from glass, deep cuts across his palms and fingers. He's staring at something in his hands, not responding to Shinji's arrival, not moving.
"Hakurage. What happened? Are you hurt?" Finally, Hakurage looks up, and his eyes are devastated. Empty in a way that makes Shinji's stomach drop. "They're gone," Hakurage says. His voice is hollow, scraped clean. "All of them. Six years of work. Gone."
Shinji kneels beside him, careful of the glass. "What's gone? What happened?"
Hakurage opens his hands, and Shinji sees what he's holding—photograph fragments, torn and water-damaged beyond recognition. Just pieces now. Meaningless scraps.
"My parents' research photos. Every image they ever took of the garden. Every documentation of their work." Hakurage's voice breaks completely. "The storm. Something hit the greenhouse—a branch, I don't know—broke through the panels. Rain got into the archive boxes. Everything's ruined. All of it."
He's shaking, Shinji realizes. Not from cold but from shock, from grief so profound it's physical. "Let me see your hands," Shinji says gently. "It doesn't matter—"
"Your hands, Hakurage. Show me."
Hakurage extends them mechanically, and Shinji winces at the damage. Glass embedded in skin, blood mixing with rainwater, some cuts deep enough to need stitches. He pulls off his jacket, uses it to carefully wrap Hakurage's hands, applying pressure to slow the bleeding.
"We need to get you to a hospital," Shinji says. "No. No hospitals. Can't afford it. Just—" Hakurage pulls his hands back, cradles them against his stomach. "Just leave me alone. Please."
"I'm not leaving you like this."
"Why not? Everyone else does." Hakurage laughs, but it's a broken sound, sharp edges that cut on the way out. "My parents left. The social workers left. Everyone who was supposed to help just processed paperwork and left. Why should you be different?"
"Because I'm not leaving," Shinji says simply. "Even if you want me to."
They stare at each other in the ruined greenhouse, surrounded by broken glass and destroyed memories, and something passes between them that feels like recognition. Like finding someone in the dark who isn't afraid of darkness.
"I brought the painting," Shinji says quietly. "The paper boats. It's finished." "I don't care about the painting." "Yes you do. You always care. That's your problem—you care too much about everything, and it's killing you."
The words come out harsher than intended, but they're true. Shinji can see it in how Hakurage holds himself, how he collects broken photographs like they're sacred, how he treats the garden like a temple that will collapse if he stops believing.
Hakurage's eyes fill with tears he's too proud to let fall. "You don't understand. Those photographs were all I had left of them. Their work, their legacy, proof they existed, proof this place mattered—" His voice breaks completely. "And I couldn't even protect that. I can't protect anything."
Just like the storm that killed them, Shinji hears in the words Hakurage doesn't say. Just like I couldn't protect them.
Shinji sits beside him on the glass-covered floor, close enough that their shoulders touch. He pulls out the wrapped painting from his bag—miraculously dry inside its plastic—and unwraps it carefully.
"Look," he says, holding it up. "This is proof. This is documentation. Your parents studied winter-blooming plants in this garden. They made discoveries about resilience, about things that survive when everything else dies. And now their work is in art. It's permanent. It's real."
Hakurage stares at the painting—the two paper boats among hydrangeas, white and red, together against the rain—and something breaks in his expression. The tears finally fall.
"We made those boats," he whispers. "You and I. When we were six and seven. Your boat was white. Mine was red. We floated them in the fountain and promised we'd make boats every summer forever."
Shinji's hands go numb. "What?"
"You don't remember. Of course you don't remember. Your brain erased me to protect you from when everything fell apart." Hakurage wipes at his face with his wrapped hands, leaving red smears. "But I remember. I remember everything. Every game we played, every promise we made, every time you looked at me like I was worth something."
The greenhouse spins. Shinji grips the painting to ground himself. "We were friends?" His voice comes out small, childlike.
"Best friends. Brothers, almost. Your father worked for my parents. You were here every day after school, all summer, all the time. The garden was ours." Hakurage's voice is breaking with every word. "Then the facility went bankrupt. Your father got blamed for something he didn't do. Got fired. My parents tried to keep going, took on debt, and then—the storm. The accident. Everything ended. Your family fell apart. You forgot me. And I've been alone ever since."
Shinji's hands shake so violently the painting nearly slips. Images flash through his mind—fragments, pieces, not full memories but echoes of them. A person with dark hair showing him how to fold paper. Small hands gripping his on a swing chain. Laughter in a greenhouse. A promise made under rain.
"Haku," he whispers, and the nickname comes from somewhere deep, somewhere that remembers even when he doesn't. "Your name is Haku." Hakurage's face crumbles completely. "Nobody's called me that in six years."
They sit in the destroyed greenhouse as rain pounds overhead, two people trying to rebuild a friendship from ruins, and Shinji feels his entire understanding of himself shift. He wasn't just surviving. He was mourning. Mourning a loss he didn't know he'd suffered.
"I'm sorry," Shinji says, his voice breaking. "I'm sorry I forgot you. I'm sorry I left you alone."
"You didn't leave. You were taken. There's a difference." Hakurage looks at him with eyes that have carried six years of solitude. "But you're here now. That's what matters."
Shinji sets the painting down carefully, then does something instinct demands—he reaches out and pulls Hakurage into an embrace. It's awkward, their angles wrong, Hakurage's injured hands trapped between them, but it's real. It's connection. It's saying with touch what words can't hold.
Hakurage goes rigid, then slowly, slowly relaxes into it. His forehead drops to Shinji's shoulder, and he shakes silently, crying in the way people cry when they've forgotten how.
"I'm here," Shinji says quietly. "I'm here, and I'm remembering, and I'm not leaving again." They stay like that as the storm rages outside, two pieces of a broken whole trying to fit back together.
Eventually, Hakurage pulls back, wiping his face. "Your uniform is covered in blood." "I don't care." "Your mother will ask questions." "Let her." Shinji stands, extends a hand. "Come on. Let's get your hands properly treated. Then we're cleaning this up together."
"I can't pay you for today—" "I'm not here for payment, Haku. I'm here because this is where I'm supposed to be."
Hakurage takes his hand, lets Shinji pull him up. They stand surrounded by destruction, but somehow, it feels less catastrophic than it did. Less ending, more beginning.
"The red boat," Hakurage says, looking at the painting. "You drew it from memory." "I didn't think I remembered." "Memory lives in hands too. In how we move through space. Your hands remembered even when your mind couldn't."
Shinji looks at the painting, at the two boats together, and feels something slot into place. A piece of himself returning from exile.
"Tell me everything," he says. "Every memory. Even the ones that hurt. I want them back. All of them." "That could take a while." "Then we have the whole rainy season." They smile at each other—small, fragile things, but real—and begin the slow work of salvage.
Outside, the rain continues. Inside, two people who thought they were strangers remember they're family.
TO BE CONTINUED...