If Yasuko had gone to work, the lack of shoes at the front entrance, the coldness and darkness of an empty house, the closed curtains, and the silence that seemed to seep into the bottom of his feet would have all been ordinary. Possibly because of the snow, however, Ryuuji slowly turned his head.
The first sign things were out of place came from the birdcage not being in its normal spot.
He looked into his own room and Yasuko’s, checking that the birdcage really was gone. Forgetting to even change his damp clothes, he went right and left through the two-bedroom apartment. He tried calling the store. In the middle of telling them he was Yasuko’s son, they asked him, “How’s your mom doing? Do you know how long she’ll be out for?” and he knew that she hadn’t gone to work. He put down the phone and thought of asking the landlady. Then, for the first time, he noticed the thing left in the middle of the low table.
On the note, which bore the squirrel-shaped trademark of a phone shop, was an address.
The name of the closest station was written on it, and even a phone number. Next to it was the watch he’d worn to the Christmas party.
“…”
His throat made a strange sound.
The situation was no longer I’ll run away from home and abandon Yasuko. It was no longer about whether that was okay. It was no longer about whether that was how adults did things. He needn’t have worried about those things.
He was the one who’d been abandoned.
“Uh—”
They really were exactly alike, mother and son. The one who was quicker to run was the winner, and the one who got left behind was the loser.
Ryuuji dropped to his knees, or rather, didn’t have the willpower left to stand. Before he realized it, he was sitting on the tatami mats. He didn’t even know what he was looking at, what he was listening to, what he was doing, or what he was thinking as he took several drawn-out breaths.
Am I really starting from here again?
He had no idea where those short words he had assembled into one phrase had come from. Am I really starting from here again? He just kept repeating that. Am I really starting from here again? He forgot to blink. He was exhausted and worn out, but he was starting again—his spine felt like it was being crushed one vertebra at a time—he couldn’t even move his fingertips.
Tick, tick, tick. He realized the watch was making a faint sound.
“Ah ahhhh, ahhhHHHHHhhhhhhhhhh!”
Thrown with terrific force, the watch hit the sliding door and stopped. Ryuuji knocked over the table, grabbing the overturned legs to stand back up. He threw it against the wall. He punched the tatami mats with both hands. He held his head and scratched at his face, and since he had nothing in reach to hit anymore, he punched his own thighs.
“Why did this happen?! You can’t be serious, you’ve got to be kidding, you’ve got to be kidding! You’ve! Got! To! Be! Kidding! Am I supposed to start over again?! Is it going…to keep going…like this…?!”
His voice seemed to go shrill as he writhed and yelled and clawed at himself. “Taiga…Taiga! Taigaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”
Come, please be with me, he cried out, like a baby, though his cries would never reach her. Ryuuji rolled over on the tatami mats.
Maybe this was the “mass destruction” Taiga had spoken of? If you acquired something, something would be taken from you in return. If you desired something, everything you loved would be destroyed. This was what that meant. But did he even have the right to be so hurt by his mother abandoning him? He’d been planning to abandon her himself, after all.
In a way, he was in exactly the situation he hoped for. He’d gotten his wish.
“Taiga…”
Ryuuji once again called that name, covered his face, and buried his head in his knees.
The sliding door had once been patched with a flower made from the love letter that Taiga wrote for Kitamura. She’d knocked the hole through the door back in the spring, when she first raided the house. Though it had looked a bit shabby, that sakura-colored patch had had a kind of sweetness to it. It seemed to match their old house, and he actually really liked it. That was why, even though he had several opportunities to fix it, after everything was said and done, Ryuuji had created excuses to continue leaving it as is.
But now it was caved in, busted through by the watch he’d thrown. Another trace of Taiga’s presence was erased.
He imagined taking Taiga’s small hand and the two of them running away as far as they needed to go. They would run and run, escaping from the crumbling and cracking ground that followed on their heels. But if they did that, would the whole world just end up being destroyed?
Ryuuji coughed. When it came to just deserts, this one was well prepared. Yasuko, who abandoned her parents, had now abandoned Ryuuji. If that hadn’t happened, then Ryuuji would have abandoned Yasuko. Any kid Ryuuji might go on to have was sure to abandon him too, if Ryuuji didn’t abandon them first.
Taiga had also been abandoned by her parents and would now abandon them in turn. Her future kids would abandon her. It would be a cycle of abandonment, absent of love or affection.
Slowly, Ryuuji came to a realization. Being abandoned by Yasuko wasn’t what really hurt—it was what the abandonment had revealed to him. Seeing not just the betrayal happening right now, but the ones in the past and the ones in the future, the way this pain would be passed on from generation to generation—that was what made him sad.
He saw that this sorrow would stay with them even if he ran away with Taiga. Even if she ran away with him, Taiga, in that future, would be sad.
Taiga was afraid of inviting destruction into her life, and so she was offering to sacrifice her bond with her parents to protect her love for Ryuuji. She might not be consciously aware that was what she was doing, but it was. Where did Ryuuji plan to lead Taiga while she was like that? What was he trying to show her? What destination did he think awaited them if she abandoned everything she had to reach it?
Wanting things isn’t bad, Ryuuji wanted to tell Taiga. But in a way, he was helping to destroy everything. Their friends, who’d put themselves in harm’s way for Ryuuji and Taiga’s sake, might have been part of that destruction. Ryuuji and Taiga had locked themselves into an endless cycle of sorrow, all while saying they would do anything for the sake of happiness.
He was stupid, stupid, stupid. He was a kid who had no idea how small he was.
“I…really had it all wrong…”
In that moment, Ryuuji felt like he was sinking into a deep body of water. It was even deeper than the icy river, and he had dreamed for a long time of the bottom of a darkness where light wouldn’t penetrate. But this was safe. Ryuuji was curled up, his head under his body, always sinking there. And then finally—finally—he took a foamy breath and breathed it out.
Taiga.
Bubbles issued from his lips with the utterance of that one and only name. His eyelids opened, feeling hard as scales. He gradually lifted his heavy head. He braced his hand on the tatami. Waking from his long dream, opening his intensely gleaming eyes wide, the dragonling known as Ryuuji got back on his feet.
(Up, up, faster.)
He headed to the sink. With water that was so cold it numbed him, he washed his face, wiped himself with a towel, and took off his strange-smelling clothes. He threw them into the laundry basket. He changed his underwear and put on clean loungewear. He glared at the bright red face reflected in the mirror with enough force to murder it.
(Even faster, float to the top.)
His dancing body parted the four seas and raised a roaring column of water mixed with white, cloudy bubbles. His gigantic shadow stretched across the ocean surface. The spray turned into torrential rain and came pouring down. A tsunami erased a continent and birthed several new islands, and Ryuuji ran up into the sky with his own four limbs. He passed through the clouds in a breath, devouring flashes of lightning. He could even fly.