Ryouta's Decision

Haruto woke before his alarm the next morning. He stretched, yawned, and cracked one eye open at the grey light then let it fall shut again. 

And slowly, yesterday came back to him. All of it. He lay there and let it settle over him like a weight on his chest.

He rolled his head toward the clock on the wall. 

6:00 AM. 

School wasn't until eight, and every morning he left at seven — with Shiomi.

He wanted to apologize to her. Haruto had realized none of it had been her fault. She had spent years doing nothing but trying to protect him. He still didn't know what to do with the memories crowding his head — the river, the betrayal, the quiet lies stacked up over all those years — but he knew one thing for certain. He didn't want to fight with Shiomi over any of it. Not her. Never her.

He was up and dressed in minutes. At 6:59 exactly he stepped out the front door, hopeful, and went to wait by the low wall between their houses.

He waited. 

And waited.

Then he leaned over to check her entrance and her shoes were gone. She had left early. Without him.

Something in his chest sank as he turned and set off for school alone. On the way he passed the usual faces, and to every one of them he did his best to give the same big, easy smile he always did — bright, untroubled, as if nothing in the world had happened to him at all.

He reached his classroom, and the first thing he saw was Ryouta, off in his corner, alone, turning a pencil over and over between his fingers. A little way off, Futaba was talking with her friends though her eyes kept sliding back to Ryouta between words.

Right. There was one more person he owed an apology to, before he could even think about facing Shiomi. Haruto set his bag down and crossed the room.

"Hey, Ryouta."

Ryouta looked up at him with flat, dead eyes. "Hm?"

"I— …I— uh— wanted to say sorry. About yesterday."

Ryouta rested his chin on his hand. "Why? Why would you need to apologize to me? I wasn't involved anyway. Whatever happened was between you and Shiomi. I just sat there and watched the whole thing."

"What? But you—"

"I'm sorry." Ryouta cut across him, even and bored. "But you're being kind of pushy right now. Could you… like… I don't know. Not drag me into your personal fights?"

The whole class was watching now. Haruto looked at him, lost. "But, Ryouta, you—"

"Hey. Dude." The words dropped one at a time, flat as stones. "I told you. Don't. Involve. Me." Something sour pulled at Ryouta's face.

A ripple of whispers went around the room.

"What's his problem? Haruto's just trying to be nice." "God, so rude. No wonder he's always on his own." "Didn't I see him walking with Haruto, like, a few days ago? And now this?" "Yeah... Haruto should've just left the weirdo alone."

Haruto looked around at all of them, dismay and confusion knotting tight in his chest, and slunk back to his seat before he could make it any worse.

He couldn't make sense of it. He turned it over and over and couldn't get it to fit. Maybe... what he had said to Shiomi had been so ugly that even Ryouta, who had barely known them a few days, couldn't stomach being near him for it.

And if that was true, then he had no right to any of it. Not Ryouta's forgiveness, and not Shiomi's. He had stood there and blamed her — the one person who had never once left his side — for ruining his life. He had said the cruelest thing he had in him, to the only childhood friend he had ever had. Every hope he had woken with, every apology he had rehearsed on the walk over, crumbled quietly in his hands.

He sat in silence as, one by one, his classmates drifted over to murmur the same thing in his ear. 

Stay away from that Ryouta. He's not worth it.

***

From her seat, Futaba had watched every second of it, and her nails were digging little half-moons into her own palm.

Because she understood. She had seen the whole shape of it the moment Ryouta opened his mouth — the flat voice, the bored eyes, the careful, surgical cruelty of a boy who wasn't cruel. 

He was doing it on purpose. 

He was taking a hammer to his own name and breaking it to pieces in front of everyone, so that not one crack would ever show in Haruto's.

And there was nothing she could do. If she stood up now and said it aloud — he's faking, he's protecting Haruto, can't you all see it — the rumors would only knot tighter, and his sacrifice would be for nothing. And if she stayed quiet, the whole school would go on believing he was exactly the cold, friendless boy he was pretending to be.

She watched him sitting there, turning that pencil in his fingers, wearing the not-caring like armor and she couldn't stand it. She just couldn't stand watching him quietly burn down his own shot at a normal year for the sake of a boy he'd known five days.

Her eyes stung. She blinked hard and pinched the back of her hand until it hurt, and she did not cry, and did not say a word. Not here, not now, not in front of all of them, where anything she said would only pull the thread tighter.

She unclenched her hand, smoothed her face back into something easy, and turned to the front.

***

One floor down, in Class 3-D, the bell had just let them out of History when Shiomi's friend Hanabi dropped into the seat beside her.

"Hey, Shiomi!"

"Hey, Hana."

"So, listen!" Hanabi leaned in, bright-eyed with news. "You and Haruto met some guy called Ryouta, right?"

"Oh… yeah. We did."

"Well, word's going round he was totally rude to Haruto this morning. Poor Haru was just trying to be friendly. Y'know... apologizing for something silly, the way he always does—" she giggled "—and this Ryouta guy just shut him down flat. Told him to stay away. Can you believe it? So rude~"

Shiomi blinked at her.

'But Ryouta wouldn't do that. He's not— why would he—'

And then it landed.

'…Oh.'

'Oh, of course. Anyone would want out, in his place. Why would he want to be dragged into this? We walked up to a boy we barely knew, dumped our whole dark history in his lap, and left him standing in the middle of it. I'm so stupid. I lied to Haru for years, and the moment it all fell apart, I went and pulled a stranger down into it with us.'

She gave Hanabi a small, quiet nod, turned to face the front, and waited for the next teacher to come in.

***

By the time the recess bell rang, the whole school knew the story. The rude, unfriendly boy who had humiliated poor Haruto for no reason at all.

Perfect, Ryouta thought. Right on schedule.

He took out his lunchbox and glanced across the room to Futaba, laughing at something with her friends. Of course she wasn't coming over. He had told her to stay away, hadn't he? That had been the whole point.

He got up, slipped out, and climbed the stairwell to the top of the school.

The door to the roof itself was always locked, so he did what he always did — sat down on the top step, tucked out of sight, and let the quiet settle over him.

"Ah," he said aloud, to no one. "Finally, some peace."

He opened his lunchbox and began to eat.

These stairs held a special meaning for Ryouta. It held memories with his brother.

***

He could still remember Ryuuji's first day at Kusumigaoka High. Ryuuji had walked in and pulled every eye in the building along with him, and by the second period his popularity was climbing so fast it had frightened him. When the recess bell rang, all he had wanted was out of that room — too many hands reaching to befriend him, too many invitations to smile at and slip. Somehow he managed to dodge every one and ended up here, outside the locked roof, eating his lunch alone on the cold steps.

When Ryouta had gone by his brother's classroom and found it empty, he had known at once. The only place a cornered freshman would think to hide was the roof. He had climbed the stairs and found Ryuuji sitting exactly where Ryouta sat now — shivering, just faintly.

Ryuuji hadn't had an easy time of it, after their parents died. The friends he had counted on in middle school had started looking straight through him the moment his life came apart. His best friend — the one he had trusted most — had walked off with all the rest. He had been left holding nothing but the people who used to be there.

Ryouta knew what that had done to him. He knew his brother had come out of it afraid. Afraid of friends who weren't real, afraid of being handed something warm only to have it snatched back. All that attention hadn't been a gift to Ryuuji. It had been a threat.

But the second Ryuuji saw him come up the steps, the shivering stopped. He had hauled the usual grin back into place and said, in that breezy, careless voice, "Hey, Ryo. What's up? This place is awesome, bro. So... So many new people—"

Ryouta had seen straight through it. He had seen his brother's fingers trembling where they gripped the lunchbox. 

Ryuuji had a nasty habit. He smiled through the fear and the sadness under, and kept the mask on his feelings bright enough so his brother would never have to worry. He hadn't let Ryouta see him cry since the day of the funeral. Not once. And here he was, hiding again.

Ryouta had gone and sat beside him. "It's okay, Ryu. I'm here." Ryouta kept his voice low. "What happened back then... it's not going to happen again. And if you want, you don't have to let any of them in. Just tell them no. They'll move on. People always do."

Ryuuji had gripped his own fingers to stop them shaking. And then — for the first time in years — he had let the guard drop, and let his brother pull him in.

"Hey, Ryo," he had whispered into his shoulder. "Do you mind… if I eat up here with you? Just for a few days? The classroom, it's… it gets to be too much. So many people come up to me, and every time, I just… I remember how it was, back then—"

"It's fine," Ryouta had said. "I'll be here every lunch. Whenever it gets to be too much, you come up."

"…Thank you, nii-chan," Ryuuji had whispered.

After that, the two of them met on these steps every day, and Ryuuji would talk. He would talk about his classmates, the ones he was slowly learning to trust, working his way back into a world that had once dropped him.

Then, about a week in, he had asked, "Hey, Ryo... I still haven't met any of your friends. When do I get to?"

"Ah." Ryouta had scratched his head. "Yeah… I'm not really close with anyone in my class. Not in any clubs either. So…"

Ryuuji hadn't said anything to that. He just looked at him.

And from the next day, he stopped coming. It was only after a few days that Ryouta worked out that his brother had understood the reason for Ryouta's unwavering presence at the stairwell. Every lunch he spent up here on the stairs was a lunch his brother spent further from his own classmates than he needed to be. That Ryouta was quietly folding his whole life down small to make room for his.

Ryuuji had never wanted that. Never wanted to be the reason his brother disappeared. And the only way he could think to repay it — the only thing that might make Ryouta glad of what he had given up — was to go out and live the life Ryouta had handed him. To be happy, loudly, where his brother could see it. It was the least he owed him.

***

And now, once again, Ryouta had taken something that could have been his — a normal year, friends, an ordinary place among people — and thrown it to the wolves in front of the entire school. For Haruto. A boy he had barely known for a few days.

Footsteps came scuffing up the stairwell below. A moment later Ryuuji's grinning face popped into view around the turn.

"Hey, hey, Ryo! Room for one more?"

Ryouta shrugged. Ryuuji bounded up and dropped down beside him.

"Afternoon, most-hated-boy-in-school. How's that lunch I made you?"

"You did good with the eggs, Ryu." Ryouta took another bite. "Made your nii-chan proud."

"Nii-chan? Ha!" Ryuuji snorted, and then his grin eased down a notch. "Thanks, Ryo. So... You went and made yourself the enemy." He said it lightly, but he was watching his brother's face. "That was the plan, huh? Last night, with the... the whole 'I'll take responsibility' thing?"

Ryouta shrugged. "Who knows."

"Well. It's your decision." Ryuuji leaned back on his hands. "I can't make you change it."

"No. You can't." Ryouta looked out over the railing. "And it's how things ought to be. Sooner or later Haruto apologizes to Shiomi, the two of them make up, and everything goes back to how it was."

"So that's the outcome you're betting on." Ryuuji tipped his head. "Hm... Yeah… You seem pretty sure. I really can't talk you out of it." A pause, and the grin crept back. "But Futaba can."

Ryouta turned to look at him.

"You don't know that girl yet, Ryo. She's…" Ryuuji chuckled, hunting for the word. "She's a storm." He spread his hands wide. "And she is going to... Blow. You. Away."

Ryouta laughed. "Already handled. She won't be getting involved in anything. The deed's done, and all she did was sit there and watch."

Ryuuji got to his feet and started back down the stairs. At the turn he glanced over his shoulder.

"If you think a few little words from you are enough to stop her," he said, "you're wrong, my dear Ryo."

He winked and was gone down the steps before Ryouta could answer, leaving him alone on the stairwell with a dark look settling slowly over his face.