VOLUME #2 - EPISODE 9
[NARRATOR: There's a specific moment when control becomes a prison. When emotional shutdown stops being protection and starts being suffocation. Today, we watch that prison crack. Today, we witness what happens when someone who's learned to feel nothing suddenly feels everything at once. Spoiler alert: it's violent, it's painful, and nobody walks away unchanged.]
The Day Everything Felt Wrong
Wednesday arrived with the kind of atmospheric pressure that preceded storms—not weather storms, but the human kind. The kind where tension accumulates in the air until something has to break.
Riyura felt it the moment he walked into school. His star-shaped yellow pupils reflected the gray winter sky. His purple hair was more disheveled than usual, like even his hair knew something bad was coming. His crooked red bow tie hung at an angle that suggested surrender rather than whimsy.
[RIYURA'S INTERNAL MONOLOGUE: Something's wrong. The air feels thick. Like trying to breathe through gauze. Like the universe is holding its breath waiting for disaster.]
Muzaki-sensei hadn't shown up for homeroom. The substitute teacher—a nervous young adult who looked like he regretted every life choice that led her to Jeremy High.
"Where's Muzaki-sensei?" Miyaka whispered. "Don't know," Riyura replied. "But I have a bad feeling." That feeling intensified when Yakamira showed him his phone during break. Security camera footage from last night—grainy, dark, but clear enough.
Kaiju Minuwa. Standing outside the school. Not leaving. Just standing there for hours, staring at the building like he was trying to make a decision that would change everything.
"He's still here," Yakamira said quietly. "Somewhere in the school. I can feel it." "That's not scientifically—" Riyura started.
"I know," Yakamira interrupted. "But I'm right anyway. Trauma recognizes trauma. And that kid is a walking catastrophe waiting for an excuse." The bell rang.
Fourth period: Physical Education. The gymnasium. Of course it would be the gymnasium.
[NARRATOR: Because every major conflict at Jeremy High happens in the gymnasium. It's like the building's designated trauma arena. We should really put up a sign: "Warning: Emotional Breakdowns Likely. Enter At Your Own Risk."]
The Calm Before Violence
The gym class was supposed to be simple—basketball practice, nothing intense, just students shooting hoops and pretending to care about physical fitness.
But when Riyura entered the gymnasium, he saw him. Kaiju Minuwa. Sitting in the bleachers like a spectator at his own existence. Still wearing that different school's uniform. Still radiating that terrible empty calm that preceded disaster.
Their eyes met across the gymnasium. Kaiju stood slowly. Walked down the bleachers with measured steps. Not aggressive. Not friendly. Just deliberate.
"Riyura Shiko," he said, his voice carrying across the gym despite being barely above conversational volume. "The kid who thinks kindness solves everything. The student who probably believes he can help my father. Help me. Help everyone."
He stopped about ten feet away.
"I've been watching you. Observing. You're genuine, I'll give you that. You actually care. It's not an act. Which makes you either incredibly brave or incredibly stupid."
"Why are you here?" Riyura asked, keeping his voice level despite his heart hammering. "If you wanted to see your father, you could've just—" "I saw him," Kaiju interrupted. "This morning. Before school. Waited outside his apartment. Watched him leave."
His empty eyes flickered with something—pain, maybe, or the memory of pain. "He looked right at me. Right at his own son. And you know what he did?"
Silence.
"Nothing. He stared for maybe five seconds. Then looked away and kept walking. Like I was a ghost. Like I'd stopped existing years ago and he'd finally accepted it."
Kaiju's hands clenched.
"Do you understand what that feels like? To be acknowledged and dismissed in the same breath? To realize your own family has categorized you as just another loss he can't fix?"
"Kaiju—" Riyura stepped forward carefully.
"DON'T!" The word exploded out of him—the first real emotion Riyura had heard from him. "Don't come closer. Don't try to comfort. Don't try to understand. You can't understand. You have friends. Family. People who see you and don't flinch."
His breathing was becoming faster, shallower.
"I've spent six years learning not to feel. Not to need. Not to expect anything from anyone. I made myself into stone. Cold. Hard. Safe. And then I came here and saw him—saw my father still drowning—and everything I'd buried started crawling back up."
The gymnasium had gone silent. Every student was watching now, sensing that something terrible was unfolding.
"And now you—" Kaiju pointed at Riyura with a trembling hand. "You stand there with your stupid optimistic face and your ridiculous hair accessories and your genuine concern, and it makes me FURIOUS because you're exactly what I could never be. Someone who stays soft despite being broken. Someone who doesn't weaponize their pain."
His voice broke.
"I hate you for it. I hate how easy you make it look. I hate that you probably think you can help me too. I hate—" He stopped. Breathing hard. His empty eyes filling with something that looked like tears but moved like rage.
"I hate that I want you to try."
[NARRATOR: And there's the crack. The moment when emotional shutdown collides with desperate need. When someone who's convinced themselves they feel nothing realizes they're actually feeling everything and it's overwhelming and terrifying and the only response they know is violence.]
When Control Shatters
Kaiju moved.
Not a punch. Not a tackle. Just a stumbling forward step, and then another, and suddenly he was screaming—a sound that was part rage, part grief, part six years of accumulated trauma finally finding exit.
"I HATE THIS!" He grabbed a basketball from nearby, threw it with shocking force. It hit the wall so hard it left a dent. "I HATE FEELING THIS! I HATE NEEDING ANYTHING! I HATE—"
Another basketball. Another throw. The wall shuddered. Students scattered, teachers appeared at the edges, but nobody knew how to stop a breakdown that looked like violence but was actually collapse.
Riyura stood his ground. "Kaiju," he said, his voice steady despite fear coursing through him. "It's okay to feel this. It's okay to be angry—"
"IT'S NOT OKAY!" Kaiju grabbed a metal folding chair, lifted it, brought it down on the gymnasium floor with a crash that echoed like thunder. "Nothing's okay! My father's broken! I'm broken! The world keeps spinning like any of this matters when it DOESN'T—"
He grabbed another chair. Raised it toward the equipment storage. "Kaiju, stop—" Riyura moved forward. Wrong move.
Kaiju whirled, and suddenly the chair was swinging toward Riyura's head with deadly precision—not to hurt, Riyura realized in that split second, but to make him back away, to enforce distance, to prevent connection.
Riyura ducked. The chair whistled past, close enough he felt the air displacement. "STAY AWAY!" Kaiju screamed. "Everyone just—stay away! I don't need help! I don't need fixing! I don't need—"
His voice broke completely. "—I don't need my father to see me like I need him to see me."
He collapsed to his knees, still holding the chair, his whole body shaking with sobs that sounded like they were being torn from somewhere deep and awful.
"I just wanted him to choose me," Kaiju whispered. "Just once. Choose his living son over his dead students. Choose present over past. Choose to try even if trying hurt."
He looked up at Riyura with eyes that were no longer empty—they were full, overflowing, drowning in everything he'd been refusing to feel. "But he can't. He'll never be able to. And I'm so tired of pretending that's okay. So tired of being strong. So tired of—of—"
He couldn't finish. That's when the gymnasium doors burst open.
Muzaki stood there, breathing hard like he'd been running. His usually disheveled appearance was somehow worse—shirt untucked, tie missing entirely, eyes wide with something that might've been fear or hope or both.
"Kaiju," he said. Just the name. Nothing else. Kaiju's head snapped up.
Father and son stared at each other across the destroyed gymnasium—years of distance and pain and unspoken resentment visible in that single look.
[NARRATOR: This is it. The moment. Where everything could heal or break permanently. Where two people drowning in separate oceans finally close enough to reach—if they're brave enough to try.]
The Conversation That Couldn't Happen
"Dad," Kaiju said, and the word came out broken. "You saw me this morning. You looked right at me and—"
"I know," Muzaki interrupted, his voice rough. "I saw you. And I—I didn't know what to say. Didn't know how to approach you after years of—of failing you."
He took a step forward, then stopped, like invisible walls prevented movement. "I saw you and all I could think was that you're better off without me. That you'd built a life free from my trauma and I had no right to infect it again."
"You don't get to decide that!" Kaiju stood abruptly, the chair clattering away. "You don't get to make choices for me based on your guilt! I came here! ME! I chose to see you! And you just—you just walked away like I was nothing!"
"You're not nothing," Muzaki said, and something in his voice shifted—became firmer, more present. "You're my son. Who I watched suffer because I was too buried in my own grief to be a proper parent. And I let you leave that apartment to eventually go live somewhere else without your damned father to show you support in your troubled times. A father who was to wrapped up in his own grief that he even let his son continue living with his guilt alone all those years ago. After you left me alone."
He stepped closer.
"And I don't know how to fix that. Don't know how to be the father you deserved. But I—" His voice broke. "I want to try. If you'll let me. If it's not too late."
Kaiju laughed—bitter and sharp. "Try? You want to try? After six years? After I had to teach myself not to need a fool of a father like you because he was too busy mourning strangers?"
"They weren't strangers," Muzaki said quietly. "They were students I failed to save. People whose deaths I caused—"
"YOU DIDN'T CAUSE ANYTHING!" Kaiju screamed. "A bus driver had a heart attack! The crash was an accident! The only thing you're guilty of is surviving and then letting that survival destroy everyone around you!"
The words hung in the air like accusations and truth combined. Muzaki staggered like he'd been physically hit. "I—I've never thought of it that way," he whispered.
"Of course you haven't," Kaiju's voice dropped to something dangerous. "Because thinking that way would mean acknowledging that you chose to drown. That you made your guilt more important than your own damned family. That you—"
He stopped, breathing hard. "That you could've tried to heal but decided suffering was easier." The silence that followed was absolute. Then Muzaki did something unexpected.
He sat down. Right there on the gymnasium floor. Silent and absolute in honesty.
"You're right," he said. "About all of it. I chose guilt over healing because guilt felt like punishment and I thought I deserved punishment. And in doing that, I punished you too. Made you collateral damage in my self-destruction."
He looked up at his son with eyes that were finally, finally seeing instead of just looking.
"I can't undo those six years. Can't give you back the childhood I stole. But I can—" He struggled with the words. "I can try to be present now. If you want that. If you haven't given up on me completely."
Kaiju stood frozen, his carefully constructed emotional walls crumbling in real time. "I don't know if I can trust you," he said, his voice small. "Don't know if I can let you back in without it destroying me again."
"That's fair," Muzaki replied. "More than fair. You shouldn't trust me easily. I haven't earned it." He stood slowly, not approaching, just standing—two damaged people in a damaged gymnasium, surrounded by witnesses to their breakdown.
"But maybe—" Muzaki's voice was tentative, careful. "Maybe we could try anyway. Small steps. No expectations. Just... two people trying to figure out if there's anything left to salvage."
Kaiju's face twisted with emotion—hope and fear and anger and longing all fighting for dominance. "I hate you," he said. "I know," Muzaki replied. "I hate how much I still need you to be my father."
"I know that too." "I hate that I'm crying right now." "That's okay." And Kaiju broke completely. Not violently this time. Just collapsed—like every year of holding himself together finally became too heavy and he had to let go.
Muzaki moved forward then, catching his son before he hit the ground, and suddenly they were both on the gymnasium floor, both crying, both holding each other like drowning people clutching driftwood.
"I'm sorry," Muzaki kept saying. "I'm so sorry. For everything. For failing you. For choosing ghosts over you. For—" "Shut up," Kaiju said through tears. "Just—just shut up and please stay. That's all I need right now. Just please stay."
So Muzaki did. And Riyura stood watching, tears streaming down his own face, feeling the weight of witnessing something both heartbreaking and achingly cinematic.
[RIYURA'S INTERNAL MONOLOGUE: This is what slow healing looks like. Not perfect. Not clean. Not even necessarily successful. Just two broken people choosing to exist in the same space with their brokenness visible. Choosing possibility over safety. Choosing to try even when trying means risking more pain.]
The gymnasium slowly emptied as teachers ushered students out, giving father and son privacy for a moment that belonged only to them. But Riyura stayed. Yakamira stayed. Miyaka stayed.
The people who understood that sometimes the most important thing you can do is witness someone else's courage.
The Aftermath Of Trying
Twenty minutes later, Muzaki and Kaiju sat on the bleachers, no longer crying but still holding hands like letting go would mean losing each other again.
"I'm not healed," Muzaki said quietly. "I'm still broken. Still carrying those twelve names. Still haunted." "I know," Kaiju replied. "And I can't promise I'll be a good father. Can't promise I won't fail you again."
"I know that too." "So what do we do?" Kaiju was quiet for a moment, staring at their joined hands. "We try," he said finally. "We try despite knowing we might fail. We try because the alternative is giving up, and I'm tired of giving up."
He looked at his father with eyes that were no longer empty—they were full of caution and hope and tentative possibility. "Small steps," Kaiju repeated Muzaki's earlier words. "No expectations. Just... trying."
Muzaki nodded, squeezing his son's hand. "Small steps," he agreed.
They sat in silence, and for the first time in six years, it wasn't the silence of absence. It was the silence of presence—of two people choosing to exist together despite everything that made that choice terrifying.
Riyura finally approached, his cheerful host persona absent, replaced with something quieter and more genuine. "Are you both—" He stopped, not sure what he was asking.
"No," they both said simultaneously. Then looked at each other and almost smiled. "But we're here," Muzaki added. "That's something." "That's everything," Kaiju corrected softly.
And maybe it was.
[NARRATOR: And so we've witnessed the tentative beginning of healing—not the kind that erases trauma, but the kind that chooses to carry it differently. Father and son, both broken, both terrified, both brave enough to try anyway. It's not a happy ending. But it's an honest one. And sometimes, honesty is all we have. Volume 2's emotional climax is close to reached. Now comes the slow, difficult work of rebuilding. If rebuilding is even possible.]
The Home That Stopped Being Safe
The walk home felt longer than usual.
Riyura's feet dragged against the sidewalk, his purple hair limp from exhaustion, his yellow star hairclip barely hanging on. His crooked red bow tie had finally given up on staying attached and hung from his pocket like a white flag of surrender.
[RIYURA'S INTERNAL MONOLOGUE: Today was heavy. Kaiju's breakdown. Muzaki's tears. Watching two broken people try to stitch themselves back together. I should feel good. Should feel like I helped. But I just feel... empty. So tired even my bones hurt.]
The winter evening settled over the neighborhood—streetlights flickering on one by one, the sky turning that particular shade of purple-gray that made everything feel distant and cold.
Riyura's house appeared at the end of the street. And there, parked in the driveway, was a car he recognized. Black. Expensive. Meticulously maintained.
His father's car. Riyura stopped walking. His entire body went rigid.
[RIYURA'S INTERNAL MONOLOGUE: No. Not today. Not after everything. Please not today.]
His hands clenched into fists so tight his nails cut crescents into his palms. For a moment—just a brief, terrible moment—he considered running. Just turning around and never coming back.
But that would mean leaving his mother alone with him. And Riyura would never do that. He walked forward. Each step felt like walking toward his own execution.
The Father Who Killed Childhood
The front door opened before Riyura could reach for the handle. His father stood there.
Tall. Immaculately dressed in a suit that probably cost more than their monthly rent. Dark hair slicked back with precision. Eyes that looked warm to anyone who didn't know better—but Riyura knew better. Riyura knew those eyes could turn cold faster than winter frost.
"Riyura," his father said, his voice smooth and practiced. "Welcome home, son." Riyura said nothing.
His usual cheerfulness—the host persona, the bright optimism, the silly jokes—all of it vanished like smoke. His star-shaped pupils went dark and hard. His expression flattened into something that looked almost dead.
This was the only person in the world who could make Riyura Shiko stop smiling. "Not going to greet your father?" The figures tone had an edge now. Subtle. Threatening. As he held suitcases full of moving suplies.
Riyura pushed past him without a word, his shoulder deliberately hitting his father's arm.
Inside, his mother stood in the kitchen, her expression carefully neutral but her hands trembling as she arranged teacups that didn't need arranging. She looked at Riyura with eyes that said I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.
His father followed him inside, closing the door with a soft click that sounded like a trap snapping shut. "You're being disrespectful," his father said, that false warmth evaporating. "I came here to see my family and you can't even—"
"You're not my family," Riyura said quietly, his voice stripped of everything that made him him. "You're just someone who hasn't been arrested yet." His father's jaw tightened. "That was an accident. A tragic accident that was investigated and cleared. The courts—"
"The courts you PAID," Riyura interrupted, turning to face him. "Don't pretend it was justice. It was money. That's all you've ever been good at. Buying your way out of consequences."
[FLASHBACK - DISTORTED, DREAMLIKE]
A parking lot. Bright afternoon sun. A small child—maybe five years old—playing near cars while parents loaded groceries. A black car moving too fast. The sickening sound of impact.
The child's small body hitting pavement. Young Riyura—seven years old, purple hair bobbing in silence—standing with his mother, screaming. His father stepping out of the driver's seat. Phone already to his ear. Already making calls. Already building the machinery of denial.
"It was an accident. The child ran out. Nothing I could do. Just an accident." But young Riyura had seen. Seen his father looking at his phone while driving. Seen the distraction. Seen the speed.
Seen the lie being constructed before the child's body was even cold with death. The child's mother arriving. Her scream tearing through the world like broken glass.
His father—calm, collected—speaking to lawyers while a mother collapsed over her dead son.
[END FLASHBACK]
"Don't you DARE—" his father started, stepping forward with barely controlled rage. But Riyura was already moving, heading toward the upstairs hallway, toward his bedroom, away from this murderer who wore his DNA to like stolen clothes.
"RIYURA!" his father shouted. "I'm talking to you! You don't walk away from me!" Riyura didn't stop. Didn't turn around. Just kept walking. And ignoring him.
"You think you're special?! Think those stupid friends of yours make you better than me?! You're NOTHING! Just a weird kid playing doll house, pretending to matter!"
Riyura reached his bedroom door. "That child was nothing too! Just an inconvenience! Just—" Riyura slammed the door so hard the frame shuddered.
Locked it.
The sound of his father's rage continued through the door—muffled now, but still there, still poisoning the air—until his mother's voice cut through, sharp and final: "Get out. NOW."
Footsteps. The front door opening. Closing. Silence.
The Collapse
Riyura slid down the door until he was sitting on the floor, his knees pulled tight to his ribs, his arms wrapped around them like he was trying to physically hold himself together.
The tears came immediately.
It wasn't gentle crying. Not even the loud, broken sobs from earlier that day. This was quieter, worse—silent tears streaming endlessly down his face, each one pulled from him by hitching breaths that bruised his lungs. His heart ached with every inhale.
He thought of his father. A figure who wore kindness like a costume, who smiled and acted as though the past had never happened. A past Riyura would never forget. A past soaked in blood and silence.
In public, Riyura played his part. The obedient son. The image of a normal family—flawed, perhaps, but respectable. He could have destroyed that illusion at any moment. He had evidence. He had chances. He could have had the fool arrested. But he never did. Not because he couldn't—but because doing so would tear apart everyone else around them. Because pretending was easier than becoming the truth everyone would have to face: that his father was a murderer and way to smart to not find a way out overall.
Being near him filled Riyura with revulsion. After enduring the act in public, he would return home and vomit into a trash can or anywhere secretly, his body rejecting the lie his mind had been forced to maintain. Hatred roiled inside him like an overpressurized volcano, molten and endless. A hatred so deep he wished, with absolute certainty, that this murderer had never been his father at all.
Yet he couldn't express it. Couldn't scream it. Couldn't expose him. His father was too careful, too intelligent, too cruel—using money and legal loopholes as shields, slipping through every law untouched. Riyura knew the truth with sickening clarity: even if he stood in court and laid everything bare, it would never be enough.
The criminal was smart. The thing was evil. And Riyura was trapped—living with a murderer he despised, forced to smile beside him, carrying a past that refused to stay buried.
[RIYURA'S INTERNAL MONOLOGUE: I helped Kaiju today. Helped Muzaki. Helped two broken people find each other. And now I'm here. In my room. Hiding. Because I can't fix my own family. Can't make my father feel remorse for killing another human being. Can't protect my mother from the rich husband she's too scared to divorce. Can't—can't—]
His hands shook. Outside his door, he heard his mother's footsteps pause. Heard her hand touch the wood. Heard her small, broken voice: "Riyura? Sweetie? I'm... I'm so sorry. He said he just wanted to talk. I didn't know he'd—I should have—"
"It's okay, Mom," Riyura said, his voice hollow. "Just... just go to bed. Please." Silence. Then her footsteps retreating. Riyura pulled his knees tighter, buried his face against them, and whispered into the darkness of his room:
"Why, Mom?" His voice broke. "Why did you let this murderer live with us again?" The question hung in the air—unanswered, unanswerable, joining all the other questions that had no good answers.
Outside his window, winter night settled completely. The stars were hidden behind clouds. The streetlights cast long, cold shadows.
And Riyura Shiko—the cheerful host, the optimistic friend, the child who wore chicken masks and silly hairclips and chose joy despite trauma—sat alone in the dark, crying silently, carrying weight he couldn't share with anyone.
Because some pain was too deep. Some history too dark. Some truths too terrible to speak aloud.
[FADE TO BLACK]
[The sound of Riyura's quiet, hitching breaths continues for three more seconds]
[Then silence]
TO BE CONTINUED...