The rain had returned to Shin-Tokyo, but this time it felt different—not cleansing, not neutral, but accusatory. Each drop that struck the window of Buki's room seemed to ask the same question: Why are you still here when they aren't?
Three weeks had passed since General Hazami's letter. Three weeks of Buki carrying her words like shrapnel embedded too deep to remove—painful with every breath, but extraction would kill him faster than leaving it in. He had folded the letter precisely, stored it in the drawer beside his bed, but the words had already burrowed into his mind, replicating, mutating, becoming something more than ink on paper.
You remind me of a cherry tree that grew on a battlefield. Find your spring, Sakura. I died believing you would bloom.
But cherry trees needed roots. And Buki had none. Just kept getting transplanted—life to death to life, human to weapon to whatever he was now. A thing that walked and talked and delivered death to strangers while carrying corpses inside himself.
The postal route had become mechanical again. Seventeen addresses today. Buki calculated optimal pathways with the same precision he once used for tactical insertion points. Left turn at the intersection. 247 steps to the next delivery. Avoid the construction on Fourth Street. Efficiency. Always efficiency. Because if he stopped moving, stopped calculating, stopped existing in the narrow space between one delivery and the next, something vast and terrible waited in the silence.
Yuki walked beside him, her presence steady but increasingly concerned. She'd stopped trying to make conversation after the first week. Now she just... accompanied. A witness. A anchor. A reminder that other humans existed even when Buki felt increasingly unlike one.
The morning deliveries passed without incident. Six letters. Four death notifications, two personal effects. Buki delivered each with mechanical precision, his voice flat, his movements economical. The recipients cried or didn't cry. Collapsed or remained standing. He registered their responses, documented their reactions, felt nothing.
Nothing. Always nothing. The pressure in his heart that had spiked to 15.7 after reading General Hazami's letter had gradually decreased back to baseline. 2.3. The same as always. The same as when he stood at the window in the Northern Clinic. The same as when he was five years old and something inside him had permanently shut off.
But today—the seventh delivery—something changed.
The address was in a lower-middle-class district, similar to dozens of others Buki had visited. A modest house with a small garden where someone had attempted to grow vegetables with mixed success. The door was painted blue, though the paint was peeling. A child's bicycle lay on its side in the yard, one wheel slowly spinning in the wind.
Buki knocked. Three times. Evenly spaced. Waited.
A stranger opened the door—mid-thirties, tired eyes, work-worn hands. Behind her, visible through the doorway, were two children. A child, perhaps ten. And a kid, younger. Maybe seven or eight.
"Imperial War Correspondence," Buki stated. "Delivery for Mrs. Tomoe Ishikawa." "That's me," the person said, and her voice carried that familiar mix of hope and dread that Buki had learned to recognize.
He retrieved the envelope from his satchel. Death notification. Private Kenji Ishikawa. The name registered clinically—just data, just another casualty in an endless list of casualties. He held out the envelope.
"Official correspondence regarding Private—" The name stuck in his throat. Karanome.
The kid behind the woman—eight years old, gap-toothed smile, messy hair that stuck up in the back despite obvious attempts to comb it down—chose that moment to speak.
"Mama, who is it?" His voice was high, curious, innocent. Karanome. The pressure in Buki's heart spiked suddenly. 4.7. 6.2. 8.1. Rising faster than he could calculate, faster than he could control.
"I—" he started, but couldn't finish. The envelope was shaking in his hand. Tremor frequency: 5.4. The world was tilting sideways, or maybe he was tilting, or maybe reality itself was coming unmoored from its foundations.
"Buki-san?" Yuki's voice seemed to come from very far away. "Are you okay?"
Was he okay? The question was meaningless. He was staring at a child named Karanome and the pressure in his heart was crushing his ribs from the inside and somewhere in his mind a door was opening—one of those empty rooms, one of those locked spaces—and something was trying to get out.
"I have to—" Buki's voice came out wrong, too high, too young. "I need to—"
He turned and walked away. Not ran. Walking was protocol. Running indicated panic and he wasn't panicking, he was just—the pressure was 11.3 now and rising and he needed to move, needed distance, needed—
"Buki!" Yuki called after him, but he kept walking, faster now, his carefully calculated route forgotten, just moving through streets that blurred into gray impressions of buildings and people and a world that made no sense anymore.
A child named Karanome. Eight years old. Calling for his mother. The memory hit like artillery fire—sudden, devastating, leaving craters where thoughts used to be:
A small apartment. The smell of cooking. A child's voice, high and happy: "Onii-chan, look what I drew!" Sticky hands holding up a crayon drawing—stick figures with circle heads, a family of five, everyone smiling. "Do you like it? I drew you really tall because you're a hero!"
Buki stopped walking. He was in a district he didn't recognize, standing in the middle of a narrow street while rain began to fall. When had it started raining? He looked down at his hands. They were shaking violently now. Tremor frequency: unmeasurable. And there was something on them, something dark and wet, except when he looked closer it was just rain, just water, not blood, not—
Blood. So much blood. Spreading across a floor that should have been familiar but was becoming alien, contaminated, wrong. A small kid running, screaming, calling a name that wasn't Buki but was—
"No," Buki said aloud, his voice sharp in the empty street. "Classified. Information classified. Access denied."
But the doors in his mind were opening whether he authorized access or not. Three years of careful compartment, ten years of systematic emotional suppression, fifteen years of surviving by not-remembering—all of it cracking under pressure that had exceeded design specifications.
He had a brother once. The thought arrived with absolute certainty, bypassing analysis, bypassing reason. Just pure knowledge, fundamental as gravity.
He had a brother once. A little brother. And something terrible had happened. Something that made his heart do this—made it compress and expand and compress again like it was trying to escape his heart. Something that made his hands remember being covered in blood. Something that made the name "Karanome" feel like a knife between ribs.
But when? Where? In this life? In the war? He searched his accessible memories, found nothing. Checked his military record—no siblings listed, no family connections, nothing. Just orphan status, age five, origin unknown, recruited into Unit 47 as unskilled care, promoted through ranks based on merit and survival.
No brother. No Karanome. No family at all. So why did his body know differently? Why did his heart remember what his mind refused to access? Yuki found him twenty minutes later, still standing in the rain, staring at his hands.
"Buki-san," she said gently, approaching slowly like he was a wounded animal that might bolt. "You scared me. You just left the delivery incomplete and—what's wrong? What happened?"
"I had a brother," Buki said, his voice flat despite the chaos in his heart. "I think. Or maybe I didn't. I can't access the data. The files are corrupted or locked or—" He looked at her, and his eyes felt strange, hot, producing moisture he couldn't explain. "Why can't I remember if I had a brother?"
Yuki's expression did something complicated—concern and sadness and something else, something that looked almost like recognition. "Maybe you're not ready to remember yet," she offered carefully. "Maybe your mind is protecting you from something too painful to—"
"I don't want protection!" The words came out too loud, reverberating in the narrow street. "I want data! I want access! I want to know why a child named Karanome makes my heart malfunction and my hands shake and my—"
He couldn't finish. His breath was coming too fast, irregular, inefficient.
Yuki moved closer, placed her hand on his arm. "Let's go back to the office," she said. "Kaito will understand. We can finish the deliveries tomorrow. You need to—"
"Mrs. Ishikawa needs her letter," Buki interrupted mechanically. "Delivery protocols require completion within 24 hours of assignment. I have failed mission parameters. I need to—"
"Stop," Yuki said, and her voice was firm now, almost commanding. "You're not a soldier anymore. You don't have missions. You're a person who's having a really hard time right now, and that's okay. The letter can wait. Mrs. Ishikawa can wait. Everything can wait except you taking care of yourself."
Taking care of himself. The concept was foreign, untranslatable. He was a weapon. Weapons required maintenance, not care. Required optimization, not rest. Required—
A memory, fragmented and incomplete: being small, much younger, maybe four or five years old. Crying—why was he crying? Pain. Someone hitting him. A voice, harsh and cold: "Weapons don't cry. Crying is weakness. Weakness is unacceptable." More hitting. More pain. Until the crying stopped. Until everything stopped.
"I don't know how," Buki admitted quietly, still staring at his shaking hands. "I don't know how to take care of myself. I only know how to complete missions. And even that—I'm failing. I couldn't even deliver one letter today because a child had the wrong name or the right name or—I don't know. I don't understand what's happening to me."
"You're remembering," Yuki said softly. "Something from before. Something you've kept buried. And it's scary and confusing and it hurts, but Buki-san—" She waited until he looked at her. "It's okay to be scared. It's okay to be confused. It's okay to hurt. That's what being human is."
Human. That impossible category he kept failing to inhabit.
They walked back to the Imperial War Correspondence Office in silence. The rain had intensified, turning the streets into rivers, washing away the careful boundaries between sky and ground. Buki's uniform was soaked through. He was cold—he registered this clinically, noting that his core temperature had dropped to suboptimal levels. But the cold felt distant, unimportant compared to the pressure in his heart that refused to decrease.
9.7. Still dangerously elevated. Still crushing. Kaito took one look at Buki and dismissed him for the rest of the day. No argument, no questions. Just: "Go home. Rest. We'll talk tomorrow."
But Buki didn't go to Clara's apartment. Instead, he found himself walking to the park near the postal office—a small green space with cherry trees that wouldn't bloom for months yet, their branches thin and skeletal against the gray sky. He sat on a bench, ignored the rain, and tried to understand what was happening to him.
A brother named Karanome. Eight years old. The information repeated like a skipping record, same fragment over and over, refusing to expand into complete memory.
He closed his eyes, tried to force the doors in his mind to open fully. Tried to access whatever was locked away in those empty rooms. But there was only darkness, and distant sounds that might have been screams or might have been nothing, and a sense of something vast and terrible waiting just out of reach.
When Clara found him two hours later—Yuki had called her, worried—Buki was still sitting there, soaked to the bone, staring at nothing. "Buki," Clara said, sitting beside him despite the rain. "You'll catch pneumonia out here."
"I had a brother," he said without preamble. "His name was Karanomr. Or maybe it wasn't. Or maybe I made him up. Or maybe he existed but in a different timeline or a different world or—" His voice broke. "I don't know. I don't know anything anymore. I just know that when I saw that child today, when I heard his mother call him Karanome, something inside me broke. Or started breaking. Or has always been broken and I'm just now noticing."
Clara was quiet for a long moment. Then: "Come home. Get warm. And then, if you want, we can talk about this. About brothers and memories and all the things we carry that we can't quite remember but can't quite forget either."
Buki let her guide him back to the apartment. Let her make him tea he didn't drink. Let her wrap him in blankets while his body shivered from cold or trauma or both.
And that night, alone in his room, Buki did something he'd never done consciously before: he tried to draw.
His hands moved without instruction, picking up a pencil, finding paper. The lines that emerged were crude, childish—stick figures with circle heads and limbs like twigs. Five of them. A family. He didn't know why five. Didn't know who they were. Just knew, with the same fundamental certainty that gravity pulled downward, that this was important.
Under one of the figures—the tallest one—he wrote a single word: "Onii-chan." Big brother.
The pressure in his heart spiked again. 12.1. He stared at the drawing, at that word, and something in his mind clicked—not opening fully, but shifting, like a door that had been locked for years finally moving a fraction of an inch.
He had been someone's big brother once. Someone had called him "Onii-chan" with love and trust and absolute faith that he would protect them. Someone small. Someone whose name started with K.
Karanome.
The memory tried to surface fully, but his mind rejected it, sealed it away again. Too much. Too painful. Too dangerous to his carefully maintained stability. But the knowledge remained: he had failed someone named Karanome. Had promised to protect him and then—
Then what? Death? Abandonment? Failure? The specifics escaped him, but the guilt remained. Raw. Absolute. Crushing.
Buki set down the pencil with shaking hands. The drawing stared up at him—five stick figures, all smiling, all together, all impossibly distant from the person he was now.
"I'm sorry," he whispered to the paper, to the figures, to whatever ghost named Karanome haunted the empty rooms of his mind. "I don't remember what I did or didn't do. I don't remember who you were or why you matter so much. But I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
The rain continued falling outside. The city lights flickered in the darkness. And somewhere in the locked spaces of Buki's mind, a small kid with a gap-toothed smile called out for his big brother—a cry that echoed across years or lifetimes or impossible distances, searching for someone who had forgotten how to answer.
Buki lay down, still clutching the drawing, and closed his eyes against the darkness that felt exactly like the darkness behind them. Tomorrow, he would have to return to Mrs. Ishikawa's house. Would have to finish the delivery. Would have to hand her the letter that said her husband—a person also named Karanome—was dead.
Would have to look at that eight-year-old child and not see the ghost of another Karanome, another child, another failure he couldn't quite remember but couldn't escape.
Tomorrow. But for now, just this moment of existing in the space between forgetting and remembering, between human and weapon, between one life and whatever came before.
Just existing. Breathing. Surviving. Even when surviving felt like its own form of death.
TO BE CONTINUED...