The snow falls the way it always does in December—silent, persistent, indifferent to the lives it touches.
Akio Hukitaske watches it from the window of the pharmacy, his breath fogging the glass in small, temporary clouds that vanish as quickly as they form. Each exhale is a small death. Each inhale, a small resurrection. He's gotten used to counting them—the breaths, the seconds, the heartbeats that measure out a life he's living for the second time.
Outside, Tokyo moves in its endless rhythm. Workers hurry past with umbrellas tilted against the wind. A mother pulls her child close, whispering something that makes the child laugh—a sound so pure it cuts through the glass, through the cold, straight into the part of Akio's heart where regret lives. Christmas lights flicker in shop windows across the street, red and green and gold, painting the snow in borrowed colors that will melt by morning.
It's been six months since the incident with Hikata on the rooftop. Six months since Akio stood at the edge and realized that falling wasn't the answer—that sometimes the only way forward is to keep standing, even when your legs shake, even when the ground feels less stable than the air. Six months since he decided that maybe, just maybe, this second chance at fourteen was worth the weight of thirty-two years of memory pressing down on a body too young to carry it.
But December always brings its own weight.
December brings Christmas, and Christmas brings memories of a time when hope felt less like a burden and more like a promise. When healing seemed possible. When Grandpa Toshirou was still alive, still teaching him that medicine isn't just chemistry—it's the space between suffering and relief, the bridge built from one breath to the next.
The bell above the pharmacy door chimes, sharp and bright against the winter afternoon's muted gray.
Akio turns to see Suzuki-san, the mails person, stepping inside with a gust of cold air and snowflakes clinging to his blue uniform like temporary stars. His nose is red—it's always red in winter, a perpetual flush that makes him look cheerful even when he's not. Today he's smiling, though. A real smile, not the professional one he wears when delivering bills or government notices.
"Package for you, Hukitaske-kun," Suzuki-san says, shaking snow from his shoulders with practiced efficiency. "From Osaka. Must be someone special, sending something all this way during the holidays."
Osaka.
The word sits in Akio's heart like a stone dropped into still water, sending ripples outward into places he'd forgotten existed. Osaka means distance. Osaka means separation. Osaka means a cousin who moved away when they were children, when the world was still big enough to hold all their dreams and small enough that separation felt temporary.
Osaka means Yazumira.
"Thank you," Akio says, accepting the package. It's small—light enough that it might contain nothing, heavy enough that he knows it contains everything.
Suzuki-san lingers a moment, studying Akio with the particular concern of someone who's delivered mail to the same address long enough to notice when the person receiving it has changed. "You doing okay, kid? Taking care of yourself?"
"I'm fine," Akio says automatically. The lie tastes like old medicine—bitter but necessary. Suzuki-san nods slowly, unconvinced but polite enough not to push. "Well. Stay warm. And hey—Merry Christmas, when it comes."
"Merry Christmas," Akio echoes, and the words feel strange in his mouth, like a language he used to speak fluently but can barely remember now. The bell chimes again as Suzuki-san leaves, and Akio is alone with the package and the snow and the weight of a past that refuses to stay buried.
He doesn't open it immediately.
Instead, he sets it on the counter—brown paper wrapping, string tied with the kind of care that speaks of hands that took their time—and goes about closing the pharmacy. It's a ritual he's perfected over these six months: counting the register, organizing the shelves, checking inventory on medications that people need to keep living. Grandpa Toshirou used to say that pharmacy work is just organized hope. You measure out precise amounts of chemicals that, in the right combinations, can keep a heart beating, can stop pain, can buy someone another day.
Another chance.
Akio understands that better now than he ever did before. Before the regression. Before he woke up fourteen with an adult's grief carved into his bones.
The package sits on the counter, patient as falling snow, waiting.
When the pharmacy is clean and the inventory is recorded and there are no more tasks to hide behind, Akio finally picks it up again. His hands are shaking slightly—not from cold, but from something deeper, something that lives in the space between memory and fear.
He carries it to the back room, to the small kitchen area he brought from his gramps's house where Grandpa Toshirou used to brew tea that tasted like earth and flowers and medicine. The kettle whistles as he sets it on the stove. Steam rises, temporary and ghostlike, disappearing into air that will forget it ever existed.
Akio sits at the small table he still keeps, which is now in his pharmacy these days—the same one where he used to do homework while Grandpa Toshirou prepared prescriptions, where he learned to measure chemicals with precision and kindness with generosity—and slowly, carefully, begins to unwrap the package.
The string comes away first, frayed at the edges from travel. Then the brown paper, which falls open like petals, revealing what's inside: A letter, written on paper that looks expensive, careful.
And a photograph.
Akio picks up the photograph first, because photographs are safer than words. They're fixed moments, frozen and unable to change, unable to demand anything from the present.
The photo shows two kids in a garden. Summer light pours down golden and eternal. Cicadas are lined up on a wooden fence behind them—translucent, perfect, evidence of noise at that time. One child has bright blue hair that catches the light like water, It's him. The other has dark hair and a smile so wide it looks like it might break his face in half.
They're seven years old. The world is endless. The future is inevitable and kind.
Akio stares at the photograph and feels something crack inside his heart—not breaking, exactly, but shifting. Like ice on a lake when spring finally comes, making sounds that echo across frozen surfaces, warning that nothing stays solid forever.
He remembers this day. Wow, he remembers this day.
It was the summer before Yazumira's family moved to Osaka. Before the separation that would stretch years into decades into a lifetime lived twice. They'd spent the afternoon in Grandpa Toshirou's garden, collecting cicada shells and talking about dreams with the certainty of children who don't know yet that dreams can die.
"When we grow up," seven-year-old Yazumira had said, holding a cicada shell up to the sun, "we should both learn to fly. Like these. Leave our old selves behind and become something new."
"Like a pharmacist," seven-year-old Akio had replied, serious and certain. "I want to heal people. Like Grandpa. I want to be someone who makes things better."
Yazumira had grinned—gap-toothed, unselfconscious—and said, "Then I'll be someone who makes things too. We'll both make the world better. Promise?"
"Promise," Akio had said.
And then summer ended. And Yazumira's family moved to Osaka, seeking quiet in a city that wasn't Tokyo, seeking peace in distance. And the years stretched out, and the promises made by seven-year-olds faded like photographs left too long in sunlight.
Except this photograph hasn't faded. Someone kept it. Someone preserved it. Someone remembered. Akio sets down the photo with hands that are trembling now, undeniably, and picks up the letter.
Dear Akio,
I don't know if you remember me.
The opening line hits like a punch to the mind. Akio has to stop reading, has to breathe—in for four counts, hold for four, out for four, the way he's learned to do when the weight gets too heavy and the world gets too sharp.
Of course I remember you, he thinks, fierce and aching. How could I forget?
But he knows that's not really what Yazumira means. What he's really asking is: Do you remember who we were? Do you remember the promises we made? Do you remember the garden and the cicadas and the children who believed in flying?
Akio forces himself to keep reading.
I found this photograph yesterday while helping my mom pack for our move back to Osaka (yes, back again—my parents can never seem to decide where home is), and suddenly I was seven again, standing in that garden, listening to you talk about wanting to heal people someday.
You said it so seriously, Akio. Like it was the most important thing in the world. Like you already knew, somehow, that the world needed healing.
I'm writing because I'm coming to Tokyo for Christmas. Work training, officially, but really it's because I wanted to see the city again. See if it's changed. See if I have.
And see if maybe you're still there, in that pharmacy your grandfather left behind.
Akio's vision blurs slightly. He blinks hard, refusing to let the tears fall, but they gather anyway—salt and memory and grief for a child who dreamed so earnestly, who believed so completely, who didn't know yet that he would fail.
Because Akio did become a pharmacist. Eventually. After thirty-two years of trying and failing at everything else. After the game design career that crushed him. After the relationships that withered. After the slow erosion of every dream until all that was left was exhaustion and resignation and a snowy night in an alley where a stranger with a needle offered him something impossible:
A second chance. But at what cost?
He's fourteen again, yes. Young again, yes. But he carries all of it—every failure, every regret, every moment when he wasn't good enough, strong enough, brave enough. He's a thirty-two-year-old failure wearing the mask of youth, trying to rewrite a story whose ending he already knows by heart.
What would Yazumira think if he knew? If he understood that the cousin he remembered—earnest, hopeful, determined—had grown into a person so broken that the only solution was erasure? Would he be disappointed? Disgusted?
Would he still want to see him? Akio keeps reading, even though every word feels like swallowing glass.
My parents wanted quiet when we moved to Osaka. They wanted space away from Tokyo's noise and rush. They wanted me to grow up somewhere I could breathe.
And I did breathe, Akio.
But I also wondered. Wondered what happened to the kid who dreamed of healing. Wondered if you ever became the pharmacist you wanted to be. Wondered if you were happy. If you were okay. If you still thought about cicadas and flying and promises made in summer gardens.
I'll be in Tokyo from December 20th to January 2nd. I don't want to intrude, and I know it's strange to reach out after so many years of silence. But if you're willing, I'd like to see you.
I'd like to know if you're okay.
December 20th. That's in four days. Four days to decide whether to face someone who knew him before he learned to break. Four days to figure out how to explain a lifetime of disappointment compressed into his future. Four days to prepare for a reunion that might shatter the last remaining pieces of who he used to be.
If you want to meet, leave a light on in the pharmacy window on December 20th. I'll come by at seven. If the light's off, I'll understand, and I'll keep your memory exactly as it is—perfect and untouched, like those cicada shells we used to collect.
Perfect and untouched.
The words echo in Akio's mind, bitter and beautiful. Is that what Yazumira wants? A memory preserved in amber, unchanging and safe? Or does he actually want the truth—messy, complicated, scarred?
Either way, Akio, I hope you're well. I hope the world has been kinder to you than it knows how to be to dreamers.
The letter ends with a postscript that makes Akio's throat tighten:
P.S. I've seen photos of your new blue hair? I always thought it made you look like you belonged in a different world. A better one.
Akio sets down the letter carefully, as if it might shatter. His hands are shaking badly now. The tea has gone cold in its cup, forgotten, a failure of basic care that feels symbolic of everything else.
Outside, the snow continues falling. Tokyo's Christmas lights blur through the window, colors bleeding into each other until they're almost beautiful. Almost hopeful. Almost enough to make him believe that good things are possible.
Almost.
His phone buzzes, loud in the silence. Hikata, probably, wondering where he is. They were supposed to study together after school—chemistry, ironically, the science of reactions and bonds and things transforming into other things.
Akio picks up the phone. The message reads:
"Akio where were you? Natsuko made us study ACTUAL chemistry and my brain is MELTING. Save me. Or at least bring snacks tomorrow. I'm dying. This is my death message. Tell my browser history I'm sorry."
Despite everything—the letter, the photograph, the weight of a decision crushing down on him—Akio smiles. Just a little. Just enough to remember that this is why he chose to keep living. For moments like this. For friends who are ridiculous and loyal and who see him, really see him, and choose to stay anyway.
He types back: "You're not dying. You're just dramatic. See you tomorrow." Then, before he can overthink it, before fear can catch up with courage: "Can I ask you something? About family?"
The response is immediate: "ominous but ok shoot"
Akio stares at the message cursor blinking on his screen. How do you ask someone whether facing your past is worth the risk of destroying your present? How do you explain that you're terrified of being seen because being seen means being known, and being known means people can see all the ways you've failed?
"If someone from your past showed up," he types slowly, "someone who knew you before you knew you could fail... would you want to see them? Or would you rather keep the memory perfect?"
Three dots appear. Disappear. Appear again. Hikata is thinking, which is always dangerous, usually profound, occasionally brilliant.
Finally: "damn akio that's heavy for 8pm on a tuesday"
"but real talk? i think memories are like those filters people use on photos. they make things prettier than they were. and if you only ever see someone through a filter, you never actually see THEM, you know?"
"also who is this mystery person??? do i need to worry??? should i be jealous??? give me context my pal"
Akio considers his response carefully. The truth feels too big, too complicated, too likely to require explanations he's not ready to give. But Hikata deserves something honest. Hikata, who stood with him on that school yard years ago and chose to stay. Hikata, who wears jokes like armor but removes them when it matters.
"My cousin. From when I was a kid. He's visiting for Christmas."
The response is instant, enthusiastic, painfully Hikata:
"OH DAMN FAMILY REUNION"
"ok so here's what you do: you see him. you let him see YOU. not the memory version, not the perfect version, just you. because that's what family is supposed to be, right? people who know you're kind of a mess and stick around anyway"
"also i'm inviting myself to this reunion. i need to meet someone who knew you when you had a childhood. this is GOLD for blackmail material" Despite himself, Akio laughs—actually laughs, the sound surprising him in the quiet of the back room. He types: "You're not invited."
"RUDE"
"fine but you owe me the story after"
"and akio?"
"yeah?"
"leaving the light on isn't the same as letting someone in. but sometimes it's the first step. and first steps count, even when they're scary."
Akio stares at the message for a long time. Outside, the city continues its endless rhythm. Somewhere out there, Yazumira is preparing to travel from Osaka to Tokyo, carrying with him a photograph and a memory and no idea that the cousin he's coming to see has already lived an entire lifetime of disappointment.
Akio looks at the pharmacy window. At the space where a light could be. At the decision that weighs exactly the same as hope—which is to say, both crushing and weightless at once.
He doesn't decide. Not yet. But he keeps the letter. Keeps the photograph. Keeps the memory of a garden and cicadas and a cousin who once told him they'd both learn to fly.
Four days, he thinks. Four days to remember how to be seen. Four days to decide if he's brave enough to leave the light on. That night, Akio dreams of summer.
He's seven again—the first time, before everything—running through Grandpa Toshirou's garden with Yazumira laughing beside him. The air tastes like watermelon and childhood. Cicadas sing their endless song. The sun is golden and eternal.
"Akio," dream-Yazumira says, holding up a cicada shell, "do you think it hurts? When people learn to fly? When they transform into something new?"
Seven-year-old Akio considers this seriously. Even in dreams, even at seven, he's always been too serious. "Maybe. But maybe it's worth it. If they get to fly."
"And if they can't fly?" Yazumira asks. "If they go through all that pain and transformation and they're still trapped?"
"Then someone has to help them," young Akio says with the certainty of a child who doesn't know yet that help isn't always enough. "That's what medicine is for. That's what healing is. Helping people who can't help themselves."
Dream-Yazumira smiles—bright, curious, unshadowed by knowledge of what's coming. "Then you have to promise me something." "What?"
"Promise that when we grow up, you'll heal people. And I'll come back and check on you. Make sure you're okay. Make sure you're not carrying all the weight alone."
"I promise," seven-year-old Akio says. And then the dream shifts, fractures, becomes something darker.
He's thirty-two, standing in his apartment in Tokyo, staring at a computer screen at three in the morning. The game design project is failing. The deadline is impossible. His team is exhausted. And Akio is so tired he can barely remember why he wanted this in the first place.
Why he abandoned pharmacy school for this. Why he chose code over chemistry. Why he let Grandpa Toshirou's dream die so he could chase something that felt more modern, more exciting, more him.
Except it isn't him. It's just another trap. Another mindset that kind of fits. In the dream, his phone rings. He answers without looking at the caller ID.
"Akio?" Yazumira's voice, older now, concerned. "I heard about your grandfather. I'm so sorry. Are you okay?" "I'm fine," thirty-two-year-old Akio lies, the words automatic, practiced.
"You don't sound fine." "I'm handling it." "Akio—" "I have to go. Deadline. Sorry."
He hangs up. Returns to the screen. Returns to the work that will never be enough, that will never fill the space where his dreams used to live. In the dream, he can see his reflection in the black screen—exhausted, hollow, nothing like the child in the garden who promised to heal people.
Nothing like the person Yazumira remembers. The dream shifts again, more violently this time.
He's in the alley. Snow is falling. It's the night before the regression, the night his first life ends and his second begins. A stranger approaches—someone with a needle, someone with an offer that sounds impossible.
"What if you could go back?" the stranger asks. "What if you could have another chance? Would you take it?" "I don't believe in second chances," thirty-two-year-old Akio says, but even as he says it, he knows he's lying.
"Then consider it an experiment," the stranger says. "A pharmaceutical intervention. A rewriting of the chemical equations that made you who you are."
And then the needle, and then the darkness, and then—Akio wakes up gasping, disoriented, heart pounding against his ribs like something trapped trying to escape.
He's younger again. In his small apartment. The photo and letter are on his desk where he left them, proof that yesterday wasn't a dream, that Yazumira is real, that the past doesn't stay buried just because you wish it would.
Outside, snow continues falling on Tokyo. The city sleeps, or pretends to, or dreams of becoming something better. Akio sits up, pulls his knees to his stomach, and counts his breaths until his heart remembers how to beat at a normal rhythm. Four days, he thinks. Three days now, technically, since it's past midnight. Three days to decide if he's brave enough to leave the light on.
Three days to figure out how to face someone who knew him before he learned to fail. Three days to remember that cicadas don't ask if transformation will hurt. They just shed their shells and hope that flying is worth the pain.
TO BE CONTINUED...