He was almost home.
That was the specific cruelty of it — two streets away, his bag already heavier than his shoulders wanted, his legs registering the full account of two days on a mountain. He was thinking about the bath he was going to have and then the food Sakura would almost certainly have ready and then, probably, sleep.
He heard raised voices before he saw them.
Three men, adult, the particular configuration of adults who've decided they're entitled to something and are waiting for someone to disagree. A girl — his age, maybe younger — standing with her back nearly against the wall of a shopfront, her posture trying to be composed and not quite managing it. She was holding her bag in both hands in front of her the way people hold things when they're trying to make themselves smaller without appearing to.
He read it in two seconds. Assessed it in one more.
He walked over without deciding to.
"Hey." His voice came out flat and certain, the kind that doesn't announce itself as interruption because it doesn't acknowledge there was anything worth interrupting. "She's with me. We're leaving."
He took her hand.
The men looked at him — a tall foreigner with a mountaineering bag and the specific expression of someone who has already made a decision and is simply waiting for others to catch up — and made a calculation. The police station was visible from where they stood. The math resolved itself.
They left.
He walked her down the street at a steady pace, not running, not slow — just moving, until two turns made the incident unverifiable and he stopped and let go of her hand.
She was staring at him.
He turned. "You alright?"
Her breathing was still slightly uneven. She had soft brown hair and pale skin and eyes that were doing something complicated — the processing of relief and something else underneath it, something he couldn't immediately read, which was unusual enough to notice.
Then she said, almost without voice:
"...Eddy?"
He hadn't heard that name in years.
He'd forgotten, almost, that it existed. It belonged to a specific geography — a particular garden, a particular summer, the era of his life before his family moved and the world rearranged itself and he became Eadlyn rather than Eddy. One person had ever called him that with the specific inflection that made it a name rather than a shortening.
He looked at her.
"Nino?"
And she moved — not dramatically, not throwing herself at him the way people do in stories, just stepping forward with the unsteady relief of someone who has been carrying something heavy for a long time and has finally found somewhere to set it down.
"I knew it," she said. "I knew it was you. They said someone had come from the UK and I thought — but then I thought I was being ridiculous—" She stopped herself. Looked at him. "You're tall."
"You're not."
She hit his arm, which was the most natural thing anyone had done to him since arriving in Japan, and he found himself laughing before he'd decided to.
They walked slowly — neither in a hurry, both adjusting to the strangeness of time having passed and somehow also not passed. Nino moved with a quality he was still calibrating: an expressiveness that didn't filter itself, a warmth that arrived before it checked whether it was welcome. She'd been like this as a child, he was remembering. She said what she felt at roughly the speed she felt it. It had made her easy to be around then. He was finding it still did.
"Your family moved without telling anyone," she said. It came out as an observation rather than an accusation, but it had weight in it.
"My parents decided quickly," he said. "I think I was eleven."
"I was ten." She looked at the pavement. "I thought we'd just — drifted. The way kids do." A pause. "Then I heard your name from someone who'd seen you near this neighbourhood and I thought I'd made it up."
He thought about that. About being ten and someone simply not being there anymore. About the particular loneliness of that age when someone disappears — too young to understand why, old enough to notice the absence.
He understood people, he'd always said. He was beginning to understand that understanding and having felt something yourself were different kinds of knowledge, and that he'd been confusing them.
"I'm sorry," he said. Simply. Without qualification.
She glanced at him sideways. "You didn't do it on purpose."
"Doesn't mean it didn't cost you something."
She was quiet for a moment. Then: "You're different to how I remembered."
"Older."
"Not just that." She thought about it with the directness of someone who considers thinking aloud its own kind of honesty. "You were always — observant. You noticed things. But now you notice things and then you consider them before you say anything. It's like watching someone who learned to hold things longer."
He didn't answer immediately. Which was, as Manami had once pointed out, already an answer.
"There was a girl," he said eventually.
"Someone who told me I understood people but hid behind it."
Nino tilted her head. "Was she right?"
"Working on it."
She accepted this the way she seemed to accept most things — quickly, without needing it to be more than it was.
"So who were you with?" she asked. "On this trip you mentioned."
"Camping. Some friends from school. Ken, Manami, Rin."
Something moved through her expression when he said the names. Quick, instinctive — a tightening at Manami, not dramatic, just present. He registered it without commenting. Not the moment.
"New friends," she said, lightly.
"Good ones."
She nodded once, looking ahead. "Good."
They reached her street and she stopped, pointing down it. "That one. Two blocks."
He looked. "I'm at the corner of the next street over."
She turned to face him fully, and her expression did the thing he remembered from childhood — pure, unguarded delight at the specific satisfaction of the world arranging itself well. "We're neighbours again."
"Apparently."
"That's either fate or a very small neighbourhood."
"Both, probably."
She took his number with the air of someone completing a formality rather than initiating something, because she'd clearly already decided she wasn't going to lose track of him again and this was simply the mechanism. Gave him hers. Waved, walking backward two steps before turning, the teddy-bear prize from some earlier thing tonight — he hadn't asked — bouncing on her shoulder.
"See you, Eddy," she said, without looking back.
The name settled in the evening air differently than it had when she'd first said it. Less like a shock. More like something being returned to its owner after a long time away.
He turned toward home.
He didn't notice, until he was already at the gate, the curtain shifting in the window of the house three doors down. Didn't notice the particular quality of attention watching him from behind it.
He'd find out about that later.