RATED: MA21+This episode contains the graphic murder, psychological trauma, and prolonged depictions of grief in its rawest form.
The morning is ordinary. This is the thing he will never be able to reconcile.
The morning is completely, unremarkably ordinary — the kind of morning the frontier produces without effort, assembled from the same components as every morning before it: the light coming in low and pale through the east window, the sound of his father already moving outside, the smell of something on the stove that Sayo has been up since before him to begin. Yasei lies on his bed for a moment in the specific in-between of not-yet-awake and registers all of it — the wool blanket, the cold at the edges of the room where the stove's warmth doesn't quite reach, the horse shifting in the stable, the ordinary Tuesday texture of a life he did not expect to want.
He has been here a year. He is seven years old.
The wanting happened slowly, without his permission, the way warmth enters a cold room — through every gap at once, so gradually you don't notice until you already can't remember what cold felt like as a permanent condition. He does not have language for it yet. He just gets up in the mornings and goes to the fence line with Thomas and eats what Sayo puts in front of him and sits on the porch step at night watching the unreasonable sky, and somewhere inside the machinery of him that used to run exclusively on exhaustion, something else has taken up residence.
He pulls on his boots. He goes to find breakfast.
Sayo is at the stove with her back to him, and she says without turning, "Sleep well?" because she always knows when he's entered a room, which he clocked in the first week and has never fully adjusted to.
"Well enough," he says. This is true. He has been sleeping better. This also bothers him in a way he doesn't examine.
"Your father found the south fence cut again." She sets a plate on the table. Eggs and cornbread, the cornbread slightly burned on one side the way he has decided he prefers it. "Third time this month."
Yasei sits down. "Haggerty's people?"
"Probably." She pours coffee for herself — not for him — and sits across from him with the specific expression she wears when she has already thought through a problem and arrived at a conclusion she doesn't love. "Your father's going to speak to the land office in town this week. Get the boundary recorded officially."
"Will that help?"
She looks at him over her cup. The look that means you ask questions like someone much wiser and I have decided not to think about why. "It should," she says. "In a fair world." The same applies to his father and everybody else. As they just want a peaceful life with no trouble of overthinking things to much like most people in their era, in their section of the west. And so they ignore it. And assume he's just super smart and well mannered for himself as a person, because he just chooses to do so. And he's aware of every piece of this information like how this wild west is an alternate version of the original he's come to known, from research after being obsessed with the movies as a kid in his previous life at times. But overall it was just a topic as a hobby to watch movies with his broken family. But those days are far gone. And so the wise stuff thoughts continue forward in everybody's eyes here.
The implication of the last three words sits between them over breakfast and neither of them picks it up.
Thomas comes in at nine with dirt on his hands and something careful in his face that Yasei has learned to read the way he learned to read Tanaka-san's silences — by the quality of the stillness rather than anything said. He washes his hands at the basin. He sits at the table. He accepts the coffee Sayo pours without looking at it.
"There were four of them this morning," he says. "Riding the south edge. Not Haggerty's ranch hands. Someone else." "Did you recognize them?" "One of them." He pauses. "He was wearing a badge."
The kitchen goes quiet in the specific way of a room where the people in it have understood something simultaneously and are deciding together, without discussion, how much weight to give it. Yasei eats his cornbread. He does not look up. He is tracking everything.
"A sheriff's badge?" Sayo asks. "Or something like it." Thomas wraps both hands around his cup. "They didn't approach. Just rode the line. Measuring."
People who measure other people's land. Yasei remembers Thomas saying this months ago, at the map on the table, in the tone of a person saying the thing beneath the thing he meant to say. He had filed it then. He files this now, in the same place, in the growing collection of things that have the texture of a threat before they have a name.
He wants to say something. He is the new him and he has the memories of a lifetime ago and because of that old him he already learned to recognize the shape of something going wrong before it announces itself, and in the other lifetime he learned what it costs to say nothing while it builds.
He looks at his plate. He says nothing. The riders come back at two in the afternoon.
Yasei is in the yard when he hears the horses — four of them, the specific rhythm of a group moving with purpose rather than wandering — and he looks up from the stone he has been sitting on and sees them cresting the low rise at the property's southern edge and coming on without hurry. Four people. And in front, slightly ahead, the one with the badge.
He is tall. That is the first thing. The kind of tall that is partly the horse carrying him and partly the person and partly something else entirely — the specific altitude of someone who has never once had a reason to make himself smaller. His hat is clean. His badge catches the afternoon light. His face, as he comes into range, is the face of a being who has already decided how this goes.
Lione Jurasati. Yasei does not know this name yet. He will know it within the hour and will never forget it.
He watches the people ride and knows he's not important here as his parents are the ones that have to deal with this and he's quite aware of this fact because they never told him everything they were doing to protect their son, and the people seemed to not care about him either by the looks on their faces. And so he continued to mind his own business in the background without effort as well. And Thomas comes out of the stable and stands in the yard with his arms at his sides, and Sayo appears in the doorway, and the four riders pull up ten feet short of the porch and the one in front looks down at Thomas the way a person looks at a problem they have already solved in their head.
"Thomas Nishi," the stranger says, his voice calm and carrying. "I'm Sheriff Jurasati, from the territorial land authority."
"I know who you are," Thomas replies steadily. Yasei watches his father's hands—relaxed at his sides, not reaching for anything, not backing away."What are you doing on my property?"
Jurasati reaches into his coat and pulls out a folded paper, holding it out. He doesn't move closer, forcing Thomas to come forward if he wants it."This is a land transfer document. Sign it today, and there won't be any trouble."
Thomas doesn't move closer. "Whose deed is this?"
"It belongs to the territory," Jurasati says. "It's being reassigned to an official development project. Your land is inside the survey zone, Nishi. It's been like that for six months. You should have received a notice."
"I never got anything," Thomas says. "That's unfortunate," Jurasati replies, with no hint of regret. "The notice period is over. Signing today is the cooperative choice."
"And if I don't sign?"
Jurasati looks at him for a moment. The look of a sherrif who is not accustomed to the question. "Then I'll need to return with a larger party and a court instrument, which takes time and creates paperwork for everyone and results in the same outcome with considerably more unpleasantness attached." He says this the way you explain something to a person who is slow to understand — not cruelty, just efficiency. "I'd rather not. Sign the document."
Sayo steps off the porch and stands beside Thomas. "This land is ours," she says. "We have the original deed. It was filed in Calvary County back in 1861."
Jurasati looks at her. His expression shifts slightly—not softer, just adjusting to a new factor. "Ma'am, the territorial survey takes priority over county records in development zones. That's the law."
"Then show me the law," she says. "In writing. With the judge's seal." Another pause. Longer this time. One of the people behind Jurasati twitches slightly.
Yasei is standing very still at the edge of the yard. He is watching Jurasati's hands. He does not know why he is watching his hands specifically. Some instinct — assembled from years of surviving Tokyo offices and months of surviving the frontier — tracking the variable that matters.
"Go inside," Sayo says quietly, without looking at him. To him. Just to him. He doesn't move. "Yasei." Thomas's voice. Low and absolute. "Go inside." He goes inside. He does not go to his room. If both of them say so. Then he has to go because this seems like something only they in this world seemed to know how to deal somehow hopefully. And he could tell just by the way they seemed to worry about him. And so he moves forward.
The cellar access is in the kitchen floor — a hatch with a rope handle, leading down to the root cellar where Sayo keeps the preserved food and the extra lamp oil. He has explored it once, in the first weeks, with the instinctive mapping behavior of someone who has spent years identifying exits. He opens it now, lowers himself down the four wooden steps, and pulls it most of the way closed above him.
The gap in the hatch boards is an inch wide. Maybe less. The angle gives him the yard, the porch, and most of the space between the house and where the riders stopped.
He can hear his parents. He cannot see their faces anymore — the angle is wrong — but he can hear them. Thomas's voice, flat and careful, saying he will not sign anything without a lawyer present. Sayo's voice, steadier than it has any right to be, asking again for the court seal.
Jurasati's voice, quieter now. Too quiet to carry to where Yasei is.
Then a sound he has no name for yet — quick and procedural and followed immediately by the crack that is not thunder, that is nothing like thunder, that is a thing with its own specific irreversible meaning.
One. Thomas's voice stops.
There is a sound like something heavy settling into the earth all at once, and then Sayo's voice — not a scream, something worse than a scream, a sound that is the human vocal cords creating the one note they make when language has been completely destroyed — and then the second crack, and then Sayo's voice also stops.
Two. The silence that follows is the loudest thing Yasei Nishi has ever heard in two lifetimes. He does not move. And laughs from the people his parents were talking to.
He understands this later as the thing that saved his life and cannot decide for years whether that was the right word for it. He does not move. He does not breathe in any way that makes sound. He presses himself against the cellar wall below the gap in the hatch and looks through it at the blue afternoon sky and the edge of the porch post and the edge of a boot — one boot, belonging to one of the riders — and he does not make a sound.
Boots on the porch boards. Jurasati's voice, close now, saying something quiet and administrative to someone near him. A persons voice — young, unsteady, asking something Yasei cannot parse. Jurasati's voice again, shorter this time, the way you shorten your voice at something that is asking questions you don't have patience for.
The boots move to the door. The door opens. Steps inside.
Yasei presses himself further into the wall. The hatch above him is most of the way closed. The cellar is dark. He controls his breathing with a completeness that surprises even the part of him that is still Utsu Enzu — who spent twenty-three years being invisible, who perfected the particular skill of taking up no space, of being so still in a room that the room forgot him. He uses that skill now in a root cellar in 1865 while the person who just killed his parents walks through the kitchen above his head.
Footsteps. The sound of something being moved, examined, set down. Then footsteps back. The door. The porch. Boots descending.
Horses. The sound of them turning, gathering, moving away. The specific rhythm of a group leaving without hurry because hurry implies concern, and concern implies a reason to be concerned, and Lione Jurasati has no reason to be concerned about a hidden and foolish person like him who chooses to hide. Is just a coward he has no reason to kill. Because in his eyes as a sheriff, what could some scared fool do to him.
He waits.
He waits long past the sound of the horses. He waits through the afternoon moving into early evening, through the light that comes through the hatch gap shifting from white to gold to the beginning of orange. He waits because the part of him that survived Tokyo, that survived six months on the frontier in a previous run of this story that hasn't happened yet, knows that long enough is not the same as safe and treats them accordingly.
When he finally pushes the hatch open and climbs out, the kitchen is the same kitchen. The cornbread pan still on the stove. Sayo's cup still on the table. Everything in its place because none of it knows yet what the world outside it contains.
He goes to the door. He opens it. He looks.
He does not cry immediately. He looks for a long time — at the yard, at the two shapes in it, at the specific geography of an ordinary Tuesday afternoon that has been rearranged into something with no word in any language he carries — and he looks without crying because the part of him that is Utsu Enzu has spent twenty-three years not crying at the things that most warranted it, and old habits do not die quickly even when everything else does.
He goes to his mother first. He does not know why. He sits beside her in the dirt. The afternoon light is going and the prairie wind is doing what it always does, which is continue, indifferent and constant, because the wind has never once adjusted its schedule for anything that happened beneath it.
He looks at her face. He looks at Thomas beyond her.
Something builds in his heart that has no exit — not tears, not sound, not the clean sharp thing that grief is in stories. Just pressure. The structural kind. The kind that doesn't release so much as become the new shape of the thing containing it.
He is the new him.
He was a fool in an old Tokyo apartment and he chose to lie down and close his eyes because there was nothing left worth the effort of staying, and then he was given another life in a new world with new hands and a fence line to walk in the mornings and cornbread burned on one side and his mother's arm around him on the porch step saying always, and he sat in the warmth of it for one year and then the warmth ended in two gunshots on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon.
He stays beside her until it is fully dark. Then he makes his decision.
Not with grief. Not with tears. With the specific flat absolute certainty of a person who has run the calculation and arrived at the only answer the numbers produce. The same certainty Utsu Enzu once used to make a different final decision — only this one points outward. This one has a name attached to it.
He stays beside his parents bodies until it is fully dark. Then he goes inside.
The door closes behind him and the kitchen is exactly as it was. The cornbread pan on the stove. Sayo's cup on the table. The lamp unlit. The ordinary unmoved geometry of a life arranged by people who believed they would be here tomorrow to use it.
He stands in the middle of it.
He stands in the middle of it and does nothing and the pressure in his heart builds the way pressure builds in something sealed — not loudly, not dramatically, just the slow unstoppable accumulation of force against a container that was never built for this specific weight. He looks at the table. He looks at the cup. He looks at the chair with the lean to the left that Thomas had been meaning to fix for months.
He picks up the cup.
The chip on the rim. The brown ring inside from a thousand mornings of coffee she drank while asking him if he'd slept well without turning from the stove because she always already knew.
He throws it at the wall.
The sound is wrong. Too small. He picks up the plate. Throws it. The tin cup from the shelf. The second plate. He sweeps both arms across the table and everything on it hits the floor in a single crashing wave and he is already pulling the shelf from the wall — tin, glass, the salt bottle, the book Thomas kept up there and never opened, the spare lamp that is now just glass spreading across the floor — and the sound of it comes down around him and still, still it is not big enough, not close to the size of what is happening inside him.
"Why." His voice is wrecked already, broken clean through, the voice of a body carrying something it was never used to feeling. "Why did you — why couldn't you just — "
He can't finish. He picks up Thomas's chair — the one with the lean, the one he was going to fix — and throws it at the far wall and it breaks apart against the wood and he is screaming before the sound of it settles, a sound with no words in it, just the human voice pushed to its absolute foundation which is only this: something is wrong, something is gone, something that was here an hour ago is not here anymore and it is never coming back.
He puts his fist into the wall. The plaster cracks. His knuckles split instantly and the pain is white and immediate and he does it again.
"I was right there!" The scream tears out of him. "I was in the cellar, I was right underneath you, I could hear your voices, I could hear you and I couldn't — I didn't — "
He hits the wall a third time. A fourth. The hole opens wider with each one and his hand is bleeding freely now and he cannot stop, does not want to stop, because the pain is the only thing in the room that is proportionate to what it is.
"Thomas!" The name comes out of him like something being ripped from a fixed point. He has never said it. Not once in a year — always sir, always the careful maintained distance of a person who understood what names cost. "Thomas, I — you were — you were supposed to fix that chair, you kept saying you'd fix it, why didn't you just — "
He slides down the wall to the floor. And the crying begins.
Not the quiet kind. Not the kind Utsu Enzu rationed carefully in a four-point-two tatami mat apartment with the walls thin and the city continuing outside. This kind has no management in it — violent and convulsing and so total that his whole body participates, his shoulders, his hands, everything — and he does not try to stop it because he burned through everything he had available for stopping things somewhere between the first gunshot and now.
He presses his forehead to the floor.
"Sayo." The word destroys him saying it. "Sayo, I never — I didn't — you asked me every morning if I slept well and I never once told you that you asking was the reason I — that it was the first thing I — "
He hits the floor with his bleeding palm.
"You said always." His voice breaks on the word and he says it again anyway. "Always. You said that. You put your arm around me on the porch and I didn't — I couldn't say anything back, I just sat there, I just — "
He curls on his side on the kitchen floor and pulls his knees to his stomach and the grief coming out of him is enormous and shapeless and has no end he can locate.
And then — The memories arrive.
Not gently. Not with the soft amber quality of nostalgia. They arrive the way they always arrive when the door has been blown off its hinges — immediate and merciless and from both directions at once, Osaka and 1865 colliding inside him with an impact that takes his breath.
His mother's voice. Osaka. The hallway outside his bedroom door.
"Utsu." A knock. Quiet, careful, the knock of someone who has learned to be tentative with him. "Utsu, I made dinner. It's getting cold." Silence on his side of the door. He is seventeen. He is lying on his bed staring at the ceiling. He does not answer.
"Utsu, please. Just come eat. You don't have to talk. Just — come eat with us." He puts his headphones on.
The memory lands in the kitchen floor of 1865 like a physical blow and he makes a sound against the wood that is somewhere between a sob and a scream.
His father. Osaka station. The morning Utsu left for Tokyo.
"You don't have to go." His father standing on the platform with his hands in his jacket pockets, not performing anything, just saying the true thing plainly the way he always said things. "You can stay. We can figure out something here, work, school, whatever you need — you don't have to go all the way to Tokyo alone."
"I want to go." "Utsu—"
"The train's here." He picks up his bag. He doesn't look back. He gets on the train and finds a seat and looks at his own reflection in the window because it is easier than the platform, easier than his father standing there with his hands in his pockets watching the train take his son away from him.
He never looked back. He never looked back. "I never looked back," he says out loud, to the floor, to the dark. "I didn't even — I just got on the train and I didn't — "
His fist hits the floor again. And again.
His mother. Six months before Tokyo. Standing in the kitchen doorway watching him eat alone at the table because his father was working late and she had been trying for weeks, months, years to find the angle of approach that reached him, that got through the shell he'd built at eleven and reinforced every year since.
"I miss you," she said. Quietly. Not dramatically. Just the honest flat truth of it. "You're right here and I miss you. Do you understand that? Do you know what that feels like?"
He had looked at his bowl. "I'm tired, Okasan."
"You're always tired." Her voice broken slightly on the last word and he had heard it and filed it and left it alone, left her alone, left her standing in the doorway missing her son who was sitting three feet away from her.
"Don't," he says now. To that memory. To that version of himself sitting at that table. "Don't do that. Don't just — she was right there — "
He is screaming again. He doesn't register when the words became a scream — it happened somewhere between the memory of his mother's broken voice and now, and the scream bouncing off the walls of the broken kitchen is the scream that seventeen-year-old Utsu Enzu never released in the Osaka apartment, the one that twenty-three-year-old Utsu Enzu took with him to Tokyo and kept sealed and took to the floor of that apartment as the last thing he ever carried.
"I NEVER SAID GOODBYE!" The words come out ragged and enormous. "I never — not to any of you, not — I got on that train and I just — I was right there and I never — "
He drives his fist into the floor until the knuckle reopens fully and the pain spreads up his forearm and still he cannot stop. His father. A phone call. Eight months into Tokyo. One of three calls Utsu received in that period, all of which he let ring.
He had stood there. He had watched the screen light up with his father's name — just his name, nothing else, the plain unadorned name of a father calling his son for no reason other than that his son was far away and he wanted to hear his voice. He had watched it ring out. He had put the phone face down on the floor and gone back to lying on his back staring at the water stain.
His father called two more times that month. He never picked up.
"Why didn't I pick up." The words come out as barely sound, scraped and hollow. "Why didn't I just — it was a phone call, it was just — he just wanted to hear my voice and I couldn't even — "
He presses his face into the floor and screams into the wood until his throat gives out.
The screaming exhausts itself eventually. Everything exhausts itself eventually. He lies on his side on the kitchen floor in the dark and the wreckage, breathing in the ragged incomplete way of someone who has been crying so long and so hard that breathing has become a conscious effort, and the silence that follows is the heaviest kind — the silence after everything has been said that can be said, when the body has nothing left to produce and the mind just sits in what remains.
He stares at the underside of the table. One leg slightly uneven — Thomas had been meaning to fix that too.
Don't leave, his mother had said. Not in those words. Not out loud. But in every knock on his bedroom door that he didn't answer, every dinner going cold, every phone call he let ring into nothing. She had been saying it for years in the only language he had left her — the language of the door still being knocked on, the calls still being made, the dinner still being cooked even when she already knew he wasn't coming. All because she and her husband never made any time for their son for most of his life, which had caused him to act out in a way where he rejected them back because they rejected him for so long. And eventually when they tried to reach out because he was not talking to them anymore and because they were worried about him. It was already to late, because he had begun to fully reject them because they had done so to him for so long. And so he never talked to them, even until his death as Enzu.
Don't leave.
And he had left. Comprehensively. Methodically. He had perfected the leaving until it was complete and then he had lain down on a floor in Tokyo and made it permanent.
He had never said goodbye. He had never said any of the things. He had sat in the hollowness and told himself the hollowness was the truth of him — that the emptiness was what he was made of, that the not-caring was the real thing and the caring was just residue, just noise, just the body's human memory of warmth it had decided to no longer require.
The cup on the table every morning. Sleep well? Without turning. Thomas's grip adjusting on the fence post. Nope. The blanket dropped over his shoulders on the porch step. Always.
He presses his hands over his face. The tears come again — different this time, quieter, the kind that come when the rage has burned through and what's underneath it is just grief in its purest form, grief without a target, grief that has understood itself completely.
He cared. He has always cared. About his Osaka family who knocked on doors he didn't open and called phones he didn't answer and stood on platforms watching trains take him away. About Sayo and Thomas who were warm in the specific unconditional way of people who have decided about you and do not require your participation in that decision. He cared about all of them the entire time. The hollowness was never stronger than the caring. The hollowness was the caring — inverted, sealed, turned inward on itself until it looked like nothing, felt like nothing, became indistinguishable from nothing.
But it was never nothing.
"I'm sorry," he says. To all of them. To the Osaka apartment and the porch step and the narrow couch and the train platform and the phone face down on the floor and the knock on the door he put his headphones on to not hear. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry I didn't — I'm sorry I never — "
He stops.
Because underneath the grief, below it, the way the bedrock is below everything — something else is there. Something that has been there since the first crack of sound in the afternoon air and has been waiting with the patience of a thing that knows it has nowhere to be but here.
He sees the hat. Clean. Catching the light. He sees the badge.
He sees the specific unhurried quality of a sheriff walking away from what he has just done and adjusting his hat because it is a Tuesday and there is other business to attend to.
Yasei Nishi gets up off the floor.
He does not wipe his face. He does not look at his hand. He stands in the broken kitchen with the blood dried on his knuckles and the bruise forming along his arms and the grief sitting in him like bedrock — permanent, load-bearing, the new foundation of whatever gets built on top of it from here — and he is completely still.
"Lione Jurasati," he says. Just that. Just the name. Said quietly and without ceremony, the way you say the name of a fact rather than a feeling.
He stays in the kitchen a long time after that. He does not sleep. When the cold becomes serious he finds the extra blanket from the chest in the back room and wraps it around his shoulders and sits at the table — the uneven one, the one with the chair Thomas was going to fix — and he sits there until the night starts becoming something else at its edges.
He is going to kill that sheriff.
Not with rage. Not anymore. The rage burned itself out on the floor hours ago and what remains is something colder and more permanent — the specific flat certainty of a person who has run the calculation and arrived at the only answer it produces.
He is seven years old. He has no gun and no money and no map and no person left in either world who knows him. He has two dead families and one lifetime of stepping backward and a heart that turns out to have been full the entire time he was telling himself it was empty.
He has the name. He has the face. He has every year between now and whenever the day comes to learn everything the frontier is willing to teach a kid who refuses to die.
And Yasei Nishi — who spent one life learning to step backward from every warm thing and another life learning in the span of a single year what stepping forward costs and what it gives — is not going to step backward from this.
Not for anything.
Not ever.
TO BE CONTINUED...