The days had a shape to them now.
Not a good shape, not a bad one. Just a shape. Kael woke when he woke, which was usually late, dressed without particular purpose, and left the penthouse the way you left a waiting room not going anywhere, just not staying.
He walked mostly. The city was easy to disappear into if you didn't need anything from it. He went to the park near the east side where older men played chess on permanent stone tables and nobody looked at anyone else long enough to require conversation. He sat on benches. He watched pigeons conduct their small furious business. He bought coffee from a cart and drank it standing up because sitting felt too deliberate, like he was committing to being somewhere.
Once he found himself outside an arcade.
Not the one from before that building was a gym now, had been for years, he'd checked without meaning to. Just a small place, a few machines visible through the window, the particular flashing dark of those interiors. He stood outside it for a moment. Then he kept walking.
He ate when he was hungry. He slept when he was tired. He called his mother from across the apartment sometimes instead of walking to the other room, and she answered and they exchanged the necessary information and hung up.
A week passed like this, maybe slightly more.
Then he went to see Sato.
The shop was called Respawn which Kael had always thought was either a very good name or a very obvious one and had never decided which. It occupied a corner unit on a street that couldn't decide if it was gentrifying or not a craft coffee place on one end, a laundromat that had been there since the nineties on the other, and in the middle this. The window display had been changed since he'd last seen it in person. New consoles. A hand-lettered sign advertising trade-ins.
A bell rang when he pushed the door open.
The shop was bigger than it looked from outside. Sato had expanded at some point in the last few years knocked through into the unit next door, Kael guessed, because the back half was new, higher ceilinged, lined with shelves that went up further than was practical. There were display cases along the left wall with older hardware behind the glass, organized with a care that was almost museological. A few customers moved through the aisles without urgency.
Behind the main counter, Sato looked up.
He was the same. That was the first thing Kael noticed Sato was fundamentally, stubbornly the same, like he had decided at some point on a version of himself and simply stayed there. Same build, same unhurried expression, same way of registering a thing before reacting to it.
He looked at Kael for a moment.
"You look terrible," he said.
"I'm in remission," Kael said.
"I know. That's why I said terrible and not sick." He came around the counter and they did the thing shoulder, arm, the brief contact of people who didn't perform closeness but meant it. "You should've come sooner."
"I walked around a lot first."
"Did it help?"
Kael considered. "Not really."
Sato nodded like this was a reasonable answer and gestured toward the back. "Come on. I'll make tea."
There was a room behind the stockroom that wasn't for customers. A low table, mismatched chairs, a small electric kettle that had clearly been replaced several times. Shelves back here too, but less organized personal collection, Kael guessed, things Sato had kept instead of sold. Old cartridges in their cases. A few figures. Controllers hung on a pegboard in a way that was almost decorative.
They sat.
Sato made tea without asking what kind and put a cup in front of Kael and didn't immediately say anything, which was one of the things Kael had always valued about him. The calls and FaceTimes over the years had been good Sato had talked when Kael needed talking to and been quiet when he needed quiet, navigating the hospital years with a patience that Kael had never properly acknowledged but being in the same room was different. Easier in a way he hadn't expected.
"So," Sato said eventually.
"So," Kael said.
"What are you going to do."
It wasn't quite a question. More like a thing being set on the table between them, acknowledged, left there.
"I don't know," Kael said. "I keep waiting to know and I don't."
"What does a day look like for you right now."
"Walking. Sitting. Eating sometimes. Coming here, now." He wrapped both hands around the cup. "The penthouse is quiet. My mother is—" he stopped. "She's there. She's just."
"Yeah," Sato said.
That was all. Just yeah. Like he understood the full shape of it from one unfinished sentence, which he probably did.
They drank their tea. Somewhere in the shop a customer asked a question and one of Sato's staff answered it. The kettle clicked off.
"Tell me about the shop," Kael said.
So Sato did. The expansion, the trade-in business, a regular customer who brought in vintage hardware that turned out to be worth considerably more than the man knew. A small tournament he'd run last spring, local kids, nothing serious. The economics of physical retail in the current climate, delivered without complaint, just information. Kael listened and asked questions and felt something that had been slightly clenched in him start to ease, almost without his permission.
They talked for a while like that general things, catch-up things, the kind of conversation that reestablished that two people still knew each other after years of distance. And then it turned, the way conversations did when the surface stuff had been covered, toward older territory.
A cartridge on the shelf. A specific game. Do you remember when and then they were somewhere else, some specific afternoon from years ago, and then another one, and the thread of it kept pulling until they were talking about the arcade circuit and regional competitions and the particular smell of those venues, the carpet, the noise.
Kael found himself smiling without having decided to.
"You were absurd back then," Sato said. "You know that, right. Objectively."
"I was decent."
"You were seventeen beating men in their thirties and acting like it was inconvenient." Sato shook his head. "State champion. Didn't even celebrate properly."
"I celebrated."
"You went home and slept."
"That was my celebration."
Sato laughed a short genuine one. Then he let the moment sit for a second before he shifted, the way he always did when he was moving toward something. Kael had always been able to tell.
"Have you heard about GoG," Sato said.
Kael turned the name over. He had seen it peripherally hard not to, it was everywhere but hadn't paid attention the way you didn't pay attention to things you had no context for. "VR game. The one everyone's losing their mind over."
"Generation of Gods. Released four months ago." Sato leaned back. "It destroyed everything, Kael. I don't mean that lightly. The numbers it's pulling concurrent players, streaming hours, it's not comparable to anything before it. First real full-immersion open world MMORPG at this scale. The hardware finally caught up to what the concept needed."
"You play it?"
"I have a setup here, yeah. A few sessions a week." He paused. "I want you to come in for a session."
Kael looked at him.
"I'm not saying become a professional gamer," Sato said, reading the look with accuracy. "I'm not saying anything about your future or what you're supposed to do. I'm just saying—" he searched for the words and found them carefully. "Online you're nobody. That's not an insult, that's the point. No name, no history, no dead father, no penthouse, nobody who knows you were sick. You put the headset on and you're just a player. You can be bad at something. You can fail at it. You can talk to people who have no idea who you are and it doesn't cost you anything."
He set his cup down.
"You've spent six years with people knowing exactly what was wrong with you. Every person in your life looked at you and saw the illness first. Online nobody sees anything. You're just whoever you decide to be that session." He shrugged. "I thought that might be worth something right now."
Kael was quiet for a moment.
Outside in the shop, ordinary commerce continued. A shelf of old games sat behind Sato's shoulder, their cases faded and familiar. Kael looked at them and then looked at the table.
"When," he said.
Sato replied back. "Saturday."
-to be continuied