A Quick Change In Orbits
The apartment is huge and cold and quiet.
“Just like home!” Akihiko says to himself as he drops his bags to the floor. There’s no furniture in the penthouse, no carpeting, not even any lights. The block is only just opened, and now Akihiko is the proud, if a little bit out of his depth, owner of a multimillion dollar home. He’s wiped out one of his checking accounts buying this place.
“I have two more,” he says to the world in general this time. “So it’s not like it matters.”
His voice echoes on the hardwood flooring and shivers back to him. It sounds pathetic and bratty to his ears and he sighs. Once his father finds out he’s run away from home, Akihiko suspects that he’ll lose the biggest of his other accounts to bribery attempts. The other is purely his own money - earned by writing for Isaka-san and his publishing house - but it won’t last him long, he knows, because he has very little concept of frugality.
The big glass windows on one side of the penthouse are cool to the touch, and still shiny from the last rub down they got before the builders left. Akihiko slides one open and slips outside. The night air is warmer than that inside the building, and he lights a cigarette and smokes it grimly as he watches the city below and around. All of his previous cheer has gone, faded away with the remnants of the adrenaline rush that fuelled his escape. Now he’s out on his own, and his pride says there’s no going back now.
“I did it,” Akihiko informs the cityscape as he stubs the dog-end out of the balcony. “And if I go back, then I’ll have undone it.”He lights another cigarette shakily. “Plus, can you imagine what Haruhiko would be like if I did go back?”
The city might not be able to, but Akihiko can. It’s not a nice thought, and he rests his forehead against his arms, leaning on the wall.
“And my mother,” he continues. “She’d be even worse, if she ever notices I’ve left in the first place.”
Somewhere, far below, a car horn blares, and Akihiko laughs.
“Yes, exactly. She’d be like that.” He draws on the cigarette again. “And father...”
He doesn’t actually know what Fuyuhiko would do. Not laugh, certainly, not gloat. But he suspects there would be a tiny smugness to the man that would drive his son certifiably mad within days. The internal vision of a permanent smirk on his father’s face is somehow worse than the idea of his mother’s screams or his brother’s mockery. The latter would die away, the middle is normal already, but the first... A constant reminder of his failure? Akihiko would prefer not to suffer that.
So he can’t go back.
A chill wind blows and he shudders. It’s even darker now, and he feels along the windows until he can creep back into his own home. He finds his bags by tripping over them and then fumbles through one of them until he finds a blanket. He’s had it since he was four, and it’s warm and thick and an annoyingly fluffy blue colour, but it’s dark so that can’t bother him too much.
Then he crosses back to the windows and curls against the glass. The city lights are reflected off the cloud layer, and that’s all Akihiko wants to see - the evidence that there’s a city out there, full of people.
There’s no servants bustling about, no trusty Tanaka-san who started life as a butler and somehow became a babysitter along the way, no Hiroki at the end of the road, no innocently lovable Takahiro, nobody. He’s never been this physically alone in his whole life, and it just serves to highlight the detachment he’s always suffered ever since his father saw fit to remove him from his cosy life in England with Mr. James and transplant him on the other side of the planet.
The fact that he doesn’t miss his family in the slightest makes it even worse.
Akihiko shudders again, despite himself, and snuggles deeper into his blanket. “I did it,” he repeats, “I did it. I had to do it.” He tilts his head forward and chokes down a sob. “I had to do it. I just wish...” Closing his eyes to stop the tears, he grits his teeth even as he speaks. “I just wish I didn’t have to do this...”
The reflected light and the distant noise are his only company as, ignoring the chill seeping into his joints through the blanket, he falls into a dull, uncomfortable sleep.
Notes: Think of this as an interlude, while the writer exercises her artistic license on the order of the rest of the planets.