9066 (2/?)
Title: 9066 (2/?)
Author: smile-arigatou
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Historical, AU, School, Romance
Pairing: OT9, YutoYama (main), TakaInoo, YabuHika, others to follow
Summary: It's America 1942, and it's wartime. Everyone of Japanese ancestry has to be moved and relocated away from their homes and lifestyles. Everyone seems to be losing hope, especially for a group of high school boys who suddenly feel like enemies in their own homeland. Could this terrible situation possibly bring some light into their lives?
Chapter two: Nakajima
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“Westley, c’mon, you can’t stay here in this barrack all day.”
The youngest Nakajima son looked up at his mother. “And why not? Yuto gets to stay here.”
“Your brother is doing something productive,” Mrs. Nakajima reminded him. “He’s studying. You, on the other hand, you’re just sitting there doing nothing but staring at the ceiling.”
Yuto looked up from his book, unsure if he should say anything. It wasn’t a lie that he was studying, but he wouldn’t exactly say that his brother did nothing.
“You’re going to drive yourself crazy by not doing anything.”
“What’s the point?” Westley sighed and answered gloomily. “We’re prisoners, remember?”
“Westley-“
“Here,” Yuto said, sitting up and handing his brother the book he was reading. “Why don’t you quiz me? I can’t seem to remember anything I’m reading, so you can read a question and I’ll answer what I think the answer is.”
The response seemed to be the proper one, because it gave their mother a smile before she left the barrack to go do the laundry.
“Thanks,” Westley said before giving the book back. “You’re a lot better at thinking of excuses than I am.”
Yuto stood up and jumped around, finally feeling better from not being able to do so for so long. Mrs. Nakajima had told him not to jump around because of how loud the wood got when he did. “I’m going crazy!” he told Westley. “I haven’t been able to run or jump or do anything really productive since we got here!”
Westley watched his brother for a moment before he stood up, took off his shoes, and climbed to stand on the metal bed frame. The straw-filled mattress crunched under him, but he didn’t pay any attention to it. “On the bed!” he ordered, pointing to the other bed that belonged to Yuto. “I want to play a game!”
Yuto knew exactly what his nine-year old brother was up to, and under any normal circumstance, he would scold him and tell him to get down, but he was too antsy and too keyed up to care, so he obediently did as he was told and climbed on top of his bed. His bed squeaked slightly under his weight, but he did a test jump and when he didn’t fall through, he determined it safe to continue. It was also a lot quieter than jumping on the wooden floor.
“Shiritori!” Westley smiled as he jumped.
“Ringo!” Yuto beamed back, jumping along.
“Gokiburi!”
“Ringu!”
“Kumori!”
“Stop!” Yuto stopped jumping and held onto the frame for support. “I said ‘gu’! Not ‘ku’!”
“Sorry,” Westley responded without stopping. “Guramu!”
Yuto began jumping again. “Mushi!”
“Shi!”
“Shigatsu!”
“Tsuki!”
“Kiite!”
“Tegami!”
“Mirai!”
“Ima!”
“Maiko!”
“Kodomo!”
“Momiji!
“Jitensha!”
“Shakai!”
“Inu!”
“Numa-AH!” Yuto felt the bed give from underneath him as he fell through with a large CRASH! The straw mattress protected his legs from getting scratched, but it didn’t stop from some metal springs and bolts rolling all over the floor. Westley had stopped jumping, and Yuto was still too shocked to move. Finally, he got off the bed and looked at the damage. The bars had fallen and there was a big metal mess under the bed. There was no way he would be able to sleep or even sit on this frame now, and he didn’t know if the army would give him another one.
“Are you okay?” Westley asked finally.
Yuto nodded. Then he scowled. “Mama’s going to kill me.”
“Better you than me,” Westley joked. He finally got off the bed and helped pick up the pieces. “Nii-chan, do you know how to fix this?”
Honestly, Yuto didn’t know how to fix it. His father might own a repair shop, but he never once let Yuto help him in the shop. Studying was more important, he always said. Yuto shook his head. “Do you?”
“We could probably figure it out,” Westley said, sounding unsure. “But I don’t know…. I’ve always worked on cars, not on metal frames.”
“Hello? Anyone home?”
Immediately, both boys stood up and stood in front of the bed. They froze when they saw the familiar shapes of Daiki Arioka and his new neighbor, Takaki, standing in the doorway. He looked behind and also saw the small shape of Ryosuke Yamada behind them too, and his heart skipped a beat when he recognized him.
“We wanted to see if you wanted to come out and play basketball with us,” Daiki said. “Takaki brought a ball with him and he’s complaining that Chii’s too short to play.”
Yuto shook his head. “Sorry,” he frowned. “I wish I could but…” He moved out of the way a little bit. “I just broke my bed, and I need to fix it before my mom comes home and kills me. Or before the army comes and yells.”
Yamada nodded uneasily. “Ah, okay!” he said quickly. “Well, hope you figure it out! Thanks anyway! Dai-“
Daiki, on the other hand, moved towards the bed and got on his hands and knees to look at the damage. “This isn’t so bad!” he said. “You know, we fix metal wires and bars like this all the time at the laundry shop.”
“Really?!” Westley beamed. “We’re saved!”
“How did you break it?” Daiki asked.
“We were playing shiritori while jumping on the bed.”
“Eh?!” Takaki asked, amazed. “No way!”
“I needed to jump around!” Yuto explained. “I need to jump or run or do something, otherwise I just get so keyed up that I can’t focus. That’s how we used to get rid of some energy back home.” In all honesty, Yuto felt pretty bad about breaking the bed, but he was now incredibly grateful that somebody knew how to fix it. “Dai-chan, let me help you so that I can fix it next time.”
In no time at all, the bed was fixed and Yuto could finally sit on his bed without being afraid it would break more. “Thank you guys so much!” he beamed. “You guys are amazing!”
Just then, Mrs. Nakajima walked in. “Oh, hello boys,” she said as she put the laundry down. “How are you two doing?”
“Good, thank you Nakajima-san,” Daiki said nodding his head. “We were just asking William and Westley if they wanted to play basketball with us with some new friends.”
“Westley certainly can,” Mrs. Nakajima answered. “I’m afraid that William still has some studying left.” She looked at her oldest. “Don’t you, dear?”
Yuto felt his excitement dwindle in an instant. Because he was so hyper, his mother often kept him inside studying instead of actually going out to play. Yuto hated studying, but if his mother wanted him inside to study, then he had to fight back the urge to go crazy again. “Yes, Mama,” he answered.
“Westley, why don’t you go play?”
Westley looked at his brother, whispering “I’m sorry,” before he walked out the door. There was nothing he could do about it, but Yuto bet that he probably didn’t want to play anymore.
Daiki looked at his friend and frowned. “When you’re done then,” he said before walking away.
The worst reaction came from Yamada. He looked at Yuto with a look of pity and sadness on his face, but he didn’t say a word before walking out of the barrack. It made Yuto want to sink into the ground.
When Yuto was back in Los Angeles, he wasn’t limited from going outside to play with everyone else. He often finished everything quickly in class just so he could run and play as hard as he could. He knew that once he got home, all he would have to do is study and stay inside like his mother and father wanted. They both wanted him to go to college and become something that they thought he should be. Now that they were interned, it was worse. With no school to go to and no place for Yuto to escape his parent’s gaze, just staying inside the barrack all day and studying was prison enough without adding the hot tar barracks and barbed wire fence.
When everyone was gone, Yuto went back to his perfectly-fixed bed and lay down, drumming his hands on the book just so that he could move somehow.
“Yuto William.”
Yuto stopped drumming. “Sorry, Mama.” He opened his book and quickly tried to find something interesting to read inside.
--
It wasn’t that Yuto hated Yamada. If he was honest, he really didn’t. Everyone seemed to get the impression that the two just hated each other’s guts, since after elementary school they didn’t really get along as well as they used to.
Yuto would explain that no, he didn’t hate Yamada. He couldn’t speak for the other party, but he certainly had no ill feelings for him other than envy.
When Yuto was ten, his friend Daiki had found an article in a magazine about a condition called hyperkinetic disorder which caused hyperactivity, impulsiveness, and inattentiveness in children. Yuto did okay in school and never had a problem finishing his work, but symptoms such as unable to sit still and being disruptive just seemed to hit home. Yuto wasn’t bad, he just got excited easily and found he really needed to be active to keep still.
When Yuto tried to tell his parents about what his friend had learned, he just got yelled at. “You are not sick, Yuto William!” Mama yelled. “I’m not taking you to a doctor just because you want to run all over the place!”
Yuto went to school the next day and told Daiki and Yamada about it. Yamada had said, “Well they probably just don’t want to take you to the doctor to be told you’re dumb.”
That had deeply bothered Yuto. “I’m not dumb!” he exclaimed.
Yamada apparently had not picked up that his friend was upset. “I mean, to know it is one thing but to have a doctor tell you is another. They probably just don’t want to be told to send you to a retard school.”
Yamada went home with a bruised lip and Yuto was forever banned from playing at home.
I deserve it, he thought. I beat up my friend. I deserve this punishment.
After that, Yamada didn’t really want to see him anymore. But Yuto would still watch him from his window and see how much fun he was having with everyone else. Yamada got to go outside and play and have fun, and Yuto got to stay inside.
That was why Yuto had to be creative. Jumping on the bed got energy out, and it was a sort-of quiet way to do it without getting his parents upset. It didn’t solve his problems entirely, but it helped.
“I’m sorry about earlier,” Daiki told Yuto quietly at dinner that night. “I didn’t mean to get you into trouble.”
Yuto shook his head. “It’s alright,” he answered him. “I’m used to it.”
“But you shouldn’t be,” Daiki frowned. “You should be able to go play, not stay cooped up inside all the time.”
“I heard that they’ve started building a school for us,” Chinen said. “Hopefully we won’t get to sit around all the time anymore.”
At the news, everybody burst into a flurry of excitement. Yuto almost jumped for joy because he would finally be allowed to be active again. No more sitting around studying at home, he thought. Hopefully they’ll let us play here too.
As Yuto walked back to his barrack, he was almost dancing until he nearly ran into Yamada. “Oh… sorry….”
Yamada looked at him, but didn’t answer.
The mood felt awkward, so Yuto tried to think of something to talk about. “So, what are you doing?”
Yamada answered by pointing up towards the fence in front of them. “Do you see that?”
Yuto looked up to where he was pointing, and realized that from there they could see a guard tower next to the fence. In the guard tower stood a White soldier holding his rifle and looking out of the tower as if expecting something. The scene almost seemed as ordinary and familiar as their life before the internment. “Is something wrong?” Yuto asked, not sure if he understood what Yamada was talking about.
“A few weeks ago, when we first got here, my sister asked the soldiers why we were being put in here,” Yamada explained. “They told us it was to keep us all safe from people wanting to hurt Japanese people. But look closely at where he’s looking.”
Yuto looked up again, but he still couldn’t find anything weird.
“Those guns are not pointing outside the camp to prevent any crazy people from coming in,” Yamada explained. “They’re pointing inside at us.”
His words sent a cold shiver down Yuto’s spine, and it made his stomach lurch. He was right. The guard didn’t look like it was looking out, but looking in at them. They weren’t keeping them safe. They were still in prison.
“You guys can try and make this place better all you want,” Yamada said as he looked up at him. “But we’re in prison. We’re always going to be criminals to them.”
“But they wouldn’t really hurt us, would they?” Yuto asked. “We haven’t done anything.”
Yamada looked at him, and Yuto regretted saying anything. “We’re Japanese. We don’t have to do anything.” Then, without saying another word, Yamada walked off towards his own barrack across the courtyard.
Yuto understood perfectly well why they were there. The internment camp was far from ideal with the smelly tar barracks and the hot sun and hardly no water or good food to go around. Some days, it felt like Poston was worse than a prison.
Everyone had been taken out of their homes and away from most of their friends and family only because they were Japanese. Just because the Japanese Empire attacked America, suddenly everyone was against them.
But Yuto knew that he was no traitor. He had spent his whole life in America, and even though everything was extremely unfair, he was not going to allow himself to be dragged down into the pit of despair that everyone else seemed to meet in. He couldn’t do it. He wouldn’t do it.
Yuto took one last look at the guard tower before politely nodding his head towards him and heading back into his barrack to find a study book. School was going to start soon, and he didn’t want to fall behind.
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A/N: Chapter two is finally up! Sorry for the long wait! Comments are love and thank you for reading!! <3