fic for paddyabroad (1/2)
Title: #840704
By: alienashi
Pairing: Implied Kame/Jin
Word count: 20,120-ish
Rating: PG13
Genre/Warnings: AU/Crossover with Death Note, mild swearing, inaccurate portrayals of the Japanese post-war judicial and penal system, usage of unsightly terms to refer to other people, and slight depictions of violence.
Notes: As implied, this story took place sometime during post-WWII Japan in a fictional prison and the Death Note universe will be used as a basic premise. If you have never read the manga or watched the anime or the movie before, you might want to check out this link to read about the basics of the usage of the Death Note. However, I need to include this here as this particular trait of the death note will not be elaborated or mentioned in the story: anybody who touches the death note will be able to see the death god, not just the owner of the Death Note. It’s er, pivotal to the plot?
To paddyabroad, this began as a rather simple story, but I kept adding things I went on, and in the end, it became, er, this. I really hope you’ll be able to enjoy this little fic. Thank you B-chan, for helping by reading over this fic as a panicked request. You’re the best!
Summary: Before Yagami Light, there was Kamenashi Kazuya.
__
I. 仁 ~ Benevolence
25th October 1949
The chilly coldness of autumn forced Takeda Masaru, an officer on-duty to guard the gates of Mouryou Detention Center, to rub his hand against each other at an alarming speed.
“I should have listened to my wife,” he sighed while heaving a long extended breathe into the gap between his palms, hoping that his body heat could transfer from inside to the outside. He placed his palms on the side of his neck next, just to find his co-worker, Uesugi Soujiro, laughing in mock condescension.
“You should have asked her to cook you some hot soup or prepare some hot tea,” Uesugi said, slowly uncapping his rather battered flask of hot green tea. He closed his eyes, inhaling the hot tea long and deep, allowing the aroma to pervade the guardhouse with the soothing whiff of homemade goodness, which invoked both disgust and envy in Takeda.
“My wife is pregnant. Seven months, in case you forgot,” Takeda broke Uesugi’s sequence of blissful glee with a deadpan response while uncapping his own bottle of increasingly cold tea and drank a sip. “My eldest daughter might have not thought about keeping the tea hot, she’s only six after all.” He then leaned against the wooden walls of the guardhouse, eyes wandering around directionless. There was no excuse for laziness whatsoever; if he wanted to stay in his job he had to buck up so that his family at home could be fed.
It was a harsh time to be born into; something that Takeda never failed to remind himself for every single living moment that he had. It was when stray bullets could hit a person, killing him right there and not a single passerby would be horrified. It was when bombs could arrive unannounced and the next thing anyone know was that he just lost his entire family. Personal tragedies were made trivial, other peoples’ miseries were sources of relief, and fortune came from criminal acts. Takeda resented the era he lived in so much, he would do anything to subject another one to a pain greater than or equal with his. Like an ant that despised his fate so much, it would bite a man’s feet sore just so he would be left in agony over a distress he couldn’t identify.
He hated the war. It might have been over a few years back, but it didn’t stop the battle. He had only barely served in the army, but he had seen enough to cast his bitterness on every known weapon.
He would always tell everyone the exact opposite when they asked him why he wanted to fight for the country and subsequently work for the government and guard the prison.
“I want to contribute to my country.” Reality could fuck his entire life, but he would never die without giving reality a piece of his mind.
He saw Uesugi setting down the bundle of clothes wrapping his thermos on the corner of the little shack, and Takeda steadied himself. “I just saw Miura on the watchtower. He was signaling that the truck is coming, most likely new inmates.”
Takeda straightened himself on the left of the gate, listening attentively to the distinct revving sounds of an engine approaching them rapidly. True to Miura’s signal, it was the truck.
The truck that usually signaled the arrival of one or two dozen inmates carried a very morbid connotation with it, even by Takeda’s standard of morbidity. “The time has changed, and with that, you’ll finally be tried by a fairer justice system,” was what every impending inmate was preached to, but Takeda knew better. In his 3 years of serving in Mouryou Detention Center after the war, he had never seen anyone escaping the center alive.
Even if they were alive, by any freak chance, they were no longer left in a state that qualified as a human.
“Hey,” someone whispered besides him, tugging the hem of his pants.
“Get the hell away!” Takeda didn’t want to risk disobedience, so he hissed his rejection. But whoever it was, he didn’t seem to have understood anything he said.
“Hey, sir,” he kept tugging.
Takeda kicked him away, taking a focused Uesugi by surprise. Uesugi refrained from glancing towards Takeda’s direction because a few seconds later, the truck stopped right in front of the gate. An officer jumped down the truck towards Takeda, waving the official letter with the official court seal in front of him wordlessly. Takeda gave a small nod, exchanged a knowing glance and marched to unlock the gate, allowing the truck in. The officer mouthed a “thank you” and jumped back into the truck.
After he got back to his position, he eyed the ragged old man who had been tugging his pants and had risked getting him hundred beatings for disobeying orders.
“What the fuck do you want?” he glared menacingly at him.
The ragged old man was not looking as old or as ragged as Takeda had thought he must have looked like. In fact, he was quite the opposite. The man was approximately around 50 years old at most, with a skin that glowed in the midst of the chilly cloudy weather, wearing something that looked like a torn piece of silk, and holding a few glittering pieces of round-shaped bronze.
Money.
“You are kind, sir,” he smiled, and Takeda could see the row of white, polished teeth in his mouth. “I just need a favor from you, a small favor.” He sat leaning against the brick walls, half-singing a song Takeda couldn’t recognize.
“I need you to help to buy an apple for me,” the old man raised his hand, showing Takeda the few pieces of bronze coins.
“Why don’t you buy it yourself?” Takeda didn’t stir from his position. “I see that you’re still able.” He suspected that the man was mental.
The old man waved his other hand. “They won’t sell it to me. They said I look disgusting.”
Takeda rolled his eyes. “I’m sorry, Ojii-san, but you really are.”
The old man gasped a little too loudly to be genuinely shocked. “Do you think so too? I should get some of these clothes changed, shouldn’t I?” He brought his arms to his nose and coughed in repulse. “They are right! I am smelly! It’s the weather, right?”
The old man continued to sit beside Takeda’s legs, singing songs about women and love and other issues that Takeda had never thought of, but something must have happened inside when he heard a loud voice calling a person’s name.
“Hey, Akanishi!” It was apparently referring to one of the new inmates, who deviated from the line to look around the area. From what Takeda could make out, the new inmate was clean-shaven, handsome, and ridiculously naïve-looking. He couldn’t help but stare as the officer who presented Takeda with the warrant hit Akanishi’s handcuffed arms with the back of his rifle while making silent predictions on how much the pretty boy would change in near future.
Before he knew it, the old man was rummaging his pockets.
“I gave you the money and I’ll be back tomorrow, so please get me the apple! I’m counting on you!”
With that, the mysterious old man with suspiciously torn silk on his body and a polished row of teeth disappeared.
__
“Akanishi Hitoshi.”
“It’s Jin,” Jin retorted nervously. He just saw that another inmate had peed in his pants in anxiety. He was later hit by a few officers and pulled away to another place Jin assumed would contain a greater degree of torment awaiting him.
He stepped forward, raising both his arms to shoulder level, allowing the officers-in-charge to search his entire body ruthlessly. His hair was ruffled painfully, entire body slapped hard enough to cause reddening, and his crotch touched rough enough to warrant sexual harassment. They took away his clothes and presented him with a jumpsuit in a dull, grey hue.
“Wear this inside, then wait for Officer Kobayashi in the other room,” the body-searching officer said as he scribbled something on paper laid on the desk, and shouted “Faster!” when Jin tried to balance himself after the shockingly demeaning treatment.
He stumbled into the next room to greet around a dozen sullen-looking men of all ages, most of them older than he was, carefully putting on the jumpsuit they were ordered to wear, faces draped with a mix of suspicion, fear, and apprehension for each other. He spotted a boy around his age, and he went forward to approach him.
“Hey, what’s your name?” Jin asked him. The other boy was half a head shorter, and had prominent features on his face. He could have looked rather scary to some people, but Jin couldn’t help being drawn to him, like he knew the other boy could be some sort of acquaintance.
The other boy did nothing but glare at him, then looked away in a way that puzzled Jin. “I was just-“
“Stop talking!” The sulking boy buttoned his jumpsuit and stormed away into the next room, eyes shooting him an accusing glance.
Jin followed suit not long after, bumping into a boy, also around his age, who smiled widely at him. Jin smiled back with obligation, partially wondering how such an amiable boy did ended up in his position and partially annoyed that he had unknowingly made enemies from the start. He stood next to the smiling boy in the small assembly that took place the next door during the dreadfully undignified speech made by Officer Kobayashi.
“You have no name. You have nothing of yourself. You have no friends, you have no comrades, you have no property, and you have no honor. All you have right now is the deep, debilitating shame that runs through every bone in your body. You have no one, you have nothing. You only have orders to follow, jobs to do, and days to remorse in repentance.” Officer Kobayashi’s clear, commanding voice echoing around the enclosed room, effectively reducing a group of formerly distinguished men with various degrees of honors into creatures less than dirt.
After his speech, another officer began reading a list of rules that all inmates were obligated to follow, officially starting Jin’s life in prison.
For the few months that he served time in Mouryou Detention Center for crimes of theft and burglary, Akanishi Jin was known to the authorities as Inmate #840704.
It was also the year that Jin would, much later, come to remember as the year Mouryou Detention Center experienced its first mass prison break.
__
After his first meal in prison, Jin discovered that the amiable boy was Taguchi Junnosuke and the willfully sullen boy with a perpetually threatening glare was Tanaka Koki.
Getting to know his fellow prisoners was a bizarre process of unlearning everything about himself and only coming to know one thing about himself - he wasn’t like everyone else, but everyone else was like him.
Everyone was a prisoner. Nobody cared what you did and what you would do. Jin shortly learnt about the unofficial rule about staying out of everyone else’s crime business or risking being alienated.
“Knew him before this?” Jin also, quickly mastered the art of speaking with as little words as possible under his breath. No one was supposed to speak during mealtimes.
Taguchi nodded. “On the truck,” he continued after swallowed a spoonful of rice. Jin gulped his own spoonful of the most disgusting food he had ever eaten, darting a brief look at Tanaka, who was struggling between wolfing down his bowl at one shot and restraining himself into relishing every drop of rice available to him. The sight made Jin chuckle.
“What?” Taguchi asked.
Jin pointed to Tanaka’s direction with his eyebrows and Taguchi snorted soundlessly. It earned them a warning look from the warden, and they straightened up immediately. No one was supposed to make facial expressions that weren’t related to eating.
When they were lined up, one after another, Jin had hoped that he could get Taguchi as his cellmate, but he ended up in a solitary confinement.
The prison wardens told him that he couldn’t question them, and Taguchi shook his head, agreeing with the wardens. He dragged his dejected spirit and settled into walking along the dark, creepy hallway heading towards his cell.
They slammed the rusty metal door behind him, and he heard the sound of chains rustling followed soon after.
It took the echoes of his own footsteps to realize that he really was isolated.
__
He couldn’t sleep on the first night.
The fresh inmates were excused from “repenting” on their first night, so Jin was free to accustom himself in the new habitat. Jin had wanted to sleep to prevent himself from mulling over his last few days of freedom and thinking of the future he had destroyed with his bare hands, but he couldn’t help but have all his senses escalating to react to the barest of stimulants.
He jumped abruptly when he heard a squeaking sound which turned out to be a mouse who apparently resided in the hole across his bed.
Bored and restless, he went over to the mouse, but it was too quick for Jin. Right before Jin could get hold of it, it dashed back into its hole and Jin slipped, falling on his chest to the floor.
It was then he heard a thudding sound that seemed to come from a room next door, and a soft humming. He sat against the wall, pressing his right ear to the wall, trying to discern the voice he had just heard.
It was nothing like he expected.
It was the sound of a young man singing, though Jin could hardly make out the lyrics at all. He pressed closer to hear more clearly and he could tell that the young man had a voice like a broken heart. A voice roughened by youth, broken by grief and riddled by hope. It wasn’t the best singing voice Jin had heard, but he knew he loved it for some reason he didn’t know. He thought of his desperation for company and decided that it was the reason why he didn’t move away from the spot all night.
When the warden knocked the metal door to wake him up, he found himself sitting at the exact spot where he had sat listening to the singing voice in the cell next to his.
His heart leapt with an overwhelming curiosity - he wanted to know who that voice belonged to rather badly.
__
Jin’s first task in prison was to chop a mountain of piled logs about six times his height.
“No?” he asked an also-struggling Taguchi. They were also not supposed to speak, but the officers-on-duty were slacking off elsewhere sneaking a few cigarettes and all other inmates were also employing an obscure method of communication to speak to each other. Jin had a feeling that outdoor tasks were the closest to freedom he could get in here.
“You don’t know of anyone else who is placed in solitary confinement other than me?”
Taguchi panted, wiping the sweat dripping profusely from his forehead. “You are placed in a cell reserved for prisoners of highest possible crimes, and no new inmate has been sent there for two years before you came. If anything, everyone is curious of what you had done to deserve that.”
Jin bit his tongue bitterly. “Nothing.” He raised his axe and lowered it with a loud thud, landing the sharp edge of the axe in the middle of the thick log. His arms were starting to sore.
“I stole,” Jin said. “I didn’t know it was enough to make me sound like a murderer.”
Taguchi eyed him suspiciously.
Jin shrugged impatiently. “It’s true. I didn’t kill anyone.”
“Not you,” Taguchi hit his wood and split it. “If it really was a person living in the cell next to you, he probably was a horrible criminal.”
“What do you mean if ‘it really was a person’? What else could be in there?” Jin asked.
Taguchi lowered his axe. “Do you know why there hasn’t been anyone sent to the solitary confinement cells? It was because the cells were reserved for prisoners who deserve a fate more painful than death. Rumor has it that if you walk along the hallway, you’ll reach a blood-soaked gateway to the place where that fate awaits those types of prisoners.”
Jin gulped nervously.
“Relax, I also happen to know that the punishment has been outlawed, so you’re going to be fine,” Taguchi resumed chopping his piece of log. “Anyway, there is a possibility that who-what-ever sang you to sleep could be something not human, and I just want you to be prepared.”
Jin asked Taguchi something he had been wondering since they started chopping logs into firewood.
“Taguchi, how do you know so many things within a day?”
He gave Jin an all-knowing smirk. “I smile,” he answered plainly. “It gets me everywhere.”
__
Jin spent one hour of his second night meditating in “repentance” under a watchful eye of a warden who looked like he had been badly burnt on the right side of his face. The warden dutifully watched him through a small peephole installed on the door. Jin reminded himself of what Taguchi had said earlier.
Smile, he thought.
The peephole was rashly shut a while later before Jin could act, signifying the end of his meditation. He rushed to the door and shouted “Officer! Wait!” only to get a “Sleep!” in response.
He tried to lie on his bed, driving all disturbing thoughts about mysterious rooms down the hallway with a blood-soaked door and the endless possibilities of having a fate that was more painful than death out of his head, but all he could think of was the bloodcurdling screams of faceless people and sinister laughter from their tormentors.
He shifted uncomfortably in his already-uncomfortable bed in anxiety, until he heard the lulling sounds of the singing voice again. It exerted a magnetic force that pulled Jin immediately to the corner of the cell closest to the where the voice came from, and Jin felt his erratic heartbeat slowing down tremendously.
He focused his mind on the enlightening hymn, trying to decipher the lyrics of the song.
It was faint and barely audible, but unless Jin was imagining things, he had fallen asleep to a song about bonds between two people, almost like a sad love song between two people who couldn’t be together for some incomprehensible reason.
__
A few days later, Tanaka was assigned to join Jin and Taguchi in their wood-chopping session.
Tanaka had made quite a name for himself in the prison within the week, quite like Jin but for different reasons. While Jin was the one who people whispered to spread rumors on his alleged killing spree with a bodycount that increased with every story, Tanaka had everyone gasping in fear for his unfriendly looks and scowling expressions. He had attracted the wrath of the prison’s gangleader Goda, who had a habit of looking at Koki a little too intensely, as though he was challenging him to some men’s battle. To Jin’s utter displeasure, Goda also had a habit of purposely bumping into him and make snide remarks about his “alleged” crime.
It was also partly because he was being lumped together with the troublemakers among the newer inmates, and Jin would rather be known as a lunatic than someone equally troublesome like Tanaka. He looked at an old man with an unfocused expression on his face, who, according to everyone, was a real lunatic, wondering if it was possible to fake a mental disorder.
“You will be punished!” the old man barked at Goda, who pushed him to the grounds for getting in his way.
Goda laughed.
Taguchi drew Jin back to his duties.
“Remember to call him Inmate #851105 in front of the officers, but his name is really Koki,” Taguchi introduced them. Tanaka, evidently, also looked less than enthusiastic to be associated to Jin.
“Look, I’m not here so we can be friends,” Tanaka started. “I usually hang out with Nakamaru over there,” he pointed to a guy who looked younger than all of them and had an abnormally large nose, “but today he has to guide Masuda, who just started on the woods after being stationed in textile.”
Jin smiled slightly, but Tanaka was still unimpressed.
“Spare yourself the cordialities because as you can see, I’m really not interested,” Tanaka spat at Jin.
Jin couldn’t let himself be talked down by a guy he had unknowingly, yet unreasonably made enemies with. “What is your problem?” he said as he shoved Tanaka’s shoulder back.
“I don’t know, I probably have problems with you being a high-profile murderer than no one knows about,” Koki didn’t relent.
Jin threw his axe. “At least I’m not some short loser with nothing better to do than scowl and glare.”
Taguchi seemed to have sensed the warning signs. “Guys, break it up.”
Jin ignored him.
“You think it’s nice to be locked alone in a room rumored to be housing horribly-tortured criminals?” Jin rolled his sleeves. It had been some time since he got this fired up and he wasn’t about to let Tanaka get away with such unfounded arrogance. “Then buddy, think again. You can use that axe and kill me right now if you want to stay in my place!”
Tanaka proved to be rather formidable, despite his obvious lack in size as compared to Jin. “Oh buddy,” he mocked Jin. “Unlike you, I plan to leave this place as soon as possible because unlike you, I have a purpose in life other than standing around looking pretty.”
“You’re jealous,” Jin hissed as he grabbed the collar of Tanaka’s jumpsuit. “I’m better-looking than you’ll ever be, sucker.”
With that a hard, bony punch flew towards Jin’s face and drew blood from his lips. “How does that feel, pretty boy? Want me to mess you up more?”
Tanaka climbed on top of Jin, but Jin toppled him and pushed him down to the grounds and landed him a punch on the cheeks, but was taken away before he could continue.
A loud whistle was blown.
“Everybody line up!”
__
Everyone assigned to woodcutting was punished after the public brawl. They were given no dinner, each given ten beatings on the ass, and were locked in a room to collectively chant their loyalties to the country.
Jin spent most of his time glaring across the room towards Tanaka.
To his defense, Tanaka glared at him just as hard.
__
Jin didn’t touch his bed that night.
Or, more accurately, Jin couldn’t touch his bed that night. His back was too sore for him to be able to rely on his back.
After his routine meditation that took two hours, a punishment for what happened earlier, making sure that the warden with a squashed face had definitely left, he sat at that corner of his cell, determined to speak to the voice.
“Hello,” he whispered while frantically searching for a possible opening in the wall.
He found the hole that was the home of the mouse he saw on his first day in the cell, and he dug the hole desperately, hoping to widen it enough to be able to see the person singing in the next cell.
He tapped on the wall again and again. “Hey, is someone there?”
His heart raced at a breathtaking pace, pounding against his chest, and he sensed his desperation growing more and more pathetic. The mouse squeaked nervously, and Jin knew it was not because its home was ruined.
“Hey, please, answer me. Is someone there?” he shouted, risking another set of militant punishments. He tapped the wall again and again, repeating the same question, heart sinking with every passing minute.
It wasn’t after his fingers were all bleeding that he finally resigned to the fact that whoever sang his lullaby was never going to acknowledge him.
__
Taguchi didn’t buy his story.
Nevertheless, Jin kept defending himself, even though he knew that it would be an uphill task.
It was Nakamaru who joined them this time. To Jin’s utter surprise, Nakamaru was actually older than he was. “Koki is a nice person, Akanishi,” he said. “It’s just that he has been worried sick about his little brothers and to be honest, you do scare people.”
At this point, Jin was so used to being misunderstood, he didn’t care what people thought about him anymore. “I don’t care if you believe me, but I’m not a murderer, serial killer, bomber, whichever. I only ever stole things and I don’t know how I ended up-“
“I know,” Nakamaru interrupted. “Don’t worry, Akanishi. I have been around long enough to be able to tell that people are not their crimes.”
Jin’s arm were evidently more accustomed to woodcutting than he gave them credits for, as he was no longer experiencing pain around the joints between his shoulder and his arms. However, it was probably because his bandaged fingers were giving him so much trouble that his muscular pains became inconsequential.
“You heard what I said about how people are not their crimes?” Nakamaru said, shortly after he heard no response from Jin.
Jin shook his head, and Nakamaru nudged Jin to steal a glance at a tall man slighter older than all of them, with an indifferent but defiant pair of eyes, surrounded by a few other people. It was Goda.
“You need to be careful with him,” Nakamaru directed Jin’s attention back to his half-cut log. “He can make your life hell.”
It was true; people whom Goda was not a fan off usually got harsher treatments from the prison wardens. It was a well-known fact that his yakuza boss paid the prison wardens to take care of him.
“I’m locked in a solitary confinement, there’s nothing that could make my life more hellish than that.”
“Actually Akanishi,” Nakamaru informed him. “I was going to talk about how that is the face of someone who has killed another person.
“You don’t look like that at all.”
__
It sort of became a routine.
Every night after the ugly warden left, he would sit in his favorite corner of his cell, making no move to dismantle the wall, and leaned against the cold stone wall and threw his back to stare at the ceiling.
Slowly, the words and the rhythm came together in a burst of impulsive collision, and Jin began to sing.
“One step at a time is fine, don’t let go of this hand, because the days we walk together are going to continue…”
Singing them out was a far more soul-captivating experience, as Jin just realized. He paused to think about those words, those words meticulously strung together to describe a relationship far greater than he had shared with anyone and heart sank even deeper into despair as he reminded himself of his bandaged fingers and how the other party didn’t exist. He thought of what would come next, and his chest grew heavy.
“Even if we are worn down to the point of being messed up..”
It was then he heard a voice that was not his own harmonizing with his.
“That bond we had at that time and place will never disappear.”
He stood up, thumping the wall with his injured hand. “Hey, I’m begging you! Tell me you’re there!”
There was an awkward silence, but Jin didn’t want to give up. If that someone next cell could hear him sing, that someone next cell couldn’t possibly be just a figment of his imagination.
“I’m sorry,” he apologized. “Please let me know you’re there, please!”
“Seventh from the right and tenth from the floor,” was his long-awaited reply. “The brick is loose.”
Jin found the brick and tossed it to the other side, but the brick was tossed back to him via the brick-shaped gap in the wall.
“Better put in on your end,” the other person said. “You need to be careful.” The brick hole was just the right height for his sitting position and judging by the volume from the other side, it was more or less the right height for the other person too.
Jin took the brick and placed it on the ground. “Hey,” he greeted his newfound fellow solitarily-confined inmate. He didn’t know what to say to this person whose existence no one else knew but him. He didn’t know what to call him, how he could start to talk to him, and he wasn’t quite sure if the other person was not a mole sent to monitor him.
“Hi,” was what the other person said. “I’m sorry I didn’t respond to you yesterday. I have been living alone over here for so long, I didn’t imagine someone would eventually be placed in a cell next to me.”
“Are you afraid of me?” Jin asked before he could gauge his own bluntness. He almost immediately felt a tiny pang of embarrassment, only saved by the other person’s awkward laugh.
“No,” the other person chuckled slightly. “It’s just that-“
For a reason he had yet to know, Jin felt sorry for his almost-cellmate. “What is your name?”
Jin thought he had heard him snicker. “You mean my number? I’m Inmate #86-“
“No, your name,” Jin insisted.
“My.. name,” he murmured, almost as though his name was something he had discarded. It made Jin more eager to want to know him.
“Kazuya,” He answered. “Kamenashi Kazuya.”
“Kazuya, right?”
“Yes,” he answered. “You know what, call me Kame.”
Jin cackled. “As in the turtle?”
“As in the animal, yes.”
“But why?”
Jin heard him heaving a deep breath. “Because no one has ever called me that before.”
__
II. 和 ~ Peace
7th November 1949
Takeda Masaru’s wife, who was suffering from a bad cramp, was left at home with no one but their 6-year-old daughter and Takeda’s ailing mother.
He spat to the ground as he passed a factory busy rustling with operations. He bitterly about the buzzing sounds of his wife, recounting each and every grocery good on a price hike. Rice, salt, sugar - he wasn’t earning more but the amount of food he could provide to his household got smaller by the day. The weather also turned more and more punishingly cold; there was never a week gone by without hearing any news of someone dying from hunger and cold. He wanted to remind his wife that they were lucky to be able to at least rice and she could afford getting pregnant, but the truth was that he hated their lives as much as she did. Spending his time arguing with his wife wasn’t going to make things better. It wasn’t going to magically make everyone richer, and his thought immediately darted towards the shaggy old man who had requested for Takeda to help him buy an apple.
It was Uesugi who spotted the shaggy old man, whom they had both referred to as Ringo-jii-san for his routine of shoving a few bronze coins to Takeda’s in exchange for the apples, that day.
“Hey Takeda,” Uesugi gestured discreetly with his fist. Takeda promptly reached inside his pockets for the apple and threw it to the old man’s direction.
“Be careful!” the old man shrieked a little too loudly than Takeda would have preferred. He dove into the ground, retrieving the dropped red apple. “It’s still fresh, I’m lucky!” Takeda tried to pay no attention to the weird old man. As on various occasions in the last few days since his appearance, the old man settled beside him for a brief moment, rubbing his apple shiny and muttering some random things that made no sense to both Takeda and Uesugi.
“The weather’s really good, isn’t it?” the shabby old man would usually start with. “I really love the cold, fresh air, like it could penetrate straight into people’s heart. Kind of feels like when you’re listening to Ootani Ikue’s songs.”
It was only a little more than a week since Takeda first encountered the old man, and had helped him buy apples for about 3 times, but he could already predict what he was going to say. Before he could stop himself, like a sudden gust of chilly wind during summer, something inside him nudged him.
“Ossan,” Takeda began asking. “Do you have a name?”
The old man snickered. “Name? I don’t have one, young man! In fact, I doubt I even need one.”
Takeda wasn’t surprised at the answer.
“But!” the old man got up and smoothened his shabby robe-like clothing. “You can always call me Matchy. Like Ma-cchi, get it?”
Takeda watched the old man sing as he faced his back towards him and dragged his feet away from the prison gate.
“Hey young man,” he looked back, just slightly. “Do you know why I asked for apples so often?”
Takeda shook his head slightly.
Matchy, as the old man would be referred to from that moment on, merely chuckled at Takeda’s answer, as though he just failed what seemed to be a children’s riddle.
“Because death gods, you see, they love apples.”
__
Jin was given no chance to look for Taguchi or Nakamaru to tell them who he had discovered to be dwelling in the cell beside his in the weeks to come.
When the inmates were rounded up for roll call that morning, he shot Taguchi anxious looks, signaling his eagerness to a rather confused-looking Taguchi. However, as though there was something unmistakably threatening about the innocuous exchange between Jin and Taguchi, the wardens pushed Jin aside with warning shoved to his ribcage and dragged him outside.
Much later in the evening, Jin was told that Taguchi and Nakamaru were deployed to build the railway and the only familiar faces around were those he would never have thought to approach within a three-foot radius, Goda and Tanaka. There was also the lunatic old man Higashiyama, who could be rather unnerving to stay in close proximity with.
Fortunately for Jin, there was also someone whom Jin only knew from face and name, Ueda, who was familiar with Nakamaru, and was also someone he felt least uncomfortable speaking to in a situation that reeked of suspicion and hostility. Ironically, he was also the person around Jin at the moment whom Jin had the least things to say to.
Without someone he could speak to that didn’t require him to think and revise his thoughts, Jin found himself growing indifferent about his surroundings. His thoughts felt like they were strangled in his head, drifting between the hypothetical space that connected his brains and his vocal chords. He was neither patient enough to subdue them and calmly introspect about the many aspects of his latest discovery nor was he dumb enough to spout things that were very easily just a fragment of his imagination. Randomly saying things was, after all, what got him here.
It was only then that he fully understood what he had came to take for granted - without Taguchi and by an extension, Nakamaru, and he was never more homesick.
It was also when he realized for himself that being a focal point of Goda’s unwanted attention was like having his skin slowly peeling off, leaving his flesh scorched bare.
__
Jin envisioned Kame to be a thin and weary young man in his late teens based on his voice - much like himself, only slightly younger. Perhaps there would also be a tired pair of eyes that was waiting to shine again, and a dry, cracked pair of lips. Maybe shaggy, disheveled hair, which, similar to all other features of his, was merely shadowing the brighter life he used to lead outside.
A life outside these walls. A life before being locked here. A life when he actually cared.
Even though the brick-sized hole should have been adequate for at least a face view, Kame seemed to prefer sitting just beside the hole, barely avoiding being seen. He told Jin that he hadn’t felt comfortable enough to let Jin see him, and Jin had failed rather miserably in his attempts to reassure him otherwise. Ironically, Jin knew that it was probably because he couldn’t see Kame at all that he was so fascinated by the mere presence of him.
He tried to tell himself that it was because he really wanted to know the closest thing to a confidante he could get. Kame was different. Kame was not among those he had to exercise caution at. Kame wasn’t like Taguchi, who supplied him with things he needed to know to survive. Kame wasn’t like Tanaka, who was at least, even through most vicious of the many malicious stares he threw at Jin, honest in his disdain. Kame wasn’t Nakamaru either, bless Nakamaru’s brotherly ways.
Kame was an entity so entrenched, yet so detached from the working systems of Jin’s currently futureless world, that Jin couldn’t help but to be drawn to the mere existence.
“Hey,” Jin greeted him softly. He was sure it wasn’t to avoid prying ears -previous nights had proved that the thick brick walls and the heavy metal door made his cell effectively soundproof- but because Kame felt like something he should approach while having his guards up at all times.
Kame seemed to have anticipated him. “Oh,” his answer was brief but ample. “Is it night already?”
At that, Jin immediately scanned his cell for the sign of any gaps in the wall, feeling rather ashamed about how little he had known about his own cell. The walls were, for all that they were worth for, much too high for plausible prison break plan, but had a makeshift window that was too tiny for Jin to be able to see anything outside but large enough for light to pass through.
“Yes, it is night already”, Jin replied after seeing a blinking light amidst the darkness outside, most likely to be from a watchtower.
Jin heard Kame shift slightly. “Ah,” Kame said.
“Hey, Kame,” Jin said.
“What is it?” Kame said, as polite and cautious as usual. Jin didn’t blame his vigilance; after all, he should relate very well with wanting to put up guards at all times and never reveal more than he should.
“Do you have a window over there in your cell?” Jin asked, reasoning to himself that he merely wanted to know if the cell beside him was similar to his.
“I don’t have anything here, it’s pitch black all the time,” Kame answered. “Except when the officer comes in to bring my food, but I usually shields my eyes. I can’t get used to the light.”
Jin felt his stomach twist uneasily. His initial comfort at discovering Kame’s existence seemed to be falling apart slowly, morphing into a rough tapestry woven with guilt, sympathy and curiosity.
“I’m sorry,” Jin apologized.
“Don’t be,” Kame said. “I got used to it.”
“How long have you been in here?” Jin asked.
Kame paused for a while, momentarily sent Jin into an uncomfortable fit of slight anxiety.
“I don’t know,” Kame’s voice wore a semblance of fatigue.
Jin should have known better than to ask. For a person to have never really seen the light since he was admitted, there was no way in which he could gauge the passing of time, let alone measure it.
“It’s Showa 24,” Jin helped. “It will be Showa 25 in a month, if I’m not wrong.”
“Really?” Kame asked. “I didn’t know I have only been in here for two years. It felt so much like forever, I would have thought it has already been 10 years.”
Jin didn’t want to press further. He took a deep breath. “I’m here for theft.
“I have a brother about 5 years younger, his name is Reio and he wasn’t born healthy. He always had difficulties breathing, sometimes when he got sick, he couldn’t get out of bed for a few weeks. It was worse after the war, he couldn’t get up from the bed at all. I was desperate, but because I was useless, I could only work but never been able to think of a way to cure him. Someone offered me a huge amount of money and a promise to help my brother, and in exchange, I had to steal something from a pharmaceutical company’s safe.”
Jin’s chest felt heavy and light at the same time from finally being able to get the burden off his chest. The repercussions of speaking about his past dissipated with the fact that it was Kame he was telling it to. Kame, who had probably forgotten what it was like to have people trust him.
Jin trusted him, and he wanted Kame to know it.
“Thinking back, I should not have taken the offer. If I had not taken it, I wouldn’t have been caught, wouldn’t have been separated from my family, and wouldn’t have gotten in here. You know, I never had the chance to ask my parents for forgiveness. My father, I really don’t know where he is now, or if he’s safe. My mother, she worked two jobs until she was also sick. And I’m stuck in here, a proof of my uselessness,” Jin continued.
“Akanishi,” Kame began after a short, awkward pause.
“You asked me to call you Kame, right?” Jin interrupted him. “You should call me Jin, then we are even.”
“Jin,” Kame said, almost happily.
“There you have it, I told you who I am,” Jin said. “You don’t have to worry about me.”
Kame made a sound like he just snickered. “You’re very gullible. What if I turn out to be a crazy mass murderer whom people lock because they don’t know exactly how I committed all my acts?”
It was Jin’s turn to snicker. “You can’t be.”
“Why are you so sure?” Kame challenged.
Jin claimed this to be a sign of his victory - he finally got to hear Kame in higher spirits, more like a boy who had gotten his first pay from his first job and less like a crestfallen warrior who had witnessed his entire army being annihilated.
“Because you are very kind,” Jin said. “I can hear it, and I’m usually a good judge of people.”
“Including that person who had you steal something from a company?” Kame retorted.
Jin was beginning to like him more and more. “It was a company with a bad reputation. Apparently they kidnap people and kill them for research’s sake.”
“I see,” Kame replied, apparently running out of rebuttals.
“You can trust me,” Jin reiterated.
“But you probably shouldn’t trust me,” Kame said, unexpectedly, voice regressed to the seemingly default state of disconsolate.
Jin also didn’t expect what he heard next.
“You should know that I am here because I was a crazy mass murderer and they locked me here because they couldn’t understand how I did what I did.”
Jin was stunned.
Kame’s next words seemed orchestrated, but they were more painful to hear than what had just been said.
“You don’t deserve to be here, Jin.
“After all, what you did was nothing compared to I did.”
__
Kame’s words haunted him as though they were a part of a brain-restructuring mantra that kept reverberating in his mind, telling him repeatedly that he didn’t deserve to be there. A mantra that felt like it had grown to infest his conscience with resentment.
Jin couldn’t bring himself to allocate any more patience to go along with his indifference towards Goda and Tanaka, even if he was fully aware of the risks he was taking with every moment of his thinning patience.
He tried to reason himself into not minding those words by convincing himself that to be expecting justice of any form during that time was like expecting his brother to be fully healed - delusions he would have loved to harbor in a more optimistic situation. All thoughts that were consuming him right now were directed towards Goda’s snide ridicules and Tanaka’s hostile welcomes; it felt as though nothing could satisfy him more than to be able to wipe those ill-meaning smirks off Goda’s face.
The inmates were urged to chop more firewood at a speedier rate as the weather got gradually more and more brutal, and the inmates got increasingly more and more restless. Many collapsed before they could last more than two hours, the old man Higashiyama one of them. He was the first to pass out; after yelling his usual “Punishment! You will be erased!” phrase, and fortunately to him, he was given a free pass to resting because he was what he was, and unfortunately for him, fatigue could be rather contagious.
On a more optimistic day, Jin would have fallen victim to the vicious weather assault. He would have preferred to attribute his immunity towards lethargy to his own visceral vigor, but he knew it wasn’t true.
He vividly remembered those times when he had gotten involved in various street fights when he was working as a jinrikisha1-puller, fighting back the other boys who were accusing him of stealing the customers who tipped the most. He thought of the times when he sustained black, swollen eyes for confronting those thugs who stole money of the fruit seller he was working for, in addition to having his weekly salary robbed because he wasn’t keeping a close enough eye on the money.
Having these thoughts, understanding that everyone around were social scums was different from thinking about how he had been inherently good despite his records saying otherwise.
He stared at Goda and Tanaka, one after another.
He wasn’t like them.
He didn’t get himself involved in a yakuza group and threaten people for money like Goda did before he was being arrested. He hadn’t killed anyone, like Tanaka did, even accidentally. He wasn’t mentally disabled, he thought as he caught a glance of the old man Higashiyama.
He had a family, he had jobs, and most of all he had never harmed anyone for the sake of harming them.
Kame was right; he didn’t deserve to be here. He didn’t deserve to be grouped along with these people. He wasn’t among them. He wasn’t supposed to be here.
“Hey, pretty boy,” Goda chided. Jin was so lost in his own thoughts, he hadn’t been paying attention to his surroundings.
Unfortunately for him, Warden Takenaka was nowhere to be seen.
With other inmates too busy battling against their own weakening body and a disappeared warden, there was nothing to stop Goda from beating the hell out of Jin.
“I have had my eyes on you for quite some time,” Goda said, rolling his sleeves. “I hate it when that pretty face of yours shows that type of cockiness only people of my caliber are allowed to have.”
Goda’s two minions took a hold of Jin on each side of him.
“Things would have been so much easier if you had just knelt in front of me and asked to be by my side. That way, at least your pretty face would be preserved,” Goda continued, hands clutching Jin’s chin.
Jin tried to shake Goda off. “Get away,” he said wryly.
Goda smirked. “Scared of getting scars all over your perfect face?”
Jin glared at him. The two minions seized both his hands. He tried to fight them off, but they were stronger than Jin had thought.
“I’ll teach you how it’s like to defy me,” Goda cracked his knuckles.
What happened next was too fast for Jin to comprehend. Before he could stiffen his own jaw in preparation to receive a punch from Goda, Goda was taken down from behind.
All of a sudden, Goda was lying on the grounds, writhing in pain from a blow to the back of his head. His minions immediately let go of Jin’s arms to pursue the assailant.
It was Tanaka.
Tanaka had slick movements, Jin observed. He could avoid the frontal attacks and launched assaults of his own with relative ease, and in no time at all, Goda’s two minions were down, clutching their bleeding faces.
Goda rose up, clenching his fist to finish what he had planned to do, but Jin blew him back to the floor with his fist in what was his first ever counterattack in a fight.
Jin and Tanaka were both cornered by the wardens shortly, guns pointing towards them and ready to fire.
__
It was a few blurry days before Jin was released back to his cell.
He, along with Tanaka, had been dragged into the dark dungeons where inmates were taken to be reprimanded. He had his heart firmly set on accepting what was coming next. Tanaka had seemed to be similarly resolute, even though Jin saw his fingers shaking as he rubbed his palms together stealthily.
“Does it hurt a lot?” was the first question Kame asked when Jin returned to his cell.
Jin held his backside, patting it. “My butt hurts. A lot. But I’m used to pain, so it’s alright,” he answered good-naturedly.
“You seem too laid back for someone who probably just went to hell and back,” Kame said.
Jin laughed. “I’m alright, really,” he assured Kame. “It really was like going to hell, but I think I reached an epiphany or two on my way back.”
“Epiphany,” Kame replied. “That’s a big word. Are you sure you really do mean it?”
Jin stared at his blistered palm, examining the severity of his injuries and thinking of ways to alleviate the pain to prepare for the tasks that would come. He then flipped his palm and raised his arms high.
“Hey, Kame,” he started. “Have you ever had one of those times when you were sure you had Death with your grasp, ready to embrace it, like you just seen a door opening right in front of you, but then you just closed it without knowing why?”
Kame breathed heavily before he whispered his answer. “Maybe.”
Jin hesitated to continue, but he felt like he needed to tell Kame something. “It happened to me. At first I wanted those officers to kill me, but I remembered something that you told me.”
“What was it?” Kame asked warily.
“You told me I don’t deserve to be here, didn’t you?” Jin calmly continued. “You’re right.
“Which is why I need to get out from here.”
__
Jin and Tanaka, whom he would call Koki from then on, emerged as some kind of uncelebrated hero for defeating Goda.
It wasn’t anything conspicuous, but Jin appreciated the “reward” in the form of the now-unsuspecting eyes of his fellow inmates. Like the incident had convinced them that Jin, despite his place in the solitary confinement cell, was just another victim not at all different from them, struggling with being strung along by the unfathomable judicial system. Instead of being subjected to what he perceived as undeservingly apprehensive stares, Jin was slowly getting used to random inmates being stealthily friendly with him.
Another form of “reward” was probably thanks to Goda threatening Warden Takenaka into reshuffling the work units, effectively deploying Jin and Koki plus others Goda didn’t like into being subjected to harshest work available, most unforgiving weather condition and exposure to explosions - the railway. However, building the railway also meant Jin was now reunited with Taguchi and Nakamaru, and Jin wasn’t in a position to complain.
“It is really an attempt to eliminate us all, if you think about it,” Taguchi summarized, once again acting like a guide for Jin. “A few days ago, Morita coughed blood so badly, he got dragged away and hasn’t been seen since. We think he didn’t make it.”
Jin found himself examining his surroundings with a decidedly more sympathetic light. How many of them were also similarly disproportionately or worse, unjustly punished like he was?
“Probably everyone here,” Nakamaru answered.
The best thing about working in the railway during the bone-chilling winter was the way officers-on-duty kept seeking for ways to not guard the prisoners more than merely making sure no one was escaping. Instead of patrolling around, they usually gather in a makeshift guardhouse where they had a small fire to keep them warm on top of a small stone hill, leaving the inmates practically unsupervised.
The avalanche of windfall sometimes made Jin question the reality, but he decided that the questionable reality was better than the certified truth.
“Many are here for far random reason than yours,” Taguchi said. He had evidently been stocking up more information about other inmates behind that innocent smile of his. Jin remembered overhearing Koki once commenting about how useless some of that information was in his usual disapproving tone.
“Like old man Higashiyama there? Just because he’s a little off in his head,” Taguchi made a twirling gesture with his finger positioned beside his temple, “doesn’t change the fact that he was once a high-ranking member of a large corporation. Apparently he objected to some of their new policies and the others were so upset at his vocal protests, they decided to throw him in here. Don’t look at me, Nakamaru will tell you the same.”
Upon being mentioned, Nakamaru looked up from his position. “He made quite a ruckus for around for a week or two. Spouting absurd things like ‘abominable people will be judged by God’, ‘those heartless bastards will be erased, watch out!’ and sometimes going as far as looking people in the eyes and tell them they would be judged by the one and only God and He’d live within us. Have to say, us lesser people here were effectively frightened.”
Nakamaru paused to glance at Higashiyama and the others followed suit. “As you can guess, he unnerved everyone so much, they took him to the underground dungeons and he was never the same after that. His speeches were more disconcerting, but also far more incongruous. Everyone assumed that he was tortured into madness,” he continued with a wistful look at something rather far away.
Jin exchanged knowing looks with Koki, both gulping.
“You two,” Taguchi pointed at each of them one after another, “are the epitome of prison miracle. We might not be able to know what you guys went through down there, but you guys probably had no idea what kind of inspirational thoughts just knowing that you guys survived it, mentally unscathed, gives.”
Koki squeezed Jin’s arm. Jin flinched a little, not having fully recovered yet from the injuries he sustained, but he smiled for the very time since he was imprisoned.
He had a feeling that it would be some time before Koki would agree to divulge what he was subjected to during those hellish times of being tortured by the ruthless wardens, but Jin wasn’t about to judge him for that.
They were transported back to the prison by the same truck that they rode on when they were first taken to the prison. Jin thought that it was refreshing to be able to see the outside for a change. It wasn’t anything beautiful, with the barren lands and the scattered rocks, but it was at least something to be seen.
He wondered if things could have been different for Kame if he could only see what was outside his cell.
__
“And so he was grabbing my hands when he fell, yelling at me to promise that I’d take care of his little brothers if I happen to survive that ordeal and also happen to leave this place one day,” Jin finished his story, giggling at a great part of it.
Kame seemed to like his slightly exaggerated story too. “So what did you say to him?” he asked Jin. Jin thought he was a very good listener.
In reality, Jin had been crying and stifling his anguished cries when Koki made that request. He also hastily agreed to help Koki with his little brothers, while at the same time, repeatedly telling Koki to survive because they couldn’t let Goda get away with starting a fight without being punished accordingly.
“I told him to stop all the bullshit about dying, and concentrate on living instead,” was what Jin ended up saying. “It hurt like hell, every part of me, but I kept a straight face all the way through. Maybe Koki saw what kind of man I am, and ended up admiring my valor. It’s how we became friends, you see?”
Kame’s awe was apparent. “Wow, I can’t say I am not amazed.”
“It has been some time since I felt this confident,” Jin said. “It was so surreal, like suddenly I felt like I was in hell and could no longer trust anyone, but then after all that, it seems like we were all here for the same reasons, only dubious because it’s hard to understand each other.”
“No, actually, I was more amazed at how quickly you have changed from someone who seemed to have nothing to lose except for his faith in the good in people to someone who seemed to have grasped the world within his palm,” Kame said. “It wasn’t an insult, by the way.”
Jin’s lips curved slightly to the left. “Are you always this straightforward?”
“When haven’t I been straightforward?” Kame chuckled. “To be honest, I have not lied to you even once ever since you discovered me singing from the other side of the cell.”
“That’s rich,” Jin immediately retorted, “especially coming from you, who insisted that I shouldn’t trust you. Shouldn’t you make up your mind about that a little more decisively?”
“I said you shouldn’t trust me, I never said I was dishonest.”
“You’re such a huge tease,” Jin said. “Are you also always this tricky?”
“Is that what you are supposed to call me?” Kame asked. “I am used to being called things like diplomatic and uptight but never tease or tricky. You sure are an interesting person.”
Kame’s remark made Jin remember something he had been dying to ask, but never gathered enough courage to.
“Hey Kame, what were you like before this?”
“Before what?” Kame asked. Jin couldn’t help but felt like Kame knew exactly what he was asking about, only trying to skirt around instead of answering the question, like he was hoping that Jin was asking about something more innocuous.
“Before they put you in here,” Jin said. “Before you were convicted.”
“And you call me straightforward,” Kame said, with a snicker that Jin couldn’t decide whether it our out of mockery or sincerity.
“So,” Kame continued after a brief hesitation. “How much do you want to know?”
Jin thought long about his answer.
“As much as you’re willing to tell me.”
“Which is not a lot, I’m afraid,” Kame replied. “I’m sorry, I trust you, but I don’t know where to start.”
“Then just trust me,” Jin assured. He hadn’t realized how not knowing anything concrete about Kame affected him, and not in a good way. “I said you’re not a bad person, so maybe you should stop thinking that you are.”
Kame’s voice dropped to a near-whisper. “Why does it seem like you can see right through me?”
Jin didn’t know.
“Maybe because you seem to be able to see right through me too.”
__
Part 2
By: alienashi
Pairing: Implied Kame/Jin
Word count: 20,120-ish
Rating: PG13
Genre/Warnings: AU/Crossover with Death Note, mild swearing, inaccurate portrayals of the Japanese post-war judicial and penal system, usage of unsightly terms to refer to other people, and slight depictions of violence.
Notes: As implied, this story took place sometime during post-WWII Japan in a fictional prison and the Death Note universe will be used as a basic premise. If you have never read the manga or watched the anime or the movie before, you might want to check out this link to read about the basics of the usage of the Death Note. However, I need to include this here as this particular trait of the death note will not be elaborated or mentioned in the story: anybody who touches the death note will be able to see the death god, not just the owner of the Death Note. It’s er, pivotal to the plot?
To paddyabroad, this began as a rather simple story, but I kept adding things I went on, and in the end, it became, er, this. I really hope you’ll be able to enjoy this little fic. Thank you B-chan, for helping by reading over this fic as a panicked request. You’re the best!
Summary: Before Yagami Light, there was Kamenashi Kazuya.
__
I. 仁 ~ Benevolence
25th October 1949
The chilly coldness of autumn forced Takeda Masaru, an officer on-duty to guard the gates of Mouryou Detention Center, to rub his hand against each other at an alarming speed.
“I should have listened to my wife,” he sighed while heaving a long extended breathe into the gap between his palms, hoping that his body heat could transfer from inside to the outside. He placed his palms on the side of his neck next, just to find his co-worker, Uesugi Soujiro, laughing in mock condescension.
“You should have asked her to cook you some hot soup or prepare some hot tea,” Uesugi said, slowly uncapping his rather battered flask of hot green tea. He closed his eyes, inhaling the hot tea long and deep, allowing the aroma to pervade the guardhouse with the soothing whiff of homemade goodness, which invoked both disgust and envy in Takeda.
“My wife is pregnant. Seven months, in case you forgot,” Takeda broke Uesugi’s sequence of blissful glee with a deadpan response while uncapping his own bottle of increasingly cold tea and drank a sip. “My eldest daughter might have not thought about keeping the tea hot, she’s only six after all.” He then leaned against the wooden walls of the guardhouse, eyes wandering around directionless. There was no excuse for laziness whatsoever; if he wanted to stay in his job he had to buck up so that his family at home could be fed.
It was a harsh time to be born into; something that Takeda never failed to remind himself for every single living moment that he had. It was when stray bullets could hit a person, killing him right there and not a single passerby would be horrified. It was when bombs could arrive unannounced and the next thing anyone know was that he just lost his entire family. Personal tragedies were made trivial, other peoples’ miseries were sources of relief, and fortune came from criminal acts. Takeda resented the era he lived in so much, he would do anything to subject another one to a pain greater than or equal with his. Like an ant that despised his fate so much, it would bite a man’s feet sore just so he would be left in agony over a distress he couldn’t identify.
He hated the war. It might have been over a few years back, but it didn’t stop the battle. He had only barely served in the army, but he had seen enough to cast his bitterness on every known weapon.
He would always tell everyone the exact opposite when they asked him why he wanted to fight for the country and subsequently work for the government and guard the prison.
“I want to contribute to my country.” Reality could fuck his entire life, but he would never die without giving reality a piece of his mind.
He saw Uesugi setting down the bundle of clothes wrapping his thermos on the corner of the little shack, and Takeda steadied himself. “I just saw Miura on the watchtower. He was signaling that the truck is coming, most likely new inmates.”
Takeda straightened himself on the left of the gate, listening attentively to the distinct revving sounds of an engine approaching them rapidly. True to Miura’s signal, it was the truck.
The truck that usually signaled the arrival of one or two dozen inmates carried a very morbid connotation with it, even by Takeda’s standard of morbidity. “The time has changed, and with that, you’ll finally be tried by a fairer justice system,” was what every impending inmate was preached to, but Takeda knew better. In his 3 years of serving in Mouryou Detention Center after the war, he had never seen anyone escaping the center alive.
Even if they were alive, by any freak chance, they were no longer left in a state that qualified as a human.
“Hey,” someone whispered besides him, tugging the hem of his pants.
“Get the hell away!” Takeda didn’t want to risk disobedience, so he hissed his rejection. But whoever it was, he didn’t seem to have understood anything he said.
“Hey, sir,” he kept tugging.
Takeda kicked him away, taking a focused Uesugi by surprise. Uesugi refrained from glancing towards Takeda’s direction because a few seconds later, the truck stopped right in front of the gate. An officer jumped down the truck towards Takeda, waving the official letter with the official court seal in front of him wordlessly. Takeda gave a small nod, exchanged a knowing glance and marched to unlock the gate, allowing the truck in. The officer mouthed a “thank you” and jumped back into the truck.
After he got back to his position, he eyed the ragged old man who had been tugging his pants and had risked getting him hundred beatings for disobeying orders.
“What the fuck do you want?” he glared menacingly at him.
The ragged old man was not looking as old or as ragged as Takeda had thought he must have looked like. In fact, he was quite the opposite. The man was approximately around 50 years old at most, with a skin that glowed in the midst of the chilly cloudy weather, wearing something that looked like a torn piece of silk, and holding a few glittering pieces of round-shaped bronze.
Money.
“You are kind, sir,” he smiled, and Takeda could see the row of white, polished teeth in his mouth. “I just need a favor from you, a small favor.” He sat leaning against the brick walls, half-singing a song Takeda couldn’t recognize.
“I need you to help to buy an apple for me,” the old man raised his hand, showing Takeda the few pieces of bronze coins.
“Why don’t you buy it yourself?” Takeda didn’t stir from his position. “I see that you’re still able.” He suspected that the man was mental.
The old man waved his other hand. “They won’t sell it to me. They said I look disgusting.”
Takeda rolled his eyes. “I’m sorry, Ojii-san, but you really are.”
The old man gasped a little too loudly to be genuinely shocked. “Do you think so too? I should get some of these clothes changed, shouldn’t I?” He brought his arms to his nose and coughed in repulse. “They are right! I am smelly! It’s the weather, right?”
The old man continued to sit beside Takeda’s legs, singing songs about women and love and other issues that Takeda had never thought of, but something must have happened inside when he heard a loud voice calling a person’s name.
“Hey, Akanishi!” It was apparently referring to one of the new inmates, who deviated from the line to look around the area. From what Takeda could make out, the new inmate was clean-shaven, handsome, and ridiculously naïve-looking. He couldn’t help but stare as the officer who presented Takeda with the warrant hit Akanishi’s handcuffed arms with the back of his rifle while making silent predictions on how much the pretty boy would change in near future.
Before he knew it, the old man was rummaging his pockets.
“I gave you the money and I’ll be back tomorrow, so please get me the apple! I’m counting on you!”
With that, the mysterious old man with suspiciously torn silk on his body and a polished row of teeth disappeared.
__
“Akanishi Hitoshi.”
“It’s Jin,” Jin retorted nervously. He just saw that another inmate had peed in his pants in anxiety. He was later hit by a few officers and pulled away to another place Jin assumed would contain a greater degree of torment awaiting him.
He stepped forward, raising both his arms to shoulder level, allowing the officers-in-charge to search his entire body ruthlessly. His hair was ruffled painfully, entire body slapped hard enough to cause reddening, and his crotch touched rough enough to warrant sexual harassment. They took away his clothes and presented him with a jumpsuit in a dull, grey hue.
“Wear this inside, then wait for Officer Kobayashi in the other room,” the body-searching officer said as he scribbled something on paper laid on the desk, and shouted “Faster!” when Jin tried to balance himself after the shockingly demeaning treatment.
He stumbled into the next room to greet around a dozen sullen-looking men of all ages, most of them older than he was, carefully putting on the jumpsuit they were ordered to wear, faces draped with a mix of suspicion, fear, and apprehension for each other. He spotted a boy around his age, and he went forward to approach him.
“Hey, what’s your name?” Jin asked him. The other boy was half a head shorter, and had prominent features on his face. He could have looked rather scary to some people, but Jin couldn’t help being drawn to him, like he knew the other boy could be some sort of acquaintance.
The other boy did nothing but glare at him, then looked away in a way that puzzled Jin. “I was just-“
“Stop talking!” The sulking boy buttoned his jumpsuit and stormed away into the next room, eyes shooting him an accusing glance.
Jin followed suit not long after, bumping into a boy, also around his age, who smiled widely at him. Jin smiled back with obligation, partially wondering how such an amiable boy did ended up in his position and partially annoyed that he had unknowingly made enemies from the start. He stood next to the smiling boy in the small assembly that took place the next door during the dreadfully undignified speech made by Officer Kobayashi.
“You have no name. You have nothing of yourself. You have no friends, you have no comrades, you have no property, and you have no honor. All you have right now is the deep, debilitating shame that runs through every bone in your body. You have no one, you have nothing. You only have orders to follow, jobs to do, and days to remorse in repentance.” Officer Kobayashi’s clear, commanding voice echoing around the enclosed room, effectively reducing a group of formerly distinguished men with various degrees of honors into creatures less than dirt.
After his speech, another officer began reading a list of rules that all inmates were obligated to follow, officially starting Jin’s life in prison.
For the few months that he served time in Mouryou Detention Center for crimes of theft and burglary, Akanishi Jin was known to the authorities as Inmate #840704.
It was also the year that Jin would, much later, come to remember as the year Mouryou Detention Center experienced its first mass prison break.
__
After his first meal in prison, Jin discovered that the amiable boy was Taguchi Junnosuke and the willfully sullen boy with a perpetually threatening glare was Tanaka Koki.
Getting to know his fellow prisoners was a bizarre process of unlearning everything about himself and only coming to know one thing about himself - he wasn’t like everyone else, but everyone else was like him.
Everyone was a prisoner. Nobody cared what you did and what you would do. Jin shortly learnt about the unofficial rule about staying out of everyone else’s crime business or risking being alienated.
“Knew him before this?” Jin also, quickly mastered the art of speaking with as little words as possible under his breath. No one was supposed to speak during mealtimes.
Taguchi nodded. “On the truck,” he continued after swallowed a spoonful of rice. Jin gulped his own spoonful of the most disgusting food he had ever eaten, darting a brief look at Tanaka, who was struggling between wolfing down his bowl at one shot and restraining himself into relishing every drop of rice available to him. The sight made Jin chuckle.
“What?” Taguchi asked.
Jin pointed to Tanaka’s direction with his eyebrows and Taguchi snorted soundlessly. It earned them a warning look from the warden, and they straightened up immediately. No one was supposed to make facial expressions that weren’t related to eating.
When they were lined up, one after another, Jin had hoped that he could get Taguchi as his cellmate, but he ended up in a solitary confinement.
The prison wardens told him that he couldn’t question them, and Taguchi shook his head, agreeing with the wardens. He dragged his dejected spirit and settled into walking along the dark, creepy hallway heading towards his cell.
They slammed the rusty metal door behind him, and he heard the sound of chains rustling followed soon after.
It took the echoes of his own footsteps to realize that he really was isolated.
__
He couldn’t sleep on the first night.
The fresh inmates were excused from “repenting” on their first night, so Jin was free to accustom himself in the new habitat. Jin had wanted to sleep to prevent himself from mulling over his last few days of freedom and thinking of the future he had destroyed with his bare hands, but he couldn’t help but have all his senses escalating to react to the barest of stimulants.
He jumped abruptly when he heard a squeaking sound which turned out to be a mouse who apparently resided in the hole across his bed.
Bored and restless, he went over to the mouse, but it was too quick for Jin. Right before Jin could get hold of it, it dashed back into its hole and Jin slipped, falling on his chest to the floor.
It was then he heard a thudding sound that seemed to come from a room next door, and a soft humming. He sat against the wall, pressing his right ear to the wall, trying to discern the voice he had just heard.
It was nothing like he expected.
It was the sound of a young man singing, though Jin could hardly make out the lyrics at all. He pressed closer to hear more clearly and he could tell that the young man had a voice like a broken heart. A voice roughened by youth, broken by grief and riddled by hope. It wasn’t the best singing voice Jin had heard, but he knew he loved it for some reason he didn’t know. He thought of his desperation for company and decided that it was the reason why he didn’t move away from the spot all night.
When the warden knocked the metal door to wake him up, he found himself sitting at the exact spot where he had sat listening to the singing voice in the cell next to his.
His heart leapt with an overwhelming curiosity - he wanted to know who that voice belonged to rather badly.
__
Jin’s first task in prison was to chop a mountain of piled logs about six times his height.
“No?” he asked an also-struggling Taguchi. They were also not supposed to speak, but the officers-on-duty were slacking off elsewhere sneaking a few cigarettes and all other inmates were also employing an obscure method of communication to speak to each other. Jin had a feeling that outdoor tasks were the closest to freedom he could get in here.
“You don’t know of anyone else who is placed in solitary confinement other than me?”
Taguchi panted, wiping the sweat dripping profusely from his forehead. “You are placed in a cell reserved for prisoners of highest possible crimes, and no new inmate has been sent there for two years before you came. If anything, everyone is curious of what you had done to deserve that.”
Jin bit his tongue bitterly. “Nothing.” He raised his axe and lowered it with a loud thud, landing the sharp edge of the axe in the middle of the thick log. His arms were starting to sore.
“I stole,” Jin said. “I didn’t know it was enough to make me sound like a murderer.”
Taguchi eyed him suspiciously.
Jin shrugged impatiently. “It’s true. I didn’t kill anyone.”
“Not you,” Taguchi hit his wood and split it. “If it really was a person living in the cell next to you, he probably was a horrible criminal.”
“What do you mean if ‘it really was a person’? What else could be in there?” Jin asked.
Taguchi lowered his axe. “Do you know why there hasn’t been anyone sent to the solitary confinement cells? It was because the cells were reserved for prisoners who deserve a fate more painful than death. Rumor has it that if you walk along the hallway, you’ll reach a blood-soaked gateway to the place where that fate awaits those types of prisoners.”
Jin gulped nervously.
“Relax, I also happen to know that the punishment has been outlawed, so you’re going to be fine,” Taguchi resumed chopping his piece of log. “Anyway, there is a possibility that who-what-ever sang you to sleep could be something not human, and I just want you to be prepared.”
Jin asked Taguchi something he had been wondering since they started chopping logs into firewood.
“Taguchi, how do you know so many things within a day?”
He gave Jin an all-knowing smirk. “I smile,” he answered plainly. “It gets me everywhere.”
__
Jin spent one hour of his second night meditating in “repentance” under a watchful eye of a warden who looked like he had been badly burnt on the right side of his face. The warden dutifully watched him through a small peephole installed on the door. Jin reminded himself of what Taguchi had said earlier.
Smile, he thought.
The peephole was rashly shut a while later before Jin could act, signifying the end of his meditation. He rushed to the door and shouted “Officer! Wait!” only to get a “Sleep!” in response.
He tried to lie on his bed, driving all disturbing thoughts about mysterious rooms down the hallway with a blood-soaked door and the endless possibilities of having a fate that was more painful than death out of his head, but all he could think of was the bloodcurdling screams of faceless people and sinister laughter from their tormentors.
He shifted uncomfortably in his already-uncomfortable bed in anxiety, until he heard the lulling sounds of the singing voice again. It exerted a magnetic force that pulled Jin immediately to the corner of the cell closest to the where the voice came from, and Jin felt his erratic heartbeat slowing down tremendously.
He focused his mind on the enlightening hymn, trying to decipher the lyrics of the song.
It was faint and barely audible, but unless Jin was imagining things, he had fallen asleep to a song about bonds between two people, almost like a sad love song between two people who couldn’t be together for some incomprehensible reason.
__
A few days later, Tanaka was assigned to join Jin and Taguchi in their wood-chopping session.
Tanaka had made quite a name for himself in the prison within the week, quite like Jin but for different reasons. While Jin was the one who people whispered to spread rumors on his alleged killing spree with a bodycount that increased with every story, Tanaka had everyone gasping in fear for his unfriendly looks and scowling expressions. He had attracted the wrath of the prison’s gangleader Goda, who had a habit of looking at Koki a little too intensely, as though he was challenging him to some men’s battle. To Jin’s utter displeasure, Goda also had a habit of purposely bumping into him and make snide remarks about his “alleged” crime.
It was also partly because he was being lumped together with the troublemakers among the newer inmates, and Jin would rather be known as a lunatic than someone equally troublesome like Tanaka. He looked at an old man with an unfocused expression on his face, who, according to everyone, was a real lunatic, wondering if it was possible to fake a mental disorder.
“You will be punished!” the old man barked at Goda, who pushed him to the grounds for getting in his way.
Goda laughed.
Taguchi drew Jin back to his duties.
“Remember to call him Inmate #851105 in front of the officers, but his name is really Koki,” Taguchi introduced them. Tanaka, evidently, also looked less than enthusiastic to be associated to Jin.
“Look, I’m not here so we can be friends,” Tanaka started. “I usually hang out with Nakamaru over there,” he pointed to a guy who looked younger than all of them and had an abnormally large nose, “but today he has to guide Masuda, who just started on the woods after being stationed in textile.”
Jin smiled slightly, but Tanaka was still unimpressed.
“Spare yourself the cordialities because as you can see, I’m really not interested,” Tanaka spat at Jin.
Jin couldn’t let himself be talked down by a guy he had unknowingly, yet unreasonably made enemies with. “What is your problem?” he said as he shoved Tanaka’s shoulder back.
“I don’t know, I probably have problems with you being a high-profile murderer than no one knows about,” Koki didn’t relent.
Jin threw his axe. “At least I’m not some short loser with nothing better to do than scowl and glare.”
Taguchi seemed to have sensed the warning signs. “Guys, break it up.”
Jin ignored him.
“You think it’s nice to be locked alone in a room rumored to be housing horribly-tortured criminals?” Jin rolled his sleeves. It had been some time since he got this fired up and he wasn’t about to let Tanaka get away with such unfounded arrogance. “Then buddy, think again. You can use that axe and kill me right now if you want to stay in my place!”
Tanaka proved to be rather formidable, despite his obvious lack in size as compared to Jin. “Oh buddy,” he mocked Jin. “Unlike you, I plan to leave this place as soon as possible because unlike you, I have a purpose in life other than standing around looking pretty.”
“You’re jealous,” Jin hissed as he grabbed the collar of Tanaka’s jumpsuit. “I’m better-looking than you’ll ever be, sucker.”
With that a hard, bony punch flew towards Jin’s face and drew blood from his lips. “How does that feel, pretty boy? Want me to mess you up more?”
Tanaka climbed on top of Jin, but Jin toppled him and pushed him down to the grounds and landed him a punch on the cheeks, but was taken away before he could continue.
A loud whistle was blown.
“Everybody line up!”
__
Everyone assigned to woodcutting was punished after the public brawl. They were given no dinner, each given ten beatings on the ass, and were locked in a room to collectively chant their loyalties to the country.
Jin spent most of his time glaring across the room towards Tanaka.
To his defense, Tanaka glared at him just as hard.
__
Jin didn’t touch his bed that night.
Or, more accurately, Jin couldn’t touch his bed that night. His back was too sore for him to be able to rely on his back.
After his routine meditation that took two hours, a punishment for what happened earlier, making sure that the warden with a squashed face had definitely left, he sat at that corner of his cell, determined to speak to the voice.
“Hello,” he whispered while frantically searching for a possible opening in the wall.
He found the hole that was the home of the mouse he saw on his first day in the cell, and he dug the hole desperately, hoping to widen it enough to be able to see the person singing in the next cell.
He tapped on the wall again and again. “Hey, is someone there?”
His heart raced at a breathtaking pace, pounding against his chest, and he sensed his desperation growing more and more pathetic. The mouse squeaked nervously, and Jin knew it was not because its home was ruined.
“Hey, please, answer me. Is someone there?” he shouted, risking another set of militant punishments. He tapped the wall again and again, repeating the same question, heart sinking with every passing minute.
It wasn’t after his fingers were all bleeding that he finally resigned to the fact that whoever sang his lullaby was never going to acknowledge him.
__
Taguchi didn’t buy his story.
Nevertheless, Jin kept defending himself, even though he knew that it would be an uphill task.
It was Nakamaru who joined them this time. To Jin’s utter surprise, Nakamaru was actually older than he was. “Koki is a nice person, Akanishi,” he said. “It’s just that he has been worried sick about his little brothers and to be honest, you do scare people.”
At this point, Jin was so used to being misunderstood, he didn’t care what people thought about him anymore. “I don’t care if you believe me, but I’m not a murderer, serial killer, bomber, whichever. I only ever stole things and I don’t know how I ended up-“
“I know,” Nakamaru interrupted. “Don’t worry, Akanishi. I have been around long enough to be able to tell that people are not their crimes.”
Jin’s arm were evidently more accustomed to woodcutting than he gave them credits for, as he was no longer experiencing pain around the joints between his shoulder and his arms. However, it was probably because his bandaged fingers were giving him so much trouble that his muscular pains became inconsequential.
“You heard what I said about how people are not their crimes?” Nakamaru said, shortly after he heard no response from Jin.
Jin shook his head, and Nakamaru nudged Jin to steal a glance at a tall man slighter older than all of them, with an indifferent but defiant pair of eyes, surrounded by a few other people. It was Goda.
“You need to be careful with him,” Nakamaru directed Jin’s attention back to his half-cut log. “He can make your life hell.”
It was true; people whom Goda was not a fan off usually got harsher treatments from the prison wardens. It was a well-known fact that his yakuza boss paid the prison wardens to take care of him.
“I’m locked in a solitary confinement, there’s nothing that could make my life more hellish than that.”
“Actually Akanishi,” Nakamaru informed him. “I was going to talk about how that is the face of someone who has killed another person.
“You don’t look like that at all.”
__
It sort of became a routine.
Every night after the ugly warden left, he would sit in his favorite corner of his cell, making no move to dismantle the wall, and leaned against the cold stone wall and threw his back to stare at the ceiling.
Slowly, the words and the rhythm came together in a burst of impulsive collision, and Jin began to sing.
“One step at a time is fine, don’t let go of this hand, because the days we walk together are going to continue…”
Singing them out was a far more soul-captivating experience, as Jin just realized. He paused to think about those words, those words meticulously strung together to describe a relationship far greater than he had shared with anyone and heart sank even deeper into despair as he reminded himself of his bandaged fingers and how the other party didn’t exist. He thought of what would come next, and his chest grew heavy.
“Even if we are worn down to the point of being messed up..”
It was then he heard a voice that was not his own harmonizing with his.
“That bond we had at that time and place will never disappear.”
He stood up, thumping the wall with his injured hand. “Hey, I’m begging you! Tell me you’re there!”
There was an awkward silence, but Jin didn’t want to give up. If that someone next cell could hear him sing, that someone next cell couldn’t possibly be just a figment of his imagination.
“I’m sorry,” he apologized. “Please let me know you’re there, please!”
“Seventh from the right and tenth from the floor,” was his long-awaited reply. “The brick is loose.”
Jin found the brick and tossed it to the other side, but the brick was tossed back to him via the brick-shaped gap in the wall.
“Better put in on your end,” the other person said. “You need to be careful.” The brick hole was just the right height for his sitting position and judging by the volume from the other side, it was more or less the right height for the other person too.
Jin took the brick and placed it on the ground. “Hey,” he greeted his newfound fellow solitarily-confined inmate. He didn’t know what to say to this person whose existence no one else knew but him. He didn’t know what to call him, how he could start to talk to him, and he wasn’t quite sure if the other person was not a mole sent to monitor him.
“Hi,” was what the other person said. “I’m sorry I didn’t respond to you yesterday. I have been living alone over here for so long, I didn’t imagine someone would eventually be placed in a cell next to me.”
“Are you afraid of me?” Jin asked before he could gauge his own bluntness. He almost immediately felt a tiny pang of embarrassment, only saved by the other person’s awkward laugh.
“No,” the other person chuckled slightly. “It’s just that-“
For a reason he had yet to know, Jin felt sorry for his almost-cellmate. “What is your name?”
Jin thought he had heard him snicker. “You mean my number? I’m Inmate #86-“
“No, your name,” Jin insisted.
“My.. name,” he murmured, almost as though his name was something he had discarded. It made Jin more eager to want to know him.
“Kazuya,” He answered. “Kamenashi Kazuya.”
“Kazuya, right?”
“Yes,” he answered. “You know what, call me Kame.”
Jin cackled. “As in the turtle?”
“As in the animal, yes.”
“But why?”
Jin heard him heaving a deep breath. “Because no one has ever called me that before.”
__
II. 和 ~ Peace
7th November 1949
Takeda Masaru’s wife, who was suffering from a bad cramp, was left at home with no one but their 6-year-old daughter and Takeda’s ailing mother.
He spat to the ground as he passed a factory busy rustling with operations. He bitterly about the buzzing sounds of his wife, recounting each and every grocery good on a price hike. Rice, salt, sugar - he wasn’t earning more but the amount of food he could provide to his household got smaller by the day. The weather also turned more and more punishingly cold; there was never a week gone by without hearing any news of someone dying from hunger and cold. He wanted to remind his wife that they were lucky to be able to at least rice and she could afford getting pregnant, but the truth was that he hated their lives as much as she did. Spending his time arguing with his wife wasn’t going to make things better. It wasn’t going to magically make everyone richer, and his thought immediately darted towards the shaggy old man who had requested for Takeda to help him buy an apple.
It was Uesugi who spotted the shaggy old man, whom they had both referred to as Ringo-jii-san for his routine of shoving a few bronze coins to Takeda’s in exchange for the apples, that day.
“Hey Takeda,” Uesugi gestured discreetly with his fist. Takeda promptly reached inside his pockets for the apple and threw it to the old man’s direction.
“Be careful!” the old man shrieked a little too loudly than Takeda would have preferred. He dove into the ground, retrieving the dropped red apple. “It’s still fresh, I’m lucky!” Takeda tried to pay no attention to the weird old man. As on various occasions in the last few days since his appearance, the old man settled beside him for a brief moment, rubbing his apple shiny and muttering some random things that made no sense to both Takeda and Uesugi.
“The weather’s really good, isn’t it?” the shabby old man would usually start with. “I really love the cold, fresh air, like it could penetrate straight into people’s heart. Kind of feels like when you’re listening to Ootani Ikue’s songs.”
It was only a little more than a week since Takeda first encountered the old man, and had helped him buy apples for about 3 times, but he could already predict what he was going to say. Before he could stop himself, like a sudden gust of chilly wind during summer, something inside him nudged him.
“Ossan,” Takeda began asking. “Do you have a name?”
The old man snickered. “Name? I don’t have one, young man! In fact, I doubt I even need one.”
Takeda wasn’t surprised at the answer.
“But!” the old man got up and smoothened his shabby robe-like clothing. “You can always call me Matchy. Like Ma-cchi, get it?”
Takeda watched the old man sing as he faced his back towards him and dragged his feet away from the prison gate.
“Hey young man,” he looked back, just slightly. “Do you know why I asked for apples so often?”
Takeda shook his head slightly.
Matchy, as the old man would be referred to from that moment on, merely chuckled at Takeda’s answer, as though he just failed what seemed to be a children’s riddle.
“Because death gods, you see, they love apples.”
__
Jin was given no chance to look for Taguchi or Nakamaru to tell them who he had discovered to be dwelling in the cell beside his in the weeks to come.
When the inmates were rounded up for roll call that morning, he shot Taguchi anxious looks, signaling his eagerness to a rather confused-looking Taguchi. However, as though there was something unmistakably threatening about the innocuous exchange between Jin and Taguchi, the wardens pushed Jin aside with warning shoved to his ribcage and dragged him outside.
Much later in the evening, Jin was told that Taguchi and Nakamaru were deployed to build the railway and the only familiar faces around were those he would never have thought to approach within a three-foot radius, Goda and Tanaka. There was also the lunatic old man Higashiyama, who could be rather unnerving to stay in close proximity with.
Fortunately for Jin, there was also someone whom Jin only knew from face and name, Ueda, who was familiar with Nakamaru, and was also someone he felt least uncomfortable speaking to in a situation that reeked of suspicion and hostility. Ironically, he was also the person around Jin at the moment whom Jin had the least things to say to.
Without someone he could speak to that didn’t require him to think and revise his thoughts, Jin found himself growing indifferent about his surroundings. His thoughts felt like they were strangled in his head, drifting between the hypothetical space that connected his brains and his vocal chords. He was neither patient enough to subdue them and calmly introspect about the many aspects of his latest discovery nor was he dumb enough to spout things that were very easily just a fragment of his imagination. Randomly saying things was, after all, what got him here.
It was only then that he fully understood what he had came to take for granted - without Taguchi and by an extension, Nakamaru, and he was never more homesick.
It was also when he realized for himself that being a focal point of Goda’s unwanted attention was like having his skin slowly peeling off, leaving his flesh scorched bare.
__
Jin envisioned Kame to be a thin and weary young man in his late teens based on his voice - much like himself, only slightly younger. Perhaps there would also be a tired pair of eyes that was waiting to shine again, and a dry, cracked pair of lips. Maybe shaggy, disheveled hair, which, similar to all other features of his, was merely shadowing the brighter life he used to lead outside.
A life outside these walls. A life before being locked here. A life when he actually cared.
Even though the brick-sized hole should have been adequate for at least a face view, Kame seemed to prefer sitting just beside the hole, barely avoiding being seen. He told Jin that he hadn’t felt comfortable enough to let Jin see him, and Jin had failed rather miserably in his attempts to reassure him otherwise. Ironically, Jin knew that it was probably because he couldn’t see Kame at all that he was so fascinated by the mere presence of him.
He tried to tell himself that it was because he really wanted to know the closest thing to a confidante he could get. Kame was different. Kame was not among those he had to exercise caution at. Kame wasn’t like Taguchi, who supplied him with things he needed to know to survive. Kame wasn’t like Tanaka, who was at least, even through most vicious of the many malicious stares he threw at Jin, honest in his disdain. Kame wasn’t Nakamaru either, bless Nakamaru’s brotherly ways.
Kame was an entity so entrenched, yet so detached from the working systems of Jin’s currently futureless world, that Jin couldn’t help but to be drawn to the mere existence.
“Hey,” Jin greeted him softly. He was sure it wasn’t to avoid prying ears -previous nights had proved that the thick brick walls and the heavy metal door made his cell effectively soundproof- but because Kame felt like something he should approach while having his guards up at all times.
Kame seemed to have anticipated him. “Oh,” his answer was brief but ample. “Is it night already?”
At that, Jin immediately scanned his cell for the sign of any gaps in the wall, feeling rather ashamed about how little he had known about his own cell. The walls were, for all that they were worth for, much too high for plausible prison break plan, but had a makeshift window that was too tiny for Jin to be able to see anything outside but large enough for light to pass through.
“Yes, it is night already”, Jin replied after seeing a blinking light amidst the darkness outside, most likely to be from a watchtower.
Jin heard Kame shift slightly. “Ah,” Kame said.
“Hey, Kame,” Jin said.
“What is it?” Kame said, as polite and cautious as usual. Jin didn’t blame his vigilance; after all, he should relate very well with wanting to put up guards at all times and never reveal more than he should.
“Do you have a window over there in your cell?” Jin asked, reasoning to himself that he merely wanted to know if the cell beside him was similar to his.
“I don’t have anything here, it’s pitch black all the time,” Kame answered. “Except when the officer comes in to bring my food, but I usually shields my eyes. I can’t get used to the light.”
Jin felt his stomach twist uneasily. His initial comfort at discovering Kame’s existence seemed to be falling apart slowly, morphing into a rough tapestry woven with guilt, sympathy and curiosity.
“I’m sorry,” Jin apologized.
“Don’t be,” Kame said. “I got used to it.”
“How long have you been in here?” Jin asked.
Kame paused for a while, momentarily sent Jin into an uncomfortable fit of slight anxiety.
“I don’t know,” Kame’s voice wore a semblance of fatigue.
Jin should have known better than to ask. For a person to have never really seen the light since he was admitted, there was no way in which he could gauge the passing of time, let alone measure it.
“It’s Showa 24,” Jin helped. “It will be Showa 25 in a month, if I’m not wrong.”
“Really?” Kame asked. “I didn’t know I have only been in here for two years. It felt so much like forever, I would have thought it has already been 10 years.”
Jin didn’t want to press further. He took a deep breath. “I’m here for theft.
“I have a brother about 5 years younger, his name is Reio and he wasn’t born healthy. He always had difficulties breathing, sometimes when he got sick, he couldn’t get out of bed for a few weeks. It was worse after the war, he couldn’t get up from the bed at all. I was desperate, but because I was useless, I could only work but never been able to think of a way to cure him. Someone offered me a huge amount of money and a promise to help my brother, and in exchange, I had to steal something from a pharmaceutical company’s safe.”
Jin’s chest felt heavy and light at the same time from finally being able to get the burden off his chest. The repercussions of speaking about his past dissipated with the fact that it was Kame he was telling it to. Kame, who had probably forgotten what it was like to have people trust him.
Jin trusted him, and he wanted Kame to know it.
“Thinking back, I should not have taken the offer. If I had not taken it, I wouldn’t have been caught, wouldn’t have been separated from my family, and wouldn’t have gotten in here. You know, I never had the chance to ask my parents for forgiveness. My father, I really don’t know where he is now, or if he’s safe. My mother, she worked two jobs until she was also sick. And I’m stuck in here, a proof of my uselessness,” Jin continued.
“Akanishi,” Kame began after a short, awkward pause.
“You asked me to call you Kame, right?” Jin interrupted him. “You should call me Jin, then we are even.”
“Jin,” Kame said, almost happily.
“There you have it, I told you who I am,” Jin said. “You don’t have to worry about me.”
Kame made a sound like he just snickered. “You’re very gullible. What if I turn out to be a crazy mass murderer whom people lock because they don’t know exactly how I committed all my acts?”
It was Jin’s turn to snicker. “You can’t be.”
“Why are you so sure?” Kame challenged.
Jin claimed this to be a sign of his victory - he finally got to hear Kame in higher spirits, more like a boy who had gotten his first pay from his first job and less like a crestfallen warrior who had witnessed his entire army being annihilated.
“Because you are very kind,” Jin said. “I can hear it, and I’m usually a good judge of people.”
“Including that person who had you steal something from a company?” Kame retorted.
Jin was beginning to like him more and more. “It was a company with a bad reputation. Apparently they kidnap people and kill them for research’s sake.”
“I see,” Kame replied, apparently running out of rebuttals.
“You can trust me,” Jin reiterated.
“But you probably shouldn’t trust me,” Kame said, unexpectedly, voice regressed to the seemingly default state of disconsolate.
Jin also didn’t expect what he heard next.
“You should know that I am here because I was a crazy mass murderer and they locked me here because they couldn’t understand how I did what I did.”
Jin was stunned.
Kame’s next words seemed orchestrated, but they were more painful to hear than what had just been said.
“You don’t deserve to be here, Jin.
“After all, what you did was nothing compared to I did.”
__
Kame’s words haunted him as though they were a part of a brain-restructuring mantra that kept reverberating in his mind, telling him repeatedly that he didn’t deserve to be there. A mantra that felt like it had grown to infest his conscience with resentment.
Jin couldn’t bring himself to allocate any more patience to go along with his indifference towards Goda and Tanaka, even if he was fully aware of the risks he was taking with every moment of his thinning patience.
He tried to reason himself into not minding those words by convincing himself that to be expecting justice of any form during that time was like expecting his brother to be fully healed - delusions he would have loved to harbor in a more optimistic situation. All thoughts that were consuming him right now were directed towards Goda’s snide ridicules and Tanaka’s hostile welcomes; it felt as though nothing could satisfy him more than to be able to wipe those ill-meaning smirks off Goda’s face.
The inmates were urged to chop more firewood at a speedier rate as the weather got gradually more and more brutal, and the inmates got increasingly more and more restless. Many collapsed before they could last more than two hours, the old man Higashiyama one of them. He was the first to pass out; after yelling his usual “Punishment! You will be erased!” phrase, and fortunately to him, he was given a free pass to resting because he was what he was, and unfortunately for him, fatigue could be rather contagious.
On a more optimistic day, Jin would have fallen victim to the vicious weather assault. He would have preferred to attribute his immunity towards lethargy to his own visceral vigor, but he knew it wasn’t true.
He vividly remembered those times when he had gotten involved in various street fights when he was working as a jinrikisha1-puller, fighting back the other boys who were accusing him of stealing the customers who tipped the most. He thought of the times when he sustained black, swollen eyes for confronting those thugs who stole money of the fruit seller he was working for, in addition to having his weekly salary robbed because he wasn’t keeping a close enough eye on the money.
Having these thoughts, understanding that everyone around were social scums was different from thinking about how he had been inherently good despite his records saying otherwise.
He stared at Goda and Tanaka, one after another.
He wasn’t like them.
He didn’t get himself involved in a yakuza group and threaten people for money like Goda did before he was being arrested. He hadn’t killed anyone, like Tanaka did, even accidentally. He wasn’t mentally disabled, he thought as he caught a glance of the old man Higashiyama.
He had a family, he had jobs, and most of all he had never harmed anyone for the sake of harming them.
Kame was right; he didn’t deserve to be here. He didn’t deserve to be grouped along with these people. He wasn’t among them. He wasn’t supposed to be here.
“Hey, pretty boy,” Goda chided. Jin was so lost in his own thoughts, he hadn’t been paying attention to his surroundings.
Unfortunately for him, Warden Takenaka was nowhere to be seen.
With other inmates too busy battling against their own weakening body and a disappeared warden, there was nothing to stop Goda from beating the hell out of Jin.
“I have had my eyes on you for quite some time,” Goda said, rolling his sleeves. “I hate it when that pretty face of yours shows that type of cockiness only people of my caliber are allowed to have.”
Goda’s two minions took a hold of Jin on each side of him.
“Things would have been so much easier if you had just knelt in front of me and asked to be by my side. That way, at least your pretty face would be preserved,” Goda continued, hands clutching Jin’s chin.
Jin tried to shake Goda off. “Get away,” he said wryly.
Goda smirked. “Scared of getting scars all over your perfect face?”
Jin glared at him. The two minions seized both his hands. He tried to fight them off, but they were stronger than Jin had thought.
“I’ll teach you how it’s like to defy me,” Goda cracked his knuckles.
What happened next was too fast for Jin to comprehend. Before he could stiffen his own jaw in preparation to receive a punch from Goda, Goda was taken down from behind.
All of a sudden, Goda was lying on the grounds, writhing in pain from a blow to the back of his head. His minions immediately let go of Jin’s arms to pursue the assailant.
It was Tanaka.
Tanaka had slick movements, Jin observed. He could avoid the frontal attacks and launched assaults of his own with relative ease, and in no time at all, Goda’s two minions were down, clutching their bleeding faces.
Goda rose up, clenching his fist to finish what he had planned to do, but Jin blew him back to the floor with his fist in what was his first ever counterattack in a fight.
Jin and Tanaka were both cornered by the wardens shortly, guns pointing towards them and ready to fire.
__
It was a few blurry days before Jin was released back to his cell.
He, along with Tanaka, had been dragged into the dark dungeons where inmates were taken to be reprimanded. He had his heart firmly set on accepting what was coming next. Tanaka had seemed to be similarly resolute, even though Jin saw his fingers shaking as he rubbed his palms together stealthily.
“Does it hurt a lot?” was the first question Kame asked when Jin returned to his cell.
Jin held his backside, patting it. “My butt hurts. A lot. But I’m used to pain, so it’s alright,” he answered good-naturedly.
“You seem too laid back for someone who probably just went to hell and back,” Kame said.
Jin laughed. “I’m alright, really,” he assured Kame. “It really was like going to hell, but I think I reached an epiphany or two on my way back.”
“Epiphany,” Kame replied. “That’s a big word. Are you sure you really do mean it?”
Jin stared at his blistered palm, examining the severity of his injuries and thinking of ways to alleviate the pain to prepare for the tasks that would come. He then flipped his palm and raised his arms high.
“Hey, Kame,” he started. “Have you ever had one of those times when you were sure you had Death with your grasp, ready to embrace it, like you just seen a door opening right in front of you, but then you just closed it without knowing why?”
Kame breathed heavily before he whispered his answer. “Maybe.”
Jin hesitated to continue, but he felt like he needed to tell Kame something. “It happened to me. At first I wanted those officers to kill me, but I remembered something that you told me.”
“What was it?” Kame asked warily.
“You told me I don’t deserve to be here, didn’t you?” Jin calmly continued. “You’re right.
“Which is why I need to get out from here.”
__
Jin and Tanaka, whom he would call Koki from then on, emerged as some kind of uncelebrated hero for defeating Goda.
It wasn’t anything conspicuous, but Jin appreciated the “reward” in the form of the now-unsuspecting eyes of his fellow inmates. Like the incident had convinced them that Jin, despite his place in the solitary confinement cell, was just another victim not at all different from them, struggling with being strung along by the unfathomable judicial system. Instead of being subjected to what he perceived as undeservingly apprehensive stares, Jin was slowly getting used to random inmates being stealthily friendly with him.
Another form of “reward” was probably thanks to Goda threatening Warden Takenaka into reshuffling the work units, effectively deploying Jin and Koki plus others Goda didn’t like into being subjected to harshest work available, most unforgiving weather condition and exposure to explosions - the railway. However, building the railway also meant Jin was now reunited with Taguchi and Nakamaru, and Jin wasn’t in a position to complain.
“It is really an attempt to eliminate us all, if you think about it,” Taguchi summarized, once again acting like a guide for Jin. “A few days ago, Morita coughed blood so badly, he got dragged away and hasn’t been seen since. We think he didn’t make it.”
Jin found himself examining his surroundings with a decidedly more sympathetic light. How many of them were also similarly disproportionately or worse, unjustly punished like he was?
“Probably everyone here,” Nakamaru answered.
The best thing about working in the railway during the bone-chilling winter was the way officers-on-duty kept seeking for ways to not guard the prisoners more than merely making sure no one was escaping. Instead of patrolling around, they usually gather in a makeshift guardhouse where they had a small fire to keep them warm on top of a small stone hill, leaving the inmates practically unsupervised.
The avalanche of windfall sometimes made Jin question the reality, but he decided that the questionable reality was better than the certified truth.
“Many are here for far random reason than yours,” Taguchi said. He had evidently been stocking up more information about other inmates behind that innocent smile of his. Jin remembered overhearing Koki once commenting about how useless some of that information was in his usual disapproving tone.
“Like old man Higashiyama there? Just because he’s a little off in his head,” Taguchi made a twirling gesture with his finger positioned beside his temple, “doesn’t change the fact that he was once a high-ranking member of a large corporation. Apparently he objected to some of their new policies and the others were so upset at his vocal protests, they decided to throw him in here. Don’t look at me, Nakamaru will tell you the same.”
Upon being mentioned, Nakamaru looked up from his position. “He made quite a ruckus for around for a week or two. Spouting absurd things like ‘abominable people will be judged by God’, ‘those heartless bastards will be erased, watch out!’ and sometimes going as far as looking people in the eyes and tell them they would be judged by the one and only God and He’d live within us. Have to say, us lesser people here were effectively frightened.”
Nakamaru paused to glance at Higashiyama and the others followed suit. “As you can guess, he unnerved everyone so much, they took him to the underground dungeons and he was never the same after that. His speeches were more disconcerting, but also far more incongruous. Everyone assumed that he was tortured into madness,” he continued with a wistful look at something rather far away.
Jin exchanged knowing looks with Koki, both gulping.
“You two,” Taguchi pointed at each of them one after another, “are the epitome of prison miracle. We might not be able to know what you guys went through down there, but you guys probably had no idea what kind of inspirational thoughts just knowing that you guys survived it, mentally unscathed, gives.”
Koki squeezed Jin’s arm. Jin flinched a little, not having fully recovered yet from the injuries he sustained, but he smiled for the very time since he was imprisoned.
He had a feeling that it would be some time before Koki would agree to divulge what he was subjected to during those hellish times of being tortured by the ruthless wardens, but Jin wasn’t about to judge him for that.
They were transported back to the prison by the same truck that they rode on when they were first taken to the prison. Jin thought that it was refreshing to be able to see the outside for a change. It wasn’t anything beautiful, with the barren lands and the scattered rocks, but it was at least something to be seen.
He wondered if things could have been different for Kame if he could only see what was outside his cell.
__
“And so he was grabbing my hands when he fell, yelling at me to promise that I’d take care of his little brothers if I happen to survive that ordeal and also happen to leave this place one day,” Jin finished his story, giggling at a great part of it.
Kame seemed to like his slightly exaggerated story too. “So what did you say to him?” he asked Jin. Jin thought he was a very good listener.
In reality, Jin had been crying and stifling his anguished cries when Koki made that request. He also hastily agreed to help Koki with his little brothers, while at the same time, repeatedly telling Koki to survive because they couldn’t let Goda get away with starting a fight without being punished accordingly.
“I told him to stop all the bullshit about dying, and concentrate on living instead,” was what Jin ended up saying. “It hurt like hell, every part of me, but I kept a straight face all the way through. Maybe Koki saw what kind of man I am, and ended up admiring my valor. It’s how we became friends, you see?”
Kame’s awe was apparent. “Wow, I can’t say I am not amazed.”
“It has been some time since I felt this confident,” Jin said. “It was so surreal, like suddenly I felt like I was in hell and could no longer trust anyone, but then after all that, it seems like we were all here for the same reasons, only dubious because it’s hard to understand each other.”
“No, actually, I was more amazed at how quickly you have changed from someone who seemed to have nothing to lose except for his faith in the good in people to someone who seemed to have grasped the world within his palm,” Kame said. “It wasn’t an insult, by the way.”
Jin’s lips curved slightly to the left. “Are you always this straightforward?”
“When haven’t I been straightforward?” Kame chuckled. “To be honest, I have not lied to you even once ever since you discovered me singing from the other side of the cell.”
“That’s rich,” Jin immediately retorted, “especially coming from you, who insisted that I shouldn’t trust you. Shouldn’t you make up your mind about that a little more decisively?”
“I said you shouldn’t trust me, I never said I was dishonest.”
“You’re such a huge tease,” Jin said. “Are you also always this tricky?”
“Is that what you are supposed to call me?” Kame asked. “I am used to being called things like diplomatic and uptight but never tease or tricky. You sure are an interesting person.”
Kame’s remark made Jin remember something he had been dying to ask, but never gathered enough courage to.
“Hey Kame, what were you like before this?”
“Before what?” Kame asked. Jin couldn’t help but felt like Kame knew exactly what he was asking about, only trying to skirt around instead of answering the question, like he was hoping that Jin was asking about something more innocuous.
“Before they put you in here,” Jin said. “Before you were convicted.”
“And you call me straightforward,” Kame said, with a snicker that Jin couldn’t decide whether it our out of mockery or sincerity.
“So,” Kame continued after a brief hesitation. “How much do you want to know?”
Jin thought long about his answer.
“As much as you’re willing to tell me.”
“Which is not a lot, I’m afraid,” Kame replied. “I’m sorry, I trust you, but I don’t know where to start.”
“Then just trust me,” Jin assured. He hadn’t realized how not knowing anything concrete about Kame affected him, and not in a good way. “I said you’re not a bad person, so maybe you should stop thinking that you are.”
Kame’s voice dropped to a near-whisper. “Why does it seem like you can see right through me?”
Jin didn’t know.
“Maybe because you seem to be able to see right through me too.”
__
Part 2