The morning after Buki drew the stick figures, he woke to find he'd been crying in his sleep. His face was rough, his eyes swollen, his face hollowed with dried tears he didn't remember having. The drawing lay beside him on the bed, slightly crumpled from where he'd clutched it during the night. Five stick figures. One labeled "Onii-chan." The others nameless, faceless, ghosts without identity.
He stared at the crude lines for seventeen minutes—he counted—trying to force meaning from them. Trying to remember why his unconscious mind had compelled him to create this. But there was only static. Empty rooms. And a name that echoed in spaces he couldn't access: Karanome.
He knew this with absolute certainty, though he couldn't explain how or why. Just knew it the way he knew his own heartbeat, his own breath. Karanome. The name felt like coming home and losing home simultaneously. Familiar and foreign. Beloved and unbearable.
Clara knocked softly before entering, carrying tea that had become their morning ritual. She saw the drawing, saw his tear-stained face, and her expression cycled through concern and sadness and something that looked almost like grief.
"Did you remember more?" she asked gently, setting the tea on his desk.
"A name," Buki said, his voice hoarse from sleep or crying or both. "Karanome. I had a brother named Karanome. Or I didn't. Or I did but in a different life. The data is contradictory. The files are corrupted. I can't—"
He stopped. His hands were shaking again. Tremor frequency: 4.2. Lower than yesterday but still present. Still evidence of system malfunction.
"It's okay not to know everything right now," Clara said, sitting on the edge of his bed. "Memory doesn't return in neat, organized ways. It comes in fragments. Sometimes the fragments don't make sense for a long time. Sometimes they never do."
"How long?" Buki asked. "How long until I remember properly? Until the fragments become complete files? Until I understand why thinking about Karanome makes my heart malfunction?"
Clara's expression became complicated. "There's no timeline for this, Buki. For some people, it's months. For others, years. Some people never fully remember their trauma. And sometimes that's a blessing, not a curse."
A blessing. To not remember. To stay in these empty rooms forever, never accessing whatever horror was sealed away. Part of him—the weapon part, the survival part—wanted that. Wanted to return to 2.3, to baseline, to numbness as protection.
But another part—smaller, quieter, possibly human—needed to know. Needed to understand why his body remembered what his mind refused to access. Needed to give name and face to the grief that had been growing inside him like dead plant since he delivered that letter to Mrs. Ishikawa.
"I have to go back today," he said, looking at the drawing again. "To complete the delivery. Mrs. Ishikawa is still waiting for her letter. And her son—the kid named Kenji—" It wasn't Karanome—though it was close enough that the mistake still mattered. The wrong name, similar in sound and memory, had been enough to trigger the chain of events. At the time, he'd confused the two without realizing the consequence. Now Buki understands. He only learns the child's true name after the fact, accepting it through the lens of trauma that finally forced the truth to surface. From this child that triggered a memory. "I need to see him again. Need to understand why he—"
"Are you sure that's wise?" Clara interrupted carefully. "Yesterday you had a severe dissociative episode. Seeing him again might—"
"I need to," Buki insisted, and his voice carried an edge he rarely used with Clara. "I need to see if it happens again. If the memory surfaces. If I can access the files. I need data. I need to understand."
Clara studied him for a long moment. Then nodded slowly. "Okay. But I'm coming with you. And if it becomes too much, we leave immediately. Agreed?"
"Acknowledged," Buki said, then remembered: "Yes."
The Ishikawa house looked different in the gray morning light. Smaller somehow. More fragile. The blue paint on the door seemed to have peeled further overnight, though that was impossible. The child's bicycle still lay on its side in the yard, one wheel spinning slowly in the wind like a compass searching for direction.
Buki stood at the gate for three minutes and forty-seven seconds before Clara gently touched his shoulder. "Ready?" she asked.
Was he ready? To face a child who reminded him of someone he couldn't remember? To deliver death while carrying his own dead inside him? To function as a postal worker when he could barely function as a person?
"No," he admitted. "But protocol requires completion within 48 hours. I'm already 21 hours delayed."
"This isn't about protocol, Buki. This is about whether you can handle—" "I can handle it," he interrupted, though his trembling hands suggested otherwise. Tremor frequency: 3.8. "I have to."
He walked to the door. Knocked three times. Waited.
Mrs. Ishikawa opened the door, and her face showed no recognition of yesterday's incomplete delivery. Perhaps Yuki had returned to explain. Perhaps she'd been too consumed by her own grief to notice one postal worker's breakdown. Perhaps it didn't matter.
"Imperial War Correspondence," Buki stated, his voice mechanically precise. "Delivery for Mrs. Tomoe Ishikawa. Official correspondence regarding Private Kenji Ishikawa."
The strangers face crumpled—hope dying in real-time, replaced by the terrible certainty that came with formal military notifications. She took the envelope with shaking hands, but didn't open it. Just held it like it might detonate.
"He's dead," she said. Not a question. A statement of fact she'd been preparing for. "Affirmative," Buki confirmed. "Killed in action, Battle of Kuroda Pass, six months prior to—"
A small voice from inside the house: "Mama? Is that about Papa?"
The eight-year-old appeared in the doorway. Not Karanome. Buki repeated this internally, forcing the distinction. Not Karanome. Just a child. Just a kid named Kenji who happened to be eight years old with messy hair and a gap-toothed smile and—
The pressure in his heart spiked. 6.7. 8.2. 9.4. The child looked at Buki with curious eyes. "You're the mail person from yesterday. You ran away. Are you okay now?"
A memory, fragmented: a small kid, same age, same concern in his voice. "Onii-chan, are you okay? You look sad." Sticky hands touching his face, trying to wipe away tears he didn't remember shedding. "Don't be sad. I'll draw you a picture to make you feel better!"
"I—" Buki's voice fractured. "I'm—" "Takeshi, go inside," Mrs. Ishikawa said sharply. "Now." "But Mama—" "NOW."
The kid retreated, confusion and hurt warring on his face. Mrs. Ishikawa turned back to Buki, and her expression was complicated—grief for her husband, yes, but also something else. Concern for this obviously damaged postal worker standing on her doorstep, barely holding himself together.
"Thank you for the delivery," she said quietly. "You can go now."
Buki nodded stiffly, turned to leave. Made it three steps before his legs gave out. Not dramatically. Just... stopped functioning. He sank to his knees in the yard, beside the fallen bicycle, while his heart rate climbed to dangerous levels and his breathing became irregular and some fundamental part of his operating system crashed completely.
Clara was there immediately, arms around him, voice urgent: "Buki, breathe. Count with me. One, two, three—"
But he couldn't count. Couldn't breathe. Couldn't do anything except exist in the space between memory and forgetting while something vast and terrible tried to surface from those empty rooms.
A different yard. Different house. Smaller. A bicycle there too—red, not blue. A small child riding it in circles, laughing, calling out: "Onii-chan, watch me! Watch how fast I can go!" Faster. Too fast. The bicycle tipping. The child falling. Scraped knees. Tears. And him—Daichi? Was that his name?—running to help, picking up his little brother, saying: "It's okay, Karanome. You're okay. I've got you. I'll always protect you."
"Karanome," Buki gasped, the name tearing from his throat like confession, like prayer, like accusation. "His name was Karanome. My little brother. He was eight years old and he loved drawing and he believed in everything and I—I—"
The memory shattered before completing. Sealed itself away again. But it left residue: the certain knowledge that Karanome had existed. That Buki—no, someone else, someone before Buki—had loved him. Had promised to protect him.
And had failed.
Clara was still holding him, still trying to bring him back to the present. Mrs. Ishikawa stood in her doorway, letter in hand, watching this postal worker's complete breakdown in her yard with an expression that suggested she recognized trauma when she saw it.
"He's a soldier," she said quietly. It wasn't a question. "Was," Clara corrected. "He's trying to be something else now. It's not going well. Well at first it was going well. Until that letter from his old general."
Buki forced himself to stand. His legs were unsteady—balance compromised, motor control suboptimal—but he managed it through sheer will. "I apologize for the disruption," he said mechanically. "The delivery is complete. You have 30 days to file for widow's benefits. The procedures are detailed in the enclosed documentation. I—"
"Stop," Mrs. Ishikawa interrupted. "Just stop. You don't have to do that. You don't have to be professional right now."
But he did. Professionalism was all he had. Remove it, and what remained? Just a damaged fifteen-year-old who couldn't remember his own past, couldn't deliver a simple letter without breaking down, couldn't be human no matter how hard he tried.
Clara guided him away from the house, away from the eight-year-old who wasn't Karanome but reminded him of Karanome, away from his failure that seemed to echo across time and space and impossible distances.
They didn't return to the postal office. Instead, Clara led him to a small tea house on the eastern edge of the city—quiet, nearly empty, the kind of place where broken people could exist without judgment. She ordered tea he wouldn't drink and sat across from him in silence, waiting for him to speak or not speak, to exist or not exist, whatever he could manage.
"I had a little brother named Karanome," Buki said finally, his voice flat despite the chaos beneath it. "In another life. Before this one. I was fifteen and he was eight and something terrible happened. I don't remember what. But I failed him. I know I failed him. My body knows even when my mind doesn't. That's why seeing Mrs. Ishikawa's son makes my heart malfunction. That's why the pressure won't decrease. That's why I—"
He stopped. The words were too large, too impossible. How did one explain carrying grief for someone you couldn't remember? For a brother who existed in a life that might have been a dream or a delusion or something else entirely?
"You believe me," he said suddenly, looking at Clara directly. "That I had another life. That I died before and was reborn. You believe that's possible." Clara met his gaze steadily. "General Hazami believed it. And she was one of the smartest people I ever met. If she believed you, then yes, I believe you."
"But how?" The question was plaintive, almost childlike. "How is that possible? How can someone die and be reincarnated with their memories? How can I be fifteen twice? How can I carry trauma from a life that shouldn't exist?"
"I don't know," Clara admitted. "I don't have answers for that. But does it matter? Whether it was a previous life or elaborate trauma-induced fantasy or some phenomenon beyond our understanding—does the mechanism matter? You're carrying real grief for someone named Karanome. That grief is destroying you. The source of it is less important than figuring out how to help you survive it."
Survive it. The words hung between them like a challenge. Could he survive grief for someone he couldn't remember? Could he deliver letters about death while carrying his own undeliverable sorrow? Could he bloom while rooted in trauma that spanned lifetimes?
The veteran found Buki three days later.
Buki had returned to his postal route—lighter schedule now, only civilian correspondence, nothing about death—but he moved through it like a ghost. Present but not present. Functional but not functional. Delivering letters without seeing the people who received them.
He was leaving a residential building when a voice stopped him: "You've got the eyes."
Buki turned. An elderly gramps stood in the doorway—seventies, maybe older, his face a topographical map of violence survived.
"What eyes?" Buki asked, though he already knew. Recognition was mutual, immediate. This gramps had seen what Buki had seen. Had killed as Buki had killed. Had survived war only to discover that survival was just a different kind of dying.
"Dead eyes," the veteran said. "Seen too much. Done too much. The war ended but you're still fighting it in here." He tapped his temple with his trembling hand. "How old are you, kid?"
"Fifteen years, eight months, six days."
The veteran's face did something complicated—pity and anger and something that looked like grief. "They started you young. Like me. I was twelve when they took me. Thirty years of war. Another forty years of trying to forget it." He gestured to the empty apartment behind him. "You have time. Come in. I'll make tea. Tell you what they don't tell young soldiers. About what happens after."
Buki should have declined. Should have completed his route. Should have maintained professional distance. But something in the veteran's eyes—those dead eyes that matched his own—made him follow.
The apartment was sparse, almost military in its organization. Few possessions. Everything precise. Everything controlled. A lifetime of discipline that couldn't be unlearned even when the war ended decades ago.
They sat at a low table. The veteran poured tea with shaking hands—some spilled, he didn't seem to notice. "What's your name, kid?" "Buki Kirā." "That your real name or your soldier name?"
The question hit harder than expected. "I... don't know. Both, maybe. Or neither. I can't access the data."
The veteran nodded like this made perfect sense. "I'm Takeshi Hayashi. That's not my real name either. Can't remember what my parents called me. The military renamed me when I was twelve. By the time the war ended, I'd forgotten who I was before. Tried to remember. Tried for years. Eventually gave up. Realized maybe some things should stay forgotten."
"But what if you need to remember?" Buki asked. "What if the memories are destroying you but you can't access them to process them properly?"
"Then you're doomed," Takeshi said bluntly. "Pardon my yelling. But that's the truth. You're trapped between forgetting and remembering. Both options are hell. Forget, and you carry ghosts you can't name. Remember, and you carry ghosts you wish you couldn't name. There's no winning."
The honesty was brutal, refreshing. Everyone else treated Buki like he might break with the wrong words. But Takeshi spoke to him like an equal—one traumatized soldier to another, across generations.
"I have a brother," Buki said quietly. "Karanome. Or I had one. In another life. I died and was reborn and he's—I don't know where he is or if he's alive or if he even existed outside my damaged mind. But I can't stop thinking about him. Can't stop feeling like I failed him."
Takeshi was quiet for a long moment. Then: "My whole unit died. Fifty-seven soldiers. I was the only survivor. Happened forty-three years ago. I still see their faces every night. Still hear them calling for help I couldn't give. Still feel like I should have died with them." He took a sip of tea with trembling hands. "Survivor's guilt. That's what the doctors call it. Like giving it a name makes it manageable. It doesn't. Nothing makes it manageable. You just... carry it. Forever. Some days the weight is lighter. Most days it crushes you."
"Does it ever stop?" Buki asked. "The crushing?"
"No," Takeshi said simply. "It doesn't stop. You just get better at pretending it did. That's the truth they don't tell young soldiers. Surviving the war is harder than fighting it. Because in war, you have purpose. Mission objectives. Clear enemies. After war—" He gestured at his empty apartment. "After war, you're just a person who knows how to kill but not how to live. A person who understands violence but not peace. A person who's fluent in death but illiterate in everything else."
The description was so accurate it hurt. Buki stared at his tea, watching steam rise and dissipate, temporary and meaningless.
"I can't remember most of my trauma," he admitted. "It's locked away. But my body remembers. When I see certain things—a child named Kenji, or Karanome, or any eight-year-old kid now—something inside me fractures. The pressure in my heart spikes. My hands shake. I can't breathe. And I don't know why."
"Your body's trying to protect you," Takeshi said. "By making you remember slowly. Little pieces at a time. If it all came back at once, you'd probably lose your mind completely. I've seen it happen. Soldiers who recover their full memories after years of suppression—some of them never recover from the recovery, if that makes sense."
It did make sense. Terrible, awful sense.
"So what do I do?" Buki asked, and the question was almost pleading. "How do I survive this? How do I exist with grief for someone I can't remember? How do I function as a human when I don't know how to be human?"
Takeshi looked at him with those dead eyes, and for a moment, something that might have been compassion flickered there.
"Honestly, kid? I don't know. I've been trying to figure that out for forty years. Haven't found an answer yet." He paused. "But I'll tell you what my granddaughter told me once. She was six years old, visiting me in this shitty apartment. I was having a bad day—flashback, couldn't stop shaking, couldn't look at her without seeing corpses. She asked me: 'Grandpa, why don't you ever smile?' And I didn't have an answer. Realized I couldn't remember the last time I had."
"What did you say?" Buki asked.
"Nothing. I just cried. First time in decades. She climbed into my lap—this tiny six-year-old hugged her traumatized grandfather while he fell apart—and said: 'It's okay to be sad, Grandpa. Mama says sad people need extra hugs.' And she hugged me." Takeshi's voice broke slightly. "Such a simple thing. But it was the first time since the war ended that anyone had touched me with kindness. Everyone else was afraid of me. Or disgusted. Or just... gone. But she wasn't."
"Did it help?" Buki asked. "The hug?"
"Not really," Takeshi admitted. "I still have nightmares. Still see my dead unit. Still can't remember my real name. But—" He paused, searching for words. "It reminded me that kindness exists. That not everything is violence and death and trauma. That maybe, somewhere beneath all the damage, something human still survived."
Buki thought about this. About Yuki crying with strangers. About Clara's patient presence. About Kaito's rough understanding. About General Hazami's letter ordering him to bloom. Small acts of kindness in a world that had been systematically cruel to him.
"I don't feel human," Buki said quietly. "I feel like a weapon pretending to be a person. Playing at humanity without understanding the rules."
"Yeah," Takeshi agreed. "That's accurate. That's exactly what it feels like. And honestly, kid—it might always feel like that. You might never feel fully human again. But—" He held up a trembling hand. "Even broken things can serve a purpose. Even damaged people can matter. You deliver letters, right? Death notifications?"
"Yes. And other correspondence."
"Then you're doing something I never could," Takeshi said. "I can't even look at letters from the war. Can't handle other people's grief on top of my own. But you—you're carrying your own dead and helping others carry theirs. That takes strength. Maybe not the kind of strength they taught you in the military. But strength nonetheless."
Was it strength? Or just the inability to quit? The weapon's programming overriding the person's exhaustion?
"I want to give up," Buki admitted. "Every day. I want to stop existing. Stop delivering death. Stop remembering and forgetting and existing in this impossible space between. But I can't. General Hazami ordered me to live. And I—even though she's dead, even though the order makes no sense—I can't disobey."
"Good," Takeshi said firmly. "Don't disobey. Keep living. Even when it hurts. Especially when it hurts. Because the alternative—" His expression darkened. "I've tried the alternative. Three times. Pills, rope, gun. Obviously, I failed. And you know what the worst part was? Not the pain. Not the failure. But the look on my granddaughter's face when she visited me in the hospital. She was nine years old, crying, asking why Grandpa wanted to leave her. And I realized—even damaged, even broken, even completely fucking destroyed—I still mattered to someone. My existence still meant something to one tiny person in this vast, indifferent universe."
The words settled into Buki like stones into deep water. Sinking. Heavy. True. "I don't have a granddaughter," Buki said.
"No. But you have people who check on you. Who worry when you disappear. Who sit with you when you fall apart. That's more than a lot of us have." Takeshi finished his tea. "You asked me how long until it gets better. I told you it doesn't. But here's what I didn't say: it gets different. The weight doesn't decrease, but you get stronger at carrying it. The pain doesn't fade, but you learn to function alongside it. The dead don't leave, but you learn to live with ghosts. It's not better. But it's survivable. Barely. Most days."
Buki looked at this elderly veteran—forty years past his war, still carrying his dead, still trembling, still alive despite everything. Was that his future? Decades of this crushing pressure, this endless grief, this impossible existence between human and weapon?
"That sounds terrible," Buki said honestly.
"It is terrible," Takeshi agreed. "But it's also life. Real life. Not the sanitized version they show in picture books. Not the heroic version they tell in stories. Just the brutal, ugly, exhausting work of surviving trauma while pretending to be functional. Welcome to the rest of your existence, kid. It's going to be hell. But at least you're not alone in it."
They sat in silence for a long time, two soldiers from different wars, different generations, carrying different dead. But the weight was the same. The crushing was the same. The impossible task of being human after learning to be a weapon—that was the same too.
When Buki finally left, Takeshi walked him to the door. "One more thing," the veteran said. "About your brother. Karanome." Buki's heart clenched. 7.3.
"You're going to spend the rest of your life wondering if he's okay. Wondering if your sacrifice mattered. Wondering if he survived the trauma or if it destroyed him. You'll never know. That uncertainty—it's its own special torture. Worse than knowing he died, because at least death is finite. But not-knowing? That's infinite. That's forever."
"How do I survive that?" Buki asked. "The infinite not-knowing?"
Takeshi's expression was grim. "Badly. But you do it anyway. Because that's what soldiers do. We survive the unsurvivable. We carry the uncarryable. We exist in the impossible spaces. Not because we're strong. But because we don't know how to do anything else."
Buki walked back through Shin-Tokyo carrying those words like additional weight. The veteran was right—it was terrible. All of it. The remembering and forgetting. The grief without closure. The existence without purpose. The slow, grinding work of surviving trauma while everyone else lived their normal lives, oblivious to the wars being fought inside damaged minds.
That night, alone in his room, Buki looked at the drawing again. Five stick figures. One labeled "Onii-chan." And now, carefully, he wrote a name under the smallest figure: "Karanome."
A brother he couldn't remember but couldn't forget. A child who existed somewhere—in another world, in memory, in the empty rooms of his mind—calling for protection that never came.
"I'm trying," Buki whispered to the drawing, to the ghost, to himself. "I'm trying to survive this. But it's so hard. And I don't know if I'm strong enough. I don't know if forty years is survivable. I don't know if any of this is survivable."
The drawing didn't answer. The ghosts never did. But somewhere in the distance, cherry trees waited for spring. And Buki—broken, grieving, barely human—waited with them.
TO BE CONTINUED...