Kaito's room was a sanctuary of order. Textbooks stood in sentinel-straight rows on his shelves. His desk was clear but for a single open notebook, a pen lying parallel to its edge, and a lamp casting a perfect circle of light. He had scheduled this time for advanced calculus review. The numbers on the page, however, had begun to swim and blur.
They dissolved not into confusion, but into an image: Hikari's smile on the rooftop. It wasn't her sharp, defensive smirk. It was the small, real, almost shy one that had appeared when he'd called her a friend. The warmth of that memory was a foreign sensation in his chest, a gentle heat that bypassed all his systems of emotional regulation. It was an anomaly his mind couldn't process, and it was cracking open a door he had welded shut half a lifetime ago.
He put his pen down, the click too loud in the silent room. He closed his eyes, and the present fell away.
---
Nine Years Ago
The Sato home was a symphony of warmth. The air smelled of his mother's cinnamon rolls and the ink from his father's newspaper. Eight-year-old Kaito was a bright sunbeam in that house—curious, talkative, his laughter echoing off the walls. He brought home drawings that were praised not for their technique, but for their wild imagination. He believed the world was a kind place where effort was met with smiles and trust was a gift you gave freely.
In third grade, the orbit of his world expanded to include a group of fourth-grade boys. They were cooler, louder, more confident. They noticed him.
"Hey, Kaito! You're smart, right? What's the answer for number seven?"
"Good job on that test,man. You're a genius!"
Their attention was a drug.Young Kaito, starved for peer validation, basked in it. He finally had "friends."
The requests began subtly, wrapped in camaraderie.
"Let me see your homework,just to check mine."
"The teacher's asking you anyway,just whisper me the answer."
"Cover for me,she'll believe you."
Kaito complied every time.He wanted to be helpful. He wanted to belong. To be needed felt even better than to be praised.
Then, the environment shifted. The praise in public turned to quiet corrosion in private, in the corner of the schoolyard or the empty hallway after class.
"You're not actually smart, you know. You just memorize everything like a parrot."
"Do you ever have an original thought?Or do you just spit back what the teacher says?"
They mocked the careful curls of his handwriting.They imitated his polite, precise way of speaking, twisting it into something weak and ridiculous. The laughter was no longer inclusive; it was a weapon, and he was the target. The confusion was paralyzing. Why were they nice one moment and cruel the next? What was he doing wrong?
The end was a masterpiece of childish malice. They convinced him to "borrow" the key to the equipment shed for a "secret game." Trusting, desperate to regain their fleeting approval, he did. They used it not for a game, but to trash the shed. When the teacher discovered the chaos, they pointed as one to Kaito, the key still in his trembling hand.
"He said he wanted to see the new balls. We told him not to."
The teacher,a woman he admired, looked from the vandalism to his ashen face. Her expression wasn't anger. It was something far worse: profound, weary disappointment. The trust he'd valued most—the trust of an authority figure who believed in his goodness—withdrew like a tide, leaving him exposed on a barren shore.
Their laughter as they walked away, scot-free, was a sound that seared itself onto his soul. The lesson was learned, branded into him with the cold efficiency of trauma:
His innate goodness had made him a target.
His open trust had made him a fool.
---
That summer, the bright, chattering boy who lived in the warm house died. In his place, a new Kaito was engineered.
Emotions were illogical, messy, and dangerous. They were weaknesses that could be exploited. He locked them away.
Friendship was a transactional lie,a prelude to betrayal. He would opt out.
If perfection could be achieved—flawless grades,impeccable behaviour, unassailable logic—then there would be no angle for criticism, no flaw to attack. He built systems: colour-coded notes, strict schedules, measured responses. His politeness became a wall. His academic success became a fortress.
His parents watched, heartbroken and confused. Their sweet son had retreated into a polite, distant stranger. Their love for him remained a constant, warm hum in the house, but it now echoed in the hollows of the shell he'd become. They could knock, but the door was locked from the inside.
---
Kaito opened his eyes. He was back in his orderly room, his heart pounding with a rhythm that belonged to that scared eight-year-old. He looked at his open planner, at the meticulous entry for yesterday that read: Library - History Project Finalization.
He had drawn a neat, precise checkmark next to it. But now, in his mind's eye, he saw a different mark—a faint, glowing asterisk. That was Ground Zero. That was where the flawless, defensive system he'd spent years building had first experienced a critical, inexplicable failure.
Hikari Tanaka had not tried to befriend him. She had not praised him. She had called his perfect notes a "confused parrot." She had challenged his logic with her "feeling." She had been a variable his equations could not solve, a virus his firewall could not detect. She had bypassed every defense because she approached him not as "Kaito the Untouchable Honor Student," but as a problem to be solved, and then, impossibly, as a person.
Defending her in class hadn't been a strategic calculation. It had been an instinct. A raw, human reflex from the boy he'd buried. Calling her a friend hadn't been a planned output; it had been an instinctual truth, spoken before his logic could censor it.
He stared at the blank page of his notebook under the lamplight. The schedule for tomorrow was already neatly inscribed on the next page.
Slowly, he turned to a fresh, clean sheet at the very back of the notebook. He picked up his pen, the same instrument he used to record immutable facts and solve definitive equations.
At the top of the empty page, he did not write a title. He did not draw a timeline or a chart.
He simply sat there, the pen poised, and let himself remember. The feeling of the afternoon sun on the rooftop. The sound of a lonely, beautiful violin echoing in a dusty hall. The terrifying, exhilarating warmth of a shared, silent smile.
He just wanted, with a quiet, desperate hope, to understand it. Not to solve it like an equation to be filed away, but to follow it like a path leading somewhere new. For the first time, the heavy, invisible chain of the past felt less like an anchor and more like a weight he could choose to put down. The future, which had always been a meticulously plotted graph extending into a predictable grey, now held a single, unexpected variable—a variable with messy hair, a blunt tongue, and a secret melody. He didn't just want to analyze the feeling. He wanted, more than anything, to step into the present it promised, and see what kind of future might unfold from there.
He just wanted, with a quiet, desperate hope, to understand it.
(End of Chapter 12)