Towa seems completely oblivious to it. His eye is unfocused, and he is crying freely, and his right eye socket is throbbing dully. His left hand's lying limply on his thigh, his cigarette all but forgotten, and even the hot ashes falling onto his skin aren't getting a reaction out of him.

"She s-smiled. She said it wasn't m-my fault." He hiccups and squeezes his eye shut and tries to remember why he's saying all of this. Why he's making himself go through this. But now he can't seem to stop. "She s-said she d-didn't blame me. And she s-said..."

"I̷͇͛t̸́͜'̴̟̈s̵͙̿ ̶̞͛a̴̗͌l̵̫̈́r̵̡̂ï̷͕g̴̪͆ḧ̵̬́t̴̯̐.̵̫̓"

He takes in a sharp breath, quickly enough that he chokes on it and starts coughing. This mixes really badly with the sobbing and he's having a lot of trouble breathing again.

But his eye looks like someone's thrown a bucket of cold water on him. Did he say it out loud? He thinks he might have. It felt like—like Maya was—but she's dead. And he's not Maya. No matter what, he is not her.

"...and then I woke up," he finishes quietly, eventually, once his coughing has subsided some and he no longer feels like he's being hunted.

Fujieda hasn't let go of him for even a second, hasn't stopped petting him and trying to soothe him as best he can. "Would you like me to work from home today?" he asks, in a subdued tone, once Towa is done recounting the dream.

Towa feels like he should be laughing at that, or maybe crying more, but instead that seems to have entirely drained his emotions into a pit somewhere. He feels cold. "No," he replies curtly. "That's ridiculous."

"Towa..."

"I need some air," he says, suddenly, pushing Fujieda away and getting up to go find his clothes.

Fujieda silently watches Towa get dressed, grab his phone, cigarettes, and keys, and leave without saying goodbye. He sighs to himself and starts getting ready for work.

Shinkōmi was made for him, Towa's always felt. An ugly, scarred face, with an even uglier, more scarred interior. The kind of place where he could find some random alley and get some people to beat the shit out of him until he was almost dead and no one would come investigate.

Well. Not strictly true. He had a really hard time finding anyone who would actually beat him to near death, since the way to get there is by trying to beat him to death and then failing. Most people wouldn't try that hard.

And also, it's not really true at all anymore, or it's on its way to becoming not true. It's been eight months since Sakaki and Toono died, and the gang followed shortly after. With the opportunity and the power vacuum, the mainland finally got their people here and now they're trying to get this place under control.

That's right, that means real cops. Real cops that won't beat the shit out of him even if he asks nicely.

And he shouldn't be strategising about how to get his ass kicked. That's what a therapist would call "an unhealthy coping mechanism", not that Towa's ever met a therapist. Nor, he muses, has he ever met a healthy coping mechanism.

Most importantly, though, it would make Fujieda sad, and Towa has been observing, with great annoyance, that that has started to matter more and more to him as time goes on. If he were smart he'd just run away, but he's not smart, he's never been smart, and he's not running away. Besides, the time to run away was two months ago when Fujieda first invited him to move in, not now. It's too late now.

That line of thought brings a smile to his face. He's been smiling a lot, recently, and he's finding that he doesn't even mind it that much. He's not running away, and if Fujieda isn't kicking him out then he supposes he's staying.

But that means that he can't try to go looking for people to inflict grievous bodily harm on him and so he has to find other ways to cope. And maybe he could go looking for sex instead but he hasn't brushed his teeth and his face looks like a disgusting mess from all of the crying and he promised Fujieda that he was going to try to limit himself to reputable, clean hookups.

(He had been half joking when he brought it up, and he was surprised by how seriously Fujieda took the question, though in retrospect he shouldn't have been; that was just how Fujieda was. And contrary to his expectations, Fujieda hadn't actually been assuming they'd be exclusive, even though Towa himself wouldn't have actually minded it that much. Fujieda said that,

"I want to support you and be a good thing in your life. I know... who you are. And I don't want you to become someone else for me. I just want you to become—happy."

and for reasons Towa didn't want to examine at the time they were forced to stop that conversation in the middle so that Towa could get Fujieda to fuck his brains out. But the end result is that they aren't exclusive, technically, even though Towa hasn't actually been with anyone else since.)

So, coping mechanisms: incredible violence is out, inadvisable sex is out, he's just walked out on Fujieda and he will die before he goes back home with his tail between his legs to beg for Fujieda's attention even while he knows Fujieda would never begrudge him it. What's left?

What do other people use to cope?

Drugs—he's got a cig between his lips, he's already half drunk, and he's not interested in the harder kinds.

Exercise—he supposes he's going on a walk, right now, though that hardly even counts, he always walks everywhere, but also Fujieda has gotten him to start working out and it was just a lot less effort to go along with it than to try to resist so he's been exercising a lot actually. He'll keep it in the back of his mind as an option, he guesses.

Food—hmm. He still doesn't really like food but he hasn't eaten anything today and he might as well go to Tajima's and grab some snacks there.

And as a bonus, he'll get to see that painting.

With that destination in mind, he walks.

The owner of the snack shop is a lady in her eighties who has lived in Shinkōmi since before it was called that, and certainly before the Takasato-gumi had taken over. She's a tough little thing, and Towa sometimes thinks that she's going to outlive him. He's never sure if she likes him, because while she's always incredibly curt and rude with him, she is that with everyone, and she does seem to appreciate his money. Towa himself finds that he's pretty fond of her, in that way people are sometimes fond of an old park that isn't quite so badly maintained that it's unpleasant to be in and which has a certain quaint charm and a nostalgic air.

When he walks into the shop she looks up and makes a displeased noise. "You look like shit."

"Yeah," he agrees, but he doesn't really look at her. Instead, he looks up at the corner where the wall to his right meets the ceiling. There's a painting there, one that always brings him—something akin to happiness.

That was the painting that inspired Towa to become a painter, when he was a small child. He saw it once and asked Maya to get it for him, and so she did, but it never even got hung on any walls back at the mansion and he forgot about it alongside all of his other memories. But the most frustrating part is that Old Tajima acquired this painting years ago—from Maya herself—and Towa never recognised it, because his brain had been blocking it out of his vision as a way to protect his sanity from the effects remembering his childhood would have.

Now he can see it, and though the memory is associated with Maya, it's also... good. Beautiful.

"Are you going to buy something or not?" Tajima says, impatiently. She usually lets Towa stare at the painting for a little bit whenever he visits but "a little bit" isn't actually that long.

That is a dance he is used to. "Yeah," he replies, lowering his gaze back to the store proper. He picks a bunch of stuff up at random, not really paying attention to what any of it is, then places it in a bag and offers it to Tajima.

"400 yen."

Towa slaps a thousand yen bill on the counter. "Keep the change."