|Mockingbird|
“… So… my Dad’s an asshole,” Ryūnosuke, seated at the edge of the river with her knees drawn to her chest, began as she stared at the street-lit waters below. “As long as I can remember, he told me I was his son. He raised me like a boy, taught me how to fight and stuff, and even gave me a boy’s name. And I didn’t know anything else so why even question it?”
Nick, seated next to her, nodded. “Mmhm, I guess that didn’t last long?”
“Lasted until I turned ten…” Ryūnosuke said with an implying edge to her voice.
Nick chuckled. “Ahh, I see. I have four daughters who all went through it around then.”
Ryūnosuke rolled her eyes. “I freaked out so bad, but guess what my Dad said when I told him?”
Nick gestured to her to go on. “What did he say?”
“He said it was a curse that afflicts men every full moon, one that I would have to train non-stop to break.”
She closed her eyes and shook her head in shame. “… And I freaking believed it.”
Instead of mocking laughter, Nick absolved her with a gentle response. “It ain’t your fault. You were ten, and you didn’t have anyone to tell you different.”
Ryūnosuke stared at Nick, surprised he didn’t take a cheap shot at her for not knowing something that apparently was so obvious because of her dumbass Dad. She looked down again at the river. “I finally figured it out six months after that, when my old man sent me to school to get an education and learn to run the shop. It was around that time other changes started happenin’ and I was getting picked on by other kids.”
“Early bloomer, huh?” When Ryūnosuke nodded, Nick hummed in sympathy. “Kids are cruel.”
“Yeah, well I was worse,” Ryūnosuke said with a bit of pride. “Kicked all their butts.”
Nick nodded. “Attagirl.”
“But that’s how reality kinda kicked in. The teachers didn’t understand why the kids were all picking on me, and I was fighting them, until finally we had to have a parent-teacher meeting about all my fighting. With me and the boys that I fought.”
Ryūnosuke curled up more, as embarrassment began to settle in. “… I don’t think I wanna tell this part of the story, it’s really messed up.”
Rather than press the subject, Nick nodded. “No pressure.”
Sitting in silence once again, Ryūnosuke took a deep breath and ignored the throbbing of her injuries… made worse by her stomach growling.
A moment after her stomach churned, Nick got up. “… You hungry?”
“Why?” Ryūnosuke asked.
Nick rubbed his chin. “… Because I’m buyin’.”
Ryūnosuke’s eyebrows rose a little bit.
Fifteen minutes later, after taking her order, he came back with takeout. Ryūnosuke now held a paper cardboard container of rice, beef, vegetables, and seafood in her hand and was hungrily scarfing it down. Nick sat beside her once more, eating his own container of fried noodles and chicken.
“Thanks, old man,” Ryūnosuke said between bites.
Nick snorted in mock offense. “Do I look old to you?”
“Please, you’re above 20, you’re old.” Ryūnosuke chided back.
Nick ran that logic through his head. “Okay, that’s fair.”
“You act like an old man at least. All polite and shit, not like the man-children I know wherever I go…” She grumbled.
Shoving his mouth full of noodles, Nick waited for Ryūnosuke to decide if she wanted to talk about it, and after a few moments of consideration she went on unprompted. “At the meeting, the principal demanded an explanation for why I was getting into fights, and the boys I beat up said it was because I was a girl in the boy’s bathroom.”
She tilted her head down. “I got angry for being called a girl, because Dad taught me that being called a girl was the worst thing ever, and that if anyone called me a girl, they were shaming my manhood and I should fight them like the sea.”
Nick lifted an eyebrow. “… Like the sea?”
“Yeah, the sea, my Dad freaking hates it. I think it’s rad as hell.”
There were no disagreements there. “Yeah, the sea is kinda cool. My family have a house by it, we go there in the winter when its storming to watch the waves crash in.”
Ryūnosuke liked the sound of that. “Oh, that must be awesome…”
She went back to her story. “Anyway, my Dad was the one who freaked out even worse. He actually said he’d kick their asses if they said I was a girl, and then the boys’ fathers got up in his face, and it turned into a big argument. My teacher, who I really liked, took me aside outside of the office and she asked me some questions that nobody ever asked me before–especially about the ‘curse’ I kept talking about every month when it came.”
Nick understood where this was going. “… She figured it out, huh?”
Ryūnosuke nodded. “When she explained that… that’s just how girls are and the stuff I was going through was normal for girls… it clicked, yannow?”
She smiled a bit. “… It made sense; for the first time ever I was a girl, and it was… normal.”
Her eyes narrowed a little. “After the meeting, and my Dad being barred from ever setting foot on the school grounds again. We went home and I said to him that what the teacher said made sense, and that I was a girl. He didn’t like that.”
“Took you out of that school and tried to drill into your skull that you were a boy, huh?” Nick asked.
“Yep, but there was no goin’ back, and I’ve been fighting that idiot ever since.” Ryūnosuke resumed eating. “No calling myself a girl, no girl’s clothes, no girl’s interests, and definitely no boys… not that there’d be any boys that I like…”
Nick took a long, deep breath, then exhaled so hard that Ryūnosuke swore she saw the surface of the river ripple in front of him.
After a few long moments, he asked. “Where do you live, kiddo, at the school?”
Hesitantly, she nodded. “Yeah, but…”
“I’m gonna put you up for the night at a hotel,” Nick then said.
Ryūnosuke gave Nick a suspicious side-eye. “… Excuse me?”
Nick got up again. “Actually, a few nights. You don’t need to be going back to your father.”
Ryūnosuke leaned a bit away from Nick. “Listen old man, you’re easy to talk to, but I’m not…”
Looking at her, he cut her off. “The name Fujinami Masako mean anything to you?”
Ryūnosuke stopped talking, her mouth falling open. Blinking in disbelief, she now had many, many questions–but she knew the first she had to ask right now. “… That’s my mother’s name, do you know her?”
Nick reached into the jacket of his suit, and pulled out a polaroid picture, before handing it to her. Ryūnosuke, with a trembling hand, reached out and took the photo from him. It was a photo of three women sitting at a table at an outdoor café. One was a blonde, beaming woman holding a fussy, redheaded baby on her lap. On her left was a woman with fiery red hair like Nick, and she was holding a black-haired infant who was looking at the camera with green eyes just like its mother’s. On her right was a beautiful woman who radiated joy and relief as she held up an infant that Ryūnosuke recognized from her own baby pictures.
Nick pointed at the woman holding her infant self. “That’s your mother.”
He pointed at the baby. “And that’s…”
Ryūnosuke stared at the picture, in disbelief. “… Me…”
She looked up at him. “… Who… who the hell are you, old man?”
“I’m a close friend of your mother,” Nick explained. “Years and years ago… I came to Japan for some work and during that time I stayed with your parents. Your mother was… and still is a Saint. Your father was, and to my horror still is… a delusional jackass.”
“Where was I?” Ryūnosuke asked.
“You were a newborn, and while your mother was ecstatic to have a daughter, your father got started early on this business of you being his firstborn son.” Nick sighed. “I am not proud to admit that the man was so deeply entrenched in denial that he convinced me that you were a boy, and your mother was the crazy one claiming you were a girl.”
He tapped the side of his head. “But like the monthly troubles, there was always an inevitability that comes with caring for an infant still in diapers. At your Mom’s insistence–and given I had three kids under my belt by then–I took a crack at changing you and learned the truth.”
Ryūnosuke blinked. “So you’ve literally known me since I was a baby.”
“That’s right, kiddo.” Nick folded his arms. “Given the situation you were in? I did the only thing I knew to do.”
“That bein’?”
“I swept your Mom off her feet and took the both of you back home to the US.”
Ryūnosuke blinked in surprise. “… I’ve been to America?”
“Yeah, look at that photo. That’s the Seattle Space Needle in the background.” At his instruction she looked, and indeed in the background was the iconic structure of Seattle’s skyline.
“Whoa…” She stopped. “Wait… how’d I end up back with my dad?”
Nick’s nonchalance disappeared, replaced with a stewing fury. “Fucking Canada.”
Ryūnosuke tilted her head to one side. “… Canada?”
“Your father, the mad bastard, swam completely across the Pacific Ocean–allegedly–and made landfall in Vancouver. The second he got a microphone in his face; he unleashed this unholy sob story about how his wife betrayed him and kidnapped his son and flew half the world away to disappear.”
Ryūnosuke was struck. “… And they freaking bought that?!”
“Oh yeah, the ‘poor fisherman who crosses the sea to rescue his infant child from his adulterous wife’ angle was eaten up by everyone. It became an international freaking media circus and due to my work dragging me back to Asia at the time and my wife being banned from entering Canada, there was nothing either of us could do when he caught your Mom slipping, snatched you up, and ran back across the border.”
He seethed. “That was that. They put him and ‘his son’ on the first plane back to Tokyo, patting themselves on the back the whole time, and the second it touched down you both leaped off the grid.”
Ryūnosuke blinked again, and a trembling rage ran through her, adrenaline seeping back into her system and disappearing the pain again. “… Let me find out that’s why we always opened Hamachiya on different beaches every year.”
“Oh yeah, your Dad worked hard to disappear; your Mom came back to Japan three times to try to find you after she and all of us were able to convince those maple syrup-addicted, self-righteous jackasses that they fucked up.”
He smiled. “Then the aliens showed up, and you had all the luck of getting mired in the life of Moroboshi Ataru. When the name Fujinami Ryūnosuke popped up in stories related to him, your Mom started investigating. Since I was already here in the SAD for more work, I didn’t hesitate to add finding you to my itinerary.”
Ryūnosuke’s head was starting to spin. “So… because of Ataru my Mom was able to find me… and she never stopped looking…?”
“Of course not, you’re her daughter.”
After staring at Nick in silence for a moment, Ryūnosuke slowly turned her attention inward, and poked herself in the ribs. When she tensed in pain, she grew wide-eyed.
“I ain’t dreaming… my Mom is lookin’ for me, and she’s way prettier than all those other pictures of women Dad used to show me.”
Nick paused. “What other women?”
Ryūnosuke groaned. “Ugh… the women he’d show me pictures of whenever I’d ask about my Mom. He’d go into this whole thing where he’d show me a picture of some random woman and then say how she’s either dead or left and far away. Anytime I think I’d go out of my way to find out anything about my Mom, he’d interfere…”
Slowly, Nick nodded. “I see…”
“And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. He lies about stuff all the time, usually so he doesn’t have to share food with me, or so I don’t try to do girly things.”
When she looked back up at him, Nick was cast in silhouette for a moment. She could only make out his eyes and she realized they were widely dilated. “Uh… you okay, old timer?”
When Nick looked at her, the fearful presence was gone. “Let’s get going, kiddo. There’s a nice place in Taian I can put you up in.”
Ryūnosuke perked up. “Taian…?”
“Yeah,” Nick said, “And uh… while we walk and talk… tell me more about the nonsense your sperm donor pulls on you.”
Slowly getting up, Ryūnosuke cocked her head to one side. “Sperm donor?”
Nick began walking away, his expression filled with a dark and stormy fury. “Yeah… because that son of a gun ain’t got no right bein’ called yer Daddy.”
@@@@@
It was lunch time at Tomobiki High School, and despite the foolish and ill-advised efforts of the faculty at the behest of Mendō Shūtaro, many students were happily strolling off campus to eat for lunch. Ryūnosuke was not one of those students, as she was in 3-4 with a handsomely spread-out lunch on her desk and Shinobu and Lum joining her for it. She was in the middle of regaling them the story of how she met their new teacher and the shocking connection she had with him.
“That’s amazing!” Shinobu said, stunned beyond measure. “And Sherman-sensei just… found you?”
“Yeah,” Ryūnosuke replied, “He put me up in a nice room and during Golden Week he took me to a fancy hospital to get patched up, took me shopping for all the girly stuff I could ever want, and he even got me a phone and a laptop.”
“Wow!” Lum said. “Are you sure he’s not really just trying to be one of those candy father things?”
Shinobu looked at the alien. “For fuck’s sake, Lum!”
Ryūnosuke huffed smugly. “Nah, he ain’t a weirdo or anything like that! He’s just giving me all the stuff I should have but my Sperm Donor keeps refusin’ me!” She pulled at the collar of her uniform, revealing a blue strap on her right shoulder. “See? I’m actually wearin’ a bra! No more chest wraps for me!”
Half the boys in the classroom stood and violently craned their necks to look without getting too close. When Ryūnosuke noticed them and pulled her collar back with an annoyed sweep of her gaze, they remained in their positions–because Ryūnosuke in a girl’s uniform was a beautiful sight.
Shinobu had not lost sight of the plot. “… Sperm donor?”
Ryūnosuke leaned forward a bit towards Shinobu. “You’ve known me for almost a year, Miyake. You tell me that the idiot who raised me to be a boy, treatin’ me like shit the whole time, has any right to be called my Dad!”
Lum nodded. “She has a point, Shinobu-cha.”
“It’s just kind of an extreme shift, that’s all…” Shinobu tried to defend.
Shaking her head, Ryūnosuke vehemently disagreed. “Hello! This is sixteen years past due! That idiot kidnapped me from my mother and made me live with him in that stupid tea shop! Pretending I was a man and bullying me whenever I tried to be the girl I am! Do you know what they call that in a normal world?! Child abuse!”
Shinobu grimaced at Ryūnosuke saying such a thing. “Ehh… don’t say something like that so loud…”
Ryūnosuke huffed. “Whatever you don’t wanna call it… it’s more than enough for me to not want anything to do with that insult to men anymore.”
Ataru, whose gaze had been fixed on Ryūnosuke’s general direction, closed his eyes and gave a hum of wistful contemplation. “Ryū-chan is right, a father who cannot be proud of having such a smoking hot daughter has no right calling himself a man, let alone a father.”
Shinobu went from pensive to tired disgust. “You almost had it, Ataru.”
“I don’t even feel like zapping him.” Lum muttered.
Ataru turned in his chair to face her fully. “But… what are you going to do about that jerk? He’s gonna find out eventually, right?”
Lum noticed a trembling that slowly grew in volume and intensity as Ryūnosuke replied. “Yeah, he is. As a matter a’fact, I’m lucky he didn’t find out this morning when I came to class. I had to sneak in the back, you know–?”
The door to class 3-4 was slammed open with such force that the door broke. The entire class turned to see Ryūnosuke’s father standing in the doorway, his angular face sharpened into a scowl aimed at his child.
“Ah.” The entire classroom said as one.
Rather than throw a fit, Ryūnosuke just kept eating.
“Ryūnosuke,” her father said, “Why are you crossdressing in class?”
Rather than take offense at the accusation of crossdressing, she kept eating. “Why are you interrupting my lunch?”
“Boy, do you realize what kind of fool you’re making yourself out to be?” He asked.
“Hmph.” Ryūnosuke looked up at her father, then smirked. “I look amazing.”
She turned to her classmates, smiling. “Right guys?”
The other male students in class–with the exception of Hokuto, who has a girlfriend–immediately agreed with a lovestruck expression at Ryūnosuke’s dreamy smile. It actually made her jump, how quickly they turned from quietly staring to simping.
“… Wow, that’s powerful…”
Lum agreed. “Feminine beauty is great, use it wisely Ryū-cha.”
Ryūnosuke nodded in agreement to those sage words, then looked up at her father, who was now standing over her. He was… crying?
“What?”
Her gaze flattened, and she glowered at her father, as he looked outward towards the windows of the classroom. “Ryūnosuke, your mother was a frail woman, who gave all her strength to bring you into this world.”
Rolling her eyes, Ryūnosuke resumed eating as she let him speak.
“All of her love, all of her life was sacrificed to you, our first born and only,” he said dramatically. “It was with her dying breath, her last words in this world, that she whispered to me her final wish–that I make you a man among men, whose fists could split the waves and tame the sea.”
“Mmhm,” Ryūnosuke responded with her mouth full.
“I carried that wish, that burden, alone in my heart,” the elder Fujinami went on, “And though I may have been unduly harsh, my keeping you on the path to manhood was how my wife… your mother… could reach you from beyond…”
He stopped and looked at her lunch. “Wait… is that fatty tuna?!”
Ryūnosuke ate another piece without hesitating. “Mmm, yep!”
Forgetting about his spiel, her father slammed his hands on the desk, then got in close. “Oi, share with your old man.”
In response, Ryūnosuke stuffed another piece of the expensive sushi into her mouth. “Mm-mm.”
He pulled back, filled with indignation. “You ungrateful…! Where’d you even get this, huh?!”
Savoring the bittersweet tenderness of her fish, Ryūnosuke took a moment to chew and swallow her sushi, before giving her father a pleasant smile filled with broken, jagged steel. “… He gave it to me.”
“He?” Her father repeated.
“That’s ‘He’ With a capital H,” Nick said from the front of the class, as he set down a few cans of soda. “You know, because I’m Him.”
Fujinami turned several shades whiter than his dingy casual clothes, when he heard Nick’s voice behind him. Ryūnosuke’s smug smile at his reaction faded when a new one followed–her father’s skin turned from titanium white… to a shade of red that rapidly deepened.
Once more, there was a shaking Lum noticed–but she was not alone in her awareness, as Shinobu, Ataru, and the other students began looking around while the walls shook, and the windows rattled.
Ryūnosuke’s father turned to face the teacher, whose eyebrows rose in surprise at his transformation. “Hey Fuji-kun, how many gates did you just open…?”
And then Fujinami was a blur, shooting down the row of desks straight for Nick as he drew his fist back. Reaching him, he opened his mouth and bellowed out a single word.
“FONTAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAINE!”
There was a tremendous crash and a plume of dust, drywall, chalkboard, and wood–as Ryūnosuke’s Dad met the wall behind Nick at the highest possible speed of his lunge. Standing just to his left of where he had been standing in Fujinami’s path, Nick looked at the man and the perfect outline of his body in the wall.
Picking up a can of juice, Nick tossed it over the heads of several students to Ryūnosuke, then took his own can and popped the tab. “It’s Fontaine Sherman now, Fuji-kun.”
He placed a hand on his cheek and flushed. “I’m a happily married man.”
Taking a sip of his drink, he then gestured to him and the hole he made with the can. “You’re gonna clean that up, right? This is my first day of class.”
The atmosphere was far less light behind him, as the students got up and backed away from the confrontation–no one expecting Ryūnosuke’s Dad to go beserk and attack someone other than his daughter.
Some reconsidered that observation, and actually felt bad.
Ryūnosuke stood up, actually surprised that her father was capable of such destructive power–while simultaneously giddy that he whiffed it. “Geez, what the hell, you bastard?! Why’d you attack the teach?!”
Fujinami pushed himself out of the wall. “Why…? Why did I attack…”
He turned and glared at Nick. “… THIS MAN?!”
As Nick sipped his juice, the elder Fujinami explained. “Ryūnosuke, my son. It is time that you know the truth! All your life, I have been training you–preparing you for the hardest battle of your life! A foe stronger than the sea! A demon king of the depths with no rival!”
Raising a finger, he pointed it at Nick. “THIS MAN, THIS DEVIL! IS THE ETERNAL ENEMY OF OUR FAMILY!”
Ryūnosuke nodded. “I know.”
Fujinami stopped. “Ah?”
“Yeah, I’ve been hanging out for the last three days with him, you weirdo. Where do you think I got the uniform, the food, the makeup, and–oh yeah, lookit this.”
She lifted her shirt with one hand, revealing her bra. “I burned the wraps you piece of shit. I’m never goin’ back.”
All the boys in the class–including Hokuto, who had a girlfriend–craned forward awkwardly to look at Ryūnosuke’s chest before she dropped her uniform’s top.
Ryūnosuke did not begrudge them, because all the girls looked, too.
Ataru, who gave up all the math he learned in fourth grade to burn that image into his memory, spoke up. “Yeah, she just spent the last half-hour telling us about the teach being an old friend of your wife and how he tried to save her and Ryū-chan from you.”
The elder Fujinami whirled upon Nick in fury. “Old friend?! Is that all my Masako is to you, now?!”
Nick enjoyed another sip of his juice. “I mean, it’s a little more intimate than friends–but I’m not gonna tell your daughter about how Masako and I get up to this and that.”
Like a raging demon, Fujinami punched Nick, but succeeded in only hitting the can with such force that it flew across the room and bounced off Ataru’s forehead.
“Man down!” Kōsuke shouted.
Ryūnosuke got up. “Oi! What the hell?!”
Her father kept attacking, throwing punch after punch at Nick, who swayed and dipped around the man to avoid each blow.
“You know, Fuji-kun,” he said while moving in a full circle around Fujinami and his flailing punches. “I was enjoying that juice; it was the last one in the machine and for some reason the school’s shop is closed.”
“It’s not enough that you stole my wife from me! Turned her into an adulterous fiend!” Fujinami yelled as he swung on Nick. “But now, after years of making me suffer, you’ve come back for my SON?!”
The class watched as Nick dodged each punch with the skill of a professional boxer. Leaning from side to side to avoid his crosses, he picked up another can of juice. Ducking and weaving under a hook, he popped the tab with his teeth and walked back from Fujinami’s rampaging blows towards the window.
“Fuji-kun, I’m gonna be honest with you,” Nick said as he used a gap in his attacker’s punches to reach the classroom window closest to the front and opened it. “I ain’t here to humor yer bullshit.”
“You won’t take my son…!” Fujinami yelled, not caring what Nick had to say otherwise.
The feeling was mutual as Nick moved with such speed under and around Ryūnosuke’s father, that to everyone watching it appeared that Nick had been standing in front of the open window and then abruptly was behind the lunging man.
“But if you’re gonna insist on being a joke, lemme provide the punchline.” With that he turned and kicked the man in the back. The blow didn’t appear to be very fast or forceful, but when it connected there was a very loud thump and Fujinami’s whole body arched backward as he immediately lost consciousness.
He fell forward, out the window. As the third-year classes of Japanese High Schools were on the ground floor, old man Fujinami dropped unceremoniously into the bushes below the windowsill, his legs sticking out of it comically, twitching in spasm.
Lowering his foot, Nick closed the window and locked it before walking back over to his desk. Still sipping his juice, he looked at the hole in the wall Ryūnosuke’s father made, then at his class.
“Well, shoot,” he lamented. “Looks like y’all got free study while I work to get this cleaned up. Don’t trash the class–I’m gonna find out who fixes things ‘round here and give ‘em a holler.”
Ryūnosuke watched as Nick traipsed out the door, her eyes sparkling. With Lum down on the floor, attending to Ataru, Shinobu was left to appraise the starstruck expression on Ryūnosuke’s face. She stared at her closely, and then looked back towards the door.
“You make a crack about it being springtime, and I’ll sock you,” Ryūnosuke said.
Shinobu shook her head. “No, it’s not that. This is the first time you’ve ever had a real father figure in your life, isn’t it?”
Ryūnosuke nodded. “You’re cool with your old man, aren’t you?”
“Mostly; especially since I stopped dating Ataru,” Shinobu replied.
“Is this what having a Dad is like?” She asked, feeling giddy. “I’ve only known the guy for a few days, and he’s done all this for me without askin’ for anything or wantin’ me to do something ridiculous like beat him in a fight.”
Shinobu wanted to call the starstruck look around Ryūnosuke cute. Smiling, she shrugged her shoulders. “Well, there’s a thing parents are supposed to have for their kids called unconditional love. Maybe that’s what it is.”
With the concept being utterly foreign to Ryūnosuke–for obvious reasons–she hummed in consideration. “Are kids supposed to have that for their parents, too?”
“For a while,” Shinobu said. “I mean, after a certain point kids have to go their own way, right?”
Ataru, risen, joined Ryūnosuke’s side. “There’s another kind of unconditional love–not between parent and child, but man and woman.”
He looked down at her, looking more handsome and tender than he ever had before in his life, his eyes gentler, his jaw squarer, his hair more perfect than that of a werewolf drinking a piña colada at Trader Vic’s. “Ryū-chan, I…”
Ryūnosuke raised her hand into his face, stopping him. “Please go to the front of the class so Lum can zap you there.”
Lum didn’t even wait and gave him a quick hard zap without causing any collateral.
“Gahhhhh!” As Ataru was all-naturally electric rifled, Ryūnosuke brought her balled up hands together at her chest and bounced in place.
“Well, whatever! Here I am wearin’ a girl’s uniform and makeup given to me by someone who knows my mother–and he just kicked the butt of the only person who could take it from me!” Ryūnosuke clenched her fists, stars in her eyes. “He’s so cool!”
Kōsuke, mesmerized like all of the other boys by Ryūnosuke’s pure joy, leaned forward towards Hokuto. “… Bro, she’s so fucking precious…”
Hokuto was not mesmerized by the wholesome Ryūnosuke. In fact, he was in full detail, glowering straight ahead at the mess the elder Fujinami made while being so effortlessly dispatched. Kōsuke noticed Hokuto’s intensity and joined him in it.
“Hm? What’s the matter?” Kōsuke asked.
“That man,” Hokuto said as he narrowed his eyes dramatically, “He is not what he seems at all.”
“Obviously,” Kōsuke agreed with a nod.
Hokuto lowered his head slightly. “Besides that… something about him reminds me of someone…”
He then remembered the tall, green eyed Furinkan girl in front of Ucchan’s.
“… Ah…”
=-=-Note Time-=-=
Ryūnosuke is free, but for how long...?