He couldn't just endure it anymore.
"Ever thought these games were a little too real?" Ryu's question, directed to no one in particular.
"The graphics are shit," moaned Dan. "True Crimes Hong Kong will be way better. We need to get a copy of that when it's out."
Albert laughed. "It'll never come out. Might as well stick with Final Fantasy ‘cause you're dreaming right now, bruh."
"Shut up! It will come out!" Dan retorted.
"I'd take Assassin's Creed over Final Fantasy or Grand Theft Auto any day," said Clyde.
"You don't know what you're talking about. GTA is dope," mumbled a grenade-wielding Bradley. “I really wanna play Yakuza. It’s only for PS2, though.”
Ryu scowled. Fricking idiots.
"Can you guys shut up about all that? I'm talking about all the gang stuff… it's like what we do, isn't it?" He pointed at the screen just as Yuan initiated his and Bradley's second simulated carjacking.
"Nah. In real life there aren't any second chances," said Clyde, before lazily downing a can of iced tea.
"Yeah. When you die you stay dead," added Bradley.
It rolled off their tongues so easily. Had Ryu heard correctly? These boys were so consumed and caught up in evading the imaginary cops and getting ahead in their fictional hustle, they didn't even care about how wild it was that they were doing this in the real world? After Tyler knifed someone before their very eyes? After Bradley had had an actual pistol to his head? After they'd for real lost a brother—Julian? They fired their imaginary weapons, and they didn't think twice about the few genuine hits Ryu had to make with or without his own? Even after reliving hell in their minds at night and putting on the act of being "just fine" during the day? How could they enjoy this? How could anyone? Bradley wanted to “play” yakuza? They were playing it every day!
"Have you guys… " Ryu paused. He hesitated, but decided to ask anyway, "Have you ever thought about running away?"
The first to look at him was Albert. Next, Dan, his brows pleated and forming a heavy crease. The others seemed to hear but paid no mind—not until Albert spoke.
"Yo—you're serious?"
Ryu had no response to give, rigid as his eyes shifted to see Clyde glance over in alarm.
"Hey, I think he is. Aniki's serious…"
"Oh geez, obviously. Why would I be joking about this?" Ryu was growing irritated. "You never wondered? Why do we do this stuff anyway? What is wrong with us?"
Everything came to a halt. Bradley hit pause, and all of them—Albert, Clyde, Dan and Yuan—regarded him with imploring eyes.
"Where is this coming from all of a sudden?" asked Clyde.
"I dunno," Ryu lied, mumbling. "This life. It's not normal and I think… I mean, why don't we just leave?"
Albert scrambled to his feet. He towered over Ryu, arms at his sides. “How can you ask us to do that? This is the one home we've got!”
Ryu slammed down his rice bowl, and jumped up. “This isn't a home. Look at what they make us do!" They had to know this. They did know this, didn't they?
“I thought of leaving once…”
Ryu and Albert spun to see that it was Dan who had spoken.
Bradley's face was flushed, his lips and eyebrows contorted ferociously as he gaped at his best friend. “You serious, Dan? Have you seen what they do to people that leave? Haven't you heard the stories?"
"That's grown men. We're kids," Dan argued.
Bradley gave a loud growl, sweeping his face. “You honestly think Father thinks of us as kids? We're, like, his property!"
Ryu knitted his brows. "You realised it too?"
"Hell yah, I did—I ain't dumb," Bradley huffed then crossed his arms.
Ryu searched the others for reactions. Clyde was quiet. Real quiet. And from the way he was biting his nails Ryu could tell he must have been contemplating… something. That, or suffering from caffeine withdrawal. They’d been out of Red Bull for nearly a week.
"Clyde, you don't really want to live like this? I mean, you aren't even like us. You have a family. Don't you miss your mom? Your brothers?"
Clyde didn't have a chance to respond as Albert rushed Ryu again, his face pulled into a grimace. “If you wanna go—go then! Leave us out of it!”
“Why are you being like this? I thought you'd have my back!” Ryu hollered.
"Why am I like this? Why are you? Since when did you become moral police? Aren't you the Devil Half?"
"Maybe I don't want to be. Maybe I wanna be different."
Dan gave a hard scoff. “Yeah. Do what you want. You're the favourite… Maybe he'll forgive you, but he'll kill us."
“That’s right. I'm not leaving," said Clyde, nodding.
"I won't go either," muttered Yuan, breaking his usual peace. "Forget it, asshole."
"Wow. Just… wow." Ryu looked to the ceiling with a disbelieving smirk. Even Yuan was swearing at him.
Bradley hurled the controller to the ground and clambered up. He sided with Albert, literally, and they were positioned like pieces on a chessboard, two against one.
"I get it now. It's about your girlfriend," said Bradley.
"She's not… my girlfriend."
"You liar!" Bradley snapped, pointing his finger like a lance. "You call yourself a White Flower, but you put this girl ahead of us! Now you're talkin' 'bout abandoning everything? Maybe when you go out in the real world, you've got a chance—but what have any of us got? We don't roll wif the rich people like you." Words slurring, and seething like a raging bull, he faced away. "‘Member us when you become somebody."
One-by-one, all the boys got up in a mass exodus, following Bradley out the room to—to who knew where. The rec room. The study. The basement. Their rooms. Anywhere but that room with Ryu in it. All, save for Albert, who remained glaring and fuming, his face obscured by wisps of long brown-black hair. Albert the Samurai. Of all the boys, he was the most easygoing. Of all the boys, Ryu respected him the most. Ryu even loved his puns. But here he was, challenging him. Opposing him. Why? If anyone should see reason, it should have been him.
"Albert—"
“Don't even try and tell me nothing. You wanna be different? Then you should’ve thought of that before you marked your back.” Albert clenched his fists, the veins bulging along his arms. “Bradley's right. Maybe being on the West Side so much makes you think you can do whatever you want, but this is our family. We owe this place."
"Owe this place? For what? We deserve better than this. You can be somebody, Albert. You could go back to—”
“Some crappy tent on the street? The reserves? Where? When I leave this house, what am I? A bum? A foster kid nobody cares about? Or maybe I’m just another dirty Indian?”
“That's not true!”
"Tell me what is, then. Do you even know?"
After a moment of silence, Albert's voice calmed, but he radiated fury.
"Maybe it's not true, but no one cares about truth—they only care about what they think.”
Albert spun and gusted off. Ryu alone remained. He stooped to gather everything, Xbox, controllers, the games, his rice bowl, taking on his duty and making sure all was in order. So what pathetic emotion was Ryu going to be subjected to this time? Defeat? Despair? Nope. Rejection. It had taken three weeks for the boys to forgive him for seeming to not care about Dan's disappearance, but it was obvious now that the resentment towards him had never gone away. And why should it? Ryu deserved this. That look in Albert's eyes—the hurt, the pain—how could Ryu deny it? Albert, the boy with no last name who'd been bounced from foster home to foster home his whole life, had nowhere else to go. None of them did. Maybe Ryu wasn’t even human—just like Haruna said. How could he think they'd get on board with his radical ideas? He wasn't even sure he was on board with it.
Leaving the White Flower Syndicate? This home? This family?
Is that what he wanted?
Ryu shut off the television. He
started for the staircase, prepared to savour the tranquility of a Tyler-free bedroom. But once there, the gnawing sensation came at him again, and the voice in his head urged him to get his fix. He rifled through a heap on the floor and cursed at the sight of the cigarette carton. Empty. He leered at his scarred arm. He was reminded of Haruna and the face she'd made when she saw the cuts for the first time.
Swallowing hard, Ryu lifted the bottom-bunk mattress and felt for the notebook, then the prayer book underneath.
He flipped through its pages. This prayer book could help him understand things? Understand her? In what way? Crazy. She was crazy to think something as basic as this book could. Just short of calling it quits, his finger caught on a single page. Haruna must have marked it intentionally for it was folded in the corner and much more worn than the other pages. He furrowed his brows. A single line stood out: "…accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.”
Ryu stared in a five-second daze. Then the light bulb moment struck. The conversation with Damon. This sounded so much like the whole wu-wei thing. Hadn’t Damon said something similar? Stop fighting? Stop wanting?
Ryu thought of what Bradley said.
No, Haruna was not his girlfriend, but why did he keep denying it like it made a difference anymore? For years he had convinced himself he hated her. What he actually hated was thinking he wasn't good enough. Worse than that, he hated the thought of thinking he wasn't good enough. His pride was what made him the Devil Half. Pride was all he had.
But the truth was that one day—the day she approached him with "hello," wanting to know his name when no one else had—she became important. For a fleeting moment, she’d made him feel hopeful, up until she shattered what little hope he had… hope that someone could care about a short, scruffy, parentless, half-Japanese, half-whatever-else nobody like him. Increasingly, Ryu was realising it; he didn’t just hate that she was “fake.” He hated that she wasn’t honest.
He was the same. He was so much worse.
Why was he being so hard-headed? Seth had said it. Haruna had said it. Damon, who didn't even know him as long as the others, said it. People did care. And the people who cared were begging him to change. To be better. Ryu wasn't just hurting himself. He was hurting them too. And the only mistake they had made was choosing to care about a guy like him. Like Haruna said, respect, duty and loyalty went hand-in-hand. So his brothers didn't have his back. At least not yet. But he couldn't give up.
Ryu lowered his gaze, studying that bolded block of text.
"Serenity Prayer, eh?"
Another grey tuft of fog clouds swirled overhead, swallowing up the church’s high steeple. The chill in the air was the kind that left one to wonder, but never know for sure, whether it would snow or rain. Ryu lowered his head, again taking in the large church sign. The illuminated words, “All Welcome" gleamed back at him. Beside the sign was the entrance, and Ryu watched, waited with intent. People exited to the sound of church organs and a choir. Wearing white, bearing crosses…
With Ryu's back pressed against the side of his car, he took another drag.
All welcome.
After several minutes lost to his musings, Ryu shifted his gaze and saw with mild surprise and agitation the city slime bucket, Whatever Vangelis, dressed in his Saint Laurent jacket, strutting through the exit in the company of some snooty old rich lady—the Dior clutch and antique pearls, a dead giveaway. Ryu narrowed his eyes. Such a self-assured smirk on Slime Bucket’s face. Ryu wanted nothing more than to give a smack to that gel-saturated, curly-haired head of his and grind that stupid face into the cold, hard concrete. With a snort, Ryu turned. He froze. Haruna. Her face was wrinkled with confusion, clearly having spotted him on her way out. How he hadn’t noticed when she left the building, he didn’t know. He was losing his touch.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
Ryu stared. It was always fascinating seeing her out of uniform. Her long hair was loose, in waves that looped and caressed her cheek with the wind. It must have been the way her hair was naturally or when she didn’t fight too hard to tame it. Her beige trench coat accentuated every curve of her body. Some sort of skirt or dress under it revealed her legs. Just a little. Just enough.
“I was hoping I’d see you,” Ryu said, at long last catching himself. He took notice of the cigarette in his hand and moved to put it out.
“It’s okay—go ahead. I’m not sticking around,” Haruna muttered tonelessly.
Her expression. A mask of indifference. She looked past him. She took a step away.
“Wait—don’t leave. I mean, I came all this way."
“Fine. But I’m not coming any closer than this,” she said, again cold, and after a moment of listening to the whistle of the wind she addressed him. “I thought you said you'd quit smoking.”
“Easier said than done, I s'ppose.” Ryu paused, searching for disgust, but instead reading the disappointment on her face. He scowled. It was like being gut-punched. “You know, you’re the only one I’ve ever told about what I do. Other than Seth. Damon knows 'cause I got hurt once. Without him, I might have done something terrible. Or I might've been left for dead in an alleyway. That’s how we really met.”
The quiet came again, and that disappointment started to look like fear. Ryu dropped his cigarette, stomping over it as he approached her. What could he say? How could he make things right?
“Don’t come any closer!” She stepped back. Her hands shot out. Ryu paused, conscious of the fact that the place hadn’t entirely cleared out yet. He didn’t want to make a scene. He fell back against his car and sighed. He regarded her with a straight face in spite of how he really felt.
“What I said to you was wrong. I sounded like a prick. A liar, a murderer… that’s what your Bible says ‘the Devil’ is, right? Well, I’m going to be real with you. I’m no good. 'Devil' is what they call me in the streets.”
He watched as she lowered her arms, though her guard remained high.
“Did you know the Devil once went by a different name? Lucifer. It means bearer of light. If you ask why the name changed, it’s because he chose a different path. A bad one. You don’t have to be what people call you. We all have choices. Remember?"
“Then what do you choose? To walk away?”
“You’re a criminal.”
“Don't judge. It’s in there. And forgiveness. There’re lines in the Bible about that too.”
“The book. You actually read it?”
Ryu was certain his hands were shaking again. He hid them in his pockets and gave a mild shrug before reciting, “'Living one day at a time; enjoying one moment at a time; accepting hardships as the pathway to peace'—I don’t understand any of it. But this thing about struggle and sacrifice. This Jesus person suffered out of ‘love,' right? I guess that’s when I started thinking about what I said before. Every day I sacrifice, but my reasons are… I wonder if it’s worth it.” He gave a great sigh and saw a hint of her resistance waning. “You’ll forgive me, won’t you?”
For a moment he could swear a smile was pulling at the corner of her lips. But he saw the rapid shift like an exorcism-in-reverse, her next look one of pure loathing.
"It's cold. I have to go," she said suddenly.
Ryu pulled away from the car, frantic and desperate like something was about to happen, something he would regret if he didn’t act fast enough.
"I can drive you home—"
"No thank you!"
Ryu's heart squirmed. Forgetting all semblance of pride, he rushed and reached out, wrenching, grasping, feeling the down of her jacket between his fingers.
She spun to look back at him, her endless waves of copper-brown hair twirling and swaying. And it was at that moment that the snow began to fall. The flakes and crystals, lightly floating, landing on her head, sticking on her coat. Haruna's eyes had been blazing, but they simmered, softened, and she remaine
d as still as a figurine within a snow globe.
Ryu's heart whirled like a carousel. He felt small, pathetic, and just plain stupid, more than he’d ever felt in his life. But he no longer cared. He dropped the hand that had pulled her back, and his voice croaked out, rough, uneasy:
"Please… don't go."
CHAPTER eight
truth & dare
He wasn’t a good person. He had said it himself.
It would have come as a shock if Haruna hadn't already known it. Even now, throwing out a few choice words from the prayer book she had given him, speaking of forgiveness, offering a one-off line about sacrifice. This "Jesus person”? Offensive at its best and manipulation at its worst. He was messing with her. Even the blind could see it. Haruna was smarter than this and her will was stronger than this. Oh? Did he go out of his way, come all the way from the other side of town in hopes of finding her to "apologize"? So? She wasn’t going to be taken in by this boy’s deception; no matter how sincere he sounded… no matter how much everything about him shook her completely, shook her down to her core.
Haruna felt her face on fire. She turned away. When did Ryu become that guy? Someone who made her heart thrash about and beat faster than anyone ever had? Even more than Mani who had once been so perfect? Sure, Ryu had always had a certain spell over her. It used to scare her before. Now her fear had intensified, for new reasons. Something about this, all of this, seemed wrong, insane, and totally, possibly deadly but… even so, she didn’t want to run from it. Her inner compass pointed his way even if their stained history, their clashing views, her belligerent ex, or crazy-strict grandmother demanded it sway the other direction—and all it took was that tug at her back. Haruna was prepared to tell him off, she was ready to demand he let go, but instead her shoulders dropped and her chest ached. He was hurting. She was hurting.
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