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kirisaki-daichi-scenarios · 2 years

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aftermath of manager betraying the boys p4

part 1 here, 2 here, 3 here

It’s Friday. She’s about to leave home for her afternoon shift at the bookshop, slipping her shoes on just as the door swings open.

“Honey, I’m home!” Her husband of one year tosses his rucksack to the side, and wraps his arms around her waist, “have a nice day at work, yeah?”

Leaning into his embrace, she turns her head to kiss his cheek, “you need to stop acting like you’re in a sitcom.”

Then, quietly, knowing how much he hates the topic, she adds, “how was the physio?”

“Fine.”

One final kiss to her forehead and he walks away with the limp he’s had ever since Yamazaki’s foot made contact with his spine. He can’t play judo anymore. He sees a physio once a week, and yet there’s been barely any progress since the appointments began. He was a man whose motto was “push through the pain”, but you can’t push through chronic pain. A man who lived for judo, and now all he lives for is his pain meds in the morning.

(And she never snitched. Gentleman than he is, he didn’t push her, but he wanted her to. He said that if they told on Hanamiya and his gang, they’d be expelled and she wouldn’t have to worry anymore.

“Look at what happened when you told the headmaster about their behaviour on the court,” he had said.

But she was looking at it. She is still looking at it, remembers it every day, every time she looks at him and his limp. And so, she had sworn to break up with him if he ever dared to snitch.

God she’s vicious. Undeserving. Hanamiya was right.

——

Excluding a group of children who screamed her ears off over a new instalment of some shoujo manga, her shift passes without a hitch. Outside, it’s dark and dreary. Drizzle batters the windows. But the shop itself is cosy, more so when you’re at the counter in a thick jumper. With one hand, she’s updating the shop’s blog on next week’s offers. With the other, she’s bringing her thermos of hot chocolate to her lips. It’s a lovely evening, with no customers to bother her. And, in just one hour, she’ll be on her way home, and Friday’s are movie nights.

“Excuse me, ma’am, could you direct me to the crime section?”

She hadn’t heard anyone enter. She flinches at the sound of a voice.

“Yes, it’s just on-“ she looks up. Pauses.

It’s not fear, it’s not dread that flits across her face: it’s horror.

How ironic. This was all because she snitched on them, but Seto must have told them where she worked.

—

In their first year of high school, she and Seto sat together in almost all their classes. Any group projects, they did together. Lunches, they spent together. His being there was the main reason she’d agreed to being the team’s manager. And, until the very end, when she was walking to the headmaster’s office with that damning USB in her skirt pocket, she’d still been thinking that Seto was a good guy. Yes, he’d ignored the hostility the team spewed - but that made him guilty of apathy, not cruelty, right?

It took hearing him laugh as he watched the others beat her boyfriend up for her to realise that he was just like the rest of them: entertained by violence.

Why she’d thought he’d keep his promise - when she asked him not to tell anyone where she worked - even she didn’t know.

—

“Ma’am, you still there?”

Hanamiya leans over the desk, and grins at her. It’s been six years since they last saw each other. He’s a little taller now, dressed far more formally than he used to be (black suit, sleeves cuffed, and a long black coat like the Grim Reapear), and his tone is formal though relaxed - but that big Hanamiya grin hasn’t changed.

There’s no one else in the shop. Yet, even if there was, this situation would always feel like Her-and-Hanamiya.

“The crime section, yes,” she shoves her hand below the desk so he can’t see them shaking, “take the stairs over there. The crime section will be on the other end of the basement.”

“You know, my eyesight’s not great. How about-“

“Fuck off.”

The grin slips off his lips.

He straightens his back, looks around - looks at each and every CCTV camera on the floor - then turns back to her.

“What would your boss think, if he knew you were a) speaking so rudely to a customer and b) refusing to support a customer with an eye disease. I have glaucoma, don’t you know?”

He’s a cunt. He’s a lying fucking cunt. He’s a disgusting piece of shit, whom her mother adored. She insisted that Hanamiya was a good sort, based on how kindly he helped her around the house when the team would stay the night. She with her glaucoma, that she fought with so valiantly until she died of a heart attack. Hanamiya knows she’s dead. The whole team attended the funeral with their beloved manager, letting her cry on their shoulders, holding her hand, offering her tissues. Hara even completed her memorial speech for her when she couldn’t.

And Hanamiya also would tell her boss about her behaviour. He’d tell the tale in such a way there’d be no arguing with him; her boss would fall in love him with, and she’d be unemployed by the end of the day.

For someone who warned her what happens to snitches, with her now husband’s blood across his palms, he sure is comfortable with being a snitch himself.

So she gets up slowly, holding onto her chair as tight as she can, so her fist doesn’t make contact with Hanamiya’s mouth. Steps away from the desk. And, keeping her eyes fixed in front of her, committed to ignoring him, walks towards the stairs with Hanamiya in tow.

“We should hang out sometime,” natters on Hanamiya, “reminisce the good old days. How’s that bloke of yours? Are you still with him after we… redecorated his ugly mug? Not that there was much to like originally. You were just desperate.”

“Don’t talk about him like that,” she snaps. she’s fair game, but her lover is the only good thing in this world, the only sun shining.

Hanamiya continues. “If you were so desperate for some male attention, we could have pimped you out to someone. There was no need to cause such a fuss just to get some judo moron to sleep with you. Does he even sleep with you? Back in the day, it was the male students who got along best with him, wasn’t it? Big fan of the male first years-“

She can’t bite her tongue any longer.

“You’re grown ass adults now,” she spits. “Just because you’re realising you peaked in high school, and the rest of your lives will be spent as angry depressed salarymen in shitty marriages with angry depressed kids, doesn’t meant you need to take it out on me.”

Hanamiya pauses, as if surprised - or mock surprised. As she turns the corner to the crime section, she hears wolf-whistling and applause.

“She’s still got it,” says Hara, referencing the times the team used to perform rap battles while watching each other practise shooting.

She won everytime. She was the “rap battle queen”, and when she got a 3-pointer from the bench, after coming up with a lethal bar about Matsumoto’s hair - or lack of - she was deemed the queen of the team full stop. Those were the good days. Yamazaki, ceasing to clap, has a solemn look in his gaze like he’s thinking the same thing.

The rant has given her some more confidence. Even knowing that the crime section is the only part of the bookstore that has no cameras on it, and that that’s probably why they chose it, she still feels better. They can’t do their worst in a public location. And it’s only forty minutes until she can close up shop, head to the local police station, only a five minute walk away, and tell them that she’s being followed by an obsessive boyfriend and his friends, could she please stay at the station till they walk away. As long as they don’t find out her current address, or anything about her husband, she’ll be alright.

Thirty-nine minutes now.

“It really has been a while.” Before she can think to push him away, Hara wraps his arms around her, his weight pressing her into the corner, and whispers in her ear, “I missed you, you know?”

“Leave her be, Hara,” Yamazaki sighs.

“Jealous much,” replies Hara, but he does let go, adding, “you’ve put on weight. No more basketball to keep you fit, ey? I was the same way for a bit. After you happened.”

38 minutes. Just 16 two minutes left to go.

“You know, you’re the reason Zaki didn’t get to his first choice university. Because you gave him a record.”

“Sucks to be him,” she retorts, just as Yamazaki mumbles, quietly,

“That’s not true. My parents sorted it out.”

“But it could have been true,” interjects Hara, “which is why someone should be showing more remorse.”

Hara hasn’t changed, that much is clear. He argues with the same pointless, childish, circular arguments that he’s had since he was in high school, whose logic never had to make much sense as long as he had it in his mind that he was superior to whoever he was arguing with. Even his hair colour hasn’t changed. And these stupid remarks now aren’t much different to the times he would pull her ear or punch her in the arm. Time has killed much of the malice he used to have towards her, leaving nothing but that same demand for attention. Plus - a confusion as to why he wants that attention, like a bully who targets their crush.

Had she not snitched, would she have ended up like this too - forever trying to return to the days of high school? Or was it because she snitched that the rest of them got stuck in the time loop, clinging onto the life they lived before they realised they weren’t above the law?

There’s no juvenile laws to protect them anymore. Plus she doubts that their parents would be happy to get them out of trouble, now that they’re adults who’ve been given everything they need to have a successful future. They’re not going to hurt her, really hurt her, in a situation where they could face the consequences; they must know she’ll go straight to the police.

They can’t hurt her but they also can’t leave her be.

With this in mind, she starts to speak.

“When I said I did it for your sakes, I meant it. It wasn’t from the moral high ground that you perceived it to be. I genuinely meant it. You’ll never know how many times I thought about throwing away the USB and carrying on as if the team’s - our team’s - behaviour was normal. I barely slept for the nights leading up to that final day, and I barely slept afterwards. To this day, part of me feels guilty. I threw up in the headmaster’s office when I showed him the clips. He thought it was because I was so disgusted - but it wasn’t. It was just, when you watched the videos,” her voice cracks, “you could tell we were all friends. I was watching those videos thinking what a horrible person I was to betray you all like that. I was-“

She takes a shaky breath. Her eyes are burning as she fights the urge to cry.

No one else speaks.

“The worst part of it is, I was never planned on doing it. I started recording during practice, after matches, whatever, because I wanted to make a film of us. I was going to present it to you all at the end of our third year, as a memento of our time together.

But the more time I spent editing, the more I realised what you - we - were really like. We were so cruel. I’d never realised it until I was watching us as pixels on a screen. God, the things we said - honing in on people’s physical weaknesses, with no respect for the actual game, and ignoring the fact people could actually be crippled for life thanks to one stupid basketball match. Jokes about beating people up for fun that became actually beating people up for fun. Comments on how you’d make people pay for going against you, that got increasingly explicit and violent over the course of the year. Or that time a guy yelled at me after a match, and you were with me, Zaki, you overheard. Yes, he shouldn’t have called me a bitch - but you could have killed him if Seto hadn’t showed up to help me pull you off him. What future would you have had then?

The entire fucking team was edging closer to doing something that would be in your records for the rest of your lives. Practice after school was less about basketball and more about honing this pack mentality where all that mattered was violence with no consequences. What I showed the headmaster was the mild stuff. I deleted the really incriminating bits, like Furuhashi holding a knife to someone's throat to school, or Hara waterboarding one of the health committee kids.

We didn’t need any of that. Hanamiya, with your brains, you could have developed any sort of team, you could have learnt any skill you wanted. Why did you have to pick hurting people? Kiridai could have been a really good, genuinely good basketball team. You guys were all so talented!”

Tears fall to the carpet as she stares down at the floor, her fists clenched, her voice growing quiet.

“And I loved every moment I spent with you all. I loved every single one of you. I loved pre-match prep, running around an unknown school to figure out where the toilets were, scouting out opponents in stupid disguises, playing streetball at dawn in an area I would never have felt confident to walk around with you there, or team sleepovers at my house where we’d fall asleep together on the sofa. I still dream of you all now, and I wake up crying, knowing that I was the one who ruined it. I’m sorry.” She looks them each in the eyes as she says this; her voice is loud again, and resolute, “I’m sorry. I was naive, I was self-righteous, and I ruined everything.

I’m really fucking sorry.”

She wipes the tears off her face one final time, and says, “The shop will be closing soon. Hanamiya, I directed you to the crime section as requested. If you want to make any purchases, I’ll be at the counter but please make them in the next twenty minutes. Thank you.”

She walks away.

No one calls her back.

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