#2 — Movie night

The sky tore open.
White trails burn across it like scars, one after another, the aerial movement of shapes too fast to resolve, leaving their marks carved onto the blue.
Below, a highway buckles. Cars sit abandoned at wrong angles, some still running, doors hanging open, windshields catching light from the battle in the sky.
The hero falls from the sky, hitting the asphalt hard and creating a shock wave that sends cars flying, forming a crater in the road.
He stands back up, struggling from the pain. His suit is torn at the ribs, and blood runs from a gash above his left eye, pooling in the hollow of his cheek. He spits and wipes nothing, his chest heaving with the strain in his breathing.
The Karazis descend from the rift, hundreds of them, their dark silhouettes filling the sky.
The hero looks around, and a thousand faces look back. Some press phones against the barricade glass, trying to record it. A woman holds a toddler against her chest with one hand covering the child's ear, the other ear buried in the crook of her neck.
Every pair of eyes carries the same thing: that fragile hope.
He does not look at them for long; he just gave a hopeful smile.
His hand drops to his waist, feeling the tool he clipped there, cylindrical, with a pin mechanism; his thumb finds it without searching. A fail-safe, he grins.
He launches himself upward.
He moves fast, aimed at the dead center of the swarm, his mind flooded with the actions he did in the past. Wind strips what remains of his cape. The Karazis start biting and tearing him, but the hero holds onto the pain and gives a final smile.
"Come with me to hell, you bastards."
His thumb pulls the pin. The flash engulfs everything near him, incinerating all that is there.
The explosion expanded outward, burning through the Karazis formation, turning them to ashes, leaving nothing behind. The shockwave rolls across the highway in a destructive blast that presses every standing person one step backwards.
Everything goes quiet. The smoke clears, and the screen goes dark.
The house lights turn on. Two people in the seventh row remain still.
The boy sits with his arms crossed, thinking about the money he wasted. Beside him, the girl leans back, her mouth set into a flat line of irritation or boredom.
"Three hours," the boy says. Not to her. To the room. To the concept of three hours itself.
The girl does not look at him. "The manga was better, though."
"The manga was free."
She turns then. Her eyebrows go up, sharp, accurate. "You said the movie would be good."
"I said it might be good. Might. That's a different word."
"You said," she holds up a finger, tilts her chin, and mimics his voice with an expression of mockery, "' the trailer looked decent, we can go if you want.' That's not 'might', Nii-chan. You said it so confidently. I said we could have watched the Korean movie that came out last week."
He has no answer to this because she is correct, and he knows it, and she knows he knows it. His jaw shifts once, like he wants to defend his side but knows he is going to make a blunder again. It's not worth the effort.
But he adds a final comment about the hero: "He was never cocky in the manga. If he were lore-accurate, he would never say 'bastard' out loud; the only book I ever read had a completely wrong adaptation."
They stand. He grabs both jackets from the seats while she does not reach for hers. She knows he will hand it to her when they reach the exit, folded and held in his arm, and she will put it on without thanking him.
Ashira does not slow down as they move through the crowded lobby, grumbling about the ticket prices.
3,800 yen. I suppose it just got wasted.
Mira follows close behind. The exit doors open to the cold October air. He hands her the jacket, and she puts it on.
They walk.
Ashira is already running numbers.
"If you are worried about spending money, then why did you force me to come? Nii-chan, you only said we are stable enough, so we can take care of some minor expenses."
He replies, "I did say we have money now, but that doesn't mean we can spend on things that are worthless."
Mira doesn't try to reply; she knows he overthinks a lot, so she stays silent.
Ashira does this mental calculation not just when it's about money, but for everything. He would think it's common with everyone, but only he does it this heavily. He even goes far enough to check all possible outcomes of his actions when he is bored.
He thinks about dinner: he has rice, half an onion, and two eggs, possibly three, if the one sitting at the back of the fridge since Tuesday has not turned rotten.
Mira's lunch for tomorrow needs packing tonight because he works the early shift on weekdays and won't be back before she leaves. If he makes the curry base tonight, he can portion it in the morning.
He runs this math underneath every step, a quiet logistics engine ticking along behind his eyes, constant and unacknowledged.
He is seventeen years old. He works six days a week as a waiter at a restaurant near Kita-Senju station. The pay is poor, but his life is stable for now. It is enough.
"Enough" is a word he has redefined several times over the past two years, each definition slightly smaller than the last, each accepted without ceremony.
It is Saturday,the last day of his work week, meaning tomorrow is his own.
Mira walks beside him. She is fifteen, shorter than him by a full head, maybe more. She is still chewing on the movie, turning the ending over in her mind, refusing to let go until she has located the exact point where it went wrong. Her curly-waved hair sways behind her as she walks.
"He didn't even try to survive," she says finally. The words come out sharp, carried on a small cloud of breath in the cold air. "He just gave up."
Ashira glances at her. "He saved everyone."
"He could've saved everyone and not died."
"The bomb was strapped to—"
"Then don't strap the bomb to yourself!" She throws both hands up and immediately shoves them back into her pockets because the gesture costs her warmth she cannot afford. "That's lazy writing, Nii-chan. They wanted a sad ending so everyone thinks it's peak. You can't just make someone die for no reason and call it heroic. That's cheap."
He does not argue. Not because she is wrong and not because she is right, but because he can read it from her face, set hard, chin forward, eyes narrowed against the cold and the injustice of fictional screenwriting, tells him needs she to finish the thought more than she needs his agreement.
"And the cape," she adds. "Just falling. Like, we're supposed to cry because fabric fell."
"People were crying."
"People cry at everything."
They pass a row of shuttered shops and an open convenience store. A small television above the register plays the evening news.
The anchor's voice carries through the door, a government summary on this year's anomalous activity, noting declining incidents credited to active military deployments. A map flashes on screen with the five factions colour-coded, borders redrawn along lines that did not exist twelve years ago.
Ashira's eyes catch the screen for two seconds as they pass, but he does not slow down.
The Golden Pillar incident cracked the world open, several dead, others were twisted into something no longer entirely human, and the ones who survived intact came out with abilities that made them useful enough to be recruited.
The 195 nations restructured into five factions after that, each built around a shared pillar energy reserve, trading access for lower rates and mutual defense. Borders softened within factions, so visas became a past thing, free movement across member nations, which is the reason this part of Tokyo has as many foreign faces as local ones.
Between factions, though, a political stalemate sits like a loaded spring, each side eyeing the other's pillar resources and waiting for a reason for a war.
The screen cuts to a recruitment ad for the Restoration Corps, and Ashira has already looked away.
Mira yawns, her whole face scrunching before relaxing into something softer, younger, closer to the twelve-year-old version of herself. She bumps her shoulder against his arm.
He adjusts his pace without thinking, slower, so she does not have to stretch her stride.
The apartment is on the fourth floor of a building where the city begins to fray. Ashira takes the steps two at a time, while Mira takes them one at a time just to make him wait.
He unlocks the door to their single rectangular room. His thin mattress sits opposite her proper bed. A basic kitchen counter lines one wall.
Ashira drops his bag and hangs his jacket. Mira drops onto her bed face-first, the springs protesting loudly.
"I'm hungry," she announces into the pillow.
"I know."
"What are we eating?"
"Egg curry and rice."
A pause. Then, muffled: "Again? But can I fry the eggs instead of boiling them this time?"
Ashira pauses, looks back at her. "Fine. But I'll make it, you just sit there."
She rolls onto her side. One eye visible, watching him cross to the kitchen, tracking him across the room.
He pulls what little they have left from the fridge and starts the routine, small, measured motions of someone who learned to cook because the alternative was not eating.
As he cooks, his eyes drift to a shelf above the counter. Two photographs sit on it.
The first photograph shows a family. A man and a woman, young, standing in front of a house Ashira does not recognize. Between them, a small boy, three, maybe four, looking directly at the camera with the unfocused stare of a child who has been told to stand still. The woman holds a baby, and there is an older child to the side, partially cut off by the frame's edge, one hand visible, reaching toward the boy in the centre. Everyone is smiling.
Ashira looks at it. His face does not change, his breathing does not shift, his hands do not slow over the cutting board.
There is nothing inside him that connects to these faces, no warmth, no grief, no resentment, no curiosity. The absence of emotion is complete.
It is only a photograph of strangers that happens to occupy his shelf; he has no memory of this house, no memory of these people, the people he was told were his family, though he never knew them and most likely never will. They exist in the same category as the movie they just watched, a story about someone else that ended before it could become his.
His eyes move to the second photograph.
An older woman in a white habit, seated, with two children on her lap. The boy is maybe six, already serious-faced, sitting upright, spine straight, like trying to act tough, but failing at it. The girl is three, laughing at something beyond the frame's edge,her small fist gripping the woman's sleeve.
He does not look away from this one as quickly.
The nun. He has never called her that aloud; she has a name, and he uses it when he speaks of her, and he speaks of her rarely.
But in the architecture of his thoughts, where he assigns people to categories with the efficiency of someone filing documents, she occupies a space that does not have a label. She is not a mother, grandmother, or guardian. She is something that borrows from all three and is none of them, something that lives in the gap between what language provides and what the feeling actually is.
She built something. A trust, a network of orphanages and relief institutions spanning thirty-seven countries, a name spoken with the kind of reverence that people usually reserve for those who are already dead.
She was not dead, not yet. She was alive, barely, tethered to a bed by machines and by the stubborn refusal of a body that had outlived its own timeline.
After she got sick, the others moved in. The ones who had always been nearby, patient, positioned waiting for her demise, not to mourn, but to inherit. The trust's operations shifted, slowly at first, and funds were redirected through structures that looked, on paper, like efficiency improvements. Donations intended for an orphanage in Dhaka paid for a conference room in Singapore.
They voted her out, created an advisory role for her with no authority, and moved her back to Ibaraki, to the first orphanage, now filling with Japan's elderly because the system had been reinterpreted to serve a demographic that generated more government funding.
Ashira was thirteen when he understood. He had read the financial reports in the orphanage office one Tuesday when he was supposed to be in the library. He was too young to understand, but he was too sharp for his age.
He left at fifteen.
He took Mira and his savings, modest, hard-earned, enough for three months if nothing went wrong and everything went exactly as he planned, and walked out. There was also someone else in the orphanage who left with him, Gracie, but later returned to serve the nun. There was no confrontation, no dramatic exit; he stopped eating their food, stopped sleeping in their beds, and stopped accepting their generosity that comes with conditions the giver does not name because naming them would make them visible.
His pride would not let him stay, not because he considered himself above help, but because he understood, with a clarity that sat strangely in a fifteen-year-old's mind, that accepting resources from a corrupted institution made him a participant in the corruption.
That understanding cost him a stable home. He paid it without looking back.
The nun did not stop him. She understood why he needed to leave, perhaps better than he did himself. She arranged a scholarship through channels quiet enough that it would not wound his pride; he found out later, much later, and accepted it only because the alternative was Mira not attending school. His pride had limits. They were shaped exactly like his sister.
He turns back to the stove, his hands resuming their work.
He just realized tomorrow is Sunday. The nun has messaged him saying she wants to meet him, and he plans to take the first bus to Ibaraki and visit her.
She is dying.
Mira appears beside him. She has changed into her pajamas. She does not ask if he needs help; she already knows the answer and already knows she is going to ignore it. She pulls two plates from the drying rack and sets them on the counter with a quiet clink.
"Nii-chan."
"Hm."
"Tomorrow," she hesitates, her fingers resting on the rim of a plate, tapping once. "We're going to see grandma, right?"
He does not correct the word; the nun is not their grandmother. Mira knows this and uses it anyway.
"Yes."
"Early?"
"First bus."
She nods and places the plates down, standing there for a moment, close enough that her shoulder almost touches his arm, looking at the eggs in the pan. Her mouth opens, then closes.
She wants to say something, it is visible in the slight tightening around her eyes, her bottom lip tucks inward for half a second, but whatever it is, she decides the pan does not need to hear it. Not tonight.
"She'll be happy to see us," she says instead. Quieter now. The teasing energy from earlier is gone, replaced by something quieter.
He does not answer, just portions the food, quietly giving her slightly more as he always does. They eat sitting on the floor between their beds.
Mira finishes first, brushes her teeth, and crawls into bed, kicking one foot out from under the blanket.
"Goodnight, Nii-chan."
"Night. I will leave early tomorrow, so go to Ms Yuri's apartment. I have informed her."
She is asleep in minutes. She has always been like this, fast in and fast out, with no negotiation with her own mind, no lying awake staring at ceilings while thoughts rearrange themselves into shapes that are harder to ignore in the dark. He envies it sometimes, most times, every time.
Ashira washes the plates and sits on the edge of his bed. He looks at the two photographs on the shelf, one meaningless, one everything.
He has redefined "enough" so many times that the word has lost its edge. This room. This girl. This routine. It is a small enough life,and he holds it with the grip of someone who knows exactly how easily things can be taken.
Tomorrow he will ride the first bus to Ibaraki and sit beside a woman who is dying and act as though she is not. She will look at him and act as though he is fine. They will both know the other is performing, and neither will say so; that is how it works between them, has always worked, the mutual agreement that some truths are better carried than spoken, because speaking them makes them real, whereas carrying does not.
I have a lot to ask you, Grandma.
He lies down. Reaches for his earphones, a decent pair, older, gifted to him years ago by one of the younger nuns at the orphanage who noticed he never had any. He plugs them into his phone, the screen cracked in the lower corner, and opens the music app. It was on the Free plan so the ads run between every song. He used to run pirated apps, but those are banned now, so it buffers on every fourth song instead.
He puts on something with enough noise in it to fill the spaces his thoughts would otherwise occupy, not calming, not melodic, just dense enough to crowd everything else out.
The playlist loops, and the room goes still.
The alarm does not go off.
The phone is on the floor beside his mattress, set to vibrate at 4:50 AM every Sunday. It has vibrated at 4:50 AM every Sunday for the past seven months, but Ashira has not once needed it; his body wakes at 4:47, three minutes ahead, every time, as if some internal mechanism refuses to let the phone take credit.
He lies on his bed, looking at the ceiling. The overpass headlights have thinned to almost nothing at this hour, just the occasional driver, slow and pale, the traffic of people going to open their shops. Across the room, Mira is under her blankets. One foot out, always one foot out, as she balances her body heat with the cold outside.
He sits up. Mira does not stir; she will, but not yet.
He moves to the kitchen counter and fills a glass of water, drinks it standing in the dark with his back against the fridge, feeling its hum through his spine. Then he puts on his only pair of shoes and walks to the stairs leading to the terrace.
The terrace door sticks at the hinge; it has always stuck at the hinge. He pulls it at the specific angle that releases the latch without noise, steps outside, and closes it behind him.
The terrace is small, concrete underfoot worn smooth by years of footsteps, a low wall running along the edge with metal railings that have gone cold in the early air, and the sun shade frame stretched overhead with rust eating through two of its joints.
The sky has not yet decided what it wants to be, caught somewhere between the last gray of night and the first pale wash of morning.
Ashira stands at the centre, bare feet on cold concrete. He closes his eyes.
The nun taught him this. "Here, do this, your body will remember."
His body moves through the poses without thought, breath and motion aligning into a steady rhythm. He completes his sets, working through the tension built across his back from six days of carrying trays. He finishes with a set of pull-ups on the sunshade frame, efficient but ungraceful motions that get the job done.
He wraps up the routine in an hour, like always, and walks back inside.
The apartment smells different. Oil in a pan.
Mira stands at the stove in the same oversized pajamas from last night, hair tied into a messy bun, loose strands falling around her face. She is making something; it is some rice cakes. Well, she is just warming them up in the pan, so Ashira can take them on his travels.
"You're awake already? You could have slept for some more time. Trying to act responsible, huh?" Ashira says.
She doesn't turn around. "I've been awake since you went to the terrace."
"You didn't have to—"
"Nii-chan." She flips one cake, and it lands wrong. She presses down harder than necessary with the spatula. "Sit."
He does not sit; his eyes go to a small cloth bag near the door, packed and zipped.
"What's in the bag? And why the serious face? Do you want to ask something?"
She doesn't reply to the second question. Instead, "Snacks. For the bus."
"I was going to—"
"You were going to buy onigiri from the convenience store and call it enough." She turns now. Spatula in hand, batter on her wrist. "I made enough for both of us. Also rice balls, also two bottles of water because you always forget and then buy the vending machine ones that cost more."
His mind runs the calculation. She woke at 4:50, probably earlier, set her own alarm, and planned this last night. She did not fall asleep as quickly as he thought. But... for two of them?
"Why did you pack for two of us? I never said I was going to take you with me."
"But Nii-chan—"
He knew this was going to happen. He knew it when she said she'd be happy to see us, us, not you.
He does not want her to come. The nun is dying. He knows the room will smell like antiseptic and old wood. He knows the nun will be smaller than his memory of her, connected to machines that beep in intervals he will count without wanting to, because his mind counts things.
"Well, for this time you have to stay here, okay?"
But upon her childish begging, he finally says...
"Okay," he says.
She expected a fight. He can see the second argument dissolving behind her eyes.
"Wait, really?"
"Yes."
She quickly closes the distance between them, trying to pull him into a hug, but instead just ends up hauling herself against him because he is obviously heavier. They skip breakfast, get ready, and grab the bags. The thing Mira made is some abomination of a combination of rice cake, pancake batter, and caramel... sitting in their bag.
---
Metro to Ueno, then the bus terminal. Ashira pays for two tickets, the cost slotting into his running mental spreadsheet.
The bus pulls out, and the city falls back, towers fading into fields. Mira falls asleep on Ashira's lap within minutes, lulled by the vibration of the engine.
Outside, a convoy of military vehicles sits parked on the highway shoulder. Armored carriers, flatbed trucks under tarps, the blue and white stripe along the side panel marking them as the Restoration Corps. They are the branch that handles mutant aftermath, mainly debris removal and contamination sweeping, making sure no form of contaminants or remains of mutant—or Anomalous in official terms—should remain in human vicinities.
There was an incident two days ago near the Saitama border; three buildings were damaged, no casualties, one hero deployed, and the situation was resolved.
Ashira noticed. He always noticed.
Mutant activity has been declining for years; the government says this, the news says this, the teacher at school says this every term during the mandatory disaster class. A class which Ashira has endured for three years with the same syllabus and the same PowerPoint slides.
The mutants are a managed threat, and the heroes handle it. The system works like his refrigerator, constantly, audibly, noticed only when it stops.
Two hours in, the highway narrows. A government broadcast comes through the bus radio:
ANOMALOUS ACTIVITY DETECTED, SECTOR 14-B. CIVILIAN VEHICLES MUST REROUTE VIA DESIGNATED ALTERNATE ROUTE.
*A new mutant already?*
The word anomalous. The government changed the terminology eight months ago, designed in a committee room to sound clinical rather than frightening. Everyone still says mutant. The signs say anomalous, the disconnect exists, and nobody addresses it; everything stems from the disastrous yet beautiful Golden Pillar incident, which changed the world.
He saw the convoy in the mirror, and his mind started to calculate the possible outcomes.
Why were there so many troops? The armored carriers, the flatbed trucks... what kind of mutant could cause such a disturbance? Also, why was no one doing anything? Did they lose the mutant's track? Was it a small one, or—
While he was thinking about it, a faint roar vibrated the bus window for a second before fading into the engine's hum.
Cold fear spiked in his chest, sharp and uninvited, but he immediately forced it down. There were enough soldiers back there to handle anything.
The news always confirms a successful resolution. He was ready to trust the national military. He believed in the system.
The bus follows the rerouted path, and Mira sleeps through all of it.
---
Memories surface during long trips. His mind wanders to the places it has been avoiding. He feels unprepared for this visit, but he is going anyway.
Outside, the hills of Ibaraki rise against the brightening sky.
The bus pulls in at noon, and Ashira places his hand on the side of Mira's head.
Her eyes open. "We're here already?"
"Obviously. Just because you used the forbidden method of sleeping through an entire ride, it makes you feel like you skipped time. I was awake the whole ride." Ashira feels that it is a lame, cliché dialogue, but he knows Mira can condone it.
They step off into the cooler air. The orphanage sits at the top of a long stone staircase, its wooden eaves designed by the nun to look like they grew from the hill.
Halfway up the stairs, Mira slows, looking at a worn slope of grass. The mud slide they used to play on.
Neither says it. For a second, they are both somewhere else, younger, louder, covered in wet clay. Mira's mouth twitches, not a smile, but the precursor to one.
Near the top stands a tree, old with branches spread wide, and a rope hangs from one branch, frayed and sun-bleached.
"The swing," she says quietly, almost to herself.
Ashira slows, gives her the time without giving her the attention, and she catches up.
The orphanage stands in front of them, the entrance just as he remembers, the wooden doors, everything the same, but somehow different.
Ashira steps forward, and Mira reaches for his hand, finding his sleeve instead, two fingers hooked into the fabric at his wrist.
They walk in together.