VOLUME 1 - EPISODE 1
[CONTENT WARNING: MA26+]
[NARRATOR: Some places save you. Some places take everything broken about you and hold it carefully while you figure out what to do with it. Some places become so completely part of who you are that leaving them feels less like graduation and more like your own bones — the removal of something that was part of your structure, part of how you stood upright. Jeremy High was that place. It was chaos and corruption and government agents and psychic bloodlines and a principal with a very long name and a friend group assembled from the wreckage of various impossible situations. It was the place where Riyura Shiko learned to be genuinely funny instead of performatively funny. Where Yakamira came back from death. Where broken people chose each other and kept choosing each other until the choosing became something that didn't require a decision anymore — just became what they were. And now it's behind him. The gates closed. The bow tie still in his pocket but positioned differently. The cherry blossoms falling on a new city, a new campus, a new season he didn't fully consent to entering. Welcome to Cherry University. Welcome to Osaka. Welcome to the specific terror of being somewhere that doesn't know you yet and having to decide who you are without the walls that helped you figure it out the first time.]
PART ONE: THE TRAIN TO OSAKA
He'd taken the train because Yakamira had insisted that arriving by car would be logistically suboptimal given the campus parking situation and Riyura had agreed without really listening because he'd been looking out the window at the city moving past and thinking about Principal Jeremy.
The last conversation. Two weeks ago. Jeremy High's front gate, early morning, cherry blossoms doing what cherry blossoms always did — performing beauty without asking anyone's permission, falling at the exact pace required to make even mundane moments feel cinematic.
"You'll be fine," Principal Jeremy had said. Not with the careful diplomatic warmth he used for students he was worried about. Just directly. Just the flat honest version of care that Riyura had learned to trust precisely because it didn't perform itself.
"You keep saying that," Riyura had said.
"Because it keeps being true," the principal replied. "Every time I've said it. You've been fine. Broken sometimes. Grieving sometimes. Completely unable to cook for yourself apparently, based on what Yakamira tells me—"
"I can cook—" "He says you made pasta that was simultaneously overcooked and somehow also raw—" "THAT'S PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE—"
"—and yet apparently you achieved it." The principal had smiled. The real one. The one that appeared when he'd stopped managing his expression and just let the warmth exist without framing it. "You'll be fine, Riyura. The school taught you how to survive. University is for learning how to live. They're different skills. Be patient with yourself while you figure out the difference."
Riyura had stood there at the gate for a moment after that. Looking at the building. At the windows where students moved through their days. At the place that had held him while he figured out how to stand up.
"What if I forget?" he'd said. "Who I am. Outside of here."
"You won't," Jeremy had said simply. "Because you brought your people with you. And your people know who you are. That's the whole point of choosing people — so you don't have to remember alone."
The train moved through the countryside between cities.
[RIYURA'S INTERNAL MONOLOGUE: He's right. He's usually right. That's both reassuring and deeply annoying. I have my people. Yakamira is somehow already on this train reading a book about behavioral psychology as though we aren't about to enter a completely new phase of our lives, which is either impressive composure or complete emotional repression and knowing Yakamira it's both. Miyaka is arriving tomorrow. Subarashī called me six times this morning to tell me about his new notebook which has a hero on the cover, which is exactly the correct amount of Subarashī energy for a day like today. Jisatsu is meeting us at the campus. Pan's bakery is already there — the south campus location, which he opened two months ago, which means there is already somewhere in Osaka that will smell like home even though I've never lived there. I have my people. I'm fine. I'm going to be fine. I'm absolutely terrified and I'm going to be fine. Both. Simultaneously. Apparently that's my default mode now.]
"You're doing it," Yakamira said without looking up from his book. "Doing what," Riyura said. "The thing where you stare out windows and process things loudly inside your head in ways that are somehow visible on your face."
"That's not a thing—" "You've been doing it for twenty minutes. You look like someone who is deeply reckoning with something." "I'm not deeply reckoning with anything—"
"You absolutely are," Yakamira said. He turned a page. "It's fine. Reckon. I'll tell you when we arrive."
Riyura looked at him. At his silver-haired completely composed brother who had died and come back and spent two months experiencing death on loop and had processed this experience by becoming extremely interested in the psychology of trauma survivors. "Are you fine?" Riyura asked.
Yakamira turned another page. "Define fine." "Are you—okay. With this. With Osaka. With—"
"With leaving Jeremy High," Yakamira said. Not a question. He closed the book partially, keeping his finger in the page. "Yes. I'm fine with it. Jeremy High served its purpose. I'll be going back regularly — the teaching, the research, the founders' situation. It's not truly behind me. It's just—" He paused. Finding words with his characteristic precision. "It's not the primary location anymore. This is the primary location now. I'm adjusting to that."
"Is adjusting hard?" Riyura asked.
Yakamira looked at him for a moment with the silver eyes that had seen things they shouldn't have. "Some things are harder than others," he said. Then he opened his book again. "Ask me something easier."
"Are you excited?"
A pause. "I find psychology genuinely interesting," Yakamira said. "The program at Cherry University has researchers whose work I've been following for two years. The campus library has resources I can't access from Jeremy High. So yes. In my specific way. I'm excited."
"In the you-don't-show-excitement way." "In the I-express-excitement-through-sustained-intellectual-engagement way," Yakamira corrected. "It's a valid form."
Riyura looked out the window at the countryside giving way to Osaka's edges. The city beginning to assert itself — buildings accumulating, the specific density of an urban environment arriving incrementally.
"Yakamira," he said. "Mm," Yakamira said.
"I'm glad you're here," Riyura said. "That we're doing this together. I'm glad you came back." He didn't specify from where. He didn't need to. "I'm glad every day that you came back."
Yakamira was quiet for a moment. The train moved through the approaching city.
"I know," Yakamira said. His voice was the same as it always was — measured, precise. But something underneath the measurement was different. Something that acknowledged the weight of being glad, of the thing that being glad was the response to. "Me too."
They rode the rest of the way in comfortable silence.
PART TWO: CHERRY UNIVERSITY — FIRST IMPRESSIONS
The campus was beautiful.
That was the first thing. Before the anxiety, before the adjustment, before any of the complicated feelings that came with standing somewhere new — just the immediate, uncomplicated visual fact of it. Cherry blossom trees along every path. Architecture that suggested permanence and tradition, the kind of buildings that said: generations of people have done important things here. A campus that felt like it had gravity — like it pulled things toward it and held them there with the authority of long institutional history.
Riyura stood at the main entrance with his two bags and looked at it. "It's beautiful," he said.
"It's deliberately so," Yakamira replied, standing beside him with his single precisely packed bag. "The architecture is designed to create that response. The psychological impact of beauty on a new student's sense of the institution's authority and worthiness has been documented in—"
"Can you just let it be beautiful for thirty seconds," Riyura said. A pause. "Thirty seconds," Yakamira agreed. They stood for thirty seconds. "It's beautiful," Riyura said.
"Yes," Yakamira agreed. "Now. Apartment. Map. Orientation."
The apartment was small and was going to get smaller once Riyura had been in it for a week. He could tell this immediately from the way Yakamira assessed it — making rapid mental calculations about the organization of shared space with the expression of someone preparing for a known challenge.
"You can have that side," Yakamira said, gesturing. "I'll have this side."
"They're identical sides," Riyura said. "They won't be after you've been living on yours for a week," Yakamira said. "That's—" Riyura considered objecting. Considered the pasta incident. "Fair," he said.
He unpacked while Yakamira organized his side of the apartment with the methodical precision of someone for whom organization was not a task but a natural state. Riyura's unpacking was less methodical. Things went on surfaces. Books went in approximately the right area. The yellow star hairclip — he'd been carrying it in his pocket since leaving Jeremy High, hadn't put it on yet — he set on the windowsill where the afternoon light caught it.
He looked at it there.
[RIYURA'S INTERNAL MONOLOGUE: The last time I was a new student somewhere was Jeremy High. Age fifteen. Purple hair that was a statement I hadn't figured out yet. Red bow tie as armor. Comedy as armor. Everything as armor. I walked through those gates performing someone who was fine and I was so clearly not fine and it didn't matter because Jeremy High didn't require you to be fine. It just required you to show up. And I showed up. And everything that happened after happened because I showed up. Now I'm showing up here. Different city. Different campus. Same hairclip. Same bow tie in my bag. Same brother somehow impossibly alive and on the other side of this tiny apartment alphabetizing something. What's different is — I'm not performing. I'm actually scared. The actual version of scared, not the performed version I used to hide behind comedy. And I can feel the difference between them now and that's growth. Probably. It doesn't feel like growth. It feels like being scared. But I'm told those two things often feel the same.]
He cooked dinner that evening. The dinner was terrible.
Not in the spectacular way — just in the quiet way of someone who has been meaning to learn to cook properly for years and keeps discovering that meaning to and actually doing it are completely different activities. The rice was fine. The rest of it was less fine.
Yakamira ate it with the expression of someone who had made a decision and was honoring it. "It's—" Riyura started. "It's food," Yakamira said. "It's technically food." "You don't have to eat it—"
"I'm eating it," Yakamira said. "I made a decision to eat it and I'm honoring the decision." He ate another bite. His expression did not change. "It's very bad," he said.
"I KNOW IT'S BAD—" "You said you could cook—" "I CAN COOK SOME THINGS—" "What things," Yakamira said. A pause. "Toast," Riyura said.
"Toast isn't cooking," Yakamira said. "Toast requires heat and timing—" "Toast requires a toaster," Yakamira said. "The toaster does the cooking. You just put bread in it."
"I put it in AT THE RIGHT MOMENT—" "Pan's bakery opens at seven AM tomorrow," Yakamira said. "We'll go there." "That's—yes. Okay. We'll go there."
They ate the rest of the terrible dinner in a silence that was comfortable in the specific way that silences are comfortable between people who have shared everything and have nothing left that requires words to communicate.
PART THREE: THE CAMPUS — MORNING
He met Jisatsu at the main campus entrance at 8 AM the next morning.
Jisatsu looked the same. Slightly less dramatically styled than the Jeremy High version — the emo aesthetic still present but less performed, more integrated, more just: this is how I am rather than this is what I need you to know about me. His shadows were invisible in daylight, though Riyura knew they were there the way you know about things that have become background rather than foreground.
"Hey," Riyura said.
"Hey," Jisatsu said. He looked at the campus. At the cherry blossom trees and the permanent-seeming architecture and the students moving through morning routines with the particular energy of people who belong somewhere. "It's very organized," he said.
"Yeah," Riyura said. "Jeremy High was not organized," Jisatsu said. "No," Riyura agreed. "I think I preferred not organized," Jisatsu said. "I thought you hated the chaos," Riyura said.
"I hated some of the chaos," Jisatsu said carefully. "The government agents and the psychic abilities and the part where I tried to destroy everything. I didn't hate — the energy. The specific feeling of a place that accepted broken things." He looked at the campus. At the beautiful buildings. At the if-you're-good-enough quality of the welcome. "This place wants you to meet a standard," he said.
"Yeah," Riyura said. "I noticed that too." "Jeremy High's standard was: show up. That was the whole standard. Show up and don't murder anyone." "And yet," Riyura said.
"And yet," Jisatsu agreed. "But the standard was survivable. This one—" He paused. "I'm going to have to think about how to navigate this one."
They walked through the campus together. Through the cherry blossom trees and past the buildings and through the specific gravity of an institution that took itself seriously. Students moved around them with the confident purposefulness of people who knew where they were going.
Riyura didn't know where he was going yet. Not in the logistical sense — he had the map, he had the orientation schedule, he had Yakamira who had memorized both. But in the other sense. In the who-am-I-here sense.
At Jeremy High he had been the purple-haired kid with the bow tie and the comedy and the impossible friend group and the father who turned out to be a criminal and the brother who died and came back and all the accumulated context of four years of surviving things together. He had been specific. Legible. A person with a known history to the people around him.
Here he was just a new student.
Nobody knew about the bow tie's history. Nobody knew about Yakamira dying. Nobody knew about Hariko's year or the government agents or the 1876 founders sending letters across time. Nobody knew that the comedy was genuine now, was real, was the actual personality rather than the armor — because they hadn't known the armor to compare it to.
He was going to have to be Riyura without the context.
He was thinking about this — standing near a cherry blossom tree watching petals fall in the morning light with the particular philosophical distance of someone processing something in real time — when someone walked directly into him.
Not deliberately. Just the physics of two people moving in opposite directions with one of them not watching where they were going because they were looking at their phone while carrying too many books.
The books went everywhere.
"Sorry!" the person said immediately, dropping to collect them. "Sorry, sorry, I do this — I always do this, I'm looking at my phone and then there's a person and the person is in the way and the books—" She looked up. Her eyes went to his hair first. Stopped there for a moment. "That's incredible," she said. "Is that natural?"
"No," he said, crouching to help with the books.
"Is yours?" he asked, gesturing at her hair — dark, chaotic in a specific way that suggested not styled-chaotic but genuinely-doesn't-think-about-it chaotic.
"No," she said. Then she grinned. The grin of someone who found the exchange genuinely funny and wasn't performing that. "We should be friends. I'm Hazuki Sakura. First year, literature." She said it like a declaration. Like she was announcing something.
"Riyura Shiko," he said. "First year, creative arts."
She looked at him for a moment. Something registered in her face — recognition moving through it, but sideways, like she was recognizing something adjacent to him rather than him specifically. "My brother talks about your manga," she said. "The production work you did in Tokyo. He referenced one of your series in a workshop last week. Said it was interesting but underdeveloped." She said it completely without malice — just reporting information. "He says that about most things though. It's his move."
Riyura looked at her. "Your brother," he said.
"Sakuranbo Hitomi," she said. She was already standing, books recollected, phone pocketed. "Third year. You'll probably meet him — he runs a workshop for the creative arts people. He's—" She paused. Something moved through her face that was complicated and warm and sad simultaneously. "He's talented," she said. "He's also—" Another pause. "Complicated. But talented." She looked at Riyura directly. "Come have tea. I know where all the good places are and I've only been here three weeks which is impressive." She was already walking. "Come on. I'll tell you about the campus. I've mapped it in my head and some of the maps are wrong and I know which parts."
Riyura looked at Jisatsu who had been watching this entire exchange with quiet interest. "Go," Jisatsu said. "I'll see you at orientation." Riyura went.
EPILOGUE: THE FIRST EVENING
That night. The apartment. Riyura and Yakamira at the small table with tea — Pan's tea, from Pan's bakery, which they'd visited that morning and which had been exactly what he needed it to be. The smell of the right place. The bread that tasted like surviving.
"I met someone," Riyura said. "Her name is Hazuki Sakura. She's—" He thought about how to describe her. "She's like if you took Subarashī's energy and gave it a literature degree and a specific complicated relationship with her brother."
Yakamira looked up from his notes. "Complicated how."
"The kind of complicated that's made of love and worry in equal amounts and not enough words for either," Riyura said. He turned his tea cup in his hands. "Her brother is Sakuranbo Hitomi. The person who runs the creative arts workshop. The one whose system—"
"I know who he is," Yakamira said. "I mapped the social architecture of the creative arts program before we arrived. His name is central to it." Riyura looked at him. "You did what—"
"Information is useful," Yakamira said. "You researched my university program's social dynamics before we arrived." "Preliminary assessment," Yakamira said. "Standard procedure."
Riyura stared at him. "You're extraordinary," he said. "In the completely unsettling way." "Thank you," Yakamira said, returning to his notes.
Riyura looked at the window. At the city outside — Osaka, lit up in its evening way, carrying its history underneath its lights. His father's history. The corruption network's history. The community organization he was going to volunteer at. The coffee shop built in the space where something terrible used to operate.
He looked at the yellow star hairclip on the windowsill where he'd put it that afternoon. He picked it up. Held it for a moment. Then he set it back down where the light would catch it in the morning.
He wasn't ready to put it on yet. But he was glad it was there.
Tomorrow there was orientation. Tomorrow there was the campus, the program, the specific challenge of being somewhere new without the context that had previously told him who he was. Tomorrow there was the creative arts workshop and the name Sakuranbo Hitomi said like a person who was both proud of something and worried about it simultaneously.
Tomorrow. Tonight was just the apartment and the tea and his brother alive on the other side of the small table making notes about psychological research with characteristic precision.
Tonight was enough. Outside the cherry blossoms fell in the dark. The new season. Whether he was ready or not.
TO BE CONTINUED...