[CONTENT WARNING: MA31+ — Grief, guilt, emotional confrontation, trauma legacy, psychological deterioration. Reader discretion strongly advised.]
[NARRATOR: Some things travel. Not through intention — through the specific gravity of genuine things encountering genuine people. Shoehead documented Takeshi's colors because Takeshi noticed beetle colors while dying and Shoehead needed that to mean something. Yellow for the jewel beetle. Green for the ground beetle. Blue for the water beetle. Almost-purple for the one Takeshi said he'd never properly named but kept coming back to. Shoehead carried those colors for eleven years. He shared them once, in a park at midnight in Osaka, with a purple-haired kid who understood without needing the explanation translated. And the purple-haired kid shared them quietly over time with the people who needed them — not as a speech, not as a lesson, just as the specific true thing available in a moment that needed a true thing. The colors traveled. They're still traveling. Tonight is the culinary school's graduation ceremony — the first class Shoehead and Socksiku trained together, the twelve students who learned that weird coping mechanisms didn't make you unemployable and that cooking could be the external form of an internal thing. Tonight Shoehead gives a speech he has been writing and rewriting for six months. And tonight, in a room full of people who don't know Riyura's name, the colors travel again. And Riyura, sitting in the back of the room as a stranger who shouldn't be there, hears them for the first time without the memories that explained why they mattered — and feels them matter anyway though.]
PART ONE: THE INVITATION
He almost didn't go.
It wasn't his graduation. He wasn't enrolled in the culinary program. He didn't know, in any way he could fully access right now, why the notification on his phone — Culinary Arts Graduation, Cherry University South Campus, 7 PM — had produced the specific pull it produced when he read it. He just knew his body wanted to go. The same way his body kept taking him to Pan's bakery at 4 AM, kept steering him toward the community organization on Thursdays, kept producing the sense of: this space, this direction, this is where something real is. He got dressed. Bow tie. Hairclip. The small specific armor of being recognizably himself.
He arrived at the south campus event hall at 6:52 PM and stood outside looking at the doors for a moment.
Through the glass he could see the room filling — students in chef whites, families taking photographs, the specific warmth of a celebration that had been worked toward. At the front: a low stage, two chairs, a microphone. And at one of the chairs, a person in his mid-twenties with the specific quality of someone who had been building toward this evening for months and was currently managing the building's weight by very carefully not thinking about it directly.
Shoehead. Riyura didn't know that name. Not right now. What he knew was: that person's face produced something in the star pupils. Something genuine underneath the surface, the specific orientation toward a real thing. He went inside.
PART TWO: THE SPEECH
He sat in the back. Nobody questioned it — ceremonies had guests, observers, people who wandered in from adjacent spaces. He was just a person in the back row with a red bow tie and star-shaped pupils who had arrived without explanation. Socksiku spoke first. Short, direct, the specific warmth of someone who had learned to say the honest thing in the fewest possible words. He talked about the program. What it had started as. What it had become. He did not make it about himself.
Then Shoehead stood up. He stood at the microphone for a moment before he spoke. Not dramatically — the pause of someone who was choosing the right starting point from several possible ones and taking the time to choose correctly. "I had a brother," he said. The room went quiet. The specific quality of a room that had been warm and celebratory going quiet — not uncomfortable, just: attending.
"His name was Takeshi," Shoehead said. "He was twelve years older than me. He was funny in the specific way of people who found the world genuinely amusing rather than performing amusement because the room expected it. He collected beetles." He paused. "Not as a hobby, exactly. More as — a running argument with the universe about which things deserved to be paid attention to and which things got overlooked. He thought beetles were overlooked. He had a position on this."
A few quiet laughs from the room. Shoehead's expression didn't change — he wasn't performing the warmth of the memory. He was just in it.
"He got murdered," Shoehead said. "When I was younger. He was killed and then he was never seen in my life again. The specifics aren't the point right now." He paused. "The point is that in the last weeks, when he was very tired from school and the conversation was hard to sustain, he talked about beetles. He had been cataloguing the colors of his collection for a project he wasn't going to finish and he wanted to finish it anyway. Yellow for the jewel beetle. Green for the ground beetle. Blue for the water beetle." He paused. "And almost-purple for one he'd never properly named. He said: that one keeps coming back. I don't know what it is yet. I haven't figured it out."
The room was very still. Riyura, in the back row, was very still.
"He never figured it out," Shoehead said. "He died before he could. And for a long time I thought — I thought that was the tragedy of it. The unfinished thing. The almost-purple beetle he couldn't name." He looked at the twelve students in the front rows. "But I've been thinking about it differently lately. I've been thinking that maybe the almost-purple was never supposed to be named by him. Maybe it was the kind of thing that was his to notice and someone else's to name. Maybe the noticing and the naming were always supposed to be separate acts by separate people across some amount of time."
He paused.
"You are the culinary program's first graduating class," he said. "You all came to this kitchen with difficult histories and the specific kind of hunger that isn't about food from what I've heard. You don't need to worry anymore, because you all came because something in cooking reached into whatever you were carrying and offered it a shape, you've all grown all of this time, and I was happy to here for your growth. And I want you to know that the shape you found here — the thing you made of your own difficult material — that's yours. Permanently. Not contingent on us, not contingent on this building, not contingent on whatever comes next." He looked at them. "Yellow for the jewel beetle. Green for the ground beetle. Blue for the water beetle. Almost-purple for the thing you haven't named yet. The one that keeps coming back. The one that's yours to notice even if someone else eventually names it." He paused. "Take it with you. All four."
The room was quiet for a moment. Then it wasn't. Riyura sat in the back row with his hands in his lap and something happening in his heart. Like wanting to reach out, but knowing he couldn't. Which was exactly the reason why, deep down, he was crying out to the world. To let him reach his friends' memories of him was once again. And finally be remembered once more.
PART THREE: AFTER
The ceremony was ending — graduates finding their families, the warmth of it spilling into the corridor — and Riyura was heading for the exit when Shoehead came through the same door at the same moment and they nearly walked directly into each other. Both of them stopped. Shoehead looked at him. The star pupils looking back. Not the pattern-recognition this time — something more personal, the specific quality of seeing someone whose face was doing something that wasn't finished yet.
"You were in the back," Shoehead said. "Yes," Riyura said. "You're not in the program though." "No." "Then why—" Shoehead stopped. He looked at Riyura the way he'd been looking at things all evening — with the specific quality of someone who had just delivered something true and was now recalibrating everything around it. "You knew the colors, I could tell. Because I know anyone's reaction when it comes to that saying of Takeshi's, after all. I have a massive trauma when it comes to him and everything before his death." he said. "Yes," Riyura said. "How do you know though?"
Riyura was quiet for a moment. "Something happened to my memories," he said. "And to the memories of people who knew me. I do have the full context of how I know them and you. But that's a story for another day. All you need to know is that I used to know you, and you've told me about Takeshi before. After all, we were close friends. But I learned about Takeshi's story from you in a horrible context. Not because we were close friends or anything though."
Shoehead looked at him for a long time. "Someone told me once," he said slowly, "that the almost-purple one didn't have a name yet. That it was mine to notice even if someone else named it." He paused. "I don't remember who said it. But I remember it landing correctly." "I think that was me," Riyura said. Shoehead's expression shifted. Something working behind it — not the performance of considering, the actual thing. He looked at Riyura's eyes. At the star pupils and the specific between-color quality of them in the corridor light. "Your eyes," he said. "The color in them." "Yes," Riyura said. "It's... in a way, Almost-purple." Shoehead said.
"Yes." Riyura said. Shoehead was quiet for a moment. Then he said: "Come outside."
They sat on the low wall outside the event hall. The Osaka evening around them, the celebration still audible through the glass behind them. Shoehead had a specific quality now — the speech delivered, the thing he'd been building toward for six months completed, and underneath the completion something that hadn't resolved yet. He was looking at the ground. "Takeshi didn't die because of beetles," he said.
Riyura waited.
"He died because of a car crash," Shoehead said. "When I was younger. We were heading somewhere on foot — I don't remember where now, something ordinary, somewhere that didn't matter — and someone ran a light and that was—" He stopped. "That was it. Takeshi was gone. Like that." He pressed his thumb into his palm. "And for years I told people — told myself — that I blamed myself. That I should have been there to protect him better. That if I'd been better at being a big brother, if I'd had been there faster, if I'd—" He stopped again. "But that's not actually what I blamed myself for though."
"What did you blame yourself for?" Riyura said.
"For not knowing," Shoehead said. "About the network. About Riyazo's people and what they did and how it touched our family without us knowing. There were financial—" He stopped. Jaw tight. "There were things done to our family. Business dealings. Money that moved wrong. Stress that built for years in ways we didn't fully understand. And I think — I've thought for a long time — that the stress of it was part of why Takeshi was driving that day. Why he was tired. Why his reaction time was—"
He stopped. The wall beneath them. The Osaka evening. The celebration behind the glass. "You don't actually know that," Riyura said. Quietly. Not dismissively — just: true.
"No," Shoehead said. "I don't. But I needed somewhere to put it. The rage of it. The specific rage of someone who lost their brother and couldn't find an adequate place to direct the loss." He looked at his hands. "And then years later I found out about the Shiko network. About Riyazo. About all the families it touched." His voice was flat. "And I found out about his son."
Riyura was very still.
"I told myself I was angry at the network," Shoehead said. "I told myself my choices after — the things I did, the way I positioned myself, the specific role I chose to play in the situations I got myself into — I told myself all of it was grief. Personal grief. Not directed at anyone in particular." He paused. "That was a lie I told myself." "You blamed his son, without even knowing, that you were doing so." Riyura realized, with a slight hidden shock from Shoehead.
Shoehead looked at him. "I blamed him and didn't know I was blaming him," he said. "Because blaming the son for the father's sins is — I knew that was wrong. I knew it rationally. But the rage had to go somewhere and it found him anyway. The son who was still alive when Takeshi wasn't. The son who had the network's blood in him even if he didn't have the network's choices." He stopped. "And then he — then Riyura destroyed his own father. Exposed the network. Stood in front of investigators and gave them everything." His jaw tightened. "Which made it harder to hate him. Which made the rage have nowhere to go again."
"So you chose a different role," Riyura said.
"Yes," Shoehead said. "I chose — I decided that I was the villain in his story. Not out of hatred. Out of—" He stopped. Looked at the ground. "I don't know what it was out of. Despair, maybe. The specific despair of someone who has been angry for so long that the anger has become the only architecture they know how to stand inside. If I was the villain then the rage had a function. Then it was doing something."
He was quiet for a moment.
"He helped me out of it," Shoehead said. "Riyura. He—" He stopped. "He didn't do it by forgiving me. He did it by seeing something real in me that I didn't know was still there. He did it the way he does everything, I think. By holding it carefully." He looked at Riyura. "You said that. Tonight. That I blamed myself deep down over something I couldn't stop. You said it to a stranger. You said it like you already knew."
"I think I did know," Riyura said. "From before. From somewhere underneath where the experiment could reach." "The experiment," Shoehead said.
"Someone did this to my memories deliberately," Riyura said. "And to everyone else's memories of me. I don't have the full context of who I am to people right now. But I have — the feelings of things. The emotional truth of things before the content." Shoehead looked at him. The specific look of someone who has just been handed a piece of information that reorganizes the other pieces around it. Shoehead was quiet for a long moment. He reached into his jacket pocket and produced — with the specific casual quality of someone doing something entirely normal — a shoe. Not a full shoe. The tip of a shoe, bitten through cleanly. He looked at it.
"I stopped for a while," he said. "The eating. It felt like—" He paused. "It felt like something I had to give up to be taken seriously. By the culinary school. By the graduates. By the story I was trying to tell about myself." He turned the shoe section over in his hands. "But it was never actually the problem. It was just — it was mine. Weird and mine and not hurting anyone and genuinely comforting in a way I never fully explained because I didn't think the explanation would land."
He looked at the bite mark in the leather.
"Takeshi used to say I had interesting coping mechanisms," he said. "He didn't say it cruelly. He said it the way he said everything — like the world was genuinely amusing and you might as well notice." Something moved across his face. Not grief exactly. Something older than grief. Something that had been sitting underneath it for twelve years. "He would have eaten the shoe with me if I'd asked him to," he said. "Just to be there."
Riyura didn't say anything.
"I've been so angry," Shoehead said. Very quietly. "For such a long time. And I don't know how to put it down. I've been trying to find someone to give it to who deserves it and I keep — the person I kept finding was—" He stopped. Looked at Riyura. "The memory loss," he said. "You said something happened to your memories and to everyone's memories of you." "Yes," Riyura said.
Shoehead looked at the shoe in his hands. "And you still sat in the back of that hall tonight," he said. "And you still came out here. And you're still—" He stopped. "The almost-purple one," he said quietly. "You're still almost-purple." "Yes," Riyura said. "Even without the memories," Shoehead said. "Even without knowing what I chose to do with the rage." "Yes," Riyura said. Shoehead was quiet for a very long time.
Then he bit the edge of the shoe section. Not dramatically. Just — the way he'd always done it before, with the specific practiced ease of someone doing something that had been theirs for years and that he was choosing to stop pretending it wasn't. He chewed thoughtfully. "Takeshi would have liked you," he said. Something tightened in Riyura's throat. "Tell me something about him," he said. "Not the colors. Something else."
Shoehead looked at the evening. "He had very specific opinions about beetles," he said. "Very specific. He could talk about them for hours. The taxonomy of them. The specific unfairness of certain species being overlooked by the people who compiled important lists." He paused. "I used to fall asleep listening to him talk about beetles and wake up still listening and he'd still be going." Something in his expression — warm and broken and genuine simultaneously. "I was so annoyed by it at the time. I would've given anything to be annoyed by it again. He really loved the science behind the species."
They sat on the wall for a while after that. Not talking much. The celebration behind the glass winding down.
Before they parted Shoehead looked at Riyura one more time. "When my memories come back," he said. "When I remember who I was in your story—" He stopped. "Don't give me the rage back," he said. "Whatever I chose. Whatever I decided to do with it. Don't hand it back to me when you remember." He paused. "I'm trying to put it down. I'm not finished yet. But I'm trying." "Okay," Riyura said. "The almost-purple one," Shoehead said. "It keeps coming back. Even when you don't know why." He looked at Riyura steadily. "I think that's true for both of us." "Yes," Riyura said. "I think it is." He walked home through the Osaka evening holding that. The colors traveling.
The rage somewhere behind Shoehead on a low wall outside an event hall, being put down incrementally, the way grief was put down — not all at once, not cleanly, but genuinely, in the specific direction of someone who had finally found a reason to try. Still here. Both of them. Still trying.
EPILOGUE: THE WALK HOME
He walked home through the Osaka evening. The graduation still warm in him — not comfort exactly, but the specific quality of having been in a true space where true things were said and having been reached by them despite having no business being there. Almost-purple for the thing you haven't named yet. He touched the yellow star hairclip. The between-color in his pupils doing the thing it did when something genuine was close.
His phone buzzed. Not S.N. The group chat. A message from Shoehead. He'd sent it to the whole group — Riyura's number included, which meant he'd added it at some point in the corridor without Riyura noticing. There was someone at the graduation tonight. Purple hair. Between-color pupils. He knew the colors. I don't know how. But I think he's the thing we've all been feeling was missing. I think someone should talk to him. Riyura stopped walking. Read the message twice.
Then a response from Miyaka — whose number he didn't have anymore, who had looked at him like a stranger on the street two weeks ago: Headayami had recently showed me some documents. A sign-in sheet. My own notes in my handwriting referencing someone I don't remember. I think I believe him. Then Subarashī: I asked him if he was okay when I saw him in the bakery. I didn't know why. But I asked. I always ask people that.
Then, last, from a number labeled only with initials: Y.S. — I told him I didn't have a brother. I've been thinking about it for two weeks. I think I was wrong. Riyura stood on the street. The Osaka evening around him. Patient. Indifferent. The city continuing. He typed into the group chat: I'm still here. I've been here the whole time. Almost-purple for the thing you haven't named yet. He put his phone in his pocket.
Kept walking. Still here. Still the direction. Still traveling.
[TO BE CONTINUED — Episode 11: "Hiroaki's Complete Truth"]