Part 3

Midnight conversations

Atsushi got up that morning to find a notice on his door, informing him that there will be a power-out, starting at midnight at lasting about two hours.
He wasn't particularly concerned with the upcoming shortage of power, but when he offhandedly mentioned it to Junko, something in her face darkened.

"We won't have power for two hours? That's... inconvenient..."
"But it's at midnight, so we wouldn't really notice it." Atsushi said but then noticed she got that look on her face. That distant glazed look that meant she was thinking about something else and wasn't really paying attention to her surroundings. He grew to accept that look, like it even. Something unexpected always followed a look such as that. He always got to learn something new about Junko when she got like that.

"So I won't have my tape recorder for two whole hours." she puffed her cheeks. "That's going to be... a problem."
"How so?" Atsushi asked as he took a bite of the pickled plum on his plate.
"What if I wake up to pee or something? I won't be able to go back to sleep." her eyes looked up at the ceiling as if she was looking past it and to the sky.

She was nervous.

Atsushi didn't need to ask why she slept with white noise every night. She didn't like the quiet, he could understand that. There were lots of things that Atsushi understood about her without asking. There were lots of things he didn't understand, too, and those two groups of things sometimes didn't have a very clearly defined line between them.

He knew she went through something. And he knew she didn't want to talk about it. He didn't want to talk about his time in the orphanage, either. He preferred to pretend like those memories were nothing but a bad dream. Like those scars on his body were just nasty birthmarks, like his past trauma was just a work of fiction. He didn't want to let himself stay in that world he used to live in. He wanted to immerse himself in this new life he had now, he wanted to focus on his new friends, his new family.
And he saw that in her too. He saw that desperation for normality in her. He saw that craving for the peaceful and the mundane.

But he also saw a lot of things that he didn't recognise. He knew fear, he knew desperation, he knew helplessness. But he didn't know all those other things. Maybe he will understand them one day. There were a lot of pieces missing from that puzzle, but there was no point in trying to pressure her to give him answers.

She wouldn't give them to him.

He wouldn't give answers if anyone asked, either.

So why would she?

"If you wake up, just wake me up too, that way you won't be alone." he said, but her response to that didn't surprise him.
"Oh, I couldn't possibly wake you up, you need to sleep."
He smiled.
He knew that if he said something now, she would decline, so instead of saying anything he just proceeded to spend the entire rest of the day drinking coffee cup after coffee cup. Just in case that plan failed, he made sure to take one more extra precaution, but around cup number 15 his hands started shaking and he could tell that he wasn't going to get much sleep that night.

"I can't sleep," he said before they parted ways at the end of the day, "I think I overdid it with the coffee."
"And you want me to stay up with you until the caffeine wears off?" she smiled. Atsushi was relieved that she didn't scold him for his actions and was glad she accepted it. As long as he was able to stay up and keep her company, what's a little tough love between friends?
"I'll get changed, let's meet up on the roof in ten minutes?"
"The roof?" he looked at her, "I didn't know we can get up there."
"Well, God doesn't like it because a few years ago I fell from up there and broke my leg. But I heal fast, and you can turn into a tiger, so even if we fall we should be fine."
"Right...." he took a few seconds to appreciate how casual Junko was about ignoring Kirokugakari's wishes. It was a repeating pattern, and an interesting one at that.