[Fic] On the other side of sadness... (2 - 2/2)

Part 1

~*~

She had a pretty good idea what has been tormenting Jin all these past months, years even.

At first, she had only recognized the symptoms of a trauma from the past, most likely from his childhood days. But last session they had made a fantastic progress as it had been the first time since his therapy began that he had mentioned his friend.

Now, it was crystal clear that their separation had left a scar so deep within Jin’s subconscious —within the very depths of his heart— that he hadn’t learnt how to cope with it.

A death, maybe, given the seriousness of his trauma.

But there was something else.

“Now, Jin… Regarding that friend of yours…” Jin squirmed on the divan, but he made no attempt to interrupt her. “Can you tell me their name?”

She thought she would have to repeat the question when his answer was nothing but silence.

“No.”

There was something cutting in his tone that wasn’t particularly directed at the doctor.

“And why is that?” she asked as she took notes in her clipboard.

Jin waited a few more seconds before he replied with a simple “I don’t know.”

“Jin, I’m sure if you gave a few seconds you could get to understand why it is difficult for you to-”

“No, you don’t understand, sensei” and he looked at her with pleading eyes, filled with a silent desperation and confusion. “My friend… He had a mark under his eye, much like mine. He had these bushy eyebrows and tiny, squinty eyes that became even smaller when he laughed.”

He furrowed his brows, forcing the foggy image into shape. “Unlike others, he looked a bit ugly when he laughed and he laughed big and often, clapping his hands and stomping his feet. His nose was… it wasn’t perfect or pretty.”

The doctor took sloppy notes, trying to match Jin’s speed in describing his childhood friend.

“He had this very nasal, high-pitched voice. It was almost annoying to listen to, but at the same time, it wasn’t at all. He was… He…”

And his voice died in his throat. Whether the image escaped his desperate grip or it became too heavy for his heart, the doctor didn’t dare to ask.

And so, silence stretched between them once more.

“But, Jin, what about…?”

“I cannot tell you his name because I don’t know it.”

It wasn’t a death.

“I see,” Ishikawa-sensei replied with demure, scrabbling something quickly on her notepad. Once she finished, she put her clipboard aside and look at Jin sitting in front of her, looking straight into his eyes. “It is often said that things that don’t remain in shape, remain longer in memory; and I think that holds quite a truth to it… Do you understand the meaning of that sentence?”

The man shook his head.

“Well, our memory works in a particular way. You see, we often remember things like feelings, sensations, or little details that caught our attention about something or somebody, but it is almost impossible to hold every single aspect of every single memory we hold…”

“Are you telling me it’s okay I forgot the name of my best friend?”

“I’m telling you it’s only natural,” she let the words sank a bit into Jin’s consciousness for it would take a time for him to accept the fact.

It was right there at the pitch of his stomach, at the edge of his throat… a truth that nearly makes him cry his heart out.

“I turned my back on him, on my friend… I walked on and continued my life as if he had not just disappeared on me…” he almost choked on his words “as if he had never even been there.”

“So, you feel guilty because you moved on with your life?”

“Without him! I moved on without any regard to him, sensei!” he took a few rash intakes of air, but his lungs expelled them almost immediately as if the feelings welling up inside didn’t give any room for anything else. “We made a promise back then, you know? We promised we would meet, but I just threw away any hope for that to happen, and so I continued. I never looked for him, I never tried to reach out to him, and now… More than 20 years have gone by and I cannot remember anything about him, sensei…”

The doctor checked on her notes as she gave room for Jin to weep silently, but couldn’t remain still as she heard him sigh “I’m the worst…” in between his sobs.

“It’s not anything. You don’t remember his name, it’s true, but…” she took again her clipboard and checked on the last notes she took just a few minutes ago. “All these details, all these beautiful meaningful details, don’t reduce them to nothing. You remember him dearly and you remember him plenty. Only a few details escape your grasp.”

He had calmed down enough to listen to the doctor.

“His name is not a simple detail, sensei.”

“I know. And yet, it is,” there was no point in continuing with the argument, given that for Jin it was like a sin not to know the name of this guy that was not a part of his life anymore. “From what I could gather in our previous sessions, you had a wonderful childhood. Your parents tried their very best to give you and your brother a loving, protected upbringing. However, your parents couldn’t protect you from the natural processes of life.”

“What do you mean?”

“Life is a compound of connections and separations; those are the natural processes of life. You are born and are kept close to your mother until you separate from her in search of your own friends. You keep your parents close to you, in spite of this; yet, during your adolescence, you distance yourself from them in search of your own identity. Home, school, university, work, family, classmates, friends, lovers… Over and over again, you build up a relationship or a particular experience, only to face separation from it. That’s the very nature of life and we cannot avoid it…”

“So you’re telling me what?”

“I’m telling you that, from what I know, losing this friend was the very first big separation you had to face growing up and that left a scar inside you. It was so painful at that time, that your brain decided that you needed to be protected from that ache and so, slowly but surely, you started forgetting your friend.”

“So much of a friend am I…”

“Well, it’s only natural,” the doctor sensed Jin was ready to close off for the rest of the session and she couldn’t allow it. It was too early for it; they had just merely scraped the surface of Jin’s issue. “However, it’s not irreversible. It doesn’t have to stay like this forever.”

Now she had perked Jin’s attention from the pain of loss.

“There’s this technique in psychotherapy known as hypnotherapy that would allow us to give a shape to these blurry memories of your or to gather more details in order to-”

“No.”

“It would help you a lot with-”

“No.”

Hypnosis was just something you watched on TV for your entertainment, laughing about random people sleeping soundly in quick intervals or taking bites of an onion they took for an apple. It was not a tool used in serious therapy, if you asked Jin.

However, he trusted sensei fully and if her words were to be true, things would be easier if he just let himself be hypnotized. Everything would be easier.

But he didn’t deserve easier.

He would force his brain to acknowledge the importance of his friend. Even if the pain would kill him, he would force himself to remember everything he needed to remember.

It was the least he —and his friend— deserved.

“We can continue talking all you want about him, but I won’t undertake any shortcut to remember him,” and that was final. “I got fired from my job.”

There were no raised eyebrows or a silent “oh” after the statement. Jin had decided to share this piece of information in order to stop the doctor from digging more into the topic of his friend.

He was running away from facing the core of his problem, but that was okay.

Just merely a month ago he would just simply shut up until the clock showed his time was up and he would leave without uttering a single word.

This was okay.

This was improvement.

“And how did that make you feel, being fired?” she pretended to have taken the bait.

Jin shrugged a shoulder, looking distantly out of the window.

“I was surprised it took them this long to get rid of me… But even so, it bothered me a bit.”

“And why do you think that it bothered you?”

“Because it confirmed how useless I am.”

“Because everybody can clearly see I’m a loser.”

“Because I’m not important for people, I’m just a nuisance.”

“‘Cause I won’t work with Takizawa-san anymore.”

“Because… I have to go through the hassle of job-hunting, that’s why,” he replied at the end. “And I know it might take a while to find a new one, since I suck at being interviewed.”

The doctor nodded and pretended to check her notes.

“Have you already started job-hunting?”

Jin shook his head.

“When were you fired?”

“Half a week ago.”

“I see. When are you planning to search for a job?”

“When the money of my last paycheck vanishes,” the doctor lifted a brow and Jin cracked a smirk. It had been a long time since he had pretended or even tried somehow close to a smile. The doctor was impressed. “I’m joking… I actually have this sort of offer…”

“Go on.”

“It’s not really an offer, but a possibility of working in a bar, but…”

“But?”

“I’m still not so sure.”

“Why don’t you try it out?” Jin groaned softly. “What do you have to lose?”

He looked back at the doctor, no longer a single trace of the smirk he had tried a few second ago. He was dead serious when he said, “I have nothing else to lose, sensei.”

“Jin…”

“It’s up.”

“Up?”

“Yeah… my time’s up, sensei.”

The doctor lifted up her gaze to the big, round clock behind her back. Jin was right; his session had finished 12 minutes ago.

She would let it slip, his sudden urge to leave her. She would let him have this little victory, as he had granted her a bigger one during their session together.

Today there had been a win-win situation and so, she would let it slip. But she wouldn’t concede him such an easy way out.

“If you ask me…” she said right as Jin was crossing the doorstep “…your friend is really lucky.”

Jin huffed.

“I’m serious, Jin. Friendships are broken or lost every single day without a blink of an eye and people move on with their lives just like that, but you…” Jin gripped the doorknob until his knuckles were red, “You think you moved on, but you haven’t, Jin. You really cared about your friend and you’ve been grieving his departure all your life… even if you haven’t realized.”

Jin let go of the knob and breathed out, not sure for how long he had been holding it in.

“You haven’t moved on, Jin, but maybe it’s time you do now.”

[Fic] On the other side of sadness... (2 - 1/2)

Genre: AU. Angst. Friendship.
Pairing: Akame
Rating: PG-13 for swearing
Beta: none
Summary: A book, a dream, and years of repressed emotions piled inside Jin that Sunday morning...
Disclaimer: The boys don't belong to me yet. So, so far, just the plot is mine
Warning: Unbetaed. English is not my mother tongue. Also, this is very angsty so far. Still, try to enjoy (?)

~*~

The night shift had been slower than ever that day.

The conbini where he worked was just a couple of blocks from his place, a mere 20-minute walk if he strolled. He took the night shift because he still was a college student after all and night shifts meant he didn’t have to talk to so many people. Takizawa-san had been running the place as a manager for 4 years, nearly 5, and was a very nice boss, took Jin under his wing as soon as they met, almost like a father even though he was just a few years older.

He saw Jin fidgeting as soon as the interview had started, fumbling with his one-syllable answers, and unable to hold his gaze for more than 5 minutes at a time; and yet things were okay for him as long as Jin spoke politely with the customers and made proper eye contact.

“You don’t need to be a social butterfly like myself,” he had told him before Jin started his very first shift.

No way could he complain with such a nice boss.

“How’s school?”

Jin managed to pass his scoff for a sigh as he took a cloth and started pretending to clean the already spotless counter. It was futile, though; once Takizawa-san shot one of his questions, Jin had no choice but to answer.

“Cool,” Jin cleared his throat and focused on the motion of his hand. “I’ve been stuck with a paper for a couple of weeks, but…”

“Really? What is it about?”

“Huh?”

“The paper… What is it about?”

“I don’t think you’d…” Jin’s voice died out as his gaze met Takizawa’s intent look for a second. “Bell Jar.”

“What’s that?”

“A… A novel by S-” he cleared his throat again, not used to exchange so many words in a while. “An American author.”

“And what’s the problem with it?”

Jin frowned.

“You said you were stuck with your paper…”

“Well… The story has so much parallelism with the author’s life, that it’s almost autobiographical… That’s the most interesting for me, but I don’t know how to turn it into a paper. I mean, it’s been done over and over again through the years and I’m not quite sure what angle I can use to make it fresh and…”

Takizawa-kun made a big effort to follow Jin’s low rumble about this lady and her struggles in life, but not a single word aroused his interest. He nodded here and there, hummed at times, and even let out a convincing ‘Is that so?’ that didn’t faze Jin.

And when he couldn’t take it anymore —when faking was just too painfully hard to do—, he tilted his head to one side.

“But really… What’s so amusing about that? I hardly listened to a few words and I’m ready to kill myself.”

Jin blinked.

And he blinked some more.

Depression has been a sort of permanent state in his life, growing so steadily and slowly until the point where his own steps were too heavy to walk, his bed held him in a smothering cuddle… His days were gray and dull. Every single one of them. For as long as he could remember now.

What’s so amusing about Ms. Plath’s depressing story?

“Nothing.”

He wasn’t looking for amusement. He didn’t want to be comforted. He didn’t deserve anything more than he had.

“There’s nothing amusing in it.”

Turning his back to the manager, Jin halted every attempt at pretending he was okay and focused on fixing the rows of shelves.

His one-in-a-month visits to Ishikawa-sensei were a sort of confessionary —a useless search for redemption only a sole person could truly concede and yet wouldn’t.

“Sorry about early…” Takizawa said a few minutes later. “I didn’t mean to insult your book.”

Jin merely hummed in acknowledgment.

“When I get nervous I spout the first thing in my mind and…”

“It’s okay.”

“I was very, very nervous since the big boss decided to…” Takizawa looked around, looking for the right words to say magically plastered in the products surrounding them. He gave it a second try before he would lose the nerve. “Well, the boss asked me to tell you that you don’t have to come back tomorrow.”

“I don’t need a day off.”

“It’s not-” Takizawa heaved a sigh. “There’s no easy way to say this, but you don’t need to come back ever again. He said you’re…”

“Fired,” Jin completed.

He had had nightmares with those words, fearing to hear them the first couple of months he’d been working in the conbini, messing up orders, giving the wrong change, creeping out customers, failing even the simplest tasks.

Only now that he had relaxed, the nightmare had come true.

“Like I said, that’s-” he hadn’t moved an inch and his voice faded out, “okay.”

“No, it’s not, Jin,” Takizawa said sympathetically. “It’s not okay, but it will! Things will be okay.”

“Jin…”

Takizawa called out softly when Jin had finished sweeping the floor. He had busied himself with checking the cash register and reorganizing some items around him.

He didn’t wait for an answer.

“You will really be missed in here.”

“By whom?” Jin didn’t dare to ask, but expressed anyways with a scoff.

“But this could be a great opportunity for you,” Jin still didn’t speak. “I mean it; you’re wasting your potential in here.”

Takizawa didn’t mean any harm, Jin had to remind himself.

Hell, he was the only person besides Ishikawa-sensei that made an actual effort to be nice to Jin, and he didn’t need to pay him to. But seeing how he was losing the only ground he had earned in months, Jin couldn’t even see him at that moment.

“I told you since you first walked here, remember?”

Jin did see him this time.

“What the hell are you doing here with your CV?” Takizawa’s look and voice from all those months ago overlapped with his current self as he repeated the same words with which he had received Jin back then. “With your brains and looks, you could be working anywhere you wanted.”

Jin blinked and there once again was only one Takizawa.

“Are you still not interested in modeling?” he wasn’t surprised seeing Jin shaking his head. “I thought so…”

Jin shifted uncomfortably the weigh on his feet, looking everywhere but Takizawa’s face. He had been fired a few minutes ago and, in five more minutes, his last shift would end. There was nothing to talk about, so why was Takizawa-san so keen to keep Jin there any longer?

“But you still need to work. And it has to be at night, right?”

“I’ll manage to-”

“But being a host is a no. You could manage with your looks, but then you’d have to talk to all the customers, right?” Puzzled, Jin nodded to the rhetorical question. “We wouldn’t want that. Then how about working in a bar?”

To that, Jin had no prepared answer. He made a list of all the possibilities this question could take him to, next to a longer list of what Takizawa’s intentions could really be with asking that. But by the time the two lists had reached equally improbabilities, Jin felt he was far from grasping the answer.

He wasn’t prepared to give any of his own, other than furrowing his brows.

“Not as a…” Takizawa laughed. “There are many jobs in a bar that don’t involve talking to strangers. At least to begin with…”

“Why would…? How…? Why would I even…?” He couldn’t sort his thoughts at this point. “Why a bar?”

Takizawa laughed again and took out a business card from his pocket.

“Sorry I made you all confused, there. Here, take this,” he handed it to Jin, who needed a few minutes before he actually took the card. “After the boss told me… Well, I took the liberty to contact a senpai of mine who took care of me during the few years I spent in college and ever since. He’s a nice guy and I put on a good word for you.”

This could not really mean…

“He owns a bar a couple of stations from here and he’s willing to help you out if you give him a call.”

“I can’t-”

“Don’t think of it as a favor out of pity or anything like that,” Takizawa said; Jin’s inner thoughts and fears written all over his face. “Take it as a farewell gift, since I don’t have money enough to give you a proper one.”

After receiving a short, insecure nod from Jin, Takizawa patted the other’s back affectionately muttering a soft “Don’t be a stranger, okay?” as he walked to the backroom.

Part 2