Chapter Text
Ryotaro propped his chin on his hand and smiled at Nanako while she talked about her latest school gossip. He’d finally been able to cut back on his hours at the station, after everything that happened last year, and it was nice to be able to slow things down and spend time with his daughter. Even if she usually just wanted to hang out in the Junes foodcourt.
“Huh?” Nanako paused, her drink halfway to her mouth. “Is that Yosuke-nii?”
Her father twisted in his chair to look over his shoulder. “Hey, you’re right. Hey, Hanamura!” He waved to the teen before turning back to Nanako. “Is it okay if he joins us for a bit?”
“Uh-huh!” She kicked her legs excitedly, smiling up at Hanamura when he approached their table. “Yosuke-nii!”
“Hi, Nanako-chan. And, uh, Dojima-san.”
Ryotaro shoved one of the chairs out with his foot. “Care to join us?”
“I’m just on my break, it’s okay.” Hanamura didn’t make eye contact, which set off a warning bell in Ryotaro’s head. His nephew’s friend had always been brimming with self-confidence, but today he looked like something had worn him down to a shadow of himself.
“Nonsense, we’d love to have you sit with us. Isn’t that right, Nanako?”
She looked up at Hanamura with big, pleading eyes. “Please, Yosuke-nii?”
Hanamura shook his head ruefully. “You know I can never say no to you, Nanako-chan.” He gingerly set his tray on the table and dropped into the seat Ryotaro had pushed out for him.
Ryotaro frowned inwardly. There wasn’t a lot of food on the kid’s tray. Just a bowl of rice and a couple of vegetable skewers. There were dark circles under his eyes, too, and his uniform was a little worn and ragged in places.
“So, how’s school going?” Ryotaro asked as Hanamura started picking at his rice. Hanamura barely hid a flinch, but the detective’s sharp eyes caught it.
“Oh, you know, it’s fine,” Hanamura replied breezily. If Ryotaro hadn’t been looking for the signs, the kid might have actually fooled him. Something was definitely wrong here. “Think I might get a job up in Okina after I graduate.”
Ryotaro’s frown deepened. “I thought you were going to college?” Yu had mentioned that he and Hanamura were making plans to attend the same college, maybe get an apartment together.
Hanamura shrugged. He gingerly slid a roasted tomato off one of his skewers and popped it in his mouth. “Well, y’know. Plans change.”
He still wasn’t making eye contact.
“Hey, Nanako.” Ryotaro dug a few bills out of his wallet and passed them across the table to his daughter. “Why don’t you go pick out some dessert?”
“Really?” She clutched the money to her chest, eyes shining.
“Really. Get enough for all of us, okay?”
“Yay!” Nanako’s cheer blocked out Hanamura’s protest as she wiggled out of her chair and dashed toward one of the restaurant windows.
Ryotaro focused his attention back on Hanamura as soon as his daughter was out of earshot. The kid was staring at his plate, the chopsticks trembling in his hand. “Wanna tell me what’s going on, Hanamura?” Ryotaro said as gently as he could.
Hanamura shook his head. “Everything’s fine, sir.”
He sighed. “Kid, I’ve been on the force a long time. I can recognize a runaway when I see one.”
“I didn’t run away.” Hanamura’s cheek twitched as he hissed out the answer through clenched teeth. “I just…I haven’t run away.”
“Well, if you did, you’d be pretty stupid to still be working in your old man’s store,” Ryotaro commented.
Hanamura snorted. “Yeah. Stupid. That’s me.”
Ryotaro let him eat a few more bites of his meal as he turned around to check on Nanako. She was in line at the crepe place, talking animatedly to a middle-aged woman Ryotaro recognized as one of their neighbors. Satisfied that she’d be distracted a little while longer, he turned back to Hanamura. “I can’t help if I don’t know what’s happening, Hanamura.”
“You can’t help anyway. Sir.”
He wasn’t good at this. He’d gotten better over the last year, after getting to know his nephew and spending so much time around his friends, but he still had trouble talking to kids. Even if Hanamura was almost an adult now, he was still so young in Ryotaro’s eyes.
“Just try me, okay?” he said gently, ducking down to try to meet Hanamura’s gaze. “You might feel better if you talk it out.”
Hanamura’s lips were pressed in a thin line, a muscle twitching in his cheek. His eyes were focused on his plate, but Ryotaro recognized the look of someone holding everything back. He’d seen it on the faces of the loved ones of victims, more times than he could remember. The face of someone holding every emotion and thought at bay by sheer strength of will. If one thing cracked, the whole façade would come crumbling down.
“Hanamura…Yosuke, kid, just talk to me.”
He covered his face. His shoulders shook a little as he tried to regain control of himself, and Ryotaro leaned back to give him some space.
“I think my parents are splitting up,” Yosuke said, his voice muffled behind his hands. “They just…they fight all the time now, and I can’t take it anymore.”
Ryotaro rested a hand on the back of Yosuke’s chair. “How long has this been going on?”
Yosuke shrugged. “Two months? Maybe a little more?” He turned away from Ryotaro to scrub a napkin over his face, then faced the table again with red-rimmed eyes focused on his plate. He’d barely eaten a third of his rice, and his vegetable skewers had already gone cold.
“They’ve been fighting for two months?”
“Fighting, yelling. Sometimes I hear stuff break.”
“What about you?”
Yosuke shrugged again. “Maybe if one of them isn’t home, the other might yell at me for a little bit. About my grades, usually. How much college will cost. How I don’t have any ambition.”
“So, you don’t always go home?”
There was no answer, but Ryotaro was pretty sure he’d hit the nail on the head. In a town as small as Inaba, word traveled quickly. People were always calling in about teenagers camping at the floodplain or behind the shrine or jumping the gates at the high school to sleep on the grounds.
“I mostly just work,” Yosuke finally said quietly. “Since I’m the boss’s kid, nobody cares if I work a few extra shifts. Then everything’s quiet by the time I leave here, and it’s easy enough to find a place to crash for the night.”
And his parents were too busy screaming at each other to notice that their son hadn’t come home. Ryotaro sighed and shook his head. “Well, you can’t do that anymore, okay? No more camping out.”
He’d tried to keep his voice gentle, but Yosuke’s head bowed, and his shoulders slumped. “Yes, sir,” he muttered dully.
“I mean it,” Ryotaro added. “If you feel like you can’t go home, then you should come stay with us.”
Yosuke’s head jerked up, and he stared at Ryotaro in abject terror. “Oh, no…Dojima-san…no, sir, I couldn’t do that.”
“Yes, you can,” Ryotaro replied. “Look, I’ve told you kids before, our house is always open if you need anything. You’ve all been good friends to Yu and Nanako; you’re welcome anytime.”
The kid was still shaking his head, and Ryotaro leaned back to fold his arms across his chest. “I’d rather know you were safe under my roof than miserable somewhere out there, whether with your folks or camping at the shrine, or wherever you go. So, what do you say? At least until your parents get things straightened out?”
Yosuke’s eyes were back on his plate. He probably hadn’t even noticed that he’d barely eaten his meager meal. “What do we tell Nanako-chan?” he whispered.
Ryotaro looked over his shoulder again. Nanako was walking toward them, her hands full with three paper-wrapped crepes. “Tell her as much as you feel comfortable with. She’s a smart girl, she’ll understand.”
The kid nodded and accepted the crepe from Nanako with a faint murmur of thanks. Ryotaro had to assume Yosuke was squirreling away whatever money he earned for the future, and thus didn’t have much to spend on meals. He’d mentioned taking a job in Okina, so maybe he was saving up for a place there after graduation.
“Nanako-chan?” Yosuke said after he’d eaten almost half of his crepe (and Ryotaro wondered how long it had been since he’d had that many calories in a single sitting). “Do you think it would be okay if I stayed with you for a while?”
Nanako stared at him, eyes wide, a dollop of whipped cream on her nose. “Really? You want to visit us, Yosuke-nii?”
“Yeah, of course. Is that okay?”
She stared at him, more shrewdly than any nine-year-old had business being. “Is everything okay?”
Yosuke tried to smile, but he eventually shook his head and looked away. “My parents are fighting a lot,” he admitted. “Sometimes it’s scary to be home when they’re yelling like that.”
Nanako stood up from her chair to throw her arms around Yosuke, and Ryotaro had to lunge forward to rescue her crepe before she smeared it all over the teen’s work apron. “You can stay as long as you want. Right, Dad?”
“Of course, Nanako. Any friend of Yu’s is a friend of ours.”
“You hear that?” Nanako leaned back enough to look up into Yosuke’s face. “You can live with us, okay?”
“Okay.” Yosuke patted the top of her head, a genuine smile appearing on his face for the first time that evening.
“Come by after work,” Ryotaro said, handing Nanako’s crepe back when she returned to her seat. “We’ll have the guest room set up for you.”
…
It hadn’t taken much to get the guest room set up. They kept the sheets and blankets clean in case of visitors, and it only needed a little airing out. He wasn’t sure what all Yosuke would bring with him, but they could at least give him a place to stay tonight and figure the rest out in the morning.
They didn’t have much in the kitchen, of course, but he set a ramen cup out. Maybe he was getting soft in his old age, but something inside him wanted to give that kid a hot meal before he went to sleep.
There was a tentative knock at the door, and Nanako ran to open it. “Yosuke-nii!”
He looked a little embarrassed, still dressed in his Junes uniform with a single duffle bag slung over his shoulder. “Hi, Nanako-chan.”
Ryotaro leaned around the corner and gave him an encouraging smile. “You know where the spare room is, right? The bathroom’s just down the hall from there, if you want to take a shower. I think Yu left some stuff behind.”
Yosuke gave a sigh and smiled down at Nanako, who’d taken his hand to tug him forward. “Thank you, Dojima-san. That would be great.”
As the kids went up the stairs, Ryotaro sat at the counter and idly read the newspaper for a few minutes. He heard Nanako show Yosuke the spare room and the bathroom, then she was nearly skipping back down the stairs to settle back down to watch her quiz show.
“Are you happy Yosuke’s here?” Ryotaro asked.
“Uh-huh!” she nodded. “It gets kind of lonely now that big bro went home. But I’m not sad,” she added hurriedly. “I’m fine, really.”
He smiled at her, still feeling a little pang in his heart when she said she was lonely. He was trying to spend more time with her, but sometimes his work just wouldn’t allow it. At least the girls visited her once a week or so, usually to go grocery shopping together.
Ryotaro waited until the shower upstairs shut off, then set the kettle to boil. By the time the bathroom door opened, the ramen was steaming in its cup, and he called up the stairs for Yosuke to come down for a few minutes.
Yosuke, hair damp from the shower, smiled wanly at him when he entered the kitchen. “Is everything okay, Dojima-san?”
“Sit down, will you?” Ryotaro motioned him to a seat at the counter, then slid the ramen cup in front of him. “It needs two more minutes, then it’s all yours.”
“Oh. No, sir, I’m okay.”
Ryotaro massaged the bridge of his nose with two fingers. Damn, but this kid was stubborn. “Just do me a favor and eat the food, all right? You’ll sleep better with a full stomach.”
“Okay.”
He sat down opposite Yosuke, studying him for a second. The kid tried to smile at him, but there was a current of worry in his eyes. “I can pay rent,” he suddenly said. “I’ve got some money saved up, and I can keep working extra shifts. Whatever you want.”
Ryotaro held up his hand. “Slow down, kid. Nobody’s asking you for rent money.”
“But I can pay it!”
“I’m sure you can.” He leaned on the counter, interlacing his fingers together. “I wanna make a deal with you, okay, Yosuke? I want you to cut back on your shifts at work.”
Yosuke stared at him, eyes wide. “You…want me to work less?”
“I don’t want rent money from you, all right? Just pitch in for food when you can and help out around the house. Also, I want you to cut back on work so you can focus on your studies again.”
The kid’s shoulders slumped. “My grades are pretty worthless right now.”
“Well, we can work on that. It’s still pretty early in the year, and I bet your friends would help out if you asked. Next, we need to talk to your parents.”
Yosuke groaned and let his head fall forward until it bumped against the countertop. “They’re gonna be so pissed.”
“They’ll be even more pissed if they have to report you as a runaway. Now, I may be a detective, but that’s not going to help if they report you missing. The best thing we can do is let them know you’re staying here. We’ll figure out what to say to convince them.”
“They won’t be happy.”
“Well, if they have a problem with you living with us after they did nothing when you were on the streets for a month, they’ll have more problems than they can handle.”
“It wasn’t a month,” Yosuke muttered. “And it wasn’t exactly the streets.”
Ryotaro ignored that. “Your noodles are ready. Eat up. Otherwise, we just have a few house rules here. Clean up after yourself, be courteous of the people around you. And try not to go out after dark without telling me where you’re going, okay? I’m not trying to micromanage your every move; I just want to know you’re safe.”
Yosuke nodded. Despite his earlier reservation, he was digging into the ramen with gusto. Ryotaro watched him eat for a few minutes, wondering how someone could be so absorbed in their own marital spat as to forget their own child.
Not that he was any better. He’d let his work and grief consume him, until he’d nearly lost Nanako. If it hadn’t been for his nephew—and his nephew’s friends, like Yosuke—he might have lost everything.
“You done?” he asked, when Yosuke finally set his chopsticks and the ramen cup down. “Why don’t you head to bed and get some sleep? We can work more of this out in the morning.”
“All right. Thanks again, Dojima-san.”
“Don’t mention it. We’re glad to have you here.”
Yosuke gave him a tired smile as he stood up. Nanako rose from her spot in front of the TV and hurried over to wrap her arms around his waist.
“Good night, Yosuke-nii!” She smiled up at him, radiating the kind of innocent love that only a child could show. Ryotaro swore he could see tears in Yosuke’s eyes. “Sweet dreams!”
“Thanks, Nanako-chan.” Yosuke rested a hand on the top of her head. “Thanks for letting me be here.”
Nanako giggled and squeezed him again before turning back to her show. Ryotaro watched her go with a fond smile, then turned his attention to Yosuke. “You can stay as long as you need. Our home is your home.”
Yosuke nodded. “Thank you, sir. I really appreciate it.”
“Get some sleep. We’ll talk more in the morning.”
He watched Yosuke traipse up the stairs, then leaned against the counter with a heavy sigh. Now he just had to figure out what to say to the Hanamura parents to make sure Yosuke could stay with them. If things were bad enough that he’d rather sleep in the park than go home at night, then something had to be done.
And Ryotaro Dojima was just the man to do it.