"I'm glad it wasn't me."

Kazuo knew as soon as he'd said it that it had been a mistake. His grandparents looked mortified and his father had gone green in the face. He was scolded for his words, too young then not to think he was being scolded for the thought itself. He didn't say it again, but keeping it to himself did not erase the feeling, nor the learned shame that accompanied it.

It was hard trying to process his own feelings and those of others in the aftermath. There was an appropriate level of sadness and grief; showing too much or too little was a cause for concern, and the level changed when who it was being shown to was taken into consideration. There were suddenly a lot more people in his life too, many more than what he'd lost. It was exhausting, keeping track of the tangle of friends, neighbors, family, and professionals - learning what to say to whom and when to say it. It was suffocating, feeling eyes on him all the time, trying to gauge how okay he was or looking at him with a new air of wariness when his dark hair began to pale. He knew he messed up more than once, but he was getting older, better at reading people, at deducing what they wanted to hear and telling it to them. That was why he was pretty sure he wasn't imagining what everyone, from those that whispered he was unlucky to even his father, expected of him.

He didn't want to be made to carry sorrow around for the rest of his life, but he could pretend. He was getting pretty good at it—and it would only get easier.

Kazuo didn't like living in Hiroshima. He much preferred the quieter Tottori, the modest house and happy family he had in that town, but... well. He knew they could never go back there. Even if his dad hadn't said as much when they first moved, he knew. The man had said a change would be good for him, but honestly Kazuo thought it was more for his dad's own sake than anything else. Regardless, he was no longer surrounded by so many people that looked at him with expectation or pity. Hashiguchi High wasn't all bad, there were new people and new patterns to learn, but he was more equipped to deal with it.

Now, instead of undoing a tangled mess of threads, he maintained a curated web of relationships in his new setting. As a transfer student in his first year, especially a good looking one, his peers had been quick to flock to him. On top of that he was smart and athletic, with an endearingly nurturing side as evidenced by his participation in the school's gardening club. Kazuo had learned how to make himself superficially easy to talk to a long time ago and yet he was not above joining in on some mean-spirited teasing, both of which helped cement his status in the school's hierarchy by his second year. Learning how to keep in someone's good graces meant he could just as easily get under their skin, and if he had to tear others down to build himself up, he would. There were a lot of benefits to keeping himself well liked, after all, and he'd ended up with a lot of people that seemed to like him.

More than anything though it was his apparent fearlessness that earned the respect of his classmates. In social matters and physical challenges both, Kazuo never backed down. He took on any and every class dare and performed increasingly risky stunts. He did it for himself, not them; looking cool in front of his peers was really just a fortunate side-effect. Kazuo liked when pulling breath was a little achy, needed to hear his own pulse pound in his ears, all so that he could prove something unspoken to himself.

He knew it was only a matter of time before something happened again. Before some part of him he was supposed to pretend wasn't there showed through, or he lost track of who to be and when. It was a matter of time, but it wasn't now. Right now he's subbing in one of Hashiguchi's sports teams and gently letting a girl who'd asked him out down. Right now he's leaping into rivers and growing hyacinths in the school's garden. Right now he's pushing down guilt and enjoying his life as Hashiguchi's fearless star.

...and if his hands still trembled at every peal of thunder, if his heart trembled at the thought of staring into the flame in his memory, remaining stuck between never rebuilding and moving on... that was no one's business but his own.

Born to an African American father and a Japanese mother, Kaede started life with a disadvantage, a half breed in Japan always garnered a sense of superiority from the locals. As a young kid, Kaede, who was named after his grandmother, found it tough to make friends. While he his Asian features stood out, his African American features were strongly defined which made other kids want to pick on him. Not only did he have to worry about being a half breed, his father was a real estate agent, helping to buy up land for big corporations and in turn stiffing the working class. The sins of the father made life almost unbearable for the young Kaede, always ending up in fights and scorn thrown his way by the adults.

A truly pivotal moment of his young life was his ousting from social space of his hometown. One basketball game was all it took to ruin any chance of Kaede from finding friendship, ending up with the star player being injured. In a freak accident, Kaede made the wrong play and ended landing on the star's leg, shattering it in several places. The world seemed to slow to crawl, the hatred people had for him and his father finally bubbling over. With his life in shambles, Kaede only wonders why he should even try anymore.