Work Text:
He searches for traces of Kenzaki by the cliffs. That was where Kenzaki had disappeared, after all, when he turned himself into an Undead. He knows it’s probably useless to look, but he does anyway. It keeps him occupied. It keeps him focused. He’s able to look ahead, striving to reach an impossible goal, rather than wallowing in his guilt and taking people like the Kuriharas with him. He brings his camera with him during these ventures: both to keep them from being suspicious of his behavior and to make sure he doesn’t miss a potential clue. Sometimes he can hear a nagging Kenzaki-like voice in the back of his head, telling him When I told you to live among the humans, this wasn’t what I meant. But Hajime thinks, Well, you never told me how I should live my new life.
Hajime trudges the path where they fought for the last time. He sees the afterimages of him and Kenzaki, frozen with the realization that two Jokers now exist. He quickens his pace before his memories can catch up—before Kenzaki could say That should be good enough and before Hajime feels his new heart splintering into shards that numb his whole body.
He reaches the edge. He’s been there so often that his footprints have since become part of the soil. The wind whips a salty breeze at him. The waves crash more violently than usual. The world knows what Hajime wants and this was their warning to him: it will never allow another merciless apocalypse by the hands of a Joker. He knows that they destroyed the evidence of Kenzaki’s disappearance for the same reason that Kenzaki chose the fate of being Undead.
It doesn’t stop Hajime from lifting his camera and taking pictures.
Sometimes he goes down from where he came and searches the low huddle of boulders nearby. He combs the stretch of sand. He finds nothing and goes back to Jacaranda, with the thought of coming back again.
One day, when Amane is older and had spent her entire adolescence watching Hajime quietly grieve, she tells him he should publish all the photos he takes of the ocean.
“It’ll be good for you, Hajime-san,” she says.
Hajime huffs out a wry laugh as his fingers cycle through the latest batch. “So I can cathartically release all of my feelings and learn to let him go? I just heard the same thing from Nozomi on the phone half an hour ago.”
Amane scrunches her face. “It’s because you’ve been stubborn like this for the past ten years, that’s why. But that wasn’t why I suggested it.”
“Uh-huh. So why did you suggest it, then?”
“Because they’re nice and they’d sell,” she answers. Hajime rolls his eyes—but it was her next words that got him. “And maybe if they’re popular enough, it could somehow reach him.”
Huh.
He looks down at the photos. “You know, Amane, that just might have been the most sensible thing to have ever come out of your mouth.”
He keeps looking for Kenzaki by the cliffs, by the rocks, by the sand. He looks for traces in the shells, in the creatures that wander aimlessly away as Kenzaki was probably doing. He looks in the tides. Hajime remembers the ancient Battle Fight, where the Human Undead stood as the sole victor as the waves beat against its back in celebration. He remembers that human life started here.
If he could find some trace—some small piece of evidence that a man by the name of Kenzaki Kazuma had once been by these waters—Hajime would have hope.
*
**
***
**
*
A year later, he finds a book of photography at a stall in southern Italy. He picks it up, skims through it, and hands the vendor a few bills to pay for it. He reads the title of the collection, The Waters Where I Look for You, and carefully goes through each picture, each caption. It only steels the blade of his resolve further. He puts the book away in his bag and mounts his motorcycle once more.
This’ll be enough for now.
He’ll end this quickly so Hajime won’t have to look anymore.