Of What Remains When All Is Lost

By Ruchi Sneha

Prologue

Dear Hoshi, 

It’s raining and the Earth smells like you. This is a different kind of rain – impure, acidic, laden with the debris of countered missiles. It burns through marble towers, eats through the iron foundations of my house. It tastes like our sweat from when we were still young, when grime and perspiration were badges of honour that we wore proudly on our skin. Them, and blood. 

There was always blood. Rivers of it running through the academy’s corridors. Seeping through the white sheets in which we brought home bodies. Blood that I could never wash off my fingers, blood that matted my hair and stained my heels. I used to picture your blood – would it sparkle like your eyes, or would it web like the veins on your wrist? But, no, of course not. All people bleed the same – even soldiers of the Tokubetsu Regiment. 

All the ‘special’ soldiers they brought into their cause, all the children they deemed as combatants – supple flesh, tender limbs – fodder, fodder all for the system. The system you tried to change from within – the system I am trying to destroy from its roots. 

Seeing you at the encampment yesterday opened the floodgates and all I could remember were the countless nights I spent tormented by nightmares – visions of your lips sticky with blood, your eyes dim, your cheeks waxy. You haven’t changed. The eyepatch is new – how? Was it a skirmish? Who was skilled enough to hurt you? – and the scars are new – you have years mapped out on your skin – but the weight of your halved gaze piercing into me, even through the thick aerosol of smog, it’s still the same. You see me now. You really see me now. 

You see the system for what it is. You see the cogs of this blood-fuelled machine. You see the monster that swallowed up our lives. Our childhoods. Your body. My soul. 

Do you remember the day – when we were still trainees – it rained as we were coming back from Tokyo after that long mock drill? I was soaked and you took off your raincoat just so I wouldn’t be the only one suffering. It’s still raining and I’m still suffering. You were far kinder than your ego allowed you to admit. You tried so hard to be awful but I remember you softly. I remember you like a nursery rhyme that gets stuck in your head for the rest of your life, I remember you like an address I no longer live at, I remember you like summers of the past, laughter on the wind, sunlight on the grass, golden-green, golden-green. 

If this letter finds you, I hope it finds you with love and open arms. The Masayoshi Syndicate streaks their faces with war paint even as I write, and when we dismantle your battalion tomorrow, this letter will be an invite to you. You are the only one I will spare. 

I no longer want to wait for the day they bring your bloody body back in a sheet to tell you how deeply I care for you. Please, Hoshi, if you remember me the way I remember you, let us talk. We owe each other that much, don’t we? We will be immortal, you and I. Shining stars, once again. 

If this letter never finds you, it shall mean that the Syndicate lost their last battle. In that case, whoever finds this letter, please never let Hoshi know I wrote him one. That will be my final gift to him. It’ll still rain, but he will never suffer like me. 

Yours forever, 

Yuto. 

***

Male. 23. Lacerations over his abdomen and thorax. Cause of death: thermal burns. 

I nestled the clipboard in the crook of my arm, using the pointed tip of the capped pen to follow the line I was reading. Insomnia was an old friend, but with the two cups of coffee I’d already had, I was battling its effects with a practiced indifference. In my rush to arrive at work, I’d skipped breakfast again, compensating for its absence with a diet of two cigarettes and some of last night’s whiskey. 

Three months since the ceasefire. Six since the collapse of the Syndicate – that group of terrorists fomenting violence among our troops. Aiding the enemy.

The mythical enemy – the fabled threat we sent our children to fight against.

The enemy that, allegedly, killed as many of us as we killed of them.

The body in front of me was shrouded from waist down, its torso lined with pink patches of raw, exposed skin, the surrounding areas charred and shriveled like plastic. Ghastly? I suppose it was. But it wasn’t the worst body I’d ever seen. Perhaps, in some manner, it helped that I never knew this person. It was only a body. At least it wasn’t a friend’s. At least it wasn’t …

I pulled the sheet up to cover its sooty, darkened face as a knock sounded on the morgue’s door. “Come in,” I said, placing the clipboard on the table behind me. No foul play, unless you counted death by an undiscovered landmine foul play. 

The buzzed head of Asatsuki peeked into the morgue. He still bore his scars from the war, but some of his old glow was returning. Today, especially, he was all smiles. “Dr. Ichiru!” 

I restrained myself from sighing. Too bright for me, considering the three hours of sleep I was running on. I had always wondered how people who only slept a few hours a night were able to function normally in the day. He used to make it look so easy. 

War doesn’t sleep, Ichiru, he’d say, every hour I spend in my bed, another soldier dies out there. Someone’s gotta look out for those weaklings.

“Hello, Asa,” I greeted. “Feeling alright?” 

“I was training some of the new recruits and I accidentally flipped one of them too hard. Pretty sure he sprained his ankle. Fully grown adults and they can’t even take on me!” He laughed. “Can you come take a look?”

“Why didn’t you bring him to me?” 

Asatsuki glanced around the morgue. In his eyes, I saw reflected what normal people noticed when they walked into this room: the cold leather tables, the stench of formaldehyde, the dim lights, the gray walls. Things I was already accustomed to. Things I’d stopped noticing a long time ago. 

“He can’t walk.” 

A thinly veiled attempt on his part. He could have simply carried the injured recruit to my office, but no. Asatsuki wanted me to step out of the medical wing. It wasn’t the first time he had approached me with this request. Maybe he felt a sense of obligation to involve me in their activities, or maybe he just wanted to be nice and give me a reason to take a break from my bleak quarters. Either way, I hadn’t yet found it in me to refuse him. So I kept my pen down and straightened, following him out of the morgue.

I already felt like I was forgetting details about him. I remembered his hair and his eyepatch and his booming voice, but I was forgetting the curve of his smile and which shoes he liked to wear when he wasn’t in uniform. The grief was like smoke in paper-thin lungs – it burned. We made it a point to talk about him. We owed it to him to at least remember him. 

“We need a new Commander,” Asatsuki said, walking down the stone-paved path of the Defence Academy. “Koji and I aren’t the best teachers. Saki gets annoyed with the new recruits, she thinks they have no sense of chivalry.” 

I chuckled without emotion. “And how are they holding up?” 

“Surprisingly well,” Asatsuki answered. “Koji doesn’t really talk about him. Not with me. Saki’s tough. She’s keeping it together.” 

“It always bothered me that there is no panacea for emotions.” I flipped open the pack of cigarettes in my pocket, fidgeting with them. A bad habit, in more ways than one, but when your life is full of uncertainties, you start relying on bad habits like old friends. “Some wounds, even I can’t heal.” 

“As long as we stick together, I’m sure we’ll be fine,” Asatsuki said, but his voice was full of doubt. “The war’s over. It’s in the past.”

I laughed. This time, with emotion. So young. And despite all he had witnessed, he was, at the end of the day, still just a twenty year old. “You get used to it,” I said. “You spend months trying not to think about it. Then one day you wake up, think about it, and realise it doesn’t hurt you as much as it used to.” 

“So, you’re saying, people move on? I don’t know if I want to.” 

“No. You get used to it. Not the same thing.” 

“Oh.” 

We completed the rest of the journey in silence. For some wounds, there was no salve. No amount of conversation that could bandage the loss of a friend. No amount of time that could fill up a friend-shaped hole in your life. But Asatsuki was right. Even if we were suffering in our ways, in our own time, as long as we stuck together, we’d be alright. 

We had to be.

***

After Dr. Ichiru left, I too took my leave. Practicing with the recruits made me work up quite a sweat and I was ready to dive into a long, cold shower. I shook my head hard, spraying a sprinkler of moisture around me before starting for the dorms. Before I reached the hallways, I noticed, on the stone steps nearby, a dark figure sitting with his arms folded over his knees. 

I spun on my heels and jogged over to him. 

“Koji!”

He looked up, a dark shadow flitting over his face before recognition and he nodded once. “Asa. You stink like a dog.”

I laughed, swiping a hand over my forehead. It came back drenched. Koji stared ahead, the soft light of the setting sun reflected in his eyes. I turned my head, seeing what he was seeing. The red, ripe sun inching past the treetops, wrapping up the day and paving the way for a cold night. I didn’t ask the obvious: what was he doing all alone, sitting with his head pillowed in his arms?

“How’d your meeting with Miss Yuna go?” I asked, bringing his attention back to me. 

“Hasn’t happened yet. She’s meeting me in half an hour.” 

“I can sit with you.” 

“You shouldn’t sit within five feet of anyone with a nose.” 

I sat down next to him. My legs were sore, so I stretched them out. The evening was serene: soupy sky, summer breeze. I could get used to it. 

“Hey, remember that time we went to watch the Patient Zero movie? Saki cribbed the whole time but now she wants to know when the new one’s coming out.” 

Koji grunted. “We are not watching another one of those.” 

“It’ll be a trip. You, me, her. Tokyo.” The missing name lingered. Koji cast me a side-eyed glance. We were both thinking about the same thing. 

“Okay,” he said. “It’ll be a trip.” 

There was never any point to bringing it up. Koji didn’t talk about him, but I knew he was hurting – much more, perhaps, than even I was. 

In a world where infants from powerful families were recruited into the Tokubetsu Regiment and trained to fire weapons before they were taught to speak – where if you could not serve the military in some way or another, you were as good as dead – an orphan like me was a liability. Parents passing away at seven – too old to join the military, too young to survive on my own. 

He found me. He taught me. He trained me. 

He gave me a purpose. He gave me a home. 

I owed the fact that I was sitting here, alive and breathing, to him. He saved my life. And we couldn’t save his. 

“He would have talked through the whole movie,” I said, carefully. We didn’t say his name anymore – it was too heavy. It sat like a rock in our throats. 

“Hm.” Koji tapped his foot against the stone. A sharp, ppt-ppt of a rubber sole against concrete. “He would have bought ten buckets of popcorn.” 

“Caramel popcorn.” 

“Of course.” 

There are, always, so many things to say. 

Do you miss him? Do you wish we had been there for him? 

What do you think he was thinking of in his last moments? Do you think he was scared too, even if only for a moment? Do you want him back?

Do you want him back?

But we never said these things. We couldn’t. 

Instead, we shared a small chuckle and as the sun finally vanished under the horizon, we spent the rest of our time in silence. It wasn’t a lonely silence, though. No silence, ever again, would be free of the weight of the loss, but sitting together, we shouldered it together. 

***

Yuna was waiting for me by the apple trees. The cobbled paths weaving through the Defence Academy’s orchards were cast in the mournful white light of the streetlamps. In their ghostly glow, Yuna looked no less than a spectre herself: her white shirt bright against the tangled darkness of the trees. 

“How have you been, Koji?” she asked. 

“We don’t have to draw this out,” I said. We weren’t friends. “You’re not obligated to ask how I’m doing every time we meet.” 

Her mouth pressed into a flat line, the smallest twitch blinking in her left eye. “I’ve been very busy with work,” she said, gesturing in front of her. A simple request: walk with me. I fell into step with her as we lapsed through patches of lit cobbles and shadows of gnarly trees. I didn’t mind listening to her talk, not really. Even if I didn’t have anything to offer back. 

She talked about work for a while. How she was taking over some of the training at the Kanagawa branch because of our recent … reduction in supervision. How she was often called for assistance all across the nation – for paperwork, administrative oversight and even legal cases related to the casualties of the war. How there was one particular case that was hers, and hers alone to handle. 

“So, yes, I managed to get the legalities cleared. Only took me so many months.” She came to a halt, her words hanging thickly between us. Around us, a bridge spanned over the glittering fish pond, its surface torn apart by koi fins. 

I faced her. She was waiting but I still had nothing to say to her. 

“You know what that means,” she prompted. 

“I don’t want it,” I said, finally. “I’m almost eighteen. I’ve already started looking for jobs. Yuna. I don’t want it.” 

“Not your decision to make.” She slipped a hand into her pocket and pulled out an envelope. Gold seal. “It was his to make and this is what he decided. For all his peculiarity, the grandiosity – the exhausting self-confidence …” She sighed. “When you’ve been raised as special, but disposable, you learn to make yourself big, I suppose. Irreplaceable. He always was larger than life. But even heroes aren’t infallible.” Her eyes grew distant momentarily before regaining focus. “He wasn’t the same after the Syndicate attacked – seeing his old friend like that … but he was always sure about this. He wanted this.” 

I ran my tongue over my teeth, swallowing back all the words that came to my mind. Of course he would do this. Why wouldn’t he use his one last chance to embarrass me? 

“At least for the time being,” Yuna reminded me, “I am your legal guardian. And you are his beneficiary. This money is yours. Use it, or don’t. Doesn’t concern me. But he cared about you and the least you can do is let him continue to care about you.” 

“Let him?” I drew in a sharp breath, forcing myself to control the volume of my voice. “He’s not here anymore.” 

“So? So, what?” Yuna stared at me, completely unfazed. I held her stare defiantly for a moment. Two. Then I dropped my gaze. 

So what? So what if the man who raised me like a brother, like a father, like a mentor and like a friend was no longer around? Did his absence take away the years he had looked after me? The times he’d pushed me, the times he’d annoyed me, the times he’d dragged me to things even when I just wanted to stay in my room? So what, indeed?

“So, nothing.” I took the envelope from her. 

Maybe I’d donate it to a charity. Maybe I’d give it to the Defence Academy so they could shape the next generation Tokubetsu soldiers. Adult soldiers. Maybe I’d burn it all. 

I ran a hand through my hair, sighing. “He’s annoying even in death.” 

“It’s Hoshizora.” Yuna shrugged. “What else did you expect?” 

She smiled at me: a deliberate, meaningful curve of her mouth. 

It took some effort but I nodded back at her.

We continued to cross the bridge. 

***

“You idiot,” I said, sitting down on the soft patch of grass. “You left me with a kid who is just like you. He cares so much and he’s so bad at showing it.” A wry chuckle found its place on my tongue. “At least he doesn’t cover it up with awful, indulgent, infuriating jokes like you. He’s got so much of you in him.” I overcompensated for the silence. Someone had to. “The way he runs his hand through his hair, the way he notices everything even when he’s pretending not to. I thought I’d finally be free of you, but no. You leave me ghosts of yourself.” 

I waited. 

I waited a little longer. 

I saw his smile: the crooked grin stretching to his ear, the twinkle in his bright eye, the crinkle of his long nose. 

I heard his voice: the deep reverb of his laughter, always from his belly, never in his eyes. 

The night was cold, cold in its porcelain touch, cold in its soundless breeze. And the grass never looked more inviting. 

Throwing down my jacket to keep my top from getting dirty – I’d just done my laundry earlier – I fell onto my back and stared at the candy-floss clouds above me. 

“You really were a god among mortals,” I said, thinking back to the countless medals adorning his shoulder. The ease with which he commanded, trained, fought and still interspersed his unhinged violence with quips and cracks. 

He was lying beside me. Icy to the touch. “I don’t know why I never admitted that to you.” I turned on my side, facing him. “Nah, I know why. You’d have never let me hear the end of it. You were such a jerk, Hoshizora. You promised me that the next time you saw me, you’d make fun of my glasses. You lied.” 

I closed my eyes. I couldn’t bear to look at him a second longer. We’d given him a stone as white as his scars. 

Hoshizora Tatsuki. 

2018-2048

One of the thousands of graves that were created before the war ended. Some for children. Some for the jaded old-timers. Some for the commanding Generals. 

One for a god. 

We won, I reminded myself, we won. That’s all that matters. That’s all that should matter.

Soft footsteps made me open my eyes and sit up. A tall figure peeked from behind him – followed by a plume of smoke, a tiny glow flaring at the tip of a cigarette. 

“Thought I’d find you here,” Ichiru said. 

“Where else would I go?” I muttered. 

She slipped off her shoes and lowered herself next to me. Bumped her fist against Hoshizora. 

“Friday at Omoide, same time as usual?” she asked. 

I shrugged. “I don’t know why we keep going there every month. It’s just us now.” 

“We’re all that’s left. So we’ll have to do.” She stubbed her cigarette against the ground and tossed the butt away. “Plus, someone’s gotta keep that restaurant in business now that Hoshizora isn’t dragging people to it every two days.” 

I breathed out a laugh. 

In the distance, a loud voice carried over the night wind. A loud, familiar voice. Two silhouettes appeared – inching closer until they took the form of Koji and Asatsuki. 

“Dr. Ichiru! Miss Yuna!” Asatsuki ran over to us, breaking into a delighted laugh, which seemed inappropriate in our given surroundings, but perhaps this is what graveyards deserve: laughter, love, and the rubber resilience of life marching on. 

Koji trailed behind him, his hands stuffed in his pockets. 

We scooted over, making space for the boys. 

The night was young. Even if he was gone, he remained in the spaces between us, in our conversations, in our memories, and in our hearts. 

He was gone, but he was loved. 

And he always would be. 

***

Epilogue 

When he was an ivory bundle of plump limbs and feathery eyelashes, they came to take him away. His father needed the money and they needed him. In his able-limbed body they saw a future of power: power, which they said, could shift the balance of the war. Power which could sweep like a tidal wave, sending ripples all across the world. They revered the birth of a god to be. A god, that in my arms, clutched my neck and cooed into my bosom. 

He was always a stranger, never a son. I never met him. Never kissed his head, never held his hand, never cradled him in my lap. 

I was always a stranger, never a mother. I learnt how to contort around the hollow of my womb. He belonged to the world and I never asked the world to return him to me. 

It was in the paper. I remember the ringing in my ears. They told me I screamed. 

Why did I scream?

If he was never mine to love, why was he mine to lose? 

The world lost a hero. I lost everything. 

Ruchi Sneha works as the Digital Editor at Hachette India and holds a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Birmingham. Her work has featured in Mulberry Literary, PULP Lit Mag and Eunoia Review. She likes to read widely across genres and experiments with differnt forms of writing. You can find her on Twitter as @EphemeralesqueW and on Instagram as @ephemeralesquewriting.