Chapter Text
Akihabara on a Saturday was, Chisato had always thought, the most honest place in Tokyo.
Everything else the city showed you was managed. The train system was scheduled to the minute. The department stores had designed their layouts based on decades of foot traffic research. The parks had been planted to create specific sightlines. All of it was intentional, calibrated, the city presenting itself the way it had decided to be seen.
Akihabara just *was*. The signage competed with itself for volume. The figures in shop windows had no particular arrangement beyond *look at this*. The maid café flyers came at you from multiple directions by multiple people with different ideas about which route you were probably going to take. The game center sounds were a continuous undifferentiated enthusiasm.
She liked it enormously.
She had the day off — Mika had actually said the words *you are not working today* with the specific tone of someone delivering a medical instruction — and she had come to Akihabara because Takina had a training review and Mizuki had something she was being mysterious about, and Chisato had decided that the correct response to an unscheduled afternoon was to go to the most stimulating place in the city and see what happened.
She was examining a display of Clint Eastwood Western films in the foreign cinema section of a large electronics store — they had three she didn't own, which was excellent news — when she heard the sound.
It was the specific sound of someone who had reached for something on a high shelf and miscalculated. The momentum of the reach, the overbalance, the impending contact between a falling display shelf and the floor.
And, more relevantly, between the falling display shelf and the small boy who was standing directly underneath it and was looking in the completely wrong direction.
She moved.
It was not dramatic. She didn't announce it. She stepped across the space between them in the time it took the shelf's support bracket to fully give way, caught the corner of the descending display with one hand, redirected its momentum sideways so it hit the floor at an angle rather than straight down, and was back to approximately her original position before the crash finished echoing.
The boy turned around.
He had round glasses, a yellow shirt, and the specific expression of someone who had heard a noise and was trying to figure out what it related to.
He looked at the shelf. At her. At the shelf.
"What happened?" he said.
"Shelf fell," she said.
"Huh." He looked at it with the mild philosophical interest of someone for whom unexpected furniture incidents were not unfamiliar. "Good thing it missed me."
"Yes," she said. "Very good."
He looked at her. She looked at him. He smiled the smile of someone who had entirely failed to register that he had just been saved from a genuine collision and was now simply happy to see a friendly face.
"Hi," he said. "I'm Nobita. Nobi Nobita."
"Chisato," she said.
"Are you shopping? I'm looking for a manga that Doraemon said they might have here but he wasn't sure and I forgot to ask him to check the inventory before I left so I'm just looking around." He delivered this at the pace of someone who had experienced many conversational situations and had decided that giving people context upfront was more efficient than waiting to be asked. "The Western movies section is here? I didn't know they had a whole section."
"I like Western films," she said.
"Really? Like with cowboys?"
"Exactly like with cowboys."
He looked at the selection with the earnest assessment of someone who knew approximately nothing about Westerns. "Doraemon has a gadget that lets you enter movies. I went into a Western once." A pause. "It was very dusty."
She looked at him. "What gadget?"
"The Small Light can—" he stopped. "Sorry. That's... Doraemon gets weird about me talking about the gadgets to people."
"Who's Doraemon?"
"My, um." He thought about how to explain this. "My friend. He's from the future."
She looked at him with the part of her attention she used for assessing whether something was credible or not — the same part that had spent years reading Majima's conversational gambits and identifying their precise structural function.
The problem was that Nobita appeared to be simply saying a thing he believed was true, with no structural function at all. There was no tell. No micro-expression of someone managing a story. He was just talking.
"From the future," she said.
"The twenty-second century." He nodded with the confidence of someone stating a fact. "He came to help me because apparently my life goes really badly if nobody helps, which I think is a bit harsh as a way to explain it but it's basically true." He picked up a DVD from the Western section. "Is this one good? There's a lot of guns on the cover."
She looked at it. "The Outlaw Josey Wales. Yes. Very good." She took it from him and turned it over. "The main character loses his family and spends the rest of it refusing to let that be the whole story. That's why it's good."
He looked at the back of the case. "That sounds sad."
"It is. It's also optimistic." She handed it back. "The sad part and the optimistic part aren't contradictory."
He held the DVD with the expression of someone who was going to think about this for a while. "Can I buy this?"
"It's not mine."
"Right." He turned to the shelf. "I have some money. Not a lot. Doraemon gave me some because he felt bad that I forgot the manga title but I feel like he knew I'd forget so it was kind of planned."
She looked at the boy holding the DVD. He was, she assessed, approximately elementary school age. He had come to Akihabara alone, which suggested a level of parental confidence in his ability to navigate public spaces that she personally would not have extended after watching him fail to notice a falling shelf. He was warm in the uncomplicated way of someone who had never learned to be strategic about warmth.
"I'll buy it," she said.
He looked up. "You don't have to—"
"I have three at home already. I was going to buy it as a present for my partner anyway." This was not entirely true but was true enough — Takina needed more Westerns in her life, and Chisato had thought about buying her this specific one before.
"Oh." He smiled. "That's nice of you."
She brought it to the counter. He followed, because following seemed to be what he did.
---
Outside, the Akihabara afternoon was running at full volume. The maid café flyers came at her from the right — she'd already counted three different approaches and had identified the most likely fourth angle before it materialized — and she deflected the paper with a small hand motion that the distributor never quite tracked.
The boy did not deflect his. He accepted all of them with the polite bewilderment of someone who was not sure what to do with them but felt it would be rude to refuse.
He now had six flyers.
"Do you want those?" she said.
"I don't know what to do with them," he admitted.
"There's a bin at the corner."
He looked at the bin. At the flyers. Walked to the bin. The approach path took him directly past a sign that was swinging on a loose mounting in the slight afternoon wind.
She moved two steps to the left, reached up, and steadied the sign before it completed its arc toward his head.
He continued to the bin without noticing.
She looked at the sign. At the mounting. At the boy coming back.
"Thanks," he said, about the bin, presumably.
"Sure," she said, about both things.
She had been off duty for approximately forty minutes and had made two interventions and was starting to think that Mika's instruction about not working today had not accounted for all relevant variables.
"Are you looking for something specific?" she asked, because at minimum she could strategically route him away from situations.
"The manga I mentioned. But I forgot the title." He looked up the street. "I thought I'd recognize it if I saw the cover but I've been in three shops."
She looked at the storefronts. "What's it about?"
"A robot. Sort of. From the future. They come back to help someone." He frowned. "Actually now that I'm describing it, it sounds really familiar."
She looked at him.
"Is it possible," she said carefully, "that you were looking for a manga about your own life?"
He thought about this. His face did several things in sequence. "...Doraemon has been published."
"Almost certainly yes."
"He's going to be so smug about this." He pulled out his phone and stared at it. "I can't look this up. He'll see the search history."
She looked at the phone. "Do you need to look it up? You presumably know what it looks like."
"...Yeah." He put the phone away. "The blue one. Any big bookstore should have it."
"Yodobashi is that direction," she said. "Third floor. If they have it, it'll be in the children's section."
He looked in the direction she indicated. "Thanks!" He paused. "Are you going that way? The DVD store was near here, right? Maybe they have Western stuff."
She looked at the direction of Yodobashi. At the route there. At the street furniture, the swing signs, the tourist crowds with their tendency to create unpredictable trajectory changes.
She thought about Mika's instruction.
"Sure," she said. "I'll walk that way."
He fell into step beside her with the uncomplicated trust of someone who had decided she was friendly and had not updated this assessment despite having very little information. She walked a fraction to his left and slightly behind — the positioning that put her between him and the majority of incoming traffic vectors.
"The Outlaw Josey Wales," he said, after a moment. "Why does he not let it be the whole story? If that bad thing happened."
She thought about the artificial heart under her left ribs. About the Alan necklace. About Takina, who had decided that something being difficult was not a good enough reason to stop doing it.
"Because there are still things worth doing," she said. "The sad part is real. The things worth doing are also real." She looked at the street ahead. "You don't have to choose."
He thought about this with the same focused consideration he'd given the Westerns comment. "Doraemon says something like that sometimes. When I mess something up. He says there's still the next thing."
"He sounds wise."
"He also lectures me for like twenty minutes first." He sighed. "But yeah. Then the wise part."
She almost smiled. "That sounds about right."
The Yodobashi sign was visible ahead. She guided them slightly left to avoid the corner where someone was setting up a promotional display with a banner on an extending pole — she'd calculated the pole's reach and likely sweep angle from fifty meters — and Nobita walked the adjusted route without noticing and began looking at his surroundings with the absorbed attention of someone in a very large electronics store who has just remembered that he likes very large electronics stores.
"This place is amazing," he said.
"Yes," she said.
He went ahead through the entrance, and she followed, and she thought that today had turned out to be something after all, even if it was not quite what Mika had meant by a day off.
She could read everyone. Soldiers, terrorists, colleagues, the man who ran the lottery stand near Café LycoReco who thought he was hiding that he skimmed tickets.
She could not read Nobita Nobi, who went through life producing outcomes that no available model could have predicted, and who had smiled at her like she was just someone he'd met in an electronics store, which — she supposed — was exactly what she was, today.
The Outlaw Josey Wales was in her bag. The third floor had a children's manga section. The afternoon was still going.
She pushed her hair ribbon straight and went inside.