339 Chapter six, 2017, friends from far: 7 (1/2)
”What do you think?”
Uchida turned and faced him. Uchida. No honorifics. For Mitsuo Uchida had lost any rights to that kind of respect eighty years ago. Eighty long years ago when the older officer made Mitsuo believe in the war crazed ideals of imperial Japan.
”Good enough,” Mitsuo said.
He spent 50 years atoning for his sins in Sweden until the day he suddenly arrived in Japan. He spent six years reliving a very different kind of adolescence in a very different kind of Japan, and then he found out that Uchida hadn't succumbed to cancer in the late 1970s.
That took a few years to forgive. What eventually sped that process up was when Mitsuo realised Uchida had atoned in his own way. In both worlds.
”Done reminiscing?”
'He always knew what I thought.' ”Yes, for now.” Mitsuo growled silently. He didn't like the older man at all. ”Look, you try anything funny with the Wakayamas and I'll have every last goon you've hidden in Japan vanish within a couple of months. Are we clear?”
”Are they that important?”
Raw emotions flooded Mitsuo. Feelings of friendship, almost bordering on love soared through him. There was nothing sexual about it, but just as intense anyway. ”They're my friends. They made friends with me even though I never deserved it in the first place. I'll die for them if I can stop you from hurting them.” It wasn't even conviction, just fact. He owed them more than his life – he owed them for coming alive again. Only once had he felt that strongly in his life before, and that time it was a tall, silver haired girl who turned his life upside down seventy years earlier.
Uchida stared at him. ”You've grown.”
A sudden sensation of pain in his stomach delayed Mitsuo's realisation that he wasn't ill. Then he burst out in all but hysterical laughter.
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”Moron,” he said after the attack ebbed out. ”The hundred years old tells the ninety years old that he's grown.”
”You're ninety five.” There wasn't even a trace of humour in the voice.
Mitsuo decided to react accordingly. ”In this world I'm forty. In this world, and especially in this Japan I'm the one with the power to stab you from behind. In this world I left the worst parts of the seventy years I lived in that other world behind.”
”Talk, just talk.”
”You're part of those bad parts. Two things of mine, only two, were never tainted by evil.” Mitsuo dug up old memories and sighed. Yes, this was what he truly believed. ”My wife, and my daughter.”
Uchida's eyebrows rose. ”And Christina?”
Mitsuo had expected that. ”She's my granddaughter. She was never mine to begin with.” He didn't dare to tell the older man that she carried memories of deeds almost as dark as his own. He hadn't dared to tell Ulf when he still hoped that the man turned boy would stay by Christina's side for a lifetime.