Home is the place where you happen to live.

That was always the case for Christina. Wherever she lived, and living was being alone. It was, for lack of a better word, practical. Home was clean, because home never stayed the same for very long. For as long as she could remember she had been on the move. First with her parents moving from job to job like a grazing herd, and then she on her own.

From seventeen to fifty. Three years behind the same door was the longest she could recall being in one place. This small room in a different world was maybe less grand than most of the places she had called home, but it was really no better or worse than most of them.

***

Home is where you grow up.

She was born here. Literally. In the bathroom. Kyoko hadn't know any other place than this one. Within walking distance from both school and cram school. Within walking distance from her old middle school, grade school and elementary school. Within walking distance from her entire life.

Home is where you learn to behave as is proper. Where your parents live proper lives. Home is furnished according to your family's status, is of the proper size for a public servant family and is situated where other families of equal status are likely to be found. Home is – proper.

***

Home is family.

It doesn't really matter where you live as long as your family is there. Maybe they had moved a couple of times, but the Wakayamas had always stayed together. And they always stood together. Four of them, like the four walls of what others called home.

The latest building that others named their home had seen them playing out their merry antics the last five years. It was, Ryu gloated and Noriko admitted, large. Abundantly so. Both their parents worked, and they were, mildly put, well off.

But this house, or their previous small one, was equally home. Home only when there was family there, because an empty house is a dead thing and not a home.

***

Home is a tennis court, with a net in the middle.

That net had separated Yukio's life into two halves for the better part of ten years. Like the ball he was bounced between his parents. One lived close to school, and lately he spent most of his sleeping hours there, but his father lived less than half an hour away with train. Occasionally during school days, and usually during school breaks he lived there.

But never on Fridays. Not for half a year. In a sense that café had become his third home. A neutral zone, like where the umpire sat.

***

Home is sharing and safety.

Home is where those you love stay near you. Home is never loss. Home isn't a place you need to leave behind because you can't stand it any longer.

Home is always in the now. Before that time he had known that home had also been a place he could remember from earlier. But after that time home was always a place that belonged to the here and now.

Home is shared with Amaya. Home is two bedrooms and a living room. Home is where he can make her safe. Home is safety, the safety he can buy, the reason he works and the place where, every day, the same two faces will show up before sleep.

Home will one day become where he can see a future. Not today, not tomorrow, but one day.

***

There were times when he wanted Yukio by his side. Most times were those times. This time, however, wasn't.

Ulf had stolen inside Red Rose Hell, or Red Rose Academy as the clowns running it preferred to call it. It even had a brass plaque nailed to the gates stating the lie. He wore a stolen senior high school uniform. He was the thief. Now he was on the look for a certain fictional second year student of the Himekaizen Academy.

There was a certain symmetric irony to the exchange of uniforms. One bad deed balanced by another.

If he had been told early October that he would ever set foot here again, he would probably not have believed it. What was probable was that he'd club such a person to the ground for suggesting anything that distasteful.

Last October he had still been scared enough to willingly resort to violence. It wasn't that he had developed gloriously as a person since then. Fifty year old people seldom did. But he did feel a lot more comfortable now, and that made clubbing people to the ground a less appealing option. Which was probably lucky for the student he tried to find.

He wasn't about to use violence if he found him. He was about to hurt the bastard much, much worse.

Nakagawa wanted the problem to vanish permanently. Ulf planned to oblige him.

In the end it took him three hours of skulking around in the school. Three hours for catching a glimpse, and another five minutes to make it out of the school-grounds.

Ulf waited for his prey a block away from the school. He stalked it for another five. Then he opened up his ambush.

“Sempai, could you please help me?”

The prey stopped, unaware of the assault that was about to follow.

“Yes?”

“I'm looking for a second year student from Himekaizen Academy.”

“From where?” But there had been a tell-tale glimmer in his eyes.

“It's this student,” Ulf said and flashed his smart phone to the prey. The photo was a perfect face shot. Much better than anything Ulf could have dared to hope for without the object noticing the photo shot.

Nakagawa's gift was enlightening.

The prey stared at him with the eyes of a deer facing headlights of an onrushing car.

“Within two weeks that person has dropped out of high school, or these pictures will start circulating among the Red Rose parent community.”

Ulf flicked to photos where his prey received a large sum of money from a Red Rose teacher. They showed the prey in a Red Rose uniform, with what was clearly a Himekaizen uniform in his hands.

The prey stopped breathing.

Nakagawa's gift was profitable.

“After dropping out, this person will never, ever, attend any education of any kind again. That is a lifetime condition.”

Ulf flicked from photos to a film where a second year male student hammered Christina Agerman into a locker room wall. The face of that student was splendidly captured.

“This film, and a lot of other interesting data will find its way to the police should that condition not be met.”

The prey was on his knees sobbing.

Nakagawa's gift was instructive.

Ulf called Nakagawa and reported that the gift had lived up to all its promised attributes, and that he had recognised the student after all. It was the limping that gave him away.

All in all it took Ulf the better part of five hours to permanently destroy the life for an eighteen year old school kid. He had seldom felt better.