Chapter three, 2016, beginnings: 1

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.

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Home is where you grow up.

She was born here. Literally. In the bathroom. Kyoko hadn't known 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.