This is Route 1 of 5 in The Hour Between Us, a special multi-route fanfiction retelling the same missing island hour between Kazuya and Chizuru after Episode 4.

  Each chapter begins at the same moment… but each one leads somewhere different.

  Chapter 1: The Shore of Anger

  Salt hit the back of his throat first.

  Then pain.

  Then air, dragged into his lungs like broken glass.

  Kazuya lurched forward on the sand, coughing so hard his whole body folded in on itself. Seawater poured from his mouth in ragged bursts, his chest seizing, his vision white at the edges. For one dizzy second he could not tell where the ocean ended and his body began. Everything was noise. Surf crashing. Blood pounding. A voice cutting through both.

  “Kazuya!”

  Sharp. Breathless. Too close.

  A hand caught his shoulder before he tipped sideways again. Another pressed hard between his shoulder blades as he coughed up the last of the seawater burning his lungs raw. He sucked in another breath, then another, each one tearing all the way down.

  Sand scraped his palms. His arms shook violently when he tried to push himself up.

  “Kazuya. Hey. Look at me.”

  He blinked against the sting in his eyes. The world lurched into shape in fragments: pale sky, white foam dragging itself back into the sea, wet strands of black hair plastered against a face he knew even in pieces.

  “M… Mizuhara…?”

  Chizuru was kneeling in the sand in front of him, soaked through, chest heaving, one hand still gripping his shoulder like she wasn’t fully convinced he was really there. Her hair clung to her neck and cheeks, dark with seawater, and the sleeve of her rash guard was streaked with sand. She looked less composed than he had ever seen her. Not messy. Not merely wet.

  Shaken.

  “Don’t talk.” Her voice came out tighter than usual. “Just breathe.”

  He tried. The next inhale hitched halfway and turned into another fit of coughing. Chizuru leaned closer immediately, steadying him, her fingers digging into him hard enough to hurt. It should have embarrassed him. Everything about this should have embarrassed him.

  Instead the only thought that floated up through the wreckage was the image of her body disappearing beneath the water.

  His eyes widened. “Are… are you okay?”

  For half a second, Chizuru froze.

  Not visibly, not in any dramatic way. It was just a tiny break in her expression, so brief another person might have missed it. But Kazuya saw it. Saw the way her eyes widened a fraction, the way her grip shifted on his shoulder, the way something raw flashed across her face before she shoved it down again.

  “That’s your first question?” she said.

  He stared at her, too dazed to understand why her tone had changed.

  Her hand slipped from his shoulder to his upper arm, checking him too quickly, then his wrist, then the side of his neck as if she needed proof from every pulse point she could find that he was alive. Her fingers were cold. Or maybe his skin was. It was impossible to tell.

  “You’re breathing,” she muttered, more to herself than him. “You’re conscious. You’re…”

  She cut herself off.

  Kazuya swallowed hard, his throat aching. The island around them began to sharpen into focus. A curve of sand. A wall of dark rocks further inland. No people. No boat. No one shouting from the water. Just the endless sweep of ocean glittering under the afternoon sun as if nothing had happened, as if he had not just drowned, as if she had not dragged him back out of it with her own hands.

  He looked past her automatically, scanning the water.

  “No coast guard…?”

  “Not yet.”

  Her answer came clipped. Fast. Too flat.

  Kazuya forced himself onto his elbows. His entire body screamed at the effort. “You saved me.”

  “I said don’t talk.”

  He flinched, more from the snap in her voice than the words themselves.

  She stood up so abruptly that wet sand slid from her knees. For a moment she turned away from him, both hands braced on top of her head, shoulders rising and falling in a rhythm that had nothing to do with the waves.

  Kazuya watched her, confused and slow and still not fully back inside his own body.

  “Mizuhara…?”

  She spun back around.

  “What were you thinking?”

  The words cracked across the strip of sand so hard he actually recoiled.

  Chizuru was glaring at him now, not with the clean, frosty irritation he was used to, but with something much hotter and far less controlled. Her cheeks were flushed. Her breathing still hadn’t settled. There was a tremor in her hands she seemed completely unaware of.

  “Do you have any idea,” she said, voice rising with every word, “what you almost did?”

  He opened his mouth. Nothing came out.

  “You could have died out there!”

  “I know, I just…”

  “No, clearly you don’t know!” she shot back. “Because if you did, you wouldn’t have done something that stupid in the first place!”

  Her voice echoed off the rocks behind them and disappeared into the wind. Kazuya stared at her, stunned.

  He had imagined a lot of versions of this moment in the half-conscious chaos between the waves and the shore. None of them had looked like this.

  “I’m sorry,” he blurted, because that was what came easiest. “I just saw you fall and I…”

  “That wasn’t brave, Kazuya. It was reckless.”

  Every syllable landed hard.

  “You didn’t think. You didn’t stop. You just threw yourself into the water like that somehow made sense!”

  He pushed himself into a sitting position, coughing once as his lungs protested. “I didn’t mean to make things worse, I…”

  “Worse?” Chizuru gave a breathless laugh that had no humor in it. “You nearly got yourself killed.”

  “I know!”

  “Do you?” she snapped. “Do you really?”

  Her voice cracked on the last word.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  That tiny fracture should have softened the moment. Instead it made something in Kazuya twist tighter. Because suddenly he could hear what was hiding under the anger, and somehow that made this hurt more.

  He dragged a shaking hand through his wet hair. “What was I supposed to do?”

  “What?”

  He stared up at her, breath still uneven, heart pounding for an entirely different reason now. “What was I supposed to do, Mizuhara? Just stand there?”

  Her jaw tightened. “That’s not what I said.”

  “No, but you’re acting like I had time to think!” he shot back, the words slipping free before he could stop them. “You fell. You were sinking. I thought…” His voice caught, then came out rougher. “I thought you were going to die.”

  Something in Chizuru’s face flickered, but she said nothing.

  Kazuya pushed on anyway, because now that the words were moving, he did not seem capable of shutting them off.

  “I know I mess everything up, okay? I know that.” He laughed once under his breath, bitter and breathless. “Trust me, I know. But what did you want me to do? Watch you drown? Pretend I didn’t care?”

  “I didn’t ask you to die for me,” she said.

  The sentence was quiet, but no less sharp for it.

  He stared at her. “I wasn’t trying to die.”

  “Then what were you trying to do?”

  He opened his mouth.

  Nothing neat came out. No clever answer. No excuse he could hide behind.

  So what came instead was the truth, stripped raw by seawater and fear.

  “Save you.”

  The wind moved between them. Somewhere behind them, a wave slapped the rocks.

  Chizuru folded her arms as if she were trying to hold herself together by force. “You don’t get to act like my hero just because you made a reckless choice.”

  Something hot and wounded flashed through Kazuya before he could bury it.

  “Then what am I supposed to be?” he demanded. “Just a client? Just some idiot you smile at for money?”

  For a second the whole island went still.

  Then Chizuru’s expression hardened in a way that told him he had stepped directly onto something jagged.

  “Oh, that’s rich coming from you,” she said. “You haven’t done anything right. Every time you rent me, everything just gets worse and worse and worse. So don’t you dare stand there and make me the victim. You’re the one who always goes too far. With the lies, the excuses, all that corny nonsense…” Her voice tightened, sharpened. “For once in your life, can you try to understand that?”

  Each word hit him like surf against bare skin, cold and hard and impossible to brace for.

  He got to his feet on instinct, though his knees nearly buckled under him. The world pitched once. He caught himself before he fell, every muscle in his body straining.

  “I do understand!” he snapped, louder than he meant to. “I know I mess everything up!”

  “Then act like it!”

  “What was I supposed to do, Mizuhara?!” His voice broke free, raw now, stripped of embarrassment and restraint and all the usual frantic apologies. “Watch you drown?!”

  She flinched.

  Just slightly. But enough.

  He took one unsteady step toward her, chest heaving. “I didn’t jump because I thought it would make me look good! I didn’t jump because I wanted credit! I jumped because it was you!”

  The words hung there.

  Too honest. Too close to something else.

  Chizuru looked at him as if she had forgotten how to breathe.

  Kazuya heard his own heartbeat roaring in his ears. The second after saying it was somehow worse than the drowning had been. He wanted to take it back. He wanted to explain it. He wanted the island to split open and bury him under the sand.

  Instead Chizuru looked away first.

  When she spoke again, her voice was lower. Colder because of it.

  “I never asked you to do that.”

  Kazuya’s throat tightened.

  “You don’t get to decide that your feelings make this okay,” she continued. “You don’t get to play hero and then expect me to thank you for it.”

  He stared at her.

  All the heat bled out of him at once.

  Not because her words were loud. Because they were precise. Because they landed exactly where he had no defenses.

  For a moment he thought he might say something back. Something angry. Something sharp enough to prove he could still fight. But what rose instead was a hollow, exhausted ache that made everything inside him suddenly feel very far away.

  “…Right,” he said.

  The word came out small.

  He let out a short breath that might have been a laugh if it had contained any humor at all. His gaze dropped to the sand between them.

  “Sorry,” he murmured. “I forgot my place.”

  The silence that followed was worse than the shouting.

  Chizuru’s head snapped slightly toward him, as if she had not expected that answer. Or maybe as if she had not expected the damage in it.

  But Kazuya was already turning away.

  He walked a few steps down the beach before his legs gave a warning tremor and he sat heavily in the sand near the waterline, not trusting himself to stay upright much longer. He pulled one knee up, draped an arm over it, and stared out at the ocean.

  The waves rolled in and out with maddening calm. Small now. Harmless-looking. As if they had not swallowed him whole minutes ago.

  Behind him, Chizuru did not move.

  Or maybe she did and he just could not make himself look back.

  The wind had turned cooler. His soaked clothes clung to him like a second skin, and now that the adrenaline was ebbing, the cold was sinking its teeth in. His scraped palms stung. His ribs ached every time he drew a full breath. He could still taste salt on his tongue.

  More than anything, though, he felt stupid.

  Stupid for jumping.

  Stupid for yelling.

  Stupid for saying things he had no right to say out loud.

  Just a client. Just some idiot you smile at for money.

  His eyes squeezed shut for half a second.

  Yeah. That was about right.

  Further up the beach, Chizuru wrapped her arms around herself and stared at his back.

  The anger was still there. She could feel it flickering through her, jagged and unstable, refusing to die cleanly. But it was no longer the pure, clean thing she had thrown at him. It had fractured somewhere in the middle of the argument, splintering into pieces she did not want to inspect too closely.

  Because underneath the anger was the image.

  Kazuya diving.

  Not hesitating. Not calculating. Not looking around for someone else to act first. Just throwing himself into the water after her as though his own life had never once entered the equation.

  Idiot, she thought.

  Her throat tightened.

  She had been scared.

  No, that was too weak a word for it. For that sick, freezing instant in the water when she’d seen him beneath the surface and realized he wasn’t coming back up fast enough. For the way her body had moved before her mind did. For the horrible possibility that she might reach him too late.

  She looked down at her own hands.

  They were still shaking.

  Annoyed, she curled them into fists.

  The ocean hissed over the sand. A gull cried somewhere overhead. The whole island seemed to have settled into a quiet that felt almost cruel, as if it were mocking the chaos they had just dragged onto it.

  Chizuru exhaled slowly and started toward him.

  Not all the way.

  Just close enough to see the shallow scrape along his forearm where rock or coral must have caught him in the water. Close enough to notice how pale he still looked. Close enough to see the slight wince he failed to hide when a stronger gust of wind hit him.

  “Your arm is bleeding,” she said.

  Kazuya did not turn around. “It’s fine.”

  “It doesn’t look fine.”

  “Then I guess it matches everything else.”

  The bitterness in his voice was quiet, but it still made something in her chest pull tight.

  She crouched a short distance away, careful not to get too close, careful not to make any gesture that might look like surrender. “You should rinse it before the salt dries.”

  He gave a short laugh under his breath. “Thanks for the medical advice.”

  The sarcasm should have annoyed her.

  Instead it just made him sound tired.

  Chizuru looked away toward the horizon, where the sun had begun its slow descent, spilling gold over the water in a way that would have been beautiful under any other circumstances.

  “…Idiot,” she muttered.

  This time the word came out softer.

  Kazuya heard the difference. She knew he did, because his shoulders shifted almost imperceptibly. But he still did not look at her.

  Neither of them spoke for a while after that.

  The silence changed shape.

  Not gentler, exactly. But no longer as sharp. The fight had burned through its brightest fuel, leaving behind ash and heat and a thousand things neither of them seemed able to name.

  A wave crept farther up the beach, cold around Kazuya’s ankles before sliding back again. He watched it go.

  Then, without looking at her, he said, “Were you scared?”

  The question landed between them so simply it took Chizuru a second to understand it.

  She stared at his profile. His hair was still dripping. There was sand stuck to one side of his jaw. He looked exhausted down to the bone.

  He did not ask again.

  Chizuru’s fingers curled into the damp sand.

  “…What do you think?” she said.

  Kazuya let out a breath that could have meant anything.

  They sat with that answer.

  A minute passed. Maybe two.

  Then Chizuru spoke again, so quietly the wind nearly stole it.

  “Don’t ever do that again.”

  He turned his head just enough to look at her from the corner of his eye.

  There was still tension in her face, still pride, still that stubborn hardness she wore like armor. But beneath it, for one unguarded instant, he could see the truth of what she meant.

  Don’t leave me to feel that again.

  Something inside him softened before he could stop it.

  “Then don’t scare me like that,” he said.

  Her eyes widened the slightest bit.

  No comeback came.

  No angry retort. No sharp correction. Just the two of them sitting there with the waves breathing in and out beside them, both too exhausted to pretend that line had meant nothing.

  The distant engine reached them first.

  Kazuya straightened slightly. Chizuru was already on her feet, scanning the water. A second later a voice carried faintly over the surf.

  “There! On the shore!”

  The coast guard boat appeared around the rocks in a blur of white and orange, heading toward them fast.

  Reality rushed back in all at once.

  Kazuya pushed himself up too quickly and swayed. Before he could catch himself, a hand closed around his elbow.

  Chizuru.

  The contact lasted less than a second before she let go, but by then he was already steady.

  The rescuers called out questions as they reached the shallows. Were they injured? Could they stand? Were there any others?

  Chizuru answered most of them. Her voice had its usual shape again. Calm. Controlled. Efficient. If someone had only arrived at that moment, they would never have guessed she had been shouting on the beach minutes earlier with seawater in her hair and fear still breaking open in her chest.

  Kazuya said as little as possible.

  When they were finally guided onto the boat, they sat side by side on the narrow bench near the stern, wrapped in emergency blankets that crackled every time the wind shifted. Their shoulders almost touched. Almost.

  Neither of them looked at the other.

  The island grew smaller behind them. The waves flashed gold and blue beneath the lowering sun, innocent as polished glass.

  The sea had almost taken their lives.

  Instead, it had left them with each other, and that was proving far harder to survive.