In war torn Japan, a lonely teenage girl and a young American soldier form a quiet bond despite being outcasts in their own worlds. But when war tears them apart before either can confess their feelings, both are left haunted by a love that was never spoken aloud.
The first time Hana saw him, he was covered in soot.
Not blood. Not glory. Just soot.
Coal dust stained the boy’s cheeks and forehead in uneven smears, dark against deep brown skin as he crouched beside the harbor wall with his helmet tipped too far over his eyes. The thing looked too large for him, slipping low every few seconds until he pushed it back up with annoyed fingers.
The foreign soldiers had become common in Yokohama by then.
Tall men with loud boots and louder mouths. Men who smelled like gunpowder and tobacco and sea salt. Men the townspeople watched from a careful distance.
But unlike the others, she did not stare with curiosity.
She stared because she understood loneliness when she saw it.
The boy sat apart from the other soldiers despite being only a few paces away. They laughed among themselves while he remained quiet, rubbing dirt from his palms onto his trousers with absent exhaustion.
Not much older than herself.
The evening wind lifted the edges of Hana’s pale blue kimono as she lingered near the docks with her basket pressed against her hip. Her hair, cut short just below her jaw, shifted softly around her face.
The scar beneath her collarbone ached.
It always did when the weather changed.
The boy noticed her staring.
Yet somehow, Hana did not look away.
After that, she began seeing him everywhere.
Along the market streets.
Sometimes sitting alone beside stacked crates while the other soldiers crowded into tea houses without him.
The townspeople avoided him for obvious reasons. Foreigners already drew enough suspicion, but a Black foreign soldier drew stares even among the Americans themselves.
Hana understood those looks intimately.
Her mother had once told her:
“You stole everything good from me the moment you were born.”
As a child, Hana had not understood what that meant.
She understood after the beatings started.
After the shattered porcelain.
After being shoved against the hibachi hard enough to leave a burn carved into her chest forever.
Her father never intervened.
He simply stopped looking at her altogether.
As though acknowledging her existence exhausted him.
Eventually, Hana learned silence was safer.
Silence made people forget she was there.
Isaiah, she would later learn.
never seemed disturbed by her quiet.
The first word he ever spoke to her was accidental.
She had been kneeling near the riverbank washing cloth when he approached to retrieve something drifting in the water, a little silver button from his uniform.
Their hands brushed as she picked it up first.
Then laughed softly through his nose.
“Thank you,” he said carefully.
The Japanese sounded awkward in his mouth.
Hana blinked once before placing the button into his palm.
His fingers were warm despite the cold.
After that, he began appearing beside her without invitation.
Never demanding conversation.
He would simply sit nearby while she worked.
Sometimes he sketched terribly onto scraps of paper while she silently watched.
Sometimes she brought extra rice cakes and placed them between them without acknowledgment.
Once, during rain, he removed his oversized helmet and placed it over her head instead.
It slipped down to her nose.
For the first time in years, Hana laughed.
But Isaiah stared at her like he had discovered sunlight.
After that, he tried constantly to hear it again.
The city filled with smoke and foreign chatter and rumors of conflict spreading farther than before.
Hana found Isaiah one evening seated atop a crate near the docks, carefully stitching a tear in his sleeve beneath dim lanternlight.
Coal dust marked his jaw again.
Without thinking, Hana reached toward him.
Her thumb brushed the dark smear from his cheek.
The harbor noises seemed to vanish around them.
Hana realized what she had done and immediately pulled back, lowering her gaze in embarrassment.
But Isaiah gently caught her wrist.
Just enough to stop her retreat.
His hand was rough and trembling slightly.
For a moment, neither spoke.
Then his eyes flickered downward toward the scar peeking from beneath her kimono collar.
Most people stared at it.
Isaiah looked only briefly before lifting his gaze back to her face.
As though the scar meant nothing at all.
Something inside Hana cracked open then.
She did not have words for it.
So instead, she sat beside him until the lantern burned out.
The soldiers departed before dawn three weeks later.
Hana arrived at the harbor carrying wrapped rice cakes beneath her sleeve only to find empty crates and muddy tracks leading toward the road out of town.
The harbor suddenly felt enormous.
For days afterward, she waited near the docks each evening.
Soldiers slowly returned in scattered groups afterward, wounded, exhausted, quieter than before.
Isaiah was not among them.
Hana began searching frantically despite herself.
She stopped passing like a ghost through the streets and instead approached officers with shaking hands, trying desperately to ask about the young American soldier with the crooked helmet and soot stained face.
Until one finally paused.
“The Black boy?” he asked bluntly.
The officer barely looked at her while adjusting papers beneath his arm.
“He went missing during battle.”
The world did not shatter loudly.
No dramatic scream tore from Hana’s throat.
It was quieter than that.
Like snow settling over everything all at once.
Hana bowed automatically.
People called it improvement.
Her mother called it obedience.
When marriage arrangements came months later, nobody objected on Hana’s behalf.
The man chosen for her was older by many years. A widower with tired eyes and practical manners.
That almost made it worse.
Hana wore pale cream silk during the ceremony while relatives whispered about how fortunate she was despite her scar, despite her strangeness.
She stood silently through all of it.
Like a ghost being dressed for burial.
Years seemed to pass inside her without movement.
Isaiah returned in spring.
A fragment of shrapnel had torn through his shoulder during battle, leaving him stranded among the dead long enough for reports to assume otherwise.
The first thing he did upon returning to Yokohama was search for Hana.
He found her by accident.
She stood outside a quiet home arranging laundry beneath the afternoon sun, dressed in the muted clothing of a married woman.
Her posture remained soft and withdrawn.
But there was another man beside her.
For a long moment, he simply watched her.
She looked thinner than before.
As though part of her had been left somewhere unreachable.
Hana turned slightly then.
For one impossible second, Isaiah thought she might see him standing across the street.
But her gaze passed over him entirely.
The realization settled heavily into his chest.
Of course she had moved on.
He had been gone too long.
He had never told her how he felt.
A girl like Hana could never have belonged to someone like him anyway.
Then quietly walked away before she could notice him.
Hana never learned he survived.
Isaiah never learned she had stopped speaking after his death.
And somewhere between war, silence, and timing, two people who loved each other completely became strangers again.
In another life, perhaps they would have spoken sooner.
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