Berries and cream

808 AD, Spring, 9:43 A.M.

Pretty. Really pretty.

At least that's what you thought.

It was the last lesson of the day, poetry. Kiyoshi-sensei was out sick so her class had joined with yours, which meant the room was fuller than usual and Masaru-sensei was in one of his moods about it. The kind of mood where he read aloud from scrolls with the energy of a man who resented every single person in the room including himself.

It was a little misshapen, a bit stained like it was made by dirty hands, the tips bent where it wasn't supposed to, but it had character. It was so…him. So unbelievably and undeniably him.

A dreamy little sigh was pulled from your lips as you fiddled with the origami bunny. "Young miss, put your trash in the bin and focus!" grunted Masaru-sensei, he was standing in front of the class holding up a scroll, pausing his reading aloud to scold you. When you looked up everyone was staring,but that was the last thing on your mind at the moment. How dare he? Does he even know how much this is worth? more than the charm that hung from the cords of his robe life and dank toupee. Reluctantly, you stuff the bunny origami in your robes and join in on the lesson while you thought several things you would never say out loud because you were a well raised young woman.

Lunch was under the matsu tree, same as always.

The air was warm with a breeze moving through it and fat fluffy clouds drifting across the sky above you. Hotaru was already eating, which she had somehow started before anyone else despite being the last to sit down. Masanori was complaining about something. Ume was listening to Masanori complain while also reading, which was a skill you had always admired.

You were holding the origami bunny again.

You hadn't noticed you'd taken it back out.

"Hey." Masanori knocked your knee with his. "You good? You've been all distracted since this morning. you keep touching that horribly done origami."

You looked up slowly, dazed. then down at your hands. Then back up. Horrible? What was with people today.

"Excuse you Masanori, my Pinky—"

"I made it for her." Ume cut in smoothly, not looking up from her book. "craft project."

Masanori squinted at the origami. "It's terrible. Looks like a disfigured duck that got spat out by a pig."

"Thank you." Ume said.

You caught Ume's eye over Masanori's head. She gave you a very specific look. You gave her an apologetic one back. This was the third time this month you had nearly exposed yourself and each time Ume had caught it before it became a problem. You were slacking and you knew it and so did she. She had started calling you 'gooshy' which apparently meant you had no poker face anymore when it came to him. you couldn't even argue. she wasn't wrong.

But she also wasn't there two weeks ago when it happened. So she couldn't fully blame you.

two weeks ago.

Ume had been covering your back since she found out and you had been endlessly grateful. On this particular day she had run interference with the guards while you slipped out during music to go to the food carts near the east road. You were going to get Ryo a new treat, you had been promising yourself the fish skewers and sweet potato dumplings for weeks now and today was the day.

Except when you got there most of the stalls were closed up early and the ones that weren't were packing away fast. The old lady who ran the fish cake cart muttered at you to leave the moment she saw you, "you shouldn't be here girl, a curse has robbed ol' Hikaru, took all his paper and tipped his cart over just for the fun of it. the thing laughed and ran off. A menace i tell you. G+o on now, shoo."

you went.

Pinky Pie what have you gotten yourself into now, was your first thought as you redirected toward the meadow. you had no treats and limited time but at least you could see him.

you were slightly out of breath when you made it through the trees into the meadow and what you found there stopped you mid stride.

tufts of pink hair catching the breeze, eyebrows pinched in concentration, the tip of his tongue just barely visible between his lips, and four arms each holding a different colour of paper. he was sitting cross legged in the grass with the focused energy of someone doing something that required their full attention and had absolutely no idea anyone was watching.

you stood there for a moment and just looked at him.

he had gotten bigger these past few months. taller. something about his arms was different too, like there was actual definition there now, lean muscle that hadn't been there at thirteen. you were trying very hard not to think about this. you were failing to not think about this. the thought had kept you up half of last night, you lying on your futon in the dark staring at the ceiling and then burrying your face in your sleeve and making sounds only a very dramatic fourteen year old makes.

"Ryo." you announced your presence loudly, still breathing a little hard from running. "what are you doing? i heard you robbed an old man."

he turned around immediately, all four arms moving to shield whatever was in his lap from view. "you're not supposed to see yet." he said, scowling. "go away."

ooooh.

a surprise.

how completely, devastatingly adorable.

you sat down in your usual spot right in front of him and stared at his back with a smile on your face. you could see the tips of his ears from here. pink. the tips of his ears were pink. it was not helping your situation.

"okay." you said. "i'll wait. i love surprises."

a grunt. then silence. just the sound of paper folding.

all this focus for you. all of it just for you. you were going to have to lie down when you got home.

"okay." he said eventually, still not turning around. "i...uh." he stopped. there was a pause where you heard him exhale once. "i never made it before. i saw someone doing it at the market."

before you could say a single thing he turned around and shoved something into your hand, and in the same motion his head whipped to the side in the world's least convincing display of nonchalance.

you looked down.

a small origami rabbit sat in your palm. pink paper. he had used pink paper. a bit lopsided, one ear slightly longer than the other, the body a little squished on one side. it looked like someone had cared very much about getting it right and had also been learning how to do it while doing it.

you sat very still for a moment.

"Ryomen." you said.

"it's just paper." he said, to the meadow.

"Ryomen."

"stop saying my name like that."

"it's the most beautiful thing i've ever seen in my entire life." you said, completely sincerely.

the back of his neck went pink to match his ears. "it's lopsided." he said.

"i know." you said. "i love it."

he said nothing. he was very busy looking at a patch of grass to his left. you looked back down at the little rabbit in your palm and felt something so full it almost hurt sitting in the middle of your chest.

you had been carrying it with you every day since.

"spill it." Hotaru's burp, pulling you back to the present.

she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and looked between you and Ume with the calm directness that was just how Hotaru was, no build up, no softening. "the beans. we want all of them. just because we get lower marks than you two in languages and poetry and art and—" she paused, counting, "yeah, basically everything, doesn't mean we're stupid. we've noticed you two being all secretive for months now. so. spill."

she said the last part with a full mouth of stew.

you and Ume looked at each other.

"i made an origami bunny." Ume tried.

"Ume." Hotaru said flatly.

Masanori was looking between all three of you with the focused suspicion of someone who had been waiting for this conversation and was glad it was finally happening.

you looked at the origami rabbit in your hands.

then you put it carefully back in your robe.

and you folded. completely and immediately. under zero pressure really, you could have lied your way out of this easy, you had been doing it for months. but you were tired. genuinely tired of carrying it in a box and only being able to open the box with Ume. you wanted to put it down somewhere and breathe.

so you told them. all of it. every single bean out of the can. it took up the rest of lunch, your food going cold beside you because you kept forgetting to eat. Ume filled in the parts you forgot, which told you she had been waiting to tell this story for a while and had it memorised.

Masanori went through several visible phases during the telling of it. confusion, then disbelief, then something that looked like he was doing complex maths in his head, then a long moment where he stared at a fixed point on the ground processing that this was all about the ghost boy from the shed at the edge of the meadow, the one the whole town walked around without meaning to, the one whose name the priests didn't say out loud. then something that might have been the very early stages of understanding, not full understanding, just the beginning of it.

Hotaru practically melted. she pressed both hands to her cheeks and made a sound in the back of her throat that was very similar to the sounds you made alone in your room at night. she and Ume immediately began comparing your situation to their favourite romance narratives with the enthusiasm of people who had been waiting for something to apply them to.

you ate your cold food and let it happen.

after a while Masanori looked back at you. he was still a little uncertain, you could see it, the weight of everything the town said and believed sitting somewhere in his face. but he was looking at you, his actual friend, and whatever was in your face when you talked about Ryomen was apparently doing some of the convincing for you.

"okay." he said finally. "okay. so what's the plan."

Ume looked up from her romance comparison. "we were hoping you'd ask that."

the plan was simple enough. Masanori would cover the school gate on days you needed to leave early. Hotaru would handle any curious adults with her very convincing innocent expression. Ume would continue being Ume, which was already more than enough.

what none of them could fix was home.

your father had kept the guards close since the ceremony and that hadn't changed. two of them, always. thorough men. the kind who took their job seriously and didn't leave many gaps. you had gotten creative, Ume's interference, the garden gate, the window in the poetry room, but some days there was no gap and you went home without seeing him and the next day you were tired and distracted and apparently gooshy enough that Masaru-sensei felt the need to comment on it.

the day after the lunch confession you woke up to a quiet house.

your mother was asleep, one of the slower mornings. your father had left for the courts early. the maids were moving through the house doing their work and everything was calm and a little too still in the way it sometimes got when both your parents were unavailable at the same time. you got dressed, ate something small from the kitchen, and took your snacks out to the engawa that looked over the garden.

the garden in spring was genuinely lovely. the plum tree had finished but the wisteria along the far wall was going properly now, purple and heavy, and the grass was the bright green that only happens for a few weeks before summer comes and tires it out. you sat with your legs tucked under you and ate and watched a bird do something complicated on the branch of the garden pine.

the two guards were doing their round on the far side of the garden. you could see them moving at the edge of the path, slow and methodical.

you were thinking about nothing in particular when the air changed.

it wasn't a sound. it was just that shift, the one that had been happening since you were twelve, the one your body had learned to recognise before your brain caught up with it. you looked up from your snacks.

he was sitting on top of the garden wall.

just sitting there, comfortable as anything, one leg hanging over the edge, two arms resting on his knees. his pink hair was doing its usual thing. he was looking at the garden like he was simply taking in the view.

you stared at him.

"how did you get past the outer gate." you said, keeping your voice low so it didn't carry.

"there's a gap in the stone near the east corner." he said, the same volume. "been there for years. your people should fix it."

"i will absolutely not be telling them that." you said.

something moved on his face that was close to amusement. he looked at the wisteria along the far wall. "your garden is too big." he said.

"it really is." you agreed. "we don't use half of it. my mother keeps saying she wants chickens back there but my father says absolutely not."

"chickens." he said.

"she really wants them." you said. "i support her."

he looked at you then. properly looked at you, all four eyes, the direct kind. "how is she." he said. "your mother."

you looked at your snacks for a moment. "slower lately. she's sleeping more than she was a few months ago. the physician came last week and my father went very quiet afterwards which is never a good sign." you paused. "she made a joke at dinner two nights ago that made my father laugh so hard he spilled his tea, so. it's both things at the same time."

Ryomen was quiet, listening the way he listened, actually there.

"some days it's heavy." you said. "i don't really say that to people. but some days it just sits on me and i can't put it down."

"i know." he said. simple. not trying to fix it, just acknowledging it, which was somehow exactly right.

you looked up at him. "do you ever miss them." you said. "your parents. even after everything."

he thought about it for a moment, which you appreciated. he didn't just answer fast to get past the question. "sometimes." he said. "not them exactly. i don't know them well enough to miss them. just the idea of them. what it could have been." he looked at the wall beneath him. "it passes."

you nodded slowly. you sat with that for a moment, both of you quiet, the garden around you doing its gentle spring thing.

"Ryo." you said.

"hm."

"i'm glad you came."

he looked at you again. his jaw did the thing it did when he was carrying something carefully. "i was in the area." he said.

"you're never just in the area." you said. "you know exactly where the gaps in our walls are and you know where the guards are and you came anyway." you weren't saying it to make him uncomfortable, just saying it because it was true and you were done pretending it wasn't. "so i'm glad."

he looked away at the wisteria. the tips of his ears had gone pink. one of his hands, the one closest to you even though you were several feet below him, opened and closed slowly on his knee.

"the guards are about to change direction." he said after a moment.

you looked toward the far path. he was right, you could already see them starting to turn. "same time next week?" you said.

"i make no such agreements." he said, and stood up on top of the wall with an ease that was honestly a little unfair, balanced perfectly, and looked down at you for just a second longer than he needed to.

"eat the rest of your snacks." he said. "you always stop halfway through."

then he dropped down off the other side and was gone.

you sat on the engawa and looked at the wall and ate the rest of your snacks.

best afternoon of the week, easy.

808 AD, Summer, 10:26 A.M.

it started at lunch. again.

Masanori sat down under the matsu tree practically twitching. he had news. how did you know? because Masanori had three tell tale signs when he was carrying something. first came the twitching. then the sweating. then the interrupting everybody mid sentence before he eventually just crumbled and told you anyway. you had known this boy since you were eight years old. you could read him like a book.

exhibit A.

"okay so." he cut Hotaru off mid sentence about something, already leaning in like someone was going to overhear him in an open field. "you know Ryomen right."

"we know Ryomen." Ume said without looking up from her book.

"there's a new rumour."

you put your rice cake down.

"Kenji Fujimoto." Masanori said. "big house near the west road. anyway Kenji was cutting through the meadow two nights ago after dark, which first of all, stupid, but that's not the point. the point is he ran into Ryomen. and he says when he tried to go around him Ryomen's eyes went completely white and Kenji felt all the warmth leave his body at once." Masanori paused. actually paused for dramatic effect. "and then Ryomen smiled. and apparently when he smiled he had too many teeth. way too many teeth. and then." another pause. "he disappeared into the ground."

Ume choked on her water.

not the polite kind. the full body kind, the kind that had Hotaru abandoning her lunch to pat her back while Ume held up one hand to communicate she was fine while very obviously not being fine yet.

you on the other hand were trying extremely hard not to laugh because you knew, you personally knew, that Ryomen Sukuna did not disappear into the ground. Ryomen Sukuna took night walks because the days belonged to other people and Kenji Fujimoto had probably stumbled into him in the dark, panicked because he had panicked, run home, and let his imagination write the second half of the story.

too many teeth.

into the ground.

you and Ume looked at each other. you both looked away immediately.

"and that's not it." Masanori said, completely unaware of the silent conversation happening across from him. "old man Daichi from the rice stall says last month when he tried to wave Ryomen away from his cart the sky went dark. thirty seconds. just thirty seconds of complete darkness in the middle of the afternoon and then normal again."

"the sky." Hotaru said.

"went dark." Masanori confirmed.

"for thirty seconds." you said.

"thirty seconds." he said.

Hotaru looked at you. quick and quiet, the kind of look only Hotaru did, the one that saw more than it let on. you looked back at your food.

because here was the thing. it was funny. you knew it was funny and Ume knew it was funny and honestly even Hotaru's face was doing something that suggested she found Kenji Fujimoto deeply unreliable as a source. but underneath the funny part was something with edges to it. because Kenji was going to tell that story at his dinner table tonight. and his family was going to tell their friends. and by the end of the week it was going to be bigger and darker and more ridiculous and there was nothing, not a single thing, you could do about it. you couldn't say actually i know him. you couldn't say he made me an origami rabbit. you just had to sit here and eat your rice cake.

you had stopped eating your rice cake.

Hotaru picked it up and put it back in your hand without saying a word. you ate it.

"i mean obviously it's exaggerated." Masanori said, looking at you, because he did know, they all knew. "i'm just saying what's going around."

"i know." you said. "i know you are."

"Kenji Fujimoto." Hotaru said, in the tone of someone delivering a verdict. "once told everyone he saw a river dragon near the east bridge. turned out to be a very large fish."

Ume snorted. Masanori laughed. you smiled, small but real.

it helped. not all the way. but enough to finish lunch.

afternoon lessons were fine. Ume walked with you to the gate after and bumped her shoulder into yours once without saying anything. you bumped back. that was the whole conversation and it covered everything that needed to be said.

the guards took you home.

the house was warm when you got in. you could hear your mother before you saw her, her voice coming from somewhere down the corridor, and the sound of it did what it always did, loosened the thing in your chest that had been tight since lunch.

dinner was all three of you. good dinner. your mother was sharp and funny and picking fights with your father about small things purely for entertainment, which meant she was feeling good, which made everything feel better. your father pretended to lose the arguments while clearly enjoying them. you ate and watched and felt both happy and something unnamed underneath the happy.

and then your father mentioned the east garden.

completely ordinary. something about trees and wall foundations and maintenance. your mother said she had never liked the plum tree on the east side anyway, too messy, she wanted something cleaner.

"what about a sakura?" your father suggested. "something with colour."

your mother made a face. "pink." she said, the way you say the name of a food you have never been particularly fond of. "pink has never been a favourite of mine. too sweet. too much."

the conversation moved on like nothing happened. your father agreed. your mother mentioned some pale purple tree she had seen near the temple road years ago, much more elegant.

you sat there with your chopsticks in your hand and stared at your food.

pink has never been a favourite of mine. too sweet. too much.

they were talking about a tree. you knew that. a perfectly ordinary tree for the perfectly ordinary east garden. this had nothing to do with anything else.

except you were fourteen and you had spent the last two years watching a boy be called too much by an entire town that had never once actually looked at him. and today you had sat under the matsu tree and listened to people add more stories to the pile. and now you were sitting at your own dinner table listening to pink get dismissed like it was nothing and something in you that had been sitting quietly for a very long time just stood all the way up.

"PINK HAS NEVER DONE ANYONE ANY WRONG."

both your parents stopped talking.

you were standing. you had not planned to stand but here you were. chopsticks in hand. voice loud enough that the attendant near the door went very still.

"pink is a good colour." you said, with the total conviction of someone who had been thinking about this for longer than tonight. "it has feelings. it has a heart. it deserves to be appreciated and not written off just because people have decided without looking properly that it's too sweet or too much. maybe the problem is that people don't actually look. and if they did they would see that it is one of the best colours that has ever existed and i am not going to sit here and listen to it be spoken about like it's nothing."

silence.

complete silence.

your mother had both eyebrows somewhere near her hairline. your father had set his chopsticks down carefully. the attendant near the door was staring at a fixed point on the wall.

you set your chopsticks down. bowed slightly. said "excuse me" in a voice doing its best impression of composure and walked out.

you went to your room. sat on your futon. put both hands over your face.

from down the corridor, clear as anything, your mother's voice. "that child has the most passionate relationship with colours i have ever witnessed in my life. she gets her weird from you."

and then your father laughed. the big warm real kind.

you heard both things.

later, lamp low, origami bunny in your hands, you lay on your futon and stared at the ceiling.

your mother thought it was funny. you knew she did. and your father had laughed, which was something.

but you had also seen him set his chopsticks down before you finished. quiet and precise. your father was not a foolish man. you had always known that. smart men noticed things even when they filed them away for later instead of saying them out loud.

pink has never been a favourite of mine.

they were talking about a tree. you knew that.

but the good days, the ones where it felt like the world was just the meadow and the ginkgo tree and nothing else had weight to it, those weren't the whole picture. the whole picture had dinner tables in it. rumours. a town that had already made its decision. a father who loved you in a way that had started to feel like a wall being built around you one careful brick at a time.

you tucked the origami bunny under your pillow.

outside the summer night was warm and loud with insects. somewhere across town he was probably walking. empty streets. no one looking.

you hoped he was eating.

you fell asleep thinking about pink paper.

down the corridor your father sat on the edge of the bed while your mother settled in.

she was talking about something, some small funny observation from dinner, but he was only half listening.

"you've gone quiet." your mother said.

"i'm thinking." he said.

"about the tree?"

"no." he said.

she looked at him with those eyes that had always read him faster than he liked. "she's fourteen." she said. not unkindly. just a fact.

"i know how old she is." he said.

"then you know fourteen year olds have feelings about things." she said. "loud dining room standing up from the table feelings."

"it's not the feelings." he said. "it's what they're about."

your mother was quiet for a moment. "she'll be alright." she said finally. "she's ours."

your father looked at the lamp.

"yes." he said. "i'm going to make sure of it."

809 AD, Late Winter, 13:27 P.M.

talking.

he had never really been a fan.

he was more of a listener. especially when it came to her. she had this way of going on and on and on about the most random things with the energy of someone who had seventeen cups of tea for breakfast. exhausting honestly. where did she find it? he was never quite sure. last tuesday she had shown up with mochi, the strawberry kind, a wisteria flower tucked behind her ear, and had proceeded to talk for two solid hours about something that started as a complaint about her dance instructor and somehow ended up being a full lecture about the migration patterns of birds. he had not said much. he had eaten the mochi and listened and at some point noticed the flower was slightly crooked behind her ear and thought about fixing it for about three seconds.

it was nice though. the flower. pretty almost. on her specifically.

anyway.

unfamiliar footsteps were coming through the meadow.

not her. he knew her footsteps without trying to, the same way he knew the sound the shed door made in wind, just from time and proximity. these were different. lighter. whoever this was led with the wrong foot and swung their arms differently.

this wasn't his—

it wasn't her.

he looked up.

Ume.

she walked up to him with the energy of someone who had somewhere to be and had decided this was it. no hesitation. no checking if it was okay. she dropped down into the grass directly across from him, right in the spot, the specific patch of flattened grass that had been flattened by the same person sitting in it every tuesday for three years.

"that spot's taken." Ryomen said. looking at her with all four eyes. flat.

Ume looked at the spot. then at him. then back at the spot. "what do you— oh." she snickered. "ahhh i see you. your girlfriend sits there."

"she is not my anything." he said. "what do you want, girl."

"Ume." she said, moving to a different patch of grass without any particular hurry about it. "my name is Ume. and i want to talk to you." she settled herself. "so. Ryomen."

"so." he said.

"she talks about you constantly." Ume said. "like genuinely constantly. at lunch, after school, in the middle of conversations about completely unrelated things. last week Masanori was talking about his uncle's farm and somehow within four minutes it was about you. i don't even know how she did it. it was impressive actually."

Ryomen said nothing.

"you don't seem surprised." Ume said.

"i'm not." he said.

"cocky." she said.

"realistic." he said.

Ume looked at him for a second. "okay fair." she said. she picked a blade of grass and turned it over in her fingers. "we never believed it you know. the rumors. me and the others." she said it casually, like she was talking about the weather. "i always thought they were exaggerated. people in this town are dramatic, no offense."

"some taken." he said.

"she thought they were mean and stupid." Ume continued, ignoring him. "from day one. you know what she said when we were twelve and the other kids were going on about the ghost boy in the shed? she said she felt sorry for a lonely child wandering around. that's it. that's all she got from the story." Ume shook her head. "she acts like she's all bubbly and whatever but she's soft. genuinely soft. gushy all the way through." she looked at him directly. "so don't go breaking her heart or i will gut you like a fish."

Ryomen looked at her for a long moment.

"she cried on my shirt for two hours." he said. "under a sakura tree. in winter. i didn't leave."

Ume stared at him.

he looked back at the meadow.

"okay." Ume said quietly. "okay yeah." she filed that away and moved on like a professional. "alright new segment. i have questions."

"i'm not answering questions." he said.

"cool." she said. "what do you actually do all day. like genuinely. what is a typical tuesday for Ryomen Sukuna when she's not here talking your ear off."

he looked at her sideways. "why."

"because i'm doing my due diligence." she said. "she has terrible judgment when it comes to herself. somebody has to check."

"she has fine judgment." he said, slightly faster than he meant to.

Ume's mouth did something. "right." she said. "so. tuesday."

he looked at the sky. "i walk in the mornings. check the shed. get food." he paused. "fix things when they need fixing."

"fix things." Ume said. "like what."

"the roof. the wall on the south side. the well near the east road has a loose stone." he said. "things."

"so you just. wander around fixing things." Ume said.

"yes." he said.

"alone." she said.

"yes." he said.

"hm." she said.

"stop doing that." he said.

"doing what." she said innocently.

"the hm thing." he said. "you do it when you're thinking something you've decided not to say. its annoying."

Ume looked at him with a new expression. something between surprised and impressed. "she said you were perceptive." she said. "i thought she was being biased."

"she's a lot of things." he said. "biased isn't one of them."

"no." Ume agreed. "it really isn't." she looked at him properly then. the full direct look. "okay last question. and i need you to actually answer it."

"i haven't agreed to answer anything." he said.

"why her." Ume said. "out of everyone who could have walked into that shed."

the meadow was quiet for a moment.

"she looked at me." he said finally. "just looked. no verdict in it." he paused. "i didn't know that was unusual until i'd seen enough of the other kind to compare it to."

Ume didn't say anything for a moment. she just sat with that.

then she stood up and smoothed her robes and looked down at him with an expression he couldn't fully read. "you know what." she said. "you're not so bad at this friend thing, kid."

Ryomen looked up at her. "i'm not your kid." he said. "and i don't do the friend thing."

"sure." she said. "see you around Ryomen." and she turned and walked back through the meadow like she'd come, unhurried, done with exactly what she came to do.

he watched her go.

then he looked back at the meadow.

friend thing. he didn't do the friend thing. he had never done the friend thing. he didn't need the friend thing. people were exhausting and complicated and the verdict they carried around with them was more trouble than the company was worth. he had decided this a long time ago and it had served him fine.

he thought about the last hour.

Ume had sat down without asking. had called him kid. had interviewed him like he was applying for something. had threatened to gut him like a fish with a completely straight face. had made him explain himself in full sentences and somehow it had not felt like pulling teeth. she had dry humour and a calm face and she had said we never believed it like it was just a fact she was reporting and moved on without making it a whole thing which was exactly the right way to handle it.

he thought about the old man. blind eyes and patient silence and a straightforward decency that didn't require anything. the only person before her who had just let him exist without making it complicated.

and now there was her. and apparently also her friends who showed up in meadows with dumplings and interrogated him about his tuesdays.

he looked at the flattened patch of grass where she always sat.

i have friends?

the thought arrived with the particular confusion of someone discovering something that had apparently been happening without their knowledge or consent.

he sat with that for a while.

then he ate the rest of the dumplings and did not think about tuesday.

(he thought about tuesday the whole time.)

809 AD, Early Spring 18:51 P.M.

it started as a normal dinner.

that was the thing. it started completely normally. the table was set, the food was good, the lamps were lit warm and low the way they always were in the evening. your mother was having a good day which meant she was at the table and sharp and picking at your father's opinions on small things for entertainment. Ichi was there again, which had become a semi regular thing over the past few months, him showing up for meals and conversations and fitting into the space your father had clearly decided he belonged in with the ease of someone who had been told he was welcome and had believed it.

you had gotten used to Ichi. that was the honest truth of it. he was easy to be around in the way that genuinely decent people are easy to be around. he never said anything cruel. he always included you in the conversation. he had a good sense of humour, dry and quiet, the kind that landed without announcing itself. if you had met him in different circumstances, if he had just been a person and not a person your father had selected and arranged and placed at your dinner table with a specific purpose, you thought you might have actually liked him.

but he was not just a person. he was a plan. and plans made by other people for your life without asking you had stopped sitting quietly in your chest a long time ago.

so you ate your food and you were pleasant and you waited.

you were not sure what you were waiting for. you just knew it was coming.

your father put down his chopsticks.

"i have something i'd like to share with the table." he said.

your mother looked up. something in her face changed, just slightly, a tightening around the eyes, like she had heard this sentence before, or something very like it, and had not enjoyed the way it ended.

"Ichi's family and i have been in discussion." your father said, in his comfortable measured voice, the one he used when he had already decided something and was presenting it as information rather than a decision. "we feel that the time is right to formalise things. Ichi will begin courting formally. with the intention of arrangement by the end of the year."

the table went very quiet.

Ichi sat across from you with his hands folded and his pleasant face doing its best impression of calm. he glanced at you once, brief and genuine, and in that glance was something that looked almost like an apology, like he too had not been given much say in the timing of this.

your mother stood up.

not slowly. not with the elegant measured rise she usually deployed when she wanted to make a point. she stood up fast, her chair scraping back, her composure going somewhere else entirely.

"no." she said.

your father looked at her. "Hana—"

"no." she said again, louder. her voice had an edge to it that you had heard exactly twice in your life and both times it had meant something in the house was about to change. "you told me you were going to speak to her first. you told me that. i sat in that room and i listened to you tell me that you were going to give her time and speak to her and now you're sitting at this table making announcements over dinner like she's not sitting right there—"

"this is not the moment—" your father started.

"THEN WHEN IS THE MOMENT." your mother's voice cracked through the room like something breaking. "when exactly were you planning on giving our daughter a moment? after the arrangement was signed? after the ceremony? when?" she was shaking, you could see it, the particular trembling that happened when she pushed past what her body wanted to give and demanded more of it anyway. "she is fifteen years old. she is our child. not a piece on a board you move around when the timing suits you—"

"i am doing what is best for this family—"

"you are doing what is best for YOU." your mother's finger came down on the table. "what makes YOU feel safe. what makes YOU feel like everything is under control. and you are dressing it up as love because it's easier than admitting you're afraid."

the silence that followed was the loudest thing you had ever heard.

your father's face had gone very still. the kind of still that meant something had landed somewhere real and he was deciding whether to acknowledge it.

your mother looked at him for one long moment. then she picked up the vase from the centre of the table, the small ceramic one with the painted plum blossoms that had sat there for as long as you could remember, and she threw it against the wall.

it shattered.

then she walked out of the room without another word, her footsteps sharp and certain down the corridor, the sound of her getting smaller until it was gone.

nobody moved.

Ichi was looking at a fixed point on the table. you were looking at the pieces of the vase on the floor. the painted plum blossoms in fragments across the wood.

your father cleared his throat.

"i apologise for that." he said to Ichi, with the smooth composed recovery of a man who had spent his whole life knowing how to present himself in rooms. "she has strong feelings."

Ichi nodded. said nothing. he was looking at the floor too.

and then your father went back to talking. just like that. about the arrangement, about the timeline, about the families involved, like the room hadn't just had something shatter in it, like you weren't sitting three feet away completely frozen, like you weren't there at all.

you sat at that table and you went somewhere else.

your brain had left the dinner and was running without you.

this was it. this was the thing. it was happening, the thing you had been feeling approach for months like bad weather you could see on the horizon but couldn't outrun. formal courting. arrangement by the end of the year. you were fifteen. your birthday was in two days. you would be sixteen and arranged and by this time next year you would be—

ichi. you would be Ichi's.

a life you had never wanted laid out in front of you like a table your father had set without asking what you were hungry for. lessons and duties and a husband chosen for his family name and his steady manner and his completely genuine decency and it would be fine. it would probably be fine. it would be the kind of fine that looked like contentment from the outside and felt like a room with no windows from the inside and you would spend the rest of your life being fine in it.

and Ryomen.

the thought of him arrived the way it always did, without asking, right in the centre of everything.

no more tuesday afternoons. no more evening walks or garden walls or mochi on a cloth with the cloth being his but neither of you saying so. no more forty five seconds on the shrine road. no more sitting in the grass until the light went gold and neither of you wanting to be the one to say it was time to go. no more any of it. because a formal arrangement meant guards and attendants and a life that got smaller and more watched and more arranged every day until there was no gap left in it for meadows or ginkgo trees or boys who tucked hair behind your ear and then looked away fast so you couldn't see their face.

you were going to lose him.

not because he left. because they were going to build walls high enough that you couldn't reach him anymore.

okay. okay. you needed a plan. you could fake an illness, you had faked minor ailments before, nothing dramatic, just enough to buy time. or you could— no. or Ume could— no that wouldn't work either. or maybe if you spoke to Ichi directly, explained, he seemed like a reasonable person, he had looked at you like an apology during the announcement, maybe—

"my little blossom."

your father's voice. gentle. warm. the voice he used when he was being your father and not the Dainagon.

you looked up.

he was looking at you with that careful loving face, the one that had been looking at you your whole life, the one that had kissed your forehead before ceremonies and sat beside your futon and told you stories about fireflies.

"are you alright?" he said softly. "would you like some water?"

something snapped.

not loudly. not all at once. just a clean quiet snap, like a thread pulled one too many times.

"no." you said. "i would not like some water."

your father blinked. Ichi went very still across from you.

"i would like." you said, and your voice was doing something you had never heard it do before, steady and sharp and coming from somewhere below your chest, "to have been part of this conversation before it became an announcement at a dinner table."

"we can discuss—" your father started.

"we ARE discussing." you said. "right now. this is the discussion you should have had with me weeks ago." you put your chopsticks down. they made a sound on the table. "you sat in this room and you made a decision about my life. about who i will be and who i will belong to and what the rest of my years are going to look like. and you did it without asking me a single question."

"i am your father." he said. still measured. still the Dainagon voice. "it is my responsibility to—"

"to what?" you said. "to decide? to arrange? to move me around until i end up somewhere that makes you feel better?" you could feel your voice rising and you didn't stop it. "i am not something that needs to be placed, father. i am not a piece on a board. i am a person. i have thoughts and feelings and a whole life happening inside me that you keep making decisions over the top of without ever once asking what's in it."

"i know what's in it." your father said, and something in his voice had shifted, the measured quality cracking just slightly at the edges. "that is exactly why i am doing this."

"you don't know." you said. "you think you do. you have decided you do. there is a difference."

"i know that you are fifteen years old." he said, and now the crack was more visible, something harder underneath the warmth. "i know that you are headstrong and brilliant and you have your mother's eyes and her way of seeing things and i love every part of that but i also know that you are fifteen and the world is not the meadow, do you understand me? the world is not whatever happens in that meadow!"

the room went still.

you looked at him.

he looked back at you.

he had said it. not directly. not with a name. but he had said it and you both knew what he had said and the space between you felt suddenly enormous.

"the meadow." you said quietly.

your father said nothing.

"you know about the meadow." you said.

"i know a great deal more than you have given me credit for." he said. low now. careful again, but differently careful, the careful of someone who had been carrying something heavy for a long time and was finally putting it down. "i have known for a long time. i have waited. i have been patient. i have tried to give you time and space to come to the right decision on your own because i did not want to force your hand." he leaned forward. "but you have not come to it. and i will not watch you walk off a cliff because i was too gentle to tell you it was there."

"he is not a cliff." you said.

"he is not safe." your father said. "he is not—"

"he is the best person i know." you said, and your voice broke on the last word, just slightly, just enough. "he is the most honest and real person i have ever met in my entire life and you have never once looked at him. you have looked at what the town says about him. you have looked at what he is not, what he does not have, where he does not come from. you have never looked at who he actually is."

"i don't need to look at who he is." your father said, and his voice cracked too now, properly, the warmth and the hardness breaking against each other. "i need to look at what he is to you. and what you are to him. and what this town will do to both of you if this continues. i need to look at that because you won't." his jaw was tight. his eyes were bright in a way you had never seen them. "i need to protect you. that is my job. it has always been my job. from the moment you were born it has been the only thing i have cared about getting right."

"then GET IT RIGHT." you stood up. your chair scraped back the same way your mother's had. "getting it right means asking me. it means trusting me. it means believing that maybe, maybe i am capable of knowing what is good for me and what isn't." your voice was shaking now and you didn't care. "you gave me a necklace. you told me it was a birthday gift and the whole time it was a weapon. you put it around my neck with your own hands and told me to wear it always and it was a weapon, father. against someone you had already decided to hate before you ever met him."

your father flinched.

it was small. barely visible. but you had been reading his face your whole life and you saw it.

"i took it off." you said. "the same day. i took it off and i put it at the bottom of my chest and i have not worn it since and i am not going to wear it. not for you. not for anyone." you looked at him across the table, across all the years of firefly stories and forehead kisses and warm laughs at dinner and the slow quiet growing distance of the last two years. "i love you." your voice broke again, worse this time. "i love you so much and i know you love me and i know you think you are doing the right thing. but you are not. you are doing the frightened thing. and i need you to know the difference."

the room was completely silent.

Ichi had not moved. had barely breathed.

your father sat at the head of the table and looked at you with an expression you had never seen on his face before. not anger. not the Dainagon. just a man. just your father. looking at his daughter across a table covered in the remains of a conversation that could not be untaken.

you picked up your robes.

"excuse me." you said.

and you walked out.

you made it to your room before you fell apart properly.

you sat on the floor with your back against the futon and your knees pulled up to your chest and you pressed your face into your arms and you cried, the ugly shaking kind, the kind that had been building for months and months and had finally found its way out.

after a long time you heard footsteps in the corridor.

they stopped outside your door.

they didn't come in.

after a moment they went away again.

you sat on the floor for a long time after that.

then you reached under your pillow and found the origami bunny and held it in both hands in the dark and breathed

809 AD, Spring — 810 AD, Summer

somewhere between the dinner table fight and the first day of summer, the house changed.

not all at once. not dramatically. just the way houses change when something important has been said out loud and nobody quite knows what to do with it yet. it settled into the walls and the corridors and the careful way everyone moved through the rooms, like the air itself had been rearranged and everyone was still figuring out where things were now.

your father was not cold. that would have been easier in some ways, cold you could push back against, cold had edges you could find. he was still warm. still your father. still the man who asked if you had eaten and noticed when you were tired and remembered small things you had mentioned in passing weeks ago. but there was a distance in it now that hadn't been there before, a careful measured space between the warmth and whatever was underneath it, and you both maintained that space with the unspoken agreement of people who had said too much and were not ready to say more.

he didn't mention Ryomen again.

you didn't either.

the guards however.

the guards were a whole new situation.

they had gotten serious.

you didn't know what your father had said to them after the dinner table incident but whatever it was had produced two completely different men. these were not the guards who lost you in crowds and let you slip through garden gates. these were focused, attentive, communicating with each other in small signals you couldn't decode, rotating in patterns you had spent three weeks trying to map and couldn't. Ume had tried twice to run her usual interference and both times it hadn't worked and she had come back to you with the expression of someone who had met a worthy opponent and was annoyed about it.

the window in the poetry room had been nailed shut. you didn't know how your father had found out about the window. you had your suspicions, which lived in the general direction of a household staff that had been with your family for decades and were loyal in ways that ran deeper than you had accounted for.

the garden gate had a new lock.

you stood in front of it one afternoon and looked at it for a long time.

then you went back inside.

your mother had a bad week in the middle of summer.

three physicians in five days, which was new, which meant something had changed in the way her body was doing what it was doing and the people who understood these things were trying to figure out what. your father barely slept. you could see it in him, the particular thinning that happened when he was running on worry instead of rest, and underneath all the distance and the careful space and the guards and the locked gate he was just a man who was terrified of losing his wife and you were just a girl who was terrified of the same thing.

you sat with her one afternoon when the physicians had gone. she was having a slow day, the slow kind, the kind where even talking took more than she had. you didn't talk. you just sat with her the way your father sat with her, just being there, because sometimes that was the whole thing.

she reached out at some point and took your hand.

you held on.

neither of you said anything.

you thought about how unfair it was that the world kept asking you to choose. between your family and your freedom. between your father's love and your own life. between staying in this house that was yours and had always been yours and running toward the person who had become as much yours as any of it. you thought about how you shouldn't have to choose. how nobody should have to choose. how the fact that you were being asked to was not something you had caused or deserved.

you held your mother's hand and looked at the garden through the screen door and didn't say any of it.

late summer

he came to the garden wall on a tuesday evening.

you didn't know he was going to. you were on the engawa eating something small you had taken from the kitchen, the guards were doing their far round, the evening was warm and going gold, and then the air changed and you looked up and there he was.

he looked different.

not dramatically. just. more. like the months since you had properly seen him had done something to the lines of him, filled things in, made him more present somehow. he sat on the wall with his usual impossible ease and looked at the garden and did not explain how he had gotten past the new outer gate which had a lock that had defeated you completely.

"how." you said.

"the lock is cheap." he said. "your father should spend more."

you looked at him. he looked at the wisteria. it had gone leggy in the heat, sprawling further along the wall than it was supposed to, purple and insistent.

"i've missed you." you said. you were done being careful about saying things.

he was quiet for a moment. "i know." he said.

"that's not the same as saying it back." you said.

another moment. longer. "i know that too." he said. and then, to the wisteria, to the garden, to somewhere just slightly away from you, "it's been too quiet."

you looked at him.

"the meadow." he said. "it's been too quiet."

you understood what he was saying. you had always understood what he was saying even when he said it sideways.

"i'm working on it." you said.

"i know." he said.

you sat in the warm evening and talked, quieter than usual, both of you aware of the guards in a way you hadn't had to be in the early days. shorter sentences. longer silences. but the silences were the good kind, full rather than empty, the kind you had built together over four years of tuesday afternoons.

he left before the guards came back.

you sat on the engawa after and held the warmth of it carefully, the way you held all of it now, more carefully than before because there was less of it and what there was mattered more.

autumn

the visits were short. sometimes very short. ten minutes at the wall, twenty if the guards were slow on their round. once he managed to stay for almost an hour and you talked until the dark came properly and you could barely see his face and neither of you wanted to be the one to say it was time.

he was different in these visits. you noticed it gradually, the way you noticed things about him, which was slowly and then all at once. he was more open. not dramatically, not in a way he would probably acknowledge if you pointed it out, but you had four years of comparison to measure against and the difference was visible. he asked you things. real questions, not just responses to what you said, actual questions about what you thought and how you were and what was happening inside the house that he couldn't see from the wall.

he asked about your mother a lot.

he asked about your father once, carefully, and you had told him the truth which was that your father was exhausted and frightened and doing everything wrong for all the right reasons and you still loved him and it was still complicated and Ryomen had listened and said nothing and that had been exactly right.

one evening in autumn he had arrived at the wall with something wrapped in cloth and dropped it over the side into the garden without comment. you had found it after he left. persimmons, the good sweet kind that only came for a few weeks in autumn. your favourite. you had eaten one sitting on the engawa in the dark and thought about how he had remembered that, filed it away somewhere in that head of his that noticed everything and said nothing, and gone out of his way to bring them.

you had cried a little. just a little.

winter into spring

the physicians came more regularly.

your father started leaving earlier and coming home later and when he was home he was present in that way that meant he was physically there and mentally somewhere else entirely, doing the maths on something that didn't have a good answer. you had stopped trying to breach the distance between you. not because you had given up but because you understood, in the way you understood most things about people you loved, that he needed to come to it himself. pushing wouldn't get you there. you had pushed at the dinner table and it had cost both of you something that was still healing.

so you waited.

you helped with your mother when you could. you sat with her in the afternoons. you learned which days were which kind and adjusted accordingly and you tried not to think too hard about the fact that the physician's face had been doing something different lately when he came out of her room.

the guard situation did not improve.

Ume had essentially given up on interference and moved to a support role which mostly consisted of her showing up at school with snacks and updates about Masanori and Hotaru and making you laugh on the days when laughing felt difficult. Masanori had started leaving food at the school gate on days he knew you couldn't get out which had made you cry in a completely different way, the warm kind, the kind that came from being known by people who showed up for you.

Ryomen came to the wall when he could.

sometimes that was once a week. sometimes it was less. sometimes you sat on the engawa and the air didn't change and you went back inside and tried not to let the missing of it sit too heavy.

but when he came he stayed as long as he could. and every time he came he was a little more there, a little less armoured, a little more willing to sit in the space between you without filling it with distance. one evening in late winter he had sat on the wall and talked for almost two hours, not about anything in particular, just talking, the way you had always talked at the ginkgo tree except now it went both ways, him saying things without waiting to be asked, offering pieces of himself like he had decided you had earned them and was settling a debt.

you hadn't said anything about it.

butterfly rule.

even now. even after everything. some things you still had to pretend not to see or they'd fly away.

and then it was spring.

your birthday soon.

the house was warm with it, your mother had insisted on plans despite the physician's opinions, your father had arranged things with the particular focused energy of a man who needed something to go right. there would be food and music and people and your mother in her best robes doing what she always did in public which was making everyone in the room stand up a little straighter without knowing why.

it should have felt like something to look forward to.

you sat on the engawa on the evening before the evening before your birthday and looked at the garden wall and thought about how much had changed since you were twelve years old and the world was just a game of hide and seek and a shed at the edge of a meadow and a boy with pink hair who had never expected anyone to follow him out of it.

the air changed.

you looked up.

he was on the wall.

he looked at you and you looked at him and neither of you said anything for a moment.

"three days." you said.

"i know." he said.

"are you going to wish me a happy birthday." you said.

he looked at the garden. "probably not." he said.

"typical." you said.

something moved on his face. the soft fast thing. except lately it was staying a little longer before he covered it. like the covering was getting harder. like something in him had decided the covering was less important than it used to be.

"i'll bring you something." he said. to the wisteria.

"you don't have to—" you started.

"i know i don't have to." he said. and he looked at you when he said it, all four eyes, direct and steady. "that's kind of my whole thing with you."

your own words. from years ago. sitting in the frost. back in his voice now like he had been holding them somewhere and had decided tonight was when they came back.

you looked at him.

he looked at you.

the garden sat between you, warm and spring green, the wisteria starting its thing again along the wall, purple and insistent and completely unbothered.

"same time tuesday." you said softly.

he looked away.

"i make no such agreements." he said.

you smiled.

the guards were coming back around. you could hear them. he heard them too, you knew because he shifted slightly on the wall, preparing to go.

"Ryomen." you said.

he looked at you one more time.

"it's going to be okay." you said. you weren't sure you believed it completely. but you said it the way you said most things you needed to be true, with the particular conviction of someone who had decided to believe it until it was.

he looked at you for a long moment.

"yeah." he said quietly. like he was deciding to believe it too.

then he dropped off the wall and was gone.

you sat on the engawa until the guards came back and then you went inside and went to bed and lay in the dark holding the origami bunny and thinking about tomorrow and the day after and everything that came after that.

three days until your birthday.

three days.

810 AD, Spring, 10:09 A.M. PRESENT DAY

Sixteen, furious at the world and absolutely no one's sweetheart- Sukuna was, to put it plainly, a bear waiting to be poked. The abandonment issues and the judgment he caught for the way he looked didn't help matters either.

That's exactly why your father never understood your obsession with the little freak. The boy was poor and- well. four eyes. four arms. your father shuddered just thinking about it. no daughter of a Dainagon would so much as glance at something like that, let alone lose sleep over it.

So, what does any loving and overprotective father do? He gets his men to discreetly execute the boy. obviously.

One cool night when the sun had long set and moon sat high and mighty- your father, an elegant noble man who loved you very dearly, picked up his pen and jotted instructions down on a paper.

He'd keep you safe. he always has, your pretty little head was too full of butterflies and fuji petals to know any better.

In two days, my daughter's birthday will be held. You, my most trusted soldiers, will go and capture Ryomen Sukuna. Do not return without success.

dispose of the body properly and quietly.

Spread believable rumors to justify the boy's disappearance.

destroy the shed in the meadow.

he read it over once. folded it with the precise unhurried movements of a man who had made his decision and was done deliberating. he stood, dusted his robes, and handed it to his head attendant with a single nod.

the attendant bowed and left.

your father stood in his office alone for a moment. looked at his desk. at the lamp that had burned low while he wrote. at the window where the spring morning was doing its cheerful unbothered thing outside.

then he straightened his collar and went to start his day.

the consultation had started at nine.

you were standing in the middle of your room in your under robes while Miu, the seamstress your father had been using since before you were born, circled you slowly with fabric swatches and the focused expression of a woman who took her work very seriously. she had been talking for the better part of an hour about silhouettes and seasonal colours and what was appropriate for a sixteen year old birthday celebration versus what was appropriate for the formal events that would follow, and you had been nodding at all the right moments while hearing approximately none of it.

the ache behind your ribs had been there since you woke up. not a new ache. a familiar one, the kind that had moved in sometime around last autumn and had been paying very consistent rent ever since. it sat there while Miu talked about sleeve lengths and it sat there while you looked at the fabric swatches and it sat there while you tried to remember the last time you had looked forward to something like this, a new robe, a celebration, the whole event of being dressed and admired and presented, and couldn't.

you used to love these. you remembered loving these. standing here while Miu talked and the colours were spread out and the whole thing felt like something exciting was coming. that version of you felt very far away this morning.

"the deep plum would complement your colouring beautifully." Miu was saying, holding a swatch up near your face. "or if you wanted something softer for the occasion, the blush—"

the door creaked.

you looked up.

Ichi stood in the doorway. he had that look on his face, the uncomfortable apologetic one he got when he knew he was somewhere that was going to be received badly and had come anyway because he didn't have a choice. Miu froze mid sentence. you looked at him with the particular expression you had developed over the past several months for his appearances, pleasant on the surface, pointed underneath.

"what a surprise." you said. "i wasn't aware this was a shared appointment."

Ichi opened his mouth. closed it. opened it again.

and then, for the first time in all the months of him being quietly decent and endlessly patient in rooms where he was not entirely welcome, something shifted in his face.

"your father requested i attend." he said. not apologetic this time. direct. clipped. the words of someone who had been holding something for a long time and had decided to put it down. "i didn't get a choice in any of this either." he said. "you're not the only one losing someone because our fathers think we are chess pieces."

the room was very quiet.

Miu had gone completely still, a swatch of blush fabric suspended in one hand, eyes moving between the two of you with the careful expression of a professional who had witnessed family drama before and knew better than to engage with it.

Ichi took a breath. pressed his lips together. composed himself back into the person he usually was, measured and pleasant, like he had opened a door and then thought better of it and closed it again. he sat down in the chair near the window without waiting to be invited and looked at Miu. "i apologise for interrupting." he said. "please continue."

Miu continued. less enthusiastically now.

you stood in the middle of the room and let her drape fabric against your shoulder and thought about what Ichi had just said. losing someone. he had said losing someone. which meant there was someone. which meant Ichi, who you had spent months resenting as a symbol of everything your father was doing to your life, was also a person with a life your fathers had been rearranging without consulting him. which meant he had been sitting at your dinner table all these months being decent and genuine and quietly patient while also carrying something you hadn't once thought to ask about.

you looked at him sideways.

he was looking out the window. his jaw was set. his hands were folded in his lap with the careful stillness of someone keeping themselves composed by choice.

you thought about all the things you had said in rooms with him. all the pointed pleasantries. all the times you had made it clear without saying it directly that his presence was an inconvenience. you had never been cruel. you had been too well raised for cruel. but you had not been kind either.

you were still thinking about this when the sound came from the corridor.

a wretching cough. then a pause. then your mother's voice, low and steady, saying your name through the door.

your mother was already walking away from the door when you came out. you followed her down the corridor to her room, the one that had started smelling permanently of the physician's medicines and the particular incense the attendants burned to cover it. she moved slowly today. not the slow of a bad day, the slow of someone who had something to say and was choosing the right moment for it.

she sat on the edge of her futon and patted the space beside her.

you sat.

she reached under the low table beside her and produced a box. lacquered wood, old, the kind of old that meant it had been somewhere for a long time. she set it on your lap and looked at you.

"your father." she said, "is a hypocrite. a stupid, handsome, strong willed hypocrite."

you giggled despite yourself. the giggle came out of nowhere and surprised you both.

your mother looked satisfied. she reached over and opened the box.

inside, packed carefully, were dried flowers. hundreds of them, small and aromatic, their colour faded to a soft brown gold but their scent still present, something warm and green underneath the dryness. you looked at them and then at your mother.

"do you know what these are?" she said.

"flowers." you said. "old ones."

your mother nodded. she scooped a handful up slowly, careful with them, and brought them to her face and breathed them in. the spring light was coming through the screen behind her and it caught her in that particular way it sometimes did, making her look less like someone who had physicians visiting three times a week and more like herself, the version of herself that had always seemed to take up more space than her body should allow.

"the first gift i ever got from a boy." she said.

you stared at her. "father?"

"your father." she confirmed. a small smile, private, not for you exactly, more like a thing she was remembering that you were being allowed to see. "my best friend was with his friend. we used to all go to the stream together. when those two would wander off on their own your father would carry me on his back and walk along the flower bushes at the edge of the water." she looked at the flowers in her palm. "i would pick the blossoms and set them in his hair before we moved on to the next bush. he never once told me to stop."

"mother." you said.

"hm."

"that is the most romantic thing i have ever heard in my entire life."

she laughed. a real one, the kind that came from somewhere light. and you laughed too and for a moment it was just the two of you on the futon being ridiculous about dried flowers and a boy who had let someone put blossoms in his hair because he was in love and didn't know what else to do about it.

and then the ache came back.

worse than usual. like the laughing had moved something and now the thing that had been sitting quietly had shifted and was pressing against places it hadn't reached before. you looked at the flowers in the box in your lap and felt it rising and couldn't stop it.

"why is he doing this to me." your voice came out smaller than you meant it to. "why can't he be like that. like he was then. you chose each other. nobody arranged you. nobody put you at a dinner table and made an announcement." you looked up at her. "i want a choice too. i just want a choice."

your mother looked at you.

then she opened her arms.

you folded into them before you finished deciding to, your face going into her shoulder, her arms coming around you, and you cried. the full kind. the kind that had your shoulders shaking and your breath going uneven and all the months of it coming out at once, the guards and the locked gate and the short visits and the distance at the dinner table and Ichi at the window saying you're not the only one and Ryomen on the wall saying it's going to be okay in a voice that was trying to believe it.

your mother held you and didn't tell you to stop and didn't say it was fine when it wasn't.

after a while, when the worst of it had passed and you were just sitting in the aftermath of it, she spoke.

"i am very sick." she said. simply. directly. the way she said things she had decided to stop softening. "sicker than we have been telling you. the treatments have been doing very little for a long time now."

you went still in her arms.

"two weeks ago the physician told us there is a cure." she said. "a real one. but it would require more money and more time than we have easily available. your father is working on it." a pause. "he is terrified. not just of losing me. of losing you too. he feels everything slipping and he is grabbing at things and not all of the things he is grabbing at are the right ones." she smoothed your hair back from your face, slow and gentle, the way she always had. "i have tried to talk to him. i keep trying. but he is deep in it right now and the fear is louder than the sense." she looked at you, direct and clear. "so if you want your freedom. if you want him to see you properly. then it is in your hands to make him."

you sat with all of it.

the sickness, worse than you knew, the physicians three times a week suddenly making a different kind of sense. the cure, existing, real, possible but not certain. your father grabbing at things, at you, at arrangements and guards and letters written in the middle of the night, trying to hold on to everything at once with hands that weren't big enough for all of it.

you thought about a man carrying a girl on his back along flower bushes at the edge of a stream. letting her put blossoms in his hair. becoming, somehow, the man who had sat in his office last night and written something down on a piece of paper with careful measured brushstrokes.

you thought about how much distance there was between those two people. how much fear it took to travel that far from yourself.

you looked at the dried flowers in the box.

"okay." you said quietly. "okay."

your mother looked at you.

"i'm going to figure it out." you said. you weren't sure exactly what that meant yet. but you said it the way you said things you needed to be true, with the particular conviction of someone who had decided to believe it until it was.

your mother looked at you for a long moment. then she did something she hadn't done in a while. she smiled. not the small private one from the flowers. the full one, the one that had always made rooms stand up straighter without knowing why.

"i know you will." she said. "you are mine after all."

you sat with her for a long time after that.

the spring morning continued outside, warm and bright and completely unbothered, the way spring mornings always are.

810 AD, Spring, 12:34 A.M.

kaze ni chiru, hana no yume...

he stopped dead.

stood completely frozen in the middle of the meadow with his arrow half drawn and his mouth still open from the last note like an absolute fool.

he had been singing. OUT LOUD. to nobody. to the trees. to the bird he was supposed to be hunting who was now staring at him from the base of the cedar with what felt like judgment.

he stood there for one long humiliating moment.

she had been humming that stupid song two weeks ago on the garden wall. just humming it softly to herself like she wasn't in the process of completely rewiring his brain without his knowledge or consent, and now apparently it lived in his head permanently, taking up space alongside everything else she had installed there without asking, coming out of his mouth in the middle of meadows when he was supposed to be concentrating.

he was going to have some very serious words with her about this.

he reset. found the bird again, small and brown and magnificently unaware of how close it was to becoming lunch. he steadied his breathing. drew the arrow back. fixed his eye right on it—

and then something felt wrong.

not a sound. nothing he could see or point to or explain. just a shift in the air, the cold certain kind that skipped his brain entirely and went straight to his gut and screamed at him to MOVE—

he dropped.

all four arms hit the ground at once and the spear buried itself into the cedar tree so hard the bark split and exploded outward and rained down across the back of his skull and somewhere above him the bird lost its entire mind and shot into the sky screaming.

Ryomen rolled. came up onto his feet with his dagger already drawn.

five of them.

good gear. really good gear. not the rattling cheap equipment of the town watch, this was proper armour, the expensive kind, the kind that said someone with serious money had given very specific instructions to very serious people. they spread out around him immediately, smooth and coordinated and utterly silent, the practiced formation of men who had worked together before and had been briefed on exactly what they were dealing with.

they looked at him.

he looked back.

sixteen years old. no training to speak of. and absolutely no intention of dying in his own meadow today.

he pulled his dagger and the first one came.

fast! really fast! Ryomen let him come, waited until the absolute last second, stepped inside the reach and used two arms to knock the blade wide and two to drive the man into the ground with everything he had. the impact rattled up through his bones and the man stayed down, which was good, because the second and third were already moving and they had clearly taken notes on what just happened to their friend, splitting wide to come from different angles at the same time—

and it worked.

he caught the second one across the jaw with an elbow, felt the crack of it land satisfyingly, but the third came through his guard completely and the blade caught him across the ribs and the burn was immediate and vicious and mean and he hissed through his teeth and spun away and caught a fist across his cheekbone from the fourth man that he did not see coming at all and the world went white and sideways and loud for one very bad second.

he hit the ground.

hard.

the grass rushed up and he tasted copper and everything spun and for one genuinely horrible moment his body was asking him very sincerely if maybe they should just stay down here for a bit. and then the fifth man was coming and Ryomen shoved himself up off the ground through what could only be described as pure unadulterated spite and got his feet under him and kept going.

it was not clean. there was nothing impressive or controlled about any of it. it was loud and desperate and ugly, grunting and scrambling and hitting the ground twice more and getting up twice more because the alternative was considerably worse than the pain of getting up. his side was bleeding properly now, soaking warm and dark through his robe. his shoulder had been wrenched in a direction it was never designed to go and was filing a formal complaint about it. there was a ringing in his left ear from the fist to his cheek that suggested it had done more damage than just sting.

but he was Ryomen Sukuna.

and Ryomen Sukuna had been surviving things that should have finished him since he was six years old standing next to a blind old man watching his parents' cart disappear down a road. he had four arms and sixteen years of stubborn that had nothing to do with training and everything to do with never once having had the option of giving up.

when it was finally, messily, exhaustingly over, he put his back against the cedar tree and let himself slide all the way down it until he was sitting in the grass.

he sat there and breathed. great heaving lungfuls of spring air that tasted like blood and dirt and the very specific relief of still being alive to complain about it.

his side throbbed. his shoulder screamed. his cheek was already swelling like it had opinions about what had just happened and wanted to make them known. his hands were shaking slightly which he noticed and filed away to think about never.

he looked at his meadow.

his shed with the crooked door and the twice patched roof. his ginkgo tree. the fire pit he had built himself. the flattened patch of grass in front of it where someone had been sitting across from him every tuesday for four years without ever once being asked to.

someone had sent those men here.

someone with money and specific instructions and the particular kind of desperation that makes people do things that can't be taken back.

and she didn't know.

he was certain she didn't know because if she knew she would have come running in her house robes in the dark before any of this happened, doing something completely unhinged that would have made everything infinitely more complicated, and he would have been furious about it. but she wasn't here. which meant she was somewhere in that house right now, totally unaware, probably talking someone's ear off about something completely unrelated to the fact that her world had just changed this morning without her permission.

he needed to get to her.

a thought arrived. warm and wanting, the kind he didn't usually let get far enough to look at properly.

they could go. just leave. pack nothing, or nearly nothing, and disappear somewhere no one knew either of their names. he knew how to survive on very little. had been doing exactly that his whole life. and she was so much tougher than anyone who looked at her would ever guess. he had four years of very specific evidence to support that.

he sat with it.

then he thought about her mother. the slow mornings and the physicians with their careful faces coming and going. he thought about Ume showing up in his meadow with dumplings and the most unbothered gaze he had ever seen. he thought about food left quietly at school gates. he thought about her, specifically, in rooms full of people who loved her, laughing at something her parents had said, sitting with her mother on slow afternoons just being there because being there was the whole thing.

and then he thought about the shelter he would build. badly. because he had never built one in his life. and the winter that would follow. and her, who had been raised in a house with actual physicians and seamstresses and a father who imported things from distant villages, trying to eat whatever scraggly thing he managed to catch.

he looked at where the bird had been.

still there. same spot. same patch of ground. pecking away completely unbothered by the entire last twenty minutes as if none of it had happened.

he wanted to give her better than a badly built shelter and a hungry winter. he wanted to give her the best thing he could figure out how to build. he didn't know exactly what that looked like yet or how long it was going to take him. but he knew he wanted to try and he knew he couldn't do it from somewhere else.

he pressed one hand against his bleeding side. picked his dagger up off the grass with another. looked at the bird.

reset his stance. drew the arrow back.

i wonder if she likes bird.

the thought arrived completely soft and unguarded, slipping through every single one of his filters without asking, and he let it sit there for exactly one warm second.

then he let the arrow

your father was directing the servants on the birthday decorations.

he moved through the main hall with the focused energy of a man who had found a task and was going to do it correctly, pointing and adjusting and redirecting, a lantern two feet to the left, a knot retied, a table repositioned three inches. the servants moved around him efficiently and you sat on the step at the edge of the hall and watched him and tried to get inside his head.

what was he thinking right now? what was his next move? what would it actually take to make him see you, not the version of you he had constructed and arranged and decided on, but the actual you, the one sitting on this step watching him and trying to figure out how to reach him?

you had been trying to figure that out for two years and you were running out of time.

one of the servants caught the edge of a hanging decoration on his sleeve while climbing down from a stool and the whole thing came down on top of him in an enormous cascade of fabric and a sound like a small indoor disaster. the man stood in the middle of the wreckage looking mortified and your father—

your father clapped both hands over his mouth.

his whole face changed! the Dainagon face, the careful controlled composed one he wore like a second skin, cracked completely open, and underneath it was something younger, his shoulders shaking with the effort of not laughing, eyes bright and wet with it, the laugh coming through anyway muffled and helpless and completely real. he waved at the poor man frantically to say it was fine, it was fine, he wasn't in trouble, while clearly barely holding himself together.

you stared at him.

you thought about dried flowers in a lacquered box. a young man carrying a girl on his back along the edge of a stream, letting her put blossoms in his hair because he was young and in love and didn't know what else to do about it. your mother's voice. he is scared. he is getting desperate. if you want your freedom it is in your hands to make him see.

he had to meet Ryomen.

that was it! that was the whole plan! simple, clean, obvious. not through guards and gates and letters written at night. actually meet him. look at him. talk to him. see the real one, the one who made origami rabbits out of pink paper and noticed when you stopped eating halfway through your snacks and came to garden walls in the evening because the meadow was too quiet.

the only hard parts were finding a way to get to Ryomen, convincing Ryomen to agree, and then getting both of them in a room together without anyone dying.

so basically. everything was the hard part.

you looked at the guards. both of them had been sent on errands over an hour ago and hadn't come back.

you looked at your father, still occupied and cheerfully embarrassed about it, helping the servant gather the fallen decoration with a composure he was clearly struggling to maintain.

you stood up from the step very quietly.

you walked out of the hall.

and then once you were outside and around the corner and out of anyone's sightline you ran.

the meadow was warm and bright and smelled like spring and Ryomen was crouched by the fire pit with two rocks in his hands, and on a rack above the unlit wood was a plucked bird that you were making a very active and sincere effort not to look at directly.

he looked up when he heard you coming, slightly out of breath from running across town in your house robes, and you dropped down in front of him and looked at him. something was different about the way he was sitting but you couldn't quite— actually never mind, you had something important to say.

"Pinky." you said. "i need your help."

he looked at you. blinked once. went back to the rocks. "okay." he said. "what do i need to do."

you paused. "that's it?? you're not even going to ask what kind of help first?"

"i'll ask while you talk." sparks off the rocks. small and determined. "what do i need to do."

"i want you to meet my father." you said.

the rocks stopped.

he looked up at you very slowly with the expression of someone checking if they had heard correctly and hoping they hadn't.

"your father." he said.

"yes." you said. "i know, i know how it sounds, just listen. he doesn't know you! he knows the version of you the town invented and the version he built on top of that out of fear and rumors and none of it is actually you. but if he just met you, actually met you, talked to you, i really genuinely believe—"

"how." he said. "how would i even get close enough to the man to have a conversation? your house has guards and a gate and a lock your father specifically paid money for." he tilted his head at you. "did you think this through, woman."

"i think through things constantly." you said.

"how long this time." he said.

you paused. "twenty minutes."

he stared at you.

"it's a really solid twenty minutes!" you said. "listen. the guards are both gone right now, my father is busy with the decorations, if we move fast—"

"sneak me in." he said slowly. "into your father's house. the man who has spent two years trying to keep me away from you."

"he just needs to see that he's wrong about you." you said. "and the only way that happens is if he actually sees you. not the ghost boy. not whatever the town has been saying. you. and i know it's a risk, i know it's probably the most terrifying thing i've ever asked—"

"i'm not terrified." he said immediately.

"i know." you said. "wrong word. i know. what i'm saying is i know it's a lot to ask. but Ryomen." you looked at him steadily. "if we don't do something nothing changes. ever. the guards don't go away. the distance between me and my father doesn't go away. Ichi doesn't go away. nothing changes unless we change it." you paused. "and i think you're the thing that could change it. i think if he met you he would understand. i think he's not a bad man, he's just a scared one, and scared men can still change their minds if you give them something real to look at."

Ryomen looked at you for a long moment. the sparks from the rocks had landed in the wood and the fire was catching now, small and orange and spreading carefully through the kindling, crackling to life in the spring morning air.

you scooted back from the heat instinctively and looked up at him.

"and if he doesn't." Ryomen said. "change his mind."

"then we tried." you said. "and we figure out what's next from there. but i need to try. i can't keep doing this." you said it quietly. all the performance gone out of it. just the truth. "i can't keep living in two halves. half here and half there and never fully in either place. i'm so tired Ryomen."

he held your gaze.

then he looked at the fire.

"fine." he said.

"really?!" you said.

"you said trust you." flat. simple. completely certain. "i trust you." he set the rocks down. "give me a minute." he stood. "wait here."

he turned and jogged toward the tree line and disappeared between the cedars.

you sat by the fire and waited.

you were trying very hard not to look at the bird on the rack.

(you stared at it the entire time)

after a while his footsteps came back through the grass and you looked up and—

he was holding flowers.

a bouquet. or the closest approximation of a bouquet that could be assembled by someone who had been in a significant hurry and had also never made a bouquet before in their entire life. the stems were all wildly different lengths. several of the outer leaves were bruised and bent from being grabbed too fast. one of them was facing the completely wrong direction and didn't seem to know it.

but the flowers themselves were something else entirely! a lily shape, gorgeous and unusual, blue at the outer petals fading to a soft pink at the centre, a silky almost luminous texture that caught the spring light and held it. they were extraordinary. they looked like something out of a dream or a painting or a story someone was trying to tell you.

you stared at them.

"for your mother." he said, not quite meeting your eyes. "i was out this morning and i saw them near the tree line and something just— i don't know. they caught my eye and they made me think of her for some reason." he held them out with the slightly awkward energy of someone who had decided to do something and was following through on it regardless of how it felt to stand there doing it. "i thought she might like them."

you looked at the flowers.

then at him.

then at the flowers again.

the tears came without any warning whatsoever.

"Ryomen." your voice was completely wrecked.

"don't." he said immediately.

"i'm not doing anything—"

"your face is doing something." he said. "stop."

you launched yourself at him.

arms around his waist, face directly into his chest, the flowers getting significantly squashed in the collision and neither of you addressing that. he made a sound that was not entirely prepared for the impact and then all four of his arms came around you and he held on properly, all of him, and you stood in the spring meadow in the warm morning air and just breathed.

"thank you." you said into his chest. muffled. genuine. completely meant. "for the flowers. and for trusting me. and for just. being you. specifically you."

he said nothing. but his arms got tighter.

after a moment he said "we should go before someone notices you're gone."

"yes." you agreed, and neither of you moved for another few seconds.

then you did.

the outer gate Ryomen opened in approximately three seconds using nothing but his hands and what appeared to be an insultingly casual assessment of the lock, and you decided firmly that you were not going to ask about that.

getting over the inner garden wall was considerably less elegant. he made a step with two of his hands and boosted you up and you discovered that the top of the wall was significantly less comfortable than it had always looked from below.

"my guards have been gone all morning." you said, hauling yourself over with what little dignity remained. "both of them at the same time. that never happens. it's strange."

Ryomen made a sound below you. not quite a response. not quite not a response either.

"do you think my father sent them somewhere specific?" you said.

"probably." he said. and then he was up and over the wall in one single fluid motion that made your entire effort look considerably worse than it had already looked.

you grabbed the old blanket from the engawa, the one that had lived there through every season for as long as you could remember, and wrapped it around his shoulders and pulled it up as far as it would go. he stood there and submitted to this process with the expression of someone enduring something they have agreed to and are committed to seeing through.

"this is humiliating." he said.

"you look like a very tall servant!" you said encouragingly.

"i look like a person inside a blanket." he said.

"walk like you belong here." you said. "confident. purposeful."

"i am always confident and purposeful." he said.

"then this should be completely easy." you said. "come on. eyes forward. don't make eye contact with anyone."

you moved through the garden, into the back corridor, past the kitchen where someone was making noise and not looking, around the corner, heading toward the main hall—

"dear."

you stopped so fast you almost fell over.

your mother was standing in the corridor in her day robes with a cup of something warm between her hands, looking at you with the mild curious expression of someone who has not yet decided what they are looking at. her eyes moved from your face to the large blanket wrapped shape standing directly beside you.

"who is that." she said. "you know you're not supposed to hug the servants."

from somewhere inside the blanket came a sound. a short, choked, completely involuntary sound. the sound of someone finding something extremely funny against their absolute will.

you elbowed him as hard as you could.

your mother stepped forward and grabbed the blanket and pulled it off. "you are not allowed in our qua—"

she stumbled backwards.

her hand flew up to cover her mouth as she found herself face to face with four scarlet eyes, dark lashed and vivid, set in a face framed by pink hair that was doing its usual gravity defying thing, four arms now visible in the spring light, and the particular weight in the air around him that you had learned to recognise when you were twelve years old in a shed.

"is that." she said. her voice had gone very strange. "is that an angel?!" her hand pressed harder over her mouth. "oh my gosh. am i. this cannot be— i thought i had so much more time—"

"mother." you said, extremely confused on multiple levels, firstly how did she not sense his energy, secondly why is she calling him an angle, weird.... "how are you not— this is Ryomen. Ryomen Sukuna. mother. this is him."

your mother blinked. stared. took one long slow assessing look at the boy in front of her from top to bottom and back again with the thoroughness of a woman who had been reading rooms her entire life. then she let out a very slow breath. "phew." she said quietly. barely audible. "so it's not my time yet."

she collected herself with impressive speed. the composure came back like a curtain being drawn. she straightened up and took one step forward and then another and looked at Ryomen the way she looked at things she was making up her mind about. which was completely and without apology.

"so." she said. "this is the boy."

Ryomen cleared his throat. he reached behind his back and produced the flowers, slightly rearranged from the earlier collision but still luminous and extraordinary, and held them out toward her with a bow that was a little shaky and a lot genuine. "it is a pleasure to meet you ma'am." he said carefully. "these are for you."

your mother's eyes dropped to the flowers.

they went very wide.

something moved across her face. deep and sudden and old, the kind of recognition that lives in the body before the mind catches up to it. she reached out slowly and ran her finger over the pettle and released a shaky exhale, her lips parted and she lifted her eyes back to Ryomen's face and opened her mouth to say something—

"YOU BROUGHT THAT DEMON INTO MY HOUSE! NEAR MY WIFE?"

the voice came from the end of the corridor like a thunderclap and everyone in the hallway went completely still.

you moved first. "father—"

but he was already coming, long fast strides, the controlled fury of a man who had reached the absolute limit of his patience, and before you could get yourself between them his hand was on Ryomen's shoulder and he was wrenching him around.

"Sanetomo." your mother's voice came out sharp and clear and carrying every ounce of the authority she had been deploying her entire life. "stop. look at what he is holding. look at what he brought for me." she held the flowers up between all of them. "let go of that boy. and thank him."

your father's grip didn't release. but it stopped tightening.

his eyes went to the flowers.

the fury on his face did something complicated. shifted. moved sideways to make room for something else. confusion first, sharp and genuine. then something underneath the confusion that was harder to name. his eyes moved from the flowers to Ryomen's face and back to the flowers and the grip on Ryomen's shoulder loosened without him seeming to make the decision to loosen it.

"you." he said. all the thunder had gone out of his voice completely. "where did you get those."

"the meadow." Ryomen said. steady. unhurried. "near the tree line. i found them this morning. i don't know why but they made me think of her." a brief glance at your mother. "i thought she would want them."

your father stared at the flowers for a long moment.

then he grabbed Ryomen by the shoulder again. differently this time. and started moving.

"FATHER!" you stepped forward fast.

your mother's arm came around you. gentle. completely immovable.

"mother let me—"

"no." she said softly.

"he's going to—"

"no." softer still. and she pulled you back against her chest.

you watched your father march Ryomen down the corridor and around the corner and out of sight. you stood in your mother's arms with your heart doing something absolutely terrible in your chest and your eyes already burning.

"mother." your voice cracked right down the middle.

"i know." she said. her arms tightened around you. "i know."

the room smelled sterile and clean the way rooms smell when their purpose is serious. a mahogany desk dominated the centre of it, tools and instruments arranged on shelves with the precision of someone who valued order above most things, a narrow bed pushed against the far wall, a lamp burning in the corner despite the morning light coming through the screen.

an old man sat behind the desk who looked up when the door opened and went completely still when he saw what came through it.

your father pushed Ryomen into the chair across from the desk and looked at the physician. "is that the—" the old man started, eyes already going wide.

"yes." your father said. then to Ryomen, "hold up your hands,boy. show him what you have ."

Ryomen held up his hands. all four of them.

the physician stood so fast his chair scraped back and came around the desk and leaned in close, eyes moving over Ryomen's hands with the intense scrutiny of a man who did not believe what he was seeing

your father let him look for exactly long enough.

then he stepped forward and brought his fist down on the desk so hard everything on it jumped.

the old man stumbled back against the wall.

"you told me." your father's voice was dangerously controlled. the kind of controlled that meant the control was working very hard. "that these flowers were only found near Mount Asama. you told me local sourcing was completely impossible. you told me that was the reason for the cost." he took one step closer and the physician pressed himself further back against the shelves. "you lied to me. you took my money. you sat in this room and you told me there was nothing closer while my wife got sicker and your pockets got heavier." his jaw was so tight it looked painful. "i trusted you with her life."

the physician was stammering. actually trembling, words dissolving before they formed into anything coherent, hands up in a gesture that was half explanation and half protection. hid eyes darted to the bouqet and the boy holding it and a cold shiver ran down his old man spine.

Ryomen was smiling.

not a small smile. not a polite one. a full wide open ear to ear smile, the kind you had genuinely never seen on his face in four years of knowing him, watching your father take the physician apart with the focused satisfaction of someone watching something be done exactly right.

"there are more patches." he said, into the middle of everything, completely calm. "in the meadow. along the whole tree line. i walked past them this morning when i got firewood. there are more than you could possibly need."

the room went absolutely silent.

your father turned from the physician and looked at Ryomen.

Ryomen looked back at him.

the physician made a very small sound in the corner.

your father turned back to him.

what followed did not need to be described in detail except to say that it was not brief and it was not quiet and when it was finally over, when the gurgled whimpers and gasps for air ceased, your father straightened up, picked up a cloth from the desk, and began wiping his knuckles with measured unhurried calm.

he looked over at Ryomen.

Ryomen was studying the physician's swollen face with the focused interest of a scholar examining something genuinely fascinating. then his eyes moved, all four of them, slowly, deliberately, up to your father's face.

"will you do that to me now?" he said. quiet. direct. not afraid. just asking.

the room held its breath.

something happened to Sanetomo's face.

it moved through him slowly, whatever it was, arriving in waves. the fury had burned itself completely out and what was underneath it was something older and more tired and more human than anything he had shown in this room today. he looked at the boy in the chair. this boy. pink hair and four eyes and arms built from years of surviving alone and a face that was so young it knocked something loose in his chest.

he thought about what he would do if someone had done this to his daughter. grabbed her. dragged her. raised a fist in front of her eyes. what he would do to that person.

he knew exactly what he would do.

his eyes were wet. that surprised him. he honestly couldn't remember the last time.

his body moved before his mind gave it permission. down, slowly, until his knees hit the floor in front of the chair. in front of this boy. he reached over and took the flowers gently from Ryomen's hands and set them on the desk. then he took those hands, the two closest to him, both of them, into his own.

Ryomen went completely still.

the only person who had ever held his hands was her. this was different in every way and also, unexpectedly, warm. and the hands holding his were smooth and soft in the way that hands are when they have been cared for, and they smelled like agarwood, rich and grounding. he sat with it and let it be what it was.

"i hate you." your father said. his voice was low and unsteady in a way it almost never allowed itself to be. "i want you to know that. i have hated the idea of you for two years. every single time i thought about you i felt something i am not proud of at all." he looked at their joined hands. "but i hate myself more right now. i sent men to that meadow. i wrote it down and sealed it and i told myself i was protecting her and somewhere underneath all of that i knew. i knew it wasn't only that."

he stopped. breathed.

"she was my baby girl." he said. "she used to chase fireflies for an entire hour and come running to find me just to show me before she let them go. i don't know when she stopped coming to find me. i think i stopped being someone she could come to. and i watched it happen and i didn't know how to stop it and i made it worse instead."

a drop of water landed on their joined hands.

Ryomen looked up.

he had never seen a man cry before. not like this. not a man like this, a man whose presence filled every room he entered, sitting on the floor in front of him with wet eyes and a face that had come completely undone.

"she doesn't hate you." Ryomen said.

your father looked at him.

"she talks about you." Ryomen said. "even when she's angry at you she talks about you. she told me about the fireflies." a pause. "she still lets ladybugs crawl up her fingers. i've seen her do it."

your father closed his eyes for a moment. just a moment.

"i don't think it will go back to the way it was." he said quietly. "and i feel this ache. every time i breathe it feels like something tearing slowly. and all i can think is i'm sorry. i know it isn't enough. this morning i wanted you dead and now i'm on my knees saying sorry like a child and i don't know what to do with that."

Ryomen sat with this for a moment.

then he slipped one hand free.

he reached over, slowly, and patted your father's shoulder. once. twice. the most genuinely awkward pat in the history of human comfort, the pat of someone who had never done this before in their life and was doing it anyway because it seemed like the right thing and he had decided to do the right thing.

your father looked at him.

Ryomen looked at the floor. "you look like her." he said. "your eyebrows. the shape of your eyes. the curve of your cheekbones." a pause. "you also talk a lot."

your father made a sound. startled and wet and completely undignified. an actual laugh.

"her mother says the exact same thing." he said, wiping his face with the back of his hand. "she says we have a talent for going on and on about things." a small pause. "i think being able to put words to what you feel is one of the greatest gifts a person can have. not everyone can."

Ryomen looked up at that.

something moved carefully across his face. wanting and cautious and trying not to show either.

"could you teach me." he said.

your father blinked. "i beg your pardon?"

"could you teach me." Ryomen said again, steadier this time. and then, before the silence could stretch long enough for the answer to become no, "why did you react like that about the flowers? your wife also looked shocked when i gave them to her. i thought flowers were just gifts."

your father looked at him for a moment. something that was almost amusement moved through the exhaustion on his face. "you walked into my house." he said carefully. "and gave my wife flowers."

"yes." Ryomen said.

"boy." your father said. "are you trying to court my wife?"

Ryomen stared at him with all four eyes.

"i'm joking." your father said. and then, quieter, the amusement fading into something more serious and more tired, "those flowers. i used to find them for her when we were very young. before everything. before this house and this title and all of it." he looked at the bouquet on the desk. "i have been trying to find them for two years. the physician told me they could only be sourced from very far away and that the cost was the cost because of how rare they were locally." he looked at Ryomen steadily. "my wife is very sick. there is a cure. but the ingredient has been, apparently, impossible to get hold of nearby." his jaw tightened slightly. "so i have been working myself into the ground trying to pay for something that has been growing in my meadow this whole time. and the man sitting in that corner has known it."

Ryomen was quiet.

"every late night." your father said. "every argument. every decision i have made this past year and the year before that that i am not proud of. i made all of it from a place of absolute terror. i felt like i was losing everything at the same time and i was grabbing at whatever i could reach and not thinking clearly about what i was reaching for or whether i had any right to it." he paused. "i grabbed at her. i put her in a smaller and smaller space because i thought if i could just control the variables i could keep her safe. and all i did was push her further away and make everything worse and i could see it happening and i could not stop myself."

he looked at the flowers on the desk for a long moment.

"and then you walked in." he said quietly. "with those. from my meadow. all this time."

the room was very still.

Ryomen looked at the floor. then at the flowers. then back at your father.

"could you still teach me." he said. "even after all of it."

your father looked at him for a long moment. at this boy. this sixteen year old boy with calloused hands and pink hair and four eyes that were looking at him with something in them that was not fear and not anger and not any of the things he had expected.

"yes." he said. like the word had surprised him by coming out. "i think i could."

✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ

the knock at the door was soft but urgent.

"come in." Sanetomo said, not looking up from where he was still sitting on the floor, which in retrospect was probably something he should have done something about before saying that.

the attendant who came through the door took one look at the state of the room, at the physician in the corner and the boy with four eyes sitting in the chair and the Dainagon on the floor, and to his enormous credit did not say a single word about any of it. he bowed, deeply, and when he straightened his face was the colour of old ash.

"my lord." he said. "i apologise for the interruption. it's the meadow. the one at the edge of town." he paused. "it's on fire, my lord. the council is convening. they're asking for you."

Sanetomo's head came up.

"what?!" he was on his feet before the word finished leaving his mouth. "the meadow— how, when did—" and then he stopped.

his eyes found the flowers on the desk.

he stared at them for exactly one second.

and then he ran.

not walked. not moved briskly. ran, out of the room, past the attendant, down the corridor, his robes flying behind him, the sound of his footsteps disappearing fast down the hall and out toward the garden.

Ryomen sat in the chair and watched him go.

then something arrived in his chest like a stone dropping into still water.

the fire.

he had left the fire going. small and careful and orange in the spring morning air, crackling under the rack with the bird on it, completely unattended. and the spring grass around the meadow was dry from the last weeks of warm weather and the wind had been coming in from the east all morning and he had been so focused on getting to her that he hadn't—

oh no.

oh no no no.

he was out of the chair and through the door before the thought finished forming.

you had been sitting against the corridor wall outside the physician's office for what felt like a very long time, your knees pulled up, your face doing the things your face did after it had been crying for a while and hadn't quite stopped yet, when the door burst open and Ryomen came through it at speed.

you scrambled to your feet. "Ryo! you're alive, oh thank—"

"the meadow's on fire." he said, already moving past you.

you stared at his back. "what?!"

but he was already at the end of the corridor, already at the garden, already gone.

you stood there for exactly one second watching the space where he had been.

then you watched him clear the garden wall in one single motion that was almost too fast to follow properly, and then he was over and gone and the wall was just a wall again and the spring evening was just a spring evening and somewhere across town a meadow was burning.

the smoke reached him before the fire did.

thick and grey and wrong, rising above the rooftops in a column that he could see from three streets away, and he ran faster, pushing through the early evening foot traffic that was starting to fill the roads, past stalls and carts and people stopping to point and stare, past the shrine gate and down toward the edge of town where the houses got sparse and the road gave way to the path through the grass—

or what had been grass.

he stopped at the edge of the meadow and looked at it.

a good chunk of it was already gone. the fire had moved fast with the wind behind it, eating through the dry spring grass in sweeping orange lines, and the smoke was thick and low and the air tasted like ash and heat. there was already a crowd gathered at the edge, townspeople standing and watching with their hands over their mouths, and pushing through the middle of them, shoving past people who were twice his size without appearing to notice or care, was Sanetomo.

Ryomen watched him push through the crowd.

for a nobleman. for a Dainagon. for a man whose entire existence was built around composure and position and the careful maintenance of dignity in all circumstances. he was shoving through a crowd of commoners in the middle of a burning meadow and he was not stopping for anyone.

he didn't hesitate at the edge of the fire either.

he went straight in through the burning bushes, smoke swirling around him, and dropped to his knees in a patch of grass near the tree line and started pulling.

Ryomen watched him for a moment.

then he went in after him.

the heat was significant up close, the kind that pressed against your face and made your eyes water immediately. the grass crackled and hissed around them and somewhere to the left a branch came down in a shower of sparks. Sanetomo was pulling flowers out of the ground with both hands, frantic, thorough, getting the roots and the dirt with them, his chest heaving from the smoke and the effort, face red, eyes streaming.

"you need to get out of here!" Ryomen called over the noise of the fire. "the trees are going to come down soon!"

Sanetomo did not look up.

continued pulling.

Ryomen looked at the treeline. at the shed, which was fully alight now, the old wood going fast and bright, the flames licking up the crooked door and the twice patched roof and all of it. the ginkgo tree had caught too, the one he had leaned against for four years while someone sat in the flattened grass in front of it and talked and talked and talked. it was burning orange and gold against the blue spring sky and the sight of it did something strange in his chest that he stood with for a moment.

why wasn't he sad?

he waited for it. the devastation. the desperate need to run in and save it the way Sanetomo was trying to save the flowers. this had been his home for ten years. every memory he had of not being completely alone had happened in this meadow. the old man had lived and died here. she had sat in that grass every tuesday and Thursday for four years and left rice cakes between them and refused to leave no matter how many times he hadn't asked her to stay.

he watched the shed burn.

and felt something that was closer to relief than grief. like watching something that had been heavy for a very long time finally being put down.

would the old man enjoy watching it go? he thought he might. the old man had been practical about most things.

a sharp cracking sound came from somewhere above and to the left.

"we have to go!" Ryomen grabbed Sanetomo's arm with two hands. "now! come on—"

Sanetomo fought him. actually fought him, trying to pull his arm back, still reaching for the flowers with his free hand, and Ryomen had to use two more arms to get a proper grip and haul, and then the cracking sound came again, louder and final, and the tree trunk came down directly in front of them in an explosion of sparks and burning wood and Sanetomo lurched forward toward it—

Ryomen pulled him back hard.

they stumbled away from the heat together and Sanetomo immediately tried to go back. tried to push Ryomen's arms off him, tried to get back to the flowers on the other side of the fallen trunk, scrabbling and desperate in a way that had completely abandoned all composure.

"there are more!" Ryomen said, pulling him back again. "i promise you there are more patches, i'll find them, but you are going to get yourself killed and they still need you! she still needs you! come on!"

Sanetomo stopped fighting.

not all at once. in stages, like something going out. the frantic energy leaving him slowly until he was just a man being hauled through a burning meadow, still clutching a handful of damaged flowers in one hand, coughing hard into the smoke. Ryomen got him moving and kept him moving, away from the fire and toward the tree line where the air was cleaner, and Sanetomo let himself be moved, and somewhere in the noise of the burning Ryomen heard him crying. not quietly. the kind that comes from somewhere deep and has nothing left to hide.

great. two of them now.

✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ

you came running across the meadow at a speed rivaling Usain Bolts.

you saw the smoke first. then the fire. then the crowd at the edge of it. then, through the crowd, two figures coming out of the burning grass toward the tree line, one of them being hauled by four arms and stumbling and not walking straight, and the other one—

"FATHER!" you pushed through the crowd without caring who you were pushing. "RYO!"

you crashed down onto the grass next to your father before you'd finished deciding to, both arms around him, face into his shoulder. he was coughing and his robes were singed at the edges and his face was streaked with smoke and he was still holding, somehow, a handful of flowers in one hand that were damaged but intact.

you held on and cried and he held on back and you could feel him shaking slightly.

"mother told me." you said into his shoulder. "she told me everything. daddy i'm sorry. i should have known. i should have been there to help more. there has to be more of those flowers, Ryo said there are more patches, we can—"

your father's hand came up and smoothed your hair back. slow and careful, the way he had since you were three years old.

"i have so much to say to you." he said. his voice was wrecked and quiet and more honest than you had heard it in two years. "so much to apologise for. and some of it i can never make up for and i know that." a pause. just breathing. "you are my whole heart. and your mother is my very soul. my baby. my little girl." another pause. "i should have never doubted your ability. never. and this boy—" he stopped. "he saved my life today. in more ways than either of us know yet."

you pulled back and looked at him. then you looked at Ryomen.

who turned and walked away into the dark of the tree line without a word.

you watched him go. the smoke and the dark swallowing him up until he was gone. you didn't call after him. somehow you knew not to.

"his name is Ryomen." you said quietly, still watching the tree line. "Ryomen Sukuna." a pause. "i knew if you met him, you'd love him like i do."

✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ

the forest was dark and quiet away from the fire.

he moved through it by instinct more than sight, the smoke thinner here, the air cleaner, his lungs grateful for it. behind him the orange glow of the burning meadow flickered between the trunks and the cracking of it carried through the trees but it was distant now, manageable.

he slowed.

stopped.

stood still in the dark forest and let something move through him that he didn't have a name for yet. the shed was gone. the ginkgo tree was gone. ten years of the only home he had ever had, burning down to nothing behind him while a man he had met this morning wept over it in the grass.

her father. who had wanted him dead at breakfast. who had sat on the floor of a physician's office and held his hands and cried and said i hate you and i hate myself more in the same breath. who had run into a burning meadow for flowers because the woman he loved was dying and he would burn with everything else before he let that happen.

Ryomen stood in the dark forest and thought about that.

then something pulled.

not a sound. not a sight. just that feeling, the same one from this morning when he had spotted the flowers by the tree line before his brain had finished telling him to look, like a compass needle finding north and the rest of him just following.

he moved toward it.

there. blue in the dark, catching what little light came through the canopy, a whole patch of them growing undisturbed between the roots of two old cedars, petals like silk, blue fading to pink at the centre.

he knelt down.

pulled them out carefully this time. roots and dirt and everything, the way you pull something you intend to keep. one by one, all four hands working, filling up with them until he couldn't hold any more.

i saved someone...curses dont save people

the thought arrived quietly and he sat with it in the dark for a moment.

then he got up and ran back.

Sanetomo was sitting up by the time Ryomen came back through the tree line, the coughing better, some composure returning in patches, the fire at the edge of the meadow still going but slower now, running out of things to eat. you were beside him, and when Ryomen dropped down and spread the flowers out between all of them you made a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a sob and it was the best sound he had heard all day.

the fire crept closer by degrees and eventually the three of you got up and moved, back through the thinning crowd, back through the streets of the town in the dimming golden light light, smoke still rising behind you, and somewhere on the way back through the market district Ryomen stopped at an unattended cart and took a basket off it.

"Ryo!" you said immediately.

"if they didn't want their things taken they shouldn't leave their cart unattended." he said, already setting the flowers down into the basket one by one with more care than was strictly necessary for someone who was simultaneously justifying theft.

your father made a sound. tired and cracked and genuine. a laugh.

he put his hand on your shoulder. then he looked at both of you, his daughter and the boy with the pink hair and the stolen basket with inside flowers, standing in the middle of a market street in the spring evening with smoke still in their hair and absolutely nowhere else to be.

"come on then." he said. "let's go home."

ugh they are literally my babies.

can you keep a secret? i wasnt gonna tell but like oh what the heck, the original ending was the father dying and then like reader is devastated obvi and she cant bare the very thought of Sukuna and that's when he gets all evil and there was this whole long part where hes a yearner and searching for her and he burns the villages he doesnt find her in and then one day he goes to sit under a sukura tree after destroying lives and hwat not and he sees a tomb stone. readers name is on it. buried under a sukura tree and he just knows its you. and hes falling to his knees when he notices a tomb stone next to yours with a Ichi's name on it. and you canput two and two together. but i thought let me be happy and kind so here we are. but i do feel that it was the right choice cause i was crying just thinking about writing all that

Birth.

It's always seen as something beautiful. Expected of women. A miracle, they call it— and yeah, okay, it is. But nobody ever talks about what it actually is. The real version. Not the one in the Instagram caption with the soft lighting and the pink balloons and the words she's finally here and a trail of hearts underneath. Not the version they hand you in the books with the watercolour illustrations and the pastel diagrams.

Nobody talks about the battlefield.

The ripping. The tearing. The way your body does something so violent, so extreme, that your brain just simply cannot keep up with it. Labour doesn't ask if you're ready. It doesn't wait for the room to be right or the people to be right or for you to feel anything approaching prepared. It just arrives, and it takes, and it keeps taking until it decides it's finished with you.

And here's something they put in the books but don't say the right way — not the way it deserves to be said:

Your baby builds its bones from yours.

While it's inside you, growing, getting bigger and stronger by the day — it pulls the calcium right out of your skeleton to do it. You become less so that they can become whole. You hollow out in ways nobody can see from the outside, ways you only feel later, quietly, when you reach for something and notice something has shifted. And after? Even if you go back to the gym. Even if you eat well and sleep enough and do all the things and bounce back the way everyone around you seems to expect like it's the most natural thing in the world — you will never be the same. Not your spine. Not your hips. Not the shape of your body or the way it moves or the way it feels from the inside. It changes you permanently and it doesn't ask permission and it doesn't say sorry.

Now.

Take a second with all of that. Really sit in it.

Imagine going through it. The hours of it. The screaming — and you screamed, you are not going to pretend that you didn't, you screamed until your throat was raw and you didn't care who heard — and the mess and the fear and the strange, specific grief of looking in the mirror three days later and not recognising the person looking back. The softness where there wasn't softness before. The new shape of your hips. The way your body felt like it now belonged to someone else, something functional and necessary rather than yours. The weeks of sitting carefully, of wincing when you forget, of loving something so completely that the love itself is almost frightening in how big it is.

Tough, right?

Yeah.

Now add a husband to the mix.

A husband who wasn't at the birth. Who picked up on the second ring when you called and said I'll be right there in his calm, even voice, the one that usually makes everything feel manageable, and then simply — wasn't. Not right there. Not close to right there. Not there at all until it was over and you were already holding her and the most important moment of your life had already happened in a room he wasn't in.

A husband who only comes home to sleep now. Who moves through the house like a very polite ghost, like someone who is perpetually on his way somewhere else and has simply stopped here briefly. Who you pass in the hallway and who nods, who you eat beside in silence, who takes up space in a bed beside you without touching you. Who you haven't touched — haven't been touched — in so long that you've stopped counting, because counting makes the number feel real, and the number is not a number you're ready to feel.

A husband who hasn't held your hand in months.

A husband who hasn't spent more than thirty minutes with his baby girl — and she is two weeks old.

Two weeks. Fourteen days. And not even one full hour of his time.

Thirty minutes.

Sounds like hell, doesn't it?

Yeah. That's your life.

Three Years Later

The bar Haibara had chosen was the kind of place that understood what it was trying to be. Dark wood and low, warm lighting. Real leather on the stools. The kind of whiskey selection that meant someone who worked there actually cared. It was loud enough to feel like a party without being so loud that you couldn't hear the person next to you, which Nanami appreciated — he'd been to Haibara's birthdays in louder venues and had spent entire evenings watching people shout at each other's faces and call it conversation.

Tonight was better than that.

Tonight was also considerably worse, for reasons that had nothing to do with the noise level.

He'd been here forty minutes. He'd spoken to Haibara, who was vibrating with the specific energy of a man deeply, genuinely thrilled to have turned thirty-two, and to a few colleagues, and he'd found a spot near the end of the bar that gave him a clear view of the room without requiring him to be in the middle of it. He'd ordered a glass of Yamazaki that he was working through slowly. He'd been doing fine.

Then she'd arrived, and he'd stopped doing fine, and he'd been managing that ever since.

He hadn't seen her come in. He'd felt it — or felt something, some shift in the room that his body had apparently catalogued before his brain caught up. A change in the atmosphere the way pressure changes before weather. He'd looked up and there she was, already moving through the bar toward someone she'd spotted, her face breaking into a smile, and something in Nanami's chest had done what it always did when she walked into a room he was already in.

It pulled toward her.

Like a compass. Like the world had a new north and his body knew it before he did.

She was wearing something dark — he clocked it as navy from across the bar, though the lighting made it hard to be completely sure. The fabric had something worked into it, small and light-catching, so that when she moved she threw off these tiny scattered points of gold that appeared and disappeared as she shifted. It was subtle. It was the kind of thing you might not notice if you weren't watching. Nanami was watching. He'd been watching, with great discretion and absolutely zero success at stopping himself, for the better part of an hour now.

He'd noticed the shoes early. He hadn't meant to — she'd shifted her weight and he'd caught the glimpse of it, just a flash, the underside of her heel: red. That specific deep red, lacquered and deliberate, the kind that was a decision. Not just a shoe you put on because it was there. A choice. She'd stood in front of her mirror tonight and she'd chosen that, and the knowledge of it sat in Nanami's chest like a coal.

She laughed at something across the room.

He felt it in his jaw.

He took a sip of his whiskey and told himself, for approximately the twelfth time since she'd arrived, to look somewhere else. He was good at discipline. He was exceptionally good at discipline, had spent years building it, had applied it to his work and his habits and the way he ate and the hours he kept and every other area of his life with consistent, methodical success.

She was the single area where it consistently did not work.

He looked somewhere else. He looked at the bar. He looked at the bottles lined up behind it. He looked at the back of Haibara's head and Haibara's enthusiastic hand gestures as he talked to someone across the room. He looked at the door. He looked at the ceiling, briefly, which was perhaps a step too far.

He looked back at her.

She was talking with her hands, the way she always had. Quick and expressive, hands moving to shape whatever she was saying, like the words alone couldn't quite carry the full weight of it. He'd forgotten this, or he'd told himself he'd forgotten it, which was different. The truth was he'd forgotten nothing. Not a single thing. He'd spent three years telling himself he was forgetting things and three years finding out, on occasions exactly like this one, that he hadn't forgotten anything at all.

He remembered everything.

The specific way she tipped her head when she was really listening to something. The way she tucked her hair behind her ear. The particular version of her laugh that meant she'd been genuinely caught off guard by something funny rather than just performing amusement — that was the one he could hear right now, floating across the room, landing on him like it always had, like the room wasn't even between them.

Three years was supposed to have done something about this.

Three years was supposed to have — he didn't know. Blunted it. Filed the edges down. Made it something he could look at without it being so immediate. He'd been told, by the few people he'd talked to about it — which was not many, he was not someone who talked about things easily — that time helped. That the shape of the loss changed. That you put one foot in front of the other and eventually the ground stopped feeling like it might give out.

He was waiting.

"You've been staring at the same part of the room for fifteen minutes," said a voice at his elbow, and Nanami closed his eyes for a very brief moment before opening them.

Gojo.

He'd materialised with a drink in each hand and the expression of someone who had been enjoying himself immensely for the last hour and intended to continue doing so. He set one of the drinks down on the bar and leaned against it with the easy confidence of a man who had never in his life felt unwelcome anywhere.

"I'm watching the room," Nanami said.

"Mm. Very specific part of the room."

"If you have something to say, say it."

Gojo tilted his head slightly and looked at him with that look — the one that meant he saw more than he was letting on, which with Gojo was always more than was comfortable. "She looks good," he said.

Nanami's jaw was tight. "Don't."

"I'm making an observation. It's a fact. Objective—"

"Satoru." He turned and looked at him directly. "If you finish that sentence, I will leave."

Gojo smiled at him, and it was a sincere smile underneath the mischief — the version he only used when he actually meant something — and he picked his drink back up and straightened. "Alright," he said. "I'm going to go have fun with people who are also having fun." He moved away with the easy drift of someone who knew exactly when to make an exit, which Nanami would have appreciated more if he wasn't currently so aware of every single inch of the room between himself and her.

He turned back to his drink.

He worked through the rest of it slowly.

She moved through the room over the next hour the way she always moved through rooms — not performing it, not trying, just doing it, and people naturally turned toward her the way plants turn toward windows. He watched three separate people light up when she started talking to them. He watched her listen to something with her whole face, the way she listened when something was actually interesting to her. He watched the little gold points in her dress catch the light every time she moved, scattered and glittering and then gone.

He watched the red sole of her shoe when she shifted her weight.

He ordered a second drink and had some of it and was considering whether a third was either warranted or wise when he saw her make her goodbyes to the group she was with. Touching an arm, a smile, the brief warmth of an exit. And then she was moving toward the side door — the one that opened onto the small terrace the bar had, barely enough space for a few tables, but outside and darker and quieter.

Alone.

Nanami stayed where he was.

Don't, he said, internally, with what he felt was reasonable firmness. She's getting some air. People do that at parties. She's been on her feet for an hour and she wanted a minute outside and it has nothing to do with you and you are going to stay exactly where you are and finish your drink and then you're going to go say happy birthday to Haibara again and go home.

He set his drink down.

You have been doing well tonight. That was true. He had been keeping his distance, which was what worked, which was what the custody schedule and their shared life and the specific geography of all of it required — distance, managed and maintained. You've been normal. You've been functional. You've been the version of yourself that is coping fine, which is the version you're required to be, which is the version that doesn't make anything harder for either of you.

He picked up his jacket from the barstool.

She has somewhere to be tomorrow. She said that on the phone when she asked about the drop-off, somewhere to be, and you heard it and you did not ask what it was, which was correct, which was the right thing, which is what you're going to keep doing — not asking, not looking, not following her outside onto—

He was already at the door.

He pushed through it.

The air outside was cooler than the bar, which hit him pleasantly across his face. The terrace was small, just as he remembered from having seen it once before — a few round iron tables, string lights threaded between them, a low railing at the far end with the street visible below. She was at the railing, her back to him, her arms resting on the stone, looking down at the street.

She heard him come out. She'd always had excellent hearing, or maybe she was just always very aware of him in the same involuntary way he was always aware of her — he'd never asked, he had no idea, he wasn't going to examine that particular question too closely.

She turned her head.

"Nanami."

"Sorry," he said, and he didn't reach for a cover story because he wasn't good at cover stories and she'd see through it immediately anyway. "Air."

She held his gaze for a moment, reading something there, and then she turned to face him properly. Her expression was careful in the way it got when she was deciding how to be. Not cold. Not closed. Just — deliberate. Like she'd set something down before she started talking and she was keeping it there. "Same," she said.

He came to stand at the railing, leaving a gap of a few feet between them. Below, the street was doing what streets did at this hour on a Saturday — couples walking arm in arm, a group of young people too loud and too happy, a taxi idling at the corner with its light off. The sounds rose up to them warm and diffused.

Neither of them said anything.

It wasn't uncomfortable, which was the strange thing — it should have been, by any reasonable measure, two people in their situation standing on a terrace in the dark saying nothing. But he'd always been someone who was at ease with silence, and she'd always been someone who didn't fill it out of anxiety, and so the quiet settled between them in the way it used to, a long time ago, when it had been easy.

He missed easy.

"Good party," she said, eventually.

"Haibara put effort in." He glanced through the window at the warm noise of the bar inside. "He made me a seating chart."

She looked at him. "A seating chart."

"Colour coded. There were footnotes."

The laugh came out of her before she could catch it — the real one, the involuntary one, tipped slightly back and completely unguarded — and Nanami felt it settle in his chest and stay there, warm and inconvenient. She pressed her lips together after, like she was trying to be more composed about it, but her eyes were still bright with it when she looked back at the street.

"He sent me a voice note every day for a week," she said. "About the snack selection."

"He's passionate."

"He really is."

A beat. The street below. The string lights above, swaying slightly in a breeze that was just barely there. Nanami was aware of the exact distance between them — three feet, maybe three and a half — in a way that was completely irrational and that he had no intention of doing anything about.

"How's work?" she asked.

"Busy. Managing." He paused. "You?"

"Good, actually." She said it with a slight note of surprise, like it was still new. "They offered me the department lead."

He looked at her properly. "That's — genuinely, that's great. You've been building toward that for—"

"Two years." She said it with a slight smile that didn't quite reach all the way, and they both knew what two years meant in the specific chronology they shared, and neither of them named it.

"You'll be brilliant at it," he said. He meant it completely.

She glanced at him and then away, and for a moment something shifted in her face — something that wasn't quite the careful expression, something more unguarded — and then she was looking at the street again and the moment was gone. "Thanks," she said, quietly.

Silence came back. The breeze moved through again and carried some warmth from the bar inside with it, and for a moment Nanami was just standing there in the night air next to her and not thinking about anything, which was the closest he'd gotten to peace in longer than he could accurately say.

Then she shifted, both hands repositioning on the railing slightly, and he noticed it the way he noticed everything she did: in full, without permission, without being able to stop.

"I wanted to ask you something," she said. "About the weekend."

"Go ahead."

She looked at the street when she said it, not at him, which told him something before the words did. "Would it be okay if I brought Daphne a day earlier? Saturday instead of Sunday morning. I have somewhere to be in the afternoon and it would make things easier."

Somewhere to be.

There it was again. The same phrase, the same careful vagueness he'd heard when she'd first mentioned it on the phone. Somewhere to be. Not a work thing — she'd have said work. Not family — she'd have said family, they were on friendly enough terms with each other's families that she wouldn't have been weird about it. Somewhere to be was a phrase you used when you'd thought about how to say the thing and you'd landed on something neutral, something that didn't give much away, something that closed a door before you'd opened it.

Somewhere to be.

His mind did what it always did with information — took it apart, looked at all the pieces, laid them out. The careful phrasing. The not-quite-eye contact. The dress she was wearing. The shoes she'd chosen. The specific way she'd said somewhere to be on the phone three days ago and the specific way she was saying it now, like she'd practiced the neutrality of it.

Is it a date.

He didn't say that. He had absolutely no right to say that. She was a grown woman, it was three years on, and even in their marriage he hadn't had the right to interrogate her movements — though he'd certainly, in those last months, been too absent to even know what questions to ask. She owed him nothing. Not an explanation, not a name, not a single additional word beyond somewhere to be.

He held all of this inside his chest and kept his face exactly still and said: "Of course. That's completely fine."

She finally looked at him, checking his tone, checking his face. He gave her nothing to find.

"You're sure?" she said. "I know it changes things for you—"

"It doesn't change anything. Bring her whenever works." He paused, kept his voice easy. "I'll be ready."

She looked at him for a moment longer, that slight reading quality in her eyes, and he felt it like a hand pressing gently on a bruise — not enough to hurt, just enough to know it was there. Then she nodded. "I'll text you a time in the morning," she said. "Thank you."

"No need." He looked back at the street. "Make sure she has her rabbit. She won't sleep without it."

A beat. And then something in her softened, not much, just at the corners. "I know," she said.

"I know you know." He kept his eyes on the street below. "Just saying."

She was quiet for a moment. He could feel her standing beside him, could feel the particular quality of her attention. The terrace was small and the night was a specific kind of quiet that made everything feel closer than it was.

"Nanami," she said.

"Mm."

She seemed to decide against whatever she'd been about to say, because she just said "goodnight" instead, quietly, and turned and went back inside, and he heard the door close and he stood at the railing alone.

Somewhere to be.

He stood there for a while.

He breathed.

He told himself it was fine.

It wasn't fine. It wasn't a disaster, and he wasn't going to behave as though it was, but it was not fine, and he knew it wasn't fine, and he went back inside and said goodbye to Haibara and drove home in the quiet of his car with his hands steady on the wheel and something unsettled moving through him all the way there.

Saturday Morning

He was awake before the alarm, which was normal. He laid in the quiet of his bedroom for a moment before getting up, looking at the ceiling, at the early light coming in around the curtains. His room had high ceilings — the whole house did, that was one of the things he'd bought it for — and in the mornings the light came in at an angle that made the plasterwork above him look different every day depending on the season. Right now it was spring-white, clean and cool and just starting to warm up.

He got up and made coffee.

The house was quiet in the way it was always quiet, which was a comfortable quiet rather than an empty one — or at least that was what he told himself, and most mornings he believed it. He stood at the back window while the coffee brewed and looked at the garden below. Not his garden, technically — shared between the building's residents — but he used it sometimes in the evenings, had planted some things along the far edge last autumn that were apparently coming back, small and green and stubborn.

He drank his coffee and then he set the mug down and started to clean.

The house was not dirty. It was never dirty — this was something that had been true of him since before he could remember, a baseline need for order and cleanliness that he'd stopped apologising for sometime in his mid-twenties. But Daphne was coming, and Daphne was three years old, and three-year-olds operated according to a set of physical laws that were entirely different from those of adults, laws in which clean surfaces were temporary suggestions rather than permanent states and anything left at low enough height would absolutely be touched, moved, or redistributed.

So he cleaned anyway.

He went room by room, methodical and unhurried. The kitchen first — counters wiped, floor mopped, the island cleared of the papers he'd left on it. He checked the cupboards for anything that had found its way to a low shelf and shouldn't be there. He put away the coffee things and wiped down the machine.

The sitting room next. He moved the art books from the low shelf — too heavy, they'd either be pulled or knocked — and replaced them with Daphne's things, the ones he kept here for her visits. Her toys, the plastic cups with handles, the folder of drawings she'd made that he kept in the third drawer of the side table and occasionally took out without being entirely sure why. There was one she'd done at the beginning of this year, him and her drawn in thick crayon, both of them with yellow hair even though she didn't have yellow hair — apparently artistic license ran in the family — standing in what was either a garden or the sea, he was not entirely sure she knew either. He put it back and smoothed the folder closed.

He moved to the spare bedroom, which he'd stopped thinking of as the spare bedroom some time ago.

He'd painted it himself. A soft sage green that he'd tested about four times before committing, doing swatches on the wall over the course of a weekend, standing back and looking at them in different lights. He'd done it on a Sunday in an old shirt he didn't care about anymore, listening to music he kept private (in my mind its defiantly R&B), and by the end of the afternoon the room had looked like something. Like it meant something. He'd put up the shelf at the right height for small hands and filled it carefully — picture books, a soft giraffe with a yellow mane, the wooden train set he'd assembled on the kitchen floor one evening with the instructions spread around him in three languages, fitting each piece together until it was right. The toddler bed with the sunflower duvet cover he'd found after looking at approximately sixty sunflower duvet covers online and deciding that one was the best. (ugh he's so girl dad. okay ill shut up now)

He hadn't told anyone he'd done any of it.

He wasn't sure what he'd say if asked.

He straightened the sunflower duvet and checked the pillow and moved the giraffe to a position where Daphne would see it when she walked in. Then he went to the bathroom.

Daphne had a shelf in here too, now. The no-sting shampoo in the orange bottle, the rubber duck with the small crown that he'd bought with the paycheck he got right after his promotion, the step stool in soft yellow so she could reach the sink. He checked the temperature gauge on the bath. He made sure the hot tap required enough resistance that she couldn't just turn it fully on herself.

He reached under the sink for the tile spray.

He'd been using a bleach-based one, which was efficient and effective for him. But bleach was — Daphne had a patch of eczema on her inner left arm that the doctor was watching, and her skin was sensitive generally, and small hands and knees and faces ended up on floors, and he'd been meaning to switch to something gentler, something without the harsh chemicals, and the other cupboard had what he needed. so he moved for the other handle—

He opened the wrong cupboard.

He didn't move.

His hand was still on the door. The cupboard was the smaller one, the one to the left of the sink, the one he'd essentially stopped opening because he knew what was in it and he didn't need it on a regular basis and that had seemed like the right logic at the time.

Her face looked back at him.

A lot of her faces.

Photo frames, stacked upright in the small dark space, slightly overlapping, some of them turned at angles because the cupboard wasn't quite wide enough for them to sit perfectly straight. Eight, nine, maybe ten of them, shoved in here at some point in the first weeks after the move, in the specific way of a person who cannot bring themselves to throw something away and also cannot bring themselves to look at it every day. He remembered the logic of it — somewhere contained, somewhere managed, somewhere they won't be in front of me every time I walk down the hallway — and that logic had made sense at the time. From the outside. Standing in a hallway with a box of frames and knowing he couldn't put them on the walls but also not being able to put them in a bin.

The front frame was their wedding photo.

Not the formal one. He'd never liked the formal one — both of them standing stiff and slightly unnatural in front of the photographer, the kind of image that communicated wedding without communicating anything true about the people in it. This was a candid from the reception. The photographer had caught it mid-evening, and in it she was laughing at something he'd just said, her head tipped back slightly, completely unguarded, and he was looking at her with an expression that he had absolutely no memory of making but that was right there in the photograph, undeniable. Open. Undefended. The expression of a man looking at someone he loves with no attempt to be anything other than someone looking at someone he loves.

He hadn't known he was capable of looking like that.

He hadn't known he'd looked like that.

Behind it: her graduation. Academic dress, the flat cap sitting at the wrong angle because it always sat at the wrong angle, she'd push it straight and it would tilt again within ten minutes, and she'd given up by the time this photo was taken and was just beaming in spite of the cap. Actually beaming — not the performed happiness of someone aware of a camera, but the real version, the whole-face version, the one that reached her eyes and made them crinkle at the outside corners.

Behind that: her as a baby. Six months old, maybe seven, sitting on a lawn somewhere in a yellow sunsuit with her eyes squinted against the light. He'd gotten it from her mother, quietly, years ago, had it printed and framed for her birthday. She'd gone very still when she'd unwrapped it and then she'd pressed her lips together and her eyes had gone bright and she'd said I love it very quietly and held it for a while.

He'd felt, that day, like he'd done something exactly right.

Behind the baby photo: Daphne.

His daughter at four hours old.

The hospital light was harsh and fluorescent and unforgiving of everything, and Daphne at four hours old was red-faced and furious — genuinely, deeply furious in the way that brand new people are furious about having arrived somewhere cold and loud and incomprehensibly different from where they'd been — her tiny fists clenched against her chest, her mouth a square of outrage. And she was in his arms.

He was in the photograph.

He was sitting in the chair beside the bed, and he was holding her against his chest with the stiff, almost rigid care of a man holding something he is terrified of breaking, every muscle in his arms set to a kind of careful tension, and he was looking down at her. And his face was—

He didn't have a word for what his face was doing.

He'd been so terrified, in that moment — he remembered the terror, the weight of it, how enormous she was in his arms despite how small she actually was — and he'd thought he was holding it together, thought he was being composed, thought he was managing it the way he managed everything.

But the photograph said otherwise.

The photograph showed a man whose entire face was — open. Broken open. Undone by this tiny, furious, perfect person in his arms, every wall he'd ever built completely irrelevant, looking at his daughter the way he apparently looked at very few things in the world: without any protection at all.

He hadn't known.

Nanami closed the cupboard.

He didn't do it carefully. He pushed it shut and the latch caught and he stood there with one hand still pressed flat against the wood, not moving, not breathing particularly well.

Then his back found the cabinet under the sink and he sat down.

The floor was cold through his trousers. He put his back against the cabinet and looked at the cupboard door swinging gently back to closed and he sat there, and there was a moment — maybe five seconds, maybe ten — where he was just completely still.

Then something in him gave way.

It wasn't a decision. It was the opposite of a decision. It was the absence of the decision he'd been making for three years, the continuous, low-level, constant decision to hold himself together, to keep things managed, to be the version of himself that was coping fine — and for a moment, in the quiet of his bathroom on a Saturday morning, that decision simply stopped being made, and what was underneath it turned out to be considerable.

He put his face in his hands.

He cried.

He cried for the photograph of himself looking at his daughter like she was everything, like she was the most astonishing and terrifying and beautiful thing he'd ever held, because she was, she absolutely was, and he had somehow managed to be a man who felt that entirely and showed it apparently involuntarily in photographs and yet couldn't find the words for it in real life when it would have mattered. He cried for all the evenings he'd come home late to a house where the lights were already down and she'd already gone to bed and he'd stood in the kitchen with his briefcase still in his hand thinking tomorrow, I'll do better tomorrow, and then done exactly the same thing tomorrow. He cried for the wedding photo and the version of himself in it that had been so full of something real and had then — had then slowly, incrementally, with the best possible intentions, built the walls back.

He cried, and it was not quiet it was messy and broken and everything he usually was not, and he pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes and the cold tile was under him and the cupboard with her faces in it was three feet away and he cried until it ran out, which took longer than he would have liked.

Then he sat in the aftermath of it.

The hollow, strange calm that follows a proper breakdown. He breathed. His chest ached in the specific way it ached when he'd been holding tension in it for longer than a body is really meant to hold tension. He breathed again.

"Right," he said, to the empty bathroom, to the rubber duck, to the step stool, to the closed cupboard. "You absolute idiot."

He got up.

Cold water on his face — proper cold, held there, counted to ten. He looked at himself in the mirror with the redness around his eyes and the slight wreckage of his expression and he breathed through his nose until the exterior was more or less back to what it usually was. Then he dried his face. He found the right cupboard — the one that just had cleaning products in it, the gentler tile spray — and he finished the bathroom.

He changed his shirt.

He made himself a second cup of coffee and took it to the back window and stood there, looking at the garden, at something small and green coming up along the far edge.

He waited for the sound of a car.

Saturday

The morning was doing everything it could.

Genuinely, it was making a real effort — the kind of spring morning that has actual warmth in the sunshine rather than just the light, where the birds are loud enough to be slightly annoying about it, where the air smells like something was washed overnight and put out to dry. You'd noticed it when you went to load Daphne into the car, the whole street golden and green and trying its best, and you'd thought okay, this is nice, which was something you'd been trying to think more often.

Daphne had opinions about the car seat buckle that she'd had for approximately three months now and that did not appear to be changing anytime soon. The opinion was that she could do it. She could not, actually, do it. But the process of her trying and you helping without appearing to help had become a whole choreography, and you'd gotten good at it — you held the strap and pretended to be doing something else entirely and she snapped the clip in and looked up at you with enormous satisfaction, as though she'd done something brilliant.

"Did it," she told you.

"You did," you said.

"All by self."

"All by yourself," you agreed.

She settled into the seat and found the rabbit, which had somehow gotten wedged under one side, and extracted it and held it across her chest and was ready. Her hair was in two buns — you'd managed it this morning through sheer stubborn patience, two small buns with the yellow duck clips she'd chosen herself, one of which was already slanting slightly to the left which honestly you respected, the chaos of it was very Daphne — and she was wearing the lilac coat over the outfit she'd also chosen herself, which was floral on floral, two patterns together that should not have worked but somehow did, because Daphne was three and hadn't learned yet that patterns were supposed to coordinate and the results were charming.

The drive was about twenty minutes and Daphne spent most of it telling you about a dream she'd had that involved, as far as you could, her (imaginary) friend names 'Kuna' that could turn into a bee and sting people. from what you've heard about this Kuna kid you could confidently say he was not the best influence. You listened and responded and asked questions and tried not to think about where you were going or who would open the door when you got there.

You tried. You were less than completely successful.

You parked on the street outside his building and sat for just a moment with your hands still on the wheel and the engine off.

You were fine. You'd done this many times. Drop-off was routine, it was normal, you'd long since reached the point where you and Nanami could be in the same space and be functional and adult about it, which was what mattered, which was what Daphne needed, and so that was what you both were. Functional. Adult. Managing it, which was a different thing from being fine but had come to function as a reasonable substitute.

"Daddy's house," Daphne said from the back seat, looking out the window.

"Daddy's house," you confirmed.

You got out and went around to her door.

When you unclipped her and lifted her out she was warm and heavy in the way children are first thing in the morning, a particular kind of settled weight, and she looped one arm around your neck without putting down the rabbit and looked at the building with those sparkling eyes — your eyes, everyone said, she had your eyes — wide and considering.

You reached back into the car for the diaper bag, a whole operation — the formula at the right ratio on the sticky note, three changes of clothes because three-year-olds were optimists about keeping themselves clean, the nappy cream (cream-coloured tube, not the white one), the backup rabbit because sometimes the primary rabbit went AWOL and you had twelve minutes of crisis before the backup appeared and resolved everything, enough snacks for what felt like a siege. You got the strap over your shoulder and bumped the door closed with your hip and beeped the lock.

The walk to the door was short.

You knocked.

He opened it before you'd quite finished knocking, which meant he'd been listening for the car, which meant something you weren't going to think about right now, and you looked at him in the doorway in the morning light — in a clean shirt, sleeves not yet rolled, hair not quite as severe as it usually was in work contexts — and something in your chest did the thing it did sometimes when you looked at him.

"Morning," he said.

His eyes went to Daphne first. They always went to Daphne first.

"Morning," you said. "She was good in the car." You shifted the bag on your shoulder. "She had most of her breakfast. Had a banana in the car too."

"I did it," Daphne confirmed. "Ate it all."

"Almost all of it," you said.

"Most of it," Daphne said, which was her version of a correction, and you felt the corner of your mouth lift.

Nanami stepped back and you carried Daphne inside and the house was — it was always slightly jarring, in a way you hadn't gotten completely used to, coming into this space. Not uncomfortable. The opposite, actually, which was the jarring part. It was warm and it smelled like coffee and it had those high ceilings and those enormous windows and the built-in bookshelves either side of the fireplace that you'd never managed to read all the spines of, and it felt — it felt like something. Like care. Like intention. Every time you came here you were aware of how much of himself he'd put into this space, and something about that caught at you in a way you kept moving past.

You carried Daphne to the sofa and set her down and she immediately began the process of assessing the available toys — a thorough visual sweep,in simpler terms she was scoping the scenery out. rabbit still clutched to her chest, very serious about it.

"Daddy," she said, and held her free arm out toward him.

He crouched to her level and she grabbed his face with her small hand and turned it slightly, like she was positioning him for inspection, and then apparently satisfied she patted his cheek twice. Decisive.

"Hi," she said.

"Hi," he said, and his voice did the thing it did for her, softened all the way through, every layer of the usual reserve just gone.

You watched it happen and looked away.

You set the bag on the coffee table and unzipped the front pocket and started talking, which was easier than standing there in the warm room watching Nanami be soft for your daughter. "Okay — bottles in the front, formula ratio on the sticky note, two a day with meals. The nappy cream is the cream-coloured tube in the side pocket—"

"I know where it is," he said, gentle. He'd straightened up, Daphne now climbing the sofa beside him with extreme focus.

"I know you know. The arm patch needs it every change, not just when it looks bad—"

"I know."

"And she's in a both-rabbit-and-bear phase for bedtime, she'll need both or she'll be up—"

"I know." He looked at you, not sharp, just — even. Steady. "I know what I'm doing."

You stopped.

You breathed.

"Yeah," you said. "Sorry."

"Don't apologise." He said it easily, not as a correction, just as a fact.

You looked at the bag, then at your daughter, who had found a board book and was flipping through it with the focus of a scholar. You crouched down to her.

"Hey, baby. Mummy's going to go, okay?"

She looked up immediately.

"Mama stay?"

Every single time. No matter how many times you'd done this, every single time.

"Mummy can't stay, sweet girl." You kissed her cheek, then the other one, then her forehead, and you stayed there a second with your lips on her hair. You could feel Nanami standing nearby, not close, just present, and you were aware of him the way you were always aware of him in small spaces. "I love you so much. You're going to have the best time. Yeah?"

Daphne considered this. Then she grabbed your face the same way she'd grabbed Nanami's, both small palms on your cheeks, and she pressed her forehead to yours.

"Lub you Mama," she said, very seriously. "Wuv you so much."

Something behind your sternum pulled tight.

"I love you too," you said. You stood up. You were not going to cry in his house. You were — and you weren't sure if this was accurate — doing fine. You picked up your bag and walked to the door and turned around one more time because you needed to and Daphne was already back to the book and Nanami was crouching beside her asking what she was reading, and the scene of it hit you somewhere in the chest like it always did, the two of them, his face and your eyes.

"I'll text Sunday," you said.

He looked up at you from beside her. Something in his eyes, in that brief moment, that you couldn't quite name and looked away from.

"Whenever," he said.

You left.

You sat in the car for a minute before starting it.

You looked at the building.

You thought about the way he'd said I know what I'm doing — not defensive, not cold, just certain in the quiet way he was certain about things that mattered to him.

You thought about the terrace last night. The night air and the string lights and the way he'd said make sure she has her rabbit like it was the most natural thing, the thing he was already thinking about.

You thought about the way he'd looked when Daphne grabbed his face.

You started the car.

Saturday

Nanami Kento was, by any reasonable measure, a capable man.

He was patient in professional contexts that would have made other people snap. He could hold complicated information in his head across long periods without losing the thread. He was organised, thorough, and had good instincts about when to push a situation and when to wait it out. He'd spent years building these qualities deliberately and they had served him consistently.

He had not fully accounted for a Daphne in a mood.

It started before breakfast.

She'd woken at half past six from a dead sleep to full volume in approximately three seconds — Daddy, Daddy, DADDY — and he'd gone in and she'd stood up in the sunflower bed with her curls completely vertical on one side and flattened on the other and her eyes half closed and she'd held both arms up. He'd picked her up and she'd gone straight back to mostly asleep against his shoulder, a warm, dense, trusting weight, and he'd carried her to the kitchen like that and stood there with her for a moment not wanting to put her down quite yet.

He made her warm milk and started on breakfast and by the time she was properly awake she'd claimed the kitchen stool as her throne and was watching his every move with the evaluative attention of Gordan Ramsey himself

He made scrambled eggs. The soft kind, the kind she liked, with a small amount of butter in the pan.

She looked at them.

She looked at him.

"No."

He looked back. "No?"

"No eggy."

"You had eggs on Wednesday."

She blinked. pulled a Rock and somehow raised an eyebrow. "No eggy today."

He breathed through his nose. "What would you like instead?"

The thinking face appeared — one finger against her chin, genuinely considering, deeply serious about it. He waited.

"Biskwit," she said finally.

"Biscuit is not breakfast."

it was obvious that if she knew how to roll her eyes she would, so instead she settled for a little huff and pout. Satoru has been babysitting her too much was the first thought that popped into nanamis head.

"Toast," he said. "Triangle toast. You like triangle toast."

She examined the triangle toast already on the counter. Picked up a piece. Turned it over. Handed it back.

"No pointy."

He looked at the triangle toast.

He looked at her.

He cut the corners off the triangle toast.

She ate three pieces and some of the eggs, which she decided she wanted once he pretended he might eat them himself, because apparently that changed everything. He drank his coffee and watched her eat with the inefficient focus of a three-year-old who uses her whole hand to feed herself and simply uses spoons to hit the food with, and something that was warm and slightly painful sat in his chest the entire time.

He loved her so much it was genuinely inconvenient.

After breakfast there was a walk, which lasted about thirty minutes and involved a lot of detours. Daphne was interested in: a crack in the pavement that she needed to look at. for 2 minutes straight. . A discarded bottle cap she felt needed to come with them. Two pigeons that appeared to be fighting, and with a concerned expression nanami watched as Daphne cheered "Fwight! Fwight! Fwight!" she was just a little too happy then. The building on the corner that was painted yellow. A dog on the other side of the street that she needed to wave at until it waved back, which it couldn't do because it was a dog, but she was patient about it.

He redirected her from the bottle cap.

He let her examine the crack for a reasonable amount of time.

He waved at the dog with her.

She got tired twenty minutes from the house — sudden, total tiredness, the kind three-year-olds got as if tiredness were a light switch — and he picked her up and carried her back, and she went to sleep on his shoulder for about eight minutes and then woke up completely refreshed and demanding to know if there were snacks.

There were snacks.

The mid-morning developed its own rhythm. She played in the sitting room with the train set, building something she described as a mountain but which was structurally more of a pile. He sat nearby and read, or tried to, though the book was less engaging than watching her work through the logistics of her mountain with absolute certainty about what she was doing even when the pieces kept sliding off.

"Mountain," she said, when it slid off again.

"Almost," he said.

"Is mountain," she said, more firmly, and started again.

He watched her hands — small and quick and confident — and he thought about her mother's hands doing the same thing, the same quick sureness when she was committed to something, and then he stopped thinking about that and went back to his book.

Lunch was better. She ate most of it, which was a relief — the doctor had mentioned at the last check that she was in a light phase, not concerning but worth watching, and he'd been watching. She sat in the high chair with the silicone bib and ate small pasta shapes with soft vegetables and fruit on the side, and she talked throughout — a continuous commentary on the food, on the room, on the rabbit she'd placed on the chair, on various philosophical matters he couldn't quite follow.

He tied the bib strings and listened and responded and internally he was calculation of whether she'd eaten enough, whether her arm patch needed the cream again after this, whether she'd want the bath before or after her nap, whether—

"Mama," Daphne said.

"Mm."

"Mama mama."

"I know." He pushed a piece of pasta toward her. "Mama will be back tomorrow."

"Mama busy," she said, nodding to herself.

"Yes." He kept his voice neutral. "Mama had somewhere to be today."

She considered this, chewing. "Mama go out."

"Yes."

"With man."

Nanami went very still.

He said, carefully, "What?"

Daphne looked up at him with those big dark eyes, completely unbothered. "Man came to house," she said. "Big man. He bwing Mama flowers."

There was a silence in the kitchen that was quite long.

Nanami set down the small spoon.

"A man," he said. Steadily. Like he was confirming a detail in a report. "A big man. He brought flowers."

"Pwetty flowers," Daphne added, helpfully. "Pink ones. Mama smiled."

Something cold moved through him that he did not let reach his face. He nodded slowly. He picked the spoon back up. He pushed another piece of pasta toward her.

"Mama like him," Daphne continued, serene. "She did dis." She demonstrated, which involved fluttering her hands slightly and making a sound that was presumably her version of happiness.

"Mm," Nanami said.

"Dada sad?"

"No," he said. Immediately. Firmly. "I'm fine."

She looked at him with those eyes — her mother's eyes, always her mother's eyes, looking at him with that particular quality of attention that went right through the composure — and then she reached out and put her small hand on top of his on the table.

Patted it.

Once. Twice. The way you'd comfort someone.

Something in his chest moved in a way he didn't have words for.

"Thank you," he said. Very quietly.

"Welcome," she said, and went back to her pasta.

He stood up a minute later, because he needed to stand up. He went to the counter and put both hands flat on it and looked at the wall. Someone brought her flowers. Pink flowers. And she'd smiled — of course she'd smiled, she was a person, someone brought her flowers, people smiled at flowers, that was — that was fine, that was — he was bringing her flowers. Pink ones. Someone Daphne had met. Someone who had come to the house. Someone she'd smiled at.

Somewhere to be.

He breathed.

"It's fine," he said. Out loud, to himself, to the kitchen wall. "She's allowed. It's been three years and she's allowed and you have no — this is not your — you have no claim on what she—"

"Dada," said Daphne.

"I'm talking."

"Cup."

He turned around. Her cup had tipped sideways on the tray.

He went and righted her cup.

He sat back down across from her and she held out another piece of pasta and he took it and ate it without really knowing why, and she watched him with those big baby eyes, the rabbit on the chair beside her watching too, and the afternoon sunlight came through the kitchen window and fell across the table between them, and it was very quiet.

"She's happy," he said. Not to Daphne. To himself. "She should be happy. That's what matters."

Daphne patted his hand again.

"Yeah," he said. "I know."

The afternoon was the park.

He'd intended to suggest it and then Daphne appeared at the front door with her shoes in her hands and said "Outside now," and so the suggestion became redundant. He got her coat and her shoes and they went.

The park was ten minutes' walk and Daphne held two of his fingers for the entire walk, it was amazing how tiny humans can be. in a perfect world these tiny humans would be tiny forever, they'd hold your hand and look at you like you hung the stars and never leave. cause when tiny humans grow they leave. and then you have no one. He adjusted his pace to hers and she talked about the mountain she'd built and about and about her thoughts on this show called cocomelon that her mom would put on.

The park had a good toddler section. A climbing frame, a slide, swings with the bucket seats. Daphne assessed all of it in about four seconds and went straight for the swings.

He pushed her.

She wanted to go high — "higher, Daddy, higher" — and he went carefully higher, and she shrieked with the specific joy of velocity, the completely unself-conscious joy of a person who hasn't learned yet that joy is something you might want to moderate in public, and the sound of it moved through him like something clarifying.

He pushed her again.

The afternoon sun was in the right part of the sky, low enough now to be warm and golden rather than bright, and it came through the trees in the broken way it did in spring when the leaves were new and not yet full, light and shadow moving together. He pushed her and she laughed and the shadow-light moved across them and he thought about the photograph in the cupboard.

He thought about the expression on his face in it.

He thought: I am capable of that. That open, undefended thing. He was capable of it. The photograph proved it. He'd just — spent so long doing the other thing, the managed thing, the protected and productive and responsible thing, that the undefended thing had gotten buried somewhere and he hadn't even noticed it going.

He pushed her again.

She wanted to stop eventually, abruptly, in the way she made all her decisions — decisively and without warning — and he caught the swing and she climbed out and they went to the climbing frame, and he spotted her while she went up and across and down, and she fell once, landed on her hands on the soft ground, looked at her hands, looked at him, made a decision about whether to cry, decided not to, and got back up cause she knew that cring would mean home time, and she was not about to let that happen yet.

He felt something fierce and quiet move through him.

"You're alright," he said.

"I know," she said, and went back up the frame.

Bath time was an event, as it was always an event, as he was starting to understand it would always be an event until some future point when she was old enough to bathe herself and he would probably find himself standing outside the bathroom door worrying about that instead.

He ran the water and tested it with his elbow and then tested it again. He set the rubber duck on the edge of the bath and she grabbed it immediately and pulled it in as if rescuing it. He got the no-sting shampoo.

The hair washing portion of the bath required strategy.

She hated water on her face. Not a mild dislike — a genuine, hate that she was not letting go anytime soon. He'd worked out a system: the flannel, held against her forehead at the right angle, his hand firm and steady. It didn't eliminate the experience but it contained the worst of it. He told her she was doing brilliantly throughout, which she was, gripping the sides of the tub with both hands and holding as still as she could manage, face screwed up with the effort of tolerating something she found deeply unreasonable.

"Done?" she asked.

"Nearly."

"Done NOW?"

"Now," he said, and rinsed the last of it.

She opened her eyes and checked. Then she let go of the bath sides and resumed the game she'd been playing before the hair washing interruption, which involved the rubber duck and a small plastic cup that represented a boat and an increasingly complex story she narrated in real time. kids got imagination he had to admit.

He sat on the bathmat and listened.

Dried her off. Got the cream on the arm patch — she'd gotten better about the cream, had stopped treating it like the Kragle, she loved the Lego Movie, and now simply held the arm out and watched him apply it with the manner of someone submitting to a medical procedure they'd made peace with. Pyjamas, the fox ones she'd chosen herself from the drawer. Her hair towel-dried and then gently, carefully worked through with the wide-tooth comb, which required patience because the curls were significant and the tangles were real, and he was patient, and she sat between his knees on the bathroom floor and talked while he worked through them.

"Flamingos," she said. "Da pink birds."

"Yes."

"Dey stand on one leg."

"They do."

"Why?"

He thought about it. "Warmth," he said. "They tuck one leg close to their body to keep warm."

She turned her head and looked up at him, which did not help with the detangling but he let it go. "Dat's clever," she said seriously.

"It is," he agreed.

She turned back. He kept working.

"Daddy," she said, after a moment.

"Mm."

"I like it here."

He stopped for a moment.

Just a moment.

"Good," he said. "I like it when you're here."

"Every time?"

"Every time," he said.

She seemed satisfied by this and turned her attention back to flamingos.

Bedtime. He read her The Bear's Hat — she'd pulled it from the shelf and he gave all the characters different voices, including the bear, including the rabbit the bear asked about the hat, including the fish, though the fish only had one line. She lay in his lap with her thumb very close to her mouth, hovering, not quite touching, and by the third page she was heavy against him, by the fifth her breathing had slowed, and when the bear found his hat on the very last page she was asleep.

He sat there.

He didn't move her immediately. He sat in the sage-green room with the sunflower duvet and the shelf with the giraffe and the train set, and his daughter asleep in his lap, and the bedside lamp making everything warm and the book open on its last page.

He thought about a man bringing pink flowers.

He thought about her smile.

He thought: let her be happy. He said it to himself like a directive, like something he was choosing deliberately. Whatever it takes. Whatever it looks like. Let her be happy.

He moved Daphne very carefully into the sunflower bed and covered her and stood at the door for a moment.

Then he went and sat at the kitchen island with a cup of tea he didn't drink much of, and the house was quiet around him, and Daphne's breathing came through the monitor in the soft, steady rhythm that he had come to find more settling than almost anything else he knew.

He went to bed eventually.

He didn't sleep much.

Sunday

Sunday arrived the way Sundays did — slower than every other day, with more light in it, like the morning had time to actually be a morning. You'd woken early, earlier than you needed to, and lay in bed for a while looking at the ceiling of your flat and thinking about things you weren't supposed to be thinking about at seven in the morning.

You got up. Made coffee. Sat at the kitchen table where Daphne's drawings were still stuck to the fridge from last week with magnets — one of you, one of Nanami, one that was just a lot of orange — and drank it slowly.

By eleven you were in the car.

He opened the door with Daphne on his forearm.

That was the image that met you — Daphne horizontal, stomach-down, arms dangling, head up, wearing an expression of profound satisfaction, the rabbit somewhere in her grip. Like he was a surfboard and she was entirely at peace with this. He was holding her with one arm, completely matter-of-fact about it, and his hair was slightly less formal than usual and he had no jacket on, and the combination of it hit you somewhere unhelpful. like there was a lot of bicep showing—

"Mama," Daphne said, immediately reaching for you.

You took her before you'd quite decided to, pulling her into you, and she grabbed your neck and pressed herself against you like she'd been waiting. You breathed her in — the shampoo smell, the warm clean smell of her — and felt something in you unclench that you hadn't noticed was clenched.

"Hi, baby," you murmured into her curls. "Hi, my girl."

"I went to da park," she told you, pulling back to look at your face. "And da swings. Daddy pushed me VERY high."

"Did he." You looked up at Nanami over her head. "Very high."

"Appropriately high," he said.

"So high," Daphne confirmed.

You stepped inside and he moved back to let you, and the house was warm and that smell was the coffee smell again, and there were train pieces on the sitting room floor and Daphne's small shoes by the door and a cup with a handle on the coffee table, the particular evidence of a child having been thoroughly present in a space.

"Her things are mostly packed," Nanami said, going to the bag on the sofa. "Just need the—"

"It's fine, I can get the rest." You set Daphne down and she immediately went to the sitting room to do an inspection of what had happened to her mountain in her absence. You followed Nanami to the sofa and started gathering the last things — the rabbit backup from the pocket, the book she'd evidently been reading.

He was beside you, doing the same, and the space between you was — not much. A foot, maybe less. You could smell the specific clean smell that was his, something that wasn't a cologne exactly, just — him, and you had been married to this person for seven years and sometimes your body remembered that before your brain had time to put the appropriate distance in place.

You moved to put the book in the bag.

He reached for the same pocket.

Your hands didn't quite touch — almost, the side of his hand against your knuckles for a fraction of a second — and you both pulled back and neither of you said anything and you focused very hard on the bag.

"She ate well," he said. His voice was normal.

"Good." Yours was also normal. "Good, I've been—"

"I know. The doctor. I've been keeping track." He moved to the other side of the sofa, creating distance in a way that was probably not deliberate and definitely felt deliberate. "She was fine. Happy."

"She looks it." You glanced at Daphne, who had decided the mountain situation was unacceptable and was rebuilding it, in all honesty she was kind of just smashing things on top of other things...oh well shes cute so its okay! "She really does."

He was quiet for a moment.

You kept packing, keeping your hands busy.

"She said something," he said.

You looked up.

His expression was even — too even, in the way that meant it was being held. "About your weekend," he said. "Specifically about—" A pause. "A man. Who brought flowers."

There it was.

You held his gaze. "Okay?" you said, carefully.

"Pink flowers, apparently." He said it like he was reading from a report. "She said you smiled."

"Daphne is very observant."

"She is." He nodded once. "I'm not — I'm not asking. I don't have any right to ask." He looked away, then back, and in the brief moment of the return something showed in his face that was gone too quickly for you to name. "I just needed you to know that I know. That's all."

"And?" you said, because there was an and in his voice, you could hear it, you'd always been able to hear when he had more than he was saying.

"And nothing." He looked at you. "And she deserves to be happy. And you deserve to be happy. And I would like it — I would very much like it — if the people who come into Daphne's life are people worth having in it. That's all I'm going to say."

You looked at him.

"She went on one date with me," you said. "One. To a restaurant. Nothing — it was one date, Nanami, it wasn't—"

"That's not my business," he said. "I know it isn't."

"Then why bring it up?"

"Because Daphne mentioned it and I wanted to know that you knew I knew." He was quiet for a second. "And because—" He stopped. He looked at the floor. "No. That's all."

"Because what?"

He looked at you, and something in his eyes was — open, briefly, more open than he usually let things be — and your chest tightened before he'd said a word.

"It's been two years since the papers," he said. "Not three. Two. I know what I said that night, on the terrace, I said—"

"I know what you said."

"Right." He nodded. Looked away. "Right. Forget it."

"Nanami."

"I said forget it." Not sharp. Just — done with the thread of it, pulling back, pulling the walls back up with that efficiency he had, the one that had taken you years to understand was not coldness but armour.

You looked at him for a long moment.

You could feel the warmth of the room. You could feel Daphne in the background, the small sounds of her rearranging her mountain, the particular contained world of a three-year-old absorbed in something. You could feel the distance between you and him, three feet of carpet, and the specific quality of attention between two people who have been in each other's orbit long enough that the gravity of it is just always there.

"She moved on," you said, carefully. "The person I went on a date with. She moved on because she was lonely and she'd been standing still for two years and she needed to try something different."

He was looking at you now.

"And it was fine," you said. "He's fine. It was one dinner and it was — fine. But it wasn't—" You stopped. You looked at your hands. "It wasn't anything. And I think I knew it wasn't going to be anything, but I went anyway, because standing still forever is—" You exhaled. "It's not a life, Nanami."

"I know," he said. Very quiet.

"So if you have something to say," you said, "say it."

Something moved across his face. Something pulled at, something being held back, something you recognised from years of reading him, from years of knowing when he was right at the edge of something and retreating from it.

"MAMA," Daphne announced from the sitting room. "Come SEE."

Both of you turned. Broke whatever that was.

"Coming," you called, and the moment dissolved.

You went and admired the mountain, which was now taller and less structurally sound than before but deeply satisfying to Daphne, and Nanami brought Daphne's bag to the door, and you got her coat and her shoes on with the usual negotiation, and Nanami crouched down to her level.

"Bye, little bug," he said.

"Bye Daddy." She grabbed his face again — the two-handed grip, the inspection, the assessment. Then she patted both cheeks at once. "Good face," she said, conclusively.

He made a sound that might have been a laugh. "Thanks," he said.

She turned to find the rabbit and he looked up at you, from crouched down there, and the angle of it put him looking up at you which almost never happened and the quality of it — something in your chest moved and you looked away first.

"Sunday next week," you said.

"Sunday." He stood up.

You opened the door. You got Daphne through it, the bag over your shoulder, the rabbit under her arm.

You turned around once.

He was in the doorway. Hands in his pockets. The afternoon light behind you lighting up the hallway behind him, and his face in partial shadow, and something in the set of his jaw that you recognised and that made the back of your throat ache slightly.

"Get home safe," he said.

"Yeah," you said. "thanks."

You walked to the car.

You put Daphne in her seat and you did the buckle choreography and she said "I did it," and you said "you did," and you got in the driver's seat and you sat there for a moment with your hands in your lap.

You drove home.

You didn't stop thinking about his face in the doorway the entire way.

Sunday Evening

The restaurant was the kind of place with low warm lighting and tablecloths and menus that didn't list prices on the version they gave you, which was either charming or unnecessary depending on your mood. Tonight you were choosing charming.

You'd dropped Daphne at your mother's for the evening — she loved your mother's house, had a particular love for your mother's dog, a very old golden retriever who tolerated Daphne's enthusiastic affection with the patience of a saint — and you'd come here in a cab because it felt like the kind of evening that should involve a cab rather than struggling to find parking...and maybe other reasons were involved.

Shiu was already there.

He stood when he saw you, which you'd gotten used to but which still caught you slightly each time, and he held out your chair and you sat, and he sat across from you, and he smiled and it was a warm, genuine smile and you liked him, you genuinely liked him, and you were aware even as you thought this that you were cataloguing it like a thing to hold onto.

"You look great," he said.

"Thank you." You unfolded your napkin. "Hey, Shiu."

"How was the drop-off?"

"Fine." You picked up the menu. "Good. She's happy there. She always is."

He nodded, no complication about it. This was something you liked about Shiu — he was uncomplicated about the things that could be complicated, didn't add weight where there wasn't any. "And you?" he said.

"Fine," you said again, and meant it about eighty percent.

The dinner was good. really good — the food was excellent, the conversation moved easily, you laughed more than once at things he said and he laughed at things you said and there was nothing strained about any of it. This was what you'd been looking for, you reminded yourself. This easy version of things. This uncomplicated, no-history, no-grief version of sitting across a table from someone and just — being present with them.

You were present with him.

You were also, underneath it, in the way that you'd been trying not to be, thinking about an expression you'd seen in a doorway earlier.

It's been two years since the papers. Not three.

You'd said three years on the terrace. You'd been wrong and he'd corrected you, quietly, and then said forget it, and you had not, in fact, forgotten it.

You finished your main course. Shiu refilled your water.

"Can I say something?" he said.

"Sure."

He looked at you with the particular look of a person who is about to say something they've been thinking about for a while. "You're here," he said. "And you're good company, and this is a very nice evening. But you're also not entirely here."

You held his gaze. You didn't deny it, because he didn't deserve the denial and because you respected him too much for it.

"I'm sorry," you said.

"Don't apologise." He said it easily. "I'm just naming it."

You looked at your water glass. "It's been a weird day," you said.

"It always will be," he said, and he wasn't being unkind, he was being honest. "That's just — it's the situation. I know the situation."

"Shiu—"

"I like you," he said. "I really do. But I think you need to sort out what's in the way before you can actually be here. With anyone." He smiled, and it was a genuinely kind smile, a generous one. "Not just me. Anyone."

You sat with that.

"I think you might be right," you said.

He topped up both your glasses. "Good. Now eat your dessert and tell me about Daphne's flamingo theory because that is the most interesting thing you've said all evening."

You laughed, surprised. "She thinks they sound like sad singing."

"That's what it is," he said. "I always knew there was something melancholy about flamingos."

You laughed again, properly this time, and dinner ended warmly and well, and he kissed your cheek goodbye outside and said take care of yourself and meant it, and you got in a cab and looked at the city going past the window all the way home.

What's in the way.

Your phone rang when you were two minutes from home.

Unknown number. You almost didn't — but something in you, some particular signal, made you pick up.

"Hello?"

"Hi — sorry, is this Daphne's mom?" A woman's voice, young, slightly flustered. "This is Maya, the babysitter — we haven't spoken before, I usually coordinate with—"

"Is she okay? Is Daphne—"

"She's fine! She's totally fine, she's with — that's actually what I'm calling about. Her dad came by." A pause. "Mr Kento. He came to the house earlier this evening, and I explained I was there until ten as arranged, and he — asked me to leave."

You were very still.

"He asked you to leave," you said.

"He was very polite. Very. he was quite firm about it, though. Said he'd stay with her himself. He's on the emergency contacts so I didn't really feel I could push back, I just — I wanted to let you know since you'd arranged it."

"Thank you for calling, Maya. I'll sort it."

The cab was pulling up to your building. You paid and got out and stood on the pavement for a moment.

You thought about the phone call.

You thought about it's been two years since the papers. You thought about the expression in the doorway. You thought about the way his hand had been against yours for half a second reaching for the same bag pocket.

You went inside.

The front door was unlocked.

Not broken into — just unlocked, because he had his key. The spare you kept on the hook by his daughter's drawings. You pushed it open and stepped into your hallway and heard the tap in the kitchen.

The kitchen light was the only one on in the flat.

You walked toward it.

He was at the sink with his back to you, sleeves rolled to the elbows, washing Daphne's bottles and bowls by hand. Not the dishwasher — by hand, one by one, methodical, each one turned under the water and wiped with the cloth and placed on the drying rack. The bottles were already there, lined up in order of size, perfectly aligned. He hadn't heard you come in.

You stood in the kitchen doorway and looked at him.

His shoulders. The rolled sleeves. The way he moved through even a task like this with a kind of quiet efficiency, like care was something he expressed with his hands because it didn't always come out in words. The particular shape of him that you'd spent seven years learning and that your body, apparently, still had completely memorised.

Something in your chest ached.

"What are you doing in my house?" you said.

He turned.

He didn't look surprised. He looked like he'd known you'd come eventually. "She's asleep," he said. "Has been for about an hour."

"I know she's asleep. I know she's fine. I know you're perfectly capable of looking after her." You set your bag down on the counter. "I got a call from Maya."

"I know."

"You sent the babysitter home."

"I was five minutes away. Daphne didn't need a stranger."

"She knows Maya, Nanami, they've been together a dozen times—"

"I know." He turned back to the sink. His voice was quiet. "I know that. I'm not arguing with you about Maya."

"Then what are you arguing about?"

He didn't answer. He dried his hands on the dish cloth and set it down with the careful precision he brought to everything, every small movement, and then he turned around again and put his back against the counter and looked at you.

The kitchen was not large. There were perhaps five feet between you.

You were suddenly very aware of those five feet.

"You didn't come here about Maya," you said.

"No," he said. He held your gaze. "I didn't."

"Then why are you here?"

"Because I couldn't not be." He said it simply, like it was just a fact, like he'd stopped fighting it somewhere on the drive over. "Because I've been sitting in my flat since you left this afternoon and I've been — I've been not fine, and I needed to—" He stopped. His jaw worked. "I don't entirely know what I needed. I just needed to not be there."

The kitchen was very quiet.

You could hear the clock on the wall. You could hear, faintly, from down the hall, the soft sound of Daphne breathing through the monitor on the counter. The bottles were on the drying rack. His sleeves were still rolled. The light above you was the warm one, the one you'd bought specifically because the cold white overhead had made the kitchen feel like somewhere you just passed through rather than somewhere you lived.

"You sent the babysitter home," you said, and your voice was quieter now. "So I'd have to come back."

He looked at you. He didn't deny it.

"Nanami." Your voice was not quite steady. "You can't — you can't do that. You can't just—"

"I know." He said it directly. He met your eyes. "I know I can't. I know I don't have the right. I know it's been, whatever it's been, and you're allowed to—" He exhaled. "The man tonight. The one with the flowers."

"Shiu."

"Shiu." He said the name like he was placing it, like it was information. "Is it serious?"

You looked at him for a long time.

"He told me I had something in the way," you said. "That I couldn't really be present with anyone until I sorted out what was in the way."

Something shifted in Nanami's face.

"Smart man," he said, very quietly.

"Yeah," you said. "He is."

The five feet between you felt like nothing and like everything at the same time. You could feel the heat of the kitchen. You could feel the way he was looking at you — that look, the open one, the one from the wedding photograph that he apparently had in him but so rarely let out — and your heart was doing something inconvenient and you were so tired. You were so tired of keeping the appropriate distance, so tired of managing it, so tired of being two people who shared a daughter and a history and apparently a gravitational field and standing on opposite sides of rooms calling that fine.

"I'm angry at you," you said.

"I know."

"Not just for tonight. For all of it. I'm still angry about so much of it and I don't... I haven't—"

"I know." He pushed off the counter. He took a step toward you. Just one. "I'm angry at myself. I have been for three years."

Your throat was tight. "You missed so much."

"I know."

"And I let you. I locked every door and I wouldn't let you back in and then I was angry you weren't there and that was — that wasn't fair either, and I know that, I have known that—"

He was closer now, three feet, two, and you could see everything in his face, all the things he usually kept back, and it was — it was a lot, it was almost too much to look at directly.

"You kissed me at that party," you said. The one after his promotion. The one where things had briefly seemed possible again before they weren't. "And then you went back to work the next morning like nothing happened"

"I know." His voice cracked. Just slightly. Just for a second. "I know what I did. I know all of it."

"Then tell me what you want," you said. "Right now. Stop managing it and tell me what you actually want."

He looked at you.

"You," he said.

One word. No preamble, no qualification. Just that.

The word landed and sat in you and your eyes stung and you breathed and he was right there, two feet away, looking at you with that open expression that meant he wasn't going to take it back.

You closed the distance.

You kissed him.

It wasn't tentative. It wasn't polite. It was three years of managed distance collapsing all at once, and he kissed you back immediately, both hands coming to your face the way they used to, holding you there like you were something he was terrified of losing, and the kitchen counter was behind you and the clock was on the wall and somewhere down the hall Daphne was breathing and neither of you moved away.

He kissed you and it was familiar and it was also new, the specific new of something you thought you'd lost, and you grabbed the front of his shirt and he made a sound against your mouth that you hadn't heard in three years and your eyes stung harder.

He pulled back just enough. His forehead against yours, both of you breathing.

"Hey," he said, low and careful. "Are you okay? We can stop"

And that was what did it.

That are you okay. That careful, gentle we can stop. Because he'd always been this, underneath all of it, this person who held things carefully, and you'd forgotten that, or you'd stopped being able to see it, or it had gotten buried under everything else.

You started crying.

Not the neat kind. The real kind, the kind that came from somewhere you'd been keeping sealed, and it came up and out of you before you had any say in it and your face was against his shoulder and his arms were around you and you were crying in your kitchen at whatever hour this was with Daphne asleep down the hall.

He held you.

He didn't say anything for a moment. He just held you and let it happen and his arms were completely steady and his hand was at the back of your head and you cried until you got to the other side of it, which took a while.

"I'm sorry," you said, when you could talk.

"Don't."

"I'm—"

"Don't apologise for that." He pulled back enough to look at your face, and he was still holding your face in both hands, thumb brushing something away. "Don't."

You looked at him. Your eyes were swollen. You probably looked awful. His eyes were bright and he looked, he looked like the photograph. The wedding reception photograph in the cupboard that you didn't know existed. Open all the way through. exposed and vulnerable.

"I need to say something," you said.

"Okay."

"I shut you out." You held his gaze. This needed to be said properly, needed to be said directly. "When things got hard I shut down completely. I started fights instead of asking for what I needed and then I locked the door when you tried to come in. You suggested counselling and I said no because I was so exhausted from all of it that I thought it was easier to just end it. And I thought I was doing the right thing, for Daphne, I thought..." Your voice caught. "I thought a house of love meant it couldn't be our house. But I think I just I stopped trying. And that wasn't fair to you."

He was very still.

"I worked," he said. "I know what I did. I worked and I wasn't there and I told myself it was for you, for Daphne, for the life I was trying to give you, and—" His voice was low and steady and underneath it you could hear the effort it took to keep it that way. "I got the promotion the week before you filed. Did you know that?"

"No."

He nodded slowly. "I'd been working toward it for two years. And I got it, and I stood in my office and I thought, I thought now. Now I'll have time. And I drove home and you—" He stopped. "You handed me the papers at the kitchen table."

You had.

"You were right to," he said. "I need you to know that I know that. I'm not I'm not saying I wasn't. I just—" He exhaled. "I was so terrified of being the thing that let you down financially that I became the thing that let you down in every other way. And I didn't see it happening until it was already done."

"We both did it," you said.

"Yeah."

"We both did it and we both should have done it differently."

"Yeah."

You looked at each other.

The kitchen clock. Daphne's breathing through the monitor. The bottles on the rack.

"I wasn't there when she was born," he said. He said it quietly and he didn't look away from you. "I should have been there. That is not something I can—" His jaw tightened. "There's no version of it where I was right."

"No," you said. "There isn't."

He took the truth of that. He didn't try to soften it or explain around it. He just took it.

"I'm sorry," he said.

"I'm sorry too," you said.

The words fell into the space between you and you let them settle.

He was still holding your face, both hands, and you were still holding the front of his shirt, and neither of you moved for a moment. Outside, the city made its nighttime sounds, and inside, the kitchen was warm and the light was the warm kind, and your daughter was asleep down the hall breathing her steady, settled breath.

"Where do we go from here," you said. Not quite a question.

"I don't know," he said honestly. "I don't think I should—" He paused. "Not tonight. Tonight was too much and I don't want to—" He seemed to be choosing words carefully. "I don't want to do anything tonight that we'd need to undo tomorrow."

You looked at him.

That careful, steady version of him. The one that held things properly.

"Okay," you said.

"Okay," he said.

He made you tea.

You sat at the kitchen table and drank it and talked, quietly, the way you used to be able to talk. not fighting, not avoiding, just talking. About Daphne. About the flamingo theory. About the department lead position. About small things, ordinary things, things that were easy to say.

It was almost midnight when he picked up his jacket from the chair.

"I'll go," he said.

You looked up at him. You didn't say you don't have to. You didn't say stay. You looked at him and something passed between you that was not any of those words but that maybe was all of them.

"Sunday," he said. "I'll bring her back Sunday. Normal time."

"Sunday," you agreed.

He looked at you for a moment longer, and the open expression was still there, and you held it because you could, because tonight it was okay to hold it.

"Goodnight," he said.

"Goodnight, Nanami."

He left, and the door clicked shut, and you sat at the kitchen table in the warm light and listened to your daughter breathe.

___

The lego situation was not going well.

That is to say, Daphne was having the time of her life. Nanami was experiencing what could generously be called a conflict of professional standards.

He was sitting on the living room floor across from her, the instruction booklet for the Lego Friends Cosy House open on his knee, having spent the last twenty-five minutes building what the instructions described as the south wall with attached flower bed. He'd been explaining, with what he felt was admirable clarity and patience, about why the structural pieces needed to go in before the decorative ones.

Daphne had listened to this the way she listened to most things she through one ear and out the other.

She put a yellow block on top of a purple block.

"That's not load-bearing," he said.

"Pwetty," she said.

"It won't—"

She put another yellow block on top.

"Very pwetty," she said.

He looked at the technically correct south wall with its attached flower bed. He looked at her tower of cheerful structural nonsense. He looked at her face, which was the face of someone who had made a decision and was at peace with it.

He put the instruction booklet down.

"That is," he said, "very pretty, sweetheart."

She lit up. Four years old, still his face and your eyes, still completely undoing him on a regular basis. She immediately started adding more blocks in the colours she felt were right.

He heard you coming down the stairs.

He heard you pause at the bottom, and then you were in the living room doorway, and you were holding something behind your back. He looked at you. He knew this version of you, the careful smile, the slightly held breath, the hands behind your back.

"Daphne," you said, very casually. "Can you do something really important for me?"

She looked up with immediate seriousness. Important tasks were taken seriously.

"Can you go and find Daddy the big red lego piece? The really big flat one? I think it's in the kitchen box."

Daphne was already moving. She trotted past you toward the kitchen with complete purpose, and you listened for the sound of the box being opened before you came fully into the room.

You stood in front of him.

He looked up at you from the floor.

"Close your eyes," you said.

He looked at you for a second. The careful smile. The held breath. The hands behind your back.

He closed his eyes.

He held out his hand.

You placed something in it — small, soft, fabric, folded small.

"Open," you said.

He opened his eyes.

A tiny onesie. White, soft as anything, a small yellow duck embroidered on the front. He turned it over in his hands, this small impossible weight of a thing.

He looked up at you.

You were nervous. He could see it in every line of you — the way you were holding your own elbows, the way your eyes were very wide, the way you were watching his face for the thing he was going to do with this.

He stood up.

He stood up and he closed the space between you and he pulled you in, both arms all the way in, held you the way he'd learned to hold you again over the last year. properly, fully, not the careful managed version but the real one and you exhaled against him, the whole length of you settling.

"When?" he said, against your hair.

"Eight weeks, I think. I have an appointment—"

"I'll be there." He said it before she finished. Then he pulled back to look at your face, both hands. "Don't even ask me. I'll be there."

Your eyes were bright. "Okay," you said.

"Okay," he said.

"I FOUND IT," Daphne announced, from the kitchen. "I ALSO FOUND A BISCUIT. IS DIS MINE?"

"That's Daddy's," you called.

A pause.

"I already ate it," she said.

Nanami made a sound that was absolutely a laugh, and your face broke open against his chest, and you were both laughing in the living room room with the lego on the floor and Daphne in the kitchen already planning on how she'd reach the cookie jar, and the yellow duck onesie was in his hand, and the light was coming in through the big windows golden and warm.

She appeared in the doorway with the large red lego piece and a look of complete innocence.

"Got it," she said.

He crouched down. He took the piece from her. He looked at it with all the seriousness it deserved.

"Perfect," he said. "That's exactly the one."

She puffed up.

He looked at her and he looked up at you and he thought about a photograph in a cupboard of himself looking at his daughter like she was everything — because she was, she had always been, they both had always been — and he thought about a man in a hospital chair holding something small and precious with a face that was completely open and he thought:

This time I'll know what I'm doing with it.

"Come on," he said, to both of you. "Let's build something."

He deserved to figure it out. So did she. So does everyone — even if it takes a little longer than it should have.

810 AD, Spring, 10:09 A.M.

Sixteen, furious at the world and absolutely no one's sweetheart- Sukuna was, to put it plainly, a bear waiting to be poked. The abandonment issues and the judgment he caught for the way he looked didn't help matters either.

That's exactly why your father never understood your obsession with the little freak. The boy was poor and- well. four eyes. four arms. your father shuddered just thinking about it. no daughter of a Dainagon would so much as glance at something like that, let alone lose sleep over it

So, what does any loving and overprotective father do? He gets his men to discreetly execute the boy. obviously.

One cool night when the sun had long set and moon sat high and mighty- your father, an elegant noble man who loved you very dearly, picked up his pen and jotted instructions down on a paper.

He'd keep you safe. he always has, your pretty little head was too full of butterflies and fuji petals to know any better.

In two days, my daughter’s birthday will be held. You, my most trusted soldiers, will go and and capture Ryomen Sukuna. Do not return without success.

wait wait wait. i almost forgot! i should probably give some background about this whole crush on the village outcast thing huh?

806 AD, Spring, 3:12 P.M.

it all started when you were twelve.

afternoon sun filtered through the trees and the cool breeze provided some relief to the frenzied children. they took hide and seek very seriously.

"one...two...three..."

Hotaru counted to one hundred facing an old sakura tree. you and your friend Ume decided to hide together, so giggling and sweaty the both of you beelined it to the abandoned shed at the end of the meadow. usually you'd be too scared to hide there, but Ume was with you and in your eyes she was fearless or in your friend Masanori's, words 'badass'

why would you be scared exactly? well there was a rumor that the ghost of a young monster lived in the shed. the kids at school said his mother had been cursed and turned into a sakura tree. the woman was pregnant when it happened and when she, or more so the tree, gave birth, the child came out hideous. to protect her son from any danger the woman used the last of her strength to turn him into a ghost so that no one would ever be able to harm him.

stupid story right? that's what you'd always thought. it hardly made any sense. but still- the thought of a lonely child just wandering around made you feel something more than fear or sadness. you could never quite name what it was.

"Ready or not here i come, LOSERS!!!!" Hotaru screamed loud enough that the whole town must have heard, she was always so overly competitive. Ume shoved you behind the shed and flopped right next to you, both of you heaving.

"there's no way Hotaru will find us." Ume said between breaths. "she's too much of a scaredy cat to come here. she just pretends to be all tuff."

the two of you camped for a while till the sun hung lazy and low. you'd need to be heading home in the next twenty minutes. Ume had slipped away from her spot to go take a tinkle.

crunch.

you flinched, head whipping around. "Ume is that you?"

silence.

"if you're playing one of your pranks on me it's not funny. i don't want to be by this shed anymore, let's move spots. Ume?"

oh flip.

now you were getting scared. you stood up and like a complete horror movie character, started walking toward the noise anyway. found yourself stepping inside the shed before you'd even made the decision to.

the sight greeting you was a small back facing you, fluffy pink hair, and- wait. did he have four arms?

stepping away your back hit the wall and your breath caught in your throat. the person was short so it must've been a boy. oh gosh the stories were true. it's the little ghost boy. you expected to see the ugliest creature ever (like full on E.T. or smth) when he turned around- instead you were met with two pairs of scarlet eyes staring straight into yours.

"you are beautiful."

the words escaped your mouth before you even knew you'd formed them. you couldn't help it, truly. just looking at him made you want to melt into the shed floor, your limbs felt all gooey, your cheeks and the tips of your ears warm. something about him made your twelve year old heart do things it had absolutely no business doing.

the boy looked taken aback, all four of his eyes going wide for just a fraction of a second, and then his expression slammed shut like a door. the scowl that replaced it was practiced. comfortable. like a thing he wore so often it had shaped itself to his face. his very pretty face. he pulled the dagger from his belt and took a step forward, slow and deliberate, the kind of step that was meant to make you stumble backward.

"What was that you dared utter?" his voice was low and careful, the way someone is careful when they are trying very hard to be frightening. "Do you truly believe flattery will spare your life, child? Your lies are as worthless as you are."

the light was on but absolutely nobody was home.

you heard none of it. not a single syllable. your eyes had found those four scarlet ones and simply refused to leave. up close they were even more extraordinary — deep and red like the inside of a pomegranate, ringed with the kind of thick dark lashes that girls at court spent hours trying to achieve with powder and brushes. every time he blinked they swept down slow and pretty and you felt your brain turn completely to soup. so this is love?

his hair was so fluffy. you wanted to touch it so badly it was actually painful, your fingers twitched helplessly by your sides.

"the hell are you staring at—"

"pink's my favourite colour."

the words came out dreamy and distant like you were half asleep. somewhere in the back of your mind you were aware this was perhaps not the ideal thing to say to someone holding a dagger. that part of your mind was unfortunately very far away right now.

the boy stared at you. a long, disbelieving stare, like he was waiting for the rest of the sentence that would make this make sense.

it did not come.

"What is this nonsense?" something almost offended flickered across his face. "You truly must be insane. i do not care about your favourite anything, girl!"

at this point your irises had absolutely turned into literal hearts. he talked all funny. How cute!

"don't you see?" you breathed, gesturing between the two of you like you were explaining something very important and very obvious. "pink is my favourite colour and your hair is pink. it must be a sign from the Gods." a dreamy little sigh escaped your lips before you could stop it.

then you introduced yourself.

you announced your name with the kind of bright toothy smile normally reserved for festival days, one hand pressed politely to your chest the way your etiquette tutors had taught you. something in the way you said it- the cadence of it, the name itself - must have placed you immediately because two of his four eyes twitched at once. a noble's daughter. here. beaming at him like he was something wonderful.

your hand shot out between you, palm open and waiting.

in all honesty it wasn't entirely out of courtesy. you just wanted to feel his hand in yours. just once. he was so pretty it was making you feel a little insane. gosh you hoped your hands weren't clammy, that would be embarrassed but it would make a great story at your wedding.

he looked at your hand. then at your face. then at your hand again.

"You-" he seemed to be having some difficulty. "I have a dagger."

"i know! you're left handed, that's so cool." you wiggled your outstretched fingers encouragingly. "i'm right handed myself, hence-"

he did not take your hand. you were not particularly deterred.

"what's your name?" you asked, retracting nothing, least of all your enthusiasm. "i bet it's really cute."

something behind those scarlet eyes short circuited visibly. he opened his mouth. closed it. the dagger had drifted down an inch — not on purpose, you suspected. more like his body had simply forgotten what it was supposed to be doing. he had clearly never encountered this specific problem before and had no tools for it.

he turned and walked away.

you followed him.

"hey wait! i didn't catch your name!"

"i did not give it." flat. not breaking stride.

"that's okay! i'll just come up with one." you fell into step beside him like this was a perfectly normal afternoon stroll and not a twelve year old chasing a ghost boy out of a haunted shed. you tapped your chin thoughtfully. "you look like a...Nao. are you a Ren? maybe a Takamori?"

he stopped walking.

his jaw was tight. a vein in his temple was having a genuinely terrible time. slowly he turned to look at you with an expression that had run completely out of patience.

"Leave. Me. Alone."

you gasped softly. even angry he was the prettiest thing you'd ever seen in your entire life.

"so you're not a Nao or Ren." you said solemnly. "noted. i'll figure it out."

Somehow you ended up loosing him. You followed him deeper into the meadow. Yapping his ears off about the most minute details of your life, and yes you knew it was unwise not to talk to strangers let alone tell them all your business but this boy was no stranger, you could feel that in your bones. He was your soulmate!

when you didn't here the occasional huff of annoyance any more you stood very still.

your hands found your cheeks. they were warm. embarrassingly warm. you could feel the heat radiating off them like you'd sat too close to a fire and honestly you had, just a different kind.

you spun around twice just to be sure, scanning the tree line with the desperate energy of someone who had just lost something very very precious and very very pink. nothing. he was simply gone, the way beautiful things sometimes are, cruelly and without warning.

you pressed your hands harder against your burning cheeks.

you didn't even get his name.

you had given him yours. you had told him your favourite colour, your favourite season, your feelings about plum blossom versus cherry blossom- cherry blossom obviously but plum blossom had a certain charm- your completely honest thoughts about your language tutor, the names you'd already been quietly saving up for your future children, and a fairly detailed description of where you imagined your wedding ceremony taking place as well as how you wanted your wedding robes to be the same shade as his hair.

and you didn't even know what to call him.

well.

you looked out at the tree line, lips pursed, thinking very hard for approximately four seconds.

Pinky Pie, you decided. you would call him Pinky Pie until further notice. it was perfect actually. it was him. you were incredibly good at this. the universe owed you a real name eventually but Pinky Pie would do for now.

it was fine. it was okay. this was not the end. the Gods had clearly put an enormous amount of effort into this afternoon and they were absolutely not done yet. you were going to see him again, you felt it in your fingers and your toes and somewhere deep behind your ribs where things just knew.

you also still had very important questions about the arms, like who needs so many-

"WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN!"

Ume appeared from thin air and seized your wrist, dragging you backward through the grass with the energy of someone who had converted a solid hour of worry into pure irritation.

"i've been looking for you EVERYWHERE. we won by the way, no thanks to you—" she stopped abruptly and squinted at your face. "why are you so red?!"

"i'm not red." you said, which was an enormous lie.

Ume opened her mouth. then closed it. then filed it away with the very efficient system she had for things you weren't telling her yet.

the others were calling and the sun was melting gold into the hills and she dragged you off through the grass before you could float any further away.

you looked back once at the meadow.

soon, Pinky Pie, you thought, with the complete unshakeable confidence of someone who had already decided how the story ended.

very very soon.

806 AD, Spring, 14:25pm

you had thought about him every single day.

not in a small manageable way either. in the way that had completely colonised the inside of your head and evicted everything else. #he was living rent free in your cranium. your calligraphy tutor had said your name three times last tuesday before you heard her. ume had waved her hand in front of your face at lunch and gotten nothing. your favourite attendant had given you a look that morning while fixing your hair.

you were unbothered. you were in love. these things happened.

three weeks and four days after the shed you went back to the meadow.

the long path home from calligraphy just happened to go past the edge of town. past the old shrine gate. past the place where the houses got quiet and the air got a little thick and strange and the birds stopped singing past a certain point for reasons nobody talked about openly.

most people found that part of town unsettling.

you found it had very nice afternoon light actually.

he wasn't at the shed when you got there. you stood in front of it with your hands clasped, considering, remembering the way he'd looked standing inside it three weeks ago. four scarlet eyes. fluffy pink hair. four arms. the dagger. the scowl. the way he'd said leave me alone like you were the most exhausting thing that had ever happened to him.

you sighed dreamily.

you turned around and he was already there, leaning against the ginkgo tree like he owned it, arms crossed, two of them anyway, watching you with the expression of someone who had been there a while and was deeply unimpressed by what they'd seen.

your heart did a full cartwheel.

"you're here!" you said, with exactly as much delight as you felt. which was an enormous amount.

"this is where i live." he said plainly, like girl duh.

"i know! i came to find you."

the look he gave you could have curdled milk. "why."

"because i wanted to." you sat down in the grass nearby, robes smoothed neatly beneath you, perfectly comfortable, completely unbothered by the fact that he was staring at you like you'd just announced something insane. which you hadn't. wanting to see someone was very normal. this was fine.

"what," he said slowly, "are you doing."

"sitting."

"why."

"my feet are tired." your feet were completely fine. "also you're here."

he stared at you for a long moment. then he looked away. his jaw did the tight thing you'd already started to recognise. the strange heavy feeling in the air around him shifted slightly, like something exhaling.

you had brought something from home, wrapped carefully in cloth and tucked in your sleeve all morning. you set it in the grass between you like a peace offering.

"i brought you something. sweet rice cake from the good place near the east gate, the old woman there uses proper red bean paste, not the thin watery kind, very important distinction-"

"i don't want it."

"okay!" you left it there anyway.

then you started talking.

about your calligraphy lesson. about the poem your literature tutor had made you memorise and what was specifically wrong with it. about the baby bird ume had hidden in her sleeve through an entire afternoon of lessons before it escaped during the quiet reading portion and pecked the teacher in the back of the neck.. about the dream you'd had where all your teeth fell out and whether that was an omen or just your brain being strange.

he said nothing.

he also didn't leave.

he stayed against his tree with the afternoon light coming through the ginkgo leaves above him, scarlet eyes somewhere in the middle distance, and you talked and talked and talked and he said absolutely nothing and somehow it was the nicest afternoon you'd had in a very long time.

at some point you noticed the cloth between you was empty.

you looked up at him. he was very busy looking at the tree line. very focused on it actually. extremely interested in those particular trees right now.

you looked back at the empty cloth.

you said nothing. you were twelve but you were not stupid. some things were better left alone. some things were like butterflies — you had to pretend not to see them or they'd fly away.

so you just kept talking, softer now, chin in your hand, watching the light go gold.

when it got low enough that you knew your attendant would be starting to pace you stood up, smoothed your robes, and said goodbye the same cheerful way you said everything.

"same time next week?" you asked.

"no." he said, not looking at you.

"perfect." you said. "see you then."

you were almost back to the path when you heard it. the tiniest sound. barely anything at all. somewhere between a scoff and something that didn't have a name yet.

you kept walking.

you smiled the whole way home.

that night you lay on your futon staring at the ceiling with your hands pressed to your cheeks, feet kicking slowly in the air behind you.

best. date. ever.

807 AD, Summer, 13:52pm

a year was a long time.

a year was also somehow not very long at all when you measured it in stolen afternoons and one sided conversations and a boy who never once told you to come back but never once told you to stay away either.

you had a system now. calligraphy on tuesdays meant the long way home. temple visits on thursdays meant a detour through the meadow. any other excuse your twelve, now thirteen, year old brain could manufacture meant a trip to the ginkgo tree where he was sometimes there and sometimes wasn't and when he wasn't you sat in the grass anyway and waited and approximately seventy percent of the time he showed up eventually pretending he hadn't been anywhere in particular. he was dependable or more so predictable, you liked that in a man.

you had never once pointed this out. butterfly rule.

ume was suspicious. ume was always suspicious. she had the instincts of a girl three times her age and the patience to wait you out and you were running out of deflections. but that was a problem for another day.

today you had something important to do.

you had been working up to it for weeks actually. the name had lived in your head for a full year now, warm and private, and something about keeping it only in there had started to feel insufficient. he deserved to know. it was a good name. you had put genuine thought into it.

he was at the tree when you arrived, which was the seventy percent. sitting this time rather than leaning, back against the bark, one of his four hands turning a stone over and over. he looked up when he heard you coming through the grass and his expression did the thing it always did. starting at something almost neutral before remembering it was supposed to be a scowl and correcting itself.

you found this absolutely precious. you had never told him that.

"you're here!" you said.

"you say that every time." he said. "as though it is surprising."

"it's always a little surprising." you sat down across from him, closer than you used to sit a year ago, close enough now that you could have reached out and touched the hem of his sleeve if you'd wanted to. you hadn't. yet. "good surprising though."

he looked at you for a moment with those four scarlet eyes and then looked back at his stone.

you had brought sweet rice cake again. you always brought sweet rice cake. you set it between you and he always said he didn't want it and it was always gone by the time you left and this had become so routine that neither of you even acknowledged the script anymore, you just set it down and moved on.

"i've been calling you something." you said, after a moment.

he didn't look up. "i am aware. you have called me several things. none of them my name."

"in my head i mean. i have a name for you. in my head." you paused. "i've decided to tell you what it is."

now he looked up. something cautious moved through his expression. "...why?"

"because you should know." you said, very reasonably. "it's yours after all."

he stared at you. the stone had stopped turning. "i already have a name."

"that you won't tell me." you pointed out.

his jaw tightened. he had no response to this because it was simply true and you both knew it.

you took a small breath.

"Pinky Pie." you said.

the silence that followed was very loud.

he looked at you with an expression you had never seen on his face before, which was impressive because you had catalogued quite a few of them by now. this one was new. this one was a specific kind of stillness that preceded something, like the air before lightning.

"what." he said. very quietly.

"Pinky Pie." you repeated, maintaining full eye contact, completely serene. "that's what i call you. in my head. and now out loud. i think it suits you."

"it." he stopped. started again. "it does not."

"it really does though."

"i am not—" he seemed to be having some difficulty locating the correct words for how wrong this was. one of his upper eyes was twitching. "i am not a Pinky Pie."

"you have pink hair." you said helpfully.

"i am aware of the colour of my own hair-"

"and you're sweet." you added.

the twitching stopped. everything stopped. he looked at you like you had just said something in a language he didn't speak and his brain was still working on the translation.

"i am," he said, very carefully, "not sweet."

"you ate my rice cake every single week for a whole year." you said. "and you never once actually made me leave." you tilted your head at him, chin in your hand. "that's pretty sweet Pinky Pie."

the expression that crossed his face in the next three seconds was genuinely extraordinary. you watched it move through him like weather- the outrage, the denial, the scramble for something cutting to say, and then underneath all of that, buried so fast you almost missed it, something small and flustered that he absolutely did not want you to see. did he have to be so adorable?

he looked away so quickly his hair moved.

"that name," he said, to the tree line, with great dignity, "will never leave this meadow."

"of course." you agreed very seriously.

"if you utter it anywhere near another living person—"

"i would never."

"i mean it."

"Pinky Pie i would never." you said, and the way you slipped the name in so naturally made him turn back with an expression of pure betrayal that you met with your most innocent smile.

he made a sound low in his throat. looked away again. one of his four hands had come up to push his pink hair out of his face in a gesture that felt almost — self conscious. almost. it was gone very quickly.

you watched him with your chin in your hand and felt that warm squeezing thing happen behind your ribs, bigger than usual, bigger than it had been a year ago when it had started.

it was getting harder to keep things butterfly-rule quiet.

"same time next week?" you asked, when the light started going low.

he picked his stone back up. turned it over once. "i make no such agreements."

"love you too Pinky Pie." you said cheerfully, standing and smoothing your robes.

the sound he made at that was truly spectacular. you were going to think about it all the way home.

you did.

best date ever, you thought, for the approximately three hundredth time.

number one still belonged to the sweet rice cake afternoon but this one was a very strong second.

807 AD, Autumn, 12:43pm

to be clear, you were not supposed to be at the market.

noble daughters of Dainagon did not wander the market ward unattended. this was a known and established fact that you were aware of and had chosen not to apply to yourself today because ume had described the new fabric stall near the east gate in such detail that you had simply needed to see it with your own eyes. your attendant thought you were in the garden. your father thought you were at your calligraphy lesson. everyone was happy.

you had your eye on a particularly beautiful bolt of silk, deep blue, the colour of the sky just before it decided to become night, when the person beside you made a sharp sound.

you turned.

a hooded figure. small. quick. already moving away through the crowd with something tucked under their arm before the merchant had even finished processing what had happened.

the merchant processed it.

"thief!"

now here is where a sensible person- a noble daughter, for instance, who was not supposed to be here- would have stepped back and let the matter sort itself out. you were already moving.

you were a fast runner. ume had always said so, usually while failing to keep up with you. you ducked under elbows and around baskets and through the crowd with a focus that would have impressed your physical tutors if they had known you possessed it, eyes fixed on the hooded figure weaving ahead.

they were fast too. but you were faster.

you caught up at the edge of the market where the stalls gave way to the quieter lane behind the old granary, and you grabbed the back of their hood without fully thinking through what came after the grabbing part.

the figure stopped.

turned around.

the hood fell back.

pink hair. four eyes. a look on his face that cycled through surprise, recognition, and extreme displeasure in about half a second.

oh.

"Pinky Pie." you said, slightly out of breath.

"you." the displeasure won out. "why are you-" he stopped. looked at your hand still clutching the back of his hood. looked at your face. "why did you chase me."

"you took something." you said.

"i am aware of what i did."

"from the person next to me."

"also aware."

you looked at him. he looked at you. you both looked at the thing tucked under two of his four arms which was, upon closer inspection, a small bundle of food. rice. a couple of wrapped portions of something. nothing extravagant.

something settled quietly in your chest.

"are you hungry?" you asked.

his expression did something complicated and fast that he shut down immediately. "that is none of your concern."

"it's a simple question."

"and i am choosing not to answer it." he pulled his hood back up with sharp dignity, which was impressive given the circumstances. "let go of my hood."

you let go of his hood.

he straightened himself up and looked at you with the expression of someone who would very much like for this interaction to be over. you looked back at him with the expression of someone who had just run halfway across the market ward and was not going anywhere.

"how much was it worth." you said.

"i told you it's none of—"

"how much Pinky Pie."

the vein in his temple. hello old friend.

he told you. grudgingly. like the words had to be pulled out one at a time.

you reached into your sleeve, produced the right amount, and held it out to him.

he stared at it. "what is that."

"it's the money. so you didn't steal it. so if anyone asks you paid for it." you said. "take it."

"i don't want your money."

"i know." you said. "take it anyway."

he looked at the money. then at you. then at the money again. his jaw was doing the tight thing. all four of his eyes had an expression in them that you couldn't entirely read, something tangled up and complicated that he was working very hard to keep off his face.

"i don't need your pity." he said. low and quiet and with an edge to it.

"it's not pity." you said, just as quiet. "it's just money. and you're just hungry. and i have enough." you kept your hand out steady between you. "just take it."

a long moment.

he took it.

he didn't say thank you. you didn't expect him to. he looked away down the lane, hood up, money tucked somewhere in his sleeve, food still under two of his arms.

"you shouldn't be at the market alone." he said, after a moment. still not looking at you. "noble daughters don't come here unattended."

"this one does apparently." something moved across his profile that might- very briefly, very quietly, have been the ghost of something almost warm.

"you're going to cause yourself trouble one day." he said.

"probably." you agreed happily.

he looked at you then. just for a moment. all four eyes. the complicated thing still in them but quieter now, settled. then he pulled his hood further up and turned to go.

"Pinky Pie." you called after him. he stopped but didn't turn around.

"same time tuesday." you said.

he walked away. you stood at the edge of the lane watching him disappear and felt that warm squeezing thing behind your ribs, bigger than usual. then you smoothed your robes and headed back into the market to find that silk.

you had completely forgotten about the silk.

807 AD, Winter, 10:47am

Freezing. it was cold enough to crack an egg and it would immediately freeze, like literally you were watching the chefs make breakfast and your egg froze before it even touched the pan.

so why were you currently layering you clothes and putting your boots on? well you had to go see your favourite guy of course! its been weeks or has it been a month since you've seen the grumpy chap? it was hard to tell with the increase in duties. Your father also started having more time for you suddenly which did play a role in distracting you.

in all honesty these past few days you've been really tired, bags under your eyes tired. why you might me thinking to yourself again? well because of the face he made that day. he looked so...sad. the thought of your Pinky pie going hungry all this time broke you. he probably needed those rice cakes more than you could imagine. how was he doing now? without them for so long.

you were going to go to him. maybe buy something new for him too try, but a part of you was a little scared.

its like hes been avoiding you after you gave him money which is weird because you were only trying to help, but it did kind of make sense i mean your mother told you about how men relied on dignity or whatever and that they were born with egos bigger than their heads. she says thats why your father is such a big selfish basta-

"Sweetheartttt! are you decent? i have something to show you!"

your father's cheerful voice rang through the door. you smiled and opened it. he practically skipped into the room with a small cherry wood box in his hands, holding it out to you with the energy of someone who had been waiting to do this for quite some time.

As you can see, you got your optimism from him.

"it was supposed to be your birthday present but it arrived early and i simply could not wait. open it up!"

you popped the box open and inside sat a gorgeous necklace.

oh the Gods are hilarious.

how creative they are, the gem in the center was the same hypnotic colour as Pinky pies hair, though nothing could ever compare to your- i mean his lushes locks. The way they stood up and defied gravity, every thing about him was just so magical.

"I LOVE IT!!! EEEEEEK!"

you were basically frothing at the mouth. the whole wing probably heard you. your father beamed and laughed the big warm laugh he saved for moments like this. "only the best for my little girl." he leaned forward and fastened it around your neck himself, careful and gentle. "you must promise to wear it at all times, my delicate one."

Your mother always scolded the man when he'd call you that. 'delicate'. she'd argue that it made you sound fragile when you were anything but. She felt that it was condescending, her words not yours.

you nodded so eagerly your vision got all grainy. Darn low iron. you were already thinking about showing Pinky Pie. he was going to see it and think of his own hair and realise it was a sign from the Gods and then the wedding planning could really begin.

"oh and my little blossom." your father paused at the door, turning back with a smile that was somehow both warm and careful at the same time. "i want to discuss something with you when you come home from your lessons."

you were already too busy admiring the necklace to notice the careful part.

Pinky Pie was at the tree. seventy percent. dependable.

he was sitting with his back against the bark, two arms crossed over his chest, the other two tucked into his sleeves against the cold. his pink hair was as aggressively fluffy as ever despite the weather. he looked up when he heard you coming through the frosted grass and did the thing. almost neutral, remembers the scowl, corrects itself.

you had missed that thing so much.

"Pinky Pie!" you dropped into your usual spot, pulling your layers tighter. "i've missed you. have you been avoiding me? you have haven't you. it's about the market isn't it, i want you to know i wasn't trying to-"

you stopped.

he wasn't looking at your face.

he was looking at your neck. at the necklace. and something in his expression had shifted in a way you couldn't immediately name. not the scowl, not the controlled nothing he usually wore. something else. something you had never seen on his face before in all these months.

"what?" you said.

he didn't answer.

"Pinky Pie."

nothing. his eyes stayed on the necklace and the look in them was doing something complicated that he hadn't managed to shut down yet. in all these months he had always been so quick about that. always got his face back before you could read it properly.

right now he wasn't managing.

"do you like it?" you touched the pendant, suddenly self conscious in a way you couldn't explain. "my father gave it to me this morning. look at the colour-" you held it out toward him so he could see the pink gem properly, leaning forward slightly.

he stepped back.

not dramatically. not storming off. just one step. then another. until there was a distance between you that had never existed before, not in all the months of sitting in the grass together with the rice cake between you and the afternoons going quiet around you both.

you lowered your hand slowly.

"what's wrong?" you asked.

"nothing." flat.

"you stepped back."

"i'm standing."

"you stepped back when you saw the necklace-"

"i said i'm standing."

his eyes had gone to the middle distance. you had learned enough about him by now to know that was where he went when something got too close. you looked at him standing there in the cold with all that careful nothing on his face and felt something uncomfortable growing in your chest.

"did i do something wrong?" you asked.

"no."

"then why-"

"nothing is wrong." quiet. final.

you sat in the frost and looked at him standing further away than he had ever stood and went through everything you could think of. the market. the money. the weeks of avoiding. and now this, all because of a necklace your father had given you this morning that you had loved immediately because it was pink like his hair.

it didn't make sense.

none of it made sense and he wasn't going to tell you why and you didn't know how to ask in a way that would reach him through whatever wall had gone up so fast you'd almost missed it happening.

so you just sat there. and he just stood there. and the cold sat between you like a third person neither of you had invited.

he stayed the whole afternoon. he always stayed. but it was different today and you felt the difference in a way you couldn't find words for yet. He didnt touch the dango skewers you brought.

when the light went grey he left without ceremony.

he didn't look back.

you sat in the frost alone and held the pendant in your palm and stared at it for a long time.

and somehow the most important question that sat on your heart was "is he hungry?"

✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ

your father was in the main room when you got home.

he looked up when you came in and smiled and something about the smile was warm and careful at the same time. you had been too distracted this morning by the necklace to notice the careful part.

"my little blossom. sit with me."

you sat. hands folded. waiting.

"i want to ask you something." he said, in the gentle voice he used when he wanted you to know he wasn't angry before he said the thing. "and i want you to be honest with me."

"of course father."

"you were at the market recently." he said. "unattended."

you kept your face very still. "i only wanted to see the new fabric stall..."

"you were seen." he said. "giving money to a boy."

the room felt smaller.

"someone near me had something taken. i was only trying to help!"

"the boy with the pink hair." your father said. and the way he said it, slowly, like he had been holding it all day, made something cold settle in your stomach. "you know who he is?"

"i've seen him around." carefully. "i don't really know him."

your father looked at you for a long moment. "do you know what they say about that boy." he said. not a question.

you said nothing.

"they say his mother was cursed." your father said. "that she wasn't even human by the end of it. that whatever came out of that isn't human either. four eyes, four arms..." he shook his head slowly. "the priests won't go near that part of town anymore. did you know that? the animals won't either. dogs won't even bark in that direction." he paused. "there is something deeply wrong with that boy. something that has been wrong since before he was born. and the whole town knows it."

you thought about the heavy air near the ginkgo tree. the way birds stopped singing past a certain point. the way the shrine road always sat emptier than it should.

you thought about him walking alone at night because the days belonged to people who had decided they didn't want him in them.

"he didn't seem wrong to me." you said, very quietly.

your father's expression shifted. not angry. something more concerned than angry, which almost felt worse. "that is exactly what worries me my little blossom." he said. "you are young and you are kind and that is a beautiful thing. but kindness without wisdom can lead you somewhere you don't want to go." he leaned forward. "that boy is not someone you help. not someone you speak to. not someone you go near. do you understand me?"

you looked at your hands. "yes father."

he was quiet for a moment. then, "starting tomorrow you will have two of my men with you when you go out. just for peace of mind." a small smile. like it was nothing. like it was simply a kindness. "a Dainagon's daughter shouldn't be wandering unattended anyway. i should have arranged it sooner."

your head came up before you could stop it. "that isn't necessary-"

"it's already arranged." gently. warmly. like a door being closed very softly so you almost don't hear the click.

you sat very still.

"go rest before dinner." he said. "my little blossom."

you went to your room.

you sat on your futon and stared at the wall and thought about all of it. the things your father had said. the things the town said. the priests. the animals. the heavy air and the empty streets.

then you thought about tuesday afternoons and sweet rice cake disappearing without acknowledgement. you thought about him stepping back today. the look on his face before he managed to put the nothing back.

you took the necklace off.

you folded it into the bottom of your robe chest under three layers of silk and closed the lid.

then you lay on your futon and stared at the ceiling and thought about two guards who would be standing behind you from tomorrow onwards and a ginkgo tree that was now going to be very hard to get to.

next tuesday felt very far away. and very complicated.

807 AD, Winter, 08:10 A.M.

You were half way dressed when the whispers started. your attendants had the habit of forgetting you were there when they dressed you. You never really minded because you honestly enjoyed the gossip, its not like it was ever about someone you knew. until now that is.

you stared at yourself in the mirror while they spoke. your fathers gift sat prettily on your neck. Pink gem glittering in the light.

Its been two days since you've seen him and the thought that he'd be skinnier when you saw him had next played on your mind all night. has he stolen food again? does he miss you like you miss him?

the chatter behind you pulled you from your thoughts. "I heard the lady is going to the festival. her and the Lord had a huge fight, she threw a a shoe at him. almost hit his head." one of your attendants whispered the other gasped and paused her ministrations on your robe. "The lady has always been remarkably feisty, i admire her strength even in times like these..."the other responded.

CLANK! BOOM! POW!

hairpins one the floor, accessories scattered in your wake as you ran out the room. Hair standing up in several places and robe going every which way, when you busted into your parents bedroom to see your mother styling her hair and your father impeccably dressed as always, pacing around the room, and a shoe laying on the floor. your mouth moved before your brain. "YOU CANT GO! YOU JUST CANT. I WONT ALLOW IT!"

"pffffft!"

one thing about your mother is she was not serious .her hand went up to cover her mouth as she snickered, she was always so effortlessly elegant. your father paused his pacing and looked at you. up then down. it was obvious what he was thinking i mean with the way you were looking?

he wanted to rip out his hair and just yell. say something on the lines of "girl. call yo fucking uber, look at your hAiR! you look an absolute mess and the hell do you mean 'allow'? im having a tough day as is with you're mother being stubborn and now i have to deal with my spawn doing the same thing. fuck my stupid fucking chungus life."

but lucky for you your father was a man of patients or at least he tried, he sided eyed your mother who was still giggling but had went back to doing her hair, he took a deep breath and walked over to you. he knelt down so he reached about eye level or at least he was closer to your eyes than he would be standing and took both your hands in his.

his eyes locked onto the necklace you were wearing. before they made their way to your eyes, "My jewel, you know why i gave you this necklace other than a birthday gift?" his voice was soft and soothing. you stayed silent for a moment, "No...i dont."

"I gave it to you to protect you. It was your mothers grandmothers. i had to import it from her village far away. it deters cursed spirits and oni. i love you so much that i will do anything in my power to protect you. the same goes for your mother, but id never clip her wings nor yours. this is her choice and there will be two physicians comming with us. now finished getting dressed and fix your hair, we are leaving in an hour and a half. do not forget to bring something to offer."

he placed a gentle kiss on your forehead and stood up. your mother had watched the entire thing with a soft smile on her face. when she started coughing your father rushed to her side and your heart panged.

when you were back in your room, the ladies continuing their work on you after apologising profusely for their insolence, the only thing you could think of was the necklace.

did your father know more than he was letting on? why else would he give a necklace that protected you from cursed spirits unless he knew there was more to the story of you and the pink haired boy.

then your mind wandered to your mother, she was anything but fragile, well that's how she used to be at least. Now...now you don't know.

✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ

Stepping out of the carriage, you had to stop yourself from petting the oxen, they were just so fluffy! you just wanted to hug their big chubby faces when they'd release little puffs of hair that looked like tiny clouds of smoke in the cold air. they were just too cute. (now i want a pet ox)