Chapter Text
Some sort of window to your right
As he goes left and you stay right
Between the lines of fear and blame
You begin to wonder why you came
She experiences the weeks after the accident hours at a time. At first, only physicians and nurses visit her room, tending to her broken leg and monitoring her recovery from a concussion. Usually she never sleeps more than a few hours, making the most of her time to practice, to study, to still find time to spend with her friends; she can’t stand the long nights that the doctors insist on, and she lies awake in the darkness often.
There is nothing to do but replay the events of her fight with Sunny—and everything else that led to it, the weeks of incessant practicing, the way she had ignored his frustration. The medication she’s on dulls everything, but she can feel the roaring tide of unrelenting rage beneath the calm surface of her mind.
She dreads facing the others, not knowing what they know about the accident, not knowing what Sunny and Basil told them. But when they finally start to visit her, she is grateful just to have something to grasp on to that isn’t unthinking anger.
Hero comes first, of course, and between long companionable silences, he recounts the story in short steps. Sunny had come running to his house, but he hadn’t been there—off running an errand in town—so instead he had found Kel picking out an outfit for that night. Hero had gotten a call from his brother, and he’d heard Sunny’s voice over the phone, repeating Mari over and over in an unsteady rhythm. He had run to the Suzukis’ house and found her there, lying at the bottom of the stairs, severely hurt.
That’s all he knows.
The others visit her the next day, Kel bursting in through the door without knocking, Aubrey running in after him, Basil lurking behind both of them guiltily. None of them exactly explain their side of what had happened, but she gathers piecemeal that they know as little as Hero. Only Kel seems curious, but Aubrey whacks him upside the head when he asks, telling him off for being so rude. It isn’t like Mari wants to relate the story just now, anyway.
Eventually Kel and Aubrey bid their farewells and leave, and she is alone with Basil. He hasn’t said a word the whole time, only trembling and stammering quietly, but evidently unable to piece together a sentence. For a moment, he turns to go as well, but he stops at the door, caught in indecision. Eventually he glances back at her, terror in his eyes, and finally speaks.
“S-Sunny...” he says falteringly, a tremor in his voice. “H-he wouldn’t hurt you, r-r-right? It m-must have been...s-something else...something b-behind him...”
What could she say?
He leaves her too, refusing to know the truth.
They come to visit a few more times over the next weeks, as the date of her release from the hospital approached. Summer is almost over now; she missed some of it to her injury and the rest to practicing the same duet again and again, but her friends catch her up on the fun they had. They’ve long since moved on from wondering how she’d fallen, looking to the future instead.
Kel talks excitedly about going to the beach once Mari is discharged, getting in one last day of fun before school starts again. He eagerly sets out everything they’ll do to make the most of her newfound freedom (including, when Hero wasn’t around, the elaborate Orange Joe heist he had planned).
Aubrey explains how she’s saved up money all summer so she could buy supplies to dye her hair. She’s experimented with her new friend, Kim, to make sure she’ll get it right when she does their hair in matching colors—pink with a purple streak for her, purple with a pink streak for Mari.
Hero describes the celebratory dinner he’s planned for her first night back at home, to make up for the bland hospital diet she’d been on. When they’re alone, he mentions offhandedly (with so much weight behind it) that he’s been studying late into the night to get accepted by her dream school.
Basil never comes to visit again.
Sunny never comes to visit at all.
He knows we should, but what could he say?
Basil should have explained what Sunny was feeling, what he was trying to communicate, the way he always did. But when he had led Hero and Kel to find her broken body lying on the ground, she was alone. Basil wasn’t there; nor were the remains of the violin. It could’ve been an accident. They don’t have to know that she had been pushed, or that she had pushed him to that point.
It’s just as he had hoped, wasn’t it? Mari will recover, eventually. Her knee won’t sustain much, but that’s hardly different from how it had been before. And from what the others tell him when they visit, standing on the other side of his bedroom door, things are almost back to normal. Hero, Kel, and Aubrey still hang out together, and sometimes they manage to drag Basil along with them, although he never sounds like he’s having much fun.
The others don’t know the truth; all that weighs on their minds is waiting for Mari to be released and for Sunny to leave his room. In the end, he’ll be the only piece missing from their group, once Mari recovers and once Basil moves on, like everybody else is trying so hard to do. This is as it should be, he knows. They’ll be better off without him.
It only really hurts that they won’t leave him alone, though he’s certain they want to. They keep trying to invite him along with them to Hobbeez, to the supermarket, to the old hangout spot, to the treehouse. Kel talks about going to the beach, Aubrey talks about a new friend she’s made, Hero talks about a party for the day Mari comes home.
It sickens him, knowing that they’ve written him into all of these plans. They’ll be disappointed when he doesn’t come along, but they should have already moved on. He’s careful to stay silent whenever they visit, the only sign of his presence the split second when he opens the door and takes his mother’s food that they’ve brought up for him. It couldn’t be more obvious that he wants to be forgotten. But they just keep coming back .
After an eternity of days spent sulking in his room, waiting for the inevitable visit, one finally goes by without them. Then another, a few days later. He knows Mari will be out of the hospital soon, and they’re preparing to give her a warm welcome when she does. Part of him knows she deserves it, for going through everything she has, perhaps (selfishly) for keeping his secret.
Part of him hates that she won’t tell anyone, because he knows the only reason is that she’d have to explain why he had been so angry. She can’t ruin her perfect image, after all, so better to let it stay an “accident”, better to let them wonder why Sunny won’t talk to anyone, until they accept that he’s not coming back.
He is lost in this tangle of feelings, hate and misery and annoyance spilling from the memory of a day he cannot escape, when he hears a soft tap on the door that stops his heart.
Hero knocks firmly, Aubrey a little more hesitantly. Kel doesn’t knock and just starts talking, while Basil doesn’t knock because he never comes alone. But the soft little tap-tap at the door, the second a fraction louder than the first, is reserved for him and Mari. It’s the rhythm with which he would poke on her arm when he was younger, in time with the rapid beating of his heart. A sign that he needed help. And when she returned it, it was a sign that her heart was beating with his, that she understood the abundance of noise or light that had overwhelmed him. A sign that help was there.
“Sunny?” she says, her voice muffled by the door but unmistakable. He says nothing in reply. “I—I’m home.”
Long seconds go by as reality sets in.
“Hero made dinner,” she adds. “The others are downstairs...did you want to join us?”
How is he supposed to look at her? How is he supposed to share a room with her?
“Hero told me that you haven’t left your room since—”
They both go quiet for a while, thinking of things left unsaid.
“I...would really appreciate it you came out for a bit.” It’s hard to gauge through the door, but she sounds muted, quietly concerned. “Everyone has missed you.”
Maybe if he doesn’t talk, she’ll go away. It works with the others.
“... I really missed you.”
She doesn’t say anything more after that, and eventually the shadow at the door moves away. He hears her take the stairs slowly, wondering absentmindedly if she’s still on crutches. Distantly, he knows he should feel bad about that. Or, at least, that he should feel something about it.
He hasn’t felt anything, fully, since she fell. Only emotions he doesn’t understand, that he wishes he didn’t have, cascading beneath his waking mind, burying him in a flood at night. He lies in his bed and wishes he could repress it all, that he could feel none of it. He hates wishing he could tell Mari how much he misses her, how much he hates her, how much he needs her, how much he despises her. He hates the subdued urge that rises when his friends visit, that rises now as he hears them talking and laughing downstairs—to leave his room, to go with them, to try to explain what he has done.
He closes his eyes and stares into endless darkness, praying for these remnants of feeling to leave him, for his fear, anger, sorrow, and hope to fade and leave him cold and untouchable. He slips into sleep, overrun by sentiments that he cannot hold back.
He wakes in the dream, and finds himself in an empty white room.