Chapter Text
The classroom smelled like crayon wax and floor cleaner, which Shoko had decided was the smell of institutional optimism. She had been sitting in a chair designed for someone about a third of her height for four minutes now, and her lower back was already filing a formal complaint.
Across the table, Yamamoto-sensei wore the expression of a woman choosing her words very carefully. Shoko recognized the expression. She used it herself when she had bad news and a patient wasn't going to take it well.
"Ieiri-san." A pause. "Hina is a wonderful child."
"But," Shoko added.
Yamamoto-sensei blinked. "Sorry?"
"You said but with your face. Go ahead."
Another pause. Then the teacher folded her hands on the table. "Two days ago, during free play, Hina became frustrated when another child took her coloring book. And the window-" she gestured, briefly, toward the far wall "-cracked. From the inside."
Shoko looked at the window. A single fracture, thin as a strand of hair, running diagonally across the lower pane. Someone had placed a strip of tape over it, which solved absolutely nothing structurally but presumably made the school feel better about itself. Yamamoto-sensei, meanwhile, appeared to be bracing for a response.
"Now, I don't want to jump to conclusions, but—"
"Was anyone hurt?" Shoko interjected. Maybe a bit too impatiently.
"No, but—"
"Does she participate? Pay attention? Complete her work?"
"She does, but—"
"Has Hina been disruptive otherwise? Unkind to the other children?"
The teacher hesitated. "Well, yesterday she told the other children that their drawings are anatomically incorrect."
Shoko raised a brow. "Are they?"
The woman across from her opened her mouth, then closed it. "...frequently, yes."
"Then I'd call that honesty, not disruption." Shoko pulled her bag onto her shoulder and stood up, which was an immediate relief to her spine. "I'll cover the costs of the repairs. Just send the invoice to my address. It won't happen again."
Yamamoto-sensei looked faintly surprised that the meeting was already over. She opened her mouth again, but Shoko was already halfway to the door.
*
Hina was waiting outside the classroom with her backpack on and her arms crossed, which was a posture she had perfected at approximately age three and deployed ever since. She had Shoko's cinnamon-brown eyes, her father's white hair, and absolutely no one's permission to be this unsettling at only five years old.
"I know," Hina said immediately. Pouting as if that would change anything.
"Do you now?"
"It was an accident!"
"I figured." Shoko held out her hand, and Hina took it, and they walked down the hall together. "You still have to be careful."
"I was being careful."
"Careful enough that a window didn't crack?"
Hina made a sound, something resembling a huff. Shoko squeezed her hand in return. Hina, who had learned her mother's vocabulary of small gestures, understood it perfectly.
Outside, the afternoon had turned gray, threatening rain without fully committing to it. Shoko stopped on the steps, shifted her bag to her other shoulder, and pulled out her pack of cigarettes. The first drag, as always, felt like a promise of relief from the headache already building behind her eyes.
"Those are bad for you," Hina reminded her with a small frown.
"I'm well aware."
"Utahime-san said—"
"Utahime-san is correct, and I've heard the speech about a billion times."
Hina mulled it over, apparently decided there was no winning it, and sat down on the step instead. She picked at a loose thread on her sleeve. Her hair caught the grayness above and did something luminous and infuriating with it, the way Shoko had never quite gotten used to.
She watched her daughter, took another drag and allowed it to settle in her bloodstream.
*
Third year had ended. The exams were over. Shoko had been awake for twenty-six hours and some fundamental part of her had simply detached and was floating somewhere near the ceiling, looking down at her body going through its motions with polite disinterest. This was what medical school did to you. She had been warned. She had not been warned enough, it seemed.
"You need to go outside," Suguru said, leaning in the doorway of her dorm room with that particular expression he wore when he had made a decision on her behalf and was now presenting it as a suggestion. "You need to interact with the world."
"I interact with the world every day," Shoko said. "I interact with its injuries."
"That's not what I mean and you know it."
He took her to a bar in Shinjuku that was too loud and too warm and full of people having emotions Shoko no longer had the bandwidth to process. She drank one glass, and then another, and somewhere around the third the edges of herself went soft in a way that wasn't entirely unpleasant.
She noticed him the way you noticed the weather. As if his presence alone changed the atmosphere in the room. White hair that should have looked strange, but didn't. Laughing too hard at something, a little performative, the laugh of someone who had learned laughter as a second language.
Their eyes met across the room. His laughter faltered.
The shade of blue stood out the most to her. Peculiar, but magnetic.
She looked away first.
But later, much later, when Suguru had gone home - only after making sure she was sober enough to get home on her own - the bar had thinned out. She was putting on her coat when she glanced up. He was still there, even though most people had long since gone home. Leaning against the wall, hands in his pockets, watching her with an expression she didn't have a name for and didn't try to find one.
"You've been here all night," she pointed out.
"So have you," he countered.
She didn't ask his name. He didn't ask hers.
He opened the door for her. She followed.
He rubbed his neck, and nodded towards the bus stop.
"My place's not that far."
She nodded in response.
The short ride was mostly spent in silence - particularly from her side.
"I usually walk."
"Hm."
"...But it's a nice night for the bus."
His leg bounced. She noticed it, thought little of it, and looked back out the window.
His apartment was on the fourth floor of a building that looked no different from any other. He fished for his keys in his pocket. The first attempt missed the lock.
"Sorry," he muttered, more to the door than to her. The door barely clicked shut when she kissed him.
She left before he woke up. It felt easier that way.
*
"Mama."
Shoko came back to the steps, to the gray afternoon, the cigarette still between her fingers. Hina was looking up at her with those dark eyes that somehow always felt like a question Shoko wasn't prepared to answer.
"What?"
Hina shrugged, then kicked an invisible rock. "You were somewhere else."
"I'm here, silly," Shoko replied with an amused exhale. She dropped the cigarette and pressed it out under her heel. "Come on. Utahime should be there by six."
Hina's expression shifted immediately—the small private brightness reserved for a short list of people. "Is she staying for dinner?"
"Probably. You know how she is."
Hina shuddered, as if remembering the inevitable. "She'll make me eat vegetables again, though."
"She'll try."
Hina nodded seriously, as though this were a known and manageable risk, and took Shoko's outstretched hand as they started towards the station. Her white hair caught every bit of light the afternoon had left. Shoko found herself tightening her grip around Hina's hand.
*
Utahime was already at her apartment when they got there, which required no explanation — she also had a key, obtained through a campaign of sustained concern that Shoko had eventually surrendered to purely out of exhaustion. She was two years her senior, had finished her undergraduate degree with the kind of quiet competence that made everyone around her feel vaguely inadequate. She had responded to the news of Shoko's pregnancy with nearly forty-five minutes of panic followed by a complete reorganization of her priorities.
Currently, she was reorganizing Shoko's refrigerator.
"You're stress-cleaning my fridge again," Shoko called from the doorway, ushering Hina inside. They both left their bags at the entrance and switched their outdoor shoes for house slippers.
"I'm restocking your fridge. There's a difference! And don't think I didn't notice there was nothing in here but leftover pizza and what I genuinely hope is yogurt."
Utahime turned around, and whatever lecture she was preparing dissolved the moment Hina barreled into her at knee level.
"Utahime-san! I cracked a window!"
The older woman blinked, eyes darting from Shoko to Hina. For a moment, she considered scolding the mother instead, but she'd have to save that conversation for later.
Right now, the little criminal was her first priority.
"Hina, sweetie..."
"It wasn't a big window."
"That's not helping your case."
Utahime crouched down and cupped Hina's face in both hands with the easy affection of someone who had been doing this since Hina was three days old and remarkably tiny.
"What made you want to break the window?"
"Wuji took my coloring book!"
"That does sound very frustrating." Utahime nodded solemnly. "But what does that have to do with the window?"
"I wasn't going to use it. I just didn't want him to use it."
"Hm." Utahime's mouth did something complicated. "We can talk about that later."
She looked up at Shoko over Hina's head. Are you alright? Shoko held her gaze for a fraction of a second before giving the smallest shrug. Then she walked past them both, reached in the cupboard for two glasses, and filled them both with water
Utahime sighed and straightened. "I'm making dinner."
"I appreciate it."
"You don't know what I'm making yet."
Hina looked up immediately after taking a gulp of her water. "...Will there be broccoli?"
Utahime smiled without a trace of guilt.
"Maybe."
This was most of their communication, and it had kept Shoko alive through worse than this.
*
Suguru arrived at seven with the suspiciously specific timing of someone who had been coordinating with Utahime, which Shoko chose not to address. He'd come directly from his shift judging by the lingering smell of antiseptic on him and his hospital ID absentmindedly clipped to his belt. Which meant he had about the same amount of sleep that she had, which meant neither of them was going to say anything about it. That was the implicit agreement of working in healthcare. You didn't acknowledge the cliff edge you were both standing on; you just stood there together.
He dropped onto her couch with the boneless relief of someone whose body had simply stopped negotiating.
"Hina cracked a window," Shoko told him.
"Utahime texted me." He looked at the ceiling. "How bad was it?"
"Hairline fracture. The teacher was diplomatic about it."
"That's something."
From the kitchen came the sounds of a brewing argument between Utahime and Hina, negotiating the terms of dinner. Hina's position was that vegetables were a conceptual framework she rejected. Utahime's counterpoint was that she had not come all the way across the city to argue with a five-year-old whose ideal meal consisted of plain rice.
Suguru closed his eyes. Shoko sat on the other end of the couch and pulled her knees up.
"She's getting more opinionated by the day," he snorted, quietly.
"Yeah, I know"
"She's too smart for her own good."
"I know."
"Once she starts realizing—"
"I know, Suguru."
He didn't push. He never pushed. He just let the silence sit there until it said what he wasn't saying.
"Eat something," he diverted. "Utahime made actual food."
"I'm well aware. And I will."
"Before your sleep."
"I said I will."
He opened one eye to look at her, skeptical, then closed it again. "I'm going to sit here and make sure you do."
"You're going to fall asleep on my couch."
"Those aren't mutually exclusive."
From the kitchen, Hina's voice rose in triumph about something. Utahime's response was patient and long-suffering in the specific register she reserved for Hina and, occasionally, for Shoko. Suguru's breathing had already evened out into something close to sleep.
Shoko sat in the middle of it. And felt something that was adjacent to warmth.
*
Shoko didn't regret Hina. She wanted to be clear about that — if only to herself, if only in the two-in-the-morning quiet when everything stripped down to its load-bearing walls.
She did not regret Hina.
Before Hina, she had moved through the world efficiently and left no real impression on it. She had been good at medicine and anatomical studies, and bad at being known and perfectly comfortable with both. She had built a life that required nothing from anyone and asked nothing in return. That, she called self-sufficiency.
Then she had made one decision — or failed to make one, which was its own kind of decision — and the whole architecture had shifted.
What she did not regret was him. Nor did she regret the daughter that came after.
What she regretted, if she was being honest — and she was, always, even when honesty was the least comfortable option — was that he would never know.
She didn't even know his name.
She had walked out of his apartment at five in the morning with her shoes in her hand and she hadn't looked back, because looking back had never once made anything easier. But lately, she was growing tired of it.
*
Hina was put to sleep at exactly eight-thirty, after an extensive retelling of her favorite fairytale Momotarō, and a brief philosophical debate about whether a person could have two best friends or if that mathematically cancelled both of them out. It led to a little quarrel, or as close to a quarrel one could have with a five-year-old.
Utahime left first, pausing at the door with Hina's drawing tucked under her arm — she collected them, had done since the beginning, kept them in a folder Shoko had seen once and chosen not to comment on.
"You have a shift at six," Utahime said. It wasn't a question.
"Yes."
"So you'll eat before you go."
"Suguru already extracted that promise."
"Good." She looked at Shoko for a moment with the unguarded worry she usually kept better hidden. "Call me if it's a bad night."
"I'm fine."
"Shoko."
"I'll call. Don't worry."
She wouldn't. Utahime knew that.
She came anyway, every time. Reorganized the refrigerator and made Hina eat her vegetables and collected the drawings.
Suguru left twenty minutes later, groggy from his accidental couch sleep, pausing in the doorway.
"You okay?" he asked, rubbing his eyes and fighting back a yawn.
"I should ask you that."
"Oh me? I napped like a baby. You should get some sleep as well."
Shoko nodded. "Goodnight."
He gave her a fleeting smile in return, lifting up his hand in a wave as he began walking down the hallway.
Shoko closed the door and stood in the quiet apartment. Her eyes drifted towards Hina's bedroom, lingering on the small gap in the door she always left open. She let herself have thirty seconds of not being fine before taking a breath and headed to the bathroom.
She had learned, a long time ago, to work within her limits.