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“And this is where you’ll be staying.”
Kouta stares into the room, void of everything but a small bed and sunlight bleaching the walls an off-white. There are cobwebs in one corner and the bed has creases, and it’s nothing like what he’s used to.
He’s used to his room at the end of a long day. The luminescent stars that watched over him from the ceiling every night. The seahorse and dragon and Pokémon pillows that cluttered his bed, toys thrown around the room when he played. He’s used to the tick of a clock, the birds chirping, his mum singing soft lullabies with her hands threading his hair.
It feels worse than barren; hollow, like the inside of a long tunnel with no light at the end.
Behind him, Shino worries her lower lip between her teeth, watching him watch the room. He’s tiny in the doorway, more a doll than a toddler, dwarfed by the suitcase by his side and the teddy hanging limply from his hand, one ear shredded.
And his eyes, a child’s eyes, are as empty as the room.
“You can go in,” she tells him, picking up his suitcase and setting it on the bed. The rug softens the click of her heels—an off-white like the walls—and the hardwood underneath is cold, shiny.
Nobody’s slept here before; it’s used as a contemporary for friends rather than the training dorms nearby. They’re isolated deep in the forest, so the room has stayed deserted. Now, it’s the bedroom of Izumi Kouta, three years old, except it’s the bedroom that looks nothing like a bedroom . It’s just a room that he’ll sleep in.
Kouta finally follows her, the soles of his trainers muffled. He hasn’t said a word, not a noise of contempt nor approval, and hasn’t since he arrived. He’s a shell filled with mechanics and extravagant contraptions; an android she’d been called in to care for.
It was that, or an orphanage. Shino would rather die.
She sits on the bed, hands in her lap, and looks at him. He’s staring at her like she holds answers to questions she doesn’t know, or understand. Death to a toddler is inhumane and stupid, one she can’t explain more than mummy and daddy are in heaven now , and even then it’s a guess not a promise.
Shino isn’t cut out for this, not for parenthood. But she has to try .
“Um,” she begins, not knowing where to begin. “Do you want to—do you want to talk about this? I know it must be hard for you—”
She trails off when Kouta walks by her to the window. His bedroom is right next to her’s on the first floor, overlooking the tips of the trees from the crest of a swollen hill. It’s a repetitive view, but one she’s learnt to love, and it’s one that Kouta isn’t used to. He’s a city boy.
She stands again. Crouching makes her knees cramp and her feet, stuffed into these stupid heels for the court hearing, are rubbing.
“It’s the forest,” Shino says slowly, unsure. How much does a three year old know? “There are lots of animals out there we help.”
“Like a hero?”
Her stomach drops. “I—yeah. Like a hero.”
Now Kouta looks at her. Tears curl in his eyes, drip down his cheeks like a melancholic river, rimmed-red and raw. Pain that she can’t heal with a plaster, with bandages, with a bottle of disinfectant—everything she’s used to when laughing away a child’s tears. They always break a smile when the kitten stickers come out.
And here she is, bare. She’s not armed with plasters, or bandages, or disinfectant and kitten stickers, only her words, and she has never felt more alone. What can she say? What can she say?
He doesn’t speak, but she knows what he’s saying. She can read it in his eyes, can hear it in the echoes of his jigsaw thoughts. He’s too young to argue with her, but inside his head he’s crying, screaming, asking—
If you’re a hero, why didn’t you save them?
Why didn’t you help?
Why?
And Shino has no answer.
Ryuuko finds her kicking a punching bag at midnight, when it’s just the cicadas chirping in the grass in their nightly lullaby.
The skin on her knees and elbows are red, filled with tell-tale bruises sweeping her shins and forearms, and Ryuuko simply watches as she kicks and kicks and kicks. She’s past pain, frantic and wild, and when she finally sits it’s from exhaustion. Only then does she join her, handing Shino a cold beer.
“How’s it going?” Ryuuko asks absently, cracking the lip of her beer and scanning the unmoving forest.
Shino sighs, bypassing the aching throb in her arms as she sips. It’s refreshing, like the first nip of winter after a cruel summer, and she lifts the bottle and presses it to her forehead, hair plastered to her skin in messy waves.
“I’m not cut out for this. He hates me.”
“Kouta?” Ryuuko looks at her, the blue in her eyes flickering in the soft light of the fluorescents. “Yeah, he really doesn’t seem to like you right now.”
She shakes her head and takes another sip. A few days ago, she would have been able to sit here until dawn, drinking beer until the forest became hazy with daylight and she was able to sleep and sleep and sleep, but now there’s someone dependent on her. Someone she can’t throw to Ryuuko, or Tomoko, or even Yawara and expect them to get on with it. She’d never be that selfish.
But the temptation, the lure of freedom she finds herself chasing, is always whispering at the forefront of her mind.
Shino sets down her beer when she realises she’s crying, her sniffles echoing in the darkness. She’s too tired for pretence, too tired to lie through her teeth and say she likes Kouta, that he runs to her and trusts in her and treats her like family.
The truth is that he hates her like fire, unforgiving with the sharp bite of a blaze, embers that hiss and spit. Kouta’s more his father than her cousin, and it feels like she lost them all to that villain with towering muscles. They were just out of her grip, brushing her fingertips, those few seconds late before there was the snap of bones and the other shrieks and screams and pain, God, the pain—
“Hey, hey, you’re okay,” Ryuuko says gently, all that bubbly enthusiasm bleeding into the night with every skip of Shino’s heart. “You’re okay, Shino. Okay?”
No, I’m not , she wants to say, but can’t find the energy to speak beyond whimpers. It’s pathetic.
“I don’t know what to do.” Her eventual whisper is like a secret, more the child in his bed who knows so much, has seen more. “What do I do? I can’t raise a kid. I’m not even married, for God’s sake.”
Ryuuko presses a kiss to her forehead, drops her voice to a mutter. “We’re eighteen at heart! You can’t raise a kid on your own. Remember, if it gets too much, there’s still the option of—”
“No.” Shino surprises herself at the finality in her voice, the certainty. It doesn’t sound like her. “I won’t send him away. He’s still family. I’d never be able to live with myself.”
Even that sounds selfish, like it’s for her own benefit. Like it’s her who has to live parentless after all he’s seen and been thrown into. Guilt, sharp as a blade, stabs her gut and twists.
“Then he stays!” Ryuuko’s voice is kind; gentle, like she’s speaking to a lost child. Like she has the kitten plasters and a tissue to wipe away her tears. “We’re here for you, you know that. We wouldn’t be the Pussycats if we didn’t help one another.”
It still feels like an obligation. If the roles were reversed, would Shino say the same?
The Pussycats are the core of her being, are her heart and soul embellished in one, but they can’t chase away the ghosts that haunt her dreams.
She buys him a hat on the way back from the funeral.
Sendai is a long trip north, and the silence that swallows Shino’s car is unbearable. Kouta is tiny in his black suit and tie, the messy spikes of his hair gelled flat to make him look older. His eyes are wrinkled and hollow like someone ten times his age.
The hat is a frugal attempt of reminding a child that he’s a child. It’s big on him, falling over his eyes when he slid it on, but it softens him to something that Shino thinks she’ll be able to look at. It’s red, frayed at the base, two horns like a triceratops tearing through the fabric, and it accentuates the roughness in his personality. Her cousin-in-laws personality.
“We’ll be back soon,” she tells him, sidestepping the word home . The Pussycats’ base isn’t home to Kouta, it’s just a place where he’ll rest and be cared for. Home died with his parents, and that’s something Shino can’t provide him.
Her hands grip the steering wheel as they fly down the freeway, the wind ruffling Kouta’s hair sympathetically as it rushes past. His hat sits on his lap, thumb stroking the horns rhythmically. Over and over and over.
“Are you going to disappear too?”
He has a habit of crypticity. Kouta speaks his mind when he feels it’s right to, and, despite her stomach dropping several stories a second time, she respects it. Maybe he’s always been an adult stuffed into a child’s body. Maybe he always will be.
“No.” She glances at him. He’s staring out the window, head resting heavily on the seat. “I’m going to take care of you.”
“Promise?”
Shino thinks back to the funeral, to the roses he dropped on the graves. She thinks to the tears in his eyes that he bit back hard enough for his lip to bleed. She thinks of the nightmares, the screams, where she would rush in half-asleep and hold him, only for him to shout at her that he wants his mum, not her.
She can’t promise him she won’t disappear. That’s the life of a hero; you can never know, can never tell, can never make promises in a world that constantly changes. Society will move on after they erect a memorial, and more heroes will take the rank. Heroes are expendable.
Shino can’t promise him that she’ll come back, and it would be stupid of her to promise it, but, to Kouta, she isn’t expendable. She’s his last hope, he depends on her like the moon depends on the rotation of the earth. Like plants worship the rain.
Like a lost child searching for home.
“—Yeah. Yeah, I promise.” She slides one hand from the wheel and holds out her pinkie. It takes a moment for Kouta to see it, to hesitate and stare, but then he lifts his hand too. Their pinkies curl and shake. “Pinky promise. That’s unbreakable, you know.”
“I know.”
Kouta goes back to staring out the window. Shino can’t give him a hero's promise, but a child’s promise is different; forged from trust, the hopes and dreams of toddlers.
Unlike a hero's promise, a child’s promise is one she can fight tooth and claw to keep.