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The first heart Akira had mended when he came to the city had belonged to a young man with sunlit hair and a broken leg. Akira had done what he could, and then he’d sent the man to a physician.
It was an object lesson in what he could do and what he couldn’t—he could mend hearts.
But not much else.
There was no point repairing a heart only to send it back to be broken by the same circumstance again. Some hearts Akira turned away, because he could do nothing for them that half a year in the countryside and a loving friendship couldn’t do.
Of all the hearts Akira mended, his own was the hardest.
He tinkered with it for months, trying to make it better. It had never really broken. It was just—chipped in places, cracked in others, the enamel wearing away.
There was still something missing, but it was a good heart, because it was his, and because he’d fixed it himself.
Most Menders didn’t look like Akira Kurusu. For their part they were rich in years, and wore expressions that befitted people who dealt with the clumsiness of humanity all day long. But then, most Menders didn’t work with hearts.
Perhaps Akira had more cause than most to be constantly exasperated, but that wasn’t in his nature. He was aware that most hearts were broken not by clumsiness, but by cruelty, and since it cost him nothing to be kind, he was.
Some hearts he charged for, if he thought the person could bear the price. Most hearts he mended—not for free, for debts were burdens that could wear down the strongest arteries—in exchange for small gifts or favors, stored carefully in the shelves of the dark attic out of which he lived and worked.
The attic was on the top floor of a shop owned by a man whose daughter’s heart Akira had mended. She’d paid him back with a treasured memory of her mother, and her friendship.
Though Akira wasn’t a lonely person, he had few friends. People came to him to have their hearts mended; few could stomach the realization that Akira could tell the condition of their heart with a glance. Every scrape and bruise was visible to him, as though the person carrying it were naked before his eyes. It was an uncomfortable thing to be seen with such grace and clarity, no matter that Akira hid his knife-colored eyes behind glasses.
Akira mended a young boy’s heart, and the boy gave him his favorite toy. Akira walked him back home, and held his hand while his mother asked him where he’d been. He held the boy’s hand even as his mother’s eyes fell on Akira and widened with fear and understanding.
Her heart was as broken as her son’s, but Akira didn’t mend what he hadn’t been asked to mend. That would’ve been more for his comfort than hers, and that was unacceptable.
“I trust I won’t have to do this again,” Akira said, cold and heavy as he hated being.
She nodded. Akira gave the boy’s hand one final squeeze before he left.
One of his few friends was the owner of an antique shop halfway across the city. The shop was a quiet little thing, its front stoop haunted by the crows the owner fed and its shelves haunted by broken things the owner loved too much to fix. He could be relied upon for rare parts, freely given, and the gift of an evening in company—during slow weeks they found new places in their shared city, walking through parks and museums. Goro Akechi was a strange man—unfailingly pleasant, occasionally sharp, and with not a single scar on his heart.
That last was the strangest part.
No one in Akira’s experience had an unscathed heart. Though cruelty was the most common breaking factor, everyone’s heart was laid over by the marks of living. Fingerprints and dusty corners and papercuts. But nothing stung Goro’s heart, and he laughed off all of Akira’s attempts to find out why.
He didn’t want to pry—Goro was a friend to him as few people dared to be. He never pried into the parts of Akira’s life that he didn’t wish to talk about.
Which was why Akira told him so much. They talked around every topic they had and then some; their city, which they loved, Akira’s parents, who he hated, the younger brother Akira had left behind and missed like a sore tooth.
Goro rarely brought up his own life, but what little he revealed made Akira ache for him. All the more surprising that a boy with a dead mother and a tyrannical father had a heart in such perfect condition.
“Aren’t you lonely?” Akira had asked him once. They were in the park.
Goro held out a wrist for a crow to settle on, and smiled at Akira. “Are you?”
“No,” Akira said unhesitatingly. “My work is complicated and beautiful. I love people, even from a distance. I have everything I want. I’m not lonely.” He stared at Goro’s wrist. He wondered if he was telling the entire truth.
“There you have it,” Goro laughed. He was looking at the crow. “I have my crows, and my shop, and now I have you. Why would I be lonely?”
That wasn’t an answer. Akira didn’t ask for another one.
Perhaps it was because Goro made it easy not to think about his work. Nowhere else could Akira so fully escape it. Nowhere else could Akira lay down his worry for other people and be himself. Even when their arguments followed him late into the night and he found himself muttering angrily to himself over his morning’s coffee, he felt free.
Akira mended a dying girl’s heart, and she told him he could have her collarbones when she died. A terrible acquisition, but a valuable one. Her heart, of course, would go to her younger sister.
Akira mended the heart of a schoolteacher, and she gave him her favorite cardigan. He used it to cradle the cat’s heart that he’d found when he first came to the city.
The heart spoke, sometimes. And if it spoke it could feel warmth. It deserved comfort.
Akira wandered down to the cemetery, because sometimes ghosts had hearts and mending theirs was hard work but worth the price. He stood in the sweet stillness of hearts at peace and pictured lives like theirs—full, satisfied, enough that they felt they’d earned their rest.
Goro’s heart didn’t feel like this.
Goro’s heart felt like nothing at all.
Goro’s shop was lit by white lights, because he claimed the yellow ones made his eyes hurt. He wasn’t in when Akira stopped by. His assistant, a quiet girl with long dark hair that Akira had recommended, was dusting a shelf when he let himself in.
Hifumi’s heart carried the old ache of mending, and the new burn of fragile love. “How’s the heart?” he asked her, and she froze and laughed.
“I always forget you can do that,” she said admiringly.
Akira looked away, chagrined. He picked up a precise little mechanism in the shape of a bird’s nest, turning the dial at the base to see a chick hatch from the egg.
“It’s fine,” she continued, going pink. “I met someone new. She’s a carpenter.”
“Is she treating you alright?” Akira murmured. The chick was now an adolescent bird, preparing for flight.
Hifumi giggled, uncharacteristic from her. “She treats me wonderfully. I think...I really hope it works out.”
The bird took off in a gentle puff of magic, circling Akira’s head once before settling back into the nest and tucking her head under one wing. The heart that had made this had been precise and gentle, mathematically inclined, lonely.
“Messing with my things, Kurusu?” Goro inquired from behind him.
“I might buy it,” Akira said casually. “You never know.”
“The day you buy anything, I’ll sell my shop,” Goro snorted. Akira grinned shamelessly.
Everything he got from Goro was a gift. A debt was a heavy burden for a heart to bear.
Still, he’d never been made to think he owed Goro anything. Perhaps that made a difference.
Despite Akira’s uncanny sense for the hearts of others, he could not figure out what ailed his own. Not lonely, like so many he knew. Not unhappy, or haunted by the past, or broken by cruelty, or used up by a heavy life. Not angry, or scared, or worried.
And yet.
“If I promise to buy something, can I ask you a question?” Akira asked.
Goro shook his head, smiling. “Take a break, Hifumi,” he commanded, taking off his jacket and hanging it on the oddly twisted stand.
Hifumi exited swiftly, heart tender with eagerness, and Akira turned to the counter as Goro let himself behind it. The shelves behind the counter were mostly books and pieces too fragile to be left where errant hands (like Akira’s) could touch them.
He’d mended a writer’s heart, once. He’d been given a story in return, about an unwanted boy who’d run away from home with bitterness in his throat, only to find love everywhere he looked.
“What do you want to know, meddler?” Goro said exasperatedly, cutting through Akira’s daze.
Meddler was Goro’s nickname for Akira, fond as he’d deny being to his dying breath but an undeniably sweet riff on Mender. Akira smiled at him, leaning against the counter. Now that he was here, he was nervous.
Goro disliked having his affairs pried into. And Akira could mend a broken heart, but he didn’t know how to mend broken trust.
Akira took a deep breath. “Do you have a heart at all?”
A pause, and no sense at all of how Goro was feeling except for the tightly-drawn expression on his face. Akira had never been very good with expressions. “Please leave,” Goro said quietly.
If Akira had been a better friend, he would’ve waited it out, insisted. But he left.
He thought Goro was happier that way, anyway.
Akira mended a blacksmith’s heart, so he could show his son how loved he was. In return he received a fine iron lamp, with a handle like vines. His son wrote Akira a letter, which he tucked under the lamp unread.
A heart could be removed. It had never come to that for Akira—he’d never met a heart he couldn’t mend. Just because it could be done didn’t mean it was right.
There wasn’t anything visibly off about Goro. He struggled to make friends—so did Akira. If he was sad, he’d always hidden it well. Sometimes his smile was strained, and sometimes he asked to sit down because he was easily winded. Those weren’t signs of anything.
Akira had never met anyone without a heart. He had a mechanical replacement for his clients as he worked on theirs. He didn’t know how people without hearts acted.
It was an awful presumption to say such a thing at all.
He’d apologize when he saw Goro again.
When he went downstairs the next morning, though, Goro was waiting for him. He looked tired, as neat and sharp as ever but worn down.
“I’m sorry,” Akira said, because it seemed like the right thing to start with.
“No,” Goro said. “You were right.”
He smiled his charming smile at Sojiro. “Thank you for the coffee. May I borrow Akira for a brief moment?”
“I feel like I’m dreaming,” Akira confessed, as they went outside. It was a cold day. “I never thought I’d hear you say I’m right.”
“And you never will again,” Goro sniffed.
It was half an hour’s walk to Goro’s shop, made longer by the break he insisted on when he learnt Akira hadn’t had breakfast (“You gave me no time!”) and the injured cat Akira insisted on finding a home for.
Stomach full and stray cat successfully rehomed, they finally reached Goro’s shop. It was dark inside. “Wait,” he said tersely, leaving Akira standing awkwardly next to the counter.
He returned in a few minutes, flicking on a couple of lights. Half-light in the shop was even more eerie than full darkness, but enough for Akira to see the box Goro was holding.
Goro handed Akira the box. His heart sank, aching, as he took it.
Oh.
Oh, no.
He tried to give it back, but Goro shook his head. “Open it.”
Akira opened it with trembling fingers. The sanded metal insides of the box were full of a fine pink powder, shards of emerald and clay sticking out amid the rest.
He could feel the pain pulsing through it. A dim echo of how bad it had once been, but the most resilient hearts could get tired of screaming unheard. And how long had this heart suffered for?
Long enough that there was nothing left.
Akira sifted through the remains of Goro’s heart. Pain burst through his hand, and then settled tentatively. Hopefully.
“I can’t do something for a heart so broken,” Akira admitted. The sudden lack of hope left his blood cold.
But Goro was smiling when he looked up. That was the worst part. “I know,” he said. “That’s why I never came to you.”
“How do you live without—”
“With great difficulty, and largely on spite,” Goro replied.
Akira closed his eyes, closed the box, tried to hand it back. Failed.
“Keep it,” Goro said. “I have no use for it. I haven’t in years.”
“I see,” Akira murmured. He put the box on the counter, and used his freed hands to pull Goro closer. To kiss him, matching him for fragile hope and buried desire.
Goro kissed back quietly. His hands were cool against Akira’s sides.
Akira cupped Goro’s face as he pulled away. Stared, for a second, into deep red eyes. The hurt and tentative wonder in them.
“I’ll be back,” Akira whispered, grabbed the box, and ran.
Akira could have had options, but in the end he didn’t. There were some gifts no one could be expected to receive, and Akira wasn’t in the habit of handing them out. Still, it took every bit of knowledge he’d gathered over half a decade of mending hearts to make it work. And even then he had to consult textbooks he hadn’t flipped the pages of in years.
This wasn’t mending. This was nothing like what he knew. He’d made a mechanical heart once, but never a real one.
Which meant he had to get it right.
He could’ve used the remains of the old heart as a base, but he didn’t know what had smashed it. He didn’t know what he’d be saddling Goro with. And he wanted to make something new, something that matched the Goro Akechi that had leaned into Akira’s hands like he’d never let himself lean on anything before.
Goro hadn’t asked for this, and Akira did not mend hearts he hadn’t been asked to mend. But this, he told himself, wasn’t mending. It was making, and gifts could be turned down.
He hoped Goro wouldn’t turn it down.
Akira worked for hours, stumbled downstairs for coffee, and kept working.
It took a week.
It took a month. There was another flaw every time Akira sat down.
No heart was flawless, and a flawless heart would be an awful curse. But he did his best, and no better.
Akira mended other hearts in the meantime. The heart of a physician, who knew she didn’t have long to live. She gave him silver surgical tools.
The heart of a barmaid, who hated being seen.
The heart of a gardener.
All their gifts lay in corners of the attic, untouched as Akira focused.
Goro’s shop was well-lit again when Akira entered. He was reading behind the counter, a pair of gold-framed glasses perched on his nose.
“I thought I’d never see you again,” Goro said warily.
Akira grinned, bouncing on his feet. “I have something for you.”
Goro led him upstairs, a neat little room with a view that opened to a nearby orchard. Akira kissed Goro slowly, drawing his hands down Goro’s chest. Only the faintest heartbeat, and no sense of what lay underneath.
Undressing, and being undressed in turn, was a thrilling dance of reveal. Goro lowered Akira to the bed, and Akira pressed until he was the one on top again.
He waited until he was straddling Goro to reach for his jacket, pulling the box out from a pocket.
“Now?” Goro asked. “Really?”
Akira pulled out a heart. It was a fine piece of work, even though Akira had stared at it too long to either love it or hate it. He simply knew it, knew it so well it was simple. It would grow in Goro’s chest, and change, and perhaps bloom into something unrecognizable.
“So this is what you were up to,” Goro breathed. “I can’t take this.”
“I didn’t work this hard for nothing,” Akira said, leaning down to kiss the protest out of Goro’s mouth. “A debt is a heavy burden for a heart to bear.”
“And you saddle me with it from the start,” Goro mumbled.
“It’s repayment. For all the friendship and the trust.”
Goro sat up, nearly knocking off Akira and his precious cargo. “I don’t require repayment for that,” he said sharply. “Though I suppose a heart is worth the sum of all the parts I’ve given you over the years.”
Akira hadn’t thought about that. Now he pretended he’d known it all along. “For that too.”
Goro rolled his eyes, warm. “Go on, then.”
The heart glowed in his hands as Akira placed it where it belonged. It was glad to be home. A pulse started up, blue and golden and steady.
Not a hitch. Akira pressed a kiss to Goro’s collarbone, silently relieved.
“You’re,” Goro whispered. His arms came up, holding Akira close. He smelled like old things well cared for and a gentle perfume. “You’re something else.”
A slight hitch. Akira looked up. Goro was crying, quiet tears sliding down his cheeks.
No bruises on his heart, not just yet. Just the overwhelming tenderness that came with being loved like Akira loved him. Maybe that was what Akira had been missing all along. To care for people was one thing—to be loved despite what you couldn’t do for them was another.
And though Goro’s heart was new, Akira could tell that Goro would’ve loved him if he’d never made Goro a heart.
Akira smiled. “So are you.”