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She has no idea how long it’s been since she passed out. She doesn’t know how long she’s been laying awake in a stupor, either, only that she’s finally collected her senses and taken inventory of her body and situation as best as one can when one is deaf and blind and not yet used to being either.
If she could see and had her smartphone in hand to make a checklist, it would go something like this:
Vision still gone. Hearing still gone. No sensation at all in right arm/leg. No pain in eyes/ears/arm/leg (so, at least there’s that). Lying on a bed. Have been lying on a bed for some time judging by warmth of sheets underneath body. Sheets probably dubiously clean. (Don’t like being unable to check for cleanliness.)
Have IV in good arm; have catheter in. (Try to ignore the innate creepiness of some unknown adult having undressed you to stick something in there while you were unconscious.) Can feel edges of bed. Rest of body presumably still works.
Probably would not be hyperventilating if more body parts functional.
Lying on bed = civilization still exists. Existence = we probably won.
Miyoshi Karin bites her lip for the reassurance of the pain and reminds herself that she did this thing fully aware that she would not come out able-bodied, so there’s no use complaining about it now.
It’s not very convincing.
She takes a breath and says “Bring me my smartphone,” because if she’s in a bed with hospital equipment there will probably be medical professionals somewhere to hear her. “Teach me Braille.”
She waits in the dark for some kind of response she can perceive. There isn’t any, so she says it again, louder. And again. Again.
Mankai. Full bloom. Sange. Dying as the flowers fall. Karin thinks in the dark that this is a terrible misnomer of a system. The Taisha is probably trying to be cute about it because the Hero system works based on the powers of the Sacred Tree and most Hero outfits have flower patterns, but of course the adults who’d never gone through either wouldn’t know better. She thinks this with more tiredness than disgust.
As frightening as fighting a whole swarm of Vertexes was, Mankai had been worse: Her body had felt like a circuit with more electricity flowing through it than was wise, frayed wires ready to give at the slightest moment of weakness. Only a real idiot or someone really desperate would joggle the socket about and stick the plug right back in, but she’d been on her own fighting too many enemies and getting hit too hard had made her grip on the too-much-power slip. And what was she supposed to do, just stand around and wait for the Vertexes to come attack Yuuna?
(Thinking about Yuuna is her innards contracting like they’re being mushed up inside somebody’s clenched fist. She doesn’t want to think about Yuuna because there’s fear enough in her to choke on: They’ve made it this far, but god, what else has victory cost?)
It had been awful, but Karin thinks on the sensation in between helpful reminders to anyone who might be listening that she wants her smartphone and a Braille teacher. She taps her working fingers on the bed and squirms at the phantom sensations of pins and needles.
Vertexes come back even when you kill them. Earth is molten as a newborn star and an endless army of tiny gods is building the zodiac again and again outside Japan’s last fever dream. Even like this, she’ll be called to fight again eventually. There are former Heroes who still have it worse.
She wants to acclimate herself to it just in case.
The familiar plastic of the smartphone is like a choir complete with heavenly trumpets when it slides under her hand after the mind-numbing expanse of empty waiting. Karin baps at the screen triumphantly, clumsy with fingers not used to subtle tasks, until she’s rewarded with red light and her Hero transformation.
The room isn’t bright. The rustles of the sheets underneath her aren’t painfully loud. And they aren’t back to the way she remembers them being, the way sight and sound are in her dreams. Colors and distant shapes are smudged even with the visor of her Hero outfit, and the sounds processed through its built-in hearing aid are tinny. It’s still better than nothing. When she sits up she finds she can move her arm and leg—she can move them—but not the limbs themselves, only by pulling at the ribbons wrapped around them, and there’s still no sensation in them at all.
She takes a deep breath. She can work with this. She’s seen Tougou fight plenty of times, she knows better than to expect her Hero form to cure her. All the Hero system will do is make her combat-capable.
She knows that. She wasn’t really expecting anything different. It was only a vague, childish hope, that was all. She can put it aside.
Done taking proper inventory of her body, she turns slowly around.
“This is not the hospital,” is what comes out of her mouth immediately at the sight of the dim lights and dimmer room.
“It is, actually, but not the hospital normal people would see.”
Karin jumps a little where she’s sitting—crackly and fuzzy or not, it is a real human voice—and squints until Fuu is clear enough in her visor for her to make out the eyepatch and forced smile. Itsuki is standing by her sister’s side, and catching Karin’s eye, she waves. Fuu goes right on talking, as if oblivious to Karin’s startlement. She probably is.
“This is one of Taisha’s places. It’s—basically the same as where Nogi Sonoko is being held. You’re right down the hall from her, even.”
“What,” says Karin, and she cranes her neck around. “There are things on the walls. What are those.”
She hears Fuu sigh (hears) and twists her torso forward again to see the club president pinching her nose. “It’s pretty messed up,” Fuu says. “They’ve basically enshrined you. You were in the normal hospital for a while, but then they whisked you off down here. If your faeries hadn’t come to get us I don’t think we’d ever have found you.”
Faeries. Plural. Karin shivers before she can stop herself. Four times the glorified suicide watch; four times the extra shielding from enemy attacks in case her disabilities make her too clumsy to dodge.
“They’re trying to worship me,” she says out loud. “Worship me, when I was just their tool all this time.”
She wants to spit. She wants to laugh. Her throat is dry and she doesn’t know if she could stop herself, so she holds it in. Besides, Itsuki already looks sad enough. Karin recognizes the look—it’s the same guilt she’d felt after the other four’s first round of Mankai. Itsuki probably knows it’s stupid just like Karin did, and voicing the irritation and the sorrow won’t help, so she just sighs.
“I finally get people to pay tribute to the might of a true Hero, and they won’t even listen to me when I say I want my Terminal and a Braille teacher,” says Karin, instead. “This is ridiculous. Tell them I want proper service or, I don’t know, I’ll make Yoshiteru drop something heavy on them.”
Itsuki and Fuu make identical gobsmacked faces and then start to giggle. Karin tilts her chin up and smiles. She loses all the details of their clothes and the angle turns their light hair ashy gray, but damned if she’ll let go of the pretense of normalcy.
(She wants to ask about Tougou and Yuuna so badly that it hurts, but the Inubouzaki sisters’ failure to tell her what happened immediately is so terrifying that she can’t.)
“Why Braille?” Fuu asks at last. “I mean, as long as you have your Hero powers—”
“Adults can’t become Heroes,” Karin says. “At this point we don’t know if Heroes ever grow up, or if we’re going to live to grow up, but. And I can’t stay in Hero form all the time. I don’t—an arm and a leg, that’s not such a big deal in the end, but I don’t want to lay in this room like a piece of meat unless I have to Mankai so many times I actually turn into one. I want to be able to talk to people. I want to be able to go outside even when Shikoku’s not Forestized. Being deaf and blind and not having anybody to talk to or anything to read is boring.
“Besides, I’ve read in history that before the Vertexes wiped out the rest of the world at the end of the last era, there was an American activist that lost her vision and hearing as a kid, and she still learned to read and write and everything.”
Fuu rubs both hands over her face. “Karin-chan, that was literally hundreds of years ago.”
“Exactly. If Helen Keller could do it in ancient times, then logically there is no way that the great Miyoshi Karin cannot do the same in this glorious modern era.”
“Keep talking, kid,” says Fuu, but Itsuki pulls out notebook and marker and begins scribbling at a furious pace. She holds the page up for Karin and Fuu to see, and Fuu starts nodding, but the kanji look like blobs to Karin no matter how hard she squints.
“This lighting is terrible, give that here,” she says, and reaches out to make grabby motions with her good hand. Itsuki blushes, but passes the notebook to her dutifully.
I want to learn Braille too, is what she’s written. That way even if I can’t go to karaoke with the girls in class anymore, I can copy things out for Karin-san to read.
“Hmph,” Karin says, and passes the notebook back. Even if she wanted to, she doubts she could properly express the strange mix of gratitude and sadness that’s making her useless eyes burn.
“Okay,” Fuu says with a great show of rolling her eye. “If you two are that determined to show me up, then Onee-chan will twist some arms and see what we can shake out of Taisha. It’s my duty as the Hero Club president to organize our activities. Most things can be nudged along with the proper amount of elbow grease and girl power.”
Itsuki is giggling again. Karin ignores them both regally.
It surprises Karin that what she misses the most is her treadmill.
Itsuki comes often—they develop a signal, a series of taps on Karin’s wrist, so that she will know to transform—but she and Fuu are busy with… school, Karin supposes, if not whatever has happened to Yuuna and Tougou. She still can’t ask. Anyway, it means that Karin is left to her own devices often. It’s better when she has tools to practice her Braille with, because writing with her left hand and lining the dots up correctly is a hell unto itself, but most of the time she is very bored and very lonely.
Boredom and loneliness aren’t new, exactly, but before Karin lost the use of her arm and leg, she’d spent most of her free time training. It was incredibly freeing, to just pump iron or run or do sword drills until your mind went empty. It had always been her escape from being stuck in her head. It had been her only comfort after the other girls had first developed their disabilities from their first Mankai and Sange, and she’d got into a terrible rut of feeling like it was her fault for not being useful enough, that it was somehow disloyal of her to stay healthy.
Braille is hard work just like physical training, but it’s head work. It can’t really distract Karin from her jealousy of the Inubouzakis’ functioning limbs, from Fuu’s perfectly healthy eye. It can’t comfort her when she gets confused as to whether colors were ever really as vivid as she thinks she remembers them, sounds ever as sharp, or if her Hero’s visor and hearing aids are perfectly accurate to her old senses after all. It can’t shake her out of berating herself for her cowardice, not being able to ask after Tougou and Yuuna and what happened after she blacked out during that fight.
The Taisha priests have their own way to signal her and ask her if she needs anything, now, and she’s considered asking them for a treadmill so that she can work out in Hero form. But moving her arm and her leg with the ribbons is impossibly arduous. Hero shape can compensate vaguely for her senses, but it can’t fix her dead nerves. Even if she got a treadmill, even in a best case scenario, she knows she’ll never be able to run again.
It’s the combination of deafness and blindness that needs the biggest adjustments, but the loss of her freedom of movement is what makes her feel most like an invalid.
She’s losing her muscle mass. She doesn’t need to see to know it; when she touches her numb arm and leg in the void, she can feel it.
She tells herself that the sensations of helplessness will pass. She’ll adjust. She won’t be so angry forever. But her arguments are never all that convincing.
“I am so tired,” she says to Itsuki one day, “of this IV. I want to eat real food. I want to practice eating enough with one hand and without being able to see that I can ask for udon again. No udon, no life.”
It’s long since stopped bothering her, seeing Itsuki laugh without making any sound. She asked once if Itsuki would rather just talk over writing, and Itsuki wrote that no, she understood Karin’s wanting to hear her own voice, please talk out loud. She scratched at her chin for a moment with the wrong side of the pen so that it left a black mark, and so lost in thought that she didn’t notice, she added and it’s less awkward with you anyway than with people at school. Maybe that should have made Karin feel sorry, but it comforted her instead. Itsuki is a good girl.
(“By the way,” she said when Itsuki was getting ready to leave, “you have ink on your face”—and was rewarded by Itsuki jumping in place and flailing about. She laughed for half a minute for the hell of it before telling Itsuki where.)
I don’t know about udon just yet, but I can see if Onee-chan and I can start bringing you boxed lunches? I’m sure the doctors will have to be consulted about taking you off of the IV and changing your diet, but I don’t think they will say no to you for very long…
“That would be great,” says Karin, and scowls at the sheet of paper she’s been poking holes in for the past five minutes. “This penmanship is atrocious. It’s even more atrocious than my kanji, and those look written by a kindergartener trying too hard. I couldn’t read this if my life depended on it. I hate being right-handed.”
Itsuki shrugs, like what can you do.
“Give me another piece of paper,” Karin demands, waving her hand. The room is dark and Itsuki’s face is a pale moon, blurry. The visor’s not doing much good picking up color today. Apparently the Sacred Tree cares more about being able to eat little girls for temple offerings than properly equipping them against Vertexes that change color as part of their attack patterns. Either that or she needs to bully the Taisha people into giving her better lighting for the sake of these visits. Somehow this seems more like something to roll her eyes over than something to get upset about, though; in another hour or two Itsuki will leave and Karin will turn her eyes off and read kiddie books in Braille until she falls asleep anyway.
Itsuki passes the sheet of paper. Karin scowls at it tremendously and pokes holes to make bumps, clenching her hand around her pen until her wrist starts to hurt.
“Everybody else should come sometime,” she says after a while. “We can have a stupid party and invite Nogi Sonoko and annoy the Taisha by reminding them that we haven’t turned into mini Sacred Trees yet. It’ll be great.”
The line of Itsuki’s shoulders seems to quiver for a moment, but Karin isn’t sure whether it’s real or if it’s just that her visor’s reception is crap as usual. Either way, Itsuki doesn’t grope for her notebook to reply: She just nods.