Chapter Text
Towa liked waking up in the early morning. Tokyo wasn’t necessarily a city that ever slept. People always seemed to have something to do or somewhere to go. Even after shops closed, subways stopped running, and the sun went down— someone somewhere was making their way across town. Sometimes, she could hear them passing by her building. Whispered ill intentions or well-meaning ones she would keep an ear out for or smile about respectively, before drifting off to sleep.
Then, there were the people in her family’s residential skyscraper. Such a tall building housed numerous apartments she’d grown to know the inhabitants of simply out of being unable not to hear what they were up to. Like Miyazaki Sugi, the elderly woman on the floor below the Higurashis who always offered to look after Mei when Towa, Sōta Papa, and Moe Mama were busy after Mei got home from school.
Towa could always smell the bittersweetness of her homemade ketchup when making omurice, and hear her snipping scissors as she tended to the potted vegetable garden on her terrace. Mei liked to keep her company on the weekends, listening to stories of her life in the countryside, while Towa caught up on her homework. To no avail as she found herself swept up in the old woman’s whimsical retellings of past summers with her friends amidst the click of her knitting needles, tales of catching bugs in green rolling hills teeming with trees as tall as their building. Towa imagined climbing those trees, peering off into the distance where there was nothing before her but sprawling grass blanketing the earth in verdant green.
However, a sight like that just wasn’t possible in Tokyo. Crowded concrete streets, glowing neon signs, dark and narrow alleyways between tall buildings with clear glass windows reflecting the sun’s majesty in a blinding glare. Beautiful in its own way but incomparable to nature’s tangled, cozy warmth.
In the early morning, under dawn’s muted blues and greys when the sun was only a pale fissure of petal pinks and pale yellow breaking over the horizon, Tokyo’s glowing lights were almost like stars. It was the closest one could ever get to nature’s bounty while in the city, or so Miyazaki-san would say. Towa had to agree. Practicing her kata[1] on the roof was impossible with the smog clogging her throat. Thick exhaust fumes, clouds of smoke from shops, clumps of trash mingled with dust and grease in wet sludge traveling in the sewers’ stagnant waters, with the vaguely metallic scent ever-present in the metropolis.
However, when the wind blew in the right direction, Towa turned her head to the horizon. In the morning, she found herself looking for something in the sun’s light haze scarcely visible across the skyline. It seemed impossible as nothing but airplanes and helicopters traveled across the skies. But in her heart, she felt something would come.
Her mind cobbled together an image to accompany the strange feeling. A lone figure as white as clouds but with a more shapely form, wandering but never aimlessly. It would come toward her if she waited long enough, and wait she did, until her phone alarm rang, reminding her it was time to make breakfast.
As the Higurashi household slept, Towa entered through her window like a ghost, with the lingering chill of winter trailing after her. She sighed, rubbing her palm along the center of her chest to stir the yōki congested there into movement. Protecting her core was an act of self-preservation, but it left the rest of her feeling cold by comparison. Numbness stiffened her fingers until the flow returned to them, her skin tingling with prickling warmth.
Once she felt sufficiently warmed, she cradled the sword in her hand and set it carefully above Kikujūmonji upon the wooden mounting taking up wall space beside her mauve-colored punching bag. Nostalgia pressed against the back of her eyes as she remembered when Sōta Papa first hung it up for her back in their room at the Higurashi Shrine.
At the time, the bag was twice her size. So tall, she had to take several steps back even to see the top of it, and Grandma Asako worried over what would happen if it knocked her down. Sōta Papa didn’t seem worried at all, telling his mother that he wasn’t using it at all and she’d benefit from it more than their storage house would. While Great-Grandpa Higurashi encouraged her to give it a go, simply wanting to see what would happen.
Towa could see her childhood self balling her hand up in a tight fist, remembering not to tuck her thumb after the last time she broke it when throwing a punch into a bully’s face for pulling her friend’s pigtails. Then, she swung with all the force her body could muster, feeling the rough fabric connect with her fists for a brief second before it gave and swung back hard enough to hit the wall. Sōta Papa ran over just as the sandbag hurtled back toward Towa’s stunned form. His nervous laughter ringing somewhere above the dizzying acknowledgement of her triumph.
“It didn’t go down,” Towa could hear her childhood self scream happily. Tugging at Sōta Papa’s t-shirt as she jumped up and down, pointing at the still-standing bag. At the time, Towa didn’t notice Grandma Asako’s tight smile loosening a tad bit at her visible excitement or the way Great-Grandpa Higurashi clutched his chest, startled by such a close call.
Nothing was more important than what she’d found in this bag of sand. “Sōta Papa, this thing is tough. Really tough! It didn’t go down when I hit it. See?!”
Later on, he would explain the chain holding the punching bag in place to her. But at the time, nothing could ease Towa’s excitement at finally finding something that could give her an even albeit one-sided fight.
Towa gave the punching bag a fond look with a slight smile on her lips as the memory ebbed away. It’d been so long since then, and she missed living on the shrine grounds along with the room she shared with Sōta Papa. Cramped as it was, it’d been the first home she knew since losing the one from before.
Now, only the punching bag, Tenseiga, and her snoring adoptive father were all that remained.
Melancholy swirled around a hollow, familiar ache in Towa’s chest, but she pushed it down. The shrine was still there with Great-Grandpa Higurashi and Grandma Asako. She could see them anytime. And besides, her current home had Moe Mama and Mei in it. Even when she lost something, she gained something else.
Her hand smoothed thoughtfully over the punching bag’s textured surface. How hard did she hit before? Measuring her strength against her childhood self was a fruitless effort, but she knew how to pull her punches. Her knuckles brushed against the bag once. Like a warning to an opponent, only one chance before she struck. Then, her hand balled into a fist from memory, and she swung. One hard thwack broke the room’s stillness as the bag swung like a pendulum with its rusted chain creaking with each sway. Towa caught it with both hands, lovingly smiling at the purple patches sewn haphazardly across its sides. Grains of sand trickle down onto the cute, fluffy blue rug underneath and Towa made a mental note to shake it out later before she left for school.
“I’ll have to make another patch, huh?” Towa said to herself with a soft sigh, thumbing over a ruined patch before she tapped her forehead against it. “Here I go..”
She shrugged out of her knitted sweater, draping it across the backrest of her desk chair, then walked across the hardwood floor to her bedroom door, where she slipped out of the room as silently as she came in.