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Rin doesn’t remember the accident, only the aftermath, which in hindsight says a lot about her tendency towards selective amnesia. She doesn’t even really remember being taken to the hospital, but she concedes that she may have been unconscious for that bit.
She does remember flashing blue and red lights, and she remembers the view of broken glass and spattered bits of blood across the pavement. She has the vaguest memory of telling one of the paramedics that he needed to call Kitay, though she isn’t quite sure the words ever came out or if her message got across. She remembers, too, the fear, not of dying, but of Kitay being angry with her.
And the worst part of all is that she remembers the pain.
It hadn’t been so bad at first, adrenaline and shock dulling and numbing the pain into something manageable, something she figured she would walk away from. The ambulance ride to the hospital had been spent slipping in and out of consciousness, only the vaguest kind of awareness as to what was happening, and it wasn’t until the bright white lights of the hospital and the antiseptic and bleach-like smell of the emergency room that the pain had settled in, deep and sharp in her bones.
She sleeps through the worst of it. At least, this is what Rin tells herself to make herself feel better about what she is conscious to experience, which isn’t exactly pleasant. Each moment she’s awake is filled with sharp and unending pain, from the scrapes and road rash across her skin to the broken leg and bruised ribs to the pounding in her head from the concussion. Rin can’t get away from it.
She cries out every time they move her, every poke and prod to examine and treat her injuries. Even through the sobs, Rin manages to grab the nurse’s wrist when one of the doctors mentions morphine. Before she can speak, she bites down on her lip so hard she tastes blood and sucks in a breath through her teeth. The nurse waits, even holds Rin’s hand, and she’s surprised by how much that gesture touches her. “Please don’t,” Rin begs him, and hopes he understands without her having to say the words out loud. “I don’t… can’t…”
She won’t do that again, can’t do that again, because she’s pretty sure that a second time dealing with those first few fraught and fragile weeks of sobriety would kill her.
They understand. Rin is given less addictive painkillers, but ones that are less effective all the same. It works as something of a placebo for her to lie to herself about it, to say she’s already on the other side of the worst of it, even if her first day of true consciousness post-accident is spent mostly holding Kitay’s hand and crying.
Kitay isn’t mad at her, and that’s a mercy far beyond what Rin considers herself to be deserving of. She can’t be sure when he arrived at the hospital, though knowing him it didn’t take him long at all. He was there when Rin woke up from surgery, and she doesn’t have it in her to ask any more questions than that.
He doesn’t talk to her much. Rin knows by now that that’s his way of processing things. Ever the logical one between them, Kitay won’t speak to her from a place of emotion, and so he won’t speak to her at all. Rather than his laughter or even his complaints about all the papers he has to grade for the class he’s TA-ing (both of which Rin would much rather prefer to her own thoughts right about now), her hospital room is filled with the musical stings and cheers from whatever happens to be on the Game Show Network at that particular moment.
To get out of her own head, she tells Kitay to have Venka come by when she has a moment. Just as she expected, Venka is having none of the contemplative and merciful silence that Kitay was willing to give her. The first words out of her mouth upon storming into Rin’s hospital room are, “What the everloving fuck were you thinking, Rin? Are you fucking stupid? You could’ve died!”
Shortly thereafter, she sets the flowers she brought on Rin’s bedside table, so she considers it a net positive, really.
Rin doesn’t talk, not right away. She lets Venka yell at her for quite a while, watches the minutes tick away on the clock right over her friend’s shoulder, and revels in the feeling of the fact that someone’s angry at her. When Venka’s done, she actually starts laughing, which makes her ribs hurt so bad she considers calling one of the nurses in and makes Venka start yelling all over again.
“I missed you,” she tells Venka, weak and breathy, but happy nonetheless. “I knew you’d be pissed at me.”
“I still am,” Venka clarifies; her five minute and twenty-seven second lecture left Rin with no doubts about that. “But more than anything I’m glad you’re still alive.”
Rin feels a little bit like throwing up; it wouldn’t be the first time that day alone, so she just reaches for Venka’s hand and squeezes rather than answering. “Would you stay for a little bit?” She asks, and Venka rolls her eyes as if to say ‘of fucking course’.
“Of course, but I’m not watching fucking The Price is Right.” Venka doesn’t know how to be delicate, so it hurts a little bit when she she bumps Rin shoulder and pulls her laptop out of her bag, but it’s so delightfully worth it to sit with her and make fun of The Bachelor that she smiles until her face hurts and she forgets about all the other pain.
Sometimes, late at night, Rin wishes Altan would come visit her. He doesn’t, and she knows he won’t, but if the night shift nurses notice her crying silently into her pillow, they don’t say anything.
At least Kitay comes nearly daily. He talks to her a little more each day, though usually in between working, either marking papers or typing furiously on his laptop, answering Rin’s questions about the tax systems of feudal Nikan with a patience only he could have. He must know that it’s purely for her to distract herself, and yet he indulges anyway.
He first brings up the accident three whole days after it happens. Rin figures by then that they’ll just never bring it up, not as long as she’s in the hospital anyway. He startles her when he does finally mention it, while typing away on his laptop about something Rin has no energy to question him on, not today.
“I think getting that call was the worst moment of my life,” he says, making Rin look up from where she’s been quietly disassociating in her bed, with so little else to do to keep herself from going crazy. She makes a little noise of surprise, which must be enough acknowledgement for Kitay. “I had no idea what to think when they’d told me there’d been an accident… I really thought you might have been dead, and so I rushed over here—”
“Kitay, can we not do this right now?” Rin asks, suddenly feeling so uncomfortable in her own skin. She hasn’t felt right in days, not since she woke up in this hospital bed, but she chalks that up to the pain and the mere sensation of being in a hospital. Kitay wanting to talk about the accident brought all that up and more, an extra layer of misery to what has already been probably the worst three days of her life.
He looks up from his laptop, glasses sliding down the bridge of his nose. Without even thinking, Rin stretches her hand out to adjust them by one arm until they’re sitting where they should. He looks sad in a way Rin’s never seen from him before, and she vows that she’ll never give him a reason to look at her like that again. “We don’t have to talk about it, no.” He doesn’t say anything else, and Rin knows it that he never will unless she gives him the go ahead.
“I’m sorry,” she says, her hand finding his and squeezing it tight. She wants to reassure herself that she’s really there just as much as she wants to reassure him. It takes a lot for Kitay not to cry when she does; she can see the tension in his jaw and the way his blinks come quicker than usual. She’s thankful that he holds it back, because if Kitay cracks, she doesn’t know who will be there to put her back together.
The most surprising visitor that she gets is Nezha. The two might be friends, but it’s always felt like it’s out of necessity because of their mutual friendship with both Venka and Kitay rather than any real bond between them. But he does come, four days into her seemingly never-ending stay in the hospital, and he comes by himself. It’s after work, if she were to guess, based on his clothes.
He sits in the chair next to her, not saying anything while she flips a page in her book. Kitay wanted her to rest, but Rin won’t let herself fall behind in her classes, and studying keeps her distracted.
Nezha, too, serves as a distraction, because she wants to figure out what he’s doing here. If he had any illusions about how close they were, he would’ve been here sooner, and if they aren’t close, she isn’t sure why he wouldn’t just wait until she’s home to come see her.
He sits with her for a while, his bouquet of flowers going in a vase next to Venka’s and his chair pulled up next to her bed. He even plays along with her when a new episode of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? comes on, the two of them arguing back and forth over the trickier answers until it’s revealed that they’re both wrong.
Rin likes this, sitting with Nezha with no real expectation for what happens; there’s none of that tension that Kitay sat with for so many days, and there’s no explosive anger like Venka. She likes that about Nezha, or maybe she just likes the fact that they aren’t particularly close friends. Either way, it feels good to spend time with him, and it makes her feel halfway to normal even though her road to recovery stretches long ahead of her.
Finally, though, it eats at her. She has to ask.
“Why’d you come visit me?”
The question takes him by surprise. “Am I not allowed to?”
“Well, you are, but…” She isn’t sure how to say this in a way that won’t sound rude. “I just didn’t expect you to come.”
“Kitay told me about it, and I was worried about you,” Nezha admits. He has a way of being so matter-of-fact about things like this, laying it out the same way he would a research report. “I’m sure it must have been scary, an accident like that, and I wouldn’t want to be alone in your shoes, so…” Sheepishly, he looks away, but Rin doesn’t break her gaze in his direction.
“It wasn’t so bad,” she says with a shrug, narrowing her eyes as she watches for his reaction. “I think the worst part was the pain afterwards. I wasn’t afraid, just… I don’t know.”
Nezha nods like he understands, though Rin can’t imagine he really does. Rin’s not deluded into thinking her feelings are unique, but someone like Nezha would never understand. “Did you want for it to happen?”
Rin feels her blood run cold, something awful knotting up in the pit of her stomach. “What are you asking me?” She asks.
Nezha looks up at her again, his eyes locking onto hers. “I’m asking if you wanted it to happen. If you wanted that to just be… it?”
“You’re asking me if I wanted to die,” Rin says. She has to swallow back a little bit of bile she feels rising in the back of her throat. Nezha doesn’t acknowledge what she says, but he doesn’t need to in order for her to know what he meant anyway.
She can’t respond; not in any way that will be meaningful or what Nezha wants to hear, and even if she had the right words they’re all caught in her throat. Her hands, folded neatly in her lap, suddenly seem so interesting. She can’t look at Nezha, not for a long while.
When she does, her voice sounds so thin and lifeless.
“Would you be willing to get me something to eat? Hospital food sucks.”
Nezha gets up, kisses her hand, and walks out without another word. He comes back with takeout for her, somehow getting her favorite order without even asking.
Eight weeks and three days earlier, Rin attended Altan’s funeral.
In some terribly fucked up away, she’d always known that she’d be doing this at some point, and that it would likely be sooner rather than later. Altan was the kind of person that burned too bright too fast, that would burn himself just to feel the warmth of the fire. It was a matter of time before he flew too close to the sun, and the bitter part of Rin was only surprised that it had taken him this long.
Despite everyone’s best insistence that she say a few words—she was the little sister that had never had, his partner in crime and little pest all wrapped all in one—she couldn’t. She was too angry.
How dare Altan leave her alone?
Seven weeks and six days earlier, Rin learned that Altan was dead.
She had sat, sandwiched between Qara and Ramsa as Baji broke the news to them; why he had been the first one to know, Rin can’t begin to understand. But where Qara’s reaction was to burst into sudden, loud sobs, and Ramsa’s was to wonder whose idea of a prank this was, Rin could only think of one, single word.
“How?”
She didn’t realize she’d asked it out loud until after she did and everyone reacted. Baji looked pained. “Rin, I don’t…”
“How?” She repeated, firmer. An insistance.
“
Rin…” Baji’s never been good at not mincing words. When she pressed, he spat it out. “Altan killed himself.”
Qara burst into another fresh round of sobs, and Ramsa was stunned into silence.
Rin could only clench her fists, swallowing down her rage for reasons she couldn’t quite comprehend.
When Rin is discharged from the hospital and into the care of Kitay, she hopes that this will be the end of it. She’s still on crutches, likely will be for at least the next six months. Kitay gets Nezha to drive them so that Rin isn’t hopping around Sinegard’s public transportation system to get back to their shared apartment, but this only means that Rin is gripping the roof handrail for dear life every time they go around a turn. She’d rather be navigating the subway with these fucking crutches.
The first few days go as smoothly as she might have imagined. They consist largely of her floating between her bed and the living room sofa (Kitay won’t let her wallow in bed, no matter how much she begs), still watching the same slew of reruns and game shows in between assignments and attending some of her classes online. She can’t even easily make her way around their kitchen, so all her meals come courtesy of Kitay, or otherwise they’re microwaveable tv dinners or ordered from Doordash.
Rin had expected this experience to be far from pleasant, but by day three, it’s soul-suckingly boring.
Kitay won’t talk about the accident, and he hasn’t since the hospital, when she asked him not to; whether that’s to protect her or himself, she doesn’t know, but the fragile peace that’s brokered between them is anything but comforting. Each day, Rin waits for it to shatter, wait for the spill of shattered glass again, and it drives her mad.
But it’s Kitay, and she loves Kitay, so she lets it go, and doesn’t press him for his feelings, or push him to at all acknowledge how she ended up limping around in this cast and feeling so sore she can’t properly sleep on her side.
So by day three, when Kitay finally sits down with her to talk about something that seems serious, she’s so grateful that she might get to talk about how she feels. The pain, the misery, the abject boredom. Kitay turns off the tv and puts his hand on her knee, on her good leg. But what comes out still isn’t him ready to talk about what happened.
“Rin,” he says, sounding grave. Rin’s stomach drops the same way it did when the doctors promised her morphine. She isn’t looking to be berated by Kitay, but that isn’t what happens at all. “I have this important work conference I have to go to next week.”
Kitay has those often. Rin’s no stranger to being alone in their apartment for a weekend, perhaps a few days at a time while he travels and presents his invaluable, genius research. She couldn’t be more proud of him, but he’s never announced his travel plans so seriously before. “Okay, and? You do that all the time.”
“I know,” he says. He bites down on his bottom lip, chewing the already-chapped skin there, but he won’t make eye contact with Rin. “I just… I’m worried about you being here by yourself so soon after the… accident.” He says it like it’s a dirty word, like something he has to stay away from.
A lump forms in Rin’s throat, and she swallows it down. “I’ll be fine. A few more days and I’ll be able to get around better, and worst case scenario you can throw some extra meals in the fridge for me.”
“It’s not that,” he says, and Rin holds her breath, desperate for him to not say the quiet part out loud. “I’ve just… anyway, I’ve asked Nezha to come stay, just for the week.”
“What? Why?” She asks, suddenly feeling indignant. One accident, and suddenly Kitay feels like she can’t take care of herself? She knows this goes beyond being able to make meals for herself, but as long as they aren’t acknowledging it she’ll assert her own competence.
“Just to make sure everything’s alright. If something happens I want someone nearby.” Kitay gets up from the couch and kisses Rin’s forehead before going to start on dinner.
He’s always been good at getting the last word. If Rin didn’t love him so much she wouldn’t let him get away with it.
However, she finds that the companionship that she had with Nezha in the hospital was short-lived.
“Nezha, I can fucking make a microwaveable dinner by myself,” Rin protests, hobbling towards the kitchen on one crutch. She’s been plenty irritable for the last few days, and hearing Nezha working the microwave in the kitchen when she insisted she would get it, that she just needed a moment, set her off.
Nezha doesn’t say anything at first, which just serves to make her angrier. When she gets to the kitchen he smiles at her, fucking smiles in some fake-ass way that makes her just feel that much angrier that he has the nerve to look smug. “I’m just following Kitay’s orders.”
“Kitay’s orders my ass,” she says. “You’re being a dick is what you are. You think I can’t do this shit myself just because I’m on crutches? Because of some bruised ribs?”
Gone is the mirth from Nezha’s face. He looks suddenly serious and, if Rin thought that Nezha had it in him to be this way, apologetic. “Rin, you got really hurt. Kitay just wants someone to make sure you aren’t going to… overdo it, and hurt yourself worse.”
“What, I’m going to overdo it and hurt myself moving the ten feet from the couch to the kitchen? Or what, that I’m incompetent and can’t reach up that high?” Rin knows it’s more than just that, that Kitay has walked on eggshells with her since the accident, careful to set her off. Nezha doesn’t tread so lightly, but he’s still lying to her—or deluding himself—as to what he’s really worried about.
“Is that what you think I’m thinking, Rin?” He asks. “I know you can do this for yourself. If you’ve ever proven anything to me, it’s that you're more than capable of anything, far more so than even I am.”
Rin should feel placated by this, but anger bristles up within her. She clenches and unclenches her fists slowly, trying to remind herself to breathe.
“I didn’t realize it meant that much to you to make your own dinner,” he continues. “I just wanted to… help. I know you’re capable, I know, but Rin… I’m worried about you.”
“Say it,” Rin says through clenched teeth. She knows it’s there, simmering just under the layer of concern he’s built up about her, she knows what he’s thinking. “Tell me why you’re so worried.”
She wants someone to say it out loud. Maybe then she won’t feel so alone in worrying that she’ll follow Altan.
“Rin… I don’t want to lose you.” When Nezha says it, it’s barely a whisper. His blue eyes are suddenly glassy with tears, and he steps forward to take the hand that’s not curled around the handle of her crutch. “I don’t want you to hurt yourself again, none of us do.”
Rin feels utterly pathetic when she can’t storm off to her room dramatically, and is instead left shuffling across the apartment until she can slam her door behind her. Nezha leaves the plate of food, covered to keep it warm, outside of her door.
That night, Rin dreams for the first time since Altan died. It stands to reason then that he would be the subject of it, a twisted and fucked up version of the man she’d considered a brother, egging her on. Berating her for being stupid enough to only get herself hurt, not killed. Telling her she can’t even die right.
When Rin wakes up screaming, Nezha bursts into her room and throws the light on. It’s too bright; Rin puts her arm up to shield her eyes from the harsh glow of the lamp at her bedside table. “What the fuck,” she groans, “is wrong with you?”
“You were… crying out,” Nezha tells her. “I was worried, so I came to check on you. Are you alright?”
Rin doesn’t feel alright. Her pulse races and her stomach feels wrong. If she could muster up the energy, she thought that she might throw up, but despite the adrenaline pumping through her body, she feels exhausted down to the bone. “It was just a bad dream. Go back to bed,” she tells Nezha.
Nezha turns off the light, and Rin lowers her arms. She folds her hands across her stomach and looks across the room to him, silhouetted in the hallway light. “Are you alright, though?” He asks.
She can’t find the words, not when they’re a lie, so she just nods.
Nezha turns to go, and then he stops. He looks at her over his shoulder, and in the warm glow of the hallway light, he looks beautiful, a thought that Rin is no stranger to. “Do you mean that?”
“No,” Rin says, realizing she’s choking back tears. “I don’t want to be alone.”
“You don’t have to be,” Nezha says. He walks to the other side of her bed and sits, extending a hand towards her. “I’m right here.”
Rin drifts off to sleep that night with Nezha’s hand between her two smaller ones, and by the time she wakes up the next morning, he’s sprawled out on the bed next to her, asleep as well.
They don’t talk about it the next morning, but Nezha brings her breakfast in bed while she watches a class lecture on her laptop.
It happens again the next night. Unable to close her eyes without seeing flashes of red and blue lights, Rin hops out of bed and uses the wall instead of her crutches to hobble into the living room, where Nezha sits watching television. Bathed in the blue light of the television, he looks so handsome but at the same time, so tired. Exhaustion chips away at his features, a droop in his eyes and a knitting together of his brows. Rin hasn’t seen this side of him the whole time he’s stayed at her apartment.
He hasn’t let her see this side of him.
She coughs to catch his attention and he looks up, his face immediately different. “Rin? What do you need?” He asks, already leaping into action for her. The sincerity of it makes her want to laugh, but, feeling it rather inappropriate for the moment, only smiles at him.
“I can’t sleep,” she admits. “Again.”
Admittedly, Rin doesn’t know how to ask for what she wants. Nezha picks up on it anyway, though, and puts an arm around her shoulder to help her back towards the bedroom. As much as she wants to, Rin doesn’t shake him off.
He helps her into bed, a little too delicately considering Rin’s been healing for overa week now, and goes around to the other side of the bed where, just like the night before, she holds his hand between hers.
“You’re so warm,” he tells her. It’s not the first time he’s commented on how hot her body runs. Reverently, he reaches out to brush a stray strand of hair away from her face.
Rin scrunches her nose up. “Don’t do that.”
Nezha’s hand brushes against her cheek again, a light and gentle touch that she shies away from. “Do you not want me to touch you?”
“Not like that,” she says, pushing his hand away from her face. “I’m not a porcelain doll.”
“Rin, you were hurt. Badly,” Nezha says, as if she needs the reminder.
She lets go of his hand and turns away from him. “And this doesn’t make it any better.”
“What do you want?” He asks her, which is a question she doesn’t know how to answer. “No, wait. What do you need?” He asks.
“No one’s ever asked me that before,” Rin says, sounding small to her own ears. She can’t imagine how Nezha must see her in that moment, so small and pitiful and pathetic.
Nezha slings an arm around her waist and settles in next to her, their bodies pressed close together. “I’m asking now,” he tells her.
“I don’t know what I need,” Rin admits, mostly because it’s not something she’s ever sat down to think about.
But she falls asleep in Nezha’s arms that night, and whether or not she knows why it feels a bit like something she needed to heal.
Growing up with Altan around, there’d been more than one occasion where Rin had sought comfort in him after a nightmare or when she couldn’t sleep. Even after the worst of fights during the day, their usual yelling and hitting and scratching until her mother pulled them apart, he’d curl around Rin protectively and promise that he was scarier than any of the monsters that might come out of the dark to hurt her, and Rin always believed him.
The next morning, she and Nezha don’t talk about how they woke up, limbs intertwined, sweaty hair stuck to Rin’s pillow. Rin wakes up with her face against Nezha’s chest, feeling his heartbeat under her hand, and realizing she never wants the moment to end.
And then Nezha woke up. Rin pretends to be asleep while he pries his arm out from under her and settles her back onto the pillow, her bad leg propped up. She stays with her eyes closed, still feigning sleep, when Nezha brushes a stray piece of hair from her face and kisses her forehead, and is grateful that he leaves her be for her to cry silently into her pillow.
Kitay’s conference ends too soon and not soon enough. By the time he enters their apartment with suitcase in hand, Rin feels like she’s going through withdrawal from her best friend; if not for the crutches and the boot-like cast on her foot, she’d launch herself at him the second he comes through the door.
Instead she settles for a wave from her position on the couch, lacking her usual enthusiasm. She pauses the tv for Kitay, at least, and smiles as much as she can these days. “I missed you.”
Kitay pulls his suitcase behind him as he walks towards Rin to lay a hand on her shoulder. “I missed you more,” he says, wistful. Rin has to force herself not to think about why he looks so pained to see her. “I hope Nezha treated you well.”
“Sometimes too well,” she says, and she knows Kitay will understand. He leaves her be with a squeeze to the shoulder, and she can hear the quiet murmurs of him talking to Nezha down the hallway.
She turns up the tv to drown out the sound of them talking.
When Nezha comes to leave, his weekender bag slung over his shoulder, he says a pleasant goodbye to Rin, then lingers by the door, like there’s more to say.
“Nezha?” She asks, pausing the tv. She hauls herself from the the couch without her crutches and hobbles the few steps away from the couch. “Thank you for everything this week.” She hopes he knows what she means when she says everything.
Nezha looks at her, not like Kitay, but like he’s seeing her for the first time. He leaves his bag at the door and walks over to her. His hand finds hers, his skin so soft and so cold compared to how hot Rin runs. “Rin,” he says softly. “I really like spending time with you.” Rin laughs sharply, her ribs aching with the effort of it. “You might be the first to say so,” she says, hoping her voice doesn’t give away the way she suddenly strains not to cry.
“And hopefully not the last,” Nezha says. He kisses her cheek, and before she can even hobble back to the sofa, he’s gone.
“Rin, go away,” Altan said on his first night under Hanelai’s roof. Rin watched the way his shadow, huddled under the blanket, shivered in the dark.
“I can’t sleep,” Rin said meekly, which she knew was a lie, but she didn’t want Altan to know that she could hear his crying on the other side of the wall in her bedroom. “So I thought I might come see you.”
She would go see her mom if she couldn’t sleep. But she came to see Altan instead. He doesn’t turn over to look at her, but he reaches for the lamp at his beside and flicks it on. “What do you want?”
Rin hadn’t thought that far ahead. But she climbed onto his bed next to him and wrapped her tiny arms around his much larger one, attaching herself to his side. “I dunno. What do you do when you can’t sleep?”
“I close my eyes and hope for the best,” he said stoically, shifting to his back. But he wouldn’t touch Rin, wouldn’t hold her.
“What about if you really couldn’t?” Rin asked.
“Then I wouldn’t keep myself up by bothering someone else,” he countered. “Now go to sleep, Rin.”
“Okay,” Rin muttered, but she didn’t close her eyes. She watched the slow rise and fall of Altan’s chest, the way he barely moved as he slept. “Altan?” She says, not a few minutes later.
“What, Rin?” He asked, heaving a sigh.
Her heart deflates, and she lets go of his arm to roll over, her back to him. “Nothing,” she said quietly.
“Then shut the fuck up and go to sleep,” he said. And that time, she did.
Rin takes a deep breath and looks at the woman sitting across from her on an uncomfortable, overstuffed sofa. Sweat slides the woman’s glasses down her nose and Rin wonders why the tiny, windowless room has a heater in the corner of it.
“Why don’t we start with why you’re here?” The woman suggests. Rin hates the way her clipboard feels so clinical and she feels like she’s being judged.
“I’m here,” she says, “because three months ago my cousin killed himself. And because a month ago I got into an accident, and all my friends think that I tried to kill myself, too.”
“Mhmm,” the therapist says, and looks up from her clipboard with a pitying look in her eyes. “So why don’t we go back to the beginning?” She suggests.
“I’m never doing that again,” Rin tells Kitay in the comfort of his car. He still won’t let her on public transportation with her crutch, even though she’s gotten good enough at hobbling around to only need the one. “She kept looking at me like there was something wrong with me.”
Kitay keeps his eyes on the road, but Rin notices the way his knuckles whiten around the steering wheel.
“There’s nothing wrong with me,” she insists.
Kitay still doesn’t say anything, which is more infuriating than anything he could say in response.
“There’s not!” she protests, louder than she means to be. “I just got into an accident! Do you know how common those are? They happen literally all the time.”
Kitay still has nothing to say, so Rin settles in against the passenger seat with a huff. Her arms cross neatly over her chest as if they’re armor shielding her from whatever comeback he’s working on. She watches the pedestrian traffic outside the passenger-side window.
“Rin, do you know how fast you were going?” He asks.
“Well, yeah, of course I do, it was only like five over the speed limit,” she says, suddenly defensive. She doesn’t want to look at Kitay now, doesn’t want to see his grip on the steering wheel or the way his jaw tightens or the way that he stares straight ahead at the road.
“Forensic report says otherwise,” he says evenly, which is the most uncomfortable part about this whole exchange. “You were doing double the speed limit, Rin.”
“No way I was. I had this guy riding my ass the whole time, I couldn’t have been doing double the speed limit.” Rin knows she’s lying, but it feels like there’s little else she can do to convince Kitay she’s not suicidal when it seems to be the only conclusion he’s reached.
She won’t turn her head away from the window.
“Rin, no one else was on the road,” he says. “You were alone, and ran your car off the road, and flipped it, and you nearly died.”
“I know,” is all Rin can muster.
Every day, rain or shine, Rin would walk the half-mile from the junior high to the high school and find Altan in the parking lot, waiting to drive her home.
She still remembers the day she walked up to the front steps of the high school in the blazing heat, miserable from Nezha bragging that he had done better on his chemistry test than her, and found Altan sitting with Chaghan. She hadn’t known Chaghan then, of course, but she had noticed him and Altan before they noticed her.
She noticed, too, the discarded cigarette butts by Altan’s feet, and the way his hands were tangled in Chaghan’s hair. The way that the two of them seemed so utterly inseparable for people she had never seen together, the way that they kissed with an intimacy Rin was only familiar with from movies her mother didn’t let her watch.
Rin awkwardly ground the toe of her worn-down sneaker into the gravel of the parking lot. Then, she cleared her throat. Altan pulled away from Chaghan with such force it startled both Rin and Chaghan. He grabbed his backpack abruptly in one hand and Rin’s arm in another. “See you later, Chaghan,” he said over his shoulder, pushing Rin toward the beat-up old Honda that used to be her mom’s in the corner of the parking lot.
With the keys in the ignition and the familiar rumble of the engine underneath her, Rin felt soothed. “Who was that?” She asked, tracing her fingers around the well-worn window crank of the passenger side door.
“Just a friend,” Altan said under his breath. Rin could tell from the way that his foot pressed down on the accelerator that he was feeling anxious; Altan would always start speeding when he felt anxious. “Listen, Rin, you didn’t—”
“I saw you two kissing,” she teased, trying to imitate the kids at school, who would make kissy faces at Nezha and Venka and talk all the time about how they were dating. She didn’t get the good natured blushing and ribbing in return that Nezha and Venka could dish out, though. Instead, Altan stopped the car at the next stoplight so short that, if not for her seatbelt, Rin would’ve hit her chest on the glovebox.
“You didn’t see shit,” Altan said sharply, a hardness in his eyes that Rin had simply never seen before. “You don’t tell mom, you don’t tell the kids at school, you don’t tell anyone, got it?”
Rin nodded silently, and in consolation, Altan draped his sweatshirt over her shoulders when they got to the next light. All she can remember is that it smelled like tobacco and she wanted nothing to do with it.
She gets her cast off, and it’s like a sudden weight off her shoulders.
“You should take it easy for the next few weeks, still,” the doctor says, patting her leg, which now feels bare without the cast. Rin can see the tan line the cast made just below her knee, her skin more than a little dry, but still. She’s free of the cast and crutches, and that’s enough to make her plenty happy.
“Like, how easy?” She asks. “Can I drive again? And I don’t have to sit down to shower anymore, right?” She desperately grasps for a sense of normalcy after weeks of anything but.
“You should be able to do all your daily activities, in moderation. I would stay away from any strenuous exercises, running…” The doctor looks at her chart again, as if refreshing the details of Rin’s case, which is a testament to how many terrible accidents that involve broken limbs and road rash that they must see in the hospital. “You could drive, I suppose,” she acquiesces. “But I would wait a little longer, don’t you think?”
Rin finds Kitay in the waiting room after she’s been given the all clear, and holds her hand out for his keys.
“Not a chance,” he says, deflating the good mood she’s been put in.
“But the cast is off—” Rin protests, following Kitay out to the parking lot like she’s sixteen again and pleading with her mother to get behind the wheel.
“I know, Rin,” he says with exasperation she’s seen only reserved for when he’s on the phone with his sister. “But I think you should let me drive.”
Rin likes when Venka visits the most, because at least Venka makes her feel normal. Venka doesn’t think twice about bumping Rin with her shoulder or being rough with her. She doesn’t mince words when it comes to Rin, and it feels good to not be treated like a delicate doll when Kitay walks on eggshells around her and Nezha never quite looks at her right.
And the Cike haven’t talked to her since Altan’s funeral, so.
“If you use that blue shell on me, you’re a fucking bitch,” Venka warns her, which is typical Mario Kart trash talk coming from her. At least it lets Rin feel like she’s behind the wheel of something, no matter how pathetic. And no matter how terribly she loses to Venka, who seems to have a supernatural ability to come in first place every time.
“Do you want drinks?” Rin asks when they finish their race, setting her controller down on the coffee table. “I think we still have some beers in the fridge from when we celebrated Kitay’s birthday…”
Venka looks at her sideways and Rin cringes; it’s the sure sign that she’s going to say something Rin doesn’t particularly want to hear. Sometimes, usually, Venka’s tough love is necessary, but that doesn’t mean Rin wants to hear it, exactly.
“Don’t you think you should stay away from that stuff? I mean, you get so depressed when you’re drunk. You should take it easy for now,” Venka suggests.
Rin crosses her arms over her chest and turns away. “Why does everyone keep worrying about me like that? I’m fine, I’m not depressed, and I can handle having a drink without getting into an accident—which is what that was, by the way, and accident.”
She doesn’t mean to snap the way she does, not exactly, but the surprised look on Venka’s face is enough to tell her she crossed a line.
“You said that about painkillers, too, and here we are.” Venka has always had that uncanny ability to poke at the sore spots, to find the little hole in anyone’s armor and pierce through it. Rin doesn’t bother hiding how much of a gut punch it is to her.
“You don’t have to be a bitch about it,” she mumbles. “And I’m fine. my cast is off and the doctor said I was healing just fine. That I got really lucky.”
“Damn right you got lucky,” Venka says harshly. “You nearly fucking died. And don’t try to give me this bullshit that it was an accident. Kitay told me how fast you were going, and no one who doesn’t have a death wish speeds like that, let alone in the fucking dark.”
“So what are you implying?” Rin asks. If nothing else, Venka will be brave enough to say what no one else has.
“I won’t imply it, I’ll state it outright: I think you want to end up like Altan, and I don’t know whether it’s because you’re actually fucking stupid enough to think that you’d be doing us all a favor, or if you just want all the glory and the crying and the theatrics he got.”
There’s something fierce in Venka’s eyes when she says that, but Rin doesn’t miss how her eyes are watery with tears, too.
“But Rin, don’t be fucking stupid. You need help. And I can’t just sit around and watch while you’re too prideful to actually admit it.”
“I think you should go home,” is all Rin responds with as she turns off the tv.
That night, she drinks the four leftover beers by herself, and still can’t stop replaying the conversation over and over.
Rin had been sixteen and oblivious when it had started, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t seen the signs.
Altan had stopped spending time at home, stopped spending time with her, and Rin had ignored it.
Her mother had, too, or perhaps hadn’t noticed it the way Rin felt his unsaid rejection of her so. Keenly.
She had been fine, though, until Altan had moved home for the summer. After one of the typical screaming matches between him and Hanelai, the ones that had become more frequent since he started failing classes and not going altogether and lying about where he was, Altan had stormed out. The rev of his car engine in the driveway made Rin peek through the blinds in her room quickly enough to watch him peel away down the street and out of sight.
She had only wanted one of his sweatshirts.
The comfort of Altan was so rare anymore that she had tiptoed on silent feet into his room, careful to open the door slowly and avoid the creaky hinge, and to dig her way into Altan’s messy closet for a sweatshirt. Rin could still hear the quiet, shuddering sighs of her mother at the kitchen table down the hall as she tried not to cry.
Rin had pulled out one of Altan’s high school sweatshirts, a favorite of hers for how worn it was, for how it had reminded her of a better time. And then the orange bottle had tumbled out of the sleeve, rattling onto the messy floor of her cousin’s closet.
The name on the bottle wasn’t his, but one she didn’t recognize. But the label was one she did, and Rin had been nearly sick to her stomach right there in Altan’s room.
She should’ve told her mother right then and there. She should’ve run down the hall with that little orange bottle in hand and said look, look. But then her mother would have cried and screamed more, and Altan would’ve screamed back and walked out again, and this time, Rin wouldn’t know if he’d come back.
She reaches for Kitay’s car keys in their dish by the door, just feeling the weight of them in her hand for a moment. How bad could just around the block be?
Kitay pokes his head out of the kitchen too quickly. “Where do you need to go? Just give me a second and I can come with you,” he says.
Rin sets the keys back in their dish with a resigned sigh. “Nowhere,” she responds. “I was just cleaning up.”
Her first semester at Sinegard was the hardest thing Rin had ever done.
The Keju to get into Sinegard had been a beast on its own, but at least she had time to prepare, albeit not much. She has passed with flying colors, too. The only reason her mother would ever be able to afford to send her to such a prestigious school.
But getting to Sinegard wasn’t the battle, keeping up was. Everywhere she turned, it felt like there was something else Rin’s public school hadn’t taught her that her peers already knew like second nature, and she was left trying to play catch up with them.
There was many a long night spent in Sinegard’s library, poring over one of her textbooks or revising an essay or falling asleep while Kitay tries to quiz her on historical concepts that he knows like the back of his hand.
“Come on, Rin.” One of the fifth years who work-studied in the library tapped on her desk to wake her, not for the first time. Arda had at least always been kind in telling Rin she had to leave, unlike the Friday night shift librarian that would push her out half an hour before closing just because she could. “I’ve gotta lock up, and you’re not really doing yourself any good sitting here like this.”
Rin covered the drool-stained notebook next to her and wiped at her cheek, hoping she didn’t smear her pen on it again. “No, sorry, I was just resting my eyes…” she said, then checked the time on her laptop. “Is it really midnight already?”
“Yeah,” Arda responded. “But what are you studying for this time?”
“I have this paper due next week,” Rin explained. “And it’s all about the socio-economic impacts of the War of the Burning Sea, except that was never something I actually learned about in my high school, so here I am reading all about it just to try and get some background so I can actually read this paper.” The words tumbled out of her far easier than she was expecting to an upperclassman who Rin only ever saw when she was being kicked out of the library. “But it’s…”
“Not the most exciting?” Arda guessed. “Well, yeah. Have you ever tried, like, taking something for it? Tons of students here do study drugs. But you didn’t hear that from me.”
Rin snorted. “Yeah, you mean like when Tobi told all us first years that he could hook us up with Ritalin and then got someone kicked out for buying a bunch of Tic-Tacs from him? I’m not falling for that.”
“No, really,” Arda said. “I mean, Tobi’s an ass, that has to be said. But seriously, loads of upperclassmen do it.”
Rin couldn’t help but thing back to the orange bottle she had kept a secret from two years, buried deep in Altan’s closet.
“You just have to know who to ask.”
What was the worst that could happen, Rin thought. Once in a while to help her study for a test or plow through a paper couldn’t be all that bad. If it got her through the game of catch-up her first year seemed to consist of, she’d quit by sophomore year.
She wasn’t proud of the text she’d sent to Altan that night.
Much to Rin’s chagrin, she accepts Kitay’s pleads to go visit another therapist. Out of network, sure, and she can almost feel her wallet hurt when she paid for the visit, but one that came with a much better reputation than the first.
“So, Runin…” the woman says, older than the first that she saw. If Rin hadn’t felt so on edge in the tiny room her appointment was taking pace in, she might’ve thought the woman had the air of an eccentric aunt, or a slightly strange but well-meaning grandmother.
“Rin. Just Rin. That works fine,” she corrects.
“Rin, of course,” she says warmly. “So, Rin, why don’t you tell me just a bit about what brings you in?”
Rin considers the fact that the least she could possibly do is try, but that’s more effort than she was willing to give the first woman she saw. But then she thinks of Kitay who so patiently insisted on sitting in the waiting room so he could take her home, and who had squeezed her shoulder and asked her to “just give it another go, please” before she stepped in here, and whose disappoint she can’t bear to see written so plainly on his face one more time.
So she shrugs her shoulders, hoping to see more casual about it than she really feels. “I was in a really bad car accident about eight weeks ago.”
“Oh I’m so sorry to hear that. How have you been coping with the accident?” Her therapist asks.
“Fine, I guess,” Rin says with another shrug. “Obviously no one wants to get into an accident, but it’s not like I’m traumatized and can’t get in a car again. My friends all seem to think that it it was some… I don’t know, cry for help or suicide attempt.”
The woman perks up at that; there’s no clipboard like the last lady, thank god, but she shifts and sits up straighter. “Have you ever considered hurting yourself or taking your own life?” She asks, that carefully worded question that Rin knows is surreptitiously asking whether or not she needs a mandatory 72 hour hold in the psych ward.
Rin whets her lips and considers the question. Or at least looks like she’s considering it. She briefly thinks back to the early days of her sobriety and she’s pretty sure she had begged for Kitay to let her die at some point during that, but she’s pretty sure that doesn’t really count. “No, but my cousin killed himself a few months back, and my friends all think it’s related to my accident.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she says, and Rin cynically finds herself doubting the authenticity of that statement. “It’s so difficult losing a family member, especially to something like that. Tell me about your cousin. Were the two of you close?”
The relationship between her and Altan doesn’t need any contemplation, Rin thinks. She nods and answers right away. “He lived with my mom and I for a few years, after my aunt and uncle died. He and I lived together for awhile after my mom died, too, but I moved out like a year before he died.”
Her therapist’s face scrunches as if she’s thinking. “It sounds like you’ve been through a lot, Rin.” The use of her name makes Rin cringe for some reason. “Did you and your cousin have a positive relationship? What about you and your mom?”
“My mom was the best,” Rin answers without hesitation, and believes it. “She sacrificed a lot to make things happen for me without my dad around. Altan, though… I mean, we loved each other. I love him. But we also fought a lot and butted heads over a lot so… I guess it’s complicated?”
“What do you mean by complicated?”
“Just kind of like siblings, I guess. You know how siblings can have rivalries,” Rin says. She knows there’s more than that. She could talk about all the fights that ended in slamming doors or cars speeding away, the things thrown and the threats made. But it feels easier to shrug and simplify it all, so no matter the churning in her stomach the longer the appointment drags on, that’s what she does.
“How do you think it went?” Kitay asks her in the car after the appointment.
“Fine,” Rin shrugs, because she’s not sure what else to say.
“Do you feel like this therapist is helpful?” He asks. Rin hates the tiptoeing around that he does now, like Rin is a ticking time bomb that will explode if he says the wrong thing.
Her arms crossed over her chest, Rin looks out the window and sighs. “You can ask what I know you’re thinking,” she says bitterly. Kitay feels safe to be bitter with, safe to throw barbs at, because she knows he’ll never throw them back at her.
“Rin, I just want you to be happy.” Kitay lays a hand on her knee in an attempt to be comforting, but all it does is make tears prick at Rin’s eyes.
“I don’t know that I can be,” she admits, her whole body shuddering with the weight of that confession off of her shoulders.
Kitay pulls the car over in an instant. The center console doesn’t get in his way as he wraps his arms around her, and suddenly Rin starts crying. The dam breaks, and Rin sobs.
“I promise, Rin,” he soothes, kissing her forehead. “I promise you can.”
“Don’t ever leave me Kitay,” she begs. “Promise me. Promise me you won’t.”
“I won’t,” he says, and he has no idea how much that means.
The first stop Rin makes when she gets a new car is the cemetery.
She hasn’t been there since Altan’s funeral, and she hadn’t visited in a year before that. The summer weather, the heat with the sun beating down on her and prickling sweat down her back and her arms, doesn’t line up with her memories of this place. When she thinks about Altan’s grave, or her mother’s next to it, she always thinks of rain. Cold rain, spitting down on her and the grass and the sidewalk and the tombstones, painting everything in a muddy, dreary gray that’s so perfect for the mood it might as well as be cliche.
But today it’s sunny, and that feels too darkly ironic for Rin. Still, she does that if she doesn’t go today, she never will.
Altan’s grave has flowers at it.
It’s hard enough for Rin to stare at the stone long enough to read that the birth and death dates are only twenty-five years apart, but the shock of bright white flowers planted in front of it makes her tear up.
She thinks of Chaghan, sitting alone at the back of Altan’s funeral and her throat constricts, that tense feeling in her jaw that tells her she’s holding tension—our bodies tend to hold onto our anxieties without us even realizing, she remembers her therapist saying—and she lets it go. Her shoulders slump and she can feel the ache of that release in her right arm, the the sudden flow of blood to her jaw when she unclenches it.
“I’m sorry,” she says quietly to the stone in front of her and the ground beneath her feet. “I’m sorry I couldn’t help you.”
On the way home, it rains, and Rin rolls down the car window just to give a middle finger to the sky.
It’s a miracle Rin didn’t kill herself on her first day of sobriety.
Not that it had been easy to even get to that point. It had taken Venka sitting her down and telling Rin that she was going to walk out of her life and not look back unless she got sober, and even then it had taken three weeks before she could break the twenty-hour mark to even make it into her first full day of being sober.
She had deposited herself on the couch in Altan and Chaghan’s apartment that morning, and had spent that morning snapping at the two of them for every perceived slight against her. She had all but barked at Altan for turning off the television in front of her, only to shrink back under the blanket as a chill overtook her. “Rin, you need to sleep,” Altan advised her.
“Yeah, like you know so much about withdrawal,” she snapped at him, not particularly caring about the way he flinched away from how harsh she was.
“Did you sleep last night?” He asked, that unnaturally even tone of voice that Rin had always known to mean he was trying his hardest to keep his cool when his temper was failing.
Rin only nodded, too tired to include the fact that it had been in fitful stops and starts, a few minutes here and an hour or two there.
“You should get some sleep now,” he told her, moving to adjust the blanket draped over her body.
Rin swatted his hand away, rolling over petulantly just so she didn’t have to face him. “Don’t you think that’s what I’m fucking trying to do?” She asked. “Except you and Chaghan keep being bitches and interrupting me.”
“Rin, you’re being a bitch,’ he said with a sigh, that edge to his voice that made Rin feel more pleased than she should’ve, knowing she was getting under his skin. “Try to sleep, I’m going to get you some water.”
Rin shut her eyes against the dim light of the living room, the blinds drawn to keep it as dark and as cool as possible. But the noise from the sink in the kitchen, the tickle of the blanket’s uncomfortable fabric scratching against her arm, even the gentle footfalls of the upstairs neighbors kept Rin from having even a chance at falling asleep; it was like every little inconvenience kept her imprisoned in her own body, achy and tired as it was, despite her wanting anything but.
“Here,” Altan said, the clink of the water glass against the table like nails on a chalkboard. “Let me make sure you don’t have a fever.”
It was hardly gentle, not that anything Altan ever did was, but Rin suddenly felt his hand hot against her forehead, practically burning her when all she wanted was to burrow further under the blankets to get away from him.
“Fuck off,” she said, slapping his arm away. “You don’t need to mother me, what the hell is this?” Rin felt bad the second she had said it, since she had come here, seeking Altan’s comfort in a way she’d never let herself admit, the last bit of her mom she had. Altan had always had her eyes, her soothing touch. But hurt flashed across Altan’s face, followed quickly by anger. And it was always all too easy for Rin to fall into old habits and let his anger fuel her own.
“You don’t want to be mothered, huh? You sure don’t act like it, laying on my couch and bitching about everything. You want to do this yourself? Then fine,” he snapped back, that all-too familiar fire in his eyes as he paced the room in front of her. “Think again the next time you try and ask me or Chaghan to do something for you.”
Altan slammed the front door behind him, and like a black hole, all the fight was sucked out of her. Rin laid there on the couch, her head pressed into the cushion, and cried.
It wasn’t like Altan stayed away for very long. As angry as the two of them could get, as children and as adults, it was hard to separate them.
For better or for worse.
When he had come in the door that afternoon, after hours of Rin laying there on the couch and drifting in and out of a horrible, dreamless sleep, she had wanted to be angry. But try as she might, Rin couldn’t quite muster up the energy for anything more than a vague annoyance for Altan interrupting her attempt at a nap.
Even that vague annoyance faded away when Altan sat on the couch by her feet and set a styrofoam cup of ice cream on the coffee table in front of her.
“I even got gummy bears sprinkled on top,” he said.
Rin still wasn’t quite ready to soften up on him just yet. “What flavor?” she asked.
“Neapolitan, your favorite.”
Rin begrudgingly sat up on the couch to take the ice cream and the plastic spoon stuck in it.
“How do you feel?” Altan asked her, tucking a stray piece of her hair behind her ear. “Any better?”
The most Rin could muster up as an answer to that was a vague shrug, but she leaned against Altan’s side to eat the rest of her ice cream.
Later that night she had rocked back and forth on the couch before throwing herself into Altan’s arms again. “Please don’t ever leave me,” she cried, her tears less a conscious act and more a reaction to the pain in her body and in her head. “Please don’t ever leave,” she begged, not stopping until Altan had linked his pinky with hers.
“I promise,” he had said, kissing her forehead before he let her drift off into sleep again.
One year into Rin’s sobriety, Altan had died out in the big field that ran behind her mother’s home, and the only emotion she could think to muster during his funeral was anger that he had broke his promise.
“I don’t know how to get over losing him,” Rin tells Nezha, letting herself seem a bit drunker than she is, if only to be able to speak her mind.
Nezha looks at her strangely; probably because she’s never let herself be this open about losing Altan to anyone, let alone to him. But even as his eyebrows furrow together and he looks intently at her expression, examining her face, his jaw softens and his lips part, just slightly. “I don’t know that you ever do. I think you just manage it. Grow around it.”
Rin thinks about the bottle in her hand the night she had gotten into that accident, and wondered if she had grown around her grief or shrunk to fit inside it.
“I lost my brother, you know,” he says quietly. Rin has never seen Nezha’s eyes quite so sad, so unfocused, so distant. “He was only six.”
“Oh,” Rin says, uncomfortable around Nezha’s feelings. But it feels right to reach out, to lay a hand on his arms, to try and be comforting. “I’m so sorry.”
“It was years ago. Over a decade,” Nezha says, and Rin watches the change in his face as he comes back to himself, comes back to the moment. “But all I mean is… not a day goes by where I don’t think about Mingzha. I miss him every day, and every day I’m so angry that he had to die like that.”
Rin knows the feeling, but she can’t quite muster saying as much. Instead, her bottom lip wobbles and her hand around Nezha’s arm tightens.
"I wanted to die so badly, when it first happened," he says. Rin has never seen Nezha so tense, his shoulders near his ears and his jaw clenched. His hands ball in fists on the table and his knuckles go white. "I wanted it to be me instead of him, or I wanted to be with him... it didn't really matter so long as the pain ended."
"But?" Rin says expectantly.
"But what?" Nezha asks. "Do you want to know how many times I spent in the pysch ward?"
"But you're better now," Rin says.
“Rin, I still miss him. I still hate that he's dead, I still wish it had never happened. I think you just grow around the grief, Rin. It’s there, but you get bigger around it and some days it’s not quite so bad.”
“What about the days where it is bad?” Rin clears her throat, her voice strangled like she’s trying not to cry.
“Then it’s bad,” Nezha replies. “And you learn to live with it.”
Ten months and fourteen days after Altan’s funeral, Rin visits his grave again.
This time, she’s the one to plant flowers, chrysanthemums that the gardener had promised would stay hardy through the fall. She thinks about Chaghan and the last message she has from him, almost nine months ago, as she takes away the dead lillies he must've left.
It’s one of the bad days when she visits, one where the clouds overhead seem to cast her world in shades of gray and she can’t quite seem to look at the picture of her and Altan she keeps on the side table in the hallway. But she digs and dirt builds up under her fingernails, and she admires the handiwork of flowers blooming fire-red in front of Altan’s name, and she realizes Nezha was right.
She’s learning to live with it.