Archive of Our Own

It wasn’t often that someone would see to the disposal of the red roses on Dr. Urokodaki’s office desk, and the eulogy- which Shinobu had comprised both in writing and in speech, had caused her to miss half a surgery, and a lunch. 

It was written by her in a five-day tempest that ranged from denial to acceptance to uncomfortable lonesomeness. When the preparations were complete, she had nothing to do but contemplate her finished draft and await the appearance of the funerary services from the north of London. She had been tasked with meeting them in the commons room an hour from then.

Though Shinobu was one of those women, who in her childhood, had possessed the desire to have the world just so, now, and over the last few days especially, she finds her life in a stew of unclosed textbooks, unfolded clothes, an unmade bed, and many empty cups of coffee.

Dr. Urokodaki had, a mere fortnight ago, praised their team after a successful heart bypass. She had hardly known it then, but this surgery was to be the highest point of fulfilment. Nothing else would come near it for satisfaction, everything else was dreams, frustrations and unresponsive patients. Since then, there were moments in the afternoon especially where she would remember how the dear chief of medicine was now the dear late chief of medicine.

Today is one such afternoon. The sun shines through the window in all its vigour, and the office is decked in mournful cards and colourful carnations. Shinobu clutches her papers as she carries his roses along the hospital halls. The accumulated inactivity also hurries her along; since his passing, the hospital has stood still, and a fine day like this makes her impatient, almost desperate.

Her quickest way into the commons room is through the hallway on the left, but seeing an acquaintance in the sometimes dear (most times insufferable) Giyuu Tomioka around the corner is enough to dissuade her. She doesn't feel like getting into conversation with him, at least not now. She paces along the right and avoids him by hurrying uncomfortably faster. It was an excuse- she thought, to find a trash can and finally dispose of the red roses before they withered.

Tomioka had read the five pages of eulogy in a supply closet earlier that day, stiff and unmoving, and 6 feet away from her the entire time. She had studied his face very intensely, but there was nothing, and then he left. It made her a little angry.

They hadn’t discussed the death, and for as long as their secret trysts are to continue, she doesn’t think they ever will.

Shinobu grips her papers and enters the workroom. She stands on one foot and with the other hurls the window right open. The world is much brighter outside, light tickles her face as she settles her papers along one table to look outside. Two swallows are making passes over the road.

Funerary services make their way into space one by one an hour later. The men are dressed in suits and the women wear blazers, making her feel a little squeamish in her dark blue scrubs.

They all turn at the sound of her approach. “Dr. Kochou, you are…family of Dr Urokodaki?” one says.

“No.” she answers, though the residents under his guise were the closest thing to that.

“A close friend?”

“...No.”

They look at her with amused suspicion. “You are…”

“Chief resident.” she then says through a sigh. 

Dr. Urokodaki had been an old man of seventy-four. He was as respectable as anyone could be, muscular and of silver hair, but he did not speak of his family, and most residents had come to assume he simply didn’t have one. So somehow, oddly, the task fell onto her. The eulogy- a speech that praises someone highly, especially someone who has just died. She much expected the task to fall on Tomioka, who seemed to know him more personally, but he never has been good at expressing himself in either written or spoken form.

The truth was, she could pretend to know more about the former than she could about the latter. Though sympathetic for all of his patients, Dr Urokodaki had been stern and pragmatic for as long as she knew him. He took her under his wing during her first year of residency, and he had been her first term professor at Cambridge. He taught her most of what she knew about cardiology, the rest was derived from books and ancient texts. As for Giyuu Tomioka, well, her relationship with him was no more than a physical one. She once supposed she liked his eyes, the unblended mix of dark and blue that was made even more granular in the sunlight. And she liked the fact that he was so tall.

She remembers very clearly the day the trysts began, though their timeline is often muddled between months and years. A little more than a decade. She often sifts unfamiliar feelings and returns to certain memories again, and again. Now, seconds away from shooing the people gathered in front of her, the muscles of her stomach tighten involuntarily as she recalls another detail.

They were old friends from secondary school, but it had been years since she'd understood him. They fell out of touch at Cambridge. It had been difficult to do anything else. But there was always him, who exasperated her with his affectation of distance, even when she found her fingers tangled in his hair inside that closet every Thursday afternoon. They had known each other since they were fifteen, she and Giyuu, and it bothered her that they were awkward when they talked anywhere else. Even though she felt it was largely her fault. She had tried to suppress some unknowing feeling for him by cutting him off entirely, so at Cambridge they spoke no more than in passing. 

Once she came to a lecture with one friend from Norfolk, they idled for an hour with nervous jokes, handed cigarettes about, and she had only looked at him. She concluded that’s why they stopped speaking- she did not like the way she looked at him, so since then, they passed each other in the hallway and only smiled. He always seemed to find it awkward- that’s that girl from secondary school, he might have told his friends as he walked on.

So she liked to pretend she didn’t care- there goes that one boy from secondary school, she once said to her friend in retaliation. She had her wits to protect her, always first in her practicals, her science classes. She had her odd, stubborn theories of the world. Her classic novels. He was one of many old friends, he was invisible. That lean figure and messy hair- if she never thought about him at all, she might have never noticed the blue in his eyes.

The blinds frame a partial view of the cloudless sky as funerary services leave after a half hour of chit-chatting (she could not call it anything else). She finds herself alone in the room again. Through the open window comes the smell of fresh flowers, always a contrast from the rather distinguishable smell of the soapy hospital halls.

She shifts through the hallways uncomfortably after a while. It was mostly the men asking her about hymns, caskets, and flower arrangements. It felt as though her own parents had died all over again, as though lawyers were recounting inheritance, properties and will. She did not know which answer was the right one, nor did she know the doctor's favourite songs and flowers. All the while she mostly nodded, her lack of words sifting a foolish, ignorant feeling within her.

At first she wondered why no sister or brother or even distant cousin stood in her place, in a quiet, mournful home instead of a crowded, mournful hospital. Then she remembered the doctor was never one for family at all.

She looks down at her watch. 3:34PM . She had resident’s schedules to modify, and a girl of four with an aortic aneurysm at 4:50. And a room to clean, she could not stew in her unmade bed and dirty coffee cups forever. 

It was also Thursday, and she would always meet with Tomioka on Thursday afternoons. She stretches down onto a chair in the lounge and pokes at the lunch she’d missed yet again, her eyes fixed and unseeing, and indulged in another thought of those 6 years at Cambridge. There is a certain fury she feels whenever she thinks about the course of her relationship with Giyuu Tomioka, her classmate, her friend, a stranger, a lover. She once dreamed she was back in college, pounding against his lapels before yielding with a little sob to the safe enclosure of his arms, letting herself be kissed. She did not forgive herself for not speaking to him, she simply gave up.

She replays this dream several times before returning to what is real: she never once apologised for ending their friendship, and maybe he was angry with her for that, or maybe he never bothered to care. But she had simply liked him a little too much.

With some certainty, she decides she won’t go into the closet that afternoon.

Shinobu rereads the five pages of her now doubtful draft. Giyuu never said anything about it, though it’s uncertain if he actually disliked what she’d written. This thought tortures her as she finishes her salad and walks towards the operating room. That morning, when he walked away from the closet, she agonised going after him and demanding him to speak. She remained alone for a few minutes, loitering on how to choose the less disastrous of the two poor options: demand what was wrong with what she thought to be an eloquent, appropriate speech, or go about her day without another word.

She had found the latter less humiliating, and begged the afternoon would pass by her quickly. Though just then, she realises knowing nothing about his reaction and being puzzled by his silence is even more unbearable. She turns away from the operating room and marches towards that closet in an alert, aggressive manner. Her stomach twists.

She ponders with her hand over the knob for a moment longer, and then she hurls the door right open. For several seconds they stare at each other, and neither speak. For all her hesitation, she had prepared nothing to say.

He makes a forward motion as though to loop his arms around her, but she stops him. “Wait,” firmly, she states. “Don’t.”

He listens. He has always listened to her. 

Voices reach them from across the hall, and she quickly hurls herself inside the closet as well. “We should never see each other socially.”

Though it has never been easy, the darkness makes his expression even harder to read. “No.”

“That was established in college.” she tells him.

“Yes.”

It may have been fear of interruption that caused her to step forward and lock the door. With that, he moves a little further away from her. 

“The funeral is tomorrow.” she says, trying to raise his lowered gaze “About the eulogy-”

“I heard.”

She can gauge nothing from these tense replies and she’s still unable to see him clearly. A single ray of sunlight passes through the space from a window the size of a textbook, and she moves towards it.

“You are going, no?” She smiles. Isn’t a smile the best way to move away from difficult topics of conversation? 

He looks away. “Yes.”

She changes the subject. “Beautiful day,”

“Hardly. The weather is much more pleasant down in Cornwall.”

She’s silent for another moment. There was always something between them, something even he must have sometime acknowledged. Perhaps it’s easier to stick to tame remarks about the weather for fear of sounding perverse, but the last thing she wants is a postgraduate debate on geography.

The climate in Cornwall is naturally finer, but Giyuu is tenacious in argument and she’s tired of that.  “Oh. Is it?”

He looks away again, but this time for only a second or less, and when he turns to her she thinks she sees a touch of irritation. Had she sounded so condescending? He was never used to speaking in the closet, though when he did he sounded perfectly pleasant. “Dr. Kochou,” he starts, “I know you’ve never much enjoyed our conversations.”

The harshness of her last name on his tongue makes her wince. Her eyebrows narrow. “That’s not what I meant at all.”

She’s surprised he would ever raise that question. Giyuu had a manner of wrong footing ever since their competitive first years of residency, and she remembered she used to brutally tease him in secondary school, but he was always the first to the closet. Why?

He looks at her as though he’s said something stupid, only then does he flush a little with shame.

Their friendship had become vague and even constrained in recent years, but it was an old

habit, and they had broken it to become strangers on intimate terms. She had come to know every part of him except his mind and his heart.

It began on a Thursday six months ago. She had gone to fetch swabs, and he was there too. They stared at each other a little, having long accepted their acquaintance continued being much like it was in Cambridge, and smiled. I went to secondary school with him- she once said to a nurse. I went to secondary school with her- he had probably said at least once since college.

She had moved to greet him, but he spoke instead. “What are you looking for?” 

“Cotton balls and swabs.”

“They moved them to the top,” he replied.

She thanked him and moved to reach for the top shelf, but in some way or another their faces drew close instead, and she was certain for a moment that she would spring away or hit him across the cheek with her open hand, but she didn’t do any of that, and found his mouth tasted of salt.

She had snuck away after afternoon surgery a Thursday after that, her feet moved swiftly by some newly ignited yearning, and found him there again. He was there the Thursday after that, and the Thursday after that, and so they had come to their wordless agreement.

She is tired of it now. “That’s not what I meant…” she repeats, but he moves further towards the shadows, as though recoiling from her.

Her throat constricts and she can not bring herself to await his answer. “I don’t feel like doing this today. All day I've been furious with you, and with myself. Why is it that you can never bring yourself to say a single meaningful thing to me? Is it because you think I don’t enjoy conversation with you?”

Still, he shrinks away. “When we went off to medical school you let off that sentiment.”

She gives a tense little laugh. “Because it was a convenient way of not thinking about it.”

“It?”

Until then she had kept her composure, but this senselessness towards her makes her feel all the more small. To stay there a moment longer would be an inconceivable folly. “That there was something there!” She yells, hurling the door behind them open, then shut.

The girl of four’s surgery passes without complication, and at night, in the darkness of the ward, her sleepy eyes gaze mournfully at Shinobu out of nests of hair.

She begins to wonder about the dead because their days had ended, and she does not know how she would get through hers.

The smell of fresh lilacs always reminded Giyuu Tomioka of the fate of unrequited love.

He looks ahead. For a moment he has a vivid picture of the sunlight that partly framed the woman in the closet. But that afternoon passed by him, she was angry, and Dr Urokodaki was…

Sobs shake the funerary hall. By that emotion, everyone there seems to give themselves up to them. Everywhere is the rich odour of roses, for they were the doctor’s favourite, but when the light summer stirs admits the trees of the burial site, there comes also through the mounts of black a fresh smell of lilac. He had noticed it from the moment he arrived. He had buried many people here before.

In front of the casket, over which she towers alert as was custom, Dr. Shinobu Kochou says something about art and its uselessness. “The artist is the creator of beautiful things.” says she, “the artist is the giver of life and life is the creator of such beautiful things.”

The sullen murmur of the bees shouldering their way through the uncut grass seems to make her stillness more oppressive. The dim roar of London is like the deep bourbon of a distant piano.

She speaks eloquently, but that eloquence is far from personal. It was true that he had first been tasked with the writing of the eulogy, and he had tried, but the words continuously avoided his pen.

He looks forward again. In the centre of the space, clamped to an upright easel, stands the full-length portrait of Dr. Urokodaki, and behind it, some little distance away was Giyuu, who picked at his nail beds in uncomfortable silence. He looks as gracious as he had been taught to. “The moral life of a man who dedicated 5 decades to the improvement of others,” Dr. Kochou worms her way back into notice, she continues.

She had lost that innocence about her from secondary school, that was inevitable. They were friends once, maybe more than that- whatever that’s supposed to entail in a relationship between two people. One day they weren’t, he supposed she’d woke up and decided that was the way that things should be.

On the hottest day of the summer of 1963 they had hurled their graduation caps into the air. That was back when he used to feel something for her.

“I heard you’re going to be a doctor too.” she said.

“You heard right.”

She feigned surprise. It occurred to him then that her soft, sunken features had never appeared more beautiful than they did in that moment. “That’s six more years of me,” she flashed him a witty smile. “You might get sick.” 

“That’s not so bad.” He liked listening to her talk.

There was this feeling. It was strange. It led him to notice the small things she did, her stubborn habits. He was stricken by the way her cheeks became pools of red in the winter, he liked how she never read the introductions to her favourite classic novels in fear of spoilers. He liked her blithe, innocent smile, though only when it was hernest. She went through periods of time so irritated at everything she only managed to conjure a fake one, but never around him. Though he hadn’t realised it then, around him she was always simply Shinobu. This realisation would unnerve him in the years to come. He would become deathly terrified of that feeling.

Though at Cambridge, not once did Giyuu Tomioka dare give his feelings a name. A friend once supposed that feelings, especially the most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But he never went along with that. The strongest of feelings have no way of fading, though sometimes he wakes and wishes they would.

He thinks he’s too old to be giving these memories any more time of day, but they are everywhere. They tread through the halls of the hospital, shoulder through the uncut grass. They come with the smell of lilacs.

Then on the coldest day of the winter of 1966 Shinobu hurried her way out of Biology class. She walked right into the meticulous sanctuary that was the library whenever the thought of their practical exams carried her off. There she’d get lost in T.S Elliot and teach herself foreign languages, little habits of eternal quality she’d never lose over the years.

Giyuu did very well in secondary school- not exceptionally well, but very well. Shinobu was the exceptional one. But he couldn’t be sure about how their academics stood in college in comparison to each other- she had created that distance.

“Why don’t we talk?” he asked. Her breath faltered, and for a second he thought she’d hit him with a ‘Hey, you’ or call him terribly heartless and run from him, smiling.

But her cheeks pertained to that same reddish colour they did in the cold. “I just don’t like you anymore.”

He wasn’t simple enough to take that for an answer, but it sounded as though it had come from the very bottom of her heart. She was what she was. An old friend, almost invisible. But in her he saw a strange beauty- something carved, almost delicate about the face, a full, rosebud mouth, eyes that were so dark and contemplative. Like a moonflower dripping in starlight.

The sweetness of her, her character, his childhood friend, all in danger of becoming unreachable. Shinobu would not see him or talk to him, but in his dreams he wrote her poems- sweet words. He had so many words. But in the conscious world none of these would manifest in front of pen and paper.

He honestly can’t remember much of those years except a certain mood that permeated most of them, a melancholy feeling that he associates with the closet on Thursday afternoons.

His thoughts are broken by the sound of winching. The casket is slowly lowered into the ground, but most eyes remain on Dr. Kochou, who after finishing her speech neatly shuffles her papers and steps down from the podium.

For a period of time, loitering around the Cambridge library on most afternoons was Dr. Urokodaki. He had come in the spring of 1969, just before college graduation, to scout three interns for his residency program in cardiology. Every student of medicine wanted it not because of the opportunity, for they could surely intern elsewhere, but because of how increasingly difficult it was to secure it. There were only three . It would end up being him, Shinobu, and a ginger girl who now worked up in Manchester. Most inquired, and were given all sorts of contradictory information: that the doctor was a brilliant man, that he had been a great intellectual in the forties, that he was a fraud. Rumour had it that he was so wealthy he wouldn’t even accept a salary, and this, Giyuu would learn in the future, was entirely fabricated.

Though he knew the doctor from a different time- secondary school. Even then he could not be certain of which information was true.

The doctor used to lurch around the apple tree in the garden as though he were looking for something. Giyuu had noticed him watching, but it was only one morning on his way to English Literature that the doctor finally approached him, he twirled an apple between his fingers. He was a man of average height, black of hair, and muscular.

“Your professors tell me you got into Cambridge. One of two in this school for medical college. You’re going to be a doctor.” he said, with a certain firmness.

Giyuu winced. “I don’t know. I can’t afford it.”

See, the doctor had gone to Cambridge himself, he came from old money. Even Shinobu Kochou came from old money. She never made much show of it, and they did not discuss matters of wealth even as friends. But she grew up in central London, in a nice Kensington townhouse. Two sisters, parents who were never there. They were brought up in such a magnanimous style that differentiated them from the rest- nannies and private school, summers in Italy, in the French Riviera, winters in Switzerland, in St. Moritz. Not a childhood of ‘50p for the bus fare!’ and ‘50p for the dancing lessons!’, but a proper, English childhood.

Giyuu was not poor by any means, his parents worked hard enough to send him to a nice, decent school. His father was a mechanic and his mother stayed at home until times got tighter when they finalised that nice, decent prep school he was to be sent off to. When his father died in his 9th year his sister took all their money and kept him there. But she could not afford six years at Cambridge. This he knew from the beginning. 

It dawned on him then that being very good, being second, was very different from being exceptional.

“You can always go on financial aid.” Dr. Urokodaki obliged.

But Giyuu’s mother had gotten sick, a nasty cancer of the stomach (she would die a year later), and that aid would not cover the full tuition. He had gotten into many other schools, almost a quarter of that price. Some public colleges with no tuition at all.

“It’s not meant for me,” he answered, “My family will do better with the money elsewhere.”

The doctor stayed under the tree, twirling his apple. Giyuu was late for English Literature that day. 

But the next day, his Cambridge tuition had been paid in full. All six years. All that study of the underlying principles of medicine and cardiology.

Cambridge, Michaelmas term, October. The wind bit, the sun hid, and on the first day of class when he ought to have been lecturing post-graduate residents, Dr. Urokodaki saw Giyuu to the general admissions office. The doctor had this look about him that spoke wordlessly, do well, be exceptional. Mediocrity was not enough for such a college, even very good, and though Giyuu had never before been one to think of himself as exceptional, he took it upon himself during his pre-clinical years to be just so. And he became so.

“What are you doing?”

He knew that voice. He knew, before he turned around, who he would find on the other side of the headstone.

Dr. Shinobu Kochou in her little black dress, papers flapping from underneath her arms, threatening to tear away in the warm wind.

“What was that thing you said?” he asks her instead, “About art.”

“The doctor was a fan of the classics. Tolstoy. Even Oscar Wilde” She slings a black glove over her shoulder and walks away. For his 18th birthday, she had gifted him a copy of The Picture of Dorian Grey, which remains tucked under his night desk to this day.

The hospital was in oppressive stillness the following day. Mourners shouldered their way through the halls, the janitor department even held out on scratching the name Dr. Sakonji Urokodaki from the glass on his office door out of blatant respect. Shinobu, perched over the Xerox machine, had just barely finished her lunch. 

She knew it was a palpable human reaction to grief- but the grief that would take place across the hospital in the coming days yet managed to surprise her. Attendants weeped, their residents weeped, of whose interns weeped. He touched people’s lives, she would hear in their whispers, and it was, in the doctor’s case at least, entirely true. 

He did touch people, doctor and patient alike, but it was the latter who really mourned him with a grief no less sharp than that of those closest to him.

She sits on a small stack of boxes in the general hall, watching the new chief of medicine bring things out of Dr. Urokodaki’s office. There is a certain melancholy to it, as things had been the same for so long, and this unforeseen change had certainly shaken most out of their usual routine. Human beings, in that moment, had never seemed more expendable. More replaceable, as though leaves falling from the trees in the autumn, only to be replaced by new ones in the spring.

Shinobu looks over the files she’d printed, scribbling corrections with the only pen she ever used- a fountain pen gifted to her by her sister while she was in college. Montblanc. She checks up on the girl with the aneurysm in her heart, who was set to be checked out that afternoon. She talks with the girl’s parents, waves them goodbye, and tries to find her smile again.

Her mood seemed to have improved after that, yet there was still something permeating her mind. Suddenly the room felt too hot, too crowded, too loud. She swallows heavily. She thought she had gotten over it.

That night, she falls to the floor of the entryway, not bothering to turn on the hallway light lest she visualise the mess there was inside. The next day, a Sunday, she dedicated herself to cleaning it all up. All the empty cups of coffee, the scattered books, of which there were heaps and heaps she still wanted to read. She surveyed her desk as one would a life, reaching through her folders and hiking maps, her copies of Emily Dikinson’s poems. At the end of the table was still a brochure for the French Riviera, some trip with her colleagues halted by an emergency at the hospital years ago. Though when she woke up at 4AM she found herself reaching for the essays of T.S Elliot, evoking within her a nostalgia she hadn't felt since her college days. Then arriving at 6AM, she was second to the hospital, second to Giyuu Tomioka.

Sighing, she puts her hands over her head as though that would stop her from facing what she knew to be true, what she has known for years but never dared to admit to anyone, not even herself.

Especially not herself.

But there it was, a truth so undeniable, spilling out of the pages of her favourite essays, her favourite theories of the world. A truth that glowed vibrantly in the centre of her head like the sun. One would think that as a cardiac surgeon in training, Dr. Shinobu Kochou would be learned in matters of the heart. But when it came to love she was as green as the young, shallow knights of the summertime. As green as a boy soldier marching to war.

Being a surgeon was always more than just a job to her, it was her calling and her way of life. She was more than happy to sacrifice her free time so that her patients could have more time with their loved ones, but she’d always thought this made her wholly unlovable. Sometimes she was in the operating room for more than thirteen hours when someone came into the emergency room with an acute aortic dissection. She couldn’t simply say, ‘oh no, I've worked too much today’, she sacrificed what most people thought was crazy just to save other people’s lives, and there was no room for a lover in all that chaos.

But that day, as she set eyes on Giyuu Tomioka, she had never felt more sick to her stomach.

All those years she’d spent tiptoeing around him, avoiding him in every college hallway, repressing whatever feeling the sight of him evoked until she managed to convince herself she never wanted him in that way at all.

He smiles at her, there in the brink of dawn, passing her the pen in the lobby so that she could sign herself in too.

“Morning.” she says.

“Morning.” he echoes, his voice cool and sullen.

She opens her mouth, urging to continue, but how could she explain herself? “Sorry, sorry for what I said in college. Or rather what I didn’t say. I really am sorry.” Absolutely not. So she goes quiet, Giyuu goes quiet too, and they walk the halls to their department in silence. 

The week goes by painfully slowly, worsened by the weather. Shinobu finds herself stuck with a patient who is nauseated at the idea of the required surgery. Her appetite, already cloyed by the heat of that Thursday afternoon, is further diminished.

The halls are a bath of heat, leaving her perching out of a window during her lunch hour, scrambling for air. To her right are most of the residents, to her left Giyuu Tomioka converses with a senior attending physician. Shinobu maintains her steady perch by the window, gripping to it for support, amazed that no one appears to hear her still thudding heart. She longs for a coffee, but she has no appetite.

She cups her left hand above her cheek, likely to exclude Giyuu out of her peripheral vision. She listens and engages in the chatter of those familiar to her, yet from where she sits she has the opportunity to contemplate him. And she does. It was Thursday, and she longs to throw herself inside of that closet.

Then suddenly, as quickly as the tide turns, there was no hope at all. A nurse bursts into the room, and as soon as Shinobu hears the winching wheels and stretcher being ushered through the halls, she knows.

“This kid,” the nurse says, “he doesn’t have an hour. He doesn’t.”

“How are his vitals?” someone else says.

“Bad. Very bad.”

The kid is carried away, a swarm of nurses making their way into the operating room. It passes by in a blur- this kid, his heart was wholly deprived of oxygen, he had multiple blocked arteries, and at thirteen, a history of chronic heart disease.

She washes her hands methodically, her movements practised and precise, and there the kid was, with all his heart open laid onto the table, for the world to see. He was poked and prodded, Shinobu can only recall looking into his heart, passing around long, metal tweezers, standing there, trying to fix what was wrong along with four others.

The child’s heart was fragile, Shinobu was aware of every breath, every movement in the room, and yet she thought of Giyuu despite herself. She thought of the rare moments when his eyes softened, the brief touches that spoke volumes. He was standing right infront of her. It was both comforting and unnerving to have him so close, yet so far.

“Clamp,” the attending says, the instrument is placed in his hands.

“How’s the pulse?”

“Stable, but weak.” Shinobu says, swallowing, her eyes never leaving that child’s heart. 

Right then she was acutely aware of the fragility of life. Even when the child’s heart was repaired, when he was stitched back up, even when the hospital was quieter, she could not save herself from the anguish that plagued all her thoughts. She endures this for eight hours, coming and going, splashing her face with water during allocated periods of time.

During which she finds herself ridiculous. She has known this for months, even years, and she’s no better than she was in school. She could not fix it with him, not with cool, casual conversations, not with witty remarks and teases. She could not wrap herself in satin darkness and begin again.

She had always known him, now she knew nothing of him. His eyes were sometimes plain, sometimes beautiful. So blue in the light.

He bewildered her, he was capable of that, and her stupid indifference might have repelled him. They might soon be alone together, with more contradictions. Where? In that wretched, claustrophobic closet, in some vacant patient room, beneath the street lights by the river. She could not bear it.

That was no fantasy, it was certain- a future both desirable and unavoidable.

Shinobu strips herself of her gloves and gown, glancing at Giyuu, who was doing the same. For a moment their eyes meet, but she has built so many walls around herself that a single gaze can not be unscrambled.

She stands there feeling like a woman who has just swallowed a suicide pill- nothing to do but wait. She scrubs and scrubs, specks of blood streaking into the cool water, like marble, before draining down the large metal sink.

From outside she hears steps, nurses, wheeling the sleeping child into a patient room. Inside, she and Giyuu Tomioka stare at each other and neither say a word. The bright lights make it hard to read his expression, but his eyes are softened in worry.

“Are you well?” he asks, quietly, and with a hint of concern.

“Perfectly well.”

He follows her into the commons room. She makes them both a coffee, adding one teaspoon of sugar to hers, yet stopping bluntly over his when she realises she can’t quite remember.

“I’m sorry, I can’t remember how-”

“Two, thank you.”

She nods absently, and the silence is stretched. Finally he breaks it, his voice tinged with frustration and a little bit of something else.

“How is your family?”

She doesn’t look at him. “Well. My sisters came to visit me at the hospital just last week. The youngest, she’s grown up to be so…so lovely.”

Her tiny teaspoon clatters against its cup. She shakes a little, arms tied behind her back, gaze fixed on the floor below her.  “Sorry.”

“No.”

“Yes but- I don’t know if…I don’t think…”

 “Why do you resent me?”

Voices reach her through the open door. She hears a nurse’s voice, and that attending physician’s. It may have been fear of interruption that causes Giyuu to step back and open the door wider for her to follow through.

“I don’t.”

“No.”

“I really don’t.”

“Dr. Urokodaki-”

She sends him a chilling gaze meant to cut through him, bones and all.

Yes, the doctor had his favourites and she accepted that. But him, even in secondary he- secondary school, why did it always come down to secondary school? He, with his bluntness and willingness to help other people. Giyuu never crowded or condescended, he was the darling resident, ample and observant. He only really started to be like that in college. And she- she was scrambling over the eulogy, thus struggling over proofs she used to be able to do in her sleep. Shinobu loathes this. “I didn’t even know his favourite flower.”

“Red roses,” he says.

She wants to slap all the life out of him at that moment. At the same time doesn’t understand this feeling- she was never jealous of him, she simply missed him so much. She had given herself up to teenage delusion, and even though she was a grown woman, at that moment, she would not have minded yielding and sobbing and pounding against his chest, surrendering under his kiss.

She pinches the bridge of her nose, relieving some of the tension between her brows before slapping back on her perpetual smile. 

“Lilacs and wisteria plant,” he starts. “Your favourites-” but he is quickly interrupted.

“This secret thing we have, Giyuu, it’s not right.” She had not called him by his name outside that closet in a very long time. “This back and forth.”

The romantics said that many boys would come to bring the girl flowers. But one day, the girl would meet a boy who would learn her favourite flowers, her favourite songs, her favourite sweets. A boy that would take the time to know the girl better than anybody, and that boy would earn her heart.

How childish, and how she wishes it so.

“What do I mean to you, Shinobu?” He says it there in the dark, his eyes alive under moonlight, trying to unscramble her.

And hours earlier, she had been about to conjure him for a private moment inside the closet, for something straight out of the classics she so liked- Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D.H Lawrence. How frivolous she had been, so much so that she can only let out in a whisper:

“Oh God. I’m sorry.”

And she really did mean it, she meant it for all those lost, forgotten years. She moves further away, towards the corner into a deeper shadow.

“It was stupid thing, this indifference. I never meant to let it get this way.” She shrinks away, crossing a quiet hall, surrendering under the moonlight. The hospital was silent, the rush of emergency had passed.

He stops, too, metres away, and there is just enough light for him to see she’s tearful and trying to speak. For a moment that isn’t possible and she shakes her head so as to indicate he should wait, then presses both eyes with her thumbs, bringing herself under control before saying, “Perhaps it’s been years since I felt it. But recently it’s been strange, with everything we do in that closet. I mean, I’ve been seeing so strangely- it’s too sharp, too real. For months I’ve been so angry at myself for that time, when I said I just didn’t like you anymore. I thought I'd be perfectly happy cutting you off in medical school and focusing on myself. I was so angry with myself. I didn’t want to think about it…”

It? His eyes say it. Until then her gaze was lowered, but when she raises it to look at him, she knows that he knows it too.

“Why?” he asks instead.

“It was larger than me.” She hated the feeling of losing control, of the sight of him sparking some joy in her. What would happen when he was gone? “But something has happened now, hasn’t it? Something so large, and I know it’s there because it’s made me behave ridiculously. Last Thursday, and at the funeral…Do you remember that book I gave you, the Oscar Wilde one? Damn it. You even know my favourite…” She stops. She looks down and he waits, but the words do not leave her. “I’m sorry…” She’d slowly begun to understand- how could she have been so ignorant about herself, so foolish? “You know what I’m talking about…You feel it too.”

It's a plea. “Tell me you do. ”

“I know it. I do. But why are you crying? Is there something else?”

She doesn’t know how to answer and she looks at him. Why was she crying? She couldn't begin to explain when so many emotions engulfed her. She had no time to hate, nor had she time to love. Those little, fleeting glances, she thought, must be enough for her.

She shakes her head. She was afraid that there was nothing shared, that her assumptions were all wrong and that it was purely physical, that she had isolated herself further, and that he would think she was a fool.

So they stare at each other, afraid that something delicately established in that moment might slip them, that for all his candour Giyuu would turn and repel from her, his words of eternal quality abandoned in the ebony of that night. There seemed no way out in words. He puts his hand on her shoulder, there, in a quiet corner, away from the hum of machines.

“Shinobu, come back to me.” His mouth still tasted of that same salt. Momentarily, he draws away. “Come back. Please .” She kisses him with greater confidence in between falling, sighing sounds. It was almost foreign to kiss him so freely and even then she felt slightly unnerved by the knowledge that someone might wander and see them.

He pushes her hard into the corner, between the walls. As they kissed she was pulling at his hair, losing herself in the smell of his clothes. He scatters his kisses across her temples, her throat, the top of her chest through the loose, cotton fabric. He whispers her name as though a child trying out new words and sounds, she whispers his back knowing it had taken on an entirely different meaning. The sound was the same, and so were the two syllables, but the meaning evoked in her a strangeness. She liked the name of the tip of her tongue. She might as well have been rolling her r’s and calling him darling. 

It feels so intimate to see him like this- face to face in the gloom, staring into what little she can see of his eyes. The daughter of a lawyer and the son of a mechanic, there’s nothing abstract about their faces except the disconnection they once felt from each other. For all their mutual yearning across a near decade, since they’d thrown those damned graduation caps in the air many summers ago.

Finally, he speaks the three simple words that could never be cheapened. She speaks them back to him, as though she’d been the one to speak to them first.

Morning settles briskly over London. It was early, so early that the roar of the city hadn’t coaxed Giyuu out of his slumber, but a gentle stir beside him- the touch of a woman.

He wasn’t home, but the nostalgia evoked by the place around him, foreign, yet familiar, makes it appear as though he were anyway. Birds are singing and the first signs of dawn slip through the curtains. He didn’t remember falling asleep (and could much less comprehend how he had drifted off in the first place), but he was aware of the warmth beside him. Gently, to not wake her, he turns his neck. Her face was by his shoulder, nestled in peaceful slumber. 

Shinobu stirs, her eyes not quite fluttering open. She rolls over her poem books, sprawled over her bed as the morning brews.

She wakes in an almost mechanical manner as soon as the clock strikes 5AM, murmuring, her eyes fluttering open, her gaze soft and warm. “Hey, you.” 

A good morning escapes her, then she rolls over again, her voice still heavy with sleep. She blinks twice, as though begging her eyes to show his face clearly, but they are too tired from all her tears and they put her back to sleep in a matter of moments.

When she definitely wakes, she slips out of bed, her feet touching the cool floor. She moves with a grace that seems almost effortless, wandering through her well-worn volumes of poetry. She finally settles over her morning coffee, her gaze daringly fixed on him, almost teasingly.

“What are you thinking of?” she asks.

It feels incomprehensible to Giyuu in that moment, that he may be afflicted by hopeful notions, like the ones he had not felt in a very long time. But alas he was. She wandered back to him like a butterfly. “Hope.”

She puts a finger to her lips, “Hope is the thing with feathers, that perches the soul, and sings the tune without the words, and never stops, at all. ”

She recites endless poems, laughing, that same elementary laugh he so enjoyed. She didn’t want to live in fear anymore. She had come back.

There from the bed, he peers up at her. “So how long do you suppose we can keep this damn thing going?” 

She begins talking about what one may call the burden of the self, she waves her poetry books, then with a little smile says, “Forever.”