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For many years you have had a recurring dream. You are suspended in the air on invisible strings, your limbs spread like an anatomical diagram. The air around you is cold and thick with a sterile scent. It is completely dark but you know you are being watched. Every inch of your body is being scrutinized by a clinical gaze, eyes cutting vivisection lines across your skin with the precision of a surgeon’s hands. It always ends just before you can look down at yourself and you wake with a pounding sense of dread.
Then you came to Inaba and the dream changed.
There are lights piercing through the dark, they seem to come from everywhere. As you try and fail to find the source, colors dancing over your retinas, you realize that they’re all pointed at you.
Somewhere you can hear the sounds of rummaging. Metal parts clicking and clacking as if being carried and assembled haphazardly. The noise is always accompanied by footsteps and a soft whirring that reminds you of an engine motor.
It all feels so vivid that with each dream you wonder more and more—Are you truly dreaming? Or is your life out there the dream, and these are glimpses of your true reality?
The pressure is mounting. There is a case to be solved, lives at stake. You have to make a move but the strings tethered to your joints render your body limp and useless.
Golden eyes too bright to be natural meet yours in the dark and you realize that you can’t wake up this time. You feel bare under its gaze. Perversely exposed to the cold, sterile air.
The homunculus splits your face with its smile.
“It’s so nice to finally meet you, Pinocchio,” It says, its voice echoing off the walls in such a way that makes it feel like a hulking presence.
“Do you like what I made? I carved it just for you!” It asks too gleefully, eagerness dripping from its distorted voice. It spreads its arms, rustling the fabric of its oversized sleeves. “Now you and I can go out into the world together, we can show everyone what we really are! Don’t you want them to see?”
You can’t speak. Your mouth won’t move. And yet the figure’s smile drops as if it heard you anyways. “No? What’s the problem, then?”
“Is it my hands? Are my hands too small?” You watch it open and close its fists, raising them up to its eyes.
“No, it’s because my face is too round, isn’t it?” It whines, cupping its cheeks in its palms. Its nails dig into the flesh and suddenly there's a sickening tear that makes your stomach twist.
“My shoulders, they aren’t square enough,” Something juts out from its shoulder blade as it slouches forwards, threatening to pierce its way out.
“My voice is too high,” Your ears ring, it sounds like too many people talking at once.
“I’m too short,” It’s legs tremble and it stumbles, clutching its marred face in its hands. Something ripples under its skin.
You notice security cameras hung from the ceiling in corners of the room. Are there other people seeing this? You feel sick.
It doubles over and screams, a piercing sound that cuts right down to your bones. The lights pulse and hum and buzz. Between the brief periods of darkness you see its silhouette morphing between what seem like various insectoid features.
“Look at me! Why won’t you look at me?” Thick tears are pouring from its eyes, the only thing about it still resembling a person. “Please! Tell me what I need to fix to make you happy! Don’t leave me!”
You squeeze your eyes shut. This isn’t real. That isn’t you. No matter how much it reminds you of the thoughts pounding in your head every time you look at yourself, even if it seems to know things that no one else would know besides you, it has to be some kind of trick.
“It’s useless, it’s useless! I’ll never be a real boy!” It shrieks and the fluorescent lights buzz louder and louder until they shatter with an ear splitting pop and the room goes dark.
***
That was all so long ago, now.
It’s no longer as simple as awakening to an otherworldly power and deciding on a whim that the public’s opinions don’t matter. That you can be yourself freely if you just rid yourself of your shame. It felt that simple back then, you wish it still was.
Your keys clatter against the plate by the entrance as you shove the door shut behind you. Toeing off your shoes and hanging up your coat, you move on autopilot over to the couch where your girlfriend is working diligently with a bundle of fabric and yarn.
She doesn’t even flinch as you slump down beside her, melting against her side and letting out a long, weary sigh.
“Long day?” She hums around the tapestry needle held between her lips. You nod softly against her shoulder.
She decided recently to finally try growing out her hair. It’s only just reached the top of her neck now, but it’s already starting to take on a silky curl. It frames the rest of her face so differently that she almost looks like a completely new person. You can faintly smell cherries as it brushes against your nose.
Kanji pulls the needle from her lips like she’s holding a cigarette. “Tell me about it.”
You do. You explain how the magazine you got interviewed for was released the other day and its all anyone wants to talk to you about. You thought you had made yourself plenty clear, but all you get are proddings for clarifications that will fall on deaf ears.
“It’s as if they care more about me being a feminist talking point than they do about my actual accomplishments as a detective,” You say with thinly veiled scorn. It’s a needle poking through the space between your joints each time you hear it. Something is sewing you together, conjoining your pieces into something you don’t recognize in the mirror.
“Is it impossible to have both?” She asks sincerely.
Yes , you want to bite back. I’m not a girl, I can’t be the role model they want me to be. But it turns to lead on your tongue, so you resign to chewing on the inside of your cheek.
“What are you working on?” You ask, desperate to change the subject. Kanji thankfully picks up on it.
“My sewing group is doing a charity drive to make dolls for orphans,” She explains softly, and you can see it now that you know what you’re looking at.
She lacks form without stuffing inside, but you can make out her humanoid form as it slowly comes together. Her skin is made of a flower print fabric that reminds you of antique furniture, stems of lilies and long silky leaves painted over her face. She has a plain white shirt and Kanji is in the process of attaching a navy blue skirt to her body. There’s a bundle of chestnut colored yarn on the table that you assume will later become her hair.
Every stitch is done with an acute tenderness, as if it’s Kanji’s very own body that she’s giving life and form to. It’s a body that will be loved by both its creator and its beholder. You feel the awe you always do when you see Kanji’s work, yet somewhere underneath there is a stir of envy.
***
“You look awful,” A coworker of yours says, snapping you out of the daze you’ve been stuck in at your desk. You glance at the clock in the corner of your screen—you’ve been staring at the same page of case notes for over an hour.
“Hello to you, too,” You grumble back while pinching the bridge of your nose, “Did you need something from me?”
“Not really, I just was thinking, I don’t think there’s been a single day since I joined this agency where I haven’t seen you in the office,” And oh you don’t like where this is going.
You lean back in your chair with folded arms, “Well I am the acting director, it’s in my best interest to keep a close eye on things here.”
“Yeah, but do you ever take breaks? You might be one of the best detectives out there, but you aren’t a working machine you know.”
“What are you getting at?” Your coworker suddenly looks caught red handed, rubbing the back of his neck with a shaky smile.
“Look, uh. Me and the others have been planning this for a while actually. We think you should take a week off, we’re all prepared to pick up the slack in the meantime.”
They must think you’re crazy. You founded this detective agency with your own hands and you haven’t trusted anyone but yourself to do the hard work of running it. A few rough days is nothing, you’ll be back on your feet in no time.
“I appreciate it, but—”
“We really insist. You need to take some time off. I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but the rest of us certainly have. You’ve been really fraying at the seams lately.”
So it’s about your performance? You don’t need to be coddled like this, you’re plenty capable as you are. You go to explain this to your coworker, but he cuts you off again.
“Look, we’re just worried, okay? If you burn yourself out and crash it’ll be a lot worse than if you just let us handle things for a few days.”
The protests fizzle out on your tongue. It’s easy to forget that this isn’t like the departments you worked at in your early days. You’ve hand-picked this team with diligent and compassionate people, it’s really no surprise that it would come back to bite you like this.
“Fine,” You sigh, and his smile breaks into a grin, “At least let me finish the rest of my day here. And if I catch wind of anything that needs my attention I won’t hesitate to come right back here. Got it?”
“Clear as day, boss.”
You realize quickly that he may have had a point when you wake the next morning to find morning has already long passed. You reach blindly from your cocoon of blankets to grab your phone from the nightstand and blink away smudges in your eyes as you read the screen. It’s two in the afternoon, Kanji must have turned off your alarm in secret after you told her about your forced time off.
Speaking of your girlfriend, she’s missing from the bed. It startles you for a moment, so used to waking up and leaving for work long before she begins to stir. You figure she must also be responsible for how snugly all your bedding seems to be tucked around you.
After prying yourself out of bed you make it about halfway through your morning routine on autopilot before realizing there’s no point in putting on your uniform and begrudgingly pull on a large featherman hoodie gifted to you by one of your friends and saunter out to find Kanji.
You spot her in the living room with a large convenience store bag setting up your kotatsu in front of the tv. You wordlessly trudge over and sit cross legged beside her and check the contents of the bag. Piled within are a variety of snacks you recognize as a mix of your favorites and hers. From the corner of your eye you catch her wearing a mischievous smile.
“Good morning, Nao. Did you sleep well?” She hums. You nod while pulling out a packet of taiyaki crackers.
“It was fine, what’s all this for?” You ask and her smile turns to a grin.
“We’re gonna kick off your vacation with a good ol’ marathon. You still haven’t gotten to watch that new season of Featherman X yet, right?” Your face must perk up against your will because she snickers proudly.
All reservations about your forced leave from work are swept away as you get comfortable and fix your gaze on the tv screen. Kanji breaks open the first of many boxes of animal crackers and sets episode one to play. Hours bleed into one another, the season quickly proves to be just as good as you were told from the very minimal you allowed others to speak to you about it.
When evening hits you take a break to order and eat dinner while discussing the narrative and possible directions the story could be going as it nears its conclusion. Then you clean up the stray wrappers and switch to laying on the couch for the rest of the marathon.
A few episodes later you get to what seems to be the conclusion of Feather Swan’s character arc for the season. Thus far it’s been fairly standard, with her struggling with Red Hawk’s more focused concern on her despite her equal capabilities to her teammates. You find yourself quiet for most of the climax, not having much to add to a story that seems to speak well enough for itself. But Kanji catches you off guard by piping up during the episode’s credits.
“That…felt weird.”
You lift your head from the arm of the couch to look at her, “What do you mean?”
“Well it seemed like they were making everything about her being a girl at the end, but that’s not really what her story was about, is it?” You tilt your head to the side, you hadn’t been thinking much about that aspect of the storytelling.
Kanji continues, “This whole time the reason she’s been struggling is cause she feels like she isn’t reaching her personal standards of performance, and keeps making stupid mistakes when she gets in her own head about proving she can be better.”
“Right,” You frown.
“But then she has that whole speech at the end about how her being a woman doesn’t make her lesser than her teammates even though that hasn’t really been brought up at all until now. It kind of feels like the writers had a different plan for her arc, but decided to dial back and go with a more cliche feminist message.”
Something curdles in your stomach. “Feather Swan’s character arcs have always been related to femininity though, it’s consistent with her role in past iterations of the show.”
Kanji looks unconvinced, “Is that really a good thing, though? If all her character boils down to in the end is that she’s a woman?”
Uncertainty mixes with something foul in the back of your throat. “No, I think you have a point. They seem reluctant to take a more complex route with her development despite utilizing more mature themes with other characters in this season.”
“Exactly!” Kanji says, “It’s not that her story is bad or that there shouldn’t be empowering narratives for women in tv. I just wish they would follow through with what they set up for. It feels insulting to the audience to have the themes be sanded down for digestibility.”
You nod, and she seems satisfied with her rant as the next episode opens. But it sits with you for the rest of the night, a cold weight on the bridge of your nose. You can’t help but wonder if she feels the same way as you, trapped in other people’s fixations on your womanhood.
***
Kanji is like a mechanized doll. Her arms move with practiced grace that contrasts the roughness of her arms. With each stitch she pulls the pieces of fabric closer together, building an image out of incomplete parts. She takes wayward fabric into her hands and refits it, transforms it into something new. You can’t help but catalog the features of her expression, the crease in her brow, the slight purse of her lips, the hard look of concentration in her eyes.
When you admitted to not having any plans for your vacation she suggested you spend today watching her work on commissions. You accepted, because you’ve always been fascinated by her creative process, but the bubble of silence she encapsulates herself within to focus on her work is killing you.
You see a shimmer of light on the thread in her hand, where the angle makes it appear attached to her wrist, and feel a brief rush of vertigo.
Before you can think better of breaking her concentration, your mouth is open and you’re calling her name. She only pauses for a moment, hand held still in the air with the string of thread catching sunlight from the window across the room. She finishes the stitch and looks at you with open concern.
“Something wrong, Nao?” She asks. You swallow the bitter lump in your throat. You aren’t sure what you even want to say, so you default to what’s been spinning around in your mind as of late.
“Do you ever think about whether you'll come out publicly someday?” It’s a shaky subject to touch on, you know it, but her eyes soften as she takes in your words. She sticks her needle in the side of the mannequin and turns to face you with her whole body.
“Of course I do. Couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve thought about it, just saying screw it and telling the whole world the truth,” You know it would be a stunning sight, to see Kanji embrace her full confidence and throw it in the faces of all who would try to discourage her. “But besides the satisfaction I’d get from it in the moment, it wouldn’t do me much good long term. I’d risk more harm by coming out than I would benefit from it.”
You can see it in her face that she knows there’s more to your inquiry. You watch the shift of contemplation over her features as she ponders pressing further. It reminds you of being at the station, only a pane of glass between you and your charge. Somehow you feel like you aren’t the one in the interrogator’s seat.
Her shoulders drop as she lets out a breath and strides over to sit next to you. She’s so warm where her shoulder brushes against yours and you’re reminded how much you envy the comfort she feels in having her arms bare.
“I’ll have to live a long time to ever see a world that will accept me as I am. I’m not going to make it harder on myself by trying to brute force my way into being accepted, I’m done with that,” She smiles and her eyes shift and then her gaze is burning on your cheeks. “What I do have, though, is you. As long as you’re here to see my true self, the rest of the world can go suck shit.”
Your chest tightens and your face heats at her words, she has a remarkable ability to do that to you when you least expect it. Her self satisfied smile soothes you as she squeezes your shoulder and pecks you on the cheek before getting up to resume her work.
But something is still bubbling underneath. Dread and envy mix into a crude oil under your skin, one spark away from setting you ablaze. You stare down at your hands, where you can almost see thin lines running over each knuckle of your fingers, carved around hinge joints. At times you’ve considered buying a pair of gloves to cover them, the rough texture of leather concealing the delicate thinness of your phalanges. But every time you go to try them on you find it burns against your skin. You can’t adjust to the barrier between you and everything you touch.
***
There was going to be a breaking point one way or another. It finally comes while you’re on your way back from a brief set of errands and you happen to overhear the conversation between a gathering of highschool boys as you pass them by.
“Hey, isn’t that Naoto-chan?”
“What? Oh, yeah! Wow, you don’t see her in photos like this very often.”
“Can’t imagine why, she always looks great on magazine covers.”
“Haha, right? That uniform looks really good on her.”
You pick up the pace as your ears start to ring. They’re just teenagers, they don’t know any better you try to chant to yourself. The binding fabric around your chest feels too tight, pressing your ribs into your lungs. You pick up your pace and don’t slow down until you reach the station.
That night you toss and turn.
They don’t know, they don’t know, they don’t know . And is that really the problem? Would they treat you any better if you told the world the truth?
They don’t know, they don’t know. And isn’t that your fault? With each day comes another excuse to push it off, to stall for more time. There just isn’t enough time and you’re grasping at straws.
They don’t know. Your struggles in life, from the way you’re expected to move and act to the way society perverts the idea of your body, are those of a woman. Does that make it impossible for you to really be a man?
When you open your eyes you are met with a familiar sight.
It’s been a long time since you last saw Yamato-Sumeragi. Despite all these years they still shine with a regal luster. When you were young they used to represent everything you’d wanted to become. All those childish ideals about heroism and justice that had driven you forward. It’s a bit embarrassing to think about now, actually.
What would your younger self think if they saw you now? What does Yamato-Sumeragi think of you?
The voice that comes from your persona is both yours and not. “Pinocchio, oh Pinocchio. Why do you forsake the wood I crafted you with, why do you desire a different form?”
The ever present strings jump to life, yanking your arms up and out to your sides. Yamato-Sumeragi takes one of your outstretched hands and pulls you close. Your feet fall into the spaces left open by its own as it looms over you, then suddenly there’s a tempo buzzing in your heels.
“You’re breaking my heart. Don’t you know my vision of you is more important than your joy?” You move as if your heels are linked to your persona’s by iron rods, pushing and pulling in sync.
“Is being the perfect doll not enough to you, that you would rather be a boy?” Yamato-Sumeragi’s hands on your arms keep you moving in time, avoiding its heels stomping where your toes were moments before, a constant taunt and pursuit.
Yamato-Sumeragi releases you and you twirl, stopping on your back heel as a spotlight opens above you with a loud clunk . You breathe heavy, sweat beading around your temples. It draws its blade, gleaming in flawless metal against the darkness of the stage, and dashes forwards to meet you again.
“Dance for them, Pinocchio, you’re their precious detective prince.” Yamato-Sumeragi moves like a swan, elegant and aggressive. You become the center point of a clock where it is the hand moving steadily clockwise around you, dragging you along to its fervent tempo.
“You break the gender roles thrust upon you.” You feel its gaze piercing you with judgment, the strings continue to pull. Your feet take to the rhythm against your will.
“You prove that a girl can be just as smart,” You hear the slice rather than see it, bending out of shape to dodge just barely in time. Yamato-Sumeragi’s hand stays pressed to your back as it pulls you back up from the dip.
“Just as cool,” You twist around its side and it spins on its heel. You feel lighter than air as your toes leave the ground for a brief moment.
“Look just as good in uniform.” Your muscles are screaming at you to stop, you want to scream back that you don’t have a choice. You leap, it twirls, you kick, it catches you by the waist in midair. You both land together with a click of your heels against the floor.
“You prove that a girl can be a hero, too.” Its blade grazes the skin of your throat, right over your larynx. You don’t dare breathe.
Suddenly in a slice of cutting wind, the weights vanish. Your limbs drop until you’re hanging by one wrist, a single string tethering you to the invisible force far above. The lights shut off, leaving only you and your other self suspended in nothingness.
Yamato-Sumeragi’s heels click as it approaches you. You can barely muster the strength to lift your head and meet its gaze.
“Sew your pieces back together. The strings running through your hollow wooden limbs are all that keep you upright. The day you decide to cut them is the day that little girl inside you dies.”
The final string snaps. Your stomach lurches as you fall.
You wake up cold with a lump in your throat. Slowly the world bleeds back into your peripherals. Kanji’s even snoring is the only sound in the room, you can feel her warm breath brushing against your ear. One of her arms is looped around your middle, the other tucked under a pillow somewhere. Your legs are pinned between her thighs, her feet reach so much farther down to the end of the bed than yours do.
The pillow is damp where it presses against your cheek. You raise a shaky hand to touch the side of your face. It comes away stained with fresh tears. Lead crushes down on your ribs.
Despite your best efforts, Kanji is stirred by your muffled hiccups. The shuffling of bedsheets is your only warning before the lamp clicks on and you’re met with her worried expression. One look is all it takes for you to crumble.
“ I can’t do it, ” Your voice is thin and raspy. Kanji’s hand brushes your cheek to wipe away a tear.
She doesn’t ask what you mean, nor does she seem surprised by your sudden breakdown. She just pulls the blankets off of you and swings her legs over the edge of the bed.
It isn’t the first time something like this has happened. Now and then one of you will wake late at night in fractured pieces, too raw to be put back together. It’s been a while since it was you, though. You’re thankful for the routine, letting the familiar motions guide you to the kitchen on autopilot. You make a move for the cupboard but Kanji shoos you away from the stove with a gentle yet firm I’ve got it .
Instead you settle at the small dining table and watch her fill the kettle that you only ever use for these nights. It was a gift from her mother when the two of you first moved in together, allegedly it had been part of an antique set she had herself been gifted by an old friend of hers, and since misplaced the rest of the pieces.
She reaches across to wrap her fingers around yours. Her firm grip and patient gaze ground you enough to start sorting your thoughts into words.
“It’s not like I don’t want to be a role model for them,” You whisper, “All those young girls who feel like they can’t make it in the world because of their biology, I understand how they feel. Having men look down on you, being brushed aside in every conversation, being treated like a fragile doll that isn’t capable of hard work…”
Your lip wobbles and you fight the urge to bite down on it. “I want to prove to them that they’re more than what society thinks of them. But can I really do that from the position of another man? If I’m just another masculine figure talking over women’s troubles?”
Kanji hums with a nod as you take a pause to keep your breath steady. “Your past struggles don’t make you less of a man,” She says, and you know she’s right, but even so.
You press the palm of your hand against your eye to wipe away more tears, “It just feels like…I could wake up tomorrow fully transitioned, unmistakably a man, and they would still talk about how I’m sticking it to the patriarchy.” Bitterness drips from the cracks in your voice.
“Well, aren’t you?”
You stare at her with open confusion. It’s the same tone she had the other day, you get the feeling she’s trying to convey the same idea that she was then.
“Even if you woke up tomorrow completely transformed, it wouldn’t erase the journey you took to get to that point.” She taps idly at the rim of her teacup, thinking on her next words carefully, “You weren’t born with a prewritten idea of what it means to be a man written into you. You had to go searching for it, figure out what masculinity meant to you, and then choose it.”
“You’ve still been fighting an uphill battle. You still didn’t get all the societal advantages that come with being born in the body you were meant to be in. So really you’re still proving exactly what you wanted to show them. That your biology isn’t what makes you capable of great things.”
For the first time in these past weeks you find the discontented buzzing in your chest quieting down. The sound of frantic wings beating against your ribs settles into a contemplative silence.
“I thought this ended in Inaba,” You finally confess, “I faced it all back then. I promised my other self I would never run away from the truth again, yet here I am.”
Silence hangs heavy between the two of you, the way it always does when this topic inevitably arises.
“We were kids,” She mutters, and you ache, because how many times have those words been whispered between you, complete with all the weight and grief they carry? “Not even our other selves could have predicted the challenges that life would throw at us later down the line.”
With a grin that crinkles the edges of her eyes she laughs, “I mean, can you imagine what kid me would think if I told him that possibly being a gay man was just barely scraping the surface?”
You let out a light huff. You know all of this, of course, you were there for the whole thing. Kanji squeezes her hand around your balled fist—when did you get so tense?—and the dark weight around your neck feels a little lighter.
“My point is, you aren’t alone. I figure this is gonna be rough, but you know that I’ll be here for you, okay?”
The corners of your mouth twitch up a bit despite you, “Thank you, Kan.”
“Now drink up, no use letting the good stuff go to waste.”
You bring the cup to your lips. The tea has gone cold, but a comforting warmth blooms in your stomach all the same.
***
It’s a few days later, long enough for the conversation to begin settling into the back of your mind, that you’re startled out of your seat by a knock at the door. Kanji doesn’t seem nearly as surprised as she gets up right away to answer it. Then suddenly your apartment is crowded with people.
It must be a testament to the structural integrity of your apartment that your door doesn’t get blown out of its frame by all of your friends trying to enter at once.
By the time you regain your bearings Yu has already taken over the kitchen and exiled everyone to the living room. You find yourself squished between Kanji and Rise on your tiny couch while Chie and Yukiko drag your kotatsu out of storage and Yosuke tries to figure out how to cast music to the tv from his phone.
“I swear you can do it with this model, it’s one of the main selling points!” He insists while swatting Teddie away from trying to do it for him. Your head is still spinning. You don’t remember planning a gathering, much less here at your place where you can barely fit everyone in one room together.
“What are you all doing here?” You ask dumbly and everyone pauses. Yosuke makes weary eye contact with Chie, who glances nervously at Yukiko, who looks like she’s fighting a real internal battle to keep the secret behind her tongue.
“Uh, well you know, it’s just been a while and—” Rise pipes up at the same time that Teddie jumps up from his spot on the floor.
“It was Kanji’s idea!” Everyone turns to look at him in shock while you make a curious glance at the supposed offender. Kanji just smiles.
“After the other night I called everyone up to ask if they could come over. They all dropped whatever was on their schedules to come see you.” It’s easy sometimes to forget that Kanji is her own kind of detective, always one step ahead of everyone else when it comes to understanding what’s happening in someone's head. Especially yours.
“Thank you. You’re all far too kind, you didn’t have to go out of your way like—” Chie cuts you off with a loud yell and an accusatory finger pointed at you.
“Nuh uh! None of that! If you think anything we’ve got going on is more important than being here when you need us, you’re sorely mistaken!” The assurance in her voice is enough to shut down any further arguments you would have made.
Yosuke manages to get the tv to work and puts on a playlist of 2010 music hits. A familiar tune passes over your ears and you find it’s beginning to feel a lot like you’re back in Inaba, spending the afternoon hanging out with your friends.
Then Yu comes in and sweeps away everyone’s voices as he sets a platter down on top of the kotatsu. Rows of onigiri, each one big enough to fill both your hands. They’re all decorated with different animal faces, complete with little ears shaped from the rice. It looks like a child’s bento box scaled up to adult proportions, it makes you feel warm.
“Bon appetite,” He says, and everyone clamors to reach in and grab one.
Meanwhile Yosuke grumbles, “Dude, that’s not how it goes. It’s bon appétit .”
“That’s what I said,” Yu hums back.
“No man, you said appe tite .”
“Did I?” Yu’s shit eating grin says plenty and Yosuke gives up with a groan.
You bite into the one you picked, a little shiba dog with angry round eyebrows and its tongue playfully stuck out at you, as if taunting you into eating it. You almost feel bad for ruining Yu’s hard work, but that guilt washes away when the taste hits your tongue.
Yu’s cooking has always had a knack for making you feel like a kid again. Bits of tuna soaked in soy sauce burst in your mouth, accompanied by a distinct sweet and creamy texture that pushes the depth of the flavor even further.
Yosuke’s eyes fly open as he bites down on a winking panda bear, “Woah, this tastes crazy. What did you put in these?”
“Mmhf, therfs crhm schs in fihfs one!” Chie says around half the onigiri in her mouth.
“Is this kimchi?” Yukiko asks.
“Wait, trade with me, I wanna try!” Rise yelps, holding hers out in offering.
The conversation jumps back and forth between them, everyone wanting to have a taste of everyone else's surprise flavors. You tune out as Chie scolds Teddie for scarfing down the rest of hers in one bite.
You expected prying questions, for them to prop open your ribs and dig around inside your insides to pull out every lurid thought you’ve had over the past few weeks. You expected to have your space invaded under the guise of concern, pressing down on your pressure points until you crack.
Instead you find an almost incongruous lack of attention directly on you. Your friends chat and bicker with one another like they always have, it’s just another regular day spent with them.
And that’s when it occurs to you, the way it really should have from the start, that support from them doesn’t have to be an intervention. The comfort in having them around isn’t about bearing your soul to them, it’s the reinforcement of your bonds, a reminder that even at this low point you can still indulge in the presence of those who care about you.
With the realization comes a sense of overwhelming serenity. It washes away the tension in your limbs, wiping away the dirt and grime that had been clogging your joints. Everything that had been weighing you down with worry now seems so small in comparison to the relief you feel in the company of your closest friends.
From there it’s easy to be swept away in their antics and spend the rest of the afternoon simply enjoying their presence.
***
Your first day back at work goes exactly as you expect it to, until it doesn’t. You were relieved to step into the office and find it not burnt to the ground, the fact that your team had not only kept up with your day to day duties but also worked through a significant portion of the more mundane busywork that had been piling up on your agenda is a nice bonus. You spend the day catching up on the progress of ongoing investigations and being surprised at how much lighter and more stable you feel overall.
Yet Kanji catches the somber look on your face the moment you walk in the door. She immediately seems to expect the worst, leaping up from her seat to take your coat and usher you onto the couch. You let her take you into her arms, cocooned by her gentle warmth as the words tumble out from you.
On your way home from work you were stopped by a woman and her child who seemed to recognize you. The child seemed deeply embarrassed as their mother went on and on to you about how much of an inspiration you were. You had braced yourself for dread and discomfort to well in your stomach only to be surprised by a fluttery warmth in its place. It felt so much easier to smile along and accept her gratitude.
“ My daughter just adores your work, she wants to be just like you. ”
You think about the way they kept their arms tucked against their chest, the baggy hoodie they wore that must have been one or two sizes too large, the slight twitch of their frown every time they were referred to. And of course you can’t make assumptions over such a brief interaction, but something in your heart had sung with recognition and nostalgia at the sight.
“I’ve been a fool,” You whine against her chest. She threads her fingers into your hair, gently untangling loose strands.
Softly and filled with affection she whispers, “I know.”
All of the brine that had been building in your lungs pours out at once. You cry out the vestiges of your misery to be soaked into the fabric of her shirt.
***
Your strings will never leave you, Pinocchio, but you can take them in your own hands. Nevermore shall tethers bind your wings, for you dance now to your own tune. Waves will shake the struts you step across but the ocean will not threaten to break you.
Perhaps it’s not such a bad thing to be made of wood, after all.