Chapter Text
Who were you without love?
Gosh, you didn't know.
The question itself was a wound—one you had learned to dress and carry with such practiced care that you sometimes forgot it was there at all. The answer, or rather the absence of one, was truly the terrifying part. Not the want of affection itself, but the slow, creeping realization that somewhere in the unmapped territory between childhood and whatever this was, you had come to measure your very existence by its presence or lack thereof.
You had grown to despise this truth about yourself: that you believed, with a conviction so shameful, that your worth was contingible upon another's recognition of it. That without love, you were somehow incomplete, a half-finished portrait abandoned by its artist. The vacancy of it seemed to leach the colour from your very being until you felt reduced to little more than preliminary sketches in graphite, all outlined and potential, but lacking the warmth and substance that only another's hand might provide.
And isn't that awful? To tether your sense of self to something so fleeting and fragile?
You had been waiting with your hands outstretched for longer than you cared to acknowledge. Because the stories had promised you a red string. A string as thin as a spider's silk, vivid as arterial blood, fate itself spun delicate between two souls destined to seek and find one another. Across distances that confounded geography, across years that made a mockery of time, even across the boundaries between one life and the next.
And so you waited. How could you not? When every tale, every poem committed to memory insisted that love was not merely probable but inevitable—a collision ordained by celestial bodies and inscribed upon the soul before birth itself.
Yet the years accumulated like dust, and still your hands remained empty. Your fingers cramped from holding their position, and your shoulders ached from bearing the invisible weight. On certain nights, you permitted yourself to wonder whether the stories had been nothing more than elaborate lies. Beautiful, but lies nonetheless.
You recalled, with something between regret and recognition, how many times you had diminished yourself in the hope that someone might cup you gently in their palms and whisper, "I have been searching for you." But no one ever had. For there existed a truth that no fairy tale had thought to mention: that one could spend an entire lifetime searching for someone to see you, for that transforming glance of love, and still be searching when the stars themselves burned into oblivion.
And so, though your hands trembled now from the years spent outstretched, you continued to hold them aloft. Not for salvation—you had relinquished that particular hope—but because the gesture had carved itself into muscle memory, because of your stubborn, foolish belief that someone, someday, might reach back and make a home in your heart.
–
The hospital corridors stretched before you, your footsteps punctuating the low murmur of distant conversations and the beeping of monitors that never once failed to remind you of tiny mechanical heartbeats.
You were visiting your friend Kuina Hikari. You had been worried sick since you heard about the meteor that tore through Tokyo. You had been lucky, as on that day, you had been miles away. But you still scoured every news update, and by the time you made it back, half the city was in ruins.
You pushed open her hospital room. In your arms was a small bag with her favourite snacks wrapped neatly and a handful of bright fresh fruit you had sweet-talked off a vendor outside. The room was washed in a pale amber of a tired afternoon sun that pooled by the window and stretched across the interior. Kuina looked half-asleep, but you saw her eyes flicker open at the sound of your footsteps.
"You're awake!" you chirped.
Her face lit up. "Look who finally showed up."
You nearly dropped the bag onto the side table as you leaned over, wrapping your arms around her shoulders in a hug that knocked a soft laugh out of her.
"I missed you so much, Hikari!" you sniffled. "I'm so, so glad you're alright."
"Careful, careful!" she chuckled, patting your back with her hand. "Don't squash me. I'm practically held together with bandages right as we speak. But I missed you too, [Name]. I'm so happy that you visited!"
"Of course I visited," you smiled, pulling back. "How could I not? Anyways, I bought your favourites!"
You reached into your bag, and out came a bottle of peach tea, two pudding cups (because she'd complain if you only brought one), a convenience store onigiri that had been squished slightly in transit, and a paper bag of neatly sliced persimmons.
"You brought offerings," she remarked. "You've grown."
You grinned, setting the items one by one onto the tray table beside her bed. "Only the best for my convalescing queen and me."
"I like how you assume I'll be sharing."
"I like how you assume you have a choice."
She rolled her eyes, but the corner of her mouth curved. "They should've put you in the empty bed next to me. Maybe the nurses would mistake you for a patient and sedate you."
"Tempting," you said, flopping into the chair. "Free food, housing, and your charming bedside manner. What more could I want?"
"A personality," Kuina smirked, spooning a bite of pudding into her mouth.
"Bold words for someone who cried when my fish died."
"It was floating!" she cried. "Upside down! It was beyond devastating."
You snorted. "You said it made you reflect on the fragility of time."
You both dissolved into laughter that made the nurses glance in with a mix of amusement and mild concern. You fell into easy conversation, as always. The ones where teasing and laughter were stitched together with an undercurrent of care.
And as the sun began to surrender itself to shadow, you rose with a soft, reluctant sigh.
"I'll come back tomorrow," you promised. "Behave, okay?"
Kuina shot you a grin. "Bring twice the snacks too."
You laughed, stepping back towards the door.
–
As you retraced your path through the corridors, your thoughts remained partially with Kuina. But as you passed a room whose door stood just sufficiently ajar to permit observation, something caught the periphery of your vision—something soft and silvery that stopped your forward movement entirely.
At first, it registered as a mere glimmer: several strands of hair catching both the fluorescent hospital lighting and what remained of natural illumination, resembling fine silk threads laid beneath a lamp. You found yourself slowing, then stopping, drawn by curiosity that bloomed into something similar to hearing the first note of your favourite song for the very first time.
Through the gap, you saw two beds sitting next to each other. One contained a figure so thoroughly wrapped in bandages that only glimpses of raw, angry skin peeked through.
But it was the second occupant who held you tethered to the sight.
There lay a man with his eyes closed in serenity. His hair, a colour of silver-blond, framed his face softly. The light seemed to have developed a fondness for him, catching on each strand as moonlight danced on water.
Your gaze, without your permission, traced downward. Even in rest, there was something uncannily precise about him. He appeared unreal lying there beneath the hospital blankets, surrounded by the mundane machinery of medical care.
For a moment, you entertained the notion that he could feel your observation. Because something in the quality of his stillness suggested he might open his eyes at any second and catch you in the act with a single flicker of cold amusement. A thread of embarrassment unfurled in your chest at the thought.
Then you exhaled—when had you stopped breathing?—and pulled yourself free, but not without one final glance at that pale hair, at the unsettling beauty of him.
You continued with your evening, but you let yourself linger just enough to wonder who he was. And perhaps, in some small corner of your heart that still believed in red threads and fated encounters, you wondered if he might be wondering about that too.
Though that, you told yourself firmly, was merely the old stories speaking. Nothing more.