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Kanade is improving. Progress was slow in the first few weeks but it has now been long enough since Mafuyu moved in that she can’t quite remember her life before. She’s improving. Slow progress is progress nonetheless.
And maybe she still isn’t quite at three meals a day yet but she wakes up beside Mafuyu in the morning to eat breakfast and cooks dinner with her in the evenings. Most nights don’t have her sleeping quite seven or eight hours but she manages a solid five to six with relative consistency.
She hasn’t stayed at her desk long enough to see more than one Nightcord call in a single session since over two months ago. She’s been trying to get outside at least three times a week. The number of cup noodles in the pantry has stayed firmly below ten since Mafuyu moved in and they only restock every month or so. Her desk is also no longer an energy drink graveyard, limiting her caffeine to a maximum of two cans a day.
It’s not perfect. But she’s trying. It’s progress.
Mafuyu’s confrontation still echoes in her mind on the bad days. And even if it sounds far from sustainable to take care of herself simply for Mafuyu’s sake, there’s an undeniable grain of truth in the message that Kanade found most easily palatable from the entire ordeal: she can’t save anyone if she’s dead.
That truth still manages to stay louder than the selfish thought that Mafuyu would still love her no matter how sickly, how broken, and how utterly exhausted she could become.
And besides, Kanade is too cowardly to leap from a bridge and too hesitant to drag the nice steak knife in the fourth cabinet from to the stove through her wrists. Like it or not, she isn’t going anywhere no matter how much she daydreams about one of the cars on the road driving just a little too recklessly or the window shattering behind her when she leans just a little harder than necessary against it.
Death is elusive no matter how often Kanade finds herself wishing it could swoop in and strike her down.
Still, she is improving. She sleeps at night and eats in the day and she’s left the scabs along her arms alone long enough for the conveniently “random” scrapes to heal over.
Then, of course, when for the first time in far, far too long she feels almost as though things may be looking up, exam season rolls around. It isn’t pretty.
In the past, Kanade wouldn’t pay it too much mind. Perhaps just enough to scrape by but she’s never quite had the drive to aim any higher. She is a composer before she is a student and a martyr before she is a person. Composing takes time – time that academics cannot be allowed to consume any more of than strictly necessary.
She really doesn’t know how Mafuyu manages it, that awkward double life between Niigo by night and honors student by day. Or at least she’d been shockingly oblivious to exactly how much it took before they’d begun living together. Either way, it was clear to her now that with exams just a week away and counting, Mafuyu was feeling the pressure.
In an odd reversal of fates, it suddenly became that Kanade was managing more sleep than the prospective doctor nurse. And then came the skipped meals and forgotten dinners, sitting alone at a table meant for two with no choice but to leave a portion in the fridge that would just sit there until someone remembered to throw it away.
Kanade watches helplessly as the mask slips back over Mafuyu’s face and flickers on at times when it’s just the two of them. Just for a moment. But it’s still there and it hurts. It hurts to know that Mafuyu is hurting in a way that she can’t really understand, can’t really fix, can’t solve with something as simple as a song because no matter how much Kanade wants to comfort and create for her, she can do nothing to make the world any less cruel.
“Mafuyu?” she asks gently as she nudges the bedroom door open. Or, well, she supposes it has finally become Mafuyu’s bedroom. Kanade has been sleeping on the living room couch for a week now, overcome with exhaustion before Mafuyu can finish studying. “Mafuyu, it’s late. You should go to sleep.”
“I’m almost done.” She’s lying. Kanade knows that lie as intimately as the discordant melodies that echo constantly through her own mind. “You go to sleep first. I’ll be up just a little longer.”
Mafuyu is stronger than Kanade will ever be and she hates it. Hates that sleep is already stinging her eyes and fogging her mind whereas Mafuyu was always alert whenever she did this. Hates that she can feel the hint of frustration that must have burned in Mafuyu’s chest when the composer became lost in the timeless haze of her song and refused to be found.
Mafuyu must have been stronger than Kanade is now because she walks away without flicking the light off and lets herself succumb to exhaustion. It doesn’t matter how much she pleads because she is not strong enough to force Mafuyu away from her studies, not strong enough to argue until Mafuyu caves and agrees to go to sleep, not strong enough to be Mafuyu’s guiding light when she doesn’t want to follow it.
Despite all logic and reason the quiet doubt plants itself in her mind that maybe it was just a sign of weakness that she had ever allowed herself to be saved. Because after offering Mafuyu refuge from her mother’s reach, all Kanade has done is become soft, become slow, become complacent, and become saved by the very girl she is here to rescue.
And so it becomes that the first day of Mafuyu’s actual exams is the day she resolves to put things right.
She wakes to an empty home, Mafuyu already having left the house to study at school before the grueling exam schedule truly begins. Her mornings tend to start this way a lot these days, in a silence that needles at her in a way that it never really has before. The rooms feel hollow and the house too big to fit a single lonely soul.
Up until two weeks ago, Mafuyu had woken up with her and they’d eat breakfast together at the table at this time. It was harder to forget back then when there were two of them and she’d learned to simply add Mafuyu’s routine to her own.
Up until a week ago, Mafuyu would be halfway out the door by the time Kanade woke up but there would be a small plate left out on the table for her.
Today? Today there is nothing.
And Kanade knows better than to assume that it’s malicious, knows that there isn’t even a hint of ill will in this little omission. It’s probably just because Mafuyu was in a hurry to leave early this morning. There are more pressing things waiting out there for her than a negligent, burdensome housemate.
Besides, what right does Kanade have to expect such a gesture every morning? To wake up and simply have food set out for her as though she is still a child?
Mafuyu will forever have bigger concerns than Kanade’s shocking incompetence.
It’s fine. She’s fine. Kanade has just fallen victim to her own learned weakness. That can be fixed easily enough.
Kanade steps out of the kitchen and sits down at her desk. Food can wait for later and she isn’t even hungry right now anyway. She knows exactly how much more hidden her bones are after eating more consistently for the past few months. She can easily afford to skip a meal or two. Hunger plummets from her ordered list of priorities and it feels freeing.
Time passes her by as familiar, stilted melodies play through her headphones. The song she’s been working on fills her mind. It’s peaceful. It’s easy. Lost progress lays in pieces at her feet and the failure drives her deeper into her fugue of creation.
The hunger kicks in sometime before noon (it’s pathetic, she used to be able to go an entire day before even realizing she hadn’t eaten anything at all) but she’s mid-demo recording so she pushes the thought of food from her mind. By the time the vocals seem complete enough to work with, she’s already forgotten that she was ever hungry at all.
Time keeps slipping by and the clock in the corner of her monitor says that it’s early afternoon when she first ponders leaving the room. Mafuyu’s reminder chimes on her phone, an automatic, hollow ringtone that interrupts her composing. Hydration is important, Kanade recites mindlessly in her head over the sound of backing tracks that are slowly coming together.
She pushes herself back from her desk and stands up, walking smoothly to the door despite the way her vision blacks out and her ears ring with the frequency of imaginary tuning forks. Her hand lands on the cold doorknob and she walks herself to the kitchen with both senses slowly returning.
Her hand closes around a random glass that feels oddly heavy in her hand when it is only half-filled. There is just enough water to keep the dehydration headaches and dry mouth away. Then right as she is about to lift it to her lips she freezes.
Maybe it’s because she’s already broken her streak of eating two proper meals a day and thus forgotten to drink the usual half-glass of water in the morning. Maybe it’s because this is Mafuyu’s reminder and following it feels so much like being helpless and weak on her own. Maybe it’s because she can see it in the empty sink and the flicker of Mafuyu’s eyes when she lies about eating and drinking water herself.
Or maybe it’s because some awful, broken, selfish part of her whispers that heroes need to take care of themselves and she has become too weak to do that for Mafuyu. Too undeserving.
It’s the same small, spiteful piece of her that hates Mafuyu for saving her from herself.
It’s the same piece of her that pushes back when she tries to make painfully slow progress, insisting that it hates Mafuyu for making her want to be saved. But she wants it. She really, really, really does. (And maybe that’s also weakness but she’s not strong enough to stamp it out.)
Kanade walks to the sink where she pours the water down the drain and leaves the glass inside to clean later. She retreats back to her room feeling light but not lightheaded and lets her monitors burn into her eyes once more. Twisted victory lets a small smile flicker across her face.
Mafuyu returns home late in the afternoon after attending cram school with a curt greeting before immediately heading to her room. Kanade knows better than to ask the typical questions that Mafuyu’s mother used to frequent but that just leaves her lost for any words at all.
But it’s okay because it’s normal and exams are just stressful and Mafuyu is exhausted and Kanade is too tiring to talk to, too much to care for, and too high maintenance to love.
She thinks back to the days when their roles had been reversed, before the tables had turned and everything became wrong and broken. She remembers the simple meals Mafuyu had made and lured her away from her desk with. The little things that had saved her, made in her unused kitchen that had nothing but cup noodles and the essentials Honami still bothered to keep stocked up.
Of everything she’s cooked with Mafuyu in the few months where she still called every meal a small victory, simple fried eggs feel the most attainable so she heads to the kitchen. A small container of frozen leftover rice goes in the microwave and an egg on the frying pan as she cobbles together a meal. The egg yolk bursts on the pan and instead of staying at the center just engulfs the white part but it still looks okay.
The smell is still tempting.
Kanade remembers her hunger for the first time since the morning but this meal is for Mafuyu so she sets the egg on the rice in a bowl with chopsticks and walks away from the kitchen resolutely.
She whispers Mafuyu’s name in front of her door (she’d figured out within the first month that Mafuyu’s mother liked to wordlessly rap her knuckles against bedroom doors) and gently makes her way inside after a quiet affirmative hum.
“I didn’t know if you had dinner so I made this for you,” she says.
Of course, she knows that Mafuyu hasn’t eaten – she can tell from the way there hadn’t been a dish in the sink this morning and how she looks at the egg and rice now with a spark of gratitude that makes Kanade feel wanted and loved and warm in the way that she imagines burning to death in a volcano to be like.
She wonders if she would be brave enough to step over the edge if she ever found herself there. To embrace the burning heat and ash and let herself fall into oblivion. Or maybe she’d just pass out from the smoke and let gravity do the work for her.
“Thank you,” Mafuyu recites, voice dull and lifeless in a way that her usual monotone hasn’t been in months around Kanade.
“Of course!” Kanade’s smile is plastered to her face with such fake happiness that she feels hollowed out down to her stomach.
Mafuyu doesn’t notice.
There is another moment of tenuous silence that Kanade holds for just a second longer before retreating. She’s pulling the door closed behind her when Mafuyu speaks again.
“Kanade?”
The way her voice wavers just a hint too far above her normal register has Kanade whirling around fast enough for her hair to smack audibly against the door. Mafuyu stares down at the school book in front of her with a pen poised just above the paper.
She’s shaking.
It usually takes exactly five steps to cross the distance between Mafuyu’s door and her desk but Kanade makes it in two.
Mafuyu stays frozen for another long, drawn out moment. And another. And another. Then just before Kanade is about to say something, Mafuyu whispers, “I want to disappear.”
Oh.
To say that this is bad, horrible, terrible, awful is an understatement to say the least.
Me too, Kanade wants to say. Scream. Cry. Express in a way that words can’t fully encompass.
But Mafuyu takes a shaky breath and swipes angrily at her eyes and Kanade knows that this moment is not about her own pain.
Kanade carefully plucks the pen from Mafuyu’s grip before it can rip or scribble against the textbook. She slouches just enough to be at eye level, intercepting Mafuyu’s other hand before it can tangle itself in her hair. Their fingers stay interlaced between them (Kanade knows not to grab her wrist the way her mother did).
“I don’t know who I am. I thought I did but I… Mother said I wanted to be a doctor so I studied and took exams and I made that who I was a-and then I thought I wanted to be a nurse so I’m studying and taking these exams. But I don’t know – I don’t know – I’m not happy. I still feel numb and tired and empty all the time and I don’t remember what happy even feels like anymore,” Mafuyu blurts out.
It’s the most she’s said to Kanade all week.
“I’m sorry–”
“It’s not your fault,” Mafuyu interrupts mechanically. Habitually. But it is. “I just – I hate it. I hate this. I hate how all I do is study and go to school and make music and study and study and study and study and I don’t know who I am outside of what I do and make and pretend to be anymore. It hurts.”
Her voice breaks, pitching up by exactly an octave and two steps in a wordless, breathy cry.
The hand clasped in Kanade’s goes limp and she releases it to move slightly closer and offer an embrace (she lets Mafuyu choose whether she wants the hug or not because she has vowed never to be like her mother in that way).
“I hate it! I hate me!” Mafuyu practically yells in that broken, angry, shaky voice, glaring through tears at the book still laying open on her desk. “Why am I like this? W-why – what have I become?”
Kanade wonders if she would know what to say if the words spewing from Mafuyu’s mouth didn’t taste the same as the poison that sits in her own lungs.
The desk chair’s arm digs into her ribs as Mafuyu buries her face in Kanade’s shoulder.
“I hate her too,” Mafuyu chokes out between silent sobs that would be undetectable if not for the tears soaking into Kanade’s shirt. “I hate what she turned me into.”
There’s a faint hint of victory that flares in Kanade’s chest at those words. Or at least in every possible situation she’s imagined, she’d figured it would be there.
“I love you. So much. Enough for the both of us, even. I love you even if you can’t find it in yourself to love every part of who you are,” Kanade murmurs into Mafuyu’s hair. And there is not a hint of a lie in a single word she has said.
“What if it isn’t enough? What if you can’t fix me?”
Then I will tear myself apart to fight for you again and again and again until I find a way to do it anyway.
“I’ll still love you.”
Except she knows that this isn’t what Mafuyu needs to hear so she presses a mask of calm over her face and lets warm lies spill from her mouth instead. “But I promise it’ll get better; I promise I’ll do anything I can to try. Anything. Everything. I promise.”
Mafuyu wipes the tears from her eyes and sniffles uninterrupted until her breaths are even and slow with the pull of sleep. For once, it is Kanade who leads her to their Mafuyu’s bed. Though she is still wearing her school uniform and hasn’t brushed her teeth or showered, Kanade figures it is best to let her rest. She switches the light off as quietly as possible on her way out of the room, Mafuyu fast asleep behind her.
Kanade barely makes it to her own room before everything comes crashing down – literally. Eyes blurred with unspilled tears, she slips on a stray paper and tumbles to the floor.
Twisting to somehow avoid hitting her head means that her elbow rams into the wall and her hip takes the brunt of the fall. Her entire body aches with a blinding fury as she just tilts her head back and lays there. At least the bruises will be easily hidden by her clothes.
Trying to keep her mind from the slowly fading pain, she lets herself sink into her own despair, once again remembering that she hasn’t eaten since dinner yesterday. But with Mafuyu’s tears still drying on her shirt and the memory of her words burned into her mind, Kanade welcomes it. She relishes in her pain.
The hunger and thirst are badges of honor against her weakness, promises that she will be better this time around and embrace the beginning of a new end with open arms.
Maybe before Mafuyu began living with her she would have considered just laying here forever and letting herself rot away into the nothing she craves becoming. To disappear – slowly, painfully, and easily until there was nothing left at all.
But she has to live for Mafuyu, survive for Mafuyu, create for Mafuyu, and finish what she started.
“I want to disappear,” she whispers, repeating the same words that, in her mind, have become Mafuyu’s. And now they are her purpose.
Now they are a little rebellion against the weakness she’s succumbed to.
“I want to disappear. I want to disappear. I want to disappear,” she recites. It means nothing. It means everything. The hole in her heart that she has been filling with Mafuyu’s love finally cracks open once more, letting the rotten nothing contained inside wash over her again. She greets it like an old friend.
“I want to disappear.”
To leave behind something beautiful in her absence. To be freed from the weight that sits in her chest and chokes her throat with a silent, never-ending scream. To let go of the pain that refuses to become real in a way that matters. To finally take that final, deadly step over the edge and prove that she is not afraid, not hesitant, not weak.
She laughs a quiet, bitter laugh at that thought, wallowing in the pain and sadness and fury before letting it wash over her. Then she picks herself up off the floor, reveling in the way her vision blots out and reveals an entire sky of stars that only she can see.
It’s beautiful. If death looks anything like this then maybe she wouldn’t mind it very much at all.
She walks into the kitchen for the fourth time of the day and reaches for an energy drink can. And another just in case. Back in her room, she sets them on her desk and turns on her monitors, cracking one of the cans open as her files load.
The fizziness and the flavor are potent enough to make her mouth hurt but she gulps a quarter of it down anyways before truly getting to work.
She is still awake when Mafuyu is getting ready for school the next morning. But her door stays firmly closed and just like the day before, Mafuyu doesn’t bother waking her up to say goodbye.
Kanade deletes the song and starts over.