Work Text:
In late April, Shiho Suzui is discharged from the hospital. She's been awake for sixty days and counting. She attends all her physical therapy sessions, she takes it slow and doesn't strain herself too much, and eats the bland hospital food dutifully. She uses a cane to get around when she needs to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and can't call a nurse to help. She's doing amazing. Ann tells her as such whenever she comes to visit, which is nearly every day, straight after school.
Ann visits a lot. A nurse once asked if Ann was family because she'd been at Shiho's bedside near every day for those first two months, nonstop, hands clasping Shiho's unresponsive ones. She always brings little fun treats for Shiho—coaxing her to eat, helping her in those early days where Shiho's hands shook too badly to bring the spoon to her mouth—and gives her gossip magazines from the konbini after school. Shiho flips through them when she can't sleep. Once Shiho started talking again—two weeks, seven hours, and forty minutes after she woke up—her first words had been: I'm thirsty and Hi Ann.
To which Ann responded by bursting into tears, right there, on the spot.
Shiho's voice is not what it used to be. She still doesn't talk as much as she should, her doctor's said before, but Shiho doesn't really like talking anymore. The creakiness of her voice and the wispiness of her tenor has never been more obvious than when she talks to Ann, or maybe to her parents. Sometimes Shiho can't find the words for things that she used to know. It's like they swim out of her reach inside the fractured shell of her mind, little goldfish slipping from her grasp. It's frustrating enough as it is.
Though Ann never seemed to mind, Shiho caught her parents sometimes: in the hallway, quietly crying to each other in the dark. It's not their fault. Shiho's never blamed them for a single thing. That's not what this is about.
Her physiotherapist once suggested that Shiho start writing things down, once she was released from their care. Might help put those thoughts in order, she'd said, patiently, at the end of one of Shiho's harder days. Her legs still sometimes shook like a newborn faun's and her shoulders could not carry their weight like they should, which meant lots and lots of gentle exercises and 'walking' with her cane.
Shiho had not taken her suggestion until she left the hospital, aided by Ann and her mother—helped into the car by warm, gentle hands. At home, in her bed, Shiho'd curled up under the sheets and looked at her hands, her pale, scarred hands, the medical ID bracelet hanging loosely from her right wrist. The bracelet she couldn't find the scissors for. It was enough to make her cry.
The next morning, she got up and started writing on a blank piece of paper. Well. Writing is generous. She wrote down everything she could hear, feel and smell, and taste too. And then when she was exhausted of her dark house, her hair scraping against the back of her neck, the cicadas outside; she started writing down words. Incision. Goldfish. Enamel. Talon. Mannequin. Rice. Hail. Style. Anything that she liked the sound of. She wrote her own name. She wrote Ann, and then as an afterthought, added Takamaki, engraving the kanji with the focus of a surgeon. Her hands didn't seem to want to work: the right one shook, and the left one kept flinching, sending the pencil skittering across paper. Her letters came out too big and shaky, like kiddie furigana, but Shiho did it anyway. It's not about being precise, her physiotherapist had said. It's about doing the work.
So Shiho worked. In absence of doing what she normally would have done—left the house, gone for a run, and kept running until her ankles felt like they had been dipped in molten glass—she put paper to pen. Shiho scratched lines and lines into the paper—dark gouges left by her ballpoint pen, stumbling and falling amongst themselves, despite her best attempts to be neat. They stopped being words and turned into lines: skittering, dancing across the page, overlapping and undertaking each other, scuttling when she tried to put a stop to it.
In the end she had a bunch of pages in one hand and a dry pen in the other. Pages of lines, words, messy kanji scribbled with too much force. She used both hands. Sometimes just to hold the pen. Sometimes to alternate when her left hand grew weak, shivering with a phantom pain. She'd been a lefty, before.
Shiho put the papers on her desk. They were messy and kind of ugly, but Shiho needed them. Like an anchor, a signal-flare in the dark, when she turned out the lights: that she was alive. To keep trying.
Sometimes she lay in bed and cried when she had to sit under the running spray of the hot water in the shower. Sometimes she couldn't turn the lights on at all. Sometimes her parents would get home to see Shiho collapsed near the bathtub, having wet herself because her knee gave out and she couldn't get to the bathroom in time. Sometimes she was ashamed just to ask Ann to come to her house so she could have someone to sit in the dark with. She'd missed the hospital, with its sterile walls and floors and the nurses that looked Shiho over with a clinical, sympathetic eye. The house was cold, but not in the way Shiho liked. Nothing was right anymore.
Ann still came over. Even on her bad days. Especially on her bad days. Sometimes she had gifts for Shiho—because she knew distraction, she knew how to wave flags in front of Shiho's eyes just so she wouldn't slip back into the dark shell that Shiho'd worked so hard on trying to escape. She knew what Shiho actually wanted, and that was to pretend, just for a moment, that she was still right. Everything was normal. That nothing had changed.
Shiho still goes to physical therapy. Ann even went with her, sometimes. Her gait's awkward—like a three-legged dog, sloping and uneven as she moved around the house—but she muscled her way through most of the exercises, panting and wheezing even as her bad leg dragged behind her like so much a physical weight. Her knee brace—the one that wrapped her around her left leg—sometimes felt like seven hundred tonnes, and her knee itself might have been made out of lead. On cold days it ached. She has to massage it often, just so it didn't stiffen.
The doctors had told Shiho—with her parents in the room, at her side—that she'd been lucky. She could have easily never walked again. She could have easily never woken up, period, the head doctor tells her severely. The list of injuries was as long as her arm. Some issues she'll suffer for the rest of her life. Like the brain trauma, and the weakness in her elbow. Shiho put her head down and kept tracing circles in the palm of her hand. Sometimes the line deviated.
If she couldn't live in her body where could she go?
"You've heard of the Phantom Thieves, right?" Ann flopped down next to Shiho, on her bed. Shiho's propped herself up against her pillows, trying to read a book Ann'd brought her on her last visit. A detective romance of some kind. It was steamy and overdramatic and exactly the type of thing Shiho would have laughed at, in the past. As it is: she's busy reading a paragraph with great concentration, getting frustrated when she didn't absorb any of it. The words were getting mixed up. It was slow going.
"Yes," she finally said, putting down the paperback. "I saw the news." Understatement. The news were all that she saw, back when she was still in the hospital. The nurses channel surfed but all she wanted to know was what was going on. She'd seen Ann's face on the news. She'd seen how Kamoshida had confessed to what he'd done in front of the whole school, the remorse in his face, the way the man had bowed to the student population. She'd wondered, of course. Shiho couldn't not wonder.
Kamoshida's resignation had been hard to hear, for her. It hadn't really registered—not that she wanted it to. But she knew that Ann probably had something to do with it. So she'd sat through the news and watched with great apathy as Kamoshida was carted off, and wondered what Ann had done.
And then the newscasters started talking about the Phantom Thieves.
"I thought you'd be happy," Ann said, tentatively.
"About what?"
"The Phantom Thieves changed Kamoshida's heart. He's paying for his crimes. Isn't…that what you want?"
Shiho paused to consider. Really think about it. "Why would I want that?"
Ann frowned. For Ann, Kamoshida having his crimes being known was a victory. The abuse they'd endured, the endless torment, the misery Ann'd put herself through just for Shiho to throw all that away. "Because it's over, Shiho. I wanted you to be happy. I still do."
She'd only wanted to be free. She'd only wanted Ann to be free. "It's not over," she told Ann, eventually. "At least for me."
The work stretches from April to December. She keeps having to attend more and more physical therapy sessions. Once, because she fell mid-session and couldn't get up, she was confined to a wheelchair for a few days while the doctor went and confirmed from her x-rays that Shiho hadn't accidentally twisted her spine further out of alignment, or something. Her parents treated her like she was made of glass, a figurine that they were afraid to breathe on too hard lest she topple and shatter from accidentally bumping something too hard. It was frustrating. It was mortifying. Shiho'd screamed and yelled when her parents almost withdrew her from physical therapy, claiming that they didn't want her to do anything dangerous while she was 'recovering.'
Hah. If she didn't go, she might as well as give up and check herself back into the hospital. She crawled everywhere for three days and wheeled herself to the grocery store. She took her pills and made soup and ate it without throwing up in the sink. She kept writing. Lines, words, letters that were becoming more and more legible as time went. When the doctor cleared her to go back to using her cane, Shiho walked all the way around the corner and around the park near her house, all by herself, just because she could.
It wasn't a run. But it was close enough.
Months and months later, her parents transferred her out of Shujin. Fair enough. She needed to repeat a year and she wasn't going to do it at Shujin.
Initially, they'd tried to give her another year off, but Shiho insisted. As her voice grew stronger, she called Sakamoto and Ann and anyone else in their year who'd been sympathetic enough to lend her their material—just so she could catch up.
"I'm happy to tutor you," Makoto Nijima said, once, while passing off her schoolbooks to Shiho. "I do it all the time for Sakamoto-kun and Takamaki-san."
"It's very kind of you," Shiho said. "I promise I'll be okay! You have student council duties, right?"
"I, ah," Nijima flustered, glancing around her room. Shiho'd kept her things tidy, but there were still remnants of her old life peeking out: a volleyball under her bed, a Shujin jumper thrown over the back of her closet door, several textbooks piled high on her desk. And then there were the scribbles, pinned carefully to the wall like butterflies or insects under a scope. "I'm always happy to make time for you. You're Ann's friend."
Shiho smiled, wistfully. "I'll be alright," she repeated. "Just the books is enough. And Ann can help me if I really have questions."
Nijima looked at her, and then smiled back, tentative. "Alright, then." When she left, Shiho opened one of the books to discover a card had been made and pasted into the inside—on bright pink paper, Ann's childishly bubbly handwriting had left her a message:
Hi Shiho,
This is from all of us!! We're so proud of you and we're really glad you made it through okay. I'm always going to be here for you but the rest of us—Akira-kun, Kitagawa-kun, even Okumura-san—want to wish you well too, when you go to your new school. We'll always be there to cheer you on!!
Onwards and upwards, right? You told me I inspired you to get stronger. Well, it goes both ways. You have always inspired me, surviving whatever came at you, because you're not scared of anything. You're the strongest person I know.
I love you too. You better stay in touch,
Ann xxx
Shiho laughed, a wispy dry thing. Ignored the wetness beading at her eyes, brushing them away. Of course. Ann hadn't forgotten the promise she'd made on the roof. Of course Ann wouldn't forget.
She clasped the paper tightly to her chest. Outside, the sun had begun to set, casting the last rays of light through her bedroom window, faint flickers of orange across her bedsheets. It was like she'd let out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding since February, a trapped ball of condensed air inside her lungs. She breathed, and breathed, and breathed until it turned into racking sobs. Sucked in air like she was afraid to die.
One day she'll look back and marvel at it all. She's still got so far yet to go, many many hours of physical therapy and a few more hundred strokes of pen to paper. Moving houses, packing herself up, discarding the things she didn't need. Several letters to write and send.
That's alright. She's patient.