Work Text:
The knocking came at 12:45 AM.
Kanade had been hunched over her computer since morning, holed up in her dimmed room, the same four measures looping endlessly, when she first heard the doorbell. It rang twice, three times, then stopped, replaced by knocking, frantic and arrhythmic, as if whoever stood outside had given up trusting the bell to work at all.
She pried herself from her desk, more annoyed than alarmed. Only once she stood did she notice the cramps seizing her back and shoulders, the price of hours spent motionless over unfinished music. The walk to the front door felt endless. When she finally opened it, the person standing there was the last one she expected and, in some buried part of her, the only one she'd have wanted.
Mafuyu Asahina.
Her uniform clung to her, soaked through. Wet hair hung in ropes across her face. Rain and tears had blurred together on her cheeks, and she stood with her head bowed, shaking so hard her teeth clicked.
"Kanade..." Her voice cracked on the single syllable, small and splintered.
"Mafuyu, calm down. It's alright." Kanade reached for her, but the words didn't land. Mafuyu kept trembling, breathing in short, ragged pulls, like something behind her hadn't stopped chasing her yet.
"N-no. Kanade, I..." She faltered, swallowed, tried again.
"I killed someone yesterday."
Kanade went still. Behind Mafuyu, rain hammered the pavement, filling the silence that followed.
"It was my mother." The tremors worsened, violent enough now that her whole frame shuddered. "I killed my mother."
The summer had barely begun, and already it opened with a confession like that.
---
Kanade should have done something: pulled her inside, called someone, called the police, anything but stand frozen in the doorway. But her mind had gone cold and very quiet, the way it did when a problem was too large to hold all at once. What could she possibly do, faced with the one person she'd wanted to protect, watching her unravel in real time?
"Come in," she finally managed, gentle out of habit more than resolve.
Mafuyu didn't move. "I can't. I can't stay anywhere." Her breath hitched. "I came to say goodbye. I'm going somewhere far away. Somewhere far away to die."
The rain thickened into a downpour.
"How did it happen?" Kanade asked.
A laugh escaped Mafuyu, high and cracked, nothing like a real one. "She found them. My songs, the ones I write as OWN. She went through my computer and found everything, and she..." Her hands twisted at nothing, grasping for a steadiness that wasn't there. "She said I was sick. Broken. Ungrateful, after everything she'd given up for me. That writing something so dark and ugly was how I repaid her. That Niigo was corrupting me."
Her voice flattened into recitation, the only way she seemed able to get the words out without breaking further.
"We were at the top of the stairs. She wouldn't stop, kept saying she'd built a future for me, that I was supposed to become a doctor, supposed to be perfect, that she only wanted good things for me, so why couldn't I just be good for her? And then she grabbed my phone, and something in me just snapped."
She lifted her head. Her eyes were empty in a way Kanade had never seen on her before.
"I pushed her shoulders. I only wanted her to stop talking, to give my phone back. But she fell backward down the stairs, and I heard it: the sound of her head against the floor. She didn't move after that. There was blood. I didn't know what else to do, so I ran."
The rain fell harder, as if trying to drown the memory out with her.
"That was last night," Mafuyu whispered. "I've been walking ever since. I can't go home. The police are probably already looking for me. My father must be ashamed of me by now." Her shoulders curled inward, small. "So I'm leaving, far enough that no one will find me. I just wanted to tell someone first. You're the only person who might understand."
Something hot and sharp opened in Kanade's chest. She thought of her father, unconscious, tethered to machines that breathed for him, because of music she had written. Because she had been good at the one thing that mattered least.
"Then take me with you," she said.
Mafuyu blinked, startled out of her own grief for a moment. "W-what?"
"Take me with you." Kanade stepped past the threshold, letting the rain soak straight through her shirt. "You're running away to die. Take me with you."
"Kanade..."
"I've spent every day composing to save people. To save you. To make up for what happened to my father. None of it changes anything. Maybe it never will." The words came out flat, matter-of-fact, as though she'd rehearsed them in some private corner of her mind for years. "So if you're leaving, I want to go too."
Mafuyu stared at her, and for the first time since arriving, something flickered across her face. Disbelief, maybe, or a fragile kind of hope. "You'd really come with me? Even knowing I'm a murderer?"
"It's fine." Kanade meant it completely. "You did nothing wrong."
Mafuyu's composure finally broke. She seized Kanade's hands, gripping hard enough to bruise. "You did nothing wrong either."
They stood there in the downpour, holding on to each other like two people trying not to drown.
"Wait here," Kanade said at last. "I need to pack."
---
Inside, Kanade moved through her room on autopilot. Wallet, phone, a change of clothes, a kitchen knife, tucked in for protection. On impulse, she added her handheld console, something to fill the hours ahead. She found a backpack hanging behind her door and crammed everything inside.
Then she stopped in front of her computer.
Years of compositions waited on the screen. Songs meant to save people. Songs that had never saved anyone, not even Mafuyu, who had just lost her mother by her own two hands.
She selected every file. Her cursor hovered over delete.
Her phone buzzed.
Enanan: Kanade, you didn't answer earlier. It's almost 1 AM. Are you okay? You're pushing yourself too hard again, aren't you?
Kanade looked at the message for a long moment. A flicker of guilt rose and just as quickly sank. Useless people didn't deserve people who worried about them. She turned the phone face-down and pressed delete.
While the files erased themselves one by one, she pulled the photo albums down from her shelf. Pictures of her mother, gone for years. Pictures of her father from before the hospital, when he still smiled without effort. Pictures of herself as a small child, unaware of what her own hands would one day do to the people she loved.
She tore them apart without hesitation.
"What are you doing?" Mafuyu had appeared in the doorway, still dripping onto the floor.
"Getting rid of what I don't need anymore." Kanade ripped another photo in half, separating her father's face from her own, an act that felt, in some private way, like erasing herself from his life before he could forget her on his own. "We're leaving that world behind. None of this matters where we're going."
Mafuyu watched her in silence. Then she crossed to Kanade's desk, opened the drawer, and pulled out a worn journal, the one Kanade used for composition notes, originally her father's, its pages soft with age and guilt. Without a word, Mafuyu began tearing the pages loose.
They worked together in silence after that. Photographs. Journals. Unfinished scores. Anything that tied them to who they used to be. By the time they finished, Kanade's floor looked like the scene of some quiet disaster, paper scattered like the first snow of a season that would never come.
"I think I'm ready," Kanade said, her voice flat.
Mafuyu still looked faintly stunned by how easily Kanade had agreed to this, by how little convincing it had taken. "Kanade, are you sure? We're going somewhere far, far away. Somewhere with no one."
Kanade met her eyes without hesitation. "If you're going to die, then we'll die together. I don't have anything else to live for anyway."
"But you don't have to..."
Kanade cut her off, reaching for her hands instead of an argument.
"It's okay. You did nothing wrong."
Oh. Mafuyu thought distantly. Her smile, her steadiness: those were the only things that had ever felt like warmth in Mafuyu's life.
They stepped out into the rain together. Kanade didn't look back at the house behind her, the house she'd lived in alone for so long, full of childhood memories no one else remembered with her. She simply locked the door and dropped the key into a storm drain, watching it vanish into the dark water.
"They'll come looking for us," Mafuyu said as they walked down the empty street.
"Let them look."
"It's a journey of a killer," Mafuyu murmured.
"...and a worthless person," Kanade finished.
Mafuyu let out a small, broken laugh. "I suppose that's what we are now."
Kanade took her hand. "Then at least we'll be that together."
Mafuyu didn't bother correcting her. It was the least of what weighed on either of them tonight.
Behind them, the city lights smeared into streaks of gold through the rain. Ahead, there was only darkness, and the sound of two sets of footsteps on wet pavement, carrying them somewhere neither of them could name yet.
The rain followed them into the night, unwilling to let go.
---
They walked until dawn.
Neither spoke much. Mafuyu's hand stayed cold and clammy in Kanade's for the first hour, but as the rain tapered off and the sky lightened from black to bruised violet, the tremors finally eased. By the time the sun rose, pale, watery, filtered through low clouds, her grip had gone steady.
"We need money," Kanade said as the city gave way to its outer edges. Her feet throbbed. She couldn't remember the last time she'd walked this far in one stretch.
"I know." Mafuyu's voice had changed overnight, more distant, as if some switch inside her had been thrown. "There's a convenience store ahead. Places like that always keep cash in the register."
Kanade glanced at her. "You're going to steal?"
"I already killed someone. Theft doesn't rank very high after that."
"Fair point."
They hit the store at six in the morning, when only one bleary employee manned the counter. Mafuyu went in first, asking for a pack of cigarettes she'd never smoke. While the clerk turned to the shelf behind him, Kanade slipped around the counter and emptied the register: thirty-two thousand yen, gone before he turned back around.
Outside, Kanade's heart hammered against her ribs. "That was easier than I expected."
"Everything's easy once you have nothing left to lose." Mafuyu chewed mechanically on a rice ball they'd also lifted, then held out the unfinished half without looking at Kanade. "I wonder if she's been found yet. I wonder if she's cold."
"Does it matter now?" Kanade asked, watching the sky shift from navy to soft pink above the rooftops. "She never let you have a life of your own anyway."
"I suppose it doesn't." Mafuyu's voice wavered slightly, before settling back into stillness.
---
They rode trains further and further from the city, the stolen cash covering fare after fare. Through the window, Kanade watched concrete give way to quiet suburbs, then to rice paddies stitched between low mountains.
Her phone kept buzzing in her pocket. She finally pulled it out.
Fifteen missed calls from Ena. Twenty-three from her grandmother, who lived two prefectures away and had clearly heard something was wrong.
A text from Mizuki: Kanade, where ARE you?? Everyone's worried sick!!
Then, later: The police came by. They're asking about Mafuyu Asahina. They said her mother is dead. Please tell me you're not running with her. Just tell us where you are. We can figure this out together, as Niigo.
Kanade read it twice. Some small, aching part of her wished she could go back to them, to the people who loved her without asking anything in return. But it was already too late for that. As long as she could shield Mafuyu from everyone else, that would have to be enough.
She powered the phone off, pried out the SIM card, and let it fall out the train window into the passing green.
Mafuyu was watching the opposite window. "Are they looking for me?"
"Yes."
"Did they say anything about my mother?"
"She's dead."
Mafuyu nodded slowly, as though this only confirmed something she'd already known in her bones. "Good. Then I really did kill her. It's not just something I imagined."
"Would it matter if she'd lived?" Kanade asked.
"No." Mafuyu turned to face her, calm now in a way that unsettled more than it comforted. "Nothing would change. I still pushed her. I still can't go back." A small, strange smile crossed her lips. "At least now I know for certain what I am. A murderer."
"You did nothing wrong." Kanade reached over and laced their fingers together. The warmth of her palm seemed to still something in Mafuyu's chest. Her breathing slowed, her shoulders eased slightly.
---
They got off at a small unmanned station deep in the mountains. The platform sat empty, heat shimmering visibly off the concrete in the early afternoon sun. Kanade was sweating within minutes, her breath already uneven.
"You okay?" Mafuyu asked, glancing over. She knew better than anyone how little time Kanade spent outdoors, how unused her body was to exertion like this.
"A little tired. I'm fine, though."
"There's a shrine up that path." Mafuyu pointed to a weathered wooden sign, its paint long since faded past legibility. "We can rest there."
The shrine had clearly been abandoned for years. The torii gate peeling, the grounds overtaken by weeds. Inside the main hall, the wooden floor smelled of dust and old rain, undisturbed by anyone but them. They collapsed onto it without ceremony.
After a while, Kanade's phone buzzed again. She'd forgotten to remove the battery. More messages, this time routed through her laptop's linked notification system, silent proof that people were still searching. She sat up, pulled the phone from her bag, weighed it in her hand for a second, and hurled it against the wall. It shattered with a satisfying crack, plastic and glass scattering across the floor.
"Feel better?" Mafuyu asked.
"Yeah."
They lay there as cicadas began their afternoon chorus outside, a wall of sound so dense it swallowed every other thought.
"Do you think about her?" Kanade asked eventually. "Your mother."
"Every second." Mafuyu stared up at the water-stained ceiling, tracing the shapes with her eyes. "I keep hearing it. The fall and the sound her head made. Do you think she felt anything, even for a moment, before it was over?"
"I don't know."
"I hope she didn't." Mafuyu's voice cracked. "I never hated her. I loved her. She was my mother after all. But I couldn't breathe with her watching every part of me, deciding everything for me, even trying to pull me away from Niigo." She turned her head toward Kanade. "Is it possible to love someone and still want to be free of them?"
Kanade thought of her father, unconscious for months, kept alive by machines because of the music she'd written. Of how she kept composing anyway, chasing some impossible redemption while he wasted away in a hospital bed.
"In the end," she said quietly, "neither of us was ever loved for who we actually were."
"That ugly thing we have in common," Mafuyu murmured, "made it so easy to believe in each other." She reached for Kanade's hand again. This time, there was no tremor left in her grip at all.
They fell asleep like that: fingers intertwined, cicadas screaming outside, the summer heat pressing down on them like something with weight.
---
When Kanade woke, evening had settled, filling the shrine with long shadows. Mafuyu sat near the entrance, gazing out at the darkening treeline. In her hands was the knife from Kanade's bag, turning slowly, catching the last orange light along its edge.
"Mafuyu?"
"Did you know," Mafuyu said, conversational, as if discussing the weather, "everyone always told me I had perfect form and perfect focus. I never missed once during archery." She pressed the flat of the blade lightly to her palm. "I wonder if that's why it was so easy to push her. I suppose I had perfect form for that too."
Kanade sat beside her, voice suddenly firm. "Put it away."
"Why? We're going to die eventually, aren't we?" But she handed it over anyway. "How much further do you think we need to go before we can stop? Before we find that place with no one in it?"
"I don't know. Further than this."
"Then we should keep moving." Mafuyu rose, brushing dust from her ruined skirt. Her uniform was filthy now, stained past recognition. She looked nothing like the girl who used to stand at the front of school assemblies, and for the first time, she looked almost at peace with that.
They left the shrine as night swallowed the mountains, following railroad tracks deeper into the dark. Neither of them knew nor cared where the tracks led.
"No one to answer to," Mafuyu said. "Just the two of us, walking on a railroad. It's nice, isn't it?"
Kanade thought of her grandmother, who still called every week even from two prefectures away. Of Ena and Mizuki, searching, worrying, calling her name into voicemail after voicemail. Of her father, who by now might not even recognize her face if she stood in front of him, not after everything his mind had lost since the collapse that her music had caused.
"Yeah," she said. "It's nice."
She meant it, and that frightened her more than anything else that night.
They walked on through the dark, two shadows swallowed by larger ones, while somewhere behind them, people kept calling names into a silence that refused to answer.
---
By the fourth day, the money was gone.
The convenience store cash had carried them further than either expected, but not far enough. Now they were buried deep in countryside, miles from the nearest town, and the summer heat had turned punishing.
"We need water," Kanade said. Her lips had cracked, her throat raw and sandpapered. She couldn't recall ever feeling this wrecked, her usual diet of instant noodles at her desk suddenly felt like unimaginable luxury.
Mafuyu looked worse. She'd barely eaten in two days and barely drunk anything. Whatever discipline had once made her the school's star student had curdled into something closer to self-erasure.
"There's a farm up ahead," Mafuyu said, pointing toward a distant roofline. "They'll have water."
"They'll also have people."
"Then we take it while they're not looking." Her voice carried no weight of guilt anymore. "What's the worst they can do? We're already criminals."
They waited for dusk before slipping onto the property. An outdoor tap sat near the barn, and they drank straight from it, gulping down water that tasted faintly of rust and tasted like heaven anyway. Kanade filled their bottles while Mafuyu kept watch, eyes fixed on the farmhouse windows.
"Hey!" A shout split the quiet. "Who's there?"
They bolted. An old farmer gave chase for a few dozen meters before his body gave out, too tired to keep pace with two teenage girls running for their lives. Once they'd collapsed in the treeline beyond his property, gasping, something strange bubbled up in Kanade's chest.
Real laughter, the kind she hadn't felt in longer than she could remember.
"This is insane," she said between breaths. "We're insane."
"Does it matter?" Mafuyu was grinning, the first unguarded smile Kanade had seen from her since the rain. "We're free. For the first time in our lives, we're actually free."
---
The feeling didn't last past the next morning.
They found an abandoned storage shed near a dry irrigation ditch and crawled inside to escape the sun. The heat inside was suffocating, thick enough to taste. They hadn't eaten in two days. The water was gone again.
Kanade lay on the concrete floor, staring up at a corrugated roof, her skull throbbing, her stomach twisting on itself.
"Kanade?" Mafuyu's voice sounded distant, filtered through cotton.
"I'm fine."
"You're not. Neither am I." Mafuyu crawled closer. This close, Kanade could see how sunken her eyes had become, how her skin had taken on a grayish undertone. "We're already dying. We haven't even found the place, and we're already dying."
"Not here, though." Kanade forced the words out. "Someone would find our bodies too fast."
They lay in silence for a while before Mafuyu settled beside her, close enough to share warmth despite the heat.
"I used to dream about being saved," Mafuyu said. "Like in the picture books they read us in elementary school. Some kind hero who loved everyone, who'd come and save even people as dirty as us. Do you think something like that could be real?"
Kanade considered it. If a hero like that existed, she'd have been forgiven years ago. Her father would still be the man who used to smile at her compositions instead of a stranger in a hospital bed.
"No."
"Me neither." Mafuyu's laugh came out bitter, thin. "If you ever had a dream like that, you should throw it out. Look at what's real. H-A-P-P-Y-ness, the whole idea of it, doesn't exist for people like us. We've had our whole lives to learn that."
(Note: Japanese word for happy only has four characters)
"Everyone thinks they've done nothing wrong," Kanade murmured. "Your mother thought so too. She thought she was building you the perfect future."
"And my father thought he was only supporting my music," Kanade went on. "He never realized that he was creating a monster."
They lay there a while longer, staring at the same water-stained ceiling as before, different shed with same silence.
"You did nothing wrong," Mafuyu said at last.
"Neither did you."
It was a lie. They both knew it. But they clung to it anyway, because the truth was unbearable, that they were two broken people who had broken others, and no amount of distance would undo that.
---
On the sixth day, everything went wrong.
They'd broken into another building, this time an old warehouse, hunting for anything useful: food, water, cash. But it wasn't as abandoned as it looked.
"Hey! What the hell are you doing in here?"
Two men emerged from the back, younger than the farmer and far less patient. "Get out!" one bellowed. "Damn thieves!"
Mafuyu grabbed Kanade's hand. "Run."
They ran, the men's shouts chasing them through the trees, curses and threats tangled with the drone of cicadas. Kanade's vision swam, dehydration and hunger catching up all at once, her legs threatening to give out beneath her. Mafuyu's breathing beside her had gone ragged, torn.
They broke through the treeline and found themselves at the edge of a cliff, a highway stretching out far below like a gray ribbon. Nowhere left to go.
Behind them, the men closed in, their voices rising like something with teeth.
Mafuyu reached into Kanade's bag without thinking and pulled out the knife.
"Mafuyu..."
"It's fine." Her voice had gone eerily calm, almost peaceful. "This was always how it was going to end, wasn't it?"
She turned to face Kanade, her back to the drop.
"I made it this far because you stayed beside me," she said softly. "You ran with me when no one else would have. You told me I did nothing wrong. So that's why it’s enough. It's enough now."
"What are you talking about..."
"The one who dies can just be me."
She raised the blade to her own throat and closed her eyes.
"No, wait..." Kanade lunged forward.
But Mafuyu was already faster than her.
---
The blade crossed Mafuyu's throat in one clean motion. Blood sprayed in a fine arc.
Kanade watched it happen as though time itself had slowed to nothing. The metal parting skin. Red blooming violent against pale. Mafuyu's eyes widening from something closer to surprise, as if some part of her hadn't quite believed she'd go through with it until it was already done.
It's just like a scene from a movie, Kanade thought, distant and unreal. Like I'm caught inside someone else's dream. For a moment, she couldn't breathe at all.
Then time snapped forward, and Mafuyu was falling.
Kanade lunged and caught her before she hit the ground, and they went down together, hard, the impact jarring up through her knees. Blood was everywhere. It was hot, slick and spreading fast. Her trembling hands pressed against the wound, trying to hold the bleeding back, but it kept coming, soaking through her fingers, staining her shirt, pooling in her lap in a widening terrible warmth.
"Mafuyu... Mafuyu, no..."
Small, wet sounds escaped her. Blood welled at the corner of her mouth. Her hands clutched weakly at Kanade's arms, her eyes wide with something like fear now, as if she'd only just understood what she'd done to herself.
"I'm sorry," she tried to say, but it came out as a gurgle, blood bubbling past her lips. "I'm sorry. Tell her. Tell her I'm sorry..."
"Don't talk. Don't..." Kanade's voice cracked, panic breaking through her carefully cold composure. "Help! Somebody help!"
The two men had frozen at the treeline, faces drained of color, staring in horror at what they'd chased two teenagers into.
"Call an ambulance!" Kanade screamed, the sound tearing raw from her throat. "Call someone, now!"
One of them fumbled for his phone with shaking hands.
Mafuyu's lips kept moving. "Kanade..."
"Shut up, just... just stay with me, you're going to be fine..."
She wasn't going to be fine. Kanade had known that the instant the blade touched skin. The cut ran too deep, too clean: Mafuyu had done it with the same precision she brought to everything else in her life, perfect even in this. Blood kept pouring, soaking into the dirt beneath them, and there was nothing Kanade could do to make it stop.
"I'm glad," Mafuyu whispered, barely audible now. "I'm glad you came with me. I'm glad I wasn't alone."
"You're not dying." Kanade watched the light behind her eyes begin to dim and refused to accept it. "You're not allowed to die. We were supposed to find that place together, the place far away where no one could reach us..."
She heard herself talking, frantic, saying anything at all to keep the moment from ending. And somewhere beneath the panic, a truth surfaced that she didn't want to look at directly: she had never actually wanted them to die together. She had only wanted to keep running with Mafuyu beside her, to keep her close, to matter to someone the way she'd failed to matter to her father. If Mafuyu stayed with her, then she hadn't lost her purpose yet. Maybe there was still a chance to be forgiven, forgiven for existing, for her music, for everything, if she could just be the one who saved this one broken girl.
It had been selfish from the very beginning. She understood that now, far too late to matter.
Mafuyu's mouth curved, faint and blood-stained. "You'll find it. Find it for both of us."
Her hand, still tangled in Kanade's, had gone cold.
"You did nothing wrong, Kanade. You did... nothing... wrong."
Sirens wailed somewhere down the mountain road, growing louder.
They didn't matter. Nothing mattered except the hand growing colder in hers. "Mafuyu? Stay with me. Mafuyu..."
But she was already gone, slipping away as quietly as she'd slipped through her entire life, leaving nothing behind but blood soaking into the earth.
---
The paramedics arrived fifteen minutes later. Fifteen minutes too late. By the time they reached the cliff, Mafuyu had stopped breathing, her body already cooling, already pale in a way that no longer looked like sleep. Kanade could only stare, unable to process what her own eyes were showing her.
They pulled her away from the body and she didn't resist. She let them wrap a blanket around her shoulders. Let them ask questions she couldn't quite hear over the ringing that had taken up residence in her ears.
The police arrived not long after. More questions, and Kanade answered them the way a machine might, mechanical and detached, while some other part of her mind replayed nothing but memories. Yes, she had run away with Mafuyu Asahina. Yes, she'd known Mafuyu had killed her mother. No, she hadn't tried to stop her. No, she hadn't called for help before this. No, she hadn't known Mafuyu would...
Would what? Kill herself?
"We were running away together," she heard herself say. "To die. We were supposed to die together. But she went alone. She left me behind and I couldn't find her. I couldn't find her anywhere."
The words sounded wrong even as she said them. What had happened to Mafuyu? Why couldn't she find her? Why was she alone now, when they'd promised to go together? The questions circled without landing, spinning faster the longer she tried to hold them still.
The officers exchanged a look and decided she was in shock and traumatized. They finally softened their voices, handled her like something already cracked that might shatter further if pushed.
They weren't wrong.
---
By the time I realized it, I was caught, Kanade thought numbly as they guided her toward the patrol car. I couldn't find you anywhere.
Behind her, Mafuyu's body was loaded into an ambulance that didn't bother with lights or sirens. There was no urgency left to serve. You were the only one who wasn't anywhere.
The blood on Kanade's hands had begun to dry, turning the deep red to a dull, sticky brown.
Why are you the only one who isn't anywhere?
They drove her down the mountain as the sun sank behind the ridgeline, staining the whole valley in shades of red and violet, colors far too beautiful for what had just happened beneath them.
---
September arrived without any fanfare at all.
Kanade's phone still buzzed constantly. Messages from Ena, from Mizuki, from her grandmother, who called every few days now from two prefectures away, her voice carefully bright in a way that fooled no one. Kanade let most of it go to voicemail.
Her desk, once cluttered with half-finished scores, was now crowded with orange pill bottles from the psychiatrist the police had insisted she see. She sat in front of her computer anyway, out of habit more than intention, trying to fall back into the same ritual that used to define her days. But the compositions she'd deleted that night were gone for good, and whatever she tried to write now came out hollow. The warmth that used to live inside her music simply wasn't there anymore.
She was still looking for Mafuyu. She knew that didn't make sense. She looked anyway.
---
Sorting through a stack of unopened mail that had piled up on her desk for weeks, Kanade found a folded newspaper clipping tucked between two envelopes she hadn't bothered to open.
LOCAL STUDENT FOUND DECEASED FOLLOWING MOTHER'S DEATH
Mafuyu Asahina, 17, was discovered deceased on August 15th in an apparent suicide. Asahina had been sought for questioning regarding the death of her mother, who died from head trauma on August 10th following what investigators now believe was an accidental fall during a domestic dispute. Asahina had fled the scene, later traveling with classmate Kanade Yoisaki before taking her own life at a location several prefectures away. Authorities have closed the investigation.
An accident.
She wondered if Mafuyu would have hated that. Or if some tired part of her would have simply been relieved to be spared one last time, from disappointing anyone.
---
The days folded into each other indistinctly.
Kanade started walking in the evenings, always as the light began to fail. Sometimes along the railroad tracks near her apartment. Sometimes all the way out to the station. She told herself she wasn't looking for anything in particular. She didn't believe it.
Whenever it rained, she went outside and stood in it until she was soaked through, eyes closed, letting herself remember.
"I killed someone yesterday."
"Then take me with you."
The scent of rain on early summer pavement. The sound of Mafuyu's breath, ragged beside her as they ran. The exact moment her hand had gone from trembling to steady to finally cold.
---
Near the end of September, without quite deciding to, Kanade found herself retracing the whole journey.
She started at the convenience store, still standing exactly as she remembered it, the same fluorescent hum spilling out onto the sidewalk. She boarded the same train line, watched the same skyline dissolve into suburbs and then rice fields through the window. She got off at the same unmanned station, the platform baking under a sun that no longer felt like summer, just its tired last breath.
The shrine was harder to find than she remembered, half-swallowed now by overgrowth, the torii gate leaning further than before. She stood in the doorway of the main hall for a long moment before she could make herself step inside. Dust motes hung suspended in the slanted light. The floor still smelled the same old wood and old rain.
She kept going. Past the farm, where the same tired farmer gave them a tired chase. Past the warehouse, its broken windows staring out like empty sockets. Through the treeline, cicadas rising into their deafening chorus around her, until the trees opened onto the cliff.
There was no blood left anywhere. Months of rain had washed it all away, seeped it into soil that had already forgotten too.
Kanade stood at the edge and tried to remember exactly where Mafuyu had been standing. Where she herself had lunged forward too slow.
The memory arrived all at once completely. The metal parting skin, the impossible red, the wide dark surprise in Mafuyu's eyes, the sirens climbing the mountain road. Her knees buckled before she understood what was happening, and she went down hard onto the dirt at the cliff's edge, gasping, the whole world tilting sideways around her.
She hadn't cried once since that day. Not during the police questioning, nor at the psychiatrist's office. Never once, in three months.
The first tear surprised her more than the memory had.
Then came the second, and the third, until she was sobbing without restraint, folded over her own knees, her whole body shaking the way Mafuyu's had that first night in the rain. She remembered the true smile Mafuyu had worn in the woods after outrunning the farmer, the only unguarded happiness she'd ever shown. She remembered thinking, in that one bright moment, that maybe they really could be free.
"Mafuyu," she finally choked out, the name breaking apart in her throat.
No one does anything wrong, she thought, the words arriving like something half-remembered from a dream, half-invented in her own grief. You did nothing wrong. That's enough now. Let it all go.
Isn't that what you wanted someone to tell you? All along?
She cried until there was nothing left to cry, until the cicadas' screaming had softened into something almost like silence, until the sun had dropped low enough to paint the whole cliffside gold. And when it finally passed, she felt lighter in some small, aching way, like she'd set down a weight she hadn't realized she'd been carrying with both hands the entire time.
She sat there until the sky went dark, then made her way back down the mountain alone, the way she probably should have from the very beginning.
---
That night, Kanade opened her laptop and, for the first time in three months, created a new file.
Her hands hovered over the keys for a long time. She didn't know what she was trying to say, or whether music could even hold something like this. But she started anyway, not to save anyone this time, not out of guilt or obligation, but simply to remember.
To remember the girl who had knocked on her door in the rain, confessing to murder the way someone else might confess to a dream. Who had held her hand and, just once, smiled like she'd found something real to hold onto.
The song that came out was nothing like anything she'd written before. There’s no warmth, no promise of rescue, nothing that pretended to save anyone from anything. Only the sound of the cicadas, the coldness of the rain, the railroad tracks, the heat, the blood, the cold spreading through a hand held too tight to let go. She worked through the night and into the gray hours before dawn, and when her grandmother called to check on her the next morning, Kanade let it ring, wanting to finish the song before anything else.
She titled the song That Summer Saturates.