Archive of Our Own

     The table is older than Sakura's entire apartment building.

     He knows this because Suo told him so twenty minutes ago, in the same pleasant voice he uses to inform Sakura that the exam covers chapters four through nine, that he's holding his pencil wrong, and that a crow has been following him since the bus stop. (The crow was real. Sakura is still annoyed about it.) The table is low and dark and polished so deep that his scowl looks back at him whenever he leans too far over his worksheet. Suo said something about a royal dynasty? Sakura hesitantly believed him.

     Now he's afraid to put his elbows down on the surface.

     "You can put your hands on it," Suo says, without looking up from his tea.

     "I wasn't gonna."

     "You were hovering. It's very stressful to watch."

     "Then don't watch."

     "Haruka." Suo turns the page in the book he’s holding more for show than anything else. "You're sitting directly across from me. Where would you like me to look?"

     Sakura doesn't have an answer for that, so he glares at the worksheet instead. The worksheet deserves it. It's kanbun, which as far as Sakura can tell is somebody's bright idea of taking perfectly good Chinese, chopping it into pieces, and then gluing tiny numbers and hooks all over it so a Japanese person has to read it backwards and forwards at the same time. The little marks tell you which character to jump to next.

     The little marks are lying to him. He has read the same line six times and every time it comes out as a sentence about a mountain being sad at a horse.

     Next to him, Nirei makes a noise of pure joy.

     "Oh! Oh, it's a reversal," Nirei says, and uncaps a green highlighter with his teeth. "Suo-san, look, the re-mark sends you back one character, so the verb comes after the object. That's why I kept getting 'wine drink' instead of 'drink wine,' right?"

     "Very good," Suo says, and means it, and Sakura hates it a little.

     Nirei has three highlighters, a stack of neon tabs, and a notebook he has divided into sections with a ruler. His handwriting slants when he gets excited, which is almost always. He's been bent over the same page for forty minutes with the focus of a guy defusing a bomb, and every time something clicks he says oh! out loud like he's been personally let in on a secret. It would be annoying if he weren't so cute… and getting the answers right.

     Sakura is not getting the answers right.

     "What does this say?" He mutters the words and turns the sheet around so it faces Suo.

     Suo sets down his cup. He leans in, and the tassels on his earrings swing forward and catch the lamplight, gold against the dark wood. He reads the line once, silently, and then out loud… in Chinese. The sounds come out low and rounded and tonal, rising in places Sakura's ears don't expect, and they sit easy in Suo's mouth that he could have been reading off a menu.

     Sakura stares at him.

     "In Japanese," he says.

     "That was the homework." Suo's smile doesn't move. "I just skipped the part where you do it backwards."

     "That's cheating."

     "It's reading."

     "It's cheating when you do it."

     "Sakura-san," Nirei says, smiling and not looking up, "that's not how cheating works."

     "Whose side are you on?"

     "The side of the answer key, of course."

     Suo laughs, quiet, mostly with his shoulders. He takes Sakura's pencil straight out of his fingers before Sakura can close his hand around it, which is an insult all by itself, and he writes the line out in neat Japanese underneath the original. His handwriting looks like it came off a printer that went to finishing school. Then, in the corner of the page, he adds one more character that isn't part of the assignment at all.

     遥

     "Hey," Sakura says. "That's not on there."

     "It's in the next poem." Suo taps the page two lines down, and there it is, the same character, sitting in the middle of a line about a road. "Far off. Distant. The poet's looking at a mountain he can't reach." He turns the pencil around and offers it back, eraser first. "I thought you'd want to recognize it when you got there."

     "I know what my own name means."

     "Do you?"

     It's a normal question. Suo asks it with his chin on his hand, like he's asking whether Sakura wants more tea. Sakura takes the pencil back hard enough that it knocks against the table, remembers the dynasty, and freezes.

     "It's fine," Suo says. "Bà props the back door open with it in summer."

     "With the table?"

     "With one of the legs. He took it off." Suo nods at the corner, where yes, now that Sakura looks, one leg is a slightly different shade than the other three. "Diē made him put it back when I pointed out it was probably worth more than the house. Bà said the house was ugly anyway."

     Sakura has met Suo's parents perhaps nine times, most of them at the front gate, and none of them have prepared him for the idea of a man unscrewing a table leg from a museum to hold a door. He decides that it fits. Everything about this house is quietly wrong sometimes. The front hall has a shoe cabinet made of wood so red that it looks wet. On top of it sits a battered straw hat, the wide conical kind, that looks as though it has been rained on for a hundred years. Nobody has ever explained either one, not that he asked. The tea comes out of a pot that Suo handles with two hands and the care people give newborn animals. There's a painting in the hallway of a man (probably a man?) dancing in a beautiful mask and a hanfu that looks like a whirlwind. Nirei stopped in front of it for a full minute on the way in and then walked away very quickly. When Sakura asked him why, Nirei whispered, "It's on xuan paper, Sakura-san," like that meant anything to him.

     Sakura grew up in apartments where you weren't allowed to put nails in the wall. He doesn't really know what to do with a house that treats its treasures like furniture. He sits very straight (uncharacteristic and slightly painful) every time he notices where he is and keeps his elbows in.

     "You're hovering over the table again," Suo says.

     "Shut up."

     "I'll shut up if you do the next line."

     Sakura does, in fact, do the next line. It takes him four minutes. It comes out as The traveler on the far road does not look back, which seems a little on the nose, and Suo reads it over his shoulder and hums and says "close~" which from Suo can mean anything between perfect and you've invented a new language.

     "What's wrong with it?"

     "Nothing's wrong with it, per se. It’s just that the original says the traveler can't look back. It's a different verb."

     "What's the difference?"

     Suo considers that longer than the question deserves. His finger rests on the character and doesn't tap. "One of them is a choice," he says, and then his face resets to pleasant, and he picks up his cup. "Your tea's getting cold, Haruka."

     Sakura drinks it to have something to do with his hands. It's good. He can't name what's in it — some kind of flower that's been dried in the sun for a long time, probably — but the water underneath tastes different from the water at his apartment too, rounder, without the pipe taste that he stopped noticing about a month after he moved in. He says so before he can stop himself.

     Suo looks up. For a second his visible eye goes wide, and then it curves back into the smile.

     "Diē filters it twice," he says. "Most people can't tell."

     "It's not hard to tell."

     "It is, a little." Suo turns his own cup a quarter turn on its saucer. "You'd be surprised how few people notice these things."

     Sakura isn't sure if that's a compliment. He decides it probably is, which is worse, and he looks back down at his worksheet with his ears getting hot. He doesn't see Suo watch him for several long seconds afterward with his cup halfway to his mouth, and he doesn't see Suo put it back down without drinking.

     Nirei sees. Nirei writes something small in the margin of his notebook, well away from the kanbun, and covers it with his hand.

     The next hour goes like this. Nirei works. Sakura fights the worksheet and loses on points. Suo finishes his last assignment in maybe eleven minutes, closes his book, and spends the rest of the time finding new and creative ways to distract Sakura from finishing his. He corrects Sakura's stroke order out loud. He rearranges Sakura's erasers by size while Sakura's looking at the page. He reads one of Sakura's translations back to him in a grave, dramatic voice, like it's a famous poem, until Sakura throws a stray pen cap at him, which Suo catches between two fingers without looking and sets neatly beside his saucer like a trophy.

     "You're the worst," Sakura says.

     "You keep saying that."

     "Because you keep being it!"

     "And yet here you are." Suo props his cheek on his hand. "In my house. At my table. Drinking my tea."

     "Nirei made me come."

     "I invited you," Nirei says, scandalized. "There's a difference!"

     "You showed up at my door."

     "With an invitation!"

     "Holding a notebook."

     "The notebook was the invitation!" Nirei flips it around, and sure enough, a page near the back has STUDY DATE @ SUO-SAN'S written in block letters, underlined twice, with a little star beside it and a doodle of three stick figures. One of the stick figures has hair colored in half black with a pen. It is scowling. "See? Official."

     Sakura doesn't know what to do with his face. He hunches down behind his worksheet.

     "Why is it called a date?" He mutters.

     "That's just what it's called," Nirei says. "Study date. My sister goes on them all the time."

     "Your sister is in middle school."

     "And she gets better grades than me! It's a proven method."

     Suo is laughing again, silently, with the back of his hand pressed to his mouth. Sakura kicks him under the table. It's a mistake. The table is low and old, and his toes hit the museum leg instead. Pain shoots up through Sakura’s shin while Suo's laughter tips over into a bright sound, a little breathless, higher than his speaking voice. Sakura has heard it maybe five times since April. He's counted, which he will never admit to anyone.

     "Are you all right?" Suo asks, not managing to stop.

     "No."

     "Should I call a doctor for the table?"

     Sakura is saved from committing a crime by the sound of the sliding door.

     The man who comes in first always looks like he's apologizing for something. Xie Lian is slim and pale and has been dressed in soft grey trousers and a white shirt every time Sakura has seen him, with a strip of white cloth wound around his wrist at all times. His face is kind in a way that makes Sakura want to leave the room, like he doesn’t deserve to see that gentleness.

     "I made something for you all!" Suo's diēdie says, very pleased, holding out a plate.

     Suo's smile does not move a millimeter. His hand, resting on the table, goes flat over his teacup like he's covering it from rain.

     Sakura doesn't notice. He's looking at the offered food.

     He isn't sure what's on it. They're round, which is a start. They're the size of a steamed bun or a large rice ball, and they're a color that isn't found in nature, a grayish green going brownish at the edges, and one of them is very faintly steaming from the top, as if something inside it is thinking about exploding. There's a smell that Sakura can't name either.

     "They're to help your studying," Xie Lian says, and sets the plate down in the exact center of the table, between Nirei's highlighters and Sakura's worksheet. "For energy. I read that the brain needs sugar."

     "Thank you, diē," says Suo, who hasn't moved.

     "Thank you!" says Nirei, who takes one immediately because Nirei was raised right, and who then goes absolutely still with it halfway to his mouth, blinking very fast.

     Xie Lian turns to Sakura. He picks the plate back up, and holds it out, straight at Sakura, low, the way you would hold out your hand to a dog you didn't know yet. He's smiling, not the least bit pushy, and yet...

     Sakura has had food handed to him before. Kotoha does it all the time, at Pothos, with her hands on her hips like she's daring him to say no. The old lady at the vegetable stall slips him a tomato when he walks by. Once, when he was sick, a whole parade of people turned up at his door holding rice porridge and his whole chest had tightened up until he could barely breathe. He's not always good at accepting it, but he’s getting better.

     He takes the closest one. Xie Lian's smile gets bigger.

     "Thanks," Sakura mumbles, and puts it in his mouth.

     It is the worst thing he has ever eaten.

     He knows it immediately. The texture is wrong in three separate ways, gummy and gritty and somehow wet at the core, and the flavor arrives in layers like an argument, sweet first, then very salty, then something bitter that coats the back of his tongue and settles there to live. His eyes water. His jaw wants to stop. There's a crunch halfway through that he chooses not to think about.

     Xie Lian is watching him with his hands folded, hopeful.

     Sakura chews. He chews like it's a fight, like he's been hit in the gut and has to keep standing because the other guy is still standing. He swallows, puts his hand flat on the museum table to keep his balance and manages to speak in a slightly hoarse voice. "It's good."

     It is completely silent in the room.

     Nirei is staring at him with open horror and something close to worship. Suo has put his cup down and turned his face slightly away and pressed his knuckles against his mouth, and his shoulders are shaking.

     And from the doorway, a second voice says, "Is it?"

     Hua Cheng is leaning on the frame with his arms crossed. Sakura didn't hear him come in, which is typical. He's taller than Xie Lian, dressed in a brilliant red that would look stupid on anybody else, and wears a black patch over his right eye at all times. The eye that shows is dark and amused and doesn't blink nearly often enough.

     He comes to the table and takes one of the greenish things off the plate without looking at it, and eats it in one bite, and chews, and swallows. His expression doesn't change except to get warmer.

     "Delicious, gēge," he says to Xie Lian. "Better than last time."

     "Really?" Xie Lian lights up. "I added more salt."

     "I could tell." Hua Cheng takes another one. Then he turns his head and looks down at Sakura, and the look goes on for a while. Sakura holds it. He doesn't know what else to do. He thinks, again, that Hua Cheng has the eyes of someone who has already decided how the fight is going to end and is only staying to watch.

     What Sakura doesn't see, because he's busy holding the stare and trying not to taste the inside of his own mouth, is that the corner of Hua Cheng's mouth tips up, very slightly, and stays there.

     "Finish your homework," Hua Cheng says, to all three of them. “I’ll bring you some juice and dessert.” He puts a hand on Xie Lian's back, and steers him gently out the door.

     The door slides shut. Nirei puts his untouched bun back on the plate with enormous care, like it might go off.

     "Sakura-san," he whispers. "You ate it."

     "He was holding it out to me. What was I supposed to do?"

     "I know." Suo has turned back around. His eye is wet at the corner. He's smiling in an unusual manner, a little crooked, a little too wide on one side. "Nobody eats it, Haruka. Nobody except Bà. I've lived with them eight years and I've watched grown men from the tax office say they're allergic to rice to avoid eating that crap."

     Sakura drinks the entire rest of his tea in one go. It doesn't help.

     "Your dad," he says, "is going to kill me."

     "Which one?"

     "Either."

     "Neither," Suo says, and pushes his own full cup across the table into Sakura's hands. "Here. You earned it."

     It starts raining around six.

     Sakura doesn't notice when it starts coming down. It’s not until he finally finishes the last line on the worksheet and sets his pencil down that he hears it, a steady hiss on the roof tiles, and a gurgle from somewhere out in the garden where a gutter is losing a fight. The window at the end of the room has gone dark blue. The lamp on the table has become the main source of light in the room, and the empty jug of juice distorts the beams in an almost beautiful way.

     "Done!" he says triumphantly.

     Suo leans over to look. He reads the whole page top to bottom with his finger under each line, which takes a while, because Sakura's handwriting is bad and gets worse when he's angry. He says nothing until he reaches the bottom. Then he says, "Two wrong."

     "Two?"

     "Out of fourteen." Suo slides the paper back. "Haruka, that's very good."

     Sakura looks at the paper. There are no marks on it. Suo hasn't circled anything or crossed anything out.

     "Which two?"

     "Find them."

     "You're the worst—"

     "That's four times you’ve said that today," Nirei reports cheerfully. "I'm keeping a tally."

     "Why."

     "Data!"

     The door slides open again. This time it's Hua Cheng alone, with his sleeves pushed up past the elbow and a dish towel over one shoulder. Sakura sees the edge of something dark on the inside of his left forearm, ink, a word maybe, but the handwriting is so bad he can't even tell which alphabet it's in, and then Hua Cheng's arm has moved and it's gone.

     "Dinner," Hua Cheng announces. "Wash your hands."

     Nirei is on his feet before Sakura has fully registered the words, gathering his highlighters into his pencil case with such speed that he must have a lot of practice obeying adults who sound like that. Sakura follows more slowly. He's been sitting on his heels so long that his legs have gone to static below the knee. He stands up wrong and has to put his hand on the wall. Suo is beside him immediately with a hand under his elbow.

     "I'm fine."

     "You're practically falling over to your left."

     "I'm fine." He shakes Suo off. Suo lets go at once, and Sakura, who was braced for an argument, stumbles a little on the release.

     The kitchen is bright and warm and smells like garlic, ginger, and something with a lot of black pepper. The dinner table is a normal table (thank god) with legs and chairs that match, and it's covered in more dishes than five people can eat. There's fish steamed whole with scallions laid across its back. There's something glossy and red with pork. There's a green vegetable Sakura doesn't know the name of, bright as paint, cooked in a way that keeps its crunch, and rice, and a clear soup with little white dumplings floating in it like fat clouds.

     "Did you make all of this?" Nirei asks Hua Cheng, reverent.

     "Yes."

     "All of it?"

     "Diē usually isn't allowed in the kitchen when we have guests," Suo says, pulling out a chair. He pulls out the chair next to it too, and looks at Sakura until Sakura sits in it.

     "Sun Fei exaggerates," Xie Lian says from the sink, a little embarrassed. "I'm allowed to wash things."

     Sun Fei. Sakura has heard him call Hayato that before. He doesn't know what it means. Xie Lian says it with such warmth that it almost hurts to hear and Sakura looks down at his rice, choosing not to ask yet again.

     Dinner is loud. Most of that is Nirei, who has decided that Hua Cheng's cooking is the greatest thing to happen in the history of Makochi and wants to know everything about it: where the ginger is from, why the fish tastes like that, whether it's hard to steam a whole fish, whether Hua Cheng has ever thought of opening a restaurant. Hua Cheng answers the first question and then lets Xie Lian answer the rest, which Xie Lian does, happily and at length, and slightly wrong, because every so often Hua Cheng looks at him and says "Gēge, that's not quite—" in the softest voice Sakura has ever heard come out of that face. Xie Lian’s "Oh, isn't it?" is unconcerned and followed by a laugh.

     Suo eats very little. He takes a small portion of everything, arranges it in his bowl so nothing touches, and eats it slowly while he watches the table. Mostly he watches his parents. His face stays pleasant and his chopsticks stay neat, but when Xie Lian laughs, Suo melts a little every time.

     He also keeps putting food in Sakura's bowl.

     Sakura notices around the third time. He looks down and there's a piece of the red pork where there wasn't one a second ago, and he looks up and Suo is looking at Nirei, nodding along to something about fish. Sakura eats the pork. It's excellent. He puts his chopsticks down for a moment to drink some soup and when he picks them back up there's a piece of fish on his rice, carefully deboned, with a bit of scallion laid across the top.

     "Stop that," he mutters.

     "Stop what?" Suo asks, not looking over.

     "You know what."

     "I really don't."

     "You're putting stuff in my bowl."

     "Am I?" Suo turns his head, and his face is perfectly innocent. "It must be the ghosts. This is an old house."

     Across the table, Hua Cheng makes a sound into his tea that could have been a laugh, if the man ever did things like that. Maybe it was a cough, who knows.

     Sakura eats the fish. He decides he isn't going to say anything else about it, and the food keeps coming, steadily, one piece at a time, until he feels like he has eaten more at this table than he's eaten in the rest of the week put together. At some point it stops feeling like bullying and starts feeling like care. There's a warmth low in his stomach that's only partly the soup.

     By the time they finish, the rain is coming down hard enough to hear over the dishes. It sounds heavy and dramatic, rattling the window over the sink. Out in the dark garden, something metal is being hit over and over by the runoff, tink tink tink, fast and uneven.

     Xie Lian goes to the window and looks out, and then turns around with an expression of total calm certainty that reminds Sakura, weirdly, of Umemiya right before a fight.

     "You're all staying the night," he says.

     "Oh, we couldn't," Nirei says automatically, in the tone of a boy whose mother has trained him to refuse things three times.

     "You could."

     "We really shouldn't impose—"

     "It's no imposition. We have so much room!" Xie Lian is already drying his hands. "The last bus has probably stopped running with all this rain. And I don't want you walking in it, it's getting dark, and there's no reason not to stay. Sun Fei, can you prep the big room upstairs, the one with the long tatami? There are extra futons in the closet in the hall, the good ones. My love, do we still have those new toothbrushes?"

     "Second drawer." Hua Cheng replies immediately.

     "Second drawer!" Xie Lian beams at the three of them like the matter has been settled by a higher court. "There. It's decided. Stay the night."

     Nirei looks at Sakura with enormous eyes. Sakura looks at the rain.

     "Okay," Nirei says. "Okay! I'll text my mom."

     He already has his phone out. It's in a case with little cartoon melons all over it, bright green, a bit scratched at the corners. He types fast, both thumbs going, and Sakura can see the glowing screen without even trying. It's pinned at the top of his messages under the name MOM with three hearts after it. Nirei sends a string of words and a picture of the table, the dirty bowls and the steamed fish skeleton and Hua Cheng's elbow at the edge of the frame. The reply comes back in less than ten seconds. A sticker of a cartoon cat bowing deeply. Then another message. Then a third.

     "She says thank you for having me," Nirei reads out. "And that I'm supposed to help with the dishes. And to brush my teeth. And that my sister says I'm not allowed to take the good pillow when I get home because she's claiming it now. And..." He scrolls. His ears go pink. "Never mind."

     "What?" Suo asks, curious.

     "Nothing!"

     "Nirei-kun~"

     "She just said to have fun!" Nirei says quickly. "And that she loves me. She always says that. It's kind of embarrassing how often she does."

     He puts the phone face down on the table, grinning, and his ears stay pink.

     Sakura looks away.

     His own phone is in his back pocket. It doesn't have a case. It's never had one; they cost money and it’s not like he’s accustomed enough to having one to even remember to take the phone with him half the time. And there are no messages worth sending right now and none waiting for him. There never are, not unless the Bofurin group chat is going off about someone's cousin's ramen stand or the second-years are arguing about who ate whose melon bread or people threatening to beat someone up. His contact list is short. Kotoha. Nirei. Suo, who is saved as SUO in capital letters because Sakura typed it in a hurry and never changed it. Umemiya, who put his own number in and saved himself as UME ♡. The landlord. A number that belongs to a pizza place that closed in June.

     There's nobody to text. He knew that. He already knew that before he took the phone out to look at it.

     He puts it back in his pocket.

     It shouldn't matter. It doesn't matter. He has lived on his own since spring, and before that it wasn't much different, a string of places with a string of people who were paid to keep him in one piece and not much else. Some of them were okay. One or two of them were borderline nice to him but moved him along anyway like unwanted cargo. He learned very early that the best thing was to need as little as possible, because then when you got shoved off to your next destination, there was less to pack.

     He has never had a curfew. He has never had anyone waiting up. He can stay out all night in the rain if he wants and nobody's going to text him in capital letters asking where he is. That's good. That's freedom. That's what he's always wanted.

     Nobody's sending him a cartoon cat.

     Nobody's going to fight him over a pillow.

     He's not jealous of a stupid sticker. That would be pathetic.

     "Sakura-san?" Nirei says. "Do you want to text anybody? You can use my phone if yours is dead."

     "It's not dead."

     "Oh. Okay."

     Nirei opens his mouth, closes it, and looks down. Sakura doesn't see the look Nirei throws across the table at Suo, quick and worried, or how Suo meets it. He's looking at the window, at his own reflection in the black glass, at the line down the middle of his hair.

     Across the table, Hua Cheng sets down his tea without a sound.

     "Dishes," he says. "Akihiko, you wash. I’ll dry. Sakura." He waits until Sakura turns his head. "You can put them away. Gēge will show you where things go."

     Sakura opens his mouth to argue, for no reason except that he's in the mood to argue with something, but Xie Lian is already at his elbow with a stack of bowls, smiling, saying "These go up top, you're tall enough, would you mind?" and Sakura finds himself standing on his toes putting porcelain on a shelf before he's decided to say anything at all.

     The big room upstairs is bigger than Sakura's whole apartment.

     That keeps happening in this house. He's starting to take it personally. The room is long and plain, with tatami from wall to wall and nothing else in it but a low cabinet under the window and a calligraphy scroll hanging in an alcove, a few lines of ink so loose and wild they look like somebody wrote them during an earthquake. Sakura can't read them. He isn't sure anyone could.

     "Bà did that one," Suo says, following his gaze. He's carrying three futons stacked on top of each other like they weigh nothing. "Diē hung it up. Bà keeps trying to take it down."

     "What's it say?"

     "Nobody knows." Suo drops the futons in the middle of the floor with a soft whump. "Diē says it's a poem. Bà says it's a grocery list. Diē says he's lying, of course. They’ve been arguing about it since before I ever met them."

     Nirei laughs out loud and starts unrolling futons.

     They lay them side by side, edge to edge, three in a row, with no gap between them. Sakura isn't consulted about this. Nirei does the first one, square to the wall, and then Suo does the second, flush against the first, and then Suo looks at Sakura and at the last futon until Sakura sighs and drags it over and kicks it into line with the other two. It makes one giant bed that takes up the middle third of the room. Nirei throws the quilts on top. Suo straightens every corner.

     "Middle?" Nirei asks.

     "Not me," Sakura says.

     "Haruka takes the end." Suo’s voice is quiet. "He'll want to be near the door."

     Sakura looks at him sharply. Suo, busy folding a pillowcase, doesn't look back.

     It's true. He will. He always sleeps with his back to a wall and his face to the way out, has done it for as long as he can remember, in every room in every place, and he's never once told anybody that. He wonders when Suo noticed. He wonders what else Suo has noticed. It makes the back of his neck prickle, like a hand is hovering there without touching.

     Xie Lian brings them clothes to sleep in. They're Suo's clothes, which means they're soft and loose and the color of weak tea, a long-sleeved top with little knotted buttons down the front and a pair of wide trousers that tie at the waist. Nirei holds his up in front of himself and the hem comes down to his knees.

     "It's like a dress," he says, thrilled.

     "It's silk," Suo says. "Try not to drool on it."

     "I don't drool!"

     "You drooled on my shoulder on the bus in June."

     "That was one time!"

     Sakura takes his set without looking at it. He goes to the bathroom down the hall to change and finds it's bigger than his kitchen, with a deep tub and a stack of towels folded into perfect squares. He washes his face in the sink, keeping the water cold out of habit, and then stands there with his hands braced on either side and water dripping off his nose, staring in the mirror for a while.

     He hardly recognizes himself these days. Everything is just… he doesn’t know what. It’s just not quite right.

     The clothes are too soft, he muses. Maybe that’s the problem. They feel like being touched all over by someone careful and that runs counter to his experience throughout his whole life. He puts them on anyway because the alternative is sleeping in his school pants, and the sleeves come down exactly to the ends of his fingers. Ignoring the way the fabric brushes against his perennially bruised knuckles, he heads back to the big room.

     Nirei is already lying on his stomach in the middle futon in a silk shirt that swallows him whole, typing on his phone with the quilt pulled up over his head like a tent. Every so often, the tent giggles.

     "Who're you texting." It’s technically a question, but Sakura’s voice comes out harder than he wants, so it reads more like a statement, or perhaps a demand.

     "My sister." The quilt shifts as Nirei wiggles a little. "She says the good pillow is hers forever now because I abandoned it. I said I'd fight her."

     "She'd win," Suo says from the window.

     "She would win." The tent sounds happy about this.

     Sakura sits down on the end futon — his futon — with his back against the wall and his knees drawn up. The rain is still going. It's gentler up here, or maybe the insulation is thicker, and it makes the room feel like the inside of a shell. He pulls one knee up tighter and puts his chin on it.

     He's in a bad mood. He knows he's in a bad mood and has no idea what to do with it. He wants to hit something, a wall, a bag, anybody who'd hit back. Of course, there's nothing in the room to hit except futons and Suo and Nirei. (He’s pretty sure that he would never hit Nirei. Suo… well, if he could land the hit, Suo could take it, but he’d never hit him unprovoked anyway.)

     Sakura knows it's stupid. He's warm and full and clean and sitting in a room so big it's almost funny, in somebody's expensive clothes, with the two people he likes best in the whole world within arm's reach. There's nothing wrong. Nothing has happened. Nobody has done anything to him. And still it's in his throat, in his chest, in his stomach, like a stone he swallowed, round and heavy and sitting right on top of all that dinner.

     She loves me. She always says that. It's embarrassing.

     He grinds his teeth.

     At the window, Suo has stopped pretending to look at the rain. He's leaning against the frame with his arms loosely folded, looking at the room. No, at Sakura. Sakura can feel it without looking, the way you can feel sunlight on the side of your face with your eyes closed. He doesn't turn around. He really isn't in the mood for teasing, and if Suo says one word he'll bite his head off.

     Suo doesn't say anything.

     Instead, he watches a while longer. Then he pushes himself off the frame and crosses the room and crouches down, not too close, at the corner of Sakura's futon. His knees are level with Sakura's feet. His face is pleasant. His voice, when it comes, is pitched low enough that the quilt-tent in the middle of the room doesn't take notice and stop giggling.

     "Help me bring up the tea things?"

     Sakura looks at him.

     "Diē left them in the kitchen," Suo says. "I'd like some before bed and it's two trips alone. You don't have to."

     It's a lie, of course. Sakura knows it's a lie. Suo has carried three futons at once today like they were magazines. He could carry a tea tray up a flight of stairs with his eyes closed and the tray on his head. But Suo's looking at him, level and steady, with his head a little tilted, and there's no smile on his face at all for once. He’s just... waiting.

     Sakura stares for a minute and then gets up.

     "Fine," he says. "Whatever."

     "Nirei-kun," Suo speaks over his shoulder as he leaves the room, "we'll be right back.~"

     "Bring melon bread!" says the quilt-muffled voice.

     "We don't have melon bread."

     "Bring the idea of melon bread, then!"

     Suo just shakes his head and keeps walking.

     They don't go to the kitchen.

     Suo leads him down the stairs and along the back hall, past the kitchen door with the tea tray sitting on the counter in plain view, and doesn't even glance at it. Sakura frowns but doesn't say anything. They go through a small dark room that smells like cedar and old paper, and Suo slides open a door on the far side of it, and suddenly the rain is loud.

     It's a veranda. A strip of polished wood runs along the back of the house under a deep overhang of roof, open to the garden on one side. The garden is in grayscale, between the storm and the night. Sakura can make out shapes in it, a stone lantern, a twisted pine, the pale rim of a pond with the rain pocking its surface so hard it looks like it's boiling. Water pours off the edge of the roof in a curtain a foot out from the boards. The air out here is cold and wet and smells like moss.

     Suo sits down on the edge of the veranda with his feet hanging over, just inside the line where the water falls. He doesn't say anything. He just sits.

     Sakura stays standing.

     "There's no tea," he says, dumbly.

     "No."

     "...You did say tea though."

     "I did say that." Suo tilts his head back to look at him. There's just enough light from the room behind them to catch the side of his face and the gold of one earring. "Sit with me?"

     "Why?"

     "Because I asked nicely."

     Sakura thinks about going back upstairs. Then he sits down, not quite beside Suo but a body-width away, with his knees up and his arms around them, and stares at the rain.

     They don't talk. The rain fills up the space between them so completely that for a while Sakura thinks that's going to be it, that Suo dragged him down here to sit and be quiet and look at a pond, and some of the tension starts going out of his shoulders. He can do this. He can sit.

     "You haven't said a word since Nirei-kun texted home."

     The tension comes right back.

     "I said words," Sakura returns stubbornly.

     "You said 'it's fine.' You said 'no.' You said 'who're you texting' in a voice that made Nirei-kun hide under a quilt." Suo keeps his eyes on the garden. "You said 'fine, whatever' to me. That's all, Haruka. I was counting."

     "Why were you counting?"

     "Why were you going so quiet all of the sudden?"

     Sakura clamps his jaw shut. He isn't going to do this. He doesn't know what this is, exactly, but he knows the feeling of being backed into a corner, and he knows Suo. He knows that Suo can get a shopkeeper to hand over a security tape and a delinquent to confess where he hid his friend just by smiling at them and waiting. Sakura has watched him do it. It’s a little terrifying.

     "Don't do your thing," he says.

     "What thing?"

     "Your thing. The thing where you look at people until they tell you stuff."

     Suo actually turns his head at that. His eyebrow goes up. "If I were doing my thing, you'd have told me already."

     "See, that's—"

     "I'm not doing it," Suo says. "I promise. I'm only sitting here."

     He means it. Sakura can tell, somehow. Suo's hands are loose in his lap. There's no smile. His voice doesn't have the silky edge it gets when he's working on someone. He sounds just a little tired, and careful, and very patient. He's settled in to wait out the rain for as long as it takes. Sakura's bad temper isn't going to move him.

     This is worse, Sakura thinks. I could try to fight being worked over, but I can't fight this.

     The rain keeps coming.

     The pond keeps boiling.

     "It's stupid," Sakura says finally, to his knees.

     Suo doesn't say anything. He just turns so his body is angled toward Sakura instead of toward the garden.

     "It's stupid. I know it's stupid. I don't even know why I'm..." Sakura scrubs a hand over his face. His fingers come away damp from the air. "Nirei texted his mom. That's it. That's what happened. He sent her a picture of a fish and she sent a cat back, and she told him to brush his teeth, and his sister's gonna fight him over a pillow. And I sat there and I..."

     He stops. The rest of it is in his throat and it doesn't want to come out. He swallows it and it just comes back up.

     "I don't have anybody to text," he says. "I've never had anybody. You know that. Everybody knows that. It's not a secret. I live by myself, I've always pretty much been by myself, and it's fine, I'm used to it, I like it, nobody tells me what to do. And I sat there watching Nirei go all red about his mom saying she loves him and I wanted..."

     His voice has gone low and flat and ugly. He hates the sound of it. His throat hurts but he keeps going anyway, because now that it's started it's like a nosebleed, he can't make it stop by wanting to.

     "I wanted somebody to tell me to brush my teeth," he says. "That's how pathetic I am. I'm fifteen years old and I can beat up guys twice my size and I sat at your table and wanted some lady I've never met to text me a cat."

     "Haruka—"

     "No. Shut up!" He presses the heels of his hands into his eyes until he sees a bloom of red behind his eyelids. "I came here to get strong. That's the whole reason. That's all I ever wanted. I was gonna be the strongest guy at Furin and nobody was ever gonna look at me like I was a freak again, because they'd be too scared to, and I wouldn't need them to look at me any other way. I didn't need anything. I got through every single stupid foster house and every single stupid school by not needing anything from anybody, and I was good at it, and what's the point of getting strong if you're just gonna turn around and go soft the second somebody feeds you dinner? What's the point if some guy's mom's text can knock you flat? What's the point of any of it if I'm sitting in a room full of people who've got everything, wishing I was..."

     He can't finish it. He doesn't know how it ends. Loved is the word sitting in the gap, and he won't say it, he'd rather bite off his own tongue.

     "Strong," he finishes instead. "It's weak. Fuck, I'm weak."

     His voice cracks on the last line, and he winces.

     For a while there's nothing but rain. Sakura keeps his hands over his eyes. He's breathing too hard for somebody who's been sitting still, and his face is burning, and he wants very badly to be anywhere else, back in his tiny apartment with its one window and its pipe-tasting water, where there's nobody around to hear any of this.

     "Are you finished?" Suo asks.

     His voice is wrong. Sakura takes his hands away from his face and looks.

     Suo is sitting very straight. His hands are pressed flat on his thighs. His face is still, completely still, and in the dim light from the room behind them it's pale, paler than usual, and his mouth is a thin hard line. His one eye is fixed on Sakura and it isn't smiling at all.

     Sakura has seen Suo angry exactly twice before. There was a fight, near the start of the school year, and a guy had said something vile about Kotoha and Suo had gone quiet and pleasant and put the guy in the dirt so fast Sakura had missed half of it. That had been a cold thing, calm, almost bored. And there was the time he saw Nirei bleeding during the battle with KEEL. He’d been so single-mindedly violent then that Sakura had reflexively caught his hand to stop someone from dying under Suo’s fist.

     This isn't that. This looks like it hurts him.

     "Needing people doesn't make you weak," Suo says. "I want to be very clear about that, Haruka, before anything else, so listen to me. It's how people are built. You aren't broken for wanting it. You'd be broken if you didn't."

     "That's easy for you to—"

     "You don't know what's easy for me."

     It's the sharpest thing Suo has ever said to him. It cuts straight across Sakura's sentence and slams into his chest, and Suo doesn't take it back, doesn't soften it with a smile or make the hit easier to take. Suo just looks away, out at the rain, jaw tight.

     Sakura doesn't see Suo's hand move, in the dark, up toward the strap of his eyepatch, where it runs back over his ear and into his hair. He doesn't see it stop halfway, hover, and come back down to his knee. He only sees Suo turn back to him, a second later, with his face under control again, and it makes Sakura want to yell just a little bit. It makes him want to punch Suo, or maybe cry. He does none of those things.

     "And it isn't true," Suo says, quieter. "What you said. That you don't have anyone. You keep saying that and I keep letting you, and I shouldn't. It isn't true."

     "It is, though. Nobody would even notice if I didn't go home tonight. I could not go home for a week and—"

     "Kotoha-san would."

     Sakura's mouth shuts.

     "Kotoha-san would notice by eight-fifteen tomorrow morning," Suo says, "because that's when you come in for breakfast, and you always sit at the counter on the end, and she's started putting your omurice on before you've even got the door open. I've seen her do it. She hears your feet on the step outside and she cracks the eggs. If you didn't come in, she'd stand there holding the pan and look at the door. And at eight-thirty she'd call Umemiya-san. And Umemiya-san would call me."

     "That's..."

     "The lady at the vegetable stall on the corner by the bridge. She puts a tomato aside for you every day. Every day, Haruka. She keeps it under the counter in a paper bag with your name on it in beautiful, incorrect handwriting. I asked her once why she didn't write it in kana so it'd be easier and she said He's a Sakura, he should have a proper flower, so she'd written it in kanji very carefully, but had gotten one of the strokes backwards." Suo's voice doesn't break, but it wavers, just barely, on the last word. "The little boys who play by the canal wave at you. You don't wave back. You do this thing where you lift two fingers off your pocket and look the other way, and they go wild. They think you're the coolest person who has ever lived. The second-years fight about whose turn it is to walk back with you. Kiryu-senpai sends you stickers you never answer. Umemiya-san put himself in your phone with a heart."

     "How do you know about the heart?"

     "He showed everyone. He's very proud of it." Suo's mouth twitches, and then steadies. "When you had the fever, fourteen people came to your apartment. Fourteen. I counted them too. You were so out of it you called me Nirei and asked me if I'd fed the cat, and you don't have a cat. We didn't all fit in your room. Umemiya-san sat in the hall before fussing at everyone to get out and let you get your rest."

     Sakura stares at him. His face is so hot it hurts. He wants to tell Suo to stop. He can't find his voice.

     "Nirei-kun," Suo says, "has eleven pages on you in that notebook. Eleven. I have four. Umemiya-san has six. He has a whole page that's just things you've said that made him laugh. He wrote down the date and the time for every one." He takes a breath. "That's not nobody, Haruka. That's not nobody sitting there hoping you'll come home. That's a whole town. And every time you say nobody cares about you, you're telling all of those people that what they feel doesn't count. You're telling Kotoha-san her eggs don't count. You're telling the tomato lady she wrote your name down for nothing."

     He stops. His voice has gone thin at the end of that, thinner than Sakura has ever heard it.

     "You're telling me," he says.

     Sakura looks at him. He's never seen Suo like this. Suo is the one who stays calm. Suo is the one who smiles through everything, who finishes his homework in eleven minutes and catches pencil caps without looking and never, ever lets anything show on his face that he hasn't chosen to put there. And he's sitting on the edge of a veranda in the rain looking like somebody's reached into his chest and squeezed so tight that he’s going to die.

     Because of Sakura.

     It doesn't make any sense.

     "Why do you care so much?" Sakura’s voice comes out bewildered and rough. "Seriously. I don't get it. I don't get you. I'm a pain in the ass, I yell at everybody, I can't do kanbun, I ate your dad's weird green thing and almost threw up, I'm..." He waves a hand at himself. At his hair. At all of himself. "This. Why would you... what do you even get out of it? Why do you care?"

     "I can't help it," Suo says immediately.

     It almost sounds like it has been sitting in his mouth all day and has finally gotten loose. All that sentiment bound up inside him wants so desperately to be free.

     "I can't help it, Haruka. I don't know. I like..." He stops. His hand comes up, like he's going to gesture, and it doesn't know what shape to make, so it just hangs there in the air between them. "I like everything. About you. I like how you're rude to the people who deserve it and never once to the ones who don't. I like that you can taste the water in the tea, for some reason. I like that you ate the..." A breath that's almost a laugh, almost. "The thing even though you knew it wouldn’t end well. I like how you hold a pencil wrong — don’t look at me like that, you do. I like that you fight like you're trying to hold up a building by yourself, but once in a while, you let us hold it up with you. I like that you come back. You always come back, every time, even when you think you've failed. I..."

     The hand drops.

     "I just want to stay by your side," Suo says. "That's all. I'd like to stay by your side, if you'll let me. For as long as you'll let me. That's all it is."

     The rain is very loud.

     Sakura doesn't move. He can't. He's sitting there with his arms around his knees and his mouth a little open and every part of him has gone completely still, the way it does in a fight right before somebody swings, when time slows down and you can see every single raindrop hanging in the air.

     He doesn't know what that was.

     He knows what it isn’t. It’s not one of those things people say in movies, on rooftops, with music. Suo's not blushing. Suo's not looking at him that way, the way Sakura's seen boys at school look at girls at the mall, all hopeful and stupid. Suo's looking at him the way he looked at his dads at dinner, like he's watching something he'd go through heaven and hell to keep.

     But friends don't say that. Sakura doesn't have a lot of practice at friends but he knows that much. Friends say you're alright and good fight and get your own melon bread. They don't say everything. They don't say for as long as you'll let me, in a voice like that, like the words cost something. Nirei loves him, probably, in Nirei's loud eleven-pages way, and Nirei has never once said anything like that.

     It's too much. It's too big. It doesn't fit in any box Sakura's got.

     He stands up too fast. His knees crack. Suo flinches, very slightly, and doesn't move otherwise.

     "I'm gonna..." Sakura's voice doesn't sound like his. "I need to walk."

     "It's raining," Suo says quietly.

     "I don't care."

     "There's an umbrella by the door. The black one." Suo's looking at the pond again. "Don't take the red one. That one is Bà's."

     Sakura goes.

     He goes back through the dark cedar room and down the hall and past the kitchen with the tea tray still sitting on the counter and, at the front door, he shoves his feet into his sneakers without untying them and crushes the backs down flat. His hands are shaking. He grabs the first umbrella his hand touches, which is black. He doesn't look back down the hall.

     He doesn't see that, at the far end of it, through the open door of the cedar room, Suo is still sitting on the edge of the veranda, exactly where Sakura left him. He's bent forward over his knees. Both of his hands are pressed over his face, over the patch and the eye alike, and he stays like that, not moving, while the rain comes down a foot in front of him.

     The rain is letting up by the time he gets to the gate.

     It thins from a roar to a hiss to a fine, drifting mist that doesn't really fall so much as hang in the air and wait for you to walk into it. The streetlight at the corner has a fuzzy halo around it. The black umbrella drums gently over Sakura's head, and his crushed-down sneakers are soaked through in six steps, and he doesn't care. He needs to move. He needs to put his feet down one after the other until his head stops ringing.

     I like everything. About you.

     He walks faster.

     The street outside Suo's house is quiet and residential and very neat, with tall walls on both sides and the tops of trees showing over them, and nobody is foolish enough to be out in this weather but him. Somebody's dog barks three times behind a gate and gives up when the rain drowns out Sakura’s scent. Water gurgles in the gutters. He walks to the end of the block with no idea where to go and turns left because left is downhill, toward the canal, and he could stand to look at some water that isn't coming out of the sky.

     I'd like to stay by your side, if you'll let me.

     What does that even mean? What is he supposed to do with that? Nobody's ever said anything like that to him. Nobody's ever said anything even remotely like it. He's had people say he was strong, and people say he was scary, and people say he was a freak or a monster or a problem, and lately, since coming here, people saying stuff like thank you and good job and come back anytime, which still makes him blush and want to crawl under a table. But nobody's ever sat there and looked at him and listed things about him. Nobody's ever told him they liked the way he held a pencil even though it’s wrong.

     His face is hot all over again. He pushes a hand through his wet hair and it doesn't help.

     He's so busy not thinking about it that he almost walks straight into the red umbrella.

     It's at the bottom of the hill, where the road meets the path along the canal. Somebody's standing under it at the railing with their back to the street, looking down at the water, and the umbrella is the only bright thing in the whole grey world, deep red, almost black in the folds. Sakura stops so hard his heel slides on the wet pavement.

     Hua Cheng turns around.

     He isn't wet. That's the first thing Sakura notices. The mist is blowing sideways under the umbrella, it's soaked the front of Sakura's borrowed silk shirt in a dozen places, and Hua Cheng's dark red coat and loose black hair are somehow completely dry. The red bead in his braid shines like it's been polished.

     The second thing Sakura notices is the butterfly.

     It's sitting on the rim of Hua Cheng's umbrella. Small, silver, pale as a coin, with its wings folded up. Butterflies don't come out in the rain. and Sakura is pretty sure butterflies don't come out at night either. He looks at it and it opens its wings, once, slow, and they catch the streetlight and flash, and then it closes them again.

     "Sakura Haruka-kun," Hua Cheng says. "Out for a walk?"

     "How'd you get down here?"

     "I walked."

     "I didn't see you leave."

     "No," Hua Cheng agrees pleasantly. "You didn't."

     Sakura thinks about the front door. The umbrella stand. The black one, which he grabbed, and next to it... he doesn't remember. He didn't look. There could have been a red umbrella there or there could have been nothing. He was busy trying to get his shoes on with his hands shaking.

     He decides not to think about it. It's been a long day.

     Hua Cheng is looking at him. It's the same look from earlier, over the plate, the long level look like he's reading the fine print on a contract, except now there's no table between them and nobody else in the street. Sakura can feel himself wanting to shift his weight.

     He doesn't. He plants his feet and looks back.

     "Walk with me," Hua Cheng says, and turns, and starts up the canal path without waiting to see whether Sakura will follow.

     Sakura does.

     The canal runs along beside them, dark and full and moving faster than usual from the rain, with bits of leaf and twig spinning on the surface. There are lights on in some of the windows across the water. Hua Cheng walks unhurried, one hand holding the red umbrella over his shoulder and the other in the lapel of his robe, and his boots make almost no sound on the wet stone. Sakura's sneakers squelch. He's hyper-aware of it every step.

     "You ate gēge's cooking," Hua Cheng says after a while.

     "Yeah."

     "All of it."

     "He was holding it out." The line of conversation leaves Sakura with a sinking sense of déjà vu.

     "Mm." Hua Cheng watches the water. "People usually find a way not to. They drop it. They say they're full. One man from the ward office faked a phone call so he could leave the room with it, and it was still in his pocket when he left the house. Gēge found it in the umbrella stand a week later. He was very sad."

     Sakura doesn't know what to say to that. "It wasn't that bad."

     "It was that bad," Hua Cheng says, with as close to cheer as Sakura has heard. Hua Cheng must really enjoy teasing Xie Lian how atrocious his food is. "But you ate it anyway. Why?"

     "I dunno. He was..." Sakura scowls at the path. "He was smiling. He made it for us. You don't just throw that back in somebody's face."

     Hua Cheng doesn't answer. Sakura glances sideways and sees the man in silhouette, only really the black patch and the corner of the mouth visible, and he can't tell what Hua Cheng is thinking. He thinks, maybe, that the mouth is smiling. It's hard to tell with Hua Cheng.

     "What do you want?" Hua Cheng asks.

     "Huh?"

     "In life. What do you want?" He says it the way a teacher would ask about a career form, flat and a little bored. "You came to Makochi for something. Everyone does."

     "To get strong," Sakura says. It comes out automatic, from months of practice. "To be the strongest at Furin."

     "And?"

     "And what?"

     "And when you are." Hua Cheng turns his head. His eye catches the light. "When you're the strongest one at Furin. When nobody can touch you. The day after that. What do you want then?"

     Sakura opens his mouth. Nothing comes out.

     He's never thought about it. That's the embarrassing truth. For as long as he's been thinking about anything, the plan has been get strong, and that's where it stops, like a road that runs straight into a wall. He's never thought past the wall. He's never needed to. The wall was the point.

     "Then nobody messes with me," he tries.

     "People will always mess with you," Hua Cheng says. "They'll mess with you for your hair or because you're standing next to someone they want to hurt or because it's Tuesday. Being strong doesn't stop that. It only means that when they do, you get to decide what happens next." He looks back at the canal. "Most people never get to decide anything, but you have choices. Make them."

     It’s the most that Sakura has heard Hua Cheng talk in all the time they’ve been in each other’s company. They keep walking. The mist is barely there now. It's more like the air's gone soft.

     Sakura thinks about Umemiya on the school roof, with his stupid watering can, talking about the town like it was a garden. He thinks about the kids by the canal, the ones who wave. He thinks about Kotoha cracking eggs before he's through the door. It's all tangled up and he can't make it into a sentence. He's never been good at making things into sentences.

     "I want to protect it," he finally replies, and feels intensely awkward about saying so. "This place. I guess. The town and the... the people in it. I didn't used to care about that. Now I do. It's weird."

     "It's not weird," Hua Cheng says.

     "It's weird for me."

     A short sound. It might be a laugh. The butterfly on the umbrella rim opens and closes its wings, lifting off the surface for a moment before settling again. "Better," Hua Cheng says. "Still not an answer. But better."

     They reach a little footbridge over the canal and Hua Cheng stops in the middle of it and leans on the railing, and after a second Sakura stops too, and leans a little way off. The water rushes under them. Across the canal a light goes off in a window, then another.

     "And my son?" Hua Cheng says.

     Sakura's hands tighten on the rail.

     "What about him," he replies tersely.

     "What do you want from him?"

     "Nothing!" It comes out way too loud. His voice bounces off the water. He lowers it, face burning. "Nothing. He's... he's my vice-captain. He's my friend. I don't want anything."

     "That's his job," Hua Cheng says. "And what he is to you. I asked what you want."

     "I don't know!"

     He doesn't mean to shout it. It just comes out, raw, and hangs there over the canal, and he can't take it back. He glares down at the water and waits for Hua Cheng to say something cutting. He's pretty sure Hua Cheng could take him apart with about three words if he felt like it. He's pretty sure Hua Cheng could take him apart without any words at all.

     Hua Cheng doesn't say anything cutting.

     He says, "Good."

     Sakura looks up.

     "That's an honest answer," Hua Cheng says. "Most boys your age would have lied." He turns the umbrella a little in his hand, and the butterfly doesn't fall off. "Most people any age would have lied."

     "I don't lie." Sakura looks almost offended.

     "No. You don't." Hua Cheng considers him again. "You say exactly what you mean, as loudly as possible, and then you run away from it."

     "I'm not running, I'm taking a walk—"

     "In the rain. In slippers."

     "They're sneakers."

     "You've crushed the backs down. They're slippers now."

     Sakura looks down at his feet, and the sneakers on them that are halfway destroyed. His heels are black with wet grit. He looks back up, mutinous, and Hua Cheng is definitely smiling now, just at the edge, just barely, and it makes Sakura want to kick the railing.

     "I found a flower in the rain once," Hua Cheng says.

     Sakura blinks. "What?"

     "A long time ago. It was a bad night. Worse rain than this." He's looking out at the water again. His voice has gone thoughtful and far away, the way old people's voices go when they tell a story they've told a hundred times, except Hua Cheng doesn't look old at all. "There was a flower growing in the middle of a path, small and pale. The rain was beating it flat. It would have drowned."

     "So?"

     "So I stood over it. I held an umbrella over it until the rain stopped."

     Sakura waits. Hua Cheng doesn't say anything else.

     "...Why?" Sakura asks.

     "Because I wanted to."

     "That's it?"

     "That's it." Hua Cheng shrugs one shoulder. "Nobody asked me to. The flower certainly didn't. It didn't even know I was there. I stood there all night."

     "What happened to it?"

     For a second, Hua Cheng's face does something Sakura doesn't understand. It goes soft, all at once, completely, as if somebody has taken the sharp edges off it with sandpaper. It's there and then it's gone.

     "It's still around," he says. "It doesn't need me to stand over it anymore. I do it anyway."

     Sakura has no idea what that means. He turns it over in his head and it slips away from him every time. A flower. An umbrella. Standing in the rain all night for something that didn't know you were there. He thinks it's supposed to be about Suo, somehow, or about him, or maybe about Xie Lian, and he can't make the pieces go together.

     The butterfly on the umbrella lifts off. It flutters up into the dark, silver, dry, not bothered by the mist at all, and circles once over their heads and is gone. Sakura follows it with his eyes until he can't see it. When he looks back down Hua Cheng is watching him.

     "When Xiao Fei first came to us," Hua Cheng says, "he didn't break a single thing for two years."

     Sakura frowns. "Xiao Fei?"

     The smallest pause. Hua Cheng's eye flicks sideways, and back.

     "Hayato," he says. "He was seven. Nearly eight. He was the most polite child I'd ever met. He said please and thank you for everything, for water, for a blanket, for the door being opened. He made his bed so tight you could bounce a coin on it. He never cried where anyone could see. He never asked for anything." Hua Cheng turns his face back to the canal. "Gēge used to leave the kitchen door open at night so he could hear if Hayato got up. He never did. Two years, and not a single dropped cup."

     Sakura doesn't know what to say. He grips the railing. The metal's cold and wet under his fingers.

     "What happened after two years?" he asks.

     "He dropped a teapot," Hua Cheng says. "A very old one. It broke into eleven pieces. He stood in the middle of the kitchen and looked at it and started shaking, and gēge came running, and Hayato said I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'll go." A short breath through his nose. "Gēge sat down on the floor with him in all the pieces and told him it was only a teapot. That it was only ever a thing. That he could break every teapot in the house and nobody would ever ask him to leave. Hayato finally cried that night."

     The canal rushes on under them. Hua Cheng would never relate this story to anyone else, but Suo wouldn't ever admit to it either and Sakura needs to know it right now.

     "I glued the pot back together. With gold, to show it that it is still treasured. He still makes his tea in it."

     Sakura thinks about Suo pouring tea this afternoon, two hands on the pot, so careful. He didn't look closely. He thinks that there might have been lines on it, thin and shimmering, but he isn't sure.

     He thinks about the eyepatch.

     He's never asked. Not once, since April. Some things you don't ask people, and Sakura, who has spent his whole life having strangers ask him what's wrong with your hair and what happened to your eyes and are you sick or something, knows better than anybody which things those are. He's never even let himself wonder very hard. It's Suo's. It's just there.

     But Hua Cheng wears one too. Over the same eye. The right one.

     He looks at it now, the black patch, the thin strap disappearing into that dark hair. He opens his mouth.

     "Ask him," Hua Cheng says, before Sakura gets a single word out. "Not me. He might tell you." A pause. "He'd probably tell you."

     Sakura shuts his mouth again.

     Hua Cheng pushes off the railing. He straightens up to his full height (which is a lot of height, sheesh) and shifts the red umbrella to his other hand, and looks down at Sakura with his head tilted, and for a second the look is sharp again, sharp enough to cut.

     "You can go back now," he says. "Or you can keep walking. I won't stop you either way. But you should know that he's still sitting where you left him."

     Sakura's stomach drops.

     "How do you know that?"

     Hua Cheng just looks at him and doesn’t admit to anything.

     "If you hurt him," he says instead with deadly calm, "I'll know. You should understand that. Wherever you are. Whatever you're doing. I'll know about it before you do."

     "I'm not gonna hurt him," Sakura says. His voice comes out hoarse.

     "I know," Hua Cheng says. "That's the only reason why you're still standing here."

     Hua Cheng turns and walks away down the canal path the way they came, unhurried, the red umbrella bobbing over his shoulder like a lantern. He doesn't look back. Sakura watches him go until the path bends behind a row of trees, and then he watches the empty place where he was.

     He stands on the bridge a while longer.

     He feels... he doesn't know how he feels. He feels like he just walked out of a fight he didn't know he was in, and won, somehow, without landing a single punch. He's pretty sure that whatever that was, he passed. He's pretty sure Hua Cheng likes him, a little, in whatever way Hua Cheng likes anything, and that thought is so strange and so big that he has to hold onto the railing for a second.

     He also understands maybe a third of what Hua Cheng said.

     Xiao Fei. A flower in the rain. A teapot once in eleven pieces, saved by kintsugi, cradled by loving hands. He's still sitting where you left him. It rattles around in his head like loose change. He can't make any of it add up. Every answer Hua Cheng gave him came with two new questions stapled to the back of it.

     Except the last one. He understands the last one fine.

     Sakura turns around and walks back up the hill.

     The red umbrella is in the stand by the front door.

     It's closed and furled neatly beside the empty space where the black one goes, and it's bone dry, not a single drop on it anywhere. Sakura looks at it for a long moment with the black one dripping in his hand. Then he puts the black one away next to it and decides, very firmly, that he's too tired for this.

     Xie Lian is sitting on the step up from the entryway.

     He has a towel folded over his knees and a cup of something beside him that's stopped steaming, and he looks up when Sakura comes in with a small, easy smile, as if he's been sitting there for no reason, as if people just sit on steps at eleven at night. The white strip of cloth on his wrist has come loose at one end. He hasn't noticed.

     "Welcome home," Xie Lian says.

     Sakura stops on the doormat.

     Shopkeepers welcome everyone. Kotoha says it when he walks into Pothos — Welcome! —bright, the same way she says it to everybody. He's heard it a thousand times.

     And this isn't his home. He's a guest. He's a guest who ate a terrible green thing and made the only son of the house sit alone in the rain, and he doesn't know what he's doing, and he's standing here dripping on a floor that probably cost more than his whole life.

     "...I'm back," he says anyway. It comes out rough.

     Xie Lian's smile gets bigger.

     He stands up and shakes out the towel and, before Sakura can see it coming, drops it over Sakura's head and starts rubbing. It's brisk and thorough and a bit clumsy, the way you'd dry off a dog that came in from the yard, and Sakura's head gets pushed back and forth and his hair gets scrubbed every which way. He stands there and takes it. He doesn't know what else to do. His ears are burning. His throat is doing something strange.

     "There," Xie Lian says, and lifts the towel off. He looks at Sakura's hair, which must be sticking up in every direction, half black and half white, and doesn't say anything about it at all except "Much better." Then he folds the towel over his arm.

     "Hayato went up a little while ago," he says. "About ten minutes. He said to tell you there's a cup of tea on the tray if you want it, but I'm afraid I drank it." He looks down at the cup by the step, a little sheepish. "It was getting cold. It seemed a shame."

     "S'fine."

     "Go on up," Xie Lian says. "Get warm."

     Sakura toes off his ruined sneakers. He goes past Xie Lian and up one step, and then he stops, and turns halfway around.

     "Thanks," he says. "For dinner. And. Everything."

     Xie Lian's face goes soft all over, just like Hua Cheng's did on the bridge, and for the same half-second, there and gone. He doesn't answer. He just nods, once, and reaches out and pats Sakura on the arm, twice, light.

     Sakura runs off to the washroom before his face can do anything else, and rinses the backs of his feet before heading upstairs.

     The big room is dark. Someone has turned off the lamp. The only light comes from the window at the end, where the clouds have started to pull apart and a thin grey moon is showing through, not much, just enough to see shapes by. The rain has stopped. Sakura didn't notice when.

     The futons have been rearranged.

     Nirei is on the far end now, by the window, curled on his side with his back to the room, hugging a pillow in both arms like it might escape. His phone is face down on the tatami beside his head. His notebook is next to it, closed, with a pencil stuck in it to hold a page. He's snoring very quietly, a little whistle on every breath, and there's a dark spot spreading on the silk collar under his mouth.

     Suo is in the middle.

     He's on his back with the quilt pulled up to his chest and his hands folded on top of it, very straight, very neat, like somebody laid out for a portrait. His face is turned up to the ceiling. His eye is closed. The patch is still on. Sakura's never seen him without it, not once, not even at the pool in July, and apparently he doesn't take it off to sleep either if there are other people around. His hair is spread out a little on the pillow and he looks younger with his face slack. Suo looks like he could be any age at all.

     He isn't asleep, Sakura can tell. His breathing's too even, like he's counting it. One-two-three-four-five in, one-two-three-four-five-six-seven out.

     The end futon, the one by the door, is waiting. Its quilt has been turned down at one corner.

     Sakura stands in the doorway for a while.

     He thinks about the poem, for some reason. The traveler on the far road. Does not look back or can't look back, and Suo said one of them was a choice, and Sakura can't remember now which verb was the right one. He's pretty sure he got it wrong on the worksheet.

     He goes in.

     He lies down on the end futon with his back to the wall and his face toward the room, and pulls the quilt up. The tatami smells like grass under the sheet. The quilt is heavy and warm. His feet are still cold from the walk and they sting a little as they start to thaw. Across the room Nirei snores a tiny whistle. Somewhere below, very faintly, Sakura hears two voices murmuring, one low, one lower, and a soft laugh, and then a door sliding shut.

     Suo doesn't move.

     Sakura looks at him. At the line of his profile against the grey window, nose and mouth and the hard black edge of the patch. At his hands folded on the quilt.

     I just want to stay by your side.

     He still doesn't know what it means. He doesn't know what he's supposed to say back, or if he's supposed to say anything, or if Suo even wants him to. He doesn't know what the flower was or who Xiao Fei is or what happened to Suo's eye or why a man who can walk through the rain without getting wet would stand over a flower all night. He doesn't know what he wants.

     All he knows is that he came back. Suo said that he liked that Sakura always came back.

     His hand is already moving before he's decided anything. It goes out from under his quilt across the little gap between the futons, over the seam where the two mattresses meet, out and reaching.

     Suo's hand is there to meet it.

     It comes off the quilt so fast Sakura knows he was awake the whole time, knows he heard Sakura come in, knows he was lying there with his eye shut listening to every step. His fingers close around Sakura's. They're warm. They're warmer than Sakura's by a lot. They hold on hard, harder than Sakura expects, and then, when Sakura doesn't pull away, they loosen just a little and stay.

     Neither of them says anything.

     Suo turns his head on the pillow. His eye is open now. It catches the grey light from the window, and it's looking right at Sakura, and he looks, for once, like he doesn't know what's going to happen next. Like he’s bracing for it, whatever it happens to be.

     Sakura doesn't know how to say any of what’s on his mind. He doesn't have the words. He never has. He's always had to say things with his hands.

     So he smiles.

     It isn't much. He doesn't do it often and he isn't good at it and it probably comes out crooked, one side higher than the other, a little uncertain around the edges. But it's real. It comes up from somewhere under his ribs, from the same place the dinner went, and the towel, and welcome home, and it gets all the way to his face before he can stop it, and he doesn't stop it.

     Suo goes very still.

     Then all the air goes out of him. Sakura hears it, a long, slow breath through his nose, the kind people let out when they've been holding it for a very long time without noticing. His shoulders sink into the futon. His fingers tighten around Sakura's once more, briefly, and then relax.

     He smiles back.

     It's smaller than his usual one, and a little lopsided, and there's nothing fake or polite about it at all. It’s beautiful.

     Sakura closes his eyes.

     He doesn't know if he's going to sleep. He doesn't know what tomorrow looks like, or what he'll say to Suo in the morning over breakfast, or whether Nirei is going to wake up and see their hands and write it down in his notebook with the date and time. He probably will, the little bastard, but Sakura finds he doesn't mind enough to pull away.

     It's enough. For tonight, it's enough.

     Sakura doesn't let go.