Sunflowers
(Shin's PoV)
—
"Tsugikawa."
Yes. I called her by her surname. And I think that single word told her everything she needed to know about how much of myself I intended to bring into this room.
Her eyes went wide. Her mouth opened halfway, and nothing came out.
I don't want to be involved with her beyond the paperwork on this table. That was the whole arrangement. That was the entire treaty my life had been rebuilt on.
She was about to cry. I could feel it coming the way you feel rain before it starts.
"Th-thank goodness..." she breathed, and then she pulled in a shaky breath and asked the real question. "S-Shin... why did you call me that?"
Her voice was barely above a whisper.
"What else should I call you, now that we're not 'best friends' anymore?" My voice came out flat. Almost cold. That's the only way I could talk to her.
"The way you always did, Shin..." Her breath hitched. "Please. Hate me, insult me, yell at me, slap me if you want, but please, please don't treat me with this much indifference. I can't bear it anymore, even though you have every reason in this world to hate me."
A small, exhausted smile pulled at my lips before I could stop it.
"That's rich, coming from you," I said, and there was a low laugh in it that held no warmth. "Where's Kenji? Didn't he give you a beautiful gold ring? Why aren't you with him? I'm pretty sure that he's probably searching for you."
And then, I felt the atmosphere of the room change.
Kurone froze, completely, instantly, the way water freezes in a film played too fast, and took two stumbling steps backward until her back hit the wall.
"...Kenji... no..." she whispered.
Her hands came up into her hair.
Something in the air went rigid. I felt it before I understood it, a small cold hand closing around my heart.
Then... Kurone slid.
Her back dragged down the wall until she was sitting on the floor, knees pulled up, head buried between them.
She was shaking. And some instinct in me was completely certain of one thing: she wasn't acting.
"Please... no... stop... enough... no... it hurts... it hurts so much..." She was whispering it to the floor. Each word landed with the soft drip of her tears against the tile.
I stood there, confused, my brain refusing to assemble what my eyes were reporting.
After a few instants, my body moved on its own, with a strange feeling of guilt wrapping around my heart.
"Hey...?" I tried.
I took one step toward her.
Kurone jerked backward even though the wall left her nowhere to go, and both her arms flew up in front of her face, crossed in a shield.
That was the posture of someone protecting themselves from a blow that was coming.
"N-no... don't come closer..." Her own breathing shredded her voice. "Please... stop..."
Her pupils were blown wide, and they weren't looking at me. They were going through me, fixed on someone who wasn't in this room, someone standing exactly where I was standing.
"Kurone," I called her name quietly.
Nothing.
She kept shaking, arms still raised, and silent tears were running down her face in steady lines now, and she flinched at sounds I couldn't hear.
A chill went down the whole length of my spine, and not because I thought she was manipulating me, but the exact opposite.
Because I had watched Kurone perform for all these years, and I knew her whole repertoire, every register of it, every calculated tear.
And her theater had never once come anywhere near this. This wasn't a performance of fear. This was fear with the skin off.
Something had happened to her, and my instincts told me it was something really bad.
I crouched down slowly, bringing myself to her height, and edged closer.
She watched me come through her tears, arms still up. "Don't come closer... don't hurt me..." And then she said the thing that knocked the air out of the room.
"Please... Kenji... no... let go of me..."
That name, again. My whole blood started to boil in anger.
She whispered it like someone talking in her sleep. Like someone who wasn't here at all — who was somewhere else, in some other room, on some other night.
And I understood. Everything.
So, I took a deep breath. Then I closed the last of the distance and set my hands, very gently, on her shoulders.
The instant I touched her, her whole body went rigid, and her eyes flew wide.
She was trembling in a way I had never seen a human being tremble.
"Kurone." Calmer this time. Lower.
"Don't touch me... it hurts." She whispered, not moving an inch.
"Kurone. It's me. It's Shin. I'm right here." I tried to calm her down.
I reached for her hand on instinct, and she snatched it back the second my fingers brushed hers.
But something had landed. Some syllable had gotten through.
"...Shin...?" she whispered.
"Yeah, Kurone. It's me, Shin."
Her eyes were still wide, still wet, still half in the other room. So I did the only thing left in me. The thing that came up from somewhere deep without asking my permission.
I lowered myself the rest of the way to the floor, sat beside her against the wall, close, not touching, and I started to sing. Very quietly.
"Little sunflower, don't you cry,
turn your face up to the sky,
the rain is gone, the sun is warm,
little sunflower, you're safe from harm."
The song I made up when we were children, the summer she fell off the garden wall and split her knee open and screamed like the world was ending, and nothing her mother did would calm her, and then a small boy sat down next to her in the dirt and sang nonsense about sunflowers until she stopped.
The song I sang after every scraped elbow, every lost tooth, every childhood catastrophe for years, because it worked every single time and neither of us ever questioned why.
I sang it now, to the cold floor of a committee room, and I reached over slowly — calculating every centimeter — and rested my hand on her head, and began to stroke her hair the way I did when we were small.
"Little sunflower, don't you cry..."
In that moment, Kurone's breathing stuttered.
Something moved behind her eyes, and I watched it happen. I watched the focus come swimming back up from wherever it had been drowning, and watched this room reassemble itself around her.
The arms slowly came down from her face, her shoulders dropped, and her breath went from shredded to ragged to merely unsteady.
Memory arrived on her face like weather. I could see everything passing behind her eyes while my hand moved slowly over her hair: the garden wall, the split knee, the dirt, all the summers, everything we were before we became what we became.
After a few minutes, she came back.
She took one deep breath, then another, then a third, each one steadier than the last. Her eyes cleared. And when they finally focused, they flooded.
Not the panic tears from before, but different ones. Heavy and silent and absolutely present, the tears of someone who knows exactly where she is, exactly what she's looking at, and exactly what she can never have.
She looked at me like I was the sun and she was standing in a country where it no longer rose.
"I'm sorry," she whispered. "I didn't mean to. I just... remembered some bad things..."
Her right hand came up and gripped her own left arm. Hard. Knuckles white. Holding it in place.
And I understood, in some wordless way, that she was pinning herself down — that every muscle in her body wanted to close the distance between us and she was physically restraining it, arm locked against arm, probably because of a girl with dark hair who wasn't in this room.
"Can I ask what happened right now, Kurone?" My voice came out calm, but it was a lie of tone.
Inside, something had already started to burn — low and steady, in my subconscious, growing — but I kept it out of my voice and off my face, and I moved my hand from her hair to her arm and stroked it once, gently, the way you'd gently stroke a frightened animal.
Kurone closed her eyes at the contact, just for a second. Like the touch was something she wanted to live inside of.
Then she pulled away from it.
"Shin... don't suddenly be kind to me." Her voice wavered and held. "Akane... she loves you. She wouldn't like to see this."
I let out a slow breath, and I withdrew my hand.
"Akane would have helped you through what just happened," I said quietly. "And she would've done it without hesitating. So go ahead. Talk."
Kurone looked at me for a long moment, probably thinking about a million different things.
And then she told me.
She told me about the karaoke room. The private one. She didn't give me too many details.
Her voice kept stopping and restarting, and she stared at the far wall the whole time, and she said it in the fewest words a thing like that can be said in.
She didn't need details. The shape was enough. The shape was more than enough.
The burning fire in my heart became something with a temperature I don't have a word for.
I sat very still and let her finish.
"I broke up with him, and... he didn't care about it at all," she said finally, wiping her face with the heel of her hand. "That's... that's all done. It's over." She managed a broken laugh. "But at least you found happiness. You really did. I see it on you — you're different now, you're whole now, and I'm glad. I'm so glad, Shin. I'm happy that you're smiling with Akane. In the end... our separation was... what you really needed to be happy. In the end... even though I am alone, my bad choices weren't so bad, after all..." Kurone scratched her right cheek with her trembling index finger while letting out a small giggle.
I clenched my fists, feeling a sharp, bitter taste in my mouth.
'You need to calm down, Shin. Calm. Calm.' I kept thinking.
Then her head came up, and her eyes found mine, and they went sharp with sudden fear.
"And please... now that you know everything, just don't do anything reckless. Shin. Promise me. I didn't tell you this so you'd — I have no proof, there's nothing anyone can do, and his family — Shin, promise me—"
I wasn't listening anymore.
I could hear her voice arriving from somewhere far away, and I could see her frightened face, and none of it was getting through, because the burning had filled the whole space where my thinking usually happens.
There was no room left in me for anything measured.
There was a private karaoke room, and a girl whom I spent my whole childhood with whispering 'let go of me' to a floor, and there was a boy with a letterman jacket and a gold ring somewhere in this school, at this exact moment, walking around untouched.
I couldn't let him pass.
In the end, Kurone was a selfish, narcissistic, and egoistic girl. She treated me like trash for seven years. She destroyed me. She sent me to the edge of a roof. She kissed someone else in front of the whole school, humiliating me.
I had every reason to hate her with all my heart.
But in the end, after knowing what happened to her, and because I'm now happy with Akane, I still couldn't bring myself to hate her.
I wasn't like that. Not anymore. Tears are over; I'm learning to live again, with Akane.
And I'm pretty sure that nobody in the whole world deserves what Kenji had done to Kurone. Nobody.
So, after a few instants, I stood up.
"Shin—"
"Stay here, Kurone." My voice came out flat. Completely flat. That was the strangest part: how flat it was. "Rest a minute, and then go home as soon as you can. I'll talk with Sora later about this room. I'll tell her that you were feeling sick and that I had to take you to the infirmary."
"Shin, no — wait—" She scrambled up the wall to her feet, swaying, and grabbed for my sleeve. "Please, you promised — you didn't promise, Shin, promise me — where are you going—"
I took her hand off my sleeve. Gently. The way you move something breakable.
"Listen to me for once, Kurone. Please." I said.
"SHIN—"
But I was already through the door.
The corridor was loud since we were almost at lunch period.
Students were everywhere, banners and noise and ordinary life flowing in both directions, and I walked straight through the middle without seeing any of it.
Somebody said my name, but I didn't turn.
My hands had closed into fists somewhere without asking me, nails against palms, and they would not open.
Through the glass doors at the end of the hall, out into the cold light of the courtyard, past the half-built festival stalls and the stacked pallets for the bonfire.
The athletics field was on the far side of the grounds.
The soccer field, where the club trained through lunch.
Where Kenji would be.
I walked toward it.