Chapter 7

ｎｏｗ ｌｏａｄｉｎｇ．．．

“素顔の夜明け”

Sugao no Yoake

「 ｖｅｒｉｆｉｅｄ」

The dream came on the fourth night.

You’d been expecting it, in the dull, resigned way you expected all the things you couldn’t stop. You’d been waiting for your sleeping brain to do what your waking brain had been carefully, fastidiously, exhaustingly refusing to do for days.

It wasn’t a nightmare, exactly. It didn’t come with monsters.

It was just the scene. That scene. The one you’d watched on a fifteen-inch laptop screen with your knees against your chest and your hand pressed over your mouth, the one you had immediately rewound because you’d been certain, absolutely certain, that you had misread what you were seeing.

You hadn’t misread it.

You woke up before it ended, which was either mercy or its own kind of cruelty, and you lay in the dark of the ward with the sound of the other girls’ breathing around you—Aoi’s measured, Naho’s soft, Sumi’s somehow resolute even in sleep—and you stared at the ceiling until the shapes in the wood became familiar.

Don’t, you told yourself.

Don’t what, said the part of your brain that had run out of things to suppress.

Don’t make this yours. It’s not yours. You’re a passenger. You got in the wrong car, or the right car, or whatever cosmological accident put you here, but you don’t get to grieve it like you own it. You don’t get to—

She’s in the next room.

You closed your eyes.

She’s in the next room, and she wakes up at four in the morning to check compound ratios, and she hums when she thinks no one can hear her, and she calls Aoi on every single thing but never raises her voice, and she’s been looking at you like a puzzle she’s already halfway solved, and she is—

She’s real.

That was the thing you kept crashing into. The wall at the end of every corridor of thought. She was real. The version of her you’d mourned had always been fictional, and then you’d come here, and the distinction had quietly collapsed, and you hadn’t had a single uncluttered moment since.

You got up before sunrise.

· · ─────── · 𓅪 · ─────── · ·

The compound was still at this hour. The sky above the wisteria was the deep, ambiguous blue of not-quite-morning, and your breath made small ghosts in the air as you walked the engawa’s length for no reason you could have named.

You almost didn’t see her.

She was in the garden, at the far end where the wisteria grew thinnest and the light from her small lamp could reach the page she was reading. She sat with her legs folded beneath her, her haori traded for a plain dark robe, her hair down.

You stopped.

You had never seen her with her hair down.

It was stupid, the things that made people real. Anaemic, inadequate facts. She has hair down to her shoulders. She reads by lamp in the early morning hours. She holds the page with two hands.

She looked up.

You were too far away to read her expression, but she didn’t seem startled. Shinobu, you had gathered, was almost never startled. She had recalibrated the world’s capacity to surprise her and found it wanting.

She tilted her head. An invitation, or a challenge. With Shinobu, the two were frequently indistinguishable.

You walked over, because the alternative was retreating, and retreating had the problem of requiring you to explain yourself in the morning.

She watched you come the whole way.

“You didn’t sleep well,” she observed, when you were close enough.

“I sleep fine,” you lied.

Her expression said I am a doctor and a Hashira and I have catalogued your sleep patterns for four nights, but she let it pass. “Sit.”

You sat on the stone at the garden’s edge. The wisteria overhead was just a dark mass at this hour, and the air smelled intensely, almost oppressively, of it.

“What are you reading?” you asked.

She showed you the cover. A medical text, handwritten, the characters dense and practised. “Compound interactions,” she said. “I find new ones occasionally. The poisons in this world are endlessly creative.” She said it the way someone else might say the sunsets here are lovely. Matter-of-fact. Fond.

“You like it,” you said, and then were mildly surprised to hear it come out of your mouth. “The work. Not just—doing it. You actually like it.”

She looked at you with something that wasn’t quite amusement. “Did you think I didn’t?”

“I thought—” I thought you were performing it. I thought you were a girl who swallowed her grief and decided to build something lethal out of it and called it purpose. “I thought it was harder for you. That’s all.”

The silence stretched.

The lamp flame bent sideways in a breath of wind and then straightened.

“It is hard,” Shinobu said. “And I like it.” She said it simply, like the two were not in conflict. “Most things worth doing are both.”

You looked at your hands.

Tell her, said the part of you that had been saying that since the first day. Tell her something. Not everything. But something. She is going to figure out the shape of your secret eventually, and when she does, she’s going to be furious that you made her do it the hard way.

“I had someone,” you said, before you could stop yourself. “Back home. Someone who taught me—not to fight, exactly. Just. Not to be easily moved.” You paused. “She was very practical about it. She said the point wasn’t to win. The point was to still be there at the end.”

It was true. It was also the only piece of your real life that mapped cleanly onto the language of this one, which was why it slipped out instead of something better guarded.

Shinobu had gone very still.

“She sounds,” she said slowly, “like someone who understood the difference between survival and victory.”

“She did.”

“Those two things are not always the same.”

“No,” you agreed. “They’re really not.”

The blue of the sky was beginning, at its farthest edge, to soften. In another hour the compound would be awake. The boys would be loud. Aoi would materialize with tasks. The day would take hold with both hands and make demands.

But right now there was just this: a garden, a lamp, and a woman reading about poison by choice at four in the morning, sitting across from someone who knew how her story ended and was sitting here anyway, in the absurd and helpless hope that knowing was the same as being able to do something about it.

It wasn’t. You knew it wasn’t.

But you also knew that Shinobu Kocho was looking at you right now with her hair down and no smile on her face and her full, unperformed attention—and that this, too, was the kind of moment that didn’t make it into the panels. The in-between. The ordinary.

Still be there at the end, your imaginary teacher said.

You breathed in the wisteria.

“Go back to sleep,” Shinobu said, turning back to her page. “You have conditioning in three hours.”

“I’m already awake.”

“Then sit quietly,” she said. “I’m at a critical passage.”

You sat quietly.

The sky went grey, then pearl, then, slowly, gold.

Neither of you moved.

· · ─────── · 𓅪 · ─────── · ·

Aoi found you both there when she came out with the morning water.

She looked at you. She looked at Shinobu. She looked at the lamp, which had burned down to almost nothing.

She set the water down without a word.

But on her way back inside, you caught the very edge of her expression—not soft, exactly, because Aoi’s face didn’t have a gear for soft. But something adjacent. Something that looked like oh.

You picked up the water and drank it.

Don’t, you told yourself again.

But it came out, this time, with a great deal less conviction.

꩜

ᶻ 𝗓 𐰁

大正コソコソ噂話 — Taishō Kosokoso Iwasubanashi

Shinobu Kocho’s handwritten medical text is filled with dense, practiced characters and notes that crowd every margin. She specifically reads by a small lamp at four in the morning to find “endlessly creative” new poison interactions.