Chapter Text
If nothing else, a clock was supposed to be uniform. Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock. A constant rhythm, a constant rate. Perfect cycles, spinning around and around and around. Even if it displayed the wrong time, it wasn’t the clock’s fault. It was humans’. There weren’t 24 hours in a day. There weren’t 365 days in a year. Those were just our most convenient approximations of a system incomprehensibly larger than us, reduced down to a circular representation 50 centimetres in diameter. The clock acted as the universe did and the universe didn’t fall out of sync. Humans did.
That’s what Ochako’s physics textbook taught her. It had clearly never met her bedroom clock.
Tick-to-CLUNK. Tick-tick-tick-tock. Ti-CLUNK-tick-tock. Tock-tick-tock.
Supposedly it was 7:17. Five minutes ago it had been 9:34. She knew it was closer to 11:45.
The sun had set hours ago, casting the world into shades of deep blue, illuminated only by the light of the full moon. At first, the forest outside her bedroom window had been a single, shadowed shape, spiny like a porcupine. But now, she could make out the edges of every leaf, every tree, every bush. Her eyes passed over it all, searching for a distinct outline.
Ti-CLUNK. Tick-tock-to-tock-tick. Tick-tock-CLUNK.
There.
Leant against the bark of a smaller tree was a girlish figure, made familiar by the glowing rings of yellow that shone from its head. They stared at each other for a short while, motionless, until, slowly, Ochako raised her hand and waved. Himiko waved back.
Ochako floated her way downstairs, only touching down once she’d opened the backdoor. The night air was chilly and prickled her skin. Winter, it seemed, was making its approach. Himiko, however, was not. Finding her figure again, Ochako beckoned her in with one hand while trying to warm herself up with the other. Himiko still didn’t move. It was hard to see her expression from here, but her eyes seemed almost… anxious.
Sighing to herself, Ochako hustled into the great outdoors. She stomped to a stop in front of the girl, whose feet still had yet to leave the treeline.
“Are you coming or not?” she prodded.
Himiko continued to just stare at her face in the spine-tingling way she always did. Ochako figured she’d gotten used to it earlier today, but seeing again how the shadows seemed to seep from the girl’s skin like rainfall made Ochako second-guess herself. Eventually, however, Himiko’s eyes flicked down to Ochako’s shivering arms. Himiko didn’t seem to notice the cold.
“Yeah… I’m coming.”
Her first steps were slow as she finally broke out of the forest before she eventually matched pace with Ochako. With a final look back, she walked into Ochako’s home. The door clicked quietly shut behind them.
“It’s just up this way.”
Shuffling off her shoes, Ochako padded lightly up the stairs, her gait wobbly to avoid the creaky floorboards. Himiko didn’t bother, though her steps were silent regardless. It was as if she weighed nothing at all. Ochako carefully led them past her parents’ room and creaked open the bathroom door with a wince. She quickly smuggled Himiko inside and flicked on the lightswitch. Finally, they were bathed in the buzzing bliss of warm, orange light.
Ochako heaved a sigh of relief, but Himiko’s shoulders had only hiked higher the deeper into her home they’d gotten. Placing her palms upon them, Ochako whispered, “We’re in the clear. It’ll be fine. Now let me show you how it works.”
Ochako gave her the rundown of their shower’s controls, including how the hot and cold settings were the wrong way round for some reason, as well as where the towels were. Himiko never actually turned to look at anything, her eyes instead just following Ochako as she spun about the room, but she was a smart girl, probably, she’d figure it out.
“You can use my shampoo and conditioner. They’re the orange-scented ones,” Ochako continued to babble. “And I’ve gotten you a change of clothes from my wardrobe. They’re probably, like, way too big on you but we’ll see. And, uh, what else is there? Oh, yeah! The lock is a little wobbly, so make sure you do it tight. Is that all good? Sorry, it’s a little crampe–”
Bones. Bones pressed into her flesh through dirty, itchy fabric. They encircled her torso, exerting just the slightest bit of pressure such that, if it weren’t for how their angular shapes dug into her, she might not have even noticed them at all. Fear should have gripped her, that would have been reasonable, but it was so hard to muster the urge when something soft nestled into the crook of her shoulder. A wild animal seeking shelter.
Muffled against her skin, it murmured, “Thanks.”
Ochako felt another heart beat against her own and swallowed thickly.
“No problem.”
With that, she left Himiko to her shower with a smile and a wave, and, as soon as she was out of the view of those yellow irises, she sprinted to her room. She dove facedown onto her pink bedsheets and very impressively didn’t scream. Instead, she just laid there, motionless, like a chewed up dog toy.
Or a corpse…
She rolled over with a groan as the sound of running water trickled its way through the wall.
Tick-CLUNK. Tick-CLUNK. Tick-tock.
Ochako reached over to her bedside table and feebly tugged open the drawer. She plunged her hand into its ribcage and pulled out its beating red heart. She held it aloft in delicate fingers, careful of tearing it thoughtlessly, and was just able to trace its shape with her now night-adjusted sight. It was the cheapest thing in her room full of cheap things, and yet was her newest and most precious treasure: a perfect autumnal leaf.
A shower. When was the last time she had a shower? Has she ever? Surely, right? I mean, she had to have come from somewhere.
Ochako could see it now: a blonde girl packing her bag in the dead of night. Maybe she came from one of those apartments in a big city. She’d throw open her window and clamber down the fire escape. Under a moonless sky she’d weave through dirty alleys and dodge around creepy drug dealers until she reached the train station. She’d sit there alone on the platform until the train arrived, her steely salvation. She’d get on and never look back, back at the life she was leaving behind, which was surely terrible and tortured. And she’d smile, knowing she’d had the resolve to do what others only dared to fantasise about.
It made sense; the girl had shared stories of people she’d known and the schools she’d been to and Ochako knew for a fact that none of it had happened in Ochako’s hometown. Himiko was from some kind of elsewhere, one with a name and a population and a culture. That had to be correct… but it didn’t feel right.
The girl was just so… raw. Unfettered. Himiko was constrained by nothing, weighed down by nothing. She wore no shackles. Maybe it was because she’d had the strength to break them off, but wasn’t it nicer to think that no one had ever had the chance to put them on her in the first place?
Ochako continued to admire the leaf for a while, mind spiralling along its web of veins, pushed along by the lulling sound of a light shower outside her room. She lurched up, however, when a sudden bang interrupted the peace, followed by a clattering cacophony. Then, as if it had never happened at all, there was nothing but the pitter patter of falling water.
She placed the treasure back in its chest before hustling out of the room, her skin buzzing with both the potential awakening of her parents and her concern for the wild girl.
“Himiko?” She whispered loudly into the flaking wood of the door. “Himiko, are you okay?”
There was no response, save for a faint murmuring. A floorboard creaked ominously down the hallway from within her parents’ room.
“Himiko?!” she whispered louder, more frantically, as she pushed down on the door handle to no avail. The floorboards creaked again, and she pushed harder, then harder still, until finally the damn thing gave way.
Ochako was once again bathed in orange warmth, but she paid no mind to what it illuminated. Instead, she quickly turned back around and shut the door with quiet speed. She clicked the pathetic lock as tightly as she could. It was then, and only then, that she trusted it was safe to check on Himiko.
Her throat grew tight at what she saw.
The girl was collapsed awkwardly on her knees in the shower cubicle. She was curled up somewhat, as if trying to defend herself from the vicious peltering of the shower above. Looking down, her head appeared as nothing more than a bubble of suds, white and fluffy, but from beneath them trickled a steady dripping of a vibrant red, striking in its contrast with the grey of the room. She was also, obviously, stark naked.
“Hey, a little privacy, lady!” she barked, a finger pointed accusingly right at Ochako’s chest – impressive, considering she was shooting blind, her eyes screwed shut for some reason.
“Oh my goodness!” Ochako squeaked, immediately turning back around and slapping her hands over her eyes, making herself blind to the automatic flash of pink it caused. Her own head bubbling with frothing embarrassment, she began to float away as her socked feet suddenly slipped free of the tiled floor. “I am so sorry! I didn’t – I was – Oh my gosh, I am so sorry!”
Just as she thumped against the ceiling, a fist thumped against the door.
“Ochako?” her father called out, voice gruff with exhaustion. “Everythin’ alright?”
“Yeah!” she called back far too loudly, making even herself wince. “I mean, yeah, I, uh, I’m all good.”
“You sure? I heard a noise.”
“Yeah, I…” Even through the void of her palms, the sight of Himiko on the floor returned to her, vivid and unbidden. Her skin reaching Martian levels of red, she blabbered, “I just slipped but I’m fine, totally fine. Sorry for wakin’ you up, you can go back to sleep!”
“Okay,” her father acquiesced, before checking one final time, “You didn’t hurt yourself or nothin’ did you? You’re okay?”
Blood began to circle the drain.
“Yep! I’m all good!”
“Alright, well… be more careful next time. And don’t take too long, you need your sleep.”
“Sure thing, Pa. Good night!”
“G’night.”
Slowly, his footsteps retreated.
It wasn’t until ten seconds after she heard the bedroom door click shut that she dared to move, ten seconds of floating in the void, a total vacuum of sensation save for the sounds of running water and Himiko clambering back to her feet. Ochako eventually clambered her own way down from the ceiling, pulling herself back to earth with the help of the bathroom sink. She nearly slipped when she released her quirk, her socks not made for the tile. Her forehead began to ache from how hard she’d been screwing her eyes shut, but she didn’t even think to loosen them. She didn’t think to do anything but stand there and worry until Himiko’s voice once again filled the air.
“Ow!” she hissed.
“Are…” Ochako coughed, throat dry even as steam began to creep up the room. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, just got some shampoo in my eye and slipped is all,” Himiko dismissed.
“...You were bleeding.”
“I know.” A bottle cap popped open. The scent of citrus began to swell. “But I can barely even feel it. It’s nothing.”
Ochako’s heart still pounded in her chest. The sight still stuck to the back of her eyelids, but now it was hazy, fogged up like the mirror surely was till she could only make out the broad strokes. The red against the grey and white.
“Let me look.”
“I knew you were a pervert.”
“No!” Ochako yelped, but resisted the urge to cover her already closed eyes. “I mean the cut! I’ve practiced some first aid. Let me look it over, make sure it really is nothing.”
She expected push-back, stubbornness, a denial of her offer, of her attempt at treading any closer to Himiko’s heart. But, after a long moment, the girl simply said, “Fine. But give me five more minutes. Let me enjoy this.”
Ochako didn’t know how much longer Himiko really took. Blind to the world and without even an errorful clock to count to, time swirled its way down the drain. Ochako grasped her way to the stool and took a seat. Boredom tried its best to clench her mind, but couldn’t find a stable grip. Ochako found herself oddly mesmerised by the ample nothingness of the moment.
They didn’t speak to each other, didn’t acknowledge each other, but Ochako felt the other girl’s presence profoundly. Two beings but metres apart in space, separated only by a single glass door thin enough that Ochako could hear every sigh of relief that left Himiko’s lips, the stuttered gliding of her fingers through her matted hair, the splashing of her feet as she turned about, all as if it were happening in the shell of her ear. And yet, the girl was a universe away, beyond the dark horizon of eigengrau. Infinity stretched between them, full of steam and citrus and steel. And then the water stopped running. The shower squeaked to a stop. The glass door slid open.
Ochako held her breath as Himiko stepped onto the bathmat right in front of her, the sounds and smells of her bolstered by the breaking of the barrier between them. And then she padded away, towards the bathroom door where the dry towels hung. She heard its warm fabric unravelling. Another long moment of pseudo-silence, and then…
“You can open your eyes now.”
It was hesitant, but Ochako did as she was told. She regretted it immediately. The once comforting glow of the overhead light was blinding, a veritable private star in her bathroom. Her retinas smoldered at its intensity and she had to blink rapidly to muscle her way through the pain. Eventually, her nervous system stabilised into a lingering discomfort and she could stand to keep her eyes open, although it was with a mild squint. Still, she could see the girl before her clearly enough.
As Ochako had now come to expect, Himiko was already staring back at her, observing her sensory struggle with mild interest. Her skin prickled at the thought that maybe she’d been doing so the whole time, that while Ochako had been staring into nothingness, Himiko had been staring into her. Himiko didn’t react as Ochako shrugged the idea away and surveyed her in kind.
The blonde loomed over her seated perspective, her figure larger and more ominous now that her hair hung loosely down her back, darkened by moisture. Paradoxically, however, the girl was smaller than ever. Wrapped in only a towel, her shoulders were exposed. The dip of her clavicle was steep, her malnutrition now illuminated without cloth to cover it. She no longer hunched, seemingly at ease, and yet that only shrunk her frame further. It was bizarre, it was really, really bizarre, but in that bathroom Ochako was struck for the very first time with a sense of certainty that Himiko was, well… real.
Whatever had chased her in the woods before, whatever had skulked through the shadows by the stream and latched onto her ankle, it wasn’t here now. She had seen Himiko at her most vulnerable, even if by accident, but it wasn’t until now, seeing her through a veil of vapour, that Ochako accepted the truth: Himiko was a human being. She really was just a girl, like her.
The realisation made her dizzy, though perhaps she’d already been made woozy by the engulfing steam. After all, ever since Ochako had opened her eyes, Himiko hadn’t just glimmered with the reflective light of skin-slicking water droplets but with great sunspots of colour. Greens and blues and reds dotted her vision in wavering splotches, and they seemed to congregate around Himiko as if gravitationally compelled.
Ochako knew they weren’t real – they were phosphenes, tricks not of the light but of the body and mind. Her physics textbook had told her so. But it had been wrong before.
She wondered if the other girl saw them too, if spirits of cyan and magenta and yellow danced around Ochako’s form. She wanted to ask. She wanted to know. But she didn’t. She just continued to watch as Himiko watched her. She watched as red began to trickle once again from Himiko’s forehead.
“Here,” Ochako said, finally standing, “take a seat.”
They swapped positions, Himiko on the stool and Ochako turning to rummage through the cupboard for their first aid kit. The cut wasn’t deep so it wasn’t like the girl was going to bleed out or anything, but Ochako’s brow still furrowed when she looked at it. With the way the girl was living, it could get infected easily, and what then?
She cracked the kit open on the sink to reveal its scarce innards: a near-empty roll of bandage, a handful of safety pins, a single disposable glove, and an old box of hero-branded adhesive plasters. She reached into the box. Only two were still left inside. She held them up in front of her own face, forcing the other girl to look at them.
“Do you want the Thirteen one or the Wash one?”
Damp blonde hair swished as Himiko cocked her head, one amber eye peering around the objects to stare once again at Ochako’s face.
“The what?” she asked.
Ochako shook the plasters, moving them to block Himiko’s eyeline again.
“Thirteen and Wash, the pro heroes? There’s no way you ain’t at least seen their faces before.”
She saw the towel move in what was obviously a shrugging motion and sighed, lowering the plasters. She looked up to see red already beginning to dribble back down Himiko’s face, the girl herself either completely unaware or completely unbothered. Unbidden, Ochako tutted and swiped her thumb over the droplet before idly sucking it clean. She missed how Himiko’s pupils dilated at the sight, the black hole fed.
“Fine,” Ochako decided before saying somewhat petulantly, “you can have the Thirteen one.”
She peeled the protective covers off the adhesive and leaned in to carefully place it over the girl’s cut, her tongue stuck out in cartoonish concentration. Himiko’s gaze flickered down to glance at it. Ochako’s stubbornly refused to waver from her task, even as she saw Himiko’s pointed peek in her peripheral vision. The plaster applied, Ochako leaned back and sighed in what she decided was relief from the tension, not a lament that it had not developed further.
She watched as Himiko turned away to assess herself in the mirror. It was still fogged, but you could just about make out the shape of Thirteen’s helmeted smile, shrunken down into the corner of the girl’s forehead. Himiko turned back, now smiling softly herself. She couldn’t have known the significance of this tiny choice Ochako had made, the potent idle joy she’d given up for her sake, but even still her next words came out certain and soulful.
“Thank you,” Himiko said.
Now Ochako turned away, though she had only her own blurry reflection to distract her. She watched as her head became a rosy blob.
“Whatever,” she mumbled, hurriedly packing away the first aid kit. She wished she hadn’t though because as soon as she was done she found herself stewing in an uncomfortably familiar discomfort.
They stood together in silence.
…What now? Do I leave, let her get changed, and send her off? I should, it’s getting late, she’s had her shower. But…
“Hey.”
Ochako’s head whipped with the speed of a rocket to the sound. She found an unexpected sight, addictive in its novelty. Himiko’s gaze stared, focused, into a random spot on the wall, her head ducked just the slightest in what Ochako tentatively – but excitedly – identified as bashfulness. She ran her fingers through the long strands of her hair and they glid and glid and glid before, abruptly, they snagged.
“You, um, don’t happen to have a comb, do you?”
“I, uh… gimme a sec!”
Ochako scrambled to her room for the second time, making much faster work of it now. She returned with a hot pink hairbrush in hand. Himiko held her hand out for it, rightfully expectant, but Ochako shook her head.
“Let me do it for you,” she said.
Himiko quirked an eyebrow, immediately shooting back, “Why?”
“Because,” Ochako searched, “it’ll just be easier, don’t you think?”
The girl stared at her and Ochako fought to return the gesture. She wavered, however, when Himiko’s brow furrowed. She hoped it was simply a sign of consideration and not something harsher.
“Okay,” the blonde decided cheerfully, before swivelling about on the stool to face the other way. She began to kick her feet idly. As Ochako bent to kneel on the cold tile behind Himiko, she swallowed a heavy sigh.
It was relieving to have a reprieve from the girl’s searing yellow gaze, golden flecks or otherwise. There was just something so innately unsettling about it: dual suns staring her down. It activated some kind of ancient evolutionary instinct in Ochako, the reflexive urge to yank her hand away from the stove, to run for her life like an ant beneath a magnifying glass. Or maybe Ochako was just reaching for excuses; biology had never been her best subject. Either way, now that Himiko had turned away, that the suns had set, she was able to rejoice at the balming cold. Yet she still shivered in the night. Ochako wasn’t sure if she missed the heat or not.
She began to run the comb through Himiko’s hair. The sight of Himiko collapsed in the shower flashed in her eyelids. Ochako managed to restrain her curiosity for a full five seconds.
“That scar,” she began, “the one on your stomach… how’d you get it?”
Ochako anticipated deep thought, a sigh, a revealing yet mysterious answer. Profundity. After all, the scar was a messy thing. Even curled up as Himiko had been, Ochako had been able to see it stretching up her abdomen. Its shape was not the straight, certain thing of a blade, but a gnarled, disjointed blight. It was as if something had clawed its way out of the girl. Or in.
“Got stabbed,” Himiko shrugged.
The comb stalled, but hit no snag.
“You… what?”
She repeated herself, deadpan. “Got stabbed. It happens.”
The comb resumed its journey. “No, it doesn’t.”
“Well, then why did it happen to me?”
The retort was snarky, a joking hole poked in Ochako’s theory, but something in it stung. An old wound turned into a weapon that wasn’t quite as blunt as the girl thought it would be.
“I don’t know,” Ochako replied delicately, placing one hand on the girl’s shoulder while the other continued to work, “why do you think it happened to you?”
She could practically feel Himiko’s eyes roll.
“Relax,” Himiko huffed. “I know exactly why. Got caught stealing from the wrong guy. I was too reckless.”
Ochako wanted to push, wanted to know. But she could feel the tension threading back into the girl’s muscles, her shoulders hiking back up.
That doesn’t explain anything, she wanted to say.
“You’re tellin’ me I’ve known you at your least reckless?” she joked instead.
The girl laughed – well, scoffed, really – and shook her head. But Ochako could’ve sworn she heard a smile in her voice when she said, “Yeah, and what are you gonna do about it?”
“Nothing, nothing,” she surrendered before refocusing on her task. Then, after a few moments, she quietly said, “Just sayin’ I reckon you're on track for gettin’ stabbed again is all.”
Himiko gasped loudly and whipped her head back around to look at Ochako, her hair slapping her in the face as she did. Dual suns shone down once again, wide in feigned offense.
“That’s it!” Himiko declared. “You’ve lost your hair brushing privileges.”
“Oh no,” Ochako laughed openly as the other girl swiped the brush from her grasp and started kicking at her, “how will I ever survive? It’s not like I was already done or nothin’.”
“Yeah, that’s what they all say. Now, get out of my bathroom, pervert, I need to change.”
“Your bathroom?”
A hot pink comb lightly thudded against her chest. “I said, get out!”
“Alright, alright. I’ll be out in the hall,” she chuckled. Before she clicked the door shut behind her though, she sobered a little. “Be quick, please. It’s gettin’ late.”
It was only a single short minute until Himiko creaked the door open, the last remnants of steam tickling at her heels as she entered the hallway. Ochako faltered at the sight of her.
“So,” the girl asked, giving her a quick spin, “how do I look?”
The t-shirt Ochako had left out for her was a simple thing, unremarkable in shape or size or colour. There had to be thousands, no, millions of t-shirts practically identical to it across the world, down to the very shade of grey it was dyed with. Ochako herself had probably worn it hundreds of times without a thought. And yet, now, backlit by the lambent light of the bathroom, it looked impossibly eye-catching.
It was just a smidge too big on Himiko, its hem skimming against her mid-thigh and its neck hole wide enough to expose the pale slope of her shoulders. That should have made it obfuscating, a draping cloak, but the light behind her shone faintly through the fabric, revealing the outline of her body to the keen eye. Grey had never seemed so inviting.
At Ochako’s lack of response, Himiko stepped closer, putting them nose to nose in the thin corridor. Ochako watched the movement of the girl’s legs, wrapped in her sweatpants, and the tap of the girl’s feet, covered in her socks, and felt something new take root in her heart. She reached for it, wanting to know its texture and weight, but it slipped through her fingers. She could ascertain only one thing about it: it was warm.
She eventually croaked out, “You look comfortable.”
Himiko huffed through her nose, amused, and turned to head towards the stairs. After a brief moment, Ochako trailed behind. Himiko walked slowly, however, almost torturously so. It took Ochako a second to figure out why.
“You gonna find my life story in these photos?” she nudged.
The blonde didn’t turn back to look at her, eyes fixed to the family photos framed on the walls. She hummed as she finally began to descend the stairs, “I just might.” Suddenly, she stopped about a third of the way down. She turned to the wall and pointed. “What’s this one?”
Ochako turned to peer at the photo and hummed in recognition. It was a selfie, the camera held aloft by the arm of a brunette woman. Beside her was a near identical individual albeit smaller, as if she was standing next to her own childhood self.
“My Ma and I at a new year’s festival,” Ochako explained. “I was… I don’t know, seven? You ever been to one?”
“Where’s your dad?” Himiko asked.
Ochako glanced at her, then turned back to the photo. Faintly, through the walls…
Tick-to-CLUNK. CLUNK. Tock-tick.
She sighed. “He couldn’t come. He’d wanted to though. That year he’d been workin’ a big job – he’s in construction. Fell asleep as soon as he made it through the door, toolbelt still on. Ma didn’t wanna wake him. We took his camera with us instead. That way he could look at the photos later and it’d be like he was actually there.” Ochako stared at the empty space between her mother and her seven year old self. “But he wasn’t.”
A pale hand broke into her view as a finger reached out to the photo. It caressed the jaw of the two dimensional girl softly.
“You look like you’re having fun,” Himiko murmured.
“I do,” she acknowledged. “But I was really upset about it inside. That kinda thing happened a lot, my Pa missin’ out on things. Still does. Even when he is around, it’s like he’s not really there. Like he’s sleep walkin’.”
“But he is around.”
Himiko kept walking down the stairs. Ochako followed behind.
Rather than heading straight for the door, Himiko turned towards the living room. Ochako’s heart pounded at the decision, yet was glad for it.
The girl pondered the space as if it were a museum. Hands loosely clasped behind her, she followed the wall around in slow, wandering steps. She paused to observe the stain on the wallpaper. She hummed in thought at the chip in the TV screen. She smiled at the vase, alone on its island table.
“A hand me down from my paternal grandmother,” Ochako decided to explain, accepting her position as tour guide.
“It’s nice,” Himiko commented simply. “I like the flowers.”
Ochako wished she’d say more. Say why her expression looked so poisoned and sweet.
“They’re forget-me-nots. Three guesses what they symbolise,” she joked sarcastically.
Himiko didn’t respond. She only reached out to stroke their petals. Their baby blue pigment was nigh invisible in the dark, nothing more than flat light, sapped of colour.
“It’s not even worth anythin’, y’know,” Ochako found herself saying. “The vase, I mean. Still, my parents would throw a fit if I broke it. Feel like my heart’s in my chest every time I step into the room. Like if I lose focus for even a single second somethin’ll go wrong. I’ll break it.”
“Maybe. It feels awful to lose something precious to you.”
Himiko completed her lap of the room. It seemed she found herself wanting for more, however, because she went back around for seconds. She savoured the feeling of the floor beneath her feet, of the slight draught that slipped through the open door. She breathed deep of the air as if it were fresher than even that of the forest. As she did, Ochako rummaged through her mind for any question other than the one that sat heavy on her tongue. She failed. And so, when Himiko made her way back to her and finally came to a stop, she surrendered to the urge and let it loose.
“When you got stabbed,” she began, mouth dry, “what did you do?”
Ochako traced the scar from her memory over the grey t-shirt Himiko was adorned in. She balked at its size, its ragged shape. It couldn’t have been done with a knife. Ochako looked at the sacred vase behind the girl, imagined how its shards would feel in her hand. She wondered if it would slice her own palms if she tried to stab it into someone else.
She continued, “How did you survive?”
The girl in her living room didn’t respond immediately, but she could tell that it wasn’t hesitation that tightened her lips. Rather, she blinked in consideration, a momentary reprieve from the twin suns. Ochako’s heart weighed a thousand tonnes in her chest, knowing the consideration was for her sake. Eventually, Himiko made her decision. She spoke.
“I stabbed him back. And then I walked away.”
Ochako’s breath stuttered. Yellow irises latched onto the tremble of her chest.
“Does that scare you?”
Ochako didn’t need to consider her answer. She needed only to consider whether to tell the truth.
“It doesn’t.”
They stared at each other, the air charged once again, when a noise suddenly sounded from the staircase. Reflexively, Ochako whipped around to face it, just in time to see her mother approaching.
“Ochako, honey, what are you doin’ up? It’s too late.”
Her heart seized.
“Uh, nothin’! I just–” She turned back, ready to hide her unannounced guest, only to find herself alone. A slight gust blew in through a cracked open window. “I… I just wanted a glass of water.”
“Well, be quick about it. And if you wake me or your Pa up again, you’re grounded.”
Ochako went back to her room and her broken clock and her loneliness, unwanted glass of water in hand. She did her best to go to sleep, but found her nerves too alive. The only thing that could lull her to slumber was a crisp autumnal leaf.