Chapter Text
Sakura learned her new name the way she learned most things now: indirectly, without ceremony, as something spoken around her rather than to her.
She was eight months old, seated on the living room floor atop a rug whose fibers scratched faintly against her palms, chewing thoughtfully on the corner of a plastic block that tasted vaguely of soap and old saliva. The room smelled like dust, lemon cleaner, and the faint sourness of stale coffee. Sunlight filtered in through thin curtains, too bright and too flat, washing everything into pale shapes. Isabella was somewhere behind her, babbling happily in her crib, producing sounds that reliably summoned affection.
A voice cut through the quiet. “Tayen.” The sound struck her with enough force that she froze mid-motion, with the block hovering near her mouth. “Tayen,” Renée repeated, sharper this time. “Don’t put that in your mouth.”
Sakura lifted her head slowly, heart stuttering in a way she didn’t yet have words for.
Tayen.
The name slid into her awareness like a foreign object under the skin. It didn’t carry weight or memory the way Sakura did. It didn’t echo with years of effort, failure, stubborn persistence. It was just a sound, carelessly attached to her like a hospital bracelet snapped onto the wrong wrist.
Renée stood in the doorway, arms folded tightly across her chest, posture rigid with irritation. Her blue eyes (your eyes now, Sakura noted distantly) skimmed over Tayen with thinly veiled displeasure before flicking instantly toward the crib behind her.
“Oh, Bella, sweetheart, I’m coming,” Renée cooed, her voice transforming into something soft and warm as she turned away.
(Tayen was forgotten again.)
So that was it, then.
Tayen Helen Swan.
Not Sakura Haruno. Not even Sakura-with-a-different-last-name.
She rolled the name over mentally, examining it the way she once examined unfamiliar diagnoses. Short, vowel-heavy, and inoffensive. But names, she had already learned, were rarely chosen by the people who had to live with them.
(They were assigned.)
Charlie wasn’t there when Renée spoke her name.
Charlie was often not there.
At first, Tayen didn't understand absence as a concept. People simply appeared and vanished, like objects leaving her field of vision. But as her awareness sharpened and memory began to string moments together into patterns, she started to recognize that Charlie’s disappearances followed a rhythm.
Charlie left early, when the light was still gray and the house quiet. Charlie came home late, when the air smelled of cold and metal and something heavier. Sometimes, he didn’t come home at all.
When he did, he always came to the crib first.
One evening, long after Isabella had fallen asleep curled against the side of the shared crib, Charlie lifted Tayen carefully into his arms. His hands were rough, scarred, too large for her small body, but he held her like she was breakable.
“Hey there, peanut,” he murmured, his voice low and tired. “You’re getting heavier.”
Tayen stared up at him, cataloging details automatically: the deep lines around his eyes, the faint redness at the bridge of his nose, the crease between his brows that seemed permanently etched there. He smiled at her, a real smile, soft and unguarded in a way she had never seen Renée manage.
Renée hovered in the doorway, with her arms crossed and her mouth pulled tight. “You’re spoiling her,” she said sharply. “She cries more when you hold her like that.”
Charlie didn’t look at her. He shifted Tayen higher against his chest, adjusting his grip with practiced care. “She cries less with me,” he replied quietly.
“That’s because she’s manipulating you,” Renée snapped. “Babies do that.”
Charlie finally turned to her, surprise flickering across his face, followed by something heavier. “She’s a baby, Renée.”
Renée scoffed, already turning away. “Exactly.”
Tayen pressed her cheek against her father’s chest, listening to the steady thud of his heart. Her body recognized safety even if her mind had not yet attached language to it.
She was still nine months old when she didn’t understand divorce when it happened.
She understood raised voices, though. She understood tension, the way it thickened the air and made her skin prickle. She understood Isabella’s sudden inconsolable crying and the way Renée’s footsteps became sharp, restless, pacing the house like a trapped animal.
She lay in her crib, staring up at the ceiling, listening as words began to mean something.
“I can’t do this anymore, Charlie.”
“What does that even mean?” Her father’s voice was low, strained, stretched thin.
“It means I’m suffocating. This town, this house, this life. It’s killing me.”
“What about the girls?”
“What about me?”
Tayen’s fingers curled reflexively around the edge of her blanket.
“You wanted this,” Charlie said. “You wanted kids.”
“I wanted Bella,” Renée shot back, and then stopped.
The silence that followed was worse than shouting. It stretched long enough that even Isabella quieted, sensing the shift.
Tayen didn’t cry. She had already learned that crying summoned irritation from Renée, not comfort. Isabella’s cries brought warmth, frantic attention, and reassurance.
So Tayen lay still and listened as her parents dismantled their marriage piece by piece, sentence by sentence.
They left Forks when the sisters were nine months old.
Charlie stood in the doorway as Renée loaded the car, his hands shoved deep into his jacket pockets. He watched silently as she buckled Isabella into her car seat, murmuring reassurances, brushing her dark hair from her face with trembling tenderness.
Tayen was already strapped in, placed there earlier with brisk efficiency.
“You don’t have to do this,” Charlie said, voice quiet but firm.
“Yes, I do,” Renée replied without looking at him.
“You’re taking them across the country.”
“I’m taking Bella somewhere she won’t rot,” Renée snapped. Then, as an afterthought, “And Tayen too.”
Charlie’s jaw tightened. His gaze drifted to the backseat, lingering on Tayen longer than Isabella. “You can visit,” he said. “Bring them back for the summers.”
Renée laughed, short and sharp. “We’ll see.”
She slammed the door.
Tayen watched her father shrink through the rear window as the car pulled away, something tight and unfamiliar settling in her chest.
(He didn’t follow.)
Downey was louder and hotter. Constantly vibrating with motion and sound.
Marie Higginbotham did not greet them warmly.
She assessed Renée with one sharp look, then turned her attention to the sisters. Isabella was scooped up immediately, greeted with smiles and soft murmurs.
“And who’s this little angel?” Marie asked.
“That’s Bella, Isabella Marie,” Renée said quickly.
“And the other one?”
Renée hesitated, just long enough. “Tayen,” she said. “Tayen Helen.”
Marie noticed the hesitation. She noticed everything. “She sure looks like Charlie, but she has your blue eyes,” Marie observed.
Renée stiffened.
Over time, Marie noticed more. The way Tayen was fed second, held last, soothed only when necessary. The way she watched the room with unsettling focus.
One evening, with Renée gone after another argument, Marie sat at the kitchen table with Tayen on her lap.
“She doesn’t look at you much,” Marie said later, bluntly, when Renée wasn’t around.
Tayen met Marie’s gaze. ‘No shit.’
Marie inhaled sharply. “Well. That’s… unsettling.”
(But she didn’t put her down.)
By the time they moved to Riverside, Tayen understood faces clearly.
She had Renée’s blue eyes and Marie’s pale brown hair, but dark skin, almost russet-like. People commented on it constantly, “She must look like her father.”
Renée smiled tightly every time.
(Tayen knew that none of her parents had tanned skin.)
Renée found work in a kindergarten classroom and flourished there, adored by children who never saw the parts of her that recoiled from Tayen.
The announcement came on a Tuesday afternoon, six years later, delivered with the same restless energy Renée brought to everything else in her life, as if stillness itself offended her.
They were sitting at the small kitchen table in Riverside, the one with the uneven leg that made Tayen careful about where she leaned her elbows. Sunlight streamed through the window in a way that made dust motes visible, drifting lazily through the air. Isabella was drawing something with bright markers (flowers, maybe, or people with too many limbs) while Tayen worked silently on a puzzle she had already finished twice before, rearranging the pieces simply to have something to do with her hands.
Renée paced as she spoke, unable to stay still, her words tumbling out ahead of any real explanation. “So,” she said, clapping her hands together once, sharply, as if calling attention in a classroom, “I’ve been thinking. And I’ve decided we’re going to move.”
Isabella’s head snapped up immediately. “Move?” she echoed, wide-eyed, anxious in the way she always was when things changed.
Tayen did not look up. She already knew.
“Phoenix,” Renée continued, her voice brightening as if the word itself were a reward. “Arizona. It’s warmer, it’s bigger, there’s more to do, and frankly, Riverside has started to feel… stagnant.”
Tayen fitted a puzzle piece into place with deliberate calm. Phoenix. Of course. The book had said Isabella grew up there. This was one of those fixed points, one of the things that happened regardless of how much Tayen observed, calculated, or silently resisted. Knowing it in advance didn’t soften the impact, but it did remove the element of surprise. She had learned, over the years, that inevitability often hurt less when you recognized it early.
Isabella, on the other hand, was spiraling.
“But what about school?” she asked, her voice small. “What about my friends?”
Renée waved a hand dismissively. “You’ll make new ones. You always do. And this will be a fresh start. For all of us.”
Tayen almost laughed at that. Fresh starts, she had learned, were Renée’s favorite myth. They were something she chased the way other people chased stability, always convinced the next city, the next job, the next environment would finally align the world to her liking. Tayen had been alive twice now and had yet to see that theory hold up.
“What about Tayen?” Isabella asked suddenly, glancing sideways at her sister. “She has friends too.”
Renée paused, just briefly, then shrugged. “She’ll be fine.”
Tayen kept her eyes on the puzzle. Fine, in Renée’s vocabulary, meant manageable. Invisible.
(Not requiring attention.)
Tayen had thought, briefly, that she might miss Riverside.
That thought surprised her when it appeared, unwelcome and faint, like a ghost of an emotion she didn’t quite believe she was allowed to have. Riverside was not kind to her. Renée was not kind to her. Even so, there were patterns she had grown accustomed to: the route to school, the shape of the playground, the way the air cooled in the evenings. Familiarity, even unpleasant familiarity, had a way of rooting itself deep.
She had even, against her better judgment, begun to make friends.
Not well. Not easily. But she had tried.
The kids in their neighborhood were a loose, shifting group, bound together more by proximity than affection. They played tag, hopscotch, made up elaborate games that dissolved into arguments halfway through. Tayen was tolerated rather than sought out, included because she was there, because excluding her would have required effort.
They liked Isabella more.
That wasn’t Isabella’s fault, Tayen reminded herself, over and over, like a mantra. They were just kids. They gravitated toward softness, toward big eyes and hesitant smiles. Isabella had a way of making herself seem smaller than she was, quieter, more fragile. The adults called it shyness. Tayen, with her ‘adult’ mind stuffed into a child’s skull, recognized it as something else entirely: an instinctive understanding of how to elicit care.
Isabella didn’t do it on purpose. Probably. But she did it well.
When the kids gathered after school, Isabella was the one they asked about first. Isabella was the one they worried over when she scraped her knee or got overwhelmed by noise. Isabella was the one they hugged goodbye.
Tayen stood a step back, hands in her pockets, watching.
She didn’t resent Isabella for it. Not really. She was too tired for resentment. Instead, she filed the information away, the way she filed everything away. People responded to vulnerability. They rewarded it. Strength, quiet competence, or emotional distance.
(Those things were less appealing, especially in children.)
Renée reinforced this dynamic effortlessly.
Tayen was not allowed to go to other kids’ houses. Renée said it was about safety, about not trusting other parents, about not wanting to inconvenience anyone. Isabella, however, was frequently invited out, and Renée almost always agreed.
“She’s sensitive,” Renée would say. “She needs socialization.”
Tayen, apparently, did not.
So her friendships existed in narrow windows: recess, short walks home, moments stolen before the inevitable separation. She learned not to invest too deeply. She learned to listen more than she spoke, to make herself useful, agreeable. It was a skill she had honed in her first life too, though the stakes had been different then.
When Renée told them they were moving, Isabella cried.
It happened on the playground, after school, surrounded by a half-circle of children who reacted as if tragedy had struck. Isabella’s face crumpled, her shoulders shook, and soon she was sobbing in earnest, clinging to one of the girls like the world had ended.
“We’re moving,” she wailed. “To Phoenix. Far away.”
The reaction was immediate and intense.
“What? No!”
“You can’t leave!”
“We’ll miss you!”
“You have to visit!”
The kids crowded around her, voices overlapping, some of them crying too, caught up in the contagious emotion of it all. Tayen stood at the edge of the group, watching the scene unfold with a detached sort of fascination. It was impressive, in a way. The sheer force of Isabella’s gravity.
Someone noticed Tayen eventually.
“What about you?” a boy asked, glancing at her uncertainly. “Are you sad too?”
Tayen considered the question carefully.
“I dunno,” she said honestly, her pronunciation always weird even at six.
That seemed to be the wrong answer.
They turned back to Isabella almost immediately, as if Tayen’s emotional ambiguity made her irrelevant. Tayen didn’t mind. She had already checked out of the interaction. The crying, the promises to write letters and visit and never forget each other felt performative, even if the children didn’t realize it. Tayen sincerely didn’t give a fuck about those promises. She had lived long enough to know how rarely they were kept.
Later, as they walked home, Isabella sniffled quietly, wiping her eyes on her sleeve.
“They were really sad,” Isabella said, voice trembling. “I didn’t know they’d care so much.”
Tayen hummed in acknowledgment.
“Are you sad?” Isabella asked again, more tentatively.
Tayen looked at her sister. Really looked at her. Six years old, earnest, overwhelmed by emotions that felt enormous because everything still did.
“I’m… curious,” Tayen said after a moment. “‘bout Phoenix.”
Isabella frowned slightly, as if that answer didn’t fit the script she expected. But then she nodded. “It’s supposed to be really hot,” she said. “Mom says there’s cactus.”
(Tayen almost smiled.)
The weeks leading up to the move passed in a blur of boxes and discarded objects, of Renée swinging wildly between excitement and irritation. She complained about the packing, about the heat, about the logistics, about how no one appreciated how much effort she was putting in.
Marie visited once, standing in the doorway with crossed arms, surveying the chaos.
“So,” she said dryly. “You’re running again.”
Renée bristled. “I’m improving my situation.”
Marie’s gaze flicked to Tayen, who was sitting quietly on the floor, sorting books into a neat stack. “And the girls?”
“They’ll adapt.”
Marie snorted. “They always do, don’t they? Or at least one of them does.”
Renée’s jaw tightened. “Don’t start.”
“I’m not starting,” Marie replied. “I’m noticing.”
Tayen didn’t look up, but she listened.
When the moving truck finally pulled away, taking Riverside with it, Tayen felt something loosen in her chest. Not grief or relief, just the acceptance of another transition she had never been consulted about.
Phoenix awaited, with more heat, dust, a city that loomed large in the future she remembered too well.
If the book was right (and so far, it had been disturbingly accurate) this was only another step toward something much larger, much darker.
Tayen, just six years old, rested her forehead against the car window as the landscape shifted, watching familiar shapes dissolve into unfamiliar ones.