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The bones started growing when Chika was six.
She hadn't known what they were at first. Just pressure, heavy and constant, like something inside her body was weighing her down. She told her mother in November of that year, standing in the kitchen doorway while dinner was being made. Her mother had looked at her with that distant expression, like the one she wore after Chika told her about those white monsters, and said that Chika was probably just growing.
She grew. And the pressure became pain, something that kept her awake on a lot of nights, flat on her stomach because lying any other way would just make it more painful. She learned how to breathe carefully through her nose and empty her mind, because this trick had made the white monsters stop chasing her, and now, it helped reduce the pain, even if it’s only a little.
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Rinji was the one who noticed the changes on her back. The way her shoulder blades had started to sit wrong and become elevated. How angled outward it is, and the skin over them is taut in a way that looks even worse.
"Does it hurt here?" he asked, voice careful, fingers barely pressing.
She flinched. "Yes."
"Here too?" His touch was lighter this time, but it still made her breath catch.
"Yes," she said, quieter now, eyes stinging. "Everywhere. It hurts everywhere."
He was quiet for a long moment. Then, in the rare tone he used for everything important. "I'm going to find out what's happening."
"Thank you," she said, because that’s her brother.
Rinji was fifteen, and he took her to three different doctors over two months. Their parents always find reasons to be elsewhere, and her brother never mentioned it, which she understood, even at eight, was his own way of kindness.
(The third doctor said something to Rinji that she wasn't supposed to hear.
"I've never seen this in a child. Where are your parents? This might be expensive but she needs surgery as soon as possible, if not, she might—”)
Rinji's face did something complicated on their way home, but he bought her those small rabbit puddings, so she decided not to ask, because sometimes you just let your older brother buy you desserts and let the matter go.
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From that day on, Rinji and her parents fell into a pattern of waiting until they thought she was asleep, then starting to argue about money and family reputation. But she heard every word because they never quite remembered how old their house was and how easily its walls let sound through.
It went on like that for weeks. The same argument, looping back on itself, until the night it didn't.
She heard her father's voice first, sharp and tired in the same breath, something about how they couldn't, how it wasn't that simple, how surgery like that cost more than what they made in a year. And then her mother's, lower, softer, talking about what people would say, what it would do to the family name if people see how different her daughter is compared to them, as if the things under her back would cease to exist if she never tried surgery.
And then Rinji's voice, so familiar yet different. Stripped of every careful caution he usually wrapped his words in when in front of their parents, until what was left underneath was something closer to a blade.
"I'll do it myself."
A moment of silence. Her mother said something she couldn't catch.
"I said I'll make the money myself," Rinji said again, and this time his voice didn't waver or rise. "I'm not asking either of you anymore. I'm done asking."
A chair scraped. Footsteps. A door closed loudly.
Then nothing.
The house went eerily quiet after that. Quieter than it had been in weeks, quieter than it had any right to be, as if the walls themselves were also startled into holding their breath.
In her room, Chika lay in the dark, one hand pressed flat against her scapula, where the ache always sat heaviest. 'He means it,’ she realized. 'He's actually going to do this for me.'
She wanted to feel grateful. But mostly she felt guilty. He was fifteen. He had his own life too. He should have started preparing for high school. But he was choosing her instead, even when Chika wasn’t his responsibility.
She didn't say anything about it the next morning. She never did before. She just watched him leave earlier and come home later. How he started to fall asleep some nights, still in his school uniform with a textbook open on his chest. How he stopped going out on weekends, stopped mentioning his friends as often, stopped sounding like someone with a life beyond this.
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She had just turned nine for two days when the wings suddenly pierced through her back.
She remembered the day before, when the pain stopped being something she could breathe through and became so agonizing she want to die, but didn’t say anything because Rinji was busy working and working, and she didn't want to give him more things to worry about.
She remembered screaming until her throat was hoarse, the blood soaking through the back of her shirt before anyone understood what was happening. She remembered Rinji holding her through the journey to the hospital, begging her to stay awake, and then the warmth of his hand through hours of surgery that felt like years with his jaw set, eyes red, yet voice completely steady.
He talked the entire time. About nothing. About everything. About a manga he was reading that he thinks she would love. About the little cats he saw on his way to work, which he has yet to show her. About how he should have worked harder for the money, should have begged their parents until they gave in, and how he shouldn't have let the surgery get delayed this long. His voice was her lifebuoy, and she held onto it with everything she had.
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"You slept through the best part of my villain monologue. I'm offended."
That was the first thing her brother said when she woke up from the surgery.
"T-tell me again," she demanded, voice shaking from everything she'd just survived.
He said it again. She didn't remember most of it. But she remembered that he stayed until she fell back asleep, and that the second time she woke up, he was still there, hunched in the most uncomfortable-looking chair imaginable, and snoring slightly.
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The pain was different afterward. Not less, just different.
The limbs were bloody. That was the first thing she knew. The wet blood was soaking through the gauze faster than anyone could change it. The thick smell of iron and sweat, underlain with something rawer, like meat left too long in the heat. The pus that wept steadily from the stitch line turned the gauze a sickly yellow at the edges, stiff and crusted by morning, no matter how often it was changed.
They also didn't sit right. The joints bent at angles that felt like a mistake, the long bones still soft enough to flex with a faint crack that felt louder than it should be. And every shift of her body made her certain those limbs would simply come apart, ripping themselves along the seams that had only just been stitched.
Even the air moving across them caused something so painful she cannot describe. Every current of air somehow found the rawest, least-healed part of her and pressed there deliberately. The fluttering hem of a doctor's coat as they passed could do it. The lazy turning of the hospital's ceiling fan could do it. She learned to lie very still and not think about the limbs and scars she'd caught a glimpse of once, because remembering them made it real in a way the physical pain alone hadn't managed to.
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The feathers came a month later.
She had thought, in the particular logic of someone who has already survived more than they expected to, that the limbs would mean it would be over. That those limbs meant done, finished, this is what you are now, the pain has served its purpose.
But the feathers were itchy. Itchy in a way that was its own specific kind of suffering, entirely distinct from everything that she had experienced before. Like something was still moving in there, like bugs crawling and living under the skin rather than on it, deciding where to push through next. Like hail landing on an open wound, except the hail never stopped, never ceased, came from inside her own body in a slow, relentless rhythm that had no mercy built into it at all. She would lie awake at night with her hands pressed flat against the mattress to stop herself from reaching back, both palms full of crescent marks from her nails, because her brother had told her not to scratch them.
"Damage those quills and I’ll stop giving you my rice portions, Chika." He had threatened, voice tight with worry he wasn't quite hiding. She had smiled, despite the pain, despite everything, because she knew he wouldn’t. That’s his own unique trick. He made being miserable feel slightly less like the only option available.
(She still lay awake most nights anyway, thinking very clearly and calmly, ‘I want someone to make them gone.’
It’s not a dramatic thought. Just a honest one. She wanted them removed from her body. She wanted to go back to being the person she had been before, the person who could seamlessly blend in with the crowd, who could sleep on her side, who didn't have to be careful of chairs, of doorways, and everything else.)
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She also misses her parents.
They're still there, technically. Her mother still cooked dinner, and her father still came home at seven, and they still existed in the same space as she did. Because that's what they are now, people who share the same roof. Nothing more, nothing less.
Her father had stopped asking how she was. He used to, back when the pain was still something familiar, a scraped knee, a fever, something a hand on the forehead could measure. Now he just nodded at her over dinner, eyes sliding off his daughter before they could catch on anything, letting the silence fill in the space where questions about school used to be, like it would be much easier that way, as if she's not worth the effort anymore.
Her mother still set the table for four every night out of habit, but she'd started making Chika's portions as smaller than before without seeming to notice she was doing it, like some unconscious part of her had decided the daughter she was feeding now needed less than the one before. Occasionally, Chika would catch her mother looking at her wings with a distant expression again, like she was looking at something that had replaced her daughter and didn’t know what to do with it.
She missed them. She missed them constantly, in the way you miss someone who is still alive but has already changed past recognition, which is the worst kind of grief because the people they were aren't coming back, and you have to keep seeing the people who replaced them.
(Sometimes Chika thought it would have been easier if they'd simply hated her. Hatred, at least, was a kind of attention. What she got instead was something gentler and far worse, a slow and careful withdrawal, like two people backing out of a room without saying out loud, as if it would not count as leaving at all.)
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School after the surgery was even harder. She had known some of those children since she was five years old, and now they looked at her like she was a different species, which she supposed she was. The words they used were not always cruel; sometimes they were just probing, like the way children push the boundaries of people because they’re curious, but the effect was the same.
It was Harukawa Aoba who made school bearable.
Aoba sat with her every day without being asked, the first and only person who had decided that the empty seat beside Chika was simply where she belonged. She talked about ordinary things, her favorite TV show, a dog she'd seen on the way to school, rumors of who's dating who, the new hairstyles she'd been trying to replace her usual pig tails, the kind of random everything that no one else had bothered to offer Chika in months.
(Aoba touched her wings only once, by accident when reaching for her dropped pencil, and apologized immediately. It was so genuine that it didn't feel like her wings were the ones being touched at all. Instead, it felt like it's her, the actual her, the one that lived undetected all this time, had been touched.)
Aoba listened when Chika talked about her favorite food, the animals she saw on her way to school, her brother, the books she read with him, her parents, her thoughts, her fears, the white monsters, and her nightmares. She has listened to all of it, with no mocking or ridicule. And Aoba believed Chika. Her teal eyes had shone bright with determination, freckles standing out faintly across her nose as she promised she'd protect Chika.
Chika cried. She hadn't meant to. Those words had unlocked something tight in her chest, something she hadn't realized she'd been holding closed for months. And for that one fleeting moment, she felt like Aoba could be hers forever, not as her classmate, not as her friend, but hers in the same way Rinji was hers, permanent and unconditional.
So she gave Aoba her feathers.
Her hands shook the whole time she worked them loose from the primaries, fingers fumbling at the quills because she'd never done this for anyone before. She picked the biggest, softest ones she had at that time, still faintly marked at the base with the memory of blood they no longer carried, similar to the one on her brother's necklace, and held them out before she could think better of it.
"You don't have to," she whispered, eyes focusing on the floor, the words tumbling out ahead of her courage a bit too fast. "Only if you want them. It's okay if you don't want them."
Aoba just looked at her, then at the feathers, and took them, her eyes shining even brighter than Chika thought was possible. Aoba decided to sew them onto her favorite hair ties to wear every day, and now watching those feathers catch the light across the classroom had become the thing Chika looked forward to most.
Then Aoba’s gone.
There one day and not the next. All she left was one of the hair ties. No one could find her. The police came to the school once, asked questions to a room full of nine-year-olds, and left without anything useful. Chika remembered an officer crouching down to her level, asking if she'd noticed anything strange that week, and she remembered becoming frozen in place, then said the word no, and the officer nodded, wrote something down, and left.
(Her mind screamed, over and over, in the same useless cadence of something rehearsed too many times to ever be said out loud: “It's the white monsters! The same ones that have always come for me, please believe me. Please, just this once.” But the words never made it past her teeth. She had learned, by now, that the truth could not bring Aoba back, only ever bought her more sets of eyes looking at her the way her parents already did. So she said nothing, and let the scream stay where it had always stayed.)
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She kept catching herself looking for the reflective light before she remembered there was no one left to wear them. A flash of gold in the corner of her eye that turned out to be someone's hair clip, someone's sharpener, never the right shape nor color once she actually looked.
She missed the small, ordinary things most, the ones she hadn't known she had always sought for until they stopped existing. The scraping sound when Aoba's chair pulled up beside hers every morning, the way she always saved some of her rice for Chika, the sound of her voice narrating nothing in particular just to fill the quiet during their free study period.
The space Aoba left was shaped exactly like her, and nothing else seemed to fit it, no matter how Chika tried. She didn't know what to do with it. So she started eating in the corner. She pressed her wings flatter, tucking the feathers so tightly beneath her clothes that the quills bruised her own skin, because at least that pain had a shape she could change at will.
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She had come down for water, like she always did when she couldn't sleep, and stopped at the bottom of the stairs because of her parents' hushed voices in the kitchen.
"He told the school no," her mother was saying. "A full ride, and he told them no."
"And we only found out because his teacher called." Her father's voice was flat, more tired than angry. "Three years he worked for that score, for Rokueikan. And he just—"
"Because of us." Her mother didn't say it unkindly. That was somehow worse. "He's not going to leave Chika with us. You know that. He doesn't think we'll look after her properly."
"He's sixteen. It's not his job to look after her at all."
"Try telling him that."
A long silence. Then her father again, quieter. "He could have a different life."
Chika stood very still on the stairs, water forgotten, and let the sentence settle into her. He could have attended his dream high school. Not might have. Could have, but it's already gone, already spent, already chosen against, and chosen against for her, specifically.
She didn't go back upstairs right away. She stood there working out her thoughts. Rinji had never once told her there'd been a scholarship, for his dream school no less. Never told her there'd been a different life sitting right there, fully funded, three years in the making, and that he had looked at it and looked at her and chosen the smaller and harder thing instead.
That should have felt like love. For one terrible, suspended second on the staircase, it almost did.
But Chika had learned, by now, exactly what happened to the people who got close enough to choose her. Aoba had chosen her, too, in her own small way, sewing a feather into her hair ties to wear every day, and then the white monsters had taken her anyway, as if proximity to Chika was its own kind of curse. Her parents had stopped choosing her, and they are still here, even though they had become something she couldn't recognize nowadays. Everyone who got close enough to her eventually paid something for it, and the bill always seemed to come due, sooner or later, one way or another.
‘Rinji turned down his whole life for me,’ she thought, climbing the stairs slowly, with no water in hand. ‘People don't usually forgive what costs them that much, not forever. Not even him, properly.’
The thought wasn't dramatic. It was just honest, in the clinical way most of her thoughts had become more honest lately. If she was the reason he'd already lost one future, she would eventually be the reason he resented the rest of it. Not yet, maybe not for years, but eventually, like debts always come due eventually. It would be better, she decided, standing in front of Rinji's room with one hand hovering on the doorknob, to make the leaving smaller now, while it could still fit through a door, than to wait for it to grow big enough to take the roof down with it later.
So that night, while her brother slept, carefully not to wake him, she took her feather off his neck, and promised herself she'd start keeping her distance from him the way she'd learned to with everyone else.
(She pointedly ignored the way her mind screamed no and please for her flock as she closed his door.)
Chika didn't look her brother in the eyes the next morning. Rinji didn't ask where the feather had gone, or why she'd done it. He just looked at her for a long moment and left the house for school without saying goodbye.
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The invasion happened three months before her tenth birthday. It killed over 1200 people, and over 400 people are still missing.
That longer-than-usual work trip of theirs had spared her parents from becoming another statistic among the dead. Even their old house has somehow survived all the white creatures she now has a name for. Neighbors, that’s what that organization has called them.
Rinji also survived, but something in his demeanor had changed. Because unlike their parents, who had forgotten about her six-year-old's desperate pleas, he still remembered every word, every detail as she'd cried out at the kitchen doorway all those years ago. He had spent the years after brushing it off as her nightmare given too much weight, until he'd seen the horror firsthand. The same white monsters she'd described at six years old were the ones tearing through the streets he walked every day, and there was no longer any room left to call it a child's imagination.
In the quiet of their untouched house, his face had gone pale in a way she'd never seen before, the careful composure he'd worn in the loneliest weeks she had ever experienced was now cracking at the edges. All he said was one word, sorry. Not an explanation, not a justification, just that.
It did not bring the closure she thought she once desired. If anything, it brought the opposite, because now there are two people who believed her, one is her childhood friend who’s currently missing, and the other is her older brother. And she was the one who'd have to decide what to do, just weeks after she'd stopped expecting anyone to believe and reach out to her again.
She gave her brother another feather and told him about Aoba.
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She was eleven when she first met Mikumo Osamu.
"This is Osamu, my tutee," Rinji said, presenting the other boy with a small smile at the edges of his face like Mikumo’s gonna be a permanent part of his life, which made her stomach churn with something ugly. "He's going to be around a lot. Try not to scare him."
"I don't scare people."
"You're very intimidating, actually," her brother replied, voice so comically serious that she didn’t know if it was a joke for her or a warning for his student.
Mikumo looked at her wings first, like everyone did; that is something she had stopped expecting to change, but his eyes moved off them almost immediately, settling on her face instead, like her oversized wings were only a fact to acknowledge. He introduced himself, a little too politely and stiffly, and then turned the conversation back to his studies without lingering.
She didn't know what to do with that, so she withheld her judgment.
She withheld it for weeks, watching from the edges of the staircase, waiting for the catch. There was always a catch, like the children who were nice in front of teachers and weren't after, like the relatives who looked at her parents with pity that meant they were glad it wasn't them. A sign that his kindness was really just management.
Mikumo Osamu didn't have a catch she could find.
He came by twice a week, sometimes thrice, for his study sessions with her brother, said hello when he arrived and goodbye when he left, and not once did he ignore her. Sometimes he brought food his parents had made to share, bringing more rice each time and never mentioning it. When not studying, he talked about his glasses prescription changing again, about the bridges his dad built, and about his mom teaching him a new recipe that week. Just small, ordinary things, offered the same way to her as they were to Rinji.
She decided to let Osamu watch while Rinji preened her wings.
She didn't say anything when her brother started showing Osamu what to look for when grooming. The angle of the coverts, the way a feather should sit so it wouldn’t be pulled wrong later, and the difference between a normal molt and a stuck one.
Osamu asked questions while he watched, not the pity kind people usually ask, like “how did this happen” or “are they uncomfortable”, but practical ones. How do you know when to stop? How to detect the blood feathers? What grooming tools actually suit her feathers since they are waterproof? And her brother answered all of them without hesitation, matching Osamu’s practical curiosity with his effortless precision.
She just sat there, relaxed, and let it happen around her, as if she wasn't the one being discussed, even though every word they’re saying was about her.
(She ignored the excitement and satisfaction in her chest when Osamu mentioned he'd been reading about wing care on his own, not because her brother had asked him to, just because he'd thought it might be useful for her. Rinji’s hand stopped for a moment at that, something flickering behind his eyes too quick for her to name, then hummed in acknowledgment, adjusted his hands, and kept preening her feathers.)
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They'd taken their usual board game up to her brother's room one afternoon, spreading it out on the floor between his desk and his bed, the only spot big enough for both of them and her wings.
"That's cheating," she said, not for the first time, sliding his piece back where it belonged.
"It's called initiative," Rinji said, picking up the dice and rolling them once in his palm before throwing, a habit she had never managed to learn about, even though she'd been watching him do it for years.
"Hey." She nudged his shoulder with her right wing. "Why'd you introduce me to Osamu, anyway?"
His hand paused mid-roll. "Where did that come from?"
"I don't know. I was just thinking about it." She shrugged, looking at her own piece on the board instead of her brother. "You never did that before. Introduce me to your tutees, I mean. Osamu's the first."
He was quiet for a second too long, which was how she knew that what came next must be the honest version and not the easy one for him. "I'm in college now. Osamu's someone else I can trust to look after you when I'm not around."
"I can take care of myself." She crossed her arms, relief settling into her chest at hearing her brother talk about a life that now existed outside of her, even as something quieter and sadder crept in right behind it. "And honestly, you should be more worried about Osamu than me. He's too nice for his own good, you know."
"I figured you'd say that." He shook his head, smiling despite himself. "That's exactly why you should keep an eye on him, too. Both of you attract too much trouble on your own."
She punched his arm, playful and light, the way she only ever let herself be around him. "Of course I will. Osamu's my friend."
"That's great." He reached over and ruffled her hair, "You should open up to him more. Osamu’s a good kid."
She let herself sit with that for a moment, thinking it over with most things he said to her lately, looking for what was underneath it. He didn't say anything else either, just looked at her, with a smile pulling at his mouth that didn't quite reach the rest of his eyes, before he picked his dice back up again.
(It wasn't her he looking at. He was looking at the small calendar on the wall, where some of the dates were already crossed out in thick blue ink.)
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She gave Osamu her feather on a Tuesday afternoon.
It was a small feather, the kind that usually came loose from the coverts after stretching her wing, small enough to fit inside her palm without peaking out of the edges. It didn’t look like much compared to the primaries she had once given Aoba, but it was clean, free of blood, and entirely whole.
Osamu had just packed his textbooks into his bag when she stepped up right beside his chair and held it out to him. He looked up, his glasses slipping slightly down his nose, and blinked. He didn't look frightened, nor did he look overly delicate about it, the way people sometimes did when handling things they considered strange. He simply stopped what he was doing and received it.
"For your notebook," Chika said. She didn't whisper it, and she didn't look down at her feet. She looked straight at him, offering a small smile that reached her eyes. "To keep the page. And it's waterproof, so it won't get ruined if you spill your tea."
Osamu looked at the feather for a long beat, then a very small smile tugged at the corner of his own mouth. He didn't offer the loud, exaggerated gratitude that adults used when they were trying to manage a child. He just took it by the quill, his fingers brushing against her hand, warm and now familiar.
"Thank you, Chika," he said, his tone exactly the same as the way he thanked Rinji for helping him with a difficult math problem. He opened his notebook, placed the small yellow feather flat against the grid paper of his notes, and pressed the book shut. "I'll use it every day."
As Osamu slung his bag over his shoulder and gave her his usual awkward wave, Chika walked him all the way to the door. Her wings hung loose and relaxed at her sides, content to see him off until his next tutoring day.
(From the doorway, she heard the faint sound of the floorboards creaking. Chika shifted her eyes and saw Rinji standing there, watching them from the shadows of the hall. He didn't say anything, but the tight line of his shoulders had loosened a bit, a relieved yet bitter smile settling over his face as he avoided her eyes.)
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Two months and twenty-one days after her thirteenth birthday, Rinji went missing.
He didn't say goodbye. That was the thing she kept coming back to in the days afterward, not that he was gone. That Rinji had put her to bed on a Wednesday night and did not say goodnight back when she did. That she has one of the best sleeps that day and was expecting to do homework together with both her brother and Osamu tomorrow because it's tutoring day, only to wake up and find out Rinji’s missing since midnight.
She hated him. She hated the fact that he didn't say anything to her. She hated that she'd slept so well that night, so peacefully, so stupidly, while he was preparing to leave. She hated that she'd let her guard down again, after everything, after she'd promised herself she wouldn't.
She pressed her face into the pillow, her wings trembling against her back, heavy and useless. Not leaving her bed, not leaving her room, just lying there.
She didn't know how long she stayed like that before the knock came, soft at first, then again, more insistent. She heard her parents' door not open down the hall, heard their footsteps not come, the house keeping its old habit of letting things be someone else's problem. For a moment, she considered not moving either, letting the knocking go unanswered the way everything else in this house had simply gone unanswered for years.
But some small, stubborn part of her, the part that had once stood frozen on a staircase and decided to make her own leaving smaller, decided she didn't want to be the kind of person who let a knock go unanswered, either.
She got up, wings loose, heavy, and aching, and went downstairs.
She opened the door, and Osamu was standing on the step with his jacket on. And she got hit with a realization that she has been staying in her room, not once getting out of her house, for more than one week. That was the last time she saw Osamu; she had cried, interrogated, and pushed him out of her room after seeing Rinji’s message. That she has missed Osamu's birthday, when both she and Rinji had promised to celebrate with him by going to see the new bridge in Kyoto.
“Osamu—”
"Are you okay?" he asked before she said anything.
"I… I don't know," she answered.
He nodded like that was a fair answer. Then he sat down on the step and looked out at the street, leaving room beside him that was clearly available if she wanted it.
She sat down. Hesitantly, she leaned in just enough for the edge of her wing to brush against his shoulder. They sat there for a long time. Long enough that the light above the door clicked off, and neither of them moved to turn it back on.
Eventually, Osamu said, without looking at her, "My mom said you can stay with us. While things are—until things are sorted out."
She stared at him.
He was still looking at the street. His green eyes are calm yet so full of determination, as if he had already thought this through and had no intention of being argued out of it.
"She said that?" Chika asked.
"I asked her," he said. It was not the same thing, and they both knew it, and he didn't try to pretend it was.
She thought about going back inside. About her parents' careful, managing faces. About Rinji's room with the light off, exactly as he'd left it, like the house itself hadn't accepted yet that two weeks had passed. She thought about how long it had been since she'd eaten a full meal, since she'd done anything except lie there listening for a door that never opened, a voice that never came back. She thought about Osamu's birthday, which had passed somewhere in the middle of these days without her, how she hadn't even remembered until just now, and how she had broken a promise with him without knowing.
"Okay," she decided.
Osamu nodded and stood, offering his hand to help her up like it was the most natural thing in the world. She took it and let herself be pulled upright before she could think too hard about needing the help at all.
He waited while she went inside to get her things, which didn't take long. A few changes of clothes, her schoolwork, the essentials, and nothing more. She left her favorite blanket folded at the foot of her bed without much hesitation, because it would have been one more thing to carry and one more thing to feel, and she didn't have room in her arms or her chest for either right now. But she hesitated at her desk drawer, fingers resting on the small yellow feather she never gave back and the hair tie still faintly catching the light even after all this time, before tucking both of them carefully into the front pocket of her bag, against her chest where she could feel them.
Before she left, she tore a page from her notebook and wrote her parents a short note, propped against the kitchen table where they'd be sure to see it in the morning.
I'm staying with Osamu's family for a while. I'll still go to school. Please don't worry about me.
She read it over once and decided it was enough.
She stood in the doorway of the old house one last time, looking at nothing in particular. The kitchen where her mother had once said that she was just growing. The living room where their parents used to argue when they thought she was asleep. The stairs where she'd learned what her brother had given up for her. All of it was sitting exactly where it always had, indifferent to the fact that she was leaving.
She closed the door behind her.
Osamu was still waiting on the step. He took her bag without asking, his eyes flicking once over how thin her arms had gotten, how her wings hung duller than he'd ever seen them.
"Do you want to have something before going to my place?" he asked.
"Would your mother mind if I did?"
"She wouldn't. I promised."
"Alright then," Chika replied, with a small, tired yet genuine smile on her face, the first one in weeks. "Thank you, Osamu."