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Mizuki never went home that day.
Today had been a bad day.
Not the kind of bad day that announces itself, not a crisis or a catastrophe. Nothing you could point to and say there, that's the thing, that's what broke me.
Today had been a death by one thousand papercuts. A hundred sideways glances. Fifty whispered conversations that died in her throat. Ten people who looked through her like she was made of glass. One teacher who said "young man" and then corrected themselves so loudly the whole class heard.
Mizuki kept walking.
She passed the bus stop. She passed the bench she usually waited for Ena. She passed the intersection where she always turned left. Step by step she crossed the edge of the neighborhood she knew, into the one she didn't.
The sky above Tokyo was a deep overcast.
The first drop hit the back of her hand.
Then another, then another, and then another. Then the sky opened up, finally exhaling the flood.
Mizuki kept walking.
Her school blouse clung to her arms within seconds. Her skirt darkened.
It would be easier this way. Easier to just keep moving, to disappear for a little while under the rain. Just until the noise stopped. Just until the thousand eyes closed.
Just for a little while.
---
The park was empty.
Mizuki didn't remember choosing it. Her feet had carried her here on some instinct, some muscle memory of a younger version of themselves who used to come to this playground after school.
Mizuki sat down. The chains were wet and cold, orange with rust, each flaking under her fingers when she wrapped her hands around them.
Time passed. The gray overcast of the sky shifted darker. That incremental change that crept up on you.
She's only been here for an hour. At least, it felt like an hour. Maybe it had only been thirty minutes. Maybe it had been hours. Time moved strangely when you were trying to disappear.
The rain fell harder. Mizuki was shivering now, violent tremors that shook her entire body. Her lips had turned blue. Her fingers were numb.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket. Again. Like it had been doing the entire time she had been sitting here.
Mizuki let the phone buzz. She knew who it was, but she didn't want to give the excuse they wanted. Mizuki didn't want to be a person right now.
The rain was washing her out. Like a watercolor in the rain. First the yellows went, then the reds, then the greens, until everything was gray and silver and the color of water on concrete.
She was disappearing.
It was what she'd wanted. She had chosen this.
But it didn't feel like relief.
It felt like nothing. She shivered, and the shiver didn't feel like hers. She breathed, and the breath felt borrowed.
Her phone buzzed again.
Mizuki let her head drop forward. The rain fell on the back of her neck, running down her spine.
---
The shivering had gotten worse.
The cold, unfeeling numbness she felt as she watches her life float away in the rain. Her eyelids were growing heavy. It was going to be over soon.
But then, a sound.
It was muffled, distorted, directionless. Under the ocean of the rain. A voice, maybe, or just the wind, or nothing at all. Her head was so heavy. Everything was heavy, and cold, and far away.
But then, yellow.
Bright yellow, brilliant even. Something yellow was moving at the edge of her vision, a bright slash of color in all that gray.
"Mizuki!"
The voice was closer now. Mizuki forced her eyes open.
A figure was running toward her. Bright yellow raincoat, orange boots, a familiar silhouette that made something in Mizuki's chest ache. Ena.
"MIZUKI!" Ena's voice cracked as she stumbled to a stop in front of the swing. Her arms wrapped around the other girl with a tightness that made Mizuki believe she wasn't ever going to let go.
Ena was warm. So warm it burned against Mizuki's cold skin. She had been crying. Mizuki could see it in the redness around her eyes, but rain was falling now, and it was impossible to tell where tears ended and raindrops began.
"Ena..." Her own voice sounded wrong. Sluggish. Slurred, like Mizuki was speaking from underwater.
Ena pulled back just enough to look at her. Hands on Mizuki's shoulders. Grip firm. Eyes wide and red-rimmed. "Are you an idiot?!?"
"I just wanted to disappear for a while." Mizuki whispered.
She said it the way you'd say I was thirsty or I was tired. A simple explanation for a simple need, as if disappearing were a reasonable thing to want, as if sitting in a rusted swing in a thunderstorm until you forgot your own name were something that just happened sometimes.
Ena's eyes squeezed shut for one terrible second, and when they opened, they were shining with something that looked a lot like fear. "You-!" Ena's voice broke. She swallowed hard. Her hands were still on Mizuki's shoulders, and they were shaking. "Don't. Don't say that. Don't ever-!"
She was scared, Mizuki realized. She was really scared.
"Ena, I'm sorry." Mizuki said, her voice cracking.
"Shut up." Ena was already pulling off her raincoat, already wrapping it around Mizuki's shoulders.
The coat was dry. Warm from Ena's body heat. Mizuki felt something inside her chest crack open. It smelled like her too.
"I'm sorry," she whispered again. "I'm so sorry."
Ena ignored her. "Can you stand?" Ena asked. Her voice had leveled out, but still raw.
Mizuki tried. She pushed off the swing, legs buckling immediately, knees folding like wet paper. Ena caught her, she always did.
One arm around Mizuki's waist, the other stabilizing. "I've got you. Just lean on me."
They moved like a broken unit. Mizuki's feet dragged through the gravel. Ena's shoulder dug into her ribs. The rain kept falling on both of them.
---
Mizuki was shaking so violently that her teeth chattered.
The sound filled Ena's entry hall as she kicked the door shut behind them. The heat hitting Mizuki's frozen skin like a wall. Every nerve ending screamed. The shaking got worse.
"Okay," Ena said. She was pulling off her rain boots with one hand, while the other was holding Mizuki's wrist. "Okay. Bathroom. Come on."
She guided Mizuki down the hallway. Her grip steering her through the door of the small bathroom. The light was too bright. Mizuki flinched.
"You need to get out of these clothes. Right now. Okay?" Her voice was firm but not harsh. She was trying, visibly trying, to be gentle. "Can you do that?"
Ena's chest tightened. She turned.
"I'll get you dry clothes," she said. "Don't wander off."
She was back in less than a minute. A pair of sweatpants, an oversized shirt, socks, underwear. Each her own, pulled from her drawer without hesitation. She set them on the edge of the sink in a neat pile and turned back to Mizuki.
Mizuki was sitting on the bathroom floor now, leaning against the side of the tub, legs drawn up, arms wrapped around her knees. She was still shaking.
The wet clothes clung to her, heavy and cold and stubborn. She made no move to remove them.
Ena crouched in front of her. Mizuki looked at her. Her lips were still blue. She didn't move.
"Mizuki."
Nothing.
"If you aren't going to strip," Ena said, and her voice was careful in a way that sounded almost painful, "I'm going to have to strip you."
Mizuki looked at her. The sentence registered slowly, like a radio signal coming in through static. Something flickered in her expression. Not embarrassment. Grief. Her stomach turned.
Ena watched her face. She saw something there, saw the way Mizuki's eyes dropped to the floor, saw the way her arms tightened around her knees. That specific and particular anguish of a person who has spent years constructing a barrier and is now being asked, gently and without malice, to dismantle it.
"Would it be better," Ena asked, slowly, carefully, like she was defusing something, "if we both stripped at the same time?"
Mizuki made a broken sound. It was somewhere between a laugh and a sob.
"That would be worse." She whispered.
Ena understood. Not all of it, maybe. Not the specifics. But she understood that she had said the wrong thing. She didn't apologize, she didn't explain, and she didn't try to fix it with more words. She just stepped closer.
"Okay," Ena said. "Okay. I'm going to help you. Is that alright?"
After a long moment, Mizuki nodded. It was barely a movement.
She reached for the buttons of Mizuki's cardigan with fingers still cold from the rain. Ena fumbled slightly on the wet fabric. Button by button the cardigan came undone, heavy with water, and Ena peeled it off Mizuki's shoulders. It hit the tile floor with a wet slap.
Underneath was a long-sleeved shirt, soaked through and clinging to Mizuki's skin. Ena took the hem in both hands.
"Arms up?"
Mizuki raised her arms. Slowly. Like they weighed more than they should.
Ena pulled the shirt up and over her head.
And stopped.
Mizuki's arms were a map. Both arms were covered in scars. They ran up the inside of both forearms in lines. Some were white and faded, barely visible, old enough that the skin had smoothed over them. Some pink. Some raised. And some that were red and raw and angry, some that looked fresh, some that looked like they might have been done today, hours ago, in a school bathroom stall.
Ena swallowed. The sound was audible in the small bathroom. Her throat moved. Her jaw tightened. And then she said, very quietly: "Do you want me to take care of them for you?"
Mizuki didn't answer.
Ena's hands grabbed the hem of Mizuki's tank top. "Can I take this off?" Mizuki nodded.
And then Ena saw her ribs — each one visible, a ladder of bone beneath skin that was too pale, too thin.
"When was the last time you ate?"
Mizuki didn't answer.
"Mizuki."
"I don't remember."
"Okay." Ena let out a breath. "We'll deal with that later. Socks next."
The socks were easy. Ena peeled them off and dropped them on the pile of wet clothes. Mizuki had another ladder of scars trailing up her legs.
Then both of them looked at the skirt.
She looked at Mizuki. She was staring at the floor again.
"I can turn around," Ena said. "You can do this part."
Mizuki nodded. It was a small, grateful thing.
Ena turned around. She faced the bathroom door. Behind her, she could hear Mizuki shifting, the wet sound of fabric. She stared at the door and tried to listen to the rain outside.
Mizuki grabbed the panties with haste.
"Do you have cuts there too?" Ena asked.
A pause. Then, very quietly, "Yes."
Ena closed her eyes. "Can I help you?"
Mizuki didn't say anything. She didn't have the words for what she was feeling. For the hope, the terror, the despair.
"I don't care," Ena said. The words came out rougher than she intended. She softened. "I don't care what you look like down there. I don't care what's there. I just want to make sure you're okay, Mizuki. Let me help you."
A long pause. Then, "Okay."
Ena turned around, Mizuki didn't.
Mizuki was sitting with one arm wrapped around herself. Mizuki watched her eyes.
This was the moment. This was the part she'd rehearsed in her head a thousand times, in bed, in the shower, in every quiet moment when the fear crept in and she imagined this exact scenario, Ena seeing, Ena knowing, Ena's face doing the thing that everyone's face did when they saw the full picture. The micro-expression. The recalculation. The moment where the person in front of you updates their understanding of who you are and arrives at a conclusion that excludes you from the category you'd been living in.
This is it, Mizuki thought, and the thought was calm and resigned and exhausted. She's going to see all of it and realize she was wrong about me.
Ena looked at her.
She looked at Mizuki's body, the parts of it that Mizuki had been hiding, the parts that didn't match, the parts that were supposed to disqualify her from everything she'd built and everyone she'd loved. She looked, and Mizuki watched for the flinch, the flicker, the tightening around the eyes that would confirm every fear she'd ever had.
Nothing came.
Wordlessly, Ena slid the first aid kit from under the sink. The plastic popping noise the clamp makes cuts through the air like a knife.
Her first words were: "This might sting a little." And it did. Mizuki hissed, and Ena murmured "sorry" without stopping.
Ena worked in silence. She cleaned each cut. She applied the ointment. She cut bandages to size with the small scissors from the kit, her fingers careful and precise, and she wrapped them around Mizuki's thighs in neat, even layers that covered the red and the silver and the pink and the white. She was too efficient for this to be her first time, but Mizuki didn't prod.
"You can put the underwear on now," Ena said, her hands drifting to hand the pants over to Mizuki, "and these too."
Mizuki did. The fabric was warm and soft and smelled like Ena's laundry detergent.
"Arms," Ena said. "Sit back down."
She took Mizuki's left arm, gently but firmly, the way you'd hold something precious that you were afraid might shatter.
The cuts were worse here. Deeper. More recent. Just hours ago.
Ena worked. Cut by cut. Wipe, ointment, bandage. Wipe, ointment, bandage. The rhythm was methodical.
When she was wrapping the newest ones, the ones from today, the ones that were still raw, she paused.
"Does it help?" she asked.
Mizuki looked at her. Ena wasn't looking at her face. She was looking at the cuts under her fingers, the thin lines across the inside of her forearm, fresh and red. Her voice was quiet.
"For a minute," Mizuki said. It was the most honest thing she'd said in months.
"Then what?"
"Then I have to do it again."
Ena just nodded.
The left arm was done. She moved to the right.
---
The kotatsu was warm. Mizuki sat on a cushion, wrapped in blankets, a cup of hot tea in her hands, a bowl of rice filled with fridge leftovers in her lap. Ena was behind her, slowly working a brush through her tangled, wet hair.
The dryer hummed across the house. Ena's room was dimly lit by a desk lamp.
Ena set the brush down.
She'd gotten most of the tangles out. Mizuki's hair fell around her face in soft, damp waves. It wasn't perfect, but it was better.
Ena wrapped both arms around Mizuki from behind. Her chin settling on Mizuki's shoulder, her chest pressing against Mizuki's back. She held on tight. Tight enough that Mizuki could feel her heartbeat.
"Whenever it gets too loud," Ena said, her voice low, right against her ear, "you call me. Even if I'm in class. Even if I'm asleep. Even if it's three in the morning and I have a test the next day. You call me. I don't want you to disappear alone, Mizuki."
Mizuki's throat closed.
The tears came without warning. It wasn't the dramatic kind. Just a slow, steady leak, tears sliding down her cheeks and dripping off her chin and landing on Ena's arms. She couldn't stop them. She didn't try.
Ena held her tighter.
They stayed like that for a long time. Long enough that the rain stopped. Long enough that the heater cycled off and clicked back on. Long enough that Mizuki's tears slowed and her breathing evened and the only sound in the room was two hearts beating, not quite in sync, but close.
"You're staying here tonight," Ena said.
It wasn't a question. "We'll share my bed," Ena continued. "I don't want to hear anything about it."
Mizuki almost laughed. Almost. "Okay," she said. The word was small, broken, but it was a word.
Ena's arms tightened one more time. A punctuation mark. Then, slowly, she loosened her grip.
---
The bed was small. Narrow. Made for one person, barely wide enough for two. Ena pulled back the covers and guided Mizuki in first, then climbed in after, and the mattress dipped under their combined weight, and the sheets were cool and then warm, and Ena's arm found its way back around Mizuki's waist, and Mizuki felt the heartbeat again against her back, and the rain was falling, and the room was dark, but.
Mizuki was still here.
Still here. Still in her body. Still in this room, in this bed, in this specific, unrepeatable moment with Ena's arm around her and the rain outside and Ena's heartbeat against her saying I am here, I am here, I am here.
She closed her eyes.
She didn't disappear.