Visiting the Angel

(Akane’s PoV)

—

The Tsugikawa Villa sat behind a low wall at the end of a quiet street, and I’d been inside it maybe three times in my life.

That’s the part people always got wrong about Kurone and me. 

We were ‘close’ for years, because her narrative needed someone ‘dark’ like me to shine, but I almost never went to her house. We studied in libraries or met after school. 

I became her ‘friend’ years ago mostly because of Shin, and soon after that, Kurone decided that I was her bestie, only because she liked my advice, saying that ‘nobody has ever spoken to me like that; let’s be friends!’

But in the end, she was also the only person who treated me like a human being aside from Hoshiko. 

Despite being ‘besties’, I’d only crossed her house’s threshold a handful of times, and always to sit at the same low table in the same room and work on the same exams, so the house was not something special to me.

Which was a mercy today, honestly. One less thing to carry up the path.

I rang the bell. The white pharmacy bag sat at the bottom of my school bag like a stone.

The gates of her house opened almost immediately, and I stepped in.

Too many luxury things here. I felt a little wave of disgust.

As soon as I walked near the big entrance door, it opened like it was waiting for me.

“Oh — Akane-chan!” 

Her mother stood in the entryway in a cardigan with her reading glasses pushed up into her hair, and her whole face opened into a smile that looked completely genuine.

‘Ah. She was clearly waiting.’

“Goodness, it’s been such a long time. Look at you.” She stepped back, holding the door wide. “Come in, come in, it’s freezing out there. Let me get you some water.”

“Please, Mrs Tsugikawa, don’t trouble yourself—”

“It’s a glass of water; it’s not trouble.” She was already moving toward the kitchen, and I toed off my shoes in the entry and followed her as far as the hall, and by the time I’d straightened up, she was pressing a cold glass into my hands. “So. What brings you here?”

The thing that surprised me the most was that she was the one doing that stuff instead of the butlers.

I could have made something up. There were four or five perfectly serviceable versions available, and my mouth had them lined up before she’d finished the question, but this woman arranges international relocations for a living and has, by her own daughter’s account, never once failed to know exactly what’s happening in her own city.

Lying to her would have been like lying to God. Useless.

“I came to see Kurone,” I said. “I know she isn’t feeling well. Is she in her room?”

Half truth.

Something moved through her mother’s expression. It was brief, warm, and a little sad.

“You’ve always been so thoughtful with her,” she said. “Even back then.” She nodded down the hall. “Yes, she’s upstairs. She’s wide awake, though. She has been all day. I think she’s been waiting for you, actually.”

I bowed. “Thank you. Excuse me, then.”

“Go ahead.” Then, just as I turned toward the stairs, in the same pleasant register: “Oh, and afterwards, there’s something I need to talk to you about.”

I stopped for half a second.

And I knew. Of course I knew. 

“Of course,” I said, without turning around.

"See you later, Akane-chan!" Her mother said, with a cheerfulness that almost made me puke.

Then, I went up to see the fallen angel.

Kurone’s door was closed, so I knocked twice.

“…Come in. *cough*” 

Her voice came through the wood thin and papery, and something in my chest tightened before I’d even touched the handle.

I opened the door.

The curtains were drawn, but a lamp was on in the corner. Every lamp in the room was on, actually, which I realised why soon after.

'I’m terrified of the dark.' That was the only reason.

Kurone was sitting on the edge of the bed.

I have known this girl for a long time, and I’ve seen her in every way a person can be in: triumphant, cruel, laughing, drunk on her own attention, ruined on a bathroom floor... But I had never seen her like this.

Her skin was white. Not pale, but white, the colour of something that hasn’t been outside in years, with a translucent quality under the lamps that made the veins visible at her temple.

Her hair hung in unwashed strands around her face, and the shadows under her eyes made her a totally different girl.

Moreover, she was breathing wrong. Shallow, fast, through her mouth, with her hand pressed flat against her sternum and her shoulders rising in small, tight lifts, the breathing of someone fighting nausea in real time and losing at a steady rate.

She saw me, and she tried to stand up.

I watched her do it. She got one hand braced on the mattress and started to push. Her arm shook, and her body didn’t come with it, and she made it maybe ten centimetres off the bed before she sank back down.

“Sorry,” she whispered. “Sorry. Give me a second, I’ll—”

“Don’t, Kurone,” I said.

I crossed the room in four steps and was down on one knee in front of her, my bag hitting the floor beside me.

“Don’t get up. Don’t move.” I got a hand on her shoulder, and she was cold, genuinely cold through her shirt. “Kuro, look at me. When was the last time you ate?”

She opened her mouth and then closed it. Her eyes moved sideways, which is what she does instead of lying to me.

“Kurone.”

“…Yesterday morning, I think...” she said. “Maybe. There was... I had some tea.”

“Tea isn’t food, Kuro,” I said, worried. 

“It had sugar in it—” she tried to say.

“Tea,” I said, “is not food, you absolute idiot.” I said, worried.

After that, I got up and went to the door and out into the hall like it was my own house. I didn't even think about the pregnancy tests in my bag or the trial or Kenji or any of it, because there was a girl in that room who hadn’t eaten in a day and a half, and everything else could stand in line.

Her mother let me into the kitchen without a single question, which I appreciated more than I could say.

I made rice porridge, because it’s the only thing that stays down when a body has decided to stop cooperating, and I made it plain,  thin and warm.

Then I found a small dish and put a little salted plum on the side, and I carried it up on a tray with a fresh glass of water and a straw I’d found in a drawer.

No butlers or maids were there, for some weird reason.

Kurone stared at the tray like I’d brought her a live animal.

“You cooked... for me?” Kurone's eyes were wide.

“I boiled rice in water. It’s not a culinary achievement.” I set the tray down on the bed beside her and sat on the floor at her feet, cross-legged, so I was looking up at her instead of down. “Small bites. If it comes back up, that’s fine; we’ll try again in twenty minutes. Just get something in you before you pass out.”

“Akane, you don’t have to—” She protested.

“Kuro.” I looked at her. “Eat the rice.”

After realising that I wouldn't have accepted any other answer, she ate.

It took a long time. She got maybe six spoonfuls down in twenty minutes, with two long pauses where she had to stop and breathe through her nose with her eyes shut and her hand back on her sternum. But, luckily, it stayed down. And somewhere around the eighth spoonful, a tiny amount of colour came back into her face, and her breathing settled from panic-fast into something closer to tired.

I sat on the floor the whole time without saying a word, and, very often, I’d reach up and take the spoon out of her hand and hold it while her arm shook, and then give it back.

“Why are you being like this, Akane?” she said, her tone a mix between surprise and a glimpse of sadness.

“Like... what?” I asked.

“Kind.” Her voice cracked on it. “You have every right in the world to hate me, and instead you’re sitting on my floor making me eat porridge.”

I thought about it.

“I do hate a lot of things you’ve done,” I said. “That hasn’t changed, and it isn’t going to. But that’s a completely separate conversation from a girl who hasn’t eaten since yesterday, Kuro. Those two things live in different rooms. I can't hate you. Especially not now.” I nudged the water glass toward her. “Now drink.”

She drank, luckily.

And then, because I hadn’t come here to be a nurse and we both knew it, I reached over and pulled my school bag toward me and took out the small white pharmacy bag and set it on the bed beside the tray.

In that moment, Kurone went very still.

“Three of them,” I said. “Different brands. In case one’s wrong, and then a tiebreaker if the first two disagree.”

“Akane—” Kurone was trembling a little. 

“I know you told me about birth control. I believe you. I’m not here because I think you’re lying.” I kept my voice soft. “I’m here because you wrote me a message saying you don’t know what’s happening to your own body, and that is not a thing I’m willing to leave as an open question. Not for a week. Not for a day. So we’re going to close it, right now, and then whatever the answer is, we’ll know what we’re dealing with.” A pause. "Don't worry about it, I'll help you."

She looked at the bag for a long moment, and then she picked it up with a shaking hand and went into the bathroom off her room, closing the door.

Meanwhile, I sat on her floor and listened to the tap run.

She came out after a few minutes and sat back down on the edge of the bed with the test flat on the tray in front of her, face-down, and said, “Three minutes.”

She wasn’t speaking, but the way she gripped her own arm was speaking for her.

I set the timer on my phone.

And that was the longest three minutes of the past three months, and I’ve had some contenders.

Neither of us spoke at first. The house made its house noises. 

The lamps burned in every corner of a room with the curtains shut.

Kurone stared at the back of a plastic stick on a tray with her hands knotted in her lap, and I sat on the floor with my phone counting down and my back against her bed frame.

Suddenly, she said, very quietly:

“If it’s positive, I’m not going to keep it. I simply can’t.” Kurone was trembling a little. 

“I know. You already told me.” I sighed.

“That’s not- “ her breath hitched “ — I need you to know that’s not about hating a baby. It’s not. It’s that I would have to look at it every single day for the rest of my life and see him, and I would ruin it, Akane, I would ruin it just by being the person holding it. And it would take my family apart, and it would take his family apart, and there’d be lawyers, and it would become a thing in this city forever, and it would never once be allowed to be a person. It would only ever be evidence.”

She already told me these things. 

But there also was a positive thing if the test came out positive. She could use it as a proof of his assault.

“I know, Kuro—”

“And I’ve been eighteen since a month,” she whispered. “I’m eighteen and I’m scared of my own bedroom light being off. Having a baby with his face… his features… I don’t know…”

After those words left her mouth, I reached up and took her hand before she would go into total panic. 

She flinched, of course, and then held on so hard my knuckles ground together, and I let her.

“Whatever that thing says,” I said, “you’re not alone. I’ll help you.”

Her eyes widened, but she didn’t speak.

Then, the timer went off.

Neither of us moved for a second. Then Kurone let go of my hand and reached out and turned the test over, and we both looked.

One line.

I read it three times. I read the little printed key on the box, which I’d already read twice in the pharmacy, to be absolutely certain I hadn’t inverted it in my head.

One line meant negative.

Kurone made a sound.

It came out of her strangely, halfway between a laugh and something breaking, and then her whole body folded. She bent forward over her own knees with her hands over her face and started sobbing, and I got up off the floor and sat beside her on the bed and put my arm around her shoulders and pulled her in.

She softly cried into my shoulder for a long time. She tried her best to hold it in so her mother wouldn’t hear anything, but she couldn’t. It felt like a dam breaking.

 I held on and let her. 

“It’s the other thing,” she managed eventually, wrecked. “Isn’t it. The nausea and the shaking and being… being scared of the dark. It’s not… there’s nothing wrong with me, it’s just—”

“It’s your body keeping score,” I said quietly. “Yeah.”

“So it doesn’t stop.” She said.

“Not on its own. Not fast.” I tightened my arm around her. “But it’s treatable, Kuro. That’s the actual news here. This isn’t a mystery illness. It has a name and people who know how to help with it, and you’re going to see one of them. I promise it will get better. Slowly. Unevenly. But it will.”

“I can’t tell my mother—” she said.

“Then we’ll find another way. There are clinics you can walk into without anybody signing anything.” I pulled back enough to look at her. “But you’re going to somebody. That’s the price of the porridge.”

She let out a wet, broken laugh.

“You’re too kind, Akane. I don’t deserve this.” She sobbed. 

“Nobody deserves what happened to you, Kuro. And trust me, the fact that you want to change… says everything.” I said, my voice softening.

She then wiped her face with the back of her wrist, and looked at the negative test on the tray, and let out one more long shuddering breath. 

“Thank you,” she said. “Akane, I—”

“Don’t.” I stood up and started stacking the dishes onto the tray, because if she said one more grateful thing to me I was going to lose my own composure in a bedroom with all the lights on. “Eat the rest of that porridge before it goes cold. I’m going to take these down.”

I then walked towards the door.

“Akane.” Her voice was small. “The lights. Could you… leave them on when you go, please?”

I looked back at her, sitting there white-faced in a room fully lit.

“Sure,” I said, smiling. 

She smiled back.

“I’m gonna check up on you later,” I said.

She nodded. “Y-Yeah.”

Then, I went out and closed the door behind me, and stood in the hallway for a second with a tray of dishes in my hands and my heart going hard.

Downstairs, in the kitchen, I could hear her mother moving around. Waiting.

‘Afterward, there’s something I need to talk to you about.’

I took a breath, straightened my back, and went down the stairs…