The light in the hospital is so white, so brilliant, Rei feels it must be burning her eyes. She has to keep them open. She has to stare into the whiteness until it becomes the glare of headlights, until the hum of noise becomes the sound of rain and the road streaming underneath the car, until the ringing of phones becomes the squeal of tyres and she's reliving it, the sickening swerve, the first impact that threw her against Yuu's body, which then was still breathing, still warm. The last time she touched him while he was alive.
Before that he was talking about work, something to do with a book he was reading, but Rei was only half listening. She can't remember the words he was saying. She can't remember what he was trying to tell her.
She holds her arm at her side. She wants it to be broken, wants a cast and a sling and something to show what she's been through, what she's lost. But they say it's only sprained. When she was thrown clear of the car, she landed in soft mud, not a scratch on her. They said she was lucky.
Rei should have screamed. She should have leapt at them and clawed the smiles from their appalling faces. She would have screamed that word, hurled it back at them like a projectile. Lucky! Lucky! Lucky!
If she were lucky, she'd be blind now. She wouldn't have to see all the people, how they walk past her with curious expressions, wondering what she's doing here. She wouldn't have to see all these people who don't understand that Yuu is dead.
She looks down at the tiles that bounce the light back into her eyes. She can see the mud on her clothes. There is still water in her hair, coming loose in drops and sliding down her neck. It is like someone standing behind her, trailing cold fingers over her skin.
She wishes she could close her eyes, pretend it's Yuu, but she won't let herself do that. She won't give herself false memories. She has enough. She has that moment when her shoulder banged into his, the back of his hand grazed her arm – she can feel it there, like a cut, where he touched her – and then the lurching car plucked her away from him again.
Rei has that, and she will keep it close.
She moves her sprained arm to make it hurt. It brings tears to her eyes, but tears are her friends. She greets them one by one, and crushes them with her hand, smearing them all over her face.
The seat moves beside her as someone sits down. She doesn't look up, and the person doesn't speak. Rei sees the edge of a pair of shoes, slim legs in brown stockings, a pleated skirt with a band of crimson. The hands resting in the girl's lap are small and short-nailed.
She and Miku sit together in silence for a long time before Rei looks up. Miku is already looking at her, as if she sensed that Rei was about to move. Looking into Miku's eyes is like looking into a well, and she doesn't smile, or say that Rei is lucky; she doesn't pretend there's anything much to be happy about.
'Let's go home,' she says.
It lifts a curtain in Rei's mind and shows her what she has been trying not to see: home. That funny little house where Yuu no longer lives. There are three rooms, and one of them is going to be empty when they get back, and after that it will always be empty.
Rei lifts her sprained arm again, pulls it up against her shoulder so the pain gathers into a current, racing back and forth, making itself stronger.
Miku's little hand stops her. 'Rei,' she says, reproachfully, 'what are you doing?'
Rei doesn't have an answer. The pain melts into a flickering haze. Miku puts a hand on her back, strokes her, down and then up, and says,
'Come on. Let's go home now.'
As they get up, Rei looks again down the hallway towards the morgue. They're going home without Yuu. It's not his home any more; she's leaving him here, with the blinding light, with the abominably smiling nurses and doctors. Yuu isn't coming back with them.
'No,' she says, 'Miku, I can't go without him.'
Miku's eyes are full of rain. It's still falling, Rei can hear it, and it's still in her hair and in her clothes.
'It's okay,' Miku says. 'I'll wait with you.'
They sit back down on the uncomfortable chairs in the dazzling headlights. With her fingertips, Rei squeezes a drop of water out of her clothes. She thinks there could have been a flood, a tide that came in, drenched everything, and when it went away, it took Yuu with it. But where, where?
She thinks of Yuu floating on dark water, a dark sea, to an unknown horizon. Why won't the tide take her too?
After a while she becomes aware of Miku's hand, slipped into hers and holding her, a little mooring rope. The tides go out, come in, go out, but Miku's hand keeps her here.
It's dawn, and Rei hasn't slept. The pain in her arm comes in little spots of indigo that flare before her eyes and disappear again. She looks towards the morgue. She could go through those doors and bring something out, but it wouldn't be Yuu. He's not there. Somehow, in the night, he's gone very far away, and left her, debris.
Miku lifts her head, blinking sleepily. 'Is it time now?' she asks.
'Yes,' says Rei. 'There's nothing else, is there?'
'Everything's dealt with,' said Miku, 'the paperwork and so on. You don't have to worry about any of that, Rei. I'll take care of it all. You just rest.'
Without Miku here, she'd be just... wreckage, sitting washed up in that chair, or wherever she set down first. She can do things, she is good at that, always in the middle of some action or another, but she can't manage things, not the way Miku can.
'I don't know what I'd do without you,' says Rei, and means it.
'Me neither,' said Miku softly. 'It's awful, but Rei, I'm glad you're all right.'
Rei remembers that Miku doesn't have anybody else either. So at least they have each other. The doctors would say she's lucky, but it's not luck, it's salvage.
She holds onto Miku's hand, and the dry mud flakes off her clothes and skin as they walk. There's an empty room waiting for her, an empty bed, a future that's not what she thought it was going to be. She's unsteady. Her arm throbs. She imagines herself the way others must see her, dirty, exhausted, pale, clinging on to her friend's hand, staring dazedly out at a changed world. She's a casualty of a great disaster that, probably, nobody else will even hear about, except perhaps for a paragraph or two in the newspaper: Local anthropologist Asou Yuu...
And she'll never know which book he was reading, or what he was studying that made his words come out warm and sparkling with excitement. And there'll always be a place on her arm, like a burn, where his living hand touched her for the last time.
Casualties, she and Miku, their heads bowed against the sunlight as they leave the hospital. The rain has passed on and left the world glittering. It's a long way home from here.