Written for the Beyond the Camera's Lens Christmas Exchange. This was meant to be Miu/Yuuri, but it was already getting quite long for such a little exchange, and it never quite had time to get there. If you want to read it as shippy, though, I won't object. Follows the Yomiko and Bride of Yomi endings.
There was a handwritten sign on the door of the shop the next day, when Yuuri went down to start opening up. "Closed today. Apologies for any inconvenience. Please come back tomorrow!"
Hisoka must have been down earlier, then gone back to bed. Sighing with relief, Yuuri set about making herself a cup of coffee instead, and sat at the table to drink it, watching the deserted street outside as the sun rose above the buildings.
An hour later, she was circling the shop with a duster. Some things had been knocked over in Ren's battles of the night before last, and she set them to rights as well, enjoying the quiet, the absence of any sense of urgency. She was just beginning to think of another cup of coffee when Miu walked in, and sat down at the table Yuuri had vacated.
"How are you feeling?" Yuuri asked. She had been in to check on Miu last night and found her sleeping alone. She wasn't sure it would be a good idea to ask where her mother had gone.
Miu said nothing. Yuuri went on with her dusting.
"Would you like coffee?" she asked a few minutes later. "I'm making some for myself."
Miu still said nothing, so Yuuri poured two cups and placed them both on the table. She sat opposite Miu, but kept her eyes on the window. People were starting to appear on the street, walking past alone or in pairs, their shadows long.
Miu picked up her cup, then put it down again. "I don't like coffee," she said.
Yuuri looked at her, and Miu returned the look with a slightly defiant air, as if to say, There, I said it.
"I'll make tea next time," Yuuri offered.
"I used to drink it anyway," Miu went on, as if to herself. "I'm going to stop doing that. I want to come and live here."
She said it in the same flat tone, so that it took Yuuri several seconds to realise what Miu had just said. "You want to... live here?"
"Yes."
"I – I'll ask Hisoka. I'm sure it will be okay. But don't you want to go home?"
Miu's eyes travelled the shop restlessly, passing over teacups and mirrors and old pictures in gilt frames. "Just to get some things. Will you come with me?"
As Yuuri had expected, Hisoka had no problem with the request, at least in the short term. She took over Yuuri's lackadaisical cleaning efforts, and Yuuri and Miu set off together. Yuuri had to admit she was curious to see where Miu lived, and meet her guardian.
It was right on the edge of the village, a town-house built in a rather dated style. The garden was overgrown with blue and pink hydrangeas, just beginning to lose their colour. Miu opened the front door to let them in, and didn't bother calling out that she was home.
"Nobody's here," she said. "She goes out in the mornings."
She led the way up the stairs to her room, which was small and almost completely bare. The only decorative ornaments were a lamp with a handmade paper shade, and a Japanese doll in a red kimono on the dresser. Both looked old and faded, and Miu didn't glance at them as she pulled down three cases and started carelessly throwing clothes into them from the chest of drawers.
"You can get the clothes in the wardrobe," she told Yuuri, and they worked in silence until the wardrobe and drawers were all emptied. Without them, the room looked even less inhabited than the spare rooms in the shop. Miu packed the doll and the lampshade last, handling them as if she didn't want to touch them at all.
She picked up the two smaller cases, leaving Yuuri to wrestle the biggest one down the steep, narrow staircase. She was almost at the front door when Yuuri said,
"Aren't you even going to leave a note?"
Miu paused, half turning.
"Won't she be worried?" Yuuri went on, hesitantly. "If you just leave without saying anything?"
For half a second, Yuuri saw a sky aglow with sunset, so bright the silhouetted figure from memory seemed to be dissolving in it: someone else who left without saying anything. Miu lowered her head. "We can wait until she gets home."
They left the cases in the hall, and went to wait in the living-room. Like the rest of the house, it was small, dark and cramped, so that even two people living here would be constantly under each other's feet. Except for a single pale blue vase on a side table, all the furnishings were plain and functional. In another room a clock was ticking. The air smelled faintly of dried flowers and furniture polish, barren: the people who lived in the house had made no impression on it that Yuuri could perceive. The moment Miu left, the lifeless air would flood back to fill the space she had occupied, and there'd be no trace.
"My mother's gone," said Miu.
She was looking down at her hands in her lap. The clock ticked on sedately in the silence.
"I told her I was fine," Miu went on. "When I woke up and she wasn't there, I wanted to die."
She said it simply, with no melodrama. Yuuri knew that feeling from the inside, the flat, dry, colourless nothing of it, like a desert stretching forever in every direction. Nothing to feel. Pointless to try. Everything the same.
"What changed your mind?" she asked.
"I came down to say goodbye to you. You gave me a cup of coffee. I knew I didn't want it, but I started to drink it anyway. That's what I always did before. What I wanted didn't matter. Then that made me angry. I thought, I'm about to die, why should I have to drink something I don't want? And you said you'd make tea next time, so I thought I might as well stay until then." She shook her head. "A cup of coffee changed my mind. Isn't it ridiculous?"
"No," Yuuri said, smiling. "Hisoka would like it."
"I don't mean you're going to be condemning me to death next time you make tea instead," Miu went on. Her words were flowing more easily now. "Once I started thinking about what I wanted, I realised there were all sorts of things, and if it didn't matter one way or another, I might as well ask." She looked up, her face unreadable. "Like I asked you before, not to go, and you didn't."
The sunset – the darkness of Higan Lake – memories blurring into each other, until it was impossible to tell who was saving whom. Yuuri shook her head, trying to clear it. "Miu..."
There was the sound of a key in the front door. Miu and Yuuri both stood up at once, as if they'd been caught doing something wrong. There was a pause while Sachi Iyama presumably stared in confusion at the suitcases lined up in the entrance, and then she appeared in the doorway: an old, grey woman with soft lined skin, cloudy light-coloured eyes, a summer coat folded over her arm and a look of puzzled expectation on her face. She surveyed Yuuri first, then turned to Miu.
"So you did come back," she said. "I had a call from a gentleman named Hojo, but to tell the truth, I thought I'd never see you again."
"I'm moving out," Miu admitted, and, with a brief glance at Yuuri, "I stayed to tell you."
Sachi Iyama seemed to comprehend the meaning of the glance at once. She smiled at Yuuri, a sad, resigned smile. "I knew it all along."
An hour later, they came home to the shop. Miu went to her room to start unpacking, while Yuuri made a slow circuit of the shop, breathing in the sweet fragrance of coffee and sugar, beeswax from the old furniture and moss from the garden, where Hisoka was tending her plants after the rain. She touched tables and chairs, old radio sets, folding screens, glass bowls and ceramic pots. It was like walking through a room full of sleeping cats, sensing their dreamy memories: rooms dozing in late afternoon sunlight; attics with all the life of the house going on somewhere below, half-heard; kitchen cabinets with glass doors that hadn't been opened in years; armchairs under reading-lamps, cosy in the evening.
When all her bad feelings had fallen away, she sat down at the table again. Sure enough, after a few minutes, Miu came down to join her. The sun was just setting.
"I'm all unpacked," Miu said. She looked softer, somehow, in the honey-coloured light pouring through the windows. Or maybe it was something in her that had changed. When she sat down, she looked more at ease; when she met Yuuri's eyes, some of the cool speculation was gone, the challenge and indifference, and in their place, a question, open-ended, unarticulated, not yet requiring an answer.
"Welcome home," Yuuri said. It felt like the right thing to say, even a few hours too late. "What do you want to do next?"