A/N: Written for the
Random Character Is Your Hero! Redux, random character: Relena Norstein
Diversity Writing Challenge, j35 – write a fic that explores a death/injury/sickness
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walking to walking
Chapter 1
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Relena Norstein can walk, sometimes.
Her legs feel like noodles when she tries, and if there's nothing for her to hold on to and cruise like an eight month old child, then she'll fall within a few feet. But she can still walk if she tries.
Saiba Rei could walk, once upon a time, but she can't walk at all anymore. Once upon a time, she could walk like normal, like there was nothing wrong… and there wasn't anything wrong, until one day she froze on the crossing when a car ran a red light and knocked her over.
Really, she's lucky it's only her legs… or rather, her spine. She could have cracked her head open. She could have gotten her ribs splaying her lungs and heart. She's alive. She'll live just fine and she can't walk and that's a relatively small price to pay for being alive.
But sometimes, sometimes, they wish their wheelchairs weren't their prisons as well.
Relena always has someone pushing her wheelchair. Attendants, usually: the silent sort and sometimes she doesn't even know what they look like. It's lonely, having someone at her back who she doesn't know. Sometimes it's Touma, though. She likes when it's Touma because Touma is her big brother and always talks to her. Sometimes it's her father too, but he doesn't talk as much. He gets stuck in his head a lot. He worries. And he's so hard on her big brother as well, because she can't pick up the slack.
She wishes she can help, but she can't. She's only more of a burden because Touma wouldn't be set on curing her if she wasn't sick, and she can't even pretend to be doing fine until she can cross the room and back without needing the wall to hold her up, because who will believe her otherwise?
As for Rei, Rei isn't sick; she's paralysed but it's all the same to her big brother who's obsessed with giving her ability to walk back to her.
So, of course their brothers meet, nose deep in books but sitting close to each other enough times to make eye contact inevitable.
And so, of course, Saiba Rei and Relena Nortsein wind up meeting as well. And it doesn't really matter if it's coincidence, or fate.
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Japan would have throttled them. Touma knows their education system is top notch, but it also doesn't understand haste. Relena doesn't have ten years to wait for him to go through high school in the proper channels, and then undergraduate courses and finally crawl out the other end with a degree that can get him a junior level position. She doesn't have the time to wait for him to claw his way up the ladder until he can do his own research on the things he wants to research while funded by whatever hospital he's working for or whatever institute is investing in his success. But that could take twenty years, or thirty… and the doctors aren't even giving Relena ten. He can't stay here and do that.
Austria has an accelerated programme, if he can keep up with its demanding schedule. And it's not hard to move to Austria. Relena is there, after all. And so is his father.
Well, his father is one of the things that makes it harder, but that's okay. Relena makes it all worthwhile.
So he moves to Austria, settles in while keeping himself as remote from his father as he can manage while being under the same roof. His grandmother's passed some time ago, thankfully, so she can't put a wedge in his plans and his father is too spineless to try. It works to his favour, now. He can move along this path he's set for himself: speed through the rest of his schooling, get into their undergraduate medical programme with stellar marks and an equally stellar interview (because personal stories hit harder than the altruistic but rather empty words they're usually faced with), and by fourteen, he's sitting in a large lecture hall, dwarfed by the benches but finally, finally, feeling like he's going somewhere.
And, to his surprise, there's someone even shorter next to him. Also Japanese, by the looks of him. Also desperate, pressed for time, because he's here and he's got his nose in a book as well and a scowl etched onto his face.
They don't talk. Touma doesn't have time for small talk and he doubts the other boy does either. But he sees him again and again: lectures, the mixer where neither of them socialise but just sit on benches and study, the tutorials were they give quick and curt answers and ask questions that go over their fellow students heads (and apparently age doesn't speak for experience, because the rest of their group is far older, but look far more bewildered as well). Then there's their once a week clinical placements where they've coincidentally wound up at the same hospital on the same day but not in the same bedside tutorial groups (and that's good, because otherwise he'll suspect the administration with tampering with so-called random allocations).
They still don't really talk. But being in so many things together in an already niche course means they'll have to talk, eventually.
And then they do talk, eventually.
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Saiba Neo hasn't come to Austria to make friends. He came to Austria because they're the first country who offered him what he wanted in the time frame he wanted it in. He knows that, logically, there's no rush. Rei's legs aren't going anyway and it's not like it's degenerative or there's anything else that's got the clock ticking, except the usual aging biology. But Rei could walk until not long ago and that makes the difference: that makes all the difference in the world.
Neo can't stand it, so he looks for a way to make it happen as fast as possible, and when modern medicine isn't up to the task, he decides to become a doctor and fix that problem himself. Which means escaping Japan because Japan's got a set timeline and they'll be old and torn apart by the time he reaches the end, so he puts feelers out elsewhere and Austria's the first to get back to him.
And maybe there were better offers following, but he shoots off a reply to Austria and they're moving, just like that. He's speeding through the rest of high school, just like that. And he's starting undergraduate medicine just like that, sitting next to, of all the coincidences, another Japanese kid who doesn't look like he's old enough for university either.
They don't talk, because he doesn't have the time to talk, and anyway, it's his friend who did this to Rei so he doesn't want any more of them. Still, the Japanese kid keeps popping up. Some natural gravitation, perhaps: two Japanese kids in a university in Austria, or two kids who, in Japan, would've been too young to be in a university. It doesn't matter. They both have their noses stuck in books and don't really talk. Except in tutorials where they have to talk.
But being thrown together so often means they will inevitably talk about more than the bare essentials.
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'Can I sit here?'
'Sure.'
'Thanks.'
There's an awkward pause after that. They're the only two in the library at that time: after hours access and they've stuck around late to study. Touma takes the empty seat across from the other boy and wonders if he too has something he simultaneously loves and avoids back home: something he's working towards and working for… which inevitably means spending less time with in the process.
But it's worth it, he tells himself, turning back to his books. He'll find a cure for Relena before she runs out of time and it'll be worth it. Even if that means Relena's feeling lonely now, in that big house with just the staff and their father who, sometimes, may as well just be another member of the staff.
They study in silence until the lights flicker; the unengaged ones are going off as the hospital switches over to night mode. Clever little system, really, to save power but make sure they haven't left the wandering night staff and students and patients in the dark. Still, that's his cue to get home, so he sets off a trial of lights as he walks out, leaving the other student still there. A dorm dweller, maybe?
Touma knows he's lucky to have a home, even if it is sometimes big and lonely. Not that it matters to him per say if it is big and lonely, because Relena is always there.
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Neo only looks up long enough to accept the other boy, and then gets back to his books. And the other doesn't make small talk either. He doesn't bother asking, for instance, why he's still hanging around when their classmates have long since gone home. Just like Neo doesn't bother asking why, of all the empty seats in an empty library, does the other pick the one half-occupied table?
It doesn't matter, anyway: empty or not empty. If they don't talk, they're not engaged with each other and he'll talk to patients but he doesn't need friends to talk with as well. He has Rei and Rei is all he needs, and he'll give Rei her legs back and they'll go back to how things used to be before he brought Hideto home.
The lights flicker, and it's pure night where only the artificial lights, when woken, shine. But that's okay. Their dorm space is small anyway and he can't take all these books. He'll stay longer, because Rei will understand. Rei understands. Rei knows he has to study hard, study quickly, so he can give her her legs back.
The other boy leaves, though. He packs his things away, says a quiet goodbye, and leaves.
And leaves one of his books behind, and Neo, only because he knows how hard it is to find something lost in a hospital, picks it up to return to him another time.
A photo flutters out, of a girl in a wheelchair looking up at him.
It's inevitable that he's clued into this, perhaps, because his heart flutters in his chest and he can't, at least, ignore this.
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Rei is lonely. She won't deny it, except to Neo because she knows Neo works for her sake and she knows that, even if she says it, Neo won't stop blaming himself and blaming Hideto for what happened. And Hideto won't stop blaming himself either. Poor Hideto whose all alone in Japan now with his guilt, after Neo cut all ties with him and he cut all ties with Rei. If only she has a way to free these boys… but, right now, perhaps the only way is to help Neo find the answer and that means supporting him along his way.
So she manages their little dorm room as best as she can manage. She cooks good nutritious food and makes sure Neo's taken snacks because he studies late because he knows she'll be a lot less mobile when he's there as well, due to space. So she does her best in her own studies even though she's not academically orientated at all, and she roams around the hospital sometimes because, at least here, she's not out of place in a wheelchair.
She does her best, and she knows her brother does her best. Still, doesn't change the being lonely part.
Maybe Neo will find another friend here. Or maybe she will.
And then suddenly Neo is home and tossing a notebook that doesn't look like his onto the table, and a photo of a girl in a wheelchair that doesn't look like her is slipping out… and she wonders if there isn't friend material for the both of them in that notebook.
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Relena is lonely in her big mansion with the staff and her often stiff and quiet father and her often absent big brother, but it's lovely when her brother comes home and spends some time with her. Often, though, his mind is elsewhere. And she can tell his mind is even further away today.
'What's wrong?' she asks.
'I've lost one of my notebooks.' And it bothers him, because he's the meticulous sort and so any of his notebooks are important. 'And it's a nightmare trying to find things again in the hospital.
'Maybe someone picked it up?' Relena suggests. 'There are lots of kind people in the world.'
'Maybe.' He doesn't sound so hopeful… but she hopes she's right. There are lots of kind people in the world, but she hasn't met many people outside of the staff and nurses and doctors and most of them are quite kind, but they need something more. Touma needs something more.
It'll be a stretch, she thinks, if whoever finds Touma's notebook can be a good friend to him, but the good kind of stretch. The sort of stretch she should pray for, she thinks. A good friend for Touma. And maybe a good friend for her as well, but she'll probably have to wait until she's better and that's why Touma's working so hard denying himself his own youth… And maybe it'll seem like a small sacrifice at the end, but right now it feels like they've had their lives on hold for so long…
If it's not the notebook, it'll be something, she thinks. Touma can't go to university and hospital placements most days of the week and not find at least one classmate he can call a friend. He's a kind person, after all. A kind, wonderful person. And if given half a chance, she's sure others will see that too.
University is like school, and school is a place to make friends after all. Or maybe that's just the way she, who's never been to school, sees these things.
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Two pairs of siblings, whose circumstances are similar yet different, have been carefully set up by a string of coincidences or fate to meet.
And one day, soon, they will meet.
