The Sun Through Your Eyes
These are the things that Yuna has consistently wished for since she was twelve: to be one step closer to remission, for her brother and her best friend's volleyball team to dominate Nationals, and for the three of them—Kiyoomi and Motoya and Yuna—to be happy. A story about moving forward in moments, one step at a time.
Chapter 1
Tell me, oh ocean-crossing winds, that prayers will cross through time.
Yuna is seven when she gets a new big brother.
The difference between them is slight, because he's only a few months older than she is and at seven, he's also not that much taller than her. But he smiles wider than even Yuna can manage, showing off a wide gap in his front teeth, and his eyes are bright. His hand on hers is warm, with a strong grip as if he's afraid she's going to wander away if he's not careful. His name is Motoya, and he breezes into Yuna's life like summer rain. Before she's even quite aware of it, Yuna is scrambling after him everywhere, trying her best to keep up. He leaves her in the dust more often than not, but she doggedly pushes on, and he always waits for her when she falls too far behind. Soon, it's hard to remember a time when she didn't have a brother. Only the struggle of learning to write her new name—no more moons for Kisaragi, but instead plenty of trees for Komori—and getting used to Saturday bike rides to the park are proof that there was once a life pre-Moto-nii.
Motoya plays in a junior co-ed volleyball team, so naturally, Yuna begs to join too. One of their neighbors down the street plays there as well, and he's even brighter than Motoya. He grins like he's always planning some sort of heist, and when he jumps it seems like he can fly. He gets into arguments with Motoya a lot, because Motoya likes the satisfaction of ruining a team from the ground up as opposed to Sakusa Kiyoomi, who liked to do his destruction from high above. Yuna likes them both, so she diligently works to become the link between the two destroyers, taking the balls that Motoya saves and popping them back up to Kiyoomi. Like this, she thinks that being a setter is the coolest.
They while away their summer with volleyball, beetle hunting, and festivals. They do their summer homework late while sprawled out in front of the fan at the Sakusas house, and then rush off with half-completed journals to play more volleyball in the park around the corner. Mrs. Sakusa yells at them when they get back but feeds them ice-cold watermelon anyway. They go to the public pool when Mama gets tickets and race to hop in, playing until evening when they head home with pruned fingers while licking at dripping ice pops. Then there's more homework and more volleyball and more mundane neighborhood adventures.
The summer that Yuna is seven is easily the best summer of her life.
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Motoya is ten when his sister collapses for the first time.
They had been playing volleyball in a little court in the park. It was a quiet morning, and it was just the three of them and their usual game of set-spike-receive. Except then Motoya takes a receive at the wrong angle, it hits Yuna in the face, and she goes down with a truly impressive nosebleed. She goes down and she can't get up, and so she scrabbles a little at the dirt looking confused and faintly alarmed while the blood pours down her face.
Naturally, Motoya and Kiyoomi panic. There's a scuffle as they push and prod each other towards the ball and Yuna, despite them being in opposite directions, and they finally just settle on abandoning the ball and both try to put Yuna to rights. Motoya's best friend looks more like a statue with each passing second, but Motoya can't spare him much thought because he's shoving the sleeve of his jacket at his sister's nose. Kiyoomi slips his hands underneath Motoya's arms to wipe at the blood dripping down her chin and onto her shirt. He ends up streaking wide red smears all over her cheeks.
"We need to tell Mom!" Motoya shouts at Kiyoomi, sounding hysterical. Mom will know what to do. She's always fixed all of his problems.
Kiyoomi, who has more sense than him, snipes back: "No! We need an ambulance!" It's a moot argument though—none of them have cell phones, so they resort to the next best method: screaming for help at the top of their lungs and forgetting that they have two sets of working legs between them.
Eventually, their commotion catches the attention of a jogger, who does the most sensible thing of them all. First, they remove Motoya's jacket and Kiyoomi's useless hands and replace it with a proper kerchief. Then, they call the ambulance, Motoya's parents, and Kiyoomi's parents, in that order.
Motoya clamors onto the ambulance after his sister when the paramedics pull up, and he clutches her hand so tightly that she actively tries to squirm away. Kiyoomi is doing the same with her other hand, because his knuckles are as white as Motoya's, and his eyes are wild and screaming. The wail of the sirens meshes perfectly with the roaring of the blood in Motoya's ears.
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(By the third time Yuna is brought to the hospital for a fever that's so severe she needs to be in emergency, the doctors tell you that they're going to order some new tests. Your heart free falls and never stops, not when your baby is stabilized in that too-white bed, not when you're introduced to the pediatric oncologist, and certainly not when he tells you that they're making final confirmations but you need to prepare for the worst, for leukemia, and you stop listening as he talks about childhood cancers and chemotherapy and advanced medical procedures and chances. That's your daughter, the one thing that kept you going when your first marriage had failed and you did everything in your power to get the both of you away while leaving her with nothing more severe than memories of her father being mean on occasion. That's your child, ten and a half, being sentenced with something she doesn't deserve.
Yuna hates when you fuss like this over her. You tell yourself that she's ten and a half and she doesn't know better, she doesn't know the fear that cancer strikes into your bones. You tell her that you and the doctors are doing what's best for her and her recovery; that she needs to do her best too; she needs to keep fighting, and a twinge of guilt flits across her face before it's wiped away by rage. She throws tantrums you weren't even aware she was capable of; she screams herself hoarse, to the point of hyperventilation, and fights you tooth and nail when you try to calm her. Both of you cry, but you have the distinct feeling that she isn't crying about what you think she should be crying about. Cancer seems to be only a secondary inconvenience compared to whatever else she's focusing on.
You are at a loss of what to do, so you do the only thing you can do, which is to clutch her to you and put her ear to your pounding heart. And when she reaches up to cling back to you, with a grip so strong it hurts, you realize that she's your daughter in every way but the most important one: when it counts, she's like her father, focused and present and a fighter. While you are stuck in the murky waters of the future Yuna is storming her way through every moment placed in front of her, moments that you are not privy to and that you may never be privy to. You may never be in sync with your daughter, and the tears come anew.
You have never felt further away her than you have in this moment.)
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Kiyoomi is eleven when he finally musters up the courage to go to the hospital.
He doesn't want to be here, not really. But at the same time he doesn't want to wait a couple days for Yuna to go home, where she's going to be just down the street but fully in her fussing mother's grasp. That's just too much for him to handle, so he sucks in his discomfort and follows quietly behind Motoya as they navigate the halls. He figures they're getting close when the walls stop looking so impersonal, instead painted with cheery pastel stripes and a mild polka-dotted pattern.
Kiyoomi's read books where people describe hospital patients as small and vulnerable and weak. Yuna doesn't look like any of those things. She looks mostly angry, in that fluffed up defensive way that Kiyoomi's cat gets sometimes. Her eyes are bright and focused and they bore right into Kiyoomi, and she tosses her book aside with a flick of her wrist when the boys open the door to her room. She's a little paler, and maybe a little thinner, but it's been a year since Kiyoomi took a good look at her so he's not entirely sure.
Motoya chatters brightly, a little too fast and a little too loud. It's a habit he's gotten into in the last couple months, just like Kiyoomi's started to wash his hands for 49 long seconds at a time and familiarize himself with the constant scratching of face masks. But Yuna—Yuna eventually smiles at him like she still gets what he's thinking about, even after a year and even with half of his face covered. Kiyoomi does not think he doubts that; it's a trait shared by both the Komori siblings and he had always loved and hated it in equal measures.
He takes her hands in his and squeezes, and he hopes it can convey all the fears and reassurances and other feelings that he has swirling in him that he doesn't know how to talk about. This is the best he can do right now—a hand squeeze and apologies in his eyes for the big things and the little things like getting blood all over her face last year and having to play with another setter at their last junior league volleyball match and being a shitty best friend.
The three of them have never struggled so hard to be on the same page. They don't even feel like they're in the same book right now. Kiyoomi hates it.
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Here's the only thing that Yuna cares about: one day, Motoya and Kiyoomi are the brightest people she knows, and somehow in the span of 4 months, 1 week, and 3 days she's ruined it all. The thought consumes her. She's too busy worrying about Motoya and Kiyoomi hating her forever, or somehow veering from the path where they grow into bright and amazing adults, that it's all she can think about. She's frustrated to tears, and it tips into rage when Mama, or the nurses, or anyone else tries to redirect her attention to the cancer problem.
Yuna's favorite subject in school is math, because math has very logical steps that you follow one by one to get to the answer. It means that Yuna can only really focus on one thing on a time, but ruining her brother's and best friend's lives and having cancer are important enough issues that they each need her undivided attention. Mama thinks so too, but that's where the similarities end, because Mama wants her to focus on the cancer. Mama doesn't seem to care that Motoya always looks at her like a puff of wind is going to slice her to ribbons. Mama doesn't understand that dying is the same feeling as having Kiyoomi give her the barest hint of a nod before scuttling rapidly away in the opposite direction at school.
So when both of them finally visit her, she contemplates being angry for a solid few minutes, because being angry is easy. She was lonely. The needles were scary, and she doesn't understand half of the words being spoken, and she's so sick of apple bunnies. There's only one doctor here that gets her but even he can't do much when Mama gets into her moods. She hates sleeping over at the hospital for further observation because there are no glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling and her brother's room isn't just down the hall.
She doesn't get to say any of that, because Kiyoomi crosses the room and lets her fall into him finally. Motoya pats her head like he does when he's humoring her sulking. With each pat and each squeeze on her hands, another piece of those terrible 4 months, 1 week, and 3 days slides away.
This time, when she cries, she can finally cry about the cancer.
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They are twelve when they climb the tiny jungle gym in the park for the first time.
It's kind of boring. It's really short actually, and there's not much to do on it besides climb up and down and then shuffle around it. They've never played on it before, but today, they sit in a row on the top and kick their legs with their fingers laced together, Kiyoomi on the left and Motoya on the right and Yuna in the middle. They are silent for a long time.
"If you abandon me, I will never forgive you."
Yuna's voice is barely above a whisper, but Motoya and Kiyoomi are so attuned to her that they hear her regardless. Motoya tips his head back to look up at the sky. Kiyoomi focuses on the wood chips underneath their feet. Yuna stares straight ahead.
"If you leave us, we'll never forgive you."
Kiyoomi wonders if he said that. He wonders if Motoya said it. He wonders if they both said it. Yuna huffs out a laugh.
"Never," she says. "I'm right here. I've always been right here."
Motoya grins back, and Kiyoomi's eyes sparkle with something familiar.
"Then so will we."
The next morning, Motoya and Kiyoomi sit their junior high entrance exams, and Yuna swallows down the first of her chemotherapy medication.