Year 1

Yoshino stepped through the open double doors, curiously scanning her new surroundings. The room she found herself in was larger than any she'd ever seen before, with a high ceiling and places marked on the vast tiled floor for beds and equipment; it was obviously meant to hold much more than the single solitary bed at the far end of the room, toward which Dr. Murata led her briskly.

As they drew closer, she noticed that the floor was dotted with white, here and there at first, but thickening into a veritable cloud around the bed. She knelt down to examine the first spot she saw; as she moved closer, her eyes were able to pick out the shape and feed it back to her cyberbrain as a coherent image.

A paper crane.

Delicately, she lifted it off the ground and turned it back and forth.

As she looked around, she realized that the rest of the spots on the floor were cranes, gathering into a great heap at the far end of the room. She stood up again; where had they all come from?

Her eyes moved to the bed, to the boy who lay there, his left hand working furiously at something she couldn't see. When he withdrew it, it held a finished crane, which he promptly dropped on the floor before reaching for a new sheet of paper. He didn't seem to have noticed that he had visitors; his attention was focused entirely on his cranes, his face a rigid mask of determination.

"Good morning, Hideo," said Dr. Murata. "Feeling all right today?"

The boy glanced upward briefly, and then returned his gaze to the piece of paper he was working with. Yoshino thought this was very rude of him, but Dr. Murata seemed unfazed.

"I've brought someone to visit you," he continued cheerfully. "This is Yoshino; you remember me telling you about her, don't you?"

The boy, Hideo, offered a short nod, then dropped another crane on the ground and reached for more paper. His left hand manipulated it with the precision of a factory machine.

Usually Yoshino would have said something herself by this point, but she was beginning to feel that her presence here was unwanted, and so she remained silent.

"He's been mostly unresponsive for the last two years," Dr. Murata had told her only the day before. "I'm not sure this will work, but it's worth a try – he might be more open to speaking with someone closer to his own age."

Hideo had been almost completely paralyzed after suffering a major spinal injury in a plane crash. It was Yoshino's task to talk him into accepting a replacement prosthetic body like her own, an idea to which he had not been at all receptive.

Yoshino wasn't particularly enthusiastic about her new job either; while she understood that she would have died without her prosthetics, her current condition wasn't exactly something she wanted to try to push onto someone else. Still, it was an excuse to get away from her normal, boring routine, and so she'd leapt upon it the instant Dr. Murata had asked her.

"Well, I'll leave you to it, then," said the doctor. He patted Yoshino on the shoulder and then left the room.

The sound of rustling paper was nearly deafening.

Yoshino stepped forward slowly; Hideo seemed not to notice, absorbed as he was in folding his cranes.

A tall pyramid of cardboard boxes stood against the wall. Curiously, she peeked into the nearest one.

It was full of still more paper cranes. Was this really all he'd done for two years?

"Wow," said Yoshino quietly, stepping back from the box. She turned to Hideo.

"Are you making all of these so you'll get better someday? You've gotta have more than a thousand by now…"

He ignored her. Another crane fluttered to the ground.

This was going to be interesting. How was she supposed to talk him into a prosthetic body if he kept pretending she wasn't even there?

Yoshino sighed and resignedly began boxing up the cranes that still remained on the floor. It was something to do, and at any rate, being here was better than being bossed around by the usual nurses. When she left for the day, she had asked Dr. Murata, in a very quiet, concerned voice, if it would be problematic for her to skip her therapy sessions and come back tomorrow. It was no trouble at all, he'd said at once, and he promised to make sure the rest of the staff knew what was going on, so no one would worry.

When she smiled as she did then, one could almost suspect her of just having manipulated something to her advantage.

The days began to fall into a distinct pattern; after breakfast, Yoshino would make her way across the building to the ward where Hideo lived (she had downloaded the hospital's floor plan to her cyberbrain months ago, and had no difficulty finding her way.) She'd tell him good morning, he wouldn't respond, and then she'd clean up all of the paper cranes he had produced the previous day and stack them against the wall with the rest. Once the floor was mostly bare, she would curl up against the pile of boxes with a book, which she didn't actually read; she had learned to work her cyberbrain with her eyes open, and the book was just to cover her stillness while she was lost within the mazy patterns of data.

One morning, several days later, as Yoshino was boxing up the latest flurry of paper cranes, she came across one that was different from the others; instead of plain white, it was a light lavender color. She supposed that it had been a part of an envelope at one point, as she could see writing still on the underside of one of the wings – it must have made its way into the piles of scrap paper that the nurses delivered to Hideo every day.

She held it up.

"Hey, Hideo-kun, I really like this one's color…can I keep it?"

"No."

It was the first word she'd heard him say.

"How come?"

"It's not yours," he said tersely, without looking up.

"All you do is fold these dumb things, you'd think you'd have enough by now," muttered Yoshino, tucking the lavender crane into the box with the rest.

The sound of folding paper stopped. She turned back to Hideo; he was glaring fiercely at her.

"They aren't mine either!"

"What? Then who are you making them for, you weirdo?"

"They're for…someone else! And you're the weirdo – you have purple hair!"

"Shut up about my hair, okay?" snarled Yoshino, getting to her feet at once. She made it to the bed in three quick strides, with Hideo still staring daggers at her.

"What on earth is going on here?"

Both children looked up at the same time; one of the front office nurses was standing only a few meters away with her hands on her hips. She must have heard the commotion.

"I finally got him to talk," said Yoshino coolly, pushing past the woman. "Excuse me."

She spent the rest of the day in her room, alternately fuming and perusing the few news sites she could access through the hospital's limited Net, repeatedly swearing to herself that she'd have nothing to do with that boy for as long as she lived. However, when the next morning came and Miss Ohta asked if she'd be joining the group that day, she politely declined and went off to Hideo's room as she usually did. He'd probably just go back to ignoring her anyway, and she could sit and explore in peace.

To her surprise, he seemed genuinely pleased to see her again when she showed up in his doorway, and even mumbled a little "good morning" in response to her usual brusque greeting.

Yoshino had just tucked the latest box of paper cranes against the wall and settled in to pretend to read her book when she heard her name.

"Yoshino-chan…"

She looked up. Hideo was gazing down at her, looking as though he might burst into tears.

"What?"

"I…I'm sorry I said your hair was weird."

"Oh," she said, and turned away again. "It's okay."

There was a long pause.

"I thought you weren't going to come back after yesterday."

"Me too," said Yoshino briefly.

"Why did you?"

"Because Dr. Murata wants me to tell you to get a prosthetic body." And because this is better than being with those other idiots I have to spend time with, she thought, although she didn't say it.

"Oh…"

Yoshino was silent for several moments. At last, she looked up again.

"Hideo-kun?"

The boy blinked. "Yes?"

"How come you won't get prosthetics, anyway?"

He pointed at her.

"Your hands…can you fold cranes with them?"

Yoshino sighed.

"I guess I could. What is it with you and the stupid cranes anyway?"

"It's not stupid," he mumbled, his brow furrowing.

"Sorry," said Yoshino. "But, really…why do you keep making them?"

Hideo stared at her for a long moment, as if deciding whether or not to share something that was very close to him, and she waited patiently for him to speak. He took a deep breath.

"There used to be a girl there, in the bed next to mine, where you're sitting now…only after the accident, she fell asleep and she wouldn't wake up again. I wanted her to wake up...she was the only one who was still…who didn't….and then…"

He fell silent again, but his expression told Yoshino everything she needed to know; the girl had been very dear to him, somehow, and she'd died. Wordlessly, she got up and placed her hand on top of his.

"If I can't keep making cranes for her," said Hideo, "I'm fine with staying the way I am."

Yoshino thought for a moment, and then smiled.

"So if I can show you that I can fold paper cranes, you'll get a prosthetic body?"

"I guess…"

"All right," said Yoshino. "You're on!"

She reached for a piece of paper; it slipped out of her fingers almost immediately.

Perhaps this wasn't going to be as easy as she'd thought.

The afternoon wore on, and although Yoshino had finally managed to maneuver a sheet of paper close enough to herself on the tabletop to actually work with it, she had yet to produce a single crane, or anything, really, other than a crumpled mess. At first Hideo had politely directed her, but he had given up after about half an hour and was now watching mutely with a blank expression. Every so often Yoshino would look up and smile at him, trying to pretend that everything was all right, but her frustration was growing harder and harder to mask.

She had progressed enormously in the last year; all of the doctors and nurses said so. She could eat and put on clothes by herself, and she hadn't broken anything in months. And still her senses were nowhere near delicate enough to be able to fold a sheet of paper.

She pushed her chair back from the bed and got up.

"Tomorrow. I'll do it tomorrow, for real."

Hideo merely nodded. He didn't believe her.

That night, as Yoshino lay in bed, she began searching through the old patient records of the ward where Hideo lived. She was curious about the girl for whom he'd done nothing other than fold cranes for the last two years - what had she been to him to merit such devotion? Could they have been siblings, or had some other close relationship?

She raced along the Net paths as she searched for the information.

Finally, she managed to turn up the appropriate file; there were three girls who had been admitted in connection with that particular plane crash, all of them burned beyond recognition and unable to be identified. Two had died only the day after incident – Yoshino pushed their files out of the way, focusing on the third. She scanned the file eagerly, soaking up the information it contained.

The girl was estimated to be six or seven years old at the time of the crash; she had also been the least outwardly damaged, although her internal injuries had been severe enough to send her into a coma. She had lived in this condition for another week and a half, until finally she was pronounced brain dead. No relatives had ever come to claim her remains.

So Hideo had spent two years folding paper cranes for a girl he'd never spoken to, whose face he'd never even had a chance to see.

That was definitely weird.

Yoshino was about to release the file and go to sleep when she noticed a small icon at the bottom, next to the date of death. It was an icon that usually indicated the transfer of a patient from one ward to another.

Why would anyone have transferred a dead body?

Curiously, she followed the path.

The data displayed in her mind shimmered and rearranged itself.

A very familiar face appeared in her cyberbrain, next to a single name.

Yoshino.

It was the file she'd tried to find months ago, that had always seemed to elude her.

Name unknown. Age unknown. Gender: Female

Why hadn't she looked harder, been more curious about where she had come from, about her life before this body? All this time and she'd barely given it any thought.

The patient's brain functions were supplanted with micromachines in an attempt to induce consciousness. The stress proved too great for the patient's injured body, which had be replaced. Memory loss was unavoidable due to the extent of the existing neural damage, although the patient has since made a full recovery and regularly exhibits normal and above-normal mental facilities.

The data went on into a lengthy description of her progress so far, but Yoshino scrolled past it without seeing it. She was thinking of all of the boxes that were piled up next to Hideo's bed. She was the girl. Every crane in every one of those boxes was for her.

He'd wished and wished for her to wake up, and when she hadn't, he'd continued to fold cranes for her, every day for two years, without even knowing what she looked like. He was willing to stay paralyzed for the rest of his life, all for her.

She pushed the file away. She didn't want to see anymore.

Tomorrow, she thought. Tomorrow I'm going to make a perfect crane, and then I'll tell him everything.

"Good morning, Hideo-kun."

"Good morning, Yoshino-chan," he replied quietly.

She sat down next to the bed and coaxed a piece of paper across the tabletop, dragging at it with her fingertips.

She was definitely going to do it this time. Then she'd tell him, very quietly, that she was the girl he thought had died, and he'd never feel compelled to make another crane again.

Very delicately, she rolled the top corner of the paper down to meet the bottom corner, and then flattened the crease with the heel of her hand.

She'd be there for him during every step of his rehabilitation; she could help him learn to walk, to use his hands, to do everything she wished she'd had someone to show her. She would finally have someone to be different with.

Yoshino flattened the folded triangle into a square, then picked it up, easing her thumb under one of the flaps.

She would even show him the strange, vast world of light and information only accessible by cyberbrain; her dearest secret.

She opened the flap and began pressing it gently downward into a flat diamond.

It was the only way she could begin to reciprocate the thousands of wishes he'd already made for her happiness. She would convince him to get a prosthetic body, and then she would never leave his side.

So suddenly that it startled her, the paper snagged on her fingertips, tearing neatly across the top corner.

She looked up at Hideo; he had turned away.

Slowly, Yoshino pushed the ruined piece of paper away, then got to her feet.

"I'm going to practice folding paper cranes so that I can make them for you someday, okay?"

Hideo turned toward her with wide eyes. She smiled at him, and then left.

"Not going to visit your friend today, Yoshino?" said Miss Ohta as the girl complacently filed outside for morning exercises with the rest of the group.

"No, ma'am," she said quietly.

Someday she'd be able to fold paper cranes, and then she could think about facing him again.

(A/N: Fun fact; this episode is actually how I learned to fold cranes. .

Also, I loved finally getting to write dialogue in this chapter XD Yoshino gets progressively more catty from this point forward, and the next chapter is pretty much all about her cattiness, so it should be a bit more fun to read than just her doing stuff and then navel-gazing about it. Stay tuned, and thank you as always for reading and reviewing 8D)