FOURTEEN
On the verge of sinking into sleep, drifting from one indefinable moment to the next, she barely tastes whatever it is that Chris ordered for her and barely registers whatever she sees out the café's windows (if her eyes are even open). A single concrete thought circles slowly through her mind: Pick up Carol. Pick up Carol. Pick up Caro—
"Miku, hello, Earth to Miku. Did you fall asleep? Wake up, Miku, or else you're gonna choke and then what kinda doc would you be if you let that happen?"
She blinks herself back into greater awareness, helped in no small part by Chris' shoe prodding insistently at her calf. She finishes chewing, then for the sake of saying something she mutters, "I wasn't asleep."
Chris cocks an eyebrow. "You were close enough to it that you didn't hear me talking. Here, buck up and have some coffee." Chris slides her own mug across the small table with a warning glower to forestall any protests Miku might make, which is entirely unnecessary, because they both know Miku folds easily to Chris' fussing.
Her hands remember steadily smoothing bandages across purple-red welts, and her shoulders remember the weight of Chris' arm after three months of unbearable nothingness—from the very beginning, their friendship has been defined by a deliberate application of care.
"You were saying?" Miku asks once she's downed half of Chris' coffee.
"Tsubasa visited me."
Chris trails a finger down the condensation gathered on her glass of iced water, shoulders pulled inward now that the spotlight is on her, gaze ostensibly affixed on her half-eaten meal but intermittently peeking at Miku from beneath her fringe. Tsubasa visited me, Chis said.
Tsubasa visited me, Chris said, and that means… that means the stalemate has broken.
She remembers that Tsubasa and Maria had made it clear that they needed time to think without anger coloring everything, because Chris—and Miku, Hibiki, Genjuurou—participated in what can generously be called a plan and uncharitably a machination. Logically, a visit from Tsubasa means this grey interlude between them has ended.
There should be some form of anticipation here, right? Yet… sometimes she thinks she is a stagnant, sunless person, because when she reaches for the parts of her that used to quicken with emotion, she finds… a lack? No… not exactly. Instead of finding anxiety, anger, or hurt, or whatever else, she finds a lump of numbness. The grey interlude exists within her as much as it exists externally.
How much time has passed? How much inertia has the numbness accrued?
To help burn away that heaviness, she pulls up the memory of Carol sharing a day's worth of crêpes with Hibiki: flour lingering on Carol's smooth brow, raspberry jam smearing at the corner of Hibiki's wide smile, Carol's slip into rapid-fire German, and Hibiki's bright, adoring gaze on Carol and Miku.
She breathes. She exists. She's warm, and awake. She can think again. She can feel again.
"How did that go?" She says it in an encouraging voice with a brief glance to Chris.
"Better than I expected." Chris fusses over one rolled up sleeve to avoid eye contact, but her broad shoulders relax and her jaw relaxes from its uncertain jut into something more confident. "I mean, we didn't actually talk about the elephant in the room. Mostly it was—well—Tsubasa wanted to… check in, first, I guess. About, about Finé, and whatever. She brought me breakfast in a picnic basket." Chris rolls her eyes and snorts, but her delight at Tsubasa's regard is clear.
An emotion spikes in her sternum: a fierce gratitude toward Tsubasa for putting aside her anger to check on Chris' wellbeing.
When thinking about both Chris and Finé in the same train of thought, inevitably she remembers the bruises, the burns, the welts that had marked Chris' back. She remembers her hands trembling in anxiety, and she remembers how they became steady when she treated Chris' wounds. She remembers how Chris had kept her face averted, her shy thanks directed to the floor before she'd fled. She remembers wanting to say something, yet being afraid to say the wrong thing and keeping silent instead.
"Anyway, I was thinking—if you want, I could take Carol for a few hours one of these days, so you can talk with them. They'll listen, now."
"I know they will," is all she says, touching her fingertips to her temples; she doesn't feel awake enough to deal with complex things—not with Hibiki absent, and the grey fog still curling its tendrils over her thoughts.
Chris knows to let the matter lie.
For Chris, however, she asks one question: "Do you feel better?"
"Yeah. I do."
[***]
Her lab coat shines too brightly outside. The sun directly on her head makes her wish she'd thought to bring a hat or parasol, but at least she has sunglasses to help her tired eyes a little. She just, just wants to sink into her bed and close her eyes and sleep for rest of her life….
No. Those are unhelpful, bad thoughts. What she wants is to spend time with her daughter, and she will. She won't be a ghost in her own daughter's life. She wants to be the kind of parent her own father was to her, except better: she loved greeting her father with a flying hug when he finally came home after a long shift, she cherished the puzzles and dolls and other toys he gave her, and she delighted in spending time in his presence, but all that had eventually given way in favor of his expectations for her future career.
She won't do that to Carol.
Reaching out a hand to get Chris' attention, she asks, "Can you help me choose a new toy for Carol?" They've just passed a toy store; detouring there probably won't take long.
Chris shrugs, "Sure." They double back and pause to stare at the aisles and aisles filled with bright, colorful toys upon entering the store. "What does she like, besides reading literally anything she can get her hands on?"
"Music—she has a real miniature harp, so I doubt she'll want any toy instrument." She shuffles to the left, an eye on the aisle labels. "She'd think them childish, anyway. She has very little patience for chess and board games, so those are certainly out of the question." She thinks of the toys her parents would get for her. "Maybe a puzzle of some sort…."
They find the puzzles section pretty quickly, and Chris quickly dismisses the suggestion of jigsaw and tiling puzzles: "C'mon, Miku, those are boring. She'll either piece them together really quickly, or she'll pull her hair out and Hibiki's trying to figure out all the sky pieces or whatever."
"You might have a point," she concedes, recalling the disaster that wrecked their living room one rainy day a few years ago. Hibiki… simply does not have an appreciation for 1000-piece jigsaw puzzles. She's still missing five snow pieces for her Mt. Fuji puzzle—they have also lost assorted chessmen, dice, letter tiles, place markers, and whatnot. "What about a Rubik's cube?" She picks up a five by five by five one.
"Eh, maybe. Look, these 3-D puzzles look way more interesting than the other ones."
"Chris, we've all heard horror stories about stepping on LEGO pieces in the dark."
"Better you than me," Chris says, then tilts her head. "Hold on, I'll be right back." She darts away before Miku can ask.
"O…kay."
She keeps looking while Chris pursues whatever thought she'd had, but nothing really stands out. Maybe she'll call her mother, instead, to see if her parents kept any of her old toys. She remembers fiddling with puzzle boxes for hours on end on lonely evenings and weekends; those might be something to help keep Carol's energetic mind entertained.
Chris comes back with a smirk and her hands behind her back.
Miku feels a strange sense of dread. "What is it?"
"The perfect toy for Carol." Chris stops just in front of her and pointedly keeps whatever is in her hands out of sight. "Go on," Chris jerks her chin toward the front of the store, "I'll pay for this and get them to gift wrap it so it's a surprise, then I'll meet you outside."
"Chris…"
"—Don't worry, she'll love it, I swear." Chris continues smirking, but at least makes an effort to appear reassuring.
She rolls her eyes, and warns, "Don't embarrass her in front of her friends, okay?"
"Alright, alright, I won't, now get going." Chris' smirk broadens into a happy grin.
Outside, her eyes squint automatically against the sunlight until she manages to shove her sunglasses back onto her face. Her thoughts linger on the mystery of the toy Chris is buying; she finds herself anticipating Carol's reaction, mostly on the basis of Chris being mischievous about the entire thing.
The bell jingles, and Chris steps out.
"Ready to go?" She glances at the surprisingly elegant purple gift bag that Chris carries.
"Yeah."
They walk more briskly now, Miku picking up her pace as she realizes that Carol's class is about to end. By the time they arrive at Matsuoka, the grey fog over her mind has completely dispersed; her body feels less like a clumsy, lumbering thing and more a well-oiled machine.
"You're smiling," Chris remarks, leaning against a pillar, hopelessly wrinkling her suit.
"What?" She glances at Chris in askance.
Chris shrugs one shoulder. "It's good to see you so… lively. Sometimes, I think… I don't know what I think, but you know I worry about you, Miku."
She answers, softly, "I miss Hibiki. I miss our friends."
"Things'll get better," Chris promises. "Even if I have to knock sense into Hibiki, you'll see. And our friends miss you, too."
[***]
Carol's wary look at Chris brightens into hungry curiosity when Chris presents the gift bag to her. "Thank you, Miss Chris," she says dutifully and then adds under her breath but not quietly enough, "for the bribe," to which Chris only smirks.
"Carol," she reproves, tweaking Carol's ear.
"Sorry," Carol tells Chris almost-genuinely, and she promptly sticks her free hand into Miku's and tugs demandingly.
Thusly they leave in a hurry—not because they want to avoid Maria and Elfnein as they have on previous days, but because Carol is eager to unveil Chris' gift away from the prying eyes of her classmates. Carol lifts the bag up and down a few times, probably trying to guess its contents by its heft and sound.
From the school, it is only a short walk and bus ride to the Tachibana house, though it seems longer when Carol's running ahead and back every few minutes, seizing and dropping Miku's hand in turns as she goes. "Why are you so slow, Miku?" she whines just as they reach the corner of their block.
"Did you have too many sweets at lunch today?" she huffs, but lengthens her stride just a bit. After all, she, too, wants to see what Chris has gotten for Carol. It honestly probably isn't a bribe, not with the way Chris acts.
At their gate, she gives Carol the keys, just to bleed away some of that energy; Carol, of course, bounds up the stairs and is inside before Miku and Chris are halfway to the door. They're lucky that it takes Carol a minute to fumble her shoes off, letting them catch up.
While Carol dives into the mass of tissue paper in the bag, Miku alternates between watching Carol's expression and Chris' glee, which Carol doesn't notice.
Carol's expression narrows into confusion. Her arm retracts, and in her hand is—
A stuffed tiger posed on its haunches.
"I'm not a baby," Carol says sharply, the beginning of a sullen flush on her face. It's the beginning of a tantrum, if Chris doesn't manage to diffuse Carol's train of thought.
"Oh?" Chris responds in that mild tone that is sure to infuriate Carol, except a twitch of her hand tells Miku not to intervene yet. "Are you saying that Elfnein is a baby, then? She has an impressive collection of these, you know. She loves playing with them—she's even given them all names."
Elfnein's name was enough to give Carol pause, but Carol listens with a longing hunger to the rest of Chris' argument. Carol quickly forgets her offense in favor of this insight to Elfnein; if Chris were anyone else, Miku might have rebuked her for her tactlessness. It's clear, however, that Chris is waiting for Carol's response.
Carol breaks eye contact with Chris to stare at the plush in her hands.
Miku wants to pull Carol into her arms—to shut the world away. She settles for lightly brushing her hand over Carol's hair.
"Tora," Carol declares. "I'll call her 'Tora.'"
"That's it?" Chris tilts her head at Carol.
"Yes."
"Not very imaginative, is it?"
Carol frowns, "She's a tiger. THE tiger, so that's her name. All the other tigers are just copying her."
"Huh. That's actually pretty cool."
Carol considers the matter closed after that, turning to Miku to say, "I'm going to do my homework now."
"Tell Chris 'thank you' for Tora first," she prompts Carol; part of her worries for Carol's lack of an explosive response, but she knows she has to give Carol some space to process her thoughts and feelings.
"Thank you, Miss Chris, for getting me Tora," Carol says much more genuinely and bows properly this time.
"You're welcome, Carol," Chris says instead of trying to tease Carol.
"I'll be by with some snacks in half an hour, okay, Carol?" Miku asks, to which Carol nods as she scoops up the tissue paper and gift bag.
Once Carol is out of earshot in her room, Miku pins Chris with an exasperated look.
Chris fiddles with the band of her watch. "I got Elfnein a stuffed lion for Christmas," she mutters. "I don't want Carol to feel left out, and—and she needs to remember that she's a kid, she's allowed to have fun and let herself be coddled sometimes because she has you guys now, and—"
—Miku hugs her.
"Thank you, Chris."
[***]
Later, at bedtime, she's in the middle of tucking the covers around Carol when Carol finally admits, "I want to see Elfnein. Please, Miku. I… I miss her."
Her hands pause by Carol's feet. She looks back at Carol, whose gaze is a little blank because she's already taken off her glasses; even so, Carol looks solemn and tentatively hopeful.
"I'll talk to Maria and Tsubasa," she promises.
If it's true that Tsubasa and Maria are willing to talk, then really—there is no point in letting the greyness in her drag her and her family down.
a/n:
We're more than halfway through! Comments keep me motivated :P