Two full years after Hayato's diagnosis, Asahi sat across the table from Yua in Marron. His almost-four-year-old nephew sat on his knees in the chair next to him, concentrating very hard on a coloring page. Yua and Asahi were coloring too, to amuse him, even though Yua's coloring skills were unfair, so it wasn't all that amusing.

It was a warm, late-spring day with cloudless skies and busy streets. Cherry blossoms blew in from the parks and pinwheeled onto the sidewalks like pink snow. The café smelled of freshly baked cake and new coffee. It hummed with the murmur of satisfied customers, with giggles, and stories, and baseball on the television. It was a promising Sunday.

"Jiji, look!"

Asahi paused to glance over as his nephew pushed his paper over and pointed to a crowd of circles and lines scribbled in with haphazard color that maybe vaguely resembled people.

"Ahh," Asahi said, nodding wisely. "Gorillas. How cute."

"Nooo," Tsukushi exclaimed, rising up higher on his knees. "Dat's you, and dat's me, and dat's Mama, and dat's Papa, and dat's Mimi!"

Yua gasped dramatically, tossing one colored pencil to pick up another. "What about me?"

"Oh." Tsukushi hunched over the paper and drew more circles and lines in the corner, then scribbled over it with yellow. "Dat's Yu-chan!"

"Let me see," Yua said, lifting her chin with a smile.

Tsukushi passed the paper across the table, and Yua beamed at it.

"Tsuku-chan! It's beautiful! When did you become such a good artist?"

"I did when Mama um … She did it. And she told me to color the lines."

"She did huh?"

"Yeah."

"Yeah, yeah," Asahi mumbled, focusing back on his own picture. "Bet no one told you that your Mama learned how to color from me."

"Nuh uh."

"Yes, she did."

"No, you can't color good."

"What?!"

"Yu-chan did … Hers are colored better."

"Lies."

Yua giggled and peeked up toward Asahi's picture. "Are you sure about that?"

Asahi huddled over his picture, blocking it with his arms circled. "No cheating."

Tsukushi tugged on his arm. "Me see!"

"No, go away."

"Jiji's real competitive, Tsuku-chan," Yua said, setting Tsukushi's paper back in front of him.

"I'm gonna color it better than him is."

Asahi scoffed. "I'd like to see you try."

His phone went off on the table next to him then. He glanced at it, then picked it up to answer with it pressed between his ear and his shoulder as he returned to his picture. "Hey, Kisumi."

"Mimi!"

There was no response. Asahi set his pencil down and looked at the phone to check he hadn't accidentally hung up. The line was still connected, the seconds ticking by. He put the phone back up to his ear and pinned his nephew under his arm when he tried to take it from him.

"Kisumi?" he said again, listening close for any sign that he was there. He heard only the whisper of an exhale, or maybe not even that, but it was more than enough to drop his heart into his stomach.

He knew he should step out, but his legs were suddenly too heavy to move. So he turned in his seat and flagged his sister down. She glanced up from behind the bar at his frantically waving arm and interpreted the look on his face for exactly what it was. She rushed over to cut the TV off, then hurriedly shushed everyone in the café, somehow convincing them to drop their voices. Everyone looked around to find the reason they all had to be quiet. Yua reached across the table to pick up a squirming Tsukushi and hold him tightly as she gazed at Asahi with wide, worried eyes.

Asahi hunched closer to the table, pressing the phone close with a finger in his other ear. His pulse was throbbing in his throat and he felt a rush of dread, but he listened. It took a few heart-rattling seconds, but he heard it, maybe because it broke halfway through the silence, or maybe because Asahi was focusing in so hard, but it was unmistakably there — just Kisumi crying — and Asahi didn't need to ask any questions to know why.

He felt a sudden cold, like winter was forcing its way back across Japan. It shook his spine, and he wanted to deny it, but all that he could do in that moment was deflate, was sink his elbows on the table and pinch his nose to keep his eyes from stinging so fiercely.

The world suddenly condensed itself down to the table he was sitting at and the broken-hearted voice on the other end of the line. For the longest pause of his life, he just sat there and made himself present, letting Kisumi know, without words, that he was there, and he was listening, and he was absorbing the pain with him.

He glanced up across the table to Yua, whose eyes were wide and questioning, already heavy with a fearful gloss and all he had to do was shake his head. She grimaced and cuddled Tsukushi close, kissing the side of his face to keep him pacified and quiet as she allowed the tears to fall silently. He repeated the same gesture to his sister, who cupped her hands around her nose, took a brief moment to close her eyes and collect herself, then whispered an apology to her customers, and circled around the room to briefly explain what had just happened.

Asahi just sat there and stayed present. He never said anything, and neither did Kisumi. But they also never needed to. It was the third time they sat through the grief in silence.

The casket was too small.

At no point in his life did Asahi ever wish or expect to see a casket built for a child. He didn't know what to do with the image, how to absorb it, if he should absorb it, if he should frantically turn away and erase the memory that had surely already burned itself too deep not to plague him for the rest of his life.

He couldn't turn away. He couldn't turn away, because he could see the sleeping little boy's face, and it didn't look like Hayato at all. In some ways, he was relieved, in others, it only disturbed him more, and he was lost in the further uncertainty of how to digest what he was looking at, what all of this meant, why there were so many people around him crying, while all he felt was cold.

Kisumi was with his family, and that was better right now than him being next to Asahi, but Asahi couldn't deny that he wished that space wasn't so empty. He glanced toward the left of the too-small casket, where the boy he loved was standing with his arms around his mother, his cheek on top of her head as he rubbed her back and allowed her to weep into his suit. Asahi couldn't tell if Kisumi was crying too, because Genji was standing in the way, arms protectively encircled around both his wife and his remaining son. He repeatedly kissed the tops of both of their heads, and nodded at whatever Katsumi was saying to him, as his brother consoled him from close by his side. Both grown men were letting their own silent tears race down their cheeks, and there was something almost warm about that moment, but it didn't quite hit Asahi hard enough to chase away the cold.

He was glad Kisumi was in the arms of his family — of his parents, and his uncle, of the people who'd raised him and cared for him, and whom he should not be in long-standing, silent fights with. They were all together, and the nauseating roller coaster ride that they had occupied for two years was now over. It just brought a painful consequence with it.

His eyes dragged around the room until they landed on poor Makoto, who couldn't even bring himself to stand. He had one arm wrapped tightly around each of his siblings, his face pressed into their stomachs as they ran their hands through his hair and over his shoulders and wiped the backs of their hands across their noses. Haru was sitting in the seat next to him, palm gliding soothingly across Makoto's lower back. His eyes were dry, but his expression wasn't quite blank the way it usually was, and Asahi couldn't decipher in words what little nuances made it different.

Ikuya and Hiyori were in the row behind Haru and the Tachibanas, talking quietly amongst themselves, and occasionally lifting their gazes to each one of their friends. Asahi managed to accidentally lock onto Ikuya's gaze for a moment, and Ikuya tipped his head to the side with an inviting sadness to his gaze. Asahi acknowledged it with the faintest of nods, but also silently informed his friend that he was not ready to sit down yet. Ikuya nodded in return.

Over on the right side of the room, not too far from where Asahi was standing, Sousuke was hunched low over his knees, fingers steepled against the bridge of his nose. His eyes were closed, and he was sitting very still, but Asahi could see his jaw flexing as though he was concentrating very hard on remaining still and undisturbed. Rin was on his feet next to him, standing so close to his shoulder that he was practically leaning against him. His fingers were just touching the top of Sousuke's hair and his eyes were staring with a distant, unfocused focus on the casket, not unlike the way Asahi had been staring at it.

There were several other people in the room, some of them talking, others of them not, most of them crying. A good handful of them were faces that Asahi sort of recognized — Sasabe the swim coach, Makoto's parents, a few of Kisumi's more distant relatives, Hayato's nurse from chemotherapy — and the rest of them were not. The service hadn't yet started, so there were still small clumps of people arriving and new tears breaking out, and there was a frightful number of children, looking either confused, sad, or downright traumatized.

This little detail only made the cold colder until his eyes landed on a lady he felt like he knew, but couldn't place where he'd met her. He allowed himself to be distracted, trying to remember it for a while. Maybe she was one of Hayato's teachers, or another distant relative. Maybe he'd seen her come by to visit on one of the many occasions that he'd spent time at the Shiginos' house during Hayato's battle with cancer.

It wasn't clicking, not quite, and his eyes dragged down to an even smaller small person next to her. Another child, though, this one didn't seem so put down. She couldn't have been much older than eight years old, with a bob of shiny, deep red hair that he felt like he should have recognized. He wasn't sure how he'd missed her until just now, because she was the only person in attendance wearing anything other than black as her shoulders were draped with an alarmingly pink cape.

The little girl bounced restlessly and tugged on the lady's hand — that must have been her mother — who now shook her head and muttered something down to her. The little girl whined a bit, then turned to look over her shoulder with large, dark eyes that arrested Asahi's heart on the spot. She blinked around the room for a quick moment, before those eyes picked up on Asahi staring over at her, and she immediately broke out into a wide and lively smile.

"Asa-chan!" she exclaimed, running over to him without pause, her pink cape fluttering behind her.

Asahi was already sinking, his knees finding the floor by the time she barreled into him with a strong hug and a giggle. Something in him shuddered, disturbed by a temperature change, and when she pulled away from him to smile some more, he was mostly stuck staring at her in awe, noticing her full pink cheeks, and the sparkle in her eyes, just as much as the energy that radiated from her body.

"Emi, is that you?" his voice choked out.

The little girl nodded. "Yeah, did you see my cape?" She pulled the edges of her cape out behind her and twirled around to show him, and he felt a sting crawl through the bridge of his nose.

"It's beautiful."

"Hayato-chan asked me to wear it."

His face fell and the sting spread to his eyes. Emi didn't seem to notice.

"He said to come with my glitter powers, because probably everyone would need it." She glanced around the room at all the weeping faces and thoughtfully pursed her lips. "I think he was right. Here, do you want some?"

She opened a pouch at her hip and a cascade of glitter poofed out onto the floor. She ignored it and dipped her fingers in to cover them with sticky sparkles, then turned her attention back to Asahi and focused very hard on his face as she drew a line on his forehead and then poked each of his cheeks.

"There," she said with a satisfied nod. She snapped her pouch close. "Now you're sparkling. You should start to feel it in a couple minutes."

An amused breath of air managed to escape his chest in a huff, and he smiled, gaze blurring over now. "Thank you. That's a very good super power."

She nodded, then stopped very abruptly when she noticed the way he was looking at her. Her eyes went wide with worry. "Oh no, Asa-chan! Don't cry. I promise the glitter will kick in soon. It'll make you feel better."

Asahi nodded, still smiling, even though he could barely see her anymore. "It's okay. I don't think they're sad tears."

"They're not?"

Something twisted violently in the back of his chest and he found himself grimacing. "I don't know, actually. I can't tell."

"Oh. Are you sad about Hayato-chan?"

A blush of warmth flooded his face and he nodded. "Yeah."

"He was your friend too," she stated.

Asahi's grimace pulled even deeper and the tears were already falling. He found himself nodding again. "Yeah."

"It's okay," she said, reaching up with warm fingers to rub the tears from his cheeks and probably spread more glitter across his face. "You don't have to be sad. That's what Hayato-chan told me. He said he was just changing his mind about being a superhero. He wanted to be an angel instead."

He couldn't stop the gushing cascade after that and neither could she. He'd told himself before walking into the room that he wasn't going to cry today, because he'd done enough crying over the past six months to last him a lifetime, and it was much too exhausting. But he'd just felt an incredible warmth touch his back, like a small hand of comfort, and it, for whatever reason, made him realize that none of the tears he'd already shed had been dedicated to the cheerful little boy who had gone out of the world so gracefully and so quietly that no one had noticed yet how much his once-earthly powers had already changed all of their lives.

So he cried for the loss of his friend this time, and he wrapped his arms around Emi's healthy, growing body and buried his face in her shoulder. She patted his back, leaving yet more sparkles exactly on the spot where the warmth had arrived, and he felt, very truly, that the glitter was already starting to kick in.

Approximately four months later, Asahi officially changed his major, which was just as well, because he basically needed to start school all over again. Thankfully, most of the credits he'd managed to earn over the past three years weren't a complete waste, as he was just moving his physical education degree to a minor and adding business on top of it. It was more work, and he wished his past self would have known about it sooner, but it would be worth the effort. And anyway, he wasn't the only one adding more schooling to his docket. Both Hiyori and Makoto had added business to their degrees as well, and Kisumi had up and completely started over from scratch, aiming this time for nursing. The two Olympic swimmers were the only ones okay with actually finishing school on time.

It had gotten easier bit by bit, especially over the past month, to really focus on and find a passion for all the things he was learning, and he was still more than ready to just get out into the field. But he was also okay with re-reading his papers and staying after in his economics class to strike up curious conversations with his professor.

He was just making it home from one of those conversations, when he walked through the door of his and Kisumi's apartment to find silence. His eyes scanned the apartment from the genkan, then he exhaled a breath and set his stuff down, before walking through his routine check of all the hiding places. Only, Kisumi wasn't in the bathroom or under the bed, and before he could check the closet, he stopped at the desk, in front of Kisumi's open laptop, and stared down at the frozen frame of himself and Hayato taking up a split screen. Asahi was on the left, Hayato on the right, and Hayato was leaning on his elbows close to the camera, attentive, while Asahi's mouth stood partially open, waiting to say something.

Asahi rolled the inside of his lip between his teeth. His eyes dropped to the keyboard and his index finger raised itself over the spacebar, but then hesitated. There was a rumbling discomfort rolling in the pit of his stomach, because he knew exactly the moment the movie had been paused, and he wasn't sure if he truly wanted to stomach the ending. But his eyes glanced up at Hayato's smiling face, and his finger pressed the button within the next breath.

"… incredibly poetic, Hayato. I think he'll get a lot out of that," screen Asahi said.

Hayato giggled, his eyes crinkling at the corners. "Thank you!"

Screen Asahi gave Hayato a sad and tender smile, one that didn't remotely speak the volumes of what Asahi had actually felt in that moment, and would never sum up anything that he felt now. His pause of silence had been mostly edited out, and he still partially wished that it hadn't been, now more so than before, because Hayato's innocent brilliance truly deserved a moment of respect, to be absorbed and contemplated carefully, the way that Asahi had absorbed and contemplated it carefully in the moment.

"Thank you so much for being a part of our video, Hayato."

"You're welcome!"

"Would you like to say goodbye to everybody watching?"

Hayato crowded the screen with a large smile and a happy wave. "Bye, everybody! Bye, Oniichan! I love you!"

He kissed the camera and the screen went back to black. And this time, the ringing charm of his goodbye echoed way down into Asahi's very soul. He stopped the movie, and closed the laptop, then took a moment to let it wash over and away from him as he recalled that warm and comforting touch on his back before he straightened up and moved on.

Kisumi was not hiding, but there were a couple of very specific things missing from their usual places, and he was surprised, but not disturbingly so. He grabbed a pair of shorts and a t-shirt and changed out of his day clothes, then slipped his bomber jacket over his shoulders, tied on his Onitsukas, and took himself back out into the world.

The walk to the recreation center was refreshingly brief, and the first thing that met his ears when he opened the doors was the squeak of rubber soles on shiny wooden floors. He strolled into Court Room One with his hands in his pockets, and his eyes roamed around the chaotic shuffle of university students running up and down the court. It was noisy, smelled like sweat and boys, but it was a kind of familiar that he found he didn't mind in that moment. It had been a long time since he'd walked in on a pick-up game. But none of the bobbing heads of hair scrambling about was the cotton-candy pink mop he was looking for. So he continued his stroll onto Court Room Two, where the echoes of the ruckus from next door were muffled in a mostly empty silence.

The loan thud of a single ball took up the space in the room that would have otherwise been vacant, and Asahi stopped just inside the door, allowing it to shut behind him as he watched Kisumi dribble for a moment, and then lean back into a three-point shot. All to be heard was the swish of the net and the ball finding the floor again. Kisumi jogged up to get it, then performed the same motion once more, then twice more, then dribbled between his legs and spun around an imaginary opponent to toss up a seamless layup. His eyes picked up Asahi's presence a split second after his feet stuck back to the floor, and he paused there, staring across the court with flushed cheeks and damp hair.

Asahi stared back at him, watching his chest rise and fall at a rate that was oddly satisfying. He couldn't remember the last time he'd seen Kisumi out of breath in a moment that didn't involve tears. The sheen of sweat on his neck was something Asahi had forgotten about too, and he didn't know how, because it was attractive. Or maybe it was attractive, because he hadn't seen it in so long. He couldn't be sure. But he felt a warming tingle in the soles of his feet, and he just took a moment to absorb the glimmering mirage of a Kisumi he once knew, daring himself to call it real.

The ball rolled up and tapped the toe of Kisumi's shoe. He ignored it for another breath, then blinked and bent over to pick it up. Asahi chose that moment to cross the court.

As Kisumi straightened out of his bend and met Asahi's gaze again, he noticed the quiet red rimming Kisumi's eyes and the odd presence of shyness in the purple of his irises, as though he'd been caught in a vulnerable moment. The closer Asahi got, the more Kisumi's gaze shifted anxiously. He pursed his lips as Asahi stepped up in front of him, and then he offered the ball without looking.

Asahi held his palms up for it, but when Kisumi set the ball there, he didn't initially take his hands away from it. So they just stood like that for a moment, both holding the rubber sphere between them while Kisumi stared down at it quietly, his gaze distant, as though he was slowly piecing together the words to say. Asahi waited, let him take his time, his own eyes roaming the shine of Kisumi's glistening skin until the other boy finally drew in a careful breath and met Asahi's gaze again.

"I think I'll take that happiness now," he said quietly, "… if you still have it."

Asahi nodded. "I hid it away in the sock drawer for safe keeping."

Kisumi's lips twitched, as though wanting to smile, but not yet ready to. He dipped his head again, brow creasing as something pulled at his chest, and he had to breathe around it. He swallowed and looked back up with shimmering lavender eyes.

"Can you teach me a new way to swim?"

Asahi reached up with a slow hand and softly brushed his thumb over Kisumi's cheek before any of the tears could get away. He nodded again, then leaned in close and touched his forehead to Kisumi's. They breathed, for one quiet moment, accepting the formidable newness of the reality surrounding them with their eyes closed and their trust laid out in front of one another.

The ball dropped from between them, forgotten, and they simultaneously folded their arms around each other. Kisumi buried his nose in Asahi's shoulder, and Asahi buried his nose in Kisumi's. And for one quick moment, it was just like middle school, except there were no more goodbyes to be said anymore.