iv.
Everything about the hours that followed were torture in its purest variety. Nighteye called with no news – and by some sense of the instinctual, Mirio didn't tell him about Eri. About the phone call and the visit to come. He swallowed down upon his bliss and terror with a numb jolt of exhaustion, and didn't get a wink of sleep after hanging up. Tossing. Turning. Scrambling up from the futon to vomit; only to retch harshly and fruitlessly while his insides burned in acidic turmoil.
He chewed through the next days' meetings in a restless distraction. He didn't eat. Couldn't think. Though he put up a good enough façade, managing to seal deals with a smile which pulled painfully at his lips' corners, he thought only of Eri and counted the hours, minutes, seconds until he would see her.
Late, she'd said. She'd be at his hotel room late. And what was late? Ten p.m.? Midnight? The nauseous, dizzy stupor didn't fade: not a hangover but a hideous anticipation which kept Mirio swimming against the current of his delicately established routine.
He may as well have cancelled all his week's business. Nighteye, in gentle understanding, had given him permission to do so. Had even encouraged it.
But Mirio had reasoned that the distraction would be good (would make time tick by more smoothly).
How wrong he'd been.
So when at last the evening arrived in pastel hues of purple fading to dark blue fading to black, Mirio could not allow himself the indulgence of sitting still. For a long time – hours, perhaps – he paced the hotel room in an expectant daze. Jumping at the most innocent of noises – muffled footsteps in the hallway, a bird taking off in flapping panic outside the window. Nudging the furniture. Adjusting his hair in the mirror, senses attuned to the spontaneous appearance of a wrinkle or grey hair. And for the first time in years, Mirio became overtly aware of how old he looked. Age happened. He knew he was not immune. But with a sinking horror, he considered how strange it would seem for Eri to see him like this.
Would she pick out the dull circles beneath his eyes like plums from branches?
Would she find in his smile the weighed, humdrum quality of a man not a hero?
She'd thought he was dead. Perhaps that would be how she'd remembered him all these years – sunken and cold and very, very dead. The thought struck a blade through Mirio's heart, and he wondered – did he have any life left in him to make her remember otherwise?
He changed his clothes twice. He ordered a platter of cold foods and left them waiting upon the table by the TV.
He watched the figure skating semi-finals, but paid no heed to the glittering images that flashed before him. He lay in a stiff, impatient line upon the futon. And as the clock continued to tick, and tick and tick and tickticktick, Mirio was overcome with the terrible fear that she wouldn't arrive. Perhaps in a desperate fever, he'd only dreamed their phone call. A cruel trick. A shattering illusion conjured by the aching mind.
But no, there was still the number with which she'd called him. It glared bright and tempting out from the cellphone screen.
What if? What if she didn't come?
Mirio got a call from the reception desk at eleven p.m.
The voice over the line was irritated, sounding tired and harsh as Mirio was informed he had a visitor – a visitor, the reception-desk-voice said, and with such an undertone which could only have been to remind Mirio that prostitutes and parties were strictly forbidden in the hotel. But oh! Yes! Yes, he'd been expecting her, the visitor, and the reception-desk-voice muttered touchily that she would be up shortly.
The line cracked downwards into black silence. And Mirio could have screamed for all the relief and all the exhilaration.
He waited in the doorway with his eyes set hard upon the end of the corridor. The gloomy, golden-glowing corridor which stretched itself further outwards into separating space.
And from around its corner, like a mist-clad fairy in a stale sunset, she appeared at last. Long, white sleeves over long, white arms. Long, white hair down her long, white neck. Eri froze there, mere paces away, and swayed uncertainly in the dull light. She looked at Mirio and Mirio looked at her, both of them speechless and upon the brink of something earth-shattering. Mirio sensed it. The way time stopped with the same skidding plunge as his heart. The way everything before and behind them fell into a tight, terrible emptiness. She felt it too. Perhaps more so, for even so far away – she was so close! – Mirio could see her tremble.
"I– I'm sorry it's so late," Eri said quietly, remaining rooted at the end of the hallway.
Hesitantly, slowly – for fear of scaring her off – Mirio went towards her. "That's okay. Really. I was completely awake."
Not entirely untrue. However, its okay-ness had more to do with the fact that the moment had lost any sense of time or place. It was neither late nor early, neither here nor there. There was only Eri. Eri, not Eri, not the one who'd haunted Mirio all these years. She stared at him, lips parted to speak but still saying nothing, and looked so wrong in her confusion and shock it was almost heartbreaking, almost beautiful in the way of art.
"Do you, umm, want to… come in, Eri-chan? To my hotel room, I mean. I have–"
"Yes," Eri said in a gasp. Her accent strange and bounding like cursive. "I want to come in."
Trying to hide from the imposing stillness of the hallway was futile though. Even on the sitting cushions, beneath the brighter illumination of the room, there still lay between them a chasm of space and memory.
They were strangers whose paths had once crashed violently in a jumble of good intentions and failure. They were strangers whose paths had gone separate ways once again, though for years Mirio had fought against it. And by the hollow rips in their flimsy bond, he found himself disappointed. This was no reunion. After all that had come to pass, this was not a moment to be inscribed in poems of romance or tragedy. No – after everything, this was meant to be an apology. Simply that.
An apology without explanation, because there could be no explaining why he'd failed her. Why he hadn't been strong enough to be the hero she'd needed.
An apology without absolution, because there was no such thing in the universe for Mirio after he'd let her go.
Mirio bowed his head, dismayed by the untouched selection of food between them and weak under the dewy, glazed look on Eri's face. "This is strange, isn't it?" he murmured, feeling false and diabolical as he tried to smile. "Like a dream."
"Yes," Eri just about whispered, dropping her eyes from him. "A dream."
Did she hate Mirio as much as he hated himself?
"Please help yourself if you'd like something to eat!" Forced cheer. "The food here is delicious." Small talk.
Eri's face wilted into a tight look of sadness. "I'm sorry to have made you go through all of this, Lemill– Mirio-san. I've already eaten dinner."
"No, no. Don't be sorry! I just thought…" What had he thought? He'd thought with his heart, that's what he'd thought, and it amounted to idiocy. "Something to drink maybe?"
"Umm… I don't think– No. No, thank you, Mirio-san."
"Right. Okay. That's totally fine."
Silence again. Eri's back remained upright, her hands tight in her lap like shivering pearls. Everything about her was polite and polished, and simmering with an unreadable emotion which dared not escape. The question blared between the walls of Mirio's skull without the promise of being turned to words: Where did Overhaul fit in in all of this? He did his best to quell the swirling, seething swell inside of him – now was not the time for Overhaul. There was only Eri, and all the things she deserved being given to her too late.
Shuffling, curling his own hands into fists and flattening them again, Mirio heaved a stuttering breath. "Eri-chan. I need to tell you–"
She crumbled. And under the distinct weight of the moment, she began to cry.
"Eri!"
"I can't do this."
In a sweeping motion, the material of her skirt dancing about her legs in pale blue airs, she jumped up and circled around the table. Around Mirio. For the door. But he was up too, too soon for her to get far, and before he could stop himself his hand was around hers. She didn't fight him, instead looking back in a quiet plead of tears and soundless gasps.
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry!" Mirio choked out. "I couldn't save you." Not thinking about the words, finding no strength to make them stop. "I couldn't keep you safe. All I wanted was for you to be safe!" And then he too, with a spine-breaking weight upon his shoulders, began to weep. He couldn't smile for her this time. What had it gotten her before? He couldn't smile for her this time because to do so would be a betrayal. He had no right. Not when she trembled and he trembled and all the immensity of his weakness set itself against her beautiful, terrified face. "I couldn't keep my promise to you."
"No…" he heard her murmur. "No, Mirio-san."
"I'm so sorry."
"It was all my fault."
"No, Eri." His turn to object. "Nothing– nothing was ever your fault! Ever."
A merciful touch of her fingers to his cheek. And such perfect fingers they were, long and white and with all the same gentleness as years before. When had she come so close? Why wouldn't the tears, the suffocating ache they brought with them, stop? Something slipped. Something broke, and for sacred seconds the two of them were separated from the unwritten rules of decency and dissociation. The years crashed down, no longer so empty and no longer so silent.
Mirio pulled her into him, and Eri buried her face into his neck. Still wet. Still warm. And for a long time, they stayed like that: holding each other with the ghosting sense that they'd been there before. Her in his arms, held close and safe. He, for a moment, carrying what he could only describe as the entire universe in the dangling circumference of his grasp.
She was clouded in a potent scent of soap. Something chemical and clean, a harsh overtone to the blossom of lotus flowers.
She still felt so tiny alongside him.
Both of them sighed, and in its falling sound there opened up before them the beginning of something terribly confused. Their old selves shed, the strangeness of the new falling about them in a concealing curtain.
It was hard to believe that it all lasted mere minutes, that within a handful of clock ticks – tickticktick – they were back at the table. Still stuttering against tears, but with a certain loose relief which made it easier to smile. Easier to talk. Neither of them ate. They didn't touch again, though Eri's shape had bored itself into Mirio's memory like a million hot pinpricks. She asked him questions. Simple, easy questions about what he did, and where he lived, and how old he was. Thirty had never seemed like such a grey number compared to twenty.
Mirio couldn't believe she was twenty.
She didn't tell him anything about herself apart from her age though, and to expect her to do so now seemed unfair somehow – even though the questions loomed over them, unseen but distinct as glass. However, she was here. Uneasy, and tending to flinch at sudden movements, but here. She was okay, and for the moment Mirio accepted it as enough.
So he answered her questions tenderly. Gently. He showed her photos in his phone of the places he'd been and the people he knew. "These guys are Tamaki and Neijire," he told her. "We all knew each other in high school, and they got married after graduating."
"Married," Eri murmured, almost in a trance as she gazed stiffly at the image. Then she hummed. "She's very beautiful."
"And they have two beautiful kids. Look, here they are." Mirio grinned proudly, though the smile didn't quite reach his heart. "I'm their godfather."
"What's a godfather?"
"Oh… Well it's… actually, I don't know. I suppose it's just a nice title."
Charmed, Eri took the phone and stared at the photo of Neijire and Tamaki's daughters for a long time. A long, long time, and after a while lifted her fingers to stroke at the screen.
Something in the motion was shattering. Mirio tilted his head at her, and tried hard to think of something to say. "Do you have anyone special in your life, Eri-chan?"
"A husband."
"Oh!" Mirio cried falsely. "That's wonderful! Was it the man you were with at the market?"
She drew a harsh breath. Tears welled in the corners of her eyes, though it was hard to say if they were new or simply the remnants from before. "No," she said, and handed Mirio his phone back. "That was his… brother." Then she stood once again, more gingerly this time, and avoided meeting Mirio's eye. His heart sank for the umpteenth time that evening – the photo of the girls had upset her. "I should go now."
And feebly, Mirio only nodded. "Okay."
The reception desk on the bottom floor now stood dark and abandoned. The night outside was still, hushed and waiting to consume Eri in its obscurity. She didn't want Mirio to walk her home; and though he couldn't bear to let her go yet, he didn't argue. He couldn't ask too much. She'd come and he'd done what he needed to, although it didn't seem like enough. He still owed her the world, and he couldn't possibly give that to her in the space of an hour and a wept apology.
In the border of the doorway, they paused. Hesitated. The air was hung heavy with unspoken somethings, and Eri – more specter than human, too aglow in the halfway light of the hotel and the star-speckled darkness for Mirio to look away – seemed about to speak. God, he wanted to hold her again. He wanted to feel her heartbeat align with his. Nothing suspect. Nothing of the sort. Only the simplicity of his arms cradling her in a mock attempt at the safety he wished for her. All the warmth. All the tenderness. Like all those years ago.
With a stunning grace, Eri reached out for him and clasped his hand in both her own. "I want to see you again, Mirio-san," she said, almost desperate. "Please let me see you again."
"Come tomorrow," he replied, too eager.
Eri shook her head. "Next week. The same night and time."
"But–"
She was on her toes. Her lips, cold and soft, were to his cheek in a fairy-light touch of skin to skin. And then she was gone from him in a blurry grace of doe-limbed rushing and a fluttering skirt. White against the black. Stealing Mirio's heartbeats with her into the night like a sylph running through myth. He watched her, fingertips lifted to graze the place her lips had been, and imagined a cold scrape down the entirety of his spine despite the sweat which marred his nape and brow. That moment, that very second, he began to count the hours once more.