infinityneverlasts: (Sick username, btw) Kosuke is 18 as of right now, and has just graduated high school - and btw, this is going by the Japanese school year, which begins with April and ends in the next March.
Lillyannp: Thank you very much! I can't say I've been in Kosuke's position before, so I hoped I had portrayed the shock well enough. This chapter, and the next three, will detail Kosuke's life following this. We'll get to Kyoya's introduction and the plot proper in chapter eight ;)
I also just want to take a second here to say that the age of adulthood in Japan has thus far been 20, but will change to 18 in 2022. So while I'm not going to place this fic in a specific year, we're just going to pretend that this takes place in a Japan where 18 is considered adult age. Good? Good. Let's roll.
Kosuke spends the next month learning everything that her mind can possibly fit.
She learns how to do the laundry. Which medicines to use for which sickness and ailment. How to clean the bathrooms. How to double-bag the garbage. Which cleaning liquids can be mixed together and which ones should absolutely not, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, be mixed together. How to clean out the gutters of the roof. How to sew up tears in clothing. What to do if a machine is on the fritz. How to wash the dishes when the dishwasher is one of the machines that is on the fritz.
Blisters form on her palms at some point, leaving them not hard as rock but not as soft as they were before. She goes to sleep later and gets up earlier. She gets used to tossing up her hair in a ponytail and sometimes forgets to take it down before she goes to bed.
There is a lot of paper involved in this process, mostly because of money. Damn, does she have to deal with so many money issues. Not just how to do taxes and make a budget, but picking up the things her parents left. Emiko and Marti have left a trust for all three of them, and that atop of the inheritance they all get in a three-way split, and that on top of their stashed money—tucked away in a fireproof box under her parents' bed, most of it Kosuke's only there because she could never really grasp how a bank account worked—means that they are all pretty well off.
At first, anyway.
There are inheritance taxes, the funeral, cremation, coffin, and other "death" fees, and overall a good chunk of it all is put away just to pay for the house and the children's school costs. Kosuke could go on and on about every last detail, but she really doesn't care to. She finally gets an understanding of everything from Okina's parents, but even then she swears her brain physically hurts after.
After it's all taken care of, they're well-off enough, but Kosuke starts calculating everything down to the penny.
The children eventually return to school—Minami to second grade, Hitsuji to preschool. Together, this will cost them about 11,000 yen, which is only a problem because their income is frozen cold, something that Kosuke will have to face later. Okina and Kohta had both put off Seneca and Oshimi for as long as they could, but time had run out, and towards the beginning of May it is time to return. Kosuke, meanwhile, decides that there is simply no realistic way that she's going to college at a time like this. So one refund later, she's officially the only one out of the five of them not attending school.
The hardest thing of all is shutting down The Lily Bowl.
It really hurts, closing the doors on the restaurant that her parents had poured their sweat, blood, and tears into, but she just doesn't have a choice. She was never going to sell the place—it was their home just as much as their business—but she isn't grown or experienced enough to be a business owner and manager, and she definitely cannot take her parents' places in the kitchen.
She has to fire all the workers with one last severance pay. None of them are really close (there were less than ten, and no one had held a job there longer than a year) but they take it with grace and give her no trouble for it. She hangs a sign on the fence outside that reads CLOSED INDEFINITELY. Just about every day, she has at least five people coming for a meal, and she has to send them away with a quick explanation and an apology.
In summation, she just learns how to be an adult.
She gets back on her feet with such a vengeance that Okina and Kohta are scared. Their visits become half to comfort her in her grief and half out of concern for her mental state. She's always on her feet, always asking questions. She carries around a notebook and crams it full of notes and footnotes and sticky notes on top of that.
The first time it's time to clean the house, she chooses to do it by herself, her sleeves rolled up to the elbows and a cloth tied around her mouth to block out the fumes. By the time she's done, the house is actually almost too clean to look at, too lemon-scented to breathe in for long, and she cannot lift her arms up for the next two hours. Okina has to spoon-feed her dinner.
She finds a schedule for herself unlike any schedule she's ever had before. Seven o'clock, everyone wakes up. Seven-thirty, everyone eats cereal for breakfast. Seven fifty, walk the children to school. Nine ten, get started on the chores. Eleven o'clock, lunch. Twelve o'clock, head out and take care of whatever daily outings need to be taken care of. Three-fifty, return home with kids from school. Resume paperwork. Five-fifteen, microwave her and the children's dinner, or head over to Okina's for it. Eight-o'clock, put the kids to bed. Ten o'clock, throw cold water in her face when she starts to nod off. Midnight-ish, go to bed and pass out in seconds.
Repeat.
Okina and Kohta offer their help on the weekends and she turns them down almost every time. She is grateful, of course, she lets them know, but she's spent so long letting everyone do everything for her that she has to just figure it out herself. She realizes at some point that her constant glare of determination makes her look more like she's always angry about something. She can't fix it, though, even when everyone backs away from her in fear.
She's always in the future when it's really the present. At breakfast, she thinks about lunch. In the middle of one chore, she's planning on how to do another. Even as she talks to Okina and Kohta and a few people who didn't come to the wake or the funeral but want to offer their condolences, she's thinking about how much the week is going to take out of the bank.
She gathers up just about every bit of junk food she has left in the house, picks out which ones are just borderline fine enough to stay, and gives the rest to Okina and Kohta. When she passes them a box full of cookies, chips, and only God knows how many candies, they take it with polite understanding. When she hands them her remaining bottles of Candy Juice, Kohta pins her down to the couch so Okina can take her temperature.
Every time her muscles ache, or sleep starts to creep up on her, she either splashes cold water in her face, chugs down a cup of caffeine-filled coffee, or just repeats her parents'-not-parents voice in her head.
Keep going and be strong.
There are moments of weakness, of course. Once or twice she struggles with something, gets up to ask Emiko or Marti about it, and remembers she can't. Mornings where she wakes up and remembers what's happening. Times when she has to go into their bedroom to get something, but never lasts more than two minutes before breaking down and hoping the kids don't hear her before she manages to get out again.
There are nights where she can't sleep, and it's not really a solution, but creeping into the kids' bedroom and sitting between them as they dream helps soothe her some.
Keep going and be strong, she always remembers when she leaves, making sure to tread lightly so that the creak of the floorboards doesn't wake them. Keep going and be strong.
If she doesn't spend her every waking moment taking care of anything and everything, she's taking care of Hitsuji and Minami.
And sweet merciful heaven, Kosuke has never given her parents enough credit, because taking care of one child, let alone two, is hard.
It does take a while for Minami to get back to normal. It isn't until maybe three weeks after the start of it all, almost May, that she actually starts to smile again, maybe not as freely but just as genuinely. She becomes a bit more likely to whine, getting shaky-voiced where she usually would have brushed things off, but besides that, she falls back into her old habits. She runs around the house barefoot, steals the broom to pretend to be a witch, puts on her swimsuit when it starts to rain and goes outside to dance in the downpour. She makes more paper rings in the chain she's stuffing in her closet, long enough to all the way up the stairs now. In the mornings she makes Kosuke watch a fashion show of the outfits she's considering.
(Nine times out of ten, this takes so much time that Kosuke eventually has to allow her to just wear her rainboots when it's not raining and her most formal dress when it's time to go to the park.)
Hitsuji somehow does a little better, so much so that he's almost—almost—back to normal in almost no time. He laughs and he makes other people laugh when he can. If he does something that gets a laugh from anyone, he'll do it a dozen times more. He makes tents out of the unused chairs in the dining room and takes out the pots and pans to bang on them like drums. He likes to do puzzles and do just about any kind of game that involves a ball, but refuses to do them without someone (hence why paperwork always takes so long). He can play hide-and-seek and tag for hours on end.
Kosuke still cannot hold them for more than five minutes at a time, and for now, she still sometimes has to make excuses that lets her stay seated for a little bit. "Here, you do it and I'll watch, okay?" She wakes them up in the morning and puts them to bed every night. When they fall down at the park, it's up to her to run to and comfort them. If their tummies ache, it's up to her to drop everything like hot metal and get to the bottom of it.
She loves them, her sister and her brother, she loves them and she wouldn't give them up for anything in the world.
But it is. so. hard.
See, the ways that kids and adults deal with grief can be similar and dissimilar. They both cry, of course. They can both pent up how they feel and let it out at the same time. They both turn to the people close to them for support.
But kids—at least those at Minami and Hitsuji's ages—have ways of dealing with grief that range from simple lashing out and misbehavior to full-on regression. That is what makes it all so hard.
It's not enough that Minami is always full of energy, likes to talk, and bounces from one thing to the next. On top of that, losing both her mother and her father and having to accept that her sister really isn't her sister anymore so much as her new parent just makes her…not insufferable, but "hard-to-put-up-with." If Kosuke asks her to stop doing something, she'll roll her eyes or say a sassy excuse to make Kosuke look like a tyrannical villain. If she keeps doing it, Kosuke has to put her foot down, and by that point she'll either start crying or lock herself in her room. She gets upset more easily in general. Kosuke loses track of how many times they'll be at the park, her sitting with Okina or Kohta or both of them, and Minami comes running to her, crying about a game her and some other children are playing. Not because they were cheating or being mean, but just because she wasn't winning.
She cries when Kosuke tells her to go to bed, cries when Kosuke tells her that she's not getting dessert before she finishes her dinner, cries when Kosuke won't buy her whatever toy or candy she asks for at the grocery store.
Hitsuji shares a lot of these problems, particularly crying at simple things, albeit it's actually wailing for him. But he also starts talking more babyish. He stops saying his "L" sounds and instead of saying "I want" or "Can I?", he relies almost solely on making whiny "Eh! Eh! Eh!" noises. He starts wetting the bed again and loses grasp on any answer more difficult than "yes" or "no." So, if he asks Kosuke to play hide-and-seek, and she says "in a minute", he'll just ask again and again as if she isn't answering him at all. Bad habits that he already had before get worse. He refuses to stay in his seat for more than thirty seconds at a time. If Kosuke says "no, don't do that", he translates this as "let's make this a game!" and will keep doing it, giggling and smug, until Kosuke plants her foot a little firmer. Then he starts crying.
There's a night where Hitsuji spends thirty minutes straight screaming his face red because Kosuke won't let him open the knife drawer. There's a morning where Minami wants to go out into the rain, but Kosuke tells her no because it's thundering, and she cries about it until she finally tries to sneak out, and bawls when that sends her right into time-out.
They exhaust Kosuke to no end, and once or twice she snaps at them a little too harshly, her temper pushed just a little too far over the edge.
There's more to it than just exhaustion and annoyance, though. Kosuke's always wondering if she's doing it right. When should she let things slide, and when should she put a stop to them? When should she try to convince them to do something else, and when should she just tell them to stop doing whatever it is they're doing, period? She reprimands them when they misbehave, but when she praises them for good behavior, is she balancing it enough? With only Kosuke left, are they going to grow up spoiled, distant, rotten?
For that first month, that's what causes her the most stress. Still, when either of her siblings begin to ask for Mommy or Daddy, or just weep at the never-changing knowledge that they are gone forever, not just for a little while, that there is no "when they come back", Kosuke just puts that all aside and pulls them into her arms.
It's about three and a half weeks after the night her parents died when she and Kohta go on a kind of-sort of date on one of the weekends he comes home. It ends in complete, utter disaster.
Minami and Hitsuji are dropped off at Okina's house while the two of them go out. Okina gets her ballet practice out of the way early to put the time aside. She waves goodbye to them, but the shallow smile on her face as she waves goodbye to them tells Kosuke that even Okina knows that something's up.
Kohta and Kosuke just walk around the town side-by-side. They talk about Kohta's upcoming semester and Kosuke's woes with all the paperwork. Kohta buys her dinner at a local restaurant and she makes a point of getting the most inexpensive dish, a fried fish meal that she doesn't even like but eats regardless. They stroll through stores without buying anything, and when they make it to the old antique store, they stand in there for ten minutes just so they can hear all the grandfather clocks go off at the same time.
Kosuke hardly enjoys herself for a second.
Oh, she manages to put her worries aside just for the night. She likes to walk around town without meaning, she likes eating food that isn't microwavable-ready or leftover from the night before, she likes listening to the clocks sing together. The night is neither hot nor cold and she lets her hair down for the first time in a while, dressed in something besides jeans and a T-shirt.
But there isn't a second between her and her boyfriend that feels even slightly tender. The way they talk to each other is like two strangers at a party, waiting for their friends to come and get them. Their meal is spent in near silence before and after they get their food. As they shop, they both feign fascination with everything they find just so they don't have to try to come up with a conversation topic.
It's stiff, awkward, almost entirely void of emotion, and Kosuke is more bothered that she isn't surprised, above all else.
Kohta does at least try to avoid any stressful conversation. Her parents do not come up once, he doesn't ask about her siblings. Nothing is said unless she brings it up first. Problem being that those things took up the entirety of Kosuke's life at the moment, so what else was there to talk about?
It's only a few minutes after the clocks chime that Kosuke gets a phone call from Okina.
Hitsuji is really, really sick.
It takes five minutes for Kosuke to run to the Henkas' house, at such a speed that she's almost flying and just about falls flat on her face five times. She runs so fast that Kohta arrives almost seven minutes after her, completely out of breath.
Okina physically draws back from her when she flies into the house, practically screaming, "What's wrong?"
She's pulled into the living room, where her little brother is curled up on the sofa, holding his belly and crying so awfully. Kosuke smells something vile—vomit. Hitsuji looks pale, and despite the tears, a little sleepy. A line of drool goes down his chin.
Minami runs to her as soon as she comes in. "Is Hitsuji okay?"
Kosuke forces herself to calm down and not act even the slightest bit scared. She cannot deal with a child scared solid when there's already one on the brink of consciousness. "I'm sure he's fine, Mina. Hold on."
She goes to Hitsuji and kneels down. He won't even look at her. He's whimpering, and more drool spills out.
"Hey, buddy. Hey. Can you tell me what's wrong? Why're you crying?"
The answer she gets is garbled at best. "Tastes bad…"
Okina appears near-instantly with a cold glass of water, but when Kosuke presses it to his lips, he draws back with a whine.
"It's just to get the taste out, bud. Just a little bit."
She tries to coax him to it, but he's scared and stubborn, so he just burrows his face into the sofa cushion and refuses.
Every worst possible scenario is bouncing around Kosuke's head like pachinko balls. She considers a simple stomach bug, then food poisoning, then the first step of a deadly illness.
Kosuke asks Hitsuji questions—"How do you feel?" "What did you eat?" "Did you eat something you weren't supposed to?"—but he won't answer any of them. Kosuke remembers this behavior from Minami's age. He wants to be better and stop hurting, but he also wants everyone to leave him alone, not do anything.
"Kosuke, breathe. You have to breathe."
She's right, because Kosuke is only just now realizing that her lungs are tight. She takes a deep breath, practically sucking in air, and takes a second to collect herself. Kohta has a sponge and a rag, going to clean up the mess—troublesome but necessary. Minami is on the brink of freaking out. Hitsuji is still drooling and whimpering. Okina is ready to help.
"Get me the phone."
She does so without question. Kosuke punches in the numbers and waits two rings before the voice of poison control comes on.
"Poison control, what's your emergency?"
"My little brother is—he's thrown up twice and he's drooling and holding his stomach. We don't know what's wrong but—"
"I understand, ma'am. Please remain calm."
The woman on the other side is calm, very calm, and that gives Kosuke mixed feelings. One part of her is thankful for it, and the other part is demanding to know how the woman isn't freaking out as much as she is.
Minami has become a ghost in the corner of the room, and Okina is hovering over Hitsuji while Kosuke answers every question.
"What has he eaten?"
"Just dinner, I think. I'm trying to ask but he won't talk."
"Is he running a fever?"
Hitsuji tries to reel back from her, so Kosuke has to basically pin him down palm-to-forehead. "No, it doesn't feel like it."
"Does he have an appetite?"
"Kosuke."
"We can't even get him to drink water."
"Kosuke."
"Alright, I'm going to give you some instructions."
"Kosuke."
"Do you have any idea what's wrong with him? I can't—"
"Kosuke."
She whips around, almost expecting Hitsuji to be a heap on the floor, only to see that he isn't anywhere near the sofa. Rather, he's found the puzzle on the table on the other side of the room. He has a piece in hand and was looking around very intensely for where to put it.
"Ma'am, he seems to be fine now. Thank you." She hangs up.
Hitsuji does drink a glass of water when offered to him. Okina tells Kosuke that she had noticed him eating quite a bit of the takeout they'd ordered, but had just marked it up to a big appetite. Asking Hitsuji one more time what he ate answers the question once and for all. He goes to his little backpack of toys and pulls out a torn and empty packet of silica balls.
Everyone heaves a sigh in relief when the whole thing ends with a simple burp and a request for more water. Then Kosuke just about football-tackles her baby brother when he looks for more silica in the packet.
Oh, she will be able to laugh about it later. Just not now. It doesn't matter that it was just a little belly trouble that got solved within thirty minutes. It could have even been less than that, and Kosuke would have been just as scared, because she only had two family members left. Only two, and they both depended on her, and she can't lose either of them, she can't lose either of them and have it be her fault.
Okina takes the blame for all the trouble, but Kosuke takes it right back from her. Hitsuji is a picky eater just like every other kid his age, but when he has a food that he liked, he will stuff it away like a black hole. She should have warned her.
After that, the three of them just linger around Okina's house until her parents return home. Mai comments on the smell of lemon cleaner just barely covering up putrid vomit, and nearly faints when she's told what has happened. Kosuke is offered the takeout that they haven't eaten, and though she does take it for later, the sight of food alone roils her belly too much at the moment.
Kohta leaves before she does, with a mumbled goodnight-and-take-care-of-yourself and a brief hug. He goes without turning to look back. When Kosuke and the children leave not long after, Okina looks like she wants to ask something, but in the end she just bids them all a good evening.
The kids go to bed easily enough that night, and Kosuke once again sits between them. As she does so, she realizes two things:
This is going to be even harder than she imagined.
She cannot let these children out of her sight.
Kosuke sighs loud enough that she worries about waking both of them. Keep going and be strong.
It is roughly two weeks later that she and Kohta break up.
Kosuke saw it coming from a mile away, so it does not hit her full-force like it would have. It comes and goes like a bad storm.
It's been far too long since they last shared a genuine smile. They haven't kissed since that one time weeks ago, and just about every other physical contact between them has been stiff and fleeting. Throw that on top of their conversations turning into those awkward wish-I-wasn't here chats, and it was an inevitability.
Such an inevitability, in fact, that it's a bit of a surprise that they still even have to talk about it. After a long day of grocery shopping and the first round of paperwork and reading, Kosuke is in the middle of loading the fridge with more microwavable meals—which she has just realized was a problem, but a problem that will flourish into something else later—when there is a knock on the door.
It's Kohta, and the look on his face alone tells her what they're about to discuss.
"Hey, Minami?" She calls up the stairs. "Kohta and I need to talk about something. You and Hitsuji stay upstairs, okay?"
She gets a distant "okay", and can just barely hear Minami telling her brother not to go downstairs. Kosuke doubts he understands why, but whatever.
She and Kohta take a seat at the only dining table they haven't pushed up against the walls. Kosuke guesses that The Lily Bowl's dining room is to forevermore be abandoned. The chairs are stacked away, the windows are almost always closed to get privacy from passerby, and the floor that once had hundreds of feet walking across it every day now serves as home to Hitsuji and Minami's toys. Even now, two coloring books and a great array of crayons is spread across the middle of the room.
Kohta does not immediately say anything, not that Kosuke can blame him. It ian't like he was dropping a bomb, more like he was confessing a secret. Kosuke doesn't know what to say; she just waits.
"I'm…going to need to head to Oshimi pretty soon," he tells her at last. "Stay a little while, I mean. I've been putting it off, but…you know."
"Yeah, I know."
"And…" Kohta rubs at the back of his neck. His green eyes flicker down to the floorboards. "We…"
Ten full seconds of him failing to form proper words, and Kosuke decides she's going to have to do this herself.
"You don't have to say it."
A slow, shaky breath escapes him. Somewhere upstairs, something or another thumps on the floor. The muffled giggles that follow somehow make everything tenser instead of less. It's not just a reminder that they aren't really alone, but that this conversation isn't the most important thing in her world.
"Kosuke, listen." He raises his hands in a hopeless kind of gesture. "It's not that I want to—hurt you, or anything…"
"Kohta, come on. I know that. You don't have to apologize for anything."
"Don't I, though?"
Kosuke chews on her lip for a second. Footsteps start padding down the stairs, pause, and retreat back upwards. Kosuke would usually laugh at the inaudible "oh, wait" Minami or Hitsuji just gave, if it weren't for…literally everything else.
"Should've done this before," she murmurs.
Kohta's mouth twists like he's in pain. A hand reaches up and scratches above his brow, then drags down his face. "I—I know. I just…God, Kosuke, you know how much I suck at saying what I mean! I tried to, I did, but…"
"You should have said something," Kosuke says, "but I should have, too. I knew what you wanted to say, and I just swept it under the rug. Didn't want to face it."
"So…You know this isn't just coming now, right? I really didn't want to do this so soon after—everything, but you know what I said. All the cancelled plans, and the calling in sick, I wasn't sure if you could—"
"Kohta, I know why this is happening, but could you just…not say it? I'm not mad and I'm not blaming you, so please just—Don't."
Kohta nods, swallowing thickly. Kosuke rubs beneath her eye, and realizes that she isn't even anywhere near crying. She doesn't know whether this should unnerve her or not. Maybe she's just cried herself out by now.
In any case, the conversation just seems too short. Everything is taken care of, but it still doesn't feel right. She should be more upset about this. At the least, she should be saying more.
"I'm sorry this didn't work," is what she settles on. "I should've tried more."
"It's fine," he says. Then again, "It's fine."
She takes a deep breath and lets it out in a whoosh. "Take care of yourself at Oshimi, yeah?"
"I think I should be telling you that," he answers readily enough. He's smiling, at least a little bit.
Kosuke scoffs and flicks her hand at him, joking. "Nah. I'll be fine."
She will be, eventually. Of that she is sure. Just because this is happening doesn't mean anything is going to be different; it's just a slight change in schedule, that's all. Maybe a quick explanation to her siblings and Okina, answering the inevitable "What happened to you and Kohta?" questions. Nothing that will ruin her life.
Kohta stays for a little while longer, and the two of them exchange meaningless chit-chat. Somehow, their post-breakup chatter is less awkward than the pre-breakup chatter—not enlightening conversation, sure, but certainly better. Eventually the children cannot be confined upstairs any longer, and when Minami finally calls "Can we come down now?" the two of them wrap it up pretty quickly.
Kohta bids her goodbye, grants her one last light hug, and leaves. Not ten seconds later, Minami comes requesting a snack, and another thump upstairs that's just a little too hard has Kosuke checking up on Hitsuji—that was just how life is, it doesn't slow down to let drama sink in. Kosuke and her boyfriend breakup, he leaves forever, it's time to take care of the kids. Tick-tock, tick-tock.
Of course, things just can't be that painlessly simple, can they? No, the amount of times "It's fine" resounds in Kosuke's mind apparently did not matter.
It isn't until that night's dinner (once again ramen, not at all bad, but served so many times in the past month alone that Hitsuji and Minami both deflated at the sight) that Kosuke finally understands the weight of what's happened. Maybe "weight" was the wrong word. "Meaning"?
Two years ago, she'd stopped a guy who she'd seen before but never talked to from leaving his books behind in the classroom. He did it again two days later, and she stopped him again with a quip at his memory. The third time three days later, she asked if he wanted a note. The fourth time the very next day, she gave him his book, turned him around, and slapped a sticky note on his backpack reading "REMEMBER YOUR BOOKS!"
After that, a combination of them talking to each other outside of class, sitting together at the cafeteria, him introducing her to his friends, and still leaving his books gave her the impression that they were at least friends. A day in the gym, a volleyball bomping against her head, and Kohta tearing the already-apologetic thrower of said ball to shreds gave her the impression that maybe he liked her a little more. By this point, Kosuke had already found herself admiring the softness of his hair, the little snort he did whenever he laughed, and the way he gave his complete and utter attention when anyone spoke to him. As Okina herself had said, it was Kosuke who made the first move, asking him if he wanted to go hang out specifically alone.
One date became another and another and another. Kohta introduced her as my girlfriend and Kosuke introduced him as my boyfriend. Jet just about lost his voice laughing when he found out, and it took a punch to the gut from Kosuke and Kohta both to shut him up. They exchanged gifts on Valentine's Day and White Day. They went to one another's birthday celebrations. The first snowfall after they made it official, he had insisted on walking her home in the weather, and Kosuke initiated the fight with the first flying snowball. He bumped into a tree and got showered in a snowy downfall, and once she was done laughing at him, Kosuke initiated their first kiss—her first kiss—too.
True, he had never spent too much time at her house, and neither she at his, but they were happy enough. "I love you" was a rare phrase but Kosuke knew they both meant it.
That happy, lovey-dovey, comforting relationship is not only over now, it had all been for nothing. Their first kiss had been for nothing. The "I love you's" had been for nothing. Any conversation they had about their future had not only been for nothing, they could no longer be remembered without being painfully aware of the irony of every word.
It's her fault. That is really the cherry on top of the cake, the one last "Ha-ha!" Their split had been mutual, sure, but mutual on the fact that it was her that was the problem. Kosuke knows she hadn't "led Kohta on", but she doesn't know what else to call it. She'd asked him out under the false pretense that she was starting something and was going to go through with it. Every time she promised that she wouldn't miss something again, or that she'd try a little harder, those were all just lies after lies after lies dressed up in hugs and kisses.
Kosuke doesn't even know what she's upset about. That she had wasted so much time on nothing? That three years' worth of memories were permanently soured, on top of each and every memory she had of her parents? That she'd done some kind of irreversible damage to Kohta, had given him reason to suspect each and every girl that he felt affection for after? That there was going to be more girls for him, but she couldn't imagine any other boys for her? That even though all Kohta could have done for her these past weeks was offer her his comfort, she appreciated that comfort so much she didn't know what she was going to do without it?
Kosuke manages not to cry—again, probably because she'd cried herself out long ago. Still, after she sets the last bowl into the dishwasher rack, she presses her hands to her forehead and leans heavily against the counter. She's hardly even thinking about anything. Even after it occurs to her that it's time to get back to work on everything else, she just puts it off.
A sudden weight twining around her leg has her flinching so hard it hurt. But it's only Minami, her little arms wrapped around Kosuke's leg, almost leaning against her. She isn't even looking up at Kosuke, just staring down at the floorboards with eyes that are wide and thoughtful.
Maybe she thinks Kosuke's stressed out over her work, or that she's suffering yet another bout of grief. Maybe she has even pieced together that Kohta's visit is his last. Whatever it is, she doesn't say anything about it.
Kosuke reaches down and brushes her sister's hair back from her face, and once again wonders when it got so long and curly.