[takeda sadako]

She hadn’t seen Ren again before he left for the chuunin exams in Akazaya. They’d beaten the shit out of each other and then separated without a word, and Sadako had thought that bridge was burned for good—something else she’d ruined, like she ruined so many things, and in the end it was for the best because she didn’t fuckin’ need him anyway. She watched his fights, though. Focused on Akirei for the first couple rounds, determined not to pay a single ounce of her attention to Ren, but when the combat rounds came she had no choice but to sit and watch him fight. He was good. Better than her, that was for sure. Couldn’t catch him after the exams, either. With everything going on, there was no way to get him alone, and she’d sooner cut out her own tongue than say the things she wanted to say to him with anyone else around to hear. She was impatient, but there was time, right? She could just track him down when they got back to Ame—it wasn’t like he’d be hard to find, always at Lord Sixth’s side. But then he went missing. When he was found, he didn’t wake up. Stable but unconscious, she’d been told, and when she’d begged and bullied for more information she eventually found out that it had taken the Head Medic and the Hyuuga defector hours, but they’d put him back together. Barely, and it was a miracle he was alive, but they’d done it. He was still unconscious, and it would likely take a little time for him to recover enough to wake up completely. One overly sympathetic nurse—one of the Susanoo aunties, some relative of Yua’s who knew Sadako tangentially—let her in to see him while he was sleeping. She’d left almost immediately. Her eyes burned with tears she adamantly refused to shed, and if she stayed a moment longer she thought her chest might collapse in on itself, that she might sit down on the floor and never get up again. Getting what she needed was easy now that she knew how to do it—the guys in the Himin Machi didn’t tend to ask her too many questions—and she went back to the hospital an hour later with her emotions securely locked down and a gift in hand. She left it on the little table at his bedside, then stood beside him for a few minutes: watching his sleeping face, hoping for some sign of consciousness there. He would wake up and she could say what she needed to say and everything could go back to the way it was before. He would smile at her and crack some stupid joke, and she would roll her eyes and all would be forgiven. He didn’t wake up. Sadako went home. At his bedside, she left a bottle of very expensive whisky—entirely out of a teenager’s budget, but it seemed like the grown-up kind of gift appropriate for a situation like this. Folded beneath the bottle was a note scrawled in spidery handwriting on plain white paper, as sparse in language as it was appearance. I’m sorry. — Sadako

Ishikawa Ren -- 537

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