Ken snored with the confidence of someone who had never once been embarrassed by it.
Eadlyn woke at five forty and lay still for a while listening to the forest, which had its own morning sounds separate from the mountain's daytime sounds — smaller, more tentative, the first birds testing the air before the full chorus decided to commit. He got up carefully, took his wash things, and walked to the waterfall.
The water at that hour was cold in a way that rearranged him. Not dramatically — he didn't gasp or perform surprise. It simply made him present in his body in a way that sleep had diffused. He stood in the shallows and let it, and the mountain was grey-green around him and the sky above the treeline was beginning to lighten.
He thought about Rin's question again.
Was there a girl. In your neighbourhood.
He knew, with the certainty of someone who'd spent months reading people, that this was a question with history behind it. History she hadn't offered and he hadn't asked for. The casual tone had been carrying something heavier — not grief exactly, more like the particular feeling of a memory you've held so long you don't quite trust its accuracy anymore. Something from childhood, preserved imperfectly in the way children preserve things.
He didn't know if he was the boy she remembered. He honestly couldn't say — he'd been young, he'd moved, the UK contained a non-trivial number of boys who played in neighbourhoods. But he understood why she'd asked, and he understood why she'd asked it sideways, as a race prize, at a moment when the water and the day gave her cover.
She wasn't asking whether he was the boy.
She was asking whether it was possible. Whether coincidences like that happened to real people.
He waded back to shore and decided that whenever the right moment arrived, he'd give her an honest answer to the real question. Not pushed. Just — available.
The cliff was low enough to be manageable and high enough to be genuine.
Ken changed entirely at the base of it — the easiness fell away, the performance stopped, and what was left was focused and careful and gave simple instructions clearly. This was the thing about Ken that people who only saw the arcade version missed: there was a serious person underneath who came out when the situation required him. When the situation required it, Ken was someone you could trust with ropes.
He climbed first, moving with the economy of someone who had learned that rock-climbing punished showing off. Each hold tested before weight was committed. Each step deliberate. He reached the top, secured the ropes, called down.
Rin went next. She climbed the way she swam, the way she walked through a classroom — like the space had been designed for her and she simply needed to use it correctly. No hesitation. No second-guessing. She reached the top and immediately looked down to assess the others' positions, cataloguing the difficulty of each section.
Manami. This was the one Eadlyn watched.
She was fit — track club, real stamina — but climbing asked for upper body strength and grip in a way that running didn't, and halfway up her arms began to communicate their disagreement. Her face, from below, showed the internal negotiation happening: the part that wanted to stop, the part that refused to, and the part that was embarrassed there was a negotiation at all.
Rin said something from the top. He couldn't hear the words, just the tone — not encouragement exactly, more like a quiet acknowledgment that the next section had a better foothold and she should look three feet to the left. Information rather than sympathy, which was exactly what Manami needed. She found the foothold. Adjusted. Kept going.
Reached the top.
Then Eadlyn.
He'd been watching all three climb and felt, accordingly, the particular pressure of being last. The expectation of competence he'd somehow generated since arriving at Hamikawa High had followed him up a mountain, which he found faintly absurd.
The first section was fine. The holds were obvious, the rope was solid, the height was manageable. Then around the midpoint something happened that he couldn't entirely explain — some convergence of tiredness and the sudden visibility of the ground and the specific silence of the moment where everyone above was watching — and his body, without consulting him, decided to be afraid.
His foot slipped.
The rope caught him the way ropes catch people — violently, and then holding — and he swung against the face and scraped his forearm and his shin on the rock and then just hung there for a moment, his heart going much faster than the situation technically warranted.
"Don't freeze." Ken's voice from below, calm, the voice of someone giving information not comfort. "Find the next hold. Left foot, two inches up."
From above, Manami: "You're okay — the rope's solid—"
He found the hold. Breathed. Climbed.
When he reached the top, Rin's hand appeared first — extended, matter-of-fact, not making anything of it but not withdrawing it either. He took it. She pulled. He was up.
Manami had the first-aid kit open before he'd finished standing.
"Arm," she said. Not a question.
He showed her. She cleaned it with the focused attention she brought to things that required care, her hands steady, her expression concentrated — and this, he thought, was the version of Manami that existed without audience. Not the composed one, not the elegant one. Just someone who was good at taking care of people when they needed it, without making them feel cared-for as a category rather than as themselves.
"It's not bad," she said.
"I know."
"You were scared."
"For about four seconds."
She looked up at him. "That's allowed."
He nodded. Didn't say anything. She finished bandaging and packed the kit away.
Ken appeared at the top via a side path that circumvented the face, took one look at Eadlyn's patched arm, and said: "You know, most people do the scary thing once."
"I wasn't going to not finish."
Ken considered this. "Yeah," he said. "That's very you." He sat down on the rock. "Photo. Everyone. Now."
They took the photo.
It was a good photo — slightly too bright on one side, Rin's expression doing the thing where it tried to look neutral and ended up looking like she was thinking about something much more interesting than the camera, Ken with his arm around Eadlyn's shoulders with the ease of ownership, Manami looking at the view rather than the lens.
Eadlyn kept it. Later, when he looked at it, he noticed that all four of them were slightly turned toward each other rather than toward the camera, which was either an accident or evidence of something.
He decided it was evidence of something.
Diary — Camping.
I've been thinking about what Ken said. That he wants to be like the stars — there whether you look or not.
I spent years believing that was what I was. Present but undemanding. Available but not needing.
I think I confused that with actually being there.
There's a difference between being patient and being absent.
I think I've been absent in a very quiet, very convincing way.
I think the mountain knew that.
Four seconds of honest fear.
It was clarifying.