Yuna's POV
By the time Aunt Rosa's house came into view, I had already accepted that this town was going to be the end of me.
My clothes were stiff with dried mud. My legs ached from the sprint across half the neighborhood. My suitcase was being carried by Kai because it had fully given up on itself, and honestly, I related to it on a spiritual level.
But there it was. The house.
Bigger than I expected — two stories, painted in a shade of blue that had probably been cheerful once, back when the paint was new and the world was younger. Now it had faded into something softer, the kind of color that made the house look like it had been standing there long enough to have earned a few opinions. The front porch was crowded with potted plants in every size mismatched clay pots, plastic containers, one repurposed tin can all of them stuffed with something green and growing, like the house itself was slowly being reclaimed by the garden.
It was loud before we even reached the gate.
From somewhere inside came the high, piercing wail of a baby. A television blasted what sounded like the climax of an afternoon drama at full volume. A dog barked furiously at something invisible, paused, then barked again with renewed conviction. All of it stacked on top of each other into one solid wall of noise that reached me before I even touched the door.
Kai, walking beside me with my battered suitcase, didn't even blink.
I blinked enough for the both of us.
Before I could knock, the front door swung open.
Now that I wasn't in full survival mode, I got a proper look at him in the daylight messy black hair, sun-kissed skin, the kind of easy, relaxed confidence that made him look like he belonged anywhere without even trying. He'd already set my suitcase just inside the door and turned to face me, arms crossed loosely, completely at home in a house that wasn't his. Or maybe it was, in some way I didn't fully understand yet.
"Try not to get chased by any more chickens," he said, the corner of his mouth tilting up.
I was about to say something when the universe interrupted me.
"ATEEEE!"
Something small and very fast came shooting through the doorway and slammed into my midsection with the force of a tiny, enthusiastic cannonball. My arms flew out and I stumbled back half a step before my brain caught up with what was happening.
A little girl. Two messy pigtails. A smear of what looked like chocolate on her cheek. Arms wrapped around my waist like a koala who had been waiting for this exact moment her entire life.
"I missed you soooo much!" she announced at full volume, beaming up at me. "We're gonna be best friends! You can sleep in my room! I have so many toys! Do you like unicorns? I love unicorns! I have a whole collection and a secret hideout but you can only come if you pass my test!"
I stared down at her. "Test?"
Kai, from behind me, said, "You're doomed," in a tone that was completely, infuriatingly calm.
I shot him a look. He looked back, unbothered, one corner of his mouth still tilted up.
"LILY."
My aunt appeared from somewhere deeper in the house, wiping her hands on a dish towel, moving with the specific energy of someone who had been in motion since before sunrise. She looked me over the way you look at something that has been through a lot — slow, head to toe, expression caught somewhere between sympathy and judgment.
"Yuna," she said, clicking her tongue. "Look at you. You poor thing."
"Hi, Tita," I said, smiling tiredly.
"Too fragile," she declared, already shaking her head. "I knew it. Too fragile for this town. Such a city girl."
I had expected this. I had braced for it. That didn't make it easier.
"I'm fine," I said. "It was just a long trip."
She was already turning back toward the kitchen. "You're too thin. Do they not feed you in the city? Come, come, I made adobo. You need to eat before you fall over."
Kai, still by the door, said quietly, "Told you," with a satisfaction that I chose not to reward with a response.
I had about one second to prepare something before Lily grabbed both my hands and started towing me inside with a grip that was alarming for her size.
"Come on, Ate! I'll show you everything! This is the living room—" she spun in a little half-circle as she walked— "that's Mama's chair, don't sit there when she's watching her shows or you'll be trapped forever, and the kitchen is over here, there's a cookie stash behind the big pot but you didn't hear it from me—"
"Lily," Aunt Rosa called from somewhere ahead. "Let her breathe. She just got here."
Lily paused for exactly one second. Then continued at a slightly lower volume.
I let her drag me through it, taking everything in. The walls were covered family photos in mismatched frames, old school certificates, decorative plates arranged with complete sincerity. Live, Laugh, Love in cursive. God is Good All the Time beside what looked like a hand-painted rooster. The dining table was buried under a layer of everyday life a fruit bowl, a folded newspaper, a stack of receipts, a crochet project mid-row with the yarn still attached. The air smelled like warm rice and soy sauce and something faintly sweet underneath all of it.
It was chaotic and cluttered and loud.
But it felt real. Lived-in and full in a way I wasn't used to, but couldn't quite call unpleasant.
I heard the front door close quietly behind me. Kai had slipped out the way people do when they know the noise level is about to go up and they've made the sensible choice.
Smart.
Dinner was a battlefield.
I had barely lifted my spoon before the questions started coming from every direction at once, layering on top of each other like a coordinated interrogation nobody had warned me about.
"How's school in the city? Are you keeping up with everything?" Aunt Rosa asked, setting the adobo down in front of me.
"It's good," I said carefully.
"You have friends there?" Uncle Ramon added, already piling rice onto his plate in a quantity that seemed medically concerning.
"Yeah, a few."
"Boyfriend?"
I nearly dropped my spoon. "What?"
Before I could even figure out who had asked, Lily stood slightly in her chair and declared at full volume, "YUNA HAS NO BOYFRIEND!"
The table erupted.
"Kawawa naman!"
"How old are you now?"
"Maybe she's too focused on her studies," Aunt Rosa offered charitably.
From across the table, my older cousin Ben, who had said approximately four words since I arrived, looked up from his plate with the relaxed delivery of someone who had been saving this for the right moment. "Or maybe she's just scary."
I looked at him. "I will stab you with this fork."
He pointed his spoon at me. "See? Scary."
Aunt Rosa shook her head slowly. "City girls are so aggressive these days."
I shoved a large spoonful of rice into my mouth and made the conscious decision to stop fighting. The adobo was genuinely good and I was exhausted, and some battles were simply not worth the energy. I ate and nodded and let it all wash over me.
By the time we were done, I felt like I had run three marathons back to back.
Lily was already bouncing down the hallway before I pushed back my chair. "You're sleeping with me! Come on, Ate!"
"What?"
"Your room isn't ready yet! Mama said! So we're sharing!"
I wanted to argue. I truly did. But my legs were heavy and my eyes were burning and debating a seven-year-old required a kind of energy I simply did not have left.
Lily's room was something else entirely.
Pink walls, floor to ceiling. Unicorn stickers layered so thick in some spots they overlapped each other. Stuffed animals on every surface — shelves, floor, piled on the bed in a soft, pastel mountain. A Barbie Dream House sat in the corner, optimistic and fully intact, completely unaware of what was coming. Glitter caught the light from approximately forty different directions. A stuffed octopus on the shelf stared at me from across the room with button eyes that held no warmth.
"I made space!" Lily announced proudly, gesturing to a sliver of mattress roughly the width of my forearm.
I stared at it.
"Great," I said.
I needed to write. I had half-formed lyrics turning over in my head all day and the only way to quiet them was to get them onto paper. So I sat at the edge of the bed, pulled out my notebook, and told myself I'd get at least one solid verse down before I let myself sleep.
The cockroach appeared twenty minutes later.
It came from the direction of the window — large, dark, glossy, and airborne, launched into the room with a confidence that should have been illegal. My brain registered it in pieces. Wings. Movement. The specific, horrifying trajectory of a flying cockroach aimed directly at my face.
Time slowed down.
I had one second.
I used that second to freeze, yell, and throw my notebook across the room all at once.
"NOT TODAY," I whisper-screamed, scrambling backward and grabbing the first thing within reach.
Lily's giant stuffed unicorn.
I held it up like a shield. The cockroach looped through the air above me, completely unbothered, doing what I could only describe as a leisurely victory lap around the ceiling.
"I see you," I hissed.
It dipped lower.
I swung.
I swung too hard, completely misjudged the weight of the stuffed animal, lost my grip mid-arc, and watched in slow motion as the unicorn left my hands and connected squarely with Lily's face.
She bolted upright like she'd been electrocuted.
"THE UNICORNS ARE ATTACKING?!"
"No — Lily — it's a cockroach, there's a cockroach—"
Too late. Lily, running entirely on half-asleep instinct, grabbed the nearest pillow and launched it at me with terrifying accuracy. It hit me square in the face. I stumbled backward, hit the edge of the bed wrong, and went down — straight onto the Barbie Dream House in the corner.
The sound it made was genuinely awful. Plastic walls caved. A tiny horse cracked under my weight. A small pink door detached and skidded across the floor into the darkness.
Somewhere, Barbie was already calling her lawyer.
The cockroach was thriving.
I watched it from the floor, zipping across the ceiling like something that had been training specifically for this moment, and felt a very specific kind of defeat.
"LILY," I whisper-shrieked, climbing up from the wreckage. "I need backup."
She looked at me from her bed. Surveyed the disaster. Took in the broken dream house, the notebook on the floor, me standing in the middle of all of it holding a slipper I didn't remember picking up.
Then she pulled her blanket over her head.
"Goodnight."
"LILY, YOU TRAITOR—"
Not even a flinch.
I was on my own.
I squared my feet, raised the slipper, and stared the cockroach down. What followed was several minutes of the most humiliating thing I have ever done — dodging around the room, swinging, whisper-screaming, knocking into things, the cockroach outmaneuvering me at every single turn like it had studied my weaknesses in advance.
Then, on one swing I had put real feeling into, I connected.
The cockroach hit the floor and stayed there.
I stood over it, chest heaving, slipper still raised.
Then I collapsed onto the bed and stared up at the pink ceiling with its unicorn stickers and its slightly crooked horse poster and its little glow-in-the-dark stars.
"Did you win?" Lily's voice came from under the blanket, small and almost genuinely curious.
"I don't know," I said. "But I think I left part of myself on that floor."
She made a sound that was either sympathy or her already falling back asleep. Probably the second one.
I lay there for another minute, then grabbed my notebook from across the room, slipped out into the hallway, and made my way to the kitchen.
The house had finally gone quiet. The baby, the TV, the dog — all of it settled into silence. Just the soft hum of the refrigerator and the dim yellow glow of the light above the counter, warm and still in a way that felt almost kind after everything the day had thrown at me.
I sat down, opened my notebook, and exhaled slowly.
Okay. Focus.
The words were still there, waiting where I'd left them. My pen moved across the page, slow at first, then finding a rhythm. Just one verse. One good verse and then I could sleep.
My eyes got heavy somewhere in the middle of the second line.
The pen slowed. The words softened at the edges. My head dipped once, caught itself, dipped again.
Just one more line, I thought. Just one—
Footsteps in the hallway.
I snapped upright so fast my elbow caught the notebook and sent it skidding off the table. My pen rolled off the edge and clattered to the floor just as a shadow filled the kitchen doorway.
My brain, running on absolute fumes, did the only thing it could.
I grabbed the spoon off the counter. Sat up straight. Arranged my face into an expression of calm, serious thought.
Aunt Rosa appeared in the doorway, hair loose, squinting against the kitchen light, carrying the specific expression of someone who had not planned on finding anything in this room at two in the morning.
She looked at me. At the spoon. At my notebook on the floor.
"Yuna? What are you doing?"
"Thinking," I said, nodding slowly. I tapped the spoon against my chin for effect. "About cooking."
A long pause.
"At two in the morning."
"Yes."
She looked at me for another moment. Something moved behind her eyes — the gears turning, possibilities running, most of them being quietly discarded.
Then she sighed. "City kids," she muttered, shuffling past me to check the rice cooker. She clicked it off, stood there for a second, yawned once, and shuffled back out without another word.
I didn't move until I heard her door click shut.
Then I set the spoon down on the counter, pressed my hand flat against my chest, and sat very still in the quiet kitchen for a long moment.
Never again.
I closed the notebook, tucked it under my arm, and went back to Lily's room, where she had stolen every single blanket in my absence. I climbed onto my sliver of mattress, pulled whatever edge of blanket I could reach over my shoulder, and closed my eyes.
The lyrics could wait.
Surviving the night came first.
To be continued.