The hallway smells like lemon cleaner and late afternoon—bright lights, soft shoes, doors that close with polite sighs. Watari walks two steps ahead, balancing a pastry box like it's a sacred artifact. The logo of Kaori's favorite bakery curls across the lid in gold. He keeps glancing down to make sure the ribbon hasn't come loose, as if a croissant might attempt escape.
"She's going to love these," he says for the third time, voice pitched high with optimism. "They're the flakey ones with the sugar crust and the—"
"Watari." Tsubaki doesn't look away from the room numbers as we pass them. "She fainted. This is not a 'sugar crust' emergency; it's a hospital emergency."
"It's called morale," he counters. "I am boosting it." He lifts the box higher, proud. "Morale-enhancement pastries."
"Your 'morale enhancement' better not get crumbs on her sheets." Tsubaki's ponytail is crooked and furious, her hands sunk into her skirt pockets like she'll rip the fabric if she takes them out. "shes staying for tests. That's not nothing."
I don't say anything. The fluorescent light turns the floor into moving water. My eyes feel like I sanded them with my palms and forgot to stop. The applause, the bright stage, the weight of her knees sliding out from under her—everything from a few hours ago keeps rising and falling behind my ribs like a tide I can't outrun. Overexertion is a word people use when they need a lid for a box that doesn't close. The dazed, grateful joy on her face, the sentence she whispered—I will never forget this day until I die—has been replaying in my head with the brightness turned too high. The next frame is me catching her before her violin hits the floor.
"Here." Tsubaki has to tug twice before I realize she's pressed a small can of tea into my hand. "Drink. You look like a chalk outline."
"I'm fine," I lie, and put the cold rim to my mouth anyway. It tastes like tin and barley and a scolding that won't let me sleep standing up.
We stop at a door with a paper name tag clipped to the sign. Miyazono. The letters sit there calmly, as if they're not the center of a small storm. Watari shifts the box to one hand and smooths his hair with the other. Tsubaki rolls her shoulders, then pushes the handle.
She doesn't ease it open; she swings it in with full force. "Yoo-hoo—!"
We rush through like confetti. And freeze.
Kaori is on the bed, knees tucked into the sheet. Her back is bare—slender, pale, a faint map of muscle and the light trapezoid where her shirt was. A nurse in pale scrubs stands behind her, washing the curve of her shoulder blades with a square of gauze. The disinfectant catches the light in a small, clean sheen.
For the briefest blink, Kaori's eyes go dull—like someone switched off the stage lights behind them. Then she sees us, sees herself seen, and the brightness snaps back, too quick, too bright. "Kyaaa!" she squeaks, grabbing the sheet with both hands and yanking it up to her shoulders.
The nurse rounds on us without moving her feet. Her eyebrows do what words would only slow down. "Excuse me," she says, which is hospital for get out.
Tsubaki reacts before anyone else. She wheels around and boots both me and Watari with a swift, precise kick to the backs of our heads. Not hard enough to be cruel—just punishing. Our foreheads knock together with a comic thunk. The pastry box wobbles; Watari claws it back with an inhuman noise of pastry-protective terror.
"Ow!" he yelps, staggering sideways into the curtain. "Why is your foot made of rebar—?"
"Memory erasure kick," Tsubaki says, each word a stamp. "Wipe the film. Say 'white screen'. Now."
Watari claps a hand to his head. "White screen—ow—white screen—" He blinks at the ceiling tiles like they're the night sky over a desert and he's forgotten his name. "Who am I? Where am I? Why am I holding cake?"
Kaori makes a strangled sound halfway between horrified and delighted, cheeks turning the color of a watercolor wash. "I can never get married now!" she cries from behind the sheet, voice muffled. "My back has been—seen!"
"Forgive us," Tsubaki says to the nurse, bowing so fast her hair tries to fall and doesn't. "They're idiots. They will atone."
The nurse softens a notch and finishes with the gauze, folding the used pad into a neat square. "You can atone by standing there until I say you can move." She gestures us into a corner and goes back to Kaori, low voice practical and kind.
Watari sidles to the appointed spot with the exaggerated carefulness of a bomb technician, cradling the cake box against his chest like a small animal. I follow, rubbing the place where Tsubaki's shoe made friends with my skull. I'm awake, at least. Thoroughly.
"Okay," the nurse says at last, stepping back. "Shirt."
Kaori slides her arms into the sleeves and closes the buttons with fingers that don't tremble. The sheet drops to her lap. Her violin case sits on the bedside table like a loyal dog. A monitor blinks some patient, patient number. The nurse checks a chart, glances at us, decides we have done nothing unforgivable, and departs with a warning look Tsubaki returns with a soldier's salute.
"Now." Kaori makes a show of smoothing the hem of her shirt, sniffing dramatically. "Apologize to my innocence."
Watari practically launches himself to the edge of the bed, thrusting the pastry box forward with redemption blazing in his eyes. "I will make an honest woman of you," he declares. "Cakes first, vows later."
She drops the pout an inch and lets a sparkle slip through. "Ohhh?" she sings lightly, tilting her head. "Is that so?"
"I would bring a dowry," he says, tapping the box, "of sugar and butter and... friendship."
Tsubaki sighs so loudly the blinds tremble. "You cannot propose with muffins."
"These are gateaux," he says, deeply offended.
"Those are pastries," I mutter.
"Gateaux," he insists, wrapping the word in an accent he found in a cartoon. Kaori giggles, finally, real and bright. The room exhales.
We pull chairs into a crooked semicircle, Tsubaki claiming the left flank like a guard, Watari perched on the right like a nervous bird who packed snacks, me at the foot of the bed where I can see her face without being in the way. The window shows the top halves of other buildings, their windows square with indifferent light. The hallway hum is a constant under note.
"Everyone okay now?" Kaori asks, teasing gentle. She tries to tuck a lock of hair behind her ear and misses twice.
"We're fine," Tsubaki says, her voice softening as if the nurse left some of her professionalism in the air. "You scared us."
Kaori lifts one shoulder, not quite a shrug. "They're keeping me for tests." She goes breezy, the tinsel-light version of her smile slipping into place. "Just to be sure. Probably nothing. You know how hospitals are—make you stay, poke you with a hundred tiny sticks so they can say you're fine and send you home anyway."
I feel my jaw set. "You fainted," I say. The words are simple, flat. They fall into the space like a coin dropped into a clear jar; there's no sound afterward but the echo.
Her eyes flick to mine. The smile holds, but a sheet goes up behind it. "Maybe if a certain sleepy piano-kun hadn't wandered off like a stray cat before lunch, I wouldn't have had to sprint around school looking for him," she says, sweet as tea with the sugar doubled. "Ever think of that?"
Tsubaki doesn't miss a beat. She leans forward and flicks my forehead—not hard, just a reminder. "He has a point," she says, and then contradicts herself with a glare. "But she has a bigger point. You vanished."
"I was on the roof," I say. The sentence tastes unhelpful even as it leaves my mouth.
"Exactly." Tsubaki points, then taps my temple with two fingers, less a poke and more a post-it note of correction. "No roof naps the day before a competition, genius."
Watari leans in and pokes my shoulder with the corner of the pastry box like a rubber mallet. "You heard the lady: no naps when people need their duets. Also: hydrate. Also: stop looking like a ghost who won a trophy."
"I am," I say, "hydrated." The can of tea sits on the windowsill, proof I at least tried. Across the bed, Kaori's gaze doesn't move. I could say a hundred technical things—we were clean, we held the line, the cadenza was honest, we turned the last page like a door—and none of them would reach what I mean. So I say only, quieter, "You fainted."
She glares at me, and for a second I can see the wire she walks, the way she keeps it taut. "And you made me add cardio to my day," she says, chin tipping. The glimmer in her eyes is mischief; the steel under it is the shape of a wall. "Maybe next time don't play hide-and-sleep."
Watari whistles low. "She deploys barbs today."
"It's called boundaries," Tsubaki says, but the corner of her mouth is betraying her. "We support them."
"I get it," I say. And I do. I get that there's a part of her that has to make this a joke or it will become something she can't turn into music. I know the cost of letting the ground open. I meet her stare, just long enough for the message to travel without words: I don't believe you. I won't force you. I saw you.
She looks away first, but not because I won. She looks away because she chooses to end the exchange. "So," she says briskly, eyes jumping to the pastry box. "What did you bring me—wait, is that—?"
"Melon pan, strawberry short, and the flakey things whose French name begins with chou and ends with delicious," Watari says with ceremony, opening the lid with a flourish. Pink cream and sugar-glass gleam like a tiny parade. "Your favorites."
"I love you," she tells the pastries, hand to chest. "And maybe you, too," she adds, pointing the second declaration at him with suspicious generosity.
He beams like a lighthouse. "I accept being second to sugar."
The nurse's head pokes back in at the smell that probably crossed the entire floor. "No food yet," she warns, and the chorus of groans would be funny if it weren't so heartfelt. "After the blood draw. Then small bites."
"Small bites," Kaori repeats, crumpling into theatrical despair. "How cruel."
When the nurse vanishes again, Tsubaki sits back. "Speaking of cruel," she says, softer now. "You scared us. We were in the front row. Watari almost fell over."
"I did not," Watari says instantly, then ruins his defense by adding, "I sat down very quickly in a dramatic manner."
Kaori looks from one to the other, and then to me, and something gentler passes through her eyes—like dawn light cutting between buildings. "I'm okay," she says, more honest. "Really. They're just checking things. I promise." She says promise like a fragile object she wants to put in our hands. I want to hand it back so she doesn't have to carry it alone.
A new thread appears, bright and unbelievable. "Also," Watari says, already vibrating. "The results."
Tsubaki straightens. "Already?"
He holds up his phone like a priest holding a relic. "Posted online ten minutes ago. Do you want the spoiler or the live reading?"
"Live," Kaori says, instantly. She sits taller without meaning to, one hand on the bedrail like she's about to lean into a hard phrase. I feel the hall's hush again, the way sound can wrap a person.
Watari clears his throat, adopts a voice two octaves deeper than his. "Towa Hall Youth Duos, Division B. In first place..."
He drags it out so long Tsubaki threatens to strangle him with his own headphone cord.
"—Miyazono and Arima."
The room's noise is tiny and enormous at once, a pop of air in a sealed space. Kaori's mouth opens, then shuts, then opens again like she forgot what order breathing comes in. "First?" she says, small and awed, as if she doesn't trust the number to sit still.
"First." Watari shoves the screen under her nose. Her name and mine crawl across the display, black on white, solid as road paint. "And finals next month. See? Right there: 'advance to finals.'" He thumps the line like it will purr.
Tsubaki's smile spreads slowly, as if she's letting herself do it in stages. "You did it," she says, pride tightening her voice into something almost stern with relief. "You actually did it."
Kaori's eyes shine the way they did on stage—full, wet, not show—and she laughs, helpless and delighted. "I told you," she says, laughing again, a little breathless. "We were great. You were great." She points at me like an accusation of excellence. "Piano man. You were there."
For a second I can't get any words to come out. It's not the praise. It's the weight of how badly I want this version of her—this bright, laughing, completely present Kaori—to be the one we keep. The frame blurs and sharpens, and over the joy slides a colder fact: every day we spend building toward a stage is a day I might not be building toward a lab bench. Finals are a calendar, not just a performance. The boxes I drew last night reappear behind my eyes, inked arrows threading from one scheduled thing to the next: approvals, consults, the Tuesday lobby meeting turning into a door that should open sooner than Tuesday.
Tsubaki feels the shift in me the way she always does. She bumps my ankle with her shoe. "Hey," she says, warning folded into comfort. "Enjoy this part at least."
"I am," I say, and I am. The two truths refuse to cancel each other.
We try to talk about other things and fail—our conversation circling back to the performance like a magnet. We trade the details that only we would notice: where the hinge didn't squeak this time, the small bend she threw without telling me, the way I answered it so it sounded inevitable. When she smiles, the gray light of the room turns warmer by a shade you can't measure with instruments. I tuck that away in the part of my head where I keep small proofs that the world hasn't broken entirely.
A phlebotomist arrives with a cart rattling plastic vials. We shuffle back. Kaori offers her arm without flinching. "Small bites, then?" she asks the nurse hopefully as the vials fill.
"Small," the nurse confirms, amusement threading her voice. "Your cheering squad can parcel it out."
Watari nods with the solemnity of a man given a sacred duty. "I was born for this."
"Born to miscount and eat half the rations," Tsubaki mutters, but she opens the pastry box and chooses a piece of melon bread the size of a coin, holding it like medicine. "Tiny. Don't inhale it."
Kaori nibbles and closes her eyes like sunshine happened in her mouth. "Victory bread," she sighs. "The best kind."
We linger until visiting hours glare at us from a clock. The room dims by degrees—corridor sounds growing softer, the building settling into its night posture. Watari stacks the pastry box on the table for later like he's leaving a shrine. Tsubaki fusses over Kaori's blanket and threatens to fight anyone who wakes her.
"Text when they kick you out in the morning," she orders. "We'll come kidnap you."
Kaori salutes without sitting up. "Yes, captain."
Watari leans over and takes her hand with a grin he can't sit on. "First place." He squeezes. "Finals. I'm going to brag until the cops ask me to stop."
"They're not going to ask," Tsubaki says. "They're going to arrest you."
"Worth it," he says, and somehow means it.
They say goodbye in a tangle of jokes and real concern. The door clicks shut behind them, and the quiet that follows is different—less crowded, more fragile. I stay where I am by the end of the bed. Kaori watches me watch her, head tipped, eyes seeing more than I want to show.
"Hey," she says finally. "Piano man."
I lift a hand, the smallest answer.
She pats the space on the bed near her hip where the blanket is smooth. "Come closer. I'm not going to bite. Yet."
I step closer, careful of the IV line curling like a lazy vine. The antiseptic smell is brighter up close. Her hair has escaped its tie and frames her face in tired curls. She looks like she could sleep for a century and still wake up humming.
"We did it," she says, and the grin that comes takes years off her. "I knew we would be great. Look—first place! We made it to the finals!" She spreads her fingers as if to display the word finals in the air between us, a bright coin she expects me to catch.
The word lands and wobbles. My heart surges up like it wants to agree without asking me. Behind it, the part of me that hasn't slept and doesn't forgive fate puts both hands up to slow it down. Another competition means days blocked out: rehearsals, warm-ups, travel, more chances for her to pour everything out and then vanish into white light while people clap. It means my calendar bleeding time where I wanted to write call Uncle and secure centrifuge time and get in the room with someone who has the keys.
A thought arrives so clean it feels like it's been waiting: what if I drop out...?
The phrase is disgustingly practical and heavy. It unfolds further without permission. If I step back now—if I make some excuse, if I let a different duo take our slot—those days come back to me. Hours I can spend making the phone calls that become doors. Hours I can spend turning what I know into something that doesn't just live in my head. Saving her is not a metaphor. It's a schedule. It's reagent orders and equipment time and a human who will say yes to a favor because I ask in the right voice at the right hour. Finals do not move that needle. Finals feed her joy. Finals break my heart. Finals cost us days I do not know how to buy back.
Her eyes are so bright. She is so proud.
I look at her and feel the cruel geometry of it: the line that runs between what will make her glow and what might keep her living long enough to glow again. I have never wanted to be two people more. One to stand on a stage and play until the hall forgets itself. One to stay up all night in a room with white floors and a hum in the walls and force the future to arrive early.
I sit on the edge of the bed without quite sitting, my weight in my feet, my hands on my knees. The hospital-green blanket whispers under my fingers. "Yeah," I say, but the word has to cross a long distance to get out of me. "We... we made it."
Her smile falters a fraction, just enough to let me see she sees me. "What?" she says, so gently it almost makes me angry—at myself, at time, at the way she reads me without needing sheet music. "Why the face?"
I don't give the thought language. If I say drop out, the air will change shape and I won't be able to change it back. "I'm just... tired," I say. That part at least is true. "It's been a big day."
Her expression softens until it's almost sleep. "It has," she agrees. "You were so good." The way she says you makes the bed tilt a little; the room gets a fraction warmer. "I didn't have to drag you at all."
"You dragged me to the hospital with your dramatic timing," I say, and try to make it sound like a joke. It almost is. Her giggle comes out small, then gets larger.
She tucks the blanket corner around her hip as if she's nesting, then reaches one hand toward me, palm up. I don't make her wait. Our fingers fit in the way that makes time sit down and behave: not a clasp, just an alignment.
"Don't vanish," she says, hardly more than breath. It's not about stages. It's not about finals. It is a little rope she tosses across the space between us in case the space tries to grow.
"I won't," I say. The words taste like a promise I can keep without tearing something else out of place. I squeeze once, carefully, then let go before the nurse reappears and scolds us for reckless hand-holding.
"You'll come tomorrow?" she asks, a child asking a question she already knows the answer to but wanting the answer anyway.
"As soon as they let me," I say.
"Bring music," she says, eyelids lowering. "Or don't. Just bring you."
The monitor blinks. In the hallway, a cart goes by with a metal rattle. Somewhere down the corridor, someone laughs, then catches themselves and turns the laugh into something hospital-appropriate. Kaori's breath evens, then hitches once like a skipped beat, then settles. If I watch long enough I could set a metronome to it.
"Kaori," I say, because if I don't say her name now, it will build pressure inside and crack something. "We did it."
She smiles without opening her eyes. "We did."
She drifts. I sit a little longer, then stand. The chair legs tuck back under the bed with a quiet scrape. I stack the empty tea can next to the pastry box and straighten the ribbon because leaving it crooked feels like an insult to good luck. I look at her one more time. She looks like a person who made a room believe in something for four minutes and then had the nerve to be tired.
On the way to the door, the thought tries to stand in front of me again—drop out. It doesn't sound less cruel in a second pass. It doesn't get prettier if I rename it step back or prioritize. It's a knife with a clean edge. The handle fits my hand too well.
I turn the handle quietly and step into the hall. The door clicks behind me. The corridor is a long strip of light with soft noises moving through it—pagers, long shoes, the faint music of a TV from a room where someone has decided silence is worse. The air is cooler out here. I lean my forehead against the wall for one second and allow myself the indulgence of being exactly as tired as I am.
Watari and Tsubaki are sitting on the bench outside like they couldn't figure out how to leave either. Watari has his elbows on his knees and his hands tented in front of his face like a detective considering a case. Tsubaki is scrolling without seeing, the screen lighting her determined frown.
"How is she?" Watari asks softly, and I hear the way his voice fails to bounce like usual.
"Good," I say. The word is true on one axis and a placeholder on another. "They'll draw blood, then let her sleep. We can come back in the morning."
"First place," he says again, like repetition will cement it into the universe. "I keep thinking I misread it."
"You didn't," Tsubaki says, standing. She touches my sleeve, familiar as measuring a seam. "You were there when it mattered," she says, gaze skimming my face for signs of collapse. "Now go home and be a human. Sleep in an actual bed."
"I will," I tell her. Some. The metronome in my head ticks once, as if it knows I'm telling a truth and a lie that will hold each other up for one night.
We walk to the lobby together, three pairs of footsteps and one shadow that stays behind in a room with a sleeping girl and a box of pastries. The automatic doors breathe open. Night air folds around us, soft and damp, city sound softened by distance. Watari peels off toward the station with a hand flung over his shoulder, a buoyant silhouette even when he's trying to be solemn. Tsubaki lingers one more second.
"Text me when you're home," she says, echoing Kaori without knowing she's echoing her. "Eat something real. Don't... you know." She can't say vanish without pulling the wrong thread. She says nothing and everything with her eyes.
"I won't," I say again.
She nods, satisfied enough to turn and go. I watch her until the corner takes her. The hospital behind me hums. The street ahead doesn't care. I shove my hands into my pockets because I don't know what to do with them when I can't touch a keyboard or a lab bench.
I look up at the blank, ordinary sky and think of the two lines I can't hold at the same time: the one that leads back to the stage, to the finals, to the sound of her catching the light and bending it; the one that takes me through doors with badge readers and into rooms where answers are slow and real. Then I think of her whispering We did it, and the way her weight felt in my arms when the lights went white.
"Yeah," I say to the indifferent night, to the locked hospital windows, to the part of me that wants to tear the calendar into a different shape with my hands. "We made it."
Well..... No time to rest...
I start walking.