The door paint is still the stubborn blue I remember. It has chips the shape of countries if you squint. The porch light draws a soft circle on the stoop; moths patrol its border like sleepy guards. When I press the bell, the tiny crack in the enamel nicks my fingertip the way it always has, a small ritual that says: this is family, not a transaction.
My uncle answers in his house sweater and reading glasses, an ink thumbprint on the cuff like he tried to hold a sentence and it ran. He takes me in with one quiet glance—the scuff on my shoes, the way my bag strap bites my shoulder, the hollow under my eyes I forgot to cover.
"You look like your bed lost a fight," he says, which is his version of hello.
I bow a fraction too deeply, because if I try to speak right away I'll say something I didn't plan to. "Evening."
"Come. Shoes," he adds, because the old rules keep the floor polite.
The entry smells like cedar and rain. A row of umbrellas leans together like gossiping aunts. Inside, the lamps are warm and placed for reading, not for decoration; his living room has the calm of a laboratory that learned to exhale. A kettle murmurs in the kitchen like someone telling good news far away. There's a mug already set on the counter, a second set beside it the way some people keep a spare heartbeat. He pulls it down when he sees me and sets it next to the first without comment. A plant I always forget the name of reaches for the window with a green hand; a bowl of clementines glows on the table like low suns.
"Tea?" he asks.
"Please."
He works in quiet, practiced motions—spoon, leaves, water, the small clink of ceramic that turns a house into a place you can be a person. He does the thing where he turns the mug so the painted crane faces me; he's done it since I was small enough to think the bird was looking at me on purpose. He carries both to the table and gestures to the chair with the better back support. He sits opposite and considers me across the steam like a problem he can't measure yet.
"I didn't expect you tonight," he says. "Or maybe I did. Your texts use perfect punctuation when you're lying about being fine."
"I'm not lying," I say, and then soften it into something not stupid. "I mean—I'm okay. Just... full day."
His eyebrows say: and a night before it, and the night before that. He doesn't reach for the easy questions. He lets the steam do its work between us, aromatic, a small fog where urgency can get its breath.
I take the handle like it's a hand I'm allowed to hold. "I needed to ask you something."
"Ask."
I feel the sentence trying to leap out of me and break something fragile on its way. I lower my voice so it has to step carefully. "I wanted to see if you knew anyone who'd... let me observe. A lab. Any lab. Just a few hours a week, or—" I keep it tidy. "My teacher said I could do a research project if I wanted. Something unusual helps for certain programs. It would look better if I'd actually seen the inside of a room where real work happens."
He watches me over the edge of his mug, eyes steady. "Most fourteen-year-olds ask for part-time jobs at smoothie shops. You're asking for centrifuges."
I try a smile. It stays on the surface. "Smoothie shops don't have pipettes."
"Some would argue they do." The corner of his mouth nudges upward and then rests. "What kind of project."
I put the words down like I'm handling glass. "Rare diseases. Ones that... get worse. Progressive. Incurable." A breath. "I picked Friedreich's ataxia."
The name sits between us with more gravity than a school paper should carry. He doesn't move for a heartbeat, two. The steam curls and uncurls like it's trying to decide whether it was invited. When he speaks, his voice is a step slower, like he's testing a stair.
"That isn't a word I expected to hear from you."
I look at the teabag string as if it provides instructions. "We could choose anything. My teacher said to pick something we didn't already know." Careful, casual. "I was reading—open journals, forum posts—and it sounded... it stuck."
"Open journals," he repeats, skeptical without being unkind. "And you just happened on that one."
I shrug in a way I practiced on the walk over. "It was in a list. 'Rare, progressive, inherited, no cure.' It sounded... important." It comes out steady, which feels like telling the truth and lying at the same time.
He takes his glasses off and polishes them with the corner of his sleeve, a think-better gesture I remember from parent-teacher meetings where he saved me with the exact tone of his hum. "Describe it to me."
"Clumsy at first," I say, the words finding the track they rehearsed all afternoon. "Then walking gets harder. Balance, coordination. Speech goes. Hands." I close mine and open them so I don't talk with them. "Sometimes the heart gets involved. Fast heart, thick walls. There are... studies. People talk about weak ankles and... the way stairs get longer. It's... cruel."
He puts his glasses back on and looks at me like he's checking my work. "Cruel is accurate."
"I thought I could... write something that wasn't just copy and paste," I add quickly, before the part of me that wants to confess decides to do anything heroic and foolish. "If I could ask someone who actually knows the shape of the problems. If they'd even let me watch how they think."
He leans back a half-inch, enough that the chair creaks a small opinion. The kettle clicks off in the other room. The sound feels like punctuation.
"I knew a man," he says finally, and his breath fogs the edge of his glasses with the weight of it. "A long time ago. Brilliant. Too clever for his own comfort. He worked on mitochondrial disorders. We wrote a paper together that nobody but six people read." The smallest smile, brief as a passing light. "His name is Saitou Yonoshita."
The name lands with the kind of immediacy that makes the air thinner. I don't look up sharply because people notice sharpness. I let my eyes stay on the crane on my mug, as if it might keep flying if I don't spook it. "What did he do?" I ask, careful.
"He married too young and loved exactly the right amount." My uncle's mouth makes a line that isn't disapproval so much as respect trying not to become a eulogy. "His wife had Friedreich's. It was... a long road. He stayed until the end and then some. After she died, he left the track he was on. Didn't want to write about energy metabolism anymore. Didn't want to write at all. The last time I saw him, he looked like someone dropped a piano on his shadow."
The tea turns the back of my throat warm and useless. For a second, against my will, the hospital room from last night overlays this kitchen—the clean smell, the pale sheet pulled over skinny knees, the brittle way she smiled around a word she wanted to hold without bleeding. I swallow and the taste is bitter in the way medicine is bitter, a sign that something functional might be hiding in it.
"Is he..." I let the sentence wander as if it doesn't know what question it wants to be. "Do you still talk?"
"Not often," he says. "He sent me a postcard with a picture of a mountain on it two years ago. The mountain looked cheerful. The handwriting did not." He rubs his thumb along the mug like he's smoothing a memory that won't lay flat. "He teaches, technically. Mentors a graduate student or two if they don't say anything optimistic. Keeps a room somewhere that smells like solvents. He is not, I must warn you, a kind man anymore."
The caution wants to sit on my tongue and do something reasonable. I don't invite it. "Do you have his number? An email? Where is the room."
He looks up at me sharply enough that I feel the wind of it. "No, Kousei." Soft, firm. "You will not go knocking on that door and ask a man with that history to help you write a school essay."
"It's not—" I start, then change lanes so fast my chest stings. "I know it's... odd. But you always told me if I wanted to understand something, I should stand next to it until it admits I exist. Even if someone says no at first. Even if I'm the least useful person in the room." I make my voice smaller so the words fit in it. "I can stand quietly."
He studies me. The clock in the hallway moves one step the way time does when it knows you're listening.
"Why that disease," he says finally. Not a challenge. An invitation to make a better lie.
Because I know the shape of its teeth. Because I can hear the tick of it behind everything she says is fine. Because the first time, I watched it take her and I let the world happen to me like a person in a seat facing the wrong direction on a train.
"Because my teacher will be impressed," I say instead, and hate how thin it sounds next to the weight of the truth. I reach for something that isn't only performance. "And because... because I watched my mother be sick for a long time." The room tilts a little and then settles. "I know what helpless feels like when the person you love is in a room you can't fix. It's not the same disease. I know that. But the... the powerlessness is the same shape." My throat tries to close and I let it try and then ask it kindly to move aside. "I don't want to write a paragraph and then go back to lunch. I want to know what people actually do when a disease tells you 'no' and you argue with it anyway."
He looks at me, and I watch the two parts of his face—scientist and uncle—try to decide who gets to speak. The scientist admires my argument; the uncle hears what I left out like a wrong note in otherwise pretty work. He was there for the endless herbs and incantations, the waiting rooms that smelled like television light, the soft click my mother made with her tongue when she didn't want to wake me but needed to signal that she was still here. He knows I'm using her pain as leverage and he knows I'm not faking the weight of it. Both things can be true. Both things are.
"You're too young to be this serious," he says quietly, and then, because he is a decent man and decency is inefficient, he adds, "But I suppose some of us don't get to pick when we become boring."
"Boring," I echo, because humor is a trick that keeps you from falling down. "That's me."
He stands, slow, like his knees aren't convinced the day requires further standing. He walks to the desk in the corner with the blotter and the pencil cup full of pens that all write better than the cheap ones at the convenience store. He opens the narrow drawer where he keeps the address book nobody under thirty uses; the rotary of names that smell like anniversaries and old coffee rides under his finger. He finds an index card that's been used for other truths and flips it to a clean side. The pen makes a soft hairline sound against the card as he writes, pauses, adds a building floor and a name for the security desk that will make the guard look at me like I fooled him into smiling.
He stays still for a second with the pen tip on the paper, as if the right warning lives in the last dot of an "i."
He returns and sets the card on the table without pushing it toward me. It sits there—stark, useful, no ceremony except the weight it radiates by existing.
"If I give you this," he says, "you will go. I know you." No anger. A statement of the facts like a weather report.
"I'll be polite," I say, because that part is easy.
He exhales through his nose in the way he does when a reaction has too many components and he refuses to pretend it's one. "Don't expect much," he says. The words are not unkind. They carry the tired wisdom of a person who has been disappointed without becoming cruel. "He is not the man I worked with. He may not answer when you knock. If he does, he will test you in ways that have nothing to do with science. He won't care about a school rubric. He won't be moved by your apology for interrupting his solitude. He may say something that sends you home before you sit down. Don't take it personally." A beat. "Even if he says something designed to make it personal."
I nod, and the nod feels like a vow I don't say out loud: I have already survived being told "no" by the universe in more expensive rooms than any lab a bitter man can keep. I can go home with a closed door and still call it movement.
He taps the card, once. I pick it up, and the paper behaves like paper, light and ordinary and completely unprepared to carry destiny. The address is a place I can reach by two trains and a bus or one longer train and a walk. The name under it—Saitou Yonoshita—looks like the kind of person you pass on a campus and think you've seen in a photograph with eyebrows raised at the camera's poor timing. The floor number is high enough for windows with a view that could make the world look solvable if you were allowed to look down from there and pretend people are dots.
"Thank you," I say, not performative, not stiff, only what the moment deserves.
He eases his glasses higher up the bridge of his nose. "You remind me of him when we were both prettier," he admits. "It frightens me to think of you becoming him. It also... reassures me. It means you might be useful where I've been merely amused."
"Being useful would be... nice," I say, and we both smile because nice isn't the right word and we both know it.
The tea has cooled to the exact temperature where it tastes like the idea of tea. I finish it because finishing small things makes larger ones feel possible. He asks about school in the way that lets me dodge particulars; I tell him just enough for him to make an adult noise that means life persists. We sit a while in the gentle clink of clean-up. He dries; I stack dishes because muscle memory is older than despair.
When I stand to go, he follows me to the door without making it ceremonial. He opens a drawer by the shoe rack and takes out a folded umbrella with a dumb pattern of clouds on it. "It'll mist in the morning," he says, like this is a weather report and not permission. "You'll hate yourself if your hair tries to leave your head."
"I'm not my hair," I say, and tuck the umbrella under my arm anyway.
On the threshold he does something he doesn't do every time. He sets his hand on my shoulder, light, like he's checking the tuning of a violin string. "Kousei."
"Mm?"
"If he is unkind, and you don't have to be noble about it, leave." His mouth makes that line again, the one that is so close to a smile and resolutely stops. "You are allowed to protect the parts of you that music needs."
Parts of me that music needs. The sentence fits like a switch I didn't know how to flip. I nod because my throat is busy.
Outside, the night smells like wet concrete and far-off udon. The streetlight over his gate has learned not to flicker. A cat I've never met owns the neighbor's low wall and blinks at me like it has an opinion about my shoes. I put the card in the inner pocket of my jacket, not the outer one where rain could find it and turn fate into papier-mâché. It's warm there immediately, as if paper learns body temperature faster than objects should.
I walk slow at first because there is pleasure in the state of having a direction when you didn't a minute ago. The card sits against my ribs like a small metronome, not loud, just insistently ticking—tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow—until the idea becomes a thing with train lines and a departure time. At the corner, I pause under a lamppost and open my notes app with thumbs that suddenly remember what hands are for. A list forms without my permission: blazer, clean shirt, summary page (short, not a manifesto), ask one specific question if he lets you, don't beg, don't pretend you know more than you do, don't pretend you know less.
The map app shows me two routes. One cuts across the city like a scalpel and leaves me with a long walk. The other takes a bendy path but drops me at a station that smells like coffee and printer ink. I pick the one with the coffee because if this goes badly, I'll want to sit on a bench afterward and pretend to be a person whose problems are on paper.
A bus hisses by with two passengers and a driver whose face says the day told him a joke he's still thinking about. Windows above me hold rectangles of lives in different brightnesses. Someone's television laughs at something my uncle would call unfunny with love in his voice. Behind one window a piano is practicing scales that sound like an apology. I try not to get sentimental about the fact that the world keeps turning its quiet wheels when I have a card in my pocket that feels like a lever.
Don't expect much. The warning travels with me as faithfully as my keys.
I turn it over in my head the way you handle a coin you might spend and might take home because it has a commemorative bird on it. Don't expect him to answer. Don't expect him to be gentle. Don't expect him to reward your courage with anything but the door closing. Okay. The part of me that loves her doesn't run on expectation; it runs on something older and dumber that refuses to die when told to.
Another man who lost the woman he loved. I hold the idea in my mouth like a secret candy and let it dissolve slow. It tastes like rust and something medicinal. It tastes like church in a culture that doesn't do church. I imagine his face—not the actual details; I let my brain draw him out of shadows, the way grief hollows people in the same three places. I imagine him looking at me and seeing a boy. He will. That's fine. It's the costume I'm wearing this time. I can perform it if it gets me through the door.
A couple passes holding hands like something they learned in a class. Their heads are bent toward each other in a small architecture that looks like it could survive unless someone sneezes at the wrong moment. A dog drags a man who pretends not to be dragged. A bicycle whispers chalk on asphalt. The city gives me the soundscape for resolve to brew in. Not a boil. Something slower. Yeast at work. Sugars turning to something that can rise. Fermenting, the way Tsubaki looks at me when she can't decide whether to throw a ball at my head or stand beside me breathing in rhythm. I let the feeling lift under my ribs. It's not fireworks. It's a steady fizz, an interior carbonation that says: you are not done yet.
At a red light I rehearse the first sentence a few different ways and choose none of them. The right opening line will not announce itself from here; it will be whatever vocabulary that room allows. Maybe it will be, "I'm sorry to bother you." Maybe it will be, "I read your paper from 2009 about coenzyme response and I didn't understand two-thirds of it." Maybe it will be no words at all until he lifts an eyebrow that means: speak.
At home, I put the card on my desk and then immediately put it back in my jacket because paper on wood looks too unarmed. I set an alarm for earlier than for school and then set a second one because I don't trust sleep not to be greedy. I lay out my blazer and the white shirt that makes me look less like a ghost and more like a kid trying to behave. I fold a single page of notes until it's the size of a playing card and tuck it where the address lives, a tiny pack of courage. The umbrella leans by the door like a joke.
Before I turn off the light, I stand by the window and watch the street gulls argue with nothing useful. My phone sits face-down, good and quiet. For once I don't pick it up and text Tsubaki I'm alive. She'll feel me in the air anyway and call me an idiot tomorrow if she needs to. Watari is probably asleep upside down like a bat who talks in his dreams. In a building across the river, a violin case leans against a chair, and I pretend I can hear someone breathing evenly in a room that forgives her for being tired.
"Don't expect much," my uncle said. I honor the advice by lowering my expectations to the floor. But hope doesn't ask your permission. It ferments. It changes the chemistry of whatever space you store it in. It seeps into the paper in my pocket and the cotton of my shirt and the gap between two beats in my chest.
Tomorrow, I think, and it lands inside me with a small, decisive click, the way a latch finds its other half in the dark.
I turn the light off. The room keeps its shape without me. I lie down and don't fight when sleep tries to teach me what to do with my hands. The card warms the jacket chair like a living thing. Night goes about its business. Resolve bubbles quietly under my ribs, not flashy, not loud, just ready.