She exhaled slowly, letting the steam hit her face. This was the hour she used to unwind. Sometimes she read. Sometimes she played soft koto music from a hidden stereo system. Tonight, there was only silence.
When the water was just below boiling, she poured it gently into the porcelain pot and set the leaves to steep, then settled into the chair, legs crossed at the ankle, posture straight. She did not lounge, but rather inhabited space like a well-kept blade; polished, precise, and meant to be respected.
Tea at home was different than anything else. It was her anchor. She drank in silence, never rushing, savoring the heat, the bite of umami on her tongue. Every motion was elegant without trying to be. The kind of grace one doesn't learn from etiquette classes but from a lifetime of control.
After tea, she changed. Loose linen pants. A charcoal-gray camisole. A soft sweater over her shoulders. She tied her hair back into a low, loose bun and moved to the large floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked the city.
Below, Monaco was winding down into its evening rhythm; tourists dining late, the odd sound of sports cars purring past. The world moved, and she remained still.
She moved to the mat in the spare room. It wasn't a gym. She didn't need a gym. Just space, and a mirror. She started with stretches. Slow, methodical, deliberate. Then a sequence of martial forms. Old ones. From more than one discipline. She moved like silk over steel, no wasted motion, no flourishes.
Each movement had a memory attached, whether she acknowledged it or not.
A wrist lock. A turn. A sudden drop into a stance. Every part of it lived in her bones, and every now and then, her body remembered things her mind refused to.
When she finished, sweat barely beading her brow, she sat on the mat, closed her eyes, and focused on her breathing. Not to calm down. She wasn't angry. She wasn't afraid. She just wanted to remain precise.
Dinner was light. Grilled fish. Steamed vegetables. Rice made in a donabe she'd brought with her from Kyoto years ago. She ate alone and without distraction. No TV. No music. Just the soft tick of the clock on the wall and the quiet clink of utensils.
After the dishes were done, she poured herself a small glass of plum wine and sat out on the narrow balcony. The stars above Monte Carlo were faint, but visible. She watched them like one might watch distant fireworks, detached, but not uninterested.
She sat there for a long while, unmoving. A statue sipping tea.
But the quiet didn't calm her tonight. It crawled. It pressed. It echoed. Her fingers tightened slightly around the cup.
She stood up too fast. The chair creaked, her ankle twisted slightly as she walked away. In the kitchen, she rinsed the cup with precision, but the motions weren't smooth now. They were clipped. Aggressive.
Back in the hallway, she passed the mirror again.
Stopped.
Looked.
She saw her reflection, and stared. Not at her face. But through it.
Her breath hitched.
Just slightly. And then it cracked.
She slammed a palm against the wall beside the mirror. Once. Twice. Her eyes squeezed shut, and her lips pulled tight. Not in a sob, at least not yet. Her breath came sharp, thin, ragged.
She stumbled back, turned, moved blindly down the hall, into her bedroom. She yanked open the drawer of her bedside table. Inside, tucked under a layer of folded scarves, was a very old photograph.
A child. More so a fetus. Clearly not anymore, as she had lost the child.
But once.
She clutched the photo to her chest. The first sound she made wasn't a cry. It was something deeper. Guttural. Almost silent.
She dropped to her knees on the tatami mat laid beside the bed. Her head bowed. Her hands still clutching the image, fingers trembling.
"I did everything right," she whispered.
No one answered.
"I don't drink. I don't smoke. I kept my body strong. I gave up everything. I survived things people can't even imagine."
The tears came then. Quiet. Controlled at first. Then harder. "I fought for this body. I earned every scar. And it's still not enough."
The sob that tore from her throat was raw, like a wound reopened after years of pretending it was gone.
She wept not like someone broken, but like someone exhausted of pretending not to be. Her cries were muffled into her sleeve, into the floor, into the dark. They echoed inside her more than they did in the room.
For once, Keiko didn't hold it in. She let it all out. The fear, the anger, the hollowness. She punched the side of the mattress once, twice, again, until her knuckles burned.
Then she went still. Chest heaving. Tears drying on her cheeks.
Silence took the room. She didn't move for a long time. Not until the moonlight shifted across the floor and reminded her that time still passed.
She rose, slowly. Folded the photo again. Placed it back in the drawer. In the bathroom, she rinsed her face again. Cold water this time.
She looked at herself in the mirror once more.
"I'm tired" she whispered to herself. She turned off the light and the house went quiet again.
She got up, grabbed a knife. She had lost her brother to the greed of men, and now she was doomed to be alone and without child.
Taking another look at the knife in her hand, she resolved herself. And with her eyes hollow as a bead, she slit her wrist.
~The Democratic Republic of Congo~
~Two Hours Ago~
Cries of several dozen animals faded around subtly, faint echoes of the creatures residing in the distance, but never too far away.
In that silence, a thunderclap so deafening it physically shook the earth below, bellowed down from the sky. A strange incident given the sky was as sunny as could be, it was as though someone had set off a hydrogen bomb in the middle of the sky.
For a moment, a very brief moment in time, everything came to a grinding crawl. Time slowed visibly, the beating wings of a butterfly passing by slowed down just enough that each individual flap was at a crawl.
Ants on a nearby tree came to a halt, the forages and the bushes, even the wind itself came to a perceivable crawl.
Then, in the presence of this anomaly, a singularity, in and of its own right began to manifest, a black hole of sorts, absorbing everything within a small radius of its surroundings.
Soon enough it stopped after making a small clearing. Oddly, it didn't affect the ground, but the black hole began collapsing in on itself, a small hand the size of a child's reached out from the collapsing singularity.
Then another arm reached out, and then a small head peeked out from the absurdity, the rest of the child's body following after as he gravitated slowly towards the ground.
The forest was deathly silent by this point.
A child that looked equally as absurd as its origins, eyes that carried the universe within, hair of liquid starlight that fluttered gently without wind, a second set of arms made of pure white energy... if one could call it that; unconnected at his joints, hovering below his physical arms.
The singularity slowly closed... no! It was slowly being absorbed by the child. The boy becoming a singularity of his own, absorbing the entirety of the black hole within him, surprisingly no radiation spread to the surroundings.
The being... boy, stood confused, disoriented as his legs shook, before eventually giving in as he fell. A burning sensation began to swell in his chest, like a furnace rising in temperature until eventually, it burst out.
A wave of exotic matter and pure energy shot out in all directions, covering the globe for a very brief moment before it subsided.
Africa... or more specifically, the congo basin; had become ground zero in that very moment. A moment entirely insignificant currently, but its repercussions were all but.
The boy got up, the burning sensations gone, as he scanned the surroundings with curiosity. His mind, if one could see within it, was chaos and yet knowledge untold.
Enough to make anyone or any being go insane. Innumerable universes worth of knowledge, some pieces whole, most fragmented into pieces.
But he stood, with a childlike glee in his eyes. Everything was new to him. Every sensation, light, color, temperature, everything... it was the first thing he'd ever seen, but nowhere near the first things he'd ever learn.
It was all beautiful.
Overstimulating? Not nearly. Not with how fast and efficiently his mind was processing the information. Not with how much information was already within his mind.
He took his first step cautiously, clumsy at best. Then the next, and the next, each step he took his posture straightened, his gait more refined, his feet more firm.
Slowly but surely, he walked with weighted firm steps, eventually reaching a tree... grabbing onto it subconsciously.
...And then it happened
That single moment brought along something so incomprehensible it was equivalent to fiction, the tree, massive and firm as it was, broke down into its individual atoms.
It was an absurd sight, as much as the boy himself was... but it was a sight to be seen. The individual atoms hovered around him, swirling in different directions with him at the center as he stared in awe and wonder.
He reached out to the atoms from sheer curiosity. The instant his fingers brushed the shimmering cloud, the world shifted again.
Though, not violently this time. Instead, it was as if reality leaned closer, holding its breath.
The atoms reacted to his presence like iron filings to a magnet. They aligned, reoriented, their electron clouds trembling as if awaiting instruction. He boy felt it then, a sensation unlike heat or touch. It was intention made tangible. The atoms were not resisting him. They were listening.
His second set of arms, the ones made of white energy, stirred. They drifted forward on their own, mirroring the movement of his physical hands, though they did not quite overlap. Where they passed through the cloud, the atoms glowed brighter, vibrating faster, their internal structures briefly exposed to perception no human mind could withstand.
But his mind was not human.
Images cascaded through him, unbidden. The human equivalent of what happened in that moment, put in physical terms, was effectively akin to a person trying to headbutt a truck barrelling towards them at 70mph.
He saw the tree as it had been moments ago, as it had been years ago, as it would have been decades from now had it remained untouched. He saw the seed it sprouted from, the soil composition, the fungal networks beneath the forest floor that fed it nutrients for decades in quiet cooperation. He saw the carbon atoms within it, forged in the heart of a dying star billions of years prior.
All of it existed at once, layered, transparent, understandable. He gasped softly. Not from fear. From wonder.
His fingers closed. The atoms snapped into new arrangements.
What reformed was not the tree... or at least, not exactly.
The wood returned first, but denser, smoother, its molecular bonds tighter than any natural growth could achieve. The trunk twisted into an elegant spiral, bark reforming as overlapping hexagonal plates instead of rough ridges.
Leaves followed, but they were visibly different too. They shimmered faintly, their veins glowing with soft bioluminescence, chlorophyll altered into something more efficient, something closer to perfection.
He staggered back, startled by the result. He hadn't meant to change it. He had only wanted to see.
The tree stood taller than before, humming faintly, its roots sinking deeper into the earth as if seeking something it had lost and found again all at once.
The boy stared at his hands.
He flexed his fingers slowly, watching the way the air bent around them. Not visibly, not in the way heat distorted light, but in subtler patterns. Probability shifted around him like a tide. The world was… to some extent, pliable.
A laugh escaped him, small and breathless. It sounded strange in the silent forest, like the first note of a song in an empty hall.
He took another step back, then another, until his heel caught on uneven ground and he stumbled. Instinct flared. His extra arms snapped forward, catching him mid-fall without touching the ground. They held him aloft for a moment before gently lowering him to his feet.
He blinked.
"Oh," he said, the word forming naturally despite him not remembering ever learning language as a whole.
"I can do that?"