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After everything, there’s still forty days left until England. Susato spends it with a man she barely knows, pretending not to grieve.
Studying is a fine enough distraction. They often speak in English, a language Susato does not think she could ever cry in. It is easier, this way, to speak and say nothing at all. It’s good practice. Who knows how long they’ll live like this? Just the two of them, a matching set, abroad in a foreign land, speaking a foreign tongue, living as if they aren’t strangers.
Naruhodou is a good student. He is not unfair to her, he respects her expertise, turns to her for advice when he does not understand. He spends much of his time at Kazuma’s desk, hunched over Kazuma’s law books, and Susato can hardly bear to look at him. He is shorter than Kazuma, she cannot help but note, his shoulders narrower. It makes her want to snap the desk in half.
She is surprised by it, the depth of her anger. Perhaps nothing linked them by blood, but she and Kazuma seem to hold this in common. She recalls him, younger, when he first came to live with them; how he paced the empty halls, shoulders taut; the violence of his sword against open air as he ran drills in the yard, as if imagining the blade against another’s throat. Whose throat, she couldn’t say, only that she understands now—the desire to turn hatred into momentum.
But there is nowhere for it to go, not for her. It would be easier, she thinks, if it had been murder. First degree, perhaps even second—at least then she’d have someone to hate, without reservation. Nina, she finds she can only pity. Justice without a villain rings as hollow as it does true, and in the aftermath all she learned was this: the truth mended no wounds, merely held them up to the light and showed how they bled.
It keeps her up at night. When she tries to sleep, she just sees Kazuma’s corpse, dead, and for no reason at all.
Those nights, she does judo katas until exhaustion overtakes her, wishing her blows would make contact with flesh. She wants to leave a bruise. She wants to break a bone. She’s never able to settle on whose bones she wants to break.
She is grateful for the solitude of her room, where no one can question the depth of her mourning for a man who was never her brother in public. She can let the worst of it fester in silence, carefully demure, until she finds herself alone once more and lets the grief unsteady her. Eventually, there is nothing left for it to consume. She falls to sleep each night unfeeling, scattered like ash. In the morning, she will dress, and tie ribbons in her hair, and join Naruhodou for breakfast.
Forty days is a long time.
She hates him, Naruhodou. She shouldn’t. It’s cruel, almost, to hate such a nothing of a man for the crime of not filling the spaces Kazuma left. There wasn’t a soul left on earth that could hope to match her brother’s passion, his sharp gaze, that warm laugh– least of all Ryuunosuke Naruhodou. He is soft-spoken, agreeable, polite, and Susato wishes she had good reason to throw him across the room again.
She won’t, though. She won’t.
--
Two weeks after she finds Kazuma dead on the floor of his cabin, everything shatters.
It is habit, at this point, for Susato to serve tea as they study. She finds the process calms her. The steps require focus, and they are always the same. She can reduce herself down to hands and wrists, and pay no attention to Naruhodou at the other end of the table, nervously fiddling with his pen.
It is Naruhodou’s habit to drink the tea when it is at its hottest. It is an idiotic habit, she thinks, and always inevitably ends with his tongue scorched. She does not ever give him more than a disappointed tilt of her head, because anything more would be rude.
It makes him easy to blame for what happens next. Perhaps the tea was too hot, or Naruhodou too impulsive, but when he goes to lift the teacup to his lips that afternoon, the heat startles it out of his hands.
It is not a teacup of any particular value. It is a small, ceramic cup, glazed black, from a tea set to which Susato held no particular attachment, other than that it reminded her of home.
The sound of it breaking is so delicate. More like a bell than a fracture.
Susato doesn’t know why that’s the final straw, but it is.
When Susato moves, it is not a decision. It is something more primal than that, her body simply moving with the tide of her anger. She’s hardly aware of what she’s doing until the palms of her hands collide against the flat plane of Naruhodou’s chest, pushing him backwards with all the force her body can muster. He stumbles.
She doesn’t even think to flip him—whatever she’s feeling, it’s past the point of form.
Naruhodou retreats a step, hands up as if in surrender. “Susato-san—Susato, it was an accident—” And his voice, his awful, worthless sympathy, tears at her ears like broken glass, and she cannot stand it.
Her own voice rips out of her, screaming—“Shut up! Just shut up!”
He does.
Naruhodou’s responding silence echoes on the metal walls, and the meter between them stretches for a mile.
Then, after a moment, he finds his voice, quieter than it has any right to be: “It really was just an accident, I swear.”
He doesn’t understand. That was just the problem, wasn’t it? It was always just an accident, an honest mistake, not really anyone’s fault. There was no guilty party, no one to blame, but what did that change, when things were said and done? Nothing. Nothing at all. In the end, the undeniable truth was—
“That doesn’t mean it’s not still broken!” she wails, her fists tightening into knots, “It’s still, it’s still—”
And after that there are no more words, only tears.
It’s just a cup, she thinks.
She knows though, with the startling clarity only ever afforded to a girl with hot tears and snot dripping down her face, that the cup was never the issue.
She cries for a lifetime and a half.
She is only reminded of Naruhodou’s presence when her sobs finally begin to wane. He is barely a person, a blurry figure in black, nervously tying and untying his fingers together. His voice, when he tries to speak, is timid and gentle, and shocks her back to reality all at once.
“Susato-san, I…”
She cuts him off with an inhale. It is meant to be a deep, soothing breath, but it is wet and gasping, like a drowning man struggling for air. “I’m sorry,” she says. She can’t bear to look at him—instead, she hides her face behind one long sleeve, pressing it to her skin in an attempt to rid herself of the evidence of her breakdown. When she pulls away, it is wet with tears and mucus. She folds her hands in front of her, and dips her head in a shallow bow, refusing to meet Naruhodou’s gaze. It would be too much to bear. “I apologize, Naruhodou-san, I shouldn’t have… behaved in such a manner.”
“It’s okay. We can… We can put it back together. We can fix it.”
Susato stares down at the mess. Amidst the shattered pieces, tea stains the carpet and leaves the red wool dark as blood. “No,” she murmurs. “No, we can’t.”
She kneels down and reaches out a hand to collect the broken pieces. In the cracks she can see their insides—white ceramic exposed within black carapace. A dead thing now, useless, but she collects what’s left of its skeleton. It’s the only thing she can do.
When a sharp edge slices open the pad of her forefinger, she doesn’t feel it until she sees the wound. Red drawn along the line of her flesh, parallel to the cup’s newly sharp mouth—it paints the white ceramic lip, and makes it bleed.
“Oh,” is all she can say.
Naruhodou reaches a hand towards her, and Susato lets him. He moves slowly, as if approaching a wild animal, and she can’t find it within herself to blame him. It feels kinder than she deserves.
“Here, let me,” he says, a gentle half-whisper. He takes her finger, wrapping a handkerchief that he’s manifested from his pocket around the wound. She can’t find the courage to look him in the eye, and instead focuses her gaze on the places where red is beginning to seep through the weave.
“Thank you,” she breathes out.
Naruhodou gently squeezes her hand in reply.
There is a long moment in which neither speaks. Susato does not know what she could say. That animal anger has fled her, and in its now-empty hiding places she only feels shame. Shame that she had let her anger overtake her, yes, but moreso: that Naruhodou had witnessed it, felt the brunt of it, when his innocence had long been proven. It was unfair to him. It was unbecoming of her.
Susato bites her lip.
It is Naruhodou who breaks the silence. “Susato-san—”
“Please, don’t apologize.”
He’s too easy to read. Susato can see the guilt on his face as he swallows an apology. “No, I just wanted to ask…” he lies, “were you close? You and Kazuma?”
Were they close, she thinks, and it takes all of her not to laugh, or cry again. They were seven years apart, not related by blood, and Susato can hardly remember a home without Kazuma in it. She was his assistant, they were going to England together; she is standing across from the man he smuggled aboard in his suitcase under her nose, a man who has to ask her this very question, whom Kazuma must have assumed she would simply accept once their charade was revealed.
Were they close? She hopes so. She’s not sure. She doesn’t know if the question is even worth the breath it takes to ask it. If she could measure the hole in her heart, would it do anything to stop it bleeding?
“We were family friends,” she merely says, the past tense bitter on her tongue. “I knew him for most of my life, since I was a child.”
Naruhodou nods, considering, his hand still pressing a now-stained handkerchief to her finger. Susato is almost certain the bleeding has been stymied by now. Still, she does not pull away.
When he speaks, his voice is thick with the effort of it. “You know, it seems so strange to me now, but I only knew him a year?” The sound he makes resembles a laugh, but it’s too wet to convince her. “I only knew him a year, and I still…” Susato watches as he searches for the words with his hands, fingers that aren’t holding hers grappling at his chest as if pressing at a wound that she cannot see. When he finds them, it is with one hand clenched above his ribcage, in a fist the same size as the heart pumping beneath it, digging into his skin as if trying to fill a lack. “I don’t know, it’s like he changes the whole shape of your life, somehow. Not even on purpose. You just can’t help but get swept up.”
His eyes do not meet hers as he talks. His gaze is far away, on a distant horizon hidden behind the ship’s walls. When she squeezes his hand, gentle and bloody, he startles, as if woken from a trance. She doesn’t miss the way his eyes shine, illuminated in electric light.
“I’m sorry. I suppose what I mean to say is…”
“You miss him too,” Susato whispers.
Naruhodou’s voice, when he finally responds, is less than a sound, as if there were no more room for air inside him. “Yeah,” he manages. “I really do.”
And with that, what is left of her composure shatters, no match for the coming flood. “It’s not fair,” she cries. She grips Naruhodou’s hand to the point of pain, just to have something to hold. She feels like a child at her father’s knee, desperately seeking comfort. She’s already cried so much, and still, she sobs. “It’s not fair.”
Through her tears, she still feels the warmth when Naruhodou places his other hand over hers. She still hears the ache in his voice as he replies, “It isn’t. It really isn’t.”
They remain that way for some time—two near-strangers, sobbing together in the middle of the ocean.
Eventually, they run out of tears. All that’s left is to clean up the mess.
Naruhodou’s face is blotchy and red, cheeks wet, and eyes so very kind despite everything. Susato finds there’s no anger left in her, not for him, as he bandages her finger with a care that is hardly deserved. She is just tired. Her head hurts. Her heart aches, still, but not so keenly as it once had.
“Naruhodou-san,” she begins as their hands separate, nothing left connecting them except that shared thread of grief hanging between them like a promise. When his gaze meets hers, she finds she has stopped looking for Kazuma in it. Instead, reflected back at her, there is just herself. “Thank you.”
Naruhodou furrows his brow, and when he speaks, she can hear the echo of tears in his hoarse voice. “Susato-san—"
“Please let me finish, Naruhodou-san,” she interjects, and he does. “Thank you for being here. And for understanding.”
Naruhodou smiles—closed-mouthed, tired, and warmer than she deserves. “Then I must thank you as well, Susato-san,” he replies, and in that moment Susato knows they are no longer strangers, if they ever were.
Susato smiles back. This time, she means it.
–
There are twenty-six days until they reach Great Britain, and each comes easier than the last.
There is peace, here, atop the rolling tide, peace Susato does not yet know how to name. But she will know it in those cold evenings crowded around Naruhodou’s writing desk, books long set aside, trading stories of her brother just to say his name aloud. She will know it in the nights that follow, when sleep comes, not as an enemy, but as the warm embrace of a friend.
It will not last forever. That final day, as they near the docks in the early morning light, they will follow each other up to the deck, and watch their approach from the bow. The saltwater air will sting her eyes, and Naruhodou will grip the sword at his hip like a lifeline, and neither of them will say a word.
But when they disembark, he will offer her his arm, and she will take it; and in the dizzying foreign crowd of the Port of Dover, neither of them will be alone.