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When Tsubomi wakes up, she does not scream, and she does not hyperventilate; instead, she shakes. She sits up and breathes deeply and vibrates, eyes wide, tense and poised and listening, listening for voices that are gone: Like a small animal waiting for a predator to give itself away, so that it may run.
It is only when she sees light—through gaps in a door, through the windowpanes—that she will jump, and curl up tightly and breathe harshly and perhaps cry.
Sometimes—sometimes, she will grasp at her head as if struck by a migraine, and her body will start to lose opacity. This is the point, early on, when she would panic: These days, however, she knows that there is a way to stop it, and she will reach for the hand of whoever is closest and grab on with all her strength.
Ayano often doesn’t wake up until the sudden pain in her fingers. She does not know what to do about that, and wishes that there were something within her power: Tsubomi still hasn’t learned that she doesn’t need to try so hard to be good, to be mature and not cause problems. It may take years for her to learn. If no one is around to catch her at it, it will only take longer.
When it is at its worst, Ayano picks her up while she clings like an anxious plant, and they go to the bathroom and Ayano turns on the showerhead to lukewarm or cool and they stand underneath it. This means having to dry their hair and change pajamas later, but it also means that if Tsubomi is still shivering it is because of the temperature and only the temperature (or perhaps relief): She cannot catch fire if she is soaking wet.
When Kousuke wakes up, he wakes up thrashing and gasping: This is good because it almost always wakes Ayano right away, and this is bad because often he will wake up the other two, and even after a few months’ worth of experience Ayano can barely handle the chaos of three panicking children who don’t have a full grasp on how to turn their powers off.
If she wants to keep pandemonium from breaking loose, Ayano has to scramble awake and pick him up and get to the pile of paper bags to convince him to breathe into one: He could easily pass out and hit his head, and if he cannot calm down, he will sometimes throw up from the panic. (She can, at least, usually get him outside and down the hall if he starts heaving.)
If he can stop hyperventilating, then the rest is easy: She just has to curl up around him until he is so tired that he falls asleep again. Kousuke is at once the easiest and the most difficult of the three to handle: He doesn’t speak, but he is honest in his fears and his needs; he is good at listening to directions and is a hard worker, but he gets distracted easily and when he wanders off he invariably gets lost.
And if the easy part is getting him back to sleep when he is calm, then the difficult part is when his power malfunctions, because then he will panic all over again.
It doesn’t matter that he must be able to hear that she doesn’t hate him or blame him, because he will persecute himself so for looking into her heart. The only time he ever uses his voice is in times like these, mumbling hoarse apologies over and over until they sound like nonsense. It will take hours to settle him down, hours of drowning out his words of self-blame with reassurances that he is safe, that he is loved.
When Shuuya wakes up, he screams.
Needless to say, he wakes up everyone in the room with him—sending Kousuke into the corner with hands over his ears, sometimes even making Tsubomi cry and fold herself into nothing. When Shuuya wakes up, he will scream and punch and kick at anything that comes near him, and more often than not his body will flicker and twist at the pace of a strobe light, bruises and bleeding wounds appearing and vanishing, mimicking Ayano and the other children and even their parents.
Oftentimes touching him will only make his thrashing and yelling worse, but Ayano doesn’t know what else to do; she will grab on and pull him to her while he squirms, like the old fairy tale her class studied in school a few months ago and which she already cannot remember clearly, except that it is not romantic like a fairy tale, it is frightening and awful.
Sometimes the other two will try to help, but that is almost worse, because being hit or kicked will set them off just as badly. Too many a night when Shuuya wakes up ends in Ayano ready to cry along with the children, sad and exhausted and considering going down the hall to wake her parents up, because Shuuya is writhing and twisting from one form to the next like a nightmare, and Tsubomi is hiding somewhere invisible, and Kousuke is crying and apologizing fit to drown out the noise Shuuya keeps making until he loses his voice.
But in the end they will run out of energy, because it is the middle of the night and they have been running around all day, and they will be three ordinary little kids, draped over Ayano as they cry. And when they run out of tears, then she can lead them in a tiptoeing swarm down to the kitchen and heat up milk on the stove, because once they drink some of that it will knock them right out.
When Ayano wakes up, as she does several times a night even when the kids are sleeping just fine, she does so silently and without any sudden movements.
She will sneak out of the futon bit by bit, terrified of waking anyone, and crawl to the door until she can open it soundlessly and peek into the hallway.
Sometimes her parents will be downstairs, still, talking about research and other grown-up things. Sometimes the lights will be off, and she can creep to their bedroom and listen to them moving around or just breathing.
Because she is happy, she is lucky, she is blessed to have this wonderful house and a wonderful mom and dad—she has only just realized how lucky, how blessed, how easy it would be for her happiness to break, and that makes her scared. So she has to remind herself that her parents are still here, and the house is still here. She will go into the kitchen and make herself a snack, or hide in the bathroom, and tell herself what she has told the children, over and over.
She is safe. She is loved. She is safe. She is loved.
Ayano does not get much sleep, these days.
The teachers at school were initially concerned about her bruised hands, and the band-aids on her arms and face to cover up panicked-child scratches; now, they are much more concerned—and angry—with how she catnaps in class and doesn’t remember facts as well, and that her grade average has fallen from "good" to "passing" and is threatening to slip down the "barely passing" range.
That’s all right. She is doing the best she can, and she just has to do better as she gets more used to being a big sister. As long as no one is complaining to her parents—as long as they don’t have to know how she’s slipping—then she doesn’t mind.
Tsubomi and Kousuke and Shuuya are smiling now. Even when Ayano is tired, even when she’s been shouted at so much that she wants to cry, she just has to remember their joyful faces. This is enough for her.