It's been 2 long weeks....
The lab is quieter than it's been in months—no timers barking, no centrifuge squeal—just the freezer hum and the soft tick of a wall clock that only matters again today.
Saitou stands under the tired fluorescent, riffling a stack of stamped forms like they might evaporate if he holds them too loosely. His shoulders look older, but his hands are steady.
"We did it, kid," he says, still looking at the papers.
My throat tightens. "Did it?"
"Skyclars." He taps the header with a fingernail. "Unanimous approval. Prioritized distribution. The manufacturing slot opens Monday. Mass production starts next week."
Next week.
I brace a palm on the stainless bench until the cold leaks into my skin. Air goes thin for a second, then floods back.
"You're sure?" I ask, and I hate the way it sounds: small.
"I'm reading it." He flips another page. "Emergency procurement, hospital-first rollout, then specialty clinics, then wider dispensing as supply ramps. It's not a memo. It's happening."
I glance past him at the row of dummy bottles on the far bench—white caps, tamper bands, the draft label with the crooked logo we never fixed because it felt superstitious to tidy what wasn't real. Today it looks real enough to touch.
I swallow. "So... next week people actually start."
"People actually start," he echoes, deadpan. Then, softer, "It buys time."
"I know." I let my hand fall. "It's enough to matter."
He watches me for a beat that's longer than habit, then clears his throat and goes procedural. "Distribution will be chaotic at first. Committees. Lists. Complaints. We keep our heads down and feed data to the right places. If the safety profile looks like it did in Phase I/II, the curve steepens fast."
I nod. "We'll log everything. Real-world outcomes, tolerability, dose adherence, all of it."
He smirks. "I'll make a scientist out of you yet."
The other bench—the messy one—pulls me like gravity. Not the tidy pill line, but the place where the real fight lives: organoids under humid domes, protein blots drying on a rack, a 96-well plate glowing like a tiny city. A graph with a hesitant upward bend that we keep pretending not to love.
"We don't stop," I say to the dishes, to the notes, to him. "This"—I nod at the approvals—"buys us time and credibility. We cash both."
"We already are," he says, joining me at the dome. "Stabilization markers keep holding. Repair signaling might be peeking through the noise. I'm not saying it out loud yet."
"You just did," I say.
He snorts. "In this room doesn't count."
We lean over the dome like two people peering into a crib. Fine neurites thread across the gel, searching. Two weeks ago they sagged into mush by day five. We're at day eleven. Not victory. Direction.
"Vector dosing," I say, pointing at the notebook. "The low-mid range looks like the sweet spot. Anything higher and the microglia wake up cranky."
"Good," he says. "We need cranky sleeping through the whole show. And we'll need a second PCR rig with this cadence. I'll requisition it."
I let the word good unclench something behind my ribs. "The damage panel from Tuesday—axon retention is tracking. If that holds in vivo..."
"If it holds," he repeats, encouraging and corrective at once. "You know the list. Stability, immune crosstalk, delivery. One mountain at a time."
"Then we climb faster." I stop, take a breath, modulate. "Faster, not reckless."
"Better." He taps the side of the dome. "Skyclars bought us a reputation we can spend. The same administrators who underlined 'overstated potential?' are now asking how big a team we want. Trust is a resource. Don't waste it."
I glance at the approvals again. "We pre-stage the patient materials," I say, brain already running. "Blister cards, dosing logs, the plain-language side-effect sheet—the honest one, not the legal one. A hotline with a human, not a menu."
"Write the copy," he says. "I'll carve the budget. And we start in-hospital. No 'my cousin shipped me a bottle off the internet' nonsense on day one."
"In-hospital," I repeat. "By the book."
He slides his glasses up and rubs his eyes with the back of one gloved hand. "You look like you lost a fight with a week."
"I did," I say. "It was close."
He doesn't ask to what. He doesn't have to. "Then pace yourself," he says instead. "Sandwich, nap, electrolyte, something not coffee. You can't sprint the whole marathon."
"I can try."
He huffs. "You're impossible."
"And you're here at dawn and past midnight," I shoot back.
"That's because I'm old and slow." He tilts his head at the dome. "But I'm stubborn. Which wins more races than speed."
Silence, but not the empty kind. The freezer hum sounds like a metronome we finally hear again. I rest my fingers on the bench and feel the fine vibration of the building.
"So," he says, business returning to his voice, "rollout. Hospital pharmacies will receive first. Our job is to make their job idiot-proof. Dosing guide for clinicians. Interactions. Triage criteria summarized in words a human can read. And daily data pulls—anonymized, but fast."
"On it," I say. "I'll draft tonight."
"Draft now," he corrects, then softens. "After you eat."
I nod, half smile, and fail to hide a yawn. He pretends not to see it.
"Also," he adds, "no personal courier fantasies. You're not running bottles across town. It comes through channels. Clean chain of custody, hospital oversight, documentation. We don't lose this on a technicality."
"I know." I lift my hands in surrender. "No heroics. I'm not touching a production bottle."
"Good." He studies me a second. "You were going to, if I didn't say it."
"Probably," I admit.
He grunts something that might be a laugh. "Honesty. Another scarce resource."
I step to the whiteboard and pull the cap off a dead marker. Of course. I find a live one, and the chemical smell snaps everything into focus. I write in block letters: SKYCLARS ROLLOUT—WEEK 1. Under it, a list blooms: Clinician one-pager. Patient-friendly insert. Monitoring cadence. Hotline staffing. Data pipeline. Beside it I scrawl: CURE—next milestones: vector optimization, immune dampening, long-window in vivo.
He comes up beside me and adds QC lot verification in a tight, neat hand, then underlines no off-protocol dosing so hard the board squeaks.
We stand there looking at the board like it's a map we could fold and take with us. For the first time in a long time, the road doesn't look like fog.
He hesitates. "You staying to draft?"
"I'll eat. Then draft." I glance toward the couch under a pile of lab coats. "Then maybe twenty minutes of not existing."
"An extravagant plan," he says dryly. "Try twelve."
I almost smile. It feels like borrowing a face from an earlier life. "Twelve, then."
He moves off to the office bay to make the call. I turn back to the bench. A crooked dummy bottle has drifted out of line. I straighten it without thinking. Superstition disguised as tidiness. My fingers linger on the cap a second longer than they need to, feeling the ridges.
This is not the finish line. It's the gunshot at the start.
I set the bottle down and pull a fresh notebook toward me, the good paper that doesn't bleed through. I print the date in the corner and write the first sentence of the clinician one-pager like I'm talking to a person, not a committee: Skyclars is a once-daily oral therapy designed to slow functional decline in FA. Then a second line I can live with: Start in-hospital. Monitor vitals and tolerance. Call us if anything feels off—even if it seems small.
The pen warms in my hand. The lab feels bigger.
Saitou's voice filters from the office—flat, professional, answering questions I can guess: logistics, dosing, stock arrival, patient selection. He pauses. "Yes," he says, and his tone shifts a fraction warmer, "there is reason to be cautiously optimistic."
Cautiously optimistic. The phrase lands right. Not hope without brakes. Not fear without light.
I flip the page and sketch the data pipeline: ward → pharmacy → our secure server → nightly review. Under it I write no leaks and circle it twice. Trust was hard to win. I won't lose it to a screenshot.
A long breath leaves me. For the first time in too long, it doesn't shake at the end.
We didn't save the world, not today. We made it harder for the worst thing to happen fast. We bought days that stack into weeks. We earned enough belief to keep pushing on the thing that matters most.
"Arima," Saitou calls from the doorway, pocketing his phone. "They're ready to coordinate. Send your drafts when you've got them."
"On it," I say, and mean right now.
He lingers, then gives me a look that's half warning, half pride. "Good work."
"Yours too."
He snorts like that's illegal, then disappears back into the office.
I roll my shoulders, cap the pen, uncap it again. The clock ticks. The freezer hums. The city outside does what it always does. I set my eyes on the page and keep writing.
—
Watari knew Kousei had garnered quite the reputation.
By third period the whole school knows when Kousei shows up and when he disappears. You can feel it in the hall noise, like a wave that lifts and drops with his name. Teachers sigh the way adults sigh when they don't want to say "problem." Kids whisper "zombie boy" like it's a joke but I can hear the worry in it. They don't mean he's creepy. They mean he looks like he's fading.
They're not wrong.
He used to slide around the edges of things—quiet, polite, the kid you forget is still in the room until the piano opens its mouth. Now he's this... intense line cutting through the day. Either he's there with eyes like high beams, or he's gone. No middle. He'll drift in for homeroom, stare through roll call, then vanish before lunch. I'll ask Tsubaki if she saw him and she'll lift a hand like, yeah, for five minutes, then poof. It's like the wind keeps picking him up and setting him down someplace we can't go.
Absence after absence. That's what eats at me. Not because I'm the model student or anything—my report card is held together by corner kicks and charm—but if you stack enough zeros, they don't care how many goals you score. Grades and futures are numbers here. That stupid attendance board in the office might as well be a heart monitor. Every time a teacher slaps another pink slip under "Arima, Kousei," I feel a little beep flatten out.
At practice my coach is yelling about marking the back post and I'm nodding like I'm listening, but I'm clocking the empty spot on the sideline where Kousei used to show up sometimes with a canned coffee and a blank stare. He'd sit, hunched, like he was trying to make himself smaller, and then Tsubaki would drag him off by the sleeve because the sunset was "doing something." Now he doesn't even pretend. He just ghosts.
What does he even do all day? Easy answer: he's at the hospital. Every free period, every lunch, after school, nights. The security guard knows him by name. The nurse at the desk smiles a tired smile when he clicks the door open. If I text, he replies hours later with "sorry, was with her" like there's no world outside that room.
There's also the other thing. The suspicious thing. The one he doesn't talk about. He'll go tight around the eyes and say, "I've got work," like that explains anything. Work? Since when? I've known him forever and he has never said that word like it belongs to him. I've tried to joke it out of him—"Secret girlfriend number two?"—and he just blinks like he didn't hear me. Tsubaki pretends not to be curious, which means she is. Hiroko-san is absolutely curious in that heavy, quiet way she has, the one that makes you feel like you're about to get graded.
I keep thinking about the day me and Tsubaki walked into Kaori's room and stopped dead. Two minutes earlier, we were arguing over which fruit tart to bring, and then we open the door and—boom—lovebirds. The spiky-haired violinist and the zombie boy, curled up on top of the blanket, just... asleep. Her cheek tucked under his chin. His arm around her like he forgot where his body ends. I choked on air. Tsubaki made this tiny sound like a kettle that just learned to whistle. I stage-whispered, "Dang Kousei... Do they have no shame?" and then imagined her parents coming in with flowers and dying on the spot.
I wanted to laugh. I did laugh. But I also stood there with this weird ache in my chest because I've never seen him hold onto anything that hard. Kousei used to look at the ground like it was safer to love that. Now he looks at her and it's like he finally decided to gamble.
And the gamble is killing him. That's how it looks from the outside. He's not eating right. He's not sleeping. He shows up to second period once in a blue moon and when he does, he sags in his chair like he's borrowing a spine. The teacher calls on him and he answers with that calm, flat voice that makes everyone pretend they weren't staring at the bags under his eyes. Then he's gone again, like a bad magic trick.
People notice. They can't help it. Tsubaki notices the most. She watches him the way you watch a pot that keeps boiling over—hands ready, eyes tired. She jokes at him, nudges him, shoves bento into his hands, gets mad when he won't chew. She says he's an idiot. It's how she says "don't disappear." Hiroko-san notices too. She asked him about Kousei.. Teachers notice. Even the strict ones soften when they say his name now, like someone told them to be careful with it.
At lunch the guys keep asking me what's up. They think I know because I'm supposedly his best friend. Maybe I am. I don't know anymore. He feels beyond best friends lately. He feels like a person who decided to live on a different street. I say "He's fine" because that's what you say when you're not fine and you need the room to breathe. I say "He's busy" because busy sounds better than breaking.
Someone taped a paper ghost to his locker after the Maihou mess: two dot eyes, a wobbly smile, "Boo" in bubble letters. It was dumb and harmless, but I ripped it down anyway. Didn't know why until later. It's easy to make him into a story. The prodigy. The disappointment. The robot. The ghost. None of those words help him pass math.
I catch myself keeping score on him now. Did he eat at lunch? Did he sleep five hours last night? Did he answer when I said his name, or did he look through me like the light was wrong? I don't like that I'm keeping score. But once you start, you can't stop. Maybe that's what love looks like from the outside: terrible statistics.
The part that messes with me is how shameless he's gotten. Not in a gross way. In a no-more-hiding way. Timid Kousei would have died before taking a nap in a hospital bed with a girl in front of two friends and a machine that beeps. This Kousei tucks her hair behind her ear and doesn't care if I see it. Timid Kousei mumbled. This one looks people in the eye and says, "I'm tired," like it's not a crime. He's still quiet, but it's a different quiet. A hard quiet. The kind those soldiers have in movies after the battle.
I joked once, "You're different," and he said, "Yeah," and that was it. No apology. No explanation. Just yeah, like he had to spend all his words somewhere else and there weren't any left for me.
Sometimes I want to shake him and tell him to pace himself. Take a day off from saving the world or whatever he's doing with that secret "work." Go to three classes in a row. Eat noodles with me and complain about the ref at last weekend's match. Be a person. Then I think about the way Kaori smiles when he walks in and the way his shoulders finally stop trying to touch his ears, and I shut up.
Here's the math that scares me: the more he gives to her and to that invisible project of his, the less he saves for everything else. And "everything else" includes a report card, a recommendation letter, an entrance exam, a future with student discounts and bad part-time jobs and a life that does not require miracles. He's always been down in the dumps, sure. But this is different. He's digging. On purpose. Maybe because he thinks there's treasure. Maybe because he thinks there's no other way out.
After practice I sit on the bleachers with a juice box because I'm a child and also because I left my water bottle somewhere dumb, and I watch the sky go orange over the gym roof. The team messes around on the far side of the field. I check my phone. No message from him. Tsubaki texts me a single dot, which is her way of saying "say something" without admitting she needs me to. I send back a dot. We're very emotionally mature.
I want everyone to end up okay. That's the simple version. Kaori back on her feet, complaining about metronomes and shoving sugar into our hands. Tsubaki yelling about my first touch and throwing a ball at my head. Me, not blowing it on the pitch and not blowing it with... I don't know, whoever decides to put up with me. And Kousei—sleeping, eating, laughing at something dumb I said because I timed it right for once.
If I look honest at what I see, though? It's like watching a candle burn at both ends. It's pretty. It's bright. And it doesn't last. I keep hoping I'm wrong. I keep hoping there's a trick ending where the wax grows back.
Tomorrow, second period, I'll turn my head toward the door when it slides open. Everyone will. We can't help it. We're all watching him now. Tsubaki. Hiroko-san. The teachers with their pens and their soft voices. Me with my stupid juice box.
If he shows, I'll raise my chin like, hey. If he doesn't, I'll pretend I didn't notice. And after school I'll lace my cleats, run until my lungs hurt, and try not to think about a boy who keeps choosing the hardest road and calling it nothing.
I laugh out loud for no reason, and the guy next to me gives me a look. Whatever. I finish the juice, crush the box, and toss it toward the bin. Miss by a mile. Figures. I get up to pick it out of the grass, because even clowns get one thing right a day, and I tell myself that tomorrow I'm going to drag Kousei to class by the collar if I have to. He'll blink at me. I'll grin back. We'll pretend this is normal.
It's not. But that's okay. We'll fake it until it is.
—
I knew he was gone before Hiroko-sensei closed the score.
She didn't even sigh this time. Just tapped the page with her nail and said, "That's enough for today. You're not here, Arima." Then,softer, "We'll pick up tomorrow."
He nodded like the word enough had weight. He started packing the way tired people pack: metronome, pencil, the corner of the score he almost folded by mistake, hands pausing a second too long over nothing. No excuses. No fuss. Just that hollowed-out face and the way his eyes never really stuck to anything in the room. Like sound was happening in a place I couldn't get to, and he was half there already.
I didn't say a thing. I watched his back. Even the jacket looked tired.
When the door clicked, I counted three beats and then made an excuse to Hiroko about having something to do. I then slipped after him.
The hallway smelled like old wood and tobacco—Hiroko-sensei must've cracked a window. Evening was getting into everything. The light had that pale orange edge that makes dust look like slow snow. He moved down the stairs with his shoulder a notch lower than usual, one hand on the rail as if it mattered.
I told myself I was following to mock him later. "Sensei, did losing to your own student finally break you?" Easy. Clean. Practiced.
My feet didn't believe me.
He didn't notice me at first. He turned the corner, shoes soft on the tile, and the door breathed us into the street. The air outside had changed—cooler, sweeter. Somewhere, someone was cooking onions. A vending machine hummed like a tame spaceship. The sky was a thin blue bowl you could see the metal through.
"Hey," I called, a little too loud. "Sensei. Don't ignore your student."
He stopped. Looked back over his shoulder. Those same tired eyes. That little half-smile he uses when he's trying not to scare people.
"I wasn't ignoring you," he said. "I thought you wanted to get away from me."
"Tch." I bounced down the last step, hair clips crooked, a bear on each side of my head judging him. "You wish. You walk weird when you're alone. Like you're carrying groceries but forgot the bag."
He actually glanced at his hands like he might find milk there. "That's... vivid."
"Yeah, I'm talented. Keep up."
I slipped past him to the sidewalk so he'd have to fall into step. He did. Not quite beside me. Half a pace behind, like the idea of equal ground made him shy.
We didn't talk at first. Outside sounds stitched themselves together: the soft clack of a bike pedal, a dog's muffled bark, the cicadas warming their throats. He put his hands in his pockets and stared at the slice of sky between the wires.
"You're walking to the station?" I asked, pretending it was just logistics.
He shook his head. "A little farther."
"Visiting someone," I said, more like a fact than a question.
He didn't answer. He didn't have to. I'd seen him check the time twice during the lesson, both times like the clock might bite his fingers.
We hit the corner by the tiny park with the two swings and the chipped slide. The swings looked lonely, their chains black with the kind of rust that rubs off on hands. Someone had left a juice box on the bench. The carton had that crumpled mouth shape of something sucked dry.
I veered in without warning. "Break," I ordered, kicking a toe into the dust under the nearest swing. "Sit. You looked like you were melting on the staircase. It was embarrassing."
He followed me in with that small-oh look he gets when he realizes I'm going to do what I want whether or not he approves. He dropped onto the other swing. The chain gave a gentle eeeenk I could feel in my teeth. For a second it felt like we were the only two people on the planet allowed to move.
"I'm not melting," he said.
"You're a puddle with hair."
"Artistic."
"Don't slouch," I snapped, because if I didn't needle him, I'd go soft. "You always tell me about weight and line and then you sit like you're ninety. Straighten up."
He straightened. It fixed almost nothing and still helped.
We rocked the swings a little. Not enough to lift off. Just enough to get the chains talking to each other.
"So," I said, looking at the slide instead of his face, "in the end I totally impressed them."
His head turned. I could feel it.
"At school," I went on. "Mock rep. The accompanist dragged the tempo like they were hauling a suitcase up a hill. I hauled them back. Full body. Wrist soft, elbow heavy. The judge with the weird eyebrows actually blinked when I doubled the left-hand weight in bar twenty-one, on purpose."
He smiled. A real one. Small. It moved something under his eyes that had been too still for weeks.
"Ah!" I pointed with both hands before my brain could stop me. "You smiled! Finally."
He ducked like I'd thrown something. "Don't make it rare and I won't notice," he said.
"Don't be boring and I won't have to work this hard," I shot back, which was dangerously close to flirting, so I scuffed my shoe on the dirt to fix it.
We let the quiet return. The swings answered the breeze. A train murmured far away.
"I'm sorry if I'm worrying you," he said after a while.
"Hah? Worry? Me?" The laugh came out too fast. "Don't flatter yourself. I just don't want to waste good critique time on a zombie."
He nodded like that made perfect sense and also like it didn't touch him at all. His hands tightened on the chains and then loosened again. The motion left gray on his fingers.
"Don't, though," he said, voice easy, almost light. "Worry, I mean. I'll be okay. Whether it's in a few weeks... or months... or years..."
The words landed wrong in my stomach. They were too tidy. Too measured. Like he'd practiced them alone and was testing how they felt out loud.
I kicked the dirt. "That's a weird way to say you're fine."
He lifted a shoulder. "Maybe."
"What does that even mean?" I wanted to follow it, pry it open, but the look on his face made me swallow the tools. He wasn't offering the kind of truth you can poke without breaking it.
We swung a little more. The blue over the slide went faint with evening. A moth bumped itself silly against the park light.
"I told you to fix bar nine," he said, sudden as a dropped coin.
"You told me to fix the way I think bar nine," I corrected. "Which is rude and also accurate." I squinted at him. "Your head was somewhere else the whole time, though."
"It wandered." He smiled without teeth. "I'm trying to train it."
"Put it on a leash."
"Working on it."
He looked different when he smiled. Not less tired. Just more like the tired had somewhere to sit.
I studied his profile without being obvious about it. The shadows under his eyes were deeper than they had any right to be at fourteen. His mouth had a cut on one side from where he'd probably worried it during a scale. His hair fell in that annoying way that would be cool if he were anyone else.
"You're bad at being a person," I blurted, because kindness makes me itchy. "You know that, right? Like. Eat. Sleep. Basic human patch notes."
He laughed, quick and quiet. "I'll patch."
"Good. Or I'll tell Hiroko-sensei you're unteachable and she'll finally throw a shoe..."
"She's threatened."
"I'll help her aim."
We both smiled at the exact same time. It made the park brighter.
"You're going to win," I announced, because saying it out loud forced the world to arrange itself. "At my next school rep. I mean. I'll win. You'll... look from the audience and pretend you're not proud."
"I'll be very proud," he said, and it had no sugar in it. Just a clean line.
Heat flickered in my chest. I kicked harder, lifting two inches, three. The chain sang.
Idiot Kousei...
"Are you going to be late?" I asked, when the swing slowed again.
He checked the time without really looking at the numbers. "I always am," he said. Not bragging. Not sorry. Just a thing the day had decided.
I wanted to ask where he was going, and who, and why it made his voice go soft at the edges. I wanted to say if you vanish, I'll be mad forever. I wanted to say you don't get to be a ghost when I need you to be a wall.
Instead, I shoved his shoulder with my foot. "Fix your posture for real or I'm telling Hiroko you sat like a shrimp at the park."
"Rude," he said, but he straightened again, this time finding the place where the chain didn't rattle. He looked up into the stupid fragile sky. "Thanks."
"For what?" I snapped, because my face felt hot and that was illegal.
"For following," he said. "For making noise."
I rolled my eyes so hard the bears on my clips probably spun. "You're welcome, I guess."
He stood, brushing dust off his pants like it mattered. "Don't be late next time."
"Don't you be late," I echoed. "If you ditch me again, I'll key your metronome."
"I'd like to see you try."
"Oh, I'll try."
He lifted two fingers in that tired little salute and headed toward the path. He didn't look back. I hated that I watched anyway.
The park light clicked fully on. The moth kept battering itself against brightness. The swing creaked under me, a small animal breathing. I wrapped my hands tighter around the chains until the rust printed on my palms.
He's not my enemy. He's not even a rival. He's a cracked cup, and for reasons that make no sense I want to keep pouring water in.
Fine. I'll do it my way. I'll practice until my wrists remember without being told. I'll put weight where it lives instead of where I wish it lived. I'll make a sound he can't ignore even when his head is somewhere else.
And next lesson, if he drifts, I'll yank him back by his hoodie. If he slouches, I'll kick his shin. If he says weeks, months, years in that careful voice again, I'll make a noise so loud the sky drops it.
I hopped off the swing and brushed dirt from my knees. The stairs out of the park felt familiar, like a line I'd finally learned how to play. I headed home, already hearing bar nine the way he wanted it, and—fine—bar nine the way I wanted it too.