Morning light slid through the thin curtains, painting the room a pale, indifferent gold.
Itsuki woke to a dull ache behind his left eye, a stubborn, pulsing reminder that yesterday had happened and that promises could become burdens. He lay still for a moment, fingers tracing the faint skin where the bandage had been. The ache sat beside his breath like a small, loyal animal.
"It still hurts," he murmured to the empty room.
"If anyone asks at school, I'll tell them I fell," he told himself, voice rough and brittle.
He forced himself up, padded to the small kitchen, and quietly made breakfast the way he had learned—measured, practical, the motions of survival. He ate alone, swallowing the food as if it were medicine. Then he put on his coat, shouldered his bag, and walked toward school with his head down.
The classroom smelled of chalk and hot breath and other people's small histories. Itsuki moved to his usual bench and sat as if nothing had changed—an act he had perfected. The other students avoided looking at him. Only the teacher glanced over, an absent, curious tilt to his face.
"What happened to your eye?" the teacher asked during the morning roll-call, curiosity sharper than concern.
"I fell," Itsuki said, casual and flat.
"I slipped walking home. It was nothing."
The teacher made a note and moved on. The question should have been a door for compassion; instead it felt like another ledger to be checked and closed.
Outside, the river ran the same gray the color of old glass. A small deciduous bridge arched across the current—a footbridge the kids used as a shortcut and, sometimes, as a stage for cruelty. Itsuki's so‑called friends were waiting there, pockets heavy with cheap bravado.
They jostled him, casual and practiced. One shoved an elbow into his ribs. Another pushed a sneaker out so its toe clipped the rough stone under his foot. The group laughed like they had a right to noise.
"You should stay down, idiot," one of them jeered.
"You're pathetic, getting all soft. Look at her, she can't even see—who cares?" another said.
Itsuki tried not to feel the cuts their words made. He had learned the formula: pain plus shame equals safety. Hurt people didn't get noticed. But the hands that pushed and shoved did more than injure the body—they asked for an answer Itsuki had not learned to give.
At one point they cornered him beside the small bridge they often used to torment others. One of them shoved him forward with an aimless, mean shove. Itsuki's foot caught on stone; he stumbled, arms flailing, and barely kept from falling into the shallow brown water. The shove itself felt like a small, ritual humiliation: everyone looked on, smirks waiting.
"You should be like that," one of them said, voice heavy with contempt. "You're the kind of trash who writes things about girls who can't even see. Who raised you, huh? No parents—no backbone."
They hurled words like stones. They called him names—cold, pinched things that landed in his chest and stayed.
He walked home with the insult lodged behind his teeth. The walk was empty and loud all at once. When he reached his apartment he let the door fall closed and slid down until the wall held him and the floor took the rest. He cried then—hard, ragged sobs that tasted like salt and old regrets. He called himself names in the dark. He called himself stupid and useless until the sound of the words wore thin.
"I'm an idiot," he choked out between sobs.
"I'm a coward."
When the crying subsided he pressed his palms to his eyes and told himself what he always told himself after these storms: that being cruel was safer than being seen. But the bruises under his heart were deep and patient.
The next morning, the classroom felt a degree quieter than usual. A rumor had rippled through the school the night before—something that makes small communities rearrange themselves overnight.
"Did you hear?" one girl whispered to another as Itsuki passed.
"They say she got one eye back. A donor was found."
Itsuki froze. The words were a small, sharp blade, but their edge cut in a direction he hadn't expected.
"How? Who?" another voice asked.
At that moment Hotaru's name floated near the teacher's lips as he called the class to attention.
"Hotaru was able to receive a donor tissue," the teacher announced during morning announcements. "It seems she is showing some light perception now. We are hopeful."
A soft hum of curious voices followed the news. Someone muffled a squeal. Someone clapped once and then looked embarrassed.
Itsuki sat very still. His breath became shallow. Part of him wanted to leap up, to ask a hundred questions—was it him? Had the tests worked? Had the process the doctor'd hinted at actually taken root? But pride, panic, and confusion braided together and kept his mouth shut.
Across the room, Hotaru smiled. It was small, like a flame in a protected glass, but it reached the edges of her face and warmed them. A classmate whispered, "Does it make a difference? Can she see with one eye?"
She answered in her measured voice, bright as ever.
"It makes a little difference," Hotaru said, voice clear.
"I can sense the light now—like a shadow lifting. It's not the same as before, but it's enough."
Even when the world had scrawled words of meanness on the bench she once sat at, she would come and quietly wipe it away. Tiffin time found her cleaning the desk, hands careful and patient. She never blamed anyone aloud; she simply tended what she could, like someone collecting small, necessary pieces of a broken place.
Itsuki watched her work. The image of her stooping to erase the childish tags from her own desk carved into him like a quiet reproach.
Days folded into weeks. A month passed.
Itsuki's absence had been noted more than once. The principal finally stepped into the classroom with the kind of expression that compacts worry into lines. He set his eyes on the students like someone reading a list they did not want to read.
"Has anyone seen Itsuki in the last month?" he asked, voice low, the question like a dropped object no one wanted to pick up.
Students shuffled. A few hands went up halfheartedly; others stared at their shoes. No one had any solid answer; a month is long for a child to simply vanish from habit, and rumors metastasized in that silence.
"If he is not coming to school, that is our responsibility," the homeroom teacher said. "We need to find out where he is. I will go to his home and speak with him. Someone come with me."
The class murmured assent. Hotaru simply folded her hands and listened, a small, serene presence among the restless noise.
Itsuki, meanwhile, sat alone on his doorway steps at home, the month stretching out both behind and ahead like a road he had to walk but could not find the courage to start. He had not known how to ask for help. He had not known how to be a child needing shelter instead of a shield. The world had schooled him in a certain hard economy—give pain to get attention—and now that currency had left him bankrupt.
The chapter closes on the sound of the teacher's footsteps leaving the classroom—an implied promise that someone will knock on the door and try to pull Itsuki back from whatever cliff edge he is leaning toward. For now, the silence hangs heavy, and Hotaru's small, new light keeps growing in a place Itsuki cannot yet reach.
✨ End of Chapter 5 ✨