Chapter Text
Honami’s found she just can’t let go of things when people insult her childhood friends. It’s been weeks since she last spoke to Ichika, and longer since she even tried to speak to Shiho, and yet whenever her classmates, the ones she’s been so desperately trying to fit in with, speak about the quiet grey-haired girl and the ‘strange’ blue-haired girl with mockery, she just… She can’t help but grow upset. The uncomfortable feeling of fury sits deep inside her chest, and Honami tries to ignore it, but it still lingers.
She finds listening to them say, ad nauseum, that Ichika’s love of Vocaloid and its companions is “weird” and that “she needs to get a less childish hobby than collecting figures” only stokes the flame that burns away at her. It’s not even the worst things they say, really, because those are directed instead towards Shiho. Horrible little comments whenever her older sister takes a deserved and earned break from idol work has her wishing she was allowed to punch them. For them to even suggest that Shiho would poison her sister was insensitive enough as is, let alone what they said about her without it.
It’s vitriol for vitriol’s sake. Honami hates it, truly, but she lacks any real connections in her class and without Saki to act as the binding force between them, the rest of their little group has drifted too far apart for her to be able to handle sitting in class alone, waiting for the bell to ring to meet somewhere outside and eat lunch with her friends. Saki’s not the reason they were friends in the first place, but she was what kept them together, kept them close. With her sudden dip in health, bad enough to land her in hospital and on bedrest at home for the better part of the year as of yet, Honami finds that it seems those tight knit bonds she had have started to unravel.
The fire burns one afternoon, as she cleans her classroom with some of her more… chatty classmates, in such a way that she could’ve almost ignored it. Of course, that didn’t mean it would fade. She doubted it ever would, not while she had to listen to them talk endlessly about people she found she simply could never untie herself from, about her childhood playmates. But she could’ve ignored it. Honami could’ve ignored it, continuing to only try and half pay attention to the conversation and fail as she listened to every cruel comment about Shiho and Ichika, and felt the knot in her stomach tighten and tighten until it became nearly unbearable.
At the very least, she could’ve until they started to talk about Saki.
“Hey, weren’t they also friends with that other girl? The gyaru one?” Someone says, and Honami’s breath catches. She quietly breaths in, trying her best to ignore the way the fire suddenly burns significantly more than it ever had before.
“Oh my god, yeah! The one who was ‘always sick’, and got special treatment from the teachers for it!” Someone else says, and her tone is far too mocking when she talks about Saki’s illness, far too uncaring and unbelieving. “It was so annoying, y'know? She got to have like, a million extensions on projects for being sick and yet if you missed a day because you had the flu, you couldn’t even get the notes off the teacher!”
The other three laugh. Honami’s grip on the spray bottle of cleaner tightens.
“She always had so much energy too, like, way too much for a person who’s actually sick-” The fire burns , and Honami wants so desperately for them to shut the fuck up- “-I bet you she was faking it for the perks, I know-”
The bottle of cleaner hits a desk. Loudly. Everyone else turns to her, with a look of shock akin to a deer caught in headlights.
“...Please don’t talk that way about people who aren’t even here to defend themselves,” She says, unable to mask the anger that leaks into her voice as she speaks. Her classmates stutter, but Honami ignores them. “I’m done with the windows now, so I’m going to head home. I’ll see you all tomorrow.” It takes her maybe a minute to put away the cleaning supplies she’s holding and grab her bag, and she half waves at them as she heads to the shoe lockers.
They don’t wave back as they stare at her.
Honami knows very well that come tomorrow morning, she’s going to regret letting the anger get the better of her. Regret that she didn’t take a moment to calm down, regret not just leaving things be. But right now, the fury that’s been growing inside her as she’s listened to hundreds of comments and cruelties finally feels satisfied by her actions.
( She should go see Saki after school tomorrow. See how she’s doing.
She’s not done that in far too long. )
In much the same way her anger ate at her, the whispers that spread around school eat at her too. At the start, there’s only a few, a murmur here and there as she walks through the halls to her classroom, as she sits at her desk and pulls out her notebook. By lunch, her entire class seems to clear out at a record speed, faster than she’s ever seen before. She’s left alone, in the classroom, the teacher having already left as well.
Honami doesn’t hate the peace and quiet as she eats, checking over her notes for her next class, trying to remember whether their teacher said they’d have two lessons of revision or only one. She also tries to ignore the feeling of people peeking in, staring at her before talking loudly enough she can tell they’re talking about her, but not quite parse what they’re saying.
By the end of lunch, when everyone filters back in, she can feel their eyes on her staring at her with fear. Peering over a textbook at her, whispering to friends about her. She tries not to squirm under the intensity of their staring, tries her best to pay attention to the lessons and not to the rumours. She’s really never been good at it.
“Hey, did you hear what Mochizuki did yesterday? She threatened to hurt Kiyabu, Sada and Maki for talking about the sick girl!” Someone whispers from behind her, and Honami can feel her skin crawl at their words.
“Wait, really? No way Mochizuki did that! She’s like… way too much of a bootlicker for that,” Someone else giggles, just barely quiet enough that the teacher won’t notice. Something sinks deep into her stomach, and she tries to redirect her focus from the conversation about her to the lesson, but this is just revision for things they’ve already learnt and that means she already knows the information being taught.
“You’d think, right? But I heard from Maki herself, and she’s not the type to lie about things like this, you know? Mochizuki got so pissed about them talking about the sick girl that she left them to clean the entire classroom on their own after snapping at them! Maki said she was glad that she left too, because she slammed the bottle of cleaner hard enough into a desk that she left a mark! Imagine if she’d hit one of them-”
“Okuma-san, Yoshihara-san. Please focus on the lesson, instead of each other,” Their teacher cuts off the conversation, but Honami barely listens to the sheepish apologies from the two sitting behind her. The rest of the day, it feels like there’s cotton in her ears, muting any and all sounds, and her mind seems to have decided to go somewhere else, because she’s barely aware of her own actions as she goes through the last of her classes, and helps to clean the school while her classmates avoid going near her like she’s radioactive.
She zones back into awareness at a familiar corner. From here, she can either turn left, and head to her own home, where her parents and little brother and puppy are waiting. She can take a long, warm shower, and try to scrub off her own thoughts and her stress. But, she promised to herself yesterday that she’d go see Saki, check in on her, see how she was doing. It’d been months since she’d done that, and if it meant having to put her own troubles to the side for a little longer than it was ok.
So instead of taking the left path, Honami continues forward, and finds her way onto paths she hasn’t walked in almost a full year. She still remembers the way to the Tenma household, and she almost swears she knows it better than even the path to her home. Halfway along, she remembers to pull out her phone and message her mother that she would be stopping past Saki’s house to check in on her.
Her mother tells her to send her own well wishes to the girl, and for Honami to be back before dinner. She sends back a confirmation that she will be as she rounds the last corner before she gets to their house. She pockets her phone, and then looks up towards the familiar house.
It stands before her, unaffected by the turbulent waters that have since shaken the group of girls that once rounded the corner with her, laughing as they went to see if their last friend could come out to play that day, like the cliff face of a lighthouse as the ocean rages before it. Unflinching at the passage of time, the lone survivour of a shipwreck that destroyed the rest of them so utterly that she’s not even sure there’s any pieces that remain.
The gate still swings open with the same clatter of noise, and the gravel path still crunches in the same way it always had when she was little. It’s just that this time, there’s no other pairs of feet that make the same sounds. Only her own. She’s tall enough to reach the doorbell on her own now, instead of having to wait for one of the Hinomoris to catch up. Honami stands on the doorstep of her childhood, wishing she could hear the same muffled excitement as the Tenma siblings ran to the door that she used to, that when it opened Saki would be standing on the other side, smiling as she always would when she was well enough to be walking around, or for her voice to carry from the second floor as she called out to her friends.
Instead, only one voice calls out from inside, and the door doesn’t open to reveal Saki. When the door finally cracks open, her blue eyes meet auburn brown. At first, Tsukasa looks surprised by her presence, but then his expression softens. “Hey, Honami. Haven’t seen you in a while,” he says, and his voice sounds heavy with something she can’t quite place. He opens the door further, and continues, “Saki’s up in her room right now, if you wanna come in and see her. I’m sure she’d love to see you too!” Whatever was weighing down his voice doesn’t completely disappear, but it does fade as he speaks.
She gives him a shaky smile. “Thanks, Tsukasa-san. Sorry I haven’t visited sooner, I’ve been… busy with school,” she settles on, and her heart aches at the familiarity of this, of how often Saki had to stay inside as their elementary school days started to near their end.
Honami steps through the door, into the living room of the house she spent nearly as much of her childhood in as her own, as the conversation that serves only to distract both of them from the troubles of today, by falling back into the roles of a time long since past, continues on without any real meaning, and she finds herself wondering if Ichika or Shiho had felt the same way, if they’d visited at all recently.
( Honami also wonders if anything will ever be as good as it was back then, when they were too young to bother with rumours and gossip. When they were too young to really care about anything except what they would play tomorrow, and when friendships didn’t die out once they stopped being in the same class.
Back when all four of them promised to stay friends no matter what.
A promise they failed to keep. )