Ink Stained

97: his trigger*

Shouta continued lending her books out of his large collection for her to read when he noticed her own dwindling resources to keep herself occupied (he was absolutely mortified to learn that she could read English novels better than he was, and now often harangued her to help him whenever he got stuck on phrases he couldn't understand. She didn't mention it was because of the language courses force-fed to trainees in So Fu).

Even Jirou and Yuu went out of their way to ask after her, to make sure she was all right. Yuu had manhandled a basket of laundry away from her after declaring it too heavy, and took it upon himself to get it where it needed to go, which proved to be a mistake when Yukiji's jeans were found in Kouta's closet hours later. Kouta turned it into a joke and actually wore the jeans – and looked good in them, surprisingly – though Yukiji was less than amused when she whacked him on the shoulder with a wet rag for stretching her jeans out. Shiori, of course, took enough pictures to set her phone's storage space flashing.

Jirou helped her out when she was with the kids and they got particularly rowdy, so much so that the combined efforts of Pai and both Yukiji and Mizutani were barely able to handle them. The kids loved it when he teased them – with a perfectly stoic face – with all the different animals he could shapeshift into and sit on them with. Sometimes he had to bribe the kids with promises that he'd give them a ride if he ever just so happened to change into an elephant.

Mizutani was particularly terrified of that happening. She claimed that last time her brother shifted into something that big, he actually did nearly sit on her, after almost swatting her out of the sky when she flew around him. She was still convinced (and traumatized by it) he'd done it on purpose, and refused to listen to Yukiji's teasing that it had been an accident.

Shiori was with Pai as often as she could, to the point that Pai had to chase Shiori out of her room several times so they could sleep instead of staying up to all hours of the night marathon-ing their favourite anime, binge-reading manga and books, and stalking favoured idols and bands on social media (all whilst conspicuously not mentioning anything about Pai's past or condition).

At first, she'd felt unbelievably awkward around Shiori after she broke down and cried when her best friend said she wasn't the enemy. She hated herself for crying, and barricaded herself in her room and trying to hide for as long as she could from the disgust at her show of weakness that broiled in her like venomous pit snakes. Shiori didn't let her hide for long.

It was a day, at most, before the girl barged into Pai's room with her arms laden with food she'd stolen from the kitchen with Ryu's help, DVDs of old dramas the two loved to watch, and several types of hair appliances that, at first glance, terrified Pai. She didn't say anything about Pai's avoidance manoeuvres, or ask her why she was avoiding Shiori in the first place. She simply sat Pai down and began what she ingeniously dubbed, Hair Retail Therapy.

(The pink dye at the tips of her hair did not fade away hours later. It took several washings to get it out. Shiori lied.)

Over the next few days, Shiori managed to sneakily take so many pictures of Pai that left her stunned at how much storage space Shiori had on her phone. Pai had had to delete her soul just to make space for Mystic Messenger, while Shiori somehow retained enough for what looked like millions of pictures, hundreds of videos, and several games to boot.

When they weren't wasting time quite literally doing nothing, Shiori would needle her for help with English homework. That didn't last too long before they Shiori whipped her phone out and the two ended up video-calling Aoi, Natsume, and Shuusei, who all said they missed Pai and wanted to hang out sometime soon.

Pai knew what Shiori was doing, but she never commented on it. She had finally accepted what was happening to her now that more people knew about it, but she wasn't ready to face what her dying would do to the people she loved.