Ink Stained

105: kaizaki yukiji*

海崎雪路

Yukiji is Kichi's sister.

Yes.

Nishio was Kichi's husband.

Yes.

Theia was their daughter.

Yes.

I killed Yukiji's family. The only family she had left.

A hard Yes that she flinched from.

Pai lay like a limp noodle on the infirmary bed in the convalescence room, self-loathing filling her to the brim as she stared up at the ceiling. She couldn't move even if she tried. Every part of her – her body, her heart, her mind, her spirit – was lifeless. Her heart muddled through and kept pumping, but she felt more dead than anything else.

She'd been in the convalescence room for the whole day since she fainted. Kanou had wanted to take Pai to see Aihara, to find out if her sudden dizzy spell had anything to do with her being Hanyou. She'd flat-out refused to see Aihara though, stomach roiling nauseatingly at the reminder of what she was, what she'd done because of being Hanyou, the reason why So Fu used those like her in the first place.

Kouta had asked her if she wanted him to get Aihara to come to the house, but she rejected that as well. She didn't want to bring Aihara and her knowledge of Hanyou into the one place that she still considered pure and untainted by that darkness. It was her own small act of rebellion against her absentee parents, and the truth they'd kept from her for her entire life. If she could keep Ayashi House safe from her past, then the sins she'd committed wouldn't reach out with envious fingers to hurt the people here.

She knew she was being childish, but she didn't care.

She thought that, maybe, Shin knew what was wrong with her. Not with her body, but her heart, her mind. He didn't say anything, but she could see, from the bleak look in his eyes, that he knew her fainting had something to do with the things she'd done.

He stayed with her as long as he could after she woke up, until duties left unattended to with Kouta pulled him away. In that time, she waited for him to give voice to the heaviness that lingered between them, the reality she tried to hide from at every turn.

He never did.

Yukiji was the first face she opened her eyes to after she passed out, with Shin right beside her. Instead of looking at her in hatred, suspicion, blame, Yukiji smiled with such relief that Pai had to bite back a trembling cry that warbled like a live thing stuck in her throat.

How can you look at me like that? She'd wanted to scream. How can you look at me like that when I killed your only family left?

She'd had to bite her tongue to keep her silence as Shin helped her sit up when she was still too groggy to do it herself. Kanou checked her over several times throughout the day to make sure nothing was amiss, that his observations of her otherwise healthy countenance despite her fainting weren't wrong. As soon as Kanou cleared her, Yukiji threw her arms around Pai and hugged her so tight she saw stars for a few moments.

Kanou heeded Pai's refusal to meet with Aihara, but still called the nurse to talk over the phone, Kouta taking over before Aihara hung up. Fainting, unsurprisingly, wasn't unusual when it came to Hanyou who still lived as half-and-half, instead of the whole they'd chosen. It wasn't an indicator of how long she had left, but there wasn't much cause to worry when it happened.