Ink Stained

109: what's wrong?*

どうしたの？

Pai woke in silence, with a scream stuck in the back of her throat and her heart pounding in her chest like boulders falling down a mountainside.

For a horrifying moment, she couldn't place where she was. The ceiling above her head was wholly unfamiliar, and the faint scent of jasmine incense lingering in the air had her curling her lip as she jerked upright on a too-sharp inhale that stung the back of her throat. The ceiling was supposed to be white, the walls as well, pressing in on every side of her, disorienting with how large the white made the small room seem.

But the ceiling above her head was brown, planks laid beside each other, and much further away. Even as she stared at it, she could feel her mind slipping, being pulled back into the memorydream, though in a distant part of her brain, she knew she was awake.

Slowly, finally, when her breathing relaxed and the tension and fear in her twitching muscles had eased, she looked down from the ceiling. Her breath felt too loud for the space around her, but even as she noticed it, her breaths quietened until the only sound that was left was the gentle rush of wind rustling the leaves of the tree next to the window next to her.

Her heart leaped to her throat when she abruptly realized that she wasn't alone. She jerked, fingers twitching into clawed shapes as she instinctively reached deep in herself, searching for the one thing that she remembered always being there to protect her as best as it could when nothing else ever did, before she went completely still.

In a chair pulled up beside the bed she was on – close, but with enough distance that it didn't feel suffocating – was Rikuto. He sat with his legs drawn up to his chest and his temple resting on his knee as he slept. The sound of his even, deep breaths steadied the burst of fear that had gone through her when she'd realized someone was in the room and she hadn't noticed it immediately like she needed to, so as to never be caught unawares. His chair was angled towards her but facing the window, and his face turned to hers.

Pai couldn't look away from him. She stared, taking in her fill of him, her mind a confused array of the few memories in pictures that she could place of those years, whizzing by her so fast she felt almost dizzy with it. His eyelashes and brows were as dark as hers, eyelashes curling up at the ends just a bit, just like hers did.

She looked at his hair, the bed creaking ever so quietly as she unconsciously leaned forward a bit, staring. She could see the white at the roots of his hair, as if it had decided to start growing that way only fairly recently. It didn't look dyed – rather, the brown looked like it was what had been painted on his hair, and the white was what it was always supposed to look like.

His hair had always been a dark brown, bouncing whenever he walked, streaks of lighter brown playing about in the dark curls whenever he stood under the sun, or those painfully harsh fluorescent lights and painfully bright white rooms.

She had a tiny birthmark on the side of her nose, something Shin had noticed and taking to kissing lightly whenever he teased her when she blushed at whatever scandalous little thing he'd decided to randomly say out of nowhere.

Rikuto had the same birthmark, only it was on the other side of his nose.

How stuck in her own head must she have been, for those years – few as they had been – to not notice how physically alike she and Rikuto were? Now that she knew, the similarities were staggering. Others had pointed them out many times before. She could even vaguely remember one girl – Akane? Was her name Akane? – putting her and Rikuto side by side in front of a mirror to show Pai how much they looked alike.