Shinomiya, it turned out, was a toast person.

She emerged bleary-eyed, ran two slices through the toaster for each of them, laid them out on plates, set out the jam and margarine in their little packets beside them, and that was how a holiday morning without lectures began. By the time they had finished eating and drunk enough hot coffee to become functional, both of them had more or less woken up, and the question of what came next presented itself.

There was nothing particular in Hatano’s diary, but she wasn’t at home, and spending the whole morning installed in Shinomiya’s flat didn’t seem right. There was also the practical consideration that if Shinomiya invited her to stay again, the way she had last night, she might not hold.

She changed back into her own clothes, which she’d left to dry in the bathroom overnight, and coming out of the bathroom found Shinomiya already dressed. She stopped.

Shinomiya was wearing an outfit quite unlike anything Hatano had seen on her: more covered-up than usual, a palette of restrained basics. A white shirt, a navy vest, wide-cut black trousers with some length to them. Hair pulled back with a plain black band, boyish and clean. Looking at her like that, Hatano let out a small, involuntary breath of something like admiration. She was still striking, evidently, regardless of register. Slightly rude to be surprised by it, perhaps, but she was.

“That’s unusual. I don’t think I’ve seen you dressed like this before.”
“This is what I wear on my days off. Showing skin gets a better response from men, but when that’s not the plan, I dress like this. Being looked at is tiring, when it goes on long enough.”

She said it while reaching for the remote and turning on the television, and the picture of her watching the morning news and reaching for her coffee was the kind of image you’d put in a frame. Hatano thought, not for the first time, that whatever made Rōkai and Shinomiya remarkable as people, both of them had faces that the world was inclined to look at. The Shinomiya family must be an exceptional-looking family in general. She was faintly envious.

Shinomiya glanced at her with something bright in her eyes.

“No lectures today for you either, right? What are you going to do?”

Hatano, who had been turning this over for the past few minutes, made a small sound of consideration.

“Nothing particular. I was thinking I’d go home and write.”

The competition deadline was still a few weeks away, and the progress was good enough that she could probably even start a second piece. That said, leaving things for later and then finding the deadline closer than expected was a failure mode she had no interest in. Better to write while she could.

Shinomiya’s expression immediately shifted into something sulky.

“…You’re going home?”

Hatano watched her making her disappointment conspicuous without directly asking for anything, lifted her mug, and thought.

She understood well enough what Shinomiya wanted. Something along the lines of spending the day out together. That was not, in itself, an objectionable request, and Hatano had no particular resistance to it. But they weren’t in a romantic relationship, and she thought the right time to move things in that direction was still some way off.

Something that had been forming vaguely over the course of yesterday was coming into clarity: Shinomiya was becoming dependent on her.

She had turned her back on painting, and gone looking for someone to acknowledge her, and the looks and jealousy she’d spent years collecting had simply been replaced by something unconditionally given by Hatano. If Hatano disappeared tomorrow, the sense of safety she’d found would probably dissolve, and she’d go back to the way things were.

Hatano still didn’t entirely know what she wanted to do, or what she was able to do. But she was certain, now, that continuing to give without asking anything of her was not the right direction. If she was going to spend this day with Shinomiya, the time needed to reach somewhere deeper in her.

“What to do about this…”

She murmured it to herself, legs crossed, looking at the television.

The morning programme had moved to a segment on museums around the country. This winter, engage with paintings, sculpture, and art from around the world, said the polished announcer, and a comedian who had reportedly just said on a variety show that he didn’t know anything about art and wasn’t interested nodded along enthusiastically.

Hatano allowed herself one moment of thoroughly unhelpful speculation, involving Rōkai’s art books and Shinomiya’s face, and then decided that was not the direction and thought more carefully.

She looked around the flat for something to work with.

Plain, sparse, a little lonely. Furniture for necessity and nothing extra, no indication that anyone living here was interested in making the space pleasant. For someone whose life until now had been built around drawing attention, the room where she lived was entirely without appeal.

The things in the flat that weren’t strictly necessary: the coffee maker, and the art supplies.

The art supplies. The brushes and canvases she’d seen last night in the half-open cupboard, dusty and untouched. Someone who kept nothing unnecessary still kept those. Which meant some part of her couldn’t let go, however hard the rest of her was trying to.

She was looking around the room with this in mind when her eye settled on the small bookshelf near the wall, packed with textbooks and notebooks. Squeezed in at one end, pushed aside by the books, was a sheet of drawing paper, slightly yellowed.

“Hm.”

She stood before she’d quite decided to and crossed to the shelf. She drew out the paper, trailing a little dust, while behind her Shinomiya said “oh” in a sharp voice. Hatano waved the loose dust away with her free hand and looked at what she was holding.

Her eyes went wide.

It was the watercolour puffer fish, the one she had seen on Rōkai’s phone wallpaper, the one a small girl had painted and held up grinning. Faded and dusty at the edges, but the colours still alive, the technical precision still startling for the age of the hand that had painted it. She looked at it and simultaneously recalled, with full force, the gap between this and the work hanging in the museum — and the thing Rōkai had said to her that night.

She was careful to compose her expression before turning around. Hatano had no connection to Rōkai that Shinomiya knew of. She couldn’t show recognition.

“This is—”

She turned with her best expression of neutral curiosity, and found Shinomiya’s face contorted as though she were swallowing something bitter, lower lip caught between her teeth. She looked down, steadied herself, and arranged her face into a smile. The kind you’d notice even from across the room.

“…Something I forgot to throw away. What’s it doing over there.”

She said it with a matching air of innocence and took the paper back.

Something she had tried, more than once, to throw away and couldn’t. Her hands, very slightly unsteady, held it while she looked at it, and then, with the expression of someone deciding, she closed her eyes, exhaled, and brought both hands to the top edge of the paper.

She was about to tear it in two. And in the instant her hands tightened, Hatano’s reflexes moved before her reasoning did. She caught Shinomiya’s wrist. Shinomiya startled and went still and looked at her.

“It’s too well done to throw away.”

Shinomiya’s face tightened. She looked down.

“What I do with my own paintings is my business.”
“I know. But if you’re going to throw it away, I’d rather have it.”

This drawing was, in whatever sense, the last ground Shinomiya was standing on. The fact that the art supplies were still in this flat, that this painting was still here, was the evidence that she hadn’t fully let go. And letting go of it, Hatano felt with some certainty, would be the act that made the separation real.

Even if that weren’t true, tearing apart your own work would leave a weight on the hand that might one day lift a brush again.

Shinomiya looked at Hatano looking at her, serious and without calculation or pity, and she turned her face away, toward the window. When Hatano released her wrist, she let the arm drop and pressed her own hand to her forehead.

The eyes that were struggling, looking down at the puffer fish, belonged to someone in real pain.

“…I’ll come clean. It’s not something I ‘forgot to throw away.’ It’s something I couldn’t throw away. I’ve tried. Several times. And each time, I couldn’t make myself do it.”

She said it as though releasing something that had been held too long, and her shoulders dropped fractionally with the relief of it. She gave a small, tired smile at the puffer fish in the paper, biting her lip with sad eyes. In Rōkai’s photograph, she had held this painting up with her whole face open, delighted. That was no longer possible for her. All she could do now was call it rubbish.

“It was good, back then.”

The small voice that pressed the words out overlapped, somewhere at the back of Hatano’s memory, with another voice saying almost exactly the same thing.

The girl who had run from everything still had one image she couldn’t let go of, even inside a memory that held plenty of things that were not beautiful. Hatano watched this quietly, let out a breath that she kept too small for Shinomiya to hear, and settled on the arm of the sofa.

It was painful to see her still caught on the painting. But it was also a kind of hope. If she had truly finished with it, she would probably never touch a brush again. The fact that she couldn’t let go meant the possibility remained.

With that thought, Hatano spoke before she’d quite finished deciding to.

“Do you still not want to paint?”

At the quiet question, Shinomiya looked up at her with something startled. Then her eyes went, with a faint shadow in them, back to the puffer fish, and then to the limitless winter blue outside the window, as though searching for a version of herself she’d left somewhere out there. Who knows, she said, barely above a murmur, addressed mostly to herself.

---

Shinomiya tied on an old denim apron and began, without a word, to set up the art supplies. Each action was slow and deliberate, as though she were remembering it as she went.

She spread an old sheet across the living room floor, set up the easel with a careful expression, and placed on it a canvas that had been opened long ago and left, its condition not ideal. She sat on a small folding wooden chair, took several tubes from a paint box with a red lid and white numbers, reached for the palette on the castored shelf, and stopped.

The palette’s small compartments held paint that had dried and set long ago. Patchy, but there was enough left in each colour to work with. She put the tubes back.

“Aren’t you going to wash it? It’s all dried out.”
“Transparent watercolour is like this. You wet it when you use it. You put out your colours, let them dry, and then you don’t have to keep squeezing them out. They last longer that way.”

Hatano had been told off for unwashed palettes in primary school art classes, and had apparently been missing something. She settled on the arm of the sofa and watched, while Shinomiya continued getting things ready, speaking as though remembering things as she went.

“Five-year-old paints. The quality will be questionable at this point.”
“Vintage. Or retro, if you prefer.”
“I’d welcome the rarity value.”

She smiled, faintly, and then picked up a brush from the jar.

The moment she did, her expression changed completely. She went still, not speaking. After a small, slow breath, she swallowed, and looked a long time at the pale winter blue outside the window. Then she bit her lip, dipped the brush in the jar, wiped it on the cloth, and began to dissolve a sky blue from the palette.

She spread the colour in the mixing area, blinking steadily as she did, controlling her breathing. From the side, Hatano could see the faint sheen of sweat at her hairline. She was clearly straining against something. Hatano’s instinct was to stop her, to say it was all right, that she didn’t have to, and she shifted her weight to stand.

Then she caught Shinomiya’s eyes, and stopped.

The look in them had cut everything else out. The canvas, the subject matter, some interior confrontation, all of it absorbing her entirely.

Shinomiya raised the brush, slowly, and brought it toward the canvas.

At the last possible moment, just before the colour could meet the surface, she went completely still.

In the quiet room, her breathing reached Hatano’s ears, slightly unsteady. The brush tip trembled. Across Shinomiya’s face moved anxiety, frustration, doubt, conflict, regret, pain, the way colours move on a wet palette, bleeding into each other, staining the canvas of her expression.

Hatano said nothing. She would not interrupt someone trying to face themselves.

She looked like she was staring down an enemy. Like a predator coiled over its prey. The full weight of whatever she needed to put into the brush, she held against the white of the canvas.

Five minutes of silence, and then the brush slipped from her hand and landed in the jar with a small splash. Droplets of water hit her fingers. She didn’t notice. She pressed her hand to her hair, gripping it, her face twisted with a frustration that looked like it might tip into tears.

“…”

She hunched over it, disgusted with herself, furious at her own inadequacy. She bit her lip hard enough that Hatano worried for her. She looked at the floor.

To say you don’t have to push yourself or you did well would have been easy. But it was obvious she wasn’t deflated, and wasn’t waiting for someone’s words. She was still facing herself. Interfering clumsily would serve no one.

After a while, Shinomiya raised her face, wearing a weak smile, and looked at Hatano.

“…I’m frightened. I can’t help it. Will you call me a coward?”

The question, offered in a tired voice, settled in Hatano’s mind and she turned it over.

She was still afraid. Still unable to move forward. The hand that should hold the brush was too heavy, the heart that should move toward art too frightened. But even so, today, even if forward wasn’t possible, she had turned to face it. That wasn’t something to file away under cowardice and leave there.

Hatano thought for a moment, and smiled, lightly.

“Maybe it was fear that kept you from moving forward. But you’re frightened because you’re looking right at it. Your feet can stay where they are for now. Just facing it — that’s enough for today.”

It was not the kind of praise Hatano usually offered anyone, and Shinomiya looked at her with an expression of mild surprise. Then, gradually, something that had been pulled taut began to ease in her, and her shoulders came down, and her face softened.

She looked at the canvas, with something close to a smile.

“…Maybe so.”

Perhaps a small allowance for herself. She nodded, her expression gentle.

A silence settled over the room again, but this time it was a slightly easier one. Shinomiya sat looking vaguely at the canvas, and then, not quite to anyone, in the tone of someone speaking aloud a thought that had been sitting with her a long time:

“It’s just photographic, my painting. That’s all it is.”

Hatano glanced at the puffer fish drawing on the table. For a piece made by a primary-school child it was extraordinarily accomplished, the kind of thing that would make most people reach for an art school prospectus on the spot.

But she called it just photographic.

Shinomiya looked at something through the faint yellow of the old canvas.

“What do you think art is?”
“…I’m not sure. Something that makes a person’s heart move?”

She was aware of the inadequacy of giving that answer while claiming to work in the literary arts, and winced privately as she said it. Shinomiya was looking at the brush, and spoke.

“Different people and publishers will put it differently, but in the end, they’re all talking about the pursuit of beauty, or about nourishing the spirit. Which means art, at its core, has its essential nature somewhere removed from reality. My own understanding is that art is the act of taking things that don’t exist on reality’s continuum and bringing them into reality.”

She glanced briefly at the cold winter sky outside.

“Cubism is perhaps the clearest example of this. The strange eggs laid by the fathers of modern painting were hatched by Picasso, himself another kind of creature, and the name has been in the textbooks ever since. Fauvism too. Looking at multiple perspectives within a single image, deconstructing and reconstructing. Seeing the world through the lens of the heart, the inner life. Not painting what you see, but putting the self and the world into what you paint — that’s where the art in painting lives.”

She spoke with a pained expression that Hatano wouldn’t have expected from the Shinomiya she’d first known, working through a world that had formed her and then expelled her. Literature, painting, sculpture, music, dance — each with its own history, none of them reducible to the same terms. But Hatano could follow where she was going, and saw the conclusion forming before it arrived.

Shinomiya said it quietly, with her knees drawn up:

“A photograph does the photographic just as well.”

Hatano looked again at the puffer fish. Technically accomplished. Carefully observed. But technique without something else underneath it.

And there it was, the thing Rōkai had said to her that night.

She has technique. She has studied the methods well, and paints with care and precision. The delicacy of her colour, compared to her peers, would be highly regarded. But…\

There is no soul in it.

The words that the painter Rōkai had spoken quietly on a winter evening, and that Hatano had been carrying since.

The sensibility that might have given soul to the painting was never cultivated, I think. The environment suppressed it. Or perhaps having received no acknowledgement frightened her away from it. Either way, what is fatally absent from her work is interiority.

Not the testing language she had used at the start of that evening, but the painter’s honest assessment. She had described Shinomiya’s painting as the output of a sophisticated robot. No interiority. And Shinomiya knew it, understood it at depth, and that was precisely why she was afraid to paint.

The path for her, probably, was through developing that sensibility. But whether she actually wanted to walk it wasn’t clear, and her heart was already refusing what painting meant. She was right at the edge of a final separation.

Hatano watched her sitting there, arms around her knees, turning things over, and found that she couldn’t sit still any longer.

She slapped both palms on her knees and stood up from the sofa arm, pulling her phone out of her pocket. The sudden noise made Shinomiya jump, eyes wide.

“S-senpai?”

Brooding had its place. But staring at the same problem from the same angle produced the same answers. If the wall was too high to climb, you could go around it. And sometimes finding a way around meant looking for a completely different approach, calling it a walk, getting some air. She had been working at words since before Shinomiya had a brush in her hand; as a creator, if in a different field, she was the more senior of the two.

She scrolled through a few websites, found what she was looking for in under a minute, checked the details, and gave a satisfied nod. Then she looked up at Shinomiya, who was watching her with puzzled suspicion.

“Shinomiya. Come with me for a bit.”