Where Hatano led Shinomiya was a small craft workshop in the city.

Set just off a main road on a quieter side street, the place had whitewashed walls and a glass shopfront displaying an assortment of finished pieces. The kind of window display that makes you stop without meaning to. Shinomiya looked at the craft workshop sign and spoke with some uncertainty.

“A… craft workshop?”

She clearly couldn’t work out what Hatano had in mind, but when Hatano said “you’re not doing anything, are you. Come on,” with a grin, she gave a somewhat apprehensive nod and followed her in.

The interior smelled faintly of ink. Several tables were set up around the space, occupied by a family with young children and what looked like a group of high school girls in uniform. The tables were covered with newspaper and laid out with painting tools, brushes and pigments and pens in abundance. Arranged along each table, like stalls at a festival, were rows of small lanterns. The customers were painting their own designs onto them.

It was a lantern-painting workshop.

“…Lantern. Painting?”
“That’s right. I’ve been wanting one for the flat.”
“Are you planning to hold a festival in your living room?”

The real intention was obvious to anyone looking, and Hatano deflected it with the most transparent possible excuse. Shinomiya cut through the pretext with a flat look, and at the same moment felt a sharp ache in her chest. Gratitude and guilt at once, at Hatano doing all this for her. Anxiety about what would happen if she still couldn’t paint, even now. A faint, tight feeling of nerves. She pressed a hand against her chest without thinking, and then the hand that was free was taken gently into Hatano’s.

The warmth of it made her eyes go wide. Hatano smiled, openly.

“Don’t worry. Even Picasso probably couldn’t paint a lantern.”

That was probably true, though the terrifying thing was he’d likely master it within minutes.

Shinomiya laughed, almost against her will, and felt the ache in her chest ease slightly. A young woman who had been helping the children came over to them.

“Welcome! Do you have a reservation?”
“Hatano, for now. Thank you for having us.”

The woman wiped paint-covered hands on a paint-covered apron and welcomed them in. Hatano paid for both of them, and they were shown to a table with two blank white lanterns and a full set of painting materials. A brief introduction from the staff, and then the woman was called away by the children. Hatano felt something she could only call excitement, not having done anything like this since middle school. Shinomiya’s expression was quieter, a little shadowed.

There was some guilt at having brought her here without asking. But if Shinomiya couldn’t bring herself to paint, Hatano would simply put something on both lanterns herself. And the thinking behind it was this: a small, unserious environment with no stakes might loosen the knot of tension and avoidance that had formed around painting. Not a confrontation — a way around.

So what Hatano needed to do today was enjoy it.

The staff retreated, and the two of them faced their blank lanterns. Hatano smiled and offered a suggestion.

“Painting something just for yourself seems a bit dull. Why don’t we make them for each other?”

Shinomiya had been examining the materials. She looked up.

“…Are you serious?”
“You don’t have to paint, either. Words would work just as well.”

Hatano was already squeezing black and pink paint onto a palette, swirling a brush in the water jar. Shinomiya gave her the look of someone who cannot believe what they’re witnessing at the sight of Hatano apparently planning to go at it freehand with no sketch, and then murmured “a present” and looked at the lantern.

A lantern was not a canvas or a flat sheet of paper. The surface was curved, uneven, difficult to work with — placing marks where you intended was a challenge, and having the finished image read the way you wanted was another. Shinomiya crossed her arms and thought about it.

But a present, something for Hatano, meant she had no intention of compromising with herself. She could look away from what she felt, whether it was closer to love or to friendship, but beyond that there was gratitude, and that was greater than any of it.

She had stayed beside her. Despite everything.

Shinomiya’s expression, which had been dark, found a thread of something like resolve. She held her heart steady against its uneven beating and picked up a pencil. She felt a line of sweat at her temple. She searched inside herself for a subject she could paint without reference, a scene from her memory that held on and wouldn’t let go, something she shared with this person.

Without having to think, the image came: a dim space, and the blue light of a tank, and the world of the aquarium around them. The memory that had burned itself into her, the day she’d understood that people like Hatano existed. She held the thought, and her pencil began to move.

Light, careful marks, just enough to position things. Thin enough not to fight the transparency of the watercolour. She used the eraser several times when the line refused to go where she asked it, working the image she had in her head down into something with a shape.

She wasn’t going to compromise, but she also had to finish before closing time. Unfinished was not an option. She set aside any excessive fussiness and gave her attention to producing something as good as possible within the time she had.

Something fell away from the outside world. The noise, the light, the sense of other people in the room. She was in something like a waking dream, drawing. Lantern-painting was not her field, and she probably couldn’t access more than a fraction of her usual ability on this surface. Her heart was going badly the whole time, the anxiety pressing in. But something behind all of that was pushing her forward, continuously. Something drove the pencil, and she followed it toward the image she was trying to give.

Then, unexpectedly, she felt something enter the pencil tip from somewhere inside her.

She stopped. She came back to the room, and the world reassembled itself: sight, sound, smell, the workshop’s noise, the awareness of time. She looked down at what she had drawn.

A sketch of a scene that felt like an image of her own interior.

Is this really all right? asked a voice that sounded like herself at a younger age, simple and direct.

Her heart was loud with alarm. Shinomiya felt a faint dizziness, and was ashamed of her own interior, the mess and the experience she had accumulated, and for a moment wanted to crumple the lantern and throw it away. Blood moved faster in her and brought a slight headache. Who would want this rubbish, she said to herself, bluntly. She wanted to cry as her grip tightened on the pencil. Self-loathing, cycling through. A person who had bared herself to men and women alike for short-term comfort, who had fed on other people’s ugly feelings, what right did the image of that person’s heart have to be anyone’s gift. The technically precise, photographic work would be so much cleaner. More appealing. Who would want this. Who would acknowledge it.

She lifted the eraser, ready to remove the sketch.

Then she noticed Hatano beside her, struggling cheerfully with her own lantern. Brush in hand, brow furrowed slightly, painting with great effort and limited technical ability. The good-faith person who had done nothing but write novels her whole life, who was not remotely a visual artist, had paid ten thousand yen for two people to be here today, given up her time, and was now making an earnest attempt at something she wasn’t built for.

Shinomiya looked once more at the sketch on her lantern.

If she gave this to Hatano, would she be glad to have it? She gritted her teeth and turned the question over, and, oddly, she simply could not picture Hatano dismissing this painting. What she could picture, and could only picture, was that slightly warm, slightly quiet smile, and Hatano saying this is good with complete sincerity.

Convenient fantasy, she thought, even for her. But this person probably wouldn’t deny someone’s effort, whatever the result. Soft-hearted as she was, she didn’t laugh at what people genuinely tried to do. Artists might be defined by results; the people who cared about art didn’t condemn the process.

Shinomiya felt the tension go out of her shoulders. The hand that had been trembling set down the pencil, and she looked at Hatano’s profile with the expression of someone from whom something has been lifted.

Shinomiya looked at her for a moment, and then asked, quietly:

“If I try hard, will you tell me it’s good?”

The question, the look that went with it, the shift in how she was approaching the painting — evidently not what Hatano had expected. She looked up in surprise, then glanced at the sketch on the lantern, and then she smiled, from somewhere deep, and looked back at Shinomiya’s eyes, which had found something in them they hadn’t had before.

“Of course.”

No decoration around it. And that was what moved her.

Shinomiya held the answer in her chest for a moment, then reached for the colours she needed from the table. Her hands were steady.

She chose her pigments and picked up the brush. The outside world fell away, and the world became herself and the surface in front of her. Nothing superfluous anywhere; everything, mind and body, poured into a single object. You could only hold your head up before something you’d made if you’d put everything into it. Driven by feeling, she moved the brush in alignment with the image in her head.

Deep indigo settled onto the washi paper with its trace of bamboo fibre.

How long had it been. Five years. Since she’d last put colour onto anything. And since she’d last painted without dreading it, without pressure — since the puffer fish, perhaps, in those days that had been good.

Those days had been good. Since then, it had not been.

Today, just a little, it was good again.

She moved the brush the way feeling and instinct directed her, planting colour on the lantern surface. The pale blue of the tank and the mercury lamps lighting the interior, the figures of visitors turned to silhouette against the light. The bright silver of a school of fish moving through the space everyone was watching, and the overwhelming, wave-like blue.

Colour reached her like oxygen, like blood moving through the body she’d been denying was a painter’s body. The tiny, barely-there sound of brush on surface was like breathing. She layered colour to make the contrast between light and shadow vivid. As a lantern painting this would probably be below passable. But this image could not have been made on any other surface.

It moved because it was being made not as a painter facing a canvas, but as Hatano’s friend, painting a gift for someone. This lantern was what made the brush move. She was not going to let anyone stop her hand. Not now.

By the time Shinomiya surfaced from something she could no longer measure in time, she had expressed the luminous, blurring light through thin blue, and the painting was done.

She came up like someone breaking the surface of water, breathing slightly hard, taking air in.

The workshop’s noise came back to her, and the smell of paint, and she was back in the room.

She looked at the lantern she had just finished, and smiled, faintly.

Compared to Rōkai it was terribly unskilled, without the force to move a stranger’s heart. But she felt about it the way she had felt about the puffer fish painting the day her sister praised it. Imperfect, insufficient in ways she could count on both hands, but this painting, she liked.

She looked up, slightly proud, to show it to Hatano.

And only then noticed that Hatano had been watching her the whole time. She was resting her chin in her hand, and she was smiling. At that face, the face she loved, Shinomiya felt as if the thing she had made, the child she had given birth to, had been recognised by the world. An overwhelming happiness came over her and she wanted to give her the lantern right now, in this moment.

“Whoaaa!? Oh my god — did you paint this, miss?”

A voice loud enough to carry across the workshop, from one of the high school girls who had apparently drifted over at some point without Shinomiya noticing. She was staring at the lantern with wide, stunned eyes, and the girl beside her, blonde, was covering her mouth with the expression of someone who has just seen something remarkable. She reached for her phone.

“That’s incredible — can I take a photo!? Is it okay to post on social media!?”

The excited question from the girl left Shinomiya deeply flustered, thrown entirely by the direction from which acknowledgement had arrived, and she looked at Hatano. But the lantern was Shinomiya’s, and until she received it, the decision wasn’t Hatano’s to make. She thought so, and let her smile show, and closed her eyes.

Shinomiya hesitated for a moment longer, but looking at the high school girls, whose admiration was entirely unperformed, she let a smile come through, carrying the pleasure she couldn’t conceal.

“It’s a little embarrassing, but please, go ahead.”

A cheer, and the phone came up, and the photos were taken. Shinomiya flushed slightly and couldn’t hide the happiness working in her face. The commotion drew the attention of a few of the families nearby, and they came over too.

“That’s beautiful,” and “How incredible,” from the parents and children around her. Shinomiya ducked her head, embarrassed. It was still far from Rōkai, and beside the work of people who had committed to painting seriously it was probably rough in ways she couldn’t count. But the effort she had accumulated before the day she put down the brush, five years ago — for the first time today, she felt it might have meant something after all.

She held the feeling quietly in herself, not letting it become words.

While she and Hatano were watching the people with their phones, the staff member approached, somewhat tentatively, holding a blank white lantern. Both of them looked at her, and she pressed her hands together apologetically.

“I’m sorry to ask — I don’t want to impose — but I’d be happy to refund the session fee and pay you separately, if you might be willing to paint something for the studio? For promotional use?”

A commission. Shinomiya hadn’t expected anything remotely like this, and blinked, nearly asking her to repeat herself, but understanding caught up with her a moment later and she went quiet. She looked at Hatano, who smiled the smile of someone saying do whatever you like.

She thought about it, briefly. She wasn’t a proper painter. Not even close to being able to call herself one. She wasn’t the kind of person who could take a commission and be relied upon to deliver.

But someone who had seen what she’d made had called it worth paying for and asked specifically for her. That was extraordinarily, painfully good to hear.

Shinomiya glanced at the brush she had set down, and the colours she had mixed through trial and error.

The time — she didn’t need to worry about that. That much settled, she looked once more at Hatano, confirmed the smile she got back, and opened her mouth.

---

By the time they left the craft workshop, the street outside was dark.

“I did want you to try a bit harder, though.”

On the way home, Shinomiya held up Hatano’s lantern and said this with mild dissatisfaction. Hatano laughed and said “I gave it everything I had” while carrying the piece Shinomiya had poured herself into. Hatano’s lantern displayed, in bold and confident brushwork, the four hiragana of shinomiya, and nothing else of note — plus a scattering of random small doodles in random colours arranged around it without any apparent plan. After everything Shinomiya had put into composition, colour, and approach, Hatano had delivered four characters in black and a handful of miscellaneous scribbles.

Shinomiya puffed her cheeks and made her dissatisfaction plain. Hatano returned a gentle smile.

“…The honest answer is that I thought if you couldn’t pick up the brush, I didn’t want something so good it would make you feel bad. If I’d tried hard, you’d have felt guilty.”

Shinomiya opened her eyes wide at this, and then, recognising that the thought had never occurred to her, looked briefly ashamed of herself. Then she held the lantern with something tender in her expression.

“Oh — yes, I see, that makes sense. I’m sorry, I didn’t realise you were thinking of—”
“Which is the official story.”

The admission came with a contained laugh, and Shinomiya went scarlet and shoved her and then kicked her and conducted herself in a generally undignified manner. Hatano found all of it delightful and absorbed the complaints with a shaking of shoulders, and even with Shinomiya glaring at her, the lantern made for her remained carefully held.

Had she moved forward, even a little?

Hatano walked and breathed out white into the dark and thought about it.

She thought of Shinomiya as a friend. She wasn’t going to look away from that or pretend otherwise to herself. And that was why, when Shinomiya was struggling, she thought about what she could do and then did it. Today had been the same.

One visit to a craft workshop would not undo everything she was carrying. But if she had managed to set down even a little of the past and take one step, the afternoon had been worth something. Hatano watched the girl walking beside her, cheeks still puffed in protest, and felt something fond moving through her.

“Shinomiya.”

One thing she wanted to ask, just once.

“Did you enjoy today?”

Shinomiya looked at her at the question, and closed her eyes for a moment, as though thinking. Then, seeming to understand what the question was really after, she looked at the lantern on her own arm and then at the one Hatano was carrying, the painting she had made. She was probably still some way from going back to painting in earnest. Facing a canvas, she might still freeze with the brush in her hand. The day she painted on cloth with transparent watercolour was still out of sight.

She might not yet be able to say she loved painting.

But Shinomiya looked back on what the day had been, and her face broke into a smile — an open, complete smile, without anything held back and without any shadow in it. The most unguarded smile Hatano had seen on her since they’d met.

“Very much.”
“Good,” said Hatano, quietly, and found she could smile just as simply.