By the time they reached the aquarium it was nearly seven o’clock.
The penguin show wasn’t for another hour, so they moved slowly through an aquarium that was beginning to thin of visitors, taking their time. Tropical fish, deep-sea creatures, crustaceans, cephalopods, the whole impossible variety of water-dwelling life, moving through its dim and luminous world. Both of them found the situation faintly surreal, it was not, by any measure, the kind of place they could have pictured themselves going together until very recently, and both of them enjoyed it in spite of that. Hatano had assumed she’d be there primarily for Shinomiya’s sake, and then found herself genuinely absorbed by the strange and extravagant creatures on the other side of the glass.
“Oh, a puffer fish!”
Shinomiya stopped in front of one of the tanks, barely containing her delight, face soft. She turned and indicated it to Hatano with her eyes. Hatano looked, and found herself looking directly into the round, vacant, faintly idiotic face of a puffer fish.
She laughed, she couldn’t help it, and said “what are you looking at” to it, entirely without thinking, and a few of the puffer fish drifted forward in response. Hatano watched them come with quiet amusement, and glanced at Shinomiya beside her, who was watching the approaching fish with her cheeks completely undefended, face soft and open and glowing, like a child who has found something precious.
No performance in it. No calculation. Eyes bright, guard entirely down, the real thing.
She can look like this too, Hatano thought, and didn’t say it, and waited until the last of Shinomiya’s attention had been spent before moving on.
When Shinomiya finally pulled herself away from the puffer fish tank, Hatano asked with a look whether she was ready. What she got in return was a story, offered to the air as they walked.
“…When I was small. I used to draw all the time.”
A sentence offered quietly, like a stone dropped into still water. Hatano listened.
It was the first time Shinomiya had spoken about art of her own accord. This was the territory Hatano had been circling without knowing how to enter, and now it was being opened from the inside, she wasn’t going to say a word that might close it.
“Landscapes were always beyond me back then, I didn’t know how to approach things I couldn’t hold in my hand. So I stuck to simple shapes, things with clear outlines. Looking back, that was probably the beginning of the habit of always taking the easier path. But at the time it didn’t feel like an escape. Drawing easy things was just, enjoyable.”
Shinomiya stopped occasionally to look at something, a shoal of small fish, a crab picking its way across the tank floor, a creature moving with unhurried grace through its bounded world, and each time she seemed to be looking through the glass at something further back.
“I used to copy from reference books. Picture books from the school library, the kind you could borrow and bring home. Mostly fish. So it was always copying, never anything original. I was an ordinary, unremarkable little artist, the kind who can’t create anything that would move anyone.”
The past tense. Hatano almost interrupted, was, she’d said. If she was an ordinary artist then, what did that make her now? Had she become something extraordinary, or had she stopped making things entirely? The question formed and then dissolved. The answer was already known.
Hatano said nothing, and looked at a tank nearby, where a moray eel regarded her with unimpressed patience.
“Once, when I was in middle school. My sister brought me to an aquarium. The prize money from a competition she’d won. Not this one, but somewhere just as good.”
The watercolour surfaced again in Hatano’s mind, the image Shindo had shown her on his phone, the one she hadn’t managed to stop seeing since. The figure standing beside the dignitary, the painting behind them, the quality of the still water rendered in pale pastels reaching through the photograph with an immediacy that had no right to be there.
“She sounds like a good sister.”
“She was. Everything she did for me. When my work stopped developing and I didn’t know what to do, it was my sister who taught me. When I was about to give up, it was my sister who kept me going. The time she brought me to the aquarium, it was exactly when I was thinking of walking away from painting.”
She said it with a look in her eyes of someone reaching back to something they’re not sure they can still touch. She must have kept close watch, she added quietly, not quite to Hatano, perhaps not quite to anyone.
“…And I remember looking at the puffer fish at that aquarium too. It’s nothing, really, just an old memory that surfaced.”
She said it as a closing, and looked out across the aquarium without meeting Hatano’s eyes.
A good sister. Whatever the full shape of Shinomiya’s family was, and most of it remained hidden, the sister had clearly been present, and attentive, and trying. And it hadn’t been enough in the end, or at least not enough to hold her. That fact settled into Hatano with a flat, helpless weight.
She exhaled, forcing it out, and Shinomiya chose exactly that moment to turn and look at her. Hatano’s expression had gone somewhere she hadn’t meant to take it, the kind of thing she usually managed to keep off her face, and she tried to cover it with a smile. Shinomiya’s least favourite version of her face.
A ripple of light passed across her cheek, water-shadows thrown by the tank nearby.
“You’re the first person I’ve told about my family.”
Not a confession of feeling, not in any romantic sense. Just a plain record of something: that this friendship, still new and strange and without a name, had opened a door that other kinds of closeness had not. Hatano received it with a complicated expression, and Shinomiya gave a wry little smile and looked ahead.
“Just keep in mind that you’re a soft touch, and live with that knowledge for the rest of your natural life.”
The rest of her natural life. As it was, she couldn’t see the halfway point from here. Hatano watched Shinomiya’s back and thought about none of that and all of it at once.
She didn’t care about being called a soft touch, or being the first one to hear about her family. What sat with her, the thing that had been quietly eating at her since they’d walked through those doors, was the fact that Shinomiya had turned her back on painting. She understood why she cared this much, she thought: some part of it was simply liking the girl, genuinely and without calculation, in a way that had crept up on her. But some part of it was recognition, the knowledge, from the inside, of what it is to make things.
Anyone who makes things is surrounded by others who make things. Anyone who goes out into the world encounters people with more talent than they have, too many to count. For Shinomiya, the person closest to her, the person who had done most to support her and understand her, had also been the person with by far the most talent. And the weight of that, invisible, constant, was the kind of weight that didn’t break the hand that held the brush. It broke the will that lifted it.
“I’d like to have seen your paintings,” Hatano said.
She kept her voice light, as though it were a passing thought. She didn’t know what she was offering, only that she wanted to say it; wanted the girl who had put down her brush, for whatever reason, to know that someone would have looked. She reached for the words like someone reaching for something in the dark, hoping they’d find something worth holding onto.
Shinomiya’s step faltered, just briefly.
Then she walked on as though nothing had happened, and said quietly, without looking back:
“You’d be wasting your time. There’s nothing worth seeing.”
She had already stopped looking at blank canvas entirely.
The penguin show arena was a small raised stage surrounded by water on three sides, with tiered seating arranged in a semicircle around it. Without the scale and drama of a dolphin show, and without the risk of getting wet, the venue was intimate, the seating close, the stage near enough to feel immediate.
Eight o’clock. More people than either of them had expected for the hour. They found seats toward the end of a row and settled in. The show hadn’t started yet; a keeper and the penguins were going through what appeared to be a preparatory process that could only charitably be described as communication. When one keeper produced a fish from the bucket, the penguins converged en masse with their flippers spread wide. Each one was patted in turn as it ate, and then one of them simply plunged its beak directly into the bucket and helped itself. It was a disaster. A charming one.
“They’re so—”
Shinomiya stopped herself, mouth closing abruptly.
She couldn’t let Hatano see that. She glanced sideways at her, ready to deflect, and found Hatano looking at the stage with a distant, unfocused expression, thoughts visibly elsewhere.
The sight of it put something cold in Shinomiya’s chest.
Not resentment. Not irritation.
Something closer to anxiety.
That look… was it boredom? Shinomiya turned the question over. Hatano had been the one to suggest coming. She had extended the invitation herself. But was she actually enjoying this, or was she simply here out of obligation, keeping Shinomiya company because she’d started something she felt she had to see through?
No particular guilt attached to the thought; Hatano had offered, freely, without being pushed. But Shinomiya had been quietly happy, in the part of herself she didn’t usually let anyone near, about the prospect of experiencing something like this with someone she… with someone who was at least in some sense close to her. And the possibility that only one of them was feeling that made the happiness feel suddenly smaller.
She was going to ask are you bored? but stopped, not wanting it to sound like an accusation. But she couldn’t hold the question down indefinitely, and eventually it came out anyway.
“…Are you bored?”
The moment she asked, Hatano’s unfocused gaze sharpened, focus returning from wherever it had been, and she turned to Shinomiya with an expression of visible surprise, mouth closing over words she hadn’t found yet.
“You’ve looked distracted this whole time.”
She kept her voice as neutral as she could manage, pulling it back from the combative edge it wanted to take. Hatano pressed her fingers to her forehead in a gesture of self-reproach and said, quietly: “…Sorry.”
The straightforward apology left Shinomiya nowhere to go. She stayed quiet. It would have been easier for both of them if Hatano had said no, I’m fine, even knowing it was a lie, but Shinomiya had known for a while now that Hatano was not the kind of person who offered convenient untruths.
After a moment, Hatano seemed to reach a decision, she lifted her head and looked at Shinomiya, and her expression was pained.
“I’m not bored. I was thinking.”
“…Thinking?”
“Doesn’t it hurt. When no one acknowledges you.”
She returned Shinomiya’s own question to her, word for word.
She hadn’t forgotten it. Shinomiya felt the recognition land. She remembered exactly why she’d asked, because Hatano’s commitment to her work, the particular stubbornness of it, had looked like something Shinomiya wanted and couldn’t name and had reached for in the clumsiest possible way. She’d been looking at Hatano and seeing something else. She understood now that Hatano had known that. And the realisation that she’d been thought about, genuinely, at length, produced in her a knotted feeling she couldn’t entirely separate into its parts.
“That was you projecting yourself onto me, wasn’t it.”
Shinomiya opened her mouth and found she didn’t know what to say.
The answer was obviously yes. But saying so risked pulling Hatano further into a concern that was Shinomiya’s own to carry, and besides, it wasn’t a comfortable topic to lay out simply, like facts on a table. She couldn’t deny it at this point either. She closed her eyes, the gesture of someone conceding.
“…And if it was?”
“I was trying to think of what I could do.”
Shinomiya looked up at her, startled. Hatano was staring at the stage with the complete seriousness of someone who meant exactly what they were saying, one of those transparently good-hearted statements that most people would feel slightly embarrassed to say aloud in full sincerity. She meant it from the bottom of herself. She really was doing this.
Hatano was, genuinely, with her whole unremarkable but apparently inexhaustible good faith, trying to do something for her.
She’d known this. She’d known it, because Hatano was exactly this kind of person underneath the composed exterior, the type who couldn’t leave someone she’d grown close to alone in their difficulty, the type who would have been the earnest, devoted teacher in some drama set forty years ago. She’d known. And yet hearing it stated plainly, without evasion or irony, was slightly ridiculous in the best possible way, and Shinomiya had to work not to laugh.
Except at the same moment, she felt the warmth of it reaching her. The feeling of holding cold hands in front of a kerosene heater on a winter day, that specific, unhurried warmth. She looked at this clumsy person sitting next to her, and felt herself struck from all directions at once.
She liked to be acknowledged. She always had. It didn’t matter if the acknowledgement came through desire, or envy, or conflict, any of it confirmed that she existed, that she occupied space in someone else’s world. She’d taken all of it. But this was different from anything she’d taken before.
Not pleasure. Not relief. Just, warmth. The kind of warmth she hadn’t felt in a very long time, and hadn’t noticed she was missing until it arrived.
“I make things too, or try to, so I think I can understand at least a small piece of what you’re carrying. You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to. But if getting it out would help, I’ll listen. If what you’re going through now is connected to why you stopped, I want to know. I want to try.”
It came out of her with difficulty, as though the words cost something. The honesty of it was almost uncomfortable to witness.
What an impossibly soft-hearted person, Shinomiya thought.
She pressed her hand to her face to cover the warmth she could feel rising in it, and thought.
The Shinomiya family. An artistic lineage going back generations, parents, sister, most of the extended family, all of them living within that world. Every time someone produced something, the name was celebrated in that circle. And at the centre of all of it: Rōkai, the watercolourist, who had produced results that transcended family, discipline, and national context alike. Someone called a prospector, an artist whose gift was for surfacing the desires and longings and emotions buried beneath consciousness and rendering them as landscape. That was Shinomiya’s sister. Her parents’ pride.
“…There’s nothing anyone can say or do that would change anything about the family.”
She said it quietly, looking at Hatano’s face, which had gone unhappy.
The guilt smouldered, but this was her own problem, not something anyone could solve for her. She had been weak; she had run from something; that was hers to carry. She wasn’t going to hand it to anyone else. And yet, in spite of all that, something small was opening in her, some willingness she hadn’t felt before.
She thought for a few seconds, then arranged her face into the best approximation of well, fine she could manage.
“But, just once. Just this once, I’ll be honest.”
A terrible first meeting. Two people who fundamentally could not approve of each other’s choices. And still, when someone had troubled themselves over you enough to sit here beside you in the dark and mean it, opening up a little was, probably, the most ordinary and human response available.
Hatano looked at her, puzzled. Shinomiya was aware of her face getting warmer, and whispered, quietly enough that only Hatano could hear, the penguin show beginning to stir at the edge of her vision:
“—Right now, I feel like my heart is completely full.”
Hatano’s puzzled expression gave way to something she couldn’t contain.
Shinomiya pushed through, pressing her hand against her ear as though that might help.
“Since I put down the brush. No, probably since I first picked it up. This is the first time I’ve come somewhere like this with someone, without it being about what we want from each other, and just looked at things together and talked honestly. I think it’s the first time I’ve understood that this kind of enjoyment exists.”
Her body had gone hot enough that her throat felt dry. She hadn’t known that being honest could feel this embarrassing. Her face was warm enough to bring tears to the corners of her eyes, and the thought of how she must look to Hatano was frightening, and she let her eyes drop.
But the reason she valued this, this particular closeness, was that it was the kind where you could look at someone and mean it. So she made herself look up.
Hatano’s face. Taking in what she’d said with an expression Shinomiya could only describe as disbelief, not a cold disbelief, but the kind that comes from receiving something you hadn’t thought was coming. Her cheeks were faintly, unmistakably pink. Because she was embarrassed too, probably.
Given everything they’d already done together, the things they’d seen, the places they’d ended up, it was objectively ridiculous to be embarrassed by this. And yet the embarrassment felt right, somehow. Comfortable.
“I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself, obviously. But please, stop worrying quite so much about me. Right now I’m happy because of you. So. That’s enough.”
She’d said what she meant to say. All of it. It was done.
Shinomiya turned her face away from Hatano and fanned herself with one hand, hoping for a miracle. She was here to watch the penguin show. She had been brought here by this specific person. She was not going to spend any more of this on conversation.
She peeked sideways at Hatano: still frozen in place, expression still caught somewhere between surprise and something she hadn’t sorted through yet. Say something, Shinomiya thought, with a specific kind of impatience she didn’t have words for.
And then Hatano came back to herself. She looked briefly embarrassed, and then she gave a small laugh, the restraint of it not quite adequate for what she was feeling, and after a moment, when the smaller expression wasn’t enough, a broader one came through. Genuine. Unreserved. Rare.
“I see. I’m glad.”
Five words. And that smile, a smile Shinomiya had never seen on her, unguarded in a way that had nothing performed in it, and something took hold of Shinomiya’s chest without warning.
Her heart started hitting unevenly. Her blood felt warm all the way to the surface. Something deep in her stomach ached with a hunger she couldn’t name.
She looked away from Hatano. She looked at the stage.
She knew what this was. She’d always been this way, finding people to look at her, seeking acknowledgement from wherever it came. This was the same thing. It had to be. It was what she always did, and right now she was doing it again, and Hatano would see it the same way too, there she goes again, because that was all it ever was.
She told herself this while her heart continued its irregular rhythm. She pressed her hand against her sternum, took a breath Hatano couldn’t hear, and tried to focus on the stage.
The need to do something, anything, was pressing. She blamed Hatano, privately and unfairly.
All of this is your fault.
She thought it like a small, transparent complaint, and she laid her hand over Hatano’s where it rested on the seat between them. She hooked her index finger around Hatano’s to keep from being let go.
Hatano looked at her, surprised, but Shinomiya kept her burning ears forward and her eyes on the stage.
It’s fine. This is just what I do. This is who I’ve always been.
She told herself this while she waited. She could feel the slight tension of uncertainty in Hatano’s hand beside hers. And then, slowly, Hatano curled her own index finger and held on.
Shinomiya almost looked. She stopped herself.
Something rose from somewhere deep and quiet and tried to name itself, and she turned away from it, and finally, finally, managed to look at the penguins.
