The penguin show ended, and they left the aquarium a little after nine.
Outside, the city was fully dark. Despite the hour, the foot traffic was light — office workers making their way home, occasional clusters of them — and the two of them moved through it without hurry toward the station. A silence settled between them that neither found uncomfortable, and Hatano let the cool late-autumn night air move against her as they walked.
The pedestrian signal ahead started blinking. Any other evening she’d have jogged across, but something made her stop instead, and Shinomiya stopped beside her without a word. After a moment, Shinomiya glanced at her sideways.
“How was it? Today.”
The phrasing left too much open, and Hatano tilted her head. “What do you mean?” Shinomiya seemed to register the gap in her own question, but pressed her lips together rather than repeat it clearly, casting an annoyed look at Hatano while a new set of pedestrians arranged themselves nearby. Then, voice lowered, cheeks faintly pink:
“The date.”
That was the last word Hatano had expected. She stared at her, and Shinomiya immediately said “…the aquarium” in correction, exasperated. Whether she’d been trying to get under her skin, or making some small, tentative move toward warmth — Hatano couldn’t tell. But then she thought: whoever she was trying to make jealous with that word, it wasn’t anyone within range of them right now. And so she laughed.
“Do I look like someone trying to enjoy herself despite herself?”
Shinomiya considered this, then exhaled in something like quiet concession.
She didn’t dislike recreational outings as a rule. The aquarium had been genuinely good. And time spent going somewhere with someone — it had been a while since she’d had that, since starting university, and she was revising upward her sense of what it was worth. Besides, she’d seen the real Shinomiya across several hours tonight, unguarded and unperforming, and that was worth something in itself.
The red light ahead blurred softly in the mist of their breath. Shinomiya narrowed her eyes at it.
“…You really are a strange person, you know. Has anyone ever said so?”
Hatano thought about it.
“I’m told I’m very sensible.”
“That’s a lie.”
No inflection, no follow-up — just a flat instant denial. No room for rebuttal. And it was true, she supposed. She had friends; not many, but most of them would call her unusual without hesitation. She shrugged, and Shinomiya watched her with something almost like amusement. “Common sense is just a slightly more constricting way to live,” Shinomiya murmured.
Hatano heard it, and stopped herself before something rose all the way to speech. She looked at Shinomiya’s profile — that distant, composed expression — and turned inward for a moment.
“…I say constricting things too. Plenty of them.”
She had. She would keep doing so.
Shinomiya heard this and blinked, as if reminded of something. Then she gave a wry smile, murmured “yes, I suppose you did” like someone tasting a memory, and looked at the traffic signal as it turned amber.
The signals changed in sequence, a cascade of colour. The pedestrian light went green, and they moved with the crowd.
Matching Shinomiya’s unhurried pace, they crossed and reached the other side, and then Shinomiya said something quietly, slipped into the exhaust-sound of a turning car:
“Do you still feel that way?”
Hatano looked at her profile. The question’s meaning wasn’t clear.
What she saw in Shinomiya’s face — the dark expression that seemed to belong to the night itself, the loneliness held in those eyes where the green signal reflected — was this: beneath the careful mask of someone who needed the whole world to see her, a perfectly ordinary girl who was hungry to be loved. Slightly too much of a handful, and not much older than she looked.
The distance between them had closed a little tonight, Hatano felt — which was exactly why she hesitated. But changing her view of things because she’d grown fond of someone ran against every principle she held. More than that: being fond of her was precisely why the view didn’t change.
“…I don’t think there’s anything wrong with drawing people in. With wanting someone to want you. But building a life where that’s the only way you know how to feel real — someday that collapses. And when it does, if there’s nothing holding you up, staying upright gets hard.”
She laid it out as plainly as she could — the thing she’d been carrying, vaguely and without clean edges, as a feeling about this girl.
“A while ago I wouldn’t have cared. However you lived, it had nothing to do with me. But now I know too much about what’s good in you to cut that off and call it someone else’s problem. If you need someone to see you — I can be that. I’ll do it. So—”
Her voice was picking up some kind of heat, and she felt it, and watched Shinomiya’s face change — something glad in it, and something pained, the two of them inseparable. Before that expression could complete itself Shinomiya’s face shifted, as though she’d decided something, and the pained happiness became something more resolved.
“Senpai.”
She stopped walking. She turned to Hatano there among the passing cars and the smeared red-and-yellow blur of traffic lights behind her, and said her name.
Hatano looked at her. Shinomiya took that as acknowledgement.
“Do you have a little more time tonight?”
The interesting place she would only describe as interesting turned out to be an art museum, a ten-minute walk from a station in central Tokyo. The grounds were startling in their scale; the exterior was large and immaculate. Hatano lost her words. Shinomiya walked as though she knew every step. But — the gates were closed, the route through was dark, and the hour was approaching ten. The museum was clearly not open.
“It’s closed, isn’t it.”
“It’s fine.”
Shinomiya approached the security guard stationed near the gate, drew something from her bag, and presented it. The guard had been watching them with some wariness, but the moment he saw the pass — or whatever it was — he straightened, offered a proper bow, and said “Confirmed. Thank you for your cooperation.” He murmured something into his radio, looking toward the building.
The gate began to open.
He gestured them through. “Exhibition rooms 1-A through 3-C are currently occupied by the relevant parties. Final exit time is midnight — please notify a staff member if you expect to stay past that.”
“Thank you. — This person is also my associate.”
Shinomiya indicated Hatano, who had started reaching for her student card, but the guard nodded without checking. “Understood.” He gestured toward the building.
They walked into the closed museum, and Hatano looked at Shinomiya beside her.
There was plenty she wanted to ask. But this wasn’t a conversational mood, and the answers would probably reveal themselves without prompting. And she’d already arrived at the shape of it. The reasoning was straightforward enough:
An ordinary person couldn’t enter a closed museum. But Shinomiya came from an artistic lineage, with a sister who held solo exhibitions abroad. There was no reason for that not to include domestic ones, and exhibitions meant visits, and visits meant passes. Shinomiya having one was unremarkable in itself.
What it meant was that someone in Shinomiya’s circle was currently exhibiting here. Tonight, in this building.
Hatano glanced at Shinomiya’s profile — those eyes that held something smouldering and dark — and then looked past her at the notice board on the wall.
Rōkai Solo Exhibition.
That single line turned suspicion into certainty.
A security guard at the front desk rose as they entered, but sat back when Shinomiya produced the pass, and indicated the illuminated section of the building.
They followed the light. Further in, voices — relaxed, conversational — drifted from around a turning in the corridor. A moment later, several people appeared. Some, recognising visitors, offered good evening as they passed and gave Shinomiya a slightly questioning look — staff, probably. Their conclusion, it seemed, was that anyone cleared through security must have reason to be there.
But the others — the ones who didn’t look like museum staff — saw Shinomiya, and the expression that crossed their faces was the particular shock of encountering someone who has no business being there. After that: a deep bow, in unison.
“Good evening!”
The kind of greeting a major corporation’s employee might offer a senior executive. To a university student. The museum staff blinked; Hatano stared. Shinomiya looked away, visibly uncomfortable.
One of the group — a tall woman — turned to the puzzled museum staff and indicated Shinomiya.
“She is the sensei’s younger sister.”
The museum staff immediately changed bearing. “Oh — good evening!” in slightly ragged unison, and bowed. Words of apology followed for what apparently felt like a lapse in deference. Shinomiya watched this with a faint, unmistakable shade of loneliness crossing her face.
“…Good evening.”
A voice Hatano hadn’t heard from her before — flat, mechanical. She stood to one side and watched without intervening. Sensei’s younger sister — meaning the sister was sensei, which meant the Rōkai exhibition currently in this building was by Shinomiya’s sister and her circle. And to those people, Shinomiya was the great artist’s little sister, and so all of this was, from their perspective, appropriate.
The tall woman glanced briefly at Hatano, then turned to Shinomiya.
“So late in the evening — what brings you?”
“I came to see the exhibition. My sister’s — Rōkai’s.”
At that, the tension in the woman’s posture released — and something almost like relief moved across her face. The particular expression of someone who had wanted something understood for a long time and now found that it had been.
“I see.”
She looked at Shinomiya quietly, with a small smile.
“If you had come during the day, the sensei would have been so pleased.”
“The family wouldn’t want a dropout appearing in daylight as Rōkai’s sister.”
Shinomiya said it coolly, dismissively. The woman went still — neither agreement nor denial available. The museum staff looked uncertain. Hatano closed her eyes briefly and absorbed the confirmation of what she’d already suspected. A family that didn’t want its less accomplished member showing up in the same light as its star. The shape of Shinomiya’s world assembled itself more clearly, and the feeling it left was bleak.
The tall woman composed herself and redirected.
“The contractors left a short while ago, so the exhibition rooms are empty. We’ll keep the lights on for a while longer — please let the security desk know before you leave.”
“Understood. Thank you.”
“Please take your time. The sensei’s Gunjō from last year is extraordinary.”
Shinomiya nodded, looking down, and started walking. Hatano followed. But the tall woman had been curious about Hatano, and spoke up before they could pass.
“And this person?”
Hatano had been prepared to remain unintroduced. Shinomiya stopped, looked briefly at Hatano, and seemed to consider for a moment how to put it. Something safe and practical was forming in her expression — she turned back to the woman and began:
“She’s my university senpai—”
“—She’s my friend.”
Hatano said it before Shinomiya’s sentence could close, looking steadily at the tall woman.
She wasn’t entirely sure why it had to be that word. But it did.
The woman’s composure wavered for a moment. She started to open her mouth, stopped, and looked at Shinomiya. Shinomiya was also looking at Hatano, surprised — but Hatano thought: there was Rōkai, and there were their parents who didn’t want Shinomiya visible in that world, and there were these people for whom art and that lineage were the only context. If all of those people approached Shinomiya from within the world she’d walked away from — then Hatano, who was outside it, should be the one to stand beside her in the place she actually inhabited, and to call it what it was.
The woman looked at Hatano for a long moment. Then she closed her eyes as if taking something in, and smiled.
Shinomiya spoke as they moved through the exhibition, explaining as she walked.
“Rōkai emerged seven years ago from a small regional competition. That same year her talent was identified and a major corporation became her patron. The people back there — they’re part of a department that corporation formed specifically for this work, along with art specialists who have long connections to the Shinomiya family.”
They came out of the corridor into a large, open room.
The watercolours of Rōkai hung around them.
Each piece had a long, carefully written accompanying text — the history carried by each work, it seemed. Hatano glanced at one, then looked up at the painting above it, and felt something strike the back of her neck, like a burn. The depth of it pulled her forward — another world opening inside the frame. The colours were precise and alive, and they did something to familiar things, showed them from an angle that made them new. She was not someone who knew much about painting. But the reason this person was called a genius — she understood it without being told.
Shinomiya stopped in front of one painting.
Hatano followed her gaze and felt her pulse accelerate.
“This was the painting my sister made. The one that was — when I put down the brush.”
Sensō — Battleground. The title was quiet against the image: a Blue Hour sky, luminous and beautiful, and in the far distance, across what must be ocean, a scatter of red lights so faint they might be stars if you didn’t look carefully. A view of catastrophe from somewhere safe. The moment Hatano looked at it, she began to think about each one of those red points of light — how many lives, and what kind — and her teeth came together.
“My sister was sixteen when she made this. Until then she’d been called a prodigy, a young talent. After this one painting, no artist alive looked at Rōkai as a child anymore. A well-known writer, describing contemporary painters, called her ‘the monster who holds the brush.’”
Shinomiya turned around, quietly, and looked at Hatano with sad eyes.
“Rōkai is genuinely a genius. I understood that I would never catch up to her.”
She resumed walking. Hatano wanted to argue — but the language of effort is always rewarded was the language of people for whom it had been, or people who needed to believe it. What might actually serve Shinomiya was objectivity: you cannot win against this person. Not as cruelty, but as fact.
“The Shinomiya family is an artistic lineage that goes back generations. It’s not accidental. The family has desired it and pursued it for so long that children grow up exposed to nothing else — from birth until they’re old enough to make choices of their own, the only world they encounter is one of aesthetic creation. Any form — it doesn’t matter, as long as it expresses beauty.”
She paused.
“What you and your sister both found was watercolour.”
“…Yes.”
Shinomiya looked around at the paintings as though caught in a current.
“My sister has always been soft with me. She taught me herself — because she could, because watercolour was something they could share. When I tried to stop, she set aside her own work to encourage me. She devoted time she couldn’t really spare.”
Rōkai had loved her that much. And love, however real, was not a force that could accomplish everything.
“In the beginning I thought I would become a painter like her. But the gap only widened, and the people around us stopped looking at my work and turned back to hers. The things they said to me: try to be like your sister. The way they referred to me: Rōkai’s little sister. The studio filled with things I’d abandoned. And one day, my father made a suggestion.”
They moved out of the first room and into the corridor connecting to the second. Shinomiya stopped and turned.
Hatano looked at her face and forgot to breathe.
There was no adequate word for it. She was wearing the mixture of anger and helplessness and powerlessness and pain and resignation, all of it crushed together into something fine, and it was seeping into a smile that was just barely holding, the kind of smile that is almost crying.
“Why don’t you try a different name.”
Hatano stopped. Something in her refused to accept it.
A different name. A pseudonym. Hide the failure behind an alias so it doesn’t touch the family’s reputation. Objectively, results were everything — she could see the logic. The family probably didn’t value art for its own sake, only for what it produced in the world. But that wasn’t the family’s role to decide. The world did that. The people who were supposed to be on your side were not supposed to do that.
Shinomiya gave a short, dry laugh and walked on.
“Two sisters from the Shinomiya family. One blazes through the world on rare talent. The other brings nothing but shame to the name. For the family, I was the shackle on Rōkai’s legacy. Others in our lineage had failed to leave their mark too — but I was an exception. A lump of coal beside a gem is an eyesore.”
The second room held the works from last year. Rōkai and Shindo were the same age — which made her twenty when she’d painted these. Hatano looked at them with that fact in mind.
“When my sister found out what my father had said, she was furious. She destroyed a piece everyone had been waiting to see completed. She told him she would break her brush and never paint again unless he took it back. After that, no one in the family said anything more to me. And without even the negatives — my work had no response at all.”
What remains in a piece of art when there’s nothing — no acknowledgement, no rejection, no connection of any kind?
She had chased after someone she could never reach, had been sheltered by that person’s rage on her behalf, and had seen what her protected and sheltered painting amounted to: nothing. If the most ordinary human desire — to be seen by someone, to exist in someone’s awareness — was something she’d been denied in every other part of her life, and if a beautiful face turned out to offer a simple, immediate way to have it — wasn’t running toward that the natural thing to do?
“Senpai — you said once that you understood something of what I feel.”
“…I did.”
The night she’d had Shinomiya stay over the second time. And Shinomiya had said to her: doesn’t it hurt, when no one acknowledges you — and she had answered: of course it hurts, that’s why I write, to make them acknowledge it. The difference between them surfaced cleanly.
Shinomiya turned with a smile that was nearly crying, and said in a voice that shook a little, but kept itself flat:
“I don’t want to say something so ordinary. But — you don’t understand, Senpai. Not really. Someone who can keep going without anyone’s acknowledgement can’t understand what it’s like to be me.”
She was right. There was nothing to say to that, and Hatano closed her eyes and looked down.
“Getting results isn’t the only form of talent. Making your name heard around the world isn’t the only form of talent. It takes talent to keep going without breaking. I didn’t have that particular kind of strength. Please don’t try to get down to eye level with someone like me — someone who is weak, who ran away, who is just weeds at the side of the road. Please don’t kneel down to meet my eyes. Not everyone can grit their teeth and keep moving forward. Don’t try to understand me for your own satisfaction. Look down from where you are, and if I’m in your way, step on me. Isn’t that the way the world works?”
She was keeping her voice level, but the feelings were in the words anyway. When she’d said all of it, she was very slightly out of breath, and she looked at herself with something like self-disgust, and said, quietly and with difficulty:
“I ran away from painting. I couldn’t face it alone.”
Only here — at the end of all of it — did Hatano understand. These words hadn’t been aimed at her. They’d been aimed at the inside of Shinomiya’s chest. She had never said any of this to anyone; she’d been carrying it alone, all this time, and now she was saying it to someone for the first time, and what it needed from Hatano wasn’t wisdom, wasn’t counsel, wasn’t even comfort.
It needed to be heard.
So Hatano stayed quiet and kept listening.
“…I ran. I put down the brush. And it was only then that I realised painting was all I’d had. I had nothing else — no capabilities I was proud of, nowhere to escape to. And then a boy I’d never even spoken to confessed to me. And a girl was jealous of that. And I understood.”
Shinomiya walked on, voice lightening now, almost detached.
“Apparently I’m pretty. If I look at someone just right, they look back. And there are people who resent me for it. The first time a girl pushed me and a boy jumped in to defend me — I felt it. What it felt like to have someone acknowledge me. And I couldn’t go back after that. I couldn’t change. Not anymore.”
She stopped.
Above her: a painting in deep indigo. Gunjō. The one the tall woman had described as extraordinary. Like Sensō, it captured the Blue Hour — but where that painting had held the spectacle of distant war, this one held solitude. Nothing on the label said so. But the title came to Hatano without being told, because the painting showed a city in mist, a blurred traffic signal given centre light, a single figure on a street at night — and it looked like the inside of a long walk home, alone.
“…Winning a competition — does it feel similar, I wonder. To someone lusting after me, someone envying me. They’re all people acknowledging me. But what’s different between them? I don’t know. But while it’s happening — while someone is doing any of it — I feel like I’m real. Like I’m allowed to be here.”
She said it as though it were true, and it probably was.
But to Hatano, looking at her, she looked desolate. And empty. And the short time she’d known Shinomiya was long enough to know that this wasn’t a misreading.
That world she lives in — that club, the men who want her and the women who resent it — it ought not to exist. The thought came and Hatano let it come and then she let it go, because she also knew: for Shinomiya, that hollow world was a place of comfort. It was the only place that had ever said you’re here, and you matter.
She was thinking this when Shinomiya looked at her and her eyes went wide in surprise. Then she laughed — somewhere between fond and exasperated — and said, with a note of warmth she wasn’t hiding very well:
“Why does Senpai look like she’s about to cry?”
What? Hatano blinked, not understanding — and then something hot arrived at the corner of her eye. She pressed her finger there. It came away wet. “Damn it,” she said, under her breath, with real feeling, and shook her head and forced her focus elsewhere.
Shinomiya watched this, and her expression did something that had no name in any category Hatano had assembled for her.
“I think you’re a good person. I’m grateful for today. And — for the first time, I felt something that had nothing to do with painting, or with desire, or with wanting to be wanted. Just — enjoyment. Because of you.”
“But,” she went on, and her face turned just slightly sad.
“I’m not going to change. I’ll probably keep living this way, and keep filling myself up this way. So if you’re hoping for something different from me — please give up on that. Please let me go. You’re someone who can live on your own.”
She said it in front of Gunjō, with the deep blue painting behind her, and she looked very lonely.
Hatano didn’t know what to say. She wanted to refuse the whole premise. If Shinomiya wanted to change and needed help — she’d do anything. But Shinomiya wasn’t asking for that, and Hatano didn’t know what she herself wanted. To change how Shinomiya lived, or simply to be near her. She’d started today without a clear plan, and she was only understanding now that she needed to look more carefully at her own heart.
They’d seen all of Rōkai’s work, left the museum, and now it was past eleven — the last trains running but not for much longer.
Shinomiya just made hers. Hatano stood at the ticket gate and watched her go through, down toward the platform. She kept looking back, waving. You’re going to trip, Hatano told her with a wave of her hand that said go. Shinomiya puffed her cheeks in protest and ran.
Her own last train had almost no margin left. She stood in the cold of the station with her hands in her pockets, looking toward the direction Shinomiya had gone.
She had never particularly liked Shinomiya the easy-virtue girl. But from the night they’d both woken up with nothing explained, some flicker of interest had started. Every new thing she’d learned about her had added to it, until now she couldn’t look away.
She wasn’t going to call it romance — that would be fanciful. But there was something there that was at least in the territory of friendship, of care. And inside that: a past, a set of circumstances, that Hatano didn’t know what to do with. Or what she wanted to do with.
She exhaled — long, like something draining — raked her hand through the back of her hair, and turned toward her own gate before the train left without her.
And then a voice she didn’t know stopped her.
“Good evening. We haven’t met — Hatano-san.”
A stranger’s voice, but clearly addressing her. Hatano stopped and turned.
She went still. Her eyes widened.
Black hair to the shoulder. Black eyes that she’d seen recently in another face. Everything about the woman standing before her was almost exactly Shinomiya — except for the quality of stillness in her bearing, and a slight additional height, and the scarf and trench coat of someone who felt the cold easily even in mid-autumn. She looked at Hatano with a composed, measuring expression.
Hatano had seen her face in a news article on a phone screen. Standing beside an important man, in front of a watercolour. She had known her only through a painting — the one that had seized something in Hatano’s chest and not let go.
She said the name without the honorific, because it was the only name she had for her.
“Rōkai.”
The woman received it without displeasure, and her eyes moved over Hatano’s face with the look of someone trying to understand what they’re dealing with.
“Thank you for looking after my sister. I know your last train is soon and I’m imposing on your time — I’ll cover a taxi. Could you spare a few minutes?”