Chapter Text
It was November. Seiji was still hard at work at the violin workshop, and sometimes, he would even go a whole day without crying once. Shizuku’s grades had slipped so much since her miscarriage, but whenever her professors confronted her about it, she didn’t feel comfortable expressing the reason, but many of them agreed that she should take a break from school. She had no motivation to edit her book, which had been continuing to get rejection letter after rejection letter. There was one company that she hadn’t heard from yet, but she was convinced she would get rejected from them as well. It was still difficult for her to eat, and she had lost a lot of weight. After dropping out of school indefinitely, when she had once fantasized about her story, she was now beginning to fantasize about suicide, each fantasy more graphic, and yet appealing to her, than the last. Christmas, and her and Seiji’s three-year anniversary were fast approaching. So was what might have been her child’s due date. Sex became rarer and rarer as the months went on, and although her feelings about having another child were mixed, she didn’t seem to have any feelings at all. They had run dry. She was nothing anymore.
She was face-down in the middle of their bed when she heard the phone ring. She stumbled over to the phone and picked it up. “Hello?” she said in a groggy voice.
“Shizuku! It’s me, Sugimura!” he said.
“What do you want,” Shizuku grumbled between clenched teeth.
“Guess who just gave birth to two beautiful twin girls?” Sugimura gushed.
“You?” Shizuku guessed sarcastically.
Sugimura laughed. “You’re so funny! No, it was my wife and your best friend, Yuuko! Their names are Umi and Sora Sugimura! Let’s see: Umi was born at 4:39; she’s forty-seven centimeters and weighs 2.9 kilograms, while Sora was born at 4:50 and is forty-five centimeters and weighs 2.5 kilograms! So obviously they’re not fat like Ryouta was, but it’s a little before the due date, so–”
Shizuku hung up. That was the nail in the coffin for her.
///
Meanwhile, at Tokyo Hospital, Sugimura was still on the phone with Shizuku. “Hello? Shizuku? I think we got disconnected! Hello?”
Despite how tired she was from giving birth to her third and forth children in the same afternoon, Yuuko began to cry hysterically.
“I wish you were still on!” Sugimura continued, “Yuuko’s so happy she’s crying.”
“No, you idiot!” Yuuko shouted. “She hung up on you! You know why she hung up, don’t you?!”
“Somehow, I understand girls even less now that I’m married and have three of my own,” Sugimura remarked to himself. “You’re gonna have to spell it out for me,” he said.
“Shizuku and Seiji have been trying to have a baby for years now! And as soon as they finally had one, they lost it! Shizuku dropped out of school because she’s so traumatized! I haven’t seen her in months because she never leaves her apartment! This ruined her life, and you just wanna brag about how ours is so much better?!”
“She’s…really taking it that hard?” Sugimura’s hands started to shake.
Yuuko nodded.
Sugimura sat down. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I wish there was something I could do.”
///
After a few minutes of staring blankly at the ceiling in existential dread, the phone rang once again. She picked it up. “Yes?” she said, unable to feel a thing anymore.
“Hey, Shizuku!” Seiji said. “How’s it going over there?”
Shizuku was not even sure what to say at that point. “It’s…going,” she said.
Seiji took a deep breath. He knew things were not okay. “Is there anything you want me to get on my way home?”
“Just get me some medicine,” she said.
“Medicine?” Seiji questioned.
“Mhm.”
Seiji chuckled. “You’re gonna have to be more specific. I mean…”
“Any kind,” Shizuku answered.
Seiji was starting to get nervous.
“Seiji, I…I can’t take it anymore. I just wanna end it all. I…I have no energy. I can’t eat. I can’t get pregnant. I can’t write. I’m doing nothing with my life. Just please take all the pain away.”
Seiji nearly dropped the phone. “I’m coming straight home,” he said.
As Seiji rushed home, he didn’t even bother waiting for the train or taking off his apron; he just sprinted on his own two feet as tears blurred his vision. In his head, he tried to imagine what life without Shizuku would be like, what it would be like to bury her body in front of her parents and sister. No, he couldn’t think like that. He wiped his eyes on his sleeve. His body felt like lead, as if it would give out on him at any moment, and yet his heart knew it beat only for Shizuku. As that name repeated itself in his head, he found the strength to make it to their apartment building and rush up the stairs to her. Catching his breath at the door, he noticed an envelope shoved through the door. He couldn’t help but notice it was from a publishing company. His heart raced as he opened it. Too late; his hopes were already up that it was someone offering to publish Whisper of the Heart, and sure enough it was.
Seiji faked a smile as he walked through the door. “Hey, Shizuku!” he started, still out of breath and a sweaty, shaking, teary mess, “you’ll never guess what I found in the door!”
Shizuku was curled up on the couch, away from him and in nothing but a pajama top and underpants. She made herself smaller. “Did someone else have a baby?”
Seiji faked a laugh. “Funny! No, it’s from that publishing company you were waiting to hear back from, remember?”
“I don’t need this right now!” Shizuku snapped.
“No, no! It’s good news! They wanna publish your book!”
Shizuku didn’t move.
“I said, they wanna publish your–”
“I know what you said!”
Seiji sadly placed the envelope down on the table.
“Yuuko had her twins this afternoon,” Shizuku said flatly.
“I’m sorry,” Seiji said. “But hey! This is good news! Now you can finally start your writing career, and–”
Shizuku turned around. “WHO GIVES A SHIT ABOUT MY WRITING CAREER?!” she yelled.
Seiji started to get scared.
“I THOUGHT WRITING THIS STUPID BOOK WOULD MAKE ME WORTHY OF YOU, BUT ALL YOU WANTED WAS A FREAKING BABY!”
Seiji was getting nervous again. “Shizuku, no! That’s not all I want! I was just eighteen and horny and I hadn’t seen you in a while and–”
“SO YOU ONLY LIKED ME ‘CAUSE YOU WERE HORNY?!”
“What…no! I…”
“Why didn’t you get me the damn medicine?! Can’t you just put me out of my misery, already?!”
Seiji was starting to get angry. “Shizuku, why do you think I didn’t get it?!”
“Ugh!” Shizuku tried to throw the envelope against the door and then marched in that direction, as if to take her life by throwing herself off of her own apartment building. As calmly as he could, Seiji grabbed Shizuku’s hands and held them together in his.
“Shizuku…please…just calm down.”
“Don’t you dare tell me to calm down, okay?! I lost everything! Why are you so damn calm and unemotional all the time?! Why don’t you ever fall into this despair and hate like I do?!”
Seiji looked angrily at her. “You want me to get emotional like you do? You want me to say what’s actually on my mind?”
Shizuku was starting to regret telling him that.
“How dare you, Shizuku!” he yelled. “That’s all I could think when you called me up and told me to help you take your own life! Just…how dare you! All I could think of was what my life would be like without you! How I could possibly go on! What it would be like to bury you in front of your family! And you know what?!” His face went from angry to crying almost immediately. “I don’t think I could do it.” He held tightly onto Shizuku as he began to cry. “Oh god, Shizuku! I can’t live without you! You’re the reason I get up every god damn miserable day! I thought my job was enough, but I can’t lose you! I can’t lose the mother of my child!”
Shizuku began to cry as well. And there they were for a few solid minutes, just holding each other, rocking back and forth, and letting out months and months of pent-up pain.
“Seiji?” Shizuku sniffled. “Can I ask you something?”
“Of course,” Seiji answered, wiping his eyes.
“Am I…” She sniffled again. “Good enough for you?”
“Shizuku…” Seiji answered, holding her. “You are…so much. Before I met you, it’s like I had this hole in my heart that needed to be filled.” He sniffled. “But when you filled that hole in my heart, you were too big for it, so my heart needed to get bigger to make room for you.”
Shizuku sniffled. “That’s beautiful,” she said.
Seiji thought for a moment. He took off his apron and knelt down in front of Shizuku, placing his hands over her womb again. “It’s much like how a woman’s womb needs to get bigger to make room for the baby. My heart needed to get bigger to make room for you. And make no mistake, that child was real. There was a real, living human inside you, and now that’s he’s gone…” He took Shizuku’s hand and led it to her heart. “...Your heart is broken.” He stood up and guided her hand to his own heart. “Mine is too,” he said. “You know…” He let their hands fall to the side, before taking her other hand in his. “...I would try to be strong, but I’ve cried at work too many times to count. My tears fell all over the violins I made. I would make up corny little stories about my violins sounding sad and beautiful because of the maker’s tears of grief all over them, but then I thought that was stupid until one day, a single tear fell into the f-hole, and it’s like I heard a voice saying, ‘That’s the only way the light gets in.’”
“ ‘That’s the only way the light gets in,’” Shizuku repeated. “Maybe I’ll write another book, and maybe it’ll be about our baby. Maybe about a couple like us trying to deal with their loss. He just…” Shizuku’s tears began to flood back to her eyes. “He can’t die in vain, Seiji!”
Shizuku cried into Seiji’s chest, and he cried quietly into her hair. It was the most intimate they had been in months.