Chapter Text
It’s a lazy Sunday afternoon in the Higashikata house, and Hato is nine years old. It’s been almost two weeks since her mother went away, and the house still feels emptier.
“I want cookies!” Joshu yells to the room at large.
“You just had breakfast,” her father points out from behind his newspaper.
Daiya drools and flails her arms.
“Mom used to make cookies with me,” Hato shares. She liked baking cookies with her mother - she got to stand on a stepping stool at their kitchen counter and measure ingredients out, stir the bowl, sneak bites of dough.
“Huh?” Joshu asks.
“Mom used to -”
“ Hato .” Norisuke interrupts. “Come talk with me in the other room, please.”
It’s the voice her father uses when she’s in trouble, but she can’t think of anything she’s done wrong. She follows him into the living room, and he sits down heavily with a sigh.
“We don’t talk about mom anymore,” he says simply.
Hato frowns. He’s told her this; she still doesn’t understand. “Why?”
“There’s no need to talk about her. She’s gone now. She left.”
Hato knows why she’s gone: she had to go to jail because she did something bad. Nobody will tell her what. “But I want to talk about her,” she protests weakly.
“It would confuse Joshu and Daiya. You don’t want to upset them, right? You want to be a good big sister, right?”
This is what hits her in the heart, snuffing out any fight she might put up. “...Yeah.”
“Thank you, Hato. I knew you’d understand. Why don’t you come back to the breakfast table? We can talk about other things.”
“No, thank you. I’m done already.”
Instead, Hato goes to see Jobin. She likes Jobin’s room, with its many cages and tanks for the bugs he collects. They’re fun to watch. He even let her name a pair of ladybugs; when she enters, after he tells her to come in, she says a customary hello to Hato 1 and Hato 2.
Jobin is lounging on his bed, reading a book with a beetle on the cover. “Dad says we can’t talk about mom anymore,” she tells him.
Jobin sighs. “Dad doesn’t like talking about things that make him sad,” he says. Hato can somewhat understand; she doesn’t like sad stories for the same reason. Why make yourself sad on purpose, when you don’t have to be?
But although talking about her mother might make her sad, not talking about her is worse, somehow. “Does talking about mom make you sad?” she asks.
Jobin huffs out a sigh, fluttering his side-swept bangs. “Obviously. But I’m not the same as dad. If you ever want to talk about mom, come talk to me, okay?”
“Okay.” Hato fiddles with the ends of her hair. “Mom used to make cookies with me,” she says, feeling stupid. She doesn’t know why it’s so important for her to say it, or for someone to listen.
Jobin smiles. “She used to make cookies with me, too, when I was little. I liked eating the dough.”
“Me too,” Hato says.
Jobin puts down his book. “Wanna go make some cookie dough and just eat it all?” he asks.
Hato does.
Hato is ten.
Jobin has a girlfriend, Mitsuba, and Hato likes her a lot. She spends most of her time with Jobin, but sometimes she’ll help Hato with math homework and talk to her about the books she likes. She’s pretty and has a job as a model, which Hato thinks sounds like the best job ever. She’s nice to Hato, and even does her makeup sometimes.
“Do you have like a berry purple colored lipstick?” Hato asks as Mitsuba drags a brush through her hair. Her father took all of the pictures with her mother away - off the walls, out of their albums - but she has a few squirreled away between the pages of an old textbook on her bookshelf. Her mother is pretty, with sharper features than Hato, and in every picture her lipstick is a bold, rich sort of berry purple. Hato thinks it looks dramatic and grown-up. She wonders how it would look on her.
“How about this?” asks Mitsuba, plucking one out of her bag and twisting up the bullet to display the color.
Hato wrinkles her nose. “Darker.”
“This one?”
Hato thinks. “Less pink-y.”
“Picky!” Mitsuba teases. “Why so specific?”
“I, um, saw it on a model in a magazine,” Hato lies. “I don’t have it with me so I can’t show you,”
Mitsuba hums thoughtfully, and picks up a third lipstick. “How about this, then?”
“It’s perfect!” Hato exclaims. It could even be the exact same one her mother used, for all she knows.
Mitsuba applies it to Hato in a few practiced swipes. “Don’t rub your lips together!” she warns Hato just in time.
Hato turns to the mirror and - frowns. It’s not as pretty on her as it was on her mother. It doesn’t look the same, somehow. She was sure it was the right color, but it’s wrong. “I don’t look like her,” Hato says quietly.
“Hm. I guess it’s not your color,” Mitsuba says, shaking her head. “It washes you out.”
How can people have colors? Hato’s berry-purple lips tremble, and the mirror blurs. She feels stupid, like a kid playing dress-up.
“Hey, don’t cry like that! Some colors just don’t work on people. Here.” Mitsuba wipes off Hato’s lipstick while she sniffles, and applies a different color. Hato looks at herself - it’s a lighter sort of peachy pink. She doesn’t look like her mother at all, but she does look pretty.
“See? If I wore a color like that, it wouldn’t look right on me, it’s too light and warm. And I bet it wouldn’t look right on that model, either. But it’s lovely on you!” Mitsuba puts the color on her own lips to demonstrate and - she’s right. It looks a little weird on her, in a way Hato can’t define.
“You can keep this one, it really does look better on you. Everyone has different colors that look best on them,” Mitsuba continues. “You just have to figure out the ones that work for you. That’s what growing up is.”
Hato is twelve.
She’s eating lunch with her friends at school. Reimi is complaining about a fight she had with her mother, and Tomoko and Aya are commiserating about how moms can be so overbearing. Hato keeps quiet, picking at her food.
“Hey, Hato! Don’t you have a mom?” Tomoko calls out.
“No.”
“Did she die? Oh my gosh, I’m sorry, I didn’t know she was dead!”
“She went to prison, Tomoko,” says Reimi. “Don’t be so clueless.”
“Oh, what for?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Hato answers quickly. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“My mom said it was for murder,” Aya pipes up snidely. “She said your mom killed a kid. Is that why?”
“No it’s not! Stop repeating shitty rumors!” Hato says heatedly.
“What was it for, then?”
“I don’t want to talk about it!” Hato repeats, storming away to finish her lunch alone. But for the first time, it strikes her as truly strange that she doesn’t actually know. She’s always assumed it was for some complex, boring adult crime - she has another classmate whose father went to prison for tax fraud. She figured it was something like that.
She thinks about asking Jobin when she gets home, but it’s been a long time since she’s gone to him to talk about their mother. And maybe this is something that is too upsetting for him to talk about. Most of all, she feels embarrassed that she doesn’t know, that in all these years she never thought to ask.
So she goes to the library after school to look through Morioh’s news archives. She’s supposed to be writing a research essay on starfish, due next week - if anyone asks why she’s there, she can say she got lost trying to find references for her paper. She’s begun to notice that people call her an airhead, sometimes. She doesn’t like it, but it lets her get away with things like that.
As it turns out, nobody asks why she’s in the archives. Nobody’s even there. She remembers the time of year her mother was arrested - it was the end of autumn, right before the first snow. She thumbs through old papers, scanning headlines until her mother’s name jumps out at her among the text, beneath the headline:
MISSING TEEN FOUND BURIED ALIVE
Local Woman Found Guilty of Murder
She scans the article once, then reads it thoroughly three times. Then she carefully places it back, and leaves.
The details repeat in her mind as she walks home. There was DNA evidence. She was found guilty. The “missing” teen was 13, just one year older than Hato is now. He was buried alive. Buried alive. Imagining it makes Hato’s blood run cold. It’s horror movie stuff, unreal - and her own mother did that, to someone her own age.
My mother is a child murderer, she thinks. The thought lodges itself in her mind and refuses to let go.
When Hato gets home, she goes to Jobin. She likes his room as much as she used to - the beetles are bigger and fancier now, but just the same amount of fun to watch. One thing hasn’t changed: she leans in close to the ladybugs in the small terrarium by the door, and whispers a greeting to Hato 8 and Hato 9.
“What’s up, Hato? Wanna see some beetles fight?” Jobin asks jovially.
“Mom’s a murderer,” Hato says bluntly. “I looked it up.”
Jobin closes the display case he was cleaning. He keeps staring into it, even though there aren’t any beetles there.
“You knew about it,” Hato accuses. Jobin was much older, even at the time; he must have known.
Jobin says nothing.
“Nobody told me. Dad didn’t tell me. You didn’t tell me. You said I could talk to you.” She can’t stop her voice from wavering. She feels so stupid. The whole town probably knew Kaato Higashikata was a child murderer; everyone except her own daughter.
“You were a little kid,” Jobin says to the empty beetle cage. “There was no reason to make you think mom was a bad person.”
“She murdered a 13 year old, Jobin. Doesn’t that - doesn’t that mean she’s a bad person? How could she not be?”
“Shut up,” Jobin hisses.
“But she-”
“Just shut up. You don’t know what you’re talking about. She had reasons. She was a good mother. She’s more than just a murderer!”
“But she buried a kid alive- ”
“I said shut up!” Jobin yells, facing her at last, eyes filled with rage. Hato takes a step back - he hasn’t yelled at her in a long time, not since they were both little kids. “Don’t talk about this. Never talk about this!”
“Okay,” she whispers. “Okay. I’m sorry.”
Jobin’s demeanor instantly relaxes. “That’s good, Hato. Everything’s fine. Wanna watch beetles fight, now that we’ve got things sorted out?” He smiles.
Hato glares at him for a moment, then turns and leaves. He doesn’t try to stop her, or ask why she’s leaving so suddenly.
She goes to the door of her father’s study and hovers outside for a minute, before deciding it would be best not to talk to him about it, either.
A few days after her eighteenth birthday, Hato is in her room, catching up on homework after multiple days of partying. She’s just starting to make some progress when she hears a knock on her door.
“It’s Jobin,” he calls out.
Hato is surprised - Jobin has been so busy with work and Tsurugi, he hardly ever comes to talk to her anymore. “Come in.”
He does, and closes the door behind him, but lingers in the entryway. “I visit mom sometimes,” he confesses. It’s not in his nature to be so blunt, but Jobin knows Hato well enough to know she likes to hear information like this without preamble.
Hato stands up and approaches him. “And? Why are you telling me this now?” Jobin hasn’t spoken about their mother to her in years.
“If you want...I can take you to visit her, too. Dad wouldn’t like it, but you’re an adult now. You can make your own choices.”
Hato gaped at him. The idea of visiting her mother had never crossed her mind, had never been an option, but now...does she even want to? Part of her does, and badly - she remembers her mother being warm, and kind. She imagines her exclaiming at how well she’s grown up. She imagines telling her about school, her friends, her birthday party.
And she’ll be talking to a woman who murdered a child. A thirteen-year-old, which seems so much younger to Hato than it did when she first learned about it. Joshu is thirteen now, and he’s still just a kid. She couldn’t imagine anything that would get her to murder someone Joshu’s age.
So she turns away. “No,” she says simply.
“Alright,” says Jobin. “But the offer’s always on the table.”
Hato crosses her arms. “Can you not tell her that you offered? And that I said no?”
“Sure. I wasn’t going to tell her, anyway.”
After a brief silence, Jobin speaks up again. “I don’t know if you remember, so I’ll remind you: she got fifteen years. So she’ll be out in six. Just so you know.”
Hato hadn’t remembered. Or, now that he mentions it, she does - “fifteen years” pops up in a suddenly vivid memory, along with the smell of the Morioh library and the fluttering sound of an old newspaper shaking in her hands. At twelve, “fifteen years” was so long it might as well have been forever, a full lifetime and then some. But now - six years from now was long, but not that long.
“Oh,” she says.
Jobin turns to go.
“Wait, Jobin! Thanks for - for reminding me. And for the offer. And for - thinking about me, I guess.”
“Sure, Hato. Any time.”
Hato is nineteen, and leaving the family fruit parlor to meet up with some friends across town.
“Hey, little strawberry. Wanna come have some fun?” a man leers at her, stepping in front of her to block her path.
Ugh, creeps. She’s on a busy street and the guy doesn’t seem to have friends, so she feels confident enough to stomp hard on his foot, yelling “Leave me alone!”.
What she expects to happen is that he’ll yelp and jump back, and she’ll disappear into the crowd on the street. Instead, as she stomps down, she feels the expected resistance of his foot beneath her heel...but then the resistance snaps , and her heel keeps going, and she feels the solid thud of it hitting concrete.
The man lets out an ear piercing scream, and she pulls back her foot - no, pulls out her foot. Her heel is several inches longer than it was, covered in blood. How can I run in this? she thinks frantically - and it shrinks back to normal size.
And a creature steps out from behind her - steps through her - and looks at her expectantly, with featureless eyes. The man, cradling his profusely bleeding foot, looks at her with shock and fury. He can’t see the otherworldly being standing right next to her.
Hato runs.
She runs all the way home, blood pumping in her ears. The creature is still there - it’s inside her somehow, she can feel it. She can see it when she looks down at herself, a phantom superimposed over her.
When she gets home, she goes straight to her father’s office. He has to know what’s going on. He has to be able to help. She has to know that she wasn’t just imagining things.
“Come in!” he says jovially when she knocks, but his smile falls when he sees her face and how hard she’s breathing.
How can I show him? Hato thinks, but as if to answer her question the creature appears beside her. He stands up when he sees it, eyes wide - confirmation it’s real, at least.
“What’s this? What is this?” she asks.
“Put that away!” Norisuke exclaims.
“Are you kidding me? I have no idea what’s going on!”
“Put it away! And I’ll tell you what you need to know.”
To her surprise, Hato is able to will it away the same way she brought it out.
Norisuke sighs. “It’s called a ‘Stand’, and it’s under your control. Most members of the Higashikata family acquire one. Each one does something different - but it’s a very private matter!”
“Why is it private?”
“For one thing, it’s a manifestation of some part of your innermost soul, which I think anyone would classify as a very private part. For another, if you know all of the details of how a Stand works, you will know how to defeat it. So keep that information as secret as you can.”
Hato furrows her brow. “You’re my dad. It’s not like we’re going to fight to the death or something.”
Norisuke’s eyes soften. “Of course we won’t. But still. The Higashikata family doesn’t discuss these things.”
Hato scowls. She hates when her father invokes family tradition to end an argument whenever he doesn’t want to justify something. “That’s stupid! Why not?” she snaps, but she knows what the answer will be.
“Because we don’t. Now, I’ve told you all you need to know. I’m busy.” He waves Hato away.
She bristles, furious. Her entire world’s been turned upside down, and he’s barely told her a thing. “That’s it? Are you fucking serious?”
“Language, Hato.”
“You are no help at all. Ever,” Hato mutters. She turns on her heel, digging a hole into the office’s nice wooden floors. Her father won’t know it was her since he didn’t even care to ask what her “Stand” even did.
She decides to try going to Jobin. If it’s something that comes with age, he might have gone through whatever she just had. She certainly doesn’t think Joshu and Daiya have superpowers yet - they would absolutely have used it to get up to noticeable mischief if they did.
As it turns out, Joshu and Daiya are both in Jobin’s room. He’s set up a miniature race track for his beetles and they’re betting on winners, with little piles of candy in front of each of them. Jobin’s is by far the largest, of course - he never lets anyone win anything, even kids. Moreover, it wouldn’t be beyond him to cheat. Nevertheless, everyone is in high spirits.
“Buzz off, you two,” Hato announces. “I need to talk to Jobin alone.”
“Oooooh, is it about a ~~boyyyy~~?” Daiya coos, fluttering her eyelashes.
“Is it about adult topics ?” Joshu jumps in, waggling his eyebrows.
“Gross. It’s about math homework,” Hato lies. “Go see who can eat your candy the fastest or whatever.”
“I’d win!” they both say at once. They look at each other, grab their paltry winnings, and scramble off.
Jobin scowls. “I was having fun, Hato, and I know you were lying. What do you really want?”
“Dad was being unhelpful.”
Jobin makes a face. “If this is about a boy, go talk to Mitsuba.”
“Why does everyone think it’s about a boy?” Hato throws up her hands. “It’s about this, asshole,” she snaps, summoning her Stand.
“Oh, fuck,” Jobin exclaims. “Did - did that just show up today?”
“Yes! And dad was just like: this is a Stand, never talk about it, bye,” Hato complains. “He always does this!”
Jobin looks at her uncomfortably. “Yeah, but...it is probably a good idea not to talk about it. It’s practical. And honestly, at this point, you probably know as much as me. You have one, it does stuff. That’s kind of it.”
Hato throws up her hands in frustration. “So, what now? I just have to deal with this? Alone? Dad said it’s a family thing, did you know it was going to happen to me?”
Jobin shrugs. “It was likely, I guess. I didn’t think about it much.”
“You could have warned me. I accidentally really hurt someone!”
Jobin stands so quickly his chair falls over, moving towards her and putting his hands on her shoulders. “Hato. Did you kill someone? Are they going to make it? I need to know, I should be able to help. I don’t want you getting into trouble.”
It’s a relief that Jobin is so concerned for her, that he’s on her side. It’s worrying that he seems to be willing to literally bury a body for her, but luckily that’s just hypothetical. “No, thank god. I went to step on some creep’s foot and stepped... through instead.”
“Oh! Well, whatever, then.”
“Whatever? It scared the shit out of me! Maybe things were chill when it happened to you, but it was pretty startling.”
Jobin’s face goes blank, and he steps away. “You don’t know anything, Hato.”
Hato makes a noise of pure exasperation. “How could I? No one tells me anything! Ever!"
“Consider yourself lucky. You should be grateful for not having to worry about everything! Enjoy your carefree life!” Jobin spits out bitterly.
“It’s not carefree if I don’t know what messed up thing is going to happen next! If shit goes down, I want to be prepared! I always feel like I’m in the dark, and I hate it, Jobin!” Hato cries.
“You’re wrong. There are things that it’s worse to know.”
“Maybe not for me. Maybe I’m just a different kind of person than you are.”
Jobin crosses his arms. “What do you want from me, Hato? If you just want to whine at me, go away.”
“Tell me all the shit you’re not telling me.” It’s a bold demand, but it’s what she wants.
“No. You have no idea what you’re asking.”
Hato throws up her arms. “Of course I don’t! I can’t!”
“Good. Go away.”
Hato leaves dents in Jobin’s floor as she walks away. It’s petty, but it’s all she can do, petty and useless little protests.
She goes to a place she knows in the orchards, a dense crop of trees that can’t be seen from the house, and she experiments with her Stand. She can grow her heels up to four meters, even if she’s not wearing shoes. She can pierce not just skin and wood, but stone too, with some effort. She gives her Stand a name, Walking Heart . Hato tries talking to her, but she has no mouth, and can't respond with words.
She’s fast, and strong, and proud, and has nobody in the world to tell about it.
“Hato, are you afraid to die?”
Tsurugi’s ninth birthday was last week. Hato sits with him on the floor of his bedroom. One of his gifts was a book of origami shapes and a stack of pretty colored squares of paper, and they work on them together. Tsurugi’s folds are neater than Hato’s. He must have been practicing.
She misses him - she used to be the go-to choice to babysit him when he was little, when her father was busy at least. But now that he’s older and she’s busier with work, she sees him much less often. He was never an overly boisterous child, but he’s gotten quieter than he used to be.
“I think everyone is,” she says. Hato is lucky enough not to have many opportunities to fear for her life, but still - dying is a frightening concept. She doesn’t like to think about it too much.
Tsurugi’s eyes are downcast, as he puts the finishing touches on the rabbit he’s folding. “Yeah, I guess.”
Hato almost stops herself from what she’s about to ask, but she can’t think of a good reason not to. “Are you worried about the family curse?”
Tsurugi gapes at her. “Hato, you just - you can’t…”
Hato waves him off. “It’s not like it’s against the law to talk about it or anything. It’s just that nobody wants to.” She doesn’t admit that she doesn’t know all that much about it - just that it’s an illness that hits the eldest sons when they’re young.
Tsurugi shrugs. He starts to fold a frog.
“You’ll probably be okay,” Hato tries to reassure him. “Dad and Jobin are totally fine, right?” She knows there was a time her father got sick, long before she was born, but he’s still around somehow. She doesn’t even know about Jobin. She can’t imagine asking either of them about it now.
Tsurugi’s eyes meet hers, dark and desperate. “It’s going to happen,” he insists. “It’s going to be bad.”
Hato wants to convince him that it won’t be bad, but in truth, she has no idea what’s going to happen. “I don’t know,” she says honestly. “But you don’t, either.”
“Dad and Grandpa just say not to worry about it. But I can’t stop worrying.”
Hato has no idea how to comfort him. So she offers what she can: “You can talk to me about it, if you want. Whenever you want.”
“Okay,” Tsurugi mumbles. He tries to make his neatly folded frog jump, but he’s pushing it too hard (he knows how to do it. She’s seen him do it a million times). “But I don’t wanna talk about it anymore right now.”
It’s obvious, from the strain in his voice and the shimmer in his eyes, that he’s trying not to cry. He’s getting frustrated with the frog, slamming his fist down, so Hato picks it up and tucks it behind his ear.
“Come on, show me how to make a crane again. I keep messing it up.”
It’s exciting to have a new addition to the family household. Hato doesn’t know Josuke that well, yet - it’s only been a couple of weeks since he’s moved in. She doesn’t dislike him like Joshu does, or love him like Daiya does (it’s hilariously embarrassing, the way she throws herself at him. Hato can’t wait until Daiya gets older and she can tease her mercilessly about it). But Josuke is polite and funny, and Hato wonders how it would feel, to wake up one day and have no memory at all.
She knocks on his door one evening. Daiya really must have done a number on him - he opens it by just a crack and peers through suspiciously.
“Hey,” she greets him cheerfully. “We haven’t really gotten time to know each other. I thought we could hang out.” She opens a fist to reveal a bottle of lime green nail polish. “I could do your nails. I don’t know anyone else who can pull off this color.”
“...Alright.” He lets her in, and they set up on the bed.
“I thought you were going to paint them green,” he says as she gets started. “That one’s clear.”
“This is a base coat,” Hato tells him, swiping the brush across another nail. She likes having something to work on as she talks, something to keep her hands and eyes occupied.
“Oh. I’m sorry. I guess I don’t remember what that is,” Josuke says dejectedly.
“Hey, don’t think about it like that. Most people don’t know what a base coat is, unless they paint their nails a lot.”
“Oh.” Josuke pauses; he seems to be thinking about how to word something, so Hato waits. “I never know what I’m supposed to know,” he admits eventually. “I don’t know what’s normal to know. Every time I learn something new, I have no idea if I knew it before and forgot it, or if I’m really hearing it for the first time.”
“I’m sorry,” Hato says, putting down his right hand and taking his left. “That sounds pretty stressful.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry if this is rude, but I’ve been wanting to ask...what’s it like, not to have any memories? Like, in general? I mean, it sounds awful, but...is it kind of freeing, too? Just to be able to...be who you are, right now?”
Her eyes flick up to his. He doesn’t look offended, at least. She notices for the first time how strange his eyes are: two different colors split down the middle, the edges not quite meeting where they should.
“I don’t think so,” he answers eventually. “I’m always wondering - whatever I do, would the previous me have done it? And I have no idea what - what foods I like, or how I did at school, or what mattered to me. And I’m always thinking about it, in the back of my mind, so I guess it’s not freeing at all.”
“That makes sense,” says Hato. She realizes that Josuke is usually pretty quiet around the whole family - they can be boisterous, all together - and she’s never heard him say so much at one time.
“And it’s lonely, not really knowing anyone. I mean, I truly am grateful to your family, but we’ve only known each other for a couple of weeks. It seems like what everyone really cares about are the people they’ve known for years and years. I don’t have any relationships built up like that. And, as far as I can tell...nobody is looking for me.”
Hato starts the first coat of the lime green. If she went missing, so many people would be trying to find her. Her family, her friends, probably some coworkers and former classmates. Her father would certainly hire private investigators. She can feel overlooked, sometimes, in certain ways - but really she has no idea how Josuke is feeling.
“Maybe people are looking for you, and they’re just really bad at it,” she suggests, half-jokingly.
Josuke chuckles. “I guess I can’t know for sure.” He wiggles the newly green-tipped fingers of the hand Hato isn’t working on. “What if I was a terrible person?” he asks quietly.
Hato freezes. All that matters is who you are now, not what you did in the past, she wants to tell him. Once you’re part of this family, you’re always part of this family, she wants to tell him.
But she knows better. That wasn’t even the case for her own mother. People can do terrible things, things beyond forgiveness. And the Higashikata family has the ability to pretend that one of their own never even existed.
“I don’t know,” she confesses. “I guess it would depend on how terrible. Like, Joshu can be obnoxious and Daiya’s a lot , and Jobin’s really weird, and I know I can be pretty forgetful, and that doesn’t matter in the end, you know? Even if you were a jerk or stole stuff or whatever, I don’t think that’s a big deal. You’d still be family. But if you were like a serial killer or something...I don’t know.”
Josuke gives her a haggard look. “That’s the thing,” he says quietly. “I could have been. And I wouldn’t know.”
“If the idea bothers you that much, then you probably weren’t,” Hato says. She doesn’t know if it’s true, but it sounds true. It sounds comforting, at least.
“Probably,” Josuke echoes dully.
“But you don’t know for sure. That’s the hard part,” she fills in.
“Yeah.”
For a minute or two, she works in silence. “This is a top coat,” she tells him eventually, pulling out the third bottle.
“What’s the difference between the base coat and the top coat? They’re both just clear.”
Hato looks between them. “I don’t know,” she said slowly. “I figure there has to be a difference, but maybe it’s just a scam to get you to buy more nail polish.”
“Or maybe they are different and they just look the same,” Josuke suggests.
“One of life’s greatest mysteries,” Hato says solemnly.
They chat idly until she’s done. She leaves him with the green nail polish - the color never looked right on her, anyway. “If you ever need to talk about stuff, I’m around,” she offers.
“Thanks,” Josuke says, still guarded.
Whether it’s because he doesn’t trust her or he has someone else to talk to, he never takes her up on her offer. They paint each other’s nails sometimes, but he only brings up light topics. Whatever mystery he’s out unravelling, he doesn’t share the details with her.
The Higashikata family is like a puzzle: fractured, separate pieces, but they still fit together to make a whole.
Hato doesn’t notice when her family begins to fall apart. There’s no way for her to know where to look.
When it does, she doesn’t see each piece fall until it hits the ground.
From her position on the roof, Hato can’t see what it looks like when she kills Tamaki Damo. But she can feel it from the movement of her heel, a fast and sickening sequence of resistance, then breaking free, resistance, then breaking free. Skin and skull, brains and muscle. Then free air. She can feel him jerking so she retracts and stabs him again, and again until he stops, and she and her family are safe.
She’s never done anything like this with Walking Heart before; she’s never had to. She doesn’t regret it, or second-guess her actions - she knows it was to save herself and her family.
She never loved him, not really, not deeply - it was too soon for that. But she thought she could have. She’s never felt so stupid, so angry, so used . Despite Daiya’s proclamations to the contrary, she has had boyfriends, but she’s never been close enough with anyone to bring them home. She would always get the feeling that they were with her just for her looks, or feelings would never quite bloom. It’s not a big deal; she figures it’s okay to be picky.
But the first time she thinks it might be good enough, she brings home an enemy. He could have killed them all.
If she’d known her family had dangerous enemies after them, she might have been more wary. It had struck her as strange, the amount of effort he’d put into their relationship from the very start. How often he talked about how he wanted to make a good impression on her family, asking when he could finally meet them. But she’d dismissed it as simple earnestness. She’d had no reason to think otherwise.
Still on the roof, Hato watches in shock as he staggers from the house - she hadn’t killed him, after all. But he looks so horrible. His skull is caved in. He’s bleeding from innumerable wounds.
I did that, she thinks numbly.
She watches Josuke deal the final blow. It doesn’t make her feel better.
Her family comforts her afterwards. They don’t blame her. She learns that people are after their family, although she doesn’t know why. She asks, but nobody tells her.
Hato walks into the living room and sees her mother lounging on the couch as if she belongs there.
She looks older, but not as much as Hato thought she might. Her hairstyle is the same. She’s even wearing that same purple lipstick. Hato can remember the photographs so clearly, despite not having looked at them for quite some time.
Kaato greets them blithely, as if she’s just come back from vacation. She calls Hato beautiful, and reminds her of an old mistake she used to make as a kid. Hato worried, every so often, that she would regret not visiting her mother. She doesn’t worry now.
Jobin isn’t around, but Hato’s sure he brought her - brought her and left, avoiding the fallout, only to return when the dust has settled. Kaato is being coy and vague, her father is being outraged and vague. Joshu and Daiya are confused, of course. Josuke asks her what’s going on.
She recalls her father’s voice from fifteen years ago. You want to be a good big sister, right? She did. She does.
So Hato tells him everything she knows, in clipped, blunt sentences. In front of Joshu, in front of Daiya. She expects her father to yell at her, to pull her away, but he does nothing. She expects Kaato to interrupt, to defend herself and lie, but she does nothing.
Her father says nothing afterwards, either, after she and Joshu drive Kaato away and Jobin returns, cheerful as ever. He eats his pancakes and doesn’t comment on how everyone leaves in a shocked daze, going to their rooms, shutting their doors.
Hato can hear Daiya making her rounds, looking for more answers - she asks Norisuke, then Jobin, and then she knocks on Hato’s door.
Hato tells Daiya everything she knows. She recounts every detail she can remember from the article about their mother’s arrest. She pulls out the old photographs she’s kept hidden away. She’s feeling good about herself - if Jobin and her father won’t explain anything, she will.
But then Daiya asks, “Why didn’t you tell me before?”
And Hato doesn’t have a good answer for her.
Of course, she couldn’t tell her when Daiya was little. But there was plenty of time - Daiya is now years older than Hato was when she saw her mother get arrested, and when she discovered what it had been for.
It was just - easier, not to tell her. Or Joshu, for that matter. She was afraid of what would happen if they reacted badly, if her father got angry with her. It would be upsetting, dramatic. Maybe she’d say things wrong, and she couldn’t take it back once she said it. She didn’t know how to bring it up. She just hadn’t wanted to deal with it.
She feels an intense surge of regret - she left Daiya and Joshu in the dark, the same way she was.
She’d only been marginally better about Stands. Shortly after she’d gotten Walking Heart, she’d gone to Daiya and Joshu and said: “If you ever see a ghost, don’t freak out. Come talk to me.” They’d made fun of her for being superstitious, understandably.
Four years later, Daiya came up to her, looking pale, and said “You really undersold the whole ghost thing.” She’d explained what she could, but she obviously hadn’t prepared her enough. Joshu hadn’t come to talk to her at all; Hato only knew that he had a Stand because he’d started playing pranks with it. It was recent - she hopes he’d had a less upsetting time with it than she had.
She wants to do better - wants to tell Daiya and Joshu and Josuke all the rest, everything she knows - but this is it, she realizes. They know as much about Stands and Kaato and the family curse as she does, now. If there are more family secrets, she doesn’t know what they are.
She realizes with a wave of dread that there must be more. She still doesn’t know why the family has so many enemies. And something odd is going on with the family business - Jobin is taking more business trips than ever. Mitsuba and Tsurugi have been acting strange and disappearing for long stretches of time. Josuke has only revealed scraps of what he’s learned about his identity. She feels a sense of doom in her gut: something is going to go very, very wrong.
“I think something bad’s going to happen, Daiya,” she says, sounding dazed.
“Bad stuff is already happening,” Daiya pointed out. “But I don’t think it’s over, either.”
Hato takes a deep breath. She’s used to unexpected things being thrown at her, and so are the rest of them. They’re not perfect, but in the end they’re a family.
“Whatever’s coming, I’m sure we can fight it together.”