Before I Saw You

Volume 1: Spring Semester # Chapter 1: The Boy Who Came Out of Nowhere The morning air was cool as students streamed through the front gate of Seihan Private High School. Hana Fujimoto walked along the sidewalk, her white cane tapping softly against the pavement — tap, tap, tap, a rhythm as familiar to her as her own heartbeat. She listened to the world take shape around her. Footsteps overlapping in a dozen different rhythms. Students laughing about something that had happened over break. Birds arguing in the trees above the gate. A bicycle bell, too close, then gone. To Hana, sound painted a picture sight never could — layered, moving, alive. Just another ordinary morning. Or so she thought. She was still half-lost in the melody of it all when— *Thud.* "Ah—!" Something slammed into her shoulder. The world tilted. For one weightless second she was falling, and then a hand closed around her wrist. Firm. Steady. It stopped her before the ground could. "Watch where you're going." A boy's voice. Flat, unbothered, like he was commenting on the weather. Hana straightened, indignant. "That's rich, coming from the person who ran into *me*." Silence. She could feel him looking at something — her hand, probably, and the white cane curled in it. "Oh," he said. Just that. Hana frowned harder. "...That's it? *Oh?*" "What?" "Most people apologize about a hundred times once they notice." "Should I?" It didn't sound like an apology. It sounded like an actual question, like he was checking a fact against a rulebook he didn't personally believe in. "...No," Hana admitted, thrown off balance all over again, and not from the collision this time. "Then we're good." A beat. "You okay?" "Yes." "Good." She heard him turn to go, footsteps already unhurried, like the conversation had simply expired. "Wait." He stopped. "What?" "What's your name?" A pause, just long enough to make her wonder if he'd bother answering at all. "Kai." "Huh?" "Kai," he said again, no more patient the second time, and then he was gone, folded back into the noise of the crowd. Hana stood there, cane loose in her hand, replaying the whole strange exchange. No pity in his voice. No awkward stumble over the word *blind*, no too-careful gentleness. Just — nothing. Like she was simply a person who happened to be in his way. *Who was that?* The classroom was loud with the particular chaos of a first day — second-years reuniting after a summer that already felt too short, comparing tans and grades and the injustice of homework nobody remembered assigning. "I can't believe we're second-years already." "Right? Next year we're *thirds*." "I still feel like a first-year." Hana sat near the middle of the room, letting the noise wash over her, picking out threads of it here and there — two boys arguing about which club would take the sports festival this year, a girl recounting a trip to the coast in exhaustive detail. The door slid open with a bang. "Alright, alright. Settle down." The room recognized the voice immediately — Ms. Aizawa, their homeroom teacher, literature, sharp-tongued and beloved in equal measure. She dropped a stack of papers on her desk and crossed her arms, surveying them like a general inspecting troops who'd somehow survived a war she hadn't expected them to. "Good morning, class." "Good morning, Ms. Aizawa," they chorused, half-hearted. "Much better." A smile crept onto her face. "So. You all somehow survived your first year." Laughter. "Congratulations. That means next year, you'll all be third-years." A collective groan. "Already?" "Don't remind us." "Oh, trust me," Aizawa said, "time moves faster than you think. So take this year seriously — the choices you make now follow you." Her tone had gone almost solemn for a moment — and then, just as fast, the smirk was back, and her eyes landed on a boy near the back who visibly flinched. "Oh?" She adjusted her glasses with theatrical slowness. "*You* made it to second year?" The class erupted. "W-What's that supposed to mean, sensei?!" "It means I'm proud of you." "Even the *teacher* didn't believe in you!" someone shouted, and the boy buried his face in his arms while the room howled. "Honestly," Aizawa said, fighting her own laugh, "when I saw your exam scores last semester, I started drafting a eulogy." "SENSEI—" By the time the laughter died down, the nervous static of a new term had burned off completely, replaced by something warmer. Near the window, none of it touched Kai at all. He sat with his chin propped on one hand, eyes fixed past the glass on a sky so blue it looked freshly painted. The jokes. The noise. The easy warmth filling the room like it belonged to everyone equally. None of it seemed to include him, and none of it seemed to bother him either. He watched the clouds drift, unhurried, as if the entire classroom were happening in some other building entirely. By second period, the first-day excitement had cooled into something closer to a coma. Mr. Domoto, the math teacher, wrote a string of equations across the board with the enthusiasm of a man defusing a bomb he'd defused eleven hundred times before. "If x plus three equals seven," he said, not turning around, "someone tell me what x is." Silence. "Anyone." More silence, punctuated by the soft, rhythmic snoring of a boy in the back row who had apparently mistaken *first day of second year* for *nap day*. Domoto sighed without looking up. "Wake him at the bell. I don't have the energy today." A ripple of quiet laughter moved through the room. Even Hana, listening with her chin propped on one hand, smiled at the sheer defeat in his voice. Beside her, Yui was diligently copying the equations down and getting every third symbol wrong, muttering *x equals — no wait — x equals* under her breath like a curse she was trying to break. Near the window, Kai sat with his usual stillness, pencil untouched, eyes on the sky like the equations were happening to somebody else entirely. The lunch bell rang, and the classroom exhaled all at once. Hana and Yui pushed their desks together, lunch boxes out, and Yui immediately folded forward onto the desk with a groan so dramatic it startled the boy at the next table. "I need eight hours of sleep," Yui announced to the room at large. "I keep hearing about it. Eight hours. People just — get it. Like it's normal. Like it's *allowed.*" "How much did you get?" Hana asked. "Four. Maybe four and a half if you count the part where I was just lying there regretting my life choices." "What choices?" "Watching one more episode. It's always one more episode, Hana. It's never *actually* one more." Hana laughed into her rice. "So you're saying it's your fault." "I'm saying the eight-hours people are lying, and I refuse to be part of their conspiracy." Across the room, Sengoku Ishikawa had climbed — actually climbed, one foot on a chair — onto his desk, one hand pressed to his chest like a man about to deliver a wedding toast. "Everyone!" he bellowed. "As your unofficial class representative, I hereby declare today's lunch a national holiday!" "You're not the class rep," someone called out. "I am *today.*" He struck a pose. "I have selflessly appointed myself, at great personal risk, for the good of—" "SENGOKU." Yui's voice cracked across the room like a whip. "Sit. DOWN. Some of us are trying to eat in peace and quiet without your — your *TED Talk* about lunch!" The room went dead silent for exactly one second. Then it erupted — not at Sengoku, but at Yui, whose "keep your voice down" had come out roughly four times louder than the thing she was trying to silence. Sengoku pointed at her, delighted, betrayal in his own volume forgotten entirely. "You're LOUDER than me right now!" "I AM NOT—" Yui caught herself mid-shout, heard exactly what she sounded like, and went the color of a tomato as the laughter doubled. "The empress has spoken," Sengoku said solemnly, still standing on the desk, "and she is *furious.*" "I will end you, Sengoku." "See, this is what I mean! Everybody witness this! The rage! The fury! It's like — it's like an oni came down from the mountains just to yell about lunch volume—" "Oh my god," someone wheezed, "the Oni Princess has awoken—" "ONI PRINCESS!" someone else shouted, delighted, and just like that the name caught — the way the worst nicknames always do, instantly, permanently, unkillable. "Bow before her wrath!" "Everyone RUN, she's coming—" Chairs scraped back in mock terror as half the class scattered toward the door, laughing too hard to actually flee properly, and Yui stood in the middle of it all with her fists clenched and absolutely nothing left to say except— "I HATE all of you." "We love you too, Your Highness!" Hana was laughing so hard she had to set her chopsticks down, one hand pressed over her mouth, and even that didn't fully contain it. It was the good kind of ache in her stomach — the kind that came from a room full of people who liked each other more than they let on. Slowly, gradually, the noise settled back into its usual lunchtime hum. Yui dropped back into her seat with the wounded dignity of royalty in exile. "For the record," she muttered, stabbing a piece of rice like it had personally wronged her, "I'm never yelling at that i***t again." "You said that after homeroom too," Hana pointed out. "That doesn't count." "You said it wouldn't count last time either." "Hana." Yui pointed her chopsticks at her, deadly serious. "Whose side are you on." "The Oni Princess's, obviously. I fear for my life." Yui made a strangled noise of betrayal, and Hana just smiled, letting the warmth of the room settle around her like sunlight. Then, without quite meaning to, she turned her head toward the window. She couldn't make out much — a shape, mostly, blurred at the edges the way everything was for her past a certain distance. A boy, sitting alone near the glass, a juice carton loosely held in one hand like he'd forgotten it was there. Still. Unbothered by the chaos two rows over, like none of it had ever been loud enough to reach him at all. *Who's that,* she wondered, *just sitting there by the window, doing nothing?* Something about the stillness of him snagged at her attention and wouldn't quite let go. She didn't know yet that she already knew the answer. DING... DONG... DANG... DONG... The bell cut through the last of the lunchtime noise, and the classroom groaned as one organism. "Chem lab," someone muttered, like a diagnosis. Chairs scraped back. Bags were slung over shoulders. The hallway outside filled almost instantly with the shuffle of students who had eaten just enough to feel sluggish and not nearly enough to feel ready for anything involving Bunsen burners. Yui stood, stretched until her spine popped, and glanced sideways at Hana. "Lab days. Why does the universe hate us on a *Tuesday.*" "You say that about every day that has a letter in it." "Because every day has been personally designed to test me." Yui looped her arm loosely through Hana's, an old habit neither of them commented on anymore, and steered them both toward the door with the rest of the herd. Behind them, the classroom was emptying in the usual order — the eager ones first, chattering about lab partners, then the stragglers, then the ones who simply moved slower because there was no reason not to. Sengoku was second to last. He wasn't shouting. He wasn't balancing on furniture or declaring himself anything. He shuffled toward the door with his bag hanging off one shoulder and his expression gone flat in a way that didn't suit him at all — like someone had switched the channel on his face and forgotten to turn the volume back up. Whether it was the thought of another hour trapped in a lab coat measuring things that would inevitably explode a little, or the leftover sting of being torn apart by half the class an hour ago, he didn't say. He just went quiet, and shuffled out, and let the door swing half-shut behind him. Kai was the last one in the room. He unhooked his headphones from around his neck, folded them without any particular care, and tucked them into the front pocket of his bag. Then he reached in and pulled out his chemistry textbook — worn at the corners, like it was the one book he actually opened — and held it loosely at his side as he stood. He didn't look at the window again. He didn't look at anything in particular. He just walked out, and the classroom went still and sunlit and empty behind him, exactly the way it had been before any of them arrived that morning. By the time the final bell rang, the sky outside had gone the soft orange of early evening, and the halls of Seihan Private High School filled with the particular energy of a school day finally, mercifully over. Hana was gathering her things when she heard it — a familiar voice, restored to full and obnoxious volume, echoing down the corridor. "—and THAT, my friends, is why I am, without question, the most reasonable person in this entire school—" "Oh, he's back," Yui said, not even looking up from her bag. Sengoku rounded the corner into the doorway with his arms spread wide, grinning like the afternoon's chemistry disaster — whatever it had been — had never happened at all. Whatever gray cloud had followed him to the lab was gone, evaporated the second the final bell rang, like it existed on a strict school-hours schedule. Yui eyed him with the weary patience of someone watching a storm pass for the second time in one day. "Wow. Look at that. High-spirited Sengoku is *back*, right on schedule, the second class is over." She shook her head slowly. "You're so energetic, bro. It's honestly exhausting just watching you." Sengoku struck a pose, entirely too pleased with himself. "The trick," he said, "is to be cool. Like me." He grinned wider, as if that settled the matter completely. Yui stared at him for a long moment — the same flat, unimpressed stare she'd been giving him all day — and then simply shook her head, gathering the last of her things. "You're hopeless." "I know." He said it like a compliment. Hana laughed under her breath, cane in hand, and the three of them — Sengoku already talking again about something entirely unrelated, Yui half-listening and half-regretting it — made their way out into the gold light of the afternoon, the school day folding quietly shut behind them. *End of Chapter 1.*