Chapter 9: The Truth She Carried
It was raining again.
Sogen's campus felt smaller now, quieter—like the world was holding its breath. Kyoshi waited beneath the sakura tree near the literature building, the one where they first truly spoke, the petals now falling wet and heavy onto his shoulders.
Hikari was late.
Not her usual late. Not the kind followed by a bright apology and a playful excuse.
Just... absent.
He checked his phone. No messages. No read receipts. Nothing for two days.
Then—his phone buzzed.
One name. One line.
Can we talk somewhere quiet? Tonight. Alone.
They met at the riverwalk just outside the city—a place they'd discovered on one of their late-night walks. The water whispered like it knew too much. The sky above was bruised with approaching twilight.
Hikari stood by the railing, her coat pulled tightly around her, her long hair damp from the misting rain.
She didn't smile when she saw him.
Kyoshi approached slowly. "You scared me," he said, voice low.
"I know," she replied. "I'm sorry."
A pause. Then, the words came—soft and fragile, like glass sliding across stone.
"I have blood cancer."
Kyoshi stared at her.
"What?"
She didn't flinch. She didn't look away.
"The doctors told me six months ago. Acute leukemia. It progressed fast. I tried treatment. It didn't respond. They gave me two months, but... that was five weeks ago."
Silence.
The river moved on behind them, uncaring.
Kyoshi took a step back. "That's not funny."
"I'm not joking."
"No." He shook his head. "You're lying. This is—this is because of Ren, isn't it? You're pushing me away again—"
"Kyoshi."
Her voice broke this time. "I didn't tell you because I didn't want pity. I wanted something real. I wanted to feel alive. You gave me that. Our trip, our time... it was the happiest I've been since I got the diagnosis."
Tears rolled down her cheeks, blending with the light rain.
"I don't want to die as someone's tragedy. I just wanted to live as your friend. As... something more. For a little while."
Kyoshi's chest tightened. He felt the world tilt beneath him. "No. This can't be it. There has to be something—another treatment, another doctor—anything."
She smiled softly. "That's what I told myself. Until I couldn't walk without getting dizzy. Until my bones started aching like they were burning from the inside."
He reached for her hands.
They were cold. Thinner.
"You should've told me," he whispered, voice cracking. "I could've been there."
"I didn't want you to watch me fade."
"You don't get to choose that for me."
A silence fell between them, deeper than any before.
Then Kyoshi did something he hadn't done in all the weeks they'd grown close.
He pulled her into a full embrace.
Held her tightly.
Felt the slow, shallow rise and fall of her breathing.
"I don't care how much time you have left," he whispered. "I'm not letting you spend the last of it alone."
She clung to him now, trembling.
"I'm scared," she confessed into his chest. "I don't want to vanish."
"You won't," he said, eyes closing against the burn. "I'll remember everything. Every laugh. Every word. Every spark you left behind."
But as they stood beneath the clouds, wrapped in each other like the last pieces of something breaking, Kyoshi knew—
Time had become a countdown.
And he was already afraid of the silence that would follow her last breath.
To be continued…
Would you like Chapter 9 to explore how they spend her remaining weeks—peacefully, romantically, or with emotional intensity—or dive into Kyoshi's growing desperation and the dark choices he might consider to stop time from taking her away?