Chapter 60: Chapter 58 — What the Prince Carries
The university’s annual sports exhibition was, technically, optional.
Haruka had never treated it that way. Every year since enrolling, she had competed — not because she loved competition particularly, but because "the prince" was expected to be exceptional at things, and she had learned a long time ago that meeting expectations cleanly was easier than explaining why she might not want to.
This year, the exhibition fell on the same week as her father’s quarterly board review, which always made him distracted and short, and the same week Hiroto’s continued media monitoring had her checking her phone every fifteen minutes for new mentions of the household. And it fell three days after she’d quietly, privately, started worrying that everyone else in the house had a clear, named relationship with Kaito except her — Yoru had her confession, Nana had Okinawa, Tsukasa had eleven years of history, Satsuki had her thirteen weeks of patient documentation. Haruka had an alley, a beach, a hot spring story that wasn’t even hers, and a high-ceilinged room she liked standing in.
She had not said any of this to anyone.
She had, instead, signed up for three events instead of her usual one.
Yuki noticed first, because Yuki noticed exhaustion the way she noticed everything — quietly, from a slight distance, filing it without commenting until the filing became unsustainable.
"You’ve been at the gym every morning this week," Yuki said, finding Haruka stretching in the garden before dawn, the sky still gray. "Before training. Before your actual training."
"I have three events," Haruka said. "I need the conditioning."
"You usually do one event."
"I decided to do more this year."
Yuki looked at her for a long moment — the specific, patient look of someone who had spent three years building a wall and therefore recognized the early architecture of one going up in someone else.
"You don’t have to prove anything," Yuki said.
"I’m not proving anything," Haruka said. "I’m participating in a school event."
"Haruka."
"I’m fine," Haruka said, and the words came out faster and harder than she meant them to, the composure cracking at the edge in a way that startled them both.
Yuki didn’t push. She had learned, from the inside, exactly how unhelpful pushing was.
She just sat down on the garden wall and waited, the way Kaito had once waited for her in an alley without demanding she explain anything immediately.
The exhibition was three days later.
Haruka competed in all three events — the 400m, the long jump, and a relay leg she’d agreed to only because the team had been short a runner. She won two of the three outright and placed second in the third, an objectively excellent showing by any standard.
She also, by the third event, was visibly running on fumes — pale, breathing wrong, the kind of exhausted that conditioning alone couldn’t explain.
Kaito watched from the stands with the rest of the household, his expression growing more concerned with each event rather than less.
"Something’s wrong," he said to Yuki, who was sitting beside him with her usual composed stillness.
"She’s been pushing herself all week," Yuki said. "I tried to ask. She said she was fine."
"You believed her?"
Yuki looked at him.
"I know what it sounds like when someone says they’re fine and means it," she said. "This wasn’t that. But I also know it’s not always my place to force someone’s hand before they’re ready. Sometimes you just have to be present and wait."
Kaito looked at the track, where Haruka was crossing the finish line of the relay, second place, immediately bending forward with her hands on her knees in a way that read less like normal post-race exhaustion and more like something closer to collapse.
He was already moving before he finished the thought.
She was sitting on the ground behind the team tent when he found her, knees pulled up, head down, the composed posture she maintained even in private finally, fully gone.
"Haruka."
She didn’t look up.
"I’m fine," she said, automatically, the words sounding hollow even to her.
"You’re not," he said, sitting down across from her without asking permission. "And I don’t think you have been, for a while."
She was quiet for a long moment.
"Everyone else has something," she said finally, into her knees. "A story. A reason it makes sense that they’re part of this. Yoru has the alley and the confession. Nana has eight months and her daughters. Tsukasa has eleven years. Satsuki has a folder full of patience." Her voice cracked slightly. "I have an alley too, but it’s about you saving me from being mistaken for a boy, which is — it’s not even romantic, it’s just embarrassing. I don’t have eleven years or eight months. I have a hot spring story that’s Satsuki’s, not mine. I don’t know what my story even is."
He was quiet, letting her finish.
"So I thought if I could just be exceptional at something," she continued, "win enough events, be impressive enough — maybe it would feel like I’d earned a place here instead of just having wandered into one. Maybe it would feel like less of an accident."
"It was never an accident," he said. "And it was never about earning anything."
"Then what is it," she said, finally looking up, her eyes red and exhausted and stripped of every careful composure she’d built over nineteen years. "What’s my story, if it’s not the alley and it’s not impressing anyone?"
He thought about it seriously, the way he thought about most things that mattered.
"Your story is the first question I ever asked you," he said. "Are you okay. Before I knew your name, before I knew anything else about you — that was the only thing that mattered in that alley. Not your height, not your face, not anything you could perform or win." He paused. "Your story is that you let yourself stand in a room with a high ceiling and just be your actual size for the first time in years. That’s not nothing. That’s not a story you need to compete your way into deserving."
Haruka was crying now, quietly, the kind of crying that came from holding something too tightly for too long.
"I’m so tired," she said. "I didn’t even realize how tired until right now."
"Then stop," he said simply. "You don’t have to win a third event to belong somewhere you already belong."
Yuki found them like that a few minutes later, and rather than intruding, she simply sat down on Haruka’s other side, mirroring the position she’d taken in the garden days earlier — present, patient, asking nothing.
"I did the same thing," Yuki said quietly, after a while. "Three years of it. Building a wall so thorough nobody could ask me anything I didn’t want to answer. Telling everyone I was fine until I almost believed it myself." She looked at Haruka. "The difference between you and me is you’re stopping after one week. It took me three years and a stranger in an alley asking the right question first."
"How do you actually stop, though," Haruka said. "Not in theory. Actually."
"You let people see the exhausted version," Yuki said. "Not just once, performatively, as some big breakthrough moment. Repeatedly. Until it stops feeling like exposure and starts feeling like just — being known." She paused. "I’m still working on it, honestly. It doesn’t fully finish. You just get better at tolerating the discomfort of it."
Haruka looked between them — Kaito, steady and unhurried as always; Yuki, offering something rare and hard-won without performance.
"I think I need to stop signing up for three events," she said finally, with the first genuine laugh she’d managed in days, thin but real.
"That would be a start," Yuki said.
That evening, back at the house, Nana made sure dinner included Haruka’s favorite dish without anyone needing to ask, and Hana climbed into Haruka’s lap uninvited and stayed there through the whole meal, and nobody mentioned the exhibition or the events or the medals sitting forgotten in Haruka’s bag.
She sat with the weight of a small child against her chest, in a kitchen full of warm noise, and let herself simply be tired without needing to justify it to anyone.
Later, on the balcony, she found Kaito looking at the garden the way he sometimes did, quiet and thinking about something he wasn’t sharing yet.
"Thank you," she said. "For finding me behind the tent."
"You don’t have to thank me for that," he said. "It’s not a favor. It’s just what happens when someone matters to you."
She looked at him for a long moment.
"I think that’s my story, actually," she said. "Not the alley. Just — this. Being someone you’d notice was missing from the stands and come find behind a tent."
He looked at her.
"That’s a good story," he said.
She leaned against the railing beside him, the high sky above them, finally, fully, just her actual size.
Comments