The V-tuber Who Became Obsessed With Me

Chapter 109: A friendship that begins in a park

Anna looked at me for a long time without saying anything.

She did not ask another question or tell me everything would be fine. She simply sat on the edge of my bed watching me with those blue eyes that had always noticed things before I had decided to show them.

It made me uncomfortable.

Not because she was judging me. Because she was not. She was looking at me the way you looked at something you were afraid to touch in case the wrong pressure made it worse.

I looked away.

Outside, the evening breeze moved the curtains. Somewhere below the safe house the ocean was doing what it always did, indifferent and continuous. From downstairs came the low sound of voices, one of my grandfather’s men laughing at something another had said in Japanese. The ordinary rhythm of a household that did not know or care that I was sitting in a room above it trying to hold myself in one piece.

Anna finally spoke.

"You’ve changed."

Not an accusation. Just an observation, said the way people said things when they wished they were wrong.

I managed something that was close to a laugh. "Everyone changes."

"People grow," she said. "They mature. But this isn’t that, Himari." She paused. "This is pain."

I had no answer for that.

My gaze drifted to the rain-speckled window beside the bed. My reflection looked back at me from the dark glass. Red hair. Tired eyes. Someone I had spent years constructing and who no longer looked the way I had imagined she would.

There had been a time when I could not wait to become this person.

Now I could not remember what she had been for.

"Do you remember," Anna said, "the day we met?"

My mind suddenly drifted back to that day .

Fourteen years ago.

The playground was full of noise and I was not part of any of it.

Children ran between the swings and the climbing frames, laughter going in every direction. A boy chased soap bubbles toward the treeline. Two girls argued at the top of the slide. Parents stood in clusters under coloured umbrellas, occasionally calling out without looking up from their conversations.

Everyone had somewhere to be.

I sat on the bottom step of the carousel and held Mr. Turtles against my chest. He was a stuffed turtle, soft and slightly floppy at the head, and my father had won him at a festival when I was four. I had carried him to every new place we had ever lived, which was several by then.

We had been in Orsbone for a week.

Every day since arriving had been the same. Children looked. Children whispered. No one stopped. No one asked my name. I had stopped expecting them to.

I pressed my chin against the top of his shell.

"They don’t like us," I told him.

He did not answer. He never did.

"Sweetheart."

My mother crouched in front of me, brushing a strand of hair back from my face. She had a way of appearing without announcement, my mother, as though she moved through spaces differently from everyone else.

"You’ve been quiet."

I gave her the smile I used when I did not want her to worry. "I’m okay."

She never believed that smile. She had known since I was small that it meant the opposite.

She tapped Mr. Turtles gently on the nose. "Looks like he’s doing his best." That made me laugh, a small real one. She tucked the strand of hair back again and looked around the playground. "I think somewhere out here there’s another little girl who feels exactly the same as you do".

"They all have friends already."

"For now," she said. "But somewhere."

" "Lonely people always find each other eventually...And you my dear won’t be lonely for long , I promise ".

She said it with enough certainty that I believed her, the way I believed most things she said with conviction.

Then she stood and her expression changed into something lighter. "I believe someone promised me we’d celebrate surviving our first week."

"Ice cream?"

"Ice -cream. stay here. I’ll only be a minute."

She kissed the top of my head and walked toward the ice cream stand on the far side of the park. I watched her until the crowd swallowed her.

The excitement lasted about thirty seconds.

Then the quiet came back.

I looked down at Mr. Turtles. "It would’ve been nice if someone wanted to play with us."

A shadow stretched across my shoes.

I looked up.

A girl stood in front of me. Around my age, maybe a little older. Golden hair moving in the afternoon breeze. Blue eyes watching me with open curiosity rather than the sideways looks I had grown used to. She was holding a pink rabbit pressed against her chest.

Neither of us spoke.

She looked at me. I looked at her.

Then she smiled.

"Hi."

I gripped Mr. Turtles tighter. "My mum’s coming back."

She blinked. "Okay." A pause. "I just thought you looked lonely. I was wondering if I could sit with you."

No one had asked me that since we moved.

I shuffled sideways on the step.

She sat down.

We watched the carousel turn without speaking. The silence was not awkward. It was the first silence in a week that had not felt like something missing.

She looked at Mr. Turtles.

"What’s his name?"

"Mr. Turtles."

She stared at me. "But he’s already a turtle."

"So?"

"You named a turtle Mr. Turtles?"

"Yes."

She looked genuinely troubled by this. "You could have tried harder."

I pulled him closer. "I like his name."

She held up her rabbit. "This is Poppy. It’s elegant. It sounds important."

"Mr. Turtles sounds important."

"It doesn’t."

"It does."

"It really doesn’t."

"It really does."

We stared at each other for a moment.

Then she burst out laughing. A loud, completely unself-conscious laugh that made her whole body shake, and I tried very hard not to join her and failed completely, and somewhere in the middle of that laughter something that had been sitting heavy in my chest for a week simply was not there anymore.

She wiped the corner of her eye. "I still think it’s a terrible name."

"And I still think Poppy sounds like a dog’s name "

She laughed again. Then she extended her hand. "I’m Annabelle. But everyone calls me Anna." She left her hand there in the air between us. "If we’re going to be friends, you should call me Anna too."

I looked at her hand.

There was no pity in her face. No hesitation. She was not being kind out of obligation. She simply wanted to sit next to me and that was the whole of it.

I put my hand in hers.

"I’m Himari."

She shook it with enthusiasm and then stood up suddenly. "Come on."

"Where?"

"We’re going to play."

"Just us?"

She wrinkled her nose. "Why just us?" She pointed across the playground. "We’re going to ask them if we can join."

I shrank back. "They’ll say no."

"How do you know?"

"They always do."

Anna looked at me for a moment. Then she reached down and took my hand. Her fingers were warm and completely certain and she started walking before I had decided to follow, which meant I stumbled after her holding Mr. Turtles in my free hand while trying to keep my feet under me.

"Wait, I’m not fast."

"You don’t have to be," she said. "I’m fast enough for both of us."

I could not stop smiling. Not because I was less afraid. Not because anything had been solved. But because someone had reached for my hand without needing a reason, and at nine years old I did not know yet how uncommon that was.

I did not know that years later, when almost everyone else I had ever trusted let go, Anna would not.

"Himari."

I blinked.

The playground dissolved. The laughter faded. The smell of cut grass was replaced by salt air drifting through the open window.

Anna’s hand was on my shoulder.

"You went somewhere for a minute."

I exhaled slowly. "I was remembering."

"Me too." She smiled in a way that had not changed since she was nine years old, and something about that made my throat tight. She moved to the small table by the window where two cups of tea sat completely forgotten..sometime while I was thinking a maid came in and dropped it . She picked one up and frowned at the temperature.

"It’s cold."

She set it back down and turned to look at me properly. The way she had been looking at me since she walked in, not with pity or alarm, just with the patient attention of someone who had known me long enough to understand that some things took time to surface.

"So," she said. "What happened?"

And this time I did not reach for a version that would make it easier to hear.

I just started talking.