Eleven days.
That's how long it had been.
Kujo stood alone in the training ground, breathing hard, sweat cooling on his skin in the early morning air. The sky above was still pale, the sun not fully up yet, the light flat and grey and cold. His lungs stung when he pushed too hard. He had been pushing too hard for a while now.
He raised his hand.
Light gathered at his palm. Slow at first, building from almost nothing, the way it always started. Then it steadied, settled into something consistent, a clean sustained glow that held its shape without demanding his entire concentration to maintain.
He exhaled through his nose.
Progress.
Not enough. Not close to enough. But more than yesterday, and yesterday had been more than the day before.
He pushed it further, trying to shape it. The light stretched and thinned at the edges as he coaxed it outward, forming something with definition, something with an edge. It wobbled. He corrected. It wobbled again, less this time, and then held, longer than it had yesterday, longer than he had managed all week.
He kept it there until his arm began to tremble.
Then he let it go.
The light dissolved quietly, leaving nothing behind.
Kujo stood with his hand still raised, staring at the empty air where it had been.
Eleven days ago, he couldn't produce so much as a flicker without panic driving it out of him.
Eleven days ago, his parents were still alive.
He lowered his arm slowly.
Stood there for another moment, not thinking about anything specific, just letting the morning sit around him. The distant sounds of the campus beginning to wake up. The wind moving through the trees somewhere beyond the training ground. The faint ache in his arm from holding the energy longer than he should have.
Then he turned and walked back inside.
Sumi was in the hallway.
She was leaning against the wall with her phone in both hands, thumb scrolling without much apparent interest in what was actually on the screen. The kind of scrolling that was more about having something to do with your hands than actually looking at anything.
She heard him coming and glanced up.
Her expression shifted immediately into something caught between sympathy and mild disgust.
"You look terrible."
"Good morning," Kujo said.
"Seriously." She lowered the phone slightly. "How long have you been out there?"
"Since five."
Sumi stared at him.
"It's seven thirty."
"I know."
She looked at him for a long moment with the particular expression of someone trying to decide which category something falls into. Then she clicked the phone off and pushed off the wall.
"Okay," she said. "Shower. Right now. We're going out."
Kujo blinked. "Out where?"
"Food." She was already moving down the hallway, not waiting. "I found this place online last night, it looked incredible, I've been thinking about it since midnight and I can't keep doing that, I need to actually go."
"You could've asked if I wanted to come."
"You want to come," she said, without turning around.
Kujo watched her disappear around the corner.
"What about Sado?" he called after her.
Her voice came back from somewhere already further away.
"Already texted him. He said fine."
Kujo stood in the empty hallway for a moment.
"Very enthusiastic," he said to no one.
He went to shower.
The place was exactly what Sumi had described and nothing she had described could have prepared him for how small it actually was.
It was wedged between a convenience store and a laundromat in a part of town that clearly hadn't been designed with ambition in mind. The sign outside was handwritten. The chairs inside didn't match each other. The menu was a single laminated sheet that had been laminated a long time ago and had lived a full life since then.
Sumi walked in like she owned it and went directly to a table in the corner.
Sado was already there.
He had arrived before them, which Kujo was learning was simply how Sado operated. He was sitting with his hands flat on the table, not on his phone, not looking at the menu, just present in the way he was always present, completely still, taking up exactly the space he needed and no more.
He gave Kujo a brief nod as they sat down.
Sumi had already decided what she was ordering. She had apparently studied the menu online the night before with the same focus she brought to a fight and had arrived with a clear strategy.
Kujo took slightly longer.
Sado looked at the laminated sheet for approximately ten seconds, ordered when the server came, and put it down.
The table was too small for three people comfortably. Their knees bumped occasionally. Keeping distance wasn't really an option. Sumi didn't seem to notice or have any interest in noticing.
She was already talking, hands moving, telling them about a video she'd come across that morning, a cat that had figured out how to open lever-style door handles and was apparently doing it constantly, to the complete despair of its owner. She'd watched it four times. She felt this was important information to share.
Kujo watched her as she talked.
There was something about it that he was still getting used to. In the training ground, in a fight, Sumi was a completely different person, focused, quiet, every part of her pointed at the problem in front of her with no room left over for anything else. Here she was animated and easily distracted and talking about a cat video with genuine investment.
The same person. Completely different register.
"You're staring," she said, without breaking stride.
"Sorry."
"It's fine." She grinned. "What is it?"
"Nothing." Kujo shook his head slightly. "You're just different out here. Outside of training."
Sumi tilted her head. "Different how?"
He thought about it for a second.
"Normal," he said. "Like a normal person."
"Is that a compliment?"
"Yeah," he said. "It is."
Something shifted in her expression. The grin softened into something smaller and less performed, there and then gone before she looked back down at the table.
"Can't be locked in all the time," she said. She picked up her chopsticks. "Doesn't work like that."
Sado, who had been eating quietly, glanced up.
"You're not serious enough," he said to her.
Sumi pointed her chopsticks at him without missing a beat. "And you're too serious. It balances out."
Sado looked at her for a moment. Then returned to his food without arguing.
Kujo was learning that this meant she had said something accurate.
The food arrived and for a while they just ate.
It was genuinely good. Better than the setting suggested it had any right to be. Sumi sat back after the first few bites with the expression of someone whose faith in their own judgment had been publicly confirmed.
"Okay," Kujo said eventually.
"I know," she said.
"You were right."
"I'm always right about food. It's the one area where I have never once been wrong." She looked at Sado. "Back me up."
"She's right about food," Sado said quietly, without looking up.
Sumi pointed at him again. "See."
Kujo smiled. It came without him deciding to, easier than he expected, easier than most things had felt in eleven days.
They stayed in it for a moment, the three of them, in the cramped corner of a restaurant that didn't match itself, eating food that was better than it had any right to be.
Then Sumi set her chopsticks down.
She leaned forward slightly, resting her chin on one hand, and looked at Kujo with an expression that was different from the one she'd been wearing for the last twenty minutes. The ease was still there but the performance had gone out of it.
"How are you actually doing?" she asked.
Kujo looked at her.
"Fine," he said.
She just looked at him.
He exhaled.
"I don't know," he said. "Honestly. I feel like I'm getting better, I can tell the difference, I can feel it. But then I think about where I am compared to where I need to be and it's—" He stopped. Started again. "It's frustrating. It's really frustrating. And I can't tell if that's pushing me forward or just weighing me down."
Sumi was quiet for a moment, listening properly in the way she didn't always advertise.
"You know why I came here?" she said. "To this school."
Kujo shook his head.
She looked down at the table. Something moved through her expression, crossing it briefly the way a shadow crosses the ground when clouds shift, there, and then gone, the surface smooth again before you could fully read what it was.
"Someone I cared about got hurt," she said. Her voice was even. Steady. "Because I couldn't do anything. I just—" A short pause. "Couldn't do anything."
She didn't say anything more than that.
Kujo understood, somewhere underneath the words, that there was a door there. That she had opened it just slightly, shown him the shape of what was behind it, and that was as far as it went for now.
He respected that.
"I came here so it wouldn't happen again," she said. "That's the whole reason. That's all of it."
She picked her chopsticks back up.
"The frustration doesn't go away," she said, her voice settling back into something more casual, the door closing quietly behind her. "You just get strong enough that it stops being the thing that slows you down."
Silence settled over the table.
Not uncomfortable. The kind of silence that meant something had been said and landed and didn't need anything added to it.
Kujo looked down at his food.
"Yeah," he said quietly. "Okay."
He glanced at Sado.
Sado held his gaze for a moment. Then gave one small, deliberate nod.
That was all. It was enough.
They stayed longer than any of them had planned.
Nobody brought up leaving so nobody left. At some point Sumi pulled out her phone and started showing them something, a trend she'd apparently missed by a week and was taking personally. She explained why this was a significant failure on her part with the gravity of someone discussing something that mattered.
Sado looked at the screen. Said nothing. Handed the phone back.
Kujo laughed, genuinely, unexpectedly, and Sumi immediately turned and pointed at him like he was the source of a problem.
"You're not allowed to laugh," she said. "You also would have missed it."
"I don't even know what it is."
"Exactly. You would have missed it."
Kujo laughed again.
They left eventually, stepping out into an afternoon that had settled into something warm and unhurried, the kind of day that didn't press against you. They walked back without rushing, the three of them falling into an easy pace that nobody had to think about.
At some point Kujo realized he had stopped watching the people around them the way he usually did. The ordinary people going about their ordinary afternoon, unbothered and unaware. He usually noticed them too much, felt the distance between their world and his too sharply.
He wasn't noticing them now.
He was just walking.
Between Sumi who was still talking about the trend she'd missed, and Sado who wasn't saying anything and didn't need to.
It didn't feel significant.
It just felt easy.
Like something that had quietly become normal without making a formal announcement about it.
That night Kujo sat on the edge of his bed for a long time.
The room was dark. Quiet. The campus outside his window had wound down into the particular stillness of late evening.
He raised his hand.
Light gathered. Slow and steady and calm, building the way he had trained it to build, holding without demanding everything he had to maintain it. He shaped it slightly, just enough to feel the edges of it, the weight of it, the way it responded.
It was his.
Had always been his, apparently.
He held it there until his eyes grew heavy and his arm grew warm and the light began to blur slightly at the edges of his vision.
Then he let it go.
Lay back.
And slept.