Work Text:
Jigsaw falling into place
So there is nothing to explain
You eye each other as you pass
She looks back, you look back
Not just once, not just twice
Wish away your nightmare
Wish away the nightmare
You’ve got a light, you can feel it on your back
A light you can feel on your back
Your jigsaw falling into place— Jigsaw Falling into Place - Radiohead
She hears a crash of glass outside her bedroom door, and for a moment wonders if the kitchen window got smashed. A moment later, a second, identical crash makes her flinch, but Takumi forces Hachi to look at him instead of towards the door and the source of the noise. Then, Hachi hears the front door slam shut. Hachi isn’t able to focus on it in the moment because of what Takumi is doing to her. What he feels like she owes him. She’s six weeks pregnant and terrified that this’ll hurt the baby, but that’s seemingly the last thing on Takumi’s mind right now.
Hachi endures it to ‘tame his anger’ as he called it, and she slowly realises that this might become a habit if she doesn’t leave him. When he’s done, he finally leaves to get to the recording studio, and Hachi is alone in the apartment once more. Nana’s face flashes across Hachi’s retinas, an expression of bewilderment, resentment, and shock that Hachi never, ever wanted to see on Nana’s face. Let alone be the cause of.
But she knows that it was bound to happen as soon as she decided to choose Takumi over Nobu, when she essentially chose Trapnest over Blast, despite being Blast’s so-called mascot. It took her a while to take it to heart since it was so unbelievable, but with time, Hachi has come to realise just how much the band members of Blast care about her and value her presence in their lives. As thanks, this is what she does. She chooses someone else.
Hachi leaves her bedroom and immediately sees the broken glass on the floor by the table. None of the strawberry glasses remain on the table where she last saw them about twenty minutes ago. Instead, she finds them both in pieces on the floor right at her feet. She can see one of them as being an accident, but with how soon after the second one fell to the floor, it feels deliberate. And Hachi doesn’t even have to wonder why—she knows why.
She knows they’ll never forgive her for this. Tears start running down her cheeks as she sweeps up the broken glass and puts it into a kitchen towel. What happened after that is an almost complete blank in her mind. Hachi goes to bed at some point, but she doesn’t recall what she did with the broken glass gathered in the towel. Only a few days later when she’s moving out does she notice the bundle on the kitchen counter.
“Why haven’t you thrown that out yet?” Takumi asks, scoffing. “It’s just broken glass at this point.”
Looking down at the pieces of glass in the towel in her arms, Hachi doesn’t feel like she can just throw them away. They were cheap, two-hundred-yen glasses they bought after they moved in together, but to Hachi, they symbolise a friendship she doesn’t want to let go to waste. And if she doesn’t want it to go to waste, she has to put in effort of her own.
Hachi empties the towel full of broken glass into an old shoebox she finds in her closet, and while the movers take most of the stuff out of the apartment, she carries said shoebox on her own out the door.
Months pass. Her belly steadily grows bigger just as Takumi’s possessive behaviour and anger does the same. Nana sends her a message on live television that makes an already overly emotional Hachi weep loudly on the rug in front of Junko and Kyousuke’s living room television. At some point, the box full of broken glass became something less than a thought stuffed in the back of her mind, but it makes its presence known once more when Hachi is sorting through her wardrobe.
“Kintsugi?”
“Is it too cheesy? Do you think she’d like it? I know she wasn’t a huge fan of the glasses when I bought them…”
Junko shakes her head. “I think it’s a great idea. I just can’t believe you’d save broken glass for this long.”
“I honestly sort of forgot about it, what with the move and everything,” Hachi admits sheepishly. “Well, both of the moves.”
“A lot happened in the past few months for sure,” Junko amends. “And now you’re in your third Tokyo home in less than a year.”
Hachi groans. “I know. Hopefully fourth soon, so I can get out of your hair.”
“What are you, a bird?” Junko laughs. “It’s okay… for now. I don’t want you stressing out while you’re still pregnant, but we also can’t really house the both of you when the baby comes.”
“I think I’m just gonna move back to the apartment. We still have the lease, and Takumi still hasn’t stopped paying my half of the rent. I think he forgot about it, honestly.”
Junko snorts. “Well, that’s convenient. But why would you wanna go back? He did have a point about that building not being the best place for you to live when you’re pregnant, and especially when you have to haul a stroller up and down seven floors with a baby in it all on your own. I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
Takumi was right, and so is Junko. The harsh reality of the situation is that Hachi probably shouldn’t move back, but the apartment holds so many dear memories to her already that she’s strangely emotionally attached to it. And maybe, just maybe, Nana still lives there. Takumi did tell Hachi that he was strongly against Nana moving in with Ren, and if anyone has a say in that matter, it’s him, in the end—unless Ren decided to leave Trapnest. But judging by their growing number of media appearances, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
“I know it probably isn’t.” Hachi says, smiling feebly. “Maybe I can beg Mr Ando to see if they can install a lift in the building and argue that it would be good for disabled people, too.”
The sound of Junko snapping her fingers makes Hachi jump. “That’s actually a great idea, Nana. I think it’s worth a shot. I mean, it’ll take a while even if they agree to it, but if you really want to keep living there, it’s worth it. For you and everyone else living there—I’m sure the elderly people and their knees would thank you.”
Hachi can’t help but laugh at that. “Then I guess I’ll try. He’s heard crazier ideas from me than this one.”
When she meets up with Ando at his office a few days after that, he almost immediately clocks what she’s going to ask.
“How did you know?”
He laughs. “Well, you can’t walk up all those stairs in a few months when you’re close to your due date, right? I feel bad having you do that now, Ms Komatsu.”
“It’s… fine,” she says, knowing full well that it’s mostly a lie. “I just wanted to see if it was possible, but I don’t want to cause an inconvenience.”
“Nonsense. People living in the building have asked in the past, but there wasn’t a need back then as much as there is nowadays. I think your case might be what finally seals the deal.”
“You do?”
“Mm-hmm. I’ll be in touch, and I promise to try to get this moving as soon as I can.”
Hachi feels giddy with excitement and satisfaction over having actually gotten her voice heard as she walks away from the building with her shoebox in her arms. Her next stop is just a few train stations away, where she’ll be attending a kintsugi workshop for an hour and a half. Luckily, she’ll get out just after Kyousuke gets off work, so he’s graciously offered to pick her up afterwards.
At first, Hachi had looked into getting the glasses repaired by a professional in a shop or something similar, but there aren’t many such places around anymore since there’s a much higher demand from people who want to learn how to do it themselves. There’s a lot of places all over Tokyo who offer workshops like the one she’s about to attend, so she wasn’t exactly struggling to find a place where she can learn to repair the strawberry glasses.
Hachi has never really been the artistic type, which is ironic given the fact that she went to art school. The real, and only, reason she went was because all of her friends with actual interest and talent in art were going. And in her younger years, Hachi was terrified of being left behind, so of course she had to follow them where they went. Sure, she still struggles with this vice of hers, but she personally feels like she’s doing a lot better these days.
Despite her lack of artistic talent, the instructor at the workshop is very patient with her and also explains things in a way that makes it easier for Hachi to understand what she’s doing. Soon enough, she has two repaired drinking glasses standing in front of her on the table, each decorated in what looks like golden-coloured scars.
“That’s actually a very good description,” her instructor, Ikeda, says. “In a way, that’s what they are. They can be healed with kintsugi, but broken pieces will never quite become whole again since there’s always microscopic pieces missing after the object breaks. It’s similar to how humans heal; you’ll never quite be the same afterwards.”
“Oh,” Hachi says, though it’s more of a sigh or exhale than anything. “I think I can relate to that.”
Ikeda smiles sombrely. “I’m sure many can. Maybe that’s part of what draws people to this technique of repairing broken items.”
There are so many broken pieces to piece together, vaguely reminiscent of trying to complete a jigsaw puzzle. It takes a lot of time, effort, and especially patience that Hachi initially doesn’t think she has in her. But she does, and after an hour and a half in the studio, her shoebox is empty of broken pieces of glass. Instead, she gets to wrap up her strawberry glasses in paper to put back in said box—both whole again.
What amazes her now that she can look at the glasses in their repaired state is that they did manage to fit back together and even get back to a functional state despite many tiny pieces missing. Ikeda explains that the lacquer used somewhat functions like glue that keeps the pieces together after the lacquer dries.
“Thank you so much,” Hachi says. She smiles. “If I ever break something again, I’m coming back here. It was very fun and a good learning experience.”
“I’m glad to hear that. You are welcome back anytime, Ms Komatsu.”
Hachi walks towards the train station as the sun starts to dip behind the rooftops, casting an amber glow on her surroundings. Right outside as she’s about to fish her wallet out of her purse, Hachi changes her mind and instead pulls out her phone. She scrolls through her recent calls for a moment and then lands on the person she’s looking for. The bad thing with Ren is that he often chooses not to answer the phone, mostly because he’s too lazy regardless of where it is.
Luckily for Hachi, he does pick up for her this time.
“Hey, Hachi. What’s up?”
“Hi,” she responds. “Um… is Nana with you?”
“Yeah, she is. Why, do you wanna talk to her?”
Hachi shakes her head before she realises Ren can’t see her. “No, I… can I come by?”
“Sure, of course you can. Wait, oh shit—do you girls need a moment alone?”
“I… would appreciate that. If that’s okay.”
Ren snorts. “Why wouldn’t it be? I’m not your ex.”
“… you knew?” Hachi asks, her heart skipping a beat at Ren referring to Takumi as her ex-boyfriend. It’s strange; they were never really dating, per se—they just happened to have sex, then she got pregnant, and he decided to selfishly take on the role as the child’s guardian without asking either Hachi or the other potential father, Nobu, first.
Everything happened so fast that she’s surprised Ren even managed to hear the news of their breakup, if that’s what you can call it at that point.
“’Course I do. Word travels fast,” Ren replies. He laughs. “Nah, I figured as much based on how he’s been so easily annoyed lately. Congrats.”
Hachi makes a face. “I don’t know if I deserve congratulations for that. But, um… thank you.”
“Mm. So, I’ll just open the door for you when you get here, and then I guess I’ll go and get cigarettes. The missus needs a new pack, anyway.”
“Thank you. Again,” Hachi says, smiling to herself. “I’ll be there in about twenty minutes.”
“Alright.”
Hachi hangs up and then rushes into the station to catch the next train arriving in just two minutes. Luck is on her side once more as she just manages to get on the train before it leaves, and then she just stands by the doors for a quick and easy exit in five stops. Maybe she’s acting impulsively and perhaps a bit irrationally, but Hachi feels like she at least has to try. She wants to apologise to Nana, explain herself, and most of all give her peace offering. All she can do is that Nana accepts it—they don’t have to immediately go back to being the best friends they used to be, but if Nana is at least willing to give Hachi another chance, that’s more than Hachi could dare dream of.
As she gets off the train and starts walking toward Ren’s apartment complex, Hachi starts to feel the nerves of the situation, and so her pace slows down a bit. A big part of her can’t help but worry that Nana will reject her apology. Of course, Hachi kind of expects her to, but that doesn’t mean that’s what Hachi wants. Still, as much as it wouldn’t surprise her if that was the outcome, it’d still hurt a lot. And it would mean that she’s tried and failed, and that she should probably give up. And giving up is something Hachi absolutely hates doing.
Clutching her shoebox in her arms as if it were some sort of emotional support item, Hachi enters Ren’s apartment complex and rides the lift up to his floor. While doing so, she sends him a text letting him know she’s right outside. She feels bad about giving such short notice, but part of her worries Nana might’ve left beforehand otherwise. As she steps out of the lift, she can see the end of the hallway where Ren’s apartment is, and as hard as her heart pounds against her ribcage, Hachi keeps walking.
Ren opens the door as soon as the tip of Hachi’s index finger touches the doorbell, and it scares her so much that she jumps and yelps. Of course, that makes Ren laugh.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you. Go on, I’ll be back soon.”
“Okay.”
Ren ruffles Hachi’s hair lightly with his right hand before he walks towards the lift, and Hachi watches him for a moment before walking inside the apartment proper and closing the door.
“Who’s at the door?” Hachi hears Nana call out. “Delivery?”
“Sort of,” Hachi responds sheepishly as she walks inside. She finds Nana sitting on Ren’s couch, and as soon as Nana sees her, she flies up from where she’s sitting as if she got stung by a wasp.
“You… why are you here?”
Hachi bows her head slightly out of habit. She walks forward to place the box down on the coffee table, immediately feeling the loss of the weight in her arms. It wasn’t necessarily heavy, but she has been carrying it for a while now. Hachi takes a deep breath, and then she faces Nana.
“To apologise. I’m… sorry. I was terrified of what you would say and think of me, so I didn’t want to tell anyone about the baby. But then I realised I wanted to keep it—keep… him. And I do. But I hope you can forgive me, Nana.”
The silence that immediately follows is terrifying. Hachi feels like she could hear a needle fall to the floor. She wants to look away so badly, to break eye contact with Nana, but she knows she can’t or her words won’t come off as sincere. She is sincere, she’s just scared of being it.
Nana’s facial expression and reaction is, as always, hard for Hachi to read. She does still look Hachi directly in the eye, though, and maybe it feels a bit… defiant? Arrogant? As if she’s waiting for Hachi to break eye contact first. But Hachi refuses. Finally, Nana breaks the silence with a sigh.
“You said ‘him’—you know it’s a boy you’re having?”
Hachi nods. “Yes. I just found out a little while ago.”
“Oh. Con… congrats.”
“Thank you.”
Finally, Nana breaks eye contact, but only to look at the box Hachi brought with her and put on the coffee table between them. It almost feels as if the coffee table acts as a barrier between both Nanas, keeping them safe from emotional hurt as long as they don’t cross it.
“What’s in that thing? You didn’t bring me a dead animal or anything, I hope.”
Hachi frowns. “No. I… I made something. Well, sort of. I’d like you to open and see it.”
Finally, Hachi can see an expression she can decipher on Nana’s face: confusion. Maybe even a little bit of trepidation, as if she expects a bomb inside the Asics box. But she does open the box, albeit carefully, and then she lets out a huff, a quiet laugh, as she’s greeted by newspaper wrappings.
“Packaged with care, huh.”
“Well, you might see why if you open them.”
“Uh-huh.”
Nana does as she’s asked to, and she tears the newspaper up to slowly reveal the glasses underneath. Immediately, the first detail that pops out at Hachi is the gold lacquer she used to repair the glasses, which makes her very happy. As much as she used to love that the strawberries were the first thing people would notice, this new detail makes them much cooler. Gives them history, as short as it may be.
“What… huh? Are these… oh. Oh, shit. Hachi, I’m… I should be the one to apologise.”
Nana sets the glasses down, and Hachi barely has time to react before Nana steps forward and takes Hachi into her arms. The gesture is so surprising that it immediately makes Hachi tear up, and as much as she’d like to be able to hold them back, she can’t. She’s missed this, missed Nana, so much. She thought she’d lost Nana as her best friend forever as soon as people found out about her pregnancy, and yet… here they are.
“I’m sorry,” Nana continues. “I was just so angry and felt betrayed when you and Takumi talked about you moving out and stuff, so I…” she trails off before she starts over briefly. “I get why now, but…”
“I could’ve handled it better,” Hachi unintentionally interrupts. “I was so ashamed of myself and scared of what you’d say, so I couldn’t even speak. I felt awful. I still do.”
Nana shakes her head, and she tightens her embrace. Hachi realises that this is the longest they’ve ever hugged, so knowing that Nana usually isn’t a hugger makes it all the more special to her that Nana initiated it.
“I should’ve still been there for you. I just… didn’t know how. Still don’t, I think.”
Hachi’s heart sinks in her chest as she realises that Nana definitely isn’t alone in thinking the way she does about Hachi’s unborn child. They still don’t know who the actual father is, and even though it’s more likely to be Takumi’s, the chances of it being Nobu’s child aren’t zero. Still, she knows he probably won’t want anything to do with her or the child given how she treated him—just like how she’d expected Nana to never forgive her.
And yet.
Returning the embrace, Hachi can’t help but cry. Maybe it’s the hormones, maybe it’s just her usual, emotional self. But she feels a strange sense of happiness and sadness at the same time. She takes in as many details of this moment as she can register: the feeling of Nana’s embrace, the smell of Ren’s shampoo in her hair, how Nana’s fist clenches around the fabric of Hachi’s blouse as if she doesn’t want to let go.
“Did you have them repaired? Why?”
Hachi smiles to herself. “No, I went to this place that does workshops in kintsugi. So, I learnt how to repair them.”
“What?!” Nana pulls away slightly, but only far enough to the point where she can still hold Hachi in her arms but stare at her in surprise at the same time. “You did that?”
“I did. Is it… bad? Ugly? Too much?”
“Hachi, they’re amazing. Honestly, I like them better this way.”
Now, Hachi can’t help but laugh. “Right? Me too. I was hoping it could… ugh, this is gonna sound dumb. But I was thinking it could symbolise us?”
“Huh?”
“You know, how we, um… were friends, but then things happened, and I know things won’t really go back to how they used to be. But I hope we can still be friends.”
Nana blinks a few times, looking stunned or maybe still confused, but then she laughs. She presses a quick kiss to Hachi’s lips. “That’s one of the cheesier things you’ve said, for sure. But I like it.”
“So… we can still be friends?”
“Are you proposing to me right now?”
Hachi feels her face heat up. “No!”
“Good, ‘cause I’m not giving her up that easily.”
Both women jump at the sudden sound of Ren’s voice at the door. He laughs as he kicks his shoes off before coming in to join them in the living room.
“Man, you two are so easy to scare. That’s hilarious.”
“Yeah, because you sneak in specifically to scare people. I could scare you that way, too.”
Ren scoffs. “Bet. Anyway, hey—glad you two made up. It was keeping me up at night.”
“He’s a fucking liar; he could sleep through the apocalypse without waking up,” Nana says to Hachi, but she glares straight at Ren who’s wearing the trademark shit-eating grin he has whenever he’s teasing Nana.
Hachi laughs, too, feeling happier than she has in months.
Thanks to Mr Ando being proactive and having the right connections, construction on a lift in Hachi and Nana’s apartment building starts within just weeks after Hachi first talked to him about it. He apologised to her, though, saying that renovation might take a while since they’ll have to make expansions on the exterior to make things fit, so Hachi still has to walk up and down seven flights of stairs while pregnant. But thankfully, she has help from both Nana and their friends who visit frequently.
Slowly but surely, Hachi moves back into the apartment, and so does Nana. Once they’re mostly settled back in, Hachi suggests they hold a move-back-in-party for their friends, and while it gets cramped with all Blast members present plus Junko and Kyousuke, they make it work.
Hachi had been terrified to face Nobu again after all she put him through, but much like Nana, he listens to her explanation and apology, and he accepts it. He, too, apologises for not quite following through on what he had promised her back then, which Hachi personally feels isn’t as bad as what she did to him.
“I’m so glad you’re willing to forgive me,” she says. “And thankful. I promise I’ll make it up to you, Nobu.”
He smiles a little, scratching his chin. “It’s alright. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be in your situation, so I can’t say I wouldn’t have acted the same way. Maybe worse. I’m just saying that… you know. I’m here for you, if you need me.”
Hachi feels her lower lip quiver, but this time, she successfully keeps her tears from falling, and she nods. “Okay. Thank you.”
“Hey,” Nana calls out to the group. “A toast? To whatever this party was called?”
“A move-back-in party,” Hachi chimes in with a laugh. “And I agree!”
Nana pours herself a beer in one of the strawberry glasses, and apple juice in Hachi’s. They lift them to perform a toast, but Nana makes a face and stops herself halfway.
“Ugh, I don’t wanna accidentally break this thing again. I can’t do it.”
“As long as you don’t smash them together, they’ll be fine,” Yasu assures them. “I hear there’s… metal dust or something in the lacquer that makes it durable.”
“You sure know a lot,” Junko says, and Yasu gives her a challenging look.
“Don’t let my looks deceive you. I read a lot of weird shit when I have a bunch of free time.”
The entire apartment erupts in laughter, spurring Nana to finally perform that toast with Hachi. As Yasu had told them, the glasses don’t actually break as they clink together, and for some reason, it feels strangely symbolic.
There are still a lot of uncertainties in her life, mostly pertaining to how life will turn out once the baby is born, and what she’ll do long-term to support herself and her son. But for right now, Hachi chooses to focus on the present where she’s reunited with her friends, and she’s surrounded by the best support system one could ever ask for.
Somehow, she’ll be alright—she’s sure of it.
