I'm going home, you idiot

 The evidence had been there all along but I chose to look away from it.

It was in the way my mum had been distant without even the smallest traces of concern in her words, whereas Uchi had placed her hands upon me as if they had shaped my body from the birth and anything other than that would have been unnatural.

The way Alec had told me I was the love of his life and a special person, but Tatsuya had picked lavender flowers just to make me more comfortable and prioritised my safety over his own even when a spear cut through his wing.

Tina stared at me as if I were an inconvenience she couldn't wait to get rid of whilst Toshi had hugged me with all of her heart, even as my presence rewrote the love story she dared to write with the first man who cared about her pain.

My dad couldn't even attend the hospital to find out why his eldest daughter was there yet Kohaku had saved me without knowing whether or not I was the friend she had lost over a decade ago.

Sheila had spent a lifetime with her blood relatives and a few years with her ex-boyfriend.

Shizuka had spent the same amount of time with the family that had found her.

And right now there was only one group that both of them wanted to see again.

“Hey, what're you doing?” exclaimed Alec as I threw back the sheets and slid off the mattress.

I moved as though half of my blood had been drained, leaning heavily on the bed as I made for the gap in the curtains.

“Sheila!” Tina tried to grab me as I approached but I swatted her hands away.

“Get off me,” I snapped.

“Where are you going?” said my mum. I could feel her rolling her eyes. “You haven't even put your clothes on yet.”

I ignored her and didn't hang around to find out exactly how that made her feel, stumbling out into the ward with my arms held out for balance. Thankfully I was wearing hospital pyjamas with awful blue and white stripes instead of a revealing hospital gown as I hurried as fast as I could down the corridor. Had I died in Nippo? Is that how I had ended up back here again? There had to be a way to get back.

The flooring was cold beneath my bare feet and the lights were too bright but I knew my way around the hospital like it was the back of my hand. I knew where they kept the MRI machines and CT scanners. I knew which way I had to go to reach the phlebotomy department and I knew that I had already left the cancer ward far behind me. The reception came into view at the same time as Dr Kallik, brow furrowed, a thin paper folder stuffed with papers in his left hand.

“Sheila?” he murmured and I almost stopped moving as his grey eyes narrowed at me from beyond the lens of his glasses.

“You –?” He seemed to hear my unspoken question and stepped aside without another word, clearing eyeing the people who tried to catch up with me without hurrying.

The tip of my fingers brushed the wooden frame of his Mahatma Gandhi quote as I leaned against the wall and came away warmer when I withdrew them. And I remembered the conversation we had had in Uchi's house as well as her mysterious smile.

“Did anything strange happen right before you died?”

“I don't know. It was my first time dying … Not really.”

“No or not really? Those are two very different things, child. I'd appreciate your accuracy right now.”

“There was a tree in my world. It looks almost exactly like the one where Kohaku found me, except it wasn't dead. I touched it right before I – woke up here and it was hot. Most trees are kind of cold where I come from.”

“A tree? And it looks like one we have here? Where?”

“She means the Spiritless Tree. By the Jaw.”

“Aaah, the Spiritless Tree, you say? How very intriguing.”

I staggered into the reception and narrowly avoided crashing into a father carrying his daughter. The little girl had clearly hurt her leg, her little face crumpled and drenched by tears as she held onto her knee, and I tried to remember how many months it would take before she would be able to walk again. Her mother apologised to me but their overflowing panic was the last thing I needed to deal with right now.

The branches of the cherry blossom tree waved at me like an old friend and I ran towards it as fast as I could, wincing each time the soles of my feet made contact with the dirty pavement. I hoped I hadn't imagined the welcoming glow of its pale pink petals and the warmth that somehow reached me across the road. I tried not think about what I would do if I hugged its trunk and nothing happened.

“Sheila!” Alec grabbed the back of my pyjamas as I stepped onto the asphalt and I choked as the fabric bit into my throat.

“Let go of me!” I half turned to dislodge his grip but he grabbed my elbow instead.

“What the hell are you doing?” he demanded.

“I'm going home, you idiot!” I tried to yank my arm free but he hung on like a crab and I had never wanted a seafood cracker more.

His confusion filled my senses like hot chemicals until the screech of tyres made us both turn to the car trying to slow down less than a meter away. He let go at once and fell back onto the pavement and the horror that twisted his features told me that my triumphant expression would probably haunt him for the rest of his life.

Even as the brush of metal against my flesh made my heart skip several beats and the crunch of the bonnet colliding with my hip bone made me break out into a sweat. I cried out as pain snaked through my nerves like lightning and shot upright as fast as I could.

Crashing straight into Tatsuya, who had lunged forward to stop me from falling off the bed and hissed as my shoulder pressed against his wounded upper arm.

I grabbed onto the front of his clothes, breathing hard, the echo of a scream stinging my vocal cords. He held onto me, lightly rubbing my back until I felt connected to my spine once more. He froze only when I wrapped my arms around him and sank my face into the curve of his neck as if it belonged there. His gentle scent wiped away the acrid stench of a car braking too late. His touch overwriting Alec's even though my ex-boyfriend had laid his hands on different parts of me a few moments ago.

“Shizu?” His voice anchored me to a world I thought I would never see again.

I spread my fingers out as far as I could to feel more of his back and tightened my hold to stop him from slipping through it ever again.

“I'm back,” I said quietly, rubbing my forehead against his cheek before hiding my face again, squeezing my eyelids and lips together so neither of them could embarrass me further.

“Back?” He muffled a low gasp. His hands settled firmly on my back and nape like a weighted blanket instead of a barbed wire. “Did you –?”

“Not everything,” I replied after a moment. “But I'm here.”

The pain from his injury mixed with the joy that burst from his tired body and he pulled me just a little bit closer, driving away the dream that had seemed real enough to disrupt every single system in my body. He leaned forward against me and our heartbeats slowed in sync with each other as the seconds ticked by.

“Welcome back, Shizu,” he whispered, clearing the tears from his throat.

I didn't say anything but hoped he could tell just how much those words meant to me.