“I was very careful about what I let in. She didn’t seem to notice I was being careful.”
Hana moved to Zelwinds City several months after the war ended. She lost her family to it — not all at once, but in the drawn-out way that felt worse in some respects: first her brother, then her mother, the news arriving in intervals that gave her enough time to hope before each one. She did not follow the details of the war’s conclusion. She made a deliberate decision not to: the names of the people involved, the shape of the final battle, what the ending cost and what it saved. She knows enough. She packed what she could carry and moved to a city she had never been to, learned its streets slowly, and built a handful of small routines to hold the days in shape.
The most important of these is the park. It is quiet, no one knows her there, and she can eat her lunch in peace.
Story
Uninvited Guest
She had a spot she had started to think of as hers — a corner near a tree that filtered the afternoon light at a particular angle. She had her lunch arranged, a book open beside it that she had not looked at yet. The day was warm and still, and it felt, for a moment, like exactly the peace she had moved here to find.
Then Eryn materialized at the edge of her blanket.
There was no polite buildup to it. One moment Hana was alone; the next, a pink-haired girl in a red dress was crouching approximately thirty centimetres from her lunch, leaning forward with unconcealed interest and no apparent awareness that this was unusual behaviour. She was examining the food with the focused intensity of someone taking a careful inventory.
Hana opened her mouth to say something and found she had no idea what.
“This smells incredible,” Eryn said. It was less an observation than a verdict. She looked up briefly, seemed to register Hana’s existence, and looked back at the food. “Did you make this yourself?”
Hana said that she had. She was not sure why she answered. Some default social function had engaged before she could think to stop it.
Eryn tried the rice without asking. She did this with the calm confidence of someone who has never in her life developed the instinct to wonder whether she should check first. Her expression shifted immediately into what Hana would later learn was her highest form of approval.
“You’re very good at this,” Eryn said.
She ate a little more, offered no further conversation, and left. Hana sat for a long moment looking at the space she had occupied and then slowly looked back down at her book.
She did not read a word of it.
She’s Back
She came back three days later.
Hana had not been certain she would — had spent the intervening days oscillating between hoping she wouldn’t and, less comfortably, hoping she would. She arrived at the park to find Eryn already there, seated cross-legged in the same spot with the air of someone who had been waiting and was not going to acknowledge having been waiting.
“You’re here again,” Eryn said.
“You’re here again,” Hana said, and immediately wished she had found something less symmetrical to offer.
They sat together in the loose, provisional way of people who have not decided yet whether they are doing this on purpose. Hana ate. Eryn did not have food but showed no inclination to leave, which Hana found she was not particularly upset about. They talked, slowly. Eryn asked how long she had been in the city, and something in her expression when Hana said “a few months” was almost offended — not at Hana but at the situation, at the magnitude of unexplored restaurants that this implied.
“There’s so much good food here,” Eryn said. “You’ve barely started.”
“I’ve been finding my feet,” Hana said.
“You need a guide.”
Hana did not agree to this out loud. She also did not say no.
The City (For the Food)
The guide appointments were never called that. They were never formally arranged. But Eryn had a way of appearing at the park at lunchtime and saying “there’s a place nearby” with the easy authority of someone who has long since decided what is happening, and Hana had a way of being too uncertain how to stop it to actually stop it.
They went to the noodle shop near the east canal, the bakery in the market district that Eryn deemed acceptable but not exceptional, the dumpling place tucked between two larger restaurants that Hana would never have noticed on her own. Eryn approached all of it with focused, discriminating seriousness. She had opinions and shared them without particular regard for whether opinions had been solicited.
Hana started to relax somewhere around the third outing. She was not sure exactly when. It crept up on her the way warmth does when you have been outside too long — present before you notice it.
She learned things about Eryn by accumulation rather than by being told: that she had a dry wit she deployed without warning, that she was impatient with very little except being given incorrect information, that she ate with a focus and sincerity that Hana found inexplicably charming. Eryn did not ask many questions about Hana’s past. She seemed to understand, in her particular way, that some questions required answers that were complicated, and she had no interest in pressing for anything that was not freely offered.
What Eryn was not told, through all of this, was anything about the war. Or Hana’s family. Or why she had come here.
It did not come up. Hana did not bring it up. The afternoons stayed warm and small and hers.
Fang
She met him on a Wednesday, outside the noodle shop, where he had appeared with no advance notice and was cheerfully stealing Eryn’s leftovers before she had finished with them.
He was tall, loud in the easy way of someone who has never had to moderate themselves very much, and unambiguously familiar with Eryn in a way that immediately reconfigured the space. They argued about the food the way people argue when they are actually very comfortable with each other. Hana sat slightly to the side and was not sure what to do with her hands.
He introduced himself as Fang. He asked how she knew Eryn. She said they had met in the park. He laughed at something in this — some context she did not have — and Eryn told him to stop.
Then someone passing by recognised them both. Said something about the war. Said a name — the Goddess — with the easy, fond familiarity of a city that had been quietly celebrating its survival for months. Said Eryn’s name in the same tone.
Hana went still.
The conversation around her continued. She caught pieces of it — Furies, the Goddess restored, Eryn’s return. The shape of the ending she had never looked up arranged itself in front of her regardless, in broad strokes, on a busy street. The war that had taken her family. The people who had ended it.
The person who had been eating her lunch every other afternoon for six weeks.
Hana said she had to be somewhere and left. She did not run. She walked at a perfectly normal pace for someone whose ears were ringing.
A Quiet Afternoon
She did not go back to the park for two weeks. Then her birthday arrived, and she went because there was nowhere else to be. The apartment was too quiet for a day that used to be loud — her mother’s cooking, her brother taking credit for a gift he had clearly not chosen himself. There was no one left to make it anything, so she brought her own lunch and sat in her spot by the tree and tried to let it be an ordinary afternoon.
Eryn was there within ten minutes. Hana had not told her she would be there. She did not ask how Eryn had known, because she suspected the answer was something like “I come here looking sometimes,” and she did not know what to do with that yet.
Eryn sat beside her without explanation or fanfare. She did not ask what was wrong. She did not ask where Hana had been for two weeks. She simply sat with the specific quality of someone who has decided that presence is what is needed and has the patience to let it be enough.
After a while, without planning to, Hana said: “My family died in the war.”
She had not said it out loud before. Not to anyone.
Eryn was quiet for a moment. Then she said: “I know. I mean — I didn’t know. But I think I knew something was there.”
“I’ve been avoiding everything about it.”
“I know,” Eryn said. She said it without deflection or apology, without the weight of everything she could have been connecting it to. She said it and stayed.
They sat there until the light changed. Eryn did not say she was sorry, because sorry was not the shape of what the afternoon required. When Hana finally stood to leave, Eryn stood with her and walked her as far as the end of the park without being asked.
It was the most looked after Hana had felt in a year.
Hungry
It was a Sunday, another park afternoon, and Eryn said it the way she said most things — with the confidence of someone who has made a decision and is now simply informing the relevant parties.
“I want to keep having lunch with you,” she said. “Not just — not only because of the food.”
Hana looked at her.
“The food is very good,” Eryn continued, with the measured precision of someone who is not retreating from their primary compliment but is clarifying its scope. “I want to be clear that that remains true. But there is also the other part.”
“The other part,” Hana said.
“The part where you’re there.” A pause. Eryn’s jaw set slightly, the way it did when she was annoyed at the logistics of something that should in theory be simple. “I like it when you’re there. I come to the park because you’re there. Not only because of the food.”
Hana was quiet for a moment.
“You could have just said that,” she said. “The last part.”
“I did say it.”
“After several qualifications about the food.”
Eryn looked at her with the specific expression of someone who is aware they have been perceived and would like to be done with it. “Are you going to say something back, or are you just going to make observations.”
Hana considered this. She was shy, and shy people did not typically do well in moments like this — did not find the words, or found them too late, or let them stay wherever they lived when they weren’t being said.
She said: “I come to the park because you’re there too. In case that wasn’t clear.”
Eryn looked away briefly. When she looked back she was not quite smiling, but she was something adjacent to it.
“Good,” she said.
It was, Hana thought, exactly the right amount of badly handled.
The Rooftop
Eryn had described it as a restaurant. This was technically accurate in the sense that food had at some point been served there — the terrace on the roof of a building near the canal district, accessible through a narrow staircase and a door that Eryn opened with the confidence of someone who had never once considered that she might not be allowed somewhere. By the time they arrived the kitchen had closed, but Eryn had anticipated this and produced, from somewhere, a wrapped paper parcel of the dumplings from the market district below, still warm.
They ate on the low wall at the terrace’s edge, the city laid out below them in its nighttime configuration — lit windows, the slow movement of the canal, the particular quiet of a place that has settled into itself after a long day. The sky above was clear.
Eryn finished eating first, as she always did, and sat with her legs dangling over the edge looking at nothing in particular. Hana sat beside her. At some point the parcel was empty and neither of them had moved to leave.
“You can see the stars better from here,” Eryn said. It was not a romantic observation — it was Eryn stating a fact she had verified empirically, the same way she stated facts about soup.
“You can,” Hana agreed.
The silence between them had a different quality now than it had in the beginning — not provisional, not the silence of two people who hadn’t decided yet what they were doing, but something settled. Hana had been noticing this for weeks. The shift had happened gradually enough that she could not locate the exact moment; it was just that she sat beside Eryn now the way she sat in her spot by the tree — as though she had started to think of it as hers.
Eryn’s hand found hers on the wall between them. Not tentative — deliberate, the way Eryn did most things, without ceremony or preamble. Her thumb moved once across Hana’s knuckles and then stayed still.
Hana looked at her. Eryn was still looking at the city.
“You’re not watching the stars,” Hana said.
“I know where the stars are,” Eryn said.
She turned then, and the look on her face was the one Hana had learned to read — the one where she had made a decision and was acting on it before she could find reasons not to. She kissed her once, with the same precise directness she brought to everything, and then pulled back a fraction and waited.
Hana kissed her back. This was not something she had to think about.
Below them the canal moved, and the city made its nighttime sounds, and Eryn’s hand was still warm in hers when they finally looked back up at the sky.
Interactions
Eryn
The early dynamic between them had a specific imbalance to it that Hana is not sure Eryn has ever fully registered. Eryn would arrive with the certainty of someone who had already decided what was happening; Hana would accommodate this because she did not have the confidence to do otherwise. The city tour was never formally agreed to. The park visits were never scheduled. Things became what they were, and Hana let them, and only later did she think about the fact that she had let them — and consider what that said about her.
What she noticed, in the accumulated time, was that Eryn was paying more attention than she made it look like. Not in a way she broadcast — Eryn’s version of attentiveness is oblique and quiet, delivered through a pointed observation rather than a direct question, through sitting somewhere rather than saying why. But the attention was there. The afternoon on the park bench, when she came without being called and stayed without being asked, was only the most visible instance of it.
What being with Eryn is actually like, day to day, is this: she still shows up without announcing herself, and she still has opinions about the food that she delivers without being asked. She has taken to critiquing Hana’s cooking with slightly more affection than she used to, which Hana suspects is the closest Eryn comes to a compliment on most days. She takes her hand the way she did on the rooftop — without preamble, as though it is simply the most logical thing to do with the hand that is available — and does not let go for longer than is strictly necessary. She says “come here” instead of “I missed you” and “eat something” instead of “I was worried” and Hana has learned to hear both. There is a particular face she makes when she is about to say something she finds difficult — jaw set, eyes slightly elsewhere — and Hana has started to recognise it early enough to wait, which seems to be what Eryn needs most: someone who will wait without filling the silence.
The question Hana spent some time with — and has arrived at an incomplete but workable answer to — is what it means to be loved by someone who came to know her through loss. Eryn arrived in her life in the specific season of grief, in the aftermath of a war that Eryn was at the centre of. She did not know Hana before that. In some ways, neither did Hana know herself before that. What she has, then, is someone who encountered her at her most reduced and stayed. She has decided, on balance, that this is a generous thing — and on the rooftop, with Eryn’s hand warm in hers and the city quiet below them, she stopped deciding and simply knew it.
Tiara
She met Tiara through Eryn, the way she has met most people since moving to the city — through proximity and Eryn’s particular disregard for asking whether introductions were wanted. Tiara was quieter than Fang, more careful with the space she occupied, and Hana found her easier to be around for exactly that reason.
What she noticed early is that Tiara understood, without needing it explained, that Hana was not from their world. Not the city — the other world, the Fencer world, the war and the Furies and the weight of everything that came before Hana arrived. She did not make it a subject. She did not walk delicately around it either, which would have been its own kind of pressure. She simply engaged with Hana as she was, which is a rarer quality than it sounds.
There was an afternoon, early on, when Tiara mentioned something about Eryn offhand — some small, specific observation about the way she behaves around people she actually cares about, delivered without ceremony and clearly not intended as a statement about anything in particular. Hana has thought about it several times since. She suspects Tiara knew exactly what she was doing and chose to do it anyway. Now that the thing has happened, she has told Tiara as much, and Tiara received this with the composure of someone who is not at all surprised and is too polite to say so.
Fang
She does not hold it against him. She has thought about whether she should — whether something underneath her decided-not-to might hold it anyway — and the honest answer is that she doesn’t. He is not responsible for the war any more than Eryn is. He ended it, at cost, the same as Eryn did. The shape of that cost is something she can hold in her head without requiring it to become resentment.
What she finds harder is the warmth. He is easy to be around in the way of people who assume welcome without being aggressive about it, who take up space without effort, who ask questions without wanting anything complicated from the answers. He had been kind to Eryn across a story Hana has since, gradually, allowed herself to learn the shape of. She respects that. She is still deciding what to do with the respecting.
The working arrangement between them is polite and increasingly comfortable. He makes bad jokes at her expense; she tells him they’re bad, which he seems to find satisfying. He does not make the history into a thing she has to navigate carefully around. Neither does she. That he was Eryn’s before — in the specific, tangled way that the war made things — is something neither of them has felt the need to address directly. He seems genuinely glad that Eryn is glad. Hana has decided to take this at face value, and so far it has held.