The week drifted by like a song with no chorus.
Autumn was still young, and the trees outside the classroom windows whispered every time the wind passed.
Yuto Manabe sat by the window again, half-distracted, half-lost. He liked mornings the dull hum of voices, the scrape of chalk against the board, the way sunlight cut through the glass and scattered across the desks like quiet mosaics.
Lately, though, there was something different in that light.
It wasn't color not in the way he remembered.
But when Mika sat beside him, the world didn't look so heavy in black and white.
She didn't talk much.
Even when she did, her voice came out like a ripple across still water soft, unsure if it should exist. But it was enough. For Yuto, even a single word from her carried something he couldn't name.
That morning, she was sketching again. A small notebook, edges slightly torn, pencil marks faint. Her drawings were quiet things a bridge, a few flowers, maybe a girl standing by a river.
Yuto tried not to stare, but he did anyway.
"You like bridges, huh?" he asked.
Her hand froze. She didn't look up immediately, just nodded a little.
"They're… quiet," she said, almost in a whisper.
"Quiet?"
"They don't move," she added, eyes still on the page. "Even when everything else falls apart, they just… stay."
Yuto smiled faintly. "That's kinda poetic."
Mika looked at him for a moment not cold, just unreadable. "You think too much about words," she said.
He laughed. "And you think too much about silence."
She almost smiled. Almost.
Days slipped into one another after that.
They'd sit beside each other, sometimes talking, sometimes not. But the silence between them began to change. It wasn't awkward anymore. It felt like a place both of them could rest in like the air itself had learned how to breathe slower.
At lunch, Yuto would sometimes share his sketches.
They weren't as perfect as before ever since he lost color, his drawings looked pale, tired. But Mika didn't laugh. She'd just look at them carefully, then say something small, like,
"I like how you draw hands."
Or, "Your shadows look kind."
It didn't sound like much, but to Yuto, it was everything.
One afternoon, it rained.
The kind of rain that blurred the city thin, endless, gentle. They waited under the same bus stop, the smell of wet pavement filling the air.
Mika hugged her sketchbook to her chest. Her hair was a little damp.
"Your mom must worry when you're late," Yuto said.
"She doesn't," she replied quietly. Then after a pause, "She stopped asking long ago."
He looked at her, but she kept her eyes on the rain. There was something about the way she said it not angry, not bitter just… empty.
Yuto didn't press further. He wanted to, but something told him not to. So instead, he said, "I think rain makes the world look softer."
Mika turned to him, blinking. "Softer?"
"Yeah. Like even the bad things get blurry for a while."
She looked away, but he caught it the small smile that wasn't really a smile.
In the following days, Mika began talking a bit more.
Not about her father, not yet but about small things: the taste of milk she hated, a stray cat that always waited near the school gate, a book she couldn't finish reading because the story "felt too clean to be true."
Each word she gave him felt like a piece of color Yuto could almost see.
He didn't tell her that, of course.
But sometimes when she laughed softly barely there he could swear the world flickered for half a second, and the gray around her hair looked a little warmer.
When Friday came, Yuto and Mika walked home again, side by side, bags swaying lightly. The sky was pale blue, almost white at the edges.
"You still draw bridges?" Yuto asked.
She nodded. "I started drawing one that broke in the middle."
He tilted his head. "Why?"
"Because," she said, "some bridges need to break before they can carry new weight."
Yuto didn't answer. He just watched her walk ahead quiet, small, her uniform sleeves brushing the air.
And for the first time in years, the world didn't look completely black and white anymore.
It wasn't color.
But it was something close.