The year turned quietly.
Winter pressed itself against the windows. New Year decorations went up and came down. Cousins sent messages. Neighbors talked about sales, exams, relatives visiting.
Inside the small apartment, time was measured differently.
Not by holidays.
By appointments.
By kicks.
By how many times Mirai woke in the night to shift the weight of herself.
After the scare, everything slowed.
She stopped wearing her uniform. It hung in her closet like something that belonged to someone else. Her classmates kept going—mock exams, final assignments, talk about universities.
Mirai watched that world from her phone now.
Kana still sent her pictures.
Your replacement in class is a potted plant.
It's doing its best.
Teacher wrote something on the board and sighed, "Mirai would've solved this already."
I rolled my eyes on your behalf.
Sometimes they called—short, quiet calls, more like shared breathing than conversation.
"How's it there?" Kana would ask.
"Loud," Mirai would say, listening to the baby stretch under her skin. "How's it there?"
"Stupid," Kana would say. "So, normal."
The school counselor brought materials once a month. Her homeroom teacher called twice to check in, asking nothing about gossip, only whether she needed any help with the coursework they'd agreed she could postpone.
The world she'd built over years kept going without her.
And inside her, another one grew.
By the last month, walking felt like carrying a small planet.
"Slow down," her mother would say.
"You sound like an old man when you get up," Yuuto would say.
"I feel like one," Mirai would reply.
The baby's movements had changed too.
They were less flutter now, more deliberate. Rolls. Stretches. An elbow maybe, pressing against her ribs. Sometimes it hurt. Sometimes it made her laugh, breathless.
"You're greedy with space," she whispered once, hands framing the curve. "There's not that much of me, you know."
She talked more these days.
Half to herself. Half to him.
Not in big speeches. Just small, everyday thoughts.
"I saw a picture of a park today."
"Your uncle nearly dropped a pot in the kitchen."
"Your grandmother cried during a TV drama and blamed onions."
When fear crept in—late at night, when the apartment was quiet and the future felt like a long, dark hallway—she'd put her hand on her stomach and wait for a movement.
A reassurance.
A reminder.
An answer that said: still here.
He chose to arrive on a night when everything felt almost ordinary.
The sky was clear. The cold was sharp. Someone downstairs was watching a comedy show loud enough that laughter bubbles floated up through the floor.
Dinner was simple—rice, miso, grilled fish, pickles.
"You're moving slowly today," her mother observed.
"I'm full," Mirai said, though she'd eaten less than usual. "He's sitting too low, I think. Or maybe my stomach has finally given up."
Her father chuckled weakly.
"I think it's allowed," he said.
Yuuto watched her more quietly than usual, eyes tracking the way she shifted in her seat.
"You good?" he asked.
"Tired," she answered. "That's all."
"You've been 'just tired' for nine months," he muttered. "I don't trust those words anymore."
She rolled her eyes.
"Not everything is a crisis," she said.
He didn't seem convinced.
The first pain came while she was washing her face before bed.
Sharp, this time.
Not like the dull ache from the scare weeks ago. This rolled through her and then away again, like a cruel tide testing the shore.
She grabbed the sink, head dropping forward.
"Ah…"
It left.
She straightened, breathing carefully.
Maybe that was—
Another wave cut through the thought, stronger.
She shut her eyes, jaw tightening.
This one took a little longer to leave.
She stood very still for a full minute after it faded, hands braced.
Then called, quietly:
"Mom?"
Her mother answered from down the hall.
"What is it?"
"I think…" Mirai began, then stopped, swaying slightly as another tightening started deep in her body, rising and cresting. "I think… something's starting."
Silence.
Then hurried footsteps.
Her mother appeared at the bathroom door, eyes already wide.
"Your stomach?" she asked.
Mirai nodded, unable to find words while the wave still held her.
She breathed through it, remembering the doctor's hand gestures, the pamphlet that had seemed abstract at the time: breathe in, breathe out, ride it, don't fight it.
When it finally eased, she let out a shaky laugh.
"I guess… he doesn't want to wait," she said.
Her mother's hands were already moving.
"Yuuto! Get up! Call the hospital," she called, louder now. "Your sister—"
"I heard," Yuuto said, emerging from his room half-dressed, phone in hand. His face was pale again, but his voice was steadier than last time. "I'll call."
Her father was next, stumbling from the bedroom, reaching for his jacket and his composure at the same time.
Mirai leaned against the wall, one arm wrapped around her belly.
She wasn't ready.
She was so ready.
She wanted it to stop. She wanted it to be over. She wanted it never to have to begin.
But it already had.
Labor didn't feel like TV.
There were no perfectly-timed screams, no cinematic counting. No neat fade in, fade out.
It was long.
Long in a way that made time strange.
A series of waves and waiting.
Pain and pause.
Faces and voices and the white glare of hospital lights.
The taxi ride blurred.
The check-in blurred.
The nurse's calm questions blurred.
"How far apart?"
"When did it start?"
"Any fluid?"
Her answers scattered, pieces picked up by her mother and Yuuto when she couldn't find them.
She remembered the hospital bed, the cool sheet under her. The monitor's beeping. The doctor's measured tone.
"You're progressing," he said. "It will take time. First births usually do."
Time became a room with no windows.
Contractions came. Grew. Took more of her breath. The pain was not a sharp blade but a deep, crushing pressure, like something inside her was being wrung out slowly.
She gripped the sides of the bed, then her mother's hand, then the railing again.
"It hurts," she gasped once, obvious and insufficient.
"I know," her mother said softly, eyes wet. "I know."
She didn't, exactly.
But Mirai let the lie stand.
Between the waves, there were strange islands of quiet.
Moments where she lay sweating, panting, staring at the ceiling fan turning slowly above her.
In those gaps, her mind would flick back over everything that had led her here.
The bathroom with the test.
The boy at the station.
The words "your mistake" thrown like stones.
Yuuto's arms around her in the dark.
Her parents shouting, then apologizing, then choosing.
The heartbeat.
The blood.
The decision to let go of school.
"You're almost there," a nurse said at some point, voice encouraging.
Almost where, Mirai thought.
The end?
The beginning?
Sometimes she wanted to cry out, I don't know if I can do this.
But her throat felt too tight, her body too busy.
So she thought it instead, over and over.
I don't know. I don't know. I don't—
Another wave hit, tearing the thought in half.
Outside the delivery ward, the waiting area was a different kind of storm.
Yuuto paced.
Sat.
Stood again.
His father sat with his elbows on his knees, hands clasped so tightly the knuckles were bone-white. His mother walked small circles with a paper cup of water she never drank.
Occasionally, a nurse would pass by.
"Still in labor," they would say. "Everything is progressing."
Progressing.
The word meant nothing and everything.
"How long does it usually…?" his father began to ask one nurse, but she just gave him the kind smile reserved for anxious relatives.
"As long as it needs to," she said. "We're monitoring her closely."
Yuuto checked the time so often it began to lose meaning.
Minutes stretched.
Hours folded in on themselves.
He tried to remember to breathe.
In. Out.
He thought about the alley behind his work. The boy at the vending machines. The promise he'd made to not hit him, to save his fists for lifting, not damage.
He thought about how little control he actually had over anything that mattered most.
"Do you… want to sit?" his mother asked him at one point, voice hoarse.
He shook his head.
"If I sit, I'll break," he said.
She didn't laugh.
At some point, his father pressed a warm can of coffee into his hand.
"Drink," he said. "You'll fall over before she does, at this rate."
Yuuto stared at the can.
He didn't feel like drinking. Or eating. Or doing anything. But he forced himself to take a few swallows anyway.
If she has to keep going, he thought, I can at least stay conscious.
He closed his eyes.
In his mind, he saw her as a little kid, clinging to his sleeve on the first day of elementary school. He saw her at the kitchen table, head bowed over homework. He saw her in the clinic, listening to the heartbeat with tears on her cheeks. He saw her on the balcony, saying goodbye to a hope she should never have had to hold.
Now she was in a room he could not enter, doing something only she could do.
Let me trade with you, he thought uselessly. Just for a little. Just so you can rest.
The door stayed closed.
Inside, time broke down into commands.
"Breathe."
"Push."
"Again."
"Rest."
"You're doing well."
"Almost there."
Her hair stuck to her forehead. Sweat ran down her back. Her throat hurt from making sounds she didn't even recognize.
At one point, she thought she might be sick. At another, she thought she might pass out. The edges of her vision darkened, then brightened, then swam.
"You're okay," a nurse said. "You're okay."
She didn't know if that was true.
She clung to the sound of it anyway.
At some point, the doctor's tone shifted.
"Good," he said. "The head is crowning. One more big push, Mirai-san. You can do this."
She wanted to say, No, I can't. I've given you all I have.
But something deeper than refusal rose up.
Not bravery exactly. Not even determination.
More like a stubborn, exhausted refusal to stop when a life was hanging on the other end.
She gathered what was left of herself.
For a breath, the pain grew so enormous it erased every other thought.
She pushed.
The world sharpened to a single, impossible moment.
Then—
Release.
A sudden, terrifying silence.
Then, like the memory of a heartbeat magnified and turned inside out,
a wail.
Thin. Piercing. Shocked. Furious at being dragged from one world into another.
The sound knifed through the room, through her bones, through the layers of fear that had built around her over months.
She started crying at the same time and didn't know if it was from relief, pain, or something else that had no good name.
"It's a boy," someone said.
The words floated around her, half-heard.
A boy.
Of course.
Somewhere deep in the haze, she thought:
Then we'll raise you into the kind of man who does not run.
She didn't say it out loud.
They were busy.
There were hands. Towels. Voices. The weight of everything shifting in the room—away from about to be born toward is here.
"Do you want to see him?" a nurse asked.
Yes.
No.
I'm not ready.
I've been waiting forever.
All at once.
"Yes," she croaked.
They placed him on her chest.
He was… small.
Smaller than she'd imagined, and bigger than anything she'd ever held.
His face scrunched, eyes squeezed shut, mouth open from crying. His skin was flushed, his hair damp and dark.
He smelled like something new and old at the same time.
Her arms moved awkwardly, unsure where to put her hands.
One settled under his head. The other curved around his back, careful not to press too hard.
"Hi," she whispered, voice shaking. "We've… we've met before, but… hi."
His cries faltered, then resumed at a lower pitch, as if deciding whether this new arrangement was acceptable.
"You did well," someone said. Maybe the doctor. Maybe the nurse. The words didn't seem to have an owner.
She wanted to say no, she hadn't. She'd screamed, and doubted, and wanted to stop.
But here he was.
Here.
Alive not as a flicker on a screen or a tap under her ribs, but as weight and sound and warmth against her.
A quiet terror bloomed alongside the awe.
I have no idea what I'm doing, she thought.
He didn't know that.
His tiny hand flexed once, fingers brushing her skin.
"I'm sorry," she whispered suddenly.
The nurse looked at her, confused.
"What for?" the woman asked gently.
"For… everything," Mirai said. "For not being… older. Or wiser. Or… ready. You didn't choose any of this."
She swallowed.
"But I'll…" Her throat closed. She tried again. "I'll do my best, okay? That's all I have. But I'll give you that."
He didn't answer.
He made a small, sleepy sound that might have been a complaint or contentment or just air moving through a newborn throat.
It was enough.
When they told the family they could come in, Yuuto almost tripped over his own feet.
He'd prepared himself for the worst kind of tired—pale, shaken, hollow-eyed, barely there.
She was tired, yes.
Her hair was damp, skin washed out, eyes heavy.
But she was also there.
Holding a bundled shape in her arms, looking at it with an expression he had never seen on her face before.
A mix of fear, wonder, pain, and something fierce and fragile at once.
Their parents stopped in the doorway.
His mother clapped a hand over her mouth, sobbing before she even reached the bed.
His father's shoulders slumped, some invisible weight finally dropping off.
Yuuto stepped closer, breath caught.
The baby was smaller than he'd imagined too.
"Come," Mirai whispered, voice rough. "Meet him."
His legs felt strange, like they were walking without permission, but they carried him to her side.
He looked down.
A tiny face.
Closed eyes.
Soft mouth.
Barely-there brows.
Wrapped so tightly in blankets that only the face was visible, like a little knot of humanity.
Something in his chest twisted.
He'd thought about this moment for months—imagined feeling joy, or anger at the world, or a sense of protective rage.
What he felt instead was… quiet.
A deep, almost painful quiet.
Like the part of him that had been screaming quietly since that first clinic heartbeat had finally run out of voice.
"This is… him?" he asked, because his brain needed confirmation even when his eyes had already accepted it.
Mirai nodded.
"I think so," she said.
Her attempt at a joke was weak but real.
"Do you want to hold him?" a nurse asked, looking at Yuuto.
He panicked instantly.
"I might drop him," he blurted.
"You won't," the nurse said with a small smile. "But we can wait if you're not ready."
He hesitated, then shook his head.
"If I wait, I'll get more scared," he said. "Now is… fine."
They placed the bundle in his arms, guiding his hands to support the head, the back, the weight.
He'd held heavy boxes, crates, even drunk friends once or twice.
None of that prepared him for this.
The baby felt both incredibly light and impossibly heavy.
Easy to lift.
Terrifying to be responsible for.
He looked down, eyes stinging.
"Hey," he said softly. "I'm… your uncle, I guess."
The word felt strange on his tongue.
Uncle.
He was barely old enough to be confident about his own life. Now there was a person here who would call him that someday and expect the world.
The baby's mouth twitched.
He didn't open his eyes.
Yuuto swallowed.
"You almost weren't here," he whispered, too quiet for anyone else to hear. "Because of someone else's fear. Because of ours."
He inhaled slowly.
"I won't forget that," he added. "Not to hold it over you. To remind myself not to waste it."
He thought of the boy at the vending machines.
Of phrases like my future, my parents, I can't.
He looked at this small face and made a decision without realizing it solidified in that moment:
I won't teach you to run.
He handed the baby back to Mirai when his hands started to shake.
"You did it," he said.
She let out a breath that was half laugh, half exhausted sob.
"I didn't have a choice," she said.
He shook his head.
"You had plenty of chances to run," he replied quietly. "You didn't take them."
Her eyes shimmered.
Their parents hovered nearby, touching the baby's foot, his tiny hand, Mirai's hair, as if needing to confirm all three of them existed at the same time.
"Have you… thought about a name?" their father asked tentatively, as if he were intruding on some secret.
Mirai had, in the long, sleepless stretches of the last months.
Names had floated in and out of her mind like ideas for futures.
She looked at the small bundle.
"Haru," she said softly.
They all went still.
"Haru?" her mother repeated. "As in… spring?"
Mirai nodded.
"It's been… a long winter," she said. "For me. For us. For him."
Her hand brushed the edge of the blanket.
"Spring doesn't erase winter," she continued. "It just proves it didn't last forever."
There was a quiet in the room that wasn't emptiness.
Her father smiled, the expression breaking open the tiredness on his face.
"Haru," he said, testing it. "Haru-kun."
Her mother whispered it too, as if tasting it.
Yuuto rolled it in his mind.
Haru.
He looked at the baby again.
"Hey, Haru," he murmured. "Welcome to the mess."
Mirai laughed quietly.
"He deserves more than a mess," she said.
Yuuto nodded.
"He deserves us trying," he replied. "Even when we don't know how."
The nurse came to check on them, gentle but firm.
"Mother needs rest," she said. "You can stay a little longer, but not all night."
They took a few more minutes they hadn't been offered but felt owed.
Then, one by one, they stepped back.
As they left, Mirai lay back against the pillows, exhaustion pressing her down in a way even fear hadn't managed.
Haru shifted on her chest, making a small, soft noise.
She looked down at him.
"So," she whispered. "It's really you."
She thought about all the versions of herself that had cracked and reformed to reach this point.
The girl who stared at a test in a bathroom.
The one who begged a boy to stay.
The one who listened to cruelty in someone else's living room.
The one who stood in her own, waiting for judgment.
The one who heard a heartbeat.
The one who almost bled.
The one who let go of a future she'd planned to keep another she hadn't.
Now she was this girl.
A young mother who didn't have all the answers. Or even most of them.
But she had this:
An aching heart.
Hands that would hold even when they shook.
A family that had learned—late, but still—to stand with her instead of against her.
She closed her eyes, tears slipping sideways into her hair, mixing with the sweat and the salt and the newness of this night.
"Your life started with too much fear around it," she murmured. "But it doesn't have to stay that way."
Haru's breathing was small and steady against her.
"I can't promise you an easy road," she said. "I can't promise I won't make mistakes. I probably will. Many."
Her fingers curled lightly over his blanket.
"But I can promise this," she whispered. "I won't run. Not from you. Not anymore."
Outside the window, the city moved on—lights blinking, cars passing, people sleeping or working or worrying about things that seemed huge to them and very small from a hospital bed.
Inside, a teenage girl and her newborn son shared a space too small to contain everything that had led them here.
The night felt impossibly big.
And yet, somehow,
for the first time since a single line appeared on a test,
the future—uncertain, fragile, terrifying—
felt like something that might still be worth walking toward.