Every world had orphans. Every world had children fate had set down and walked away from.
This one just seemed to have so many more, and their endings ran crueler.
He didn't know how much he could do. He only wanted to take a little weight off them, put a little warmth back.
The question left her looking lost. Then she shook her head, something dimming in her voice.
"I don't have a home. I sleep under the bridge up ahead."
His chest pulled tight again. That open, disappointed little face made it worse.
"Thank you, mister. You're really kind."
The smile came back as she said it, clean and unclouded, sunlight breaking through after rain.
Except.
Something new sat underneath it now. Not the practiced version, the one shaped to please.
She'd worn that same smile earlier even when nobody dropped anything in the bowl.
Back then it had been standardized, the way people in service work greet a customer, mouth curving while nothing moves behind the eyes. Reflex, nothing more.
Years on the street had taught her that. A smile traded for a scrap of pity, for a meal.
She reached out with a thin hand and closed her fingers carefully around his. Her skin was cold, the fingertips split with small cracks from too many days out in the wind and sun.
She walked slowly. Her free hand stayed pressed to the weathered wall beside her, fingers reading the bumps in it, testing each step against the fear of falling.
He kept pace without complaint, letting her lead him, moving like a man out for an afternoon stroll. His eyes never left her.
That fragile grip in his palm, the cold and roughness of it, sat badly in him.
"You're fond of him, aren't you? Doesn't a scene like this make you jealous?"
Sumire watched the pair ahead, their shadows drawn out long across the pavement, the whole picture almost too gentle to look at. She turned to Betty with a teasing curl at her mouth.
Whatever ran between those two, it wasn't the ordinary kind. That level of understanding didn't come from being partners.
"What a shallow way to see it."
Betty lifted her chin, face unmoved, a thread of pride running under the words.
"Betty's bond with him goes past whatever you people mean by fondness. It's trust cut into the bone."
"And jealousy is beneath consideration."
She paused, and her voice took on weight.
"If there's one person in this world he can trust, it's Betty. Same in reverse. He's the only thing I lean on, and I'm the only place he goes home to."
None of it ruffled her. That small face stayed composed, as if Sumire's teasing barely qualified as a topic.
Too many worlds crossed together, too much weathered side by side. What sat between them had outgrown ordinary attachment a long time ago, and nobody could take its place.
"That's mature of you. If it were Enju, she'd have already run up there and grabbed Rentaro's other hand, glaring at that kid like she was about to lose him."
Sumire laughed and shook her head. The reaction had landed nowhere near where she'd expected. She'd assumed she'd get sulking, or a pout at minimum.
"Don't compare me to a child like that. There's nothing to compare."
Betty wrinkled her nose, dismissal plain. Enju's blunt, childish flailing struck her as ridiculous.
Gojo guided the girl along, steering her clear of loose stones and puddles, keeping his voice soft while he coaxed a little more out of her.
"Do you live on your own?"
He spoke like a man handling something that might come apart, careful not to frighten this small, too-well-behaved creature.
"Yes. I started begging out here when I was little."
She nodded, tone flat, recounting it like it belonged to somebody else. No self-pity anywhere in it.
"But everyone's nice to me. They look after me. Kind people give me money so I can buy something to eat."
"Otherwise I'd probably have starved a long time ago."
A life that would break most people came out of her mouth as an ordinary fact, and she smiled through it, meaning every word.
She'd made her peace with surviving on other people's mercy. However hard the days ran, she found some small warmth in them and kept going with gratitude.
Something twisted under his ribs. He held it down and kept his voice level.
"What do you do in winter?"
Tokyo winters bit hard. Grown men struggled. A frail blind girl begging in that wind hardly stood a chance.
"I go into the subway and hide there. Nobody chases me out, and it's warm."
Soft, and content with it, as though shelter in a subway station counted as good fortune.
She didn't know that winter down there still ran cold, that the platforms filled with people rougher than her, that some of them turned mean without warning. She'd carried all of it in silence and never told a soul.
"Your eyes. Were you hurt?"
He'd sat on the question a long time before asking. She hadn't been born blind. That much he could see.
"Yes."
Her steps slowed. Fingers twisted at the hem of her shirt without her noticing, and the smile thinned before she gave a small nod.
"Mom didn't like red eyes. So she poured lead into mine."
She said it in that young, even voice, the way a person mentions the weather.
No anger. No grudge. A quiet acceptance, a fact settled long ago.
The faint curve at Gojo's mouth vanished.
Behind the lenses, something churned in the blue.
He'd walked through more darkness than most people would survive, and it had never occurred to him that a mother could do that to her own daughter.
Sumire and Betty had heard every word. They exchanged a look, and neither face held anything simple.
Mothers protect their children. It runs deeper than choice.
Cold ones existed, ones who walked away, but they were rare, and usually young and frightened and unequipped, abandoning a child in a moment of panic.
Not this. Not abandonment plus lead poured into a little girl's eyes, blinding her by hand. There was no scale that measured it.
Sumire's brows drew tight, something cold moving through her. Years of Gastrea Virus research had shown her plenty of what people were capable of, and this still landed like a blow.
Abandonment alone leaves a road open. Someone might take the child in. She might claw her way through on her own.
Destroy her eyes on top of it and every road closes.
In this world, in this much chaos, a blind girl with nobody behind her trying to survive amounts to being pushed toward death by hand.
A child of a few years old, thrown away by the person closest to her, then dropped into permanent dark.
Alone in a world full of malice and unknowns. God only knew how much she'd endured, how many people had shoved her around, how many nights she'd gone hungry before she learned to live in it.
Forget a child. Take a grown adult with a steady mind, take their sight away overnight, and most of them wouldn't come out the other side intact.
Aika had ground through it and kept that clean smile, still grateful toward every person who'd ever helped her.
Something in the air must have shifted, because she let go of his hand and stepped back.
Then she lowered her head and bowed deeply, that small body folding over, the posture careful and full of deference.
"I'm sorry. I should have told you I'm one of the Cursed Children."
Her voice trembled faintly, an apology from a child who believed she'd done something wrong.
"Thank you for helping me. If you hate me now, please take the money back. Getting your help today already made me happy."
She understood what her kind meant to people. The powerful, the poor, all of them recoiled the same way.
She assumed he'd helped because he hadn't known. Once he did, he'd turn like everyone turned. He'd loathe her, leave her, maybe worse.
So she apologized first and offered the money back, however much she wanted to keep it, rather than let what she was earn his disgust.
That careful little posture, the earnest gratitude, went into him like a needle and kept going.
With the Six Eyes he caught every shift across her face, every flicker of feeling underneath. The fear sitting deep in her. The unease. The shame.
Her fingertips shaking through the apology. The flash of loss and hurt she couldn't hide. The fragile, raw thing behind the calm she'd manufactured.
That was exactly why the blue in his eyes burned, and why the anger came up alongside the ache.
Her caution. Her suffering. Her impossible obedience. Her innocence.
He took all of it in and filed every piece away, and each one hurt.
When she finished, he said nothing. He bent and gathered up her cold hand again, then crouched to bring his eyes level with hers. His voice came out gentle and entirely serious.
"What's your name?"
She hesitated, thrown by a response she hadn't braced for. Her face turned toward the sound, uncertain.
"Aika Kirizuki. Mom used to call me Aii."
Something wistful crept in around the word for mother, a small ache she hadn't managed to bury. No hatred in it at all.
"Aii, do you want to see again?"
He watched her, and the softness in his voice carried something that left no room for doubt.
She tilted her head, confusion crossing that small face. Whatever seeing again was supposed to mean, it didn't reach her.
Young as she was, she knew her eyes were finished. Too many years had passed since the injury for anything to come back. She'd stopped wishing for light a long time ago.
"I don't understand what you mean."
"Can my eyes be fixed?"
Quiet, lost, with something underneath it that she didn't dare name.