She was sitting by the window, staring at the mountain. Her small hand was pressed against the glass. And in the vision, he saw the exact second her heart had broken. It was not the day Hana died. It was the day before. Hana had called Yuki to her bedside and whispered, "Take care of your father." Yuki had nodded. But in that nod, something had snapped. A seven-year-old should not have to take care of anyone. That burden, that beautiful, impossible burden, had shattered her voice.
He made her rice porridge, the way Hana used to make it. As she ate, he watched her. And he saw the future heartbreaks. He saw the boy who would reject her in high school. He saw the friend who would betray her in university. He saw the job she would lose at twenty-six. He saw her husband—a kind man with glasses—who would leave his socks on the floor every single day, and every single day it would chip at her, a thousand tiny fractures adding up to one dull ache. yama hime no mi
He turned to her. His eyes were old now, clouded with cataracts, but they still held that strange, twilight shimmer from the fruit. She was sitting by the window, staring at the mountain
He could see every future heartbreak, too. It was not the day Hana died
He saw all of it. And he could not stop any of it.
The taste was indescribable: first honey, then salt, then the sharp, clean bitterness of green persimmon. And then the vision came.
The story they told was always the same. The princess, whose name was lost to time, had loved a mortal hunter. When the hunter was slain by a boar god, she climbed to the highest peak and wept for three hundred days. On the last day, her tears turned to blood, and her body dissolved into the roots of a single tree. That tree, they said, bore a fruit once every century: the Yama Hime no Mi . It was the color of a sunset bruise, and it smelled like longing.