On January 1, 12:01 am, Makoto's life goes to pieces.

All around them, the other celebrators cheer and clap as the temple bells begin to ring, counting up in their sonorous voices to the traditional one hundred and eight. But the eighteen-year-olds, they're silent; every one of them gazing at their bared wrists, soft and pale and exposed in the biting cold, like so many twists of sea foam.

Staring at the ink beginning to bleed across his skin, heart on hyper-drive and white static hissing before his eyes, Makoto imagines the bells all across the nation simultaneously crying out to one another. Reaching desperately across the darkness and silence, like mournful birds.

He's been so on-edge this whole week that he hasn't slept more than five hours in three days. Everything around him looks dim and far away. He hopes he's not blacking out.

In a moment, it's done. His mouth goes cotton-dry and his head pounds in time with the next strike of the bell, whole body vibrating in shock. He forces himself to check again, carefully. But of course he's known the characters of Haru's name since practically before he could write his own; he'd have realized, already, if they were his. Just once, he mouthes the kanji to himself. It's a gender-neutral name; no one he knows.

Perhaps the disappointment is too intense; Makoto actually does feel himself black out a little, his knees dipping suddenly.

It's over.

In a second, he straightens himself, sucking in a breath. I'm all right. I'm okay.

His eyes go straight to Haru. But Haru, he hasn't noticed Makoto at all.

No, he's staring at Rin, and Rin is staring back.

Makoto feels his heart stop again.

()

He has no idea how he makes it home that night. He does remember having to keep his hands in his pockets the entire way back to hide how they were shaking. Standing at his doorstep—alone, Rin and Haru had long ago vanished off somewhere—his keys escape him, breaking their backs against the ground. It takes him three tries to fit them into the doorknob.

He slips his shoes off as quietly as he can. The house is mostly dark, which means the twins must have already dozed off.

"Welcome home." His mother's voice floats down the hall, soft and warm as the scent of baking bread. Already Makoto feels his eyes brimming.

"Hey, Mom," he calls out as casually as he can, hoping to escape quickly up the stairs into the sanctuary of his bedroom.

Right away she peers around the corner.

"What's wrong?"

The tenderness of her voice breaks him like a piece of glass. Tears streak down his face.

"Oh, Mako-chan. What happened?"

He has to lean down to bury his face into her shoulder.

She guides him to the sofa. The sobs wring the air out of him, tighten around his temples like screws, boring inwards.

"Was it the matching?"

Mutely, he nods into her sweater.

She doesn't try and look at the name marring his wrist.

"I j-j-just th-thought it would b-be someone I knew," he chokes, careful even now to avoid any mention of Haru's name. "E-everyone else…"

"Oh, honey. It's okay. It'll be all right."

He keeps telling himself to stop, to pull himself together, but it's like something's cracked inside of him. He clings to her like a child until he cries himself out.

()

Makoto wakes up on the couch, tucked snugly underneath a blanket.

Ah, that's right. He'd made a scene of himself last night.

His head aches as badly as if he's hungover. In the bathroom mirror, his eyes look horribly puffy. He presses a cold wet towel to them, and takes some of the twins' bright-red liquid fever medicine, half for the headache and half for the comforting, too-sweet artificial taste he associates with being pampered during childhood bouts of sickness.

Already he's determined to put himself on lockdown. No matter what he does or thinks, feels or wishes, there's no way he can go back to last night and undo what happened; the neat navy characters branded on his left wrist remind him of as much. The sooner he accepts it and moves on, the better for everyone.

Still, as he wobbles out into the harsh morning air to fetch Haru, he thanks god Rin doesn't go to their school. He doesn't know if he could hold up in front of him.

As expected, Haru doesn't seem the slightest bit affected. He doesn't once mention what happened between him and Rin, how between two peals of the bells Rin had made a strangled noise and pressed Haru to him, forehead-to-forehead, murmuring something only Haru could hear; doesn't mention what they did when they slipped off, leaving Makoto and Gou and Rei and Nagisa to take the subway home without them. And because Makoto is too shaky to trust himself to say anything, the walk to Iwatobi is mostly silent.

"Nagisa and Gou…" Haru mutters as they turn the corner to the main road.

That's right. If Makoto hadn't been a bit—preoccupied, he's sure he would have been shocked. The two of them are close, in that bickering sort of way, but surely none of them had expected it. They, too, had disappeared off somewhere together that morning.

He nods, wondering vaguely what they'll do about it.

At school, their classroom suddenly has a few more couples. It makes sense—there's no point in waiting. Not as if there's any uncertainty.

Makoto bites his lip. Rin and Haru. Nagisa and Gou.

He'd give anything to go back to yesterday.

()

Really, only Rei's in the same boat as him.

He doesn't seem to be taking it badly. "I'm going to post on Eighteen," he says to Makoto quietly. "What about you?"

Makoto shakes his head. Eighteen's the most popular match-finding service in Japan, a small application that runs in conjunction with most social-media websites. Newly matched people simply enter their match's name into the app, and it sends them a notification and contact information if it finds a corresponding match in its database. "It feels kind of strange."

"Don't you want to find them?" Rei taps his wrist, grinning, and Makoto realizes he's excited—practically humming in his seat. "Your other."

Nausea. Makoto swallows hard.

"I'm not really in a hurry."

It takes less than five days for Rei to hear back.

It takes less than five days for Makoto to fall apart.

He keeps reminding himself that everyone will stop talking about it, eventually. That after a week or two it'll be less of a novelty, and he'll finally be able to stop hearing ecstatic stories about old crushes validated or new loves found in the next town over, or down the street. Scores of well-meaning girls and a few boys have peered at the name on his wrist, but so far nobody's identified it as one they know. Thank god for that—he'd feel terrible for them. He knows he's in no shape right now to be a match for anyone.

Since the New Year, he has cried every night. For fifteen minutes, twenty, masked by the spray of their shower. He thinks he could probably keep going for hours, if it weren't for the fact that he eventually has to get out, has to help set the dinner table and tutor the twins and smilingly listen to his parents' stories about work. They should help, his family. A distraction, at least. Instead, it's exhausting. He can't stop thinking about his mom and dad—bonded the instant they found one another as freshmen in college. Every day, he seesthem fall more in love.

This is what the bond should do. Match you to the missing half of your soul.

No, he corrects himself, sluggishly. This is what the bond does. For example, Haru and Rin—

Idly, he scratches at the tattoo.

Ran leans over and grabs his arm. Peering at the name, sounding out the syllables.

"Ha… Haka…"

"Hanewa," corrects Mom. "Hanewa Yuki. It's a lovely name."

She doesn't quite glance at him, but he's noticed—how she's been extra cheery lately, cooking foods he likes, hovering at his door when she comes by to say good night. Ever since that night he made a fool of himself, she's treated him like fine porcelain. He should've held himself together better.

So he smiles as cheerily as he can at his little sister and says, "Good try, though."

"It's a girl, right?" asks Ren, legs swinging. "But I thought…"

"It's what's called 'gender neutral,'" says Makoto too fast. "That means we don't know whether it's a boy or a girl's name."

"Kinda like how onii-san has a girl's name," laughs Ran.

"Something like that."

Dinner that night is pork cutlet, one of Makoto's favorites. He tries, he really does, but he can't finish half as much of it as he normally does. The food is oddly tasteless, sandlike in his mouth. He's sure Mom notices. He feels terrible about it.