Kintsugi: the golden repair // Hanemiya Kazutora x Reader

Chapter One I need an easy friend

Y/n realized at the age of ten that your entire life can fit into three boxes. The whole experience felt judgmental, like she should have been able to produce more of herself. Ten years. Three boxes. Each box was labelled in her mother's neat penmanship: clothes, toys/books, art supplies. Y/n was overcome with the sense of consciousness. Reality was sinking in. The moving van was tiny and half full. The most prominent thing occupying its open back was their beds. There was a box with basic kitchen supplies. A box with bathroom necessities. Her mother's clothes. There wasn't a single box full of decorations. There wasn't anything adherently personal. Not a single piece to say Welcome Home Y/n.

Y/n's single mother didn't have the luxury of having living room furniture or grand pieces. It was all just enough to get the two of them by. Enough to survive in this alien environment. Y/n had spent the last ten years living with her grandparents. Her mom had given birth to her at the ripe age of sixteen and now at twenty-six had managed to find a job at the Kanto Chou Hospital. With the help of her own mother, Y/n's mom had found a one-bedroom apartment in close proximity to her workplace, packed their things, and within a week Y/n was looking up at the most unremarkable building she had ever seen.

Y/n was used to the quiet. The countryside full of flowers and trees. Open fields and simple pleasures. A place where you could hear the crickets chirp and catch fireflies in glass jars. Now all she could hear was the sounds of traffic and drones of moving bodies. The choking smell of exhaust had given her a headache.
Y/n adjusted the baseball cap on her head to hid her teary eyes from her mother. She had chewed the bubblegum in her mouth to tiny particles; it had lost its flavor a long time ago. Instructing the men from the moving company which apartment was theirs her mother spotted her disgruntled daughter in the corner of her eyes. Y/n had her hands in her pockets, kicking rocks around. The girl couldn't even stand to look at the apartment complex any longer. The height and weight of the situation was giving her vertigo.

Y/n's mother cupped under her daughter's cheek. The young girl covered her sadness with a look of distaste, a sour scowl on her face. Her mother rubbed the Band-Aid occupying her child's chin. Y/n had climbed the tree in her grandparents' backyard and fell. The drop wasn't bad, but the way down had been bumpy. She had landed on her backside, scraping the tip of her chin off of a branch on the way down. Still rubbing the spot her mother's eyes were tired with dark marks under each socket. Those same eyes were full of love and sympathy.
"I promise you baby. I promise you that this city is full of opportunities for the both of us."
"It's noisy." Y/n whipped her face out of her mother's grip and rubbed her fist across the spot that was just held. She needed to remove her mother's gentle touch. Y/n wanted to soak up the dread of moving away from home. Her real home.
"We'll get used to it. I got a CD from the store that plays nature night time sounds so in the meantime it'll sound just like Gramma and Grampa's house." She sighed deep when the expression Y/n was sporting became more skeptical. "In the meantime," her mother's voice had become honey sweet and song tuned, "there's a playground here." That made Y/n light up.

The only playground back home had been at her elementary school. It was large, enough to satisfy all age groups. Over the years Y/n had created a mental checklist of everything that could be accomplished on that playset. She had made it a mission to reach its top and she had. Not only getting to its highest platform but also scaling the outside of it, to wrap her body around the plastic flag at the tippy top. She had gotten in trouble with her second-year teacher for that exhibition. Her next mission had been climbing the top of the monkey bars and she had done that too. She had figured out how to hang from it upside down, how to do backflips using the bars as leverage, and how to walk across the stop of it instead of swinging across. Her third-year teacher had almost had a heart attack watching the ambitious girl's balancing act. The next goal was seeing how high she could make it on the swing set and when that was accomplished, she wanted to see how much air should could get jumping out of the seat when it reached its peak. She had come home bruised and battered after a week of failed attempts.
Y/n always had dirt crusted into the knees of her jeans. Those marks never completely washing out. She always counted the new scrapes and bruises on her body. She spent her days with dirt under her fingernails.