Chapter Text
Nozomi hops to the edge of the windowsill, looking down at the maze of cars and light splayed out below her; gold pinpricks and the rushing whitish flush of headlights streaming in traffic nineteen floors below. She breathes in, a deep rise of her chest, and rolls her shoulders loosely, excited. She jumps.
The open wind tears away any screams - there’s only the flood of joy as she hurtles toward the street, the stream of cold air rushing through her, pulling her down, hungry gravity at her light body - and Nozomi flares out her wings.
Her bullet fall is cut short by the hard jerk of air trapped by the snap of feathers - Nozomi flaps laboriously and clacks her beak, rising up from the flow of nightlife far below her and swerving around the side of her apartment complex, loving the quick fingers of wind that tug at her primaries and drag her back, reminding her to stay careful. Flying is really like nothing else.
Out of pure joy she ripples out a harsh caw, a crow’s bawl that startles a flock of natural birds from their spindly tree out back by the neighboring building as she glides past. The swift little sparrows swirl out and up in a tornado of riotous panic, chittering madly as they avoid Nozomi’s crow form. She flicks at wing at them, just teasing, but this causes her to bank sharply and she has to flap hard to stay balanced.
“You’re being ridiculous,” calls Umi’s voice from somewhere below, and Nozomi wheels in the sky gleefully, searching for the source. She soars across a parking lot low enough to near scrape her chest to the gravel, and swings out her wings gracefully to slow, allowing her to hop to a halt in the lantern-lit garden some blocks from her apartment. Umi, still in human form, squints into the evening light as Nozomi bops over on the path’s tiles, claws scrabbling with an unattractive grinding of nail on stone.
“Is this fountain new?” Nozomi wants to know, and pecks it with her beak, just to make a point.
“My father had it installed last weekend. Where is Rin?”
Nozomi tilts her head and caws again, the coarse shriek of her bird form grating against her throat. A cheerful whistle answers her, and Rin’s phantom shape blooms out of the darkness, quicksilver wingbeats stirring up a small storm.
The cockatiel hums and haws, then says, “I learned a new song from the radio today, Umi! Hi, Nozomi!”
“Good evening, Rin. How was your flight?”
“Great, as usual. Too bad there aren’t more natural tropics birds around here. I’d like to fly more in the open, like you,” she says enviously to Nozomi, who gives a bird’s shrug - a ripple of feathers - and stands, form lengthening and sliding into human shape, easy as breathing. Rin hops to Nozomi’s soft shoulder immediately, clucking excitedly. Her little claws dig tiny pinpricks into the skin, but Nozomi takes the pain in favor of spinning a giddy circle, always delighted to be in any form at all with her friends.
“I like your dress,” says Umi, who is putting her bracelets on a flat rock near the fountain. Though clothing shifts with the avian form, hair binders and jewelry do not.
**
After the flight, Nozomi watches Umi and Rin comb out each others’ hair. Rin’s cockatiel form is a brilliant ivory, her crest a flare of vermillion that doesn’t quite match her human form’s plume of ruddy orange that Umi wrestles, elbows out, with mild success.
“It won’t lay flat-”
Nozomi smiles to herself, tucking the contentment into her stance, her breath. She feels loose, easy; the press of night and friendship as brave and glorious as a plummeting dive from the roof of her apartment. She bends down and runs her hands over the cut stone, the rough vines, feeling her soul both flying and grounded. How spiritual a night.
“Are you excited for your first day of high school, Nozomi!?” Rin honks and Umi gives a wicked yank.
“I don’t think so,” she says, and her shifter friends turn and gape at her comically, Rin half-headlocked as Umi maneuvers the large-toothed comb delicately through one last chunk of tangles. Rin drops to the ground as Umi releases.
“What’s not to look forward to?” asks Umi, and frowns at her comb. The strands of ginger hair have coiled and drawn into themselves, and turned into soft, pearly feathers. She plucks them out, waving them into the garden air with a backhand.
“Just, another move. You know,” Nozomi says, and catches onto the tail end of her good flight mood. She plays a quick tug-of-war with herself, loses, and forces a game smile anyway. “Back to being the new girl, with the weird cards, and all the birds fly to me in the courtyard.”
“Witch girl!” says Rin, leaping onto the rim of the fountain and making a spooky gesture, but her tone has lowered with empathy.
“I’ll be okay,” says Nozomi, and laughs as Rin splashes her, fingertips skimming the surface of the burbling water, lit by pale underwater lights.
“You’re always okay, but we’re here for you, too,” says Umi, more seriously. She tilts her head, for a moment seeming so much like her avian form that Nozomi double-checks for people around, in case Umi suddenly pops the feathers. “We’ll always be here for you.”
**
Nozomi lives alone in her apartment now that she’s a high schooler and her parents think she can handle it - well, the wind calls to some shifters more than others, and the feeling of flight is an addiction, the kiss of sunlight on feathers more potent than any spark or chemical, so she doesn’t mind - but she jolts awake right as the alarm blurts some radio bubblegum pop, and slaps it with a hand bristled in dark feathers. She takes a moment to tense, hoping she didn’t wake anyone else, and then remembers she’s alone.
The feathers sink back into her skin, and she goes about the morning activities mechanically, thinking about nothing as hard as she can, and then opens all the windows so that the morning breeze sends her high school orientation papers sailing from her tiny 2-person table all over the living room and kitchen; a bureaucratic, indoor hurricane. She picks up her bookbag.
**
Nozomi, early as usual, takes a seat in the precise middle of her classroom exactly fifteen minutes before roll call, half-glancing at the floor-to-ceiling windows that promise sun and a light updraft, perfect flying conditions. She takes out her meager supplies, lays them in an organized row across the top of her desk, and puts her head down until her nose and cheeks numb with discomfort, squashed against the flat surface. She clenches her hands into fists until the muscles strain, and holds back her wings until she’s aching with the desire to run - fly - out into the brisk, crowded Tokyo streets and above, into the gleaming buildings and pruned treetops.
Instead she raises her head as the scrape of chairs sound like the chorus of academia, sees the majority of the class in their skirts and bows and the teacher besides, shaking out her jacket at the front of the room, and stands to introduce herself at her turn.
After she sits down, Nozomi twirls her pen between her fingers, and listens to “Rae, Akisa!” talk about being thrilled to meet new people. Then the girl two seats ahead rises for her turn, and Nozomi almost drops the pen.
The girl stands, turns around in one knife-edged motion, and shows her frosty expression to the whole class for one bare instant before lowering her torso in a slight bow. “Hello everyone, it’s nice to meet you. My name is Ayase Eli. I hope we can be friends.” She spits out the words like coals, like she’s hoping they burn, like she can’t and won’t care if they’re all on fire, one way or another. Ignoring the interested gazes and half-smiles from the class, she seats herself in one rigid, polished swing, and her ponytail whips with her and shudders to a standstill half a second later. Nozomi snaps her jaw shut.
**
Nozomi fumbles with her lunch box, and takes almost ten seconds to release the latch for her thermos because she’s too busy watching that Ayase, that Eli, chew her sandwich with a wired concentration in her bright eyes, looking down at her desk. After class, Nozomi almost ruffles out some feathers on her arms when two girls - clearly friends, look at them dip their heads together and whisper behind their painted nails - approach Eli, smiling in the way that only girls can, friendly and sweet and open, like hopeful sparrows. They lean down, tap hands on the desk in brittle rhythms, and offer something to Eli. Eli stands, and walks away.
**
“-and her hair looks like, like gold, all spun tight and sleek, not like feathers, but sunlight all tied up, her nose is so big and pretty and kind of scrunches up when she scowls, which is all the time, so far-”
Rin ducks her head back and preens her left wing with her beak, short propulsions of her head in the mass of silky feathers, licked up in wildly different directions like she’s been smacked around on the air currents. Umi, a branch above, digs her talons into the bark and it splits with a crack like a faultline, but it sounds like a mere puff as the leaves around them swallow the echo delightedly, peacefully.
“Nozomi,” says Rin, surfacing from her feathers and snapping her head back and forth to flatten her neck ruffles, “I asked if you liked your first day!”
**
“Hello!” Nozomi places herself at the table abruptly and beams as brightly as she knows how, the feeling of her smile overtaking her nerves. Her heart is beating; she’s near shaking for some reason, but Eli can’t know that and the moment of confidence doesn’t pass and so she waits with her anxiety in her fingertips that vibrates down to her knees - an electric bounce that sings in her motions and makes her feel jerky, like she’s falling apart. She tries to stay still.
Eli, who looks at first alarmed, (shocked out of her coldness at the approach of a stranger?), then bitterly suspicious, neatly wraps her expression back into the usual mask of cool dispassion and plucks at her lunch with quick, birdlike motions. She says nothing, but still manages to exude an aura of disinterest like frostbite. Nozomi begins to feel like an unwanted solicitor, door slammed in her face. No thank you.
Well, she knew this might happen. Eli’s shown herself to be fair prickly to those who make their polite move (is that what Nozomi is doing? No. She just wants to talk to the girl who shines so), so maybe more direct is a good way of doing this, whatever this is - “I’m Toujou Nozomi! I’m in your class!”
Eli stares her down. “What do you want?” So blunt. So cold. Nozomi is delighted. All the things Eli must be wanting to say, asides and snarky comments and homework help and puns that must be in there - Nozomi can’t wait to get to that, to the friendship with this clearly clever girl she wants so bad it rattles her teeth.
“I’ll just eat lunch with you,” she says cheerfully.
**
Eli can’t stop her from sitting down at lunches, but Nozomi keeps waiting for a statement, a look that says leave off in a way that’s harder and meaner, enough to be real. She doesn’t want to offend, just wants something in a hungry way that’s different than the want of sunlight on her back or the rushing wind on her face on the roof of her building as she jumps every night.
But surprisingly, Eli doesn’t issue an order for independence. Nozomi sits down every day waiting to leap back up, feeling the apology for her intrusion bubble up in her throat and almost come out as a bird cry, but Eli takes to giving Nozomi a single, searching look, and returning to her own pristine meal.
Nozomi says, “Eli, what’s your favorite color?”
Eli finishes her bite and touches her mouth with a paper napkin. Nozomi follows the movement with careful scrutiny. “Purple,” she says after another, root-slow moment. They wait in crystal silence, Nozomi too breathless even to fidget, before Eli says, awkwardly, “and yours?”
It’s another day and a half until Eli turns around during a bit of free time and calls to Nozomi, “Have you done number seven on the math?”, to the disbelief of the majority of the class, who pick up their amazement in short order from the floor. After that it just seems easier to sit right behind Eli, one seat forward, no longer in the center of the room, but it’s like gravity has shifted. Good thing Nozomi can fly.
**
Nozomi hiccups in the bathroom, and watches the ripple of feather patterns beneath the skin on her arms fade in and out, a tiny ocean of inky waves that settles back into dusky gold as soon as the moment ends. Eli, washing her hands at a mirror on the opposite side, laughs at the sound. Nozomi only freezes for part of a second at the sensation.
“My sister had the hiccups for three days once,” Eli confides, and dries her hands in the air blower, which drones, monotone and shrill, for a few seconds. Nozomi shoves her fists under the same machine, bumping hips with Eli like a fateful breeze, and perks up with this new mention of a sister, like she’s been flying for hours over open seas and finally, finally spotted an island far below. She takes the dive.
“You have a sister?”
“Yes,” says Eli distractedly over the shriek of the drier, and crosses to the sinks to adjust her ponytail, the stride unhurried, fluid as a the first step of a dance. “She is three years younger than me - than us, I suppose. Her Japanese is not very good, yet.”
Us, thinks Nozomi, and blinks. Her hands will need lotion if she holds them under the dry air like this! She scrapes them vaguely against the sides of her wrinkled uniform and catches her reflection’s maniac grin across the bathroom - if she were in crow form, the shine of her own eyes would stop her mid-flight; a fabulous riot of refraction as dazzling as any gem in the world.
They take their time back to the classroom, slow march with feet synced: left, right, left, right. Nozomi knows because she’s staring at the ground. Eli seems hesitant to go in and sit, so since there’s still a few more minutes of break Nozomi grabs her hand by the door; it’s a weird, awkward lunge that almost unbalances her. She takes the space of an instant to reflect that being agile on wing doesn’t mean she won’t trip over her own blocky feet, and then the rest of her mind is filled with awe that she had the gall to touch Eli - the hand Nozomi has is surprisingly coarse, tough with calluses on the palm. Nozomi realizes she lightly stroked Eli’s hand in the bargain, blinks, and steps backwards. The whole devastating event has taken about two seconds.
“Let’s stand out here before we go in,” she manages. Eli shrugs, apparently unaffected.
“Where’s the happiest you’ve ever been?” Nozomi asks, and plants her hands behind her in a clasp, leaning against the wall. Eli stalks over to the opposite with her particular grace, a lope both tightly controlled and carefully loose. She matches Nozomi’s pose.
“Do you mean a memory, or an actual place?” Her gaze, so intense, is broken by a blink - dusty colored lashes obscuring that startling laser of focus for one nervous thump of Nozomi’s heartbeat.
“A memory!” Nozomi gives herself credit for the confidence, the cheer she injects into her tone. She pretends she’s wearing her other form, the one that doesn’t have facial expressions to give her away.
“The most recent one,” Eli stops, and thinks, turning inward slightly and chewing on her tongue. “I think it was the first few days after we had moved. We had made soup, Alisa - my sister - spilled it down her front. My parents had had their first days at their new jobs, and I was helping unpack. We laughed together, with Alisa, cleaned her up, and ordered a pizza. We ate it on my parents’ bed, and we talked about what life had been, and what it would be like.” Eli jolts clearly back into the present, then looks surprised when she makes eye contact with Nozomi, as if Nozomi wasn’t expected to actually stand there and listen to the whole musing.
In reality, Nozomi is riveted and thrilled with this disclosure - she imagines, briefly, the sweet, high laughter of a child with Eli’s sunshine hair, parents with the same strong jaws, long noses, kind eyes, lifting their girls to the plush bed and dropping pizza cheese-down back into the box, the snickers, the hope in the lines of their bodies as they pretend they understand the future.
“What is your happiest?” Eli stumbles over the words, flushing, as if she’s embarrassed.
Nozomi reaches for the words without thinking - “When I’m flying with my friends,” and then snaps her mouth shut so sharply her teeth make an audible click. Eli manages to make an eyebrow raise dignified, smelling an untruth of some sort.
“Have you travelled together often?”
“No!” says Nozomi, and then, because she may as well be as rash as possible, “If you’re free after classes, I can show you what I mean.”
**
“This study room is empty,” says Eli, on her tiptoes to peer over the segment of frosted glass that decorates the door window. They enter, Eli shuts the door behind them with one easy hand, and reaches out with the other to tap the lights. Nozomi pushes the table and the few chairs against the wall, too fast. They crash into each other and the far side of the room with a rickety bang. Nozomi struggles to the window, sweating, and fiddles with the lock with shaking hands until she can press up and the glass slides away, the study blossoming with a pure fall breeze.
They’re still fairly close, standing in the room two feet apart. Eli, in all her patience, has started to look intrigued with all the preparation, a crease of concern on her forehead. There’s no way she’s ready for what will happen, so Nozomi yanks out her hair ties, letting her twintails pool down her back in a flowing mess, and brings her hands up, then down.
As always, in the moment where she is neither avian nor human, her senses bring her everything - the icy, clear scent of Eli’s hair, the hush of the traffic stories below, the eddies of air that pass over her formless existence and are taken in by Eli’s gasp and then Nozomi flares out her wingtips and hops to the back of one of the chairs in full crow form.
Eli, to her immense credit, is not a volatile girl and instead of screaming or reacting at all, really, straightens her back and frowns.
“What am I seeing here?”
Nozomi, turns so one eye faces Eli directly, seeing the great spill of the room in the particular rotund perspective of a bird, like a distorted camera lens. Eli is both larger and smaller than she appears in Nozomi’s human eyes - larger, in that Nozomi is so petite, and smaller, in that Nozomi can see everything. A few strands of Eli’s hair straggle free of her strict ponytail. Her face is set in that confused frown, arms a little too tightly held at her sides. Nozomi can hear her heartbeat, a fluttering tick tock much too swift as the real seconds tick by.
“I can fly,” Nozomi says through her bird’s beak after they’ve held this scene for a moment. “I am Nozomi, and I can take the form of a crow. This is where I am my happiest,” she finishes, and because she’s dramatic and maybe a little nervous, turns, and shoots herself out the open window.
**
“That was incredible,” Eli says when they’ve reunited outside the school building, by some cherry trees on the hill. Lowering her voice to a hush, Eli says, “I think I talked to the wrong crow outside by mistake, though.”
Nozomi laughs, and pulls herself up and into human form, willing her mind to close out the sensations of Eli so near her during that vulnerable non-existent instant when she is nothing, and everything. She drops out of the tree, landing too lightly for a human. Leaves scrape her arms, face, hair; sharp kisses as the ground takes her feet.
“An avian shifter,” says Nozomi softly, and, somehow, she’s a step closer to Eli than she remembers telling her legs to be. The area smells like cherry, fresh-mow grass, the peculiar hot scent of sunlight on skin. Or is it just Eli?
“Is it a secret?” asks Eli, grave and suddenly deathly serious. The mein looks good on her. Nozomi meets her gaze, helpless as a fledgling falling from the nest, and nods.
**
“You did what!” Umi cries, and her human form blurs, almost too fast to see, a real-world glitch in a solid object that flickers and skitters. Shifters, always playing with existence. She pulls herself together. “A human? A full human? You know that’s dangerous! It’s, it’s,” Umi puts both hands on her head, looking like a slightly manic version of some old dance craze as she lilts and paces, “it’s shameless!”
Rin, who has fluttered away from Umi’s after in her cockatiel form, watches with worries eyes, a dragging concern in her peaked crest and tight stance, claws tapping on the tiles of the garden. “Oh Nozomi, why did you do that? We used to be hunted, defeathered. We don’t tell for the safety of our community.”
Nozomi flaps her wings from the ground, looks at up Umi in sheepish defiance, feeling the feathers on her back riffle into anxious attention. “The mate is the one exception,” she says with a panic that laces her breath, makes her stutter, half-restricted by the bulwark of denial in the back of her throat that chokes out the words, somehow.
Umi’s osprey wings smack out to full breadth as she drops her human form, a slash of vicious air as she throws back her shoulders and shrieks a high, shrill keen of a hunting bird. “You started in high school with her a week ago, Nozomi! A week!” She snaps over to Nozomi with the terrifying dart of a raptor and buffets everyone in the garden with the speed of her passage, a quick one-two punch of air to add to the aggression as she gets in Nozomi’s face, the cruel curve of her beak too close, predatory, and glaring moltenly.
“Hey!” squawks Rin, and nearly falls over.
“Give me time, Umi,” says Nozomi, and hears the elder tone in her own voice, the classic Nozomi certainty and tranquility that perfectly masks her own raging nerves. What if Eli wasn’t to be trusted? Umi steps back, taloned feet scrabbling awkwardly on the ground. “I know you’re worried about me, for us, and I thank you for your looking after our safety. I love you guys.”
“You love her, too, don’t you? Already?” says Rin softly, and stands into sleek humanity, brushing dirt off the soles of her bare feet, such an expression of hope and regretful sweetness in her baby-fat cheeks. Rin is so young, Nozomi thinks, and forces herself up to two legs, two arms, to meet her. Umi hops and flutters through the air to the tree, pulling her huge wings in tight around her.
“I’m worried about you, Nozomi,” she says, and fear grips her tone, but she turns her head away. “You’re going to break your own heart, like this.”
“Why!” demands Rin supportively, and grasps Nozomi’s hand, hanging on with such passion that she might be a simian shifter, rather than an avian. “She could love Nozomi back! Anybody should!”
“That’s not why I told her,” Nozomi says, feeling the flash of mortification rip through her cheeks and is twice galled knowing that an osprey’s vision has stunning acuity, and Umi is probably entertaining thoughts of an I-Told-You-So in that tree. “She has no obligation to be... anything to me because of my secret, and the community. I told her because...” Was it because of Eli’s way of standing, that harsh line of her neck when she looked out at the classroom and saw nobody she would unbend herself to relax for? Was it the rigorous way she tackled responsibilities, knocking out impenetrable problems like dominoes, navigating friendships with the same cutting efficiency until Nozomi knocked her off course? Was it her undeniable beauty, the angled wrists and arched brows that promised to grow into something perfect, something stunning? Or was it because Nozomi had taken one look at that girl and seen exactly what she knew in herself: a loneliness that yawned inside her torso, ate her from the inside, pieced her apart and really, whether you fill it with academics or the adrenaline rush of falling from the skies with wings, the hunger is there.
Nozomi loves Eli, and she puts her hand to her mouth to cover the words on her lips. “Because I wanted to show her what I am.”
**
“What are you doing after school?” asks Eli, and it secretly pleases Nozomi how, because she sits in front, Eli has to turn around to communicate to Nozomi, a voluntary and effortful motion. She turns around often.
“I must go to the grocery story.” Nozomi scrabbles around on her desk for her list, and shows it to Eli, unwarranted. It has things like tea, pineapple, and peppers on it. Eli crinkles her nose and flicks that smile like a spotlight. It shines over Nozomi, blinds her.
“Can I come along? My sister has discovered some new music group, and wants me to sit and watch all their videos after classes. I would rather see what you do.”
“Of course. I’d be delighted by your company,” Nozomi demurrs, and wipes her hands on her skirt.
**
They have a grand time. Nozomi shows Eli how the natural birds will hop onto her arm, glassy eyes trusting that an avian in a girl-shaped cloak won’t take their wings. They chirp and honk and caw in the alley that Nozomi brings them down to with a soft noise in the back of her throat, almost a dozen sparrows and pigeons strutting and fluttering at each other. They scatter when a hawk dips down from overhead, curious at the informal gathering. Eli brushes the little birds’ feathers from her hair and grins.
Tempted by the scent of samples in the local grocer’s, Nozomi takes a steamed bun from the kiosk and almost makes an impulse buy, while Eli listens painstakingly to an old woman in the cashier line declaim about how Eli’s sweet face reminds her of her grandson, and would they like to meet sometime? Nozomi catches Eli’s eye and they splutter, unable to hold a poker face, and have to leave without Nozomi’s buns. On the second round they cavort in the candy aisle, and Eli picks a hefty chocolate bar. Nozomi puts some mints in her reusable bag, and they talk about everything. This is what friendship is, then. This is what love can be.
Part of the sky is streaked a blushing pink by the time they manage to ramble back towards Nozomi’s neighborhood - Eli steps in a puddle, remnant of an afternoon muggy shower, and they shriek with delight. Nozomi stops Eli to let her sock dry, and they take refuge on a bench by the sidewalk, finally silent, breathing lightly as people pass by. Nozomi feels the weight of the idle gazes of the passerby, the call of the skies; her own feelings as Eli fumbles with the damp shoe. She sees something.
“Look,” Nozomi nudges Eli. Down the street a ways is a girl in the same uniform as them, a petite girl in pigtails with a narrow, tired face and a bundle of papers in her arms.
“Yazawa Nico,” says Eli. “She’s in the other class in our year.” They watch her stop by the window of an electronic store, gazing into the wall of screens with a mesmerized hyperfocus. A dreamer’s expression, thinks Nozomi, as Nico wrenches herself from the storefront and vanishes into the crowd. She has a lonely walk.
**
“I made you this sweater.” Eli presents the lavender bundle with uncharacteristic embarrassment.
Nozomi takes it with shaking hands and flushes, the unbearable love sweeping through her and out to her nervous words, “I love... it. I didn’t know you crafted. Oh my,” and she unfolds it and there’s a blue crow on the front, half posed as if it’s taking off. Where did Eli find the time to do this, when they go out after school half the week?
“The crow is blue instead of the traditional black because your hair is so shiny,” Eli explains. “Sometimes it shines blue. I wanted to capture that. I wanted to capture the beauty of when you fly.”
Nozomi slips it on over her uniform, ignoring the bulk it makes of her torso. It will be perfect for the upcoming evenings as fall sinks its teeth into the city.
**
It’s almost half a year before Nozomi can’t take it anymore.
“Nozomi, we need to do these exercises for science, you can’t just avoid them completely-” Eli’s voice flits through the hallway, and Nozomi’s supposed to be in her club activity but mostly she’s playing the ghost game as cleverly as she knows how, running off from the warning and sticking herself in a spare storage room with the wide windows on third floor. There’s a wind that tugs at her loose hair, ends in all directions like a waving flag. It reminds her of flight: sweeping along the treetops with Umi and Rin, of seeing them (hearing them laugh) every day; taking lazy trips up and down the quieter streets of Tokyo with this same breeze in her feathers, world awash in the faint purple of bird’s vision. The wind reminds her of times when she was not so lonely.
Eli finds her, though, because Eli has that clever gaze and quicksilver mind that maybe understands Nozomi’s thoughts and feelings better than she guesses. Eli knocks at the door, a strict sequence of thumps that betray her impatience. “Are you in here?”
“Yes,” Nozomi says dutifully, halting halfway through her shift and turning as the handle dips and Eli peers in, squinting into the glare of the sun. There’s a wire-mesh screen on this window, anyway. Besides, she couldn’t soar out into the sunset by herself. What was she thinking?
“Oh,” Eli mutters, and Nozomi looks back to see her almost drop her bundle of papers. “Your wings.”
“Right,” Nozomi says, and lifts her arms up. The sleek, dark feathers layer themselves into wings, intricately flowing over her shoulders and down her forearms, creeping glossy patterns that refract the gold of the sun in startling orange and copper-on-black. She flaps them experimentally, and the shaking of the feathers throw hues of crystalline blue around the shadowed room. “They’re much too small to fly with when I’m in a half-shift like this. I just have wing-arms.” She smiles, feeling ridiculous.
But Eli crosses the room, setting her coursework on a bookshelf and moving closer with the patient tread of a hunter. Nozomi stiffens as Eli’s breath comes sweet on her neck. Smells like mint. Eli’s eyes are wide, entranced like a child, and Nozomi can see the fascination in them, an odd mixture of scientific inquiry and the respectful reverence of something truly beautiful. How strange, to have that look honed on her, Nozomi thinks shallowly as Eli’s fingers reach out, then hesitate.
“May I,” she pauses, “just touch the feathers? For a second? I don’t mean to be rude.”
“Go ahead, Eli,” Nozomi says graciously, and tries to force down the goosebumps that rise on her neck.
Eli starts with one hand as Nozomi stands still, a quick open-palm stroke of the smooth feathers on Nozomi’s left wing. “Ah, so soft,” she says with an astoundingly gleeful tone. She moves to the other wing, running her hand over it, this time digging into the mass of feathers and tugging, ever so gently, with all her fingertips. “Wow, Nozomi, these are beautiful. You’re incredible.”
“Thanks, Eli,” Nozomi says quietly. Eli seems to think she’s been rude - she pulls back and blinks with a flush. “No, it’s okay.”
“You have feathers like a crown on your face,” Eli murmurs, “like a masquerade ball.” Very slowly, her fingers brush the delicate plumes that curve out from Nozomi’s forehead and frill her jawline.
Nozomi thinks about saying, careful, most birds have bristling feathers for protection on their face, or hey, I’m in love with you, Eli, but instead she bites her lip and the movement draws Eli’s eyes down to her mouth. There’s a pause.
“Homework?” Nozomi blurts, unable to take the stress of the second or the confessions trapped behind her teeth, and Eli’s eyes - so open and almost confused - clear and fill with a familiar, polite interest.
“Yes, we should get going. It’s getting late.” She retrieves her papers and holds the door for Nozomi, who slips her cardigan back on as the feathers melt back into her skin like ink in water. “Are you going flying tonight with Umi and Rin?” Eli asks, horrendously casual.
“Yep!” says Nozomi brightly, and forces herself to think of the skies.