Work Text:
It’s a small violence at first, a minor exertion of will. Under her desk, she slams her fist against her thigh. There's a rush of pain. A burst of perfect, sustained feeling. It's enough to replace the muted anger, the shame, the formless cloud expanding in her chest.
How could she have done it: missed one exam question, misread another, landed an imperfect grade? It isn't a failure by any means, but it's enough to threaten her place at the top of the class. Another bad score, and she'll tumble into obscurity. And who will she be then?
At home, the desire for more comes in waves: anxiety, guilt, violence. Her brain feels full to bursting. Her fist hovers by her forehead, then slams into her thigh. Pain floods her skin, a blissfully hot ache. Again, again, again. She feels the bruise blooming, easy enough to hide under her skirt. Finally—her head is clear. The world regains its sharp edges, its color.
Most people would call it irrational: why would anyone seek self-injury, self-destruction? Sayaka knows otherwise. It's only logical to condition oneself against failure. If pain is the only way to perfection, her path has never been clearer.
She gets flawless scores on the rest of her exams. Finishes middle school at the top of her class. The bruises on her thighs go unnoticed. To the rest of the world, she's everything she's always been: perfectly unremarkable, indisputably perfect.
*
Pain—at least the physical kind—is preferable to failure. Failure is nebulous, abstract, an endless fall. Failure is unacceptable in a place like Hyakkaou Academy. At least Sayaka can control her pain, wield it as punishment or salve.
She cringes at the students who gamble their afternoons away, reducing themselves to disconsolate wrecks. Why would anyone prefer the possibility of ruin to the certainty of academic achievement? Why would anyone accept possible failure—catastrophic failure—as a precondition? As usual, she spends her time buried in books, giving herself occasional pinches to sharpen her focus. Her classmates try to entice her into their games, but it's no use.
She finds herself at the top of the class again, socially estranged from the academy. For half of her first year, she's less than nobody. But a storm comes to Hyakkaou, and it doesn't miss her. She looks up from her Statistics textbook to see a flash of white hair, glacial lips. Before she knows it, she's in a throng of students watching Kirari Momobami challenge the Student Council president.
Something about Kirari seizes her. The girl makes foolish move after foolish move, then—in an electric moment—goes all in. Something clenches in Sayaka; she should be mortified by this brazen display. But she's breathless. If failure is an endless drop, then Kirari is teetering on the knife edge, laughing.
Kirari's gamble pays off. The president, voiceless, slumps over. Kirari doesn't gloat, doesn't even smile. Her face is that of a woman caught in midair, weightless, as if gravity has made her its exception.
*
Sayaka decides that there is a better way to be. It's one thing to fear failure, to spend her whole life skirting around some doomed drop. It's quite another thing to float, like only Kirari can. For the first time, Sayaka skips her homework and heads straight for the Student Council. Her grades are enough to grant her an audience—this, at least, is one benefit of perfect test scores.
And what had she expected? Praise? Adulation? If this were any other president, maybe Sayaka would've received a position on the spot. But all Kirari does is scrutinize her, question her, as if Sayaka is actually interesting. She can't meet the new president's gaze—it might sear straight through her, make all the bruises on her skin pulse bright.
In the end, Sayaka does look up. And what she sees disarms her. There's something different about Kirari today, as if she's floating underwater instead of in midair. Her eyes are murky, evasive. Was that really you? Sayaka thinks, and then realizes she's said it aloud. A strange smile makes its way onto Kirari's lips.
She leaves the room burning, burning. This is worse than any missed test question, any failed assignment. Her skin itches everywhere, and her head swirls, and she has to resist the impulse to bash her skull against something hard. How could she have shown her hand, humiliated herself—before a gambler, no less? Did she really think she could be somebody other than herself?
When she gets home, she almost does it—a blow to the forehead, a decisive strike against her thoughts. In the end, reason protects her. People will talk, if they aren't talking already. Don't give them anything to use against you.
The next day, people do talk, and for a different reason. Sayaka accepts her position as Student Council secretary. Her hairstyle is the first thing to go.
*
She's standing behind her president, threading strands of white hair between her fingers. The pattern is soothing, repetitive. Perfect. Kirari's talking about some abstract system—naturalistic order, aquariums, Darwinian logic—and all Sayaka can do is nod and nod, her eyes fixed on Kirari's bare neck. Since becoming secretary, she's discovered that there are different ways to fall.
Kirari is one of them.
Sayaka's grades are slipping—marginally, yes—but slipping nonetheless. There's no time for studying when there are agendas to consult, council plans to implement, a president to protect. She even finds herself in charge of mediating official gambles, and she can't help but appreciate the mathematics involved. This newfound appreciation is only rational; knowledge means nothing without application.
She'd only been secretary for a few weeks when Kirari had offered her a gift. "Something tells me you're not a stranger to pain," Kirari had said, and Sayaka had flushed on the spot. "Please, no need to be bashful," Kirari continued. "There are few things more dangerous than desperate gamblers, and you receive the brunt of their disappointment. You shouldn't go about unarmed."
As Kirari talks about her housepets and her fish and her hierarchy, Sayaka feels it—the weight of the taser on her hip, a reminder that she's someone more. A glance in the mirror confirms it: her asymmetrical hair, her unblinking eyes. Kirari has taught her another way to be perfect. A life not shaped by fear, or blind ambition, but by purpose. Power. A feeling almost like flying.
She hasn't hurt herself in weeks.
*
Sayaka also discovers that there are different kinds of pain.
A dismissive gesture. A brusque "No." Long periods of silence. Sometimes Sayaka will lapse on notetaking, or offer one suggestion too many, and then a veil will fall on Kirari's face, separating her from the rest of the world. It is a worse hurt than anything Sayaka can inflict on herself: the not-getting, the spurned desire, an ache so immeasurably out of her control that it feels almost otherworldly. This is what it truly means to fail, she realizes—to do one's best, and still to be denied over and over.
Even then, her devotion never falters. She studies Kirari's erratic habits, her thoughtless decisions, her childish whims. There's a logic to them, Sayaka knows. She's the only one close enough to know. The only one observant enough to thread Kirari's caprices into a warped line of reasoning. And Kirari must love her for it—must love her for being the only one who sees, in some way, a method to her madness.
But there are more things that Sayaka doesn't understand. There's Kirari's inexplicable fascination with a new transfer student, whose very name makes Sayaka's gut twist. Then comes the succession of blows to the Student Council, whose failures had once been as infrequent as Sayaka's academic lapses. Sayaka watches, horrified, as Yumeko Jabami humiliates one council member after another. Kirari is unperturbed, but Sayaka's mind works differently. Already she sees the similarities: a face free of fear, a transfer student floating high above failure, above death, above anything.
And then comes the inexplicable goodbye. Kirari leaves, and Sayaka is alone again.
This time, she carries the weight of the entire school. A whole system, Kirari's system. She freezes as Yumeko tears through one council member after another. Even when Kirari reveals herself, the situation is unbearable.
In the days that follow, she paces the hallways with one hand on her taser, the other clenched in a habitual fist. Kirari notices, of course, but doesn't offer any consolation. All Sayaka has is faith—blind faith that her president will see her vision through. Faith that Kirari is, and always will be, perfect.
At night, the pain in her chest blooms so brightly that it brings tears to her eyes. She dreams of lilies, bone-white as Kirari's hair. Sometimes the dreams are sharper: Kirari's nails in her scalp, her teeth skimming the thin flesh at her neck. And some nights she dreams of falling and falling—sometimes into an open mouth, sometimes into a darkness that goes on forever.
*
Finally, it's Sayaka's turn to fail. She doesn't know what the greater humiliation is: being told to gamble her devotion away, or doing so with Kirari as witness, or doing both in a playground she's never been told about.
Kirari keeps secrets—of course she does—and the Tower of Doors is a living monument to her impenetrability. A monolith bearing infinite possibilities, each one of them spiraling back to the same great mystery. Sayaka's apprehension gives way to warped relief. The structure itself is Kirari, and nobody knows Kirari better than she does.
She descends to the fourth floor, heart hammering. Then—immediate, paralyzing—comes the knowledge of her fatal error. There's another way down. A better answer. Something hotter than shame consumes her, terror, fear; her knees give way, and she's shaking and clutching her hands, and she may as well be falling already, the threads suspending her cut one by one, Kirari holding the blade, Kirari laughing, Kirari spiraling further and further out of reach—
When she lifts her head from the floor, there's blood, heavy and hot, and a dull pounding in her skull, and a conviction she's never known before.
I know you, President.
She blazes past it all. The math problems. The ladders. The lilies, searing white and mocking, plucked out of her dreams. The stem between her teeth. The pulp of the stem. Climbing up—up—all the way up, like she's done her whole life (but only for herself, and never for someone like her). Always the chance of slipping, always the cavernous dark below, but she breezes past each problem and each ladder and she's breathless, fully herself, her blood thrumming with something far greater than fear. Sayaka has always known the possibility of stepping off the precipice, been struck to the bone by the threat of falling, that she's never once known herself to love being at the top. This time is different. This time she'll meet Kirari at the very peak and float, suspend, hanging above the known world and its petty infatuations, its irrational violences, its silly victories—
Yumeko greets her on the fifth floor, and the world gives out beneath her.
The rest of it happens too quickly for her to think about. Her mind, once her sharpest tool, fails her. There is no logic in the face of death, no reason in the face of estrangement. She looks into Kirari's eyes and finds nothing—but hadn't this always been true?
You don't know me, Kirari's face is saying.
Don't you know anything? is what it means.
When Sayaka opens the door, she realizes it. The only answer to fear—to failure—is to fall, over and over and over.
It strikes her that she already knows what that feels like.
*
Sayaka remembers it all—the waving lilies. The glint of Kirari's eyes under the moon. The hot dampness of her tongue on Sayaka’s forehead. For once, Sayaka had allowed herself to spill blood—allowed it to escape past her skin, not pool into a hidden bruise. Kirari’s touch felt like a strange kind of absolution.
On the walk back, they didn’t speak. Kirari’s fingers found their way to every place Sayaka had ever hurt herself: her wrists, her hands. One hand brushed against her thigh and stayed there for a split second.
Had she ever believed anything could get past Kirari Momobami?
She replays it now, in the Student Council office, her limbs feeling strangely weightless. There is something liberating about total failure. The world feels a little less threatening, the earth feels less likely to give way underneath her. How could it, after she fell five stories of her own volition? How could it, when Kirari is around to catch her?
But Sayaka knows this, too: she will always be a stranger to Kirari, and Kirari to her. Sayaka’s world is one of ups and downs. Linear reason. Victories and defeats. Kirari’s world is far more nebulous—she exists in a world without consequence, floating above earthly logic.
There is a split second where their worlds intersect. It’s in the act of falling.
And for once in her life, Sayaka knows that act is worth it.
Here, in a meeting with her most ruthless clan member, Kirari prickles with suppressed amusement. Sayaka watches as Terano launches invective after invective:
Now I’m certain. With someone like you at the top, the academy and the clan will be ruined.
Sayaka resists the impulse to bristle, to meet this attack with fear and loathing. Instead, she smiles. Stands on the precipice. And, in front of the love of her life, tells the room how good it can feel to fail.