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“It’s raining.”
Yuuri says it, and Chito groans. It’s raining, yes, it’s been raining, and for as long as it’s been raining Yuuri has been saying that it’s raining. The rain has soaked through Chito’s coat, formed an inch-thick layer on the ground such that when she looks back she can see a V of displaced water trail behind them as they drive through the alleys of a lower layer. The rain is so thick that it’s difficult for Chito to see as she drives, water clinging to the edge of her helmet and pouring down in sheets when it doesn’t go straight into her eyes. Every noise is drowned out by the sound of water falling onto metal, fixed right onto her head, banging unpleasantly against her skull. Yet, somehow, Yuuri is louder, her inanities coming to Chito loud and clear every single time she says them.
“It’s raining.”
It’s driving Chito insane. They need to get inside, out of the rain, before water starts to get into their supplies, before Chito finally snaps. It’s cold and it’s wet and they haven’t eaten in hours and Chito is just tired.
“Shut up!” she shouts to Yuuri, who is at the very least trying to make herself useful by holding a tarp over their supplies. A gust of wind blows, flipping up the tarp and Chito shivers with cold as Yuuri tries her best to pin the fabric back down. “It’s... hard to see... keep an eye out for any entrances.”
For some time now they’ve been surrounded by the same pattern of tall, gray buildings, built so closely together their sides nearly touch, such that Chito can see she’ll be unable to drive her kettenkrad between them. Since it began to rain she has not seen an entrance facing them, and she laments her poor choice in alleys to go down. If nothing else, the way has been straight and clear, so her limited vision has as of yet caused no problems. There will definitely be a problem if they can’t find someplace soon, though.
“Ah, Chi-chan!” Yuuri shouts, and Chito turns to see her leaning over the side of their kettenkrad, pointing at a wide building behind them. Immediately Chito turns the kettenkrad around, squinting to look where Yuuri points— through the haze of rain she’s able to make out a door, large enough to accommodate even their kettenkrad.
A short set of stairs separate the door from the ground, raising it above the floodline. “... we should get the door open,” Chito calls as she stops the kettenkrad just before the first step, and Yuuri nods before jumping out the back.
The moment she does the tarp protecting their supplies comes loose, and Chito yelps and dives to refasten it just before Yuuri yells to show her she’s successfully opened the heavy double doors. Though she’d rather they get inside as soon as possible, Chito waits for Yuuri to climb back into the kettenkrad before returning to the driver’s seat and navigating their kettenkrad inside the dark building. Neither flinches as the doors bang against the kettenkrad’s sides, having nothing to support it, nor do they react as they close behind them, leaving them with no light.
“It’s dark,” Yuuri says, and Chito groans again. She hears Yuuri shuffle out and remove the tarp- she hears it slosh water onto the ground. Hopefully nothing happened to their fire-starting supplies.
After briefly pausing to let her eyes adjust, Chito climbs into the back to retrieve their lighter and fuel— the lighter’s fine, thankfully, but some of their tinder got soaked in the rain. “We’re nearly out of wood for the fire...” she says as she double checks their inventory. “I’ll get it started… it should last the night.”
She gathers the tinder in her arms and drops it onto dry floor. After a second or two of struggling to manage the lighter with her wet gloves Chito realizes she risks dampening what fuel they have left— “... The fire’ll help dry our clothes,” she mumbles just loud enough for Yuuri to hear as she begins to strip.
Once she hears Yuuri’s acknowledgement, Chito begins to slowly shed her outerwear. Despite her hopes otherwise, her underclothes cling to her body, as soaked as what was exposed directly to the rain. She sighs and hears Yuuri rustling around nearby— she calls out to say their change of clothes got soaked, too. Chito shivers, deciding she’d rather be naked than drenched in the cold, so she throws her undershirt to the side and starts the fire with bare arms.
Within a few seconds the fire catches, and Chito shivers yet again as she lays her clothes out a safe distance beside it. She had assumed that she’d be less cold once she was no longer drenched, yet she can tell now, as she attempts to dry herself in front of the fire, that coldness was something inherent to the room. The hard ground does nothing to warm her up and she thinks to retrieve their sleeping bags— those, at least, are waterproof, even if she doesn’t feel like sleeping.
The fire’s light is enough for her to easily see around the room, which is large and unfurnished yet stocked full of things Chito doesn’t recognize. On the wall next to the entrance leans several large, almost ceiling-high… things, painted all sorts of colors she can’t accurately identify in the fire’s flickering light. Most of them aren’t painted to look like anything she’d seen before but she recognizes one of them as being the city, and that one has her favorite colors too, all grays and greens and subtly muted colors instead of the loud and unsettling hues she sees on the other tall slabs, blotches of blood-color on green too bright to have ever been real against a clear blue sky she understands, which makes it worse. Shadows are cast upon them by several protrusions from the ground— levers, she recognizes, like the ones on their kettenkrad— the flickering of the fire making them look almost like human shadows.
Fascination compels her to sit and stare at the paintings for as long as she can but a shiver runs through her, and she remembers her sleeping bag. Something else catches her eye as she stands, though— in a huff she calls out, “... What are you doing?”
Yuuri stands, back straight, black pants pooling around her ankles as she tries to button a white shirt over her chest. It’s clearly not made for someone with a bust of her size— when she finally secures the button at her neck she makes a little ta-da noise even as the fabric is pushed apart in the middle. “I’m putting on clothes,” Yuuri says, beginning to slip on a second layer consisting of a gray vest.
“No, I mean... We don’t… know where it came from!”
“It’s better than being naked... I’m cold,” Yuu replies, then rattles the hanger she stands next to. “There’s another thing here. … Maybe you’d like it.”
Despite her grumbling Chito walks to the hanger, taking the single remaining article from the rack. It’s covered by some sort of black sheet, which she removes quickly as the cold once again bites at her skin. The outfit beneath is a single piece, long and white, and Chito’s never seen anything like it. There are no sleeves, but a zipper in the back, which she undoes before slipping in. Her hands scrabble along her back to pull the zipper back up, but she loses her grip about halfway through. “Can you help me put this on?”
"Alright," Yuuri says, and Chito feels one of Yuuri's hands rest on her hip. Chito waits as she feels her hands search for the zipper—
About half a minute passes and Chito's dress is no tighter so she turns around, "What's taking so long?"
"My sleeves… The ends keep getting in the way of my fingers."
Palm pinning the dress's front to her chest, Chito turns around and uses her free right hand to grab Yuuri's. As best she can with only one hand she rolls Yuuri's sleeve up to the elbow. "There… You don't have an excuse anymore."
With a huff Chito turns back around, left hand still pressed over her chest as Yuuri's hand comes back to rest on her hip, zipper finally catching between her fingers and sliding up Chito's back. Relief washes over Chito as she hears the zipper meet its destination between her shoulder blades, and she lets her left hand relax at her side. She had been far too nervous, much more so than the situation warranted, and with her arm clutched against her tense body she could feel her heart beat faster than she would like. Now she could relax a little, let her limbs hang loose as Yuuri stepped away and Chito shivered once again.
Better, now that she has this dress on, with its hem glancing just above her bare feet, with its front still holding solid a couple inches from her chest, with its waist holding snugly at the widest part of her ribcage. Not perfect, though. The dress has no sleeves, and she's left rubbing her arms awkwardly in an attempt to warm herself. Just by looking she can tell her coat is still far too damp to use, even as it had laid exposed to the fire a few meters away.
Then her eyes fall upon something interesting— a box, big enough for Chito to fit into if she curled up tight enough, nesting beside the rack where they had retrieved their outfits. Its lid was slightly open, and the flickering light of the fire wasn't enough to allow Chito to see inside.
A great dark mass appears in the corner of Chito's vision and she yelps as Yuuri leans over her shoulder. "Whatcha looking at?"
Before Chito knows it Yuuri has thrown open the box, tipping it onto its side and letting all its contents spill out in a great assortment of unrecognizable colors. Chito chastises Yuuri for her lack of caution but soon the two of them are on their knees, picking through their spoils. Nearly all of it is stuff Chito had never seen before and couldn't discern any use for— balls of fabric shaped like the sun, strips of cloth too small to be clothes, packs of what she thinks might be rations, but their color is unpleasant and when she squeezes it so very lightly its aged plastic casing bursts and spills red all over her lap and hands. After hurriedly wiping up with one of the loose strips of fabric she hears Yuuri call again, "Hey, I found a knife!"
“I— put… put that away!”
“No— see?” Yuuri says, dragging her ungloved finger up the knife’s edge and drawing it away uncut.Stealthily she approaches Chito, though subtlety is unnecessary, knife still gripped in one hand, and through Chito’s objections she grabs her arm and begins to slowly push the knife into it. The blade's edge is blunt, and its tip does not even attempt to sink into her flesh— instead, it retreats into its hilt, and Chito yells in indignance while Yuuri begins to quietly laugh. Still, Chito muses on the object's purpose, confused as to why someone would make something as useless and disturbing as Yuuri's little toy, stewing even as she returns to sorting through the pile.
“It must be for… faking your death,” Yuuri postulates.
“Faking your death?”
“Yeah, like…” she continues… then drifts off. “Like if I was holding the last piece of food, and you told me to give it over… so instead I took this thing out and stabbed you, and you’d leave me alone because you think you’re dead.”
“That wouldn’t work.”
“But if I have a fake knife, you can have a fake death!” Yuuri laughs, and the two return to scavenging.
“Ah,” Chito gasps and pulls from the pile a longer strip of textile, this time big enough to span the width of her torso. Her hands clutched a loose end but at the other side the cloth was bound to a sort of incomplete ring, only forming about three-fourths of a circle and weak enough that when she pulls the open ends apart, the structure bends easily. Yuuri sidles up to her, leaning on her shoulder and snatches the ring from her grip.
One hand on each end of the ring, Yuuri attempts to open it around her waist. It’s clearly not large enough— she’s pulled it almost to a straight line and Chito yelps, taking it back. “You— you’re going to break it!”
A shrug. “... then what’s it for?”
Interest overtakes Chito as she stares at the strip of fabric. It’s pale, like her dress, but its material is completely different. What’s attached to the ring is scratchier, more see through, such that she can clearly make out Yuuri’s face even as she holds it over her own. There’s no weight to it whatsoever, and when she wraps it around her wrist, she feels no warmth. Though she turns it over repeatedly in her hands, inspecting it, ignoring the sounds of Yuuri still shuffling through the refuse, she doesn’t reach a conclusion as to its purpose.
“What about this?” Yuuri chimes.
Pulled from the pile is a great swatch of similar fabric yet this is of multiple materials, some scratchy, some soft. It’s as long as Chito is tall and she’s astonished, watching in fascination as Yuuri collects more and more of its body in her lap. In a curious frenzy Chito searches the fabric with her hands, looking for any inconsistencies, any explanations. Eventually she finds two white ribbons, sewn tightly to adjacent corners. Hesitantly, she brings the ribbons to her neck, tying them into a neat little bow so the textile body rests on her shoulders. It’s no warmth, but at least if a breeze passes through she’ll have something to protect her, the fabric long enough that it trains onto the floor behind her.
Black flutters in the corner of her eye and she hears Yuuri cry out in delight. "Here!" she shouts, standing up and then moving like she's pushed by a fickle wind, and with the blur of motion Chito can barely make out what Yuuri holds. It isn't until Yuuri begins to slip it over her arms that Chito realizes and immediately, she lunges for it.
“Ah— give me that! You have long sleeves, you don’t need a jacket!”
Yuuri dances out of the reach of Chito’s outstretched fingers, avoiding the claw of her grip. “But Chi-chan already got that other thing to keep warm! ...So isn’t it fair that I get to have this?”
The two dance around the area, Chito pouncing forward as Yuuri leaps back, to the side, legs twisting around themselves as Chito chases her with arms outstretched and hands grasping desperately at the article. “Agh— come— here—!” she growls, jumping forward, the two tumbling to the ground and knocking aside a lever as they fall.
On her back Chito is blinded for a moment, light flooding her vision as Yuuri pins her to the ground. She lays there, not really processing anything, not the brightness of the light, not the weight of Yuuri on her body, not the soft throbbing of the back of her head where it met the ground. Then an unusual noise begins to ring throughout the room, first gentle squeaking and the ruffle of fabric, turning into strange, low blips repeating every few moments. Chito turns her head to the side, blinking away the after-image brought about by her staring into white light above her.
Ahead of them is something she’d never seen before— a platform, illuminated with domed lights, leading into a walkway. On either side the floor patterns between elevated and depressed in two foot blocks, such that it appears striped. For several moments Chito stares, waiting for something to happen, but those strange, droning blips only continue without pause. Not until Yuuri gets off of her, black jacket now fully over her arms, does Chito break from her trance.
Before she can react more than a simple, choked syllable of Yuuri’s name Chito is scooped up, swung around by Yuuri’s strong arms. The breath spills out of Chito’s lungs and she gasps anxiously, momentarily forgetting about the jacket as Yuuri drags her towards the walkway, spinning playfully. There’s no way Chito can keep up, and their legs keep tangling together because Chito has no idea what’s going on, until Yuuri starts making noises with her mouth in time with those blipping tones.
One step forward as Yuuri hums in unison with the room, Yuuri lifting her foot up, Chito putting it down. One step back as they cry again, Chito lifting her foot to accommodate Yuuri’s. At some point Yuuri’s hand had gone from Chito’s wrist to her waist, and she presses them together such that Chito can feel Yuuri’s body heat. They move quickly enough that Chito quickly loses her breath— she looks up to Yuuri’s face and missteps when she sees her smile, and the two nearly fall again and Chito can see the ground and she’s falling and Yuuri grabs her arms and pulls her back up again and the droning doesn’t stop, Yuuri’s still humming along.
Loud— it’s so loud; Chito understands that a microphone two feet away wouldn’t pick it up but it’s loud enough to make her ears ring, louder still when she presses her ear to Yuuri’s chest and feels the vibration of her body against her cheek. Chito lets her arms rise up Yuuri’s back until her hands rest at Yuuri’s nape, caught at the hem of Yuuri’s jacket and they’re back in time soon, Yuuri leading her around and Chito closing her eyes, until the noise of the room stops and it’s just Yuuri humming, and the room grows warmer, somehow, and Chito thinks it’s nice until she hears a crackling sound—
“Ah! Yuuri!” She shouts, and breaks away when she realizes they’re standing not five feet from the fire and oh no, her clothes have caught fire, oh no and she tears off the fabric she had tied to her shoulders and realizes how quickly it’s spreading, she needs to get rid of it— she throws it into the fire and it catches almost immediately, stoking the small flame into what one could call a decent fire if only for a moment. Chito’s eyes follow the edge of the flame for a moment, seeing the fabric disappear, but when the fire returns to what it was she remembers her panic and turns to Yuuri, enraged. “Y- you!” she shouts, and tries to take the jacket from Yuuri’s shoulders.
The lights which had once illuminated the room have all gone off now. Chito and Yuuri fight some more before, finally, Yuuri relents, snickering as she helps Chito put it on. The two retreat quietly to their sleeping bags, placed side by side so close they touch.
“What was that?” Yuuri asks.
Chito pauses for a moment, thinking. “... I think it was a play,” she answers.
“A play?”
“It’s, um… it’s a bit like a book, where people show off a story, so other people can watch them.”
The rain beats heavily on the roof as Yuuri digests Chito’s words. “Like a fake death?”
“Yeah,” Chito answers. “... like fake killing. Though… people pretended to be dead themselves for other reasons.”
“Why would they do that?”
“I don’t know,” Chito answers. “For different reasons… marriage seems to be a big one.”
“Then what’s marriage?”
“... something people faked their death to get away from. Or to have where no one could stop them.”
“... Dunno why anyone would want someone else to think they were dead,” Yuuri answers, finally. “Sounds like a good way for your food to go to someone else.”
“Stop thinking about food!”
The two fall silent. It’s still raining, Chito realizes, closing her eyes as she listens to water pour onto the roof. It reminds her dimly of the room’s now-dead blipping. Chito falls asleep before she realizes Yuuri had begun to hum along to the rain, as well.