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i.
Mizore felt the eyes of the pufferfish on her as she stood there with Nozomi, on the cusp of everything.
"I understand if you don't feel the same way," she said, and the words sounded like they were coming from somewhere- from someone else, like she was floating above her own body and watching them leave her lips. Nozomi's face remained carefully impartial, which on her looked like her soft and placid smile that had plagued Mizore's dreams for about five years now. "But we're both leaving, soon, so I figured it was probably…a good time, for this. Or maybe I shouldn't have said anything…"
"Mizore." Nozomi didn't say anything else. She didn't need to, Mizore thought. She - Mizore - had messed up, and now she would pay the price for it, and it was as simple and complicated as that.
Except Nozomi hadn't turned away from her, which was not at all what should be happening, Mizore thought. She should be shaking her head slowly like Mizore was a child who'd gotten a very simple problem wrong, or at least hugging her, giving some comfort, letting her go.
Wasn't that what they were supposed to be doing?
Nozomi's hands were- well, they were familiar, Mizore thought, they fit into her own perfectly and that was a fact she'd clung to, and it was still true now, except they weren't clasped with fingers intertwined, they were wrapped around the back of Mizore's head, tangled in the soft, feathery strands of hair she always tugged at, made new with Nozomi's touch.
"Do you want this?" Nozomi murmured, and Mizore thought it strange how close they were, yet she still couldn't see all of her face.
"I do," Mizore said. And she did. As turbulent and confusing everything else was, this was the truth. It was the thing she knew, deep-set in her bones like it had been born there. Perhaps it had.
"Okay, then." Nozomi leaned in, kissed her, and it was so soft that it took Mizore a moment to even register it. She wondered if this was how they'd be forever - circling each other, just-barely-close-enough-to-lovers. Nozomi stepped back and stared, waiting for an answer.
It terrified Mizore, to have Nozomi's heart in her hands. She'd been so used to it going the other way around.
"I love you," Mizore said, because it would have been impossible to say anything else, and she closed her eyes and she kissed Nozomi this time, and she thought that this was what the world was built for.
It shouldn't be possible for someone's lips to be this soft, she thought, it shouldn't be possible for a moment like this to exist, and even as that quiet dread began to creep up on her, she found it impossible to hold back the joy she felt. Sure, she had no clue where they would be, soon enough. Sure, they were likely destined for separate paths.
Right now, though, they were kissing and nothing else mattered nearly as much as the two of them.
ii.
"We have to stop doing this," Yuuko gasped, not for any particular reason but largely because Natsuki had unknowingly pushed her against a specific spot on the staircase that had quite literally knocked the breath out of her, but also because she was breathless for other reasons.
"Hmm?" Natsuki smirked, uniform shirt rumpled, her cheeks as red as her hair. Yuuko smirked back. Smirking, she thought, was something often written about in books that very rarely lent itself to any actual usage, except for now, when they were very much making out in a stairwell and also very much smirking at each other. This was their preferred method of doing things.
The secrecy was partially for reasons of decency - their relationship might have been an open secret, but neither one of them wanted to be caught mid-kiss by some unsuspecting first-year - and partially because, frankly, it was hot. Yuuko, for all her prudishness, absolutely could not deny that her heart flipped over a little when she saw Natsuki waiting for her, one of her feet precariously balanced on the wall so as to give off the impression of nonchalance. It had the opposite effect, and that only endeared Yuuko to her more.
It was unbelievable, the effect this girl had on her. Just the feeling of being seen for once would have been enough on its own, but no, Natsuki had to love her like she actually meant something and had to tease her about it in the same sentence, like she was making up for the sincerity, like she was telling Yuuko that they didn't need to talk about the implications of this if they didn't want to.
All of this was to say that the last thing on Yuuko's mind right now was band practice, and she'd have rather preferred it stay that way.
"You're amazing," she whispered, when they were both taking a short pause from kissing to just look at each other. Natsuki paused for a moment - Yuuko imagined that she was taking the time to decide between saying something like yeah, I am or something genuine that would probably leave her smiling and also tearing up later. Ultimately, she said nothing at all and just sat down. Yuuko followed suit.
"D'you ever get tired of this?" Natsuki asked, looking up at the imprint of the stairs left above her. Yuuko's heart was suddenly very full of nervousness.
"I've been tired of your stupid face since before we met," she said, because defense mechanisms were always a safe bet, and hers was sarcasm as obviously as ambition was Kousaka's.
"I just meant...this. Sneaking around."
"Oh." This was not what she'd been expecting. It wasn't unwelcome. Yuuko took a deep breath. "Would you rather we paraded ourselves around like those two in your section…Toto and Riko?"
"I know you know their names, Ribbons."
"I do know their names, but I can still be mean about it."
"Ya sure can." Natsuki paused. "It's a stupid train of thought."
"Most of your trains of thoughts are stupid," Yuuko said, and then thought better of it and added, "but so are mine, so we're even."
"It's just cramped." Natsuki arched her back, as if to prove her point, and Yuuko very pointedly did not look at the little expanse of skin that showed between her shirt and her skirt, because that felt like it wasn't allowed, somehow, even if they'd been making out thirty seconds ago.
The teenage mind, Yuuko decided, was an indecipherable one, but she definitely was very much feeling something for Natsuki.
"We could go to my house," Yuuko suggested, and even as she said it she felt the weight of the words crush her. She pictured the stairs falling on top of her head.
"Hah, or my apartment." Natsuki laughed, a little hoarse. "Head home after school, stay in together."
"Never leave," Yuuko said, resting her head on Natsuki's shoulder, marveling in how they were exactly the same height and therefore fit each other perfectly, when it came to these sorts of things, leaning. "Just waste away together in your little twin bed until we're little old ladies."
"I wouldn't mind that."
"It'd beat hiding from being president."
"'Course it would."
"But we still need to go back."
"Yeah, I know." Natsuki stood up, offered Yuuko a hand.
"How chivalrous," she drawled, and took it anyway. "Afterwards, though. I'll meet you at the station."
"It's a date." Natsuki bowed, a little exaggerated. Yuuko had to stifle a laugh. Natsuki continued to be stationed in her bow, hand gratefully outstretched towards the heavy door, and Yuuko laughed loudly this time.
"You're ridiculous." Yuuko looped her arm through Natsuki's, ever-devoted to keeping up the bit, and they walked out the door together like that, into a promise.
iii.
So.
There was Kumiko, and there was Reina, and there was this unspoken thing between them which neither of them dared name, because to name it would be to risk everything, and Kumiko felt much too fragile to chance anything else.
(Sure, she was impulsive and her filter didn't always work, but that didn't mean she let everything out into the open. Surely if she did then people wouldn't look at her with nearly as much fondness)
"What about Taki-sensei?" Kumiko murmured, the instrument cases fading to background noise and then to nothingness in her eyes. There couldn't possibly be anything nearly as interesting, as world-affirming as Reina, right there, in the storage room that smelled like brass and also like air freshener even though the amount of dust in there made her think that nobody actually bothered to clean it. They probably just spritzed some of the stuff in there and called it a day. All of these thoughts were largely there to act as a buffer, so that she didn't explode, because Reina was right there and she'd just kissed her and that trampled over every single silent rule they had about this not-relationship that consisted largely of yearning and more-than-platonic touches and coded conversations about how awful boys were.
"I don't…he won't reciprocate." Reina wrapped her hands around the small of Kumiko's back, like she was a dancer, like she was a vampire about to strike. Kumiko didn't think she minded being the victim of either.
"S-so I'm the second choice, then?" Ah. There was that terrible personality showing through. Reina stepped back, and Kumiko felt her absence just as acutely as she'd felt her presence.
"No. Of course not, Kumiko. Of course you're not the second choice."
"Then what am I?" Kumiko didn't notice that her hands were shaking until Reina steadied them. She wondered what kind of lotion Reina used, to make her palms so smooth when her fingers were always calloused from so many hours of trumpet practice.
"You're Kumiko," Reina said, and apparently that was enough of an answer for her, because she didn't say anything else.
"Ah." Kumiko had left the hairpin at home - no need to let that make things worse - but its presence still haunted her, a plastic ghost. And it wasn't the hairpin itself - she probably could've bought the thing at a pharmacy if she'd wanted to. It was, as most sentimental or un-sentimental things were, entirely because of where it had come from and the intention placed behind it by one Shuichi Tsukamoto, who had given it back to her after she'd hoped he'd forget about it, and now she was just waiting it out until they could go to university and never see each other again, and now here they were in the storage closet with only a little while before they all left and Reina was kissing her again.
Well. She'd be lying if she said she wasn't floating, euphoric for lack of a better term. Fireworks were an understatement; this was more like new worlds being invented on top of each other, each one so much grander and more beautiful than the last. Kumiko's uncertainties slipped away like dreams a few minutes after waking, sliding off her body into the abyss.
"Kumiko?" Reina pulled away again.
"Reina?" Somewhere in her mind, Kumiko thought that she'd like to be the one to step back at some point.
"Are you…with Tsukamoto again?" Reina dropped her gaze to the floor.
"W-what?! No! Of course I'm not! I wouldn't h-have…done this. With you. If I was." This was true. "Shuichi's. Out of the picture. H-he's still waiting on a confession."
"And it's never coming, is it?" Reina didn't move for her again. Kumiko shook her head. The admission made her feel lighter, somehow, and for a moment she thought of the last time she'd seen Natsuki, her arm casually slung around Yuuko like it was the most natural thing in the world (it was) and her grin taking up a solid three quarters of her face. She'd never noticed how nice Natsuki's cheekbones were, how widely she could smile when she wasn't slouched or hidden.
Kumiko wanted to feel like that. She had felt like that. She'd never feel that for Shuichi, not in a million years, not if the sun burned out. Absolutely nothing in the world could make her feel that for Shuichi.
But she'd thought of Reina and her ambition and her talk of good-girl skins and her simple desire to run away to something greater and her heart beat faster, louder, more securely.
"I want this, Reina," she said, and because she did and because she wanted to be able to step back (not that she would) she took Reina's face in her hands and kissed her like the world was ending.
Maybe it was. She wasn't really thinking about that at the moment.
"Oh," Reina said, flushed, when Kumiko did let go. Her eyelashes fluttered like a cartoon deer. Kumiko thought she might cry.
"'Oh?'" Kumiko echoed, unable to stop the smile from appearing on her face. Her cheeks would hurt tomorrow, and it would be the best possible way to hurt.
"We can make this work," Reina said, and Kumiko could practically see her mentally calculating the distance between Kyoto and New York and how, in the end, it really wasn't that far at all, when love was what mattered.
"Y-yeah." And Kumiko knew they could, against the odds, and also knew that she'd never make it in New York and Reina would never be able to stay here but they would make it work, because Reina had said they could, and because Kumiko believed it, because she knew that between herself and Reina they had dedication and determination to spare and that nothing would stop them.
They could rule the world, if they chose to do so, but Kumiko was more than content with this.