Chapter Text
“Since when has my sewing machine refused to sew straight?” Alisa complains, ripping through the seams of the skirt she’s been trying to perfect for the last week. Every time she checks in the mirror, the hem line is just the slightest bit uneven.
Miwa snips at the bottom of a brown wig, the spirals weighed down by ample amounts of gel and hairspray. “The hem looked fine the last five times you fixed it. I don’t know why you won’t move on.”
Alisa frowns. “Says the person who’s been spraying and trimming my Aerith wig for the last five hours.”
Miwa points her scissors in Alisa’s direction, a tool much more threatening than any buster sword. “Don’t compare a hem line to her damn hair. Screwing this up would mess up my entire vision.”
“And an uneven hemline is perfectly acceptable?”
Miwa raises an eyebrow. “What’s a cosplayer’s biggest secret?”
Alisa smirks. “Our cosplays are mostly held together with safety pins and hot glue.”
“That’s right,” Miwa says, retracting her weapon. “Now take a break and either sew it properly afterward or just hot glue it.”
She’s right. A break might be just what Alisa needs to survive the rest of the night’s last-minute con crunch. For smaller events, she’s not usually this late, but Anime Expo demands the utmost perfection and she’s not about to shirk her responsibility to her craft. It’s been years since the first time she went, all bright-eyed in her Kikyo cosplay. Back then, she’d walked as if she weren’t meant to occupy the same space as all of the other incredible cosplayers.
“Ooh. I think I just hit 44k followers,” Alisa says, scrolling through her Instagram notifications. She’d been aiming for the number for a while, but she hadn’t been sure which cosplay to post to get her there. Apparently her She-ra cosplay worked.
Miwa grunts around the bobby pins in her mouth.
A new comment pops up and a surge of happiness fills Alisa. The likes are great, but it feels much more special when someone takes time out of their day to compliment her with more than a single tap of a heart. She skims it, ready for her smile to grow bigger.
She groans.
“Why is it that every time I post, someone tells me to collab with Karasukyun?”
Miwa spritzes some hairspray on the wig’s bangs which barely move despite the disturbance. “Because you two like the same shows and games and always happen to wear matching cosplays.”
Alisa slouches in her chair and types in the username of her arch nemesis into the search bar. Karasukyun. Age: 23. Pronouns: she/her. Location: wherever is causing the pain in Alisa’s neck.
They’d met about seven months previous at Anime Los Angeles. Alisa had wanted to do a casual Starfire cosplay she’d seen fanart of and Karasukyun had happened to be wearing the matching Raven. Her boisterous personality and endless energy drew Alisa in, for once encouraging her to spend time with a new person outside of her pre-established friend group.
“She just had to ruin it,” Alisa grumbles to herself.
“I still don’t know why you care,” Miwa says. “You could just, I don’t know, let bygones be bygones and focus on your own work. She’s not getting in the way.”
Miwa’s wrong. She is getting in the way.
“Even when you’re not saying it out loud, I know when you’re arguing with me.”
Alisa rolls her eyes and closes Instagram. While bygones will never be bygones, she does have a skirt to fix. Her eyes flick over to the pile of containers which are only half-filled with all of the costumes, wigs, accessories, and props she needs for the con weekend. Crunching in the morning is not an option.
She rolls her shoulders and takes a deep breath. “Okay. Back to work.”