Archive of Our Own

The quizzical gaze of her fellow employee makes Ei lower her gaze onto the patterned carpet.

“Pardon me, but aren’t you Inazuma Inc.’s next CEO?”

She looks up from under her cap, hand loose on the broom she was using to sweep up the mess of popcorn some inconsiderate movie watcher left behind. “Yes.”

An intimidated silence hangs over her head as she cleans up the rest of the theatre.

💮

It was an accident. 

One moment, as brief as a flash of lighting.

Ei had known, through that devastating connection all twins had, when she felt her phone vibrate in her hand. She was doing something so mundane too, sweeping under the television console when her body went rigid and she just knew , with a crippling sense of dread, as her phone went off in the next moment. 

Her limbs had moved on their own, arm bending, her hand flexing around her phone, and thumb pressing against that trembling green icon. Ei looked from the outside as her body responded automatically, watched the way it answered like it didn’t know what laid behind fickle formalities. The muscles in her body knew too, for the smile she made as she picked up was bright but brittle.

The world had slowed with the viscosity of honey, except it was also coagulated blood. 

Makoto’s hand was frigid when Ei touched her in the morgue.

Ei had kneeled down on the ceramic tiles to look at Makoto’s face. Her own face felt deathly cold and burning hot at the same time. White linen covered the rest of her body, like a dove gently euthanized. 

Her hand crept its way to the cloth’s edge because how can Ei call herself Makoto’s twin if she couldn’t even stomach seeing her sister one final time?

She tugged it off, arm lined with lead falling to her side. It fluttered, gently, devastatingly, like a falling dove from flight as the rest of Makoto’s body came to view.

Ei had held her sister’s hand for as long as she could, except that the hand she held wasn’t really hers.

After all, Makoto always ran warmer than her. This hand was just cold and blue.

In one moment, as brief as a flash of lighting and all of life changed for one.

Ei doesn’t want to take Makoto’s place so soon. Inazuma Incorporated’s board of shareholders and directors have their breaths down her metaphorical neck like jets of fire, for Makoto’s shares are under her name now.

It didn’t matter to Ei whether she is the major shareholder or otherwise because that’s not what she wants, but this is what her sister’s left her with. It’s what she has. 

She wants many things. (Ei wants her sister back.)

Some of these things, she can’t have. 

So, she takes her life into her hands. Ei chooses instead of sticking with having something she doesn’t want. 

She chooses this: a job at a dingy cinema in the middle of nowhere. Its hallways have a certain damp smell, its carpet faded and pipes that always creek overhead as she goes around. The air-con always sounds like it's on its final rattle before it breaks down. Corridors with an emptiness that makes her feel fuller. 

And back in the middle of Teyvat, she has the once warm throne of Inazuma Inc. awaiting its next CEO. 

In the meantime, Ei continues to sweep the worn carpet floors of this run-down cinema.

💮

Cinemas always have these corridors. Those long, dark corridors that weave through the back of theatres so moviegoers can leave through their one-way tunnels. Their fluorescent lights and eerie silence, concrete grey walls and floors blending into one, a single purpose in their existence.

Unlike the other employees, Ei likes them. She finds herself walking for hours in them when the theatres are occupied, a film of silence warping any noise outside into a surreal, subspace of reality. She walks through them, walks through the whole cinema through these corridors.

They are simple, easy, and numbing. Being in these corridors means not being exposed to the outside world with too many people where a single motion can throw Ei off her entire rhythm for the rest of the week when a too-sharp noise causes her to curl away in a bathroom stall for hours on end. 

Ei pretends the world doesn’t exist in this space, as though being forgotten by time. She was left behind cruelly like this too, by Makoto and death.

Concrete greyness blends into space and awareness, an echoing white silence that seeps into her ears and stays long after she leaves, like a lasting yet unseen mark imprinted on her body. 

The employee corridors are similar, with pipes creaking almost ominously overhead and too many wires underfoot but they aren’t the same. Too many intrusions from the outside world, too much traction from fellow employees and not soundproofed; it’s not truly empty in the way she so desperately craves.

She prefers these fluorescent-buzzing corridors. It listens to her heartbeat and lets her stay silent, just a little longer, lets her stay stagnant without begrudging and urging her to move on, move forward . It accepts her silence and existence without comment, unlike what the rest of the world has to say. 

Ei can’t see her sister again but perhaps, in this empty void that disconnects from reality, her sister is looking at her from the edge of another corner.

(It’s not true, of course, she knows this too well, after that time.)

Ei is in these empty grey corridors of nothingness when she first meets her. 

Closing shifts always meant Ei would be the one to check the cinema hallways, the unspoken responsibility going to her after doing it for so long. Having been lulled into a sense of security in this environment, she misses the shadow on the floor while turning the corner. 

There’s a woman squatting in a suit and flats with a book in her hands under the lights. Ei blinks. The last movie screening should have ended thirty minutes ago. 

“Excuse me?” 

The woman’s blouse is unbuttoned at the top and she tries not to stare at fair skin from this angle. “You’re not supposed to be in these corridors.”

The head of pink looks up and Ei startles when she sees purple irises. A cherry-red lollipop leaves her lips as the woman stands up, snapping the book shut into her blazer. 

She’s almost the same height as her, Ei notes inanely. “If no one checks, technically, I was never here.”

The mysterious woman’s logic strikes a tender part in her heart.

Steeling herself, she adopts her customer service voice. “That’s not how it works, miss. I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave now.” 

Her laughter brings back an old memory: Spring’s first fall of sakura blossoms on an empty evening street, soft and mellifluous yet with a magnetic pull behind it. And Ei is not sure why. 

“I don’t think you should be afraid of me.” Purple irises dart to the nametag she knows hangs above her left pocket before a knowing smile graces her. “Raiden Ei.”

Ei blinks again and that pink-haired woman is gone, no noise echoing off the narrow walls she stands between. She would believe that experience to be a dream, if not for that woman’s words and the sting they brought still lingering.

If no one checks, technically, I was never here. It is unnervingly close to the reason why Ei is attached to these corridors.

As Ei looks at the corner that leads towards where she knows is the street exit, that woman’s face floats in her vision.

Her irises are violet, her mind distantly tells her. 

Exhaling, Ei closes her eyes and dismisses today as an uncanny experience that will not repeat itself. 

💮

Ei doesn’t drink on an empty stomach anymore but the fabled food coma doesn’t hit even after she’s swirled eight glasses of decanted wine. 

The sky is twilight purple and black, the rolling clouds indigo. Her back on the scratchy sofa, the edge of the coffee table at the corner of her vision and her neck at an uncomfortable angle. She's been lying here the whole night. She doesn't know how many days in she is in her compulsory paid leave.

It’s been five years. Ei is tired, tired from grieving, and tired of trying not to. Makoto’s death still hurts. She still grieves anyway because there is nothing else for her to do that others can’t, that Ei wouldn’t let them do for her and for her .

Sunny, cloudy, snowy. The hours flit by during the weekends, during the times in her too empty one-room apartment, the distant dripping of water from a faucet she can never completely close setting a steady tempo. Shadows stretch then thin, the moon waxes and wanes, and her fingers are still curled around her crystal wine glass.

Ei pops open one of the many aged bottles of wine she’s kept whenever a rainy day rolls by. It was Makoto’s favourite weather after all, the spray of rain and the split illumination lightning blanketing the world with a dreary chill.

They used to drink by her coffee table, where Ei would pretend she still needed her sister to protect her from thunder and Makoto would tell her to drink some wine and get under the blanket fort already , giggling like they were ten and drinking raspberry punch instead.

Makoto was busy but never failed to make time for her. Ei resolved to abuse this privilege because what else would any other twin do otherwise with all this free reign over one of the most influential persons of Teyvat?

(Ei had only ever viewed Makoto as her sister.)

Independence, dependence. She’s older but she still wants her sister. Her hands are cold in the biting breath of morning dawn. Makoto was always there to give her a hot water bottle and a warmer smile.

Ei thinks about the fluttering white sheet, deathly pale skin and the bleeding from red to the white of fingernails torn from their beds. She pours her ninth glass of wine because she’ll age another few hundred days before she knows it, wasting her hours away leaking hot tears down cool cheeks, so what’s just one more?

‘Alright, go easy there,’ a gentle hand rests on her wrist, a pulse of summer warmth. ‘This is your last one, okay?’

Ei swirls the remaining dregs idly because her glass is empty, yet again. The tendons behind her eyeballs are too tight, corneas burning from staying up all night. She closes her eyelids, leaves her glass dangling by her fingers and exhales stained sighs. With enough time, her eyes won’t hurt anymore.

Time will take away everything. Summer takes away spring, ripening fruits take away budding flowers, and carelessness takes away lives like her sister’s. Surely, surely , time will take her pain away too.

Under the fleeing night sky, Ei tips her wine glass to catch a dying star. 

💮

The best thing about working in a middle-of-nowhere cinema might be the perpetually leftover popcorn. The bad aspect about that is it happens every day, so the law of diminishing marginal utility quickly comes into play. Ei grew sick of free-flow butter popcorn in less than a week, even with her sweet tooth.

She holds too many bags of salted caramel popcorn in her hand as she stands outside the locked cinema anyway, the moon’s illumination her only company as she closes for the night. There’s the chirping sound of crickets and that eerie, echoing silence that accompanies the witching hour, no humans or cars to be seen in sight. 

Ei sets off to her destination, one step after the other. She’s fatigued, as most night-shift days end up feeling, but this walk she’s making for the first time is strangely invigorating and she’s not sure why. Maybe it’s the purpose of it, more intention behind it than most of anything she’s done these days. 

Purpose. Ei wouldn’t have cared if it didn’t mean throwing away Makoto’s first choice of popcorn whenever they indulged in rare outings to public theatres. 

“You like sweet, and I like salty. Complementary flavours, befitting for sisters.”  

Corn is dirt cheap. Cinema food pays for more than half of Ei’s paycheck monthly in this run-down place, where the cost of production is less than one-tenth of what cinemas charge paying consumers. What’s left of freshly-made popcorn is tossed out into the trash daily. She doesn’t even care about food wastage, she just got saddled with the job a previous employee had who has now been fired due to paycheck cuts, presumably. 

Yet, they reminded her of Makoto. Hence, Ei finds herself spending an extra hour in the cinema after the manager left bagging the remaining popcorn into paper bags instead of just throwing it out. 

It’s irrational, of course, but many things are in the wake of loss. Like Ei working here at this cinema despite being essentially a CEO, the gut-wrenching sobs that overtake her in the dead of night when she’s just trying to sleep, and the occasional urge to fling herself in front of a moving car - among many others actions and thoughts. 

She’s long given up trying to rationalise anything she feels or thinks. After all, how does one rationalise grief? 

The midnight wind is biting. She tips her neck back and among the cicadas and nightlife, breathes in deeply. Her lungs shudder with the weight of her breath and Ei stays like that, chest aching with longing. Flittering bugs and floating dust shine starkly under yellowed streetlamps and she distantly remembers something about photosynthesis and carbon dioxide, how you shouldn’t go jogging at night, Ei, the trees can’t provide you oxygen without sunlight!

She lets out a defeated laugh as her lungs deflate, closing her eyes. Fuck, even until now, her mind refuses to let go of Makoto’s smallest reminders. Ei wants to throw caution to the wind and just run, flee, scream, anything — but the weight of reality and four jumbo-sized plastic bags worth of meticulously-packaged popcorn stops her. 

Her heels hurt from walking this long. Her shadow thins when she nears a lamppost, then stretches behind her as she continues on.

An owl hoots in the distance and irrationally, Ei cups her hands to hoot back; there is no reply. She continues to take shallow breaths, the walk morphing into a hike as the road gradually inclines upwards. 

She thinks as she scales her way up, keeps thinking and thinking because there’s nothing to occupy her mind with, so it wanders. The acute awareness of sweat rolling down her back and sticking to her cinema crew polo shirt irks her occupied hands. There’s a building in sight.

The thought process is this: these roads that are bustling and bursting with life during the day are now devoid of any living being at night. It should feel strange for the average person. However, this fact makes Ei feel at ease.

How long has it been since she’s been out on the streets beyond anything else but work? When was the last time she jogged, did anything related to sport?

Five years. She ignores that nagging voice that sounds like her sister as she arrives in front of metal gates. It’s been five years, Ei.

Ei stops thinking, leaves two bags of popcorn at the local orphanage and hands the rest over to the homeless shelter, where she knows shitty quality 80’s movies play on a worn-out projector screen every Sunday, target audience so niche it hardly affects the sales at their cinema. 

She would have done it , Ei thinks, Makoto was always too kind for her own good.  

As she runs all the way back to her apartment, lungs burning with the chilly night air and her exhales hot on her face, Ei thinks about how loss manifests itself; how it holds space in her chest, a throbbing longing ache that wants and wants and wants .

One may rationalise grief like this: through feeling displaced and being left behind, through longing and wanting things that cannot be had, and through doing actions one thinks the diseased would have done.

💮

Strangely, Ei meets that pink-haired woman again. 

She’s in the same corridor, under the same fluorescent lights with another red lollipop in her mouth. 

“Miss,” Ei pauses because what are the chances there’s another pink-haired woman in this town. “You should know what the protocol is.”

Violet irises meet her own and she tries not to stare at cherry lips as the lollipop, as per its namesake, leaves with a loud ‘pop’ . Said lips are also glossy, no doubt from the lollipop. Ei is very, very screwed. 

Those lips curl into a smirk and Ei raises her eyes to look into the woman’s irises instead. There’s a spark of amusement in them and she wants to crawl into a hole and pass away because why does she have to be so attracted to women.

Her face flushes and she ignores the knowing look directed at her. “I’m sorry. Please leave the premises soon.”

The lady straightens her knees and the soft ‘snick’ of cracking knuckles echoes loudly in the space and Ei’s ears. Her face is still hot and her eyes stray to those slender fingers again. They regard each other before the pink-haired woman tilts her head just a little to the left. Cute.

“Did anyone ever tell you that when the light catches your hair at a certain angle, it looks purple?”

A breath of air tickles the fine hairs on Ei’s nape. She suppresses a shiver. Its presence makes no sense because what kind of wind would be here, in this concrete labyrinth of nothingness? 

“... No.”

An emotion flits over the lady’s face and Ei can’t get a grasp on it before her face is back to its smiling, omniscient state. “A pity. Guess no one’s looked at you closely enough.”

A resonant gong aches in her chest. One person did but she’s gone now.

Something is placed into her hand and hot breath fans over her ear and neck. “All the better for me, it seems.” 

Ei burns , a barrage of feelings on her tongue, but when she comes to her senses the woman is gone, as though she was never there in the first place. The lingering body warmth that comes with physical contact on her skin proves otherwise.

She blinks while goosebumps erupt over her skin, a late reaction and realisation of both body and mind. Is that pink-haired woman a dream, a mirage of these empty places Ei fills her own emptiness with? After five years, is this her breaking point, manifested in the form of a mysterious, attractive woman?

Her fingers are wrapped around something. Ei looks down and finds the woman’s lollipop in her hand, still glossy in certain parts where it hasn’t dried. She tries not to think where it last rested, putting it into her own mouth. 

The lollipop’s tangy, raspberry cordial taste rests like a promise on her tongue, as do the pink-haired woman’s words linger in her mind. 

She meets her five days later, except this round it's three in the afternoon on a weekday and in the movie theatre instead. Ei is just sweeping another mess movie-watching teenagers make on a daily basis, head bowed with her employee cap on after the audience cleared out. 

“Rough day?” A voice calls from the side of the cinema.

Ei doesn’t even have the strength to startle. She turns and finds, both a surprise and not, that pink-haired lady leaning on the wall under one of the lamps, idly flicking the page of her light novel, again. She tries, and fails, to not notice that there’s no lollipop this time. 

“Are you a figment of my imagination?” she wonders out loud. “I have a distinct feeling that you’re just a hallucination.”

The lady shrugs in response, eyes still fixed on the pages. 

“I thought you only ever appeared in places you shouldn’t be in,” Ei supplies. “I’m often alone when you appear too. Then you leave, like a dream, yet always finding your way back somehow.”

The woman trades her implied question for one of her own. “Do you dream of me?” 

Ei is glad the lights of the cinema are on the lowest setting because her face is heating up again. “If all our encounters count as dreams, then yes.”

There’s a contemplative silence, and as much as she wants to continue staring at the pink-haired lady, Ei is still on the clock. So, she continues to sweep the mess, if a little half-heartedly and wholly distracted by the other woman’s sheer lack of presence. 

Somehow, the silence doesn’t hang like a noose over her head. It lingers and wafts around but never crushes or judges, miraculously, a feeling that Ei has learnt to associate with these always awkward human silences. Slowly, slowly, she lets herself relax.

“I bet you're dreaming about someone else too." My sister, my twin; Makoto.

Her broom stills. "I am.” Hope and delusion hold her jackhammering heart in a vice grip, as does her hand tighten on the broom’s handle. This desperation is just bargaining under the guise of hoping. “... Do you see her in these dreams too?"

Can you feel her presence, her weight? Makoto? My sister and the gaping, festering hole where she once rested in my chest, ripped away by life?

Ei lifts her head to see an almost sorrowful look on that unfathomable face but that’s such a silly thought because how could this stranger know Makoto like she did?

"I see her in you."

She must just be dreaming. Yes, that is it. That must be it. 

Yet, Ei’s eyes remain hot as she continues sweeping up corn kernels, the papery flutter of pages a gentle accompaniment to the dull dragging of bristles on carpet. 

She gets used to these uncanny meetings, gets used to detecting the pink-haired lady’s lack of presence in the cinema. Like a ghost but also more tangible, a newly-wedged constant in her simple, monotonous life of remembering Makoto. 

Somehow, they match. Both of them are omnipresent in Ei’s life, their presence surrounding her and her mind like mirages in the desert, like ghosts that no one else seems to be aware of.

They, in some inexplicit way, intersect even though that’s too much of a coincidence. Too much of a coincidence especially since how would Makoto know this woman, assuming that she isn’t a figment of Ei’s imagination?

Spotting the lady before she greets her for the first time makes Ei feel a strange surge of satisfaction. She learns the woman’s name is Yae. It’s not her given name, just her family’s but it’s the start of something, a proof that this woman isn’t a dream, a mirage, just like what she has left of Makoto. 

Yae’s voice is crisp and strangely magnetic, like a safe harbour. Her wit and sense of humour is sharp and oftentimes, flirty. Ei doesn’t know why she’s so attracted to it, hanging off every little word or quip that leaves those cherry lips. 

Sometimes, they talk. Sometimes, Yae talks and she listens or vice versa. Sometimes, they just do their own things in silence and listen to the cinema instead, through creaky pipes and rattling air conditioners. 

Yae is a good listener. Ei hasn’t realised how much she needed it, a valve that slowly releases the turmoil of emotions compressed in the pressure cooker that is her body. Somehow, this woman is helping her feel better just by being there. 

When she leaves the cinema afterwards, the night is just as quiet and weighty as it always has been, as though there has been no difference no matter Yae’s presence in the cinema at all. 

Ei walks home with a weary body and a mind freshly filled with soft sakura laughter and glossy red lips. 

“What's that novel you’re reading?” Ei asks one day.

Yae blinks, fingers skittering over the book’s edge. They’re sitting on the floor in the cinema’s back corridors while Ei nibbles on her dinner onigiri. “It’s a light novel.”

Her feet are going numb from squatting but Ei’s interest outweighs the pins and needles crawling up her ankles so she opts to shuffle closer to the other, ignoring the pain in her legs. “What is it about?”

Those lips Ei find her eyes wandering to purse in thought, fingernail scratching gently against the corner of a page. “This is a love story about two women who found each other in the middle of a cinema.”

“You’re being mean again, teasing me.” Yae smiles in response and her fingers twitch.

Ei still doesn’t dare to touch her. She fears that if Yae truly is a figment of her imagination, touching her will dissolve her like the morning dew meeting sun rays, never to return. 

(She can’t bear losing someone who cares again.)

“It is technically true.” The gnawing of Yae’s lollipop stick is loud in the silence. “The protagonist loses someone dear to her and seeks refuge in the silence that is an abandoned cinema theatre, where a female ghost haunts.”

Ei ignores the squeeze of her heart, opting to distract herself by nipping a grain of rice stuck on her fingertip. “That sounds like an interesting plot.”

“There’s something I keep thinking about though.” Yae twirls the lollipop stick in her fingers idly, eyes fixed on something she cannot see. “What it means to be a ghost. If you linger in someone’s mind despite being absent, can that be called a haunting as well?”

Every muscle in Ei’s body stiffens. She doesn’t know how to answer that question. 

Purple and violet irises flash by in memories, and a sakura tree gently sways by spring’s first breath. She wakes up in the morning and stares into the ceiling that is off-white and thinks of alabaster skin under a button-up blouse. 

💮

Things take a turn when Ei finds a silver mini convertible outside the cinema at one in the night. 

She blinks. The night shouldn’t have any of this, any of anything that reminds her of the day and the living. Why is there a silver convertible in the middle of the otherwise deserted street?

“Raiden Ei.” She knows that it has to be Yae because who else could it be? A little disbelievingly, Ei turns around to see Yae, who is obviously now not a figment of her imagination, sucking on another lollipop that she’s associated with the pink-haired woman. “I did not think you liked popcorn this much.”

Ei turns red, now acutely aware of the sweatiness of her palms as she shrugs. Yae somehow manages to have her heart hanging on her sleeve. “I was going to bring these to the orphanage and the homeless shelter.”

A myriad of emotions passes by on Yae’s face like rolling clouds. It’s been happening more often these days, Ei’s noticed. It made her feel uncomfortable, as though they were on the precipice of a cliff’s edge, one stray strong gust of wind from falling.

Ei doesn’t want any of this to change. She doesn’t. She’s comfortable like this, content even, maybe happy ever since she arrived here. The darkness in the sky overcasts above them, rolling storm clouds a threshold threatening to give way in her simple, enclosed snow globe. 

Yae kicks herself off the wall she was leaning on, car keys already in hand. “I’ll give you a lift.”

Ei silently loads the plastic bags of popcorn into the convertible’s backseat. 

The popcorn delivery is quick and easy business and now they’re sitting in the car outside of the homeless shelter, under the hanging uncertainty of what now?

Yae traces her lips with the shrunken lollipop and the streetlight catches off her glossy lips; the shine makes Ei want to do irrational things like replace the lollipop with her lips instead. Yae catches her eyes with a side-look, a silent question within her gaze. Do you want to go home?  

“No,” Ei blurts out involuntarily. Her fists clench on her thighs. “Anywhere but home.” That apartment is not my home.

“Okay,” Yae says, sticking the lollipop back into her mouth, hand shifting towards the gear stick. Ei blinks. She didn’t expect the other to concede without a teasing quip. “Buckle up, sweetheart.”

Ei tries not to smile. Ah, there it is.

And just like that, they’re on the way to the highway of nowhere.

The streetlights zip by the roads like comets in the sky and Ei stares out, legs curled on the passenger seat. Her sports shoes are somewhere on the floor and the air exhaled through her nose warms her chilled skin. 

Idly, Ei shifts her fingers from under her jaw to the window, nails gently tapping against the glass. Despite her knowing Yae is in the car, and real , she still doesn’t feel real. The breath and sound of taking up space are almost absent when it comes to Yae, so silent that Ei doesn’t mind her unlike the rest of the world. 

Yae is so unobtrusive that her presence sits so gently, a steady string that holds Ei’s soul like a constellation’s weaving line through seemingly scattered stars. Under the inky velvet of the night sky and with someone who cares by her side, Ei finds herself drifting. 

From the corner of her eye, she sees Yae shift in the driver’s seat. As though in response to her, the glass under her fingers gives way to buffeting winds and the symphony of sound that is the twilight hour, artificial coldness of the car’s AC exchanged for natural chilly winds. 

Ei looks towards Yae and sees her arm stuck out of her window, lollipop left to the winds’ mercy. Her irises catch the sparkle of the stars and they reflect so brightly, golden flecks in violet depths. 

The headlights guide them through the roads, a lighthouse illuminating the dark sky and sea.  Ei braces herself before sticking her head out of the window. It’s cold. She closes her eyes at the wind’s biting breath, focusing on the harsh drag through her hair and collar, snaking into her clothes. 

Goosebumps break out all over her skin, darkness under her eyelids trembling. The reminder of what lies beyond makes Ei want to open them again in order to truly appreciate the night scenery in its full glory. 

She forces one eye open and promptly doesn’t hesitate to open the other because oh, wow, it’s beautiful.

Jinren town has always been so far away from the skyscraper skylines of Inazuma City, but Ei has never noticed just how brightly the stars shine in the sky. She spent five years’ worth of nights staring at her off-white ceiling instead of what was outside the window, and now these five years’ worth of idiocy and ignorance accumulate in this moment of incandescent appreciation for the stars. 

Ei breathes and breathes the cold air into her lungs, feeling the oxygen rushing to her head and through her body, its bite is so acute and she's so cold and so painfully alive , no sound leaving her throat even with parted lips.

Throwing a careless noise into the wind, Ei physically feels the wind rip it away. She flings a couple of other noises and sounds just for the hell of it, they are all laughs, made with breathless sounds and damp eyes. She lets the wind take it away, undeniably alive and almost happy . 

Beside her, cherry pink lips curl upwards in the driver’s seat. 

💮

There’s a distant buzzing from the neon lights as Yae pulls up at a roadside motel. The ride has reduced Ei into a starry, wind-dazed existence. Hinges squeaking, they’re greeted by a small lobby and a receptionist scrolling their phone screen in boredom. 

At the counter, Ei is hit with the irrational urge to smile as Yae tips her head to the left while finding her wallet. She slumps her arm over on the counter, hand stifling her smile as pink hair flicks back into place while Yae looks towards her with an arched brow. The receptionist is pressing some keys and their clicking fills the tiny space, a white noise that occupies. 

“What’s so funny?” The crackling of thunder echoes in the distance. 

Cute. Ei drops her hand from her mouth, letting Yae see her smile. Nothing feels real right now. 

You’re cute. “Nothing much.”

Raindrops fall then, their pitter-pattering accompanying the tip-tapping of pressed keycaps as the beginnings of a storm start outside. 

They run back to the car, sprinkling rainwater at each other while laughing all the while. Ei doesn’t wait for Yae to get a firm grip on whatever she’s getting from the car, yelling incoherently and deliriously as her arms ache from holding up Yae’s blazer to block the pouring torrent that grows heavier by the second.

Both of them rush back to the row of rooms on the other side of the motel, laughing hysterically once again and almost slipping in puddles. It’s probably the coldness of the rain or the adrenaline from running but Ei feels drunk, suspended somewhere between realities. 

Right now, both of them are invisible to the rest of the world, suspended in an insignificant state of being beside each other.

Staring at Yae’s shivering body as they finally find their way under cover, that white blouse sticking onto patches of pale skin under flickering lights, there’s a warmth in her chest. She folds the soaking wet blazer to drape over her arm in a bid to occupy her hands.

Her mind still drifts towards Yae anyway. 

“Room 23,” Yae murmurs as Ei trails after her, the rain still spraying under the sheltered corridor. “Here.”

They look at each other before Yae sticks her arm out to unlock the door. 

Ei steps in first. 

Her hand stops Yae from putting her polo shirt into the laundry bag. They lock eyes and Ei tries not to blush.

“I need to wear this to work tomorrow.”

They both strip their wet clothes and Ei feels naked in more ways than one, beyond the touch of air on her rapidly drying skin. Yae continues to look at her, before turning away from her shirt. 

She’s glad her jeans are still on even if they feel absolutely suffocating because right now, it’s too much to see Yae out of that white blouse and grey slacks that it makes her face hot. Ei takes up Yae’s offer for shower privileges too quickly to be subtle but at this point, she’s just grateful to escape that teasing, searing gaze.

The water is hot, surprising for a motel. She tips her neck and lets the warm water flush the chill out of her system. It trickles down her skin and soaks her scalp, weighing down her hair and sticking it to her back. The motel soap has an odd scent of plastic like most cheap temporary lodgings do. 

When Ei steps out, the rain is pouring louder than before. The mellow yellow of their bedside lamps paints shadows on floral-printed wallpaper, a perfect still life study composition save for Yae sitting in the middle.

Yae is stretching and still shirtless, and Ei’s come out of the shower too soon for this. 

“The bathroom is free now,” she mumbles while drying her hair. The carpet she is staring at is incredibly interesting. “Sorry it took me a while.”

Yae’s cool hand burns on her arm as she passes by. “Don’t worry about it, love.” 

The door clicks shut behind her. Ei blinks, face too hot for the cold weather. What?  

She listens to the rain on the thin roof, the atmosphere of the night like a dream. Her skin is tingling and her fingernails find the crease of her elbow to scratch at where Yae last touched. Love.

Ei wanders to the closed window, curtains fluttering from her presence. The trees outside have branches that are whipping around with a terrifying intensity but something urges her fingers to open the window, so she does. 

She winces at the initial hit of freezing wind but then it becomes soothing after she closes the window slightly so the wind’s coldness is but a fraction of its intensity outside. The curtains flap around her, following the wind’s whims and tickling her ankles; its material is scratchy but Ei relishes in the roughness, feeling her hair float from the breeze. 

There's a click. How long have I been standing here? She keeps her eyes shut as the soft padding of feet and shuffling noises echo in the room, listening to Yae move about. 

She should be feeling unsettled like she normally does but perhaps maybe the fact that its Yae makes Ei less guarded instead. She’s not intolerably noisy like others and if Ei tunes her sounds out in favour of the rain howling outside, it’s almost like she’s not there. 

How long has she stayed by the window? She doesn’t know. It’s just that Ei doesn’t want this day to end so soon. By the time she shuts the window, the bedside lamps are dimmed and there is only the steady sound of Yae’s breathing. 

After shutting the window, she realises just how chilly the wind has been. Ei stares at the empty bed on the right then at Yae’s silhouette under the blanket on the left, a nagging want in her chest. 

She steps towards the in-between, hesitant. Those white linen bed sheets look so lonely and she doesn’t want to go into a bed that anyone else could be sleeping in. 

“Ei?” A muffled voice comes from the left and a hand pops out of the plain white blankets. “You’re not sleeping?”

Yae’s voice weighs like warmth with a magnetic pull behind it and Ei steps over the in-between into her space. There is no thought in her head other than how Yae’s skin looks against the bedsheets. 

“Can I sleep with you?”

Having Yae so close has her unconsciously holding her breath. The bed is warm too. The side she’s leaning on is already heating up. There’s something near her leg that’s moving. “Sorry.” 

The bed’s cushiness has Ei’s brain turn to mush. She hasn’t realised just how tiring it’s been to stand and stare out of a window. And as much as she wants this moment to last for eternity, her body is still very much human. She exhales, feeling her own breath tickle her hair. 

Ei didn’t draw the curtains and the indigo shadows paint Yae’s face so beautifully. Her irises in the dark are amethyst jewels under moonlight and they stand out even more starkly against pink hair that pools beside her own black. 

Yae’s right. Ei thinks, fingers curling against her chest. My hair does look a little purple like this. 

Yae. In this moment, Ei laments that she doesn’t have anything else to call her by. Why won’t she give me her real name?  

She returns Yae’s stare. “Yae.”

A slow blink. A hushed exhale. “Yes?”

She inches her fingers towards Yae’s. They bump. Wine-like eyes flicker down and back up.

The back of Ei’s neck is hot. Their legs brush against each other again. “What is your name?”

Not your surname. Tell me your name. I want to call you by your name.

She laughs. The sound is soft like sakura petals and lonely like an empty street. “I told you my name before.”

Ei touches the back of her neck in response, a plea. A nagging feeling rises in her, a feeling of vertigo that nudges and pokes her, undercurrents of thoughts she can’t catch. 

Yae curls her fingers into her lying on the sheets. She did? But I would have remembered.  

She opens her mouth to try again but the touch of Yae’s hand makes her lips under those fingers falter. Yae brings her hand back to her own mouth, placing a finger over her own lips. Ei tries not to think about how that finger was on her own mouth seconds prior.

Not an indirect kiss. Their faces are so close.

“Take your time to remember, Ei.”

“... Okay.”

Eyelids draw like curtains over those magnetic eyes and Ei finds herself drifting, drifting as Yae’s steady breaths lull her to sleep as well, a gentle lullaby, two separate individuals becoming one.

💮

“Come on Ei! We’ve got a train to catch!”

Makoto? Ei is dreaming. It’s been a while since she last dreamed. This is a memory.

The eighteen-year-old her stares back at her with a gentle waving of her hand and a lopsided smile. “You go back first. I’m waiting for someone.”

“Oh, alright. See you later!”

Someone? Ei looks into the distance but there’s nothing but a stretch of road in a city. A sharp lurch of realisation jolts her. Wait, if I’m saying goodbye to Makoto—

She turns hastily, a cry on her lips and tears beading in her eyes, a flood of emotions surging in her chest. 

Makoto!

There’s not much of the dream on this end, only a corner about three meters away and a bus stop. And the street is empty too, save for a receding shadow on the asphalt. 

Ei tries to run towards it but the whole dream warps violently, yanking her back. And she has to stand on her spot, feet glued to the ground, as Makoto’s shadow grows further and further away from her until there is nothing left.

She is crying and there are no tears. Makoto.

Ei doesn’t know how long she stares at that corner, except suddenly, suddenly there are two silhouettes passing in front of her, giggling softly. 

One of them is eighteen-year-old Ei, and the other is—

The sunlight shines through in that inexplicable way dreams do, warm and the red of evening dusk, onto the other person whose face suddenly comes starkly into focus like a film playing right in front of her eyes.

An empty street. Spring’s first fall of sakura blossoms lining the roads. Laughter, tinkling and teasing, sweet and soft. A side profile of a person that is so familiar with younger features, save for the head of black. And a name.

“Miko!”  

💮

Ei blinks. 

The birds are chirping outside obnoxiously and the bedsheets are glowing. It’s morning.

She turns to look at Yae. Yae Miko. How could she have forgotten?

Yae Miko, transfer student from their last year of high school, from four years of college. Ei and Makoto’s friend. Her hair used to be black.

Maybe that’s why. Ei tucks an errant strand of hair behind Yae’s ears. It is smooth and just a little dry at its tip. Must be the dye.

Yae’s presence beside her weighs like a hot bottle in her chest, a reminder and a regret. Makoto. She focused so much on her death that everything else about Makoto’s life and her own slipped away. No contact with their pasts because back then, it hurt too much to even remember, to recall happier times. 

Ei remembers their conversation back then, back in the reality that doesn’t exist in this moment and motel room. 

“I bet you're dreaming about someone else too."

“Do you see her in these dreams too?"

"I see her in you ."

It never crossed her mind that others would have missed her. Ei only ever thought Makoto would care if she disappeared. She forgot all about her best friend from college from being too busy mourning Makoto, from leaving everything and everyone behind, including Yae. 

There’s a noise under her hand and Ei pulls it away hastily, heart thudding as she watches Yae stretch beside her. Why is she here? Is she here for me? Why isn’t she angrier? Why isn’t she angry at me?

Violet eyes meet her own. “Ei.”

Her mouth is dry and the rancid taste of morning breath on her tongue makes her not want to speak. But Yae deserves something, something more and Ei is obligated to give it to her, to acknowledge their past. It’s the least she can do, can’t she?

She swallows, the soft gulping noise pounding like a drum in her ears. “Miko.”

A smile blooms over Yae’s face and oh, oh how did Ei forget Yae’s name if it meant she smiled like that? It’s an even prettier smile on an already pretty face that she thought she knew all of, of this mysterious lovely stranger who found her in those grey corridors of nothingness during her lowest. 

Shame courses through her. Ei abandoned the world for her sister and a part of it came back to chase her all the way out here to find her. And she forgot about her, about Yae, the only other person who knew Makoto like she did too.

“You remember.” Her focus flitters back to Yae. Those violet eyes are filled with relief and tiredness. Guilt rears in the back of her head, it screams in self-hatred . “I knew you would remember.”

The wound from Makoto’s loss still aches, still hurts so terribly. It only ever felt bearable when Ei swapped out the emptiness for more emptiness in the form of all the empty spaces she could find, in all the bottles of wine she could drink, in all the tears she could shed.

Nothing went in and nothing went out. An ache that would stay for all eternity. Maybe it’s better this way. This way, I will never forget Makoto.

Yae in front of her is the opposite of everything she’s worked for in the past five years. And yet, inexplicably, Ei wants her, wants more of this. Can she have both? Does she deserve to have both?

“I’m sorry,” Ei elects to say. “I never thought… anyone else would care.”

“As much as Makoto did? My, my, Ei, you underestimate your friends.”

She looks up. Yae is upright now, alabaster skin under mellow sunlight. Beyond her attractiveness, Ei can hardly bear to look at her glowing self, ashamed of her actions. She sits up on the bed as well. “It was selfish of me to leave you without leaving any contact over the past five years.”

The rustling of sheets enters her ears. “At least you know that.”

Violet orchids stare into her soul. Ei suppresses a shudder, her toes curling at the kindness in Yae’s eyes.

“Come back with me.”

“... I’m sorry. There’s nothing left for me back there.”

No Makoto. She doesn’t notice how Yae’s posture stiffens. “You deserve a better f-friend than this.”

Friend. Ei doesn’t want Yae to leave but it’s for the best, isn’t it? She’s just a friend. This grief is something Ei must shoulder alone. She’s hurt Yae enough. 

She turns away. “Go home, Miko. Go home.”

So why does knowing Yae will leave already hurts this much? How much more will it hurt when she’s actually gone?

The numbness and emptiness sink back into her chest. A familiar loneliness. A hollow, echoing presence. “I’m sorry.”

There is silence. Yae is probably going to leave now.  

“No.” Ei looks up again. “Ei.”

How long has it been since someone has curled their tongue so fondly around the syllables of her name like that? Yae’s short laugh contrasts that call, sharp and empty like that empty sakura tree-lined street in her memory. “Ei, you are too cruel.

You are too cruel to others but what’s more heartbreaking is the fact that you are too cruel to yourself.”

She meets Miko’s eyes then. “Tell me this. Why is it that you stayed with me despite not knowing my name? Why even when you didn’t remember?”

Ei stares at her, at Yae’s solemn face and seeking eyes. Like an impending disaster, she can’t look away. 

“Your heart and body remember me, even if you’ve tricked your mind to forget. Why else would you have let a random stranger sneak around the cinema and drive you to the middle of nowhere?

Admit it, Ei. You’re happy to see me again after these years.”

Her heart aches too painfully at the truth. “You don’t deserve this baggage that is mine, Miko. Makoto’s death will stay with me for all eternity and I don’t deserve your kindness after forgetting your existence.”

“You do not get to dictate to me what I deserve , Raiden Ei.”

Yae’s hands are on her wrists, her body on hers as she presses Ei down into the mattress, weight pinning her down. Ei tries to shake her off to no avail and can only stare into Yae’s eyes, helpless under her surprisingly firm grasp and forced to listen to whatever extremities Miko will surely, surely subject her to.

(It’s what she deserves for hurting someone who cares, time and time again.)

“Nobody deserves anything another can give them. I don’t need to deserve you and you most certainly do not need to be deserving of me .”

And suddenly, suddenly Yae’s head is in the crook of her neck and her shoulders are trembling, her hands loosened from her wrists. Ei places a hand onto those trembling shoulder blades, guilt crawling under her skin. I didn’t know.

“I want you , Ei. I just want you back.” 

Quietly, quietly, she returns Yae’s hug and its warmth is melting, shattering her to the very core. Yae wants her, wants her and all her mistakes, and cracks, and Makoto .

“...Okay.”

They stay like that for a while. Leaning out of the hug, Ei realises Yae’s eyes are clear. “Weren’t you crying?”

Yae dabbles the edge of her eyes. “Oh, the shaking? It was just a little emotional projection from theatre studies back in university.”

There’s an unknown blooming of affection in her chest. Her memories are coming back slowly, bit by bit, and something tells her this isn’t the first time Yae’s done something similar to this. “You’re still the same old Miko.”

Violet irises flash playfully with seriousness. “I really do want you, Ei.”

“... I’ll go back with you.”

💮

The room is empty. 

Ei stares at the plain white walls of Makoto’s old apartment. The phantom smell of sakura petals still lingers in her mind, even though all of her sister’s furniture has been moved out the minute her lease expired. 

It’s so empty that it reminds her of all the liminal spaces she’s wandered in for the past five years. There was so much of Makoto’s personality that extended in this space and it’s gone now, all white and seemingly untouched. The fragrance of that sakura essential oil is still there, somewhere, always going to be out of her reach.

“Makoto,” she whispers into the air. “I miss you.”

This white space once held her sister and now, it looks like it never did . She recognises the corner that used to hold her shoes. The area that she and Makoto used to build their blanket forts.

“Do you remember Miko, Makoto? I bet you do,” Ei clenches her fists and places them into her coat pockets.

“You might not have expected her, of all possible future prospects, to spend the rest of my life with.”

She traces circles in the dusty wooden floor with the tip of her shoe. The corridor used to hold Makoto’s shelf of fashion magazines. The island counter was where they swirled glasses of wine at one a.m. in the morning. There is no air conditioner rattling, no sense of home. 

“I’m happy and I’m scared. I’m scared of losing again. Is that stupid?”

No one replies because there is no one here with her. Ei’s not really sure why she chose to come to Makoto’s old apartment instead of her grave. Maybe it’s here where all her precious memories with Makoto are laid to rest instead of that cold graveyard that has never known them as the floor and walls of this apartment do.

She walks into the bathroom. The faucet isn’t dripping. The tiles are clean, absent of Makoto’s comfortable, ultra-absorbent rug that Ei loved to step on. Everything that isn’t her sister’s and for the first she thinks, that’s okay.

This place was never home. After all, home was Makoto, not this empty apartment she stayed in.

Her reflection looks back at her, as does her shadow stretch over those white tiles. If Ei ignores the shape of their heads, they could be Makoto’s own shadow.

“I miss you, Makoto,” she says, looking at her dull eyes in the mirror. “But I’ll carry on with life for the both of us.

I think it’s what you would have wanted, instead of me being in stasis in that run-down town.”

A breeze blows in. There’s a sound but Ei knows it’s the wind, not Makoto staring at her from another corner she cannot see. She doesn’t cling on to desperation disguised as hope, doesn’t believe her twin might be around. 

Moving on never meant forgetting like all those other people told her to. 

Someone is calling her. She blinks. It’s Yae. 

She presses the green button on her phone. “Miko.”

“Ei, I’ve just ended work and an author the Yae Publishing House recently signed a deal with gave me tickets for Zhenyu’s ‘ A Legend of Sword’ pre-release screening. Shall we go?”

She tucks her chin into her scarf to hide her smile. Miko always gets so spirited over her light novels. 

“Okay, let’s go.”

“Now that’s settled, hmm, what for dinner?”

It’s been three months since Ei returned to the city, a month since she stepped up into the chair Makoto once sat in. She draws the wooden door shut behind her, the ring of keys jangling melodiously as she locks the gate. 

“You can decide Miko,” she responds, walking down the corridor back to the lift. “It’s a date.”

“Oh? A date it shall be then, puppet.”

Ei laughs in response, pressing the button for the elevator. 

She will hold Makoto with her for all eternity. Living does not come without loss and it’s okay. It’s okay because Ei will have Miko next to her and Makoto beside her heart. 

Home was Makoto, and it still is. But now her home is also Yae, and her memories, and everything else she holds close.

There’s a soft ‘ding!’ above her. Ei shifts her shoulder to adjust her bag. 

“See you, Miko.”

It’s been working out. It will work out. It will work.

The elevator doors open and Ei steps into the next phase of her life.