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“You- You’re just good at everything, huh?”
The words leave Ena’s mouth before she internalises them. It’s nothing alien to her, speaking her mind before she gets the chance to regurgitate the thoughts she’s about to voice out, but somehow this time the aftertaste left on her tongue licks of acerbity she’s never experienced for herself.
“What do you mean?” Mafuyu casts her a blank gaze, though something about how the color in her eyes were now flowing in the opposite direction told Ena that something was amiss. She pushes on regardless.
“Don’t play dumb with me. You know you’re far from that.” Ena huffs. “There’s just nothing you can’t do and it- it honestly pisses me off!”
Mafuyu raises her eyebrows. “Pisses you off? How?”
“What do you mean, how?! Seeing someone that can do everything that you can’t… It’s bound to infuriate you, don’t you think?! I’m sick of it!”
Ena stands up abruptly from her seat, hands slamming down on the table hard and crumpling the papers and textbooks sprawled across it. For a moment she just stays there, her chest heaving in and out in a rhythmic sequence as the tips of her ears burn red. Mafuyu can only stare back, as she so usually does in most situations, this one being no different.
“But I’m not… good at everything.”
“Mafuyu, I know you have no grasp of the gravity of your words, or the situation at hand, but if you speak a word more I might actually go crazy.”
The other girl simply blinks at this, backed even further now into her own corner of confusion. She’s not sure how she should respond, if Ena even wants a response in the first place. Yet, keeping mum throughout would only dig at her further, so she decides not to mull over the expectations being held over her head for once in her life.
“Could you please elaborate? I don’t get what you mean.” Mafuyu makes sure to keep her tone empty, dare she say even emptier than it usually sounds, but still maintains the wariness in her cadence in order not to push Ena off the edge.
Ena takes a deep breath, pinching the bridge of her nose between her fingers and rubbing it in circles. “You’re- God, where do I even start? You can sing, you can write your own lyrics, you’re in the archery club and you’re good at it, you get the highest scores in class all the time, you’re pretty, and everyone likes you, looks up to you even. You were born with talent that I could never have. You put in half the work that I do and get twice the honors, you barely lift a finger and you get everything that you could ever ask for. Everything that I could ever ask for! It’s driving me further and further up the wall every second that I spend in your presence, and the worst part is I can’t even blame you for it, can I?”
She pauses to take another breath, collecting herself while Mafuyu continues to look at her with as much disorientation in her eyes that they could possibly hold. Mafuyu doesn’t prompt her to go on, nor does she ask any follow-up questions. She only sits there with her hand still wrapped tightly around her pen, letting its ink bleed through her papers but not finding it in herself to care.
“It’s not even your fault that you were born so lucky. It’s not fair for me to hold that against you, and yet I…” Ena slumps back into her seat, sinking her head into her arms as her fingers tangle themselves into the roots of her hair. “Sometimes I just wish I’d never met you.”
The silence that trickles into the atmosphere doesn’t make the effort to disguise itself as something familiar. It’s cold and suffocating, and though it brings about remnants of past memories for the both of them, it’s not particularly a specific ambience either of them are used to. Mafuyu clicks her pen shut, paying no mind to the pool of ink now collected on her paper.
“Ena,” she starts, “did something happen?”
There’s no change in her tone, no difference to the usual apathy creasing the lines of her face, yet Ena can’t help the way she perks up at the sound of Mafuyu’s question, the red in her ears slowly fading away. She brings her face down again, hiding its lower half below her arms and making sure to look away from the other girl.
“Why do you ask?” She mumbles into the cloth of her blouse. “Would it change anything?”
Mafuyu hums. “Maybe not. I just thought something happened before you came here and potentially set you off. The last time you said something like this to me was when I-”
“Yeah, okay. I know.” Ena sighs loudly, now fully tucking her head away into her arms. “So maybe something did happen. Not that it’s any of your business.”
“I never implied that.”
Ena rolls her eyes, albeit completely aware that Mafuyu can’t see it. “Sorry for the outburst. I’m just a bit… tired.”
The quietness overtakes them again, its threat a little less looming than it was before. Ena is about to apologise for the second time with added sincerity when Mafuyu speaks up before she gets the opportunity.
“Did you mean it? Everything that you said?”
Ena pauses to think.
Even if she’s known Mafuyu for a little over a year now, even if they’ve spent countless hours together on calls working on their projects side by side, even if she has the absolute confidence to say she’s gotten used to Mafuyu’s inscrutability and the way her eyes of twilight hold no shape or form to them whatsoever, she could never retain the strength to say that she knows Mafuyu at all. She doesn’t think she could ever.
To comment on a person’s livelihood when you can barely even tell yourself that you know them was a concept purely absurd to Ena herself. Her voice is small as she replies, “Some of it. Like how you seem to be good at everything even without trying… but I know you try. It’s how you got here in the first place anyway, right?”
She doesn’t get an audible reaction, so she continues. “I know that you’re… always trying to live up to everyone’s expectations even if sometimes it’s just completely insane standards to ask of you. It’s how it makes you appear so put together in the first place and I shouldn’t have lashed out on you for something you’ve worked so hard to achieve. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” is all Mafuyu allows herself to respond with before she falls back into silence. Ena doesn’t add on either, so they sit in the quiet for a minute or two, the ticking of the wall clock behind them serving as reputable background noise.
“I’m not as hardworking as you put me out to be.”
The sudden initiation from Mafuyu’s side startles Ena out of her daze, causing her to lift her head up as a result. For the first time throughout the whole conversation, their eyes meet, and something in the pit of both of their stomachs knots and ingrains itself deep into the flesh of their gut. Something they’d both prefer not to put a label on.
“Huh?”
“It doesn’t seem that way to me. I worked hard for something I wish I didn’t have to… It doesn’t seem credible in my eyes.”
It takes a moment for Mafuyu’s words to sink into Ena’s heart, for her to entirely get a hold of what the insinuation behind her speech is, and when it finally hits her she’s not sure what the appropriate response should be. There’s an urge within her that’s telling her to reach out to Mafuyu, in one way or another, but a bigger part of her tells her to let Mafuyu carry on, so she listens to it instead.
“When I study, or I sit for a test knowing that I did well, I don’t feel much of anything. People tend to talk about this feeling of gratification when they’ve worked hard for an exam, but I’ve never truly known what that’s supposed to feel like.” Mafuyu glances downwards. “The only time I’ve felt anything remotely similar to that was whenever I wrote lyrics for Nightcord. And even then, I…”
“H-Hey,” Ena stops her mid-sentence, her hand finding its place atop hers, “I get it. It’s fine.”
“You don’t have to pretend to understand.”
“…But I do. Believe it or not.” Ena squeezes Mafuyu’s hand a little bit tighter. “I don’t care for anything else other than what my art can bring to the world. I’m assuming that’s what you feel with your lyrics too, right?”
Mafuyu takes a pause, taking the time to run it through. “I guess so.”
“…Maybe that’s why you piss me off so easily.” Ena laughs, a sound so light and airy it just about sparks a resemblance of a smile from the girl sitting beside her.
“What do you mean?”
“We’re too alike. When two things rub against each other in opposite directions…” She runs her thumb over the back of Mafuyu’s hand. “…it causes friction, you know?”
“…Everyone knows that.”
Ena can only grumble at how literal Mafuyu can be sometimes, but she guesses it’s one of the things she wishes could stay the same forever. The smile that makes its way onto her face is one of high resistance, but Ena doesn’t try to fight it off this time.
“So… you really think I’m good at everything?” Mafuyu asks.
“I guess.”
“And that everyone likes me?”
“Seems like it.”
“And that I’m pretty?”
Ena feels her heart sink to her feet. Shit… She had said that, hadn’t she? She retracts her hand from above Mafuyu’s immediately, almost like a knee-jerk reaction, her gaze now boring into the worksheets splayed out in front of her.
“We should get on with our work. My dad will be home soon.” Ena mutters under her breath, trying her best to conceal the warmth spreading across her cheeks. Mafuyu doesn’t give a physical reaction, but she’d be lying if she said something along the lines of amusement weren’t playing on the hem of her heart in this instance.
Regardless, Mafuyu turns back to her work, picking up the pen she’d dropped earlier and now staring at the dried pool of ink residing on her paper. And maybe she’d have cleaned it up were she alone, or if today were just any other day. Contrary to that, she realises she likes the mark it’s left behind — an imprint of her own development, so to speak.
“Do you still need help with that question?”
“No. Unless you want me to yell at you again.”
Ena thinks she hears a sound echoing a chuckle coming from Mafuyu’s side, but even just the idea itself of Mafuyu laughing at something she’d said is deemed ludicrous to her. She doesn’t heed it any care, only choosing to focus on her schoolwork while Mafuyu does the same.
The hours tick by and the girls are finishing up the last parts of their work, both of them having stayed silent the rest of the time they were there. They know they’ll have to meet up again tonight with the others, so they wrap things up quickly and send each other their goodbyes.
“C-Come again, okay?” Ena says, unable to look Mafuyu in the eye.
“Okay.”
She shuts the door, pressing her forehead against its wood and squeezing her eyes so tight she sees colors of every kind. Colors that resembled the shadows of dusk, of purples and indigos that she’s never really worked with before.
And when she opens her eyes in the shock of her own thoughts, she wastes no time ditching her school supplies and rushing to her art materials instead, scrawling a rough sketch on a blank canvas hoisted on her easel and letting her hand bring her to its own traces.
She’s painting now, despite not remembering when she’d finished the sketch. She throws on the aforementioned colors she’d seen in her vision, not really caring about the details and just letting her arms roam free around the canvas. Soon enough, the final product presents itself, an array of cool tones and darker shadows jumbled together to form a face she recognises better than anyone’s.
Sitting back to properly assess her work, she lets her eyes trail the visual she’s just created, and then she smiles.
“I’m glad I met you, Mafuyu.”