Chapter Text
Shinomiya Kaguya felt as though she could see footprints beginning to form in the carpeted floor of her bedroom. Two lines of imprints, stretching from one end of the room to the other, from footfalls traveling in both directions. If she were to disappear, a detective investigating the scene would likely gather that the heir to the Shinomiya family fortune had been pacing the length of her room for what Kaguya conservatively estimated to be about a month.
What is taking her so long?
The girl stopped in her tracks and bit her lower lip, gaze fixed unfocused on the wall ahead of her.
Is it possible something has happened to her? She wouldn’t have tried to come all this way by herself, would she? Any number of terrible things could happen to a girl like her wandering alone through the streets on a weekend.
“Hayasaka?” The lady of Shinomiya called out, intent on setting things aright.
“No.” The maid standing on the other side of her door responded.
“You don’t even know what I was going to ask!” Kaguya whined.
“Is it the same question you’ve been asking every five minutes for the last hour?” Hayasaka asked.
“Yes, but—” Kaguya called out.
“Then no, my lady,” Hayasaka responded. “She is not here and we cannot send out a search party.”
“Are you implying that she would subject me to this indignity on purpose?” Kaguya demanded. “To leave the oldest daughter of the Shinomiya family waiting for over an hour? Either she is impertinent or in danger, and both should be met with immediate action!”
“Or,” Hasaka offered, “She lost track of time and left late.”
“Well then she should have told me as much, or she should have answered any of the times I tried to call her.”
Kaguya heard the muffled sound of Hayasaka’s exasperated sigh from the other side of the door.
“Lady Kaguya, you have become aware that phones can be turned off, haven’t you?”
“And why would I turn mine off unless I were trying to ignore someone?” Kaguya shot back, mocking Hayasaka’s tone of voice.
How can she be impossible to avoid and impossible to get a hold of? Shinomiya thought bitterly to herself.
“Hayasaka, I need you to—”
The sound of a doorbell echoing through the palatial estate cut through Kaguya’s demands and her foul mood with surgical precision.
“Hayasaka, I believe that is my guest,” Kaguya said with all the grace and condescension expected of her family. “Please show her to my room.”
Her request was met with grumbled acquiescence and the faint sound of footsteps receding from her doorway.
Little time passed before Kaguya could hear the muffled sounds of idle chatter growing louder as two sets of footsteps approached the room. As soon as Kaguya was sure they were right outside, the door to her room flew open with a flourish. Fujiwara Chika stood in the doorway with a magnifying glass in her hand, a deerstalker cap on her head, and a wide, manic smile dancing across her lips.
“Ta-da! Love Detective Chika is on the case!”
The pink-haired girl struck a powerful pose—stance wide, one hand on her hip and the other raising her magnifying glass to her eye. The pose itself was almost powerful enough to distract from the shiny layer of sweat across the girl’s forehead, her heaving chest, and the general disorder of her attire. She held this pose for a little more than a second before she doubled over, hands on her knees, and panted like a dehydrated dog.
“Fujiwara, what on earth is the matter with you?” Kaguya demanded.
“I had to break into the school,” Chika replied between great, heaving breaths.
“You… what ?”
Chika rolled her eyes. “It’s not like I own a detective hat, you know. So I had to go to the school, but everything was locked for the weekend. It took me forever to get inside. Then, once I found everything and realized how late I was, I had to run all the way over here.”
The pink-haired girl slumped against Kaguya’s shoulders. “Hey, could I just lie down on your bed for a minute?”
Kaguya sighed, wrapped her friend’s arm around her, and began to lug her across the room. “I don’t know why you went to such trouble,” she complained. “I never said anything about love.”
Chika flopped face-first onto the bed, but not without raising a finger above her head.
“That’s true,” she conceded, her voice muffled by Kaguya’s mattress and fine, silk sheets. “But you said you needed advice on a ‘personal matter.’”
“So?” Kaguya demanded, carefully taking a seat beside her.
With Herculean effort, Chika rolled onto her back and looked back up at Kaguya. Despite her exhaustion, she still found a way to appear smug.
“So you never ask me for personal advice, which means that it must be something very important.” Using what little was left of her strength, Chika hoisted herself up onto her elbows, eventually wriggling into a sitting position. “Furthermore…if the matter had been bothering you for a while, you probably would’ve reached out about it at school instead of calling me over to your house on the weekend. Which implies that this ‘personal matter’ came about only recently. And the most recent event of significance?”
Pointing a triumphant finger in Kaguya’s face, the Love Detective nearly exploded with the ecstasy of her conclusion.
“The Culture Festival! Notorious for being the beginning—and oftentimes end—of high-school romance. Therefore, the only logical conclusion is that someone has finally stolen the heart of Shinomiya’s perfect heiress.”
Kaguya’s face went red with embarrassment and frustration.
Of course she already figured it out. Bad enough I have to humiliate myself in front of her, but I don’t even get to surprise her a little?
Chika clapped her hands together and bounced up and down on the bed. “I’m right, aren’t I? You fell in love at the Culture Festival!”
“Love”
With that one word, all of Kaguya’s bitterness and irritation melted away. To hear somebody other than her or Hayasaka say it, to acknowledge everything she’d been keeping so close to her chest for so long, it became impossible to be angry with her.
“Well…yes,” she confessed, unable to even look at Chika as she said it. “The truth is…I’ve liked him for a long time. A really long time. I knew he felt the same, or—at least—I needed him to feel the same. Needed to hear him say it. And now…he has. Sort of. We finally get to take this big next step, but…I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”
She waited for Chika’s response, her breath quick and shallow as her fingernails dug into her knee. What if Chika laughed at her for being so ridiculous? What if Chika criticized her for waiting so long, like Hayasaka had? What if Chika held her very softly and told her everything was going to be alright? After a long, tense silence, Kaguya finally forced herself to look back at her friend.
“You’re telling me…” Chika began, tears welling up in her eyes. “That you’ve had a crush on someone for a long time…”
With a sudden lurch, Chika grabbed Kaguya’s shoulders and began shaking the heiress of the Shinomiya family like a rag doll.
“AND YOU NEVER TOLD ME?”
This violent assault on her person was enough to snap Kaguya out of her embarrassment.
“Fujiwara, let go of me!” She demanded.
“Never!” Chika screamed, on the verge of hysterics. “Do you have any idea how long I’ve waited for you to be in love so that I could talk to you about it? And now you finally fall in love, and YOU KEEP IT FROM ME?”
“It’s not like that!” Kaguya shouted back.
“You know how much talking about love means to me, but you must have a gaping black hole for a heart—” Chika started.
“I wasn’t even certain myself until the Culture Festival when we…”
Instinctively, Kaguya stopped herself from finishing the sentence, but it was too late. Chika’s fury subsided so suddenly that Kaguya was forced to wonder if it had all been an act from the beginning. No longer did she feel as if she were looking into the face of her excitable, ridiculous friend, but rather the cold, dead eyes of a predator stalking her prey. A devilish smile split the young Fujiwara’s face.
“ When we… what?”
Kaguya found herself blushing again, but she did not attempt to evade the blow.
“When we…kissed.”
The cry that erupted from Fujiwara Chika’s lips was older than civilization itself. Older than war. Perhaps even older than love. It was a cry of pure, primal joy—animalistic in its ferocity and all-consuming in its scope. A high-pitched screech that signaled certain victory and no quarter for pessimism.
“You did it! You finally kissed a boy!” She exclaimed, wildly kicking her legs out in front of her.
“I was going to tell you that,” Kaguya snapped. “You were just being so ridiculous that I couldn’t get a word in edgewise.”
“Sorry,” Chika conceded, laughing giddily to herself. “You know I get carried away when it comes to matters of the heart. But anyway, tell me who he is!”
“It’s…not official between us yet,” Kaguya recited, using the words she had spent the better part of the morning repeating into a mirror. “If it’s all the same, I’d rather keep it private until we put a label on it.”
For a moment, it looked as though Chika were going to begin sulking again. Kaguya mentally prepared the next series of arguments she had written out in her conversation tree in case Chika decided to push the issue, but the other girl simply let out a beleaguered sigh.
“Fine,” Chika relented bitterly.
“R-really?” Kaguya asked.
“Of course,” the Love Detective responded in a huff. “Privacy can be very important in the early stages of a relationship, especially when one or both parties are in the public eye. You wouldn’t want your peers to push you into something before you were ready for it.”
“Thank you, Fujiwara. I really appreciate that.”
More than you know.
“So…” Chika began, an edge of curiosity creeping into her voice, “What exactly did you want to talk to me about? You said you wanted advice, but it sounds like everything is going well.”
Kaguya raised her right hand to her left cheek and centered herself.
“Kissing him at the Culture Festival,” she ventured carefully, “That was…my first time kissing someone. Romantically, I mean. And it was—it was magical, but…it wasn’t quite how I thought it would be. And I think…I think I may have messed it up.”
She cast her eyes to the ground.
“I was just trying to do what I thought was usual. Based on what I’d seen other people do with the person who was special to them. But I told Hayasaka about it afterwards, and she…er, I mean, he said that some of what I did was maybe not as usual as I thought.”
Chika sat quietly, listening closely.. Only after Kaguya stopped talking for a long enough time did Chika choose to respond.
“Well, first of all, everyone’s first kiss is awkward. Kissing’s something you need to practice with a specific person to be good at, and until you’ve had that practice, there’s going to be a bit of trial and error.”
“But it has to have gone well!” Kaguya cried. “We didn’t even really say how we felt for each other. That kiss was all we had, so if it was bad, we don’t have anything!”
“Well, what did you do that Hayasaka said was unusual?” Chika asked. “That’s the only reason you think it went badly in the first place, right?”
Kaguya’s ears were now generating enough heat to start a small forest fire.
“Well, I wanted to make sure that when it finally happened, I did it right. So I figured if I watched people with a lot of experience, I’d know exactly what to do,” she explained meekly. “And Kashiwagi and Tsubasa seem like they do it all the time…”
“Oh no,” Chika said.
“Is it…is it really that bad?” Kaguya asked, squirming under the shocked gaze of Fujiwara.
“Well…” Chika replied with deliberation. “A bit of tongue on the first kiss could definitely come across as a little…intense. But depending on the guy, that wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. If you’re really worried about if it was good or not, though, you could always show me how you kissed him.”
Kaguya furrowed her brow. “Show you? How would I do that?”
Chika cocked her head, as if the question didn’t make any sense to her. “Well…by kissing me, of course.”
Kaguya blinked.
“H-how can you suggest that so casually?”
Fujiwara merely shrugged. “It doesn’t have to be a big deal. Kissing is one of those things that can mean as much or as little as you want it to, just like how some friends cuddle or hold hands, while some people only do that with their partner.”
“I—I guess so,” Kaguya agreed uncertainly.
“We don’t have to if you don’t want to,” Chika assured her. “But if you really want somebody to tell you if you’re a good kisser, you’re going to need to ask someone who’s kissed you.”
Kaguya turned the words over in her head, scanning them for any hidden dangers or structural flaws.
“Would you…would you really be okay with that?” Kaguya asked timidly.
Chika reached out a finger and bopped Kaguya on the nose.
“Of course I would, silly,” the pink-haired girl said. “That’s why I offered.”
“Very well then,” Kaguya responded, sitting up straight and staring ahead with fierce determination. “What should I do?”
“Just kiss me the exact same way you kissed this boy,” she instructed, “And if you need me to move or readjust myself for accuracy’s sake, just tell me.”
“Well…” Kaguya considered the best way to proceed. “The boy in question is a bit taller than me, and we were standing up when it happened.”
“Hmmmm,” the Love Detective mused. “We could always ask Hayasaka to provide some kind of stool or step-ladder, but I may have another idea. Stay right where you are.”
Chika scooted herself closer to Kaguya and pulled her knees under her so that she was kneeling on top of the mattress, looking down at a still-seated Kaguya.
“Is my head roughly as far away as his would’ve been?” she asked.
“That’s…actually not too bad,” Kaguya admitted, somewhat impressed by her friend’s practical low cunning. “But I don’t know if I can do the movement while sitting down.”
“Just turn your body toward me, but don’t get up on your knees,” Chika asserted confidently. “As long as you didn’t wrap your legs around him or anything, I doubt we need to go over their exact position. Just lean in toward me or instruct me how to lean in toward you, depending on who initiated it.”
Kaguya felt the heat rise to her cheeks at the thought of wrapping her legs around The President, but she drew upon her vast experience in suppressing those kinds of thoughts and focused on the matter at hand.
“I was the one who initiated it,” she said. “Just…give me a moment.”
She closed her eyes to better recall the specifics. It was not Fujiwara Chika towering over her right now—not her childhood friend of many years, the first person to have ever shown her true kindness. It was Shirogane’s frame cutting an imposing figure in the night, his weary eyes boring into hers with the same combination of intensity and apprehension that had drawn her feet toward him. A light breeze tugged insistently at her hair and clothes, the slightest hint of an Autumn chill settling against her skin—just enough to make her crave the warmth The President’s proximity promised her. Hundreds, maybe thousands of balloons danced in a controlled frenzy around her head, and she saw none of them. She saw only him, wanted only him.
Her body acted on its own then, remembering the steps she had taken like a dance she’d spent years memorizing. The same sensation that drew her bow-string taut in the exact same way every time now moved her toward a different target. Her right hand went first, fingertips singing with the sensation of his face held softly between them. Fujiwara’s face felt different than his had. Her jaw was less defined, her skin softer, and there was little trace of the burning intensity that she had felt radiating off of The President’s—as if his cheek had burned to be touched as much as her fingers had burned to touch it.
At this point she had taken another step forward, not satisfied to keep him at arm’s length. Here, on her bed, she shifted slightly to mimic the motion as best she could—keeping her mind and body firmly fixed on the past. Closing the distance between them, her free hand had come to rest against his chest, fingers toying with the heavy metal aiguillette along his collarbone. In that instant, she’d had the wild urge to tear it from its place, tossing it behind them so that no aspect of Shuiichin Academy—none of their responsibilities and reasons for delay—could come between them ever again. Despite this, she had restrained herself, both out of the fear that such an aggressive action would shatter this perfect moment but also out of respect for Shirogane Miyuki’s position as Student Council President—the thing that had brought them together in the first place. Fujiwara’s clothes bore no similar adornment, so she simply lay her hand against the girl’s chest, curled fingers digging tentatively into the cloth of her shirt.
Her neck craned upward, her mouth inched forward, and she stopped—a breath away from the other’s lips. Her body had remembered her final moment of hesitation and cowardice from that night: the thought that had run across her mind whispering that all she needed to do was go this far, and she could let him do the rest. Her eyes fluttered open, and while her bedroom had far more sunlight and far less Shirogane’s in it, she still remembered the way his eyes had burned down into hers with the look of someone begging—praying—for her to continue. And that had been all she’d needed. Her second of doubt ended and her eyes shut anew, she closed the gap between their eager mouths.
Fujiwara’s lips tasted different than The President’s. An almost chemical flavor lingered on them, though it was faint enough that Kaguya could not tell if it were some candy the girl had eaten earlier that day or some brand of lip balm she was unfamiliar with. Chika also reciprocated the kiss much quicker than The President had, her own body shifting closer to Kaguya’s, her hands finding their way to her shoulders, and her head tilting ever so slightly to one side to allow for a more comfortable angle. Kaguya melted into this kiss the same way she had on the night of the Culture Festival, offering Shirogane—and, by extension now, Fujiwara—nothing short of her full physical surrender. The movement was slight—so much so, she doubted The President had even noticed. It was little more than the relaxing of her shoulders and the miniscule movement of her body to be closer to his. Still, he could have done anything in that moment, and she would have given herself to him completely. The final part of her surrender came as she opened her lips against Fujiwara’s and pressed her tongue into the other girl’s mouth. The two held themselves in this position for a moment that felt both like a second and an eternity, before Kaguya finally returned her tongue to her mouth, closed her lips, and pulled away.
There was a long silence where neither girl looked at each other. Strangely enough, Kaguya felt more nervous about the fact that Chika now knew exactly how her and The President had kissed than embarrassed by the fact that she had just stuck her tongue into her best friend’s mouth. If Fujiwara declared her to be a terrible kisser, Kaguya knew that she would have no choice but to accept that judgment as fact.
“Um, and afterwards…” Kaguya stuttered, “I said, ‘And that is how I feel about you. ’”
“I see…” Chika responded absently. “So you’d say the main thing you were hoping for with this kiss was to communicate a level of emotional intimacy?”
The specificity of the question startled Kaguya into finally looking back up at her friend. Fujiwara was not looking down to the ground, her cheeks flush with embarrassment. She was not glaring off to the side, disgusted with what she had just done. Her eyes were turned upward with a thoughtful expression, like there was some riddle she was trying to unravel.
“I—um, yeah,” she responded. “I was trying to tell him that I like him. Like…romantically. But without actually…y’know, saying it?”
Somehow, saying that out loud to Fujiwara made the whole ordeal sound even more stupid than when she had said it to Hayasaka. And Haysaka had tried to make it sound stupid.
“Hmmm,” Chika mused to herself.
After another painfully long period of silence, she finally said, “Well, you certainly could’ve spent a bit more time building up to the tongue thing.”
Kaguya deflated, every ounce of her will to live fleeing her body as she collapsed face-first onto the bed.
Does it all really come back to that? Why did I have to be so stupid? Why couldn’t I have just kissed him like a normal person? Kashiwagi and Tsubasa kiss all the time, but I should’ve known that they’re the farthest thing from normal…
“But…”
That one word from Chika sent Kaguya’s will to live surging back into her body. Her head popped up from the mattress, eagerly awaiting whatever absolution Fujiwara could offer.
“If that’s how you kissed this boy, I think it’s a pretty safe bet that you communicated your feelings to him.”
“Really?” Kaguya asked, equal parts curious and elated. “How do you know?”
“How to put it?” Chika scratched the side of her head as she slid back into a sitting position, her legs dangling off of the bed. “You kiss like it’s your wedding day.”
Kaguya blinked and sat up. “What do you mean?”
“It’s not a criticism,” Chika assured her. “Especially since your goal was to communicate some pretty intense romantic feelings. It was equal parts passionate and tender. Intense and chaste. You clearly enjoyed it enough that there’s no risk of him thinking you didn’t like kissing him, but you weren’t so aggressive that he would think you were just trying to sleep with him. Except for the tongue thing.”
Kaguya felt like this news should have made her feel more relieved. She finally had proof: undeniable, evidence-based proof that her and The President’s first kiss had been a (nearly) flawless success. Her intentions had been made clear, and she hadn’t embarrassed herself. Even so, some knot of worry still held together tightly in her chest, though she felt powerless to identify its source.
“So…the next time we kiss,” Kaguya began. “The boy and I—I mean—not us. But the next time he and I kiss, I can do the same thing, and it won’t be weird?”
“Well, I wouldn’t go that far,” Chika replied.
“But…but you said it was a good kiss! Aside from the—ahem—tongue business. But everything else…”
“Kissing isn’t like solving a math problem,” Chika interrupted. “You don’t find the one correct way to do it and just keep doing that over and over again. Besides, even if you didn’t do anything wrong , isn’t there anything you’d like to change about it?”
“Change?”
“Or, think about it like this,” Chika offered. “Your goal for your first kiss was to communicate how you felt. What is the goal for your second kiss?”
The thought made Kaguya’s head swim. If she had discovered a way to do something well…a way to be intimate with The President without having to confess, why would she change it? Wasn’t it safer to stick with the thing that had already proven itself effective?
And yet, she realized, Isn’t that exactly what I’m doing with him now? We could have just stayed friends, working alongside each other in the Student Council until he went off to Stanford. That was safe. That was working. But we changed.
“I…want…”
It wasn’t enough for me to let our relationship stay stagnant. I wouldn’t have been satisfied with that. I wanted more of him. I wanted him to want more of me. But mostly, I wanted him to confess.
“I want to make him lose control,” she said with a firmness to her conviction. “When I kissed him, I gave myself to him. Now, it’s his turn to give himself to me .”
“Hmmm…” Chika pondered again, a wry smile curling up the side of her face. She still bore the expression of one solving a riddle, but now there was a glint of mischief in her eyes and a hint of playfulness to the way she carried herself.
“If that’s so,” she said, “I may have a couple ideas that could work. If you were up to a bit more practicing.”
Kaguya pulled herself upright and ran the tip of her tongue along her lips.
“I’m ready,” she said, with the iron will of a Shinomiya.
Chika got onto her knees again, mimicking The President’s height. She fixed Kaguya with an exacting glare that indicated she would have no patience for a half-assed attempt.
“Remember,” she instructed. “Being a good kisser is not something you can do in a vacuum. It’s not a technique you can do the exact same way over and over again. You have to respond to your partner’s energy: their strengths and their weaknesses. It’s like a dance, two bodies responding to even the slightest movement of the other. But even though there has to be some give and take–-just like in a dance, somebody has to lead.”
Kaguya looked up at Fujiwara, her cold, red eyes meeting the burning blue gaze of the Love Detective in her element. From this angle, Fujiwara staring down at her with fierce determination, it was not difficult to imagine that it was The President’s intense expression piercing into her soul.
Like a dance, Kaguya thought to herself.
No.
Like a war.