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When Nagi was younger, she vividly remembered sneaking out the house and disappearing onto the streets to look at the stars. They were so shiny and twinkly, unlike the glitz and glamour of her barbie dolls, these were natural and so far away. She couldn't reach them.
Taiga had told her once, entertaining her on a night their parents were busy, and he was the babysitter. He was her fantastic older brother who did everything to make her smile and listen. To get her brown eyes to open up all wide with stars dancing around them and in them. To get her to believe in something, anything.
He first tried magic and she had believed that easily, mesmerised by the disappearing cards and the random coins that came back. The novelty and spectacle wore off eventually, there was only so many tricks he could do before she got bored since she got bored easily.
He moved to singing and yes, she adored music and singing. There was just not something right about doing so in their home and not being on the street with people. She needed the social interaction and to be friendly and hospitable. She liked the social networking and whilst she hated being a 'Cry-baby' she appreciated all of the gifts and advice the town gave to her. The doting and the adoration.
She could not separate that from music.
So, in a desperate and last-ditch effort, Taiga tried storytelling. He wasn't adept at it. Really, if she were honest, he was God awful at it. His stories were rushed and lacked cohesion, lacked something more and something tangible. It wasn't anything noteworthy or spectacular. Obvious, it was created in the mind of a child. But they were the best things she had ever heard.
Even if at her grown age as she looked back at it, she could admit to their flaws and recognised how to improve upon them in order to tell An her own stories. They were still phenomenal to her and the best pieces of literature she knew.
Maybe it was her utter love and adoration. Maybe it was the way he spoke so clearly and made the tiger in the jungle prowl around right next to her. Or it could've just been that she had an imagination and liked to daydream, losing herself in the time and Taiga gave her an excuse for it. Whatever it was, she just knew that whenever it was night or raining or they simply were not allowed on the bright streets with their friends, he would grab cushions and sit on the floor, and she would be awake until the crack of dawn.
One story he told on one of those days always stuck with her though, it was stupid, of course it was, but it was memorable all the same. It was about the stars, the sun and the moon. A love story that made her want to be sick when he first recalled the tale, but a love story for the ages.
Well, it would've been if she cared for it. Instead, she focused, centred her thoughts on the stars. The bright stars that were past dreams and memories. The relics of ancient heroes and brave souls. The one eternal thing in a sea of change that stayed and if you did good, if you lived and if you believed, you would join those ever-present all-knowing stars.
So she did, she believed and prayed constantly that she would join them one day. That she would achieve her dreams. She just adored them so much. She wanted to chase them relentlessly and she was always dreaming, always thinking about them.
They were too distant. Far too distant even when she broke out of the home and ran to a field to look at them, to get closer to them because in the house they were not above her, but in the field, they were directly above her, twinkling and taunting her at the gap between her and them.
She wanted to reach them though, always performing grabby hands in the darkness of the street, staying out of sight because one wrong move and she would be in bed away from them all.
She needed to be discreet.
She came back, sometime before the sun was due to rise and slept for two hours before continuing her day and no one was none the wiser.
No one knew this titbit.
No one save Yuka.
That was how she knew the evening of learning about the cancer, her inevitable end, that it was Yuka who found her and sat with her in companionable silence.
There were other tells of course. The distinct lack of whiskey that tinged the air courtesy of Taiga's need to drink the awful drink. There was the missing scent of bitter coffee from Ken and the tolls of parenthood, the late nights spend with An bunkered in her room, pouring over homework she just didn't get.
(She truly was her mother's daughter.)
But, instead, there was the smell of oranges and roses. Gasoline and leather too, and yes, Taiga wore leather jackets but nothing that lingered like Yuka and her motorbike gear. She always smelt so comforting and warm and maybe people were thrown off by her demeanour, but she was everything to Nagi. She would be everything to Nagi and, of all the people she was leaving, she loathed to leave Yuka the most.
They had memories, good ones and bad ones, funny ones and sombre ones and whilst An was young and she wouldn't understand her death, Yuka was old and able to. Maybe it was selfish to not think of Taiga, to not think of how even as children he was brutish and did whatever he could to make her happy and whatever she wanted to happen. How they were always by each other’s sides, thick as thieves and how she clung to him tightly and never let go when she was only tiny. And she wasn't disregarding Taiga, she never could. But it was more so, in that moment, she realised how close she and Yuka were under the dizzying stars.
She dropped an arm that was wrapping tightly around her knees and let it touch the grass. Barely wet. Barely covered in a light mist of rain that felt so reminiscent and similar to the soft and hollow beating of her heart.
Her hand was waiting there, fingers twitching nervously, and strangely as it closed the gap between her and Yuka. Silent Yuka who was often so full of life and knew what to say it gave Nagi chills for her to be doing and saying nothing and simply staring into space alongside her but watching her intensely.
They always did stare at one another intensely, the lines of friendship and something more blurred constantly.
Nagi wanted to say at one point it was just friendly, and maybe it was when she was younger and ignorant to her feelings about Yuka. Ignorant to the way she was weirdly protective over her and not in a strange way, though people often painted it that way, just in a way of that no-one was good for her. That there was a weird clattering and breaking in her heart whenever she came around and talked about a "cute guy in my English lecture," who had asked her out snd she wanted to go on the date.
Maybe she should've realised it years ago, back before Ken was even a name that constantly swam in Yuka's mind. Back when life was simpler, maybe she was under the oppressive regime of the music industry. And maybe she was losing hope and letting her dream slip through her fingers like grains of sand. But it was always, somehow, good. And it all led back to Yuka.
Yuka was a reprieve from her life surrounded by the two men and their constant denial, their teasing and friendly banter. She was someone special to Nagi, someone that she felt so secretive over. Like she had to keep her hidden away from Taiga and Ken, fearful of something subconsciously but she never could place it just right or reasonably explain it well.
But now, now at the great age of thirty-six, she knew what it was. It was a crush; it was a strong oppressive feeling and she simply watched and had to suffer just watching because her inaction meant she had missed the timing. She had missed whatever could've been because she couldn't be, she was almost certain she wasn't imagining it with the lack of a distance between them and so much more.
The suffering and the pain that they shared between them, things that only they knew and were privy to. The secrets and the history that ran so deep, that it would be told for generation after generation, but it was devastating for Nagi to know she would not be able to hear them talk about it. Talk and Kotaki Nagi and Shiraishi Yuka. Kotaki Nagi and Suzuki Yuka. Kotaki Nagi and her best friend she loved more than life itself. The best friend she never wanted to leave. The best friend that she wished she had said something else to. Regretting her decision in that moment to tell her of her late-night childish rendezvous to the field with the stars and wanting to have told her about her crushing feelings, her suffocating feelings.
Maybe if she had, maybe if she weren't so scared, she and Taiga could've been happy. Their feelings confessed to Yuka and Ken respectively since neither one of them were acting on their feelings and she, she was always the brave one. She was the one who dove headfirst into everything. Who requested them, forced them Taiga would argue, to break into the high school building with her because they could. Who challenged the moulds for shits and giggles and for fun because she was brave.
If she had spoken up earlier, if she had said something instead of anything so pointless, would their lives be different? Maybe.
She wasn't wholly sure because there was always the chance that the stars up in the sky made sure to write for destiny that Suzuki Yuka would become Shiraishi Yuka and that Shiraishi An would be a thing. But she wanted to believe it would be different, she just had to because as she reminisced on her life, the phases and stages that she had seen staring up at the sky. The ever-standing sky that had everything perfect and mapped out.
Maybe this was her destiny, this was her fate to be, and she knew she couldn't change it. But for a moment, like a child, she dreamed of doing so.
And in that precious dream, she swore that hers and Yuka's hands met. Yuka covering her hand up, soft and powerful. Centring Nagi back to Earth and away from regret.
She had chosen her life, and in her final months, her final hours, her final days she would have to accept that. There was no point in hoping she had said something and done something.
She was simply stuck still and living with the fact that Yuka was a best friend and nothing more in her life and the generations had nothing to debate.
#
Yuka had ventured to the field again, she did it so often now that Nagi was gone and had been for years. The grief, the wound was still so fresh in her mind. It was as if she hadn't died.
And maybe, she hadn't. Her memory still lived on within An and her other friends, those youngsters that Ken liked to laugh at smile fondly about when he stumbled in late at night smelling of cheap beer and tequila. Those youngsters where one was exactly like a younger Nagi, a Nagi that Yuka was not privy to and had never known about.
That was always strange Yuka thought when she and Ken in the silence of the night, with An fast asleep down the hall, reminisced for a moment about Nagi and her life. She had told them to act as though she were alive and still singing somewhere, but Yuka was unable to deny it to herself properly in the way Nagi wanted. So, she didn't try.
Was that an awful thing for a best friend to do? Maybe, but Nagi was much more to Yuka.
She was her first best friend, but her confidant. The one that was with her every step of her pregnancy. The one that raised An in her stead when she was too busy. She was her everything.
And vice versa.
Some nights, on the more painful nights where the pain in her heart didn't cease when she thought about Nagi. She remembered their last meeting and seeing her all withered in the hospital bed, pale lips and sunken eyes. A visible hand dipped into the pool of death, and she was rendered speechless.
Ken had described the deterioration of her. How you could see every bone protruding through the skin. How it was waxy and pale it was. How dead and lifeless she looked, and she was always full of life. Even on the bad days, the days where she felt weaker and weaker and her head was spinning, she was still lively. Boasting and bragging about riding Yuka's motorbike and now Yuka thought she was staring at someone different entirely.
She walked into the ward hesitantly and took a seat. She wanted to touch Nagi, but she didn't. Instead, she clasped her hands together and waited. Staring at her.
Even when death was knocking at her door, she was still pretty. She always had been pretty, but Yuka didn't know if she was prettier now or earlier. Probably earlier because she missed the colour that dusted her cheeks, the soft rosy pink that tinged her ears when embarrassed. The soft pink of her lips that were now faded and muted and almost white.
She was too ghostly and then it truly set into Yuka's mind Nagi was dying.
No matter how many times Ken informed her of the changes, tears in his eyes and his voice breaking at the thought of losing the one person who was like a sister to him, the severity never clicked to Yuka.
Nagi groaned for a moment, and her eyes opened blearily, and she smiled a small smile at her. It was a smile Yuka thought, but she wasn't able to tell because she could barely pull up the corners of her lips up properly. But it was an attempt and Yuka returned it easily.
"You came. I thought you wouldn't make it."
"I wouldn't leave you," Yuka breathed out softly and Nagi shook her head fondly.
"You're right, you aren't. But I am..." it was oddly depressing for Nagi, at least according to Ken and what she had heard of her. But, then again, Yuka knew more than Ken in some cases like that field. Maybe she felt like she was able to be more open with her rather than the boys.
"Don't be like that. Where's the positive Nagi that I've heard so much about?"
"She doesn't have to be here. Not with you. Never with you."
There was a silence, a tense one with unspoken words as Nagi’s hand twitched at the edge of the cot. It was like the night she had learnt of her imminent death and the silence was companionable and needed.
She reached out though, and took it, stilling her moving fingers and holding onto it. Careful of the IV attached to it which forced Nagi to face her with the smallest smile on her face.
She closed her eyes and sighed blissfully, and Yuka wanted to beg her to open them. Fearful that if she closed her eyes, she would never open them, and Yuka could never see her pretty eyes again. She would never hear the bubbling laugh again and she would never contemplate if she married the right person again.
Sometimes, she felt as though she and Ken were more like roommates with a child and best friends. There was no real love, at least that was how she felt. It was like she and Ken existed in a way that they were denying whatever they felt for the other people around them, namely the Kotaki siblings.
It was clear to her as she watched Ken and Taiga, that there was something there. Something that was not childhood rivals turned friends turned to family. There was a sort of fizzing undertone of something more and whilst Taiga and Ken, both denied it, Ken more so than Taiga, Yuka knew.
Nagi knew too and they discussed it one day when An was five. That day, Nagi had skilfully avoided the conversation but admitted there was something there but feigned a lack of reasonable advice to give. And, to this day, Yuka was utterly bamboozled at the fact and had to hum to herself in thought.
That was only one time of many where she pondered life and Nagi’s secretism. She wanted to ask them all, but time was running out and Nagi was content in the silence and with her presence, so that was what she offered her.
"You know," Nagi began. "There's so much I want to say to you, but I don't know how."
Her voice was frail now, raspy and Yuka still heard it in perfectly clarity, intertwining their fingers together. "Then don't."
"You make it seem easy when you will live to see another sunrise."
"Without you? I don't think I'd be living."
"You would. You'd be looking after An and helping her chase after me, right?"
"I'd be joining you both in the stars," Yuka laughed and Nagi sighed happily.
"Good. You're the brightest and prettiest thing ever. You deserve to be admired and remembered."
Yuka blinked and Nagi smiled, she laughed bitterly. "Ken's a lucky fucking bastard, you know? Each day getting to be in your embrace, getting to see your face, having the world’s most perfect daughter. Having my brother being in love with him, you being in love with him. He is so fucking lucky," she ranted jealously. It was unlike Nagi, it was rare, unheard of actually, for her to be jealous or bitter or full of resentment. But she was dying. She deserved to be so.
Yuka blinked and Nagi shook her head. "It's doing no good for me to be jealous of him in my last hours when I should be cherishing them with you. Making sure that what you remember of me is positive. I suppose, I'm selfish this way making sure everyone, but you remembered me as strong."
Yuka shook her head, "Far from it."
"It is. It's a selfish wish of mine for you to see me as broken and remember that but wanting you to remember all the good we had."
"I could never forget the good. You introduced me to Ken, and I got An that way. I have tattoos and scars from your stupid ideas. I have stomach pains from laughing too hard at you still," she reminisced fondly laughing to herself before schooling her features straight. "But I want to remember you for being real. For making me genuinely laugh because you were truly being an idiot and impulsive. For making me smile because you have the prettiest one of them all. For making me feel pretty and like I was the only person in the room, the world even. For making me feel loved. For everything. I don't want you to have to lie to me. Ever."
Nagi frowned and shook her head. It was slow. Careful. Any other day, her hair would be whipping all over and she wouldn't be able to see. But today was not any other day.
"I always have to lie to you."
"You never have had to."
"I have because otherwise I'll say things I can't take back, I'll change everything... And the stars say you can't do that."
Yuka hummed, "But isn't everything prewritten there? Your place, my place, Taiga's place, An's place and Ken’s place is all foretold. So, whatever you say is enacting the will of the stars."
"If only it were so simple."
"It can be if you let it be."
Nagi said nothing more but tried to hold onto Yuka's hand tighter and she missed her longer nails that dug into her skin whenever they walked together hand in hand. That dug into her arms whenever she got excited and had to race off ahead and profess said happiness about whatever she spotted in stores.
She missed the pain and comfort Nagi brought.
"Tell me a story."
"You want me to tell you a story? Why not Taiga?"
"Because you know me better than he does. He knows a lot; we were inseparable but at times he was too dense. You were too, but I'd rather it be you talking to me about the stars," Nagi huffed. "Besides, you are a teacher. And a mother. You have to be good at telling stories."
"You can't be serious..."
"Would you humour me? At least try and if it’s bad, we have a good memory."
Yuka couldn't refuse her, she never could and so she racked her brain and settled on a tale. A tale of two lovers, separated by forces greater than them. Lovers that were very similar to them though Yuka wouldn't recognise the fact until much later. Lovers that could never be and in their agony became the stars.
She continued and continued to talk and expand upon it until the story came to its depressing end, looking back at Nagi and sighing as the woman had closed her eyes. Not permanently at least, but for a little rest.
Yuka was tempted to stay for longer, but she knew she couldn't. An would worry and she wanted to honour her best friend, somehow, someway even if she was doubting, only momentarily, her love for Ken. She adored her daughter and she needed to be by her side, any longer with Nagi and she was certain she would break.
She hesitated for a moment, she wanted to give Nagi something. A hand was nothing much anymore and as she stood over her, the unexplainable urge to kiss her lips was present.
Yuka stayed strong though and elected to give her a kiss on the cheek, lingering a few moments too long to be considered friendly. A final goodbye to her everything.
Nagi stirred and she lingered, and some days she would regret lingering as she listened to Nagi breathe out, "I wish I had told you I love you before he did."
Yuka froze in her steps. She wanted clarification. She wanted to rush over and ask for clearer details, but Nagi had either pretended to slip into sleep or truly had fallen asleep.
She died later that night.
On those painful nights, Yuka wondered if she died that night solely to avoid a confrontation. To avoid being pestered by her about what she meant exactly. What it would've meant for them.
But Yuka wasn't a fool, she knew what Nagi meant. She knew Nagi loved her as more than a friend and it took her until her final hours to realise that. To click the pieces into place, to slot them together and realise that she too loved Nagi as more than a friend. That she had married the wrong person, but denial ran deep within RADder and as soon as she realised that she had locked the feelings down.
She had denied it once more. That she could've had a more fulfilling life if she and Nagi had just been brave enough to try. She denied it when she glanced at An, a lover of stars like Nagi (and herself she supposed), and how she would never trade her for the world.
Beside. She loved Ken, she was certain of it. He complimented her well, both in matching her weakness and calling her good looking, he loved her too she believed that. But she doubted it some nights, on those painful nights where she ventured to the field, and she thought about Nagi. She wondered how it was like in Heaven looking down at her if she was doing her proud or the likes. If she was failing her.
It was depressing, but so was life without her. Without her precious Nagi, her everything. She thought that gap year she took was difficult, but living three years on end without her was arguably worse. It was a definitive fact that Nagi was gone and only lingered in her memories. But when she looked at the stars, and she saw one twinkling back at her and her hand felt warm on the cold grass and her heart felt light, she knew Nagi was with her. By her side.
And she knew on those nights that she hated denial. She knew on those nights that she and Ken had been fools eager to pretend they did not love their best friends and she would always regret never saying anything.
But it was all foretold in the stars, so wallowing in the pity achieved nothing. It did nothing for her, it never would and latching onto that denial was for the best.
Ken denied the fact that he opened a bar with a signature whiskey in Taiga's name. To keep him alive. And Yuka would deny Nagi and the love she held for her. And the world would keep on spinning, the stars shining and one day. Someday, not soon in the far distant future, they would be reunited and the denial would die.