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It takes An way, way too long to know she’s doomed.
She starts telling it as an aside, a random story, at first. The hazy permanent afternoon in Crase Cafe is a far too comfortable embrace around them, post-practice and sleepy in the sun next to the big windows, even though they’ve eased back from their manic schedule post-Rad Blast. It makes it easy to relax too far and open her mouth too much, to needle Akito more than she means to (not that it matters, because he only ever pretends to take it personally).
So it’s easy, when Kohane slips away to go to the bathroom, to go against the little niggle in her gut, and lean in all conspiratorial, like how funny, right?
From the looks on Toya and Akito’s faces, her story is not, in fact, funny.
“What exactly was it that you said to her?” says Toya, with that funny calmness plastered on his face that he gets when he’s about to start panicking but hasn’t quite realised it yet.
“I mean, it wasn’t a long sentence,” An laughs, even if part of her already knows she does not at all like where this is going. “Did you already forget what I said, somehow?”
“The exact phrasing might be important.”
“I mean, why?” She pushes away her half-eaten croissant, suddenly nauseous. “All I said was the moon is beautiful. What’s wrong with that?”
Akito and Toya both flinch again like they’ve been smacked.
“What? Is it, like, an insult or something?”
“No,” says Toya evenly, and shifts in his seat, not meeting her gaze. “The phrase is attributed to Soseki Natsume, who as you probably know was a famous novelist and translator—”
“—I didn’t know that, actually—”
“—and even though it became popular quite a while after his death, a story began to circulate, first in literary circles and then in popular media, in which—”
“Cut to the chase, Toya,” says Akito, not unkindly, and Toya obliges, finally looking at least in the vague direction of her face.
“It’s a love confession, Shiraishi.”
“A what,” An shouts, very calmly. From the counter at the other side of the cafe, Miku drops the glass she’d been polishing and it shatters all over the floor.
“A confession, Jesus, my ears,” says Akito.
“…Sorry. Sorry, Miku,” she calls a little louder.
“It’s okay!” says the Vocaloid from halfway inside the cleaning closet. Shit. An knows exactly how much sweeping glass out of tile grout sucks, too. She’ll have to help her out later if the floor doesn’t open up and swallow her up first.
“For what it’s worth, it sounds like she is aware you didn’t know,” Toya attempts, bracing his coffee cup in front of his chest like it’ll shield him from whatever this train wreck of a conversation is.
“Right,” says An, pretending to sound mollified. “So it’s fine, right? It’s not like she’d be expecting me to confess to her, or anything like that.”
There is less agreement in the boys’ faces than she’d like. Akito in particular has his mouth twisted into a grimace, and not just the usual one that lives on his face.
“Why wouldn’t she be?” he grinds out, shovelling the last bite of pancake into his mouth with little ceremony, like he can no longer enjoy it.
“Huh?” says An faintly.
“I mean, you know she likes you, right?”
“She huh?”
“...You know you like her, right?”
An’s voice comes out so pitiful it’s barely audible. “...No?”
Akito sets down his fork with a clatter and buries his face in his hands. “You’re not serious.”
“Akito,” says Toya, “come on now.” He’s managed to keep the smile off his face so far, but it curls in his voice still.
“You’ve been acting like that for two years and you just thought it was like. Normal behaviour. Partner stuff.” He groans. “You’re not serious.”
“It’s not like you two can talk!” she fires back hotly, with the remaining five percent of her brain that isn’t actively on fire. “You’re like that too!”
“We’ve been dating for four years, An.”
“Well!!” she cries, throwing her hands up in defeat. “If me being, uh—me liking her was that obvious to everyone else, then—then I wish one of you had told me!”
“How was I supposed to know you’re that dense,” Akito spits back under his breath. “Be for real right now. And what are you going to do about this, anyway?”
“What can she do?” says Toya quietly, suddenly melancholy. “I mean, the moment has passed, so I’m not sure if—”
“I’m back, everyone!” says Kohane, and all three at the table jump almost all the way out of their chairs. Toya nearly knocks over the dregs of his coffee. “Oh, I'm so sorry, am I interrupting?”
Her eyes go big and wide, apologetic, and An’s heart lurches in her chest, the same way it always has when she sees Kohane—except now apparently that’s not just a special partner dynamic they have, it’s something else! Something even more complicated, when they really only just figured out the first thing! Awesome!
(Because Akito is right, obviously. She’d known he was right as soon as he said it, but it keeps crashing into her in slow waves, in a starry replay of every moment since they met, and oh god, she really is stupid, isn’t she?)
“No, Kohane, you’re fine! We were just talking about what time we’re going to check in at the airport,” An lies, almost managing to keep the hysteria out of her voice.
She is so, so doomed.
***
Except she has a plan.
It’s a really good plan, too. Unlike most of her plans, since she’s actually thought it through for more than five minutes.
Which wasn’t that hard, because there were a lot of things she had to rule out from the get go. It wouldn’t make sense to just outright bring the situation up with Kohane, or somehow recreate the moment by saying the same thing about the moon by “coincidence” again—too much time has passed, it’ll be too obvious, and by the way Kohane reacted the first time… she won’t be willing to trust that it’s actually happening for real a second time.
Her chest tightens remembering Kohane’s shoulders, pinched tight together after she’d pretended to just laugh it off.
No. An has it figured out. She has to get Kohane to say it, instead—so An can say the right phrase back (“It is, isn’t it?”, as she’d found out with frantic googling yesterday after they’d left SEKAI), and make it clear that it’s really, actually intentional this time. And they can pretend the first go around just never happened. Easy. It’ll be fine.
Kohane definitely… feels the way An thinks she does, or else she wouldn’t have gotten that little flutter of nerves in her voice, and it wouldn’t have hurt her so badly that it wasn’t what she thought it might be.
(Because it had hurt her, and that has haunted An since, even before she knew exactly why, otherwise she’d never have brought it up to the boys in the first place.)
And An—after having taken stock and quizzing Ken rigorously about what specifically having a partner was about in the context of Vivid Street, which was an eye opener (was everyone planning on just leaving her in the dark forever about this?)—An knows how she feels, too.
How she’s felt since they met, really, but it’s only grown wider and deeper with every moment Kohane has grown into her ego, into her fully earnest, fierce, dazzling self, while somehow retaining every cute part that An had loved her for in the first place. She’s only pissed off that she wasted so much time letting Kohane wonder. How long have they both been sitting on this?
God… what if Kohane has been pining after her? Guilt and delight and greed all twist as one into a big knot in the pit of her stomach at the thought of it.
But they have all the time in the world from now on, especially if they’re going to make the world theirs together. An is determined not to waste another second of it.
***
It’s only a few days later when she enacts her plan, arranging last-minute to meet up with Kohane after practice, in the dark of nighttime Vivid Street. Her excuse is that they’re leaving Vivid Street for the first time since they formed (not a lie, really, even if it’ll only be for a short time), so they should do a little tour of the town to say goodbye to everyone, just for fun.
“It’ll be like practice for when we’re pro touring musicians and have to say goodbye to everyone all the time!” she’d texted, maybe a little too enthusiastically for such a limp excuse. But she’d agreed to come anyway—Kohane always indulges her, without complaint, like she enjoys it even when An is being unreasonable and overbearing.
Like a partner. Like her partner. The thought of it makes her feel suddenly dizzy.
Unfortunately, her plan is a wash as soon as it starts.
“Oh. It’s cloudy.”
“Yes?” says Kohane, turning back to where An has gone stock-still right under the WEG eaves, eyes riveted on the profound lack of moon in the sky above them. “An-chan, you’re blocking the doorway.”
“Oh! Oh, sorry, Auntie. How’s the new duo song coming along?”
The patron claps her on the shoulder and sidles past, muttering some affirmative reply that slides in one ear and out the other, and An edges out into the street as the door chimes shut, struggling against the urge to kick rocks. Minute one and she’s already doomed again. What is this, some slapstick comedy?
The sliver of sky visible between the buildings is soft and dark like velvet, almost mockingly flat and devoid of stars.
Well, there’s nothing else for it. An still isn’t going to turn down time with her partner, even if they’re about to go on not-really-vacation together, and being around her sets off all kinds of new eddies of feeling whorling around long-familiar actions. She can’t just… be easy around her, easy and tactile and warm, the way she used to, knowing that there is a something between them that they’re not talking about. And she can’t just talk about the something either since her plan went so firmly out the window. All there is left is to walk Vivid Street together and hope Kohane doesn’t cotton on before she can figure out something else.
So they walk, mostly waving through familiar peoples’ windows, since it’s late enough that even the last stragglers are nowhere to be found around the live houses, and even WEG is mostly empty behind them. But even now, in the deserted streets, there is still a low undercurrent of sound—like the street itself breathes in a steady rhythm. It’s one of her favourite parts of this place. She’s felt lonely here, and for good reason, but An has never once actually felt alone, because she never really was.
Being able to introduce someone new to that feeling is something An hadn’t really considered—honestly she isn’t sure where she thought her partner was supposed to come from, since nobody actually from here had been the right fit, and for some reason it had never occurred to her that her partner might be a stranger to Vivid Street. To the way they live and breathe music, here. She’d just been waiting for someone to miraculously fall into her lap without ever really knowing what that person could be like, and then it actually happened.
She’s sort of glad she didn’t imagine it first. Her imaginary partner could never have lived up to the way Kohane actually is.
And it doesn’t matter now that she was a late arrival to Vivid Street, obviously. Kohane is just as much of a fixture here as she is, nowadays. And seeing her take to the community like a duck to water, and be received with such wide open arms, had been so satisfying it overwhelmed anything else. The same way she’s so proud of Kohane’s skyrocketing talent that she somehow managed not to choke on the fear that mounted with every time she stretched her wings. She survived it, the fear that Kohane’s horizon would expand until it made An an invisible speck, until they hashed it out, in their own way.
An smiles, despite herself. They’re going to see the same horizon from the plane window, tomorrow. Just as they promised each other.
At the nadir of their loop, where the street widens in preparation to meet the highway, Kohane leans her shoulder across to bump with An’s—the way An has always leant into her, and Kohane has only just started doing back, an unconscious admission that they share the same bubble of personal space. Apparently she misses the way An’s voice audibly catches in her throat, by some miracle.
“This is nice, An-chan. I’m glad you suggested going for one last walk around the street,” she says, and her past-tense tone suggests she’s getting around to saying I’d better get going next.
“No problem!” says An in her best approximation of chipper (which, at this moment, is abysmal). “Hey, actually, don’t you think we’d better adjust our sleep schedule before we get to America?”
Kohane stops walking and frowns. “Oh… I hadn’t thought about it. Maybe if we sleep on the plane tomorrow?”
“Hmm,” says An, pretending to think about it. “Or we could stay up all night first to make sure. I’m not so good at sleeping on command.”
Something flickers across Kohane’s face, but it’s gone before An can tell if she knows she’s lying or not.
“That does sound fun,” she says, like an admission of guilt. “But I wouldn’t want to bother anyone… we’d be too noisy at this time of night even if we go back to Weekend Garage or your house, wouldn’t we?”
“Well, that part’s easy.” Her plan (plan B) is all coming together. “We can just go over there.”
It takes Kohane a second, like they haven’t been saying it that way for two years already. “Oh! Of course! Well, alright, let’s do it.” And, with so much more grace than An deserves, Kohane actually dimples back at her, those wide eyes crinkling shut, and something aches in An all over again, the thought that not only she had any part in wiping that smile away with her stupid mistake, but that Kohane had to hide how she felt. That night, and all the times before that, if Akito is right.
I gotta make this right.
***
Of course, once they get to SEKAI, the sun is up.
“Huh??” An squints, the contrast so over-bright she has to feel along the wall so she doesn’t fall over a chair or something. “Since when is it opposite day over here?”
It’s actually late afternoon, by the time her eyes adjust past the blur—it’s like stepping onstage and looking directly into the followspot, a habit it took her an embarrassing amount of time to grow out of—but the sun is just as bright, and either way, the obvious lack of moon ruins plan B from the outset.
And what’s worse, Rin and Len are here.
(That’s mean. She likes Rin and Len, obviously, she’s just ready to lose her marbles any second now.)
“You guys!” cries Len, dropping something into a basket at his feet and wiping his hands together.
“Hi hi!” says Rin.
“Why is it afternoon?” An asks before she can manage to make herself ask the vastly more normal question of what are you guys up to instead.
Rin tilts her head. “Uh….? I mean, I dunno.”
“What time is it in the real world?”
“Night time,” says An, trying not to sound like her own brain is strangling her from the inside out, and failing miserably.
“That is strange,” says Kohane from behind her. “I do feel like they usually line up.”
“Not always,” says Len. “I think MEIKO said once that this place sometimes makes day and night uneven compared to the real world.”
“Cool,” says An, even though it would have actually been much cooler to know that about three minutes ago.
“What are you two up to?” asks Kohane, leaning to look into the basket.
“We’re doing some art with chalk!”
Rin pouts. “We wanted to borrow the spray cans and do some big murals, but Miku said we should sketch some things out first.”
“Smart,” says An. Maybe the smartest thing Miku has ever said, actually.
“Do you mind if we join in?” Kohane asks, clapping her hands together excitedly. “An and I are staying up all night before we get on the plane tomorrow. That’s why we came over here, so we don’t bother anybody.”
Guilt seeps into An’s stomach, thrown in the shade of Kohane’s brightness.
But they bury their hands together in the chalk and the dust, which helps, and before long they’ve doodled their way around to the back of Crase Cafe and up the fire escape stairs, leaving the Kagamines behind.
Once she’s brave enough to tackle plan C, An draws a moon the size of her body on the flat concrete of the roof, and methodically fills it in with white. It takes her a full half an hour, and by the time she’s finished Kohane has already ringed both the air conditioner port and the top of the stairs with chalk, rainbows and planes and more than one doodled Phenny.
“Wow!” says Kohane, turning around to see her featureless white orb.
“What do you think?”
“It's so... big!”
“What is it?” prompts An.
Kohane blinks.
“...A circle?”
An draws a rabbit next to it for context, but the moment has already passed, and Kohane sets about decorating the rim of the roof with flowers.
Dude, what am I doing here.
An draws four wonky animal shapes—a pink hamster, a black and white dog, a blue cat, and some orange dog-cat creature that sorta looks like a weird badger if you squint—and then casts the chalk down, putting her head in her hands.
What am I going to do? Should I even do anything?
Does she deserve to, after all this? After pointlessly yanking Kohane around all night, when she’s already done nothing but yank Kohane around their entire partnership, and she could be about to ruin it for good even if she does do what she’s trying to do, anyway?
She picks up a stick of blue chalk and snaps it in two.
Kohane already promised her forever, and An believes her, to the extent that she can believe any kind of promise like that. They said they’d keep fighting each other, their way of fighting for each other. Why isn’t that enough for her, all of a sudden?
Why do I feel so guilty? Like… like it’s wrong to ask—
Mid-thought, An realises she can no longer see what she’s drawing. The city plunges into shadow, in the sudden way it always seems to when the final sliver of the sun tips below the horizon, and An shivers, with the cold of the shade or with something else entirely.
“An-chan,” Kohane calls quietly, from where she sits at the edge of the roof with her feet dangling into the air. A little while ago, she would have been too scared of the drop to go anywhere near it. “Come sit with me.”
Before she knows she’s doing it, she finds herself walking, and she brings the night with her as she falls into place at Kohane’s side.
They sit in soft, well-worn silence as the unreal city in front of them seeps from dusk into night, with their knees brushing as their heels bounce off the front wall of the cafe below. There is a strange kind of peace that comes with it—she hasn’t planned this far ahead, doesn’t know what she’ll say or do from now on, but An can’t bring herself to prod this moment into happening anymore. Kohane has her, and she has Kohane. If it happens, it happens.
At her elbow, Kohane huffs a little breath through her nose, and straightens up a little. “Look.”
And there it is. The moon is just peeking up, cut off between two buildings’ silhouettes, like it’s too shy to be seen just yet, but it’s definitely there, light bouncing off the glass in that signature blue glow.
“Oh, yeah,” An says, stupidly.
There’s a pause.
“The moon is beautiful, isn’t it.” And when An looks back, Kohane is not looking at the moon. She is looking right at her.
Suddenly An can’t help herself. Despite everything else—despite the very real part of her in the background doing flips and cartwheels and falling over herself because oh god, it’s actually happening—it’s suddenly the easiest thing in the world to let her shoulders fall back, to lean a hair closer, and to reply with the closing phrase. “It is, isn’t it?”
When we first met, I thought it’d be my job to guide her. But it always seems to be Kohane showing me the way, doesn’t it?
The wide expanse of Kohane’s hazel eyes sparkles against the starscape of SEKAI’s skyline behind them. Past the aching openness and tentative hope in her gaze, there’s something almost a little self-satisfied in the curve of her mouth that surprises An, surprises and delights her, like every new thing she learns about her partner.
There is a little of the snake in Kohane, too, curled tight within the hamster, so tightly An isn’t sure anyone else has ever seen it before now. Something flares fierce in her chest, hot like greed, at how much she knows about Kohane already that nobody else ever will, because they have both fought deliberately to draw each other that close.
And she could know more. She might, if the moon has anything to say about it.
“You didn’t know the first time, did you,” says Kohane, and it’s not a question.
“No,” she replies, and looks back at the moon, hoping somehow it’ll hide how red her ears are getting, because she is slowly realising that Kohane may have cottoned onto her whole gambit a little earlier than she’d let on, and she’s trying not to imagine the rooftop swallowing her whole about it. “Toya had to tell me. And he was so nice about it, which actually just made it worse.”
“Of course he was. He’s a very nice boy.”
“And then Akito gave me an earful about not knowing I’ve been in love with you for two years already.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Kohane’s cheeks go pink. “Well. He was being nice in his own way.”
Kohane shuffles closer, until they’re hip-to-hip, shoulder-to-shoulder. Then, her head dipped and her voice small like she’s carrying a secret, she says “You really didn’t know?”
She doesn't need to specify which unknowing she means. It’s more than obvious.
An shrugs. “I’ve never had a partner before.” And suddenly she isn’t embarrassed, because she’s glad, glad to finally be sharing this with the one who needs to hear it most. “I didn’t have anything to compare it to, after I waited so long for someone to feel right next to me, and all I knew is—you—you made everything make sense for the first time. Like everything I saw came into focus.”
Kohane hides her forehead against An’s shoulder, and the touch scalds.
“Did you?” An asks. The ‘know’ is silent.
“Yes,” she breathes, like it’s something to be ashamed of. “From the moment I saw you singing at the crossing, I knew. Why do you think I got so embarrassed every time you were… you know, so… like that? I thought you were just being friendly!”
Kohane doubles over and covers her face, and An leans closer, laughing. “I was! Or I thought I was, anyway! It’s not my fault I didn’t know!”
“Nooo,” Kohane groans into her hands.
“At least we were both stupid about this,” says An, and as she watches as the moon creeps a little higher into the horizon, as if emboldened.
“True.” And she pauses, like she’s steeling herself. An could watch Kohane be brave all day, has watched her learn over the years how to take her nerves in her own fist and hold them there, and pride and glee bubbles in An’s chest seeing it again and so up-close, at the thought of being worth taking any kind of risk for.
“An-chan?”
“Yeah?”
Her gaze flicks across, landing back home into An’s. “...You know now, don’t you?”
Oh my god she’s asking me to kiss her.
It’s as obvious as anything in the world. Down in her lap, Kohane’s hands are shaking, and beyond the play of her asks’s pretense, Kohane’s eyes search An’s face, luminous as the moon and wide with yearning. Asking her to make the last of the questions over what-it-is between them into certainty. And isn’t it just like her—Kohane keeps creating these moments for An to step into, with her careful sense of purpose and her considered grace, and it’s so easy to just take the invitation, to stride forward and reach close—
But she takes her hands, first, squeezes in an echo from long ago of I’m right here, okay?
And Kohane breathes out like she hears it, in something like a laugh or a sigh, because she does hear it, right before their lips meet.
She makes it easy. Somehow, An never imagined this far, either, and again she’s glad she didn’t; being so close to Kohane, with every sense full of her and every second heavy with certainty, is miles beyond anything she could have come up with on her own. The hesitant insistence in Kohane’s mouth against hers is like a balm on every wound her heart has ever gotten, a promise too up-close and too sincere for her to help believing this time.
Some time after they’ve drawn back, their hands still intertwined like lifelines, An gets brave enough to ask, “How long did you know I was trying to get you to do that?”
“A while,” admits Kohane. “When it was cloudy and you freaked out, that made me pretty sure.”
“I did not freak out,” says An, lying.
Kohane cranes back a little. “I didn’t… upset you, did I? I just couldn’t be sure—”
“No, no, Kohane,” An blusters. “It’s fine. I mean, even if I was upset then I kinda owe you one anyway, so.” She makes a face. “Sorry it took me another go around to get it.”
“It’s okay,” says Kohane, and somehow when she says it, it always is okay. “It got us here, didn’t it?”
And it did. It brought them in front of a brave moon in an unreal city, larger than life, bigger than the world, just like they are.
“Yeah,” smiles An, and kisses her again, and again, and again—one for each plan and then some more.
***