Work Text:
“Well, that’s it, then.” Takina emerges from under their stolen car’s hood, wiping at her hands with a rag she found in the car’s toolbox. The soot and grease from the infuriatingly confusing concept that is car repairs swipes off on the rag, but she doesn’t feel any cleaner for it. She clicks off the flashlight, drenching her vision in darkness. The sun hasn’t quite set, and yet her faith is slipping beneath the horizon line anyway. “We’re going to die here.”
“You sure?” Chisato pops her head out of the window. Before the car’s battery had sputtered its last breath, Chisato managed to roll the window down and waste that one last bit of power. “You can’t give it a quick punch? You’re super strong, I bet it’d work. But if it doesn’t, couldn’t we just stay here for a bit?” She thinks for a moment. “Alive, I mean.”
Takina frowns at her. They’ve been on the run for hours now, from the center of Tokyo to the outskirts of the city until the neon streets and high-rise shopping malls turned to wide, lush fields and flower gardens. Geography wasn’t one of Takina’s best subjects, but she’s pretty certain that Tokyo’s suburbs aren’t supposed to be this green. “I don’t think the zombies would be discerning enough to care that our car’s battery died when seeking their next prey.”
“We can sweet talk them,” Chisato says, as if that’s helpful. “Maybe they’d be open to a deal. One dead car battery for the safety of two beautiful girls.”
“They already have death in spades, Chisato. I think they would prefer something that’s alive, not dead.”
“Do you have to be so logical about this?” Chisato whines. She opens the car door and spills out with vim and vigor, a whirlwind meeting an empty field to spread from its epicenter. “It’s a zombie apocalypse, you know. Straight out of a movie! Movie logic isn’t like real logic!”
The car’s hood is blocking Chisato’s expression from where Takina is standing, so she slams it shut, channeling her frustration into her strike. It doesn’t give her enough of an outlet to get rid of the tension she’s holding. “This isn’t a movie.” She’s not so sure about that, actually, but she does know by now that this isn’t reality; the absurdity of a zombie apocalypse has her convinced that she’s somewhere lost in a nightmare.
“Movie or not, it’s definitely not a logical situation.” Chisato steps around to the front of the car and puts her elbow on the hood; the waxy surface makes her elbow squeak and slide. “I wish we’d picked a cooler car to steal.”
“Is that really what you want to focus on?” Takina grimaces. If she had a choice in this situation, she’d choose to tackle the zombies on her own. At least then she wouldn’t have to contend with Chisato’s illogical, inane guesses and inability to take anything seriously. Tokyo is overrun with zombies and all Chisato can think about is that they stole a brown Jeep instead of a bright red Lexus.
Not content with her elbows slipping off the car’s hood, Chisato leans over to put her chin there, too, collapsing like a deflated balloon. “Think about how lame the movie poster would be,” she says, rolling her head to look up at Takina. “Two girls with guns and bandoliers, silhouetted by the sunset with zombies chasing them in the distance, and the car has to be a weird blocky mess instead of a sleek supercar.”
Takina looks out at the empty expanse in front of them. The grass is tinged yellow in the faintly setting sun; they’d managed to get the car close to a grove of trees before it gave up the ghost, which is somehow of little comfort when she looks in the rearview mirror just to see how many places their undead enemies could hide in the dark behind. “We're almost out of ammo, too,” she corrects. “We’re not wearing bandoliers.”
The noise Chisato makes sounds more like a strangled duck than a human. “You are so not fun.”
Silence overtakes them, and Takina is grateful for the precious seconds to plan. She takes stock of their situation: they’re running low on food, and it wasn’t like they had time to stock up at the grocery store before fleeing. Even though Takina makes sure to pack extra every time she steps out with her gun in her bag, their ammo is almost spent. Chisato’s cache of rubber bullets is empty, and Takina briefly thinks about how much money Mika spent to acquire them. Café LycoReco is going to go into the red again, and it’s all this stupid apocalypse’s fault.
Well, she thinks. Not that it matters if society itself is collapsing.
Takina groans and slumps down, with enough sense to smooth her uniform’s skirt out before she falls like a discarded doll. “We’re sitting ducks like this.” She puts her head in her hands, stealing a glance at Chisato’s shoes between her fingers. They’re caked with mud, and her legs are red and bruised, battle scars sharpened by the edge of exhaustion. Neither of them are in any state to fight.
“It’s not so bad, though, is it?” There’s a gust of motion at her side, and Chisato plops down on the ground to join her, flopping her lips like a fish out of water to try and bring a smile to them both. “We’re here together. It could be worse.”
Takina feels her heart catch in her throat. She’s been trying to ignore it by focusing on the present and not the future, but somehow the past few hours are haunting her, too. Chisato’s bashful smile as she gazed at her from the passenger seat, her eyes aglow with a shyness that Takina didn’t believe she possessed. Chisato’s simple declarations of every reality that Takina locked away from herself, that the true strength between them wasn’t their training at DA but the bonds of their partnership.
Chisato looking to her, a hint of red on her cheeks as she asked a question so simple that it pierced Takina’s bulletproof uniform: “Shall we go somewhere far away? Just the two of us?”
The farther they drove from the city center, the more time Takina had to consider what it would be like. Perhaps if they weren’t on the run from an army of the undead, she wouldn’t think about it as desperately as she has; adrenaline has a way of twisting her focus and filling her mind with doubts and blank emotions. She’s used to the kinetic energy of a gunfight, the artistry of dancing between bullets, but she’s never been able to swerve between her emotions with the same finesse.
If it were just the two of them—
If it were just the two of them, perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad to dream.
“Takina?” Chisato calls, shaking Takina out of her thoughts. “Earth to Takina! Yoo-hoo!”
Takina whips her head around so fast she feels the snap of her muscles protesting. “Chisato, I was concentrating,” she lies.
“Concentrating on what, now?” There’s a devilish glint in Chisato’s eyes and smile, and Takina doesn’t like it. “Your face is getting pretty red, you know.”
Damn her. The world is still moving and Takina feels herself stunned instead, as sharply as if she’d been shot by a rubber bullet. “It’s your fault,” she says before she can stop herself.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Damn her. Takina bundles her knees to her chest and rests her chin there, on the cold skin of her kneecaps and the goosebumps cropping up. “It’s nothing.”
“That doesn’t sound like nothing,” Chisato says. There’s a hint of a laugh in her voice, a warbling tone in a crescendo, and the paradox that is Chisato Nishikigi looks angelic and demented all at once. “It sounds like you don’t know what to think about this whole thing.”
“I’m thinking about how frustrating it is to get stuck here with you of all people.”
Chisato puts her hand over her chest, as if her still heart could be shot into a flatline. “You wound me!” She thumps back against the car’s darkened headlight. Takina wonders if the glimmer of Chisato’s eyes could light the lamp itself if she only let it. “You didn’t seem to mind the idea of driving somewhere far off together.”
“That’s exactly what I’m stuck on,” Takina corrects, pinching the bridge of her nose. She sighs. “How are you so frustrating and yet so captivating all at once? It’s illogical.”
“More illogical than a zombie apocalypse?”
There’s no doubt in her mind. “Yes,” Takina replies. No hesitation. “Because I know that zombies don’t exist in reality, but you do.”
Somehow, despite all logical reasoning, Chisato herself is a mess of contradictions: a gifted assassin who practices pacifism, a girl without a heartbeat that rivals the sun in energy, a partner with a shy smile playing at her lips even as she presses each and every one of Takina’s buttons. “I do,” Chisato agrees. “And so do you. But I’d brave a zombie apocalypse in real life if it meant we could be together like this.”
How can Chisato be so blunt and so subtle at the same time? It doesn’t make any sense. “Together at the end of the world?”
“Together at the end of the world,” Chisato says, nodding. “Because it’s not really the end if you’re here by my side.” She leans in Takina's direction, and Takina catches her head on her shoulder without even a second of conscious thought.
Like Chisato belongs there, right at her side, her tenderness a part of Takina’s very being. Takina spent so long considering what life would be like with Chisato beside her that she’d never stopped to think about what it would be like without her.
The zombies could catch up to them at any minute. She could hear shambling from the forests behind them, the groan of a lumbering reanimated corpse dragging itself through the trees. They could be captured in a fraction of a second, and all of their training would be forfeit under the pressure of a collapsing world.
But Takina feels Chisato’s body lean into her, hears the soft sound of Chisato’s gentle and even breathing, tastes anticipation on her tongue and catches the faint scent of Chisato’s strawberry shampoo on her nose, and she doesn’t care about what could happen to them, only what should.
Takina turns to her side. Chisato is looking at her, her eyelashes fluttering up and down. Chisato has always seized every moment with full-powered honesty and joy, but for the first time, she waits in cautious silence as Takina stares at her, tilting her head to grant Takina greater access to her very core.
“This must be a dream,” Takina whispers. She can feel goosebumps blooming on her knees again when she breathes the words onto Chisato’s lips. “There’s no way I’d be able to do this in real life.”
“This is a dream, Takina, and I don’t want you to wake up yet.”
Takina thinks about what Chisato would do, if this was her dream. If this was Chisato’s dream, and Takina were the one reading the script and not writing it, would Chisato pull her closer? Would Chisato spin her into her orbit like she does so effortlessly, someone whose light rivals—but never drowns—the stars themselves? Would Chisato turn to her, stare at her like Takina is, and draw herself closer?
Would Chisato want to kiss her?
She doesn’t know what Chisato would do if it was her dream. But she knows, she knows—
She knows, when she moves to be in front of Chisato and kisses her, that only she would do this in her own shameful, forbidden dreams.
It’s forceful. There’s too many mechanics involved, and Takina has only ever read clinical textbooks in DA’s curriculum. Romance novels were never something she had the time to consider opening, if she even had the interest in them in the first place. She’d never thought about what someone else’s lips would feel like, but she has dreamed about whether Chisato’s warmth against her own would swallow her up or build her into something greater.
Takina has never done this before, and she knows it’s obvious in her uncertain movements and her trembling jaw. Their noses bump together. She keeps her hands to herself, not quite sure where they should go. They’re getting in the way; the car is getting in the way, she thinks, pressing Chisato against the headlight with more force than she needs to. Her inhibitions are getting in the way.
Chisato murmurs something into Takina’s lips, the pressure causing her to bounce back from the car and into Takina’s grip. She snakes her hands around Takina’s back, and Takina squeaks into the kiss, feeling Chisato’s fingers trace the curve of her spine, wind their way to the outline of her bra.
Takina leans forward. The lack of oxygen is making her feel lightheaded. Maybe Chisato’s warmth is swallowing her up, she thinks, and she feels a distinct emptiness as she finally pulls away, gasping for air like she’s breathing it for the first time.
Chisato says nothing. The corners of her mouth are tipped up into a smile.
Takina stares at her. She realizes, dizzyingly, that the chapstick on Chisato’s lips is smeared.
And Chisato—
“Okay!” Chisato hops to her feet in less than a second, her jump shocking Takina out of her very being. She puffs out her cheeks and slaps her palms against them. “This was totally worth it! But now you have to do it for real, Takina. No chickening out!”
Takina blinks. Chisato jumped so quickly that Takina is stuck looking at the space she left behind. “Are you ordering me to kiss you in real life?”
“It’s not an order.” Chisato stomps her foot in a way that Takina briefly considers almost cute. “It’s what the real Chisato wants! But more importantly, it’s what you want!”
“How can you know what either I or your real counterpart wants?” Takina asks her, rising to her full height again. For once, it’s impossible to meet Chisato’s gaze.
“I’m a part of your subconscious, so what I want is what you want. Or… what you want the real Chisato to do? Or maybe both?”
“That is what I asked you.”
“What’s with all the logic today?” Chisato asks her again, and Takina is suddenly reminded that they could see zombies lurching toward them in the rearview mirror at any moment. The thought doesn’t make her feel any better. “Well, not just today, I guess. Always. But a dream is the perfect time to let loose.”
“Letting loose isn’t becoming of a Lycoris.” There’s a pang of a memory, a slight flash of regret when she remembers shooting first and asking questions later, a split-second decision that ultimately expelled her from everything she’d known. “And it’s not in my nature.”
“So that means it’s time to practice.” Chisato puts her hands on her hips. She looks so much like a petulant café customer that Takina is half-wondering if she’s going to call for Mika to settle their dispute. “Your confession needs work. And your kissing does, too.”
Takina listens to the leaves rattling in the breeze above them. It’s a much nicer sound than Chisato’s voice right now—a lot less of a whine. “I believe you still understood the message.”
“But you have to do it all cool and smooth! If I know me, which”—Chisato spins and puts her chest forward, like she’s posing for a calendar Takina would have summarily trashed back in the Lycoris dorms—“I definitely do, then you’re going about it all wrong. Chisato Nishikigi won’t settle for a weak confession, you know!”
Takina touches at her lips. She can still feel faint traces of Chisato’s breath, like the rays of the early morning sun on the spring’s first flowers. “I thought I was being perfectly strong about it.”
“That’s not what I—!” Chisato huffs, stomping her foot on the ground again. She’s going to crack the earth like that. “Yes, you have strong arms, and apparently strong lips! But what I meant was something with more impact. Like an action movie with a dramatic confession during the climax!”
Takina imagines a scene playing out in front of her, Chisato’s dream visage and her own acting on stage to her appraisal. She watches as they dance on the battlefield beneath the moonlight—not in each others’ arms but at each others’ backs, tip-toeing around obstacles and vaulting over bullets. Their guns flash with flowers of light, gunpowder swirling around them as their ammo embeds itself into zombies left, right, and center; Takina can see the glint of Chisato’s smile in her mind, bright through the metallic residue in the air. They swirl around the arena, plié into relevé and back, until their bullets are spent and the zombies decimated. When they crash together again, back-to-back, Takina imagines—
Takina imagines herself grabbing Chisato’s shoulder and spinning her around, twirling Chisato into her arms. She imagines the bodies beneath them are a strange and lifeless witness to their farce, something that makes their movements mean something. She imagines tipping Chisato’s body down with her own, their arms linked together and held straight out, Chisato looking up at her with wonder in her eyes. She imagines pulling Chisato up to her face, to whisper sweet words far beyond who Takina knows she could be in reality, to tie their lips together like the very connection is a prerequisite for their existence.
Takina imagines it, and then dashes the scene from her mind. “That won’t happen.”
“What?” Chisato’s voice is little more than a squeal of disappointment. “Why not?”
She looks at the empty stage in front of her, the climax to her mental play. “It’s not something I could do. If Chisato wants a partner like that, I would not be able to give it to her. I can’t be her perfect match.”
Chisato lets the statement hang in the air for a moment, Takina’s words spilling between them and crashing to the ground like flash mines. She fidgets. “Perfect doesn’t exist, you know,” she says. She’s uncharacteristically quiet, as if even the real Chisato wouldn’t know what to say. “But I think you’re pretty close to it.”
The mental bombs beneath Takina’s footing feel like duds in comparison to the shock Chisato is imparting on her. “Is my subconscious really this egotistical?” she asks.
“The real Chisato thinks you’re pretty close to perfect,” Chisato corrects, wagging a finger at her. “Like, yeah, TabeMog reviews say that I’m the perfect waitress at Café LycoReco, but every review that they write has a photo of you in it, too. The only reason it’s a perfect place is because you’re there with me.”
The pudding Takina ate after dinner must have gone sour, because the only reason she can imagine that her unconscious mind can conjure such embarrassing words is food poisoning. “Chisato, please take this seriously.”
“First of all,” Chisato says, using her finger to tick off her complaints instead of chastising her again, “you’re the one that’s not taking this seriously. Second, you ought to think about what you want, too. The only reason we’re talking about this is because you’ve buried what you want for so long that only a dream version of your future girlfriend—”
“Please don’t make assumptions.”
“—Fine, crush,” she corrects, the corners of her lips turning up at Takina’s frown, “can tell that you need help. So think about it for a minute: what is it that you want?”
A bird starts to chirp on the branches above them, its song taken away by the breeze. The sun is setting. A warm, soft wind brushes her cheek, thawing the ice Takina froze herself in long ago. She could respond with any number of explanations that Chisato already knows, even if she’d disregarded the tenets entirely: Lycoris don’t want anything. Lycoris work for the sake of the people, the safety of Japan; they do not want peace, because peace is something that merely is because of them. Lycoris must be stalwart and focused on the many, not selfish and obsessed with the few.
Lycoris can’t want anything. But Takina wants this.
Her throat is dry. She swallows past the rawness, testing the words on her tongue before she lets them escape. “I want you,” she whispers, feeling her heart leap in her chest. Her heartbeat quickens as if she could share her pulse with Chisato’s flatline. “The real you. I wouldn’t let myself think about it because I wasn’t sure what it could mean, and I…”
Chisato looks at her, patiently. There’s sunlight in Chisato’s eyes and sunlight in Takina’s heart and she feels like she’s burning up.
“I was not sure if it would be acceptable. To want someone.”
Chisato’s smile fills the contours of her face, as if she was born with it and the idea of it disappearing isn’t physically possible. “What have I told you about choosing things for yourself?” she says, stepping closer; her hands grab Takina’s before Takina can pull away out of instinct, and Takina feels the cool water from the plaza fountain at DA spraying on her skin again, a mirage of Chisato's own making. “You have to go after what you want. Because it’s not selfish to ask for something, and it’s not selfish to share what you truly think. It’d be more selfish to hide it when it’s what I want, too.”
It might be a dream, but the warmth of Chisato’s hands in hers feels so implausibly, impossibly real. “I think I’m in love with you,” Takina says, slow and deliberate, “and it scares me.”
“That’s why we’re a team, you know?” Chisato reaches with one hand to caress Takina’s cheek; with her other, she squeezes Takina’s hand, the pressure as comforting as it is terrifying. “We jump in the line of fire together every night. It’s not as scary to face your feelings as it is to dodge bullets.”
Yes, it is, Takina wants to tell her, but her words get trapped between her teeth. She feels her chest catch with every breath. Why do her own dreams still require her to breathe in and out, to keep her lungs filled with air? “We were both trained to dodge bullets from birth, Chisato. That’s natural.”
Chisato laughs. It’s a clear, gentle melody, and it puts the songbirds above them to shame. “Yeah, and it’s not so natural for Lycoris to want something, I guess. Or someone. But you don’t have to be scared of telling me. I—the real Chisato—both of us love you, too.”
“That’s not what I mean.” Takina finds the strength to squeeze Chisato’s hand back. It helps to stymie the tremors she can feel creeping up, the energy in her fingers close to leaking out into something abjectly terrifying. “I mean that I’m afraid of… losing you.”
She remembers resting her head at Chisato’s chest, the hollow sensation of it. The certainty she felt from Chisato’s breast as she inhaled and exhaled, her chest rising and falling without a pulse to keep her steady. Chisato is anything but empty, and yet Takina feels an overwhelming sense of desolation when her heart beats alone.
“Then we face that fear together until joy wins out.” Her tone brooks no argument. “Just because you’re afraid of something doesn't mean it’s not worth trying. Café LycoReco is a sanctuary for our customers’ worries. We solve their problems and help them smile again. It’s not so bad to chip away at that fear, one day at a time.”
It’s a sanctuary for Takina, too, she knows. A place where she finally knew what life could be outside of the sterile walls of DA, outside of the smell of gunpowder and the deafening shock of bullets. A place where she could call home, where she could return to for more than a place to sleep and prepare for her next mission.
A place where she finally understood what it meant to love and be loved in return.
“Just give it a shot, okay? Rent an action movie from Tsutaya and scoot over closer on the couch. Then just lean in really close.” Chisato pulls Takina into her orbit as if to demonstrate, and Takina gasps; the look in Chisato’s eyes is making is hard to concentrate. “And then…”
There’s a whisper of pressure on Takina’s cheek, and suddenly, Chisato stops. Their noses are touching. Chisato is giving her the opportunity to back out, she knows, even though it’s not the first time in this dream that they’ve come together as if they’d never known a life before each other at all.
She reminds herself that it’s okay to want, and Takina closes the distance between them of her own volition again. This time it’s tender, languid, more emotion than logic; even the jolt that rushes through Takina’s body feels like lingering electric shocks, not a sudden burst of energy. She captures Chisato’s surprised squeak with her lips and laces their fingers together. She feels her knees going weak, as if she could collapse like a nova bursting into everything and nothing all at once. The totality of everything she could ever need and ever want.
A Lycoris does not want, but Takina knows that she’d never be able to look at every star in the galaxy and not wish for Chisato’s light instead.
When they part, Takina reminds herself to breathe. There’s a light dusting of pink on Chisato’s cheeks, and Chisato’s hand is still in her own, and Takina has never felt more complete than she does right now, even in her dreams.
“See?” Chisato whispers, and her hand leaves Takina’s cheek, a sudden chill seeping in its place; in penance, Chisato presses her forehead to Takina’s. They’re almost the same height, yet Chisato seems like a bigger presence than Takina could ever be. “It’s okay to want to be happy.”
Takina lets herself believe.
“So, you think you’re ready to try that for real?” Chisato asks. Her heat has never burned before, but Takina feels the chill seeping out of her as if she’d melted from the touch just the same. “The real Chisato has been wanting to see the fourth John Wick movie. She’d want to watch it with you. So let’s make sure we clean up these zombies before you wake up so you’re not stuck thinking about whether we’d kick their butts or not, and then you can see how cool action movies really are.”
“I didn’t like the third movie,” Takina says.
“But you sure did like the video essays I sent you about the High Table stuff,” Chisato adds. She touches Takina’s lips with her finger and smiles. “And I heard the fourth one has lots of that. So I think you’d love it. I want to watch it with you when we’re done here.”
Despite herself, Takina wants that, too.
Takina wakes up in her bed with sunlight on her lips and warmth in her fingertips, and she doesn’t know how to want anything but the feeling of Chisato next to her.
She steadies herself as she rolls her knees beneath her, stretching the tension out of her sore muscles and aching heart. For a moment, she tilts beneath the pull of the Earth and lets it take her where it may. And then she thinks—
It’s okay. She hasn’t made a habit of lying to Chisato, even if she’d been lying to herself to close off her own heart. And so she knows that it’s real, even if it took the Chisato in her head to sort it out.
She pulls her phone off her nightstand and hits the first number on speed-dial.
“Chisato,” Takina says, her name sounding like the hum of a songbird when the call connects. “Would you like to watch a movie tonight?”