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The URA award ceremonies, like most else, always took place at the end of the year.
Winter had long since blown in, cooling the air until it was harsh enough to bite. Nights now bled darker, the stark white of the moon doing little to edge away the black, deep wells of the sky.
For those who stayed inside the hall, dancing the night away, heating their blood with wine and laughter, it wasn’t much of a problem.
For McQueen, here only on account of her status as a Mejiro, it made the night drag on longer.
The balcony she found herself on was silent, the potted plants bare and dead at her feet. The party was held in a penthouse, leaving her with a sparkling view of the city’s vast sea; light swam along roads of rushing cars, or lingered in the small dots of apartment windows. So many people squeezed together into one, faraway scene.
“Looks like someone had the same idea as me, huh?”
A voice. A familiar voice. It was the kind that could cut through any crowd, vibrant and alive and once quite childish. Now, it seemed to fall just that little bit harder.
“Aren’t you the type to dance the night away?” She countered, turning back to spot the face she expected (but wasn’t quite sure whether she wanted) to see. “Teio.”
Time had aged her like it did all else. Even the ‘forever child’ Tokai Teio wasn’t immune to it.
An orange glow engulfed her back, warmth leaking out from the party before it faded out into the night’s blues. It caught the burning auburn of Teio’s hair, curling in its usual playful waves and tied at the back — half-up, half-down, just like during Tracen’s dance so long ago now. Her face was still carved with a boyish softness, though now it had matured in the sharp curve of her brow and jaw. McQueen recalled a time when her cheeks were still chubby enough to pull at.
“I’ve spent too many nights doing that,” she mused, crossing the balcony to stand at the bannister, too. Her arms came to rest upon the sloped bars, strained to reach. She was still short.. a few centimetres couldn’t change that. “Now I’m all out of juice. My legs cramp up after the first song.”
When they were younger, dance had been just another of the many things they competed with. Teio had the upper hand usually, her energy as contagious as her peerless smile, bared readily like the heart on her sleeve. No wonder it was tiring, laying her entire self out on the stage like that. McQueen had always admired it.
How many years had it been since then? Seven, eight?
“It’s a surprise, really. You don’t usually come to these ‘galas’,” McQueen said, and knew that it gave away the fact she looked out for her at all. “What changed?”
A shaky breath tried its hardest to form a chuckle before falling flat on Teio’s lips. “The URA wanted to see my lovely face again,” she answered, inclining her head to peer up at McQueen with a cheeky smile. “And I wanted to see yours.”
Just as she did when they were young, Teio had a way of making her blush. Still, even the fuzzy warmth in her cheeks couldn’t stop her from sighing, the cool air taking it away - away with her old feelings. “You could have called.”
“I know.” The woman beside her shuffled, her pink-tinted fingers pulling up the cuffs of her sleeves. She seemed to consider for a moment, swaying her head as if to catch a retort on the wind. “And you could have texted.”
“Ha. I know that too.”
It really wasn’t a case of ‘wrongdoing’ on either of their ends. Life just had a way of crawling on, ever forward, and its pace never stopped or stalled for anyone. After graduation, some kept running in their own ways; backed by a life of victories and losses, fans and rivals, dreams and memories, they dug their feet into the ground and made new marks. Others? Others had a late start, or maybe they never left the starting gate at all.
That was McQueen, in a way.
“I actually came here as the figurehead for a new URA programme,” the shorter woman murmured, tentative now. “The goal is to nurture all of those girls with hearts like gold and legs like glass. Care for even the most fragile of things can stop them from shattering.”
They had cared so much, but that didn’t stop the inevitable fracture. That bond, strung together with casts, wounds, and hospital gowns, was one that paved its way to a miracle. Of course, how could they not have cherished each other? They were each other’s goal, the reward at the end of a long day of running.
But McQueen was the ‘eternal stayer’, and Teio was a racer who passed into the light and shot straight into the dark, a shooting star whose beauty lasted only a brief but brilliant moment. Whilst the Mejiro’s successor branded her feet into the turf, the Monarch stepped right off. She hit the ground running, but wasn’t afraid to walk.
“You’re getting back into the racing scene?” McQueen asked, sure that the face she was making was comical in its.. relief?
“Well, you won’t catch me running a lap around Nakayama racecourse anymore-“ she quipped, grinning. “-But I always planned to come back like this. I owe it to the younger me, crossing dream after dream off of that damn board.”
“You were strong.”
A beat.
“I had you.”
Keeping in touch started easy enough. They talked over the phone, arranging to meet in person from time to time. Something was always missing. There were fleeting glances, hidden touches, gentle brushes of a knee, all small signs of a string ready to snap— all of which they passed by, unworried because why should they be? Neither of them were rushed. They had all the time in the world, years to collect their feelings and even more to share them.
But life had a way of crawling onwards, and McQueen always liked to take her time. It wasn’t a quick or swift disconnect. There was no argument over the phone, no hangout that went horrifically awry: nothing. One day they were talking, and the next they were not.
Teio had run ahead. She’d decided to travel, to gain experience, and McQueen had smiled upon hearing it like her heart didn’t twist rather than leap. Her duties to her family kept her grounded, whereas Teio’s adoration for the stars she’d tried to catch since childhood urged her to take to the skies. It was an inevitable split. A simple diversion in goals.
McQueen regretted it all anyway.
“Am I still your goal?” She wondered, half a joke, half a plea. “Even after all this time?”
“Even time can’t steal away our miracle, McQueen.” The response was serious. The strong, confident tone behind it served only to make her shudder - not unpleasantly, but certainly only in a way Teio could make her. “We made it together, after all.”
Maybe she’d had too much to drink. Her vision had begun to blur, eyes stinging at the corners the more she tried to blink her way to clarity. “I’m sorry.”
“Me too.”
“I was too scared to call you, too scared to look up and only see your back,” she explained, her tongue feeling heavy as she swallowed back her fears. “I wanted to run alongside you forever. That childishness, I think, is what scared me the most.”
Of course it was. Even when she was young, McQueen knew what she had to do; she was aware of the weight of her name, the way it would loom over her back until she propped it up with her own arms again. There never felt like there was a chance to let go, to follow that fleeting spark of love. It was only her and her future.
Hiccuping, she sagged her shoulders and continued, “You told me you were going to see the world, and I remember your face when all I did was congratulate you.”
The vivid memory of a brief frown flashed behind her eyes, catching on the way the younger Teio had wilted beneath her rejection.
“I thought you would ask to join me,” she whispered, as if admitting to it was some kind of secret. Startled, McQueen whipped her head around to look at her, finding a soft, bittersweet slope of a smile playing at unsure lips. “When you didn’t, I realised how silly it was to expect that you would. I was still a kid at heart, I think. I only had a responsibility to myself, and I thought you.. you were the same.”
Instead of waiting for a response, her grip on the bannister tightened, anchoring McQueen to her silence. “It was what you said that day. It opened my eyes, ‘made me realise we were really growing up,” Teio added, sucking in a breath. “‘I’m happy for you.’”
Of course. For the first time in forever, there had been a distance carved between them. There was ‘you’ and ‘I’, and a clear absence of ‘‘us’.
“You stopped calling as much after that,” McQueen muttered. Her heart throbbed in her chest, a steadier beat than her thoughts or the words that voiced them, and threatened to spill in hot tears.
“Yeah, well..” the derby champion bit her lip, a glimpse of turmoil creasing those kind, warm features. She seemed to have noticed the wetness in her old friend’s eyes. The silence felt like a realisation. “I always had a habit of bottling things up.”
McQueen dipped her head to that, remembering each phase of time after those fractures - her avoidance, her abandonment, her self-imposed isolation. She could picture them vividly, of course she could: every tear, every stutter of breath, every awkward attempt to regain herself, they were all seared into her mind. Back then, she had wanted to smoothen away all of her troubles, kiss them better with all she had.
She wanted, more than anything, to do that now too. It was weird.
Teio had a habit of shrinking away just like she did, and it had always been up to the other to pull them back. They were never the quiet types - both of made declarations and meant them, promised the world and then offered more. It was naive.
It was sincere.
And yet.. once a month check-ups had turned into whenever they could remember, then crumbled further until it was only a message during certain holidays. Both of them were growing, changing, trying to find their place again in a world much bigger than the winner’s podium.
McQueen took up the mantle she’d been promised since she was a child. She played as a role model for her younger cousins, watching them debut, just as she had, in the vivid cyan of their family racewear.
It wasn’t a horrible lifestyle, watching those children, small and clumsy and with tangled tails; the very foals whose shoelaces she’d tied were now filling the same boots she once had, writing their names into history right after her own. It was the life she had expected, the one she had worked so hard to achieve.
And still, the love she had for them all was a different kind of love than what she had for Teio. Even the dignified, polite Mejiro McQueen had a habit of throwing her pleasantries aside when her monarch was involved.
In the end, they would always be like this. Side by side, awkward, retracting steps over themselves like remembering an old routine.
“I remember.”
But never apart. Not forever.
She raised a hand to wipe away her tears, but it wasn’t the cold fabric of her own glove that met her cheek in the middle. No- only one person’s touch could be that warm on a night like this one, tender and gentle like it was scared to be there. McQueen couldn’t help but press into her palm like she was chasing a fire, the soft, trailing fingers doing nothing but stoking the flame.
“How do I make it up to you?”
And it was so, so simply put that McQueen couldn’t help but laugh. Her own breath shuddered on it, straining to stay light, reluctant to be open. Without even meaning to, Teio steadied it with her own bubble of giggles, teeth flashing in a sharp smile.
“Come on, McQueen! Why are you laughing?” She pressed, her other hand slipping up to poke her on the forehead, firm enough that the Mejiro couldn’t help but squeak - how embarassing.. “I’ll be as straightforward as I need to be. I won’t make any more mistakes again. I promise.”
“You sound like someone about to confess their love,” she teased, the words feeling familiar on her tongue. Despite the red-faced mumbling of the woman next to her, she continued on, “After all these years.. does it not hurt to think of the time wasted?”
Thankfully, that question recalibrated Teio’s mind. Her ears twitched, hand dropping from McQueen’s cheek to dig inside her jacket pocket. “It’s not wasted! Think of it as finding ourselves,” she said, whipping around to face her directly. In her hand, squeezed so tightly her knuckles were turning white, was a rose. Only when it was thrust into McQueen’s face did she realise the truth of it.
It was.. plastic. The petals curled upwards, fabric coiling around a hard yet smooth stem. Teio dipped her head, ears flattening against the deep brown of her hair.
“No matter what, this rose will never wither. It doesn’t matter how old it gets, what weather it toughs, whose hands it sits between..” she rambled, looking up again. Her eyes shone with desperation, lingering inside a deep, melancholy blue. “It’s childish, probably, and a little ugly, but it’s my heart. It’s—“
“It’s exactly what I love about you.” She plucked the stem from between Teio’s fingers, bringing the artificial flower to her nose. It tickled, and it didn’t really smell of anything, but she smiled nonetheless and breathed it in all the same.
“Ahh, come on now..” despite the bashfulness, her lifelong rival was practically grinning from ear to ear, the sharp point of a tooth betraying her attempts to smoothen it out into a grimace. “My face feels all hot.”
“From guilt?” McQueen wondered, eyeing the candle-lit ball behind them. “After all, I believe you snatched this from one of those table vases, didn’t you?”
“I considered it for a long time!” She argued, face flushing a tiny bit red and ears flicking, disgruntled, backwards like they were frowning too. “As soon as I saw you, I knew I needed to do something. Rudolf said-!”
“So that’s why.” Amused by the sheepish aversion of Teio’s eyes, McQueen hummed and tucked the rose into her blouse, bending the stem so that it fell over her collar like a fresh kiss. “You know, you’ve always been the type to say the most romantic things on pure accident. Our Halloween date, that day in the rain after my diagnosis.. out of nowhere, and completely clumsily every time, you’d say things that made me feel so special.”
The air between them grew heavier. Silent. McQueen sniffled, felt her lips tremble, and then turned to catch Teio’s gaze.
Glistening, the eyes she met welled up with a new, rueful prick of tears. They pooled and spilled within moments of one another, slipping like cold rivulets down cheeks already bitten by the frost. “I meant them all,” she mumbled, the heel of her palms dragging across her face in desperate attempts to dry her eyes. “So why did I.. why did we drift apart?”
“Maybe we’d been too lucky,” McQueen replied, chest tightening at the sight of someone so bright and steady crumpling right in front of her. For a moment, she reached to swipe them away, but settled instead for placing a hand on her shoulder; this kind of silent stability, she knew, was more of a comfort to Teio than anything else. “Or maybe we needed to grow up.”
Teio barked out a laugh, and bit out her words through salt and wetness. “When you’re young, you really do think you can do anything, huh?” She asked, leaving only the space for a heartbeat between that and her next words, “but that’s my answer. That rose. It may be stolen, but I mean it!”
Her tears were still falling, but now she wasn’t trying to wipe them away before they came. Her jaw set, her eyes narrowed, and in their small pocket of time, she allowed herself to cry.
“It won’t be easy. It’s been seven years, hasn’t it?” McQueen asked. “We’ll have to relearn who each other are.”
“I wouldn’t mind. I want to know you: your past self and your present and, well, can I say your future?” The brunette grinned like such a statement was the most normal thing in the world, and as if she wasn’t still silently weeping - McQueen wasn’t quite sure how she was pulling that off, but it was probably a ploy to let her eyes retain their sparkle. “And I wouldn’t mind sharing myself with you. I never shied away from a chance to talk big!”
“So that hasn’t changed,” she murmured, unsurprised by the fondness that slept below her tongue. Her hand slid from Teio, reaching instead for the flower at her chest, fingertips touching the physical reminder of their ‘bond’. “I know it will be hard, but I would like to try.”
A deep breath escaped her, or maybe she released it. Either way, the heaviness that had weighed on her lungs for, by now, more than half a decade began to alleviate. It wasn’t gone yet, not completely, but Teio was smiling at her like she’d just put her universe back in order, and perhaps that was enough.
“McQueen!”
“Yeah?”
“I missed you.”