Archive of Our Own

The locker room was loud, cramped, and bizarrely damp. Norn had only been there long enough to shove her track bag into a locker, and she had already been elbowed twice by the girl to the right of her. The only thing keeping her from losing it was the fact that Rudy was to the left of her and didn’t seem to mind Norn borrowing a bit of her personal space to expand her own bubble. She tried not to think about the fact that she was close enough to Rudy to feel her body heat as she took off her school top.

Back when Norn was a kid she was enamored by the concept of dressing rooms. They came up constantly in interviews with umas running in national races. Just about every article she read had some anecdote about something their trainer said, or a team member dropping by before the race, or just the nervous energy in the room. The idea of having a room to herself, a room where she was the main character, just really seemed magical to her as a kid. One time in elementary school, she even got Rudy and Mini to pretend they were in a dressing room with her before a race. Mini had been a terrible trainer.

Norn winced, as the girl to her right jabbed her in the side with her elbows again. She was this close to shoving the girl into her locker. She hated that you didn’t get a dressing room for regional races. Yeah the big regional races took place on the same Chukyo tracks as the national ones did, but with everyone running in track suits, there wasn’t much of a point to giving them more than a locker room. That, and the proper dressing rooms were all taken up by the actual racers in nationals who’d be running a much more prestigious race later in the day.

She shook her head, making a conscious effort to correct herself. She was a real racer. She wasn’t running something nearly as prestigious, but she trained for it just as hard… She wished she had a dressing room, or at the very least a locker room dedicated to their team rather than the entire race.

Norn sighed, pulling her shirt over her head. The thick canvas material of the racing bib hung awkwardly on her body, tenting weirdly and refusing to match her curves no matter how she tightened the straps. Looking at herself in the mirror mounted to the inside of her locker, it was clear that no level of hair or makeup would salvage how frumpy the track suit made her look. Not for the first time she wished she got to wear something more like what the umas at the G1 races got to wear.

She was under no delusions she’d ever make it to that level, though. Yes, she had started taking her training seriously ever since that one race with Oguri that changed her, but wasn’t going to pretend that she could manage the same miracle that beast had wrought. She would still settle for her small, regional, pond, but she was going to be the queen of it instead of just settling for good enough. This race was her first step in the path to taking down March.

Finishing up by tying her track jacket around her waist, she closed her locker with a clang, feeling the metal rattle under her hand. To her left, Rudy had already slipped on her jacket—somehow not at all bothered by the sweltering heat of over a dozen umas packed in a tiny room—and was now leaning against her own locker staring off into space with a vacant expression, tail motionless, and her hands in her pockets. Unlike Norn, Rudy’s racing bib seemed to actually suit her, and not just because it bore the number one. It pissed her off, and Norn could only find so much comfort in the fact that Rudy’s much flatter chest was pretty much the entire reason the bib was hanging well on her frame.

Norn pushed past Rudy out of the locker room and into the small corridor that connected the collection of locker rooms to the tunnel. Across from the door, Mini sat on a bench, still in her school uniform. It was honestly a mystery why she was even allowed inside given she wasn’t participating in the upcoming race.

Mini looked up and snickered. “Your ears are flicking like crazy, Norn. Want to play ‘Pre-race Jitters’ like when we were kids? Trainer Mini has premium advice befitting a top class uma.”

Rudy laughed, emerging from the locker room behind Norn. “You were terrible at playing trainer. You kept telling us to run with our eyes closed so we wouldn’t be scared, and then you’d trip Norn the moment she went along with it.”

“Like you were any better at playing the ‘concerned rival giving a pep talk’!” Mini retorted, full of fake indignation betrayed by the playful swish of her tail, “You used to chew on a grass stalk because you thought it made you look cool and talk about how your victory was already assured.”

“That was cool!”

Norn groaned, rolling her eyes dramatically. “You’re both idiots. I am not running with my eyes closed, and Rudy…” She turned to face Rudy, donning about the cockiest grin she could muster. “…I am going to smoke you today.”

Rudy matched Norn’s grin. “Bring it on!”

The sharp click of a course staff member’s shoes on the tile floor interrupted their conversation before Norn could continue to posture. It was go time. As everyone started to slowly file out to set up for the starting gates, she clung tightly to that bravado. It was more than earned.

“Norn! Rudy!” Their trainer called out to them as they walked down the tunnel. She had a warm looking blazer, perhaps a little too warm for mid-autumn, and her chest adorned with a trainer’s badge. She was about as put together as Norn had ever seen her, and it was, as always, servicable. “Goddesses, Norn, are you okay?”

Norn scoffed. “Of course I’m okay.”

“Her ears haven’t stopped since we got to the locker room,” Rudy said.

Norn grumbled quietly, but did not correct her.

“Listen Norn, you’ll be fine. You’ve trained for this.” Her voice was laden with misguided pity, in a frankly unnecessary attempt to comfort. It served only to needle at Norn, and piss her off even further.

Their trainer continued, addressing the both of them, “You both remember what we talked about before the race right? We don’t need to go over strategy again?”

Norn and Rudy both nodded the affirmative.

“Now have either of you seen Mini? She was supposed to meet me in the stands.”

Rudy answered, “Last I saw she was sneaking into the locker room. Probably going to swap everyone’s underwear around or something.”

“Shit.” Their trainer bolted off the way Norn had just come.

The lead up to the race was the same as it had been on any of the smaller venues she had run in before. It was the standard showboating for the skeleton crowd that showed up early to get seats for the more impressive races later in the day. There wasn’t the same level of grandeur that the umas in nationals demanded, but Norn was still going to own it. She made sure to give a cute pose as she took off the track jacket she had thrown on only a moment before emerging onto the track. The sound of a bored announcer filling dead air grated.

She found her position near the twelfth gate, finally separating from Rudy, and started to do her stretches. She had trained. Maybe not her entire time at school, but certainly since that race with Oguri. She was trying. She had changed.

She looked to her sides, taking in the lineup again. It was just her, Rudy, and a bunch of no names. No March. No Oguri. She had it in the bag. She could beat Rudy. When they were kids she always had. And it was okay that it was such a small race. It was just her first step—one step of many, and a demonstration of her growth.

A race tech signaled, and she took her position in her gate, the rattle of it closing behind her filling her skull.

She had this. She wasn’t the same Norn. She wouldn’t settle for placing. She wouldn’t settle for being the best in her town. She was going to win. She had this. She had tried. She had practiced. She had trained. She had this.

She had this. She had this. She had this. She had this. She had-

The crack of the starting pistol. Norn bolted forward a half a second too late. The pack was already forming with her near the back. She tried to jockey for position, but the first corner loomed, and she struggled to get closer to the inside rail, forced to take a much wider arc than she wanted to.

She had intended to pace chase, to mark one of the front runners and maintain a perfect distance, but coming into the second straight even Rudy, a rough and tumble late surger, was ahead of her. She couldn’t waste the moment it would take to check who was behind her. Norn needed to force her way through the pack. She needed to get back to her original plan.

She had the entire second straight before the final corner to make that happen, but each time she tried to move forward there was no gap to force her way through. She wasn’t Oguri—she didn’t have the stamina to go wide around the rapidly approaching final bend.

But she had to make something happen. This was her first step. She didn’t have time to hesitate. She didn’t have time to falter.

Moving out, before she even hit the final bend, Norn started her surge.

She could feel Rudy’s eyes on her as she passed her on the last bit of straight before the final corner. With each frantic step she clawed another position back. Her lungs burned, and her legs ached before she was even halfway through the bend.

She came into the final stretch barely hanging on to third.

Norn’s body screamed at her. Her legs felt like lead, and it took every last bit of energy left in her just to keep moving forward. Rudy shot past, and Norn could only watch the girl’s back as one by one she lost every single place she had gained.

Though she’d never acknowledge it out loud, Norn knew she wasn’t exceptional. She was pretty damn good, but she wasn’t by any means exceptional. To be exceptional was to be borderline inhuman.

She was trying though. For the first time in her life she really had given a race her all. It was supposed to have gone better. But her all wasn’t the same as someone else’s all. Hers was smaller and easily trampled. It was the product of small talent mired in a lifetime of being good enough, fragile and easily overshadowed by those with greater talents who worked them harder. And because she tried, because she pushed herself to her limit, her inadequacies burned.

As she stumbled over the finish line dead last, Norn Ace regretted trying.

The small crowd cheering sounded so much bigger when it wasn’t for her. Ahead, across the sea of nameless umas blending together in a homogeneous mixture of crying and celebrating was Rudy, two sweat streaked arms held over her head to show off her victory. It was such a worthless race and even then, Norn struggled just to make last. Even in front of such a small crowd, she had made a fool of herself. She wanted to scream. She wanted to scream. She wanted to scream.

All at once, Norn’s exertion caught up with her. She gasped for breath. Her legs trembled, and it was all she could do not to fall over. Her stomach threatened to rebel, and then two steps later followed through, forcing her to buckle over to avoid spewing bile all over her shirt. She could see flecks of vomit in the frizzy halo of hair thrown over her head and revulsion drove her to gag out the last of her stomach and fall into a fit of dry heaves.

Someone touched her back. Her hair disappeared from her peripheral vision. She could feel the pressure of words being spoken on her skin, but she couldn’t hear them. All she heard was the pounding of blood in her ears.

She stumbled, and it was only then that she realized she was being led. A shoulder was wedged awkwardly into her armpit, her own arm was making no attempt to hold on to the person propping her up. Her eyes wandered down and found a sweat soaked shirt plastered with the number one. She looked up, and there was Rudy, her face twisted in a pitying grimace.

Norn wanted nothing more than to shove Rudy away, but she lacked the strength to do so.

The bus ride back to Kasamatsu was disturbingly subdued. Norn expected some level of fanfare to celebrate Rudy’s victory. In fact, she was dreading it; a pounding headache set in as she was leaving the course, and she really wasn’t looking forward to the cacophony. But it was silent save for the rumbling of the engine, the sound of Mini tapping away at some handheld game, and the thud of the tires every time they went over a bump. Their trainer was seated at the other end of the bus, quietly going over notes. Even Rudy, the victor, was just staring out the window at the setting sun.

It was weird. Even for races where all three of them had lost, there had been something going on on the ride back. Sometimes it was ribbing over the race, other times it was just the three of them coming together to forget it ever happened. But now that one of them- now that Rudy had won, they were all silent?

A small part of Norn wanted to believe that it was because they were worried about her. Dead last was bad, and Rudy at least had seen the state she was in at the end of the race. Her hair was still damp from rinsing out the bits of vomit. It wouldn’t be that absurd for someone to be worried about her. She wasn’t insane for thinking that she warranted it. The closer to Kasamatsu they got without anyone so much as waving to her, the more certain she was that something else was going on.

So if they weren’t worried about her, what were they doing? A sickening realization dawned on Norn. She was being iced out. She’d never been iced out before, but she knew what it looked like; she had done it to others over some pretty inconsequential slights before, and what was her display at the end of the race if not a slight so massive it would be impossible to ignore? It was so obvious.

She stilled her tapping foot, the sound of her shoe on the vinyl flooring fading as soon as she noticed it. The sun had slipped below the horizon, leaving her surroundings lit by the flicker of passing streetlamps. There was the faint odor of vomit, and she wasn’t sure if it was her or the tacky floor beneath her feet. The bus shuddered as it turned off the main road and toward the training center.

Norn was being stupid. It was painfully obvious that she was being stupid. Rudy didn’t play the social game like Norn did. Rudy was brash, arrogant, and bordering on violent at times—approaching things with the same level of social competency as Norn was honestly beyond her, and Norn knew that. To have gone that far into convincing herself that Rudy was plotting… It spoke to how shaken she was in a way that sickened her.

“Stupid,” she muttered to herself, her words lost in the crunch of gravel beneath the tires. She was just unsteady. She needed to shore up her foundations… Find some out of place kid, and beat her down to affirm both their places in society. She could already feel the rush- Shit. No, she was beyond that. She had moved past that. She was better than that now. She was-

The brakes squealed as the bus came to a halt outside the dorm rooms, jolting her out of her head with the long uncomfortable tone. She stood up just a moment too fast and had to take a large unsteady step down the aisle to remain upright. She corrected herself by taking another large step, just as large; one slip was a mistake, two was a choice. Despite being seated the furthest back in the bus, she was the first off, and, feet on loose gravel, she forced a dramatic yawn to sell it.

“Today took it out of you, huh?” Rudy prodded as she dismounted the bus behind Norn. “Heading to bed early?”

It had only been hours since then, but Norn couldn’t remember the face Rudy had made in the tunnel outside the track. Still she recalled the feeling and, even if it was just in her head, it felt like it was dripping from Rudy’s words. She wanted to back out, find another path that made her look less like a child, but Norn had made her choice, so she replied in line: “Yep, I am exhausted.”

Rudy waited a moment too long to say, “Right…”

“…”

Mini walked past the both of them, her neck craned at a weird angle peering at her handheld as she fiddled with the angler fish light snaking out of the top. She was either unaware of, or simply did not care about, the air of awkwardness that filled the area.

Norn took that as an opportunity to head wordlessly to her dorm room, all the while unable to shake the wriggling bit of doubt telling her that Rudy was up to something.

“No see, swapping someone’s pen with one that writes in invisible ink is kiddie stuff.” Mini smirked, flicking her spoon at Rudy to punctuate her sentence. “What you really need to do is cover the entire page in invisible ink beforehand, and then while they’re writing on it the heat from the kotatsu turns the entire sheet black.”

“Since when was there a kotatsu?” Rudy asked, seemingly unaware of the fleck of whipped cream Mini had deposited on her cheek.

Norn groaned and looked down at the small collection of circular water stains that covered the table in front of her. She was seated alone on her side of the booth at a bustling family style restaurant, Rudy and Mini across from her. Her pounding headache from the night before had yet to go away, and as her concentration lapsed, Rudy and Mini’s conversation faded into the thrum of noise around them. Words flowed through her ears but she didn’t bother turning them into anything more coherent than an endless stream of mouth sounds punctuated by the smack of Mini’s lips as she took another bite of her frankly gluttenous parfait. It nauseated Norn, to the point that even the dainty strawberry shortcake sitting on her own plate failed to be appetizing.

The night before had been short. She had barely managed to clean herself to the point where she stopped feeling the tacky sensation of vomit on her skin before dropping like a brick in her bed. And that morning had been even shorter, the coarse rapping of Rudy’s knuckles on her bed waking her up late enough that it was already almost afternoon and dragging her to their little celebratory get together.

She hadn’t had time to put herself together. She hadn’t had time to find a throughline for her actions that didn’t paint her as insane. She hadn’t had time to patch her facade. Hell, she hadn’t even had time to take painkillers for her stupid headache. So instead of being on top of things—instead of being a confident social butterfly—she was a sullen mess staring at water stains on the table. It was stupid. She was stupid.

An alarming length of silence drew Norn out of her thoughts. She looked up. Mini and Rudy were both staring at her, their ears trained directly on her despite the noise going on around them. Rudy still had that bit of whipped cream on her face. Norn tried to recall the last several seconds, to see if she could figure out why they were both staring at her, but just came up with scattered word-shaped white noise. She was stupid for letting them get that edge on her.

“Rudy, you’ve got something right here,” Norn said, tapping her own face just above her cheek. She was off guard, and getting uncomfortably sloppy, but she still had cards she could play to reclaim the upper hand.

Rudy wiped at her own cheek with a finger, missing the whipped cream twice before finally getting it. Licking it off her finger, she cocked her head slightly in confusion and then asked, “That’s what was bothering you?”

“Of course that’s what was bothering me.” Norn paused: a moment between statements to find her angle. Genuine concern, wasted food, disgust- “I mean it was pretty gross.”

“Huh? This is hardly the messiest meal we’ve had together.”

Oh great, now Norn was painting herself as a closet neat freak. She needed an intensifier; she needed something to make it sound disgusting to just about anyone. The whipped cream had come from a flick of Mini’s spoon, but they didn’t know that, so… “Yeah, but you getting food on yourself isn’t the same Mini spitting a bit of her food on you.”

Rudy looked at the finger she had just licked, and her face twisted in disgust. “Could you have said that before I licked it off my finger?”

“Hah!” Mini burst out into sharp and gloriously disruptive laughter before Norn had to reply. “You gave me an indirect kiss!”

Rudy flushed red, and everything on the table rattled as she lunged to the side and hooked an arm around Mini’s neck. Mini’s legs kicked out dramatically under the table, nearly striking Norn, and Rudy somehow managed to fit the intensity of a roar into a normal speaking volume as she said, “I did not kiss you, you brat!”

Norn let the tension out of her jaw. She still had it. She could still play the social game. Even if she hadn’t needed to really dominate a conversation in months with how much of her free time had been taken up by race prep. It was kind of comforting how easily it came to her. At the end of the day this was where her real talent was—not racing.

Mini slapped the table with an open palm. “I give in! You didn’t kiss me!”

Rudy tensed her arm, getting one last gagging sound out of Mini before releasing her and turning back to Norn. “I’ll let you have this one because choking Mini out is fun, but next time you’re telling me what’s really bugging you.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Norn forced a smile.

Rudy just frowned.

The suspicion that Rudy could be setting a trap for her reignited from the ember that had been smoldering in her stomach since the night before, and with sleep freeing her from the cloying desperation for attention there were no remaining possibilities to tamp that blaze down. Pretending it was beyond Rudy was meaningless; Rudy wasn’t stupid. And as far as motivation… Norn could taste phantom bile on her tongue.

There was a small part of her that wanted to spring the trap early. She couldn’t tell if it was a desire to be done with it, to end her nausea by jumping to the inevitable puking, or if it was because it would be justice. It wasn’t like she didn’t have it coming; regardless of any recent growth she had done much worse to others, and made Rudy her tool in doing so.

Norn chose to hang on to her empty grin. That was a small part of her after all.

Norn scrolled listlessly through the gallery on her phone in the dark. She had opened her phone to find hints about what might be up with Rudy, as if she could discern some pattern in the way that Rudy held herself or where she was looking that could possibly shed any insight. Unsurprisingly, there hadn’t been any, and she had found herself slowly scrolling back through the past few months. It was like a thin layer of nauseatingly sweet frosting. It wasn’t good for her—she wasn’t even sure if she got any joy out of lingering on each smiling photograph—but she couldn’t stop herself digging needily through her memories.

Only to dig just a bit too deep. The warmly disinterested gaze of her Oguri plush stared at Norn from across the room, and the thousands of sets of Oguri’s eyes fixated on something beyond the horizon stared past her from her phone. There were months and months of photos, almost all taken a little bit less than consensually. Oguri training, her sweat glistening in the setting sun. Oguri practicing dance, reflected in the mirror at Norn’s family’s studio. Oguri before a large plate of food, sparkles in her eyes. Oguri racing down the track, little more than a blur of overwhelming presence.

And then it was back to that saccharine sweet frosting; just her, Rudy, and Mini finding trouble. If what came before, and what came after, was distressingly sweet, then what came in the middle? That was comfortingly bitter.

Norn flopped onto her back, and stared at the bunk above her. The harsh light of her phone made the slats holding up the mattress cast sharp shadows and gave the illusion that there was nothing left beyond them. No overhard dorm mattress, no sheets that had long lost the scent of Oguri’s shampoo, and no handwritten letter tucked beneath the pillow never to be sent.

She wondered how Rudy, or god forbid Mini, would react if they saw that letter. She was a different person than before that race with Oguri. That dorky beast had changed her; for the better, she had thought at the time. She balked at some of the things she had done with a smile to her fellow umas before, so that change had to have been for the better. But now she wasn’t sure. Her fangs were dull, and she was unwilling to do what she needed to secure herself socially. Taking racing seriously hadn’t gone anywhere good either.

She could taste bile on her tongue and the empty bunk ached above her. Norn didn’t sleep well that night.

Sand crunched underneath Norn’s shoes as she worked her way through her routine training warmups. Exhaustion weighed her down, but more than that she could feel a frustrating hesitation in her actions, as if she were second guessing herself with each movement. The exercises had felt so simple before, but even for a first day back after a small break there was an uncharacteristic level of unfamiliarity in her own body. It wasn’t that her muscles had changed dramatically over the past few days, but she still couldn’t bring herself to trust it in the same way as she had before her loss. Stupid.

Mini hadn’t had the time off, and didn’t seem to be having any issues. And Rudy… Rudy hadn’t started yet. Off to the side, Rudy and her trainer were talking together in hushed tones. It put Norn on edge. If Rudy wanted to humiliate her in front of her peers, this would be the time and the place to do it. Norn strained her ears, but heard nothing other than the biting autumn breeze and the grating sound of other teams training.

Just as Norn was wrapping up her warm ups, her trainer approached, clipboard in hand and hair tied back in a simple bun with hair clips keeping her bangs out of the way. Trainer Kawamura’s sense of style had seemed serviceable before, but now Norn wasn’t even sure she could do better.

“Norn.” Her trainer didn’t look up from her clipboard as she addressed her. “We’re working on stamina today. I’m going to have you run the outer track slow until you drop, and I want you to focus on maintaining a steady pace. I don’t want to see a lap time faster than five minutes, got it?”

Norn nodded the affirmative before jogging over to her position. She waited a moment for her trainer to jot something down and grab one of the three stop watches hanging from her belt. Then, just a little bit early in anticipation of the click of the stop watch Norn bolted. Behind her she could hear her trainer shouting for her to slow down, and reluctantly, she obliged, falling to a sluggish pace.

One lap passed, a lazy arc around the full oval. Her legs did not burn, and her lungs didn’t gasp for air. It was not lost on Norn that her failure to maintain pace in her last race was a large part of why she had run out of stamina and all but failed to finish, but even so, each time another uma passed her she felt a sting of inadequacy and an urge to pick up the pace; she wanted to surge past them, to take the non-existent finish line for herself, and to prove once and for all that she was better. Instead she plodded along, at her glacial pace with nothing but her thoughts and the boring Kasamatsu skyline.

Three laps later she was starting to feel it. Her legs were just a bit heavier, and she had to focus to keep her breathing steady and in form. In the inner track she could see Rudy partner running with Mini. She wondered if Rudy conspiring with her trainer had something to do with their current split. What if rather than oust her in some grand humiliation, Rudy planned to slowly isolate her until it felt natural for her to be alone, alienated from the group? …It still felt too indirect for Rudy.

Four more laps went by, and she was amazed at how little stamina she truly had. She had been running barely above a jog for only a little over a half an hour and her legs still burned as if she had sprinted a 1,200 meter race. Another runner passed her, and Norn’s form fell to pieces for a moment, the urge to take off after her somehow stronger with only fumes left in the tank. What she was doing was hell. It took every single one of her flaws as a runner and shoved them in her face. No stamina, no control, she had nothing. She almost wanted to believe that Rudy was behind it; that would mean that her newfound social incompetency played a role in it too.

She made it through one and a half more laps before she had to stop, doubled over and gulping down air, and her stomach thankfully obedient.

There was the click of a stopwatch nearby, and a sports bottle entered her peripheral vision. “Fifty-four minutes. That’s impressive, Norn.”

Norn straightened up and grabbed the drink, losing near half of it down her face as she knocked her head back and guzzled it. Even fogged by exhaustion, she knew her trainer was lying. The urge to call her on it fluttered in Norn’s chest, but experience told her that she had nothing to gain from it. So instead, she finished up the drink and carefully intoned, “Thank you.”

“Why don’t you go take a break with Mini and Rudy,” her trainer said, pointing out where her ‘friends’ were sitting on the shabby bleachers at the edge of the track. “Try and catch your breath before we start the next set of drills as a team.”

Norn was halfway through nodding when her trainer added, “We’ll be doing something Rudy suggested actually.”

Norn hesitated, before finishing nodding with a shaky jerk. Her trainer didn’t seem to notice the slip up as they parted ways. She had known since she had seen Rudy and their trainer talking together that morning that something was coming. But now that something was imminent. Approaching where Rudy and Mini were seated, her legs burning with exhaustion, it felt less and less worth it to make the effort to stay close to them. The rational part of her told her that even if things were probably about to blow up in her face, it was worth it to make that effort just to make picking up the pieces just a little bit easier; maybe she could even win over Mini.

But she was exhausted, both from running and a lack of sleep, and every step closer felt like wading through mud. Instead she stopped, still a distance away, and collapsed onto the bleachers, pivoting her ears to make out what she could of Rudy and Mini’s conversation.

“See her?” Mini asked, and there was a gasp from Rudy as if Mini had just jabbed her in the side.

Norn wondered if they were talking about her, but the next thing Rudy said disproved that. “Oh, that girl owes me money. What about her?”

Norn let her head fall back, staring into the clouds as Mini detailed some elaborate prank involving stealing a girl’s notes and rewriting them in her own hand writing before returning them. Somehow this was supposed to gaslight them into believing that their hand writing had suddenly changed. It was stupid. Everything was stupid. Norn chuckled for half a moment before choking the sound down as she felt everyone’s eyes turn to her even at a distance.

She sat upright, making eye contact with Mini. She needed to insert herself into the conversation to cover, and Mini had been detailing some prank she was going to do- …Or had she already done it? Norn opened her mouth to respond, and-

Their trainer cleared her throat, and the three of them all looked forward. Norn felt a weight sink into her stomach. Their trainer had a slight sheen of sweat, and behind her was the starting gate.

“Norn! Gather up! Why are you sitting so far away?” their trainer shouted, and waited for Norn to do so before continuing, “We’ll be doing starting gate drills for the rest of our training session.”

This was it. The real crowning jewel of Norn’s failure at Chukyo was her late start, and now Rudy was going to make her live it over and over again.

Rudy gave Norn a small, knowing, wave from the other side of Mini. Her face bore a gentle pity, and Norn felt vitriol threatening to bubble up into her expression. It was so stupid. This was beginner’s shit and it was getting under her skin. But didn’t that make her worse than a beginner for listlessly wandering into it and letting it get to her? She forced herself to calm down. Even if she was gritting her teeth to do it, she could still recover.

Norn stood up and took her position in a gate, their trainer closing it behind her. All she had to do was perform. There would be no humilation if she did nothing that deserved it. The gate snapped open. She could taste bile on her tongue. She just needed to run right when it opened and… She wasn’t running. She was still in the gate in Kasamatsu. She was still in the gate at Chukyo.

Rudy jogged back, having darted forward right on time. Perfection incarnate. The stupid pitying smile dominating her face. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

“Screw this.” Norn barreled past Rudy, veered to the side, and hopped the wall at the edge of the track.

No one followed her.

She didn’t bother showing up for training the next day, electing instead to take a day trip to Nagoya and kill some time in department stores. The day after that, she wandered Kasamatsu and lingered in places that she used to hang with Rudy and Mini, some part of her hoping to be found. On the third day, she had run out of places to go.

Norn’s entire body was sore, and not in the way it was after a race. There wasn’t that fatigue that came from blowing far past any of the sane or reasonable limits that were in place during training. Instead it was the kind of stiffness that came from stagnation; it was the feeling of every muscle in her body drawing into the tightest possible configuration that let her lie motionless on her back staring at the slats and mattress of the bunk above her. What really capped it off was the dull throb where her neck met her head that had developed somewhere during the last few hours.

The time was… she didn't know. Her phone was dead and she couldn’t make out the digital clock on the dresser across the room without her contacts. It was probably past noon at the very least. That morning the sun had been overly bright, killing any impulse she had to get up early enough to make practice before it even sprouted in the barren wasteland that was her desire to let Rudy make a fool of her again. So she had watched the shadows slowly move across the room and fade into indistinction as those beams of sunlight imperceptibly morphed into the suffocating blanket of diffuse ambient light that filled the room now.

She blinked and it was night.

Norn didn’t know when she passed out, just that when she came to she was half turned over onto her stomach, one of her arms felt like mud trapped awkwardly under her body, and the other was hanging halfway off the bed, her elbow screaming in pain. Half her weight was pressing down onto half her chest, and that hurt too. And the real discomfort was the gnawing hunger; she didn’t remotely have an idea of how she had managed to sleep through that feeling. She desperately needed food.

She stumbled to her feet, her bedding tangled in her legs sending her spilling to the dark floor in a bundle of sharp, lancing pain. Not waiting for it to fade, she forced herself up and over to her dresser. She fumbled for her clock with the arm she could feel, and lifted it up close enough that she could actually read it… Norn growled. It was long after curfew. The dining hall would be closed, and the gates locked so she couldn’t just dash out to a corner store and grab something to eat. And hopping the fence was more Rudy’s thing.

But she hadn’t talked to Rudy in days, and in all likelihood she would never talk to Rudy again. There was no one she could tap to get her food. She’d have to get it herself.

She didn’t bother brushing her hair out—if she did she’d have to do a lot more to keep it from ending up a frizzy nightmare. She didn’t bother putting on her morning makeup in spite of the pit of dread that being seen without it gave her. The only reason she bothered to change her clothes is that the autumn air was frigid at night.

Norn slipped out of her room, careful to shut her door behind her quietly enough that it wouldn’t wake anyone else in the building. The floor felt cool even through her socks, and she hunched over slightly, taking a low stance to sneak her way down toward the entry hall. There was something eerie about the corridor at night; she felt watched whenever she was in it. Mini’s shitty ghost stories probably didn’t help, but she would sooner be haunted to death than admit that. Which wasn’t going to happen because ghosts weren’t real.

As if she had taunted it, the window at the end of the hall behind her rattled, and she started, accidentally lunging forward and bringing her foot down with a sharp thud right outside of Mini and Rudy’s dorm room. …She hoped that didn’t wake one of them, picking up the pace anyways just in case.

She was out the door faster than she was on training days, the chill immediately hitting her like a frosty sledgehammer to the face. She thought she had dressed warm enough but she could already feel it nipping at the tips of her fuzzy ears and flushing her face a bright red. Quickly. She needed to get food and get out of the cold quickly.

She remembered the place Rudy showed her near the beginning of the school year where the wall had been caved in a little by a tree branch and it could be clambered over easily, but in the darkness she couldn’t find it. Everything was a mass of dark shapes and glimmering flecks in the long shadows cast by the nearby streetlamps, and she couldn’t spot a dark hole in a dark wall. She fumbled in her pocket for her cellphone to use as a flashlight only to remember she both didn’t have it and it was dead. She wanted to scream.

“You look like shit.”

Norn whirled around. Rudy was standing, leaning on one foot with her hands jammed in her coat pockets and a thick knit hat over her head. Her breath fogged in front of her. Norn couldn’t make out her expression in the lighting, but it was probably a taunting smirk.

“What are you doing here?” Norn snarled.

“Following you. The gap in the wall is over there by the way.” Rudy pointed, and Norn kicked herself for not being able to see it before.

Norn turned her back on Rudy, stomping off toward the wall. She grasped at the lower ledge, and coarse broken concrete dug into her delicate palms, before hauling herself up on top. She teetered briefly and then hopped down on the other side in a thin line of trees before the sidewalk. Behind her, she heard Rudy take a few running steps and then vault it effortlessly. Another blade buried in her inadequacy.

“Careful,” Rudy said, not missing a breath, “It’s rooty ahead and you can’t see it in the dark.”

Patronizing. Was that what Rudy was going to do from now on? Flaunt her own competence and highlight Norn’s glaring flaws? Wear down on her self esteem until she was a husk and leave her to wither on her own? Norn pitched forward, and the only reason she didn’t crack her skull on the ground was a sharp tug on her back that left her sprawled out. Cold dirt pressed into the heel of her hand, and her knees scraped against roots, and her tail dragged through fallen leaves.

“Holy shit, are you okay?”

Norn pounded her fist on the ground and pain crackled up her arm. She was so stupid. She could feel hot tears in her eyes that served only to chill her further. She scrambled forward on her hands and knees, nearly falling again, before pulling herself up on the sidewalk in the shadows between lamps.

She didn’t care what Rudy was up to anymore. She didn’t care about minimizing the damage or coming up on top. She just wanted it to be over. Turning back to the darkness behind her, she shouted, “Leave me the fuck alone. I don’t need your shit!”

“You don’t need my shit?” There was an unmistakable anger in Rudy’s voice now. Even if Norn couldn’t see her, she knew exactly how she felt. “The hell are you talking about?”

“You know exactly what I’m talking about.” Norn stomped her foot, a jolt of pain in her shin. Stupid cold hard ground. It was supposed to be autumn, not winter.

“No I don’t?” Rudy stepped forward, and Norn matched her by taking a step backward.

Norn took another step back, she could feel the edge of the curb on her heel, and she almost fell over again. “Of course you do! You’ve been avoiding me for days. You humiliated me in the starting gates at practice. You’ve been distant and trying to ice me out of our friend group ever since the race last week!”

“I was worried about you.” Rudy said, her voice dropping from a shout to an intense speaking volume. “When you finished in last you were shaking. You puked. You looked like you were having a fucking panic attack. I’ve been worried about you.”

There was no way that was true. There was no way it was true, but it made a lot of things make sense. Norn knew Rudy wasn’t one for subterfuge. And keeping that in mind a lot of what Norn thought Rudy was doing didn’t make sense. But if she had been worried…

Norn didn’t notice when Rudy had approached, but she was right in front of her. She didn’t know if it was her eyes adjusting to the darkness, or the moonlight parting the clouds, but she could make out Rudy’s face for the first time in days. Her ears were flicking nervously. Her smile, it wasn’t pitying. It was uncertain. Rudy was lost; she didn’t know what to do. Norn was so stupid. She felt tears welling up in her eyes.

“Oh holy shit, you look cold. Let me-”

Norn lunged forward, wrapping her arms awkwardly around Rudy and burying her face in her shoulder. Failing to suppress her first stupid sob, she immediately followed it by shackily saying, “I’m just cold. Nothing else.”

Norn’s ears were squished briefly before slipping through two slits as Rudy put her hat on Norn. “Right… You’re just cold.”

They stayed like that for probably a bit too long. That night, Norn had the best corner store rice balls of her life.