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if i’m S, can you be my N?
so i can always find you
the us of tomorrow might realize
the ten millionth reason why opposites attract.
For eight thousand years, what keeps Kaguya going is the constant reminder that if I give up now, I’ll be the biggest hypocrite ever. And that is all she needs to keep going with the hope that she’ll find Iroha again. Even when it’s hard, even when she’s tired, even when she wonders what she’s doing, even when she wonders if it’s even possible to find Iroha again.
But—and this is important—Iroha didn’t want her to leave, and she sang as if to bring her back, and so Kaguya will wait until Iroha is born and she can find her again. It really is as simple as that.
The thing about crash-landing eight thousand years before Iroha and several hundred generations of her family before her are even an inkling in anybody’s mind is that there isn’t a lot to do for someone used to work, work, and more work and is trapped in a body that can’t really do much. Never mind that—Iroha’s time is filled with so many shiny, fun things, and in her terror and despair and eventual depression over this colossal mistake of hers, it takes a while to find things that’ll take up her time with something that isn’t sitting on rocks and bemoaning her luck.
Kaguya is very good at using her cheerfulness and curiosity about everything to her advantage, she’d like to believe. If not, she wouldn’t have survived so much boring work on the moon; otherwise, she might not have held it together very well in the last few weeks before they came to take her away from Iroha.
And so she travels as best as she can. Hitches rides here and there, makes human friends and is determined to live as much as she can so that she’ll have so much to tell Iroha about when she finds her again. Iroha will be annoyed, surely, that she missed the mark by so much, but it’ll be okay, because she’ll have had Yachiyo and her friends and maybe even her brother, so really, she won’t have been that lonely—
—even if it seems like she hadn’t really been living so much as surviving before Kaguya?
Time is a tricky thing. What’s important is that she makes it back, isn’t it?
Time is a tricky thing.
The longer she lives on, unaging and immortal, the more she realizes that human lives are ephemeral, here and then gone in the blink of an eye. How many friends has she made and watched die?
It almost makes her want to give up. But there is the pull of Iroha, somewhere at the end of this long, long period of waiting, and it is magnetic. It’s tugging her on and on, and she’ll be damned before she gives up. She tells stories about Iroha again and again, over and over, to anyone who’ll listen. The humans who look after her when she needs it look at her in wonderment as she describes worlds far beyond their imagination.
I’d like to see that world, they say. And sometimes, you look as if you are in love when you speak of this.
Kaguya laughs, her fluffy little body shaking with it, or maybe with a grief and ache so old she almost forgets how long it’s been, if not for the determined way she clings to the droplets of time passing. Maybe your descendants will tell you about them in the afterlife, she jokes sometimes. It’s hard not to be in love with something so wonderful, ya know?!
Some time after she crash-lands eight thousand years in the past—maybe four, five hundred years, could be six or seven—she realizes that she isn’t even the same Kaguya that Iroha loved, anymore.
Time is a tricky thing. It wears at you, sands down your edges. Even when you try your hardest to be the same person. If she loses herself, then she loses the only thing she has left of Iroha.
Every few years, she has this realization, so often throughout the centuries that it becomes second-nature.
The closer she gets to the year Iroha is born, and then crossing that threshold, the more she’s confused that Yachiyo doesn’t exist yet. She’s gotten adept at fiddling around on the internet, even without the help of humans, now, and a virtual AI streamer called Runami Yachiyo simply doesn’t exist.
And then it hits her: oh, I’m so stupid.
The wondrous thing about being Runami Yachiyo is that singing truly, truly does make her happy. Inventing the world she remembers from eight thousand years ago, which does not exist yet, is great fun, and it’s with the anticipation of knowing Iroha will enter it, and soon.
Her debut song is composed of the melody she remembers hearing from Iroha. My dad and I were working on it. I don’t know how to finish it anymore. The only thing that matters about this song is that it reaches Iroha, that Iroha listens to it, that Iroha—
Oh, it looks like she hasn’t forgotten excitement yet. Her mouth curves upwards, a smile tinged with her everlasting melancholy.
So, yeah, being Yachiyo is easier than expected, all things considered, but the real challenge is to contain herself when she sees Iroha inside Tsukuyomi. That fox girl form of hers has somehow not grown entirely faint in her memory—and entirely the reason she’d added those items to the options given to design one’s model—and she very nearly cries. Though AI models can’t really cry.
That night, the concert Yachiyo gives inside Tsukuyomi is noted to be one of her best yet.
Her (younger? older?) other self is unrestrained and unapologetic in a way that makes Yachiyo’s heart ache. If she had ever doubted that Iroha cared about her as much as she cared about Iroha, then this is the undoing of that doubt—the way Iroha hovers over Kaguya, tells her off and drags her closer by the arm in the space of the same heartbeat, grimacing at Kaguya’s clinginess but never actively saying she dislikes it.
The way she immediately gets fired up just like Yachiyo remembers at the mention of Kaguya’s so-called marriage proposals. Even though she’s so inwardly delighted by the realization that Iroha is pretty much in love with her oshi, with Yachiyo, who is her, it’s…
Maybe it’s even harder to play off the way her little mini-me clones get all up in Iroha’s space as something she does to pretty much everyone, because being close to Iroha, being there, and then, performing with her again. Isn’t this what she’s supposed to be doing? She’s so happy she could cry. She’s so happy she twirls and dances all around Iroha, and it’s all part of the performance.
I missed you so much, Iroha, I miss you so much comes out as, “it already reached who it needed to reach. It’s job is done!” immediately flipping into performing mode (as if that hasn’t been what she’s doing this entire time, anyhow).
“If I were you,” Kaguya says, red flush evident even in the semi-darkness, “maybe I could have won her over better.”
That’s. Yachiyo doesn’t remember saying that. The irony of the statement nearly knocks her over, and once her moment of shock is over, it’s not at all a lie to say her smile and reassurance is genuine. So much loneliness lies ahead, but it’ll all be worth it, won’t it?
“You’re so irresponsible. But I always liked that part of you,” Kaguya says, and Yachiyo beams. That she’s still someone her less-experienced self admires is somewhat of a reassurance.
The thing is, she doesn’t know what happens after they come to take Kaguya away. She can tell how that’ll end, but everything after that is unknown to her. That she doesn’t see Iroha for days worries her so badly, but she’s just Yachiyo! How is she meant to do anything?
Is there anything she’s supposed to do, even when Iroha goes looking for her?
This is how she discovers that perhaps an AI model can cry: “I’m sorry,” she tells Iroha, voice wavering. What was that she’d said a second earlier? That she could smile because she’s Yachiyo? Yeah. Sure. “That dazzling Princess Kaguya is an old lady now.”
Stricken, reeling, all Iroha can say is, “Kaguya never had that sad expression on her face.” Which is true. It’s true. Is she even Kaguya anymore?
It’s only been such a short time for Iroha. How can she explain the gap between Princess Kaguya and Runami Yachiyo, now?
The magnitude of her blunder sits with her. All of this, and is this still the only way she can be with Iroha?
And even then: “Tell me everything,” Iroha demands. “Tell me everything that’s happened in the past eight thousand years. I’m not sleeping tonight!”
Yachiyo beams.
“Well, Kaguya-chan,” Mikado drawls, “when were you going to tell anyone?”
Yachiyo jumps, slightly. “Well,” she says, matching his sarcasm with sweetness, “even if I did, would you have believed me?”
Mikado looks at her. “We fought those creepy moon monster things without questioning it, didn’t we?”
“True,” Yachiyo concedes. “Iroha told you? And you just believed her?”
Mikado purses his lips. “It took a second, but…” he sighs. “There are few things Iroha is so passionate and determined about. For a long time, she behaved as if she could survive on her own, and I don’t think anything made her very happy besides, well, you. Then Kaguya-chan came along, and…” he shakes his head. Yachiyo smiles, resisting the urge to do a twirl on the spot. “Anyway, you have me to thank!”
“You? For what?”
“Guess who’s funding your return to the real world?”
“My—you?” for the first time in talking to Mikado Akira, she’s genuinely thrown for a loop. “Iroha didn’t say…”
“Because she didn’t want to confirm anything without reassurance,” which is just like Iroha.
“I’m…” she searches for the right words to express how she feels, and all she can end up with is a slightly-choked-up, bright, “thank you so much, Mikado-kun, I…I’m so grateful.”
“What, no more Mikado-sama?” he asks, grinning. Yachiyo giggles. “But—y’know, Yachiyo-chan, I’m grateful to you more than I am to most people. It’s not a huge deal for me to do this.”
“Me?”
“You know how Iroha is,” Mikado says, looking away and above, as if this is awkward to speak about, “and you know how she is with our mother. It’s true that I was the one who moved out and to Tokyo first, and even if Iroha sort of…resented me, for it, I kind of feel guilty that I served sort of as an example for her jumping ship to Tokyo, knowing how she can be. She refused to stay in regular contact with our mother, much less me. Probably didn’t make that very easy… knowing that something made her happy is a reassurance, at least.”
Yachiyo swallows. “I’m happy I make Iroha happy,” she says quietly. “That’s all I did this for. To find Iroha again, to make her happy. To find our happy ending.”
“Incredible,” Mikado shakes his head. “This still feels unreal. Anyway, that’s all I had to say. See you around, Yachiyo-chan.”
Yachiyo waves goodbye to him as his avatar dissipates. She wonders what he looks like in real-life, what his name is, and all the ways he matters to Iroha, and resolves to ask Iroha later.
“When this works out,” Iroha tells her one night, delirious from lack of sleep and persisting despite Yachiyo’s insistence that she begin work again tomorrow, “I’m going to get you a huge stack of pancakes. With syrup and cream and everything…”
“Sounds great!” Yachiyo cheers, laughing when Iroha continues on and on, right up until she falls asleep at her desk. She could probably ask her brother to come take her home, but for now, she’s struck by something else.
As Iroha sleeps, she looks just the same she did years ago when Kaguya crept into her bed regularly. Peaceful and at rest. Like everything is right with the world.