Work Text:
Oh, she was fucked. She was so, utterly fucked. No, this can’t be the end, can it? Not like—like this? But blood is seeping from under her arm and her shirt is soaked crimson through and through; it was going to be such a chore washing it. The puddle of red slowly pools on the gritty pavement, and—oh, something must’ve pierced her from the back, but she couldn’t feel it through the adrenaline rushing in her veins, her ears. Her body’s one last desperate attempt at consciousness.
She tries to look up through her blurred vision and watches him come close, dragging his failing body closer to her. Something’s hit him, too, a shrapnel or glass, something sharp that’s left him coughing up a mouthful of blood before her. He spits it out and reaches out to grab her cheeks.
“Kiss me again when we’re reborn,” she gasps through her own speckles of blood. There’s just so much of them, everywhere, but the only thing he’s looking at is her. “Promise me.”
He nods. “I promise.”
And how lucky is she that her last memory alive is his promise, and the touch of his lips?
Not that lucky, apparently. He’s always been such a gentleman, staying true to every promise he makes—it was just a shame that he’d been reborn as an extinction-scale meteor.
Fujino frowns at the mess of eraser dust and phantom lines left by her pencil. She’s been redrawing and erasing this panel for half an hour. How is it this hard to draw a goddamn kiss?
True, she could just find a good reference or watch a video on Youtube about it—for anatomical purposes, duh—but that’s so gross. Plus, her parents had her devices monitored, courtesy of some stupid government campaign last year at school, and now she can’t even draw a dumb four-panel manga without awkward conversations about her growing body!
Fujino tilts back her chair and groans, pulling on her cheeks until her eyelids twitch. She might actually hate drawing, now that she’s thinking about it. It was hard enough to tell a whole story in two comic strips and eight blocks of space. It was also hard enough to make it meaningful and funny—and then on top of that, she has to draw them, and shade them well, and make sure it doesn’t look weird! It was all such hard work, and it was all out of her own volition for a school magazine that everyone will read for three seconds, bring home, and leave on top of their kitchen counters. Why does she even draw?
She sighs and bangs her head against her desk. Another hour, she thinks, and then I’ll give up on drawing lips forever.
She gives up. She supposes a big red heart between them will do.
Kyomoto stared at Fujino’s back for the longest time, waving her hand like that, even as the rain escalated from little droplets into steady drizzles of water on her hair. It begins to feel sort of stupid the moment Fujino fades away into a dot of red backpack in the distance, but she needs to shake the energy off anyway, so she stays like that until the rain fully comes down in a torrent from the firmament and her robe is beginning to get soaked through. She ran back inside when she could no longer see through the mist and was afraid the ink from Fujino’s signature would get washed away.
For the longest time, she wonders if Fujino will look back, maybe to see if she was still standing there—but she never does. That was fine. She had the brightest red colour on her backpack that danced around in her daydreams long after that.
The week before the new term starts—middle school! How terrifying—Kyomoto was spending her fourth consecutive day in the Ayumu household, just beginning to sketch out the background for the sixteenth page of Metal Parade, when Fujino rolled away from her desk and said: “Let’s go out.”
Out is not a word Kyomoto is fond of. She wasn’t sure how it started; she was always terrified of going out as a toddler when she’s not tucked under one of her parents’ arms, but it only got worse after she’d entered grade school. Everything was just so unpredictable and loud and she really didn’t get people, couldn’t seem to make herself just like everyone else, and she was afraid of what was going to happen to her if they found out. She decided then that she was going to hide before they ever could, so that was that.
And then Fujino came along.
Slowly, over the drawn-out heat of the summer, her world expands from her room and her house into the path to Fujino’s house, her front door, her living room; the kitchen where Mrs. Ayumu-san offers to cut up every fruit available from the fridge, and then Fujino’s bedroom. The carpet where she has spent five days sketching and inking and sleeping and eating off. And now, she guesses, she has to start going out too, because Fujino isn’t the type to wallow in her own room, afraid of the world.
“O…kay,” Kyomoto mumbles, instinctively fiddling with the hem of her hoodie. “Um, to where?”
“To the bookstore, to get more supplies,” she shrugs, “we’re running low on pencils again. And then we can get some ice cream?”
“Ice cream?”
“Yea, from Famima,” Fujino drawls, stretching back against the chair until it was almost at its tipping point. “C’mon, I really need to stretch out. We’ve been holed up in here for days!”
Kyomoto swallowed thickly. It was nice enough that Fujino even wants to be around her, and she wants to at least seem cool enough to be kept around. She wants this to last. She’s never had a friend before.
“Yeah, sure.”
Fujino perked up at that, as if she was expecting another answer. “Eh, really?”
“Yeah,” Kyomoto nods. The swell in her chest when Fujino smiles brightly at her swallows up her fear almost too easily. “Yeah, let’s go.”
Fujino held her hand the whole way as she stayed shriveled up and hidden behind her back while she asked a store attendant about the specific 4B pencil they needed, and where the A5 sketchbooks were, and if the new shojo jump edition for the month had arrived (it hasn’t). She followed her around like a smitten ghost, dark hair covering her eyes just enough so she doesn’t have to think too hard about where to look, where to put her eyes.
Eventually, after a few dizzy minutes of panicking in silence while the cashier chatted about with Fujino, her gaze decided to settle onto the crook of Fujino’s neck. Her shoulder. The small of her back. Is that creepy? Maybe Fujino would think it is, if she knew; but right now she is holding her hand and the world feels a little more solid with every reassuring squeeze.
They exited the store with their paper bag with victory, and Fujino declares that the ice cream is on her.
Kyomoto didn’t continue to middle school, but she still patiently sat cross-legged on Fujino’s bedroom floor long after the summer had ended, like a dog waiting for its master to come home. Mrs. Ayumu was lovely (and seemed rather bothered that Kyomoto was always being left alone in her own home), Fujino’s older sister was indifferent at worst, and her dad only came home in the late afternoons and seemed pretty alright—so there she stayed, a welcome-unwelcome guest, a ghost nobody can shake off. Fujino’s little friend.
She mostly did the shading and sketched out the backgrounds while Fujino was gone, and piled the pages neatly in order on her desk when she’s done. When Fujino comes home she would barge straight into her room, kicking her bag and socks to the corner much to her mother’s dismay, and immediately sit down on her desk to continue the work.
She mostly had nothing to do after that other than watch Fujino’s back, her neck straining to get all the angles right. The light cascading from the window and spilling on the side of her hair, her shoulder.
Fujino and Kyomoto at the beach, staring at the sun disappearing over the horizon in all its vivid glory, a cumulus swatch of red and purple and yellow and everything else in between. Skipping along the shoreline, holding hands, water rushing and receding against their feet. Playing tag, catch, cat-and-mouse, squealing when it’s Fujino’s turn to chase after her—she’s always been so athletic, it wasn’t fair! Trips to the city, huddled side-by-side on the train ride, clutching her hand in a crowded street. Following her, always following after her, trailing behind her back as she leads the way.
Fujino glancing over her shoulder to look at her. Kyomoto smiling in return.
She could stare at her back all day.
One day, Kyomoto was laying splayed on Fujino's bed and laughing while they recalled every four-panel manga Fujino had drawn in grade school. There were so many; Fujino started the addiction in third grade, and Kyomoto started noticing half a year in, immediately becoming a fan right then and there. Love Square, Sasaki, and everything she made before she abruptly stopped. One of her last ones was First Kiss, from the fourth week of sixth grade—Kyomoto recalled how tragically funny it was, and how impressive it is that she could tell a story like that in just eight panels.
“Oh, man, that manga was like, probably one of the first times I started wanting to give up,” Fujino wheezed, wiping a single tear out of her eyes after Kyomoto was done telling her how absurd it was to have the ending to that story be a meteor crashing into earth. All of her old stories were so cringey! “Drawing a kiss was so hard, would you even guess? I spent two hours trying to draw two lips locking together. Seriously, it was so gross. And I can’t even look for references, or my mom would be really weird about it!”
That comment sets Kyomoto off into a renewed fit of laughter, doubling over and clutching on her sides while she wheezed.
Fujino is really enjoying her newfound comedic talent. She loved wringing the reaction out of Kyomoto, loved the sound of her laughter and the asthmatic burst of inhales when she couldn’t get enough air in between. “Yeah, yeah, it’s true—if my mom saw my search history, she’d sit me down and have that talk, you know, and that was not worth it for a school newspaper comic—”
Kyomoto’s laughter recedes suddenly.
“Huh? What talk?”
Fujino frowned back. Okay, maybe that was a bad joke? Maybe she’s dragging this too much. “The… the talk? Like, I needed references of two people kissing, and if I searched two people kissing on Google and my mom saw that…”
Kyomoto shrugs. “Yeah?”
“Dude,” Fujino deadpans. “You seriously never had that talk?”
“No?”
They stared at each other blankly for a while. Shit, Fujino forgot that Kyomoto doesn’t even go to school anymore. She doesn’t know all the fuss about boys and girls in her class right now, and rumours of who has a crush on who, and everything gross in between. Hell, she was Kyomoto’s only friend! Of course she doesn’t now. Now she just feels mean. Why would she joke about that?
Just as abruptly, Kyomoto bursts into a harder fit of laughter.
“Oh my god! Oh my god, Fujino, you fell for it! You totally fell for it!” She’s kicking her legs in the air, now, rolling on her bed until the sheets wrinkled. Fujino’s face falls as she realizes what trap she’d fallen right into. Did she seriously think Kyomoto wouldn’t know about kissing?
“Ugh!!!” Fujino groans, half annoyed, half indignant. “Screw yoooouuu!” She joins Kyomoto on the bed to hit her fists at her, like puppies playing tug of war. “I can’t believe—you’re soooo annoying! You really made me scared like—ughhhhhh!!!!” She wrestles her around right there as she laughed and laughed and laughed, eventually drawing out both of Kyomoto’s arms and pin them to her sides. It was when Kyomoto’s laughter ceased and she was staring at her through the tears that Fujino had the mind to question what the hell it is that she’s doing, pinning her against the bed like this.
She wanted to… tickle her? Wrestle her down? Why the hell is she wrestling her down? Maybe it was just because the—the heat of the moment. Yeah, that was that. She should let Kyomoto go before it gets really weird, because this position is very, very weird—if her mother walks in at this exact moment, and she happens to be doing it with a boy, Fujino would get a five-hour rant of The Talk. But Kyomoto isn’t a boy. Kyomoto is her best friend.
So she stared. And Kyomoto stared right back at her.
“Uhh,” Fujino rasps, but her throat felt dry all too suddenly. She just stared dumbly at Kyomoto’s own flustered face until she could memorize every line etched on her skin, imagining it as graphite on paper.
“For the record,” Kyomoto says, barely a whisper herself, “I think you’re pretty good at drawing people kissing.”
Fujino scoffs. “No I’m not.”
“I’ve seen you draw it. In Computer Dreams the main characters kissed, right? And you won runner-up.”
“Shut up. You’re just sayin’ that.”
“You always put yourself down when it comes to drawing, Fujino-san. It’s weird. I’ve always been such a big fan of yours.”
“Shut up,” Fujino hissed, this time.
“You are good at drawing,” Kyomoto insists anyway, despite the no longer playful tone. Sometimes there were moments where it seemed like all Kyomoto’s fears of the world vanished in a blink, and all that was left was the long-buried determination clawing up into the firm shine in her eyes. This time, Kyomoto stares up right into her eyes with that same look, and the rosy tint on her cheeks she always has when she’s flustered. “You are.”
Fujino shook her head, just as stubborn.
"Fujino-sensei.”
Her breath hitches. She stares at Kyomoto for another while, as long as nothing interrupts them, not even their bated breaths; if her mother walked in right now, she would be so, so fucked. But why? What would she even say? Kyomoto is her best friend.
“Do you—do you wanna?” Fujino blurts out instead. She wasn’t even sure what she was asking until she licked the bottom of her dry lip, and—oh. That’s weird. She’s weird. Why would she ask Kyomoto that?
“Want to…?”
“Kiss,” she says, between her gasped-out breath. “If you want.”
Kyomoto stared up at her for another long while, and it’s weird, it’s so weird, she knows it’s weird—Kyomoto is her best friend, and are girls even supposed to kiss each other? But Kyomoto is her best friend. Kyomoto is nodding, biting down on her lower lip, and she’s her best friend.
Fujino shut her eyes, pressed her lips together, and smashed it against Kyomoto’s.
It lasted for exactly three seconds before Fujino pulled away, gasping. Kyomoto still has her eyes scrunched up into a petrified frown, her lips a firm line against each other, and Fujino rolls away from above her to sit on the edge of her bed, frowning.
Her lower lip was wet, a little bit. From herself, maybe. From Kyomoto when she was kissing her. Is that how it’s supposed to be when two people kiss each other? How it’s supposed to feel? Who knows—Fujino isn’t even good at drawing them. She reached up to feel her mouth, and the moisture that pools on the soft pad of her lips, and frowned at it some more.
She kissed Kyomoto. She’d just kissed Kyomoto. How weird is that? Girls don’t really kiss each other.
But she’s her best friend.
Fujino sat there touching her lips for the longest time. There isn’t really anything else to feel.
Growing up, Fujino never had a boyfriend, or frankly any friends who are boys. She realized how weird that is a little too late, but just as easily shrugged it off at the wake of their next competition deadline. She didn’t have time for stupid boys when she’s trying to make it big early on in the manga industry, anyway.
(Kyomoto’s only friend was Fujino. That isn’t weird to her at all.)
They’d started getting more frequent in cozying up with a certain publisher as Fujino comes nearer to graduating high school. She wanted to start getting her works serialized as soon as possible, even if it had to come with climbing up the ladder first; she’d hated school the entire twelve years she had to sit through and wished she could be more like Kyomoto, sometimes.
But Kyomoto needed her to be Fujino. Sitting here on the bench by the train tracks, in the middle of the November freeze, she could see how terrified Kyomoto always is—she had both arms clutching her left side and picking on the dried-up hangnail on her thumb again. They’ve been going back and forth from the city for a while now; even since they were girls she’s been dragging Kyomoto everywhere in an attempt to ease her into the world again, but also because—well, she’s her best friend, isn’t she?
Kyomoto needs her to be her best friend. Kyomoto needs her, and it felt good to be needed.
“Hey,” Fujino speaks up. For the longest while there’s only the announcement bell and the rushing of wind in her ears, so Kyomoto startles herself at the sudden voice. Fujino squeezed on her hand apologetically. “You’re picking on your skin again.”
“Oh,” she just squeaks out. “Sorry.”
“No, it’s fine, just—” Fujino shakes their intertwined hand a little. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” Kyomoto gives her a small nod. “I’m fine.”
“Alright. Cool,” Fujino says.
And then—“Y’know, if you ever have anything on your mind…” She taps on her knee. “I’m here for you. You know that, right?”
Kyomoto nods again. “Sure, yeah. I just—” she sighs. “I guess I’m… scared…?”
Fujino’s chest is tight, all of a sudden, and she squeezed Kyomoto’s hand just a little bit tighter.
“Of what?”
“Of what happens,” Kyomoto bit her lip. “After this. When we… you, graduate.”
She breathes out, slightly, and lets out a little laugh. “Kyo-chan, you don’t need to worry about that,” she says. “As long as you’re with me, we’ll be okay, right? We’ll—get a deal, get serialized, work on it together. Like we always do. It’ll be just the same.”
“But…”
“But?”
Kyomoto swallowed thickly, and stared on her knees for a long while.
“Hey,” Fujino wrapped an arm around her shoulders and shook her around a little. She is so close, always so close, pulling herself closer like she’s trying to blur the lines between their hands, their fingers, their skin. Kyomoto remembers reading in one of those bizarre fact books about how everything always has some degree of separation—that an atom, the smallest fundamental unit of everything that’s ever existed, were always repelling against each other in its very nature. So when you touch something, you’re not really touching it; instead there’s an atomic degree of separation between her and everything else. Her and the world. Her and Fujino.
“Maybe it’ll be a little different,” Fujino adds, suddenly, “but—only a little. Maybe when we get more famous we’ll live in Tokyo, and get a dog.”
“A dog…” Kyomoto trails off. “A Shiba Inu?”
Fujino smiles at that. “Sure, if you want.”
Kyomoto doesn’t think she knows what she wants. Fujino has always known exactly what it is that she wants, working rigorously towards it all her life like a heat-seeking missile. And maybe Kyomoto does know what she wants, but they were only ever things that she could never have. Courage, spirit, persistence; the same determination that Fujino carries every day she goes to school and comes home to draw all over again.
Counting Fujino’s eyelashes in the dark, and the lines around her mouth when she smiles at her. Her mouth. Her lips. Things she could never have.
After everything is said and done, Fujino moved five hours away from Nikaho and never once looked back.
She hated that little town and every nook and cranny it holds. The convenience stores, the streets, the dirt path surrounded by rice fields between her house and Kyomoto's. That bookstore. The flickering streetlight outside her bedroom window. She couldn’t stand being there anymore, knowing that the thought of her would linger at every corner, and that she’s practically only a few hours away by local commute.
So what if Kyomoto wants to spend her entire life trapped in that dumb little town forever—not Fujino’s problem. But just so you know, they could’ve built something great together. They already had everything, years and years of it, before Kyomoto decided to just throw it all away. Just so you know.
Sendai held the largest branch office of Fujino’s publisher in Northern Japan, so she moved there for that purpose, too. She was so very lucky to be given the serialization opportunity for someone so young and knowing barely anything about the industry, despite having spent all her entire teenage years being its distant little star. That was exactly what her boss had called her the first day she moved in; their little star, finally on the path to making it big. Mr. Kimura-san praised Fujino nearly every meeting they had throughout the years and had a tendency of being overly enthusiastic, but that day Fujino drank up all the praise from him and everyone else in that office as she settled into her very own room, by the window, overlooking the city. Yes, without a doubt, Ayumu Fujino is going to make something great. She’s spent all her life building for it.
So it was such a pain in the ass when, a year into writing Shark Kick, that Fujino finds herself eleven years old all over again, frowning at the dizzying brightness of her wacom screen.
She’s been redrawing and erasing this panel for half an hour. How is it this hard to draw a goddamn kiss?
She’s twenty now, and this is a published and curated weekly shojo, for god’s sake—so she can’t just slap a big red heart over it to make up for her terrible anatomical skills. Seriously, how is it so hard to draw two lips locking together? She’s already drawn both their bodies… their overlapping arms, their shoulders, their heads. A hand pressed against the back of the other’s head… and a nose over the other… their chins, chins are supposed to press against one another when people kiss, right? How would Fujino know, she’s never officially kissed anyone in her life. She’s never even had a boyfriend. She had—
This is pathetic.
Fujino studies the incomplete panel with renewed annoyance. Dissatisfaction. Disgust, maybe? Resentment. Shame. Aching. Aching? For what?
She’s always so terrible at this. Bodies all over each other. What a mess.
Dani knew she was trouble, but like, not the bite-your-tongue-off sort of trouble, y’know?
Okay, no she didn’t. She wouldn’t have ever guessed that Jane was anywhere near trouble. She should have—Jane is way too perfect to be a real girl, but Dani has never been a real girl before, so how the hell would she know? Jane laughs pitch-perfect, says her name pitch-perfect, but smiles just sweetly enough without it being weird. Jane could never be weird. She was the realest girl she knew.
When she kissed her the first time, that kiss felt real, too.
Well—
—until she sees half of her tongue sit neat as a candy inside of Jane’s open mouth, that is, and her own flooding with the taste of copper. She coughs and spits, all crimson, and oh, fuck, Aiko is so going to be bitching about the laundry when she gets home—but Jane is watching with the same sweet smile as she falls backward on her ass, blood pooling on her hands, and her hand scrambling to reach under her shirt—
Another flash of searing pain struck her. In horror, her right hand, a clean cut and spurting weakly with blood—there was really so much blood, smeared on the ground into a crimson dragged stain as she kicked and struggled to get away from Jane. It’s on her pants, too, and dripping from her collar, her chin, but why is she worrying about it at all if she’s never going to get home—?
Dani stared at the little bursts of blood, under the light of a million cascading spark of fireworks. When she stares at it like this, the pain seems to go numb.
It really is so beautiful.
“It hurts, doesn’t it?” Fingers in her hair, gently streaking the strands apart before pulling her entire head up with such force. Her eyes roll up and there’s Jane, looking at her with such kind eyes, moving her bloodied lips closer. The sharp glint of a blade in her hand. “I’m sorry.”
Dani feels her eyes roll back.
When she kissed her the second time, she dripped blood right into her lips, her mouth. Her blood, theirs, mingled together by the lick of her tongue. As real as the first time. Almost.
After everything is said and done and half of Tokyo is crumbled to rubble, Jane grazes her fingertips over Dani’s cheeks, her mouth, her lips. Stands on her tiptoes to reach for her, the bridge of her nose bumping against hers. Opening her mouth and just holding it there, an inch away from Dani’s own. Their soft, bated exhales, hot and wanting. So much wanting.
In another life, Fujino breaks somewhere along the long hard months of winter and slams the door to her dad’s hand-me-down Suzuki Spacia in the middle of the night. She drives the three long hours back to Nikaho until the streetlights look like distant stars and washes herself in cold grimy sweat when she abruptly realizes, in the middle of the way, that Kyomoto wouldn’t be home, snug in her bedroom among the stacks and stacks of sketchbooks that line along the walls; she’d be all the way in Yamagata instead.
The thought of Kyomoto being anywhere other than safe asleep in her room, wearing that oversized sleep robe of hers—the red one, the one she signed the first time they met at thirteen—makes Fujino’s chest restrict with pain and she bursts out sobbing for no apparent reason. It was all just so bewildering to her. Was she on her period? No, maybe she’s going to be, but—she just had it last week. Fuck. Was she pregnant, seriously? But she’s never even had a boyfriend, let alone kiss anyone, or do that sort of stuff. She had—
In the dream they wouldn’t let her see Kyomoto even when she’s dropped everything to see her one last time. Every time someone held her back from bursting through the morgue doors, flashes of the initial news rang over and over in her head: 12 dead, 3 gravely injured—unknown man—axe-like weapon—struck the bodies multiple times—
The hospital air clung with the sharp scent of antiseptics and her own salt tears, the grating sobs that keep escaping out of her throat even when she’s slumped to the point of exhaustion. Her mother sat with her in that hallway, on the bench—the rigid metallic sort, with holes poking out of the seat. It was so cold, Kyomoto must’ve been so cold, does she have her robe in there? She can’t sleep without that dumb robe. Her mother held her down like a dog and shushed her over and over, telling her that she couldn’t, shouldn’t see her, not like that. Kyomoto wouldn’t want you to remember her like that, right, sweetheart? She was always so sweet. Oh, god, that poor girl. I’m so sorry, baby. I’m so sorry.
She had Kyomoto. Has her. Will have her again in her life even if she had to crawl back on her knees begging. Her stomach hurts and her chest hurts and her eyes ached from the strain, and her mouth is so dry, and she should be commuting to work by this early hour instead of driving along some highway in the middle of nowhere out of her damn mind, but she is never going to lose Kyomoto like that. She couldn’t. The suffocating dread that she feels—
She can’t, she can’t. She needs her. Fujino needs her.
She swerved her steering wheel towards the exit for another hour-long drive to Yamagata.
In a few hours she’ll finish begging and Kyomoto will shove a duffel bag into the cramped trunk of her car, because it isn’t every day that your old best friend comes back to you in hysterics after months and months of cold radio silence. She’d hold her by the doorway and tell her to calm down, breathe, what happened, what are you doing here, don’t you have work tomorrow—? But Fujino wouldn’t hear it.
Let’s go home, Fujino begs, with both hands clasping hers in a prayer. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. Just come home. Come home with me, Kyomoto, please.
So she climbs into the backseat and curls up under Fujino’s jacket, the sound of radio static lulling her eyelids into a trance: fluttering closed, and open, and closed. And open. Fujino in the driver’s seat, the shadow cast on her back with every passing streetlight. Kyomoto staring all night long. It really is so cold up here in winter.
She watches dawn break the horizon over Fujino’s shoulder and wonders if she could paint the sight. Oil on canvas. She can’t imagine anything more beautiful.
But in this life, Fujino never once looked back, and there were no kisses to be had for sore regretters.
Fujino was ten when her sweet old grandmother died. She’d been one of her first ever fans; praised every drawing she’s ever made, kept every stray paper Fujino had drawn on into a neat stack pressed under a lotus paperweight on top of her bookshelf. When she died, Fujino didn’t cry, but she ate the last tin of Sakuma drops her grandmother gave her in one go until her throat ached from the sweetness. She watched her father moisten her grandmother’s lips with water on her deathbed and learned what it was that very day. Matsugo-no-mizu. One last kiss from the living.
At Kyomoto’s funeral, there was only the cold hard stare of white flowers adorning Kyomoto’s graduation picture. Closed casket; Fujino hears her teary-eyed mother whisper in the hallway about how the body was far too damaged for a proper wake, and she has to run to the bathroom to dry heave all over again. Her mother waited by the door and wiped her sweaty forehead when she came out, despite her own tears dripping down her chin. She loved Kyomoto as if she were her own daughter, too; for the longest time, it felt like the Ayumus had three.
But nobody loved Kyomoto more than Fujino did. Nobody.
There were no last kisses to be had for sore regretters. Still, Fujino kneeled down and pressed her lips against the smooth surface of her casket, caressing the head as if it were Kyomoto’s stubborn hair. It felt cold and plastic and only left her with a bitter aftertaste. Maybe that was how kisses were supposed to feel like. She wouldn’t know—she never officially kissed anyone before, never had a boyfriend, or even a boy who was a friend. She had Kyomoto. She only ever had Kyomoto.
After the wake goes back to Kyomoto’s house, in the dark, trudging through plowed mud and snow. That hallway, the one littered with stacks and stacks of sketchbooks, collecting dust on its cover—Fujino brushed it away, choked down a sharp sob, and kissed it. That room, with her red sleep robe still hung on the back of the door, and kisses that, too. Her clothes. Her books. Her backpack. Her pictures. Everything. There is nothing else to be had.
In a kinder one, Kyomoto met Fujino the day she saved her life.
Unfortunately, it was because exactly that, was why Kyomoto never called back. How do you properly thank someone for saving your whole life? For the longest time she just sat there, in her room, staring at the two kanji on top of that saved phone number. She’s spent her whole life sitting in this room, afraid of the world; it would have been such terrible luck if she really died that day, just as she’s starting to peek out of her shell.
She laid splayed on her futon and stared at the ceiling instead. That dust collecting on the corner. Her parents had worried about what was going to come after the incident—if she was having trouble sleeping they could get help, and if she was too afraid to go out all over again then, well, that’s fine by them, too. But—
Kyomoto can’t be that little kid again. She can’t. She wants to be something more, something good. Something better. Just—something.
Ayumu Fujino.
For the longest time, she wonders if Fujino will call her instead. And then she thought: How pathetic. Seriously, she saved my life, and I want her to call me? That anguished thought made her finally bite down her lip and reach a trembling finger to push the call button on her phone. Or—maybe text? You should text first before calling someone, right? Yes, that’s the norm, isn’t it? But what if she’ll never read her text? What if—
Her phone lights up. On the screen, bouncing that damn two kanji—
Ayumu Fujino.
Kyomoto’s eyes widened. She struggled for a long while to get her act right, pressing both hands against her mouth like an overeager teenage girl being met with her idol—but no, this is the woman who saved her life, she should—she should, oh god, she hasn’t practiced what to say, she should, she should—answer that damn call!
Static.
“Uhh… Hello?” Shuffling. “This is… Kyomoto’s phone number, right? Sorry, I didn’t quite catch a last name when we met…” An awkward laugh. “You didn’t really save your number on my phone, either…”
“I—” Kyomoto’s breath hitched. “Fujino-sensei! I… am so sorry, I really was going to call, I swear…”
An easy laugh, so light and amused that it startled her all over again. “Ahh, no worries, seriously! I was just calling to check how you were doing, that’s all.”
“I’m…” she swallowed thickly. All things considered, she was… “doing, well?”
Another amused huff. “You don’t sound so sure about that.”
“I—” Okay, what do you say to that? Kyomoto is really bad at conversations. She’s really bad at being with other people, or being a person in general, really. Maybe she really should have died that day. Maybe it would’ve been a mercy.
Her throat hurts.
“I’m sorry…”
“Hey, c’mon…” Fujino’s voice softened. “Do you always apologize this much?”
“Sorry…” Kyomoto said again, out of reflex, then winced. “I just, I’m not sure… how to properly thank someone for saving my whole life.” And then for some stupid reason, she said: “Should I—give you a lot of money?”
“Yes, you owe me a million yen.”
“Ah—huh? R-really?”
“I’m joking!” Fujino laughs again. “You are too easy, god!”
Kyomoto grumbled.
“Hey, aren’t you studying art at Yamagata?” Fujino asks instead. “You were covered in paint that day, and you had that… painting jumpsuit on. I looked back at you for the longest time through the ambulance window—I remember, you had red paint on your cheek!”
Kyomoto giggled at that, absently reaching up to touch her cheek where the paint no longer existed. “Yes, I’m studying fine art. I have an emphasis on landscape painting this year.”
Fujino’s voice brightened. “What, no way! Oh, man, I was always so bad at drawing backgrounds. They were always such a chore—I gave up drawing for years because of that!”
“Ehh, really? Is that why you quit drawing the school newspaper manga?”
“I swear!”
Kyomoto laughed, truly laughed this time. It was beginning to feel strangely easy to be with Fujino, despite never having met her in her life. She imagines two red strings just short of crossing each other, that one degree of separation—and then crossing, touching ever so briefly, after years and years apart. Kyomoto wants it to stay entangled over each other, looped and twisted into a knot until nobody could tell them apart.
In another life, maybe they would have met as girls in grade school, revolving around each other all their lives—maybe they would’ve drawn together, skipping to each other’s houses, spent the long hot summers splayed on Fujino’s bedroom floor. Train rides, and trips to the beach. But in this life—
“I was actually thinking… if you can take me around to see your works, instead?” Fujino asked. Her voice is small and shy all of a sudden. “If that’s not too much.”
Kyomoto beamed. “Of course not, Fujino-sensei.”
Fujino laughed. “Seriously, quit it with the sensei! Just call me Fujino.”
“Ah, hai,” Kyomoto said. “Fujino…”
She had a certain three-syllable name dancing around in her daydreams long after that.
That next Saturday, Fujino followed her around the studio that she shared with three other students. It was a pretty large studio, all things considered; there were canvases standing halfway up to the ceiling, lining up along the walls, overlapping each other. Everything smelled of dust and paint, yet Fujino gasped and whoa-ed in awe at each one—even the unfinished ones, and the abstracts only understood by the painter’s own eyes. Kyomoto would’ve thought she was just being nice, but there's the same glint in her eye that Kyomoto remembers having the first time she took a tour around the university’s gallery.
“I was always an amateur self taught, but—oh, man, I think properly studying art would ruin me,” Fujino said as she skipped around the studio, tilting her head to look at the paintings right. “Everyone’s so great! You’re so great. I could never.”
Kyomoto frowned. “Really? I’ve always loved your newspaper mangas in grade school.”
“Aw, you’re just sayin’ that,” Fujino laughed. “They were grade school drawings, seriously—when I read back some of them, they were all so cringey!”
“But… they were why I started drawing.”
Fujino stood very still, all of a sudden. She stared at a painting for the longest time as her eyes started to glaze over, like she was thinking so far that she’s no longer there. Kyomoto was beginning to be afraid that she might’ve said something wrong, but just as abruptly, Fujino turned around to look at her.
“Were they really?”
Kyomoto has never been more sure of anything in her life.
“Yes, they were.”
Fujino smiled at her. She smiles back.
“Will you show me some more of yours?”
Kyomoto began to drone on about her own paintings, the lines that she’d practiced the entire week before. This is a painting of the dirt path between the rice fields that I always went through in grade school, before I stopped going. This is inspired by the streetlight outside my bedroom window. When I was a kid, I liked watching the moths swarm at night. This is… a door. It isn’t done. It meant something, but I forgot. I think it was just about how I was always afraid to come out of my room, really…
Fujino followed her around, watching the paintings from over Kyomoto’s shoulder. She liked how they looked from behind her back.
Days became weeks and stretched into long, exciting months. Strings of texts after texts, and late night phone calls, weekend flings in the city, the beach, Kyomoto’s art studio. Fujino’s new cubicle at the publishing office, the one she told Kyomoto about how she wanted to work her way up to serialization—she is going to get her stories out there, no matter what. Kyomoto asking her what they were about. Fujino going on and on about a shark, and a woman, a shark-woman?—And a certain femme fatale from her dreams.
Kyomoto laughed. “You like girls?”
Fujino shrugs, despite her own shy smile. “Apparently so.”
It took them three more months to go on a date—a proper one, not the fleeting cat and mouse meetings they were frequently having on odd weekends. Nikaho summer festival, and the lanterns washing everything in warm hues of red and orange. Carp streamers, hot spindles of cotton candy, trying to fish out a ramune marble from its neck. Red ayatori strings between Fujino’s fingers, and a cheap excuse to be touching her. Glass candies glistening under the light. Running around like smitten school crushes, and Fujino following after her, enamored at how the world looked from behind her back.
Fireworks blooming in the dark, and a first kiss, Kyomoto and Fujino’s both. The one where they finally do it right.
(And again, and again, and again…)