Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The stream had been going for forty-one minutes.

Marche Lorraine knew because she’d been checking her phone, though at some point the checking had become an excuse to have something to do with her hands. The puppet sat on the floor beside her, propped against the foot of Loves Only You’s bed where she’d left it when she started drawing, small hat slightly askew. She picked it up now without thinking, the way you reach for a glass of water.

She was on the floor, back against the bed, tucked just outside the camera’s frame. This had always been the arrangement — since before Tracen, since the bedroom at home where Loves had done her first streams and Marche had sat in the exact same place, sketchbook open, just there. Close enough to exist. Far enough not to be in the way.

At the desk across the room, Loves Only You was doing what Loves Only You did.

“—so the variation with sesame oil is going to have a higher protein ratio, but I want to give that its own video. You deserve more than a footnote!” She tilted her head, a pale-pink strand sliding across her shoulder. The ring light lit her face, catching the small heart on her left cheek and the glossy red of her ponytail. “The recipe I suggested tonight, genuinely, anyone can make that. You don’t need to be at any kind of training intensity. That’s the whole point!”

Chat scrolled. Marche couldn’t read it from here, but she knew the rhythm of a pleased audience. Years of watching.

Loves smiled — slightly crooked, weighted to the left, visible only at certain angles.

Marche looked back down at her sketchbook. She’d drawn Loves’s profile without deciding to, accurate and faintly embarrassing — jawline, ear, the arc of her hair. She turned to a fresh page.

“Before I sign off,” Loves said, her voice shifting — still warm, but quieter now, directed somewhere specific rather than outward. “I wanted to say something.”

Marche’s pencil stopped.

“I talk about love in a big way here, and I mean every word. But sometimes love is also very small and very close. One person. Right in front of you.” Loves’ hands stilled in her lap. “There’s someone I’ve been thinking about. She’s actually right here, but she’s shy, so don’t bother looking.” A small, private laugh. “I just… I’ve been thinking about how proud I am of her. She shows up quietly. She always shows up quietly. And she always makes things better.”

Marche went still.

Not dramatically. She just… stopped. Pencil on the page, breath halfway out. The words landed somewhere in the middle of her chest and stayed there. She didn’t move, just in case moving would make them shift.

Proud. Of her?

The problem — which she understood intellectually and could not resolve emotionally — was that Loves said things like this. Not as performance. This was simply how she was. Some people ran warm, some ran cold; Loves Only You ran warm everywhere, all the time, and meant it every time. She had said something nearly identical about a shop assistant last week. About community members supporting her training block. She distributed specific, genuine affection with a consistency that made it almost impossible to tell whether, in any given moment, you were the recipient or simply nearby.

Marche looked down at the puppet in her lap. It looked back with its embroidered eyes, patient.

She lifted it slightly without meaning to.

I know, she thought, at herself. I know I'm doing it.

'She shows up quietly' was… specific, in a way the other examples hadn’t been. Specific, and earned by observation, not just affection in the direction of a person.

But then again.

She set the puppet down and turned to a page that already held the beginnings of a window sketch. She tried to work.

She mostly stared at it.

"— everyone! Love me~♡ Love you~♡ It's Loves Only You~♡"

The ring light dimmed as Loves switched to the desk lamp. The stream indicator went dark.

Loves exhaled, rolled her shoulders, and turned in her chair. She looked across the room and smiled — her regular smile, not the stream one.

"Maru-chan!" She crossed the room immediately and dropped down beside Marche, back against the bed. Close. Always close. "How was it? I couldn't see you the whole time."

Marche opened her mouth. Closed it. Looked at her phone.

"I, um, well..." She glanced sideways — and then the puppet came up, smooth as a reflex, and the voice that came out of it was bright, rounded, front-of-room loud. "Heyy, hiii~☆ The stream was amazing!! Love-chan absolutely nailed the nutrition segment, the chat was going crazy! Did you see how long they stayed after the recipe??"

Loves laughed, leaning lightly into her shoulder. "I saw! I was watching the numbers — I really thought they'd drop off."

"They didn't drop off at all," the puppet declared. "They stayed because Love-chan explains things — not just what to do, but why. That’s why people trust her!!"

"Maru-chan." Loves said gently, addressing Marche rather than the puppet, as she always did. Loves had never really bothered to maintain the fiction of it being a separate entity. "Did you think it went well?"

The puppet lowered fractionally.

"...Yeah," Marche said, small. "The pacing was right. The recipe didn't overstay."

"Good." Loves settled back against the bed frame. "I was worried about the middle dragging."

"It didn't."

"I see." She nodded, accepting it, and the silence between them settled into something that didn’t need filling.

After a moment: "Did you draw anything?"

"A little."

"Can I...?"

"It's not finished."

Loves did not push. She was good at not pushing, had learned the geography of Marche's edges over a lifetime of proximity, and mostly stopped trying to cross them directly. She leaned her head back against the bed frame, content in the afterglow of a stream gone well.

"I meant it. I know you heard me."

Marche said nothing at first.

"I..." Marche started. Then the puppet came up, quick as a reflex. "Oh, Love-chan was talking about someone? Ohhh, who is it, who is it~?"

"Maru-chan." Gently. No edge to it.

The puppet went back down.

Loves turned her head. From this angle, side-lit by the lamp, every detail of her eyes was visible. "I meant it specifically. Not as a general thing."

Marche fidgeted. "You say things like that a lot," not defensive, just accurate.

"I do. And I mean it every time. This time, I meant it about you."

Marche turned the puppet over in her hands, nudging the small hat she’d resewn twice when the thread came loose.

"...Okay."

"Okay?"

"Okay." A pause. "...Thank you."

Loves let that sit, then nodded.

They sat together as the September light went blue.

Marche opened her sketchbook and began to draw — Loves from this angle, close, head tilted back, the line of her throat, the loose fall of her ponytail against the pale wall. The kind of angle you only get when someone is forty centimeters away.

It was immediately better than the earlier profile from across the room. She could tell from the first line.

"Do you want tea?" she asked, when the drawing was far enough along not to abandon.

“Yes.” Immediate, bright. “Yes.”

Marche closed the sketchbook, picked up the puppet, and went to the kettle.

She didn’t think about the drawing. She thought about whether Loves still took two sugars, or if she’d gone back to one since the training block. That was easier to think about.

The puppet, tucked under her arm, said nothing.

Later, when the tea was done and Loves was showing her a thumbnail draft on her laptop — leaning close so Marche could see the screen, hair falling over her shoulder into Marche's space the way it always did and that Loves had never once noticed — she would say: "I really love having you here, Maru-chan. I mean that." And she would mean it completely, without weight or agenda, the way she said all true things.

Marche would say "mm," and point at the thumbnail font, which was wrong.

"Too small," the puppet would add helpfully. "Much too small, Love-chan~☆"

Loves would laugh and fix the font.

The canteen at noon was loud — not unpleasant necessarily, just dense, the accumulated sound of a hundred conversations at the same height. Trays clattered. Someone laughed too hard across the room and set off a small chain reaction. The air smelled good: rice, dashi, something faintly sweet.

Marche followed Loves through the line with her tray, puppet tucked under her left arm. It had come with her automatically, the way it always did when they were leaving the dorm for anywhere with people in it. She'd stopped being embarrassed about this approximately two years ago, or at least she'd stopped showing it.

"The karaage looks good," Loves was saying, tilting her head to evaluate the options. She always behaved like that in public spaces, a kind of gentle brightness that wasn't performance so much as her default state. People glanced at her, registered her upbeat demeanour, glanced away slightly dazzled. "Oh, they have sesame spinach today too."

Marche took the karaage, because Loves was right about it looking good, and because having a decision made for her was easier than making one.

They found a table near the window. Loves set her tray down and was already pulling out her phone to note something (a thumbnail idea, probably, or a stream segment) when a tray hit the table across from them with a sound like a small controlled explosion.

"OKAY so the whole B-wing situation was not my fault—"

Someone dropped into the seat opposite Loves with the kinetic commitment of someone who had been moving at speed for the last several hours and had chosen this specific table as her landing point. She was gesturing with one hand while the other person steadied her tray, clearly mid-sentence in a conversation that had started somewhere else entirely.

"—I was just trying to see if you could hear the bass from the third floor with the door closed, that's a legitimate acoustics question—"

"You cannot," said the other one, arriving approximately one second later with her own tray, pulling out the chair beside her friend. A shachihoko earring on her right ear caught the light. "I already told you. You cannot. I tested it."

"You tested it before I upgraded the—"

"Helios."

"—system—"

"Helios." she picked up her chopsticks. "You don't have a system. You have a Bluetooth speaker and ambition."

Helios pointed at her. "That is literally the same thing."

They looked at eachother for a moment. Then she turned to Loves Only You like making a lateral decision. "Hey. Sorry. She's been like this since breakfast." Her accent sounded American South, softened slightly by months of immersion in Japanese, a slow vowel here and there, cadences not fully ironed out. It made her sound like she was always on the verge of something.... comfortable? "Tap Dance City. You're Loves Only You, right? I've seen your streams."

"You have?" Loves's face lit up. "Yes! It's nice to meet you!"

"Good content." Tap didn't feel the need to elaborate on this immediately. She picked up her rice. "The community format is interesting. You're building something that doesn't quit when the racing does."

Loves looked briefly like she'd been given a very specific and well-aimed gift. "That's... exactly what I'm hoping for. Thank you, that means a lot."

"Good." Tap nodded once, satisfied, and ate her rice.

Helios, who had been shoveling karaage into her mouth at an impressive rate, swallowed and pointed her chopsticks at Marche. "Okay but wait, who's this? Are you... wait, are you the illustrator? The one who does the thumbnails for the streams?"

Marche looked at her tray.

"I, um—" The silence was getting awkward. The puppet came up, smooth and immediate, and the voice that came out of it was nothing like the near-silence of a second ago: bright, bouncy, front-row loud. "Heyy~☆ That's Mar-chan! She does all the illustrations! Nice to meet you!"

Helios stared at the puppet for approximately half a second. Then her face broke into a grin wide enough to suggest this was the best development of her afternoon. "NO WAY. Okay, that's so — that's so valid, I'm not even — okay, I love this, this is great, hi, I'm Helios—" She pointed to herself. "—she's Tap, we're roommates, we share a room with what I maintain is a perfectly reasonable amount of audio equipment—"

"Two speakers."

"Three speakers—"

"The third one is broken."

"It's fixable."

"It's in four pieces, Helios."

Helios turned back to Marche and the puppet, having apparently decided to simply move forward. "The thumbnails are so good, no cap, the one with the gradient on the cooking stream? That was genuinely fire, I screenshotted it."

"Ehehe~!" The puppet tilted with what might have been a bow. "That one took a while! Mar-chan kept redoing the gradient because she couldn't get the color right!"

"See, that's the thing, that's craft, that's real craft—"

"She did it six times," Loves offered, helpfully, having watched all six attempts in real time.

Marche's cheeks went slightly pink. She looked at her karaage.

Tap was watching her with a thoughtful expression. Not unkind, just assessing. "You're the childhood friend she mentions sometimes?"

Marche glanced up.

"I—" The puppet didn't come up this time, just her own voice, small. "...Yes."

"Mm." Tap ate another bite. She seemed satisfied with this, as though it explained something she'd been working out.

Helios, meanwhile, had rotated her attention to Loves, seemingly not experiencing social momentum as a thing that ran out. "Okay so I have to ask — the late-night streams, how do you maintain your training schedule with those? Because I've been trying to work out if I can do a Tenage☆Helios Channel upload before morning practice and every time I do I run like complete garbage—"

"You run like garbage because you stay up editing until two."

"I run like garbage coincidentally around the same time I stay up editing until two, those are correlated not—"

"Helios."

"—causal—"

"The editing can wait," Tap said like she had had this conversation before. Which judging from the few minutes of knowing Helios, she probably had. "Training can't."

Helios opened her mouth. Closed it. Made a face that suggested she found this both accurate and deeply annoying. "Okay but—"

"No."

"I wasn't—"

"Whatever you were about to say, no."

Helios looked at Loves. "She always does this."

"She's right, though," Loves sounded cheerful. "I schedule streams around training blocks. Training is immovable — everything else fits around it, not the other way."

Helios pointed at Loves. Then at Tap. Then back at Loves. "You two are going to be really annoying together, I can already tell."

Tap looked at Loves, a smile on her face. "Smart," she said, meaning it as a compliment.

Loves laughed.

Under the table, out of sight, Marche was drawing in the small sketchbook she kept in her jacket pocket, the one she used for fast things, crowd sketches, visual notes. She was drawing the table. Helios's tray at an angle, the chopsticks pointing somewhere. Tap's posture, very straight and very settled, a person who took up her space deliberately. Loves' hands, which she used when she talked, which Marche had drawn approximately a thousand times and could now do from memory but kept doing from observation anyway.

Loves’ had very pretty hands.

Marche wasn't in the drawing. She usually wasn't.

"Oh, what are you drawing~?" the puppet vocalized, suddenly, because Marche had made the mistake of letting the sketchbook tilt above table height for a moment.

"—nothing," Marche answered, in her own voice.

"Mar-chan always says nothing and it's always something really good!"

Helios immediately craned her neck. "Can I see—"

Marche closed the sketchbook.

"She's shy about it~!" the puppet explained, cheerfully.

"That's so real," Helios nodded, with genuine solidarity. "I hate watching my old videos back, I get like, physically ill, it's a whole thing—"

"You literally rewatch your own streams."

"I rewatch them to learn, not to enjoy them, those are different—"

"You enjoy them."

"I enjoy some of—" Helios stopped, pointing at Tap. "You know what, you're lucky I like you."

Tap's mouth moved in something that was almost, barely, a smile. She picked up her tea.

The table had settled into a comfortable shape by now, the lunch noise around them doing what lunch noise does, which is to say leveling out, becoming ambient, something you stopped noticing. Loves was asking Tap about her training schedule with genuine curiosity, Helios eating at a rate that suggested she had somewhere to be in twelve minutes.

Marche ate her karaage. It was good, Loves had been right. She held the puppet loosely in her left hand, not raised, just present.

Helios glanced over at her between bites. "Hey, so. The illustrations." She swallowed. "Do you do commissions? Because I've been trying to get proper art for the thumbnails of my channel and I keep doing them myself and they look, very bad."

Marche looked at her.

"Mar-chan does do art for people!" the puppet answered.

"Okay but like, would you? For my channel? I can actually pay, I have a budget now, Tap made me make a budget—"

"You didn't have a budget before," Tap confirmed.

"I had a vibe."

"You had a vibe," Tap agreed, in a tone that made clear what she thought of vibe-based financial planning.

Marche looked at the closed sketchbook on her knee. Then at Helios, all guileless hopefulness of someone who had not yet encountered a request she believed would go badly. There was something very uncomplicated about that. Marche found it, unexpectedly, easier to meet than most things.

"...Send me," her own voice. "What kind of thumbnails. You want."

Helios's face did something very bright. "Okay YES—"

"Send examples!" the puppet added. "Mar-chan needs references!"

"I have so many references, I have a whole folder—"

"She does have a folder," Tap confirmed. "It's organized, actually. I was surprised."

"I contain multitudes, Tap—"

Loves Only You, across the table, was watching Marche with the expression she got when something she'd wanted to happen had happened: quiet, happy, trying not to be obvious about it. Marche noticed without looking directly at her. She had developed a sort of peripheral sensitivity to Loves' expressions, specifically, gained it over approximately a decade and a half of proximity and never managing to turn it off since then.

She looked at her tray. She ate her sesame spinach.

"Mar-chan's work is really good," the puppet told the table enthusiastically. "She just doesn't like saying so herself!"

"Honestly iconic behavior," Helios nodded. "Respect."

Tap looked at Marche for a moment, unhurried. "Good to be selective. Means the work matters."

Marche didn't say anything. But she opened the sketchbook again, to a fresh page, and started drawing Helios's hands in motion: chopsticks, gesturing, the specific arc of someone who talks with their whole body.

Loves saw. Said nothing. Smiled into her tea.

The canteen thinned out around them in the slow way of a weekday afternoon — people peeling off in twos and threes and fours, trays stacked, the ambient noise dropping by gradual degrees until the table by the window felt less like part of a crowd and more like its own small weather system.

Helios had eaten everything on her tray and was now eating what remained on Tap's. Tap was permitting this, having apparently made peace with it as a permanent condition of their friendship.

"I'm just saying," Helios said, around a piece of karaage that was technically Tap's, "if we did a collab stream with you, me, Loves-san, the numbers would be like—" she made an exploding gesture with her free hand — "because the audiences are completely different demos and that's the whole point, you get crossover, you get new people—"

"You've proposed four collabs this week," Tap sighed.

"And they were all good ideas."

"Two of them involved the school roof."

"The acoustics up there are incredible, Tap—"

"We're not streaming from the roof."

Helios turned to Loves. "Tell her. Tell her the roof idea was good."

Loves had her chin in her hand, following this with gentle amusement, like watching a very familiar kind of argument. "I think the collab idea is genuinely interesting," she commented, which was diplomatic and true simultaneously. "The roof, though..."

"See, she said the collab—"

"—probably needs a permit," Loves finished.

Helios pointed at her. Then deflated slightly. "Okay but a permit is figureout-able—"

Tap squeezed the bridge of her nose between two fingers. "Helios."

"What."

"Eat your food."

"I ate my food. And then you gave me your food."

"Then eat that."

Helios ate that.

Marche had her sketchbook open on her knee under the table, finishing the drawing of Helios' hands she'd started earlier. She worked quickly on these, drawings made from gesture and impression, the kind of drawing that was true for about three minutes before the subject moved into a different configuration entirely. She'd filled four pages since they sat down. Helios in motion, Tap's posture, Loves' hands around her tea mug.

She hadn't drawn herself. She usually didn't, when she was drawing the people she was with. There wasn't a particular reason for it.

Tap was watching her draw. Not intrusively, necessarily, she hadn't leaned over or asked to see, just a steady peripheral presence that Marche had clocked in the first five minutes as the kind that didn't go away but also didn't push.

"You draw fast."

Marche looked up. "...A little."

"Mar-chan draws super fast!" the puppet confirmed, swinging up with its usual entrance energy. "She can do a whole portrait in like twenty minutes if you give her a good reference photo! Thirty if it's complicated!"

"Longer," Marche corrected, in her own voice.

"Mar-chan always undersells it—"

"It depends on what it is."

"Okay fine but still—"

Tap looked between Marche and the puppet with an expression that was not quite a smile but lived in the same neighborhood. "You argue with yourself," no accusation, just observation.

A small moment of silence.

"...They're different opinions."

Tap nodded, like it made complete sense, which it did. She picked up her tea.

Helios, who had been watching this exchange with her chopsticks paused halfway to her mouth, suddenly interrupted: "Oh my god, that's so real, okay, I do that too, I have whole notes in my phone that I argue with, like I'll write something down and then argue with the notes—"

"That's a to-do list," Tap corrected.

"It's a dialogue—"

"You're describing a to-do list."

"I'm describing a—" Helios stopped. Looked at the ceiling. "Okay, it might also function as a to-do list." She pointed at her roommate. "But the intent is dialogue."

Tap drank her tea, not bothering to answer.

Loves was laughing again. Her laugh was always easy, front-of-chest, the kind she didn't need to think about before doing. Marche drew it in the margin of the page without looking down, just the line of her, head tilted back slightly, the shape of a person laughing without self-consciousness. She'd been drawing that shape since they were children. She could do it in three lines.

"So what's the plan for this afternoon?" Loves asked, when she'd settled. "Do you two have practice?"

Tap answered first. "Track session at three. Which means..." she glanced at Helios "... we're leaving the canteen in ten minutes."

"Fifteen."

"Ten. You run better if you warm up properly, and you won't warm up properly if we get there with five minutes to spare."

"I warmed up fine last—"

"You pulled your right hamstring last Tuesday."

Helios opened her mouth. Closed it after a moment. "That was unrelated."

"It was directly related."

"It was related to—" Helios visibly reassessed her argument mid-construction "—other factors."

Tap stared at her in silence.

"Fine. Ten minutes."

Loves had her phone out, the way she did sometimes when something gave her an idea. Not urgently, just noting down whatever she had thought about, the small reflex of a person who thought about content continuously without that being a bad thing. "Actually, I've been thinking about doing a stream segment on pre-race routines. Not just training, the whole process. What different people do in the hours before." She looked at Tap. "Yours sounds very structured."

Tap considered this. "It's true. Routine's a tool. You don't want to be thinking about the race before you're actually running it."

"Do you... would you be interested in talking about it? On stream sometime? I ask people from different backgrounds because the community learns from the variety—"

Tap was quiet for a moment. The thoughtful kind, not the resistant kind. "What's the format?"

"Conversational, mostly. I prepare questions but it doesn't feel like an interview. More like—" Loves gestured, her palm open. She usually did this to describe something that was easier to show than say. "—two people talking about something they both care about, and the community gets to listen in."

Tap nodded, once, slowly. "Alright."

"Yeah?" Loves' face looked genuinely pleased.

"Yeah." Tap was already back to her tea, decision filed and complete. "Just tell me the date with enough lead time."

"She needs two weeks minimum," Helios added, helpfully. "She won't tell you that, but she does."

"I need time to prepare."

"She prepares for everything."

"That's how you do things correctly."

"I don't prepare for anything and I do plenty of things correctly—"

Tap gave her a look.

Helios ate the last of the karaage.

The ten minutes passed. They passed the way time passes when it's moving too fast and you're in the middle of something that hasn't finished yet, there and then abruptly gone, canteen sounds shifting around them as the after-lunch lull deepened.

Tap stood first, stacking her tray and cleaning up as a matter of principle. Helios stood a half-second later with considerably less balance: she knocked her chopsticks off the tray, caught them, dropped one, picked it up, knocked the chopsticks off again.

"I've got it," she said, eventually, to nobody in particular.

"You don't," Tap was already picking the second chopstick up from the floor and setting it on the tray.

Helios pointed at Marche. "The commission thing — I'm going to DM you, okay? I'll send you my folder. It's labeled and everything."

"Send the folder~!" the puppet agreed.

"I will. I absolutely will." Helios was already moving, tray in hand, but she turned back once at about three steps out. "It was really nice meeting you guys. Loves-san, your idea sounds actually amazing and I want to hear about it. Marche-san—" She pointed with the hand not holding the tray. "Your thumbnails are so good. So good."

Marche's cheeks went pink again.

"Thank you~☆" the puppet said brightly.

"You're welcome~☆" Helios grinned — wide, unguarded, the kind of smile that had nothing behind it but the actual feeling — and then Tap said her name at a normal volume from five meters away and she left.

They watched them go. Tap's walk was a straight line, while Helios' was a suggestion of a line.

Loves scratched her cheek. "I like them."

"Mm."

"Tap is very serious."

"Mm."

"Helios is—"

"Loud," the puppet offered.

"I was going to say energetic."

"Same thing."

Loves laughed. Then she settled, both hands around her tea mug, looking at the table, as if turning something over. The canteen had gone quiet enough around them that Marche could hear the slight sound of the ventilation, and the far-end conversation between two girls she didn't recognize yet.

Loves broke the silence again. "I think Tap is lonely."

Marche looked wordlessly.

"Not obviously." Loves traced the rim of her mug with one finger. "But she... the way she talks about what works. Routine, structure. It's all about performance. She didn't say a single thing about who she runs for."

Marche considered this. She thought about what had seen of Tap's posture: the deliberate settledness of it, the way she'd taken up space at the table like she'd decided to do so, rather than something she always did. How she'd looked at the collab conversation between Helios and Loves with something that wasn't quite wistfulness but lived adjacent to it.

Marche's voice was quiet. "...She did say the community format was interesting. Yours. That it didn't quit when the racing did."

Loves looked pleased. "You noticed that too."

"You noticed first."

"You noticed better." Loves said this simply, the way she said things she just believed. "You always do."

Marche looked at her sketchbook. She'd drawn Tap at the table; the back of her, mostly, her posture, the line of her neck where it met her shoulder, the space she took up. It was a different drawing from the Helios ones. Those were all motion. This one was mostly mass. Stillness with weight.

She closed the sketchbook.

"She'll be okay," not reassurance exactly, more like an assessment. "She found a friend."

Loves looked at her for a moment. Then she smiled — the real one, the left-sided one. "That's a very good point."

She finished her tea. Set the mug down. "Do you want to walk? Before I have to do stream prep."

Marche stood, gathering her things. The puppet went under her arm. "Where?"

"Somewhere. The grounds are nice in the afternoon."

This was true. She'd been drawing the Tracen grounds since she arrived — the trees along the track, the way the main building's shadow fell across the courtyard in the late afternoon. She had a whole section of the sketchbook for it.

"Okay."

They put their trays on the return stack and went out through the canteen's side door, then outside. The September air was cooler out here than inside, clean and slightly piney from the tree line. Afternoon practice sessions hadn't started yet, so the track was quiet, just two third-years doing easy laps at a pace that was barely more than a walk.

Loves walked beside her, a little closer than necessary given the width of the path. She'd done this since they were children, the slight gravitational pull toward Marche's side, close enough that their arms sometimes brushed. She never seemed to notice. Marche had developed, over two decades, a very practiced relationship with noticing it.

Loves made a low hum. "The Helios commission. It was good."

"She asked."

"You said yes."

Marche looked at the path ahead. "...The folder might be terrible."

"Or," Loves emphasized, having made this particular argument many times in many forms, "it might be fine, and you'll do great work, and someone new will have your art on their channel."

Marche said nothing to this.

Loves continued. "Tap said it's good to be selective. You are. That's not a problem."

"I know what the problem is," Marche answered, quiet and flat.

"I know you know." Loves didn't push it. They walked. A gust moved through the trees on the far side of the track, not cold, just present, and a few early-turning leaves came loose and crossed the path ahead of them.

Marche watched them land.

She thought about the drawing she'd done of Loves laughing, the three-line version, the one she'd put in the margin without looking down. She thought about how many drawings she had like that — drawings made sideways, incidentally, without the subject at hand knowing she was doing it. The whole secondary sketchbook she'd started last year that was organized by date. A folder on her drawing tablet labeled, very neutrally, references.

She did not think about those things further.

"Ooh!" the puppet jolted up, suddenly, swinging up with full entrance energy. "A kitty!"

There was, in fact, a cat. A large tabby, specifically, sitting on the low stone wall at the bend of the path with complete indifference to the concept of Tracen Academy or anything happening within it. It had the look of a cat that had made a territorial decision about this wall specifically and had not been moved on it since.

Loves made a small sound of pure delight and immediately slowed her walking. "Oh, hello—"

"Hi hi hi, kitty kitty~!"

The cat looked at them. It looked, specifically, at Loves's tail, which was doing the slow-swaying thing it did when Loves was happy and not paying attention to it. The cat's pupils did something interested.

Marche noticed, putting herself between the cat and Loves. "Don't."

The cat looked at her.

"She means well," Marche told it, in her own voice, which was the driest it ever got. "But she'll be upset if you catch it."

The cat appeared to consider this. Then it looked back at Loves' tail.

"Don't even think about it~!" the puppet pointed one small arm at the cat, which was the exact wrong instinct since the puppet's arm was approximately as interesting as the tail.

The cat reached out and batted at the puppet's arm.

"—!" Marche pulled the puppet back.

The cat looked satisfied.

Loves, who had been watching this with her hand over her mouth, lost the battle with her composure entirely and laughed, genuine and helpless, leaning slightly into Marche's shoulder. Marche let her. It was an old instinct, the letting — Loves had been doing this since they were small, tipping into Marche's space when something was funny, and Marche had long since stopped registering it as anything other than normal. Completely normal. Nothing to note.

She looked at the cat. The cat looked back at her, entirely self-possessed.

"Rude," the puppet informed.

The cat licked its paw.

"It knows what it did."

Marche looked at it. "It's a cat."

"It knows."

Loves straightened up, still smiling, reaching out carefully toward the cat with the back of her hand. Patient, non-threatening. Someone who actually knew how to approach animals. The cat observed this. Sniffed once. Then, as if performing an enormous favor, allowed the back of its head to be scratched.

Loves made a sound like this was the best thing that had happened all day. Given that Loves said the stream had gone well, this was a particularly high bar.

Marche watched her.

Then, under the arm holding the puppet, she opened her sketchbook. Found a blank corner on the last page. Drew quick: Loves with her hand out toward the cat, the cat's indifferent profile, the afternoon light. Three lines. A note in the corner she'd painted later in pale wash, the kind of light that only existed in early September.

She would paint it later. She usually told herself that and then did it — the promise to herself to go back to a thing, which was one of the few promises she kept reliably.

The cat endured approximately forty-five seconds of attention, decided it had been generous enough, and dropped off the back of the wall into the grass below.

Loves watched it go with fondness. Then she straightened, tucked a strand of red hair back, and looked at Marche.

"Good walk."

"We've been outside for seven minutes."

Loves shrugged, walking again. "Good seven minutes."

Marche followed.

The puppet, under her arm, said nothing, which meant Marche had to handle whatever she was currently feeling entirely on her own, which was... fine. It was fine. She walked beside Loves along the path in the clean September air with her sketchbook in her pocket and a drawing of three lines in the margin and Loves in her peripheral vision, and she told herself it was fine. She had been telling herself that for quite a long time now.

The afternoon light stretched long across the track.

Somewhere behind the wall, the cat was probably still watching Loves's tail.

The dorm building had a specific smell in the late afternoon — old wood, someone's floral shampoo from the floor above, the faint ghost of whatever Chrono Genesis had been heating in the shared kitchen two hours ago. Marche had mapped it without meaning to, the way she mapped most spaces she spent time in, building a sensory catalogue she didn't particularly ask for but always had.

They took the stairs. Loves always took the stairs — not as discipline, just preference, having always defaulted to movement when given the option. Marche followed because following Loves up stairs was something she'd been doing since they were old enough to climb them.

The third floor had a particular creak on the fourth step from the top. Marche stepped over it automatically. Loves stepped on it on purpose, the way she always did, the small percussive satisfaction of a consistent sound.

"You do that every time," Marche pointed out.

"It's a good creak."

Marche did not argue this.

The room was exactly as they'd left it: ring light off, Loves' desk with the monitor asleep, a lamp that had been on all morning. Marche's little corner of the room was in the state it was always in, which was organized in a way that looked slightly chaotic from the outside but had a kind of internal logic only she could navigate in the dark. Sketchbooks stacked by size. The acrylic set on the small table she'd claimed for it, the palette covered with cling wrap to keep the paint workable. The puppet's usual spot on the windowsill, which it occupied when not in use with the dignity of an object that had opinions about placement.

She set it there now. It looked out at the Tracen grounds, the long afternoon shadow of the main building crossing the courtyard below. Marche was often asked why most of her belongings had been brought here and not to her own room. She was also a firm believer in not answering such a question.

Loves was already at her desk, pulling up her notes without delay. She had a particular focus mode that was distinct from her stream mode — quieter, more internal, the warmth still there but turned toward the work rather than outward. Marche liked both modes. She had opinions about neither.

She sat on the floor with her sketchbook and opened it to the drawings from lunch. Helios' hands. Tap's back. The quick laughing line she'd put in the margin.

She looked at the laughing line for a moment. Then she got out the small watercolor set she kept in her jacket pocket — a travel set, twelve colors, a brush with a water reservoir she'd filled before they left — and started laying wash into the lunch drawings. Light work. The kind of thing her hands did while her brain was elsewhere.

"Okay," Loves said this half to herself, half to the room. She was reading through notes on her monitor. "Thumbnail first, then segment outline, then I need to message my trainer about next week's schedule. Maru-chan, did the thumbnail font look wrong to you last night? Be honest."

"Yes."

"I knew it. I knew it looked wrong." Loves pulled up the file. "Too heavy?"

"Too heavy. And too high. It's competing with the image."

"Competing with—" Loves looked at it. Made a sound of acknowledgment. "You're right. Okay." She started adjusting. "What about the color? The green."

Marche looked up. Across the room, the monitor was showing the thumbnail — Loves in her cooking segment, warm background, the offending font, a green that was doing something uncertain. "The green is pulling the eye wrong. It's going for warm but reading cold."

"Cold...?" Loves repeated, dissatisfied. "Because of the background temperature?"

"Because of the background temperature."

"Okay." More adjusting. "What if I shift it—"

"More yellow. Not much."

"This?"

Marche looked. "A little more."

"This?"

"Yes."

"Okay." Loves sat back. Looked at it. Then she smiled, the small satisfied version, the one that meant something had clicked into place. "Better."

"Mm."

"You didn't even fully look up."

"I can see it from here."

Loves turned in her chair to look at her directly, which she did sometimes in the middle of work — sudden full attention directed at her, like a light swiveling. "How do you do that."

Marche mixed a small amount of yellow into the warm brown on her palette. "Do what?"

"The color thing. Instantly know the correct color. You've always done it."

"You either see it or you don't." She applied the wash to Tap's drawing, the amber of the canteen light on the back of her neck. "You see other things instantly. You're good at understanding the running form of others."

"That's different."

"It's not different."

Loves looked at her for a moment. Then she turned back to the monitor, but not before Marche caught the edge of her expression, directed and quiet, the kind that had been happening more frequently lately or possibly had always been happening and Marche was only recently keeping count.

She was not keeping count.

She focused on the wash instead. The trick with watercolor on sketchbook paper was not to overwork it, the paper wasn't meant for it, would buckle and pill if you pushed, so you committed to the wash in one pass and let it do what it wanted at the edges. She'd learned this by ruining about forty drawings in her first year of trying it, and at some point the ruining had become data rather than failure.

Loves was typing, the efficient double-handed typing she did when she had the outline clear in her head and was just getting it down. The sound was good to draw to. Most of Loves' sounds were good to draw to. She made rooms occupied without being intrusive, homely and present without demanding response.

Marche knew this was a specific and notable thing to have catalogued about a person.

She was not, currently, doing anything about that catalogue.

She finished the wash on the Tap drawing. Moved to the laughing line in the margin — Loves at the table, head back, three lines. She looked at it for a long time before she picked up the brush. The thing about this particular drawing was that it was accurate in a way that some drawings weren't, catching something specific rather than just the surface, and she wasn't entirely sure she wanted to put color into it because it would make the drawing more real and more real was... it was fine. It was fine.

She put color into it. The warm terracotta of Loves' hair, a brief suggestion of it. The gold of the canteen light. She stopped there. Closed the sketchbook.

"Can I ask you something?"

Loves's typing paused. "Always."

Marche looked at the puppet on the windowsill. Then at her own hands, the faint watercolor residue on her fingertips, burnt sienna and yellow ochre. "About Tap. What you said about her being lonely." A beat. "Is that why you asked about the stream?"

Loves turned in her chair again, fully this time, arms folding in her lap. She had her thoughtful face on — chin slightly down, eyes somewhere between Marche and the distance between both of them. "Partly. Mostly I was interested in what she does. But... yes. Partly."

"You do that a lot."

"Do what?"

Marche considered the phrasing. "Find the people who are struggling, and — point your love at them."

Loves was quiet for a moment. "Is that a bad thing?"

"No." Marche picked up a clean brush, turned it in her fingers. "It's just what you do."

Loves watched her. The afternoon had gone further while they were drawing and adjusting thumbnails, the light through the window more horizontal now, the tree outside throwing a long thin shadow across the courtyard. The room had the quality of late afternoon in September, which was a quality Marche associated specifically and permanently with Loves' dorm room because that was where she'd spent most of it.

"Tap will be okay," Marche's own voice. Small and certain.

"How can you tell?"

Marche thought about her drawing. Tap's posture at the table — how deliberate she was, and how it had loosened, fractionally, by the end of lunch. The way she'd picked up Helios's fallen chopstick without comment. "The way she handles her. She's already decided Helios is worth the patience." A pause, thinking. "People don't do that for people they don't care about. And it’s hard to care about people genuinely without first finding a balance with yourself."

Loves looked at her with the expression Marche had been cataloguing and not cataloguing. Warm and specific and slightly more than the sum of its parts.

"That's very perceptive."

"It's just observation."

"Maru-chan." Loves's voice had the gentle edge she used when she was about to say the thing directly rather than around it. "You know those aren't different things."

Marche put the brush down.

"I love that about you," Loves continued, in the same tone, the way she said all true things, without setup or conclusion, just the statement itself placed in the room. "The way you see people. You always see the thing underneath what they show."

Marche's hands went still.

There it was. The problem, in its most recent form.

I love that about you was — it was Loves. It was completely, foundationally, entirely Loves, who said I love as a structural feature of her speech the way other people said I think or you know, who meant it every time, who had said some version of it to Helios at lunch within forty minutes of meeting her and had meant that too. It was not a small thing when Loves said it and it was also not a singular thing because Loves said it the way some people breathe, continuously and without running out.

Marche knew this.

She had a whole internal document on this, well-organized, frequently consulted.

"Mm."

Loves smiled. Turned back to her monitor. "Okay — segment outline. I want to do the pre-race routine thing properly, make it a series. Different athletes, different approaches. Tap first because hers is so structured it'll give people a framework, and then someone with a more intuitive approach as a contrast—"

"Helios?"

"Helios, yes, exactly, and then maybe someone who's still building their routine, earlier in their career..." Loves was typing again, the fast kind, the ideas-landing kind. "I want to frame it around the question of what running for someone does to your pre-race state. Versus running for yourself. Whether it changes the routine."

Marche thought about that. "Does it? For you?"

"Completely." No hesitation. Loves was still typing. "When I know my community is watching, not just that they'll see the result later, but that they're there, the whole point of my warmup changes. I stop thinking about the race. I start thinking about..." she paused, choosing the word — "the giving of it. The run as something I'm bringing somewhere rather than just doing."

Marche looked at her profile. The way she looked when she was thinking about something she genuinely believed, fully occupied, all of her in the same direction.

She picked up her sketchbook. Opened it. Drew.

"Does that make sense?" Loves asked, glancing over briefly.

"Yes."

"Some people would say it's a distraction. Some trainers hold the philosophy that, for example—" a mild note entered her voice, the thoughtful kind rather than the critical kind "—a runner should seal everything off. Race as a closed system."

"Does it work?"

"For some people. Not for me." Loves finished typing a line, sat back. "I ran my worst times under that framework. Not because it was wrong, just because it was wrong for me. I need the—" she made an expansive gesture, a spherical shape "—the out-and-back. Love that goes somewhere and comes back."

Marche had drawn her twice in the last four minutes without fully deciding to — her profile at the desk, and then a smaller version in the corner, a detail study of her hands on the keyboard, the way she held her wrists when she typed. She looked at the drawings. Then she looked at the page number. Added it to the mental index she kept of the sketchbook, which was organized but not in any way she'd ever explained to anyone.

"You should say that in the stream. What you just said. About the out-and-back."

Loves tilted her head. "Love that goes somewhere and comes back?"

"Yes. That's your whole argument. Your main idea. Everything else is supporting material."

Loves gave her full-swivel attention again. Then she smiled. "You're very good at this."

"At what?"

"At seeing what the core of something actually is." She turned back to the monitor, added a note. "I was going to bury the lede. You found it in thirty seconds."

"You said the words. I just heard them."

"That's what I mean."

Marche closed her sketchbook. She did not look at the drawings inside it. She looked instead at the puppet on the windowsill, outlined now against the early evening sky outside, the little top hat a dark shape against the blue.

The puppet had nothing to say, for once.

Which meant Marche was on her own with the quiet conclusion her brain had arrived at and was now declining to un-arrive at, that she had spent the last several hours drawing Loves Only You from every angle available to her and had told herself, at each instance, that it was observational, incidental, the product of proximity and good subject matter.

She was thirty percent convinced by this argument.

The percentage had been declining all afternoon.

"Maru-chan," Loves didn't look up from her monitor.

"Mm."

"Are you okay? You've gone quiet."

"I'm always quiet."

"Quieter than your usual quiet."

Silence.

"Mar-chan is fine~!" the puppet announced, from the windowsill, which was... she hadn't even picked it up, she'd just thrown her voice at it out of reflex, which happened sometimes when the inside/outside gap got too wide for her own voice to bridge alone.

Loves glanced at the puppet on the windowsill, amused. Then at Marche. "Long-range now?"

"...Force of habit," Marche's own voice, now.

Loves looked at her for one more moment with the expression that was neither stream-warmth nor general-warmth but the third kind, the one Marche's internal document had the least useful things to say about. Then she turned back to the screen.

"Twenty more minutes on this, then I want to show you the full thumbnail series side by side and get your read on the visual consistency."

"Okay."

She opened the sketchbook again. Found a blank page. The tree outside the window was a good subject, she'd drawn it before in other lights and the late afternoon version was different, the shadows doing something specific in the long horizontal. She drew the tree.

She drew it accurately and in detail and she did not draw the thing she'd been drawing all afternoon, which was not a tree.

She drew the tree for approximately four minutes before a strand of red hair caught the light at the edge of her vision and she drew that instead.

She looked at what she'd drawn.

She turned the page.

Outside, the September evening came in slowly, the way it did this time of year, without hurry, the sky going deep blue at the edges while the middle held its gold. Somewhere on the track below, the late practice session had started — she could hear the distant rhythm of hoofbeats, steady and real.

Loves was typing. The room was warm. The puppet watched the courtyard from the windowsill with its embroidered eyes.

Marche drew the tree, and only the tree, for the remaining twenty minutes.

She was mostly successful.

The twenty minutes became forty, because the thumbnail series had a consistency problem that revealed itself only when all six were lined up side by side — the third one had a slightly different color temperature from the rest, warm where the others were neutral, and once Marche pointed it out it couldn't be unseen.

"I knew something was off," Loves leaned close to the monitor. "I kept looking at it and not finding it."

"The background. The shoot was different lighting."

"The afternoon shoot, yes, the window light was coming from the other side." Loves pulled the file open. "Can it be corrected in post or do I need to reshoot?"

"Post. Desaturate the highlights slightly, they're reading too golden."

Loves made the adjustments. Looked. "Like this?"

"A little more on the highlights."

"This?"

"Yes."

She sat back. The six thumbnails sat in a row across the monitor, consistent now, a clean visual thread running through them. Loves exhaled with the satisfaction of a problem solved.

Marche nodded "Much better."

"Much better." Loves looked at the row for another moment, then closed the files and stretched both arms above her head, a long full-body stretch that ended with her slumped back in the chair, looking at the ceiling. "Okay. I think that's actually everything."

Marche looked at her phone. It was later than she'd registered. The sky outside had completed its transition — proper dark now, the courtyard lit by the low path lights, the tree a dark shape against it. The distant sound of the track had stopped a while ago; she hadn't noticed when.

"It's late."

"Mm." Loves didn't move from the ceiling-looking position. "You should sleep."

"You should also sleep."

"I will. I'm going to do ten minutes of reading first. Wind down."

Marche began collecting her things. The watercolor set, capping the paints she'd left open. The puppet from the windowsill, which she tucked under her arm. The sketchbook she hesitated over for a moment, flipping to the back sections without fully opening it, then zipping it into her bag.

Loves watched her from the chair. Still slumped, at ease, since the day had gone well and there was nothing left that required her energy. She had been fully present all day and was now, gently, starting to let that go.

"Today was good."

"Mm."

"Helios and Tap." Loves tilted her head against the chair back. "The walk. The cat." A small smile. "Good day."

"Good day," Marche agreed, and meant it, which was a clean and uncomplicated feeling that she held carefully, because uncomplicated feelings involving Loves Only You were worth keeping when they arrived.

She picked up her bag. Stood.

Loves stood too, because she always did when Marche was leaving. It was less a formality and more of an old instinct, the small ceremony of a goodbye done properly. She crossed the room in a few steps and stopped in front of Marche, the forty centimeters that had been the default distance between them for as long as Marche could remember.

"Thank you. For today. For the thumbnails. For, just..." She gestured towards the room, intimate rather than expansive. "Being here."

"I live here now. In this building."

"I know." Loves's voice was warm and dry in equal measure. "I meant the other thing."

Marche looked at the puppet under her arm.

"Maru-chan." The gentle edge. The direct version.

"...You're welcome," Marche's voice was very quiet.

Loves looked at her for a moment, the full warm attention of her, and then she stepped forward and put her arms around Marche in the straightforward uncomplicated way she had always hugged people she loved, which was without preamble or qualification. Complete. She smelled like lavender fabric softener and faintly like green tea, and Marche stood very still for approximately one second before her free arm came up and returned the hug because what else was she supposed to do.

The puppet was slightly in the way. It was always slightly in the way during hugs. Neither of them had ever remarked on this.

"I love you," Loves' words. Easy. Clear. The way she said all true things.

Marche's arm tightened fractionally around her.

She knew what this was. She had her document, internally, well-maintained, and she consulted it now with the efficiency of long practice: Loves said this. Loves said this to people she loved and she loved widely and deeply and genuinely, she said it to the community members who'd been with her for years, she said some version of it to new friends within minutes of acquaintance, it was the linguistic expression of a personality that ran warm all the way through and did not ration itself, it was—

She always shows up quietly. She always makes things better.

She closed the document.

"I love you too," Marche answered, quiet and simple, into the red of Loves' hair.

She meant it the way she always meant it, which was the way that had no clean name and that she had been putting in sketchbooks and margins and three-line drawings for approximately as long as she'd known how to hold a pencil.

Loves didn't hear the distinction. There was no reason she would.

They stayed like that for a moment, the distant ordinary sounds of the dormitory building settling around them. Then Loves pulled back, since she had never been awkward about physical affection in her life. She looked happy, her day ending just right.

She looked down at the puppet under Marche's arm. The small hat. Embroidered eyes looking up at her.

"Goodnight," she told it, bending and pressing a small kiss to the top of the hat, neat and deliberate, the way she did most things.

Marche watched this happen.

Something in her chest did the thing it did, the thing without a clean name, settling and complicated and warm in equal measure.

"Goodnight~!" the puppet answered, bright and immediate, and then — softer, genuine, Marche's real voice underneath the puppet's without quite making the full switch: "...night, Love-chan."

Loves smiled. The left-sided one. "Goodnight, Maru-chan."

Marche went to the door. Opened it. The hallway outside was dim, the late-evening quiet of a dormitory floor, someone's music faint through a closed door two rooms down.

She looked back once. She always looked back once, old habit, a leaving-a-room instinct that had never gone away.

Loves was already moving back toward her desk, reaching for a book she'd left there — but she glanced up at the look-back, the way she always did, like she was waiting for it.

"Sleep well."

Marche nodded. Stepped out. Let the door close behind her with the soft click of a well-fitted frame.

The hallway was quiet. The fourth step from the top of the stairs creaked under her foot before she remembered to step over it.

She stopped walking.

She stood on it for a moment, the small percussion of it still present in the air.

Then she went down to her own room, on the second floor, the cold of a room that had been empty all day. She turned on the desk lamp. Set her bag down. Put the puppet on the shelf above her desk, where it sat in a row with the others — three of them, each made at different points in her life, each with a different face, all of them looking outward.

She sat on the bed.

She held the thought: I love you, in Loves's voice, easy and clear and without any of the weight that Marche would have given it if she'd had the courage to say it the way she actually meant it. Her document, the well-maintained internal catalogue, said: this is how she speaks. This is structural. This is who she is and who she has always been and the fact that she says it does not mean—

She lay back on the bed, looking at the ceiling.

The puppet on the shelf looked at the wall.

Loves Only You was probably already reading. Ten minutes, she'd said. Then sleep. She would fall asleep quickly because she always did, she was one of those people whose bodies worked hard all day and required rest without negotiation. She would sleep well. In the morning she would wake up and it would be the same, warm, present, genuinely itself, saying true things in the tone of someone who had never once had to think about whether to say them.

Marche put her arm over her eyes.

She thought about the kiss on the puppet's hat. The careful press of it, the ease of it, the way it was just... naturally, just a natural expression of the same love that went everywhere and meant everything and was very difficult to live adjacent to when you had a sketchbook full of three-line drawings and a color index and a feeling you'd been carefully not naming for longer than was probably reasonable.

She took her arm off her eyes.

Sat up. Got her sketchbook out. Opened it to the drawing she'd done of Loves laughing, the one with the watercolor wash — terracotta hair, gold light, the three lines. She looked at it for a long time in the desk lamp's small circle.

Then she turned to a fresh page and wrote, in the corner in very small letters, because she wrote notes to herself this way sometimes when drawing wasn't enough:

she kissed the hat.

She looked at this. Then she drew a line through it. Then she turned the page again and picked up a pencil and drew the cat on the wall, from memory, the large tabby with its self-possessed expression and opinion about tails.

The cat looked better on paper than it had any right to.

She drew until she was tired enough to sleep, which took a while, and when she finally turned off the lamp the room was the same dark it always was, ordinary and quiet, the puppet watching the wall from its shelf.

Outside, somewhere, September was finishing its slow work on the trees.