Chapter Text
Kaori Aida had long been used to the unfortunate truth that she would always feel like an "other". She didn't know when it began, as she had felt this way for years. She didn't know why it began, but the people on TV always said there was a why, like it were a virus. But she did know the how, from her own stories, and the ones she read on the newly discovered Internet. How she felt, to be specific: isolated, besieged, and misunderstood.
She was eight when she noticed no girls in her classes felt a deep, instinctual longing for other girls like she did, and from there, she felt the need to hide it. It left a very small pool of people she could see herself spending her life with. Some were indifferent. Some didn't really get it. Others were outright hostile. She wasn't hurting anybody, so why did it have to be such a big deal? Why couldn't they just let her live?
The only positive: it left less time to be held back by fleeting crushes, and thus more time for studies. The competition of academia was ruthless, and people would usually ask if she was studying for some far-off test before asking if she had brought a boy home. Both questions were annoying, but the former was harmless; she was a smart girl, after all. Hearing it from her mother just before a break almost felt like a relief.
Her mother claimed to not imprint on her daughter's life. And sure, her parenting never felt outright controlling, but they wore their hair the same way, were quick to assumptions the same way, and were impatient with people in the same way. Kaori felt at least a bit of that was intentional, and if it was, her mother likely had a plan laid out for her. Throwing the wrench of 'Mom, I actually like girls, and I'd like to marry one' into that was too risky. So, Kaori never told her.
She had read the horror stories about arranged marriages. She liked to think people had become more understanding since then, but this was the same country that stopped having kids because a zodiac cycle told them girls born on a certain year were evil*. Old traditions died hard, and the idea of being wed to a stranger was nauseating. She would open no doors for the chance of someone "recommending" it. So, Kaori never told her relatives.
In a period of her life that was already painful and awkward, Kaori was saddled with the notion that she was doomed to be lonely forever, that nobody would know nor care about her struggle. Two people broke through this idea for her. The first was Chihiro Inoue.
Kaori was twelve, early in her second year of junior high, when Chihiro first caught her eye. She was the only person who made short hair look so pretty, so detached from the boys who wore it like she did. She still didn't know how to describe it, but it felt very much like a crush. The kind that superseded logic, that told her she needed to pursue it, that it was everything if it went right and a disaster if it went wrong. Such a binary view was all she knew, too used to disappointment and scorn at every turn. But this was a real chance.
Kaori's attempt at asking Chihiro out was a disaster. She knew what Kaori was trying to say and let her continue out of respect, but when Kaori stumbled upon 'I... I-I...' for the twelfth time, Chihiro really should have intervened. She was too young to know what the weight of a refusal meant for Kaori, but she had to be honest and say that she didn't really like girls that way.
Blessedly, she also didn't know the weight of the three words that followed: "But I understand."
Kaori gasped, actually gasped, not just because she had never heard those words from someone her age, but because it blunted most of the heartache she had expected. Someone actually understood. They didn't call it a bad thing, they didn't even call it a good thing, they just called it a thing. A natural conclusion, a different rhythm that existed in and of itself. Chihiro understood.
From there, it was the beginning of a strong friendship. Kaori knew better than to reduce Chihiro to some kind of wingwoman, and they'd learned stuff about each other that was entirely unrelated. For example, Chihiro had a book detailing the stars of the Milky Way Galaxy and a telescope in her backyard, one Kaori would later get for herself. Gazing at the stars together... it was almost romantic. Almost. And she didn't even need to make it a big, messy, complicated thing to do it!
Eventually, she found it more interesting to read about Proxima Centauri than to look into Chihiro's eyes. They didn't take in a lot of light, but those irises were nearly green, weren't they? Like a pond on an overcast day. She'd have stood out in the rain to get those clouds if it were for someone like her. She was into things that girls weren't into. Chihiro was, dare she say it, kind of cool. She wasn't even worried about being cool, she just ended up that way.
Kaori found her curiosity trending towards the cooler girls, like a compass reaching out for the North Pole. She remembered this one girl near the end of second year, Tadako, she seemed to have more money than she knew what to do with. She seemed to harshly demand that intrinsic coolness, and it soured her in the eyes of Kaori right away. That, and the legions of fangirls around her. So annoying, can't they live without basing their whole identity around someone else?
Only one other time could Kaori really say she was into a girl, and this was more of a "cute" girl than a "cool" one. In her first term of third year, Kaori found herself in a bit of a craze for cute. Her mother occasionally humored her, it was a sight for sore eyes to see her daughter coming home from school so chipper. Of course, the reason Kaori was happy was the sight of a girl who embodied cuteness to a T: Emiko.
She was the only person who could put fifty-seven Hello Kitty stickers (Kaori counted) on her lunchbox and not make it look garish. If the school dress code allowed it, Kaori was certain Emiko would show up draped in pink every single day. She seemed to follow a pretty clear end, a deceptively simple one, and Kaori liked it... until Emiko started looking more orange than pink. Part of some odd trend called gyaru, whatever that meant. Suddenly, Kaori found herself looking her way a lot less. Cuteness seemed to consume itself, coolness was too intangible. Maybe she should just focus on herself.
Chihiro seemed to think so, too. Both times, during the very brief looks at Tadako and the captivated stares at Emiko, Chihiro would give advice for the occasions when Kaori got caught in her own indecisiveness and saddled her friend with questions. They typically involved keeping a good distance, not that Kaori could even close that gap. Her throat would almost seize up, her words would come out jumbled, she was so terrified of being rejected that it stopped her from opening up.
The void in Kaori where a partner should be was still there, but it was becoming easier to cope. Tadako and Emiko wouldn't even have given her the time that Chihiro did. Between that and her continued friendship, Kaori had reason to be optimistic, and she told herself that when high school came, she would vow to start clean. The mangas made all-girl relationships look at least normal at that stage, and there would surely be people still unsure of who they were or what they wanted or who it would be with. Nothing, short of finding someone so amazing she couldn't look away, would stop her.
But just as she entered high school, she found that someone, the second person to change her mindset.
When Kaori first saw her, she had no words for her awe. She hadn't had to learn them until now. Nobody had captivated her this heavily before, nor would they ever again. Forevermore, they would pale in the light of this girl. Sakaki, she was called.
Sakaki didn't need to take action to alter how Kaori saw the world. No boasting, no trends, she just went about her business like nothing concerned her. It was refreshing, to see someone wield such an aura and know it spoke for itself. Kaori's first instinct was to pray, to thank the heavens. There was hope. There had to be. How could the random order of an uncaring world result in someone so brilliant? It was the universe's recompense for years of agony.
Chihiro looked like someone Kaori could easily stack up to, but Sakaki? Kaori couldn't believe they were even the same age. She was a head taller than her, maybe more. Her hair looked like the finest curtain, all the way down to her hips, a length her mother would never have approved of. And, as much as Kaori told herself she was above such impropriety, her eyes tended to wander at the chest and hips whenever Sakaki walked past.
Sakaki didn't look like she should be in this school. She didn't look like she should be in any school. She looked like she was designed to have legions of mere mortals bowing at her. She was so far above Kaori's league, and that made her desire stronger. It made Sakaki look that much cooler, that much more unstoppable, that much better. If Kaori could just talk to her, that would make her whole year. Maybe her whole life. Who could say? What was the limit to her emotions with Sakaki around? Why did she need a limit? What was stopping someone like Sakaki from taking her higher, and higher, and higher, and-
'No! Come on, Kaori, focus! What was I going to say... um... oh! Oh, high up like space! Astronomy! Right! The astronomy club!' She and Chihiro had joined it together, and it turned out she could invite a guest! Just a few days in and she had the chance to spend time with this absolute titan of a girl. This was the best high school ever!
Or so she hoped. All Kaori planned was a request to join her as a guest at her club, but she could not have planned for the intensity of Sakaki's stare. The second Kaori's eyes met with those of the towering noirette, her question died in her throat. Sakaki's eyes could trace a path of destruction wherever she looked, and, taking the cue from her last try at personal conversation with a girl she liked, Kaori backed off right away. It took a fair deal of stammering, a trait that hadn't changed, before shuffling off in defeat. Surely, someone like Sakaki had better things to do.
Though Kaori noticed that Sakaki never said no to the offer, and even seemed wistful afterwards. She thought nothing of it. Being so cool just clearly meant nobody could match up. In Sakaki's shoes, she'd be wistful as well, it must be lonely to be in a category all of your own. A good category. Not the broken, miserable category where Kaori was.
Now, it didn't seem quite as miserable anymore. It felt great to be so in love.
Terrified for so long of the whispers behind her back and the insults hurled at her, Kaori expected to turn to a familiar section of her playbook. She would downplay how she felt, wait for Chihiro to read her tells, then beat herself up about needing her help yet again. However, she truly could not help herself whenever she caught a glimpse of Sakaki doing... essentially anything. She remembered the first time she let it slip while talking about her: an "Ah, Miss Sakaki is just so cool!" that couldn't be contained.
Openly gushing, a terrible mistake. And the subject wasn't a boy, even worse. But nobody responded. Nobody seemed to care. The environment was just open enough that she could sing the praises of Sakaki and get away with it.
It was a good thing, too, because with the amount of everyday things she made look so effortlessly brilliant, putting a pin in that would have made Kaori explode. It was a decent release valve, and it gradually became more regular to come within Sakaki's vicinity without feeling like she would combust. She still hadn't mastered the part where she actually spoke to Sakaki, but she had plenty of time.
But the world was never keen to give Kaori too much of a good thing at once. That first dazzling moment of contact, the folk dance during the annual sports festival, felt like the greatest two minutes of her life. She moved with such skill, such poise, especially for a girl of her size! Kaori would have given anything to be suspended in that moment forever... which is why, of course, it was followed right up with a dance with that horrid Mr. Kimura.
Even if he wasn't twice her age and completely unskilled, he had far, far too much fun during it. The way he laughed at her anguish, had he been watching? Had he seen her silent bliss with Sakaki and decided to crush her? Once it was done, Kaori was frustrated to no end, hoping to never run into that weirdo again. All that mattered was time with Sakaki, thinking about her managed to bring Kaori to a calm. That, and a reminder that she had plenty of time.
Another stint of mental downtime came at her club camp. It felt like junior high again, where it was nothing but Kaori, Chihiro, and the endless cosmos above. It couldn't have come at a better time for her, and besides, she could have been stuck at some boring old beach house for a week. What a disaster that would have been!
Indeed, it was a disaster, because Sakaki had gone there! And slept in the same mattress as Tomo! When Kaori saw the photos of them resting so peacefully, Tomo's arm sprawled over the sleeping beauty herself, a tidal wave of defeat washed over her. It was hard to breathe, the room started to spin, and when Tomo explained that she had tossed in her sleep and started the night a lot farther from Sakaki than the photo suggested, Kaori didn't feel relief. These girls Sakaki was spending time with, they weren't just friends, they were competition. She had to fix this. She had to, while she had time.
That was the last time Kaori went to that camp, and by the end of the year, she had dropped out of the club altogether. It was impossible to look at something that once brought her such solace without thinking of the missed chance to see her beloved. Seeing her in class was starting to feel insufficient, she had even taken to learning the route she walked to school every day. It diverged from Kaori's own route, and it felt too overt to try, but it was good to simply... know. That was it, just knowledge! Just innocently wanting to know more about a friend!
It got to a point where it all began to blend together. That raven-haired giantess was showing up in Kaori's diary more and more. Between that and her usual studies, everything else began to fall to the wayside. She was getting closer to the entourage that kept Sakaki company, even if it did include a pair of total idiots like Tomo and Osaka. They didn't really spend a lot of time with Chihiro, and in turn, Kaori was starting to spend less time with her. She was starting to talk about her everyday happenings less too. But she had time. There was a whole new school year to give it a go!
Nothing about second year even stood out to Kaori beyond the sports festival, the trip to Chiyo's beach house where Miss Yukari nearly killed a pedestrian, and the falling out with her dear friend. Chihiro seemed to have sprained her ankle, and Sakaki volunteered to take her place in the three-legged race, an event Kimura couldn't foil this time. When it turned out Chihiro was alright, Kaori looked at her like she had deeply insulted her, hissing at her to back off. So close to having an entire event all to herself with the girl she would gladly give her life for, and Chihiro picked now to mess it up? She couldn't afford any distractions while she still had time.
The culture fest was a great success, and for a moment, Kaori felt satisfied on multiple fronts. The idea of spending a whole day working with Sakaki on something nice together was so sweet, so perfect for her ultimate goal of approaching the wallflower, which was starting to muddle with her other priorities. She was speaking to Chihiro less. To operate in tandem with her former crush made her forget about the pressure for a moment.
It was true that Kaori spent a lot of it gazing Sakaki's way, and she missed a perfect chance to make fun of some girl's awful attempt at a makeshift cat plush, and Kimura again tried to butt in and make things creepier, and Chihiro told Kaori her crush on Sakaki was starting to get uncomfortable, and that she didn't seem like the same girl anymore, and Kaori still didn't get a close conversation with her... but that was alright. She had time.
From there, everything continued to blur, especially when Kaori found out her third year would be spent with Kimura as her homeroom teacher, a move he didn't even try to hide the ulterior motives of. That meant no more Sakaki. That meant no more anything. No more anyone. Most days, she just closed her eyes and pretended she was anywhere else. If she thought hard enough, maybe it'd come true. Maybe she'd pop right up in Sakaki's lap, somewhere nice, somewhere sacred.
So pure was this goal that even after the near-death experience called Miss Yukari's driving, just the thought of embracing the end with Sakaki and meeting her in the heavens allowed her to recover in record time. Time. She had to have spent some of it with Sakaki while studying, right? She'd failed, once more, to have a meaningful conversation, but she had it. Time. Yes, of course.
One day, she happened to open her eyes while Kimura was droning on about something new: the entrance exams. He was urging his students to hanker down, and that while having to say goodbye to another class of students broke his heart, he would still guide them to a brighter future. Kaori wanted to scoff, someone should guide him into a prison cell, or maybe-
Wait. Entrance exams? How could the entrance exams be coming up? They weren't that late into third term, were they?
She mentally flipped her way through a calendar. The trip to Okinawa (yet another venture ruined by the demon disguised as a teacher) was a while ago, so was the second trip to that beach house. Winter break had gone by less than a month ago. That would put her in late January, just before the final stretch of exam studying began, and about two months before graduation. But that would mean...
No. No, surely not, perish the thought. The instant class ended, Kaori grabbed her school bag and bolted from her desk, trying to outrun the truth. She didn't have any time at all. She never did.
The practical destination was the cafeteria, but practicality was the last thing on Kaori's mind. Almost defying physics to come to a near-perfect stop once she was past the door, she took a hard right turn and gunned for the end of the hallway. Panting from this sudden burst of activity and the realization she had tried to push back, she came up to the window at the corridor's end. Hints of snow on the ground, with a month of her high school tenure left to go. She'd walked here, of course she saw it earlier, but that didn't make this harsh passage of time any less cruel.
Her heavy breathing didn't cease as she remembered the implications. This was Miss Sakaki, there wasn't going to be another girl like her. She could run into ten women who looked just like her, but they wouldn't be her. They wouldn't be the ones who set a fire in her heart that burned for years. They wouldn't be the ones who made her feel normal and safe in a world that insisted she had to be neither. They wouldn't be the ones who caught her eye with no effort, the ones who said it best by saying nothing at all. They would never represent hope in the face of total oblivion.
For the smallest sliver of time, Kaori was back in middle school, back to being even shyer around those girls that took her mind by storm, back to when Chihiro was 'Miss Inoue' in her mind, distant and untouchable. Asking her to be her girlfriend hadn't been successful, but she still spent so much time with her from that point on. She overcame her fears, the many factors stacked against her, and had come out of it better than before. She would just have to do it one more time, that was all.
Yes, that made sense! It was coming together, she just needed to approach this the way she did back then! The circumstances weren't too different once she thought about it. Both times involved asking out a girl with black hair that tufts out to the side a bit, has eyes closer to grey than brown, a softer register than expected, a penchant to keep to themselves, some intangible charm that flips a switch in Kaori's brain and makes her stop thinking- she stopped herself from listing more similarities, starting to become cognizant of the world around her again.
Some boy had been muttering 'excuse me, miss...' in her direction four times, and only on the fifth try did he get an acknowledgement. He'd asked if Kaori was alright, to which she very hesitantly replied that she was. Nothing to worry over, being hunched over by the window was perfectly fine! Once she had lost him, her pace of a stilted walk turned back into a sprint. Fresh scenery would clear her mind, surely.
She sat alone in the cafeteria, making sure to stay at least five tables from the group she was on the periphery of. She kept her distance more often than not, usually because Tomo would be especially loud, but right now? She wasn't in the mood to speak to anyone, she was too busy working out her plans. Kaori told herself not to shout her admiration for Sakaki from the rooftops, and she believed that she had kept a pretty tight lid on it. Thus, she knew that if she walked right up to their table and let it spill to one person in the group how she really felt, then they would all know, and that was a disaster she couldn't prepare for.
It was a much-needed breath of fresh air to be by herself in a somewhat more open environment, but the more Kaori thought on it, the more she realized it wasn't practical. Having nobody to ease her into asking someone out the first time around was a major undoing. Since then, over two years of going it alone to win over Sakaki hadn't worked. With a couple curses under her breath, she accepted that she was going to need assistance. She couldn't say anything to her until she was absolutely prepared.
The person who would have helped the most, Miss Inoue herself, was a no-go. Kaori would oscillate between resentment with Chihiro for 'sabotaging' her attempts to be near Sakaki and immense regret from having pushed away her ally and confidant, all because of her own mistakes. To bother her over this yet again would be tone-deaf at best, insulting at worst.
Removing Chihiro from the equation left a dismal roster. Yomi pretended she was above all interpersonal relationships, Tomo and Kagura would let their ambitions to be better than Sakaki cloud their judgement, the idea of Osaka even asking someone out forced a brief snicker out of Kaori, and Chiyo was a little kid. Asking someone coming up on thirteen for advice on someone coming up on eighteen just felt wrong.
But Chiyo hated being little. She always made a whole stink out of feeling belittled, mocked, and never taken seriously. What better to disprove that than helping someone out with high school relationship advice, always the most serious and chivalrous of affairs? And Chiyo spent more time alone with Sakaki than anyone, especially during third year. There was no clear reason for someone as pristine as Sakaki to be talking to such a runt, so she had to know something about her.
It's settled, Kaori would ask what Sakaki might like, make it as clear as possible that it's on totally friendly and casual terms, and go from there. It's Chiyo, she'll have something helpful to say!