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Sunday means Nakayama doesn’t need to get up bright and early to rush towards the elementary school for another day of student teaching. It also means it takes her a little while to realize someone else is breathing softly next to her in bed, and a little longer after that to notice she’s not in her bed at all.
When her eyes open, her face is pressed into the crook of her elbow, against soft and silky floral pajamas that aren’t hers either. Well, she’d been out last night for a meetup of fellow retired racers — that much she remembers at the moment — so it’s not that big of a shock that she’d have gone home with one of them. She doesn’t make it a habit to wake up in the beds of strangers, especially now that she’s on track to become a teacher and exercises a bit more caution with herself than she had when she was merely an athlete, but nobody at a Tracen meetup would be a stranger.
Sirius was there, too.
She’d been in Italy recently. She’s really very ambitious, an incredibly busy person, and she always seemed happy about the life she’d chosen to lead. Only about half of Nakayama’s texts ever reach her, but it’s not like they’d let their “friendship” from back when they were roommates ever fizzle out completely. She sends pictures and updates back to Nakayama from her travels, sending invitations too on multiple occasions that she begrudgingly has to decline for as long as she’s still hard at work pursuing her teaching license.
Nakayama only entertains the idea that she’s in Sirius’ bed for a minute (it’s impossibly clean and soft, clearly belonging to someone of status) before she actually deigns to lift her head from her elbow and look over at the long auburn hair of the woman next to her.
She’s never been one to wake up easily, so the gravity of what’s going on doesn’t dawn on her immediately. The woman she’s with has cute, fluffy ears, and they’re both completely fully clothed, which lulls her into a false sense of security — maybe she’s actually still asleep and having a weird dream about being married and living in domestic bliss with the kind of random girl her mind would conjure up in the haze of dreaming.
Nakayama pushes herself up on her elbow to get a look at this woman and is instantly baffled by the sight before her. She’s in bed with a Symboli, but it’s definitely not Sirius.
So somehow, last night, she’d let Rudolf take her home, do… whatever they’d done in this apartment that she couldn’t remember at the moment, borrowed her pajamas and fell asleep cuddling her.
She doesn’t have a girlfriend or something, right? Nakayama thinks. She absolutely does not want to be caught in some sort of drama regarding Rudolf and the myriad girls who always seem to be surrounding her and begging for her attention. But she also can’t leave before Rudolf wakes up, because she’s wearing her pajamas, doesn’t know where her clothes are (leaving them here would let Rudolf know exactly who she took home anyway) and doesn’t even know where Rudolf lives in the first place.
Her shuffling causes Symboli Rudolf to stir. She flops over onto her back, looking pretty cute with her bangs messed up from sleep. She’s far from the worst sight to see first thing in the morning.
Rudolf sighs, rolls over again restlessly and buries her face in Nakayama’s chest. She doesn’t seem to notice that anything is out of the ordinary.
Ha, she sleeps like I do, Nakayama muses. Unable to make sound decisions this early in the morning, she pokes at Rudolf’s flicking ear.
“Mmmh?” she responds from against Nakayama. She snuggles closer before pulling back and struggling to open her eyes, heavy with sleep. “What’s… what’s wrong?”
How many girls does she regularly wake up with that she’s not immediately shaken out of sleep by sharing her bed with someone else?
Rudolf’s purple eyes blink awake, finally. Suddenly, it’s difficult for Nakayama to look at her face; the embarrassment has started to kick in, now that Rudolf is aware that she’s here.
“Um… Naka… yama…?” Oh, it’s really cute how she slurs her words when she’s sleepy. Nakayama has always found her adorable and fun to mess with, but her crush was so firmly on Sirius that she barely thought about her outside of that context for more than a few minutes.
Nakayama distances herself as much as she can without getting out of bed. Rudolf is bound to become just as embarrassed as she is, and probably doesn’t want to be cuddling with her anymore either. “…Yeah. Uh, good morning.” She musters up the courage to meet Rudolf’s face, which is now flushed bright red from cheeks to neck.
Her eyes dart around the space. “Sorry,” Rudolf says quickly. She bites her lip like she’s trying to force her brain to think of something to say as soon as possible, but, like Nakayama, she doesn’t seem like the type to be able to do that so soon after waking up. “I’m really not a morning person.”
“It’s… fine,” Nakayama responds. “I’m not either.”
“Again, I’m sorry.”
“I said it’s fine, don’t keep saying that.”
It’s become so awkward so quickly. She wants to go home right now and swear to forget that this ever happened.
Rudolf sits up in bed, rubbing her eyes and combing her bangs into a more presentable state with her fingers. “So… are you a tea person or a coffee person?” she asks. Her voice is pretty quiet and lacks the commanding presence it usually has. “I’d like to, um, offer you something to drink…”
“Tea’s good.”
“Wonderful. Would you mind staying put? I… want to make sure the rest of my apartment is presentable,” Rudolf says sheepishly.
Nakayama doesn’t argue — they probably both need time apart from each other to process where they are and what’s going on without the deep embarrassment of the other person right there in the room with them. “Go ahead. It’s your place.”
Rudolf gets up as quickly as she can to leave the room and closes the bedroom door behind her, giving them their own distinct spaces for the time being. Nakayama can’t believe she ended up wearing matching pajamas with her.
She pushes herself to sit up and finally look around the room. It’s pretty clean, barely anything out of place. They were both definitely drunk when they showed up, that she remembers, but they hadn’t carelessly trashed the place.
She also can’t find the red dress she’d been wearing at the reunion anywhere in the room, even when she finally gets out of Rudolf’s bed to look around further. At least it’s not on the floor or under the bed. Not wanting to invade Rudolf’s privacy more than she already has, she decides not to open the closet or rummage through her hamper, although she doesn’t see it on the top layer there either.
As she’s stumbling around, she accidentally steps on a pawn from a chessboard that was left on the rug by Rudolf’s dresser, its pieces strewn about randomly, and she lets out a brief cry of pain. Rudolf, barely raising her voice, calls out from outside the bedroom. “Are you alright?”
“Stepped on a chess piece,” she says, somewhat mumbling. “Want me to clean it up?”
“Hmm? Oh, yes, I’d appreciate it.”
As she tidies Rudolf’s bedroom, she takes a moment to pause and think. Is that really what they did last night? Sit on the floor and play chess together in matching fucking pajamas? In a way, that’s much more mortifying than the alternative of spending an impulsive night of passion in each other’s arms. You can excuse something like that pretty easily.
In the back of her mind, she starts to vaguely remember kissing Rudolf, but no matter how hard she tries, she can’t conjure memories of doing anything more than that. They’re still hazy images, but she thinks of Rudolf’s smile, laying on the rug in the living room next to her and just talking, Rudolf pouting as they played chess and Nakayama tried to annoy her by bending the rules…
No matter how embarrassed she is, she thinks she knows how to take things casually. Rudolf is probably downright panicking in the other room. She’s a very private person when it comes to Nakayama, since they’ve never been very close. Even when they’d met up on rare occasions to compete at chess or cards, Rudolf was very, very deliberate about how she carried herself in front of Nakayama and in front of most people in general. When she let some of her true feelings — her true competitive nature — slip, she would often frown and act like she didn’t intend to let Nakayama know that she was seriously enjoying competing with her at random games, which she found absolutely ridiculous.
Sirius was always one of the few people she let even a modicum of that guard down around. Sirius was there last night, too, and Nakayama remembers that fact vividly, but even though it was just last night, the actual memories of her presence feel distant. There’s no way she would have ditched Sirius for Rudolf, and there’s also no way Rudolf would ditch Sirius for her. The only logical explanation is that Sirius was there after all, but she’d ditched both of them. And so the pieces of this situation begin to fall into place.
Sirius had just come back from Italy, so maybe she was tired or needed to settle back in, and left the reunion early, thinking she’d run into everyone during the time she spent back in Japan anyway. And even though she respects Sirius’ current life choices, that doesn’t necessarily stop her from feeling lonely about them. So she’d ended up kissing Rudolf. Or maybe it was the other way around, because Rudolf was probably feeling a similar way. Whatever happened had melted Symboli Rudolf’s inhibitions and tricked her mind into believing Nakayama was one of the people she tells herself she’s allowed to bear a piece of her soul to.
It’s very easy to imagine how Rudolf feels about the whole thing, but harder for Nakayama to process how she herself feels about it. Casual physical intimacy is fine with her — she knows she loves Sirius, she knows she doesn’t have Sirius, at least for now, and she knows she doesn’t want anything deeper with anyone until she’s in a position to maybe, finally tell Sirius exactly how she feels. Either she gets her, or she doesn’t, but either way, before that, spending a night messing around with friends means next to nothing.
Rudolf isn’t really her friend and none of her memories of the night before seem very casual or physical at all, just intimate. She’s not dumb enough to think this counts as a betrayal because she’s not even dating Sirius, but it still makes her feel weird inside.
Symboli Rudolf knocks on her own bedroom door to let Nakayama know her tea is ready. When she opens the door, Rudolf is dressed in casual clothing instead of her pajamas, which makes it a little easier to talk to her.
Looking past her into the room, she spots her red dress hanging on a hook on a door that seems to lead to the bathroom. Everything looks essentially pristine, exactly as she’d expect Rudolf’s apartment to look. There are two empty glasses on the coffee table, and that’s about all she can notice before Rudolf’s impatient shuffling reminds her that she’s not really supposed to be scrutinizing every inch of this apartment.
Rudolf leads her towards her kitchen table and sits her down with all the seriousness of the old student council president calling her over for a disciplinary meeting. She supposes it’s to create a layer of distance between them, but seeing as she’s still dressed in Rudolf’s pajamas and they’re sitting down in her apartment for a cup of tea together, it’s hard to call it an effective tactic.
“So,” Rudolf says, breaking the silence as she pours piping hot tea into a cute little porcelain teacup, “I’m assuming you weren’t drunk enough to forget everything we did last night, were you?”
Nakayama can’t touch the teacup as it’s still completely boiling hot, but the smell is very nostalgic. She looks up from her cup to meet Rudolf’s eyes as Rudolf’s hands twist into knots on top of the table. “I also remember what we didn’t do, so don’t worry about it.”
“Well, yes,” Rudolf sputters, “but I still want to apologize. It’s unlike me to lead someone else into a situation like this.”
Is it, though, Nakayama thinks. You weren’t that surprised to wake up next to someone. You were just surprised that it was me.
Nakayama grows a little bit bolder, seeing just how openly embarrassed Rudolf is acting. “You’re apologizing to me for having a fun time playing chess,” she says incredulously.
“I’m apologizing for complicating things for the both of us,” Rudolf retorts. A little bit of that commanding presence has returned to her tone, which means she’s finally stopped pretending to be meek and submissive. “I know you’re not the type to believe a night spent enjoying each other’s company means anything more than that, but I will have to ask you to keep this between us regardless.”
“Glad we’re on the same page about it.” She lifts her tea to her mouth to blow on it so she can take the first sip; when she does, she smirks. She was right in her initial thought that it was familiar. It’s Ruhuna. Famously, Sirius’ favorite.
She should probably be upset at the implication that Rudolf planned to spend the night catching up with Sirius, but instead it sparks something inside her that sits adjacent to her burning competitive spirit.
“You know, you’re pretty cute when you’re sleepy.” It slips out before Nakayama can bite her tongue. “But I won’t tell anyone else. It’s between us.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she can see how Rudolf’s grip on her teacup falters and her ears droop, which is, ironically, adorable. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t try to flirt with me right now.”
She so badly wants to tell Rudolf to calm down and take it easy, but knows that if she did it would actually make her upset.
Of course, Rudolf is already on edge, just as Nakayama thought she’d be, because she hates how incredible the chemistry between the two of them is. Even when they were both still in Tracen she’d always seemed like she was actively dodging any budding friendship between them whenever it dared to sprout up. Nakayama always respected that — Sirius came home enough times unreasonably pissed off by Rudolf’s actions that she’d decided going against Rudolf’s wishes to try to befriend her would be much more trouble than it’s worth.
As she sips her tea she finds herself growing more annoyed. She doesn’t want to become fond of Rudolf either, but it seems they’ve already flung themselves far past that point.
“Your dress is on the bathroom door when you’d like to get changed,” Rudolf eventually says, ears forward. “Your bag and shoes should be by the front door when you’re ready to leave.”
“Thanks, I guess?” Do you really think everything’s just going to go back to normal once you kick me out?
Rudolf probably hasn't thought of it yet, but she’ll also have to contend with Sirius tomorrow at work — knowing her, and knowing how bad she is at hiding her emotions even though she practices doing so every second of every day, Sirius will know something is up immediately. She wishes she could be there to see it, but she can already imagine it anyway.
If she really wants to be devious, she’ll send Sirius an invitation to hang out tonight so she can tell Rudolf she has other plans to her face when they confront each other. The possibilities for where this goes from here are almost endless, and some of those outcomes are even favorable to her, which is more than enough for her to get excited.
Leaving Rudolf to come to that particular realization, Nakayama gets up out of her chair, leaving a tiny bit of tea still in her teacup, and makes her way towards the bathroom, removing her dress from the door before locking herself inside.
The first thing she does is look at herself in the mirror. Shockingly, she doesn’t look much more disheveled than normal. Her hair looks soft and glossy — she remembers borrowing Rudolf’s shower and using her expensive shampoo, which was when Rudolf had lent her the pajamas she couldn’t wait one more second to take off.
She realizes with dawning horror that all her memories are correct, and what exactly that means. They’re kind of pathetic, both her and Rudolf. But she did have fun — did enjoy Rudolf’s company. There’s no chance that she’ll call her to play chess again any time in the near future, but she won’t soon forget how much they had just… clicked, as a duo, when they weren’t bound by their own inhibitions.
Nakayama drags her hand over her face. She doesn’t even have her usual dark circles because she slept like a baby next to Rudolf, apparently.
She slips back into her red dress from the night before, knowing full well that if she has to take a bus or train everyone there with her will know she was at a party last night. Begrudgingly, she picks up a comb from the edge of the sink and wrestles her hair into something more presentable. If she had her hat, maybe she’d feel a little more comfortable.
Folding Rudolf’s pajamas with minimal care and hanging them on her arm, Nakayama slowly opens the door to see Rudolf still sitting at her kitchen table, yawning with her chin resting against her hand. Her ears perk up and swivel in Nakayama’s direction, and she blushes at being caught doing something she probably categorizes as “unlike her.”
Nakayama smiles awkwardly. “Where do you want me to put these?” She lifts the arm with Rudolf’s pajamas dangling from it.
“Back of the couch,” Rudolf replies before pursing her lips to stifle what looks like the start of another yawn. Nakayama does what she’s told, finally ridding herself of the overly frilly floral clothes.
“Do you need any directions to get home? I can arrange something for you if you need it,” Rudolf adds, yawning against her will as soon as she finishes speaking.
Nakayama stops by the doorway, sliding her flats back on. “Nah, I’ve got a GPS,” she settles on, even though she probably won’t use it and will rely on her intuition to find the nearest station, because it’s much more fun that way. “Seriously, don’t worry about it.”
“Stay safe,” Rudolf says rather warmly. Nakayama takes her bag, exits the apartment, and tries not to look back on her way out, tail wagging.