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The teacup shattered.
There was a brief pause, the large amber eyes blank and listless. Then came the sound of scraping wood as Cafe stood up from the table, murmuring.
“I’ll clean it.”
Agnes listened to her heels clacking into the distance, silently rubbing her still-curled fingers with an unperturbed air.
30 days since the Sasuki Sho.
30 days since Agnes Tachyon’s flawless victory, sending tremors through the entire racing world. When she had, for a few blissful seconds, left her body to taste pure speed, pure euphoria, unburdened by the imperfections of her biology. A culmination of everything she’d worked for—in that moment, she thought it would last forever.
And now she was back in the classroom, face to face with the shadow she’d left behind.
“Cafe.”
…
“Do you hate me?”
The scraping of porcelain against wood stopped.
A spare sugar cube danced over Agnes’s fingers, and she watched it deconstruct into granules and sprinkle across the table. What shape would it be underneath, without all of the superfluous material? How much longer could it go on destroying itself?
It was hot. Unbearably so.
The scraping of porcelain continued again.
“I made a promise to my friend when I was young.”
Cafe responded softly as usual, not bothering to raise her eyes.
“I had promised her that I would be the one to eventually overtake her. I would be the one to surpass her.”
There was no bitterness in her voice, no more than there was tea within the shattered pieces of the cup. Nothing but the cold, brittle truth.
“When you ran past me that day, Agnes, I saw her shatter. I saw our promise blow away to nothing, to dust.”
The trickle of sugar grew to a steady leak, sticking to her skin and bouncing off the table. The cube gradually lost its form—its edges, its lines—
Cafe swept up the last of the shards elegantly and threw them in the trash bin without elaboration.
Idly, Agnes’s eyes drifted up to the gloomy girl. Their relationship was a fickle one, wasn’t it? Two students, both eccentric outcasts, both stubborn and unwavering in who they were. Even to each other, rivals to the very root—in ideology and practice. Agnes Tachyon, running blindly into the future; Manhattan Cafe, chasing the reflections of the past. Neither of them willing to stop for anything.
And yet, Agnes couldn’t imagine a world without Cafe. There didn’t exist a single thought when she ran that didn’t revolve around her, the need to defeat her. And no matter how much Cafe tried to hide it, Agnes knew she wasn’t above thinking that way about her as well.
So what was it then? A hypothesis with no direction, a formula with no variables; a friendship, without any of the niceties that made it one.
What was it that kept them together?
“So?”
“So.”
Cafe walked back to her seat, staring in disgust at the sugar pouring onto the table. That was the only emotion she’d ever spare her—some variant of disgust or rage, perhaps both.
“Yes, Agnes. I do hate you. I hate you with every fiber of my being, every inch of my soul.”
The sugar grew to a cascade, pouring down in sweet, grainy avalanches as the cube finally crumbled around Agnes’s fingers.
”Oh?”
“I hate you for your careless experiments, putting others at risk for your own selfish reasons. I hate you for your perseverance, which should have been given to someone better than you. And above all, I hate you for hating me enough to destroy yourself—to destroy my dream.”
Then, nothing; a thin pile of white on Agnes’s palm, as ordinary as any other scoop of sugar. A soft breath escaped from her lips, and it was gone.
Agnes stayed still for a few seconds. Suddenly, she laughed.
Her wheelchair creaked as she leaned back, distancing herself from the bitter stench of coffee in the air. From the ends of the table, crimson and yellow met; a sly grin spread across Agnes’s face.
For the first time since they met, they were finally seeing eye to eye.
“I enjoyed it.”
Her voice, low and thick; almost intimate, only meant for the girl across from her to hear. Although the other girl’s expression didn’t change, her own grin cut wider, letting free a faint giggle.
“Didn’t you know, Cafe? That moment when I crossed the finish line…my thoughts were only of you. That look of despair on your face, that slack in your posture as my foot reached over the border. That naive promise which you think can be compared to my dream…finally shattered.”
The wheelchair squeaked as she pulled herself closer to the table, the sugar crystals digging into her palm as she did so. Her teeth gritted with the strain in her arms, but those crimson eyes never broke, those mocking, egotistic eyes.
In a sardonic, cruelly humorous way, this was the most present with each other they had ever been. Before, their conversations had always been more of a tug of war than anything, a battle where one side’s ideology had to emerge right. Now, however, there were no more dreams in the future to fight for, nothing left in the past to look for. Just the sight of each other, sitting at the opposite ends they’d forced themselves into.
“I hate you too, Cafe.”
If Cafe was surprised by the whisper in any way, she didn’t show it. Instead, she took a reserved sip from her steaming cup, listening as the girl before her continued.
“I hate how you throw away your life, chasing ghosts of the past when you could be focusing on your future. I hate your innate, undeniable talent—completely wasted on someone like you. And I hate how, even then…even then! You still pretend like you’re somehow the better, more hardworking one out of us.”
The words flowed out by themselves, a culmination of everything Agnes had experienced for the past few years coming to light. An unfamiliar raw honesty that made her mind race and heart pound, her eyes growing sour.
Cafe blinked. Perhaps it was surprise, satisfaction—even hurt, maybe, a thought that sent ripples of ecstasy through her body. But Agnes was no longer interested in delving in anyone’s mind other than her own.
“But that’s not what I hate most about you. What I hate most about you, Cafe, is that even as I sit in this wheelchair with my legs broken and mangled, even with your talent and speed…”
Trembling hands clutching the wood, brown tendrils of hair dangling over narrow eyes, her final words lowered to a sharp hiss.
“I still can’t imagine you ever surpassing me.”
With an arrogant leer, almost leaning out of her wheelchair and over the table—sitting apathetically as always, any shred of emotion locked within her stone facade. In this way, they stared at each other wordlessly, the final product of their relationship laid bare.
One of them destroyed physically, one of them destroyed mentally. With this exchange, the war came to a standstill.
I can’t fix you.
Bursting out into maniacal laughter, Agnes finally broke contact, sinking back into her wheelchair as her legs finally gave out. Not missing a beat, Cafe took her cup of coffee and exited the room without sparing a second glance, her racing clothes fluttering behind her.
Sunlight poured through the windows, thick and heavy. Bit by bit, Agnes’s laughter subsided, leaving an empty lightness on her chest. The answer to the question she’d been asking for so long finally found.
Hatred.
That was the word.
Bringing her hand to her lips, Agnes tasted the sickly sweet of her fingers and opened the television to Cafe’s next upcoming race.