Work Text:
Mafuyu is gone.
Well, okay, that’s somewhat of an overstatement.
Mafuyu has gone home.
There. Neat, tidy, and accurate. Never mind the way that something in Kanade’s heart sours at the thought that Mafuyu’s ‘home’ has nothing to do with a fragile composer and the apartment they’d shared.
No. Mafuyu is home now, with a mother and a father and their offer to try again, to be better this time around. Every room in Kanade’s house is vacant but for herself once more, as it should always have been.
And Kanade? Oh. Well, she’s doing fine. Her monitor screen is kept just bright enough that it’ll keep her awake without giving her a headache too soon, and her headphones are a familiar pressure and weight on her head. She plays the fragments of melody that she’s been working on and hears her progress as she works into the night.
The one problem here is that she has had absolutely no progress to speak of, in all the hours between Mafuyu’s departure and now.
She glances at her screen, at each of the notes laid out in front of her as though scrutiny will be enough to assemble the rest of the composition around what is already there.
It’s absurd that her home should feel emptier now. After all, it isn’t as though Mafuyu never left the apartment. She had a life outside of this place—her school, her archery, her cram schools. And while Kanade strayed only within the defined boundaries of a handful of rooms, it was routine for Mafuyu to be gone for hours at a time every day.
And yet it doesn’t change the fact that the emptiness is still there. It is as though some kind of shadow has swallowed up the rooms that Mafuyu had once inhabited, emptied them of any warmth left by her presence and let the cold void leech back into place. It aches and prods at the edges of Kanade’s mind like a lingering pain that refuses to fade. She can almost feel the cold seeping into her skin, a tangible sort of loneliness that scrapes her bones raw.
In the early days of this life, when the doctors still told her there was a chance her father’s condition could be temporary, and she’d believed them because temporary was all she could imagine that kind of loss to be, the silence of her home used to scare her. The way things would seem to echo in her mind when nobody else was around to hear them, echoing and echoing and echoing until they faded and she couldn’t be sure that there’d been any sound at all.
That was years ago and with those years, that specific fear had softened, quieting and muddling into the background of her monotonous days. What did it matter if the clock ticked or a paper rustled? There was music to be wrung from her bleeding heart and shaking hands.
She’d forgotten what it felt like not to be alone in a home full to bursting with ghosts and memories and nothing else.
Living with Mafuyu, though? Even after what had felt like a lifetime and more spent so completely and utterly alone, it felt seamless. Easy. Effortless.
It was peaceful in the way that only things as simple as being able to walk into a room with the light already on can be. For the first time in years, the loneliness—the restless, urgent feeling that every shard of her being was reaching and reaching and reaching out into the void with hopes that anyone would be there, anyone at all—receded. Not all at once and not entirely (Kanade isn’t naive enough to think that it will ever truly leave her), but like an ocean settling after a long storm. It’s calm. It’s quiet. It’s warm.
The relief isn’t loud. It isn’t one of laughter or tears. But she sees it in Mafuyu, too, the way some of the tension bleeds out from around her eyes when she returns from school and steps inside. She recognizes it in the comfortable silence between them when Mafuyu brings her schoolwork to whatever room Kanade is in. They simply exist, content in the mutual knowledge that neither of them have to be alone anymore.
Neither of them have to be alone.
Does that thought still belong in the present tense?
Less than a single day after Mafuyu left to go home, and it is just Kanade once more. Kanade, in front of her monitor in the music room, illuminated by the cold white light of her screens and her music and her work that may never be complete. Years and years and years of toil and she has no way to know if she is any closer to the finish line than the day she began, only blind faith and blind hope.
And she is impossibly, painfully, deafeningly alone.
A small, selfish piece of her wishes she’d done something, pleaded for Mafuyu to stay. It’s the sharp, jagged, broken piece of her that wants to bury itself in the space next to Mafuyu’s heart, or cut herself open and offer Mafuyu a place to rest inside her ribcage. It’s sick and twisted and ugly and cruel—was it actually for Mafuyu’s good or just a product of her own cowardice that she never asked if the life they’ve tried living together is enough?
If home could be here, just the two of them and the warmth they share?
And, oh, how that little fantasy plays out in her mind. How differently could it have ended if she’d been a little braver, or a lot more selfish and cruel. If she’d reached out and her fingers had snagged the hem of Mafuyu’s sleeve. If she’d held on when Mafuyu tried to leave. If she’d begged, on her knees like the pathetic, lonely, broken thing she’s become in Mafuyu’s wake.
She can imagine Mafuyu’s sleeve slipping from her grasp, the door slamming shut. And maybe that would be enough. Maybe she would have returned to the work, the music, the penance she still has yet to pay. She ignores the fleeting vision of this version of herself lingering there at the door, like a dog with sickening, endless, fruitless hope.
But what if there is a world in which Mafuyu would have stayed? If she would have turned back, chosen Kanade’s home over the one she’d once yearned to disappear from? They could have made dinner together, side by side in the kitchen as they have spent every evening since that one fateful night.
Except. That isn’t what happened.
And it can never happen again.
And the only room in Kanade’s home that has held a heartbeat or heard a breath since Mafuyu left is the one she is in now. Illuminated by her monitor screen. Buried in discarded sheet music. Permeated by the vague scent of stale energy drinks and cup noodles.
And occupied by one Yoisaki Kanade, alone again at last.