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Mari is used to nightmares.
Some time after primary school, whenever she sleeps, she either dreams of: 1) nothing at all, or 2) her mom. Most of the time, it’s the latter. They’re always the same; her and her mom, doing something they used to do, talking the way they used to talk, and then, after a while, something goes wrong and her mom dies. So far she’s died in a boating accident and gotten shot by an armed robber and been struck by lightning during a thunderstorm. In one she fell down a set of stairs and broke her neck. In another she got hit by a car while she was driving Mari home from her boxing lesson. It’s like being in a halfway house between purgatory and hell, except that her mom never dies the way she actually died. And every time she dies, Mari can only watch. She can’t cry for her mom. She can’t stop it. She can’t help, much less save her. She’s completely useless.
Tonight, however, she doesn’t dream about her mom.
Mari is at Lake Biwa. It's night, and the water is so still it looks like obsidian under the dark sky, holding the moon whole and unbroken on its surface. She knows this lake. She's known it all her life. It should feel all too familiar to her, until she sees Lara standing at the water's edge, facing away from her, her dress ghost-pale under the moonlight.
"Lara," Mari says, or tries to. No sound comes out. Her voice belongs to someone else tonight.
Lara doesn't turn around. She takes a step forward, and the water swallows her shoes, up to her ankles. Then her knees. From there, she just keeps walking, like the lake is a hallway in her own house, like she's done this a thousand times before and this is merely the thousand-and-first.
Mari runs. Or she means to. Her legs move but the shore stretches longer with every step, the way distances only lie in dreams, and Lara keeps receding no matter how fast Mari's heart slams against her ribs. The water is at Lara's waist now. Her hair spreads out behind her, bright red and heavy, drinking in the moonlight instead of reflecting it.
"Lara, wait—"
Nothing. Not even the small mercy of her name landing somewhere. Mari's mouth keeps shaping the word, over and over, uselessly. She knows this feeling. She hates that she knows this feeling. She hates that her body has a whole vocabulary for watching someone she loves walk away from her and being able to do nothing but scream inside a throat that makes no sound.
The water reaches Lara's shoulders. Her chin. She still hasn't turned around, and somehow that's the worst part—that Mari won't even get to see her face one last time, won't get to memorize whatever expression she's wearing, whether it's peaceful or afraid or something else that Mari doesn't have the words for.
"Please." It finally comes out, fragile and small, swallowed by the vast and ancient quiet of the lake. "Please, look at me. Look at me before you go."
Lara's head tips back. The lake closes over her like a mouth closing over a secret, and the water goes still again, as if she was never there at all.
Mari wakes up gasping, tangled in her blanket, her heart pounding so hard she can feel it in her teeth. For one long, terrible second, she doesn't know where she is; the foreign darkness of her ceiling, the quiet hum of Gon-chan’s tank filter, the wrongness of waking up somewhere that isn't the inside of her own grief.
Then she remembers. Lara.
She turns her head so fast her neck aches, violently drawing back the drapes that section off her sleeping area from the rest of her bedroom. Her eyes zero in on the futon on the floor next to her bed before her mind has even finished catching up to her body.
And there she is.
Lara, under her blanket—curled on her side, hair loose and spilling over her shoulder, chest rising and falling in a slow, even rhythm.
Mari doesn't move for what seems like a lifetime. She just watches Lara breathe, counts each rise and fall like she's confirming something to a part of her brain that refuses to be reasoned with and insists on proof.
Only when Mari’s own heartbeat finally starts to slow does she let herself lie back down, though she doesn't close her eyes again. She stares at the ceiling instead, at the thin blade of streetlight slicing through the curtain, and tries to understand why a dream about someone who isn't her mother could carve out the exact same hollow, panicked ache in her chest.
The phone screen reads 1:47 AM when Mari checks it, and she frowns at the digits like that's going to negotiate her back into unconsciousness. It doesn't. She lies there for another ten minutes doing the thing where you keep your eyes shut on principle, pretending sleep is still a possibility if she just commits hard enough, but her body isn't buying it. Every muscle from her calves to her shoulders has the inevitable ache that comes from three days of back-to-back matches; the kind of soreness that sits underneath the skin and pulses in time with her heartbeat. Worth it, she supposes. She took gold in her weight class and left several girls' egos considerably lighter than when she found them. But dang, her body is going to make her pay interest on that trophy for the next week.
She blames the nap. She (and Lara) had conked out somewhere around the Yokaichi interchange on the drive home, and that's clearly why her internal clock is a mess right now. That's the story she's telling herself, anyway. It's a lot easier than the alternative explanation, which involves closing her eyes and immediately being handed a rerun of Lara disappearing under black water, so she's electing not to dwell on that one.
Mari sits up slowly, wincing when her ribs remind her that she ate a body shot at some point during Saturday's semifinal. The room is dark and quiet except for the low electric hum of Gon-chan's tank filter, a sound she's found weirdly comforting since the day she brought that fish home. She turns her head toward the futon out of habit—checking, again, like her brain hasn't fully accepted the results of the first inspection—and finds Lara exactly where she left her. Still curled up, her breathing still slow and even, her mouth slightly parted, one hand fisted loosely by her chin like she's holding onto something in her sleep.
Mari eases herself off the bed and manoeuvres around Lara, avoiding the one floorboard she long ago mapped as a creaker. She skirts the edge of the futon, careful not to let her shadow fall over Lara's face, and tiptoes out of her room. She hesitates only a second in front of the balcony's sliding door, before pulling it open—just enough to slip through, not enough to let the night air come flooding in—and steps out into the warm, orange light.
The world outside is quiet. Streetlights glow amber and the roads are empty, a stillness that feels earned rather than eerie. Mari lowers herself onto one of the balcony chairs, and lets her head fall back with a long breath. The metal is cold through her clothes even though the night is warm. She doesn't mind it. Cold, at least, is a sensation she can trust; something real and immediate that isn't a lake or a face turned away from her or a voice that won't carry.
She’s not going to think about why she doesn't want to go back to sleep. She's decided that. Firmly. Several times now, in fact, which maybe means it’s not working.
Mari stands up and goes to lean against the balcony railing. She looks up to count the handful of stars that manage to fight through the light pollution, and tries very hard to let her mind go blank the way it does after a fight; that hollowed-out, floaty calm that usually shows up once the adrenaline's finished its exit. It doesn't come. Instead there's just Lara's back, over and over, water climbing higher.
She exhales hard through her nose and tries again, tips her head back until the muscles in her neck pull taut, and for a second it almost works—the stars blur into an homogenous smear of light and her mind goes properly, blessedly empty.
Then her brain, unhelpful as ever, decides to show her the futon instead. Not tonight's futon, with Lara curled up safe and breathing under it. The other one. Folded into a neat, layered square, a note resting on top of it in Lara's messy handwriting and her phone set beside that like she'd been considerate enough to leave it charged. Mari remembers waking up that morning with a start, traces of sleep still in her eyes, getting a front-seat view of that horrible, tidy little arrangement, and understanding that she’d left—for good. Lara didn't fold futons. Lara left cabinet doors open and socks in places socks had no business being. A folded futon meant goodbye, and Mari's stomach had dropped through the floor before she’s even fully awake.
She remembers Lisa's face, too. Unnervingly calm and cold in a way Lara’s never managed, delivering the words like she was reading out a weather report and not the fact that Lara was dying, and was going to die if she couldn’t find true love. Mari remembers that night under the bridge, remembers hearing her own voice cracking apart syllable by syllable as she told Lara to go back to her sister, thinking please, please just not die, and underneath all of it—underneath the panic the moment Lara collapsed, underneath the potion Lisa had given Mari to buy Lara some time—there'd been something else Mari still can’t put her finger on. Something that had nothing to do with wanting Lara to simply continue existing in the abstract, and everything to do with not being able to picture a version of her own life that didn't have Lara loudly ruining her bedroom for the nth time in it.
She'd told herself that was normal. Because what else are you supposed to feel when your airheaded mermaid friend is going to turn into sea foam in front of you? Anyone would be anxious (assuming ‘anyone’ is also in Shiga hosting a mythical sea creature in their home).
Mari's grip on the railing tightens.
And then—because her memory apparently isn't done torturing her tonight—there's the finals. The heat of the lights, her mouthguard tasting like iron, her dad’s voice somewhere in the crowd shouting something she couldn't process because all she could hear was the ringing in her own skull and the awful, hollow certainty that Lara wasn't coming, that she'd chosen Luca, her sister, the sea, whatever future that didn't include seeing Mari getting beat up in a gym by a girl with a bad dye job. It was for the better, Mari had convinced herself since the morning she saw that folded futon. But then, impossibly, Lara made it there. Looking at Mari like she was the only person in the world, red hair catching the arena lights, her eyes as blue as the ocean even under all that exposure. Of course she was there—her refusal to listen sometimes made Mari want to grab her by the shoulders and shake her until she’d come to her senses. And yet, something in Mari had clicked back into place so fast and so completely that she was back dishing out punishment like she wasn’t just in tears mere moments ago.
If you become the best in the world, I'll bake you a cake.
She presses the heel of her hand against her sternum, right where that stupid, traitorous ache has decided to set up permanent residence, and breathes out slow through her teeth.
It doesn't mean anything, she tells herself. It's just leftover adrenaline. Bad sleep. A body that fought for three days straight and doesn't know how to power down properly. That's all this is.
She almost believes it.
The sliding door creaks softly behind her, and Mari doesn't need to turn around to know who it is.
"You're awake," Lara says, voice thick with sleep, rubbing one eye with the back of her hand as she drags her feet out onto the balcony. Her long hair is flattened on one side, and she lets out a big yawn before saying, "It's so late. Or early. I don't know which one it is.”
"Couldn't sleep," Mari says, which is true in the same way that saying she ‘got a little tired’ during the tournament is true. Technically accurate.
Lara comes to stand beside her at the railing, arms folding on top of it, chin resting on her wrists. Up close, Mari can see the crease lines still pressed into her cheek from the pillow, and something in her loosens slightly at the sight—proof, again, that she’s still warm and breathing.
"Me neither," Lara admits with a small, sheepish smile. "I had a dream. A bad one."
Mari's stomach flips. "...Bad how?"
"The manager put me back on dishes."
There's a pause.
"...That's it?"
"That's it!" Lara says, scandalized, like Mari's the one being unreasonable here. "I ruined four batches of custard in a row. It kept curdling and I don't even know why, I did everything the same as always, and then the manager just looked at me and said, ‘Lara-chan, maybe the dishes suit you better’..." She shudders theatrically. "I woke up and for one horrible second I thought it was real."
Mari stares at her for a beat. "You're tellin’ me," she says, "that out of everythin’ your brain could've cooked up, it went with bad custard."
"It's not funny," Lara says, though the corner of her mouth is already twitching. "Custard is very technical. Temperature, timing, you can't just—"
"You told me you can already make it. You said so, what, four hours ago? Right before you promised me cake for being ‘the best in the world’." Mari can't resist the smirk that creeps onto her face. "Some prodigy. Can't even survive her own dream kitchen."
"I can make custard," Lara huffs, cheeks going pink. "It was a dream! Dreams don't have to make sense! Yours could be about- about being chased by, I don't know, a whale, and it wouldn't mean you're actually bad at running from whales."
Mari's smirk falters for exactly one second too long before she catches it and forces it back into place. "Sure," she says. "Totally different situation."
If Lara notices the hitch, she doesn't say anything; just huffs again, puffing air upward so it lifts the fringe off her forehead, and goes back to glaring balefully at the middle distance like the dream custard personally wronged her. Mari watches her do it, the easy way Lara's whole face rearranges itself around something as small as ruined dessert, and feels the tight coil somewhere in her body loosen by another half a degree.
At least one of them gets to have the funny nightmare.
The silence stretches for a moment before Lara tilts her head, studying Mari with open curiosity she's never learned to filter (Mari hopes she never does). “Did you have a bad dream, too?”
"Not really,” Mari says, too quick, eyes fixed on the streetlights instead of Lara's face. “I just…kinda woke up.”
“So no bad dreams?”
“Nope.” Mari glances down at her own hands, knuckles pale where she's clamped onto the metal without noticing. She forces her fingers to loosen. “It's nothin’. Jus’ tired. Adrenaline crash, probably. It’s usually like this after a tournament.”
Lara doesn't look convinced. There's a small furrow between her brows, but she doesn't push, not directly. Instead she seems to search for a different angle in, something softer.
"Luca said his sleep schedule is all over the place after big art shows," she offers, like she's handing Mari a matching puzzle piece. "He said it happened after his gallery thing last spring, too."
It shouldn't land the way it does. It's such a small, harmless sentence. Mari’s sure that Lara isn't even trying to make a point with it, she's just reaching for whatever comparison is closest at hand to make Mari feel less alone. But all Mari can hear underneath it is the fact that Lara has apparently discussed post-competition nerves with Luca before. That there's an entire shared language of comfort sitting between the two of them that Mari's only now hearing second hand. That Lara called him—from a stranger's phone, on a boat—before she called anyone else. Before she came back for Mari at all.
Mari knows that he’s the reason Lara could even find the venue. She knows this because Lara told her after they took that photo of Mari with the medal and Lara holding up Mari’s award certificate. Mari’s chosen, every hour since, not to think about the order of operations.
Lara, calling Luca first—
—yep, that’s as far as she can handle.
If Mari hadn't already used up all her adrenaline for the day, she thinks this might actually make her want to hit something. And she doesn’t even have the slightest idea why she wants to hit something.
"Right," she says instead, sanding every rough edge off her voice before it can show. "Makes sense."
"Are you okay?" Lara asks.
"I'm fine. Like I told you, I’m jus’ tired." Mari straightens off the railing, rolling one stiff shoulder like that's the reason she needs to move. "We should probably try to sleep. You got the early shift tomorrow, right? Can't have you ruinin’ custard for real this time."
It's a decent redirect; good enough that Lara's mouth twitches despite herself, some of the concern in her face softening into mock offense. "I would never ruin real custard. That was slander, committed by my own subconscious, and I refuse to be held responsible for it."
"Sure, sure." Mari's already moving toward the sliding door, putting distance between herself and the railing, the conversation, and whatever expression might still be sitting on her own face. "C’mon. Bed."
Instead of following, Lara's gaze drifts before she can turn fully toward the door, catching on something over the rooftops. Mari follows the line of it and finds the chapel next door, its cross catching a thin edge of moonlight where it juts up against the sky.
"Should we go to the church?" Lara asks, like she's suggesting getting midnight snack, or go on a walk around the block.
"...Huh?"
It's not that it's the strangest thing Lara's ever said—that bar for peculiarity was set fairly low for Mari the moment she got herself a talking fish and found out her housemate was a mermaid—but it comes out of nowhere enough that Mari just blinks at her for a second, waiting for the rest of the sentence to make sense. It doesn't arrive.
"The prince told me once, that churches are the places closest to God's love. And that God is very powerful, and grants wishes to people who've done good deeds." She says all of this plainly, the way she says most things she learned in her old life, delivered with total sincerity regardless of how reliable the source actually was. "So I thought, maybe if we go somewhere close to God, we could just...ask him for sleep. It seems like an easy thing to grant."
Mari doesn't know whether to laugh or wince, so she does neither. Her eyes flick, involuntarily, to her bedroom, where her grey cross necklace is.
"That ain’t really how it works," Mari says instead, quieter than she means to.
"How does it work, then?"
Mari doesn't have a clean answer for that, which is its own kind of answer. The truth is stitched together out of a dozen things she doesn't like to recall: her mother, standing at the front of that same chapel on Sundays with a guitar and a stack of song sheets for the youth group; her mother's cross, the one Mari has now; three months of Mari kneeling by a hospital bed after lights-out, folding her hands the way she'd been taught, promising God every good deed she could think of in exchange for one specific, reasonable thing. Please just make her better. I'll be good. I'll be so good. And then the machines going quiet anyway, like none of it had registered as a fair trade.
She stopped going to church after the funeral, and nobody made her go. Her dad still goes, sometimes—slips out early on Sunday morning, never mentions it unless asked. Her brother stopped the same year she did, though neither of them ever explicitly discussed it; some decisions just get made in the space where a person used to be.
"It's complicated," is what Mari decides to say, which is true and also nothing at all. “Also, that’s grandma’s chapel. You really wanna sneak in there after she gave us that talkin’-to?”
Lara's shoulders hunch up toward her ears, the exact reaction of someone who's been personally attacked by a memory. “I know.” Her voice goes small. “I didn't think anyone would- I thought...it was better to leave quietly.”
That settles somewhere soft and open in Mari's chest, and she has to look away from it for a second, back toward the chapel, because she doesn't trust her own face not to give too much away if she keeps looking at Lara instead.
"Well, grandma wasn't wrong to lay into you for that,” Mari says gruffly.
A beat. "Though for the record, your scolding was worse than mine."
"Don't remind me." Mari tips her head back. Grandma's voice is still ringing somewhere in the back of her skull—you coulda broken something, Mari, you coulda been seriously hurt, what in the world was goin’ through your noggin out there—delivered in her disappointed register that hits ten times harder than yelling ever could. "She's got a point, though. I did get sloppy out there. Coulda ate much worse hits than I did."
"You weren't sloppy," Lara says immediately, catching Mari off guard. "You were amazing. You won!"
“I almost didn't." Mari's mouth twists. “Can't let that happen again, next fight or no.”
Lara doesn't have a response ready for that one—her mouth opens, then closes again, like she's turning it over and finding several different things she could say and isn't sure which is safe to pick. Mari doesn't wait around for her to settle on one. She nods back toward the chapel instead, changing the subject before it can go somewhere she's not ready for it to go at two in the morning.
“Anyway. That's the whole reason we ain't sneakin' in there tonight. Grandma catches us anywhere near that chapel at this hour, she'll have us scrubbin' the roof.”
“That does sound like her,” Lara admits, some of the tension easing out of her shoulders. She glances toward the cross one more time, wistful in a way Mari doesn't fully understand yet. “I still want to go, though.”
“Why? Do mermaids even believe in God?”
"Not exactly," Lara says, tilting her head like she's trying to translate something across a language barrier that only exists in her own head. "Where I'm from, we have the Sea Mother. She's not so different, I think. Old, and everywhere, and mostly quiet unless you've done something to make her really angry." She looks back at the chapel. "But I like the idea of a place built just for asking. My people don't really have that. You go to the Sea Mother when the tides tell you to, not whenever you need something."
"And you need somethin' bad enough tonight to risk gettin' put on roof-scrubbin' duty."
"I told you. I want to ask for sleep." Lara's mouth curves, small and a little sly. "For both of us. Since it looks like neither of us seems very good at finding it on our own tonight."
Mari studies her for a long moment—the stubborn set of her chin, the way she's already halfway to bouncing on the balls of her feet, her blue eyes burning a hole in Mari’s irises. Mari’s fought a lot of people (sanctioned AND unsanctioned, these fists are rated E for everyone), but fighting this is probably a losing battle. It usually is.
“Fine,” Mari says, dragging a hand down her face. "But we’re gonna be quick about it. In, God, out, back in bed. And you ain’t sayin’ one word if we get caught. I ain't explainin' this to anyone.”
Lara's whole face lights up like Mari just handed her a present. “You won't regret it.”
“I already regret it.”
They go the back way, cutting through the narrow gap between the house and the chapel's low stone wall, Mari leading because she's the only one who actually knows which window doesn't lock properly. The window in question is on the side facing the garden, half-hidden behind an overgrown hydrangea bush that scratches at Mari's arms as she pries the frame loose.
"After you," Mari mutters, holding it open.
Lara climbs through with more grace than Mari expects, landing lightly on the chapel's wooden floor without so much as a creak. Mari follows less elegantly, banging her knee against the sill hard enough to bite back a curse, and hauls herself through into the dark.
Inside, the chapel is cool and hushed, moonlight falling in long, pale, flat panels through the high windows, catching dust motes in the air like something out of a painting. The pews sit in careful rows, worn smooth at the edges from decades of hands and knees, and up at the front the gold-finished metal cross above the altar seems to glow faintly in the dark.
Mari hasn't been this close to it in years.
“I didn’t get a chance to appreciate it the first time I was here…” Lara whispers, drifting a few steps down the aisle, head tipped back to take in the low wooden beams overhead. "…but it’s pretty. Quieter than I expected. I thought God's house would be louder."
"It's two in the mornin', Lara. Even God's asleep."
Lara huffs out a soft laugh, and it echoes strangely off the walls—too big a sound for the small, careful space they're standing in. She claps a hand over her own mouth, eyes wide over her fingers, and Mari has to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing too.
They make their way up toward the altar together, slow and quiet, the old floorboards creaking faintly under their bare feet despite their best efforts. Mari's fingers drift up to her collarbone out of habit, an old motion looking for a necklace that isn't there tonight, and finds only skin.
"What's it like?"
Mari blinks out of it. Lara has drifted closer, head tilted up toward the cross above the altar, moonlight catching pale on the side of her face.
"What's what like?"
"God's love." Lara says it plainly, without embarrassment or self-consciousness that usually keeps people from asking the big, obvious questions out loud. "The prince talked about it like it was something you could feel. Something warm. But I never understood what he meant.”
Mari’s gaze drifts to a corner. "I dunno if I'm the right person to ask," she says, quieter than she means to. "Been a while since I felt anything like that."
"But you did, once. Feel it."
It's not really a question, the way Lara says it, but Mari answers it like one anyway. “Yeah. You could say that.” She looks up at the cross, solid and indifferent in the dark, same as it's always been. “Felt like bein' held onto by somethin' bigger than you, I guess. Like no matter how bad things got, you weren't ever really alone in it.” A beat. “Felt real nice, when I still believed it.”
“And now?”
“I think I’ve beat too many people up and I ain’t gonna stop, so God probably doesn’t want me askin’ any favours from him.” Mari's mouth twitches, more habit than humour. “So. Not much of a testimony.”
Lara doesn't laugh at that; which Mari half expects her to. Instead she just looks at her for one long, quiet moment.
“I think,” Lara says slowly, “that whatever that warmth was, when you had it…I don't think it's gone just because you stopped believing in it. I think it just moved somewhere else. Into other things.” She glances around the chapel, then back at Mari. “Maybe you don't have to find it back up there.” A small nod toward the cross. “Maybe it's already somewhere closer.”
Mari's throat goes tight. "...That supposed to be deep or somethin'?" she manages, aiming for teasing and hitting somewhere closer to unsteady.
"I don't know," Lara says, entirely serious. "Was it?"
Mari doesn't have an answer ready for that, and Lara doesn't seem to need one. She turns back toward the altar instead, squares her shoulders like she's about to attempt something technical, and folds her hands together in front of her chest the way Mari supposes she's seen it done in a drama she watched, or maybe just guessed at, close enough.
"Okay," Lara says, mostly to herself. Then, louder, tipping her face up toward the cross: "Um. Hello. I don't really know how this is supposed to go, so I'm sorry if I do it wrong."
"Lara—"
"Shh, I'm trying to talk to God." She says it without any heat, eyes still fixed upward, utterly unbothered by her own audacity. Mari rolls her eyes and lets her keep going, mostly because stopping her now feels like it would be its own kind of rude, to whoever might or might not be listening.
"I don't have very many good deeds to my name yet," Lara continues, earnest, like she's filling out a form she's worried about getting wrong. "I've only been human again for a little while. Umm…I confess that I’ve committed quite a few wrongdoings since I got here. I threw HAL out the window in Mari’s bedroom and as a result, I also smashed the window. Uh…I also made the entire kitchen wet that one time, and ordered too much Baumkuchen, and I’ve burned several trays’ worth of muffins at work…” She stops to take a breath. “But I've been trying to do good deeds. I stopped someone’s dog from running into traffic last week, and I gave my umbrella to a stranger even though it made my hair wet, and I didn't cry at work even though I wanted to, when all I did that day was peel some peaches." A small pause, considering. "I think that counts for something. I hope it does."
Mari watches her from a few feet back, arms crossed loosely over her chest, feeling like she's intruding on something she probably shouldn't be standing this close to and unable to make herself step away.
“Anyway.” Lara clears her throat. “I'd like to ask for sleep. For both of us. Mine doesn't really matter—mermaids don't need it the way humans do, not really—but Mari does.” Her voice softens, drops into something gentler, more careful, like she's choosing the words with more weight than everything she's said before them. “She works so hard. Harder than anyone I've ever seen. She fights until her whole body hurts and then gets up the next day and does it again.” A beat. “I just want her to be able to rest tonight. She’s had a big day, so she deserves that. More than almost anyone I know.”
Mari's insides do something complicated and much too large for the space it's contained in.
“So,” Lara finishes, business-like again, snapping back into her earlier brisk, get-it-done tone, “if you could arrange that, I'd appreciate it. Sleep for Mari, especially. Mine's optional.” A pause. “Amen…I think.” She turns, looking for Mari. “Is that how you're supposed to end it?”
“...Yeah,” Mari says. “That's how you end it.”
Lara turns around, looking pleased with herself. “There. Now we've asked properly.”
Mari can't look at her directly for a second. She stares instead at the worn floorboards, at the bars of moonlight lying across them, anywhere that isn't Lara's open, hopeful face.
“Yeah,” she says again, rougher this time. “Guess we have.”
"Can we stay a little longer?" Lara asks, before Mari's even finished turning toward the window they came in through. "It's so peaceful here. I don't want to leave yet."
Mari glances toward the chapel doors, half-expecting to hear Grandma's footsteps on the other side of them just from the sheer impulsivity this night's been running on, but everything stays quiet, still, undisturbed.
"...Fine. Little while longer. But if we fall asleep in a pew and grandma finds us in the mornin', I'm blamin' you entirely."
"Deal."
They settle onto one of the back pews together, close enough that their shoulders nearly touch, the old wood creaking softly under them. The moonlight's shifted since they climbed in, thinner now, sliding further up the far wall. Lara tips her head back against the pew, eyes half-lidded, looking more at peace than she has all night.
"Do you think God heard me?" she asks after a while.
"Maybe."
"Are you feeling sleepy now?"
Mari considers lying, just to give her something. She doesn't quite manage it. "Not really."
"Then he didn't hear me."
"Give it some time," Mari says. "Guys like that probably got a backlog."
Lara hums, unconvinced but willing to let it go, and for a while neither of them says anything. The quiet stretches out comfortably, the kind Mari hasn't felt much of recently, and she almost lets herself sink into it before Lara speaks again, more thoughtful this time.
"Do you think I could ask him something else? Since I'm already here."
"Depends what it is."
"To find my true love." Lara turns the words over like she's testing whether they still fit right. "Properly, I mean. All the way. Not just...close."
Something in Mari's chest folds in on itself, quiet and sharp, the same shape as the dream from hours ago. She keeps her face carefully blank, or tries to.
"You don't think Luca's the one?"
It's not the question she means to ask. It comes out anyway; low and testing, like poking at a bruise just to confirm it still hurts.
Something crosses Lara's face—quick, there and gone before Mari can properly identify it, gone too fast to be sure she saw it at all. A flicker of hesitation. Maybe surprise. Maybe something else entirely.
"I do think so," Lara says, but it comes a half-beat too late to land the way it should.
"Yeah." Mari makes herself say it lightly, makes herself not look too closely at that half-beat. "He's good to you, right?"
Lara doesn't answer right away. She's looking up at the cross again, or maybe just past it, somewhere Mari can't follow.
"...Yes," she says finally. "Yeah. He is."
"Good." Mari's voice comes out steadier than she has any right to expect, given the way her chest feels like it's folding into a smaller and smaller shape with every word. "That's really good, Lara."
"Is it?"
"’Course it is." Mari forces something that's almost a smile, keeps her eyes fixed on the altar instead of on the girl sitting close enough that their shoulders are nearly touching. "Ain't that what you're s'posed to do here? Find your true love?"
I just don't want you to die.
Lara doesn't say anything to that. When Mari finally risks a glance sideways, she finds Lara watching her instead of the cross, an expression on her face that Mari can't read and doesn't trust herself to try.
Lara keeps looking at her a moment too long, something incomprehensible working behind her eyes, and Mari's pulse does an uncomfortable stutter under her ribs.
"...Lara?"
"Mari, I—" Lara starts, then stops, like whatever she was about to say ran ahead of the words meant to carry it. She looks down at her own hands, folded loosely in her lap, and tries again, slower this time. "I'm going to find love in this surface world. Like I told you."
"I know." Mari says it evenly, carefully, like handling something that might shatter if she puts too much weight on it. "You don't gotta remind me."
"I'm not—" Lara shakes her head, a little frustrated with herself, though Mari can't tell if it's at the words or at whatever's underneath them. "I just wanted to say it again. Because I know things are different now. Now that you know what will happen—" She cuts herself off. Takes a breath, steadies herself, before continuing, "So. I'm going to be here for a while. And I'm going to keep my promise. I'll make you that cake." A small, fierce certainty creeps into her voice, chasing out whatever hesitation was there a second ago. "Because you work hard. And you're strong. I know you're going to be the best in the world one day."
Mari opens her mouth—to say what, she isn't even sure, something about not needing a cake, or needing one very badly, or something entirely unrelated to cake that she has absolutely no intention of saying out loud in a chapel at two in the morning—but she doesn't get the chance to find out which one would have come out.
Lara hugs her.
It's not a careful hug, or a testing one; it's sudden and full-armed, Lara's face pressing into the curve of Mari's shoulder, arms wrapping around her, knocking whatever Mari was about to say clean out of her head. Mari sits frozen for half a second, arms hovering awkwardly in the air like she's forgotten how they work, before something in her just gives up trying to overthink it and folds around Lara instead, one hand coming to rest between her shoulder blades.
Lara's hair smells like the shampoo they share, and something fainter underneath it that Mari's never been able to name: something like salt, something that belongs to the sea and never fully left even after all this time on land. Lara's hold doesn't loosen. If anything, it tightens, like she's the one that needs reassuring tonight, not Mari.
"You're gonna be fine," Mari says, into the quiet, more to fill the silence than because she has anything wiser to offer. "Findin' your person, I mean. If Luca's it, then—" the name comes out rougher than she means it to, "—then it's gonna work out. It should work out."
Lara doesn't answer. She just holds on a beat longer than the moment probably calls for, long enough that Mari can feel her own heartbeat start doing something erratic and inconvenient against her ribs, before finally pulling back, hands still loosely braced on Mari's shoulders.
"Thank you," Lara says, quiet, and there's something in her face—some remnant of whatever crossed it earlier, out at the railing, out under the cross—that Mari still can't place, and isn't sure she's ready to.
"For what?"
"For always being the person I come find," Lara says, like it's the most obvious thing in the world, "even when I don't say why."
Mari doesn't trust her own voice enough to answer that one. She just nods, and looks away toward the altar instead, where the cross sits quiet and utterly unhelpful in the dark.
They climb back out through the same window, Lara again managing it with more grace than the situation calls for, Mari again catching her knee against the sill and biting back the same curse from before. The night air outside feels different now. Thinner, somehow, like the chapel had been taking a breath and holding it so they could pass.
Neither of them says much on the walk back across the garden. The hydrangea bush scratches at Mari's arm again on the way past, and this time she barely registers it. Her mind's still half inside the chapel, snagged on things she doesn't have anywhere to put yet.
She can feel the phantom weight of Lara's arms around her.
They slip back into the house through the front door, quiet as they came, up the stairs, and Mari’s bedroom greets them exactly as they left it—Gon-chan's tank humming low, the futon still rumpled from where Lara climbed out of it hours ago, streetlight still slicing the same thin blade across the ceiling.
"Bed," Mari says, mostly to herself, and Lara doesn't argue this time.
Mari watches her settle back onto the futon, watches her curl onto her side the same way she was lying when Mari checked on her the first time tonight, hand loosely fisted near her chin, hair spilling messily over her shoulder. It's such an unremarkable image. It shouldn't feel like anything. And yet Mari finds herself standing there a beat too long anyway, cataloguing it the way she's catalogued it twice already tonight.
"Mari?" Lara mumbles, already half gone, eyes barely open.
"Hm?"
"Thank you for coming with me tonight."
"Wasn't gonna let you break into a chapel alone," Mari says, climbing into her own bed at last, pulling the blanket up over the ache still sitting low in her ribs—the fight, mostly, though not only. "Somebody's gotta keep you outta trouble."
Lara lets out something that sounds like a laugh, soft, already fading toward sleep. "Goodnight."
"Night."
Mari lies there for a while after Lara's breathing evens out, staring up at that same thin blade of streetlight, running the whole night back through her head. She doesn't let herself think too hard about what any of it means. Not tonight. There'll be time for that later; hopefully more time than she wants. For now it's enough that Lara's breathing is slow and even next to her, that the dream's already losing its shape the way dreams do, that whatever's sitting unnamed and stubborn in the pit of Mari’s stomach hasn't gone anywhere, but hasn't grown any louder either.
Mari lets her eyes fall shut, and for the first time all night, sleep actually comes to find her.
She doesn't dream of anything at all.
Mari wakes to blue.
Not the flat black of two in the morning anymore, but the soft, watered-down blue that comes right before sunrise, seeping in around the curtain edges and settling over everything like a held breath. Her body clocks it before her brain fully catches up. The quality of early light means she probably got, what, three hours, if she's generous with herself.
The first thing she does, before she's even fully conscious of doing it, is draw back the drapes and turn her head toward the futon.
Lara's still there, curled on her side, blanket pushed halfway down in the way she usually kicks it off partway through the night, hair a soft dark tangle against the pillow. Fast asleep. Alive and breathing. Mari sighs, relieved, and settles back against her own pillow to watch Lara for a moment longer than is strictly necessary.
In this light, everything about Lara looks softened at the edges—the slope of her nose, the curve of her mouth slightly parted around some slow, even breath, the fan of her eyelashes resting still against her cheek. It's stupid, probably, the thought that surfaces next, but it comes anyway, uninvited: no wonder she used to be a princess. If Lara went to an actual school, sat in actual classrooms with actual normal teenage boys, she'd probably have a line out the door. Some poor kid would trip over a desk just trying to get a better look at her.
Then, almost immediately, something hot and unpleasant flares up under Mari's ribs at the thought, gone as fast as it arrives, and she shoves it down without unpacking whatever that was.
There's a thin line of drool at the corner of Lara's mouth, silver-bright in the pale light, entirely undignified for someone Mari was just mentally comparing to royalty two seconds ago. Mari huffs quietly, fond despite herself, and reaches over without really thinking about it to wipe it away with the pad of her thumb.
Lara stirs. Turns further into the pillow with a small, sleepy noise, one hand curling loosely around nothing.
Mari freezes like she's been caught doing something illegal, heart slamming so hard and so suddenly it feels less like a heartbeat and more like something trying to physically separate itself from her chest. She doesn't breathe. Doesn't move. Waits out three of the longest seconds of her night—longer than the tournament final, longer than their late-night excursion, longer than any of it—until Lara's breathing settles back into its gentle rhythm, still asleep.
Mari eases back down onto her own pillow, hand pressed flat against her sternum like she can physically hold her heart in place, and stares at the ceiling until the blue light steadies into something less fragile-feeling.
She doesn't decide to pray. It just happens, the way old habits do, slipping back in through some door she thought she'd locked years ago. She doesn't kneel this time, nor does she fold her hands and make any of the careful shapes she used to think mattered. She just lies there, eyes open, and thinks it instead, the closest thing to a prayer she's managed since a hospital room she doesn't like to remember.
Don't take her from me. Whatever you gotta take instead…take it.
Just not her.