Archive of Our Own

The club room doors are closed to her on a Tuesday morning for the first time in almost three years, and Mari notices it the way you notice a missing tooth—with your tongue, over and over, unable to leave it alone.

She stands outside them anyway. Long enough to hallucinate her own reflection ghosted on the polished surface of the wooden doors, coat buttoned all the way up because it’s January and the wind coming off the lake still knows her name. Somewhere behind those doors, the underclassmen are running suicides, sneakers screeching against the same floor she'd bled on—literally—during nationals prep in her second year. She can hear Coach's whistle. Two short bursts. Faster.

Her body wants to walk in. Nearly three years of Tuesday mornings have trained it to.

She keeps walking instead.

***

Wednesday evening, Mari goes to the gym. 

She doesn’t train at school anymore since all the third-years retired from the club just last month before winter break, one last handshake with her coach and a box of her old gear cleared out of the equipment room. However, the old neighborhood gym on the other side of Ōtsu has never stopped being hers. She started there when she was small enough that the gloves used to swallow her whole hands, and she still goes most days out of something that feels less like choice than muscle memory, the way a heart keeps beating without being told to.

Mari goes at the heavy bag round after round well past when her arms should have given out—sweat soaking through her shirt, knuckles throbbing even through the wraps, chasing something she can’t name and isn’t able to explain if anyone asked. The old coach who still runs the place even though his knees have given out on him years ago, has been watching her from the corner for a while.

"Yer gonna break yer hand hittin’ it like that," he says when she pauses to re-wrap a glove that’s come loose.

"’M fine."

"Didn't say you ain’t fine. Said yer gonna break your hand." He comes over, adjusts her stance. "What's chasin’ you tonight?"

She doesn’t have an answer. She just goes back to the bag, harder, until her shoulders burn and her lungs ache and her head finally goes quiet.

She trains like that for two hours. Then she goes home, showers, ices her knuckles, and lies awake until nearly one in the morning with her phone in her hand.

There’s an email she hasn’t answered sitting in her inbox. Three of them, actually, from three different gyms, the most recent one four days old now. The subject line has gone soft and unthreatening after enough time has passed (Ōtsu-san, following up on our offer…), like it’s given up trying to sound urgent. She knows what’s in it without opening it. She knows what’s in all three, more or less. Signing bonus, training schedule, a B-Class license waiting for her signature instead of the C-Class grind everyone else her age has to slog through, because ten medals in a little under three years can bring you that kind of shortcut.

Ten medals. Seven golds and—she makes herself think about the actual number, the way you press on a bruise to check if it still hurts—two silver, one bronze. That’s only throughout her high school career and not counting the wins she’d nabbed before. Mari’s been boxing for a long time, had been humbling other kids since before she knew the square root of four. Objectively, it’s a good record. An illustrious one, her coach had said, more than once—like the word itself was supposed to settle something. But Mari doesn’t think about the seven golds most days. She thinks about March, two years ago, standing on the second-place podium at the Asian Youth Championships with a silver medal around her neck, heavy like a verdict. She thinks about November just a few months ago, a split decision she still replays some nights, one round she should’ve taken and didn't.

At fifteen she'd wanted this so badly—an ache low in her chest every time she watched footage of fighters two, three, five years older than her. Wanted to keep finding bigger opponents until there weren't any left that scared her.

She's been having a hard time remembering what that wanting feels like.

***

Morning assembly in January ushers in the kind of cold that gets into the gymnasium and stays there no matter how many bodies packed the space—the jumble of some five hundred students’ conversations making Mari’s ears buzz while the vice principal reads announcements in a voice built for lulling people to sleep. Mari has perfected the art of standing at attention while thinking about nothing. It’s a boxer's skill, actually—the way you could go somewhere else behind your own eyes and leave your face exactly where you left it.

Two rows down, Sakaguchi is telling somebody about her ski trip last winter break.

“—and then my dad let me drive on the last stretch, which is illegal, obviously, but there was nobody on the road for like an hour—”

Hokkaido. Some family lodge with an outdoor bath that steams even at negative ten. Sakaguchi has the pictures already loaded and ready, phone tilting toward her friend at an angle that suggests she's been waiting all through assembly for someone to ask.

Mari doesn’t ask. She doesn’t need to see the pictures to know exactly what they'd look like. Envy isn’t what she feels standing there. Envy is too clean a word for it. It’s more like noticing a door in a hallway you walk down every day and only now wondering where it leads.

She hasn’t taken a trip anywhere in nearly three years that wasn't a tournament. And now that there aren’t any tournaments left to go to, she still hasn’t taken one.

***

At lunch, her phone buzzes on her desk, and she knows before she even looks that it’s Lara, because it’s always Lara. At exactly this hour, with exactly this kind of nothing.

A photo. Some kind of tart, pale gold and glazed, arranged on white ceramic like it belongs in a magazine instead of on a folding table in the back of a bakery in Kobe.

Wish you could try this, the text says. Chef said it's not even that hard but I burned the first two batches lol

Mari sits with her lunch box in front of her, rice going cold, and stares at the photo a beat longer than she needs to.

looks better than your cooking, she types back. that's a low bar tho.

RUDE!! (It tastes amazing)

She smiles—the kind of smile that doesn’t get much use anymore—and puts the phone face-down on her desk before anyone can ask who she was talking to.

***

That night, packing her gym bag for the next day out of habit, she looks at the photo. The one on her shelf, framed and somewhat sunbleached, sitting next to her trophies.

Mari, fifteen years old. Standing in front of the checkered blue backdrop with the prefecture's crest stamped over and over behind her like wallpaper. She had a gold medal looped around her neck and a trophy in one hand, its little red gem catching the light funny. Her hair was flat with old sweat, and she stared wide-eyed into the camera with an expression that wasn't quite a smile—more like she hadn't figured out yet how to arrange her face around something this big. And beside her, red hair a wild halo under the fluorescent lights—

—Lara.

Also fifteen. Holding up Mari’s certificate with both hands like it was hers instead of Mari's, looking so unreasonably delighted that you'd think she'd been the one to win.

Mari remembers that Lara hadn't even been able to read half the kanji on it. Had asked, loudly in the middle of the ceremony, what it said.

Almost three years now.

It doesn’t feel like it was that long ago. It feels like last week, and also like something that had happened to somebody else.

Mari looks at the photo for a long time.

Then she looks at the calendar pinned above her desk—nothing circled on it now for the first time in three years. Blank white squares where some sort of deadline used to be.

Eventually, she goes to sleep without deciding anything at all.

***

She wakes up on Friday and doesn’t put her uniform on.

It’s not a plan. She wonders how, exactly, this happened. Ōtsu Mari always does the thing that’s in front of her, every day, without asking whether she wants to. That’s supposed to be her whole personality: she’s disciplined, she’s reliable, she always shows up. Except lately there’s nothing in front of her to show up for.

Unless she counts the three unanswered emails and a version of herself at fifteen she doesn’t know how to be anymore.

But she stands in front of her closet at six-forty in the morning with her sailor uniform on its hanger, and instead of getting dressed for school, she puts on jeans, T-shirt, and a sweatshirt over it. She pulls an old backpack out from under the bed, dumps last term's textbooks onto the floor, and starts packing it with things that have nothing to do with school. A change of clothes. Her charger. Earbuds. The little origami crane Lara had folded badly the last time she visited—the one that’s been living on Mari’s desk, gathering dust.

Her phone buzzes—probably from the class group chat, someone asking in a panic if there’s homework due today—and she silences it without looking before grabbing her coat.

By seven she’s at the station, breath fogging in front of the ticket machine, scrolling through departures with the strange calm of someone who has already, somewhere below the reach of conscious thought, made up her mind.

Kobe, she types into the machine.

Departure from Ōtsu at 8:15.

One way.

She buys the ticket before she can talk herself out of it.

***

The train pulls out of the station with a lurch that makes her stomach drop, and Mari presses her temple to the cold window glass, watching Shiga slide backward into grey.

She opens her phone once, out of habit, and there they are: the emails, still unanswered, corporately patient and polite, which somehow feels worse than if they’d just pressured her outright.

Ōtsu-san, we'd love to discuss next steps whenever you're ready. No rush.

No rush.

Mari has read that line probably thirty times in the last two weeks and it never stops prickling her like an accusation. She locks the screen and buries her phone in her coat pocket.

She hasn’t let herself think about Silver Week yet. Not really. Or at least, not the entirety of it. But now, with almost two empty hours ahead of her and nothing to do but sit with her own heartbeat, the memory comes anyway, warm and unbidden.

A month after Mari won her second consecutive Inter-High, Lara showed up at the Ōtsu house with a duffel bag half her size and an energy that filled every room she walked into—hugging Mari's grandmother so hard she laughed and swatted her away, charming Yoshiya into carrying her bags upstairs by simply looking at him with those wide, hopeful eyes until he caved. Against all odds, she’d attained her GED that month—Mari remembers how she waved the results around at dinner like a trophy, prouder of that single certificate than Mari managed to feel about hers that came with her medal last month—and she spent half the visit talking about pastry school applications, portfolio pieces, a recommendation letter she was nervous about. Her whole face lit up with anxious hope. Mari had envied that, a little, without being able to say why. Lara didn't know yet if she'd get in anywhere. She was terrified and reaching anyway.

By the second night, she claimed half of Mari's bed like she'd always slept there, sprawled sideways with one foot hanging off the edge, and when Mari came out of the bathroom to find her stretched diagonally across the whole mattress—the whole thing, not even trying to be fair about it—something in her simply refused to let that stand.

She nudged Lara’s foot with her toes. “Move over.”

Lara lifted her head off the mattress just to give Mari a dirty look. “There's no over. I've claimed your bed. It's mine.”

“You don't get to claim my bed.”

“Too late.” She smirked, all too smugly. “It’s mine now.”

And then Mari shoved her, and Lara shoved back twice as hard but half as effectively, all elbows and no leverage, laughing too hard, and it dissolved almost instantly into the kind of wrestling that wasn't really about winning anymore. Lara had the height on Mari, always had, even now—but Mari had years of a boxer's coiled strength packed into a smaller frame. It took embarrassingly little effort to flip Lara, pin one wrist to the mattress, straddle her hips, and grin down in triumph.

“Say I win.”

“Never.” Lara was breathless, hair fanned out across the pillow, cheeks pink from laughing. “You're trained to fight. That’s basically cheating.”

“Skill issue.”

“Say I get to keep at least a little of the bed.”

“Say I win first.”

Lara looked up at her for a second too long, the laughter still there but something else moving underneath it now, something that made the air in the room feel thinner. “Fine,” she said, quieter. “You win.”

And then she reached up and kissed Mari.

It wasn't their first time—they'd figured this part out slowly and clumsily, over the last few years, whenever Lara came to visit and Mari had time to kill in between fighting for her life in one training camp after another—but it never stopped doing something surreal and immense to Mari's chest, every single time, like her ribs didn't know where to arrange themselves. She let go of Lara's wrist. Lara's arms came up around her neck instead, pulling her down, and the wrestling match became something slower, much warmer, both of them smiling too much to kiss properly for the first minute—noses bumping, someone's elbow catching the pillow wrong. Mari had one hand braced in Lara's hair, and Lara made a small, satisfied sound against her mouth like she'd won after all.

Maybe it’s because they hadn’t done this in months, or maybe it’s because of general teenage hormones, or maybe Mari was subconsciously feeling stressed and pent-up, but feeling Lara against her that way made her so excited that she couldn’t lie still. She slipped her hand under Lara’s shirt, savoring the feel of her skin—warm and soft and very much human—and they moved together again and again and it felt so good that Mari didn’t ever want to stop.

When they finally settled—tangled together in the narrow space of a twin bed clearly not built for two people—Lara went quiet. Her hair was a mess, her lips were red from all the kissing they did, and Mari thought about how she wouldn’t mind lying with a bed thief if she was that beautiful. Lara untangled one arm and reached for her bag on the floor without fully sitting up, rummaging for something.

“Here.” She pressed something small and cool into Mari's palm. “It’s about time you have this.”

It was a key. Plain and ordinary, a little rubber cap over the top in a shade of teal.

“For my place,” Lara said, suddenly a little shy. “I know you’re busy, but just in case you ever…I don't know. Want to just show up. You don't have to text first or anything. I want you to be able to just come in. Whenever.”

Mari turned the key over in her fingers, feeling the absurd weight of it, a piece of metal that shouldn't have meant as much as it did.

“Whenever?”

“Whenever.” Lara settled back against her, satisfied, like the matter was closed. “Just show up. I mean it.”

***

Kobe hits her all at once when she steps off the platform—a city that smells like salt and diesel, mountains crowding close on one side like they’re trying to shove the whole place into the sea. It’s nothing like Ōtsu. Taller, louder, apathetic to her in a way that makes her feel pleasantly invisible. Just another girl walking through Sannomiya Station on a Friday morning she’s very much not supposed to be free for.

The cold here has a different texture than home—damper, sharper off the sea—and she pulls the collar of her coat against it as she checks the address against the map on her phone for the third time, even though she basically has it memorized from a hundred nights of scrolling through it.

Lara's building is a ten-minute walk from the station, narrow and a little worn at the edges, the kind of place that’s probably been there since before Mari was born. She stands in front of the entrance longer than she needs to, breath fogging, watching the morning light go slanted against the brick.

The key is warm from where she's been gripping it in her coat pocket the entire walk, the little teal cap soft under her thumb. She's carried it for four months without using it once. Not because she hasn't wanted to before this. The obvious reason is because boxing took up most of her time. But behind all of that, Mari just thinks the first turn of that key in her hand should mean something, and some superstitious part of her doesn’t want to spend that meaning on a casual afternoon. It feels, stupidly, like it needs to be earned. Like walking through Lara's front door alone is a kind of promise she’s not ready to make good on yet.

Now, though, with nothing circled on her calendar and a full day of school unaccounted for behind her, it feels like exactly the right time to spend it.

The lock clicks over on the second try—Lara's directions over the phone months ago had been characteristically imprecise, you kind of have to jiggle it, the landlord keeps saying he'll fix it—and the door swings open onto a wash of warm, close air that smells unmistakably of vanilla.

Mari steps inside, closes the door behind her, and stands very still for a second, feeling like an intruder despite the key still in her hand.

She’s pictured this space a hundred times from Lara's photos and video calls with her—it's small, don't laugh, there's barely room for the bed—but pictures and footage on a screen while Mari did homework were nothing like standing in the middle of it. The apartment is small, true, but it doesn’t feel small so much as full, crowded with things that show how lived-in the space is. A single shoe rack by the door holds two pairs of battered sneakers and one pair of clogs, scuffed white, that Mari realizes after a second must be for the bakery. There are houseplants everywhere. A cardigan hangs off the back of a chair.

Mari ventures further into the apartment, to the kitchen area. On the counter, a row of mismatched jars holds flour and sugar and something labelled in handwriting too messy to be anyone but Lara's. Beside them sits a stack of textbooks Mari doesn’t recognize at all—thick, glossy-covered things with titles like Fundamentals of Viennoiserie and Chocolate Techniques Vol. 2, dog-eared and sticky-noted within an inch of their lives, one left open to a page of diagrams showing how to laminate dough in careful numbered steps.

There’s a manila envelope on the kitchen table, already opened, edges soft from being handled. Kobe Confectionery Arts Institute printed across the top in both kanji and tidy serif type. Mari picks it up before she can think better of it—a thin stack of pages, an application confirmation, a portfolio checklist with half the boxes checked off in pen, a printed photo of some elaborate layered cake that had to be Lara's own work, annotated in the margins with notes about technique. Tucked behind it all, a second, smaller envelope: We regret to inform you that your application has been placed on our waitlist. Dated three weeks ago.

Lara never mentioned it. Not once, in any of their calls.

Mari sets it down exactly where she found it, her chest feeling a little too tight for comfort.

She didn't know about this part. She’s known the appearance of Lara's life in Kobe from the phone calls—the bakery, pastry school plans, the vague outline of hope around exhaustion in her voice some evenings—but she hasn’t known there’s a waitlist letter sitting out on the kitchen table, or dog-eared textbooks, or a cardigan that has a whole worn-in shape to it now. She hasn’t known Lara owns four very colourful yet mismatched mugs, all chipped, clearly acquired separately rather than bought as a set. She hasn’t known there’s a corkboard on the wall with a rotating schedule pinned to it in three different colours of ink, shift times crossed out and rewritten, a photo tucked into one corner that Mari recognizes with a small jolt as one Lara had taken of Mari mid-sneeze during their picnic date by the reservoir back in Shiga last September.

It hits her harder than she expects, standing there in the middle of the apartment, that Lara has been building an entire life here—in fragments Mari has only ever gotten second-hand, over the phone, in photos of pastries and quick miss yous dashed off on break. A whole life, not very far from Shiga, that exists uncertain and unfinished, in full colour and real texture, whether or not Mari is in it to see it happen.

It’s quiet.

Too quiet.

The realization hits her a beat too late, the way bad ones always do—a full ten seconds of being in the space before it actually occurs to Mari that quiet means nobody is home. Lara could be anywhere. At the bakery, at school, out running some errand three neighbourhoods over, could be literally anywhere in a city this size, and Mari has ridden two hours on a train and let herself into an apartment based on nothing but a feeling.

Oh god. She’s just going to be standing here. Alone. In someone else's apartment. Like a weirdo.

“Shit,” she mutters, and feels her face go hot, humiliation scratching up the back of her neck faster than she can talk herself down from it. What was she thinking? She hadn’t texted ahead, hadn’t called, hadn’t done a single one of the reasonable things a person would before showing up unannounced on a school day, and now she’s going to have to sit here in this apartment that’s not hers.

She turns toward the door, some vague, mortified instinct telling her to just leave, go sit at a café somewhere and pretend this whole day didn’t happen—until she hears the sound of running water.

She freezes.

The sound is coming from somewhere down the short hallway. Footsteps, light and quick—definitely not what she'd expect from an intruder-cautious approach, more like someone who's heard a noise and is mostly just curious.

Mari barely has time to feel any of it—the panic, the sudden bright spike of hope—before Lara rounds the corner in an old T-shirt and sleep shorts, toothbrush still somehow in one hand, toothpaste foam at a spot on her chin, hair pulled back in a knot that has mostly come undone.

Oh.

That’s right.

She misses her.

Misses the way Lara talks with her whole face, the way she smells, the way she teases. They talk every day. Texts, calls, photos. It hadn't felt like enough of an absence to name until right now, standing in her space, watching her come around a corner with toothpaste on her face like the single most beautiful, ridiculous thing Mari has ever seen in her life.

Lara's whole face lights up.

“Mari?” A question, but not really—giddy, delighted, setting down her toothbrush on a counter before crossing the distance with her hands coming up like she means to grab Mari by the shoulders and shake her. “I thought you weren't coming up until Golden Week.”

Mari could cry. She’s so relieved, so unbearably happy. “I was- I am, still. I just—” Her voice catches somewhere behind her teeth. “I missed you. I just missed you and I can’t—”

She doesn’t get to finish. It doesn’t matter anymore whether she finishes.

Lara's hands come up to hold Mari’s face instead, palms cool against her jaw, thumbs brushing her cheekbones, and she kisses her like she missed her too. Like it’s been longer than four months.

Like she loves her.

Because she does. Mari knows that. She's known it for a while.

She knows it.

Lara is taller—always has been—but Mari has the leverage of a boxer’s stance and months of built-up longing screaming in her veins. The very first time Mari had done this, Lara had gasped right into her mouth, startled. Mid-kiss and just whoop, right up she went, hoisted into the air as effortlessly as if she weighed no more than a couple of grapes.

Mari does it again now. She hooks her arms under Lara’s thighs and lifts.

Lara doesn't hesitate. She follows the lead instantly, wrapping her legs securely around Mari’s waist, trusting her implicitly not to let her drop, both of her hands frantically anchoring themselves to Mari.

Mari carries her forward blindly. She hopes Lara has a plan, because Mari is running entirely on instinct. She hadn’t intended for this to be the very first thing they did upon reentering each other's orbits—maybe the fourth or fifth thing, after a proper hello, maybe taking off her coat and setting her bag down, catching her breath.

But as Lara deepens the kiss, Mari decides she doesn’t care about the order of operations anymore.

God, she missed this.

Lara tastes like minty toothpaste and smells like the comforting steam of a fresh shower. She probably had somewhere to be. A planned-out morning that Mari has just walked into and detonated. She can’t bring herself to feel bad about it, and judging by the way Lara's fingers curl into her hair and tug, just slightly, enough to make Mari's whole spine light up—neither can she.

Mari presses forward until Lara’s back meets the cool, solid surface of the wall, pinning her there, holding her close enough to feel the wild rhythm of her heartbeat.

“I missed you,” Mari says, when they break apart just long enough to breathe, forehead against Lara's. “So much.”

“Me too.” Lara's voice has gone fuzzy and a little wrecked already, fingers still tangled in Mari's hair like she’s not ready to let go of any part of her. Mari feels bold enough to duck her head, mouth finding the curve of Lara's neck, and the sound Lara makes—her name, breathless, barely more than an exhale—goes straight through Mari like a current, everywhere at once. Her face and her fingertips and someplace low in her stomach.

“Bed.” Lara says. “Bed’s right there. Put me down first.”

Mari chuckles—a short, surprised sound against Lara's collarbone—and sets her down, careful even now. The second Lara’s feet touch the floor, she takes Mari’s hand, fingers lacing through hers the way she's done it a thousand times, tugging her the short distance across the apartment toward the narrow bed tucked under the window, sheets rumpled from the morning.

At the edge of it, Lara turns back to Mari and reaches for the buttons of her coat, working them open one by one. It slides off Mari's shoulders and hits the floor in a heap, forgotten. She then pulls Mari down onto the mattress by the front of her sweatshirt, and Mari goes easily, catching herself on one forearm so she doesn’t crush her, and for a second they just look at each other as Mari hovers over her. Lara’s auburn hair is a wild, beautiful halo against the pillows—almost exactly like it had been that day in September. Her cheeks flush a dark pink, the streak of toothpaste still on her chin. Her blue eyes are wide, blown-out, and fixed entirely on Mari.

“Hi,” Lara says, breathless, smiling up at her like this is the funniest and best thing that’s happened to her all week.

“Hi.” Mari kisses the corner of that grin, before going to lick the toothpaste off her skin. “You got toothpaste on you.”

Lara’s eyebrows go up, then she chuckles at herself. “That’s embarrassing,” she says, hands coming up to hold Mari’s face again.

“It’s okay.” Mari turns her head to kiss Lara’s palm. “’Cause you’re pretty.”

Lara smirks, finding an opening. “Who’s the cheesy one now?”

“Shut up.”

They kiss for a long time. There’d been an urgency to it earlier—four months of missing each other crashing into a single morning—but here, Mari doesn’t want to hurry through. Lara's hands map the back of her neck, her shoulders, as if she’s checking to make sure Mari is actually real and not something she'd invented out of loneliness. Mari keeps catching herself smiling into it, which makes the kissing clumsy and uncoordinated, causing Lara to laugh against her mouth, and now Mari is laughing, too—foreheads knocking together the way they always somehow ended up doing.

“You're supposed to be good at this by now,” Lara teases, tugging her back down by the collar when Mari pulls back too far to breathe.

“I am good at this.”

“Debatable.” But she’s already pulling her in again, and whatever argument Mari might’ve made gets lost somewhere against Lara's mouth.

At some point they end up on their sides, facing each other, legs entwined, the frantic edge of it worn down into something slower and sweeter. Lara's fingers are tracing idle lines along Mari's jaw between kisses, while Mari's hand fists loosely in the hem of Lara's shirt like she needs something to hold onto even now.

But then, Lara pulls back abruptly. Mari chases her mouth without thinking, following the kiss even as she finds air instead.

“Wait.” Lara’s brows furrow, something belated visibly clicking into place behind her eyes. “Don't you have school today?”

Mari goes still.

It’s such a small thing that’s said so lightly. Lara looks at Mari with a puzzled half-smile, clearly expecting some reasonable answer: oh, teacher's conference, we got out early. Mari feels the whole morning come rushing back into focus around the one detail she'd successfully avoided thinking about.

“...Technically,” Mari mutters.

Lara blinks. “Technically...?”

“Technically, yeah. I got school today.”

Lara pushes herself up onto one elbow, staring down at her with an expression caught somewhere between delight and genuine alarm. “Ōtsu Mari. Did you skip school to come here?”

Mari’s eyes refuse to be in Lara’s line of sight. “…Maybe.”

“What about training? You said—”

“Can we not?” Something in Mari's chest pulls tight, fast, before she can stop it. “Can we not…talk about that right now?”

She watches as Lara’s face does a slow fall. “Mari…what's wrong?”

“Nothin’.” It comes out too quick, and Mari hears it land wrong even as she says it. She sits up a little, putting a few inches of distance between them that she immediately regrets, staring hard at a crease in the bedsheet instead of at Lara's face. “Nothin's wrong, I'm just—”

She doesn’t have the rest of the sentence. She had two hours on a train to figure out how to explain it and she still doesn’t have the words for the things sitting like pests in the pit of her stomach.

“Just kiss me,” she says, loud enough only for the both of them to hear. “Please.”

Lara looks at her—long enough that Mari feels the full weight of being seen through, gently and completely, the way only Lara has ever managed to do. Her eyes search Mari's face like she’s deciding whether to push, whether this is a door worth knocking on right now or one that needs to be left alone until Mari is ready to open it herself.

Mercifully, she lets it go. She reaches up, tucking a piece of hair behind Mari's ear.

“Okay,” she murmurs, her gaze flitting to Mari’s lips. “Okay. Come here.”

She shifts before Mari can lean back down, sitting up properly against the headboard instead, sheets pooling around her, and pats the space in front of her, a small, inviting tilt of her head.

Mari follows her, swinging a leg over to settle into Lara's lap, knees braced on either side of her thighs. It puts them nearly at eye level for once, close enough that she can feel the warmth coming off Lara's skin, can count the few faint freckles across her nose she usually only notices this close up.

“Better?” Lara asks.

“Yeah,” Mari answers, a little breathless already just from the shift of it, from Lara's hands finding her waist and settling there like they belong.

Lara leans in, and Mari welcomes her.

It's slower like this, somehow, than it had been before. Lara's mouth is soft against hers and her handstrace idle warmth up Mari's sides, over her shoulder blades, like she's mapping her all over again just to be sure. Mari's fingers find their way into Lara's hair, still faintly damp at the ends, and the sound Lara lets out against her mouth sends a shudder Mari can feel all the way to the ends of her fingernails.

They stay like that for what feels like hours. Mari flinches at the sudden heat of Lara’s hands sliding under her shirt, her palms warm against the bare skin of the small of her back.

Lara pulls away to ask, “Is this okay?”

“Yeah.” Mari's voice comes out rougher than she means it to. “Yeah, it's…okay.”

Lara's hands stay where they are, giving her room to change her mind if she wants to. Mari doesn't. She kisses her instead, and feels Lara relax under her as she moves her hands higher to Mari’s sides—tracing slow circles over her ribs, setting off tiny sparks of fireworks under Mari’s skin. Their foreheads bump every so often between kisses, breaking apart just long enough to laugh quietly at nothing at all before coming back together. At one point, Lara takes one hand out of Mari’s shirt and slides it up to cradle the side of Mari’s face, so tender and cautious it makes something in her ache in an entirely different way than exhaustion ever had.

“I really did miss you,” Mari murmurs against Lara’s mouth. “I missed you a lot.”

Lara smiles against her lips, doesn't pull back to answer and presses closer instead, arms tightening around her. “I missed you a lot, too. I miss you all the time.”

Mari tucks her face into the curve of Lara’s neck instead, breathing her in. Lara’s hand rubs slow circles against her back, like she has nowhere else in the world she'd rather be than here. Mari lets herself be held, the two of them wrapped up so completely in each other that the rest of the apartmen, the rest of the day, and the rest of everything waiting outside that door, simply ceases to exist.

***

The changing room was empty by the time Mari finally got out of the showers, her wraps unravelled and pooled on the bench beside her like shed skin. The medal sat a few feet away, stuffed back in its small velvet box, tossed into the open mouth of her gym bag along with her mouthguard and a half-empty water bottle. She hadn't put it on. She'd taken it off almost the second she was out of sight of the cameras, tucked it away like something she didn't want touching her skin, and hadn't thought much about why until just now, sitting here, noticing the bare weight of her own collarbone where a medal had just been.

She should’ve felt something. That part kept snagging at her, bouncing off the walls of her head over and over as she sat there in the fluorescent quiet—the sound of the crowd from twenty minutes ago, cheering her name, chanting it even, still ringing faintly in her ears, and she felt...nothing. Not the good kind of nothing, either. There used to be this satisfaction she’d carry home from tournaments like a second medal nobody could see. But there was nothing. It’d felt like someone had turned the volume down on the whole day and forgotten to turn it back up.

Gold. JABF High School Selection, her second year running. It should’ve felt like redemption, if nothing else—four months ago, she'd stood on a podium in a different country, third step, after a decision at the Youth Worlds that still mocked her sometimes behind her eyes when she couldn't sleep. She'd told herself, standing there in November with that bronze medal, that she'd come back from it. That a tournament on home turf, a division she knew inside and out, opponents she'd already beaten before—would be the thing that put it right.

And it had, on paper. She’d stood on the first step. Her teammates had swarmed her so aggressively after the decision was announced that she'd nearly lost her footing. Her coach had beamed at her, already talking about the Inter-High coming up in the summer, talking about next season like the bronze hadn't even happened.

Mari smiled back. She remembered her face making the shape it’s supposed to make, and she remembered, distinctly, that underneath it she'd mostly just been thinking about how much her hands hurt, and how long the ride home would take, and whether she had enough energy left to eat dinner before her body shuts down. Wondering whether the gold in her bag actually felt any different from the bronze that was still sitting in a drawer at home, where she'd shoved it the day she got back from Worlds so she wouldn't have to look at it.

It didn't feel different. She couldn’t say that part out loud to anyone, not even to Lara. Months of training harder than she ever had in her life, replaying that one bad round in her head until she could see it with her eyes closed, promising herself that gold would close that black hole where her stomach used to be.

She glanced sideways at the gym bag now, at the corner of the velvet box just visible above the zipper. She’d imagined this exact moment a hundred different ways, had pictured herself crying from the sheer size of finally getting what she'd wanted so badly after that humiliation of coming up third for the whole world to see. It kept her up at night. She'd pictured wearing the thing home, parading it around town, sleeping with it on the nightstand where she could see it first thing in the morning. Instead she'd shoved it into her bag like a phone charger, something to be found later. She felt tired in a way that sleep couldn’t seem to touch anymore, settling somewhere deeper than her muscles.

What's wrong with you, she’d thought, staring at her own reflection in the dark screen of her phone. You won. You fixed it. This is what you wanted.

Her phone buzzed. A text from Lara, five prefectures away, who'd been messaging her congratulations all day in a steady, delighted stream of exclamation points.

!!!! I’M SO PROUD OF YOU!!! YOU DID SO WELL!! I KNEW YOU COULD DO IT <3<3<3 this makes up for worlds right?? how does it feel??

Mari looked at the question for a long moment, thumb hovering over the keyboard, eyes drifting once more to the bag where the medal sat, unworn and uncelebrated, already halfway to being forgotten right alongside the one it was supposed to have made up for.

good, she typed back, finally. i’m tired tho.

It wasn't a lie, but it wasn't the whole truth either. A part of her—the part that had gone very quiet and very bitter somewhere in the last few months—noticed that this was becoming a habit. Giving the easy version of an answer. Making the shape of a smile that wouldn’t reach her eyes no matter how hard she tried. Taking the medal off before anyone could see her not wanting to wear it, and telling herself that the next one, surely, would eventually feel like enough.

She didn't think much of it at the time. It was one night, one strange flat feeling after one exhausting tournament, and there'd be another one in a few months, and another gold, probably, if she kept training the way she always had. She told herself that. She believed it, mostly.

She just also, wordlessly zipped the bag shut over the medal without looking at it again, put her loafers back on, and sat alone in an empty changing room a while longer before she could make herself get up and go home.

***

“Mari.”

Lara's voice is gentle and close, and Mari's eyes startle open before she even registers she'd closed them. For a disoriented second she doesn't know where she is: warm, tangled in something soft, something solid against her chest that turns out to be Lara's collarbone.

“I fell asleep?” she says, blinking, genuinely baffled at herself. She's still in Lara's lap, head having tipped forward at some point without her permission.

Lara smiles, running a hand over her cheek, fond and a little smug about it. “Yeah. Only for a couple minutes, don't worry. But you should probably get off me now. I can't feel my legs.”

Mari groans, pouting out her bottom lip in a way she’d rather eat shards of glass than admit to doing in front of literally anyone else on earth. Lara laughs at the sight of it, leaning in to kiss her lightly, but pulls away faster than Mari would like, hands coming to her shoulders to gently steer her off her lap and onto the mattress beside her.

Mari watches her go, propped up on one elbow, feeling strangely bereft already at the loss of contact. Lara moves around the small apartment with an easy, practiced familiarity that Mari's still not used to seeing up close—reaching for a hair tie on the dresser, pulling a sweater down off a hook by the door, all these small domestic motions that belong to a whole life Mari's only getting in glimpses. It hits her again, watching her, how much of Lara's day-to-day this is and how little of it Mari's actually seen.

“Were you goin' somewhere?” Mari asks, sitting up properly now. “Looked like you were gettin' ready, before.”

Lara glances back at her, smiling. “Yeah. I had an important meeting I missed. I'll probably lose my job now.”

Mari's mouth drops open. “What—”

The laugh comes immediately, and Mari feels her whole face go hot with a mix of alarm and betrayal.

“That ain't funny!” she says, fighting her own smile even as she says it, scrambling up off the bed too. God, she's the worst. Mari loves her so much it's genuinely embarrassing. “You asshole. Don’t joke about stuff like that. Almost got me goin’ for a second…”

“Sorry, sorry. You’re so cute when you’re upset.” Lara's still grinning, walking over to Mari. She puts her hand under Mari’s chin and gently lifts her gaze to hers. “I'm kidding. I don't have work today. It's just brunch with some friends, nothing important.”

Mari blinks. Friends. It hadn't occurred to her, not once on the entire train ride, that there might be an entire other cast of people in Lara's life here—friends, coworkers, whole relationships that exist independently of the two of them and the phone calls that stitched them together. “Oh.”

“Although…” Lara tilts her head, considering. “If you're up for it, I bet they'll still be there for a few more hours. I'd like you to meet them.”

Mari blinks again. “You…want me to meet your friends?”

“Only if you want to.” Lara cups her cheeks with both hands. “I know you didn't plan for this, and the train ride was—” She catches herself. Something shifts behind her eyes. “Does anybody know you're here?”

Mari's face floods with heat. “No,” she says, too fast, before her brain can catch up with her mouth. “I mean…yeah. No. I didn’t tell anyone, but it’s fine. S’okay.”

She hates, more than almost anything, how easily she flusters around this exact kind of question.

“It's not a big deal,” she adds, which doesn't help.

Lara looks amused—but there's an edge underneath it now, a flicker of the same concern from earlier, the one Mari had managed to kiss her way out of once already. “Mari. Seriously. What's—”

“I wanna meet your friends!” It comes out fast and too loud, an obvious clumsy dodge and they both know it, but Mari doesn’t care. Anything to keep that question from finishing itself. “Gimme one minute—”

She's already reaching for her coat before Lara can get another word out.

***

The walk to the café takes them down a slope of narrow streets that Lara navigates without once checking her phone, and that alone tells Mari that Lara actually lives here now. She turns corners as if she's turned them a hundred times. She waves at a woman sweeping outside a dry cleaner's, and gets a wave back like it’s routine.

“That's Fujita-san,” Lara says, apropos of nothing, noticing Mari noticing. “She always tells me my hair's too red for winter. I have no idea what that means, but I say thank you anyway.”

Mari smiles thinly, falling into step beside her. “Is that a sayin’ here? ‘Your hair’s too red for winter’?”

“Don’t know, but I choose to take it as a compliment. Not my fault my aura’s too bold for the season.” Lara says it so cheerfully and confidently that Mari doesn’t even try to argue.

They pass a bakery that’s not Lara's—a rival, judging by the exaggerated scowl Lara aims at its window display—and a tiny shrine tucked between two buildings that Lara says she stops at sometimes on bad mornings, and a vending machine that, according to Lara, dispenses hot corn soup in December and inexplicably nothing but grape soda for the rest of the year.

“Nobody's ever explained the grape soda thing to me,” Lara says, very seriously. “I've made peace with it.”

Mari finds herself laughing more in ten minutes than she had in the last two weeks combined. It’s so easy, walking beside her like this. Lara's hand finds hers somewhere around the second block and just stays there, swinging a little between them. She talks about everything and nothing, the way she always has: a regular at the bakery who orders exclusively in haiku, a classmate from her GED prep course with a northern accent so thick he had to incorporate sign language in his speech so people could understand him, the portfolio piece she’s still tweaking for pastry school even though she said the words pastry school with a careful, deliberate lightness that Mari notices and decides, for now, not to poke at.

“You'll like Shiki,” Lara is saying, tugging Mari around a corner onto a street lined with plane trees, bare-branched and rattling faintly in the wind. “She’s great. And Naoto’s quiet, but he's super sweet and he’ll warm up to you eventually, probably by the second brunch—”

“There's gonna be a second brunch?”

“There's always a second brunch.” Lara grins at her sideways. “Oh, and Kakeru’s friendly, but don't let him ask you about boxing unless you actually want an hour-long conversation about it. He watched some documentary last year and now he thinks he's an expert. He thinks he knows more than I do! And I'm literally dating a boxer.”

Something in Mari's chest twists unpleasantly at that—boxing, tossed into the conversation like any other topic—but Lara doesn’t seem to notice, already moving on to a story about the last time they went to try out a new ramen place and nearly got banned from there over too many modifications.

Mari lets herself get carried along by it. The cold, the trees, Lara's hand in hers, the foreign rhythm of a city she’s not acquainted with threading past them on every side. For these few blocks, it’s easy to pretend this is just an ordinary thing—a girlfriend-visits-girlfriend kind of Wednesday, nothing waiting for her back home, and Mari lets herself believe, just for the length of this walk, that nothing else matters.

“—and that's the story of why Kakeru isn't allowed to order for the table anymore,” Lara finishes, laughing at her own memory of it, squeezing Mari's hand as they slow. “Okay. We're here.”

Mari looks up.

The café is tucked into the ground floor of an old building, its window fogged with warmth from inside, string lights looped along the awning even though it’s not evening yet. Through the glass. Mari can make out a corner table crowded with people: three of them, coats slung over chair backs, a teapot and too many plates for the size of the table, the unmistakable noise of people who'd been talking for a while already and aren’t planning on stopping soon.

Lara pushes the door open, and the sound hits them both at once: a bell overhead, a wash of chatter, the clatter of dishes. One of the three at the table looks up first. A girl with a round face and chubby cheeks, hair in a layered bob, wearing wire-frame glasses. She breaks into a smile the second she spots Lara.

"There she is!" the girl calls, loud enough that a couple of other tables glance over. "We thought you got lost."

"I got a surprise guest," Lara calls back, already tugging Mari forward by the hand, not letting go even as they reach the table. "Guys, meet Mari. My girlfriend."

Three faces turn to look at her at once, and Mari feels the urge to stand up straighter, the way she used to right before a weigh-in, like she's about to be assessed.

"The Mari?" The bob-haired girl with glasses—Shiki, presumably—is already half out of her chair, delighted. "Oh wow, she's real. I was startin' to think you made her up."

It catches Mari off guard before the words even register. She'd expected Kansai dialect, obviously, since they’re still in the region, but this isn't quite that. It's softer somehow, rounder at the edges, syllables drawn out like it doesn’t feel the need to rush the sentence. It’s Kansai, technically, the same bones as home. It’s just in different clothes.

Lara rolls her eyes. "Now, why would you think that?"

"Honey, you showed us, like, four hundred pictures, I stand by my theory that at least one of 'em was AI—"

"Shiki."

"I'm kiddin'! Mostly." Shiki sticks a hand out toward Mari, as if meeting strangers is something she does for fun rather than out of necessity. "It's real nice to finally meet you. I'm Shiki. Awaya Shiki. Lara talks about you all the time, I mean all the time. It's Mari this, Mari that, Mari did this thing, Mari did that thing. It's honestly a lot."

"Go cry about it," Lara says, without an ounce of real hostility in it.

There's a quiet guy—Naoto, dark hair falling into his eyes with half a pastry still in one hand—offering Mari a small nod and an even smaller smile, which feels, from what Lara's said on the walk over, like the warmest greeting Mari's likely to get out of him today. And beside him—a broad-shouldered guy with skin more tanned than hers—is already leaning forward across the table, eyes wide. It makes something in Mari's stomach sink half a second before he even opens his mouth.

"Well, would you look at that," he says, genuinely awestruck, the words coming out slow and warm like he's got all the time in the world to say them. "Ōtsu Mari? The Ōtsu Mari, as I live and breathe? You mean to tell me you're Lara's girl?"

Mari's smile goes thin and automatic. "That's me."

"No way." Kakeru is already pulling his chair back to make room, gesturing at the empty seat like he'd just won something. "Alright, you gotta sit next to me. I've got about a hundred questions."

"Absolutely not," Lara says, cutting in before Mari can even say anything, tugging her toward the other side of the table instead. "She just got here, Kakeru. And she's my girlfriend, go get your own."

It comes out light and teasing, but Mari hears something underneath it that's not quite a joke at all—something with a little more weight and edge around it.

Mari likes it.

Shiki cackles, delighted. "Wow, since when did you get so territorial? You weren't like this when we went to that cake picnic last week."

"That's different, this is my girlfriend—"

"We know," Naoto mumbles from his seat. "You did mention that."

"And I'll say it as many times as I please." Lara pulls out the chair beside her own and all but installs Mari into it, dropping into her own seat right after. "I don't like sharing. Sue me."

Kakeru holds both hands up in mock surrender, grinning, not minding the loss. "Fine, fine. Name's Kakeru, by the way, Ōtsu-san. It's an honor, truly. And I'll get my questions in eventually, don't you worry. You're not leavin' Kobe without givin' me one good story, at least."

Mari's insides free-fall at that, but Lara narrows her eyes at him. "Did you just threaten my girlfriend?"

"Hold on now, that ain't a threat," Kakeru insists. "That's a statement of intent."

"That's called a threat."

"You really gonna give me grief over nomenclature?"

"Ignore them," Shiki says to Mari, leaning across the table, waving a hand at Kakeru and Lara like she's swatting away a fly. "They're like this all the time, bless their hearts. Lara loves stirrin' the pot with him. And Kakeru's harmless. He once tried to get an autograph off a delivery man 'cause he thought he recognized him from a game show."

"He was on a game show," Kakeru supplies.

"He was in the audience, honey, that don't count."

Mari can feel Lara's hand finding her knee under the table, thumb tracing an absent little circle against Mari's jeans like she can't help herself, like she's missed having a reason to touch her every few seconds and isn't planning on giving it up now that she has one again.

"Anyway." Shiki turns back to Mari, propping her chin on one hand, eyes bright with interest. "Has Lara ever told you about us?"

Mari opens her mouth, hesitates, and—apparently, that's answer enough.

"She hasn't," Shiki says, delighted rather than offended, swatting Lara's arm across the table. "You coward. We know all about your girlfriend and she don't even know we exist?"

"It just never came up," Lara says, a little sheepish. "We talk about other stuff."

"Mm-hm." Shiki doesn't look remotely convinced, but she lets it go. She turns her attention fully to Mari instead, settling in like she's about to tell a story she enjoys telling. "Okay. So. We met at GED prep, all of us. Same cohort, and the classroom always smelled like rotten eggs for some reason."

"Still smells like that," Naoto mutters.

"I'm tellin' you, it's Uotani's farts. It has always been Uotani's farts." Shiki waves this off. "Anyway. None of us exactly took the scenic route to get there. I dropped out in junior high—got bullied out, really, the teachers didn't do a thing about it, so I just stopped showin' up and nobody made me go back." She says it lightly, like a fact she's worn smooth from repeating it. "Naoto's dyslexic, and regular school made him feel stupid pretty much every day for no good reason, so he checked out early too."

"Basically," Naoto agrees, softly, flashing a peace sign.

"And Kakeru's been in and out of foster care since he was six, which…didn't exactly leave much room for consistent schoolin', as you can imagine."

Kakeru shrugs, like this is a fact about himself roughly as significant as his blood type. "Moved around plenty. Missed a good chunk of school in the shuffle. Figured I'd catch up eventually."

"So we all landed in the same prep course," Shiki finishes, gesturing around the table like she's closing a loop, "and then Lara showed up a few months later, world's most enthusiastic mermaid-coded weirdo, bless her, and we all just started hangin’ out after they put us together for a group project."

Mari's mind is still wrestling with why Lara never talked about her friends to her, so she can only respond with, "Oh."

Shiki apparently doesn't see anything wrong with that response, because next she says, "Okay, I'll let Lara fill in the gaps for you if you've got questions, let's talk about you now. When'd you get in?"

"Umm…just this mornin’," Mari says. "I took a train."

"You gonna be here long, or just visitin' for the day?" Shiki continues asking. "Shiga's not that far, is it?"

Mari doesn't see those questions coming. Now she wishes Shiki would go back to talking about their friend group lore.

"Not sure yet," she says, reaching for a menu that suddenly seems very interesting.

"You want to order something, Mari?" Lara opens the menu for her. "Get whatever you like. My treat."

"Are you treatin' all of us too, Lara-sama?" Kakeru teases, wiggling his eyebrows.

"Depends," she says, eyes glinting with mischief. "Singing the full 'Ruby-chan~' verse with the cute voice, full volume, right here, gets you one hojicha latte."

"Forget it." Kakeru looks at Mari and jabs a thumb in Lara's direction. "Ōtsu-san, with all due respect, did you know your girlfriend's kind of an asshole?"

"Takes one to know one," Mari says before she can stop herself, mouth moving faster than the part of her brain that usually keeps her quiet around strangers.

There's a half-second of silence—Kakeru blinking, Shiki's eyes going wide—and then the whole table erupts, Shiki slapping the table with the flat of her hand, laughing hard. Even Naoto starts chuckling.

Lara is laughing harder than any of them, head tipped back, the sound of it Mari's missed more than she'd let herself admit, and under the table her hand finds Mari's knee again, gives it a squeeze, like Mari's just landed a clean hit in the first round and she's the only one in the room who really understands the scoring.

"Oh, I like her," Shiki announces to the table at large.

Kakeru shakes his head in disbelief. "I kinda get why y'all are together now."

"See," Lara says, once she's got her breath back, "this is why I keep her."

"I ain’t a pet," Mari says, but she's smiling as she does.

A waiter appears, and there's a flurry of ordering. Shiki requests something with a French name Mari doesn't catch, Naoto orders the same thing he always orders per Lara's explanation, Kakeru attempts and fails to negotiate free food in exchange for a song nobody wants to hear. Mari lets Lara pick something for her off the menu, half-listening, the noise of the table washing over her as easily as the walk over.

It should feel comfortable, sitting here. Lara’s friends are nice, and it’s clear that they try to make her feel included. Shiki asks her about the train ride, whether she's ever been to Kobe before, whether she's had the food here—simple, harmless questions that snag on nothing. Naoto mostly listens, offering the occasional dry aside, but once he warms up a degree or two, he turns out to have opinions about pastry that rival Lara's, and the two of them get into a heated debate about whether an American cheesecake is a cake or a pie. Once the food and drink arrive, Kakeru makes sure everyone has napkins, asking them if they have their utensils, reminding them to wash their hands before they eat. But Mari still feels like an outsider looking in, sitting among virtual strangers who know this side of Lara's life more than Mari ever will.

"Okay, but for real," Kakeru starts, leaning forward over his food. "I watched this documentary last year about amateur boxing, and it kind of blew my mind how much goes into it. Like the weight cuttin' alone sounds insane. Is that real? Y'all actually have to do that?"

"Yeah," Mari says. It's simpler, somehow, answering a stranger's genuine curiosity than it is answering the version of the question that now, surely, lives behind Lara's eyes. "It ain’t fun, but you get used to it."

Kakeru whistles, low and drawn out. "That's somethin' else. And you're, what, undefeated? Lara said you're undefeated."

"No." The word comes out steady enough, but she can feel a familiar tension climbing up the back of her neck. "I've lost before."

"Still. That's tough." Kakeru shakes his head, impressed. "So what's next for you, then? Goin' pro, right? Lara mentioned you had, like, actual offers—"

"Yeah. Somethin’ like that." Mari keeps her face even. Her fork finds a piece of egg on her plate and pushes it around without any real intention of eating it.

"That's real cool. You already know which gym you're gonna join, or is that classified information—"

"Still figurin’ it out," Mari cuts him off as she reaches for her drink, using the motion as an excuse to look somewhere that isn't Kakeru's face. "Lots of factors."

"Sure, sure, that tracks." He nods like that's a perfectly satisfying answer, already reaching for the ketchup. "Same federation as the Olympic stuff, or a whole different track? Couldn't quite tell from the documentary—"

"It's, um—" Mari's mouth goes dry. "It's different. Kind of. There's a licensin’ thing—"

"Oh, right, right, the class system, I remember that part. So what class would you start at? Do you get to skip on ahead if you're good enough, or—"

"I don't—" Mari stops, aware of her own voice fraying at the edges, of Kakeru's well-meaning inquiries waiting for an answer she doesn't have. The questions aren't unkind. He's just curious, the way anyone would be, no idea that every single one of them is hitting her somewhere raw. "Sorry, I'm- I'm gonna use the bathroom."

She's up before anyone can react, chair scraping back louder than she means it to, already moving toward the back of the café with her heart going too fast and her face uncomfortably hot.

***

The bathroom is small and too bright, fluorescent light bouncing hard off white tile that takes her back to every changing room she’s ever been, and Mari locks the door behind her. She stands there for a second just breathing, both hands braced against the edge of the sink like she needs it to hold herself up.

Her heart won’t slow down. It keeps going too fast, too hard, some animal part of her brain convinced she’s in danger even though nothing here can hurt her, nothing here is a ring or an opponent she has to defend herself from in front of a crowd.

This was a mistake.

The thought arrives immediate and whole.

Coming here. Skipping school like some reckless idiot, buying a ticket on a whim, sitting in Lara's lap convincing herself this was romantic instead of just—

Now she's made it worse, hasn’t she, excusing herself from the table like a coward in front of people Lara actually cares about, people Lara has to see again after this, long after Mari gets back on a train and disappears back into her own life.

You embarrassed her.

That thought is worse than the first one, worse than the panic itself. She can picture it exactly: the four of them at that table right now, Shiki’s laugh gone quiet, Kakeru probably confused and maybe apologizing for something he doesn’t even understand he’s done wrong, and Lara—

Lara having to smooth it over, explain it away, cover for whatever this is that Mari refuses to fess up to. Sorry, she's just tired. Sorry, she’s not great with new people. Sorry, she gets like this sometimes. Except Lara also doesn’t even know what "this" is. Mari hasn’t told her. Mari has spent half the day very deliberately not telling her, kissing her instead every time the question gets too close, and now she’s locked herself in a bathroom at a café falling apart over a boy who only ever meant to be nice.

Her breath is coming shorter now, catching somewhere high in her throat instead of going all the way down, and the edges of her vision have gone a little skewed, a little too bright, the tile too white, the mirror too close—

A knock. Two careful taps against the door.

"Mari?" Lara's voice, muffled, right on the other side of the wood. "It's me. Can you let me in?"

Mari's hand finds the lock before she's fully decided to move it, and the door clicks open.

Lara doesn’t come in loud. She slips through the gap and shuts the door quietly behind her. The second she gets a proper look at Mari's face—pale, glassy-eyed, breath still coming too shallow—something in her own expression shifts fast, worry replacing whatever patience she’s been holding onto all day.

"Hey." She doesn’t reach for Mari right away and only stands close to her, voice low and even, the kind of voice you'd use on something spooked. "Hey, look at me. You're okay. I'm right here."

Mari tries to say something—I'm fine, probably—but what comes out instead is a shaky, humiliating breath that cracks somewhere in the middle, and she presses the heel of her hand against her eyes instead of finishing the sentence.

"Okay." Lara's hands come up then, gently framing her face. "Okay, you don't have to talk. Just breathe with me, yeah? In." A beat. "Out."

Mari does, mostly because there’s nothing else left in her to resist it with. In. Out. Lara's forehead comes to rest against hers, grounding her. Slowly—too slowly, it feels like, though it probably isn’t more than a minute or two—her heart stops trying to climb out of her chest.

"There you go," Lara murmurs. "There you go."

They stand like that a while longer, Lara's hands still cradling her face, before she finally pulls back just enough to actually look at her.

"You want to tell me what that was?"

Mari shakes her head, throat too tight to trust with words yet.

Lara doesn’t push. She nods slowly, taking that in, and after a moment says, "Do you want to go back to my place?"

"No.” Mari's voice comes out thin and unsteady. "No, I don’t- your friends are here, I don't wanna—"

I don't wanna ruin this too.

"They'll be fine." Lara's thumb brushes her cheekbone, patient and unwavering. "But you clearly won't be, if we stay."

"I don't want them to think—" Mari stops, swallowing hard. "I don't want them thinkin’ I'm some kind of—"

"Mari." Lara's voice goes soft, but the firmness underneath it is unmistakable. "I don't care what they think right now.” She tucks a strand of hair back from Mari's face. “I care about you. So we're going to go back to the apartment, and you're going to tell me what's actually going on, whenever you're ready to. Okay?"

Mari's eyes sting again, differently this time.

"Okay," she manages.

Lara presses a kiss to the crown of her head, then takes her hand, lacing their fingers together the way she had all through the walk over. "Okay. Let's go say a quick goodbye, and then it's just us. Deal?"

Mari nods, and lets Lara lead her out of the bathroom, out into the café’s warmth. The walk back to the table feels longer than it should have, and Mari makes herself walk normally, breathe normally, though she suspects she’s not fooling anyone. Lara's hand stays wrapped around hers the whole way, and it’s the only thing that keeps Mari moving forward instead of straight out the front door.

The table went quiet as they approached. It’s not an awful, judgmental quiet—Mari can see that from the way Shiki's face softens the second she looks up—but it still feels loud in Mari's ears, every second of it stretched too long.

"Hey," Lara says casually, like nothing happened. "We're gonna head out first, actually. Mari's not feeling well, so I think we're just gonna go crash.”

"Of course," Shiki says, already reaching for Mari and Lara’s coats slung over the back of their empty chairs, handing Mari's over to her without making a thing of it. Whatever she saw on Mari's face must’ve told her more than Lara's explanation did. "Get on home safe, y’hear?" She squeezes Lara's arm. "Text me later."

"I will."

Kakeru, meanwhile, looks like he wants to sink straight through the floor.

"Hey, Ōtsu-san, I'm- I'm real sorry," he says, hands doing something awkward and useless in the air like he doesn't know where to put them. "If I said somethin' that- I didn't mean to make anybody feel some kind of way, I was just curious, I wasn't tryin' to—"

"You didn't do anything wrong," Lara says before he can trip over more words. "Don't worry about it."

Mari opens her mouth, some instinct telling her she should be the one apologizing. Nothing comes out except a small, stiff nod in Kakeru's direction, which feels woefully inadequate and is, apparently, all she has in her right now.

Lara pulls her own coat on first, then turns and holds Mari's open for her, waiting. Mari slides her arms into the sleeves, grateful for something to do with her hands.

"Mari-san," Naoto says. Mari can still hear him even though his voice is softer than the others’. "Lara's our friend. That means you are too, whenever you'd like to be. You're welcome back 'round here anytime."

Mari blinks, her brain lagging half a step behind trying to process his words. "…Thanks," she eventually says. "Sorry about…all this."

Naoto smiles. "Ain’t nothin’ to be sorry for.”

Shiki catches Mari's eye one more time.  "You feel better soon, alright?" she says. "It was real nice meetin’ you today, Mari."

"You too," Mari manages, and she means it, even with her voice still not quite steady.

“Bye, guys.” Lara puts her hands on Mari’s shoulders and guides her gently away from the table. “Love you, don’t get yourselves banned this time!”

"No promises!" Shiki calls after them, already grinning, and behind her Kakeru lets out a groan that sounds like it belongs to an old, well-worn joke. "That was ONE ramen shop, and it was ONE TIME—"

"It was one time ‘cause they banned us," Naoto says mildly.

Their bickering trails off behind them, already going back into its own rhythm the way it probably did every single time one of them left first. Lara steers Mari toward the counter instead, catching the cashier’s attention with a small wave.

"Table 20. We'll take both checks," she says, opening something on her phone before Mari's brain catches up enough to protest. “Cashless, please.”

"Lara, I can—"

"Nope." Lara doesn’t even look over, tapping her phone against the reader like she’s done this a thousand times before. “I already told you. It’s my treat. Don’t fight me.”

Mari opens her mouth to argue anyway, out of pure reflex, and then closes it again. She recognizes that particular set to Lara's jaw and has seen it plenty of times before over who paid for what, who carried what, who got the last word. She knows from experience that fighting it would just take longer than giving in.

"Thanks," she says instead.

"You're welcome." Lara pockets her phone, finally glancing over, something soft flickering across her face at the sight of Mari looking a little pale and worn thin around the edges. "C'mon. Let's get you home."

Home.

Not to the apartment, or even back to my place.

Mari doesn’t correct her.

The bell above the door jingles as they step back out into the cold, which had sharpened while they were inside. Lara's hand finds hers the second they hit the sidewalk, finger lacing through without a word. They walk back the way they'd come—retracing the same streets, pass the same rival bakery, the shrine—except this time neither of them talks.

Mari keeps her eyes on the pavement, matching her steps to Lara's, and Lara leads her the rest of the way back.

***

Mari has been sitting down on the floor of the small kitchen area, back against the wall as she watches Lara put the kettle on. She lets herself just breathe for a while. The panic has drained out of her on the walk back, leaving something duller and heavier in its place—a tired, hollowed-out feeling that makes even lifting her arms feel like an effort.

Her phone buzzes next to her. Then again, a few seconds later. Then twice more in quick succession, an ugly little rhythm she doesn’t want any part of.

She doesn’t reach for it.

Lara glances over from the stove, taking in the phone buzzing away, ignored, on the floor beside her. She doesn’t say anything about it at first. She turns back to the kettle, waits for the water, pours two cups. But when she comes to sit down across from Mari, mug held out for her to take, her eyes flick to the phone one more time.

"You should probably look at that," she says.

Mari wraps both hands around the warm mug instead of answering, staring into the tea like it might tell her something useful.

The phone buzzes again.

Lara watches her not move for another few seconds, then, without asking, reaches over and picks it up herself, thumb hovering over the screen. Mari doesn’t stop her, mostly because she doesn’t trust her own hands right now, and doesn’t especially want to see it herself.

Lara unlocks it—Mari's passcode long since memorized between the two of them—and her eyebrows go up slightly at whatever greets her on the screen. "Okay. So. You have—" she scrolls, counting under her breath, "—seven messages from somebody named Minase, eleven from a group chat that's just called '3-B???', and two from your homeroom teacher."

Mari remains silent.

"They all say pretty much the same thing," Lara goes on, gently. "Where are you. Are you sick. Otsu answer your phone. Minase’s guessing you got food poisoning, for what it's worth. This person is very committed to this theory."

"Great," Mari mumbles into the air. "Wonderful."

"You probably do have to say something," Lara says, setting the phone down on the floor between them instead of handing it over, giving Mari space to reach for it or not. "Your teacher's two messages in and getting formal. If I’ve learned anything from Shiki, that's usually a sign the next one calls your dad."

That gets Mari sitting a little straighter. She stares at the phone for a long moment, then reaches for it with a sigh that feels like it came from somewhere much deeper than her chest.

not feeling well, she types into the group chat first. sorry, should've said something earlier.

To her homeroom teacher, she adds a stiffer, more careful version of the same thing: I'm sorry for the trouble, I wasn't feeling well this morning and should have contacted the school properly. I'll bring a note. Hits send before she can second-guess the wording any further.

The messages go out. She watches the little checkmarks turn to read almost immediately, Minase’s response already coming in: some relieved, exclamation-mark-heavy string of OMG FEEL BETTER.

Then she sits there, phone still in hand, staring at her own contacts list.

"What is it?" Lara asks, watching her face.

"My dad." Mari's thumb hovers over his name. "If the school calls home and I'm not there, he's gonna—" She doesn’t finish the sentence. "I should probably tell him before that happens."

Lara reaches over and squeezes her knee, a permission to take whatever time she needs.

Mari opens a new message, stares at the blank field, and types slowly

hey dad. i'm in kobe, at lara's. i wasn't feeling good this morning so i skipped school and came to see her. i'll explain more when i'm back. sorry for not saying anything.

She reads it over twice, half-convinced she should soften it further, make it sound less like the reckless thing it actually was.

She sends it anyway.

For the next few minutes, they drink their tea in silence. The only sounds that can be heard in the apartment are the occasional soft clink of ceramic, the muted hum of the refrigerator, the city outside going about the rest of the day without them. Lara doesn’t push, mug cradled in both hands, patient in a way that feels like its own kind of pressure—present, clearly waiting for Mari to be the one to open the door this time.

Mari watches the tea in her hands ripple, and lets her mind drift sideways to something smaller and safer that’s been sitting oddly in the back of her thoughts since the café.

"Lara..." Mari says slowly, still looking at her tea.

"Yes?"

"How come you never told me about them before? Shiki, and…the others. You never mentioned your friends. Not once." She’s almost embarrassed at how much those words have been begging to be let out, waiting to be asked. "I didn't even know you had a whole friend group here until today."

Something careful passes over Lara’s face. Mari waits as she chooses her words.

"It's not that I didn't want you to know about them…" she says. "I just…I wanted to be sure, first. Before I brought it up."

"Sure of what?"

"That they'd be okay with it." Lara’s gaze drops briefly before coming back up to meet Mari's. "I didn't want to introduce you as my girlfriend and then have to watch someone be weird about it, you know? I didn't want to find that out in real time, with you standing right there. So I kind of...tested the waters first."

Mari sits with that for a second. "And?"

"Well, you saw it yourself. They were cool with it when I first told them. Shiki cried a little…she said it was 'so cute.' Naoto just went 'okay' and moved on with his life, but that's just him with everything." Lara smiles faintly. "Kakeru asked way too many questions, but that's also just him with everything. Then you came to visit, and I was going to see them today anyway, so I thought ‘why not?’ but…I hadn't actually figured out the right time to put you all in the same room." She rests the hand that was on Mari’s knee lightly over hers on the mug, thumb brushing her knuckles. "I wanted it to go well. I guess I was more nervous about that than I let on."

Mari looks at their hands together on the mug for a long moment, feeling the shape of her own secret sitting heavier in her chest.

"I have to tell you somethin’ too," Mari says.

Lara's thumb stilled against her knuckles. "Okay."

"When I got here today…before you came out of the shower…" Mari pushes herself to keep going, even though everything in her wants to stop right there. "I saw a letter on your table. From the pastry school." She swallows. "I didn't mean to read it. It was just sittin’ there, and I picked it up before I thought about it, and I saw. The waitlist thing. I know you didn't get in yet."

Lara’s eyes widen, just slightly.

"I'm sorry," Mari adds quickly, into the silence. "I should've said somethin’ right away instead of…I don't know. Sitting on it all day."

For a moment Lara just looks down at their joined hands. Then: "I wasn't trying to hide it forever. I just—" She exhales. "You had so much going on already. The debut stuff, your training, and then you showed up out of nowhere…it didn't feel like the moment to also dump my own stress on top of yours. I figured I'd tell you eventually. When things were calmer."

"You didn't have to protect me from it."

"I know." Lara looks up, something wry and a little sad tugging at the corner of her mouth. "Force of habit, I guess. You've had enough on your plate. I didn't want to add to it."

Mari feels Lara’s words land somewhere uncomfortably close to home.

Lara seems to notice the same thing at almost the same moment, because something rueful paints over her eyes as she looks between their hands and Mari's face.

"I guess…" she starts, "…we haven't been really honest with each other lately."

We haven't been really honest with each other lately.

That sentence is between them now, and hearing them out loud finally tears down whatever’s left holding Mari together.

It doesn’t come out as words. Not at first. It comes out as a feeling—like a seismic wave rising up through her chest so fast she barely has time to brace for it, the same wave that knocked her sideways in the bathroom except this time there’s nowhere to lock a door against it, no faucet to grip, nothing to do but sit there on the floor and let it move through her.

The gym doors closed on a Tuesday morning, the whistle she could hear but wasn't part of anymore.

There are the emails sitting unopened in her phone, suffocating for how little pressure they applied. No rush. Whenever you're ready. As if there would ever be a whenever. As if the word ready means anything to her anymore, when she’s starting to forget what it felt like to want the thing she was supposed to be ready for.

There’s the silver medal from two years ago, the bronze from Worlds, how she couldn't stand to look at them. How the wins that came after that—not one, not a single one—has ever managed to fill the hole those two losses had punched into her. There was the fifteen-year-old self in that photo, and she tried to find that version of herself somewhere deep under her skin right now and came up with absolutely nothing. There’s only static where all of it used to live.

There’s the habit she's built, one match at a time, of answering good, tired but good, until the truth has gotten so far away from her she doesn’t know how to reach it anymore even when someone is sitting right in front of her, holding her hand, offering her every possible opening to say it.

There’s the training since Thursday she hasn’t gone to. The absence of it didn’t feel like relief and didn’t feel like guilt either. It just felt like nothing, and that scared her more than anything else in her life, because there had never—not once in her entire life—been a version of her that felt nothing about boxing. Even at her worst. Even after Worlds. There had always been something there, some ember, however small.

She can’t find any trace of it now. She's been looking for it all day, underneath the panic, underneath the deflections, underneath every kiss she used like a stopgap to keep from having to say any of this out loud, and it simply isn’t there. She doesn’t know when it went out. She doesn’t know if it’s still smoldering somewhere she hasn’t checked yet, or if it guttered out entirely months ago and she's just kept moving on momentum and muscle memory, on the sheer bullheaded discipline that used to be in service of something and now just spins in place, serving nothing at all.

It hurts to breathe.

Everything hurts.

I don't wanna do this anymore, she thinks, and the thought arrives so anti-climactically that it’s almost worse than if it had come as a scream. I don't know who I am if I'm not doin’ this. But I don't wanna do this anymore.

She realizes, distantly, that her eyes have gone hot and blurry, that her breath has gone thin and uneven again. From the sheer relief and terror of finally letting herself think the sentence all the way through.

Lara notices before Mari manages to say anything at all.

"Mari." She sets her mug down on the floor, both hands free now, and pries Mari’s mug off her hands and puts it down next to hers. She shifts closer. "Hey. You're crying."

Mari hasn’t realized it either until Lara says it—but her cheeks are wet, and her breath is shallow, and she presses the back of her hand hard against her eyes like she can shove the whole feeling back down where it came from.

"Sorry," she says, thick. "I don't- I don't know why I'm—"

"Don't be sorry." Lara moves even closer, kneeling in front of her now, hands coming up to rest lightly on Mari's knees. "Won’t you talk to me? I've been trying not to push all day because I didn't want to make it worse, but I can't- I can't just sit here and not know what’s going on."

Mari lets out a breath that’s half a laugh and half something closer to a sob, empty and exhausted. "I don't…I don’t even know how to say it."

"Just start anywhere. It doesn't have to make sense yet."

Mari closes her eyes, her thoughts flooding back to her like water off a broken dam, making her chest cave in.

"I don’t wanna do it anymore.”

Lara is quiet, waiting for her to say more.

"I haven’t answered any of the offers," Mari goes on, and now that the first sentence is out, the rest comes tumbling after it. "I can't make myself answer them. I keep tellin’ myself I'll do it tomorrow and then tomorrow comes and I still can't." Her voice cracks again, and she doesn’t bother stopping it this time. "I retired from the club and I thought it’d be easier, and it didn't feel like anythin’. Trainin’ didn't feel like anything. I used to feel somethin’, and now there's just…nothin’. Nothin’. All the time."

She finally looks up—eyes swimming, face wet and blotchy, undone in a way she's never once let anyone see, not even Lara, not in three years.

"Somethin’s wrong with me," she whispers. "Somethin’s really, really wrong. I don't know who I am anymore. Boxing's the only thing I've ever been. If I'm not that, I don't—" Her voice gave out entirely. "I don't know."

The room goes dense with everything Mari’s just handed over, both of them sitting inside it without either one rushing to smooth it out. Lara doesn’t reach for a fix. She stays where she is, knees pressed against Mari's. 

"I'm…not going to tell you to quit," she says eventually. "I don't actually know if that's the right thing. I don't think you know either…right now."

Mari lets out a wet, exhausted breath that might've been an agreement.

"Can I ask you something instead?" Lara says. "You don't have to answer right away."

Mari nods, wiping at her face with the back of her wrist.

"When's the last time boxing actually felt good? Can you remember?”

Mari opens her mouth to answer fast, and then stops, because the question isn’t as simple as it sounds. She tries—really tries—to find the memory instead of reaching for the nearest acceptable one.

Lara watches her try, and she seems to understand without needing Mari to say it out loud. She reaches over, clumsily wiping the tears away from Mari’s cheek with her hand.

"I don't know what the answer is for you,” she says. “I just think maybe it's worth asking.”

Slowly, an answer does surface. An actual, specific memory; sharp enough that it startles her a little, how clearly she can still see it.

"Junior Nationals. When we were fifteen." She looks down at her hands. "That's the last time."

Lara listens.

"I remember standin’ there with the medal on, and my hands were shakin’, and I couldn't stop smilin’ even though I didn't know how to smile right for the camera, and you were right there." Mari's mouth twitches, despite her tears, something aching and fond moving under the grief of it. "I was happy that I won, but I also remember lookin’ over and you were there, and you were so happy, and it felt like…” She swallows hard. “Like the whole thing actually meant somethin’. ‘Cause you were there to see it mean somethin’."

She inhales, slowly, then goes on.

"Every single one after that…I dunno. It just started bein’ about the next one. The next tournament, whether I could do it again, whether I'd embarrass myself if I didn't. Then I stopped actually feelin’ anythin’ about the winnin’ part and…I was just scared of losin’."

Lara watches her, waiting for whatever else is still working its way out.

"I’m gonna tell you somethin’ kinda embarrassin’," Mari says, eyes still fixed somewhere on the floor between them.

"Okay."

"That night. After Nationals." Mari's voice has gone smaller, younger almost, like some fifteen-year-old version of her is doing the talking now. "Remember? We were out on the balcony, and you said you were gonna find love here even if it scared you, and when you asked me what I was gonna do next, I told you I wasn't gonna stop. I was gonna keep fightin’ stronger people, and then I’m gonna go pro. Do you remember that?"

“Of course I do."

"And you said—" Mari cries a fresh batch of tears. "You said if I actually became the strongest in the world…you'd make me a cake. And I made you swear on it. I made you promise me. I was so serious about it."

Lara's breath catches, audible, like the memory has physically hit her.

"I've thought about that promise more than I've thought about basically anythin’ else the last few years." Mari's eyes finally lift, wet and raw. "Every time I wanted to quit, I thought about that dumb cake. I thought, well I can't stop now, ‘cause Lara's gonna make me the best cake in the world someday and I have to keep goin’. It sounds so stupid sayin' it out loud, but it was…it was never stupid to me." She wipes roughly at her face. "I wanted to get to that cake. I wanted…to get to the version of us where I actually did the thing, and you'll be there, and…and it means what it used to mean." She pauses. "I just…I don’t wanna let you down."

As soon as she finishes talking, Lara reaches out and pulls Mari into her, arms wrapping fully around her shoulders, and Mari lets herself be held, face pressed into the curve of Lara's neck.

"Hey," Lara says into her hair. "Look at me."

Mari pulls back enough to meet her eyes, and Lara holds her face in both hands, a familiar gesture by now, one Lara seems to reach for whenever Mari is coming undone.

"I don't care about the cake," Lara says. "I mean…I'll still make it, obviously. I'm not backing out of a promise." A watery laugh escapes her despite everything. "But Mari. I never need you to be the strongest in the world for me to be proud of you. I would've loved you the same if you'd lost every single fight after that day.”

Mari feels Lara's thumbs still against her cheeks. 

"You died," she continues, her voice shaking around the edges of it. "That blade went straight through you, and I thought I'd lost you. I've never been that scared in my entire life. Nothing before and after that has ever scared me the way that did.”

Mari's breath catches.

"And when you came back…when you actually opened your eyes again…I didn't care about anything else. Nothing else mattered except that you were breathing." Lara’s eyes begin to well up, too, but she doesn't stop. "You're already the strongest in the world. You always have been, but even when you’re weak, I’ll still be on your side. All I want is for you to be here…boxing or not boxing, pro or not pro, I don't care.” She's close to sobbing now, and seeing it makes Mari’s heart break a little. “...I’ll never, ever love you less.”

Whatever composure Mari has been holding onto gives out completely, grief and relief tangled together so tightly she can't tell them apart anymore. She folds forward into Lara's arms, and Lara holds her through all of it, rocking her gently, weeping into her hair, as Mari cries like she hasn't let herself cry in three years. 

Finally, letting the last of it go.

***

They must’ve dozed off at some point, tangled together on the floor and then, eventually, migrated to the bed without either of them fully registering the transition—because by the time Mari opens her eyes again, the light through the window has gone fully dark, streetlamps casting a soft orange glow against the curtain. Mari wakes slowly, disoriented for a second by the unfamiliar ceiling, the weight of the day settling back over her in pieces before she remembers where she is, and why her eyes feel swollen, and whose arm is slung loosely over her waist.

She lies there for a while, not moving, just listening to Lara breathe evenly behind her.

It’s not long before Lara stirs too—a soft, sleepy sound against the back of Mari's head, and then an arm tightening around her middle, pulling her in snugly instead of letting go.

"Mm. No," Lara mumbles, voice heavy with sleep. "Stay."

"Wasn't goin’ anywhere."

"Good." Lara tucks herself in closer, chin hooking over Mari's shoulder like she has every intention of keeping Mari exactly where she is for the foreseeable future. "Don't move. This is where we live now."

Mari lets out a small chuckle, and sinks back into the warmth and weight of Lara's embrace. Time stretches further as they stay like that, neither of them in any hurry to be anywhere else, the evening settling soft and leisurely around them.

Eventually, Lara's voice comes again. "Looks like we slept through the afternoon."

Mari hums in agreement. “Guess we needed it.”

“How are you feeling?”

Mari thinks about it honestly before answering. "Lighter, I think." She traces a slow line along Lara's forearm where it rests against her stomach. "I don’t know if I’m fully okay yet, though.”

"That's okay." Lara presses a kiss against her temple before her one hand starts stroking her hair, slow and soothing. "You don't have to be fixed today."

Mari closes her eyes, letting the touch settle something in her that has been unsettled all day.

After a while, Lara asks, “What time is it?”

Mari reaches for her phone on Lara’s beside table and turns it on, the screen glaring all too brightly in the dim light. “…It’s almost seven.”

“Seven?” Lara repeats like she can’t believe it. “It’s dinnertime already. Do you want anything?”

“Sure.”

“What do you want to eat?”

“Anythin’s fine.”

“That’s not a proper answer.” Lara’s hand that was on Mari’s midsection moves to her face, and she pinches Mari’s nose.

“I don’t mind anythin’, really.” Mari takes Lara’s hand and takes it back to her midsection.

“Then dinner’s gonna be fermented fish on rice tonight.”

Mari can’t say that she’s fully awake yet, but when she hears ‘fermented fish’, her stomach turns. “…Never mind, I do mind.”

“Thought so. I know you too well.”

To Mari’s dismay, Lara breaks the spooning formation. She stretches with a small groan, and then sits up properly, scrubbing a hand over her face. “Okay. I’ll see what’s in the fridge and get started on dinner. You’re not going hungry under my roof.”

Mari sits up on the bed and stretches, too, hair a wild mess from the nap. “Can I take a shower? I feel like I've had the whole day on me.”

"Oh, sure." Lara swings her legs off the bed. She gets up, makes her way to a corner of the room and switches on the lights. "C'mon, I'll show you where everything is."

Mari grabs her bag from the floor and tails behind Lara.

The bathroom is small, tiled in cheerful mismatched blue, shelves crowded with more skincare products than Mari has ever seen one person own. Lara points things out in quick succession—"that one's shampoo, that one's conditioner, don't use the pink one unless you want to smell like a strawberry for three days, I speak from experience"— before crouching down at the tub and fiddling with a knob.

"This part's a whole thing," Lara says, half-apologetic, jiggling the handle. "You have to turn it almost all the way, then back a little, then- there." The water sputters, then evens out into a steady, warm stream. "Easy once you know the trick."

Mari frowns. "That don’t look easy.”

"Welcome to my life." Lara straightens up and presses a quick kiss to Mari's cheek on her way out. “Call out to me if you need anything. I can hear you from the kitchen.”

She disappears down the hall, and Mari, left alone, turns to dig through her bag for something to sleep in.

She gets about halfway through before the realization lands.

She packed a change of clothes, but somehow, in the frantic four minutes she'd spent throwing things together that morning, the only clothes she packed were her ‘going out clothes’ and nothing for her to sleep in. What she has, instead, sitting at the very bottom of the bag for reasons she genuinely could not explain, was a spare pillowcase.

"...Why do I have this," she mutters to herself, holding it up.

"Have what?" Lara's voice carries over from the kitchen.

"Nothin’." Mari shoves it back into the bag, mortified, and pokes her head out into the hallway. "So, uh…funny story. I don't think I packed pajamas."

There’s quiet on the other side. Then, "Are you making this up so you have an excuse to borrow my clothes?"

“No, I really didn’t pack anythin’ to sleep in,” Mari says. “Also, you’re one to talk. You used to wear my clothes all the time.”

Lara laughs, and Mari can hear the shuffling of her feet, the sound of a wardrobe sliding open, then closed. She walks to the bathroom later with an old Namba48 T-shirt and a pair of sleep shorts, handing them over. “Here. You can wear these.”

Mari accepts the clothes, cheeks feeling warm. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” Lara says, kissing her cheek again, before heading back to the kitchen.

They look a little long on Mari, but they feel warm, and soft from wear. When she pulls the T-shirt over her head in the bathroom a few minutes later, she catches herself breathing in without quite meaning to.

It smells like Lara.

Mari stands there a second longer than necessary, holding the collar up near her face, before she undresses and makes herself turn toward the shower and step in.

***

Fresh out of the shower, Mari pads out to the tiny apartment kitchen in Lara's clothes, the hem of the T-shirt brushing her thighs, and stops just outside of it for a moment just to watch. Lara is standing at the stove, sleeves pushed up, steam curling off something already going, a cutting board beside her scattered with shrimp shells and the faint briny smell of the sea filling the small apartment.

"Smells good," Mari says, finally announcing herself.

Lara glances back, smiling. "Cute. Did you have a good shower?"

"More or less." Mari comes up beside her, peering into the pot. "What’s cookin’?"

"Spicy seafood noodle soup. I have shrimp and some mussels that needed to get used tonight. They were already on sale yesterday when I bought them, which is code for 'use immediately or regret it.'"

Lara gives the pot a stir, the broth already gone a deep, warm red. Mari watches her work—the way she moves between pot and cutting board, eyeballing seasonings—and something almost like disbelief creeps into her voice.

"You’re gettin’ good at this."

Lara turns to frown at her. "Excuse you, I was always good."

"You put chocolate in onigiri once." Mari crosses her arms. “And fermented fish. That already had rice in it.”

"I didn’t know they weren’t supposed to be in onigiri, considering I was…oh, I don’t know, a mermaid.” Lara jabs her stirring spoon in Mari's direction, mock-offended. "You know what, lay off. You're no Yamamoto Seiji yourself. I remember you microwaving cup ramen. Dry."

"That was one time. And I was dead tired.”

"Mm-hm. See how that feels."

Mari laughs—actually laughs—and Lara smiles back at her, clearly pleased with herself, before nodding toward a small pile of produce sitting untouched on the counter: a head of napa cabbage, a couple of carrots, a carton of mushrooms.

"Anyway. If you want to help, I could use those cut up. Cabbage in strips, carrots thin, mushrooms however you want. Table's probably easier than trying to squeeze in next to me at this counter."

“On it.” Mari takes the knife and the cutting board and settles at the small kitchen table. Lara goes back to the shrimp, the two of them working in parallel, the apartment filling slowly with steam and spice and the sound of knives against wood. After a while, the vegetables pile up neatly beside her cutting board, the pot on the stove starts to bubble in earnest. Mari watches Lara's back and her movements—the shrimp deveined and set aside, the broth adjusted with a taste and a small, thoughtful frown before another dash of something gets added—and the question forms itself on the tip of Mari’s tongue.

"So…" Mari starts. "Are you still gonna go for it? Pastry school, I mean."

Lara doesn’t turn around, focused on the pot. "Yeah. That school was my first choice. It's the best program in the city. Waitlisted isn't the same as rejected so there's still a chance a spot opens up." She shrugs, working a shell free with her thumb. "And if it doesn't come through, I'll apply to some other programs. There's a couple in the city that's supposed to be decent. Worst case, I just keep working, getting better on my own, and claw my way up until I can open my own shop someday."

“You make it sound easy.”

"It's not easy,” Lara remarks. “I think about the waitlist letter more than I probably should. But I don't know. I've already died once…a rejection letter's not exactly the scariest thing I've survived." She looks over her shoulder, a little wry. “Puts things in perspective.”

Mari cracks a smile and goes quiet, turning that over as she goes back to the vegetables. Carrots first, thin even strips the way Lara asked for.

The conversation dies down after that, the space back to being filled with the sound of knives and the low bubble of the pot, Lara humming something tuneless under her breath as she works. Mari finds her eyes drifting up again from the cutting board, over to where Lara stands at the stove—sleeves pushed up, hair tied, stirring the pot of broth in an apartment that smells like her, in a life she'd built here entirely on her own.

Without quite meaning to, Mari lets herself imagine it. Not just this one strange, aching, cathartic day—but evenings like this one, stretched out into weeks. Months. Years. Coming home to a tiny kitchen that only fits two people. Lara's back to her at a stove, some new recipe going, a new story about a regular or a co-worker spilling out easily between them. A life where the things waiting for her at the end of the day are Lara's off-key humming and a pair of borrowed pajamas that smells like someone she loves.

She doesn’t know yet what shape her own life is supposed to take. She still doesn’t know what will come after boxing, if anything will come after boxing at all.

"Do you still wanna do it?" Mari asks. "Livin’ together?"

Lara turns around at that, eyebrows going up, a slow smile spreading across her face like the question catches her pleasantly off guard. "Obviously. I’ve been talking about it for years." She sets her spoon down, leans back against the counter. "Though if we're doing it for real, we'll need somewhere bigger than this. This place is basically a shoebox with delusions of grandeur."

"It's not that bad."

"I've hit my head on that cabinet four separate times." Lara nods toward the corner in question. "We need space, lots of it. Maybe a new building too, if we can swing it. I love this place, but the water heater situation is not something I want to inflict on you long-term."

"Deal," Mari says, and means it more than the word probably lets on.

***

The soup turns out to be as good as it smells, rich and just spicy enough to make Mari's nose run a little, thick with shrimp and mussels and noodles gone soft and silky from the broth. She doesn’t realize how hungry she is until the first bowl disappears faster than the speed of sound.

"Slow down," Lara says, laughing, already reaching for the pot to refill her bowl without being asked. "There's plenty. I made way too much, we'll probably be eating this for lunch tomorrow too."

"You say that like it's a bad thing."

"It's not. I'm just saying, pace yourself, or you'll burn your tongue and regret every decision you've made today, including this one."

Mari's phone buzzes against the table between bites. She glances at it, chewing, and her eyes go wide when she sees the name.

Dad.

She sets her chopsticks down and opens it. The message is short, and the tone is exactly what she's braced herself for.

We'll talk when you're home. Don't make yourself a burden to Lara. Text me when you're on the train back.

"What is it?" Lara asks, watching her face.

Mari passes her phone over without a word. Lara scans it, her face softening into something sympathetic as she reads. "Could be worse," she says, handing it back. "He's not thrilled, but he's not, like, driving down here to drag you home either."

"Yeah. Small mercies." Mari sets the phone face-down, appetite dampened slightly but not gone. She picks her chopsticks back up anyway, if only because the soup is too good to abandon over a text.

Lara is quiet for a beat, twirling a noodle around her chopsticks without eating it. "By the way," she says, "are you staying over tonight?"

Mari blinks. "I…didn't plan that far, honestly." Which is true. She barely planned past buy the ticket this morning, let alone anything as complicated as an overnight bag, a return time, or an actual itinerary.

"Well, you’re already in PJs, and…tomorrow's Saturday, so it's not like you've got school to rush back for. Might as well stay. Actually…just stay until Sunday. Give yourself the whole weekend."

Mari looks, something hopeful and cautious both flickering through her at once. "Are you sure? That's…that's a lot. I don’t wanna get in your way—"

"You wouldn’t be getting in my way," Lara says without hesitation. "I want you here, Mari."

"Okay," Mari says. It’s the easiest decision she’s made all day. "Yeah. I'll stay."

Lara's whole face lights up, and she reaches over to squeeze Mari's hand once before going back to her soup. "Good. I've got a morning shift tomorrow, but I'm off by one. Chef doesn't need me past the lunch rush on Saturdays. And I’ve got Sunday free."

"So you're stuck with me for like forty-something hours."

"Tragic," Lara deadpans, "truly the worst thing that's happened to me all year," and then ruins the bit entirely by smiling goofily at her over the rim of her bowl.

"What do you do around here, when you've got a day off?" 

"Oh, tons." Lara sets her chopsticks down, already warming to the subject, hands starting to gesture as she talks. "There's the harbor, the whole waterfront's really pretty at night. Mount Rokko has a cable car if you want a view of the whole city. There's this old foreigners' district with all the historic houses, Kitano…something. It's touristy but it's actually really charming. Chinatown's close by too. The food there is life-changing." She ticks them off on her fingers, enjoying the chance to show Mari a piece of the life she's built here. "Oh! And there are aquariums. There’s a really good one, it's not too far, I go sometimes on my day off when I need to just sit and stare at something for a while."

Mari's attention catches on that immediately. "An aquarium?"

"Yeah. I figured you'd want to go, if we had the time."

"Aquarium," she says out loud. “Let's do that."

***

They spend the weekend exactly the way Lara had promised—the aquarium on Saturday afternoon after her shift, Mari pressed up against the glass in front of a tank of mandarin dragonets for a solid ten minutes; a walk along the harbor after dark, lights strung out across the water, Lara's hand in hers the whole way.

Sunday comes faster than either of them wants it to.

The morning starts slow—neither of them in any hurry to get up, tangled together under blankets while pale winter light creeps across the floor, and it’s well past ten before Lara finally groans into the pillow and admits she actually has things to do.

"I have errands," she says, like the word personally offends her. "Grocery stuff, a package I need to pick up…I should probably also get actual pajamas for my apartment's guest situation since apparently that's a need now."

"Hey," Mari says, mock-wounded. "The pillowcase was a valid choice."

"It was not, but I love you anyway." Lara sits up, stretching, unaware by how easily that last part came out of her mouth, like she says it every day, which—Mari realizes, warm all over—she basically has, all weekend, tossed off casually and constantly. I love you, pass the soy sauce. I love you, you're hogging the blanket. "Will you come with me? We can make a whole thing of it before you have to catch your train."

So they do. They wander through a grocery store with a shopping list that keeps growing the longer they’re in it; pick up a package at a convenience counter that turns out to be a specialty piping tip Lara ordered weeks ago and forgot about; stops at a shop for the promised pajamas, where Lara holds up increasingly ridiculous options. A shirt with a cartoon shrimp on it, something with far too many frills purely to make Mari laugh, before actually buying something reasonable.

It’s on the walk back, cutting through a covered shopping arcade to get out of the wind, that they pass a photobooth wedged between a crepe stand and a shoe repair shop, its curtain faded, string lights blinking cheerfully around the frame.

"Oh," Lara says, stopping dead. "We have to."

Mari makes a face. "We really don't—"

"We really do." Lara is already tugging her toward it, smiling gleefully wide, unstoppable once she's decided something. "Come on! When's the last time we actually took a picture together?”

Mari doesn’t have a good answer for that, so she lets herself be pulled in.

The booth is cramped, barely built for two, which means there’s no version of this that doesn’t end with them practically in each other's laps, laughing before the first flash even goes off. The first photo catches them mid-laugh, Lara's head thrown back. The second, Lara turns and kisses Mari's cheek just as the flash fires, and Mari's whole face catching bright red in the photo. The third, Mari finally gets it together enough to actually look at the camera, Lara pressed close beside her, both of them almost managing a normal picture. Except Lara is making bunny ears behind Mari's head, visible in the frame despite Mari's best efforts to block her. The fourth is just a kiss, unplanned, the two of them so lost in each other's faces that neither of them bothers looking at the camera at all.

The machine spits out two identical strips. Lara hands one over like it’s something precious, folding the other carefully into her own coat pocket.

"There," she says, satisfied. "Now you have proof this weekend actually happened."

Mari looks down at the strip in her hand—at her own face, undone and laughing and lit up in four small frames—and tucks it safely into her bag.

The afternoon goes fast after that, the way good afternoons always do, and before either of them is ready for it, they’re standing on the platform at Sannomiya with Mari's train pulling in at exactly four.

"You have my key," Lara says, reaching to straighten Mari's collar. "So you know. Whenever."

"Whenever," Mari repeats.

"You don't have to have it all figured out by the time you get home.” She’s serious now, searching Mari's face the way she had all weekend.

"I know." Mari doesn't know it, for maybe the first time since this whole thing started. "I'm still gonna have to actually deal with it, so…I might start openin’ those emails again.”

"That's a start."

Mari looks down at their joined hands, then back up. "I don't know what I'm gonna say yet. I might still sign with one of them. Or I might not. I genuinely don't know. But I think…I think I’d like to find out."

Lara smiles at that, small and proud. She pulls Mari in, and she sinks into it, breathing her in one more time—home, somehow, a prefecture away from the house she'd grown up in. "Text me when you're back. And when you talk to your dad. And when you open those emails. I want a full report."

"You're gonna get so sick of me."

"Never," Lara says immediately. "Not possible. I can never get enough of you."

Mari laughs and kisses her.

It feels like a promise renewed.

The platform announcement crackles overhead, and Mari makes herself let go, makes herself shoulder her bag and turn toward the doors, even though every part of her still wants to stay exactly where she’s standing. She looks back once before boarding. Lara is still there, smiling, waving her goodbye.  

The train pulls away, and Mari watches Kobe slide backward the way Shiga slid backward two days ago.

She pulls out her phone. For the first time in two weeks, she opens the first email without hesitating. She doesn’t answer any of them yet. She just reads it, all the way through, and then puts the phone back in her coat pocket, watching the coastline give way to hills.