Chapter Text
The train rumbles out of the station: slowly, at first, before gathering speed at all once, the groan of its engine crescendoing before it dissolves into the distance.
Lara doesn’t look back twice.
Instead, she keeps her eyes trained on the path ahead of her, ducking past a tall couple with their arms interlocked and weaving around the gaggle of tourists in line for the elevator. The worn soles of her sneakers scuff against concrete as she bounds up the staircase two steps at a time, grip tight on the paper bag in her hand.
A buzz in her pocket. She scrambles to retrieve her phone, tapping it against the IC reader before swiping into her inbox. Her heart skips a beat, that same old song.
She blinks at the message she’d typed out hurriedly with one hand—
almost there see you soon!!!!
—and then at the reply just below that, if it can even be considered one.
A single thumbs-up stares up at her, unmoving.
She shakes her head in wry amusement. Even then, she can’t help the smile that stretches across her face, rising in tandem with the anticipation in her chest. At the top of the staircase leading out of the platform, she continues to scan her surroundings, fervent.
On the street below, pedestrians scramble to cross tracks that wind through the asphalt, office workers and high school students alike rushing to head home. A bus spills out passengers in front of the convenience store a block away. In the near distance, the twin doves of Heiwado float suspended above mid-rise buildings, their green and white wings raised as if in greeting.
A friend in Kobe once taught Lara about how migrating birds were able to find their way back home. It was a matter of orientation and navigation, they’d told her. The earth’s compass, guiding them in the right direction, alongside an internal map that showed them where to go.
She hadn’t really understood how it worked, back then. She doesn’t think she ever truly did, until now: caught between the pillars of the station entrance, every single one of her senses honing in on the girl before her, standing tall and immovable in the golden afternoon light.
And then Mari smiles at her—a lovely, lopsided little thing—and it’s as if something inside Lara finally slots back into place. A compass-needle, sliding north.
“Lara.” The paper bag slips out of her grasp and hits the floor with a smack. “Welcome back.”
Two seconds is all it takes to close the distance between them. Another, for Mari to wrap her strong arms around Lara’s waist and hold her there, her mouth curving warm and sweet against the skin of her shoulder. Distantly, Lara wonders how much Mari can hear her heart, that traitorous thing, beating thunderously in her chest to the rhythm of home, home, home.
In the distance, the surface of Lake Biwa glitters in the early spring sun.
The rectangular box sits at the center of the dining table in all its dented, smushed-up glory.
“Smells good,” Yoshiya comments, gesturing vaguely towards the dark stain bleeding through the sunken top flap. “Chocolate?”
Lara buries her face in her hands and groans.
“Aww, Lara-chan,” Yoshiya sings, drawing out the honorific. “Did ya make chocolate ‘cause you know it’s my favorite?”
“Who said it’s for you?”
Mari elbows past her brother to stand next to Lara. Her hair is still damp from the shower, the ends of her bangs sticking endearingly to her forehead in tiny little whorls. From this close, Lara feels almost overwhelmed by the scent of her body wash rolling off her. It’s nostalgic. Lara’s got her own bottle of the stuff back at her place, but the smell of it on Mari’s skin is different, somehow. Sweeter.
“Took you long enough.” Yoshiya crosses his arms. “If you’d been any slower I would’ve eaten it all already.”
“No dessert before dinner!” yells Ema-san from the kitchen.
“Sucks.”
“Is that a complaint I’m hearing from you, young man?” Ema-san calls, her sharp voice somehow more threatening than the miso-coated spatula she waves in her hand. Her expression softens marginally as she turns to Lara. “Lara-chan, how about we put the cake in the refrigerator first? It’s for tomorrow anyway, isn’t it?”
“Tomorrow?” Mari lets go of the towel she’d been using to dry her hair. It hangs loosely around the back of her neck, wet ends dripping onto the stretched hem of her SIGA shirt, its print faded with the years. “Why not now?”
Ema-san shoots her a quizzical glare. “Remind me again who made the rule of no sweets except on special occasions?”
“Today’s a special occasion,” Mari tells her, matter-of-fact. “‘Cause Lara’s back.”
Heat crawls up Lara’s cheeks. “I mean, I’m going to be here tomorrow too, anyway.”
The two of them exchange a glance. Lara doesn’t know how long they stand there, locked in a sort of stalemate, until something in Mari’s expression finally gives way.
“Alright,” she concedes. “Tomorrow, then.”
The misshapen cake gets put away and replaced by the colorful spread of an Otsu family dinner: bowls of freshly-cooked white rice, grilled mackerel, and pickled vegetables surrounding a steaming pot of nabe in the center. Makoto-san arrives not too long after, weary eyes going bright behind his glasses the moment he sees Lara at the table. She’s sitting at his spot, she knows, by the way he pulls out the spare chair and places it at the head of the table. But the smile on his face tells her otherwise—tells her that she’s right where she’s meant to be, with Mari beside her, picking out the pieces of fermented fish from her salad and not-so-subtly placing them on Lara’s plate.
It’s almost as if she’d never left.
The heavy metal door clicks shut behind her. Slowly, gingerly, Lara toes off her sneakers in the genkan, tosses her bags into a corner, and promptly slides down the wall.
“I did it,” she mutters, into the silence. “Oh, dear, I really did it.”
The apartment does not say anything in return.
It’s a small studio, perfect for one, though slightly cramped and only barely furnished: cabinets built into the wall, a too-low kitchen counter with a sink crammed into one corner. Halfway through the room, there’s a curtain rail embedded in a projection from the ceiling, meant to divide the measly living space from the measly sleeping one.
A dry chuckle escapes her when she realizes she’d been sitting right next to the door to the bathroom.
She gets up, wobbling slightly. Each step she takes grows more confident than the last. A faint sense of pride thrums in her chest as she walks to the window across the room.
She had picked this place specifically for its small balcony—nothing like the one in the Otsu home, with its lush collection of flowers and table for two—but a balcony nonetheless. The first time she’d seen the apartment listing on SUUMO, she’d been immediately drawn to the photo of what appeared to be the view outside.
“Oh, cool,” Mari had said, peering over her shoulder. “It’s got a nice view.”
“You think so?” Lara smiled, basking in her approval. “It would look a lot nicer with flowers, though.”
“You don’t know how to take care of a plant.”
“I can learn!”
Lara rummages through her pocket now, the crinkle of plastic echoing through the empty room as her fingers close around a familiar packet. She’ll have to go out first thing tomorrow to buy a pot and some soil. But for now, she contents herself with watching the tree beyond the window sway in the breeze, the late afternoon sun illuminating its crown and washing its leaves in gold. Past that: a glimpse of pink, promising the beginning of spring.
She slides the balcony door open.
It feels like breaking surface. Emerging from the water for the first time and being welcomed by a myriad of colors and warmth and sound. There’s laughter, bubbling up from somewhere three stories below; the bark of a dog being walked by its elderly owner; the chime of bells as a pair of bicycles speed past. (She thinks, not for the first time, of Mari, laughing as she refused to let go of the rear rack on Lara’s bike). In the distance, like the bass beneath the melody of a bustling city: the hum of a ferry docking for the night in Kobe Bay, hidden from sight by the buildings that stretch all the way to the skyline.
“It really is a beautiful view,” she says.
The voice in her head does not answer back. Lara reaches for her phone and calls Mari.
Two rings in, the line clicks.
“Lara? Did you make it?”
Mari’s voice, familiar and so far away all at once, unlatches the floodgates in Lara’s chest.
“Lara? Hello? Are you there?”
She can’t hear me cry, Lara tells herself, through tears, because Mari sounds like—she sounds like she’s about to drop everything, rearrange her life all over again, just to be with Lara. It’s not wishful thinking, either, because Lara knows how Mari gets when she’s like this. That tremble in her voice, the cracks in her usually stoic demeanor. She can’t.
“I’m here!” Lara cries. “I made it. I’m in my apartment.”
“Oh,” Mari breathes. “Dummy. You scared me for a bit.”
“Sorry, I’m—” she tilts her head towards the darkening sky, willing her tears to recede— “just taking in the view, that’s all. It’s really nice. Like you said.”
“That’s great,” Mari replies. “I’m glad.” A pause. “Sorry, I’m still on my way home from practice and my battery’s pretty low so I can’t turn on my camera. Send me a pic later?”
Lara’s shoulders sag in relief. “I’ll take a picture. A nice one.”
“Okay.”
The silence that follows isn’t awkward, per se, but different. More weighted. Static crackles on the line between them as Lara fishes for something to say.
Her gaze anchors on the cherry blossoms peeking out from behind the library across the street. “There’s a sakura tree here. I can watch it from my balcony.”
Mari huffs: a soft, amused sound that Lara files away in her memory, for warmth. “Guess that’s one way to avoid getting allergies, then.”
“Mhm.” Then, because she can’t help herself: “What about you? Going hanami with anyone?”
“Haven’t really thought about it yet,” Mari admits. “Maybe I’ll go with my family again, or somethin’. Since, you know…”
Since you’re not here lingers unsaid in the distance between them. It goes without saying that they’re thinking of the same thing: this time last year, the two of them walking together through the park Mari used to visit with her family as a child.
“You should go,” Lara tells her. “It’ll be like old times, right?”
Mari hums. “Yeah. It’d be nice.”
“You’ll send me photos, too?”
“I will.”
“Good,” Lara says, the tight feeling in her chest unwinding a little. Maybe it’ll be alright. Maybe she can do this, even if it aches. Even if she can’t see Mari. As long as she can still hear Mari’s voice, breathing and alive at the other end of the line… she can afford in the meantime to dream of her smile instead.
It’ll be alright.
Lara cries on Mari’s graduation day.
Predictably, the tears come exactly as she watches Mari walk up on stage. Her expression is impassive to the point of ridiculousness—Lara might’ve laughed, actually, if she weren’t furiously trying to stop her nose from leaking. Mari’s posture, her ninety-degree bow, even the way she receives the diploma with open hands—everything about her is firmly poised, at least until her gaze finds Lara’s in the crowd.
And then she softens.
Lara manages a wet smile. Mari’s eyes widen a fraction, concern flickering across her features before melting into fond exasperation. The rest of her expression disappears from Lara’s sight as she returns to her seat.
Beside her, Makoto-san gives her a gentle nudge. “Here. Take this,” he whispers and offers Lara a tissue packet, complete with a promotional print for a HOP card tucked into the plastic packaging.
Heat creeps up Lara’s cheeks. “Thank you.”
The rest of the ceremony passes in a blur after that. Lara stands off to the side at the end of it, watching the graduates file out from the rows of seats before coming together again in hordes. Makoto-san and Ema-san both venture into the crowd with the other guests in a futile attempt to locate their kids in the ruckus.
Being a head taller than most of the students gives Lara the advantage of spotting Mari almost immediately in the crowd, half-buried underneath a pile of what Lara assumes, at first, to be her boxing teammates. But the tall girl with a bob next to her is unfamiliar to Lara, as is the one with short, spiky hair. Both of them have their arms around Mari, laughing and swaying and ruffling her bangs as if it’s the most natural thing in the world.
The strangest part of it all is that Mari isn’t even moving away. In fact, there’s a grin on her face, too—so sharp and lucent it makes something burn in Lara’s gut.
“Those two again,” Yoshiya sighs. “Grandma’s gonna be so mad after all that time she spent fixing Mari’s hair for the photo.”
“Who are they?”
“Err…” Yoshiya scratches the back of his neck. “Mari’s classmates, I reckon. Started hangin’ out with her in second year. Along with…”
“Lara-chan!”
Lara spins around. “Himeka?”
“That’s the one,” Yoshiya mutters in the background.
Himeka doesn’t give Lara a chance to utter anything more than a congratulations before she throws her arms around her. “You’re here! I can’t believe it!”
She pulls away to examine Lara’s face. “It’s really you!”
“It’s me,” Lara agrees. “You cut your hair? It looks really nice on you!”
“Aww, thank you!” She tugs sheepishly at her new layers, then points excitedly at her ear, where a gem in the shape of the North Star sits just underneath her helix. “And I got a new piercing, too!”
Lara peers at it curiously. “Did it hurt?”
“Barely!”
“Don’t give Lara any ideas,” warns Mari.
Something roars to the surface of Lara’s skin at the sight of her. She pulls away from Himeka in a half-daze and stumbles, without any grace or reason, towards Mari, as if she hasn’t spent the past two years learning how to walk steadily on her own two feet. Surprise colors Mari’s face, an expression that Lara drinks in momentarily before she collapses into Mari and buries her face in her shoulder.
“Congratulations, Mari,” she whispers. Goosebumps prickle up the back of Mari’s neck as Lara breathes her in. Her hands come up to clutch at the fabric of her uniform, and catch on the invisible stitches somewhere behind her heart.
She freezes. Mari must realize it, too, with the way she places her hands on Lara’s forearms to gently move them away.
“Lara.”
Her dark eyes are knowing, too knowing. A million things to say run through Lara’s head, amidst the upwelling of pride and residual fear mixing like oil and water in her veins.
So of course Lara opens her mouth and blurts:
“Are you still going to keep wearing that uniform? I feel like it’s your favorite thing to wear.”
“Idiot. I’m not wearin' my high school uniform to college.” Mari rolls her eyes. “Besides, it’s gotten a little small on me, anyway.”
Lara raises an eyebrow skeptically. “Mari, I don’t think you’ve gotten any taller.”
“I’ve gotten bigger,” she smirks, and crosses her arms to prove her point.
She’s right, unfortunately, and Lara knows it. She knows because she’s spent the past twenty-four hours trying to ignore it for the sake of her poor human heart.
“Omi’s lightning, ready to conquer the world!” Himeka crows—and, much to Lara’s horror, wraps a hand around one of Mari’s biceps and squeezes.
“Hey, no fair!” calls another voice: lower and much more gravelly, but feminine all the same. Lara is able to pinpoint the exact moment recognition strikes her like a drop kick to her stomach. “Leave some for us, too!”
“Should we take a picture now that we’re all here?” suggests the bob-haired girl, trailing behind her spiky-haired companion.
“Ugh, I’m so annoyed that we don’t get any sakura!” Spiky Hair complains. “My brother’s graduating from Todai on the 25th and he’s gonna have them in full bloom. And he doesn’t even like taking pictures!”
“Would you like me to take your photo?” Lara cuts in with a smile.
The girl turns to peer at her curiously. Casting a quick, wide-eyed glance at Mari, she asks, “Is this…” back to Lara, “are you Lara?”
Lara nods, suddenly feeling rather shy. “Hi, Mari’s friends.”
“You didn’t even tell her our names?”
Mari shrugs. “Lara, this is Rana”—the spiky-haired one points at herself—“and Akane.” The girl with a bob gives her a little wave. “And Himeka, but you already know her.”
“Wait, Lara-chan, you should join our photo, too!” Himeka loops her arm through Lara’s and drags her over to their circle. “Where’s your dad, Mari-chan? Can he take our photo? He’s a professional, right?”
“I think my brother went to go get him,” Mari says, scanning the crowd. “Oh, there.”
Rana lets out an appreciative whistle. “Now that’s a real pro.”
“Hello, girls.” Makoto-san grins at them from behind the mountain of equipment in his arms: a folded tripod, a pile of cables, and a large, complex-looking camera, with an array of lenses fit for a professional photoshoot to boot. “Ready?”
For all his preparation and fancy apparatus, it doesn’t take long for Makoto-san to take the actual photos. “You’ve gotta be quick on the job,” he explains. “Especially since there’s still all that post-processing to do.”
He angles the screen of the camera towards them. “Here you go. I’ll print off copies when I’m done editing. Somethin’ to look back on when you all go off to college.”
The photos are met with a cacophony of ooh’s and aah’s.
“You look so cute here, Mari-chan!”
Mari’s ears flush a bright red. Lara can’t blame her, though she does press a bit closer to Mari to soothe the thing with green eyes in the pit of her stomach.
And then she peers more closely at the screen and squeaks.
“My eyes look so swollen!”
Mari shoots her a funny look over her shoulder. “That’s cause you were cryin’ like a baby earlier.”
“It was an emotional moment!”
“I agree,” says Rana solemnly. “Especially ‘cause Mari’s gonna go off into the big city. Our big shot boxer girl.”
Hard, cold dread presses up against Lara’s gut. She’d been doing such a good job pushing it down, too.
“As if you’re not heading all the way to Hokkaido.”
“That’s only for uni, though,” Rana says. “In four years you could end up in, what, LA or somethin’?”
“Eh? Aren’t the next Olympics in Australia, though?”
Lara’s head spins. The rest of the conversation glides slowly towards the edge of her awareness, in places too far away for her mind to process. It’s a feeling that evokes a distant memory: one that doesn’t feel like it belongs to her, but to some other creature drifting fifty meters into the deep, watching the blurred shapes of ships journeying across an unreachable surface.
Mari’s hand wraps around hers, a lifeline.
“Lara. Hey. It’s time to go.”
Lara blinks. The rest of her surroundings slide back into full resolution: Mari’s friends, chatting idly among each other, Makoto-san packing up the last of his gear.
“Oh.”
“I’ve got to go to the graduation party first.” Mari says. She drops Lara’s hand, though not without a bit of hesitation. “I’ll see you later, okay?”
“Okay.” Lara manages a smile, for Rana and Akane. Himeka walks over to give her one last fierce hug.
“You’ll be back, right?” Her chin digs into Lara’s shoulder as she speaks. “After your trip with Mari-chan?”
Lara nods.
“I’m so happy for the two of you,” Himeka whispers, and disentangles herself before Lara can think twice about what she means. “Have fun, alright?”
And then she’s off, dragging Rana and Akane by the hand.
Mari is the last one to turn.
A second later, something possesses Lara’s hand to reach out and grasp the back of Mari’s uniform. Her fingers slip and bunch clumsily around the star-shaped patch in the fabric.
Mari looks back.
“The cake,” Lara says, suddenly breathless. “We’re still having your cake later, right?”
For a moment, Mari looks taken aback. And then her jaw goes slack, the muscles of her face relaxing, in the way it does when she looks at Lara gently. “Of course, dummy.”
“Okay.” Lara lets go. “Don’t forget it.”
“I won’t.”
Feet anchored to the grass, Lara watches Mari’s retreating back, and shakes off the feeling of something slipping out of her grasp.
“You’re sulking.”
It’s almost insulting, the way Luca says it so directly.
“Is it that obvious?”
The ice cream from his overly-sweet melon soda float bunches on his top lip as he scoffs. “Very.”
Lara sighs. She toys idly with the straw of her drink: a peach milkshake, complete with a decorative flower of whipped cream on top. She hasn’t had much, but they’ve been sitting in this Zetteria long enough for the whip to melt into a flimsy layer of white foam.
Sometime in the past two years, Luca had more or less dropped the whole gentleman persona he’d adopted back then, rather ludicrously, for Lara. Though their meetings had been few and far between, they had been enough to show Lara the truth: the guy was a real nuisance.
But Lara still likes him much better like this, when neither of them are pretending to be something they’re not.
“Can’t you afford to look at least a bit excited for your trip?”
“I am excited!”
Luca rolls his eyes. “I saw the way Mari was looking at you earlier. She seemed concerned. You know that big, shiny-eyed expression she gets sometimes when she thinks nobody’s looking?”
“That is…” Lara pauses to parse that statement. “Oddly specific.”
“It’s an Otsu family thing,” Luca says, conversationally, as if Lara needed to know that.
“You’re staying, right?” asks Lara. “In Shiga.”
“Yeah.” He leans back against the couch, gaze flicking out the window to where a motorcycle speeds down the street. “Got into the Seian University of Art and Design.”
Lara reaches over the table and punches his arm.
“Ow! What the hell was that for?”
“You didn’t tell me!” Lara exclaims, grinning wildly.
“Figured I’d tell you in person to see your reaction,” Luca pouts, rubbing nonsensically at the invisible bruise on his arm. “Though I didn’t expect it to be that. Guess it’s true that the person you’re dating rubs off on you, yeah?”
The smile immediately melts off Lara’s face. “...What?”
“You’re not… are you and Mari not dating?” He folds his hands in front of his face and stares vacantly at the table. “Oh, my god.”
Lara isn’t sure she can trust herself to speak.
“Please,” he peeks up at her momentarily through his fingers, “please tell me you’re not doing that whole thing where you hang out with someone without, you know, caring to tell them properly where you actually stand?”
Irritation flares in Lara’s chest. “This again? Seriously? It’s not my fault you assumed all those things about me.”
“I’m just trying to make a point,” Luca protests weakly. “Which is that, yes, I assumed a lot of stuff. But Mari… don’t you think she might be doing that, too?”
“Mari isn’t you.”
Frankly, Lara is offended. That Luca can make a comparison with something so completely and wholly different, so close to Lara’s chest. No, Lara knows that Mari knows exactly where they stand. A prefecture apart; further in the near future.
“You’re right,” Luca agrees, which throws Lara off a little because she’d been prepared for a rebuttal. “It hardly is. You and Mari…” He trails off, seemingly wary of breaching the line of this great, nameless thing that’s been going on for three years, now. “Even when you were supposed to be dating me… you’d always still look for her.”
And Lara can’t really argue against the truth now, can she? It doesn’t matter whether she’s here in Shiga or Kobe or even some other far-off part of Japan: she’ll always look for Mari, in every crowd, in every corner of the world she’d set out to explore.
Even now, watching the ebb and flow of pedestrians outside the glass, she searches for her—and feels her heart stab painfully in her chest the moment she does catch sight of her, as if still not used to the reality of Mari being within her grasp.
“Ready to go?” Mari inclines her head towards Luca in greeting, then frowns at the sight of Lara’s unfinished milkshake. “Or not.”
“No, no, I’m ready,” Lara reassures her, taking her tray and the drink with it. “I can just have this on the way home. Sorry, we got kind of caught up in conversation.”
Mari’s eyes sweep from her to Luca. “Alright. You comin’ with?” The next words she spits out like chewed cardboard. “Yoshiya’s expectin’ you.”
The tips of Luca’s ears flush a bright red. “Um, yeah. But, I, actually, he. He said he’s gonna pick me up.”
“Great,” Mari mutters, fingers wrapping around Lara’s wrist to tug her away. “See you, then.”
“See you, Luca,” Lara calls, pointedly ignoring the way he gestures largely at their joined hands, exasperated, before slapping his palm to his face.
Mari casts her a sideways glance. “Is he okay?”
Lara shrugs, a halfhearted thing, too focused on the warm weight of Mari’s hand in hers to care.
There is a dream Lara has, when she isn’t dreaming of Mari in her arms (sometimes warm and alive, though more often with eyes glazed, lightless, her sturdy boxer’s body the most weightless it’s ever been—)
In this dream, Lara wakes to semi-darkness, bare threads of sunlight slowly unraveling on the floor next to her. The futon she lies in is soft, and smells faintly like something she loves. There’s an ache to the familiarity of it, as with the smattering of water stains on the ceiling overhead.
Above her, a square lamp with a pull switch dangles just out of reach. It would be easy, so easy, to just stand up and turn on the light.
But it would always be easier to turn towards the sunrise.
It’s a dream Lara’s had so often that she’s almost always able to predict how it goes, when she rolls onto her side to look for Mari beside her—Mari, who is sometimes there and sometimes not, sometimes sleeping and sometimes awake, lying next to Lara with calloused fingers carding through her hair.
This one is new, though. This time, she wakes to the very uncomfortable feeling of pins and needles crawling down her right arm—which is, for some reason, thrown haphazardly off the side of the futon. All of a sudden the numb, prickly feeling becomes much too real, and it hits her when she looks to her side and sees Mari sprawled on her stomach near the edge of her bed, her own right hand dangling close to Lara’s extended one, that she isn’t dreaming at all.
She cranes her neck to check the clock sitting on the windowsill. Half past five. Mari is still in bed. Why?
“Hey.” Lara reaches for her. The ease with which her fingers brush against Mari’s makes her wonder, briefly, if they’d been holding hands at some point during the night. “Mari.”
A muffled groan. “Lara?”
The sound of her name in Mari’s voice, still thick with sleep, makes something tighten behind Lara’s ribs.
“It’s late,” Lara whispers, squeezing her hand. “You’re not gonna go running?”
“Mmm.” A small sigh. “I kinda woke up randomly earlier, so I went then.”
“Earlier? Like what time?”
“No idea. It was still pitch black outside, though.”
“Mari!” Lara sits up, holds her even tighter. “Don’t do that.”
A small smile stretches across Mari’s lips. Even with her sleep mask on, Lara knows it’s a genuine one: the soft, unguarded kind that reaches her irises and lights them up from the inside.
“I couldn’t sleep,” Mari admits, finally pulling down her mask. Guilt climbs up Lara’s throat at the sight of the shadows underneath her eyes. “I was like this when I was a kid, too. Always tossin’ and turnin’ the night before a school trip.”
“Because…”
“Because I couldn’t wait for the mornin’ to come.” Her gaze flickers downwards. A sliver of sunlight cuts through the curtain and illuminates the faint blush on her cheeks. “Was like this the night before you arrived, too.”
“Oh.” Lara’s throat tightens even more. “I’m sorry.”
“What are you sayin’ sorry for, dummy?” Mari makes to stand, but Lara immediately hoists her back down.
“You need to sleep,” Lara instructs her firmly. “Some more.”
“That’s impossible,” Mari says. “Besides, didn’t we want to leave early to make the most of the day, anyway?”
“No point if you fall asleep in the middle of it!”
“I won’t,” Mari tells her, amused. The sparkle in her eyes catches Lara off-guard, her grip on Mari’s wrist going slack and allowing her to gently slip out of her hold. Then she stands, shoulders cracking as she stretches her arms towards the ceiling. A solid strip of skin appears briefly below the hem of her shirt. “Or maybe I’ll sleep on the bus, I dunno.”
Lara watches as Mari shuffles over towards the closet at the other side of the room. It’s mostly empty now, emptier than Lara’s ever seen it, save for the couple of track jackets Mari’s been using for her jogs.
“You’ve packed almost everything,” Lara notes.
“Hmm? Yeah,” Mari answers, voice slightly muffled as she rifles through the drawer underneath. “Won’t really have much time after we come back.”
Lara thinks back to another version of her dream, in which she wakes up in Mari’s empty room. “What are you going to do with the rest of your stuff? The ones you’re not bringing with you?”
“Nothin’.”
“Nothin’?”
“I’ll keep ‘em here,” Mari says. “Besides, it’s not like I won’t be comin’ back. I’ll visit over the breaks ‘n stuff.”
“But you’ll be busy with training.”
“Yeah.” She stands with her change of clothes piled neatly underneath one arm. “And you’re busy with work and studyin’ for the Kōnin, but you still get to visit.”
“Not nearly as much as I want to.”
Mari raises an eyebrow at her. There’s a shadow of a smirk at the corner of her mouth as she says, “What happened to not wanting to come back anytime soon?”
“Coming back isn’t the same as visiting,” Lara protests, and stops herself before she can add, and what will I come back to if you’re not here?
Mari snorts. One brief, disbelieving glance is all she throws in Lara’s direction before she steps towards the door. “You sure are a funny one, Lara.”
“Well, good thing you like funny characters, right?” Lara quips back, and immediately regrets it. She feels almost childish bringing it up, even if it’s only been three years and three years is nothing—a blink, really—in mermaid time. But Lara is not a mermaid anymore. She’s human, completely and wholly, and in three years she’s witnessed herself, and Mari, grow and change at a frightening speed—the way humans often do, at this frightening age.
But when Mari looks back at her, time seems to contract, the years all fading away into nothingness. The small smile on Mari’s face is still the one of the girl Lara first fell in love with, all that time ago.
“Yeah, I do.”
“You’re comin’ to my graduation, right?”
Mari says it so casually that Lara almost doesn’t register it, at first. It’s one of those sleepy, late-night calls where the silences stretch longer than the conversations, the both of them content to simply bask in each other’s presence at the unwinding of a long day. There’s a cup of tea on Lara’s kotatsu, set out amidst the lingering February chill, next to a plate of half-eaten chocolate chip scones she’d abandoned in favor of steaming her apron for tomorrow.
She puts the steamer down. The vapor clears to reveal Mari on the tiny screen of her phone, propped up on the table using a flimsy stand she’d bought from Daiso. Mari isn’t even looking at the camera. Most of her face is lowered, obscured by her bangs as she peers down at something beyond the frame.
Almost two years, and it’s the first time Mari has ever explicitly asked Lara to visit. Lara still isn’t sure she can believe it.
“Say that again?”
Mari looks up. “Do you wanna come visit? For my graduation?”
“Of course!” Lara beams. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
Mari’s shoulders sag in relief. “Good. That’s good.” Then, “You think you could spare a week or two for vacation?”
“Absolutely.” She’s drawing out the plans in her head immediately: there’s the study material for the high school equivalency exam that she has to go through weekly, but she can do a couple of lessons in advance; she’s also saved up enough vacation days from the bakery in the past year to take a leave for at least two weeks. In fact, her manager had been nagging her almost non-stop over the winter holidays to take some time off. “Do you think you could give me some dates? I’ll have to inform my manager, of course, but I’m sure she’ll let me off easy.”
“My graduation’s on the sixth of March,” Mari replies. “And… I was thinkin’ of goin’ on a trip afterwards, to Kyoto and Osaka.”
“Oh!” Lara clasps her hands together excitedly. “With who?”
A faint red tint appears on Mari’s cheeks. “Just you.”
“Oh.” This time, it’s Lara’s turn to blush. “Just us?”
Mari averts her gaze, face doing that thing where it tries and fails to look impassive as she goes, “Mhm.”
Lara doesn’t even try to stop herself from grinning ridiculously wide. “For how long?”
“I’ve saved up enough for a few days, for the both of us,” Mari tells her. “Though technically, we can just go back ‘n forth since it’s so near. It might be a little tirin’, though.”
“What about we spread it out?” Lara suggests. “Since you’ve got the rest of the month, right?”
Mari pauses. “Actually, I’ll have to move out by the middle of the month.”
The words wash over her like a bucket of ice-cold water. Her brain short-circuits. “Move… out?”
“Yeah. I got into Chuo University.” Mari looks sheepish, eyebrows scrunching in a mixture of pride and embarrassment. “I’m moving to Tokyo.”
Tokyo.
Tokyo.
Blood roars in Lara’s ears. She feels hot all over, which is ridiculous considering it’s winter, and she’d just turned off the heater to conserve her gas bill, and her heart is throbbing painfully in her chest like it wants to tear through her ribcage.
“Lara?” Mari’s voice reaches her as if from underwater. “Lara, are you okay?”
For a second, Lara almost thinks she’s lost her tongue all over again. But it sits there anyway: a heavy, leaden thing tucked between her teeth. So she unsticks it from the roof of her mouth, and pushes out the first thing that wells up in her throat.
“You’re incredible, Mari,” she chokes out. Pride burns in her chest, white-hot around the ache beneath her sternum. “When did you find out?”
Mari still looks uncertain as she says, “In December.”
December! Lara wants to jump through the screen and wring Mari by the shoulders.
“They offered me a sports scholarship,” continues Mari. “But… I wanted to wait for the results of the regular admissions, first.”
Why didn’t you tell me, when I went to the shrine on New Year’s and prayed for your success? She’d even bought an ema and painstakingly wrote the kanji for the Common Test on it, 大学入学共通テスト. She’d prayed to God that the gods would be able to read her childlike handwriting and grant Mari a perfect score.
“I had no idea,” Lara murmurs.
Mari looks at her, expression suddenly as transparent as a lake in autumn. “But I told you already, didn’t I?”
The stunning clarity of it hits Lara all at once. What Mari had always known, what she had told Lara at fifteen, bright-eyed and already looking ahead: that she was going to keep fighting the next, stronger opponent, and every one after that, until she became the strongest in the world.
Mari was already the best boxer in Shiga. Of course, of course. She couldn’t become the world’s greatest if she stayed.
And yet—
A part of Lara—that sharp, fragile shard of her she’d left behind in Shiga—had somehow believed she’d always be able to come back to this, no matter how long it took: to the house by the lake, with its balcony of flowers; to the girl who stood among them, stretching her arms to the sky. And maybe, one day, when she was finally strong enough to really, truly stand on her own, then they could go and see the world together.
Shame prickles hot and fast in her throat. How could she have ever thought that Mari would stay and wait for her, after she left and went off on her own? Of course Mari is already a step ahead of her. Of course Lara is still every bit as proud of her. Of course Lara will keep going, on her own two feet, in this world she’d chosen to live in for Mari.
“Hey.” Mari’s voice is sure but wavering, close but impossibly out of reach. “I’ll see you soon.”
And Lara thinks, I want to see you now. I want to see you yesterday. I want to see you tomorrow, and the day after that, and every day after that for the rest of our lives.
She doesn’t say any of it. Instead, she swallows her wanting down, until it no longer threatens to split her smile like a dagger. She’s had more than enough of it—that sharp, devouring kind of desire—for two lifetimes.
So she offers up the simple, human truth. “I can’t wait.”
Mari grins.
As winter melts into spring, Lara learns what it means to have a love that only grows with distance.