Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The world ended without the decency to take Moca Aoba along with it.

“I could handle a zombie apocalypse.”

“No you couldn’t Tomoe.”

“Uh, I definitely could. I have a plan.”

They’re on the school roof. They’re always on the roof, even when they’re not. Tomoe’s standing up, back to the railing because she can’t even imagine falling over it. Ran’s on the ground at her feet, notebook in hand but it’s practically abandoned. Her attempt at writing has been totally thwarted by her friends and their inane hypotheticals, but she can’t keep from smiling anyway. Same as always.

There’s Tsugumi and Himari on the side sitting back to back with hands intertwined because why not hold hands when you can. It’s a nice substitution for their girlfriends—one’s across town probably lecturing some unlucky kid about the moral degradation of knee high skirts (hilarious when Moca knows exactly what kind of moral degradation she and Tsugumi get up to) and the other is about to give them a speech none of them asked for that will only demonstrate that she’s thought way too long on something that’s not about to happen.

And Moca’s there too, head half resting on Ran’s thigh and half on the concrete below. Ran’ll protest if Moca moves any closer. She knows how close she has can get down to the millimeter before Ran shoves her off just hard enough that Moca wonders if it’s playful or not. She steals the warmth whenever she can.

Ran snaps her notebook shut with one hand and turns to Tsugumi, “Did you finish the math homework?”

“Hey!” Tomoe protests, “Aren’t you gonna ask?!”

“Ask what?” Ran says, knowing full well what.

Tomoe deflates, “It’s really cool.”

“You can tell me babe!” Himari blushes on the word ‘babe’—it’s still brand new to them. In less than a year it’ll make up approximately 90% of their shared vocabulary and only Moca will be able to decode exactly what each nuanced ‘babe’ means. Tsugumi will try to understand but it’s a foreign language she’s not fluent in. Ran does not attempt a translation.

“… The moment’s passed.”

“Tomoe~!” Himari whines her girlfriend’s name with twice the syllables it should have.

Ran sighs and shifts, thigh moving under Moca—Moca moving over the thigh. “Fine. Tell me about how you’re going to survive the zombie apocalypse.”

“How we’re going to survive. No Afterglow left behind!”

Himari and Tsugumi both cheer. Tomoe puffs up her chest a little with their collective pride and keeps on going. “Two words: cruise ship.” She lets said two words hang out in the air like the details fill in themselves while the rest of the band looks at each other to make sure they’re united in cluelessness.

Tomoe panics, “Come on, you get it? We get on a cruise ship, load it up with food and hit the sea til it all clears up!”

Moca snickers, not with any ill-will just a general sense of mischief. “Tomo-chin~ who’s gonna drive this big boat? Moca-chan’s little arms can’t steer.”

“We’ll do it together! That’s what we do.”

“Mmmm, no good~ no good~.”

“What?!” Thunder cracks in the sky. “What’s your plan then?”

“Become a zombie. Chomp chomp. If the world’s over I can’t get any more buns. What’s the point? Might as well eat brains~. Boo hoo.”

Tomoe leans over Moca, fist clenched. “Then I’ll make you come with us! I’ll drag you on board!”

“Bad plan~.” Moca bats at Tomoe’s fist. “Moca-chan’ll turn you all. Better leave me behind.”

“No way! I’d never!”

But she did.

“A whole cruise ship for the five of us? It’ll be hard to control on our own.” Tsugumi, as always, gives the dumb idea more consideration than it deserves. “We should bring others too!”

The stream of Tomoe’s attention is totally diverted along the Tsugumi bend. She forgets Moca quickly and bounds to Himari’s side.

“Moca…”

But Ran’s still at Moca’s side, looking down at her with a look caught between sadness and concern. Moca can hear it in her voice: she’s so close to asking. So, so close that Moca almost wants to cheer her on. Because all she needs is to be asked once: ‘what do you mean by that?’ and Moca will break open like a melon left too long in the sun.

But instead Ran says, “Don’t eat me.”

And Himari is blathering on about who they’ll take on their cruise ship. It’s nice to listen to, like a humming fan to fall asleep to. “Sayo-san has to come, obviously.”

“Don’t forget Ako-chan!” Tsugumi has her own notebook out now, scribbling down names for this very important and very real survival plan.

“I would never!” Himari is absolutely actually offended. “And if we bring Ako-chan we have to bring Rinko-san too and it’d be mean to bring them and not the rest of Roselia! Lisa-senpai and Yukina-san have to be on the list on board.”

“We have to bring Hina-senpai too!”

“You can’t have one Hikawa without the other! Oh! And if we bring Hina-senpai we have to bring Chisato Shirasagi!”

“Of course!” Tsugumi says, “we can’t forget Chisato Shirasagi.”

The world turns. They’re still on the roof. Tomoe’s gone but they’re always on the roof even when all of them aren’t. Now Tsugumi’s standing with her back to the railing, careful not to touch it lest the paint disturbed by years of their fingernails scratching flake onto her jacket.

Tsugumi’s about to break the world in five pieces. She tries to crutch in something nice, talking weird circles around the topic by discussing phones and the group chat and isn’t video calling nice until she finally, finally gets to the point they’ve been dreading. The thing that has already broken their hearts.

“I’m going to Kyoto for college. I want—I have to be with Sayo-san.”

Every word smashes cracks in the concrete and turns the roof into a dried river bed of violent crevasses. They’re splintered apart by canyons—maybe they can make it if they jump but it’s so hard to leap and Moca’s always had ice cold feet.

The flood comes quickly to fill the holes anyway. Tears pour from Himari’s eyes until rivers separate the four of them. There are unshed tears in Ran’s eyes too. Moca thinks about wiping them into her own eyes because try as she might Moca doesn’t have any of her own to cry. It’s the first time the world’s ended but she’s imagined it so much that it’s already an old story she’s memorized.

Sayo is the future and Afterglow is the past. Of course, Tsugumi chooses Sayo.

“I’ll still visit!” Tsugumi promises. “On holidays, over the summer and when college is over, I’ll be back at the coffee shop. With Sayo-san.” She is so panicked. She wants to make it okay so badly but she’s the cause. She can’t fix this.

Her big brown eyes, always like something more gentle than a person, focus on Moca. All her concern is aimed in one place. “You won’t be alone.”

But Moca was.

“Plenty of our friends will be in Tokyo! Tomoe and Himari are still here, you’ll be with Ran. Chisato Shirasagi is here too!”

Even in pieces the world still revolves on her axis. They’re on the roof. No Tsugumi, no Tomoe but they’re always on the roof even when there’s still a saltwater river rushing over it. Himari and Moca stick to an island in the middle with the bars at their back. Himari is sitting against the rails, not noticing how they wrinkle the back of her shirt. When she gets home she’ll realize it and laugh and sent them a picture of the flakey black stripes that transformed her school uniform into a prisoner’s.

Tsugumi and Tomoe are off studying so hard for their exams. Moca doesn’t need to study. Himari does. But neither of them do. Ran works hard on her own little island made up of books on books floating in the torrent. It doesn’t end up mattering how hard she works.

Himari buzzes beside Moca, ever since Moca told her the plan Himari hasn’t been able to sit still. Her excitement is almost contagious, but Moca’s nerves are much stronger. “This is going to be amazing, Moca! I’m so happy for you.”

“Eh heh, Moca-chan hasn’t told her yet. She could break Moca-chan’s little heart.” She’s going to. Moca knows she’s going to but the movie’s already started.

“She won’t! You and Ran are gonna get together, I just know it.” She’s wrong. “It’ll be perfect!” It isn’t. “Me and Tomoe, Tsugu and Sayo and Moca and Ran! Together forever! Afterglow… and Sayo.”

They weren’t.

Himari nudges Moca with her shoulder. She always tries to catch Moca’s eye, even when Moca isn’t offering it. “Besides, there’s always Chisato Shirasagi.”

It started with two of them. It ends with two of them. The world still turns but she’s running out of gas.

They’re on the rooftop. They both wish they weren’t.

“I—I’m sorry Moca. I don’t feel—”

“Ha Ha! Just kidding!” Why did Moca ask a question she knew the answer to? She knew it, she knows it. She knows Ran doesn’t love her the way Moca loves Ran but she still just had to say something. A masochist through and through. No. Masochists get pleasure out of it. Moca is just stupid.

Because there had been a little tiny part of her that actually thought Ran felt the same way and she nurses that molecule for three more wasted years.

“Forget it.”

There’s a rumbling in the distance.

“I can’t.”

No. Ran’s supposed to say “okay” and they’re supposed to never, ever talk about it again and they would have never, ever talked about it again except for—

“I talked to Shirasagi-san.”

Ran isn’t Ran. Not the Ran Moca wants to remember. She’s getting older bit by bit. Her face thins out, the red streak retracts like syrup through a straw as her hair gets longer and the light in her eyes just dims and dims until they’re just empty bottomless holes.

“I can’t do this to you any more.”

“No.” But Moca knows she can’t stop this. It’s already happened.

The world’s already over, everything left is a eulogy.

The rumbling grows.

Their stupid paisley couch is squished against the roof railing. There’s that ancient rug thinned from feet on the floor. Static flickers on the TV screen stretching over where their friends used to sit. Ran’s plants overwhelm the little outcropping with the door to the school. Their leaves grow and twist over the bricks to the metal of the door and down to the knob. No exit.

“Moca… we can’t—I can’t do this to you anymore. We need space Moca. I think… I think I need space.”

“No.”

“It’s not fair to either of us.”

The walls rise from the ground, dirty and stained by a dozen previous residents. They seal up the roof in a horrid familiar package. They lock in Moca in a two bedroom prison. Is their whole apartment really the size of one rooftop? Did they really never leave?

“It’s not fair to me.”

Himari’s salt water river crashes over them. It’s gone. It’s all gone in a rushing roar, no couch, no rug, no friends, no Ran. Rivers only run one way. Always forward while Moca stands still.

She’s always on the roof, even when everyone else has left.

It was dark outside when Moca woke up. The scratchy fabric of the couch itched at her face. With mechanical fingertips, she traced the tight grid imprinted onto her cheek. She really had to stop falling asleep on the couch when she had a perfectly decent—technically adequate—bed. In that first moment after waking, Moca didn’t know if it was early or late and in the second moment she tried to figure out what those words even meant to someone who’d spent the last week falling asleep whenever she didn’t want to think any more.

Blurry eyes tried to focus on the window sill as she struggled up. There was nothing there for her eyes to grasp. For a magic, golden second her mind was completely empty. No dreams, no memories, no feelings. A car drove by the window, the sound growing and growing until it crescendoed and disappeared quicker than it came. And then she reached for her phone.

No notifications. Such was life. Whatever sort of life this was.

Moca Aoba was thirsty and it was ten at night on a Saturday. Her new same as always.

Golden Gai was the sort of place you went to drink when you wanted to seem interesting without all the effort and work. It had always intrigued Moca—she never could bear the idea of hard work—and it got her out of the house.

A little block of blocks in the middle of Kabukicho, in the middle of Shinjuku, in the middle of Tokyo, Golden Gai was a place where the residents clung so hard to the past they froze time. The buildings harked back to a time before real estate developers ate the interesting out of Tokyo’s heart, when every building was thrown up by someone different with whatever they had on hand—only matching in the mismatch. Immortals roamed the alleys of Golden Gai.

So Moca assumed, as immortality was the only way someone could have enough time to untangle all the rules that greeted guests at the entrance. Before you could even wander into the narrow alleys—so narrow that the pavers must have set a snake loose, seen it just barely squeeze through and thought ‘good enough’—there was a big posted sign smothered with the phrase ‘No Photos’ written in every language a person could think of. What happens in Golden Gai, stays in Golden Gai, Moca supposed, that is if you can figure out what it is you’re allowed to do.

Every door featured a different command. No tourists, yes tourists, please tourists, are we not all tourists? No couples, only couples, couples with a third who seems lonely. No dyed hair. If you don’t have dyed hair are you really punk rock? No phonies. Fakers only—if you’ve ever looked the same in two selfies get out. Each bar stood in prideful opposition to its neighbor—angular neon signs in conflicting colors overlapping like posters plastered over and over on a billboard.

There was a personal bar for every guest. Not one of the theoretically two hundred micro bars packed in over, under and around each other matched its neighbor. There were punk bars, horror bars, Victorian bars, tiny bars dyed in red with a little screen flickering with the owner’s favorite movie on loop, micro bars in blue with stacks of yellowed books looming over patrons who longed for the constant danger of being smothered, and then there were the “regulars only” bars with their large abrasive warning signs and sullen, staring bartenders watching out the doorways. How you became a regular of a bar you couldn’t enter alluded Moca.

She struggled to find a fit for herself. All Moca really wanted was to drink alone on a Friday night in a place that wouldn’t make her feel like she was drinking alone on a Friday night. Was that really such an ask?

Apparently, because the only bar she could figure out she was welcome in was “western” themed—which Moca hoped meant cowboy hats but really meant American football helmets and a crackling old recording of beefy dudes in inadequate protection trying to crush each other projected on the wall. But at least the beer was cheap and foreign.

The bar was green and wooden and the bartender was grumpy and sweaty and not the least bit interested in Moca when there was a thirty year old recording of a game behind her. Understandable. Moca wasn’t much interested in herself either. Much more fun to peer into the liquid so light it was practically seltzer swirling around her glass, and listen to some probably dead dude excitedly yell about touching down.

This was fine. Moca wanted to be alone. Moca hated being alone. As usual, Moca’s real desires were a mystery to even herself. It’d be easier to want the former now that she officially Had No Friends. Who exactly could she call on to end her social exile? Tsugumi ditched her for love and sex and Kyoto and a guitarist with long fingers and no conversation skills. Himari and Tomoe ditched her for adulthood and Scandinavian furniture and brunches with other plywood couples with career goals and good hair. And Ran…

“ I’m going to stay with my dad for a while. Moca… we can’t—I can’t do this to you anymore.”

…Ran just ditched her. The what for didn’t much matter.

By the third beer Moca’s loneliness was turning into hate. She swiped her index finger across her frosty glass and used the condensation to scribble out names on the waxy bar. The official Moca Aoba shit list.

Kaoru Seta. For stealing away her friend.

But then again Moca had accidentally ended her relationship so they were probably pretty even. Moca wiped away the name into a puddle.

Sayo Hikawa. For breaking up her band.

It was hard to hate Sayo when Tsugumi loved her so much but Moca could always try.

Chisato Shirasagi. For ruining her fucking life.

She didn’t ask Chisato to help her. She didn’t WANT Chisato to help her. All Moca tried to do was—

All she wanted was—

Things had been fine before—

Moca swung back her beer, gulping messily before slamming it back on the counter and looking back down at her watery handwriting, already abstracting itself into an illegible blob. Two people made a shitty shit list. But she had had enough. Moca had to do SOMETHING. She had to take some action or these feelings were going to swallow her. Her fingers caught a hold of the idea and started to type out a text before her brain caught on. It wasn’t the first time that week she’d found herself with Chisato’s number selected and a message under her thumb. But it was the first time she pressed send.

>I hat u

Aw fuck shit, Moca screwed up. That severely reduced the dramatic effect.

>*hat u

Dammit.

>HETE U

AW, COME ON! COULDN’T SHESEND HATE MAIL RIGHT?!

Moca groaned into her beer before typing out one last message.

>this is moca btw

Just in case she got mixed up.

Moca slid the phone down the baras if to distance herself and her embarrassment. This was her life now. Drunk texting famous people hate mail so she could forget to feel bad for one second. Finally everything was coming up Moca Aoba.

…

Her phone slid back to her.

Moca stared and then she turned to find Sayo Hikawa sitting next to her.

Sayo Hikawa was sitting next to Moca and staring. Totally Silent.

Moca Aoba was absolutely, definitely drunken hallucinating Sayo Hikawa. Sayo Hikawa couldn’t be there. Sayo Hikawa lived in Kyoto where she canoodled with Tsugu while Moca sat alone in a bar getting drunk as some dudes in silver helmets win the big game thirty years ago in the background. But there was no mistaking that hair, those eyes and most of all that smug self-satisfied better than you, specifically you Moca Aoba, smile.

Sayo wasn’t number one on her shit list but if absence made the heart grow fonder proximity made it turn black. Hallucination or not, this was Moca’s chance to yell, to let out a truly devastating insult that would make someone else feel as rotten to the bones as she did.

“Hey Sayo.” Moca raised her glass, pointing with her middle finger. “Fuck you.”

Perfect.

Somehow, Moca’s brilliant original wit did not reduce Sayo to the crumpled pile of self loathing and sororal angst Moca had hoped for. Very rude. She’d have to search deeper for better cutting words.

“You suck and your guitar playing is—it’s pretty good but you, personally suck. And you’re overrated and Moca-chan wants her Tsugu back. So… Nyeh.” She tried to punctuate with a flick of the tongue but the effect was more retch than raspberry and she instantly regretted giving her stomach the idea of hurling.

But if an upset stomach was the price she paid to finally wipe that sickening smirk off Sayo’s face it was worth it. Who cared—not Moca—that Sayo had never been anything but nice to her and good to Tsugumi and it was actually Moca’s fault for not being such an amazing, perfect, fantastic friend that Tsugumi had to stay and really she was just projecting—

NO!

Moca chugged her beer. This was why being smart was so STUPID. She couldn’t just hate Sayo in peace. She had to think it through and find the roots and the reasons and she couldn’t just enjoy the miserable pleasure of hating someone. She swung out the glass again, jabbing it so hard at that unflinching face that beer splashed over the edge in a wasted wave. “I hate you.”

And Sayo Hikawa laughed.

The beer swung back and forth as Moca’s arm shook in hesitation and intoxication. Did Sayo normally laugh like that? No, no this was a drunk hallucination. Unless it wasn’t a hallucination. What if she was projecting onto the nearest office lady with long hair just trying to unwind and enjoy her night? Oh no. What if—

“You know when I saw you in here I thought, ‘what a boppin’ coincidence!’ But now it’s like zazam! Ya know? It’s been a long time since someone thought I was Sayo!”

What if Moca had unloaded on the wrong Hikawa twin?

Hina Hikawa plucked Moca’s glass away with a wink and downed the last third of a beer. “Wow! You have terrible taste!” She laughed again, green eyes sparkling wickedly in the electric glow of the final touchdown. “Hey Koji! Get us two beers that don’t suck!”

The weary bartender snorted, “It’s an American themed bar, all our beers suck.”

“Hmm…” Hina clapped her hands and bounced off her barstool, “Guess we’ll have to go somewhere else then!” She tugged Moca to her feet.

There wasn’t enough space in Moca’s brain to process what was happening with any sort of eloquence. “Huh?”

“Come on Moca! I wanna know why you hate my sister!”

“I’ll get—hmm… a bloody Mary!” Hina told the jellyfish tending bar, smushing her nose against the blue glowing glass like it’d help with the sound.

“We don’t serve bloody Mary’s at night Hikawa-san,” the jellyfish responded in an even familiar tone. Hina was well liked by the jellies indeed.

Moca slid on her lazy grin and let her eyes droop down like she was suiting up for a night on the town. She sidled up alongside Hina and played the matching fool. It was so much easier to be Moca Aoba in someone else’s company.

“Woah woah~ a talking jellyfish?” Moca pressed her hands to the aquarium crudely mounted on top of the bar and leaned in almost close enough to kiss the lacy frills of the spotted jellyfish pulsing through the water. The lowlights of the bar let the bioluminescence of jellies take over, dozens floated into their cases along the walls like stars let loose from their mounts in the sky.

“Don’t touch the glass,” the jellyfish—or rather the taciturn woman tending bar behind the aquarium—scolded. “And we don’t serve bloody Mary’s at night Hikawa-san.”
“How boring. I’m really feeling tomato juice right now!”

“I can make you a red snapper.” The jellyfish offered up its fellow fish as tribute.

Hina smeared her nose along the glass, following the jellyfish along its path and ignoring the woman behind it. “Can you put celery in it?”

“No.”

“Hmm,” Hina signed her name with the tip of her nose. “How ‘bout a really crunchy straw?”

A sigh. “…Sure.”

“Boppin’! What do you want Moca?”

Moca stopped making faces at the Jellyfish and tried to remember literally any cocktail names. “Uh… Moca-chan’ll trust your taste.”

Hina laughed, dyed in bioluminescent blue, “two red snappers! Grab us a table, Moca-chan~.”

There weren’t many options ina bar barely bigger than Moca’s bedroom. Their only company was some lame-ass couple lost in their own precious little world, so Moca settled into the adjacent table and stared. It wasn’t an entertaining show. They didn’t have the decency to be an embarrassing couple, just the kind that listened to each other and sat close with goo-goo eyes. Boring.

Moca knocked her head against the back of her chair, vibrating along with a low rumbling note like the hum at the break of the sound barrier. A hidden speaker somewhere sang something like post rock into the room—just soft enough she couldn’t quite be sure she was hearing it. The ideal volume for post rock.

Hina approached with two identical cocktails. The younger Hikawa looked a lot different when she wasn’t hanging out on a rooftop taking scandalous photos of Moca’s boobs: both more and less like her twin sister than she had in high school. She’d grown her hair out—or maybe Sayo had let her grow it out—but where Sayo still wore hers more or less the same, Hina wore half of her hair flipped over her head wild and free and the other half buzzed into such a close undercut no one in the world could have shaved it but the perfect twin herself.

The longer Moca looked at her, the more drunk Moca realized she was. How did she ever manage to think Miss Priss and Prim Sayo could pull off a black bomber jacket with a red fur collar flaring out with just a loose white tee and a pair of jeans for company? It was the kind of look that winked at you from the corner and invited you stare ‘cause she was sure as hell gonna stare back. Hina’s eyes crinkled at the corners as she proved Moca’s point with a smirk. Moca’s heart skipped a little. Hina was a dangerous sort of devil.

Hina set a cocktail down its skinny tall glass. It was red, thick and smelled an awful lot like an ill conceived pizza. But it was there and theoretically free, so down the mouth hole it went. The drink had the exact consistency of a milkshake and the exact opposite taste. The first sip was slimy and sluggish down Moca’s throat. The second sip burned as spicy as a chili pepper in the eye.

Moca choked, flecks of red spew from her mouth like the flames from the weakest dragon. “Hot!”

“That’s the hot sauce!” Hina wiped Moca’s spittle from her cheek with her thumb and a smile.

One time in middle school Tomoe put chili flakes in Moca’s ramen without warning. It took a week for Moca to regain her sense of taste and two years for her to learn to trust again. Moca did not do spicy.

She winced and took a third sip. But she really wasn’t int the mood to sober up.

Hina sipped her own cocktail without consequences. “You look exactly the same.”

“No need to flatter Moca-chan~.”

“Am I?” She shrugged, no more sure than Moca if it was better or worse to change.

“Aren’t you gonna ask me what I’ve been up to?”

“Why?”

Moca looked for the answer in a jellyfish’s glow. “There’s a script to these kinds of things—surprise reunions. First you go: woah! You look so different.”

“But you don’t. You even used to wear that hoodie!” Hina flicked the zipper of Moca’s familiar black hoodie, enchanted by how gravity pulled it back down no matter how many times Hina snapped it up.

“You’re supposed to pretend Senpai~.” The old title slipped out. Moca let it hang. “Then we tell each other the highlights of our lives and leave out all the boring sad things. Moca-chan’ll only tell you the cool, sexy parts.”

“But I’ve already seen the sexy parts.”

Moca gagged on the burning liquid. “You only saw the tamest of Moca-chan’s pastimes. Moca-chan’s living it up big time, making it big on the bread market, betting high on rye. Same as always.”

“Obviously not!” Hina laughed. “If that was true you wouldn’t be out here alone!” Hina was like one of those mythical guards that always cropped up in riddles and only told the truth—whether you wanted her to or not. “What’s next?”

“We reminisce about the good ‘ol days. Insert each other into memories we weren’t there for, get sloppy drunk and sing the Haneoka school song.”

“We had a school song?”

“Miss President~ you’re supposed to know the song.”

“I let Tsugu-chan handle that stuff!” Hina swirled a red vortex in her glass with a clever smile. “She was good at the actual doing stuff part.”

“See, this is it,” Moca motioned between them. “This is reminiscing.”

“Do you like it?”

Tsugumi stands on the rooftop with hands fisted in her skirt and her eyes cast so far beyond Moca.

“No.” Moca sipped her drink again. A few more sips and she might even like it.

“Yeah, it’s pretty lame to just focus on the past. So much more zappin’ livin’ in the future!”

“How do I get to be you?”

Hina frowned with half her mouth, the other still cocked in a smile. “Why do you want to be me?”

“Moca-chan’s tried out being Moca-chan for twenty one years and she’d like to swap now.” The jellyfish pulsed in their glass cages, almost synchronized the Moca’s sigh.

Without warning, the jellyfish were replaced by Hina’s green-gold eyes glowing in the lowlight. “What comes next in the reunion script?”
“We promise to do this again soon knowing full well we won’t see each other until the next time the universe decides to throw us together.”

Hina set down her glass—empty. “Why wait? There are like two hundred bars in Golden Gai.” She shrugged as she stood, “we can probably hit like half of them tonight.” It was silly, impossible, and a totally unappealing prospect.

“Let’s do it.” Moca swallowed the last of her fire beverage—it sizzled all the way down.

Moca had no idea if there really were two hundred bars in Golden Gai; she lost count after number eleven. Somewhere in Hina’s head was a platonic (Hinaonic?) ideal of a bar that she had inscribed so perfectly into her brain folds that Moca’s accidental bar crawl tour guide knew whether or not she wanted to linger in a location with only half a foot in the doorway.

On the Hina Hikawa scale of bar appropriateness there was Zappin’ on one end and Boppin’ on the other (or maybe they were reversed, Moca was too many drinks in for proper statistical analysis) and somewhere betwixt lie the perfect place to drink. The sci-fi bar they stopped in with the plastic UFO over the door and the inflatable alien at the counter was “not zappin’ enough”, the spot done up like a dragon’s den had too much “boppity bop” for Hina’s liking and just when Moca thought she was getting a handle on that special Hina language the old student council president declared the neon hippie flare of a psychedelic styled lounge “Scooby Doobie to the max”, finished off some stoner’s rum and coke, and scurried away. There was no understanding some Hikawas.

But at least Moca understood now how Tsugumi had been so easily swept up by Hina in high school. Hina-senpai wants this, Hina-senpai needs that. Himari’d been so shocked when Tsugumi started dating Sayo because she SWORE Hina and Tsugumi were destined to be. But Himari wasn’t particularly good at picking out true love, was she? She was sure Ran felt the same way as Moca. If she’d never pushed then Moca never would have confessed and—

“Kanpai senpai!” Moca clinked their vodka shots before melting down into the rotating heart shaped bar. Maybe it was just the booze spinning Moca around. “Hehe~ Moca-chan’s a poet.”

Moca didn’t have to think, not when Hina was there to shove another free drink in her hand:vibrant cocktails and acid shots. Moca’d lost count of those too. Every time the buzz started to dim there was something between her fingers to refresh it. That was the Hina Hikawa bar crawl methodology, Moca decided, you just keep going and going and your thoughts can’t catch up. Not that she was positive Hina had thoughts. It’d be like trying to read a cat’s mind—not that they didn’t think but if you could understand you’d surely soon wish you couldn’t.

Would it be easier or harder to live if Moca could read people’s minds and know just how little they thought of her? Or rather, how little they thought about her. Did anyone even care? Did Moca even exist when she wasn’t being looked at? If everyone was gone what was left to—

“Aye! Sláinte!” Hina shouted in the best/worst Irish accent Moca had ever heard with the flat cap she’d stolen from the bartender tugged down around her undercut and a pint of Guinness held high in the air.

Beers were always welcome. Moca liked this one: a stout, it was called. Good word, sturdy word. Word she could hold onto as Hina steered her out of the bar and down the street, arm clamped Moca’s shoulders. Hina was more holding her up than leading her around but that was a concern for another Moca, or maybe for Hina. Could Hina be concerned?

“No sleeping Moca-chan.” Hina jostled Moca upright.

Moca hadn’t even noticed she was falling asleep on her feet. But now that the idea was in her head it sounded so lovely, so very very lovely and warm and cozy and—

She came back to the world sitting on another barstool in another place she didn’t know, staring at another face she didn’t recognize.

There was an abyss calling for Moca. It beckoned her through the yellowed pearly gates with damp darkness and into the cavern beyond and she probably would have tried to crawl into it like wayward chunk of spinach if the barrel chested bartender didn’t flick her back off the bar and into her seat with the wry stare of a man who had seen much worse. She wondered briefly if his terrible teeth were part of the bar’s theming too.

Moca unstuck her hands from the laminate bar just as two glasses clucked down, covering Joey Ramone’s face on one side and the Queen of England’s on the other. It was a punk bar alright, Moca knew punk—though Himari’s heart shaped glasses crushed their chances at punk rock glory. The whole bar was done up in a garish orange-red with more Union Jacks than had ever hung in the United Kingdom. Any space the owner could find could find—walls, floors, bar, even the ceiling—was covered in vinyls and covers and inserts in the sort of condition that would make a collector sob in the doorway.

“This’ll bring you right back to zappin’. Scout’s honor!” Hina bounced in anticipation beside her. It wasn’t that Hina didn’t sit still, it was that Hina didn’t have a still to sit. The longer they drank together, the more Moca envied her in the same idle way one envied fictional characters.

The bartender cracked open a Red Bull and began to pour. Why did Moca keep letting Hina choose the drinks? A quick glance at the prices on the handwritten menu reminded Moca exactly why. If Hina paid, Hina picked. Beggars and choosers after all. Their glasses filled with a shade of yellow Moca never really thought about putting in her body. Two shot glasses followed. The bartender pulled out a smooth green bottle adorned with a holy stag—full antlers and a cross like Jesus’ own fursona—and a name like a mecha: Jägermeister. The shots were poured.

Hina snatched up her glass and her shot and held them up to the light like the villain in a kids movie finally getting her hands on a priceless magic gem. It didn’t help the drinks look better. Then lickity split, she dropped the Jägermeister in the Red Bull. Boom. Or rather: splish. A Jägerbomb was born.

Moca copied, wincing at the splash of noxious energy elixir over the rim. The shot hung in the energy drink, some curse of science keeping it buoyant. Auburn liquid viewed through yellow was hardly attractive. There was only one comparison in Moca’s mind:

Blood and piss.

What a fun thing to drink. She wondered if she could refuse but Hina was already done with her own and waiting and it’d just be rude to say no at that point.

It was as awful as it looked. Awfuller. First the Red Bull hit. Like sucking on a battery and chasing it with gasoline. And then there was the licorice. The green glass bottle proudly declared it featured 56 different herbs but licorice was the culinary equivalent of the color black, no matter how you mixed it, it was always going to be stronger. Combined together there were no words to describe the flavor, just the painful knowledge that it would be so, so much worse if she stopped drinking.

Moca gagged as she slammed down the glass, the shot glass jingling a circuit around the inside. Disgusting, terrible, an eldritch blast to the stomach and yet… somehow she was grateful. Just a little bit. “Hina-senpai~ you’re gonna kill poor little Moca-chan with drinks like that.”

Hina cackled. The more Moca drank the nicer it sounded—a siren’s song for psychos. “Don’t ‘cha just wanna try something terrible sometimes? Something that makes you think ‘huh! That sure does exist!’ Like lutefisk or men!”

It clicked. “It’s like a limited edition bread, just for the season. It’s not about if it’s good, it’s about having it.”

“Bazamo!” Hina slapped her hands against the bared torsos of skeletal British men on the counter. “The pain’s the fun!” She smacked Moca on the back in a maybe friendly manner. “Now tell me why you hate my sister!”

“Right now?” There weren’t many bad ideas she wouldn’t follow through on but explaining her complex feelings on Sayo Hikawa to her adoring younger sister felt dangerous in a way she didn’t want to explore. “Nah.”

“Booooooo. BOO. Yo, Ando!” Hina waved to the bartender. “Boo her.”

He paused wiping down a glance to look directly into Moca’s dull eyes with his own. “Boo.”

Moca raised her hands in a weary surrender. The horrid mixture of uppers and downers in her stomach was starting to kick together. Moca’s eyes were wide but her brain was a cloud floating just out of reach. “Actually.” This was so exciting. Moca had no idea where her mouth was going with this, “Moca-chan hates you more.”

“Yes!” Hina pumped her fist. This was so much more exciting to her than Moca hating Sayo, “What’d I do?”

The thought formed as she spoke. “You told Kaoru that Moca-chan slept with Chisato and then she tried to kill me—her!” She looked to the bartender for confirmation. “Right?”

He shrugged.

It was a good thing Hina had better teeth than the patron saints of this bar because Moca could see every single one as Hina grinned. “Boppin’,” she whispered reverently. “Did it work?”

“Oh…” Moca had to think that one through. “No. She’s very bad at murder.”

“Figures Kaoru-kun would be bad at that. Still, good for you two.”

“But senpai~,” Moca sang sweetly with acid on her breath, “We didn’t.”

“Eh? Why not? You looked like you were gonna you know—” Hina crudely scissored her fingers together—“Snip snip.”

Moca had long agonized over her socially constructed and yet horribly real virginity but for the first time she was grateful, if only because she had no idea what Hina was talking about. She concocted the best excuse her drunk mind could find. “The living room just isn’t where Moca-chan likes to conduct her intimate affairs.”

“So like… you do it in the bathroom?”

Moca stared into the depths of her empty glass as she tried not to drown in the depths of her own ignorance. Did people normally have sex in the bathroom? Was that one of the great secrets of adulthood Moca had been denied? “W-well Moca-chan saves intimate activities for an intimate space.”

“Like the bathroom!”

“Senpai, what about the bedroom?”

“Hmm, but the bathroom’s way more intimate. Think about it, you’re totally exposed in there!”

Moca’s head fell to the countertop. “It doesn’t really matter. We didn’t have sex in any room.”

“You missed out.” Hina looked almost offended. “Chisato’s great! I rank her… eleven.”

“Out of how many?”

“Lost count!” She shrugged cheerfully, “There are so many interesting people in the world.”

So many interesting people for Hina to sleep with. Just more proof that Hina was actually thought up in a writer’s room for broadcast on Saturday nights in thirty minute chunks. “So you’re just this world roaming Lothario now?”

“Pretty much. I crash in Kyoto sometimes, or at Maya-chan’s place but mostly I just…” Hina swirled her empty glass, watching the shot glass roll higher and higher up the sides until she stopped and let it clatter back down, “…go.”

“Go where?” Moca longed for something to drink. It didn’t even have to be alcoholic, just something to do with her hands.

“Wherever I want. Europe, the States, spent a quick weekywoo in the Amazon. Sometimes just other places in Japan. You should watch my vlogs!”

“But why?”

Hina stopped moving. She stared at Moca, blinking slowly like a relaxed cat or maybe a hungry tiger, before finally answering, “Because that’s what I do. Why are you still here?”

Did ‘here’ mean the bar, the city, the country, or the world? Maybe it didn’t matter since the answer would be the same.

“Because that’s what Moca-chan does.”

Moca was probably supposed to learn something valuable from all this, but it just struck her as unfair that she was stuck as Moca Aoba when there were Hinas running around the world having ranked competitive sex.

“Hey.” Bright green eyes invaded Moca’s personal space again.

Moca stumbled back, almost tumbling off her barstool.

Hina didn’t pull back, “you never told me why you hate Sis.”

She didn’t. The hate slipped out her fingers—another name smudged off Moca’s shit list. Hanging out with Hina turned all the hate Moca held for Sayo into understanding. Was this what it felt like to be Moca’s friend? Was this how Afterglow felt watching her effortlessly pick up guitar, ace school, and never gain a pound while they all struggled? They didn’t know it was all fake. That there were real geniuses in the world like Hina and Moca only ever played pretend. Of course they left her. Moca would have left someone so insufferable too.

Why was she here?

“You look like Chisato right now.” Hina said, regarding Moca with a sort of knowing sadness. She slapped the bar, smacking Billie Joe Armstrong in the head. “That’s it! I know where to go!”

The world was so much smaller than Moca anticipated behind the “regular’s only” sign tacked to the door. Maybe it was just Moca’s last experience with an exclusive club coloring her expectations but there wasn’t any of the snobbery she assumed she’d find when Hina led her to the otherwise unassuming door. It was just another small bar withno tables, a few empty stools and a man behind the counter wiping down his glasses. And then Hina. And then Moca.

They took two empty seats, dodging debris sprayed from the swaying chandler over the bar hinting some lost ambition. There was an age to everything in the space. The cobwebbed bottles on the shelves, the worn wood under Moca’s fingers, the grimy mirror with growing black spots mounted across from them, even the old man running the place seemed ready to fall to dust.

“This is Chisato’s favorite bar.”

Moca blinked slowly, unsure the inhumane amounts of liquor that had replaced all other fluid in her body was allowing her to hear correctly. “Chisato’s?”

Hina nodded.

No, no that—that couldn’t be right. Moca looked around for some sign of life, for proof that someone so abstract could frequent this very real place. She struggled to muster up the hate she’d felt earlier. She pictured Chisato tucked in the corner of the bar, hand wrapped around a glass. Elbow bent and hovering just above the bar, never on the bar, as she laughed at something clever Moca said. Her long blonde hair—not golden, too real in Moca’s memory for golden— flipping over her shoulder as she let out that real laugh Moca pried out of her.

Hina raised two fingers. “Two Absinthes. Bohemian style.”

The bartender looked from Hina to Moca without judgement, then turned and pulled a bright green bottle from the top shelf. He wiped the glass down with a rag until all the dust and cobwebs that had long settled were gone and the bottle shone in the little light the bar had.

“110 proof,” The bartender said, holding the bottle out for Hina’s approval.

“That’s strong right?” Moca asked as nervously as the liquid courage coursing through her veins would allow.

Hina laughed in response and nodded to the bottle. “Perfect nightcap.”

The bartender turned away and fetched his tools. First, he set down an unfamiliar crystal glass with a deep bulbous reservoir at the bottom on the worn wood of the bar. Carefully, he plucked out a flat piece of silverware like a large slotted knife with dulled edges and placed it over the rim of the glass so the slots led down below. On top of the slots he placed a single sugar cube, perfect until a venom green liquid poured over it in a disfiguring drizzle. The reservoir in the glass filled with foggy noxious liquid.The bartender lit the sugar cube on fire with the casual confidence of someone who very regularly lit alcohol on fire and hadn’t burned down his bar yet.

The blue flame bubbled the surface of the sugar cube until it wasn’t a sugar cube at all. It was a former sugar cube, a pile of all the bits that used to form a thing melted down and falling down the holes to the poison below. It burned and it burned but the sugar fell before it caramelized—before it could become something else. Then it all washed away in a rush of water from above.

The bartender gave the drink a quick stir before pushing it to Moca. “Enjoy.”

Moca pulled out her phone one last time. No messages. She sighed—no eleventh hour call from the governor. It didn’t matter if Moca wanted to drink the thing or not. She was going to drink it. It was as predetermined as every other part of the twenty one years leading there. It was Tomoe forgetting her. It was Tsugumi leaving her. It was every time Himari was wrong. It was Ran never loving her. This was exactly where Moca was always going to be and all she could do was send one last text before she faced her destiny at the bottom of a green glass.

“You don’t want to be Moca, right?” The green devil grinned beside her. “You won’t be anyone after this.”

She didn’t hate Sayo. She couldn’t bear to hate Tsugumi. Or Himari. Or Tomoe. Or Ran. She couldn’t even manage to hate Chisato Shirasagi.

Moca stared into the absinthe and saw only her own face dyed in green. One option left. The hate needed somewhere to go.

Inside it went.

Shit. Siht. Stih. If Moca was drunk before, the absinthe had slapped her around the face and shouted ‘I’ll show you drunk!’ Or maybe that was Hina. It was very easy to mix the two up when Moca’s brain was a liquid lump sloshing around between her ears.

Where was that little green fairy? They’d finished their drinks and left the bar and now… no Hina. Just a lot of abstract walls shifting around Moca. Or was Moca shifting around the walls? Maybe neither of them were moving. Maybe she was just so drunk she could finally feel the tilt of the world, maybe, if she was very lucky, the world was finally trying to fling her off!

Moca stumbled against a corner—fingers around a brick, mortar under her nails. Was she still in Golden Gai? Eeeeeehhhhhh whatever. Who cared? Not Moca! Not about anything, anyone—that was the green fairy’s gift a big “fuck you” to everything and everyone. They’d forgotten Moca, she could forget them.

Moca was alone in the world and why the FUCK not?! What was the point of other people? Why’d she want ‘em so much? Stupid other people always having other lives. Stupid Tsugu, Stupid Tomoe, Stupid Himari, Stupid Stupid STUPID Ran. And then there was the master of moron manor, the grande dame of dumb: Moca Aoba! The crowd went wild. Moca shook every hand reaching out to greet her in adulation—exactly none.

But that was to be expected! There was no one. No people. No friends. Just Moca Aoba and maybe a little more of that green elixir if she could find the way back to the bar. Almost tasty as bread if she lied to herself.

Her foot caught on something—a red plastic milk crate minding its own business on the side of the street. A proper throne for an improper king! Moca collapsed onto the box like a puppet controlled by… someone who was real shit at puppetry.

Cuh-CRACK!

And then her throne gave out with an awful plastic snap. Appropriate.

The sound of Hina’s laughter floated to her ears from… somewhere. Everywhere? Moca understood, she was hilarious after all. Everything was hilarious. Here she was lying on the ground—in the gutter—with her arms spread out and plastic shards probably stuck in her butt and what was the point of doing anything else? At least she finally had a kingdom of her own. Better to rule in the gutter than serve in… uh… not a gutter! Thinking was hard.

“Fuck thinking!”

“FUCK thinking!” Hina agreed somewhere to the left. Or to the right. Directions were stupid too. No one needed to know where Moca was—Moca didn’t! She lived here now, trapped in Golden Gai. She’d visit the other hundred bars tomorrow (later today?) and just keep going and going until she joined the ranks of the liquid immortals.

The back of Moca’s head ached against the ground in an abstraction of pain. It’d hurt later, whenever later was. For now, she could only look upwards past all the buildings to the sky above. There were no stars in the light-sick sky. It was like looking up from the bottom of a great deep hole, hoping the foggy light from above would pour down and lift you up. But you could never, ever reach it on your own. How could anyone hope to climb out of a hole they dug?

And yet suddenly, a bit of light cut through all that hazy nothing and fell down to earth, hanging in brilliant strands in the air about Moca. An inverted Rapunzel lowering her golden hair into a well for the prince to climb with. But Moca wasn’t a prince and she was a king only as long as she stayed down below in the places no one wanted to linger.

But the midnight queen didn’t care for sovereignty. With a voice so strong Moca wondered if it could carry her home, the blonde invader ordered:

“Get up Moca Aoba.”

Chapter Text

It was funny how two innocuous words could come together to create something that filled Chisato with such a sense of bored dread. On their own cocktails and parties both served an entertaining purpose but together they signified long nights at private clubs rented out by men in boring suits for other men in boring suits and the young women forced to entertain their fantasies of being clever and interesting for anything other than their money. The invited actresses were expected to serve as both entertainment and entrée—put on display to titter and tee hee on command as their agents wheeled and dealed around them to get roles in films they didn’t want and spots on shows they couldn’t stand. It was the most annoying sort of unpaid labor: the sort one had to pretend was fun.

Chisato’s attention was in constant demand, though she very rarely gave it in full. She’d long memorized the script for any encounter with a producer entranced the sound of their own voice. A laugh, a flip of the hair, an astonished ‘really?’ when appropriate, a few bats of the eye, and a final ‘I’ll have to remember that’ before flitting off to repeat it all with someone else were tricks enough to make anyone think Chisato found them as fascinating as they had convinced themself they were. She rewarded herself for good behavior from time to time with a quick glimpse at her phone, hoping for the occasional reminder that there were people Chisato actually cared for in the world.

The phone had been particularly active that night though not from anyone she had expected. There was the worried text from Kanon she’d put off answering for days but otherwise her phone burst with drunken selfies in familiar bars from Hina with a guest star Chisato hadn’t expected. Chisato didn’t realize Moca barrage of misspelled texts revealing her frankly understandable distaste for Chisato were prologue to an adventure with Hina Hikawa. Every picture Hina sent with Moca trying to lie with a smile in the background hurt like a paper cut—the injury was small but impossible to ignore.

Eventually she stopped checking. Curiosity had never been a weakness of Chisato’s, she’d learned so early how awful the world was that looking for further evidence seemed the epitome of self-loathing. Still, when Chisato’s phone buzzed once more next to midnight she had no choice but to look. There was no such thing as a boring midnight text message. She doubted Moca Aoba would be the first exception.

>Please come

Chisato made her excuses and left at once.

Walking into Golden Gai was like stepping into a world Chisato was tragically too young to ever have known. There were no distinguished periods in the greater district of Kabukicho’s history but surely there had been one with a little more dignity than the tourist traps and ‘Robot Restaurants’ that dominated the neighborhood now. Golden Gai was Kabukicho’s last bastion against blasé modernity. The Yakuza and Drag Queens—somehow equal in societal infamy— that once marked the area had mostly fled, but the buildings remained and the buildings remembered a time before phones turned the populous into paparazzi, when a person could still disappear for the night without the world knowing their exact going ons by the morning. It was a selfish longing. There was never an easy time to be a woman like Chisato but she certainly lived in an easier one. And yet, she still longed for a moment of anonymity.

Chisato understood the irony of feeling concern over paparazzi after everything she’d tried to do over the last month, but it was impossible to unlearn a lifetime of instincts so quickly. She wanted to be left alone, except when she didn’t and she refused to explore the contradiction. The actress reserved the right to contradict herself. That’s why she strode through squeezed alleys of Golden Gai in a cocktail dress and high heels in the middle of the night to answer a call from a woman who was not and could never be her friend. Because Chisato Shirasagi was a complicated woman, no matter how simply others wanted to draw her. At least there was no photography allowed in Golden Gai.

Moca wasn’t hard to find. She’d turned herself into a traffic stop. The alleys of Golden Gai were fortuitously too narrow for cars but they were just about wide enough for one whole Moca Aoba to spread across the width. At least the regulars of Golden Gai were numb enough to drunken foolishness to know to just step around the drunken student lounging in the gutter. Though perhaps that was a fault.

Chisato felt such a mix of pained emotions she couldn’t possibly begin to unpack them, but the feeling she chose to let bubble to the top of the noxious cocktail was commanding annoyance. With severity in her voice, Chisato ordered, “Get up Moca Aoba.”

“No!” Moca raised her head, voice somehow rising and falling on the monosyllable. Her sloppy grin crested over her chest like a half harvest moon rising. “Moca-chan is the Gutter King!” She slurred before slumping back on the ground.

The Gutter King’s court was hardly large enough to fit its liege. She had crashed off her milk crate throne—the red plastic splinters splayed around her head in a pauper’s crown—to wallow amongst the litter and muck that lined the street. The king hardly noticed her predicament, legs flailing in slow motion with all the concern and immediacy of an overturned tortoise.

A familiar laugh drifted from behind the fallen sovereign. Chisato knew it well from the three years she’d spent listening to it every day and the many, many nightmares it still plagued her in. The actress looked over her shoulder. Hina leaned against a bar lit up by the humming neon boasting ‘Area 69’ in toxic green. To an amateur in Hinaese, she appeared to be trying to play things cool but Chisato had spent enough late nights in this very neighborhood to recognize when Hina Hikawa was out of her mind intoxicated.

“Hina, what did you give her?”

Hina shrugged with the same charming half-smirk that had lured Chisato into her bed more than once. She was an infuriatingly attractive person and for some reason one of Chisato’s closest friends. Just her luck.

“Hina.”

“Lots of stuff, Moca-chan’s not picky like you.” Hina somehow made a drunken stumble look stylish as she slunk towards Chisato and Moca. “Little bop of Absinthe last.”

“Absinthe?” Chisato had partaken in absinthe exactly once. It convinced her to end her first break up with a sloppy reunion. “What has Moca Aoba done to deserve such punishment?”

“Nothing! We’re buddies~.” Hina squatted down behind Moca, scooping her up by the armpits and hoisting her slightly. Moca’s arms dangled. “See!”

“Buddies~,” Moca crowed as her head jauntily bounced from side to side. Chisato could almost hear her brain rattling.

“I can’t decide whether I should call my car or an ambulance.” Chisato sighed. She crouched down, careful to keep her dress decent and her hands free of the ground.

Moca’s eyes narrowed. She hissed as well as she could, which was to say very poorly and with a lot of spit. “This is an… invasion.”

“An invasion,” Chisato repeated slowly.

“An act of war,” she shrugged a little too long, dozing for microseconds as her head got comfortable on her shoulder before snorting herself back awake. “A foreign ruler has entered the Gutter Kingdom!”

“This seems highly unjust. Why is Hina permitted in your kingdom and I am not? I hardly believe she’s a citizen.” Chisato utilized her many years of reciting truly abysmal scripts with the utmost sincerity to keep her lips from twitching as they so longed to do.

“She’s a visiting digmiberry. Dignidairy?” Moca struggled. “Digimi—visitor.”

“I have diplomatic immunity!” Hina waved Moca’s hand for her.

Chisato huffed in amusement.“And who does that make me?”

“Enemy queen from the… Kingdom of… Bougie, stealin’ secrets.”

“Not the worst role I’ve been cast in.” She tapped Moca’s cheek with the tips of her fingers. No response. “What if I’m an olive branch, sent so we can unite our kingdoms in marriage?”

Moca regarded her hypothetical bride with wary suspicion before shaking her head. “It would never work out, I’m too good for you.”

Chisato had to chuckle at that, pulling back her hand. “Probably.”

Moca slumped a little as Hina let go of her arms, leaving Moca to Chisato alone.

“Look at me, Gutter King.”

Her attention turned to Chisato, eyes unfocused but trying their best to find Chisato’s face until the moment they did. At that moment, Moca’s drunken smile sunk off her face, replaced with lost confusion. “Why are…” Moca’s hands wriggled around in the air as she squinted and looked for the end of her question in the gravel. “…you?”

“Getting deep tonight aren’t we?” Chisato sighed and grabbed Moca by the chin, forcing her drunken gaze to meet Chisato’s eyes.

Moca pushed away her hand, rejecting her with a drunken grace reminiscent of a toddler throwing her peas to the ground. “You don’t have to be here.”

The message in her pocket said differently. “You asked me to come so I came, and now I’m telling you,” Chisato stood up, towering over someone for once in her life and repeated herself—each syllable striking like the bullets from a six round revolver. “Get up, Moca Aoba.”

There was a scraping sound on the pavement as Moca rocked her heels back and forth on the ground, swishing the grime at her feet in little crescents. Then, quite sloppily and with the sort of effort and concentration Chisato suspected Moca gave absolutely nothing in her sober life, Moca stood up. And then Moca swayed and came dangerously close to toppling down.

Chisato lunged and just barely caught Moca around the waist before her legs twisted sky high and she fell back to the ground. As if she were trying out a new grappling technique, Chisato grabbed Moca’s upper arm, stopping her from flailing out any further. Instead of flinging Moca across the alley, Chisato dragged Moca’s arm around her shoulders, holding tight to Moca’s forearm as if it were the strap of a purse in a suspicious neighborhood. When she was certain Moca wasn’t about to slide away, Chisato turned the side of her head to Hina. “Thank you for your assistance.”

Hina rolled to her feet one vertebrae at a time. She hopped a little in place, testing both feet before winking. “Anytime!”

The world collapsed around Chisato’s shoulders but it was so much lighter than she expected. It bothered Chisato how easy Moca’s full weight was to bear. It seemed a person’s life should be heavier than Moca’s mass. With curious affectionate impulse, Chisato squeezed the hand flung over her chest. “Hina, I’ll call you a cab, who are you staying with?”

“Bzzt,” Chisato’s fellow former idol crossed her arms in an X as they had on so many silly little live streams in their past life. Those days seemed even further away on nights like this.

“Hina, you’re drunk.” Slowly, Chisato began to maneuver down the side street with Moca around her neck. Moca wasn’t totally useless. Her feet barely shuffled alongside Chisato’s but she was docile enough to try to obey.

“Bingo bango bongo,” Hina snapped her fingers. “So I don’t need your help. Imma bop out of here.”

Moca nuzzled Chisato’s neck as if she were trying to distract her from Hina’s nonsense. “You’re so pretty, why are you so pretty?”

“Years of watching very talented makeup artists.” Chisato nudged Moca’s head away with her own. “Where. Are. You. Staying?”

“How dare they,” Moca whispered in reverent disbelief.

Hina’s eyes sparkled as she danced around Chisato with entirely more grace than Hina deserved. “Hmm~ Maybe Aya-chan’s place tonight?

“Does Aya-chan know you’re coming by?” Chisato grunted at Hina, shuffling Moca around her shoulders. They were a slow moving group and each

“Nope! But I have her key~.” Said key jangled between Hina’s fingers. “Can’t stop me!”

“I’ll take you.”

“No way, we’re in the opposite direction.”

Chisato stopped marching forward. “Hina.”

“Hina,” Hina giggled as she mockingly imitated Chisato’s low warning tone. “You gotta focus on your own problems.”

“This isn’t my problem.”

Hina stopped and spun around, lowering her face so their eyes were even. “Then why are you here?”

“I—” Chisato cut herself off, finding herself suddenly on stage with the wrong script.

“I better get going!” Hina snapped upright with no regard for the bomb she’d just dropped on Chisato. “Aya’s bed must be cold without me!”

“Hina wait!” Chisato called after her but Hina was Hina and Hina was already vanished into the night leaving Chisato with her problem lolling around on her shoulder. They trudged on, heels biting into Chisato’s ankles with every step.

The first time she’d worn heels—long enough ago that Chisato couldn’t quite remember the exact when—Chisato almost immediately twisted her ankle. Since then, whenever then was, she’d reached the point where the extra six centimeters may as well have been grafted on her foot for how naturally she could walk with them. However, no amount of poise practice could prepare her for dragging along another woman while balancing her feet on two sharp points. With a grunt that Moca was blessedly oblivious to, Chisato kicked off her shoes and looped the straps through the hand around Moca’s waist.

It was an odd sensation, the feeling of her feet on the bare ground with only the sheer lining of her pantyhose to protect them. It felt so wrong to be barefoot on the street like this, as if she were nude on the sidewalk. Almost as odd as holding Moca with such unintended intimacy. But wherever Moca was, it wasn’t here.

Chisato sighed in relief as the entrance to Golden Gai entered her view. Her waiting car hummed just beyond. “Come on Aoba. We’re almost there.”

“Ho ho~.” Moca’s lyrical laugh tickled Chisato’s ear with hot air. Chisato jerked away on instinct. “Careful being so nice, you’ll make Moca-chan fall for you.”

“Oh how terrible that would be, thank you for the warning.” Chisato was grateful for some drunken flirting. At least she knew how to react to it.

Moca cocked her head up and asked with wide and almost somber eyes, “Really?”

“No, but I don’t think you want to go falling for someone you hate so much.”

She collapsed back onto Chisato and grew quiet. Very softly, she mumbled into Chisato’s bare shoulder. “Don’t hate you.” 

Chisato politely pretended not to hear. It’d be much easier if Moca hated her. She deserved a little hatred after everything she’d put her through. For now star of stage and screen, Chisato Shirasagi could only bear their mutual burdens out of the smoky dream of Golden Gai.

It wasn’t difficult to get Moca into the car. She’d hit the stage of intoxication where she’d do just about anything anyone with any sense of good will would tell her—probably what anyone with bad will said too. Fortunately for the errant drunkard, Chisato was there. Even if she was still wondering why exactly she was asked. As she pushed Moca into the passenger’s seat, she found she was grateful for once that she was a slender young blonde woman. At least, no one with prying eyes would think her a kidnapper.

“We’re going home,” Chisato called out to the plastic division in the center of the car, keeping driver from passenger. She paused. For the first time, it occurred to her that the midnight excursion was perhaps out of her driver’s purview. “Thank you for your help.”

The driver tipped his hat with a knowing smile to the rearview mirror before rolling the plastic divider up. She’d make sure he was compensated for his extraordinary service.

Chisato looked back to Moca, already making herself comfortable against the window as the car’s engine began to hum. She’d sleep it all off, Chisato assured herself. They’d get to Chisato’s apartment and she’d set Moca on the couch and tomorrow Moca would grumble about back pain and her hangover and then… and then what? When she left Moca’s apartment—one long week ago—this… them was supposed to end. Chisato came in, knowingly overstepped boundaries for the good of all involved parties and planned to be cast out from Moca’s life forever. The barrage of misspelled hate from earlier in the evening should have been proof enough that Chisato assumed correctly.

But then Moca asked her to come.

There were so many other people to ask. So many good people. But here they were again. Even if Chisato wasn’t certain why.

Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.

The street lights ran orange-black orange-black over Moca’s hair as her head rhythmically hit the window—light enough not to notice, strong enough to bruise later. It was a shame to let such a good brain hurt itself.

Chisato took Moca by the shoulders and moved her slightly enough to be but a suggestion at a more upright position. Moca’s subconscious took the idea further than she intended. Her head fell to Chisato’s shoulder, a little drool falling from her open mouth to Chisato’s exposed skin. Occupational Hazard.

It seemed prudent to move Moca again, but then with a slight sigh she tucked against Chisato in a subconscious snuggle and the actress found she didn’t have the heart for it. Her left hand was trapped at her side but… it wasn’t a long drive home anyway. She could afford to loan the arm to Moca for a moment. In exchange, she indulged in the sensation of Moca’s soft hair against her cheek.

With her free hand, Chisato pulled out her phone and thumbed through her texts. Chisato tried to answer texts as quickly and politely as possible, even when she wasn’t interested in a conversation. Occasionally, she would answer texts she truly dreaded late at night. It eliminated the uncomfortable, nervous waiting and very rarely did anyone want to pick up a conversation after an entire night had passed. But sometimes, Chisato found herself staring very hard at an unanswered message from someone she wanted to talk to very much.

>How are you?

Oh Kanon. Chisato had opened and closed her phone to try to respond to that little question so many times over the past few days that she did it on instinct alone now whenever the phone was in her hand. It wasn’t supposed to be a hard question. Chisato had lied to so many people so many times that her phone auto-suggested ‘fine’ as soon as she typed ‘I’m’. But once again, Chisato shut off the screen without answering.

“So sad~ Kanon-san’s left dangling~.”

“Moca!” Chisato jerked away from the cuddly drunk, leaving Moca’s seatbelt to catch her with a grunt before she crumpled onto the car floor. “You were awake?”

“Nope,” Moca yawned, sleepy tears growing in the corners of her eyes . “Talk to Kanon-san~.”

“That’s not particularly your concern.”

Moca swayed back and forth in her seat, “Kanon-san always seemed suuuper nice.” She reconsidered, “At least Tsugu liked her. Tsugu’s got the beeest taste in everything! ‘Cept women. Did you know I hate Sayo? Well not hate hate. Just hate.”

There was a lot going on there and Chisato wasn’t sure how much was meant for her to hear. She chose to comment on the obvious, “Yes, Kanon-chan is wonderful.”

“But you can’t tell her your secrets~.” Moca’s words slopped around her mouth until they poured out in a musical butchering of language. It would be a little endearing if she wasn’t trying to give Chisato a drunken 3^rd degree.

“That’s not—” Chisato clicked her tongue. Moca wasn’t exactly a subtle drunk. It was obvious she was trying to get Chisato to open up and yet… “Kanon cares very much about me, but she has other friends to consider.”

“Like Kaoru-san.” Moca slapped a hand over her mouth. “Shit.”

She chuckled with tired resignation, “It’s alright. It’s just a name.” A name that squeezed at her heart but one she could hear without falling apart. It really was a different hurt now.

Moca’s mouth remained sealed.

There really wasn’t a use to playing games around Moca that weren’t about Moca. Even drunk she was too clever to be dissuaded. “Yes. You’re right. It is simply—I suppose it’s not simply anything. It is what it is.”

“You don’t want to know who she’ll choose, huh?”

Somehow the complete lack of tact made the truth hurt less. Chisato held herself back from laughing and simply stared at the odd little person sitting in her car. “Probably.”

“Sometimes it’s better not to know. Moca-chan gets it,” she held out her right hand, five fingers outstretched. “Tomoe and Himari chose each other—” she folded down her pinky and ring fingers— “Tsugumi chose Sayo—” down went the middle finger—“And Ran… Ran chose Ran—” and finally she closed her hand, only the thumb jutting out from her fist in a wiggling thumbs up. “But no one chose Moca-chan.”

Chisato clutched her phone to her chest. “Moca… where are your friends? Why didn’t they come get you?”

“They don’t know,” Her eyes closed like the lids were too heavy to keep open any longer. “They didn’t ask so Moca-chan didn’t tell.”

Moca paused for a minute, waiting for a response Chisato couldn’t find, then continued. “Ya know. I think you’re the strongest person I’ve ever met. You had someone choose you and you were able to say no. I couldn’t do that.” She clasped her hands together, eyes still shut. “I’m so pathetic if anyone ever fell in love with me, that’d be it. I’d follow them to the end of time.”

“I don’t know that I’m strong.” Chisato reached for Moca’s hands.

Moca shoved her hand out of the way without malice. A foul look darkened her face, screwed up in a squint. She let out a long groan. “Moca-chan’s gonna be sick.”

“Absolutely not.” Chisato jumped to inaction, helpless to do anything but shout her disapproval. “Moca Aoba do not DARE vomit in this car.”

“Baaaaag?”

“Hold. It. In!”

To Moca’s credit, she did not throw up in Chisato’s car. Whether by strength of will or strength of abdominal muscles, she managed not to vomit in the lobby, or the elevator, or the hallway to Chisato’s apartment either. Though Chisato did watch Moca’s tepid expression the entire crawl over, her arm around Moca’s waist and Moca’s arm around her shoulders as if they were a pair of buddy soldiers in a war movie—like anything other than a pair of lovers returning from a night out. At least, Chisato’s grimace helped the former image and not the latter.

Counterintuitively, the more Moca sobered up the harder she was to navigate. Wherever Moca was trying to go, she was hardly going to reach it stumbling into the wall. Chisato navigated her over the apartment’s threshold, dragging her away from the coatrack she seemed desperate to collide with.

Once they were inside, Chisato felt free to release Moca. Like a new puppy brought home for the first time, Moca wobbled through the foyer. She touched just about everything on the walls—all of Chisato’s coats and accolades and paintings of various foreign birds. The sorts of things one was supposed to have in their entrance to seem respectable. It was almost a pity, Chisato thought, that Moca couldn’t manage to knock any of them down.

Moca stopped when she entered the living room. She looked around the room with a sort of curious surprise, as if she’d been expecting the end of the hall to lead to somewhere entirely different. “It looks the same.”

“It’s only been three weeks,” Chisato walked up behind her, lightly pushing at the small of Moca’s back with the pads of her fingers to make her move again.

Chisato joined Moca in staring around the room, wondering what it looked like from Moca’s eyes—all the modern furniture that had simply appeared in the apartment before she moved in, hand-picked by a designer Chisato had met exactly once. She sometimes fantasized about tearing it all down, wrecking the place soulless art piece by soulless art piece, but then what would she do with the ruins? The only things Chisato liked were the things others had given her, the kettle in the kitchen from Kanon, the framed photo of Aya (given by Hina) she kept on the desk she never used, and the assortment of horse related knick-knacks she kept hidden in a treasured box in the closet. There was nothing of Chisato in Chisato’s home.

“I try to keep the interior consistent for at least a month.”

“Really?” Moca asked with a sweet gullibility Chisato attributed entirely to alcohol still inside her.

“No.” Chisato chuckled fondly and tried to urge Moca onwards again. “Come on, I’ll settle you on the couch.”

The horrid furniture lay exactly as Chisato left it with the folded white cashmere throw across the top and the empty glass of melted ice by its side. The couch made the whole room more blue—like the inside of an aquarium Kanon once said as she gave Chisato the jellyfish painting that still hung over Chisato’s liquor cabinet. What a privilege of wealth: an entire freestanding cabinet for booze. Moca would probably say something like that if her eyes weren’t so cloudy.

Chisato looked over to find Moca staring not at her but just past to the city skyline, maybe at the blinking red of Tokyo Tower. “Moca? Are you…” Alright wasn’t the right thing to ask. It was rude to ask questions she knew the answer to. “Coming?”

Moca nodded and slunk to the couch.

Chisato placed her hands firmly on the sides of Moca’s shoulders and looked into her lost eyes. The focus was slowly beginning to return to her pupils. “You seem to be sobering up a bit.”

“Moca-chan’s all good.” Moca averted her gaze and lowered Chisato’s hands with her own.

“You’re sobering up, not sober.”

“You’re sobering up!” Moca snapped goofily, switching from discomfort to comedic anger in a snap. She stabbed her finger at Chisato with a loopy giggle, missing her chest completely to prod just above her belly button.

“I’m not the one who tried to keep up with Hina Hikawa.” Chisato laid her hand over Moca’s forearm and, when she wasn’t immediately pushed away, tugged her down onto the stiff couch below.

Moca tumbled, legs flailing up and out as if she’d never sat down before. They sat together for a quiet moment as Moca slipped in and out of sobriety and tried to find some comfort in her seat. One moment she’d be there, the Moca Chisato had come to… know and the next moment the fuzziness slipped back in and her words started to slur until her speech was one long and messy multisyllabic experience. And strangest of all, she was clingy.

It wasn’t that Chisato was unused to sitting with someone desperate for physical affection—she was, in fact, very intimately familiar—but Moca was clingy in a wholly new way, almost embarrassed at her desire for the slightest touch. She laid her head very briefly on Chisato’s shoulder before jerking back with a startled, uncomfortable chuckle and eyes that wouldn’t meet Chisato’s. If their hands brushed Moca hurried to pull away, if their knees touched Moca rocketed herself to the other end of the couch. This new Moca fell somewhere between the bravado of their first encounter and the pain of their second—somewhere in that nebulous between space was this twitchy sobering Moca.

Moca regarded Chisato from her end of the couch with a distracted innocence. “Don’t let Moca-chan keep you from getting comfy.”

Chisato spread her arms across the back of the couch, forgoing the feminine demur she tried to project for something more cocksure and playful—a response to the exhaustion of playing the responsible adult. “Moca Aoba, what are you suggesting?”

“Eh?” She was precious like this, wide eyed and loopy, like a little animal Chisato couldn’t help but bully a little.

“Nothing.” She smiled in her own confidence. “The dress isn’t so uncomfortable.” Chisato leaned forward, shoulders flexing inwards. “I’m used to them.” She’d worn cocktail dresses her whole life, like heels she found the clothes had become an extension of herself. Perhaps not one she’d choose but it was the one she was given.

Moca crawled towards Chisato tentatively, inching out with hands first before allowing her body to follow. “Do you ever just wear sweats?”

“I don’t own any, no.”

“Woah~. Were you cursed by an evil witch? If you wear a hoodie will you die?”

“Are you offering yours? We can trade.” Chisato was struck by a longing to see Moca in her formal attire. She leaned forward, reaching for Moca’s face without thinking.

Moca flinched back. “That dress wouldn’t fit me.”

“You’re not that much taller than I am,” She placed her hand on Moca’s cheek, rubbing away a spec of dirt with her thumb. At first, Moca went rigid at the touch with a queer tension on her face Chisato couldn’t quite read but her body soon eased in, her lips parting as she relaxed so slowly.

Moca was very lovely, even if she’d never really learned how to dress herself as an adult—still dressed in worn jeans and hoodies that swallowed her whole. But if her hair was combed and tied back, if she was fitted for proper bra, if she learned to stand without sloping her body like she wanted to disappear, if she stopped watching everyone with suspicion guised as lackadaisical disinterest and let them see how kind those stormy sea eyes really were—

Well then she wouldn’t be Moca any more.

“Ah…” The air leaked out of the slight part between Moca’s lips—so soft, so kissable—in a single sound of absolute misplaced trust.

Chisato jerked back at her own intrusive opinions on Moca’s mouth, covering her sudden movement by rising up and brushing down her dress. “I’ll get you some water.” She’d get water, get Moca a better blanket and then get out of there before they did anything stupid. Before Chisato did anything stupid, Moca wasn’t particularly in a mindset to do anything different.

“Moca-chan’s got a better idea~,” she grinned and sunk against the hard arm of the couch, chin tucked into her chest and body wriggling into the crook where the arm and couch met.

Chisato paused and played along with caution. “Pray tell what Moca-chan has on her mind.”

“Shots,” Moca said with pride as if she were the first drunk in the history of time to propose ill-advised shots.

“Shots,” Chisato repeated incredulously.

“Let’s do some! Moca-chan’s practically sober, you’re tragically sober so let’s do shoooots.” She punched the air with little fists.

“You’re not as sober as you think.”

“Nooo!” She whined, sliding off the couch onto the floor with a sullen pout. “No thinky, more drinky.”

“I think it’s time for some water.” Chisato left for her kitchen, abandoning Moca to moan mournfully on the floor.

The kitchen—conjoined by a narrow entrance to the living room—was theoretically amazing. Top of the line and state of the art and all those other stock phrases Chisato’s real estate agent rattled off on her tour as if Chisato were ever going to use it for more than reheating leftovers and making tea.

The old fashioned sky blue tea kettle sitting on the very modern range earned a fondness she didn’t feel for most everything else in the house. Briefly, Chisato entertained the idea of heating up some plain water and serving that to her surprise guest but Chisato doubted Moca had enough wits about her to get the joke. There were bottles of water in the refrigerator that would hopefully ward off the worst of a hangover in the morning. Besides, it was better not to remind Moca of that night anyway.

Chisato dug into the refrigerator handle, comfortable squeezing with all her strength knowing she couldn’t bruise it. What was she doing? It was probably morally reprehensible to flirt with a drunk person who had already proclaimed their hatred for you a week after you ruined her life, and yet her mouth, her mind, and her hands kept going as her morality slumbered. She was taking care of a drunk, not hunting for a rebound.

But was it such an awful idea? Chisato thought into the cold interior, devoid of anything save for a careful stack of liter water bottles and some take out dumplings. They were both hurt people, both totally unsuited for a relationship, but a rebound wasn’t a relationship was it? It was a placebo one relied on until they were strong enough on their own. Not tonight, of course, when Moca couldn’t walk in a straight line, but later—

CahTHUNK.

A dull thumping noise like a bird hitting a window echoed from the living room, as Chisato grabbed a water bottle. She shut the door and rushed back,imagining Moca trying and failing to climb back onto the couch, smashing her head on the coffee table and all sorts of horrors.

Instead she found a different kind of nightmare: Moca slumped against her liquor cabinet trying to suck down a bottle of bourbon that cost way too much to let Moca drink it like a juice box. The liquor dribbled down Moca’s chin as she looked at Chisato, startled and barely processing that she was found out: a Moca caught in the headlights.

Then she tried to chug.

Chisato sped across the room so quickly she shocked herself. That was the magic of Moca, she taught Chisato so many new things that she could do.

Moca’s reaction to a waifish actress coming at her like a dainty semi-truck was to drink harder. Chisato, lacking better options, dove. The water bottle bounced off to parts unknown as Chisato fell on top of Moca, hands wrapped around the smooth oval bottle of Angel’s Envy that Moca was trying to empty at record pace.

It was a struggle, Moca had a drunkard’s strength and Chisato had always been chided against letting herself grow even a hint of visible musculature. But even if Moca’s brain wanted to keep drinking, her body had other ideas. Her throat may have been impressively numb enough to try to shotgun a liter of whiskey but it wasn’t quite ready to hold that much liquid at once. She sputtered, giving Chisato just enough leverage to yank the bottle away and spray them in an arc of amber—cold against her exposed back.

They panted, both still shocked by their sudden struggle. Moca rubbed at the liquid on her lips, lapping what remained from her fingers. “Give it back.”

Chisato held the bottle as high as she could. “No.”

Moca rose with a pathetic roar, grabbing the thin straps of Chisato’s dress hard enough to almost rip them. Chisato tried to catch her balance but tumbled from her knees into Moca’s lap, the bottle still raised above them. Her other arm braced against the cabinet. Moca’s volatility didn’t frighten Chisato. Maybe it should have but all she could see was the begging underneath. “Please.”

“Moca…” Left alone with her thoughts for five minutes and this is what she became. Chisato didn’t pity Moca, she understood her too well for that.

“Please.” That soft moan was so defeated, so beat down by her own life. “My head’s clearing up and I… I can’t stand it. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. Please. I don’t wanna hear myself.”

“Talk to me.” Chisato reached for Moca’s hair. She flinched away, eyes darkened to thunderstorms.

“I’m all hollow.” Moca crumpled against the liquor cabinet, letting it bare the burden of keeping her upright. “There’s nothing under my skin. No friends, no interests, no career prospects. The last thing I had was that love… It was my definition. And now…” A drop of liquid rounded her cheek, following the line of her jaw until it pooled on the tip of Moca’s chin and fell with gravity’s grace onto Chisato’s arm. Whether a tear or bourbon it was surely bitter.

Chisato wasn’t good at this part, the comforting, the condolences. She’d always been an awful liar when it mattered. Some people considered it cruelty, others called it honesty. Chisato wasn’t sure there was a difference. In this moment, Chisato could only think like an actress and do what she had mastered: recite another’s words.

She pulled her hand from the wood and brushed the streak of liquid from Moca’s face. “You deserve to be okay Moca Aoba.”

With a snarl, Moca smacked away Chisato’s hand. “No, no, no no. You don’t get to say that to me.” She tried to twist away but their bodies were too mixed up in each other for escape. “I comfort. I’m not comforted.”

Chisato understood that better than she could express. She wanted to try, but the words weren’t there. The bottle slipped down her raised hand, Chisato struggled to keep her grip on its neck. “Moca—”

“Why?” Moca shouted. “Why do I deserve that?” Her eyes darted with frantic anger. “I’m such a fucking waste. What’s the point of Moca Aoba?!”

“Because you’re a person!” Chisato’s voice was so much louder than she meant, their pain so much realer than she wanted it to be.

The bottle slipped from Chisato’s hand with a crash that should have forced them to look away from each other. It shattered on the floor in a hundred glass shards mercifully cresting away from their bodies but the bourbon came for them. The amber liquid splashed over Chisato and Moca, soaking them through with acid rain drops.

Chisato took Moca’s head in her hands and held her tightly in place, keeping her from daring to look away. “Because everyone alive deserves to be okay. That’s what you told me.” Furious tears burned at Chisato’s eyes—furious at Moca or herself or maybe the world at large. “That’s all I’ve been holding on to for a week. So don’t dare tell me you don’t deserve it too. Don’t you dare.”

“I—”

Chisato couldn’t bear to hear any refutation. “Hate anyone else you like. Hate me. Please. Hate me, before you hate yourself.”

“I don’t want to hate you,” Moca whispered with shaking liquor soaked words, “Please Chisato. I don’t want to hate you.”

“Oh Moca.” Chisato understood. Maybe she didn’t know why Moca asked, but Chisato knew why she came for her.

Moca Aoba was too precious to waste on a rebound.

Moca surged forward, hand weakly clasping around the back of Chisato’s head, mouth groping for hers. Her bourbon coated lips stung like venom. They were cold and wet but her breath was so, so warm as she sighed, soothing over the sharpness her lips left behind with a vanilla tipped tongue. The only word for it: intoxicating.

Chisato shifted her weight. She framed Moca with her body, knees on either side, hands drifting down to rest in the divots of the waist Moca kept so hidden under layers of hoodies and jackets and t-shirts. The bourbon turned those layers into a united second skin, clothing sealed together, revealing more than it could hide.

The more they kissed, the more Chisato knew with certainty they couldn’t. Their future lay before her in every caress. It would be wonderful until it wasn’t—until every stroke turned into a dulled knife stabbing their old wounds open, promising they’d never heal. There was a temptation beckoning in her heart, whispering that if this was what Moca needed then why not let her take all she wanted. Why else were the temptations of the flesh so very tempting if not to be indulged in?

But Chisato knew the kisses Moca placed on her lips, that she trailed over her jaw and suckled down her neck as Chisato’s own. Imitations of imitations. She wanted to want Moca for Moca’s sake not as an excuse for someone else. And she wanted Moca to want her for the same reasons.

So Chisato pulled away with bitter reluctance, sticky forehead on sticky forehead, and panted her plea, “Moca, we can’t.”

The only response was Moca labored breathing like a machine whirring through steps—two sharp intakes into a deep rhythmic huff. The expansion and contraction of her chest was almost soothing to feel against Chisato’s own—a concentrated effort to keep something inside.

“Moca?” The pool underneath Chisato’s knees rippled as she shuffled back. She realized exactly three seconds too late that Moca was heaving.

“Blaaaaarrrgh.”

Being alive was really fucking disgusting. Bodies were gross—always expelling their contents out one end or the other. Everyone did it, and everyone acted like they didn’t. But maybe, just maybe, there was something comforting about hanging your head in the bowl of a toilet. At least the bad stuff was gone and couldn’t go back in.

Moca’s arms couldn’t even push her off the rim. They were just done helping, drained of strength from the falling, the shouting, the fighting and all the other things she was starting to feel the ache of. At least there was nothing else in her stomach to get out. The slurry of bread and energy drinks and all that booze, booze, booze was already in the bowl. Urgh.

As she sobered bit by bit, her intoxication was replaced with shame and exhaustion in equal parts. She really did belong in the toilet. Bit of a tight squeeze but with some effort she could worm down and flush herself away. Finally, a place she fit in.

Moca heaved again. Nothing came out but the motion felt comfortably familiar now. Good ‘ol attempted upchuck. It sucked. Everything sucked. Her throat burned all the way up through her nostrils, her teeth felt chalky like she’d take a power sander to the enamel and her mouth tasted as rank as it probably smelled. The only thing in the whole world that wasn’t currently totally, completely sucky was the hand rubbing her barely covered back.

She loved that hand. Loved it with her whole being. Couldn’t quite think who it could be attached to but that touch was so calming—petting circles into circles—that Moca was just about ready to pledge allegiance to the feeling. This bathroom was the whole world now. Sometimes a family was just a girl, a toilet and the disembodied hand she loved.

Of course Moca did know who it was, didn’t she? She remembered being rushed to the bathroom, remembered having her soaked clothes tugged over her head between porcelain pit stops. She didn’t have the full picture in her head but she had enough of a sketch to be embarrassed over.

Moca was growing too cold to stay put. The tiles on the ground couldn’t hold a bit of heat and the toilet emitted cold air like there was a secret fridge in the pipes. With only a cashmere blanket around her shoulders for warmth—Moca had no idea if it actually was cashmere but something so soft and comfortable had to cost more than anything Moca had ever worn—Moca’s shivering threatened to turn her insides into ice cream.

With two deep and instantly regretted breaths of toilet air to steady herself, Moca forced the last remnants of strength into her arms and pushed out of the toilet. The room spun around as the few centimeters difference in height caused her brain and eyes to completely forget how to communicate.

“Be careful.” The hand at her back went from comforting to steadying.

Moca groaned, blinking into the light as the room stilled. Her knees thanked her for relieving them from duty as she fell back onto a shaggy bath mat and cocooned inside the blanket. Tragically, the hand left her and it’s owner reappeared in her line of sight.

Chisato rose up from the ground behind Moca, setting down a black t-shirt as she did. “You can put on that when you’re ready. Apologies for undressing you. I just thought it was better to get you out of those wet clothes.”

“No biggie~,” Moca tried to croon but her voice came out as a hoarse scrap across her throat. “Nothing you haven’t seen.” Moca poked her arms out of her blanket armor and grabbed the shirt, pulling it on over her bra under the blanket still. She tugged the bottom out so she could read the shirt’s bright familiar logo. “You still have this thing?”

“It’s the only T-shirt I own,” Chisato smiled at their shared memory of bands long disbanded.

Moca’s grin peeked onto her face as she looked Chisato up and down and took in the pajama set she’d claimed not to have—striped yellow pants and a baggy matching shirt. “You DO own pajamas.”

“I said I don’t own sweatpants.” She laughed, still such a nice sound. “Did you really think I slept in one of those fluttering nightgowns every night?”

“I dunno what to think about you.” Moca huddled in her cocoon, letting the softness soothe her.

Chisato’s face fell a little, or maybe Moca imagined it. The actress was way too composed to let something so small show. “I’ll let you collect yourself. You’re welcome to sleep on the couch. I’d offer you the bed but—”

“Please stay.” Moca didn’t think through what she was asking before she asked it but for once she didn’t regret her instincts.

“Is that a good idea?”

Did the taste of bourbon make Chisato’ s lips better or worse? Or was it just the same beautiful sharpness Moca had acquired a taste for?

The blanket could hide almost all of Moca’s blush but the tips of her ears still gave away her thoughts. “S-s’all good, haha!” Moca scrambled to stand. The blanket transformed into a draping cape. “Moca-chan barfed out all the drunk.” This declaration was severely undercut by a dramatic sway of her hips and buckle in her knees that knocked Moca teetering back towards the tiles. She grabbed the high wall of the bathtub to steady herself.

It was a small bathroom, barely large enough for the two of them to stand. Most of the space was devoted to a large tub built for soaking. The white porcelain sat in stark contrast to the dark tiled wall and floor—like a little spaceship in the void. It beckoned Moca to become its pilot.

Moca looked from the floor to the rounded interior of the tub and, without explaining, stepped into the bathtub and sat down underneath the faucet so the metal just brushed over her head. Her entire body pulsed with her heartbeat. The tips of her fingers throbbed, her neck flared, the point where her lower back touched the smooth porcelain ached and thudded as if her heart itself had fallen down her body and gotten lodged in her spine. But it could hold Moca in full. It was comforting to think if she melted down or fell apart she’d still stay together in that little liminal space.

Silently, Chisato joined her on the opposite end. For a second, Moca expected the regal Chisato Shirasagi to sit down as if she were on a throne—always a queen wherever she went. But no. It was just Chisato on one end and just Moca on the other with enough room for the two of them if Moca bent her legs in and clutched her knees to her chest. Just two girls—still trying to get a handle on being women—sitting in a bathtub.

“I’m sorry,” Moca apologized into her knees.

Chisato didn’t respond at once. Didn’t accept, didn’t brush it off. She just sat there, hands folded over what little belly she had, and breathed in and out until the two started to synchronize—united on opposite ends of a tiny world. Then, in almost a whisper, she asked:

“Why did you ask me to come?”

Moca unfolded her legs, sliding hers between Chisato’s and letting their knees knock together. She met Chisato’s eyes, lit up with uncertainty and a hope so small Chisato couldn’t have known she felt it.

“Because I knew you would.”

A possibility passed between them. The could have been, maybe should have been, fading into what was. The two of them lingered in that moment of perfect understanding.

Chisato opened her arms to the woman who wasn’t her anything. “Come here.”

Moca didn’t hesitate. She crawled carefully over and between Chisato’s legs until she was set half on the bathtub floor and half on Chisato’s lap. Chisato shifted the blanket around them like a comforter of cloud and pulled Moca to her chest, easing Moca’s head to rest on her breast. She was soft and so so warm. One hand held Moca’s thin frame in place and the other stroked her hair with the care and tenderness Moca had never known to ask for.

And Moca cried. How could she not? Small tears turned to trickles winding down her cheeks and staining Chisato’s nightshirt. It was a comfort. It was all a comfort. How could someone so small make her feel safe? Protected. If she could borrow a bit of that strength for the moment. A bit of that warmth.

The world was ended. The world was new. And they would never be friends. Moca was so grateful they would never be friends.

Her eyes fluttered closed to the lull of Chisato’s heartbeat. It wasn’t everything she had ever wanted, nothing was. But in that moment, Moca was as close to okay as she was gonna get.

Sleep made itself known before it arrived. Moca felt it through her body and gave herself willingly. The last thing she heard, before the night finally ended, was a wistful whisper she could have dreamed.

“If only we had met in better times, Moca Aoba.”

In a half formed thought Moca wondered if there was such a thing but she was asleep before the thought could finish.

It was impossible to tell whether it was morning or still a very long night from the inside of a bathtub in a windowless room. For the first moment after waking it didn’t matter. Moca was a little sore and bent oddly but she was warm and comfortable and that mattered so much more. Only for a little bit though, until she was cognizant enough to realize her brain was beating against her skull demanding to be let out to find someone who wouldn’t dehydrate it so cruelly.

Moca Aoba had many regrets and at the top of the list was not accepting the freakin’ glass of water. She wanted to take her drunk self by the shoulders and rattle her, shake her up and yell until she somehow invented time travel and went back to punch herself in the face before leaving that first bar with Hina. Moca’s fantasy wasn’t entirely consistent but her head hurt and there was a desert growing in her throat so she reserved the right to be a little inconsistent first thing in the maybe morning.

“Mmm.” The body cradling Moca shifted underneath her with a sleepy moan. Chisato’s eyes opened slowly. Moca watched the sleep clear away from her indigo irises and the memories of the night before (still happening?) flutter in. “What time is it?”

“No idea.” No windows. No phones. No way to tell if time had passed at all. Moca stretched out her sore legs, flexing her toes over Chisato’s, but otherwise she stayed put. Moca was embarrassed down to her core but her position was so pleasant and—

Bam. Bam. Bam.

“Urg.” Except for that headache. Moca rubbed her forehead and kept her head squarely attached to Chisato’s chest. Now her pain had a sound attached to it, just perfect for a Sunday morning.

Bam. Bam. Bam.

Chisato’s brow furrowed. She carefully pushed Moca off of her, with a delicacy that let Moca know it wasn’t what she wanted, and stepped from the bathtub, staring quizzically at the door. So the muffled banging was not in Moca’s head.

Bam. Bam. Bam.

Reluctantly, Moca stood, though she kept the blanket clutched around her shoulders, and followed Chisato as she exited the room.

BAM! BAM! BAM!
The sound was much louder without a door between them. Someone was thunderously knocking on the door in— Moca could tell now by the bright light filtering through the window—the early morning. From Chisato’s face Moca could tell she hadn’t forgotten she was hosting Sunday brunch.

“CHISATO-SAN! Open up!”

BAM! BAM! BAM!

Moca’s ears twitched. There was no way. Her ears had to be deceiving her.

Chisato cautiously unlocked her door. With a nod to Moca, she slowly turned the handle.

As soon as the door cracked open, two people tumbled through the doorway as if they’d been pressing as hard as possible to the other side. “Babe! Watch out!” They shouted at each other in unison as they tripped in their hurry to stand up straight. Behind them a third person walked no less briskly, but much more calmly, into the apartment.

The blanket slipped from Moca’s fingers, falling to the floor in a soft mound around her feet. She struggled to find her voice, so great was her shock and so tired was her throat. “Why are you here?”

“MOCA!” Three longed for voices shouted at once, completely filling the room.

Before Moca’s pounding brain could process what was happening she was tackled around the shoulders in an intense clasping hug. Her nose filled with the earthy scent of roasted coffee beans she had missed so much for so long nestled under her chin.

Moca’s hands hovered over the person’s back, afraid to touch down and realize she was dreaming. “Tsugu?”

“Moca-chan! You’re okay,” Tsugumi sniffed. She pulled away, smiling brightly despite the tears in the corners of her eyes. She looked Moca over from arms length away with a flash of regret and threw herself back onto Moca in a squeeze.

Before Moca could express her disbelief, another set of arms grabbed around her neck, shaking her head back and forth with a wailing sob. “M-M-M-MOCAAA!”

This was terrible for Moca’s headache and her windpipe. “Hii-ii-ii-chan, Moca-chan ca-an-an-an’t breathe.”

Himari didn’t care about Moca’s hangover. She only clung harder, blubbering all over Moca’s face and Chisato’s shirt. Moca could only grow used to the treatment, not stop it.

Moca braced for a third set of arms to try to strangle her but instead Tomoe approached the group hug cautiously with her head hung low like a guilty dog. She chewed on her lower lip, looking more pensive than Moca had ever seen her. “Tomo-chin, hurry up!”

Tomoe’s cheeks burned red. Her hands clenched into stubborn fists and with her face cast down Moca couldn’t tell what was on her mind.

Himari half let go of Moca to give her girlfriend’s hand a supportive squeeze. “Babe, just tell Moca what you want to say.”

Moca tensed for whatever storm of rage was coming. Instead she heard a loud, choked sob.

“I’m s-so sorry,” Tomoe howled. “Moca. I didn’t know—when you called me last week I—I’m so so sorry.”

“Tomo-chin~,” Moca plastered her grin on her face for her friend. “Moca-chan never holds a grudge.”

Tomoe tackled them, sending her friends sprawling into a pile on the ground only cushioned by the fallen blanket. Moca didn’t care. She didn’t care that her head hurt or that she could barely breathe with three people trying to crawl as close to her as possible. Moca’s heart healed in real time nursed by her friends’ loving hands. It only mattered that they were there. Somehow they were there.

Moca caught Chisato’s eye from across the room. She smiled softly with a little wave. Somehow…

One way or another they made it onto the couch, all four friends clung to each other as much as they could. Tomoe practically dragged Moca into her lap, kissing the crown of her head as she held Moca like a stuffed toy. Himari still posed as Moca’s scarf, tears flowing freely and unabashedly around all of them. Tsugumi tried to give Moca a little room to breath but she held her hand tight like a promise to never let it go.

Somewhere between the hallway and the sofa Chisato managed to get completely dressed for the day and still find a glass of water to force into Moca’s hands. Moca gulped down so quickly she gagged. Another full glass was pushed onto her as soon as she finished the first. When Moca finally felt like she was about to drown on the ground she asked her friends. “How did you know?”

Chisato cleared her throat, “I texted Himari-chan last night while you were…”

Moca smirked. “Blowing huge chunks.”

“Yes Moca, while you were blowing huge chunks.” Chisato picked the cup up from the table and nodded her head to the others. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll let you chat in private.” She exited with one last soft smile sent to Moca.

Himari hurried to fill in the details, “Chisato texted me last night. Luckily, Tomoe’s never seen Sex and the City so we were staying up late watching that, we were at the season where the City really becomes the fifth chara—”

“Hii-chan~ no spoilers,” Moca teased.

“You’re gonna watch? You have to join us. We can start over!”

Tomoe paled.

Moca tried to keep hidden how happy the offer made her. “Hii-chan~ continue~.”

“Right! So Chisato texted me and we were ready to come over right away but she said she would take care of you and get you home. BUT THAT TOTALLY WASN’T OKAY! So we texted Tsugu and Ran and Ran told us she MOVED OUT and neither of you SAID ANYTHING and that is just SO—GAH!”

Tsugumi patted Himari on the shoulder, “I panicked, but Sayo-san promised to get me on the first train to Tokyo this morning. Himari-chan and Tomoe-chan picked me up and—”

“Rushed over here! We got the address from Hina-senpai!” Tomoe squeezed the life out of Moca. It was the best feeling Moca had had in years.

Her friends were here. They came for her. Tsugumi looked more presentable than anyone should after catching the first train in the morning—but of course she did, she was Tsuguriffic—while Tomoe and Himari seemed to have come directly from bed. Himari’s hair was even still done up in the messy bun she liked to sleep in and Tomoe’s mane was tangles all the way down. But they were here. All that mattered was that they were here.

Still, there was some secret between them hidden in the looks they kept shooting one another when they thought Moca was looking the other way.

“We didn’t know,” Tsugumi whispered, a hitch in her voice. “None of us knew what you were going through. If Chisato-san hadn’t texted Himari-chan, we still wouldn’t know.”

Moca’s heart filled up with the kind of hot shame that only came when you underestimated the people you love most. Every foul thought she’d had about her friends—her family—over the last week bombarded her at once, reminding her of all her doubt, spite and bitter jealousy. It was a swamp she could sink into so easily…

…but Tsugumi squeezed her hand and Himari kissed Moca’s cheek when her eyes teared up and Tomoe ruffled her hair like she was a little boy who’d just done good in the Big Game. They loved her so much more than Moca could hate herself. Moca’s brain made it easy to forget something that should be so simple.

Everyone moved in closer, if it was even possible, clinging to each other as they had for so long it was amazing they still had five—four separate bodies. The absence stung a little.

Brrr brrr brrrrrrrr.

“Tsugu?” Moca felt a hum from Tsugumi’s pocket against her leg. “You’re vibrating.”

“Oh no! Ran-chan!” Tsugumi dove for the phone in her sweater. She pulled it out, hurriedly thumbing at the screen.

“Where’s Moca?” Ran’s voice crackled Tsugumi’s phone. “Is she there?! Is she okay??”

It was like the air was punched Moca’s lungs. It hurt to hear her voice, even distorted by space and static. It hurt so much.

But it hurt different. Still painful, still brutal, still longing. But it was different.

“Hey Ran~.” Moca tried to make herself presentable—an impossible task she knew.

“Moca…” Ran’s expression of immense relief immediately turned into a sigh, “You look like shit.”

They all burst with the laughter they’d longed for since Tsugumi, Tomoe and Himari flooded into the house. They fell over one another, even Ran on the phone tumbling between them, tossed from one friend to the next and they laughed and cried and laughed again.

“Moca,” Ran said with a new intonation, something clearer than she’d sounded in years. “Just because we’re apart doesn’t mean… it doesn’t mean… it doesn’t mean you’re not my best friend!” Ran roared her into her phone like she was on stage and it was her mic. “No matter how we’re separated, we’re still Afterglow. This can only make us stronger!”

Afterglow nodded to each other, affirming the passion Moca’d thought they’d forgotten in every look and touch. Moca pulled Tsugumi’s phone to her face, looking Ran in the eyes as best as she could on a tiny touchscreen.

“Oh ho~ Is that so? Don’t worry~. Sweet little Moca-chan loves you too.” Moca wiped her own tears away. “I love all of you.”

Chisato had the day off and no plans to speak of so if she had to stay in her kitchen doing crossword puzzles while most of Afterglow reconciled in her living room for the rest of the day then that was what she would do. Her crossword skill could be charitably considered ‘fine’ on a normal morning but trying to solve a puzzle while periodically interrupted by riotous laughter trickling in from the other room brought her down to borderline awful. But it was comforting to hear happy noise in her house. Especially when she could pick out Moca’s playful laugh—the real one not the nervous one she used like a shield. It made Chisato… well, it didn’t matter much what it made Chisato feel. It was just nice to hear.

She worked like that at her kitchen table for an hour or so, barely making any headway on the puzzle but finding her morning tea tasting much sweeter. Chisato tapped her pen against her chin, thinking through the clue tripping her up:

12 Down — A Fortunate Accident.

“Excuse me, Chisato-san?”

Chisato set down her pen and looked up at Tsugumi, standing in the doorway with the pleasant aura of a welcome interruption. Tsugumi wore her early twenties like a couture dress, all the unease of her teens had given way to a young woman shining with humble self assurance. “Can I get you something, Tsugumi-chan? I apologize for not offering any tea, I’d hoped not to disrupt you, but I can put on the kettle now.”

“No, please you’ve been kind enough already,” Tsugumi hurried to stop Chisato from rising out of her chair, pausing at the puzzle on the table when she was satisfied that Chisato wasn’t about to lunge for the stovetop. “A crossword! Would you like some help? Sayo and I do them sometimes. I’m not very good— no I’m still learning how to do them!” At Chisato’s curious glance, Tsugumi elaborated, “Sayo doesn’t like it when I put myself down, I’m working on it.”

“Unfortunately, if I don’t do these sorts of things myself I’m afraid I won’t be satisfied.” She smiled and waited for Tsugumi to say whatever was clearly weighing on her mind.

Tsugumi breathed in and bowed deeply. “Thank you for helping Moca-chan. Please allow me to have your apartment cleaned.”

Chisato regarded the folded woman with a slow blink. “I appreciate your gracious offer, but I must decline.”

Tsugumi stayed planted in place. “Please. Moca-chan is my family. This is the least I can do.”

“I understand the sentiment but again I must decline. Besides, you have a home of your own to tend to don’t you?” Chisato rose from her chair and glided towards her cabinets. “We can’t have you worrying over someone else’s.”

“Then let me pay to have the rug cleaned at least,” Tsugumi rose up with earnest passion in her eyes. “For everything you’ve done for Moca-chan.”

Chisato picked through the many tins of tea in her cabinet until she found a sealed imported one she was particularly fond of. She turned, and tucked it into Tsugumi’s hands. “A belated housewarming gift for you and Sayo-chan.”

“T-thank you,” Tsugumi stumbled over her words, taking the aqua tea tin more on instinct than acceptance. “H-hold on, I’m trying to thank you!”

“Moca and I…” She let a month of memories inform her words as Chisato crossed back to the kitchen table, “That’s not the sort of thing you thank a person for.” Oddly if anything, Chisato wanted to thank Tsugumi. “It was—”

“Fate?”

“It was a lot more work than fate.”

“I think even fate takes work.” Tsugumi clutched the tin to her chest. “Chisato-san, I don’t know what’s happened between you and Moca-chan, but I’m glad it did.”

“We were just…” Chisato looked to the table where her puzzle rested, “…a fortunate accident.”

“Serendipity!”

Chisato tapped the empty spaces in the puzzle. “It fits.”

It wasn’t long long after Tsugumi returned to the living room that the rest of the group decided it was time to make their exit. They invited Chisato along for breakfast at Hazawa Coffee but, no matter how earnest the offer, Chisato couldn’t shake the feeling she’d be intruding. Besides, it’d do no good to extend the farewell. The night was over after all, morning came just the same.

First Tomoe and Himari ducked out, with noisy thank yous and promises to get brunch again that none of them planned to follow up on—they’d always been closer to Kaoru. Then Tsugumi followed after them with one last bow and a knowing smile that kept some secret from Chisato. And then there was just Moca and Chisato standing in her foyer trying to figure out how to say goodbye.

They’d crawled through the darkest parts of each other’s hearts and yet there was so much left unsaid. But Chisato wasn’t ready to speak any of it into the world and somehow she’d gotten to know Moca well enough to know she wasn’t ready either.

Moca hand rose as if to offer Chisato it out in a handshake. The idea was quickly abandoned. She clamped it back down to her side, knowing as well as Chisato that it was absurd. They’d spent a night in each other’s arms, whatever that meant, but leaving things on a handshake was almost callous. Yet the alternative felt too intimate for company—maybe too intimate for them.

So Chisato raised her hand up to her chest in a slight wave, a matching slight smile quietly waiting on her face to break with the only words she knew how to say in that moment. “Goodbye, Moca Aoba.”

Moca watched her and then slowly held up her own hand in a mirrored movement. And maybe it was the light, or maybe it was wishful thinking, but Moca’s lips seemed to curve with a little sadness tucked between them. “Goodbye, Chisato Shirasagi.”

And then she was gone.

Chisato refused to examine the emptiness that overcame her. There were things to be done. Her living room was still a mess. There was glass all over the floor, the bourbon had dried into a sticky pit on the floor leading ominously onto her obnoxiously expensive rug and her precious cashmere throw would have to be washed—dry clean only of course.

…Dry cleaning? Shoot. Chisato hurried to the bathroom.

There in a little pile stuffed into the corner of the room like a miserable, soggy black cat was Moca’s hoodie, abandoned in the night after she’d pried it from Moca’s shivering body. It made the room feel colder. Chisato sat down on the edge of the tub and realized it wasn’t the hoodie, it was just so cold in an empty house. Chisato didn’t care for loneliness, it just cared deeply for her.

She stared at the crumpled, still soggy, piece of cloth just barely sneaking in under the definition of clothing and pulled out her phone, reaching for a number with muscle memory. Chisato’s life didn’t have to be like this.

It rang once. Twice.

Click.

“Chisato-chan?”

Chisato breathed in, the sharp scent of alcohol and Moca still lingering in the air, and asked, “Kanon, could we meet for tea today?”

Chapter Text

CahChunkCahChunk CahChunkCahChunk.

Waking up to catch an early train sucked about as much as her Sunday hangover had but Moca was trying out this new thing where she didn’t flunk out of college with literally three months to go. She’d done her best to get suspended in the week and a change she’d spent drinking and moping and having intense emotional experiences with multiple celebrity guest stars but somehow she was still enrolled.

The train jerked into station, rolling back before coming to a stop. Moca rocked forward, her entire inconsiderable weight testing the tensile strength of the toxic yellow strap clasped in her hands as she dangled with a loose sway just above an old seated granny—frail enough for even someone as slight as Moca to crush. She rolled back onto her heels as the train doors opened, commuters swelling around Moca from the doorways to her left and right like two opposing waves determined to crush her. Unfortunately, they didn’t—

Moca’s teeth ground together in her mouth as she crumpled the thought. Those were the kinds of thoughts that made Tsugu and Himari cry and Moca had sworn off that particular habit. If she couldn’t do it for herself, she’d do it for them. She might not be worth—

Moca tugged her phone out of her pocket for a distraction. A message from Tsugumi sparkled in the center of the screen:

>Have a good day Moca-chan!

She smiled despite herself, just a little tug at her lips. It wasn’t the only message. The group chat was alive again. Himari sent a dozen different stickers from different sets: cheering bunnies, dancing frogs, and at least three different pandas. Tomoe interjected with question marks and ‘huh’s between Himari’s exuberant display and Tsugumi’s careful detailing of her trip back to Kyoto, helplessly lost in the cheering but happy to be involved. And then, at the very bottom, there was the final—for now— message from Ran: a little picture of a daisy waving its leaves with the caption “I be-leaf in you”.

Moca stared down at her phone, grateful her hair fell over her eyes like a curtain so she couldn’t lose her cool guy cred with the strangers on the train for tearing up. They’d finally had the conversation they were supposed to have four years ago. The thing they’d thought unbearable was somehow manageable with Tomoe and Himari’s hands on their shoulders and Tsugumi mediating between their raw feelings. For now, this was Moca and Ran: supportive silence. Not forever. Just for now. Ran had her dad’s place and Moca had the spare bedroom Tomoe and Himari pretended Himari slept in when her parents visited. Their insistence. Just temporary, while Moca adjusted to the brave new world and all the people who weren’t in it.

Moca sniffed, rubbing at her eye with the back of her hand to avoid getting whatever noxious public train germs fizzled over her fingertips. The granny in the seat looked up, torn between suspicion and sympathy—trying to figure out if Moca was sick or sad. Moca didn’t really want to be thought of as either, the constant struggle of her life. She forced her gaze up at the ads and the screens on the upper strip of wall over the windows.

A pair of violet eyes greeted Moca, posted just above the luggage racks only someone with an insane sense of security would ever use. If it weren’t for the eyes, Moca never would have recognized Chisato Shirasagi with her face and body digitally altered to porcelain smoothness and her frozen attention devoted to some hot dude with broody caterpillar eyebrows. It was just another ad for some TV drama about attractive people kissing, every part of it generic, but, even with the rest of her body posed like she was pretending—which she was as that was literally her job—those eyes still belonged to Chisato.

They probably weren’t going to see each other again, were they? Not never, they knew too many of the same people for never, but not like they had. They said their goodbyes and Moca had done the only thing she could. Anything else was in Chisato’s hands.

The train began its journey again with wheels clicking round and round the track in a sound so constant the brain just funneled it out.

Moca plastered her grin on for the poster’s sake. What was she thinking? Chisato was right there. Moca could see her anytime she wanted to.

CahChunkCahChunk CahChunkCahChunk.

There was something almost lovely about a laundromat cast in early morning blues with only the sounds of rolling washing machines and the afterthoughts of pop music echoing out from an older gentleman’s headphones for a soundtrack. The wrinkled man enjoying city pop in his boxers—for every piece of clothing he owned spun in a technicolor circle in the machine before him—didn’t care or even notice that a celebrity walked in at six in the morning with a plastic bag reeking of vanilla and vomit. Perfect.

She’d passed by the laundromat enough times to know it as part of her local landscape, but Chisato had never imagined she’d have reason to use it. She could count on one hand the amount of times she’d used a washing machine. The distance between her childhood and a normal upbringing never felt as stark as when she faced the gaping steel giant and realized she wasn’t sure what to do. Something with soap, something with water but in which order and in which hole was beyond Chisato’s banks of knowledge.

Fortunately, the internet was full of people lacking the essential skills of everyday life and searching ‘how to use a laundromat’ revealed a bevy of individuals whose ignorance assured Chisato that at least she had common sense and correct change. It seemed a waste to use a mammoth machine for a single hoodie but the only other option was to send it out to be cleaned again. It meant something if she did it herself and Chisato wanted it to mean something.

She set the hoodie in the bottom of the washing drum with more tenderness than stained fabric warranted and followed the instructions written by a helpful internet mom to the letter. Chisato’s worries proved unnecessary, truly anyone could use a washing machine.

The machine whirled to life, the interior flooding with water and sweeping up the little piece of cloth. The hoodie turned over and over in an incomplete circle, each rotation of the machine resounding with a wet splat interrupting the calming droll of the spinning drum. A drowsy voice floated from the recesses of Chisato’s mind—cobbled together by memory and a hint of longing, “Celebrities. They’re just like Moca-chan~.”

Chisato pulled herself on top of an unused dryer, feet hanging above the ground. Nothing to do but think or listen. If she thought, she’d think of Moca. They needed time. What was the point of a soulful goodbye after a night filled with such meaning if she simply undid the parting a few days later? Moca couldn’t feel any differently, after all, she didn’t ask for her hoodie back. Chisato wanted—

That was enough thinking. Chisato’s fingers stuck against the dryer’s smooth metal metal top. She relaxed her hands, then her shoulders, and finally her head. Chisato’s eyes fluttered shut to the rhythmic clank of the washing machine.

CahChunkCahChunk CahChunkCahChunk

At some point that Moca couldn’t quite pin down, she’d started to like her commute. Maybe it was when the destination improved or when she started having something to look forward to at home. Maybe it was when Himari started her office job and began to pepper the group chat full of the endless details of her day, enough that Moca was sure she could sub in with a pink wig and no one would know the difference. Or when Tsugumi wrapped up her graduation vacation and landed back home in Tokyo for good with Sayo on her arm and plans in her eyes.

>Show ready?

But it was probably when Ran came back into Moca’s life.

Moca smiled to herself as she clicked on the picture Ran sent, wide enough the salaryman sitting below her smiled back. She winked down cheekily before examining Ran’s latest creation.

Ran’s ikebana had always left her friends astonished, but in the last four months, as she prepared to officially join the Mitake school as an instructor, she’d truly, Moca couldn’t resist the obvious pun, blossomed. The picture was blurry—Ran still didn’t care to understand technology—but it was clear enough for Moca.

>omg RAN!!!!! WHAT?!

>Ran-chan! It looks so amazing, is your show this weekend?

It was a line of flowers, placed in a rising line with stems intertwined. Each white blossom in the line was a little more open than the one below it, as if the stamens were shedding away their petals as they rose through the air until the final one hung highest in the arrangement, fully unfurled to reveal the frozen explosion within. Every one a Camellia Sasanqua set like a line of fireworks forever suspended in time.

Himari and Tsugumi continued to glow over Ran’s work, hashing out the details of where and when the show was—Himari promising Tomoe would be just as excited as soon as she recovered from her late shift slumber. Moca just smiled over the picture, rocking naturally with the stops and starts of the train now encoded in her muscles.

>Moca. Will you come too?

Moca’s hand slipped, knocking the honeybee yellow strap askew. Something like terror thumbed at her heart, pressing down until it couldn’t beat any more just stick there like a rock threatening to send her crashing through the floor. Texting was good, the occasional group call was okay but seeing Ran in person? Hearing her voice without a computer interpreting it, watching all the little micro expressions on her face, getting caught up in once again interpreting her moods and emotions so Moca could try to manage them to make her smile just a little.

Her heart started to beat again, faster, too fast, too fast by too much and the people around her were too close and—

“It’s not a film like any other, I hope you’ll enjoy watching it as much as I enjoyed making it.”

Moca’s brain latched onto the familiar timbre in the air before it handed the functions of her body to her panic. It was impossible to forget Chisato, not with the country was so inundated with her image. She set her gaze on the screen above the door broadcasting a clip of a recent interview with none other than Chisato Shirasagi on her latest starring role—suspiciously similar to her previous twelve.

Chisato was poised, obviously, and completely in character as Chisato Shirasagi the actress—all pleasant smiles and uncontroversial, unremarkable statements. But her voice, even as pure velvet lacking her usual steel, was unmistakably her own.

Before Chisato could repeat another prewritten comment on how unique and original the third romantic drama she’d starred in that year was, Moca was back at her phone—heart beating normally again.

>Moca-chan wouldn’t miss Master Ran’s first show~

CahChunkCahChunk CahChunkCahChunk.

No matter how clean Chisato tried to keep her home there was always a dusty corner of her closet she failed to catch. Occasionally, Chisato still called on professionals to take a fine bristled brush to the place but more and more she put up her own hair and vacuumed it herself. On her last full apartment sweep she found a little black hoodie, folded and forgotten in the back of her closet and completely covered in dust.

There never was a right moment to return it to Moca. Chisato just kept letting time pass on and on until too much time had passed. First it was one month, then two and suddenly she realized it would be rather odd to just text Moca out of the blue four months later and offer to give back her hoodie and anyway Moca never asked for it back. It wasn’t the right time. It was never the right time. It was better to cling to the clothing until it was.

But it was unacceptable to let it get messy again, so back again Chisato went to the laundromat with the hoodie and a few odd pieces of clothing she hadn’t gotten around to sending out stuffed into a bag. The mid-morning laundromat bustled with college students sneaking in their dirty clothes between classes. Most of them were too invested in their own messes to care about the one slung over Chisato’s shoulder. A few gave her a double take but she was between movie marketing campaigns—the agency had just ended the horrid one on the train for the disaster of a film “A Lovebird Has Two Wings”— so Chisato would have as much privacy as she ever did until the fall when the cycle started all over for the next movie.

Marketing campaigns weren’t all annoyances though. Old friends crawled out of the woodwork to shoot her pictures with Chisato’s floating head on a billboard or the overheard clips on the Tokyo Metro. Tae even sent a selfie with Chisato’s cardboard standee at a theater—someone had drawn a dashing mustache on Chisato’s face, probably Tae. For the first time, Chisato replied to such messages with a genuine desire to reforge those long cracked friendships. Afternoon tea had become a permanent fixture in Chisato’s schedule. It felt like she was reconnecting with everyone she’d ever known. Almost.

Chisato gingerly pulled the black hoodie from her sack and set it in the bottom of the drum and then threw in the rest of her things—mostly socks, she rarely even wore them and yet she had so many. She shut the door with a clunk.

Perhaps Moca didn’t ride the train to work. Perhaps she never looked up and saw the many billboards and posters and tie in singles and commemorative popcorn tins. Or perhaps she saw all of them and they reminded her of a time she’d rather forget.

The washing machine whirled to life, clothes writing in half a circle smacking the door with a wet splap.

Chisato didn’t want to forget it. She still thought of Moca from time to time. When she passed a convenience store, when she thought of a clever comeback to a producer she couldn’t say out loud but wanted so much to share, when it was late at night and Kanon or Aya or Eve, or occasionally all three, had headed home for the night and Chisato’s thoughts settled back into their favorite spots in her mind. No news was probably good news but Chisato really wanted some news. She just wanted to know that Moca was okay.

CahChunkCahChunk CahChunkCahChunk.

The many mysterious Gods of the Tokyo Metro looked down upon Moca Aoba and liked what they saw: a willowy woman a quarter of a year post graduation in desperate need of a haircut and a backpack with two working straps. That was the only explanation Moca could think of for the perfect empty seat—snuggled on the end of its row, perfect for catching a few precious extra z’s—that simply appeared before her on the rush hour morning train. The ride was twenty minutes, just enough time for a nineteen and a half minute nap and a thirty second panicked rush not to miss her stop. She burrowed into her shirt’s collar, just a size too big, the way she’d learned she liked her button downs, and let her eyes fall shut as her arms wrapped tight around her bag.

It was going to be a good day.

“—round mountain report.”

Moca’s consciousness was just close enough to the surface to let a familiar voice seep in. Aya Maruyama’s smiling face waved down at Moca, framed by swinging daffodil yellow straps on the video screens above the seats, as she wrapped up a video spot on some snowy onsen vacation destination for tired businessmen to dream of. Moca’s commute was full of old acquaintances half-remembered through blurry eyes. Some days Eve offered her a new perfume, others Maya appeared at a Yamaha drum set and there’d been a whole month after their debut album dropped that Moca spent every commute under the blank gaze of Yukina Minato with Sayo’s stern glare at her back. To be fair she’d felt that glare in the flesh too, though Sayo couldn’t bug Moca with her grumpy looks anymore. Moca had long discovered Tsugumi was Sayo’s gooey center and the grouch was pretty kind if you dragged her in.

The world faded away behind Moca’s eyelids again. Her brain began to spin out of focus like the lens of a camera turned slowly by knowing hands. That’s how train naps went—in and out and in again in time to the cahChunk cahChunk of the train on the tracks.

“It’s just not true!”

A smile snuck onto Moca’s face as Chisato Shirasagi’s voice crackled over the train speakers. Moca’s eyes stayed sealed shut as she nestled down further against her chest, blue cotton collar scratching her cheeks. That voice had become Moca’s acoustic sleeping pill. On the bad nights, when her thoughts were too heavy and she couldn’t bear to knock on Tomoe and Himari’s door—there still were some but every month a few less than the one before thanks to a patient doctor and even more patient friends—Moca would put one of Chisato’s old movies on her laptop and let the dulcet tones of Chisato falling in love in “The Springtime of Our Last Summer” or “Valentine Daze” fill the spaces in her brain so snuggly there wasn’t room for any harsh feelings and she could finally fall asleep. The movies weren’t good but Chisato’s voice, even masked with cheesy lines and forced affectation, was audible comfort.

“My love is nothing like that!”

Moca had seen the Chisato on that screen so many times she didn’t have to open her eyes to picture the cotton sundress and drooping wide brimmed hat Chisato—Chisato’s character—wore as she chased after the leading man’s back through a field of something or other.

It was strange to have a casual parasocial relationship with a woman she’d once known. But then again, there was such a difference between the real Chisato Shirasagi with her velvet coated steel voice and wicked sense of humor and the Chisato on the screen who sounded like sucking syrup out of a bottle tasted—intolerably sticky and sweet and built in a lab for the most neutral amount of enjoyment by the highest amount of people. Just a facsimile of a person Moca’d known once six months ago.

The real woman was just a memory to think on in the quiet moments. Maybe she’d forget all together until one day many years in the future when Tomoe and Himari’s inevitable red haired and fangy offspring looked up at her with big eyes and asked if auntie Moca had ever met a celebrity. She’d tell them the whole story, except for most of it and maybe she’d add in a sword fight or two—just to liven it up.

Moca drifted back to sleep to the smooth voice of the male announcer finishing the ad. “Love like a Strawberry, coming soon to theaters.”

It wasn’t a particularly good trailer and it probably wouldn’t be a particularly good movie but Moca hoped they’d keep advertising it for a while.

CahChunkCahChunk CahChunkCahChunk.

“Are you Chisato Shirasagi?”

Chisato could always tell when the advertising campaign for a new film had begun in earnest because suddenly every public outing became a wade through a sea of rubbernecking fans no matter how thick a cloth mask she wore or how high she tied back her hair. She could ward off most gawkers with a stern glare and a slow nod that said ‘I am who you think I am, and no you do not want my autograph’ but sometimes fans got the drop on her when she least expected it. Such as when she was buried in her laundry bag, one hand busy with her cellphone, the other holding her lacy underthings for the machine. Truly, a moment for, as Aya would put it, the ‘gram’.

“Hold on one moment Kanon,” Chisato chirped into her phone, switching on the pleasant celebrity voice halfway through the sentence. The girls asking looked like a nice enough pair of teenagers and she wasn’t in any hurry—no way to speed up her laundry after all—so Chisato turned and smiled. “Yes I am.”

The two girls clung to each other, nervous giggling overtaking them. “Can we get a selfie?”

Their phones were already out and the girls were already sidling around Chisato before she could agree. It didn’t much matter what Chisato did, she was really more of a neat background than a subject but it was part of her job to look pretty and approachable and she was ever the professional. The muscles in her face knew exactly how to spring together in an instant for the perfect image—no teeth, thin lips, and a slight (very slight) raise of her eyebrows. There was no such thing as a bad picture of Chisato Shirasagi, at least not one her publicist would allow to stay online.

As soon as the picture was saved the girls thanked her hurriedly before giggling their way out of the laundromat. Chisato made a mental note to choose a machine closer to the back next time. Though if fans kept causing commotions, she’d have to stop doing her own laundry for the time being.

“I’m back, Kanon.” Chisato pinned her phone between her cheek and her shoulder as she loaded the last of her laundry into the machine. “What were you saying about baby jellyfish?”

“He he, they’re called polyps Chisato-chan!”

Chisato hummed her acknowledgement and settled into her routine of listening to Kanon cheerfully ramble on about her graduate school work as she did her laundry. It’d become a comfort to her. A bit of normalcy in an abnormal life.

She shuffled the bag with her foot, surprised to find something still inside. Chisato reached down—Kanon was explaining the differences between the phases of the jellyfish she was caring for—and pulled loose a piece of clothing she hardly remembered: a black hoodie. Why did she—of course, she’d found it while tidying. Moca’s hoodie still haunted her nine months later.

Daintily, as if it was made of tissue paper, Chisato pulled it from the bag, smoothing it with her hand before carefully laying it on top of her other clothes. As long as she had it, she’d keep it clean.

Chisato had long resigned herself to letting fate decide if she’d get to see Moca Aoba again—not that she believed in such a thing. Moca never asked for the hoodie back and Chisato never offered it. It was a fixture of her house now. Chekov’s pistol lying in the closet—unfired and doomed to remain that way.

Her clothes began to tumble through the wash, rolling around and around until they all blended together into a multicolored whirlpool sloshing through the suds. Every cycle or so the metal aglet on the end of a long pull string from Moca’s hoodie clicked against the glass, like it was trying ineffectually to escape. Chisato’s lips twitched. Moca would say something like that.

These days she didn’t have much opportunity to think about Moca. Their lives just… weren’t. The right moment never came. But at least Chisato had the hoodie and the comfort in her chest when she held it close on every rediscovery—though all the scents it once held were long washed away. This was how they were supposed to go. They were never even friends.

“—texts lately?”

Chisato stirred from her thoughts, slipping her phone back into her hand. “I’m so sorry Kanon I drifted away for a moment. What were you saying?”

“Have you had any… interesting texts lately?”

Like magic, Chisato’s phone pulsed. She pulled her phone away and frowned so deeply Kanon could probably hear it. “Kanon. What did you do?”

“I just thought you might want to talk to her!” Kanon squeaked. Chisato instantly regretted the harshness in her voice but the shock had forced it there.

“It’s been nine months,” Chisato sighed, undecided if it had already or only been nine months.

“It’s your choice but—but I think you need closure!”

Chisato looked at the message on her phone and sighed down to her soul.

>It has been an aeon since your visage last graced my sight. P erchance we can partake in a cup of tea?

“Welcome to Hazawa Coffee!”

There was a lifetime between Chisato’s last visit to the family owned and operated coffee shop and this one, yet time had scarcely touched the quaint interior. There were the same matching chairs and tables, unmoved from their eternal floor plan. There was the smell of coffee and cake, mixed together into an irresistible perfume, wafting through the doorway as soon as it was opened. And there was Tsugumi Hazawa, still waiting by the door to greet all guests to her home. If Chisato didn’t know about the young woman’s Kyoto sabbatical, she’d assume Tsugumi had simply rooted to the spot and grown there for five years.

“Chisato-san!” Tsugumi laughed in happy surprise, clutching her tray to her chest and engulfing Chisato’s vision with her shining face. “What a surprise! It’s good to see you!”

“Tsugumi-chan? It’s lovely to see you as well,” Chisato bowed her head graciously and tried her best to keep focused on Tsugumi’s sweet brown eyes. “I’m surprised as well, I was under the impression you were in Kyoto.”

“We just moved back! I graduated in the spring and we’re working here for now.”

The ever present passage of time tapped Chisato on the shoulder. She was old enough that her juniors were graduating. That explained the energy Tsugumi emanated—the excited terror of a recent college graduate trying to catch sight of the rest of her life out the corner of her eye. Chisato knew the feeling well, she’d coached Kanon through it once.

“We?” Chisato fought her eyes’ instinct to drift and kept them fixed forward. “Is Sayo-chan here as well?”

“Yeah! I’m the manager in training now! Sayo-san helps when she’s not too busy with Roselia. She was my second hire!” Tsugumi gestured to the room behind her and Chisato’s ingrained manners made it impossible not to follow her lead.

Now that she looked more properly at the shop, Chisato realized how deceiving first appearances could be. The things were the same but the people were not. Hazawa Coffee bustled with young life—high school students gossiping, college students with textbooks spread before them and relaxed groups of young adults enjoying the ambiance together. A few of them twittered in her direction but none seemed prone to rise up and beg her attention. The staff was changed as well, the Hazawa patriarch still hummed the same tunes behind the coffee bar but he was joined by Sayo Hikawa, cleaning glasses at his side and conversing with—

Something in Chisato’s heart twinged as she caught sight of Kaoru’s back leaned over the counter—ponytail taut and dancing as she threw back her head to laugh as joke she’d probably made—like plucking a single note and letting the string reverberate until the sound grew faint.

Tsugumi tilted her head innocently, blessedly blocking any possible distraction from Chisato’s line of sight. “Can I show you to a table?”

“No I…” The words tangled up in her throat as the reality of her situation set it. She and Kaoru were in the same room for the first time since she’d watched Kaoru walk out of Moca’s apartment.

Tsugumi looked between Chisato and the counter and put the facts together. Always the perceptive one. She squeezed her tray as if it were Chisato’s hand and with refreshing earnestness cheered, “Chisato-san, good luck.”

“Thank you.” It didn’t ease her heart but Chisato appreciated the effort. With a nod of her head Chisato stepped away from the security of Tsugumi’s presence. She breathed in very deeply, letting her feelings swirl around like some bitter miasma in her lungs and began to walk across the room.

As if sensing Chisato’s footsteps, Kaoru turned around and grinned, with arms wide open and a mug almost spilling over her hand. “Chisato!”

The sight struck Chisato with three feelings at once: annoyance, shame and horrid anticipation. Annoyance at Kaoru’s Kaoruness, that she was waving and shouting in a small store when they were mere meters from one another as if in nine months Chisato had completely forgotten her face. Shame because being annoyed with Kaoru was a privilege she’d lost with their break up and cordiality demanded tolerance. Anticipation because she knew it was going to hurt but she couldn’t be certain when.

That anticipation quickly turned into a dull sort of nagging fear. Chisato had no way to foretell how much the reunion could hurt her and guide for what that hurt would mean. If there was pain did that mean some part of her still clung to an aging love? Chisato knew now that time didn’t heal all wounds as much as it made one forget they’d ever been injured. It was difficult to confirm or deny if one’s heart still bled if they never faced the dagger again. So here Chisato was, ready to drink tea with a dagger she had once loved very dearly.

Kaoru ushered Chisato away from the counter with a flourish of her hands and towards a table on the side, mostly obscured from view. Her enthusiasm was matched only by her body’s confusion. Her limbs couldn’t collaborate on an action. Her arms reached towards Chisato’s chair while her legs moved towards her own and somewhere in the middle Chisato waited beside her chair for it to be pulled out. At once, they both realized they’d instantly fallen into old habits.

Chisato hid her embarrassment with a glance around the room, catching Sayo at the counter watching Tsugumi at the door. Another emotion she could add to her pile: frustration with herself. Chisato never cared much for Kaoru’s unwarranted chivalry and yet her body anticipated it all the same. They were actors with old blocking scribbled in their margins. They’d have to cross it out and write in something new.

Sayo recoiled as she caught Chisato’s glare from across the room. Chisato tried to silently apologize but her old classmate turned away too quickly.

“Ahem, Chisato?” Kaoru coughed lightly.

“Sorry,” Chisato turned back with her camera ready smile across her face. “I was momentarily distracted.”

“I understand.” Kaoru rocked her drink elliptically on the table. The liquid contents bubbled around the rim, always threatening to overflow but never quite committing to it.

Surely, meeting for tea with one’s ex-girlfriend was not a wholly unique social experience and yet, Chisato couldn’t find a script for this particular encounter in her mental library.

“You look beau—lov—” Kaoru stumbled through her rolodex of compliments— “punctual.”

Chisato cocked an eyebrow as she sipped her tea to hold back her instinct to tease. “Thank you. You look—” Happy. Bright. Like herself again. Like the Kaoru of Chisato’s distant memories and not her more recent ones— “well.”

“I am well. And yourself?” Kaoru hesitated. “Are you well?”

“I am. Though I suppose you heard as much from Kanon-chan?”

“I-I did.”

Conversation time of death: 2:42 PM.

“Shirasagi-san, would you like me to take your order?”

The ex-couple both turned to Sayo Hikawa staring blankly down at them with her order pad in hand at the side of their table. Sayo frowned at their confusion. “You looked at me from across the room? Did you not want something?”

Chisato jumped at the distraction. “Sayo-chan! Yes. I will have a chai tea latte.” It was undoubtedly the same thing Kaoru was drinking. It had been their combined order for years: two chai tea lattes. And without fail as soon as she ordered it Kaoru would say:

“The proper name for that beverage, if you were to translate all the words from their native tongues to ours, is…” Kaoru leaned on her fist, delivering this ‘fun fact’ to Sayo with the same suaveness she used to play Don Juan in a particularly off off broadway style production once. “Tea tea milk. Were you aware of that Sayo?”

Sayo’s brow furrowed as she translated the phrase in her mind. “I was not but now I am. I shall consult with Tsugumi-san about changing the menus.”

“Ah—that was not my intention—” Kaoru blustered.

“I shall return with your drink shortly, Shirasagi-san.” With a bow of her head, Sayo retreated from the table.

Kaoru’s fist under her chin unfurled to cup her cheek. She sighed with melancholy drama and turned her gaze to Chisato with a Kaoru sort of smile—mysterious, though Chisato knew it held no mysteries, and wistful. “Ah. Youth.”

Their eyes met and Chisato tore at her skirt with her fingers, bracing herself for unbearable pain that was sure to swell over her, a riptide of torment she surely deserved. But then there was nothing. Those were Kaoru’s familiar crimson eyes peering into Chisato’s but they didn’t hold the stars as she once remembered. They still shone, just not for her.

Chisato hid her internal surprise with a huff. “You sound like an old woman, Kaoru.”

“Would you not call me an old soul?”

“I would not,” Chisato teased, before hesitating at their sudden familiarity. How much distance were they supposed to keep between them? Were they allowed to enjoy themselves or would that mean too much?

Kaoru seemed to suffer the same confusion. Her smile flickered, the edges wilting in their awkward quiet. Her fingers found the table with a rolling tap-tap-tap, trying to fill the air with something.

It was a nervous tick she’d had as long as they’d known each other—as long as either had known anyone. Chisato forced tension into her body to keep from reaching over to ease Kaoru’s nervousness as she had for so long. It wasn’t her place to comfort anymore but it was so hard when there wasn’t an expression that had ever crossed Kaoru’s face that she wasn’t intimately familiar with.

“Chi—Chisato.” Kaoru steadied herself on her inhale. “I wanted to talk to you about…”

Chisato’s lips fell. Of course there was some great big Kaoru Seta proclamation planned. There was always some plan, wasn’t there. The worry had cut at Chisato on the trip over, that perhaps the reason for their sudden reunion was… reunion. But that—

“Shirasagi-san. Here is your beverage.” Sayo reappeared—exactly on time for the worst time—from the nebulous barista aether and set a steaming mug on the table before Chisato.

Though Chisato tried, she couldn’t catch the bounce between emotions on Kaoru’s face.

“Marvelous Sayo! So quick. Tsugumi-chan is a very lucky woman.” Kaoru fed on flirtation like a flower chasing the sun around the sky—she didn’t know she was doing it but she would surely die without it. It was maddening when it wasn’t charming.

“I am the lucky one, Seta-san,” Sayo said with the sort of straight forwardness that allowed such a sentimental response to go unchallenged. She nodded to Chisato, “Can I get you anything else? Some blueberry muffins will be coming out of the oven soon.”

Chisato paused with the cup raised to her lips, her breath burrowing a small hole into the foam resting on the tea. “A muffin sounds lovely.”

Sayo smiled with much more warmth than Chisato ever remembered in their school days. “I’ll have one brought out when they’re ready.” And once again she vanished from whence she came.

The chai tea was as lovely as it had been all those years ago when Chisato would sit and linger with Kanon in the shop. It ran warm down her throat and through her chest, the excess heat releasing in a satisfied sigh. She looked up to find Kaoru with wide eyes. “Kaoru. You’re staring. Is there something on my face?”

“No, not a thing.” Kaoru shook her head with a ruffle of her bangs. “I hope you will enjoy your muffin as much as I shall enjoy watching you enjoy it.”

That comment would deserve a slap from anyone but Kaoru—the woman who still believed Othello’s ‘beast with two backs’ was a very unfortunate dog. “What on earth do you mean?”

“I’m only surprised. But it’s heartening to see you eating a snack.” Kaoru sipped deeply from her mug. She plunged into the ceramic cavern and emerged with a satisfied lip smack and dollop of whipped cream bouncing on the tip of her nose.

Whipped cream? Chisato frowned. “What are you drinking?”

Kaoru winked, “The finest hot chocolate.”

“Not chai tea?” It was a completely harmless change, Chisato knew that, and yet she felt as though the chair underneath her was about to splinter.

“I was recently introduced to the wonders of Hazawa Coffee’s hot chocolate by… a dear companion. They put a touch of cinnamon within it. It is simply… fleeting.”

What else had changed? Chisato looked Kaoru over again. Had she always worn her hair that high? Where had she bought that auburn button down? When did Kaoru start wearing cuff-links—so old fashion as to seem fresh—on her wrists? Did she always look like this? Did she always sound like this? Were they truly strangers again after all that time?

Chisato wondered if she might excuse herself to the restroom and never return. Had she driven Kaoru from herself? So destroyed Kaoru that all remnants of their time together were evicted from Kaoru’s heart. Was the hot chocolate a metaphor? The cinnamon a symbol? How horribly lovelorn was Kaoru still that she couldn’t bear partaking in her favorite beverage?

But instead of any of that, Chisato asked in an even tone, “What did you want to tell me?”

“I wanted…” Kaoru sniffed and wiggled her nose. The cream slid off the end and onto the table. She wiped off the remnants. “I wanted to tell you I’ll… I’ll be in a new performance soon! For the Tokyo Fringe Festival.”

That was probably true but it wasn’t the sort of thing one called their ex about. Chisato waited.

“It’s called ‘Let, no Ham.’ It is a production of the Bard’s great tragedy told entirely without the letters H, A, and M!”

It was so far away from what Chisato had expected that she lost all sense of decorum and set her tea cup against the table. Forcefully. “That is the most offensive use of Shakespeare I’ve ever heard of.”

“It’s experimental!” Kaoru boasted proudly.

“It’s lamentable.” Chisato glared, falling into their old rhythm with gusto. “Who are the leads: Let, Cludius and Opeli?”

“You understand completely.”

“I most certainly do not. ‘Ls, poor Yorick! I knew ‘im, ortio.’ All you’ll manage is to turn the general public more against Shakespeare than they already are. Though I suppose no one has ever attended a Fringe Festival who wasn’t also IN the Fringe Festival and we could debate all day on the morality of torturing torturers.” Chisato froze.

She was smiling, really smiling without any of the niceties drilled into her. Her antagonistic soliloquy was invigorating. It was fun, a little thrilling even, to sharpen the blade of her mind on Kaoru’s whetstone again. Others could match her better but no one could provoke her to such fulfilling frustration. It was a reminder that—no matter how she had wallowed in the muckiest bits of their relationship in her darkest hours—there was a reason it had been so hard to let go.

“I shall pass your critiques onto Maya,” Kaoru set down her cup with a bow of her head.

Chisato’s eyes narrowed and her head cocked. “What part does poor Maya-chan play in this catastrophe of a production?”

“On the contrary, she recruited me for this great experiment. The director is an old chum from her college. Of course, she’s stage managing.”

“I didn’t realize you were still friends.” Chisato was a little surprised, Maya was always so busy jumping between student-led productions and her graduate work in music production that she never seemed to have a moment to spare. And yet she’d made moments for Kaoru.

“We…” The hesitation was back. “…reconnected recently.”

The realization dawned on Chisato just before Kaoru continued. “Maya and I have been…” Kaoru paused out of both fear and dramatic instinct, “...seeing one another.”

Finally, the hurt Chisato had waited agonizingly for came. It knocked on her heart’s door with the heavy sigh of a mailman delivering envelopes thick with bad news. But when it finally struck, Chisato found it was a pinprick. Once upon a time this conversation would have destroyed Chisato. Because they loved each other. But now Chisato knew for certain it was past tense.

Then the relief flooded in like a tidal wave wiping away everything carelessly left behind on a beach. Chisato almost choked on dread she didn’t realize she’d held in her stomach for nine months as it made it’s way out of her mouth. Kaoru was dating. Kaoru was in love again with someone else. Kaoru was okay. After everything Chisato had done, she hadn’t broken Kaoru.

“Whyever is that news,” Chisato deflected before relieved tears could form in her eyes and steal away her pride. “I see people all the time.”

“A-all the?!” Kaoru sputtered flecks of hot chocolate. She dabbed at her lips, “I am simply delighted for you.”

Chisato counted on her fingers, “On the street, in the studio, at tea time. Why I believe I’m even seeing you right now?”

“That is—I am—” Kaoru smiled despite her fluster. “Very well. I am courting Maya Yamato.”

Chisato sent Kaoru a withering look. “There are so many ways to phrase that and yet you picked that one.”

“It’s an accurate statement!”

“It is if you’re an English dandy going down to call on some beautiful young thing.”

“Well, my lady love’s fleeting countenance is quite beautiful and what am I if not dandy?”

Chisato laughed into her curled fist. “You are indeed.”

“I wanted to tell you right away—I still want to tell you all my good news first—but I wasn’t certain…” Kaoru lowered her head so she could look up at Chisato with soft apologetic eyes. “There are no rules to this.”

Kaoru smiled in the tender way she had so many times before. It used to make Chisato’s problems seem so very small. It wasn’t for her alone anymore, but Maya would surely treasure it.

Chisato sighed, “There aren’t.” She paused and realized Kaoru was waiting for more. “I’m happy for you Kao-chan.”

Kaoru flinched, “I’m afraid I’m not ready to hear that name.”

“I’m sorry,” Chisato said gently. “It has a lot of history, doesn’t it?”

“Our everything has a lot of history. That’s why it’s worth salvaging. If…” Kaoru looked almost bashful. “If you’re willing.”

“I don’t know that I’m worth salvaging.”

“I know you better than I know anyone Chisato.” Her smile was nostalgic, a little sad too. “You deserve to be happy.”

“I don’t know that I deserve to be happy.” Those stupid tears were crawling through her nose up to her tear ducts. Chisato sniffed in an attempt to keep them down. “But I deserve to be okay.”

. “I don’t think I know the difference.”

“No,” Chisato laughed a little. What was she doing? Reflecting on ghosts with a ghost. “You wouldn’t, would you?”

Kaoru smiled gently. “I’d like it if you came to show, have dinner with Maya and I. Not at the same time—though dinner theater does have a fleeting ring perhaps I will suggest it for the sequel.”

Chisato bit her tongue to keep from asking after the sequel to avante garde Hamlet. “I suppose for Maya-chan’s sake I shall.”

“I’ll have a ticket set aside for you on opening night!” Kaoru’s mood rose with her eyebrows. “Perhaps two?”

The implication was not lost on Chisato. “I don’t have anyone to bring.”

“You could always find someone! It’s still weeks off.”

“I… I’m very busy.” The truth. “I don’t really have the time for dating.” A lie.

Kaoru sat back in her chair, nearly empty—though not completely empty— mug swinging from her fingers as she thought over Chisato’s words. “You know, I’m still a little bit in love with you.”

“Kaoru…” Chisato’s fingers tightened around her mug.

She held up a hand, squeezing her thumb and forefingers together. “Just a little. I don’t know if that will ever go away. It seems to me that when you love someone—truly, honestly, madly love someone—they get to have a little piece of you forever. But it’s not the same. I care for you, of course, I always will but, the love is a memory.”

As always, Kaoru read through Chisato’s defenses. Though she was afraid of the answer, Chisato still asked, “Is it a good memory?”

Kaoru set her hand beside Chisato’s on the table. “It’s a wonderful one. It gave me the strength to try again.”

Chisato’s fingers loosened. She brought the cup to her lips and paused. “Thank you Kaoru.”

“I didn’t do a thing,” Kaoru shrugged, her eyes flickering just above Chisato’s shoulder. “And I’ll have two tickets set aside.”

“That’s still entirely too presumptuous—”

“Yo~.”

The world went silent with a single word lackadaisically sung out behind Chisato’s back. It swept through the air as if it had physical form, swooping between Chisato and Kaoru until it settled around her shoulders and laughed into her ear.

“Who ordered the muffin~!”

Chisato’s heartbeat was the first sound to return to the world, pulsing once. For the length of that heartbeat, she forgot how to speak, how to turn around, how to do anything but listen to the sounds of a person who had only existed in her mind for months moving, breathing, living, behind Chisato in the real world. Then her senses returned, the shock still vibrating through her body but not condemning her to stillness. Chisato turned around.

“It’s mine.”

Moca Aoba was too professional to drop her tray, balanced on the palm of her hand with a solitary muffin laden plate atop it, but she absolutely considered it. Her mouth and eyes widened at the same rate, her whole face pulling back with surprise. Chisato fought to keep her face from matching.

Where every other employee of Hazawa Coffee committed to a crisp white collared shirt under their apron, Moca wore a tropical blue button up as if she were working at a tiki bar. It was a size too big but in a way that suited her instead of swallowing her. But for all her familiarity, Chisato couldn’t help but look at her in wonder. She was so much more now.

It was like someone had finally filled in Moca’s line art with color.

“Chisato?” Moca’s voice shook in the middle of her name.

Chisato had never wanted so much to look through someone else’s eyes, to know if she shone half as brightly as Moca now did. She’d wanted to know if Moca was okay and now she did. How could she possibly want anything more than to have reason to say that lyrical name again? “Moca Aoba.”

Maybe Sayo and Tsugumi hovered in the background, knowing the reunion was imminent. Maybe Kaoru had some witty comment to add to the proceedings. Maybe the entire cafe was on fire and all the patrons were screaming and running for their lives out the door and the towering inferno was about to turn them to cinders. Chisato would never know because in that moment there was exactly one other person in the world, setting a muffin on the table and regarding her with as much disbelief as she knew she bore.

“Uh,” Moca tilted her head in an imitation of a bow. “Please enjoy?”

In slow motion, she began to turn away and disappear back into the nothing she had been in for nine months. Chisato couldn’t bear the thought. It still wasn’t the right moment, it wasn’t but it was the only moment she had right now, so—

“I have your hoodie.”

Moca turned enough to stare at Chisato in profile. “Huh?”

“Your black hoodie.” Chisato’s eyes held steady on Moca’s face, coaxing her with unspoken pleas to turn back. “You left it at my house.”

Recognition spread over Moca’s features, “You still have it?”

“Of course I do.”

Moca smiled. Not the clever sneaking smirk or the plastered grin but a smile so wide and bright it could only be a perfectly natural reaction. She almost laughed, Chisato could see the instinct flare inside her. “Can I have it back?”

“Yes, I—” She hadn’t quite thought the next step out. “I’ll have it sent to you. If you just give me your address I can have it shipped to you.”

“Oh, yeah. Yeah of course.” Moca laughed a little forced, trapping her tray against her side. “You’ll send it. ‘Ol Moca-chan can’t wait to get it back.”

Chisato tried to smile in return. It was just good luck really. What good fortune, Moca could get her sweatshirt and then— and then— and then Chisato would lose her one tenuous connection to this person. Chisato’s teeth clipped her tongue. She couldn’t stand the thought. “On second thought, shipping costs are so absurd for so little. Would you like to get dinner with me? Tonight?”

For a small eternity, the question rolled around in Moca’s head as her thumb beat against the bottom of her tray. Then slowly, she nodded. “Yeah. I gotta do something after work but… yeah okay.”

“Excellent.” And with that Chisato turned away before she could try to take it back. She glared at Kaoru—grinning with entirely too much self-satisfaction for a woman who had contributed nothing to the proceedings—and picked up her muffin, bulging with fresh blueberries and enough calories to count as two meals.

It was delicious.

“Wo~ow~ we really lived here?”

It was amazing how much larger Moca’s old apartment was when stripped of all furniture, floor fixtures and tenants. Moca spread her arms wide and spun around the room like a singing nun or a particularly whirly dervish. She twirled between the tacky kitchen and the lackluster living room, down the brief excuse of a hallway to their bedrooms and back again until Ran entered shuffling the packet of move out paperwork they’d been trying to get their former landlady to hand over for almost a year.

Moca would make sure the next lease she signed wasn’t so ironclad in it’s exit policies. No early termination. Ran’s dad swooped in to off-set the cost of renting an empty apartment that neither friend could bear to stay in. No questions asked as far as Moca knew. For all Ran’s teenage complaints, he’d always been supportive when it mattered.

“Moca,” Ran called out in her brand new authoritative “heir to the Mitake Flower School, teacher of grandmas” voice, slightly under cut by the new red streak burned back into her hair by the teenage rebellion she’d had rekindled in her soul when she moved back in with her dad. “Did you check the bedrooms yet?”

“Nope~.” Moca’s hands fell to her sides. “But the living room’s clear of everything ‘cept dust~.”

“I’ll go check those then.” She stepped away from Moca, every foot step sounding through the house with a perfect click clack like she was playing a stock sound effect of footsteps off her phone.

Moca paused for a wave of nostalgia as she watched Ran walk into her old room at the far end of the apartment. Instead, her stomach growled because she’d tricked Sayo into letting Moca work through her break to sneak glimpses at Chisato in the corner, just to make sure she was really real. With a pat to her empty stomach, Moca continued to walk around the perimeter with only the fall of rain outside as her soundtrack.

For a place she’d spent almost all of her admittedly short adult life, Moca sure didn’t miss it much. She kicked a dust bunny along the edge of the wall, struggling to remember if they’d ever bothered to vacuum when there were still things to stop the dust from conquering the floor. Tomoe and Himari—mostly Tomoe—helped move everything important out and dump all the stuff Moca and Ran chose to leave behind: the couch, the carpet, the shitty old knife without a handle, two thirds of Moca’s mugs, a box of black tea she hadn’t managed to find in the one moment she actually needed it.

Turned out all that stuff didn’t mean much in the end. They were all just things to lug around from one apartment to the next. It turned out everything that mattered to Moca could fit in one van. At least after they tied the mattress to the roof.

“Hey Moca,” Ran called out from Moca’s old room, cutting off Moca’s reminiscing. “I found something.”

It was hard to imagine what Moca could have possibly left behind in her shoebox of an old room. Moca found Ran standing in the center of the room, pointing up at the ceiling and the dozens of pale stars stuck there, faintly glowing in the unlit room. She leaned against the door frame and screwed her face up in an attempt at thought. “Hmm.”

“What should we do with them?”

They both stared up at the ceiling, individually trying to judge the height and their personal jumping ability. The ceilings were low but neither Ran nor Moca were particularly tall, even with the glorious extra centimeter Moca had lorded over her friend since the summer of their last growth spurt.

“Give Moca-chan a little boost.” Moca swayed over to Ran and motioned for her to squat down. Ran stayed put, regarding Moca with the questioning eyes of someone trying to figure out where Moca got the idea from. Then, very slowly, Ran got on her knees and bowed down until her head brushed the long uncleaned floor. There was something sweet about how much trust Ran put in Moca, and something very stupid too.

The first step was almost like stepping onto a stool—a wobbly, fleshy stool with more give than Santa Claus but something you could stand on. The second was more like a dance move that sent Moca’s knees rocking together as she tried to get any sort of footing on Ran’s curved back. She stretched out for the stars, arm waving back and forth just short each time as her jelly legs on Ran’s pudding back rocked and rolled Moca around like a wave pool. Then the whole thing—thing being Ran—fell apart.

KaThUD.

Ran’s body gave in just as Moca’s feet gave out. They sprawled across the sticky wooden floor in a heap of groans and grunts, rubbing the invisible bruises that would soon bloom in their stunned silence.

“Ha!” Ran broke the stillness with a sharp barking laugh that quickly dissolved into sloppy giggles and chortles and all the other laughing noises pouring out of both friends’ as they slid towards each other. With bodies still shaking with laughter, they stopped when they were parallel to one another but upside down.

“Why did I let you do that?” Ran pressed the back of her arm to her forehead, tears forming in her eyes as she tried to catch her breath.

“I really thought that would work~ and yet~.” Moca stared up at the haphazard recreation of her childhood ceiling. She’d carried them this far through life with her, but it seemed this was where their journey would end.

“Well,” Ran sighed as Moca tapped her feet against the door. “I don’t think the two of us can do this.”

“Probably not.”

“We could call Tomoe. Could use her gorilla strength to just lift you up there.”

“Heh,” Moca was charmed by the image of Tomoe swinging her around by the legs but reality was much simpler, if harder to swallow. “Nah, we’ll just leave them.”

Moca could hear Ran shift by her head. “You sure?”

“Yeah, yeah. Besides,” Moca cooed, “Landlady probably won’t even look up~.”

“She probably won’t even clean the place.”

“Yup~ yup~.”

Ran stretched her hand up towards the ceiling, closing her fist around the tip of Moca’s handmade Breadus Major constellation. “You know what Moca?”

“What?”

“This apartment really sucks,.”

“It suuuuuuucks,” Moca whined in agreement. “Cold in the winter~ Hot in the summer~ and miserable everywhere in between.”

“Why’d we move in here?”

“’Cause we were broke!”

“We’re still broke!” Ran growled with the full spirit of punk rock behind her. “Fuck this place!”

“Fu~uck~ this place! We’ll move somewhere better!”

Ran nudged Moca with the side of her head. “You already did.”

“We can get another biiig apartment with room for me and Tsugu and Sayochi and Tomo-chin and Hii-chan and a liiiiittle room for our Ran-y too~.”

“Where are you gonna get an apartment like that?”Ran’s voice grew wistful.

“It’s a big city!”

Ran huffed, “I like my space.”

“How ‘bout an adjoining place? Build a little cat bridge for you to cross between.”

“Moca.” A light warning, but Moca barreled through.

“Moca-chan just doesn’t want Ran to be lonely~!”

Ran’s head turned, her nose poking Moca’s cheek, and sighed softly, “I’m not your problem to worry about, remember?”

Moca turned her head too. Their upside down eyes met each other with softened affection. “Yeah I know.” She held out her pinky finger to Ran. “Promise.”

Ran looped her pinky around Moca’s and shook them together, “Promise.”

They’d had this conversation before, and they’d have it again but they’d committed to having it as many times as they had to. That’s what friendship was—sometimes never giving up on someone meant trusting them to figure it out on their own.

“As our beloved red haired golem would say—”

“Moca, if you say I guess this is our new same as always I’m going to hit you.”

“—this is our new same as alwa—ow!”

“Told you.”

Moca soothed the top of her head where she had been so rudely flicked. “Ran’s such a bully.”

Ran rolled up to a sitting position, resting her arms on her knees and eying Moca with amused suspicion. “Don’t you have somewhere to be tonight?”

“Wo-ah~ who told you about my hot date?” Moca wiggled herself upright. Five months of working on her feet had finally shaped her body into something other than a twig—not much more than a branch but she wouldn’t snap quite as easily.

“I read the group chat.”

“You read the group chat?!” Moca couldn’t keep her genuine surprise from leaking out.

“Just ‘cause I don’t respond doesn’t mean I don’t read it.”

“Well~ it’s not really a date date,” Moca shrugged. “It’s a ‘thank you for holding on to Moca-chan’s laundry for nine months’ get together.”

“Moca.” Ran looked out the little window at the sliver of stormy sky Moca had spent so much time staring at listlessly. “It’s okay to want something.”

“Okay, okay~.” Moca wasn’t quite sure about that but it was a nice idea.

A hand was extended to her, Ran stood before Moca, offering assistance. With a whole hearted half-smile Moca clasped Ran’s hand and let her pull Moca back to her feet.

“Now, let’s get the hell out of this shitty place and never look back!”

Moca laughed as Ran left, and shut the door behind them.

The headlines on at least half a dozen gossip blogs and clickbait sites the next day were going to read: “Chisato Shirasagi Spotted at Family Diner: Exclusive Coverage on Her Order!” Chisato could hardly miss the unsubtle amateur camera work of every patron under twenty-five—peeking over booths, trying to aim their cameras without looking, taking selfies without reversing the camera. The opposite of Hazawa Coffee’s reserved clientele. To be fair, Hazawa Coffee employed a rising rock star while Chisato made a much rarer sight dining alone at a normal booth in a normal restaurant with only a black hoodie resting on the seat beside her for company. She was, as always, an anomaly.

She wasn’t going to give them anything particularly interesting to witness, other than her existence outside of their phones and televisions. Chisato had long given up on shocking the world into leaving her alone, now she just wanted to get dinner. She was going to catch up with an old—not friend, not exactly— Moca and return a long lost item. That was the extent of her expectations for the evening. Kaoru could say what Kaoru wanted to—she always did anyway,—but Chisato wasn’t about to make any assumptions about destiny.

Nothing magical was about to happen in an old family diner with fading paint and a menu long enough she could option it for a film. Chisato thumbed through the thick laminate pages, each inscribed with dozens of mismatched menu items. Rice bowls and pizzas mingled on one page, burgers and stir fry on another. There was no rhyme or reason to the culture of each section, just piles and piles of more choices trying to drown Chisato in possibility and glossy photos. And the greatest sin of all: she couldn’t even find the drink menu.

The footsteps came before the person, tap tapping up to Chisato’s table in a jaunty quick step hopefully born from the same nervousness that struck Chisato. She thought to remind the butterflies in her stomach that she wasn’t 7 years old and about to put on a school play. But her heart drummed as she looked up from the convoluted menu anyway.

If Chisato had been a character in one of her awful movies this would have been the moment when the heroine entered post-makeover, proving once and for all she too could be a conventionally attractive adult female to please test audiences across the globe. But reality, for once, was much more wonderful and Chisato watched in muted pleasure as Moca joined her.

Somewhere in the last nine months, someone—probably Himari—must have sat Moca down and insisted if she were going to keep dressing like a college student post-graduation she at least be a stylish one. Everything that had once seemed accidental about Moca—her messy hair, her mis-sized shirts—now bore an intentionality. “I don’t care” as a choice rather than a resignation. Her shirt drew Chisato’s eyes, a black button down dotted with white spots. At first Chisato mistook them for stars but as Moca grew closer it became clear they were tiny daisies suspended in the void.

“Sorry for being late.” Moca held up her hand in quick apology before sliding into the booth across from Chisato and ruffling the water from her hair. “Rain delays.”

“I just arrived myself,” Chisato lied out of polite habit.

“Heh. No way.” Moca laughed. Chisato curled inwards at the sound she’d long forgotten except in some secret corner of her mind. “You totally arrived early~.”

Chisato shrugged, “Perhaps.” She pulled the hoodie from the seat beside her and placed it on the table towards Moca. “For you.”

Moca’s face lit up. “My old friend!” She took the black hoodie and hugged it to her chest, grin stretching to her ears. “You washed it?”

“Several times. It kept gathering dust in my closet.”

“That’s probably more than I’ve ever washed it.” She flipped it open, slipping it on over her shirt and holding out her arms to let Chisato judge her style.

“Apologies I should have burned it when I had the opportunity.” But Chisato couldn’t help but smile. Without really thinking about it, she reached over the table and untucked one of the pull strings from under the collar, tugging both strings until they were perfectly even. Perhaps it was not about to send Paris fashion week into a tizzy, but now the look was very Moca chic. “There we go.”

Moca hid behind one of the fortress sized menus. “Hmm~ No prix-fixe here?”

“Not hardly,” Chisato huffed amusedly and picked up her own menu.

“Surprising pick from you,” Moca said, just barely looking over the top. “Not much like the last place.”

Memories of the members only exclusive restaurant she’d used as a power play against Moca on their second meeting flooded Chisato—very few of them were pleasant.“I haven’t been back there.” At Moca’s surprised blink she added, “The ambiance stopped suiting me.”

“Never suited Moca-chan much but that bread pudding.” Moca sighed whimsically. “Moca-chan’d kill a man for that bread pudding. …A small man.”

“So a child.”

“Wo~ow~ what a leap!”

Chisato could hear Moca’s grin sparkle behind the menu. “How am I expected to sort through all these options?”

“Hoo hoo~.” Moca’s laughter rose up like hot air, “The trick is knowing only a third of the menu is real.”

“You’re joking.”

“Nope~ the first two pages, real. The last two pages, also real. Everything in the middle? Fluff so they can brag about the number of options in the window.”

“So—” Chisato flipped through the pages, landing in the middle on some confusingly eclectic seafood— “if I order the shrimp scampi what will happen?”

“Food poisoning from the decades old shrimp in the back of the freezer probably.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Chisato hummed, scanning the official pages for something to wet her throat.

Without looking up from her menu, Moca said, “Drinks are on the second page from the last.”

Chisato turned the page to a drink list comically small for how overblown everything else on the menu was. “Will you be having anything?”

“Eh, Moca-chan really only drinks with friends nowadays.” She paused. “So no.” A wink over the top of the menu before she returned to pretending to find it fascinating.

“Then I won’t imbibe either.”

“Oh ho~ Moca-chan’s in danger.” Her eyebrows waggled. “I’m not nearly as charming to the sober.”

“I doubt my level of intoxication will truly affect my affection towards you.”

“And what affections are those~?”

“Bold aren’t you, Moca Aboa?”

That was the question of the night wasn’t it? What affection did she hold for Moca Aoba? Yes, she found Moca attractive, but she always had. They’d been through so much together at once and then so very little. What did it mean now that they were together again? The possibilities were going to give Chisato a headache, or worse wrinkles.

Moca slapped the menu onto the table, her sly grin greeting Chisato. “As a typeface.”

Flirting was a game they both enjoyed playing. Flirting didn’t mean the closeness she felt that night in the bathtub was reciprocated. Flirting didn’t mean Chisato still felt that closeness.

She could be forward, she could ask plainly what, if anything, Moca felt for her. She could interrogate her own feelings, they could discuss the pros and cons of a relationship—if that was what they wanted. But those were questions with answers she might not want to know—that she wasn’t even certain what the answer she was hoping for. No, it was much more simple to wallow in the misty grey zone of attraction together. To prod and tease until one of them decided they couldn’t take it any longer.

“Perhaps I will have the shrimp scampi.”

They were soon joined by their waitress, the sort of woman with tired eyes that had seen just about everything twice over. The pair ordered quickly—neither dared risk the shrimp scampi after all. A burger for Moca, hamburg steak for Chisato. A simple and classic choice that could hardly be messed up by a confused chef and wouldn’t excite the amateur paparazzi around her.

“Oh and two glasses for the drink bar!” Moca called after their waitress just as she turned away.

The woman regarded Moca with the sullen exhaustion of being expected to do her job and pulled two cups from her vast apron pockets, thunking them on the table. The establishment had only the finest sanitation standards.

Moca spun the cups around in her hands. “Do you trust me?”

“Absolutely not.” Completely, her thoughts corrected.

Moca smiled as if she could read minds and skipped off with the two glasses in hand. Chisato craned her neck to watch Moca leave but she was so quickly out of sight all Chisato did was strain it. But the drink bar was only soda. There was only so much harm Moca could do.

Chisato waited patiently for her dinner companion to return, trying to ignore the creep of eyes up the back of her neck. It was quite impossible to ignore when the stares came from the table directly beside hers. She tried her usual polite back off look but the man seemed to misread her displeasure as permission and rose to greet her.

“Are you Chisato Shirasagi?”

Chisato sighed internally. He looked harmless but unwanted attention was the last thing she desired. Perhaps he just wanted a picture or an autograph or to say hello but if one person started there’d be ten others right behind him and then suddenly she’d be doing an unauthorized handshaking event in a diner.

“I—”

“Nope, you’ve got the wrong person~. She’s not who you think she is.” Moca, with two glasses of bubbling orange something in her hands, swooped in between the man and the table, totally intercepting his question.

“O-Oh.” The man immediately responded with an embarrassed laugh. “I’m sorry.”

“It happens~,” Moca winked. “She’s way cuter than any actress though.”

Chisato’s lip twitched up at the positive comparison of herself to herself.

“Ah ha, I don’t know about that,” he rubbed the back of his head. “But your friend does look different now that I think about it.”

“Not my friend, have a good night~.” Moca shut down any further conversation with a turn of her back and wink at Chisato. She stayed standing and blocked Chisato from view, pretending to focus on perfectly placing the drinks on each side of the table, until she heard the squeak of the man’s booth behind them.

Moca took her seat back. “Can’t believe you were just gonna reveal yourself~.”

“I try not to make a habit of lying to my fans.”

“Moca-chan didn’t lie~.” Moca shrugged languidly, sipping her sparkling brew. “You’re not who they think you are.”

Chisato picked up the drink Moca had so thoughtfully (?) procured for her. A bit of carbonation jumped off of the surface onto her cheek. “Perhaps.” Chisato conceded, just before she sipped.

At first, she missed the flavor for the strength of the carbonated bite on her tongue, then the artificial orange rushed in with a hint of vanilla—a bit like an orange creamsicle, something she hadn’t tasted since she was a little girl. The actress smiled around the glass. It wasn’t really to her taste but the nostalgic flavor was lovely to indulge in.

“Moca-chan’s a soda mixologist~.”

“Perhaps you should focus on making coffee.” But Chisato sipped again.

Moca preened as the waitress brought out their steaming plates from the kitchen. Chisato’s hamburg steak looked tastier than she imagined, or perhaps she was just that much hungrier than she thought.

Moca paused with her burger raised to her mouth. “Does that happen to you a lot?”

Chisato squinted up from her dinner. “What?”

“Fans,” Moca bit into the burger as punctuation. She continued after swallowing “Do they just approach you like that all the time?”

“Only when I have a new movie about to come out,” Chisato said diplomatically.

“But you’re so prolific.”

Chisato tipped her head in acknowledgement of the dots Moca had connected and concentrated on her steak.

“Have you ever signed anyone’s boobs?”

A piece of steak lodged in Chisato’s throat as the surprise kept her from finishing. She hid her cough in a napkin and glared with a stern, matronly aura. “Moca.”

“What?” She shrugged, munching the fry like a cigar. “You’re saying you wouldn’t? Even if the most beautiful woman in the world asked ‘Chisato, please sign my tatas’ you wouldn’t do it?”

Chisato leaned her elbow hovering just above the table, chin framed by her fingers.Her eyes lingered over Moca Aoba, as brazen as she ever dared be in public. “I’ve never been particular towards beautiful women.” She sipped Moca’s hand poured soda again.

Moca’s eyes lingered a little too long on Chisato’s fingers around the glass before she caught herself and tried to distract herself with a messy bite. Chisato took the opportunity to eat several, excruciatingly slow bites of her meal.

Riposte Moca Aoba, a bold stroke deserves a bold stroke. “Besides, you were the rock star, not me. Did you ever sign anyone’s breasts?”

“Only my own, for practice once. Didn’t rub off in time so we did a whole festival set with Moca Aoba written upside down and backwards across Moca-chan’s cleavage.”

Chisato couldn’t help but laugh at the very vivid image of Moca proudly displaying her own miswritten name across her chest. She caught herself with a hand around her mouth before a snort could exit from the back of her throat but Chisato’s smile still peeked out from behind her hand. “That can’t be true.”

“Ran still has the picture.”

Chisato froze. Was it a slip up or a casual admission that things were fine between them? What were the rules of response? Chisato had so many questions about the 9 month gap between her and Moca but no way to know what was a landmine and what was a dud.

“It’s cool.” But as always, Moca read her so easily, “Ran and I are good.”

She relaxed as much as Chisato could—lowering her shoulders a full two centimeters from their rigid position. “I’m glad… I’m very glad.”

Moca pulled her leg onto the booth, arm looped around her knee, hugging it tight to her chest as she finished off her burger.“Took off a couple months to just… chill things between us. The others helped a lot.” Moca stirred a fry in red ketchup circles, looping around the plate. “So did the brain pills… for my brain.” The fry crumpled in her fingers.

Whatever response Moca was afraid of, Chisato refused to give it. She laid her fingers against the table, just beside Moca’s resting hand and tapped, hoping the soft sensation could pass for comfort. “That’s a good thing Moca, you don’t have to look so nervous.”

Her body shuddered with a relieved exhale. “They help unless Moca-chan forget ‘em... but Tomoe has a system. She divided the kitchen table into seven sections and every day Moca-chan moves them along like the most boring board game.” As Moca’s banter continued her body relaxed again, hands gesturing along in a rehearsed bit. “Doesn’t work one bit but she likes to help— she likes to think she’s helping. I just set a timer and then Hii-chan texts me like five times to check in.”

“Moca.” Chisato didn’t have anything to add, she just wanted to stop Moca from distancing herself from the topic with every laugh. She could hardly force honesty out in a family diner amongst the aging vinyl tables and cotton leaking seats.

Moca plastered her grin across her face. Chisato winced. “They’re just worrywarts.”

“Even so—”

“You ready to get out of here?” She pushed her empty plate away, eyeing Chisato’s abandoned one.

“Nothing for dessert?” Chisato kept her disappointment at the almost hurried exit in check. This was the way things were supposed to go. “I’m surprised with you.”

“Moca-chan’s got something else in mind for that. If you’re interested.”

“Pick out anything you want,” Moca called out to the woman rendered invisible by the moderately high convenience store shelves. “Moca-chan’s treat.”

Chisato’s melodious voice snuck over the snack foods. “How very generous of Moca-chan.”

“I make those big barista bucks now so don’t be stingy!”

Chisato laughed in response accompanied by the crinkling of plastic wrappers. Moca flipped through the remaining convenience store buns languishing on their shelves waiting to be swept away into her stomach. Though, her budget could only afford to rescue two of them from their tragic fate of not being devoured by Moca—pending on Chisato’s choices. Moca wasn’t about to be made a liar, even if Chisato chose the deluxe convenience store sushi set out of a slavish devotion to indigestion, Moca would buy it with grinning teeth. As long as the withering actress didn’t try to get something too healthy.

Moca frowned as she thumbed over the best by dates on the bread. There were still day old buns in the back of the shelf. Her long forgotten convenience store pride reared up. They’d really gone lax without her—or maybe it was just without her there to eat up the old stock. Not her problem any more, Moca decided, as she tossed a fresher cream bun and a red bean bun in her basket.

More crinkling, Moca’s ears twitched. She lopped down the aisle, creeping around the corner as quietly as she could to catch a glimpse of Chisato’s decision making process. The seemingly ever shrinking actress stood at the side of the aisle, politely pressing herself against the shelf for the convenience of the other customers—that there weren’t any didn’t deter her. She weighed two packaged sweets in her hands, reading over the contents of each one, probably realizing there wasn’t much different in the combinations of sugar, lard and more sugar.

There was something inherently appealing about seeing Chisato in a place so normal. Sure she was a sight to behold on her throne—a fancy restaurant, a tv screen, a back alley in the middle of the night—but it was just as fun to see the queen pick through prepackaged donuts in the snack aisle. It was easy to be beautiful when lit by artists and shot by professionals. But a real beauty that could shine under the washed out blue lights of a late night convenience store was something else. Almost enough to make Moca wonder what the point of looking anywhere else was.

Moca felt the tell-tale pinpricks on her cheeks as she watched Chisato place both packages back on the shelf and turn to find Moca sneaking. She smirked in that self-assured act Moca fell for every time. If Moca wasn’t certain after they flirted their way through dinner, she was now: she had a big stupid full fledged burning ‘do you like me y/n?’ crush on Chisato Shirasagi.

“However did Hazawa Coffee lure you away from this place?” Chisato chuckled and picked up a small bar from the shelf, tossing it to Moca.

Moca caught it in one hand and cringed at the contents, “This is not dessert.” She tapped the misleading jolly bear on the front of the so-called nutrition bar. “This is a punishment.”

“I don’t care for sweet things.” Chisato offered as a terrible excuse for an excuse.

“You know what’s not that sweet?” Moca waggled a bun from her basket.

With a playful smirk, Chisato closed the gap between herself and Moca and plucked the bar from her fingers. She didn’t retreat. “I thought I was supposed to pick out ‘whatever I want’.”

Moca’s brain screamed at her that the girl of her dreams—literally, mostly appearing to scold her over a math test she’d forgotten to study for—was standing so close and she was going to blow it. What exactly “blowing it” meant which the person in front of you had already held you together through the most pathetic moment of your life was lost on Moca. But it probably entailed red tipped ears.

“Perhaps I’ll get a beverage.” And with that Chisato pushed past Moca, their shoulders brushing as she made her way to the cold items in the back. A whiff of lavender drifted past Moca’s nose. She squeezed the hoodie thrown over her shoulder and followed.

Nothing in the rows of brightly decorated drinks, dripping in condensation sweat, pleased Chisato. Moca watched her pick through each beverage, deeming each unsatisfactory as she went along with trailing fingers riding the ridges of the bottles like a gentle roller coaster.

“Get something with sugar~.”

Chisato sent a withering look over her shoulder as she tweaked a cola bottle. “Such a demanding patron. Your soda was filled with more sugar than I usually consume in a month.”

“The Moca-chan special is a delight!”

“I didn’t say it wasn’t,” She hummed pleasantly and pulled a bottle loose, tilting it from the shelf and letting the cap fall between her middle and index fingers. She held the dangling bottle out for Moca’s approval.

Moca eyed the plastic bottle filled with cream brown liquid and adorned with an old fashioned lady in a fancy floppy hat. “Milk tea?”

“It has sugar.” The bottle wiggled.

“Foiled by a technicality~,” Moca playfully grumbled, swiping the bottle and dumping it in her basket. “You could at least get one with bubbles.”

“No I don’t think I will~,” Chisato patted Moca’s shoulder with the pads of her fingers, brushing them down the short sleeve to graze Moca’s bare arm. The light touch buzzed through Moca. “I’ll meet you outside.”

Moca kept her face from turning red just long enough to hear the ding dong of the door’s electric bell. The kid at the counter got the full view of Moca’s red cheeks—probably thought she was drunk this time of night but Moca didn’t really care what some high school student thought of her.

High school student? No, high school students didn’t work late night shifts. Jeez, Moca grumbled to herself as she dug change out of her pocket, when did she stop being able to tell High School and College kids apart? Every year more and more people became children.

She exited quickly with her plastic sack of goodies—and tea—in hand. On her way out, her eyes caught on a magazine by the exit boldly announcing the launch of “Boppin’ Around the World With Hina Hikawa” soon to be streaming. Somehow, it made more sense to Moca than just about anything else in her life.

Chisato waited outside, standing in a pool of light like an indiscriminate spotlight as the last remnant of the rainstorm slid from the awning above. She idly tapped something on her phone, thin lips resting in a neutral melancholy. As Moca approached, the actress looked up with slow surprise as if she had forgotten who she was waiting for, pushing long strands of blond hair back behind her ear. Then she smiled, a little sadly in a way Moca recognized: They were about to say goodbye again.

Moca looked up at the sky and muttered a weak delay. “It stopped raining.”

“I’ve called my car,” Chisato told her as Moca handed her the tea. “I’d hate to keep you any longer.”

“You can keep me all you want,” Moca flirted in that noncommittal way to keep from letting a genuine ‘please don’t’ escape her mouth.

The plastic wrapper ripped easily in Moca’s hand as she leaned lazily against the store’s glass front, plastic bag dangling from her wrist. Bread was always a comfort. She bit into one of her buns. Cold cream spilled into her mouth—somehow bittersweet. Maybe she’d got the expired one after all. She’d tell Chisato everything when this bite ended. Everything she’d felt in the last nine months, how much she wanted to see her, what she’d started in the diner before the feelings scared her off. She’d tell her she didn’t want to say goodbye again.

Something flitted in the corner of Moca’s eye. She turned, just slightly, but all she found was Chisato sipping her tea with her eyes fixed very forward. Moca took another bite.

She’d tell her as soon as she finished this bun. But how exactly was that conversation supposed to go?

Hey remember nine months ago when we were both going through hell and you fell asleep on my bed and I threw up on your fancy rug? Anyway, I’ve never felt that safe before and I still want to be around you like all the time and I don’t really know what to do with that? Wanna make out?

Moca tore open her second bun. Once again something darted at the edge of her vision, but this time Chisato wasn’t quite fast enough as she looked away. Moca winked, though cringing inside, “Oh ho, you want Moca-chan’s sweet buns after all?”

“I’m simply concerned for how quickly you eat,” Chisato chuckled, tongue darting out to catch a stray drop of tea on her lip.

“Have it,” Moca held out the untouched bun to Chisato.

Chisato softly pushed it back towards Moca, “If I have two empty carbohydrates in one day my agents will never forgive me.”

“All the better.” Moca ripped the bun in two and held it out again. “Half.”

She sighed but leaned down to accept the torn half from Moca, biting into it with playful savagery in an imitation of Moca. “It’s our secret.”

“I’ll never tell.” She never would. Their time was up wasted on flirting for what was flirting but sex and jokes in practice. Their two original sins spun together. At least it was fun.

Loose asphalt crackled under the wheels of a familiar black car rolling up to the curb.

Chisato straightened her shoulders, her perfect posture somehow becoming more perfect. “That’s my cue.”

Moca suffocated on her own words. They piled up in her throat around the bits of bread stuck in there and formed a wall so thick nothing could pass. All she had was one final beckoning bite of bread in her fingers. She held it out to Chisato. The last temptation of Chisato Shirasagi.

Chisato took it into the palm of her hand and held it there, fingers gently closing around it. “I’ll see you later.” And she began to walk towards the car and out of Moca’s life.

Moca slid down the glass window-wall into a crouch, her knees even with her eyes as she watched Chisato open the door to her car. The plastic bag crumpled against the ground. Chisato’s own voice, nine months younger, echoed in Moca’s head.

“If only we had met in better times, Moca Aoba.”

“No such thing,” Moca muttered bitterly. It wasn’t fair. That was a standard Moca couldn’t meet. Couldn’t change the way they met, couldn’t change the things they’d done too quick. No such thing as better times, just times Moca couldn’t go back to and improve. They’d come so far, she needed more time to gather her courage. They needed just a little more time.

Moca squeezed the black fabric over her shoulder. There was nothing tethering them together anymore. Only Moca could buy them time.

She stood up with all the strength she didn’t have and charged for the car door with more athleticism than Moca had ever bothered with before. It was nearly closed. There wasn’t time to think about how to reasonably stop Chisato from driving away, so Moca shoved her hand in the ever shrinking crack of space between door and frame and pulled.

Chisato stared out of the car at Moca, wide eyed and shocked at having a car door wrenched from her hands and probably thinking, as Moca was, how lucky Moca was that while Chisato’s acting was greatly improved now, she still had the upper body strength she had when she was eight.

Moca’s brain fumbled for words as her adrenaline whirled out of control so what spilled out of her mouth was: “Are you Chisato Shirasagi?”

“No, you’ve mistaken me for someone else,” Chisato replied without hesitation.

Half a smile crept onto Moca’s face. She could feel everything about her softening as she looked down at Chisato. “Good answer.”

“Moca?”

Say my name again, Moca wanted to ask, say my name every day like it means something more than just me. But she needed time to collect herself, just a bit more, so instead Moca said, “I don’t wanna do that thing where we say ‘oh we should do this again’ and then we never do. That’s for old friends who keep forgetting each other. We’re not friends.” Moca didn’t wait for Chisato to ask what they were. “Can I walk you home?”

“I live several miles away,” Chisato said, filled with surprise but not displeasure.

“And I live in the opposite direction.” The other half of Moca’s grin filled her face. “Can I walk you home?”

Chisato closed her hand over Moca’s fingers tight around the door frame. “Please.”

There were parts of Tokyo that never slept but those swaths were worth taking the long way around for two people just enjoying the honesty of the moonlight and each other. The rest of the city lived by the train timetables and when the last train arrived at its final destination they were tucked in their beds or finishing their supper by the couch. With good enough company and a dark enough night, time faded away from the specificities of hours into a general sense of “late”.

The night was damp like it hadn’t made up its mind if it was going to rain again or not—the pooling puddles on each street corner were already starting to dwindle away under the electric red suns of the street lamps that parsed the sidewalk into stripes of light and dark. The only consistent light was the lonely moon up above, nearly full but for a wink.

And somewhere in all that were Moca and Chisato, following half-remembered roads that could get them most of the way to wherever they were going. They were aimed at Chisato’s home in theory if not in practice—neither bothered to check their phones.

It took time to learn each other’s pacing, Moca’s slow gait speeding up for Chisato’s pointed march until Chisato relaxed back into a more leisurely wander. A comfortable companionship between them, content for the moment to simply exist around one another, alternating between aimless chatter and a warm silence.

Now that Moca had her extra time, she struggled to use it. Where could she start? Moca looked for the answer in every billboard spread high above them on the sides of buildings—reading off tag lines and marketing copy in funny voices that never failed to make Chisato smile despite herself. When that failed she looked for answers in the empty streets and the parked cars but there was nothing there for Moca either. So she fell back to Chisato, watching Moca with a question on her lips.

“When did you start working at Hazawa Coffee?” Chisato asked with her hands folded in front of her and her eyes cast over the many stretching buildings flanking them with flickering windows.

Moca’s eyebrows raised. She pressed her hands further into her pants pockets. “Why are you asking now?”

“Is it a problem to be curious?” Chisato asked, to Moca’s shrug. “I wanted to ask earlier but… I wasn’t sure if it would be gauche. I never want to pull up bad memories for you.”

The unexpected thoughtfulness tugged at Moca’s heart. “Nah it’s fine~.” She pulled her hands from her pockets, folding them behind her head with thumbs pressing into the sides. “They put out an aggressive recruitment campaign to get ‘ol Moca-chan on their staff a couple months ago. Just banging down the door to get Moca-chan to say yes.”

“Were they?” Chisato chuckled.

“Weeellll,” Moca dragged out the sound so long she almost fell asleep in the middle. “There might have been a dozen failed job interviews and ten times more unanswered applications after graduation. Then the new manager in training wanted to make some changes in the store and she offered Moca-chan the kind of deal she couldn’t pass up. Preeeetty nepotistic girl though, heard she hired her own girlfriend too.”

“How very dare she.”

Moca swallowed hard, inadequacy biting at her heels. “Moca-chan should probably be looking for a real job, shouldn’t I?”

Chisato considered the question seriously as they continued down the street, turning when their feet both deemed it reasonable. “Are you happy?”

There was a set of easy lies—yes I’m happy or no I’m miserable—on Moca’s mind but honesty was easier with only moonlight bearing down. “I’m not unhappy.”

Chisato waited for Moca to continue, hands falling to her side, eyes falling to Moca.

“I used to think that I was just broken, that everyone else got to be happy and okay and I—” Moca lost her place in the depths of the empathy in Chisato’s eyes. “And I didn’t. Now I know I am.” She tapped the side of her head where her brain sat waiting to be coaxed into producing serotonin.

She paused for the denial she knew wouldn’t come. They respected each other too much to ever deny the other’s pain. Moca smiled. “But people still like ‘ol Moca-chan. Even on the days I don’t know why. I don’t know if it gets better than this. I don’t know that I need it to get better than this. Maybe these are my better times.”

“I can’t tell if that’s intensely depressing or the most hopeful thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Ha!” Moca laughed once, obnoxiously loud and sure to have woken up some light sleeper with a low hanging apartment. A series of chuckles followed, forcing Moca’s stride to come to a stop so she could catch her breath around her knees.

She rose with tears pooling in her eyes, crinkled into corners by her smile. “Yeah it’s not much like me, huh?”

Chisato reached into the small purse strapped around her shoulder and pulled out a small lace handkerchief. Slowly, she dabbed at Moca’s eyes with barely more force than a breeze. As she wiped, she whispered. “On the contrary, I think it’s such a very you thing to say.” Her body shivered with cold and something else as she pulled away. “You’ve grown quite a bit and I remain as stationary as ever.”

Moca’s first instinct was to reach around Chisato and trade her own body heat for Chisato’s comfort but instead she tugged the black hoodie from over her shoulder and pressed it into Chisato’s hands. Wordlessly, the actress accepted. She pulled it on over her head, getting caught on the neck hole. With a mutual laugh between them, Moca grabbed around the sweatshirt’s armpits and pulled. Chisato’s head popped out in a tiny blonde explosion. Her hair spilled over the hood—lumpy and tangled. The contrast between the neat pleats of her skirt and the mess of the hoodie and hair didn’t suit Chisato in the least and Moca could hardly contain how happy the sight made her.

Moca swallowed. Her hands rested over Chisato’s waist, unmoving from helping her pull. It was time to tell her. “Chisato of nine months ago never would have done that~.”

Chisato dismissed the comment with a half-smiling scoff and a light push against Moca’s arm, not enough to move Moca away. “Hush.”

“Never would have gone to coffee with her ex.”

“I did that for Kanon.”

“Probably wouldn’t be doing things for Kanon either.”

Her eyes dramatically spun around in their sockets, “Alright, you win Moca Aoba, I am a completely different person now.”

“Not completely.” Moca gathered her bravery, eyes flickering between those violet eyes and her perfect lips. “Still Chisato.”

Only air hung between them. Chisato’s eyes flickered back. “Still Moca.”

“Chisato, these last nine month I—”

Abruptly, Chisato pulled away from Moca. “Has it ever struck you how odd it is that there are so many stars up there and we can’t see any of them?”

Was it that Chisato didn’t hear or that she didn’t want to? Either way her eyes were fixed up above, far beyond the light pollution of Tokyo.

But Moca couldn’t see that far. All she could see was the foggy barrier of light like an unwanted forcefield, clouding out the stars beyond. “I’ve lived here so long I don’t really notice.”

“Sometimes, I go out to the countryside for work and I find myself so overwhelmed by just how many stars there are. Then I come home and—they’re just gone. And I forget I’m missing them. Until I see them again and I remember what I lack.” Chisato looked down at her fists. “I don’t want to remember what I can’t have.”

“But they’re still there,” Moca murmured, unsure if Chisato could hear. Her eyes trailed away from the sky to the buildings underneath. There was a tall and wide building close by with open walls and the omnipresent white on blue ‘P’ sign signaling a parking garage. The inkling of an idea blossomed in her head. There was no plan but she had to trust it’d work. “Come with me.”

“Moca Aoba you’re the one who wanted to climb these stairs. I will not have you whining about them.”

“I thought there’d be an elevator. I didn’t know it’d be this HIGH!”

Moca collapsed dramatically against the railing of the open air stairway she’d unwittingly committed herself to. Dramatic, exaggerated pants emerged from her lungs, doubtlessly exhausting her even further.

Chisato paused at the bend between flights, looking up at their final destination just before them: the roof. “You’re on the last one,” she called back to Moca straggling up the stairs before bounding up the last few. There may not have been a bulging muscle on her upper body, but Chisato’s lower half was toned from endless hours of cardio. She shifted comfortably in Moca’s hoodie and climbed up to the final landing: a little roofed enclosure with no walls, save for safety rails and an unlocked push door to the roof proper.

She leaned against the railing, hands snug in cotton pockets around her belly and looked back over the city they’d just walked through, so much smaller in hindsight. Up close each building felt distinct but from distance it was impossible to tell any but the largest apart. Everything else was simply another piece of the greater landscape like a tree blanketing a mountain. Well, everything except for Chisato’s own enlarged face staring back at her from a billboard right at eye level.

“Love like a Strawberry~.” A exact imitation of that stupid trailer announcer sang out at half speed and elongated over Chisato’s shoulder. “Can’t wait.”

“Please do not go see that film,” Chisato sighed in her own giant face’s direction, hardly recognizing herself for all the digital alterations.

Moca joined her at the railing, panting a reasonable amount. “Are you gonna die in this one too?”

“Moca, I’ve signed an NDA. You know I can’t tell you.” She shimmed her shoulders with more mischief than she normally permitted herself. “But yes. I do believe it’s one of my better deaths.”

“Better than when you drowned in that creek to save those kittens~?” Moca teased, leaning in.

Chisato scoffed, “Much more tragic.”

“What about when you got eaten by your were-dino lover in 'Were-Rexes of Tokyo'?”

“Absolutely more shocking.”

“When lawyer kid’s ghost had to defend her own murderer in court?”

“That didn’t happen.”

Moca clapped her hands together. “But it would have been a great episode.”

“How is it you know so much about my filmography?” Chisato leaned forward and looked up at Moca with batting eyes and the wicked look of a cat who’d just cornered that mouse that ruined her milk.

She expected a witty response. A joke. A retort. Something about bad movie nights or needing a good laugh. What Chisato didn’t expect was the same seriousness in Moca’s eyes she’d deflected from on the street below. The same self-assuredness that was so frighteningly new to both of them. She wanted to see more and she was so so terrified of what she desired.

“I’ve seen all your movies,” Moca admitted with trembling hands on the railing and a steady voice. “Even the shitty ones.”

“Most of them are shitty ones,” Chisato offered the self-deprecation weakly, stepping back towards the door to the roof so Moca couldn’t hear how loudly her heart beat.

Moca smiled small. “I wanted to see you.” She pinched the bridge of her nose. “I wanted to tell you everything that happened to me. All the pain, all the shit. On the nights I couldn’t sleep, after… everything. Sometimes I’d just put one on to hear your voice when it was too hard to be me. And even though it wasn’t you, it was comforting.”

Moca stepped forward. “I wanna tell you all the good stuff too. Chisato I—. When I went to Ran’s first show I almost asked you to come.” Moca winced, glancing away. “But Moca-chan’s no good at this stuff.”

Chisato pressed against the door, the push bar at her back and breathed very slowly as she processed what Moca was saying. It shook her to know that all that time she was thinking of Moca, even just in passing, that Moca was also— “Me too. I didn’t know what to do so I put you in a closet with your hoodie and every few months I took you out and washed you and folded you and I had every excuse to call you and I didn’t.”

Chisato’s voice broke, “Because I never wanted to give back your hoodie.” Her hand clasped around her mouth at the realization. “Because as long as I had it, I still had a chance to see you again. When things were right. But they’re not right Moca. I don’t know if they’ll ever be right. Or better or—”

Moca stepped towards her, delicately laying her hands on either side of Chisato—not quite pinning her but resting, waiting just in case.

She tugged at clothing around her chest. “If only you hadn’t left this behind.”

“Chisato,” Moca whispered into her ear with a rumble that made it clear those three syllables existed only for Moca to say them. “Did you really think I forgot the hoodie?”

And she pushed the door in.

They stumbled back into the blast of cold open air, goosebumps rising out of their skin, from the sudden chill and from the nearness of each other. Chisato fell away from Moca with eyes shut, clinging to the open door like a buoy in a storm. She tried to dig into the metal, to chip away with dulled fingernails, anything to keep her from floating away in the gentle tide that scared her worse than any storm. But the wave didn’t crash around her and she still stood. So slowly she opened her eyes and she looked. And then she gasped.

All the stars in Tokyo had hidden themselves here.

A thousand gleaming, shimmering lights spread over the flat rooftop. Pinpricks of infinity winking in pools as far as her eyes could understand. They sparkled in blues and yellows and whites with occasional pin pricks of red or flickering purple flickering betwixt. The air smelled fresh up here in the closest thing to silence a city could ever get. Tokyo spread around the roof, all the buildings around contributing their lights to the earthbound night sky.

The stars rippled under Moca’s feet as she walked forward into the void, every footstep a meteor shower. Chisato almost called out after her, struck by an irrational dread that Moca would disappear and become another star for Chisato to forget as soon as she was out of view. Instead, she watched Moca reach the center and stop. And wait.

How long was Moca willing to wait for her?

She put the decision in Chisato’s hands, wasn’t she afraid that Chisato would make the wrong one? Moca knew all the worst parts of Chisato, that every rumor ever whispered behind her back was true.

She could barely see Moca, only the reflection of reflections dancing over her skin and the moonlight in her hair. That, and the faint outline of a grin, not hollow like the carving of a mask, but her real smile, wondrous and waiting.

Chisato knew the worst of Moca too. She’d seen how deep the well of self-loathing could go. How vindictive she could become with claws and teeth and how pathetic she was when the sharp tips fell off. They knew each others’ pain as their own. For every difference they had, there were two similarities. Or maybe it was the other way around. And yet, Moca still waited.

Chisato stepped forward.

She wasn’t a romantic. She wasn’t a fool. She was too jaded not to know she was walking through the remnants of an afternoon storm pooled on a rooftop with poor drainage. That Moca was human the same as she was, not the hero of some love story covered in starlight but a woman standing in a puddle with city lights bouncing around her.

But Chisato chose to believe there were stars at their feet anyway.

Air had no space between them when Chisato finally stopped her slow approach. She whispered, as raising her voice any more would shatter the moment, “How did you know this was here?”

Moca hands hovered over Chisato’s, just close enough that heat gathered between them. “I didn’t.”

For one very brief moment in time, so short as to be worthless by many accounts, they had been trapped in the same prison, only to discover they both held half the key to their escape. By all accounts, they never should have met but for—

“Serendipity.”

Chisato pivoted slightly, sending comets falling with her heel. She could barely see Moca but she knew that smile by feeling alone. She laid her hand on Moca’s cheek, the sensation was almost familiar now, and drew their faces together.

With a hushed and shaking tone on that star kissed rooftop, Chisato whispered the most honest words she’d ever mustered into Moca’s lips. “I’m afraid.”

Moca’s hand fell to the small of Chisato’s back, just under her own sweatshirt, resting, pressing but never forcing, as she responded with equal honesty. “Me too.”

They felt at once the terror of standing at the edge of a cliff knowing you could fall and the realization that they already had and all they could do was hope there was something more wonderful at the bottom than what they left behind.

Chisato kissed Moca with a softness once thought impermissible. There was a timidness to their touch, lips barely more than pressing, hinting at more but reveling in the slightness. The future passed between their lips, not with promises but unconditional hope that this was their something better.

And when it was done and the magic fading around them—when they were becoming aware of the water soaking into their shoes and the chill in the air and the absurdity of walking around an unlit rooftop slick with rainwater in the middle of the night— they kissed again with lips that ignited the wonder back in their hearts and made that rooftop the whole world for a moment.

Moca nuzzled the side of Chisato’s face as they pulled away, peppering her with kisses until Chisato pressed against her body, tucking her face protectively in the crook of Moca’s neck with a girlish giggle, hands on Moca’s arms as Moca pulled her in so tight she felt she’d disappear if Moca let go. They were two spirits of air who’d found each other and clung together to keep from blowing away.

But Chisato wouldn’t let go. She was so tired of lying. At least to Moca. At least to herself. Not when she’d felt how wonderful it was to see and be seen.

“Thank you Moca Aoba.”

Moca noticed two differences as they stepped back onto the street to continue their pilgrimage along the Tokyo streets. First, they walked much lighter. Their steps matched more easily with a new found bounce—though it was as likely from the water in their shoes as the burdens they dumped on the rooftop. The second was that they walked much much closer, bumping against each other as if at any moment one of them would pull the other into an alley and pick up where they’d left off on the roof. To be fair, Moca considered it but her boldness was used up for the night. Hopefully, she could recharge and try again later.

Still, she treasured the feeling of the back of Chisato’s hand brushing against Moca’s, feather light and iron cold. A spark ran up from their touching skin to Moca’s cheeks. She tried to turn the unmistakable tingle into teasing, “If you want to hold Moca-chan’s hand so bad you just have to ask.”

“Oh?” Chisato teased the backs of their hands together, hinting her fingers between Moca’s without ever committing to a grasp. “I thought your hands were all tied up. Something about a full hand of friends and no room for more.”

Moca had no idea how ticklish hands could be until the agonizing moment Chisato slid her perfectly manicured nails along the back of her hand. She’d never realized handholding could have foreplay. “I’ve rethought things. Moca-chan’s right hand—” she lifted her hand up, wiggling digits illuminated by streetlight for Chisato’s approval— “full up, no room for entry. But the left hand—” Moca held her palm out to Chisato, fingers spread— “you can have the whole thing.”

As she interlaced their fingers, Chisato looked up at Moca and batted her eyes while betrayed her innocent pretension with a smirk. “Whatever will I do with so many fingers?”

Moca squeezed Chisato’s hand to keep from squeaking and turned away to try to hide the fire licking up her features. It was a total failure. There’d be time later to wonder a million questions about what it all meant, and what they all meant, and what name they had to put on it and all the girly things the little Hii-chan in her head screamed at her. For now, they had the empty Tokyo landscape to cross together.

It was such a new feeling, Moca realized, to long for closeness from someone who longed for it back. Moca knew desire unfortunately but sharing it with someone else? The fluttering in her chest was so strong Moca found herself overcome with the urge to lean over and peck Chisato’s lips. She could just do that now, score.

Or maybe not. Chisato glared as they parted, though the playful smirk around her lips promised she was only half serious. “I’ll let you off with a warning this time but you can’t just kiss me whenever you’d like.”

“Okay~ Okay~.” So there’d be rules to learn. Chisato was worth it. They were worth it. “But there’s no one around right now.”

“Develop good habits now and you won’t suffer later.” Chisato leaned against Moca’s shoulder as they walked, hands still intertwined.

Somehow, they managed to actually walk to Chisato’s neighborhood. Moca recognized it as the straight streets they’d walked along started to roll with hills Moca had run away from a lifetime ago, just as the sky began to brighten in prelude to the sun.

Chisato realized it too, straightening up, though refusing to relinquish Moca’s hand. She stopped quickly and pivoted, leading Moca into a concealed side street. There she firmly pushed Moca into a wall and pressed their lips together again. Longer, more languid this time. The kind of kiss that made Moca’s toes curl and the rest of her want to crawl into Chisato’s lap.

“Heh he,” Moca chuckled when she had air to breath. “What happened to the rules?”

Chisato kissed each corner of Moca’s mouth with a smile. “I make the rules and I’d like to kiss you.”

Moca pressed her head against the brick at her back, hardly able to handle the combination of sincerity and mischief out of Chisato’s mouth. “Oo~ hoo~. Such a needy woman~.”

Her free hand roamed up the stiff line of buttons on Moca’s shirt onto her collar, slipping underneath to run ticklishly around the base of Moca’s neck. “Yes, I am.”

Moca squirmed. It felt so good, but it was a little much at once. “Got a little taste of Moca-chan’s sweet kissaroos and now you need more? I see~ I see~.”

Chisato was immediately an arm’s length away with narrowed eyes. “I am filled with regrets suddenly.”

“Too late~.” Moca swung behind her, scooping Chisato up in a tight, squealing hug as the night began to fade away around them. The boldness was temporary after all, they couldn’t spend every night wandering empty streets, but so much would remain. It was too late. Too wonderfully late for both of them.

As they climbed the last hill between night and day where just below Chisato’s apartment building waited to fulfill the almost forgotten promise of ‘walking her home’, they watched the sky burst in purples and pinks, a last show of color before blue returned to the sky and the sun resumed her throne. Well, the sun was a star too, wasn’t she? Things weren’tall that different in the daylight.

And then they were at her door—a tower of glass and concrete for a princess—a queen—a Chisato. They couldn’t kiss goodbye, not with the doorman there probably already wondering if Chisato was coming home early or late, so Chisato turned at the entrance and watched Moca with a small smile. Her blonde hair cascaded so beautifully against the black hoodie she still wore as she tilted her head and waved.

Moca didn’t care how mushy the look on her face was as she raised her hand and waved back. “Good night, Chisato Shirasagi.”

“Good morning, Moca Aoba.” And then Chisato disappeared as if she’d always been a dream. A very good dream.

Exhaustion quickly weighed Moca down. Without the caffeine buzz of lovestruck adrenaline, she was just a normal girl realizing her cellphone was probably full of worried texts. At least this time she had a happy excuse to share. Moca dragged her feet as she turned around. It was way too much effort to pick them up but maybe she could shuffle all the way to the station to catch the first train home.

“Moca!”

Moca spun back around. Chisato stood in the doorway, leaning against the frame with the same hazy, comfortable tiredness Moca felt. “You forgot your hoodie again.”

Moca cupped her hands to her mouth and shouted. “I’ll come get it tomorrow!”

Her Chisato—too early to think that? No, never—laughed, “It is tomorrow.”

They were tomorrow and today and yesterday all in one. There was so much before them and so much behind them blending together into one ever present Now. “Then I’ll come get it later today!”

Chisato uttered that wonderful word:

“Okay.”

And they were.