a/n: so this is the first half of a two-parter i'm doing in honor of the three-year anniversary of 1x11 airing/my heart being made whole again/incredible hibike nostalgia

please watch brausur's amv "ice can burn as much as flames do" before reading this to get the Full Experience

The events of the auditions weren't something anyone brought up again, not really. The cracks it'd shown, the ugliness lying down underneath everyone, were things most people would prefer to squash down and keep buried. Even Reina, ever the ripper of emotional scabs, went quiet whenever anything referencing that spring came up, so Kumiko never mentioned it - simple as that.

Except it was never that simple, of course, and it gnawed at the edge of her mind like an insistent pug dog until she had no choice but to shake it away, and the best way to do that was to ask Reina about it.

"H-hey, Reina?" It was a greeting she'd used a million times before, but this time it felt like she was already proclaiming her eternal love on top of the world's biggest stage. Reina sat, still as a statue, under the awning she'd spent so many hours practicing on, the awning that Kumiko now (somewhat irrationally, for the awning itself hadn't done anything wrong) hated. It was deliciously ironic that she'd be there of all places, but Kumiko didn't say that. Instead, she took another deep breath.

"Yes?" Reina looked up, setting her trumpet down on her lap. Kumiko gulped.

"Do you, uh, do you remember when we had those auditions in the first year? When everyone was acting r-really weird?"

"I don't think I could forget." Reina didn't look directly at her while she talked, which unsettled Kumiko more than she'd like to admit. "Could you?"

"No." Kumiko paused. "It's j-just, you never talk about it, so I didn't know if maybe you didn't really think about it at all."

"I try not to." Reina put a hand over her trumpet, rubbing the shiny brass. Kumiko sat cautiously beside her, cringing when she realized the bench was still wet from the thunderstorm the night before. Reina seemed unbothered. "Why? Do you?"

"Some of it." Kumiko closed her eyes, tried not to let the worst of her thoughts in. "Kaori-senpai. Yuuko-senpai."

"Right."

"Taki-sensei."

"Of course."

"You." Reina stiffened, just a little, enough that anyone else would think she just happened to be chilled by the still-damp weather. "I m-mean, that was a big part of it. We'd just been to the mountain, what, a week ago? Two weeks?" Kumiko knew exactly what the distance between those two points was, had been using the day of the mountain to keep time since then, but she didn't tell Reina that. She figured it'd come soon enough. "We'd just really gotten to b-be friends."

"I remember." Kumiko wondered if she remembered the hug in the hallway, the way Reina stood on her tiptoes to even reach Kumiko's height, the way she'd smelled that day - lavender and rosemary and brass, always. "Why are you talking about this, Kumiko?"

"It was just a lot of emotion, I guess. Everyone - everything - was all heightened and weird and surreal." Kumiko plucked a strand of grass from the ground and rubbed it between her fingers. "S-sometimes I wake up and wonder if I dreamed all of it."

"I know what that's like." Reina moved closer. "Why did it bother you, though? You had your part secured, even at Nakagawa-san's expense, and she didn't mind it." She was so close now, so warm even when her gaze was as distant as the Arctic. "Kumiko, why are you bringing this up now?"

"Taki-sensei." She said it so quietly that perhaps some part of her subconscious hoped Reina wouldn't hear. Reina did hear, and in fact she turned to face Kumiko head-on, violet eyes cold and glassy.

"What about him?" she asked. Kumiko remembered the way Reina's voice had lilted on the word love, how she'd turned red and flopped onto the bench, so unlike herself, that a funny part of Kumiko thought that this had to be a stranger who looked like Reina. She thought about how her heart had stopped, her mind had exploded, the mountain and the hug and the way Reina's finger dragged down her lip all but rolling like a film reel over and over and over again.

"You said you loved him." Kumiko was quiet as a mouse now, but Reina still heard her. It seemed she always did.

"I did." Reina looked up to the sky, just beginning to darken. Kumiko figured they must be the only students left on campus at this point, for how late it was. "I needed you to understand why I . . . acted like that. Told off Yoshikawa-senpai like I did."

"Because you were in love." And of course she understood that. Of course she knew that love made people do stupid, crazy, terrible things, but it still hurt. It still perplexed her.

"Exactly."

"Everyone was so on edge." Kumiko wanted to cry - she didn't know why she was talking like this, why she was pouring everything out to the very root of the problem. "P-people were so upset. Yuuko-senpai would've done anything for Kaori-senpai, and you would've done anything for Taki-sensei, and it was j-just a mess, and I didn't know what to do!" It came as a surprise to both of them how loud her voice was. "I didn't know what to do for you."

What she didn't say: "You were in love with a man twice your age, and I loved you, and I still do and I can't do anything about it."

What she didn't say: "You acted so cold and then you didn't and then you became something else entirely, and I couldn't say anything at all."

What she didn't say: "It felt like everything went gray as soon as you said you loved Taki-sensei."

Instead, she stood up, trembling like a kitten left in the cold, and offered Reina her hand.

"C'mon," she mumbled. Reina looked at her strangely. "I have to show you something."

a/n: part two to be uploaded soon!