"Oh, rain," Tokino said pleasantly. He hadn't expected anything different. He stretched out his palm to catch the first few raindrops as they fell.
Mikado rummaged in her bag for her umbrella, "Wait a second."
"Don't worry, it's okay, I like the rain you bring," Tokino turned to her with one of his usual smiles. In a few minutes, the curls of brown hair that curved inward to cup his face would be pressed flat and wet against his skin. The loose strands at the back and sides would clump together and drip freely onto the floor when he and Mikado got home, creating puddles, and Mikado would fetch a towel to rub his hair dry.
Mikado walked home, a tiny anonymous figure within her umbrella and the tall figure of Tokino guarding her without.
"The train station is twenty minutes away. Too far without one," Mikado reasoned to Tokino as she took the umbrella from under her arm and unfurled it. This time she was comfortable in her logic. It was irrefutable.
"Oh."
They both stared at the rim of the transparent vinyl umbrella where it came up to the middle of Tokino's upper arm.
"Too bad. You keep it. It's important that my Sacrifice doesn't get sick," Tokino assured her.
Mikado frowned. Shut up, you're the one that gets sick.
The new red umbrella, extended to the limits of its rod, bloomed open at the end and swung up to where it nestled in Tokino's hair, catching the strands painfully in the metallic supporting web at its centre as he slouched under it.
It had been the longest umbrella in the store.
"I was expecting this," Mikado said emotionlessly. The receipt was in her bag and she could return the umbrella tomorrow.
The end of the school year heralded a special performance by each class. The class next to Mikado's was doing a play and Mikado found herself unusually interested in the boys clowning around with the stilts, until she realised what she was thinking and marched herself off with deliberate self-consciousness.
"But if I hold the umbrella, then you'll get wet."
Demonstrated in earnest when they had returned from a fight and the gusting wind sent sprays of rain diagonally underneath the umbrella to soak Mikado by the time they returned to Seven Voices.
"Finally."
The illumination from the lightning lit up the undersides of the clouds overhead. The after-rumble rolled over them both about ten seconds later and sounded like car tyres on gravel. Whether the lightning coincided with Mikado's rain or Mikado's presence brought to existence a storm made possible by the afternoon's heat, Tokino couldn't say.
The first raindrops were big black blotches on the concrete. Pedestrians, who had looked skyward at the first flash and thunder, began to hurry indoors into shops, into restaurants, crowding into the lone bus shelter on the street. The rain, audible first as quiet splatters on the dry dusty pavement, went from single, easily separate sounds to a rapidly speeding tempo that blurred into a continuous drumming within seconds; the intensity of a summer downpour.
Tokino, who had initially not stirred, began to stand up as it became apparent how heavy the rain was going to become when Mikado's order cut through the air, "Sit."
Mikado produced, from the small light bag she had been carrying over her shoulder, an umbrella of all things. It probably took up half the space within her bag and had not even been mentioned as a recommendation in the morning weather forecast.
Tokino waited without question as the sound of velcro being unstrapped sounded quietly beside him and Mikado opened, triumphantly, one of the numerous umbrellas they now had at home and settled it over their heads, where they sat side-by-side on a concrete wall bordering a grassy area and the closest they'd ever get to being the same height.
"Won't we get struck by lightning?" Tokino had obediently ducked his head underneath when Mikado first opened it and was almost cheek-to-cheek with her.
"It's far away and moving east. Besides, it'll strike one of the buildings first. They're taller," Mikado murmured. Her voice probably didn't carry outside the radius of the umbrella.
The light shining through the orange of the umbrella's fabric cast the faintest coloured glow onto Mikado's features and the tops of her bared shoulders. Tokino could just see the same orange fluorescence tinting his own nose.
Watching Mikado's face, he felt the same contentment – he was sure that was what she felt – being transmitted, as it were, to him. Just inches away from the outward side of her face, the rain sheeted down unhindered, a translucent flickering within his vision. The rhythm of water droplets that fell from the ends of the umbrella's metal struts was just perceivable as rapid ticking separate from the din of the general downpour. Mikado's free hand, resting at her side, was outside the shelter of the umbrella and a column of diverted raindrops was dripping steadily onto it, splashing and jewelling her hand with colourless trembling drops.
Tokino took the tiny cold hand and folded it between his two own, settling them on his lap. Mikado turned to look at him when he did so.
How was it, Tokino wondered, that he had never felt shy around this girl, not once. Proximity had been no problem for them. Tokino had felt none of the natural embarrassment that accompanied sustained eye-contact with a stranger. That accompanied physical contact. Being observed. Judged. On the first day they'd met, they had held hands. If that embarrassment came from social programming that begun even before memory began, then this was evidence that their bond ran deeper than anything society could impose on them. It was primal. Essential. Inerasable.
Outside, the rain was a warm downpour that doused the accumulated heat of the summer day. It chased people away under shelter, separating and creating arbitrary divisions of dry and wet, withstand or leave. Watch them scurry. Mikado's voice in his ear, "You understand?" Water painted a circle round them and drew a line that ran continuous along their two sets of huddled-together knees. The peach-coloured sundress Mikado wore continued to the border of that line and, past it, stuck drenched to her knees, the material made pathetic and flimsy by saturation. Summer-warm droplets ran down her legs and wet her bare feet in their flip-flops.
The rain and thunder ran on for twenty minutes until it began to pitter-patter to an eventual halt. People slowly and gingerly began to emerge. The sun returned from thick clouds to make blinding reflections of every puddle and slowly restored the colour to rain-darkened buildings. Mikado's dress dried within minutes.