As she lay down, Tsuyu thought of Yume.

She was not sure why. It had been Miyako who taught her to shoot pool with a practiced hand; Miyako who had grabbed her and started running like she'd stolen something when that one bouncer finally got a good look at the picture on Tsuyu's ID.

So, too, had it been Miyako who had snapped "I didn't even know they would check!" in her place when Yume complained on the train ride home about losing that gig. It had been Miyako who later had smoothed out her hair and told her that it wasn't her fault she looked so young anyway. (Even in junior high, Miyako never got carded.)

It had been Miyako who had lost them yet another show for slamming Tsuyu's cello case into a barfly's solar plexus, apparently because he had said girls shouldn't play brass. Her expression was perfectly serene throughout. Tsuyu had realized then that Miyako's experiences of the music world might have been a little different from her own.

It had been Miyako who asked Yume point-blank why she even gave Lamunaid the time of day. Yume had agreed that yes, he was kind of an idiot and all, but he was actually pretty nice sometimes, and brave, and even selfless. It had been Tsuyu who had pointed out that that was a really weird thing to say.

"Well, like…see, when we were little," Yume had said, "I was a real tomboy and…I kind of broke a window. And he took the blame for it. He never even complained, and you all know what his parents are like." A pause. "This might have happened more than once. Like, every other week until we were in middle school. Also, yesterday."

It had been Miyako who'd said "damn, girl, you're an unrepentant criminal!" and slapped Yume's shoulders, and the next time she saw Lamunaid, she greeted him with "'Sup, Catspaw!" Only Tsuyu had laughed.

It had been Miyako who had dragged Tsuyu home, one spring night so long ago, to show her a stack of vinyls with faded sleeves. "Louis Armstrong," Miyako had breathed, pride mixed with reverence, and Tsuyu had suppressed the urge to ask who even used records anymore. Then Miyako, half-drunk, started yelling "let's fall in love!" and none of it mattered, not even a little.

It had been Miyako who had decked Lamunaid so hard that she'd called Tsuyu in tears to ask if she should call the morgue. Of course, Miyako said, he had it coming because he'd touched her butt — supposedly "on accident", but then again, he was Lamunaid. Tsuyu had just sighed and talked her friend through the Glasgow coma scale, and then through basic nosebleed treatment after the former had turned out to not quite be necessary in this particular case.

(Yume didn't laugh at that story lately.)

It had been Miyako who'd stood up with sparkling eyes and said their band should be called The Sultanas, because they were Very Classy Ladies, and they should wear suits and shades to all their shows for the same reason. They'd all giggled a little, Miyako included, and they ended up having no name at all — at least, until Yume fell in love with the logo on the side of an abandoned train car. After the fifteen hundredth rendition of "It'll be so awesomely retro and, like, a message against commercialism," they'd given in.

It had Miyako and Tsuyu who had given up a Sunday afternoon to hike through the junkyard and let Yume take pictures of the stupid car, so she could look up what those weird Cyrillic letters actually said.

It had been Yume who cut class the next day, then showed up at school on Tuesday with dark circles under her eyes. She was beaming as if she were queen of the world. And then she showed off a mobile phone photo, taken in the earliest rays of dawn, of her drum kit with the new name carefully stencilled on the front, and it really had looked sharp enough that Tsuyu could hardly fault her.

It had been Miyako who'd mumbled "don't worry us so much, geez" and told Yume she still had some paint in her hair.

It had been Miyako who had picked up Lamunaid by the collar, looked him in the eye, and told him not to come to their shows anymore if he was going to bring his stupid friends — or at least that one creep who kept trying to look up Yume's skirt, because seriously, what the Hell. He'd agreed to her position with only minimal coshing, a net win in Tsuyu's book. And to his (admittedly meager) credit, he really hadn't brought that guy around anymore.

It had been Miyako who'd snapped her gum and yelled "hey, shorty, where you think you're goin' with all that junk in your trunk?" the first time they'd met, when Tsuyu's spine was threatening to snap under the weight of a cello, purse, and bookbag. It had been Yume, of course, who had nudged Miyako's arm and told her not to be so mean, but it had been Miyako who grunted assent, shouldered the case as if it were weightless, and asked "where to, short stuff?"

It had been Miyako who had broken the silence of a midnight cram session to ask, face unreadable, if the others believed in reincarnation. "I'm starting to wonder," she had continued, "if maybe the three of us have, I don't know, some kind of connection."

To which Yume had responded that of course they were connected — they made music together, and that was as good as sharing one soul between three bodies.

It had been Miyako who froze for an instant, face slightly pale, before mumbling generic agreement and begging Tsuyu to teach her trigonometry.

Every time, Tsuyu knew it was Miyako she was closer to. That Yume was their friend and they loved her, but at the same time, she was a separate existence from the two of them. That Yume was bound for, if not greater things, simply different things.

And yet, and yet.

Every so often, Tsuyu woke in a cold sweat from dreams of Yume bleeding to death in a field of snow.

Notes

I kind of wanted to write something about the future (or present; the timeline of 40 Fire makes for confusing tenses) of human Cello, Drum, and Trumpet, so here we go. The latter two weren't really given much time for development in canon, but I was charmed by a manga panel of human Trumpet carrying a stringed instrument case. Deciding she was "the kind of person who carries heavy stuff for her smaller friends a lot", I slowly worked out the dynamics of the trio.

None of my Japanese sources had a name for the human reincarnations of Cello and Trumpet, so I made some up with the same form as Drum's: Drum's last syllable is "mu" and that can be written as "yume", Cello's last syllable is "ro" and that can be written as "tsuyu", and Trumpet's last syllable is "to" and that can be written as "miyako".

Likewise, Yume is confirmed as a drummer in one of the CD dramas, so I've written her here as part of a weird little trio with Tsuyu the cellist and Miyako the trumpeter. That pretty much means they play swing or big band music, so that necessitated characterizing them as retro geeks. (If the intention was supposed to be that only Yume plays her namesake instrument, too bad, I call Alternate Universe.)

I wanted to work in a reincarnated Dacider-sama as a guitarist, but there wasn't really a good place. Also, the band name is supposed to be in Russian because Organ and her marionettes were associated with Russian imagery. The intended name here is budushcheye ("future", "tomorrow"), which is written on some of Organ's equipment in the manga.