She comes across one of them on an unremarkable day.
Against common sense, she pauses when she comes across it. Her. It's a girl with short choppy hair and ragged clothes, lying across the path with her arms and legs splayed like she's trying to cover as much ground as possible. Maki runs a hand over her face and considers her options. There's a small, slightly crushed wing peeking out from beneath the girl. Her eyes are open, but she doesn't look at the woman now standing over her.
If she stares at the sun any longer like that, she'll go blind.
"You're in the way." No. She isn't, Maki could easily just walk around her.
The girl doesn't say anything. As if on a whim, Maki reaches down and grabs one of her arms, and drags her along with as much compassion she would have for a sack of garbage.
She drags the girl all the way home without any more strange encounters and lets her arm drop to the ground once they reach her lonely house. Her clothes are in an even sorrier condition now and Maki would apologize for that, but she doubts the girl cares much about her rags.
Only then does she feel the urge to tug at and maybe pull off that one pathetic wing the girl bears on her back. Cruelty dances in Maki's vision and she shakes her head to clear them away, crouching by the girl who won't take her eyes away from the sky. A brief sting of annoyance clouds Maki again; shouldn't the girl at least acknowledge her savior?
"So. Your name?"
"Rin of the Starry Skies." She gave herself that title after staring at the night sky a little too long.
"Rin." Maki repeats flatly, ignoring the second part.
"Yep."
"What happened to your other wing?"
"I lost it somewhere," she simply says.
Slowly, Rin pushes herself up to her knees in one oddly fluid motion and arches her spine. The wing sadly flutters and wispy white feathers fall across her back like dead leaves. Maki holds her hand forward as if to catch one of them, but changes her mind and pulls her arm away from Rin at the last second.
The sunlight is waning. Maki stands and motions for Rin to follow her inside, and when she only gets a puzzled blink she impatiently grabs the girl by the back of her shirt and pulls her along.
—
Dreams are silly, childish things better left to drift away up to the clouds and out of sight. In the clouds they linger, forgotten by those below, lingering and lingering until they come to a realization that the clouds are not where they should be. They return to the earth. They belong neither here nor there anymore.
—
After sitting Rin down in an uncomfortable wooden chair, Maki retreats to the privacy of her bedroom to rest and think. Well, she brought the girl inside. That was something. No one saw her. With too much weariness for someone still in the zenith of her youth, Maki reaches for a pack of cigarettes in her coat pocket and looks down at it in consideration. There's no noise coming from the other room; Rin hasn't moved at all, has she?
Someone like Nozomi or Honoka or Hanayo would be better equipped to handle a situation like this. Maki, queen of icy boundaries and standoffishness, can't interact with another person let alone someone like this strange winged girl who called herself Of the Starry Skies. She should have left her on that path for anyone else to trip over. Maybe the guilt of leaving her there would have been more bearable than this.
She sets the cigarettes down and goes back to the other room. Rin turns her head with an inquisitive little look and that little wing clumsily flaps.
The thought of pulling it off passes Maki again. She scowls without intending too, and Rin quickly looks the other way. Just as she had suspected, Rin hasn't left the chair she was left in. It only infuriates Maki.
"Stop looking away like that. You look terrible with that expression on her face."
Confused. All sorts of confused. Her eyes remind Maki of a kitten she had once found toddling in her yard. Its mother had plucked it up and carried it away before Maki could even entertain the thought of taking it in as a pet.
Maybe this is some sort of strange compensation for that lost opportunity.
"Do you live alone?"
Maki ignores the question and busies herself with doing absolutely nothing. "You can call me Maki."
"Maki." Rin rolls the name over her tongue like something sweet, and Maki finds herself awkwardly scratching the back of her head.
"You must have come from a long way."
"Maki!"
She scowls and this time Rin doesn't avert her inquisitive, oddly empty stare. "I heard you the first time. Cut it out."
—
Maki might have had dreams when she was a child. Years of a strict upbringing and not enough time for fun and play cut the strings loose before she could properly grasp them, leaving some sort of emptiness she filled with study and work. But it was like stripping a tree of its leaves and pasting sheets of paper to its branches. It didn't fit quite right.
—
She becomes accustomed to a daily routine of waking up, going to work, and coming home to find Rin either fast asleep sitting upright in that uncomfortable wooden chair or restlessly pacing through the rooms. Maki finds her presence to be neither a nuisance nor a comfort, and more than once she questions why she keeps the girl around.
Technically she never told Rin to stay, and Rin doesn't seem to have any real incentive to stick around either since Maki barely gives her any attention. She's like a ghost that Maki only tolerates, but Rin only gives those blank smiles and repeats Maki's name like a mantra whenever Maki tries to prod her with questions about herself.
Maybe Rin really doesn't have anything to say about herself. The thought makes Maki hesitate on her frustration.
Just to try to make things entertaining for herself, Maki stops on her way back from work to buy a new shirt for Rin. When she hands it over, Rin immediately changes right there without any hesitation.
"At least wait until I'm out of the room." Maki grumbles, an unwanted blush crawling up her neck and ears. She moves to cover her eyes a moment too late— she spots the gaping hole on Rin's chest, slightly to the left, the flesh straining to meet together to close the wound. Then it's gone, covered by the new shirt.
"I like it!" Rin declares, automatically turning around for Maki to cut a hole for her wing. It's weakly straining against the fabric.
She wants to ask, she really does, but instead she places one hand on each shoulder blade. Rin shudders. Maki can feel the wing beneath one hand, and an unevenness beneath the other. There's a tiny bump, barely noticeable.
That satisfies one of her curiosities, at least. Maki squeezes the wing without thinking and Rin shifts in discomfort.
"When we first met, you said you lost your other wing," Maki says, holding onto Rin to stop her from moving away. "But that wasn't all you lost, was it?"
"N-no?" Rin nervously twitches. "I don't get you…"
"That's what I should be saying, you weirdo."
The days have been so mundane yet so strange, lately. Maki roughly turns her around and jabs a finger at where she estimates the hole should be; Rin gasps as the finger pushes the shirt inward into the wound, and red blooms beneath it. Maki stumbles back.
"Sorry—"
Rin cups a hand below the wound and sadly looks down at the stain. "The shirt is ruined now."
More questions are raised, but now Maki thinks she may know the answers to them all. She steadies herself and clears her throat, extending a hand to Rin again. "No, it's fine. It will come out with cold water."
The air is heavy with awkward tension now. Rin reluctantly pulls the shirt off and Maki takes it without looking at her face, turning on her heels and marching off to get the blood out. When she looks back, she sees Rin gingerly prodding a fingertip at the wound in her chest like she's just noticing it for the first time.
—
She loved to stargaze as a child. There's no time for stargazing these days when she's too tired from work and can't stay up late.
—
She doesn't mention the hole in Rin's chest again for another couple weeks, and things begin to settle back to the weird sort of normalcy they had, if it could even be called normalcy. Without saying anything she buys more clothes for Rin, and Rin takes to sleeping on the sofa instead of the wooden chair.
After a while, Maki moves the sofa into her own bedroom so she can listen to Rin breathe as she sleeps.
And then things aren't quite as lonely, and Maki stops thinking about how it's a shame that all her friends live too far away for frequent visits, that they're also busy with their own lives, and that the likes of Honoka and Nico and Hanayo haven't been completely strangled by the grip of adulthood yet. She almost envies them.
Rin, too, in all her simplistic cheerfulness, replaces her confused stares with confused smiles instead, and that's quite better. Maki stops resenting her for no real reason.
"Maybe your other wing will grow back, and then you can fly." Maki wonders out loud as she's cutting holes in new shirts she bought for Rin.
"Rin can't fly." She says like it's the most obvious thing in the world, knees pulled up to her chest and her shining eyes carefully watching Maki's fingers as they work. "If I could, I wouldn't have ended up here!"
"That's unfortunate." Her fingers stop for a second. "I mean, your wings being nonfunctional."
"It's lonely up there." Rin looks upward at the ceiling.
Maki stares at her for a moment, and then shakes her head. "Down here, too."
—
No one offers to visit, and Maki offers to visit no one. That's not entirely true. Nico and Hanayo keep calling her and Nozomi had even dropped by who knows when, leaving a basket from the local confectionary on her front step. Maki lets Rin eat all the sweets and doesn't return any of the calls.
In a way, her life had barely changed once Rin had entered her house (though Maki had technically dragged her in, that first time) with all her quiet eccentricities. But it should, it must have, and Maki still ponders over the hole in her chest and the answers to all those questions.
What if I met you in a dream? she wants to ask so badly, collecting the downy feathers and leaving them outside on the windowsill to be carried away by the wind. What if you met me in a dream?
—
"You didn't lose it, did you?"
Spring is nearly at its end. Maki sits Rin down in that uncomfortable wooden chair and stands over her, waiting.
Rin casts her eyes downward and folds her hands in her lap. "No, because Rin never had one to begin with."
Maybe Maki should ask whose fault it is, but that's not one of the questions she thought about. She cautiously reaches towards Rin and places three fingers over where the hole is, this time careful not to push in. "You're not whole."
"No… are you mad, Maki?"
Maki hasn't been angry in a while. She gives Rin a wry smile and straightens up, drawing her hand away.
Despite everything and everyone, Maki just doesn't know what to do with her heart anymore. She's lost, a wayward bird hopelessly lost from the others, also with no intention to find her way back. Her parents could be easily blamed, but that'd be avoiding responsibility for being her own self.
Rin's smiles never quite reach her eyes. Now Maki knows what to do. She presses a hand down on Rin's shoulder when the girl tries to stand, and her wing slightly flutters in protest.
"I'll give you mine, because I don't know what to do with it, and you deserve to be whole."
"Maki—"
"Shut up. This is my own choice, alright? I want you to have it."
She brought a scalpel home from work without anyone there noticing. Rin's mouth slightly opens in shock and befuddlement as Maki drives the scalpel into her own chest, never closing her eyes or wincing. It drives in deeper. Skin and bone easily give way to the cold blade like clay.
Ah, now Rin is crying, but she doesn't look sad, only confused. That much is more than enough to drive Maki to continue.
The illogical ridiculousness isn't lost on her; she dryly laughs as she pulls out her own beating heart to let it gently spit red at both of them as it beats in her hand. Rin stands up now, sharply drawing in a chestful of air. "Maki, don't do that."
"Too late for that. You're so slow, jeez."
Rin doesn't even try to fight back as Maki lifts her shirt up and crams the beating heart into her chest wound.
—
The second wing blooms in a magnificent explosion of feathers and the other one follows pursuit, both cracking and nearly brushing up against the ceiling as they extend to a wingspan greater than any albatross. Rin cries for real now, clawing at her sealed chest and falling to her knees when the unfamiliar weight of the wings drag her down.
Maki's dry smile is nothing but that now, dry, and she gently lays a hand on Rin's head. "See? Now you're fine, so stop crying."
"But— but Maki,"
"I'll hit you if you keep being annoying like that."
Through her burning tears and aching grief, Rin shakily grasps Maki's hand and holds it to her cheek. "You already did so much for me! Why would you go this far?!"
"Because I felt like it?" Maki shrugs. She looks down at the hole in her chest, and shrugs again. "I figured you were worth it. And I'm always right, you should know."
"Maki…" Rin wails. She's pulled up to her feet, still unsteady. Her resurrected wings envelop them both in a flurry of ivory feathers and she holds Maki tightly.
The days were never really that strange, some to think of it. Maki pats Rin's lower back and closes her eyes, unable to share her tears or let go of her satisfaction despite the girl's distress.
"Go back to your starry skies, Rin."
—
She lost her heart, but at the same time she didn't really. It's in a locked safe and nothing can touch it despite how it's bared on a sleeve for all to see. Rin is strange, even moreso now that she's whole again, but Maki knows that's fine.
She can fly now.
—
Nozomi leaves a basket on the front step and is just about to walk away when someone answers the door. She turns and beams. "Maki! We've been wondering where you were."
"Just busy with work," Maki yawns and rubs her eyes, even though it's getting close to the afternoon. She glances at the basket and raises an eyebrow. "You know these ones are too sweet for me, Nozomi."
"Then give them to someone else," Nozomi folds her hands behind her back and rocks back and forth on her heels, the childish stance disjointed with her mature features. "Elicchi and Nicocchi really like those. Try offering it to them?"
"Are you trying to make me visit the others? Jeez, just say it out loud instead of doing it the roundabout way." Maki rolls her eyes, feigning irritation, and plucks the basket off the ground. Nozomi still looks too pleased. "Fine, fine, call everyone and arrange a lunch meeting sometime if you're being so persistent about it. I'll make room in my schedule."
"There we go!" Nozomi grins. "See? I knew it'd work."
Pleasantries properly exchanged, Maki bids Nozomi farewell and shuts the door. She sets the basket of sweets on a wooden chair and goes to rummage for a pack of cigarettes in her bedroom, then realizes she can't find her lighter. Ah. For a while Maki simply stands there with a cigarette dangling between her fingers, staring at the sofa before deciding she should move it back into the living room.
On the windowsill, a handful of downy feathers is picked up by the wind and tossed into the air.
—
I always knew you were an angel from the first day we met.
.
.
.
A/N: wow i wrote my first ll fic almost exactly a year ago one week from now. this is a thing to celebrate that i guess! a vaguely sad rinmaki to commemorate my cheesy angst rinmaki from a year ago hahhaha. i left the end p vague on purpose because i dig the ambiguity.