A/N: This story obviously contains femslash. If you don't like it, don't read it. Thanks. :)

One Last Night

We are sitting underneath our tree; the place we always go when we want no-one to disturb us. Lana's tears fall down her cheeks and I do my best to kiss them away and for the most part, Lana lets me, even though she has never cried in front of me before.

Between two sobs, she gasps, "Sometimes I don't know if I can keep going on." She never usually lays out her fears so openly, but the news of her parents' deaths had been a completely unexpected shock. "Then I think of Ema. She'll depend on me now." I can hear the unspoken words at the end of the sentence. If she lives.

Lana's little sister is in intensive care, and they're struggling to stabilise her condition. I know it broke her heart that she was stuck here, on the other side of the country, while her sister was fighting for her life. "Ema's not the only person who depends on you, Lana," I remind her meaningfully. It's not the most direct way of saying it, but she needs to know that I love her very much.

"But I know I can depend on you too, Mia," Lana replies with a shake of her head. "We can lean on each other for support when we need it. Ema's just a child. She looks up to me, and I meant to take care of her, and I can't." Her tears fall faster now, running onto her cheeks and down her neck and I bend my head down closer to her collarbone just so I can reach. I kiss her tears hard enough that there will be marks on her neck tomorrow morning.

I'm not crying; I don't think I can. But nevertheless, Lana starts kissing my neck, soft lips sucking hard against my skin. Our faces are so close that when Lana cries, her tears fall down my cheeks.

Then there is the rumble of thunder over our heads; I hadn't noticed the amassing rainclouds. We had been much too engrossed in what we were doing, and even if we hadn't been preoccupied, I don't think Lana would have noticed anyway. The tree doesn't provide much shelter from the rain, and soon we are soaking wet and clinging to each other, kisses all over our faces.

Lana's no longer crying, instead, she throws her head back and laughs. It's not her normal laugh, the one that I hear when I tickle the soles of her feet, and it's not even the patronizing laugh she uses when one of our classmates makes a dirty joke that only an eleven-year-old boy would find funny. This laugh is crazed, and sounds more like the melodious arrangement of a scream than a response to humour. "I'm kissing you in the rain," she spits, "while my sister is dying." She turns around and runs off, shoes living footprints in the muddy ground.

I know her well enough to know that she is running home. I know where she lives, even though I have never been inside her house. Her mother, Lana had told me, would have never approved of our relationship had she learnt of it. Now Lana's mother is dead; car crashed by a drunk driver when she was visiting Lana's father, and Lana's sister, Ema, who had lived together on the other side of the country. I had known that Lana's parents were divorced, but it had not been a messy one. They had still visited each other, and I know that Lana loved her whole family with every fibre of her being. Her mother's approval had still meant a lot to her.

The house is not too far away from our tree, but our heels are not made for running and Lana stops halfway, and I stop too, once I catch up to her. I put my arms around her but she shakes me off. "Leave me alone, Mia." She looks up at the sky and the clouds break; sunshine falls onto her face and brightens her hair. She is beautiful.

"I'm not going to leave you alone," I tell her stubbornly. "Not when you're like this."

Lana laughs that same crazed laugh. "Why, are you scared I'm going to do something that I shouldn't?" she asks hollowly. I know Lana sometimes bites the skin around her fingernails hard enough that they bleed, but surely she wouldn't take it any further than that, would she?

"I'm going home with you, Lana," I insist, and Lana glowers at me for a second, and then her stance slackens, and she concedes defeat.

"Fine. You can sleep on the couch tonight; keep an eye on me, as it were."

I am being relegated to the couch. It hurts a little bit to be told that, as we have spent more than one or two nights together in my bed in my cramped little apartment with the peeling wallpaper, the cracked tiles and the smell of stale cigarettes that will never go away. Then I remind myself that Lana is going through a tough time, and she needs my support. We can lean on each other.

We enter her house and although it's my first time in the place, I don't find myself paying too much attention to the surroundings. "I'm having a shower," Lana says shortly, and I wait in the next room for her. I can't help but listen to make sure that there are no unusual sounds. The shower is almost three times the length of a normal one, but after a while, Lana comes out of the bathroom, looking a bit fresher, but with the same despondent expression on her face.

She doesn't say anything as she sits down next to me on the couch. She does, however, lift a hand to my face and start to slowly kiss down my neck. Her lips, still moist from the shower, feel wonderful against my skin, and I find myself unable to stop myself from moaning into her hair before I grab hold of her hand and say, "Lana, no."

I don't expect the words that come next. "I want to kiss you for one last night."

"What are you talking about?" I ask. "There can be plenty of nights after this one. There is tomorrow, and there is next week, there is next month, there is next year…" I trail off when I receive an icy glare from Lana.

"Mom…" Lana whispers, and her gaze flickers away from me and to a photo frame sitting on the mantle. "She read one of the letters that you wrote me, Mia."

I hold her tighter in my arms and she doesn't struggle from my grasp for now. "What happened?" I say. "Tell me everything."

Her eyes are even more dazed than they have been all day as she replies. "She said it was wrong, she said it was disgusting, and she said if I didn't put an end to it, something horrible would happen. Don't you see, Mia? Something horrible has happened. It is all my fault. This is why this has to be our last night, Mia, before any other bad things happen to people I love." Gathering the courage to look at me again, she stares into my eyes as she says the last word.

I don't want to believe what she is telling me. I kiss her forehead. "This is right." The rise of her cheekbones. "This is beautiful." The tip of her nose. "It was an accident." Both of her cheeks. "It's the fault of the moron who thought he could drive drunk." A trail from her chin to her collarbone. "I don't have any plans to die."

As soon as I say it, I realise what a stupidly insensitive thing it was to say, and Lana realises it too. "I don't think my parents planned to die, either, Mia," she hisses.

"I'm sorry. I just meant that…" That what? I ask myself. That I couldn't envision myself dying any time in the next ten years? Lana's parents probably didn't think they were going to die on the way home from Ema's birthday dinner either.

"I know what you're trying to say." Lana silences me with a kiss. "I just don't think you're doing a very good job of saying it. This has to end, Mia. This is our last night together like this. Tomorrow I want us to walk away as friends, and nothing more."

"I understand," I reply, but my voice cracks, and for the first time, I cry in front of Lana, and now it's her who is kissing away my tears. Once I manage to regain control of my own voice, I add, "I just hope that one day, Lana, you'll be able to forgive yourself."

Lana shakes her head. "Never."

"Don't you think your mother would want you to be happy?"

Lana stalls at this question, mouth turning into a confused frown. "I want my mother to be happy too, Mia."

I still can't understand completely; can't understand why she's reacting in this way. Her mother's dead after all, and no longer preventing us from having a closer relationship.

"I know what you're thinking," she says shrewdly. "My mother may be dead now, but the dead are never truly gone from our lives. You of all people should know that, Mia."

Of course I do. I grew up in a family of spirit mediums, after all. Seeing dead people is a daily occasion for a professional spirit medium. But I'm not a professional spirit medium. I am an aspiring defense attorney. "I think you should just do your best to be happy, that's all." I never seem to be able to think of the right comforting words to say. I want to help Lana feel that she doesn't need to be ashamed of this relationship, ashamed of us, but the problem extends much farther than her mother's disproval. No-one, not a single other person alive now, knows about our relationship but us.

That's why we have our tree. No-one ever goes there and we can just be ourselves, and not stuck in my apartment, struggling to breath, or in the endless crush of people at law school, who Lana had decided would shun and condemn us if they ever knew about our relationship.

It's our last night together. I know that for certain now, as Lana looks at me and her facade cracks again and she is running her hands up my back and nibbling my earlobe nervously as she whispers, "I'm going to miss you so much, Mia, but I just can't go on like this."

It's not like I expected a last night to be. There is no frantic touching, no clothing being hastily removed, no final session of hot, passionate sex. There is just the two of us, lying down side by side on the couch, lips close enough to kiss if we wanted to.

We're not really sleeping. Instead we're quiet, listening to each other breathe. It's nearly four in the morning when Lana admits, "I don't know if I'm doing the right thing, but I have to try. For my parent's sake, for Ema's sake, for your sake, Mia." Lana still thinks that something terrible is going to happen to me, but doesn't seem to realise that impeding end of this relationship has been the worst thing to happen to me in a long time.

"There's someone you're forgetting, Lana. Do it for your sake. Even if your happiness can't be with me, I want you to promise that whatever you do, you don't forget to take care of yourself too."

"I think…" she struggles with the words for a bit, then her eyebrows slant and she continues, "…I can do that." She nuzzles her face against mine, bringing her lips in for a soft, chaste kiss. It is our last kiss, and it almost tastes like an apology.

We both must have fallen asleep at some point, because when wake up later the sun is shining through the window and Lana is already sitting in an armchair opposite the couch, dressed in different clothes and drinking a cup of steaming fresh coffee. "Good morning, Mia. Did you have a nice sleep? Thanks for taking care of me last night. I think I should be able to take care of myself from now on." The words sound rehearsed, and I remember what Lana said last night. "Tomorrow I want us to walk away as friends, and nothing more."

Tomorrow is now, and now we can only just be friends. Something strikes me as odd about Lana. Maybe it is the look on her face, but her face has looked like that ever since she found out about her parents. Maybe it is the way she is sitting in the chair, but I can see nothing unusual about her posture.

It most likely has everything to do with the fact that she is wearing a red muffler in the middle of July. "What's with the muffler?" I ask, and Lana's face flushes unexpectedly, and her fingers working at untying the muffler from around her neck.

As soon as it comes off, I can see why she had decided to wear it. There are splotchy red bruises on her neck; I recognised them as the places I kissed yesterday, the places where Lana's tears fell down to.

"You'll need one too." Lana points at the armrest of the couch, and there is a matching yellow muffler lying over it. I touch the side of my neck gingerly with my fingertips. Had we really kissed so hard, so desperately, yesterday afternoon? I still found it hard to believe that it was all over. "You don't have to give it back," Lana tells me, as she helps wrap it around my neck, tugging down the wire my Magatama is threaded on when it becomes tangled, "you can keep it. It can be our last reminder of what we used to have together."

I stroke the material of the end of my muffler between forefinger and thumb. "Then I will wear it until the day I die," I promise her.

Lana smiles then, not as wide as she used to before everything happens, but it's a start. "You may want to wash it occasionally; after all, it'll get dirty, and you promised me that you weren't going to die any time soon." I know she means it as a joke, an attempt in returning to normalcy, but she starts crying again. It is, of course, much too soon after the fact to start making jokes about death. "You should get going," Lana reminds me. "You have a class this morning." She holds my elbow and guides me towards the door before I can say anything else.

I'm standing on the doorstep, rearranging the books in my bag when Lana calls out, "Mia?"

I turn around. "Yes?"

"I'll wear my muffler to remind myself who I am, and what you have taught me, Mia. It'll remind me to always do my best in life and dream for my own happiness, just like you want me to. I'll only ever take it off when I've failed you by forgetting who I am and for whom I am doing things."

It's my turn to tease now. "What about when it goes in the laundry?" I ask.

"Well, I was always a failure when it came to laundry anyway."

I can see the tears glistening on her cheeks, but today we are only friends and I can no longer kiss the tears away.