Notes: This piece was meant to be for Yuletide, several years ago now, looking at what Rei's adult life would be like if she had one. I didn't get it done then, and I've had this ambition for ages that I'd write a huge story from this idea, which isn't really looking that probable at the moment. But I have this section of it, and if I'm ever going to get anywhere I think the entire story will have to be built up as a sequence of stand-alones. To that end, I'm posting this now. It might meet some other pieces from the same AU one day, but I think it can fend for itself too. Stand-alone, possibly one-shot.

Rei lives.

Rei wakes up slowly to the insistent stream of light filtering through the slats of her blinds, tugging her toward the surface against her will. She opens her eyes and frowns into the sun, counting deadlines already, and feels a headache growing.

In about an hour Kaoru will show up at the door and expect her to come running, she thinks sourly, and tells herself that that's the reason she gets up and makes coffee instead of throwing the duvet back over her head and ignoring the world.

In the sink the last week's worth of washing up makes an annoying, tenuously constructed mountain, but there's still food in the fridge in a row of carefully labled boxes, sorted after date. She considers them with suspicion, but eventually pulls one out; the lid is labled RICE PORRIDGE DON'T EAT AFTER 6/3!, together with a little smiling cat face. 6/3 is probably today, she decides; the piece on the modern Japanese novel was due in on the 4th, which she's fairly sure was the day before yesterday, and the extension was until the 7th, which she seriously hopes is tomorrow. And she has a booking for the 8th, which had better be the day after that or she's been counting wrong all week. Fine, good enough.

When Kaoru arrives she's on the balcony in shorts and a worn t-shirt, coffee and food balanced on the tiny square of a table that's screwed to the wall. There's no chair, so she just leans against the railing, watching the street, six floors below - can see the small form of Kaoru coming a block away, through the deep shadows of pagoda trees that stripe the pavement. She always moves with purpose.

She has her own key, so Rei stays where she is, and makes another half-hearted attempt at eating her breakfast.

"Wow," Kaoru says, squinting in the bright light as she steps into the balcony doorway. "I'm impressed."

"OK," Rei says, "don't get ideas. I'm only eating so you don't beat the crap out of me. It's for show."

"Obviously," Kaoru agrees; a contrast of dry tone and amused eyes.

Rei shrugs, puts the tupaware aside on the table again and abandoning it, brushing past Kaoru on her way inside. "I expect you want me to find my shoes now."

Kaoru leads and Rei follows, through the early sun, toward the river, the railway; overpasses and long avenues of trees so close to the water and the scream of metal under the wheels of trains where the tracks bend and dive away, a sharp corner in towards the centre of the district, past a school that Rei hasn't set foot in since that last night that sent her to hospital. A clock-tower she never said goodbye to, knives and a book of poems that are probably still lying forgotten in a corner that no-one has any reason to explore.

In that place, everything was so dramatic.

But there was a time when even this was too much for her; when the river called her down to it and the rails knew her name and every car that drove a little too fast was a possibility - not exactly a wish but an idea, the knowledge that at any moment everything could just stop. Railings can break or a tire can burst. The combination of longing and horror.

She didn't leave her flat for two years, moved through it furtively, stood far from the windows, screamed at people who wanted to help.

But that was half a decade ago. Today it's a memory, flashes of almost physical sensation that pass through her without settling - or without settling for long. She holds knives again and walks on narrow pavements.

And she runs, feet pounding on dusty concrete, only half a meter from the edge of the river, and Kaoru runs half a pace ahead and trusts that she'll follow.

As much as anything else, it's the trust that makes her do it.

When they stop there are still crowds of girls. But it's Kaoru they want, tall and athletic and handsome, a star in a new national team there are high hopes for. Rei can't be a star of any sort, not really; there would be one too many scandals just waiting to break, she's told herself - maybe all her eighteen year old self ever wanted was for the world to see her but maybe her eighteen year old self was, just kind of, an idiot. She'd have loved a dramatic explosion, to put on a show and to go down in an even better one. But she has words and music anyway, and between them they more or less pay for a place to live that's really her own, in the ways that count.

One of the girls eyes her speculatively and asks for her autograph as well - just in case, Rei figures. Weird. But she's pretty in an unusual kind of way, delicate bone structure like a doll Rei used to own but with a wide smiling mouth and a set to her eyes that doesn't match at all, and she looks at Rei so intently that she could also be asking for something else.

Rei signs a piece of paper for her in an untidy scrawl, and writes her phone number neatly underneath.

[fin]