1.
"Let's get out of here, Umi-chan."
It's the first sentence out of her mouth after one long established silence in-between, so it's no surprise when Umi responds with one eyebrow raised, question marks all over her face, tip of her pen freezing in mid-air and a word just one kanji away from completion.
"I dunno," she continues anyway, her eyes still oddly fixated onto the ceiling, legs see-sawing under the slick cafeteria table, "to France, maybe. And we can eat lasagna for the rest of our lives." Her food is still untouched, the bland-looking yakisoba used to be warm, five, ten minutes ago, maybe. Her appetite is as good as thrown out the window and buried six feet underneath.
"Honoka, lasagna is from Italy." Umi lets out a dry laugh, and resumed through her essay, pen darting back and forth, indifferent to the cold. It's winter. Honoka finds a newfound hatred for the season. Negativity is running rampant inside her mind, after all. "You're a college student, for crying out loud…"
"Right," She replies, her voice sounding so mechanical, as if she's reading off a script; her body is here but her heart is not, and her mind is battling irrationality and the wish to just jump off a cliff, simply because depression kills, "right, right."
At last her hands, which have been hanging limply beside her for the last minutes (years, decades, light years, it felt so long to her) moves, grabs the chopsticks and begin to dig the yakisoba. It's kind of funny in hindsight, how a statement can throw her off her game even though she is the leader of Muse, braved through a storm once, fought against fate, came back stronger than ever and all that jazz.
It's funny how not even the weather and the world or God or them in some kind of twisted alliance can bring her down to this level, and of all things, it's the fact that the girl she loves will be married (arranged, of course) to a man and live happily ever after in a big house with two, three, five expensive cars parked in the basement garage, and spawns two cute little daughters she plans to strangle later. Her love life sure is dreadfully tragic.
2.
"You look dead."
She shrugs in reply, "Probably so." Definitely is, but it's embarrassing for her to admit so. Then again she's still in denial of how even after all that she still loves a woman with a gleaming golden on her ring finger. Eri snickers and leans her back to the metal rail, settling beside her.
She is thankful even though they went to the same college, Umi is in the opposite end of the building complex, in the literature department, while she is stuck here with her five hundred pages book tucked inside her backpack and reminds herself to tackle the tome sooner or later even though film of dust begin to pile up in the hard cover. The pages still smell like a bookstore.
"How about we go to a karaoke? You, me, and Nozomi, maybe," Eri says, her chin propped with the palm of her left hand while her right holds the cold metal in loose grip, "and Rin, since the girl seems down lately, and I bet it's about her raging crush on a certain glasses-wearing brunette."
"Yeah, sure, but help me with my assignments later. They're two weeks overdue, for your information."
Eri replies with a laugh, and Honoka wonders when the last time she laughed, or even smiled was. Or studied. Everything in her mind is a jumbled mess lately, and she'll definitely regret it later in the upcoming tests. The urge to jump off from the rooftop she's standing right now is tempting her like crazy. She decides that self-infliction and suicidal thoughts are not good for the mental health, but it's not like she can stop them from terrorizing her mind with ideas anyways.
"Law, huh?" Eri inquires, meddles, but Honoka doesn't know where the Eri is going with the topic, "it's unexpected, coming from you, really. It's probably too late though, considering you have been at it for three years now."
"It pays, plus I think you guys said that I have a knack when it comes to persuading others, so," Honoka answers nonchalantly, still sounding like a newbie, freshly hand-picked actor. Then again she's a pretender now. Just one that's horrible at it.
"True."
"And, well. I ruin others' lives." In which Eri punched her lightly, but she can feel behind the playful punch there is an intention of giving her a good beating up in the face just to knock some sense into her. Subtlety is not something she appreciates with her current state of mind. She frowned at the older girl.
"The only life you have ever ruined is your own."
Honoka snorts, and wonders since when she was this negative about everything. The word 'love' comes to mind, and she found herself fishing out her pocket for a box carrying death in form of sticks and a lighter. She takes a drag, and an image of deep blue flashes in her mind. It is hauntingly familiar somehow, reminding her of heartbreak and rotting lungs. She will probably die young, with "unreciprocated feelings" written in her autopsy report under the cause of death column. She takes another drag, imagines a funeral, and let the smoke actually goes into her lungs before coughing it back out.
The next thing she knows, there are stains of tear drops in the metal rail and arms wrapped around her and the noise of angry sobs. She feels every last of her defense crumbling apart when she realizes that while the stains are hers to blame, the sobs aren't. Soon after, the sky turns grey not unlike what she pictures her future to be, and raindrops begin to fall. The world is crying for a girl who is too tired to even cry for herself.
3.
She ends up going to the karaoke and spends her evening singing cheesy love songs with all too familiar tunes. Nowadays every love songs sound the same, and when it's not about heartbroken girls blaming themselves for failing relationships, it's about the joyride of fun that is falling in love. Honoka remarks that the latter is obviously a childish view of things and it's a crime due to it being misleading, since love is supposed to hurt one party or even both, and every song writers out there who have written even one song about it should be charged with life sentence. Eri massages her forehead with her thumb and index fingers in disbelief. Nozomi tries to hold back her laughter while Rin doesn't even try, and instead bursts out while pointing a finger at her as if she's a lunatic. She is.
The next song comes up, the intro blaring throughout the small four-person room. Nozomi rises up to her feet with a mic in hand and Rin shakes the tambourine vigorously. Honoka swears Nozomi is grinning at her, all-knowing and sly, and she tries her best to look as deadpan as possible. She is singing a song from one of their album, an old one at that, a solo of a certain literature student.
Then a second later, deep blue flashing before her eyes, and a trip down the memory lane. In reflex she balls up her fists, her knuckles turning fury red, then switches to ghostly white and remains so.
The self-hating spiral is killing her faster than her new smoking habit and it's incurable, so there's nothing she can do about it. Unless, of course, she gets the girl of her dreams and holds a wedding there in Italy and that's as impossible as one plus one equals three.
4.
Eri takes her out from time to time, most of them with Nozomi and one other "guest member", usually Rin or Niko or both. Maki calls her to check up on her and reprimands her about her smoking habit like a mother, to which she simply laughs off. Hanayo drops by sometimes with a paper bag filled with lunch and a worried smile. Kotori, out of the country, calls her whenever possible and talks about things with miniscule importance like idols and ideas for new costume concept, but never about Umi. She herself, on the other hand, has been avoiding Umi as if she's a third-world plague.
With exams coming up she's been pouring over her books from five to eight hundred pages in content and thousand things to cramp into her small capacity brain. It's saddening how her books are a hundred times bulkier than her wallet. She mentally nicknames one of them necronomicon, just because.
Her cellphone rings and she groans, dragging her feet across her room to her bed where her phone laid, and picks up at the third right without so much as looking at the name flashing on the screen. The caller greets her, voice unsure and shrinking per second. Honoka regrets answering the phone, then again there's no such thing as undo button in real life, and secretly wishes for the existence of control plus Z.
She flings an excuse to get away with it, something about having to see her landlady or else she'll have to live in a bus stop. Later turns to tomorrow, tomorrow turns to the day after tomorrow, and begets to never.
In the end she is too much of an escapist and a coward to call back. The self-hating part inside her mind begins to take form of a deep blue (why, she briefly wonders) daredevil and taunts her night and day. She considers going to the psychiatrists, if only the she has the penny to spare, and promptly reminds herself she has yet to pay her rent.
There's a knocking in her door and the voice of a woman in her middle-age screaming about rents and she feels like vanishing into thin air right about now.
5.
It's December and the atmosphere is festive with the approaching Christmas and the stores decorated in white and blue, and it reminds her of someone and it's sickening so she begins revise the preamble of Japan's constitution, and it reminds her of exams and now she's feeling worse than ever. Well, at least her grades are improving a little and she's seeing less and less deep blue. She can live.
She enters the café borderline bar and not even an extravagant one as the thin smell of cheap wine reeks in the air, and seats herself in four-seat table, across Eri and beside Nozomi. "Christmas is just around the corner and I'm spending it like a hopeless person I am, huh."
"There's of course, this method called moving on," Nozomi advises sagely, pretending to stroke a beard like someone from Socrates era, "but the idea flew past your head and you're too much of a stubborn person to consider it."
They order some drinks, some alcoholic and talk about things from Hanayo's obliviousness to every of Rin's attempt to woo her, to Niko and Maki's ever harmonious relationship (as in, a quarrel every five days or so, but at least they love each other and they have each other and they're not stuck with a glass of alcohol to forget the their worries), to recent hop scoop of a parliament member embarrassing himself in a TV show about debate and such.
"So I went to Umi's apartment the other day," Eri says, taking a sip in-between, and even though the brand is not one to brag about she still manages to do so gracefully, "and I saw her fiancé. Had a small talk with him, even."
Honoka wants to say, "He is a creepy man with abusive tendencies and she totally doesn't deserve him, right."
But instead she settles with, "The guy must be a good man." And swallows the bitter pill. She takes a large gulp of her drink and her throat protests, screams out, but she pays them no heed. Here it goes, self-hating and masochism. Alcohol is indeed, a perfect scapegoat for everything.
"He is," Eri gives her a wry smile, "a gentleman, also really polite. Obviously they're in an arranged marriage. His parents are on good terms with Umi's too."
Honoka grits her teeth hard, breaths out in a sharp manner, Eri fears for an angry outbursts or a wail and a bucketful of tears. Nozomi flicks Honoka in the head and the latter looks stunned and pissed off.
Nozomi's smile is there and she looks the brightest between Honoka who's angry and ashamed of herself for hating someone far better than her and Eri who's worried all over, "You know, Honoka-chan, there's a reason why you're failing at life, yet you quickly put yourself together and stand back up and ready to take on the world as it is. But look, you're studying, aiming for a job that pays well, and even with your masochistic tendencies you're still alive,"
"I'm giving up,"
"But you are not."
'I can't', she decides to keep the words to herself, and proceeds to sob, and everything falls to pieces.
6.
Eri and Nozomi appear at her doorstep with a Christmas present gone wrong.
"Um, Merry Christmas?" Eri smiles sheepishly and the atmosphere is as awkward as it can be, with Nozomi supporting a passed out Honoka and despite Umi's chagrin ("What kind of sick joke is this supposed to be? Explain yourselves!") she lends her shoulder for Honoka to lean to, and before getting the chance to pull a proper explanation from the older girls, both are already on their way outside ("Sorry, Umi, but we have another heartbroken girl that needs saving as much as Honoka there, so, uh, once again, Merry Christmas!") leaving the two alone, one baffled and the other still sleeping like a log.
Umi drags Honoka and dumps her to her sofa, the latter out cold, face planted on the cushion of the sofa and her left hand stuck under her weight. It looks uncomfortable, Umi thought. Her expression painted with worry and confusion and she decides to waste no time and brings a spare blanket to put on her childhood friend.
It's been a while since they have met face-to-face (then again the other party is far from awake) and Umi notices quite some glaring changes on the other girl. Honoka looks thinner than ever and Umi knows Honoka is not the type to work out, and she used to be not just skin and bones. She spots bags under her eyes and even in her sleep a frown is etched on her face.
Umi realizes she's slowly breaking the girl who used to smile like sunshine and grief turns over her stomach. She moves her hand and swipes off a bang on Honoka's face, one that is threatening to poke itself into the small gap formed by her eyelid, using her right hand, decorated with a gleaming golden curling around her small ring finger. She realizes at the irony, bites down her bottom lip hard, and soon she's so angry at herself she begins to cry. She is also fighting back the urge to leans in closer, to give a light peck on her lips, smelling smoke and cheap wine, but decides against it. She doesn't deserve her. She apologizes, and the swallows back the words, it can't be helped.
She is blaming at herself now, and feels like crying a fountain tonight.
It's also ironic how when Honoka can't see it, the girl of her dreams is crying for her, the bright leader she used to be in the past, and the hopeless knight in sour armor reeking of nicotine and alcohol she is in the present.
7.
It's just three days after New Years and she's hanging out in the karaoke again, enjoying the company of Eri and Nozomi and a fellow bad luck-magnet Rin. She's been pondering over Nozomi's words back there, days before Christmas. Maybe she is still not giving up, even after all those craps thrown at her face. Maybe she is just too much of a masochist.
Maybe she's just being melodramatic, but moving on is no longer an option and she's five years too late for that.
On the way home, she decides to screw it, bought a ring placed in small, deep blue box (she can cry over the price later in her apartment with instant noodle as dinner). When she is walking halfway through a bridge, she stops and looks over the hand rail to the stream underneath, grabs a box and a lighter from her pants' pocket, and throws them into the river.
8.
"Hello, Arisa? Yea, it's me, Honoka! I can't seem to reach your sis' number, maybe she's making out with Nozomi right now or I dunno, doing her reports maybe. Anyway, can you relay this message to her? Uh huh, yea, OK, tell her this: Guess what Eri, I'm back at my game again! Also, her ring size is 4, right? ASAP! Anyway, thanks! …what? No no no, I-I'm not proposing to anyone…geez…er, bye!"
9.
She is trying her best to contain her excitement, but she's just feeling so giddy today. It's better than coughing smokes while thinking about her love life, or the lack of a successful one, but still.
She is standing in front of an apartment complex clutching a small, deep blue box, and heart hammers as she recites the magical three words inside her head and practices dialog with her inner daredevil. Eri is standing beside her, hand on her shoulder, being a reassuring older sister (or even father) she usually is. Nozomi is to her left, quoting a romantic line from a novel she recently finished in a night, something about never giving up till the last blood has been drawn. Rin and Niko is bickering about soccer teams, Honoka remembers a rather heated friendly match between Rin and Niko's favorite teams respectively. Hanayo is caught in between and is stammering hopelessly, all teary-eyed. Maki's face is buried in her palm. Kotori, who is here for two weeks until she returns to America, studying abroad, laughs heartily.
They're missing out one person, who doesn't even know that the eight of them is ganging up together just meters away from her flat.
"I bet she'll be surprised. In the middle of get-together with her parents and her fiancé, and then there's you bursting in with a marriage proposal up your sleeve."
"Thanks Eri-chan," she says so in a mocking tone, but she's grinning ear to ear and it's hard to miss, "bet as soon I made my entry, popped the question to her, and proclaimed my undying love, she'll pull a three-night long lecture about privacy and all that, knowing Umi-chan."
"Yea, knowing Umi-chan!" a laughter erupts from Eri and it is infectious, soon she's laughing her buttocks off and Nozomi, who is in the mood of taciturn but listens in to them joins in as well. The others arched an eyebrow, asking what just happened.
"Okay, guys, wish me luck."
The smiles on her comrade's faces beaming, some with teeth bore. She walks straight ahead, doesn't look back, clad in suit that makes her feel like a she's a proper attorney already. This time her steps are sure even though the two outcomes will either be her greatest mistake ever of her life beside her picking up smoking or a man-made miracle, and what the world is about to witness is the latter.
End.
Notes: [1] Yay for minor pairing?
[2] Rereading it, I noticed how this fic is, contrary to the Honoka/Umi tag plastered on it, is more about Honoka and Eri and their…sismance.
[3] I think I was high when I wrote this, with Honoka smoking and stuffs. There are probably grammatical errors here and there too, as it's been years since I've written anything in English.
[4] Honoka being bad at geography is actually a reference to a scene in the School Idol Festival rhythm game.
[5] I think I'll stick around this fandom for a little while, so feedbacks, flames, whatever is welcome, and you can also request a pairing for me to write. Thanks for reading!
[6] Fixed some more errors. Oh my God I should start paying attention in English class. Not really. I'm too far gone to help.
[7] Notice the lack of Kotori. I...can't seem to write her no matter what...without turning her into a one-dimensional yes-man for Honoka or a psychotic hypotenuse in soap opera-esque love triangle.