a/n: thanks to the hebb discord for a fantastic conversation last week about kumiko and reina's lives post-canon, i'm excited about hibike again and that's why i wrote this fic!

Orientation at Juilliard was not at all like Kitauji's - Reina sensed a kind of kinship among the individuals here, a warmth that she hadn't felt in…

It occurred to Reina that she hadn't felt this way possibly ever. The thought did not depress her as much as she thought it would.

She woke up early, feeling about blearily for her phone while her roommate slept soundly on. She'd arrived on a Friday, after all. Most of the others would be sleeping in.

"Dammit, Kumiko," she muttered, finally grasping the thing and sliding out of her bed as quietly as possible. "It would be too easy to simply go and leave my feelings behind, wouldn't it?"

Slipping into the hall, her eyes slowly adjusting to the dark, Reina squinted at the phone until she'd tapped Kumiko's contact. There was that telltale beeeeeeeeeep, beeeeeeeeeeeeeep, beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep that had her counting the beeps on her fingers, feeling at once dreamlike and all too grounded.

"Reina?"

"Yes."

"Reina! I, uh, wasn't expecting you to call."

"I said I would, didn't I?" Reina wouldn't admit the relief she felt at hearing Kumiko's voice, like rain after a long drought. She liked university, what she'd seen of it so far anyway, but here was Kumiko. Here was home.

"It's late."

"It's early for me." Reina pulled out her phone, checking it again to see if the time had changed somehow. "This is the only time we can talk, isn't it?"

"Seems like it. What's New York like?"

"Big." Reina looked out the window, the entire city stretched out beneath her. "Remember the mountain, how we could see everything?"

"How could I forget?"

"It's like that, only...larger." Reina touched the ends of her hair, looked at the carpeting beneath her. She still felt displaced, but it was not an unpleasant feeling. Not an unpleasant feeling at all.

Kumiko found that Tokyo suited her rather well - close enough to home that she could take the train back, far enough away that she didn't feel tempted to.

Still, she couldn't help the jumping in her heart, late at night, when Reina's face appeared on her phone as it nearly vibrated off her bedside table.

And Reina was hard to see in the dark - as Kumiko imagined she was as well - but she was there, talking, a little tired but still with that fierce, determined glint in her eye.

They were years and kilometers away from where they'd started, but Kumiko still found herself back on that mountain, hearing Reina talk about wanting to become special for the first time, staring up at her and committing every moment to memory, knowing in the deepest parts of her bones that this was something she would always, always treasure.

"Only larger, huh?" Kumiko paused. "Tokyo's pretty big too."

"I figured." The screen went black. "The video isn't working anymore."

"The train system's great, though, a-and everyone's pretty nice."

"I miss you."

Oh.

Well, there was Reina, so direct, she really shouldn't have expected anything else, but Kumiko felt her heart sputter anyway.

Her heart really did quite a lot of the heavy lifting, these days. She wondered what it would be like not to put it through this, and decided quickly that she didn't want to find out.

"I miss you too." Understatement of the century, as Natsuki would say, but she wasn't here right now - she was touring with Yuuko, playing her guitar, having the time of her damn life. Kumiko had been fine at Kitauji, confused and dodging Shuichi's advances like a ninja but in general it had been fine. Natsuki, she'd been...less so.

It was nice to know she'd found her place. Kumiko briefly considered bringing that up, dispelling any existing tension with talk of friends scattered to the winds, but Reina beat her to the punch.

"I'm still adjusting to the time difference." Reina shuffled about a bit. "I keep waking up and thinking it'll be morning, but it never is."

"Ah, it's about the same here." Kumiko yawned. "Still late, though."

"Did I wake you up?"

"You, uh, didn't think to ask me that at the beginning?" Kumiko raised her eyebrows, then remembered that Reina couldn't see her. "How terrible."

"You must be rubbing off on me."

"All this way across the ocean?"

"Perhaps." Then there was Reina's chuckle, light and a little airy, and Kumiko's heart popped and reformed in an instant. "We have a hold on each other, don't we? I can't imagine distance would have much to do with that."

"I hope not." Kumiko flopped over on her bed so that she faced the wall, closed her eyes and pictured Reina there in front of her. It felt a bit too desperate, right now, to hug a pillow and pretend it was her.

That would have to come later, if it came at all, if this wonderful and confusing and terrifying thing between them was ever defined.

"You wouldn't believe how many people there are here. Everywhere you look, every time you go outside, it's full to the brim." Reina paused - Kumiko knew her pauses from the phone's occasional sputtering out of service - and for just a moment all the sound in the world was a fan whirring, somewhere, maybe down the hall or maybe a couple thousand kilometers across the world. "You could just disappear. Everyone wants to be somebody here."

So that's it. "Is this about becoming special?"

"What else would it be?"

"A conversation between-" oh, what to say "-friends."

"I didn't just call you to lament about feeling lost in the crowd, Kumiko." Reina paused again.

She looked out the window, at all the buildings that seemed to tower above the entire world, and sighed. Now was as good a time as any, wasn't it?

"I really do miss you."

And there it was, out in the open, right there for anyone to see it. Reina felt the wind knocked out of her after she said it, like she'd just played an entire solo without taking a breath, like someone had stolen the air from her lungs, like…

Well, like a teenager in love, when she got down to it. Just like a teenager in love.

Kumiko was the one to pause this time. Unconsciously, she found herself clutching the ends of her sheets tight in her hands, grounding her.

She'd fly to the sky, otherwise.

"Hah, Reina, you can't just say things like that…" A part of her, the part that died on her tongue, wanted to say now that we're in college, but that would be admitting to some kind of lie, acting like their thing (what was it, how could she breach it, what was happening to her) was just a product of adolescence, an innocent thing, two children play-acting at adulthood. Kumiko might not have known everything - not even close - but if there was one thing she knew, decisively, it was that this was the furthest thing from a phase.

"It's true."

"Right. Yeah. Okay." Kumiko squeezed her eyes shut. "I know."

"I'd hoped you would." An alarm went off, then, somewhere in between that vast distance, and Kumiko wondered if she'd feel that red string tugging her to Reina forever, if distance really meant anything at all beyond sleepy times like this.

"I t-think that's on your end," she blurted out. "I mean, uh, if anyone's got their phone alarm set to midnight, that'd be…"

"Terrible?"

"Yeah." Kumiko sighed. "I guess that's probably a good sign we should say goodbye for now, then? I wouldn't want to make you late to classes your first week."

"It's Saturday."

"Is it?"

"I should hope so. But I should probably find my way around campus anyway, figure out where I can get breakfast. I'll see you later, then?"

"I hope so, Reina."

And Kumiko let Reina hang up, let that click ring in her ear as long as it needed to, unstuck the phone from her cheek. It was a little damp - it was still hot here, in Tokyo, and sweat seemed to cover everything, even this late at night. Kumiko rubbed at the screen with her sleeve until it seemed dry.

The world was still, outside, or as still as it could be in a city like this one, but Kumiko felt her whole body buzzing.

Reina watched the sun rise and pondered upon it, in the way artsy students such as herself were expected to. There were worse things to be than a stereotype, she thought.

Things like a coward, which she might have been as well, but who was to say, really?

With a weighted sigh, Reina stood back up and went back into her room, quiet in a way that she was not accustomed to - her parents had never minded her rehearsals late into the night, and as an only child she had never shared her room with anyone but a pile of stuffed animals, but with her roommate snoring peacefully it would have simply been cruel to barge about like she usually did.

Oh, people could speak of Kousaka-san the ice queen all they wanted, but it would not change the fact that Reina was not a person accustomed to being quiet. She just didn't always talk.

Reina packed up for the day, setting out in the direction of the rising sun, and she wondered what might possibly lie ahead.

a/n: according to the handful of final movement translations available, canonically reina "goes to a prestigious music school in america" which to me brings forth the thought of julliard, so julliard it is

yeehaw!