a/n: i've written these kids so frequently in post-canon that it was nice to return to s1, if only for a little while
"So, you and Kousaka-san, huh?" Hazuki asks it lazily, casually, a hand draped over her own chest like she's swearing to something invisible as she watches the ceiling fan circle around and around. They're at Midori's house, mostly because it has the best air conditioning, and it's still so hot. Kumiko fiddles with the Eupho-kun keychain on her bag, still so new. It doesn't have the same nicks and scratches as the Tuba-kun one, but she imagines it will. She imagines a world laid out in front of her, something cracked open and unlocked.
The girl is positively giddy, has been since the audition, somehow even more so after her revelation on the bridge.
"Uh, w-what about her?"
"You two hang out a lot, that's all." Hazuki makes a motion like she'd be shrugging if she weren't lying down. Midori mirrors her. "You're not replacing us, are you?" Kumiko shoots upwards.
"No, of course not! Reina's just…" And then she has to trail off, because it's impossible to say anything else. She's got no clue at all, not really.
"She's got such an amazing sound," Midori gushes, cupping her cheeks in her hands. One of the Band-Aids wrapped loosely around her fingers sticks to her face, and it takes her a second to yank it off. "I still feel bad for Kaori-senpai, though."
"Ah. Yeah." Kumiko has to force it. She can't stop thinking about Reina. She can't stop thinking about her hand holding her face and taking the whole world with it.
Reina, meanwhile, is sitting across the table from Yuuko at a place that is much too fancy for a pair of former enemies to be meeting for a casual reconciliation.
"This sandwich is fifteen hundred yen," Yuuko hisses through her teeth, seeming to have forgotten that she was the one to suggest it. "It's two slices of bread with one tomato between them. This place is basically a glorified coffeeshop! Where do they get off acting like they're running the world, huh?"
"It's just a sandwich."
"You know that it's not, Kousaka." Yuuko folds her arms, stares at Reina intently. "Well?"
"Why did you call me here, Yoshikawa-senpai?" Reina doesn't think she'll ever call her Yuuko, the way she knows Kumiko calls Natsuki.
"To build bridges. Make amends. Mature as a person or whatever."
"You don't sound very excited about it."
"You want the truth, Kousaka?" Yuuko puts her elbows on the table like Reina's mother always took great pains to tell her not to do and leans closer, conspiratorial. "I still don't like you. I didn't really want to do this."
Reina says nothing.
"But you got the solo, because Kaori-senpai is too much of an angel to simply let something good happen to her, and we'll be performing together, and I don't want any bad blood between us messing up your music. Got it?"
"My music will be fine regardless." Reina drops a sugarcube in her tea, stirs it with a spoon. Mostly just so she can do something with her hands. She's never been particularly fidgety, but Yuuko seems like the type to take stillness as a challenge.
"Ugh, you're insufferable."
"You think everyone but Kaori-senpai is insufferable."
"And Mizore."
"Who?"
"The oboe." Yuuko pauses, looks at Reina again, tugs at the end of her ribbon. "Yoroizuka? Blue hair? Always practices alone?"
"Oh."
"She's great." Yuuko smiles a little, staring down at the table. Reina wonders if one could ever see their reflection in here, if it were clean enough. "She doesn't think that, though. No matter how many times I tell her."
"Are you lonely, Yoshikawa-san?" Reina thinks that if she doesn't cut to the core of this, she will be here all day, and then she won't have time to practice before bed.
"Of course I'm not!" Yuuko snaps, hands coming down hard on the table. She winces. "I have plenty of friends! What about you, Kousaka? I've never seen you with anyone other than Oumae."
"Perhaps I don't care for anyone else."
"That's pretty gay of you." Yuuko lets that hang, then. Reina doesn't respond. It's becoming a bit of a constant. "Well?"
They have somehow shifted to playing cards, using an old deck that belongs to Midori's father and has different rocks on the backs. The face cards look like they're wearing capes of lapis lazuli, crowns of amethyst.
"That was pretty bold of you, though, Kumiko," Hazuki says, setting a card down. Kumiko slaps it. The rules are still pretty fuzzy, but Kumiko has the best reflexes out of any of them - she thinks that the euphonium gives her an unfair advantage, but then again she still doesn't know how the game works, so it evens out. Midori pushes the stack towards her, which means she's either winning or losing now. "Clapping for Kousaka-san?"
"She was the better player." I'll be a villain with you. Is that what she's becoming? Hazuki and Midori don't seem to have changed much, but then again they could always be hiding something. Certainly the dynamics of the band have changed.
"Oh, yeah, totally." Hazuki flaps one hand in agreement while picking out a card with the other. Midori is quiet throughout it all. "She's pretty cool. Kousaka-san. Why don't you invite her to hang out with us?"
"She's, uh, usually pretty busy. With practice and schoolwork and stuff." This isn't really a lie, by the way. Reina is, in fact, very busy, and Kumiko has no way of knowing that at this very moment she is…
…sitting in an overpriced restaurant with the girl who'd caused most of this trouble in the first place, who had ended up ordering the sandwich after all and is currently biting into it like she's never seen food before.
"Always takes them forever to do it," she says between mouthfuls. Reina wants to pick up the thread she's left dangling, the thing they have in common that Yuuko could apparently just see, but she also doesn't want to push it. There's a delicate balance here. "You toast two slices of bread. Really. I'm not coming back here, after today. I'll start going to that crappy chain place that Natsuki- that Nakagawa always takes me to. When we go as a band. I don't go with her on my own." Reina takes a sip of her tea, even though it's cold and not very good at this point. "She's so relaxed about everything, thinks it makes her look cool to have her hair dyed purple at the end and t-shirts with bands nobody's heard of on them. That dye gets everywhere, by the way. It's a pain in the ass to clean up."
"Am I your only friend, Yoshikawa-senpai?" Reina asks. Yuuko makes a throaty noise that could generously be described as a growl.
"If I say yes, will you stop asking me these questions?"
"Probably not."
"God. Fine. Yeah. Maybe you are." Yuuko doesn't make eye contact, and her ribbon bobs with each motion she makes. "Not to sound like a movie villain, but I think we're really pretty alike."
"Perhaps we are." Reina lets herself relax into that a little. A friend. There's something nice about that.
"And if I can ask you the same thing, jackass?" Yuuko picks at her fingernails. "Aside from Oumae, is there anyone in your corner?"
"Taki-sensei."
"He's our teacher. That doesn't count."
"I think that it does."
"I think that you're a pretentious twit and the solo still should've gone to Kaori-senpai."
"And I don't expect to change your mind on that. But you said it yourself. We're pretty alike."
"Both of us in love, huh?" Yuuko looks out the window. It's the middle of the day, and the light from the sun casts every speck of dust in their booth in high definition. People are walking around outside, not doing much. Just being. Reina feels a sudden sense of relief that she isn't one of them. "But yours is requited, at least. You don't have any reason to be so broody."
Reina doesn't say anything. Can't. Yuuko is seeing through her like she's transparent, like she's plucking her heart out from her translucent body and holding it up to the light.
"You can't say anything," Reina mutters, low, as if someone would be eavesdropping on two teenage girls having a completely normal conversation. Reina doesn't think she would eavesdrop on them, if she were an outsider. But then again she's herself.
"Jeez, what kind of person do you take me for, Kousaka? Of course I'm not going to tell anyone!" Then she pauses, and there's an unspoken sense that there isn't anyone else she'd be able to tell, anyway. Reina doesn't comment on it. She's not cruel, after all. Simply direct. It's a subtle difference that most people don't pick up on, but she isn't most people, as she has frequently said to Kumiko and few others.
"I hardly understand anything myself."
"That's life for you." Yuuko polishes off her overpriced sandwich. "Fifteen hundred yen for that thing. I could make something better out of the junk in Natsuki's freezer." A pause. Reina simply regards her. "Not that I know what's in her freezer. Just that she gives off that vibe, like she hasn't eaten a fresh meal in years and subsists off, like, dollar-store ramen or something. Like she's already a college student. Pah! I can tell you I won't go to the same college as her."
"Right."
"But Kaori-senpai's graduating in less than a year, and the rest of the trumpet section won't shut up about how there aren't enough boys in the band, so. It just makes sense for the two of us to hang out like this."
"Sure."
"Also I'm not interested in you. At all. Romantically, I mean. So there's no risk of anything there."
"I feel the same."
"Well, you don't have to put it like that!" Yuuko bristles. Reina can't help but crack a smile. Yuuko looks at her for another moment. "There's something you don't see every day. Kousaka, smiling."
"Thank you for this, Yoshikawa-senpai."
"Next time we're not going here."
"Will there be a next time, then?" Reina knows she's teasing her a little. She's found that she doesn't mind that.
"Of course there will." Yuuko stands up. "We're splitting the bill, by the way."
"I only bought this." Reina holds up her teacup for emphasis.
"Be a lady, Kousaka. I know that personal trumpets don't come cheap. My parents go to parties on your block."
"You're tremendously consistent yourself, Yoshikawa-senpai." Reina doesn't think she will ever call her Yuuko, and thinks that Yuuko will never call her Reina, and has no problem with either of those things.
"Is that a good thing?"
"You decide."
They do end up splitting the bill, because that's easier than fighting with Yuuko and Reina is nothing if not a master of picking her battles, and as they walk home and Yuuko snipes about how Natsuki never asks for the flannels that Yuuko borrows from her back and I have so many flannels, Kousaka, you know that it's the middle of the summer? I don't need them! and Reina wonders what the two of them look like, passing under streetlights in the hot evening air, and finds that she doesn't need an answer to that question.
Kumiko is always the last one on the train home. She doesn't mind this so much; it's not late enough for her to feel like she's in too much danger, especially since the train is empty. The only real drawback of it is that she's left alone with her thoughts, something she has never enjoyed. It's one of the appeals of the euphonium and the concert band at large, that it requires so much focus and that the music is the only thing you can really concentrate on, lest you lose something of yourself in other thoughts.
It's because of this that Kumiko finds herself humming the Crescent Moon Dance, as she is wont to do when she's alone, and also why it takes her a few moments to notice Reina getting on the train.
"Kumiko."
"Myeh!" Even with this unspoken…thing between them, this feeling that is too tremendous for words, Kumiko still startles easily. Reina sits down next to her, wordlessly, closer than she would have a few weeks ago.
God. A few weeks. It feels like she's known Reina all her life, feels like she's felt Reina's thigh pressed casually against her own setting her heart on fire since the dawn of time.
"You. Uh. Why're you on this train? We usually come from the same direction but I was hanging out with Hazuki-chan and Midori-chan…"
"I was having a meal with a friend," Reina says, and Kumiko knows she won't say anything else. Cautiously, terrified, Kumiko leans her head on Reina's shoulder.
"The Kyoto competition's soon," she murmurs.
"I know." Reina moves her head a little, and Kumiko prepares to sit up from her space, but all Reina does is look out the window at the spotty lights of the town. "We're doing well, though. I think we'll win gold."
"This is a trick question, isn't it?" Kumiko grumbles.
"It's not a question."
"Y-you know what I mean."
"I wonder if I do." Reina hums a little, a tune that Kumiko quickly recognizes as the trumpet solo. "Everything turned out better than expected, though."
"Ah, look at you. Reina, the optimist."
"I like to be unexpected."
"That you do." Kumiko nestles into her shoulder again. The unquestioning nature of their touchiness nowadays - the way that they communicate it through gazes, the way they always end up glued to each other one way or another - is something that will never stop feeling new and incredible and brilliant to Kumiko.
"What were you doing with Katou-san and Kawashima-san?"
"Eh. Hanging out. Playing cards." Playing at being a normal girl, Kumiko doesn't say, but they both seem to know it's true. "You should come with me sometime. They both, uh, they both think you're pretty cool. Because, y'know, you are."
"I might do that." Reina folds her hands in her lap, and Kumiko looks at them, and the train shudders to a stop.
"This is our stop, isn't it?" Kumiko says, and something about that - our - makes her heart go all over the place. So this is what they always said about young love, she thinks. This is what the poets cry over.
Reina stands up first, offering Kumiko her hand, and they step out into the warm night together.
a/n: kumirei...