a/n: someday i will have a consistent fic update schedule but until then have nozomi thinking about things
Mizore is silent when she plays rhythm games.
She's usually quiet anyway, so it isn't particularly noticeable, but whenever she's on her phone, tapping methodically without the sound on, it's like she isn't breathing. Nozomi knows this because there are only so many things you can talk about, when you see someone every day, and sometimes it's better just to let the silence be rather than try to suffocate it with small talk.
All of this to say she knows Mizore isn't playing rhythm games right now, because she's breathing - quietly, but still breathing - and sleeping peacefully. Nozomi leans against her, the credits of the movie they'd both been watching scrolling down the screen. It's moments like these that she loves the most.
It's Mizore that she loves the most.
This is a thought she'll keep to herself, because as much as she's promised to be open with Mizore about what she wants - as much as she's asked Mizore to do the same, to tell her when she's feeling some tremendous thing - there are still some unsaid things too precious to bring into words. That's how she justifies it, anyway.
Nozomi lets her hand drift through Mizore's hair, feather-soft and thin in her fingers, blue in daylight and hard to make out here, now, in the dark. Mizore murmurs into the touch, and Nozomi stiffens, then relaxes again. They're dating. It's entirely normal to do something like this, lean on your lover, but it still feels forbidden, as if someone will arrive and snatch this moment away, and the next, and all the following moments after that.
"We've been dating for a year, now," Nozomi had said, earlier that day, sitting across from Mizore on her parents' kitchen island. Convenient, it was, that this anniversary also happened to fall on one of the rare days they were both back in town and without preexisting plans. Nozomi had suggested a night on the town. Mizore had suggested a night on the couch.
It was obvious who had won there.
And then, in her fashion, Mizore had fallen asleep partway through the movie she herself had decided on, and left Nozomi to wander about her own thoughts, and that's how she's here, now, wondering if it will last or if this, too, is only a stop on the way, a wire for the bird to rest on before continuing into the great sky. She's more than willing to provide that - would bend all the telephone poles in the world to give Mizore a perch, a moment of reprieve - but those feelings are not ones she is particularly good at articulating, so she leaves them be, for now.
For now, she's with Mizore.
"Nozomi?" Mizore stirs, and for a moment Nozomi fears that she's somehow said all of that out loud - like that euphonium girl, the silent witness to their reconciliation, ever-present in the peripheral - but then Mizore simply looks at the television. "It's over already?"
"Hah, yeah. You fell asleep halfway through." Nozomi threads her fingers through Mizore's, and they fit perfectly, as always.
"Did I miss anything good?" Mizore asks. Nozomi would be lying if she said she'd been paying attention to the movie at all.
"I don't think so."
"Hm." Mizore makes a little self-satisfied noise and looks right at Nozomi, glowing by the streaming menu, glowing by the light of everything. Nozomi's heart thumps so loudly she's sure that Mizore can hear her. "You would have preferred a night out." It's not a question. She's - they've both become somewhat more assertive, the past year.
"It would've been a little harder to explain you falling asleep in the middle of the street," Nozomi jokes, voice so light she nearly loses it. She shrugs and presses herself against Mizore again. "Mizore, I really don't care what we do. You're here, I'm here. That's what matters, okay?" She looks right at Mizore, then, tries to commit her face to memory in case this really is just temporary.
"You're beautiful," Mizore murmurs, and Nozomi cups her face gently in her hands. Gentle, always gentle. She won't be the one to break Mizore's wings. They're dating, this isn't anything out of the question, kissing your lover, but Nozomi is-
Well, she's scared. And that's a terrible thing to be when you're sitting less than a centimeter away from the person you love the most, so she kisses Mizore and it's not like the first one, or the second, or any of the others, because each one has been different, each one has meant another thing. Nozomi is certain Mizore can feel her heart getting lifted into the sky.
When they break apart, Nozomi's face flushed and Mizore's probably the same - it's still dark, the television having given up on reminding the pair of its presence and turned off - something feels renewed, and Nozomi just smiles.
"Wow," she says, in lieu of anything else. Mizore laughs a little, so quietly that anyone else would take it as a strange breath or a sniffle, but Nozomi knows.
It's a sound she never wants to stop hearing, and of course youths are known for being overblown, romantic to a fault, all of that, but right then Nozomi wants to spend her life with this girl, and who's there to stop her?
"We should actually watch this tomorrow," she says, to dispel the tone the scene's taken on, "Natsuki keeps pestering me about how it's a masterpiece of cinema, she'll never let either of us hear the end of it if we tell her we slept through it."
"I think I'd like that," Mizore says, and she snuggles against Nozomi and this, Nozomi thinks, this is so allowed and so right and so perfect that she allows her mind a bit of rest and just leans on her.
a/n: liz and the blue bird is one of maybe like three? lesbian coming-of-age movies not focused around homophobia and for that i feel deeply indebted to nozomizo