a/n: was talking with some folks about daikichi meta and this happened?
Kumiko thinks about it all the way home, the way Reina had accepted the broken orange candy without a second thought - she could've taken the red one, Kumiko wouldn't have minded - but she'd held the snapped stick in her hand a little tighter than she needed to, just in case it fell out.
They'd been so close, then, so casual. Taking bites out of each other's foods like a couple, or like particularly close friends, which is of course what they were. What they are. Kumiko shakes her head, and the flower pin digs into her scalp. With a wince, she wrestles it out of her hair, takes out the tie holding the whole thing up, and breathes a sigh of relief at the freedom the action gives her.
"Kumiko?"
Oh, and of course she's also right there, always there to drag Kumiko out of her brain-spirals, broken stick still clenched in her fist.
"Eh?"
"You seemed…lost in thought, there." Reina's words seem picked carefully, selected like one would a piece of artwork. Kumiko shrugs. Her phone buzzes in her pocket - no doubt it's Shuichi again. She leaves it be. "Aren't you going to get that?"
"Eh. It can, uh, it can wait." The walk through the streets feels strange, unfamiliar, like an inverted version of the world they'd known. Kumiko can't get the almost-kiss out of her head, for all the wrong reasons. In the movies, it's supposed to be magical. It's supposed to light up your world, to make everything else fall away. The only thing that had lit up had been the car that'd driven by, blissfully unaware of everything happening.
Of course she'd known in her heart of hearts that she was really just humoring him, that it would never work, but it almost had, hadn't it? They'd had fun at the festival, surrounded by people from school. They'd held hands and sometimes his hand hadn't even felt gross and sweaty. Wasn't that enough? It could've been enough, if he hadn't taken it that far, if his breath hadn't been so unpleasantly warm, so close to her face.
"Your hair looks better like that." Reina wordlessly, comfortably, runs a hand through it, and Kumiko leans into the sensation. She wonders what they look like to the passerby, if the passerby are even looking at them.
(She knows that they were looking at her and Shuichi, some of them remembering their own youth, reminiscing at the so-called happy couple as if they were a mirror into the past)
"Oh. Thanks." Was that a compliment? It's hard to tell, Kumiko thinks, but then again it's hard to tell most of the time, when it comes to Reina. Kumiko's heart sloshes around in her body like it's not made of muscle anymore, like it's liquid, like it could consume her and burst out from the inside at any moment.
"He didn't…try anything, did he?" Reina looks directly at her, then, and the force of it nearly knocks Kumiko sideways.
"What? No, no, nothing like that! He's a nice guy!" This much is true, which is perhaps what makes this so difficult. "Just, ah, leaned in to kiss me. And I panicked." Kumiko can feel her voice speeding up, getting higher pitched. "And I maybe kinda hit him with an umbrella?"
"An umbrella." Reina stifles a laugh.
"W-what's so funny?"
"You hit him with an umbrella- oh, that's fantastic!" Reina doubles over, now, wheezing, wiping a tear from the corner of her eye.
"I got freaked out!" Kumiko feels warm all over, now, in a way she's not necessarily used to - definitely not how she felt around Shuichi in any case. "I'm being serious!"
"I'm sorry, it's just-" Reina straightens up, cheeks flushed. Even in heels, she's just at Kumiko's height. It's a detail that Kumiko forgets a lot - larger than life and all that, it's hard to remember how small she really is. Not that she'd ever say any of this to Reina, of course. "Ah, Tsukamoto really can't catch a break, can he?"
"What?"
"Nothing." Reina keeps walking, pace faster and more clipped at the same time. Kumiko hurries to keep up. "I really wasn't expecting you to come."
"I almost didn't," Kumiko admits, because Reina's been nothing but honest and the least she can do is repay that. Reina holds her trumpet case tighter. "I mean, I was supposed to just go with Shuichi and then go home, y'know, b-because that's what people usually do, at festivals. They go on their dates and go home."
"But we're not like them, are we?" Reina asks it softly, like she's- no, she can't be afraid of Kumiko's answer, that would be ridiculous.
("You won't abandon me?")
"I wanted to be." The words feel like they're pulled from somewhere deep in Kumiko's lungs, like they've been waiting. It doesn't make them hurt less. "I thought- I thought I could just let things take their course, y'know? Date Shuichi and let it happen and eventually we'd break up because who'd have the patience for me anyway?" Kumiko presses a hand to her cheek and knows it'll come back wet. "I didn't think I'd hate it so much when he…the festival was fun. We had fun at the festival."
"Who are you trying to convince?"
"You."
"You'll need to do a better job." Reina tucks the remnants of the candy orange stick in her pocket, intertwines her hand with Kumiko's so that each one of their fingers is filling in the gap between the other's. It's so intimate that Kumiko forgets to breathe.
"I don't want to lose this," Kumiko says, because it's the truth, because she can feel the flower pin's plastic petals catching on the folds of her pockets, because Liz and the Blue Bird's refrain had been inescapable for the past two and a half months and it still is, now, the loneliness of it, the love found and lost.
"I know," Reina says, and she raises their hands to Kumiko's face, and the gesture is awkward but it feels grand and romantic, somehow, maybe because that's probably how Reina intended for it to be taken. "We're at your apartment."
"Ah." Kumiko stares up at the building she's lived in her whole life and doesn't particularly want to go inside. "What, uh, w-what're you doing, tonight?"
"The night's nearly over." Reina lets go of Kumiko's hand, tucks her arms neatly behind her back like she's a soldier. "The trumpet section said something about having a gathering at Kabe-senpai's house, afterwards, but I'm not particularly inclined to go. It'll likely just be the president and vice president squabbling over something or another."
"Natsuki did say something about that."
"She spends more time with Yoshikawa-senpai than with her own section."
"I spend more time with you than my own section," Kumiko points out, contrarian because she can be.
"I'm not the president."
"You could be."
"I'm too intense." Reina laughs again, short and halted, then clears her throat. Kumiko wonders if this is what she's supposed to feel for Shuichi, heart racing, a tiny smile making its way onto her face and feeling as natural as breathing. She wonders if there'd ever been a way to stop this, or if her efforts had been futile from the beginning.
"People listen to you."
"They listen to you. I make them hear me whether they care or not." Reina pauses. "We're not doing this."
"Okay."
"Just like that?"
"See, that's why I'd be a bad president, too." The soles of Kumiko's feet have gone past the point of hurting and now just feel numb. The backs of Reina's ankles are red. Neither one of them says anything about it. Why should they, after all? What would come of it? "You can come inside if you want, a-and if your parents are okay with it. With you staying over, I mean. At my house."
"Sure." Reina strides inside as soon as Kumiko hits the buzzer, navy blue dress flowing a little behind her.
"Just like that," Kumiko echoes her, grinning a little, and Reina tugs her inside like it's the easiest thing in the world.
Reina sleeps on the floor, even though Kumiko had offered her the bed in a show of hospitality, and scrunched up on a haphazard pile of Mamiko's paper-thin blankets she's no longer the philosopher waxing romantic about the end of time, she's just herself. The dress hangs by its tag on a thumbtack, a lack of clothing hangers having required some improvisation. Kumiko stares at it, now, in the dark of her familiar room made strange and unknown in Reina's presence.
A glance at her phone shows less texts from Shuichi than she'd expected, more from Natsuki taking candid pictures of Yuuko and then still taking them when she noticed and tried to take the phone away and still taking them when the entire scene was just a glowing blur. Kumiko chuckles to herself. It's hard to make out much detail (nobody had ever pegged Natsuki Nakagawa for a photographer, and for good reason) but Natsuki's grinning, when she's in the frame, and Yuuko's trying to stop herself from laughing.
Reina is there often enough that she's claimed a handful of items as her own, and one of them is the oversized t-shirt from a band Kumiko has never heard of that she picked up in the free box at music camp when she was a little kid. She'd swam in it as a six-year-old; now it's about the right size for an adult man to wear in public, just right for a teenager to wear in her friend's house.
Kumiko knows all of this because Reina's shamelessness was not something that had disappeared with her ascension to second year, clearly, having stripped off the dress as soon as they were out of the hallway and either pretending not to notice or basking in Kumiko's startled little yelp, followed by hands clapped over her eyes and a sudden fascination with the wall on the other side of the room.
So there is a lot to unpack, she knows, and she'll have to leave Shuichi eventually - the knowledge of that in particular curls uncomfortably in her gut, like the seed for an invasive plant with no natural enemies. The almost-kiss threatens to overwrite her other memories of the night, of Reina playing that solo like it was made for her, of their strange little trip home, of now, even, the two of them here like this.
Kumiko wonders, and she wonders, and she falls asleep eventually and Reina is awake before her, polishing her trumpet in that ridiculous shirt, and Kumiko knows.
There isn't much else to say in the matter.
a/n: who's been watching killing eve here because i can't stop thinking about the kiss scene
stay safe, everyone.