Good bye, Good girl
Wait a moment longer, just a moment longer, she told herself, the brim of her cap down low, dark hair pulled up in a high ponytail, hands deep in the pockets of her windbreaker. Around her, the sound of other people's happiness filled the air, the artifice of enjoyment, mechanical voices welcoming the crowds, the chimes of bells, a chorus of arcade machines in competing choirs of noise.
She lifted her head to the bright lights and sound. Just a moment longer, she protested, arguing with herself, and yet she already knew what was happening, already knew she had been stood up.
A sigh escaped her lips, unheard beneath the hammering of taiko drums, the sound of music.
"It's on you, Lita," she said quietly. "It's on you for getting your hopes up."
Still, she had been so sure that she had been right this time, that her string of bad luck was finally at an end—yet there are things you do when you need the company of others that only serves to put them off, and even though Lita knew she was doing them, she could not stop doing them.
'Boys don't like it you're too needy,' Mina had said with casual indifference. 'You have to play hard to get.'
She had bit back a sharp reply, a comment about how Mina was contractually obliged to not date by her agency, that the magic of being an idol was supposedly diminished if sweaty boys in the audience realised that affection was actually obtainable by others, just not them.
She resisted the urge to kick a vending machine, instead gently moving her foot forward and pushing the tip of her sneaker up against the white metal; an enactment of her anger, a performance of her frustration.
It was supposed to get easier as time went on, wasn't it?
It was hard to explain her loneliness to the others. Everyone else had a family to go home to, and she was living alone, trying to balance school work with her part-time job, trying to balance her part-time job with saving the world, and trying to balance saving the world with meeting the right person, someone who cared for her in the way she yearned for.
When she had first met Bunny, she had been confused by the feelings she felt, mistaking that need, that closeness for the romance she so craved. At D-Point, when they had died, when she had received an unwelcome understanding of their past life, of the courts and palaces of the cosmos as it had once been, she had been able to put those feelings into perspective, to understand where they were coming from. It was loyalty she felt for Bunny, not romance.
A small smile touched her lips as she tried to imagine what it might be like to actually try and date the other girl and realised that she could not imagine any scenario that did not end in unmitigated disaster.
When you lived alone, when there was no one else in your life, you came to depend on a certain sense of order, and Bunny was anathema to that kind of order. Trying to reconcile her memories of who the Princess had been, and who Bunny was often proved difficult, and yet, hadn't she also felt like someone else in the past; hadn't she also felt as if the person she recalled, a princess in her own right, was as lost to her now as her parents were also?
She sighed again, convinced she would go crazy if she thought about it too much. All of those feelings about her past life, about who she had been before she was even born didn't change anything; she was here now, it was Saturday night, and she had been stood up again.
"Perhaps you're just a bad judge of character," she chided herself, but if that was true, then the loyalty she felt towards Bunny, and the feelings of friendship she felt towards the other Scouts were misplaced, and she couldn't believe that for even a moment.
The thought of them warmed her heart, and she felt a sudden longing for them, a desire to be with them, to laugh together, to make stupid jokes, to talk about boys, to talk about girls even, it didn't matter.
It was a different kind of love to the one she yearned for, but it was love all the same, she thought, and in the cold, amidst the blaring sounds of the arcade, she smiled despite the tears in her eyes.
"Ain't that its own kind of Christmas miracle, Lita?" she asked herself.