a/n: here it is, part two! i almost cried writing this

please watch brausur's amv "just in love" before reading, and then think about how it's been three years since that episode aired and join me in having an existential crisis

Kumiko's hunch was right - the campus was empty, which meant the area outside the theatre was as well.

Which meant, of course, that the two of them were completely alone.

"Here?" Reina said, and Kumiko had to admit it didn't really look so magnificent in the evening, without the sun filtered through the glass to cast it all in that dreamy light.

"Do you remember it here?" Kumiko thought she might not survive if Reina said she didn't. She must have, if she still thought over Kumiko's dismissal of the idea of their middle school band winning the Nationals. "W-what happened before you played against Kaori-senpai?"

"I do." She wasn't lying, Kumiko could tell that much, but she had no clue as to whether Reina's version of events was even slightly similar to her own. Reina stepped forward, and her hair swished with her movements.

"Why'd you do it?" Kumiko asked, because there was nothing else to ask.

Oh, she remembered this place well, remembered the way Reina's hand rested on her cheek and her breath was so close, how the room felt like it was shaking, how she promised never to leave and to be the villain with her - whatever that meant, even, she didn't really know and didn't care so much as to ask. All she cared about, in that little pocket of time, was Reina, inches from her face, the now-or-never feeling of the moment that spurred her to echo Reina's words from the mountain - to confess.

She'd confessed, and Reina'd played the most beautiful sound Kumiko had ever heard, and she was euphoric. She was not just floating, as the books said. She was drifting in space.

But here they were, and the impossibly warm blues of this lobby were substituted for gray, and Kumiko struggled to hold onto the feelings she'd had that day, which was precisely why she stood here, now, with Reina by her side.

"I meant what I said," she continued, because Reina wasn't responding and she had to fill the space somehow. "About being a villain and not leaving you. Y'know that, right?"

"I do."

"A-and the . . . the other stuff, too?"

"Yes, Kumiko." Reina folded her arms, impatient like a child. "What are you trying to say?"

"Why'd it turn out like this?" Kumiko snapped - almost screamed, really. Reina recoiled, just slightly, and Kumiko felt an awful sinking in her chest. It was a mistake to come here, to overwrite those memories with whatever this was - an argument, maybe, or the beginnings of a breakup for a relationship that never was. "Y-you kept going after Taki-sensei! I thought things were . . . I dunno, I thought they were 'different,' that they'd be different after this!" She gestured to the space around them. She wanted to stop talking, rewind rewind rewind, but the words kept tumbling out of her mouth of their own accord.

"Kumiko-"

"I mean, did any of it mean anything to you? At all?" Tears started leaking out of the corners of her eyes, and she hated that - the only other person who'd ever seen her cry like that was Asuka. "Y'know I was s-so happy after you won the audition and we'd said those things to each other and I thought we'd, I dunno, be together? After that?" Reina said nothing. "I thought it'd just be like that forever."

"I felt like that too," Reina murmured, and Kumiko stared at her, sniffled, wiped the tears and snot away with her sleeve.

"Y-you did?"

"But nothing lasts, does it?" Reina looked at the blade of grass Kumiko had carried in with her, now lying on the floor. It flew weakly for a few feet, propelled by the air conditioning, before going limp again. "I thought that - used it to hide, I suppose. I figured it would pass. I didn't want it to, but it'd hurt less that way."

Kumiko kissed her, consequences and blades of grass and confusion be damned, and it was soft and sweet and fervent, and she thought in the back of her mind that they could've done this the first time if she'd just closed the tiny, tiny difference, but there was no time to think about that.

They had now, and that was something, at least.

a/n: clap your hands if you miss kumirei