Week 1 Without You

Masumi had fallen asleep on the piano again.

Yaiba stopped at the half open door, hesitating. His hand hovered against the wood for a moment, halfway to pushing it all the way open. He could see her just barely through the crack, her face pressed into the keys, cheek smushed against the white and black. She was going to have marks on her face again, and he wasn't going to be allowed to say anything about it. Her arms dangled down beside her. Eyes closed shut, the most peaceful he had ever seen the girl since he had ever known her.

One week. It had already been one week since the end of the Maiami championship.

She had been here every single day since then. Yaiba had passed the room several times running errands for a teacher—things were chaos in the aftermath of Reiji's announcement about the impending interdimensional war, and every moment of every day was being spent preparing everyone. Combat training, defense lectures, fortification set up, organization of squads and emergency military hierarchies among the duel students as a reserve force if the invasion came too soon.

Yaiba hadn't slept in three days and he was staring to feel it. The second he would close his eyes, he saw those blue-coated guys in the masks with their sword-shaped duel disks, their cruel smiles twisting their faces as they mercilessly turned their enemies into cards. A lot of times, those images would turn into nightmares—nightmares that usually involved Hokuto. That must have been what had happened to him. That guy wouldn't disappear like that, not without a reason.

Yaiba's hand clenched on the door. His heart had started beating a little too quickly and he clutched at his chest in an attempt to calm down.

Yuzu was another one that had been missing since that day. Was Masumi thinking of her, too?

Yaiba pushed the door half open, peeking inside.

Was that the reason for the flowers?

They completely filled the small practice room, on every possible surface. Yaiba had found Masumi in here in the first place because he had seen her carrying a huge pot of tulips down the hall. He had watched her every day after that, climbing the stairs with another pot of flowers.

Every single one of them was a soft, gentle pink.

A breeze whispered through the open window, jostling the blossoms in a ripple of pink. Masumi seemed to be floating on a sea of petals. A ripple of cherry pink blossoms that bounced in the breeze.

It looks like a funeral offering, he thought with a sinking feeling in his chest.

Just who was Hiragi Yuzu to Masumi, in the end?

Masumi stirred in her sleep. Yaiba flinched a moment, taking a step back. Guilt stabbed him in the chest for spying on her. Her face turned slightly—was he imagining things or was...was that a tear in the corner of her eye?

"Yuzu," she whispered.

Yaiba thought he felt something lump up in his throat.

Fuck, he thought.

Yaiba hesitated for a few more moments. Then he stepped away from the door, and walked away down the hallway. Leaving Masumi in her sanctuary of petals.

Pink. Pink was the best thing to use to remember. Only a week had passed and already things were fading. She hadn't paid enough attention that single evening that they had spent together, the night after the duel, when Masumi had sat beside her at this very piano and watched Yuzu's fingers pick out careful notes. She was so hesitant with the piano, admitting that she had never actually learned how to play, and only knew it by sound. The lilt and twist of her voice in the small room, feeling so much more real than when Masumi had listened from the hallway. There was something angelic about the sound, something heavenly in a way that she had never thought she would think of anything.

But the memory of that voice was fading. Masumi could only barely hear the echoes of Yuzu's song in her ears.

Pink. This room needed more of it, the shadow of Yuzu that still clung to this tiny room.

She couldn't put words to why she needed this so badly. She needed to cling to her. To Yuzu. She needed to capture that...that sense of peace that she had felt, at the end of their second duel, in that moment when she had learned that Yuzu was the owner of the voice, in that evening she had spent at Yuzu's side, listening to her voice swirl up to the ceiling like an angel's wings.

And thus...the flowers. She had seen the pot of tulips while walking back from one of her combat drills—combat drills. The very idea of that sent a shudder down her spine. She was a soldier, now. The thought made her feel uncomfortably sharp, not the sharpness of a perfectly polished gem, but the sharpness of steel and weapons. She...she wasn't sure she wanted to be that. And while thinking that, she had seen the flowers—the gentle, beautiful, soft-edged flowers the same color as Yuzu's hair, and the sight had taken her breath away.

She had brought them to the music room and put them on the seat next to her. A poor substitute. Even the wind jostling their blossoms did not make them sing.

She had tried to play the piano a few times, to sing a bit herself, but she didn't know what pitch was, and she had forgotten her piano lessons from her elementary school days, so she was reduced to picking out a few random notes in a half-hearted attempt to draw out a sound like Yuzu's voice.

She shifted in her sleep and dreams, half aware of the keys digging into her face.

Yuzu.

Come back.

She could fill this room with a million pink-hued flowers and they would still never match what had been here in that single evening that Masumi had gotten to be at Yuzu's side. Her hands clenched in her sleep.

Was this all she could do, in the end? Fill the room with flowers like a coffin was filled with petals?

She might as well admit that Yuzu was dead.

The thought made Masumi jerk her head up, snapping out of sleep. She blinked groggily for a moment, the world a blur of pink. Although, whether that was from the haze of sleep or the glazing of tears in her eyes, she couldn't be sure.

Masumi rubbed furiously at her eyes.

"You bitch," she muttered. "You'd better fucking come back. Do you hear me?"

The flowers, of course, did not answer.

But she knew, somewhere, in her heart—or rather, she clung to the idea of knowing, because she couldn't walk on with the thought of anything else—that Yuzu was still alive. She was out there, and she was fighting.

Masumi just had to wait until she could hear her voice raised in song again.