Chapter Text
Like it always is with kids like you, you grow up together.
You throw sand in each other’s shoes, and you steal spare erasers from each other’s bags, and the teachers know the two of you are always talking during class but they can never catch you in the act. You find an old set of keys to the roof under a vending machine, and you have your lunches together up there, and you rest your head on Iroha’s lap because this is the way things have always been, and you love it.
You love her.
You take the same entrance exams for the same high school, and you whinge and whine but Iroha still pulls you to her room with a Buddha’s smile, and drills you on basic algebra like a demon, and you’d have it no other way because you’d rather demons with Iroha than Buddhas without her. You get in together, and you join the light music club together, and you go to that cute little cafe near the station together whenever you have some spare spending money.
And then your mothers both toss you out. Like it always is with kids like you, you grow up together.
You remember that vacant stare on your mother’s face, when you’d told her you’d be moving in with Iroha. You remember telling her you love Iroha, with all your heart, and you remember the sting of a slap against your cheek. You remember the curl of a snarl on her lips, and you remember her asking if you were some kind of dyke.
A lot went down after that, and you don’t like thinking about much of it. Next time you speak, it is when all four of you are gathered at the station saying your goodbyes. You both have gauze on your cheeks, which the Sakayoris pointedly ignore. You look at your mother, and she looks desperately like she wants to say something. And you see her, in the end, settle for saying nothing at all. It’s a mercy and you know it. You just can’t find it in you to be thankful for it.
You move in together. You learn how to share a space, and how to keep it clean, and how to split up chores, and you, specifically, learn how to hide. You’ve seen the horror stories about roommates who get in relationships, and you think the two of you are better than that but you can’t risk it. You can’t. So you both get a job at the same little ramen shop, and you are a savant with a strainer but there is space there for Iroha too, because the shopkeep is seventy years old and his daughter just moved away and he desperately needs someone to handle the accounting. Iroha steps in, and handles it with aplomb. You fall for her just a little more.
You share a bathroom and it's torture, and a bed—a futon, you didn’t have enough money for a bed—and it's torture, and you share bills, and those are somehow the easiest part of it all. Iroha is always a little better about saving up, and you are always a little better about buying things to keep you both sane. Iroha saves, and saves, and saves, and you buy her a pair of beautiful little earrings and she smiles so wide and bright at you when she sees them that you stumble, and fall, and get a hairline fracture on your leg.
Iroha empties her bank account for you without a second thought. It kills you a little bit, but then she tells you that how could she ever not, when the two of you have never had anything more than each other?
And you love her. You love her so much it hurts, and so much that it doesn’t matter how light your pockets feel after you buy a rice cooker and two pairs of smart contacts.
Iroha protests, fiercely, against having a pair of her own. You think about her, stooped low over a textbook with bags under her eyes, and you think about her, back ramrod straight as she (correctly, of course) answers the question she was called out for while half-asleep, and you think about her, with her bright eyes and shaking hands, telling you how you’ve brought in enough new customers that she can probably fit in a raise for you next month, as long as the owner agrees.
You think about Iroha, and you wonder how anyone could deserve it more.
She’d needed it more than she’s willing to admit, you can tell. She’d needed something she could sink her teeth into that wasn’t intrinsically tied to your uncertain futures. And you tell her you knew she’d like it, because you don’t indulge in much but you will allow yourself the chance to brag about how well you know her, just this once. You savor the knowing like it is enough.
Like it always is with kids like you, you grow up together.
Social spaces have always been scary enough in real life. The two of you have survived, always, by sticking together. That doesn’t change now, but you stick together in a whole bunch of new places. You discover competitive guilds, and streamer groups, and beauty pageants, and cooking segments, and you do it all together.
And something about that big, red ‘Go Live’ button calls to you. You imagine yourself on a stage, and Iroha next to you, and it feels good. You start a channel together, and you are a savant on the stream but there is space for Iroha there too, because there’s no way in hell she would allow you to keep streaming with that god-awful jingle you made by yourself. She steps in, and handles it with aplomb.
You meet Roka and Mami, and they are a balm the two of you never thought you needed. You sit down in your little player housing apartment in Tsukuyomi, and you lay your head down on Iroha’s lap, and her fingers are cold where they drag against your scalp because this is the way things have always been, and you love it. You recount the tale of your shared youth, and shared banishment, and receive a shared, impassioned response of ‘Your parents are insane!’
(For reasons you cannot verbalize, you decide to tell Roka about your mom. About the things you told her, and what you were told in return, and what that all means for you. She hugs you, tight enough it almost hurts, and tells you that you’re not alone.
You are, apparently, not alone in several ways. It’s funny. If you were a more jealous person, you’d feel threatened by her interest in Iroha. Instead, some prideful corner of your mind preens under the knowledge that if you’re being honest, she doesn’t stand a chance. Not against you.
It’s an ugly thought, but you can’t help but want it to be true.)
You watch Iroha discover herself.
Tsukuyomi is a vast place, with a vast people, and a small, small section of that vast people is your people. Men who love men, and women who love women, and people who love both, and people who are both, and people who are neither, and people who should be one but were born the other, and—
And everything. And it’s like being pulled from underwater, when you realize you are free to be who you are here. But all the while, you can only think about Iroha. Iroha, and her strangely subdued reaction to all the colors of the rainbow scattered around you. Iroha, and the bags under her eyes, and her clenched fists, and her sleepless nights tossing and turning next to you in the futon.
It scares you a little. Enough that you don’t come out to her just yet, and enough that you don’t come out to her even after she seems to settle into herself a little more, right before your third year finals. It’s worth it, you know. It will be. It has to be.
You use the same notes to study for your finals, and you use the same secondhand study guide for Tokyo U entrance exams (helpfully annotated by Iroha before being given to you), and right before tests you find yourself cutting an eraser in half with safety scissors. You give one half to Iroha, and keep the other for yourself, and you insist that it is enough for you to say that you are doing this together too. You get in, both of you.
Like it always is with kids like you, you grow up together.
Streaming has made you a tidy sum of money, and Iroha has been saving enough of it that when it’s time to go to college you decide to move into this beautiful little apartment, right by Tachikawa station. The wind feels crisp, and clear, and new, this high up.
For the first time in years, you split apart. Just a little, though. Iroha is studying law, and you are studying computer science, and there’s not a whole lot of overlap between the two where classes are concerned, so you have to split apart. You brave the world without your second half for the first time in a long time.
It goes well enough. People like you enough to talk to you, and enough to have lunch with you, and enough to still want to talk to you after you say ‘No, sorry, I’m eating lunch with Iroha!’ for the nth time.
People like you enough to try to ask you out.
It comes as a bit of a surprise, if you’re being honest.
They catch you in the halls, and in your lectures, and in the cafeteria on the rare occasion that you are not with Iroha. The guys that walk up to you are all the suave, roguish type. They have slick hair and sharp smiles and smooth skin and they are so, so far from Kaguya’s type that it is almost funny. Kaguya turns them down at every opportunity.
The girls, though. Those you didn’t expect.
You should’ve, the more you think about it. The college age group has always been the most accepting of stuff like this, so of course you were going to find other lesbians. And it’s cute, you admit. It’s brave. You think every single one of them that confesses to you is a far, far better person than you could ever hope to be. Kumiko, Saki, and Yō are their names. You thank them for their honesty, and you wish them your very best, and you turn them down without a second thought.
And without fail, they all cant their heads at you with tears in their bright eyes and say, with the same sad smiles on their faces, ‘I guess I never stood a chance, did I?’
And that… hurts.
Because it’s true, yes, but also because you are… you are somewhat upset, that it is so obvious to everyone. And it really is obvious, you must admit, with the way Iroha looks at you in the cafeteria and outside your lecture halls and while carrying you out of a smoky old izakaya. And it is obvious, in the way you look at her, because you don’t know what it looks like but you know that other people are all too happy to smirk at you when they catch you doing it.
It’s an open secret, and Iroha is the only one out of the loop.
And then you stumble upon her and her brother—her very openly very gay brother—and you can’t tell what they’re saying but you know what they’re talking about. You have, after all, always been entranced with the way Iroha’s lips form around ‘Kaguya’. Picking it out is child’s play.
And suddenly Asahi is giving Iroha a look. A look that, unless you have fallen victim to a particularly severe bout of apophenia, feels eerily similar to the one you’d seen on Kumiko and Saki and Yō’s faces, once upon a time. A look that says ‘I know you.’
Asahi leaves, and he spots you on his way out. He smiles, and there’s a lot hidden there but in the end a smile is all it is.
Like it always is with kids like you, you grow up together.
You both graduate, and you still love streaming and Iroha still loves helping you because she’s the best. You love your stream. You love the people you’ve met, and the fanbase you’ve cultivated, and you love that they draw ship art of you and Iroha but you will never say that out loud. Still, even though Iroha helps it isn’t her stream. She gets restless. She passes the Bar. She gets restless again. She gets a job.
You have… mixed feelings about it.
On one hand, it’s less time with Iroha. It’s immature, you know, this desire to monopolize her. It’s not even really healthy. Iroha is her own person, and she deserves to do with her own life what she will. You know all this. You still miss her.
On the other, there’s something about it that feels like a light at the end of the tunnel. You fillet fish on your fancy marble countertop, and Iroha walks in from work and looks at you with lights in her eyes. You sit down together, and eat together, and laugh together, and she’s looking at you like you hope you’ve never looked at her, for fear of how obvious it’d make you.
Iroha doesn’t come home at the usual time, later that week. She goes to a company drinking party, and she stays out late, and when she gets home she smells like shōchū and regret and it makes you afraid. It makes you more afraid than you’ve ever been of anything in your entire life.
Like it always is with kids like you, you grow up together.
Soon after, Iroha tells you she is gay. The words are barely free from her lips before you are parroting them. Then Iroha tells you about Shizuku, and you have to fight your body from going slack with relief. That prideful part of you from so long ago feels simultaneously humbled and vindicated.
It appears, however, that you did not do a good enough job hiding your relief. Iroha looks at you with carnivore eyes and, all at once too soon and not soon enough, you are dragged into a searing kiss. And then you are dragged into a bedroom. And then you are dragged through the crest of a wave, and your head is being pulled from underwater, and Iroha says, “I love you, Kaguya.”
And you’ve been waiting your entire life for the words. “I love you too, Iroha,” you say.
And then you cry.
Like it always is with kids like you, you grow up together some more.
Past shaky breaths and a cracking voice, you tell your story. You tell Iroha about that puppy love crush you’d had on her since you were just kids, since all you could really think about was how pretty she looked, her mouth wide open in a laugh as she swung from the monkey bars. You tell her about how high school made you realize maybe you were less ‘crushing’ and more ‘hopelessly in love.’
(It was a Sunday morning, and you didn’t have school but you were studying anyway because you’d rather die than let Iroha go.
You remember looking up from your textbook and looking at Iroha looking at you, smiling softly. Smiling like it was a private thing. And you remember her telling you, gently, that as long as you kept at this pace there’s no way you wouldn’t both make it into the same school.
And you remember how she said that, like it was the greatest thing in the world. Like maybe she wanted it as badly as you did. And you fall in love with it, the idea of being loved, and with her, the girl who has been your everything for forever.)
You tell her about your mother, and Iroha’s incandescent, indignant fury is almost alluring. You temper it by reminding her that she’s not a part of your lives anymore, and that you are happy to keep it that way. She kisses you on the cheek, right where you’d once been hit, and it tingles pleasantly.
For the fun of it, you tell her about Roka. Her immediate panic is adorable. She tries to get out of bed to look for her phone, but you convince her that it's not worth the trouble right now. It’d be much simpler to just kiss you again instead.
And she does. Often.
She kisses you, and you have to remind yourself over and over that this is something you’ve fought for. That you are worthy of it. You lace your hands together, and Iroha’s thumb brushes across your ring finger one too many times for you to ignore it. You have always held on for dear life, white-knuckled and desperate, when it came to her. You choose to reach for this with more poise than that.
You set up a private bank account so that Iroha can’t tell what you’re doing, and then you go to a jeweler, and you pick out a ring, and you decide that diamonds have no choice but to be forever. The two of you will be, after all.
And then you’re at a champagne dinner, and there is something at the bottom of your flute and something else at the bottom of Iroha’s.
And you both say yes. Because that’s how it always is with kids like you.
“Hey, Iroha?”
“Hm?”
“Would you still love me if I was an old lady?”
“Of course.”
“Really? Even if I got all wrinkly and my hair went white?”
“Without question. Besides, I’d be an old lady too, wouldn’t I? We'd be in the same boat.”
“Oh, but you’d be so cute, I just know it.”
“Kaguya.”
“Yes?”
Something warm presses against the top of your head. “Go to sleep.”
“Fine…”
A beat.
“I love you.”
“I love you too.”
“Forever, right?”
A laugh. Arms wrap around you, warm and strong and feeling so much like home.
“Forever.”