Chapter Text
Everything is dark when Kaguya wakes up.
Consciousness assaults her relentlessly, every sensation multiplied and magnified a thousandfold. Her body is small, and thin, and weak. Her vision fills with spots, static crackling behind her eyes. Something in the back of her head feels like it buzzes, weirdly enough. A strange pressure bores down on the base of her skull, tingling down her spine. She steps, and glows, and stumbles. Her limbs have gotten longer, from one step to the next. The racket in her skull quiets down. The weight of her head no longer feels quite so much like it’s compacting her spine into a coiled spring.
Everything is still dark, thirty seconds after Kaguya has woken up.
The room is a cluttered mess of dusty old boxes and precariously perched piles of machinery. Nothing too complicated, as far as she can tell, but definitely a… motley assortment. There’s an old gramophone in the corner, and a morse clacker stuffed in a box next to it, and a rotary dial phone stacked on top of that. Her shin strikes sharply at the corner of a bulky fax machine, and she takes a second to hiss and hop around as she rubs some relief into the bruised skin. The only light in the room comes from a water tank at the very end of it. The edges are lined with thin LED tubes that shine in soft, pillowy hues of electric blue.
Her ship is inside.
She can only really assume it’s her ship, at least. The buzzing in her head rises to an aching thrum, drowning out what little she feels she can even remember. The ship looks worn, and old, and the colors on it have faded from rich, earthy browns to something… tawnier. Something a little more beaten down and tossed around. Her heart beats in time with the pounding in her head. She thinks on the ship no more.
There’s more stuff littered about. There’s a payphone booth thrown against one of the walls, and for some reason there’s also a regular wall phone installed next to it, and then there’s a small stool with a rotary dial phone next to that. There’s an old bugle, rusty and beat up, hanging off a wooden peg in the wall. Right next to the ship, there is a dust-caked printer. Kaguya blinks, and the orange power light at the front blinks back. Neither of them move. Kaguya thinks on that for a second, realizes that only one of them even could move, and decides that maybe she’s more out of it than she thinks, if she’s waiting for printers to start moving. Kaguya blinks again.
The printer hums, whirrs, and moves.
She doesn’t bother hiding her flinch. She elects to call it a flinch, in the privacy of her own mind, to hide from the abject embarrassment of having jumped so high in the air that she’d almost rolled her already-bruised ankle trying to stick the landing. That’s not the important part, though. The important part is that the printer is moving and Kaguya is five minutes old so she is, understandably, scared. She eyes the old hunk of plastic warily, not letting anything pass her by. She sees a piece of paper drop into the machine’s bowels, swallowed up in jerky starts and stops that remind her a little of her own steps, right when she’d woken up. She sees the whole thing shake side to side as something is printed, the sound of the mechanical arm whirring back and forth feeling unbearably loud. She sees the monster spit out its meal, still warm from its trek through the cavernous maw of a beat up Canon inkjet printer.
Two words stare at her from the tray. They’re written in black. Size 12. Times New Roman.
‘Hello there,’ the paper says.
Kaguya screams, and the world goes dark.
The printer’s name is Yachiyo. Kaguya decides they’re now friends.
‘I’m not the printer,’ the printer—Yachiyo responds, after Kaguya says as much. ‘I’m just using the printer to communicate for now.’
Kaguya hums. She flits idly about the room, picking up all the scattered missives that make up their short history together. “But you are my friend, right?”
There’s a pause. The mechanical arm whirrs, stops, and whirrs again. A blank piece of paper makes its way out onto the tray. Kaguya glides her fingers across it, and notes just how warm it feels. A second piece of paper follows shortly after, and Kaguya smiles.
‘Of course we are,’ Yachiyo says. Kaguya’s new friend is awesome.
The process of acquainting herself with the world is a slow one.
Kaguya asks the still air of the apartment if there’s anywhere she can read up on the news. The whirr of a cooling fan is the only warning she gets before she is promptly blinded by the glow of a monitor. She blinks the spots from her vision and notices, for the first time, the small little setup in what she realizes is the only truly organized corner of the room.
All told, it’s very simple. A sleek desktop computer, a monitor hanging off a metal arm, a bulky headset, a backlit keyboard, an unadorned but comfortable-feeling mouse. She taps away at the keyboard, and the heavy clack of the keys is far more satisfying than she expects it to be. There’s a post-it note on the desk. ‘The password is 123456.’
“That doesn’t seem safe,” Kaguya mutters worriedly. She types the code in, and a Notepad document opens up out of nowhere. She panics, but it is short-lived.
‘I trust you,’ is all it reads.
Warmth blooms in Kaguya’s chest. She chases it down with news articles and an unhealthy amount of viral videos.
The year is 2030, she learns. It’s July. She’s in Japan. None of this is surprising, because she knew what month and year it was when she decided to come down to Japan, but it is reassuring nonetheless. She lets herself be swept away by the torrent of information at her fingertips. The clack of the keys never stops being satisfying.
Yachiyo is with her every step of the way.
She keeps typing in the same document she first opened. Any time Kaguya has a question, Yachiyo answers it. Who is this guy? What does that word mean? Is this old technology? Is that real? How popular of an opinion is this? How unpopular of an opinion is that? Her new friend’s gentle guidance ferries her along. It’s all smooth sailing and calm waters as far as the eye can see.
As far as the eye can see, huh?
She looks up the stuff in the room.
“What is that?” Kaguya will ask, pointing at one thing or another, and Yachiyo will answer.
The charred remains of a bonfire stare at her; she learns about smoke signals. A pair of faded flags hang from iron hooks in the wall; she learns about semaphores. She points at the bulky fax machine she’d bruised her ankle with; she learns about xerography.
There’s so much to learn. She envies humans, for all their creativity in replacing the spoken word. She wonders at all their failures to improve upon it. She thinks it’s admirable.
The Notepad document goes quiet.
Kaguya doesn’t notice it at first. She is enraptured by century-old pictures of century-dead men standing by the crude inventions that would one day turn into the myriad treasures scattered about the room. She wonders if maybe Yachiyo thinks she’s being ignored, and splits her screen in two, document in one half and browser in the other. Nothing comes of it. A frown pulls at her brow.
The document is quiet, but the room is not.
Something seems to shift. There is an energy here, and it’s scurrying about in the shadows cast by the cool light of the monitor. One of the phones rattles against its hook. The fax machine turns on, then off. The needle on the turntable swings into and out of position, lack of a record to scratch against notwithstanding.
There is an energy here, and she thinks its name is Yachiyo.
It’s beautiful, she decides. She’s beautiful.
‘I apologize,’ Yachiyo writes into the document once she has settled down.
Kaguya shakes her head, a little breathless and a lot awed. “That was so cool,” Kaguya whisper-squeals, eyes blown wide. She traces every typed-out word like a treasure. “What were you doing?”
A pause.
‘This is—’
Backspace.
‘I’m not—’
Backspace.
‘I—’
Backspace.
‘You—’
Backspace. Kaguya shakes, restless, but does not push.
‘I am unused to being,’ Yachiyo finally settles on. Hastily, almost an afterthought, she adds, ‘myself. I am unused to being… me.’
Kaguya smiles. “You’re a lot like me, then!”
Yachiyo says nothing in return.
Kaguya hums, content with her questioning, and turns her attention back to an article on radio waves.
The room moves, and she lets it. They both have much to learn.
Kaguya stares at the door to the apartment.
It’s a door. A normal one. It sure looks that way, at least.
She approaches the normal-looking door, a dogged determination lining her shoulders as she stamps forward. She slides her hand along the strange, plasticky synthetic wood. Her fingers catch the occasional groove. There’s a splinter embedded in her thumbpad, needling just beneath the skin. She moves her hand down, wraps her hand firmly around the metal handle, and twists.
Just like the ten other times she’d done this, nothing happens.
She tries throwing all her weight down on the handle, but all that really does is lift her in the air and tire her out further. She tries hanging off it, and she sure does hang off it. She dangles all her weight from five flimsy inches of stainless steel and wonders where everything went wrong.
Kaguya sighs, defeated and downtrodden, and pads listlessly back to the desk. Her wounded pride and splintered thumb will take time to recover; she’s done trying for the day. She throws her head back over the headrest, eyes tracking cracks in the ceiling like they’re the most interesting thing in the world.
A small projector hums to life behind her. ‘It was worth a try,’ Yachiyo writes across the ceiling.
Kaguya groans. “Was it actually, or do you think I’m stupid for even trying again?”
Too fast to really be comforting, ‘I don’t think it was actually worth a try, but I also don’t think you’re stupid for trying anyways.’
“You’re too kind,” Kaguya intones drily.
‘Only as kind as you deserve :)’
Her heart does strange, dangerous things in her chest. The curve of Yachiyo’s smile is too dangerous a thing to imagine.
(She imagines it anyway, beneath the bedrock of her own conscious thought. It gleams like silver, and it’s beautiful.)
The year is 2030. It’s August. She’s not so sure she’s in Japan anymore.
Yachiyo had been the first one to point it out. ‘There are no windows here,’ she’d told Kaguya, and it’d been like a veil had suddenly peeled itself from the world. The pleasant haze provided by an overload of information and her friend’s undivided attention had crumbled beneath the realization that oh, there are no windows here.
Kaguya is not ashamed to admit that she’d panicked a little. That she’d spent a whole day knocking on drywall and hoping it’d sound like glass. That she’d tried shoving a pencil through the enclosure of her fancy box in the hopes that light would come peeking through the holes.
She is, however, ashamed to admit that it had taken another nudge from Yachiyo to actually try opening the door.
It didn’t work, obviously. But it’s embarrassing that she hadn’t even managed to find that out on her own.
‘Do you want something to take your mind off it?’
Kaguya stares at the words. She wonders if her mood is so easily inferrable, that Yachiyo doesn’t even have to be physically in the room to pick up on it. She wonders if this is a bad thing. She wonders if maybe it’s actually quite a good thing. Her thoughts all pile on top of one another, awkward and heavy. A feeling that she is sure she knows but is unsure how to name simmers in her gut.
“I’d love that,” she finally answers. The projector turns off, and the embossing machine turns on.
This is how she spends most of her time.
Not on the embossing machine specifically, but on the learning part of things. The language.
The internet is a valuable resource, but a resource is all it is. She knows about braille, but she doesn’t know braille. She knows about semaphores, but she doesn’t know how to use them.
She knows about so much. She doesn’t know so much more.
It’s exciting, the thought that there’s still a whole world waiting for her to find it.
Yachiyo guides, and Kaguya follows.
A piece of paper comes tumbling out of the embossing machine. Kaguya closes her eyes and feels. Her fingers slide over a smattering of assorted bumps with the measured stillness of intense focus. Some of these little masses of not-written word feel familiar. Some of them don’t. She tries to fill in the gaps where she can.
“Hello to you, too,” Kaguya whispers.
The machine hums. It sounds satisfied, she swears. It sounds proud. It spits another message at her.
She answers, “I have a good teacher.”
Another sound. Something gentle. Something frail. Another message.
“I…” Kaguya stops. Hums. Feels. “Oh! Yes, yes I’m sure!”
Something fragile. Something scared. Another message.
Kaguya’s fingers glide across the paper. She thinks, idly, on what exactly she’s doing. On the nature of this strange conversation. She thinks about the fact that, in a way, what she’s reading is Yachiyo. What she’s touching is Yachiyo. A part of her, at least. The splinter in her thumb aches.
The paper is warm. She thinks of skin.
“Because it’s you,” she answers. Her cheeks are warm. “What could be more worth my time than learning about my best friend?”
Something sly. Something sweet. More skin.
“I don’t really care that you’re my only friend.” Kaguya pouts. She drags her nail across a smooth expanse of eggshell white. “You’d still be my best friend even if I had another regular friend. Or ten others. Or everyone else in the world.”
Something probing. Something pleading. Kaguya’s heart seizes.
“Because I think it’s something different. I think it’s something more. I think there’s a word for it, but I’m not exactly sure.”
Nothing.
The machine thrums with life, but it speaks no more. It goes quiet in a way that Kaguya thinks only people really do. In a way that feels haunted, and hurt, and human.
Something terrified. Something true. Kaguya traces her fingers over a four-letter word she does not recognize but she’s sure she knows. She imagines it writ across the silvery curl of Yachiyo’s smile, and it’s beautiful too.
“Yeah,” she says, a wide grin pulling at her lips. “I think I’m in love with you.”
The phone booth is dark. The door shuts behind Kaguya with a hollow, plastic click.
She’s never been in here before. Something about it has always felt… personal. A room within a room implies an expectation of privacy that she had never felt confident enough to breach. And yet, here she is. The small space feels warm—electric, almost—and Kaguya cannot help the racing of her treacherous heart because now she is a part of it.
There’s a box on the floor and a payphone in front of her. She ignores the former in favor of the latter.
She’s inclined to say there’s nothing special about it, but that wouldn’t be true for a lot of reasons. Still, it looks like nothing special. The smudged metal panel is scuffed, gouges of pearly white scratched into it at uneven intervals. The black handset rests on a simple metal hook, and it's dusty enough that it looks almost matte. There’s an old washcloth hanging from the box panel, and she decides to take it as a sign.
She cleans.
The wipedown does barely anything. Gunmetal gray lightens to cloudy silver, and the handset has regained some of its glossy sheen, but that’s really it. Kaguya doesn’t really mind, though. Regardless of how much or how little it accomplishes, the act feels meaningful. Reverent. A priestess at a shrine, or a mourner at a grave. Bodies that aren’t bodies still deserve care.
She stares at the phone, and waits.
They hadn’t really planned this out that much. Or at least, Kaguya hadn’t. She has a feeling Yachiyo’s been a little more preoccupied with… this. Whatever it is. She’s been quieter, recently. She still talks often, and Kaguya has never felt neglected, but there’s just been… something subdued about her. She still flits from machine to machine, but it’s a subtler form of movement. Like she’s moving nothing but the insides. Like she’s thinking, going round and round in circles that she tracks across her many minds. Or maybe she has one mind that she tracks across many bodies?
Yachiyo is so interesting. Kaguya can’t wait to hear her.
As if answering her impatience, the phone rings.
She startles, at first. It’s the loudest sound she’s heard in all her time here, and the way it echoes in the stuffy acoustics of the phone booth is… harsh. It rattles around in her skull like a loose bell. She plucks the handset from the hook before her idle thoughts can distract her any longer.
There’s static against her ear. It’s the kind of curious not-sound that comes from ambient noise filtering in through a speaker. She wonders if Yachiyo’s breath makes up any part of it. She wonders if Yachiyo has any breath to breathe into the phone in the first place. Kaguya’s heart hammers in her chest, and blood rushes in her ears, and for a second she’s scared that the sound of it is so loud that Yachiyo can hear it—that it’s loud of enough to drown out the sound of—
“Hi,” Yachiyo says, and everything goes quiet.
The sound of her own uneven breathing. The wardrum beat of her heart. The static flooding from the speaker. It all just… fades away. Her brain has zeroed in on a single point, with a voice like powdered snow and flowing mercury.
“Hi,” Kaguya says back. It feels like far too little, but it’s all she can gather up.
The quiet persists. She rolls the sound of Yachiyo’s voice around in her head. She wants more of it. She needs it.
“Yachiyo?”
“…Mhm?”
“Hehe… Yachiyo.”
“…Kaguya.”
A shiver races up her spine. “Your voice is beautiful.”
A new sound. Belatedly, she recognizes it as a laugh. “Yours is too.”
“But yours is more beautiful,” Kaguya insists. She leans against the side of the phone booth. She’s smiling so hard it hurts. “It sounds like… like the rain.”
“Yours sounds like the sun.”
Kaguya’s entire body goes terribly warm. Something scalding hot crawls up the back of her neck. Her thoughts blow away like powdered snow. Her blood flows thick like mercury. Yachiyo’s words—virulent, dangerous, addictive—invade and infect her.
“I love you, Yachiyo.”
The words feel right. They feel enough. Yachiyo’s breath hitches, and Kaguya wishes she could see how that looks. She wants to be intimately familiar with what Yachiyo’s pulse feels like when it’s thumping in her neck.
“I love you too, Kaguya.”
It’s the best thing she’s ever heard. Tears well in her eyes, and a giggle bubbles from her mouth. She feels giddy. Ecstasy flows like springwater from her chest, spilling down her sternum and into her stomach. Her arms are a gooseflesh mess, hairs raised and fingers tingling with unspent energy. Yachiyo loves her. Yachiyo loves her, and the way the lullaby lilt of her voice drapes itself around the words feels like art. It feels like something coming together.
“Gosh, I’m sorry,” Kaguya whispers at length. She sniffles, swallowing past the thick clump of emotion in her throat. “I didn’t mean…”
“I get it,” Yachiyo breathes, voice whispery and wet. “I really, really do.”
Kaguya hums. “So…”
“…So.”
“…Talk to me?”
Yachiyo smiles. Kaguya can’t see it, but she knows it's there. She doesn’t bother hiding from the thought of it anymore. She lets it fester until it’s all she sees.
Yachiyo talks.
She’s been waiting for this, Kaguya can tell.
It’s a combination of things that lead her to this conclusion. It’s the way she seems to never run out of things to say. The way she flows from word to word, graceful in a way that screams rehearsal—a lot of it. It’s the way she always has answers for Kaguya’s questions—no matter how strange or sudden they might be—like she’d been expecting them. It’s the way she doesn’t stop. The way she soldiers on, and on, and on, like there’s an end to all of this that she is trying desperately to reach. It's the way she sounds like she doesn’t want it to ever end either.
It does, though. Eventually.
Kaguya’s not exactly sure how long it’s been. Her head buzzes, heady from the voice whispering in her ear, and she’s warm. Sweat pools along the small of her back. A spot of cold carves down the middle of her chest. It’s slow, and gentle, and it’s barely even there. Her mind fills with the sound of Yachiyo’s voice. With the image of her smile. With the feel of a blunt-edged nail traveling low, lower, down her chest and her stomach and—
“Kaguya?”
She jumps. Her cheeks feel hot. “Whuh—yeah! Hm? What’s up?”
“You’re distracted,” Yachiyo whispers, mildly. Slyly.
“I… am.”
“By me.”
Kaguya’s face feels like it’s about to melt off. “Um… Yeah. By you.”
Something feels wrong. Something feels right. The air in the phone booth is charged, and the silence through the phone matches it. Kaguya’s legs press together, and her lips pull down at how strange that feels. Something about the sweat. Something about the heat seeping into her bones.
“Could you tell me?” Yachiyo’s voice sounds… awed. “Could you… describe what you’re feeling right now?”
Kaguya does not want to do that. “I–”
“Tell me,” Yachiyo whispers intensely. Insistently. Knowingly.
“I’m warm,” Kaguya chokes out. Sweat beads along the side of her neck, but she doesn’t bother wiping it away. “I’m… really, really warm. It’s making me sweaty.”
“Are you uncomfortable?”
Kaguya’s breath shakes as she sucks air into her lungs. “Kind of? A little. But in like… It’s weird. I feel weird, but not uncomfortable, but not… okay. Not normal.”
Yachiyo hums. “Do you not like it?”
Kaguya bites back a curse. She rubs her thighs together again, and the sensation feels slick and slippery. How does she know? How does she always know, and why doesn’t Kaguya ever mind it?
“I don’t dislike it,” she confesses. “I just… I don’t know…”
“What to do about it?”
A single, lonely night not too long ago. A question and an answer, for once not asked to or given by Yachiyo. Kaguya’s throat bobs. “…Yeah.”
Silence. Static. Sweat. Kaguya rests her hand on her stomach.
“I think you do.”
Always, she always knows–
“I–”
“Kaguya.”
Her lungs aren’t getting enough air. Spots dance in her vision. “Yes?”
“Finger yourself.”
–and Kaguya never minds it.
It’s not a release. It’s barely even a relief. Her hand races under her clothes and she slips two fingers into the scalding mess between her legs and it’s not enough.
“How did you get like this?” Yachiyo asks.
“Y-you.”
“Mhm?”
It’s not enough. The base of her palm keeps rubbing against her clit. It’s not enough. “’Love you,” Kaguya gasps. “I love you, and you’re t-talking, and your voice ’s so nice. I love you, Yachi-yo.”
“I love you too, Kaguya,” Yachiyo’s voice sounds in Kaguya’s ear. Her brain feels like it turns to mush. Her ears burn so bright they hurt. Her fingers curl, scrambling desperately in search of the raw sensation of pleasure.
“Now, stop.”
She ignores the demand, fingers pumping deeper into herself in rebellion. The boldfaced disobedience feels more illicit than anything said out loud in the last few minutes minutes. ‘I love you too, Kaguya’ knocks around in her skull like a thrashing bull. She bucks her hips into her hand with a pitiful, keening noise.
Firmer, this time, “Stop.”
Kaguya whines. A wounded noise escapes her, not a moan or a sob but built from the same raw materials as both. Her body writhes, hot and heady and helplessly confused. She stops. Her hands shake where she presses them into her thighs. ‘I love you. Stop. Kaguya. Stop. I love you.’
“Good girl,” Yachiyo breathes, and the sound of her voice suddenly feels so lacking, crackling through the dusty receiver. Kaguya wants the words pressed into her throat with teeth. Her nails are gonna leave marks from how hard she has to hold herself back. “Open the box for me?”
‘Good girl.’
‘Good girl.’
‘Good girl.’
Kaguya had forgotten about the box. She reaches over and rips into it like a lifeline.
Something plastic and pink falls onto her lap.
She’s… not really sure what she’s looking at.
“It’s called a rabbit vibrator,” Yachiyo provides from the handset. Kaguya realizes she’d let it slip from her hand and hastily moves to cradle it between her head and shoulder.
“Is this…” Kaguya swallows. She eyes the shape of it. Does a little bit of simple mental geometry. “Is it going… inside me?”
There’s silence, for a moment. Kaguya wonders if she’s said something wrong.
Then the vibrator… vibrates. In her hands. Without her having to do anything. Her eyes fly between it and the phone. Her thoughts race.
“Spread your legs for me, okay?” Yachiyo says. She sounds a little out of breath. A little drunk, and a little listless, and in summary, a lot like how Kaguya feels.
‘Good girl. For me.’
Kaguya throws her underwear off and spreads her legs. Her knees thump against the walls of the phone booth, sending pins and needles racing all the way down to her toes, but she ignores that. Some animal part of her wants something to bite down on, so she raises the hem of her shirt to her mouth and grips it between her teeth. The vibrator goes between her legs, but not inside her. Not yet. She hasn’t been told to.
Yachiyo’s voice garbles in her ear, melting in the space between it and her brain. Something about it sounds wrong. Everything else about it sounds so right it hurts. “What do you want, Kaguya?” she says.
She stops trying to wrangle her imagination. Yachiyo’s finger slides between her breasts, and her hand is curved around the soaked small of Kaguya’s back, and she’s right there and Kaguya wants—
“You,” she rasps. “I want you.”
Another murmur in her ear. Her body acts before the rest of her can parse the words.
Yachiyo is inside her and the feel of it threatens to undo her.
“Slowly,” a voice whispers. “Slowly. Don’t rush it.”
Kaguya gasps. It’s a low setting, but the rumble of the vibrator feels like it shoots straight into the marrow of her bones. She goes slow. She doesn’t rush it. ‘Good girl.’
“You’re so cute, you know that? So beautiful. All for me.”
Kaguya mewls. The external arm ghosts against her, but she wants more. She’s soaking her shirt in drool. She clenches her teeth harder. “Please,” she forces out from the corner of her mouth. “Please. More. Call me that—more.”
“Call you what?” The vibrator speeds up. Yachiyo seats herself more firmly inside Kaguya. Presses herself more firmly against the heated nub of her clit.
“Good.” Kaguya gasps. “Yours.”
Yachiyo giggles. The sound carries like bell chimes through the handset speaker. “You’re so lewd, Kaguya.” Another setting higher. The resulting moan it elicits is throaty and raw. “My Kaguya. My lewd little Kaguya.”
“Fuck.”
“Language, love.”
Fuck. Kaguya presses her lips together, scrunches her eyes shut, and throws her head back. Yachiyo hilts into her. She’s going to pass out.
“You’re close,” Yachiyo says
Kaguya doesn’t know. Yes. Probably. Yachiyo didn’t ask, she stated, and that feels telling because she always knows. All Kaguya knows is that she feels like a rope pulled taut. She’s fraying at the edges and her skin feels like it’s going to burn off and her legs tremble like autumn leaves. She doesn’t know what sound she’ll let out if she opens her mouth, so she just nods.
“Hold on for just a little longer, okay?”
Kaguya nods again. Her eyes are still screwed shut, but sweat burns in them anyways. She lets the shirt in her mouth fall from between her teeth.
“Five.”
She gasps, and the air she sucks in feels ragged. It scrapes, and claws, and eats its way to the back of her throat.
“Four.”
Her hips start floating. Her toes curl into the floor, and her calves burn from holding her up. The hand that’s not holding Yachiyo moves to hold the handset against her ear. She doesn’t want to miss a word.
“Three.”
Something in her belly burns. Something in her chest does, too. She feels like a coiled spring of molten iron. She has a headache.
“Two.”
She has a headache. The kind she gets when she looks at the ship at the back of the room for too long. When she thinks about the ship at the back of the room too hard. She doesn’t know why. The world feels like it’s unraveling around her.
“One.”
She loves Yachiyo. Loves her so much. Loves her like a part of herself. The headache disappears.
A whisper. A word.
Kaguya unfurls.
She can’t think. She can’t see. She’s cumming, and her legs are shaking, and her hips collapse, and Yachiyo is crooning in her ear, ‘Good girl. My Kaguya. Just like that. You did so good for me. I love you. I love you. I love you,’ and it’s too much.
It’s too much.
She melts onto the floor like a clump of warm clay, a rasping sob croaking from her throat. She’s soaked in tears, and drool, and sweat, and her own slick. It’s disgusting. She wonders, idly, if Yachiyo can see her. Her hips jerk, and her cheeks—somehow; they’re already a burning crimson—darken and flush further.
Maybe that’d be okay.
“Kaguya?” she hears through the haze in her head. The handset swings from its thick metal wire, just a few feet away. The motion would be hypnotic to her addled brain if she wasn’t so focused on the muted tones of Yachiyo’s voice. “Are you okay?”
Kaguya manages to lift herself up on shaky limbs. Not all the way to her feet, but at least enough to sit back against the wall of the phone booth. She raises her knees up to her chest, winces at how tender the motion feels, and just lets them fall back down against the floor with a wet thwack.
“Here,” she mumbles into the receiver next to her. “’M ’ere.”
“And are you okay?”
Kaguya smiles. She feels loopy and wrung dry and like her consciousness is floating two inches to the side of her body. “I’m great.”
“Silly,” Yachiyo mutters between giggles. “I’m glad you enjoyed yourself, but please get some water.”
Kaguya blinks. “Water?”
“It was in the box.” Her voice turns sly. “Too distracted?”
“You–” Kaguya stops herself and grumbles. She looks around, finds the aforementioned water bottle, and forces a weakened arm to reach for it. “You distracted me.”
Another laugh. Kaguya burns it into her memory just like all the rest. Her fingers fumble with the plastic cap of the water bottle, but she eventually manages to twist it off. She brings it to her lips, and half the bottle seems to just disappear. It’s like new life is being breathed into her. She saves the other half, twisting the cap back on and throwing her head back with a contented sigh.
“Did you have fun too?” she asks, probing. “I don’t… I’d hate to be the only one who enjoyed herself.”
There’s a moment, here. Something is happening, but Kaguya cannot tell exactly what. She doesn’t have a headache anymore, but she feels like maybe she should. The world tilts on its axis, a two-degree tumble that knocks her off-balance even if she can’t feel it.
“More than you know,” Yachiyo answers.
Kaguya hums, satisfied.
The year is 2030. It’s September. She’s not in Japan, but she thinks she likes this more anyways.
Kaguya stares up at the ceiling and thinks.
It’s a nice ceiling. Not because there’s anything extraordinary about it that makes it nice, mind you, but just because it… is. Cracks spiderweb across the popcorn finish, and some of the paint is flaking off in places, and there’s a couple bulging spots of water damage where the pipes are, but it’s still nice. It’s home. It’s the platonic ideal of the ceiling of a lived-in apartment.
“Did I put myself here?”
The ceiling says nothing. Its cracks don't split into words. The dried paint hides no secrets other than bare concrete. The bulbous sacks of water damage do not burst and spew hidden truths all over the place. It’s a nice ceiling, and a ceiling is all it is. A ceiling that is nice because it is.
The old flip phone next to her answers, “It’s not out of the question.”
Kaguya looks to the side. She’d laid the phone down next to her, still open and on speaker, back when they’d started the call. It’s been four hours since then. Four hours of the ceiling and Yachiyo and the thought that maybe, just maybe, she’d put herself here.
“I just…” Kaguya flounders. She rolls her head back and forth over a squeaky floorboard. “It’s not real, obviously, but it’s… it’s good. Too good to be something my family or my bosses did for me.”
A breath. She hears the way it goes in through Yachiyo’s nose, and the way it whistles out from her mouth, and she imagines catching it in her own. “…I think you’re right.”
Kaguya crosses her arms and nods, self-assured and more confident than she really feels. “Right? It makes sense. I’d totally make myself a little pocket of Earth just to relax in for a while.”
“My Kaguya is a delinquent,” Yachiyo laments, voice pitching down into manufactured disappointment. “I’d never imagined a day like this would come…”
“They work me like a dog up there!” Kaguya argues, throwing her arms up and behind her. “I deserve a break!”
Yachiyo hums, and says no more.
Kaguya looks away from the phone and stares back up at the ceiling. She kicks her legs up and down, just so she’s doing something. Her thoughts come in threes, metronomic, directed by the quiet thunk of her feet smacking against the floor. Water, cracks, paint. Secrets, secrets, secrets. Questions with no answers.
“Where do you fit in?” Kaguya finally asks. The question tumbles awkwardly from her lips, more direct than she’d really meant it to be. “I never knew you before this, so if I did make this place, then… then how’d you end up here with me?”
Water, cracks, paint.
There’s something here. There’s something being kept from her, and she can’t even begin to see the edges of it. It scares her, a little bit. She wants to see the bare concrete.
“I put myself here too.”
The words feel familiar. Or… not just the words, but the way Yachiyo says them. Like they’ve also tumbled from her lips, more direct than she really meant them to be. “You’re sure?” Kaguya asks. She doesn’t make mention of their shared clumsiness.
Yachiyo, seemingly, accepts the olive branch. “I’m sure.”
Kaguya hums. Her legs are still beating steadily against the floor. The very back of her head keeps rubbing over a cold spot on the floor that she vaguely recognizes as being from a nail. She keeps it there, letting the chill spread across her skull, down her neck and into her spine.
“How do you know?” Kaguya thinks a little more on that, and adds, “How are you sure?”
The cold spreads. It creeps along the curve of her ribs, into the ball joints at her hips, down the length of her legs. Her eyes flick towards the door, wondering if maybe it has somehow opened on its own and let a draft in, but all she sees is fake wood and stainless steel.
The words stab through the frozen mess of her like an ice pick. “Because I found the way out,” Yachiyo says, and it’s wonderful, and cruel, and it’s the last thing Kaguya ever wanted to hear but it’s also exactly what she expected.
Metronome. July, August, September. One full moon, two full moons, three.
“Tonight, right?”
Everything in threes—the year is 2030, it is September 12th, she’s not in Japan—but all of a sudden there is an interloper. A break in the rhythm. The number four rears its head like an omen. The moon is full tonight.
“…Tonight.”
Kaguya’s legs stop. She pats around blindly for the phone and brings it to her ear when she finally finds it. She doesn’t want any more space between them. Not right now.
“Will I see you again?”
“Yes,” Yachiyo breathes. It leaves her like it hurts. It leaves her like it’s true. It leaves her quickly, and it leaves her ragged, Kaguya can tell. “It might take a while, but I swear, I swear that I–”
“You’ll find me again,” Kaguya finishes for her. There are tears in her eyes and a crack in her voice. She smiles through both. She smiles and hopes that Yachiyo can see it.
“…I’ll find you again.”
The words feel like too little. She knows they’ll just have to be enough.
They stay quiet for a long, long time after that.
Kaguya keeps the phone pressed against her ear no matter what. Time marches ever forward, unrelenting, and she just… listens. Yachiyo is like sheer cloth, a thing only half-there, but she swaddles herself in it all the same. She wraps her hands with the sound of her breath and holds it close. She imagines herself a vessel for something greater than herself. For something beautiful, like Yachiyo is.
She closes her eyes, and waits.
“Yachiyo?”
“I’m here, Kaguya.”
She waits until the heartbeat in her ears feels not quite her own. Until the arms she’s wrapped around herself feel warmer than she is.
“Yachiyo.”
“Kaguya.”
She waits until her eyes feel heavy. Until the boundary between her and her dreams is barely more than a line in the sand.
“Yachiyo…”
“…Kaguya.”
She waits.
And waits.
And waits until she can wait no more.
“’Love you.”
And then, she sleeps.
The moon is full. The moon is beautiful tonight.
“I love you too, Kaguya.”
She doesn’t know what to do, at first.
September 13th arrives with no fanfare. Kaguya wakes up, sore and bleary-eyed, and it feels like any other day. Her cheek is stained with a dry trail of drool. The wooden design of the floorboards has been imprinted onto her skin. Her phone is on the floor, flashing a low battery warning. ‘Call Ended,’ it says. ‘Duration: 8:25:41’
September 13th arrives, and the only thing different about it is that Yachiyo isn’t here anymore.
Kaguya is a passenger in her own body.
She doesn’t know how else to say it. Doesn’t know how else to describe the feeling of tumbling out of her skin and watching herself waste away. Doesn’t know how else to describe the way that every waking moment following September 13th melds into some amorphous blob of stolen time. Doesn’t know how else to describe the cut-string-puppet jerk of her body as it fumbles around the room, turning machine after machine on.
The metronome snaps. She’s out of time. She has all the time in the world.
The year is 2037.
She wakes up in the driver’s seat, and moves.
The printer eyes a ream of A4 paper as an overfull housecat would. It eats nothing, and makes nothing, and spits nothing out. Kaguya turns it off. The blinking cursor on the Notepad document stares at her lazily. Languidly. Uselessly. Kaguya closes it. The projector shines its light across water, cracks, paint. The sickly eggshell white reminds her of the moon, and it makes her stomach roil like something raw has settled there. Kaguya unplugs it from the wall. The cardstock loaded into the embossing machine is cold to the touch. Dead skin. Kaguya tears it all out before she switches it off too.
The dead line droning from the phone booth screams in her ears. She hangs it up. The vibrator on the floor looks grotesque, garish pink and bent in odd shapes. She stuffs it back in its box.
She doesn’t know what to do. She’s back in the driver’s seat, but she doesn’t know what to do.
She’s out of time. She has all the time in the world.
Bodies that aren’t bodies. Cadavers line the walls.
It feels like dissecting a corpse.
She pries open back panels with a sound like ribs cracking beneath her palms. She shifts cables about like viscera, letting them coil and twist around her fingers like writhing worms. She breaks everything down into its base components, the pieces catalogued and put aside like dead meat. She fills trays and boxes and bags with the flesh that isn’t flesh of the best person she has ever known and the only one she has ever loved.
It feels like dissecting a corpse. Like desecrating one too.
She forges on.
‘The number you are trying to reach is currently not available—’
‘The number you are trying to reach is currently not available—’
‘The number you are trying to reach is currently not—’
The year is 2063.
Everything has a story. Everything has a use. She abandons the armchair engineering in favor of digging her nails into the meaty mass of nuts and bolts she has collected. She considers looking up articles or tutorials, but discards the idea out of hand. This is an act of love, and she refuses to have to be guided to do that, too.
There’s a gentleness in her hands that she had not known existed, she notices. She handles everything with more care than she’s ever thought this clumsy, shambling body of hers could ever muster.
She’s done learning about things. She learns about Yachiyo instead.
The year is 2092.
Everything is pristine. Barely any wear-and-tear. No worn screws or sanded-down belts or stressed motors. Yachiyo was always so gentle. Always, with Kaguya and with herself.
Everything is complex. It’s a little jarring, the distance between principle and practical. Yachiyo was always a mystery, vast and unknowable and alluring.
Everything is… ingenious. Kaguya fumbles in the dark, fitting pieces together through trial and error like a toddler. Nothing ever works how she expects it to. Nothing is ever as simple as she wishes it was. It’s always better. It’s always more than she could have ever imagined.
Yachiyo leads, and—
‘The number you are trying to reach is currently not available—’
‘The number you are trying to reach is currently not available—’
‘The number you are—’
The phone smashes against the wall.
The year is 2100.
The ship is warm.
She’s getting water everywhere. Her shirt is soaked through and sticks to her chest like a second skin, and the floorboards are going to rot from all the water pouring from the cracked-open stomach of the water tank, and one of the LED lights is flickering in her peripheral vision just so, that it makes her stomach fold in on itself, and none of it matters because the ship is warm.
Yachiyo was warm.
“You’ll come find me,” Kaguya whispers. The floorboards rot. “You’ll find me. You’ll find me. You will.”
The year is 2110.
Kaguya waits until she can wait no more.
And then, she sleeps.
Everything is dark when Yachiyo wakes up.