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 Kaguya rests her head on your lap because this is the way things have always been, and you love it.
You take the same entrance exams for the same high school, and Kaguya whinges and whines but she studies every day because she’d rather die than let go of you. You take the same crowded train lines to school, and you join the same light music club, and you always go to that cute little cafe near the station for a treat when 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 the worry across your parents’ brows when you tell them, in no uncertain terms, that you’ll be moving out together. You remember them looking desperately like they'd wanted to say something, and you remember them settling for nothing at all. Like cowards, you can’t help but think.
You move in together. You learn how to share a space, and how to keep it clean, and how to split up chores. You both get a job at the same little ramen shop, and Kaguya is a savant with a strainer but there is space for you there too, because the shopkeep is seventy years old and his daughter just moved away and he desperately needs someone to handle the accounting. You step in, and handle it with aplomb.
You share a bathroom, and a bed—a futon, you didn’t have enough money for a bed—and you share bills. You are always a little better about saving up, and Kaguya is always a little better about buying things to keep you both sane. You save, and save, and save, and when Kaguya takes a tumble and gets a hairline fracture on her leg you empty your bank account without a second thought. You have never had anything more than each other, so how could you ever not?
Kaguya buys a rice cooker and two pairs of smart contacts.
You protest, fiercely, against having a pair of your own. You don’t think about their cost in food, though. You don’t think about your electricity bill, climbing up during the winter because you can only huddle for so much warmth, and you don’t think about all the laundry loads you could’ve done with the money.
You think about Kaguya, looking wistfully at a wooly pink top through the glass pane of a chic storefront. You think about Kaguya, slurping down a packet of jelly as a snack when there’s a pastry shop just two blocks down. You think about Kaguya, using the bathrooms at school at the end of the day instead of taking a trip to that nearby bathhouse with the nice-smelling salts.
You think about Kaguya. Kaguya, clearly, thinks about you.
You needed it more than you’re willing to admit, the fun of it all. The excitement of something new, and the competition of something that challenges you in ways unrelated to calculus and classical literature. You needed it more than you’re willing to admit, but Kaguya is all too happy to put the words in your mouth, because she knew you’d love it, and she knew you’d needed it, and she knew you’d come around to it after playing for a bit.
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.
You both start a channel together, and Kaguya is a savant on the stream but there is space for you there too, because you still have that dusty old keyboard and years of lessons stuck in your head and Kaguya needs music. You step in, and handle 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 Kaguya lays her head down on your lap, and you thread your fingers through the fine-mesh static of her hair 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!’
(You admit to each other, privately, that it is immensely reassuring to hear those words. You've always thought so, but then again you have never been the best at thinking clearly when it comes to one another. It has always been as simple as standing shoulder to shoulder with each other, and whosoever would stand in one’s way thus stands in the other’s.)
You discover yourselves together.
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 takes a little bit of exposure therapy to the concept, and it takes a little bit of fighting with yourself over the right and wrong of it, but you are gay and it feels right to say that. Or, well, to think it. You find you can’t say it, just yet. Not to Kaguya, at least, and if not to Kaguya then to no one.
You try not to think too hard about why that is, as your third year finals roll around.
You use the same notes to study for your finals, and you use the same secondhand study guide for your Tokyo U entrance exams, and you split an eraser in two and each use one half of it on your tests so that it is like you are together there, 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 you have always been the one to save, so when it’s time to go to college you let a landlord bite a chunk out of your bank account—colloquially known as a down payment—and move into this beautiful little apartment right by Tachikawa station. The air smells cleaner, this high up, and it makes you spill over with hope.
For the first time in your lives, you split apart. Just a little, though. Kaguya is studying computer science, and you are studying law, 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 want to have lunch with you, and enough to still want to talk to you after you say ‘No, sorry, I’m eating lunch with Kaguya again today.’ for the nth time.
And then people start to look at you, with these strangely piercing gazes. They look at you, at the cafeteria, with Kaguya’s head in your lap because this is the way things have always been. They look at you, waiting outside her lecture halls with your headphones in and a smile on your face, but only once Kaguya comes into view. They look at you, carrying her on your back after a particularly liberal night of drinking, and clearly there is a look on your face too, because then the questions come.
‘How long have you known each other?’
Since you were kids.
‘How long have you lived together?’
Six years. Since you were 16.
‘And she’s… your girlfriend?’
No.
‘So she’s single?’
…Yes.
‘Think you could pass my number along?’
…Sure.
(That last guy writes his phone number down on the margin of a notebook, rips the corner out, and hands it to you with a flourish.
As stealthily as you can, you throw it in the trash.)
‘Are you gay?’
Yes.
‘Is Kaguya?’
You don’t know.
‘Does she know you are?’
You haven’t told her.
A look. Piercing, and knowing. You answer back with a question of your own. “Why does this matter to you so much?”
And your brother’s kind eyes turn up at the corners, a little sad, and he says, “No reason.”
Like it always is with kids like you, you grow up together.
You both graduate, and Kaguya still loves streaming and you still love helping her. It’s making enough money that when you decide to take and pass the Bar, it’s basically for fun. The days pass you by in a pleasant haze of nothing-happenings and the comforting feeling of being stuck at Kaguya’s hip.
You start getting antsy. You get a job for the hell of it.
It’s not even something in law. Your degree is a framed piece of paper hung on a wall, and you’re perfectly content to let it remain as such. No, instead you find the nearest office job that isn’t for an exploitative black company hell-bent on sucking your soul away, and you apply, and you are vastly overqualified so they accept you the moment your resume finds its way into their hands.
It’s kind of nice. You go in every morning, and you mindlessly fill out forms until the afternoon, and then you leave and you come home and Kaguya is making dinner, and it always smells divine. The two of you settle down at the dining table, and you eat and laugh together like always, and the thought strikes you that maybe life could be perfect, if it was just this forevermore.
You don’t like how that thought makes you feel, for some reason.
So you go into work in the morning, and you mindlessly fill out forms until the afternoon, and then you leave and you go with your coworkers to a drinking party. And there is this wonderful young woman, just a year younger than you, and her name is Shizuku. She is smitten with you, totally and completely, and her breath smells like alcohol when she tries to kiss you, and it smells like alcohol when you push her away. She’s seven shōchū shots deep but her eyes are horribly clear, when she starts crying. You walk her home, apologize, duck behind a corner, and throw up in a dumpster.
You are in love with Kaguya.
You are a frog in a boiling pot. Something rises within you, and you are twenty eight years old now but this feeling has been a part of you since you were sixteen, a castaway hidden in the shadows your heart casts. All it takes is saying the words to realize the moment you started feeling this way. All it takes is remembering that you’d always been doomed to grow up quickly, but at least you’d never had to do it alone.
(It was your first morning in the apartment, and when you woke up Kaguya was looking out the window with a fire burning in her eyes.
You remember thinking how lucky you were, to be right there right then.)
Like it always is with kids like you, you grow up together.
You tell Kaguya you are gay, and she admits, happily, that she is too. You tell Kaguya about Shizuku, and something like relief floods her eyes, and you wish you were clueless enough to miss it.
You aren’t, and you don’t. And since you don’t, it barely takes you ten more minutes before you have Kaguya pinned beneath you with your tongue in her mouth. And it barely takes you ten more minutes before your clothes are all flung halfway across the room. And it takes you a significantly longer amount of time after that before you collapse in a heap next to her and say, “I love you, Kaguya.”
And it takes Kaguya no time at all to reply, “I love you too, Iroha.”
And like it always is with kids like you, you grow up together some more.
Kaguya tells you about her lifelong crush on you, and it makes your face burn with shame. You remember your mom telling you, back when you were just a child, that maybe Kaguya had put all that sand in your shoes because she liked you. You remember blowing a raspberry at her and planning your revenge.
You are determined to never, ever let Momiji know that you remember that. Ever.
Kaguya tells you about Roka’s crush on you, and it makes you practically explode on the spot. Apparently they’d commiserated much over you, during their high school days. Kaguya has to talk you out of sending a panicky, long-winded apology text to Roka right then and there. She convinces you, quite easily, that that time is better spent kissing her.
So you kiss her. You kiss her, and your hands lace together, and the thinness of her ring finger embeds itself in the soft meat of your head like a stake. You work your office job, with its paychecks that go to a recently-set-up private bank account so that Kaguya can’t tell what you’re doing, and then you go to a jeweler, and you pick out a ring, and you’re not dumb enough to believe that diamonds really are forever, but still. Still, it feels like something.
And then you are kissing thirty, and you’re at a champagne dinner, and there is something at the bottom of your flute and something else at the bottom of Kaguya’s.
And you both say yes. Because that’s how it always is with kids like you.