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5mm.
It’s just their luck that evening when the flood warning hits that Ryoji and Minako are both crowded in Minako’s dorm room, half-asleep until the alarm blares—and it’s just their luck that the rest of the dorm’s residents take that moment to all return. Minako shifts, wearing only an oversized pajama shirt, as the rest of the dorm explodes with life, the hallway light flipping on, casting errant rays of light under the door into the dark room. Rain patters heavily against the roof and the windows, an inconstant heartbeat.
“What’s going on?” Minako murmurs, her speech slurring with sleep.
“Flooding alarm,” Ryoji whispers back, his mouth pressed to the hollow of her throat. Minako shivers. She reaches across him to catch the TV remote on the bedside table, and presses the ON button. The TV blares to life, already on the severe weather alert: flash flooding predicted over the course of the next five hours or so, all citizens encouraged to return home as soon as possible and stay indoors until the rain subsides.
The meteorologist stares into the camera while the interactive map behind her highlights all of Iwatodai and the surrounding areas in bright red, indicating high chances of flash flooding due to rainfall. Minako sits up and leans against the wall, her eyes half-lidded and tired. Ryoji tugs at her arm, but she doesn’t lay back down, just intertwines her fingers with his and keeps watching the meteorologist’s placid stare.
“Hey,” Ryoji says, pushing himself onto his elbows, “what’s wrong?”
“Hm?” Minako looks at him then. “Nothing, nothing. Is everyone back?”
“Sounds like it.” He glances at the door, the hallway light seeping between the cracks. “I guess it’s not a good idea for me to sneak out right now, huh.”
“Probably not,” Minako agrees. “Even if you made it out the window, you’d be swept away by the rain.”
“We’re three stories up,” Ryoji deadpans.
“Well, that too,” Minako says. “Guess you’re stuck with me a little longer.”
Ryoji curls into her side, winding an arm around her. His fingers dip beneath the fabric of her cotton shirt. “Guess I am.”
“Hey now,” Minako starts.
“I’m not doing anything.”
She lets him pull her back into the bed, far away from the world of rain and tomorrows. Far away from the inevitability of time.
10mm.
A splotch of shadow intercepts the light bending beneath the door, and two quick knocks interrupt the quiet. The room is silent for a moment; neither Minako nor Ryoji breathe.
“Under the bed,” Minako hisses.
“What—” Ryoji starts, but she drags him with her to their feet, throwing him with that inhuman strength of hers under the bed.
“Coming!” Minako calls to the door. She doesn’t bother to put on pants before opening the door.
“Minako-chan—whoa, hey!”
“Oh. Junpei.”
“Put some pants on!”
“You’re the one who knocked on my door. I don’t owe you pants. What’s up?”
“Uh, Mitsuru-senpai wanted me to—um, to tell you that we’re not going to Tartarus today—” Junpei swallows thickly; Ryoji can hear it through the barriers separating them. He can practically see Junpei’s concerted effort to keep his eyes on Minako’s face—as a courtesy to both her and his love Chidori, to whom he vows to do no wrong. Junpei’s a sweet kind of boyfriend like that, even when the girl he likes is dead. Ryoji can’t quite say the same of himself.
“I could’ve guessed as much, judging by the rain,” Minako says.
“Right. Yeah. I’ll leave you to it, then.” Junpei scurries away, leaving the impression of a cartoon sound effect. Minako laughs and closes the door.
“You can come out now,” she says. “I’m gonna turn the light on.”
“My eyes,” Ryoji grumbles when he rolls out. The artificial light is harsh compared to the earlier peaceful darkness. Minako draws the curtains, further muffling the sound of the rain.
“Don’t be a baby.” Minako plops back down at the edge of the bed, curling her knees under her chin, watching the broadcast again. The meteorologist shows footage of fat raindrops pounding slick streets, darkened by water.
“Hey,” he says. “Don’t think about the flooding.”
“People will get hurt,” she says, as if she knows this.
“Yeah. That’s how it always goes.” Ryoji sits next to her, rests his chin on her shoulder. Minako leans her head against his. “Hey, can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“What’s Tartarus?”
Minako doesn’t look at him when she answers. “It’s hard to explain.”
“Try.”
“It’s a place we go most nights. Dorm activities.”
“At night?”
“You might’ve guessed, but we’re a strange dorm.”
“Hm.” Ryoji puffs his cheeks out. “So you’re telling me you go out with your roommates every few days or so, and you don’t invite me.”
“I would, but you’re married to your sleep,” Minako says, pinching his cheek. “You’re out like a light at eleven.”
“I’d much rather be married to you,” Ryoji complains.
“We’ll see about that,” Minako says. “I’m quite a handful.”
“Nothing I don’t love already,” Ryoji says.
“Aww.” Minako presses a kiss behind his ear. “Thanks for saying that.”
Something constricts inside Ryoji’s chest—something bittersweet and painful. As always, he shoves it down. He’s not alone right now; he doesn’t have to be in pain. He doesn’t have to stay up wondering what this phantom ache traveling around his body is. He traces circles into Minako’s arm; the pain both abates and intensifies all at once. Gets tighter.
“Ryoji? Is something wrong?”
“No, I just—” he starts, then cuts himself off. He tries again. “I’m so happy it hurts.”
Minako nods, like she understands. This acute sense of having lost something. This fear that burns coils into his lungs. Like she understands it all. He doesn’t doubt for a moment that she does. He is a part of her, after all. Her fortune and her death.
Where did he get that idea?
15mm.
“You know,” Ryoji says, laying back on the bed, “why do you even like me?”
Minako slows her button mashing on her PSP. She’s sitting at her desk, finally having put on a pair of sweatpants. A small area on the table is cleared—probably for homework space, Ryoji guesses—and the rest of it is cluttered with knick-knacks: anime keychains, jewelry, a stand of books he recognizes for class. There’s a Sailor Moon plushie leaning against the windowsill. A fluorescent desk lamp, currently switched off, oversees the mess. “Huh?”
“Why do you like me?” Ryoji repeats.
“Uh.” Minako doesn’t seem to know what to say about this. Ryoji thinks of all the times he’s expressed this strange desire to be close to her—that feeling he has, deep down, that he knows her from somewhere, or has loved her sometime in a past life. Minako has never said she feels that way, though. When he brings up feeling drawn to her, she laughs—and he knows she’s never cared much for concepts like fate anyway.
“I feel like I’m always pushing my feelings onto you,” Ryoji says, “and I don’t really know if it’s too much.”
“It’s not,” Minako says. “I guess it’s hard to verbalize.”
“Can you try?”
Minako takes a deep breath. “Yeah, I can try.” She looks at him and cocks her head to the side. “You know, I didn’t like you very much at first.”
“What? Why?”
“You’re kind of a skirt-chaser.”
“I am not!”
“Yeah, the moment you joined our class, the first thing you did was flirt with Aigis.”
“And she called me dangerous.”
“Then there was that time where we were hanging out and you got swarmed by girls.”
“I turned them away to be with you!”
“By telling them you’ll be in their dreams. Why aren’t you in my dreams, huh?”
Ryoji pouts. “Come on. You don’t dream of me?”
Minako crosses her legs on the chair. It rocks on its wheels, to and fro, threatening to tip her onto the floor. She doesn’t pay it any mind. “My dreams are pretty weird,” she says.
“Tell me about them.”
“Sometimes I’m in an elevator. And in the elevator, I can choose which personalities to wear. Sometimes I dream of this little kid who tells me about the end of the world. Sometimes I dream of normal things, too, but those are usually nightmares.”
“Normality is a nightmare for you?”
“It’s not that.” Minako sets her PSP on the desk, still open to whatever game she was mashing buttons for. “I think I’m just always so on edge that things being normal feels uncanny.”
“I know what you mean,” Ryoji says. “Everyday things are precious, so you’re under a lot of pressure to enjoy it properly.”
“Yeah,” Minako says.
“I’ll stop saying flirty stuff if it’ll make you happy,” Ryoji says.
“Would you be happy with that? Would you feel insincere?”
“The flirting is already insincere. I told you. You’re the only one I’m completely real with.”
“Thanks,” Minako says. “That does mean a lot.”
Ryoji curls into the pink comforter and looks over at Minako, who’s staring at a patch of nothing on the wooden floor. The TV continues to blare updates. Eventually, it gets broken up by a broadcast advertising felt dolls.
20mm.
There’s knocking at the door again.
“Minako-san!”
Ryoji and Minako exchange a look. Now that evening has given way into night, there’s even less excuse for Ryoji to be in a dorm that already doesn’t allow visitors. Mitsuru had said, of course, that during the day it was fine—never good to test her or her rules.
It’s Aigis, Minako mouths. She looks meaningfully over at the bed.
Ryoji sighs and rolls back under the bed, pulling the comforter down to brush the floor, obscuring him from view. He hears Minako pad over to the door, the creak of it opening. The whirring of Aigis’s fans.
“It’s dinner time,” Aigis says.
“Oh,” Minako says.
“Fuuka-san says it’s important for us to all eat together in difficult times,” Aigis says, matter-of-fact.
“Who cooked?”
“It was Fuuka-san’s idea, so she cooked.”
Minako groans. “Suddenly I’m not very hungry.”
Ryoji’s stomach growls.
“What was that?” Aigis asks.
“Ah—” Minako stammers. “That was me! Guess I can’t hide that I’m really hungry!”
“It sounded like it came from further inside—”
“I’ve been practicing ventriloquism.”
“What?”
“It’s like throwing sounds out to make it seem like they’re coming from other places or people. Haha! I got you!”
“Interesting,” Aigis says. “I will look more into this.”
“Yes, please do,” Minako says. Ryoji can practically hear her nervous sweating. “Come on, let’s go to dinner.”
A moment, some footsteps, and then the door clicks shut. Ryoji crawls out from under the bed, now alone in Minako’s bedroom.
Now, it is important to remember that Ryoji is a perfect gentleman. He always takes his shoes off when he enters others’ living spaces—there his shoes are right now, easily hidden in shadow if the door opens—and he always asks before asking personal questions. He doesn’t look or touch without permission (school trip notwithstanding—he’d been coerced into spying by a menace using the name Iori Junpei), and he always says please and thank you.
Which is why it is perfectly excusable that, when left alone in his girlfriend’s room, he immediately decides to look through her things.
Nothing inappropriate. It’s not like he’s going through her underwear drawer or anything. No—instead, he takes one glance at the bookstand containing her textbooks and class notebooks and decides to look for her idle mid-class doodles. He wants to know where her mind goes when she’s not paying attention. Those few times he’s noticed her spacing out in class, he’s found her pages chock-full of all kinds of scribbles: music staffs, patterns of leaves, cute bunny faces with speech bubbles full of encouragement. Ryoji firmly believes that seeing someone in idleness is the only way to know them fully.
He tugs out a thread-bound, A5 notebook: its cover is a simple brown-pink, with “1/9 ~ 26/12” written on the front in black ink, right on top of Minako’s name. Arisato Minako, penned in careful kanji strokes. He traces his fingers over the characters like they mean something holy. Arisato—to have a home. Then he flips the notebook open.
Minako’s highlighted the top of each page with a color corresponding to each class, including Edogawa’s substitute teacher lectures about witchcraft—during which Ryoji finds himself falling asleep more often than not. He’s become acutely familiar with the press of Minako’s shoulder on his cheek this way. Not that he’s complaining.
The notes themselves are pristine and meticulous. It’s clear Minako cares deeply about doing her best in school. It’s in the empty spaces—the margins, the spaces between ideas—where her humanity shows. She’s drawn patterns of diamonds and cards in several corners, and on one page, there’s a drawing of a large room with elevator-door walls and a huge couch that’s occupied by a scribble of a silhouette. In the corner of one page, a pattern of swirling branches ending in leaves bleeds into her notes. There are reminders to herself too: lodged between a section of notes about Shinsengumi era generals is new items w/ officer kurosawa today; in the margins of a concise trigonometric proof reads clotho + lachesis + atropos; and and sandwiched between a breakdown of several Edogawa tangents is a note that reads date with Theo today.
Hey, who the hell is Theo?
…Ryoji’s head hurts.
25mm.
Ryoji stirs awake when Minako gets back. She closes the door behind her softly, trying to keep from waking Ryoji up. It was, instead, the hallway light that roused him, a warm contrast from the now-muted TV.
Truthfully, Ryoji had worked himself into a tizzy trying to figure out who that name in her notebook was—for some reason, he can’t remember it anymore—but the notes were from September, so does it really matter that Minako had gone on a date back then? And anyway, he staunchly believes they’re destined to be together—the bittersweetness he feels with her must be evidence of that—so what does it matter if she’d been with someone else before him? But his head hurt from all the thinking—not something he does often—and he’d promptly fallen asleep, her notebook falling open on his face.
“Minako…?” he groans, turning over and letting the notebook fall onto the bed next to him. In tiredness, he’s dropped all honorifics; if Minako notices or cares, she doesn’t mention it.
“Hey,” she says, taking a seat next to him at the edge of the bed. “I’m not surprised you could sleep more. What did I say about you being married to it?”
“Minako.” He grips a handful of her shirt. “You like me, right?”
“This again?” Her voice is soft, without judgment, but Ryoji can’t help but feel frazzled. Like something in him needs her reassurance, no matter how unnecessary it might be. No matter how repetitive. “Of course I do. I wouldn’t be with you if I didn’t.”
“But you like a lot of people,” Ryoji says.
Minako is silent for a breath before saying, “Not the way I like you.”
“Because we’re fated.”
It’s this that seems to finally make Minako angry. Ryoji’s never seen her mad before; it’s enthralling. Her brows furrow and her lips turn down just slightly, like she’s suppressing a frown.
“That’s not why,” she says. “I like you because of you. Does there need to be more to it?”
“I don’t know,” Ryoji says. “It feels like there is. Don’t you feel it? Like we’re meant to be together.”
“I feel that way because I love you,” Minako says. Her voice trembles; something in denial. “I didn’t feel it before I loved you.”
“I don’t know,” Ryoji says.
“What can I do,” Minako says, tinged with desperation, “to make you feel more loved?”
Ryoji, still gripping her clothes like a lifeline, says again, “I don’t know.” Minako pries his hand from the fabric of her shirt and intertwines her fingers with his, moving to lay down facing him.
“Ryoji,” Minako murmurs. He can’t look at her. Shame claws at his lungs. Fear is a wretch awaiting death at the foot of the bed. There are so many things to be afraid of in love.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t know what came over me.”
“It’s okay,” Minako soothes. She is so gentle; soft, accepting. Ryoji wants to tear this fragile adoration to shreds. It hurts. He loves her, he loves her. Without Minako, there is no Ryoji; he believes this fully.
The room’s air is cold, and the blankets are warm. She is warm.
“You’re safe,” Minako says. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Thank you,” Ryoji breathes. It is all he can manage. He is an insincere beast, spouting flirtatious platitudes on any woman in the nearest vicinity. He has always been crushing pieces of himself into tiny boxes.
Minako cards her hands through his hair, and they stay like this: both too awake to sleep, both too bittersweet to move away.
30mm.
Minako’s reading a book out loud that Ryoji finds incredibly confusing.
35mm.
They finish the book. There was more philosophy in it than Ryoji could follow, but Minako spoke it into being like she’d read it many times. Ryoji’s a simple guy—complex things fly over his head often.
But listening to her read it—her throat going hoarse, nevertheless enraptured by words—he feels full in a way he never has before.
40mm.
“Want me to do a tarot reading for you?”
It’s solidly one in the morning, and due to their lazy evening spent dozing on and off to the sound of the rain, both Ryoji and Minako are wide awake. He’s just recently reawoken from another nap, Minako tells him—he’d passed out hugging one of her stuffed animals while she’d been reading. The lights are off again, but the fluorescent desk lamp illuminates the desk with a steady humming. The TV, finally, is off, though the rain still hammers away.
“You read tarot?” Ryoji asks, surprised. Minako does not seem one for these vices.
“Kind of,” Minako says. “I started when I moved here. I just think it’s fun, you know?”
“I guess,” Ryoji says. “Sure, read me.”
Minako goes to the desk and retrieves a blue box from one of the drawers. The words Persona Deck are printed over the front in white letters, contrasting the face drawn in darker blue shadows above it. From his vantage point sitting on the floor, the face seems to wink at him.
“They say,” Minako says, “that you should never buy your first tarot deck. This one was a gift.”
“From who?”
She gets an unreadable, faraway look in her eyes. “I don’t know,” she says, and he knows she means it. “I found them in the room when I got here. I guess it might’ve been the previous resident, if there ever was one, but I decided that I’d start using them. I saw it as a gift.”
“You really are carefree,” Ryoji deadpans.
Minako laughs. “Maybe.” She sits across from Ryoji on the floor and takes a deck of cards out from the box, tipping it over to let the cards fall into her open palm. The card on the bottom depicts the silhouette of a jester with a bindle over one shoulder, legs splayed, jumping, dog hot on his heels. She turns the cards over in her hands and shuffles.
“So do the cards, like, speak to you in your mind or something?” Ryoji asks.
“Not really,” Minako says. She abruptly stops shuffling and fans the cards out on the rug. “I just memorized their meanings from a book. It’s a lot of interpretive guesswork. Now, pick six cards.”
Ryoji pulls out six cards, and Minako arranges them in a line, drawing all the other cards back into a deck.
“Normally it would require you to ask a question,” Minako says, “but since we’re just doing a general reading, that’s not totally necessary.”
“This sure is a lot,” Ryoji says.
Minako flips over the first card. It depicts a large skull overlaid over a pair of closed doors. The Roman numeral for thirteen is printed at the bottom.
“Oh, this is my favorite one,” Minako says. “This one is death.”
“Death?” Sweat beads on Ryoji’s temple.
“It’s not a bad thing. It doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to die,” Minako says. “This card, in general, indicates a period of transition. You see yourself in limbo.”
“Oh,” Ryoji says.
Minako flips over the second card. Thorny vines laid in concentric circles surround the silhouette of a man hanging upside down by one foot. The Roman numeral for twelve is stamped under it. “This card represents what you want most right now,” Minako says. “The hanged man. You want to surrender or let go of something, even if you don’t know what that is right now. There is something weighing on you.”
Ryoji thinks of that sharp, bittersweet pang in his chest, and says, “Maybe.”
“This one represents your fears.” Minako flips over the third card. It shows five blue cups, with the number five printed on the top right and bottom left corners. “Five of cups. You’re afraid of failure, and of regretting the choices you’re making now.”
“This all seems pretty basic,” Ryoji says.
“It is,” Minako says. “Like I said, it’s kind of a pseudoscience. But it’s fine, don’t you think?”
“Kind of,” Ryoji says.
Minako flips over the fourth card. The moment she turns it over, Ryoji knows he has seen this card before. It’s a sword pointing upright, with the head of a Sphinx on top of its hilt. In Roman numerals at the bottom is the number ten. “This one represents what’s going for you. This is the fortune card. Your dedication to appreciating things as they are and treasuring them, knowing they will not last forever, is working for you.”
“That’s a nice sentiment,” Ryoji says.
“You see the beauty in impermanent things,” Minako says.
Ryoji looks her in the eyes—bright crimson, full of adoration—and says, “I do.”
Minako swallows thickly and flips over the fifth card. This one showcases a large arrow pointing straight up, with three lines capped in flowers running perpendicular to it. On either side of the design is a figure of a person in prayer, on the same level as the big Roman numeral for five. “The hierophant,” she muses. “This one will tell us what’s working against you. Traditions, conservatism, institutions. You feel as though they are nothing special, and should not be the backbone of society.”
“Maybe,” Ryoji says. “I mean, I can’t say I’m all that attached to tradition.”
“Me neither,” Minako says. And she leaves it at that. Without saying more, Ryoji understands; this world which is so difficult to live in operates under traditions dedicated to inequity. They both know it.
Ryoji opens his mouth to say something, but he swallows it. He’d only had three words in mind.
“This is the last card,” Minako says, and she flips the sixth card. “This one will tell us the likely outcome… oh.”
Ryoji looks down at the three red swords, the number three printed on two corners. “What?”
“This card means,” Minako says slowly, “that you will experience an acute and very necessary heartbreak. You will be grieving. What you are struggling with right now will hurt you.”
There it is again—that addicting pain. Ryoji can only watch the tiny twitch of Minako’s eyes, the way they seek him out. He says, “I know.”
Minako stares at him for a beat. She tangles her fingers between the fibers of her yellow-green carpet.
“Well,” she finally says, gathering the cards together and adding them back to the deck, “like I said, it doesn’t really mean anything. The cards are all vague enough that they could really apply to anything.”
“Right,” Ryoji says.
“So don’t worry about it too much,” Minako says. She takes one of Ryoji’s hands and presses his palm to her cheek. “I’ll protect you from heartbreak.”
Ryoji flushes bright red all the way to his fingertips. They haven’t been together long, and he suspects even after ten years she will still fluster him like this. On pure instinct, he leans forward and kisses her.
When he pulls back, Minako’s smile is radiant. The rain continues its thunderous applause as Ryoji kisses the girl he loves.
45mm.
The power goes out.
They’ve already turned off all the lights, so the most the outage does is kill the dorm’s heating—in late November, no less. Frankly, Ryoji’s surprised it took this long for an outage—he had definitely expected it earlier—but he supposes a lot of the rain buildup in the streets found its way into the ocean and destroyed a few power lines while at it.
The primary result of this, for Ryoji and Minako at least, is that they’re huddled together under Minako’s bedsheets, letting their body heat warm the space, talking about—
“I haven’t decided yet what I want to study in university,” Minako murmurs. “I’d like to do something where I get to understand people.”
“You would be a good psychologist,” Ryoji says.
Minako wrinkles her nose, twining her legs with Ryoji’s, curling into his chest. “I don’t think I would like it very much.”
“Why’s that?”
“You know, it’s all, ‘you’re crazy!’ and ‘you’ve got this disease!' ” Ryoji will never say it, but Minako’s impression of an old male psychologist is adorable. “I don’t think there’s really any use in categorizing deviance as illness.”
“Some of it is illness, though,” Ryoji says.
“Sure, but they’re only treated as illnesses because the world we live in is constructed around not accommodating different modes of living,” Minako says.
“Okay,” Ryoji cedes. “No psychology, then. You’re really way too smart, Minako-chan.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“You should.”
Ryoji’s arm, acting as a pillow for Minako’s head, is getting numb, but he doesn’t want to move it. So he doesn’t.
“Have you thought about it, Ryoji?”
“Um… not really. I think it’s kind of hard to believe that I could go to college,” Ryoji says. Minako smoothes down the cowlick that sticks up in the center of his bangs, pulling it down over his nose.
“I think you’d do well at anything you tried,” Minako says.
“I don’t know,” Ryoji says. “Maybe I’ll start working right away so I can move in with you.”
“Ooh.” Minako grins up at him coyly. “You’re already thinking about moving in together, huh?”
“Yeah. This was just a test run. Be ready for it.”
“I’ll be looking forward to it, then,” Minako says.
“Well, I’ll need to compete with those college guys somehow .”
“Oh, please.” Minako tugs on the strand of hair she’s been toying with in reprimand.
Ryoji laughs lightly, a low echo in his chest. “Sorry, sorry.”
Minako shivers and draws closer to him, pulling herself into a tighter ball. Ryoji winds himself around her.
“I’ll want us to have matching mugs,” Minako says.
“Sure,” Ryoji says. “But the rug has to go.”
“What? This rug?”
“Yes, this rug. It’s not a great color, and it totally clashes with your color palette.”
“What’s my color palette?”
Ryoji has to think about this one for a moment, but he lands on, “Red, black, and blue.”
“That’s so obvious.”
“You’re the one who asked!”
Minako laughs into her fist. “You know,” she says, “I think you could be a good artist, Ryoji.”
“You think?”
“Yeah, you’ve got a good eye for color and aesthetics.”
“Maybe I’ll do that, then,” Ryoji says. He does not tell her the part where whatever she praises him on he feels more inclined to do. How much her words sway him. “I’ll have to start practicing soon.”
He does not say how soothing it is to plan out their future like this. He does not tell her that the multitude of possibilities is a heavy weight in his palms that hurts in only the most beautiful, the most warm ways. He does not tell her this burden of the future is theirs to bear; he does not tell her this aching feeling they will never see it.
50mm.
At some point, the rain stops. The flooding in the streets trails into the ocean, where salt absorbs the freshwater. The people with Apathy Syndrome do not care to dust themselves off, dry their clothes; they stand where the water brought them and groan on.
In Arisato Minako’s dorm room, all is quiet.
Ryoji reads a volume of her manga—some slice of life romance about the transience of youth—while Minako’s still curled into his side, her breathing soft and slow. She’s asleep and dreaming of wonderful things, he hopes, carding a hand through her hair. Dreaming of a world in which normalcy is not a nightmare.
Outside, the remnants of last night’s rain drip from the trees. Ryoji becomes acutely aware of these little sounds: Minako’s breathing, the birds chirping, the electric hum of the heating. The slow-starting bustle downstairs to get ready for the day. He wishes he could stay in this moment for the rest of his life.
Next to him, Minako stirs. She nuzzles into his side, her hair pressed into her cheek. Again Ryoji thinks how much he aches to live this moment over and over, that he might always fall in love tenfold with the sleepy curve of her lips.
“Morning,” Minako says.
“Good morning.” Ryoji presses a kiss to her forehead. Minako’s smile widens, her eyes still unopening. “I guess I should be sneaking out soon.”
“Mm, not yet.” She wraps an arm around his waist and digs further into his side. “Stay a little longer.”
“You want me forever, huh.” Ryoji sets the volume of manga he was reading on the table behind the bed and burrows deeper into the blankets with her.
“Yeah,” Minako mumbles. “So don’t go anywhere.”
“You got it,” Ryoji says. “I’ll be with you always.”
The sun streams in through the cracks in the curtains, reminding them of time’s inevitability. Despite it, the two of them remain unyielding, surrendering nothing to it. Time can continue its march at a later date.
For now, they have this: the illusion of a future.
0mm.
(Nyx and the girl are locked in dance.
“Good morning,” says Nyx, ready to be sealed away again.
“Good morning,” the girl says, reliving this day again and again. In some ways, their promises have never been broken.)