Promptober 2026 Day 1: Love
Her love does not come suddenly.
No moment of sublime epiphany here. No trumpets, no clarion call, no castle walls crumbling to dust.
It comes on like the slow hiss of gas leaking into her home.
It comes on like the sweet words of a long-suffering but persistent suitor.
It comes on like high tide.
Love suffereth long, after all, and is kind; it envieth not; vaunteth not itself.
It’ll wait.
She barely remembers how she got here. It’s pouring buckets in the dark. Her uniform is soaked. Her hair is soaked. Her back is pressed up against the offertory box of a small shrine and she is trying so, so hard not to cry.
A shortcut through the park had made sense at the time. Tomori, the quiet one who couldn't make eye contact for more than a second (as opposed to the guitarist, the girl who didn't even try to make eye contact, period) had been holding the umbrella. They were alone. The lights of the train station twinkled merrily at the other far end of the path. Neither of them saw the root of the zelkova tree.
Her foot slipped under it. Her ankle turned. The gravel stung, but not as badly as the root itself. It scraped a long, ugly gash up her shin.
She cried out. The next couple of minutes blurred into wet and pain and sweat and grass and the Tomori girl saying her name - Taki-chan, Taki-chan, Taki-chan.
Had Tomori called her that before tonight? She would remember that later, and wonder.
Then, momentary relief from the rain - the shrine, the offertory box, Tomori digging frantically through her bag. Tomori’s hands, delicate and swift, push the hem of her skirt up over her knee and toward her thigh.
“Please hold this,” Tomori says. All business. Her stammer is gone. She pours the contents of a brown bottle onto a cotton ball.
In the moment before the cotton ball presses against the bloody shin, Tomori’s eyes turn upward to meet hers. They’re shining with concern and anxiety and excitement (?) and that’s when the last six weeks all start to make sense.
Up until now, Taki had been living with the notion that CRYCHIC was quite simply a giant waste of her time.
If she hadn’t given in to her sister’s incessant nagging and joined Sakiko’s stupid rich girl Morfonica-wannabe band, she would be sitting at home, at her own desk, doing homework, not even bleeding, and not even in love.
It is already in the room with her. It has been in the room the whole time. Waiting for the right moment, waiting to get a word in edgewise, waiting for Taki to turn her back so it can slide its many-fingered hands around her waist and kiss her sweetly on the neck and beckon, beckon.
Come, come.
Over here is blood rushing to your head. Over here is the world where love songs are true. Over here is your heart racing.
I’ve been here the whole time, it says. Won’t you let me go a little farther? Won’t you let me in?
You only get one first love, after all. It’s never going to be this sweet again. Don’t you want to enjoy it?
It reaches around and pulls insistently at her as Tomori’s brow furrows in concentration.
It won’t hurt much, and it’s worth it. It’s fun. It’s normal. Hey, come on. You’ve read about falling in love, haven’t you always wanted to try it for yourself? Haven’t you? It’s fine, right? It’s okay, right? This is what you want, right? It’s gonna feel amazing.
“It’s… going to sting,” Tomori says. Her hands are steady. She is waiting for Taki to tell her ‘yes’. Waiting for her consent.
Taki nods, and squeezes her eyes shut.
And she’s not lying: the hydrogen peroxide making contact with the wound on her shin feels like she’s going to split in two. Taki jerks backward and the fingers of Tomori’s free hand close hard around her ankle to keep her foot on the wet concrete.
A few short weeks later, Taki will cry. The night that CRYCHIC dies will remind her of this pain, the worst she’s ever, ever, ever, ever felt.
But she doesn’t cry now.
Her old life bleeds into a cotton ball. Her new life starts forming, cell by cell, underneath the biggest band-aid that Taki has ever seen.
It’s blue.
“I’m sorry,” Tomori says at their next practice, with astonishing sincerity.
“You did an amazing job. Honestly, I can barely feel it now. Why are you sorry?”
“The big ones don’t usually… have anything good on them,” she said sorrowfully.