Promptober 2026 Day 22: Perfume
Ever since she stepped into the cafe, something had been haunting Tomori.
It was… a memory. Vivid, bright. So strong that it was almost overpowering.
A song playing. A heavy feeling in her eyelids. A sense of lightness. A melody.
She began to write.
Raana looked up from across the table. “Hmm?”
“Oh– I–” Tomori reddened, and shook her head. She hadn’t realized that she had actually been singing aloud. “S…sorry. I was just… humming something.”
“New song?”
Tomori shook her head slowly. “...I don’t think so. I keep… remembering something. Not something specific, but– a feeling. And… this song…”
Raana seemed to chew on this for a minute before delivering her pronouncement. “It’s a nice sound.”
Despite her distracted consternation, Tomori smiled. Raana always said things so confidently. “Thanks,” she murmured, then looked down at the notebook in front of her to find that she had scrawled words listlessly across the page - lyrics, perhaps?
We’re only human, so…
She sighed. Nothing more concrete leapt to her mind.
Taki finished up her shift, and in a short time, Soyo and Anon both arrived, separated by a few minutes.
Their practice that afternoon was focused mainly on their efforts to nail a new song that they had been putting together for a couple of weeks. Anon had been having some trouble with a certain part just before the chorus, and she and Taki had been working closely together. As they put their heads together over Taki’s tablet, Tomori opened a bottle of water.
She wasn’t quite certain when it had changed, but something had definitely shifted recently. Anon was making a lot fewer errors during practice, and when the errors did happen, Taki was not reacting quite as sharply as she had before. She was frowning, yes - Taki was often frowning - but she didn’t really seem angry. If anything, she seemed… determined.
“What if we tried– Hey, Tomori?” Taki waved her over.
“Hmm?”
“Can you try singing– just from the last line of the second verse here, through the chorus?”
“Oh– sure!” Tomori picked up right where Taki indicated on the tablet. As she did, Anon began to strum underneath her vocals, and as Tomori crossed into the first lines of the chorus, both of them nodded.
“Okay, yeah!” Anon said.
“That was easier?”
“Yeah, way easier–”
“Good– yeah, that voicing sounds totally fine. Okay, let’s try it again.” Taki squeezed past Tomori and slid back onto her drum throne - and as she did, Tomori was struck, again, by that same memory.
The melody in her head, the voice she remembered singing it - it was Taki’s voice.
As the train home rumbled from one station to the next, she stared absentmindedly at the open notebook on her lap. Ever since practice had let out, an anxious dread had grown in her chest, a creeping certainty that if she didn’t solve this mystery soon, it would be too late.
“...Tomori?” Taki’s voice beside her was tentative, and broke her train of thought immediately. She looked up, and saw, with some surprise, that Taki actually looked quite anxious herself.
“Taki-chan…?”
“Sorry, I was just– wh– what are you–?!”
A revelation had struck Tomori. With a sudden motion, she reached up and took hold of the collar of Taki’s hooded sweatshirt, leaned close, and inhaled deeply.
“T…Tomori?!”
“Shh.” Tomori made an impatient noise. She squeezed her eyes shut. Her face was very close to Taki’s neck, where tiny beads of terrified sweat were suddenly visible.
“Taki-chan,” she murmured. “Are you using… a new perfume?”
With a small noise like the air being let out of a balloon, Taki nodded.
A flood of relief spread to the very tips of Tomori’s toes. All at once, she understood.
“You’ve a-actually worn it before,” she murmured. “Do you remember the night… that we went to karaoke? With Saki-chan… and the others?”
“I… um…”
“Ah–! S…sorry.” Tomori leaned back into her seat, letting the fabric of Taki’s sweatshirt slip through her fingers. “I’ve just been remembering… the song you sang that night.”
“Oh,” Taki said in a very, very small voice. “Um– sorry, I dont– really–”
“Don’t apologize,” Tomori said. “It’s… a nice smell.”