This Pious Morn
- The idea gets stuck in her head.
Not like a song would sometimes get stuck, but more like a splinter.
Caught under the fingernail.
Making the whole area tender and hot.
Taki-chan… is beautiful.
The irony is that if it had been a real splinter, she would have known exactly what to do: Dig in with the tweezers. Yank it out. Isopropyl alcohol on the wound. A bandage - she has one with little sea urchins on it that would be perfect for just such an occasion.
Momentary pain, yes, but it's better to endure something in the short term than drag it out.
Taki-chan is really, really beautiful.
But… all of her friends are beautiful. It's not as if she completely lacks a sense of aesthetics. She can recognize that someone is beautiful without any kind of ulterior motive. Here, she'll prove it. Here are the things that are beautiful about her friends:
Anon: Her soft eyes and perfect skin.
Soyo: Her - what's the word… Poise? Grace? Dignity?
Raana: Her grin, full of mischief, promise, mystery. Her legs. Her bright white teeth. Her cool style.
Taki: …
…she rips the page out of her notebook and balls it up and throws it away.
Thinking better of it, she unfolds it and tears it in half first - once - twice - three times, and balls up the remains and throws them away again.
The splinter throbs. It's buried deep.
Beautiful.
- Tomori knows how people think of her.
It took about eight days for her reputation as Haneoka’s guileless girl to stick. It started to follow her into classrooms like department store perfume. Oh, her? She's the rock girl. She's looking for bugs. She's odd, but isn't it kind of adorable? She's basically our class’s mascot. We love her. Ahaha, isn't that just what you'd expect from her? And on and on.
Being shrouded in that aroma makes her feel inhuman.
She hears people chuckling good-naturedly. She doesn't exactly know what to think, but at least nobody is making fun of her.
There are no mean notes in her shoe locker.
Nobody is hiding her pencil case in the ceiling above the bathroom.
On the contrary:
A memory.
One time - early on, not long after that awful day at RiNG when Anon and Soyo left, when it was just her and Raana - one of her classmates came up to her after school, and…
Nothing has ever made me feel like that before, she said. I went home and cried, she said. I had been sinking into something deep and scary but your words felt like you were holding out your hand, she said. Thank you, she said. Thank you, she said. Thank you.
What on earth could Tomori even say to that? All she could manage was to bow deeply, and say thank you for your support. The words came out stilted and awkward but her classmate just beamed.
She saw her classmate at the next show. Right up front, at the edge of the darkness.
And right behind her classmate, leaning against the wall, was…
She couldn't see clearly from the stage - the lights were too bright. She couldn't tell for sure that Taki was there watching, too. It could have been anyone.
It could have been anyone.
- Months pass. Events occur in a flurry, fast and scary. Sakiko's new band. Mutsumi. It all feels like an unpleasant and anxious blur, but it passes. First year becomes second year and it's spring again and cherry blossoms twist and twirl just out of reach.
Her life is bifurcated - a word she learned in class the other day.
Offstage,
It's about what things aren't.
Her life isn't bright. Her mind isn't sharp. Her heart isn't full. She isn't mute, but she can't speak. She can't act. She isn't herself.
Herself isn't here. Herself isn't anywhere.
and Onstage.
The only way that she can possibly explain the feeling of singing onstage is, paradoxically, by doing it.
It doesn't sound like a song to most people.
It might barely clear the bar of ‘spoken word poetry.’
But she isn’t doing it for ‘most people.’
It isn’t musical, but it’s a song, nonetheless.
She doesn't just ‘come back to life.’ It was never going to be that easy. But in the moment after the guitars fade out, and her chest heaves, the edges of her vision are shining with color.
It isn't until she's lying on her back on the bench in the dressing room that she says it.
Her eyes are still bright. Her voice is still clear.
“...she was… beautiful tonight.”
Raana bends low over her. There's a sudden eagerness in her smile.
“Rikki?”
Raana's eyes are oddly colored and almost hypnotic in their asynchronicity. They're hard to look away from - even for a girl who is an expert at avoiding extended periods of direct eye contact.
They're alone in the dressing room.
They've been alone a lot recently.
She nods, and Raana shows her a mouthful of teeth in a Cheshire grin that makes her heartbeat skip and thrill.
With a quick, sudden movement, Raana is straddling her. Her head dips down and suddenly there's a sharp, electric stab of pain on Tomori’s collarbone that rips a noise from her throat; not musical, but a song nonetheless.
When Raana comes back up, she's smirking. Tomori can feel her cheeks flush. The music from the stage seems so distant. Raana stands up and walks to the door and then there’s a click and the room is dark.
“Let me breathe some more,” Raana says.
Before Tomori can sit up, she is very close again. Her breath is grassy and sweet. Her eyes are shining. Her legs are strong. Her fingertips are rough.
Not for the first time, Tomori marvels at the preternatural strength of her hands, and the pressure she can apply with them, when she wants.
Tomori can breathe, too. She can breathe, and even in the dark, the color doesn’t fade from the world.
Raana always takes what she wants from Tomori, but it isn't like she minds. Because when they're alone like this, Raana takes something else, too:
The aroma.
The perfume.
The distant, numb, alienated boredom.
It flows out of her with each labored breath and bead of sweat.
Every time Raana traps her lower lip between her teeth and bites just a little harder than Tomori might have normally preferred, she feels her tearing through the layers of paper separating herself from ‘someone who is allowed to feel like a human being.’
It's a mutually beneficial arrangement.
Give and take.
Onstage and Offstage.
Later, alone, as the shower in her bathroom washes off the day, she catches sight of her own bare shoulders and chest. She sees the little puckers of dark red. Nothing to worry about - just tiny, busted-open blood vessels under her skin. She runs her hands over them and smiles faintly.
The marks will stay red, long after the color of the world melts down the drain with the soap.
They're beautiful.
- She loves beautiful things. She has loved beautiful things all her life.
The ocean, wide and inviting and so loud that it can even drown out her own thoughts.
Exsuperoteuthis depressa, which lives on the seabed in the dark and has never seen the sun, but still manages to be cute. Unbelievably cute. Incredibly, unbearably, heart-stoppingly cute.
A gift from her mother - on a business trip to a professional event in Kumano-shi, she had detoured briefly to the pilgrimage route along the coastline and stopped to pray at the Benten shrine. She brought back one of the most breathtakingly beautiful things that Tomori had ever seen: a chunk of volcanic coastline, pockmarked and shining and rough. She feels calm when she holds it. She can squeeze it just so and it will dig into her palm and for some reason the ache it leaves feels like weight bleeding away from her shoulders.
She knows, however distantly, that her mother doesn't really understand her fascination with rocks.
(How could she? She barely understands it herself, at least in a way that would make sense to another ear.)
But she brought back this rock, which is older than every animal and every plant, older than the grass and the dirt and all the gods under the sky, and Tomori loves it. She loves it.
She squeezes it now. It digs into her palm and leaves behind imprints of a hundred tiny holes and it hurts, and she is able to relax a little. Enough for tonight, anyway. Enough to sleep.
- Sometimes she wonders how her classmates would react if they knew the kind of things Tomori thought about.
Some of the girls in her class have boyfriends outside of school. One of the girls is dating another girl, and is afraid to admit it. She's afraid she'll get kicked off the track team. She didn't confide in Tomori, but one afternoon after class let out, Tomori glanced down an alleyway a block away from her local station and there they were. The older girl was almost ten centimeters shorter than the younger and had to stand on tip-toe to kiss. Tomori stood, transfixed, for several seconds before she started, and quickly hurried toward her train with burning cheeks.
The first time she gets kissed, Tomori is too surprised to see if Raana is standing on tip-toe. After that, the difference in their heights is almost never definitive; sometimes, she is sitting and Raana is standing. Other times, neither of them is standing and the lights are off and it suddenly becomes difficult to remember exactly why she cared about the difference in their heights to begin with. It made sense at the time. It always makes sense at the time.
It makes sense the day after, too, when she's thinking about it in class. She's looking intently at the chalkboard, but her brain is a million miles away. Her hand is on her pencil, but her fingers are fumbling with the ribbon on Raana's blouse. She nods at the right places during the lecture and takes diligent notes and nobody can tell that she's remembering the sound that one of them (impossible to know who) made when Raana's hair found its way into Tomori's clenched and trembling fist and she pulled-
Anon asks if she has a fever. She smiles and shakes her head.
- She's lying on her back on the floor and staring upward. Her projector is throwing the summer triangle up onto her ceiling.
Altair, Deneb, Vega.
Vega and Altair are both relatively close to Earth, and to each other. Deneb, by comparison, is impossibly far. It can only be seen because it shines so, so much brighter than anything else in the sky. Even from two thousand light-years away, it completes the triangle in the night sky.
She stares at the projection of Deneb on her ceiling. It really does look close enough to touch.
She reaches up.
- As she nods along to the music in her headphones, Taki is spinning her stylus around her thumb again and again. Tomori is mesmerized by it. She does it with careless deftness, with the thoughtlessness of breathing or blinking. She hasn't dropped it once.
The house is dark. The Shiina parents’ jobs take them out of the country for weeks at a time and Maki-senpai is at the conservatory and the house is too big for one girl, and the five of them together made the place feel full again.
They practiced, talked, wrote. They laughed. That was always the best part.
Now, it's past midnight. Soyo caught the last train, but Anon is asleep on the couch in Taki’s living room. Raana is curled up under the desk with Taki’s comforter.
Eight days until their next show, and the new song is almost done.
Everyone else is sleeping, but Taki applies all-nighters to problems like Tomori applies band-aids to knees (con brio).
On Taki’s bed, Tomori’s eyes are half-closed and heavy and she can feel the world slowly, slowly, slowly revolving in space, pointing her in a certain direction.
Her mind drifts, and for a while, she loses time.
It’s Raana that brings her back to earth - the girl and her comforter both move up onto the bed.
Look at me again.
Taki’s smell is everywhere. She fights a sudden urge to rub her cheek against it like one of Raana’s cats.
Stop assuming that you already know me.
In the dim light of the desk lamp, Taki’s outline is fuzzy, and for all of the color that leapt through her veins when she smiled and laughed and hummed, she is as grey now as the rest of the world.
Raana stares at Tomori for a moment, then looks up at Taki, still sitting at the desk, still composing, still somewhere far away.
This is who I am, too.
Tomori tries to reach up to bring her down to them, but the distance between her and the desk is a thousand miles, two thousand, ten thousand. The universe is expanding. The distance between two things can only grow.
It’s impossible.
Making something ‘permanent’ is impossible.
Everything is worn away by time and water and wind.
At this exact moment, she is in love, and alone, and adrift, unable to connect, unable to be heard, unable to speak.
Tomorrow she’ll be new again.
It’s better for the distance to endure. Better to stay still, unmoving. If things never change between them, then things can never get worse. If she never takes a chance, she doesn’t have to straddle the line between propriety and desire, between
what she desperately wants
and
what she believes is okay to be seen wanting.
Tomorrow, she’ll be new again. She’ll be whole. She won’t be lonely. She won't want what she obviously wants. She’ll be able to live without it. She’ll—
“Ugh. Boring.”
Raana reaches up from the bed and tugs Taki's sleeve. The stylus clatters as it falls to the desk.
- The first time she kisses Taki is soft and slow. She pushes through Taki’s evident terror until she whimpers, and the sound sets Tomori’s mind on fire.
But the world is still grey. Her fingernail throbs. When she kisses Taki’s neck - or maybe it’s Raana biting down on her earlobe - Taki cries out loud and Tomori’s hand goes up to stifle the sound. Shhh.
She peels her own shirt off. The world is grey. Taki’s stomach is flat and hard (drumming burns around 600 kcal per hour, she looked it up once and that means it’s in there somewhere forever just waiting to come out when called for) and smells faintly of lavender and anxious sweat.
It isn’t working. She kisses Taki’s hipbone. It isn’t working. There’s pain in her hand. The sensation of her own skirt and underwear against her own skin is becoming overwhelming and unbearable but she tries to bear it a little longer anyway. Soyo called her greedy once for (it isn’t working) always (grey) getting what she wanted and now she’s taking something else that she (grey) wants. And Raana (all grinning teeth and mischief) points at a spot on Taki’s thigh, there, right there, and Tomori (it isn’t working) leans in and kisses and it doesn’t work, it isn’t working, everything is grey, she can’t catch her br eath, she opens her mouth to suck in a lungful of air and bites down instead, right on that spot, and Taki goes tense and she knows she would cry out but Raana’s ffingers are in her mouth and as her teeth sink into thee soft and pliant skin her vision goes bright it goes so, so, sosososososososososososssooososososooo bright.
Beautiful.
She doesn’t remember anything else for a little while. Forgive her.
She hadn’t thought this through. She didn’t know what to do with the car once she caught it.
Many people thought that Tomori did nothing but think, by way of explaining why she spent so little time speaking.
But she learned a long time ago that ‘if’ was far, far too long of a word to fit in her head, that it contained the entire 24,597,899,228,710,080 kilometers from here to Deneb and wouldn’t it just be easier to reach out and cross that distance with a single step, a single song, a single word, a single kiss, a single…?
Beautiful.
Sometime later, she drifts.
They sleep.
Before dawn, Raana wriggles her way between the two of them. It’s summer, but Tomori shivers under the air conditioner.
She reaches across two sleeping bodies, grasping weakly, like a child.
She finds a hand, and holds it.
She doesn’t let go.