three
something.
are
pain
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—
I awoke to the sound of rain. A retina-blast of light from my phone shattered the predawn veil of darkness as I confirmed the time—5:47, a truly ungodly hour, a time during which no sane person should be up. I squeezed my eyes tighter shut and rolled over in bed, hoping the pitter-patter of the rain outside would lull me back to oblivion. I’d just been having an interesting dream, though I couldn’t recall the details and had the sense that it had reached some kind of conclusion. I wanted to get back to it and see what else my subconscious could spin up while I rested a few hours more.
If the Radiances wanted me up early to prepare for Saturday or paperwork or something else time-sensitive, well, they could just text me or knock on the door or something. Until then, I was going back to sleep. I might miss breakfast, but that was fine if it meant I could avoid another unpleasant run-in with Yuuka.
Just as I had snuggled further into my blanket and hooked my arm under the pillow, my hopes of returning to dream-land were sabotaged by the human brain’s propensity for pattern recognition; I realized that the sound of the rain contained an oddly rhythmic component. Of course, there was the generally random white noise of countless raindrops, but there was also a distinct sequence of tapping noises, four at a time.
Curiosity got the better of me. I peeled one eye open, turned my head, craned my neck—
There was a silhouette on my balcony, visible only as a dark void, a humanoid shape where the lights of the skyscrapers beyond weren’t, half-obscured in the misty condensation.
Adrenaline flooded my system as I parsed the figure. I bolted upright and scrambled to disentangle myself from the blankets. With my prosthetic foot still on the nightstand, I was limited in how far I could move, but I managed to roll off the edge of the bed and land behind it in a crouch, then half-knelt, half-stood to direct the speartip over the top of the bed like a Roman soldier hiding behind a barricade. Emphatically not Heung-like, in hindsight.
Moments before filling my lungs to yell for backup, I looked at my balcony again and assessed the figure more carefully. During those few seconds of panic, my eyes had begun to adjust to the darkness, and I realized who this was. I caught the shine of rain-soaked hair matted down over shoulders, the silhouette of slender legs. And of course, when the light caught her face just right, an unmistakably brilliant blue shone from my girlfriend’s eyes. Perhaps obvious in hindsight. Hina glinted a toothy grin and waved enthusiastically at me. Her other palm was pressed against the glass; the rhythmic tapping sound had been her galloping her fingernails on the door.
My face turned hot as I realized how my maneuver across the bed must have looked. I averted my eyes from hers—always so difficult to look away from that beautiful sapphire—and hurriedly banished my spear. I knew rationally that I had probably done the right thing, but I couldn’t stop my body from repurposing the adrenal energy of my erroneous fight-or-flight response toward embarrassment. On the balcony, Hina seemed to giggle, shoulders shaking in mirth—or perhaps shivering from the cold, but that didn’t seem like her. While I tried to keep myself from cringing at my reaction, she pointed at the door handle and tilted her head, a wordless request for permission. She was drenched, so I did the decent thing and hurriedly waved assent. The open door brought the dull, distant roar of the rain into immediate clarity, making me flinch and move to cover my ears.
As Hina stepped in, closing the door behind her to re-establish the barrier between cozy interior and unpleasant outdoors, I had to wonder—
“Why the ”
“It’s pretty nice out there!”
I gaped at her, glanced out the window to confirm we were seeing the same rainstorm, then back at her, soaked head to toe. She was already on the move, wringing out her hair with her hands.
“Mind if I dry off?”
If it were any other person, I would have insisted that she make full use of my towels. But because it was Hina, I instead had a terrible premonition that she was about to do something distinctly dog-like.
“I just built that,” I declared, pointing at my PC, hoping to head off the spattering. “Please don’t ruin it.”
“What? Wasn’t gonna. I mean, that sounds …” For a terrifying moment, she seemed to be genuinely considering it, ultramarine eyes scanning across my belongings, “But I’m not gonna ruin your room. You think I’d do that?”
“Uh…I guess not? In any case—” I pointed at the bathroom, relieved by the sanity, “Yeah, use what you need.”
“Oh, I was just gonna, uh, blow-dry. With magic. Can I?” In response to my suspicious look, she clarified, “Won’t make a mess, I promise! And I’ll be warm after.” She batted her eyes at me, probably trying to look alluring—a little too wet-dog at that moment to pull it off, but the message was received.
“Uh, sure.”
“Yay!”
Then there was heat.
—
I woke up again as dawn began to break. This time, the puppygirl equivalent of a heating pad was entangled with me, radiating wonderful warmth across everywhere our bodies touched and our limbs wrapped around one another’s. My hazy return to consciousness brought a dim wonder to the post-coital embrace—before my brain came slightly more online and I remembered that nothing sexual had happened. She’d just stripped her most-soaked outer layers, blow-dried herself, and hopped into bed with me, and I’d fallen right back asleep in short order.
Now, shifting and readjusting slightly against her smaller form, I very much didn’t want to get up, even less so than before. I just wanted to stay here with her in my arms and be warm and safe forever. And I feel safe, paradoxically—Hina was being very lovey, all snuggles.
“Making up for lost time,” she explained. “Sorry I was out last night.”
“Mm.” Her hair still smelled a bit rainy; tricky to identify, not wet-dog, more like earthy notes layered over the aroma of her shampoo. I felt unimaginably spoiled to have my face pressed into her mane like this. “Find anything?”
“No,” she muttered dejectedly into my chest while her hand idly ran up and down my flank. “I went to run some tests with a friend in Kyoto. Oh! You probably know them, maybe, they’re on the forums. On there, they’re…Gorogorosan?”
I blinked, pulling away from her slightly, enough to look down at her. In hindsight, it wasn’t surprising at all that she knew one of Japan’s premier experts in ripple propagation, but I hadn’t made the connection myself.
“Oh, yeah. So you were testing ripple?”
“Mhm. Trying to figure it out. What they did, where they went. But we didn’t really find anything. Sorry.”
“For what?”
“Not solving it!” She wiggled unhappily.
“‘S fine,” I murmured, letting my eyes slide back shut. “You really don’t have to go that far. How far away is Kyoto, again?”
“Mmmm…two-fifty miles? Sum’n’ like that. Sorry, yeah, I know I’m getting wound up about this, I just don’t want there to be something out there that can hurt you. Any of you,” she added hastily, squirming again. “I think it’s just nerves about the Peacies. I’d rather they just showed up so I can tear ‘em apart and we can be done with this. But that won’t be for a bit, says Yuuka.”
I grimaced a bit at the mention of her abrasive teammate.
“You…talked to her? I seem to recall you saying you were going to…enact violence.”
“Yeah. Took a few swings at her, but she’s always so slippery. Got my point across, though, I think.”
“That being?”
“Stay from my cutie.” She injected a spine-tickling growl into the words. I shivered at the goosebumps that raced across my arms, heady with the surreality of our intimacy. She ran her hand down my arm possessively, approvingly, and dug her claws into the rough scar tissue. I winced, heart pounding. “Or at least, IDK, treat you with basic respect. That’d be good too.”
“Thanks,” I squeaked out. “Mmf. Ow.”
“Hm? Oh.” The claws retreated and she rubbed the stinging depressions contritely. “Sorry?”
Something giddy and vulnerable took control of me, urged on by the protectiveness on full display. She wouldn’t let anybody else hurt me—but cocooned here together, I was happy to let her do so.
“I didn’t say stop.”
—
Half an hour of ragged-edged gasping and delirious giggles and nibbling kisses later, Hina finally had to get up for work. My collection of hickeys had grown and my hand stung in all sorts of interesting ways, the result of clawing and gnawing and kneading. She seemed positively fixated on my flame-touched limb, seeming to prefer when I touched her with it over my other hand—and touch her I did, all the more reason for me to curse the tyranny of the clock and her presumably important responsibilities when she had to disentangle from me. Then again, an eyeful of mostly naked Hina was a lovely note to end on.
Some time later, I dragged myself out of bed as well and spent the morning enjoying my new PC setup. There was more work to be done, customizing and tuning increasingly miniscule settings, but mostly, I just relaxed with the chatroom on one monitor and YouTube on another, catching up properly on the few days I’d been out of the news cycle. It was good to be back. There were new glyphcraft papers, updates on the Vaetna—nothing pertaining to Bri at a glance—and continuing ripple effects of the non-magical sort from the Thunder Horse Inferno. And beyond my little bubble of awareness, the world kept turning as well, random new politics that I had little time for and banished from my feed as soon as they appeared.
The great invisible algorithms of the modern internet seemed to have picked up that I was now in Japan, and I chuckled dryly as I saw that my interest in magical studies had been correlated with my location and resulted in a slew of Todai videos dotted across my recommended page. I had a degree of academic interest in those, scrubbing through, looking for things to fill in the gaps in my understanding of what they did all day. The through-line across all five of them was that they did a lot of brand collaborations, but I was still a bit hazy on the day-to-day.
As it happened, though, I wound up getting mezzanine seats to exactly that subject in person. My hunger reached a tipping point and overcame inertia to send me creeping out of my room to the top of the stairs, intending to raid the kitchen for snacks and possibly a full meal if something in the fridge struck my fancy. I didn’t make it that far—I stopped short of the top of the stairs as I overheard a pair of raised voices, British and Australian. Fortunate, perhaps, that they were having this conversation—argument, really—in English.
“So you decided that I wasn’t going?”
“I’d have assumed you would be fine with it.”
“I have been, if we’d decided this when it had first come up! But I’ve planned my whole day around it now, so I’m going.”
“This is a serious event, not an excuse for you to hang out with Amane all day.”
“That’s not what I . I was going to get some field advocacy work done!”
“Ah. For your research?”
“Yeah!” Yuuka sounded annoyed, as though this shouldn’t need explaining. “I was talking to Inoue- and told him I was going, and he said I could count attendance instead of going to lecture next week because of the whole environmental focus of the fundraising. I was just going to take some pictures with the FOEI people there, y’know, we do that stuff all the time—”
“And were you going to me about this? Or PR?”
“Tch. Probably!”
“ isn’t enough, Yuuka,” Alice chided. “We’ve been over this. If you want to do a marketing campaign, collab, whatever, you have to run it by us first. And how were you going to juggle that with keeping an eye on Ezzen?”
“You’re sending Ai instead! Why does he have to be problem? Now there’ll be of us to keep an eye on the monsterfu—on him.” There was no contrition in the self-correction, but her resigned tone at least suggested that Amane had gotten through to her, even if Hina’s message perhaps hadn’t stuck. “Don’t know why you even fuckin’ bother—”
“Language. Can’t you got this vulgar after two years down there—”
“Piss off, it’s part of my . There’s a reason my merch sales are the highest—”
“ reasons.” Alice retorted with uncharacteristic venom in her voice. I could picture her tail lashing angrily. “And they’re both attached to your chest.”
The bickering collapsed into very angry-sounding Japanese. I’d been crouching, a reflexive but pointless attempt to be stealthy as I eavesdropped from out of view up above them—now I sat down more carefully to relieve the stress on my foot, waiting to see if they’d return to English. I didn’t like to pry, but…I was already learning a lot. Yuuka was some kind of environmental sciences major, for one. For two, her relationship with Alice was a little…incendiary, not unlike a rebellious teen and her mother. Weren’t they only two years separated?
“Listen, Alice. Point is, cunt’s a .”
“He’s a . Like Amane! It’s almost the same situation.”
“He’s a guy, and he’s balls-deep in that thing. I thought after all the shit with Jason you’d be done letting her bring her chew toys back here!”
“Yuuka,” Alice’s voice went gentler. “Have they caused you any ? I think you’re projecting some of your own experiences onto him; he’s been nothing but pleasant and polite. Help me understand where the problem is so we can solve it together. You’re a smart girl, you know—”
“Ugh. Fine, here’s a reason: Having of those things here is fucking terrible for Amane. Ai wants him to help with the for some fucking reason, but with how much red Hina’s gonna make because of him, it just winds up giving Amane a bunch more flare-ups.”
“Is that foresight, or an assumption?”
“I pinged for something this morning! They’re biting each other or some shit.”
I blushed—then my stomach lurched. Had we contributed to some “bad weather” for Amane in our selfish, giddy exchanges of passion?
“And yet Amane has been fine,” Alice retorted, and I sighed in relief. Yuuka’s silence was damning—her foresight was imperfect, it seemed. Alice sighed. “Amane wants him here too. She told you that this morning, so just…I’m not even asking you to get along with him. Avoid him, if you have to, just…right now, you’re being a bigger problem than he is.”
“Right now? You know what’s not , Alice? Three weeks from now, when the PCTF will start making offers to take him off our hands. Which we’ll refuse, of course, and then they’ll stop and start moving assets up from Okinawa. He is a mess waiting to happen. foresight, and I’m .”
“Alright,” Alice allowed. “Thank you for the heads-up, it’s good to have some precision on that. Add it to the chart sometime today, please. I’ll inform Hikanome that you’ll also be attending on Saturday. Be nice to Ezzen, please.”
“Fine.” I heard furniture shift, a chair being pushed back. “Don’t know how you can be so calm about it, Ally. He’s going to fuck us all over just by being here. That’s my .”
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