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When the pale moon dreams, she dreams of the land below her.
There is a great expanse her light shines on, a round watery canvas that stretches onto itself and is painted with flecks of earthen green, and without fail that canvas reflects her light back at her; Hello, the moon dreams she says to the land below her, and I love you, the land always replies. The moon is vast, and unknowable, and when she is awake she knows not what love is — but when the moon dreams, she sees them, and though a moon cannot understand, she sees, and when she sees, she feels—
—she feels—
Yuzuriha stumbles on pillowy snow, and realises, moonlight streaking through the fog in her mind, that Nerine’s hand has not stopped trembling in hers since they kissed.
Her silver slippers are caught on a cloud, her being too stretched to take in the magnanimity of the shiver that travels from Nerine’s spine to hers, twisting them together in the same braid that Nerine had said looked lovely on her. She doesn’t notice if the tremble of the hand in hers subsides when she pushes Nerine against a nearby tree and tries to steal the blood from her lips, because Nerine makes a sound—
“Yuzuriha...”
The sound drives all perception from her but awareness of it; oh, that delicious, subsuming sound, a sound that tears through the storm that took her home and hands it back to her, wide-eyed and swollen-lipped.
Home does not have to be a place, thinks Yuzuriha again, the room behind her eyes full of a presence no name could do justice.
Nerine’s swollen lips move around a silent question, colour flooding her pale cheeks. Yuzuriha can’t quite bring herself to tease, painfully aware of the snow-melting heat her own face has been giving off ever since Nerine told her she would be with her in sickness and in health, and—
“You called me sweet and gentle,” explains Yuzuriha, shrugging blithely, as if this girl before her hadn’t just suffused her incredible golden light into Yuzuriha’s heart and made it sing. Not that she hadn’t been doing that since they first met, but Nerine has said many things to her over the years that have made her want to kiss her senseless. Now that she can — now that she can! — she intends to trawl through the list at her leisure, kiss by kiss.
Nerine giggles, her snow-flecked gold lashes fluttering gently as Yuzuriha pulls her off the tree; she keeps moving, though, letting the momentum of her bulging backpack bring her face to a stop against Yuzuriha’s collarbone instead of standing upright, her nose tickling the side of Yuzuriha’s neck.
Yuzuriha gulps reflexively at the contact, and then almost chokes when Nerine places her lips on her carotid. She feels like Dorothy, for once, instead of the Tin Man; standing in the midst of her home in the arms of a storm, not knowing where she will be taken next.
“Where will you take me, yellow brick road?” asks Nerine as if their minds are braided together, too, just like their spines, and the breath that carries her question carries also the tremble in her hands down into Yuzuriha’s soul.
Yuzuriha considers the question. They stand, shivering in the snow, at the crossroads beyond the gate and beyond the wall, weighed down by scant belongings and kept warm by the bloom of a nascent love. To their south is history; the afterimage of a shared love and joy and feeling burned into film (Pictures that don’t just live in my empty heart anymore, thinks Yuzuriha, and the child she once was nods determinedly at that). To their east stands a building with a full-length makeshift mirror that has witnessed many times silver and once gold, and a bedroom that listened to the beginning of the rest of their lives. To their west lies a half-remembered dream that smells faintly of cherry trees; the outline of a road she barely remembers walking, stumbling in and out of her golden-haired love’s shadow.
But those beloved places beside and behind her are not where Glinda Goodwitch resides, and Yuzuriha’s being feels bent towards obtaining the silver slippers that will take her home.
(Aren’t you already home? asks a voice inside her, and her eyes flick automatically to the blonde in her vision.)
North, then, is a blanket of snowfall Yuzuriha cannot see past, and yet her mind is still ever so keen to paint beyond it. She imagines a bridge beyond those rows of trees, vaulting over the stream that cleaves through the thick forest. A lantern or two on the posts, perhaps, and the warm glow of dimly-lit streetlamps. She wonders how it would feel, stumbling into one of those buildings they buffet, hands full of wrinkled money she’s saved from every allowance she’s ever gotten. Perhaps they’d even be turned away, their school uniforms lighting a shadow of recognition in the eyes of the faceless receptionist who would greet them.
But perhaps the person behind those formless eyes would not care, would simply wave them through with a look of unspecified emotion, and perhaps they would trudge up a set of rickety stairs into a room with a bare desk and a creaking chair, seeking refuge under the rapidly-warming covers of that threadbare bed.
Yuzuriha looks down, then, into the celadon eyes staring at her, the room behind them — that room she’s hardly ever dared to look at — that room that is all hers. (Mine, a voice inside her almost purrs, and a heady rush thrums up through the base of her spine.) There is a refuge in that room, too; a hearth, vast and roaring, and a bed by the window, and a chair with two settings, and a pot of delicious, soul-warming coffee, and a vase full of lily-of-the-valley, and—
“Home,” says Yuzuriha to the girl tending to the hearth, and the trembling smile Nerine gives her is so dazzling that it freezes solid the autumn air inside her lungs.
The town they eventually make it to is certainly a welcome change; there is a loveliness and a life to the half-melted snow here that the academy does not quite have. It shimmers softly in the amber light that suffuses the powdered white world with the suggestion of warmth, lighting the way of the two girls who look around, furtive and uncertain at their new surroundings. Beyond the wall, the flakes dance freer, spinning almost more merrily the closer Nerine peers at them — she tries reaching for one of them, but Yuzuriha’s grip on her other hand tightens and she is brought softly back to the ground.
Her eyes seek out the glimmering silver in her vision like the moon seeking the Earth; an orbit so inescapable Nerine almost wonders that she ever tried to deny it.
“It looks alive,” mutters Yuzuriha as they walk, their feet retreading worn prints in the already-compressed snow. There are no cars around them this late, but the road they walk beside still bears snow-tracks in the shape of the traffic it once guided, and the salt sprinkled on it glimmers in the half-light of the lanterns. Here and there, they see people milling about; huddled into bulky clothing for warmth — or some, like them, into each other.
There are shops here too, and Nerine’s mind does not take long to adjust to the names despite the long lack of anything in her life beyond the academy’s four walls; a store with fishing gear, a shop with charms and statues for luck, a shop selling scarves, a small convenience store, a bakery, and — everywhere her eyes travel there is a place with a unique name and its own life and a history all to itself, and Nerine feels terribly strange that she had ever lived without such a sight for almost two years. It feels like waking up, almost, this gentle barrage on her senses; Nerine cannot smell the coffee that usually accompanies that feeling, but the hazy cold scent of freshly fallen snow somehow suffices much the same.
Yuzuriha seems to be having similar thoughts too, if the minute furrow dimpling her best friend’s forehead is any indication, but there seems to be a focus in Yuzuriha’s gaze, as if she is searching for something. She is only barely reading the names of the stores they pass, not pausing to look at their contents, and though her grip on Nerine’s hand does not falter—
—Nerine knows the tremors she feels cannot all be her own.
“What is it, Yuzuriha?” she asks gently, her smile deepening entirely of its own accord when Yuzuriha turns to her as if she had just woken from a fitful sleep.
“Ah, well,” begins Yuzuriha, stumbling over her words; Nerine does not bother hiding her giggle behind her hand. “I was just— we came all the way out here, but I didn’t really plan very far ahead on what we’d do once we got here.”
Something light flutters in Nerine’s chest, and she squeezes the chilly hand clasped in hers. “How unlike my dashing Yuzuriha to not have planned ahead on where she would run away with her lover to,” teases Nerine gently, marvelling at herself for being able to even say the word.
Yuzuriha seems pleased, if the way she straightens and clears her throat is any indication; Nerine almost feels a stab of guilt again, thinking she is about to see her best friend put on the mask of the gallant hero, again for her sake. Always for her sake, never for what Yuzuriha wants for herself—
“My Nereid, I only wish to spend the rest of my life by the sea with you,” intones Yuzuriha in a throaty, dramatic tone with a showy curtsy in her direction, and Nerine’s heart does a somersault in her chest. “But alas, the road to the sea is long and stuffed with the burdensome demands of capital.”
Nerine blinks, and then breaks into giggles at Yuzuriha’s usual dramatisation, even though the entire upper half of her body is still aflame from how earnestly Yuzuriha had declared her wish for them to live by the sea.
“We should head inside somewhere before you freeze to death trying to do your best prehistoric impression,” rejoins Nerine, fondly rolling her eyes at Yuzuriha’s indignant cry of prehistoric! “Some food would only help your creative juices flow, wouldn’t it?”
“I can think of something else that would get my creative juices flowing,” retorts Yuzuriha instantly, and Nerine frowns at the implication, nonplussed — until Yuzuriha adds a lurid waggle of her eyebrows and Nerine flushes beet red, feeling a strange heat travel from the tips of her toes to the roots of her hair.
“Yuzuriha—” she begins to protest in her usual way whenever Yuzuriha practices her absolutely incorrigible flirting on her, and then falters immediately, because Yuzuriha had been pressing her against a tree and kissing her senseless beneath its snow-covered branches an hour ago.
Somehow, the flirting doesn’t quite register the same way in the face of that memory.
Yuzuriha must sense the mood her joke created, too, because Nerine sees her eyes flick briefly down to her mouth as she pulls on her hand to drag herself a half-step closer.
“Only because the windows around us are all snowed up,” breathes Nerine when they stand less than an inch apart, her voice lost to the wind in Yuzuriha’s stormy eyes, before she lets herself be kissed—
—there is a fire that burns in Nerine Komikado.
As a child she dreamt, often, that this fire inside her would one day decide to burst forth, and set her alight, and perhaps the bed she slept on, and perhaps her house, too. In her more childish fits Nerine would try to summon the fire, imagining that she could beckon it at will, perhaps to smite her imagined enemies for their also-imagined transgressions. She never managed much beyond puffs of frustration, and though she never forgot the fire inside her, she learned to dismiss its gentle warmth as just another fluke of her overactive imagination.
When Nerine was eight years old and lying in a hospital bed, reeling and sick and uncertain if she would ever feel warmth again, she felt a small hand take hold of hers, and decided to name the fire Yuzuriha.
That fire never stopped burning, and though Nerine had named it after her best friend, she had still not thought much of it; had not respected it as fire, really, except to secretly credit it for her unusually high body temperature. But kissing Yuzuriha reminds her what it is that lives inside her, and what she had named it, because now it surges to life within her, a towering conflagration whipped into a frenzy by the thunderous grey eyes that feature in all of her dreams, and the fire now threatens to turn her into a mountain of flame and set her free—
—Yuzuriha tries to draw back from her kiss, and the fire inside Nerine roars.
She isn’t content with that at all — a groaning noise escapes her throat involuntarily — because Yuzuriha kisses her like she is made of glass, her hands only gently holding Nerine’s arms, and the fire inside her protests at the feeling. She cups Yuzuriha’s face with one hand and circles her back with another, pulling her closer; in, in, in, until they are standing in the middle of the sidewalk with bodies flush against each other and hearts in each other’s throats and the stormy blaze inside Nerine enveloping them both in its all-consuming heat, panting with their glistening foreheads touching.
“Neri...” breathes Yuzuriha, the usual fierce steel of her eyes melted to the gentle haze of a mid-winter morning. “We should—” Yuzuriha makes an elaborate effort to speak, her cheeks puffing and blood pulsing against Nerine’s hand, which has inexplicably slipped down to Yuzuriha’s creamy, slender neck, “—head inside.”
“We should,” agrees Nerine, but doesn’t stop, stealing another breath from her beloved’s lips. “We won’t be able to stop, otherwise.” She tiptoes up again, unable to help herself — and plants a kiss between Yuzuriha’s brows, if only for the sheer marvel of just knowing she can do that now.
Yuzuriha blushes scarlet at that, her cheeks darkening several shades more than they already had been. “Y-yeah,” she mutters weakly, averting her gaze.
It does not take them long to find a place to stay when both of them are actively searching, Nerine attempting to drag her attention away from the infinitely charming possibilities on display by the world around her. She succeeds mostly because whatever Yuzuriha has awakened inside her demands to be fed every inch of the beauty that is holding her hand, and she would have begun her feast on the frozen street, but she had just spent two years at the Academy learning decorum and feels it would be a waste if she did not at least try. So she points out a rather plain looking building that promises a comfortable room and warm food, and Yuzuriha does not need any convincing at all before she is pushing open the door with an elaborate bow that makes Nerine giggle.
Yuzuriha talks to the old woman at the rickety reception as if she had been born charming grandmothers at ryokans out of room and board. Nerine is not at all surprised when, after only a brief conversation, the woman tut-tuts at the both of them reproachfully, shoves a key into Yuzuriha’s hand, and totters off with mutterings about warm meals and girls looking too thin and dressing too unassumingly for the cold.
For the moment, the unassumingly-dressed girls manage to find the room they have been handed the key to, tiptoeing on the squeaky floors and doing their best to not disturb the denizens of the inn — although it turns out there are only three rooms in the rather modest building, and from the way the creaks of their footsteps echo, Nerine doubts either of the other two are occupied. They head inside, Nerine’s overfilled bag slipping automatically from her shoulders with a dramatic thud that makes Yuzuriha jump.
“Sorry,” apologises Nerine bashfully, unable to hold back a slight giggle when Yuzuriha tries to play off her flinch as her just coincidentally deciding to drop her own bag at that moment. Yuzuriha has never been the greatest at dealing with being startled, but Nerine finds the brave face her best friend always puts on undeniably adorable.
The thought of adoration gives Nerine pause enough that Yuzuriha gradually starts reddening under her focused gaze. Eventually, Yuzuriha mumbles out something about her bag and bends down to shuffle through it, her bangs effectively covering her now-crimson face, but Nerine keeps staring at her as if hypnotised—
—as if, in the dim light of the wooden room where the two of them are alone and awake, she is seeing Yuzuriha Yatsushiro for the first time.
Her hair shines differently under the weak amber light, for one, so different to the brighter yellow in their rooms at St Angraecum. The silvery shimmer of it seems almost ectoplasmic instead, the way it stands out vibrantly against the wooden tones of the room, and Nerine wishes her hands could move to card through it. Yuzuriha’s eyes, too, are dizzyingly electric against the stillness of the walls around her, the blue orbs flicking up to hers occasionally to see if Nerine is still staring; for her part, Nerine wishes she could apologise or move, but her body seems to have ceded control fully to her eyes. So she stares some more; the moonlight that shines through the open window effortlessly traces the veins and tendons along Yuzuriha’s wrist, and Nerine watches her slender, graceful fingers make quick work of the knot on her backpack. She does not have to expend the slightest effort to feel the phantom pressure of those wonderful, sweet, life-giving fingers against her back, and her mind wonders what they’d feel like wrapped around her pulse, her heart thrumming weakly against—
—she sinks slowly to the floor, tongue swiping fruitlessly against lips that are suddenly too dry.
“Neri!” exclaims Yuzuriha instantly, though she had been pretending not to pay attention. “Are you okay?”
“I— yes,” somehow replies Nerine, suddenly unsure of everything she has ever known. “I— I just—”
“You just?” probes Yuzuriha gently, and she is suddenly so close, and whatever half-formed thought had jogged Nerine’s mind flees it as surely as if it had never been there.
“I love you,” says Nerine dumbly. Somehow that is the only thing she thinks is left for her to say, though in truth there is no thought involved at all, just echoes of a feeling too grand for her to fathom.
Yuzuriha blinks at her — then smiles, blushes, and makes a noise all at once. There is a blinding joy in her eyes, the blue of the deep ocean in them singing; and suddenly Nerine feels like she is more certain of everything than she has ever felt.
“I love you,” repeats Nerine, pushing herself forward and wrapping her arms around Yuzuriha’s midriff, tucking her head into the cardigan that smells so beautifully of the girl she loves. “I — Yuzuriha, I love you.”
“I love you too,” hoarsely repeats Yuzuriha from somewhere above her, “Always, Neri. But what—”
“No, I— I need to tell you,” insists Nerine. That fire inside her named Yuzuriha is lost somewhere, now, and in its place is a flood instead, a torrent of emotion she wants desperately to name. There is a burning need in her to explain, because Yuzuriha needs to understand, she needs to know—
“I’ve never loved anybody else more,” says Nerine, drawing back slightly to look her best friend in the eyes. “Yuzuriha, I can’t stop thinking about you. I haven’t stopped thinking about you since you held my hand when I thought I was going to die and told me you would protect me. I think I did die, because I’ve always been all broken since, I don’t know which way is up, I—” she pauses on a hiccup, and her face feels hot and damp, and suddenly there are fingers made of liquid grace combing through her hair—
“Shhh, Neri,” soothes Yuzuriha, and Nerine realises she is sobbing. She cries, and cries, and weakly turns in Yuzuriha’s arms to wipe at her face, but the tears have decided they have no end, and Nerine does not know why she is crying without end but she is. It’s not like she feels sad; being with Yuzuriha is the most incredible thing she never deserved, and she—
Oh.
“I’m sorry,” rasps Nerine, her voice shattered to a million rough edges and a stinging burn in her throat. “Yuzuriha, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I—”
“Never, Neri,” whispers Yuzuriha to her, her angel, the halo above her head a galaxy and the steel in her eyes light itself. “I said I forgive you, didn’t I? I want you to be happy when you’re with me. You have nothing to be sorry for.”
“But I—” starts Nerine in protest, when Yuzuriha grabs her hand and shoves it into her chest.
Nerine stares at her, eyes swollen and bloody red, and Yuzuriha’s mind feels strangely clear, the drumbeat of her own heart ringing unimpeded through her soul.
“It’s fast, isn’t it?” breathes Yuzuriha, her voice as even as it has ever been, even as her heart slams against Nerine’s hand three times a second. “It’s only like this for you. I love you, Nerine Komikado. Of all the time between my first heartbeat and my last, I would be happiest if most of it I could spend loving you.”
Nerine stares at her for a moment longer, then breaks into a watery, halting laugh. Yuzuriha grins at her, embarrassment still colouring her face, and asks, “Aren’t you glad you met someone so effortlessly charming?”
“I couldn’t be happier,” replies Nerine, the occasional tear still streaming down her face, her voice completely sincere. But her hand is still on Yuzuriha’s chest, and—
“—oof!”
She pushes Yuzuriha down, crawling atop her, and presses their bodies and their lips together. Her hand shifts and squeezes and elicits unfettered moans from somewhere deep inside Yuzuriha, and whatever fire Nerine seems to always have burning inside her licks at Yuzuriha’s core.
“Show me, Yuzuriha,” whispers Nerine, her tear-stained eyes glittering in the light of the moon and her hands trailing down the suddenly-undone ribbon holding Yuzuriha’s autumn uniform together. “Show me how you would love me.”
The pale moon, so far away, cannot understand what the land means; even in dreams, such matters are a galaxy away and a cosmos wider than her scale. But in her dream the moon sees them, silver and gold, as they tangle together on the land far below her; inseparable to her eyes, the moon feels them come undone, and she knows that while she will never be able to know that word wider than all her expanse, she can name it—
—love.