Archive of Our Own ^beta

Asahina Mafuyu was six years old when she decided she was never going to get married. She told no one, not even her own mother, about this. After all, her mother assumed Mafuyu would marry someone when she was older; she’d told Mafuyu that marriage would happen to her in its own time, that she’d fall in love with a man who cared about her and wanted to stay by her side forever.  

Mafuyu found her mother’s insistence on this to be strange, especially when she said that her daughter would find someone the same way she had. Mafuyu knew her father was almost never in her life, to the point where she couldn’t remember the last time he’d talked to her for longer than a few minutes at the table before she was sent to bed on account of her having school the next day. She did not want to marry someone if they were going to be away from her like that all the time. Maybe that was a selfish desire; maybe she needed to marry such a person to continue her family name, but it did not seem to her – even as a young child – that anyone would benefit from that arrangement.  

Besides, it was her right to choose to marry, she reasoned when she was eleven. She was not forced to marry like women had been in years gone by. Mafuyu did not have to fall in love with anyone. She certainly didn’t need to pledge herself to them, either.  

Mafuyu watched as her parents put up a facade of complete and total connection at family gatherings. A part of her wished her family would notice that her mother’s daughter did not seem to view her parents as a unit; rather, she saw her mother as the person who looked after her and her father as the one who made it possible but could not make any time to see his only child. They were not together as her classmates’ parents were; while they were not divorced, they still lacked the ability to read each other as the couples in novels Mafuyu had read did. Her mother had told her that marriage and divorce were two completely different things and that there was no overlap between them, but surely there was, for what else could explain how her parents acted?  

She was thirteen years old when her classmates started asking if she’d thought about marriage and dating. If she’d given a thought to the potential of loving someone, of being vulnerable around them, of baring her soul to another.  

“Not particularly, no,” she said.  

“You’ve never even had a crush?” Seina-chan seemed incredibly surprised at that.  

“No,” Mafuyu said. “Why? Is that abnormal?”  

“Nah. You’re probably just a late bloomer,” she said. “That’s what my mom says. You’ll find someone, Mafuyu-chan. I know it.”  

“Oh, you have a crush on someone?”  

Seina-chan flushed bright red. “Mafuyu-chan! That’s - well, yes. There’s a boy at my cram school who’s quite lovely and we hang out sometimes, but I don’t think he likes me back...”  

Mafuyu wasn’t truly listening to the rest of her words; she gave responses, of course, but her mind was preoccupied on the way the other girl had acted. Did everyone have to fall in love with someone of the opposite sex? Was that the way life worked? Was it natural? Mafuyu had never had a crush on a boy – had never wanted to have a crush on one – and she’d thought that not liking boys was normal. Natural. Acceptable.  

Was... Was it wrong to not fall in love with boys? Was something wrong with her mind and the way she felt and thought? Was- was she broken?  

Ah, what was that word Seina had used? Late bloomer ? Surely her attraction to men would come in time, even if Mafuyu didn’t intend to act on it. It must simply be taking her longer to realize how she feels about people.  

Mafuyu was sixteen years old when she realized she’d fallen in love with someone. This person was not a boy, neither were they likely to be approved of by her mother. But they had saved her life and become her friend along the way, and Mafuyu had somehow fallen in love with her own groupmate. Maybe Kanade’s kindness was what had triggered it, but Mafuyu didn’t much care to investigate why she was in love with Kanade. Her undeniable crush on her was already causing her trouble; she had caught herself thinking about Kanade in situations where it was not appropriate to do so (during a test, for example), and it had been after one of her senpai had caught her staring off into the distance during an archery club meeting that she’d realized that her attraction – her love for – Kanade was a distraction.  

It was a pleasant distraction – Mafuyu was not going to fight an excuse to experience the warmth she craved, and thoughts of Kanade tended to make her feel much more at ease because she felt so at ease being around her.  

God , was simple kindness and maybe a little social awkwardness all it took to have Mafuyu blushing at the thought of someone else? She’d thought herself above the girls in her classes who took romance more seriously than academics, who fantasized about kissing boys instead of studying, who went on over-the-top dates with their significant others and then talked about those dates for weeks afterwards, but if Mafuyu dared to think about Kanade’s lips against hers, she put herself in the same state as the romance-obsessed girls in her school. Kanade kissing her was a forbidden thought, but it was so pleasant that she ignored the social implications of it.  

When she was in third year, there was a rumor going around school that the great honour student Asahina Mafuyu had gotten a boyfriend who fit her mother’s strict criteria of a good future son-in-law. She shrugged these rumors off; they could not be further from the truth.  

Some days, Kanade would collect her from the school gate and they would walk home, hand in hand.  

And late at night, Mafuyu realized she’d found someone whose side she wanted to stay beside forever. They couldn’t get married, not yet, but if the day where they could finally arrived, Mafuyu didn’t think she’d hesitate to say yes to Kanade.