Chapter 1: Deflated Croissant Moon

Going on nostalgia trips isn't nearly all it's cracked up to be.

I'm sure you've done the exact same thing. Visited that one place with that one person or that one thing?

Lying on your bedroom floor, headphones in blasting songs you once loved, pretending that one particular point in time still matters.

Doesn’t matter. It’s not like that version of me exists anymore.

Rapidly moving on.

Some, if not most of the population refer to me by my last name, Ishikura.

Others closest to me, have the great honour of calling me Azu.

Slap those two together and you get Ishikura Azusa, high schooler with a poker face and a lot to say about games and manga.

Too generic? Step off man, Fate of War and visual novels are all I got.

I winced as I sat up, even at seventeen my low back felt like I'd been hamming it up at a labour camp.

At that moment I was brought back to the present by the alarm delightfully shrilling its way into my eardrums.

I've got stuff to do within the next fifteen minutes, no point in airing myself out anymore.

Stuff, in this case, meant throwing together a presentable face and heading off to the station.

It was a brief walk chock full of birdsong and the hum of generic suburban city ambience.

The perfect soundtrack to let your thoughts sneak around. One of the few places I could reflect without someone noticing that I overthink literally everything.

I've only ever had one ex before, if you could even call it that.

What's it called when you put in way too much one-sided effort and stress out over someone who persistently flakes out on you?

One failed situationship and seven completely reasonable career identity crises later, and I’m… surviving. Sort of.

"Azu! Hey! G'morning!"

A beam of energy—impossibly cheerful, possibly radioactive—crashed into the front of me in the form of Tomoe Nakano. She didn’t wait for a hello. She never does.

"Tomoe! What's good?" I greeted her back brightly.

“Everything, Azu.” She sighed dreamily, as if the entire world had just aligned to bless her with my presence.

Tomoe, younger than me by two months and proudly obsessed with pointing this out whenever she can, refuses to take no for an answer. I tell her it’s fine; she doesn’t listen.

Her weird tick? She tends to say things without thinking twice. Or more precisely, she says things that have no business being that filter-less.

She really is the younger sister I wish I had.

One train ride later, and soon we'd found ourselves in our first class.

Homeroom itself didn't exactly feature any new faces.

Tomoe behind me, Honomi and Machiko close but not too far.

We were tightly knit, like a skulk of foxes that tried our damnedest to fly under everyone's radar.

It worked most of the time.

Our teacher burst through the door, apologizing for his lateness. I'd have preferred 5 minutes more but, what can you do?

I gave the room a scan, everybody was getting settled in.

The occasional flicker of fluorescent lights, the collective low-grade suffering of thirty teenagers, and—

Something across the room.

A small, precise movement.

I didn't mean to look. I want that on the record.

But there was a boy at the far desk, focused wholly on whatever he was tinkering with.

Sugihara Yuta.

He was looking at something small in his hands.

Turning it. Examining it. Setting it down, picking up something even smaller. A tool, thin as a needle.

I looked away, then back again, and realized he was disassembling a watch—not a smart watch, nothing new—but something old, something delicate that deserved more attention than a homeroom ever could.

I blinked.

What is he—

"Ishikura."

I snapped forward. Tanaka-sensei was looking at me with the patient exhaustion of a man who had seen this exact face on this exact student before.

"Present," I said, with dignity.

He had already moved on.

I slid down approximately one centimeter in my chair and did not look across the room again.

For about four minutes.

The tool, I had concluded, was a screwdriver.

A very small one. The kind that had no business existing in a homeroom setting.

Speaking of small, Tomoe, popped out under my elbow.

"Azu." Her voice was barely above a whisper. "What are you looking at?"

"Nothing."

"You've been staring for like—"

"Thinking, not staring."

"At that direction specifically?"

I opened my mouth.

What came out was: "He has a very interesting screwdriver."

Tomoe blinked.

I blinked.

We looked at each other for a moment with the mutual understanding that I'd just revealed something extremely telling.

"Oh," Tomoe said, her voice careful, as if filing that tidbit away for later.

She took another quick look at him.

"Sugihara," she said. "Makes sense. He's always tinkering. Nobody really knows with what."

She looked back at me. A small smile.

On Tomoe, that meant she was thinking something she was too polite to say at full volume.

"Are you gonna be the one to find out, Azusa?"

"Absolutely not," I said.

She nodded, still smiling, and turned back to her notes.

I looked down at my doodle of a deflated croissant moon.

Sugihara.

The first time I met Yuta I thought he looked nice and left it at that.

I didn’t think of him again until now.