Chapter 7 — Sora (s)

"You've got the same coffee as me." Godai-sensei glanced at the can on my desk without breaking his stride from the board. "Bold choice for someone who still has to survive homeroom."

"It was the only one left in the machine."

"Sure it was." He capped his marker, actually looked at me for once. "You look like a raccoon that lost a fight."

The room laughed, loud enough that people up front turned around to check what they'd missed, because Godai-sensei making a joke was rare enough to count as an event. He didn't smile at his own line. Just turned back to the board like it hadn't happened.

I didn't argue the raccoon part. I'd been up most of the night on the Tanabata sheet, layout sketches, tanzaku counts, a bamboo stand that kept coming out wrong in some new way every time I redrew it, because I'd promised Hina I wouldn't finish it without her, but nobody said I couldn't get most of the way there first.

She found out around second period.

Sora (Currently Hina)
question!! does the banner HAVE to be red

Me
nothing's finalized yet

Sora
ok good bc red is scary
like Aggressive red
like "you owe us money" red 😳

Me
noted. no aggressive red.

Sora
!!! ok also can we add penguins somewhere
just little ones!! on the corners!!
for Atmosphere

Me
I don't think tanabata has a penguin connection

Sora
neither does a COW and every festival has one anyway???
penguins are ✨timeless✨ they're basically a neutral color
also they're cute and that IS a real design reason, look it up

Me
I'll pencil in penguins

Sora
yessss ok LAST thing and it's important
do not, I repeat, DO NOT let Mio near the color scheme
she'll turn the whole thing gray
every color will become gray somehow
she thinks gray is "clean" 🙄

Me
she's three seats up from me right now

Sora
GOOD let her see this then
Mio if ur reading over his shoulder rn: NO GRAY. i mean it.

I glanced up automatically, phone still in hand, half expecting Mio to somehow already know, the way she seemed to know most things without being told. She hadn't moved. Hadn't turned around. Just sat there, same straight posture, pen tapping once against the edge of her desk before going still again, completely unaware an entire gray-themed conspiracy was being filed against her three seats away.

Which felt like it should've been reassuring, and somehow wasn't.

Sora
did u show her??

Me
she's not looking at my phone, I can't just walk it over there

Sora
coward

Me
it's called not being weird in class

Sora
it's called protecting gray supremacy and you know it

Sora
anyway
thank u for working on it
u didn't have to stay up so late for it (i can tell u did btw, raccoon energy is VERY obvious)
but um
thank u. for real for real (´｡• ᵕ •｡`)

I put my phone away before I did something embarrassing, like smile at it in the middle of class.

Long day. Confirmed early.

By the time I got to the koi pond, the light had gone that orange color that means dark isn't far off, and I had three bamboo stand sketches spread across the bench, all of them wrong in slightly different, deeply personal ways.

"Working late?"

I looked up, already halfway into the greeting. Wednesday. Mio's day. "Hey, So—"

Something hit me from behind hard enough to nearly knock the sketches off my lap.

"SURPRISE!"

"...Hina??"

"You knew right away, that's so unfair, you didn't even flinch." Both arms stayed slung around my shoulders from behind the bench, her chin practically on my ear. "I couldn't stay away. Don't give me that look, I can feel you giving it."

"I'm not giving you a look."

"You're giving me the safety lecture look. I know the safety lecture look. Save it."

"There are two Soras on campus right now, that's not a safety lecture, that's math."

"There's one Sora on campus." She swung around and dropped onto the bench beside me, entirely too pleased with herself. "I'm off duty. Just a regular girl named Hina. Completely different person, different hair, everything."

"That's not how identical faces work."

"It's how identical faces work if nobody's LOOKING that closely, which nobody is, because it's a koi pond nobody remembers exists, which is literally why we're here."

I opened my mouth to argue that further and she was already leaning over my lap toward the sketches, close enough that I lost track of what I was going to say.

"Okay, this bamboo stand looks like it's mid-collapse."

"It's a work in progress."

"It's a crime scene, Kazuki." She plucked the pencil out of my hand without asking, already sketching over my terrible version. "You widen the base here, and here, and it stands up straight. Basic structural integrity. I took a whole class on this once."

"You took... a structural engineering class."

"One time. Then I switched into pottery."

"That's not even the same skill set."

"It's ADJACENT. Both involve things not falling over." She held the fixed sketch up for inspection, visibly proud of herself. "See? Doesn't look like it's dying anymore."

"I'll admit that's better."

"Just better?"

"...Significantly better."

"That's what I thought." She set it down, satisfied, and reached for the next one, and somewhere in the middle of her narrating exactly why the second sketch was also, apparently, a crime scene, her shoulder had settled against mine and just stayed there.

Neither of us moved it.

"This is nice," she said, quieter now, still holding the pencil but not really drawing anymore. "Just, sitting here doing something normal."

"It's a booth planning sheet."

"It's normal for us. That counts as normal, for us specifically."

"That's a pretty low bar."

"It's OUR bar. We built it ourselves." She bumped her shoulder against mine, light, deliberate. "Don't insult the bar."

I didn't have a comeback ready for that, so I let the quiet sit for a second instead, and for once it wasn't the kind of quiet either of us needed to fill.

It lasted about four seconds.

"KENJI THE BATTERY THING WAS A LIE, RUN—"

Ren came tearing around the corner of the science building at a dead sprint, blazer flapping loose behind him like a cape that had given up on its job, and didn't so much as glance our way as he blew past.

Ten seconds later, Mio came around the same corner just as fast, uniform somehow still perfectly pressed, chasing him down with the exact controlled fury of someone whose patience had run out with precision timing.

She stopped dead the second she saw the bench.

Both of us. Sitting there. Together.

Her eyes moved from Hina's loose hair, to Hina's collar, to the two inches of shoulder still pressed against mine, and for the first time since I'd known her, Mio looked like she genuinely had no idea what to say.