Chapter 12 — Whoever You Are Today

The ceiling was the wrong color.

That was the first thing Sora noticed, blinking up at pale infirmary tile instead of the classroom's fluorescent panels, and for a few seconds nothing else made sense either. The window across the room had gone dim, the kind of dim that meant hours had passed, not minutes. Somewhere outside, faint and far off, festival music was still playing, tinny and cheerful, completely at odds with how heavy her own body felt.

She turned her head, slow, and found Kazuki asleep in a chair pulled up beside the bed, arms crossed, chin tipped down against his chest at an angle that had to be doing serious damage to his neck and clearly hadn't stopped him from staying anyway.

Something in her chest went warm before she could stop it. He didn't even go back to the festival. Just sat there long enough to fall asleep sitting up, which was either extremely sweet or extremely stupid, possibly both, and some quiet, unguarded part of her thought, nobody's ever done that for me before, not without me asking, and I think I might actually—

She slammed the door on that thought before it could finish the sentence.

Absolutely not. Not today. Not like this.

She sat up slowly, testing her own weight before trusting it, and her whole body felt like it had personally been wrung out and hung up to dry. She stood anyway, wobbled once, caught the bed frame, and made it the short distance to the chair on the second try.

She poked his shoulder.

Nothing.

She poked harder.

He came awake like someone had fired a starting pistol, jerking upright so fast the chair legs screeched against the floor. "Sora—wait, you're awake, are you okay, does anything hurt, do I need to get the nurse, do you want water, do you want BOTH—"

"I want you to breathe first. You're doing the thing."

"What thing."

"The thing where you ask four questions before I can answer one."

"That's a valid strategy. Coverage."

"It's chaos with extra steps."

He stared at her for a second, some of the panic finally draining out, replaced by something quieter. "You collapsed. In the middle of the entire school. That's not a small thing, you can't 'I'm fine' your way out of that one."

"Watch me."

"I'm watching you fail already."

She almost smiled at that, which felt dangerous, so she looked away instead, down at her own hands.

"Which one are you today," he asked, gentler now. "I never actually confirmed it before you went down—"

"Doesn't matter right now." Too fast. She heard it herself. "Just... tell me what happened after. What did everyone see."

"You should be resting, not doing an interrogation—"

"Kazuki."

"That's not an answer."

"It's a warning."

He sighed, the specific sigh of someone who'd learned, over the last two weeks, exactly which battles weren't worth fighting, and told her. The scream from the crowd. The scramble. Someone sprinting for the nurse, someone else for water, the longest sixty seconds of his life waiting to confirm she was breathing and just exhausted, not something worse.

"You scared a lot of people," he finished. "Including me. Mostly me, actually, if we're ranking it."

She kept her eyes on her hands. "Sorry."

"Don't apologize, just tell me what's actually happening. You've been off all week and every time I almost ask you about it I chicken out because I don't know if it's my business, but you passed out in front of the entire school today, so I've officially decided it's my business now, whether you like it or not."

She didn't answer that. Instead: "Who carried me here."

"Nice redirect."

"Thank you, I practiced."

"I don't actually know who it was. Some girl had you halfway to the infirmary before I even got through the crowd. Never seen her before in my life. Very calm about the whole thing. Suspiciously calm, honestly, like carrying an unconscious person was a normal Tuesday for her."

Something in Sora's shoulders finally eased. "You can call her Sora's big sister."

"That's not a real name."

"It's the one you're allowed to have."

He looked like he wanted to argue that further, and might have, if the door hadn't swung open right then.

"Oh good, you're up." A girl breezed in holding two paper cups of water, setting one down on the bedside table without waiting to be asked, moving through the small room like she'd done this exact walk a dozen times before.

Kazuki straightened in his chair. "Wait, you're the one who—"

"Carried her here, yes, that was me." She glanced at him, sizing him up in about half a second, and stuck out a hand like she was closing a business deal rather than meeting someone in an infirmary. "Kotone. I'd say nice to meet you but you were asleep sitting up when I first saw you, so we're a little past first impressions already."

"...Kazuki."

"I know. She talks about you." Kotone tilted her head toward the bed without missing a beat, already moving on before he could ask what that meant. "You've been running yourself into the ground for two weeks straight," she said, this time to Sora. "I told you this was coming."

"You did say that."

"I say a lot of things. This time I was right."

"You're always a little smug when you're right."

"I've earned the smugness. Rest tonight. Actually rest, not 'lying down while mentally drafting tomorrow's schedule' rest."

"I would never."

"You're doing it right now. I can see it on your face."

Sora opened her mouth to argue and found, annoyingly, that she didn't have a defense ready.

Kotone's gaze drifted, casual, curious, to the narrow gap between the bed and the chair, to exactly how close the two of them had ended up sitting without either one noticing it happen.

Her mouth curved slow, delighted.

"Well." She let the word hang there a second, eyes flicking between them both. "Have fun, whoever you are today. "

She winked, unmistakable, and slipped back out before either of them could form a response.

The silence that followed sat there one full second too long.

Sora looked over. Kazuki was still leaned in from earlier, close, closer than either of them had actually meant to end up, one hand braced on the edge of the bed near enough to hers that she could feel the warmth radiating off it without either of them touching.

Her whole face went up in flames, straight to the ears.

"Out," she said, already scrambling to her feet, hands finding his shoulder and shoving.

"What, I didn't even do anything—"

"OUT, Kazuki."

"I'm GOING—"

She got him through the door with a strength her exhausted body had no business supplying, slammed it, and threw the lock before her brain had caught up to what she was doing.

Then she slid straight down to the floor, back against the door, both hands pressed over her own face, breathing like she'd just run a lap.

"What IS this," she muttered into her palms, to nobody, to the empty room. "Why is it doing that. Why that specifically right now, of all the times, right after THAT."

Nobody answered. Somewhere outside, the festival music kept playing, cheerful and completely, uselessly unhelpful.