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The night before the world ends.
Junpei is asleep, an old sketchbook clutched to his chest. Arisato sits and stares at the wall, knees pulled up, half-dead. Akihiko and Ken sit on the couch by the boys’ dorms, mirror images of each other, deep in thought. Aigis whirs, listening to her own mechanisms, and Fuuka’s door is locked, nothing but the faint sound of rustling sheets in response to Yukari’s knock. Even Koromaru paces.
And Yukari?
She’s waxing her bowstrings. Restringing her bows. Doing anything to keep her and her hands busy.
Yukari’s never considered herself someone capable of wallowing. She cries, sure, and she gets upset. But she is, first and foremost, someone who moves forward instead of back, facing toward the effervescent future.
So she preps herself for the battle ahead, the showdown with Nyx, possibly the last time she’ll see any of the people she loves, that love her in a way that makes sense to her—
She gets ready with a grim press of her lips, testing her bows, plucking them like stringed instruments.
A knock on the door. Yukari isn’t expecting any visitors, but she supposes there’s only one person she hasn’t checked on today. Kirijo Mitsuru—who would’ve expected that?
“Mitsuru-senpai,” Yukari says, opening the door further for her. She tamps down the instinctive embarrassment at the state of her room: the assortment of pillows and dirty clothes on the floor, the photos she’s torn down from the corkboard and arranged haphazardly over the desk, the snapped bowstrings scattered on the bed and the red tips of Yukari’s fingers.
“May I come in?” Mitsuru asks.
“Ah, yeah, come in.” Yukari ushers her inside, shutting the door behind them. Mitsuru looks around like she’s never been in here before, like she and Yukari haven’t spent entire nights doing nothing but laying on opposite sides of this very room, letting resolve take root in each of them. Easier together than alone, Yukari’s learned that this year.
Mitsuru, seemingly looking for a place to sit and finding nothing, crosses her arms over her chest and says, “How are you holding up?”
Anyone else might mistake the edge in her voice for aggression, but Yukari knows better. That’s fear. Concern. It says, so the world is ending, what does that feel like for you? It’s awkward and charming and unequivocally Mitsuru. Nice to see not everything’s changed.
Compared to the beginning of last year, everything is different. Yukari knows what happened to her father, and knows it was Mitsuru’s father’s fault. They’ve all loved and lost and lost again. Death gently touches them all, a chilled finger on their chins. Whispering a promise for a later date. Those kinds of poetic images aren’t usually Yukari’s thing, but it feels apt to use them now, when there’s nothing left but a battle and a prayer.
“As well as I can be, I guess,” Yukari says to answer Mitsuru’s question. She throws herself to the ground between piles of laundry, next to the side of her bed; Mitsuru’s nose instinctively scrunches up before relaxing carefully, and she sits down cross-legged where she’s standing. It’s how Yukari realizes belatedly that she’s wearing those pants she always wears when she goes out into town—which happens more often now than it used to. That sleeveless shirt makes Yukari’s heart flip-flop over itself.
“That’s good,” Mitsuru murmurs. She nods once, as if affirming something to herself. “I just… wanted to check in on you.”
“Looks like we had similar ideas, then,” Yukari says. “Everyone… seems really out of it.”
“I imagine it’s the uncertainty that adds fuel to that fire.”
Yukari leans back against her bed, thinking. “Yeah, I think so, too. It’s weird—even though it feels like we’ve saved the world a few times already, this time feels bigger than all of that. Like whether or not we win, it’s still an ending.”
“I see what you mean.” Mitsuru toys with the fibers of Yukari’s carpet, pulling out a tuft and rolling it between a perfectly manicured thumb and forefinger. There’s something cracked in her usual composure—light filtering through. The real her, burdened with anxieties and the weight of leadership.
It’s hard to broach the subject, but Yukari can’t help the question perched on her tongue. “What do you think,” she says, slowly, “will happen if we win?”
They both know what happens if they lose. The Fall. The end of the world. What that looks like is anyone’s guess—widespread Apathy Syndrome until all infrastructure collapses, the Earth’s core turning supernova, a simple snap of the fingers in which everything becomes nothing becomes everything. Maybe the very moment Nyx touches the tower is the End, and they’re doomed before they can even try.
Mitsuru purses her lips. “I don’t know.”
That makes sense, too. None of them know what it will cost to win. How does one make a deal with the End? How does one prolong the inevitable with weapons like toothpicks and resolve like fire? They’re Prometheus, each and every one of them, livers being plucked clean and raw by circling eagles, day after day after day, until one of them succumbs in apathy.
“We might all die anyway,” Yukari says. It’s not like her to say it, not out loud, but since that trip to Kyoto she’s felt that Mitsuru is the only person she can show these worse sides of herself to. The pessimistic sides. The afraid ones. It’s different with everyone else, but she and Mitsuru are in the same boat, different sides of the same coin. A father and ten years away.
“We might,” Mitsuru says, and at this she looks at Yukari. Really looks, pushing the hair that falls over one eye back and tucking it behind her ear. “Are you having second thoughts?”
“It’s not that,” Yukari insists. Really, it isn’t. She tugs at a flyaway thread poking out from her sock and frowns. “If I were to go back in time, I’d do everything the same. We can’t give up hope just because it’s hard. We wouldn’t have even gotten here if we backed down from challenges like this.”
“That’s true.”
“So it’s not that I’m having second thoughts. It’s more that I just… wonder what it’ll be like, not having the Dark Hour. Or what it’ll be like when we’re free from Tartarus.”
Mitsuru nods slowly and swallows, like she’s internalizing the words. Reminding herself that in the face of hopelessness, all of them are what matters most—SEES, Tatsumi Port Island, this little swath of land and its people she has learned to love and hate all at the same time. Yukari sees it; she’s the only one who can understand what goes through Mitsuru’s head.
“Yukari,” Mitsuru says, her voice so serious and deliberately calculated that Yukari can’t help but lean forward in interest.
“Yes?”
“Since we… don’t know if we’ll make it through the next twenty-four hours—” and at this, Mitsuru pauses to take in a deep breath before continuing, “—would you be opposed to me trying something?”
“Trying… something?” Yukari blinks, but the gears in her head stutter to a halt. She trusts Mitsuru enough that, whatever she asks, Yukari will grant it. It took a long time, but after fighting together for the better part of a year and discovering their parallel histories, there isn’t a single person in this world Yukari feels closer to. So Yukari says, “Sure.”
“Close your eyes,” Mitsuru says. There’s a faint tremor in her voice, something nervous. Terrified, even. Yukari closes her eyes.
She hears Mitsuru shuffle about until her hands land on Yukari’s knees, palm to skin; one of those hands shifts upward to cup Yukari’s face.
It’s the kind of exhilaration she only gets from archery. Yukari involuntarily shudders, her skin prickling.
“Is this okay?” Mitsuru asks.
“Yes,” Yukari breathes. She can guess what comes next. She’s read enough shoujo manga to know how this goes, even though it’s not shot-for-shot the same as it is in the books—
Mitsuru’s mouth presses to Yukari’s, and her mind goes blank.
All she can think of is the gloss on Mitsuru’s lips, which feels sticky on her own—she’s imagining the color transferring over, both their mouths red and betraying the same secrets as their eyes, pupils blown wide.
When Mitsuru pulls away, all too quickly, withdrawing to the other side of the rug, she says, “I’m sorry.”
Yukari opens her eyes.
“I just wanted to try that, once. Before…”
“Do it again,” Yukari says.
“I’m sorry?”
“Don’t be sorry.” Yukari leans forward, her eyes drawn to the smudge of red gloss at the corner of Mitsuru’s lips—she’s sure her own mouth mirrors it. There’s an impossible flush resting high on Mitsuru’s cheeks, a fact of which both of them are careful to tiptoe around. “I said, do it again.”
“You didn’t… You didn’t feel it was inappropriate?”
“No.” Yukari props her chin up in her palm and makes a big show out of looking Mitsuru up and down. Well, if the world doesn’t end tomorrow, she can feel all her shame then. For now, she wants.
“Uhm… well, then.” Mitsuru clears her throat and crawls toward Yukari—not unlike a nervous panther, she muses, stalking its prey while feeling guilty of its fangs. She doesn’t get to pursue this metaphor further, though, because Mitsuru’s mouth fingers hers again, sticky lip gloss and all, and Yukari feels like she’s drowning.
As far as first-second kisses go, it’s Yukari’s best. Not that she has the longest track record—just a guy in middle school who was fine but whom she did not want a repeat performance with, and a girl who’d transferred away after their third month of high school. Mitsuru’s kiss puts all those previous ones out of mind, demanding that Yukari think only of her—deep and heady and intoxicating. Yukari thinks she could get drunk off of Mitsuru’s lip gloss, and swipes her tongue out for a taste.
Mm. Glossy.
She doesn’t miss, either, how what starts on Mitsuru’s end quickly becomes dominated by Yukari—how Mitsuru had kissed her, but now she’s the one pressing forward, her hands tangling in Mitsuru’s hair, keeping them connected for as long as possible. How Yukari is the one who opened her mouth first, how her head spins at the sound of Mitsuru taking a rushed breath in between kisses, how she’s spread her legs and hooked them around Mitsuru’s waist to keep her from going anywhere.
It’s this last action that gets Mitsuru to groan against Yukari’s mouth, a low, keening sound that Yukari swallows whole. She wants more. She wants to eat her alive. She wants tongue and teeth and hands and the promise of tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.
“Yukari,” Mitsuru gasps, pulling away but managing to only wrest her mouth a centimeter from Yukari’s in their tangled-up position. “The bed.”
“Hm? You wanna take this to the bed?”
“Yes.”
The two of them clamber up onto the bed and waste no time going after each other’s mouths again—Yukari pinning Mitsuru down by the wrists, grinding against her thigh, whispering encouragement into her ear.
“I love you,” Yukari murmurs.
“Me, too,” Mitsuru says.
When Yukari slides two fingers in, her mouth sucking bruises against Mitsuru’s collarbone, she breathes into the skin, “I love you.”
When Yukari traces patterns with her tongue between Mitsuru’s legs, watching as she writhes above her, she whispers, “I love you.”
And finally, when the night ends—when Yukari’s hands are cramped and her stomach heaving, when Mitsuru’s lip gloss is smeared around both of their mouths and in marks all over their bodies—Yukari says, “I love you.”
Mitsuru says, “I love you.”
If the world ends tomorrow, at least they have had this. A night, and all the time before it.