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Kira Trimurov’s Notes App, Last edited 9:12 a.m.
● Actually go to an aquarium.
● Interrogate Mary on what Yumeko would like to do there.
● Do not punch my sister’s girlfriend even when she is really annoying.
● Do not make Riri sad for any reason actually.
● Do not inflict violence if I see misinformation.
● Only use 20% of my phone storage on photos.
● Refrain from talking about fish for too long.
● Ask Yumeko to a first date.
Kira stares daggers into Mary Davis’s reflection in the windshield.
Mary is in the front passenger seat.
Her seat.
Kira knows her driver's name, his rabbit's name, and at least three things that could get him reassigned permanently, and yet, never once has she been allowed to sit in front.
Mary, meanwhile, is blissfully unaware she has committed a cardinal sin. She’s got her new earphones in, scrolling on her phone, legs crossed like she belongs there. Like this is normal. Like the universe hasn’t just spat directly in Kira’s face.
She is grateful—profoundly grateful—that Mary has not yet discovered the panel that controls the music. If Mary knew, she would absolutely change it to that song. The one about doing disgusting things to a SpongeBob character. Kira doesn’t know how Mary even found it, but she knows she would rather grab the wheel and swerve into the harbor than hear it again.
Riri had suggested watching the show offhandedly as background noise while they were doing separate tasks around their room. Stalking their friend’s parents for blackmail. Ordering new fencing gear. Discussing the best ways to kill their father, Normal sister things. Somehow, they’d both ended up watching the children’s show instead. Somehow, they’d both gotten weirdly endeared by it.
Kira refuses to let that be tainted.
She glances out the window, then back down at her phone. She could have brought Riri. That had been the obvious move. But Riri knows less about Yumeko than Kira does, and worse, she would have tried to make it just about Kira. About nerves and reassurance and telling her she’d be fine no matter what. The entire mental health spiel Mary is propagandizing her with.
Kira doesn’t want fine.
She wants it to be perfect for Yumeko.
Which is why she’d made the excuse. The perfectly reasonable, well-researched, completely fabricated excuse about an educational collaboration with the aquarium. Funding opportunities for them in return for a partnership with the biology department for school trips. Mary had fallen for it immediately, reluctant and entirely unsuspecting.
Kira opens the aquarium app she downloaded just for today and scrolls through the schedule again before she looks at anything else.
Nothing canceled.
Good.
Her phone’s do not disturb feature worked its magic and there were only two notifications sitting at the top of her screen.
She opens the first.
маленький ворон: You should be there in 10 minutes if Lucien is going by schedule. How is everything?
Kira’s mouth softens as she reads her sister's message.
Then the second.
Outlier: Please dont kill Mary ≽^•⩊•^≼
Kira closes her eyes.
Sighs.
Another line to add to the list.
Yumeko leans in too close, shoulder brushing Riri’s arm, entirely unbothered by the way Riri went into fight-or-flight mode.
“So,” Yumeko says lightly, eyes searching Riri’s face in open interest. “Has Kira responded to you yet?”
Riri moves her entire body away. Chair scraping faintly as she angles herself out of Yumeko’s reach. She is trying very hard not to do the more instinctive thing. The thing that would involve the instinctive retaliation.
Yumeko notices.
Of course she does.
She pauses, then steps back on her own, hands lifting in a small, placating gesture. “Sorry. I’m naturally affectionate, if you haven’t noticed.”
“I’ve noticed,” Riri says flatly.
Yumeko’s smile sharpens, delighted rather than offended, “Do I sense some jealousy?”
Riri blinks. Once.
“You know,” Yumeko continues, sing-song, “Mary is crazy about you. To a kind of scary degree. She made me promise I’d be on my very best behaviour with my future sister-in-law.”
Riri doesn’t miss a beat. “You and my sister are not dating.”
The yet hangs in the air anyway.
Yumeko’s eyes light up with something triumphant. Got you.
“Oh, that’s cute,” she says. “You thought I meant my eventual marriage to your sister.”
Riri’s brow furrows. “Eventual—”
“I meant my sister.”
Riri freezes.
Her mind immediately starts rifling through all the documents, background checks, and their inconsistencies. Yumeko Jabami has no listed siblings. Or perhaps she does. Half of them are falsified.
Yumeko watches the process unfold with open amusement.
“I meant Mary,” she says gently.
Riri stops thinking.
Yumeko continues, unfazed. “When I went over, her mother tried to adopt me. She is absolutely going to do that with you as well when you finally brave meeting the parents.”
Riri opens her mouth.
Closes it.
Yumeko keeps going, her tone softening even as Riri struggles to process the fact that Yumeko is speaking as though Riri and Mary existing together in the future is already settled.
“I already considered Mary family,” Yumeko says. “But the longstanding invite to all family events is…nice.”
Something sad flickers across her face.
Riri looks down at her phone before she can ask about it.
She reads the message aloud, voice carefully neutral.
“Kira replied,” she says, “‘Mary is ignoring me, which is a wonderful change. I see the sign in the distance. Tell Yumeko I won’t kill your girlfriend.’”
Yumeko laughs, delighted. “She ignored me and answered you? Oh, she’s serious with no distractions. She must really want our date to go well. She’s so adorable."
Riri wouldn’t describe her sister as exactly adorable. “You know—”
“And that means Mary knows,” Yumeko adds.
Riri nods. “My sister can be…unsubtle.”
“Mary didn’t want to tell you,” Yumeko says, eyes shining, “because you’re equally unsubtle, and Kira would know that Mary knows, which means I’d know if you know.”
Riri deadpans, “Know.”
“Know!” Yumeko continues.
She claps her hands once, decision made. “So. Do you want to gamble or something?”
Riri looks up.
Yumeko shrugs. “We’re going to be in each other’s lives whether Kira ever works up the nerve to ask me out or we have a doomed and tragic situationship. Might as well get comfortable.”
Kira doesn’t run toward the entrance of the aquarium.
She just walks with a natural speed that might be slightly faster than usual.
Mary’s shorter legs try valiantly to keep up.
They fail.
By the time Mary is half-jogging, carabiner jingling as she catches up, Kira has already reached the wide concrete plaza in front of the aquarium. She stops there, not because she’s waiting for the other girl, but because momentum has carried her to the next acceptable pause. She tilts her head back and takes in the orca statue rearing above the entrance, sleek and monumental, frozen mid-motion as though it’s about to breach straight into the sky.
She raises her phone.
Framed just enough to capture the curve of the orca’s body reflecting the water below. No people in the shot. One image, checked immediately, then tucked away.
She does not take sixteen photos from different angles.
In front of her, Mary was dealing with the line.
Kira watches for exactly three seconds before she steps forward.
She slips past Mary with the ease of someone who has never learned to ask permission. Her shoulder turns just enough to fit through the gap, her elbow catching Mary’s side in passing. An accident, of course.
Fingers clamp around Kira’s sleeve.
“Let go,” Kira says, voice low, edged with warning.
Mary releases her reluctantly. “Okay, okay. But there’s literally two people in front of us. Just wait and don’t make a scene.”
Kira stares at the line. At the concept of standing still when there are things to do.
Then, thinking of her sister, she steps back into place.
Her attention slides away immediately from the others in the line, seeking refuge in the massive wall display beside the entrance, where whitetip reef sharks move through a slow, endless circuit of blue.
She does not look forward.
She does not look at the father standing ahead of her, both hands holding onto the legs of a little girl wearing a ridiculous knitted jellyfish hat on his shoulders.
“Daddy!” the girl points at the glass. “Look! It’s a nurse shark!”
It is not.
The silhouette is wrong. The dorsal fin angle is wrong. The behaviour is wrong. The fact that no one is correcting her is wrong.
What idiots.
“All set,” Mary says, who sneaked off to the counter while Kira was focusing on just the wall.
She adds something quietly to the staff member, then steps aside. “I asked for no accompanying tour guide.”
“Why.”
Mary shrugs, “Tour guides just aren’t really the vibe when it’s only two people.”
This was the information needed to be shared that made this entire trip worthwhile.
Without comment, she reaches into her bag and hands Mary a clipboard.
Mary recoils instantly. “Fuck no,” she says, and sets it down on the nearest table like it might bite her.
Kira watches this happen and has a brief, vivid image of abandoning Mary here. Just leaving her. Walking inside alone. Free. Unburdened by her future girlfriend’s best friend.
The thought makes her happy enough to survive for the moment.
“You can’t keep saying no to every game I suggest,” Yumeko says, arms crossed, clearly offended on principle.
“No icebreakers,” Riri replies.
“And no Monopoly.”
Riri pauses.
She exhales through her nose, the long-suffering sound of someone making a concession they will later regret. “We could… look at the sea otter cam.”
“They have that?” She squints at Riri, “Wait. How do you know I love sea otters?”
“I remember everything Mary has told me,” She says simply, as though this is the most obvious thing in the world, “Even when it’s about other people.”
The silence that follows is brief, while Yumeko processes that Riri listens, that nothing offered in passing is ever actually lost to her.
Then Yumeko says, “You are so unbelievably gay.”
“Says you.” Riri replies, a fraction too fast, the defensiveness threading itself into her voice before she can stop it.
“Bisexual,” Yumeko corrects, “But yes. Very gay for your sister.”
Riri has the urge to measure. To make sure Yumeko is good enough. Worthy of being anywhere near her sister. To weigh Yumeko against an invisible standard only Riri knows exists. To assess if she understands what it means to love someone like Kira. So, she says:
“Do you want to duel?”
Kira hates touch tanks on principle.
They are an open invitation for contamination—an endless cycle of hands, lotions, oils, micro abrasions pressed into water that pretends to be clean. A system that teaches so-called lesser animals that resistance is useless, and they will be held by unwanted hands. It makes her so enraged for them.
And yet.
Mary stands at the edge of the tank, sleeves pushed up, holding an Atlantic blue crab. Her fingers are careful, respectful. The crab’s shell gleams an impossible blue beneath the lights, legs shifting slowly. Patient or resigned? Kira can’t tell which, and that uncertainty gnaws at her.
Kira’s fingers itch with the urge to intervene. To take it. To put it back. To fix it.
“That’s disgusting,” she says, sharper than necessary. “Do you have any idea how many people have touched that thing before you?”
Mary glances at her, expression somewhere between fond and exasperated. “It’s a touch tank.”
“Yes. That’s the problem,” Kira says, “Humans strip protective slime coatings from fish when they touch them. It leads to compromised immune systems, fungal infections, open lesions. Invertebrates experience prolonged stress responses. This environment shortens lifespans and everyone just doesn’t care.”
She is talking too fast. She knows she is. She can’t stop.
“Kira. Stop guilting me for holding a crab when thousands of people have done it before me.”
The words land wrong. They twist something ugly inside Kira.
“Isn’t your entire pathetic complex built on being better than thousands?” Kira says, “Being exceptional. Being the one percent.”
The second it leaves her mouth; she feels the crack in the air.
Mary stares at her. Hurt flashes openly across her face before it hardens into disbelief. “Wow. Okay. So now we’re doing this? Dragging my insecurities out because I was holding a crab. In the designated area. For holding them.”
Her voice rises, brittle with the strain of staying composed. “Meanwhile half of your fish aren’t even alive because you’re such a weird bitch you turn the dead ones into mechanical replicas.”
She feels eyes on them now. She feels the space closing in. She hates that Mary said it where people can hear. She hates not having any sway over these people. She hates Mary.
“Are you done,” Kira asks, carefully neutral, as though volume might save her.
Mary laughs, sharp and wounded. “No. We’ve been here barely an hour, and you’ve spent the entire time taking subtle digs at me and being a huge asshole. I don’t understand what Yumeko sees in you. Or how someone as wonderful as Riri is even related to you.”
That’s when it happens.
Both names hit and then afterwards the invisible weight of comparison, of goodness, of people who love easily where Kira does not.
“I can tell you how a murderer is related to me,” Kira says.
She hears how loud it is even as she says it. She sees heads turn.
Regret hits immediately, sharp and suffocating. She wants to swallow the words back. She wants to claw them out of the air before they land on Mary. Who will repeat them to the very person they are about.
“Fuck you,” Mary says, voice shaking now. “Seriously. Fuck you. You don’t have to be a control freak all the time.”
“And you don’t have to steal time away from two of the best things in my life,” Kira snaps, because she doesn’t know how to stop once she’s bleeding.
For a heartbeat, Mary looks like she might actually hit her.
Kira thinks, distantly, that she would deserve it. That this is the correct consequence. She said something out of line in a place she does not have authority in.
Instead, Mary looks around.
She takes in the whispering of the other people who were staring at them. Shame flickers across her face before the crab is returned gently to the surface and she disappears into the next exhibit.
Kira is left standing by the touch tank.
Alone.
Yumeko doesn’t hesitate after Riri’s challenge.
If anything, she looks pleased like this is exactly the direction she hoped things would go.
They end up in one of the private practice rooms which in practice means a clean, echoing space with enough clearance to swing a blade without alarming any of the students. The fencing bags are already there. Riri notes this without comment. Kira is always prepared.
Riri, unfortunately, has inherited that habit.
She knows Yumeko fences sabre at an ability that will be a semi equal match with her own abilities. She’s seen it in fragments. Moments stolen between Kira being summoned away, a few exchanges cut short because something more important always seemed to need Kira specifically. Sometimes Riri has wondered if Yumeko dulled herself on purpose, let Kira correct her form, allowed herself to be taught. She would do the same if it meant time with Mary before they started dating.
Then again, Yumeko Jabami has never struck Riri as someone who would resist a true challenge.
Her rivalry with Kira has softened since becoming…whatever they are now. Less about proving something. More about refinement. About making each other better.
She still tries to show off, she doubted if Kira would ever not have other attention even if she now wanted to share it with Yumeko.
Yumeko eyes the gear sceptically as Riri tightens the straps of her jacket.
“Do we really need all of this?” she asks. “Where’s the fun in padding?”
“Minimal fun,” Riri replies, securing her mask, “for maximum consequences.”
“Can we at least abandon the gloves?”
Riri gives her an unimpressed look but still, she peels her own gloves off and sets them neatly on the table.
Yumeko immediately kicks hers across the room.
Riri sighs, retrieves them, and places them beside her own.
“Does the neat obsession and that patch thing run in the family,” Yumeko continues, “Kira would probably order me to pick it up though and then it would turn into this entire thing and then she’d pretend she wasn’t flustered about it while her face went just a little pink.”
Riri doesn’t answer the first part of the question.
“The patch,” she says instead, tapping the embroidered symbol on her shoulder, “is the Timurov family crest.”
“Huh.” Yumeko tilts her head. “Why don’t you and Kira make one just for the two of you?”
“My sister has already gifted me items with our design,” Riri replies. A pause. “You remember.”
“Oh. That night. Sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“It’s fine,” Riri says, already lifting her sabre. “Ready?”
She settles into en garde. One foot slides forward, heel barely kissing the floor, the other angled out to anchor her weight. Her knees soften, body coiled and ready, spine straight but not rigid. The sabre rests forward in her hand, grip firm yet unforced, wrist loose enough to flick or snap at a moment’s notice. She breathes once, steady, and fixes her gaze on Yumeko without blinking.
Yumeko mirrors her stance, though less conservatively. Her posture is sharper, more forward-leaning, as if she’s already halfway into the attack. The playful looseness she carried earlier drains away, replaced by something intent eyes narrowed, mouth set in a line that looks almost eager. Predatory, Riri thinks, and corrects her grip by a fraction.
They engage.
Metal meets metal with a clean, ringing sound. She feints to the outside line, a subtle flick meant to draw Yumeko’s guard wide, and when it works, she snaps her wrist and cuts in fast. The blade lands before Yumeko can fully recover, the point clean and undeniable.
Riri lowers her blade just enough to speak, breath barely quickened. “What do you want from my sister?”
Yumeko doesn’t bristle. If anything, she looks thoughtful. Considering the question as though it were part of the bout itself.
“I think she’s fascinating,” she says honestly. “I want to get inside her brain. Under her skin. I want to be part of her. And—” she smiles, unapologetic, “—I want to kiss her.”
Riri thinks about her own obsession and can understand that need completely.
They reset.
This time, Yumeko scores. Pressing aggressively, forcing Riri to give ground step by step. Riri parries once, twice, but Yumeko catches her mid-transition, blade snapping through the opening with a sharp, decisive strike.
“Why did Kira start fencing?” Yumeko asks, already stepping away.
“Because of me.”
“It was a sport I could do with a mask,” Riri continues, “No one staring at me due to the mask because everyone is like me. I didn’t take to it the way she did. Same with archery. She stayed. I moved on.”
Yumeko absorbs this without comment.
“Next round,” she says.
Riri controls the distance this time. She waits for Yumeko to overextend and when she does Riri wins again.
“Do you think Mary is still a neutral party?” Riri asks.
Yumeko hums, circling her “No. I think she’s on your team first. Herself second. Me last.” A pause. “Her neutrality depends on you.”
Riri scores again, blade snapping into place before Yumeko can close the gap.
“Does that worry you?”
Yumeko meets her eyes through the mesh of the mask. “You already know the answer. I like you two together. I didn’t at first. But you’ve proven you aren’t using her. That’s all I needed.”
Yumeko lands the next hit.
“What was Kira like as a toddler?”
“Happy,” Riri says.
“That’s cheating. You have to give me more than that.”
Riri exhales. “She couldn’t pronounce words with æ. She used ɛ instead. Is that sufficient?”
“Yep. Next round.”
They engage again but this time, Riri’s focus slips.
A familiar caller tone. One that is just slightly different from the default one Riri has for most other people.
Riri’s hand moves without thinking, reaching into the hidden pocket of her gear for her phone.
Yumeko doesn’t register the duel stopping in time.
Her blade snaps forward, catching Riri’s fingers.
Riri registers several things at once: the sting blooming in her fingers, the wet warmth of blood, the sharp sound of metal meeting tile. She crouches immediately, instinct overriding pain, and scoops the phone up with her injured hand.
Blood smears across the cracked screen.
She ignores it.
The glass is fractured but intact, spiderwebbing from one corner. Still usable. That’s all that matters. She has spares for when her father sneaks a tracking device.
The caller ID is already gone by the time her thumb swipes clumsily across it.
A second later, a message appears.
Sister 🦈: Are you okay?
She presses the heel of her other hand's palm to the cut without looking at it, and types back quickly.
Another message comes in almost immediately.
Sister 🦈: No. Don’t call me back. Everything is fine. Just don’t believe what Mary says.
Sister 🦈: love you.
They’ve been practicing this. Saying it plainly. Not letting actions do the work anymore. Too much damage had come from assuming the other knew.
She doesn’t push any questions. Just hopes that whatever happened will be resolved by the afternoon.
She sends one last message and pockets the phone.
As she presses send, she hears a quiet sound of pain.
Riri looks up.
Yumeko is standing a few steps away, sabre held awkwardly in her non-dominant hand. The blade is pressed against her closed palm.
Riri’s eyes narrow.
“You’re supposed to hold it the opposite way,” she says.
“I didn’t know that, thank you, Riri.” She tilts her head. “Aren’t you going to ask why I did that?”
Riri looks at the damage the other girl did. Considers Yumeko. The logic clicks with a few missing pieces, as often the case with the other girl.
“I assumed you’d explain eventually,” she says. “You’re not the type for mutilation without a reason.”
Yumeko smiles, pleased to be understood.
“If only you had been injured,” she says, “Kira and Mary would blame me. Even if it was your idea to duel.” She gestures vaguely between them. “Now they have to blame us both!”
Riri thinks that a) Yumeko is insane and b) Yumeko is perfect for her sister.
Yumeko extends her injured hand, palm up, the blood that has pooled drops to the floor, “Are we blood brothers now? We should make a pact.”
Riri looks at the offered hand.
Looks at the blood on the floor.
Looks back at Yumeko.
“No,” she says, unimpressed. “We’re going to clean up.”
Kira doesn’t stand in her misery for long.
She can feel the eyes on her still, but she refuses to give them anything else. She reaches for her phone and steps just far enough away from the touch tank to pretend she has somewhere to be.
She calls Riri.
Riri always answers by the second ring. Always. It’s one of the few constants Kira allows herself to rely on.
The call goes to voicemail.
She ends the call immediately and stares at the screen, heart accelerating in a way she despises. Her mind fills the silence with worst-case scenarios faster than she can stop it. They have only just repaired things between them. What if Riri is hurt? What if she’s bleeding? What if she’s dead? What if Yumeko is—
Kira forces herself to type something measured. Something that won’t sound like she’s panicking.
A few seconds later, her phone buzzes.
маленький ворон: I was busy with a game against Yumeko. I can ring you back?
Relief hits her so hard she has to brace herself against the railing.
If Mary is already on her way to Riri, if words are already being twisted, Kira needs to control what she can. She doesn’t know who Riri would pick if forced. She’s had to make that choice before and somehow, impossibly, she’s always found a way to choose both of them. Kira has never understood how.
Then, because she is trying—because she refuses a future where they regress back to how they were—she adds it.
Kira: Don’t call. Everything’s fine.
Kira: I love you.
The words feel too exposed on the screen.
маленький ворон: I love you too. See you soon.
She drifts through the exhibits without really taking the time to see them. Kelp forests sway behind thick glass, long fronds curling and uncurling like slow thoughts. Schools of fish scatter and reform in synchronized flashes. Bioluminescent displays glow in controlled darkness, blues and greens pulsing softly, engineered wonder meant to awe. Manta rays pass overhead in a wide tank, their wingspans cutting elegant arcs through the water, creatures that would demand her full attention on any other day.
She lifts her phone to take photos anyway.
Every few steps, she thinks of Yumeko. What she’d point out, what ridiculous commentary she’d make. Kira slows in places she knows Yumeko would like, then moves on before the ache can settle. She wants these moments to be shared. She refuses to cheapen them by having them alone.
At one smaller tank, she stops without quite realising why.
A purple firefish hovers near the glass, its elongated dorsal fin flicking. It doesn’t dart away when she approaches. Instead, it watches her with dark, unblinking eyes.
Kira takes another photo, framing the fish dead center. The firefish doesn’t flinch at the movement. It holds its position, fins rippling, as if it has decided she is something worth observing.
“Don’t start,” Kira murmurs under her breath, because the last thing she needs is to anthropomorphise a fish.
Eventually, the time comes for the Coral Propagation talk she had planned for, and she enters into the circular lecture room a few minutes late.
Two hundred seats and Mary are sitting in the front row.
Mary has the clipboard, the one Kira abandoned earlier, and she’s writing intently. Of course she is. Mary has always been good at noting down everything during meetings.
She could choose any other seat. Any row. Any distance that would let her avoid this. Instead, she doesn’t give herself the time to reconsider. She walks down the aisle and takes the empty chair beside Mary.
The talk is already in progress. Three massive screens hang in the center of the circular room, arranged in a triangle so that no matter where you sit, at least one is awkwardly angled away from you. All three display the same pre-recorded lecture: a balding man in a polo shirt standing in front of a coral diagram, speaking in a flat, tired voice that suggests he has given this presentation far too many times and believes in it far too little. The slides look old. The fonts are worse. Kira knows the aquarium’s budget and knows where it went instead.
She leans slightly toward Mary and murmurs, “With six million spent on public awareness of reef restoration, you’d expect an actual real life person.”
Mary doesn’t even look at her. “With six million,” she replies, equally quiet, “you’d expect a screen for each direction instead of cheaping out at three.”
Then: “Don’t distract me with a shared enemy. I’m supposed to hate you right now. If you aren’t going to apologise, leave.”
Kira ignores that and she watches the screens. The looping animation playing on all three screens slightly out of sync. She counts time by the steady scratch of Mary’s pen. Ten minutes pass like this.
Finally, she grits out, “I’m sorry.”
“See? That wasn’t so difficult.” A pause. “I’m sorry too…Why are you here?”
Kira answers. “Riri. Why are you here?”
Mary’s mouth tilts into something almost like a smile, “Also Riri. We both thought she’d like this.”
Kira hesitates, then admits part of her very secret plan, “It was also one of the only talks that didn’t seem like something Yumeko would be interested in.”
“You finally admit it.”
“It makes it easier to actually ask you for information,” she says flatly.
“And not just say lame excuses like we can’t go see the sea otters or any of the outdoor animals actually because you ‘didn’t plan it in.’” Mary adds, doing a painfully accurate imitation of Kira’s tone on the last part.
“That wasn’t a lie,” Kira replies.
Mary gives her a sideways look, “No. But the reason you didn’t plan it was obvious, Kira.”
The word obvious lands harder than Kira expects but she doesn’t argue.
“When you go on your date with Yumeko are you planning to get food here?”
Kira’s mouth tightens. “I doubt the food will be good enough for her.”
“Well. I’m hungry.” Mary slings the clipboard under her arm and looks down at Kira. “Are you joining me or not.”
Kira clocks the sign as they approach and immediately hates it.
Upstream Café.
Not everything needs an aquatic pun. And if it did, this is what passes for creativity? She could conjure something better before breakfast on any random Tuesday. They sit anyway. The chairs are awful—cheap white plastic moulded into a shape that suggests ergonomics were once explained to someone and then ignored entirely. The table wobbles if she so much as shifts her elbow. Kira files the entire location away under never again. Yumeko will never be subjected to this. Not the chairs. Not the laminated menus with their faintly sticky texture that suggests generations of spilled soda and inadequate cleaning.
She flips the menu. Nothing looks appealing. She flips it back.
Mary peers over. “Go for the piranha waffles with ice cream.”
Kira looks at her like she’s just suggested eating gravel.
“I can’t trust you,” Kira says flatly.
“It’s one of the only things I trust you will like,” Mary replies, unbothered. “And if you don’t, I’ll just have it.”
That doesn’t help. If anything, it makes it worse. Mary eating anything from Kira’s plate, even terrible aquarium food, is not acceptable.
Mary scans the QR code taped to the table. “Is that a confirmation?”
“A confirmation of what?” Kira narrows her eyes. “What are you doing?”
“I’m ordering,” Mary says. “And paying. It’s easier than lining up.”
Kira stares at her. “What are you doing,” she repeats, slower this time, as though if she dumbs it down enough Mary will realise she’s crossing a line.
“Give me your order.”
Mary hesitates. You can see it, the internal fight, brief but entirely present.
“The salmon donburi bowl,” she says, like ripping off a bandage.
Kira places the order while Mary slides her earphones back in.
The action is immediate, noticeable. Rude. Kira thinks it and forces herself to hold the thought. Don’t start another fight. Not so soon after the last.
A moment later, Mary speaks anyway. “You can still talk to me.”
“Wonderful,” Kira says. “Exactly what I wanted to hear.”
She studies Mary more closely now. “Why the earphones? I’ve never seen you wear them before.”
Mary touches one absently. “I’m thinking of getting it as a gift for Riri. You can barely see them while wearing them, and they’ve got really good noise cancelling, so. Just testing that out.” A pause. “They even have an option to match your skin tone.”
Kira squints. “They’re green, Mary.”
“Yes,” Mary says serenely. “I’m Cynthia Erivo. So, it matches.”
The food arrives before Kira can decide what to even say to that.
She stares down at the plate. The ice cream is already melting into its crevices and the waffle is off-centre. Aggressively so. To the point that it doesn’t even look like any aquatic creature she knows of. Kira decides she can survive this. She has endured worse things.
She cuts into it.
“You should go bald to match,” Kira says, deadpan.
Mary taps the top of her head. “The concept of you eating your waffles, staying away from scissors, and not making me bald because that would be a hate crime.”
Riri pulls the first aid kit from the wall cabinet without looking. Her hands know where it is. They always do.
She sets it down on the countertop, unzips it, lines the contents up by size and use. Gauze first. Antiseptic. Tape.
“Sit,” Riri says.
Yumeko does, obedient for once, perching on the edge of the bench. She offers her injured hand again, palm up. The cut isn’t deep, but it’s as dramatic as the owner and looks worse than it is.
Riri takes it. She presses gauze down hard enough to sting.
Yumeko hisses. “You’re gentle.”
“This is gentle,” Riri replies.
She cleans the wound methodically, wiping blood away in short, efficient motions. There’s no flinch in her hands, no visible reaction to the blood pooling, smearing, soaking into white gauze until it turns dark and familiar.
She’s done this before. Too many times.
Her father hated inefficiency. Hated mess. If Kira or her bled, it had to be resolved before it inconvenienced him.
So she learned.
Yumeko studies her face. “You’re very good at this.”
Riri tapes the gauze down, snug but not tight enough to cut circulation. “I’ve had practice.”
She releases Yumeko’s hand and focuses on her own.
The placement mimics a mark she remembers well, the tiny cut on one of Mary’s fingers from that dull guillotine blade months ago. She catches herself in thought, and her chest tightens in a way that’s almost absurd: part of her hopes this one will scar the same way, a matching imperfection, a silent echo of something shared. It’s probably strange. To find romance in a similar injury done by the same person.
“I’ve always wondered about your chip,” Ruri says softly, “One side’s a mirror. That must make the balance uneven?”
“I’ve thought about that too. I would never willingly cheat, if that’s what you mean. I’ve tested it multiple times, just to be sure.”
Yumeko continues, “Does it bother you, doing this for other people?”
Riri finishes wrapping her hand. Tests her grip. Satisfied. “No.”
“So. Have I passed your test with flying colours?”
Riri meets her eyes, “Yes.”
Then: “I loved the duel, by the way. But did you really have to be so Gomez about it?”
Riri blinks. “The Addams?”
“Yes! You know that reference?” Yumeko squints at her. “I thought you were, like, chronically offline.”
“I am,” Riri says. “But when you spend enough time around the council, you absorb information through proximity. I downplay it somewhat to make Mary laugh.”
“Full of surprises. Any more confessions?” She says it lightly, not expecting an answer.
Riri answers anyway.
“When I’m bored,” she says, re-zipping the kit, “I occasionally write fake bets on the board. Nothing important, just enough to amuse myself.”
“Oh, you need to teach me how to do that.”
“Your turn,” Riri says.
“I was the one who left the window open in Kira’s room when the pigeon got in.”
The memory hits her whole-body vivid: feathers everywhere. Droppings on paperwork. Kira standing in the doorway in absolute, horrified stillness. The cleaning staff summoned. The room declared uninhabitable.
Kira sleeping in Riri’s room for three nights after, curled too close. Riri should have minded the disruption, missed the presence of Mary in her dorm, but she didn’t. Instead, there’s a warmth in having her sister there, a rare stretch of time where Kira was entirely hers.
Riri looks at Yumeko, horror flickering across her face at the chaos recounted, while Yumeko grins, unrepentant.
“Oh,” Mary says, already veering off. “Wait. One second.”
“Mary—” Kira starts, then cuts herself off as Mary breaks into a jog toward the play area tucked beside the gift shop. It’s loud in the way only children can be loud: overlapping voices shrieking that pierce through the ears.
Mary ducks just outside the barrier, unclips her carabiner and holds it up toward one of the large aquarium mascots molded into the wall.
She re-clips it and jogs back.
“What was that?” Kira asks, despite herself.
Mary turns the carabiner so Kira can see.
Hanging from it is a lego minifigure.
Kira stares.
Mary slightly annoyed that Kira doesn’t get it, “It’s me!”
It’s not at all accurate, she thinks.
Out loud, she says, “It looks so much like you Mary.”
Mary laughs. “There’s not a lot of hairstyles to choose from, okay. My whole family has one. We all got them from legoland years ago. There’s a family group chat.”
“A group chat,” Kira repeats.
“Yeah. We send pictures of our minifigs doing things. Museums. Road trips. Grocery stores. My dad once staged his on the edge of a mug like it was cliff-diving.” She scrolls through her phone and briefly flashes Kira a photo of a lego man mid-plunge. “It’s stupid. But kind of great.”
Kira watches the screen go dark again.
“Is legoland somewhere you’d recommend?” she asks, already planning a trip.
“Wait. We so should go. That’s actually a really good idea.”
Kira blinks. “We?”
“Yeah. Once you get your minifigure, I can add you to the group chat.”
The words land casually like Mary didn’t just imply she would willingly let Kira join an exclusively family thing. Even just a group chat.
Children swarm over soft structures shaped like coral and shipwrecks in the play area across from them. A little girl slides down a blue tunnel laughing so hard she almost tumbles at the end.
“They seem… energetic,” Kira says.
“Do you not like kids?” Mary asks, curious rather than accusatory.
“I’ve spent enough years micromanaging people younger than me. I don’t particularly want to do that again.”
She hesitates, then adds, a thread of worry she doesn’t fully mask, “Does Yumeko want kids?”
Mary considers this. “I don’t think she does. But you really have to ask her these things.”
Kira doesn’t respond, but Mary keeps going.
“I can tell you what she does like.”
Kira glances at her.
Mary gestures back toward the play area. “They do adult-only evenings. And everything is big enough for most adults. You are Yumeko are both eighteen so.”
Kira frowns. “That seems childish.”
Mary smiles, certain. “Trust me. Yumeko will love it.”
Yumeko doesn’t hug her when she returns.
They don’t have to do that performance where Kira pretends, she doesn’t want Yumeko’s arms around her, that she doesn’t wrap hers around Yumeko’s just as tightly.
Riri doesn’t even take the bags from Mary’s hands.
Which is saying something, because Mary is carrying many bags. Kira had, by her own standards, shown restraint. Yes, she may have gone slightly overboard in the gift shop. Yes, she did cause a small scene when a staff member tried to apply a twelve-percent members’ discount she very pointedly did not ask for and absolutely did not need. She also did not try to buy the entire store and only didn’t on Mary's assurance that she could do that on her date with Yumeko instead.
Now, standing in the council lounge, Mary squints at the two of them. “You’re both hiding something.”
Then, a pointed: “Riri.”
Riri answers by moving her injured hand from behind her back.
Mary’s expression changes, worry flashing sharp and bright, followed immediately by a mixing of annoyance.
“So,” she says, voice taut, “while we successfully didn’t kill each other, you two really tried to.”
Riri opens her mouth. Tries to explain.
Mary doesn’t listen.
She addresses Kira instead. “I take care of mine. You take care of yours?”
Kira agrees.
Mary turns away, already walking, Riri trailing after her with remarkable similarities to a sad lost puppy who has been gently but firmly confiscated.
Kira exhales. Long. Tired.
“Let me see the damage,” she says.
Yumeko holds out her hand.
Kira examines the gauze carefully. It’s Riri’s work and Kira trusts it instantly.
She looks up.
They’re standing too close.
Not intentionally. They just drifted. Gravity doing what it always does with them.
For a second, it feels like they might kiss.
Yumeko breaks it first.
“Don’t I deserve a reward?” she asks, “For sustaining such a grievous injury?”
Kira arches an eyebrow, but there’s a curve to her lips she can’t quite hide. “I don’t think you need a reward for getting injured in a duel. That seems like the opposite incentive structure.”
Yumeko leans a fraction closer. “At least give me a chance at feeling better about it.” The mock-pleading is full of heat, deliberate, meant to tempt.
Kira considers. Then says, “Fifty-fifty?”
She gestures to the chip hanging from Yumeko’s necklace.
Yumeko slips it off, placing her family's secret in Kira’s palm. Their fingers brush.
“Heads,” Yumeko says, “I get what I want.”
“Tails,” Kira replies, “you have to wait until this heals for me to ask you.”
She doesn’t say on a date, but it is implied.
Kira flips the coin.
It spins.
Clatters.
And lands perfectly—impossibly—on its side.