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*Will fill our hearts for all time.*
The final note faded into the night, leaving a silence that ached more than any sound. As it left me, a tightness seized my throat. Not from the strain of singing, but from the void the song left behind.
Countless days had bled into this moment. Days stolen from sleep, from school, from my part-time shifts. I had neglected my health, my responsibilities, the very ground I walked on, all to pour every unsaid word and unconveyed feeling into this single, desperate composition.
The rational part of me knew that this was a beautiful futility. My voice was a whisper against the cosmic void. It could never bridge the gulf to the silent, silver plains where she now resided. But still…
The words I never said back then. The feelings I never got to convey. I wrote it all onto this song in hopes that she could hear it.
“Kaguya.”
Her name escaped in a breath, and with it came the tears I could no longer dam. I had fought my rationality and lost.
Kaguya. Kaguya. Kaguya.
I had named her haphazardly, carelessly, from the old tale. A girl found in a shaft of otherworldly light, like the princess in the bamboo. Back then, I had wished the story to be true. Perhaps, in naming her after a princess who returned to the moon, I could will her away. To make her departure a fated, storybook thing I could bear.
The knowledge of that childish wish now cut deeper than any goodbye.
“KAGUYAAAA!!!!!”
I roared her name into the indifferent sky, my voice tearing from my chest. I did not care who heard, if the whole world judged me. Let them think me mad. Grief this profound is a kind of madness.
The echo died. The cold balcony rail pressed against my clenched hands. Above, the moon shone down, serene and distant, cradling my heart in its silent, silver light.
I slumped to the cold concrete, my energy spent. Exhaustion, long held at bay by desperation, finally washed over me, a heavy tide pulling me under. The fight is over.
"Kaguya." I breathed her name into the night, a final, futile incantation. The moon’s silvery gaze was a cold, perfect mirror, reflecting nothing but my own solitude.
Or so I believed.
A glimmer. A minuscule, impossible fluctuation of light on the lunar surface. So faint it could have been a trick of tear-blurred vision, a star’s twinkle mistaken for movement. But it held. And within that pinprick of light, a colour that did not belong to the monochrome moon—a hint of spectral blue.
I held my breath. Could it be a sign? Or a desperate hallucination?
Despite every muscle protesting, I forced myself upright. My hands, white-knuckled, gripped the railing as I leaned out, my whole being straining towards that distant sphere.
The glimmer did not fade. It detached. A single, shimmering mote of light, like a teardrop falling in reverse, lifting from the moon’s surface. As it moved into the void, it fractured the sterile moonlight, shimmering with a faint, nascent rainbow—a promise of seven colours.
Kaguya?
Logic screamed its protests: satellite debris, a meteor, the madness of grief. I silenced it. In the ruins of my rational heart, a new, undeniable truth took root: She heard it. She heard our song.
The mote grew. Not just closer, but brighter, intensifying as it kissed the Earth’s atmosphere. It was no longer a speck, but a brilliant, falling star trailing a wake of opalescent fire—a brushstroke of impossible colour across the black canvas of space.
Then, carried on a wind that hadn’t been blowing a moment before, a sound. A voice, woven from memory and starlight, tearing across the miles not as a whisper, but as a triumphant, aching cry that shattered the night’s silence and my soul in the same instant.
“IRRRRRROOOOOHHHHHAAAAA!!!!!”
It is her. It is always her.
The world dissolved into a roar of light and a shower of splintering sound. The last thing I saw was the kaleidoscopic mote filling my vision before the impact slammed into the balcony, and everything went black.
I awoke to the dull ache of my body and the familiar texture of our sofa’s fabric against my cheek. Sunlight, harsh and ordinary, streamed through the window.
My apartment.
The silence was a physical weight. The air is still, empty. No shimmering light, no ethereal presence. Just the same dust motes dancing in the sunbeams, the same quiet that had accompanied me for the past month.
A hollow laugh escaped me. Of course. The crash, the light. It was the final, cruel punchline of my exhaustion. A hallucination so vivid it had knocked me out. The song, the shout, the falling star… all just a desperate dream. The hope that had flared so brilliantly now curdled into a shame so deep it burned behind my eyes. I pressed my face into the cushion, a sob gathering in my chest.
“Woof!”
The sound was crisp, digital, and entirely out of place. A synth-bark.
My head snapped up. There, in the middle of my sun-bleached rug, sat a small, sleek robot dog. Its chassis was a polished metal, and a single, azure sensor-light regarded me with a curious tilt of its head.
“Inudogge?” I breathed, the name a reflex from a hundred hours in another world. The companion that followed Kaguya everywhere in the virtual realm of Tsukuyomi. But this is impossible. Virtual things didn’t cast shadows. They couldn’t exist here, in the dusty air and plain morning light of my real, lonely world..
I raised a hand to my eyes, searching for the non-existent VR lenses, my mind scrambling for any logical anchor.
The front door clicked open.
“Inudogge, you shouldn’t bother Iroha when she’s unwell.” a voice chided. A voice that was a symphony of brash confidence and effortless cool, a voice I had composed an entire universe of music to somehow replicate.
The robot dog cocked its head to the other side with a soft whirr.
I couldn’t breathe. This is a dream, a deeper, more vicious layer of the dream. I was still unconscious on the balcony. This was my mind’s last, merciful lie before I woke up to the truth.
Slowly, as if moving through deep water, I turned towards the door.
And there she stood.
Leaning against the frame, wearing my old, too-big black t-shirt like she’d just stolen it from my drawer yesterday. Her hair was a flash of impossible, sunlit gold against the dim hallway. Her posture was all familiar and graceful. Kaguya. The spendthrift, loud-mouthed, brilliant, blinding star of my life.
My Kaguya.
“Is…Is this a dream?”
She pushed off the doorframe and did a slow, deliberate twirl. “Nope! One hundred percent the real deal! The one and only Kaguya, finally back from that boring old moon.”
I didn’t hear the rest. Logic, reality, questions—they evaporated.
With a sound that was half-sob, half-laugh, I was moving. My legs carried me across the space before my mind could catch up. I crashed into her, my arms locking around her waist, my face burying itself in the soft cotton of the shirt that smelled like my laundry detergent and, underneath it, her. That faint, electric scent of ozone and sugar.
I held on as if the world depended on it. As if she were the only solid thing in a universe that had just rewritten its own laws. She is warm. She is real. She is here.
And in that moment, nothing else in all of existence mattered.
We held on for a long while. The frantic pulse of my heart against hers slowly steadied into a shared, solid rhythm. The silence was no longer empty; it was full of her breath, the faint hum of her being, the reality of her shoulder beneath my cheek.
Questions began to surface. A torrent of how and why and what now pressing against the back of my throat. But before I could give them voice, a low, traitorous growl echoed from my stomach, breaking the sacred quiet.
Kaguya’s body shook against mine with a sudden, delighted laugh. “Good thing I was out getting supplies. How do pancakes sound?”
The old, familiar reflex sparked in me. “You shouldn’t feed someone unwell with just pancakes.” I murmured, but the words held no bite, only a worn-out tenderness. They sounded less like a scolding and more like a remembered script from a happier time.
Kaguya’s laugh was a clear, delightful sound that seemed to vibrate through the very air, warming my heart like a swallowed sunbeam. “Ah, but that’s why I bought all the fruits!” she declared triumphantly. “Strawberries, blueberries, bananas. You can pile all of them on the pancakes! And since fruit is excellent for the sick, it’s practically medicine.”
I wanted to shake my head at her flawless, ridiculous logic. But I couldn’t. I had missed this. Missed the way she could twist the world to fit her whims and make it sound perfectly reasonable.
“Let me help,” I said, trying to stand. My legs, however, betrayed me, buckling as a wave of spent adrenaline and profound weakness washed through me.
“Ah-ah-ah.” Kaguya’s arms were around me in an instant, strong and sure. She guided me a few steps back to the sofa, her touch impossibly gentle. “Your only job is to not fall over. Doctor’s orders.”
As she tried to lower me onto the cushions, my fingers clenched in the fabric of her shirt. Letting go felt like a risk, like she might dissolve back into moonlight if she left my reach.
She didn’t pull away. Instead, she knelt, placing a warm hand over mine. “I’ll be right over there. It won’t take long. Scout’s honor.”
Reluctantly, finger by finger, I released my grip. She gave my hand a final squeeze and floated towards the kitchen, like a sunbeam given human form.
“Man, it feels like forever since I’ve done this,” she mused aloud, her voice dancing with a casual lightness as she rummaged in a bag. “Hope I remember how to not start a fire.”
I knew it had been a month since she left. Her ‘forever’ was always a dramatic exaggeration. Yet, a strange weight clung to her words this time, a shadow in the sun. There was a history in that simple statement I didn’t know, a gap of time I couldn’t fathom.
But then she glanced back over her shoulder, a smile playing on her lips as she found a bowl, and the thought evaporated like mist. The questions could wait. The universe had just performed a miracle and delivered her to my kitchen. For now, it was enough to watch her move, to listen to her hum a tuneless, happy song, and to breathe in the long-missed scent of home.
She placed the plate before me with a small, proud flourish. The pancakes were golden, stacked high, with a vibrant mosaic of berries spilling over the sides. They looked almost exactly like the ones from that cafe, from the day she’d first met Mami and Roka.
But I couldn’t look at the food. My eyes were locked on her. On the faint smudge of flour on her cheek, on the way her hair fell across her forehead as she leaned in, on the simple, impossible reality of her presence by the stove, in our apartment, alive.
"Eat up." she said softly, her hip nudging mine as she settled onto the sofa beside me. Our shoulders touched, a line of warmth that felt like a lifeline. She clapped her hands together with a loud, theatrical, "Itadakimasu!" and immediately forked a massive, syrup-drenched bite into her mouth, eating with the unrestrained gusto of someone who hadn't tasted food in a decade.
A quiet, tearful laugh escaped me. Who’s the starving one here? I wondered, picking up my own fork. The first bite is fluffy, sweet, and perfectly cooked. It was exactly, devastatingly, as delicious as every meal she’d ever made for me. I glanced to the side and saw Inudogge, too, diligently eating from a small stack placed on the floor, its mechanism somehow processing the fluffy batter with a series of happy, whirring clicks. The part of my mind that clung to how the world should work wondered how a robot could digest pancakes. But then I let it go. Nothing is ever normal around Kaguya. That was her first and greatest magic.
A hot tear splashed onto my plate, then another. I kept eating, the salt of my tears mixing with the sweet maple syrup.
"Whoa," Kaguya said around a mouthful, her voice softening. "Is it really that good? I’m touched!"
Not just this, I thought. But my throat is too tight to speak. All your meals are this delicious. Every single one. That wasn't why I was crying. I was crying because this one was real. I was crying for all the meals we'd missed, for the empty plates and the silent kitchens. I ate with a desperate, graceless hunger I never knew I could.
Eventually, I set my fork down on the clean plate, the last sweet bite still lingering. But my eyes weren’t on the plate. They were on her. Kaguya was just watching me, her usual dazzling energy banked into a soft, patient quiet. She wasn’t eating anymore. She was just… waiting. For what, I wasn't sure, until I felt the words rise up.
“Welcome home.
”
The effect was instant. Her expectant look shattered into a sunrise of a smile, so bright and relieved it made my heart ache. “I am home!”
And just like that, it was real. The last, frozen splinter of doubt in my chest melted, and a laugh burst out of me. A watery, hiccuping sound tangled with tears of pure, uncomplicated relief. These tears were warm. They were happy.
She shifted, closing the last inch of space until we were pressed together from shoulder to knee, a solid line of shared warmth. I let my head fall against her shoulder, my eyes closing. The hum of the fridge, the scent of berries and batter, the soft sound of her breathing beside me. They were no longer just parts of my empty apartment. They were the texture of a world restored.
She is here. She is home.
We lingered in the quiet, a soft, shared stillness that felt more intimate than any conversation. A part of me waited for Kaguya to shatter it. To fill the air with her boisterous plans, her loud laughter, her everything. But she didn’t. She just held me, her arms a gentle, unyielding cradle. Our fingers found each other, threading together on the worn cushion between us, a silent promise woven through skin and bone.
I let myself look at her. At the way the afternoon light caught the gold in her hair, at the impossible brightness of her eyes, at the gentle curve of her smile that held a universe of stories I was desperate to hear. It was ironic, I thought. She had returned from the cold, silver moon, yet she radiated a warmth that felt like the heart of the sun itself. She was my personal supernova, and I was happily caught in her gravity.
“See something you like?” she teased, her voice a low hum that vibrated through me. Her grin was pure, yet filled with mischief.
I felt the heat rush to my cheeks instantly. I became a flustered mess, my composure fleeing. “N-no! I was just—!” I stammered, the reflexive denial halfway out before my courage, small but fierce, caught up. I looked down at our joined hands, my voice dropping to a shy, almost inaudible whisper. “…Yes.”
Her cheeky grin softened into something unbearably fond. She didn’t gloat. She just pulled me closer, tucking my head under her chin, surrounding me with the scent of syrup, ozone, and her. “Good,” she murmured into my hair, her voice thick with a happiness that made my chest ache. “We’ve got our whole lives for you to keep looking.”
The warmth of her promise lingered in the air. It was that very thought that finally nudged the last, lingering fear from the depths of my heart.
“Kaguya,” I began, my voice small against her shoulder. “The… the people from the moon. Won’t they come for you again?”
She gave my hand a quick, reassuring squeeze. “Nah! I am all done with my work! Contract fulfilled, mission accomplished, stamped and filed!” she declared with her signature cheer. “They’ve got no reason to bother this celestial superstar anymore. I’m officially retired!”
A wave of pure, unadulterated relief washed over me. It was over. Truly over. She is free.
Then, the math hit me.
The relief curdled, transforming into a hot, sharp spike of indignation. I straightened up, pulling back just enough to stare at her. “A month?” My voice was dangerously quiet. “It only took you a month? I was… I was falling apart down here. I thought I’d lost you forever. And it was just… a job that took a month?”
Kaguya’s brilliant grin faltered. A sheepish, almost guilty look crossed her face as she rubbed the back of her neck, avoiding my eyes. “Well… technically? It wasn’t… um. It wasn’t technically a month.”
I sat up fully now, crossing my arms, letting my best unimpressed, angry glare do the talking. “Explain. Now.”
She fidgeted under my gaze. “So, the work itself? It, uh… took a bit longer to wrap up.” She held up her hands defensively. “Like… decades longer. By the time I filled out the last form and turned it in, you were probably… really, really old. Like, grandma-old. No offense to future-grandma-you, I’m sure you were gorgeous!”
My anger was rapidly being replaced by sheer, dizzying bewilderment. “What?”
“But!” she barreled on, flashing a wobbly thumbs-up. “Great news! My folks have time travel! So I just set the coordinates for right about… now… and hopped in my pod.” Her cheerful expression flickered, a genuine shiver running through her. “The flight was wild, though. I almost smacked right into a rogue asteroid! If Inudogge hadn’t nudged the steering column at the last second…” She trailed off, looking genuinely spooked for a moment before brightening again. “I could have ended up landing in the Cretaceous period. Would’ve been a real hassle, too. Dinosaurs are not good at pancake brunch.”
I stared at her. Decades. Time travel. Asteroids. Dinosaurs. The explanations were so utterly, cosmically Kaguya that my initial anger simply deflated, leaving behind a familiar, fond exhaustion. Of course. Nothing was ever normal. Why would her method of return be any different?
I took a deep, steadying breath, letting the absurdity settle. Only one thing truly mattered. I reached out, taking her hand with a firm grip again. “So. You’re sure. They’re done. They won’t come knocking?”
This time, her smile was boundless, a sunrise that filled the entire room. She struck a triumphant pose, her free hand shooting skyward. “One hundred million percent! No more duties, no more moon-mails, no more nothing!” She dropped the pose and leaned in, her forehead gently touching mine, her voice dropping to a whisper meant only for me. “Nothing is holding me back anymore. Just Kaguya and Iroha. Back together.”
And as she said it, with the scent of distant stars still clinging to her hair and the echo of a saved world in her laugh, I finally, completely, believed it.
The quiet comfort of our embrace settled around us again, a soft blanket after the storm of revelations. Into that peace, Kaguya’s voice slipped, smaller than I’d ever heard it.
“I really am sorry, Iroha,” she murmured. “For making you worry like that. For all of it.”
I pulled back just enough to see the genuine remorse in her eyes. My anger had vanished, leaving only a tender ache. I gently stroked her cheek with my thumb, feeling the reality of her, before giving it a soft, pinching tug. “I’ll forgive you,” I said, my voice firm but gentle. “On one condition. No more troubles. Please.”
She captured my hand, holding it against her face. “Promise!” she declared, her eyes sparkling. “No more galaxy-level, time-travel-required trouble. Pinky swear!” The old, irrepressible grin was already creeping back. “Besides, of course, you’d forgive me. I’m just too pretty to stay mad at, right?”
I felt the familiar, flustered heat rise to my cheeks. “D-don’t say things like that!” I managed to turn my face away to hide my expression. “And don’t make a habit of it.”
But she just wrapped her arms around me from behind, her chin resting on my shoulder. Her next words were a soft, warm breath against my ear. “But it’s true. Though I can admit that Iroha is, like… eight thousand times prettier than me.”
“That’s not true!” I blurted out automatically. The compliment felt like a spotlight. “I’m… Right now, I’m a mess. I haven’t showered in days, I haven’t slept properly, I probably smell like despair and old ramen… I let everything fall apart while you were gone.”
Her arms tightened around me for a moment before she gently turned me to face her. Her hands came up to cradle my face, her touch impossibly tender. She looked at me. Not at the tired eyes or the messy hair, but at me. “Iroha,” she said, her voice steady and sure, stripping away all her usual playful theatrics. “I have always thought you were beautiful. From the very first second I saw you, trying so hard to look stern while your eyes gave everything away.”
I was trapped in her gaze, in the depth of longing and absolute sincerity I found there. My heart hammered against my ribs. She took one of my hands and held it against her own chest, where I could feel the strong, quick beat of her heart.
“I love you,” she said, the words simple, clear, and seismic. “I always loved you since that first day.”
The world tilted. My stomach erupted in a frenzy of butterflies, and all the air seemed to leave the room. The confession I’d carried for so long, the song I’d sent to the moon, rose up in answer.
“You…” I started, my voice trembling. “At first, I thought you were the biggest nuisance in the universe. You blew through my cash, turned all my careful plans into chaos, and were so… so loud.” A tear, happy and overwhelmed, traced a path down my cheek. “But… I started living for those days. I started needing that chaos. Your light… it became my light.”
I took a shuddering breath, squeezing her hand. The final wall crumbled. “I love you too, Kaguya. So much it hurt when you were gone.”
For a single, frozen second, she just stared at me, her eyes wide. Then, the dam broke.
“YES! SHE SAID IT! SHE REALLY SAID IT!” Kaguya exploded, releasing me to burst into a spontaneous, jubilant dance around the living room. She punched the air, spun in dizzying circles, and let out a series of triumphant whoops that should have alarmed the neighbors. Inudogge began bouncing around her feet, adding a chorus of happy, digital barks to the celebration.
And I, sitting on the sofa watching the girl I loved turn my quiet apartment into a one-woman festival of joy, could do nothing but lean back and laugh. It was a deep, hearty, full-bodied laugh that came from a place I thought had sealed shut forever. It was the sound of my heart, finally, finally catching up to the song it had been singing all along.
The world seemed to shrink to the space between our lips. Kaguya’s jubilant dance ended as she bounced to a stop in front of me, her chest rising and falling with exhilaration. All the sound, all the motion, drained away. There was only the silent pull in her eyes, a gravity I had no desire to resist. Our faces drew closer, a magnetic inevitability. I could feel the warmth of her breath, see the faint tremble in her smile. My eyes fluttered shut—
—and opened to the familiar, ambient glow of my simulated room.
A soft, weary sigh escaped me. The lingering ghost of a touch faded from my lips, leaving behind a familiar, hollow ache.
“The same dream again, Yachiyo?”
I turned my head to the source of the gentle voice. Sitting on my shoulder is a luminous, pearl-white sea slug, which has been my faithful companion for the past 8000 years, once called Inudogge. Now called Fushi.
I wiped away the tears as I recalled the dream. I had played the scenario over and over in my mind during the long, dull stretches of my work on the moon. It was supposed to be my happy ending. The detailed, perfect script for my return. The song, the crash-landing on the balcony (dramatic but safe), the pancakes, the confession, the kiss. I had it all planned out. It was supposed to be easy. A few decades of boring work, a quick hop through time, and then… home.
“If you’re feeling unwell, we could cancel today’s concert.” Fushi advised. “Iroha wouldn’t be arriving at Tsukuyomi for a while yet. There isn’t any important reason for you to attend to it, anyway.”
I pushed myself up from the digital bed, as I gazed upon at the glittering city of Tsukuyomi below. A digital world I had created for me to exist within.
“But I’m still a performer. Even if she can’t see me yet… I want to be the brightest star in her sky when she finally looks up. I need to stay shining, so she’ll know where to find me.”
I turned from the window, as the performer’s energy within me began to course through my form, pushing back the quiet ache.
“Let’s go,” I said, a real, determined smile touching my lips. “Let’s keep moving towards our happy ending.”