Chapter Text
"Yo, Manato. Question."
"Yeah?"
"How do you pick up girls?"
"...You screwing with me?"
Manato's harsh tone spooked a couple first year students walking past the nook where they were lurking, who quickly scurried away. Yuzuha huffed dramatically, sinking down against the wall she was leaning on. "Man, I wish, but I'm really struggling here. Help a girl out, would you?"
Her utmost sincerity did little to stop Manato from giving her the stink eye. She watched the gears turn in his head for a moment before he decided to take her seriously. "Yeah, sure. Hey, toss me one of those sodas."
Yuzuha reached into the bag they'd gotten from the convenience store. "Sure... fetch!" she called, and tossed a can up and to the left of Manato. He whipped out a hand and caught it without even looking, and snapped it open with a soft hiss.
"When are you finally gonna drop that bit, exactly?"
"When you stop fetching."
Manato's ear twitched, but he chose not to dignify her with a response. He took a long drink of his soda, and then said: "I don't actually know what you think I can do for you."
"Well, you're the only straight guy I hang out with, which by process of elimination makes you the girl-whisperer."
"Gee, glad you appreciate me so much."
"Don't mention it, buddy," she said, flashing him a winning smile. Manato sighed. "But for real, you've gotta know something about wooing the ladies, right?"
"Like I've ever had a girlfriend in my life," he grumbled dismissively. Yuzuha got the impression she had just stumbled onto a sore spot. "I'm not exactly a chick magnet."
"What, no way! You've got lots of stuff going for you."
"Like?"
"Like, you're..." Yuzuha thought for a moment. "You're, uh... big! Girls like guys who are big, right?"
Manato folded his arms and gave her a look. "Uh huh. Do you?"
"Well, hold on now, you know you're not exactly ladylike enough for me. Tall girls though are pretty good. I mean, you saw that ripped Yunkui mystic lady who brought us outta the Hollow, right?" She whistled. "Now that's what I'm talking about."
"If what you want is help hooking up with a woman over twice your age, that's gonna have to be a nope."
Yuzuha rolled her eyes. "I don't want to date her, I just want her to pick me up and crush me like a soda can with her bare hands."
"Also a nope."
"Killjoy. But that's not the point. You're really not seeing anyone?"
"If I was, wouldn't I be hanging with her instead of a lesbian sadomasochist who keeps swapping all my drinks with bitter melon juice? No offence."
Yuzuha cackled. "Ooh, puppy's learning how to bite! What's got your panties in such a twist today, huh?"
"I just don't get your angle here. I figured you were just gloating, but you seem too serious about this."
Yuzuha's giggles died down and she eyed him curiously. "Uh, 'gloating'?"
"Yeah? About your girlfriend?"
"I don't have a girlfriend, which was the whole problem here."
"Hah?"
"...You need it in writing?"
Manato looked like she had just told him the sky was purple. "No, wait a minute. You and Alice—"
"—Are not girlfriends. Yet. Which is why I would like your help getting her attention."
Manato scratched the back of his neck awkwardly. "Alright, that's my bad I guess. But man, I dunno how much more attention you think you can get, girl's been surgically attached to you since we got you back from the Porcelumex facility. I coulda sworn you two were a thing already."
"Auuugh, I know!" said Yuzuha, dragging her hands down her face despairingly. "But she keeps saying to me, 'oh, Yuzuha, you're such a great friend,' 'oh, Yuzuha, I'm so glad we're friends,' on and on and on. I'm glad she's happy, but how do I get it through to her that what I wanna do is pin her to the ground and—"
"Yeah, yeah, I get the picture. I'm gonna go ahead and leave that last part to you, but for getting her to go out with you..." he rubbed his chin with one hand. "I mean, you just take her to dinner or something, right? We've all gotten takeout and stuff, but have the two of you gone anywhere nice together?"
"Anything a Thymefield heiress would consider 'nice' is maaaaybe a little over budget," said Yuzuha. When she wasn't humouring her poorer friends, Alice probably ate endangered birds at a golden palace floating in the sky or something. "But you're right — we've had lunch sometimes, but we haven't really made a whole event out of it. That's total girlfriend stuff!"
"Yeah," said Manato, "and then maybe, I dunno, dress up a little or something. Show her you're serious."
Yuzuha shuddered to think what Alice would spend if she told her to 'dress up a little', but the idea of seeing her all dolled up was certainly appealing. She stood up and snagged a box of candies from her bag before holding it out to Manato. "Hey, thanks for the idea. I'm gonna go set things up, you want the rest of this?"
"Oh, cool," he said, reaching out to take it from her. She crinkled the bag as she passed it over, just loudly enough to mask the sound of a box slipping out of her sleeve into it. "I've got work in a bit, lemme know what your plans end up being."
"Will do — have fun at work," she said, giving a little wave before skipping off. She made it just out of earshot before she allowed herself a giggle. She looked forward to Manato's message when he tried the ultra-sour candy she'd repackaged as a regular flavour.
Following an intense period of web searching and an even more intense period of staring at her bank balance with disdain, Yuzuha finally settled on a pretty nice restaurant in the Janus Quarter. It was a bit of a trip for her, but not so far from Alice's school. A quick phone call later, and things were just about set. She flopped down on her bed and texted Alice.
Yuzuha
Heeeeeeeeeeey
Alice
You used an odd number of Es.
Yuzuha
e
Alice
Thank you. How are you today, Yuzuha?
Yuzuha grinned at her phone. Alice's messages always took an age to type, all prim and proper like she was writing to the mayor. It was adorable.
Yuzuha
I'm good, hbu
Alice
I beg your pardon?
Yuzuha
How about you
Alice
Oh, I see! I'm doing well... is what I'd like to say, but truthfully I am a little cross with you.
Yuzuha
Huh
What did I do??
Alice
You told me the other day about an urban legend where if you went to Lumina Square and ordered five large teamilks in the order mint-matcha-strawberry-strawberry-caramel, then a little bit later you would be able to see your doppelgänger approach the store and order the same drinks that you did, but in reverse.
Oh yeah, Yuzuha remembered mentioning something like that. It was a common sort of rumour you saw floating around online.
Yuzuha
Did you try it?
Alice
I thought that my bladder was going to burst, and I was jittery all day from the caffeine, but nothing happened! And then when I explained what I was doing to the person running the store, she had no idea what I was talking about!
The order of the drinks was also horribly asymmetrical, and the only way to correct it would have been to buy four more of them. Simply dreadful.
Yuzuha
You didn't actually get four more of them, did you
Alice
Of course not. That would be silly.
Yuzuha felt like the delay before that reply was just a little bit too long.
Yuzuha
Well woops
But I told you that one was only B rank, right?
And you didn't actually need to DRINK the teamilk, just buy it
Alice
That would have been an awful waste, I couldn't just do that.
Yuzuha
Invite some friends then?
Alice
Oh.
Would that not be against the rules of investigating a ghost story?
Yuzuha
No way, people form ghost hunting groups all the time
That's how theres so many stories where everybody dies but one person lives to tell the tale
Alice
Well I wouldn't like at all for everybody to die!
Still, I suppose it could be said that I jumped the gun here... I was hoping that the rumour was true, though. Meeting my doppelgänger would have been fascinating.
Yuzuha
Sorry it turned out to be a dud
But
How about I make it up to you
You free on Saturday?
Alice
I believe that I am. If not, I can clear my schedule.
Yuzuha
sick
How about a date?
Alice
That sounds lovely. Did you have somewhere in mind?
Yuzuha shot her a link to the restaurant.
Yuzuha
I've got seats for us at 6
Does that sound good?
Alice
Oh my, you booked a reservation? What sort of occasion should I prepare for?
Yuzuha
The reservation is just to make sure we have seats, it's still a pretty casual thing
Just wear whatever you like.
Alice
Delightful. I look forward to seeing you there!
She had... told a little white lie. It was a pretty fancy dinner. But Alice was used to fancy fancy, and to dinners as business negotiations and social maneuvering more than as a leisure activity — it would stress her out to make it too big a deal. Besides, it wasn't like she wouldn't show up wearing something worth more than the restaurant anyway.
Her conscience so assuaged, she allowed herself to flood with elation at the prospect of her date. She had a date! With Alice! Alice, who... hadn't exactly reacted to the invitation like she was being propositioned, which she totally was, but Yuzuha could work with that.
The next two days each lasted about a hundred years. Yuzuha was too restless to even pull any good pranks, though she did hide a decorative plastic skull in the girls' bathroom that managed to spook a couple people.
She and Alice texted back and forth, though they didn't talk much about the date. Alice loved to send her pictures of interesting things she saw, like a really symmetrical leaf, or a really symmetrical rock, or a really symmetrical traffic jam. Yuzuha got the impression that she didn't have a lot of people she could share that with — even aside from being disastrously down bad for her, Yuzuha was happy that Alice could feel so comfortable with her.
Eventually, the promised day arrived. Dad had given her the day off from helping out at the store, but she still lent a hand throughout the morning. Once the afternoon rolled around, it was finally time to start getting ready.
She wore her hair in her usual style, though she took it down and re-braided it three times to try and get the braids more even. Thereafter she went into her and her sisters' shared bedroom to look for her clothes. It was easy, it turned out — it was amazing just how clean a bedroom could get when Yuzuha only lived there for two out of seven days.
Most of her clothes were used, though well cared for, but when she had some extra dennies lying around she was known to splurge on something nice. Her dress for the evening was one such purchase, and she had never worn it out before.
It was a bold red dress, fastened tight around the waist and falling to just above her knees. It had the look of being scandalously low-cut, but the sheer top that covered her arms and upper body grew more opaque towards the chest so as to not show too much. A sort of ivy pattern flowed up her sleeves, creeping along the pale skin slightly visible through the fabric. Faint texture on the dress broke up the colour just a bit, and Yuzuha felt that it really brought out her eyes.
Sumire had told her she looked like a tomato, to which Yuzuha had responded with various rude words that dad had gently but firmly instructed her not to say towards her sister in the future.
...She did not look like a tomato.
Checking herself in the mirror, Yuzuha's eyes lingered on a spot below her collarbone, where beneath the gauzy fabric was visible a faded tattoo reading 'ES-07' below a design of overlapping leaves. Her mouth crooked up in a humourless smile — she found it kind of funny sometimes to imagine the bland corporate meetings where Porcelumex planned and approved the graphic design work for their gruesome child nightmare factory. Maybe it was in some artist's portfolio somewhere.
A quick smear of concealer later and she had put her dress back on, looking at what now seemed like just a regular old patch of skin. There, said Alice's voice in her head, perfectly symmetrical!
She applied a little makeup, checked and double-checked the batteries on her sound processors, practiced walking on heels a little narrower than she was used to, and apologized profusely to Kamanosuke that he'd have to sit this one out. When she finally started running out of things to fuss with, she decided it was time to go before she made herself late.
Yuzuha rarely made the trip into the big city, long and boring as it was, but she'd done it enough times to be familiar with it. She arrived at the station in the Janus Quarter without incident, tastefully ahead of their scheduled meeting time.
The place was packed with countless people coming home from work, and Yuzuha wove through the crowds like the practiced street rat she was, searching for a pair of bunny ears. It took a couple minutes, but eventually she spied a little rabbit, standing nervously on the edge of the throng of people like she was afraid of being trampled if she stepped inside.
Alice wore a short navy blue jacket with a boyish cut and cuffed sleeves over a crisp white shirt cinched with a narrow black belt. Deep blue pants hugged her thighs and flared around her calves, with a flattering fit around the rear accentuated by her fluffy little bunny tail poking out the back.
Oh my god, thought Yuzuha.
Alice hadn't noticed her yet. She broke from the crowd and made a wide circle, staying clear of Alice's line of sight until she was right behind her. She leant in and whispered huskily: "Hey there beautiful — you come here often?"
Alice probably grew three centimetres from how stiffly she stood up. Her jaw clamped tightly shut, reducing her scream to the whistle of a particularly panicked kettle. She wheeled around, glaring daggers. "Yuzuha!" she hissed, "d-don't startle me like that! And you sound like some sort of... lecher!"
"Whaaat, me? No way."
"Hmph," said Alice, folding her arms over her chest. "But, thank you for the compliment. You are looking lovely today as well."
"You flatter me, my lady," said Yuzuha, twirling her dress theatrically. She held out a hand to Alice. "We're almost right on time, should we get going?"
"I know where it is, Yuzuha, you don't need to lead me by the hand," said Alice, but she reached out and took Yuzuha's hand in hers regardless.
Yuzuha laced their fingers together with a grin and practically skipped all the way to the restaurant. It was out of the way of the main thoroughfare, a sleek modern building nestled on a quiet street, with a well-manicured little garden flanking the doors.
The place was packed. The line wasn't quite out the door, but the people there were going to be waiting for a while. Fortunately, their reservation saw them whisked swiftly to their table, where the waiter left them to discuss their orders.
"You want some wine?" asked Yuzuha, leafing through the drinks menu. "I bet if you told them you're a Thymefield they'd let us order it."
"I will do no such thing," said Alice. "Iced tea would be lovely, if they have that."
"Sure, sure," she replied, raising a hand for a server's attention.
Drinks in hand, they settled on their orders, and were left to themselves again while they waited. After Alice finished poking her straw around in her glass to ensure the ice was evenly distributed to either side, she took a sip.
"Ah, delightful," she said, smiling across the table at Yuzuha. "It's been too long since we spent the evening together — thank you for inviting me."
"Let's see if the food's not terrible before you thank me, but, you're right. It's been way too long."
Specifically, it had been eight days. They had gone for a long stroll around Failume Heights last Friday. But that was eight days too many, and Yuzuha had been itching for her fix. She didn't miss her opportunity to stare more-or-less openly, watching the mood lighting glint off of Alice's mismatched eyes, and highlight the little flyaway she could never quite get tucked into her hair. Her typically razor-straight posture had relaxed, leaning slightly to one side as she sat almost—if not quite—like a regular person instead of some sort of noble courtier.
"...There isn't something on my face, is there?" Alice asked eventually.
"Oh! No," said Yuzuha, quickly pulling her gaze away, "no, it's perfect. You're perfect."
"That's surely an exaggeration," she replied with some amusement. "But I'm flattered. Ah," she added, "and I've been meaning to ask how Kamanosuke was doing, I've missed seeing him as well. How has everyone been?"
"Kama's cranky that he doesn't get to eat at a restaurant today, but he'll recover. Otherwise, things have been pretty quiet lately." Business at Mystic Wares had been good, but not so good as to be remarkable. Everyone was in good health, and no particular disasters had arisen — a thoroughly unexciting week. "Oh yeah, there was one thing," Yuzuha remembered, "Kaede did a school report about me."
"...Oh, did she really?"
"I don't appreciate that dubious tone of yours, m'lady. I'll have you know that I took it perfectly seriously. But yeah, it was some thing about your family's jobs. They mostly meant your parents, but she said to dad, 'I don't wanna talk about some old guy,' and so I became the official Mystic Wares representative in his place."
"How rude of her," said Alice, looking a little scandalized.
Yuzuha shook her head. "No, well... he was definitely a little bummed, but at the same time sort of not?" Well, not the exact same time. Yuzuha had watched him go through the five stages of grief right there in the kitchen. His mood had picked up pretty quick, though. "I think he's happy that the little ones can see him that way: like he's just her dad. He's not somebody who took in out of charity; he's the same as any other dad, and dads are boring — so she wrote about her totally awesome big sister instead."
"Is that not how you feel as well? I thought you had quite a good relationship with Mr. Li."
"You mean Mr. Ukinami Baorong?"
Alice gave her a look. "You're simply never going to let me live that down, are you?"
Yuzuha giggled. "Nope. But don't get me wrong, dad's great. I was just a little older, y'know? I'm always going to remember a time when I wasn't his daughter."
Yuzuha had spent her first couple years of freedom mostly feral. She had never disliked Li Baorong — her dad had a way with kids like nothing else, honestly — but it had taken a long time for her to feel like part of a family, and not a stowaway liable to be handed back over to her captors at any moment. She still had every escape route she'd plotted from Failume Heights memorized, though she probably wouldn't fit through some of the narrower passages these days.
"I feel I can relate, in a fashion," said Alice. "Not that I was ever adopted, of course, but after my father... passed, and as grandpa's health began to ail, I spent a lot of time with some of my childhood caregivers. I'm not oblivious to the fact that they were paid for their efforts, but they have always treated me as family, and I do love them dearly. It was just never the same."
Time to reminding Alice of her murdered father: around ten minutes. Stellar work, Yuzuha, really crushing this whole 'date' thing. Still, Alice spoke with a smile, if a sad and distant one.
"I'd bet anything that they love you right back," said Yuzuha. "I'm sure that the paycheque doesn't hurt, but nobody was ever gonna see a pretty little princess like you in pain and not get attached."
Her smile brightened just a bit. "I wouldn't mind thinking so."
"Annnnyway, that's what's up with my folks. How about you? Any notable shenanigans ongoing in the noble House of Thymefield?"
"There is no need to make it sound so grandiose," said Alice, like a woman who didn't swear an oath on her family's name every three conversations or so. "...Nor would I say that there are any 'shenanigans' occurring, particularly."
Yuzuha didn't miss the way she fidgeted as she spoke. "Buuuuut...?"
Alice folded her arms over her chest with a pout, not quite meeting Yuzuha's eyes as she responded. "But I did get quite a scolding the other day, if you must know."
"Eh? Who gets a taste of my umbrella?"
"Absolutely nobody. It was entirely my fault. There's been a rumour going around school, you see: if you look out of a specific window on the third floor during the second last period of the day, you can witness the apparition of a former student walking along the outer edge of the West garden pond, where she supposedly drowned many years ago."
"Your school has a pond?"
"That's not the important part of the story. The point is, I decided to investigate. I calculated where the girl must be appearing at what time, and went down to the pond to meet her. After trying it for three days, though, I failed to even catch a glimpse of her, and I ended up being seen by Mrs. Bricke, whose class I was supposed to be attending those days. She gave me quite an earful."
Yuzuha couldn't help the grin that spread wide across her face. "Skipping class, huh? A good girl like you?"
Alice smiled back somewhat bashfully, a rare mischief twinkling in her eyes. "Yes, well... perhaps the way that you behave has inspired me to be a bit of a bad girl sometimes."
"My lady," Yuzuha gasped, holding a hand over her heart in shock, "is that really the impression that you have of me?"
"It is."
"Yeowch."
It was around that time that their food arrived at last. For Alice, a creamy truffle pasta tossed with a variety of mushrooms with fancy-sounding names. For Yuzuha, a plump cut of grilled fish with charred vegetables and an artful drizzle of sauce. Between them, a plate of lightly toasted artisanal bread that looked right out of a photo in some food magazine.
Yuzuha waited politely for Alice to try a dainty little bite of her food before she sawed off a chunk of fish and shoved it in her mouth. Her eyes went wide, and she immediately followed it with a piece of the bread. "Thish ish really good," she said.
"Yuzuha, chew your food," Alice directed. "But I'm impressed, yes. Maybe we should come here more often."
...That wasn't happening on Yuzuha's budget, but if Alice ever felt like treating her she would be hard-pressed to refuse.
Yuzuha sheepishly slowed her pace so as to not devour her food like a starving orphan — she had been neither of those things for close to a decade. The two of them continued to chatter as they ate; Alice's admission of her misadventure seemed to have put her in a mood to share, and Yuzuha was happy to sit back and let her take the stage for a while.
She talked about the family garden (it had been quite an effort to make sure all the flowers were arranged symmetrically), about a horror novel she regretted reading (she had thought it wouldn't be that scary if it was just words), and some amusing anecdotes about her classmates. Yuzuha gave her a prompt here and there where she felt the recounting could use more details, but her storytelling wasn't half bad. Maybe she'd been practicing.
Eventually, though, Yuzuha started to notice something missing from the conversation. She had every time they'd talked recently, actually. When Alice was winding down a tale about her butler, Mr. Arnold — apparently the man could be quite a character — she decided to voice what had been on her mind.
"Has everything been going alright in your classes?" she asked.
Alice blinked, struck silent like the question had taken her by surprise. "Oh, um, yes. Why do you ask?"
"I just haven't heard anything about them lately. You're always telling me all about whatever you're studying — I know that I'm a feckless delinquent who would be happy to never think about school again, but to you it's pretty exciting. I like hearing you excited about it."
"Oh, I... do you really? Well, it's..."
Yuzuha decided to offer her an out. "Nothing that interesting, huh? Eh, that happens."
Alice didn't take it. She twirled her pasta around her fork with a complicated expression. "No, it's interesting, just... it's a difficult subject matter. I didn't want to burden you with it."
"Hey, I'm not that dumb."
"Not that sort of difficult," she said with a shake of her head. "Rather, we're entering a fairly intense period in Ether studies. Most of it, you know, has been learning about Ether from an industrial perspective. How to harvest it, contain it, use it, profit from it. The basic principles of Ethereals and corruption have been included as well, obviously, but sooner or later you need to dig a little deeper. Lately, we've been learning about the specific effects of Ether on living tissue. There have been, um, examples."
"I hope they picked someone you didn't like."
"Yuzuha! They're not corrupting students, it's just videos." Alice scrunched up her face. "Sorry, that's an inappropriate way to speak of them. They are not just videos, they're recordings of Ether corruption captured on tape in Hollows. The people in them are—were—very real."
Yuzuha was a little surprised that they would show something like that at a pampered rich girls' school, but perhaps that wasn't fair. Alice was right, you didn't become an expert in Ether science without seeing what it was really like.
"Hey," she said softly, "this isn't something you need to keep from me, y'know? If you're ever having trouble with it, we can talk."
She had, after all, seen Ether corruption up close in ways she hoped Alice never would.
"Thank you. I think I'm handling it just fine, but it's a complicated feeling. It's horrifying, obviously, but at the same time... would it be alright if I called it fascinating? Ever since we've started these lessons, I've been struck by what an enigma it all is. It's humbling to realise that for all that we've accomplished, there's still so much we just don't know."
Alice's expression took on an unusual cast. Yuzuha had seen that steely look in her eyes before, when she was staring down a holographic horror at the Fantasy Resort, or prowling the city for ghosts at night. An almost manic dedication to grabbing hold of a mystery and taking it apart with her own hands.
"It's something you want to get the bottom of, right?"
Alice's eyes lit up. "Yes, exactly! It would be presumptuous, of course, to think that I would be the one to finally crack it, after all these years, but can you imagine? One of the greatest mysteries of our time, a true horror story known by everyone alive — what a thing to solve."
Her words came out in a rush, passion thick in her voice. It was hard not to get caught up in it. Yuzuha cocked a grin at her. "Well, if you ever need a great test subject, I happen to know a girl."
She might as well have dumped a glass of water on her head. "That isn't funny," Alice said flatly. All of her enthusiasm seemed to have vanished in an instant.
Yeesh, tough crowd.
"I-It's not something I mind joking about, you know?" Yuzuha insisted. "Not with you. But if it upsets you, my bad."
"No, it's..." Alice stared down at her food for a moment, looking embarrassed. "I can't pretend it doesn't, but I overstepped. This was years of your life, it wouldn't be fair of me to ask you not to speak of it. Even if it's a joke, though, I want you to know that nobody, least of all me, will ever put you through that again. I would not allow it."
Yuzuha was caught off guard by the swooping sensation in her gut the declaration triggered. "Appreciate it, Princess," she mumbled, hoping that the low light in the restaurant would disguise her face turning the same shade as her dress.
An awkward silence settled over them, cooling to a more companionable one as they both decided to return their attention to their meals. Yuzuha reached across the table, wordlessly poaching a mushroom from Alice's plate. Alice retaliated by snatching a sprout, and back and forth, until soon they were both smiling at their quiet little game.
Alice ended up eating a decent portion of Yuzuha's meal in addition to most of her own. For such a delicate little princess, she sure could pack it away. Yuzuha waved down her offer to settle the bill, and winced only slightly when she saw the number printed on it.
The daylight was fading fast as they left the restaurant, casting the city in shades of orange mixed with sickly green sloughed from the horizon of the nearby Hollow. Alice's hand found Yuzuha's again as they walked back towards the city's heart. Their course meandered, leading them astray from the terminal Yuzuha would be returning home by and towards a railing overlooking the sea. Even at this hour ships drifted across the water, their lights joining the dance of shattered colours across its surface.
Yuzuha wasn't looking at any of it. She watched Alice's face in profile, and the way her ears swiveled to catch the sounds of the city around her. She watched her small, gentle smile, and finally pulled her eyes away when they lingered too long on her lips.
"Y'know," said Yuzuha eventually, "you're really amazing."
"Hmm?" said Alice. "Wherever is that coming from?"
"You just are," she repeated firmly. "You're so..." Beautiful. Brave. Kind. Everything Yuzuha wanted. Everything Yuzuha wasn't. "...so driven. You have such a clear idea of what you want to achieve, and you work so hard to get there. I think you deserve some recognition for that, sometimes."
Alice chuckled.
"H-Hey, what's so funny?"
"Ah, sorry," she said, "it's nothing you said. Just, I think I'm quite ordinary, if anything. But hearing that from you, it's a little funny — because I feel the same way about you."
"Eh, me? No way."
"Somehow, I thought you would say that." Alice turned to face her fully, features cast into relief by the setting sun. "But it's how I really feel. You're such a warm and outgoing person, even after... everything. Even when you're struggling, you make it seem effortless to just keep going. You're so much cleverer than you let on, and you always have a joke or a story to make people smile — even if some of them are a little off-colour."
Yuzuha opened her mouth to brush off the praise, but Alice continued.
"I haven't really had a lot of close relationships, I'm sure you can guess. Between the weight of my family name and my... peculiarities, few of my peers tend to get too close to me. With you, I never feel the need to be so guarded. Every day I spend with you is a delight, and after such a short time together, you've become an incredibly precious friend." Alice shook her head. "No, even more than that."
Yuzuha considered the possibility that she had been struck by lightning and died on the walk here. Or maybe she was dreaming, and her date was still tomorrow. Despite how forward Alice assumed she was, she still hadn't worked her way up to confessing. Every time she thought about it, the words wouldn't connect right in her mind. It felt like being drugged, just trying to string together the few sentences she needed. And now, Alice was...
"M-More?" she choked out.
"That's right!" Alice declared boldly, stepping forward and wrapping her arms around Yuzuha. "You're my best friend in the whole world!"
Ah, so it wasn't a dream. It was a nightmare. That made more sense.
"O-Oh," said Yuzuha, awkwardly returning the hug with one arm. "I really... appreciate that..."
The hug seemed to last forever, Alice's warmth pressed tightly against her and Alice's scent filling her nose. Before Yuzuha could choke to death on it, Alice finally pulled away, beaming at her.
She was... really happy. Yuzuha smiled despite herself. "You're my best friend too," she said. "My favourite person in the world. Never woulda expected that from how I thought of you a few months ago, huh?"
"Well, I won't pretend that I enjoyed being the target of your ire, but it is nostalgic to look back on. It isn't as if you were wrong to be upset with me back then."
I was wrong, she wanted to say. It had never been Alice's fault, not what had been done to her or to any of the miners. She had just been an excuse, a scapegoat, exactly like Porcelumex had wanted her to be from the beginning, and Yuzuha had fallen for it. For some reason the words died in her throat, though, and she ended up just sort of staring at her.
After a moment, Alice seemed to notice the mounting darkness around them. "Oh, but it really is getting late, isn't it?" she observed. "I should be calling Mr. Arnold to bring the car around soon. We can bring you home, if you like."
"Nah, I already paid for a two-way ticket," Yuzuha lied. "I don't mind the long ride, it's a nice chance to think about stuff."
"If you're sure," said Alice. She leaned in to grab Yuzuha's hand one last time. "I really enjoyed today, Yuzuha. We should do things like this more often."
"I'd love that," she replied.
She hadn't lied about the ride back to Failume Heights being a nice chance to think. Yuzuha spent a while just watching the world zoom past out the window, before they had left the city lights behind and she saw only herself in the dark glass, lit by the dim lights overhead. Her reflection smirked at her.
Things weren't actually so bad. She hadn't really gotten rejected. She was still Alice's friend — her best friend — and friendship was the first step on the road to girlfriendship. Probably.
She just hadn't set things up right. She'd gotten something about the mood wrong, and Alice hadn't understood her properly. She needed to take a step back and try again, and she already had an idea of who to talk to about it.
It was time to call in the cavalry.