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Since Mayuri can remember, a part of her has been somewhere else. A part of her has belonged in the sky.
Reaching out to try and reach the starlight and noticing how both sun and moon disappear behind the palm of her hand.
It only takes a thumb to cover them anyway.
One degree in one hundred and eighty.
At least, that measurement sounds like something Okarin would say.
She listens to everything he says. He's her tether to the Earth, after all. Without him, the rest of her would float away to the place where the fizz in his Dr. Pepper goes. Still around, yeah, but somewhere no one can define or reach. They might be able to describe, scientifically, what happens to those magic little bubbles when they escape and go away. But returning to the air they used to be before some big machine made them a part of the gods' nectar, or whatever it's supposed to be, is so mundane and not really an accurate description of anything.
Rintarou is two years older than Mayushii, and it had never bothered or caused her scandal. Other girls in school sometimes teased her about it, especially once Okarin started going to university, but he is still the same Okarin.
She wants to believe she is the same Mayushii, too.
Only she wonders, is she the bubble still in the soda, or the bubble after it pops, silently, back into the air?
Mayuri dreams of sparkles and ribbons, stitches and seams. She likes to put them together, making little pieces of shows and games real to her friends. She wonders if she doesn't make those things more real than she is.
Sometimes, in a room, she feels like she blends in, invisible. Other times, she thinks she stands out like a sore thumb, like a person too young to be trapped in her current skin.
She isn't as young as people think she acts, though. She isn't naive. She knows she isn't those things, because she's listening even when they think she's too young, too dumb, too far away with her head in the clouds.
Not yet, her mind says.
She doesn't know why, but not yet is how the little pendulum ticking in her head always goes.
Tick-tock, says the little hand of her old pocket watch.
Tick-tock, whisper the hands of the big, four-sided clock erected above that train station.
Tick-tock, goes the beating of her heart, because she's a hostage.
She laughs with the boys and their stupid, dirty jokes that they like to pretend she doesn't hear or doesn't understand. It isn't that she doesn't get it. It's that it doesn't really matter, because she knows that there are some things held beyond her. Things she knows she will never know. She just doesn't know how yet.
When a girl comes with fiery red hair she gets from a dye, Mayushii is thrilled that there is someone softer, someone who knows a little bit more about the world beyond the imaginary game that has kept her helium balloon heart from floating away to the place her ancestors have already gone.
She is sure that Okarin doesn't believe in magic, but she thinks there might be a little magic, a little tie between people, that pulls them all together. Bit by bit, the little rented room Okarin likes to call a lab becomes like a home. A place people would want to stay for a while.
And Mayushii is glad.
She's so glad because it means that maybe Okarin will have others who will stay, too, when his hostage finally escapes.
She has no desire to leave. Not anymore.
But each day, she feels a little bit mismatched with her own form, a bit outside the outline of her feet. It tingles and tickles, down in her soul, as she tries to work out why it feels like a knot is working itself free.
She doesn't want it when it happens.
She doesn't understand.
Moeka had been their friend.
Moeka had been all alone, and they had invited her home.
Moeka, Moeka, please, she wants to say, but she cannot.
Those pleas come from somewhere else, so far away, because the only thing in the room with her is the short, shiny barrel of the gun.
The strange thing is, Mayuri is afraid because she knows.
This is not the end.
This is the beginning.
This is the beginning of the unwinding.
This is why, all her life.
The relationship between cause and effect is a tricky one, Hououin Kyouma might say, but right now he doesn't know, doesn't know, doesn't know…
He will know, will know, will know.
And it will never go, never go, never go away in his head.
It will, sometimes, in hers.
Many times, in fact.
After the first time, she will live many, many times, each time more ignorant than the last, more lost and more confused. Not knowing why he can't look at her. Not knowing why her best friend, once full of stupid smiles and daydreams, has eyes and hands soaked in blood and tears.
She sees it, always, down at the end. Deep, deep, not in bubbles but in hourglass sand.
It's okay… It's okay… she tells him, way down deep, at the beginning and the end, in the hourglass sand.
He won't accept that it's alright. He won't let the girl who, somehow, against the odds, was always going to die. Her simple life not enough to hold her down to the ground.
Only, that's even harder for him, because he can't let the remarkable girl who is so brilliant the world can barely stand to let her shine.
One way or another, someone has to die.
She knows it when she sleeps, but when she's awake, she knows only the waking world of peace she wishes they would have. And more and more, she thinks the balance has shifted. Once, she'd held the secrets for him, never knowing what they were. Now, he holds secrets for her, knowing them all.