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It was a warm summer evening in mid-June of 2048. The sun, having just set, cast an orange sheet across the skies above metropolitan Tokyo, the hubbub of city life not fading one bit as the city’s millions of inhabitants began to shift into their nightlife.
It’s good to be home, thought one Chris Yukine, age 22, as she crossed the street, spotting her destination out of the corner of her eye. Exactly where it was supposed to be. Her time abroad hadn’t been able to clear away her memories of home, it seemed.
Not that she’d been to this place anyhow- the last time Chris had been in Tokyo, she hadn’t been of drinking age. Still, she’d filed it away for later even back then, liking how out-of-the-way it was. The nature of this meeting necessitated a low profile, after all.
Not because of her, but because of the people she was meeting.
A satisfying ring met Chris’s ears as she pushed through the door, generated by an honest-to-gods bell. That just added more to the place’s charm, in her book. But that would have to wait, because she wasn’t the only one who’d noticed the bell. Someone up at the bar had.
Sunglasses lifted away from gentle cyan eyes, and a warm smile overtook the face of their owner. She leaned over just a little, mass of coral-pink hair bouncing on the way, to whisper to the other person at the bar, who turned promptly at her hushed words. That pair of eyes, a much darker blue that matched her short hair, found Chris immediately.
Chris waved to Tsubasa and Maria for the first time in four years.
Maria stood from her barstool immediately, expensive heels tapping on the wood floor. She offered Chris the one she’d been sitting on and moved one over, letting her sit between them.
“Heya, Maria, Senpai.” Chris greeted as she took a seat.
“Oh, Chris,” Maria replied, putting a hand on Chris’s shoulder with no force and a lot of fondness, “It’s so very good to see you again face-to-face!”
Tsubasa spoke next, her voice cool but her face bright, “You don’t have to call me Senpai anymore, Yukine. Neither of us are in school.”
An eyeroll. “You’re still my S.O.N.G. senpai, Senpai.”
“That… is fair.”
“So,” began Maria, “How was your flight? Uneventful?”
Chris groaned. “Oh, I wish. Someone’s baby just would not shut up three rows behind me. Not even the headphones you got me for my birthday could cancel the noise.”
A frown. “They don’t work?”
Chris chuckled, waving her hand to signal the bartender. “Nah, I’m messing with you, they worked great. But I couldn’t have ‘em on the entire flight.”
“Oh, thank goodness,” Maria said, “With how much that model costs, I’d have felt bad if they didn’t do their job.”
“No kiddin’. I almost did a spit take on the price tag on those things. I get that you’re a rich celeb, but you don’t have to spoil me like that.”
“Chris Yukine, I will spoil you as much as I please,” replied Maria, “In fact, just because you said that, I’m getting you a really nice car tomorrow.”
“Please don’t.”
Another warm smile from the eldest of the three. “Fine. But whenever you decide that you’d like a car, let me know.”
Chris met her eyes. “You really don’t have to buy everything for me. You know that I wanna stand on my own two feet.”
“Chris, even with the vast majority of my earnings going to charity I still have more money than I know what to do with! Why shouldn’t I use it to spoil the people I love?”
“You don’t spoil Senpai.”
“That’s because I’m richer than her, technically,” Tsubasa added helpfully. “Establishing the Kazanari Foundation hasn’t even put a dent in the family fortune yet.”
“Whatever your finest beer is, please,” Chris said to the bartender, a tall, older westerner with butterfly motifs in his clothes. Then, to Tsubasa, “How is that whole thing coming along, Senpai?”
A curt nod from the sentinel. “Three weeks ago, we were able to declare the Korean peninsula officially Yggdrasil-free. Yesterday we finished rebuilding the first few neighborhoods.”
“That’s great news,” said Chris. “Even dead and inert, that tree’s a fuckin’ eyesore.”
“How do you mean?”
“I’ve been all over the place for my studies, Maria. I keep seeing branches of that thing around. Not a fun reminder.”
“You won’t have to deal with that much longer, Yukine.”
“Thank fuck.”
Maria giggled. “It’s nice to know that university did nothing to clean up your vocabulary.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Chris asked, lifting an eyebrow.
“Just what I said! Your pottymouth is one of the things that makes you… you.”
“I agree. It’s part of the Yukine charm,” Tsubasa added.
Chris frowned as a tall, foamy mug of amber alcohol was placed in front of her. “I just walked in and you’re both already teasing me.”
Maria took a sip of her own drink, which looked to be a bottle of mead. “You don’t exactly make it difficult.”
Chris huffed and turned to Tsubasa, who took a sip of her own drink from its shallow, wide dish to avoid having to speak. “What’ve you got, senpai?”
Tsubasa turned her head and gestured with the sakazuki. “I’ve got sake, Yukine. Were you expecting otherwise?”
“You’re as Japanese as ever.”
“Old habits die hard. Grandfather may be wasting away in his cell-”
“Good riddance,” hissed Maria behind them.
Tsubasa smiled bemusedly before finishing, “...but not of all the habits he drilled into me needed to go.”
“You’re out drinking, Senpai. There’s really no need to be all prim and proper.”
“I don’t plan on making a fool of myself tonight, Yukine. You have so much to catch us up on, after all. I need to remember your stories.”
Chris brought the beer to her lips and took an unnecessarily long swig. Maria’s eyebrows rose, impressed with the display. After about ten seconds, Chris set the partially-drained mug down.
“Ahh,” breathed the shorter woman, “That hits the damn spot. Before you make me talk about me, can I ask what happened to your hair? Last video chat we had, it looked as long as ever.”
Tsubasa’s cheeks reddened.
“Oh, this is a great one,” Maria chirped on Chris’s other side, “Tell her, honey.”
“No,” grumped Tsubasa, hiding her face behind the collar of her biker jacket. “It’s not funny.”
“It’s actually extremely funny,” Maria whispered to Chris.
Chris folded her arms. “Well, now I’ve gotta hear this. Spill it, Senpai.”
Tsubasa stuck out her lower lip. “Fine. I tried to cook a big fancy meal for Maria the other night.”
“It was actually just stir-fry.”
“I thought I was telling the story?”
“Sorry. Continue.” Maria stifled a giggle.
“As I was saying. I tried cooking for Maria and, well… my hair… kind of caught fire.”
Chris’s eyes widened. “Everything okay?”
“Yes, Yukine. It was just my hair… but I had to get all the burnt parts cut off. It hasn’t been this short since… well, ever.”
“I think you look dashing.” Maria said sweetly.
Tsubasa’s flush deepened. “Thank you.”
Chris made a noise of fake disgust. “Seriously? Right in front of my beer? Do that at home.”
“Sorry, Chr-”
“I’m joking, ya big kitty cat,” Chris cut Maria off with a smile, “I just spent 4 years in college. I’ve seen a frankly unethical amount of public displays of affection.”
A beat. “So you’re… okay with us flirting in front of you?”
“Knock yourselves out. That said, if you start doing nose kisses, I’m gonna puke.”
“I appreciate the warning, Yukine. Now, you’ve stalled long enough. Tell us about some of your adventures.”
And so, Chris, who had kept her video-chat status updates over the past four years limited to education progress reports and general life updates, started to share what she had been up to socially whilst out in the world.
At first the stories were tame, anecdotes about her roommates’ antics, tales of the wonders of hiking the Scottish Highlands on weekends.
Then Chris’s first mug of beer ran out and she wasted no time on ordering another. Already a pink tinge had taken her cheeks, and it was plain for both Tsubasa and Maria to see that Chris was just as much of a lightweight as her height suggested.
Halfway through the second glass, Chris admitted that, after being dragged to a sports bar by a classmate, she had taken a liking to football.
As an aside, “Apparently Americans call it ‘soccer’ because they have their own sport called football that’s played completely differently? Bass-ackwards, those guys.”
“Chris, you’re half American.”
“Evidently not the half that likes sports, or I would be tall!”
Tsubasa murmured, “And athletic.”
The second mug was emptied. Chris’s request for a third was ever so slightly slurred.
“Anyway, they kinda encouraged ya to drink while ya were watching the matches, so I tried something new every week. The whiskey up there is to die for.”
Maria smiled. “You never really struck me as an alcohol… connoiseur, Chris. I’m surprised.”
“Yeah, well,” Chris waved an arm halfheartedly in the pinkette’s direction, “I heard it can help a personnnn… come outta their shell, yanno? So I figured why th’fuck not.”
As the drinks took more of an effect on Chris, though, they truly understood what she meant by that. The stories started to sound more like the sort of thing one would see in old movies. She spun them narratives of wild parties in the dorms or the houses of richer students. When she talked about her junior year, spent studying abroad in Brazil, though, the tales grew almost dizzyingly complex.
The beers also kept coming.
“My life’s a fuckin’ movie,” muttered Chris, immediately after finishing a tale that ended in her waking up with a vicious hangover in the crook of a tree.
“In fairness,” Tsubasa said, still not showing the effects of her sake, “All three of us have led very movie-esque lives.”
“Though your recent experiences seem to have hopped to a different genre,” Maria joked, also still fully in control of her faculties after a second bottle of mead.
“Barkeep,” Chris called to the man, “Hit me up with a sixth.”
“This is your seventh, dear girl,” he replied in clipped Japanese.
“Fuck.”
Tsubasa set her sakazuki down on the bar. “Are you alright? I understand you’re no stranger to drinking, but this doesn’t seem like the sort of situation for a binge.”
A sip. “Perfectly fine, Senpai. Don’tcha worry about me.”
“Chris,” Maria prodded as gently as she dared, “It’s us. You can open up freely.”
Chris let out a big, windy sigh. “I missed you two a lot, yanno. Not just you, ‘fcourse- that dummy, Miku, not to mention Kirika ‘n Shirabe. But you two are diff’rent. There were a buncha times where I wished I had one or both ‘a you there to help guide me through stuff.”
“And now?”
“Now I’ve gotcha here and… I dunno. ‘M just feelin’ a lot.”
“Like what, Yukine?”
Chris massaged her scalp. “Y’know how college is like… the place ta meet people? Like, romantically.”
Maria blinked. “Chris, did you have relationship trouble?”
Tsubasa turned bodily to face Chris, eyes wide. “Yukine, did you have a relationship?”
“I tried, ” Chris threw up her hands in exasperation, “And for three years I couldn’t get a damn date. Whole buncha people wanted to sleep with me, but no way in hell was I getting mixed up in all that. I wanted a motherfuckin’ relationship, not a fuckbuddy.”
“And then?”
“Senior year. Really cute girl in one ‘a my classes. Suuuper fuckin’ smart too. Taller ‘n me, dark hair in twintails with bows in it, great figure, pretty eyes, liked to wear red, too, which we bonded over.”
“She sounds delightful,” Maria responded, “So… what happened?”
“She was a lot like me… and that wasn’t aaany good. We ended up bein’ really bitchy ‘n… kinda toxic to each other. Wasn’t that she was a bad gal, just… we were a mismatch. But I guess I feel real shitty that we couldn’t make it work, yanno?”
“I see. I’m sorry things turned out that way, Yukine.”
“But now ‘m here with you two… ‘n you’re real happy together from what I can tell. Match made in heaven ‘n all that shit. Didja two know your Amalgams are symbolic of a perfect Chinese marriage? Learned that inna history course.”
“I did not know that.”
“Neither did I.”
Chris picked up her mug again. “Crazy, right? Anyway, I dunno, I guess seeing you two so happy for all these years makes me wonder why I couldn’t make shit work for even one year. It’s messin’ with me, and it’s messin’ how happy I should be ta be back with you.”
Maria put her hand on Chris’s shoulder again, ever gentle and respectful of the shorter woman’s personal space. “I’m sorry you’ve had poor luck in love, Chris. I’m sure the right girl for you is out there someplace.”
Tsubasa made a noise of affirmation. “She’s right, you know. You’re a wonderful person, Yukine. Anyone would be lucky to be with you, but not just anyone can be that special someone.”
Chris leaned into Maria’s hand a little bit, turning her body towards her but unable to meet her eyes. “Sometimes I wonder if I missed th’ ‘right girl’ already. Like, I had a chance ta be with her but I fucked it up because of all the issues I hadn’t worked through. Or, like… the timing wasn’t right, so I never got the chance to begin with.”
“Chris,” Maria spoke softly, “Look at me. What are you trying to say?”
Chris forced herself to meet those bright blue eyes. “Iunno, I guess… fuck… what if she was right in front’a me the whole time?”
Those beautiful, beautiful eyes widened as Maria processed what Chris was saying, and began to put two and two together.
“Chris… do you mean-”
“Fuckin’... hell. C’mere.”
And without another word, Chris reached up and pulled Maria’s lips down to her own.
Tsubasa’s eyes went wider than her sakazuki.
The kiss wasn’t some passionate, heated act brought about by the haze of drunkenness. It was gentle, tender, a confession and nothing more. Chris could taste the sweet honey flavor of mead Maria had been drinking.
She pulled away, and both her and Maria exhaled softly, warming each other’s lips. Chris dropped her hand from the back of Maria’s head and straightened up again. The older woman looked more than a little shocked, gently touching her mouth with her fingertips. The cyan eyes Chris had fallen for five years ago darted between Chris’s face and Maria’s fingers.
But she didn’t look upset. Chris’s admittedly impaired judgment supposed that was a good thing.
She spun on her stool to face Tsubasa, whose deep blue eyes were still incredibly wide at the display.
These eyes, too. Chris had fallen for them six years ago.
Guess it’s only fair I kiss you, too.
Having more preparation in regards to Chris’s intentions, Tsubasa met her halfway, leaning in herself. The kiss itself was much the same, soft and chaste, but Tsubasa set Chris’s heart beating a little faster by cupping her chin with two fingers. She also didn’t taste anything- it was so like Tsubasa to drink the blandest sake possible.
When they broke apart, Chris licked her lips nervously, managing to feel a bit embarrassed despite her inebriation.
“Yukine,”
“Chris,”
Tsubasa and Maria spoke at the same time.
“I love you, you fuckin’ dumbasses,” Chris answered them both. “Have for a while.”
They were quiet a second, processing.
Then, “Gods above, she must be really drunk.”
“Yes, I don’t doubt she’s sincere, but to blurt that out so readily… un-Chris-like.”
“We should cut her off.”
“We should.”
Chris protested immediately. “Go ta hell! I’m not fuckinnn’... drunk… just a lil’ tipsy.”
“No more beers for you, young lady,” Maria replied, sliding Chris’s half-finished seventh mug over to herself. “You’ve had quite enough for one night.”
“Young l- I’m fuckin’ twenty-two!”
Maria lifted the mug to her lips and drank. She drank for a while. In fact, she drank the rest of the beer down all at once.
Chris stared at her.
Fuckin’ hell, that was hot.
Maria set the empty mug down. “Trust me, dear. I know what I’m talking about. And I say you’ve long since hit your limit.”
“...Fine.”
Tsubasa slowly, almost gingerly, wrapped her arms around Chris from behind, still wary of triggering any bad memories. When Chris didn’t push her off or stiffen up, she let it transition into a short but true hug.
“We’ll get you home safe, Yukine.”
“Stupid senpai,” Chris muttered as Maria helped her to her feet and steadied her, “‘M already home.”
Chris opened her eyes slowly. She immediately regretted that decision, because the hangover she was experiencing was brutal enough without the photosensitivity added on. Even so, she forced herself to wake up, slowly rising to a seated position against the pillows.
“Ow ow ow…” she grumbled to herself. She was in her own bed, at least. But where had she been before that…?
It all flooded back to her in an instant.
The bar. Tsubasa and Maria.
Confessing her long-buried feelings to both of them.
Kissing them.
“Oh fuck, ” Chris hissed, reaching for her cell phone.
She didn’t even have to unlock the thing, because waiting on the lock screen was a pair of messages, notifications from a group text that contained…
Herself, Tsubasa, and Maria.
Both texts read, told you you’d make it home safe, baby <3
Chris’s brain bluescreened.
Then, at length, to the apartment that was empty aside from her:
“Did I just get two girlfriends?”