Chapter 95: Eloquence Is Useless — Except When It Isn't.
....
Kaguya made a discovery during the night: Ais Wallenstein's body had stamina that simply did not deplete.
She had operated under the reasonable assumption that physical exertion had limits. Ais's constitution had apparently never been introduced to this concept. The Sword Princess trained every day to the edge of human capability and then past it — her body didn't know how to be tired in the way normal bodies did. If "Liliruca" hadn't transformed back into Suika midway through and inserted herself into proceedings at a critical juncture — disrupting the rhythm at exactly the wrong moment — Kaguya estimated she could have continued until sunrise without meaningful interruption.
She lay on her side afterward, breathing slowly, the room around her carrying the particular atmosphere of an evening that had fully committed to itself. Moonlight came through the window and fell across everything without comment. She rested one palm on Kihara's chest, her index finger tracing idle circles without intention.
"Hm~"
"Ais." His voice was unhurried, easy. "You were unusually motivated tonight. Did Hestia say something to you?"
"No." Kaguya let her eyes close most of the way. "I simply wanted to."
She glanced at the figure still wearing Suika's appearance on the other side of the bed, draped across it with the comfortable ease of someone who had arrived midway through a situation and immediately made herself at home.
"Why are you still in that form?"
"Kihara and I mix things up all the time — wearing different faces, trying new things. The occasional unfamiliar appearance is completely normal~!"
"...You haven't used my face before, have you."
Suika smiled without answering.
The ambiguity was deliberate. She genuinely didn't know whether Liliruca had done that specific thing, so she couldn't confirm or deny. She let the smile do the work instead.
Then her hand moved, purely on reflex — reaching toward her hip.
Found nothing.
Wait.
That gesture. That specific automatic reach for something that should be there.
Kaguya's internal landscape went very quiet, and then very loud.
Not Liliruca wearing Suika's appearance for novelty. Suika herself, using Liliruca's body and Liliruca's transformation magic to wear her own face, arriving in the middle of the night with an agenda she'd formed that afternoon while watching her own expression do things she'd never seen it do before.
She used someone else's body to play herself, Kaguya thought, with the genuine appreciation of someone who recognized a sophisticated move. That's a category of arrangement I didn't account for.
"Hm~~" Kihara yawned — the full,
unselfconscious yawn of someone whose body had finished the evening's accounting and was ready to close the books. He gathered both of them closer with the easy warmth of habit. "Time to sleep."
"Mm."
Both women settled, each carrying thoughts they kept to themselves, and let their breathing slow with the room.
When all three of them had been breathing long and even for several minutes, a fourth presence stepped out of the corner shadow.
Flandre's face was the color of a very ripe apple. Cheeks, neck, ears — all of it. The whole surface.
She had been in the shadow space long enough to receive a comprehensive education in subjects that the Scarlet Devil Mansion's basement had never covered. The air in the room was its own instructor — layered, complex, carrying information that her instincts decoded without asking her permission.
Something had been kindled inside her. The word she would have reached for, if she'd had access to the right vocabulary, was desire — though it was burning in a place she hadn't known could burn, feeding on something she didn't yet have a name for.
She stood at the edge of the bed. Looked at the sleeping figure in the center of it.
Dissolved back into shadow.
The blanket over Kihara shifted. A small lump appeared beneath it, moving with patient, rhythmic determination toward the warmth at the center — the size of a head, advancing with the focused commitment of something that knew exactly where it was going and had decided tonight was the night.
Since the farming had settled into a rhythm that no longer required early mornings, Kihara had largely stopped setting alarms. He slept until his body decided it was finished.
Occasionally Shinobu had her own opinion about when that should be.
Her philosophy on the matter, stated once and referenced often:
"Eloquence is useless. Except when it is."
He woke to her particular application of this principle — shivered once, completely, from somewhere involuntary — and then registered that the space on either side of him was empty. Residual warmth. Faint traces of scent. Two people who had gotten up some time ago.
Ais and Liliruca. Shower. Obviously.
Shinobu had taken the window their absence created.
Breakfast. Everyone present and accounted for, the morning moving through its usual comfortable shape.
"Ais" finished first, took "Liliruca" by the wrist, and both of them were out the door before Kihara had fully processed the movement. He lowered his half-raised hand.
He'd been about to suggest the beach. Hestia would be there, fishing with the focused enthusiasm she applied to everything. It was the kind of morning that suited a loose gathering of people with nowhere particular to be.
Apparently that was not on today's agenda.
He was still recalibrating when his front door received a knock — tentative, with a deliberate pause in the middle, the knock of someone who had rehearsed the approach.
He opened the door.
"Akane" was on the step in Kibougahama High's school uniform, arms at her sides, color in her cheeks running slightly warmer than the morning temperature accounted for. She had the precise, unmistakable look of someone who had prepared extensively for this moment and had used the preparation to make herself more nervous rather than less.
"Kihara... today... would you come to my world with me? Just walk around a bit?"
"Sure."
The expression that moved across her face was the expression of someone who had assembled detailed contingency plans for every form of reluctance and refusal, and was now confronting the total absence of any obstacle to plan around.
"...Really?"
"Nothing pressing today. Taking my girlfriend on a date seems like a reasonable use of a free morning."
"Then — let's go! Now! Immediately!"
Sanae had expected resistance.
She had been staffing the Moriya Shrine's prayer counter long enough to hear every variation of the my partner refuses to go anywhere with me complaint in existence. Ordinary couples generated these grievances constantly. A man with a double-digit girlfriend count, she had reasoned, would be even less inclined to devote a whole morning to one person's preferences.
Instead — he took her hand the moment they stepped into Kibougahama City.
And he talked.
Not the performed kind of talking, not conversation assembled for its own sake. The real kind — the kind that came from someone who had actually been somewhere and wanted to share the texture of it. He pointed out the corner where something had happened, the shop window they'd stopped in front of once for a reason she now understood the shape of without knowing its content. He named the feelings attached to specific streets without announcing that he was doing it.
Sanae listened. The body she was borrowing responded to his voice and his warmth and the easy, unhurried way he occupied space beside her with a current of feeling that was Akane's and not hers — and she found herself carried along in it regardless, wrapped in someone else's love like a coat that fit unexpectedly well.
Even just this, she thought. Even just walking like this, listening to him talk. This would already be enough.
"The model shop's just down there," he said, nodding toward a storefront. "Didn't you say you wanted to pick some up to go over with Sanae? We could go in—"
She looked down at their hands. The way his fingers were folded around hers.
Her teeth found her lower lip for just a moment. "...Let's leave the models for last. Can we find somewhere to sit first? There's a park nearby."
"Works for me."
The bench had paint on it in the technical sense — there had once been paint, and evidence of it remained in patches where it had not yet finished its retreat to reveal the bare wood beneath. Sanae pressed the back of her skirt flat as she sat, the ingrained habit of someone who had been managing shrine maiden robes for years and applied the instinct to every garment she wore.
From the play area nearby came the intermittent soundtrack of children fully committed to a good time. She followed the sound without quite deciding to.
A girl in a red dress was on the swings — feet kicking, chain links singing, being pushed by a friend who was putting genuine effort into it. The small figure rose and fell, rose and fell, the laughter stitching itself into the afternoon air.
"Staring at kids now. Are you thinking about getting one?"
She turned. He was back, a cup in each hand, wearing the expression that meant he had already decided something was funny and was about to make it her problem.
She felt the color arrive in her cheeks as she took the offered cup.
She opened her mouth to say something corrective — something that established the appropriate register for this conversation — and then caught herself cleanly and completely.
She was Akane right now.
And between Akane and Kihara, there was no appropriate register to establish. There was only the easy territory of two people who had already navigated past all of that.
She closed her mouth. Wrapped both hands around the warmth of the cup. Pressed her lips to the straw and took a small, careful sip.
He sat down beside her.
She wasn't talking. He found, as he reliably did when someone went quiet beside him, that the silence presented an interesting opportunity. He watched her profile. Waited for the right moment.
Cheeks slightly rounded. Straw engaged. A sip visibly in progress.
"By the way, babe," he said, clearly and conversationally, "you did let your boyfriend know you were coming out with me today, right?"
The sip became a public event.
"—PFFT!! Cough — cough—"
Sanae surfaced from the spray, face at full temperature, acutely aware with her entire peripheral nervous system that every person within a ten-meter radius had looked over. Boba pearls had achieved independent trajectories. The cup was being gripped with both hands as a structural support.
"You're my boyfriend — what are you even saying—!!"
"Hehe~ I know. Complete premeditation."
There are limits to good nature. Sanae Kochiya, who possessed one of the more durable good natures in Gensokyo, discovered in that precise moment that Kihara had located hers with some kind of instrument and walked directly past it.
She put her cup down. Turned. Hit his shoulder with a closed fist — not hard enough to mean harm, firm enough to mean something.
"You absolute — that was completely on purpose!!"
"Total premeditation. Zero regrets."
"THEN TAKE THIS—!!"
She hit him again. He was already laughing, which made the hitting feel less satisfying and somehow more urgently necessary at the same time. She hit him a third time for good measure.
Around them, the park continued its afternoon. The girl in the red dress reached the peak of her arc and came floating back down, the chain links marking the rhythm.
Sanae looked at Kihara's laughing face.
Looked away.
Pressed her free hand flat against the place in her chest where something warm had settled without asking permission, and showed no signs of moving.
This is someone else's boyfriend, she reminded herself, with careful internal precision.
The warmth considered this information, found it irrelevant, and stayed exactly where it was.
....
Thank you for reading.