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Mafuyu doesn’t know how or why it became a habit, but whenever she doesn’t feel like going home so early these days, she seeks out Shizuku.
This is not foolproof — Shizuku is somewhat hopeless with her phone and sometimes doesn’t see Mafuyu’s message until hours later, or idol practice gets in the way — but it’s become routine now, to the point where Shizuku will sometimes beat Mafuyu to the punch and be already at the range by the time she gets there.
It’s not unpleasant. Whereas she’d generally consider interacting with classmates somewhat constricting, with their over-the-top expectations and good intentions, being near Shizuku is just easy. Sometimes she watches Mafuyu with clear worry, but she never pushes, never goes too far, only stays steady.
“Ohh, Hinomori Shizuku,” Mizuki says when Mafuyu brings her up offhandedly one day, citing the reason behind her nearly imperceptible sigh of discomfort – her torso had become sore after the excessive amount of archery practice, and although the pain doesn’t register exactly how it should, the stiffness makes it hard in a counterproductive way for her to keep her back straight. “Tell her I say hi next time you two practice together, will ya?”
“You?”
“Well, she’s my friend, you know? But we never get to hang out ‘cause she’s so busy usually, with her idol stuff and whatnot.”
Mafuyu makes a quiet noise of assent. Mizuki keeps talking. “How’s it like, by the way? Going to school with an idol like her?”
Most days, Mafuyu’s just floating through the school day, absorbing the bare minimum amount of information in order to keep things churning along. She doesn’t generally put much stock into relationships between other people, but she does kind of think she can recall whispers following Shizuku around in the halls, crowds of lovestruck girls. “Well, she’s… popular.”
Mizuki laughs. “Like you, huh?”
Mafuyu doesn’t even know what to say to that. She supposes Mizuki's right, in a way. Everyone wants the girl they see in her, or perhaps more appropriately, everyone sees what they want. Eventually she settles on a disaffected, “Yeah.”
Beat. Mizuki's contemplative hum. “You think that’s why you two get along so well?”
Mafuyu blinks, hard. There are a couple of things nested in Mizuki’s statement, there. First of all, she hadn’t really considered her and Shizuku to “get along well” — friendly acquaintances, maybe, or distant friends. They have spent an awful lot of time together as of late, though, in spite of how busy they both are, so maybe there’s some truth in that statement. Secondly—
“Because she’s popular?”
“Because you two are alike, I mean.”
Mafuyu’s immediate response is confusion. Hinomori Shizuku is genuinely good, not always put together, and feels a lot, all the time. She is vocal about her love for her little sister, she gets sentimental about snow animals, she derives an absurd amount of enjoyment in picking out a new umbrella. On the other hand, the word good has lost meaning to Mafuyu. She never falters, and feels nothing.
Or. Almost nothing. She had experienced brief moments of fleeting warmth before, a thawing. Shizuku had, once, been the cause of that.
There was an unsaid understanding behind her words that day. I’ll lend you my strength, she had told Mafuyu. Mafuyu could parse what she really meant—let me be your strength. Let your guard down. Let me see the real you. It was strangely prescient, like she knew something she shouldn’t have known, unless—
Well. Mafuyu doesn’t know what Shizuku saw in her those couple of moments she’d caught her off guard—what she’d wanted to see— but there is a nonzero chance that, maybe, it was something familiar to her. She recognizes this is all, most likely, baseless speculation, sparked by Mizuki’s comment. She feels the need to clear her throat; though logically she knows there’s no purpose, she does it anyway, following the urge.
“Mafuyu?” comes Mizuki’s voice from the other end of the VC. She’d gone silent.
“...I don’t know her well enough to say.”
“Well, it was just a thought,” Mizuki says airily.
Mafuyu's already somewhere else. “I don’t know if I would be opposed to it, though,” she thinks aloud.
“What?”
“Getting to know Shizuku better.”
Mizuki goes quiet for a moment. Then: “Is that what you want?”
Want, Mafuyu thinks. She’s still not really sure, when it comes to her wants. She knows she wants to make music with N25. Other than that, the closest synonym she can think of is when she is sure she does not want to go home yet. Except at some point, that had transformed into wanting to stay at school. Wanting to go to archery practice. Wanting to practice with Shizuku.
“Maybe.”
“Okay,” Mizuki says, and drops it. They are very good at telling when to do that.
Mafuyu's mind refuses to do the same. She can't stop drifting away into Shizuku-related memory, even if she puts her pen down to her notebook, telling herself to write. That only ends in ink collecting in a big blot on her sheet of paper, threatening to stain her hardwood desk.
That first day, at the club meeting—why was it that she approached Shizuku in the first place, anyway? The afternoon is blurry, fragmented in her head. Shizuku seemed down, she knows that. Not at all like on TV, a second-year had said. No matter how much she pieces it together, the memory narrows down to that moment: a marked desperation in Shizuku’s wide-open expression. A face Mafuyu knew very well.
It might be pretty fun if we could do archery together, Mafuyu told her then. She had meant it.