Chapter 15:

Sakaki, Kaorin, and the Veritable Girlmess

***

Against all odds, a scarce minute or two after inviting Sakaki into her room, Kaorin was smiling warmly. The glow of the pep talk she'd given herself earlier had not subsided. Was she nervous? Of course she was nervous. Sakaki--*Sakaki*, of all people--had stepped into her room for the first time--was sitting on her floor--drinking her tea--darkly radiant in the dim candlelight--looking around slightly bewildered at her austere surroundings. Kaorin was so nervous she felt like she was going to pass out. But she was smiling, and her voice had a carefree sort of lilt to it. Who can predict the future? Why not just enjoy the Sakaki that's right here, for however long she stays?

Kaorin calmed her nervous muscles down and made them carry her a few feet worth of leaning, over to the box she kept her snacks in.

Bam. Two light plasticky crackles and slap on the table. Senbei crackers. This stopped Sakaki's eyes from wandering for a little bit. The ladies tore into their treats, the room filled with loud, airy crunches as they relished the savory-seaweedy glaze of the delectable cracker.

They talked for a while. They just talked. The teas were nursed slowly. The senbei disappeared but gradually. It started with little chitchat about their lives, fragments. Sakaki talked about the lights of the city. Staying out late and drinking with a little posse of acquaintances and barely taking in anything anybody's saying but gleaning so much from lighted storefronts and beacon logos and the interchange and flow of the traffic lights, headlights, taillights, railway signals. Sakaki gestured sweepingly away, as if to illustrate the idea of the city she'd left behind far off in the distance. Everywhere in the depths of the human world filled with light, guiding, beckoning, seducing. Talked about the corridor from work to home. Routine. The same foods, the same movies and TV shows, the way that any little thing that shows up and changes that almost feels like a miracle. Snow days, or even sick days. Anything that diverted her from her normal course of routine had always opened up some new avenue for her. The two books she read in a 24-hour airport stint. Like she needed an excuse, an causal impetus in order to do something even slightly different than usual, even if that 'something' happened to be important or good for her. Isn't that silly? Isn't that just so self-defeati--

Just then, Sakaki was startled out of her soliloquy by a lot of rustling and clattering outside. She opened her mouth to express concern, but Kaorin waved her off genially. Out here, there were always wild animals scurrying around and making a small ruckus. No sense in jumping at red squirrels and tanuki. 

Sakaki accepted this; she could swear she heard giggling and shushing noises afterward, but maybe this was just a trick of the wind.

Kaorin understood, and empathized. Routine could be at once a comfort and a confinement. She had lived in years of chaos and lived in years of necessity-mandated regimentation. Being busy all day was no panacea for that constant stifled feeling. Kaorin's stopgap solution had been to relish what she gets. Why read a single chapter when you can binge volumes? Why glance at social media when you could scroll through freefalling pages on Pixiv? Why not gorge yourself on snacks and get wasted once in a while? Why not sleep-procrastinate til 1:30 when you have to get up at 4:30? She treated all this like it was very funny, but Sakaki did not think it was funny. Sakaki thought that Kaorin deserved to sleep as long as she needed to every night. Kaorin was confused by this, and grasped at straws to defend her behavior. No, no, see, I was being like, ironic, or, not ironic, but like, self-deprecating? 

Sakaki dithered a little bit. She felt conflicted... She wanted to say, that's not self-deprecation, it's self-deprivation. She wanted to do *something*... it was so obvious all of a sudden, it was so obvious what Kaorin had been doing all these years, written in the lines on the corners of her lonely smiling face... she wanted to do *something* for her...

So she reached across the kotatsu and, with her thumb, carefully wiped off little bits of oily cracker crumb from the corners of Kaorin's lips.

There was silence for a long time after this. Then they both erupted into speech at the same time:

SAKAKI: Sorry...
KAORIN: Ahhh... Ahhhhhhh...?? Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh...??
SAKAKI: I just thought--you need to take care of yourself, and I'd really like to help you, and--I'm sorry--I shouldn't have--
KAORIN: NO IT'S FINE

More clattering from outside! More giggling and admonishing shushing. Something that sounded like a woman exclaiming, "OH, COME ON!!" Gosh, those loquacious red squirrels sure were having a field day! However, the mysterious shenanigan-noises from outside were of little concern to the two awkward occupants of the shed-shelter.

Shaking her face violently and going "blrblrlbrlbrlllbl" in an attempt to bring herself a little bit down to earth, Kaorin found it in herself to respond. "It's fine. Seriously. You were--You were just being nice."

Affirmative nodding from Sakaki. "Right. Just being nice. Ahahahaha..."

Affirmative nodding from Kaorin. "Right... Hahahaha..."

Awkwardness, a yawning empty silence; awkwardness, the breeze skimming the edge of the void.

Ahaha...

"Ahahahahahahahah!!"

The tension had collapsed like a waveform. The laughter had transmuted anxiety to warm bliss.

"Hey." Kaorin was done with snacktime, and she swept up the crumbs with her hands and bundled up the plastic all neatly for later separation and disposal. Just a moment was enough to regain a little composure. "Hey. Seriously. It's good to see you again. How does it feel *easier* to talk to you than it did decades ago? Even when I'm, you know. Being extremely awkward and obviously messing everything up." 

(The careful student of lesbian flirting rhetoric will note the gambit here. In being lightly self-deprecating, she says she's messing 'everything' up. This implies that 'something' is in the process of happening. It is not a particularly subtle avenue of pursuit, but effective enough on a receptive audience, and discreet enough to be wreathed in plausible deniability. Plausible deniability is EVERYTHING when it comes to flirting, in the same way that saving at a save point is important to preserving progress in a JRPG.)

Sakaki figured that it would be fine to leave the cleanup to Kaorin. She put her elbows on the now-clear table and loosely steepled her hands, leaning her head chin-first onto them gently. She had on a certain intrigued, playful smile that Kaorin was sure that she had never seen Sakaki make before. "Don't worry. You aren't messing anything up. And yes. It does feel... refreshingly different from how things used to be, doesn't it? Isn't it strange that we didn't hang out more often after you invited me to see the stars with you in first year, even though we both seemed to enjoy the other's company so much? Like there was some magnetic force pushing us apart, and now that that's finally weakened suddenly we've... I don't know... snapped together or something. Over a distance of about a thousand miles. Eheheh."

The eyes looking back at Sakaki were shining. Maybe even a little misty at the edges. Kaorin was smiling and nodding in recognition. Both of them were here by choice. Nothing was pushing them apart. Kaorin didn't seem nervous, but she was at a loss for words nonetheless. So Sakaki ventured a question or two.

SAKAKI: "Do you remember that conversation we were having earlier?"
KAORIN: "Yeah. Haha, it wasn't that long ago!"
SAKAKI: "No, no, I suppose it wasn't..."
KAORIN: "It was about a lot of things, wasn't it?"
SAKAKI: "It was. But there was one thing..."
KAORIN: "'Slowly, the Melody.'"
SAKAKI: "Right!! We were talking about 'Slowly the Melody'!! 'Slowly, the Melody', and, forbidden conceptualizations, right? Breaking the cycles."
KAORIN: "Y... Yeah. We were talking about that. And um, we were also talking about... well, I don't want to put any pressure on you..."

Those eyes were so steely. She was so serious this time. There would be no interruptions.

SAKAKI: "Putting words to the nameless feeling."
KAORIN: "...yes. Yeah. Precisely that."
SAKAKI: "It's no pressure. Kaorin... if I've ever felt pressure, it's certainly not been from you, and it's certainly not been *towards*... towards, you know. This."
KAORIN: "Ok. Right, hahaha. I mean, it's not like someone would *need* pressure in order to... to move towards... towards some way they already are."
SAKAKI: "No. Certainly not. Hey, do you mind if I be cagey for just a little bit longer? Can I be cagey and ask you a question without us saying what it's about?"
KAORIN: "Psh, sure, why not. We're already doing a great job of not saying what we're talking about, right?"
SAKAKI: "Very. Okay, sure. Thank you. I will now ask my cagey, nonspecific question, with no particular intention. Kaorin... How did you know?"

How did you know, Kaorin?

There was a long, subjective silence. For Sakaki, it was brief enough to be unnoticeable. But for Kaorin, it lasted a veritable eon of thought.

There was a darkness symbolizing time and little channels carved into it through rainbow light. These were the pathways of causality throughout Kaorin's life, the enumeration of everything that had ever happened to her. Which of these paths led to the the answer? Where did the line begin? With protosexual, protoromantic crushes? With the roleplay of idle daydreams, with dolls and anime characters? Did it only begin with the moment of self-declaration, so many years later? Or did it begin the first time she'd ever been truly swept away...?

It had, hadn't it. It all started in one place. To mention Shinjuku Nichoume situationships or naive, plausibly deniable school-nurse akogare-crushes in the same breath as the true origin would be... would be to disgrace the truth. To deny Sakaki the honest thing she had asked for. Kaorin would tell the truth, but would veil it in shadows, hide the unbearable parts in indistinct haze and shade.

She took a deep breath, and let it out slowly as she turned to the side, a weary, exasperated smile on her face.

"The first time I ever realized the thing I can't say I am, right? Yeah. Yeah... It was... It was in high school."

Sakaki's mouth was hidden by the rim of a teacup, but her eyebrows arched in surprise. Her imagination sculpted dim, crude conjectural images out of the possibility-clay. High school...? She had faint images of Kaorin spending a lot of time with a... who was it... Chihaya? Chiaki? Chihiro, right? Was that... But that doesn't make any sense because... there was a certain look she could swear she'd seen on Kaorin's face before, and she didn't remember seeing her like that around Chihiro... 

"Most of my life up until I got to high school, I felt like I was being herded, you know? I only had a few friends each school year. I didn't get bullied more than any other girl. I got pretty good grades and my teachers all seemed to like me while finding me completely uninteresting. My mom picked my hairstyle, my school clothes, and my extracurricular activities up until I graduated elementary school. There were whole worlds that I could see unfolding around me but I could not be a part of and for the most part didn't feel interested in. I didn't really care that I was terrible about sports, that I had no artistic capabilities, I didn't care about--about dating and boys and fancy shops and cute foods and whatever tacky facsimiles of adult fashion they were marketing to kids in those days.

So when I came to high school, I figured that I was just being sorted into another pen. I figured that life would just continue to pass as it always had; fleeting, disinterested, spare. Scrambling from trough to trough, yknow? Hmm, but that wasn't in the cards for me, I suppose.

I joined a club. Made a few friends. Started to feel more active, moreso a part of things, even if it felt like I had never been meant for that. In a very real sense, I came alive because I had fallen in love. There was..."

After trailing off for a moment, Kaorin put up a single finger, a 'give me just a minute' gesture. Sakaki watched pensively as Kaorin got up and rummaged through some things in her sliding-door closet. She pulled out a dusty box from the back, brushed it off, and pulled off the lid. Inside were two pristine shot glasses and a bottle of Yoichi Single Malt Whiskey. Kaorin extricated these, put the box away, closed the closet door, and returned with her bounty. She placed the shot glasses on the table, then uncorked the bottle, taking a moment to savor the strong aromas that began to waft from it upon its opening. With care and precision, Kaorin filled each of the shot glasses near to the rim, recorked the bottle, and then downed both shots at once by herself. After she had slammed the second shot glass, she pushed the bottle and a shot glass over to a nonplussed Sakaki.

"There was a girl."

Sakaki's eyes drew away from Kaorin in embarrassment, but there was a little smile of recognition in her face. She had not yet really begun to grasp what she was being told. But something felt so warm and so hopeful and so reaffirming about hearing Kaorin tell her that there was a girl. A *girl.*

"Yeah. There was... there was a girl. I had never really felt... present until I met her. And oh, I had never, ever felt so enchanted. By anyone, by anything, by the essence of beauty itself, by any all-encompassing mysterious presence, by any sparkling shadow of feeling. She was it. She was the thing that would lead me towards some miraculous future. And the more I saw of her, the more her radiance came to fill up the entirety of my teenaged girl imagination. The more she became a symbol, an emblem of *everything* that I had secretly wanted to be possible even if I didn't have words or, or mental-image-templates for it.

And it was just unbearable sometimes. It was..." Pick your words carefully, Kaorin. You've played such a delicate game so far. Don't give the whole thing away too early. Process. Precision. Timing. "It was so hard knowing that I could be feeling something so incredible, so enormous, towards someone who could not understand what I was feeling and who always seemed to be too faraway even to approach, as if... As if something were, I don't know. Pushing us apart or whatever." Sakaki did not show any outward signs of realizing what was being talked about, so Kaorin was none the wiser. And no, she hadn't let herself see what was in front of her yet. But something had hooked against a little thread in Sakaki's mind, and was slowly drawing it's way out. Something pushing her apart from... from a certain girl? Regardless of her ignorance of Sakaki's state, Kaorin did not want to leave too much contemplative silence, and resumed her retelling in haste. 

"I mean... I mean, we hung out sometimes. We were actually reasonably close, closer than we were with a lot of other people. It's not like she rejected me. Or failed to ever favor me with her fond eyes once in a very long while. She just never knew, and I was too afraid to say anything, too afraid of collapsing an anxious tentative possibility into a heart-crushing impossibility.

I used to have sort of a fantasy about her. The type of thing that I imagine that is common for girls like, like us--like me--whoever--um--But I had this image of her as someone who was very cool and stoic. Like the fact that she was quiet just meant that she was tough and that she had this rich internal life full of mystery that I could barely understand. And that eventually she would show her hand and come sweep me away on her white horse in her fucking Rose of Versailles costume.

But the more I think about it, the more I think that she wasn't really like that. I think I understood it on some level even back then. It's not that I didn't want to see her for who she was, I just... I wanted her to be the one to come sweep me away so badly. I wanted it to be easy. I wanted love to be something that *happened* to me since reaching out for it seemed to be so scary. I didn't even stop and think that... That, like... That she was probably just as nervous and anxious as I was, in her own way, about her own things. If I could do it all over, I would have reached out. I would have said something. Maybe it would have helped. Or maybe it would have just ruined our friendship. Fuck if I know, right? Hahaha."

Eyes met. There was silence. Sakaki was breathing faintly. She didn't know what had her so worked up. Kaorin was just telling stories about the past. There was nothing to overthink. There were no hooked threads to pull and unravel the plot.

Sakaki ventured comment. "You should have said something." Her head feeling strangely light, the evening starting to take on sort of a dreamy quality. Kaorin returned her gaze with an enigmatic smile.

"Yeah. I probably should have, shouldn't I? But I didn't. That's the reality we're living in, Sakaki. And anyway, what happened afterward isn't the point. Regardless of what happened, whatever regrets I might have. That's when I knew. Even if I wasn't saying the word, even to myself, I *knew* that nothing could be as powerful as this feeling I had, that this was what was natural to me, that this is what defined me. I knew I was a lesbian. Had always been. Would always be."

Eyes stayed meeting. There was more silence. Sakaki had found her breath temporarily eluding her, as if to breathe would shatter the eternal second she was in.

"The nameless feeling..."
"Yeah. Hahaha. Yeah. I know, right? How overly literal and direct of me. You don't have to say if it you don't want, I mean, it's not any of my business if you're bisexual or hetero-himejoshi or anything else, I'm just so glad that you're here and that we can--"
"No. I... I can say it. I can put words to it. It's like what you said. Me. I'm."

Sakaki pulled her hands away from her resting face and folded them firmly and primly on the table below. She stretched her arms forward, stretched her back muscles and shoulderblades, back making a pristinely understated arc. She took a deep, sharp intake of breath and let it out in a drawn-out, relaxing sigh. Kaorin looked enraptured. What a vision of immaculate feline grace. She was right. She hadn't really known Sakaki. She had just begun, just *barely* begun to unravel Sakaki's profound mysteries.

When the stretching started, Sakaki had closed her eyes, and kept them closed throughout her sighs. Now she opened them, and to Kaorin, they looked completely serene, dark and deep like the blackness between stars, the void as a warm mother ocean nestling infinite light.

"I'm a *lesbian*."

And so Sakaki was a lesbian.

***

Of course, Kaorin's brain did not process this information all at once. Even upon hearing the unmistakable words. Somehow, words had lost their semantic component. She could hear the syllables, consonants, vowels. Maybe some fricatives or something. But she could not process their meaning at all. Her entire cognition seemed to be occupied with the task of looking at Sakaki, of taking Sakaki in, of faintly trying to comprehend the magnitude of the miracle that had just appeared before her.

You'll recall we were discussing how Sakaki was outstretching her arms as part and parcel of the process of preparing herself to admit what everyone who was ever a true fan of Azumanga Daioh has known all along. Well, those outstretched arms were still outstretched. And, with Kaorin in a state of temporary bedazement, it proved an easy feat to shimmy forward and use the hands at the end of outstretched arms to grab Kaorin by her smooth, taut forearms, and draw her forward. She did so, and the movement was enough to jolt Kaorin out of her reverie-slash-stupor, enough to make her realize what Sakaki had done, which was to bring her in kiss-close.

KAORIN: "S-Sakaki...?!"
SAKAKI: "Kaorin."
KAORIN: "You're so close...! What happened...? Did I do something stupid??"
SAKAKI: "Not at all. I brought you here."
KAORIN: "Wh, why??"
SAKAKI: "Because it isn't too late. You still have the chance to tell that girl how you feel."
KAORIN: "Mmmm... Mmmmff... I... How did you..."
SAKAKI: "It's not like it wasn't obvious after you told me it was a girl from high school who you kept almost getting close to. Once I thought about it, it was clear as day."
KAORIN: "I'm sorry, I'm really sorry, I know it's messed up, pathetic, I know I--"
SAKAKI: "Did I ask you to say sorry? That's not what I dragged you over here for at all. I dragged you over here so you can tell the girl you love how you feel about her and, if you're lucky, kiss her."
KAORIN: "But... But... I don't know... It's been so *long*, and I, you don't have any idea how hard I've been trying to pretend this doesn't affect me, you don't have any how hard it's been it's been *so* hard. What if I haven't earned it yet? I probably haven't earned it. We need to have more conversations and I need to be more roundabout and tentative and patient and accepting of whatever happens and--"
SAKAKI: "Shhhhh. No. It's not about 'earning it'. Listen. You said that the girl you liked was nervous like you were. You said that if you could go back, you would have said something. Well, Kaorin... You've gone back. The girl you loved is in front of you. She's nervous and doesn't what to say, doesn't know how to express her feelings. What do you have to say to her?"
"..."

Kaorin looked downward. She saw her arms linked with Sakaki's, saw them clutching each other, one at each end, hands to upper arms, saw the linked circle they competed between each other. She summoned up the words from deep inside her.

"I love you. I just, I always have since I first saw you. You're just incredible. You're just perfect. Everything about you screams grace and poise and presence. You're so cool, and so warm. And I love how you look when you laugh, and I love your sigh, and my heart aches when I see you looking out the window so sadly. I'm sorry I didn't invite you to more astronomy club meetings. I'm sorry I was always so wound-up and inauthentic around you. It was just because I was nervous. I'm sorry that I had weird dreams about you. I'm sorry that I looked at you while you were sleeping at Chiyo's villa during the summer of our graduating year, I'm sorry that I looked at you for just a little while but long enough to see you doing kitty licks on your hand. That must make me the weirdest person on planet earth, I'm sorry, you were just so gorgeous and I felt like it would be the last time I would ever see you and I couldn't stand the thought of not just lingering a little bit longer. I have replayed my little memories of you until the tape in my mind wears down; you dancing with me at the sports festival and making my whole world blossom, that look of utterly gentle all-seeing concern you'd give me sometimes when we were hanging out with everybody else because you knew I felt so out of place and intimidated by how cool everybody else was and when you looked at me it suddenly felt like none of that mattered and that I was just a human hanging out with her friends like anybody else instead of some bizarre perpetual outsider kept at arm's length from everyone else by her barrelful of traumas and--"

Sakaki extricated one hand for the purpose of pressing her index finger lightly to Kaorin's stilled lips. Shushhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

"Thank you. You didn't do anything wrong. Maybe some part of me knew. But I wouldn't have had words for it either, and it doesn't matter now anyway. I really, really don't think it was a mistake or a coincidence that I ended up here at this particular dairy farm at this particular point in our lives. And while I still feel very, very fragile, and nascent, I feel like this was something we were meant to teach each other. Something that we could resolve no matter what had been pushing apart."

"Is it okay to say I love you? Am I rushing things?"

"I would say that, if we have been waiting for like twenty years for destiny to kick in, then we are probably allowed to cut to the chase once it happens."

"Then I love you. I love you. I am so, so, so very deeply in love with you. If you give me so much as a chance, then I promise I will give you everything. I will lick the caked, syrupy sugar off of the lollipop of your heart until it's smooth and glistening again."

Sakaki had composed herself admirably up to this point, but something about Kaorin's shamelessly evident eagerness and passion struck a chord in her, and she turned away, blushing profusely. Almost immediately, as if on a reflex, Kaorin's hand reached out and nimbly took hold of Sakaki's chin, and with it, gently tilting her head so that Sakaki's eyes met hers again. This did not help the blushing.

Kaorin drew her face close to Sakaki's, her heart thumping, her every muscle throbbing with the thick tension of this thorough, complete instant *dissolution* of the impossibly tangled knot inside her heart. She brought her lips a few scanty millimeters away from Sakaki's lips and held them there, savored the moment, savored the shivering anticipation, *Sakaki's* lips, the smell of Sakaki's gorgeous hair, Sakaki's demure little placid breaths, Sakaki... *Sakaki...*

When she had held Sakaki butterfly-pinned to the moment of incipient kiss for long enough, she pressed her lips against Sakaki's for the first time in her entire life. A long, decadent kiss began, Kaorin subsuming herself and her every thought with the texture, feeling and taste of Sakaki's lips, sliding and pressing and sucking into place, lightly precisely configuring resetting teasing trying lightly licking lightly biting. Those long drawn-out exhalations of pure relief, pure settling-in, hands reaching out, seeking, finding purchase, light enough to be gentle, firm enough to say "I want you. Right here. The one in front of me. This is the one I want."

When they finally managed to part themselves, with a little whisper of tongue-brush punctuating the very end of the kiss, both of them were breathing heavily and were quite red in the face. The hot, vibrant energy bouncing around inside of them was all but uncontainable. Deep in the pit of each girl's stomach, a very basal need for More, and for Harder was welling up. But there is a delicacy to things. Sometimes you must sate your appetite on aroma alone, so that when you finally, *finally* take your meal you will be truly grateful from the bottom of your heart. Perhaps there was an instinct for this, mutually held by the two freshly minted inamorati, for they pulled themselves from the precipice of reckless instant gratification at but the very last second, hungrier than ever and paralyzed by the appetizing scent.

In an act of enormous fortitude and self-control, the first one to break the smouldering silence was Sakaki. "There's so much I don't know."
Kaorin nodded. "That's okay."
"Will you teach me?", Sakaki asked, with eyes more trusting than pleading.
"Yeah. I'll teach you. And um. Haha. We'll learn together. Okay?" Kaorin's blush was subsiding, and now her struggle was to contain the spread of a *terribly* infectious grin that was slowly forming on her face. "Together. Everything step by step, everything we need to catch up and everything there is to discover after that. Unfolding slowly. You know, haha. Like the melody."
Sakaki's eyes, dark shining pools, bright, alive, filled with gratitude. "Like the melody..."

A long, bright, vivid moment passed, stretching unto eternity, their eyes locked, studying each other, searching each other's depths.

And then, just as the best moments of their entire lives began to yield to the resumption of time's normal flow, things were interrupted quite spectacularly by clattering and crashing from outside. Possible tanuki mischief? There was a lot of continued shushing and fussing coming through the walls. Perhaps attributable to the Hokkaido crying rabbit?

Kaorin squeezed Sakaki's arm reassuringly as she pulled herself away from the kotatsu. "I, I'm gonna go check, uhhh, real quick, just, hang tight here and we can, continue our discussion, um..."
"Yeah. Yeah. Please do that." Sakaki, her smile barely repressed, appeared to be suddenly very interested in the form and contours of her empty teacup.

It only took a moment for Kaorin to slide the door open. What she beheld there was a veritable girlmess; perhaps seven or so of the dairy farm's women, having tumbled, tangled and sprawled as if they had been only moments ago making some kind of impromptu human pyramid of eavesdropping. There was Yuuka, naturally, Naomi, unsurprisingly, and a few other faces in the nosy rogue's gallery; Saeko, Junko, Reika, and of course the twins. 

Kaorin looked like she was about to say something, so with the limited mobility afforded within the confines of the human tumbleweed, Yuuka struggled and barely succeeded to communicate their collective will in hand gestures. Hands pressed palm to palm, as if in prayer, pleading. An index finger placed to her lips, vigorously shaking her head. Kaorin rolled her eyes agreeably and then discreetly shut the door, sparing their unsubtle fanbase of embarrassment in front of their esteemed guest.

Sakaki turned toward Kaorin, genuinely quizzical. "Did you see anything...? What species were they?"
"Uh, nothing. No one. Maybe a couple of, of red-cheeked peeping chickadees that had already flown away," Kaorin offered weakly. "We get a, uh, a lot of those this time of year."
"Cute!"
"Totally."
"Come back."
"As you wish."

Kaorin came back. There was a place to return to. It was not even -close- to feeling real yet, and likely wouldn't for some time. But despite all the odds, despite everything, Sakaki had come back for her. Tactful candor and gentle, careful understanding had opened the way to Sakaki's tender, fragile heart. And the place that she would always be returning to, was her beloved Sakaki's side.