Like the Light of Dawn, Like the Latter Rain (2)
A live video was playing on the screen of a smartphone—not one of the Etube streams she watched so often, but a broadcast tethered to a social media app. What it showed was a sea at dawn, faint, and yet not wholly drowned in black, and through the wireless earbuds came the sound of waves striking the shore and shattering apart. Just listening was enough to set the heart at ease somehow: the pleasant noise of the sort people upload to Etube as hours-long white-noise ASMR. And through the thin slap of those waves, a woman's voice threaded in.
The owner of the account running the broadcast was Mary Tepes. The voice was hers.
However firmly a platform might sit as Japan's de facto national social network, a livestream on it was bound to be less approachable than one on Etube. And if you switched it on without warning, in the hours before dawn when the world was still pitch-black—summer or not—then of course almost no one would be there.
A small, stifled giggle followed. It was the sort of charming laugh that might snare you on the spot, fan or not.
Quite a few of the other viewers must have been feeling something similar, because Mary answered them with another smothered laugh.
A soft thwack—the sound of a light smack—caught on the microphone. It was, she had to admit, a thoroughly unhinged thing to say. Thinking so, Anri—Osean Lee—let a snicker slip.
"......"
And then self-loathing surged up over her all at once. Her expression locked stiff. She ended the stream and shoved the phone aside.
"...Anri-chan. Done running from reality?"
"Ah. Yes. Well. I suppose so."
The voice had come from right beside her. Senjoji Chiyo. Only natural: this was Chiyo's house, and her bedroom, and the place Anri sat—half reclined, half slumped—was the bed in it.
To put the conclusion first, Osean Lee had slept with Senjoji Chiyo the night before. The sentence did not stop at the literal meaning. It also carried the sense in which people ordinarily use "slept together" as an idiom.
It was not a thing she could accept with a clear head. That was why she had been fleeing reality with everything she had, and why, only a moment ago, she had come back to it with her self-loathing in tow. Anri stole a glance at Chiyo, lying beside her. Chiyo had drawn a blanket of nearly pure white up over her naked body, and Anri's own state was not much different. Even if they had drunk until the memory snapped and woken without it, a situation like this would have been enough to tell them what had happened. Not that either of them had forgotten. Both remembered last night with perfect clarity.
There was no way to forget it. It had been the first time in their lives, and a memory like that brands itself into the mind and has no intention of coming loose.
It was an accident, nothing more—something that had simply come to be because they were swept along by the mood. In truth, neither of them had meant to go this far from the start. They had begun the touching, yes, but it was the sort of thing schoolgirls did, squealing and kneading at a friend's chest... that degree of thing. At least, so they had believed, on their own account. In the end they never found a proper line, and they never found the moment to stop, and so it had become this.
The cause, most likely, was that both of them had been parched for contact of this kind. It did not even have to be sexual. They had simply been longing for the warmth of another person. For women who lived mostly open, to the people around them, about being lesbians, skinship with a friend was something that could not exist. Even the light touch at the chest between people of the same sex—the sort of thing that, between close friends, ended at a kyaa, honestly~—was bound to draw a suspicious look the moment they were the ones doing it. So what they were permitted amounted, at best, to holding hands or an embrace, and even that, depending on the person, was shoved away as revolting more often than not.
In short, what they had never been allowed had suddenly been unlocked, with each other as the key. The way one starves for a mischievous, ordinary youth, or the way a forsaken child starves for a mother, the two of them had demanded one another.
To put the comparison another way... it was not unlike an otaku meeting, for the first time in their life, a comrade devoted to the same obscure work. Which is to say, it was bound to end in a total loss of control, with a probability of eighty percent at the very least. And that was exactly what had happened, and this was the state they were left in.
"...What do we do. About this."
"...I know."
An awkward silence passed between them. They were women who had never had an experience like this to begin with, and it was not even something they had done while holding any firm intention. They couldn't help the thought of how, exactly, a thing like this was meant to be put to rights.
"Today—what happened today, um. Let's keep it a secret from everyone else..."
"Ah, yes... of course......"
And so, circumstances being what they were, that was the stopgap that ended up coming out. They couldn't bring themselves to say they would take responsibility, or that today ought to count as day one. Had either of them been capable of that, then minority or not, there was no way they would still be single their whole lives with faces like those. Running, so they would not be hurt, had already set in them like a habit. To hope for progress of that sort now was all but impossible, and so last night would simply be a midsummer night's dream, and they would let it pass.
They had not discussed it for any great length, and still the agreement came down that quickly. In the end, the feeling that outran every other was fear—the fear that what remained of the relationship between them might come crumbling down.
"Still... you'll eat before you go, won't you? Want to shower first?"
"Ah, um... then I'll accept. Gratefully."
A moment later Chiyo eased herself up off the bed, her face red. She was naked, and her skin was tacky enough that she balked at pulling clothes on over it at once.
"Want me to lend you some underwear?"
"Ah. Yes. Thank you."
"Hang on. I'll go get it."
The size would be off, granted... but the top, she could let pass. Putting the bottoms back on honestly repelled her. That pair was probably a little soiled. And so Anri borrowed the underwear and stepped into the bathroom with her clothes.
Left alone in the room, Senjoji Chiyo burrowed back into the bed. If Anri came out washed and dressed while she alone was still naked, the air would turn strange in every way she could think of. For now, she thought, better to hide herself under the blanket at least.
Carefully, Chiyo pressed her face into the pillow. Soaked through the whole of the bed was someone else's scent, plainly not the familiar one she knew. It was a truly, truly strange feeling. How long had it even been since she had last allowed another person into this bed? As far as the bedroom itself, her fellow VTubers had come over for offline collabs and slept the night, spreading bedding across the floor... but sharing the same bed was probably something she had not done since she was small, sleeping beside her mother.
"I must be crazy. I'm crazy......"
With that, she beat her head against the soft pillow. What in the world had she been thinking, doing a thing like this? Regret and self-loathing closed over her.
Forget it. Just forget it......
She chanted it with all her strength, but a person's thoughts only bind them tighter the harder they are refused. She went slack for a while, then buried her head again, and the cycle repeated without end.
"Wow. Wow... what did you do, you crazy bitch......"
And Osean Lee, standing under the water pouring from the shower, was no different. The only distinction was that her forehead was planted not in a soft bed, but against the tile of the bathroom wall. Self-hatred flooded in at the self who had handed her body over to impulse. Even the hot water, wetting her and warming her, felt somehow cruel.
"Haa... no. What's already done isn't something I can take back......"
Even so, Anri caught hold of her wits a little faster than Chiyo had. She rinsed herself off in a hurry, stepped out into the changing space, and dried her body with a towel. Her hair could wait. The decent thing was to let Chiyo wash as well. Thinking so, she wiped away only the worst of the water and lifted her head.
"...Huh?"
—And their eyes met.
It was something that absolutely should not have been in this place. No—something that should not have existed in this world at all. Anri's eyes flew wide. She raised a trembling arm and pointed at the figure before her. It was a rude gesture, looked at one way, but the other party was jabbing a finger at her just as abruptly, so she decided to call it even. Assuming this was a situation in which she had any spare composure for a thought like that.
"Shirase Hikari...?"
"Y-you...! What the hell did you do, you damned knockoff?!"
It was, unmistakably, Osean Lee's own model—Shirase Hikari, of Anathema Production's third generation. Her virtual avatar was there in the flesh of reality, face flushed a deep red, stabbing a finger at Anri.
"I haven't even gotten to do it yet...!"
"Uh... wait. That's the part you're furious about?"