Kanan’s hands are cold, and just a little bit clammy. As if her fingers have been submerged in water for quite some time, and the air hasn’t smoothed out the pruney lines and water-logged texture. The round little pieces of glass clink against their wrists and each other, and Mari marvels at how real all of this feels.
Eventually she’ll wake up, sit in the bed and stare at the stucco ceiling of her dorm room and think about how she never wants to go swimming ever again. But for now she lets herself enjoy the coolness of Kanan’s skin and how pretty her eyes are when she smiles.
Kanan speaks and Mari’s gaze never leave her lips.
“Hmph– wet blanket.” She sniffs, her words purposefully shrill and comedically offended. There are stairs in the distance and images that Mari doesn’t think are within her right to give shape. She thinks about Dia, about broken ankles, about an unfinished song collecting dust in the back of her notebook– smudged and still hopeful.
“Did you miss me?” She asks again (because she feels like she has already asked in so many words). “I missed the both of you.” She pulls herself closer, hand wrapped around Kanan’s wrist as she leans against her arm, forcing them both to slow down.
“Two years have come and gone and my Kanan has blossomed into a beautiful young woman.” The back of her hand comes to rest against her forehead with flourish, and she sniffs back a non-existent tear.
“The passing of time is so cruel–” Her eyes flutter open and she smiles, voice just dramatic enough to allow her to feel uninhibited. “–but so beautiful.”
The years had not been personally kind, but perhaps objectively.
But what about Chika?
It’s all so confusing. The seafoam churns like Kanan’s mind does, which is to say -- it leaps, and it pulls back, and it disappears, overtaken by the next turn of the waves. She can’t grasp any one thought for too long. It’s like peaceful existing, being content with yourself, like living thirty years down by the shore working at the dive shop every day.
In a way, it’s just a little suffocating.
‘Did they teach you that phrase?’ she asks, and doesn’t say -- overseas, because Mari isn’t over the sea. She’s next to it. She’s beside it, within it, even without the surf touching her shores. Mari has never been one to get her feet wet, anyway. She’s more at home in a pool. ‘I’m the same as I always was,’ she adds, and steals Mari’s hand out of the air for her. They’re already so close and already clasping their other set of hands -- for a second, she doesn’t look like she knows what to do with it. ‘But you...’
But what about Chika?
Chika, chicken, check the inventory one more time, Kanan, you know you’re supposed to. She doesn’t finish that thought because it turns green and sour in her mouth. Right now, she tucks her head against Mari’s, because Mari is pink and safe and familiar. Right now.
But eventually, she won’t be. They ebb and they flow, so they do, so they do.
Vaguely, she finishes: ‘You won’t get away with it just by calling me pretty, you know.’
