#and a lot more pre-femslashy

[guiltytuning]

a little bit of normal

diamari / 3.6k / ao3. Happy birthday Mari!

Japanese characters blink to life on Mari’s laptop screen after over a year of its absence. The email’s title only displays her name – the Japanese rendering of Ohara Mari that she hasn’t seen since she left Uchiura just over a year ago. With suddenly cold fingers, she clicks open the email and then stares for a moment, not wholly seeing the characters in front of her. A quick scan down and she can see a signature: Kurosawa Dia. The effect is immediate: her heart starts thumping a rugged pattern against the interiors of her ribcage, and her hands start trembling with unbridled adrenaline.

She pulls back to the top of the message, printed in black Meiryo-font text and lacking any colourful borders or photos that usually accompany the majority of the emails she receives either from her family’s business or her school’s announcements, and reads it.

 Greetings,

As of today in Uchiura, Shizuoka Prefecture, the time and date is June the 13th. Thus, I sincerely wish you a happy birthday. While the time zone in America may be different, I still hold to the fact that it is indeed June 13th on my side of my globe. So technically, I am not incorrect about sending this now.

I hope you are doing well, Mari.

 Best regards,

Kurosawa Dia

She remembered my birthday, is Mari’s first though. She had my email all along, so why did she wait until now to message? is her second thought. She reads it at least ten times, always slowing down on I hope you are doing well, Mari. The email is formal and professional in a way that is distinctly Dia and it brings an unbidden smile to Mari’s lips. On the twelfth reading, Mari thinks if she sears the words into her brain, maybe she can uncover the unspoken meanings behind each character.

Typical of Dia, the true meanings remain carefully encased in their perfectly hand-picked characters. It is unfortunate, Mari thinks, that the email cannot even convey the tremble in a stroke of a character that would give her some insight into Dia’s mindset. Instead, slight of hands are erased by the monotony of the sans-serif typography.

The only way to get something else out of Dia is to write back, Mari thinks. Hands poised over the keyboard, she begins to type a response, hoping to garner just a glimpse of what the other girl is feeling. Despite the ways they parted, surely the other girl had some semblance of feelings about it, even after a whole year. Mari definitely still has feelings about it: not a day went by without her thinking about the dark-haired girl’s enthusiastic voice and infectious smile whenever she was talking about μ’s or the way her eyes looked down, turning her back on Mari when Kanan quit being school idols.

The memory brings forth a sharp clench in her chest that she can’t help, and she closes her eyes and exhales, willing the feeling away before she continues typing.

Hello! (This part is written in English.)

I’m glad you asked because I’m doing very well! America is very fun! Recently it’s been a little hot for my liking, to be honest. Nonetheless, I’m still having fun with my American friends! Sushi is cheap here! Though it’s not as good as it is in Japan.

(Biting her lip, Mari quickly types the last few lines and presses send before she can regret her decision. Though she’s not quick enough to send it without second-guessing Do you hate me? and promptly erases the question.)

I haven’t heard from you or Kanan in a while. I know we weren’t expected to keep in touch after what happened but you can video call or phone call me anytime.

 Looking forward to hearing from you,

Mari (This part is written in English too – call it a habit of being in America.)

The moment the email blips out into cyberspace, she wants to reach out and snatch it back, tearing it into pieces and flinging it out the window.

“That was a bad idea,” she whispers out loud.

Purposefully torturing herself, she clicks her ‘Sent’ folder and rereads the message, groaning inwardly at the first paragraph’s overuse of exclamation marks. “Yeah Ohara, we get it. You’re fake,” she grumbles. America is not fun. She doesn’t really have friends. The others don’t like her heavily accented English and she knows that the Americans make fun of her. It doesn’t take much to decipher their giggles and snorts every time she says something in class. (She’s made it a point to be more exuberant now – emphasizing her accented English so hard that she hopes they get tired of making fun of it. So far, there seems to be no end to their snickers. The jabs at Mari’s accent never gets old for them.)

Though it is getting hotter recently. And the sushi is definitely cheaper and less heavenly-tasting than in Japan.

A ping from her laptop snaps her out of her thoughts, and she focuses back down on her opened email server. There’s a new email from Dia. Mari hadn’t expected her to reply so quickly, especially not immediately after sending her reply. To be honest, she didn’t really expect to hear back from Dia at all and spend the rest of her days poring over the meaning of Dia’s overly formal email. Now counter-evidence was lying right in front of her. She opens the email and takes in the brevity of Dia’s answer.

Dear Ohara,

I would be honoured to receive a call from you any time.

 Sincerely,

Kurosawa Dia

Mari pushes her laptop to the side of her bed, grabbing her phone and opening the messages app that she hasn’t touched for years. The screen loads and at the top of the list below their group chat, two contacts line up: Kurosawa Dia and Matsuura Kanan.

She’s not surprised to see that they haven’t left any messages for her there even after a year. Their group chat still has a slew of messages she sent all the way back from last year. She smiles bitterly when she scrolls through them.

[April 25, 14:26]

MARI: Kanan, please. We can talk about this.

[April 25, 14:27]

MARI: Dia, listen to me. If this is about what happened in Tokyo, I just want to let you guys know that I’m fine about it. We still have a chance to do this. We can’t give up so easily.

[April 25, 18:52]

MARI: Why did you tell me to go study abroad?

[April 28, 1:38]

MARI: Why are you ignoring me? Did I do something wrong?

[April 28, 12:42]

MARI: Kanan. Dia. Please answer me.

She exits the group chat and clicks on Dia’s name. The app is telling her that Dia is offline, but that doesn’t deter Mari from pressing the call button and bringing the phone up to her ear, the staccato of her heartbeat so loud that she feels like the other side can hear it against the phone.

It rings, once, twice –

“Hello?”

Mari exhales a breath she doesn’t realize she was holding. The voice on the other side is tentative but distinctly Dia in her deep, warm tone, cautious-sounding as it is.

“Hello Dia,” she says in Japanese, the words flowing out of her mouth freer than any English phrases she’s forced herself to utter under the American flag. “I thought you were offline.”

“Then why’d you call?” Dia says teasingly, and in that moment, Mari feels like they can go back to where they were a year ago – friends on the verge of something more, playful poking at the bounds and limits of where they can stretch their relationship. But the moment dissipates in the silence, and Mari is once again aware of the distance between them. “Never mind,” Dia backtracks. “It only shows I’m offline because I turned off my status. Anyway… Um… How are you?”

The hesitancy in Dia’s voice is a punch to the heart. They’re not like this; this isn’t how they’re supposed to be. A year later and hundreds of thousands of miles apart, Dia sounds like she’s talking a total stranger. The connection has fizzled away and Mari is left grasping at the straws left of her relationship with Dia.

Which only makes Mari want to reclaim it. She’s made a mistake of burying her feelings and not looking back. If this is her chance to turn back time in whatever way she can, she’ll take it.

“Ah-mazing!” she exclaims in English. “The sun is beautiful and the people are fantastic!” she continues, interjecting English within her sentences. “Oh! I really wish you were here. And Kanan too of course,” Mari adds.

There’s a brief silence where Mari thinks in fear that she’s gone too far with her exaggeration but then she hears a short chuckle on the other end of the line. “Seems to me like America was a good decision after all.”

No, Mari thinks. It really isn’t. I want to come back. I hate it here. I don’t get along with a lot of people. I don’t really have friends here. I miss Japan. I miss Uchiura. I miss Uranohoshi. I miss you so much, Dia.

She swallows down the words so they are locked deeply within her.

“Yes, well,” Mari begins carefully, “I still think Japan is more fun, you know? And well, there’s not a lot of…school idol stuff here in America. They’re not about that.”

“Oh,” comes Dia’s stunted reply. There’s an awkward silence and then, “Isn’t it really late over there right now? It’s eleven in the morning over here.”

“Yeah, it’s nighttime over here. It’s only ten though,” Mari says, looking out the window of her bedroom. “It’s not that late. Plus, I’m not going anywhere tomorrow morning so I’m not in a rush to go to bed.”

Dia makes a shocked sound at that admission. “Ohara Mari! It’s a school night! How could you be so casual about this?”

That elicits a laugh out of Mari, and it’s been so long that she starts doubling over while laughing, clutching the phone to her ear and listening to Dia’s scandalized scolding before bursting into more peals of laughter. She finally wipes the tears from her eyes and responds, “Dia… Dia – it’s summer vacation over here,” she says, lips curved into a smile.

That stops Dia in the middle of her lecture. “Oh. Well – I, I definitely knew that!”

She can picture it now – Dia on the other side of the line, face flushed red with embarrassment. Maybe she’s sitting in the courtyard of the school, since it seems to be around lunchtime. Mari giggles, wondering what other students would think if they saw Dia like that. Perhaps they’d think she was talking to her crush – that thought makes an involuntary smile rise to Mari’s lips, cheeks warming slightly.

“Sure you did,” Mari drawls. “I’m absolutely sure you knew,” she says, dropping an English word within.

“Yeah, I did!” is Dia’s indignant reply.

And just like that, everything falls back into place again. Mari and Dia chat for the next half hour about, catching up on each other’s lives while carefully avoiding the topic of Kanan or idol activities. Mari is cautious to keep the unpleasantness of her life under careful wraps; Dia doesn’t need to know about how Mari thinks about returning every single day. She doesn’t need to know that Mari dreams of returning to Uchiura in that stupid magenta helicopter that flew her to the airport and surprising Dia and Kanan. Sometimes, she pretends that instead of leaving without a word and waiting for friends that never came to stop her, she takes actions into her own hands and confesses her own feelings to Dia, no matter how unrequited they may be.

Dia sounds wistful on the other hand – her life has mellowed out after their half year of being school idols. She’s now a member of the student council with eyes set to become student council president. “Just like Ayase Eli. You know? In μ’s?”

It’s clear to Mari that Dia still thinks about their lost days while the three of them were Aqours. When Kanan had left the clubroom, Mari didn’t miss the way that Kanan had abandoned her final costume on the table while Dia collected hers back. She wants to ask, Why did you quit with Kanan? Why didn’t you say anything to stop her? Why did you leave with her? I thought we had something, Dia. Aqours was the three of us, no doubt, but we could have stuck together until we convinced Kanan to come back. Why did you leave? Why did you leave me? There are so many questions swimming in Mari’s head, but she knows that the moment she asks them, Dia is going to stiffen up again and they’ll once again be consciously aware of the circumstances that had led to this moment of them talking on the phone, an entire world apart.

“I’m getting tired,” Mari finally says after an hour has passed. “I’m going to hang up now. I’ll talk to you next time?”

“I’ll call you again to say happy birthday,” Dia replies before hanging up. Mari frowns, but decides not to think much of it as she heads over to turn off the lights of her bedroom and lies face-down on her bed to sleep.

Mari’s eyelids are drooping and she’s half-asleep when the buzzing of her phone wakes her. Hand fumbling around her bed, she finds the phone under her stomach from when she had flopped face-first in her bed. The display screen shows Dia’s name. “Hello?” she says groggily, slipping into English out of habit.

“Happy birthday!” Dia says back excitedly, and Mari can almost hear the grin in the other girl’s voice. She looks over at her bedside table to see the numbers 12:00 on her clock blinking back at her. “Well, at least on your side of the world. Like I’ve said in my email – it’s already June thirteenth over here.”

“Mmh, yeah thanks Dia, but I was sleeping,” Mari says, a complaint that isn’t really a complaint at all.

“Don’t get snarky with me,” Dia says but then softens on her next words. “Good night, Mari.”

“Good night,” Mari whispers back. There’s silence for a while where the both of them listen to each other breathing on the other side. It’s calming, Mari thinks. She could fall asleep to this, imagining Dia on the other side of the bed, curling closer to Mari.

Then there’s a beep of the call being ended that snaps her out of her imagination, and Mari is left conscious of the empty space in her bed.

The concert that Mari goes to for her birthday is…not what she really wanted to go to. A few friends – well, classmates really – had convinced her to buy front row tickets for them to see it since it fell on the date of her birthday. The man singing onstage was amazing, but there is just something empty about it. She wants to see girls in frilly costumes dancing and singing their hearts out, braving through hardship and despair and working to make a name for themselves on stage. And to be honest, Mari doesn’t really care about so-called attractive men the same way that her classmates do.

After the concert is over, the other girls leave together, Mari having declined to ride back with them and stating that she already has her chauffeur picking her up. There are other people leaving now – mostly girls her age or younger. All of them are starry-eyed or in tears with joy. Mari smiles, wondering if this is how school idols make people feel. She’s certain that tears were shed during the overwhelmingly emotional performance of μ’s’ KiRa-KiRa Sensation performance that she owns on tape.

She gets a call from her chauffeur telling her that traffic is heavy and that she’ll be a few minutes late. Mari ends up sitting on a bench, watching the concertgoers leave en masse. She thinks of playing a game on her phone but then checks the time and notices that it should be around the end of lunchtime at Uranohoshi. She calls Dia despite Dia’s status being offline. Once again, Dia picks up on the third ring.

“Mari? What is it?” Dia asks.

“I just went to a concert and I’m waiting for my chauffeur to pick me up,” Mari says. She can almost feel the way that Dia gets excited, thinking that it’s about idols. “No – it wasn’t idols,” Mari says quickly before Dia can say anything. “It was some middle-aged man. There were a lot of girls in the crowd.”

“Oh, that sounds interesting,” Dia says in a tone that gives away the undercurrent that she doesn’t feel interested at all.

“It wasn’t, really,” Mari says with a chuckle. “I just…” She takes a deep breath in and then says the next words so quickly that she’s almost hoping they’ll be loss through the phone. “It made me miss being an idol and watching other school idols.”

There’s a pause where Mari thinks that she’s gone too far and Dia will hang up on her and never speak to her again. She’s about to take it all back when Dia says, “Yeah…me too.”

Then why did you turn your back on me? is the question that bubbles up. Instead of voicing it, Mari swaps it out with something else. “Do you think about it a lot? Not just μ’s but also us. Aqours,” she specifies.

Instead of replying instantly, Dia clears her throat – and then she starts singing the song that brought them enough attention to attend the preliminaries in Tokyo. “Go ahead and tell me what you wanna do, please!” Dia sings a line that’s originally hers. It’s clear from her intonation that Dia has still been practicing singing even with Aqours disbanded. Mari pauses in hesitation for a second, looking around furtively to see if anyone is looking at her but then decides that she doesn’t care what people think after all.

“’Cause I wanna go have fun!” Mari sings, her voice a little scratchy from disuse over the course of the year.

“Even if it’s totally out there, we’ll do it,” they both sing together, melodies mixing together that is profoundly them and Aqours even if it is missing one member, and then Mari starts laughing.

“That was fun,” she admits to Dia, ducking her head and smiling at the ground, her hand pressing her phone against her ear. She misses it so much – the blend of melodies, the fluidity in her trained dance movements, and the feeling of being on stage.

She knows that Dia can hear the longing in her voice. “I miss it too,” Dia says. “I miss performing with you and Kanan. But most of all,” her voice lowers until it’s almost a whisper, “I miss you,”

Mari’s heart picks up the pace and she’s sitting very still in her seat.

“Not just Aqours,” Dia says, voice wavering a little. “But I miss you – just…you. I want you here with me and not in America where I can’t even see you everyday. I just miss you enough that I sometimes dream about you returning and – and I can’t control how I feel about it…” She cuts herself off with a chuckle. “Was that weird? Sorry. Ignore that.”

“No, no,” Mari replies hastily, hating the way she sounds shaken to the core. Though vague, Mari can almost swear that it was half of a confession. If only she were there in front of Dia – perhaps the other girl would say her true feelings instead of masking it in apologies. “I – Dia, I feel the sa– “

Dia cuts her off very quickly. “Um, even though we’ve disbanded, I’ve still been writing lyrics. They’re very rough, and I know there’s a very low chance of…becoming idols again. But do you want to look it over?”

Their confession moment has been pushed away, and Mari can understand why Dia did it. It’s something that only feels right face-to-face. Mari doesn’t know if she can do long-distance with Dia while there’s no guarantee that Mari will return to Uchiura or even Japan. She shuffles her feet, looking down at the cobblestone ground. The sounds of the concertgoers are distant now, and the leaving crowds have thinned considerably.

“I’d love to look at your lyrics,” Mari says, letting go of her unspoken confession. “But they better be very good,” she says, dropping another phrase into English, chuckling when Dia tries to defend lyrics that she hasn’t sent over yet.

Despite snapping back to their easy jocular friendship, Mari is almost certain Dia is aware of her feelings too, but for now, she allows it to slip by quietly.

Dia sends her an email of the lyrics she’s been drafting on the next morning.

Dear Mari,

Here’s a verse of the lyrics I was talking about the other day. I’m not sure what I should name it yet. But, it’s a song that has been sitting in my head for a while. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to do it, because I imagine it having a more EDM genre type to it and it’s…a very personal journal of my feelings but… Here it is.

 Is this the last step? The person

That understands my heart is waiting…

That someone is…

You.

 “I’m here,” I can hear your voice say

Please, guide me with your gentle voice.

With just that, it seems like

I can really come to like this planet

Let’s hurry and meet each other,

I’m calling calling you.

 Yours,

Dia

It doesn’t take much to make her decision after reading those lyrics.

After the American school year is over, she’s going back to Japan. She’s going to confront Dia and kiss the other girl stupid – or at least until Dia understands that her feelings are reciprocated.

That thought brings a wide grin to Mari’s face. A happy birthday indeed.

[convenientalias]

Yuletide Fics I Wrote

Now that Yuletide has revealed its authors, I figured I’d link to the fics I wrote here in case anyone’s interested. So here they are by fandom:

Beyond Black

Morning After--1k of femslashy awfulness.

Black Ships

The Prince’s Confidants--1k of pre-OT3 hurt/comfort.

Enter the Phoenix

Falling For Your Archnemesis’s Boyfriend--3k of Cheng Chow/George with a lot of identity porn and pining.

Granting You a Dreamlike Life

Playing House--5k of Xingcheng/Fusheng awfulness. Includes non-con.

Joy of Life

a simple vision of how life should be--Li Chengze/Xie Bi’an fluff ficlet

trust, more or less--2k of Chen Pingping/Fan Xian being Complicated.

Love Is More Than a Word

Wedding Banquet--5k of post-canon resolution to the cliffhanger.

Moths

quiet mountain life--2k coda to the novel, a little melancholy

worship and warmth--Vere/Correze smut ficlet

Murder Rooms (book series)

The Burning Cottage--2k of Doyle consulting Bell over a possibly haunted painting.

Where Your Eyes Linger

Out for Trouble--4k of Gook being Tae-joo’s “fake bodyguard”, canon divergent future fic.

a lesson and a proof--1k of whump and hurt/comfort.

Winter Begonia

A Non-Operatic Performance--5k of Shang Xirui/Cheng Fengtai, bandits (Gu Dali) made them do it.

Ying Xiong (Hero, the 2002 movie)

The Nameless Concubine--3k of Nameless/The king.

You’ve Got Mail: A Cautionary Tale

The Vanishing Rescuer--4k of Wu Xingzi/Guan Shanjin, canon divergent pre-canon meeting.

All in all, I wrote a total of 43k words divided among 15 fics in 12 fandoms. Frankly, I went a little overboard. But that’s what I was doing for a large part of December, anyway.

If you’re familiar with any of the fandoms, you should check the fic out :) I’m more satisfied with some of these fics than others, but overall, I think they’re mostly pretty good.

Oh, oh, also! I don’t think I’ve recced the fic that was written for me yet. That was who we are, where we’re going, and it’s a Circle: Two Worlds Connected fic with an interesting look at Han Jung-yeon, Kim Joon-hyuk, and Lee Ho-soo. Would recommend.