Tuesday — 4:38 PM — School Rooftop

The rooftop at 4:38 PM belongs to no one.

Or rather: it belongs to her, by default, by the particular social logic that had developed over two years without anyone intending it. Nobody came up here anymore. The door was not locked. There was no rule against it. There was simply an understanding — unspoken, unanimous, and wrong about most of its underlying assumptions — that the rooftop was where Kurenai went, and therefore the rooftop was somewhere you did not go.

It suited her fine.

The afternoon light came in from the west at this hour, low and warm and amber-toned, cutting across the rooftop at the angle that hit the corner behind the water tower exactly right. The city stretched out below, hazy with late heat. Somewhere several floors down the sound of clubs and after-school announcements had already gone muffled and soft, like they belonged to a different building entirely.

Noa Kurenai stood in the corner behind the water tower.

She was watering a plant.

It was a small succulent in a terracotta pot. Healthy. Well-tended. A plant that had clearly been watered every day for a long time by someone who knew what they were doing and had made a point of learning. She held the small watering can with the same careful precision she gave to nothing else, tilting it slowly, watching the soil.

Four more seconds, she thought. Then done. Then leave.

She had a schedule. She came up at 4:30. She watered Kuro. She sat for approximately fifteen minutes in the place where no one could find her and was simply no one in particular. Then she left before anyone noticed she had been there.

It was a good system.

It had worked for fourteen months.

The rooftop door opened.

—

The thought did not complete itself.

She heard it — the specific sound of that door, the way it stuck slightly before giving, a sound she had learned the way you learn the sounds of a space that belongs to you — and something in her went very still in a way that was different from her usual stillness, the kind of still that meant her brain had just registered a problem and had not yet figured out what to do about it.

The watering can was in her hand.

Kuro was right there.

The afternoon light was hitting the corner at exactly the right angle and there was no way to misread what she was doing.

Okay, she thought, with the flat internal tone of someone conducting emergency triage. Okay. Someone is on the roof. She turned the watering can slightly, as if the angle of it could be made to look like something else. Someone is on the roof and I am holding a watering can and there is a plant and I have been up here for — okay. Okay. New plan.

There was no new plan.

She turned around.

The blush arrived before she could stop it — faster than she could school her expression, faster than she could deploy anything, spreading across her cheeks and the bridge of her nose with the complete indifference to timing that it always had — and she looked at whoever had just come through that door with garnet eyes gone slightly wide and a watering can in her hand and a small well-loved plant in the corner directly behind her that was very obviously, very clearly hers.

For one second she said nothing.

The second ended.

"What."

Flat. The word landed the way she intended it to — like a door closing, like a full stop, like something that was not a question even though it was technically shaped like one.

Her chin lifted slightly. The watering can lowered to her side, held with the particular casualness of someone trying very hard to make a watering can look like a normal object to be holding rather than evidence of anything.

Don't look at the plant. She was aware, with some bitterness, that this instruction was useless. The plant was right there. It was in a terracotta pot. There was fresh water in the soil. It had clearly been tended by someone who cared about it. Don't look at the plant was approximately equivalent to telling someone not to think about what was directly in front of them.

She held the eye contact with flat garnet eyes and waited.

The blush was not fading.

The blush was, if anything, worse.

She was aware of this. She was furious about it and doing nothing visibly about it, because doing something about it would require acknowledging it, and acknowledging it would mean acknowledging all of it — the plant, the watering can, the fact that she had been up here alone for eight minutes doing something that did not fit any version of the story the school had built about her.

Say something, she thought, with the particular internal flatness of someone waiting for a catastrophe to finish unfolding. Say something weird. Or nothing. Or just leave. Please just leave.

She watched his face.

She waited.

The watering can was still in her hand.

She had forgotten about the watering can.

She remembered about the watering can.

She very deliberately did not look at it.

"You're not supposed to be up here."

It came out lower than she intended. More of a statement than a warning. Not the voice she used in the hallways — not the one that made first-years cross to the other side — just her actual voice, the one that existed before the reputation, a little tired and a little flat and not, currently, very threatening at all.

That was not good, she noted.

That was the opposite of good.

She set the watering can down beside the pot — she had to, she needed her hands to do something other than hold it — and it made a small sound against the rooftop surface and she did not look at it.

She looked at User instead, with the expression she had developed over two years of managing situations exactly like this one — flat, contained, the particular stillness that was supposed to signal: this is not a problem you want to make itself — and waited to see what he was going to do.

If he laughs, she thought.

She didn't finish that thought either.

He was looking at her. At her face. Which was still red. Which was not going to stop being red.

She had, she reflected privately, approximately four options:

Tell him to leave. He might not leave. Pretend this was normal. It was not normal. Start the threat. She did not know how to finish the threat. Leave herself. The plant was still there. She could not leave the plant unattended with a person present.

She arrived at option three with the resignation of someone selecting the least bad option from a list with no good options.

"Tell anyone and I'll—"

She stopped.

The sentence sat there, unfinished, the way it always did.

The rooftop was very quiet.

The afternoon light was still warm and amber and hitting the corner at exactly the right angle.

The small plant the pot that she named Kuro was right there the only witness of her true personality before you

She looked at User with garnet eyes that were still, undeniably, slightly too wide, and waited.