The Meeting

(Shin's PoV)

—

Sora walked half a step ahead of me down the corridor, and she was holding the paperwork wrong.

I noticed it without meaning to. She had the whole stack pressed flat against her chest with both arms wrapped around it, the way you'd hold something in a crowd to keep from dropping it, except the corridor was mostly empty and there was nothing to bump into.

Her knuckles had gone pale at the edges of the folders, and every few steps she'd shift her grip and press the stack a little tighter.

For someone who ran the entire student council with the calm of an air traffic controller, she looked strangely like a first-year on the first day.

"T-The bonfire allocation is the one that's going to eat the time," she was saying, mostly to the folders. "Maruyama-sensei thinks the safety perimeter is negotiable, which it absolutely is not, and if he brings up the fire marshal's report again I might—"

She glanced sideways at me, and there was a faint color high on her cheeks that hadn't been there a minute ago, and she looked back at the folders very quickly.

"—I might lose my professional composure," she finished.

"I'm pretty sure that you've never lost your composure once in your life." I teased.

"I came close in that meeting about the mochi stall placement. You still weren't there, but I assure you that it was a dark day." She adjusted her grip on the stack again. Pale knuckles. "Anyway... I'm glad you're coming. It helps to have someone who—"

She didn't finish that one. She just walked, holding the folders too tight, the color still sitting on her cheeks.

"Sora, are you okay?" I asked. Her behavior was unusual.

She flinched like I'd startled her out of a dream, and the whole stack of folders lurched in her arms. She caught it against her hip with a small gasp, papers fanning half-loose before she pressed them flat again, and when she looked up at me, her face had gone properly pink.

"Y-yes! Yes, I'm— " She took a breath and steadied the stack. "Just — call me by my surname while we're here. Please. Otherwise someone might get the wrong idea and voices might spread. I can't allow something like that."

Right. School. Corridors have ears. Too many.

I scratched the back of my head. "Damn. You're right. Sorry— Fujimoto-san." I smiled at her.

"It's fine." She let out a small laugh, quiet, and then she didn't say anything for a moment.

She just looked at me, a beat too long, the way Akane sometimes catches me when she thinks I'm not paying attention, and then seemed to realize she was doing it and dropped her eyes back to the folders.

"Are you really sure that everything is okay?" I asked again, quieter this time.

"Yes. Yes, I'm— I'm just a little distracted. There's a lot to get through today." She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. "My head's in ten places."

"Okay. Well... whatever it is, you can count on me. You know that." I said warmly.

She looked up at me, and something crossed her face that I couldn't quite read, and then she smiled. A small, real smile, tucked at the corner of her mouth.

"I know I can," she said. "I know that perfectly too well." She added.

After her words, we kept walking for some other minutes until she turned and pushed open the meeting room door, and the moment folded away behind us as the noise of the committee spilled out.

The meeting room was the usual controlled chaos of festival organization: two long tables pushed together, a map of the school grounds taped to the whiteboard with colored tabs stuck all over it, six committee members arguing across each other, and a thermos of tea nobody had touched going cold in the center. No sign of Daiki.

"Good morning, President Fujimoto," one of the members said. I recognized him almost instantly: he was Miyamura, one of the most brilliant students in the school. Very popular and admired by a lot of girls. But... I knew that he was a good guy.

"Good Miyamoto-san," Sora replied, her tone shifted to absolute professionalism, completely different from minutes ago. 

Everyone then looked at me like they were looking at an alien.

I felt embarrassed, almost. I was standing between very popular people.

I scratched the back of my head and politely bowed. "Good morning, I'll be President Fujimoto's assistant today."

"We know. Takaneda-sensei had already told us, Ishikawa-san," one of the members replied. "You'll be one of us today, so you'll see with your own eyes how everything here is boring." She added. 

All the room giggled until the president demanded everyone's attention.

"*Ahem*, we don't have so much time, so take your seats and let's begin already," Sora clapped her hands together.

Everyone obeyed, including me, of course.

Then, she took the head of the table and became a different person the instant she sat down.

The nervous girl from the corridor was gone. The one who took her place ran the room like she'd been born in it: she called the meeting to order with two quiet words, and everyone listened to her in complete silence, like a believer listening to a priest.

My job, it turned out, was to be her hands.

"Ishikawa-kun, the revised stall map, please." She demanded.

I slid it across to her.

"The fire marshal's clearance for the bonfire, page two." She added.

I had it ready before she finished the sentence.

We'd found a rhythm without ever discussing it: she'd name a thing, and I'd have it in front of her, and she never had to look up or break her train of thought, and the committee members started glancing between us like they were watching a rehearsed act.

The bonfire ate the time, exactly like she'd said. Maruyama-sensei brought up the safety perimeter. Sora dismantled him in under ninety seconds using nothing but the fire marshal's own report, which I passed to her at precisely the right moment, and one of the second-years actually laughed and then tried to pretend she'd coughed.

We got through the food stalls and even through the electrical load for the stage — which reminded me I didn't even begin cutting Tsubame's audio files down to the runtime (Akane), and I made a note to do it tonight, and tried not to think about the name attached to them.

We were about halfway through the vendor logistics, Sora mid-sentence about power distribution to the yakisoba stalls, when the door opened.

"S-sorry! I'm late—"

The whole room looked up.

Kurone stood in the doorway, one hand on the frame, breathing hard like she'd run the last flight of stairs.

Her hair was pulled back, no makeup, her uniform buttoned to the collar... and she had a folder clutched against her side.

She was... different. Totally different from the strawberry girl of Valentine's Day.

"W-What did I miss?" she managed, still catching her breath.

I didn't know she was on the festival committee. I supposed I'd stopped keeping track of where Kurone was, the way you stop noticing a sound you've decided to live with.

And then, after a few instants, her eyes finished sweeping the room and landed on me.

On me, sitting at Sora's right hand, with the stack of paperwork between us and my sleeve almost touching hers.

And... I saw Kurone freeze. I knew her too well.

Everything about her just... stopped. The hand on the door frame, the rise and fall of her breathing, and even the half-formed word still on her mouth.

For a second she stood completely still in the doorway, staring at the two of us sitting side by side, and something moved across her face that I didn't have a name for and didn't want to look at too closely.

The room waited.

Sora, at the head of the table, glanced from Kurone to me and back again, and I saw her read something in half a second that I couldn't, and her expression smoothed into perfect council-president neutrality.

"Tsugikawa-san," Sora said, warm and even, gesturing to an empty chair at the far end. "You're just in time for stall logistics. Take a seat; we're on power distribution."

Kurone didn't move for another beat.

Then she blinked, pulled herself back together with a visible effort, murmured a small "right— thank you," and crossed to the far chair without looking at me again.

But her hands, when she set her folder down on the table, were trembling. Just slightly. The same tremor I'd seen in her hands in a hundred small moments over the years and never once thought about.

I looked back down at the paperwork.

Whatever that was, it wasn't mine to figure out. Not anymore.

I had a runtime to cut and a beautiful girlfriend waiting on a rooftop and a life that had, against every reasonable expectation, started going right.

Kurone's frozen face in a doorway was a weather system from a country I no longer lived in.

"Ishikawa-kun," Sora said. "The power grid schematic?"

I slid it across to her.

And we kept going.