whenyoudesertme (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
whenyoudesertme) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
itakara2020-09-11 06:23 pm
whenyoudesertme) wrote in itakara2020-09-11 06:23 pm
Entry tags:
(fic) Quickening
Title: Quickening (AO3)
Pairing: Iwaya Sumire/Makino Tsukushi (Kimi wa Petto & Hana Yori Dango)
Rating: G
Warnings: Life-ruining attempts of the Domyouji family's variety
Summary: Inspired by a long-ago prompt from kino to write something related to her story, Tramps Like Us: "BONUS CHEATER-PANTS OPTION: A scene from the Sumire/Tsukushi version~~~" and also inspired by a note attached to the original fic: "Meanwhile, Tsukushi and Sumire hook up and go on a beautiful tropical vacation and get married and live happily ever after without any manipulative dudes around to screw with them. The end~"
Notes: Even more earnestly dedicated to kinoface in celebration of her wonderful and well-earned accomplishment. Thank you to Molly for the beta! ♥
Nothing was ominous about the click of the door closing behind Sumire until she took a few steps into the copy room and found a young woman in a box.
It was a large box, and the young woman was curled up and snoring, so Sumire's initial alarm faded quickly. Still, she had questions.
She stared down at the box and its confusing contents for a minute before deciding not to interrupt that seemingly pleasant slumber. Instead, she moved to accomplish her aim in coming here in the first place.
"It does seem a more conventional use of the copy room," she mused aloud as she finished up stapling her collated pages. She cast a glance toward the box. "Maybe I'm getting boring?"
A small snort greeted this. The young woman in the box abruptly sat up. Her hair was a mess and her face was creased with the way she'd been sleeping. Sumire was just giving in to a smile when the box's occupant spotted her and went rigid with fear.
Sumire stilled in turn. She gazed steadily at the frightened young woman, recognizing with surprise an immediate instinct to protect her. The problem wasn't so much that she didn't know who this person was, but that she had no idea what was so scary in the first place.
After a moment, the tension in the young woman's body lessened. She said bluntly, "You're not with them."
Sumire shook her head and turned to gather her copies into one neat pile. She stowed them in her bag, then dropped the bag to the floor against the copy machine. She was technically done with her use of the room, but she wasn't about to leave someone afraid in a box, stranger or not.
She walked over and crouched down close to peer at the young woman's name tag. "Makino-san?"
A nod. The silence afterward should have been awkward. But now that they were face to face, the way their eyes met seemed to shift and strengthen, becoming its own form of communication. When Sumire finally blinked, a shy voice said, "But you can call me Tsukushi."
*
It turned out that them were a group of Tsukushi's coworkers, though she didn't mention them by name. It also turned out that they'd locked her in the copy room. With the door unable to be opened from the inside, now Sumire was locked in as well.
Sumire was frustrated before she realized she was far more curious about what was going on here, and, if she was quite honest with herself, about Tsukushi.
"I had a best friend in high school, well, though he started as my enemy."
Tsukushi seemed to feel that the situation required an explanation, so Sumire sat on a stool and ignored the buzz of her phone in her bag behind her. Part of her mind, one she didn't care about much right then, reminded her that she had planned to meet a few of her least disliked coworkers for drinks.
"If I told you his name, you'd know him. No, you do--you know his whole family."
Tsukushi had moved to kneeling in the box, with Sumire not suggesting she remove herself from it because she wanted to see how long it would take Tsukushi to realize, again, that she was in a box. The angle at which Tsukushi was looking up at her gave Sumire a weird little thrill that made it hard to care about anything outside that room.
"We were both in love with the same guy, and he loved someone else."
Perhaps more than ten, probably not as much as fifteen years younger than Sumire, Tsukushi had long, straight hair with blunt bangs framing a youthful face with a certain inherent tenacity that came through clearly. Sumire also thought she looked quietly exhausted, and the fact that she was spilling out her life story in the company copy room to a complete stranger was probably due to that. Sumire hoped irrelevantly that Tsukushi wasn't too much younger than she was--she didn't want it to be creepy that at the mention of love, she'd found herself wondering about Tsukushi's more recent romantic attachments. Maybe like a big sister? Except ... no.
"We ended up spending a lot of time together nursing our heartbreak. His parents hated everything about me."
Something in the sturdy sort of kindness that oozed from Tsukushi's pores made Sumire think she must have a knack for helping people through their pain. If only Sumire had met Tsukushi a few years earlier, when her fiancé had left right as she'd been unjustly demoted, she might not have gone into the spiral that she had.
"He tried to keep them away from me, but that only made them realize I was important to him. They're not particularly imaginative, so they assumed we were in love."
Somehow looking at Tsukushi's earnest, tired face made Sumire's fingers itch for a cigarette though she'd given up smoking three years ago. She distracted herself by finding it strange how she could be caught up in Tsukushi's narrative while also finding herself curious about Tsukushi, here and now, herself, and at the same time also already beginning to brainstorm how she could help her not end up locked in the copy room again. Adding yet another layer to her ponderings, Sumire couldn't see how any of this ended up with Tsukushi sleeping in a box. She wondered if it would be rude to ask Tsukushi to answer just that before continuing.
"They kidnapped me and threatened me, offered me a great deal of money to leave, and just as it was about to get bad, my best friend found us."
It was unpleasant to imagine what Tsukushi considered bad if kidnapping and threatening weren't included. Sumire had been holding in a number of questions from the sense that Tsukushi needed to get all of this out, but this was one question that she didn't want to ask.
"My best friend can be... especially then he didn't always make the best decisions. He wreaked havoc on the room and several of his parents' goons and finally, like a dumbass, shouted that he would marry me if he damn well pleased."
It was probably just that the story continued to have mentions of love and marriage, but now Sumire found herself looking at Tsukushi's fingers. No ring. Not that it mattered. Not that Sumire cared. Not that ... except as painful as it had been, Sumire had learned a great deal from her emotional collapse, and one part of that had been that it wasn't healthy to lie to herself. Right now, the thrill of having a woman she was horribly drawn to kneeling at her feet and looking at her like Sumire was the person she'd been waiting for, the thrill that felt a little bit like ones she'd felt before with women and ignored, prioritizing her career, and fitting in, and the potential of having children, this one, even on such little acquaintance, was something she admitted felt like it would be the hardest to ignore yet. Sumire reminded herself that she'd only just met Tsukushi, and also that panic never helped anything.
"I made it clear to him what I thought of that. It seemed to upset his parents more."
This elision was too much for Sumire, and she requested details. Tsukushi looked surprised that Sumire was interested, but answered at once, if possibly with a blush. The contrast between her practical straightforwardness and the sweet way she could be shy kind of pissed Sumire off with how much it charmed her.
"I kicked his feet out from under him and told him I wouldn't marry him if he were the last person on earth. And then, oh, this is what pissed off his parents the most, I told him he should make his own choices instead deciding based on what people told him to do or not to do... and I told him that he only got one life and if he kept making it into a garbage fire I'd find a new best friend, and good riddance."
Sumire pictured Tsukushi saying anything like that to her and found herself taking back her wish that she'd met Tsukushi during the lowest point of her life. It probably would've been just what she needed to hear, but even so, she wasn't a big enough person to wish for it. Now, though, after going through all that, after learning about herself and what she needed and what she had to offer, maybe now she was a big enough person to wish for someone as strong as Tsukushi... if that were something she found herself wanting, when she knew her better. Somehow, even as she doubted herself and her sudden feelings for this person, she couldn't doubt she'd have that chance.
"And he stormed out, but he came around, later. His parents didn't. They got me kicked out of school, ruined my parents' business, made sure none of us could find jobs... when we moved to the country, they found us and did it all over again."
As mildly as she could, Sumire expressed the belief that this seemed to be a bit of an overreaction. This was the last she was able to speak for a while as Tsukushi went on, her tiredness seeming to fade as she got angrier and angrier. As her voice gained in volume it seemed to echo around Sumire, keeping her attention fixed on those fierce eyes. All the layers of Sumire's thoughts blurred and faded until her mind was filled only with the sheer force of Tsukushi.
And now here Sumire was, staring at a young woman kneeling in a box, her chest heaving after her tirade, the hands that had gestured so emphatically now clasped in front of her. Sumire knew Tsukushi wasn't actually looking to her for aid. She knew that it was just that Tsukushi was at the end of her rope and Sumire happened to be a captive audience.
Sumire wasn't sure she cared about that. In fact, the longer she looked at Tsukushi, the clearer it became to her that she couldn't ignore this, no matter the parts of herself she still wasn't sure about claiming. She'd pushed down so many things in her life and had only started to live on her own terms in the last few years. So many small things had been given up on with difficulty, but this, a big, reckless decision, was somehow an easy one to make.
"Tsukushi-san," she said, pulse speeding up as Tsukushi's eyes snapped to hers. "Let me help."
*
If Tsukushi had ever asked why Sumire wanted to help her, Sumire wasn't sure what she would've said. But Tsukushi never asked, and after a while it started to feel like a given--this was the situation they were in, the two of them, figuring things out side by side.
They spent so much time working out solutions to Tsukushi's problems that it wasn't until later that Sumire realized how much it went both ways.
That first day, with the copy room as their base for planning, Sumire established that Tsukushi's three most pressing problems were a place to live (as her landlords kept getting paid off to kick her out and now she was seen as having an undesirable renting history), respite from the abuse of her coworkers, and, most simply but perhaps the hardest to achieve, rest from the stress she'd built up for years.
Sumire had a spare room, and Tsukushi moved in with her. As much as Sumire hated to admit it, Tsukushi's healthy habits helped Sumire have more energy, and her cunning thriftiness meant Sumire had more money left over with every paycheck--and now that she had someone she was beginning to consider a real friend, they used their leftover money to try out new restaurants, go to concerts, even take some day trips.
Sumire's boss's boss owed her a favor, and she called it in to get Tsukushi transferred to her department. As imperfect as her coworkers were they weren't sneaky. If they bullied Tsukushi, Sumire would know. Since meeting Tsukushi, the focus Sumire had sharpened on work since her catastrophe a few years back started to be mixed with other things. As it turned out, a better work/life balance actually improved her performance, and though she didn't often work directly with Tsukushi, seeing the way she gave each task her all while relating to everyone with honesty--well, it didn't make Sumire loathe small talk or boring meetings any less, but it shifted her attitude just enough that she didn't go home cranky at the end of the day.
The third goal took time. Sumire had several unpleasant interactions with the Domyouji elders in the first few years after Tsukushi moved in with her, and every time she saw Tsukushi brace for what the two of them had to disappear. But Sumire didn't take their money, and she didn't bow to their threats. She owned her apartment, and the big boss at her company was an asshole, but the kind of asshole who would never use his power for anyone's convenience but his own. Perhaps it was Sumire and Tsukushi's persistence in their current situation, or perhaps it was that the passing of time since Tsukushi had been in high school had finally reached a critical mass where even master grudge-holders and life-destroyers like the Domyouji family were starting to see the effort as less than worthwhile, but the awful encounters with them, as well as with the people they paid to be awful on their behalf, started to lessen in frequency.
Still, the first time Sumire knew Tsukushi to sleep soundly through the night was after Sumire proposed. They'd been together for just over a year, their friendship evolving so gradually, Sumire becoming comfortable with herself and with Tsukushi so thoroughly, that one day it just felt natural that Tsukushi leaned over and gave Sumire a kiss. Tsukushi always tossed and turned to the point that if one of them had an early morning the next day, the other usually slept on the couch. But when Sumire proposed, putting everything she had into conveying just how dear Tsukushi was to her, how essential, the last remaining tension in Tsukushi's shoulders seemed to ebb away. She said yes first, then kissed Sumire dizzy. Then she said that something this wonderful should be shared.
Sumire was a little chagrined that she hadn't realized that marriage, for all that she and Tsukushi wanted it for themselves, could also be used to help attain that third goal made so long ago. She made a copy of their wedding announcement and mailed it to the Domyouji residence. Neither she nor Tsukushi heard from the Domyouji family ever again.
*
Except once.
On Sumire and Tsukushi's honeymoon, they arrived at their hotel on a tropical island and found that their booking had been upgraded to the most expensive suite. Sumire started to argue with the concierge, stopped herself, then questioned how this had occurred.
Tsukushi put a hand on Sumire's arm. "Let's get settled in our room."
Sumire lifted an eyebrow at her, but she wasn't that committed to giving the concierge time to find out it was all a mistake, and besides, Tsukushi looked tired from their flight.
Their suite was entirely over the top: multiple bedrooms, all with rose petals adorning the mile-wide beds, a hot tub the size of their bedroom at home, a sea of complimentary and clearly expensive refreshments, plush robes and slippers, champagne on ice... Sumire's head swam.
She flopped onto the nearest cushioned surface, of which there were a great deal to choose from, and sought with her eyes for Tsukushi. Right then Sumire was worn out from traveling, but later she hoped to get to know each of these soft places better with her wife.
Tsukushi was walking purposefully around the room. She looked in drawers and closets, flipped back the luxurious covers on the beds, and when she came back from re-examining the entryway, she had a small silky envelope in one hand.
"What's that?" Sumire asked, her sleepiness fading for a moment.
Tsukushi rolled her eyes and handed Sumire the sealed envelope. "Domyouji."
Sumire sat up with a gasp. "Those motherfuckers...!"
"No, no," Tsukushi laughed. "Tsukasa. I thought maybe he'd do something like this."
Sumire opened the envelope and read the contents of the enclosed letter aloud. It was congratulatory, courteous, and brief. She looked at Tsukushi with some worry, wondering if this would hurt her somehow.
Tsukushi smiled at her. "It's nice, right? Feels like a final goodbye. I know him--he's been feeling frustrated about not being able to protect me for years, but we both learned a long, long time ago that his interference only made things worse for both of us." She grimaced comically. "Mostly me."
Sumire said slowly, her eyes still on Tsukushi's face, "I can't say I'm upset to end up in this suite. It was kind of him to think of us."
There was a twinkle in Tsukushi's eyes as she came to sit by Sumire. She leaned in and nuzzled Sumire's cheek. "I can't say I'm upset to be here with you. My wife."
Sumire pulled her down beside her on the settee, the letter falling unnoticed to the carpet. They kissed, the thrill of it setting every part of Sumire alight, and held each other close.
"Gonna take a nap," Sumire mumbled. One or the other of them had hair in Sumire's face, but she ignored that small irritation and held tight to Tsukushi's shoulders in a clear request for company.
Tsukushi shifted slightly to the side, one leg over Sumire's, and pulled her hair back carefully before resting her head on Sumire's shoulder. "Kiss me again when we wake up."
With her last bit of energy, Sumire reached up and took the blanket from the back of the settee and arranged it over Tsukushi's shoulders as best she could. Tsukushi took hold of a side and pulled it so that it covered Sumire as well. The sound of waves from the open balcony door lulled them into peaceful sleep, together.
Pairing: Iwaya Sumire/Makino Tsukushi (Kimi wa Petto & Hana Yori Dango)
Rating: G
Warnings: Life-ruining attempts of the Domyouji family's variety
Summary: Inspired by a long-ago prompt from kino to write something related to her story, Tramps Like Us: "BONUS CHEATER-PANTS OPTION: A scene from the Sumire/Tsukushi version~~~" and also inspired by a note attached to the original fic: "Meanwhile, Tsukushi and Sumire hook up and go on a beautiful tropical vacation and get married and live happily ever after without any manipulative dudes around to screw with them. The end~"
Notes: Even more earnestly dedicated to kinoface in celebration of her wonderful and well-earned accomplishment. Thank you to Molly for the beta! ♥
Nothing was ominous about the click of the door closing behind Sumire until she took a few steps into the copy room and found a young woman in a box.
It was a large box, and the young woman was curled up and snoring, so Sumire's initial alarm faded quickly. Still, she had questions.
She stared down at the box and its confusing contents for a minute before deciding not to interrupt that seemingly pleasant slumber. Instead, she moved to accomplish her aim in coming here in the first place.
"It does seem a more conventional use of the copy room," she mused aloud as she finished up stapling her collated pages. She cast a glance toward the box. "Maybe I'm getting boring?"
A small snort greeted this. The young woman in the box abruptly sat up. Her hair was a mess and her face was creased with the way she'd been sleeping. Sumire was just giving in to a smile when the box's occupant spotted her and went rigid with fear.
Sumire stilled in turn. She gazed steadily at the frightened young woman, recognizing with surprise an immediate instinct to protect her. The problem wasn't so much that she didn't know who this person was, but that she had no idea what was so scary in the first place.
After a moment, the tension in the young woman's body lessened. She said bluntly, "You're not with them."
Sumire shook her head and turned to gather her copies into one neat pile. She stowed them in her bag, then dropped the bag to the floor against the copy machine. She was technically done with her use of the room, but she wasn't about to leave someone afraid in a box, stranger or not.
She walked over and crouched down close to peer at the young woman's name tag. "Makino-san?"
A nod. The silence afterward should have been awkward. But now that they were face to face, the way their eyes met seemed to shift and strengthen, becoming its own form of communication. When Sumire finally blinked, a shy voice said, "But you can call me Tsukushi."
*
It turned out that them were a group of Tsukushi's coworkers, though she didn't mention them by name. It also turned out that they'd locked her in the copy room. With the door unable to be opened from the inside, now Sumire was locked in as well.
Sumire was frustrated before she realized she was far more curious about what was going on here, and, if she was quite honest with herself, about Tsukushi.
"I had a best friend in high school, well, though he started as my enemy."
Tsukushi seemed to feel that the situation required an explanation, so Sumire sat on a stool and ignored the buzz of her phone in her bag behind her. Part of her mind, one she didn't care about much right then, reminded her that she had planned to meet a few of her least disliked coworkers for drinks.
"If I told you his name, you'd know him. No, you do--you know his whole family."
Tsukushi had moved to kneeling in the box, with Sumire not suggesting she remove herself from it because she wanted to see how long it would take Tsukushi to realize, again, that she was in a box. The angle at which Tsukushi was looking up at her gave Sumire a weird little thrill that made it hard to care about anything outside that room.
"We were both in love with the same guy, and he loved someone else."
Perhaps more than ten, probably not as much as fifteen years younger than Sumire, Tsukushi had long, straight hair with blunt bangs framing a youthful face with a certain inherent tenacity that came through clearly. Sumire also thought she looked quietly exhausted, and the fact that she was spilling out her life story in the company copy room to a complete stranger was probably due to that. Sumire hoped irrelevantly that Tsukushi wasn't too much younger than she was--she didn't want it to be creepy that at the mention of love, she'd found herself wondering about Tsukushi's more recent romantic attachments. Maybe like a big sister? Except ... no.
"We ended up spending a lot of time together nursing our heartbreak. His parents hated everything about me."
Something in the sturdy sort of kindness that oozed from Tsukushi's pores made Sumire think she must have a knack for helping people through their pain. If only Sumire had met Tsukushi a few years earlier, when her fiancé had left right as she'd been unjustly demoted, she might not have gone into the spiral that she had.
"He tried to keep them away from me, but that only made them realize I was important to him. They're not particularly imaginative, so they assumed we were in love."
Somehow looking at Tsukushi's earnest, tired face made Sumire's fingers itch for a cigarette though she'd given up smoking three years ago. She distracted herself by finding it strange how she could be caught up in Tsukushi's narrative while also finding herself curious about Tsukushi, here and now, herself, and at the same time also already beginning to brainstorm how she could help her not end up locked in the copy room again. Adding yet another layer to her ponderings, Sumire couldn't see how any of this ended up with Tsukushi sleeping in a box. She wondered if it would be rude to ask Tsukushi to answer just that before continuing.
"They kidnapped me and threatened me, offered me a great deal of money to leave, and just as it was about to get bad, my best friend found us."
It was unpleasant to imagine what Tsukushi considered bad if kidnapping and threatening weren't included. Sumire had been holding in a number of questions from the sense that Tsukushi needed to get all of this out, but this was one question that she didn't want to ask.
"My best friend can be... especially then he didn't always make the best decisions. He wreaked havoc on the room and several of his parents' goons and finally, like a dumbass, shouted that he would marry me if he damn well pleased."
It was probably just that the story continued to have mentions of love and marriage, but now Sumire found herself looking at Tsukushi's fingers. No ring. Not that it mattered. Not that Sumire cared. Not that ... except as painful as it had been, Sumire had learned a great deal from her emotional collapse, and one part of that had been that it wasn't healthy to lie to herself. Right now, the thrill of having a woman she was horribly drawn to kneeling at her feet and looking at her like Sumire was the person she'd been waiting for, the thrill that felt a little bit like ones she'd felt before with women and ignored, prioritizing her career, and fitting in, and the potential of having children, this one, even on such little acquaintance, was something she admitted felt like it would be the hardest to ignore yet. Sumire reminded herself that she'd only just met Tsukushi, and also that panic never helped anything.
"I made it clear to him what I thought of that. It seemed to upset his parents more."
This elision was too much for Sumire, and she requested details. Tsukushi looked surprised that Sumire was interested, but answered at once, if possibly with a blush. The contrast between her practical straightforwardness and the sweet way she could be shy kind of pissed Sumire off with how much it charmed her.
"I kicked his feet out from under him and told him I wouldn't marry him if he were the last person on earth. And then, oh, this is what pissed off his parents the most, I told him he should make his own choices instead deciding based on what people told him to do or not to do... and I told him that he only got one life and if he kept making it into a garbage fire I'd find a new best friend, and good riddance."
Sumire pictured Tsukushi saying anything like that to her and found herself taking back her wish that she'd met Tsukushi during the lowest point of her life. It probably would've been just what she needed to hear, but even so, she wasn't a big enough person to wish for it. Now, though, after going through all that, after learning about herself and what she needed and what she had to offer, maybe now she was a big enough person to wish for someone as strong as Tsukushi... if that were something she found herself wanting, when she knew her better. Somehow, even as she doubted herself and her sudden feelings for this person, she couldn't doubt she'd have that chance.
"And he stormed out, but he came around, later. His parents didn't. They got me kicked out of school, ruined my parents' business, made sure none of us could find jobs... when we moved to the country, they found us and did it all over again."
As mildly as she could, Sumire expressed the belief that this seemed to be a bit of an overreaction. This was the last she was able to speak for a while as Tsukushi went on, her tiredness seeming to fade as she got angrier and angrier. As her voice gained in volume it seemed to echo around Sumire, keeping her attention fixed on those fierce eyes. All the layers of Sumire's thoughts blurred and faded until her mind was filled only with the sheer force of Tsukushi.
And now here Sumire was, staring at a young woman kneeling in a box, her chest heaving after her tirade, the hands that had gestured so emphatically now clasped in front of her. Sumire knew Tsukushi wasn't actually looking to her for aid. She knew that it was just that Tsukushi was at the end of her rope and Sumire happened to be a captive audience.
Sumire wasn't sure she cared about that. In fact, the longer she looked at Tsukushi, the clearer it became to her that she couldn't ignore this, no matter the parts of herself she still wasn't sure about claiming. She'd pushed down so many things in her life and had only started to live on her own terms in the last few years. So many small things had been given up on with difficulty, but this, a big, reckless decision, was somehow an easy one to make.
"Tsukushi-san," she said, pulse speeding up as Tsukushi's eyes snapped to hers. "Let me help."
*
If Tsukushi had ever asked why Sumire wanted to help her, Sumire wasn't sure what she would've said. But Tsukushi never asked, and after a while it started to feel like a given--this was the situation they were in, the two of them, figuring things out side by side.
They spent so much time working out solutions to Tsukushi's problems that it wasn't until later that Sumire realized how much it went both ways.
That first day, with the copy room as their base for planning, Sumire established that Tsukushi's three most pressing problems were a place to live (as her landlords kept getting paid off to kick her out and now she was seen as having an undesirable renting history), respite from the abuse of her coworkers, and, most simply but perhaps the hardest to achieve, rest from the stress she'd built up for years.
Sumire had a spare room, and Tsukushi moved in with her. As much as Sumire hated to admit it, Tsukushi's healthy habits helped Sumire have more energy, and her cunning thriftiness meant Sumire had more money left over with every paycheck--and now that she had someone she was beginning to consider a real friend, they used their leftover money to try out new restaurants, go to concerts, even take some day trips.
Sumire's boss's boss owed her a favor, and she called it in to get Tsukushi transferred to her department. As imperfect as her coworkers were they weren't sneaky. If they bullied Tsukushi, Sumire would know. Since meeting Tsukushi, the focus Sumire had sharpened on work since her catastrophe a few years back started to be mixed with other things. As it turned out, a better work/life balance actually improved her performance, and though she didn't often work directly with Tsukushi, seeing the way she gave each task her all while relating to everyone with honesty--well, it didn't make Sumire loathe small talk or boring meetings any less, but it shifted her attitude just enough that she didn't go home cranky at the end of the day.
The third goal took time. Sumire had several unpleasant interactions with the Domyouji elders in the first few years after Tsukushi moved in with her, and every time she saw Tsukushi brace for what the two of them had to disappear. But Sumire didn't take their money, and she didn't bow to their threats. She owned her apartment, and the big boss at her company was an asshole, but the kind of asshole who would never use his power for anyone's convenience but his own. Perhaps it was Sumire and Tsukushi's persistence in their current situation, or perhaps it was that the passing of time since Tsukushi had been in high school had finally reached a critical mass where even master grudge-holders and life-destroyers like the Domyouji family were starting to see the effort as less than worthwhile, but the awful encounters with them, as well as with the people they paid to be awful on their behalf, started to lessen in frequency.
Still, the first time Sumire knew Tsukushi to sleep soundly through the night was after Sumire proposed. They'd been together for just over a year, their friendship evolving so gradually, Sumire becoming comfortable with herself and with Tsukushi so thoroughly, that one day it just felt natural that Tsukushi leaned over and gave Sumire a kiss. Tsukushi always tossed and turned to the point that if one of them had an early morning the next day, the other usually slept on the couch. But when Sumire proposed, putting everything she had into conveying just how dear Tsukushi was to her, how essential, the last remaining tension in Tsukushi's shoulders seemed to ebb away. She said yes first, then kissed Sumire dizzy. Then she said that something this wonderful should be shared.
Sumire was a little chagrined that she hadn't realized that marriage, for all that she and Tsukushi wanted it for themselves, could also be used to help attain that third goal made so long ago. She made a copy of their wedding announcement and mailed it to the Domyouji residence. Neither she nor Tsukushi heard from the Domyouji family ever again.
*
Except once.
On Sumire and Tsukushi's honeymoon, they arrived at their hotel on a tropical island and found that their booking had been upgraded to the most expensive suite. Sumire started to argue with the concierge, stopped herself, then questioned how this had occurred.
Tsukushi put a hand on Sumire's arm. "Let's get settled in our room."
Sumire lifted an eyebrow at her, but she wasn't that committed to giving the concierge time to find out it was all a mistake, and besides, Tsukushi looked tired from their flight.
Their suite was entirely over the top: multiple bedrooms, all with rose petals adorning the mile-wide beds, a hot tub the size of their bedroom at home, a sea of complimentary and clearly expensive refreshments, plush robes and slippers, champagne on ice... Sumire's head swam.
She flopped onto the nearest cushioned surface, of which there were a great deal to choose from, and sought with her eyes for Tsukushi. Right then Sumire was worn out from traveling, but later she hoped to get to know each of these soft places better with her wife.
Tsukushi was walking purposefully around the room. She looked in drawers and closets, flipped back the luxurious covers on the beds, and when she came back from re-examining the entryway, she had a small silky envelope in one hand.
"What's that?" Sumire asked, her sleepiness fading for a moment.
Tsukushi rolled her eyes and handed Sumire the sealed envelope. "Domyouji."
Sumire sat up with a gasp. "Those motherfuckers...!"
"No, no," Tsukushi laughed. "Tsukasa. I thought maybe he'd do something like this."
Sumire opened the envelope and read the contents of the enclosed letter aloud. It was congratulatory, courteous, and brief. She looked at Tsukushi with some worry, wondering if this would hurt her somehow.
Tsukushi smiled at her. "It's nice, right? Feels like a final goodbye. I know him--he's been feeling frustrated about not being able to protect me for years, but we both learned a long, long time ago that his interference only made things worse for both of us." She grimaced comically. "Mostly me."
Sumire said slowly, her eyes still on Tsukushi's face, "I can't say I'm upset to end up in this suite. It was kind of him to think of us."
There was a twinkle in Tsukushi's eyes as she came to sit by Sumire. She leaned in and nuzzled Sumire's cheek. "I can't say I'm upset to be here with you. My wife."
Sumire pulled her down beside her on the settee, the letter falling unnoticed to the carpet. They kissed, the thrill of it setting every part of Sumire alight, and held each other close.
"Gonna take a nap," Sumire mumbled. One or the other of them had hair in Sumire's face, but she ignored that small irritation and held tight to Tsukushi's shoulders in a clear request for company.
Tsukushi shifted slightly to the side, one leg over Sumire's, and pulled her hair back carefully before resting her head on Sumire's shoulder. "Kiss me again when we wake up."
With her last bit of energy, Sumire reached up and took the blanket from the back of the settee and arranged it over Tsukushi's shoulders as best she could. Tsukushi took hold of a side and pulled it so that it covered Sumire as well. The sound of waves from the open balcony door lulled them into peaceful sleep, together.