Anyone who creates something from nothing should expose themselves to as much creative work as they can.

Creation is, in its way, the study of gait — learning how to walk by tracing the footsteps of those who walked brilliantly before you. Bernard of Chartres held that we see farther because we stand on the shoulders of giants — the great minds of history, of antiquity. By extension, almost everything made in the modern world stands on accumulated inheritance.

Even without going that far in one’s thinking: you cannot write something good if you don’t know what good looks like.

That was Hatano’s conviction, and it was why she consumed creative work voraciously.

Fiction, of course — but also film, music, theatre, animation. Among all of it, film was what she loved most.

On the same evening she had quit the club, she walked out of a late showing, rolling her shoulders back, blinking into the dark. The neighbourhood was fully night now, and the breath she exhaled into the clear mid-autumn air went white.

She had been writing primarily in the mystery genre until recently, but she had begun to feel the limits of it and decided to change course. She was turning toward coming-of-age stories — youth, growth, the shape of a life finding its way — and tonight’s film had served as research of a kind. It had been more enjoyable than she’d expected.

She walked home through the dark, turning the new ideas over, and was stopped at a red light when she drew her phone from her pocket. A notification. An unfamiliar sender.

It was Shinomiya.

Sorry about today.

Sent three hours ago — shortly after Hatano had returned home, apparently.

However brief, an apology from her was unexpected, and Hatano stood there for a moment genuinely surprised. Then she let out a long breath and gave a small, dry smile. Shinomiya hadn’t actually caused her much trouble today; she would know that too. Conscientious, Hatano thought, with something almost like respect.

She wasn’t sure what to send back. The pedestrian light was edging toward green, and she fired off a simple emoji stamp — one of those illustrated things everyone uses as a neutral acknowledgement — then tucked the phone into her pocket and walked on toward the station.

“…Hm.”

But she stopped, just past the crossing.

She glanced to the right, down the street that led into the cluster of neon.

The izakaya the club usually used was not far from here. She didn’t particularly feel like drinking — but the message had put Shinomiya in her head, and she found herself thinking about her. Whatever had happened after Hatano left, she didn’t know — but Shinomiya would have gone off drinking with Shindo tonight, just as planned. That was fine in itself.

Unless she’d gotten as drunk as last time. In which case, what then.

She didn’t care who Shinomiya spent her nights with — that was Shinomiya’s life, and Shinomiya’s choice. But knowing a little more about her now, that self-destructive streak nagged at her in a way it hadn’t before. It wasn’t that she liked men. She wasn’t even driven by desire in the usual sense. All she was doing was chasing recognition — from anyone, in any form, positive or negative.

Jealousy is admiration. It means they’ve acknowledged me.

That throwaway line from the night she’d been drunk. It surfaced now, unwillingly, in Hatano’s mind.

She stood there thinking for a moment, then raked a hand through her hair.

“…Not my problem, though.”

She was beginning to understand that Shinomiya wasn’t a bad person.

She wouldn’t go out of her way to come all the way here — but she happened to be nearby, and checking in on someone she’d happened to pass wouldn’t be so unreasonable. She disliked Shinomiya’s way of living and the thinking behind it, but she wasn’t a bad person, and more to the point, they had slept together — accidentally, but still.

“Would you stop going after guys from other clubs?!”

A shout from the direction of the station. On the pavement near the izakaya, a young woman — glasses, long black hair, the sort of prim, put-together appearance that suggested a careful self-image — was bearing down on a lightly flushed, strikingly beautiful girl with chestnut hair.

Shinomiya.

The woman with glasses looked ready to grab her by the collar. “People are talking about you!” she shouted, spitting the words. “A shameless little tramp doing whatever she likes — !” Around them, the foot traffic flowing past slowed, looked, and kept moving.

Shinomiya received this volley with a cool sidelong glance and then looked at the young men in the vicinity, who appeared variously alarmed. She had done nothing wrong, as far as she was concerned.

A friend of hers was a member of this tennis club. All she had done was engineer a passing encounter to mention that she felt like drinking with someone. A perfectly ordinary thing.

Her friend was watching the confrontation with obvious fear, but Shinomiya wasn’t going to ask her to step in. Getting this far was already a kindness she was grateful for.

Arguing point by point was tiresome. Shinomiya deployed a different resource instead.

She bit her lip. Let distress move across her face. Let her head drop just slightly. And then, arms folding around herself, in a voice that barely made it into the air: “I’m sorry… I just didn’t want to be alone.”

The effect on the young men nearby was immediate.

“Hey, you don’t have to talk to her like that!”
“They’re just having drinks together, what’s the big deal?”
“No matter how angry you are, you can’t just say things like that to someone you’ve never met.”

The girl with glasses went “Excuse me?” at the chorus of rebukes, but her voice had developed a tremor. Shinomiya peeked at her from beneath lowered lashes, and turned her face so the hand pressed to her mouth would conceal the way her cheeks had softened with amusement.

She wasn’t targeting anyone’s husband. She wasn’t stealing anyone’s partner. She simply said she was lonely and wanted company, and that she’d had too much to drink and wanted walking home. What happened beyond that was entirely a question of how much self-possession the other person had.

She felt wonderful. Someone had wanted to drink with her, and someone was jealous of that, and someone was now defending her. Every person in this small circle was registering Shinomiya — seeing her, measuring her, responding to her, whether with desire or resentment or protectiveness. She was real to all of them. That warmth settled through her in a way that was almost physical.

Whatever else she might have to thank her parents for, she owed them this, at least — a face that made rooms react.

She suppressed a yawn that had crept up on her, and redirected the small involuntary tear it brought to the corner of her eye, and looked up at the most spirited of the men.

The temperature in the group shifted.

Now the momentum was with her. If nothing disrupted it, a volunteer escort was within reach. The drawback was that the women were likely to retreat — and their jealousy was the part she most enjoyed — but the criticism levelled at the glasses girl had shifted from general complaint to something more personal, and that was beginning to need management.

“Please — that’s enough!”

She said it softly, and the men’s voices dropped.

She crossed to the girl with glasses, who flinched back slightly. Shinomiya looked at her with tear-bright eyes. Then she reached out and took her hand, gently, and applied a careful pressure.

She had been with women before. Not the night with Hatano, which she had no memory of, but other occasions. She had enough experience to know something about how to move in these moments. Right now, the only way this girl could save face in front of everyone was to accept a concession from Shinomiya — meet her where she was and let that be the resolution. And that could be interesting in its own right, Shinomiya thought, letting herself consider it while she arranged her words.

“I’m sorry… I actually wanted to get closer to you, Senpai.”

The hand trembled slightly in hers at that. If this girl had felt nothing but aversion, there would have been nothing to work with, and she would have changed approach — but there was something there, something that seemed to have been worn thinner than usual lately. Shinomiya pressed her advantage and let her fingers intertwine with the girl’s, and looked up at her.

“I’d been watching you from a distance — you always look so cool when you’re playing tennis. But I’m not good at sports, so this was the only way I could think of to talk to you…”

The eyes behind the glasses wavered.

Shinomiya let her fingertip trace slow circles against the inside of the girl’s fingers, and let a soft, unsteady breath escape. Then she tightened her hand slightly, and looked up with eyes that were wet and waiting.

“Would that… be all right?”

The girl swallowed.

Shinomiya took one quiet half-step, closing the distance, until their exhaled breath almost met.

She had long since concluded that she would never fall in love — not the kind that came for other people. And she had turned down everyone who had asked for more than what she could offer. But desire was another matter. Tonight, this girl might be good company. Serve as something like an apology for the earlier rudeness too, she thought, with a small private warmth.

And then she could let the men feel jealous of that. The thought of it made something thrill in her — who, and how, and what the expressions on their faces would look like. None of that mattered in any particular way, really. What mattered, the only thing that mattered, was being seen. Being seen and being counted as real.

The girl’s eyes, behind the glass, were full of hesitation and something else entirely. Her lips parted to speak.

And then.

“— Shinomiya.”

A voice. Not one she knew well, but one she’d been hearing recently. It cut through the noise of the street in a way that made Shinomiya turn before she’d made a decision to. And there, in the flow of people moving past, stood Hatano — expression slightly severe.

“…Hatano-senpai.”

Her own voice came out flatter and cooler than she expected. She noticed it herself.

“What do you want?”

---

They walked. No particular destination — side by side, away from the neon, down a quieter road lit only by streetlamps.

In the end, Shinomiya had abandoned the evening’s plans. She could perfectly well have ignored Hatano and gone on — but the mood had broken, and her face said as much.

By the time Hatano had spotted her, Shinomiya had been in the middle of the confrontation with the tennis club girl. And then a moment later she had pivoted to trying to seduce the same girl. For Shinomiya, evidently, neither gender nor context held much relevance — romantic and physical encounters were simply currency she used to meet the same need, regardless of who was supplying it.

The club hierarchy was dissolved; the thin pretext of the one-night accident was fading. There was no particular reason Shinomiya would have followed when Hatano called out to her. And yet here she was. Hatano decided to be honest.

“I happened to be passing and saw a familiar face in the middle of something. I said something.”
“…Are you blind? It was about to resolve itself.”

Shinomiya’s cheeks puffed very slightly with dissatisfaction.

Hatano shrugged. “I didn’t see it that way.”

She knew it had been resolving. But not in a way she thought well of. Shinomiya was free to sleep with whoever she chose, and Hatano had no right to stop her — she knew that. She had no obligation to try, either.

It was just that the particular shape of that destructive life irritated her, and she had wanted Shinomiya to stop and reconsider. Nothing more than that.

She didn’t think Shinomiya was a good person. But she’d never thought of herself as a particularly good one either.

When Hatano tried to deflect the subject, Shinomiya sighed.

“…Give me a break, Senpai. How I live my life is my business. What are you, my mother? You’ve only put your fingers in me, not given birth to me.”
“I might have put my tongue there too.”
“If you had, I wouldn’t be symptom-free, so no you didn’t.”

She stuck out her tongue. Impossible girl.

Hatano scratched the back of her head and let the evasion go, and admitted, quietly, the truth instead.

“…I’m not going to pretend I didn’t notice what you were doing. And I didn’t think it was good for you.”

Shinomiya frowned at her, puzzled. Then the puzzlement became a short, dismissive sound through her nose, and her expression stayed sour even as her mouth tilted into something wry.

“Acting like my girlfriend because we slept together once? Don’t flatter yourself. I don’t know what drunk-me was thinking last time, but sober-me’s least favourite kind of person is exactly like you.”

Which was fair. It was the same for Hatano — or it should have been. And yet here she was, apparently, deciding of her own accord to interfere with a stranger’s private life on the basis of her own values. That was not a position without fault. Hatano acknowledged it, eyes cast down.

“…I felt like we’d gotten close somehow. That was presumptuous of me. Sorry.”

At that, something moved in Shinomiya’s eyes, and her expression tightened.

Hatano turned toward the station road, deciding the conversation had run its course, and lengthened her stride.

Then someone grabbed her arm.

“Hey!” — a voice halfway between irritated and startled. She turned to find Shinomiya holding her arm with both hands, wearing an expression of unmistakable displeasure.
“What?”
“What? You were just going to leave like that?! Are you an idiot?!”
“How is it that I’m the idiot here? I was leaving because you clearly wanted me gone!”
“I said the lecture was annoying! I didn’t say go home!”
“What other business do I have with you besides lectures, you impossible girl!”

She finally snapped and insulted her properly, and Shinomiya’s cheeks flushed with contained fury as she glared back. They had drifted off the main road, and there was no one around to witness this. Small mercy.

Shinomiya fumed for a moment, then seemed to be working through some kind of internal calculation. She checked that the street was empty. Hatano braced, unsure what was coming — and Shinomiya took her hand.

“I told you, didn’t I. Being wanted, being envied — it gets me going. I love it. And you got in the way of that. Do you understand? You left me wound up with nowhere to go. Don’t just wander off after doing that.”

Her cheeks were pink as she said it, and as the words formed on her lips, Hatano felt the faint heat at the tips of her fingers — felt the gentle, unmistakable pressure of Shinomiya’s body seeking contact, her warmth coaxing.

Hatano was caught off guard, but then again — they had already seen each other without a single layer of clothing on, had already been together in that way even with no memory of it on either side. The hesitation was not as strong as it might have been. She had, moreover, been carrying an unresolved restlessness of her own since that morning. And whatever she thought of Shinomiya as a person, there was no instinctive aversion — no discomfort of the kind that would matter. Kept at the level of the physical, this was not an impossible arrangement.

Shinomiya’s voice continued, curling into the night air in a pale ribbon of breath.

“Under the circumstances, I’ll make do with you, Senpai. This wasn’t supposed to happen with you, but you’re the one who got in the way, so you can take responsibility. …You’re the person I hate most in the world, but a hundred times better than doing it alone.”

If the compliment had been you’re a hundred times better than anyone else, it might have landed differently. As it was, it said only that being alone was, to Shinomiya, nearly worthless — and that having someone, anyone who could register her existence, was what gave the act its meaning.

And Hatano had been the one to deprive her of that someone.

She was aware of her body responding, of something stirring in the direction of wanting — but she marshalled everything rational she had and said no. If she agreed now, everything she’d said tonight would collapse under its own weight.

“The whole point of the lecture was to get you to stop doing this.”

She said it plainly. Shinomiya’s brow knitted.

“You already slept with me once — what’s the difference? Or am I just not your type?”
“You’re the kind of person I hate most in the world. But I think your face is beautiful.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“You’re a rotten little creature, but — that message you sent this afternoon, and things like that — I don’t think you’re a bad person. And because I don’t think you’re bad, I want you to reconsider how you’re living. That’s why I’m saying no.”

Hatano held her ground, stubborn. Shinomiya pouted.

“You’re like someone who turns down the bar tab but won’t let me go to any other bar. Relax a little. One night doesn’t mean anything.”
“No.”
“Even so?”
“If you want me to take responsibility, I’ll pay for a night somewhere else.”

She was already reaching for her wallet as she said it. It would sting, but she’d sooner take the financial hit than bend her own argument. She was pulling out the notes when Shinomiya made a defeated sound — “All right, fine, I give up” — and stopped her hand.

Then, with a half-lidded look of considerable dissatisfaction, she offered her alternative.

“I’ll sort myself out. Just lend me your place. Home’s too far, and a toilet cubicle is out of the question. I need to be without clothes for it to work.”

Lending her flat to a junior to use for her own private gratification was an objectively ridiculous thing to agree to. But desire was not something to be condescended to, and Hatano had pulled away a partner Shinomiya had worked to secure. There was some responsibility there. And her position didn’t require her to bend.

There wasn’t really another answer. Hatano, grudgingly, gave the only nod available to her.