The first time Kurumi-senpai approached me, I'd been crying.

It was the first day of highschool.

I stood before the gates that morning, overlooking a new building in a new uniform — watching all the foreign faces around me morph into smiles as shoulders bumped together and hands were thrown across necks, the flashes of red coming from all sides burning my eyes. For what felt like hours, students flooded in through the gates behind me, veering around me as they merrily made their way inside, talk of the holidays filling my ears as I stayed where I was, my feet stuck, as if they'd been nailed to the ground.

All I could think about as I stood there, motionless, was that I wasn't ready to start over again. My breath stuttered at the thought of entering a new classroom, fumbling to introduce myself only to be met with insincere, hurried smiles that would quickly be redirected towards more important things. More important people.

I was scared, and I wasn't ready to go through it all again, so I snuck away to hide. I slid down against a wall in the first obscure corridor I could find, folding my legs to my chest and making myself look as small as I possibly could. For a fleeting moment, I thought about looking for Irina, because she'd told me she'd be at school too, but I quickly let go of the idea because I didn't want to show up before her on the very first day and make it so that she'd feel obligated to walk around with me. I wanted to give her the room she needed to meet new people too, and have fun, without me around to drag her down.

Students continued to walk by me every few minutes, and each time I was left unnoticed, I felt myself shrink a little more, before Kurumi-senpai broke away from her group of friends to crouch before me. I startled when I lifted my head from my arms to see her smiling at me, a slight tilt to her head, and back then, the fact that I'd even caught her attention at all seemed like a small miracle to me.

"Hey, I don't think I've ever seen you around before. Are you a first-year?" she asked sweetly, swiping at the wet streaks on my cheek as I managed a nod.

"Oh my, then you should be at orientation right now, shouldn't you?" she exclaimed, wide-eyed as she took me by my hands and helped me to my feet, before guiding me to the location of my entrance ceremony. She left me to join my new classmates then, walking away after dropping me an energetic thumbs up, and I thought that I'd never felt more seen in my life.

In the months that followed, we regularly crossed each other in the hallway, and she always stopped to chat — asking about my day or giving me advice on what teachers I should keep on my good side. Eventually, I gathered up the courage to ask her why she was being so nice to me, and she simply said, because you're my cute junior!

When we realised that we took the same train to school, she began riding with Irina and me everyday, and it was fun, because she always had the best stories to tell and because she made me feel so, so normal.

Man, Rubi, you're so easy to talk to, she'd said once, and I felt like I'd finally, for the first time in my life, made a real friend.

To me, her smile has always been like the sun, the simple sight of it enough to dry away my tears.

And right this moment, I desperately wish that I could be that for her too. She's sitting at my side, involuntary sobs shaking out of her as our train journeys into the evening. "Sorry for intruding on your private time with Rubi again, didn't mean to," she tells Irina, scrambling to rub at her cheeks, and she means it as a joke but the laugh that follows after is strained and lifeless. I squeeze her hand, but it's not enough. What can I do? God, what can I do?

"It's okay," I whisper, while my brain screams at me that it's not, how can it be okay when she's crying like this, what do I even know, how can I say that it will? "Hey. It'll be okay."

"It's just, I-I know that we didn't get to grow up together, but, but he's still my brother, you know?" she says, words wobbling, and I simply nod, squeezing harder. Senpai left her workplace early today too, to make time to visit us at school, but Akito had already left by the time she even got there.

I can't help but notice that he's been trying to distance himself from us, and god, it hurts. He doesn't spend lunch with us anymore, and he runs home the second last period comes to an end. He used to stop me everytime we crossed paths before, ask where I was going, but now he's started avoiding all eye-contact, briskly walking past me with a restrained little nod each time we pass each other in the corridor.

Ren's been so, so down about all of it, and I've tried to think hard about why he's behaving this way, I've really tried to understand, but I just can't figure it out. Maybe Akito is going through something right now, and maybe it's a lot, but I don't get why he can't just come to us with it.

I know how much it hurts to be alone, to have no one around to hold your hand or whisper it's okay, into your ears when you need to hear it, and that's why, it just seems so ridiculous to me that despite having all of us here, wanting nothing more than for him to walk into our arms, he's still choosing to look the other way.

"Rubi, I'm, he's...he's my little brother," Senpai chokes out, the words crowding out of her mouth. "I want him to, to come home from school everyday and pester me with all of his problems until I roll my eyes and tell him to stop whining. I want him to get in trouble with his teachers every now and then, so that I can come to school and bail him out. I want him to stay out with his friends, all day long, and fall asleep on the couch after he comes home so that I can put a blanket over him, and, and wake him up again when it's time for dinner."

She finally gives up on trying to wipe away the tears, because they don't show any signs of stopping. "I just wish he'd realise that he's my responsibility, and not the other way around. That I'm family," she croaks. "Things were looking up for a while there, and I thought I was finally doing something right, but now, now it's...it's...I love him Rubi, and I just want him to be happy, but I don't think he's happy and I wish he'd just talk to me, so that I could understand what he's thinking, what I'm doing wrong—"

"You're not doing anything wrong," I quietly cut her off. "You're the best big sister anybody could ask for."

A soft sound escapes her lips. "I don't know—"

"Akito is just being a brat. Let's scold him together next time, okay?" I say, trying hard to keep it together.

She laughs, a high pitched, strangled sort of noise, and nods. "Okay. Okay."

"Yeah," I whisper. "It'll be okay."

Senpai's breathing slowly starts to even itself out, and I sigh quietly from relief. Irina gently touches my free hand, as if to say you did good, and I look into her silently concerned black eyes, flipping my hand around to let her slip her fingers into my palm, taking it in a reassuringly tight grip. The train rattles to a stop, more passengers stepping in and out as the three of us fall into a comfortable silence.

I look up to see one of the previously limp red strings start to glow anew in front of me, and out of a simple curiosity, I let my eyes dart around the train car to find the two individuals that the thread marks as soulmates. One of them is a tired woman in a baggy cardigan, clinging tightly onto one of the handholds overhead, like it's the only thing keeping her up. The string around her little finger is full of life as it flows towards a young man who just boarded, laughing into his phone as he moves to stand in an empty spot to her side.

My heart beats fast as I watch them, a small smile on my face. They don't seem to be familiar with each other yet, and it's not everyday that I get to see fated encounters play out right in front of me.

It might be my favorite thing in the world, watching two strangers bump into each other for the first time, oblivious to the fact that they're soulmates, a hurried conversation breaking out between them, before it slows and there's suddenly a lot of nodding, a lot of laughing, and then you see this look of awe on their faces, like they're thinking huh, I kind of like this person.

But the train unexpectedly lurches to a stop again, and before I know it, the woman is stepping around the man, into the crowd of exiting passengers as he continues to laugh into his phone, unaware of all the wonderful things he's going to miss by letting her walk away, and I make a confused noise in my throat.

I've interfered to make fated encounters happen before — stepping in someone's way so that they're forced to walk around me and bump into their soulmate, giving up my seat on the train when a person's soulmate walks in so that they end up sitting together, pointing a stranger out to their soulmate instead when they ask me for directions — small things like that.

I like to think that the reason I was put on this earth is to help these people push things along, and on most days, the fact that I had a role to play, however small, in this fresh, exciting, beautiful new thing that's coming to life between the two strangers I pushed together, really does make me happy.

So I think about interfering again now, wondering if I should grab the woman's arm and drag her back inside, or snatch the stupid cellphone from the man's grip and give him a nudge in her direction, but before I even manage to make up my mind, the woman is gone, the doors closing behind her, and I slump in my seat.

"What is it?" Irina asks, and I startle, blinking rapidly. Sometimes, I lose myself so deeply in this world of red that I forget all about where I am.

"Oh, it's...it's nothing," I manage.

Her eyebrows press together. "What were you looking at?" she asks softly. At the confusion on my face, she continues, "You're always looking at something...I can tell. Like when you were watching that man earlier—" She motions towards the cellphone guy. "It was like...like you were looking at something else. Something past him. You do that sometimes. You get this faraway look in your eyes, and just...zone out for a while. I was just wondering what it was."

To my other side, Senpai perks up. "Oh, I know what you mean! I've seen her do that too."

"Oh." It's the strings, I realise belatedly. They're asking about the strings. A stricken laugh escapes my lips as I shrink into my seat, burdened by the weight of their expectant gazes. It's nothing, I'm about to say. I was only spacing out a little. But then I look down at my hands, both of them held in separate, tender grips, and I realise how utterly safe I feel, how warm, sitting here in this familiar train car, pressed in between my two most favorite people in the whole world, and I don't...I don't want to hide it anymore.

Because it's not nothing. These threads that I can see have taken over my life, and for all these years, being the only one who knows, the only one who understands, has felt so terribly lonely.

I remember pointing out my parents' string to them when I was little, telling them how bright and pretty it was, and they played along with me at first, pretended they could see it too, because oh, I was a child with an active imagination and as good parents, it was their duty to encourage me. But once I started elementary school, I overhead Mom telling Dad that she was worried I was hallucinating, that maybe I needed to go to the hospital, just to make sure nothing was really wrong, and just like that, I stopped pointing the strings out to her when we walked to school every morning, and I never told anyone about them again, not until Akito.

But it was different with Akito, and I don't know how it will turn out this time. "You're going to laugh at me," I whisper. "You're going to think I'm crazy."

Irina's frown deepens, just as Senpai takes my hand into her lap, squeezing it tightly. "Don't be ridiculous. We would never think that." And so, without thinking too much about what the consequences may be, mind-numbingly nervous and semi-coherent, I blurt it all out. I tell them about the strings, about what they dictate, doing my best to explain the mythology behind it all, and it's only after I'm done talking that I let myself glance up at them. Senpai immediately bursts out laughing, and my heart almost freezes over.

"Sorry," she says between breaths. "Wow, sorry, it will just take me a minute to process everything, because this is just so—" She laughs again, and my heartbeat starts to slow, uncertainly, as I absorb the note of pleasantly surprised happiness in her voice. "So amazing. Wow, you're just like a character from a—"

"Shoujo manga?" I ask, smiling, and she nods emphatically.

"Oh my gosh," she breathes again, and I suddenly feel all tingly and excited, because this reaction is different from the silent acceptance that I got from Akito. "Oh my gosh, Ren and Akito, they're soulmates aren't they? That's why you've been so hell bent on getting them together! Oh my gosh, this is flipping crazy!" She quickly catches herself, and amends, "The good kind of crazy!" And I finally laugh, eyes stinging from the overwhelming relief.

"Rubi, I have so many questions. Can I please ask?"

A happy sob leaves my throat as I nod.

The questions she asks me are different from the kind I got from Akito. She asks me about things I've never had to stop and think about before — Can you touch them? No, they're sort of like holograms. Do they make it hard for you to see? I can see through them so it's usually okay, it gets a little hard in crowded places though, not because they obstruct my vision, but because all the red can be a little overwhelming. Have you ever thought about taking up matchmaking as a profession? W-What? No, jeez, no — and I feel so light, like I could float away, and god, I was such an idiot for not having told them sooner.

"This is so insanely cool," Senpai is now mumbling to herself, letting her head fall back against the seat in awe. "Isn't it, Irina?" And then my laughter abruptly dies out, because Irina hasn't said a single word since I fessed up. Silence sweeps across us again, and this time, it's tense and heavy. I glance at her, sweat trickling down the back of my neck. Say something, I think, pleading with my eyes. Irina.

"You and I," she starts, words thick and strained as they leave her mouth. "We're not soulmates, are we?"

And just like that, my heart shatters into a million pieces. "O-Oh, I um, actually don't have any soulmates!" I confess, voice coated with forced laughter. "But don't worry, both of you guys do! You've got multiple soulmates and so much to look forward to, and-"

"Unbelievable," Irina says under her breath, and the harsh tone of her voice makes me go stiff from shock. "I-Irina," I mumble once I've recovered, voice cracking, because she won't...she won't even look at me, and I've never seen her this way before. What is it? Why are you mad? "Iri—" The train stops moving, and she wordlessly stands up, heading straight for the opening doors. No no no, why now? I stumble to my feet and push against the crowd, letting it carry me to the exit so that I can follow after her. I hear Senpai's drowned out voice calling out to me, but gosh, there's no time. There's no time.

Once I burst out into the open platform, I frantically search my surroundings for black eyes and swaying braids, and — there. I scream her name but she doesn't slow, so I run, catching her wrist and forcing her to stop. "Hey, talk to me," I plead. She tears her hand out of my grip, and my arm falls limply to my side. Behind us, the train whistles into motion again as the passengers scatter across the platform, but all I can really focus on is the tremble in her shoulders. "Irina."

"So let me get this straight," she says stiffly, and I can hear the hurt in her voice. "You think we can't be together because, what — the universe didn't predict it first?"

I swallow. "That's not — you don't understand. Irina, we're not meant to be together," I try. "What you feel for me, it's...it's not gonna last." I'm crying now, the words leaving my mouth in short bursts. "Don't you see? There's someone out there for you, but, i-it's n-not me." I rub at my cheeks. "A-And I'm sorry, okay? But I-I'm not willing to start something with you knowing t-that there's an expiration date, I just..." My breath hitches. "I don't think I could bear it if you got tired of me, a-and decide to leave, I..."

"Wow, okay," she breathes, turning her face away, and I feel my heartbeat start to spiral.

"You don't understand," I say again, the tears steadily falling down my cheeks.

"I think I do understand, actually," she says, breathing in. "I want to be with you, I've wanted to be with you all these years, I've wanted it more than anything else in the world, Rubi, and I've told you that, but you just can't take my word for it." She briefly glances at me, the set of her face tight. "You don't get to tell me how I feel. Nobody does."

And then she's walking away, and I sink to my knees, trying hard to suppress the sounds threatening to escape my lips, chest aching, because this is not how I wanted it to end.

END OF CHAPTER