Work Text:
The easiest way to say it is like this:
Sakayori Iroha lives her life by tempering expectations; by laying out goals and working to meet the expected accomplishment waiting for her at the end. An easy way to figure life out; an easy way to tuck herself into her studio apartment and curl under her blanket on the futon and not exhaust herself further by thinking, what am I going to do tomorrow?
Or perhaps, it’s better to say it like this:
Sakayori Iroha has expectations of her life, expectations within expectations imposed on her; a clear line drawn from A to B to C, and there is no questioning it.
At least, not until a girl from the moon crash-lands in, and then: time to temper her expectations for something else. Build around it. Wait for the inevitability of joy and love to fall apart and end.
/
She doesn’t even notice that her carefully-crafted schedule is in complete shambles until a full month after Kaguya drags her into streaming with her. Study times become any time she isn’t streaming with Kaguya, any time she isn’t entertaining another one of Kaguya’s wild ideas.
She doesn’t notice, because, she realizes, it hasn’t been very important to her for a while. She expects herself to fall apart with every realization that follows. She expects everything else to fall apart— that carefully mapped out trajectory to crumbles to bits.
Except it doesn’t. She has never been more at peace. It doesn’t make sense.
There’s a girl from the moon living with her. Nothing makes sense, and she should be horrified at how okay with all this that she is— a career, or something like that, in streaming; a new apartment funded by her brother whom she can’t quite look in the eye.
She is not. And that’s fine, is what she learns with Kaguya next to her. Let everything fall away.
/
Temper your expectations is the motto she’s lived by for so long.
That she failed to do is probably why it hurts so fucking bad when the reality of Kaguya leaving smacks her square across the face.
/
Through a screen, Yachiyo gazes at her. Asks, for once not joking or filtered through a layer of cheeriness, if she’s still attaching herself to what her mother wants of her.
Iroha can only laugh. “I do this because I want you back next to me,” she says, head resting in her hand on her cheek. It comes out a little helpless, a little hurt.
“It’s just,” Yachiyo pauses, as if searching for the right phrasing, and then continues on, delicately, “you still work as if you need to show your mother exactly how capable and competent you are.”
Now it’s Iroha’s turn to pause. There’s a sureness to Yachiyo’s words, an irrefutable truth she can’t turn away from. It’s always been like this with Kaguya: truths dragged to the surface, laid bare between them. The bluntness of it has been dulled with eight thousand years, but it still hits like a thunderclap.
Do you love your mother, Iroha?
Iroha has been graduated out of high school for enough years that it all seems vaguely distant now, but: she has never worked for anything that isn’t proving herself. That wasn’t trying to prove she could do something and have it be anything of worth.
I keep wishing I could bring myself to hate her.
“If I can make this work,” she says slowly, “then it’ll be proof I can do it.” Yachiyo’s brow knits in confusion. “I mean… all this is so. Experimental. I’m flying blind in uncharted territory, and she still doesn’t think…”
Yachiyo stares back at her through the screen for a moment. “You’re allowed to disregard what your mother says,” she says, just as slowly. “She loves you. But she—”
“Yeah, I know,” Iroha cuts her off. She taps an affectionate finger on Yachiyo’s head. The screen. “She expects me to take on the whole world with my head held high, just like she does.” The memory of the initial silence that had descended onto the house when Asahi had left stings.
“Aren’t you already?” Yachiyo asks, soft and affectionate. Hearts and sparkles erupt on the screen, glittering, glowing, popping.
“Sure I am. Just not the way she wants.” She heaves a sigh. “I’m giving up and throwing away so much to make this happen. I want to be with Kaguya. I want to be with you—” her throat aches. She hadn’t known what it really meant to be happy before Kaguya, after all. Her only solace being Yachiyo, the only comfort she knew in a life that just— dragged her along.
“My mother expects me to succeed, and I will,” she says in the end. “I’ll make it happen. I’ll prove that this is the single greatest thing I’ll ever do.”
/
At the end of high school: Asahi stepping in front of her to shield her from her mother’s questioning, saying, Iroha isn’t a child anymore. If this is what she wants to do, then let her.
A stunning contrast, Iroha remembers thinking, from when they had fought within Tsukiyomi and he had poked at her for not answering anyone’s calls and worrying them. She’s not sure Asahi had quite forgiven her for it, but rather that he chooses to put it behind him.
Then, she’d pushed him aside and faced her mother herself. Endured the brunt of her questions and her skepticism, melted into it when her mother stroked her head and hugged her in a moment of weakness. It’s not that she has ever doubted her mother considers Iroha her daughter. In her weakest moments, she has wondered whether she meant anything to her mother at all.
Later on, Asahi pulled her aside to say, you know she loves you a lot, don’t you?
It didn’t change that Iroha had spent so long all alone to get away from the suffocation of it all. That Asahi had gotten to move away and take his time in the race, but Iroha had failed to meet the finish line.
The truth is: even with her path laid out before her, A to B to C marked in neat, bold lines, Kaguya splashing down from the moon and smudging the ink irreparably was probably the single best thing to happen to her.
So she told Asahi the truth: that she knows, and that’s why she’s going to keep doing this. (With his help, she eventually finds that she’s damn near unstoppable, anyway.)
/
Ten years after Kaguya leaves for the moon finds her sitting in the middle of the living room, not-so-patiently awaiting her first stack of proper pancakes in years.
On the wall above the sofa behind her hangs a board with Iroha’s schedule scribbled on it in multicolored ink. Yachiyo had helped her figure out how she wanted to structure it. Yachiyo also tells her regularly that just clocking out on time won’t help if she isn’t taking days off, either.
“Alright,” Iroha sets a stack of pancakes on the counter. “Come get em! You’ve waited long enough.”
As expected, Kaguya lets out a shriek and barrels toward the counter, digging in with a fork immediately. Iroha is caught between scolding and laughing when Kaguya’s arm wraps around her and tugs her close, and she doesn’t even stop inhaling her pancakes the entire time.
“Ah, you dummy,” Iroha sighs. If she weren’t chipping away at the last of the pancake batter on the stove, her hand holding the spatula would go around Kaguya’s waist, too. “You haven’t changed at all, have you? Bothersome.”
A girl from the moon taught Iroha to take life as it comes. A girl from the moon taught Iroha to live, to love, and be happy.
And that same girl will suck her savings dry just for pancakes at this rate, but she’d known to be prepared for that, anyway. An imperfect win, but a win regardless.