Chapter Text
A quick nap in a car ride with air conditioning and an ice-pack jacket later, and Ena’s symptoms were beginning to clear up a little. Even so, the sun overhead and the hot wind still made her a little queasy as she let Mizuki guide her to the café. The blue-haired girl threw the café doors open as Mizuki dragged Ena in behind her, waving at whoever was running the shop. “We’re back; no one died!” she announced.
A familiar voice spoke from behind the counter. “Good. If I had to- what the fuck are you doing here?”
Standing behind the counter was none other than Ena’s dipshit little brother, staring at her with eyes as wide as ping pong balls. If she didn’t already have a headache from the sun, this asshole sure would have given her one in thirty seconds flat.
“I’m getting out of the sun, asshole. Who do you think the rescue mission was for?”
It might have just been a trick of the light, but it almost seemed like Akito’s face softened at her response. In the time it took for Ena to blink, he was all rough edges again, rolling his eyes and scoffing as he turned his head away. “Don’t go dying on me anytime soon, dumbass. I’m the only thing allowed to kill you, got it?”
“I could say the same to you, dickweed,” Ena jabbed back as she flopped over in a booth. The cold leather padding was a godsend to her legs, still sore and overheated from the hours of standing in the sun. “You’re the one coming home past twenty-two hundred and waking up at five for a run. On top of your group practices. And your part-time job. God, why do they even let you pick out clothes for customers when you wear four layers in April?”
“Not even a near death experience can get you to shut your trap, huh? And I told you it’s-”
“Three and a half. We know, we know,” blue girl cut in. “At least you’re only wearing the two today.”
“Hey, mister master of the house. Does my brother actually know how to do this job or did he only get behind the counter since he’s incapable of taking a break? Because I need a white mocha on ice and some pancakes, and I don’t want to waste Mizuki’s money if he fucks it up.”
Akito’s big celebrity crush looked up from the kettle he was cleaning behind the counter. “I trust him enough with all of the basics and simple custom orders. Kid, you’re welcome to serve friends and family if you like, but I won’t let you serve a drink gone wrong, and anything you waste goes on your tab.”
“Fuck that noise,” Akito muttered, walking out from behind the counter. “It’s annoying enough to have you two here as is. I’m not gonna serve you shit. An can handle it.”
“Hey! Rude,” said the blue-haired girl. At least Ena finally had a name for her.
“Awww, is Widdle Bwo scawed of messing up a itsy bitsy thwee pawt owdew?” Mizuki teased, batting her eyes at him. “Is da big scawy iced coffee wif a widdle choccy sauce too much fow you to handew :3?”
A wave of silence washed over the café. “Did you actually just say ‘colon three’ out loud?” Akito asked, scrunching his face in disgust.
“Perhaps?”
Ena let out a deep sigh, sinking her head deeper into her arms. She heard An say, “Mizuki, I love you, but sometimes you need to not open your mouth.”
Mizuki leaned back in her booth bench and held the back of her hand in front of her forehead dramatically. “The agony of your scorn! How ever shall I recover from this cruelty…”
An giggled at her antics. “Always such a drama queen.”
“Stop judging me and get back to making Ena’s drink and pancakes.”
“Fine, fine. Iced white mocha, yeah?” Ena gave the girl a thumbs up before flopping her arm back down on the table. But before she could truly rest, Mizuki grabbed her elbow and started shaking it to grab her attention.
“Look alive, Enanan! You’re about to get a crash course in whatever you think you saw out there, so rise and shine!”
Wait, in here? Right now? “Weren’t you being all secretive about it earlier? Were you just keeping me in the dark for nothing?!” Ena aggressively whispered.
Mizuki waved her hands in front of her face. “No, no! it’s just that everyone else in the building already knows this stuff! Or some level of it, at least, since they do things differently than I do.”
“Akiyama, did you let something slip?” Akito asked. Why does he know anything about this when she doesn’t?
“Hey, Ken-san!” Mizuki called out. “I had to use some of the big secret stuff to make sure she didn’t actually die out there, and she saw enough that she’s just gonna wander into it blindly on her own. Can I give her the talk here?”
The man pinched the bridge of his nose, let out a big sigh, and grumbled under his breath. “…fine, do whatever. Just make sure she doesn’t need to call the fire department any time soon.”
“Oh, new person in the know? And it’s Mizuki’s fault?” An asked, walking up with a cold drink cup. “Finally! Now you can stop teasing me about the iced white mocha incident.” the barista blinked, and then looked down at the cup in her hands that held an iced white mocha. “Same drink, even. Damn, Akito, she really is your sister.”
“Ugh, we're nothing alike,” Ena said at the exact same time as her brother. The instant she noticed this, she turned to glare at him and saw his yellow eyes glaring right back. The five seconds of silence that followed spoke volumes. Ena rolled her eyes out of the deadlock and crossed her arms. “Whatever. Get on with your slideshow or lecture or something.”
Mizuki grinned. “So! Magic is real, and there’s a couple of different ways to use it. Performance arts and prayer tend to run the stuff straight through your body, and some scary people can do it through sheer force of will. I like doing magic circles, or runes, or glyphs, or whatever people wanna call them. Here, gimme my jacket for a second.”
Ena shrugged it off and threw it on the table, where Mizuki opened it up to show off the glowing patterns in the fabric. She turned the sleeves inside out to reveal even more glowing thread. The whole thing looked way too complicated to wrap her head around. “As you can see, they’re fairly easy to embroider and stitch into clothes, and the lines kinda just shape the magic for you.”
Wait. “So just making these shapes just does magic for you?” That seems stupid and unlikely. “How come I haven’t tasered myself drawing random shit as a kid then?”
“The symbols have magic qualities, but they’re not inherently filled with magical energy themselves,” Mizuki replied. “Think about the circuit board in your phone. They make it run, but you need a battery. If you’re not able to put magic into a rune circle, it’s kinda like a computer that’s not plugged in.”
“Or a water gun!” An said. “Can’t shoot one if the container’s empty, but that doesn’t mean the water gun doesn’t work!”
“What exactly is magical energy, anyway?” Ena asked. “And did I just miraculously go through my whole life avoiding its existence while two whole people I know are apparently knee deep in the stuff, or is there some other bullshit I don’t know about?”
“In terms of what it is? No idea,” Ken answered from across the room. “Any one person with enough brains and tech to try and study magic energy in its purest form has a different idea about it than the next, and apparently none of them are wrong about it despite some of their ideas being polar opposites. Everyone else is too busy trying to figure out how to use the stuff to give a damn.”
“When you’re talking about finding the stuff and connecting with it, that’s where things get stupid real quick,” Akito chimed in. “You gotta know that it exists and really try hard to do something with it, and then you get a weird feeling like a muscle you didn’t know existed just learned how to flex?” He shrugged. “I can’t even remember what it’s like to not feel it in and around me. Weird shit.”
“Yeah, there’s some silly power of belief type thing that you need to combine with proper technique to make a connection your first time around,” An said. “The only reason little kids with big imaginations aren’t making tiny rocks fall out of the sky when pretending that dinosaurs are going extinct in the park is that they know they’re just playing, and that they don’t know what kind of song and dance to do to make it happen.”
“So all you have to do is go through the motions and be a true believer, and you can get started?”
“Yep! Pretty convenient, right?”
Ena let her head flop down into the café table. Somehow it hurt it less than thinking about all this did.
“You good, Enanan?” Mizuki asked.
“This is the stupidest fucking bullshit I’ve ever heard.”
“Yep!”
The sound of a door opening and closing in the store made Ena flick her head up off the table to see what was going on. Toya walked over from where the restrooms were. “Sorry for taking so long; I think I had a little too much coffee and it caused some digestive issues.” He did a double take once he reached the table. “Oh, hello there, Ena-san. I didn’t expect you to be here.”
“Dumbass passed out from being in the sun for too long, and now she’s getting a crash course in magic because of it,” Akito explained.
Toya stared blankly at her. Well, it at least seemed that way to her, but Akito could probably pick out at least three emotions from that bone-dry facial expression he always wore. “I… hope everything’s okay?”
“Apparently all it takes is a WikiHow and sheer force of will to turn yourself into a cat. My whole life is a lie.”
“God, I wish it was that easy…” Mizuki groaned.
Ena raised an eyebrow. “Didn’t we just establish that toddlers can summon rocks out of thin air?”
“That’s just for getting started. Actually shapeshifting into something new is incredibly difficult if you’re not a species that can do it innately, and getting it right without those instincts is near impossible.” Ken said. “Even changelings have to work on it a ton to phase in and out of the first physical form they get in life. I still remember the aftermath of Hitoshi trying to grow wings the first time. I was finding feathers in my closet for weeks after it was over…”
“You would not believe the number of books I’ve read on matter manipulation and human biology,” Mizuki said. “Rui even had to teach me to torrent so I could get to half of them.”
Ena scoffed. “Is that why you’re not failing science despite never attending class? Because you’re trying to live out those hunter cat books you showed me?”
Ena’s jab must have actually made her uncomfortable, because whatever clockwork was running in Mizuki’s body seemed to stutter for a moment. “Uh, ye-wai-ugghh. That’s totally not it, but it’s not like I’ll ever be able to convince you otherwise…” Damn it, she wasn’t trying to be a bitch about it. Now Mizuki probably feels even worse.
“Well don’t hold yourself back on my account. Do whatever you want with your life.” Another tiny smile crept its way back onto the girl’s face. “Just don’t expect me to draw you with ears and paws to hold you over until you can get them yourself. Translating human clothes to animal body proportions is way too much effort.”
“Gods, I wish I had the money to burn on a commission like it was nothing,” Mizuki said. “There’s so many different stories people write for shows and stuff that’ll never get any official recognition that I wanna see drawn out so badly! It’s not fair…”
“I keep telling you I can teach you to cast illusion spells, Mizuki, but you never take me up on the offer…” An pouted.
“Girl, do you know how many different scenes I’ve got in my head?” Mizuki asked rhetorically. “I’d spend so long casting illusions every day that I’d get burns or skin cancer from the backlash of trying to do it your way.”
“Wait wait wait, hold up a second!” She might have wanted to die at one point, but not right now, and certainly not like this! “What do you mean, magic can give you cancer?! Am I gonna end up dead from wearing that jacket?!”
“What? No, that’s not how it works, chill out!” An said. “Burns and cancer are only from light spells. Ice and cold would give you frostbite instead.”
“Not to mention you only get directly hurt by messing up magic when you’re casting it through your body,” Mizuki chimed in. “Spell circles feed any magical backlash into themselves and the materials they’re drawn on.”
“Your Princess Charming here sews spell circles into jackets, so she gets to skip all that,” Akito said. “Lucky her. When I screw up an ice spell, my damn hand nearly freezes off. Shit sucks.”
“Well her hand felt like it was freezing off earlier, too,” Ena said. “How the hell did that happen if the jacket didn’t fuck her up?”
An’s dad looked at Mizuki with a tired stare. “What did you do, kid?”
A bead of sweat ran down Mizuki’s face. Based on how much good the air conditioning in the building was doing for her, Ena knew that it wasn’t from the heat outside. “Well, you see, she wasn’t really waking up even with the jacket, and I got scared, so I tried drawing a simple ice rune on my water bottle? Reflexive output, baby stuff. But all I had was an eyeliner marker, and it kept smudging because I needed to draw it on the metal part for it to really do any good and it just wouldn’t stick. So I, uh, might have just drawn it on my hand and held the water bottle?”
Ena’s head slammed back down into the table with a thud. She did not have the patience to keep another self-sacrificing idiot from getting herself killed, let alone a magic one at that. She looked up to glare at Mizuki. “I’m fine now, promise! It thawed out on the ride over here.”
She grabbed at the girl’s hand for the third time that day. Still chilled, but not nearly as cold as earlier. “Fine. But you’re on thin ice.”
“Hehe, good one!”
“I wasn’t- ugh, whatever.”
“What, gonna give me the cold shoulder now?”
“Yes, actually. I’m blocking your number until next week.”
“What?! C’mon, Enanan!”
“If you’re just gonna make shitty puns, I don’t have a reason to let you talk.”
The girl’s ‘shocked’ expression shifted into something more cunning and sinister. “Girl, just let it go. ”
An tried and failed to suppress a snort. Ena blinked. “Are we sure she’s fine? That one wasn’t even a joke.”
Mizuki let out a long, dramatic sigh. “Tough crowd. Uncultured in the ways of foreign media.” Just her being chronically online again, Ena supposed. Honestly, what kind of weirdo watches cartoons in a language they don’t understand?
“Anything else you wanna know?” An asked. “Or can we open back up to the general public?
“Huh?” Ena looked over to the door, and the ‘Open’ side of the sign hanging on the door was pointing back at the inside of the café. “Wait, you closed shop for this?”
“Can’t have random people off the street coming in and hearing that magic exists,” An’s dad said. “Too many people know about it, and you get a bunch of inexperienced teenagers and college students running off on their own and blowing up water towers or abandoned buildings.”
“I think that was just your friends being dumb, dad. Uncle Taiga told me about how he used to go to rich neighbourhoods and magic up the same exact potholes once a month to make the people living there go crazy.”
“He what? Motherfucker owes me 40,000 yen. Cops thought I was doing it but could only hold me for a day since they didn’t have proof. I had to bribe ‘em so they didn’t fake the evidence…”
An inhaled sharply through her teeth, sounding like a cat hissing. “Oh. Um. I’m gonna make those pancakes!” She dived back behind the counter.
“Make me a batch too!” Akito called out.
“Well, Ena?” Mizuki asked. “Got any more magic questions?”
“Honestly? I’ve learned way too much in too little time to stay sane if you tell me anything else,” Ena answered. “But you,” she poked Mizuki in the collarbone, “are teaching me some of your brand of bullshit later. If I’m gonna be keeping your secrets, I may as well learn to boil an egg for instant noodles in the palm of my hand or something.”
“Ena-san, that’s not a ve-”
“No, no, partner,” Akito said. “Let her learn. It’ll be fun.”
“Sounds like a plan!” Mizuki said with a smile. “I was kinda already planning on teaching you, to be real with you. You’re gonna have to figure out when we’re doing this, though. I’m the one with the open schedule, after all.”
“Only because you skip school all the damn time. Why don’t you just transfer to Miya and go credit-based, if stepping outside the house is so beneath you?”
Mizuki’s expression stuttered for a moment again, before resetting to a casual grin. Maybe she should ease up on the jabs. “Nah, I gotta stick with my friends over at Kamiyama.”
“Personally, I’m all for you reaching new heights,” Akito cut in. “Maybe once you’re all high and mighty up there you can get the fuck out of my hair.”
“Aww, but who’s gonna keep you on your toes without me around?”
“An. Tenma. Kamishiro. ”
“Alright, alright, you’ve made your point!” Mizuki relented, waving him off. “Still sticking around, though. Even if I’m not there half the time, it’s more my style than Miya would be.”
Ena sighed. “Suit yourself.”
Soon enough, An came out with Ena’s pancakes, and they were good. She was glad she hadn’t drunk much of her coffee yet, because the drink and dessert went together really well. Not to mention the place itself. Once more customers started filtering back in, the casual atmosphere was quite calming, if a little loud. Pretty much everyone who walked in knew the boss by name, and just like her, a lot of them stuck around after finishing whatever they ordered just to take it all in.
Once the orders slowed down, An hopped up on stage and provided some live music. The audience whooped and cheered in between songs, and for a little bit, Toya got up there with her. Ena always thought his voice was a little subdued, but he turned into a whole different person with a microphone in his hand. No wonder he’d caught Akito’s attention.
Speaking of Akito, he was still sitting at the table across the room, glancing back over to her when he wasn’t busy watching his friends on stage. He was really holding out on her about this place.
…could she really blame him, though?
Having something to remind him of home around one of her hangout spots with Airi or N25 would leave a bitter taste in her mouth, even if it was just her brother being there all the time. Besides, she was the one who told him to put himself out there and do what he wanted with his life. If this community was a part of that, who was she to butt in?
“Enanan? Earth to Ena, do you read me?” Mizuki was waving her hand in front of her face.
“Sorry, spaced out a bit. What’s up?”
“What’d you think of the show?”
Ena smiled. “It was good. A bit loud, but it suits this place perfectly. But as much as I liked it, I do want to head home now.”
Mizuki hummed and nodded. “Want me to walk you back?”
Ena nodded back. “Someone has to keep me alive, right? Might as well be you.”
She waved at her brother as she was about to step out of the shop. He waved her off dismissively, but his shoulders seemed to drop down a little at the idea of her stepping out, as if they’d been tensed up the whole time without him realizing.
The bus trip back home was short enough, and with Mizuki’s jacket, the heat wasn’t nearly as much of a problem as before. Maybe the heat from earlier was affecting her perception of time, but it almost felt like no time at all had passed before she was at her doorstep. She’d meant to ask about something on the road home, but now was as good a time as any, she supposed.
“Hey, Amia?” She turned her head to face her friend, who was helping hold her up as if she was going to fall at any moment.
“Yeah?”
“I know you’ve got your other secrets, and I don’t want to push you on those,” she said. “But I do want to let Yuki and K in on this at some point. I’m not gonna be pushy about it now, but this is some big shit, and they barely know anything about it.” Hell, she barely knew anything about it, and that’s only because shit went sideways. “I don’t want to keep lying to them for long. Kanade’s already halfway into this with her magic service dog, and I don’t want anyone else slipping and falling in the deep end, got it?”
Mizuki’s smile turned bittersweet, and she nodded her head. “We’ll let them know at some point.”
“Before the new year?”
The smile dropped for a moment as Amia thought to herself, before coming back up with a nod. “Yeah. We should start that off right, at the very least.”
“Good.” She patted Mizuki on the shoulder, and pulled off her jacket to return it. “I’m gonna go lie down in bed. Maybe put a bowl of ice behind my desk fan. Don’t die on your way home, alright?”
Mizuki grabbed the jacket and nodded. “Yup yup! I’ll let K and Yuki know you might not make it to tonight’s meeting, so get all the beauty sleep you need, girl.”
Ena jokingly set her face into a scowl. “What, I need beauty sleep now?”
“You’ve got a face only the three of us could love,” Mizuki replied with a smirk. “Not even your family likes it, if Lil’ Bro is anything to go by.”
“There’s no accounting for his taste. He wears too many jackets and has a celebrity crush on a middle-aged rapper with a fake criminal record.”
The two girls laughed amongst themselves one last time. “See ya soon, Enanan,” Mizuki said, before walking off with a wave.
Ena walked back inside and made a beeline to her bedroom. Those TV shows weren’t kidding when they said that passing out didn’t count as rest. She flopped face down and crashed as soon as her head hit the pillow.
If her dreams were filled with pink hair and shining blue lights, no one needed to know but her.