warning : Herein lies creaky writing, use of Japanese honorifics, gratuitous language mangling, butchery of Tuning facts because fuck if I remember those details, spoilers for the end of Air Gear, which I do not own and never have.

Are spoiler warnings still a thing?

Anyway, I'm serious. So fucking rusty, I swear to God. Written in twenty-four hours as a warm-up for the other three projects I've had on backlog since, like, March. If I don't start spamming this section by the end of the month, assume I'm dead in a ditch. Props if you even remember who Hako is!

codetta

Here's a motion for which there is no single sound.

No snap of knuckle or joint, no pulse-tap, no swill of water in the mouth or throat swallowing ice. No sign decisive enough to be a symptom, for outsiders to see it coming. If she hasn't been expected, then she can't be forgiven. It's logic as sound as noise, and by the time Isawa Hako was at a point to think over her options, she'd already been slotted into place. Easy as mechanics, fitted into the syllables of her name and her rank and her meaning: to tune, to have tuned, to be tuning.

She's thinking in abstractions because they stop working as soon as she applies them to the real world.

Words change; meanings change. One defining act finishes, becomes another. To turncoat, to have turned, to be turning. Betrayal is a constant, revived and renewed with every breath. She would know.

Here's the core of Isawa Hako: no mother's daughter or protege or nun-in-training; she wears her skirts like a student, wears them like a real girl. Paints stars on her nails and delights in seeing them scratched up: gear-scrapes and oil and grit all proof of progress, her evidence sure as numbers counted, though she daubs them whole again for morning. She lent whispers to the Tridents forums, one word among thousands. She mastered emergency treck reassembling in her second year. A thousand years ago, in another country, she was proud to serve in Tool Toul To's nth generation of Tuners, her whole body restrung and set to sing for a king.

A thousand years ago, she was stolen.

Fairy tales, all of them.

And yet. Here she is—

And the king's eyes are open, and his skin is warm.

She takes the trip into the depths of Tool Toul To by the only way she knows: across the gigantic gears and valves powering the clock, down to the rooting wires of the tuning system. They've only just started reconstruction around the Infinite Scale in wake of SkyLink, and the organisation knows better than to direct all their generators and mainframe restrictions to a single controlling heart—Tool Toul To has never been able to afford weakness more than any Storm Riding team. Instead, it's the beginning of a mesh, attended by Tuners day and night. A new project from the new Queen.

Hako's served her shifts there, too.

It's a quick and familiar step now—she doesn't even have to time her jumps from gear to gear within the giant clock the way she would have, once. The beat's settled into her bones, beneath her heart and the tuner's internal count, and she takes some grim comfort in this third check—hers, as it is every other Tuner's. Down and down and down: into a cavern kept stable and tempered with automated steel doors and a chair suspended by a single pole, the nucleus of a thousand wires glittering under the dim light. By now, the ritual's engrained: she shucks her shoes before she presses the button for admittance.

The door hisses open. She doesn't have to announce herself; the question drifts down within three steps of her entrance.

"Oh," the chair says, sounding a little dreamy. "It's morning, isn't it?"

Hako purses her lips. "You have got to stop sleeping in machines. How many hours have you been in here?"

"Seventeen hours, four minutes and forty-three seconds—" The lilt in Kururu's voice suggests that she knows it down to the nanosecond. Voice is never as precise as measurement, as fingers keeping place. She peers over an arm, and the pole suspending the chair sinks with a tilt of her ruffled head. She's looking up still as it descends; her thumb lingers on a wire strung high, chasing some unseen data stream before it escapes her reach. "But I can't remember if it was day or night when I came in..."

"Go out once in a while. Honestly. You have whole teams to keep your place in the systems while you're gone."

Kururu doesn't speak—which, Hako knows, is on purpose and not a slip of the mind. Here in the depths of the system's workings, any sound catches and ropes into the synthesized symphony, and the Pledge Queen counts every note. What's heard is never lost.

Six point seventy-three seconds before her eyes flick over. "Good morning," the Pledge Queen says. "Hako."

"Good morning," Hako says, and the words hold for a moment, stiff between her teeth. Still brittle, heavy with rust from the days on days when they weren't hers to say and she wouldn't have given them up if they'd taken a knife and cut them out of her lungs.

She trails closer. Wires webbed through to ceiling and keyboards and a thousand external data processors blinking in malicious lights, shelved high or neatly dissected into a sprawl of motherboard lights and drives. There's not a grain of dust under Hako's bare feet, not a single drooping cord.

There's no dreaminess today in Kururu's glance or the arch of her open hands, but her voice lingers in light. "The system's running at low-maintenance for now..." She taps her lip, thoughtful. "Did you want to see what it's improved? We've broken through to a way to conduct Tunings which can calculate and manipulate the torque of the motor cores when riders take a turn, down to a precision of three milliseconds—"

"Later. I have an appointment for today." She knows what comes next; she's recited it in her head in reels fit to write down. This isn't hesitation—she's just giving the words room to breathe. Hako clenches her hands, briefly holds them in knots. "You've used up your chances," she says at last, to the stillness and the slow whirring of a thousand metal fans in dust and darkness. "That's all I'm here to say."

The Pledge Queen startles, and the machines feel like they startle with her. Light after mechanical light stutters echoes of confusion, and the bunching connectors stretch taut and high above her head as Kururu sits up in the rooted chair.

"My—" she blinks, "chances?"

"To get him back!" Hako says, louder than she means. She tucks her hands behind her back, braces wrist against wrist, doesn't rock on her heels. Movement makes noise, noise is language, and the Pledge Queen, with all her flickers of feeling smoothing into thought on her clear face, doesn't need that much of an advantage to understand what she means. "It wouldn't matter if anybody else here wanted it. They all gave up on him way early because—" no, she won't falter, she won't let the gap ruin the stream of the words, "you were the only one he saw. Nobody had the connection to him like you did. But you let his Tuning pass to someone else—and you won't get it again."

"That's all," she adds, and means it this time. A spin of the foot has her walking back in seconds. The door's only steps away.

Behind her, Kururu says, "I know that."

Bile sputters in her throat, burning movement down. Her fists stiffen. Hako stops—thinks better of staying, but holds her place anyway. She bites down every word for heartbeats, second after second, until she's whetted them enough.

"Why?" she demands. The question burns like an accusation, sharp against the background dimness. Having spoken it, she finds that there isn't more to say, or there's too much; she's fumbling through haphazard words, unsure of every key. Demand after demand, and none of it enough to understand this: classmate, acquaintance, prodigy, the songmaker grown untouchable. "You—you understood him best, right? How could you let that go? Is the song worth so much more than that—is the sky more than him? You're not threshed into Yggdrasil now, you could be both. If you really wanted him, do you think someone like the Thorn Queen could stand in your way? Do you think he doesn't care?"

She doesn't dare turn to look at Kururu's face—doesn't want to see the distant marble ease of her answer. Instead, her eventual laughter bells out like chimes, like raindrops striking, like joy compressed to waveform. "Do you think I'm giving up? Ah, I guess if I was, I'd be a bit unworthy of you..."

"Don't make fun of me!" Hako bites out, but her own sound is less vicious to her ear than desperate. And she does hate Kururu for a heartbeat's worth—hates her, then, in the same old way that she always has: for her still patience in the dimness, for her folded watchfulness, for Hako's own teeth stinging her lip and this throat-knotted silence and the shadows for all of Kururu's exposure. Bitter, bitter, bitter, and all of it sinks in less than a second—which isn't to say that it won't come again.

She expects it. This, after all, is what she's tuned into herself.

"I'm not!" Kururu says, in three chords of honesty at least : the kind of playing only possible by someone who's never learned to lie. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry—I didn't mean it that way. You're right," she adds, quiet, and each word stirs on her tongue like a new note. "The road I've chosen doesn't mean I have to run it alone. If... I'd asked him, then, to wait for me. Before Noyamano-san had said anything. Maybe things would have gone differently. It doesn't mean I would have wanted it—like that." It's quiet enough that Hako can hear her head bend in the quiet, slipping fall of her hair—looking at her hands, probably, because Kururu would never look for outward reassurance for this. "He overshadows everyone he loves—do you know that? His team—they're kings, but they're his kings. After everything... after everything we saw, in the wake of the sky—I couldn't want to fall just in his shadow. And he couldn't follow my road." Her smile cracks the quiet. "He isn't my team, you see."

Hako turns. She says, fiercely, "Tell me you don't love him."

Kururu's hand flies to a cheek by instinct. "Um," she says, faintly. Her glance wanders, and she distracts herself with her bare feet.

She's laughing before she knows it, an edge in her throat surging fit to cut her tongue. "Don't give me excuses when the truth's that you're just too scared."

"Hako, it isn't—"

"No! I won't see him today. Or ever again."

"Because of me?"

"I don't want your leftovers!" Hako spits. "I'm not going to pick up where you left off just because you—" She can't finish the words; there is no sound to the sentence that could draw it whole in any way a sacrificial Pledge Queen could chart. She flings up her hands. "I'm done. I won't do it! If he wants it so badly, he—he can strap something on and tune himself!"

"Please," Kururu says—and that, unfairly, stops her like nothing else could. "Aaah, I really can't answer that—" she laughs, a slight note, bright and bruised. "I don't know if it counts. If this is love, then—isn't every Tuner a little in love with their King? You have to put some part of your heart into every tuning, after all, and as long as you stay with them, you can't ever stop. It isn't a choice you can make. They give you their wings to hold together... who wouldn't cling to that?"

Hako doesn't speak.

Kururu says, "It was my choice. To give it up. We could have waited... there could have been a thousand other ways to find both. You and the rest of Tool Toul To—" her mouth curves, "you came up with some of them then, didn't you? So—you're right. Both of us... we needed the sky more than we needed each other. We always will. That's why he matters—and I don't think I'll ever be sorry for that."

The space between them fills with the warm hum of machines coursing. Sound without language, meaning without need.

Hako starts, "How..." but the question unravels. She stops again.

"Just say it," Kururu suggests. Her head's still bowed. "It's easier, sometimes, than thinking about getting it right."

Muteness chases muteness in a dizzy whirl. She bursts out: "Isn't it lonely?"

Kururu's hands slide back against the seat. Her fingers aren't longer than anyone else's, or more remarkable. She's left off the gloves today, working with hard drives and blunt parts instead of more delicate mechanics, and her skin seems to hold the faint light of the makeshift cavern and mirror it. "I don't think he is. He has a team who started Air Trecks just to be by his side—who made themselves into kings to be with him. He has—someone who loves him and puts him above everything, now. He'll be all right."

"Not him," Hako says, and she's never wanted to say idiot so badly in her life—and she would, if only she thought that it might hit a nerve worth targeting. "You!"

"Oh," says Kururu, like a revelation. "Oh." She settles herself a little more, her fingers hooking the earphone set around her throat. Her smile rises again: a real one, limning secrets and an odd delight. "Well—I have a team, too."

To which Hako has nothing to say at all. She knows it, now. The rest doesn't matter. In strides, she's turned and she's reaching for the door panel.

"Will you do it?"

She doesn't hesitate—her palm doesn't hit the button with any more force than it should, and it doesn't matter. Negatives come in strings and all of them are true. "No matter how you see him," she tells the door, the opening dark, "he's still the Sky King to me. I'm not you. I won't give that up to someone else."

Steel slides open. The air's full of nothing as she goes.

He's early.

Storm Riders, on the whole, have an especially bad relationship with time: either they're too caught up in their own tricks, busy mapping out the whole damn world in wheeltracks and sparks, or they're obsessed with speed, and wind up hours ahead, meals ahead,shuffling in the low church that grows out of its entrance with a deeply uncomfortable expression—like a verse might send them reeling, and they wouldn't recognise God unless He wrapped a cloud around His face.

But nobody keeps the boy-king waiting these days.

He's dragged inside with all due haste, relocated to the main tuning chamber with only the slightest of delays needed to push his chosen, given Tuner into a tuning suit and leave her bare and waiting—and there's nothing in it that Hako hasn't prepared for, there's no possible chance that it could go too quickly for her when she's executed the practice time after time already, when it's fallen from ritual to routine, when she's steeled herself for the familiar contact of data and skin in this, with a boy who isn't iron and disdain. She's even accounted, mentally, for the delay it'll take Minami Ikki to get over the fact that, hello, he's alone in a room with a totally naked girl (and the girl is hot, thank you, even if she isn't quite naked), and get over his absolute failure not to ogle her breasts or say anything awkward. And it's easy, and expected—because to a degree, the Sky King's nothing but transparency, and that's good. And she knows what she's doing.

Except by the time he's settled and she's activating the tuning suit to start its basic checkup, there's a question, after all.

"Sure you wanna do this?"

She turns sharply—the sharper for the surprise, and finds his glance fixed in the wrong place. Her face, really? Really? "It's not about what I want, is it?" Hako says, instead of a hundred placatory or distractive remarks—maybe it's startled too much out of her, too. "You don't know me. That's why you're asking."

Ikki grimaces. "There's more to it—"

She says, steady in tone and bone, "Are you making a complaint?" because he should know his options. He should be here because he's chosen her. She shouldn't take less—can't afford a king who holds part of his heart away to spare her sympathy, mercy, pity. Someone else might be able to hear the sound in that, account for the gaps strained by kindness.

Hako, with her looped hair and her soft, pearled hands and her nails cut raw, would never stand a chance.

Minami Ikki's weakness is, as it's always been, pretty girls in desperate straits. He doesn't answer her, not yet, though there's a twist to his mouth, the way he puffs air, that tells her she won't like the thoughts brewing behind his stitching brows. He should, and she should. But she hurries on.

"At the Tower—you flew higher than you ever have. It wasn't just because of Kururu, you know," she says—more shrill, because she can hear the turn away in his shoulders and she could lose him still. "It isn't always because of Kururu. That was my song—my sound!"

"I know," he says, unexpectedly. "I felt it. There was some weird boost in the torque when I took a kick. You accounted for that, right?"

She stops—of course she stops. There's a thrill in the strings of her heart and a shiver that parts her skin from the tuning suit, and she's a girl, all flesh and sparks, and the sky king's eyes are steady on her the way they should have been from the start. Her elbows flex against a lean forward, like she could pull an echo of that victory from his skin if she touched him now, measure the glory from his pressure and pulse. "So—"

"I don't wanna waste your time," the Sky King says. Their bodies suspend, inches apart. He's looking at something that isn't her, dark eyes fixed, studying the shape and skeleton of a girl. Nothing that belongs to him. Abruptly, Ikki shakes his head, scrubbing at his hair and face. "Shiiiiit," he grumbles. "I really didn't wanna talk about this."

"What?" she says. "What?"

He stops, palm still flattening an eyelid. "You didn't want the sky," Ikki says. "Before. You were looking at something else. When'd you change your mind?"

Her voice is thin, still lost—and she's shy again, suddenly, in spite of herself and for all the spite still sunk in the deeps of her lungs. Old habit kicks hard; she ducks her head. Her fingers pick at the transparency smooth over her legs. She says, almost hopeful, "You don't have to know these things..."

"Actually," he says, "I kinda do. It's some—some Tuner compatibility shit, right? Only working with Storm Riders they really know. Tuning the sound up close, and all that." He waves a hand. She'd wince if it weren't for the fact that it doesn't strike her like condescension when it slips in Minami Ikki's voice. All that isn't just a dismissive grouping; it sounds like everything else. Sounds, for a moment, like weight and matter. "That's how it goes, right? Way back, Kururu—said something about that, too, when she was staying with us. That you've gotta know what you're looking for."

She knows, she knows. Everything since meeting Minami Ikki's felt like nothing but a series of slipping, desperate losses. They're tangled in their own awkwardness, data shimmering idle across bare stretches.

"That's so old-fashioned," Hako says, louder, to jolt herself, and feels Ikki's blink, close as if his lashes had brushed her skin. Air burns beneath her ribs—air and noise, hard as framing-wood; she can feel the scorch of it when she breathes. She wants to say, do you think I knew Takeuchi Sora to the core, do you think I ever understood him, do you think he knew my heartbeat or any part of me that hadn't been cut out with his brother's knife, do you think the pledge queen would have given you up if she could have pulled her heart together, do you think you've been flying on your own, do you ever think—

Oh, he's dangerous.

"Do you," she says, "know why?"

She can hear his words form in the hole of his throat, the crease of his forehead, before they spill out. Ikki says, "'Cause... it's old?"

"Wrong!" Chastising is her armor; faintly, under all the words, she remembers the days when she'd crawled to him, wreathed in smiles and sacrifices. Nothing he's going to get from her now. She isn't his queen, not on any level, but a Tuner can't only stand behind her king.

"People who think they know you," Hako says, "stop paying attention." Her hands are shaking. She presses them into the smooth white tiles—counts the finest tremors resounding through from elbows to wrists through to fingertips, traveling bone by bone, echoes of her own pulse, sound transmuting sound. Her voice lifts to carry. She raises it in fractures, skipping decibels and octaves, from a hush to a cry. "They decide who you are, decide they can accept you unconditionally —and that's their mistake! They stop listening for the accompaniment under the song—they forget to look for the changes in you that make your heart what it is. They stop, because they think they know enough. Nothing can wreck and wrong you like the people who think they love you."

A moment at rest. Then his eyes fix on her, doubtful and a little awkward. "Uh," Ikki says, scratches at his temple and makes a face. "You had some kind of terrible childhood or something like that, didn't you."

"No!" she bristles, and the urge to slap him thrums in her nerves, data streaming temper, temper, a host of cautions. Irregularity, irregular, and this boy's nothing like the King he should have been. No crown suspended above his bowed head. Nothing in him proven except flight in a still and steady longing through every thought and movement, flight threaded into the core of him.

"Stop trying to get to know me," Hako says. "Storm King," and that's a little slice delivered with a curve of teeth. His response, the creak in his jaw and a sharp swallow, sings to her loud as a voice. Hako lets her eyes slant as she leans into his space. Her smile curves wider. "I'm exactly where I want to be. That's all you have to understand."

"Hey—oi, hey!" he says, and he's looking at her, he really is, like it might matter, and it isn't just that she's practically naked and on top of him again. It's pretty much a wonder that he hasn't just fixated on her breasts again. "I'm going to need more than that, though. You do, too."

Air is never still—even in Tool Toul To, where every beat comes in measures condensed into rhythm, and so she hears it all: footsteps shuffling down the service halls in sneakers and heels, steam, the groan of aging coils, doors, gears ticking beneath the muted thrum of the outermost tower's bells at rest—and the boy-king, here: the sky's heart and his every slow breath, and his pulse like wings beating hard and hollow, rooting all the world's sound.

She isn't scared. She isn't.

"I don't know you," she explains, and grabs his shoulder before she can change her mind. He's scrambling to fend her off, but not sharply enough, and she settles on his lap in an easy movement, wrist and palm establishing old patterns and baselines through his shirt. "Not even a little. Not the way Kururu—or Ringo-chan does. And I'm not going to find out! You can keep your favorite ramen flavors and your manga and your weird porn habits to yourself—"

Embarrassment simmering under every syllable, Ikki says, darkly, "Wasn't actually in it to share my porn with you—"

"Whatever!" She flicks his chest; she can hear the finish of the phrase in his lilt. "Listen to that—and don't interrupt until I'm finished! That's what I'm after. The Thorn Queen's in love with you, right? And Kururu's got way better things to do than to focus on the sound of one king. She's the one you should be catching up to."

Pinch-mouthed, he says nothing—which isn't to say that he's silent: muscles categorised 4M1AT4 and 4M1A30 flex, if barely. Data gleams through her nerves in a brief registry's aligning. He looks away; his eyes lift, a sweep to the bare, bright ceiling above them, and if he's forgotten that she's there—well, it wouldn't be the first time. All these kings and their visions—but Hako's certainty, the only fact that matters, is that she won't be left behind.

Nobody's ever gotten a sense of a storm by throwing themselves into it. The proof is in the distance, the signs, the build and the wreckage it leaves.

She stoops. The curve of her skull fits against his throat.

"Which leaves me," she says, barely a hitch above a breath. "I know. The hurricane you want to make—nobody can see it but me."

He's changed since the first time he'd come—since the days when he'd gotten his ass kicked by a devil's stretch and a machine's contempt. Anyone could see that. Minami Ikki isn't a hard character to memorise. His arms a little thicker, calluses roughening the scrape of his fingertips climbing, clouds in his dark eyes—and she knows, too, that it's an easy switch from here to raucous laughter, flipping skirts, babbling strategy and boasts turning on the same word. She knows, she knows. The kindest of all fools, this boy under the crown.

Once upon a time, Hako thinks. If things had changed, even slightly. She could have, she really could have—

She breathes. Parses data. Hears the drum of blood in vein. Out loud, she says, "I'll never be the closest to you—the one who knows you best." She lets her nails skim his ribs, measuring his time through the weave of muscle and arteries to the tempest in his skin. Her hands wind in his hair as she leans in, and he isn't stopping her this time, not him or the stutter-drumming of his pulse, and this, this, she recognises: a thing more dictated than a symphony, more familiar than her own footprints, more transparent than shadows in a heart. Nothing, at last, that needs words to be understood.

Flight, she thinks, constant movement. A queen and king in love with the same sky. Words change, but the heart never does.

There's no room for her but here. Is there.

Listening, Isawa Hako smiles.

She says, "But I'm going to be the one who makes you fly again."

It's enough.

co`det ´ta

n. 1. a term used in music in a number of different senses, primarily to designate a passage that brings a piece (or a movement) to an end.
2. a short passage connecting two sections, but not forming part of either; a short coda.