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“Hold still.”
“I’m not moving.”
“You’re shaking your head.”
Amane’s girlfriend stands before her with an intensely concentrated expression, leaned down to be at eye-level. She’s working hard to glue a plastic fang to Amane’s tooth, matching the first one she put in. According to her, Amane’s natural fangs are not visible enough to accommodate the costume. And so she’s reduced to the overpriced fake ones Nene snagged at some convention last week.
“Your hands are in my mouth,” she speaks around the intrusion, careful not to bite her girlfriend’s steady hands. “It’s hard not to move.”
“Try your best,” Nene presses. “And it’s just my fingers, don’t be dramatic.”
“Aren’t you the one who insisted on an authentic vampire look?”
“I could break your teeth with these things,” she glares. “Be quiet.”
“Yes ma’am.”
She doesn’t mind the accessories- rather, she finds them fun. She’s not as into jewelry as Nene is, but she does have a flair for the dramatic (as much as she may try to deny it). That’s why she let her girlfriend pick out her costume in the first place, she knew Nene wouldn’t disappoint. No one can match her when it comes to a love of vampires and all things supernatural.
…And she means no one . Looking around Nene’s room now, the evidence of her gothic obsession is clear. A bookshelf filled to the brim with the likes of Bram Stoker, Anne Rice, and dozens of other names Amane couldn’t put a face to. She even has some Stephanie Meyers displayed without a hint of shame. Amane knows this, because she personally organized Nene’s bookshelf according to the Dewey Decimal System last year. Specific authors and titles may not stand out, but she knows a thing or two about what Nene likes to read.
That’s not the only vampiric homage in the room. The whole place is decked out in black and red, with memorabilia from various Halloween stores and horror conventions. Not limited to vampires, of course. She also owns a box full of every single prop she’s ever gotten from a showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show , placed neatly beneath a poster. Amane went with her once, even bringing her sister along. Nene and Tsukasa had a blast throwing things and screaming out every reference at all the right times, but Amane found the setting to be a little overwhelming. It was worth it though, just to hear Nene ramble about it passionately on the way home.
Amane’s more the space and science type, but she can appreciate a good ghost story every now and then. She tags along with Nene to haunted locations to act as a bodyguard, shielding her from any possible danger. They’ve been to haunted bathrooms, gravesites, libraries, art museums, halls of mirrors, staircases, clock towers, and then some. They even went to a real life supposedly haunted house, though the most eventful thing that happened was Tsukasa showing up to jumpscare them. The little bitch. Needless to say, Amane has gotten her fair share of haunted attractions.
It may not be her thing, but it’s Nene’s, so she’s more than happy to indulge. So every time Halloween rolls around, Amane lets Nene take the reins. She knows all the best fall festivals and haunted attractions, including which places to avoid. She likes to visit every costume store in town at least once, even if she doesn’t end up buying anything. She plans ahead with her costumes, matching them with Amane now that they’re together. Last year they were Gomez and Morticia Addams, and this year they’re going as a vampire couple. No specific vampire couple in particular, because Nene had too many favorites and couldn’t decide.
Couples costumes are all the rage this year, no one is slacking off. Aoi and Mei are going as Romeo and Juliet, Mitsuba and Kou are going as a pair of lesbian cheerleaders, Sakura and Natsuhiko are going as Frankenstein’s Monster and her Bride, and apparently Teru and Akane are going to be Batman and Superman. Even Tsukasa managed to find a poor guy to dress up as a bloody doctor and patient with her, though Amane questions the ethics of that costume.
This sudden trend means that Nene and Amane have to have the best couples costume, there can be no doubt about it. That’s what Nene said. What they lack in specificity, they’ll make up for in detail and creativity. Nene searched every nook and cranny of this town and the next to ensure their costumes look out of this world. Amane’s pretty sure some of the jewelry pieces she’s wearing are real rubies and pearls, though she’s too scared to ask. The second she knows it’s real, luck will work against her and she’ll start destroying key pieces.
She keeps her hands folded safely on her velvet skirt, away from any priceless jewels. Her fingernails were done professionally by Nene’s manicurist. A neutral tone for the base, and then a dark blood red shade dripping down from the pointed tips.
She can’t help but think that no one else has ever put this much effort into a Halloween costume before.
“Almost done,” one of Nene’s hands rests gently beneath her chin while the other jams up into her mouth, trying to make the glue stick to the end of her tooth. “Just hold still a little longer.”
“How long?”
“Don’t speak!”
She makes a defeated noise, pouting up at her girlfriend. For this operation, she’s seated on the stool in front of Nene’s vanity. The cushion is comfortable, but her back is starting to hurt.
“I know,” Nene coos, sympathetically. “It won’t be long. We should have done this first, your makeup is getting ruined.”
She tenses at the mention of makeup. It had taken Nene a lot of convincing to get her to wear any in the first place, “a lot” meaning six full days before Aoi finally tracked her down and lectured her about making her girlfriend happy. Amane didn’t want to do it, but she sure does want to be the one who makes Nene happy. The only one, preferably, but she’s been told that line of thinking isn’t very healthy. And so she swallowed down the overstimulation and let Nene turn her into a hot corpse (her words, not Amane’s).
Usually she loves to be dolled up by Nene. That much is true even now, she enjoyed the hair and clothing part of dress up more than she can wrap her own head around. Even the nails were fun, because Nene knew all the ladies at the salon and made gossip while Amane admired the process. The shopping was fun, the running around was fun, all of it was fun. Until Nene sat her down to paint her face.
It’s not so bad now that it’s on, Nene is very aware of her sensory issues and made sure to choose the least bothersome materials possible. She even got creative, using a natural strawberry mix for the fake dried blood. But it was still a nightmare putting on sticky foundation and horrifically dry powder. If it hadn’t been for Nene’s subtle encouragement, she probably would’ve had a meltdown halfway through. If, at any point, she had simply told Nene how she felt, the blonde would have stopped immediately. No Halloween costume was worth making her girlfriend miserable, Amane knows that. That’s just the kind of person Nene is. It’s just that…well…
She really wants to make her girlfriend happy.
She understands why Nene doesn’t quite get her tiff with makeup. When Nene wears makeup, she feels far more comfortable with the face she sees in the mirror. She feels more like herself, more like the girl she’s always been deep down. But when Amane wears makeup, the face in the mirror looks like a total stranger. Makeup doesn’t make her feel like herself, it makes her feel like she’s performing femininity for other people. They have very different experiences and feelings in that area, that’s one of the reasons Amane loves Nene so much. She loves learning about someone so similar to her yet so different.
Tsukasa had been surprised when Amane first expressed her disdain for makeup. She assumed that Amane announcing that she’s a girl meant she would want to participate in all girly things. To this day Amane still doesn’t understand where she got that from. Tsukasa was born a girl, and she’s never been the “girly” type. She should know that not all girls are the same, Amane just happens to fall into the nerd category of girl. She still associates herself more with femininity than masculinity or androgyny, but she’s on the opposite end of the feminine scale from Nene. She thinks. She doesn’t exactly have a good mental image of this hypothetical scale.
She doesn’t hate makeup as a concept, every now and then she can tolerate some lip gloss or chapstick. She also loves the way it looks on other people, particularly her girlfriend. Exclusively her girlfriend, really. All other women stopped existing to her the moment she and Nene put a label on it. She may have had feelings before, but now she has a job, someone to be loyal to. That’s something she takes pride in. And besides, why would she need any other women when Nene’s right there?
Wait, where was she? Right, makeup. She wouldn’t go as far as to say she and makeup are enemies, they’re just not on the best of terms. It would all be fine if makeup didn’t feel so…itchy. Not physically itchy, just itchy all over. Like her skin is impatient.
Then again, she can’t see herself wearing it even if it was comfortable. It’s too time consuming to put on and it’s just not who she is. She doesn’t need to prove anything to anyone, she knows who she is and Nene knows who she is and that’s all that matters to her.
“You got all still.”
Amane shifts instinctively. “I thought you wanted me to be still?”
“Yeah but,” she frowns. “Not this kind of still.”
“Is there a bad way to be still?”
“When you do it like that, there is.”
Uh-oh, this isn’t good. She made her girlfriend upset.
Amane wouldn’t consider herself a people-pleaser, not for most people. But with Nene she completely rolls over like a dog, eager to do all sorts of tricks to make Nene smile. She wants so badly to keep that smile on her face, because the second it disappears…
Nene might too.
“Shouldn’t you finish putting the fang in?”
“I did it while you were frozen up like that.”
Amane sputters. “I wasn’t frozen up , you’re reading too much into things.”
Seriously, since when did her girlfriend get so perceptive? Normally Nene’s too stuck in her own head to notice what other people are feeling. She’s had multiple fights with their friends over this, cherished loved ones she almost pushed away due to unintentional negligence. She doesn’t mean to hurt anybody, but she has a compulsive need to conceptualize the world as a fairytale. She needs things to be picture perfect, so that she doesn’t begin to think about her real world problems too long. Physical insecurities, and long-standing health problems that make her future uncertain.
She wants so badly for everything to be okay, and Amane has worked hard to make it that way for her. Her dream is to take all of Nene’s troubles and turn them into stardust, to breathe life into her by her own hand. She wants to reshape the world to match the reality Nene deserves. That’s part of the reason she works so hard to keep Nene happy, no one deserves happiness more than Nene. She’s so kind and strong and interesting, she makes everybody else on the planet look painfully boring. Amane wants to free her from hospital trips and therapy appointments, to take her somewhere far away where they can forget about everything that once hurt them. Maybe they could go to the moon, land there and start a little colony of their own. No longer bound to the earth, free to swim amongst the stars and talk to aliens.
That life sounds so beautiful. Though, truly, she’d give anything for a normal human life with Nene as well. One without complicated families and health issues. Where girls don’t have to start their lives over just because their parents were shitty, and where princesses can live into old age.
Nene grabs her cheeks with both hands, tugging them apart until the skin aches. “Stop thinking so much.”
“Whaaaaa,” Amane whines, grabbing her wrists. “Cut it out.”
The fangs make it difficult to talk, though surprisingly not as hard as she thought it would be. Looks like they were worth the money.
“Not until you stop thinking.”
“I don’t know how to stop thinking.”
“Listen to me instead,” she finally lets Amane’s face go. “My words will be your thoughts.”
It sounds so romantic that she promptly forgets the sting in her cheeks, weakly rubbing at the reddened skin with her thin fingers. Nene is so open about her feelings, so unapologetic. Amane doesn’t know how to process any of her sweet words, every compliment crashes over her like a wave. She’s barely given time to stand up before the next one hits, knocking her off her feet.
“Whatever you say.”
“We’re done with the makeup,” Nene reassures. “Thank you for putting up with me but you didn’t seem to like it too much.”
Her heart does a funny little squeeze at that, gaping up at Nene like she’s looking at an angel. Or rather, a devil, with the way she’s dressed. Amane will take her either way.
As ditzy as Nene can be, there is no stopping her from learning. She wants to know Amane so badly, enough to do research on all her interests and ask her sister for past stories. The nosiness can get irritating, but she’d be lying if she said she didn’t feel honored. To have Nene so focused on her, so determined to know her even with all the walls Amane puts up…it’s more than she could ever ask for. She tried so hard to close herself off for so long, she never thought she’d meet someone who refused to put up with it. Someone who sat her down and asked her direct questions, who picked up little traits without Amane having to explain them directly. She feels known, and therefore she is loved.
True, there are many things Nene still does not know about her, and she should probably be more concerned with her own conflict. But at the rate she’s going, there will come a day when she knows Amane like the back of her hand. Amane can only hope that day comes soon, and that they have many more days after that. Infinite days, or just enough so that they can both die without regrets.
Perhaps that’s a dramatic way of thinking for how young they are. They’ve both had to deal with far more than normal teenagers should. It should be reasonable that they get one night a year where they get to act like kids and trick-or-treat with all their friends. Amane sometimes thinks they’re getting too old for trick-or-treating. But then…
Nene spins her around to face the mirror, beaming over her shoulder. “Ta-da! What do you think?”
Amane must admit, Nene has really outdone herself this year. The makeup is a bit smudged, but it works well with the undead look. The dress is a gothic frilly thing that compliments Nene’s, blacker where the other is red. Her hair has been straightened and given product to make it look extra shiny, falling sharply down to her chin. The fangs look scarily realistic, matching the exact shade of her real teeth. She’s not sure how Nene pulled that one off and, if she’s being honest, she doesn’t want to know.
The dried blood around her mouth also looks a little too realistic, though it’s far off from the dark red color of her lipstick. She appreciates that Nene was willing to sacrifice that one detail just for her. A ruby gem sits at the center of her neck, matching the one on Nene’s. Pearls loop down the sleeves and along the ruffles of the skirt. Lace is fluffed around the openings of the sleeves and bottom of the skirt, adding to the vintage look. And most importantly, she has a cool cape that Nene notably does not have. A subtle love letter from her girlfriend, no doubt.
Above all these details, the one that stands out to her the most is Nene’s smile in the mirror. She looks so damn proud of herself, eyes sparkling with stars and seashells. Her smile is so wide that her teeth can’t even close, waiting in anticipation for Amane to give her thoughts. It’s only now that she notices the two red dots on Nene’s neck, in the exact shade of dark red she put on Amane’s lips.
She did this for both of them, not just her own pride. She specifically chose Amane as the one she wanted to drag around to all her horror events, to suffer through endless long lines with. She put these costumes together so they would fit a couple , but just an aesthetic. Sure, she had her own fun, but at the end of the day this was an act of love. It’s so nerdish and thoughtful and Nene that it makes Amane’s eyes a little misty.
“I think,” she says, carefully. “That these are definitely the best costumes.”
Nene squeals. “Really? You mean it?”
“No competition,” she smiles. “We’re gonna knock ‘em all dead.”
“I knew it!” She pecks Amane’s lips, mixing blood red with cherry. “Take that, Aoi!”
“Our biggest competition was Aoi?”
“No,” Nene rolls her eyes. “Our biggest competition was Aoi and Mei. Aoi can’t win on her own.”
“Win? Is there a contest?”
She pauses. “You didn’t know?”
Not once over their months worth of planning in advance did Nene mention anything about a costume contest. Amane wasn’t aware she was going to be judged tonight. Either this was a genuine error, or calculated scheming. As sweet as her girlfriend is, she also has her moments of evil genius.
“You never told me…”
“It’s just our group,” she promises. “And it’s not a fancy show or anything, after trick or treating we’re each going to vote on a couple that’s not our own and then Akane is going to count up the votes.”
“Why Akane?”
She shrugs. “He’s always been so brutally honest, I don’t see why he’d lie about this.”
That makes her feel a bit better. She doesn’t have to show off, she just has to show up. Just go around trick-or-treating as planned and then people will vote while they eat candy. No pressure, that’s basically what they already had planned. Minus, you know, the voting.
She really hopes she doesn’t mess this up for Nene. This is why they should’ve given up the silly candy-hunting and just stayed inside watching horror movies for once. Or they could’ve toughened up and gone to a party. That way they could cut the in-between and jump right to the uncomfortable sense of judgment.
On second thought, one more year won’t hurt. She’d like to hold onto this for as long as possible.
“Fine,” she sighs. “In that case, we’re gonna crush them.”
“That’s the spirit!”
When Nene hits her, she does not think about her itchy makeup or the overpriced fangs. She doesn’t think about the contest, or the future, or the fact that her legs are going to be sore from walking later. All she sees is Nene’s smile.