Cleaning Duty
The name on the cleaning roster was hers, in her own handwriting, which was the worst part. Usagi stood in the emptying classroom at ten past four and mourned. The arcade had a new high score on the Sailor V machine that was not hers, and every minute of o-souji was a minute the score stayed wrong.
"You're supposed to fill the bucket, not commune with it," said Eri.
Eri Nishimura had been assigned the same duty, which meant the universe was punishing Usagi for something. Eri was the girl who had, over the last two weeks, told Naru her hair ribbon looked like a first-aid dressing, told Umino nobody had asked, and told the whole class, apropos of nothing, that it must be nice to have so much time to be stupid in. She said things flatly, the way you'd read a train timetable. Nobody sat near her anymore. That, Usagi had assumed, was the point.
Usagi filled the bucket. She was tired in a way that had nothing to do with buckets — her palms still remembered a certain weight from the small hours, a coldness she couldn't explain to anyone, the brooch a dead lump in her schoolbag now, doing nothing, being a brooch. She hauled the water up and it sloshed grey over the rim and onto her socks.
"Genius," said Eri.
"It's heavy," said Usagi, with feeling.
They wiped desks. There is a rhythm to it — spray, wipe, lift the chair, wipe under, set it down — and for a while the only sound was rag on laminate and the sports club shouting outside. Usagi worked her half of the room in loops, humming the arcade jingle, and Eri worked hers in a straight brutal line, and they did not talk, and it was almost fine.
Then Usagi, reaching for the bucket without looking, put her whole foot in it.
It went over. A wide grey tongue of water shot across the floor Eri had just finished, under three desks, and stopped, sheeting, at the base of the bookshelf where the class kept its things.
"I'm sorry," Usagi said, already on her knees, "I'm sorry, I'll — I'll get it, don't — "
"Don't touch the — " Eri was faster. She snatched something off the bottom shelf a half-second before the water reached it: a flat cardboard folder, the kind art was kept in, its corner already gone dark and soft. She held it up out of the wet and looked at it, and something in her face did a thing that Usagi, on the floor in a spreading lake with a rag in each hand, saw completely.
"It's fine," Eri said. "It didn't get it." She said it to the folder.
"What is it?"
"Nothing. Class stuff." She put it back. Straightened. "Now it'll take twice as long. Good work."
But the good had a crack down the middle of it, a hairline, there and gone, and Usagi had spent a year now learning to hear exactly that — the sound a person makes when the thing they're saying is armour bolted over the thing they mean. She heard it the way she heard it in the worst places, in throne rooms, in the dark, except there was no throne room. There was a wet floor and a girl with a rag.
"Eri," Usagi said, "are you okay?"
"Wring that out before it gets the whole — "
"You're moving," said Usagi. She didn't know how she knew until she'd said it. The folder. The two weeks. The straight brutal line she cleaned in, like someone rehearsing being gone. "You're leaving."
Eri stood very still.
"Friday," she said, at last, flat as a timetable. "My dad's transfer. Osaka." She wrung her rag out over the bucket, hard, both hands, twisting long after it was dry. "So. Two more days of this and then you can all get on with being stupid without an audience."
And Usagi, kneeling in the cold water with her socks ruined and the arcade lost and the whole ordinary wreck of the afternoon around her, felt it arrive — the folder gone soft at the corner, the two weeks of small deliberate cruelties suddenly legible as what they were, a person sanding every handhold off herself so that when she fell away nobody would grab and nobody would grieve — and her eyes filled, and spilled, fast and hot and useless, and she started, humiliatingly, to cry.
It didn't heal anything. That was the thing she would think about later. There was no light. Nothing warmed, nothing mended, no wound closed under her attention. She just cried, ugly, on the floor, because it was sad, because a girl she didn't even like was so frightened of missing people that she'd made herself unmissable on purpose, and there was nothing in the room that her crying could do about any of it.
"Don't," said Eri.
Usagi tried to stop. She was very bad at it.
"Don't. Don't you dare." Eri's voice had gone up and thin. "Do you have any idea how long it took me? Do you know how much work — I had it finished. Everyone was glad. I got everyone all the way to glad and you — " She stopped. Her own eyes were bright and furious. "You're a terrible person to cry in front of. You ruin it. It was going to be nothing and you're making it be a thing."
And there it was, the whole cost of it, handed to Usagi flat across a flooded floor: her open heart was not a gift here. It was a trespass. Eri had chosen numbness the way you choose a coat, on purpose, against the weather, and Usagi had walked in and taken it off her shoulders in the cold. The tears that could reach through anything, here, in a classroom, only reached through the one wall a scared girl had spent a fortnight building so she wouldn't have to feel exactly this.
Usagi wiped her face with a wet forearm, which made it worse, salt and floor-water. "Sorry," she said, wretchedly. "I can't — it just does that. It's not — I can't turn it off. Believe me, I've — " She hiccuped. "It's really inconvenient."
For a second Eri just stared at her, this soggy weeping idiot apologising for her own heart.
Then she made a sound that was almost a laugh, disgusted and wet. "Move," she said. She stepped past Usagi, grabbed the second rag, and dropped to her knees in the lake, and she mopped — Usagi's half, the whole grey flood, fast and hard and furious, driving the water toward the corridor drain with the flat of her hands, so that Usagi wouldn't have to, so that Usagi could go. She did it the way she did everything, like she was angry at it.
They finished in six minutes flat. The floor dried in long clean stripes as they watched, the low sun coming in gold and ordinary over the emptied desks.
At the door Eri wrung both rags, hung them square on the rail, and picked up her bag. She did not say they should keep in touch. She did not give an address. She looked at Usagi one more time, the way you'd look at weather you couldn't do anything about.
"Fix the score," she said. "It's bugging you." And she left, footsteps even and unhurried down the corridor, not once looking back.
Usagi stood in the dry, gold, ordinary room, late for the arcade, her socks a lost cause, the brooch still a dead weight in her bag, having saved absolutely no one. Outside, the sports club scored something and roared.
She picked up her bag and went to fix the score.
Head-canon of [[sailor-moon-the-crybaby-and-the-cosmos]] — an ordinary school-cleaning afternoon, mid-story, no battle · the un-sublime tear: openness that fails to be heroic and lands as trespass.