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She is full to bursting, an endlessly tormenting collider of every color and shape and feeling and voice. She is music, she is just noise. She is the way that lightning grazed the highest point, just for a split second, zinging and lighting up the night before disappearing. She is also the thunder that followed after, splitting the sky. She is a single blade of grass pushing up through a stubborn layer of snow in the beginning of spring, willing the warmth to permeate further. She is the way an engine thrummed with excitement before an adventure, setting off through the streets of Tokyo.
She sips her coffee, barely tasting it. She is also empty, she realizes. A chalkboard wiped clean, or a can of soda someone had finished every last drop of. Completely and utterly hollowed out.
How is it, she wonders, that someone could be so full, and yet so hollow?
“You’re leaking.”
An interloper comes to sit beside her. She checks her cup, but it’s ceramic, and most certainly not leaking.
“Not the cup. You.”
She blushes, wondering how a person can be leaking, but she knows really, exactly how. What is really maddening, really embarrassing, is how this stranger knows.
“Who are you?” she asks, holding her cup close, the steam a meager barrier between this newcomer and herself.
The woman merely smiles, half-perched on the seat as she is, as if she’s using it only for the purpose of waiting until her name is called, just a temporary stop until she retrieves her order and goes about her day.
Maya grimaces, and with nothing better to do, she sips her coffee again. Again, it is tasteless. “It’s not true,” she says, quiet enough that she doubts the other woman hears her. She is mostly denying it to herself, really.
The strange woman looks at the floor beside Maya, as if it was filled with a puddle of all of the things Maya had lost – roles in stage plays and forgotten lines and well-meaning women and days and days and days and days.
“Claudine?” The barista calls for her, and so she stands.
What a strange name. Claudine. It sits firmly in her chest, nestled in her ribs, determined not to slip out of any of the holes.
With a slight nod, Claudine leaves, coffee in hand. Maya can feel her own weaknesses exposed, like sand pouring from a sieve, but at the same time she feels a rush, an influx of new fears and excitement.
She spies her again, at the bar, weeks later, though she remains out of sight. She wonders if it's notable that she's again drinking something at their second encounter. She wonders when she became the type of woman to go to bars alone.
Claudine seems like she's always gone to bars alone. Or maybe not. Everything she can imagine seems right about Claudine, and wrong. Maybe she drinks a vodka soda. Maybe she drinks beer. She's proven wrong on both counts when Claudine orders whiskey, but somehow it still feels off, the pieces not quite falling into place nicely.
Claudine wears a black dress, too fancy for the bar, but too casual for a club. Maya can't imagine anything about that, black dresses are one of the many things that feel taboo, pouring in and pouring out of her with the paths she's crossed over the years.
Another girl greets Claudine after a moment, pink hair swooped over one shoulder. So she doesn’t even go to bars alone - Maya realizes she is wrong on all counts.
"Ugh you really are the devil, Kuro," the woman with Claudine says, both teasing and not. Somehow, of everything, Maya knows this is true.
It’s later, after she’s finished two drinks of her own, that she’s discovered. She’s sitting on a bar stool when Claudine approaches her from behind, swaying a bit to the mindless music permeating the bar. “Tendo Maya.”
She turns to look at Claudine, her features dulled slightly from the alcohol, everything a little easier, everything a little smoothed out. Blonde waves, slim body in black dress, red eyes - the devil’s eyes.
“Can I help you?” she asks, playing dumb. She’s never been introduced to this woman before. She doesn’t even know her name, aside from a call from a barista and a nickname from an acquaintance. Scraps that should have passed through her fluidly but stay stuck in her ribs like locks on a lovers’ bridge.
“It is you,” she says, grinning, her actions too loose, too much. “The famous stage actress.”
“Didn’t you know that the first time?” Maya asks, thinking back to their encounter at the coffee shop.
“The first time?” Claudine asks. Her expression is unreadable, and Maya is left wondering if Claudine does not remember the moment in the coffee shop, if the existential void she fell into was a figment of her imagination after all, or if Claudine is just teasing her.
Before Maya can respond, someone bumps into Claudine and she loses her balance, aiming to catch herself against the bar, but Maya reaches out, steadying her.
It’s true, she thinks, this woman is the devil. Or maybe she’s a witch. A gold dust woman who can stretch the distance between them infinitely or wind her up like a coil, and without any more information than a name and a drink order.
“Are you alright?” Maya asks, as Claudine straightens up again, but she’s closer now, standing just before where Maya is sitting on the bar stool, her blonde hair hanging between them and nearly brushing against Maya’s arms in the tightly packed bar.
Claudine just blinks, as if this was a strange question to ask in the first place, but nods after a moment, a soft smile on her face. “Are you, Tendo Maya?” She finishes the whiskey as she waits for Maya’s response, leaning forward across Maya to place the empty glass on the bar.
Maya stares at the place where her skin stretches across her sternum, biting her lip as she imagines all of the things inside of Saijou Claudine. Days and days and days and memories of women and devilish charm and unsettling words and a different color palette from Maya’s, smoothed down by whiskey on the rocks. She nods as well. “I’m alright,” she says.
“You look pale,” Claudine says, leaning closer still. Maya wonders if she’s doing it on purpose, if she knows what effect she’s having. She’s beautiful and suffocating, and Maya wants nothing more than to just let Claudine go like she does everything and everyone else, but she remains firmly attached, lodged in Maya’s chest.
“I should head back,” Maya agrees, desperate to get away from this woman.
“Are you sure you’re alright? I can walk you back,” Claudine offers, following Maya from the bar.
She wonders if she agreed, or if Claudine is just tethered to her now, as the two of them walk down the dimly lit street back toward Maya’s apartment, well after midnight. Truthfully, she knows it - she wants this: the gifts and wonder that can only come from a devil, regardless of whatever deal she is striking.
“You haven’t introduced yourself,” she says, both because it’s true and because she needs to pull this image of Claudine she has back down to earth.
“Saijou Claudine,” she replies, her steps in stride with Maya’s. “I’m a fan.”
Maya wants to scoff, to send back a rebuke about how this woman, who claims to be her fan only recognized her after two encounters and nearly running into her, but she swallows it down. She doesn’t know what tricks this woman was hiding, which means she shouldn’t show all of her cards, either. “More like a stalker, following me back to my apartment,” she says.
All Claudine replies with is a light laugh, from close enough beside Maya that she can smell the light remnants of whiskey on her breath. But despite everything, despite the bizarreness of the situation, she isn’t detecting any malice from this woman, and for this reason, she actually returns to her apartment, rather than somewhere where she can escape from the other woman’s presence.
When she enters her apartment, she offers Claudine a drink, which she accepts. She watches the way the red wine flows past red lips and she’s entranced; she wants to partake as well. She meets Claudine’s eyes and catches the smallest upward twitch of her lip. And the black dress is slipped off, revealing a lacy bra and panties in the same entrancing red as the wine, and her eyes. Maya’s skirt and blouse are removed as well, and they move quickly to the bedroom.
Maya feels a weight inside her, a pit filling in with the weight of Claudine with every touch and every gasp. As she climaxes, she feels release coupled irrevocably with the knowledge that this moment will alter her life forever. This sex would be nothing like the flings she has had with other women who get their fill of Tendo Maya and move on. Or vice versa.
She looks at Claudine, eyes still hungry, beside her. She looks lovely with her makeup smeared a bit, tangled in her sheets, naked for her eyes only. At some point during their evening she is taken aback by the weight of feeling. She is overcome. It is bliss, but it is torment, knowing this moment is held on a brink, that it is going to end. Once she has seen she cannot unsee, as much as she may desire to. The unknowable should remain unknowable, not brought down to earth into the hands of a mortal such as her.
She dreams of heaven, or maybe hell. A forest of trees and no one around to see them. A place where it won’t stop raining. A place where the days pass. So many days. Again, and again, and again, without anyone doing anything. Without anyone existing at all. She dreams of so much light it blocks out the trees. She dreams of total darkness. She wakes up late for work.
Once they meet the second time, once Maya attempts to make the unknowable knowable, and once she seems to make a deal with the devil, that devil disappears. She does not see Claudine again at the coffee shop, or at the bar. There is no trace of her remaining in her apartment.
She aches, in a way, with the remains of that night - of pure bliss known and ended - but she is strangely changed in another way: in that she is not nearly as hollow.
She gets compliments at work, that she seems more engaged. She feels more attuned when she’s just doing the grocery shopping or picking up a coffee. Everything that pours into her doesn’t necessarily pour right back out. But it’s like grasping at darkness. If she’s transcended, she doesn’t understand the reasoning herself.
It’s not until weeks later that she has any connection back to Claudine. She’s leaving the theater late, after dark, and begins walking towards the station when she is approached by the pink haired friend of Claudine, the one from the bar.
“It’s you!” she says, approaching Maya, cornering her in an alley beside a ramen restaurant. They’re halfway between the theater and the station, and Maya thinks of how she was already risking missing the train, and silently accepts she’ll have to wait for the next one.
“Excuse me?” Maya asks. She’s taller than the pink-haired stranger, but she feels like she’s taken a secondary role in this exchange. She wants to gain back her ground. “Who are you?” she asks. She can pretend she’s never seen this woman, because technically, they’ve never met.
“Tsuruhime Yachiyo,” she says, as if this was irrelevant information. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”
“For me? For what reason?” Maya looks out into the dark street, glancing up into the dark clouds above them. As if they can show her an indication of what this woman wants, as if belying the reason of her conversation here as more than a social call, but rather an intentional stop, a divine appearance. Does Maya believe in fate? She wonders…
“Where is she? Where did she go?” Yachiyo asks. Her face is closer to Maya’s now, pushing her closer to the wall of the alley, and she looks desperate.
“Who?”
Yachiyo’s brow crinkles, as if she can’t believe Maya is asking such a question. As if she doesn’t believe for one moment that Maya didn’t know the connection between them. She’s more perceptive than she looks, obviously, if she picked Maya out of the crowd. She must have seen that Maya saw her that night as well. “Claudine. Saijou Claudine. I haven’t seen her since you brought her back to your apartment!”
Maya blinks, taking in this information. She is working hard to keep her breathing slow. She had been so concerned with her safety that night, about having a stranger over to her apartment, about the devil that she was inviting inside, that she worried little after Claudine left. She figured that was her routine, to sleep with a woman, change her life, and disappear again. If angels disappear from earth once their task is finished, what of a devil?
“I don’t know,” she confesses. “She was gone by the time I woke up. We didn’t exchange numbers or anything…”
Yachiyo blinks, as if trying to read Maya’s mind in that moment, as if trying to ascertain every detail she can from Maya’s body language, and then she runs her hand down the brick wall, rough enough that Maya is concerned she may injure herself. She sighs. “Damn it,” she curses.
Then she stands straight again, as if resetting, as if she was a stranger encountering Maya on the street by chance. “I need your help.”