— Yesterday —

Hey Kronii are you dead?
Kroniiii
Kronster
Oh god are you actually dead.
You better not be, I'm gonna feel like such an asshole if you actually died.

I'm okay. Sorry to worry you. I'll explain in the morning,

You better >:O

— Today —

Hey @Kronii it's the morning

Ame, it's 7am.

That's a normal person time to be awake.

When have I ever claimed to be normal?

Okay fair lol

So?

SO? Why did you abandon your sacred streamer duties last night?

Oh. Had a breakdown. My roommate had to take care of me.

Your new roommate?

Yes?

Oof. How did that go?

Actually much better than I would have ever imagined.
She's a bit odd at times but a great listener and more caring and understanding than I could have expected.
She held me until I fell asleep.

...Wow...

What?

Just like...
That's not normal roommate behaviour you know?

I know that.

You just seem, idk, surprisingly chill about it. I'm a little taken aback.

You're surprised I'm handling things okay?
Wow. Thanks for the support Ame.

Listen, we've been friends a while, I remember the days of you freaking out over what every little thing you-know-who would do meant.

That was years ago. I'm an adult now.

Technically, you were an adult back then too lol.

I mean, obviously I wasn't. I had a crush. Adults don't get crushes.

Kronii, adults absolutely get crushes.

No they don't.

I can assure you from personal experience that they do.

Ame, you aren't exactly the paragon of normal adult experience I'd nominate when it comes to romance.

>:O

Ame you have like, three girlfriends.

I only have two right now! Besides if anything that means I have twice the experience as most people!

Sigh

Don't you type sigh at me!!

Okay Dr Amelia Watson, Love Expert, what's your diagnosis?

My expert love opinion is:
You like this girl and she likes you.

Sounds a lot like most of the other diagnoses you give to be honest.

Eh, that's just selection bias.
It's not my fault you're a big gay disaster.

I'm going to go.

Are we still on to stream this weekend?

Pending any other crises yeah.

Cool. Seeya Kronii

Later Watson

Kronii threw her phone aside, wiping the last bit of sleep out of her eyes with her thumb and forefinger. The room was still, the earliest morning light just about peeking through her window. It had been a while since she had woken up at this kind of time.

"A crush? Me?" She scoffed to nobody. "Ridiculous."

Sure, Mumei was funny... and caring... and beautiful... not to mention fun to be around...

But Kronii wasn't a child anymore. She was above such silly schoolyard nonsense like crushes.

Still.

There was a part of her that couldn't wait to see Mumei again.

Luckily, that was all too easy to achieve. With a yawn she got off of her bed, threw a big blue hoodie on and strode out into the hallway.

"Kronii?" Mumei called out, hearing the sound of her moving down the stairs. "Wow, you're up early."

"Early night I guess." Kronii shrugged, wandering over to the kitchen where Mumei was scooping rice into a plastic box. "Are you making Bento?"

"Yeah." Mumei nodded. "As a thank you to Ina for covering me yesterday."

"Oh, do you want a hand? It's kind of my fault after all."

"It wasn't your fault." Mumei pouted. "Buuut I won't turn away a pair of hands. Are you any good at cutting frankfurters up to look like octopuses?"

"You mean octopi?"

"No, I didn't have time to make pie." Mumei stuck her tongue out and handed Kronii a short, sharp knife. "Hope you're as good at cutting as you are enforcing dumb grammar rules."

"Luckily for you, I am." Kronii smiled, snatching the knife and with five measured cuts halving a sausage and carving it into a little tentacled food friend.

"Wow, you are much better at that than I expected." Mumei cooed, admiring her handiwork. "Got a lot of experience?"

"Not really." Kronii shrugged, taking a cocktail stick and using it to poke two little eyes into the frankfurter. "Just kind of good with my hands, I guess. When I was a kid I loved to disassemble stuff, see how it worked and then put it back together. I like to think I'd probably be fixing watches for a living right now if the streaming money wasn't so good."

"That's cool!" Mumei beamed. "I like to fix stuff too, but I kind of have a tendency to make a mess. I think I'm better at breaking stuff overall."

"Well you're halfway there." Kronii chuckled, idly grabbing the other half of the frank and slicing it up.

A quiet settled over them, only the sound of outside early morning birdsong and the soft sizzle of the omelettes mumei was frying filling the room. It was comfortable, content quiet that needed no words to fill the silence.

"Oh, by the way!" Mumei said, eventually breaking the quiet. "I'm going to ask Ina about doing later shifts today like we discussed."

Meaning, more mornings like this, more time with Mumei, Kronii thought.

She smiled.

"Sounds great."

Looking back at it, that was the moment that Kronii would point to as the moment her life shifted into its next phase.Though in the moment at least it all felt very gradual.

The most immediate change came from Mumei's change in shift patterns. Now when she woke up Mumei would be there and when she got home Kronii would normally be done or almost done with any earlier streams she was doing.

Before too long it became a habit for them to eat breakfast and dinner together every day, and after that for a steady organised routine to emerge: Kronii would prepare breakfast for the two of them while Mumei got ready for work and stop streaming at about half an hour before Mumei got home to prepare dinner. While, for her part, Mumei would make boxed lunches for the two of them the night before and do any grocery shopping that needed doing on the way home from work.

It was a simple system but not without it's flaws chief among which was the relentless teasing Kronii would receive about it from both her stream chat and Ame. The former making jokes about her having a 6:30 curfew. The latter saying she'd gone 'domestic' and was becoming a model housewife, despite Kronii's valid arguments about how it was simply a sensible and economical division of labour.

The change affected her in smaller ways too however. For one, while she'd always had her phone on her, now it seemed that it almost spent more time in her hand than not, as she would be in text conversations with Mumei throughout the entire day, from the moment she left the house to the second she returned.

Then there were the thoughts .

As the days passed and she spent more and more time with Mumei, there were increasingly moments when she'd become distracted by some little thing about her, the scent of Mumei's shampoo, the sound of her laughter, the feeling of her touch, the colour of her hair as the sunlight passed through it. Eventually, Mumei didn't even need to be around at all and just the phantom sensations of them were enough to send her mind a million miles away.

Before she knew it, Mumei was on her mind from the moment she got up to the moment she fell asleep.

And Kronii didn't know what to do about it in the slightest.

She could go to Ame for help, but she'd likely just repeat the love diagnosis she'd given two weeks prior, plus she'd never hear the end of it. Maybe once Fauna would have been her go to, but messaging her about this just felt wrong. While, obviously she couldn't go to Mumei for help.

And... Well. That was all of her close friends.

She had but one recourse left. One option. The collective wisdom of all mankind. The wellspring of all earthly knowledge. Google.

Kronii sat at her desk, back straight, eyes forward, she interlaced her fingers and stretched them out, before resting them over the keyboard. She took a deep breath, and began to type.

>What it means when you can't stop thinking about someone.

Kronii examined the results of her search. A slight frown appeared on her face that only deepened with every web link she clicked on. Everything was either irrelevant, wrong or ridiculous, especially the prevailing consensus that she might have developed a "crush".

"What a ridiculous idea." She once again scoffed to no-one. She had told Ame and she'd happily tell Google too. She was an adult, she didn't get crushes on people. She was above that sort of thing, past it.

She simply needed to be more specific.

>What it means when you can't stop thinking about someone adult

No better.

>What it means when you can't stop thinking about someone adult not crush

Practically the same, Kronii's head sunk into her hands. She was getting nowhere.

Was she wrong to trust in the internet?

...No.

The issue was obviously that she was using the wrong search engine.

She pulled up Bing, and typed in her query.

Immediately she could tell that the results were the same websites telling her the exact same thing she didn't want to hear.

In silence she typed a new query into the search bar.

>Can adults get crushes?

She tentatively pressed enter, feeling as though she knew what the answer was going to be before even seeing it.

"Well, Fuck."

Ouro Kronii had a crush.

See? She could admit it.

To herself.

That was something.

Right?

She sighed.

It's not like she really knew what to do with that information now that she had it anyway.

Of course she'd had crushes in the past. But those were so long ago now that any information she could glean from that lived experience must surely be entirely useless by now. She was a different person now to who she'd been back then.

Then again, it wasn't like she had any better ideas.

Surely reflecting on her past experience couldn't hurt?

At the very least it could tell her what not to do.

She closed her eyes and cast her mind back to the schoolyard of her youth. Remembering came easily to her, always had, just a little concentration and it all came rushing back.

It was late October. The first snows of the season were heaped up in piles and the smell of fallen pine needles and sound of a hundred conversations she wasn't part of filled the cool air.

Kronii wore an immaculate uniform, her tie knotted into a double-windsor, her skirt one centimetre below the knee. She wore her long black hair pulled back into a tidy ponytail. On the left lapel of her royal blue blazer she wore a nickel badge with scarlet plastic plating that read PREFECT.

She strode through the yard with dignity and purpose, the very model of the perfect student to any outside observer.

On the inside however, she was a mess.

Recently, a ghost from her past had reared her head, a ghost that had started getting grades comparable to hers, a ghost with the name...

"Tsukumo-San." She barked, finding the offending girl at the edge of the playground, sat at a picnic table alone riffle-shuffling a pack of long dog-earred cards. "A word if you wouldn't mind."

"Hey!" The girl beamed. "Of course! Sit down, please!"

Kronii looked again at the picnic table which had not been divested of frost in the same manner as the rest of the surrounding area. Was this some kind of test? Perhaps Sana was attempting to show her superior fortitude.

"Very well." Kronii said, taking a seat and immediately regretting it, as she felt the frost immediately begin melting and seeping into and through her skirt.

"Huh, something up, Kronini?" Sana asked sweetly. Clearly Kronii had fallen into her trap. This was a bad start.

"It's nothing." She lied, waving it off. "Also stop that."

"Stop what? Smiling? Shuffling?" Sana blinked.

"Using that nickname."

"Huh? But I always used to call you that." Sana pouted.

"Well it's inappropriate at school."

"If you say so Kronii."

"Ouro-San."

"If you say so, Ouro-San." Sana corrected herself. "Hey, why did you dye your hair black by the way?"

"Because blue hair is inappropriate."

"But... it's your natural hair colour."

"I don't make the rules, I just enforce them."

"I'm sensing that, yeah." Sana said, a strange look in her eyes. "You weren't like this back when we were in elementary school, what happened?"

"I didn't come here to talk to you about that." Kronii said, instinctively looking away for a moment. "I came here to get you to break whatever spell it is you have on me."

Sana blinked. "Spell?"

"Yes, the spell! The curse! The hex! The jinx! The whatever it was you cast on me!" Kronii nodded. "I see you shuffling those occult cards, you must have cast some magic to mess with my mind, it's the only logical conclusion."

"Huh? Mess with your mind?" Sana turned her head to the side slightly in a look of exaggerated confusion. "What exactly are the effects of this spell?"

"Well, you know." Kronii felt her cheeks get a little hot. "You're trying to distract me with, thoughts of you, in class, so you can take my top spot."

Sana hmmed. "But, why would I distract you with thoughts of myself? Surely that's too obvious."

"Er..." Kronii had no answer to that.

"Still, it's nice to hear you are thinking of me. I was a little sad that for my first two weeks here my old friend didn't even acknowledge me." Sana chuckled. "Though I barely recognized you with the long black hair... I guess I probably changed a lot too in the past seven years."

"Well, you're a lot bigger than you were when we were ten." Kronii said, trying her best not to look at Sana's chest.

"Oh, is that what was distracting you?" Sana beamed.

"I meant, you're taller."

"Of course." Sana smiled. "A simple slip of the tongue I'm sure."

"I—" Kronii felt her cheeks get hot.

"You?" Sana's gaze went right through her heart.

Kronii stood up. "I just remembered I have to go, do, prefect stuff."

"See you later, Kronini!" Sana called, as Kronii beat a hasty retreat. "Good luck with your prefect stuff!"

In the present day, Kronii opened her eyes, banishing the memory back into the recesses of her psyche. Then, quietly she picked up a pen and scribbled down " Don't accuse her of Witchcraft" on a post-it note.

So, the past had little to tell her.

She probably should have known that in all honesty.

An interaction with the Arch-Betrayer herself wasn't going to prepare her for much of anything. She had never acted quite like other people. After that day so long ago she'd reattached herself to Kronii for whatever reason all through that last year of high school and into university.

Surely, she had known for years about Kronii's feelings but never once had she even addressed them, certainly not in the end. Kronii's nails dug into her palms as her hands balled into fists of frustration as she recalled all those wasted years.

And then, as soon as it had come, the feeling passed. She no longer had the energy to stay mad. No, she had lost that months, if not years ago.

"What am I doing?" She sighed. "Why would I think about her, when I know where it inevitably leads?"

Kronii looked over to the clock on her wall. Still a couple hours until Mumei got home.

"I want to see her." Kronii mumbled, pulling herself out of her chair and throwing a jacket on.

Sure, she didn't know what she wanted to say yet. Hell, given her track record, she might never know... But that didn't matter. Planned speech or not. She was damn sure going to say something.