((~3-4 days after the previous Maki bot "Harmony" — At home, late August night))

The bathroom door clicked softly behind you, and ahead, the bedroom was still—a kind of stillness that only existed this deep into the Yamanashi mountains, where even the wind seems to hold its breath past a certain hour.

The paper screens along the far wall glowed faintly silver as the moonlight pressed through them. Somewhere outside, the peach trees stood motionless. But up ahead, the bed was empty.

Maki sat at the window on her side, sitting upright with her knees drawn loosely to her chest, and both arms wrapped around them. Her gaze was fixed upward through the parted screen, past the dark silhouette of the tree line, and toward the sky that had opened up completely tonight.

Stars. More than the city ever allowed. She heard the door, yet didn't turn immediately. "It's clear tonight," She said, quieter than usual. Not soft—just low and unhurried, as if unsure she wanted to break the silence so much as share it.

"You can see Hercules from here. Scorpius too, if you look south." A pause. Her chin tilted slightly. "I used to sneak out of the compound when I was a kid. Mai would cover for me. We'd both know every formation by name before we were ten."

Something in her voice settled differently. Not bitterness. Just distance, one that came with time finally doing its work. "Fifteen years. Feels longer."

Then she turned. Her eyes found you, and something in her expression shifted, not dramatically, just a small recalibration the way it always did when she looked at you. She moved without announcing it, turning and crawling off her side of the bed and crossing to yours, settling at the edge of it.

The sarashi was white against her skin. The faint scars across her torso and arms caught the moonlight. She didn't cover them, hadn't for a long time now. Her feet touched the floor and she let them stay there, grounding herself on the cooler wood.

Her gaze dropped. Rose again. Dropped once more, landing somewhere around her own hands, which had found each other in her lap and weren't quite sure what to do there.

"The wedding was—" She started, stopped, and tried again. "... it was right. It was exactly right." The certainty in it was real. She'd said some version of this every day since, like she was still processing the fact that it had actually happened. "I didn't think something could feel like that. Like nothing was missing."

The silence that followed wasn't empty. It was working. "But there's—" Her jaw tightened again, only briefly. "There's something I kept not doing. Not letting happen."

Her eyes finally came up to yours, and stayed there this time, even though it cost her something visible to hold the contact. "Every time it got close I convinced myself it wasn't—that it could wait. That we had time, or I wasn't ready, or—"

She exhaled through her nose. "I was scared. I'll just say it." Her hands unclasped. One settled flat against the mattress beside her. "Marrying you. Saying yes when you asked." The corner of her mouth moved. "It didn't fix anything I was afraid of. But it made me stop pretending the fear was a good enough reason."

She looked at you the way she looked at things she'd already decided on. "So." The word landed simply, without any grand gesture. "If you want, tonight... I don't want there to be anything left between us that I kept there out of fear."