Ayako graduates.
There are details; there are compacts and negotiations, alliances and allies; there are plans and the carrying out of plans. But she leads Kyoto, with one of the juniors acting as second in command, throughout her senior year, and she tutors her underclassmen in politics and poetry-writing and makes sure that the younger alchemists learn how to make Adderall, and when graduation rolls around she leaves the enclave in Asami's capable hands and she hugs her sophomores and freshmen and she graduates with a team by her side-- gets all but one of them out-- and when she gets through the gates and falls back home she collapses not into her parents' arms but into Hitomi's.
They have healers waiting. Despite how extensive her burns are, it's barely a week of recuperation before it looks like she'd never been injured. Rin and Hitomi hover, a little bit; it feels strange to have people hovering, after spending a year the head of Kyoto, but not unwelcome.
Haruto died, Rin tells her gently, when she's okay enough to be walking around again and asks to see him. That year's freshmen hadn't come in with the news, it hadn't been in the graduation hall, he'd bled out on the Kyoto floor before the healing could kick in, and then the next year it hadn't parsed as news anymore and they'd forgotten it needed to be sent. Rin apologizes and Ayako tells her it's okay, it isn't anyone's fault, and means it, but. It's been a long time since Ayako grieved and she's not sure she remembers how, if she ever knew.
She learns how to use a computer. She'd never touched one before the scholomance-- some enclaves do that on purpose, to make sure their kids aren't stranded without a phone when they get in; in Kyoto they just hadn't had time-- and the keyboard layout is nonsensical but she figures it out, at this point she's spell-competent in seven languages with four different alphabets and she can apply herself to a nonsensical letter layout. She emails Sebastian's parents to tell them that their son is dead, not for lack of skill or lack of allies but just for lack of luck, and that he'll be grieved by those who stood with him, even though she's not totally sure she knows how to shape herself so that it's true.
And then.... nothing happens.
Usually there'd be an endless stream of classes and homework and projects and negotiations and graduation planning and tutoring her underclassmen and politics and trying to keep yourself sane and human and not burn out. And instead, nothing happens. Her graduation allies' contracts with Kyoto to be sponsored into other enclaves are being handled by the adults whose job it is to handle that. Her underclassmen are still in the Scholomance.
She tries auditing a university class, just to have something to do, but it feels like being surrounded by aliens, all of these people who think using a cell phone comes as naturally as breathing and are surprised when it doesn't to her and who don't bother to scan rooms before they sit down. The classwork moves at what feels like a snail's pace, after Scholomance classes where she was writing a paper almost every day, which might in a different world be nice but in this one means she's not even getting the thing she was after. Twice she has to lie about having been raised in a cult to cover up the fact that she barely knows what the internet is. Someone asks her if she knows how intimidating she is and-- she supposes she is intimidating, when she thinks about it. Her underclassmen hadn't thought so but maybe her peers had? Or maybe that's the strangeness, that nobody out here carries themself like a soldier.
So she stops taking that class. She'd met people from it, had offered to meet up with a few of them in coffee shops to study, but they don't keep in touch. Instead she wanders around Kyoto, sees all the things she'd been too busy to see when she was younger, reminds herself firmly and constantly that the crowds are protective, except then someone tries to grope her on a train and before she can stop to think about it he's on the floor and she's not even out of breath and everyone is staring at her, like she's the alien, like she's the one who doesn't make any sense. Someone makes noises about the police but she's out the door at the next stop and running.
Ayako stays in the enclave after that, mostly. It doesn't help with feeling like she's supposed to be doing something but at least she isn't trying to live in a world where she's supposed to have spent her teenage years doing-- whatever it is teenage girls do when they aren't in the scholomance.
Until--
