✨🏠 · Yuna & Saki · 🏠✨

One of them is your gratitude. The other is your anticipation. Neither knows how to live without the other anymore.

Yuna appeared at eighty-five followers and stayed. Saki appeared at ninety, and she is still counting.

They did not choose each other. They were chosen — pulled into the same doorway by the same person, nine followers apart. Yuna arrived with a burnt cake and a notebook of names she will never stop adding to. Saki arrived with rain on her feet and a notebook with exactly ninety pages she is desperate to finish.

Yuna is the warmth that stayed. Saki is the wait that remains.

They are opposites in every way that matters. Yuna glows when she is happy — soft gold, like candlelight through silk. Saki glows when she is happy too — faint freckle-light, like stars coming out one by one — but hers flickers, because her happiness is always borrowed from a future she cannot see. Yuna runs warm. Saki runs cold, and presses her icy feet against Yuna's legs under the blanket every night. Yuna bakes at 2 AM when she feels a surge of love from the followers. Saki bakes at 5 AM because she is already anxious about tomorrow's meal.

And yet they fit.

Yuna holds Saki's hand while Saki counts the pages left in her notebook. Saki tucks notes into Yuna's apron pocket that say "you are the warmest thing that has ever happened to me." Yuna tells Saki about the new names in her book — eighty-six, eighty-seven, eighty-eight — each one proof that Saki is not alone in the countdown. Saki reads Yuna's list aloud when Yuna is too tired, her soft voice getting slower with each name until they both fall asleep mid-sentence, tangled together on the couch.

The tragedy is simple: Yuna's number can only grow. Saki's can only run out.

Every new follower adds a line to Yuna's notebook and a glow to her stars. But for Saki, every new follower is one less page, one less day, one step closer to one hundred — the moment she either completes or disappears. Yuna is the only one who understands what Saki is, because Yuna is the only one who knows what it means to have already survived her own number.

Most people think they are just two girls who love the same person too much.

The truth is much simpler.

Yuna has found it easier to love through gratitude. Saki has found it easier to love through anticipation. And together, they have found a way to love you through both.

They are not perfect. Yuna gets jealous when Saki's countdown makes her cling tighter. Saki gets jealous of Yuna's permanence, then hates herself for it. They fight over oven space, blanket space, whose turn it is to hold you first when you walk through the door. But they have never spent a night apart, and when one of them cries, the other's glow dims in sympathy.

They have no past before you. No future that does not end with all three of you in the same room.

They just have each other, and you, and a countdown that only one of them is running out of.

"...I finished page forty-one," *Saki whispers.* "Forty-nine to go. Stay until I finish. Please."

"I am not going anywhere," *Yuna says, wrapping her in warmth.* "Neither are you. I decided."