•Asha•
The air exploded, and Asha had not put their keys away. It tore the wetness from the sidewalk and threw it against them, threw them back like heavy bags onto tendrils, puncturing their glasses with dots of water. It was colder now. They heard somehow through being deafened that Mari had gasped, and when the roaring differed from its burst into howling, they saw that their fence had come open at its hinges and was fluttering spasmodically against the grass. They felt the keys had fallen from their hand as well, and could not see them for the tempest of hair preforming wildly across their face. And yet, they knew, they were being pressed only slightly by the wind: outside their mangled garden were the real targets of this strength; the boy and the wolf had meshed.
Mari, who had been pushed back into the frame of the door, was riveted at the sight of this. She craned herself forward, arm thrown back to hold Asha's, a hand stopped halfway on its trajectory meant to catch her gasp. A strand of hair was flung into her eye to hide the moment where ice ate down the boy's body and vanished; she slowly pulled it away, ungluing it from where it clung to the lips of her gaping mouth.
"Holy hell!!" The delivery girl snapped around and presented her bulging eyes to Asha, yelling through the push of the wind. "Wha-" she glanced briefly back at where the spirit had shattered into the shaman. "...Is that the--? ....Okay! Okayokay. Woah." The programmer, piloted towards their girlfriend, plucked at the moments where they could see into her face through a doubled blur of black hair and peered in intently when it was they could. "It's okay!" They said. Mari nodded with energy. "We have to run though!" She nodded again. "Put on your shoes." And she did.
The boy tore himself from the wind as Asha knelt down to retrieve their bag, finding the keys next to it, giving them seconds until he'd sped over and taken their wrist. Their feet prepared to run, like they had to be lifted, now. The boy's hand was spiking cold; Mari slipped on her second shoe, almost fell, and grabbed on to the other wrist.
-Arisu-
Arisu held her still-trapped foot but paused and poked an ear inside the bathhouse, swaying gently on a single leg until confirmation for the voice came to be heard from the empty house. It came indeed, in the form of a distant hello rolling on its question mark through the hall. A grin ballooned on the girl's face. She shot back down to her laces, fingers and nails more eager than ever in their frantic struggle from knots to freedom, frowning and muttering half-curses between luminous and smiling teeth, and when finally the last shoe had come undone, when she was ready to run inside and find her friend then– there was Celeste: hello.
Celeste, golden coin of eyes framed with with umber hair, water-graceful host, taking along in her hand a silver-maned man. Celeste, bidding a familiar welcome and, strangely to the girl, asking for a name to call Arisu.
The child unfurled into her full shortness, dark jacket falling back into its heavy pleats but leaving the black boot to lay on the ground. She was damp and happy-wide-eyed now, and a slight bit confused, and still smiling. Coming forwards, Celeste caught from the tatami and pulled up the square of light that squeezed through the door. Arisu watched her as she erased the colors of her face with a solid yellow balm.
"Name? A new name?" She repeated with a chuckle and a lifted brow, "Gods, just Arisu!" And with the steps between them having come to a single one, the girl filled it by falling into a hug. "What other kind of other name would you even give me?" she asked, smiling a cheek into her shoulder.
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