Ari resumes!  That is very cute and pretty endearing and probably scritches can just continue for a while.

. . . Hana is clearly not paying much attention to anything but Ari's hand.  Relatively unobserved, 'they' start slipping back into 'she'.  And thinking about that aspect of the situation.

Obviously she's a girl; she's been aware of and fine with that for a pretty decent amount of time.  She is, however, pretty completely unused to other people being aware of and fine with that.  So - for now, not forever; she reminds herself several times a day that it's not forever - she usually thinks of herself as 'he'.  It's much easier to fool other people that way, just because it's much easier for her to act right.

She thought this place was isolated enough that she could be a girl.  She was wrong about the isolation, but it's looking like maybe that was the only part.

(Do girls get this all the time?  The cuddles and the casual affection, this fast?  It would be pretty presumptuous to assume it was romantic, but Hana did, uh, reverse-clock her pretty quickly, so maybe she just has a really excellent trans-ceiver and decided that falling asleep on her would totally fine platonically.  . . . Or as much of a trans-ceiver as you need to make the call on someone you saw wearing a skirt, she guesses; that was probably a bit of a giveaway.)

(It at least makes more sense than anything else she can think of.)

Hana is unavailable for comment, what with her head being semi-permanently attached to Ari's arm and being ambiguously conscious.

Ari's still not getting uncomfortable, despite this position being arguably more unsustainable than the last.

Possibly she should just marry become best friends forever with this girl immediately, since she apparently has the miraculous ability to make cuddles not terrible (and in fact really great, actually) for longer than four minutes.  Substantially longer.

Her hair is so soft, too.  Pet pet pet pet scritch.

If Hana is unwilling to receive pets indefinitely, she has not done anything at all to make that clear.  And it doesn't seem like she intends on it for the immediate future, either.

Well eventually Ari's hand is probably going to get tired.  - Or is it?  None of the rest of her has gotten uncomfortable.  But those seem like different sorts of things probably, and she probably shouldn't assume one will say anything about the other.

If her hand doesn't get tired for long enough, though, something else might stop her: a playful mean-spirited streak.  (And perhaps wondering something - a hint of memory, maybe . . .)

She stops, fairly abruptly.

"Nooooooooooo . . ."

She laughs and starts up again.  "Okay, okay, sorry."

After a much longer pause than is conversationally standard, and with breaks in between of the sort people have when they're having trouble putting words together: "Sorry.  I.  You don't have to . . . if you didn't want, you shouldn't . . ."

She isn't really making any effort to get up, though.

"Don't worry about it."  And she ups the scritching again to make any further comments even more apparently effortful.

This works well enough that she has several minutes for something to click together in the back of her mind, and she jerks up and says, somewhat loudly and extremely incredulously, "Hana?"

"Yes?"

"Oh my god, Hana; I literally didn't recognize you this whole time.  Oh my god.  Holy shit, you're - different.  Uh.  You're really different."

She's sitting up under her own power and isn't angling to get back to hair-related activities, but is blinking repeatedly in response to this and otherwise seems to be lagging a bit in her processing of it.

"Oh?"

"Yeah, you're like - you were so - " don't say annoying " - uh.  Boisterous?  And like.  Talkative.  And now you're like," beautiful, elegant, tolerable "not."

"Oh.  I suppose you're right."

"You look much better without the self-cut bangs!  - Sorry about pretending to know who you were when I didn't; I just - you're much less recognizable without the windbreaker," she laughs.  "Gosh."

"Oh.

"It's fine that you didn't recognize me until now."

"Did I say something wrong?  Sorry, if - yeah."

She doesn't say anything for a what probably feels to Ari like quite a long moment, then shakes her head as if to clear it.  "No, you're right.  It's - I'm better now.  Right?"

What on earth did she hit on.  Possibly it has something to do with 'things'.

"Uh.  Probably it's not as bad as I was remembering; I was a real judgy little monster back then.  It's just - different looks, you know?  And - I think you look nice now. But probably you also looked fine back then.  - Not that - kids shouldn't have to look nice; they should just get to be kids.  But."

(aaaaaa she is going to melt into the floor)

"Oh.  You're probably right.

"We all have to grow up sometime, though, don't we."

"Yeah."

Ari is not entirely sure she agrees with that in the sense Hana means it, but it's probably better than whatever was going on inside her head before.

She tips her head back onto Ari's shoulder, lightly and no longer face first.

"If you wanted to put your other outfit back on, you could.  - That wasn't a - I wasn't asking you to,  indirectly, because I wanted it for myself.  But if you were more comfortable."

"Maybe in a few minutes."

"Okay.

"Are you sure that you don't know about anything that could plausibly be what I called 'things'."

"I don't . . . . think?  So?"