Agrippa
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All Right! Fine! I Will Take You! – Chapter 104 [3.7k Words]
🕑 Added 2024-01-15 13:40:17 +0000 UTCThere are, at times, joyful occasions that need to be properly celebrated. Once-in-a-century star-alignments the likes of which can stand shoulder to shoulder with a gacha game’s summertime special events.
That’s right: I’m talking about finally finding a subject I haven’t already ranted about!
Because, through the myriad tropes that could be used in shounen, eroge, JRPGs, light novels, and other things not suited for sensitive palates—I mean, audiences—it’s somewhat disheartening to realize that not many are actually used. As outrageous as otakudom may seem to newcomers, veterans are always quick to find the comfortable scent of familiar tropes having gone long stale, no matter how innovative a particular series may seem.
You’ve got a convoluted non-eroge about time travel using the subculture of imageboards and a real-life conspiracy-slash-urban legend as your setting, masterfully employing the very essence of Akihabara as the backdrop for a tale spanning enough permutations and timelines to fully justify the visual novel format and its branching narrative? Good job, but you still have a red-haired tsundere right in the middle of it. You aim for a gritty series about the very fight for survival against an implacable enemy, thrusting man against colossal embodiments of the rage of nature? Nice, don’t get me wrong, but you still have shounen power-ups dropping at the merest convenience. You deconstruct the romantic comedy genre with a plot centered around the difficulty of communication and reaching across to others? Well done, but Komi-chan Can’t Avoid the Fanservice Bath Scene.
So, yes, after enough time dwelling in the intricacies or lack thereof to be found in the many, many permutations of the shounen genre, it may be slightly harder than it should be to find something new for our distinguished students to sink their teeth into, about as hard as it is for the typical otaku to find a woman who will allow them to sink anything into them. It is thus cause for joy and celebration that I, erudite researcher that I am, have discovered something hitherto unknown to the masses:
The time off!
Now, this elusive trope is a justifiable blind spot for both the creator and the audience. It is well-known that the anime industry’s approach to rest and recreation is more often than not akin to that of the average Japanese salaryman toward sane schedules. If to work is to lose, then to work as an animator is to be the kind of masochist who enjoys permadeath in games that rely on RNG.
So. Time off.
It will occasionally be portrayed in high school-themed manga, that setting heralded by too many as depicting the best, freest time of their lives, not realizing just how depressing that sounds to anyone still going through high school. It will showcase the cast interacting outside of their usual element, maybe doing something heartwarming, such as having a bossy girl forcing a poor, beleaguered gentleman with an exquisite propensity for sarcastic inner monologues to pedal uphill while carrying her loud, apocalypse-bearing ass on the backseat.
What’s that, you say? Is this a hint as to why I’ve constantly trained myself by riding a bike to school every morning?
…
Moving along!
As I was saying, it’s an elusive enough occasion that it barely counts as a trope. There are no standard occurrences for proper time off, as our Japanese roots usually make that revolve around an outing to a festival that will become incredibly stressful as soon as the crowd takes the love interest away like there’s an incoming NTR plot, or the break will feature a trip to a beach where we all know that NTR tanned jerks abound, or, more often than not, the break will turn into yet another club activity that, while technically not a job, will resemble it enough to count as the MC NTRing his free time with Job-kun.
Which, in and of itself, may as well be the actual trope: there’s no such thing as time off, just new settings for the MC to be stressed in as he tries to avoid unwanted tags.
Such as the Job-kun tag.
This, of course, means that suddenly encountering such an unexpected phenomenon should be enough to send the savviest of characters into high alert.
“Stop staring at the wall and keep that hair dryer aimed,” Komachi grumbles.
“Don’t wanna,” I say. In high alert.
“I swear, now, of all times, I’m not in the mood to deal with your laziness,” a remarkably tsun little sister character who hasn’t gotten any points today says.
“Look, it’s Sofa-chan,” I try to explain, waving Shizu’s hair dryer more or less over the wettest spot in the cushion currently standing against the shower’s wall and very much not thinking about the last thing I did in this shower, nor the things that were done to me in it. “Sofa-chan’s whole character arc is about being accepted in spite of her many failings, and I feel I’m unfairly robbing her of much-needed character development by forcefully taking away one of her endearing faults.”
“You could smoke. You could drink. You could do drugs. And none of those would be as annoying as your current stress-coping mechanisms.”
“That’s a long string of complicated words. Who are you, and what have you done with my adorably illiterate little sister?”
“I’m not that dumb.”
“I mean, you’re talking to me while I’m in this mood, so signs point to—hnrk!”
“Yes? What do the signs point to, my dearest big brother?” she says, smiling beatifically as she retrieves her Vega-like fingers from my injured side.
“To you having finally grown into your fully-powered self as a tsundere little sister, the most devastating existence in a harem, one that can easily overshadow the childhood friend—”
“Easy enough, seeing as you don’t have any childhood friends.”
“… There may be a case to be made regarding Sofa-chan counting?”
Komachi imperiously crosses her arms, raises a scathing eyebrow, and looks down at my squatting self in a way that, in more cultured media, would immediately precede her asking me to lick her feet clean. Thankfully, our family is traditionally Japanese in the good as well as the bad ways, so I’m assured about her fastidiously hygienic habits.
“You’re thinking something dumb…” she unfairly mumbles, uncrossing her arms to rudely facepalm.
“What? Me? I am the smart sibling, aren’t I? Thus, by the transitive property… uh… is it the transitive property or the commutative? I mean, you could commute terms around, I guess? What does transitive even mean? Something that trances? Is this the prelude to a crappy mind-control plot? I always knew math wasn’t to be trusted. Komachi, promise me that if a math teacher ever holds a smartphone in front of your face—”
The hair dryer abruptly cuts off, and it takes me a moment to realize that’s because somebody I’ll have to thoroughly warn about staring into smartphones just pulled the plug.
Also, she’s kneeling right in front of me.
And staring.
“I know I’m going to regret this, but… let’s talk,” she says in a tone soft enough that we could be lying on her bed with only the streetlights coming in through her window to disturb an easy, shared darkness as night makes us whisper things too hard to say during the day.
“It can’t have been easy. For you,” I say, setting the unplugged dryer on the coarse, dark grey tiles of Shizu’s bathroom.
She shakes her head slowly and takes my hands before shuffling to my side and sitting on the floor, her back resting against the glass partition of the shower, her head dropping on my shoulder when I join her, stretching out my legs from the uncomfortable, prolonged squatting that was, come to think of it, completely unnecessary, seeing as I could’ve been sitting on the floor from the very start.
I just hope that Sofa-chan will appreciate the effort.
“No, it wasn’t. I don’t even know who I was madder at,” she mumbles.
“Haruno can be… Haruno can look cruel.”
“I was including you in the list,” she says, the soft warmth not moving away from my shoulder.
“… I know,” I admit before I squeeze a hand that I have seen grown since she was a tiny, slightly chubby baby prone to grabbing my thumb and not letting go.
And, for a prolonged moment, she doesn’t say anything, as silent as she was whenever she fell asleep on my lap or when she pretended to still be asleep when I carried her upstairs to her room, the slight smile giving her away even if I never called her out on it as I took the offered excuse to hold my sister as close as I always feared nobody else would ever be.
“Mom… Mom and Dad… I don’t even know, Komachi. I should be out there, mediating that brewing mess, but…”
Thin, smooth fingers squeeze mine, making me realize the still thin callouses that have been building up since I took it upon myself to use a stupid pair of dumbbells that came with a ridiculous suitcase.
“You aren’t responsible for everything,” she whispers.
I almost laugh.
“Our parents are fighting against two of my girlfriends, and I’m here, with my little sister, taking Shizu’s excuse to get her sofa ready for the talk to come. I’m at least responsible for that much.”
“You’re also responsible for making me worry sick,” she mumbles.
“Yeah. For that as well,” I say.
And I let go of her hands to hug her. To hold her tightly enough that my arms tense against themselves, trembling strength held at bay so I won’t unwittingly hurt the one person I swore I would never bring harm to.
The one person that Hachiman Hikigaya will never use his worst side against.
Even if others came after.
“Brother… The things you’ve been hinting at… About Grandpa…”
I kiss the crown of her head and swallow the thorny thing lodged in my throat.
“It’s speculation,” I say.
“You and Haruno agree. Mom and Dad don’t… they aren’t saying it isn’t true.”
I close my eyes and curse the other oath I once made.
That I would never lie to her. Not about the important things.
In hindsight, it was always a foolish hope to keep both at once.
“I don’t know the specifics,” I say. “Can’t know,” I correct myself. “It’s… the kind of hurt that Mom has… it’s something that only somebody you’re supposed to love can give you. And I know she and Dad got married young enough that…”
I drift off.
Komachi doesn’t say anything.
I sigh.
“Mom has never let us alone with Grandpa,” I tell her.
She nods.
“And… and we don’t know the kind of things we should know. The kind of things that Haruno and Yukino have trained in since birth. We aren’t heirs to a traditional household, Komachi.”
She doesn’t nod.
She likes to say that she’s the dumb one just because she isn’t introspective. Those are… very different things. She always liked to live in the moment. To enjoy life in ways I found hard to share with the bundle of energy and social extraversion.
So, she didn’t lock herself in her room and stared at the walls as her mind raced, filling the blank space and the silence with thunderous thoughts. She rarely dove into her mind, turning the world she lived in into a myriad of possible ones, going beyond what it readily presented itself as and into all those wrong hypotheses that sometimes held a nugget of truth that grew easier to find as the years went by and I kept modeling the people around me rather than engage with them, turning them into…
Into problems to be solved.
And I know part of that is because of Mom’s inherited hurt and Dad’s absence. That I could’ve grown up to be as different a person as Komachi is.
But… I also think that it’s in my nature. That I would’ve always found that maelstrom of possibilities more enticing than the banal, prosaic, commonplace interaction of people I shared so little with.
I’ve got practice. A lot of it. Being myself.
So I should be able to guide Komachi in what I hope will be a rare occurrence of her being too much like me.
“Mom was hurt. Haruno said that Grandpa discarded her, and maybe that’s just it, but Dad was furious. Protective. So, no, that wasn’t everything. They met in college, and that means that the abuse persisted—”
“Stop,” Komachi whispers.
“I’m sorry—”
“No. No, it’s… I want to hear it from her. If it really happened, if it matters… it should come from her,” she says.
And, just like that, she reminds me that, as little practice as Komachi has being me, I’ve got even less being Komachi.
“Of course,” I say before I lay another kiss on the crown of her head. “You’re… Thank you, Komachi. For being so much better than me.”
“I’m going to punch your belly…”
“Thanks for the warning. That will give me a chance to tense up so that you can then hilariously ask me how I am so hard, which I’ll have to remind you it’s because of Shizu, and—”
“You two make me so glad I’m a single child,” Iroha says.
“… This is precisely what it looks like. That is, a perfectly regular bonding occurrence between emotionally drained siblings,” I tell my third girlfriend as she slowly comes into the bathroom, silently closing the door behind her.
“That is not what it looks like,” she says as she squats in front of us, her legs closed together without any gaps, her white socks acting like shields for her underwear, and any inappropriate comments I could’ve made regarding getting a not-so-free show.
And she grabs both my hand and Komachi’s.
I could fall deeper for her just because of it, but, really, I’m not even sure that’s possible at this point.
“How are things out there?” I ask, still cradling my sister against me with my remaining arm.
“I don’t know. Shizu hurried me here as soon as I arrived.”
“… That feels like they’re keeping the kids out of an adult conversation,” Komachi says, sounding slighted.
“Or maybe they’re trying to manage different kinds of emotional strain, and I’m here to help with the one half of the family that currently doesn’t hate me?” Iroha says with a soft, gentle smile that makes me squeeze her hand out of sheer reflex.
“Bold of you to assume…” Komachi grumbles.
“Despite your disturbing brocon jealousy, you love me, brat.”
“Please, don’t try to drag me into your disgusting harem shenanigans.”
“Oh, no, that’s Shizu’s harem. You’re safe with me. Unless she’s sent me as an undercover agent, of course—”
“Iroha, don’t make me talk about kunoichis—”
“You stay out of this!” she says with what somebody grievously uninformed could mistake as unwanted embarrassment.
“This is a sex thing. Of course this is a sex thing,” a little sister quickly regaining her dead-eyed yandere traits mutters as she goes limp against my side.
“It’s Iroha,” I say, trusting that should be explanation enough.
“And what’s that supposed to mean?” a kunoichi clutching my hand a bit tighter asks with blatantly fake offense.
“That I’m close enough to you to joke about things I would never mention in front of other people,” I say right before I tug on her hand and have her unwisely crash against the two of us, the glass partition to Shizu’s shower ominously trembling behind me at the impact of the soft missile.
There’s a brief pause, and an arm surrounds me, sliding between my back and the cool glass as I catch her other arm hugging Komachi out of the corner of my eye.
“Unfair,” my girlfriend mutters.
“I should’ve never let him read any shoujo. I’ve created a monster,” Komachi agrees.
“Please, I was the one who introduced you to CLAMP,” I tell her with barely any offense showing.
“And yet, Saika’s still single.”
“… Four is enough,” I say, sidestepping everything else I could’ve said in regards to that.
“… I may give you a pass so long as you let me film—”
“Gross,” Komachi immediately says, resorting to her earliest defense mechanism other than puking all over me—which, come to think of it, may have been the early stages of her masterful move. Ah, my endearing little sister started her shounen training arc when she was a baby. How precocious. How adorable. How terrifying. How delightfully Komachi.
“You were the one who brought up Saika,” Iroha sensibly retorts. “You can’t expect me to let that kind of material slip by unrecorded.”
“I can’t expect you to leave anything unrecorded,” I mumble.
Her arm tightens around my waist, and her face nuzzles against my chest.
“No. I’ll keep… I’ll be with you, sharing our memories together. Forever,” she says, her hot breath going right through my shirt, fighting away the heated air of a small bathroom that’s been subject to a hair dryer for long enough to almost take care of a single sofa cushion.
“… I will allow it,” Komachi says.
“Thank you,” Iroha tells her, more sincere than anything she’s said since she came in.
And I…
I don’t add anything.
I just hold the two young girls who are more important to me than anyone else in the world other than the two not-so-young women outside this door, fighting against my parents to show that what we have is real. That they can’t take me away. That…
That I need them.
Like I never allowed myself to need anyone other than the little sister who grew up to be far from the dumb sibling she claims to be.
***
Shizu
Hachiman swept away the remains of what I know to be an irreplaceable, expensive heirloom before I gently guided him to take care of my sofa’s still-wet cushion, and I could only think one thing:
How I wish I could’ve found something to shatter in Hana’s office yesterday that would’ve hurt her just half as much as the loss of a stupid bowl will.
Even if it was one that Yukino had been allowed to keep in her apartment, the poor girl clearly suspecting she’d never again see the piece of artisanry as she handed the tea set and the kimono over after Haruno forced her to rush over here fast enough that we could prepare the whole show before Hachi’s parents arrived.
A show that I was leery of, but, for once, we didn’t have time to argue, uncharacteristic as that is for the two of us, and… And whatever we are won’t ever work if I’m unable to trust her when she takes the lead.
I don’t regret it.
I don’t think I ever will.
“Here. Have some actual breakfast,” my girlfriend says as she sets a few plates with croissant, camembert, and lettuce sandwiches on my kitchen counter.
“I appreciate your hospitality,” Hachiman’s mother says from where she’s sitting on the other side of it, “but my children have yet to eat anything other than tea snacks.”
Haruno tilts her head to the side, and a small smile comes out that I, as much as I trust her, also trust to be the prelude to precisely the wrong thing to say.
“We will wait,” I interrupt. “Coffee should be more than enough to tide us over until the cushion’s dry.”
“Ah, yes. Your cushion. The perfect excuse to stall—” the older woman starts.
“I wanted to give him a break,” I cut her off, my temper rising before I can check it. “So he can compose himself.”
She stares at me with an intensity I would never have suspected the few times she came for a parent-teacher conference, drained and exhausted, clearly struggling to follow along with my not-quite factual reports.
Bitter at most of what I had to tell her.
“Maybe I should’ve come without him,” she says, her husband looking at her in a way that tells me he’s too used to wanting to say things he keeps to himself.
“What do you want, Yumiko?” I ask her, Haruno looking at me in turn, her smile shifting into something softer and enigmatic.
“To keep him safe—”
“No. What do you want? From your child?”
The woman in front of me, younger than my mother if not by that much, stares, and… and something shifts.
Something under the hard façade he managed to reapply as soon as Hachiman and Komachi left the room. Something that is raw, fearful, and vulnerable.
Something that gives me hope, misplaced as it may be.
“I… I don’t want him to be hurt…” she says, almost repeating her earlier statement but with some crucial differences.
So I take a coffee mug, one that bears Dad’s gym’s logo in black and white, the dumbbell over a rainbow taking some confounding connotations I had to struggle with for quite a while after the revelation of how, precisely, Uncle Mike had once fit into my family, and I give it a bit a twist, the dark liquid inside swirling and accumulating brown bubbles in the middle of the burgeoning vortex before I raise the mug to my lips and take a sip of something that’s always warm and acrid enough to wake me up long before the caffeine takes effect.
I drink my coffee, staring over the lip of the mug at a woman looking at me and reapplying her hard mask as thoroughly as she can.
And then I set the mug down on my grey counter, the one that Hachiman took me in yesterday after I gave him a show while wearing his own white, wet shirt and nothing else.
It’s a bit of a struggle to keep my cheeks from tingling at the intrusive memory, but I think I manage.
I think I can stare at the woman in front of me with an accusing, angry, yet calm gaze.
“A bit late for that, isn’t it?” I say.
And, with that declaration, the second round of our fight starts.
