Agrippa
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All Right! Fine! I Will Take You! – Chapter 86
🕑 Added 2023-08-06 06:11:49 +0000 UTCIn one of our past lectures, we talked about how the traditional trope of enemies becoming allies is not only a good way to enmesh a usually engaging character arc in the plot but also, and most importantly, a magnificent way for the author to avoid doing more work when coming up with ways to expand the cast of characters.
Why does the cast need expanding, though? Why can’t it stay focused on the few characters we came to care for at the very start of the story?
There are multiple reasons for that.
Character arcs? They end. And, if they end satisfyingly, there are very few ways to keep the character engaging other than walking back on their development—also known as the Uchiha Family Secret Technique. Manga as an art form is dependent on serialization, and that shows in that the most successful examples tend to focus not on an arc for the main character but for the plethora of characters that come and go, each of them adding a new focus to the narrative before they are replaced by the new hotness like a riajuu going through girlfriends or an otaku clearing routes in an eroge.
Designs? They go from engaging to stale. True, familiarity becomes a drawing point all of its own, but, as the perennial obsession that alien martial artists hold for haircare products shows, even the traditional pillars of otakudom need their looks updated often enough, either with hair dye or just plain aging, scarring, and plenty of things that seem to only matter on a cosmetic level unless your name is Guts.
This may also be one of the reasons for the popularity of cosplay among female characters. Really. Nothing else comes to mind.
But, the issue is…
You have reasons to grow the cast of regulars. Ways, lazy and otherwise, to do so. Accepted, traditional means to update the regular characters’ design.
Why would you then ever reduce the cast?
“You are not going to France,” I firmly tell the person on the other side of the phone.
“It’s… It’s a chance to—” she says.
“Do you really think I’m that stupid?” I say.
Daring to cut Haruno off.
And she doesn’t immediately answer. Which is somewhat insulting, come to think of it.
“Hachi, I can’t… I can’t be the reason she hurts,” she finally says.
“You can. Of course you can. Of course you will. Not even because leaving like this would devastate the woman you’ve been in love with for years, but because that’s what loving is. Only those close to you can hurt you.”
More silence.
More time that Haruno gives me to seethe. To rage. To stew in too many things to name.
Or, at least, that’s what she thinks is happening.
“That’s not true. You were hurt by plenty of people you didn’t care about,” she ends up saying.
“No. I was hurt by people close to me, and then people I didn’t care about stepped on that open wound. Do you think I would’ve cared, at all, that a girl whose name I can’t even remember refused to take back the eraser I had picked up for her? Don’t you think I would’ve laughed in her face and made a show of stuffing my new, freely given eraser in my pencil case if I had been the way I am today?”
There’s a soft sigh that holds some small measure of exasperation.
It is echoed by two other sighs, but those aren’t audible from the phone, so they don’t count.
“You have always been the way you are today,” she says with…
With too many things.
With love. With yearning. With sadness.
With parting.
“Haruno… Stay. We can fight your mother—”
She laughs.
It, predictably, isn’t a nice laugh.
“Guessed that right away, did you?”
“I struggle to come up with an alternative explanation,” I say.
“Right. I told her, you know? That it was too sudden, too abrupt. That there was no way I could pass this as a conveniently timed breakup with this much of a rush.”
“But she wasn’t thinking straight,” I say.
“No. She wasn’t.”
“And that’s how we win.”
I feel the need to strike a dramatic pose. To lean back in such a way as to have moonlight glint and turn my glasses opaque as a slow grin spreads to show some actual fang that would make Komachi proud.
But I don’t wear glasses, I don’t have fangs, and it isn’t nighttime.
So I, instead, lean forward, resting my elbows on my thighs without letting go of my phone and shifting my weight on a suspiciously grey sofa that I can tell has been recently vacuumed.
For all the good it’s done.
“I’m going to need more than a cool one-liner, Hachi,” she says.
And now I do smile.
“Going against your mother at the top of her game? That’s like going against a more experienced you, and I’m not that suicidal. Going after a distressed woman still reeling from too many emotions? Well, let’s just say I’ve got some experience in that field.”
Haruno, despite herself, snorts in repressed laughter.
Which is nicely timed to mask the huff of pained breath that I let out when Iroha’s elbow sinks into my side, and Shizu grinds her heel on top of my bare foot in a way that makes me suspect that she, at one time, had a side-income that came from middle-aged men who like to be called pigs in human shape.
It would explain the sports cars.
“Hachiman… She’s the most powerful woman in the city. She can and will hurt you and those around you. There’s a reason my own plans ended with me leaving the country.”
“Yes. That reason is that you’re willing to sacrifice yourself to protect the people you love.”
“Don’t make me sound so noble—”
“And don’t make it sound like we won’t do the same thing a thousand times over.”
This time, there’s no silence.
No, there’s raw, rough breathing and the beginning of something else.
“Please. Don’t. Don’t do anything stupid. Don’t make this meaningless,” she begs.
“You could join me. Help me plan. Make sure I don’t do something stupid,” I offer.
Calmly.
Except I clasp my knee hard enough to hurt, my whole leg shaking with the strength of my grip until Shizu slides her hand over mine with a touch that often enough doesn’t calm or soothe me, but always does when I need it to.
When she wants it to.
I try not to look at her. At the silver eyes that will look at me with open warmth and clear guilt.
At the woman I love hurting and wanting to help the other woman I love.
So I just focus my eyes between my knees, looking at the rich, orange hues of her wooden floor rather than at her sitting by my side or at Iroha clinging to me, near enough that she can hear Haruno’s end of the conversation.
“I could instead see through your plans and stop them before you get hurt,” Haruno finally says.
Which is…
“You wouldn’t warn me if you intended to do that,” I say.
“Maybe. And maybe you should learn once and for all to leave implicit things unstated so that people won’t be forced to articulate a position that they may not have wanted to take.”
I can feel my smile coming back at Haruno, once again, slipping out yet another of her little lessons.
Really, I struggle to think of anything she can learn in France. It would make more sense if she went there to teach.
“I love you,” I say.
“I know,” she answers.
“Do you?”
There’s a pause. A held breath.
“Are you asking if I really know or if I love you?” she asks.
“Both. None. I… I think I’m asking you if you’re aware of what that means. If you understand the lengths I can go to for classmates that I held in barely disguised contempt at the best of times and what that implies about the things I’m willing to do for you.”
Another pause.
“I… I saw you. Yesterday. When you… I saw you when Iroha dragged you away to scold you. And then I saw you when you came back,” she says.
Not answering.
Or, well, answering in unstated, implicit ways.
“Good. That’s good. Then you understand,” I say.
“No. I don’t think I do,” she says, an incredulous peal of laughter bursting out at the end.
It makes me smile.
It’s… Maybe it’s not a nice smile because it’s born of what I feel for her, and that, at the moment, is tightly bound to what is about to happen to her, around her, and due to her.
“Maybe I don’t either; I’ve been told that I’m frustratingly opaque at times,” I murmur as if she was on a pillow by my side, about to fall asleep after a day of exhaustion and a brief sharing of warmth and comfort.
“You could say that…” Iroha mumbles, thankfully softly enough that Haruno doesn’t hear it.
Nor Shizu’s muffled snort.
“See? That’s one of the advantages of leaving things unstated: you come across as enigmatic and all-knowing even when you are talking about things you don’t have a clue about,” she says with a light tone.
Maybe because she’s able to find the humor in the situation, or maybe because she wants to pretend she can.
Or, maybe, because she’s a young woman about to be torn from the people who love her unconditionally, the ones who have seen past her many masks and accepted what lies beneath, and that’s the kind of thing that you can’t feel all at once or all the time. It’s like being at a funeral and sharing a joke and a laugh.
It doesn’t mean you aren’t hurting. It doesn’t mean you haven’t lost something important.
It doesn’t mean you won’t keep feeling that loss for years to come.
“Remember when I said I loved you? That I didn’t know what that meant?” I say, letting wistfulness suffuse my tone.
“It was days ago, Hachiman. And memorable enough that I don’t think anyone would’ve forgotten,” she says with an eye roll that couldn’t be more audible.
“Right. Now I do.”
Hesitation.
Maybe fear.
“And what does that—” she starts.
“It means that I’m not letting you hurt yourself. It means that I won’t stop until you’re happy, whatever shape that ends up taking. It means that, whatever you saw last night, is going to stay until you’re free. Until you’re healed. Because I love you. Because I won’t accept a woman I love being attacked, much less by those who should protect her.”
“That isn’t love, Hachiman; that is a course of action.”
“So, you want me to state the underlying, implicit emotions that have led me to this course of action?”
She lets out a soft groan, and I’m almost certain that is accompanied by her rubbing her temples with the hand not holding her phone.
Heh.
“You are the most frustrating man I’ve ever—”
“Had sex with. Yes, I know.”
“Don’t be so proud of that.”
“Of having had sex with you? With a beautiful, brilliant, complex woman slow to trust despite her prodigious insight? With somebody that I felt the need to fuck against a mirror so she could see herself being loved like she deserves? Like she always deserved? Like she always feared she never would be? How can I not be proud of that, Haruno?”
Neither Iroha nor Shizu say anything.
And I’m grateful for that.
Because we’ve shared a lot. Iroha has made sure that we have, that so many of our important moments have been documented and passed along so that we will all be a part of those irreplaceable memories she has made her mission to preserve.
As if any of us could ever forget.
But… but this? My first time with Haruno?
I haven’t really talked about it, and only in the broadest strokes.
Because it was…
Because it was ours.
And a part of me feels guilty about it, about sharing something with the girl holding her phone that I didn’t share with those sitting on the same sofa.
Another feels guilty about how much of it I’m about to share.
“Remember when I told you to look at yourself? To talk to yourself?” I say, my voice deepening as I let the memories flood me. As I’m transported to a hotel room in which a beautiful woman bared more than her body to me and her own reflection.
“I don’t want to remember. Not when I’m letting go.”
“Then I’ll make you remember. And you won’t let go,” I say.
“That easy, huh?” she answers, the smile clear in her voice.
And I…
I recall her soft flesh under my grip, her arms extended in front of her until I pushed harder into her body, and she collapsed against the mirror, her breasts flattening against the cold surface as she looked into the frail woman’s eyes on the other side of the glass and gave her new strength with every word I forced out of her lips.
“You love. You are still able of it. And… And you want them to be happy, to be better off after meeting you,” I say, echoing what she told herself. What I forced her to tell herself.
“That… That’s true. That’s still true. That’s why I’m doing this,” she says, her tone as wavering as it was at that moment.
“Yes. I know. What else did you say? What words followed that?”
I know she’s closing her eyes right as I do the same. That she’s being transported from wherever she’s taking this call to the place we once shared. To the memory we will always share.
“You still care. You’ll always care. You’ll never be as cruel as you pretend to be,” she mutters, her voice taking on a dreamlike quality.
“Yes. And then I told you something. Something you wouldn’t say yourself.”
“That I want to be loved,” she says, and this time the dream is far away. Fragile. Sad.
“What did I say after that? What was the one thing I wanted you to believe after all that, after everything that happened between us in that room?”
My eyes are still closed, and I feel a slow smile coming on, something to soften the demand in my voice.
“That you love me,” she says, almost breaking.
No.
Almost showing the cracks.
Because I want her healed. I want her whole. I want her as free and whimsical as she pretends to be.
But she isn’t there. Not yet.
Which is the one reason why I won’t let her go until she is.
“Then, Haruno… If you ever doubt again what I mean when I say I love you… Remember that. Remember me pushing you to tell yourself the things you didn’t want to say, the truths you didn’t want to face, and how I refused to let you look away from the beautiful woman that you are, how I refused to let you look at the woman I love with anything but compassion and understanding.”
There’s silence.
Silence in which a memory lingers.
“Thank you,” she says, her voice about to break.
And then she hangs up.
My phone falls from nerveless fingers, and I bury my face in my hands, steadying my breath before it comes out ragged and wild, and Iroha and Shizu immediately hug me, their warmth and softness anchoring me.
Taking me away from a hotel room in which Haruno and I were…
Happy.
Together.
In love.
I let them push me back into the sofa’s backrest, into their embrace.
Iroha clings tightly to me.
Shizu silently cries on my chest.
And that, in turn, forces me to move, to act, to hug them back, and kiss their hair, and reassure them without words that I’m here, with them, and everything will be all right.
That I will make it all right.
Because, at the very least, now I know Haruno won’t fight us.
