Agrippa
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All Right! Fine! I Will Take You! – Chapter 80
🕑 Added 2023-05-29 17:09:57 +0000 UTCAstonishingly, no matter how deeply we’ve plumbed into the depths of the shounen genre, how carefully we have gleaned into its intricate sophistication, there are some fundamental aspects of it that we’ve yet to tackle in this lecture series, which only goes to show how esoterically complex the subject matter is.
Truly, there are few things as deep as a manga genre aimed at teenagers or people who wish they were still teenagers.
Such as rage.
You see, rage can appear to be a superficial emotion, much like the shounen genre itself, but, when properly cultivated, it is surprisingly nuanced.
And deep.
Yes. There are few things as deep as rage can be.
In the context of shounen?
Well, we’ve already established how the Power of Friendship works. How often the hero gets motivated by an expendable friend being expended just so they can discover a new hairstyle with which to better murder the villain foolish enough to mess with what’s his.
So, maybe we have already talked about rage.
Obliquely, yes, but the main thrust of the argument was there. That rage, hatred, indignation… They all work.
They are emotions we’re told to suppress. That they will only lead us down a spiral that some never climb out of. That, indeed, villains fall for it often enough, to the point of living with insane, ophidian, likely pedophiliacs rather than with a harem of fangirls.
But, when it’s the hero’s turn?
That’s another matter entirely.
Yes, heroes powered by a dark side may need to get a cooldown hug or some other manifestation of the already mentioned Power of Friendship to regain their selves from the clutches of what sleeps in their hearts, but the other kind of protagonist?
The one that doesn’t need anything other than himself to be as chuunishly dark as he cares to be?
Rage is… liberating.
It smolders in your chest as you hold your lover till she falls asleep out of sheer emotional exhaustion, letting everything else that you feel come to the surface so that you can keep trying to console her as ineffectively as you usually do.
It keeps burning, but… like embers under cinders, barely glowing through grey tobacco ash.
It waits.
And then, you let go.
You uncover it.
And it blooms.
You feel the familiar rush wash over and through you. You hold her unconscious body on her allegedly vacuumed sofa. And look at her.
At her suffering.
And your heart beats.
Because you want to protect her, yes. You want to be for her even a fraction of what she’s been for you. Of the healing, supportive presence that made your life worth living as she kept showing you things you had always believed to be out of your reach.
You want to be the kind of hero who knows the right thing to say. To do.
But you are the other kind of hero. The one who may as well start munching on chips as dramatically as possible.
You are the spiteful man who knows not how to heal, but how to hurt. How to look for weaknesses most ignore out of sheer human decency.
And it feels so right to be so wrong. It feels empowering to just let yourself go, to allow those things you usually suppress to come floating up to the surface, dragging with them parts of you that you had forgotten.
How you laughed after Hayama pushed you against the wall, his own rage consuming him at your villainous monologue.
How the bile just crawled up your throat, the bitter, disgusting, burning thing becoming sweet in that moment when you remembered Sagami’s tearful face. When you remembered the words you threw at her, deliberately meant to hurt as much as you could.
When you realized that your idle fantasies were right. That you could reduce any of them to a tearful wreck just by spilling the poison you had always carried with you.
That you could keep feeling like that, all the pain and rejection brushed aside by the dark thing burning inside and through you. That it could be so easy to give them precisely what they expected out of the broken loner.
That, as much as you hurt, you could make them feel the same.
I look at her. At Shizu. At the woman I love. My first kiss. My first time.
I look at her lying on grey cushions, her black hair spread behind her as she lies on her side, still facing me, even if I no longer lie by her side.
Even if I’m sitting next to her, afraid to caress her, to lay a reassuring hand on her upper arm. To kiss her brow.
I look at her, and the rage at whoever hurt her grows.
But it’s not the only thing that does.
And so…
And so, because I know myself, because I know precisely where the thoughts of the man laughing alone on a rooftop after being told by Hayama that we could never get along, because I know precisely what that laugh meant…
I stand up.
I take a deep breath. Not to take a hold of myself, but to feel. To have my chest swell with every single one of the… the things making my heart beat faster, my breath shallow, my skin tingling with what crawls under it.
I close my eyes for a moment, Shizu’s living room fading away so that there’s only… me. Me and what I carry inside.
I open them in that way that feels oh, so dramatic. Self-indulgent. Chuuni.
You know what I’m talking about. When a character’s eyes snap open, and you know there’s something in them that wasn’t there before they closed.
Except it’s always been there, hasn’t it?
So I walk toward the balcony. Toward the tall glass doors that I have yet to open.
And I do, just so I can step away from Shizu before I do something that I don’t want to do in her presence.
“Hachiman? Miss me already—”
“She’s been fired.”
Haruno grows silent, and I can picture it.
I can see her, lavender eyes narrowing, eyebrows drawn together, her entire demeanor shifting as her own darkness rises up like mine has.
We would make a terrible couple.
Thankfully, we are a foursome.
“Explain,” she says.
“No details. Inoue went from following the script in the morning to firing her after the lunch break. He was obviously pressured by someone who learned about what was going on.”
“Is that all you have?”
I walk farther away from the half-open door of the balcony until the metal rail digs into my abdomen with a not-quite-soothing coolness.
Below me, Chiba lights up.
It’s only night because it’s still technically winter. Because the Sun sets early.
So the streets are busy with both cars and pedestrians. With moving lights and passing silhouettes. With a city that is still hours away from sleep.
Unlike Shizu.
“No. He offered her a deal. A new one.”
“Stop drawing it out.”
“Someone wanted her gone, Haruno. She was offered a transfer outside the prefecture or being fired and blacklisted.”
Haruno doesn’t gasp.
But I know her.
I know her jawline is now tense, her teeth on the verge of grinding before she remembers her training and relaxes, the very appearance of composed calm even as she is anything but.
“She called you to vent?” she says.
“She called me to cry,” I answer.
We share another silence.
And something else.
“And you’re calling me why?”
“Because I need you to come here and spend the night.”
“Really?” she asks with not even half as much amusement as she would usually pack into such an answer.
“I… I can’t be the man she needs me to be right now, Haruno. Please, stay with her.”
“I would think you and I will have precisely the same issue with being who she needs. Iroha—”
“No.”
“Why not?”
Another pause.
Another silence.
Another moment for me to lean over the rail and stare at the small park behind Shizu’s apartment building, the rectangle of green grass and beige soil barely lit with far less power than the streets surrounding it, the bright, colorful signs contrasting with the long shadows cast by trees no longer bare as spring approaches and sparse leaves sprout from thin branches.
The park is empty.
The streets aren’t.
“I don’t want… I can’t have her see me like this,” I finally answer.
“But you can call me to tag in for you?”
“You know why.”
She does. Of course she does.
“You are being stupid,” she says. Quite unnecessarily.
“I think you meant to use the present simple, right there.”
She groans.
Heh.
“Hachi… please…”
And now she has to ruin it.
“Haruno… I can’t. I have to… I have to move. I have to do something, or plot, or scream, and I can’t do all that and properly care for Shizu. I need you to—I need you.”
Another pause.
“Fine. I’ll message you when I’m there.”
“Why—”
“So that I don’t wake her up with the doorbell, genius.”
“Ah.” I take another deep breath, one that fills me with the cooling air that reaches this high balcony, and I can almost imagine it isn’t tainted by the city below me. “That’s smart.”
“Don’t patronize me.”
“Why? Is it too novel?”
“You have no idea. I just shuddered.”
I chuckle.
So does she.
“Hey,” I say after a while, the phone warming up my cheek and ear. “Thank you. I don’t know if I could handle this if you weren’t… us.”
After a moment, she sighs.
“You do realize you’re going to owe me for this, don’t you?”
“As terrifying as those words sound coming from you, I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
“Moron,” she says, her tone carrying a lingering warmth that manages to brush past the smoldering thing still running through my veins.
I close my eyes. Allow the sounds of traffic, of wind over almost bare branches, of people living, to drift by.
“Yeah. Yeah, I am, aren’t I?”
“More than I thought. Less than I hoped,” she says, fabric rustling on the other side of the line as she, presumably, puts on her coat.
“I’m afraid to ask what that means.”
“Just pretty words that sound meaningful. Don’t worry about it.”
“You’re lying through your teeth.”
“Of course I am. That’s how you first fell for me.”
I open my eyes.
The horizon is a dark blue, and the sky above has blackened. I can see a couple of stars.
No Moon. At least, not from here.
“I’m not sure that’s true. I think… I think I first fell for you that night you came looking for me. When I first saw you fight for another—or, rather, when I first recognized it.”
“It was all part of my master plan to break down Shizu’s walls using you as the blunt instrument you were born to be.”
“Was it?” I chuckle.
Another pause.
The door to Yukino’s apartment closes shut behind her.
“Yes,” she lies.
And, this time, I laugh.
It’s… not as ugly as when I sat down on the roof of Sobu High. As when I allowed all the bitterness and hatred to pour out.
No. It’s more complex than that.
“I remember your eyes, you know? The way they locked on mine when you pressed me against the wall. When you dared me to do anything at all to resist you.”
“This is a setup for me to say that I’m irresistible.”
“You don’t need me to tell you that.”
“Need and want are different things.”
Her voice echoes. She’s walking down the stairs rather than taking the elevator, just so she can keep talking with me without losing our connection due to something as mundane as the laws of physics.
It’s Haruno.
Utterly Haruno.
“You are irresistible. Even Shizu ended up caving to you, didn’t she?” I tell her.
“Only after you softened her up.”
“Only after you made me.”
I’m smiling.
Damn it.
“Hachi… are you going to be all right?” she asks.
I push away from the rail digging into my abdomen and turn around.
The dimly lit living room is precisely as I left it. Shizu’s still resting on her sofa.
I can make out the troubled expression on her face from here, through the phantasmal reflection of the city of Chiba playing over cold glass, keeping her away from me.
“No. Not until I do something,” I answer.
She sighs.
“You make it very hard for me to hang up so I can rush to your side,” she says, the familiar note of exasperation lacking a bit of the accompanying amusement.
“Haruno… thank you.”
Another pause.
The door to the streets opens and closes, and the sound of traffic comes through her phone.
“Don’t mention it,” she mutters.
“Haruno?”
“Yes?”
“Are you going to be all right?”
And she laughs.
“When have I ever been?” she answers.
And this would be when she hangs up dramatically. When she lets the ominous, meaningful line hang over me until she deigns come here.
Except I know her, and so, I don’t let her.
“Last weekend. When you went all out to cook for us, showing a side of you that you have kept carefully hidden from anybody but us. When you decided to burn my plans to the ground just so I would be genuinely happy without having to carefully arrange every single thing about the people I love. When you decided to show me that what we have doesn’t need me to be what I always try to be. When you oh so ironically plotted to stop me from plotting.
“When we loved each other.
“When, despite it all, we still ended up in bed, exploring more of what we can be together and letting you hope that schemes and lies would one day be unnecessary.
“You were all right then. You were happy.
“And I swear I’ll do everything it takes so that you’ll be again.”
She doesn’t speak. Not for a long time in which I can picture her hurried steps, her artful dodging of the too-slow pedestrians that never quite manage to get in her way as she marches toward what she means.
What she wants.
“You are incredibly unfair, do you know that?” she finally says.
“I’m going against you. Fair play is for those who don’t desperately need to cheat.”
She laughs.
And then she hangs up.
It takes me a while to remove the phone from my ear. To put it back in my pocket and allow the cool breeze to take away the lingering, uncomfortable heat.
***
I am still angry.
The rage, the indignation at somebody daring to hurt Shizu, still beats, but now it’s… it’s no longer a rush. No longer something I can lose myself in.
And so, I start to feel pathetic.
‘What? Indulging in a full chuuni monologue that would’ve made your younger, edgiest self cringe in second-hand embarrassment was not as cathartic as you expected? I’m shocked. Shocked, I say.’
Brain-chan, nobody likes an ‘I told you so.’ Particularly when you didn’t actually tell me so.
‘I feel that you have enough experience with these rants that every single one of them counts as a monumental, dare I say cyclopean, “I told you so.”’
Maybe.
Or, maybe, nobody is able to remain in such an intense emotional state for that long, and now I’m crashing from my high.
‘… Intense emotions can be addictive. It’s one of the mechanisms to keep an abuse victim hooked, you know?’
I do. After all, that’s why you know about it.
‘That goes for both the good and the bad. For the rush of meeting a lover’s eyes, for the adrenaline overtaking you after a bout of fear or anger…’
And then you develop a tolerance. The stimulus is the same, but you don’t react to it in the same way.
‘So you look for something more intense. Maybe take a few more risks than you would’ve had, or make the romantic gestures grander.’
And you keep doing that until you get inevitably burned. Until that feeling of warning that you had at the start and the rush at overcoming what you thought you couldn’t… Are finally right.
‘You don’t overcome it. You couldn’t.’
And what do you do then?
‘Then… Then you can do a lot of things. But, hopefully? You take the warning for what it is and stop relying on purely subjective feelings. You go back to your cold, calculating logic.’
Except you’re no longer alone. Because in your frantic rush to get as much of those incredibly fulfilling feelings, in your excitement at discovering that the world was brighter than you thought…
‘You’re no longer alone. And you’ve dragged them into your own mess.’
But you aren’t going to let them be hurt. Stay hurt.
‘No. No, we aren’t.’
I am sitting beside Shizu once again, my phone silenced and lying on my lap so that Haruno’s message will alert me without waking her up.
I have been hunched over, my elbows on my thighs, since I came in from her balcony.
It’s warmer inside.
And now I recline on the backrest running perpendicular to the wall, the one that should be an armrest, but this is a big enough sofa that I don’t mind because it may as well be made to fit four people at once.
As expected, Shizu. Just as expected.
I look down at her. At the beautiful woman. At the wise teacher. At the childish, immature brat who kept oversharing and inflicting her Christmas-flavored trauma on anybody in hearing range.
I barely repress the urge to kiss her awake.
And then my phone vibrates.
I catch it before it falls off my lap, and I look to see the notification of Haruno waiting for me to open the door lighting up the screen.
So I slowly stand up and, still barefoot, walk to the entrance.
As soon as I open the door, a hand shoots in, grabs my collar, and pulls me out before I can even yelp, my socks sliding over the concrete floor of the open corridor right before the whirlwind of motion abruptly ends with my back slamming against the wall.
And then Haruno’s lips crash into mine.
Her eyes are on me like they were at the start of it all, when she did this very thing before leaving a confusing, intimidating, premonitory kiss on my cheek.
But I recognize the open wonder. The intrigue.
She slowly pulls away, her warm breath washing over my still cool skin, over cheeks tingling with far too many things for me to settle on a single one.
The scent of lilacs reaches me, and it only brings back a sharper recollection of Haruno cruelly asking me to hurt her sister until she let go of her childish delusions. To tear down Shizu’s values until she was forced to confront herself.
I wonder what she would ask them to do to me. What she would’ve dared a flushed Shizu to do to a surly, malcoltent, poorly socialized edgelord.
Nothing too flattering, I think.
And then, before I can say anything, before I can answer in any way…
Haruno lets go of my shoulders and steps back.
And Iroha takes her place.
“I should slap you,” she says rather than ‘hello.’
I find myself nodding.
“That’s what you would like, isn’t it, Hachi? Something suitably dramatic and final. A way for this all to fit what you think stories should be.”
She steps in, as close as Haruno was before pulling away, and luminous honey fills my entire world.
“It won’t be that easy,” she breathes out.
Her right hand cups my cheek, as gently as if she thought I would break, and her lips near mine.
“I will never be that easy,” she says.
And I nod.
Because if there’s one thing none of my lovers have ever been, it’s easy.
After all, my youth love comedy is wrong.
Just as I never expected.
