Agrippa
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All Right! Fine! I Will Take You! – Chapter 79
🕑 Added 2023-05-21 23:28:24 +0000 UTC“I’m fired,” she says.
And I blink dumbly at her.
I… I am at her apartment. Me. Just the two of us.
Me and Shizu.
No Iroha. No Haruno.
And we’re sitting by her kitchen counter, my teacher in front of me, framed by gleaming tiles that make it so every loose hair floating above her dark locks becomes a thin line of black on white.
She’s as beautiful, as stunning as ever.
Even in her sadness.
“Fired?” I ask. Stupidly. Like a moron who can’t even keep up with the things she’s going through.
And only then do I think to ignore the offensive cup of reddish bag tea set in front of me and reach over the grey, speckled stone counter to grab the limp right hand resting by the silver can of beer dotted with condensation that she has opened but not drank from.
Her fingers are limp at first, but then she fiercely grabs mine, her eyes going from her knees to my own eyes in desperate search of something I long to provide her.
Because it’s me sitting here. It’s me that she called after our goodbye when I left school this evening.
It’s me that she’s telling the truth to.
“I… this morning?” she says, eyes wavering from our joined hands to my captive gaze. “It went to plan, like I told you. I talked with Inoue, and he accepted my transfer request without much more than a raised eyebrow. Then… Then, after lunchtime, he called me to his office.”
“And something had happened,” I say, just to prompt her to come out of the silence I can feel her retreating to.
“Yes.”
She looks at me, eyes wet in that way I found desperately alluring when she was just kidding around about being perennially single. When she exaggerated a pain that was there but that she had known for long enough to turn it into a joke.
And now she isn’t joking.
And this pain of hers is new.
So I stand up, not letting go of her hand, our arms straightening as I go around the counter before bending back as I get closer until I stand in front of her, looking down at the woman sitting on a stool that puts her head at my chest’s height.
‘Just as planned,’ I would say to myself with a rueful smile.
If I was able to.
Because the only thing I can do is to hug her to me. To hold her against my chest as I pretend that I’m strong enough for the world not to hurt her. That I’m strong enough to protect her from anything other than the nosy neighbor Haruno and I were already plotting to blackmail into silence, shame, and horrifying trauma.
But I am not.
I am a surly, malcontent, proto-Japanese Unabomber who just recently learned to let go of that fear he had been disguising as a superiority complex for years. I am barely becoming a man. I am completely unsuited to protecting the woman who helped me come as far as I have.
To protect Shizu.
My lover.
My healer.
My savior.
So I keep holding her as she shakes. As the front of my shirt becomes wet with tears she refuses to be loud for. As I keep breaking down at watching her be anything other than happy and rewarded for being the marvelous human being that she is.
I don’t know when I start kissing the top of her hair, the dark, wild locks tickling my nose as I reassuringly rub her back under her mane, as I murmur gentle, meaningless reassurances that never amount to even words, inadequate as words always are.
My legs feel… tired. As if I was holding both of us up. As if there’s nothing in the world I’d rather do other than collapse, to stop exerting the effort of just standing up while Shizu clings to me.
“I love you. I love you, we love you. We will protect you. We will solve this. I promise,” I keep saying.
She keeps shaking her head, rubbing her face on my shirt, spreading her tears over me.
“Shizu, I don’t care what happens. You’ll be all right. You will,” I swear, just now hitting me that it’s me who did this to her. Who took one of the few good teachers I’ve ever met and had her fired from the school where she saved Haruno, Yukino, and me.
She denies it yet again, still silent. Still clinging to me so hard that it hurts, even if only in my heart.
“I will—” I tell her, not knowing what will follow, just that something has. That everything I can offer to make things all right, I will offer. I will promise. I will give her.
That there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for her so she will stop crying like her heart is as broken as it was before I first kissed her.
“No. No, you won’t,” she says.
And then she pulls back. Away.
And looks up at me.
She’s smiling.
She’s crying.
Her tears brim from the corners of her eyes, and her cheekbones glisten in smudged wetness, but her white teeth also shine as she… as she looks up at me.
Proud.
“You won’t,” she says, her voice raw. Hurt. “You won’t make it all right because you’re human. Because I don’t expect you to. Because I don’t want you to.”
Her hand is cupping my cheek, but it’s colder than usual. Colder than the warmth she always manages to instill inside of me.
“That’s not how I work,” I tell her, briefly stopping to turn aside and kiss the tips of her fingers before looking back down at the woman who can still do so many things to me with a single smile, no matter how broken. “You know that. You and Iroha took me to that unsanitary couch of yours and explained to me just precisely—”
“Unsanitary?”
“I’m pretty sure the upholstery is about ninety percent tobacco ash—”
“I—it’s not! I have a vacuum cleaner!”
“That’s very commendable of you, but I can’t help but notice the precise shade you chose—”
“It’s to hide the stains, not to store them!”
I arch an eyebrow.
She pouts.
And then we start laughing, and I can only manage to hug her head back against me as she hugs me with desperate strength, the laughter interspersed with hiccups as the joy of being us keeps fighting against the sadness of her being attacked.
Of her being hurt.
Of someone hurting mine.
And then I finally pull her up so that we both stand together, so that I can and do hold her weight, the protests of my drained body going unheard as we sway back and forth, her chest molding to me despite that damn vest that I both love and hate.
She’s still taller than me, but she tucks her face in the crook of my shoulder, her lips brushing the side of my neck with warmth, softness, and wetness.
And then I walk back, slowly, guiding her so that we can collapse on the, no matter her vacuuming assurances, suspiciously grey sofa.
We bounce up as she lets out a surprised eep, and then she’s on top of me, looking into my eyes as her black hair falls around me and turns the lights of her living room into soft shadows through which the steel in her eyes shines.
“You’re beautiful,” I say, unable to stop myself, to refrain from the dumb, stupid, out-of-place words.
And she, eyes swollen, tear tracts dull in the twilight she has brought just for the two of us, looks away as her cheeks darken.
“I’m not,” she says, almost sulking. “I’m a crying mess, and I know precisely how I look when—”
I kiss her.
Not something deep or passionate. Just… a brief interruption. A meeting of lips tinged with salt.
“You are beautiful. You always are, always have been, always will be. It’s just a matter of in which way you’re being beautiful right now,” I say, something wry curling up my lips.
She blinks at me.
And then she collapses, her face once more buried in my chest as her hair covers me until I’m forced to blow the draped locks up so that I don’t swallow a part of her I never intended to.
“You are impossible. I will have to keep you locked in the house just so you don’t accidentally seduce anybody else,” she mutters, being as baffling and mysterious as I’ve always been told women are supposed to be.
Oi, Shizu, don’t you know that part of your mature charm and allure is that you’ve always been masculinely straightforward? Far manlier than I? This is not the time to change your character type into an inscrutable maiden.
“While I have absolutely no clue what you’re talking about, I am pleased to see that, even without meaning to, I have once again managed to advance my plans to become an unemployed house-husband of the non-yakuza variety.”
Shizu, for other mysterious reasons, reverts her character type to the manly, tomboyesque, mature Christmas Cake, and gives me a non-verbal retort.
In this instance: a spear hand right below my floating ribs.
“Spousal abuse,” I mutter after I manage to stop hissing.
“You are a jerk,” she, yet again unfairly, states.
“And you are a violent tsundere type,” I tell her, being somewhat untruthful yet suddenly wondering about shiny black hair styled into long twin tails.
“You are a jerk. And you make me laugh. And I love you. And I don’t even know why I called you to unload this all on you when it’s so utterly unfair of me to expect you to be able to deal with the situation, but I’m glad I did because I love you, and—and I do love you. I… Hachi, I…”
Her eyes are once more shining down on me, her breasts pressed against my chest, her legs on either side of mine.
It would be erotic. Tantalizing.
If she wasn’t looking this lost.
“You have… Shizu, you have remade me. Whatever you ever ask of me is more than fair enough. Whatever you want me to do, I’ll do it—and yes, that includes getting a job and doing whatever it takes to help you get through this. Even if you never want to work again—”
“I can’t,” she says.
I frown.
She doesn’t clarify.
The line could mean a lot of things. That she can’t take advantage of me, that she can’t rely on me, that she can’t ask anything of me…
But it’s not any of them.
Because she called me. She told me about her problems. She broke down and relied on me to be there and help her back up.
Except, maybe she didn’t quite finish telling me everything.
So, what she can’t do…
My blood runs cold.
“Tell me,” I say, brushing her hair away with the back of my rising hand so that more light enters our space. So that I can look at her properly.
She bites her lip and hesitates.
But she did call me.
And so, she talks.
“Inoue… gave me a choice. I could get a transfer out of Chiba. Anywhere out of Chiba. Or I could get fired. And, if I did… whoever was forcing this on him would make things harder on me.
“I think I’m about to be blacklisted as a teacher, Hachi.”
Comments
Agrippa
The idea *may* cross her mind.
jordan
Wow, haruno really is going to kill someone.
