Agrippa
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All Right! Fine! I Will Take You! – Chapter 78
🕑 Added 2023-05-14 03:57:53 +0000 UTCWe have already talked about the utterly broken cheat power that is the scene transition. How a single shift in lighting turning golden and low makes the protagonist suddenly go from hesitating and nervously fiddling with the collar of his sports shirt to having his muscles ripping out of it as he pumps up yet another push-up (how painfully aware I am now that push-ups do not work that way may be a topic for future lectures). How the same shift in lighting, coupled with the appearance of multiple used tissues and a gasping girl, implies that a pregnancy is likely to happen at some point in the future—no, Iroha, that’s not a hint—or how long, grueling periods of painful rehabilitation in the hospital can easily be omitted from any martial artist’s story just with some cutaways before the doctor delivers what should be a career-ending diagnostic.
Yes, indeed, the scene transition is the main tool for a protagonist to remain the protagonist. They are what enable the story to move along at a watchable pace, the reason inconvenient scenes can be easily skipped, the root cause for any and all contrived coincidences to be handily waved away.
Yet, the scene transition has a darker, more sinister sibling.
In Media Res.
“What is it now?” my own darker sibling asks, properly demonstrating the concept being discussed.
Or, well, maybe the lighter sibling, but as plenty of JRPGs have endeavored to teach us, ‘Light’ and ‘Nice’ are far from synonymous.
And that’s the thing with In Media Res: it’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s so usually employed for dramatic reveals, for jarring introductions to things the audience hasn’t been clued to, that it’s hard to think about it without a cold sweat dripping down your back.
Or maybe that’s just due to Komachi’s glare.
“Brother, either you start telling me why you are sitting on my bed in the middle of the night, or Komachi is going to be very upset,” she says, with all the adorable, caring concern of a furious porcupine.
I nervously fidget with my pajama’s shirt’s collar, briefly pray for some hours having passed and my muscles to have grown accordingly, find reality as disappointingly unaccommodating as ever, and try to shoot a disarming smile at my adorable, not-at-all violent, perfectly reasonable and with no biting fixation younger sister.
Instead, though, I find myself showing Komachi a nervous rictus, proving yet again that absolutely nothing I plan ever works as I want it to.
“… It’s a sex thing. Of course it’s a sex thing. It’s alwaysa sex thing,” my little sister commiserates, pulling up her bedsheets and hiding her unfocused, far-away gaze beneath the blue cotton as if refusing to acknowledge my presence in her room during bedtime hours for reasons that are entirely un-Oreimo in both spirit and execution.
I look at her with some not at all misguided indignation, realize that the bedsheets are opaque enough that she won’t realize the depths of the emotional wound she just inflicted on my always dignified self, resort to sticking out my tongue now that I can do so with no fear of violent reprisal, and finally ponder how I should breach the actual subject.
‘No, you don’t. You are precisely doing all you can do to avoid doing that.’
Brain-can, if I wanted you to be sensible instead of a distraction to avoid facing issues outside my skull, I wouldn’t have bothered giving you a tragic backstory romance.
‘… Hate you. So much.’
Praise me more.
‘Tell her, or I will.’
… I’m getting concerned that this is your second attempt today to gain control of my body.
‘And why would that be? Maybe because, as a fully feminine part of you, I would not be afraid to show precisely why thinking about Zaimokuza as a sexual being is so—’
Hate you. So much.
‘Praise me more.’
… Okay, I’m going to tell her. But I don’t know why am I doing such a—
‘Because she’s the first person you ever found true companionship with—or at least that’s what you thought for years. Because she’s Komachi, and she’s precious, and nothing will ever make you not want to involve her in your life.’
Well, yes, but I mean, other than that—
“You’re still sitting on my bed. You’re still silently, creepily sitting on my bed. You’re still silently, creepily sitting on my bed when it’s almost midnight. Why are you still silently, creepily sitting on my bed when it’s almost midnight, grossther?” a blob of blue fabric ponders.
“I feel like the question may imply the answer,” I diplomatically answer it because I don’t want to be accused of being bigoted toward bedspreads after meeting such a wide variety of them over the past few weeks.
“What? Are you saying that the answer is that you are creepy and gross? No. That couldn’t be. Not my brother. My creepy, gross, sex-crazed, Hachiman, brother.”
“That last one is just my name!”
“I know. It’s a classic for a reason.”
I arch my eyebrow, ponder how unfair she’s being with her current anti-eyebrow defenses, and pull down her bedsheets.
I just hope this doesn’t end up with Twitter canceling me for bedsheet bigotry.
“Ah! You Hachiman! How dare you rapaciously expose your little sister—”
“I’m gonna stop you right there. That’s the last thing I want to defend myself from in front of Mom.”
“Always thinking about other women. You’re going to make Komachi sad,” she idly comments as she tenaciously fights me to regain control of the blue sheets that are about to be involved in a domestic violence case.
“Mom is not another woman. She’s Mom. She transcends the concept of womanhood to embody the archetypical ideal of the model Japanese parent who spends too much time working to even realize that her son is currently about to be on the news for a sexual scandal.”
Komachi’s fingers momentarily lose strength, and I take the chance to pull the sheets down to her ankles.
There.
My victory is now complete.
… Also, she’s staring at me with her eyes somewhat wider than usual. Which I can only infer is a sign of her acknowledging her utter defeat and not, you know, a reaction to what I just blurted out.
“You got caught?” she asks with a soft voice as she sits by my side, to the right of the sheets bunched around my hips, and grabs my hand with both of hers.
As gentle as she’s ever been when not trying to rabidly bite me.
So… So I let my shoulders down, the tension very much still there but just a bit ameliorated, and I squeeze back.
“Yes. Shizu’s neighbor sent photos of me going in and out of her apartment to the school.”
The words are… perfunctory. It takes some effort to let them out, but they are just… toneless. Flat.
“What happened then?” she asks, just gently prodding as she leans her shoulder against my arm, her head on my shoulder, her soft hair barely tickling my cheek.
I close my eyes.
And sigh.
“The principal gave her an out. She can just get transferred to another school, and it won’t be an issue. Then… Then I got anxious at her being absent from school, acted up, ended up learning what had gone down, and got summoned to the principal’s office.”
“Oh,” she says, encapsulating far too much with the little sound.
“Yeah. I… I may have been slightly less conciliatory than I should have.”
“You don’t say.”
All right, now it’s not my tone that is flat.
It makes me chuckle.
So I wrap my arm around her shoulders and drop both of us down to her bed, bouncing on the mattress more or less at the same time as she lets out a quiet ‘eep.’
And I open my eyes.
This is most definitely not an unfamiliar ceiling.
Not after all the times that we have hung out in one another’s room, reading manga or playing games, or just enjoying quiet companionship.
The lamp on her bedside table draws a white circle on the smooth paint and throws the rest of the room in what looks almost like candlelight after being filtered by the uneven, wavy patterns of her amber lampshade.
Our breathing synchs atop a bed that is quite softer than my own, but… but because I chose a firmer mattress, not because Mom was feeling particularly spiteful when we went furniture shopping.
I thought it was supposed to be good for my back, and, given how much time I planned to spend lying down on it, it seemed like a good investment.
Let’s just say that my perspective on proper mattresses has somewhat shifted after trying out a few other samples.
“Are you all right?” she asks after the silence grows too long, her nape and shoulders still resting on my stretched arm.
“No,” I answer, my fingers anxiously clutching at the cotton bedding on the side opposite her warm, small body.
“That was a cue for you to unload, brother,” she says, a hint of laughter in her voice.
“I’m very bad at taking cues. Just ask Yui,” I answer with my own (maybe self-deprecating) note of humor.
“You aren’t holding back any punches, are you?”
“What? And wait for you to yell that this isn’t even your final form before unleashing my true power? I would rather not tempt fate, thank you very much.”
“Right. Not tempt fate. Because that’s how you got caught.”
I attempt to reply that it was due to entirely unforeseen circumstances that no reasonable person could have accounted for, remember that I just fucked Iroha in the middle of the school’s yard, and audibly shut my mouth.
I can feel the glare.
“That is a sex thing. You just thought about a sex thing.”
“I blame Iroha. This is all her fault. She and her needy, clingy, abandonment issues that somehow always end up with me reassuring her—”
“Aaaaaahhhhh! No! I don’t want to hear about how you reassure your girlfriend! Gross! Extremely gross! Hachiman-levels gross!”
“Huh. I kinda missed that one—”
“So gross that I won’t even bite you! That’s how gross you are!”
“… I am somewhat torn on that one—gah!”
I turn to my right, where my adorable little sister is clamping down her cutely prominent canines on my biceps and gnawing on it like she didn’t expect the meat to be this tough.
“Komachi will always do her best to reassure her stupid, gross brother that he is at least bitable enough. Tee-hee. I wonder how many points that got me?”
My eyebrow twitches.
And I tickle her.
“Ah! No! My older brother is abusing his superior strength to force me down!”
“Stop yelling things people will misunderstand!”
“Ah! No! My older brother is making demands of me while forcing me down on my bed!”
“That’s it, no more talking!”
“Ah! No! My—gah!” she says.
And then I proceed to tickle her until tears stream down her face, and she bends over trying to protect her sides, while her red cheeks—gah!
“Hah… That’s… That’s what you get… for abusing poor… defenseless… Komachi…”
“You just… kneed me…”
“Defenseless… Weak… Adorable Komachi…”
“One out of three…” I say from where I’m huddled right by her side.
And then she hugs me.
“Hey… I’m sorry things… I don’t know how they could have gone better, but I’m sorry they didn’t? At least she isn’t getting fired,” she says, her voice worried from right behind my nape as her arms wrap around my waist.
And I…
“I just… I just wish I could have done something. She’s in this because of me, and the only thing I managed is to reassure the principal not to change his mind,” I say, once again closing my eyes, retreating to a comfortable darkness that is only filled by the pain already fading from my abdomen and her warmth seeping into it and my back.
“That is already more than I expected,” she murmurs.
So I take a deep breath and once again grab her hand, trying not to clutch it tightly.
“I know. I know we’ve been incredibly lucky that it has only gotten this far, but… but this is the woman I love, Komachi. And, because of me—”
“Because of you, she’s happy. She has reunited herself with a love she had refused, pushed past years of denial and hurt, and… and… Damn it, brother, don’t make me act like the smart one. That’s you. That’s always been you.”
I wait for a couple of heartbeats to pass as I worry at my lower lip with my teeth, trying to… to be the older brother she always thought I was.
“No. I was only able to look like it because I had you, Komachi. Because I had somebody to care for, and—”
“And now you’ll also care for them. And you’ll be as good a… a boyfriend as you ever were a brother. You’re going to make them so happy they won’t be able to believe it. They will think you are a dream come true. They will even doubt you are real. They… They will love you as much as your cute little sister ever did, and you’ll be happy with them and inflict me with the trauma of three sets of mini-Hachimans, and… And you… you…”
Her voice drifts off as her arms tighten.
And I turn over on her bed until she’s no longer wrapped around my back, but hiding her face in my chest as I pat her own, so much smaller, back.
“Thank you,” I whisper past dark, soft locks.
She shakes her head, tickling my chin.
“No,” she says, reinforcing the gesture. “Thank you. Thank you for… for being you. For being there. For being the best brother I could ever hope for.”
“I am not. I just… I just love you, and—”
“And that’s enough. That always was enough,” she says, making something hot and bitter rush up my throat as my eyes sting until I close them.
So I hold her tighter, drawing as much comfort from her hug as I did when I held her in my lap as I first taught her how to play a videogame, or when I tried to teach her how to read with a manga that Mom immediately confiscated, or when she had scrapped her knee and just wanted to be held by an older brother who still seemed tall enough to take care of everything wrong with the world.
A world I sometimes only faced because of her.
“No,” I finally answer. “If… If there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that love isn’t enough. Love is just the start. The beginning. It’s what you do with it that matters. It… It doesn’t matter that you love someone if you just stare at them while they read a book in the club room, or if you joke about how dumb they are when they keep trying their best despite everything through a whole year. That’s not enough. It’s only when you do something loving that it begins to matter. When what you feel is turned into a part of the world you share with that person. When you act as that love demands you do.”
Komachi’s breath slows down, and she gently pushes away until she’s looking up at me.
“… That is incredibly sappy,” she says.
“It’s kind of my thing,” I answer.
“It’s so sappy it goes way past the line.”
“I am aware.”
“I bet that makes Iroha blush,” she finally adds.
“… Among other things,” I say, looking away from earnest eyes too pure to know the dark, kitsune-shaped truth.
And she flicks the tip of my nose.
I look back at her with mild startlement, and she’s smiling something a bit wry but maybe also somewhat sappy.
“I am proud of you,” she says, making that mysterious eye-tingling return out of nowhere.
“I don’t deserve it. I should’ve been more careful, thought about the consequences—”
“There are four of you. Don’t take it all on your shoulders,” she says, almost dismissive.
“That’s… That’s not how I work, Komachi.”
And then she looks at me, the wry smile becoming just a bit sad before it brightens.
“I know. I know, and they know. So you’ll get better. With their help. Because, otherwise, Komachi is going to be very displeased,” she says, her fang ominously glinting in the warm light of her bedside lamp shining from behind her.
“I think I should warn you that both Shizu and Haruno are the kind of martial artists that scoff at following the rules.”
“Well, I don’t even know the rules!”
“That’s not as reassuring as you think.”
“But reassuring enough for you?”
I look at her.
At the young girl still hugging me, still trying to comfort and support me despite everything.
At my sister.
And I nod.
“Yes. More than enough,” I say.
And then I kiss the top of her head and get a bout of dizziness as crippling tension finally leaves my shoulders.
***
My room is dark.
Which, really, it should be, given that it’s the dead of the night and the lights are turned off.
Certainly, it’s perfectly reasonable that it should be dark. This is a mere statement of fact, an observation of objective reality, and not a chuuni attempt at projecting the inscrutable depths of my black heart on my surroundings.
It’s just that… I can’t sleep.
And so, finally, maybe a tad influenced by the speech of a certain girl far too prone to trying to turn me into a were-Komachi, I reach behind me to the shelf where my phone rests and press a button on the side of it that makes me hiss quite a few swearwords after I’m painfully blinded by the white rectangle of light glaring at me from my hand.
I wait for a few moments until the pain just becomes mild discomfort.
And I write.
‘I’m guessing you’re in the middle of plotting something nefarious, vengeful, and spiteful,’ I send to the one person I hope won’t be awake and doing precisely what I expect her to be doing.
‘My, you know me so well, my dearest Hachiman,’ she immediately answers.
My lips twist into a smile that, I think, may resemble Komachi’s earlier one. The wry and sad one.
‘Count me in,’ I tell Haruno.
The phone keeps glaring at me in my hand, the icon of the other person writing a reply blinking in and out.
‘Always,’ she finally says.
And the sad portion of my smile lightens.
