Agrippa
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All Right! Fine! I Will Take You! – Chapter 72 – Haruno Yukinoshita Is… Herself
🕑 Added 2023-03-27 09:56:53 +0000 UTCThere’s a usual misconception in those animes both Shizuka and Hachiman seem to love so much (and isn’t that an understatement, given I’m pretty sure Iroha would get unhealthily jealous of the way those two treat their respective libraries of consumerist escapism), and that’s how geniuses work.
As in, they don’t.
A genius character will show their much-vaunted intelligence by learning about a subject seemingly through sheer osmosis, barely putting in any effort, and just glinting their (usually square) glasses in an ominous way before launching into a self-satisfying tirade about how little everybody else’s travails amount to.
That, or they’ll be a walking encyclopedia full of random factoids to tirelessly expose the (possibly tired) audience to.
Usually both.
Because that’s what genius amounts to in popular culture: having a smartphone and being lazy and smug about it.
The truth is… Being a genius can be a pain in the ass.
“Haruno? Aren’t you coming to—”
“Something came up, Mio. Will you be a dear and lend me your notes later?” I tell my most acerbic classmate.
She rolls her blue eyes, brushes her long hair behind her shoulder with a dismissive gesture, and nods before marching away from our usual bench beneath a cherry tree near the campus entrance and to my Philosophy of Law class.
Because I can afford to skip it, but I can’t afford not to know what will be said in it.
See? That’s the kind of thing you have to watch out for. Because, as a kid, I could afford that. I could pretend to pay attention in class while my mind was miles away and then just take a cursory glance at the textbook and ace the upcoming tests. That was easier than actually acting like a regular student.
Because doing that was mind-numbing.
Trying to keep staring at the teacher while they ranted on and on, going over the same subject again and again, answering the most insufferably inane questions my classmates would throw at them… That was almost impossible. I kept drifting away, lost in a far more interesting tangent that my brain would come up with.
And that was one of the few things I should be grateful to my mother for.
‘I know what it’s like, Haruno, but it won’t last.’
‘What do you mean, Mother?’ I asked somebody who hadn’t been ‘Mom’ since years ago, when she’d failed to reassure me about what was wrong with Yukino.
She sighed and folded her hands on her lap, as primly as ever, her head tilted at precisely the right angle to compliment her barely-there smile.
And then she dropped it.
Suddenly, my mother’s eyes were cold. Piercing. And I was no longer looking at a mask.
‘This,’ she said, pointing at my grades report on the living room’s table, to the side of the high-backed chair she was sitting on while I lounged on the leather sofa to her right just to make things slightly uncomfortable for her. ‘You can keep coasting with barely any effort put in, but, at some point, that just doesn’t work anymore. At some point, and that point could be next year, or it could be when you start college, you will no longer be able to get by just because you’re smarter than your classmates. You won’t be able to deduce the right answers in the middle of a test. The subjects will be complex enough that you won’t be able to keep up with them without doing what your classmates are doing right now—without paying attention, taking notes, and studying.’
I looked at her with a very skeptical eyebrow, and she scoffed.
‘I am sure you’re right, Mother—’ I said with all the healthy condescension an eleven-year-old could pack into the words.
‘No, you aren’t. Like I wasn’t at your age, and like Yukino won’t be years from now.’
I, at the mention of my sister, shut up.
And Mother almost smiled.
‘Make a game out of it,’ she said.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘Pretend. Try to come across as… not normal, but just shy of abnormal. Act as if you need to do all those things. To act like your classmates do. And then, when you do need it, you won’t have to change the way you act that much.’
‘And if I never do?’ I asked. Because I was a genius, but also a dumb kid.
‘Then you keep playing the game. You skirt that line between seeming approachable and normal and being yourself. You show… You show them something they won’t be threatened by. Something that you craft. It’s a game of pretend, Haruno. You always liked those.’
Mother’s advice was… questionable.
Up to a point, it was the right thing to tell me, the right path for Haruno Yukinoshita to be a perfectly fitting member of Japanese society. Somebody who would be revered for being exceptional without being shunned for being too different.
It was also precisely the one thing that would end up with me crafting an inadequate mask that would keep failing again and again, that would drive poor, nouveau riche Yurika away once she got a glimpse of what was underneath it.
That would…
Well, that’s what I’m actually grateful for:
It was the one piece of advice that would set me on the path to being rescued by Shizuka Hiratsuka.
So, thank you, Mom. I really couldn’t have done this without you.
I sigh as I stretch back against the green wooden bench underneath the still bare branches of a tree that is quite a coveted spot once spring comes along, and the rain of cherry blossoms becomes that quintessentially Japanese spectacle, one of the few I do appreciate.
The morning sky is still somewhat gray above it, through the dark, thin boughs. It’s a clear sky, devoid of clouds, but the blue is still that of winter despite it being a late one, despite spring steadily approaching.
Like Shizuka.
…
Oh, Heavens, they are infectious.
They and their damn sappiness.
Seriously, Hachiman? Fucking me against a mirror with both a flair for symbolism and for making me feel naked in all the ways that matter? Holding me with those scarred eyes of yours, caressing me in and out with your words and your gaze, making me open, bare?
Making me care?
How dare you, you impossible man. How dare you make me…
Like this.
My lips twitch in that smile I keep trying to hold back since this all started. Since Shizuka defeated me one last time. Since we had our own rematch.
Since…
My first love.
The one I should have held for. The one I should never have stopped chasing.
Except I didn’t, did I?
And… And as much as I regretted failing, as much as I resented her for not being true to what she taught me on that night I first took her lips and she rejected me… She’s coming.
I’m here, waiting for her.
For the woman I love.
And, yet again, I can’t hold back my smile.
***
“You are a moron,” I tell her.
“I mean…” she replies, fidgeting in the way she does when acting completely unlike her age.
We are walking through the dirt path cutting across one of the grass squares around the campus, and she’s wearing that white coat of hers that looks precisely like her usual lab coat, because Heaven forbid she deviates a single iota from the aesthetic she has so painstakingly claimed as her own, that masculine flair of thrilling danger and cinematic mystique that falls apart at the slightest hint of the still childish traits she has so carefully preserved despite the years and frustrations.
Because she wants to be genuine, and that, apparently, extends to building robot models and putting them into colorfully lit glass cabinets.
… I have terrible taste in women.
“The principal gave you an out,” I try to explain to my most frustrating lover—and that’s definitely a high bar to clear.
“I know that. It’s just… I don’t want to deny—”
“Yes, is this the police? I have somebody who would like to make a confession—”
“Give me that!” she says, frantically reaching for my phone as I reflexively hold it up and away, and she ends up jumping for it, her body pressed against mine, her face suddenly in front of me, flustered and flushed.
Just as planned… I would like to claim.
But I’m staring at her, my own eyes as wide as hers, and…
And I kiss her.
Because damn them.
Because Shizuka is here, with me, being herself, and I… I don’t want to let her ever get away.
So my free hand wraps around her waist, over the folds of her white coat, and I cling to her as our lips press together, and I relish, once again, in her not pulling away, melting against me, sighing into my mouth, tilting her head to deepen the angle of our slow, tender kiss.
It ends up with my eyes closed, our foreheads resting against one another.
“Please, don’t risk this,” I beg her without even meaning to speak.
She… remains silent.
And then slightly cold hands hold my cheeks, and I open my eyes to find hers. To find that gleam of silver I dreamed of through so many lonely nights. The gleam I dreamed of waking up to.
And… this isn’t the childish Shizuka. The easily flustered, amusingly frantic, eye-rollingly appealing Christmas Cake.
This is that other side of her. The one that captivated me on a school rooftop, telling me that I was special but that it wasn’t special that I was.
This is the Shizuka that changes lives.
“I don’t want to. I don’t want to lose you—any of you. But… But am I really doing the right thing if I don’t confront this head-on? Am I not condemning Iroha and Hachi to hiding, to keeping a secret that will keep threatening them for years still? Haruno, I know that abandoning them isn’t… isn’t an option. But that doesn’t mean keeping things as they are is.”
And this…
This is what another Haruno could have latched on.
It would be so easy. So damn easy to twist her around, to lean on that weakness of hers for doing what is right for others and not herself. To steer her away from the two underage lovers and into my arms. To make her only mine.
It’s a pity I no longer want to.
If I ever did.
I put aside the complicated mess that is understanding my own twisted wants and needs and sigh before I look straight at her, in…
In a way that I have looked at very scant people.
Hachiman amongst them, on that night that I told him I can’t get drunk.
And that, quite likely, he also can’t.
… Iroha is an entirely different matter, and she won’t for years if I have anything to say about it.
“You’re making this more complicated than it needs to be,” I tell her, cupping her left hand over my cheek with my right one, the warmth between us growing with every shared heartbeat.
“I don’t want to hear that from you,” she almost reflexively answers, her wry smile a thing of beauty.
“Well, take it as an expert’s opinion, then,” I answer with my own self-deprecating grin.
“You sure are… Wait, did we just kiss in public?” she asks, another hint of the panicked Shizuka coming up to the surface.
I cock an eyebrow at her.
“I seem to recall we’ve been on dates,” I tell her.
“That—that’s different! People know you around here! Anyone could recognize you—”
“So?”
“So—I don’t know! Do you really don’t care if everybody knows—”
And I kiss her.
I drag her by her nape, and this time I’m not gentle. I push my tongue past her lips, and I take as she lets out a muffled sound of maybe surprise, maybe something entirely different, as I wrap my right leg behind hers, my stupid skirt getting in the way of straight up circling her waist and grinding against her.
I don’t let her go until… Until some time after.
Minutes.
I think.
Or, rather, I don’t, because my head is now filled with the kind of haze I’m pretty sure Hachiman would relate to heart-shaped pupils, and isn’t that a disturbing image—
“Ah…” Shizuka doesn’t quite say, her own pupils still disappointingly round.
“I don’t need to hide. We don’t need to hide. Hachiman and Iroha don’t need to hide. And if their dear teacher and her girlfriend decide to spend some time with the adorable new couple of Sobu High, that shouldn’t be anyone’s business but our own,” I tell her.
“You make it sound so simple…” she says, her eyes still locked on mine, still making something race up my spine.
“Because it is. Because if it ever gets to be too much for them, they can tell us. And we’ll work on it when it comes to that, and we’ll do our best so that it doesn’t happen, but causing problems in advance won’t help them at all. Trying to spare them any suffering by causing it here and now is stupid. It’s the kind of self-sacrificing idiocy that—” ‘that led to me having my heart broken after my first kiss,’ I don’t tell her, the urge to draw blood held back for once, “—that made you as unhappy as you ever were. And we want you to be as happy as you can possibly be. We want you to be you, Shizuka, and that’s the scatter-brained, solemn at times, wise-sounding despite it all, mess of a human being that… That I love. I love you, Shizuka, and—”
“Shizu,” she says, cutting me off.
“What?” I stupidly ask.
“Shizu. I… Iroha and Hachiman call me like that, and I… it feels right. Like something… ours. And I want you to—”
I kiss her.
I kiss her, and my fingers tangle through wild, black, long hair that envelops me with her fragrance, overpowering freshly cut grass on a campus quad that any single one of my classmates could walk through at any time. And I don’t care. Not even for the reasons I just told her, but because everything but soft lips and softer sighs is fading away, becoming less than background noise as I lose myself in Shizuka’s—in Shizu’s scent and touch. In her arms wrapped around me as fiercely as I could have ever dreamed as she pushes me, tilts me down until I’m holding onto her not to fall, and I don’t mind it at all because that’s all I ever wanted: to have her keep me from falling.
My ever-errant thoughts quieten, and there’s only… a kiss.
With the first woman I loved.
***
“So…” I try to start, still somewhat flushed and out of breath as we sit on another green bench under another bare tree. “I…”
I drift off.
She chuckles.
And I blush.
My cheeks burn as pleasantly as I could have ever hoped, and I can’t help the silly smile that keeps flitting through my lips despite what should be a serious moment as we face the first true crisis of our relationship.
But… But we’re facing it together.
And that somehow makes me… happy? That she’s relying on me for something other than going out for drinks and bitching about her terrible love life in a comical enough manner as to elicit a single spark of schadenfreude past the tangled mess of feelings that always evoked. That she’s…
Wait.
Who’s she going to bitch at about me?
…
I mean, she has other friends, but that was kind of our thing, and I know just how much and how intensely she can vent when she goes off on a rant about her latest lover’s bout of idiocy, so I’m pretty doubtful she’s already found someone who can withstand that.
Unless she does it with Hachiman.
…
For some reason, the thought of Shizu talking Hachiman’s ear off about the latest way in which I’ve made her doubt her sanity and thenme seducing Hachiman into spilling all the juicy details is making my current warm and pleasant mood turn into something slightly more… heated.
Oh, dear. I guess I just found a new fetish.
How amusing.
“What are you thinking about?” she asks, squeezing my fingers between her own, our entangled hands lying between our almost touching thighs.
“I…” I manage to hold back the words about to rush out and turn them into something slightly more diplomatic. “I was just wondering about who’re you going to talk to about our relationship issues. You are the kind to need some venting from time to time—what is it?” I ask as she goes suddenly pale.
She briefly licks her lips and looks at me out of the corner of her eye.
“I…” I arch an eyebrow when her pause grows too long, and she closes her eyes while making the kind of face a guilty child would make. “My father wants to meet you!”
I… blink.
She opens her eyes and looks at me hopefully.
“Shizu…” I say, my tone carefully even, “could we pleasehave a single crisis at a time?”
She has the gall to shrug.
“I’m dating you, Hachi, and Iroha. You have enough collective issues that I figure I’ll be making this up to you all soon enough,” she says.
My eyes twitch.
Mostly, because I can’t think of a good, sincerecomeback.
At least, not one that she wouldn’t end up bitching to Hachiman about.
