“So. Alone at last,” I say with overdramatic levity, my left wrist bent and the tips of my fingers demurely brushing over the top of my chest, adopting the pose as soon as the door closes behind the pair of students who will be the death of me.

Let’s just say that Iroha’s enthusiastic greeting was… memorable.

And that she coped a feel. Or two. Or left my entire body tingling before I even thought to push the dangling human koala off me.

And then he had to pull that stunt of his, forbidding me from leaving, making me feel… leashed. And isn’t that a discovery?

“They did the dishes. They cooked and did the dishes…” Shizu mumbles, staring at her clean kitchen like somebody who’s very much not used to her significant others being at all domestically minded.

That, or she’s playing things up.

So. I guess we’re doing things the hard way.

“I’m sure we can find something else for you to do,” I say as I come up from behind her and surround her waist with my arms, pulling the taller woman to me and burying my face in her long hair as a matter of course.

She smells… like tobacco, in all honesty.

But even that’s not enough to detract from her own scent, the aroma I caught fully for the first time when we were both drunk but not drunk enough to push past all the things that held her back.

Yet again, proof that my planning skills are overrated.

“Haruno?” she asks, unsure, even as she rests her right hand on top of both of mine, holding me against her belly and the warmth that seeps past her button-up.

“Shizu,” I affirm.

And she turns around in my embrace, looking down at me just… just enough to make me feel…

A lot of things.

Some of them I’m already used to.

“Never again,” she says, repeating his words and making me close my eyes as I feel her voice surrounding me, holding me, keeping me from drifting away.

“You’re such a hypocrite,” I mumble even as I tilt my head back and, surrounded by darkness, the traces of tobacco, and the scent of her body, wait for her to claim me.

As if she didn’t already do that much years ago with no more than a smile and a sideway look framed by a setting sun behind a school rooftop.

“I mean it,” she breathes out before her lips brush over my forehead without puckering into a kiss, the caress descending by the corner of my eye, making me shiver until she finds my lips.

And then I melt.

I fall back, not clinging to her, my hands trailing along her back and under her hair as I fall with the speed of a petal drifting down from a tree until her arms tighten around me and stop me, her hands possessively clutching my shoulders from behind as her lips press harder against mine.

There’s no tongue intruding into my mouth.

She doesn’t need it.

Not to brand me, to make me feel each and every single thing she always evoked in me. From the warm acceptance to the incredulity, to… the anger.

The anger is very much there.

So I let go of her back and cup both her cheeks, mildly pushing her away from me, half-hoping she won’t heed the gesture, that she will keep pushing until I’m spread under her on the wooden floor.

She, as ever, betrays my expectations.

And I open my eyes to find her uncertain gaze. To find what should be steel hesitating at the slightest hint that I don’t want this from her.

I want it. Crave it.

But I also don’t.

“We need to talk,” I say, trying not to lose myself in being held by her, in my body limp in her grasp, in the warmth and softness of her cheeks on my palms, on… on my first love looking at me with too many things to number.

“Do we?” she asks with a hint of wry humor that makes me arch my eyebrow in a very Hachiman way.

“At some point, yes. Tempting as it is to let you ravish me on every horizontal surface of this apartment,” I answer.

Her eyes drift to the pull-up rack installed on the wall by the TV stand, and my eyebrows raise farther in alarmed symmetry.

“Horizontal?” she asks with her own eyebrow waggle that makes me hold back a whine and press my thighs together.

“You can’t talk with your face buried between my legs. Please don’t make me put that to the test.”

“You have a very roundabout way of trying to discourage me from having sex with my girlfriend.”

“Shizu…” I whine—I mean, dignifiedly protest.

She rolls her eyes.

And then dips me lower, my back going as horizontal as the floor I’m certain she’s about to set me down on before…

Before she shifts her body around mine and her left arm slides under my knees as her right hand supports the back of my head, Shizu slowly rising up while she holds me in what, under almost any other circumstance, would be a very undignified bridal carry.

It doesn’t help that her usual attire is groom-like enough.

“This won’t let you escape from the scolding I’m about to give you,” I say, trying to ignore the blood rushing in my ears.

“Yes. The scolding you will give me,” she mumbles as she starts walking, pausing by the switches of the lights of the kitchen and living room so I can press them for her as she keeps holding me, pressing me against her, making me…

A lot of things.

So I obey the silent cue and wet my lips, staring up at eyes that hold the glint of steel yet again as she walks clad in a darkness marred only by the shifting lights of a city at night coming in from behind her balcony before she enters the short hallway that takes us to her bedroom.

Of course, when I open the door for her, I’m greeted by the colorful, moving lights of the LED strips adorning the glass case with her Gundam figurines, and my libido mercifully plummets.

“One of these days, you’ll act your age,” I mumble, only for her to shoot me such a betrayed look that my libido makes a disturbing comeback, paired with my need to soothe whatever it is that has upset her.

… Damn them. Both of them. This is all their fault. I was never this much of a sentimental mess before they delved into the pool of razor-sharp shards of my emotional equilibrium.

“The figurines are meant for adults. Kids can’t afford them,” she mutters.

“That’s… the worst argument I’ve ever heard about the maturity of a hobby,” I say, trailing my fingers down her cheek.

“I could talk about the plot and themes, but you’d mock them regardless,” she says.

I look at her, biting the corner of my lip for reasons I’d rather not elucidate that much on, no matter what the part of me that’s always watching from the inside out demands of me, and I force my hand to steady on her, to cup her cheek and direct her to look at me.

“I always hurt the people I love,” I say with as much objectivity as I can. “You know that. You’ve known that part of me since you met me. But I’m trying to change.”

She stares at me. Down at me. Through me.

Into me.

And I’m yet again that high school girl putting on masks, trying to see which of them would fit, which one would be perfect enough for people to…

To love me.

But I’ve got them. All three of them. And… And if that girl had met them sooner, maybe Yukino and I would’ve been better sisters a long time ago.

“I love you as you are, Haruno. You don’t have to force yourself,” she says with…

With the compassion of someone who means every word, even if they will also encourage me every step of the way as I shed past burdens and take on new ones.

And she wonders why we fell for her.

“Aren’t you getting tired?” I bashfully ask, looking at the firm arm by the side of my head, at the casual display of strength that makes me feel secure in ways I rarely do when not relying solely on myself.

“Of you? Just a bit,” she answers with a cheeky grin that almost has me stab her side with a spear hand before I think about how that will likely end up when she yelps and trips back, and…

… I admit it’s somewhat tempting to go ahead nonetheless.

“You’re thinking something devious,” she accuses me, as unfounded as ever.

“Hi, it seems we haven’t met before. My name is Haruno Yukinoshita; how are you?” I answer.

She, as her only answer, rolls her eyes.

And throws me on top of the bed.

Which would be far more romantic if the mattress didn’t bounce me right up, and I have to reflexively grab onto her sheets to avoid rolling all the way to the other side of the maybe inadequately sized piece of furniture to crash against her maturely expensive figurines.

Then, right as I pull myself away from the edge of the bed and the averted catastrophe, she jumps on top of me.

On the mounted position.

… I almost launch into another mixed martial arts rant out of sheer indignation.

“So. You got me,” I instead say, as dry as I’m able as my heart races and tries to take my breathing along with it.

“Do I?” she asks, her hips pressing down on mine, her hands on my shoulders, very much intent on not letting me go.

Which points at layered meanings and questions that aren’t what they first appear as.

How unwise of you, Shizu, to shift the battlefield back to where I’ve got the home advantage.

“You had me a long time ago,” I say, not adding the silent yet very much audible ‘and you threw me away.’

She, to her credit, doesn’t flinch. Because we already had this conversation. We already fought and cried and fucked over this issue.

Over my first kiss and how it remained my only one for years.

“I did. I had you. And you almost ran away,” she says, her tone lowering and dropping all pretense of lighthearted teasing.

Which prompts me to narrow my eyes and glare at her as the shifting colors wash over both her face and the loose locks of black hair that are short enough not to bathe her entirely in shadow.

Mounted position.

There are ways to escape from it. To reverse it. The most straightforward one is called ‘the shrimp,’ and I would refuse to even entertain the undignified notion in most circumstances.

Right now?

I move with the speed and grace not of trained muscle, but of trained motion, of the utter awareness of my body and the mechanisms that allow me to turn thought into form. The things trained and drilled through long hours spent in a place suffused by the scent of tatami mats and old wood, wearing a heavy hakama drenched with my sweat, and hating every second of the quintessentially Japanese pomp and ceremony that accompanied my chosen art even as I struggled to integrate objectively useful teachings.

My arms slide above the inside of her elbows, rolling inward, down and toward me, as I pull and drag the edge of my forearms against her firm biceps, triggering her to release her locked posture and fall forward.

On top of me.

This would be the start of the escape: bringing our bodies together to make it easier to roll on the floor until I’m on top of her.

I don’t do that.

“How dare you,” I tell her, the heated cloud of my own breath washing over me as it bounces off her wide-eyed face.

“Haruno, you were going to go to Paris—”

“I was going to save you. But you couldn’t let me do that one good thing—”

“Of course I couldn’t! Can’t! I won’t ever let you hurt yourself—”

“And you’ll hurt yourself instead? How—what kind of logic do you follow to make that acceptable?”

Her eyes narrow and she tries to straighten her arms, but I don’t let her, one hand on each of her wrists, my arms crossed firmly over my chest to lock hers against me.

She hesitates for a single moment, and then she grabs my shoulders yet again. Tighter, this time.

“You can’t compare my choice to yours,” she says, not realizing how stupidly hurtful she’s being.

“Of course I can’t: mine made sense.”

“Cutting off all contact with us? For the years it would take you to graduate from whatever snobbish program you selected to get your mother to accept your proposal?”

“It would’ve been two years. Two years in an elite institution, in Paris, studying a field of law that—”

“That isn’t the one you’re interested in, but the one you thought your mother would accept,” she says, as sure of this as she’s ever been about… about the things she speaks of when she grows quieter and wiser.

I look up at her, trying to find something in the face shaded by her dangling bangs and the shifting bands of color coming from the plexiglass display to my left.

And, when I don’t find it, I blow her fringe up.

“Wha—don’t do that!” she says, reflexively trying to pat her hair in place but rapidly giving up when I don’t let go of her wrists.

Which, somehow, ends up with her butting her head against my front like a cat demanding affection as unsubtly as Yukino does from Yui.

“It’s still out of place,” she mumbles, her eyes crossing when she looks at the wild bangs hanging in disarray as I try not to blink up at her in sheer confusion while holding onto my indignation.

It’s both easier and harder than it sounds.

“How can you be so sure?” I end up asking, my tone softer and slower.

She smiles.

She smiles, and I resent how easy it is for her to make this dark room all that much brighter.

“Because if I believed even for a single second that you wanted to go, I would’ve helped you pack your suitcases,” she says, taking my breath away.

Until I think about it for the time it takes me to blink in growing annoyance.

“Really,” I say, my tone as flat as Hachiman’s learning curve when it comes to acceptable social behavior.

“Yes?” she says, about as confused as Iroha when she hears the word ‘no.’

“You would have helped me pack my suitcases to move to another continent,” I clarify, hoping against hope that she’ll catch the impossibility of the statement before I need to declare it myself.

“I… It would’ve hurt. But if it was… If I believed at all that it was for the better—”

“I’ve got my phone saturated with your messages! If I take more than five minutes to answer or, Heavens forbid, I leave you on read, you start bombarding me!”

“I—I add pictures! To make up for it!”

“Which is why I can no longer check my phone with any nearby witnesses! Do you even realize how Mio’s looked at me ever since the school swimsuit incident?!”

“It’s Hachiman’s fault! All of it!”

“Why—how—oh, as a deterrent. That’s… That’s absolutely genius. So long as we define genius as somebody who never bothered to think about what would happen if he had to show his phone to his mother.”

“He what—okay. Okay, I’m no longer sending him pics. You will have to explain that to him, though.”

“I’ll cherish seeing his hopes and dreams crumble before my unyielding gaze,” I say, about half as serious as the wording implies.

It’s… somewhat baffling that Shizu starts giggling at that, though.

“What?” I ask, trying to ignore my hands protesting the prolonged effort of holding a taller, stronger woman in place.

“It’s… It’s just…” she drifts off, trying to stop laughing for a moment, only to catch a glimpse of my face and devolve from giggles to outright guffawing.

… I’m getting somewhat miffed.

“Sorry!” she says. “It’s just… ‘Hopes and dreams’…”

Another look.

Another fit of hysterical laughter.

Resigned to the loss of all gravitas, I let go of her wrists, uncross my arms, grab her shoulders, and spin us around until she’s under me, staring up in wide-eyed…something that I’m not ready to acknowledge.

“This is an anime reference, isn’t it?” I ask in the most rhetorical way possible. “This is an anime reference that makes you giggle in an asinine, puerile way, so it’s a sex thing, so… Hopes and dreams… Sex… Is this about—”

“Breasts. It’s a euphemism for breasts. Please don’t make it weirder than it is,” she says with a half-smile.

“Ah,” I say.

“Yes,” she answers.

And…

And I have to close my eyes and take a deep breath to avoid getting lost in yet another senseless tangent.

“I’m pissed off at you,” I say. “For sacrificing yourself in my name.”

“The feeling’s mutual,” she answers.

“Then… why? If you understand that I wouldn’t want—”

“Haruno… what were you thinking?”

I look at her.

She’s lying on top of her sprawling black hair, lines of color shifting over locks briefly interrupted by the lavender sheets we’re lying on top of, her face smoothed by shadows that enhance the mystery she always carried around her even at her most ridiculous.

And she has that soft smile. The smile that came out on windswept rooftops or on night rides in expensive cars. The smile that was never there when we drank in loud bars, except when the time was just right for a quiet moment of what I feel most Catholics look for in confession.

The smile that I fell for before I understood what loving was.

“That I had to save you,” I finally answer.

Her hands reach up to me, and I have to suppress a brief urge to pull away that she sees through as easily as ever, slowing her touch until I lean toward her in acceptance and her fingers glide between my own locks to trace cool, soothing lines over my temples, past the tips of my ears.

To my nape.

To pull me down so she can kiss my forehead.

So she can then hold me, press me down against her chest as she lies soft kisses on the crown of my head, and her fingers prolong those soothing lines into tender caresses that reach down my neck and have me hold back from shivering in something I’ve held onto for days of nightmarish nerves and unacknowledged fear.

“That’s the difference, Haruno,” she murmurs. “You wanted to save us. I wanted to save us.”

I could argue about the phrasing. Tell her how it makes no sense. How she should’ve chosen better grammar.

But I understand.

I understand the difference between the two ‘us.’

And… and a part of me doesn’t want to. Doesn’t want to accept it. That the second one exists. That I’m allowed to be part of…

Part of us.

Her arms tighten around me, holding me against her, rocking me back and forth, and only then do I realize my hitched breath and the edge of something about to come out that I won’t be able to hold back once it does.

“It’s all right,” she says. “I’m here. We’re here. We’re not going anywhere,” she says without a hint of accusation for how it was me who almost left.

“Please,” I end up saying despite the thing trying to strangle any and all words. “Please, don’t ever let me run away.”

There’s a brief silence, a moment in which I finally understand the disproportionate anguish she feels when I take too long to answer her messages.

Then her lips meet my hair yet again, and warm breath filters through my strands:

“I won’t stop you from leaving. But you can’t stop me from following.”

***

The Haruno in the mirror is finally looking somewhat composed.

Not that such a statement means much of anything, given…

Given who I am.

But I’m not pretending. I am… myself, looking at myself, waiting for the pieces to slide back together, to find in lavender eyes what I once saw in the mirror of a love hotel.

Except I didn’t see it by myself, did I? No, it was…

I spent my whole life alone, in one way or another, earning skills and strength from wherever I could find them, walking toward a goal I didn’t want to name.

Preparing myself to become… Either an heir that could protect Yukino from my own burdens, or somebody strong enough to leave my family behind.

That was part of it. Of the games I played, the masks I crafted. It was about becoming that lone woman who could have done what a younger, more childish me had once dreamed up.

I took pride in it, misguided as it was. In excelling by myself.

In strength that didn’t come from anywhere but my talent and effort.

But it didn’t work. It never worked.

Because every piece I lacked I found through and thanks to another. Because it was Shizu who talked me out of the piece of wonderful advice Mom gave me to deal with my peers. Because it is Iroha who allows me to see my mischievous side in a light that is not as hateful as I’ve grown used to.

Because it was him who forced me to love the Haruno in the mirror.

At least… at least a tiny bit. A fraction of how much I’ve always loathed her.

A start.

My fingers trail down the cool glass, and our shared smile is bitter, a thing that trembles at the edges and has our eyelids shift in uncertainty.

But a smile, nonetheless.

And one that is, and damn them all for it…

Genuine.

So I take out my phone and finally do the thing I’m supposed to do while hiding here after washing my face and combing my hair back into an acceptable state.

“You’re hidden in her toilet and can’t speak too loudly,” he says as soon as he picks up.

“You know me so well,” I answer with a slight drawl, the smile in the mirror growing warmer, fonder, and surer.

“I think I do,” he says.

And I believe him.

The conversation is brief, halted, just a few exchanged lines full of his worry for the two girlfriends he’s left behind and the one having yet another conversation with her divorced mother.

He worries too little for himself.

But he’s got us for that.

And, after I say goodbye, the thought hits me that…

That I’ve got them. To worry for me.

***

“Are you done conspiring?” she asks with half a smile and a wave with a hand that precariously holds a glass of sloshing amber whisky.

“Never,” I answer as I walk past her sofa and turn to her kitchen to pick up the bottle of red she always keeps in her fridge just for me.

The gesture would be more appreciated if it didn’t come from a crate of a dozen bottles I gave her long enough ago that she should’ve already drunk them all by now. As it turns out, Shizu’s tastes are both exquisite and pedestrian when it comes to alcohol.

Which is… entirely on brand.

So I grab one of her few wine glasses from her cupboard and slowly fill it up with a thin stream of red that I allow to fall from high enough that the dark liquid swirls and bubbles, aerating the drink and waking up its aroma.

I think about storing the bottle back in the fridge, but…

But I look at Shizu peering over the backrest of the short side of her L-shaped, mottled, often maligned sofa.

And, before I join her to continue our talk, I bring the whole bottle with me.

 

 

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This work is a repost of my second oldest fic on QQ, where it can be found up to date except for the latest two chapters that are currently only available on Patreon. Unless something drastic happens, it will be updated at a daily rate until it catches up to the currently written 111 chapters (or my brain is consumed by the overwhelming amounts of snark, whichever happens first).

Also, I’d like to thank my credited supporters on Patreon: aj0413, LearningDiscord, Niklarus, Tinkerware, Varosch, Xalgeon. If you feel like maybe giving me a hand and help me keep writing snarky, maladjusted teenagers and their cake buffets, consider joining them or buying one of my books on Amazon. Thank you for reading!