In this, our magnificent series on the ins and outs of the anime industry in specific and otakudom in general, we’ve already talked about anime parents. It’s not surprising at all, given both the depth and breadth of our lectures, but some points may have previously remained unaddressed.

While it is a staple of the genre that parents will remain suspiciously absent in a way that would make child protective services start looking for foster care homes, there are alternative takes on the subject. Particularly when there’s an excuse for the hero to act independently of said parents, such as with the magical girl genre, parents will often appear, even if only to be kidnapped at the most inconvenient time for a blonde girl who still, to this day, complains about not being good with computers.

Just…

Okay, ponder this for a second, will you?

What would a parental figure add to Goku’s journey? Nothing at all. Goku is the hero, the quintessential shounen powerhouse. He doesn’t get anything from somebody looking over his shoulder, and that would only serve to introduce a superfluous character to the cast.

Now, on the other hand, what does Ranma get from having his parents around?

Conflict.

He gets a clash of opinions with his scumbag of a father, who keeps getting Ranma in increasingly creative trouble the likes of which would make child protective services start looking for a shotgun. He gets to hide his true self from his mother. He gets to…

To be a real person with real issues, even if presented in outlandish, fantastic ways.

“Is this the place?” my real yet outlandish issue asks.

“Yes, Mom, this is where one of my girlfriends lives, and she’s unlikely to have had the time to pack her suitcases in the little warning time I’ve given her,” I answer.

Mom looks back at me over her shoulder, and it’s hard to guess at what’s going on behind her mask because, no matter how much of Haruno’s little tips and tricks I’ve grown accustomed to…

Okay.

Let’s try this again.

Four people are standing in a corridor lined by apartment doors on one side and a banister that Iroha told me I would never drop her from on the other. The group of four people consists of an anxious little sister constantly tugging on my sleeve in ways that do not remind me of Iroha, an adult—a grown man who hasn’t said much of anything to me since I woke up to find out we’d all be going on a little family excursion, and a woman I had a bit of a clash with after a talk that got me to drop my defenses in a stupid moment of vulnerability that, thankfully enough, Komachi was there to shield me from the fallout of.

So. What would a genius, detective-like character infer from this situation?

Other than that I’m fucked, I mean.

“Do you want me to…?” my father asks my mother, pointing with his chin at the door, and she turns toward him for a brief moment of a silent, shared glance that I should be able to decode before silently, slowly shaking her head, squeezing his hand, and letting go of him for the first time since we got out of the car.

Right.

Deduction the first: my mother is anxious about meeting my older (older, not old) girlfriend, Dad’s here as moral support rather than giving any kind of input, and I don’t need to make any kind of mental effort to arrive at these conclusions because they already were apparent enough when we were told we would be having breakfast at Shizu’s place.

A self-invitation that I had to convey on my own.

… Shit.

Okay, deduction the second? Mom’s unsure about what’s going to happen. She hasn’t come in with a proper plan, which is… quite uncharacteristic of her. She’s still shaken from yesterday, be it from my revelation of precisely what I’ve been getting up to on all my recent absences from home or because of Komachi’s confrontational support. She hasn’t decided how today’s going to turn out.

I… can use that.

But I really don’t know how, much less now that she’s finally decided to push the doorbell button, the unpleasant buzzing reminding me of all the times I’ve stood where she stands and—

“Mrs. Hikigaya, Mister Hikigaya. Good morning,” Shizu says, not at all the frazzled, pajama-wearing mess that I would’ve expected to open the door.

No, she’s, in fact, wearing her usual battle garb sans coat or jacket, the white shirt starchily ironed and the NTR barrier gleaming in the early light of a late winter sun that casts most of this corridor in grey shadows.

“Miss Hiratsuka,” Mom nods in answer as Dad waves his hand.

And then we stand.

Still.

Silently.

“Please, do come in,” my first girlfriend finally says, stepping out of the door and into her apartment with a defeated air that I would rather not analyze before—

What the Hell?

“Honored Mother and Father,” Haruno says as soon as we come in.

Kneeling in seiza. Haruno.

Wearing a kimono.

A kimono that is obviously expensive, one of those with the unwieldy, long sleeves neatly sprawled on the dark wood of Shizu’s floor, an embroidered scene of snow-covered fields in which colorful, blooming, lavender flowers peek through the winter vignette crawling all over her like a painting that harmonizes with the soft, measured rise and fall of her demurely covered chest.

A kimono that also quite apparently doesn’t belong to Shizu, closely fitting her body with the broad obi softening the fall between her breasts and stomach, Haruno’s hair combed up into a clipped updo that uncomfortably resembles that of Hana Yukinoshita, exposing her pale neck before she completes her deferential greeting by bowing forward until the tips of her fingers touch the wooden floor in front of her knees and her nape is bared to my eyes.

…

I guess this is better than her greeting my mother with a naked apron.

Somehow.

“Please, do come in,” she says, straightening up and elegantly rising to her feet before turning around with the short steps that the clinched kimono forces on her, leading us to Shizu’s living room, where a low table has been set on the floor, and…

Fuck, no.

“Haruno,” I let out with more harshness than I expected.

“Please, take a seat while I perform the preparations,” she says, the light coming from the balcony at her back casting her face in soft shadow as she kneels down yet again, though this time on an embroidered cushion with gleaming, golden thread set by the side of a lacquered table I’ve never seen before in this apartment as she reaches forward to pretend to fuss with the… the tea ceremony set.

I do my best not to groan, then take off my shoes and step past my dumbfounded parents.

“Don’t sit on the sofa—” Shizu starts to say.

“I already told them as much,” I easily dismiss her well-founded concern.

“—it’s still wet—wait, what did you just say?” she says with the first but likely not last hint of accusation of the day.

“The truth, and nothing but the truth,” I flippantly answer just to poke at Mom with a bit of a reminder about yesterday to see if she will get out of whatever shock she’s—

“You can drop that pretense right now,” Mom says, apparently getting out of that very shock.

“Pretense?” Haruno asks with a blinking confusion that fools absolutely no one, which tells me that the point is precisely that it doesn’t fool anyone, least of all my mother.

A mother who has taken her shoes off but maybe shouldn’t have if she was going to stomp dramatically into the living room. Shoes do add a nice rotund quality to dramatic stomping. I should know; I’ve done plenty of it.

Sometimes, even up the school stairs.

And, by the looks of it, so has Mom.

… Maybe not up my school’s stairs, though.

“You know perfectly well what you’re doing,” she says, staring down at Haruno in a way that makes all the times she confronted me seem like she was wearing the kiddie gloves.

“Greeting an esteemed guest brought up in a traditional household in a way that will make her feel at ease?” Haruno answers with more blinking, fake confusion.

Mom… doesn’t answer.

She, instead, sits down on the cushion situated right across from Haruno in a symmetrical stand-off that is all but casual.

“All right. Show me, then,” Mom says.

And Haruno smiles.

***

When I said that the cushion’s placement wasn’t casual, this is what I was referring to:

Dad immediately sat down on Mom’s right side, lending her his silent support like he usually does whenever I would rather he speaks up. Shizu, accordingly, even if reluctantly, sat across from him on Haruno’s left.

This made it so that Komachi and I had to sit on the two other cushions.

One by Dad’s side.

The other, on the side of the table, between my blood-related family and my two girlfriends.

If I wasn’t so tense right now, I would be plotting my vengeance.

“Please, do partake of the sweets. They should cleanse your palate so you can better enjoy the tea,” Haruno says, a smooth gesture of her left hand pointing at the platter filled with nerikiri, a snack rather similar to mochi, chewy and filled with red bean paste, yet colorfully decorated in a way that harmonizes with the black and red swirling lacquer motifs of a low table whose origin continues to elude me.

“I appreciate your hospitality,” Mom says, being as insincere as I’ve ever heard her, before taking one piece of the flower-shaped confection with wooden chopsticks and nibbling on the extreme of one petal.

I look to Haruno for a cue, any kind of guidance on what the Hell is supposed to happen now, but she isn’t meeting my eyes.

No, she’s too busy smiling placidly at my mother.

Shizu… Shizu does look at me, but her eyes are conflicted. And I quickly realize that her understanding of the situation is not much better than my own.

That she’s following Haruno’s lead.

And this would be a great time for Brain-chan to intrude and tell me precisely how screwed we all are, to which I would reply something along the lines of ‘Not with Komachi in the room,’ making the double-entendre follow-up all but obvious, and…

And I’m too busy trying not to outwardly react to the two women barely disguising the silent duel they’ve engaged in with a tea ceremony set as the battleground.

“I would now like to show the instruments,” Haruno says before Mom has finished her sweet or anybody else has taken theirs.

“Of course,” Mom says after a brief pause that I don’t quite understand until…

Wait.

Shizu is looking straight ahead, Komachi looks precisely as she has since we first came here, and Dad hasn’t reacted either.

… This is something hidden in the protocol of a ceremony that nobody but my mother and Haruno know the intricacies of. And I can only guess why Mom never taught Komachi and me.

But Haruno does proceed to show us the implements of tea making. The whisk, long spoon, bowl, and matcha powder. The pottery decorated with premature cherry blossoms because I at least know that much, that the decorations are supposed to match the season, so this is yet another message, even if the message could very well be, ‘You’ve forced me to prepare for this in such a rush that this is the best I could do.’

But that doesn’t match the obvious artisanry. The quality of the set we’re shown and expected to appreciate with silent, polite admiration as Haruno places the centerpiece of the whole set, a tea bowl decorated with a painting of blossoms falling from black branches and a sun that I can safely bet is crafted out of actual gold leaf like the kintsugi she once told me she likes so much.

That’s on one side of the mug. The other is… almost plain. Rolling green hills and white clouds that don’t match the detailed décor of the side that is supposed to face the guest when the tea’s prepared, the side that etiquette dictates always faces away from the person holding it so that the rest of the table can admire the artistry.

This is the kind of tea set that daimyos would be granted in recompense. The affectation of nobility that turned the ceremony into something for the rich to hold as a sign of their ancestry and the deeds of their clans. What, if I’m allowed to be as cynical as I usually would enjoy being, a cheapskate shogun came up with to save money when rewarding his vassals, only for the fad to become popular enough that I think it can safely count as the pioneering practice of the sale of NFTs.

This is a Yukinoshita heirloom.

And something cold drips down my spine when I try to think of how Haruno has gotten her hands on it in the short time she’s had since I called her.

“The decoration is exquisite. What’s the story behind it?” Mom asks while looking at the bowl that’s been set in front of her and that she’s turned away with two careful quarters of a circle.

“Thank you for your interest. The story is rather dull, though,” Haruno deferentially says before launching into a detailed explanation that follows along with Mom’s never-too-prodding questions regarding the NFT placed on the gleaming lacquered table.

Then, the bowl is passed along from Mom to Dad, from Dad to Komachi, and from my sister to me.

I finally meet Haruno’s eyes when I hold it, and I almost expect a signal for me to do something overly dramatic, anything at all to break the weird, silent atmosphere she’s dragged us all into.

But a demure, barely there smile pairs with an almost imperceptible shake of her head, and I…

I follow her lead and pass the bowl to Shizu, and Haruno nods at me with just a hint of gratitude to tell me this is the actual plan.

Whatever that plan may be.

So I just sit still, as uncomfortable as ever when in seiza, no matter how expensive the embroidered cushions may be, as my legs feel like they’ll fall asleep in short order.

I hold still, watching as Haruno gently wipes the tea-making implements with a pristine, meticulously folded, white cloth that she stores into the sleeve of her kimono as soon as she’s done with the performative cleansing, pouring hot water from Shizu’s clashing teapot into a big bowl in which she gently places the bamboo whisker and lets it rest for a bit.

I hold still as she keeps performing all the gestures of a ceremony I’m only peripherally aware of due to my own culture but that I was never taught. A ceremony in which my mother follows along in her role as the first guest, the one who makes conversation, asks about the things that need to be asked, shows appreciation, and, finally…

“I humbly apologize for taking the first drink,” she says as she once again turns the bowl away from her with two careful quarters of a circle.

And she drinks the green, foamy matcha tea that Haruno has vigorously whisked to, as everything she does, perfection.

“How was it?” Haruno asks.

Mom raises an eyebrow, caught in the middle of placing the bowl back on the low table.

“Exquisite,” she answers.

“Rather lacking in detail, honored Mother,” Haruno says.

And even I know the script just flipped.

“It’s a refreshing blend. Almost nostalgic,” Mom says.

“Ah, nostalgic. Such a great way to describe a flavor. I wonder though, what would Hachiman say if I asked what was a nostalgic flavor for him—no, I really don’t have to wonder, it would be that atrocity”—Oi—“he calls canned coffee. Komachi… what would a nostalgic flavor be for her? Maybe a favorite dish from her childhood? Something cooked for her by a doting parental figure?”

“How dare you—”

“What? Did I offend you with my words? I apologize. There wasn’t any implication in them other than mere sentimentality for a long-gone childhood.”

The delicate, expensive Yukinoshita heirloom is placed on the table with an audible clack, and Mom takes away a hand that I know is straining not to tremble.

“Is this your plan? To insult my family until I realize that I have no leg to stand on? To point all my failings at me until I have no recourse other than to admit that my son will be better off in your hands?” Mom says.

“It’s always nice to play the game with somebody who understands it,” Haruno answers.

Smiling softly, gently, cruelly. Quintessentially Haruno.

Or, at least, the Haruno that was so easy to see for so long.

“A game,” Mom says, almost mumbling, incredulous. “This… my child’s life is a game to you?”

“Isn’t it? Because it can’t be something serious. It can’t be a matter of import that requires an adult to step up and be there.”

“Haruno,” I finally hiss out.

“Yes, my dearest Hachiman? Have I said something you disagree with at all?”

I stare at her.

At lavender eyes so unlike those of her sister.

At a mask.

I despise her masks.

So I am myself. I reach out and pluck one of the sweets with my fingers, without the chopsticks politely placed for me to do so, and loudly munch on the stupidly delicious thing.

And then, I place both hands on the table and lean forward.

“I have missed at least half of what’s been going on—”

“Do you want me to summarize it? Just so you can follow along with the rest of us.”

“No. I have missed it because you wanted me to miss it—no, that’s wrong, you wanted Mom to feel like you were having a private battle and take the lead, slip up, let you take some insight of her that you couldn’t get from me. You wanted to lead her to this very moment, where she’s trembling with rage and frustration, and for me to react in confusion.”

“It is usually considered impolite for a man to explain a woman’s feelings,” she says, some levity dropping off her tone.

“It is always considered impolite to exclude people from a conversation, much less one filled with unstated insults.”

“Oh, you don’t know the half of it,” she says, her cruel grin growing, and—

“Stop,” Shizu says, her tone steely and firm enough to make me straighten in my seat.

“Why do I ever think things will go according to plan with you two involved? At least Iroha isn’t here…”

“Haruno,” both of us say.

“Fine! You want me to stop with the mind games? You want me to come out and say things straight and without subtext?”

“If you’re physically able to, I’ll be shocked,” Shizu mutters, causing a bit of a glare to come at her from the kimono-clad woman by her side.

“Prepare to be shocked, then,” she darkly mutters as she slowly stands up and looks down at my mother.

“I don’t think I will,” Mom answers, her jaw visibly tight as she glares up.

“How long did it take you to realize I had skipped the first step?” Haruno answers.

“Immediately,” Mom says.

“That’s a lie. You didn’t notice until I showed you the utensils. You just took the offered sweets like it was perfectly natural.”

“I was playing along.”

“And that pause and stare was playing along? Don’t fool yourself. How long has it been since you were forced to endure this ceremony? How long since your father stopped holding you to the standards of an actual heir and excluded you from instruction?”

“I don’t care what my son has told you—”

“Your son? You really expect my lover to tell me about you?”

And Mom stands up.

She’s… Haruno is taller.

She doesn’t look like it.

Not when the woman who raised me is all but trembling with unreleased tension, glaring at my girlfriend with an intensity that I’m sure would’ve made… other women stand back.

Women that aren’t here, sharing this with me, even if I once thought we would always share everything.

But Haruno and Shizu are. Here. With me. Witnessing my mother about to lose her temper for reasons I don’t quite understand, but that involve me. Reasons that Haruno is ruthlessly stabbing at with word and gesture. Wounds that are once more exposed after last night’s talk.

I miss having uneventful nights. I should apologize to Komachi.

Komachi, who’s here, with me, staring up in incomprehension but still reaching over the table to hold my hand in hers, offering as much support as I can give back to her.

“You lover? Which one, Miss Yukinoshita?” Mom finally says, her tone impossibly level, cold enough to burn. “Which of your lovers would tell you about me? My son, confiding about his feelings and wounds? His teacher, guiltily remembering a reunion with the parents of her own lover? Iroha, telling you about how she came into my house to lie to my face? Which of your three lovers would’ve confided in you? And if they didn’t, why haven’t they?”

“Because it didn’t matter,” Haruno says.

And I reel back.

Mom’s face is red, her hand trembling by her side, and I just know that she wants to slap the woman in front of her. I know that she wants to hurt her back.

She doesn’t.

And I don’t know why.

“It matters. To me,” Mom weakly answers.

“Is that what does matter, Yumiko? That it matters to you?”

Mom remains silent. And Dad stands up.

An arm over his wife’s shoulder, another shielding her from the woman in a kimono, a glare that I’ve never seen on his face.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says. The first thing he’s said since he offered to ring Shizu’s doorbell.

“Don’t I? About parents who see what they want to see? Who don’t know or care about their children’s wants and needs? Who know best?”

“Haruno—” Shizu starts, rising in slow symmetry to match my father’s posture, protective but ready to hold our girlfriend back.

“No! No, you—you all just got me back precisely from this. I almost lost you because of this. I won’t let—”

Shizu embraces Haruno.

And I stand.

On my side of the table, between two couples wounded and supporting one another, fighting over me.

So I kick it.

The lacquer slides over the wooden floor with a scratching noise that hurts my househusband instincts, and green, foamy tea splashes out of a wobbling bowl that thankfully doesn’t fall to shatter into very expensive pieces, so I step forward and kick the table again until it’s clear of the space between the four of them.

And I step into it, only realizing at the last moment that I’m still holding my sister’s hand and I have dragged her into the line of fire.

A line of fire that she willingly steps into, squeezing me back without looking at me.

“What do you want?” I ask.

“What?” Dad asks.

“Not you. I know what you want,” I say, ignoring the hurt I see in his eyes. “Them. Mom. Haruno. What the Hell are you getting at?”

“You know what I want,” Haruno says, a pleading note in her voice that many wouldn’t recognize. That only someone who held her as she saw herself in a mirror would easily catch.

“Hachiman—” Mom starts.

“What?! What did you expect to get from this? Marching in with barely any warning after the day I had yesterday? After I told you just how raw they both would be? What the Hell, Mom?!”

“I—the truth. I wanted the truth,” she says, tone once again weak in that way I can’t stand, the hurt that makes me feel guilty and angry at the same time.

“I told you the truth,” I say, refraining from yelling again, noticing my throat itching just after the fact.

“I—I need to know that… Hachiman, please,” she says with a voice that has Komachi squeeze my hand tight enough to hurt.

“What?” I ask, unable to elaborate the question further.

Haruno isn’t smiling.

Shizu is.

It’s… it’s that smile. The soft, gentle one that usually precedes words that I’ll hold onto for the rest of my life, and I almost miss it in my disorientation, in the whatever it is that has my head pound and my teeth grind, that makes it so hard not to squeeze Komachi’s hand with even more strength than she does.

But I find it. I see Shizu’s smile.

And maybe it’s because of it that I manage to look back at my mother in silence and wait for her to speak.

“I need to know that they won’t hurt you…” she finally confesses.

I could say a lot of things. I want to say a lot of things.

Haruno does it before I can.

“Hurt him like you did?”

It’s like a punch in my stomach.

“You have no right,” I mutter.

“I love you. What other right do I need?” she says, Shizu gasping at the words, and…

And Haruno’s mask slips.

There’s no barely-there smile, no mockery, no infuriating sense of distance. No cruelty.

Just… Just a woman who’s hurt and scared and wants to cling to the people she desperately doesn’t want to be torn from.

Her eyes shatter, the ice behind the lavender once more showing the jagged edges, and I’m drawn in like I’ve always been to broken things that I desperately needed to mend.

“Stop,” Komachi says.

And my little sister pulls me back and away before stepping right where I stood.

“You love him? You love my brother? Then why? Explain to me why would you go to these lengths to torture my mother in front of him when you know him. Explain so I can understand, Haruno, because I don’t. Because I can’t see… why would you hurt him like this if you love him?”

‘Because it’s genuine,’ I manage not to say.

“Because that’s not the goal. It’s what’s happened, but not what I’m doing,” Haruno says, careful and gentle like she rarely is—like she rarely shows herself to be.

“Then what the Hell are you doing to my family?” Komachi asks, her arm pushed straight behind her, keeping me away from this so I can only watch her small back in front of me.

Haruno looks at me over my sister’s head, and something flashes through her eyes faster than I can catch before she grabs Shizu’s hand on her belly and takes a shuddering breath.

And pulls the hand away.

“I… I really don’t know why I even try to plan things anymore,” she mutters before slowly kneeling down to reach over the displaced table for the expensive bowl that has withstood two kicks. And then she looks back at me once more with an apologetic smile.

Then at Mom with no smile at all.

“Force of habit, I guess,” Haruno mutters before shrugging her shoulders and standing up once more, spinning the bowl once again with the two careful quarters of a circle that end up with the front of the drawing facing my mother, the guest of honor of a tea ceremony that has definitely not adhered to the principles of harmony and quiet that the stereotype tells me are an integral part of it.

“This…” she starts to say before pausing yet again, looking first at me, then at Shizu, then apologetically at Komachi. “This is a family heirloom, obviously enough. Your mother,” she says, talking to Komachi, “knows perfectly well how important these bowls can be in traditional families because she was part of one.

“Even if you two aren’t. Particularly because the two of you aren’t.”

“I still don’t understand,” Komachi says.

And Haruno smiles. Broader and somewhat freer.

“I’m glad. I’m glad you don’t, Komachi,” she says. “Because that means you grew apart from something that your mother wanted to keep you away from. That she didn’t let your grandfather do to you what she did to her.”

“You know nothing about that,” Dad says with more acid than I’ve ever heard from him.

“Don’t I? I know your son. I know his desperate need to help. To fix what’s broken. Who did he get it from, I wonder?”

“Careful,” Dad says, something in his eyes that is… ugly. The same ugliness I can sometimes see in the mirror when I let a part of me come out that just… that just wants to fix what I know I can tear apart.

“I’ve never been, and I’m not going to start now,” Haruno says before taking the bowl to her lips and draining it of the last remaining tea in a head-tilting, supremely irreverent way that, for a brief moment, makes me smile despite everything else.

“Dad’s not like Brother,” Komachi says in what could easily be an insult.

“No. Not precisely like him. But he does have that drive, even if he lacks the other part. He has the desperation, the need to feel needed, to take a broken bird and mend her wings. But he lacked someone to teach him all the things he needed to hear so he could really help rather than cling to old wounds,” she says, smiling at Shizu and making my eyes itch.

“Stop. Get to the point,” Mom finally says in a low tone that doesn’t contradict anything, even as she grabs her husband’s hand on her belly with paling fingers.

Haruno pauses. We all do.

And it’s ridiculous. Farcical. That we all aren’t yelling over one another, the fight devolving into a proper screaming match rather than listening to her theatrics. It’s…

It’s something that can only happen because of who we are.

A husband who follows his wife’s lead in everything, waiting for a cue to act. A mother still teetering on the brink of something she fears after last night. A sister who wants to give everyone a chance.

And Haruno pulling all the strings.

But, this time, it isn’t on purpose. It’s not an elaborate performance, not at this stage. It’s… It’s her being herself and drawing all eyes to the extraordinary woman who, for some reason, chose to fall in love with me and fight for me even if I get hurt in the process.

Because she’s leaning on the teachings of the other extraordinary woman that we both fell in love with. The one silently smiling at something that she can see about to unfold even if I don’t. Even if my much-praised insight is blind to whatever’s about to happen between my girlfriends and my blood family.

Haruno looks at me over Komachi once more.

Then she looks at Mom.

“You were trapped for your entire life until you found somebody who loved you enough to pull you away. I know what that’s like. I know… I know how hard you cling to somebody who does that for you. How impossible it is to let go.

“I know how scary it would be to see your son walk into something that even reminds you of that hurt.”

Mom stares. Just… stares.

Then she reaches out and takes Haruno’s bowl.

“Your mother is one of the most powerful people I’ve ever met. She’s terrifying. And she, because of you, now sees my family as enemies. My son has blackmailed her. He’s not safe as long as he’s with you, opposing her.”

She plays with the bowl, looking down at it, shifting it in different angles until the sun is once again facing away from her, and the golden circle glints with the light coming in from Shizu’s balcony.

“I didn’t ask him to do that. I… I tried to get away. Keep him safe,” Haruno says.

“Yet you let him fight for you. Like you knew he would,” Mom answers.

And Haruno nods with a flash of guilt that turns into a warm, loving smile as soon as she looks at me.

My chest aches.

“Why? Why should I trust you with him?” Mom whispers, staring straight into the empty bowl.

“You don’t have a choice. You think Hachiman would ever let go?”

Mom’s eyes close.

“I can still act. Do something. Anything at all.”

“How about supporting him?”

It should be a snappy reply. A verbal slap, just shy of an actual one.

It’s gentle, accompanied by a hand resting over Mom’s on the side of the bowl.

“I don’t trust you. None of you. And I know that you’ve made me focus on you from the very start so I won’t attack the teacher who got in bed with three students rather than the insolent woman putting on an elaborate performance.”

“I don’t think it’s a surprise for you not to trust,” Haruno says. “Not after everything.”

Their eyes go from one another to my father, then to Shizu.

Then to the bowl.

And both of them let go.

The expensive heirloom of the Yukinoshita clan shatters loudly between two angry women, shards of ceramic scattering away over a dark wooden floor, large pieces spinning even as they stop gliding.

And I’m pretty sure that Yukino will be pretty pissed when she learns about what has happened to her tea set.

Thankfully, we got Yui to deal with that.

 

 

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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 117 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!