“Pity?” Hana asks as if she doesn’t understand the very concept.

“Funny, isn’t it?” I say, looking away from her eyes to follow the stream of smoke coming from beneath the armrest and between my fingers hanging barely past my sleeve. “I wonder how many times it has spoiled a deal for you.”

I don’t.

Not really. Not after these past few days and what she tried to pull with that stack of papers whose hard facts I’m blissfully unaware of because it’s far easier to remain calm when you know that there’s a knife pointed at you but aren’t seeing the light glinting off its edge.

“I don’t feel any pity for you, Shizuka,” she says, my name an insult on her lips, the fake familiarity just returning what I did when I went from Ms. Yukinoshita to Hana.

Flower. Flower under snow.

How very fitting, I guess.

“I could’ve guessed as much,” I finally say, looking back into her eyes and showing just a hint of how tiring this whole exchange is.

“Could you? Is this your famed insight into troubled youths at play? Is this what you used to manipulate three—”

“I have manipulated absolutely no one, but go ahead, make me even more furious. It’s not like I have the means to get some very high-ranking people in your company in jail.”

“What happened to no threats or blackmail?” she says, lips twisting into the beginning of a vicious smirk before she schools them into yet another placid line.

I have to restrain myself from making a cigarette-crushing fist, which means I don’t have the mental resources to spare so that I won’t grind my teeth.

A bad habit that my mouthguard allows me to indulge too much in.

“You are right,” I finally say with a curt nod. “I told you I wouldn’t threaten you anymore, didn’t I?”

“You did,” she says with a flat tone, and I almost can believe I did not just put her off balance.

But I’m used to feints. As much as Haruno runs rings around me when it comes to that part of our respective arts, that’s Haruno on a good day, and Hana…

Dark eyebags revealed by angry tears smudging off expensive makeup.

She isn’t having a good day.

“Right. So that just leaves talking like adults—”

“You just punched me and slapped me.”

“And you threatened everyone I love and tore my lover’s heart in pieces. Be glad you still have all your teeth.”

“Hideo Nakayama no longer has, does he? A lover’s spat, no charges pressed—”

“He was stealing from me—”

“And you were drunk and beat him up. Is that a pattern, Shizuka? Something that the school board should’ve been aware of? Or maybe something that any lover of yours—”

“Call me an abuser. Go ahead. See how far you can push me before I finally lose control.”

“Would that be my fault, then? If I made you so angry that you just had to hit me?”

Jaw clenching.

Heart thundering. Everything fading but the opponent in front of me.

Eyes. Eyes and shoulders.

Thank you, Dad.

“Yes,” I finally manage to say despite my field of view narrowing. “Yes, it would be your fault.”

She grins as if she’s scored a point.

She may have, in her deluded way of seeing the world.

“You keep slipping on your promise about not threatening me, Shizuka. It makes one wonder about your sincerity.”

When I raise the cigarette up to my lips, it’s crooked but still serviceable. I’ve managed not to crush it by some miracle of will.

The smoke feels harsh in my throat, and I realize that I must’ve screamed at some point because my throat is raw when it shouldn’t be.

She’s playing me.

I don’t know about politics, and she’s a master of the game. I don’t have half as many cards up my sleeve as she does on that damn stack of papers. I don’t know about her like she does about me, thanks to those damn detective reports she must’ve paid through the nose for.

I should be losing.

But I can’t lose.

I look back into her eyes, the cracked ice gleaming over a thin smile, and I consume the last of the cigarette before I flick the filter to her desk, the stupid thing landing by sheer chance inside of the teacup I already used as an ashtray from the very start, even if a part of me was actually hoping to hit her in the middle of the forehead.

I breathe.

Because that’s also part of the fight, you know? Keeping your head cool. Thinking when you just want to go full throttle and lose yourself in motion rather than planning.

Eyes.

Eyes and shoulders.

I can’t lose.

So I won’t.

“I just told you I pitied you,” I say, going yet again for my cigarette holder and feeling the textured silver on my fingertips before I open it to once again be comforted by the often-disregarded concern Dad had engraved on it.

“And I just told you I don’t,” she says as I slowly and deliberately light up the new white cylinder, watching as my zippo’s flame licks the edges of the paper without sucking the flame in, just observing it first blacken and then glow until I look back into icy eyes that must’ve fooled someone at some point.

I take the smoke in and slowly let it out in yet another curtain between our gazes.

“How do you think that article was written?” I ask, pointing with glowing red at the creased paper now in front of her.

“You tricked Haruno—”

“You forced Haruno to distance herself from us as abruptly and suddenly as possible, which is the only reason we knew something was wrong as soon as we did. And I’m guessing you used Yukino as leverage to get her to agree—”

“I haven’t used my daughter—”

“And that’s why I pity you,” I say with a sad, tired smile that is…

Genuine.

I never told Hachi how much it can hurt.

But he learned it on his own.

“You pity me because I won’t use my daughter? How telling, Shizuka—”

The smile on her lips dies when she finally realizes the way I look at her.

I’m still furious. I still want to break a few bones in her body and claim that she fell down the stairs, adding the line just for her crack about my ‘abusive tendencies.’

But anger’s not the only thing I feel.

“How did we get our hands on that, Hana?” I say as kindly and softly as I can.

She hesitates.

“Kanade Isshiki once was an investigative reporter. She must’ve been researching our conglomerate—”

I take something out of my coat’s right pocket. Something blue.

‘A baton,’ an unbearably corny man would say.

“Kanade Isshiki managed to write that article in a single night after Iroha explained to her everything that’s happened and begged her mother for help,” I say before I slowly place the USB memory stick on the dark wood in front of me. “She found the information she needed in this. And this… This was filled in a single night after your daughter decided she couldn’t ask you for help.”

She’s looking at it, just… The mask is slipping, and I can see the genuine despair. The heartbreak. The knowledge of just how much has been placed in my hands by the people she claims to be protecting from me.

“You…” she clears her throat, and I could almost believe she’s calm if not for the quivering of the shoulders I’m always keeping an eye on. “You said that Haruno stayed away from you,” she says.

Lost.

And I do pity her.

But I’m still going to hurt her.

“She did. The one who gave us your files was Yukino.”

She breaks.

Or, more accurately, she finally shows how broken she’s been from the very start.

“You’re lying,” she says out of stubbornness rather than belief.

“Haruno backed down because hurting the company would’ve hurt Yukino, didn’t she? And Yukino—”

“You’re lying,” she says, standing up abruptly, the office chair rolling away from her as she holds onto the edge of her desk with hands that only tremble for the brief moment that they aren’t desperately clutching anything solid.

“Call her,” I say, staring straight past shattered ice. “Ask your daughter to tell you what she thinks of what you’re doing.”

It would be simple, wouldn’t it? For a mother to talk with her daughters. To get their version of events before making any rash judgment on their behalf. Simplicity itself.

‘Simple is not easy, champ,’ Dad said with that infuriating grin of his as he walked me yet again through a proper hook, making me repeat it in slow motion to memorize the form. To engrave it in my body after tens of repetitions before letting me go at a heavy bag for the first time.

It isn’t. Simple’s rarely easy. But for things like this, it should be.

“They have phones, Hana,” I prod her, trying to remain as gentle as Haruno and Yukino deserve me to be.

“You… You’ve poisoned her. She…”

“First I’m lying, now they’re mistaken, next it will be Hachiman manipulating them. Don’t you see what you’re doing to them? To yourself?”

“Shut up. You don’t have the right—”

“I love Yukino like the hurt child she was when I first met her. I love Haruno like… like somebody I can no longer live without. What other rights do I need?”

And she, finally, looks back up at me.

The tears are no longer angry or frustrated.

“What do you want?” she whispers.

And I could remain calmly seated, purple smoke drifting up from the cigarette dangling from insolent fingers as I watch the woman hunched over in front of me, on the other side of a desk piled up with two kinds of blackmail.

But I’ve never been good at politics.

So I take yet another page out of the book of the man who refuses to learn about politics, and I stand up before I calmly walk around the desk to stand by the side of the broken woman.

And I clasp her chin to turn her head and get her to look up at me.

… It’s a very good thing it’s me and not him in here.

“Talk to them. And listen,” I say, yet again as gentle as they deserve me to be.

Them, not her.

Because I can pity someone and hate them. I can see all the loathsome deeds behind a placid façade. I definitely still remember her threatening not me but them.

But…

But I’m not Hachi.

I wouldn’t have torn a nosy, bitter, lonely widow’s heart apart.

And, as much as I’ve done it to the woman in front of me… That’s the start of things, not what I was aiming for.

“Just like that,” she says, her voice barely trembling. “I should just call Haruno and Yukino, and… and…”

And she laughs an ugly, bitter thing that has the stiff shoulders of a plum kimono quiver.

Then she slaps my hand away, and I can see the glimmer of fury sparking behind her eyes, the need to act rather than dwell on what has just been said as she opens her mouth for yet another hateful invective.

So I take a deep drag of my cigarette and blow the smoke right into her open mouth.

Which makes her bend over in harsh coughing, and that may seem petty right after what I was thinking, but…

…

Okay, it may be slightly petty.

“What does it take, Hana? What does it take for you to believe what we’re telling you?” I say, trying to sound distant rather than… well, slightly amused.

And very much furious.

She takes a moment to regain her breathing and then glares up at me with fresh tears in her eyes, this time just from the coughing fit.

I… I could see a bit of Haruno in her. A bit of the defiance and stubbornness. The anger at the world not being what she wants it to be.

A bit of Hachiman, as well.

But… But the main difference… No. The two differences are very simple: what it is that they want the world to be, and what are they willing to do about it.

“You’re… You’re just defending yourself,” she says, glancing at her stack of papers. “This isn’t about my daughters, not really—”

“Hire me,” I immediately say.

“What?” she answers, more stunned than when I slapped her.

“Hire me. Make me work for you. Have me under your heel. I don’t care. I just want you out of their—I just want you to stop hurting your own daughters to get at me.”

“I am protecting them from you—”

“Then do that! Have some actual power over me! Because this?” I say, disdainfully waving at her stack of blackmail so harshly that my coat’s sleeve snaps and the first pages flutter away. “This will only make me fight you harder. Go after me, not the people I’ll do anything for.”

“You’re insane—”

“I’m in love. Of course I’m insane.”

And that seems to be yet another slap to a woman who has to take a step away from me, her limp hand trailing over the edge of her desk when she…

When she forces herself to stop fleeing.

I can see the twisted thing behind broken eyes stirring, trying to see what just happened from all the angles she can conceive of, making and discarding plans as fast as Haruno would, even if in entirely different ways, because Haruno’s mind has been shaped by experiences Hana never had and disciplines that she never trained in. Because Haruno, as forceful as she innately is, was trained in aikido, and so she understands the importance of letting go in a way that I just know Hana never did.

Even if Haruno never let me go.

Because there’s always a bit of madness in being in love.

“What would I even hire you for—” she starts, trying to appear calm and composed despite the ruined makeup because that’s the only strategy that she was ever allowed to use. Because I can see the shape of the one who hurt her into never acting emotionally or, at least, pretending she doesn’t.

But I also see others.

I see Iroha, acting as the bright child she would’ve been if her father wasn’t scum and her mother hurt, trying to fit in despite the bullying she was subjected to for years.

I see Hachiman, not quite acting and not quite pretending, except doing both things in the very worst way possible. Showing the world a ruthless, sincere part of him that would shield the softer ones.

I see Haruno. Haruno and her collection of masks. Her acting games. Her personas to be put on and discarded according to who she was trying to be a friend to because she never learned to just be.

I see a crying girl sitting on the floor of a school’s corridor because she’d been used and discarded by a stupid boy who likely never realized what he did to one of my students when I was just starting out and learning what it was about teaching that I actually cared about.

And I see Inoue. Inoue and his doomed attempt at hiring a school counselor with a psychologist’s degree years before he decided to bet on me and my doubtful reputation as a rookie teacher with a penchant for meddling.

So I…

I answer.

“To head your new charity,” I say.

And she shuts her mouth.

The thing behind her eyes moves.

And I go back to my seat.

***

“You can’t expect me to agree to this. It would cost millions just to set up,” she says, more comfortable now that we’re talking about numbers rather than people.

Or, well, now that she is.

“Remember when I told you I wouldn’t threaten you?” I say.

“Vividly. And I would rather not take that utterance as a show of how trustworthy your word is.”

“You didn’t ask why,” I say.

She raises an eyebrow. It comes across as elegant now that she’s taken the time to clean the tear streaks to appear tired and drained rather than utterly broken.

“I assumed it was a way to soothe your conscience,” she says with the sarcasm dripping off every syllable.

“Almost,” I say. “It was a way to soothe theirs.”

Her eyes narrow, and I take that as a silent invitation for me to continue.

My fingers itch to reach for a new cigarette, but I restrain myself this time because I’ve already used too many of them as shows of aggression for me to light up another one and not expect that to be seen in the worst way it could be seen at this very moment, so, when I take a sigh and slowly let it out, there’s no curtain of purple smoke pouring out of my lips.

No matter how much I wish there was.

“They know me. Every single person I love knows me because I was never any good at hiding who I am, and whenever I tried, I only hurt myself and others. And they know how much it would go against my principles to just… just point at something you did wrong and take that as my win.”

“A draw, at the very best,” she says, meaningfully looking for a brief moment at her own weapons.

I snort.

She… may have not taken that well.

“You’ve hurt your daughters all their lives because of the conglomerate you’ve convinced yourself is the only thing you will leave them. You’ve sacrificed everything to get them their legacy and wealth. And both of them have threatened to destroy that very legacy out of repugnance for your actions. Do you really think that’s a draw, Hana?”

She pales. And, without the artfully applied makeup she wore at the start or the tearful mess of moments ago, I can see the very life drain out of her as her shoulders slump, and even rage flees from slack lips.

“I’m sorry,” I say. Because I am. “That’s… that’s part of it, you know? That I am sorry. But I also am sorry for the people you’ve hurt over the years. And I… I can’t just learn about something this horrible and be happy about getting my way. I need to do something about it, or I wouldn’t be myself, and maybe I can take that wound, but I can’t take Haruno looking at me and knowing I’ve betrayed myself because of her. That’s… that’s just…”

I trail off and look at her, begging her to understand without any more words.

She, of course, doesn’t.

Or, at least, she pretends not to.

“You’re a hypocrite,” she says.

And I almost laugh when my mind immediately comes up with somebody saying in a punchable, smug way that not only is he a hypocrite, but that he’s proud to be one.

Damn it, Hachi, stop making me mushy in the middle of my fated duel.

“Maybe,” I say with a shrug that makes me keenly aware of the cigarette holder in my coat’s inner pocket moving up and down with the gesture. “But think about it, Hana: the Yukinoshita conglomerate taking a stance for the mental health of Chiba’s youth, being in contact with all the local schools, managing to reach out to the community—”

“Mental health,” she says like it’s a swear word. “Out of all the inane things you could be begging me for, you resort to mental health.”

“Yes. Yes, I am. Because I can give up teaching if it’s for this, and neither Haruno, Iroha, or Hachiman will feel like it’s a defeat.”

“Of course it wouldn’t be. You’d go from a teacher’s salary to—”

“To going to college and getting my psych degree while living off my savings.”

She pauses.

Her eyes narrow at me, and I can see the attempt at sliding the ice back in place, a barrier between her and a world she never quite managed to understand. A Haruno who never…

…

A Haruno who never met me.

And there’s that pity again.

“Some would say that would be a good career investment,” she says.

“Some don’t have the slightest clue of what it will take for me to maintain my apartment and car while studying and working part-time jobs for years of no financial stability whatsoever as I stress out of my goddamn mind about whether you’ll fulfill your end of the deal,” I say, scoffing with no attempt whatsoever to disguise what I think of the accusation.

“My word is far more reliable than that of a violent thug.”

“I’ll take ‘violent thug’ over ‘abusive partner and groomer,’ thank you very much.”

“Those are not mutually exclusive terms.”

“Your face is not mutually exclusive.”

She blinks.

“That makes no sense whatsoever.”

“I’m drained after days of wringing my brain and trying to come up with a way to solve this that doesn’t end up with my boyfriend destroying my girlfriend’s family, and I just put my future in the hands of someone who unapologetically hates me, so my wit may not be at its best. What’s your excuse?”

“I’ve been hit and berated by the woman who seduced my daughter in her teens and claims to have the moral high ground on me, then slapped with my other daughter betraying her family just to indulge her older sister’s scandalous, impossible to ever become public, romantic entanglements, and the woman who seems to be behind all of this is now pressuring me into founding a charity that will bind the Yukinoshita name to one of the most unpopular causes in the country.”

I tilt my head.

“Admittedly, that does sound like a good excuse,” I say.

She snorts.

And I almost cheer at her finally being at least a little bit human.

***

The cool air of early spring hits me when I finally exit the Yukinoshita compound, a mild breeze tugging at my coat’s tails and making my pants cling to my ankles.

I stand there, in the middle of the broad sidewalk, in front of the double gates, and I finally fall into temptation and pull out my cigarette holder out of my coat’s inner pocket, opening the silver case to find the three remaining white cylinders and…

And an engraving.

‘Please, for my peace of mind, quit it.’

My shoulders are still tight with the tension of the past few hours, and the yearning for nicotine is harsher than ever.

I still smile.

At the concern. The words that mean so many things. The line that he told me time and time again when he learned of yet another instance of me meddling where I shouldn’t, putting myself in harm’s way because of a kid that would stop being in my life just years or months after I had crossed a line for them.

I smile, soft and tender, taking this moment for myself before I call Iroha and Hachi to let them know that Haruno is finally free and before I gear up for the rant I’m going to throw in the infuriating woman’s face as soon as she gathers the courage to visit me again.

Taking this moment just to remember Dad’s concerned, caring, proud voice.

And then…

Then I take a cigarette out and snap the silver case closed before I walk away with something white and unlit dangling from my lips.

 

 

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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 105 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!