There are plenty of differences between anime and Western animation, but there’s one that particularly stands out when you know what to look for.

Take a classic Disney film like, for instance, Fantasia. Each and every frame was hand-drawn, with staggering attention to detail. You can feel the animator’s strength in every meticulous pen stroke, in every flowing line of motion.

In anime? Recycled cells, lip flaps, backgrounds that clash horribly with the foreground… all of those are an everyday thing.

Except there are then exceptional moments. Things that stand out.

The technique is called sakuga, and you’ve always known about it, even if you didn’t know how or why. It’s in every painstakingly crafted transformation scene. In every fight that goes above and beyond. In every single moment that gets you from looking at functional scenes to art.

It’s… pretty much like life. You don’t spend all of your effort on everything all of the time. Rather, you… coast. You experience things as they happen around you, and choose where to invest your limited energies, where to try and make things go from a dull palette into something explosive.

Something worthwhile.

Even if you don’t always succeed.

Glimmering droplets of cool water trail down the back of my hands as I just hold a lettuce leaf under the stream of the faucet in Shizu’s kitchen. It’s already clean enough, and I’m just delaying in chopping it to make a simple salad, but, in this single moment, it’s… eye-catching. The white of the rigid vein running down its middle darkening into varied shades of green the farther you look toward the edges, the way the light plays across the now glossy surface, how it reflects bright dots over where moisture clings to the vegetable in my hand…

How pointlessly beautiful.

“You tried,” Iroha mutters as she hugs me from behind, getting up on her tip toes so she can rest her chin on my shoulder, by the side of my neck.

“I failed,” I counter.

“No,” she gently denies, rubbing an almost massage over where her face presses against me with her slow shaking. “It’s not over.”

“Isn’t it?” I ask, trying not to smile at… her.

Just at her.

“We’re all exhausted. Let’s… let’s just get dinner and relax. We’ll have more time to talk tomorrow. And the day after. And every other day that we care to, now that… Now that we have those,” she says before adding a gentle brush of her lips to my neck.

I sigh and lean back, pressing against the girl clinging to me.

“You agree with her,” I say, trying not to accuse her.

“I don’t. But I also… I also don’t see a better way, Hachi. Do you?”

I look at the glimmering leaf in my hands. At the way each and every droplet becomes a sparkling gem when turned at the right angle for dull fluorescent tubes to transform them into something else. Something that goes beyond the everyday.

Sakuga.

Of course I’d find it in Shizu’s apartment, out of all places.

***

“Thank you. For dinner,” my host says as I stand with my coat on in front of her doorstep.

And I… I could say a lot of things. A lot of things I’ve already said.

But I look into her eyes, and she’s exhausted. Drained after a day of fighting and worrying.

Of sacrifice.

So, for once, I back off. Hold my tongue.

And hug her as tightly as I can.

“Please. If there’s anything. Anything at all. Please,” I say, being too much of myself.

Arms still stronger than mine surround me, and she pulls me tight against clothes that still reek of chain smoking in anxiety for hours.

I bury my face in her chest, right under her neck, and breathe in as much of it as I can.

“You’ve done more than enough, Hachi. I… I couldn’t have done it without you.”

“It’s cruel of you to tell me precisely this.”

“It’s genuine,” she says with a smile shining through the tone and words.

I can’t help it: I snort. It’s not even bitter.

Not when I pull away and find her kind, caring eyes waiting for mine. When I see a smile that’s every bit as Shizu’s as any I’ve ever seen.

“I’m furious at you,” I say.

“I know. You’re a stubborn, mulish malcontent,” she answers.

“I know,” I say.

And then, of course, I kiss her. Despite the hurt. Despite the mild sting of betrayal at her wounding herself on behalf of us. Despite everything that makes it so maybe I should refuse touching her until my head’s clearer and I can properly feel past the storm of thoughts that never settle into a proper plan.

Despite a lot of things.

But because she’s Shizu.

And because I love her.

***

“Call me if you need me,” Iroha says as the fingers of her gloveless hand trail away from mine, her warm touch lingering on me, acting as a shield against the mild chill of a night that is still more winter than spring.

“Likewise,” I say.

And she looks like she’s going to say something. Anything. Maybe a teasing remark about what I’m asking her that will end up with me bending forward, or slamming her against the nearest surface, or…

Or she just smiles at me and goes to the door to her house, constantly turning to look back and wave at me until she giggles, and I laugh at the third time that she fails to get the key in because she’s too busy saying goodbye to the boy standing in the middle of the sidewalk, unable to move away from the beautiful girl that can’t get into her home.

But then the key finally turns, and a last smile and wave are thrown my way before Iroha disappears, and I’m left alone, with not even a last, unexpected appearance from Security-kun to break the silence of the street at night.

So I take a last look at the home where I slept for a few much-needed hours this very morning and turn away to walk toward my own home, where I spent a night unable to rest as I kept wondering how else everything would go wrong today.

The worst part?

I already knew.

Not completely. Not like Haruno would have. Just… Just what loving Shizuka and having been taught by her has turned me into. Just that…

That I sacrificed myself because I didn’t see anything wrong with it. Because both Yui and Yukino knew better than I did what I was doing and why.

But that when she sacrifices herself…

It’s because she’s noble.

I have trouble processing that, and not even cool air on my cheeks allows me to focus enough to work past my feelings and into the Monster of Logic. The one part of me that can model Shizu’s own Monster of Duty without understanding it.

Haruno… She knew precisely what she was saying that one night, what feels like a lifetime ago.

And, of course, that’s when my phone rings.

“You’re hidden in her toilet and can’t speak too loudly,” I say.

“You know me so well,” the detective-like character that I take too many cues from says in what could be a sultry whisper if not for the obvious, implied eye roll that carries through her voice, tone, and cadence in ways I can only understand from three girls and a little sister.

“I think I do,” I say with a smile that I become aware of with mild surprise.

Then there’s a small shared silence as I keep walking under the streetlights and bare tree branches, with only the breeze and occasional car intruding in me listening to Haruno breathe by my ear.

It’s a sound I feared missing. A small, irreplaceable thing that numbered high among all the other small, irreplaceable things I’ve been desperately fighting for.

My smile softens. But it doesn’t go away.

“How are you?” she asks.

“Better,” I say with no lie at all. “Much, much better.”

She giggles again, and my smile shifts as I feel something inside of me… loosen.

“I’m with her. Don’t worry,” she says.

“We should all be worrying about you, not her,” I say.

“It’s not about what should be, but about what is,” she deftly counters, accepting my words without being affected by them.

How aikido-like of you, Haruno. How effortlessly cool.

“How are you?” I then ask.

There’s a pause as I take a turn down into a broader street that will take me home at an hour when Komachi shouldn’t be awake to despair at my continued existence, and I look up from the sidewalk to just take in how it all stretches in front of me, the low walls on either side of the street letting me peek at houses with slanted roofs and trees that are still devoid of rustling leaves or seasonal flowers.

Some of them have windows lit from the inside, hinting at lives that go on despite the late hour. At families being together, sharing time. Sharing their lives.

I feel like this would be an ideal scene for me to be mildly tipsy. To maybe slowly smoke a cigarette trailing purple whorls behind me, the red ember on its tip harsh enough to point my way forward in the darkness of Chiba’s night.

Or, maybe, this would be an ideal scene for me to look up at the sky and realize just how many stars can still be seen despite it all. Despite the lights competing with them on my city, and the grey clouds tinted from below.

I’m standing in the middle of the sidewalk, doing just that, when I finally hear her answer.

“Better,” she says. “Much, much better.”

And the relieved smile on her tone yet again makes me answer with my own.

***

When I walk into my home, I find some light leaking into the corridor from the living room, and I prepare myself for Komachi confronting me during one of her night raids on the fridge.

“Hey,” Mom greets me instead.

I blink at her in mild surprise, watching the woman wearing a gray long-sleeved pajama top with blue shorts as she curls in the corner of our (not gray) sofa, one arm over the backrest, her left knee raised up and resting on it, and the left leg lying bent and sideways, with her foot tucked under the backrest’s cushion.

She’s holding a beer.

“Shouldn’t you be sleeping?” I say, for lack of anything better to offer.

“I should,” she groans. “I really, really should.”

Then she points with a sloshing can at the free space on her sofa, and it’s hard to take it as anything other than an order.

“Am I in trouble?” I ask as I sit down, too tired to care for putting up a grumpy façade.

“What? Why would you be?” she asks with enough confusion that I don’t immediately laugh at the long list of possible answers to offer her.

“It’s just… you’re waiting for me in the middle of the night. You’ve got work tomorrow, Mom.”

“I am just… Did you two break up?”

“What?” I answer with genuine confusion.

“You and Iroha,” she clarifies as her face twists into what she tried not to look like the first time she tasted Komachi’s attempt at cooking.

“Why are you asking me that?” I say, the confusion no less genuine than a line ago.

“It’s… You called, asking for permission to stay out late, and… and that wasn’t an ‘I’m getting laid’ call—”

“Mom!”

“Oh, hush. After all the porn I’ve caught you looking at, this is no time to be bashful—”

“High School DxD is not porn!”

“Then why don’t you let your sister watch it with you?”

“Because I’m a degenerate, but not that kind of degenerate. Besides, I watch it for the fights.”

“Sure you do.”

I look at the woman grinning at me over a can of beer dangling from her fingers in a very Misato way, and I try my best not to give her the satisfaction of groaning.

I, to my eternal shame, fail.

“You know perfectly well that’s not actual hentai. To start with, the plot is much worse,” I tell her.

“I’d rather my son didn’t explain to me the literary merits of his porn.”

“You started it.”

“And I’m ending it. Now.”

“Thank God…”

“You’re impossible,” she says.

Again.

Like so many other times.

Except… There’s that small smile. That hint of fondness and warmth that reaches eyes half-closed as the floor lamp by the side of the window stains the white curtains and casts her corner of the sofa in a warm light that turns her face into a study of shadows and…

The smile. It’s there.

“Thanks. I guess,” I end up saying.

“You’re gonna drive that girl insane…” she mumbles before taking a long sip of beer that conveniently hides my blanching horror at Iroha being even more of an Iroha.

“Kinda too late for that…” I mutter.

“Is this where you tell me that she’s already dating you?”

“What would I do without your intuitive grasp of my self-deprecating humor?”

“I don’t know. Maybe tell me about your actual problems when I wait up for you in the middle of the night?”

I raise an unimpressed eyebrow that is unfairly met with two flat ones ganging up on me like protagonists demonstrating the power of friendship on the Demon Lord.

“Mom… Everything’s fine—”

“Don’t. Tell me that you don’t want to talk about it, but… don’t lie to me.”

I look at her. At the woman that I may have truly first seen a glimpse of not that long ago, after Iroha’s visit.

“That obvious?” I finally say, slumping forward and away from the backrest, my elbows on my thighs and my hands interlaced beyond the edge of the cushion and below my knees.

I’m not looking at her.

But I still can guess at the complicated mess going through her eyes and lips. At every instinct in her body telling her to avoid this conversation even as she forces herself to push forward.

It very much mirrors my own.

“Was it your first fight?” she ends up saying.

“I… yes. And no. Just… The first serious disagreement. Everything else was just… I can see her point, but…”

I can’t tell her.

Not even because this is about Shizu rather than Iroha. Not because I’m lying to Mom. But because I don’t know. Because I understand what Shizu’s done, even if it makes my blood boil. Because I can see myself making that choice, but it’s unacceptable that she would take it herself, and the only thing I can think about is that I finally understand why Yukino was so furious and Yui so hurt when I confessed to Ebina, but I’d rather no understand that and live in a world where Shizu didn’t choose to hurt herself for our sake.

“Is it… Hachiman, what can you tell me about it?” she asks, prodding but not too deeply.

Fretful.

“It’s about who she is. And I like that person, I really do, but I don’t like that… I don’t even know. Is it unfair of me? Hypocrisy? Shouldn’t I just accept everything in the woman I—” I cut myself off.

And, when I look up, I find Mom looking at me with warm sadness.

“So. Love. Kind of fast, isn’t it?” she says, her lips trying to quirk into a smile.

“We… The first thing we had was friendship. Trust. I don’t think it’s that rushed to call it something else.”

“Ah,” she says.

And then comes a long, head-tilting gulp of beer that ends up with her crushing the can before stopping herself at the last minute from dropping it on the floor, instead reaching down to put it by her side.

“It’s a rush, isn’t it?” she says.

I nod.

I don’t know what else to add.

And, going by the wry curl of her lips, she herself doesn’t quite know how this conversation is supposed to go.

“Do you want to break up with her?” she says, making something hot and painful go through my chest.

“No. I don’t think I do,” I say, holding back on the words I really want to let out.

“Okay, then…” she looks at me and away from me. Into my eyes and all over the shadowed living room, then back again, and her lips become a thin line with an unclear meaning. “Do you think your father’s perfect?” she clumsily asks.

And I shoot her as unimpressed a stare as I would have somebody telling me about the literary merits of Zaimokuza’s latest opus.

“And you wonder why I worry about somebody punching your daylights off…” she mumbles.

“Mom.”

“Fine, fine, I get it. It’s… kind of the answer I was looking for.”

“That I really don’t think Dad would qualify for perfection no matter how many androids he vored in the process?”

“I’m going to ignore that and not even ask what the Hell you mean, but only because you’re upset, and I’m slightly tipsy.”

“You… Okay. That’s fair,” I say in the universal tone of a teenager who really thinks it isn’t.

Which prompts yet another round of her staring at me before she sighs in what I think parental exasperation would look like in a regular household, but I really don’t have enough samples of that to make a qualified statement.

And Mom looks like she’s gearing up for an argument. One of those stupid, pointless ones where nothing that hasn’t already been said a thousand times before is added. Where we just repeat old patterns and end up precisely where we started, except just that tiny bit further away from where mother and son should be.

But she takes a deep breath and, finally, says something different:

“He isn’t. I love your father, much more than I’ve loved any other man in my life. But he’s far from perfect.”

“What—”

“Let me… Let me say this. Please. No jokes or interruptions?” she says, something fragile in the eyes of a woman who doesn’t want to fall back into old, familiar, harmful patterns.

So I… listen. And nod.

And there’s a grateful little smile on her lips that makes my chest ache.

“I met your father years before we started dating. He was… somewhat clumsy. Unremarkable. Just a nice person, but niceness is not that hard to find, at least on the surface. We weren’t even friends for a long time.

“I don’t think he liked me that much, either. I was… acerbic, to put it mildly. Prickly, maybe. Far too prone to hurtful comments that put people right where I wanted them, either away or beneath me.

“And then, one day, he heard me on the phone with… and… And I told him to fuck off. To leave me alone. That there was nothing he could do, so he may as well not bother trying.

“He didn’t listen to me.”

Her eyes lid, and she stares at the hand limply hanging from the sofa’s backrest. At the glimmering band of a wedding ring that doesn’t shine in this mild darkness we’re in, but that she knows is constantly there.

Then she continues without looking at me.

“He tried to force me to move in with him. Room and board, for free, for as long as I needed them while I finished my degree. While he worked on his and… and on getting enough money for the two of us.

“I told him how stupid that was. That there was no way for him to be able to manage that much work. That it wouldn’t solve anything. That… That, in the end… Do you realize I’ve never let you alone with your grandfather, Hachiman?”

I nod.

“And yet, you never told me anything about it,” she says before her smile turns that much brighter. “I told you we were too alike, didn’t I?”

There’s a lump in my throat that makes it hard to nod again.

And she bends forward, her ringless hand reaching for mine on top of the cushion, holding me with slender fingers that are stronger than I realized as eyes too much like mine swim in something both bitter and happy.

“Thank you,” she says. “For not throwing it in my face.”

“Mom, I would never—”

“No. No, you would have. Could have. I… I know the kind of anger you have. The need to hurt others before they can hurt you. I… I know. And I’m sorry I gave it to you. And so, so proud that you have managed to grow beyond it…”

“That’s not… Even if… Not that. I wouldn’t use that,” I say, reliving a hundred arguments in which I almost did.

She pulls.

 

And, suddenly, I’m lying on top of my mother, with the woman hugging me like she hasn’t in years.

“I love you,” she says, making my throat clench at how unfair it is for her to say that now of all times. “I love you and your sister so damn much it scares me. It makes me… stupid. Hurtful. It… I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

I clench my eyes shut and try to hold back a shuddering breath as something hot comes out from between my eyelids.

“Mom… I… I love you too,” I say, surprising myself that it isn’t a lie.

Her arms hold me tighter, and she buries her face in my hair.

Then we just don’t speak for as long as it takes for our breathing to become something that won’t turn into something else.

***

“I… what I was trying to say…” She stops herself, bashful like I’ve never seen her before as we sit side by side, facing the TV rather than each other.

“It’s all right,” I say.

“No. No, I was… I was trying to give you advice, not… not unload on you, and…”

“Mom… I don’t need advice,” I say, leaving out what I need. What I needed. What I’ve needed for too many years for a single conversation to fix it all.

Even if it’s… a start.

She reaches once again for my hand, and her grasp is nervous. Stronger than it should be. On the verge of being worse than uncomfortable.

“I just… I just wanted to tell you that, sometimes, the very things that made us fall for someone are those that are most infuriating. That your father… He works too much, and he misses too much, but… but that’s precisely his way of loving us. Of making sure he can protect us from… from anything.”

“I’d rather he didn’t miss… so much.”

“So do I. And… and it’s not like I’m much better because I’m too scared to ever stop working myself to death. To rely on others taking care of me when I need it without offering them something in turn. And… It’s not… It’s not what I… It’s different, but I can still see how that has… I’m sorry.”

“Mom—”

“So. If you love Iroha and she does something that you can’t accept, but it’s still her… If you… If you really care for her… You need to look beyond the anecdote. The actual thing. You need to see where it comes from and if you still love the person that has… that is…”

I meet her eyes, but just briefly, as she yet again tries to look both away and at me, the conversation once more too uncomfortable for her to deal with after baring wounds that are still raw decades after the fact.

“That’s not how it works. If somebody does something unacceptable—” I try to tell her.

“No! No, I’m not telling you to put up with—not that. I’m just… I love your father. I love him so much it sometimes takes my breath away. But I still get mad when he drops everything to go to a meeting with a client, or barely even remembers to call and apologize for missing a dinner—your girlfriend. He wasn’t here to meet your girlfriend, and… And that hurt me more than I expected, so I can’t even know what it felt like for you, but… But it still comes from that part of him that I love. Does that… does that make sense?” she asks as if she really doesn’t know if it does.

As if she’s yet another lost woman trying to find wisdom in the words of a malcontent teenager that only ever got that wisdom from the very woman he’s now unfairly mad at.

So I squeeze her fingers between mine and look at her, for once suppressing that stupid urge to hold a distraught woman’s chin that almost got me into too much trouble this very morning.

“I think it does. It’s not… perfect. But it’s life, isn’t it? It is never perfect, and expecting it to be is just burdening the people we… we would like it to be with.”

Her eyes soften in silent gratitude, and I…

“What was it about? The fight? If you can tell me,” she asks, her free hand comfortingly lying on my shoulder.

And I stare at wet eyes, at a profile lit up in warm orange by the lamp behind her. At a vulnerable smile that I’ve never seen in her except when she held Komachi as a baby.

I just…

I can’t lie to her.

“Mom, there’s something I need to tell you.”

***

Komachi Hikigaya Does Not Worry About Her Stupid Brother

In almost every anime and manga I’ve ever read, there’s a character that barely anyone pays attention to:

The sane one.

Right. Sure. Of course the main cast is often getting into screaming matches because what would the point of everyone being sensible and reasonable be? How would that be entertaining when compared to people who belong in an asylum failing at pretending to be functional persons—rarely adults, though.

Right. Of course. Let’s just ignore the one keeping things together. The one that everybody burdens when asking for badly needed advice and direction. Let’s unfairly vote for every other character in the popularity polls as she steadily goes insane with worry—

Damnit! I’ve heard the door to the house closing ages ago! What the heck are you doing, stupid Grossther! Are you just trapped in the downstairs bathroom—

Gah! Gross, gross, gross! How do you manage to gross me out this much without even being here, telling me about the latest episode in your soap opera of an oversexed romcom?!

I swear, five minutes more, and I’m marching down there and demanding answers. It’s not like he can keep them away from me—

“You are dating who?!” Mom’s screech comes up the stairs.

I… blink up at the ceiling, pondering for a single instant if I ever will get to find a properly unfamiliar one to do that at, and then my brain reboots properly.

And, with a sigh, I throw the bedcovers off and get up, very much wondering if I should start charging family rates for my therapy sessions.

 

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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 110 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!