All Right! Fine! I Will Take You! – Chapter 107 [3.9k Words] (Patreon)

Iroha

“I—he’s never—” Mister Hikigaya says, still looking over the sofa toward the bathroom that his son just stormed into.

He looks back at his wife, the two adults sharing bewildered looks. Shocked, lost looks.

He starts to rise.

“Don’t,” Komachi says.

And I’m so damn grateful I’m not the one who has to say it.

“Komachi, your brother just—he’s never left in the middle of a conversation,” the man says as if asking for permission to care for his son.

How fucking rich.

“Maybe he never needed to before,” Haruno says, in that airy way she has of pretending she doesn’t feel petty concerns. “Or maybe he did need to, and only now is he allowing himself to act on it.”

“You don’t know him that much,” his mother says, one hand clutching at the knee of the man by her side.

“I know Hachiman Hikigaya better than I’ve known anybody in my entire life,” somebody says, the moron’s voice full of indignant rage, cold yet simmering under layers and layers of resentment that are not entirely directed at any of the people present in here but can be vaguely aimed at two of them.

Yes. Of course.

I am that moron.

“You are young,” his mother says after a short silence that is filled with sharp eyes and the pondering things lurking behind them.

“And you’re middle-aged, bordering on old. I don’t see how that gives you any advantage,” I shoot back in a way that would make Mom proud.

It also makes Haruno let out a low, long whistle, so…

…

Focus.

“I’m not going to take any insults from somebody who came into my house to lie straight to my face—”

“To protect your son. Like he clearly needed me to, seeing how this morning has turned out—”

“Enough,” the man says, standing up, his hand on the mother’s right shoulder drifting around her back and toward the left arm. “I’m going to check on him—”

Shizu stands.

“You’re going to give him all the space he needs,” she says with a tone I’ve never heard before but that I suspect Hana Yukinoshita is intimately aware of.

“Are you threatening me?” he asks, more shocked than I expected.

And Komachi stands up.

From her side of the sofa, stuck in the corner between us and them, between her family and… and her brother’s side.

I don’t envy her.

“Settle down,” she says, staring at the floor, her head bowed.

“Koma—” her father starts.

“Settle. Down!” she yells, head rising, eyes blazing.

Reminding me of him.

Just… it’s the same kind of passion. The same devotion to a course they’ve set their minds to. But he’s calculating. Distant even when close. Even when opening raw wounds, always a barrier of thought between him and the world.

She…

She doesn’t have those walls.

And I think it’s thanks to him.

The mother tugs on the father’s hand on her arm, and they share yet another silent look, their expressions rapidly shifting, pleading and begging passing from her to him and being answered with… with a tenderness that is hidden from almost everyone if I’m not guessing wrong.

I wish I could share notes with Haruno. To know what she sees when she looks at them and dissects their every gesture, word choice, and inexpressive pauses.

I wish I had talked more about this. With him.

But there would always be time, wouldn’t it? It wasn’t urgent, not with everything else going on, with how our four lives were rushing everywhere at once, not a single crisis settled when the next one came around.

And, despite all that, he still found the time to make Mom and me… talk.

Damn it.

I never knew it hurt so much to fail someone you love.

“Leave,” I say.

“What?” the father asks.

I slowly get up and…

I glare at him.

I glare at him like I wish I had glared at my father years ago. With all the resentment and spite that I wouldn’t be able to feel until the shock had faded away and I had cried myself out because of something he claimed had nothing to do with me.

He looks… taken aback. Surprised.

And I…

I could do and say a lot of things, right now. Things that maybe aren’t warranted, or, if they are, I’m not in the right state of mind to act on. Not without talking about this with him when he’s ready for it instead of washing his face over and over with cold water and refusing to cry.

So I do the one thing I know he would approve of.

I hug his sister.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper into the ear of the slightly shorter girl as her arms tremble between mine, holding her from the side until she turns toward me and, without a single word, leans against me.

She smells… a bit like him under her strawberry shampoo, and their hair looks similar enough that it doesn’t feel like the first time I’ve held this girl in my arms. It feels…

Comfortable.

Warm.

And I force myself to hold onto that warmth before I speak again.

“He’s feeling too much, right now. Leave. Tell us where you’re going. We’ll calm him down and… and he will go to meet you when he’s ready,” I say, looking away from the slight shoulder covered by a light blue cardigan and toward a pair of adults who…

I would say that they aren’t acting like it. Like adults.

Sadly, I’ve known too many adults to believe that.

“I can’t leave when he’s—” he says, clearly distraught and disoriented, cutting himself off when the mother tugs on his hand.

Another silent look. Another conversation I’m not a part of.

Another reminder of all the ones that I have been a part of since Hachiman Hikigaya saw right through my masks, and I found myself thrilled by it.

By him.

“You’re dangerous,” Komachi mumbles, her arms finally rising to surround my waist.

“I’ve learned from the best,” I say with a hint of mirthful pride.

She pulls away, eyes a shade lighter than his right in front of me, brighter and wider than his own ever are, except when we’re alone and the world’s safely kept away.

She smiles at me, the cheeky brat that I met not that long ago stepping aside to show me a woman I hope to one day call family.

“Yes. Yes, you have,” she says.

And it’s the most flattering thing I’ve ever heard from anybody other than her brother.

***

Hachiman

Superpowered evil side.

A cringy cliché. Baby Chuuni’s first delusion. The idea that, by giving into the darkness lurking inside of you, you access a power greater than you thought you were capable of at the measly price of your sanity and morals.

Then, logically, comes along Baby Chuni’s Second Delusion: that those morals are only holding you back. That you could do so much more if you just… let go.

If you let all those bitter, poisonous things flow out of you, harming the world like it’s hurt you, making others pay for every little slight or uncaring wound. Making them suffer as you have until it’s shown that, when it comes down to this, you are above them.

That no matter what they threw your way, you endured. You stood. You thrived.

But them? Just with a fraction of what you’ve suffered?

They would crumble.

It’s cringeworthy. Pathetic. The self-serving delusions of a teenager stuck in his room with nothing but looping replays of all the conversations he didn’t have throughout the day.

It’s seductive.

Comforting.

Because rage feels good. Because hurting others means you aren’t powerless. You aren’t the weak, defenseless worm you sometimes see yourself as, but the cruel bastard smirking after making a self-centered bitch cry.

The villain that Hayama slammed against a wall, the vivid memory of concrete hitting my back not half as intense as his gaze at that moment, when he looked into my eyes and found all my scorn and spite waiting for him until he had to mutter an almost inaudible, ‘Just as I thought, we could never get along.’

Couldn’t we, Hayama?

Or is it just that I refused to?

I look into the mirror at the boy staring back at me with the eyes Hayama saw that day.

At the boy I was.

It’s… easy, being him. I understand him, perhaps better than I understand the other parts of me that I try to show to the people I… care for.

He’s not the Monster of Logic, but he’s… adjacent. What happens when I let bitterness overflow and slip the leash.

Baby Hachiman’s first delusion.

I smirk once more at the thought, and I see it in the mirror, somewhat duller than a moment ago, and I decide to… indulge.

Indulge in memories of back then. The diary I kept with an entire, horribly derivative mythos about the creation of the world and the sealed powers accessed only by guys wearing black trench coats and wielding unpractical (What else?) katanas.

The smirk softens into a smile even as another part of me surfaces:

The one that craves to hide under bedcovers and cry out about wanting to disappear so he doesn’t have to face ever having been this cringe-worthy.

Seriously, past me? Couldn’t you have done something more productive with your anger? Start an angsty blog so as to spread mocking cheer around the world, for instance?

Just imagine how great that would be! Scholars generations from now on chronicling the precise moment in which a teenage boy’s broken inability to interact with the world caused humanity to join together in something vaguely reminiscent of Tang as their ego barriers eroded through solidary laughter. Yes, that leaves up in the air the question of, precisely, how would those later generations have come to be after presumably having lost all reproductive capacity when turned into an offensively orange ocean, but I suppose that hot springs penguins would have rightfully inherited the Earth by that point.

It’s a hilarious thought, isn’t it? An amusing notion, filled with all the references to a beloved series that I often use to divorce the underlying thoughts and feelings from the raw wounds they’ve sprung from.

It’s something I often do. Something that I’m used to. Something that usually works.

… Damn it.

I can’t do this on my own.

I can’t think myself out of this. Can’t come up with anything good enough to keep at bay the… the things churning in my chest, dredging up so many memories that have nothing to do with angsty puberty and everything to do with…

Loneliness.

Hurt.

Being… other.

And the absence of the man and woman I should’ve related to the most.

The me in the mirror doesn’t smile, and I don’t even know how to define the tired, drained look in his eyes.

My breathing is rough. Rougher than it was after I won a tennis match predicated on loneliness and ostracism, making the one shot nobody else in my high school ever could have.

Because I knew that lone, isolated spot. I knew how the wind would change during lunchtime when everybody else would be happily chattering away with their group of lying youths who were never half as dishonest as I managed to be with Yui and Yukino, all while pretending I was…

I didn’t understand.

A part of me still doesn’t.

But…

I look back into my eyes. Dead eyes like a fish, Yukino said more than once. Creepy, gross eyes, Yui said, hugging her chest away from my careless gaze.

Wonderfully broken eyes, Haruno said.

And I think back on that tennis match won because of stubborn self-isolation.

And how it won me a friend.

That was when Saika decided to doggedly stick by my side, wasn’t it? When I did something for him that I just… felt obligated to do. Not because it would help him, but because it was…

Not right. Right isn’t the word.

Because it was proper. Because I had been asked to accomplish something, and I saw the way to win. To reach my goal in my own way. To be myself and victorious at once.

How chuuni of me.

The smile is back.

And…

I close my eyes. Think about chuuni delusions, cringe-worthy declarations, horribly derivative mythos.

And I take out my phone.

It rings for ominously longer than it usually does when I deign to call this number. When I admit to myself that thing that my uncompromising honesty should’ve made obvious years ago.

“Hachiman?! Why wouldst thou call upon your kinsman on this hour?!” he says, full of panicked concern.

“I swear to God, Buddha, and whatever it is that you students pray upon on these days,” a booming male voice answers, “if you don’t drop your phone this very second, I’ll have you—”

“My liege requires my aid! I shall not bow to cruel tyranny!” he says.

And the by now all too familiar sound of a chair scratching back followed by rushed footsteps ensues.

“Stop being a moron and go back to class!” I tell him, tryingto be reasonable.

“Never! Not until you tell me of your concerns!” he says as the sliding door of the classroom rattles open and shut.

“I didn’t think you would be in the middle of class!”

“Which is why I know you’re in dire straits! How would someone as ever-self-aware as you fail to account for such glaringly obvious circumstances! Truly, your distress shall be as deep as the uncaring oceans—”

“I’m fine! Just lost track of time! Stop running away from the teacher before you get into more trouble!” I say right before the door rattles open once again.

“It’s just English class! Truly, my exceptional grasp of all matters linguistic should make it a non-issue—”

“Weren’t you miserably failing English?”

“Aaaaahhhh! How cruel is your careless statement of fact! How editorial!”

“Yoshiteru Zaimokuza! Get back here, you fat NTR bastard!” an adult who shouldn’t be browsing such cultured reading material on school grounds finally says out loud what we’ve all thought at one time or another.

“That is an accursed genre!” my best male friend yells, thankfully away enough from the phone that I can both deduce he’s screaming over his shoulder and that I’m spared the prodigious girth of his full tonal range.

‘Oh, yes, tell me all about Zaimokuza’s girth.’

Fuck you, Brain-chan! Where were you when I needed you the most?

‘Trying on a black leather trench coat. It suits me far better than it ever did you.’

… Self-cest is a shitty fetish, self-cest is a shitty fetish, self-cest is a shitty fetish—

“Hachiman? Talk to me, Hachiman! Don’t go toward the light!”

“For fuck’s sake, I just wanted to vent, I’m not on suicide watch!”

“Fucking Hikigaya… I… swear…” a gasping, increasingly distant male voice says.

Come to think of it…

Heavy yet fast steps rhythmically rain upon a staircase, and…

Wait. Wait, that’s not true. That’s impossible.

“Did you get a training regime?” I ask, catching the now wide eyes of the moron on the other side of the mirror.

“Does it show?!” he answers in a way that all but blinds me with the implied beaming smile.

Which makes it somewhat, slightly hard to answer with an emphatically sincere:

“Not in the slightest.”

“Oh,” he says, deflating enough that the footsteps slow down.

“But you’re sprinting away and holding a conversation at the same time, so… it’s definitely working,” I say. Not encouraging at all. Shut up. It’s not like I like him or anything.

‘Well, maybe you don’t…’

Brain-chan, I swear, if you turn into a Haruno-like sultry seductress, I’ll have to lobotomize both of us with a twenty-four-hour reel of Issei Hyoudou’s greatest hits.

‘Why wouldn’t you commit suicide and spare us the monstrous cruelty?!’

I could tell you precisely the same thing!

“Thank you! Your encouragement truly means a lot, my kinsman, even if it only confirms the Lady Minami’s claims regarding my improving stamina—”

“Aaaaaaahhhhhh!”

“Are you being attacked?! Tell me of your location, and I shall come to your aid swift as a rampaging kirin—”

“I’m locked in Shizu’s bathroom, and we both would appreciate it very much if you didn’t break down the door—”

“Thou hast… Oh. As expected of the Lord of Battle, Harems, and Battle Harems,” he says, the footsteps lowering in volume until I no longer hear them.

Which gives me enough time to think of the perfect answer:

“Zaimokuza. I will hurt you.”

“Please don’t steal the Lady Minami away! That is a degenerate genre!”

“Wha—I’m not going to NTR you, much less with a woman who would sooner wear my entrails as a necklace than… than… ugh. I can’t even think of an alternative. Seriously, as long as you’re with Sagami, that’s a non-starter.”

“Dost thou mean to imply that thou would NTR my illustrious self through other avenues? Because I wouldn’t recommend courting my demon sister, particularly while she’s enjoying Shigeru’s tragically humorous and humorously tragic courtship…”

“… I don’t even know how to answer this without some kind of over-the-top emoting. Just… Just imagine I’m facepalming or something, and then, as my hand slowly slides down my face, you can see dead eyes peering at you between barely spread fingers, silently accusing you of all that is wrong with the world in general and with my crumbling sanity in particular,” I say, pretty much describing what I see in the mirror.

“Oh, that’s a marvelously evocative line! Do you mind if I steal it? I would likely put my own spin on it to make it flourish, but the raw sentiment comes across lovingly,” he says, the cadence of his words synchronizing with the dull throbbing on my temples.

‘Sure. On your temples. That’s where he would throb.’

I despise you. Truly and utterly. From the darkest depths of my soul, where there’s not enough light for even a demonic katana to glint, my hatred for you flows everlasting.

‘Praise me more.’

You’re very caring and jokingly try to pretend that Zaimokuza is anything other than our best friend because you’re just that bashful about your feelings for somebody who stuck by us when nobody else in the entire school would.

‘You take that back! You take that back right fucking now!’

Heh.

Also, I shall now immediately and forever seal this forbidden sacrificial technique. The backlash isn’t worth it.

“You still there?” he says before a metallic door locks behind him, his tone evening out now that he’s no longer climbing the stairs.

“Yeah,” I answer, pushing up the faucet’s lever to let out a tiny trickle of cold water.

“So… what’s the matter?” he asks.

I stare at the water splashing over a shiny metal plug on a sink that tells me all about Shizu’s fastidious routine when it comes to housekeeping.

There are no signs of limescale on the bright, metallic finish nor traces of black grime around the drain. Nothing that hints at her doing anything but her utmost in keeping her house as clean as her sofa (likely) isn’t.

It makes me smile.

It, for the first time since I locked myself in here, is a smile that I’m comfortable with.

“I… just had a rough day,” I say.

There’s a brief pause, and I can all but see the chuuni standing on our school’s rooftop, the winds gently lapping at and spreading the lower half of his perennial trench coat as he slowly turns around before walking toward the handrail and leaning against it with a rotund forearm as he keeps his phone by his ear, looking upon the distance in a way he thinks is cool rather than cliched and that I, at times, found myself agreeing with.

“Tell me about it,” he says.

And I do.

***

The gamut of Zaimokuza’s reactions to my recounting of the past few days is… Let’s just say that it would be entertaining at any other time.

Now?

Now it’s… soothing. As soothing as the sounds of the thin stream of water that I haven’t cut off.

“Are you… better?” he asks after a silence that, on his end, will have been filled with the brief contemplation of the school grounds spread below him as he unwittingly imitates a chain-smoking, boxing, former teacher also prone to wearing long coats—and I dearly hope that mental association doesn’t overstay its welcome.

“Yeah. Yeah, I think I am. Thanks,” I say to one of the two guys who have sworn to be my brothers, even if I would rather omit the rest of that particular oath.

“I wish there was something I could do,” he says with a familiar hint of bitterness.

“Don’t. Just… just you listening already means a lot. You’re a good friend, Yoshiteru,” I say, not for the first time, but certainly not as much as I should have already told him.

I expect an exuberant reply to the claim.

I get something… a bit like it.

“Thank you. That means a lot, coming from you,” he says with a soft, calm, warm voice that…

That makes me answer with my own smile.

“I think I should go out there,” I say after a brief sharing of a comfortable, precious silence.

“You don’t have to. I’ll stay here as long as you need me,” he says, as supportive as Saika was when leading a shellshocked Kawasomething away from a very different bathroom.

“I know,” I say.

Because I do.

“… You haven’t hung up,” he says, somewhat recriminating.

“Excuse me?”

“You dropped the one-liner. That’s when you hang up and reaffirm that your detached, effortlessly cool self remains untouched by your recent trials before facing the battles ahead with renewed ardor,” he says, mildly miffed that he has to explain such obvious things.

And I wish that, in the deepest, darkest recesses of my mind where even Brain-chan fears to tread, I didn’t think that makes sense…

“Yoshiteru?” I say.

“Yes, my kinsman?” he answers.

“I believe in the me that you always believed in,” I say, only mildly plagiaristic.

And, as soon as I hear him take in a deep breath that will be the prelude to his gushing rant…

I hang up like a cool and detached character, swiftly pocketing my phone like a gunslinger.

Then I cup my hands into the thin stream of water, splashing my burning face with reassuring coolness one last time before I turn off the faucet and surround myself with pure silence.

I look back into the mirror, at the chuuni, angsty teenager who used to be a bit chuunier and a lot angstier.

At the brooding, sulky malcontent who’s been staring right back at me since I came here, too overwhelmed to properly answer my father telling me that he’s proud of me.

And I give him a lopsided smile and a two-finger salute before turning away from him without looking back.