Agrippa
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All Right! Fine! I Will Take You! – Chapter 66
🕑 Added 2023-01-27 09:05:43 +0000 UTCStop me if you have heard this one before.
‘Pretty sure I have.’
Not you, Brain-chan. You don’t count.
‘I’m equally sure that many people have thought that your brain doesn’t count.’
That is both likely and irrelevant, as those people aren’t inside my head and thus don’t get to complain about me repeating my thought processes.
‘Fine. Rant away.’
Thank you, I always intended to.
Anyway…
Stop me if you have heard this one before.
‘You mother—’
Two characters who have bled together through the pragmatical means of them being the one to make the other bleed stand in front of one another. Their past grudges are many, their enmity a bitter one. They are mortal enemies by virtue of having very sincerely tried to murder the other.
Yet now they set aside their differences and, with varied intensities of grudge-holding, turn to face a new enemy.
Because, yes, despite Japanese culture being mired in fantasies of revenge, despite our very foundational myths claiming that there should be no quarter given to a foe worthy of the label… shounen disagrees.
Is it because the younger generation is more optimistic, prone to undo the mistakes of the past, and accept a softer approach to kindness and forgiveness? Is it because the author acknowledges that Chrono is not actually Japanese and thus is devoid of our cultural bias when deciding how to deal with Magus’ stab at redemption? Is it because the author refuses to throw away a perfectly valid character whom he has already devoted plenty of time to both building up and establishing their audience’s interest into? Is it because recycling hairstyles gets boring after a while and the artist just wants to stick to characters he already knows how to draw?
Maybe!
I mean, it’s not like I have a definitive answer on the subject, unless we accept as such an answer that both writers and artists are lazy enough that ‘recycling’ is not something they readily associate with environmentalism. But the answer, in this instance, doesn’t matter.
Because it’s not about the ‘why,’ but about the ‘how.’
How does this affect us? Do we turn a blind eye to Vegeta’s multiple, horrific genocides just because he committed them against weird bug people who don’t tug at our heartstrings as much as the man with a prodigious forehead that would erase any and all of Sakura Haruno’s complexes finally developing paternal pride? Do we ignore Ryouga’s several, likely sincere, utterances of his famed greeting, ‘Ranma, prepare to die’ after a few instances of him laying his life on the line to protect Ranma himself, thus launching a thousand doujins? Do we forgive Piccolo just because he’s objectively the better parent in the series, with the possible exception of Krillin?
And why do we do so?
Is it because the character’s impact was great enough that we will take any excuse to have them remain in the narrative scope? Is it because we are already invested, and it’s hard to let go?
Or is it because we care?
Because we care about their struggle. Because we understand that not everybody is lucky enough to be born into the light and stay there, that there are plenty who fight for every ounce of kindness they can show to a world that never returned the favor. Because we understand that not everybody is good and that we should root for those who fight to become so.
I want to believe it’s because of this.
That, no matter any other concerns, we always want redemption for ourselves or others. We want to see growth. We want to see someone fighting to reach something out of their reach… and still grasp it.
We want to believe anyone, even the greatest of villains, can change. Become better people. Be happy.
Because if they can?
So can we.
“Stop looking at me like that,” Haruno says, shrugging her tan, detective-like coat on over something that is most definitely not a cosplay, porny, French maid uniform.
“Stop deserting me,” I immediately answer the foe-turned-ally who, without any apparent motive, is backsliding on her character arc.
She, for some unexplainable reason, rolls her eyes.
“I told you I would have dinner with Yukino,” she says, checking the watch she wears on the inside of her wrist like a weirdo who doesn’t know phones are a thing.
“I’m sure Yui would—”
“I also told you I wanted to make sure Yukino isn’t in urgent need of medical care.”
“You’re exaggerating.”
“You would really, really think so. You would be wrong, though,” she says, pulling fuzzy white woolen gloves off her coat’s pockets, and…
And looking at me out of the side of her eyes, the light above Shizu’s entrance glinting off her dark hair in shimmering waves, Haruno’s frown turns into a soft, almost goofy smile.
And she faces me, her arms surrounding my neck, her gloves dangling off dainty fingers and over my vest-clad back, her eyes bright lavender in front of mine.
“I’ll also miss you, you sappy, intolerably mushy man.”
“I’m not sappy,” I tell her with a glib tongue that would be the envy of four-year-olds anywhere.
“You most definitely are,” she says, the corners of her lips lifting farther before she leans forward and tilts her head aside just enough that our noses slide past one another before her lips meet mine, and my arms immediately close around her small waist, dragging her close to me, her soft body molding against my own.
And then I push forward, my lips opening just enough for my tongue to trace the line separating her own tender lips before I dip Haruno, her back going almost parallel to Shizu’s wooden floor as her hands let go of her gloves to frantically grasp at my neck as she feels herself about to fall.
But I’m holding her. I’m holding her, and kissing her, and embracing her.
And there’s absolutely no way I’m letting her go.
Well, not until she clasps my cheeks with both hands and pushes me so that our ragged breaths meet in heated clouds between us rather than be shared through open, yearning, hungry mouths—
“Women don’t like clingy men, you know?” she says, her eyes never wavering from mine.
“I always thought you were a very special woman,” I answer with my own cheeky grin and just a tad of growling.
She, for some enigmatic reason, shivers.
“You are dangerous.”
“Only as much as you want me to be.”
“I already told you I have to leave.”
“I said want, not ask.”
Her eyes fly wide open, her palms on my cheeks heated with both our warmth, her lips opening just a bit more, just enough for me to—
“Senpai, either you take her right now, or you step out of the way, because I also need to go home,” Iroha states from, as is her wont, right behind me.
I try to look back at her with the betrayed expression I feel such a statement merits, but Haruno’s still clasping my cheeks.
And now she’s smirking.
“It’s hard to keep a hold of so many lovely women at once, isn’t it?” she asks with no small amount of mocking.
So my right hand slides from her back to her rear, and I tighten my grasp on her before I lift her up and push her against Shizu’s door, my legs sliding between hers, my lips going straight for the side of her neck, my hands pulling up her coat before I tug at her skirt, my fingers briefly meeting the stretch of bare flesh above her tights—
“Senpai,” Iroha growls.
“What? I’m just doing what you asked.”
“Or who she asked…” Haruno mutters, her neck moving rapidly under my lips.
“I was being sarcastic!” Iroha tries to clarify her stance on almost outdoor sex.
“Not my fault you suck at communicating,” I tell her.
“Oh, I will show you sucking—”
“No, you won’t,” Shizu’s tired voice states, also from behind me, giving me more reason to think she must have at least a few levels in the assassin class.
She has the ass for it.
Also, the grip strength, going by the steely force pulling me away by my collar from a wide-eyed, flushed, gasping Haruno.
I swear, if she cries, ‘This isn’t even my final form!’ all bets are off.
“I don’t want Iroha’s mother asking her too many questions. Nor Yukino to die from dehydration,” the allegedly responsible adult of the group, the one currently having sex with two of her students and one alumni, tells me with a tone flat enough to bring to mind Yukinoshita lying in disheveled despair as Yui—uh. I guess that’s what a guilty boner feels like.
“You couldn’t have done this earlier, could you?” Haruno complains.
“You seemed to have things well in hand,” Shizu states with what I feel is a victorious smirk.
“She didn’t. Things were, in fact, pressed against her—”
“Senpai!”
“Wha—”
And once again, I’m cruelly silenced by one of my girlfriends set on denying me the most basic of human rights, that of communication, by…
…
Fine, I shall allow it.
“You’re so unfair, Senpai…” Iroha says as she lowers herself back down, her feet flat on the floor after having been on her tiptoes just to reach my lips and steal, among other things, my breath away.
“I don’t want to hear that from you…” I tell her with no heat at all as her lost expression turns into a giddy smile, and my heart thunders.
“I swear, if you two start having sex right now, I will—” Shizu says.
At least, until Haruno tackles her from the side and cuts her off with a searing kiss that has Shizu stumble back, desperately grasping onto my collar to keep herself upright until I maneuver behind her, my hands on her hips, her back on my chest, to, allegedly, support her.
“I—huh—I mean… Wha…” she says as Haruno smirks with her eyes lidded in a way that—
That seems to entice Iroha into jumping up, doing once again her best koala impersonation as her legs surround both Shizu and me, her arms going around the taller woman’s neck and her hands grasping my shoulders before she kisses her with at least as much enthusiasm as Haruno just displayed.
“Wha…?” Shizu ends up saying.
“Don’t get dehydrated yourself,” Iroha slyly comments before slowly sliding down her body, which, entirely coincidentally, means she ends up with her chin comfortably nestled between the exposed cleavage laid bare by Shizu’s half-open button-up shirt.
…
“I think it’s not her you should be concerned about,” I mutter as I feel myself reacting to the ongoing proceedings.
“Oh? Are you feeling at all under pressure, my dearest Hachiman?” Haruno idly asks over her shoulder as she bends right at her waist, marvelously slender legs perfectly straight as she takes more time than strictly necessary to pick up her gloves off the floor while swaying her shapely derriere in my direction all the way.
Iroha, Shizu, and I whimper in solidarity.
Haruno, slowly straightening up, beams.
“Out,” Shizu finally whispers. “Out before I do something… I don’t even know. Something French, I guess.”
And Haruno’s beam turns into something that could be conceivably used in Mobile Suit combat.
“Nope,” Iroha says, waving a decisive finger right under her hopefully not-aspirational figure’s nose. “None of that. You’re escorting me to the train station, and you’re doing it before I lose the next train.”
“I mean, I’m sure Yukino could hold out for a couple more rounds…”
“I find your excess of faith concerning,” I tell her.
“Weren’t you the one whining so I would stay?”
“Yes, but that doesn’t mean I’m about to let the chance for a good quip go unremarked.”
“… I don’t know if that makes my libido better or worse.”
Iroha and Shizu look at her with what some uninformed spectators may deem to be pity.
“Welcome to the club,” Shizu states.
“I would say you get used to it, but you really, reallydon’t,” Iroha commiserates with a gentle hand on the older girl’s shoulder.
And then, because Iroha, swiftly opens the door behind Haruno and drags her out of Shizu’s apartment via swift and merciless sleeve-grabbing.
“Bye, Senpai! Don’t get Shizu pregnant before me!” she cheerfully says, enthusiastically waving her already gloved hand at me.
“Wait, is that an option? Because I want to watch—” Haruno, still half-stumbling past the welcome mat, starts to say.
And gets cut off by an intensely flushed Shizu slamming the door closed on our two most chaotic girlfriends.
Then the woman dressed in a half-buttoned white shirt, lilac panties, black tights that hug her thighs spectacularly, and nothing elsestares at me.
I, dressed in my butlery shirt and vest, black boxers that match the satin finish of the vest (because Haruno), and nothing else,stare back.
“It’s not,” she says, the words rushed enough that they become almost a single syllable.
“What?” I answer, my brain still trying to catch up—
‘Fuck that. I’m not even trying anymore. You’re on your own.’
As expected, Brain-chan, your treachery knows no limits.
‘Praise me more. Or don’t. I’m currently trying to ignore anything that happens outside your eyeballs.’
“It’s not. An option.” Shizu restates while adding some clarification that clarifies absolutely nothing.
“Wha—”
“Please don’t get me pregnant!”
“I don’t—I can’t get you pregnant! You would have to take off your IUD, or—and it takes a lot of tries, and sometimes not even—”
“Don’t explain the details! It makes it worse!”
“I am not qualified to explain the details! I’m just saying it wouldn’t happen after a single attempt, and then we would have to—”
And yet again, for completely unfair reasons, one of my girlfriends silences my perfectly reasonable opinions.
With plenty of tongue.
… I shall allow it.
“I… I am feeling really stupid right now,” a gasping, blushing Shizu says after her lips let me go, but not before her arms surround my neck and her fingers tangle through my hair.
“I am feeling… a lot of things,” I tell her, being perfectly factual.
Mostly because she’s pressed against me, and the scene with Iroha and Haruno is still lingering in my mind, and the idea of Shizu naked and sweaty, below me, tenderly holding her recently filled belly while smiling softly up at me is utterly unfair!
“We… We should get dinner,” she says, her eyes still on mine.
“Yes. We should,” I answer on sheer autopilot.
And then I grasp her waist and push her with my chest and hips on hers until she’s pressed against her door, trapped between the solid piece of wood and my body, and I kiss her as thoroughly as I can, but not half as she deserves.
And then we get dinner.
But not until quite a bit later.
***
“I… I don’t want to leave,” I say, half-lying on her sofa, with her back resting on my chest and her black hair right below my lips.
“I don’t want you to,” she says, almost breathless, like she’s been through our mostly silent meal in which we just shared a couple of bowls of freshly steamed rice and a few pieces of the leftover fish from Haruno’s extravagantly French lunch.
“Then, can I…” I trail off before letting the question drift away, my arms tightening around her, below her breasts, finishing it for me.
“I… will anyone suspect…”
“I already told my parents I would stay the night out. Just in case.”
“Just in case?” she asks with a bit of a skeptical edge.
“It’s easier to explain that Iroha wasn’t feeling up to spending the night with me than it is to say that she spontaneously wanted me to.”
“… She really did fool your parents, did she?”
I chuckle. Both at the quip and… at the truth that Iroha really, really didn’t fool anyone.
My father, because he wasn’t there to be fooled, Komachi because there never was any need to, and Mom because…
…
“What’s wrong?” Shizu asks, half-turning over me to cradle my cheek and stare into my eyes with steel-gray that sometimes looks silver and is always equally piercing.
“Nothing. Nothing is wrong. I just… I am in a relationship with three amazing women who also love one another, and I should—I amhappy. I truly am, even if I still don’t know how or why I ended up here, and… and…”
And she’s on top of me, her hands resting on the cushion behind my head, her eyes near to me.
“It’s all right,” she says. “It’s all right to be happy.”
I hug her, drag her close to me.
And come undone.
I claw at her shirt’s back, clutching her closer, burying my face in the crook of her neck, still disbelieving that she’s here, that she isn’t pulling away, that—
That she’s fiercely holding onto me, shivering. Not letting go.
“I… I want to help. I desperately want to make things better, Hachiman. I want you to be the man I know you can be—the man I know you will be, with time and the chance to heal. But I… I’m still a mess myself, you know? The best thing that’s happened to me in years is something I can’t tell anybody, that would jeopardize my job, that would make your lives harder than… I…”
I kiss her.
Not because I want to cut her off, even if I want to. Not because I don’t want to hear the words she says, the common sense that is so blindingly obvious.
Not even because I love her.
But because I want her to feel loved.
“Hachi…” she murmurs as soon as I pull away, cheeks tinged with pink, eyes softened.
“Shizu…” I answer in pretty much the same way.
Her hand cradles my cheek with painful tenderness, the tips of her fingers brushing over my temples as her eyes hold me down.
“We need to talk,” she says. And my gut clenches.
But then she stands up and holds her hand to me, to pull me up from her suspiciously grey sofa, close to her, and that ends up with me following her to her bedroom. To a bed with, thankfully, changed sheets that are still in her preferred lilac tones.
And, under the shifting colors of the LED lights illuminating her figurine collection, Shizu strips.
There’s nothing of the elaborate sensuality she usually imbues the act with. The teasing, the enticing display of her skin coming in and out of view as her body undulates to music all her own.
No, she just… Slowly, shyly, vulnerably, opens her shirt and sits on her bed to unroll her tights down her legs before she does a bit of a shuffle to slide her panties off without getting up.
And then she opens the sheets and lies on her bed, looking at me expectantly until I…
I do the same.
Just one button at a time, the vest that is so much like hers opening before I do the same with the white shirt, starting with the collar and ending with the cuffs before I shrug both pieces of clothing off.
And then I pull my boxers down and let them fall.
Naked, with nothing to hide from her, I walk toward Shizu.
She slides to her left, making room for me on the right side of the bed I, somehow, usually end up on, and just that realization, that I havea spot on her bed, is enough to make my throat clench.
So I do it. I lie down on it.
Beside her.
And she immediately turns around to wrap her naked arms and legs around me.
“I love you. And Iroha. And Haruno. And this is a mess. This is everything I didn’t want it to be when you first went to the nurse’s room, and I decided not to follow. This is… Dangerous.”
“It is,” I tell her, unable to disagree.
“And I… I still want it. You. All of you, but also just you. And despite this being all that it is, I can’t bring myself to believe it’s bad. Not with… Not after Haruno. After how I hurt her in the name of doing what I thought was right, what was best for her, and how… I can never thank you enough, Hachi.”
“You?” I tell her with a bitter chuckle on my tone. “You, of all people… You have seen… You know what you did for me. Even before all this. Even before I first kissed you and you accepted me. You know there’s… there’s nothing I could ever do that would compare, Shizu,” I tell her, looking down into her eyes as her chin digs into my chest, as I thread my fingers along dark, wild tresses that always look like they should be full of tangles and knots.
They never are.
“That’s… That was what I had to—what I wanted to do. I had no choice, you know? Not with you. Never with you,” she says, something sweetly bitter in her smile.
“I am glad,” I tell her before I kiss her forehead.
She murmurs something unintelligible before she turns to rest her cheek on me, her own fingers dancing in erratic circles in front of her eyes, over my chest.
“It… It may not last, you know? People change, drift apart. And I was so afraid of letting this whole mess come to be only to be left holding only ashes that I… But I changed my mind. You changed my mind. And now… no matter what happens? I think it’s worth it. That what we have is something I will always cherish, no matter how it ends. That it’s not just my mind that you changed,” she says, her tone almost dreamlike, as if speaking to the world and not to me.
I don’t like it.
So I tug her hair to make her look up. Into my eyes. At me.
“You’re being too realistic,” I say.
“Someone has to be,” she replies with a punctuating snort.
“Yes, but it doesn’t have to be you. You are terrible at being pragmatic. You are an idealist, fighting for something high-minded and far away, and infecting those around you with hope for that better, dreamed world. Leave that to Haruno, or Iroha. That’s what relationships are supposed to be about, aren’t they?”
She stares at me, her eyes swimming in something I dare not name before her lips curl up into a bright smile that colored LEDs cast in varied hues of shadow.
“And you?” she asks, her voice barely audible.
“They say a cynic is a romantic with experience. I don’t think that’s true, not anymore. I think a cynic is a romantic who has been hurt. And you healed me.”
The line is corny. Dramatic. Over the top.
And my throat clenches while trying to finish it. While trying to convey just… just how much she meant to me, how much she changed who Hachiman Hikigaya allowed himself to be. Just how much she transformed my life even before all… this started.
But she smiles something radiant that is not marred by the tears at the corners of her eyes, and I can’t help but answer in kind, sobbing something almost silent as we hug one another as tightly as we can, with arms and legs tangling around one another over shifting, satin sheets.
“It may not last,” she still says. “You may wake up one day and decide you want something else, someone else. And that’s all right. That would be all right, because I love you and want what’s best for you, even if what’s best is somebody else.”
“It may not last,” I agree. “You may wake up one day and decide that you are too good to be wasting your time with a maladjusted teen who writes essays about bears—don’t laugh, I’m being dramatic here.”
“Sorry. Sorry, it’s just… the bear thing…”
“I don’t remember you being this amused in the staff room. You, in fact, looked quite cross. Even before throwing a literal cross at me.”
“It didn’t hit you,” she says as if that would make the incident even remotely appropriate.
And it wasn’t.
Not the… The relationship we already had, where threats of violence could be seen as careless jokes, and I never even realized just how unique it was for us two to share something so wildly improper. How above and beyond she went when treating me like…
Like a friend, I guess.
And that’s…
That’s what we first had. What I first treasured.
“It may not last,” I repeat. “But I won’t let it end.”
“What?” Silver eyes blink up at me, and I force myself to take the deep breath she just stole from me.
“No matter what… I love you. I loved you before I did romantically. I loved you as… as a friend, as an ideal, as a deranged woman who—”
“Watch it.”
“—who somehow cared for me despite her best judgment. I loved you because of what you did, what you said, what you believed in. I loved you because you are you, and I… I am a romantic. I can be once again because of you. I can believe in dreams and fairytales. And I will give you your happy ending.”
She stares at me, holding her breath as I do mine, her lips half-open.
And then she tenderly brushes my hair back and props herself on her elbows to lie a delicate kiss on my lips. One that, for once, isn’t trying to silence me, even if it takes my very thoughts away.
“I love you,” she whispers. And then it looks like she’s going to say something else until her lips thin into a small smile that still dimples her cheeks as her eyes close tightly enough to squeeze the remnants of tears past her lids.
Then, not adding anything else, she lies back down on top of my chest, surrounded by my arms, my fingers in her hair, and her breathing softens as Shizu rests.
And, because words are inadequate, because they can never convey what is truly genuine…
I hug her closer, close my eyes, and allow myself to dream while holding my lover.
