Agrippa
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All Right! Fine! I Will Take You! – Chapter 54
🕑 Added 2022-10-14 01:52:06 +0000 UTCThere’s been talk in recent years about how otaku culture is a dark mirror on which Japan’s most regressive views are often showcased. Despite our fascination with blond foreigners (or darker ones, among certain connoisseurs of the NTR tag), it’s clear that our social mores are anchored in a nostalgic past when everything had its proper place. When it comes to Japan’s political climate, it’s not so much that we are prone to conservatism but that we would rather like to get our hands on a time machine, whether or not there was a green stowaway on it prone to making Vegeta cry.
A clear example of all this would be the Ace Attorney games, in which we are shown just how utterly ridiculous our justice system is—and I’m not even talking about the case in which a parrot is called to testify—but that is far from the only example. From Son Goku’s wife becoming a screeching harpy as soon as she got a ring on her finger, to Ranma’s views on which of his forms was allowed to gorge herself on parfaits, a fair representation of gender issues is sorely lacking. That leads us to today’s topic:
Gender equality!
Yes, there are otome games, shoujo mangas, and Ebina-luring light novels where the usual dynamics of fanservice are (allegedly) geared toward a feminine audience rather than the stereotypical, prone to getting slapped in public transportation, male section of otakudom, but I must sadly say that this is all no more than a mirage, a wretchedly lacking offering. True gender equality has not reached our subculture, and we’re bereft of role models to aspire to. We, as much as we’d like to correct our despicable views and behaviors, are deprived of someone to point the way.
I mean, other than Kazuma, of course, but that goes without saying.
“Why do I feel the sudden need to poke you just below your ribs, Senpai?” Iroha asks in what some poor, misguided soul may think an innocent tone.
“Because you can no longer hide the thirst for blood instilled in you from an early childhood preparing for espionage and murder?” I suggest with an inquiring eyebrow as I look to my right, where she’s grumpily stuffing the lower half of her face behind her pink scarf.
Iroha lets out a disgruntled noise and…
Pokes me below my ribs.
“Hey!” I protest her violent double standards, taking my hand out of my coat’s pocket to fend her away and…
And she grabs my arm and clings to me with both of hers.
… Oh.
The scarf has slid down just enough that I see her pleased smile as she looks up at me, and something beats in my chest before I stop in the middle of the (thankfully deserted) street to push her against the low wall of somebody’s yard that, if I was as social as society thinks I should be, I would know the owner of.
Truly, I think I prefer the anonymity.
“Senpai?” she asks, not at all confused as luminous honey seems to drink the light of the lamppost to my left and behind me, the shadow I cast over her leaving at least that much free to shine.
I want to kiss her. I want to hold her. I want to caress her, make her moan my name, force her to bite her lip to hold back something too loud for a deserted street.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
Because I want to apologize.
Iroha looks at me. I know somebody else would be confused by the words, the gesture, the forcefulness. I know Yukino would never be able to understand, and Yui maybe would, but she wouldn’t be able to share it.
Iroha… Her right arm unwraps from around mine, and tentative fingers devoid of the gloves she should be wearing reach up to my face as her lips hesitate on what angle to adopt.
“You don’t have to be,” she says. “It’s not our fault.”
I could fall for her. Just for this.
I mean, aside from everything else.
… Just how many times have I thought something like this today? Is this all an elaborate plot on her part to secure a spot as the first wife or something equally ridiculous for anybody other than me?
‘Careful there. Pride comes before the fall.’
As Zaimokuza learned each and every time he showed me a story.
‘You’re mean.’
And you love it.
‘… In a strictly Platonic way, I feel I should add, given your recent track record.’
Self-cest is a shitty fetish.
‘Well, look at who decided to stop masturbating—’
Let’s not be so hasty—
“Senpai, I’m going to be mad,” Iroha says, rolling her eyes even as her fingers remain on my neck, behind my ear, tracing four circles of soothing warmth I never want to be without.
“Remember when you told me I rarely escape in the middle of a conversation? How that’s usually when I’m too stressed?”
“I told you a couple of hours ago, so, yes, I do remember that.”
“Right. It turns out I’m so in love with you it stresses me out,” I tell her without moving away from her fingers.
And those hesitant lips of hers bloom into a smile so pure and joyful it hurts, but then she gets on her tiptoes and the smile melts into a kiss that takes away all the doubts, all the fears, all the…
All that isn’t Iroha. Here. With me.
In my arms.
***
“You really don’t have to accompany me all the way, you know?” she says as we go through more colorful and occupied streets as we near the train station.
“I could say I don’t want to be away from you for a single second more than I have to,” I tell her as I pull her slightly toward me so that she doesn’t step on a tree pit.
“Right. Which is a good way to say that your mother insisted on you escorting me.”
“Double standards, I swear,” I do not sulk as I’m yet again reminded of how far I’m from the light of civilization that is Kazuma Satou.
“I’ll pretend you just said something chivalrous, if you don’t mind.”
“And I’ll pretend I live in a world where a man isn’t forced to pretend to even care about what somebody from a time where we outlawed foreigners from setting foot on our islands would think.”
“Please, don’t turn your escorting me to the train station into a political platform, Senpai. I fear there’s only so many mental gymnastics I can do to remain attracted to you without involving ballgags.”
“Wouldn’t an o-ring gag be better? That way, I could still shove my—”
“Senpai!”
“What?”
“You were supposed to be embarrassed and flustered, not turn that around right on me! Learn to read the mood, Senpai!”
Arching an eyebrow, I pull my right arm back, and she lets out an unfairly cute ‘eep’ as she stumbles against my chest before I hold her chin up with my left hand.
“Call me Hachi,” I growl out.
She quivers.
“Unfair…” she answers.
And I kiss her.
A similar scene keeps playing out on our way, so what should’ve been a twenty-minutes walk to the train station turns out to be much, much longer.
When I’m rushing back home, sweat drenching my shirt and my coat unbuttoned so I won’t die of overheating (Iroha-induced or otherwise), I try to lament my terrible, awful, objectively dreadful circumstances.
I don’t quite manage.
***
“Took you long enough,” Mom says, greeting me from our blue sofa as I enter the living room, unbuttoning the collar of my shirt and trying to look like I don’t desperately need hydration of any kind.
“The traffic was terrible, and parking was a non-starter,” I tell her from the other side of the kitchen counter as I open the fridge in search of a stamina potion.
“It was a non-starter because you weren’t driving in the first place?” she says with the disaffected tone of somebody hiding the depths of their cruelty.
That is, that, yet again, she’s managed to get rid of any can of Max Coffee in her monstrous attempts to ‘care for my health.’
“You know me so well. It’s almost like we’re family, live together, and share a cynical outlook on a world that’s maddeningly set on hiding my cans of coffee.”
She grunts while I take a sad, resigned stab at looking behind the leeks.
As ever, disappointment accompanies my every effort.
“She’s a nice girl,” Mom idly comments, drinking a sip from a can of something that is objectively inferior to the dark ambrosia I’ve been deprived of.
“Please, don’t ever again use those words. An acquaintance of mine has laid ferocious claim to them,” I tell her while resignedly taking out the glass jar of cold water.
“I’m not even going to ask what that means. Instead, I will ask just how much of that utter bullshit I was supposed to swallow,” she says before wiping her upper lip with the sleeve of her dark blue pajamas.
For a brief moment of repose, I allow myself to let the sound of falling water inside a tall glass fill the silence.
Then I sigh.
“She is the president of the student council,” I tell her, walking toward the sofa.
“That’s not what I doubted,” she says, looking at me over the lid of her can of beer.
“Then—”
“I know what a teenage girl acting like a goody-two-shoes looks like. I have been a teenage girl acting like a goody-two-shoes.”
I raise an eyebrow that has been steadily refined over the past few weeks.
She matches it perfectly.
And I sit beside the bare feet on the sofa’s blue cushion.
“Hachiman… I… I understand, really. I appreciate the effort it took for her to put that performance on, but she’s your girlfriend. She can’t be normal.”
“Ouch.”
“That wasn’t an insult,” she says, rolling her eyes and leaning forward to pat my knee.
“It… wasn’t?” I say, looking skeptically at the gesture of… affection, I guess?
She sighs.
And leans back to take a long gulp of her beer.
Which gives me enough time to appreciate just how many more cans are piled on the coffee table.
… Oh.
“You’re sardonic to the point I always wonder if this will be the day you’ll come home with a broken nose. When they called me from the hospital? I thought that had been it, that you had finally mouthed off to somebody who decided to teach you a lesson, you know?”
“I… I rarely… I am usually not like that—”
“That’s bullshit. You’re always like that, even if sometimes you manage to pretend otherwise. You can be more insulting with a quirk of your lips than most people would be with a debate team coaching them and feeding them lines. You’re my son. I know. Gods, do I know…”
“You often complain about how long my birth took, yes.”
And she laughs.
It’s… A bark, more than anything else. A surprised outburst, as if she never expects to find joy in the world, and so it always mixes with a bit of shock.
I can’t say it’s that unfamiliar.
So I take a sip of water as she wipes her eyes with her free hand, and I pretend to relax as she looks at me with more warmth than when she’s sober.
“See? That? That sense of humor? There’s no way a girl like the one I’m supposed to believe sat at the dinner table with us would appreciate that. But her performance was almost perfect, so I can only imagine that she’s clever, cunning… She likely has some sarcasm of her own, some bitterness… Maybe a broken heart? A broken home—”
“You’re going too far,” I tell her with a voice that I… That I didn’t know I could make.
Mom’s hand stops, frozen while raising her beer yet again to her lips clean of any makeup.
And she turns to look at me.
“You do love her,” she says after a tense silence.
I look at her. At my mother.
At the woman with dark rings below her eyes, that can only relax when she’s half-drunk, that can only half-show she cares and always leaves me guessing whether I’m imagining it.
“I do,” I say.
And stand up.
“Hachiman,” she says when I reach the counter and set my half-empty glass of water on it.
I don’t turn around.
“I… I’m happy. For you,” she says.
And I may smile.
Or maybe not.
Because I’m too confused to know as I nod without turning back and go up the stairs toward my room, where I won’t be forced to confront any complicated feelings about the woman I just put a performance for to fool her into not knowing what is going on with my life even as I keep blaming her for not knowing, not being there, not…
Not.
I enter my room, taking off my tie angrily, and—
My phone beeps.
My hand is slightly unsteady as I take it off my pocket, and I can see a couple of unanswered messages left by the only woman I know who both wants to message me and wants to do it in excess.
‘How are you? Did everything go OK? Do you want to talk?’
‘Brat, seriously, is everything OK?’
‘If I have to send a picture of my breasts for you to answer, I swear to God, I’ll get Iroha and her lighting rig in here.’
I read the most recent message three times.
By the second, I no longer have any doubts: I am smiling.
And so I decide to share my joy:
‘Get Haruno in the shot, and you have a deal.’
For some reason, Shizu’s next message doesn’t contain either a heartfelt declaration of undying love or a nude pic. Really, I don’t even know why they’re called the fair sex.
Gender equality is as faraway an ideal as ever.
Comments
Agrippa
I didn't want her to be too one-dimensional, but now I may be going too far in the other direction because I'm really empathizing with the bundle of trauma, insecurities, and neuroses...
DC2008
Hachi-mom is really growing on me
