All Right! Fine! I’ll Take You! – Zaimokuza Gaiden – Chapter 4 – A Cross Girl

“Never mind. See you tomorrow, Yoshiteru.”

With yet another sigh (something I shouldn’t get in the habit of doing, but I swear the chuuni—never mind), I drop the phone on my desk. It’s the third object in there. The first one is an insipid teen magazine that I swear is showing an article titled “How to know whether he likes you” by sheer serendipity. The other…

It’s a small box, black leather with silver filigree. It’s closed. It’s been closed since three years ago.

I lean back on my chair. A gaming chair, because Shigeru swore it would be far more comfortable than my old one, and so far I must admit (grudgingly) that the little twerp was right. The red and black clashes a bit with my subdued décor, but it’s not like anyone has visited since…

Agh, I am not doing a dramatic flashback, thank you very much!

Seriously, he gets me to open up just the slightest bit, and he suddenly thinks I am going to start rambling about a single scene from my traumatic past that somehow makes everything make sense? Screw that! I don’t make sense! I don’t have to; I am a real woman, not an anime cliché that can be easily dissected just by knowing that I had a friend who trusted me and another I trusted, and both of those turned out to be—

Goddammit, chuuni boy! You aren’t even here, and you are already getting me worked up!

Not like that!

Seriously, what is it with him and making me lose control? Yesterday, I just let go and ended up…

It was nice to be hugged by him. He’s… Big. Soft. Warm. Comfortable. Like a teddy bear with muscles.

Which… Oh gods, that was so embarrassing! His sister is a demon! Seriously, just letting me walk in on him when he was almost worse than naked? With that ridiculous compressive vest that just showed how thick his arms are, and those shorts that…

Not a lot left to the imagination, is what I mean.

Not like… I mean… Today—

Fuck!

I just made out with a boy, and I already know what his, his… His dick feels like pressed against my pussy! Aaaaaahhhh!

Why! Why did I do something as stupid as just shutting him up with a kiss only to climb on top of him?!

That isn’t normal behavior! That isn’t how you shut up an annoying, infuriating, clueless—

And he hasn’t called me!

My first kiss! Did it mean nothing?!

All right, fine, I made him promise not to mention it (because I obviously don’t want him spreading rumors around about finally getting some action with the formerly popular girl who is suddenly putting out after a single date), but… but…

My! First! Kiss!

And he groped my butt!

Butt-groping should merit a phone call! It’s in the rules!

I throw yet another dejected look at the useless magazine. All right, no, it isn’t in the rules, but it should be.

Also, who even makes those rules? Seriously, ‘wait until the third date so you don’t come across as too eager?’ So what if I am eager? So what if it feels so good not to have to put up a façade because who would even try with someone who answers his phone as ‘Blademaster General,’ and what the Hell is even up with that?!

I never said anything half as ridiculous, not even after Mika—

Goddammit!

Fine, fine, you want a flashback, Minami? Let’s have a fucking flashback.

It’s three years ago, and I am a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed whatever. I like anime well enough, because it’s a way to spend time with the runt before puberty strikes hard, and he becomes as insufferable as he currently is (while I remain a pure, innocent, well-mannered maiden, or else). My best friend is Mika, whose father owns an aikido dojo that suddenly seemed all that much cooler than I ever thought because I have gotten hooked—I mean, because Shigeru has gotten hooked on some battle manga or other, and auras, ki, and special attacks that follow not only technique but the intent and personality of the user are cool as fuck, and I dare any mouthbreather from the internet to say to my face once again that I should like magical girls other than Nanoha and Fate (because badass) rather than shounen.

Seriously, not an argument I want to have again. Mostly because of how unpleasant the people who have another opinion tend to be.

Anyway, I go by the dojo a few times, but it’s not for me. A lot of training and a lot of allowing yourself to be thrown around that gets me nothing to show for it, but Mika knows me since we were both little brats and… Well, she figures it’s not really the martial thing that I am interested in.

And then she takes me away during recess and tells me that ki is real.

I look at the small box. The leather is a bit scuffed from the many times I opened and closed it, the simple sound of it snapping after I flipped the lid… It was a pleasure. And what it contained… I liked to imagine that having it inside the box, protected by the leather as the silver acted as some kind of catalyst, would purify the power contained and… Well, that’s jumping ahead a bit, isn’t it?

Because this is skipping Mika’s first lesson.

That ki is real, but that doesn’t mean what I think it means.

Anime makes it so easy, you know? People yelling, allowing emotion to overflow, to draw out some hidden power, manifesting will through sheer intent… It’s fascinating. And, to a point, exactly how it feels. How it should feel.

But only to a point, because… Mika’s father believes in ki. He teaches that aikido can only be really learned when one understands and feels ki. He even thinks that it is actually impossible to train ki without knowing aikido.

Mika thinks his dad is a bit of a moron.

Aikido isn’t that old, and surely people would have known about ki long before the middle of the XXth century (Boys—dammit, Minami!). No, she has read on her own and knows a lot of what aikido teaches relates to kotodama, the power of words, and that should help me focus if I really want to learn…

I design a mantra. Of course I do. I couldn’t bother to learn proper meditation; no, I had to get enthusiastic and design a cool chant to gather power like…

I wonder if he has ever done something like that?

And so, for a few weeks, Mika and I spend recess together, reading articles she has printed off the web and referenced with books she has at home, and… I learn how to breathe in a certain pattern, how to visualize light flowing around and through my body, how to attune that light to my movements. And I can feel it.

I can feel ki, and it’s the biggest rush in my life.

I can feel the slight tingling pooling on my palms, the warmth flowing down my arms.

I try to do a Kamehameha. Obviously.

Nothing happens. Also obviously.

Mika explains something maybe she already said, but I was far too excited to pay attention to.

Ki is real. But that doesn’t mean what I think it means.

Placebo, nocebo, suggestion, self-hypnosis… All of them are real. It is perfectly possible I am only feeling my hands tingle because I have convinced myself they should tingle. It is even likely.

Ki is real. People who train to feel it experience an increase in performance in certain tasks. Mika shows me the research, and it sounds far too complicated for me to understand, and therefore I can not doubt it. But ki could be anything. It could be a mystic force gathered through self-discipline, or it could be an altered state of consciousness that sounds far too much like self-delusion.

Like being a useless, ridiculous chuuni.

I take the box off my desk. Its weight is still familiar, comforting, and I can feel its contents jingle with a slight shake. Without meaning to, I find myself smiling.

It is precisely the kind of thing a chuuni moron would have bought at a street stall a few years ago.

And that is precisely what it is.

I didn’t feel betrayed by Mika. Not at all. I understood, up to a point, what she was saying, and I, up to a point, agreed. It would be amazing if I could just meditate for a few days and start throwing around beams of searing light, but… Well, it’s not like I was fighting a shadow organization or something like that, was it? It still was cool to have this kind of secret with my friend, to get all excited at a particularly strong tingle, to see whether we could replicate her father’s trick to make our arm unbendable by imagining a river of light flowing from it to infinity (spoiler: we couldn’t—well, I couldn’t, Mika more or less managed, but I think she just was much stronger than me).

I spent a lot of time sharing a secret with my friend, and that was thrilling enough, even if we never got anywhere near what we both wanted to believe was possible. Even if all we did was, maybe, a bit of self-hypnosis that made us feel all good and powerful for a bit. Heck, even that time we both got a headache? That was amazing! Seriously, it felt like we synchronized and failed in our attempt to break our limits or something like that. It was exciting, fun, and if we didn’t manage to do anything substantial? We were trying to learn the secrets of the cosmos that society was too blind to see with just a few printed web pages and a couple of books, and we had already gotten this far! What more could the future hold?

Sayuri. The future held Sayuri.

I go to open the box, thinking maybe the glint of silver and something else will comfort me, but once again, like every time I have thought about doing this in the past three years, I stop. Because I’m too ashamed to.

She… was my other friend. She had never been interested in none of that, and she and Mika may not have been as friendly with each other as I had thought. Spending all that time with Mika, on something Sayuri thought was, at best, a silly game of play-pretend?

I sigh and look at the stupid magazine. There are rules. Easy to follow, once you understand them. Even if they are far too much work, even if they may seem nonsensical, they work.

Back then, I knew none of them. I just thought Mika and Sayuri were my friends, and that should have been enough.

I wish I had known.

It… Really, do I have to go through this again? It’s not like I haven’t beaten myself up about this enough times already.

People who know the real you… are the ones who can hurt you the most.

Sayuri knew me. She had for many years.

And I… I knew Mika.

Young girls are stupid, petty, prone to playing social games with clear winners and losers. To be a winner is to stand at the top with the other winners. To be a loser is to be alone.

I do not want to be alone. I never have.

And I was a young girl. And very stupid.

I don’t want to remember my last year of middle school, following Sayuri around without any of the excitement or thrill I felt with Mika, with none of the mysteries of the cosmos waiting for me to discover them after a ton of tips on makeup and boys took their place.

Sayuri was as good a teacher as Mika had been. It’s just… her lessons were far more immediately useful. More applicable. Reliable.

And in my hand lies something that was never reliable. That, if it worked, could have been a fluke, but if it didn’t, it was either through my lack of skill, or faith, or devotion, or just because it really didn’t work at all, and it could be all of those things or none of them, and I would never know.

I take the magazine. The article says you should know a boy is interested in you if he asks about you, or looks at you when he thinks you don’t notice, or tries to make you laugh, or includes you in a conversation with others. It also says a good way to attract him is to not show too much interest so that he will think you are worth pursuing.

And I think about a hand larger than any I have ever seen (and that includes Mika’s dad) grabbing my… my butt. His fingers digging into my flesh as I let out a moan that was far too sudden and unexpected for me to contain.

I think if I played hard to get, the chuuni moron wouldn’t even try to talk to me because, well, I have sworn him to silence, haven’t I?

With a sigh (dammit, Yoshiteru), I throw the magazine in the waste bin.

What use are rules when playing with someone who doesn’t know them?

And it all started… I don’t really blame Haruka and Yukko, you know? They weren’t even actively malicious, they just… played by the rules, paradoxically. Can I say what they did is any worse than what Sayuri taught me?

Yes, they pushed me. They pushed me hard, and I ended up bawling my eyes out in front of the whole sports committee. I had tried to compromise with them because I understood what they were actually trying to do, capitalizing on my previous mistakes so they could feel justified in not doing their best. So I gave them an out of sorts to avoid conflict and let them… Well, I dunno what I thought I was letting them do, but certainly not try to sabotage the whole Sports Festival! And certainly not…

Not making me rely on him.

That’s... I don’t think I would have enjoyed the date if it wasn’t for him.

Not only because I ended up watching Princess Mononoke again, though that obviously didn’t hurt any, but… My rule-abiding ‘friends’ had failed me almost catastrophically, and the one boy in school I know for a fact knowsthe rules yet forcefully ignores them… He saved me.

I don’t know when I will forgive him for that.

So, I went on a Sunday afternoon date with the other boy that ignores the rules, because his head is too far up his ass to even notice they exist. It was a punishment game, a kind of penance I had to endure for my former group to accept me after all the conflict. ‘Do this tiny, little thing, and we will act like nothing happened. Oh, well, except when we suddenly feel the need to bring up it up further down the line. Because you know how the game is played, Sagami, you know how it went for Mika, so why would you expect you deserve any better?’

Let’s just say that Sunday afternoon I was perfectly primed to accept the pleasant company of someone who thinks checkers needs three dice and a deck of cards.

And I did. And the fucking chuuni rejected me!

Because of Hiki—that boy!

I went through all of that and…

My eyes look up at the select few mangas that are in my room instead of being secreted away in Shigeru’s room. There’s one that came some time ago, a romance about a guy who stands up to a drunk guy who is harassing a young girl on the train. She is grateful and asks for his contact information so that she can send him a gift and… He’s an otaku.

Absolutely useless. The guy basically lives in 4chan, so he goes there to get advice on what to do about a cute girl feeling grateful to him. And… well, the story actually happened. It was a heartwarming tale of someone overcoming his limitations to live up to what he himself felt he should be for the sake of the girl he ended up falling in love with, who ended up reciprocating and even commenting on the thread that had brought them together through the collective advice of caring strangers.

A few years ago, it was even kind of a trend for girls to hook up with otakus, looking for that devotion, that singleminded purpose to be better for them, that loyalty only those with no other options can ever feel.

Of course, otakus being otakus, the trend passed as quickly as it came.

But… well, if a girl who suddenly realizes living by the rules doesn’t actually protect you from the other players were to find an otaku who likes her favorite movie and can talk for hours on end about a subject she has missed for years because it was a far more important part of her than she ever realized… One could forgive that girl for expecting some… some of that otaku devotion and single-mindedness, wouldn’t they?

Certainly, after giving her first kiss to him and sitting for quite a few too many minutes on top of his…

…

Dammit, Minami, what have you gotten yourself into? The man is denser than Kishimoto’s plotholes…

Yet again, I sigh before getting up.

I walk to the center of my room, my hand clutched so hard around a leather box I can feel my flesh pulsing against it with every heartbeat.

I take a deep breath and relax my hand. Tension impedes the flow of ki. Or qi, or even prana (though certainly not chakra, because those are spots on the body, not an energy field, and ninjas wouldn’t have used that terminology, even if the hand seals of the kuji kiri were supposedly stolen from India).

I take another breath, visualizing the most basic pattern: light fills my body with the onrushing air, and shadow leaves it when I exhale. I do this nine times because three and its multiples are propitious (and you should never use four as a pattern, for very obvious reasons), and I feel a hint of serenity settling around me. That’s when I switch.

Abdominal breathing, with every exhalation pushing down on my hara, the center of gravity of my body, where light gathers and pools, and I feel an echo of that warmth that came to me so easily years ago but is now… What it maybe always was: a comforting story I am telling myself.

But it doesn’t matter. Not when it follows my intent, when it grows steadily until it reaches a plateau I can’t push through. There’s… a bit of a cramping sensation when I try to increase the heat. Mika always told me that, in something that is supposed to be directly connected to the true, unconscious self, one should listen to warnings. So I do.

Then, filled with as much light and heat as I can stand before it becomes uncomfortable, I take the box in both hands and raise it to my eyes.

The words don’t come as easy as the breathing. Because the visualizations and the exercises were taught to me by a very smart friend, while the words were the whimsy of a far too excitable young girl who didn’t know, nor cared, about any rules.

They don’t come easy. But they come.

With a tiny voice, a whisper that has more of embarrassment than solemnity, I say them for the first time in three years.

“Thou hast lain dormant, in wait. Thou has dreamt of power yet to come. Thou has grown in your sleep. Thou has waited to be awoken by mine hand. And when I do, you will have grown, and your growth will fuel mine. Come, dear companion. Walk with me once more.”

My cheeks are burning, and I want to bury my face in my bed until I fall unconscious from sheer asphyxiation.

Really, past me? Really?!

I bite my lip and try not to fidget in a way the chuuni moron would think I am copying from some trashy moe anime, and…

The lid opens with a sharp clack, and…

A cross plated in silver, decorated with swirls and whorls far too elaborate, with a garnet in the middle of it that always reminded me of my hair. My earring.

An earring picked by a me who thought that things being cool made them adequate jewelry. It is not so garish as to be fitting for a gyaru, but is a near thing.

I… I am smiling more widely than I have… Since I don’t know when.

With an almost trembling hand, I reach for it. The metal feels warm to my touch, which can be explained by my holding it for minutes while my hands are heated up due to a breathing pattern that has demonstrable, physiological effects, as it brings the blood in the inner body (much warmer than the outside) to the surface. It can be explained by that. It is the logical explanation, the possibly real one.

It’s not the one I like.

I like to think months of reciting words filled with intent as I followed the precepts of kotodama learned from the daughter of a master of aikido were enough to imbue the cross with something that ties it to me, that makes it respond.

I know how it sounds. I know what people think. I know what the rules say I should do.

I take off my right earring, the stylish stud with another garnet that is far more discreet, that compliments my eyes in an understated manner.

And I put on a cross that is far bolder.

And I…

I am sorry, Mika.

I turn back to my desk, looking at the mirror I use to put on my makeup. The combination of my left stud and my right cross could be far worse. It stands out, certainly, and I am sure more than one impertinent curl who doesn’t know what they are meddling with—

Uh… I mean… I am sure some busybody will ask me about it.

I will try not to tell them that it actually represents the mystery of the rose in the cross, a Christian allegory for the incarnation of the soul in the flesh, of God come as man.

Westerners are weird, what with eating their god every week, but they have some really cool stuff.

So, it stands out. But not badly. It… I can work with this, because it…

Because I like it.

And that should be reason enough.

So I look at my mirror and cock my head just so until the garnet in the middle of the cross catches the light, and I flash an impudent grin.

“Worship me, you fucking NEET.”

“You do realize Aqua-sama is not someone you should imitate, don’t you, sis?”

I turn to the door of my room. Which is open. With the goddamn runt smirking at me, a hint of a snicker on his eyes.

…

The damn—

“Die, you shitty nerd!”

“Bakugo is not much of an improvement.”