Hyoutei Roommates: Coping Methods #4: Shintai Ryounan, Part 3
Title: Shintai Ryounan (The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea)
Part: 3/3
*_*_*_*
That clinched it-walking home with him every day was definitely killing the part of her brain devoted to sensible behaviour. Kind of like formaldehyde, only more insidious.
But darn it, how had he managed to go and alter their little list of obligatory conversational topics on her? It was hard enough to concentrate on walking and breathing at the same time-the walking wasn’t so bad, but the breathing got kind of difficult when he was walking next to her, his forearms tanned and golden in the afternoon sun. Asking her about her day-check. Her returning the question-check. Both of their days being fine-yup. Now and again, a question about this and that was well within normal limits, but not too often. Obligatory and adorably grumpy request for her to take kobujutsu lessons at the dojo, courtesy of his father-yes, ‘no thank you,’ and it still amazed her how filial he was, to keep trying. She’d have already staged a revolution at the Hiyoshi dojo if she’d had his father.
She’d have lost, but she’d have tried.
Would she like to come over to watch the advanced class this afternoon?
She’d agreed to it even before her brain had scrambled and realised that no, that wasn’t on the script.
And he’d looked so surprised-and pleased-that she’d been too busy with the breathing thing again to offer a fast ‘oh, oops, my hair needs washing’ retraction.
Though she had to admit, upon the very belated-as in, the already sitting in seiza at her appointed place kind of belated-realisation that of course he was in the advanced class, she almost rethought the necessity of the hair-washing. With only ten people in it, nine men and a lone woman, there weren’t all that many places that she could conceivably look without it being obvious that she was trying very hard not to visually devour him.
Oh, heck, given the opportunity-with Hiyoshi wearing a gi and moving like he’d thrown off everything that had ever weighed him down, if she hadn’t been gripping her thighs hard enough to leave nail prints right through her skirt, there would have been no visually about the devouring.
“Thank you for inviting me, Hiyoshi.” She’d thanked him in front of his father-and, she hoped, repaid him at least a little by making sure they both got out of there before the glint in Hiyoshi-san’s eyes materialised into real words-but it bore saying. He hadn’t had to invite her any more than she’d had to accept, after all… and much to her chagrin, she really had enjoyed it.
That was, in fact, a lot of the problem.
“You’re welcome,” he dipped his chin, gravely-before cocking his head. The one real advantage of dusk rather than late afternoon was that it didn’t gild him quite so prettily. “Did you find it interesting?”
Well, if that wasn’t a dangerous question, she didn’t know what was-but luckily, she actually did have an answer for him. “The lady with the… the surujin, is that what it’s called?” he nodded. “Those things she was doing-I mean, it was pretty incredible. She could give Gakuto a fair run for his money.”
The woman hadn’t been young, but she’d been very impressive-Mari could count off just how impressive by how long she’d been distracted by the jumping and spinning and twirling, the soft burr of the three metre long weighted chain as it cut through the air. Halfway through the exhibition, she’d had to physically close her half-open mouth.
Heck, with moves like that, the lady probably could have given Gakuto a good fight in the leg department, too.
Hiyoshi made a soft, noncommittal noise in his throat-she wasn’t sure, but it was probably protest at the idea of comparing one of his kobujutsu classmates to Gakuto. “Ah. Yes, the surujin is very difficult to control. The acrobatic style is not traditional, but Kikumaru-san has been practicing with it for many years.”
“Hmmm.” She’d thought as much-she couldn’t imagine stately old martial artists of time immemorial practically doing handsprings. Though didn’t Seigaku have…? Well, no matter. “I noticed she doesn’t use any kicks, though-or, well, I guess she can’t punch anything with the chain in her hands. Seems a bit restrictive.”
He gave her that odd, sideways look, like she’d said more than she meant to-except, well, she was sure she hadn’t. “Restrictive?”
She shrugged-obviously, kobujutsu wasn’t her sport, but at the same time… “Well, once you get past all the flashy acrobatics, it’s mostly wrapping and hitting with the weight at the end, right? Great for someone who’s far away, but what about if your opponent’s actually, say, just at arm’s reach? You can’t get any tension out of a three-metre chain from that close, can you? I mean… I guess you could probably hit them with your off-hand, the one that’s anchoring the chain, but…”
“Ah.” For some bizarre reason, he looked like he was smiling, just out of the corners of his eyes. “Traditionally, surujin have a weight on one end, and a punching blade on the other… in the off-hand, as you call it. In the dojo we replace the punch knife with another weight.”
“Oh.” Well, didn’t that make her feel like an idiot; she grinned, a little sheepishly. Of course they wouldn’t use something like that in the dojo-especially during sparring. Punches were hard enough to block as it was-she didn’t even want to think of blocking a punching blade. “Just the surujin, though? The, uh… the… the darn it. The scythe? It looks pretty bladed to me.”
His mouth half-curved again, though he didn’t look at her-maybe it was the whole gekokujou thing of her pure and utter ignorance. “The tekko. The beginners use wooden ones, but it’s the only bladed weapon in traditional kobujutsu-we would never get used to the weight and feel of live steel if we didn’t use it.”
Ri-ight. She blinked, once, slowly. He’d said it so totally matter-of-factly. She understood the principle of it, of course, and as far as martial arts went, she didn’t disagree with it… but they needed to get used to the weight and feel of bladed, curved metal because… why?
Or maybe it was pride in his smile, because she’d seen him sparring with those things-and him waltzing around with two miniature scythes in hand should not have been anywhere near as hot as it had been.
“Well.” How embarrassing, that she had to clear her throat before she could continue, just at the remembrance-how her heart had leapt from her chest and into her mouth, even knowing that there was no way his opponent was going to hurt him, scythes or no scythes. If nothing else, she’d seen the number of gold stripes on Hiyoshi-san’s belt: the man probably had the control of a Buddha. “Thank you. I really did enjoy it.”
He nodded, once, silent, and offered her that little half-tilt of a smile again before facing forward again. She was getting a bit used to it, maybe-the first time he’d actually smiled at her, it had very quickly faded into asking her what was wrong with her, because she’d stopped dead right in the middle of the sidewalk.
Her opinion was admittedly not exactly the most unbiased in the world, but she had to admit-very grudgingly-that Hiyoshi was good, even compared to some of the others in the advanced class. Though it made her grin that he’d spent most of his time working with the bo staff-she suspected that it was the only weapon in the kobujutsu arsenal that would let him work two-handed with the weight and momentum of an unwieldy object-and therefore strengthen what Atobe called his weaker backhand swing.
She tried not to take Atobe at face value regarding anything else, but one could only assume that he knew what he was about when it came to his very favourite obsession.
But even the poses that Hiyoshi was so notorious for on the tennis courts looked, well… much less silly when he was holding actual weaponry, rather than a tennis racquet. Wrapped in all the traditions of the dojo-the bowing, the ritual phrases, the acknowledgments of a single opponent’s strengths where tennis mostly just kind of forgot about that in the hurry to beat the heck out of said opponent-he seemed like he fit, where sometimes, outside, he just… well… didn’t-not in Hyoutei, at least.
She glanced sideways at his still, silent profile. Maybe not anywhere in the modern world.
Pride, she understood. Gekokujou… well, if she’d ever played tennis against Atobe, she didn’t doubt that she’d have wanted to beat the stuffing out of him, too. But there was something hot and spicy and chaotic about all the lust and aggression and drama that the boys took out on each other, and Hiyoshi was… well, more wabi and sabi than horseradish paste. Oh, he was as arrogant as all the rest of them, but there was something just a little cool about him, just a bit distant, like a snowflake.
She’d always suspected that he was suspiciously old-fashioned-but he must have really loved tennis to put up with some of the antics of the Hyoutei Regulars.
Well, unless he was old-fashioned enough to be a throwback to the good old samurai days-manly men and male love being the purest form of love and all. Yes, it was a statistical improbability that all the best players in Hyoutei be gay-those in her year and below were bad enough, but the seniors in the club were as out of the closet as party dresses on prom night. There was always one exception to every rule, wasn’t there?
She had, after all, met Kabaji’s girlfriend the other week.
She was still grinning at the memory of being in Shibuya and spotting Kabaji and his girlfriend-the captain of the women’s basketball team-when her house came into sight. There were lights on in the windows, much to her surprise and delight. Well, she wasn’t liable to get in trouble for being home late-she doubted her father had any idea when she got out of school, much less when she was supposed to arrive home-but it was, well, a very nice end to what had actually been a very nice day.
“Well… I guess I’ll see you tomorrow, Hiyoshi-kun?” it would have been courtesy to invite him in… but for one thing, she was never going to invite him in, and for another, it would have been courtesy to accept, too-and she hadn’t rescued him from an interrogation by his father only to subject him to a well-meaning, but essentially humiliating and horrifying interrogation by hers. “Thanks for walking me home.”
He waved it off with a shake of his head. “It’s nothing. But…” she watched him half-hesitate, the odd expression flickering across his eyes again before he shrugged one shoulder, casually. “You’re welcome to come to the next class, too, you know.”
She couldn’t remember what exactly she said, past the blur of idiocy that turned the inside of her brain bright blush-scarlet. Apparently it made sense to one of them, because he simply nodded, and turned on his heel to start walking away.
This time, it actually took real effort to turn away from the sight of his plain white t-shirt fading off into a road lit dimly by streetlights; actually, it took real effort to coordinate her hands enough to get them on the doorknob.
“Mari, welcome home!” There was something extremely wrong about the fact that her father had on the one apron that they had in the house-aside from the fact that it was too small for him, considering that it had been a gift from Kou-obasan, it was yellow with a white fringe. Now she was really glad she hadn’t invited Hiyoshi in. “Well! I haven’t seen you look so cheerful in months. Isn’t that a nice smile?”
Was it? She’d just been thinking that she was going to need a loofah to get the stupid grin off her face. “Hi, Papa. You’re home early.” She sniffed-there was a distinctly meaty fragrance filling the house and drifting through the doorway, and her eyes narrowed. There didn’t seem to be wisps of smoke drifting through the foyer… “Did you make dinner?”
He had, in fact, made dinner-well, frozen gyoza for dinner once in awhile wasn’t going to hurt either of them. She had to admit that his beloved pot stickers were really tasty.
“Oh,” he picked up the last gyoza; after his excited exposition about someone with Barrett’s Esophagus, she didn’t really want it anymore. “You got a call today, by the way. Very nice boy-bit of an odd accent, though.”
Mari winced. Oshitari was out: he had the self-preservation not to ruffle her home nest-she did, after all, know where the chemistry club kept its supplies. And the only other one on the tennis team with a really noticeable speech pattern should have been using her cellphone number, considering that she was the head of his fanclub, and if he’d managed to murder yet another innocent cellphone-he went through them like Shishido went through hair ties-his roommate could easily have called her. She might have had it on silent, but it still would have vibrated.
Though if the Hiyoshi dojo turned out to be a cellphone dead zone, her heart be damned, she was going to be spending more time there.
She couldn’t think of anything in particular that she had forgotten to set up, though, either for him or the fangirls. Yes, Atobe and logic were not kissing cousins at the best of times, but there was no conceivable reason behind any urgency that would lead to the great and proud Atobe Keigo going to the school administration and demanding her home phone number… she couldn’t imagine him going through the phone book any more than she could imagine him at McDonald’s, asking “Do you want fries with that? Ahhhn?”
It was really disturbing that it was harder imagining him going to the administration for her number than it was imagining the administration actually giving him her number.
She sighed. “Well, thanks for taking the call, Papa.” At least Hyoutei’s resident ego wasn’t spreading his collateral damage to her home. Her father must have been dealing lately with some exceptionally cranky patients that he’d be calling Atobe a ‘nice, polite boy;’ Atobe wouldn’t know ‘polite’ if it hit him with Ms. Manners, etiquette book and coiffed hair and all. “What did he say?”
Mari raised both of her eyebrows as her father slumped back in his chair with a disappointed-sounded grunt. “You know who it was? Well, nothing ever gets past you, does it, Mari? He said you’d be surprised, too.”
She didn’t doubt that Atobe had said just that. And tomorrow, he’d probably say quite a few other choice things about how she should be honored by him stooping to talking to a parent, of all things.“Oh, I am, trust me,” her mouth quirked, and she stood to start gathering the dishes. “Did he leave a message?”
“Oh, just leave those, I’ll get them. He just said to tell you that Ishikawa Satoshi called, and that he hoped to see you around sometime,” he told her, from somewhere over her shoulder.
“I’m just putting them in the sink.” And then she was going to wash them, because he had, after all, made dinner-and school had nothing on working at a hospital. “Wait, what?”
“People do normally leave their names when they call, Mari,” her father laughed. “He said you knew him.”
“Ishikawa, you say? Oh. Huh.” She felt herself frown as she lowered the plates into the sink; without long sleeves, she didn’t even have to go through the suspicious motions of rolling them up. Well, now she actually was surprised-the call hadn’t been what she’d expected. “Thank you.”
Ishikawa? She was sure that there was probably an Ishikawa on the Hyoutei tennis team somewhere, but if so, she didn’t know who it was, and why they’d be calling her at home-it was a fairly normal, common name, though, and normal commoners-like her, and everyone else who’d been suckled on a pacifier rather than a solid gold tennis racquet-did own copies of the phone book. Maybe someone had a crush on one of the fangirls. Oshitari had been trying to get her to play matchmaker for some of the chem club guys, but she wasn’t really into lost causes, and besides, she thought it was healthy for Oshitari Yuushi to fail at something now and again. There was an Ishikawa in her grade, but Mari doubted that said girl had gone from being Satomi to Satoshi. And in third year… third year, third year, she could have sworn there was something familiar about that…
“Ishikawa Satoshi. Third year. I see you on this train all the time…”
And then, just as all the blood in her veins pooled black in her feet and drained from her head, “Oh, so you’re the kind who likes to play it rough, are you, Taira Mari?”
The chopsticks she’d just picked up fell from numb fingers into the remains of the gyoza sauce, and she watched, abstractly, as dark droplets spattered all over the rest of the plates. At least, she found herself thinking, they were dirty already.
She wasn’t sure how she’d forgotten his name-maybe she’d convinced herself into it, after all, told herself that an alias didn’t matter-such a common name. It had been so long, it felt like it had been so long, and nothing had happened to her, in the end-a split lip, a scraped cheek, she barely even remembered what they’d felt like. The nightmares had faded, most days she really didn’t have any desire to run that last stretch home, and for the most part, when the Kashiwa silence wrapped around her-she didn’t think of Ishikawa, or whatever his name actually was, she thought of Hiyoshi Wakashi staring straight ahead and all the way down the road, with the sun through his bangs and making him squint.
Oh, she was surprised. She was. So surprised she couldn’t talk; so surprised she could feel her voice sticking to the back of her throat, and it came out very soft through the clinging dryness of her mouth when she said, “Actually… um, Papa? Would you mind doing the dishes?”
“Of course not. Didn’t I say I would do them?” But maybe there was something odd with her voice, even with him behind her. “Mari? Is something wrong?”
“It’s nothing, Papa.” She pushed back from the sink, slowly, carefully, so she wouldn’t be sick, with her head as huge and fragile as a bowl full of eggshells. “I’m just… going up to my room. I’ve got a lot to do for tomorrow, that’s all.” It wasn’t even a lie. She did have a lot to do; she always did. She’d get around to it, too, as soon as her hands stopped shaking.
If she hadn’t gone with Hiyoshi to the dojo-if he hadn’t walked her home…
Maybe she wasn’t going to need a loofah to make the smile go away, after all.
*_*_*_*
The calls never came when she expected them; maybe that was the worst part of it all.
After the first three, she called the police; after the first ten, she realised that whatever paperwork she’d filed was likely sitting in a small little box marked ‘Nuisance.’ “If something happens, call us, right away, okay?” one receiver soothed, with her delicate tinkling voice.
Mari didn’t bother to tell her that if something happened, then it was already too late, wasn’t it? There was no point in being rude to a receptionist-though for the first time in her life, she understood people who were.
Another, a policeman, was more gruff, “You were walking with him, Taira-san. It says so on your statement. You weren’t harmed-well, obviously, it took you two months to report it. Are you sure this isn’t just some teenaged mischief, maybe someone from school?”
Well, maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. After the first month of calls, she called the police office again-one last time, just one, just maybe…
She was puzzled, but pleased, when another policeman asked her if the original incident had happened in summer, and what she’d been wearing when it happened-the gods only knew that no-one else had ever taken her particularly seriously. She’d replied something or other-yes, it’d been summer, and yes, she’d been wearing her school uniform…
…and then the policeman asked her if she was the type of girl who hemmed up her skirt a little too high, and she’d sat down hard on the floor by the phone’s table, so shocked that her fingers tingled and she fumbled the phone. She didn’t know if he’d taken her silence as assent… but when he went on to tell her about how dangerous it was to ‘incite young men to passion’ and how ‘if you say no, how are they supposed to know that you really mean it, after all?’ his voice so fatherly and soothing that bile burned in her throat and she’d scrambled to her feet and dropped the phone back onto the receiver.
Japanese courtesy be damned-if she hadn’t hung up on him, they’d have been arresting her for assaulting a police officer.
Maybe they were all thinking that. Maybe they all thought she’d done something-it was giving her the crazy urge to march into there just so they could get a look at her and start laughing at the idea that she was even the least bit… what had he called it? Provocative?
It was nice enough to think that this wouldn’t have happened in Hawaii-hells, the media and its sly insinuations were one thing, she could just imagine the backlash if it came out, a police officer saying things like that to a girl!-but, for one, she wasn’t living in Hawaii anymore… and for another… she very, very, very much doubted that someone would have come running to her rescue, wielding the weaponry of a traditional Okinawan martial art.
But whatever it was, whether or not they believed her, the police weren’t going to be watching her house on the grounds of such a nebulous thing as someone breathing into the phone, that much was clear.
The truth was that she didn’t have any idea if whatever-his-name was anywhere near her house. She didn’t even know for sure that it was him on the phone. If there was actually some sort of special intuition that girls in movies had, to know with absolute certainty when it was their stalker breathing at the other end of the line, she’d missed the ticketing for it on the same day she’d missed the one for Hiyoshi-sense.
And the problem was that her father had a beeper, but he didn’t have a cellphone-she couldn’t, well, not pick up the phone. There was no point to making the suggestion, either, when the hospital didn’t allow cellphones; they had some sort of walkie-talkie thing that all the doctors and nurses carried.
Maybe that was what was so awful about it-sometimes she picked up the ringing line already braced, and had to catch herself on the end table when, say, her auntie, or one of her dad’s friends, or one of his colleagues, chimed up through the line. And sometimes she came into the door and ran to get the ringing phone only to find no-one there-just the sound of someone breathing as her “Hello? Hello?” got higher-pitched, cracking.
She was keeping it together in school, mostly-the interesting thing about Hyoutei was that she’d always thought of it as her job and her duty and her demon as much as her education, and she frankly wasn’t at all sure that her parents would have entirely been happy with most of the stuff she’d, ah, learned in her time there. But there was an odd sense of certainty in it being physically, if not mentally, safe. After all, if nothing else, the Atobe Group would never, ever have let anything happen to their heir apparent… and when she was surrounded by students, even exceptionally big-headed students, she was just too busy to think. But she couldn’t stay at school forever, and gods, if something didn’t happen soon-as demons danced with split lips in her dreams, and her grades slipped then rose out of sheer pure obstinacy and then slipped again-she was going to go insane.
Jirou noticed the blurred half-moons growing underneath her eyes-then Oshitari commented on them, to her dismay, but if the rest of them thought something was odd, they were too caught up in the dealings of their own little dramas to notice. She couldn’t blame them, to be honest-sometimes, getting mired in the Gay Brigade was all that kept her sane these days-and those weren’t words that she’d ever thought she’d hear herself say.
But she couldn’t bring herself to tell them-just told Jirou, not even trying to smile, that she was having a few personal issues that she had to deal with. And when Oshitari brought it up, it was far enough from the end of the day that she’d been able to make a comment about hearing Gakuto yowling all the way in Kashiwa.
She could have said something to someone-there was nothing stopping her-but she was already walking home with Hiyoshi, virtually every day. Even if she’d been willing to ask it of him, and he’d been willing to do it, Oshitari ran the chemistry club single-handedly and didn’t have any time to devote to her problems; Jirou would have been willing to walk her all the way home, because he gave too much of himself sometimes, but what happened if he fell asleep, say, on the train back to Tokyo-or if he decided to tuck himself under a convenient bush and take a nap on the way home? Kashiwa, as she could attest, was very quiet. And very peaceful. It was a recipe for a nap.
Other than that, what more could they do-other than worry? And when another month passed by-it was starting to get just a little chilly outside, but she didn’t mind that, it made the whole running home thing marginally more pleasant-and nothing happened… maybe the breathing into the phone wasn’t that alarming, after all. She picked it up, she said “Hello” a time or two, and put it down again. Sure, it put her pulse up, but that wasn’t all that different from what being around Hiyoshi did to her… right? It wasn’t anything she couldn’t handle. It wasn’t. Yes, she was still having a nightmare or two, and yes, she just couldn’t bring herself to assume that it’d be okay to stay late and go home long after dusk, the way she’d used to, but… but if he wanted to breathe at her, it was his five hundred yen coin to blow… wasn’t it?
She’d just about decided that maybe she was overreacting just a little, and if she thought about things a little she’d be able to clear the white, sticky cobwebs that were populating the inside of her brain when the phone rang again. She still jumped when it did. She always did, but she managed, almost, to give herself a good solid eye roll before reaching over for it. “Hello, this is the Taira residence.”
“You really shouldn’t leave your door unlocked when you leave in the morning, Mari-chan. It’s not safe.”
That was all he said. She’d always imagined that when he spoke, if he spoke, his voice would be familiar-it wasn’t. It did have a thick, arrogantly crude accent-wouldn’t she have remembered that? It was casual, rather than sneering, or mocking, or taunting.
Maybe that was why it was so utterly terrifying.
This was Japan. Kashiwa was outside of central Tokyo. It was safe, it was safe, damn it all, people didn’t even lock up their bikes here, much less their front doors; and maybe it was just a guess, maybe it was just to rattle her… but she did forget to lock the door sometimes, and she was rattled, damn it… and when she dropped the phone back onto the receiver, she missed the first time, and had to go crawling under the table to get it.
She didn’t put it back to her ear to find out if he was still there.
*_*_*_*
Mari didn’t run home the next day, after she and Hiyoshi parted ways at their corner-she walked it. Slowly. Deliberately. It was sick, and awful, how much effort it took, just to put one foot in front of the other-but it was tiring being afraid, it was tiring being tired, and what was running going to do? It would get her to her house faster, that was all… but it meant that she was tired by the time she was there, and while she didn’t doubt that the house was safe, that call had shook her in a way that even the call to her father hadn’t. There’d always been a certain, well, distance in it, even when he’d talked to her father.
But of course nothing happened, that day, or the next, and she was rolling her eyes at herself, at her own absurdities, by the time she got home on the third day, and started going through her bag for her keys.
Except when she slipped her key into the lock, and turned it…
There was no hint of pressure as the key pushed at the tumblers. There was no satisfying klunk of the lock coming undone. And when she reached for the knob, puzzled, with white rising to noise and trying to be a clamour at the back of her head, it twisted easily in her hands.
But she’d locked the door that morning.
The clamour in her head rose to a shriek when she looked down to realise that the keys were jangling in the lock from the way her hand was trembling-she yanked them out fast, the metal rasp too loud, and cupped the chill, sharp edges in her hands, one step back, two, another, slow and easy and quiet. It could be nothing. It could be nothing at all. Maybe she’d forgotten. Maybe, maybe, maybe she was being paranoid, there were no lights on in the house, no sign that anyone was in there, maybe maybe-she was as flawed as anyone else, she was misremembering, it had been a busy day, after all, one step at a time backwards, slowly, slowly…
But she was running blind before she’d even realised that she was pounding the streets underneath her scuffed Adidas three-stripe sneakers, the breath in her lungs cold and sharp in tiny dagger-points of winter approaching, her eyes and her face and her throat stinging like vinegar.
She didn’t even really realise where she was headed-she didn’t even realise where she was, past the blur of green and grey and scarlet from the pain of cold, dry winds in her face, the scuffed knee where she’d tripped and sprawled, small bits of gravel pitting her palms… until something froze her-the feel of a door under her hand, sliding open on smooth tracks, the warmth of wood underneath her socks when she shoved off her shoes and left them scattered.
Because not even the sweat blurring her vision-not even the fear-could keep her from realising exactly where she was, and who she was there with-not when Hiyoshi was standing in the middle of the empty shiai-jou, still in his gi, mid-stance, low to the floor-body extended in a sweep with his hands spread like wings, so beautiful still that she was choking on it before she even realised she was making any noise.
The irony of it… well, the Hiyoshi family didn’t lock their door, either.
I’m not okay, she admitted-but only in the silence of her mind. In many, many, many ways, she was most definitely not okay.
“Taira-san, what-“ Hiyoshi simply looked at her once-and she didn’t know what he saw, but in the next instant, there was understanding on his face when he came up from his stance in a sharp, fast jerk. There was understanding, and a change like a storm rolling in. “Are you hurt?”
She shook her head-she’d bloodied her knee, but it was odd how she couldn’t feel it. She wasn’t even sure where her voice had been trapped, but it was trapped, squirreled away where no-one could touch it. Where it could hide, and be safe.
Lucky little bastard, it was.
“Taira-san.” His voice was a low, slow roll, and she hated the way he was looking at her-like she was weak, like she was hysterical, like he didn’t know what to do, and hellfires, why should he? She was Taira Mari, she was normally in control and at least nominally put together, and she hadn’t any idea what to do. She squeezed her eyes closed-this was worse than the phone calls, in its own way, how in the name of every god there was had any part of her subconscious thought that it could make it better? When the very way Hiyoshi said her name-no-one else actually used her last name anymore-made it clear that he wasn’t the Student Crisis Hotline, and whatever distance was between them was going to stay that way, thank you very much?
She never heard him move, through the sound of her heart thundering in her ears and the taste of her pulse fluttering on her tongue, but when he said “Taira-san” again, she felt callused fingers brush her wrist.
It was accidental-or reflex-or something, honestly it was. But the thought of anyone touching her when she already felt like shattering would come all too easily-the tingle that went up her entire body at his touch, like a shudder, not quite pleasure and not fully pain-her fist was out and swinging and in flesh with a thick, dull smack before she’d even fully opened her eyes to watch him jerking away from her, just out of arm’s reach.
“Hiyoshi-kun-“ she gasped. No, this couldn’t even be a nightmare. It was too awful to be anything but real. “Oh. Oh, gods. I’m so sorry, I-“ she’d seen him take hits during the one and only time she’d seen him sparring, but this wasn’t a sparring match, and she wasn’t an opponent, and she hadn’t had the leverage or the balance to hit him hard but she’d hit him all the same. Oh gods maybe she was hysterical. “Oh, no. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have come. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
That, at least, was nothing but the truth. Gods, she knew exactly what the expression on his face was like when he saw girls doing what, in his mind, was ‘that girl thing.’ But there wasn’t anyone-or anything-that could tell her what to think. What to do.
He reached up to touch where she must have hit him, high on his arm, and blinked at her, slow and wooden and contemplative… before striding over to the wall and picking up one of the long wooden bo staves, hefting it in one hand. Then another.
She wasn’t a coward; she’d hit him, and for no good reason whatsoever, and if there were consequences… she wasn’t going to run. She wasn’t going to run, even if her skin was cold and hot and cold again, and her hands seemed utterly still when she looked down at them for the sole reason that they weren’t trembling any more than the rest of her body was.
She’d run too much already, and she was out of tears.
And then he held out one of the staves. “Here, Taira-san.”
She stared at it, then at him. Her lips couldn’t even quite form the words ‘are you insane,’ because it just seemed a little too… obvious. “What?”
He let go of the staff-it would have clattered to the floor, if she hadn’t reached out so automatically to the falling bar, and she found her hand full of smooth weight, unwieldy grace, one narrower tip resting on the floor and the other rising high above her head.
“You’re stronger than you look; you can handle a bo.” He reached out and plucked up her other hand, lying slack against her side-so quickly she barely had time to be startled by just how rough his palms and fingers were before he was pressing her hand to the staff. “Both hands on it, near the widest part of the center. There. No, a little farther apart.”
Befuddled, she stared at him as he demonstrated on his own staff-his voice was crisp in his orders, and the wood was smooth with time in her hands when she moved them, bemusedly, to match his positions. What is going…
“Yes. Good. Now try to hit me.”
She almost dropped the staff-she might have dropped it, if she hadn’t known exactly what most martial artists thought of their precious weapons hitting the floor like that, outside than them being struck out of someone’s poor, merely mortal hands. “Hiyoshi-kun, why in the name of everything would I want to hit you?”
“You just did hit me,” his logic was true, and pointed, and so very cruel for the fact that he obviously didn’t mean it that way. “You won’t hurt me, Taira-san.”
Five minutes ago, she probably would have agreed, but that was before she’d socked him just for trying to break her out of the descending spiral behind her eyes-and before he’d put a solid six-foot bar of wood in her hands and she’d realised that her knuckles were white on it. “You don’t know that,” she whispered. She didn’t know that.
“Yes.” His voice, his gaze, were calm and golden with certainty, confidence, his stillness settling through her and over her like a fleece after a long, long winter. “I do.”
She didn’t realise just how much she’d wanted to lash out-just how much she needed to feel in control of herself, her life, her body, again-until she tipped the staff towards him tentatively, and the shock of him catching it on his own staff and flipping it away, the effort of keeping the unruly, surprisingly flexible material from twisting away in her hands, sent a hard, sharp thrill like forgetfulness down her arms.
His eyes were glittering and opaque and dark through his hair; he held his staff diagonally across his body, and his mouth was stern and gorgeous. “Not like that. As hard as you can, Taira-san.”
But at the end of the day-sometimes she didn’t like him, sometimes she could have hated him for making her love him, but he’d given her reason to believe in his words. And she couldn’t deny that walking with him through the still Kashiwa streets made her feel safe from the world outside her own skin, gift and bane and pleasure and pain that it was.
She wasn’t sure she’d survive it if he somehow managed to make her feel safe from the world inside her own skin.
But nonetheless, when he bit out, “You will not hurt me,” again, she closed her eyes and swung.
The shock of contact rang down her arms and shivered up her back when wood caught wood like a thunderclap that hauled her eyes back open again-a flick of his wrists set the staff in her hands to life again, and she twisted on one heel to go with its motions. He set himself, and she slid her hands over to mirror his position-wider, more stable. “Yes. Again.”
She struck faster, this time-she’d never used a bo before, and it was heavy and clumsy and surprisingly silky against her palms and her white-knuckled fingers and her nails biting into her palms-she almost pulled back at last second hesitation no hesitation what happened the last time you pulled away, Mari and wrenched the bo in a sharp snap at his shoulder instead-it startled her, the rush of satisfaction when he twisted away, his grunt when the wood in his hands just barely deflected her staff away from his arm. She barely felt it when the angle of her swing meant that part of the staff clipped her hip. “Good,” he muttered, looking down at her with those hot, challenging eyes. “Again.”
Again it was-again, again, again, raining blows on him that never quite touched him. He could have dodged them, Mari thought, the words oddly distant-there was no grace to what she was doing, no expertise, no control, no careful calculated sweeps-and if he had, she’d have gone sprawling with the force of her own movements. But he stood his ground as casually if he didn’t have any other place to go, any other place to be but exactly where he was, and when some of the first strikes went wild, far from him, the unwieldy staff rebelling in her hands-he caught them on the spinning surface of his bo and nudged her staff-and her-back into balance.
“Again, Taira-san, you can hit harder than that,” his voice was low, and rough, just short of a snarl. This time, the shove of his parry and the flashing intensity in his eyes sent her spinning rather than just stepping back, and she only kept herself from falling by catching herself on a hand-and roaring back into him with a thrust of her legs, reveling for a moment in how his eyes widened for just a heartbeat.
And, much to Mari’s surprise, she could hit harder than that.
When she gave it her all. When she drove into him hard enough to make him take a step back, then another, then a third, trusting that he would catch her strikes, trusting that he would not let himself-or her-fall. After that, he didn’t need to tell her anymore, and sometime a moment and an infinity later, with her breath like a saw through her chest and the echoes of wood and voice ringing in her ears like she was in the centre of a temple bell, she realised distantly that she’d started yelling with every wild strike-deep belly yells, loud enough to echo and wild enough to scratch her throat-not terror, but rage.
It wasn’t fair, what had happened to her. It wasn’t fair, it was dreadful, the fear brought pale tears stinging to her eyes, but she almost never cried when she could fight.
It wasn’t a dance-she knew she was a decent dancer, and it wasn’t a dance, not elegant, not sensual, not beautiful, not fun. But it was fury, and desperation, and then it wasn’t desperation anymore but a wild, hot, glorious frustration as the staves clacked, again and again, a musical sound just enough out-of-sync from any kind of conceivable rhythm that there was no mistaking it for exactly what it was.
And finally, when there was no more fear or frustration, just the fierce blind light of adrenaline, and then finally not even that, she stopped, startled to find herself shaking all over-but with good, plain, ordinary exhaustion. Her fingers cramped on the bo staff and she almost dropped it with a clatter, barely catching one end on the crook of her arm and sucking in a sharp breath at even that small jerk of contact. There were small semilunar crescents dug into her palms; if her nails had been any longer, they’d have been stained with blood. Her shoulders were one long snarling line of fire, the line of her ribs and her side was throbbing like a pulse where she’d caught herself with her own staff more than once, and she wasn’t entirely sure that someone hadn’t snuck red-hot coals where her biceps and triceps were supposed to be.
But she felt… she felt drained, and exhausted, and normal again.
She was panting so hard that every breath hurt, and when it took so much effort to stay standing, rather than toppling over or using the bo as a crutch, it took too much effort to think about all the reasons why loving him made her an idiot. Especially when he looked down at her with a few strands of his hair clinging gently to his forehead, and nodded, slowly, lowering his staff from a guard position to resting by his side, a sleek dark, sweat-blurred line to match his sleek, white-clad form.
“I told you so,” he said, softly.
What he’d told her-she wasn’t sure she remembered; he’d told her that she couldn’t hurt him? And perhaps it was just one of those things in his mind, taken for granted, that he wouldn’t injure her: it was probably beneath Hiyoshi Wakashi’s dignity to hurt girls. Her heart squeezed at his grace, as if for the express purpose of proving him wrong, and she closed her eyes-the pain of it surprised her, against all the aches of her body. It didn’t normally sting so much-but then, she didn’t normally see the best of him. “Thank you,” her voice was a thin thread, and its crackles and pops startled her, a little. It didn’t sound very much like her at all.
He didn’t ask her if she was all right, this time; he didn’t ask her if she felt better. Maybe the questions were too personal, or maybe, just maybe, Hiyoshi didn’t need to ask. “It’s no problem, Taira-san,” his voice was quiet, and steady-not thready with exhaustion and overexertion, not like hers, but with the same lifeline of certainty.
With her eyes closed still, she heaved a long, slow breath that felt… like a breath. Not like choking, not like strangling, not like exhaustion or her life closing around her in whispers and sneers and foul memories. And when she called for her reserves, she was probably more surprised than he was that they came as a faint smile, flitting around the corners of her lips. He was haloed with late afternoon and a thin shining sheen of sweat when she opened her eyes again. “If you don’t start calling me Mari from now on, Hiyoshi-kun,” her voice was hoarse and strange, “I’m going to mean it the next time I hit you.”
The words rode bravely on the remains of adrenaline; she’d never protested the distance that his use of her last name had placed between them, because, in truth, it was easier for her that way. But it seemed ridiculous, now, artificial and obscene with her entire body soaked with sweat and fire, and the simple, unquestioning understanding that she saw in his eyes. He’d known what he was doing. He’d known what he was letting her do.
She didn’t think he had any idea just how often he could make her break her heart on him.
“You didn’t mean it when you were flailing at me?” But she noticed that he reached over and took away the staff from her anyway, and there was a faintest lingering hint of what might have been an answering smile through the dampness on his face, the droplets he wiped away with a sleeve of his gi.
“Flailing? I was not-“ well, yes, she had been: the bo was a lot clumsier than it looked; Mari humphed, and rested her hands on her hips. At least she’d made him sweat for it. “Do you give the rest of the tennis club this much sass, Hiyoshi-kun?”
“You’re not on the tennis club, and I’m not giving you sass.” Right. Sure. Who was in denial now? “And calling senpai by their given names is very disrespectful, Mari-san.”
He sounded so properly disapproving that she shook her head with a low little chuckle. “Well, considering that even the other freshmen call me Mari-‘neechan, I hardly think-“ she paused. It had come and gone, that moment, so quickly that she almost hadn’t noticed it past the giddy white walls that adrenaline and exhaustion and an utter blessed lack of fear, for once, had raised around her. “You just… Hiyoshi-kun.”
He simply looked levelly at her, through the copper fringe of his bangs, and shrugged.
Jello for knees? Noodles? Had she ever made such a silly comparison? Jello wobbled-noodles flopped-what her knees were doing was disintegrating.
This time, he asked her if she was all right-startled but not particularly alarmed, as if he had girls crumbling into a clumsy seiza at his feet every day. But when she laughed, rubbed her stupid, useless, wounded knees, and replied, “Sounds like gekokujou to me,” the martial artist was a teenaged boy again-one who blinked slowly at her as if she was completely out of her mind, and that just made her laugh all the harder.
Oh, it was absurd. He was absurd, and at moments like this, she did know why she loved him. She never understood just why she’d fallen in love at that first, fog-limned glance, but… but at moments like this, she understood, a little, why she’d never quite gotten the trick of falling out of love with him.
When he offered her a hand up, he did it tentatively-just a little too far away for her to reach without stretching, as if he were afraid the insanity was quite contagious. Mari shook her head with a rueful smile, and pushed herself back to her feet with both shaky hands. And then she tried again, after she didn’t get quite enough leverage the first time on elbows that were trying to follow her knees’ example.
She’d already had quite enough help from him getting up when she was down, thank you.
But all the same, she accepted when he reached for a windbreaker and offered to walk her home-and noticed that he kept his hair out of his face, his chin high, glancing around with slow, exacting sweeps.
His eyes, she noted, abstractly, were actually a very plain, very ordinary grey, and clashed a little with his hair.
“Did you think about calling the police, Mari-san?” her house was just coming into view, the sun just barely starting to tip over the edge of the horizon, when he finally broke the silence
“It’s… my door was unlocked, and I locked it when I left. That’s all.” With her voice as thin as it was, the words sounded broken. She wasn’t going to say it was silly, because it darned well hadn’t felt silly… but she’d acted as stupid and irrational and fearful as any of the fanclub girls, at the end of the day. At the same time… he hadn’t asked, and perhaps that was why she told him. “He said… well. It doesn’t matter. He’s been… he’s been calling my house a lot. I called the police before. I don’t think there’s anything they can do, right now.”
He frowned, his gaze narrowing to glittering dark again. “You didn’t give him your number, did you?” He wasn’t stupid; he didn’t ask who, or what kind, or why, either.
She shook her head. Maybe a part of her wanted to be indignant at the very idea that she’d give a strange man her phone number… but the larger, more sensible part of her… well, she’d let herself be duped into walking through an empty neighbourhood with a strange man. On the scale of stupid, phone numbers seemed pretty minor in comparison. “But the kanji for my name isn’t the normal Taira; he saw it written on my notebook, and I think we’re in the directory.” Because her father had been so adamantly happy about Tokyo being safe. And, ironically… it was statistically a lot safer than the Wahiawa neighbourhood she’d grown up in.
It really, really sucked to be that one in a million, though.
His lips tightened, and he shook his head, once, brisk and brusque. “This has been going on a long time. If you see him, call the police. And if you need me to talk to them, too, give them my number, Mari-san. I’ll text it to you.”
Oh, gods. The sound of him staying her name, offering his number… her knees had gotten the hint, but her heart rate, it seemed, did not understand the same things that her head did.
“I… thank you. I will.” She hadn’t realised just how long it had been-mentally, if not temporally-until swinging at him had flushed out all the cobwebs clinging to the insides of her brain. Had she really been hoping that if she let it be, she’d be able to… to just deal with it? To just let it go? “Hiyoshi-kun?” she bit on her lower lip to stop the question, but it slipped out anyway, tripping merrily to the tune of her pulse dancing. “How did you know?”
He glanced down at her out of the corners of his eyes. “How did I know what?”
If she could have thought of a single cover-up… but could she live with never knowing? She knew where her trust came from, and he’d just had it as much as he’d earned it-but what, what, what in the world would make you put your weapons-and your health-into the hands of a terrified girl you barely knew? “How did you know that… that that would make me feel better?” Why, Hiyoshi? but ‘why’ was personal in a way that knowledge wasn’t.
‘Better’ was an understatement. She was exhausted, she ached all over, but the inside of her head-for once, for the first time in a long, long time, was… her own, not crowded with the sound of that too-familiar voice on the phone, not jumping with qualms like insects, not leaping with every time a breath made his shoulders rise.
Glass houses being what they were-she really should stop making fun of Atobe for all of his issues.
His response was immediate, as if it didn’t so much as require consideration; he didn’t look at her, eyes skimming across the road ahead, the trees beside. “Because you do things, not let things happen.” He shrugged, even as she stared at the clean, sharp angle of his jaw; she hadn’t thought-she hadn’t ever for a moment thought-that he knew her so well. “You’re the kind of person who fights, Mari-san.”
She did fight; she always had. It was on the tip of her tongue to tease, to laugh, to brush it off with an ‘are you saying I’m violent?’ But with the white noise in her head gone, Mari knew pushing him away for exactly what it was-and frankly, she could be an ass as much as she wanted, but she couldn’t get him to understand her any less than he already did.
What she’d done… it wasn’t the kind of thing you did to a stranger-and it wasn’t the kind of thing that you let a stranger do.
And she hadn’t believed that she was striking at the creature of her nightmares-even in a fury of heat and pain and sweat dripping into her eyes, she couldn’t mistake Hiyoshi as being anyone other than who and what he was. But with him standing unflinching in front of her, she’d felt herself smash away at her own demons, screaming at the top of her lungs-wearing herself out on him and firmly believing, despite or perhaps because of everything, that he wouldn’t break under the pressure.
Instead, she found herself asking, tentatively, “Hiyoshi-kun? Are you… are you really okay?” Well, she didn’t think he’d be walking her home if he was genuinely not okay, but at the same time… it wasn’t that he was a gentleman, it was that she was sure that Hiyoshi Wakashi was more stubborn than the Kashiwa building foundations.
He looked just a little startled, and younger for it. “What do you mean?”
“Well…” her thumbnail wanted picking. If only because looking at him was more uncomfortable, more personal, than usual, with his face turned towards her like that. “I was going a little crazy in there, and… well.” There was no conceivable good way to explain it in a way that wasn’t going to ping on his martial arts pride. “I mean, it was really nice of you, but… I didn’t hit you or anything? You’re okay?”
“Oh.” His shrug was minimal, careless, when he glanced away from her again. “I’m not that weak, Mari-san.” Something moved behind the last remains of daylight reflected in his dark eyes, a little like amusement, maybe a little like teasing. “And you’re strong, for a girl, but no girl is that strong.”
For that, she growled and cuffed his arm-and found herself proving him entirely too right, when the growing stiffness of her right shoulder meant that she barely flicked his sleeve with her fingertips-but the laughter bubbled up all the same, almost drowning out his half-muffled, raspy little chuckle.
And to her relief-and, all things considered, probably to his-the lights were on in her house by the time they got home, and her wary “Tadaima” at the door was met by the smell of-once again-meat gyoza. By the time she turned around to thank him, Hiyoshi was already walking away, just barely a shadow in his blue windbreaker and white gi pants.
But he shot her a half-guilty, half-defiant look the next day at practice when Ootori, eyes huge as a box of Valentine’s chocolates, demanded how he’d gotten those awful bruises on his forearms.
Mari wasn’t entirely sure whether to blush, roll her eyes, roll shoulders that twinged uncomfortably at the slightest memory of how she’d abused them, or take a nice long guilt trip. She’d barely been able to grasp a pen the entire day. And he was the one who’d, er, commanded her to hit him… but she’d been the one holding the six-foot-long phallic symbol. And all because, well, her father had forgotten his beeper at home and had come home to get it… and, of course, not locked the door on his way out.
That afternoon, on the way home, when Hiyoshi asked her if she wanted to take kobujutsu lessons at the dojo, he didn’t mention his extremely stubborn father.
That afternoon, on the way home, when he asked her if she wanted to take kobujutsu lessons at the dojo, Mari found herself saying “Yes.”
~owari~
Start: June 05, 2005
End: May 23, 2007
….yeeeees. ^^; Sighness. I do apologise to everyone who’s made it all the way to here… I don’t know, I had so much in my head, but for some reason, nothing came out the way I actually wanted it to, and it's hard to know if I kept Mari "in character," considering that this one is, well, a little more serious than the rest of the series. (And considering that this fic literally had a two-year hiatus. ^^; Let's just say that about half of the first part was written in June of 05... and everything else was written in the past, uh, two weeks or so.) If anyone has any post-posting suggestions, I’d love to hear them, so I can work them in-editing on the fly, perhaps, but if it works…
The title, of course, comes from the phrase 進退両難, or roughly enough "there are difficulties to either moving forward or withdrawing." IE, being caught between the Devil and the deep blue sea.
Oh. Caveatness: Kashiwa isn’t actually much like what I describe it-or, rather, the parts of it I remember are, but the area near the station definitely isn’t. ^^; Also, I know nothing about kobujutsu, and unfortunately couldn’t really find any good details or videos of it on the Interwub, so I really just made things up whole-cloth. And Mari’s little throat-poking move in the very beginning isn’t White Crane, it’s a variation on a taekwondo maneuver. ^^; Oopses.
Part: 3/3
*_*_*_*
That clinched it-walking home with him every day was definitely killing the part of her brain devoted to sensible behaviour. Kind of like formaldehyde, only more insidious.
But darn it, how had he managed to go and alter their little list of obligatory conversational topics on her? It was hard enough to concentrate on walking and breathing at the same time-the walking wasn’t so bad, but the breathing got kind of difficult when he was walking next to her, his forearms tanned and golden in the afternoon sun. Asking her about her day-check. Her returning the question-check. Both of their days being fine-yup. Now and again, a question about this and that was well within normal limits, but not too often. Obligatory and adorably grumpy request for her to take kobujutsu lessons at the dojo, courtesy of his father-yes, ‘no thank you,’ and it still amazed her how filial he was, to keep trying. She’d have already staged a revolution at the Hiyoshi dojo if she’d had his father.
She’d have lost, but she’d have tried.
Would she like to come over to watch the advanced class this afternoon?
She’d agreed to it even before her brain had scrambled and realised that no, that wasn’t on the script.
And he’d looked so surprised-and pleased-that she’d been too busy with the breathing thing again to offer a fast ‘oh, oops, my hair needs washing’ retraction.
Though she had to admit, upon the very belated-as in, the already sitting in seiza at her appointed place kind of belated-realisation that of course he was in the advanced class, she almost rethought the necessity of the hair-washing. With only ten people in it, nine men and a lone woman, there weren’t all that many places that she could conceivably look without it being obvious that she was trying very hard not to visually devour him.
Oh, heck, given the opportunity-with Hiyoshi wearing a gi and moving like he’d thrown off everything that had ever weighed him down, if she hadn’t been gripping her thighs hard enough to leave nail prints right through her skirt, there would have been no visually about the devouring.
“Thank you for inviting me, Hiyoshi.” She’d thanked him in front of his father-and, she hoped, repaid him at least a little by making sure they both got out of there before the glint in Hiyoshi-san’s eyes materialised into real words-but it bore saying. He hadn’t had to invite her any more than she’d had to accept, after all… and much to her chagrin, she really had enjoyed it.
That was, in fact, a lot of the problem.
“You’re welcome,” he dipped his chin, gravely-before cocking his head. The one real advantage of dusk rather than late afternoon was that it didn’t gild him quite so prettily. “Did you find it interesting?”
Well, if that wasn’t a dangerous question, she didn’t know what was-but luckily, she actually did have an answer for him. “The lady with the… the surujin, is that what it’s called?” he nodded. “Those things she was doing-I mean, it was pretty incredible. She could give Gakuto a fair run for his money.”
The woman hadn’t been young, but she’d been very impressive-Mari could count off just how impressive by how long she’d been distracted by the jumping and spinning and twirling, the soft burr of the three metre long weighted chain as it cut through the air. Halfway through the exhibition, she’d had to physically close her half-open mouth.
Heck, with moves like that, the lady probably could have given Gakuto a good fight in the leg department, too.
Hiyoshi made a soft, noncommittal noise in his throat-she wasn’t sure, but it was probably protest at the idea of comparing one of his kobujutsu classmates to Gakuto. “Ah. Yes, the surujin is very difficult to control. The acrobatic style is not traditional, but Kikumaru-san has been practicing with it for many years.”
“Hmmm.” She’d thought as much-she couldn’t imagine stately old martial artists of time immemorial practically doing handsprings. Though didn’t Seigaku have…? Well, no matter. “I noticed she doesn’t use any kicks, though-or, well, I guess she can’t punch anything with the chain in her hands. Seems a bit restrictive.”
He gave her that odd, sideways look, like she’d said more than she meant to-except, well, she was sure she hadn’t. “Restrictive?”
She shrugged-obviously, kobujutsu wasn’t her sport, but at the same time… “Well, once you get past all the flashy acrobatics, it’s mostly wrapping and hitting with the weight at the end, right? Great for someone who’s far away, but what about if your opponent’s actually, say, just at arm’s reach? You can’t get any tension out of a three-metre chain from that close, can you? I mean… I guess you could probably hit them with your off-hand, the one that’s anchoring the chain, but…”
“Ah.” For some bizarre reason, he looked like he was smiling, just out of the corners of his eyes. “Traditionally, surujin have a weight on one end, and a punching blade on the other… in the off-hand, as you call it. In the dojo we replace the punch knife with another weight.”
“Oh.” Well, didn’t that make her feel like an idiot; she grinned, a little sheepishly. Of course they wouldn’t use something like that in the dojo-especially during sparring. Punches were hard enough to block as it was-she didn’t even want to think of blocking a punching blade. “Just the surujin, though? The, uh… the… the darn it. The scythe? It looks pretty bladed to me.”
His mouth half-curved again, though he didn’t look at her-maybe it was the whole gekokujou thing of her pure and utter ignorance. “The tekko. The beginners use wooden ones, but it’s the only bladed weapon in traditional kobujutsu-we would never get used to the weight and feel of live steel if we didn’t use it.”
Ri-ight. She blinked, once, slowly. He’d said it so totally matter-of-factly. She understood the principle of it, of course, and as far as martial arts went, she didn’t disagree with it… but they needed to get used to the weight and feel of bladed, curved metal because… why?
Or maybe it was pride in his smile, because she’d seen him sparring with those things-and him waltzing around with two miniature scythes in hand should not have been anywhere near as hot as it had been.
“Well.” How embarrassing, that she had to clear her throat before she could continue, just at the remembrance-how her heart had leapt from her chest and into her mouth, even knowing that there was no way his opponent was going to hurt him, scythes or no scythes. If nothing else, she’d seen the number of gold stripes on Hiyoshi-san’s belt: the man probably had the control of a Buddha. “Thank you. I really did enjoy it.”
He nodded, once, silent, and offered her that little half-tilt of a smile again before facing forward again. She was getting a bit used to it, maybe-the first time he’d actually smiled at her, it had very quickly faded into asking her what was wrong with her, because she’d stopped dead right in the middle of the sidewalk.
Her opinion was admittedly not exactly the most unbiased in the world, but she had to admit-very grudgingly-that Hiyoshi was good, even compared to some of the others in the advanced class. Though it made her grin that he’d spent most of his time working with the bo staff-she suspected that it was the only weapon in the kobujutsu arsenal that would let him work two-handed with the weight and momentum of an unwieldy object-and therefore strengthen what Atobe called his weaker backhand swing.
She tried not to take Atobe at face value regarding anything else, but one could only assume that he knew what he was about when it came to his very favourite obsession.
But even the poses that Hiyoshi was so notorious for on the tennis courts looked, well… much less silly when he was holding actual weaponry, rather than a tennis racquet. Wrapped in all the traditions of the dojo-the bowing, the ritual phrases, the acknowledgments of a single opponent’s strengths where tennis mostly just kind of forgot about that in the hurry to beat the heck out of said opponent-he seemed like he fit, where sometimes, outside, he just… well… didn’t-not in Hyoutei, at least.
She glanced sideways at his still, silent profile. Maybe not anywhere in the modern world.
Pride, she understood. Gekokujou… well, if she’d ever played tennis against Atobe, she didn’t doubt that she’d have wanted to beat the stuffing out of him, too. But there was something hot and spicy and chaotic about all the lust and aggression and drama that the boys took out on each other, and Hiyoshi was… well, more wabi and sabi than horseradish paste. Oh, he was as arrogant as all the rest of them, but there was something just a little cool about him, just a bit distant, like a snowflake.
She’d always suspected that he was suspiciously old-fashioned-but he must have really loved tennis to put up with some of the antics of the Hyoutei Regulars.
Well, unless he was old-fashioned enough to be a throwback to the good old samurai days-manly men and male love being the purest form of love and all. Yes, it was a statistical improbability that all the best players in Hyoutei be gay-those in her year and below were bad enough, but the seniors in the club were as out of the closet as party dresses on prom night. There was always one exception to every rule, wasn’t there?
She had, after all, met Kabaji’s girlfriend the other week.
She was still grinning at the memory of being in Shibuya and spotting Kabaji and his girlfriend-the captain of the women’s basketball team-when her house came into sight. There were lights on in the windows, much to her surprise and delight. Well, she wasn’t liable to get in trouble for being home late-she doubted her father had any idea when she got out of school, much less when she was supposed to arrive home-but it was, well, a very nice end to what had actually been a very nice day.
“Well… I guess I’ll see you tomorrow, Hiyoshi-kun?” it would have been courtesy to invite him in… but for one thing, she was never going to invite him in, and for another, it would have been courtesy to accept, too-and she hadn’t rescued him from an interrogation by his father only to subject him to a well-meaning, but essentially humiliating and horrifying interrogation by hers. “Thanks for walking me home.”
He waved it off with a shake of his head. “It’s nothing. But…” she watched him half-hesitate, the odd expression flickering across his eyes again before he shrugged one shoulder, casually. “You’re welcome to come to the next class, too, you know.”
She couldn’t remember what exactly she said, past the blur of idiocy that turned the inside of her brain bright blush-scarlet. Apparently it made sense to one of them, because he simply nodded, and turned on his heel to start walking away.
This time, it actually took real effort to turn away from the sight of his plain white t-shirt fading off into a road lit dimly by streetlights; actually, it took real effort to coordinate her hands enough to get them on the doorknob.
“Mari, welcome home!” There was something extremely wrong about the fact that her father had on the one apron that they had in the house-aside from the fact that it was too small for him, considering that it had been a gift from Kou-obasan, it was yellow with a white fringe. Now she was really glad she hadn’t invited Hiyoshi in. “Well! I haven’t seen you look so cheerful in months. Isn’t that a nice smile?”
Was it? She’d just been thinking that she was going to need a loofah to get the stupid grin off her face. “Hi, Papa. You’re home early.” She sniffed-there was a distinctly meaty fragrance filling the house and drifting through the doorway, and her eyes narrowed. There didn’t seem to be wisps of smoke drifting through the foyer… “Did you make dinner?”
He had, in fact, made dinner-well, frozen gyoza for dinner once in awhile wasn’t going to hurt either of them. She had to admit that his beloved pot stickers were really tasty.
“Oh,” he picked up the last gyoza; after his excited exposition about someone with Barrett’s Esophagus, she didn’t really want it anymore. “You got a call today, by the way. Very nice boy-bit of an odd accent, though.”
Mari winced. Oshitari was out: he had the self-preservation not to ruffle her home nest-she did, after all, know where the chemistry club kept its supplies. And the only other one on the tennis team with a really noticeable speech pattern should have been using her cellphone number, considering that she was the head of his fanclub, and if he’d managed to murder yet another innocent cellphone-he went through them like Shishido went through hair ties-his roommate could easily have called her. She might have had it on silent, but it still would have vibrated.
Though if the Hiyoshi dojo turned out to be a cellphone dead zone, her heart be damned, she was going to be spending more time there.
She couldn’t think of anything in particular that she had forgotten to set up, though, either for him or the fangirls. Yes, Atobe and logic were not kissing cousins at the best of times, but there was no conceivable reason behind any urgency that would lead to the great and proud Atobe Keigo going to the school administration and demanding her home phone number… she couldn’t imagine him going through the phone book any more than she could imagine him at McDonald’s, asking “Do you want fries with that? Ahhhn?”
It was really disturbing that it was harder imagining him going to the administration for her number than it was imagining the administration actually giving him her number.
She sighed. “Well, thanks for taking the call, Papa.” At least Hyoutei’s resident ego wasn’t spreading his collateral damage to her home. Her father must have been dealing lately with some exceptionally cranky patients that he’d be calling Atobe a ‘nice, polite boy;’ Atobe wouldn’t know ‘polite’ if it hit him with Ms. Manners, etiquette book and coiffed hair and all. “What did he say?”
Mari raised both of her eyebrows as her father slumped back in his chair with a disappointed-sounded grunt. “You know who it was? Well, nothing ever gets past you, does it, Mari? He said you’d be surprised, too.”
She didn’t doubt that Atobe had said just that. And tomorrow, he’d probably say quite a few other choice things about how she should be honored by him stooping to talking to a parent, of all things.“Oh, I am, trust me,” her mouth quirked, and she stood to start gathering the dishes. “Did he leave a message?”
“Oh, just leave those, I’ll get them. He just said to tell you that Ishikawa Satoshi called, and that he hoped to see you around sometime,” he told her, from somewhere over her shoulder.
“I’m just putting them in the sink.” And then she was going to wash them, because he had, after all, made dinner-and school had nothing on working at a hospital. “Wait, what?”
“People do normally leave their names when they call, Mari,” her father laughed. “He said you knew him.”
“Ishikawa, you say? Oh. Huh.” She felt herself frown as she lowered the plates into the sink; without long sleeves, she didn’t even have to go through the suspicious motions of rolling them up. Well, now she actually was surprised-the call hadn’t been what she’d expected. “Thank you.”
Ishikawa? She was sure that there was probably an Ishikawa on the Hyoutei tennis team somewhere, but if so, she didn’t know who it was, and why they’d be calling her at home-it was a fairly normal, common name, though, and normal commoners-like her, and everyone else who’d been suckled on a pacifier rather than a solid gold tennis racquet-did own copies of the phone book. Maybe someone had a crush on one of the fangirls. Oshitari had been trying to get her to play matchmaker for some of the chem club guys, but she wasn’t really into lost causes, and besides, she thought it was healthy for Oshitari Yuushi to fail at something now and again. There was an Ishikawa in her grade, but Mari doubted that said girl had gone from being Satomi to Satoshi. And in third year… third year, third year, she could have sworn there was something familiar about that…
“Ishikawa Satoshi. Third year. I see you on this train all the time…”
And then, just as all the blood in her veins pooled black in her feet and drained from her head, “Oh, so you’re the kind who likes to play it rough, are you, Taira Mari?”
The chopsticks she’d just picked up fell from numb fingers into the remains of the gyoza sauce, and she watched, abstractly, as dark droplets spattered all over the rest of the plates. At least, she found herself thinking, they were dirty already.
She wasn’t sure how she’d forgotten his name-maybe she’d convinced herself into it, after all, told herself that an alias didn’t matter-such a common name. It had been so long, it felt like it had been so long, and nothing had happened to her, in the end-a split lip, a scraped cheek, she barely even remembered what they’d felt like. The nightmares had faded, most days she really didn’t have any desire to run that last stretch home, and for the most part, when the Kashiwa silence wrapped around her-she didn’t think of Ishikawa, or whatever his name actually was, she thought of Hiyoshi Wakashi staring straight ahead and all the way down the road, with the sun through his bangs and making him squint.
Oh, she was surprised. She was. So surprised she couldn’t talk; so surprised she could feel her voice sticking to the back of her throat, and it came out very soft through the clinging dryness of her mouth when she said, “Actually… um, Papa? Would you mind doing the dishes?”
“Of course not. Didn’t I say I would do them?” But maybe there was something odd with her voice, even with him behind her. “Mari? Is something wrong?”
“It’s nothing, Papa.” She pushed back from the sink, slowly, carefully, so she wouldn’t be sick, with her head as huge and fragile as a bowl full of eggshells. “I’m just… going up to my room. I’ve got a lot to do for tomorrow, that’s all.” It wasn’t even a lie. She did have a lot to do; she always did. She’d get around to it, too, as soon as her hands stopped shaking.
If she hadn’t gone with Hiyoshi to the dojo-if he hadn’t walked her home…
Maybe she wasn’t going to need a loofah to make the smile go away, after all.
*_*_*_*
The calls never came when she expected them; maybe that was the worst part of it all.
After the first three, she called the police; after the first ten, she realised that whatever paperwork she’d filed was likely sitting in a small little box marked ‘Nuisance.’ “If something happens, call us, right away, okay?” one receiver soothed, with her delicate tinkling voice.
Mari didn’t bother to tell her that if something happened, then it was already too late, wasn’t it? There was no point in being rude to a receptionist-though for the first time in her life, she understood people who were.
Another, a policeman, was more gruff, “You were walking with him, Taira-san. It says so on your statement. You weren’t harmed-well, obviously, it took you two months to report it. Are you sure this isn’t just some teenaged mischief, maybe someone from school?”
Well, maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. After the first month of calls, she called the police office again-one last time, just one, just maybe…
She was puzzled, but pleased, when another policeman asked her if the original incident had happened in summer, and what she’d been wearing when it happened-the gods only knew that no-one else had ever taken her particularly seriously. She’d replied something or other-yes, it’d been summer, and yes, she’d been wearing her school uniform…
…and then the policeman asked her if she was the type of girl who hemmed up her skirt a little too high, and she’d sat down hard on the floor by the phone’s table, so shocked that her fingers tingled and she fumbled the phone. She didn’t know if he’d taken her silence as assent… but when he went on to tell her about how dangerous it was to ‘incite young men to passion’ and how ‘if you say no, how are they supposed to know that you really mean it, after all?’ his voice so fatherly and soothing that bile burned in her throat and she’d scrambled to her feet and dropped the phone back onto the receiver.
Japanese courtesy be damned-if she hadn’t hung up on him, they’d have been arresting her for assaulting a police officer.
Maybe they were all thinking that. Maybe they all thought she’d done something-it was giving her the crazy urge to march into there just so they could get a look at her and start laughing at the idea that she was even the least bit… what had he called it? Provocative?
It was nice enough to think that this wouldn’t have happened in Hawaii-hells, the media and its sly insinuations were one thing, she could just imagine the backlash if it came out, a police officer saying things like that to a girl!-but, for one, she wasn’t living in Hawaii anymore… and for another… she very, very, very much doubted that someone would have come running to her rescue, wielding the weaponry of a traditional Okinawan martial art.
But whatever it was, whether or not they believed her, the police weren’t going to be watching her house on the grounds of such a nebulous thing as someone breathing into the phone, that much was clear.
The truth was that she didn’t have any idea if whatever-his-name was anywhere near her house. She didn’t even know for sure that it was him on the phone. If there was actually some sort of special intuition that girls in movies had, to know with absolute certainty when it was their stalker breathing at the other end of the line, she’d missed the ticketing for it on the same day she’d missed the one for Hiyoshi-sense.
And the problem was that her father had a beeper, but he didn’t have a cellphone-she couldn’t, well, not pick up the phone. There was no point to making the suggestion, either, when the hospital didn’t allow cellphones; they had some sort of walkie-talkie thing that all the doctors and nurses carried.
Maybe that was what was so awful about it-sometimes she picked up the ringing line already braced, and had to catch herself on the end table when, say, her auntie, or one of her dad’s friends, or one of his colleagues, chimed up through the line. And sometimes she came into the door and ran to get the ringing phone only to find no-one there-just the sound of someone breathing as her “Hello? Hello?” got higher-pitched, cracking.
She was keeping it together in school, mostly-the interesting thing about Hyoutei was that she’d always thought of it as her job and her duty and her demon as much as her education, and she frankly wasn’t at all sure that her parents would have entirely been happy with most of the stuff she’d, ah, learned in her time there. But there was an odd sense of certainty in it being physically, if not mentally, safe. After all, if nothing else, the Atobe Group would never, ever have let anything happen to their heir apparent… and when she was surrounded by students, even exceptionally big-headed students, she was just too busy to think. But she couldn’t stay at school forever, and gods, if something didn’t happen soon-as demons danced with split lips in her dreams, and her grades slipped then rose out of sheer pure obstinacy and then slipped again-she was going to go insane.
Jirou noticed the blurred half-moons growing underneath her eyes-then Oshitari commented on them, to her dismay, but if the rest of them thought something was odd, they were too caught up in the dealings of their own little dramas to notice. She couldn’t blame them, to be honest-sometimes, getting mired in the Gay Brigade was all that kept her sane these days-and those weren’t words that she’d ever thought she’d hear herself say.
But she couldn’t bring herself to tell them-just told Jirou, not even trying to smile, that she was having a few personal issues that she had to deal with. And when Oshitari brought it up, it was far enough from the end of the day that she’d been able to make a comment about hearing Gakuto yowling all the way in Kashiwa.
She could have said something to someone-there was nothing stopping her-but she was already walking home with Hiyoshi, virtually every day. Even if she’d been willing to ask it of him, and he’d been willing to do it, Oshitari ran the chemistry club single-handedly and didn’t have any time to devote to her problems; Jirou would have been willing to walk her all the way home, because he gave too much of himself sometimes, but what happened if he fell asleep, say, on the train back to Tokyo-or if he decided to tuck himself under a convenient bush and take a nap on the way home? Kashiwa, as she could attest, was very quiet. And very peaceful. It was a recipe for a nap.
Other than that, what more could they do-other than worry? And when another month passed by-it was starting to get just a little chilly outside, but she didn’t mind that, it made the whole running home thing marginally more pleasant-and nothing happened… maybe the breathing into the phone wasn’t that alarming, after all. She picked it up, she said “Hello” a time or two, and put it down again. Sure, it put her pulse up, but that wasn’t all that different from what being around Hiyoshi did to her… right? It wasn’t anything she couldn’t handle. It wasn’t. Yes, she was still having a nightmare or two, and yes, she just couldn’t bring herself to assume that it’d be okay to stay late and go home long after dusk, the way she’d used to, but… but if he wanted to breathe at her, it was his five hundred yen coin to blow… wasn’t it?
She’d just about decided that maybe she was overreacting just a little, and if she thought about things a little she’d be able to clear the white, sticky cobwebs that were populating the inside of her brain when the phone rang again. She still jumped when it did. She always did, but she managed, almost, to give herself a good solid eye roll before reaching over for it. “Hello, this is the Taira residence.”
“You really shouldn’t leave your door unlocked when you leave in the morning, Mari-chan. It’s not safe.”
That was all he said. She’d always imagined that when he spoke, if he spoke, his voice would be familiar-it wasn’t. It did have a thick, arrogantly crude accent-wouldn’t she have remembered that? It was casual, rather than sneering, or mocking, or taunting.
Maybe that was why it was so utterly terrifying.
This was Japan. Kashiwa was outside of central Tokyo. It was safe, it was safe, damn it all, people didn’t even lock up their bikes here, much less their front doors; and maybe it was just a guess, maybe it was just to rattle her… but she did forget to lock the door sometimes, and she was rattled, damn it… and when she dropped the phone back onto the receiver, she missed the first time, and had to go crawling under the table to get it.
She didn’t put it back to her ear to find out if he was still there.
*_*_*_*
Mari didn’t run home the next day, after she and Hiyoshi parted ways at their corner-she walked it. Slowly. Deliberately. It was sick, and awful, how much effort it took, just to put one foot in front of the other-but it was tiring being afraid, it was tiring being tired, and what was running going to do? It would get her to her house faster, that was all… but it meant that she was tired by the time she was there, and while she didn’t doubt that the house was safe, that call had shook her in a way that even the call to her father hadn’t. There’d always been a certain, well, distance in it, even when he’d talked to her father.
But of course nothing happened, that day, or the next, and she was rolling her eyes at herself, at her own absurdities, by the time she got home on the third day, and started going through her bag for her keys.
Except when she slipped her key into the lock, and turned it…
There was no hint of pressure as the key pushed at the tumblers. There was no satisfying klunk of the lock coming undone. And when she reached for the knob, puzzled, with white rising to noise and trying to be a clamour at the back of her head, it twisted easily in her hands.
But she’d locked the door that morning.
The clamour in her head rose to a shriek when she looked down to realise that the keys were jangling in the lock from the way her hand was trembling-she yanked them out fast, the metal rasp too loud, and cupped the chill, sharp edges in her hands, one step back, two, another, slow and easy and quiet. It could be nothing. It could be nothing at all. Maybe she’d forgotten. Maybe, maybe, maybe she was being paranoid, there were no lights on in the house, no sign that anyone was in there, maybe maybe-she was as flawed as anyone else, she was misremembering, it had been a busy day, after all, one step at a time backwards, slowly, slowly…
But she was running blind before she’d even realised that she was pounding the streets underneath her scuffed Adidas three-stripe sneakers, the breath in her lungs cold and sharp in tiny dagger-points of winter approaching, her eyes and her face and her throat stinging like vinegar.
She didn’t even really realise where she was headed-she didn’t even realise where she was, past the blur of green and grey and scarlet from the pain of cold, dry winds in her face, the scuffed knee where she’d tripped and sprawled, small bits of gravel pitting her palms… until something froze her-the feel of a door under her hand, sliding open on smooth tracks, the warmth of wood underneath her socks when she shoved off her shoes and left them scattered.
Because not even the sweat blurring her vision-not even the fear-could keep her from realising exactly where she was, and who she was there with-not when Hiyoshi was standing in the middle of the empty shiai-jou, still in his gi, mid-stance, low to the floor-body extended in a sweep with his hands spread like wings, so beautiful still that she was choking on it before she even realised she was making any noise.
The irony of it… well, the Hiyoshi family didn’t lock their door, either.
I’m not okay, she admitted-but only in the silence of her mind. In many, many, many ways, she was most definitely not okay.
“Taira-san, what-“ Hiyoshi simply looked at her once-and she didn’t know what he saw, but in the next instant, there was understanding on his face when he came up from his stance in a sharp, fast jerk. There was understanding, and a change like a storm rolling in. “Are you hurt?”
She shook her head-she’d bloodied her knee, but it was odd how she couldn’t feel it. She wasn’t even sure where her voice had been trapped, but it was trapped, squirreled away where no-one could touch it. Where it could hide, and be safe.
Lucky little bastard, it was.
“Taira-san.” His voice was a low, slow roll, and she hated the way he was looking at her-like she was weak, like she was hysterical, like he didn’t know what to do, and hellfires, why should he? She was Taira Mari, she was normally in control and at least nominally put together, and she hadn’t any idea what to do. She squeezed her eyes closed-this was worse than the phone calls, in its own way, how in the name of every god there was had any part of her subconscious thought that it could make it better? When the very way Hiyoshi said her name-no-one else actually used her last name anymore-made it clear that he wasn’t the Student Crisis Hotline, and whatever distance was between them was going to stay that way, thank you very much?
She never heard him move, through the sound of her heart thundering in her ears and the taste of her pulse fluttering on her tongue, but when he said “Taira-san” again, she felt callused fingers brush her wrist.
It was accidental-or reflex-or something, honestly it was. But the thought of anyone touching her when she already felt like shattering would come all too easily-the tingle that went up her entire body at his touch, like a shudder, not quite pleasure and not fully pain-her fist was out and swinging and in flesh with a thick, dull smack before she’d even fully opened her eyes to watch him jerking away from her, just out of arm’s reach.
“Hiyoshi-kun-“ she gasped. No, this couldn’t even be a nightmare. It was too awful to be anything but real. “Oh. Oh, gods. I’m so sorry, I-“ she’d seen him take hits during the one and only time she’d seen him sparring, but this wasn’t a sparring match, and she wasn’t an opponent, and she hadn’t had the leverage or the balance to hit him hard but she’d hit him all the same. Oh gods maybe she was hysterical. “Oh, no. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have come. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
That, at least, was nothing but the truth. Gods, she knew exactly what the expression on his face was like when he saw girls doing what, in his mind, was ‘that girl thing.’ But there wasn’t anyone-or anything-that could tell her what to think. What to do.
He reached up to touch where she must have hit him, high on his arm, and blinked at her, slow and wooden and contemplative… before striding over to the wall and picking up one of the long wooden bo staves, hefting it in one hand. Then another.
She wasn’t a coward; she’d hit him, and for no good reason whatsoever, and if there were consequences… she wasn’t going to run. She wasn’t going to run, even if her skin was cold and hot and cold again, and her hands seemed utterly still when she looked down at them for the sole reason that they weren’t trembling any more than the rest of her body was.
She’d run too much already, and she was out of tears.
And then he held out one of the staves. “Here, Taira-san.”
She stared at it, then at him. Her lips couldn’t even quite form the words ‘are you insane,’ because it just seemed a little too… obvious. “What?”
He let go of the staff-it would have clattered to the floor, if she hadn’t reached out so automatically to the falling bar, and she found her hand full of smooth weight, unwieldy grace, one narrower tip resting on the floor and the other rising high above her head.
“You’re stronger than you look; you can handle a bo.” He reached out and plucked up her other hand, lying slack against her side-so quickly she barely had time to be startled by just how rough his palms and fingers were before he was pressing her hand to the staff. “Both hands on it, near the widest part of the center. There. No, a little farther apart.”
Befuddled, she stared at him as he demonstrated on his own staff-his voice was crisp in his orders, and the wood was smooth with time in her hands when she moved them, bemusedly, to match his positions. What is going…
“Yes. Good. Now try to hit me.”
She almost dropped the staff-she might have dropped it, if she hadn’t known exactly what most martial artists thought of their precious weapons hitting the floor like that, outside than them being struck out of someone’s poor, merely mortal hands. “Hiyoshi-kun, why in the name of everything would I want to hit you?”
“You just did hit me,” his logic was true, and pointed, and so very cruel for the fact that he obviously didn’t mean it that way. “You won’t hurt me, Taira-san.”
Five minutes ago, she probably would have agreed, but that was before she’d socked him just for trying to break her out of the descending spiral behind her eyes-and before he’d put a solid six-foot bar of wood in her hands and she’d realised that her knuckles were white on it. “You don’t know that,” she whispered. She didn’t know that.
“Yes.” His voice, his gaze, were calm and golden with certainty, confidence, his stillness settling through her and over her like a fleece after a long, long winter. “I do.”
She didn’t realise just how much she’d wanted to lash out-just how much she needed to feel in control of herself, her life, her body, again-until she tipped the staff towards him tentatively, and the shock of him catching it on his own staff and flipping it away, the effort of keeping the unruly, surprisingly flexible material from twisting away in her hands, sent a hard, sharp thrill like forgetfulness down her arms.
His eyes were glittering and opaque and dark through his hair; he held his staff diagonally across his body, and his mouth was stern and gorgeous. “Not like that. As hard as you can, Taira-san.”
But at the end of the day-sometimes she didn’t like him, sometimes she could have hated him for making her love him, but he’d given her reason to believe in his words. And she couldn’t deny that walking with him through the still Kashiwa streets made her feel safe from the world outside her own skin, gift and bane and pleasure and pain that it was.
She wasn’t sure she’d survive it if he somehow managed to make her feel safe from the world inside her own skin.
But nonetheless, when he bit out, “You will not hurt me,” again, she closed her eyes and swung.
The shock of contact rang down her arms and shivered up her back when wood caught wood like a thunderclap that hauled her eyes back open again-a flick of his wrists set the staff in her hands to life again, and she twisted on one heel to go with its motions. He set himself, and she slid her hands over to mirror his position-wider, more stable. “Yes. Again.”
She struck faster, this time-she’d never used a bo before, and it was heavy and clumsy and surprisingly silky against her palms and her white-knuckled fingers and her nails biting into her palms-she almost pulled back at last second hesitation no hesitation what happened the last time you pulled away, Mari and wrenched the bo in a sharp snap at his shoulder instead-it startled her, the rush of satisfaction when he twisted away, his grunt when the wood in his hands just barely deflected her staff away from his arm. She barely felt it when the angle of her swing meant that part of the staff clipped her hip. “Good,” he muttered, looking down at her with those hot, challenging eyes. “Again.”
Again it was-again, again, again, raining blows on him that never quite touched him. He could have dodged them, Mari thought, the words oddly distant-there was no grace to what she was doing, no expertise, no control, no careful calculated sweeps-and if he had, she’d have gone sprawling with the force of her own movements. But he stood his ground as casually if he didn’t have any other place to go, any other place to be but exactly where he was, and when some of the first strikes went wild, far from him, the unwieldy staff rebelling in her hands-he caught them on the spinning surface of his bo and nudged her staff-and her-back into balance.
“Again, Taira-san, you can hit harder than that,” his voice was low, and rough, just short of a snarl. This time, the shove of his parry and the flashing intensity in his eyes sent her spinning rather than just stepping back, and she only kept herself from falling by catching herself on a hand-and roaring back into him with a thrust of her legs, reveling for a moment in how his eyes widened for just a heartbeat.
And, much to Mari’s surprise, she could hit harder than that.
When she gave it her all. When she drove into him hard enough to make him take a step back, then another, then a third, trusting that he would catch her strikes, trusting that he would not let himself-or her-fall. After that, he didn’t need to tell her anymore, and sometime a moment and an infinity later, with her breath like a saw through her chest and the echoes of wood and voice ringing in her ears like she was in the centre of a temple bell, she realised distantly that she’d started yelling with every wild strike-deep belly yells, loud enough to echo and wild enough to scratch her throat-not terror, but rage.
It wasn’t fair, what had happened to her. It wasn’t fair, it was dreadful, the fear brought pale tears stinging to her eyes, but she almost never cried when she could fight.
It wasn’t a dance-she knew she was a decent dancer, and it wasn’t a dance, not elegant, not sensual, not beautiful, not fun. But it was fury, and desperation, and then it wasn’t desperation anymore but a wild, hot, glorious frustration as the staves clacked, again and again, a musical sound just enough out-of-sync from any kind of conceivable rhythm that there was no mistaking it for exactly what it was.
And finally, when there was no more fear or frustration, just the fierce blind light of adrenaline, and then finally not even that, she stopped, startled to find herself shaking all over-but with good, plain, ordinary exhaustion. Her fingers cramped on the bo staff and she almost dropped it with a clatter, barely catching one end on the crook of her arm and sucking in a sharp breath at even that small jerk of contact. There were small semilunar crescents dug into her palms; if her nails had been any longer, they’d have been stained with blood. Her shoulders were one long snarling line of fire, the line of her ribs and her side was throbbing like a pulse where she’d caught herself with her own staff more than once, and she wasn’t entirely sure that someone hadn’t snuck red-hot coals where her biceps and triceps were supposed to be.
But she felt… she felt drained, and exhausted, and normal again.
She was panting so hard that every breath hurt, and when it took so much effort to stay standing, rather than toppling over or using the bo as a crutch, it took too much effort to think about all the reasons why loving him made her an idiot. Especially when he looked down at her with a few strands of his hair clinging gently to his forehead, and nodded, slowly, lowering his staff from a guard position to resting by his side, a sleek dark, sweat-blurred line to match his sleek, white-clad form.
“I told you so,” he said, softly.
What he’d told her-she wasn’t sure she remembered; he’d told her that she couldn’t hurt him? And perhaps it was just one of those things in his mind, taken for granted, that he wouldn’t injure her: it was probably beneath Hiyoshi Wakashi’s dignity to hurt girls. Her heart squeezed at his grace, as if for the express purpose of proving him wrong, and she closed her eyes-the pain of it surprised her, against all the aches of her body. It didn’t normally sting so much-but then, she didn’t normally see the best of him. “Thank you,” her voice was a thin thread, and its crackles and pops startled her, a little. It didn’t sound very much like her at all.
He didn’t ask her if she was all right, this time; he didn’t ask her if she felt better. Maybe the questions were too personal, or maybe, just maybe, Hiyoshi didn’t need to ask. “It’s no problem, Taira-san,” his voice was quiet, and steady-not thready with exhaustion and overexertion, not like hers, but with the same lifeline of certainty.
With her eyes closed still, she heaved a long, slow breath that felt… like a breath. Not like choking, not like strangling, not like exhaustion or her life closing around her in whispers and sneers and foul memories. And when she called for her reserves, she was probably more surprised than he was that they came as a faint smile, flitting around the corners of her lips. He was haloed with late afternoon and a thin shining sheen of sweat when she opened her eyes again. “If you don’t start calling me Mari from now on, Hiyoshi-kun,” her voice was hoarse and strange, “I’m going to mean it the next time I hit you.”
The words rode bravely on the remains of adrenaline; she’d never protested the distance that his use of her last name had placed between them, because, in truth, it was easier for her that way. But it seemed ridiculous, now, artificial and obscene with her entire body soaked with sweat and fire, and the simple, unquestioning understanding that she saw in his eyes. He’d known what he was doing. He’d known what he was letting her do.
She didn’t think he had any idea just how often he could make her break her heart on him.
“You didn’t mean it when you were flailing at me?” But she noticed that he reached over and took away the staff from her anyway, and there was a faintest lingering hint of what might have been an answering smile through the dampness on his face, the droplets he wiped away with a sleeve of his gi.
“Flailing? I was not-“ well, yes, she had been: the bo was a lot clumsier than it looked; Mari humphed, and rested her hands on her hips. At least she’d made him sweat for it. “Do you give the rest of the tennis club this much sass, Hiyoshi-kun?”
“You’re not on the tennis club, and I’m not giving you sass.” Right. Sure. Who was in denial now? “And calling senpai by their given names is very disrespectful, Mari-san.”
He sounded so properly disapproving that she shook her head with a low little chuckle. “Well, considering that even the other freshmen call me Mari-‘neechan, I hardly think-“ she paused. It had come and gone, that moment, so quickly that she almost hadn’t noticed it past the giddy white walls that adrenaline and exhaustion and an utter blessed lack of fear, for once, had raised around her. “You just… Hiyoshi-kun.”
He simply looked levelly at her, through the copper fringe of his bangs, and shrugged.
Jello for knees? Noodles? Had she ever made such a silly comparison? Jello wobbled-noodles flopped-what her knees were doing was disintegrating.
This time, he asked her if she was all right-startled but not particularly alarmed, as if he had girls crumbling into a clumsy seiza at his feet every day. But when she laughed, rubbed her stupid, useless, wounded knees, and replied, “Sounds like gekokujou to me,” the martial artist was a teenaged boy again-one who blinked slowly at her as if she was completely out of her mind, and that just made her laugh all the harder.
Oh, it was absurd. He was absurd, and at moments like this, she did know why she loved him. She never understood just why she’d fallen in love at that first, fog-limned glance, but… but at moments like this, she understood, a little, why she’d never quite gotten the trick of falling out of love with him.
When he offered her a hand up, he did it tentatively-just a little too far away for her to reach without stretching, as if he were afraid the insanity was quite contagious. Mari shook her head with a rueful smile, and pushed herself back to her feet with both shaky hands. And then she tried again, after she didn’t get quite enough leverage the first time on elbows that were trying to follow her knees’ example.
She’d already had quite enough help from him getting up when she was down, thank you.
But all the same, she accepted when he reached for a windbreaker and offered to walk her home-and noticed that he kept his hair out of his face, his chin high, glancing around with slow, exacting sweeps.
His eyes, she noted, abstractly, were actually a very plain, very ordinary grey, and clashed a little with his hair.
“Did you think about calling the police, Mari-san?” her house was just coming into view, the sun just barely starting to tip over the edge of the horizon, when he finally broke the silence
“It’s… my door was unlocked, and I locked it when I left. That’s all.” With her voice as thin as it was, the words sounded broken. She wasn’t going to say it was silly, because it darned well hadn’t felt silly… but she’d acted as stupid and irrational and fearful as any of the fanclub girls, at the end of the day. At the same time… he hadn’t asked, and perhaps that was why she told him. “He said… well. It doesn’t matter. He’s been… he’s been calling my house a lot. I called the police before. I don’t think there’s anything they can do, right now.”
He frowned, his gaze narrowing to glittering dark again. “You didn’t give him your number, did you?” He wasn’t stupid; he didn’t ask who, or what kind, or why, either.
She shook her head. Maybe a part of her wanted to be indignant at the very idea that she’d give a strange man her phone number… but the larger, more sensible part of her… well, she’d let herself be duped into walking through an empty neighbourhood with a strange man. On the scale of stupid, phone numbers seemed pretty minor in comparison. “But the kanji for my name isn’t the normal Taira; he saw it written on my notebook, and I think we’re in the directory.” Because her father had been so adamantly happy about Tokyo being safe. And, ironically… it was statistically a lot safer than the Wahiawa neighbourhood she’d grown up in.
It really, really sucked to be that one in a million, though.
His lips tightened, and he shook his head, once, brisk and brusque. “This has been going on a long time. If you see him, call the police. And if you need me to talk to them, too, give them my number, Mari-san. I’ll text it to you.”
Oh, gods. The sound of him staying her name, offering his number… her knees had gotten the hint, but her heart rate, it seemed, did not understand the same things that her head did.
“I… thank you. I will.” She hadn’t realised just how long it had been-mentally, if not temporally-until swinging at him had flushed out all the cobwebs clinging to the insides of her brain. Had she really been hoping that if she let it be, she’d be able to… to just deal with it? To just let it go? “Hiyoshi-kun?” she bit on her lower lip to stop the question, but it slipped out anyway, tripping merrily to the tune of her pulse dancing. “How did you know?”
He glanced down at her out of the corners of his eyes. “How did I know what?”
If she could have thought of a single cover-up… but could she live with never knowing? She knew where her trust came from, and he’d just had it as much as he’d earned it-but what, what, what in the world would make you put your weapons-and your health-into the hands of a terrified girl you barely knew? “How did you know that… that that would make me feel better?” Why, Hiyoshi? but ‘why’ was personal in a way that knowledge wasn’t.
‘Better’ was an understatement. She was exhausted, she ached all over, but the inside of her head-for once, for the first time in a long, long time, was… her own, not crowded with the sound of that too-familiar voice on the phone, not jumping with qualms like insects, not leaping with every time a breath made his shoulders rise.
Glass houses being what they were-she really should stop making fun of Atobe for all of his issues.
His response was immediate, as if it didn’t so much as require consideration; he didn’t look at her, eyes skimming across the road ahead, the trees beside. “Because you do things, not let things happen.” He shrugged, even as she stared at the clean, sharp angle of his jaw; she hadn’t thought-she hadn’t ever for a moment thought-that he knew her so well. “You’re the kind of person who fights, Mari-san.”
She did fight; she always had. It was on the tip of her tongue to tease, to laugh, to brush it off with an ‘are you saying I’m violent?’ But with the white noise in her head gone, Mari knew pushing him away for exactly what it was-and frankly, she could be an ass as much as she wanted, but she couldn’t get him to understand her any less than he already did.
What she’d done… it wasn’t the kind of thing you did to a stranger-and it wasn’t the kind of thing that you let a stranger do.
And she hadn’t believed that she was striking at the creature of her nightmares-even in a fury of heat and pain and sweat dripping into her eyes, she couldn’t mistake Hiyoshi as being anyone other than who and what he was. But with him standing unflinching in front of her, she’d felt herself smash away at her own demons, screaming at the top of her lungs-wearing herself out on him and firmly believing, despite or perhaps because of everything, that he wouldn’t break under the pressure.
Instead, she found herself asking, tentatively, “Hiyoshi-kun? Are you… are you really okay?” Well, she didn’t think he’d be walking her home if he was genuinely not okay, but at the same time… it wasn’t that he was a gentleman, it was that she was sure that Hiyoshi Wakashi was more stubborn than the Kashiwa building foundations.
He looked just a little startled, and younger for it. “What do you mean?”
“Well…” her thumbnail wanted picking. If only because looking at him was more uncomfortable, more personal, than usual, with his face turned towards her like that. “I was going a little crazy in there, and… well.” There was no conceivable good way to explain it in a way that wasn’t going to ping on his martial arts pride. “I mean, it was really nice of you, but… I didn’t hit you or anything? You’re okay?”
“Oh.” His shrug was minimal, careless, when he glanced away from her again. “I’m not that weak, Mari-san.” Something moved behind the last remains of daylight reflected in his dark eyes, a little like amusement, maybe a little like teasing. “And you’re strong, for a girl, but no girl is that strong.”
For that, she growled and cuffed his arm-and found herself proving him entirely too right, when the growing stiffness of her right shoulder meant that she barely flicked his sleeve with her fingertips-but the laughter bubbled up all the same, almost drowning out his half-muffled, raspy little chuckle.
And to her relief-and, all things considered, probably to his-the lights were on in her house by the time they got home, and her wary “Tadaima” at the door was met by the smell of-once again-meat gyoza. By the time she turned around to thank him, Hiyoshi was already walking away, just barely a shadow in his blue windbreaker and white gi pants.
But he shot her a half-guilty, half-defiant look the next day at practice when Ootori, eyes huge as a box of Valentine’s chocolates, demanded how he’d gotten those awful bruises on his forearms.
Mari wasn’t entirely sure whether to blush, roll her eyes, roll shoulders that twinged uncomfortably at the slightest memory of how she’d abused them, or take a nice long guilt trip. She’d barely been able to grasp a pen the entire day. And he was the one who’d, er, commanded her to hit him… but she’d been the one holding the six-foot-long phallic symbol. And all because, well, her father had forgotten his beeper at home and had come home to get it… and, of course, not locked the door on his way out.
That afternoon, on the way home, when Hiyoshi asked her if she wanted to take kobujutsu lessons at the dojo, he didn’t mention his extremely stubborn father.
That afternoon, on the way home, when he asked her if she wanted to take kobujutsu lessons at the dojo, Mari found herself saying “Yes.”
~owari~
Start: June 05, 2005
End: May 23, 2007
….yeeeees. ^^; Sighness. I do apologise to everyone who’s made it all the way to here… I don’t know, I had so much in my head, but for some reason, nothing came out the way I actually wanted it to, and it's hard to know if I kept Mari "in character," considering that this one is, well, a little more serious than the rest of the series. (And considering that this fic literally had a two-year hiatus. ^^; Let's just say that about half of the first part was written in June of 05... and everything else was written in the past, uh, two weeks or so.) If anyone has any post-posting suggestions, I’d love to hear them, so I can work them in-editing on the fly, perhaps, but if it works…
The title, of course, comes from the phrase 進退両難, or roughly enough "there are difficulties to either moving forward or withdrawing." IE, being caught between the Devil and the deep blue sea.
Oh. Caveatness: Kashiwa isn’t actually much like what I describe it-or, rather, the parts of it I remember are, but the area near the station definitely isn’t. ^^; Also, I know nothing about kobujutsu, and unfortunately couldn’t really find any good details or videos of it on the Interwub, so I really just made things up whole-cloth. And Mari’s little throat-poking move in the very beginning isn’t White Crane, it’s a variation on a taekwondo maneuver. ^^; Oopses.