Like a Suit and Shoes (Short, Rin and Emi)

[CloudGrain]

Yamaku, or at least the staff in charge of dorm assignments for Yamaku, seemed to have had some sort of a strange meltdown when choosing dorms for their second-year students.

Not only had Rin and Emi seemed like polar opposites because of their lacking only the limbs that the other had, but even a cursory knowledge of their personalities placed them on completely different levels. Rin's disassociation with the world at large versus Emi's almost constant chatter about only those little irrelevant things. It seemed like something that was doomed to fail; a misplaced attempt to maybe change them both from one extreme to something more of a medium between them. Some result of a half-joke between the men and women in charge of dorm assignments, to get the girl without legs to help the girl without arms, taken a little too seriously by whoever was in charge.

Oddly enough; for Rin, Emi, and everyone else who knew about the situation everything worked out amicably enough for the first few months.

Rin wasn't one to either cause or even bother noticing friction, and neither was Emi so long as she wasn't pushed in regards to a few personal issues. Routines sprang up between them in regards to Emi helping Rin with a few things that Rin couldn't quite be expected to do for herself. Meaningless chatter, usually one-sided from Emi with only occasional commentary from Rin became natural enough. To the point where Emi often invited Rin over to the track and field club's table for lunches. It wasn't quite a full-fledged friendship from anyone's perspective. Emi had been asked to help Rin, more or less 'charged' with a few aspects of her care since she could do more with her hands than Rin could possibly be expected to with her feet. Rin's own tolerance for her new companion for the first few months of the year at Yamaku could be written off as her usual nonchalance.

It'd only take a single real common string between the two to change that though.

"Er, Rin?" The voice was accompanied by a light prod, drawing Rin back to reality from her snooze on the bus. Although the change in scenery might be nice, it was stuff she'd all seen before in the morning light. The usual trip to the city was a pretty hum-drum affair, it'd be when she got there that she might actually find something a little inspiring. Looking up dazedly, she was somewhat surprised to see Emi hovering over her with a confused expression, wearing her track uniform. There were an exceptional number of whispers, and it took a moment of confusion to realize that the majority of the people's faces seemed a little more familiar than the bus usually did. In fact, each and every one of them seemed to be a student of the school, most members of the track team in uniform.

Blinking a few times, the realization hit about the same time that the question was asked. "Did you get on the wrong bus?"

Rin gave her customary shrug, it'd stricken her that the bus seemed to be quite a bit emptier than usual this morning when there had just been a few students milling around the stop as usual, and she'd found a free-seat and almost promptly fallen asleep. Wearing her usual school uniform, it seemed like she'd managed to become a part of the background until someone noticed that she wasn't exactly one of the usual ones to travel with the field and track team to events. While it wasn't disallowed for spectators to come along, usually a student would have to fill out a waiver to travel to events, or at least get some sort of permission from the faculty.

Unconcerned, the answer eventually came to Rin. "It's a distinct possibility."

Emi looked a little guilty at having woken her up, but appeared to be being forced to say something to her. "Hopefully you're not in any trouble for coming along," she started, rubbing the back of her head gingerly as she seemed embarrassed on Rin's behalf. "but I think you've gotta stay with everyone else during the track meet. Or else they'll definitely yell at you when they find you." Emi finished quickly, seemingly happy to get the possibly unpleasant topic right out of the way.

Nodding, Rin stood up and joined the rest of the bus that was emptying out to go and spectate the events for the day. The school that they had gone to was... Like Yamaku, but definitely not the same. Where Yamaku seemed like it had been there forever, this school seemed to be much newer and more carefully built to accommodate for any student's disabilities. Hills seemed to be graded less steeply, wheelchair accessibility seemed more like the only way that there was, rather than an option in addition to stairs. Still, as the group was more or less herded to the track, everything seemed almost eerily similar as the athletes from the two schools merged.

Sitting down in the bleachers, letting her eyes scan the whole situation in front of her to try and take things in, Rin couldn't help but take in some more of the variations between Yamaku and this school. Even the bleachers seemed to be a little more accessible for wheelchairs and the like. While Yamaku certainly had more than the usual accommodations for the handicapped, this place seemed to almost pander to them by comparison. Yet the students looked so much the same. Looking out at them, Rin could see people missing the odd limb or extremity. The ones with an eyepatch, a cane, a suspiciously-large bag that probably had some medical device that they needed on hand. A startling amount of same-ness. Yawning, Rin considered completing her nap from on the bus as she continued to scan the crowds that were finally lining up for the first events. The chatter around her wasn't exactly quiet, but it wasn't extraordinarily loud and engaging either.

Something caught her interest as she watched the track-team members get ready for that first race though.

Emi.

Sure, it was impossible not to know that Emi ran despite having artificial legs from the knees down. Rin had to count on her being gone for track and field practice most afternoons, had a few people try to ask her questions about her floormate and apparently a star member of the team. But a lot of people did things that they were good at just because they were good at them. But the whole look that Emi had to her as she set up for the race was completely different from any of the expressions that Rin had witnessed.

There was just something about it; the expression, the posture, the way she carried herself and seemed to block out the rest of the world outside of the immediate that seemed familiar.

Rin watched all of the races with a fixation on Emi. Every time that she ran, that singlemindedness Rin had noticed during the lineup for the very first race was still there. That determination to do what she was going to do, inability to turn back and even bother to care about what had happened the step before. The whole of her being put into doing what she was doing, doing it the best that she could, and doing it better than anyone else could do it. Even running her final race, drenched in sweat from all the previous races and definitely a little slower than she'd been at first, Emi threw herself into it with reckless abandon in order to just barely beat out her competition.

It'd been an automatic response that brought Rin off the bleachers and into the crowd to help celebrate the victories. It'd been almost an off-chance that Emi had actually managed to spot her amongst the celebrations and asked, "How'd I do?" more out of a sense of what was proper to ask instead of out of genuine curiosity. She was already back to her usual self, happy to get back to the meaningless chatter, but it didn't mean that what Rin had seen was any less real.

"You ran." Rin said, thinking of a way to put what she'd seen into words. "Everybody else was running to try and win, but you ran to run." She settled with as the words came to mind and went right out her mouth. Emi seemed a little lost for words for a moment, before just nodding and giving a sound of agreement, before almost immediately being split off from Rin by her teammates to get ready for the awards ceremony. The whole ordeal didn't take too long, and before long all of the students from Yamaku were rounded up and brought back onto the bus bound for their own school. Another few hours back home.

Emi gave her usual grin when Rin appeared in the aisle asking for the window-seat on the bus; by now she was learning fairly well to deal with her floormate's eccentricities. "Could've been worse, right? Could've ended up going somewhere even more boring than a track-meet." It took just a few seconds for her to slip into that familiar congenial conversation about... Well, nothing of importance really. Emi liked to talk just for the sake of talking, and seemed to think that it might take the edge off any potentially awkward situation. Keeping up with the spirit of it took effort for Rin, and she usually put in the bare minimum that she could to keep Emi happy for a few moments. Her mind had already drifted out the window, to take in the new and relatively 'unusual' scenery. The fields were fields she'd never seen before, and had all sorts of subtle variation that the other fields she'd seen didn't have. It didn't take long before she was absorbed in them completely, blanking out from Emi's single-sided conversation completely as she imagined a way to depict that variation between similar objects in a painting.

Would the lighting changing within the object work...? Would putting hints of the different objects, hardly perceptible unless searched for be quite enough? Maybe taking all the subtly different objects and interposing them next to one another, just to show the variation blatantly.

Turning away from the window as the fields slowly petered out, Rin found herself face-to-face with Emi, with both of them suddenly mildly surprised as Rin snapped back to reality. Or at least as close to reality as she usually managed to get. Emi suddenly smiled as something seemed to 'click' in her mind, and asked almost knowingly, "Thinking about making a painting?" Blinking, Rin only nodded once before settling in for the rest of the bus-ride in relative quiet. She needed to keep the picture in her mind for as long as possible, and Emi was more than happy to begin talking to another teammate in another seat. But they sat next to one another for the whole bus-ride, with Rin occasionally interjecting with her own deadpan sense of humor into the conversations Emi was having.

It seemed like something changed between the two of them. Like despite all their differences, maybe Rin and Emi might not be as strange to one another as it seemed, they might just be subtly different in how they expressed their ambition, their drive, their motivation. They both seemed to understand just a little bit more about one another today, and that was a good start towards a real friendship.

[AntonSlavik020]

It's very believable that this would actually happen. Overall I liked it, I just don't have much to say about it besides that. Maybe it's just because I'm not big on either of this two.