Alt Dreams [One-Shots] (#73—'Stripping')

[Mirage_GSM]

That... Wasn't even trying to be fluffy for most of its run...

Also: Two stories with a Shizune X Kenji pairing on the same day

[ProfAllister]

Even worse, they're both post bad end and could more or less be the same timeline. And entirely unintentional, I assure you.

[Mirage_GSM]

I'm beginning to get wary of all the times you claim something is a coincidence

[brythain]

This one's written for the 2019 Secret Santa project initiated by ProfAllister.

Victim: PKMNthiefChris

Prompt: Hisao and the routeless girl of your choice (Miki, Suzu, Saki, Ikuno, etc. OC's accepted if that's how you're inclined) will not be going home for the holidays. What do they do for Christmas at Yamaku?


Winterhome

“Each year, about 20% of the school’s population elect to remain in residence during various holiday periods during which formal lessons and activities are not scheduled. Some facilities remain open, and sufficient faculty remain on campus to ensure that the needs of these students are catered to.”—Handbook of the Sendai-Aoba Mountain District Academy, 2006 Edition

***

“Hey man, sorry I’m not keeping you company, I have to visit my mother and drink whiskey with her. You stay safe from feminists, barricade your room, okay? I’ve left a stash of survival rations in our common bathroom, in a place where no feminist would think to look. Enjoy!”

And with that, his last connection to humanity—such as it was—had snapped.

Hisao sat crosslegged on the roof. There was a scent of frost in the air. His hometown had seldom had snow, but when it had happened, he had died for the first time. Snow was evil. Women were worse. And the new patch of fencing on the rooftop reminded him that drinking to forget all of it was even worse than that.

In games, he mused with dull resignation, you only get three lives.

Down in the courtyard, life passed by on its scattered and confused way. There were still people in the school. From up where he was, they looked like colourful little maggot-priests. He shook his head violently at the thought. Damn, I’m beginning to think like Kenji.

Yes, Kenji Setou, who had got him drunk and then somehow rescued him from falling off this very roof to a certain death. He’d died anyway, from shock. He’d almost died again from the agony of being resuscitated by a very enthusiastic and panicky Kenji, who had summoned the emergency services while thumping and pumping what remained of the fragile heart in his chest.

So now, what do I do? Mother and Father, they’ve accepted my excuse of having too much work to catch up on. My classmates seem to hate me, or they’re just not the kind of people to work on a sad-case depressed cripple. They probably have their own individual sad-case cripple depressions to work on, anyway.

Speaking of which, I have to visit the Medical Centre.

Sighing, he got to his feet, rubbed his nose until he could feel it, and stamped his feet. The stiff breeze hadn’t numbed his feelings, only his flesh. Maybe reviewing his new medication list would be entertaining. He could make a poem of those names. Ha!

***

“Nakai. Stop it!”

“Huh?” was the best he could come up with, under the circumstances.

It was that odd foreign girl who occasionally hung out with the other front-row students. In class, she sat in front of him, but had never joined his study group. She was an odd kind of dark-skinned, not the tanned Miki Miura kind, but a deep colour that looked like half-milked coffee.

She looked down at him, one slim hand on a grab bar near the door. “You keep singing some odd katawa song with chemical gibberish thrown in. Stop it. It’s disturbing the harmony of the medical centre.”

“Moriko?”

“Mori is fine, if we’re going there. Hello, you’re Hisao, who for months has not dared to address a girl without any thighs despite being seen at least once admiring a girl without any calves.”

“Um. Sorry.”

She laughed. It was unexpectedly loud and low and musical, which allowed Hisao an attempt at gallantry.

“You have a beautiful laugh.”

She turned her head a little to one side, like a vulture eyeing a corpse that had suddenly opened its eyes and smiled. “That’s lame. I can’t wait to hear what else you’ll come up with, walking dead man.”

He felt as if someone had just dropped him off the edge of the roof again. Unable to find anything to say, nor the willpower to say it, he remained in his seat, crossed his ankles, placed his palms flat on his thighs, and closed his eyes. He felt more resigned than tired, but wasn’t sure how much of either was weighing his heart down.

“Hey,” he heard her say softly, “that was a bit too soon, right? Tell you what, after you’re done with Nurse, I’ll be waiting outside.”

Completely confused, Hisao just nodded, not trusting himself to even open his eyes. He heard her odd metallic movements as she let herself out, and wondered how her legs worked, for the first time in his life.

***

“This place is amazing,” he whispered to her. In the last few days, she’d been showing him around Sendai. They’d eaten grilled beef tongue and hot mixed-seafood balls of a kind he’d never tasted back home. They’d drunk frozen soybean slushies. They’d walked through museums and mausoleums.

She’d even shown him how her various legs and their interchangeable options worked. He’d been a bit disturbed by how the scent of machine oil was beginning to trigger erotic impulses in him.

“The lighting from the north façade is very different compared with that from the south façade.”

Somehow, her tour-guide English accent, when she chose to use it, was also a turn-on. If I kiss her, he wondered, will I drop dead from the shock?

He’d asked her how it was possible for Japanese to be spoken with an English accent. She’d laughingly replied, “Foreigners do it all the time. I’m good at English with a Japanese accent too.”

Always, there was a touch of reticence about her ancestry. He hadn’t dared ask her where she got her colour from, but he knew her father was an Indian, one of many kinds of dark people from South Asia; her mother was Japanese, and a rebel.

“Hisao?”

“Sorry, distracted by the lighting.”

She looked at him questioningly, then laughed. “You haven’t heard anything I’ve said. This isn’t a very beautiful place. It’s just a glorified library. A very big one.”

“I like libraries.” All he could think of was: I love to hear her laugh.

“I like lots of things, Nakai-san. Glad to see you cheering up, because one thing I don’t like is moody people.”

For no particular reason, he found himself blushing.

***

It was at the archery range that he popped the question. She’d just fired off what seemed to be several rounds of perfect flights (she called them ‘ends’), hissing under her breath at the effort. There was a lot of strength in her upper body, which wasn’t as slim as he’d thought it was.

“You’ve got so much life in you, Molly,” he began, taking pains to form the ‘l’ sound that she preferred in her name. “Why aren’t you travelling with your family for Christmas?”

A split second after he’d asked it, he knew it was the wrong question.

“Huh.”

She carefully placed her bow on the stand beside her.

“Erm, you don’t have to…”

She silenced his desperate attempt to back out with a single sharp gesture.

“I’m always alone at Christmas, as are the other members of my family.”

“That must suck,” he said lamely, sensing that he was digging himself in deeper.

“It does. But you know what? Every holiday gives me a chance to find someone who’s also alone, and try to give them a good time.”

***

Many years later, when Hisao had survived into his late 40s, he’d still never forgotten that Christmas. He and Miki had both lost touch with Molly Kapur, who travelled a lot and occasionally appeared in their newsfeeds. But both of them had benefited from her crazy friendship, and she’d engineered the date that had got them married.

And so, on Christmas Day, just as they did every Christmas Day, the two of them toasted her. When the kids made their traditional request, “Tell us about Molly!” they always replied, “There’s too much to tell!” and then picked yet another outrageous tale of wonder and joy.


END
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[Feurox]

Wow, Brythain. That was wonderfully powerful for some reason. I utterly adore the flash-in-the-pan style, with life rapidly taking place around the edges. There's a beauty to the snippets of this story, like we don't need the in-betweens.

Wonderfully done, as always Bry. You continue to inspire my own stories. Thank you.

[Mirage_GSM]

"Moriko" really confused me for a while ^^°
Still a beautiful story, though.
It might have worked even better if it wasn't set at christmas, but that was more or less unavoidable given the prompt.

[brythain]

Wow, Brythain. That was wonderfully powerful for some reason. I utterly adore the flash-in-the-pan style, with life rapidly taking place around the edges. There's a beauty to the snippets of this story, like we don't need the in-betweens.

Wonderfully done, as always Bry. You continue to inspire my own stories. Thank you.

Thank you, Feurox. I had considered filling in some of those blanks, and may yet do so in time to come. But it sort of works, yeah?

"Moriko" really confused me for a while ^^°
Still a beautiful story, though.
It might have worked even better if it wasn't set at christmas, but that was more or less unavoidable given the prompt.

Heh, I've always thought of 'Molly' as what her father calls her and 'Moriko' as what her mother calls her. She's more comfortable with her biracial background than Lilly is, even though her kind of background would likely be more discriminated against in Japan. Thanks very much, Mirage!

[Kathos]

Wow, Brythain. That was wonderfully powerful for some reason. I utterly adore the flash-in-the-pan style, with life rapidly taking place around the edges. There's a beauty to the snippets of this story, like we don't need the in-betweens.

Wonderfully done, as always Bry. You continue to inspire my own stories. Thank you.

Thank you, Feurox. I had considered filling in some of those blanks, and may yet do so in time to come. But it sort of works, yeah?

"Moriko" really confused me for a while ^^°
Still a beautiful story, though.
It might have worked even better if it wasn't set at christmas, but that was more or less unavoidable given the prompt.

Heh, I've always thought of 'Molly' as what her father calls her and 'Moriko' as what her mother calls her. She's more comfortable with her biracial background than Lilly is, even though her kind of background would likely be more discriminated against in Japan. Thanks very much, Mirage!

sorry for replying with useless nonsense to say but it still amuses me that people who made their account 6 years ago still visit these forums.

[brythain]

sorry for replying with useless nonsense to say but it still amuses me that people who made their account 6 years ago still visit these forums.

Yeah... I decided I'd be here till 2024. Then, of course, something critical happens in the timeline.

[Mirage_GSM]

I made my account nearly ten years ago...

[Kathos]

I made my account nearly ten years ago...

i meant byrthain lol but yeah guess it would have made more sense to say you instead ´ᵕ`

[brythain]

The following post was written in response to Stiles Long's writing contest. Each participant was given a list of KS character pairings and a list of locations. One of each was chosen for this fic. There were a limited set of options available to participants in the contest and it may be that this fic resembles others. Any such resemblance is coincidental.

These two have always had a special relationship, canonically.


Unseen

“What’s a blind date, Emi?”

“Why do you wanna know?”

There was something shifty about the way the shorter girl twitched her twintails as she thought of an answer. Her taller friend looked bemused, but she often did—Rin’s normal musing was hard to distinguish from genuine amusement.

“Because I heard you’re going on one, and I realized I didn’t know what it meant.”

“Well…”

“I heard you talking to Takano, and he said he’d set you up. That sounds dangerous. Does it mean you throw a dart at a calendar and hit a random day and people play tricks on you?”

“Ah. No, it’s…”

Rin suddenly looked a little sad. “I tried closing my eyes and throwing darts at the wall calendar you put up for me, but I’m not very good at it and now there are holes in the wall.”

“Rin!”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, it’s not that, but a blind date is when someone arranges you to meet someone for dinner but you don’t know who it is.”

“That sounds fun. Can you do that for me?”

“I… I’ll ask Takano. He’s good at that.”

“Thank you, Emi.”

*****

It all felt wrong. She liked having Emi around. But this was a blind date, and you weren’t supposed to have an Emi around when you did it. So she wandered down to the place where hillside became the town, and shouldered her way into the Shanghai, the cheap, dim little restaurant that Yamaku seemed to have adopted.

“Ah, hello!” said the hostess, appearing out of the shadows.

She seemed oddly nervous. She also reminded Rin a lot of the woman in the library. Maybe they were sisters. Or maybe they were kittens from the same litter. Even their hair colour was the same. But kittens normally didn’t have exactly the same fur. Rin had had a kitten once, but it had got old and nippy. Then she’d left home, and not seen the kitten since. She missed him. He probably didn’t miss her.

She realized that the hostess was looking even more nervous. People got that way when you forgot to say things into the silence.

“Hello. There’s a person I’m supposed to meet.”

“Oh, who is it? I’ll bring you straight to the right seat!”

“I don’t know. Nobody told me.”

The hostess looked confused. She looked as if she would drop her order pad at any moment. This would be bad. Rin would have to catch it with her foot. From experience, people in restaurants didn’t like it when she caught things with her feet. Or ate with them. So sometimes she just stuck her face into the food, because it was easier.

At that moment, a little boy entered the Shanghai.

“Hello, Miss Yuuko?”

“Ah? That’s me,” said the hostess. “Hello!”

“There’s a note for you. Man said you’d give me a tip.”

“I don’t have money with me, sorry sorry…”

Rin felt she should help. She toed off her left shoe with her right foot. Peeling off a couple of ¥100 bills from the stash in the shoe, she offered them to the boy.

The boy looked very dubious, if not insulted, but he seized the money from her toes, handed a piece of paper to Miss Yuuko (wait, wasn’t that the library woman’s name too?), bowed and trotted back out. Rin got the distinct impression that he was relieved to not be there.

“What does the note say?”

“It says, OUTSIDE,” the hostess said, showing her a dirty piece of paper with the characters ‘OUTSIDE’ written awkwardly, as if someone was writing with their feet for the first time.

“Maybe you’re supposed to tell me to meet the person outside.”

“Ah, maybe, I don’t know! Maybe I’m supposed to look outside, but I’m not supposed to be seen outside!”

“That’s okay. I don’t mind being seen outside. I’ll go out and if I see anyone I’ll ask them if they’re looking for you or for me.”

She wandered back out, leaving behind a confused hostess who seemed like she was about to cry. Or not. Rin was never sure about people. They did things they didn’t seem they wanted to do.

Looking to the left, quite ordinary people were walking around. They looked normal, not the sort that Rin would collect. Looking to the right, same thing. Rin didn’t think they were OUTSIDE types.

Opposite the Shanghai was a little park. Rin didn’t mind the park. Occasionally, a shifty-looking female in a suit hung out there, possibly a child-eating vampire. Sometimes, she’d see people having a picnic and feel the urge to tell them about the vampire. But no vampire would bite Rin, because they probably wouldn’t know what to do with her.

She looked left and right again, then crossed the road and stepped carefully into the park. It was certainly OUTSIDE. But if she were in the park, wouldn’t it become INSIDE? She stopped. Probably best to wait and see if something happened to her.

“Psssssst!”

Something hissed in the bushes near her. It wasn’t a cat. Cats didn’t hiss that way. It wasn’t a snake either. Neither snakes nor cats were good at the ‘p’ sound.

“Yes?” she said, not looking. If you looked at something before it happened, you were asking for trouble.

“Tezuka!”

Now that was asking for trouble. If something hissed your name from the bushes, it was probably a bad thing.

“What is it?” she said, still not looking.

“Have you seen someone sitting in the Shanghai waiting for an operative?”

“No.”

“I knew it was a set-up. That guy from your class, Takano? Your class rep?”

“Yes, he’s my class rep. He does set-ups. Many set-ups each day.”

“Well, he told me to meet a fellow operative at the Shanghai. The moment he said ‘Shanghai’, I knew he was either setting me up, or someone had suborned him and made him give me false information. So I decided to surveil the place. It’s full of feminist spies, run by the worst of the lot, the evil Shirakawa.”

“What’s a Shirakawa?”

Rin had come across the word before in Geography lessons. Something to do with farmhouses. She never knew why people invented words that didn’t make sense. But they did, and you had to live with it.

“It’s a spawn of hell that will suck the energy out of brave men like you and me, Tezuka!”

There didn’t seem to be a response that Rin could think of, so she took a couple of steps and sat down on a nearby park bench. The vampire lady didn’t seem to be occupying it that day.

The boy came out of the bushes, his thick glasses steamed up and blurry. Rin noticed that even though it was a fairly warm evening, he still wore his bright scarf snugly around his neck. Wise, because it would get cooler soon as the sun set. She’d known it was him ever since he’d referred to her as a man. That boy had always had a problem figuring out what was in whose pants.

“Hello, Setou.”

“Ah. I get it now.”

“Pants?”

“What? No. I mean you must be the operative Takano sent me to meet, the brilliant double-agent who somehow infiltrated that den of iniquity which is not the men’s dorm, and which nobody else has ever managed to do.”

She filtered his words. They were like coffee. The solid stuff stayed behind and somehow all you got was the weak stuff. She let Emi make coffee and then ate the hard bits. They worked for her.

“We’re having a meeting?”

“It must be! Takano said to make sure you got a good meal. You must have some solid shit intel with you. You can share it with me. I brought two bento boxes and manly drinks.”

He polished his lenses furiously with one end of his scarf, then dumped a rucksack on the bench next to her.

“Have you… ‘surveilled’ the area?” she asked. She wasn’t sure what ‘surveilled’ meant, but it seemed to be something Setou liked to do or should be doing.

“Yes! Of course, comrade. I may be legally blind, but I have a keen sense of observation. Nothing escapes the limits of my sight.”

In the recesses of her mind, a connection came to life.

“Are you a blind date?”

“My hero is Masamune Date, and he only had one eye. Sadly I am not him.”

This wasn’t helping. She didn’t know what to say. Inside, it felt like everything was wrong.

But the boy was laying out the bento. There was a chawanmushi, some tamago and unagi sushi, a tiny pot of sesame dressing with cold soba. Somehow, he’d found a lot of her favourite things. That made her feel better.

“What’s that?” she said, as he dug into the rucksack and emerged with a plastic box of what looked like even more egg custard.

“Lemon panna cotta!” he said, as if it was supposed to mean something. The word for that, she thought, might be ‘enthusiasm’. It was promising.

“How do you know what I eat?” Had he been talking to Emi?

“We have been comrades for many years, Tezuka! How could I not know?”

“But you didn’t know it was me.”

“I suspected it might be you. After all, the courier was Takano.”

Later, after she’d tasted the weird contents of his strange brown bottle, she became aware of different feelings. They were sitting under a tree, and the park was shadowed, lit only by streetlamps some distance away.

Turning to him, Rin said, “What's the word for when it feels inside your heart that everything in the world is all right?”

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[NuclearStudent]

It starts rather sparse with the description. For example, with

“What’s a blind date, Emi?”

“Why do you wanna know?”

It feels to me as if a beat of description is missing from the second line.

Beyond that, good memework. Multiple puns and a reference for the ending.

[PKMNthiefChris]

YAY! My favorite non-Hisao related duo! Ah Kenji/Rin truly ny heart is warm.

[NuclearStudent]

Agent Tekuza is indeed truly blessed, Chris.