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?”
=====
alt index
