Author’s notes
This is essentially a one-shot chapter, in fulfillment of my promise to make good on the Shizuru/Natsuki situation that I’ve been avoiding. I’ll fill in the rest of this chapter in the next chapter. For now, enjoy!
In this chapter, Shizuru refers to Natsuki as “Miss Kuga” several times. Take this as the English translation of the formal “Kuga-san,” rather than a stern mother or an amused old woman at your church. Er, her church.
No, yours.
We started following a certain description / we started simple and fair / once again / before there wasn’t any need for an answer / things were much different then
Now you question who I am / now there’s nothing left to hide
So here it goes.
My Letter #3
Reflecting on it later, Natsuki Kuga judged the walk back to the van to be among the longest point-one-six miles of her life. Time flies when you’re having fun, but that doesn’t mean it can’t slow to a crawl, too. Really, Natsuki had always merely judged that time tended to pass more quickly when one wasn’t paying attention to it; subsequently, life moved very slowly for that particular girl.
Natsuki and Shizuru ascended the stairs, walking past Shizuru’s former captor as Natsuki did her damnedest to avoid looking him in the eye; he didn’t try hard to discourage her, either, having locked onto what may have been the most fascinating dust bunny on the face of the planet as they walked past him. They went through the kitchen, and out the door into the hallway. The shotgun was, indeed, halfway under the sofa, and as Shizuru started to look towards the staircase which led to the second floor, Natsuki took her hand gently, squeezed it, shook her head. Shizuru nodded.
As they moved past this, Natsuki took a look at where she’d shot Nayo; he was still on the staircase, halfway-slumped and halfway plastered to it, slick and a little bit crusty with his own rapidly-drying blood. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that he was dead. The axe he had been wielding had flown out of his hands when she shot him and lodged itself in the wall above the staircase; only the hilt was visible to Natsuki.
Natsuki turned her head away from it and kept walking.
They walked past the shattered window, and Shizuru said, with a little grin on her face, “Did you do that, Miss Kuga?”
Natsuki’s eyes widened a little; a sign of her shock at Shizuru’s sudden use of relatively formal language. She wondered briefly if this was what Shizuru was like when she was angry, and nodded in reply to the question. “Yeah.”
“Clever.”
They kept walking. Out the door, which had been thrown open
in a panic fleeing for his life before i kill him
by somebody, probably after Natsuki had entered. There were large, though barely visible, footprints on the brown, crunchy grass, and, near the edge of the property, a foot-sized divot and a section of flattened grass that was roughly the size of a man. Natsuki took it in automatically, and as Shizuru let go of her hand, she wished briefly and very, very privately that she couldn’t.
The grass was very dry that day.
They walked down the stairs together, onto the lawn. The grass crunched under their feet—How did I move so silently before? Natsuki wondered, and then stopped moving, suddenly overcome in a kind of dazed curiosity.
Very, very carefully, she rose up so that she was on the balls of her feet. She lifted her left foot, and slid it down at an angle as close as she could manage to the angle the grass was at. It slid through with barely a whisper.
She had done it completely automatically before. Shizuru stopped as well, and that horrible smile was back. “Marveling at your own ability, Miss Kuga?”
“No,” Natsuki said quietly. “I’m not.”
What the hell is your problem, Natsuki? You’ve killed people before; this was nothing new. Hell, you’ve killed them more viciously than this, too. An icicle in the throat isn’t a fun way to go out; it’s a hell of a lot worse than
corner of his head explodes backwards the stairs behind him stained with things thicker than blood
being shot in the head with a forty-five.
“Miss Kuga?” Shizuru gently pried. “Don’t you think we should be getting back?”
“Don’t call me that.” Natsuki was staring at the ground, her hands clutched together in fists tight enough to crush a rock.
“Excuse me?” Shizuru’s voice was more than a little bit dangerous. So was the lady who possessed it, but she kept that to herself.
“I said, don’t call me that. I just killed somebody for you, so don’t call me that.”
“Having a resurgence of humanity, Natsuki?” There was no trace of mockery in her voice, but Natsuki felt as though she heard it anyway. She didn’t care.
“Yes!” Her voice started to shake. “Yes I am, dammit. I can’t get the image of that man out of my head." She took a breath. "I can’t reconcile the me that’s standing here with the me that walked into that house and shot a man, and broke another man’s arm and barely batted an eyelash from the effort, alright? Is that what you want to hear?”
“I think it is,” Shizuru whispered.
Looking far, far into the future, Natsuki would someday, privately muse that it took only four little words to completely, utterly alter the course of her life. Even if it was far ipso-facto. At the moment, those four little words simply rammed into her, hammering her chest, her throat, her head, her stomach, each one of them stinging in it’s own way.
“Fuck you!” Natsuki shouted, less furious than bitter at Shizuru’s sudden hefty dose of hypocrisy. “Fuck you! You can’t even talk about humanity! You’ve killed more people than I have! You just…just…” she trailed off, took a step back, losing her thread as quickly as she’d gained it.
“Fuck me,” Shizuru finished. “I’m aware. Am I being cruel, Miss Kuga?”
“Yes,” Natsuki whispered. The newfound physical distance between them from her newer, lower vantage point seemed suddenly amplified. “Wh…” her throat locked up, and it took a moment for it to clear. “Why are you…why are you rubbing this…”
in my face why are you rubbing the people i killed in my face
“Haven’t you been cruel to me for a long time now?”
“I…” Natsuki understood about a second before she said it. She doesn’t care about the deaths. Not really. That’s not even kind of what this is about.
This is about the question. She’s being cruel because she’s angry at me for
“Haven’t you been avoiding my question? Haven’t you been, not accepting or rejecting my feelings for you, nor even ignoring them, but merely…postponing them? At every chance you get? ‘I don’t know yet’, you say. ‘I can’t trust you yet.’” As she said this last one, her voice became something indefinably horrible for a moment. “I don’t know what you want from me. I don’t know what I can do to make you trust me. Tell me, Natsuki. Do you need me to kill somebody for you? Is that it? Will violence be what will make you trust me? Or something else? Tell me.”
She rampaged over first district instead of me
and she doesn’t understand.
She killed
me
many people
and she doesn’t understand.
So tell her, Natsuki.
Natsuki tested her legs. They didn’t work particularly well. She tested her voice. It caught in her throat a little.
Good enough.
“You don’t understand at all.”
“I don’t understand? Me?” Shizuru laughed again, as horrible as her smile had been a moment before. “You, who can’t get over eighty small, indescribably minuscule deaths at my hands half a year ago? You, who not ten minutes ago shot a man? Did you think anything of that, Natsuki, when you did it? Anything at all?”
Natsuki took another step back. She doesn’t…
she
“You don’t understand.” It came out a lot weaker than she’d intended.
“Then explain it to me, Miss Kuga.”
“I told you not to call me that.”
Silence between them for a moment. Natsuki tested her legs again, and this time, she found she could use them. “You killed people, but some of those people were my friends, and…and one of them was me. I don’t want you to talk to me about killing people. Not after you…” she trailed off.
Shizuru looked away. “I told you I was sorry about that.”
She doesn’t understand.
So tell her, Natsuki.
“It’s not about sorry, Shizuru. It’s not about me forgiving you. You want forgiveness? Fine. I forgive you.” She scoffed. “Did that make anything better?”
Shizuru couldn’t think of anything to say to that, so Natsuki said it for her. “It’s not about that at all. It’s about I. don’t. know. It’s about seeing you ki-ki…” she took a moment to steady her tongue. “Kill those people, every time I look at you. It’s not something I can control, Shizuru. It’s just me.”
“Then say no,” Shizuru murmured. “If that’s how it is, then say no to me.”
“No,” Natsuki said without meaning to. Shizuru looked up at her, and Natsuki, having said it already, was forced to press valiantly onward with that on her back. “I’m not ready to make a decision. Not at all.”
“Then say something.”
“I won’t.”
“Why not?”
Natsuki took a deep breath. “Because if I said something now, it would be no. If I say something later…I don’t know what it will be. If you want to…” really love me “know, you’ll have to wait.” Please. Wait.
“How long?”
“I don’t know.”
“This is cruel, Natsuki.”
Natsuki did her best to smile. “I’m sorry, Shizuru. I’m really not trying to be cruel.” The attempt was mediocre, at best. “I just…I can’t. Not yet.”
“You need more time.”
“Yes.”
Shizuru sighed. “This is where we always end up.”
Natsuki frowned. “I guess it is.”
They stood in silence, and as if to fill it, Natsuki’s head immediately became something of a battlefield, that cynical little voice in the back of her mind using the empty space to challenge her.
Always where you end up, it said. What are you planning on doing, Natsuki? Are you going to make her wait until the end of time?
No! She felt a little strange, defending herself against herself; but she would have felt worse if she hadn’t.
What are you planning, then?
I just need more time.
You know that’s a lie.
It’s not!
You don’t need any more time. What you need is a hell of a lot more courage.
I don’t need courage to tell Shizuru my feelings. I don’t trust her!
Because you’re scared of her.
Shizuru was staring at Natsuki by this point—the girl had lapsed into complete silence, and was staring straight ahead, face completely blank. This, coincidentally, puther eyes roughly in line with Shizuru’s set of weaponry, far more deadly, in many ways, than the Mark-23 that Natsuki had tucked into the holster under her shirt.
I am not! I’m not afraid of her!
Then, why don’t you trust her? We distrust people we’re afraid will hurt us.
We don’t trust strangers, Natsuki countered, feeling she’d claimed the upper hand.
And why not? Because they might be perverts or rapists. Niggle: 1. Natsuki: 0. Really, Natsuki didn’t want to admit to anybody, least of all to herself, that she was really, genuinely afraid of Shizuru. She was.
What can I do, though? I can’t…I just can’t…not yet.
The current only changes when we decide it should change. This river is yours. Change it whenever you want to.
For a moment, Natsuki wanted to shout back at the voice. To go on the offensive, to accuse it of something, anything. She wasn’t used to this. She didn’t know how to deal with it.
Then do something about it. It’s your river. Do whatever you want with it.
“Natsuki?” Shizuru had dropped the icy little edge beneath her tone, and she sounded genuinely concerned at this point—any happiness she might have experienced at Natsuki’s apparent point of focus, or unfocus, as the case may be—had faded into worry when she had moved them and just Natsuki kept right on staring.
Your river.
Natsuki looked up at Shizuru and smiled half-heartedly as though nothing had happened. “I guess we really do end up here every time.”
Your river.
Shizuru nodded, a little puzzled.
You change the current.
You change it.
You…
You can change the fucking current whenever you want to.
Natsuki caught Shizuru’s gaze, as gently as she could; it wasn’t hard to do, in any event, as she’d done it often enough, but this time…
She took a step forward, and this time, it was Shizuru’s turn to be a little frightened. The taller girl’s feet grew roots all of a sudden, started drawing nutrition from the ground, and Shizuru wanted no part of anything else at that point.
Just reach out your hands.
She did. She reached for Shizuru, who, for a moment, didn’t know what to do.
Then she reached back.
When I didn’t trust anybody, you made me trust you.
When I didn’t know where to go, you pointed there.
You helped me. Every time.
Natsuki pulled Shizuru into a hug; tight, firm, warm, and after a moment, she whispered, “Thank you.”
Natsuki could have sworn she heard Shizuru sniffing next to her ear, but that could have just as easily been the sound of the waves of the river, lapping up on the shore as it changed directions.
After a while, Shizuru pulled back. It could have been minutes as easily as it could have been hours in Natsuki’s mind, which had lost most of its sense of time in a flurry of relief; the kind of relief that a man working overtime at a grueling job experiences after his shift finally ends.
Natsuki was ready to go now. She felt better. She felt good.
Shizuru, however, was not. She was looking straight-on at Natsuki, and she had the kind of look in her eye…the eye that was moving closer, nervously but steadily.
Her immediate response was, oh, shit. It was the kind of response you got from months of conditioning. The kind of reaction that would make a man run from what he, in an instant of what could have as easily been infatuation as love, perceived to be the love of his life because he was already married. A flash of sensibility, but at the same time, cowardice. Whether it was for the best was down to anybody’s opinion who wanted to speak on it.
But that meant that Natsuki had hers, too.
I’m not ready yet, Shizuru. I’m not sure if I’ll ever be ready.
But I think, this once, I can do something I’m afraid to do.
The way some tell it, dating canon states that a man should move ninety percent of the way in for a kiss, allowing the woman enough space to reject him comfortably, or accept him without much effort. It was a formula that worked fairly well for many males, worked poorly for others, notably those whose dental hygiene is less than spectacular.
This instance, however; this location, this couple, this time frame, was utterly unique in the world. Maybe that was the explanation for the pissing on of the canon. Maybe it was that there were no males involved.
Or maybe it was because Natsuki Kuga would not be only ten percent. Ever. She leaned in at least fifty percent, and captured Shizuru’s mouth, moving slowly, shaking slightly, with her own, also shaking.
They kissed. Their lips pressed against each other, one pair warm and moist, the other dry. Their respiration virtually ceased. Natsuki’s eyes were closed, Shizuru’s wide open for a moment as she allowed herself to relax. When her eyes closed, she parted her lips slightly, slid them across Natsuki’s as she tilted her head to avoid a bumping of noses.
Natsuki reciprocated her motion, and their kiss became more involved for all of twenty seconds.
The grass was very dry that day. It crunched behind Shizuru, in front of Natsuki, and their kiss ended as Natsuki opened her eyes and drew her gun in the same instinctive motion, bred into her personality by years of
violence is this really me when I’m with Shizuru like this
paranoia.
She had her weapon trained directly on Minoru Alder, who froze. He had his backpack, and his camouflage was open at the collar, revealing a black sweater.
Back to Resolution Index - Back to Mai HiME Shoujo-Ai Fanfiction