Maybe / things happen for a reason / and wherein lies the answer / to overcome the grieving / of life’s unruly lessons / I’m handed in succession / it fills my faith which makes me…
Strong.
It’s mine / and it’s pure and / as decent as I can make myself.
Only the Strong #2
Even though it was his wrist that was messed up, it was Minoru’s back that gave him the most grief as he tried, unsuccessfully, to find a way up the hill he’d been spotting from that didn’t involve clearing brush or grasping onto branches for support, or both at once. It was one of the most frustrating things he’d ever done; right on par with trying to navigate through a dog park without stepping in somebody’s shit. Every time he thought he’d found a path, something would block it; some dense thatch of foliage or a set of trees and stumps that he couldn’t get over with a heavy backpack and only one good hand.
It was a painful reminder that he wasn’t young anymore, really. Fifteen years ago, he could have cleared this little piece of forest in ten minutes flat, even with his wrist fucked up as it was.
cant seem to let go of
past that barely ever existed
not nearly as romantic
These thoughts still bothered him occasionally, but it was on very rare occasion.
Plagued is a better word.
It took him a solid twenty minutes of crashing through the forest like Godzilla plowing through Tokyo looking for a decent puppeteer before he finally made it around to where he’d come before. It was a fairly clean trail, though the lack of foot-sized dents in the foliage here led him to question whether or not he had actually been here before.
Listen to yourself.
A minute after he’d started in, he noticed a foot-sized dent in the leaves that covered the ground that was most certainly not his. He used his good hand to reach into his holster and before he noticed that he wasn’t having trouble with the latch, he had drawn his Beretta. It took him a little off-guard to find that he could still draw that fast. He hadn’t needed to draw in years, and it made him feel a little better; he felt adrenaline start to flow through his body, limbering him up and numbing the pain in his wrist.
Slow down, Minoru, he thought. If somebody was up there, planning on shooting you, they’d have done it a long time ago. Hell, they could have done it in the dark, you’re being so damn loud.
Ambushes still happen, he countered, unconcerned about the looming possibility of arguing with himself.
But Scratch-ass probably wouldn’t be the one to order them; he’s more of a shit-crazy nut than that. Remember what he said before? If one of you dies—
It clicked in his head a second later, and he wondered how he had ever forgotten that creepy son of a bitch’s warning in the first place.
We’ll shoot the other.
Minoru was looking in the wrong place. Ten minutes later (the other guy had really chosen a much better spot to snipe from; no horrid ascent plagued Minoru this time), he was up the hill several dozen meters from his, and a moment later, he found what he was looking for: Nori. Very dead Nori; blood had started to pool around his stomach from a thin wound on his back: Somebody had put a knife through his spine, by the looks of it; a pair of footprints on either side of his torso told him as much, and told him that they’d done it without much of a pretense. Or much of a struggle. The leaves and grass around him aren’t even riled up.
It frightened Minoru more than a little to think about that. Stealthy bastards such as whoever had done this were the bane of snipers: You couldn’t really flat-out charge somebody like Minoru and expect to make it more than twenty feet, and Minoru’s senses, still-undulled in spite of his age, were still very, very good. So for somebody to have taken Nori—who couldn’t have been more than ten years younger than Minoru (not to mention completely asexual and therefore impossible to distract) completely off-guard like this…you didn’t get people that good very often, and when you did, they tended to kill their share and then some.
You’re so dead, he thought without wanting to. If you’ve got this ninja or whatever he is after you, and that crazy bastard Scratch-ass…and he is after you now. Now that your partner’s dead.
He didn’t like where this train of thought was heading, but like most trains, he was powerless to stop it.
It probably didn’t even occur to him that I wasn’t even in the area when he died. Stupid bastard. This isn’t even sort of fair. Not at all like the lazy years…at your age, up against somebody like him…you’re so fucking dead.
But something occurred to him: When exactly did the lazy years end? Did they ever really end? Maybe it’s harder to find jobs recently, but have they ever been tough? And if I’m really going so far to pot, would I really be able to carry out tough jobs?
Minoru and Midori were more alike than they could have known even if they had been closely acquainted for more than about twelve hours. All at once, insecurity that he had never even recognized surfaced, and then vanished as he thought, it can’t be both, but it can certainly be neither.
Really, Minoru was pretty lucky. The kind of insecurity he was experiencing now usually hit people much harder, especially as they neared their inevitable midlife crises; he hadn’t expected it to hit him at all, but he supposed that was just hubris. He had probably started feeling that way when he had been so thoroughly whupped by a bunch of kids, none of whom were more than half his age except for Midori; there were certainly worse reasons to angst about his age, but he couldn’t think of them off-hand.
So don’t, asshole.
Minoru shook his head and turned to head back to the cabin, but not before giving Nori’s corpse an obligatory “you dead?” nudge. He repeated the process once for good measure; he had met a guy once in northern China that he thought he’d killed, and that had sprung up and tried to kill him when his back was turned. Admittedly, he’d botched the ambush terribly, mostly due to the gaping hole that Minoru had left in his esophagus, but still, it was worth another nudge.
If only the bastard had had the courtesy to drop his gun somewhere where I could find it, he mused as he started back down the hill, using a different route than the one he’d used during his ascent. Not that I’m jealous or anything, but that was certainly a nice scope.
You’re jealous.
Minoru was, in fact, so jealous that he tripped over the meter-long metallic tube that had lodged itself between a pair of trees. He lashed out with both his good and bad hands just quickly enough to keep himself from the kind of tumble usually reserved for extras in comedy movies and action flicks, and, along with a fresh surge of pain from his bad hand, he found himself afforded a lovely view of a mediocre rifle with a massive scope.
Minoru Alder was a lucky man indeed.
Or maybe not.
She sighed and leaned back against the wall that divided the boys’ and girls’ halves of the cabin, though admittedly, they were presently in a state of relative integration; Midori had more or less kicked the boys out of their half so that she could work on that guy they picked up. That guy.
Just some guy they picked up? Did Midori pick him up in a bar? That woman…Mai shook her head, refusing to get as angry as she wanted to get, deep down inside. Very deep. But still…who does that?
A lot of people. Normal people, who go out and do normal things. Who go meet people in bars if they don’t have boyfriends.
Who talk to their boyfriends if they do. Who do…other things. Whose boyfriends don’t let groupies hang off of them.
Normal people.
Yuuichi nudged her with his elbow as he slid down next to her, and she jumped, coming about (again, smush) this close to shrieking out in alarm, as though she hadn’t heard the toilet (which was now busy swirling whatever Yuuichi had put in it about in a vain attempt to sanitize itself) flush.
Yuuichi noticed the shock on her face, and, in spite of Mai’s every effort to prevent just such a thing from happening, frowned. “Are you okay?” he asked.
She was very obviously not, and it showed on her face in a way that anybody could see if they paid attention and knew Mai, and which very few people subsequently ever picked up on; a certain hesitation, like she was willing the muscles of her face to move damnit and then a smile, as cute as she could make it when it was so obviously forced. Yuuichi didn’t like that smile on her; some guys probably went for the frightened-schoolgirl look, because that was precisely what it was, but Yuuichi had his own personal frightened schoolgirl that usually refused to detach itself from his arm; it was enough to put just about anybody off the habit.
Even through that smile, he could sense her inwardly curling up into a little ball. It was something she did in the face of something that she felt like she should bear rather than actively trying to change: She smiled, bore it, and inwardly she scrunched herself up into as small of a ball as possible, like a protective shell. It worked for her; the tighter her ball got, the less of anything she felt. The problem with this was that it also tended to scare her away from other people; emotion was emotion, good or bad, and you couldn’t differentiate when you were being defensive.
Yuuichi hadn’t explicitly worked at trying to get her to stop doing that; he believed that a person should be allowed to feel how they want to feel, and interfering with other people’s emotion was just insulting. But he had seen her slowly begin to come out of that shell that she had built up around herself for most of her life; the shell that had kept both he and Reito out for a long, long time.
“I’m fine,” she said, finally. It had taken her a lot of time to work up the courage to lie fluently again. She had to do it less these days, and it had become harder as practice became more scarce.
Obligatory lie told, Yuuichi was now allowed to comfort her: Almost without thinking about it, he reached around over her shoulders and pulled Mai into his chest, and almost as soon as she touched it, she relaxed. Yuuichi could practically see the tension drift off of her shoulders and up, in a thin, wispy cloud, towards the ceiling.
For a lot of people, especially in Japan, this kind of an act was best saved for someplace where, if privacy was impossible, the image of anonymity could at least be maintained. For a lot of girls, resting their head against a boy they liked meant a lot more than what it did for Mai Tokiha; it meant some sort of mildly timid, even very, very vaguely sexual display of affection.
Mai was just happy to be there.
Yuuichi grinned down at her hair, lacking a decent view of her face as she nestled into him, her face warm and soft against him; it was a grin that was an affection that was somewhere near that of a child in that it was blind and completely, utterly pure, and that was his, and only his.
They sat there like that for a little while that stretched into a space not nearly long enough for Yuuichi’s taste, in silence; the only sound was the gentle whisper of Mai’s breath on Yuuichi’s shirt.
When Minoru screamed from the other room, Mai jerked against him, but said nothing; Yuuichi, by that point, had gone into a serene, pleased, halfway-meditative state, so what he thought first as Mai jumped and brought him out of it was, wow, Mai’s really warm.
What he thought next was, she’s also very soggy. Is it raining?
By the third second, he’d put it together in his head, but he also knew that he didn’t know what to do. He didn’t even know why she was crying.
So ask her, stupid.
Easier said then done. “M…Mai,” he managed to get out quietly, his words more empathetic than his stutter would have suggested. “What is it?” He pulled her a little tighter.
She didn’t speak, and Yuuichi frowned. “What is it? Mai?” He pulled her a little tighter.
Again, nothing. Yuuichi began to worry as the pool of wet on his shirt increased. Is this something really serious? He thought, feeling that little ache in his belly specially reserved for matters of grave import with regards to one’s love life. Is there something wrong that she can’t tell me?
Or that I should be telling her?
Again, Yuuichi realized that he had no idea what to do in a situation like this except listen to what Mai had to say. But she’s not saying anything.
Could it be about Shiho? Or about…a little jerk in his stomach, Reito?
It only vaguely occurred to him at this point that he was breaking his agreement with Reito simply by holding Mai like this. What had he been thinking when he made that agreement? What had Reito been thinking? Didn’t he know they were dating?
Mai, please, say something to me.
Mai, please. I can’t help you unless you talk to me.
I can’t ask you to talk any more than this.
Please.
Mai.
Mai was gently tugging at the arm he had wrapped so tightly around her head. He automatically loosened his grip, and Mai immediately pulled out of his embrace, and in that moment, his stomach leaked entirely out his bowels.
Then she started panting.
What?
“Mai…?” he asked cautiously. “Please…tell me what’s…”
It took her a moment to speak, and when she did, it was hesitant.
“I was just thinking,” she said quietly, “about how long it’s been since we’ve gotten to be this close by ourselves.”
Yuuichi nodded and shook his head with a sigh. “I know. I’m sorry about—”
“Don’t apologize for Shiho,” Mai interrupted. Mai rarely interrupted people, so when she did, you shut up and paid attention. “That’s what you were about to do, right?”
Yuuichi nodded silently.
“Don’t,” Mai repeated. “I know you…and she…” there were about a million things Yuuichi could think to put in those spaces, but he couldn’t decide on any particular set. “But don’t. Mikoto apologized to me earlier, and now she’s sulking, I think.”
“Are you embarrassed about what Mikoto did?”
“A little,” Mai admitted. This made perfect sense to Yuuichi: Even if it was sorely merited, Mai didn’t that kind of confrontation; she hated it. Hated fighting with other people. Hated alienating other people from herself.
“Don’t be,” Yuuichi said. “I think I should have said something like that to her a long time ago. So I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Mai said automatically. “It’s no problem.”
Bull. Shit.
The two of them lapsed into silence, and Yuuichi thought, now what? How rough has this really been for her? The way she’d said “it’s no problem” made Yuuichi understand very clearly that he could never tell her about what he’d promised Reito, ever, and the way she was acting told him….He glanced briefly at the massive wet stain on his shirt. Was this really…
“That wasn’t all…” Mai said, ever-observant. (And articulate.) “It was…actually…ah…”
It wasn’t what? It wasn’t tears of sadness? Pain?
It wasn’t tears for us?
This is …this inability to really have time, to spend time together with only each other, it’s going to kill one of us, if not both.
“Spit.”
Yuuichi blinked. “What?”
“I, ah…” Mai wiped at her eyes with her palm. “When you had me pressed into you…like that, I couldn’t…” She hesitated. A lot. “I couldn’t breathe.”
It took Yuuichi almost ten seconds to fully process this.
When he did, he wasn’t sure if he was allowed to laugh.
Mai did it for him. She dissolved completely into a small, genuine laugh, one which Yuuichi sincerely echoed.
I don’t understand this girl all the time. She’s crying one second, and laughing the next, and then I, who was scared out of his mind not two minutes ago, is guffawing along with her.
What’s the next step? What’s left for me to learn?
What happened next is best observed stepwise, as with the death of the poor, well-constructed noodle display, because stepwise is how it would forever be ingrained in Yuuichi’s memory; as a series of moments which, by themselves, meant everything to him, and when strung together resonated in his mind for a long time to come.
In the first moment, Mai stops laughing. Yuuichi is still caught up in his open, honest chuckle—unbeknownst to him, Mai thinks, I love that laugh, that laugh that he can bellow out without any reservation; she only tells him this years later, after he laughs at something she mumbles as they both slide towards sleep in the aftermath of their lovemaking—but Mai’s face has suddenly become very serious.
In the second moment, Yuuichi stops abruptly, and something in his stomach starts wiggling around as he looks into her eyes and finds them staring at his very, very steadily.
In the third moment, her stoic gaze wavers to his lips and the wiggling starts increasing in strength and frequency.
In the fourth moment, Mai’s eyes slide closed. In the fifth, Yuuichi’s eyes follow suit.
In the sixth moment, they kiss. Their kiss is passionate but quick. There is no tongue to it, though some time into the future they find that tongue is something they both enjoy with a passion. Mai leads; it is her lips that close on Yuuichi’s, and not the other way around, because of her self-doubt. Her suddenly raging insecurity that he will reject her, throw her back and yell at her, and her inexplicable, undeniable need to taste his lips at least once before he does. This is one of the few selfish acts that Mai has ever engaged in, and certainly the most enjoyable of them.
In the seventh moment, they are still kissing, and Yuuichi has done nothing of the sort.
In the tenth moment, they part, and Yuuichi grins at her. Mai grins back, but Yuuichi sees something in his peripheral vision. He turns to look at the door and sees…
Reito.
Grinning at him. His grin is like a knife, but a sheathed one. There is no anger in his eyes; what Yuuichi sees is only a sort of vague annoyance, one that said to him, you broke the promise, but that’s okay.
Mai frowned and looked over at where Yuuichi was staring, his face horrified. What is…
Reito’s look scared her as much as it appeared to scare Yuuichi, and she didn’t know why, but a moment later, he winked at the two of them and jerked his head backwards. He vanished from sight a second later, and Midori appeared in view. She spotted them a second after that, and said, her voice less playful than normal, “Ooh, caught the lovers making out!” A second later, Chie appeared with her camera phone.
What progressed from there made Mai forget all about the look on Reito’s face. He even joined in on the teasing that ensued in his very subtle, gentle way.
Yuuichi didn’t forget, though.
Minoru had just started to get used to the idea that maybe his luck hadn’t deserted him after all when he felt something poking at his back. Something really, really sharp. He froze, taking in the near-perfect silence around him and wondering how exactly somebody could be quite so silent in the middle of a forest.
Neither of them moved; whoever it was that had the upper hand on him seemed content to keep it and leave it undisturbed for the moment. Likewise, Minoru, a patient man, was content to wait it out. He had a feeling he wasn’t about to be executed; maybe it was just him, but if he’d wanted to kill somebody by sneaking up on them, he probably would have done it already. With a gun. From far, far away.
Maybe that was just him.
Minoru wasn’t sure how long he and his assailant stood there, but what he was sure of was that his muscles were going to start to ache soon. He had just finished straightening up with Nori’s rifle in his good hand, resting on his bad one so he didn’t have to use it to clutch anything too tightly, when he had been accosted by this silent assailant with what could have been, for all he knew, a pointed stick as easily as it could have been a knife. The trouble with this position was, very simply, that the rifle was really, really heavy. That was why it had a bipod, which, ironically enough, only made it heavier right now.
Two minutes passed. Three. His bad wrist was starting to throb from the weight of the rifle. In a passing thought, he reflected upon whether or not this was what the arthritis that had claimed several good (read: rival) snipers he’d known was like. If so, he decided, he was more than happy staying middle-aged for a good, long time.
Finally, with the lactic acid in his muscles threatening to eat its way out of his skin, he gave in: “Listen,” he said carefully, his voice very, very gentle. He waited a moment, and nobody stabbed him to death, so he decided it was all right to continue. “You might be young and spry, but I’m getting on a little bit in years, and this rifle is really, really heavy, and I’m about to drop it. The safety is off, and in all likelihood, it will go off, and then you’re probably going to stab me out of reflex, presuming you’re young and spry and all that. So, either put your pointy stick away or let me put this thing down, okay?”
“Set it down slowly,” Pointy-stick replied.
The voice was what really startled him the most. But then again, it didn’t, really. He had heard it before. Had it taken him off-guard then, too? He couldn’t remember.
Which is pretty sad, since “before” is less than twenty-four hours ago.
It was the voice of that ninja that had put him in this mess in the first place— If I could find a plot to put behind a novel that started like that, I could make a lot of money, Minoru thought—the one who had said only two words, “that’s all,” after she had finished disarming him. The voice was sort of deep and hoarse, but it also possessed just a touch of femininity that most men couldn’t fake even if they tried, which led him to believe that the ninja was a female.Before, he had thought it was a male, but most of that was due to his blinding agony as he tried to struggle and curse and slowly learned that his muscles not only refused to move, but rewarded him with intense pain as he did.
He did what the ninja said, though, and set the rifle down on the ground. Akira, he thought as he did. That was her name. Was it really a her, though?
Probably. Guys really did have a harder time injecting femininity into their voices than females did making their voices masculine.
As he straightened up again, he said, “So, are we going to play the ‘let’s all wait for Minoru to make a sudden move so we can stab him’ game again? Or are you going to tell me what it is you want before I die of a heart attack?”
He wondered what it was that gave him this kind of courage a moment after he said it. It certainly wasn’t the knowledge that he was probably older than Akira; young people with guns and knives were a lot more resistant to authority than young people without them, and if you tried to force them to submit by virtue of age anyway, they were pretty likely to kill you because they didn’t know what else to do.
“That depends on what you have to tell me.”
Minoru frowned. I’m being interrogated now? “What do you want to know?”
Minoru’s breaking point had never been very high; he tended to submit to interrogation rather than bravely resist. Sure, it meant betraying somebody who had paid him to do something, but it also meant keeping his tongue. Which was important.
“Who are you working for?”
Minoru chuckled as he realized he couldn’t really answer that question. “See, the trouble is, I have no idea what his name is.” And then, because he couldn’t resist, “I could tell you I work for Scratch-ass, because that’s what I call him, but I don’t think that will be much help.”
Oddly enough, Akira didn’t laugh at this. “How were you paid?”
“Money wired to my account. I got orders on a radio set that I think you took off of me back in Goza, but I don’t think monitoring it will help much.”
“I know. Tell me why.”
“He seems to be out gunning for my ass at the moment. And by ‘he,’ I mean ‘all his little henchmen.’” Unspoken was the implied, of whom I used to be one. Very recently.
Again, “Why?”
Minoru chuckled. “Actually, because of that guy.” His expression would have been a lot more useful if he’d had the balls to actually flick his head in the direction of Nori’s corpse. “The one with the hole in his back up the hill.” A flicker of understanding in his head, and then, “You did that, didn’t you?”
There aren’t really a lot of people that can sneak up on an entrenched sniper, and I’d guess there aren’t many ninja around here anymore, either. Two plus two equals…
“I did.” At least she wasn’t sheepish about it. No use being sheepish about somebody you’d already gutted.
“Well, that’s why they’re gunning for me. Because of him. The deal was, ‘if one of you dies, we’ll shoot the other,’ and, well…he’s dead.” four. Except when it doesn’t. Because it didn’t always.
Akira didn’t question the logic. She didn’t need to. “Will he send others after you?”
Minoru paused to consider, but not long. “Probably. And they’ll probably be doing it exactly the same way this guy watched the cabin down there; from a long way away, with a big, silent rifle. They don’t know where I am yet, but I’m willing to bet that they’ll find out soon enough.” Another flicker of understanding. “And that’s bad. Because those people in that cabin are your friends.”
Akira, my old mark had said, you can come out now. Two plus two…
Akira said nothing, so Minoru spoke, and did so with even more caution than when he had been afraid that he was about to be gutted. “If you’re going after this guy, we could probably help each other out.”
“You’re planning on fleeing as soon as possible.” Akira didn’t make it a question, and, unfortunately, she was spot-on. He was grateful, and a little attracted, to the girl Midori, but he wasn’t bullet-in-my-skull-for-you attracted to her. He hadn’t actually ever been that taken with any girl. Maybe he was just smarter than the guys who had taken bullets in their skulls for girls who were now fucking other men.
Minoru had no idea what to say. Akira was right, of course: This wasn’t the first deal of his that had gone sour, and it wouldn’t be the first time he had to disappear. It didn’t really bother him to have to do that.
“I’ll warn you now that I have people watching you; people like me.” Were there more ninja in the Goza area? Was that maybe why the tourism here was so bad? “If you try to flee before this is settled, you will die. If you endanger any of my f…those people down there, you will die. Understand?”
“Yeah.” Minoru frowned. Maybe he wasn’t so lucky after all.
But then again, he wasn’t dead. That by itself was evidence to the contrary. And maybe this was something he should do, anyway. “I’ll help you.”
Akira said nothing, but Minoru had a feeling she was surprised anyway. He wasn’t really the I’ll help you type. He was more of the holy shit, it’s the pope! and flee type. But if he was stuck here, and he was going to have people out gunning for him, wasn’t it better to have the ninjas on his side?
Again, I could make some money with that tagline.
Minoru obviously wasn’t much of a writer.
Ten minutes later, Minoru was most of the way back to the cabin, a lot less comfortable than he’d been half an hour ago when his only worry was a banged-up wrist. He found that the red-haired girl had been caught making out with her boyfriend—can’t really blame him, remarked the side of him that he liked to call his I actually do want to go to jail side. Before he’d gotten to the camp, he’d disassembled the rifle and stored it in his now obscenely heavy backpack, and as a result had very nearly broken his neck coming down the steps from the parking lot.
He had been planning on telling them that they should maybe clear out for a little while because there was some trouble going on around him. When he saw the spectacle that was starting to form mostly around the orange-haired girl and her boyfriend, he couldn’t. Just couldn’t. Even worse than that, he had no idea why.
As it turned out, that saved their lives, but he didn’t know that at the time.
He only knew, as he stood on the outskirts of their group—behind the cabin, but a safe distance from the slightly creepy pink-haired girl sulking fairly miserably in a bush— that for the first time in a very, very long time, he felt just a little lonely.
No Shizuru and Natsuki this chapter; see their stunning return next chapter in Mai-HiME, Resolution part 17: I still know what you’re looking at, Mary, and Jesus does too! (Guess the quote, get a gold star).
See chapter 3: Shoot me again
See chapter 6: Guarded
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