Author’s Notes:
This chapter gets a little religious. It is, after all, about a Catholic school. I take a few stances that I think that the characters in Marimite, given the heavy yuri subtext of the whole thing and the seeming lack of fundamentalism in the series as a whole, wouldn’t have trouble taking.
In other news, you might notice a disproportionate amount of references to alcohol in this chapter. Just so’s we’re clear, this fic takes place the summer after Sachiko graduates. Sei is 20, but the rest of them are underage. However, alcohol is very easy to obtain in Japan, being available from simple street vending machines, which is why the brief bit about legality on Sachiko’s part is supposed to be silly.
I should know better by now.
God Makes the Rain
As Rei led her towards the small café just off of the main lobby with a loud, honest promise to hurry back, Sachiko thought numbly that usually when two people ought to have a talk, it was usually conducted discreetly. She couldn’t come up with any concrete reasoning for this, of course; in fact, if prompted, she might have found that she could not come up with much of anything just then.
Rei sat her down at a small table and told her to stay put. Sachiko, her mind still in the midst of such a haze that those who did not know her might have called her melodramatic, needed no telling. Rei left, and returned about two minutes later with a pair of steaming cups. She put one down in front of Sachiko, who looked down and found not tea, as she had expected, but coffee. Sachiko did not ordinarily drink coffee. It stained one’s teeth, and it was bitter. She drank tea. All ladies drank tea.
(all ladies don’t look at their petite soeur’s)
This coffee was black, too. No cream, no sugar. It would be bitter. She would probably pull a face. A most unladylike
(glance)
(posterior)
face.
“So,” Rei said as she sat down across from Sachiko.
Sachiko only looked back at her.
(The least you can do is get ahold of yourself you stupid girl)
(get yourself under control or you will embarrass me)
(us)
(ALL OF US GET YOURSELF UNDER CONTROL)
Sachiko shook her head sharply. It was a move Rei knew well, and in an instant her face became full of concern.
More concern.
“I’m sorry,” Sachiko said. “I seem to have drifted into a daze for a moment. I apologize for my rudeness.”
Rei frowned. Rei didn’t like Sachiko’s tone one bit.
She’s being polite. To me. In what is, essentially, private. She looked around, and indeed, the only person even in earshot was the barista from whom she had gotten her coffee, a short, solid woman who was presently paging through a magazine disinterestedly.
This isn’t right. Not at all.
“Sachiko,” Rei said. “Stop.”
“Stop?” Sachiko looked genuinely confused. “Have I done something to offend you?”
Damn it to Hell.
Yumi might have understood immediately.
It took Rei, who had since her entrance into the Yamayurikai been fairly close with Sachiko, a good half minute, and this was not because Rei did not know Sachiko well.
Damn it to Hell, in her mind, turned into something far more vulgar. It was possible that Sachiko genuinely was not following her, but it was more likely—and frustrating—that she was simply doing as she had always been taught.
The truth, Rei thought, was that Sachiko was simply an extraordinarily good actress, because she didn’t truly believe herself to be acting at all. Some small, untraceable part of Sachiko Ogasawara believed that she was, in fact, under close watch by some obscure Forces of Those Wealthier than She at all times, and that any slight mistake might embarrass and possibly ruin the family entirely. That was the crux of the matter as Rei knew it, after long, hard thought over the course of many nights about midway through her first year. Some people might have thought it unbelievably selfish of Sachiko to require (even unaware) such deep, concentrated thought and effort in order to keep her stable and human sometimes.
Rei would have laughed at that accusation. Rei would have said that anybody who thought that didn’t understand what friendship was, not even a little.
She would have been right, too.
Nobody could do anything about the way Sachiko was, though. Getting the girl to lighten up was nearly impossible.
Except for Yumi.
Yeah. Except for Yumi.
Something that Yumi couldn’t often bring herself to do, though, was play the game she needed to play by simply stepping around Sachiko and her manners.
That was something Rei was very good at. She knew Sei was talented in this area as well, but her methods were too crass for Rei to even attempt to imitate. It worked, but there were limits to how far outside of her boundaries Rei wanted to go unless absolutely necessary.
“No,” Rei said. “Not at all. So then, let’s talk.”
“Yes,” Sachiko said pleasantly. “Was there something you needed to speak to me about?”
Rei found herself a little frustrated at this; polite, she could take patiently. Seeming memory loss, not so much.
And so, she found herself thinking of Sei, of all people.
“Yeah,” Rei said. “I need to talk to you about how you’ve been staring at Yumi’s” ass—no, you’ll lose her “butt for the past ten minutes.”
Sachiko blinked again and froze up.
Rei sighed and put her hand over Sachiko’s, moved it to the cup of coffee. “Drink it,” she said. “It’ll help.”
“I’m terribly sorry,” Sachiko said nearly automatically. “I don’t do well with coffee. My stomach sometimes becomes upset when I—”
“Drink,” Rei said more firmly. She suddenly wished she had something stronger to lace it with, but according to Sei, all of the good booze was in the trunk. (She had spoken very briefly with an uncharacteristically distracted Sei about this beforehand, and that was the only thing she had gotten from it. She wasn’t entirely sure what to make of it.) “Your teeth will be fine. You’ve eaten properly today, so your stomach will be, too.”
Sachiko blinked again. Slowly, she touched the cup, and then her fingers curled around it almost reflexively. A moment later she brought it to her lips and sipped, recoiled almost immediately.
“Hot?” Rei asked.
“Yes. I’m sorry.” Sachiko said. For a second, she felt as though she might simply shriek. Instead, she looked down. “Oh dear. I seem to have…”
“Spilled. You got coffee on your brand new swimsuit.” She finished Sachiko’s sentence so that Sachiko wouldn’t. “You’ll have to go out into the rain and clean yourself up, but not before we talk.”
“About Yumi’s…” Sachiko trailed off. The shock seemed to have done her good, and Rei was glad.
Rei looked at her with a patient, kind smile, and Sachiko couldn’t help but smile back.
A second later, it came spilling out of her mouth. It was a surprisingly brief tale, told with an objectivity which pervaded it from her description of how fast she normally changed right down to how she felt that little hit she felt in her gut when she saw the smooth line of Yumi’s backside. The objectivity made it almost frightening, but Rei understood. Sachiko normally had two reactions to things which genuinely frightened her: She avoided them, or she took the hit front-on. When they had gone to Hanadera to participate in the festival, she had done the latter, at Yumi’s behest, and she had treated it as objectively as she could, though it had not ended that way. At Yumi’s behest, she did a lot of things. She dropped her objectivity at Yumi’s behest, without Yumi even asking for it.
“I don’t understand,” Sachiko said quietly. “I don’t understand it at all. I mean…” She shook her head and tried another sip of coffee. She didn’t spill any this time, though this certainly did not mean that it was not hot enough to burn her; it just meant that she was more under her own control, and less under the control of whatever she usually kept herself subdued with.
“You felt all this,” Rei said, “and you fought off the urge to look back. Why?”
“Because it’s wrong.”
“What’s wrong?”
Sachiko stared at Rei openly, mouth agape. “What’s wrong? That! It’s…” Rei would later add at the risk of sounding like a walking cliché to her memory of that incident, “a sin.”
Rei said, “It’s not a sin to love your petite soeur. That’s the goal of the whole system, to foster a bond so strong that it defies all convention.”
“Nothing should defy convention,” Sachiko said so quickly that she probably hadn’t even thought about it. Rei ignored it and pressed on.
“Listen,” she said. “You and Yumi are…very close. Yumi is probably the only person in this universe short of God himself who can get past your defenses when you’ve got them up strong. I know that and I accept it, and I’m not ashamed by it. For you to feel a powerful love for that one person is…so normal that it’s strange to me that you haven’t noticed it until now.”
“But that sort of love shouldn’t have anything to do with—”
Rei smiled the genuine smile of a friend who feels like it’s maybe all she can do, and put her hand back on Sachiko’s. “Nobody wise ever put the words love and should in the same sentence, Sachiko. Love, no matter what the hard-liners say, is never a sin.”
“Never isn’t a good word either,” Sachiko said.
“No, you’re right. It’s not. But…I don’t think that love is a sin. Acting on love can be sinful in the same way that acting on hate can be sinful.”
Sachiko felt something hit her hard. “So that means that I shouldn’t…”
“You said that, not me,” Rei said. “I think you should love who you want without fear of sin, because I think sin is fundamentally hurtful to somebody, and that doesn’t seem to me to be what you’re…” She trailed off. “Do you understand what I mean?”
Sachiko nodded slowly. “I think I do. I don’t know if I agree, though.”
“That’s because you were raised by strict parents.” Rei smiled at her. “And you didn’t live next door to Yoshino. It doesn’t matter, though. You weren’t looking for a valid biblical justification for wanting to stare at Yumi anyway, were you?”
Sachiko slowly shook her head, and silently wondered at how mature Rei seemed at that moment.
“I suppose I’m just…” Sachiko said, not sure what she was precisely.
“I know you are,” Rei said with a smile. “It’s confusing, you know? And it’s harder since you are...who you are.”
She almost said, since I'm engaged to Suguru.
“I guess all I can really tell you to do is to take your time. There’s no other way you can think straight about these kinds of things.”
Sachiko thought, She talks about these things as if from experience, and wondered for the first time with a little jilt how similarly Sei Satou would reply if Sachiko were to confide in her about Yumi’s posterior.
“Thank you,” Sachiko said with a genuine smile.
“Hey,” Rei said. “Thank you. I feel myself as though I understand things better now.”
Sachiko could not help but wonder what exactly she understood better.
Maybe if she would have known, things would have been easier for her.
Probably it was best, then, that she didn’t.
“What do you think was wrong with Sachiko?” Yoshino asked Yumi as they clustered around the exit, all holding towels and staring at the rain outside, gathering their nerve and trying to find a nonalcoholic solution to their increasingly problematic common sense. “I didn’t notice anything, but Onee-sama seemed pretty concerned.”
“She did?” Yumi asked, genuinely surprised. To her, Rei had seemed roughly the same as she always had.
“Yeah. You probably couldn’t see it, since she doesn’t mother you around all the time, but it’s been a while since I’ve seen Rei that concerned about somebody. Probably not since my operation, you know?”
“Really…” Yumi frowned. Was something that I couldn’t see really wrong with Onee-sama? How did I miss it that easily?
Probably because you were too caught up in thinking about how nice your Onee-sama looks in that swimsuit you picked out for her.
Yumi’s neck flushed red at this and she shook her head furiously.
Yohsino laughed delightedly. “You look exactly like Shimako!” she whispered, and at this, Yumi only flushed redder.
“Speaking of Shimako, though,” Yumi said quickly, trying to get the subject off of swimsuits, Sachiko, or any combination of the two.
Yoshino was immediately serious again. “Mm. She didn’t even hear me. I think she’s off in her own world right now.”
“She’s never like that, though.”
They glanced over at the short, beautiful girl and found her, as Yoshino said, standing—nearly leaning; something unheard of for somebody as upright and proper as Shimako Toudo—staring at the mysterious space halfway between eye level and the floor, the realm which only those utterly lost in thought ever seemed to be able to see clearly. She raised a single petite finger and touched her lower lip, held it there for a moment, and then lowered it, not moving her eyes.
A hand on both of their shoulders made them jump and very nearly screech. When they turned around—neither slowly nor quietly—they saw Sei standing behind them, not grinning as she normally might have been. Rather, her face was fairly serious.
“You want to leave Shimako alone about that for a while,” she said quietly, her voice uncharacteristically raspy. “When we go outside, talk about anything else, okay?” She attempted a half-hearted smile, made it about three-quarters of the way.
Yumi looked at Sei for a moment, but before she could say anything, Yoshino said, “All right. I understand.”
Sei smiled. “Tonight ought to be interesting, I think, if that’s the case.”
Yumi hadn’t the slightest idea what was going on.
Yoshino looked a little darker after that.
Rei and Sachiko came back a few minutes after that, carrying their towels. This surprised Yumi—they had been wearing their towels as they walked out, out of a sheer sense of modesty that only Sei seemed to have no trouble overcoming. Yumi, Yoshino, and Shimako were still wearing them.
The first thing that Yumi thought was, she really does look good in that.
The first thing that Sachiko thought was almost exactly the same.
“Where did you go?” Yoshino asked. Rei shrugged helplessly.
What Rei vocalized was: “We had a cup of coffee,” What Rei said was: I’ll tell you when I’m ready.
Yumi immediately walked to Sachiko’s side, as quickly as she could. Immediately, the latter girl felt a matched set of tugs at her: One told her to move away, as quickly as she could, to look away and tell everybody that she felt ill and tell Yumi to go with the others and flee, flee as fast as you can before you do something that would shame you in front of everybody.
The other told her to move towards Yumi, and maybe to do something that might shame her in front of everybody.
She felt comfortable meeting the two tugs halfway, and standing still until Yumi reached her, and then smiling at her petite soeur, who took Sachiko’s hand as soon as she was in reach and gave her a look which went far beyond the scope of ordinary concern.
“Are you all right, Onee-sama?”
“Of course I am!” Sachiko said immediately, a smile which surprised her coming to her face. “Yumi, please don’t be ridiculous. Rei simply wanted to treat me to a cup of coffee.”
Yumi blinked. “Onee-sama, you don’t drink coffee.”
For some reason, this simple knowledge caused a very faint flutter of Sachiko’s stomach. Didn’t it take me twice that time, back in the café, to remember that myself?
“She does now,” Rei said with a little grin. “I think all of you will afterwards, too. We can all drink some after we finish catching our colds.”
At this, everybody except Shimako, who was still caught up in her own thoughts, looked towards the glass door, and a collective sigh seemed to run through them.
“Whose idea was this again?” Sei asked with a slight grimace. Simply by the draft through the door, they could tell it was far chillier outside than they had anticipated. There was such a thing as a warm rain, but it was rare and apparently, they were simply not lucky.
“I seem to recall you backing it up fairly strongly,” Sachiko said with a sort of forced sternness. “And I do think it’s too late to back out at this point.”
“Says who?” Sei said.
Sachiko did not point, (ladies did not point) but instead turned her head towards the front desk, where Satoi Tanaka and Kiyomi Yoshida were looking at them with raised eyebrows, Kiyomi with a small grin on her face that Sachiko could not entirely place.
“The fans await,” Rei said, and the two behind the desk waved.
“We can hold your towels for you if you like,” Kiyomi said.
“That’s an excellent idea,” Sachiko said before anybody could object. A minute later, and the towels were gathered up and safely behind the wood front desk. Shimako had been unreceptive to any of this until Yoshino had asked her directly to please hand her the towel around her chest, which the girl had done almost unconsciously.
And so, all that was left was to actually go outside.
Easier said than done, indeed.
“I’m getting chilly just looking at it,” Yumi murmured. Sachiko put a hand on her head, and when the girl looked up, she saw a smile from Sachiko brighter than any she had seen in almost a year.
“Well then,” she said, “it doesn’t make sense to simply stand there looking at it, does it?”
“Sachiko?” Sei said, her voice a little incredulous. “Are you…stupid?”
Sachiko smiled at Sei. “No,” she said.
What the hell are you, then?
I’m …
Giddy.
That’s the right word exactly.
Why?
Sachiko had no idea. She only knew that she felt as though a huge weight had been lifted off her shoulders, and that she had Rei to thank for that. It had been there for less than ten minutes, but already it had felt as though she might have simply been crushed to death if it had lasted much longer.
She smiled at Rei, who grinned back.
“All right!” Rei said, projecting her best kendo-instructor voice. “Everybody, no more messing around! Outside, now!”
Yoshino, catching a ride on the sudden wave of energy coming from Rei and Sachiko, opened the door, to small whoops from Kiyomi and an amused look from Satoi.
Shimako still stood against the wall, studying that strange, intangible space, and it seemed that she might do that forever, until Yumi left Sachiko’s side and crept up to Shimako’s with a single backwards glance at Sachiko, who for possibly the first time in her life felt not even the slightest regret that Yumi was no longer there. She didn’t know what had gone on between Shimako and Sei, but it must have been bad if Shimako was still reeling like this. Everybody fell silent, and Yumi, her face now also shining with that radiant energy that seemed to be catching like wildfire, turned around to face the group and held up three fingers silently.
Three fingers.
Two fingers.
Sei glanced at Yumi and wondered momentarily at how lucky Sachiko Ogasawara truly was.
For once, Sachiko and Sei were almost on the save wavelength at that moment.
One finger.
Yoshino looked at Rei, who smiled lovingly back. Yoshino had the feeling that one of Rei’s halfway matronly oh I’m so glad you’re here and okay hugs was in her future. It was a halfway pleasant thought.
Yumi’s hand closed into a fist, and then several things happened at once:
All of them bolted straight out into the cold, perhaps inspired by some wave of monstrous stupidity, or perhaps goaded into it by the fact that Rei Hasekura and Sachiko Ogasawara would be hot on their tails if they didn’t. Yumi grabbed onto Shimako’s bare arm and yanked her out; the latter girl gave a small yelp, whether at the shock or the surprise of being so suddenly interrupted, Sachiko didn’t know.
It was cold.
Oh, yes, it was cold. It was cold and wet, but they got used to it fast enough that when Yumi began to bolt towards the lake, everybody followed.
Even Sachiko Ogasawara. Even the girl who had come close to shrieking at a simple coffee stain on a cheap swimsuit.
They all dived in, Shimako no longer needing to be led by Yumi. The lake was actually a great deal warmer than the air and so they stayed there for a while. Eventually, Sachiko caught up to Yumi, and Yumi needed no other provocation to veritably fling herself into her grande soeur’s arms.
As they hugged, Sachiko felt something else prickling the bottom of her belly.
She ignored it. It was for later, she felt.
And this, after all, was the present. It was not to be lived in the future,
(o-sake isn’t that what Sei wanted to bring did she actually bring that? That’s illegal)
nor in the past,
(there is no way you can get past the fact that you are simply not normal. You do not belong with them)
but right there.
And Yumi was warm.
And then Yumi, in what she would later call a moment of unthinking giddiness, kissed Sachiko as high as she could reach, which wound up being on the collarbone. It was a light, quick thing, and Yumi pulled back almost as soon as she had done it, her face red with embarrassment, and Sachiko felt herself begin to laugh. It tickled. It was not the sort of
(memory. There is a memory here.
This isn’t the past leave me be.)
Unpleasant, unwarranted tickle that Sachiko was used to, either.
It was nice.
When Yumi finally left to join Yoshino in an epic quest to dunk Shimako, who, in spite of her head being completely drenched already by the pouring rain, refused to submerge her head in the water, Sachiko saw something else:
Yumi was very beautiful. Her face shone, pale like the moon, even through the gray haze of the rain. Her body was slim, the lines which made up her outline smooth.
Is it really okay to think that about your petite…about Yumi?
(this is the present)
I’ll think about it later.
That turned out to be just fine.
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