“You really don’t know how anything works, Nanami,” says Touga, a statement, a laugh in his voice.
“Oh,” she huffs, not answering his question (not that it was one). She can’t really cross her arms, so she squeezes them into her side, as if to push in her ribs. “Don’t do that.”
“Don’t do that,” he mirrors, a lower, rougher annoyance echoing as if bouncing off distant cliffs, pushing his chin forward so that it rests on her shoulder. She feels the tickle of his hair on her bare arm. "When you move like that, your breasts stick out of your dress. It looks like you’re trying to get attention.”
Nanami flushes. Touga’s two hands grasp both of her arms, for a second holding her completely still on his lap, hips on his thighs. Then he moves her arms himself, a robotic imitation of her cross shudder. “See? Watch.”
A demand. She does watch her own breasts tense the soft fabric of her sundress. He moves her a few more times so she can watch; one swell and then the other, back and forth like the bumps of waves creeping up the hemline. “Ugh, I get it,” she finally says, feeling a flutter of embarrassment and anxiety in her stomach.
“You really don’t get how anything works at all,” he repeats, and leans forward to wrap his arms around her waist. “You’re going to have a bad accident some day.”
“I’m sorry,” she tells him, but the thing is that she does get how this works. She does understand what’s going on. She understands, though, with the instinct of a cat that knows to crouch when the shadow of a hawk flickers quick as lightning overhead, that she has to pretend to not understand. Just like standing back to let him speak to their parents, or denying she had broken or stolen something, or explaining how she had been forced to hit another girl to defend herself, she has to pretend not to understand.
But she knows exactly what he holds her arms to her side for as he moves under her and then up, gently up. She can feel it shift, from between her legs to pressing against the soft of one thigh. She wriggles again, her movements at the whim of a nervousness in her stomach. He holds her arms more firmly.
“You don’t understand,” says Touga, “this kind of thing will get you in trouble.”
“You’ll have to protect me,” she responds. She can feel it—her stomach won’t stay still, or her hips. She keeps moving them. If she tries to stay still, she feels it, she moves. As skittish as a sheep under the eye of the dogs. He keeps holding onto her, squishing her arms in, making her breasts pop out. “If I get in trouble—”
“You don’t understand what you’re doing,” Touga informs her, moving one hand across her stomach, her side. His head tilts down to watch how the fabric of her dress tenses under the press of his hand. “I do understand these things. I know the sort of trouble that you can get into.”
“Then you’ll have to—” she feels it press into a curve of her ass. She can feel it rise. The nervousness in her stomach spikes, drives up into her, but feels warm and delicious as it sinks back down. There is something in her that moves without ceasing, running and leaping, rushing away from his hands and making her skin feel bright and exciting. “—Teach me yourself.”
“Nanami—”
“Please?”
“But, Namami…”
He moves one hand to her thigh, to hold it down, to press it down to the hard thing underneath it. The other tone falls down, between his legs. One of his hands is just under her breast, resting on the bump of the brassiere beneath it.
“But you actually know what you’re doing already,” he says, his voice suddenly angry.
—
A shaft of light fell from a slit between the curtains, opened somehow in the night. It landed on Nanami’s bed, on her waist and below, which was why her thighs and her stomach felt so warm when she woke up, startled out of a dream.
They felt very warm, like the sun had been on them for hours, even though it was early; comfortable, half-liquid with warmth, which pooled in excess right between her legs.
She felt like she could not move, so she laid still, staring at a wall, at nothing; given time, the warmth subsided and faded away, tingling as it went. Such was the nature of things; warmth fled, cold things sapped heat.
Nanami understood, in their basics, the nature of things.
With a resistance as subtle as roots refusing to unclench the black ground, the blade grasped the edge of a bone and hesitated.
Anthy’s closed eyelids twitched at the slick pour of pain down her core.
It didn’t happen this way very often. Most who drew the sword drew it as though from nowhere, manifest disbelief that they really held anything in the crook of their arm, creation ex nihilo. There was inherently no internal resistance to that conjuration, no pain. The conjurer saw the sword and, somehow, not the stab. Others imagined it sheathed in her heart and pulled it straight from the confines of an artery, poetic logic with visceral results; a release of flesh from flesh, an outpouring of liquid. A few over time had drawn it from her mouth, insisting on the logic, perhaps, of the length of the sword all fitting somewhere. She didn’t mind the serpentine slide of steel over her tongue compared to some experiences.
When Juri turned her hand on the hilt and tested the tension of the blade again, Anthy mapped the disparate pains inside her and realized that Juri had forced the sword to fit inside her by bending it around in a spiral. The pains were the ribs and guts it slid or stuck against at it struggled to unwind from the labyrinth of the body and stand outside.
How awful. Though it was only coiled, like a sleeping snake, it felt tangled, ingrown. Some wet, physical parts of Anthy, awake once disturbed, tensed and recoiled at the necessity of what was to come.
Her eyes opened in crescent slivers to look up at the girl whose hand gripped the hilt protruding not out of her heart but just below the point of her sternum. Juri’s face was expressionless, a composure that said she had noticed the problem, disliked it, and was between accepting that she had to move forward anyway and resisting. Anthy raised her eyebrows. Juri glanced, under her pale lashes, at her enemy, who stood across the arena.
Juri was defending her Rose Bride. Now that she had started, she couldn’t refuse to finish pulling the sword. That would be a de facto admission of defeat. No rule stated so; some things don’t need stated. Which fragment of princeliness had Akio seen in Juri, Anthy wondered, bending her spine further to let her frantic intestines relax around the coiled sword before it moved again; what part of himself, blunted to harmlessness but potent in potential, had he recognized in the unhappy girl to whom he had given his ring? Her sheer devotion to someone she should hate? Her monumental misunderstanding of love, and twined with it, her surrender to it? That she submitted despite not understanding to what she had submitted?
Juri’s eyes locked onto her opponent across the area, then back. She twisted her hand again, angled. With intuition, with tiny tremors, attempts to adjust the flat of the blade on the bones it bent around, she found the angle that would let it slide out and committed to it. Anthy’s organs burst like grapes on the vine as it ripped through and snapped out, and her skin did nothing. The eye that gazed on her torso would see the unruffled silk of a red dress and that alone.
Juri put the blade before her body, aiming the tip at her opponent. Shining silver, unblemished, dry as bone. There was no difference now between someone who drew the blade from nothing and someone who did what Juri did, packing it inside Anthy in a spiral and having to unpuzzle it to release it.
The self-obsession, then. Akio thought that being astoundingly self-centered was noble in Juri and he wanted to put that in a prince’s outfit and watch it be admired.
But one thing Juri did not do was let go of Anthy. “Oh,” she said, pushing her back into the inside of Juri’s elbow, “Am I a shield for this one?”
Juri’s eyes flashed to her with annoyance. Anthy hardly ever did see a deeper emotion in them, not directed her way. She tried to lift her arm off of Anthy’s back, then pushed it forward a bit when Anthy indicated with her dead weight that she refused to stand on her own. “I’m not going to protect you, especially if you won’t be of any use.”
No use. The sword glimmered in her grip as she turned it. The opponent said something that both of them ignored. “I won’t get in the way,” Anthy said.
“That’s all you do,” said Juri, an undertone of jealousy stuck to her words like blackened grease on the bottom of a copper pot. “I’m not an idiot like these boys. I see you inserting yourself whenever something might actually improve.”
“Oh,” said Anthy, “I nearly forgot!” The opponent who stood across the way (a mere boy) was jealous and hot-headed, willing to go very far with any incentive. With a smile, Anthy suddenly pushed herself up from Juri’s arm (her torso flooded with pain) and leaned into her face, faking a kiss.
She tilted her head away so that her lips were close to Juri’s ear. From the other side of the area, it would look like a hair-shrouded, tantalizing kiss, a perversion that would set the simple-minded boy on fire.
Juri tensed, tangibly revolted.
Anthy surprised herself with a flicker of anger. Nothing strong. The girl’s devotion to a fellow child who hated her, their starved and insular understanding of ‘love’, was gross. Anthy felt nearly infantile playing with it, insulted that Akio wanted her to. Being asked to imitate one of the children, even, to play her schoolgirl games for her. Gross.
At Juri’s ear, she said, “If you actually wanted a girl to touch you, you would have liked that.”
Juri stood like stone.
“And,” Anthy continued, as she hadn’t been stopped, “The reason you still want that girl so badly is because she won’t touch you. Ever. You might have to face wanting touch like a woman does if she did.”
Just to be awful, just because she was being tasked with flirting with children and it was disgusting and Akio should feel ashamed of himself, she pressed her breasts into Juri’s chest, dry fabric on dry fabric, the surging blood from the dozens of wounds Juri had just incised kept inside. “This is what a woman feels like,” she whispered. “You wouldn’t even like it, because you want to be pure instead. Much more than you actually want her.”
Anthy thrilled when she felt the flat of the sword press into her back, though for just a moment. Whenever someone was angry enough to lash out at her—but Juri deliberately, firmly grasped Anthy’s wrist and pushed her back, using her fist and the flat of the sword to direct her movements, boxing her in.
“I’m ashamed to have ever felt something for you,” Juri denied, looking not at Anthy but down a little, at her breast, or stomach. “If it were love, I would never…”
Anthy remained smiling, placid, as she watched Juri realize, and falter. Was she imagining Shiori’s breasts in her mind, her body pressed flat against her, the fact of flesh; did it really measure up to her ideals? Did she want it enough to be gross and base for it?
“She won’t feel different,” Anthy told her.
“I won’t—” Juri had enough leverage now to release Anthy, to step backwards. She tried to say again, “It doesn’t matter, because I…” And again, “She…”
It doesn’t matter, because she won’t ever have her. Which was what she wanted.
Juri did not manage to even say the sentence. Anthy could see it boiling in her mind. She fixed the physical, female body in front of her with a final look of disgust, brutally expressed hatred for the facts (physicality—femininity—Being a woman, something God made from a nightmare He had, surely—) and finally turned to face her opponent, seething at the display in front of him, the image of two women entwined.
Kyouichi held a small child above this head with both hands, clutching its waist like he was wielding a baseball bat. Were he wielding the bat at something, it would presumably be the dog that had its teeth anchored his leg despite how he kicked and flailed it in the air. Fortunately, he was wearing very thick denim and had wool socks and boots underneath, so the amount of actual skin-piercing was negligible; unfortunately, the hound’s survival instincts had fully kicked in, meaning it was unlikely to let go soon.
The dog was his, actually. He knew the dog. The child was not. He did not know the child. He had heard what sounded like a child screaming in the wooded back lot of the old family home and gone to investigate. Then seeing one of his late father’s prized guard dogs about to turn a child into a trophy he had grabbed the gender-indistinct muppet (he had no idea based on the few blurry seconds he had beheld them so far) and hoisted it and was now angling to bash his own purebred champion into the bark of a noble old pine.
Needs must.
He was in that predicament for about fifteen seconds and getting closer with each one to traumatizing the child with their first and gristly introduction to the concept of death when a woman about his age, plump, bright-eyed, clad in a sundress, wielding a library book and wearing an infant in a sling on her back burst through the trees howling like a money. With speed, precision, and absolutely no concern about whether she looked like a maniac or not she charged the hound and redirected its instincts immediately to self-preservation. It released Kyouichi’s leg and he sent it backwards with a rapid kick. He spared it a glance (and lurched forward with the instinct to chase) but the child was currently more important than the fleeing dog, which, unfortunately, he would now have to put down anyway.
Even if the child had acted stupidly, the animal that will attack under extenuating circumstances is still too dangerous under any circumstances.
“Scram!” The woman howled at the retreating canine, waving her book and arms around. “Get out of here!! Flee like the coward you are!!” Then, as it vanished, she lowered her arms with a final “Ha!”
The child in Kyouichi’s upraised arms squealed. “Mama!!”
The woman turned around and showed all of her teeth in a brilliant grin. “Mi-do-ri!” she called, reaching up to the girl. Following a better instinct, as inborn but more pleasant, Kyouichi lowered his arms to hand the child to the woman.
“Must be yours, then?” he asked, hearing his voice even and composed. Anxiety jangled in his stomach, but he had learned as a young man to compose his face no matter that was happening. The ability was now a compulsion.
“That’s my Midori. Come here, you rascal,” she grumbled, pulling the child into an aggressive hug. “What were you doing, you bird-brain?”
Midori went into a quick, slurred flurry of excuses. She watched them for a while, then sighed and pulled them forward into an embrace again. “Oh, I love you, even when you’re so stupid. That heroism will be the death of me before it’s the death of you, you know.”
“I love you too, mama,” said Midori, and burrowed into her chest. Now that the child was out of danger, Kyouichi could see the emotional downturn pressing down on their little head.
Kyouichi wasn’t sure he would frame attacking a dog twice your size with naught but chubby hands as heroism, but he wouldn’t call someone’s child a stupid idiot to their face. “The fault is mine,” he said. “I own the dog—it will be taken care of, I assure you.”
He could make excuses too; that particular dog had been raised by his father, not by him. He was living on the old family grounds now because the patriarch had finally passed on about a year ago and the sprawling territory was his now. Managing the archaic legality of the war-won estate had been taking up the bulk of his time since—as well as reckoning with the anachronistic militarism that had formed him as a boy.
Turns out that teenagers willing to kill for an ex-girlfriend don’t come out of nowhere.
“Oh, it’s alright,” huffed the woman, shifting the child into the crook of one arm. She extended the other out to shake his hand.
“It really—” Kyouichi began, starting to say, “It really isn’t alright,” because it wasn’t. But fully extending her hand, the smiling, red-cheeked woman introduced herself.
“Shirayanagi Wakaba,” she said.
Kyouichi stopped, staring at her.
“—Wakaba?” he repeated.
The woman went soft-faced for a moment, her expression unformed between one emotion and then next. Then she lit up bright.
“—Saionji Kyouichi!” She said, astounded. And they stared at each other; Shirayanagi Wakaba treasuring what she loved and being treasured in return, Saionji Kyouichi making amends and defending the weak.
After a moment of staring, Wakaba leaned back, just a little, and pulled her child further into her chest. With the other hand she reached out and whapped Kyouichi’s arm, as quick and light as a mosquito bite. “In that case, you owe me 100 yen every time she has a nightmare about this!”
“That’s fair,” responded Kyouichi, though he thought it was not. With the amounts of money he had been selling, exchanging, and signing away after his father’s death, Wakaba asking for a mere copper coin for every nightmare was comedic. But then, it was supposed to be. She was a funny girl.
“What were you thinking! A dog like that should be on a leash. That’s dangerous, you know! What are you defending the castle from, kunoichi?”
“…Something like that.”
“What. Really?”
“No—no kunoichi. But it is a little like a castle. Unfortunately.”
Wakaba made a startled noise in her throat. One hand clutched the child tighter.
“…The old house,” Kyouichi said, feeling his face flush. “My father recently passed on, I inherited the family home. It’s a creaking old castle, practically. To be honest, I’ve been trying to get rid of everything.”
“I didn’t know!” said Wakaba apologetically. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“It’s all in the past now,” Kyouichi responded nervously. “Better that way.”
“I want to see the castle,” said Midori, her voice child-like but steely with determination.
“Midori!” sighed Wakaba, “That’s someone’s home.”
“I want to see.”
“It isn’t really a castle…” Kyouichi agreed. “But, if she does want to see it, I’d be honored to tour the young lady.”
The little girl beamed up at her unimpressed mother.
“Will it make you feel better to see the castle?” Wakaba asked.
Midori nodded enthusiastically.
“It really isn’t a castle,” Kyouichi repeated, embarrassed already.
“Well,” said Wakaba, hoisting the girl up to her shoulder, “That’s for her to decide.”
The moment in which Kaoru Miki realized that he kept thinking about Himemiya Anthy was when Kozue was cutting his hair, a straight cut she had memorized, unaltered from when their mother first had it done to him as a child. (Kozue had changed her haircut since.)
It was that he kept thinking about Anthy, that it was unbidden, reoccurring, uncalled for, natural, the way the tides and the moon are not called for. He hadn’t realized this before now, just now, as a pair of sharp silver shears drew a line through the hair at the nape of his neck, but he tended to think of things in subject matter, with mathematical things or biological things or artistic things or relationship things all separated from each other in appropriate groups, remaining in their contexts and put aside all together after a completed exam. The only reason he had identified these boundaries between things was because Anthy, or the thought of Anthy, crossed them, a vine of ivy that bored into walls, climbed fences, broke old roofs open, a river that cut through the city, slicing every street and every row in half, pouring through each and all the way to and from a place unknown, not depicted on the map.
He thought about her musically, artistically, called to mind by certain chords, arpeggios, notes in succession. He thought about her in a relationship way, a tricky dealing with humans way; was forced to, because everyone around him treated her like a monumental, unsolvable problem on the test of human interaction. She entered conversations in absentia, became somehow involved in situations without even being present. He thought about her architecturally, associated with certain buildings on the Ohtori campus, squares of light from certain windows, angles and promontories and under the eave-like bars of red dusk glow in her rose garden. Miki could not file Anthy under a category or depict when she would have to be reckoned with because she arrived unasked for, thrust into his thoughts through a process unknown, like now, just now, when Kozue’s fingers brushed under the line she had cut into his hair and made him suddenly shiver.
He shuddered and Anthy bloomed into his thoughts like a rose opening, a twirl of her skirt (though, had she ever… twirled?). Anthy opened and Miki found himself reaching for Kozue’s hand, only grasping the tips of her fingers after she almost evaded him.
It was a good thing that odd instinct hit him while the hand which was not armed with shear was touching him. Kozue’s bare fingers twitched in his sudden grasp and the shear snipped the air close to his ear.
“What?” asked Kozue, behind Miki, over his bare back as he sat in the tub so she could perch above his bowed head. “What is it?”
But what was it? Miki squeezed around Kozue’s fingers for a second before loosening them, enough so that she could pull away, but she didn’t. “Are you almost done?” he asked.
“Almost. I’m clearing up the back. What, did it tickle?”
Miki had had his eyes closed. He opened them; cast down naturally, because of his position, bare feet on the cold porcelain and in the company of the scattered threads of cut hair. Something about it felt suddenly unnatural, uncomfortable, being hunched half-naked under her as she did what she would behind his head, away from his vision. He trusted his sister—but—all they had done recently was argue. She had done untrustworthy things. It was odd; he had not noticed a gap widening. Outside of the bedroom, she didn’t do anything he liked or approved of, and he only became more frustrated with her. But that seemed to not exist in the bedroom, when they came home, and he entered not just a different place but a different relationship at the threshold, an older one, like entering a cave.
An odd nervousness opened in Miki’s stomach, something that prickled. “No. It feels like it always does. But—”
“—But?”
Suddenly, and thinking only as he spoke, Miki said, “I think I don’t need you to cut my hair.”
“What?”
“That was something mom did for us as children,” he began, though of course it had been a proxy relationship, an order she gave someone else to do for her. “It’s something a child needs someone else to do for them. I don’t cut your hair. You only cut mine.”
“Well, I don’t cut my own hair, either,” she scoffed, “I have someone else do it for me. But you can’t do it yourself.”
“You have someone else do your hair?” Miki asked, surprised, because he had been unaware. “Who?”
“It changes. It doesn’t matter. I’ll just ask a friend to do it for me.”
If just anyone could do the same for Kozue, why did Miki have to depend on her? Why was he in this position, underneath her, half-dressed? Had he asked for it? Kozue had told him it was time for a haircut, but the dandelion tufts of hair at his feet were minuscule. Miki never thought about his hair.
“You don’t have to do it for me anymore,” he decided.
“What?”
“My hair. The laundry. Telling me where to go. You don’t have to do any of it.”
Behind him, Kozue scoffed. “You would not manage on your own.”
Miki felt a rush of anger that surged right up into his head. He stood, suddenly; put a hand behind him on the rim of the bathtub and jumped up. He heard a gasp as he turned around, and then saw why.
The scissors. The shears that Kozue had still clenched in one hand had still been right behind his head, and now, the blade was at its breastbone, just a hair’s width away, so incredibly close it was a miracle they hadn’t sliced him open.
A pair of shears as big as sewing scissors are easy to forget, and yet, they are a blade. Left unattended, on the floor, on a seat, they could slice open a foot or soft palm. Miki and Kozue both stared at the blade shivering nearly on his skin and for a few seconds neither could move, spell-bound.