Crossover Fan Fiction ❯ Happy Endings, And Other Lies ❯ Happy Endings: 19 ( Chapter 19 )

The episodes for season two rolled out, week by week that spring, gathering interest. During a service club bit for Iroha I introduce Orimoto as a horrible ditz, meeting Haruno at the same donut shop and see her command Hayama to show up on her own command to fan the flames with two of his fangirls. And the he turned that on its head by his own slam against her childish Middle School attitude. Hayama messaged me in support of that, even though it was entirely fictional.

I turned Tamanawa into a minor villain for the Winter event, creating more drama with more hand gestures and jargon. He actually messaged me an apology over that once it aired. I got his address and sent him a copy of the Fight Club blu-ray, gratis. The festival preparations revealed a much less complicated and intelligent version of Rumi, who mocked me after it aired by doing a math video on quantum mechanics in modern cellphone microprocessors and posting it to WeTube. She was in the Electronics Engineering track at Todai, on a fast track escalator to Toshiba’s engineering department after graduation with a doctorate she was working towards. She would be earning an eight figure annual salary before she was 20.

And it was finally time, as summer heat rose, to air the final episode of season two. Instead of the weak focus group approved appeal for “something genuine” that the publisher had asked for repeatedly, I countered with my original ending.

“This is going to bomb,” the art director insisted.

“It’s not. Trust me. Great art arises from tragedy. Rewatch RahXephon if you have any doubts.” He grumbled but went forward.

We used the carefully improved and cleaned up track we did for Policy of Truth as the backing song in the story climax, showing mouths moving and faces displaying intense emotions, tears, and no words to be heard, dropping into a tearful a cappella by first Yui and then Yukino and finally my own sobs. Roll credits.

It was huge. The audience reaction was both ecstatic and outraged, with all kinds of furor between support for traditional Asian literature styles by the academics and true fans, versus the shippers who were entirely betrayed.

The omake after the credit reel showed both Haruno and Saki eyeing Hachiman in his dejection, alone on a bench after the graduation, each from their own vantage, not seeing the other, and consideration in their eyes. Fade out.

My first volume of the sequel was dropped at the publishers to take advantage of all the furor over the very controversial ending.

Yukino was very close to popping as the summer warmed up, and we stayed in Chiba, preparing. Her mother and sister spent lots of time with her as she got closer, which I think she found some comfort in. I held her hand a lot. And rubbed her belly with ointment to prevent stretch marks marring her perfect skin. She wasn’t even getting pregnancy acne or weird food tastes. She had a physician and dietician monitoring her health all along the way so the baby would get everything they both needed. Eventually her pangs began and we went to the clinic her family worked through, and I stayed with her, which is not typical for Japanese men. I was going to prevent another naming disaster. After nine hours of labor our daughter emerged and screamed her welcome to the world.

“What name do you want to give her, Mrs. Hikigaya?” they asked my wife, high on epidurals.

“Kaede,” she finally said, concentrating through the drugs.

“Not perhaps Hikkako?” suggested the nurse. “Or maybe Yuki?” I could see how it is. She was a member of the Name Conspiracy. I grabbed the pen from her and firmly wrote down Kaede. Disaster averted.

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Book and anime collection sales were heavy, and the money rolled in for all concerned. Our nest egg grew enough to fund the jewelry business, and we got our own poster printing equipment, and a sweatshop for college students in Chiba to make the shirts and stickers, and a special bus seat sticker of me with a leg brace and cane on the buses to remind people to leave the space for actual cripples and pregnant women, using a picture of Yukino for the second seat. It helped, from what I could tell. It was only on Chiba buses, but still, I kept my promise from years ago.

The icing on the cake is that Ebina finally got famous through her ongoing hatred of me. She was caught on camera trying to destroy one of my bus stickers and was charged with public vandalism and sentenced to community service after kind words from Miura and Yui, who was now a national star. Tobe was silent on the issue, not wanting to rub salt in her wounds any more than I wanted to go hang out with Orimoto. She was sentenced to litter collection after childcare turned into a second citation for bad conduct.

The Fight Club teeshirts and movies were selling well. Returning to Nara for my final year of school and cramming out a full novel, not a light novel, but full detail romance series of actual literature, was my primary goal. Yukino was going to help around looking after Kaede, who woke us up every hour or so during the first month of nights since she was born. It stretched to every two hours after that. I don’t know how new parents function, but I finally understand the exhausted look they give. I was doing the grocery runs, and the crib in our room made it rather cramped, but we had to be there to write and this was the final year for the Platinum Generation, as Kyouya called us, being together in one place.

He was very busy writing the second novel of his series and I’d piggybacked his first sales through my own promotional site via the publisher we shared. It was good business, after all.

Things were going pretty okay. Pretty much the opposite of what I was writing for my SNAFU protagonist, the anti-hero Hachiman would suffer and go off to college, destitute and struggling on part time and minimum wage jobs to pay for art school in Nara, surrounded by talents and trying to write a memoir that didn’t make him feel like a terrible hypocrite, which meant writing the unvarnished truth and a flavor of despair over his failures. I would write of a Hachiman who was writing the SNAFU story, from its beginning, as if he’d lived it the way I wrote it, while surrounded by talent and amazing people he was jealous of, and frustrated by two women from his past that just wouldn’t leave him to sulk in misanthropic misery. That was my gimmick. It was the continuation it deserved, with all the self-hatred I could imagine in the guy I might have been if I’d failed everything I ever tried, and lost the chance for love and the only friends I had. Just getting in the right headspace to write him was difficult, but I have a good imagination.

I think of a man, and then I take away restraint and self-awareness…

END PART ONE

Continued in My College Romantic Comedy Was Wrong, As I Expected