Crossover Fan Fiction ❯ My College Romantic Comedy Was Wrong, As I Expected ❯ My College SNAFU: 7 ( Chapter 7 )

[ X - Adult: No readers under 18. Contains Graphic Adult Themes/Extreme violence. ]

Prologue (The Other Shoe)

 

“Want something… something genuine!” I said and then faltered. This didn’t feel right. I was in the classroom and Yui and Yukino were in front of me and we were having all these big feelings. This doesn’t feel right. I have something in my eye. I reach for my handkerchief and its not there. I try another pocket. Not there either.

“I think there’s something wrong.” I went for a box of tissues fluttering in the wind by the teas supplies and pulled one out and wiped my eyes. Blew my nose. Grabbed another tissue. Again. Better. I looked around. The breeze was coming in. It was getting more golden light of the late afternoon. What the hell was happening? I looked at the girl. No glitter or tattoos. They still looked like the sweet innocent students I’d known in the past, three years ago.

“There really is something wrong.”

“You said you wanted something genuine and then you just stopped.”

“Yes, I don’t think I should have said that. I don’t mean it at all. This doesn’t make any sense.”

“Hikki?” asked Yui. “Maybe you should sit down?” I looked at the chair beside her. Remember her puking the rainbow in a club a few days ago. Remembered how I’d pretty much ruined her life by rejecting her, and also know I’d ruin it by being there for her. There was only one right answer. End it without rejection. And Yukino as a man-hating abusive drunk? Chiba City night life cried out as a thousand voices and were suddenly me. This was my fault. I was here, this is now, and apparently I’ve been isekaied into myself in the past to fix things.

“I need some time to think. Thank you for your patience.” I grabbed my bag by the table and left the two astonished high school girls behind me.

Chiba City looked the same. I walked the long way home, thinking about the last few years, of college and my book and wondered where it all went wrong. Saki wasn’t wrong, but her parents weren’t happy with me. Haruno was playing games with her sister and getting laid in the process. She was a great lover, but so was Saki. In the real world you choose one and don’t have two. That entire scenario reeked of ROBs attack. So was getting forcibly time travelled to my most humiliating moment in life. Good thing I didn’t finish that terrible confession. None of that had made sense. I was being forced by an outside power, probably a publisher. Why had I thought that word? Publisher, and why did I see big bundles of yen and a push broom? How hadn’t I seen this madness while it was happening to me?

What day is this? I checked my cellphone. June 4th 2010. The Tohoku quake will be March 11th at 2:46 PM next year. I should put that on the calendar. Maybe take down Mom’s decorative glassware this time. I’ll put it on the fridge calendar when we get a new one. Still have summer and fall to get through.

Do I want to go off to college? I kinda feel like it was good for me. Would it be good without those amazing girlfriends? Without Saki and Haruno? I can’t get them involved in my lying secretive time travelling behind. This is totally nuts. I’m here, in the past. My little sister hasn’t been guppied by Taishi yet. I could… no I couldn’t. She was happy.

Returning home I found Handkerchief-chan in the back of my sock drawer. I recovered my only true friend and shook her out, folded her carefully and placed her in my breast pocket, where she could loyally serve me when something gets in my eye.

I think I might be freaking out. Just a bit.

I started cooking dinner. Something simple, with veggies, a little meat, salad, and fresh barley tea. Komachi returned home, the best little sister in the world still in Middle School. All genki energy and gently ripening sarcasm.

I would need to get her studying to get into Soubu. She flourished there, and it was a real struggle to get her through the entry exam. She didn’t study enough. She stared at the table I was setting, and all the bowls of food that were being brought there by me and then at me.

“Something terrible happened. Who are you? What have you done with my brother?” she demanded. Then she broke down laughing and bounced upstairs to change out of her uniform. I have the best little sister.

I heard the faucet run and shut off and she appeared and sat at the table.

“So, fancy dinner. You watch some cooking videos on WeTube, bro?” she queried.

“Yeah, something like that.” I wasn’t telling her I had years of cooking for a dorm in a school I knew far too well and courses I still have memorized.

She tried the food, making good noises of appreciation. It wasn’t Chiba style food. It was Nara, which uses more seasonings and veggies because they have them there. I’d have to buy more at the store tomorrow. I pretty well cleaned them out of the fridge. Good bento tomorrow, at least.

Egad. I have to finish high school. I have another year and a half of this nonsense. I haven’t written my book. Should I write my book? Should I write the Other book? About time travel? I could always claim it was science fiction. That’s the only way I can do it without getting locked up. Wait, Japan doesn’t have mental hospitals. The only way to avoid living in a cardboard box house underneath a bridge in Arakawa. That was more correct.

“You’re making a weird face, Gomi-chan. So what happened today?” she asked, slowing her eating. She’s gobbled up quite a bit. I guess she was hungry. I ate some myself and enjoyed all the layers of flavor, including mirin and miso and rice vinegar and garlic. I got to be pretty good at cooking in college. The local restaurants were too expensive to eat at much on a college kids’ part time paycheck.

“I almost confessed to the girls. I stopped myself. I realized this isn’t what I want.”

“They’re your friends.”

“If I tried to make them more, it would hurt at least one of them, probably both, and also myself. We aren’t a good fit for real life.”

Komachi considered this, face going through several expressions of curiosity, distaste, confusion, worry, and then turned to regard me.

“That is unreasonably mature of you to recognize,” Komachi finally announced, sinking into one hand, judging me. “This again points to you being a Pod Person. Where is my real brother?”

There’s no fooling Komachi, but I can’t tell her.

“I don’t think I’m fit to be a husband right now. Not a house husband or a salaryman in an office slaving away for someone else’s profits. I’m looking at the world and wondering where I fit. A woman in my life would probably get hurt by me. So leave Saki out of it.” Komachi looked startled at the suggestion, then grumped agreement.

“Probably. She likes you for some reason.”

“I’m good with kids. She noticed. That isn’t enough to build a marriage on,” I countered. Komachi slumped.

“So what are you going to do?” she asked.

“Pull back from the service club. Cram for entrance exams. I might be good at writing so I want to try for those kinds of schools which teach how to get paid writing.”

“Won’t this hurt your friends?” she asked. “Yui and Yukino?”

“I suspect it’s better than the alternative, spending a year on fruitless dates and broken hearts and a confession that will discard one for the other and leave everyone feeling bad.” It was a prediction I believed because it was almost like I could see it, spread over the course of a dozen episodes broadcast from 7:30 to 8:00 PM Thursday nights on NHK. Man, time travel is a serious mind-fu… no, I’m not saying that word even in my head.

Komachi rubbed the top of my head. “Sorry Gomi-chan. That’s pretty sad. If you’re sure this is the right thing to do, then you’re sure.” She cleaned up the dishes and I helped make bentos from leftovers for tomorrow. I went to bed early, feeling lost.

The next morning I did not wake back up in Nara with a stomachache and my phone said I was still here in the past, so no luck there.

Man. The Random Omnipotent Being was a son of a bitch and I’d punch him if I could.

Things had been going well, and now they weren’t. I readied for high school and went to classes, noting Yui looking subdued with Miura still mooning over Hayama beside her. I remembered them haring off to law school, of all things, and her finding love with Hayama’s classmate instead. The world was crazy. It was the only sane one. Or is that crazy? I think it’s crazy to think you’re the only sane one. Pretty sure. Wait: isn’t certainty the true sign of insanity? Probably?

When it was time for PE I did harder exercise than usual. Lots of strength building for my abs and core, some planking and sit up. And pull ups. I need to get a gym membership. Muscles are important in the real world, both for pulling random birds, the slang for shallow girls only interested in physical traits and perfect for meaningless sex without lasting repercussions, because this time I need to avoid getting entangled with women who care about me. Love has been nothing but poison, and happiness and contentment leads to time travel which is only delaying the cycle of reincarnation where I can end up as a snail or a guy without ugly eyes that scare people. There’s something wrong with this plan. I hurt everywhere. I stretched and drank some water and then went to jog laps around the track.

I may as well train for the school marathon since we had a service club assignment to find out where Hayama was going after high school, but I already know the answer. Why am I doing this? Time travel! Dammit. I texted Miura about law school and suggested she start learning the cram school for prelaw in Tokyo. Do I remember the name? Yes I do. I also suggested she go to Chiba driving school on the north end of the city and get her license, and pay attention, and turn off your phone when you’re doing to drive. She’d almost crashed and nearly killed five people in her previous life. I was totally giving her a book on psychology and what a fraud amnesia was. She didn’t deserve to be jerked around, even if she was mean to me a bunch last year.

I started running again because cardio is useful in the real world. I was exhausted by the end and drank lots of water, used the showers in the locker room, and went to lunch out in the space between buildings, picking at my food. Saki showed up. I sighed. She’s a nice girl, even nicer than Yui, and a good woman. She sat down with her lunch, quietly eating. We didn’t say anything because I knew she didn’t always want to talk. She was a better loner than me. And a bro-con, in the same way as I’m a sis-con. People often misunderstand that, but people are dumb.

I realized I hadn’t had my usual Max Coffee and swore I’d never drink another one. I liked the real thing, now. Good coffee.

“You’re being quiet, Hachiman,” she finally said.

“It’s a pretty day, Saki. I’m just soaking it in,” I said. She was lovely. Her hair was up in a ponytail, with a plaid scrunchy I know for a fact she’d made in sewing club. She hadn’t joined. She was too busy. Two siblings counted on her to care for them, at home. And her parents worked hard for their money. They didn’t like me. That was an insurmountable problem. How do I talk to her without setting flags? I will have to keep things calm. That might not help.

“I thought you usually have lunch in the classroom, or with the girls in Service Club,” Saki accused. 

“I wanted some space to consider life. I need perspective to make decisions. After high school there’s college to consider, and careers to put food on the table and a roof over your head. Something which hopefully doesn’t make you miserable. What do you want to do after high school?” I answered.

“We have another year,” she pointed out, watching the light flicker through the tree above us. The breeze filtered through, birds chirping.

“A year of studying, in cram schools or mostly alone, with high school classes optional. A year culminating in entrance exams for each school you’re trying for,” I explained, laying out the near future in plain language.

She sighed, agreeing in her quiet way. I knew her so well. She’d make a good wife, but I think I’d make her unhappy. She needed to be near her family. She genuinely cared about her siblings and going off to school would put extra burden on her folks. Taishi was old enough, but he wasn’t able to care for Keika. He was all wrapped up in his feelings for Komachi.

“Are you going to apply for fashion school in Tokyo and commute?” I asked her. She looked slightly startled, then relaxed again.

“Yes.”

“Its probably a good idea. You have interest and with training and contacts could do something with it. And you’ll be here for Keika so your family won’t be too stressed out.” She nodded.

“What about you? Are you going to go to school here in Chiba University or maybe Tokyo? There’s a lot of schools.”

“I don’t know. Maybe not. I’m still figuring that out. If I studied psychology I’d probably end up working HR until I fired some guy who would push me in front of a train and God would mock me and threaten to turn me into a little girl in World War One.”

“That sounds pretty awful. So not Psychology then. What else?” Saki asked, stifling a laugh.

“Business Administration is a special hell, so I’m avoiding that. My parents have jobs which produce hours like vampires. I rarely see them in daylight. I might be a Daywalker, come to think of it.”

“So stay away from swords and night clubs with pigs blood sprayers,” suggested Saki, getting the joke, giggling.

“And there’s temp jobs at convenience stores and sweeping up warehouses and dreaming of an office job with my own chair.”

“That actually sounds worse than business administration.”

“I could become a computer programmer?” I asked.

“If you were good at that, you would have done it already. And you might end up working a Death March at a black company until you pass out and wake up in a fantasy world and adopt a bunch of furry orphans and the story ends without any kind of resolution,” she suggested, getting the hang of this.

“Well, I am good with kids, but that’s hardly a job for a man, is it?” I pointed out. She glumly agreed.

The lunch bell rang, warning us to return to class.

“They’re playing our song,” I sighed. We cleaned up our bento and headed to our classroom separately because we were loners and it was our nature. Saki is a good woman. I hope she finds a more suitable husband than I was likely to be.

I turned up at Service Club to announce the resolution on Hayama, without explaining how I knew. Yukino conceded my logic and accepted the win. We did NOT talk about my aborted confession and both girls looked very tense while I was there so I begged off and left afterwards.

The supermarket was crowded with housewives and I filled my cart with stuff I’d noticed we were missing in the pantry and fridge. More veggies, more seasonings, more stuff I would use to cook for us. It used most of my allowance, but I have years of experience now. I should probably get a job, but after I put things away I left a note for mom and she promised to transfer funds for the food.

Dinner was complicated again, though it was by rote at this point, and Komachi was again impressed.

“You might be onto something about this whole house-husband thing. If only your eyes weren’t so sallow and evil. I’ll always love you, Gomi-chan! That’s worth a lot of Komachi points!” she giggled. I sighed. She went off to bathe and opened her cram study guide once changed and dried.

I opened a guide for Okami Arts and looked at the long list of recommended readings, viewings, listening. You were supposed to know all this before applying? I’d rushed it last time. If you did above a certain score you were allowed to apply for a scholarship for free tuition and even more subsidized board. I had missed that last time in my rush. I noticed now. I studied. I read the books and academic reviews, nothing the references and the structure of the metaphors and character arcs in the greatest works of international literature. I even read that collection of Checkov stories from 1900. My English was better than Sensei’s at this point, so I was able to read the original texts for the American novels. I read Gibson and Banks. I pondered The Culture and the structure of Use Of Weapons and The Bridge and Excession.

I expanded my mind over those weeks rather than simmer in frustrated lust with a couple of girls who weren’t ready for Prime Time. I put distance between us. And it hurt them, but not as much as it might have if we’d gotten closer.

I am a time traveler, and that means the world is broken. Fundamental understanding of the universe insists what I have done is completely impossible, full stop. That means an Outside Context Problem, an ROB is guaranteed to be involved because this can't happen. And it has happened. But it can’t happen because Physics proves it can’t. But physics is wrong and needs to spend time in the corner wearing the dunce cap and thinking about what it did wrong until it apologizes and means it.