Crossover Fan Fiction ❯ To Be The Villain ❯ Good Game ( Chapter 4 )

My phone buzzed me awake at 6 AM. It was Saturday. I have a game at 10 AM, and preparations to make, starting with a fair amount of water, rather than coffee, and a higher than normal carbohydrate load, with minimal protein or fat to slow digestion. Not sugar, but noodles and rice are appropriate. I want to get my muscles ready to be used hard in a mere four hours. But my phone was buzzing. Ah, Haruno again.

“Good morning, dear. Are you well?” I asked her sweetly. I do this because I know it annoys her. And Haruno likes to be annoyed.

“What did you do?” she snarled.

“Could you be more specific?” I asked her. She sent me a video link via LINES. I clicked it. It was Saki’s back at the library, giving me a quick hug.

“This may shock you, but some women have gratitude when you help them with stuff, Haruno. I’ll not expect you to understand this right away. You can let it settle in, as long as you need to take,” I promised in a condescending voice.

“What’s gotten into you?” she demanded. I looked at my clock again. Five minutes lost already.

“Into… hmm. Into? Isn’t that more of a female thing? Apologies if I’ve misunderstood my biology lessons. Can you get to the point already? I’ve got a game this morning, and I need to focus.”

“You’ve antagonized my sister with your little order, and now she’s boy crazy for a guy she says she can’t have because she’s got a friend now, that Yuigahama girl, and then she tells me that you fixed three problems without them going to her club using a smartphone and a few conversations. Is this some kind of powerplay?” Haruno demanded. See? Paranoid.

“Right. Power play. Because I’m ALL about the power. Setting myself up as the next thing to Cardinal Richelau. The power behind the throne. The right word in the right ear at the right time. That’s me,” I agreed sarcastically. Haruno humphed.

“If I’d known you’d be this fun I wouldn’t have turned you down three years ago,” she complained.

“You turned me in to your sister, who hates me forever, quote unquote. Remember that? She reminds me of this every time we speak in private. You asking me to talk to her set her off, again. Thanks for that. This is a case of you reaping what you sow, so the American saying goes.”

“Who actually says that?” asked Haruno.

“Kansas wheat and corn farmers, I think. That’s where actually heard it said without irony. Or with, followed by them spitting on the ground. It passes for a holy insult, there. I think they probably say it in Iowa and Nebraska too.”

“Weird,” Haruno commented on my effective distraction.

“So, now that you understand you’re the one who lit this fuse, what are you going to do? Talk to Hiratsuka-sensei about your sister’s temper tantrums, or are you going straight to your mom? Have her insist Yukino not pursue Hikigaya, thereby insuring she does out of spite. Or are you going to let her lose interest and stop toying with her food and actually let another woman win?”

“And what’s all this to you?” Haruno asked me.

“Yui is a friend. She’s in my clique, one of Miura’s ladies in waiting, or some equivalent. A good girl, very sweet. Not my type, but perfect for Hikigaya the loner. If you let them alone they’ll be married by the end of school and produce several children together as good tax paying citizens of Chiba City. Isn’t that what you ultimately want? He’s too low class for Yukino, and she’s too carefully watched to go through a Bad Boy phase, especially since the Badness in him is all superficial. He thinks he understands, but he’s what you call an unreliable narrator,” I explained.

“Eh? What do you mean by that?” Haruno asked for clarification.

“Everybody thinks they’re the main character of their personal story. We know better,” I laughed. Haruno made uncomfortable sounds at this, made excuses, and hung up. I felt slightly guilty at creeping her out, but got on with my game day process. A shower, clean clothes. Food at the right time, 8:15 to 8:30, clean dishes. Assemble uniform, socks, pads, shin guards. I’d be playing Narashino today, which means the hard plastic pads. They like fouls. My last couple games against them left me bruised for weeks. You heal, but it’s annoying. Father and mother escorted me to the game, to be seen to watch their son the star player of Soubu High School’s soccer team play. I played. I scored two goals. We won at the end, 4 to 3. Soccer games have low scores. That’s just how it is. The team was happy. Tobe waved to the crowd, looking very happy. I thanked the other team for their sportsmanship, much fewer fouls this time, and we shook hands in the traditional form of soccer players around the world, by high five.

“Good game,” we all said, and were relieved. Iroha beamed. There were pictures taken by the city paper, and we’d probably end up in the sport section somewhere, a few column inches, a small paragraph and mention of the current ratings for wins and losses. Someone who is paid to care will care. I have satisfied the family honor today, kept up appearances, and then I noticed Kawasaki and two siblings waving to me. I waved back and jogged over.

“Hey. That was a good game. Is it always like this?” Saki asked me. The little girl stared up at me. The boy, who I knew to be Taishi and to be dating the hero’s sister looked at me carefully.

“Does it hurt when they kick you?” asked the girl.

“This is Keika,” Saki introduced the girl, an elementary school student.

“Depends. I’m wearing shin guards, but sometimes I get kicked from behind or in the ankle, and that bruises,” I explained to her. She was cute. I smiled for her.

“Sorry if you’re missing out on a date, young man,” I offered to the boy. He humphed.

“Are you dating someone, Taishi?” Saki asked her brother.

“A little bird tells me he’s seeing Hikigaya Komachi. They go to school together. She’s the more personable sister of our classmate Hachiman.”

“You mean the guy with the eyes?” she questioned me.

“Yes. He’s actually nice if you talk to him, he just looks like a Yakuza. He’s in the Service Club with Yuigahama and Yukinoshita Yukino. If I hadn’t solved your problem, you’d have probably dealt with them in a few weeks time.”

“Oh, so you’re the guy who got neesan to stay home,” Taishi finally said, warming up at last.

“There are cram school scholarships for younger students too,” I offered, making eye contact with Saki. She looked thoughtful.

“I’ll look into that,” she promised.

“Thanks for coming out, but I need to go with my team to celebrate our win,” I said, pointing back to the crowd, and my parents, heading towards parking lots with various paraphernalia, ball bags, and soccer equipment. Stuff Iroha was struggling with. She gets things done when nobody is looking. She just acts dumb and clumsy when there’s an audience. As a dating strategy, much like actively misinterpreting comments as hitting on her and then turning them down, it was a terrible and ineffective one. It didn’t work on me, and didn’t work on Hachiman, who was a Dense Anime Protagonist so never noticed it as the offhand approach it actually was. Iroha will be doubly disappointed to find me dating Kawasaki and Hachiman dating Yuigahama. She might have to settle for one of her nerd Betas.

You would think, as we entered the restaurant, that we’d go to a pizza place and consume fats and meat and cheese, but a quarter of the team is lactose intolerant and cannot eat cheese or drink a milkshake, so instead we got sobu noodles, grilled beef tongue, and barley tea with ice. It was great, and not expensive so wouldn’t upset our scholarship students who live on a tighter budget than the city elites like me or Tobe. Mother and Father were dressed down, slightly, to show they were of the people, even as gaijin lawyers who were fairly powerful in the city, and known to every department and corporation on this side of Tokyo. A few seats down was my teammate Tetsujiro, whose father was the union head for the Chiba steel mill and ironworks. They kept cordial relations thanks to ongoing bribes between my parents various legal entities and the union’s money laundering network, a series of union-related charities and discount agencies and bulk purchasing companies, all means for filtering money into pockets without breaking the law while pissing all over the spirit and intent of it. Of course, spirit is something used by the common people to win sports games and carry portable shrines during festival events. It doesn’t put food on the table.

Speaking of food on the table, the onion I’d been grilling was ready and I lifted it from the grill to my plate and let it cool before slicing it open with a knife and picking at the soft innards, pairing the onion with beef tongue, and then buckwheat sobu dipped in cold sauce. Tasty. Not super healthy. I drank from my tall iced tea cup and soaked in the good cheer and families enjoying time with their nearly-adult sons. So high school did have some good times. It is probably not as sweet for normies without a sports team. People like Hikigaya, who falls into video games rather than friendship. He tells himself he’s not lonely, and nobody believes it.

Eventually we finished our lunch, paid our share to show we were regular people just like them, and returned to our Lexus, driving home together. I stink of sweat and need a shower and some fresh clothes. Mom and Dad talked about dinner, something to make. I pondered the people around me in my exhaustion. The food left me feeling tired, probably dehydration. I will need a pitcher of water this afternoon to clear out my salt content from those sauces. Sigh. Its Japan. What can you do?

Dinner was nice, lots of vegetables and a small beef roast, worth a small fortune in Japan and too ostentatious for non-wealthy people to enjoy. Well, rich people and probably farmers can enjoy a beef roast. It wasn’t excellent, like you get in America, but it was beef, and filled with Vitamin B12 and various nutrients you can’t get from a Japanese diet without eating some extremely weird foods, like salted fish innards. No thank you. I prefer beef. And not those meatloaf sandwich patties the Japanese pretend are hamburgers. You can squint and use a lot of sauces to hide it, but meatloaf is mostly loaf, with just enough meat to keep from being sued for false advertising. But this dinner? Real beef, with gravy mom learned to make in Amarillo, for some reason. Oil barons love to show off, and lawyers you show off to have a better idea of starting and ending points for negotiations, and why that is important in a state where everyone and their grandma is armed, by law. I didn’t care for all the heat in Texas. It feels like Summer is ten months of the year, and summer is too hot.

I was glad when we moved to San Diego, and Mom and Dad were dealing with the US Navy there. They were gone a lot of the time, and I spent a lot of my time with Yukino and Haruno. Haruno would find a way to get us into trouble, and Yukino would follow her until she realized what we’d fallen for, then she’d cry. This went on for years. She’d run to me and cuddle for protection, and I suppose that’s when things started to go wrong. The school shoes and recorder thing was at the International School, which was surrounded by sand near Miramar, just on the edge of the base where the contractors and VIP kids lived. So that’s where we were. We had to wear school shoes because of the ongoing war on the sand that blew in the doors, and girls didn’t like Yukino’s princess routine, considering her stuck up. To be fair, she was. She was raised that way because she’s pretty much a princess of Chiba Prefecture, not that the kids on the base understood it was like being the governor’s daughter. They didn’t understand, so they didn’t respect her point of view and teased her.

They stole her shoes. They teased her. And I asked her to back off from her outrage at their treatment of her. She considered this a betrayal. It was the first betrayal, and she was very hurt by this. She couldn’t run and cuddle with me anymore and just cried on her own, then found somewhere quiet to sulk, leading to how she is today, a princess in a tower. Or an upper-story room, anyway. It was close enough. Now she’s been invaded by two people, one of them male with the eyes of her favorite Pan San, and she’s opened up a whole lot of memories of better times and association which isn’t right, but she can’t be told she’s wrong, either. Yukino doesn’t know how to lose.

That sums up the situation well.

And don’t even get me started on Haruno flirting at me in front of Yukino, just to annoy her and confuse me. I was young, and Haruno wasn’t entirely crazy yet, just very flirty because she’d been visited by the boob fairy and liked male attention. I’m glad she wasn’t allowed on the base. She would have gotten in trouble flirting with the pilots and crews. Arrogant men who won’t take no for an answer, especially from a hot girl who’s practicing her low flying passes at them. Even if she only saw it as practice, she probably got more than she asked for, and suddenly went home to Japan one day without warning. Yukino liked to blame me for this, but it wasn’t anything I did. This was all Haruno and her foolish pride. And she still won’t talk about it.

So yeah, two sisters, similar in more ways than either will admit. And me, knowing a bit too much to escape their orbits. Sigh.