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Makoto doesn’t understand why looking at Aigis puts a pit in his stomach.
At first, he had thought it was attraction. It is, after all, impossible to deny that Aigis is beautiful, her face is perfectly sculpted, perhaps literally hewn from some strange aramid substrate, and her eyes are bright and curious. Arresting, even.
But she’s hardly the only girl he’s found attractive, hell she isn’t even the only attractive girl who he’s close to regularly (or seen without clothes on, a traitorous part of his mind reminds, dragging back memories of the night in the love hotel drenched in a sickly pink haze). Yukari doesn’t make him feel sick like Aigis does, neither does Fuuka, and frankly both are beautiful in their own right.
So, it must be something about Aigis, he thinks to himself, hand running through his hair, sodden with sweat and the strange ichor that the shadows leak as he cuts them apart (despite evaporating it seems to leave a film on him, and only him).
If he strains his ear, holds his breath and swallows back the squeal of tinnitus he just about hears a set of footsteps coming down the hall. They are even, measured, and heavy. Sanada for sure, Junpei doesn’t walk like that, his footsteps drag just a bit, even on the battlefield his toes drag across the ground, swinging his great sword like a club.
When he hears the click of a lock down the hall, he grabs his towel and dashes off to the shower.
Showering has always been difficult for Makoto. Something about it just makes him want to get it over with as soon as he possible can, maybe it’s the steam that chokes his lungs, or the harsh soap cracks his skin.
Sometimes when he goes shopping for new toiletries his eyes stutter, like a record skipping, over the floral scented array, bottles of shampoo and conditioner and body wash, all lined up, hanging like notes off a staff.
Once, just once he took a step towards it, but floundered. He felt watched. The blinking eye of the security camera sears into him. The woman with apathy syndrome, still wearing her store uniform, seems to stare him down, a challenge.
What would he even say.
He scoffs, scraping his 3 in 1 from his screwed-up eyes, lest he open them and burn them clean.
It’s not like he ever says much anyway.
As he walks down the hall, he cannot help but wonder: What do Aigis’ footsteps sound like? Isolated in the night’s held breath, after the dark hour.
Jealousy was by no means the second solution that Makoto had reasoned (invented?) for the pit in his stomach, nor the third. In fact, he couldn’t place it at all, it simply slipped into the imagined list one day with all the fanfare of the rising sun. Silent. Unannounced. Enlightening?
No that’s pushing it.
It’s the one he can’t refute, lodged in his throat like a particularly stubborn cough, the idea is the sole remaining one, a lone note left in the empty bar after he scratched all the others out. But inability to refute is not understanding, and this strange explanation is a confusing addition to the uneasy, irregular harmony of his life.
He had probed Junpei once, and only once, if he was every jealous of any of the girls in their little squad.
Junpei laughed and hit Makoto with one of his trademark ‘playboy’ smirks, nowhere near as oily as Tanaka’s sly slip of a smile, but it still left him feeling dirty.
“Of course, man,” he had said, “Imagine getting to share a shower room with those cuties!”
Makoto said a noncommittal nothing. As always.
So, he was jealous of Aigis. This was probably normal. Lots of people were jealous of their friends after all, and Aigis did have a certain, perhaps je ne sais quoi as Mitsuru would say. Her style is experimental, clearly influenced by the other girls in the team to be sure, but still absolutely her.
Makoto wonders how she does it. Her shoulders are wider than a normal girl’s.
Do they tailor the dresses for her hard edges? Can she divest herself of the crenelations of her armour?
Perhaps if Makoto could divest himself of his angular flesh, cut away the sharp edges like so much rotten meat. Perhaps.
But he can’t, he’s the way he is.
Having a wild card’s heart has no bearing on one’s body.
As it turns out, Aigis walks like a dancer. You wouldn’t even guess that she has a metallic midframe, though Makoto knows that she’s far denser than any human (memories of the day they met, her desperate, unmoving grip, even supporting her weight by half was nearly too much for him).
Her stiletto feet remind him of a ballerina’s en pointe, so he supposes a certain dancer’s grace is a requirement. Probably decided by the same engineers that decided to give their weapon the appearance of a teenage girl.
It hardly seems fair to Makoto, that he- that so many people have to struggle with their bodies, but Aigis was handed a perfect form, impervious to harm.
And really who wouldn’t want to be beautiful like her?
Well, Junpei doesn’t, but he wouldn’t know style if it hit him in the face, and Sanada doesn’t, but he’s got his own thing going on, and Ken, well, Ken is ten years old.
Alone in his room, in a rumpled pile at the back of his dresser, a powder blue dress stained with tears rots.