Chapter Text
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It would be of the utmost arrogance to say Yukinoshita Haruno had never thought of herself as anything special . This was, despite what many would say, considerable evidence to the contrary.
So, naturally, she thought this from the very moment she was able to. In the marrow of her bones, in her heart of heart, Yukinoshita Haruno truly believed she was ordinary, the wakes up with bed hair, twenty minutes late for work kind of ordinary. The kind whose greatest ambition was to be known deeply by someone without having to go through all the trouble and turmoil of all that entailed— simply , and axiomatic; ordinary . As a thirteen year old girl who had still only thought of love in the dreamy, ephemeral lenses of her parents, the odd shoujo manga, and a faceless anthormorphic man who did things for her like holding open the door for her and maybe on the side was a quasi-philosopher, super soldier, demon lord, internationally famous, vampire but without the frankly alarming age difference and lack of good taste to enjoy a good cup of tea.
In every sense, you could say that she was hitting levels of precociousness that had impacted the downslide at terminal velocity and only escalated from there. Or should that be de-escalated?
Everyone else, of course, disagreed. Sky-high test scores, a sociable personality better fit for a budding cult leader, and the kind of pretty that already made Father and Mother assign her a driver and sign her up for aikido lessons, which, expectedly , she quickly displayed an enviable talent for. In all things, Yukinoshita Haruno, to put it quite simply. Excelled . It was as if life had been handed to her: spoon, tucked napkin, and awaiting butler, all ready to serve her on a silver platter, to which there seemed no end. Her whole life stretched ahead of her on a rose-lined red carpet. In athletics, her natural physique and superb hand-eye coordination would either see her to an Olympic medal, or, perhaps, an international legend and household name. In the fine arts, her quick mastery of any and every instrument placed her rightly in the front leading role, and shortly after, she became the favorite darling of the orchestral conductor and his de facto second, despite there being several orchestral members possessing literally twice her experience in multiples of her age.
For god's sake, she was even born rich.
Arrogance came so easily, it was blameless in a life so smooth. Frankly, it wouldn't be surprising if the praise and mounting evidence led the young girl to conclude she was really just that special. A reincarnation of a spirit general king, the triple legendary blessed, cursed, body of peerless immortality, or some other such ridiculously superlative title, which ultimately boiled down to a childish assertion of being born different. Born distinct, distinguished.
The problem with concluding this frighteningly tempting supernatural belief was that Haruno didn't do anything. As said, everything had been handed to her.
Her test scores, a legacy of rigorous tutoring from a young age and a stunning lack of awareness to what you really should be telling a child of two by a father who regularly carried a toddling girl along to hazy, smoke-filled dinners where careers died and lived by words shared by suits worn by paper men, and a mother who serenely informed her nonsense babbling child each and every intricate web of whichever pitiless business that had asked for an investment and exactly why they would either rise or implode with a terrifying insight into the character of said business's owner. Her body had been given to her by Mother and Father, along with her ears and dexterous fingers for music. More than simple circumstances and genetics, and yet.. nothing happened to Haruno either.
No great fate loomed over her whenever she tied her shoelaces together, any tempestuous drama she could have been involved with was smoothly and cleanly handled by those same social talent for manipulation and groomed insight, and clearly, if she hadn't been kidnapped by mythical immortals in thirteen years, reason stood it wouldn't happen for the foreseeable future. Yukinoshita Haruno, by all accounts, lived a gilded, disgustingly easy, ordinary life… She wasn't even going to become an Olympian. If there was anything she had ever been destined for, it was to be the heir to her family's legacy. Her mother's businesses, and her father's rising political career, to become the crowning highlight of her life.
Nothing less than that. Nothing more.
A less charitable stranger would describe the slight, practically imperceptible, ennui that had settled over Haruno after she had determined this brief capsulation as a mid-life crisis. They might, if being of a particularly loose-lipped persuasion, call it twenty years early. Upon hearing such a thing, Yukinshita Haruno would cooly inform this pitiable stranger that making claims on the currently intangible mid-point of her life was uselessly rude, why, she could live to a hundred and fifty—suppressing the shudder at the very idea— and perhaps that instead of making wide, sweeping decorations on a thirteen year old's precocious idlings on her own mundane existence, they would be better served by examining on what unfortunate tedium existed in their own life that made analyzing a child's life more interesting than their own.
Or, she could simply call them a pedophile.
She'd liked the latter idea.
Her country's police, statistically, could be persuaded to examine the cases of sexual misconduct in the surrounding areas and then reasonably conclude that it would be simpler to arrest, imprison, and silence first before gathering evidence.
That was the sort of person Haruno was. A remarkably petty, painfully twisted sort of person who, despite all her advantages and comforts, had grown into someone who preferred to ruthlessly, definitively, and exhaustively crush those who garnered her dislike. Or when she wanted to vent her stuffy feelings.
It could be said that Yukinoshita Haruno was a too clever girl who saw too much and too far.
In that regard, the girl before Haruno looked distinctly out of place.
Rather than saying it was only the setting that didn't fit, the background failed to integrate her being inside it. Which didn't sound like it made much or any sense, but that was the only way Haruno knew how to describe it.
Maybe it was just that the girl simply would look out of place anywhere. Distinct by being permanently out of belonging. The like of the color magenta on the spectrum of light. Despite or perhaps because of this inimitable quality, she was an alarmingly pretty person with thick, messy hair that gave her a fragile innocence. The slightly curling strands hugged close to her, and by following their wilting path, one would be drawn to her eyes. Big and round and softened by the bruised shadows underneath. Eyes which seemed to be forever on the edge of falling low, and therefore inspiring a powerful urge to force them open and to look directly at whatever she was speaking to. They were also slightly unbalanced as if she was squinting on one side, so slightly it bared a second, third glance in order to confirm. As if one eye saw the world through that half-lidded translucence, and the other was always winking at some unseen lens only it could see.
It lent the girl's already… impoverished apparel more credit.
She wore a suit jacket one or two sizes too large for her, and the fabric looked ready to swallow her whole at any moment, even if it had been a proper tailored fit, underneath, a faded dress dotted with peeled-open sunflowers, starburst bright against the dark blue. She smelled of bleach and lemon. Strongly. Enough so that even Mother had an imperceptible wrinkle at the crinkle of her eye that meant she couldn't taste the immaculate tea served here properly. Her face was clean, free of any grime or dirt, and seemed so full of vitality that Haruno, for a brief moment, felt absurdly inadequate in comparison. Nothing fit quite right on her, not her clothing, not her appearance, and certainly no neat little boxes. Any attempt to compartmentalize her into a shape that would fit through the right shapes died in their ugly infancy.
There was a question, and it was a girl.
The question's name was Takatsuki Sen; the girl's name was not. Undoubtedly, it was a false name, but in the confusing manner Mother still could be, yes, even after thirteen years, she seemed to find the deception less insulting than endearing . If Haruno had to make a guess, she'd say it was likely due to the falling-out-of-fashion of pen names and the, to Mother's perception, lack of personal glory seeking that it implied. The act of using one, therefore, a pure, untarnished, striving.
Haruno thought differently. And she only thought so.
After all, making wide, sweeping, declarations ill-suited her. To do so was, in her eyes… a little unsightly? Unrefined? As Mother might say, but as much of Mother's echo Haruno might yet be, her mouthpiece she was not.
Ah. The word she was thinking of. It came to her. How sloppy .
Generalizations ultimately served no one and no end except to lessen the true worth of whatever they failed to describe so pithily. Thus, sloppy.
Takatsuki Sen moved up her seat by placing her hands between her legs and then, leverage in place, grabbed the seat and scraped the chair forward in a careless sort of scootch. Shame, it appeared, was not an apple in Takatsuki's tree. Coughing lightly to break the silence, she said finally, "I'm grateful you chose to meet me." She dipped her head. "Thank you for letting me take your time."
Authors were all brave cowards.
Mother hid a frown behind an artful kimono sleeve, but her eyes curled upwards to imply a pleased smile. "It's no matter, truly. Your work is truly something for someone so young. Meeting the one who penned such a thing can hardly be called a trouble." Mother paused. There it was , thought Haruno. "It also allows me a chance to ask you a few questions I had." There was an art to Mother's personal form of business savvy. An art the same way violence could be made into an art.
The Yukinoshita family, Mother , owned a good many businesses, many of which had hardly anything at all to do with homeless, sleep-deprived, wilting, mannerless wild girls. Those were the charities Father funded. Of course, Itsuwa Publishing House happened to be the one holding under Mother's many assets, that did actually manage to have something to do with Takatsuki Sen, and not so unusually, it was this asset out of all of them that Haruno obediently trotted along with Mother on one of the many weekend lessons that were more or less Mother's idea of hitting two birds with one stone. Mother-daughter bonding time, one might say, all with the careful grooming of Haruno into the perfect heir. How practical. How efficient. In theory, it displayed a stunning grasp of Mother's ability to seamlessly integrate family with work. Haruno, however, wasn't so sure they fit together so neatly in practice.
Takatsuki shrugged. "Ask away."
"I will apologize for the rudeness then… and if I may ask, how old are you exactly? You can think of this as only a mother's curiosity. It has no bearing, after all, on your ability or on the outcome of this meeting."
"I'm fourteen." That was only a year older than Haruno. Somehow, Takatsuki Sen didn't look like it, yet at the same time, impossibly looked several indefinable years older. "I don't know my birthday."
"May I assume you have a reason for not wishing to ask thus from your guardians?" Mother led.
"You can," Takatsuki replied easily. "The orphanage doesn't want to know about… this." Want or need?
Mother hummed, but made no other indication of how she felt on that one or the other. "If this should go forward, will using the name Takatsuki Sen be acceptable?" She let her words hang there, as if dangling by a noose. Do you want to use your real name?
"Please." No .
This was, Haruno felt, what a main character looked like. Thin, as if pushed tightly into a single, square shape by life. Possessed of a startling vitality and verve to push past their wretched circumstances despite it all. A certain beauty to her—the word compelling came to mind. Somehow, a little boring. The vitality died before it could make it into her quiet, docile response, and her voice was so small that it hardly fit the startling complexity of the one who had composed five hundred pages of delicate, confusing, and consuming horror. Put it that way, and Haruno could hardly believe this was the author of Dear Kafka, and she was looking at her. But main characters all and one were like that. Less impressive in person. Smaller in direct sunlight.
"At which educational facility are you currently presiding?"
"You can call me homeschooled."
A pause that very nearly stretched into something that could be called silence.
"Are you currently looking to secure an alternate proof of education?"
"Not at this time."
And so and so on.
They sat in a cafe, upscale, 'rustic' wooden floors, burnished steel, open concept style, and faux brick, you know the type, on the second floor of a particularly glassy building. Everything clean and away from the grit of the streets and the slightly overwhelming mix of far too many people stuffed into one place. Situated in the Sixth Ward... Relatively safe. The smell of coffee pooled into the air, and became only bearable placed beside the subtle fragrance of the tea Mother had ordered. As writers were wont to do, Takatsuki Sen had a cup of cooled black caffeine instead, and paired its bitterness with a slice of white sugared apple cake.
Finally, Takatsuki spoke into the silence lingering in the air, "Do you have any more questions?" She looked a little resigned, a little peeved . The last question and answer had been nearly five minutes and two passes of a waiter pouring out tea gone cold ago. All of which was spent in miserable silence.
Haruno could almost physically feel Mother's disapproval magnify, despite the fairness of the question.
That was how Mother was in all things, equal and fair and utterly unmovable. Her opinion remained unwavering, regardless of circumstance or situation. She treated everyone the same, and with the same frigid, crystalline regard that gently pressed those unfortunate enough to be under its cool focus into diamond, or pieces. Mother likely thought of it as her own kind of kindness. But equally did not mean equivalently . Through the narrow lens of impartiality, how many were crushed underneath that unmovable resolve? How many hopeless, desperate hopes had Haruno witnessed for herself? For Mother. Not even family was exempt. And if family could not be given leeway, then nothing and no one would. Ruthlessly ruthless. Mother in a word... two.
Mother set her tea down. "No. I have nothing more to ask you, Takatsuki-san."
The dismissal could not be any more obvious.
Or any less devastating.
It was a funny thing watching dreams be crushed. People often imagined dreams were intangible, invisible things that were like carrots dangled by a sort of god. Fate, a devil, coincidence. But when dreams were in free fall, despite their unreality, they destroyed any carefully constructed facade people had made to protect their ugly, fragile selves, and there, that was the best — the most hilarious and true — part of them.
Haruno watched Takatsuki Sen as her dream was unequivocally and impassively rejected.
Takatsuki finished the last bite of her cake, recovered her manuscript in a plain plastic bag slung around her shoulder, and… then. Only . Made a quiet noise like a sigh, and stood up. That was all.
Her face didn't change, the irritation didn't explode into understandable rage, and not a scrap of sadness pulled her shoulders low.
Haruno watched Takatsuki Sen, with a quiet and remarkably easy dispassion, give up on her dream just like that. As boredly as a child discarding a gifted toy after it had snapped into pieces. It didn't make any sense. How could she just… leave it at that, let an ending so unsatisfactory decide for her?
Perhaps she didn't fully recognize that her dream, whatever it truly was— for Haruno didn't imagine for one moment it was so small to become a writer, famous or not— hinged upon this… stepping point. But a not-so-insignificant part of it did. Oh, she hadn't truly given it all here and now, but Haruno could and easily imagined that this was how it began.
Discard this one thing, ignore another, and then, after it had fallen down, Takatsuki Sen could look around herself and say to herself honestly, Oh. I guess it wasn't meant to be . Then she could shrug and move on without acknowledging how any of it affected her.
Maybe it wouldn't go like that, but the chance it could… It sufficed to provoke something painfully hot and twisted in Haruno's stomach.
Suddenly, deus ex machina. "I have a question, if you don't mind?" Haruno only registered the words leaving her mouth far after she could stuff them back down her throat. Ah. So she was doing this? The impulse of a moment, the decision ran away from her, and all she could do was chase it to its invisible conclusion. Come what hell that may follow. Okay then. Onward to hell, then.
Mother's disapproval wasn't clear to anyone else nearby, but after living with a person attached to you in nearly every respect for thirteen years, it was as easy to see as a lightning bolt in a blue sky. Haruno's role here was… had been very clear. Observe and listen. Only . If Mother had wanted her to speak, Haruno would have known Mother wanted her to speak.
If it wasn't clear by now, Haruno didn't think of herself as a very good daughter. Great and terrible suited her far better, she thought completely unironically.
Takatsuki Sen noticed none of this. She had stilled in the midst of cleaning her plate and therefore looked a little odd, stuck between states in that liminal position between thought and action. A look of polite befuddlement etched itself onto her delicate, fine features. No, really, the contours of her cheekbones had a particularly pleasing quality to them, as if it were a crime that she should not always be smiling. Not that any of that had any bearing on the current matter. But Haruno had simply. Noticed it.
This noticing was somewhere between cataloging the exact depth of her later scolding and punishment by the angle of Mother's arched disapproval and wrestling with the sense of shock that that was something she needed to consider at all.
And then Takatsuki Sen looked at her fully and wholly with the intensity of looking at something that, previously, had been fading into the background and, for all intents and purposes, decided to jump around and flail its arms like a show monkey desperate for meager attention.
Her mouth opened. She said something.
Haruno didn't hear.
Haruno, as it was, had still been reeling from having Takatsuki Sen's full attention fall onto herself; Takatsuki's eyes, clear and arresting, settled on her like a magnifying glass pressed to a wall, like clear spun glass pinning a dissected butterfly on a portrait.
The words filtered through this observation like molasses fed through a tube. "I don't. Mind that is." Takatsuki actually looked like she very much minded, but was, inevitably, all too curious as to what Mother's silent replica that had been sitting easily beside her all this while had, all of a sudden, to say.
Haruno held out her hand. Hoping very hard it didn't shake or tremble or bead with clammy sweat or something really as messy and embarrassing. Why it would, she had no idea, only that the idea of it was intolerable. Her first act of independence and it ended up in humiliation? No, thank you, and please go die for even imagining the possibility of such happening.
Takatsuki Sen's expression turned distinctly poleaxed.
Haruno flapped her hand in the air, as if awfully impatient. She inclined her head to the plastic bag Takatsuki had entered here with. Flapped her head more vigorously. Instinctively, Takatsuki handed it over, very much still wearing that poleaxed look of confusion.
Once again, Haruno had in her hands Takatsuki Sen's unpublished masterpiece, a piece of at least five hundred pages and filled to the brim with abrupt, poetic prose and strange trunks of paragraphs made up of odder turns of phrases that only began to be spun rightly upon the axis again as you sunk deeper into the mindset of the abandoned child. A coffee stain, circular, spread spider-like over its frontmost page. The streaks of where the coffee had lightly spilled, then further forming rivers on the white paper. The implicit rejection of that previous publisher and real rejection sat opposite to each other, a sprawl of red scrawl chastising and insincerely praising Takatsuki with a brief criticism on her prose of all things, which was a nothing criticism, a sure sign that particular publisher hadn't even read her work, because if they had…
Actually, Haruno felt quite thankful they hadn't even read Takatsuki's work; she'd have to thank that fool one day. She unclipped its binder. "My question then. What would you do if I threw this out of the window, now?"
Mother made a soft sound of surprise, maybe. It struck Haruno that this was the first time she had ever shown Mother her own… unmovable, irresponsible cruelty. She'd pay for that later. Seeing as Mother couldn't directly stop Haruno from speaking now, the Yukinoshita family must always represent a united front, especially in front of outsiders. As before, this was really mother-daughter bonding now. But that hardly mattered to Haruno.
Takatsuki Sen let her mouth curve into a smile matching Haruno's. A wide, insincere, empty smile you could pass by with only an equally meaningless wave. "I'd cry. And try very, very hard to pick everything up that you so easily threw away."
This was exactly what Haruno meant. A brave coward.
"Really? Don't you think that's a little…" Haruno leant in, unable to help herself as she took every facet of Takatsuki Sen's poor facade. " Boring ?"
Takatsuki Sen, for the first time since this strange, little meeting in a cafe too nice for someone assuredly living out of a shoebox, and too small for a person who could write such tragedies, sat back into her chair. She looked —almost— as if she was leaning in to bite .
" Boring? What do you mean by that?" The polite formality had left the space. As quickly as if it had been flung out of the window, and went splat on the asphalt.
Haruno felt Mother's warning glare on the nape of her neck. The best course of action, it said, would be to abandon this turn of conversation gracefully and sensibly direct the would-be author's attention back to where it should be pointed, out the door. She didn't, of course. In fact, if pushed, she could say. This was all your fault, Mother . If Haruno was everything her parents had made her, then taking the blame for only the pretty things would be a little too hilarious for even her.
Thusly armed, she pressed on. "It's just. Ending it there feels awfully unfinished. Irresponsible even. Are you sure you're an author?"
Takatsuki had a neutral face plastered to her skull again. Maybe that was how she looked when she was angry. Haruno really wanted to see it, though. Her angry face. "The proof is in your hands." She argued calmly.
"That's just what I mean." Haruno let out a little sigh. "Shouldn't you assert that by yourself?" That was just like an author to do, see, at heart, they really were terribly afraid. Desperate for anyone to see them. Just as miserably desperate to be unseen. The trick thinking, you could do both. Simply veil them both in words, and like a rabbit pulled from a hat, it was not really you anymore, it was your work . Detached. And if need be, removable . Put the rabbit back into the hat.
But all magic died. Tricks or not. "Here I am, about to ruin your work, work I suspect you spent a lengthy, considerable, unretrievable amount of time on, a definable fraction of your life on, and you aren't even going to threaten me with anything more interesting than crying?" Like, Haruno would take it, but really?
"You won't do it." Takatsuki Sen replied. "You weren't ever going to do it. This is your question, isn't it? Once you actually make the hypothetical true, I don't have any reason to stay any longer. All of this… is just a surprise to me." She smiled, and Haruno could see the edges of it now, the vanishing sharpness. "I don't mind surprises. Even unpleasant, last-minute additions."
Oh.
"I'm glad you think so." And Haruno set the manuscript down. Reclipped it. Ignored Mother's little relieved breath. She was about to destroy that, too. "You'll need a tutor, naturally." She pretended to affect a thinking pose, tapping her finger to her chin and holding it there, thoughtfully. "I suppose I can make time." Her tone said she very much didn't mind despite her words.
"Haruno?"
Haruno turned to meet her Mother's eyes. "We'll sponsor her, Mother, won't we? It wouldn't do for an author invested by our family to not even have a general education, right? If it's just that, it's perfectly simple." She curved her eyes. "An exception is only an exception until it becomes the norm."
Mother was surely exasperated by Haruno's sudden behavior, but if there was one chink in her iconoclast armor of rigid impartiality, it was family. Of course, Mother being Mother, this chink was more of a dragon's reverse scale. Even if Haruno was approaching it from the other end, it was still akin to slapping a slumbering bear's cub and thinking you were going to do anything but die painfully. Looking at it from that angle, it was a strength. Mother certainly acted as if it were so. Or perhaps it was the other way around. A weakness honed into a strength. That was too simple a way of seeing it, honestly, but that was neither here nor there.
"So be it." Which was Mother's way of kindly saying, on your head, then .
Takatsuki Sen said intelligently. "The what to who now?"
…
Extra =>
Haruno: "People always say I'm the best, but rather than actually being the ' best', isn't it more reasonable to assume they don't have the ability to imagine what the ' best' actually looks like ?"
Eto: "I'm not disagreeing, but seriously, why am I here?"
…