Chapter 10: The Code of Chivalry
The very next thing I did was return home to collect my trusty steed, Fenrir. No proud knight would be caught dead without his trusty steed, after all! Also, the piano school Kuki took her lessons at was pretty far away and walking would’ve been a pain, but that wasn’t the real reason, I promise.
“Away, Fenrir! Fly, swift and powerful as a raging hurricane!”
“Shaddup!”
“Gwaugh?!”
“Quit talking to your bike, you crazy little jackass! And actually, quit kicking up a racket outside in general! You’re bothering the neighbors!”
“M-Machi,” I moaned from the ground, “you can’t go kicking people’s bikes like that, seriously...”
The distraction of my older sister (who must’ve just arrived home from college) overcome, I set off! I sped away, pumping my legs in perfect adherence to the golden ratio and sending Fenrir’s wheels into a state of the Spin! Together, we shot through the city streets, making a beeline for our destination at a pace so fast, we came dangerously close to tearing through the boundary between this dimension and the next one!
In the end, I spent around thirty minutes waiting in front of Kuki’s piano school before she finally emerged through the front door, took one look at me, and gasped, her eyes wide and her expression stiff as a board.
“Wh-What do you want...?” asked Kuki, her voice absolutely dripping with wariness. She held her hand at the ready, as tense as a gunman waiting to draw—though in her case, she was going for the personal alarm on her backpack rather than a six-shooter on her belt.
“Wait, wait, wait! Hands off the buzzer, please! I won’t do anything to you, I promise!” If she pulled that thing outside, I’d seriously be up a creek without a paddle! And maybe I was imagining it, but it sort of seemed like her reaction speed was a hair sharper than it had been the day before. Did she practice going for her alarm last night just in case I showed up again?
“I just want to talk, okay?” I said, slowly and calmly. “You take the bus here, right? All I ask is that you hear me out while you wait for the next bus to show up. Is that okay?”
“H-How did you know I take the bus here?” asked Kuki. “And wait, how do you know I take lessons here at all? D-Don’t tell me...you’ve been stalking me...?”
“Nooo, absolutely not!” I shouted frantically, then paused to sigh. “Chifuyu told me, that’s all.”
Kuki froze solid, and I continued. “We can chat while you walk to the bus stop. Okay?”
“So? You wanted to talk about Chii, right?” muttered Kuki as we made our way to her bus stop.
The sky was already beginning to darken overhead, but since we were on a fairly crowded and well-lit street, it didn’t feel like nighttime quite yet. I was pushing my bike, and Kuki was walking by my side. I kept my pace nice and slow to make sure I matched her walking speed.
“Yeah, that’s right,” I replied.
“In that case, this is my and Chii’s problem. It has nothing to do with you, Andou, so stay out of it,” snapped Kuki, shutting me down preemptively. Her attitude had a bit of that classical childish stubbornness to it, but I also felt a degree of strong and genuine willpower behind her words.
“Did you talk with her at all today?” I asked in spite of her denial. I knew the answer already, of course, which probably made it a little mean of me to even bring it up. Kuki didn’t reply, though, so I decided to double down with another question. “Are you just done with her? Don’t want to be friends anymore?”
“Of course not!” Kuki snapped without hesitation, then paused before continuing in a quiet, subdued tone. “But...Chii doesn’t care about me at all. I thought we were friends... I thought she was my best friend...”
“So, Chifuyu turned up to the literary club today,” I said. “And y’know what? She was really down in the dumps. I’ve never seen her look that depressed before.”
“Then why don’t you literary club people cheer her up, or something? Chii likes you way better than me, after all,” grumbled Kuki with a scowl. “I let her copy my homework, I eat her leftovers for her, I do all her chores and cleaning, and I even apologize with her when the teachers get mad at her... And that’s not even the half of it! I do so, so much for Chii, all the time, but she never, ever cared... I’m such an idiot... It’s like she was just using me...”
This time, I didn’t say anything. Frankly, I couldn’t really deny it. Chifuyu exuded a “please take care of me” aura, and Kuki had let herself get thoroughly steeped in it.
“But...it looks like Chii really loves you and your club,” continued Kuki after a lengthy pause. “You people are all she talks about lately. She sounded so happy, and I was just...so frustrated... So, I...”
...told her to stop going to the literary club. The conclusion was left unstated, but I could put together the pieces. I’d sort of expected as much; the claim that she’d done it out of worry for Chifuyu was a lie after all. Well, maybe not a total lie, but it was clear now that her biggest reason was that classic elementary school impulse to want to be someone’s absolute best friend, and nothing less.
Okay, cut that out. What am I doing? This is no time to be psychoanalyzing the poor girl and picking out her faults! It wasn’t even that complicated. Kuki was just scared of losing her friend—that’s all there was to it.
But in the face of Kuki’s worries and mixed feelings, Chifuyu had refused to heed her advice. I could only imagine how much more anxious that must have made her. How would it feel to have your best friend totally ignore your warnings and go hang out with some other group in spite of your apprehensions?
And then, worst of all, there’s what happened yesterday, when Kuki learned that Chifuyu had some sort of secret with that same group of suspicious strangers—a secret that she’d never share with Kuki, no matter what. And so, all of Kuki’s worries and feelings for her friend came back around to hurt her feelings deeply.
“Do you know why Chifuyu started hanging out with us?” I asked.
“Because her aunt’s your teacher, right? Chii told me that she’s the one who took her to your school.”
“Yeah, that’s basically true.”
I’d met Chifuyu just about a year ago, a short while before our powers awakened. It was the spring of my first year in high school, just a little after I’d joined the literary club. There’d actually been a lot of drama between me and Sayumi revolving around my potential membership, come to think of it, but looking back, it all seems more funny than anything else.
Anyway, I’d joined the club, and Tomoyo and Sayumi were finally starting to open up to me, when our advisor, Miss Satomi, brought her niece one day. “So, uhh, this is Chifuyu,” she’d told us. “She’s my older sister’s kid, and I was supposed to keep her company today, but this meeting came up at the last second. Sorry, but would you mind watching over her here for a bit?”
And that was that. Ever since then, Chifuyu had been one of us.
“But that’s just how it started,” I continued. “There’s another reason she kept coming to the club after that first time.”
And so, I recounted everything I’d learned from Miss Satomi earlier that afternoon.
“The thing is,” Miss Satomi told me, “Chifuyu’s what they call a latchkey kid.”
“A...latchkey kid?”
“Like I said earlier, my sister’s and her husband’s jobs keep them both really busy. They get home late at night more often than not. Chifuyu doesn’t have any siblings either, so she always ends up waiting at home alone for her parents to get back.”
An image of the big, empty Himeki household floated into my mind’s eye. Chifuyu’s been coming home to an empty house day after day? Nobody around to welcome her home—just that cavernous living room and deafening silence to greet her? Suddenly, I felt incredibly embarrassed by my own over-the-top home-alone antics.
“They tried sending her to lessons to keep her occupied after school once, but you know how moody that girl can be. She didn’t last long with any of them.”
That was easy for me to believe. Chifuyu seemed fundamentally poorly suited for after-school lessons.
“She’s a good girl at heart, though,” continued Miss Satomi. “Never complained a peep about being left at home alone. Once kids get old enough to go to elementary school, they tend to just put up with stuff like this.”
She was probably right, much as I hated to admit it. Who knew how many kids there were in the world who had parents that were a little on the busy side? It was the sort of misfortune you couldn’t complain about, the sort of tragedy it felt petty to acknowledge. It wasn’t something you could claim to be traumatized by or develop some big complex about. In fact, it was a matter most people would consider trifling.
“Plenty of families are way worse than yours,” people would tell you. “Everyone has something like that they have to put up with, so you just have to suck it up too.” And so your loneliness, your petty sense of isolation, would be swept under the rug. But still, though...
“Still, though, that doesn’t change the fact that she’s lonely,” said Miss Satomi as she looked me right in the eye. “And for Chifuyu, the literary club’s the best possible place she could go to kill time. I guess you could say it’s her equivalent of a daycare...though they’d probably call it an after-school childcare center or something these days.”
“A childcare center...” I was vaguely familiar with the concept. They were places that busy parents could send their kids to after school, basically. A place that would take care of their kids when they were so busy with work, they couldn’t make it home.
Yeah, actually, that sounds about right. We really were sort of like a childcare center, as far as Chifuyu was concerned. And considering that, it could very well be that Miss Satomi had tolerated Chifuyu’s constant visits to our school because she sympathized with Chifuyu’s situation. Because she knew how lonely Chifuyu was.
“’Course, I don’t exactly feel great about more or less shoving my niece off on my students to take care of,” Miss Satomi added.
“None of us have ever seen it that way,” I immediately replied. Maybe we were something close to a childcare center in terms of function, but we absolutely did not think of it as us taking care of her. “Chifuyu’s one of us. She’s our friend.”
We wanted to be together, so we were. It was as simple as that.
“Gotcha,” said Miss Satomi with a nod. “Yeah, when you put it that way, I guess you’re the sort of person who gets taken care of, not the sort of person who takes care of other people.”
“Huh? Wait, no, that’s not what I—”
“Anyway, I don’t think there’s much of anything I can do to help with the Kuki situation. It’d be pretty lame for an adult to butt into kids’ arguments, right?” Miss Satomi leaned forward and slapped a hand onto my shoulder. “I’ll leave all that kid stuff to an actual kid.”
“Got it,” I replied...even though the way she was treating me like a child was really obnoxious.
“Oh... Is that all? Really? She was just lonely...?”
By the time I finished telling my story, Kuki and I had arrived at the bus stop. We still had a little time before the bus was scheduled to show up, though, so we sat down on a nearby bench.
Kuki knew Chifuyu’s reasons for hanging out with the literary club now, but she still didn’t seem totally satisfied. “When I heard there was a reason for it, I was expecting...I don’t know, something bigger, I guess.”
“Like some huge, secret trauma, or deep-seated emotional wounds, or something?”
“I-I didn’t say that...”
“It’s fine if you thought it, though. I thought the same thing, at first.” A dramatic, traumatic backstory really would’ve been a lot more immediately convincing. Convincing, sure, but not right, for a number of reasons. “It’s kinda just like Chifuyu, though, isn’t it? Of course her reason would be nice and simple.”
She was lonely. That’s all. It was a perfectly valid reason in and of itself.
“I...guess you’re right,” admitted Kuki with a chagrined nod.
I turned to look her in the eye. “I hope you understand why we want to keep spending time with Chifuyu now, Kuki. It’s partially for her sake, sure, but it’s for ours as well. We need her. And we’re not the only ones—you do too, right? Well, what’s the problem with that? Why be worried about who her best friend is when we can say we’re all her best friends?”
“All of us...?”
“People give the educational system crap for being too light on competition these days, but not putting numbers on people isn’t always a bad thing.”
Kuki fell silent for a moment, thoroughly considering what I’d told her. Unfortunately, if the look on her face was anything to go by, she wasn’t convinced.
“Okay,” she finally said, “but what about that secret Chifuyu mentioned? The one she’s keeping with you?”
“That’s, uhh...”
“You can’t tell me, right...? I get it. It’s fine.”
“Kuki...don’t you think it’s normal for good friends to have a secret or two they keep from each other?”
“I know! I know, but...I still don’t like it. I hate it when people lie to me and keep stuff secret from me...”
A deep sense of despair emanated from her downturned eyes. As I suspected, that was the definitive issue for her. The fact that her best friend was keeping secrets from her had hurt Kuki even more than I’d imagined. And who could blame her? Nothing’s more alienating than learning that your friends are hiding something from you, especially when you’re at an emotionally sensitive age like she was.
But she was at that age, and as she grew up, I knew that she’d come to understand that sometimes, little secrets and white lies are vital to keeping a relationship going. She’d realize that there’s no such thing as a human relationship completely untouched by falsehood. Considerate omissions, lip service, lies of convenience, excuses, insincere compromises... When you look at all of those things in a negative light, interpersonal relationships are built upon a foundation of deceit.
It’s simply not possible for two people to understand everything there is to know about each other. Just look at Hatoko and I—how our misunderstandings led to us clashing, and how we reconciled without ever amending them. The fact that we did reconcile in the end made our situation better than some, though, and the perfect counterexample had practically smacked me in the face just the day before.
Sometimes things don’t end well. Sometimes you end up like Sagami and Tamaki, never understanding the first thing about each other from the beginning to the catastrophic end.
Once you wreck things up, they never go back to how they used to be.
Suddenly, a memory bubbled up from the depths of my mind. A memory of the time when Sagami called me Jurai and I called him Sagamin, with all the affection a nickname like that implied. The era when the two of us were under the happy misapprehension that we could ever be best friends. The time when I hurt Tamaki, was let down by Sagami, and was finally saved by Hatoko.
People can never truly understand each other. That’s the one thing I learned while I was in the eighth grade—the one truth I gleaned from the darkest blot on my personal record.
But that was all adult stuff. Kuki didn’t need to learn any of those awful truths now. Those could wait until she grew up a little. And besides, I didn’t want her or Chifuyu to go through the sort of misery I experienced in the eighth grade. They could learn little by little, gaining experience as they faced down the struggles the world would inevitably inflict upon them.
I knew it was egotistical of me to think that way, but still, I didn’t want them to end up like us. No matter what it took, I never wanted to let them be like Andou Jurai and Sagami Shizumu, the best friends who just couldn’t.
And so...I gulped. It was finally time to reveal the card I’d kept up my sleeve throughout the whole conversation.
“Kuki,” I said, speaking as gently and quietly as I could to the sad little girl beside me, “if it means that much to you...I’ll tell you our secret.”
“Huh...?”
“Just don’t blame Chifuyu, okay? I told her that she couldn’t tell anyone else about this, no matter what. She was just keeping her promise, that’s all.”
“She promised you...?”
“Right. Can you do the same? Will you promise me that you’ll never, ever reveal what I’m about to tell you to anyone else?”
“I-I will!” shouted Kuki, looking up at me and nodding vigorously. She waited for my next words, eyes full of hope and resolve.
All right, it’s time. Time to play my trump card. Time...to...
“...”
Gaaah, I don’t wanna! I really don’t wanna play this stupid card! I’d come up with this plan myself, sure, but it was supposed to be the last resort to end all last resorts! If there was anything I could’ve done to get out of using it, I would’ve done it in a heartbeat! And to make matters worse, it was a plan I’d come up with thanks to Sagami, of all the people!
But there was no use complaining about it. I wasn’t talking with Kuki on behalf of myself—I was talking with her on behalf of Princess Chifuyu, playing the role of her most trusted of knights. I had sworn that for her sake, I would drag my name through the mud. For her sake, I would bear the weight of any sin with a smile!
“The truth is, Kuki, that I’m...”
I took a deep breath, then another, and I hardened my resolve. And then I said it. Have a taste of the ace up my sleeve!
“I’m a lolicon!”
And the world ground to a screeching halt.
For a second, I wondered if I’d finally awakened to my own version of Closed Clock or if I’d managed to invade DIO’s world of stopped time, but needless to say, nothing of the sort had happened.
Kuki just stood there, stiff as a board, completely silent. When she finally opened her mouth, it took so much effort that her shoulders shook, and she had to flap her lips a couple times before she actually managed to squeeze any sound out from them.
“U-U-Umm...”
“I’m a lolicon.”
“No, that’s not—I mean, I heard you...”
“Oh! Right, sorry. ‘Lolicon’ is an abbreviation of ‘lolita complex.’ To put it simply, the term refers to people who get turned on by young or prepubescent girls. The origins of the word trace back to Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, which is a novel about—”
“Again, it’s not that I don’t know what ‘lolicon’ means! It’s just...” Kuki paused for a moment, blinking rapidly in confusion. “A-Andou, you’re a lolicon? I mean...huh? S-Seriously...?”
“Seriously,” I declared with a nod of utmost gentlemanly sincerity. “I’m a lolicon.”
“S-So, then...y-you really are a p-per...a perv...”
“Correct,” I agreed with a nod of utmost gentlemanly confidence. “I’m a pervert.”
Yes, indeed! On this day, here and now, I am nothing more than a solitary knight, willing to go to any lengths for the sake of Her Highness, Chifuyu! I shall bear the stigma of perversion with pride! I shall accept the brand of the lolicon with a smile!
“Yes, I am a trueborn lolicon! My strike zone for girls spans from the ages of seven to twelve! In short, elementary school girls are the exclusive subjects of my interest! I might lower my standards all the way down to kindergarten or preschool age from time to time, I’ll admit, but moving them upward is absolutely out of the question!”
“Eek!”
“And just being an elementary schooler doesn’t necessarily give you a free pass! The moment a girl starts wearing a bra, she ceases to be a girl in my eyes! The brassiere is an accursed shackle forced upon humanity by the devil himself! Oh, incidentally, it’s not that I’m into flat chests, specifically. It’s immature, underdeveloped chests that I like.”
“Eeek!”
“Any girl who isn’t prepubescent isn’t a girl at all!”
“A-Ahh...”
“A girl who’s had her first period may as well be an old hag!”
“U-Ugggh...”
“My favorite Ghibli movie is My Neighbor Totoro!”
“That’s just a plain old good movie! But!”
“My dream career’s to be a nursery or elementary school teacher!”
“That’s a perfectly respectable dream! But!”
“Good grief, elementary schoolers are just the best!”
“G-Gaaahhh!”
“I don’t even care who I go after. It may as well be you.”
“Nooooooooo!”
My Kurapika impression seemed to have dealt the finishing blow, and Kuki’s hand shot up toward her personal alarm at a terrifying speed! It wasn’t just a threat this time—she was seriously going for it! And, as expected, she pulled her buzzer’s tab without so much as a second’s hesitation!
Too bad, though! I’d seen this coming a mile away! Before she could stop me, I snatched the alarm off her backpack and reinserted the tab at light speed! In the end, its grating, screeching siren had only played for a fraction of a second.
Mwa ha ha! You’ve overplayed your hand, Kuki! You didn’t seriously think you could threaten me with that alarm over and over and not have me develop a countermeasure for it, did you? You can’t go revealing your trump cards in advance like that! Or if you do, you need to make sure you have another, trumpier card hidden in reserve!
“Y-You know how to shut off a personal alarm that quickly...? Wh-What sort of career criminal are you?!”
Oh. I, uhh, guess that does sorta logically follow, doesn’t it?
“O-Oh, god, an actual pervert... Y-You really were a real pervert this whole time! That really is why you were walking around Chii’s house in your underwear! G-Get away from me!”
Kuki already suspected me of being a pervert. As such, it was incredibly easy for her to believe that I was a lolicon on top of it. Things were playing out pretty much exactly as I’d expected them to, and—also just as expected—Kuki shot up from the bench. She was ready to bolt off into the distance, screaming like a banshee, but I managed to grab her by the wrist before she could make a break for it.
“L-Let go! Somebody, help!”
“Kuki, please!” I shouted, looking her right in the eye with the most serious, earnest expression I’d shown her so far. “Are you the same as everyone else? Do you carry the same discriminatory bias toward lolicons as the rest of society?!”
“O-Of course I do!” Kuki shouted back after a moment of confused hesitation. “I mean...lolicons are all freaks, aren’t they?!”
“Chifuyu doesn’t think so.” The instant her best friend’s name entered the picture, the look on Kuki’s face shifted dramatically. I pressed on. “She’s never looked down on me just because I’m a lolicon. She’s never made fun of me for it—not even once. She tried to learn about me instead of scorning me. She asked me to teach her what a lolicon is and tried to understand me...”
As I spoke on, I found my words taking on an emotional tinge. Everything I’d said up to that point was an act, but there was a certain element of truth to this part, at least. If you just replaced the word “lolicon” with “chuuni,” it would actually have been pretty darn close to my genuine feelings.
“The society we live in was designed to sweep minorities under the rug,” I continued. “All I want is to say that I like the things I like—to do the things I want to do! And that’s all it takes for the world around me to slap me with an epithet like ‘lolicon’...”
“An epithet...?”
“That’s right—and so, I want to destroy that epithet itself! I want to stand tall and proud, declaring the things I love for the whole world to hear!”
Yes, I would say it aloud! I’d shout it out, standing taller, prouder, and cooler than anyone else!
“A lolita complex isn’t a sickness! It’s a way of life!”
And with that, Kuki...wasn’t even remotely convinced, but at the very least, I’d given her enough to think about that she wasn’t trying to run away anymore. In fact, she quietly sat back down beside me.
“Y-Yes, fair enough,” she murmured. “I’m sorry. You’re right. I shouldn’t have acted so prejudiced against you just because you’re attracted to little girls.”
I, umm... I dunno about that, actually. Her sincere apology made me feel more than a little worried about her future in a whole new way. If she ever met an actual, for real self-admitted lolicon, ideally I’d want her to turn the prejudice up to eleven and run away at full speed. That, however, was a problem that could wait for another day.
“I hope you can understand now, Kuki. I’m absolutely head over heels for Chifuyu.”
“Huh?!”
“I’m absolutely head over heels for Chifuyu.” That’s right! It’s so important that I said it twice! And oh, god, the shame burns, but I just have to push through it!
“Wh-Wh-What’re you saying?!” squealed Kuki. “Chii’s an elementary schooler!”
“Right! Exactly!”
“Oh my god, you lolicon creep!”
“See?! You’re doing it again! Everyone always jumps right to discriminating against us lolicons!” I slammed my fist into the bench to emphasize my righteous anger. “What’s so bad about loving elementary schoolers?! What’s so messed up about cute little girls making your heart race?!”
I was really putting my all into it this time, and Kuki looked taken aback by the intensity of my speech. I mean, okay, maybe she looked more disgusted than taken aback. Even I had to admit that I was making myself look astonishingly, gag-inducingly creepy, but I’d committed too hard to pull out.
“You know, deep down...deep down, even I understand! I know that I’m messed up... I know that I’m an irredeemable degenerate... But still, in spite of all that, Chifuyu accepted me! She accepted me as I am, faults and all...”
“She...accepted you?”
“What I mean is that even though I’m a pervert, she was still willing to spend time with me! Being with Chifuyu’s all it took to grant salvation to my twisted heart! That little girl’s innocent, immaculate soul cleansed me of all my impurities! Ever since I met her, I’ve felt absolutely no desire whatsoever to do anything ethically dubious. Playing with Chifuyu—playing with a cute little girl—is more than enough to satisfy me!”
A long, awkward silence passed before Kuki simply replied, “Oh. Okay.” She was looking at me the way most people look at a particularly pungent compost heap—a look overflowing with only the purest disgust and contempt. I genuinely don’t think I could’ve been any more loathsome in her eyes. Her favorability meter for me had started well into the negative digits, and now I could say with great certainty it had completely bottomed out.
Kuki hesitated for a moment longer, then let out a heavy sigh. “So, umm... I guess that’s Chii’s secret? That’s why she can’t stop going to the literary club? I understand now... Chii was keeping it secret because it was a private matter of yours. When it comes down to it, though, it’s kind of, well... I guess it’s a lot dumber of a secret than I was expecting.”
“If you’re gonna open Pandora’s Box, you have to live with whatever comes out of it.”
“Excuse me? Quit trying to make yourself sound cool, mister pervert,” snapped Kuki with a terrifyingly frigid glare.
“Right. Sorry.” Looks like I’m firmly classified as sub-human in her mind. Wow, this hurts...but however much it feels like my heart’s been torn to shreds, this is all going more or less just as planned! And hey, getting looked down on by a little girl every once in a while isn’t so bad...or so I’m told, anyway.
In any case, I’d done everything I possibly could, and I’d managed to pull it off while keeping our powers completely off the table. My part in this charade was over—the rest was up to her.
“Cookie,” a youthful voice rang out. I looked up to find that at some point, a small blue car had pulled up in front of the bus stop. Its back door opened, and Chifuyu alighted before us.
“Chifuyu...?” I said, stunned. “How did you get here?”
“I asked Shiharu to bring me,” replied Chifuyu. I glanced over and, sure enough, Miss Satomi was sitting in the driver’s seat. It seemed she’d given Chifuyu a lift. “I thought it’d be bad to leave it all to you.”
Ha ha ha... Yeah, I get it. She was absolutely right. Only the people who were directly involved could really solve a problem like this. No more lies; no more deception. The time had come for true friendship to take the stage.
“Ch-Chii...” said Kuki.
“Cookie...this is for you.” Chifuyu held an adorable stuffed bear out to her friend. Its design was cartoony but simple, with a white stripe around its neck.
“Is this...an Asian black bear?” muttered Kuki. “And is it just me, or does it look a little like Squirrely...?”
She was right. The bear bore an unmistakable resemblance to Chifuyu’s favorite stuffed squirrel. I had to assume it was part of the same product line or something.
“I went to the arcade with Shiharu to get it. I wanted to give it to you,” explained Chifuyu. “It’s a make-up present.”
“Chii...”
“I like the literary club. I like Andou, and Tomoyo, and Hatoko, and Sayumi too. That’s why I want to keep going to the club... But I like you too, Cookie. I like all of you so, so much...so I...I...” Chifuyu paused. Her tiny voice was shaking with fear and anxiety. “Cookie... I don’t wanna stop being friends...”
She finally spit it out. Her true, unadulterated feelings were finally clear.
“I’m so sorry, Chii!” shouted Kuki. “I was just scared... I was afraid those high schoolers would steal you away from me! You sounded so happy whenever you talked about them, and I just got so jealous because...because I like you so, so much too...”
Kuki took the stuffed bear, clutching it with all her might as pure sentiment drove her onward. “Me too... I want to be friends again too...”
I let out a sigh of relief. Looks like the dynamic duo’s finally back together! I guess when it comes down to it, neither of them really stopped liking the other at any point along the way. They both wanted to make up from the very beginning. Heck, if I’d just taken a step back and not gotten involved, would they have made up on their own?
“I’m sorry, Chii,” said Kuki. “I had no idea that Andou would turn into a social pariah if you weren’t there for him! I never even considered that he could be that much of a freak...”
...If I hadn’t gotten involved, could I have not publicly humiliated myself and earned Kuki’s everlasting contempt?
“It’s okay, Cookie. It’s not your fault that Andou’s so hopeless.”
I did tell everyone in the literary club my plan, for what it’s worth, including Chifuyu. Weird, then, that she sounded so sincere about that last part. Wonder why that could’ve been?
“Cookie...you’ll keep taking care of me from now on, right?”
“Yeah!” Kuki agreed emphatically.
Waaait a second—are you sure you want to go back to square one on that part? Hmm... I mean, I guess if it works for them, that’s what really matters.
“Oh, right—Cookie, let me see your plushie.” Kuki passed Chifuyu the stuffed bear, which Chifuyu then held out to me. “Give him a name, Andou.”
“Huh? You want me to name him?”
“Yeah. I do.”
I wasn’t expecting to become a godparent today! It felt sort of nice, but it also meant I was under a lot of unexpected pressure to come up with something good.
“Hmm, let’s see...” I muttered, looking up at the sky as I lapsed into thought. The void above us was scattered with stars, and the light of the waning moon shone faintly down upon us. There’s a crescent moon out tonight, and the stuffed animal’s an Asian black bear—a species colloquially known as the moon bear... Hmm...
“All right, got it! His name shall be Neo-Lunatic—”
“Actually, you name him, Cookie.” Chifuyu snatched the plushie out of my hands and returned it to its owner.
Wait, but—oh, c’mon! You could’ve at least waited until I was finished!
“Okay, then...how about Moonie?” suggested Kuki. “You know, since he’s a moon bear.”
“I like it. That’s a good name. Moonie and Cookie,” said Chifuyu. Then she turned around, trotted over to the car, pulled out her matching stuffed squirrel, rushed back over to us, and held Squirrely up in front of her face.
“Oi, you over there! You the new rookie I’ve been hearin’ all ’bout? What’cher name, punk?” said Chifuyu, doing her very best—which was not good at all—to pull off a ventriloquist act in a horribly stilted fake accent. She still hadn’t figured out how to keep her jaw from jutting out conspicuously in the process. It was the surprise return of Chifuyu’s misaligned jaw that literally nobody asked for.
For a second, Kuki looked baffled, but a moment later she seemed to resolve herself with a little nod. Then she raised Moonie up to her face...
Wait, seriously? Sh-She’s going for it? Is she really planning on playing along with the ventriloquist shtick?
“H-Heya, bud, m’name’s Moonie,” mumbled Kuki, blushing brightly as she did her best imitation of Chifuyu’s act.
Part of me wanted to tell her she didn’t have to play along with her friend if it was that embarrassing for her, but a moment later, I thought better of it. This was, after all, just another way in which Kuki was dedicated to taking care of Chifuyu. She really didn’t have to imitate the accent, though.
“Oh? Moonie, eh? Nice li’l name you’ve got fer yerself, pal!”
“Th-Thanks, err, pal...”
“You can call me Squirrely! Real nice to meetcha, Moonie.”
“R-R-Real nice to meetcha too...”
On the one hand, you had Chifuyu/Squirrely, going all-in on the ridiculous accent without a hint of shame. On the other hand, you had Kuki/Moonie, flagrantly copying Chifuyu’s speech patterns and ashamed beyond measure. And oh. My. God, if it wasn’t just the cutest friggin’ thing I’d ever seen! It was a scene so overpoweringly sweet, I was in danger of contracting diabetes on the spot!
“You’d better take care o’ Miss Cookie, eh, Moonie? She’s Chifuyu’s best friend! Y’got that?”
“I-I got that...”
Their ventriloquism was so low-quality that I could feel myself starting to blush just listening to them, but one look at their faces was enough to tell that they were both having the time of their lives.
And so, the book closed on my tale of chivalrous knighthood. The nine-headed demon had turned back into the kindhearted little girl she used to be, the Empress of Genesis had found her smile once more, and they all lived happily ever after.
The End.
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