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prancing-uboot · 4 years ago

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Satsuma Dads Timeline

You know how Golden Kamuy is an awesome manga full of amazing (and super-hot) characters and a great main storyline? So what do I do with it? Naturally I obsess over those two old gremlins: Koito Heiji and Hanazawa Koujirou the fathers of Second Lieutenant Koito and Ogata.

It's probably the most niche pairing ever, and I thought it was just me fixating on that one panel where Tsurumi mentioned they were close friends from Satsuma. But the more I read about the history of Satsuma and the times they lived in, the more I’m becoming convinced that there’s so much of their story written between the lines and that their relationship and tumultuous past is what actually caused and keeps together most of the GK plot. But nobody else seems to see it!

So what do I do with that? I spent my nights in front of my crazywall of historical research, trying to recreate an entire universe of events 50-years before the gold plot starts, just to be able to present to you:

The Satsuma Dads Timeline

Why you Should Care for Heiji and Koujirou

~1850

Koujirou and Heiji* were born around 1850** in Kagoshima.

Heiji might have been older then Koujirou, but not more then 5 years. They were both sons of high ranking samurai (noble bloodline), serving the Shimazu clan.

* Most likely they went by other names in their youth and then changed them a bazillion times to make stuff confusing, but let's skip that.

** That would make them around the same age as Tougou Heihachiro and Nogi Maresuke ** - the chief players in the Russo-Japanese war for the navy and army. Both share a lot of biographical motives with Koujirou and Heiji and Noda might have modeled them a bit after them so I'll include the parallels where possible. I'm not sure Nogi even exists in the GK universe or was he replaced by Koujirou completely. Tougou was recently confirmed to exist. He was also a Kagoshima-boy, and grew up in the same circles so it's impossible that he and Heiji didn't know each other from childhood.

1856-65

Koujirou and Heiji train in the same gochu in Kajiya-cho*. Gochu was a Satsuma-specific education system, relying on small neighborhood study groups in which the older samurai spent a part of their time teaching the younger everything they knew. Starting from penmanship and Confucian doctrines and ending with swordsmanship, and the unstoppable Jigen-ryu.

Teenage Heiji develops a Koito-crush*. on Saigo Takamori (20 years his senior) and follows him around like a lost puppy. Koujirou makes fun of him, but in reality he feels a bit jealous.

* Kajya-cho was a Kagoshima district known now as "Home town of Revitalization" as most of the influential Satsuma leaders of the Meiji Revolution came from there. That also meant that they directly taught the younger generations as part of the gochu. For example Tougou also came from that area. I'm not that sure Heiji and Koujirou were actually from Kajiya-cho, but it being 3km downhill from the Nanshu Cemetary would fit in nicely to the place where Tsurumi and Otonoshin first met so it's likely.

** Gochu was a completely male oriented environment, so homoerotic relations bloomed and were even encouraged (think ancient Greece), hence the term "Satsuma habit" was later used as the synonym of homosexuality in Japan. But for them then it was just a natural thing they sometimes did, and not really an orientation. Koito Otonoshin crushing on Tsurumi might be a bit old fashioned but it's just a Satsuma thing, so of course his dad is cool with that.

1866-67

Both go to Kyoto to serve Hisamitsu Shimazu and there they experience the tension of the Bakumatsu period first hand. They soak up the patriotic moods of the Sonno-Joi fraction, they hear of the the assassinations by the Shinsengumi, they feel a revolution brewing. Being a hot-headed youth in those times made keeping out of trouble very difficult.

1868-69

The Boshin War breaks out. Satsuma, Choshu and Tosa fight to abolish the Tokugawa shogunate. Heiji and Koujirou join up and dispite their young age are given officer commissions*. Coming from a long line of Satsuma’s military commanders it is what they were raised up to do. This war however is nothing like the stories they grew up on. Instead of swords it relies more on modern weapons guns and artillery. What was supposed to be a short battle with the Shogun's forces, turns into a lengthy nationwide campaign of crashing shogunate loyalists long after the Shogun himself resigned. Koujiro and Heiji fight side by side and survive all the way to see the end of it in Hakodate.

* Only the oficers wore the super cool Satsuma black koguma wigs and I definitely do need fanart of that.

1870

Heiji and Koujiro come out of the war victorious. Most of the positions in the new government are taken by Satsuma and Choshu men, so practically any career path is open to them. Koujiro stays with the Imperial Guard while Heiji joins the Imperial Naval Academy in Tsukiji, Tokyo. They compete for the most ridiculous facial hair* and spend their off nights “drinking green liqueurs under red lanterns”

Ogata's grandfather fought** on the other side for the Mito clan (the last shogun was from the Mito-Tokugawa branch). After the defeat his family falls into poverty. They sell their daughter to an okiya because they cannot support her ***.

* The Haitourei edict from 1871 allowed samurai to cut of their chonmage and encouraged them to experiment with western haircuts.

** I’m guessing he was active in the Boshin by the fact that he had an old gun lying around.

*** This "Ogata's mom comes from a fallen samurai family" theory has been going around but I'm not super sure about the time frame here. Usually maiko get promoted to geisha when they're 20-21. That means to already be a geisha when she gave birth to Hyakunosuke she must have been at least 12 when she was sold. That's quite late for a geisha to start her education. Or I might be wrong about Hyakunosuke's birth date, but I'd really like it to be 1879, so I'm in a pickle here.

1873

Heiji finally finds the guts to propose to Yuki, his Kagoshima sweetheart. They marry and a son is born to them - Heinojou *.

Koujirou's family chooses a wife for him **. She's from a good family, likely Choshu to have some useful connections. Heiji comes to their wedding in his fancy navy uniform to congratulate them and say goodbye. He'll be going to study abroad in the France ***. Koujirou feels like it's his funeral wake.

* Heinojou's birthdate is the first solid date we have for them from the canon, so I'm basing the whole “born in the 1850s” on the fact that the expected age of a man to marry was their early 20s.

** Arranged marriage was the most commonplace in Japan then. The families picked the brides because they were most likely to spend more time with her then the husband, taking care of the house and such.

*** In 1871 Tougou went to study abroad with 14 other cadets to Greenwich Naval Collage and that would fit so nicely. The problem is that they went 1871-1878 and Heinojou was born in 1873 *shakes fist*. There were also individual exchange programs though and since in canon Heiji is mentioned to have some french friends I figured he was sent to France.

~1876

Koujirou is stationed in Tokyo, while his wife stays in Kagoshima, taking care of the family home. He begins an affair* with Tome**, a geisha from Asaskusa. With Heiji gone she's the only person he can open his heart to.

After abolisment of the clan system and privileges of the samurai, the dissatisfied Satsuma samurai quit the Imperial Guard en-masse and go back to Kagoshima to gather around Saigo Takamori and brew a rebelion. Koujiro - by then a major - is faced with a choice: to go back with his childhood friends, or to stay loyal to the government. He chooses his career.

* I'm guessing he must have been married already when the thing started, because marrying a geisha wasn't that unheard of and wouldn't really cause a scandal or hinder his career. All three of the Meiji prime ministers Hirobumi Ito, Taro Katsura and Yamagata Aritomo ended up marrying geisha. So Tome being a geisha was not a problem - Koujiro already having a wife was.

** Tome is a random name that Ogata used in his Sugimoto self insert fic. I love the headcanon that it's his mom's name. Because of course he makes everything personal.

1877

In January the Seinan War breaks out. Koujirou fights against his clansmen and his former war comrades *. By September most of them are dead. He is there at Shiroyama where Saigo makes his last stand. Heiji is never going to forgive him that.

When he comes back to Tokyo, Tome doesn't ask, she understands and prepares him angler nabe while he sulks.

* Koujirou's situation is by no means an unusual one. Many of the Satsuma samurai landed lucrative jobs under the new administration and didn't share the dissatisfaction of their disenfranchised clansmen. Even Saigo's own younger brother Judo stayed as a lieutenant-general in the Imperial Guard.

1878

In May, Okubou Toshimichi, the lord of home affairs, who took personal command of surpressing Saigo's rebelion is assasinated, branded in Satsuma as traitor.

Koujiro is not welcome in Kagoshima anymore*. His wife moves to Tokyo to avoid harassment. Keeping his affair with Tome is becoming more difficult. Especially when he learns that Tome is pregnant **

In December Heiji comes back to pick up the pieces.

* Both Okubo and Saigo Judo moved their families to Tokyo because of this situation, so I'm guessing that was a thing. They received some backlash from their compatriots but eventually things normalized (for Judo at least, because Okubo was, you know, slashed up dead in an alley). By 1898 Saigo was acknowledged by the government as a tragic hero and bygones were bygones. Yet Heiji still talks with the Satsuma dialect, while Koujiro doesn’t even have a trace of it left.I wonder if he still used it when talking to Heiji.

** Geisha were not supposed to have sex with their patrons. The fact that she chose to give birth to Koujirou's son tells that she dared to hope that he'll at least acknowledge him.

1879

In January Hyakunosuke is born*

* Ogata's birthdate is a shot in the dark. He could be anywhere between 1878 and 1883. I just really like the idea that he was born right into the middle of such a chaos.

EDIT: GoldenKamuyHunting pointed out that Ogata had to be born after 1881, since Noda placed him as Older than Usami. This ruins the timeline a bit, and I’ll have to think of the way to reorder it to fit. For now, treat the 1879 as canon-defying :(

~1881

After pressure from his parents and from Heiji, Koujirou comes clean and learns to make his official family work. Koujirou's legitimate son, Yuusaku is born*.

From now on he effectively ghosts Tome. Her mental health** begins to waver. Tome quits being a geisha and moves back to her parents in Ibaraki ***.

* Also a shot in the dark. This would make him 23 when he died and 2 years younger than Ogata.

** Before the 20th century the white makeup geisha wore was made out of lead, making them more likely to develop lead poisoning, the first symptom of which is the decline of intelectual ability. Fun fact: lead gets passed down in breastmilk in quantities super-harmful for the baby, so if we go with the theory "Tome went crazy because of lead poisoning" than that would explain so much about Ogata...

*** This is likely due to her health, not due to giving birth. She could have just sent Hyakunosuke to her parents and kept working. God knows how they made ends meet after that. Before they were be so poor that they had to sell their daughter. Now they were much older, she was sick and unable to work, and her child was another mouth to feed. Not to mention the cost geisha education was worse then US collage loans so she most likely had a large debt she barely started to repay. Was Koujiro at least decent enough to pay child-support? Oh god *realises* it was Heiji who was paying them, wasn’t it? *heart breaks*

1886

Heiji and Yuki's second son, Otonoshin is born, 13 years after the first. What's up with that, Heiji?

1887

Koujirou goes to Germany* to study military tactics.

Hyakunosuke (8) feeds his mother rat poison. Koujirou doesn't come to the funeral.

As a result Hyakunosuke is brought up by his grandparents alone. He likes his grandma. They might instill in him the same kind of dislike for the new government as in the case of Kadokura. They definitely install a dislike for his deadbeat dad.

* Japan sent most of the promising officers abroad to soak up the knowledge how to run a modern nation. The army was mostly modeled after Germany (the Japanese were impressed by their recent victory against France) so it's the safest bet that Koujirou went to study there sometime in his life. In 1887-88 Nogi and Soroku Kawakami were sent to Germany. So it still depends if Nogi exists in GK universe and Koujirou just tagged along with them, or are they completely interchangeable.

1888

A new division is formed in Hokkaido. Tasked with guarding the north and developing the land.

1889

Heinojou (16) passes the Naval Academy entry exams with highest marks, determined to follow the footsteps of his father.

1894-95

The first Sino-Japanese war breaks out.

Heiji and Heinojou take part in the Battle of Yalu River. Heinojou is stationed on the flagship Matsushima under admiral Ito Sukeyuki. Matsushima gets badly damaged. 57 men die (including three officers) and 54 more are wounded.

Heiji silently watches his son burning from his ship. Comes back a wreck of a man. Gets awarded a title of Baron under the kazoku system *.

No clue what Koujirou could have been doing then. It’s likely that he was part of the army that conquered Port Arthur (back than still called Lushunkou) the first time around in only 3 days **.

* I need to double-check that with the raws since I'm not sure Tsurumi calling him "lord" is meant to imply he had a noble title, or if it's just a honorific. Many of admirals had titles so it would be highly likely someone with a lineage and a service record like Heiji also got one.

** this experiance would make him a pefect choice for later leading the operation in 1904 so this would make a lot of sense, but it would also be a pretty heavy take, since that would mean he was present during the Port Arthur masacre. And as a senior officer too, so it’s hard to find any excuses for him if that was the case. Did witnessing the atrocities there influence his later opposition to the Japanese expansion into Manchuria? Was his instruction for Yuusaku not to kill anyone motivated by trying to protect his son from sharing his guilt?

1895

Tsurumi comes back from the war and joins the 7th (actually more like he’s demoted out of the 2nd). By then Koujirou is the head of the division *

* I’m guessing Tsurumi had to have enough time to work on him, to be able to learn all about the Koito family troubles and come up with the plan how to use them. Did he get into Koujirou’s confidence? Or was he just reading his private letters?

1900

Heiji stays in Kagoshima and spoils/neglects his second son. Tsurumi "accidentally" meets Otonoshin and they visit Saigo's and Heinojou's graves.

Later that year the whole Koito family moves to Hakodate and Heiji takes control of the Ominato torpedo division *.

* The Ikazuki was a new class of light destroyers specifically made not to repeat the tragedy of too large and too slow Matsushima. No wonder Heiji was willing to move across the country for that.There were 6 of them made in total. Cool factoid: One of those destroyers sunk after a crash with a civilian steamship off the coast of Hokkaido in 1909.

1902

Ogata (24) joins the army and specifically volunteers for the 7th division planning god-knows-what. By conscription he would have landed in the 2nd (Kantou region).

Koujirou doesn't acknowledge him. Tsurumi does.

The Great Hakodate kidnapping takes place. Koujiro sends his best intelligence officer from Tsukisappu to help his friend and keep things discreet. Afterwards Heiji learns to appreciate the son he has left.

Later that year Otonoshin passes the exam to join the Army acedemy.

Fresh out of the academy Yuusaku (21) joins the 7th division. His father, plagued with guilt and bad life choices instructs him not to kill people and not to sleep around.

Yuusaku meets Hyakunosuke. Hyakunosuke tries to get him to kill people and sleep around.

1904-05

The Russo-Japanese war.

In February the war starts with Japan launching night torpedo attacks on the Russian fleet stationed inside Port Arthur. Heiji leads the third destroyer squadron aboard the Sazanami*. They continue the attacks over the next months trying to impose a blockade. After the Battle of the Yellow Sea, the victorious Japanese Combined Fleet effectively traps the remaining Russian warships inside Port Arthur. The Russians can't get out, the Japanese can't get in. Heiji can only wait and watch as the Japanese Army struggles to capture Port Arthur by land.

Koujirou leaves the 7th division behind when he is promoted to a member of staff of General Nogi’s 3rd Army. They land in Incheon in April and reach Port Arthur in August to start the siege. It is a drawn out blood bath. After wasting tons of lives in pointless assaults, the Japanese realize quite late that the key to victory lies in capturing the 203 Hill overlooking the harbor. Koujirou is made chief of staff for this operation.

In October they get the news that the Russian Baltic Fleet has left Tallinn and is on its way to reinforce the besieged Pacific Fleet. The race starts. If Koujirou fails to capture the hill before the Baltic Fleet arrives, the Japanese Fleet will be annihilated, and Heiji along with it.

In November the 7th division arrives in Port Arthur. They don’t get special treatment from their former commander and they’re sent head first to the 203 Hill. They capture it on 5th December, only after the artillery stopped caring weather they hit their own or not**. From their new position they destroy the whole Pacific fleet.

The death toll is 80 000 soldiers. More than half of the 7th is gone. Among the fallen are second lieutenants Hanazawa Yuusaku and Nogi Yasusuke - general Nogi's only remaining son (the first one died earlier in the same war).***

Hyakunosuke thinks that the losses wouldn't have to be this high if they just had more snipers like him. But nobody listened.

* All of the Ikazuki-class destroyers were quite active during the war. I placed Heiji on the Sazanami just because there’s the most info about what she did and when.

** The winning strategy was implemented by Kodama Gentarou. He was sent to Port Arthur with the authority to replace Nogi. He had enough guts to sacrifice soldiers falling to friendly fire in one coordinated assault instead of bleeding them out by continuous suicidal frontal assaults. He didn't officially replace Nogi though, and he let him take the credit for the victory, because they were friends. It's a really cool story.

*** Interesingly enough Yasusuke, was also shot in the back of his head. His father when he saw his body asked only “Was it after he had completed his task, or was it before?”

1905

The 7th move on to Mukden. Koujirou and Nogi along with them.

In May the Baltic Fleet arrives. Without Port Arthur, they try to get to Vladivostok to resupply. Tougou's fleet intercepts them in the Tsushima strait and despite their smaller number, crushes them decisively. Heiji's destroyer Sazanami, captures the destroyer Buyini with the wounded admiral Zinovy Rozhestvensky **.

In September the Treaty of Portsmouth is signed. The Trans-Manchurian Railway gets handed off to the Japanese. Later Koujirou strongly opposes the plan to develop it ***.

** Heiji's torpedo division was also responsible to delivering the finishing blow to the flagship Knyaz Suarov. Later this was written on Knyaz Suarov's last moments "While she had a gun above water she fired, and not a man survived her of all that crew, to whose stubborn gallantry no words can do justice. If there is immortality in naval memory it is hers and theirs". Gives me the chills.

*** Did he see that it would lead to more war? Mantetsu was the reason behind the Manchurian Incident in 1931 and later for the breakout of the second Sino-Japanese war, where a really ugly face of Japanese imperialism saw the light of day. So, was Koujirou a good guy all along? This I hope will be explained in the manga.

1906

In January Nogi returns to give a victory report to the Emperor *.

Koujirou "commits seppuku" by his son's hand. "Writes" a sappy goodbye letter to Heiji (probably also by Ogata's hand).

Heiji gets seduced by his son's dashing young commander and does some stupid-treasonous things for him, convinced that Central Command was to blame for pushing Koujirou to suicide.

In November Mantetsu is established.

* Nogi breaks down while making the report and asks to be allowed to commit seppuku for allowing such high casualties. The Emperor forbids him. Nogi waits 7 years until the Emperor dies and commits seppuku on the day of his funeral.

Disclaimers

I would say half of this consists of what already is in GK canon (even if it’s written between the lines) or history. The other half are my free guesses for what I personally think would make a better story ;)

I tried and tried to do thorough research, but in the end I’m just a humble fangirl, and not a historian, so if there’s something I got wrong, missed or misinterpreted please correct me - learning history is a never-ending story.

Sorry for linking directly to the scanlations. Support the manga by buying the volumes if you can.

This list will most likely be growing since I will eventually figure out what Koujirou did during the Sino-Japanese war, and I’m only starting digging in to the details of the Boshin War, so I’m sure I’ll expand upon that.

If anyone ever wants to use this information for a fic, please do. Copy it all if you want to. I don’t mind the slightest. I’ll love you to pieces for writing anything for them at all!

#golden kamuy #hanazawa koujirou #koito heiji

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xyliane · 4 years ago

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AUgust 5: post-apocalypse au

PROMPT THE FIFTH: POST-APOCALYPSE

...I know there’s a robot anime with a premise kind of like this, but I haven’t seen it. also I don’t know what’s happening here, just accept that gon’s an android, the world’s dead, but he’s tending a garden I guess.

0o0o0o0o0

There is a human hiding in the oak tree eating an apple. He’s good at it, too--there are no blaring klaxons or silent alarms buzzing in Gon’s head, so he avoided all of the garden’s built-in failsafes, and the tree barely moves as he breathes. Every bite of the greenish-white fruit is timed for the gentle breeze, the creak of rickety metal and heavy tape drowning out the quite crunch of teeth into the apple’s flesh. Gon might have missed him entirely, tending the berries as he is, if the boy’s hair wasn’t pure white.

It’s too bad, really. Gon’s programming doesn’t allow for intruders. There are too many things left, looking for false sanctuary, wanting a museum of days long gone, searching for the answer to questions no android can possibly give. But he doesn’t have to do anything about intruders he doesn’t know about.

The next time he looks up, the human is gone. Gon should wipe the shock of white hair from his memory. He is supposed to be a guardian, protecting what’s left. But somewhere in his programming, his mother slipped a glimmer of free will, and she grounded it with her own love of the garden she built out of dead soil and ash with nothing but ferocious will and grief. Gon loves two things: his mother, and his mother’s garden. And his mother wanted her garden to be used.

So Gon doesn’t forget.

-------

Today, the human has found Gon’s carrots. There aren’t many images of root vegetables left, just Gon’s mother’s old old books he has scanned into his external databases, so he isn’t sure if the roots are supposed to be stained a gentle purple. The human crunches into them all the same, hiding behind the shed for the garden’s power supply, solar panels and water mills chained together with wire and ivy. Gon had left the ground innocently loose around the carrots, hoping that today the white-haired boy would come and steal without Gon noticing.

Instead, the boy is bolder, throwing himself over the fence and snatching the entire batch from the earth with a single fluid motion. A single alarm blares behind Gon’s eyes, warning at the irritation to the earth. Gon frowns in irritation and silences the alarm. Now he has to do something.

...the next time the boy comes around, because there is no foreign pressure left in the garden. Only the weight of Gon’s chassis, and a pair of errant human footprints pressed deep into the dirt.

--------

“You’re a terrible guardian, if that’s what you’re supposed to be.”

Gon smiles up from his work, unsurprised to see the human at the base of the oak tree. The last week, he hasn’t seen the white-haired boy around the garden, but the silent alarms have taken note of his presence: reddish-blue berries falling to the ground in handfuls rather than carefully transported to compose, a strip of cloth caught on the sharpened metal fence surrounding the delicate aloe bushes, even freshly-planted sunflower seeds dug up and re-planted haphazardly along the path.

So today, tired of sensing-knowing-feeling but not seeing, Gon left a basket.

A basket that worked for the human as easily as a handful of fresh greens left out for hungry rodents nibbling on the garden’s lettuce.

The boy is rail-thin and tall, old enough to have stopped growing but young enough that he shouldn’t have cheekbones standing out so sharply against his face. His hair, although the white of nuclear fallout, is soft and curling, spreading around his face like a dandelion about to seed. And he grips the rickety old basket so tightly his knuckles turn white, bones fragile and stark beneath his scarred pale hands.

Gon leans on his spade, content that his trap worked, even if he has to keep manually shutting down the alerts, warning him against the human he invited in. “Am I a guardian?” he asks.

The white-haired boy rolls his eyes--an expression so simply human that Gon can’t help but smile a little wider. “You’re an android in one of the only spots of green left along the slurge. What else are you?”

“A gardener?”

“You’re a Freecss model. Even before the Fall, anyone with sense would have known what you were. Your creator wouldn’t waste their time on a bot running around a patch of dirt playing at flowers.”

A jolt of unfamiliar feeling--annoyance--bursts into Gon’s chest, and he frowns. “Her name was Mito, and she was my mom,” he says.

The boy shrugs, jostling the basket. “Whatever. All I’m saying, you’re not following your programming.”

Gon imitates the gesture, down to the exact degree of shoulder slump, and the human’s eyes narrow. “You’re not following yours, either,” he says.

“I’m not programmed--”

“You could have taken the basket and left, before I noticed. Or before I let myself notice. The oak tree’s not a good hiding spot with your hair.” The human continues to splutter, a flush spotting his cheeks and nose, and amusement hums along the currents in Gon’s skin. “But you didn’t! Even though I could have terminated you if you were wrong.”

The human is still red with irritation, but his expression is wary when he says, “I wasn’t wrong.”

A timer ticks, the day’s schedule flickering away second by second. Gon picks up his spade again, the ballbearings in his shoulder joints clicking a little from overuse. “You’re not right, either,” he says, and scoops a shovelful of dirt out from where one day, potatoes might grow. If Gon has time, and patience, and luck.

Androids don’t have luck. Androids have programs. Gon’s father, the man who built him, made sure that he would want nothing more than to constantly search for the true meaning of his programming. But Gon’s mom made sure he had a little luck, and a little love, and a little choice in what he wanted.

“So what are you, then?” the human asks.

Gon stabs the stave into the ground firm enough to make it stick. “I’m Gon,” he says. “What about you?”

“I’m--” The human shuffles the basket under one arm, careful to not let any of the produce fall. He sticks out his other hand. “I’m Killua.”

Gon stares at the hand. “Is that a weapon?”

Killua rolls his eyes again, and Gon deliberately saves the gesture into his onboard files for future reference. “It’s a handshake. A greeting for new friends. You can shake hands, right?” He juts his hand out insistently, elbow straight, and mutters something about how even his little sisters know this.

“Oh.” Gon gingerly wraps one hand around Killua’s pale, too-thin fingers, and lets himself be shaken up and down. “Thank you, Killua. Will you be back tomorrow?”

“Aren’t you a guardian?” Killua demands. “There’s nothing out there, not that anyone’s out there to take it anymore. I’m stealing from you.”

The alarms blare out inside Gon’s programming, and he slams up a wall. “You’re trading with me,” he says, and shakes Killua’s hand firmly. The boy stares, mouth slightly agape and hand still clasped around Gon’s. Blood pumps steadiily beneath the thin warm human skin, a gentle wave against the currents that keep Gon running. “Food for friendship. So I have nothing to guard from you.”

And a tiny, fragile smile breaks out across Killua’s face.

(AUgust prompts)

#AUgust2020 #hxh #my writing #gon freecss #killua zoldyck #yet another prompt I have no idea what's going on #but hooray 5 down 25 to go!#gotta catch up on a few more a day now that I'm not dying under work #androids and gardens and gardening androids #in the post-apocalypse of course

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eldweena · 3 years ago

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I gotta admit, I'm over the crossdressing trope when it comes to cisgender characters. (It inevitably leads to queer baiting.) It's just kind of tired at this point. It was a fad over a decade ago and the synopsis of this manga feels a bit overdone. I don't even understand why the main character in this manga is disguising herself as a boy. The only purpose it serves is for her to get a job among other male staff at an all-boys café. But! Everything else about this manga, I loved. The vampires of this manga aren't the typical. There's no mention that they can't go out in the sun (which, to me, is half the point of the character being a vampire), but they don't eat human food, at least. To them, though, human blood changes flavor depending on how much love the person has felt in their life. As a general rule, girls taste better than boys. Blood from someone who is deeply loved will taste like strawberry juice, but an unloved person will still taste disgusting. That's where main character, Mito, comes in. Mito is a girl but dresses like a boy. Girls flock to her because they think she's a very attractive boy. (Creepy old men also flock to her, thinking she's an attractive boy...) Her family never loved her and kicked her out. She has no family anymore, and no friends. And when the manga begins, she's just lost her job because the restaurant where she works was tailored for old men to gather and eat but young girls keep coming in to flirt with her. I don't understand why (a customer is a customer, right?) but the restaurant owner is angry about the change in clientele and fires Mito. Mito ends up at a café where a vampire named Ruka works, and they come to an arrangement. Her blood is disgusting, but she's willing to let the vampire feed from her in exchange for room and board and a job at the café. She doesn't seem disturbed or scared by the vampire at all. (Well, I mean, he is gorgeous...) And he has a secret of his own, a reason why he can't feed from girls, so to him drinking the disgusting blood of a "boy" is still better than feeding from a girl. And he vows to love Mito until his blood tastes good. The other guys at the café don't know Ruka is a vampire, but there's someone else who does: Ren, a boy who hates vampires, because a vampire stole his mother away and turned her into one of them. Ren warns Mito about Ruka and vows to protect her from becoming a vampire, even if he has to drag her away. The art in this manga is absolutely stunning. I love male characters with beautiful faces (all of the guys in this manga are pretty!) and especially with long hair like Ruka's. The characters have depth and complexity to them, but for the most part this manga reads like a romcom and it's very lighthearted and comical. I like the worldbuilding, but the story did feel a little bit rushed. At least it's going to have several more volumes! I like the relationships between them all. There's a pretty boy who seems infatuated with the vampire, Ruka. Ruka has a manservant who changes into a bat, and he's also gorgeous. Slayer-wannabe Ren keeps trying to stand in Ruka's way. And a love triangle seems to be developing, with both Ruka and Ren crushing no Mito, whom they think is a boy. The author also did some cute side-panel comics about unrelated topics, like their cat. lol I enjoyed this manga a lot and look forward to more!

#Vampire Dormitory #manga review #Eldweena reviews #Kodansha #Ema Toyama

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sumigakure · 7 years ago

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Skyfall

To: @modernart2012

From: @pwnie3

Title: Skyfall

Rating: T

Wordcount: 2896

Prompt: Pacific Rim AU. Preference for MadaTobi, but I’m open to any pairing, romantic or otherwise. Doesn’t have to follow the movie

Warnings: Brief suicidal ideation, character death, excessive use of italics

Summary: Madara wakes up and doesn’t open his eyes, because he knows that if he does he’ll roll over and Izuna won’t be there in the next bed over. He feels like the ground has been torn out from under his feet and now he’s just falling alone into empty sky.

Drop, Category II solo, let’s do this, first blow comes, harness cracks, Izuna, Izuna, Izuna get up, “Kaleidoscope Burst please respond”, Izuna’s down, Izuna’s down, IZUNA–

Madara wakes up and doesn’t open his eyes, because he knows that if he does he’ll roll over and Izuna won’t be there in the next bed over. He feels like the ground has been torn out from under his feet and now he’s just falling alone into empty sky.

It feels strange, to not have Izuna there. Even as a little presence in the back of his head, like the way it feels to talk to someone using two soup cans and a piece of string, is gone. He and Izuna have– had always been notoriously strong ghost Drifters, to the point where they could divine each other’s emotions from across a building.

Tears well up in Madara’s eyes, and he presses the heels of his palms into them. His breath starts to shudder in his chest.

“Madara?” a scratchy voice asks, a hand laying itself on his thigh. “You in there?”

He scrubs at his eyes, then opens them to see Touka.

She looks about twice as bad as Madara feels. Her hair is a rat’s nest, her eyes are bloodshot and the bags underneath are deep enough to run a river through. She smiles at him wanly and runs her other hand over the crown of his head. “We didn’t think you were gonna wake up.”

I wish I hadn’t, he almost says. “How long was I out?”

She takes a deep breath and retracts her hand. “It’s been almost a week. Kaleidoscope Burst took most of the damage, but…”

But it wasn’t enough. No matter how much of the kaiju’s attack the Uchiha brothers’ Jaeger took, it wasn’t enough to save Izuna.

“It’s not your fault, you know,” Touka sniffs. “You know those old Mark Twos as well as I do. Flimsy harness couplings and all that, right? If anyone is to blame then–” a sob catches in her throat– “then it’s me.”

“Touka–” Madara starts.

“No, I was supposed to check everything in that conn pod, but who thinks to check on the pins holding in the damn harnesses?” She laughs bitterly, then sobers. “I checked the box without even looking because hey, you’d never had trouble with it before, why would you start now and it’s cost me my husband–” she chokes on her words and devolves into ugly, halting tears.

Madara pulls her close. She twists her hands into his hair, identical to Izuna’s except for the sheer volume of it, and bawls into his shoulder.

After a minute or two, she pulls back and takes a deep breath, then gives another little laugh. “Look at me, Madara. A week without Izuna and I’m already falling to pieces.”

“You think I’m doing much better?” he croaks eventually. “I feel like I just saw him five minutes ago and I’m already in shambles.”

“What a pair we make, huh?”

Marshall Uzumaki lets Madara rest, heal, and grieve for a week before she has him back in the ring for another copilot. She supervises him for every bout and Touka, who’s been reassigned from engineering to the command center since Kaleidoscope Burst’s last drop, calls out strikes as they land.

Like it means anything. All twenty-three of the bouts Madara’s gone in the past hour have ended 4-0 in his favor, and by this point the candidate pool is shrinking back into the audience.

Mito is one of Madara’s oldest acquaintances, and even if he can’t speak to her without losing his temper half of the time, he recognizes the look on her face when she leans over to whisper something into Touka’s ear.

“That will be all for today. Thank you for participating. Madara, come here,” Touka says. Madara steps forward. “We think that maybe a test is in order.”

He levels the two women with the most unimpressed look he can muster. “Did I not just spend the last hour doing tests?”

Mito makes an amused noise. “A different kind of test, Madara. Report to the drop bay in an hour.”

“Oh, hells no.”

Inside the mangled remains of Kaleidoscope Burst’s conn pod– the only intact part of her left– waiting and hooked up to her Pons system, is Hashirama of all people, with his little brother looking annoyed as usual behind him.

Madara gestures to Hashirama, looking straight at Tobirama. “Is this-?”

“Is this the test Mito ordered? Yes.” Tobirama looks all too pleased to be plugging someone else into Hashirama’s head. He spent four years Drifting with his brother before Hashirama screwed up his leg and got the Hidden Leaf, the Senju brothers’ Jaeger, removed from duty. “She wants to make sure your head will still let you Drift at all.”

Madara scoffs. “‘Can I still Drift’, of course I can still Drift! Why wouldn’t I be?”

Hashirama pipes in. “Well, saying that you can Drift is like saying that you can do art. It’s a generalization. Just because you can make ice sculptures doesn’t mean you can fold origami worth a damn.”

“Just because you could Drift with Izuna doesn’t mean that you can Drift with anyone else. Mito wants to make sure you’re physically capable of finding a new copilot before she spends more time on the matter,” Tobirama clarifies. “And seeing as how Hashirama is the easiest Drifter we have on site, he’ll be your partner for this exercise.”

It’s for the sake of his age-old friendship with Hashirama that Madara refrains from making a joke about how Hashirama is easy, and he knows that Madara knows exactly what he’s definitively not doing.

He takes some measure of gratitude that at least it’s Hashirama and not some green cadet that’s never even seen a kaiju. Hashirama is familiar, he was the first person Madara ever Drifted with even though he’s not the one that stuck.

“I’ll be observing your Drift from here just in case something goes wrong.” Tobirama steps back to his sleek control panel– which looks oddly different from the ones in the LOCCENT. “Initiating neural handshake,” he says, getting ready to flip switches. “In five, four, three, two, one.”

Hashirama’s memories rush into Madara’s head. Little brother, Mother is gone, new mother, more brothers, Madara, Tobirama, Madara, Madara, Madara, police academy, the first kaiju taking away Father and Itama and Kawarama, the Jaeger program, why is Tobirama here he should be safe at home, Drift compatible, victory, victory, victory, victory, victory, pain and loss, you’ll never pilot again with a leg like that, Mito, command track, oh god Kaleidoscope Burst please respond–

Madara is thrust violently back into his own body with a jolt and knows that Hashirama just felt the same thing.

“Handshake successful. Try waving hello with your right arm,” Tobirama directs.

It works, as every other command Tobirama gives them does. It goes so well in fact that only Hashirama has to listen to what Tobirama’s saying Madara just follows his lead. Hashirama exists in Madara’s head as a long road he’s compelled to follow no matter where it may take him. He’s similar, in many ways, to Izuna. Bright, happy Izuna who was like the blinding, guiding sun on a summer’s day. Izuna’s wedding was on in the middle of summer, Izuna, Izuna, Izuna-

“Right hemisphere out of alignment,” he vaguely registers hearing before he’s disconnected from the Jaeger.

He comes out of the Drift like waking up from a dream, groggy and absent and with a faraway look in his eyes. All he wants to do is sleep and not think about the report Tobirama will be presenting to Mito and how he can guess exactly what it will say. Is capable of Drifting but chased the rabbit in almost record time. Unfit for duty. End report.

A few days later, Madara– who hasn’t been asked back to the sparring ring and is completely blaming that on the report Tobirama probably filed– is tasked by a newly-busy Touka with delivering a sheaf of Important papers to the R&D department.

The “R&D Department” is actually just three guys in a too-small room with a tiny budget that mostly gets spent on whiteboard markers, takeout, and weed. After Hashirama started Drifting with Tobirama but before Madara and Izuna got a Jaeger of their own, Izuna used to split his time between flirting at Touka in Maintenance and getting high with the R&D team. Madara used to hear a lot of stories about his friends’ crazy theories and that one time they all got crossfaded and woke up ten hours later having forgotten their own names.

But the budget has been cut down even more than usual this year, and so it’s not three guys anymore. It’s just one, and it happens to be the infuriatingly snarky one with white hair and tattoos that shouldn’t look as good as they do.

Tobirama isn’t paying attention when Madara walks in– he’s shoulder deep in a, well, in something, and his white button-down is discarded across the room in favor of the tank top that shows off real, honest-to-God biceps that he didn’t have the last time Madara saw his arms (granted he had been seventeen to the albino’s fourteen at the time, and knew what would happen if Hashirama even thought Madara had a thing for his brother) and also keeps his clothes from getting stained too bad by all the machine oil.

“Hey,” Madara says to get Tobirama’s attention.

The younger man startles, and in his haste to turn around flings a streak of oil in Madara’s face. He hisses and goes to wipe it off, but Tobirama slaps his hands away with a towel. “Don’t do that, you’ll just smear it.”

“Then what am I supposed to do?” he demands. “Be blind for the rest of my life?”

Tobirama makes a frustrated sound and kicks his ankle gently to guide him over to a chair. There’s a sound like a metal hatch closing, probably from the machine he was working on. “Sit down, I have something for this.”

A few moments later, Tobirama starts dabbing a wet cloth over the oil-stained portion of Madara’s face. “If this is acid–”

“If I wanted to kill you, Madara, I have other ways. It’s just something I mixed up to remove oil and grease stains,” Tobirama rebuts.

“Why not just wear gloves?” Madara blinks hard and then opens his eyes wide when Tobirama backs off.

“I’m allergic to latex and this facility doesn’t buy anything else.” The younger man lets the awkward air hand between them for a few moments. “So why are you here?”

Madara fumbles with the sheaf of papers. “Touka asked me to bring you these.”

Tobirama finishes cleaning the oil off his arms and then gives the folder a cursory glance, but Touka has always been bad at labelling things. “Do you know what it is?”

“Something about Burst’s specs.” Madara shrugs.

“Oh.” Tobirama’s eyes widen. “It’s notes about her Pons system. I’ve theorized that her previous engineer made some kind of neural processing magnification modification to the Pons system to enhance the combat abilities of the Drift team.”

Madara is no genius, but he did take an AP class or two in high school (one of them with Tobirama, who had no business being a freshman taking senior-level classes). “Based on what evidence?”

Tobirama swiftly makes his way over to one of four desks covered in so many papers it nearly hurts to look at. He rummages around what’s either the world’s most complex sorting system or just a mess, and after a minute he sounds a victorious shout and pulls a thick file from the bottom of a pile and lays it out on the one clean half of a desk he can find.

“These are neural performance records taken from one of your Drifts with Izuna in Burst,” Tobirama says, pointing to one long scanner sheet of paper, then to a second. “These are records taken of Izuna when he was Drifting in Burst with Touka.”

“Wait, what?”

“It was her birthday and she failed the Jaeger program’s physical but they were Drift compatible and I helped him out with giving her the birthday present to end all birthday presents, okay?” he points to a third record. “This is the scan I took of them from their anniversary Drift a few months later, this time at using the system I have here.” He gestures to the piece of machinery he was tinkering with when Madara walked in.

Madara studies the records. “The performance levels are completely different.”

Tobirama nods. “And this is a scan I took of you and Hashirama the other day, compared to the record I took of him the last time we snuck into Hidden Leaf.”

Again, the performance scores are wildly different. “So you want to prove that there’s something up with my Jaeger?”

The younger man nods. “Yes, and there’s just one more scan I need to prove it.”

Madara bobs his head too. “A scan of me outside of Burst.” He gives Tobirama a Look. “Did you tell Touka to send me over specifically with the specs?”

He nods again. “You’ll be Drifting with me this time.”

Madara lets out what’s definitely not a squawk of outrage. “You want me to Drift with you? We don’t even know if we’re compatible!”

“Please. If you can Drift with numbskulls like Izuna and Hashirama, you can Drift with me,” he scoffs. “Contrary to popular belief, I’m almost as easy to Drift with as Izuna or Hashirama.”

This is different, Madara wants to scream. Hashirama is different, Izuna was different. How long has it been, since he tried to Drift with someone who wasn’t his best friend or his brother?

“Just because we can both Drift with Hashirama doesn’t mean anything,” Madara exclaims. Tobirama let out another wordless noise of annoyance, but before he can say anything Madara interrupts him. “Just because a positive magnet connects with a negative magnet does not mean that two negative magnets will connect!”

“Just put on the damn headset and let me get my results.” Tobirama shoves the headpiece at Madara’s chest.

He grumbles. “I hope no-one believes your results.”

Tobirama is wearing a matching headset as he reaches for a button. “Initiating neural handshake in five, four, three, two, one.”

Mother, Hashirama, a big treehouse, loss, learning, top of the class, accelerated learning courses recommended, he’s too young for this class, why is he here, beat them all out, what’s a kaiju?, Hashirama don’t go, ‘Tobirama why are you here”, Drift compatible, Hidden Leaf, success, saving people, killing kaiju, failure, injury, find a new copilot or find a new job, Izuna, Izuna oh God please no–

If Hashirama’s mind is a path and Izuna’s was the sun, then Tobirama’s can only be described as an endless freefall over a cliff into the sea. Being in the Drift feels like Tobirama is his parachute. Through the Drift he knows that Tobirama views Madara like a chained lion, and he can feel the euphoria the other man knows as he sets the lion free.

Madara comes back into his own mind feeling like he can take on the world and win, in a way that Drifting with Izuna had never provided.

When Madara first entered the PPDC, the team he and Izuna took over from– a pair of women who piloted a wonderful Jaeger named Whirlpool Dawn– told him that there was Drifting and then there was Drifting. Maybe, he thinks, this is what they meant.

He looks over to Tobirama, and finds that the albino’s crimson eyes are just as wide and his face is just as flushed as Madara’s own must be. He watches Tobirama’s adam’s apple bob as he swallows thickly.

“I think we need to go talk to Mito,” Madara hears, though despite being aware of Tobirama’s every move he doesn’t know if the words were said aloud or if he just understood Tobirama’s intentions through the Drift.

“I think you’re right,” he replies.

Two months later finds Tobirama and Madara in matching Drift suits and getting ready to test drop for the first time together.

They had argued for a long time about which Jaeger they would pilot. They went back and forth with their reasons; Hidden Leaf was in better condition, but Kaleidoscope Burst was the newer and safer mech, for example. But before they could come to a conclusion (which many figured would never happen at all) the victorious new head of engineering, an early twenty-something called Sarutobi, informed them that they wouldn’t have to decide at all because he’d gone around them and gotten the all-clear from Mito to combine the two Jaegers.

So here they stand, ready to pilot Konoha Burst under the watchful eyes of Touka, Hashirama, and the entire world. What Sarutobi’s done by combining two defunct Jaegers is unprecedented, and even with a hundred different news crews waiting for the results of the test Madara isn’t scared.

He doesn’t have to look or talk to know that Tobirama is putting on his helmet and raring to go, but he does it anyways.

“You ready to rock the world, Skyfall?” he drawls.

“You know it, Lionheart.”

If you enjoyed this piece, why not take a look at other pieces written by the same author on AO3.

#rated: T #Sumigakure Winter Wishes 2017 #Sumigakure Stocking Stuffers 2017 #submission #sumigakure #rank: b #pwnie3

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divinegiftofarticulatespeech · 8 years ago

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Fruits Basket another summary for Chapter 8(1)

Whew! The first half of Chapter 8 was cut well past the mid-point so this is a LONG summary.

Note: This is my regular reminder that I am in no way an expert at Japanese so if you notice anything wrong in the summary please tell me! Don’t worry about embarrassing me, I went to art school. Trust me, I can take it.

Previous chapters can all be found in the master post!

Enjoy!

Chapter 8(1)

The chapter opens with Sawa and her two school friends sitting outside in their everyday clothes. Sawa’s blonde friend, Mito, says that she hasn’t walked around in a long while. Amane responds that Mito hasn’t been able to relax since the end of term started. Mito asks if Amane is done talking about that now, and Amane cheerfully responds that she has finished. In the background, Sawa is quietly thinking about how much fun she’s having when Mito suddenly calls her name. Sawa is startled and asks Mito what she wants. Mito asks Sawa if she’s done working her part-time job, and she says yes, for now. Sawa then tells her friends that she meet Hanajima-sensei’s nephew outside of the shop. She mentions that he is Chizuru’s friend, and Sawa’s friends are shocked that Hanajima-sensei has a nephew. Sawa then has a flashback to the day she met Rio. Rio notices that her uniform is from Kaibara High School, and asks her if she knows Hanajima-sensei, saying that he is his uncle.

The flashback ends, and Sawa says that Rio is a third year middle school student. She also says that he is a calm/gentle child. Mito says she finds the whole thing deeply moving (lol). She says that Hanajma-sensei’s personal life is an enigma, and then tries to find a better way to describe it until Amane supplies the word “mysterious.” Sawa wonders about it and gets pulled into another flashback, this time of a day at school where she ran into Hanajima. He asks her if she met Rio, and she responds that yes, she did. Hanajima does the usual “please look after him” thing, and Sawa asks if Rio is his older sister’s son. Hanajima says yes, and then says the electromagnetic waves don’t transfer to male family members. Sawa is understandably confused, then goes on to ask if Hanajima’s sister’s husband is a person from a foreign country. Hanajima says yes, and remarks that he came to meet her by plane, but that it took a very long time (to first meet? to actually get together? It’s a bit vague).

Sawa’s flashback ends and she agrees with her friends that “mysterious” is indeed the best word. One of the girls remarks that Hanajima-sensei’s sister must be a very beautiful woman. As they say this, a woman in high heels with long blonde hair is seen walking past them and glancing their way, but her face is partially in shadow. The scene then changes to Sawa walking home. She’s thinking about how much fun she had, and how she has to wash and return the clothes she borrowed from the Sohmas when she notices a pair of shoes inside the front door. Her mother comes out to greet her and asks her where she went. Sawa greets her back without looking at her, and Sawa’s mom continues saying she was surprised Sawa wasn’t home. She then notices Sawa’s clothes and asks her about them. Sawa lies and tells her she bought them. Sawa’s mom says that they don’t really seem like something Sawa would wear, and that Sawa usually choses clothes that are a little unattractive/boring.

Sawa’s mom then goes back to asking her where she went, and if she went on an outing with friends. She says she told Sawa to tell her if she goes out with friends, and that Sawa’s easily disliked. Sawa’s mom then says she want to talk to her friends and asks Sawa to let her see her cell phone. Sawa lies and says she only talks to them on the house phone, and thinks that her mom is sure to erase her contacts on her cell phone. Sawa’s mom then asks her what’s causing this and if something made her mad and why is she being so unfeeling. Sawa says she’s not mad and not being unfeeling. Sawa’s mom says that’s a lie, and tells her to apologize. She also says Sawa has a bad attitude and is ungrateful and that’s why Sawa can’t make friends. She then tells her again Sawa should be apologizing, but that Sawa’s too mad. She says she gets it, Sawa hates her and has an axe to grind, and then she asks Sawa why she’s being so quiet and tells her to say something.

All of this overwhelms Sawa, and the panel shows her scrunching up her face and being surrounded by negative emotions. The scene then shifts to the next day in the apartment. Sawa’s mom is shown sleeping and Sawa pauses outside her mother’s bedroom door before turning away and leaving for school. The scene shifts to Sawa walking down the sidewalk, and she’s shown carrying an extra bag. Sawa is thinking about having to return the clothes inside it to the Sohmas as soon as possible so her mother doesn’t throw them away. She wonders how she’s going to wash them and thinks about taking them to the nearest laundromat, but remembers their dryer is out of order.

As she’s thinking this, Sora walks up behind her and asks if the clothes are from the closet/costume room at Hajime’s house. Sawa greets her, and says Sora comprehended the situation pretty well. Sora responds that she understands because borrowing clothes (from Hajime’s house) is convenient. Sora then asks if Sawa is going to return them today. Sawa says not yet, she hasn’t washed them yet because she needs to stop by the laundromat. Sora then says that she’s had a great idea, and says to leave it to her.

The scene changes again and Sora is leading Sawa into the Sohma’s yard. Sawa asks if it’s really okay to come by uninvited. Sora says it’s fine and starts calling out a greeting, but then stops to call out Mina’s name. Mina greets Sora, and Sora asks her why she didn’t go home yesterday night. Mina starts telling her that her father’s been delayed due to work and had to change his flight, but then she notices Sawa and asks who she is. Sora tells her that it’s Sawa and to introduce herself. Mina introduces herself as Mina Sohma and asks Sawa to call her Mina. Sawa introduces herself in turn and as they’re finishing their introductions, Kinu shows up. After she finishes greeting Sora and Sawa, Sora attack-hugs her.

Sawa greets Kinu and apologizes for bothering her, and Sora tells Kinu they came for an important reason. Sora then hands Kinu the clothes Sawa borrowed and says they're being returned unwashed. Sawa is horrified and yells at Sawa to stop. Sora hugs the distraught Sawa and tell her not to worry (specifically, she seems to be misquoting the phrase “the anxiety from doing nothing is worse than the trouble you might face”). Kinu tells Sawa not to worry, she understands. Sawa continues to apologize, and Kinu and Sora console her some more. Mina then suggests that Sawa can apologize by accompanying her somewhere in Kinu’s place (Kinu is too tired to go). Sora asks where they were going and Mina says Sora can come too. Mina then pulls out a bat and announces their destination is the batting cages (literally “batting center”).

Mina says she’s recovering from a fever and needs to get her strength back. Sora asks if the bat is her birthday present, and Mina says yes. She wants to go to the batting center because Hajime gave her a discount coupon. As Sora and Mina drag Sawa away, Kinu sends then off and tells them to take care. As they’re walking down the street, Mina talks about how her father’s on an overseas business trip. He regularly goes on trips and Mina stays behind to attend school baseball games. She often stays at the Sohma’s house, but this time she was sick. She says Mutsuki and Hajime took care of her, and it made her happy. She also got to meet Sawa today, so she thinks she might be lucky. She thinks just meeting someone by chance is fantastic.

As the girls continue down the street they run into Mutsuki and Hajime. Sora calls out their names and says she found them. The boys notice the girls, and Sora yells out to capture them. Someone (maybe Sawa?) asks if it’s okay for Mina to be this active after her illness.

At the batting cages, it becomes obvious that Sora isn’t very good (“Come on, ball!” “The ball came a while ago”). Mina’s very good at batting. Hajime asks Sawa if she’s well (in relation to her injured arm mentioned back in chapter 2), and she says her arm doesn’t hurt anymore. Sawa’s phone starts ringing, and when she picks it up, the caller ID shows that it’s her mother. Sawa freezes up and Hajime asks her if she’s going to answer it. Sawa says she’s going to take it in another room, and that it’s her mother. As she walks away, Sawa thinks that after what happened yesterday, her mother will probably be full of resentful complaints. The phone call goes to voicemail before she can answer it, so Sawa listens to the message.

Sawa’s mother’s message starts with her berating Sawa for not answering her calls, and saying it’s a spiteful thing to do. She also scolds her for leaving in the morning without talking to her, and then there’s more about how Sawa doesn’t appreciate her. She also tells Sawa to manage money properly, and that she expects her to properly apologize the next time she sees her. When Sawa is finished listening to the message, she’s surprised by Hajime speaking behind her. He says he knows it’s a rude question, but asks if she doesn’t get along with her mother.

Sawa gets extremely nervous, and worries that if she admits it he’ll think badly of her. Sensing Sawa’s reluctance to respond, Hajime goes on to say that while he likes his parents, he dislikes his paternal grandfather (father’s father). He says that he’s not part of his family. His grandfather’s critical and hateful, and Hajime hates him. He then goes on to say that he considers Kazuma his real grandfather. He says that kind of thing is okay, but goes on to apologize for being rude. Sawa expresses her feeling that it’s ungrateful to be against the person who raised her. Hajime then basically tells her that being family is no excuse for mistreatment, and that being forced to be grateful to family while being trampled on is like a curse.

Sawa then admits that things aren’t going well, that everything she did felt useless. She had stopped talking to her mother when she berated her because everything she said in return only caused more problems. She says she slowly built up her wall until she couldn’t feel anything. Sawa then admits both to herself and out loud that her mother is wrong, and she resolves to change the way she thinks (about herself and her situation). Sawa thanks Hajime for talking to her. Suddenly, Mina, Mutsuki, and Sora appear behind Hajime, and Mina tells Sawa that when need be, she can talk to Mina at any time. Mina will introduce Sawa to her father’s lawyer. Sawa is startled to realize the whole group has heard her conversation with Hajime.

Mina says Sawa can pay back the lawyer’s fee later, and Hajime chastises her for using her father’s influence. Mina asks what’s wrong with using her status, and Hajime nervously comments that she’s likely to get worse. Sora tells Sawa to come hit the last ball, and drags her over to the batting cage. Sawa says she’s never batted before, but Sora keeps telling her to do it. While Mina and Sora tell Sawa how to hold the bat, Sawa thinks that it’s good to be here. Sawa misses the ball and tearfully laughs over how badly she did, saying she’s a good match for Sora. Sawa thinks that it’s still good to be here.

(Edit: The next chapter can be found here!)

#Fruits Basket #Fruits Basket another #Fruits Basket another summaries #furubana

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