one of several different khr/sm verses I’ve been dabbling in.
(…this is the one that makes me cry when I think about it.)
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“He’s dame and— and— and he needs to stay dame!”
The frustrated outburst rends the silence that had fallen between the two old friends; the speaker staring down at her hands, desperately willing them to stop shaking, and the listener pausing for a long contemplative moment before setting her cup on the table between them.
“Why?”
“I… I just… I can’t do this again!” her breath hitches and her voice trembles on each word. It drops to a whisper in an attempt to control it, “In middle school it was you. In high school it was Gurio. In college it was Iemitsu. N-Now it’s my son? H-how can I stand by? How can I pretend that none of it bothers me? That I don’t know that something is going on?”
“Na—”
“Let me finish!” the retort is sharp and at odds with the rest of the conversation; loud enough to cause others in the cafe to turn and stare. Once more silence falls between them until their witnesses turn away and give them the illusion of privacy. She continues in the faint trembling voice of a woman at her wits end, “E-everyone leaves me behind, Usagi. There’s always something that they need to do. Something bigger, something dangerous, something… something that for whatever reason I can’t know about. You… you don’t know how that feels. I-I watched you go through hell and back. I was Gurio’s shoulder to lean on. I patched Iemitsu up despite his silence. And now… now…”
Usagi leans forwards, taking her friend’s hands in hers and slowly forcing them flat. Pinpricks of blood drop from the cuts her nails had dug into them onto the table, but neither woman paid all that much attention to it.
Her breath shudders, “A-and now it’s Tsu-kun’s turn. I don’t want that for him. If he stays… if he stays “no good”, then I— I can hope everything will go back to normal.”
“It doesn’t work that way,” the blonde woman’s smile was pained. “No matter how much I whined, or cried, or complained, nothing ever went back to normal. Crybaby Usagi had to grow up. Tsunayoshi is going to grow up, Naru. Though… hopefully in a safer manner than we did.”
“Somehow…” Sawada “Nana” Naruna turns her hands over to clutch at her childhood friend’s, “…I don’t think that it will be.”
