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Picture Credits: Weather pics
Till Our Lives Burn Out
Chapter 6 – This Is How We Fight
(Part 2b)
… “What is so amusing, Mister Kuryakin?” asked Setsuna.
“Nothing. Nothing at all. Well,” he said, standing up, “this is … nice.”
“It is very ordinary,” Setsuna replied.
“Oh? Some of it is even better than nice.”
“You are just being kind, I think.”
“I am sorry for being such a bother tonight.”
“It is all right.”
“Thanks again for dinner. It was very good.”
“You are welcome.”
“There is quite a bit of room back here,” he said. “If somebody wanted to do something with it, it could possibly rise to the level of …”
“… extraordinarily ordinary.”
He laughed, and she seemed taken aback a bit.
“I’m sorry. I thought you were being funny.”
“Was that amusing? I was merely stating facts, I thought. Hotaru is against any planned, proper garden back here. She feels that flowers should be free to grow wherever they do.”
“Hmm, that’s funny,” he snerked. “At my house, the adults were always in charge.”
She harrumphed, but with a bit of a smile. “The adults are in charge here, Mister Kuryakin. Come along, please. There is a nice group of cymbidium over here by the fountain that Michiru – Miss Kaioh- snuck in. And a wild rose bush over here, though it would make more sense over there…” she continued as she showed him the rest of the modest and unplanned garden.
“Thank you for the tour,” he said, sincerely. “You have been most gracious.”
“Now you are trying to amuse, I think.”
“It’s been very kind of you to tolerate my extended presence here.”
“Not at all,” she said airily.
“Really? I had gotten the feeling this house rarely sees … male company.”
She almost laughed, he was sure of it, though she hid it so well.
“Thank you, for taking care of that … intruder,” she said with a tiny shudder.
“I apologize for appearing to make fun of you. They’re not remotely dangerous. I really don’t see why we have to kill something just because it makes us uncomfortable.”
“Oh, have you no fears?”
“Oh, I have fears, yes, but mine are all perfectly reasonable ones,” he said confidently.
“You were still a bit harsh to me,” she said, but she was smiling a little now, and it was beautiful to see.
“You were a bit hard on my jacket,” he smiled back.
“Oh? Did I damage it? I know how to fix such things.”
“No.” ‘But I almost wish you had.’
“I wonder if you could tell me something,” Setsuna said after a pause.
“Possibly, Miss Meioh.”
She looked like she had to humble herself to say it. “What is the solution to that silly riddle?”
“Riddle? Oh, the two knights? You don’t know that one? You weren’t able to figure it out? Hotaru did.”
“She refuses to give me the solution.”
“Really?” he chuckled. “The Kittens, did they know it?”
“Neither would they tell me.”
”It’s really bugging you, is it?”
“You are close to mocking me again.”
He sighed. “I wasn’t mocking you, and I’m not mocking you now.”
“Please?” she implored in a simple, yet plaintive voice so unintentionally sweet that if she’d used it to ask him to go kill himself, he might have done it.
“It’s all in the wording, Miss Meioh. The king was too clever by half. The king’s words were ‘the one whose horse comes in last.’ So the wise man told them to switch horses.”
“Ah, thus it becomes possible for someone to win equitably by making the horse he owns come in last.”
“Just so.”
“Well, how silly,” she said.
“Of course it is. All riddles are silly once one knows the answer.”
“I hope you have not forgotten your promise to explain the riddle of your unusual abilities, once Hotaru has passed her finals. I am interested to know that part of your story.”
“I’ll be delighted to,” he said. He hoped she had remembered that, but the lack of enthusiasm for it in her voice made him realize for the first time tonight what might have prompted Hotaru to attempt this deception. Not only did she know how he felt, she must really be pulling for him.
“Maybe we could …,” he was going to suggest what amounted to a date, but Setsuna’s natural defenses were on form and, realizing she’d opened herself up to that, she quickly closed that window of opportunity by walking purposively toward the house. He quickly caught up to her.
“Miss Meioh, please wait a moment.”
There was something very gentle about the way he asked that stopped her.
“I guess you have realized,” he began, “that, inevitably perhaps, I have come to care for Hotaru very much. I’ve never met anyone quite like her.”
“You are a kind person,” she responded. “I would imagine that you truly care about all your students, and that is why, ultimately, they do well.”
“Perhaps, but, well, we both know that this girl is special. I really meant it when I said I should be paying you for the privilege of teaching her. I hope you will allow me to follow how she does in the future.”
“You are quite welcome to call or come by occasionally and find out how she is doing.”
“Thank you,” he said. Hotaru’s decision to act now was becoming more explicable by the moment. He thought he was being dismissed again, but then Setsuna looked up at the night sky, calm settled over her, and she seemed to have gotten over the momentary rush of discomfort.
“Lovely night,” she said looking up at a moon two nights from waxing quarter and surrounded by a sea of stars.
“Yes,” he replied, “Very warm, for early December.”
Both of them stood there for several minutes, just looking at the moon. Then he glanced at her, and her eyes were half-closed and she was deep in thought.
‘This is so nice, to be here sharing this night sky with her. Thank you, Hotaru-chan,’ he thought, looking back at the sky.
‘The sky does look lovely tonight,’ Setsuna thought. ‘How … strange I suddenly feel. This is truly not so undesirable a thing, just looking at the night sky with someone …’
Having taken herself out of the picture, Hotaru was desperate to find out how it was going. She went upstairs to spy on them. They had been walking and talking, but she could find out little more from this vantage point. Suddenly, that wasn’t good enough and so the on-the-fly clandestine mission quickly modulated to plans for a more direct approach. She had gone quietly out the front door and stealthily made her way around back. She was good at this sort of thing. She knew that quieting her mind was as important as keeping her steps quiet. She got there quite silently and then reached a nearby tree by timing her steps with theirs. As she settled in to a crouch and took a peek around the tree, what she saw looked promising. They were staring at the moon together.
‘Awww. That’s more like it.’
“I like the moon when it’s lit just a little bit,” said Kuryakin. “It really looks like a three dimensional sphere hanging there, instead of a flat disk of light. You can really see it during a lunar eclipse.”
“Yes,” Setsuna said quietly, “I like the ruddy, copper color that it takes on in the deep of earth’s umbra. Like a glowing ember.”
“Indeed. Blood red, some would say. And Venus is quite bright tonight. If you look hard enough, you can see it’s nearing full.”
“You can see that?” she asked, “With the unaided eye?”
“I’m a little farsighted.”
“You know that the Phases of Venus cycle every …”
“… 548 days, yes,” he jumped in. “One of the ways Galileo ruled out the Ptolemaic system was by observing the phases of Venus. In the Ptolemaic system, it would be impossible for Venus to be full from earth’s vantage point.”
“Indeed,” ventured Setsuna. “Did you know that the people who first brought charges against Galileo were his fellow scientists?”
“Yes,” said Kuryakin, “they were the ones who constrained his research the most. Do you know why?”
“Actually, no,” she said glancing at him, “I never looked in to that.”
“If Copernicanism was correct, henceforth, all teachers of physics would have to know mathematics as well. Galileo raised the bar, and besides a lot of supposedly educated people were going to look pretty foolish if he was right. Galileo's worst enemy was, probably, the Jesuit astronomer Grassi.”
“Ah, yes,” said Setsuna, “Galileo mocked him mercilessly -and deservedly- in The Assayer.”
“That’s right,” he said pleasantly. “There is considerable debate over how much Grassi had to do with it, but there were a bunch of other scientists who wanted Galileo out of the picture. Like Christoph Scheiner. He hated that Galileo got credit for discovering sunspots and that he correctly deduced their nature. Scheiner was the prime mover in the attempt to keep Galileo’s books from being published, and in organizing pressure on the Catholic Church to try Galileo for heresy. Although it was true that by clearly siding with Copernicus, Galileo embroiled himself, and the Church, in the larger questions of Protestantism. That’s what brought everything to a head.”
“I did not realize that,” said Setsuna with a smile.
“Miss Meioh,” he said, with the tiniest hint of provocation in his voice, “second only to the fear of mortality, the other big driver of history … is envy.”
“With that, Mister Kuryakin, I very much agree,” Setsuna smiled. If put to it, she would have to admit she was enjoying herself just now.
Hotaru wasn’t. She sat behind the tree fuming, a perturbed look twisting her face. Here she had gone and arranged all this: a guy alone with a beautiful woman, watching the moon, and what was he doing about it? Talking about Galileo. If this got any more romantic, she was going to scream.
Chapter 6 – This Is How We Fight
(Part 3a)
Epigraphs:
“My king, I must pay the price for my crime …
I was always proud of my duty, my king …
your face is so close … don’t look at me like that …
your lavender cloak, that light purple of the morning sunrise …
-The Death of Sailor Pluto, Nemesis Arc (manga)
“Directly above,” Peter Kuryakin said, looking up, “would be Jupiter.”
“Indeed,” Setsuna said, “Mercury is down, and behind the sun just now.”
“Mars and Saturn won’t be up until early morning.”
“Yes, but Uranus and Neptune are to the south east, over there,” she pointed.
“That’s right, and if I’m not mistaken, Pluto is below the horizon now, down a little from Serpens Cauda, just up from Sagittarius.”
“That is correct,” said Setsuna, sounding a little impressed. “How do you know that?”
“One might say Astronomy was my first hobby. It’s just one of those things I keep in my head all the time. It’s easy to keep track of Pluto since it doesn’t move very fast.”
“Oh, it moves quite fast,” Setsuna retorted, suddenly playful. “Just not from this vantage point.”
“Yes, and it just has such a long way to go.”
“Of course, it does not matter much anymore since Pluto is not even a planet,” she said.
“Ah, yes,” he chuckled, “the IAU meeting. A rollicking good time to be had at that little pointy-headed bore-a-thon, I’ll bet. At least they showed some class in their selection of a host city. Still …
... I, remembering, pitied well
And loved them, who, with lonely light,
In empty infinite spaces dwell,
Disconsolate. For, all the night,
I heard the thin gnat-voices cry,
Star to faint star, across the sky.
“Who wrote that?” she asked, sounding a tiny bit amused.
“Rupert Brooke.”
“Ah,” Setsuna smiled but grimly, “A very minor poet for a very minor planet.”
He started to laugh, but then caught himself, because it was very hard to tell if she was trying to be funny. “It is the glory of science to progress,” he said after regaining himself, “but the rather arbitrary definition they’ve come up with will have to be amended again eventually. The logical conclusion of the procedure they’ve inaugurated is that ultimately there’s no such thing as a planet at all. Would’ve been best to just leave it be. The Pluto system is fascinating by any measure and that New Horizons Probe is a valuable and worthy effort to learn more about it. Perhaps you and I should join the Pluto Pals club at the Jet Propulsion Lab …”
Strangely, she laughed at this, and then looked at him with something like warmth.
“Mister Kuryakin?” she asked after half a minute or so of cricket chirrups filling the quiet night.
“Yes, Miss Meioh?”
“When the moon is full, what do you see?” she asked, finally looking away from him and to the waxing crescent of light.
“What do you mean, Miss Meioh?”
“Some see a rabbit.”
“Ah yes, the rabbit of the moon, pounding out rice cakes. I can see the rabbit, if I look for it. Usually though, I see the face. The Man in the Moon.”
“Why the face?”
“Maybe because I always notice peoples’ faces first. I mean, bodies are unique too, but … well, the body is what you are, and the face is more … who you are. Does that … make sense?”
“A bit,” she said with a tiny smile, casually twisting that unruly lock of hair with her finger again. “In Ancient Egypt, they saw a scarab beetle. Or, so I have heard,” she quickly added.
“Yes, among many other things. People are always looking for the familiar. They don’t like things too much out of the expected pattern.”
“Speaking of which,” Setsuna said, “I am not entirely certain what has gotten in to Hotaru today. She is obviously not ill.”
This was, as always with her, a strange conversation. At some points it seemed like it was about over, and he would get that feeling that she seemed bored and distant, and even wanted to get away from him as soon as possible. Then, just like their phone calls, she would jump in with something else, and it felt like she didn’t want this to end. Quietly in this moment, a sense of something shared came over them: some hidden similarity that drew them both out a little, each in their own way, each on their own path, and now those paths had crossed. A cross is always a collision between two lines, each having gone their way for so long, it was hard to see how either could change course, but perhaps this night all that was needed was to bend a little. Why not admit the woman had driven him crazy from the beginning? She’d thrown him off of every pattern of his behavior in every possible way, and now, standing here, catching the faint scent of lavender about her, watching her subconsciously twisting the unruly lock of her hair, seeing her shimmering eyes, her dusky skin, a faint blush –he was sure of it- coming into her cheeks now and then, he became lost in her. He had meant for this conversation –or something like it- to take place a few days from now. Whenever he thought about that day, he had a very clear idea of what he intended to do, how he intended to do it, and how he would declare himself at the end of it. Hotaru had intervened, and changed this. Kuryakin ran the events of this odd evening one last time. She had plotted to get them together. She must know as well as anyone if ‘the way was clear,’ and she surely knew something about the ways of this woman’s heart. Perhaps he should allow that something larger was at work. The teacher decided to trust the student.
“Miss Meioh,” he said, clearing his throat, “I have an admission to make. I … know what that’s about, actually.”
Behind her tree, Hotaru perked up.
“Indeed? What?” asked Setsuna.
He hesitated and this was only to take a moment to think of, not whether, but how he should do this.
“Anything to do with Hotaru I truly need to know of,” she said firmly.
“Yes, well, it’s … uh … ,”
Setsuna was still looking sternly at him, expecting an answer. He sighed, finally deciding on how to say it.
“Okay …” he said, facing her now.
“Yes?”
“It has been four months … well, three months, 27 days, 7 hours, 32 minutes and 44 seconds since I first met Hotaru … and you.”
“Oh,” said Setsuna, sounding surprised and genuinely impressed, “that is very good. Very accurate.”
“Thank you. I have excellent time consciousness.”
“As do I.”
“Really?” he asked.
“Yes,” Setsuna replied. “One might say it runs in my family. Although I would quibble with the number of seconds, since we saw you before you saw us.”
“Yes, I suppose. Unless we count the beginning of your phone call as the starting point, anyway,” he said, getting back to the point, “… since I first met Hotaru, and you.”
She momentarily lowered her gaze and said, “We are all quite happy with the results. We have every confidence that she shall pass …”
“Miss Meioh? Shhhh,” he said firmly, and she was stunned into immediate silence when he put his hand to her lips and drew –smoothly and inexorably - far too close to her. Her eyes widened.
“In all that time,” he said softly and evenly, “not one day has passed without me wondering what it would be like to kiss you.”
Dawning comprehension about the meaning of the entire day and this man’s current intentions was suddenly very clear in her expression.
“I don’t know how Hotaru figured this out,” he said a bit haltingly. “I swear to you, I said nothing, nor did I conspire with her in any way. I would never, ever abuse a trust. I pray you’ll believe that.”
He was so tall, and close like this, towered over her. Insofar as she could think at all, she did believe him. The meaning of the cryptic napkin was now clear. He was as surprised as she by Hotaru’s behavior. For his part, he paused, trying to read any reaction in her. She was blushing, but more than that, Touch was Knowledge to him. Touching her lips was opening her up to his powers of prescience and insight, and allowing him to see into her thoughts and feelings. The depth of this woman, the things he saw within her, moved him like nothing since the moment he’d first seen her. She was incredibly lovely, yes, and more exotic to him than she could possibly know, but now he saw the long days of loneliness and wondered over the why of them: he saw her intense disregard for her own state, the deep, deep tensions, and that deeply hidden and embattled core of hope-filled innocence and goodness that struggled so mightily to reconcile them. It occurred to him that she was very restrained because nearly anything she felt was too deep for words, and only the very proper and antiquated dialect in which she spoke could hope to express her feelings properly. There was sorrow too, and yet where the sadness concerned her own self, it was, as he had surmised, matched by an almost saintly indifference to it.
Suddenly his mind was made up. If she’d let him …
“I guess I was more obvious than I thought,” he continued, “… and so Hotaru conspired to bring us together tonight.”
It was a measure of how distracted Setsuna had been that this was a revelation to her. Of course, all the strange things that happened today were a conspiracy working toward this moment, yet she only just now fully realized it.
“I guess she thought I might be tired of wondering. And you know what?” he said, as his fingers had migrated to her flushing cheek while his thumb had taken their place over her lips.
“She was right,” he said plainly, as he looked at her face to face through the eyes of fully revealed desire. Somewhere in Setsuna’s mind, a distant voice was calling, screaming, for her to escape. There were a thousand reasons why this must not happen; she could recite them in order with precision and speed; it was all for naught, as she found herself immobilized.
‘No, do not look at me like that … like HE did …the day I died …with such love, such pity for me in his eyes… your eyes, oh, your amazing eyes …’
As he leaned toward her, he hesitated, once, twice, and even a third time, offering her every opportunity to back away. She did not, and then there came a moment - the briefest flicker of her eyes coupled with a tiny, shuddered breath and the slightest hint of …was it a smile?- that seemed to welcome what was coming, and drew him in. She stood there, perfectly still, until there was no stopping, and as he pressed his mouth into hers, his hope that he had given her every fair chance to resist this advance dissolved into a feeling of exquisite bliss. She was tall, but he was still much taller and it was a bit awkward for him. As he cradled her whole cheek in the warm and surprisingly soft palm of his hand, he slipped his other hand firmly around her waist. Her eyes oscillated back to surprise and alarm, and she was very stiff in his embrace. Then, by slow degrees, she willingly softened till her eyes languorously closed, and her head arched backward as he gently pulled her to him. Neither of them noticed as he carefully and effortlessly lifted her from the ground so that he could stand properly. Nor did either of them notice that she had drawn one leg slightly up, like a woman being kissed in some French movie.
How many times since he’d met her had he awakened from the dream of kissing this woman? In his waking hours, how many times had he caught himself imagining it? But the perfume of her silken hair could not be imagined, nor could the sweet, warm, moist taste of her mouth, nor could his shock that this unbelievable woman was letting him kiss her. She began, tentatively, to return the kiss; he deepened it, and realized then that yes, she was knowing, worldly and sophisticated, yet somehow he was almost certain she had never really known the touch of a man in love with her, or ever been kissed. Then came the sweetest moment yet, and such resistance as she still retained collapsed completely, and she let herself be taken away by the wave carrying both of them into a quiet, solitary, soft lit place. When she brought one hand up through the embrace and thrust it into his hair, he was sure that if the other hadn’t for the moment been pinned at her side, she would have done the same with it. He knew now that deep down inside she did have feelings for him. The die was cast; something wasn’t quite right and there might be trouble ahead, but the consequences be damned. As if this would be the only chance he would ever have, or the only kiss she might ever receive, he held her long and kissed her deeply.
Hotaru had really perked up when he mentioned that he knew why she was acting this way today.
‘Was he going to say it?’
Tonight’s agenda was simply about getting them together and talking like normal people, and maybe, just maybe, a shy “you look very lovely tonight, Miss Meioh,” or an “I care for you very much, Miss Meioh,” might somehow find its way out into the open. Christmas Eve, Japan’s Valentines Day, was coming in a few weeks. Maybe by then, they would be comfortable enough with each other he could use that to ask her out.
Now she hid behind the tree with her hands covering an expression of shock, mingled with certain anxious satisfaction. She could not believe what she had just seen. Apparently, she’d underestimated everything: not only his feelings for her, but his courage, and possibly his experience in such matters. Even more incredible, though, was that she was letting him do it. When she brought her hand up through his embrace, Hotaru winced because she was sure she was going to hear the sound of her tutor getting smacked, hard. Perhaps she’d overestimated Setsuna’s restraint, or underestimated what she was really feeling about him. Perhaps Setsuna-momma had underestimated it herself. Him kissing her like that: letting herself be kissed like that; Michiru-momma might be right, and Hotaru shuddered at the thought that she may have started something much bigger than she realized. She had to take another look.
‘Wow, they’re still going at it …’
Setsuna finally worked her other hand free and was stroking his hair with it, too. There was no mistaking that she was kissing him back, her little whimpers of pleasure drawing him, ever deeper, into her soul. He was noticing everything in this moment of rapture, the way her long shapely nails felt on his scalp, the gradations of the dim light on her smooth, dusky yet reddened cheeks, the subtlety of the lavender eye shadow on her eyelids, the downy soft feel of every strand in her silky hair, the warmth of her strong, lean body as it strained against his. She was the woman of Byron's idyll, who walked in beauty like the night; she was Beatrice on the Ponte Vecchio, who, by one seeing of her, altered a man's life forever; or best yet, she was the woman in the Song of Songs, dark and lovely, fairer than the moon, brighter than the sun, terrible as an army on the march. Up to this moment, it was still possible that he could have backed away without too much damage to himself; and then, it was no longer possible. Everything that had gotten Peter Kuryakin this far in his very strange life was swept away; if he wasn’t gone for her before, he was now.
She was forgetting everything as well. She was not Sailor Pluto, the Daughter of Time, who watched from afar over a king and kingdom yet to come, the most faithful servant of the Queens Serenity past and future, and best friend of her dearest love, Small Lady Serenity, heiress of that kingdom. She was just Setsuna Meioh, once and still an orphan child, but now a terribly pretty, twenty year old college student, strong, mature and intelligent, with a talent for physics, who dreamed of seeing her name in lights on a fashion house marquee, who loved children, her part time job as a nurse, long walks in the rain, the odd foreign film, green tea and mint chip ice cream. She was being held, sweetly, patiently, gently, by a wonderfully strange and mysterious man, who despite his often dour expression was the kindest man she’d ever met, who seemed just sort of there at first glance, but then became more and more handsome the longer one looked, whose eyes glistened blue-white and seemed to notice everything, and who -if asked- would also admit to being very fond of children, long walks in the rain, the odd foreign film, green tea and mint chip ice cream.
And then, for a moment all the sweeter for its incredible brevity, they were not even Peter Kuryakin and Setsuna Meioh. They were Man and Woman, Adam and Eve, alone and singular, kissing for the first time in all of creation.
They kissed a bit longer, but finally he parted from her with one last gentle brush of her mouth with his own, and then he let the dazed and lovely woman to the ground. For the briefest moment, she was seized by a desire similar to the one that nearly overwhelmed her that night at the hospital, a desire to take his head in her hands, pull him to her and kiss him in return. She resisted it, though in the days that followed, she wondered how differently things might have gone, had she abandoned herself to the moment, and done so.
“So now you know,” his voice, a gentle rumbling, whispered to her.
It was a curious thing, how natural it seemed while it was happening. She had suspected that this was how he felt. She had suspected her own heart, too, from the beginning, but she had blocked it from her consciousness so effectively –old habits die hard- she was genuinely surprised that she’d allowed this to happen. Then she looked away from him, off into the distance. Like a cavalry charge, those thousand ‘reasons this must not happen’ were rushing toward her now, the most important ones in the van. He could see that she was very troubled now. There was something else, and he looked in great puzzlement at her, watching her very closely, and able to do so more effectively than he had ever been able to before. Then with a disappointment he was only barely able to conceal, he realized the problem. Hotaru had missed something. His eyes closed a little, and he said, “You’re in love with someone else, aren’t you?”
The “yes” escaped Setsuna’s lips before she’d been able to weigh whether she really intended to say it and the gasp from behind a nearby tree was so loud, Hotaru’s cover was completely blown. Looking to his right at the tree behind which she was standing, Kuryakin said “Hotaru-chan, come on out.”
Utterly chastened, she emerged, her chin resting on her chest. ‘So that was what Michiru-momma was talking about. Who could she possibly be in love with?’ Then, with a flash of insight, she thought she knew who. Her mind was racing furiously, wondering why Michiru didn’t tell her. ‘She did, in a way,’ Hotaru admitted. Of course, it almost had to be Endymion, but … that was someone she could never have. And that’s why Michiru went along. ‘She knew, but wanted to see if perhaps Setsuna-momma could accept someone else in his place. Oh no, no. Kuryakin-sensei, what have I just done to you?’
Crouching down to look her in the eye, Kuryakin put his hands on Hotaru shoulders and said amusedly, “We’ve been a very bad girl today.” Her head drooped further. It might have been one thing if he’d pursued Setsuna-momma on his own, and been rejected. She had done it for sound reasons, but she had encouraged him, given him hope where there might not be any, if only for a few hours today.
“You strange, wonderful girl,” he was saying. “I knew you were trouble. I just expected the trouble part to manifest itself a bit sooner. But, to think you care enough about me to figure out how I feel about someone and try to help me tell her … that is the kindest, not to mention most unexpected, thing anyone has done for me here. I was going to try and ask her out once you were taken care of. This … could have waited until after the tests.”
“No, it couldn’t,” she said meekly, “because after Friday ... She’s been so suspicious of you, I was just afraid I’d never get see you again.”
He looked at her with a terribly confused but happy expression. “Wow. I mean that much to you? This is the first time my … pedagogical method … has ever really backfired. The moment I heard your voice, I knew you were going to be more different than any student I’d ever had. I like you, too.”
“You don’t just like me,” she said, almost reprovingly.
“How honest and unafraid you are. Yes, I suppose I do … love you.”
‘Suppose?’ Despite herself, she looked at him a bit angrily.
"Yes, Hotaru-chan, I care for you very much.”
“That’s how you do what you do for people. When someone as cool as you,” –he arched his eyebrows in surprise at that- “takes a genuine interest in a person who is really troubled, it makes them feel the uniqueness their troubles make them forget. You’re a great teacher because you love your students so much, in the end they can’t bear to let you down, no matter what. They’ll overcome anything. Like I have.”
“Heh, well, I don’t know about the ‘cool’ part, but you’re right. That’s not only how I try to do it, that’s almost exactly how I would explain it. The best teachers I ever had taught me in the same way. I was a lousy student, a complete disaster-and that’s not the worst of it. Others made me what I am today. However, ‘the way I work’ is one of those things better left implicit. You are a very insightful girl, Hotaru.”
“I wasn’t insight. I … read your journal,” she confessed.
“Oh? The day that pipe burst? I wondered about that. It wasn’t quite where I left it. I don’t mind for myself, but for the sake of those you read about, you really shouldn’t have done that.”
“I’m sorry,” she said contritely.
“Well … I don’t see there was any malice in your heart, so … it’s okay.”
“I’m sorry for tonight, too,” Hotaru mewed. “I thought she was … I thought she had fallen … The way she was so suspicious of you, I was sure she was just covering herself. And she’s always looking at you when you’re not looking at her. Look, she’s doing it right now. She can’t stop herself. Look at her.”
“Is she?” he asked, while continuing to look deep into Hotaru’s eyes.
“I hadn’t noticed that. I was too busy noticing … everything else about her, I guess. There’s a lot there to notice.”
“I was just trying to help you both. I … I … I’m sorry.”
“I was going to ask her out after you were taken care of.”
“I knew you would. But she is so good at pushing people away.”
“Oh? Well, that explains a lot about today,” he smiled. It was obvious to Kuryakin now that Hotaru had invested a great deal of emotion in the idea of ‘him and her together.’ The look in her eyes was worrisome; it was a look of utter failure, complete defeat. This was really important to her. She may have wanted this more than he did, if that were possible. Setsuna had admitted Hotaru could see the future. Did this all have something to do with that? “But,” he continued, “I wished you hadn’t done this. It’s obvious you were really hoping for something here, and now I fear it’s going to really mess with your head. What Miss Meioh, and the Kittens and I have been trying to do for you is very important. You’ve got finals tomorrow. I wasn’t one bit worried about you passing, until tonight …
(Word Limit Reached)
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