14- You Are My World, Like Literally

After sipping on some tea and some more idle chat, of which Cal watched on in silence with a small smile, Monika opened up by taking out a sheet of paper. "So, we'll take turn exchanging our texts with each other. That way everyone will have the opportunity to both give and receive feedback from everyone. Sound good?" Upon receiving nods and affirmation all around, she smiled pleasantly. "Let's go ahead with the first round then."

Cal, at that moment, had the faintest of pressure comes pushing against his mind after the girl finished speaking, translating into an urge to choose between Sayori, Natsuki or Yuri on who to echange poems with first. But compared to every compulsion that came before, it was a mere whimper of desperation instead of the hypnotizing voices of its predecessor. It didn't help that it also seemed to struggle to influence him at all.

Of course, since he had long chosen to not follow the world's arbitrary path, he crushed the compulsion without any effort and spoke up, bringing the club's members attention to himself. "Actually, I haven't written one."

Meeting the impassive gaze of Monika, the incredulous and then fuming — almost betrayed — expression of Natsuki and the disapproving and disappointed frown of Yuri, as well as the cute clueless face of Sayori. He reached into his bag and pulled his poems sheets out, then showing them to the girls, he flashed a small cheeky smile and in a single move, spreaded the four papers into a fan in his hand. "I've written four of them."

He was met with stunned silence until a small tsk and unhappy grumble resounded. "Damn show off."

"Whoa! Four!? I barely had the time to write one! But... Why though?" Sayori said with surprise, mumbling the last part.

Rolling his eyes, he flicked his childhood's friend forehead lightly, eliciting a pitiful : 'owie' of pain from her. "That's because I worked on them yesterday evening, instead of deciding to write them this morning while also waking up late."

"...Hehe?" 

"As for why, firstly. I wanted to challenge myself a bit, see if I could do something like that without producing lacking or sloppy end results. Secondly, and more importantly. I wanted to make a good impression on everyone, so I made a poem for each of you I think you will like." He smiled innocently saying that. "Maybe it was unneccessary. I don't really care, I don't want to comes into this club and stay mediocre at writing poetry if that's what we're doing. To that end, I don't mind if you all shred into them if harsh critique is due. In fact, I encourage you all to do just that. Oh, and really, don't worry about my feelings, I can take it." Cal explained honestly with a sincere look on his face, looking each girls in the eyes as he did, only adopting a sly glint in his eyes when finally meeting Monika's gaze. To which he obtained a lifted eyebrow and a small uplift of her lips in response.

"So..." Surprisingly, it was Yuri who spoke up next, her soft voice carrying over the silent room. "If I understood well, you wrote one poem specifically for each one of us?" She looked very curious as she eyed the four poems spread before him on the table. Lifting her eyes back to him, she asked. "Which one is supposed to be mine?"

 Offering her a small smile, he picked the one on the right and slided it to her. "That one."

As the purple haired girl took it carefully and began to inspect it. Sayori leaned over the table to look at the three remaining papers more closely. "Hooo~ I wanna read mine too! Cal, which one is it? Wait, no don't tell me!" After looking at them for a second, she just swooped one of them off and retook her seat, a smile on her face as she began to peruse it.

Surprisingly, she took the right one. He had no idea how'd she know, since he hadn't written their name on them. He'd attribute it to Sayo-magic personally.

Shaking his head helplessly at her sheananigans yet having a small smirk on his face. He looked at Natsuki next, who was staring at him rather intensely. "Please stop staring at me like that Natsuki, or you're going to make me blush. Or maybe you just want to engrave my face into your memory? In that case, it's understandable, I'd do the same." He wiggled his eyebrows and winked in an exagerated manner, not specifying if he was talking about his own face or her's

Despite the slight roseness rising to her cheeks, she still made a show of wrinking her nose at his words, as if she found the thought disturbing. The pink-eyed teen then rolled her eyes and grumbled. "You're not funny." And seemingly reluctantly, she slowly grabbed the poem he had slided closer to her and quipped. "This better be good. Else I'll take you up on your words."

"...Well, after this, I think I'd be correct to assume this one is mine, am I wrong?" Monika drawled with a smile as he turned to her. Already reaching to take the last paper.

"No, this one is for myself, actually. No luck for you." After saying that with a straight face rolling his eyes, he grinned and said. "Of course it's yours, now go ahead and read it, It might just surprise you." 

Pursing her lips and squinting at his jab, she nonetheless took her own poem and began to read like the others.

Taking back out his pen to resume his training with it. He thought back on Monika's poem. Somehow, when actually writing the poems, he only had to select a string of words from a mental list for them to be put on paper. But when focusing pretty hard on the act of writing down the words itself, he could remember the specific inspirations and even the thoughts process leading to the rhymes and sentence compositions he used in them. But for Monika, it was different.

For her poem, he had to write it almost from scratch. "Almost", because he somehow managed to have the supposed minigame help him some with it. It made the words he selected and the ideas he had thinking of her wrote themselves on his paper as if per magic like it did for the others, but contrary to them, he had to manually arrange them and make them have sense for this one. Nonetheless to say, doing that under the duress of being mentally stabbed was hard. Yet despite the added difficulty, he had the distinct impression it was still his best of the bunch by quite a bit.

He had titled it SnowFall. And it was both as much a small story as it was a poem.

The story was about a little girl owning a beautiful snowglobe with tiny miniatures of people inside it. It spoke of girl would bring it everywhere with her. To school, to sleep, to the bathroom, everywhere. At the same time, it spoke of how she was too afraid to lend it to other people in fear of them breaking her most precious possession, so she never did. Then, one day, it went about how she noticed that the colors of the minipeople was fading more and more, making the once colorful and vivid scene inside the snow globe dull and dirty with flakes of plastic and grime. Still too afraid to lend it to anyone, she would try to fix it herself. Doing so, she would try opening the globe without breaking it.

And she would fail, by accidently creating a thin hair crack through the glass dome. And in her proceeding panic and haste to somehow fix it, she would make the snowglobe fall to the ground.

In the story, as the globe fell and fell, the little girl would not even try to save it, she would simply stand still and watch in silence as her once most precious thing in the world fell to its end by her own fault.

 When finally the globe would come to shatter on the floor, the girl would be violently ejected out of her house to stumble through the air. Getting a final view of her own glass like sky before it, too, exploded into pieces.

Quite tragic, wasn't it? An entire world resting in the palm of someone's hand, something that could be broken in a blink by a simple accident. Yet, it was the truth. Not everyone was the holder of someone's world, but most everyone had someone who did hold theirs. And everyone would have their world eventually shattered one day, and like everyone else, they would have to try to pick up the pieces. Though, sometimes, the damage were just irreparable.

Here and now, to him and Monika, that whole metaphore was a lot more... Literal, and personal.

He perked up as he saw Monika's eyes widen a fraction and her hands holding the paper tighten and tremble slightly. It seemed she had finished reading before anyone else despite beginning last. Sasuga Monika-Sama he guessed?

He got a sort of muted satisfaction as the girl finally got the courage to look up from the paper and at him with shock, and an undertone of fear. She seemed downright shaken as the realisation Cal knew she had only just now slowly sinked in, her lower lips trembling briefly before she pursed them into a thin line. The gears beginning to visibly turn behind her green eyes as she had the confirmation that not only was he the same as her but that he also possibly knew much, much more her than her.

It probably felt liberating to a point Cal couldn't possibly imagine, and also terrifying in equal measure.

Only because she knew what she could do to the other girls in the clubs would she realize that now the same could potentionally be done to her. Something that probably never came to her mind before.

That very much changed everything. It made him possibly dangerous to her. Just as he himself had found Monika to be able to possibly pose a great danger to him the day before.

But most importantly, he was an unknown. She didn't know his goals, or what game exactly he was playing at, or what he was capable of, or what he was. Nothing.

But while for her he was an unknown, knowing basically nothing. When it came to him, it looked like he knew her very well. 

All those thoughts jumbled and churned inside her head, threatening to overwhelm her, until-

*SCREECH*

The sound of a chair scraping against the ground resounded abruptly as Monika stood up, her face turning apologetic when everyone in the club gazed toward her. "I need to go to the bathroom."

Not even casting a single glance at him or anyone else, she walked toward of exit the club's room seemingly so normally, that if one wasn't paying attention, they wouldn't notice how her pace hastened the closer to it she got. And after a short few seconds, his poem still in hand, she finally left and disappeared out of their views.

...

"Ah, guessed it was just that good she needed some time alone to process it, eh?" He said conversationally when silence stretched for a bit too long.

"Or maybe it was just so bad she really needed to go puke in the bathroom." Natsuki answered him nonchalently, content to resume her read after having said her piece.

Damn.