All Right! Fine! I’ll Take You! – Yui’s Lily Garden – Chapter 11 – Sisters

[Haruno]

Impossible man.

I… I should be thinking about Saturday. About all the things I wanted, all the things I gave up on, and all the things that were impossible until they suddenly weren't.

I should be thinking about the woman I've loved for longer than I've resented.

I should be Haruno Yukinoshita, mired in her wounds, hidden behind her masks.

['You wanted time to hurt yourself,'] he said.

…

Impossible man.

He's… Chased me. Found me. Despite me being who I am. Despite me being Yukino's older sister in all the wrong ways.

He's caught me.

I suppress a bitter smile at the thought as I go down the gray sidewalk leading me toward my sister's apartment, a single, middle-aged man's eyes drifting to my lips when I do so, and staying there until I walk past him.

I could flatter myself and think it's because of my beauty, or I could be realistic and think it's because my lipstick has been smeared after all those angry, frustrated, lonely, demanding, yearning kisses I just shared with the man that claims to love me without knowing, by his own admission, what that means.

I hold that thought, walk into the apartment building, and wait for the elevator's brushed steel doors to open.

And there, in the mirror bisected by a black handrail, in front of me, I see Haruno Yukinoshita with her impeccable makeup ruined by demanding, eager, forceful lips.

This time, I don't suppress my smile.

But I do take out a cotton pad from my purse and wet it with just enough of my own saliva to start the meticulous removal of any traces of incriminating evidence.

Because I'm about to walk into my sister's apartment, her home, and the last thing she needs if Yui isn't there to support her is to wonder who her older sister just had some very aggressive foreplay with.

And it [is] foreplay. Because, both to Hachiman and me, sex is more a thing of the brain than the body. And he may not know what he means when he says he loves me, but that doesn't mean, at all, that he doesn't want to make love to me.

I suppress a shudder at the memory of hungry eyes staring me down as he pushed me against the brick wall, at how tall he suddenly became when…

When he angered me enough for me to bite him.

Just… just not hard enough to draw blood.

And I am going to very carefully not think about why that sends such a thrill of disappointment through my spine.

The doors rumble open just as I take away the last trace of understated coral lipstick and, after looking at how raw my lips seem to be, I decide to take a moment to reapply it rather than leave them bare.

Then I am done, and nobody else has called the elevator while I've been inside it, so I…

I run out of excuses to keep stalling.

I get out of the perfectly illuminated display of welcoming wealth of the luxury apartments my little sister currently inhabits, send a quick, hopeless prayer to whoever may be listening that she'll be yet again spending the night at Yui's…

And open the door.

"And where have you been until now?" she greets me from her desecrated white sofa with a frosty tone and arched eyebrow, proving once again that, if there are indeed gods listening, they despise me for reasons that are likely to be perfectly fair and justified.

"Making out with your ex," I say out of sheer reflex and immediately waste the time spent on hiding the evidence.

Which, somehow, ends up with Yukino throwing a pillow at my face and me being surprised enough at it that I don't dodge it.

See? The gods had a point, after all.

***

[Yukino]

Insufferable.

Brash.

Cruel.

[Maddening].

Some say it's hard to describe my sister. That she's capricious enough to flaunt all categories.

They are laughably wrong.

"Points for originality," she says, still contemplating the pillow held in her arms.

"I just didn't have an actual weapon at hand," I answer.

"Your willingness to improve and iterate is a welcome surprise. Really, my dearest Yukino, you're coming out of your shell faster than expected. I should've gotten you laid years ago."

"Must you be so brazen?" I say, allowing my eyebrows to scrounge and my eyes to narrow at the young, beautiful woman lightly throwing the pillow back to its customary spot with a flawless trajectory that will barely need me to correct the results.

Of course.

"Well, seeing as you have always been so insistent on following in my footsteps, you can take my brazenness either as an encouragement to step out of your comfort zone or as a last resort that I take refuge in so that our paths will diverge," she says, shrugging just enough to slide her coat off before hanging it behind my door.

"You are impossible…" I say, trying to sound more frustrated than defeated.

"Funny thing? I [have] been thinking about somebody that fits that descriptor far better than I do. Really, Yukino, how you can so often insist that the woman you've known for years is anything but commonplace is beyond me."

"I don't think an asylum guard ever comes to think of the residents as commonplace," I [don't] mutter.

"Oh, you flatter me so, my dearest sister," she says with a beaming smile as she effortlessly sashays from the entrance to the living room.

And toward her own room.

"I know you like him," I say right as she's about to turn her back on me.

And she freezes.

"I have never hidden my curiosity. Hikigaya is a fascinating young man," she says with careful enunciation and studied indifference.

"Don't skirt around the issue. That's not what I meant," I say, with no less careful calm and…

Damn it.

"Oh? And what, precisely, do you mean?" she says with a salacious smile and a tilt of her head that turns her profile slightly toward me, looking over her left shoulder while standing straight enough that she seems to be posing.

I close my eyes, refusing to meet hers while I go back to the words I already thought, the words I prepared while waiting for my hurt, wounded sister to come through the door and…

And…

And I don't find them.

"You said it's easier to love me," I, instead, tell her, my voice something tiny and fragile that very few people have ever heard outside of the club where Miss Hiratsuka decided to reshape my life.

She doesn't answer.

Not until I open my eyes and see her facing me. Fully.

But not one step closer than she was.

"I did," she answers, softly and melancholic in a way that I know it's Haruno, even if she's never shown me before.

I lick my lips, my dry lips that Yui has taken so many times, and her absent kisses lend me as much courage as I need to keep talking.

"I didn't believe you," I tell her. "Not… Not after everything. But…"

I fall into listless silence, my eyes going from her stocking-clad feet to her lips set into a relaxed, meaningless line of coral that gives me no hints at all on how to proceed.

And then I look at her eyes.

['Lavender. The color of innocence,' she said, pointing at a drawing of a flower in the beautifully illustrated Natural History I had gotten as a birthday gift.

'How can innocence have a color?' I asked with the stubborn, mulish tone of a child presented with something clearly nonsensical.

And she… she looked at me, my sister looking for something in my expression and words that likely wasn't there until she gave up, smiled, and ruffled my hair in that way that always comforted me just a tad more than it infuriated me.

'That's the thing, kiddo: it doesn't.'

I knew that she meant something I didn't understand. That she was saying something smarter than I could handle.

But, at the same time, under Haruno's lavender, all too deep eyes…

At the small hint of approval…

I could only nod and keep reading the book meant to make me smarter than I was.

And hope that it would be just smart enough.]

"But?" she asks in a voice that's not dissimilar to what I heard years ago.

"But Yui loves me," I answer.

Simple. To the point.

Unlike any talk we've had in far too long.

"She does," she says with a nod and a hint of a smile. Of pride.

Of something that makes my throat rough with the hint of tears that I've experienced one too many times in the whirlwind of the past few days.

"Then why don't you love me?" I say, finally daring to put to words something unsaid for years.

Haruno's eyes widen.

But she doesn't answer.

And so, taking Yui's lessons to heart, I…

Push.

"If… If you're right, if I'm so much easier to love than you are… why? Why did you never—"

"That's not true," she says, her short hair swaying side to side in slow, harmonious, graceful denial.

"It is. You… you hurt me. You tease me with things I can't understand, prod at my failings and weaknesses, you [take Hachiman] when I—"

"Don't! No, don't—do you think if things were even slightly different that he would be anywhere other than by your side? That—"

"Things [were] different! I—Yui and I were there, and… and it was slow, and clumsy, but it [was]. And then you had to come in and [judge us] because that's all you ever do, and, suddenly, nothing was good enough just because it wasn't [perfect]. Because [I] wasn't perfect, unlike you—"

A shadow falls over me, and I raise my eyes from my lap.

From the blue, pleated skirt reaching past my knees, bunched in my trembling fists, the stiff fabric shaking over my white sofa.

Away from white, blue, and pale skin.

And into lavender.

Stormy lavender.

"I am the further thing from perfection you'll ever meet, Yukino," she says, her tone trembling with something that I believe to be anger.

"You aren't. You are beautiful, a genius in everything you try your hand at, Mother's heir—"

"I am everything I don't want you to be."

The line is a slap in the face, and I struggle not to recoil, not to sink farther into the sofa's cushions at the renewed rejection, the insult, the…

The tall woman looking down at me.

And, for so long, I've only had two people I wanted to live up to. I've only had Mother and Haruno, the ones who set the unstated bar for what was expected of me, for what was acceptable and what didn't reach what should've been easily accomplished by a daughter and sister of Yukinoshitas.

For too long, I've failed to meet their expectations.

But…

But I have others in my life. People who care about me.

People I care for.

So, as much as I feel Haruno's stare pushing me down, I can also feel Yui's warm, firm hands on my back, pushing me forward, pushing me to move, to act.

To be.

And so, I don't flinch away from the one woman I always strived for.

I stand up.

Haruno doesn't back away, doesn't flinch.

Not even when I reach toward her and hold the collar of her white blouse with a tremulous hand.

"Why? Am I so wretched? So unworthy of being by your side?" I finally, [finally] ask, something old and frigid shattering at the words.

Her mouth falls open, and her lips tremble.

"Yukino… you don't want to—" she says.

"I do. I… As much as you hurt me, as much as you disrespect me, as much as you—"

"That's—that's not what I… I told you. You [are] better than me. Better than I could ever be," she says, her left hand slowly rising up, hesitating to cross the last barrier.

Hesitant to touch my hand.

To hold me.

"At a single thing. I am better than you at a single thing," I say, once again remembering my sister broken and drunk, crying and hurting in ways that I could've never guessed were hiding behind her perennial smirk and careless mischief.

Because… Because I'm not Hachiman to methodically dissect a human being into neatly tagged parts that he can peruse at his leisure.

I am not Yui, to just… to just [glimpse] at someone and [know]. To understand beyond what words can easily convey.

I am Yukino. Yukino Yukinoshita.

And I've failed at so many things that it's no wonder I also failed at this one.

"The most important," she whispers. "You are better than me at the one thing that I would give everything for. At being loved."

Her hand is still frozen, not quite reaching mine.

But, behind me, there's a warmth that doesn't come from me. That I don't have. That I have never had.

A warmth that I have been given along with tender smiles, loving caresses, and clumsy, frantic, panicked declarations.

And that warmth pushes me as gently and as forcefully as it has since I allowed it to.

My fingers wrap around Haruno's hand, and she struggles not to recoil.

"You [are] loved," I say, like an oath or a prayer.

"I… No. They… They just see what I allow them to see, but when they look past it, at what is beneath—"

"I love you, sister," I say despite my eyes stinging and my throat clenching.

Haruno looks at me, and the moisture about to brim over my eyelids distorts how she looks like.

It doesn't matter. It's not like I could ever read her.

But… But I'm holding her hand, and I'm open. I have made myself vulnerable like I haven't in… longer than I remember.

I have done what Yui has taught me to.

Isn't that enough? Isn't that all that I can offer, all that is above what the Yukino of yesterday could never dream of doing?

Isn't that enough to get you to look at me, sister?

Because it hurts. It hurts so much to see your eyes gazing in my direction without ever truly joining mine. It hurts to share so many words that never meet one another, that never become a conversation, ongoing monologues interspersed with polite silences for the other to speak through.

It hurts that the one woman I've always loved despises me so much.

"Yukino… Why do you think I told you that you are easier to love than I am?" she says, the words carefully even.

Affected.

Rehearsed.

Fake.

But I can't play that game. Not now, not when everything is so close to overflowing, when I have allowed myself to be the Yukino that Yui claims to love.

So I don't answer other than by lowering my blurry eyes and shaking my head, my long hair dragging back and forth over my bowed back with the slow show of defeat.

Then thin, elegant fingers shift under mine to return my tight grip, and my chin is pinched in a gentle clasp that still forces me to look up.

Into lavender.

Into lavender that, for the first time in ages, feels innocent.

"Because I love you," she says. "Because I have always loved you, and I always will."

A deft hand pulls on mine, and I trip forward, falling into an embrace that tightens just as we both shake and shudder, slowly falling back down to my sofa.

She's beneath me, holding me.

Not letting go.

And, for once, I understand Hachiman's words.

Of course, the ones I understand are that…

Words are never enough.

***

"I am a mess," she says, cradling my head over her chest.

"You are cruel, petty, and unable to refrain from a cutting remark, no matter how wounded your opponent," I clarify.

"… That's not inaccurate. But also not what I was talking about," she says with a dry tone that belies the rasping breaths we shared until moments ago.

"Then you're obsessed with how you present yourself to the point you're unable to drop your pretense and become vulnerable," I say, not delving into her much-vaunted codependence but skirting the edges of projection.

"That is closer to the mark. Except I can take off any mask I care to at any point," she says, her hand going from the back of my head to trailing her fingers down my hair until she delays, tracing soothing circles between my shoulder blades.

"Then why didn't you?" I ask, my tone lower. Despondent.

Hurt.

She lets out something that could be a sigh or a gasp and hugs me closer, her maroon cardigan as soft as cashmere ever is, her blouse a cotton so smooth that it could be silk.

It's…

I have never been hugged as much, as often, or as intensely as I have been over the past few days. Certainly not by my sister.

But I return it.

My arms go from between our bellies to behind her back, sliding between soft cashmere and a smooth, firm cushion that shifts just enough for me to cling to my sister as I lie on top of her.

"Because…" she finally answers after the silence stretches, and I squeeze her one more time.

"Because?" I ask, not looking at her but to the side, at the wall behind the TV, as her fingers once more caress my hair.

"Because I am ashamed," she says.

"You?" I say, turning up just for a moment to blink at guarded eyes that are still more open than when they try to appear sincere.

Or maybe not. Because she's still Haruno, and I think that… that there are layers. That if she wanted to truly seem sincere and guileless, she would do so.

She did. For a long time.

And then she went to high school, and something slowly changed as her humor became wittier and unrestrained. As empty smiles gave way to insufferable smirks. As…

As my sister…

"You… You tried to be yourself. Fully. Without disguises," I say, finally…

Finally letting something that I had shied away from connect.

"I did," she whispers, her lips turning into a beautifully sad smile.

"And you were rejected," I say.

She nods.

Something… I know it's not…

Middle school. Rumors, stares, and isolation.

Retreating behind myself. Becoming aggressively me. Stubbornly myself.

Showing something harsh and uncompromising. Being who I was, who I should be, and daring them to criticize me while they stood below me.

Learning to believe that it was as it should be. That nothing they said held any import.

And then meeting a man with sharp eyes and a sharper tongue who cared not for how I appeared to be. Who demanded nothing of me but everything I was and could be.

Who shared so many silences, so many implied words, so many barbs with hidden meanings.

Who saw me.

Me.

And… And he didn't reject me.

But he let me go.

"He… He told us. Yui and me. About Miss Hiratsuka and you," I finally say.

Because I'm not Haruno. I don't have her effortless genius, her prodigious insight, her agile mind.

But I'm a woman who has been in love and lost it.

And, maybe, just that is enough for me to understand.

"Of course he did. He has no filter at all, and discretion seems to be as foreign a concept to him as social mirroring," she says with a fond, exasperated smile that stabs me right through my heart.

"You love him," I say.

And her caressing, gentle, reassuring fingers still.

Haruno takes a moment to breathe, to look at me, before she moves, squirming back until her neck rests against the shorter backrest of the L-shaped sofa, and she shifts me on my side so that our embrace remains, but we can look at one another without more strain than that of the two of us trying to be open with one another.

"He… He stalked me today. Came right to my college and waited for me at the exit," she says.

"Of course he did," I mutter, repeating Haruno's earlier sentiment and resisting the urge to bury my face in her side.

"We ended up… Fighting, I guess would be the closest word. And he told me that he loves me." I look at her as she closes her eyes and draws breath, my heart hammering in my chest. "Then he told me that he doesn't know what that means."

I blink at her.

She [smiles].

"You are messing with me," I say with just a hint of forlorn hope.

"Always. But I'm also being factually sincere."

"Sister…" I groan, straining the word in ways I'm uncomfortably used to.

"He's right, you know?" she says, avoiding the derail with her usual bluntness. "There are many kinds of love, and you can't be sure of what each one you feel is. And he… He loves you. Was in love with you. Possibly for an entire year."

"And now he no longer is," I say, finishing the line.

Finishing it incorrectly, judging by the quirk of her lips.

"Don't be stupid, Yukino. A year of being in love with someone like [you]? He won't get over you for a long, long time. He will keep thinking about how things could've been, what could have happened differently, what happiness he missed on. He will be ecstatically in love and happy with another woman, only for a part of his heart to whisper '[Yukino]' and leave him breathless. I expect nothing less from the man who managed to see enough of my sister to realize how lovely she is."

I stare.

At Haruno happily telling me all those things, [proudly] saying them, as if…

As if bragging about me.

"You are lying," I say, not quite knowing why.

"Maybe," she immediately answers. "Maybe I'm understating things. Maybe he'll never be happy as long as he keeps remembering how strongly he felt for you. Maybe, years from now, after wrecking his romance with Shizuka and Iroha, he will show up on your doorstep, unable to refrain from seeing Yui and you one last time, barely able to resist asking you to let him in. To let him come in between you."

The hand caressing my hair is now carefully brushing it behind my ear as her smile turns bitter and wistful.

"And you? If you… if you were with them? Would he also leave you to chase after the ghost of me?" I say.

And she shrugs.

"Does it matter? I don't think so. I think that what you should ask yourself is… If it would be worth it. If it would be worth risking a life with Yui just because of an unwelcome specter of a love that never was."

I don't have an answer.

I…

I longed for him. As much as I dodged him, as I struggled to keep things as they were, I kept wishing he would push me. Break me down. Hold my shattered pieces.

That he would… That he would do to me what he's so often done for and to others.

That he would solve me.

Haruno keeps looking at me, her fingers stopping right behind my ear as she waits for something in my eyes.

And a warmth that was never mine but that I've been given pushes me forward.

"I think… I think we would risk it. If we still felt that way. If when he came to us, Yui and I wanted him… I don't think Yui would let us turn away from something good and bright."

Haruno's smile is not an answer at all. It's tremulous, unsure, and maybe just a tad inviting.

So I continue.

"But that's if. If he came to us. If we still wanted him. And I… I don't know. I think that Yui…"

I think about my earlier thoughts.

About Hachiman breaking me and gathering the pieces. Holding me together as I slowly healed past all the wounds.

He would have, and I would've loved him even more for it.

But Yui…

Yui never broke me.

She caressed the cracks, kissed the pieces about to fall off.

Loved me.

Just… just as I was.

['I want you whole,'] she said, telling me that she wanted me even if broken.

That she wanted… me.

Without solving anything. Without…

Without doing what I thought I needed and wanted until I learned that there was something else.

A warmth that was never mine.

A light to shine through my cracks.

"I think that I can be happy. With Yui. And that she can be happy with me," I finally say.

And, this time, I know precisely what Haruno's smile means.

It's… a small thing. Shy, lost, barely there, trying to be brave even when about to fade.

It's my smile. One of the few I could manage until I was kissed and then taken.

So I drag myself up and look down at her, into surprised eyes as my hair falls all around us and my arms strain while holding me above a woman with open, lavender, innocent eyes.

"I love you," I say. "And they love you. And they will keep loving you because it's hard not to. Because… you say I'm easier to love? You're impossible to forget. You are… You are an infuriating, witty, insightful, brilliant—"

"I don't need a list of—"

"—young woman with a bigger heart than you let on. You are impossible to ignore. You are my big sister, the one I admire and aspire to—"

"Yukino, you [can't] be me. You shouldn't—"

"—the one I've loved all of my life. The one I've chased after. The only one that I… I love Mother and Father. I respect them. But I… I don't want to be like them. I don't—"

She grabs my face and drags me down to her chest, holding me there with trembling hands.

"I know what you're trying to do, and I thank you for it," she says with that detached tone that means she's hiding something. "But that's wrong. That's all wrong, Yukino. I'm… I'm a collection of disparate talents, but I'm barely a person. It… It took Shizuka years to teach me how to talk with people my age as something other than a performance. You've managed so much better than I did with half the guidance… I… I'm proud of you, little sister. I'm so proud of what you've reached already and what you'll do in the years to come…"

Once again, I surround her with my arms, clinging to her, clutching her.

Trying not to cry.

"You can't be proud of me for that. It's… It's them. [Them]. I just… I just let them…"

"You let them love you. And that takes more courage than most ever have."

I shake my head in wordless denial.

She squeezes me tighter against her.

And, once again, we disagree on what we think the world is and should be.

It's just that, this time…

This time it's not a single moment of barbed words with hidden meanings. It's not another exchange of monologues. It's not that we do not understand one another.

We disagree. We hurt. We wound.

But…

But we do it together.

And that's not the end of it. That can't be the end of it.

But it's a better beginning than I could've hoped.

==================

This work is a repost of the first spin-off of the Cakeverse. The whole verse can be found on QQ (https://forum.questionablequesting.com/threads/all-right-fine-ill-take-you-oregairu.15676/), or up to date on my Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/Agrippa?fan_landing=true)—as an added perk, both those sites have italicized and bolded text… Unless something drastic happens, it will be updated on Tuesdays and Thursdays until it catches up to the currently written chapters.

Also, I'd like to thank my credited supporters on Patreon: aj0413, LearningDiscord, Niklarus, Tinkerware, Varosch, and Xalgeon. If you feel like maybe giving me a hand and help me keep writing snarky, maladjusted teenagers and their cake buffets, consider joining them or buying one of my books on https://www.amazon.com/stores/Terry-Lavere/author/B0BL7LSX2S. Thank you for reading!