Disclaimer: Don't own it.
"The matter does not appear to me now as it appears to have appeared to me then."
-Baron George W. W. Bramwell
1) Tachibana An has an opinion on everything.
2) She also has no problem telling people what these opinions are. Who cares if no else agrees or if what she thinks makes other people mad? That's not her problem.
3) Thankfully An, despite this, is rather good natured in general so most of her opinions are positive and people tend to see her as guileless instead of just tactless.
4) An is the reason that her older brother had blonde hair for most of middle school. Upset with him for not allowing her to go with him and his tennis friends to a festival she put hair bleach in his shampoo not caring that she was almost certainly going to be in trouble for it later.
5) Fortunately Kippei, who has always been rather indulgent of his younger sister, covers for her and tells their parents the he had done it himself, later promising An that he would bring her with him to the next festival.
7) An hates feeling left out of anything. She doesn't even like it when her friends get detention without her. She always feels like she's missed something important even though she knows that this is highly unlikely.
8) She currently collects hair clips. She has ninety-three pairs that she keeps color-coded in separate zip-lock baggies so that she can always find a pair she likes.
9) An, once she has formed an opinion, rarely changes it. She will hold onto most of them, for better or worse, until the day she dies and even then she's counting on rigor mortis to continue the job for her.
10) Her close friends and family can count on their hands the number of times they have heard her admit that she was wrong. It is usually done with an extreme lack of grace on her part and only tends to occur after a great deal of forceful persuasion from those around her.
11) There is a secret stash of cheap paperback romance novels hidden in the back of her closet. No one knows about them and An has taken great pains to insure that they cannot be traced back to her if they are ever discovered.
12) It's not that her family would disapprove, they're far from traditional. But Kippei, despite his newly acquired stoicism, used to be a hooligan and can still be an awful tease. So writing Property of Mitsuki on the inside of the front cover of all the books in handwriting that is deliberately dissimilar to her own is not paranoia, it is a necessary precautionary measure against humiliation.
13) An adores her brother. He is one of her favorite people in the entire world and as such she tends to see him as blameless in all situations no matter what actually happened.
14) After he injures Chitose-niichan's eye she secretly blames the other boy for not ducking faster for nearly a month before quietly letting it go. This is unreasonable even for her and she knows it. She believes that it is one of the greatest blessings of her life that she never voiced this opinion aloud as she would feel even more foolish for it than she already does.
15) An knows that Kamio has a crush on her; it's why she teases him so often. This is not done out of malice but in the hope that she can aggravate him out of his infatuation before he confesses. She likes him she really does . . . just not the way he likes her.
16) She also bears the rather dubious honor of being the only person who really listens to Shinji once he gets going. This is a fact that serves not only to boggle the minds of the majority of the school but it is also where An gets her more creative insults. Shinji can be rather colorful when he believes he is being ignored and some of the things he says make even her blush, a task that is no easy feat.
17) Before Nationals An was convinced that she would never completely forgive Kirihara for injuring her brother. She no longer actively wished him ill but he made her irritated and she was determined to avoid him at all costs.
18) While at Nationals she met Yukimura Seiichi who embodied a kind of pretty that she had only previously seen in a boy in various interchangeable shojo mangas and she spent the whole of the encounter resisting the temptation to dump water on him to see if his ink would run. She does not hear more than a few words of his extremely eloquent attempt to redeem his kouhai and, realizing this, he invites her out for coffee to try again.
19) She goes. But at the time it's born more out of a desire to spite her brother, who in a bout of overprotective instinct tried to forbid her, than any real desire to see the boy who invited her.
20) By the fourth date she cannot say the same and he has stopped talking about Kirihara completely.
Prince of Tennis
A/N: Yay! An's twenty things are now complete. The whole AnYukimura thing sort of snuck in there without me realizing it but now I'm kind of hooked on the idea and I'm thinking of doing a short story, about five chapters, based around things 18-20 if the idea generates enough interest.
I plan to do Tomoka next and then possibly a Miyuki.
Reviews and constructive criticism are, as always, much appreciated and adored.