One.
One of her earliest memories was the way her mother would inhale, sucking in all the bad words and negative thoughts. It was just a quick moment, a graceless pull of her mother's weary shoulders, but it was the earliest warning signal she ever heard.
She had learned to adapt to it. Being told to do the dishes and sullenly retorting that she had homework to do (that she likely had no intention of doing) was the typical evening fare in her household, before she darted up to her room with tentative plans to escape out the window. Being told to do the dishes followed by her mother setting her shoulders and inhaling, and knowing full well what trouble would come if her mother ever exhaled, was something different altogether and Natsuki would always end up hunched over the sink, scrubbing irritatedly at the lasagne stain on her father's dinner plate.
She'd still escape out her bedroom window later, but with unfortunate dishpan hands.
Two.
She had been a small child, frail and useless. Ugly too, as her father had been more than quick to tell her, in a jovial, mocking tone: it was okay that she had been an ugly, frail child with skin the hue of rotten peaches and a head too large for her body because her palette had refined itself, her body had struggled into a proper shape, and it wasn't as if he had meant to hurt her with those comments—and if she was hurt, she needed to toughen up. So, she did; in addition to the untidy spread of make-up on her vanity table, everything from liquid liner to browning oil, she had a copy of Sun Tzu's The Art of War tucked away between her latest egg and her ignored math textbook.
It was the only thing she had ever really bought herself. Magazines and make-up came from her mother in an awkward and often refuted attempt to connect with her haughty teenager daughter, although not without Natsuki first accepting the bounty. Everything else was the product of rare good grades: a new bedspread for her futon when she passed Geology; a rainy, weekend trip to Tokyo when she got into Gekkoukan. The book was all hers, money she didn't have for a book she only thought she needed.
She hadn't read all of it, though. Even without the annotations, it required a complicated understanding of battle techniques and there were some days when Natsuki found herself not caring. Military poetry was all well and good but when it got to things like, "Hold to the valleys / Look out at life ground and take a high position," she just couldn't be bothered – partly because it was useless if she wasn't in a valley.
Eventually, when she decided she was uninterested in fighting any future wars, she gave it to Fuuka.
Three.
She had lied.
"My parents act like I don't even exist," she said. Lies.
Her excuse was that she had no excuse. Her parents were a little distant, a little restrictive, but they were gentle, and then believed in their daughter.
That hurt more than any truth she could come up with, because she only ever hurt them with her actions. (They struck first, she'd think, remembering her father's tendency to comment on the "inappropriate" bronze of her skin, or the length of her skirt, or the fact that her mother made the most horrible face whenever Natsuki expressed an opinion she didn't entirely agree with. She had gotten so good at her little lies that eventually, they started resembling the truth.)
Four.
She had always taken the opportunity to investigate every nook and cranny of her friends' bedrooms. Sometimes it backfired.
The box, the innocuous silver box, sprang open underneath the press of her hands. "Hey, cool gun. Can I hold it?"
Her fingers had just barely gotten caught in the box as Fuuka slammed down the lid, a gasp dying on the worried girl's lips. "Na... Natsuki-chan!"
Natsuki raised a shoulder in nonchalance. "What?"
(If you can keep a secret, sometimes, even then, after reforming in her wicked ways or whatever, she still took advantage of Fuuka's timidity. She could waste her breath all she wanted, but if Fuuka wanted to remain an unrealised force, that was her prerogative – and in any case, she was leaving in a few weeks. She couldn't be the backbone Fuuka used to stand up tall if she was miles away - and it was for that reason that she said nothing, not because the expression on Fuuka's face would likely break her heart, which was another matter altogether – something about lies, and particularly the lies Natsuki used to fool herself.)
Fuuka shook her head, reminding Natsuki of her cat after she was finished teasing it. "Please... please don't do that," she said, locking the box up and pushing it under her bed.
"Whatever," Natsuki retorted, falling back onto the bed. She could see herself in the corner of Fuuka's mirror, her copper hair clashing grossly against the teal bedspread. It reminded her of blood drenched clouds against a green sky, and she didn't know why. "Is it like, some sort of family thing?"
"An heirloom? No, not really." It was a tone Natsuki knew well – something in Fuuka's voice was locked tight. Their friendship was based on the secrets they kept, and who they became when they pushed those secrets away. Sharing had never been for them. She knew full well it involved Fuuka's sudden move into the dorm, the lapse in her own memory, and the weird gun Fuuka kept in a box under her bed. The rest was just shadows, vague silhouettes in her otherwise pristine memory.
It was the little secrets she attached herself to, the ones that didn't mean anything. What was under the bed, what was hidden behind the rows of books, how far could she go before someone got pissed off and pushed back.
She had watched as Fuuka was careful to place the key on a cord around her neck.
She had never found the courage to ask; ask why Fuuka had responded to her extended friendship so warmly, and ask why she remembered—at the very back of her mind, fraught with creeping shapes and laughing empresses—Fuuka pressing the barrel of a pistol to her temple, and pulling the trigger.
"Oh, I know," she said, annoyance lending heat to her words. "You use it to save the world or something, right?"
Fuuka shrank away, evidentally hurt.
Natsuki had spent the next half hour trying to get her to cheer up.
Five.
"Where have you been lately?" Maki asked one day, while Natsuki hunched over her boxed lunch.
She had always been careful. She had flirted with the bad boys at the back of the station, lingering touches and graceful sips of the drinks they had offered, flying high on the buzzing in her blood and the hushed tones of their voices. She had brought home the nice boys, the boys who trembled when they touched her and offered up their good grades and impeccable manners to her parents like penance, like they weren't just using her for some stupid ritual into manhood.
(If she was in more of a duplicitous mood than usual, she'd insist that she didn't care about that, just like she didn't care about the rumours that'd be circulating the school within a week.)
"Uh, cram school," she lied, curling one hand underneath her temple. The movement set of a second wave of nausea, and she pressed her lips together against it.
"You look like shit," Maki had said, picking at Natsuki's tuna. Maki never had her own lunches, she had noticed long ago. "Are you drunk?"
"No," Natsuki mumbled into her hand. "Are you?"
"A little," Maki flashed a grin. "It iis/i lunch time."
Natsuki smiled up at her friend, trying not to think at how the overbearing flourescent lights were hurting her eyes.
Those times were easy; easy lies, easy boys for easy girls. It was what came next that was harder, fear and worry knotted like rusted coils in her stomach, and she purposely focused on all the wrong things — fear of getting fat, fear that the nice boys wouldn't want her anymore — just so she could get from one moment to the next.
When she got what she wanted, she felt only empty.
Six.
Even when she hated Fuuka, she had also envied her. (Maybe that's where part of the hate came from, she didn't like to think about that for very long.)
The stuff Natsuki did was easy: stuff her conscience in a box, lock a girl in a gymnasium, laugh about it in the shadows of an alley way. It wasn't right but it was easy – and she wasn't right either, so why should she care who she hurt?
Fuuka kept her head down. Fuuka was quiet and kind, the archetypal princess. Fuuka lived in a black and white little world, and Natsuki was a spot of grey in her peripheral vision. Fuuka was an ideal, something to be revered, or be destroyed. Natsuki had chosen the latter: because it was easy, because she wanted to, because she'd rather tear someone down admit she was less than them. Even later on, after they had become close, she had still kept the pictures of Fuuka's incident at the bookstore, just for reassurance she hadn't gone soft.
Seven.
When Natsuki got depressed, she started thinking in maybes. She never voiced it aloud, because it'd go against how she felt she should act—"don't waste time thinking, just do what you want," or something along those lines.
She wasn't depressed often, either. Even without the vaguely sulking feeling it inspired with her – she often ended up actually doing her homework when she was depressed, which was just silly – there just wasn't much novelty value in crying. It ruined her liquid line, smeared her toner, and no one ever looked good when they cried. (She had fostered an addiction to telenovelas a few years ago; this was a documented fact brought upon by her watching too much television.) The simplest way to avoid that was to never cry, and by extension, never get depressed. Instead of being sad, she made the best of opportunities – sometimes her idea of making the best of things was finding someone new to break, but that's neither here nor there.
When it did happen, she started to question everything.
Maybe she was wrong, had been wrong, will be wrong. Maybe she had gotten so messed up that she had messed everyone else up.
Eight.
"I wouldn't be able do it," she had told Fuuka, years later, when secrets were no longer a concern. "Actually putting a gun to your head and pulling the trigger? That's way too scary for me."
Sometimes (in the flimsiest possible definition of the word sometimes) she told the truth.
Not often, though.