Chapter One: The Notebook

The knocks on the door rang louder than expected.

Hachiman pressed his face to the door and started talking through it in a kind of voice which sounded both hushed and loud at the same time. "Yukinoshita, be reasonable. Let me in. I can explain everything. Please Yukinoshita, I am begging you here. It's all a big misunderstanding. Just hear me out for a second, okay."

There was no immediate response but then with the faintest of clicks the door unlocked. He gave her a moment to gain back her composure and return back to her seat and so he stayed waiting outside for a moment longer than either of them deemed to be fit given the circumstance. But no words were exchanged and the silence grew unbearably uncomfortable. In the end, he strengthened his resolve and pushed the door open, walking into the teacher's lounge which at the moment seemed to be bereft of a teacher. At last, something went in his favour, he thought. The look of relaxation gracing his face seemed to be taken grossly out of context by the only other occupant in the room.

To call her angry would be an understatement. Yukinoshita Yukino was positively livid and the person soon to incur her wrath was none other than the pervert having the gall to keep standing in her presence. He should be down on his knees and grovelling. "You simply got lucky, Hikigaya-kun. Hiratsuka-sensei seems to be indisposed at the moment. But not matter, I think most teachers would sympathise with my plight and take the appropriate course of action. Rest assured, I will not be denied justice and you will get your rightful comeuppance. I only opened the door to humour myself and watch you beg for mercy. Pray, don't stand on ceremony and start pleading for what remains of your worthless life."

"I am sorry okay! I should have taken into consideration that you might get offended. But to be fair I never even thought about it getting into your hands. It was mine and mine alone. You weren't supposed to have it. But you did and I guess I should apologize for not having the foresight of knowing that somehow, someway you might get a hold of it eventually." He looked at the coffee table separating the two of them and made of move to get closer, taking a step towards the couch where she was sitting like a queen, ready to sentence him to death, silently chanting off with his head over and over again, until even a look from her cold eyes made him flinch and rethink his strategy of reducing the distance between them and throwing the offending piece of garbage which lay innocently on her lap. In hindsight it was the farthest thing from innocent for it contained the deepest, darkest secrets of his rotten heart. "Did you read everything?"

"How can you ask me that? Have you no shame. This thing is vile and disgusting and I am disturbed by its contents." Yukinoshita scrunched her nose and picked the said object from her lap using only her thumb and index finger, as if it was toxic to touch and filthy to the bone. "Even I would not be so cruel as to subject my worst enemies to this kind of mental tortures. Please, refrain from thinking so lowly of me, but considering what you have already written in these pages, I think I am far too late to make such a request of you."

"C'mon Yukinoshita, give me a break, already! That was not meant to be seen by another person, least of all you. It contains some personal stuff, nothing too out of the ordinary. I am sure lots of people write these kinds of things, you know. You are just making a big deal out of nothing." He tried to make the crime sound offense less, shrugging his shoulders and shirking the guilt which lay upon him at the discovery. Not for the first time he thought back to the reasons that made him write everything down on the pages and then forced him to keep write them down, word by word, whenever the fancy seized him. He blamed his youth, his rotten imagination, and the way the light and the wind played with her long raven locks and how her hair fell over her soft blue eyes and how with a twirl of her fingers that stray lock of hair was tucked behind her ear. It was all calm, serene and beautiful. "Moreover, how can you be sure I wrote about you. It could be a completely different girl or more likely, a girl from by my imagination. It would explain everything. After all, it's only fiction."

"Oh don't you dare call this vile thing a piece of fiction. Fiction is sacred. It's literature. The books, the novels, the short stories, the biographies, the collection of poems, everything I have read up until this moment has nourished my mind and replenished my thoughts. Every word, every sentence had a different meaning to unravel, a new treasure to unearth and a new world to discover." She narrowed her eyes and looked at the notebook with unbridled hate and then dropped it unceremoniously back on top of the coffee table. It made a soft thap sound and it was equally disgusting. "What you wrote here is not fiction, Hikigaya-kun. It's pure pornography. I always thought you had a rotten mind, but I never imagined your depravity to know no bounds. I am beyond shocked and repulsed by the things you have written in this notebook of yours." She tapped the glass instead of touching the notebook. "This is disturbing."

"You are making a huge deal out of this for no reason. I know what I wrote in there and it's not as filthy as you make it sound. Yes, some of the details might be a tad graphic for your tastes but I did not ask you to read it, now did I?" He asked rhetorically, while moving inside the room and heading to the far end of the wall and leaning against it for support. "People write smut all the time. It's a different genre on in itself. You must have heard of the French artist back in the renaissance who wrote erotic literature, right? How is what I wrote different to theirs? It might be of a far, far, far more inferior quality, but that's because of my lack of writing skills. I can't say this enough times. What I wrote in that notebook, I wrote for myself and own reading pleasures. It was not meant to be read by anyone else, least of all you."

Yukinoshita glared at him. Her eyes had followed him the whole way as he walked inside the room and never for a moment did her composure slip to showcase any kind of vulnerability or weakness. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he understood where her anger was coming from and despite his best attempts it made sense for her to be angry with him. Perhaps he might have been too, had someone else written a story based on him and riddled it with numerous sex scenes. But hypocrisy was a gift of mankind which kept on giving and it was cool to be a hypocrite anyways.

"How would you feel if I wrote such a thing about you?" Yukinoshita asked. "If the shoe was on the other foot and if it was you sitting here instead of me, contemplating whether to report you to the teacher for what clearly constitutes as sexual harassment." For the first time he noticed the tears in the corners of her eyes. "Over the last couple of years I thought we had developed a grudging friendship between us. I did not like your methods, I never will and I thought you respected me enough to refrain from using them in the future. But you never did. You continued to do what you please, use whatever methods and schemes you could concoct, all in the name of getting results and though I will never like what you do, I thought you at least felt something, perhaps a little bit of guilt or experienced a modicum of sadness at the times I verbally, repeatedly forbade you from using those rotten methods. But it seems you never listened to me and why should you even bother listening to me." She spat out bitterly. "From your stories I am nothing but an object of sex." Her shoulders shook with suppressed rage and she clutched the fabric of her skirt tightly as tears slid from her eyes and ran down her cheeks. She was trying to control her sobs but it wracked through her body and made her cough. The filthy notebook which made her feel so small, so little, so weak and vulnerable swam across her vision and she hugged herself with both hands to feel at least a little bit of warmth. Before his very own eyes the confident and superior façade of the Yukinoshita Yukino was crumbling down and never before in his life did he experience such heart wrenching guilt.

"It's not like that." Hachiman stopped leaning on the wall and made to move forward but he stopped in his steps at the hand raised in his direction. Yukinoshita did not want him to come any nearer and this time around he understood her reasons quite well. But it hurt nonetheless. He tried making sense and failed horribly. "I respect you, Yukinoshita. The girl I wrote about in the notebook was not you. There might have been some similarities, like the colour of her hair or the colour of her eyes or the shape of her body or the size of her breasts; well you know what, now that I think about it there might have been more than a handful of similarities, but it's not the same thing." He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "Look, you are you. You are the clubroom president who teaches people to fish instead of giving them a fish and I have nothing but respect for you. Those stories, especially those sex scenes that you hate so much they have nothing to do with you. I don't expect you to take off your clothes in the middle of the day and start kissing me or anything. I might die out of shock if you ever did that." He turned his head to the side to evade the look in her face. "I like you the way you are: uptight and bitchy."

"Uptight and bitchy are not words commonly use to describe someone you like, Hikigaya-kun." She wiped her eyes and looked at him. The hate in her eyes had lessened to anger and the glare had lost some of its edge. It was still cutting and cold but not lethal and biting. "Though I have found a new fear for the things you might like. Your notebook is filled with numerous grotesque things and every one of those seems to be your liking. But to me they seem nothing but demeaning for the fairer sex." She pursed her lips and threw a look of disdain at the notebook. "You have listed numerous sexual acts and played out several fantasies in these pages, none of those which seem plausible but then again you might say that that's why these are called fancies. But I am afraid they paint a poor picture of your views on sexual matters, an even poorer picture than I expected, seeing as this is you we are discussing. You have to understand, this creates problems for me in my interactions with you. I look at you and I expect to see the oaf from your work." She bit her lips and met his eyes. "In other words I no longer see you, Hikigaya-kun."

"It's the same thing with me, Yukinoshita." He repeated. "I am not the guy from the notebook. I don't even know how to seduce you. I have no plans of inviting you out on a date and booking a hotel room to have my wicked ways with you. You don't have to worry about me in that way. I am still the same rotten guy you always knew. I didn't change. I am just the same. The only new thing you found about me is that I write a few smutty stories for my own entertainment and one of my female characters bears a striking resemblance to you."

"You named that character Yoshino." She rubbed her forehead trying to ease the approaching migraine. "I don't know whether you were being lazy or whether it is your lack of imagination or more likely, you gave her that name on purpose. Even the first syllables match my own name. It's like you were not even trying to hide the similarities." The glare was back with a lethal force. "You know what I think? I think you wanted me to find this, I think you wanted me to read this, and most importantly, I think you want me to do these things to you."

He was getting tired of all these nonsense. "If I really wanted you to find this notebook then I would have left it on the freaking table where it is easily accessible. But instead I always, always, put this thing in my school bag and zipped the chain closed. You only found it because you were being nosy. No one asked you to snoop into my stuff. You found it today because Yuigahama was not there to stop you from going through the contents of my bag. No one asked you to go looking for it. You just wanted to find it on your own." He leaned back on the wall and crossed his arms. "It's your own fault, Yukinoshita."

"Don't you blame this on me, Hikigaya-kun!" She thundered. "I am not the one who made it a habit of writing in that thing during club hours. I and Yuigahama-san were sitting right there and you were busy writing in that notebook and ignoring us. It was suspicious from the very beginning but I chose to ignore it because I did not think to intrude in your pastime activities unless it started to effect the functioning of the club. It did not and so I had no quarrel with you. But then over the past few months or so, I saw you looking at us in between intervals and then resuming your writing. There was nothing particularly disarming about your stares. It was just a look but it was enough to have me thinking. But I never expected such sexual fantasies. And to think you wrote all of this while having tea and biscuits with us. You have robbed the service club of its innocence." She bowed her head and refused to look at him. "I dare say it will never be the same."

"Zaimokuza writes the same stuff." He said, trying not to be affected by her words. "I have seen you critique his manuscript from time to time. You don't get outraged by his works. You think logically about it and give reasons for your dislike to his treatment of sex. Why you take such an offense to mine? It is the same thing. Just like Zaimokuza, I wrote some smutty chapters and called it a short story. Unlike him, however, I don't plan to publish this."

"My family will sue you for slander."

He blinked at the threat. It came out of nowhere but it was incredibly plausible. The Yukinoshita family was a powerful family and he had written a sex scene featuring their youngest daughter. Yukinoshita Haruno will have his head. They won't ever find his headless corpse. "Well, like I said, I don't plan on publishing this. Hell, I don't even want anyone else to find out they exist. I wrote it for my own use."

"Your own use." She repeated the words with a bitter taste in her mouth. "Oh yes, nicely put. I know the exact usage you speak of and I applaud you for your choice of euphemism. It is neither too blunt nor too frank, yet it spells out your character completely and in turn makes you out to be just the kind of man you are; always the selfish one, thinking about yourself, looking out for your own satisfaction, uncaring to the plight of others and obtuse in the face of the sensuous." She levelled him with a withering look. "You are pathetic."

He blinked in confusion. "Okay, I am pretty sure the last bit made no sense." He made a face and for the umpteenth time he tried to move closer to her. She froze at his approach but did not make any move to stop him.

"For a mind such as yours I doubt whether anything does." She shook her head and carried on in her explanation. "Your portrayal of sexual intercourse in your stories is no different than the rutting of baboons in the forest. It lacks finesse and I would barely call it human. There is no emotion, no sentiment, no love, no affection. There is simply a surface and the meeting of flesh and the most ridiculous words put together to mimic sounds by throwing in an exclamation mark in the end. Had it been not so detailed, I would call it rather juvenile. "

"Sex doesn't always have to involve emotions." He argues. "Emotions leave you vulnerable, leave you open. If you are not careful then there is a chance that you might get hurt. The protagonist knows this. He even makes it clear to the female lead that he can never love her. She is never forced into having sex with him. It's just the only thing that they can have and they make the most of it." He levels her with a puzzled look. "I don't know what all the fuzz is about. People have sex all the time. Some people write about it and some people read about it. It's all so harmless."

"But it's not when one of the female character is based on me." She argues back. "It's dishonourable and insulting to know you think of me in this way. The protagonist does not love her, he lusts after her. It's a huge difference."

"And the protagonist is well aware of the difference." He repeats. "So is the girl. It's their choice, it's there life and most important of all it's my ideas, my story, and my notebook. You don't get a say in this, Yukinoshita."

"No, I do!" She shouts. "This female character of yours is based on me. So, you think I can only be lusted after, not loved. I don't believe that. I might appear cold and aloof but I do have a heart and it is capable of expressing feelings." She looked him in the eye. "These tears of mine are not fake, Hikigaya-kun."

"I know." He looks back. "And that's why the protagonist of this story is not based on me."

"I don't understand." Yukinoshita blinked back her tears. "You wrote this. You wrote about me."

"Yes." He repeated. "But I didn't write about myself." He sighed ashamed. "I am not a part of your story, Yukinoshita. Not anymore. From now on it's your life, your choice, and your future."

"That will never be my life." She replies. "You should know that by now."

"I do." He affirms. "Thus, the need to absolve oneself from emotions. It lets go of attachments, lessens the pain. In the end you were right Yukinoshita, I am incredibly selfish and this notebook is indeed for my own personal use."

Yukinoshita realises the truth. "It's a fantasy."

"Yes." He nods. "Of what never can happen."

"It's a lie then?" Yukinoshita asks.

"It's not necessarily the truth." He explains. "But that doesn't mean it has to be a lie."

"I don't understand." Yukinoshita asks.

"Maybe someday you will." Hachiman replies. "Goodbye Yukinoshita."

"Wait," Yukinoshita reaches out to him. "Don't you want this back?"

The notebook hangs in the air between them. He looks at her and then at the notebook and shakes his head. "Keep it. It's a good read."

"I don't want to be a part of your perverted fantasies, Hikigaya-kun." She states.

He looks at her sadly. "It's a pity I couldn't be a part of yours."

It's the last day of their high school life and Yukinoshita has tears in her eyes. She is left crying with a notebook in hand and thoughts of a loner in her mind. The thoughts never leave her. But he does. Like he said, he cannot leave himself open to her affection, he cannot change. He is who he is and it's a real tragedy.

He cannot give love a chance.

Author's Note: First time writing a Fanfic. Tell me what you think? Will the ship sail or sink before it even reaches the shore.