A Librarian's Wolf
Disclaimer: I don't own anything.
XXX
Yue stared at the scene in front her. Something was ripping at her heart, but she couldn't tear her eyes away.
Was this the jealously she'd so feared, finally taking its hold on her?
It was such an innocent scene. It was such a lovely scene. It was such a horrifyingly heartbreaking scene.
Nodoka was smiling, gently playing with the strands of her teacher's hair. The teacher who looked both amused and annoyed by the attention, his own smile mirroring hers, his eyes so filled with tender care for the girl in front of him.
He loved her back. Negi loved Nodoka back.
Her eyes were burning, her vision blurrily distorting around the edges. A cold, detached, logical part of her, knew that she was crying, and yet her eyes never budged from the image in front of her.
This is what she's wanted, wasn't it? Her best friend was happy; happy with a man who would continue making her happy. It was everything she could've wished for.
She hated every minute of it.
And then she was running, not knowing where she was going, not able to stop, she just continued running as far as her legs would take her. As far away from that image as possible.
Tears were running down her cheeks, she might've at some point knocked someone to the floor without breaking stride. All she knew was running, all she knew was the pain, the unimaginable burning pain as her heart thundered impossibly hot in her throat.
That detached logical part of her mused quietly that this was perhaps why the love-triangles of stories never ended well. Why they all ended in tragedies and death. Death seemed almost a blessing in comparison.
She slammed into something, and as she tried to break free, tried to continue running, she found herself wrapped in it.
There was a voice, calling for her, worrying for her. She could run no further, no matter how hard she struggled, she was trapped by their concern.
So she did the only thing she could. She started crying.
XXX
Kotaro wasn't the brightest of people, but he did learn his lessons quickly, even if only doing so through experience. Thus, when chaos descended into his current living quarters, chaos that was of no fault of his own, but that could very easily be misinterpreted as such if he accidentally got himself mixed up in it, Kotaro did the sensible thing.
He legged it.
Getting scolded later because he'd jumped out of the window on the fourth floor was definitely going to be worth it, just to avoid Chizuru's 'preemptive' household remedies. Apparently, she wasn't going to be waiting around for him to catch a cold if she believed him to be misbehaving.
Suppressing a shiver at the horror of trying to explain to Chizuru that she was completely wrong about whatever situation would end up developing. Kotaro tried not to remember that that was also something he'd learned not to do... through experience.
A woman as wonderful as Chizuru was not physically capable of misinterpreting situations.
Those words had been drilled into his subconscious with a religious zeal that would've made most evil brain-washing villains take off their hat in admiration. Not that Kotaro could acknowledge that without triggering his by now instinctive need not to do so. Chizuru was on a level of power, all of her own.
Still, it was nice. To be able to eat meals together, to have someone fuss over him whenever he got back from training, to have someone remind him to brush his teeth, to have house-rules to circumvent in kind of amusingly sneaky ways.
He might understand why he ought to go to bed when Natsumi reminded him to, since if he didn't he would wake up in the morning without actually waking up until noon, but that didn't mean that there wasn't a certain level of satisfaction in either ignoring her completely, or sneaking off to be awake outside of his housemates' influence.
Granted, he'd quickly learned to not stay out the entire night – so as not to make them worried – to leave some kind of note if he snuck away – so as not to make them panic – and not to wake any of the girls up in the middle of the night by being too loud – so as not to get preemptively cured of colds.
Unfortunately for his current entertainment, he'd gotten sick of exploring Mahora within the first few weeks of living there, and Negi was off somewhere on some teacher-stuff or something, so there wasn't really any way to keep himself entertained. Which was why he'd been meandering across Mahora, not really bothering to pay attention beyond keeping himself from running into people.
Then he got run into.
That kind of ruined his supposed ability to remain untouched within a crowd without paying attention. And whilst it wasn't really something he prided himself of being capable of, it was still something that he should be able to do, so he wasn't all too pleased when he was nearly bowled over by the small shape – in comparison to others, not himself – slamming into him at high speeds.
The fact that the girl – 'the small shape' was wearing a skirt and had long hair – didn't even stop from the actually kind of painful impact, instead merely trying to continue to stumble onwards, made Kotaro remember his lessons on 'manners'. He didn't really understand all that Natsumi and Chizuru had been shoving down his throat since he'd started living with them, but he knew that you were supposed to apologize to people that you crashed into when running full tilt.
Thus, he grabbed the girl's arm.
And nearly fell over again, because damn that girl was a lot stronger than she looked.
Twisting so that he had more leverage, Kotaro brought the girl to a halt, only to suddenly realize who it was.
The shock of seeing the normally impassive-looking Yue with tear-marks on her cheeks, staring more through than at him with eyes so filled with betrayal and pain and-... and horrible-other-thing, was nearly enough to make Kotaro let the girl go.
But he didn't, because that look couldn't be healthy, and she really needed to not continue running if she couldn't even look at him when he was standing right in front of her. A girl running at that high a speed, without visibility? That was just an accident waiting to happen.
"Oi! Snap out of it!" He tried to to shake the girl a little, trying to be careful so as not to hurt her, but at the same time bring her back to acting more normally. It didn't work, and she was still struggling to continue running. He opened his mouth, and nearly called her what he usually called her, before remembering Natsumi's lessons on sensitivity and that emotional people could react really badly to being insulted. "Yue!" So he used her name instead.
Finally! A reaction. Yue's face started twisting in a painful-looking way.
And then he was knocked on his ass because the girl's struggle changed trajectories, and suddenly she was clinging to him and being really loud into his ears, and she was crying into his shirt, and he really didn't know what to do!
This was the super-logical Yue who could defeat him easily without ever clenching a fist, just by overpowering his brain with too much complicated stuff. And now she wasn't doing any of that, instead she was acting like Natsumi. And Natsumi was really kind of fragile and needed to be looked after all the time so that she didn't get herself hurt – not that he'd ever tell her that, because then she'd get mad at him again.
Also worthy of note was the fact that Kotaro had no clue how to deal with Natsumi when she got upset at him. Chizuru was easy to deal with, you either simply ran away and hoped to postpone punishment, or you gritted your teeth and suffered in hopes of lessening the amount of pain in the future. Ayaka was pretty easy to deal with too, since she was kind of an idiot about things, and idiocy was a language that he spoke fluently. But Natsumi... when Natsumi got upset, his best hope was to find Chizuru and convince her that it wasn't his fault but that Natsumi shouldn't be crying and that she should fix it.
Chizuru had tried to explain to him that 'hugging' was an important step in that process, but Kotaro wasn't experienced enough to be entirely sure of when Chizuru was kidding or not, so he hadn't really tried it.
Unfortunately, it was looking a lot like he was going to have to experiment with his hugging-techniques on the midget. Because he couldn't see Chizuru anywhere in the vicinity, and he wasn't going to leave the crying girl alone to go and find her. No matter how frustratingly annoying the girl could get whenever she opened her mouth.
So, awkwardly wrapping his arms around the girl that was sobbing into his shirt, he tried to ignore how he was coming to realize that Yue wasn't the type to whimper quietly when crying, but more the type to wail at the sky for the injustice that she'd suffered. Having sensitive ears when next to a girl – that you weren't sure if you were friends with or wanted to beat-the-snot-out-of-to-make-her-shut-up – whilst she cried and sobbed and wailed into his shirt-... it definitely wasn't pleasant.
He wasn't sure when or how or what, but the way his day was going was clearly proof that he must've gotten away unpunished for some grave injustice previously in his life. And when he got his hands on that 'karma'-guy he was going to beat him up sooo bad.
XXX
Kotaro's arm gently squeezed the girl's shoulders as she finally managed to finish her explanation, allowing the girl – who was actually not taller than him – to lean against him on the secluded park-bench that they'd found.
He didn't really understand why Yue was crying. Or why Yue felt guilty over crying. Or why Yue seemed so wrapped up in her depression and self-hatred to probably be pretty damn compatible with Dark Magic.
This lack of understanding wasn't because he was unsympathetic, but rather because he knew enough about emotions that he was convinced that he wouldn't have a clue as to why she felt like she did, unless he'd been in the same situation himself. And thankfully, for Kotaro, love and romance had never been very high on his list of priorities, making Yue's situation positively alien to his psyche.
But he knew that Yue was sad, and that she felt like she ought to be happy, so she was angry at herself for not being happy on top of being sad. Kotaro had been sad a few times over his life, and was fairly used to being angry at things as well, but to combine the two feelings like the girl had done until it'd become some kind of horrible sludge of bad-ness... It made Kotaro really really relieved that he'd never had to worry about love and romance previously in his life.
So Kotaro sat with the girl whose tears had finally begun to run dry, and listened to the whole parade of personal misery and guilt being dragged out into the open for what was quite possibly the first time.
It was a pretty long tale, and he wasn't overly surprised by the fact that the sun was beginning to set as she neared the end. A little bit annoyed at having had his day so suddenly commandeered by the brainy girl's love-troubles, but not surprised.
There would be other days to spend as he wished, he could spare one in order to watch over an annoying girl who he respected in order to lend her a shoulder to cry on. He'd probably have to wash the shirt though, because there was salty tears which would dry without much issue, and then there was whatever it was that was leaking out through her nose in a most unsightly manner that would probably dry in a most gruesome manner.
Nose-leakage was however, perfectly understandable during the circumstances.
Sighing tiredly, and silently pleased by how the ear-shattering wails had been replaced with hoarse sobs and whispered explanations over time, Kotaro wondered what he was supposed to do.
By now it was obvious that Yue wouldn't be alright on her own, and he couldn't escort her back to her apartment since she shared rooms with the cause of her current misery. Thus, he could either drag her along to wander around campus until someone saw her and decided to help out, or he could aim straight for someone else's apartment and hope that they'd be willing and able to help, or he could drag her home with him and be forced to explain himself to his 'sisters', or he could stay with her throughout the entire night and quite possibly longer whilst waiting for someone else to interfere and make her happy again.
Basically, he could dump her on someone else, stick around where he was, or drag her home with him and be forced to answer more questions than usual.
In the end, his conflict was postponed when there was a welcome distraction as both of their stomachs growled out their hunger in unison.
Blinking stupidly at the sound, Kotaro turned towards the girl with a confusedly dumbstruck expression.
"I think we should eat." He finally voiced.
Yue blinked back at him, red puffy eyes slowly regaining the tiniest shards of amusement through the wounded bitterness that had been occupying them. "I suppose that that would be best." She relented, straightening her uniform.
Standing up proved quite embarrassing actually, as apparently they'd managed to sit on each others clothing, and they nearly tipped over before they made it to their feet. Only to realize that the bout of sobbing had apparently completely exhausted the girl, as her knees buckled underneath her, forcing Kotaro to reaffirm his hold around her shoulders.
It didn't take long to find a place to fill their empty stomachs, but they were both embarrassed and relieved that they hadn't encountered anyone that they knew, since they'd been mistaken for a couple on several occasions on their way to the diner.
The amusingly sad part about those who saw them as a couple was probably the fact that nobody seemed to consider the idea of Yue being in middle school. Kotaro made a mental note to make fun of this aspect of the girl's physical development at a later date.
XXX
Kotaro woke up the next day to the sound of someone pounding on the door.
Groaning softly, he rolled to his feet with the casual grace that can only really be achieved through a mixture of experience and continuous battle-readiness.
Of course, the girls would probably be awake enough to take care of it, but for some reason he felt like he really needed to see who was on the other side of the door, and the only way he was going to manage that was if he answered the door himself.
A tired wave towards Chizuru kept the motherly girl from abandoning her conversation with Natsumi in the apartment's small kitchen, as Kotaro trudged onwards towards the door.
Upon opening the door however, the youth was suddenly reminded of the feeling of being hit with a bucket of ice-water. It was thoroughly unpleasant, it made him want to hurt someone, it completely shattered any lingering sleepiness, and it made him feel quite miserable.
Yue had been crying again, and from the haunted look in her eyes, Kotaro had probably been the only name that had occurred to her when she'd run off. Because she'd definitely run off, the girl's face was a bit flushed, and she was breathing far too heavily to have sauntered her way over.
Kotaro threw a glance behind him, into the apartment, and noticed out of the corner of his eye how Yue tensed.
Now, he might not be the sharpest tool in the box, and he might get a lot of things wrong, but he wasn't stupid. It was obvious that the girl didn't want to see her classmates at the moment, though he admittedly wasn't sure of her reasoning behind it.
"Chizu-nee! I'm going out! I might get back late!" He shouted into the apartment, and barely listened for an affirmative before promptly stepping outside and shutting the door solidly behind him.
He might not get along with her, and she might be annoying, and she might've used up all of his day yesterday crying over her best friend dating the boy that she herself loved, but Yue was still a girl. And Kotaro really couldn't bring himself to imagine the girl crying all on her own. She needed a shoulder to cry on, and apparently she'd only been able to think of him to fill that role.
It would be annoying, but at least this way he wouldn't have to worry uselessly over if she'd be doing alright.
He'd be able to pat her on the back and watch her doing horribly. The surety of her emotional state would at least keep him from fretting uselessly about it.
Then they were off, walking towards an unknown but hopefully private destination. A destination where the girl could unload her misery on someone who wouldn't start feeling miserable too.
Well, at least Kotaro was pretty sure that he wouldn't start bawling over the injustices the girl's love-life had suffered. Which probably put him a step above most of her crazy classmates, fun though they were.
XXX
Kotaro was quickly coming to realize that one of the worst things with being jealous of your best friend was not necessarily the jealousy in itself, so much as it was the painful separation from said best friend that the jealous caused.
Basically, Yue could probably have dealt with her heartbreak fairly well, if she'd been in a familiar and comforting environment, surrounded by people she cared about. Instead, her problem stemmed from the people she cared about, and any familiar places that she might visit were reminders of this.
So Yue didn't want to go to the library and read books on philosophy until she forgot what she was upset about as it was drowned underneath the wisdom of thousands of years of philosophers, because doing such a thing would remind her of Nodoka, her best friend, and as such also of the pain.
This caused a problem for Yue, as it proved that her hobbies couldn't be committed to, and her schoolwork – which was associated with a certain redheaded teacher – was also unavailable for her to find comfort in. Even her recent studies of magic had been a cause of pain, and she was quite disappointed in herself that she would find the emotional upheaval too great to be quenched even by the joys of magic.
Kotaro stared at the map he'd found of Japan, trying to figure out if he could drag her off on something that would not continuously remind her of her heartache, like Mahora did.
He really didn't have a lot of experience with traveling, despite his years as a mercenary. Sure, he'd traveled a lot more than most people did, but it was usually related to fighting and battles, giving his memories of most location a very different sheen than what might be found from visiting such a place peacefully in an attempt to distract someone for long enough that they could get their legs under them and let the world continue moving.
Honestly, he would've loved to ask Chizuru or Natsumi about this kind of stuff, but he got the feeling that they'd be pressing for details, and then they'd be insisting on talking it over with Yue, despite how the girl obviously didn't want to talk to any of her classmates right now. All of this meant that Kotaro needed to figure it out on his own, since apparently researching locations for a vacation was something Yue had spent quite some time doing with Nodoka, making it another one of those things that he should avoid rubbing salt in.
It wasn't going to be a long trip, more a day spent away from sadness than a true escape, before she would be tasked with once again braving Mahora campus. Though, Kotaro was trying to think up plans for allowing Yue to avoid meeting Nodoka directly in the immediate future.
Sighing heavily, Kotaro wondered what Yue could possibly find entertaining enough that she'd be distracted from Badness, whilst at the same time not be something she'd done previously so that she'd be reminded of the Badness. It was a dilemma.
It wasn't even as if Kotaro knew how to do much more than punch things, anyway. Hobbies, books, homework, all that stuff was pretty new to him. Even his magic was obscure when compared to the widespread stuff that Negi did.
Kotaro blinked.
He could do magic – that Yue enjoyed studying – of a different kind than what Yue had ever studied before. Heck, maybe he could teach her how to throw a punch too. He was pretty sure she'd appreciate knowing how to do that, even if she preferred solving her problems by using all that brain-stuff, and he couldn't remember anyone ever talking about Yue learning how to fight.
It'd be like... the perfect distraction.
Awed by his own moment of brilliance, Kotaro started scanning the map for a good place to train in.
After all, it wasn't like he could make use of Eva's resort without stumbling back into the painful territory problem that he'd originally set out to solve.
XXX
Yue was miserable.
Because of her current inability to look at Nodoka without feeling as if someone ripped the heart out of her chest, she wasn't able to spend time with her friend, or any of the friends that she'd made whilst she was Nodoka's friend.
Yue wasn't entirely convinced that they were still friends. Nodoka was important to her, no doubt. But how can two people be friends when one of them can't look at the other without fleeing in tears?
Thankfully, Nodoka's relationship with Negi-sensei at least kept the girl too distracted to notice her heartbreak, which gave Yue time to collect herself, if nothing else.
She couldn't avoid Negi. Not really. He was her English teacher after all, and she wasn't going to skip class and be singled out as acting weirdly. She wasn't ready for that kind of confrontation yet.
So, Yue went to lessons that she couldn't pay attention to, and spent time not glancing at the girl she was seated next to in an effort to keep anyone else from noticing her strange behavior and confronting her about it.
Her only real escape from the misery of her existence was the fact that Kotaro didn't seem to mind being cried on. He wouldn't ask questions – or would simply not pry when she didn't want to actually answer questions. He wouldn't try to fix things between herself and her friends. He wouldn't try to convince her to win over Negi. He wouldn't try to convince her that she was somehow better than what Negi deserved. He wouldn't try to come up with a way for both her and Nodoka to share Negi. He wouldn't react violently because he was in love with Negi and was upset about someone else getting to his heart first.
Admittedly, having only your insane classmates around to listen to your worries, was perhaps not the most ideal of situations.
So, when Kotaro declared that he would be teaching her a completely different form of magic, that would force her to forget everything she'd ever learned about it previously, and that he would also teach her how to fight properly, because she was all weak and scrawny, she'd been... surprised.
Staring curiously at the boy for a long moment, as she was too startled – both by his sudden declaration of a well-thought out plan, as well as his embarrassed blush and the weird stuttering-thing that had lead to his first insult since she'd first run into him on that day – to actually think of a good response.
In the end, Yue decided that her weekend was probably going to be quite interesting indeed.
XXX
Yue took a deep breath, then opened the door.
"Yue? Ah, where have you been?" Nodoka wondered, having apparently noticed that her best friend hadn't been present over the weekend.
"Camping." Yue readily admitted. "I needed a bit of time away."
"'Away'?" Nodoka tilted her head in confusion, before realization began to dawn. "Oh! Yue-!" She looked suddenly both horrified and guilty.
"It's fine. I'm happy for you." Yue nodded. "You make a nice couple."
And even if her heart still stung, Nodoka's nervously relieved smile was all that Yue needed to see to know that things would be alright, someday.
XXX
"Eh? Kotaro-kun! What happened to your face!?" Natsumi exclaimed, when he opened the door.
Kotaro blinked, looking confused, before reaching up to touch the still somewhat tender skin around his eye.
He grinned happily at the two worried girls. "Yue has a mean left hook." He declared with enthusiastic pride.
"Yue-chan did this?" Natsumi sounded horrified. "Why would she do that?"
"How else was she supposed to learn?" Kotaro asked the girl as he scratched his head.
"You've been teaching Yue-san to fight?" Chizuru guessed.
"Yup!" Kotaro nodded.
"Umm... shouldn't you have... you know, healed it?" Natsumi asked quietly.
"Nah." Kotaro waved the thought away. "There are lessons to be learned from healing at your own pace."
Natsumi didn't look convinced, but she let it go without further comment.
In reality, him not healing his black eye wasn't a lesson for him, but a lesson for her.
The lesson was that wounds can't always be healed with a wave of the hand, and that some people can get seriously injured if you start a fight with them. Well, that and it served as a reminder that it was alright for healing to take time, regardless of the sort of wound it was.
It was a very philosophical lesson, one that Yue had actually been really impressed with as a result. Though of course Kotaro had described it in a way that was far less... understandable. It wasn't as if he'd ever tried to teach someone before, and most of the lessons he'd tried to convey had been stuff that he himself had been forced to learn by trial and error.
He loved to fight, so of course he'd tried to fight against all kinds of people. And of course one or two had gotten themselves hurt enough from fighting him that it left him feeling guilty afterwards. And sometimes he'd gotten beaten down badly enough that it'd taken him weeks to return to some semblance of normalcy.
Healing takes time. Don't cause injuries when it's not necessary.
It was a dual lesson. A lesson that Yue would hopefully take to heart.
That the black eye was something that he himself also considered maybe a little bit deserved, was obviously not stated to the two girls with whom he shared a home.
Violent bookworm. How was he supposed to know that she'd been naked at the time? It wasn't as if she had anything worth staring at anyway.
XXX
Slumping down next to the girl on the bench, Kotaro wondered not for the first time if perhaps 'love' was really just an awfully horrible kind of flu, or something.
It certainly seemed to make people act really weirdly.
"I thought you two made up?" He finally asked into the silence, his tone carefully non-accusing.
Girls kept getting angry at him when he accused them of things. He'd never understand the opposite gender, they were so weird.
Yue, thankfully, didn't take offense. "We did." She admitted with a brief nod.
Kotaro turned to stare at the girl, feeling a sudden urge to grab her and throw her into the nearby river so that she'd react to something, rather than sit there all prim and proper. "And?"
"And what?" She faked obliviousness.
Sometimes Yue pissed him off with all of her refusal to admit to stuff that were freakishly obvious to anyone who actually looked at things. Then again, it was fully possible that it was a girl-thing. Girls were so weird.
"I mean, why are you here and not there?" He gestured in between her current seating and the general direction of 'away'.
"Do you believe you have the authority necessary to dictate where I sit?" She raised a criticizing eyebrow at him.
Kotaro growled, considered the effort of finding something solid to smack his head into, and settled for glaring at the girl. "Dictate-smictate! Why aren't you spending time with your best friend?"
Yue didn't answer, her lips thinning into a complicated expression best described as nervous frustration.
Giving up on getting an answer, Kotaro slumped back onto the bench, turning his eyes towards the pleasantly blue summer sky.
It was hard to tell how long they spent like that, Kotaro staring up at the few fluffy clouds drifting across the sky and Yue staring out at something only she could see, but finally Yue voiced her reason.
"I'm happy for them. But Nodoka is 'Negi-sensei's girlfriend', not 'Yue's best friend'." She finally admitted. "Her priorities have shifted, I don't blame her for it... but it makes talking to her... awkward. And that hurts."
Kotaro studied the girl's face, trying to figure out exactly what she'd said and translate it into something that made sense.
"She's moving on to bigger things?" He guessed hesitantly.
Yue winced at the bluntness, but nodded.
Sighing heavily at the realization that this was a different kind of emotional wound to the girl in front of him, Kotaro tried to think of something to say. "... That sucks." He finally declared, making a face at the thought of it.
Yue nodded in agreement, but didn't say anything more.
Her best friend had 'stolen' the love of the boy that she herself loved, and when she finally got over it enough to deal with it, she realized that her best friend had drifted away until the social dynamic of their previous relationship was turned on its head.
So, in virtually no time at all, she'd both lost the boy she loved, as well as the understanding of her closest friend. It was a miserable series of events, no matter how much sense they made.
Of course, Kotaro wasn't big on the thinking-side of things, and it wasn't like teaching Yue how to fight ever actually got boring in particular. It got painful though, because the girl could be sneaky as all hell, and... well, she had a wicked left hook.
"Wanna spar?"
Blinking stupidly at the change in subject, Yue turned to stare at him for a moment, before a sudden smirk appeared on her face. "Sure."
XXX
Nursing his sore ribs, Kotaro wondered if Yue had been getting enough sleep lately, because it couldn't be normal to sit down to catch her breath and then fall asleep instead.
The thought that the girl hadn't been sleeping well also made him uncomfortably hesitant to wake her up. But it wasn't as if he could just leave her where she was either.
Torn between two options, Kotaro did the third one.
Picking the girl up into his arms, he began the trek back towards her room. He could probably have convinced Chizuru to let her sleep in their apartment, but there was no need to complicate things without reason. Yue was asleep, and even if she'd been having trouble sleeping, she'd settled well enough from her pain that she probably wouldn't be horribly adverse to spending the night in her own bed.
He could guess that Yue might have a different opinion on things when she woke up, but she was a girl, and girls were weird.
XXX
Nodoka got up to answer the knock on the door, curious as to who would be knocking on it this late.
And found Yue curled up in Kotaro's arms, Kotaro who looked casually resigned to the whole thing.
"We were sparring, then she fell asleep." He explained simply.
That was news to her, because she didn't know that Kotaro and Yue sparred together. It made her wonder what else she'd been missing out on lately.
Motioning him inside, she pointed out Yue's bed for him to put her in.
Kotaro's face remained relatively bored with the entire procedure, but didn't seem to mind it terribly either. Though, when he finally lay her down on the covers, and realized that the girl had somehow managed to grab a hold of his shirt, Nodoka heard him mutter something about "stubborn bookworms" as he tried to pry her hand loose, all while wearing a face that was... complicated in a way that she didn't think she'd ever seen before.
There was exasperation and fondness, annoyance and pride, amusement and worry. There were probably more emotions flickering across it that she'd managed to miss too.
And so when Kotaro finally excused himself and the door was closed behind him, Nodoka was left curiously staring at her best friend and wondering just what the girl's relationship with the younger boy was.
XXX
Kaede smiled and inclined her head at the mercenary with her thanks. This was certainly the kind of situation that she'd pay to see.
Purely for her own amusement if nothing else.
"They make a nice couple -degozaru." She nodded to herself as she looked down at the two who were having a friendly spar – despite the insults that they seemed to be trading along with the blows – on the grounds below.
Mana shrugged, her face not shifting from her usual mask of careful neutrality. "They still have a while to go." She pointed out.
Kaede smiled at her. "They're probably a bit young still." She conceded. "But they'll grow."
Mana's lips turned up in a small smirk. "Yue-san is only four days younger than you."
"Are you implying something -degozaru?" Kaede narrowed her eyes at her friend. The same friend who was technically younger than Yue by a day.
"Not at all." … 'old lady', was not said, but it was most certainly implied.
XXX
Kotaro continued to grumble about being used for manual labor until Yue began pulling out her Library Exploration Equipment, at which point he carefully reclassified library expeditions from 'boring' to 'potentially very interesting'.
He still grumbled when Yue began loading his arms up with books though. The damn things were heavy.
"Do they make these things out of led?" He wondered out loud with a wince as another book was added to the pile that he was already carrying.
"They're made from paper." Yue deadpanned in response.
Kotaro threw a suspicious glare her way. "You sure?"
"Otherwise Nodoka would never manage to carry book-piles taller than half her height." Yue stated with her regularly blank face, before turning to him with a slightly curious expression. "It isn't too heavy for you, is it?"
Kotaro opened his mouth, then registered the challenge and hurriedly replaced what he was going to say. "Of course not! No way would I be bothered by something as light as this! I ain't no pushover!"
Yue's evil smirk was completely hidden from him, as the girl had been smart enough to turn away from him before letting it through her carefully crafted mask of innocence.
They continued walking – 'walking' being a somewhat relative term in the obstacle course that was Library Island – for a few minutes before Kotaro found something that he could allow himself to complain about without sounding weak.
"I don't get why you'd need so many books though, I mean, they're pretty useless." Not wanting to sound weak has nothing to do with whether or not he should put his foot in his mouth and talk fluent idiocy.
Yue's shoulders twitched. And only when she turned around with a calm expression that for some reason made alarm bells shriek through his mind, did he remember that Yue liked books, and that he'd just insulted them.
Not that the books had any feelings to feel insulted by, so she couldn't get mad at him for that at least, but she certainly wasn't happy with him right at the moment.
"'Useless', are they?" Her eyes were alight with a kind of terrifying glow that made Kotaro seriously consider dropping the books and bolting for the nearest exit – only that would've made her angry at him for harming the books, and then she'd be even scarier.
"Umm... Well, you know, it's not like you can learn to fight from a book." Kotaro hastily defended himself.
Yue, her face not shifting from her frightening expression and eyes not moving from his own, reached out and plucked a book off the shelf, holding it up so that he could read the title.
"'Martial arts through the ages'?" He tilted his head, confusion and curiosity distracting him from Yue's scariness. "What's history lessons got to do with fighting?"
"It explains the various documented fighting styles developed over hundreds of years. It might not be a perfect 'how to'-guide, but it can certainly hint at techniques – and situations where such a technique could be useful – that may be possible for a dedicated fighter to learn." She explained in her usual deadpan, scarily focused eyes still not wavering from his own.
Kotaro gulped nervously and decided to try for peace. "Can you add it to the pile?"
The scary expression shifted into a small triumphant smile, and with a nod it was added to the top of the pile.
The pile that was already a bit too heavy for Kotaro's comfort. Not that he was going to admit that to the girl in front of him. He was a man after all!
XXX
Natsumi felt her jaw surrendering to gravity as she finally found Kotaro.
Kotaro, who was reading a book. He didn't even seem annoyed at doing so, and it didn't look like he was doing his homework – something that he'd grumble a lot about. He was just sitting there, a pensive expression on his face as he read the book.
He didn't even seem to have noticed the smell of Chizuru's cooking, so immersed in whatever he was reading was he.
It-... It boggled the mind. Kotaro didn't read books, Kotaro didn't sit around calmly and think, and Kotaro most certainly didn't not notice that food was cooking in his vicinity. The entire scene was enough to make her seriously worry that the younger boy had been replaced by a pod-person. And that kind of insane conspiracy theories should only be considered by people like Makie.
Turning back through the doorway, she hurriedly waved for Chizuru to come over, before helplessly pointing towards Kotaro's quietly reading form in an effort to explain her panicked incomprehension.
She was immensely happy that Chizuru looked confused about the scene too. It proved that at least she wasn't hallucinating.
XXX
"Was it any good?" Yue's lips climbed upwards in the tiniest of smirks.
Kotaro's face twitched in reluctance. "It was interesting." He admitted after a moment.
Yue considered her sparring partner for a moment, before a feeling of exasperated resignation came over her. "You couldn't replicate some of the techniques, could you?"
"Why doesn't it explain!? It never works! It can't work! I'm gonna find the author and shove the book down his throat!" Kotaro exploded, ranting about his frustrations.
Yue hid a wince, she hadn't meant to upset him with the book, only force him to recognize that the written word held an importance that he shouldn't dismiss out of hand. "Did any of the techniques work?" She tried to find something positive inside of his frustration.
Kotaro opened his mouth, then closed it again, before petulantly looking away from her, mumbling something incomprehensible under his breath.
"Sorry?" Yue absently mimed her inability to pick up on what he'd said.
Sighing, as if he was readying himself for a task he didn't enjoy, Kotaro raised his volume. "Some of them work, but most are just... insane." He shook his head. "There's a lot of stuff you can do with chi, and a lot you can do with magic, but... some of the stuff that book hints at is... it's insane, doing it shouldn't be possible. It's like-... It'd be like a whale flapping its fins and flying to the moon."
"So... it's impossible?" Yue felt a slight tug of disappointment at the thought. Magic had made everything seem possible, and to realize that there were things that could once more simply not be done in her life was a bit saddening.
"The hell it is." Kotaro growled, narrowing his eyes at the thought of giving up. "Most of it is probably exaggerated, 'cause story-tellers don't care a lot about accuracy, but the ideas are there, and if I could just... figure out the lower levels on how to understand the techniques..." He shook his head. "Which is what's pissing me off, 'cause nobody uses anything like that, and that means I've gotta develop it all over again from scratch!"
Yue blinked, then tilted her head as she considered what he was saying. "So... it's a challenge?"
Kotaro twitched, turning towards her with a confused expression. "Wha-?"
"It's difficult to do, correct?" Yue explained her statement. "And if it's not worth working hard to achieve, is it truly something worth having?"
Kotaro stared at her for a long moment, before a feral grin began to stretch its way across his face. "It's definitely a challenge." He agreed.
Yue felt her earlier smirk return as she saw the adventurous spark in the boy's eyes.
She didn't want a sparring partner who was planning on giving up at first sign of adversity. And she didn't like seeing Kotaro so obviously frustrated about something that she wasn't the cause for.
It wasn't like she didn't frustrate him enough all on her own with her logic, that he didn't get his daily dose of the stuff anyway.
XXX
Kaede snickered helplessly as she watched her classmates get ready to exorcize the pod-person that'd taken away Kotaro.
The greatest part of it was perhaps that Yue kept opening and closing her mouth, looking hopelessly confused about 3-A's newest adventure.
It wasn't that Kaede hadn't been surprised when she found Kotaro studying books with an intense expression, merely that it was so obvious where he'd been influenced to do so. Especially since neither Yue nor Kotaro ever seemed to bother to hide their 'rendezvous' from the rest of the class.
After all, if Kotaro had managed to convince Yue to do physical exercise, then it was only a matter of time before she got him to read books. Or drink weird-tasting juice.
The fact that, from what she'd gathered, Kotaro was only reading books closely related to fighting – and a few dictionaries for when he was confused about a word – meant that he hadn't even changed his usual focus of interest, merely the way that he expressed it.
So, no matter how odd it was to see Kotaro surrounded by books where he sat quietly and read, it was hardly pod-person-strange.
XXX
"It's not funny." Kotaro grumbled.
Yue raised an eyebrow. "Whatever you say." She said, though her expression appeared to very much disagree.
Knowing better than to get into a word-fight with Yue when he was already losing ground, Kotaro let it slide, and instead continued to try to brush away the weird things that class 3-A had been throwing at him in an effort to exorcize the pod-person that they'd mistaken him for.
It hadn't been a great day, all in all.
XXX
"I'm going out!" Kotaro called to Chizuru. "I might be home late again!"
"Have fun!" Chizuru called back. "And tell Yue I said hello!"
Natsumi looked up from her homework and wondered when exactly it'd become normal for Kotaro to go out with Yue and come back home late.
Her conclusion was...
"Wait! 'Go out'!?" Natsumi scrambled to her feet. "When did I start thinking about it as if they're dating!?" She demanded indignantly of her subconscious.
"Natsumi-chan?" Chizuru curiously peeked in from the kitchen at her exclamation. "Are you alright?"
"Kotaro-kun is too young to date, right?" Natsumi stared intensely at her roommate.
Chizuru tilted her head thoughtfully. "Oh, I don't think you'll have to worry about them doing anything... naughty, until at least few years from now. Yue is quite a sensible girl after all."
Natsumi's jaw dropped. "B-B-But-... Th-That's-... " She shook her head. "They're seriously dating!?" She finally asked.
Chizuru smiled conspiratorially. "Ah, don't tell them. I don't think they've noticed that they are yet."
"Huh?" Was Natsumi's eloquent response.
Chizuru sighed a little at the girl's confusion. "They're still young, Natsumi-chan. And I don't think either of them really understand what it means to fall in love. One day, when they figure it out, they might realize that they're already a couple, but until then they're just considering themselves as good friends."
"But Yue-san is our age." Natsumi dismissed her roommate's belief of being older and more experienced than their classmate.
"And had a crush on Negi-sensei, that she first abandoned for the sake of her best friend, but that she then lost to that same best friend. She knows what it's like to blush and stammer in front of someone you admire, but she's not exactly the most social of people." Chizuru argued. "And Kotaro-kun is... well, he's still trying to figure out both friendship and the concept of 'family'. Trying to learn what love is, on top of that would be too much to ask of even the cleverest of souls."
"So... they're not dating?" Natsumi asked, feeling confused.
Chizuru smiled. "They're good friends. And one day, I'm sure that they'll stumble and realize that they want something more from the other than mere friendship. But that day is not here quite yet, I think."
Natsumi considered this silently for a long moment. "Is this good or bad?"
Chizuru raised an eyebrow at the girl. "Would you like to try and capture Kotaro-kun's heart for yourself, Natsumi-chan?"
Natsumi spluttered.
"Because if you do, you'd better make your stance clear right away, before Yue can get deep enough that she'll get burned by love a second time." Chizuru pointed out to the girl with a slightly sad expression.
"I'm not! He's a kid! I don't-!" Natsumi shook her head, trying to calm down. "It's just... I worry about him, 'cause he's an idiot and all that."
Chizuru frowned slightly at the girl. "Natsumi-chan. If you hurt Yue-san by not realizing that you want his heart to yourself, then I'll be angry with you."
Natsumi opened her mouth, then closed it again. "That's not it..." She finally sighed. "It's... weird. He's not my little brother, but he is, you know? I don't want him to get hurt." She stifled a giggle at a sudden thought. "Oh, but can you imagine their kids? They'd be so cute."
Chizuru stared at her roommate for a long moment, before joining her in her giggles. "They would be, wouldn't they?"
XXX
Kotaro stared at the woman in front of them, trying to keep himself from blushing at what she was hinting at.
Yue was already bright red from the tip of her nose all the way to her ears, but whether that was from embarrassment or indignant fury remained to be seen.
Sure, he'd picked up some mumblings from the crowd of them being a couple – or classmates, something he teased Yue for to no end – every now and then, but this was the first time that it'd been so blatantly thrown in their faces.
If she'd merely told them that they were a cute couple, they might've blushed a bit with their denials and then continued on their way, but that wasn't what she'd done.
The woman in front of them had hinted – rather covertly, which was why Kotaro had been struggling to suppress his blush after Yue had already succumbed to hers – that even if they did make a cute couple, they were still much too young to be walking along after dark. Which had generally been both embarrassing and annoying, because who'd honestly try to convince Kotaro that he wasn't capable of protecting himself after dark despite his youth? But the way that she'd said it was as if her problem with their youthfulness was at how she was hinting at the two of them spending the night... elsewhere. Together. In bed. Doing... stuff.
Kotaro couldn't actually splutter, because his vocal chords had apparently decided to tie a knot of themselves and had then gotten lodged in his throat in a way that made it really really hard to breathe. But if he could've, he would've spluttered more amazingly than even Natsumi could've ever done.
This was mortifyingly embarrassing, and Yue was standing next to him, and he kept remembering just how hard the girl could punch if she actually wanted to.
Then something crossed the red-faced bookworm's face, and she spun towards him in a sudden move that startled him badly enough that he actually made a strangled 'eep' despite his current inability to breathe properly.
He wasn't sure if he was supposed to be apologizing for something, though it was fully possible that he ought to and just hadn't been informed of that yet. But before he could make another sound, his eyes locked onto hers.
There was embarrassment there. Oh, absolutely, the embarrassment was enough to pour into a bathtub and go for a swim in. And yes, there was anger, a frustrated fury that made Kotaro bizarrely pleased with himself for memorizing his current escape routes on a previous occasion. However... the thing that made him halt his thoughts on desperate retreat, was the mischievous defiance sparkling their challenge at him from those eyes.
"I'm too young to be legally held accountable for my own actions." She stated in a smug monotone, much to the confusion of the woman in front of them, before the bookworm's hand suddenly latched onto Kotaro's shirt by its collar. "So, screw it."
Kotaro had exactly two and a half seconds to wonder just what in the world she was planning on doing that she didn't want to be held legally accountable for, before her lips landed on his own.
He didn't really think at all after that.
Or... well, his thoughts at least stopped questioning her, as they were far too focused on enjoying the moment to bother with pesky little details like the fact that the woman behind them were making outraged noises at their daring.
Kotaro had never really understood why all the girl's in Negi's class were so obsessed with kisses. Kissing didn't sound like a pleasant thing to do at all, with all of that saliva, and the problems with breathing, and all that stuff.
Kotaro was however, rapidly coming to the conclusion that kissing Yue wasn't a bad thing to experience. In fact, he was hoping to experience it again sometime soon, or possibly not actually stop experiencing it at all.
Yue was breathing through her nose, and even if that was clearly not enough for her breathing-related needs at the moment, the warm air of it tickled his cheeks in a way that made it hard not to smile. Her body was pressed against him and at some point her hand had gotten tangled in his hair, massaging his ears with an absentminded gentleness that made his own arms tighten around her waist in response. And his eyes had closed in an effort to not get distracted from it all and simply just feel.
It was... it was better than fighting with Negi. It was better than eating Chizu-nee's cooking together with Ayaka and Natsumi. It was just about on the same level of awe-inspiring wonderfulness as waking up in the morning and knowing that he was home.
Only, he knew that people eventually got used to waking up at home, and sometimes he could guess at what that must be like. But... he didn't think he could ever get used to this. To classify this as a normal thing to experience.
And so, Kotaro lost his first kiss to a girl he loved. A girl who'd studied the phenomenon known as 'kissing' most thoroughly, and had picked up a few tricks on how to do it as a result. Not that she'd ever admit to that.
By the time that Yue withdrew, her lips having turned puffy in an extremely attractive manner, her eyes warm with happy triumph, and her hair a bit tussled from where one of his own hands had gotten tangled at some point, Kotaro wasn't entirely sure what they'd been doing earlier, or why they were outside, or even if he was actually awake at all or simply having the strangest and most pleasant dream that he could remember.
A thought briefly surfaced amongst Kotaro's somewhat muddled thought-process. Dreams fade away until they are forgotten.
Thus armed with the horrible possibility of forgetting all of this when he woke up, Kotaro decided to make the most of it while it lasted.
He pulled Yue in for a second kiss. And, much to her appreciation, this time he made sure to attempt to recall every single thing that he'd heard the class of 3-A speak of when it came to kisses.
By the time they emerged from their second kiss, both of them were quite a bit too dazed to remember what they'd been doing standing in the middle of the street in the first place.
The woman who'd caused it would've most likely reminded them by being outraged at such indecent behavior, but she'd been removed from the equation by a certain passing-by mercenary who'd decided that it would be easy to convince Nodoka to foot the bill for her services in this matter once it was explained to her. The girl wanted her best friend to be happy, after all, and would most likely be just as supportive to the girl's love life as said girl had been to her own.
Thankfully, neither of the two members of the newly minted couple gave too much thought on the matter, and it was quickly decided that Kotaro would be escorting Yue home.
That much of the time that he spent escorting her was interrupted by sudden, wonderful kisses shared between them was something that neither of them minded terribly.
XXX
Nodoka stared at her roommate who'd just kissed Kotaro goodbye on the lips.
A distant part of her made a mental note to be a bit more daring with the time she spent together with Negi in the future.
"Yue-chan?"
Yue jumped a little, startled out of whatever thoughts had been running through her head as she'd watched the door that Kotaro had disappeared through. "Eh? Nodoka?" And showed that she'd been so utterly caught up in what was obviously her new boyfriend to notice that her best friend had most definitely noticed her behavior.
"How long-...?" She trailed off, curious, but still not sure if she ought to ask.
"One hour." Yue answered bluntly, before blushing again.
The distant part of her noted that that must've been one very productive hour for the girl to look so... thoroughly kissed. What with her tussled hair, disheveled clothes, puffy lips, and warm, bright eyes.
"I-I see." Nodoka stuttered, trying not to give voice to that distant part of her that had probably been in too much close contact with Paru to be entirely trusted.
But as she saw her best friend slowly slipping back into her happy daze, there was something that needed to be said.
"You make a cute couple."
A bit startled, Yue turned her way and beamed a smile at her.
And perhaps, life was just kind of funny that way.
XXX
A/n: I always enjoyed this pairing, even if I will never dislike the way it went canon-wise. So I decided to try and write a story completely focused on the two of them falling in love in a somewhat believable manner. Hopefully, it was enjoyable.