Nico Loves Maki

Summary:

While out walking together, Nico and Maki discover a neglected shrine.
Anxious about the possibility of parting after graduation, Maki wishes
to make the most of what time together they can share. Nico resolves
to be the best girlfriend she can possibly be. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .


Nico woke up in pain, which was a surprise. Not the pain, the waking up part.

It didn't feel like she was in a hospital. When she opened her eyes, she realized she must be still dreaming. She hoped. The sky was smokey browns and reds, as was the barren landscape. She, herself, was lying on hard, baked ground. The dream didn't seem to go away. She saw a faint shadow fall on her. She looked in the direction it came from, and there was her reason for not existing.

Nico couldn't really even remember the last time she'd been exactly happy, but the last straw had definitely been when she found out the latest reason Maki never answered her messages, even to mock them, was that she was inhabiting a drawer in the city morgue. But there she was, in the flesh. Or something like that. Looking at Nico with that amused look she'd gotten so sadly familiar with.

"You got it, Nico-chan," she said. There was something very dark and supernatural about her voice now.

"M-M-maki-chan!" Nico couldn't help yelling.

"N-N-N-Nico no more!" was the response, in a fake-sweet sing-song voice. "Welcome to hell, honey-y. Better get used to it."

Since Nico knew she'd wake up any time now, she wondered why in her dream she'd abandoned her normal attitude towards Maki, which had been to be completely self-denying, while Maki was alive. Maybe, on top of everything else, she was angry at Maki for not caring if she finally overdosed or not.


A day of confused, frightened, increasingly frantic thoughts later, not daring to move from her lying position, Nico realized it didn't matter if she was dreaming; whatever it was wasn't going away.

Maki had come back, and with bread and water, to boot. Which was ... good. Nico had never in her life felt this hungry and thirsty. When Maki got closer to her, she suddenly tossed the bread to the ground, and ground it in with her foot. Then she watered the mess with all of the water in the bottle she'd been carrying, and threw the vessel overhand. It arced out over a cliff and Nico could hear it smash on the way down.

"M-m-m-Maki-chan!" Unfortunately, Nico was again reduced to incoherence.

"N-N-N-Nico!" Maki smirked. "Doing you a favor, honey."

Nico must have made a confused face. Or an angry one. Or both.

"You're oh so hungry and thirsty, right? Of course you are," Maki said, nodding her head and shrugging.

"But the water and bread here? They just make it worse. Much worse. And .. WE" Maki pointed to herself, then Nico. "Don't need to eat or drink, anyway. Or sleep. Or go to the bathroom. All of that is for the live ones. And you're as dead as it gets, Nico-chan."

Nico must have still looked confused.

"Look. Ignore it. Ignore it long enough and it's just like being on a diet and dehydrated. Nothing you can't bear."

To take her mind off the pain and the hunger and the thirst, Nico's mind wandered to the big "why" that had filled her thoughts as she lay back and everything faded to black.

"Why? Why did you .. why did you hate me so much? What did I ever do but love you, Maki? What did I ever do to you, ever?" If they didn't need to drink, Nico wondered where tears came from here.

"Ah, same old Nico-chan. That's just what the doctors' daughter ordered," said Maki with a laugh. It couldn't be called a nice laugh, though it wasn't a cartoon villain laugh, either. It had a lot of bitterness and cruelty.

"Nico, honey, you mean the note, right? The one for you to read once I was dead? Blablabla, I never loved you, you were always a hateful, ugly, stupid, worthless drag on my time ... let's see .. what else did I say ... oh, you were lucky I took pity on you but you took advantage of it like the dumb little loser parasite you've always been. That letter was a lot of fun."

She looked at Nico with genuine enthusiasm. "Remember when I said the only people that would ever possibly want to f_ you were old, fat lolicons? And that that was why you always missed your dead father so much, because you were horny and ugly and missed his d_? That part made Anju and Erena laugh so hard ... so hard Anju wet herself."

Maybe this was the afterlife hell of confusion. Maybe, because Nico didn't understand a word Maki was saying. Of course, she remembered every hateful, painful, soul-destroying word. But Maki was acting like it was a game. Like it was fun. Why would Nico have ever been devoted to someone who could do that? But as she had the thought, it was followed quickly by another one. Regardless, she had been. She still was. Loving Maki wasn't something you could walk away from, if you were Nico. She thought she heard Maki mumble something, like "Didn't make the sex bad, though, we were so high."

But then Maki looked her in the eye. "The why should be obvious, but I bet it isn't. The point of the letter was to make you kill yourself, Nico. Sheesh. Connect the dots, for once! And it worked, obviously."

"W-Why ..." Nico began.

"I figured hell would be boring, and it is. So if you get to bring just one album, or one pet, or one stuffed animal, you make it your favorite, right? So I decided, 'let's have my favorite chew toy. Her reactions are so cute and hilarious when she's being humiliated, after all.' "

"Not that," Maki continued, holding up a finger for emphasis, "I didn't think of bringing my favorite lover, instead. But it's harder to trick a tough girl like her into dying when you're strung out on heroin and opiate pills than it is a vulnerable and gullible waif with her head already half in the noose. And I guessed the Powers That Be wouldn't let me and Anju f_ the eons away. Plus, that gets old once you've had your thousandth sex partner, to be honest."

Despite herself, Nico had to ask. "Thousandth? You mean, here in ... in ... wherever this is?"

"Nico-chan, does this place look like it has a single's spot? No, I obviously mean while alive, idiot. I beat Anju and Erena to 1000 by only a month. I'm just hotter than them, so I had an advantage." With that she twirled her hair, but in a completely fake and self-satisfied way.

"But .. but .. Nico was ... was the first?"

"Well, yeah, technically. Back when I had no idea what a good lover looked like. Congratulations on acquiring my virtue, Nico-chan - if you use an electron microscope, you might even locate it. Or maybe a telescope, it's so far gone. Let's make a joke in English: it's in Uranus!"

Nico was crying again.

"Oh, she's crying again. This is wonderful. Hey, Nico, did you know you were the most boring person to f_ in all of µ's?"

Nico looked up. It was obvious she was shocked by the news that Maki had slept with all the other girls (as well as the cut about her being Maki's least favorite).

"Oh, come on, Nico! I had every possible kind of sex with about 140 times that many girls and guys, why would I leave them out? They aren't that ugly and boring. Heck, I wouldn't even leave you out of the bottom three-fourths of a percent. That would hardly be school spirit, would it? By the way, Mika, Fumiko and Hideko were excellent. That's because they insisted on always having a foursome. Eventually I learned that a threesome is better than a pair, a foursome is even better, and an orgy is the best. But ..." She looked around.

She looked back at Nico with a wink. "I guess that bit of wisdom is going to go to waste here." And from the look in her eye, he had something else evil to add.

Sure enough: "You wouldn't know about the orgies, come to think of it. After all, you slept through all the ones you went to." And that made no sense, either.

"Ni ... Nico has never been to any orgy and Nico would never ..."

"Well, they're not called that, Nico. Idiot! They're called parties. Remember going to parties with me? We both knew you were a lightweight drinker, right?"

Nico, for a reason she couldn't quite pin down, had a cold feeling.

"Nico, I'll get you a drink, what are you having?" Maki said in a lovey dovey voice.

"Maki, this tastes funny ..." she said in a good, if cruel, imitation of Nico's voice.

"Well, drink it down and I'll have them make the next one better, okay, honey?"

"And then, Nico being a lightweight, she falls asleep, and wakes up at home. Her beloved Maki must have got her there somehow. And Nico is sore all over, but Maki tells her it's because she slept wrong at the party again, and Nico always believes her beloved Maki-chan." She looked at Nico like she was a bug.

"Of course, the guys that were having their way with a cute unconscious girl we told everyone was in middle school didn't mind carrying her to the car, so we could continue everything at my place. So I have to say, getting poor sleepy Nico home wasn't a big sacrifice. The truth is, Nico, it wasn't only the old, bald, fat lolicons that wanted you, they just paid the most for the privilege."

"Of course …" She added thoughtfully, "They paid a lot more for your siblings, obviously."

Nico stared at her, uncomprehendingly. "After you were hospitalized, we got your mom lured out on a pretext. We lost track of her somewhere in Central Europe, but I have to assume she's earning her keep, if she's still alive, I mean. Pimping out your siblings was lucrative - goodness yes - but it was too much like work for me, Nico. We basically killed time until we got the right buyers. Then I had enough money to keep me high and living in luxury for what turned out to be the rest of my life."

Finally Nico had it together enough to protest. "But I … I … always … "

"L-l-l-loved Maki!" Maki said, sneeringly. "Yes, how many times did everyone say that. Nico Loves Maki. Nico Loves Maki. True, but beside the point."

"How … when …" Nico couldn't formulate a proper question, but it was as if Maki could read her mind.

"Finally, she arrives at a question I don't mind answering," Maki said. Apparently the look of contempt she was giving Nico was a permanent fixture. "Remember our shrine visit, honey-y-y?"

Maybe Nico should learn to enjoy these cold feelings. They were the only ones she could get from now on.

"I bet," Maki said, sticking the tip of her tongue out of the side of her mouth, "You wished for something like 'I want to be a better girlfriend! I want to love Maki more each day!"

Bingo. If they hadn't been so embarrassed, so afraid of being seen and teased by Nozomi, they would have, of course, been at her shrine. But after doing hatsumode there, They had gone to a shrine they'd noticed on the way, located nearby. It was completely run down, almost abandoned, but in their infatuated state that had made it seem more romantic.

"You know, before I OD-ed, I had it worked out with A-RISE to have your urn repository say 'Yazawa Nico - she was a lousy f_' in advance for when you finally did the right thing. But those other bitches in Mu's were thwarting it. According to Tsubasa, who can be a real buzz-kill, by the way, they abandoned their efforts and your actual inscription was going to be 'Nico Loved Maki.' Well, at least they acknowledged your master, Yazawa Hachikou. Mine says "F_ you! I had a way better time than you'll EVER have!" That's a hint."

A … hint? Nico didn't get it.

"Poor, innocent, stupid Maki was stressing about you graduating, us splitting up, her medical education, your idol obsession. So she just wished to enjoy your time together, whatever you had, to the maximum."

"But that girl," and Maki winked at Nico, "didn't understand what a real maximum is. So, at first, being new to sex, she thought all the f_ing we did was wonderful. All the time with your loving family. Holding hands on the way to school! Ooh, daring!"

"But that," she continued, "Isn't miles within what the maximum enjoyment of our relationship turned out to be. I knew from the start I wanted to be in charge. On top. That that made it much hotter. But after a while, how docile you were just became boring. Sex became boring. You became the most boring of all. So I took two different approaches. First, I started cheating on you at every opportunity. That was wonderful fun, and it made everything naughty and hot again. And I started trying to make you do things you really didn't want to. So, breaking your will over and over again - also hot. But eventually you were like a stuffed toy I had outgrown. That's when I started making sure you found out about the cheating. Your tears were a real source of pleasure, I can tell you that much."

That did explain a lot, Nico thought. The ropes tied far too tight. The biting that broke the flesh and once even left a small scar. And the way she stopped hiding her cheating. The humiliation - eventually that was a standard part.

"And of course, I looked at how I could leverage your stupid, pet-like devotion to me to have a good time. Well, that worked out awfully well. And I got Erena and Anju to form a wild-girl gang with me. Tsubasa was pissed, but to appease her we whored out ourselves - and you, of course, Sleeping Beauty - to a few producers and got A-RISE and Tsubasa an inside line on some great venues and opportunities. After that she was see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Problem solved."

Problem solved? It all sounded like a problem to Nico.

"Maki-chan was not like this all along. Nico's heart would have known."

"Nico's heart is even stupider than Nico, frankly," Maki said, laughing. "But you're right, everything changed after our shrine visit. You changed, I changed. It's almost enough to make you superstitious. Oh, wait, here we are in the afterlife. Maybe I mean, it's almost enough to clue you in on how reality really works."

For the first time ever, Maki looked uncertain. "I'm not stupid, contrariwise. The Powers That Be wouldn't have allowed you to be here with me for no reason. And the hunger and thirst and heat and so on aside, I've had it suspiciously easy. You're probably here because you let your passion for one person make you neglect every other thing and person you cared about, is my guess. Why I'm here is trivial. But at some point, the other shoe is going to drop. It could be you'll only be here long enough to make me suffer remorse … go back to the weakling I was … and really suffer ..." And throw the bread and water out instead of gloating after you ate and drank it, she thought.

Maki clapped her hand over her mouth. "Oh s_t! It's already starting. I would never say that in my right mind. I might have even given you hope!" She squared her shoulders. "If that's what's happening, I promise I'll be true to my wish and enjoy myself with you as long as I can, I warn you." She started to approach Nico, that girl could see out of the corner of her eye. She was still too exhausted and shocked to bother to move.

Nico, meanwhile, had been tormented by the idea that she'd abandoned her dreams and neglected her beloved family, who depended on her, for this sickening travesty of a love relationship. She was looking for something - anything - to cling to to keep a toehold in the realm of sanity.

What was the one thing she knew for sure? It was a sad realization.

"Still … still …" she said. The gesture she made, without lifting her head, was a dull parody of her Nico-nico-nii finger hooks. "Nico loves Maki."

"Of course you do, honey," Maki said with an unreadable expression, "and that's your problem."