Here's chapter two guys, sorry about the wait! Please remember to review!


A Little Push

Two: Sticks and Stones and Broken Bones

by PrincessesAndPoisonApples


It was funny, Tamao thought, that old saying, 'Sticks and stones may break my bones—'

"But words can never hurt me," she finished softly.

That was a really stupid saying, actually. Shouldn't it have been the other way around? Because bones heal, don't they? But there's no guarantee that a broken heart ever will, and even then, you'll never get all the pieces back in their proper places—you'll get it all bent up and trashy-looking, and then no one will want it.

Tamao shook the thoughts from her head—one of the perks of being a writer, she was always thinking in lovely metaphors like that.

A moth to a flame, a cauterized wound, a merry-go-round where you fall to your doom…

Hearing the leaves shifting behind her, she quickly stored those away for a later poem (because everything in poetry could be made sense of if the reader wanted very badly to see something hidden in the words). The last thing she needed was to be on suicide watch (again! Sometimes she thought it would be better just to keep her poetry to herself) on top of everything else. Unfortunately, that was another one of those perks, specific to poets—having people always watching you, breathing down your neck and analyzing your every word. Use one too many commas and you had a potential suicide note on your hands.

The bluenette was drawn from her wry, jumbled thoughts and dark internal humor by the distinctive warmth of another body coming to rest not a foot away from her.

"Tamao-chan?"

Chikaru.

A slowing heartbeat, an (audible) of relief. Chikaru would understand. Chikaru always understood.

She didn't say anything, though, and instead turned to face Chikaru, who was, in turn, watching her with sympathy and poorly concealed concern. Part of Tamao wondered whether Chikaru had meant to conceal it at all—after all, nobody really saw anything of Chikaru that the former didn't want them to see.

After a moment of contemplation, however, Tamao decided against questioning it, mostly because she was just so exhausted.

Exhausted from what, though? What have you done recently that gives you the right to be so exhausted? Sat in your room (alone) and cried? Wandered aimlessly around the lake?

"Tamao-chan."

The sweet voice was louder this time, and tinged with more than a hint of true worry. The sudden words shocked Tamao out of her vaguely masochistic thoughts, and the bluenette turned to face the older girl once more, this time fully tethered to the present situation. "I-I'm sorry, Minamoto-sama," she said, surprised at how weak her own voice had become. With the way she'd been talking to herself in her mind…but then, she'd always been like that. For a decidedly odd moment, Tamao wondered if it was possible to be both extroverted and painfully introverted, but the troubled look on the Lulim president's face discouraged her from pondering much further. "I was just…thinking."

Chikaru's brows furrowed while her astonishingly (given her coloration) red lips morphed into a sad smile. "That's what I was afraid of…," she replied, leaning forward and wrapping her arms around her bent knees. "You always think too much, Tamao-chan."

Tamao blushed fiercely, both from the statement and the unexpected proximity that had suddenly become apparent to her in her somewhat dazed state. She reflexively moved to argue, but found herself biting her tongue before any more words escaped. What had arguing done for her recently? What had resisting done? It hadn't fixed anything, or stopped the inevitable from happening. If anything, it had sped up the process.

In light of these revelations, Tamao finally let out a pent-up sigh of acceptance and turned back to the lake. The calm, pristine water seemed almost crystalline in its undisturbed state.

Not entirely sure what drove her to do it, Tamao grabbed a small stone and lobbed it at the lake with all her strength, watching in some sort of twisted enjoyment as the illusion broke. It was, after all, human nature to want to destroy beautiful things.

And you'd know all about that, wouldn't you?

Shocked by her own thoughts, Tamao gasped as though she'd been hit, quite suddenly, by an icy wind. Her left hand clutched at (and tore out) the grass beneath it, while her right clenched subconsciously atop her knee, as if she were trying to grasp something just barely out of her reach.

And she felt the tears this time.

It wasn't like at the Etoile Election, when they'd just kind of…fallen of their own accord, leaving Tamao oblivious until the infamous morning after, when she'd finally summed up the courage to look in the mirror (and flinched away immediately after). This time they burned—pressed against the backs of her eyes until she could hardly bear the pain and the pressure. She felt herself gasping for the breath that couldn't reach her lungs through the rock in her throat, and for a split second (a very irrational split second), Tamao wondered vaguely if she was dying.

And then there was something else, and suddenly the pressure was gone—the tears had fallen over, past whatever dam had been holding them back. Through her hurried breaths and painful, racking sobs, Tamao wondered why now, of all times, she was able to cry—it seemed as though she'd been trying for days now with no results.

"It's okay, Tamao-chan."

"It isn't," the bluenette choked out, more reflexively than anything, even as she felt warm arms encircle her waist and squeeze tightly, almost painfully—even as she felt the vibrations of the words against her back.

"It will be." The words were mumbled this time, through the lips Tamao felt move against her hair. Chikaru tightened her grip once more, and briefly, the bluenette wondered whether the older girl was a psychic, or maybe an empathy. Surely, under different circumstances, such a tight embrace would have been suffocating, but now…now Tamao just wanted to be impossibly closer to this one source of comfort—this one beacon guiding her back to the shore from the jetsam she was clinging to out at sea. The arms around her waist were more of a life vest than a vice, and before she had time to mull over the consequences of her actions in her overworked head, Tamao found herself curling up in Chikaru's lap, burying her face in the older girl's chest.

"It's not fair," she found herself mumbling (like a child).

"I know."

I know.

Not "life isn't fair," not "I'm so sorry"—not even "put on your big girl panties and stop bitching already!" (three guesses as to who that was).

I know.

And the words were so quick, so sure of themselves that for the first time in years (and possibly ever), here in Chikaru's remarkably steady hold, Tamao felt truly safe.

Safe from pain, safe from emotions, but most of all, safe from herself and her tendency to think herself into utter despair.

Too mentally exhausted to worry much about social norms and/or the possibility of letting someone in so soon after the Nagisa-crisis, Tamao simply shifted, attempted to squeeze impossibly closer to the older girl, whose hold tightened with her movement. Slowly, quietly, she allowed herself to drift away, to tune out to the sound and vibrations of Chikaru's voice against Tamao's chilled skin.


It was at supper that evening that the newest additions to the Astraea Hill student body finally arrived—finally, for girls like Tsubomi, who had been practically bouncing all day ('absolutely pissing herself,' as a scowling Yaya had so delicately put it) in anticipation of her reunion with whoever this Shota boy was. Other girls, like Shion and Yaya herself, remained less than thrilled. In fact, the only emotion that every girl in the school could relate to at this point was an intense nervousness, be it from excitement or mounting tension.

Off to the right, at one of the designated 'Spica tables', Tsubomi was biting her lower lip, her right leg bouncing underneath the table as if it were the only thing keeping her from leaping out of her seat. Hikari watched this display with mild amusement mixed with vague concern, her gaze flitting between the pinkette and her remarkably silent best friend. "Yaya-chan…" the blonde began softly, lifting her gaze to meet with that of the brunette sitting across from her in a doe-eyed, pleading manner. She didn't like to manipulate her friend this way, especially given the current situation, but she doubted Yaya would respond at all if she went about it directly.

Hikari's soft-spoken plea went largely unnoticed by its target, who was currently glaring at the double-door entrance as though it had personally wronged her, and the blonde bit her lip. She was still uncomfortable raising her voice or, really, doing anything that would draw any amount of attention to herself. Still, if she didn't snap Yaya out of it soon, she was legitimately afraid that the brunette would attack the first living being that was unfortunate enough to enter through the offending doors.

"Yaya-chan!"

This had the desired effect. Yaya jumped, slamming her knees into the underside of the table in her haste. Hikari winced while Tsubomi, who had simultaneously been broken from her own world, rolled her eyes dramatically. The pinkette shot Hikari a truly nasty look out of the corner of her eye when Yaya instantly fell into the blonde's wide-eyed trap, but Hikari disregarded this, as she doubted she was meant to notice the look. Tsubomi was far too polite—far too formal to be so blatantly rude.

"Hikari? What's up?"

From beside the brunette, the younger pinkette scoffed.

"Are you alright, Yaya-chan?" Hikari asked softly, flicking her light blue gaze toward the door her friend had been watching. "It's not permanent, you know…"

As if she'd been doused with icy water, Yaya's entire demeanor seemed to shift before Hikari, and she huffed heavily. "That's not the point," she mumbled.

"Then what is, Yaya-baka?" Tsubomi interrupted. "Why do you have to be such a cliché? I mean really, Hikari-sama is already with Amane-sama—it's not like you've got anything to lose." The second the words escaped her lips, Tsubomi wanted to swallow them back down, back to the place deep inside of her where all her bitterness was hiding. But instead she just swallowed back the saliva that had collected in her mouth due to the nausea that had just come over her and met the older girls' stares with her own.

"Tsubomi-chan!" Hikari snapped, and the pinkette flinched back, even more shamed than she had been already. "That was uncalled for!"

"Leave it, Hikari," Yaya interrupted, her deep gaze flickering back up to meet her friend's. Surprisingly, there wasn't quite as much (or as deep) pain there as Hikari had expected—little trace of the agony she would have seen before. It seemed that Yaya was still more disturbed by the impending arrival of the boys than by Tsubomi's muttered comment.

"Yaya-senpai, I…" Tsubomi's voice broke, and her eyes flashed back down to her half-eaten dinner, unable to speak through the self-loathing that was very nearly crushing her. The younger girl nearly jumped out of her seat when she felt a long, strong arm wrap around her waist and pull her impossibly closer to the soft, warm and lean body beside her. Fighting back a blush (which really only succeeded in making the resulting color a shade or two lighter than fire-engine red), Tsubomi forced herself to look up at the older girl, who was in turn staring down at her with an unreadable expression.

"It's okay, Tsu-bo-mi-chan," Yaya replied softly, in just the faintest echo of a teasing lilt. "You're right anyway. Besides, it's not like I'm that stupid."

"'s a matter of opinion," Tsubomi grunted, giving up on fighting back the intense blush when she felt Yaya grin against the top of her head and press a fleeting kiss there.

Sometimes Tsubomi wished Yaya would be just a little bit more sparing with her affection; it really didn't help the pinkette's cause when the brunette would act like this, in a way that was, under any normal circumstances, reserved for lovers. That was heart wrenching enough without adding in factors like Yaya's tendency to shower all of her friends with affection (though not in such quantities) and flirt with any girl with a pulse.

On the other hand, Tsubomi knew Yaya well enough to know that her affection (and the teasing, in a way) was the physical manifestation of her care for her—of the words she couldn't figure out how to say. And it wasn't as though it was unpleasant, anyway, not even a little bit—one firm press of warm lips to the top of the pinkette's head sent an intense, exhilarating shiver down Tsubomi's spine, hitting every last nerve ending and extremity on its way.

So Tsubomi was greeted by strongly mixed feelings when the dining room doors (finally) flew open and Yaya's arm instantly tightened around her waist, the older girl wearing a strange, unreadable expression that was achingly familiar to Tsubomi and yet infinitely alien all at once.

Across the room, at the head table, a stubborn blonde, framed on either side by her two loyal (and currently warring) council members, was wearing a similar expression, violet eyes seemingly torn between the entryway and something much (much) closer.


Immediately to her left, a honey-brunette's lips curled into a smirk that was almost catlike in nature.

"Delicious," Momomi purred, chin resting on tan, intertwined fingers. If one were watching closely enough (though one rarely was, considering the hazards involved with looking this particular girl in the eye), they might have caught a glimpse of a small, pink tongue darting out and moistening candy-colored lips. "Absolutely delicious."

Honey-tinted eyes flashed with a spark of true amusement and mischief, a sight that, while normal and possibly even endearing to a passerby, would surely send chills down the spines of every last girl in the dining room (and some of the teachers, as well). Still, Momomi sat back, content to remain a spectator in this particular game. She did grow tired of constantly exerting herself for the sake of her entertainment—this time, she'd be watching from the sidelines.

This game would play itself.


So sorry for the wait guys! I got dragged into helping my family renovate my grandma's home since she's going to live with my aunt…it's past midnight now, and this is the first time I've had any motivation since then. I hope you guys will forgive me, and that this is still living up to expectations!


Review Replies (in order of review time):

Guest: Thank you! I appreciate the in-depth review, and I'd just like to add really quickly that you can also feel free to let me know what you want to see more of! Also, if there's something I'm messing up on, or if I'm just kinda messing up with the story (as in making it more dramatic than it should be ((this WILL be romance/humor eventually!))), feel free to let me know that too! I really appreciate you taking the time to let me know what you liked about this chapter :)

TodayParade: Thank you! And out of curiosity, by improvement are you referring to like, my previous story on this account, or stories on my old account? Sorry, I'm just trying to find some kind of balance between my two styles so that I can make my writing better allaround xP Anyway, I'm glad you're enjoying it, and thanks for the review!

Guest: Sorry it took so long, but here's the continuation! I got a bit distracted for a bit, but hopefully people will still read!


Please remember to review! :)