CHAPTER 24: PROGRESS
The metronome clicked with a steady rhythm that seemed to taunt her from across the room. Kyoko had spent nearly a week on this practice exercise alone and she wondered if her sanity was being adversely affected as she seemed to have acquired a conditioned response. Anytime she heard the ticking of a timer or the sharp clack of high-heeled shoes on pavement, her mood would instantly change to one of agitation and despair. She had taken to covering the alarm clock in her apartment with a towel just so she could sleep at night.
Forget controlling her ability. Just trying to use it was proving to be difficult enough.
Kotetsu did not seem the least bit perturbed by it, however. She had a sneaking suspicion that he appreciated being able to quietly do paperwork in his office while she seethed in another room trying to make a musical teaching device stop moving without touching it. The thought that he was doing it on purpose just to frustrate her was hard to banish. He seemed hellbent on curing her of some narcissistic attitude he was convinced she harbored after their conversation following her discovery of where her ability originated.
"So, it's your heart, is it?" he'd asked her that morning when she returned.
"Yes."
Concentrating on the deep furrow of his brow seemed the best option for distracting herself from the suffocating silence in the room. But not for long. Eventually, she yielded and gave in to her curiosity.
"Is that strange or rare or something?"
The older man's brow wrinkled further and he frowned at her, shaking his head slowly.
"Just because you have an uncommon ability doesn't make you special in every way, you know."
"I-I wasn't…"
"The sooner you stop fixating on yourself, the better it will be for your progress."
"You want me to… not focus on myself to figure out how to use my ability?"
Kyoko tilted her head at him in confusion and she watched her instructor take a deep breath before slowly letting it out.
"In a manner of speaking, yes. While you do need to focus on yourself for this, the 'you' that you're currently focused on is the wrong one. You need to find the right one and focus on that."
"And how do I do that?"
"That is not something I can tell you," he shook his head again. "Only you can tell yourself which 'you' is the right 'you' to focus on. Understood?"
"Clear as mud, Sir," she said with a mock salute.
His grunt signified the end of their conversation and he went about taking a small metronome from one of the storage cupboards in the room. Placing it on a desk in the far corner, he moved the weight along the pendulum arm and set it at one hundred beats per minute. He released the arm from where it was locked and it sprung forward with a twang before starting to swing steadily from side to side. Turning back to her, he folded his arms and gave her a stern look.
"We'll start with an audio cue for your training exercises," he pointed to the metronome. "Since this is set to move at a constant tempo, it'll be easier for you to hear when you've slowed or stopped time."
Kyoko only nodded in understanding, waiting for him to continue.
"You, most likely, will not get it right away, but I want you to keep trying until you do. Even if you have to keep coming back here and sit in this room by yourself for two hours each day."
Thus began her torture.
The first few days, she was content to sit quietly at one of the many small desks in the room that were neatly arranged into rows. Once she realized she gained nothing from that method, she took to restlessly pacing the room, making complex patterns with her feet as she wove her way around each desk. Eventually, she resigned herself to sitting on the floor. It was the lowest spot in the room and an accurate representation of how low she felt each time she made another fruitless attempt.
This was where she found herself, yet again, trying desperately to get something, anything to happen.
Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.
Tick… tick… tick.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.
With a huff, she slammed her hands against the floor. Why was this so difficult? Everyone else made it look so simple, so effortless and yet, there she was, sitting on the cold wooden floor with nothing but a burning in her chest and the beginnings of a headache. She tried so hard to not let it get to her and, instead, focus on her exercise, but the self-doubts and admonishments were relentless and crept in through even the tiniest cracks in her defense. She hated them.
What's more, she hated that they used her own voice to mock her.
You ran away to escape all of this, remember? Why are you even bothering?
Because she needed to be able to control it, she knew that and told it to herself repeatedly.
Then this should be a piece of cake for you, shouldn't it? You've done it several times by now, though it seems like you can only use it when he's nearby. Is that what you need? Do you need him to hold your hand through this too?
She only needed him because they had collectively hidden the missing pieces of their memories. And, what was this about hand-holding? If memory served her correct, she took the lead more often than he did.
Why was she even entertaining that train of thought in the first place? This wasn't about him.
"Leave him out of this," she muttered aloud, the echo of her voice in the empty room gave its hoarseness and fatigue extra emphasis.
Then, why can't you, the girl who stopped time for an entire town, stop a single metronome in an empty room?
"I'm not that girl anymore."
That girl existed solely in her memories, ones that she had only recently regained. The balance of her life had been lived as if that experience never happened. She lived as if she never had an ability, as if she had never Awakened.
At least, not until recently.
Thus, she was starting from scratch. Like a fledgling timidly stretching its wings for the first time or a baby stumbling about trying to put one foot in front of the other.
Kyoko reeled backwards with a gasp, nearly hitting her head on the desk behind her. At last, she understood exactly what Kotetsu had been trying to impress upon her. She really was focused on the wrong part of herself. Somehow, a deep-seated hubris had made it's home in her head the day her memories returned. Just the knowledge that she had accomplished something that attracted the attention of countries the world over caused her to make assumptions that she already had what it took to wrangle her ability like any other trained Augmented.
Assumptions that also came with an annoying voice in her head.
Well, she was about to shut that voice up for good.
Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.
Tick… tick… tick.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick… tick… tick.
Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.
She released the breath she forgot she held and noisily sucked in another lungful of air. That was the closest she had come since she started these exercises a week ago. A brief look at the — blessedly silent — clock on the wall told her she did not have enough time to make another attempt and a disappointed sigh left her lips. Pushing with her hands and feet, she stood and took a moment to stretch.
The metronome still clicked away happily in its corner and she stalked over to it, stopping the arm mid-swing and latching it back into its stationary position. She returned it to its designated spot in the storage cupboard, closing the door behind it as softly as possible although all she wanted to do was slam it shut just to spite that wretched device. Sighing again, she told herself there was no point in taking her frustrations out on an object that could not defend itself.
The walk to Kotetsu Uesugi's office was more of a slow, deliberate trudge, but she had agreed to always check in with him before she left for the day. Upon reaching his doorway, she found him hunched over a stack of papers on his desk. Her sluggish feet continued to carry her over the threshold and into the room and she dropped herself unceremoniously into the chair across from his desk, the force of her landing pushing a loud, exasperated breath from her lips. Kotetsu looked up from his papers and raised an eyebrow at her.
"I didn't know it would be this exhausting," she allowed herself o punctuate her sentence with a tiny whine of complaint.
"Exercising anything is tiring," he offered her only a shrug as consolation. "The same goes for abilities. That's why overextension causes veiling in telepaths and burnout in pyrokinetics."
Kyoko's lips pressed flat and she eyed the man with no small amount of skepticism. Before she could stop herself, she responded with the temerity found only in impulsive actions bred from fatigue.
"Do hydrokinetics get drained and do anemokinetics get winded as well?"
"Well, yes, they do," this frown was one of confusion rather than anger. "I'm glad you paid attention to the terminology in class, but that's not quite the point I was trying to make."
She bit back a groan and slowly ran a hand down her face. Whoever came up with those terms was either literal to a fault or thought themselves a comedian. But, she was letting herself get sidetracked to delay her next words. So, going against her desire to hunch forward and protectively curl her body inward, she forced herself to sit up as straight as possible.
"I wanted to let you know that I finally figured out what you meant about fixating on the wrong 'me,'" her voice was small, but grateful. "I felt I should thank you for that."
The older man waved a hand in dismissal of her words and shook his head. Folding his arms across his chest, he leaned forward against his desk as if he were about to divulge an important secret. It made her lean forward too, inexplicably eager to hear the next words he spoke.
"I realized the error in having you consult your memories about your ability once you came back to tell me the results. I could see in your face that you were allowing yourself to be haunted by a memory," his trademark contemplative frown was back on his face. "That was my mistake and I apologize."
Her brow wrinkled and she righted herself in her chair.
"One of these days you need to tell me how, exactly, you're so perceptive."
"Years of practice and exposure," he replied with a short laugh.
"I should have known," she groaned at his simplistic answer but he continued on, unperturbed.
"Memories are some of the heaviest burdens we carry with us through life," both his voice and his face were serious as stone and she listened intently to his words. "They help shape who we are and how we react to other people and events. They are a source of both joy and pain and a myriad of emotions in between. There's a reason each one of us has created a shrine for them in our own minds."
"And you just happened to figure out that mine were holding me back?"
"You are a young woman with an unusual ability who keeps a lot of secrets and only sparingly offers information regarding your past," he shook his head. "It wasn't too difficult to extrapolate from there and realize that you were being held hostage by the idea of who you thought you were supposed to be."
Everything he said was completely logical and sounded like it was no more than common knowledge. However, she felt like she had been clued in on the biggest revelation of the century. She thought of Kuon and how he shouldered the burden of a falsified memory for years until they met again. How it changed him from the bright, jovial child he once was into the seemingly cold and unfeeling man who had aged well beyond his years. If anything, being able to forget the devastating memory from her past was a significant benefit.
A benefit she reaped at the cost of someone else's happiness.
Kyoko shook her head once. No, that was not the case at all. They both agreed to forget it ever happened. It was Kuon who decided to alter the agreement without telling her. The people they became were the products of the choices they made when they were younger and she would have to live with that just like he did.
But that did not mean she would do nothing to learn from it.
While she had her doubts in the past as to whether or not she was doing the right thing by trusting in Kotetsu, they were now completely gone. This was the path she would walk so that she could grow and develop in a way she saw fit instead of at the whims of an Academy.
"I agreed to cover some morning shifts for Chiori but I will be back in a few days to keep working on this," she said as she rose from her seat. "Is that alright?"
A wide smile crossed the mans face and he nodded. Sitting back in his chair with his arms still crossed, he looked excessively pleased by her response. She could not help but smile a bit herself, though sadly, at the sight.
"You are the only person that is expecting you to make rapid progress," he chided. "The only thing I expect is that you don't give up."
"So, what was it like when you went to Uesugi's for tutoring?" Kyoko asked the following afternoon.
She was clocking out at the end of her shift when Chiori arrived to take over for her. The two crossed paths in the back room and they stopped to chat. Somewhere along the course of their work relationship — Kyoko was hesitant to call it a friendship just yet — they had fallen into this routine whenever they had separate shifts.
"I… what… were you snooping around his student files or something?" Chiori spluttered. "He assured us that our records would be kept confidential."
"They are and, for the record, I didn't look at them. I had a hunch based on the way you wouldn't talk about him, like you were deliberately trying to distance yourself from any association with him," Kyoko made a show of smoothing out her hair in the reflection of one of the glass jars on the shelf beside the time clock as she spoke. "But, I wasn't completely sure until just now."
The young woman let out a low whistle and a chuckle as she shook her head.
"Dammit, Natsu. You really are way too good at that."
Kyoko only shrugged in response and a small smile twisted her lips.
"Why would you want to know anyway? Aren't his classes in session when you're over there?"
"He specifically requested that I show up when he doesn't have classes," she shook her head. "I'm only there to help him with the upkeep of the place. I have no ability, so it's not as if I could help him with his lessons."
"Then, I ask again, why would you want to know?"
"Call it an Unaugmented's irrepressible curiosity."
"More like your own nosiness," she snorted.
"Well, if it makes you uncomfortable—" Kyoko's words sounded accommodating, but the tilt of her head and the challenge in her eyes told a different story.
"What's your angle, Kitazawa?" Chiori squinted at her.
"Nothing, honestly," she held up her hands in placation. "He's just so grumpy all the time that I wondered how his students put up with it or if he was a different person in the classroom."
"Well, the grumpiness is pretty much his signature at this point, but the good students — the ones who learned to look past that and see how valuable the lessons he provides really are — they know it's worth it to keep coming back to class."
"That's high praise coming from you," Kyoko rolled her eyes.
Chiori looked around them for a moment, surreptitiously checking to make sure the room was empty before she leaned closer and spoke in a near-whisper.
"I will deny this until my dying day, so don't think you can go around telling this to anyone but, before I started his classes, the most I could do was turn warm water into lukewarm water," the words came out with a slight hiss as she tried to keep anyone from overhearing their conversation. "So, if you refuse to believe anyone else, believe me when I tell you he is as good as everyone says he is."
"That must not have been easy," Kyoko said before wincing internally, realizing too late that 'Natsu' was not one to empathize with others.
"It wasn't and I wanted to quit more than once, but I stuck with it and I learned a lot about myself in the process," she leaned back and her voice resumed it's previous volume. "Now, does that answer your question?"
Her face was scrunched into a look of confusion, but Kyoko nodded
"But you're not the first person to have learned to improve their own ability because of him," she mused aloud. "Why the secrecy?"
Chiori shook her head and let out a sound that was halfway between a laugh and a sigh.
"If you knew my family, you wouldn't have to ask such a question."
With that, she walked away toward the locker room. Kyoko gave the space she vacated a blank stare for a moment before turning on her heels to exit through the back door. In one short conversation, she had learned more about her coworker than she assumed she would. Her sole reason for asking was merely to find out if anyone else had to endure similar struggles to hers. Since she had to do her training in complete secrecy, this was the closest she could get to commiserating with a classmate.
Unbeknownst to her, Chiori had just given Kyoko one of the most impactful pep talks. The walk back to her apartment found Kyoko holding her head a little higher, her chin jutting out with just a bit more pride than it normally did.
Perhaps she would have to reconsider classifying Chiori as a 'tentative friend' after all.
He never would have imagined that running a small tutoring facility would generate quite so much paperwork. Between making sure his licensing was up to date and filed with the appropriate governmental offices, the progress reports for his students as well as notes he kept on each of them detailing the limitations of their abilities, how they responded to various teaching methods and ideas for how to get them to improve, it seemed never-ending. The potential for him to be physically buried underneath a mountain of papers were he to neglect it for even a day was a real, if irrational, fear.
Still, Kotetsu Uesugi would never trade any of it for the world.
The work he did now had far more meaning to it than anything he did in the thirty-plus years he spent under the employment of his Academy. It got him out of bed every morning and fueled his purposeful strides to his office. As long as the world still had Augmenteds, he would still be needed.
The soft sound of the ticking metronome in the classroom filtered down the hall and into his office and he smiled a little and shook his head. His most recent student was certainly an interesting challenge. Most of his charges were much younger, having Awakened but lacking the true understanding of their potential. This one was near adulthood, but her age was the only thing that set her apart from the others. She still fussed and fumed with the best of them whenever she ran into difficulties. And, like all of his other students, he could not wait to see how her ability flourished with the right amount of attention and perseverance.
However, he could not miss the sadness that often clouded her eyes when they spoke about her ability. While they both agreed, and insisted, upon keeping their relationship on a strictly need-to-know basis, he could not help but continue to notice the weight of the emotional baggage she bore. There was a secret much bigger than the bits and pieces she shared with him; he had told her as much and she never did deny it. He concluded that it was probably a secret he was better off never knowing.
The most he could do was instruct her as carefully as he could so that she would be able to decide how much she wanted that secret to affect her life.
He worried that she would be disheartened after their conversation a few days prior about her attitude and approach to her current assignment. But, she returned from her short hiatus raring to try again with an even stronger determination than before. It pleased him more than he would ever say that he continued to be right about her. He looked away from the papers on his desk and closed his eyes, letting his ears zero in on the sound of the metronome instead of tuning it out as usual.
Quite abruptly, the sound significantly increased in volume. It was almost as if the metronome was on the desk in front of him.
With a shake of his head, he opened his eyes to find that he was still alone in the office. His eyes opened wider still when he noticed what sat before him. A small scrap of paper, bearing a hastily drawn smiling face waved from side to side at him in an almost mocking manner. The paper was taped to the freely swinging arm of a metronome.
The very same one from the classroom down the hall.
The past two weeks were filled with brief extractions on, admittedly, insignificant people. Under most circumstances, Ren would never consider anyone who warranted an extraction to be insignificant. However, it was a testament to how torturous this entire assignment had been. He had taken to ranking people's significance based on their involvement in Kyoko's life.
By the end of the previous day's extraction, he had them categorically sorted with the person who lived next door to her during her residency in Academy housing at the top and that one orderly who spoke to her for less than thirty seconds after she collapsed the first time at the bottom.
He was bored.
He was frustrated.
He tried very, very hard to not let either of those two emotions show on his face in Kimiko's presence.
From what he could tell—which was very little considering how that infuriating woman fed him only the tiniest hints of information—someone was either trying to lure him into a false sense of security or they were truly running out of avenues to pursue. Of course, knowing who he was dealing with caused him to believe the former over the latter. Kimiko was a slimy individual. He knew that trusting her as far as he could throw her was giving her way too much leeway and comparing her to a snake was insulting to reptiles as a whole. He was better off expecting the worst and, hopefully, being pleasantly surprised.
This was not going to be one of those times.
While he was certainly surprised, there was nothing pleasant about it. He had learned to stop asking who was scheduled for the next extraction. It served only to give Kimiko another opportunity to speak to him and her constant overtures had long since worn on his last nerve. Plus, she seemed to enjoy withholding some information while disclosing others as if it were some sort of game to her. It was not one he wanted to play, so he stopped asking altogether.
Nonetheless, he wished in that moment that he had asked.
Because, standing before him wearing a sour expression that almost identically matched his mood for the past few weeks, was Kanae Kotonami.
YOU'D THINK THAT THIS WAS ALL FOR NOW, BUT YOU'D BE WRONG. That's right, folks. I know you've already enjoyed this chapter so much.
But, wait, there's MORE!
Well, don't just sit/stand/slump/lie there, go read the next chapter!
AUTHOR OUT (but not really, 'cause there's another chapter)!