Dein Weg ist Mein Weg

Chapter II

The Lunch

Maho somehow managed to get through the first half of the day without losing focus again. But whenever her attention began to slip, she would start to see the Panzer III slide into the river. She would start to feel the rain on her shoulders. She would start to hear the screams of her comrades. Luckily, she could stave it all off by keeping her mind focused squarely on the teacher and blackboard in front of her.

But now there was no teacher. There was nothing written on the blackboard. There were no chatting classmates to distract her. She was alone. Alone in the classroom with a badly prepared lunchbox, and the darkness once again wished to make itself known. The smell of mud and rain, the sound of cannon-fire and tank engines, it all slowly crept back into her mind, but was interrupted by an unexpected source.

"Hey girl, you wanna grab some lunch?" As Maho turned around, she saw two girls standing beside her. After a moment, she recognized them as two of her classmates. One was tall with long flowing black hair, and the other was the orange-haired girl who had kicked her chair during attendance.

"What?" she asked, keeping her dour tone. The orange-haired one seemed taken aback by the question.

"Oh…" she said, seemingly unsure of herself, before the tall one came to her aid.

"We wondered if you would like to eat lunch with us?"

"Yeah, sorry. I was just trying to make a joke," the orange-haired girl continued.

"Sorry," Maho said as she got up from her desk, grabbed her lunchbox, and began to walk to the door at the front of the classroom. Just before she exited, she turned back to the two girls.

"You should leave me alone. Bad things happen to people who get close to me." She left the classroom to find a place to eat in peace, leaving the two girls behind.

After walking around for a little while, she found a bench beneath a tree that was sufficiently out of the way. The less she had to interact with others, the better. She sat down, opened her lunchbox, and looked at the underwhelming contents. She had never been much of a cook, and never had this been more cruelly on display. Half her lunchbox was soggy with fat from the overcooked meat, the other with water from still half-frozen vegetables. She sighed as she got her chopsticks out, and wished she could have some of Kikuyo's cooking instead. But alas, here she was with the abomination of a lunchbox she had made for herself. She picked at the contents, and tried to pick up one of the small hamburgers. She barely had time to lift it before it collapsed under its own weight, breaking into smaller and smaller pieces the more she tried to pick it up. After several minutes of this, she instead picked up a piece of broccoli. Thankfully, broccoli rarely imploded upon contact with chopsticks, even if she wouldn't have been surprised at this point. She raised it to her mouth, and began to eat. As soon as her teeth made contact, it became staggeringly clear why it had not fallen apart. Apart from the perhaps millimeter of cooked outside, the entire piece of broccoli was frozen solid all the way through. She shuddered as she slowly worked her way through it. It was just as disgusting as she had anticipated, but she needed food. If anything she might have welcomed the nightmare at this point, to distract her from the dismal lunch she desperately tried to eat.

"Uhm, excuse me." Maho looked up from the gastronomical torture she was putting herself through, and saw the two girls who had talked to her in the classroom, holding trays with a bunch of different foods on them.

"What?" Maho said as she finished another frozen piece of broccoli. The tall one, who had been the one to call attention to them, continued.

"We saw you out here, and we thought...uh...well…"

"What Hana is trying to say is that that lunchbox looks disgusting, and it looks like you agree, so we thought we'd bring you something you could actually eat without giving yourself food poisoning." The orange-haired one interceded when her friend, whose name was apparently Hana, began to stutter.

"Saori, you don't have to be so rude. We could have handled that a lot better." Maho didn't care very much that Saori had been rude. Her lunchbox was disgusting. She looked down at the broken and under-cooked contents, then up at the two girls, then back to her lunchbox. She sighed, and returned the lid to her lunchbox.

"Fine. I suppose I'll have to take you up on your offer," she said and nodded to a table on the other side of the courtyard.

"You're Nishizumi, right?" Hana asked as they sat down.

"Yeah," Maho said shortly and sighed. "That's me." She had never enjoyed being known by her family name. It carried far too much weight for her to outlive by her own merits.

"Hey," Saori piped up. "Do you mind if I call you by your first name?"

"Maho is fine, isn't it? Nishizumi is a bit long to say." Hana chimed in. Maho stared at them both. Did they really not know who she was? Were they really being this friendly just because they felt like it, and not because they wanted to get close to the heir to the Nishizumi family? Or rather, former heir. Maho had always been wary of overly-friendly people for exactly that reason. As soon as it became evident she wouldn't let friendships affect her decisions, most people turned on a dime and left her side.

"Sure," she said as she picked up some rice from a bowl. "Maho's fine." "Let's see where this goes" she thought.

"Hey Maho,"" Saori said between bites of some sushi. "You are a year older than us, aren't you?"

"That's right, did something happen to make you repeat a year?" Hana asked with a sincere voice.

"I don't want to talk about it." Maho replied. There was exactly four people on the globe who knew the circumstances of why she had repeated a year, and she wasn't about to expand the list to two girls she had just met.

"Oh," the two girls said, more or less in unison.

"Well, that's fine I suppose," Hana said as she returned to eating as if nothing had happened.

After they had eaten and returned the trays to the cafeteria, they returned to the classroom to await the afternoon classes. While Maho didn't exactly enjoy their company, she didn't hate it either. Even if Saori's refusal to be quiet was slowly driving her insane. At least it didn't seem like they knew who she was, which was a strike in their favor. Had she had the choice however, she would have rather avoided making any too close relationships while on-board. As Maho sat back down at her desk, and Saori was busy yapping away about something vacuous that Maho couldn't be bothered to listen two, three girls entered the classroom. While she wasn't entirely sure, Maho didn't think they were among her classmates. Two of them were similar to her own height, one with black hair and a strange hybrid between a monocle and a pair of glasses on her nose, and the other with brown hair pulled into a ponytail and a significantly more well-developed chest. Between them stood what must have been a visiting middle-schooler with two ponytails. The trio scanned the room, before the black haired girl pointed at Maho, and the middle-schooler piped up and waved at her.

"Hey, Nishizumi? You got a moment?"

"What do you want with me?" Maho sighed. She had gotten enough attention for a lifetime when she was at Kuromorimine, so this was nothing new. She presumed they would ask for an autograph or something, and even if she didn't feel it was right to give it out, obliging usually sent deluded fans away faster than trying to refuse. But instead, the entire group began marching towards her.

"That's the student council," Saori whispered to her. As the student council reached her desk, the raven-haired girl looked down at her and spoke.

"We need to talk."

"We do?" Maho asked back with defiance in her voice. The middle-schooler, who apparently was no such thing, leaned over Maho's desk and began to speak with a tone Maho couldn't stand.

"Hey, i don't know what you've decided to do for your mandatory elective, but pick Sensha-Do. It'll be fun."

"Won't that be rather difficult? Seeing as this school doesn't have a Sensha-Do team?" At this point the short one was acting very chummy, draping an arm across Maho's shoulders. Maho was not the least bit entertained by this.

"We didn't, but we're starting it back up this year," said the black haired cyclops.

"No can-do Ladies. I specifically transferred here to avoid Sensha-Do." Maho pushed the midget's arm off of her, and leaned back in her chair with a smug smirk.

"Well, this all sounds like fate to me," the short one said with an irritating laugh as she tried to put her arm back on Maho's shoulders. "Come on, just pick Sensha-Do. It'll be fun, we're telling you." At this point Maho had had enough. She got up from her chair, and stared down at the girl in front of her.

"And I said; No, Pipsqueak."