Disclaimer: I do not own "Love Hina" or its characters.
Matchmaker's War
Strange Encounters
Keitaro, after leaving the Sasaki Seminar, had a strange encounter with a girl that kept staring at him. As the old distinguished gentleman rambled on about some subject or another, she just kept staring. Keitaro could not keep his mind on the words the man spoke. He wanted to know why the girl did not pretend to listen like everyone else, she just kept on staring. Soon Keitaro felt a thick layer of blood rush up into his head and realized that his head must have looked with a tomato wearing glasses.
/Stop staring at me!/ Keitaro felt the urge to say, but then he'd have everyone in the five-hundred-seat lecture hall filled to capacity staring at him as he yelled at an anonymous and somewhat attractive young girl. Blowing him kisses and gesturing to a newspaper in her hand, the lady seemed more than a little interested in him.
/The girl must really think that little of me,/ Keitaro concluded as he continued to witness the kissing motions the girl made towards him. Perhaps this girl thinks only girls can have standards, but guys can too and Keitaro surely did have his. Imagine the guile this girl had, anyone here could easily have looked away and seen her doing this rather blatant display of affection and taken it the wrong way.
/I sure hope I don't look that obvious around Naru./ The girl blew another kiss. /That does it. I don't need to stay here and take this sexual harassment./ Keitaro picked up his books and made a quiet retreat from this rather large lecture hall. No doubt, the girl followed.
Keitaro tried to walk fast, trying to keep the girl's location in the corner of his eye. Like a serial killer in those American slasher movie, Keitaro started to run and made the unfortunate decision to look away from her. No sooner he taken his eyes off her, Keitaro bumped right into her. She looked bored and startled, as if she had stood waiting there for some time.
"What do you want?" Keitaro asked, not bothering to sound polite to this femme fatale stalker. /Calm down, Keitaro./ Really, she looked like anything but a stalker, just a pretty nice girl with a smile from ear to ear, but her action inside the lecture hall freaked him out. When fantasy world overlapped real world, Keitaro could do only two things. One, he would enjoy himself until the dream ended. Or two, he would freak out and run for the hills, hoping he had not offended anyone. Apparently, he had decided to freak out and run for the hills.
The girl's ear-to-ear smile diminished as she took a closer look at the object of her affection. "You sure don't look like burning passion." Keitaro sniffed at that comment, half confused and half angry. "In fact, you don't look like much of anything."
"Hey," Keitaro retorted. "I live with three girls who says things like this to me everyday, could you give me a break and explain why you looked ready to have my children back in there."
The girl stood up straight. "I most certainly don't want to 'have your children.' " She paused as if revising her next string of insults. "But you do look like a nice guy and I just thought you deserved better than that Narusegawa bitch."
This put Keitaro over the edge. "Don't you dare call Narusegawa that. She has feelings too." Keitaro hated the direction he had taken this awkward conversation, but he could not let this nameless nobody insult the love of his life. "You just don't know her the way I do."
"I don't know her the way you do, huh?" the girl replied, parroting his words and smiling a mischievous almost Kitsune-esque smile. "She has feelings, too, huh? Where does she keep them? In her diary? She certainly doesn't trust them with you, does she?"
Keitaro wanted to end this conversation as quickly and as painlessly as his little mind could devise. Suddenly a question entered his mind. Keitaro smiled as if glad to see the question in his mind's eye coming to the rescue. This one question would steer this conversation in a better direction. "You don't like her so much, how do you know so much about her?" Ha, that should get her thinking and stopping her from talking long enough from him to make his escape.
"Well, she got one thing right; you sure can act like an idiot sometimes." She unfolded the morning newspaper. "I bet you don't even read the newspaper in the morning?" Keitaro wanted to inform her that he had to cancel their subscription due to financial problems, but his not-so-witty comeback never left his mouth as he stared in utter disbelief at the headlines.
[Love letter mysteriously cropping up across Tokyo]
/No,/ Keitaro shouted mentally to himself. /I refuse to believe any of this./ But he had to believe, because everyone who read this newspaper would certainly believe. He could see an archived picture of himself and Narusegawa Naru over a photocopied picture of a letter he spent all of last week trying to convince himself he never saw. Keitaro felt like celebrating his moment of shock by throwing up in a nearby alley.
"So, you see," she said as she folded the paper away, "I wanted to know who wrote this beautiful written expression of love. He sounds like the type of guy who would put my happiness first in front of his own, basically the opposite of my last boyfriend." The girl blushed as she realized she had let Keitaro know a little too much about her private life. "Anyway, you looked a lot like him, so I figured you might know him from somewhere."
"I should," Keitaro took out his wallet and showed her his school ID.
"Oh my god, you really did write this letter."
"Well," Keitaro said, nervously scratching the back of his head. "I did not write all of it."
"Yeah," the girl replied, snapped out of her dreamy gaze. "I skipped over her part of the letter. No offense, but that girl has a lot of issues. You would do much better with someone who doesn't try to kill you every time you get in her way." Keitaro could feel his mind drifting into forbidden territory and decided to turn away before she saw his nose bleed.
"Well, can I ask you favor?" The girl smiled politely as if to say, 'Anything for Keitaro.' "Can I have that newspaper?" This enamored girl loved his writing and it hurt him to take it from her, but he needed evidence to prove later on that he had not dreamed up this surrealistic meeting. Keitaro knew only one person who would do something like this and he planned to confront her.
He felt unimaginable heat rising up inside him as he could feel the girl leaning in to kiss him on the lips. Ashamed to leave without saying goodbye and good luck, Keitaro still took his opportunity to run and run he did. What took twenty minute to walk, Keitaro had dashed through in less than ten and fell in front of Hinata-sou, a heap of flesh barely moving minus the voluminous heaving of his chest as he struggled to breath.
Keitaro could see the newspaper in his hand. For a moment, he hoped he just snatched some anonymous newspaper off the racks and forgot to return it. Sure, that would make him a crook, but spending a night in jail and calling his aunt Haruka to post bail seemed like a positive alternative over acknowledging the truth. Unfortunately, Keitaro could tell he had not picked up just any old newspaper. In the margins of the photocopied letter, someone had written things like, 'How cute!", "What a guy!" with an occasional 'What a bitch!'
Having a great deal more self-knowledge than most people, Keitaro knew he did exactly what he did everyday when he stumbled into an uncomfortable situation; he ran until he no longer remembered what he had run away from. Looking back, he could sort of tell, with twenty-twenty hindsight, that he would do something stupid like that and should not even stopped to talk to her.
"Ack, Narusegawa!" Keitaro exclaimed to himself as he snapped out his self-deprecating review of his actions. Narusegawa did not have his patience and Keitaro did not have the morbid imagination to predict what she would do if anyone showed her the morning paper. Keitaro tried with all the might his mind could muster to remember where Narusegawa had gone.
"Of course," Keitaro remembered. Narusegawa had skipped the lecture to help Shinobu shop for ingredients. Keitaro pitied the first man to talk up to her thinking she would actually do the things she wrote about in her diary. He might awake up in a hospital. Or he might not wake up at all.
*****
Narusegawa Naru loved the direction her life had taken at the present. She had all her homework and projects done weeks ahead of schedule and Keitaro's accidents had ceased mysteriously about a week ago.
Maehara Shinobu had managed to smile up at her Naru-sempai as she searched for ingredients to her special dinner planned for Seta's rescue and return to the Hinata-sou. Naru, Kitsune and Haruka nearly died of massive cardiac arrest when they heard the horrible news of the cave-in a week ago. Kitsune showed it by getting even more drunk every night, Haruka-san showed it by going through two packs of cigarettes in a single day and Naru showed it by not showing it. Unlike Haruka and Kitsune who rely on their unhealthy habits to keep themselves emotionally stable, Naru needed none of that to stay in perfect control of her emotions.
Naru prided herself as Shinobu pulled at her skirt. "Sempai, can you help me pick fruits?" Shinobu pointed to the fruit stand as Naru felt a foul essence sweep through the open air market.
The fruit vender smiled at her. "Do I know from somewhere?" the man asked. He spoke with an Osaka accent, like Kitsune, but his resemblance to anyone she knew ended there. He looked a bit cross-eyed and could not look straight ahead at her because of it. Still, his face had not rang any bells. Naru nodded no. The cross-eyed man grimaced weakly. "God, you look so familiar."
"Perhaps, she wants you to watch her undress," a voice spoke up from behind Naru. A man, who she affectionately named Muscle Head, walked up to the vender and started to talk to him. "If you ask real nice, Naru might even let you touch her."
Naru's ears perked up. As with the vender, she had never met Muscle Head before, but he seemed to know her name. /Another stalker?/ Naru wondered as she recalled how Sakata Kentaro had stalked her since her freshman year. "Yeah, she gets depressed easily, I can understand that. I recommend a psychologist, not a tutor." The two men laughed as the look of recognition came over the fruit vender's face.
Surprised she had not decked him into another universe, Naru felt that their words sounded vaguely familiar. Naru also realized she did not know how to fend off a mortal man without killing him. Using Keitaro as a flesh-and-blood punching bag gave her no need for control. He could take anything she could dish out. As their laughter grew so louder and obnoxious that she could hear it ringing on the inside of her head, she zoned out everything except the sound of the laughter. She prepared herself to do whatever it took to silence the noise of their chauvinistic cackling. The last sound she remembered hearing came from a worried Shinobu.
"Naru-sempai, please, don't do it."
The sound of Shinobu in distress brought Naru back in time to control her own punch. In that split-second, she opened up her fist and turned her killer right hook into a backhand slap. Muscle Head fell to the ground, clutching his face and twitching in pain.
"The next one will take your head off." She knew it could.
The Muscle Head nodded rapidly, bowing and asking for forgiveness.
The fruit vender had vanished.
Naru smiled at the remaining man and decided to make the best of this awkward situation. Naru walked closer to the Muscle Head.
"If you get a chance to humiliate me in public, I get a chance to humiliate you in public." Naru would enjoy this.
*****
Keitaro entered the open air market closest to Hinata-sou and found a crowd of people gathered around a spectacular sight. Keitaro smiled. He knew he would not arrive to a damsel in distress in need of a knight in shining armor, but she had really outdone herself this time. Keitaro looked down to see some over-sized muscle monster of a man, both hands pinned to his back and his face buried in the ground by the small almost petite redhead with a face he knew better than his own.
"Sempai," Shinobu exclaimed as she ran up beside Keitaro. "Someone assaulted Naru-sempai." Keitaro felt something like that would happen. Her part of the diary made her look like some kind of slut. Frankly, he never once thought of her like that, but he could see how that would cross one's mind reading this.
As Naru fumed with anger, Keitaro handed her the newspaper. "Narusegawa, I think you should read this."
Naru scanned the front page. She turned red. Anger? Embarrassment? Both? Keitaro could not tell. Except for her redness, she kept her facial expressions in check. Calmly folding the newspaper, Naru handed it back to Keitaro.
Naru walked up to the muscular man she had pinned to the ground. With all her might, she kicked him square in the groin. Satisfied, she walked away. She turned around and said something to Keitaro he may never forget.
"I'll kill her."
-----
Matchmaker's War
Strange Encounters
Keitaro, after leaving the Sasaki Seminar, had a strange encounter with a girl that kept staring at him. As the old distinguished gentleman rambled on about some subject or another, she just kept staring. Keitaro could not keep his mind on the words the man spoke. He wanted to know why the girl did not pretend to listen like everyone else, she just kept on staring. Soon Keitaro felt a thick layer of blood rush up into his head and realized that his head must have looked with a tomato wearing glasses.
/Stop staring at me!/ Keitaro felt the urge to say, but then he'd have everyone in the five-hundred-seat lecture hall filled to capacity staring at him as he yelled at an anonymous and somewhat attractive young girl. Blowing him kisses and gesturing to a newspaper in her hand, the lady seemed more than a little interested in him.
/The girl must really think that little of me,/ Keitaro concluded as he continued to witness the kissing motions the girl made towards him. Perhaps this girl thinks only girls can have standards, but guys can too and Keitaro surely did have his. Imagine the guile this girl had, anyone here could easily have looked away and seen her doing this rather blatant display of affection and taken it the wrong way.
/I sure hope I don't look that obvious around Naru./ The girl blew another kiss. /That does it. I don't need to stay here and take this sexual harassment./ Keitaro picked up his books and made a quiet retreat from this rather large lecture hall. No doubt, the girl followed.
Keitaro tried to walk fast, trying to keep the girl's location in the corner of his eye. Like a serial killer in those American slasher movie, Keitaro started to run and made the unfortunate decision to look away from her. No sooner he taken his eyes off her, Keitaro bumped right into her. She looked bored and startled, as if she had stood waiting there for some time.
"What do you want?" Keitaro asked, not bothering to sound polite to this femme fatale stalker. /Calm down, Keitaro./ Really, she looked like anything but a stalker, just a pretty nice girl with a smile from ear to ear, but her action inside the lecture hall freaked him out. When fantasy world overlapped real world, Keitaro could do only two things. One, he would enjoy himself until the dream ended. Or two, he would freak out and run for the hills, hoping he had not offended anyone. Apparently, he had decided to freak out and run for the hills.
The girl's ear-to-ear smile diminished as she took a closer look at the object of her affection. "You sure don't look like burning passion." Keitaro sniffed at that comment, half confused and half angry. "In fact, you don't look like much of anything."
"Hey," Keitaro retorted. "I live with three girls who says things like this to me everyday, could you give me a break and explain why you looked ready to have my children back in there."
The girl stood up straight. "I most certainly don't want to 'have your children.' " She paused as if revising her next string of insults. "But you do look like a nice guy and I just thought you deserved better than that Narusegawa bitch."
This put Keitaro over the edge. "Don't you dare call Narusegawa that. She has feelings too." Keitaro hated the direction he had taken this awkward conversation, but he could not let this nameless nobody insult the love of his life. "You just don't know her the way I do."
"I don't know her the way you do, huh?" the girl replied, parroting his words and smiling a mischievous almost Kitsune-esque smile. "She has feelings, too, huh? Where does she keep them? In her diary? She certainly doesn't trust them with you, does she?"
Keitaro wanted to end this conversation as quickly and as painlessly as his little mind could devise. Suddenly a question entered his mind. Keitaro smiled as if glad to see the question in his mind's eye coming to the rescue. This one question would steer this conversation in a better direction. "You don't like her so much, how do you know so much about her?" Ha, that should get her thinking and stopping her from talking long enough from him to make his escape.
"Well, she got one thing right; you sure can act like an idiot sometimes." She unfolded the morning newspaper. "I bet you don't even read the newspaper in the morning?" Keitaro wanted to inform her that he had to cancel their subscription due to financial problems, but his not-so-witty comeback never left his mouth as he stared in utter disbelief at the headlines.
[Love letter mysteriously cropping up across Tokyo]
/No,/ Keitaro shouted mentally to himself. /I refuse to believe any of this./ But he had to believe, because everyone who read this newspaper would certainly believe. He could see an archived picture of himself and Narusegawa Naru over a photocopied picture of a letter he spent all of last week trying to convince himself he never saw. Keitaro felt like celebrating his moment of shock by throwing up in a nearby alley.
"So, you see," she said as she folded the paper away, "I wanted to know who wrote this beautiful written expression of love. He sounds like the type of guy who would put my happiness first in front of his own, basically the opposite of my last boyfriend." The girl blushed as she realized she had let Keitaro know a little too much about her private life. "Anyway, you looked a lot like him, so I figured you might know him from somewhere."
"I should," Keitaro took out his wallet and showed her his school ID.
"Oh my god, you really did write this letter."
"Well," Keitaro said, nervously scratching the back of his head. "I did not write all of it."
"Yeah," the girl replied, snapped out of her dreamy gaze. "I skipped over her part of the letter. No offense, but that girl has a lot of issues. You would do much better with someone who doesn't try to kill you every time you get in her way." Keitaro could feel his mind drifting into forbidden territory and decided to turn away before she saw his nose bleed.
"Well, can I ask you favor?" The girl smiled politely as if to say, 'Anything for Keitaro.' "Can I have that newspaper?" This enamored girl loved his writing and it hurt him to take it from her, but he needed evidence to prove later on that he had not dreamed up this surrealistic meeting. Keitaro knew only one person who would do something like this and he planned to confront her.
He felt unimaginable heat rising up inside him as he could feel the girl leaning in to kiss him on the lips. Ashamed to leave without saying goodbye and good luck, Keitaro still took his opportunity to run and run he did. What took twenty minute to walk, Keitaro had dashed through in less than ten and fell in front of Hinata-sou, a heap of flesh barely moving minus the voluminous heaving of his chest as he struggled to breath.
Keitaro could see the newspaper in his hand. For a moment, he hoped he just snatched some anonymous newspaper off the racks and forgot to return it. Sure, that would make him a crook, but spending a night in jail and calling his aunt Haruka to post bail seemed like a positive alternative over acknowledging the truth. Unfortunately, Keitaro could tell he had not picked up just any old newspaper. In the margins of the photocopied letter, someone had written things like, 'How cute!", "What a guy!" with an occasional 'What a bitch!'
Having a great deal more self-knowledge than most people, Keitaro knew he did exactly what he did everyday when he stumbled into an uncomfortable situation; he ran until he no longer remembered what he had run away from. Looking back, he could sort of tell, with twenty-twenty hindsight, that he would do something stupid like that and should not even stopped to talk to her.
"Ack, Narusegawa!" Keitaro exclaimed to himself as he snapped out his self-deprecating review of his actions. Narusegawa did not have his patience and Keitaro did not have the morbid imagination to predict what she would do if anyone showed her the morning paper. Keitaro tried with all the might his mind could muster to remember where Narusegawa had gone.
"Of course," Keitaro remembered. Narusegawa had skipped the lecture to help Shinobu shop for ingredients. Keitaro pitied the first man to talk up to her thinking she would actually do the things she wrote about in her diary. He might awake up in a hospital. Or he might not wake up at all.
*****
Narusegawa Naru loved the direction her life had taken at the present. She had all her homework and projects done weeks ahead of schedule and Keitaro's accidents had ceased mysteriously about a week ago.
Maehara Shinobu had managed to smile up at her Naru-sempai as she searched for ingredients to her special dinner planned for Seta's rescue and return to the Hinata-sou. Naru, Kitsune and Haruka nearly died of massive cardiac arrest when they heard the horrible news of the cave-in a week ago. Kitsune showed it by getting even more drunk every night, Haruka-san showed it by going through two packs of cigarettes in a single day and Naru showed it by not showing it. Unlike Haruka and Kitsune who rely on their unhealthy habits to keep themselves emotionally stable, Naru needed none of that to stay in perfect control of her emotions.
Naru prided herself as Shinobu pulled at her skirt. "Sempai, can you help me pick fruits?" Shinobu pointed to the fruit stand as Naru felt a foul essence sweep through the open air market.
The fruit vender smiled at her. "Do I know from somewhere?" the man asked. He spoke with an Osaka accent, like Kitsune, but his resemblance to anyone she knew ended there. He looked a bit cross-eyed and could not look straight ahead at her because of it. Still, his face had not rang any bells. Naru nodded no. The cross-eyed man grimaced weakly. "God, you look so familiar."
"Perhaps, she wants you to watch her undress," a voice spoke up from behind Naru. A man, who she affectionately named Muscle Head, walked up to the vender and started to talk to him. "If you ask real nice, Naru might even let you touch her."
Naru's ears perked up. As with the vender, she had never met Muscle Head before, but he seemed to know her name. /Another stalker?/ Naru wondered as she recalled how Sakata Kentaro had stalked her since her freshman year. "Yeah, she gets depressed easily, I can understand that. I recommend a psychologist, not a tutor." The two men laughed as the look of recognition came over the fruit vender's face.
Surprised she had not decked him into another universe, Naru felt that their words sounded vaguely familiar. Naru also realized she did not know how to fend off a mortal man without killing him. Using Keitaro as a flesh-and-blood punching bag gave her no need for control. He could take anything she could dish out. As their laughter grew so louder and obnoxious that she could hear it ringing on the inside of her head, she zoned out everything except the sound of the laughter. She prepared herself to do whatever it took to silence the noise of their chauvinistic cackling. The last sound she remembered hearing came from a worried Shinobu.
"Naru-sempai, please, don't do it."
The sound of Shinobu in distress brought Naru back in time to control her own punch. In that split-second, she opened up her fist and turned her killer right hook into a backhand slap. Muscle Head fell to the ground, clutching his face and twitching in pain.
"The next one will take your head off." She knew it could.
The Muscle Head nodded rapidly, bowing and asking for forgiveness.
The fruit vender had vanished.
Naru smiled at the remaining man and decided to make the best of this awkward situation. Naru walked closer to the Muscle Head.
"If you get a chance to humiliate me in public, I get a chance to humiliate you in public." Naru would enjoy this.
*****
Keitaro entered the open air market closest to Hinata-sou and found a crowd of people gathered around a spectacular sight. Keitaro smiled. He knew he would not arrive to a damsel in distress in need of a knight in shining armor, but she had really outdone herself this time. Keitaro looked down to see some over-sized muscle monster of a man, both hands pinned to his back and his face buried in the ground by the small almost petite redhead with a face he knew better than his own.
"Sempai," Shinobu exclaimed as she ran up beside Keitaro. "Someone assaulted Naru-sempai." Keitaro felt something like that would happen. Her part of the diary made her look like some kind of slut. Frankly, he never once thought of her like that, but he could see how that would cross one's mind reading this.
As Naru fumed with anger, Keitaro handed her the newspaper. "Narusegawa, I think you should read this."
Naru scanned the front page. She turned red. Anger? Embarrassment? Both? Keitaro could not tell. Except for her redness, she kept her facial expressions in check. Calmly folding the newspaper, Naru handed it back to Keitaro.
Naru walked up to the muscular man she had pinned to the ground. With all her might, she kicked him square in the groin. Satisfied, she walked away. She turned around and said something to Keitaro he may never forget.
"I'll kill her."
-----