Natsuki tapped the end of her sentence with her pen, leaving the final period of her Royal Rumble log.
"Ugh…" she groaned. "If it wasn't for the fact that stuff like this had to be done right away, I would have wrote all this down at a time when what happened didn't annoy me so much."
The newly crowned queen dropped her logbook to her side and picked up where she left off from Parfait Girl. "I really suck at not twisting the knife…"
Not too far away, Yuri and Shujinkou slightly poked their heads from around a corner in order to catch a glimpse of their sullen queen.
"She doesn't look too happy, Shujinkou…" Yuri nervously noted. "Maybe I should try later."
"Well, she does look disappointed, but she doesn't look particularly angry," Shujinkou replied. "I think you could do it now. It might even cheer her up."
"I don't know, Shujinkou, I'm not exactly good enough with people to cheer them up."
In response to her doubtful words, Shujinkou simply raised his right hand.
"Ah…" Yuri quickly diverted her gaze. "But still…"
"I get it," the young maiden immediately looked back at Shujinkou, surprised by his sudden interruption. "It's scary. You want to admit you're mistake and apologize to someone you feel like you treated wrong, but you don't know how to do it."
Shujinkou scratched his right cheek, "I joined the club so I could do the same with Sayori and I still didn't apologize until recently. So, I know how hard it can be and I know you're worried what will happen if you bring up old wounds. But… If you two honestly talk things out, I'm sure that you guys can move past whatever happened in the past."
"Is that how you fixed things with Sayori?" Yuri queried.
"Well, actually I came with a scavenger hunt which was something we wanted to do as kids before leading her to realize why I did so, but you could probably skip to the talking part, which did work."
"…Okay. I'll give it a try now."
"Alright, if you need me, I'm going to head outside so I don't accidently eavesdrop on anything."
With an awkward salute goodbye, Shujinkou left leaving Yuri to take a deep breath. She then proceeded to walk from around the corner and approach Natsuki.
"Hey, Natsuki," Yuri greeted.
"Hm?" Natsuki looked up from her manga, her annoyed expression swiftly replaced it's surprised variation. "Oh… Hey."
"Um…" Yuri struggled to maintain eye contact as she desperately tried to find something to say."Are you still upset over what happened at the convention?"
"Yep." Natsuki bluntly answered.
"Well, at least you won the right to be the convention's queen. That's a good thing."
"Yeah, it's a cool accomplishment, but it's still not the thing I really wanted to do. The whole thing was just unfair."
Yuri diverted her gaze as her entire body began to shake violently. She couldn't help but feel that starting the conversation by bringing up what happened at the convention was a fatal mistake and there was no way to salvage it. "I'M SORRY!"
"Huh?" Natsuki shot a perplexed look at her fellow club member.
"I'm sorry for everything!" Yuri continued to apologize.
"What are you apologizing for? It's not like you could have done anything about the whole Royal Rumble thing."
"No, I don't mean that. I'm referring to something else…"
"What's 'something else'?"
"The… I'm talking about the… comments I made towards you when the club was first formed."
"Comments? Oh…" Natsuki crossed her arms in a huff as the memories of the event Yuri was referring to surfaced in her mind. "Those 'comments'."
"Yeah… Those…" Yuri solemnly confirmed.
"The ones about how my writing was 'cute' and pretty much saying that I didn't bring any real literature to the club?"
"Yeah?"
"Kinda funny… You wasted no time going to town on me, yet I noticed that you didn't do the same when another person who enjoys manga joined the club."
"Yeah, I know… But it's not like I my feelings on the subject were reliant on the person."
Such a response caused a surprised look to cross Natsuki's face. "What do you mean?"
"I still fully believed in my side of our argument, I just didn't want someone else to hate me like I assumed you did. So instead I decided to keep my feelings to myself," Yuri continued.
"Wait… You seriously think I hate you?" Natsuki questioned.
"It was the only logical conclusion to that kind of scenario… You were really mad and we never really interacted outside of group conversations that much."
"Yeah, but that didn't mean… I mean… I hated the things you said to me, but it's not like I hated you."
"You didn't?" Yuri's eyes lit up with surprise. "Then how come you never-"
"I don't know!" Natsuki suddenly snapped. "I just… I was just mad that's all. I mean, I just wanted one place where I can feel like no one is judging or looking down on me and I couldn't even get that at a club I was invited to.
A sullen look fell on her face as her arms slumped to her side. "You looked down on my writing and literature, I used to think that Monika only invited me so she could make her club official and I really had a hard time getting Sayori at first. It's pretty ironic that the one who gave me the least grief was the one who didn't even want to be there at first."
"I'm sorry. I didn't know what you were going through," Yuri apologized. "But even if I did know, it still wasn't right to have those kinds of feelings in the first place."
"Yeah… But even though that's true, I wasn't really that much better back then."
"Eh?"
"You kinda made it obvious that you don't really like to share your interests either. I have no idea why but I probably didn't help any there by calling your writing pointlessly long and complex after wht you said."
"You had to every right to be mad. There was no excuse for what I did, especially since our argument made it clear that I didn't respond well to such critiques either."
"Yeah, but I still made things worse by losing my cool. So stop trying to take full blame for everything."
Silence inserted itself in their conversation, providing nothing but an awkward atmosphere for the two.
"Why are you suddenly in an apologetic mood anyway?" Natsuki suddenly asked.
"Well… I t took me awhile, but I finally realized that I shouldn't have said what I said," Yuri answered.
"You just suddenly realized that out of nowhere?"
"Actually, I would really have to give credit to Shujinkou."
"Really? What did he do; point out how we both said mean things to strangers?"
No. I only told him about the argument recently, but he didn't really voice his own comments on it that much. I'm really referring to the interactions we shared since he joined.
Like you said, it was clear that he didn't really have much of an interest in being in the club at first other than to appease Sayori. One of the reasons I was nervous interacting with him was because I felt that he would respond to my thoughts and opinions in the same manner we did with each other. But that never happened. I didn't know how interested he was in the subject matters, but he would always genuinely listen to me when I spoke and always took care to make sure he'd never upset me. That allowed me to realize what I did wrong.
"You got that just because he a good friend?"
"Mm-hmm. In fact, it's because he was a good friend that I even had the courage to admit my mistake in the first place."
"Really? That's… something."
"Mm. Don't you feel like you had a similar experience?"
"Have I? Why would you ask such a thing?"
"It's just that you used to very harsh and guarded towards him in the past, but you seem to be really comfortable around to the point where anyone could see that you two are good friends now."
"D-Don't make it sound so weird! Of course I was tough on someone who made it obvious he didn't want to be in the club at first. I guess I could have been a little more lenient considering why he was there in the first place, but still. Besides, it's hard to not be friends with someone who likes what I like and makes it clear that he hates it when people he knows are upset."
"I see… Well, I'm glad you had someone to be there for you back then after I what I did."
"Seriously, stop trying to take the full blame. It makes it seem like your trying to be the only bigger person here."
Silence once again inserted itself in their conversation, except this time the atmosphere was free from any awkwardness.
"Ah… Now that we got all of this out into the open… Do you think that we could be friends now?" Yuri asked.
"Eh?" the sudden question was all it took to once again drag Natsuki from her comfort zone. "I mean… There's really no reason why we can't. It would definitely be better than whatever we have been up to now."
"Alright… So…" a tiny smile formed on Yuri's face as she stood up. "I guess I'll go and turn in for the night. Good night."
"'night." Natsuki replied, before watching Yuri disappear into the crowd. The moment she was sure she alone, she mumbled, "Just because he was a good friend, huh?"
She then stood up herself and proceeded to make her way outside; the mmoment she did, she found Shujinkou sitting on a nearby bench.
"Shujinkou?" she called as he approached the bench.
Looking up from his phone, Shujinkou followed the sudden voice that called his name and found Natsuki standing next to him.
"Hey, Natsuki," he happily greeted.
"What are you doing out here?" she queried.
"I was just hanging out."
"Hm," Natsuki sat down on the bench, making sure to keep her gaze away from Shujinkou. "I heard that you heard about the argument that I had with Yuri."
"Well… yeah. I was told about it recently," he admitted.
"Well, just so you know, we talked about it not too long ago."
"How'd that go?"
"It was painfully awkward but… I'm glad we did it. We're friends now instead of whatever we were before then."
"That's great. I'm glad you two no longer have that to deal with that argument you had."
"Yeah…" Natsuki said at a barely audible tone. "You know, it's pretty obvious that none of this would have happened if you hadn't been such a good friend to Yuri."
"I'm sure it still could have happened without me in the equation," Shujinkou insisted as scratched his right cheek.
"No, it wouldn't have; I'm pretty sure of that. Wanna know why?"
"Why?"
"Because it also depended on you being such a good friend to me also."
"Huh?"
"Look, I'm going to continue talking now, so do me a favor and don't interrupt until I'm done, okay?" Natsuki bluntly stated with red cheeks.
"Okay…" Shujinkou awkwardly nodded.
The pink-haired girl took a deep breath before finally continuing, "So, we both know that out of all of us, I've been the hardest on when you first joined the club. Don't even bother denying it because everyone knows it's true. And I know that you were probably wondering why when you've never done anything to deserve that. I mean you joined the club because Sayori asked you to and were clearly uncomfortable with it and then you had to contend with someone who would snap at you over any little thing.
Even though you never said anything, I know you had to keeping asking yourself why. Even I had to ask myself why I was so hard on someone I never even met before and when I think about it, I realize it was because I was scared. I was scared that you would be like everyone else and belittle me and my own interests. So instead of waiting for you to do that to me, I guess I decided to beat you to it. I was a pretty annoying person to deal with and it was inevitable that you would treat me like anyone would treat an annoying person. And yet… you never did.
No matter how much I freaked out around you, you always responded by shrugging it off and being nice. I couldn't understand it; why was he being so nice to me when I didn't really do anything to deserve that. I couldn't help but think that you had to have some kind of ulterior motive; like you were trying to draw me into a false sense of security or something. But over time, it became clear that your kindness and respect couldn't be anything but genuine. Even when finding that out, I was still confused by how you could be so nice and I was even surprised that you even considered me nice.
Even though your natural kindness was hard to expect, it was a really nice thing to experience. And then I got to know you better and we had a lot of fun reading each others manga. The fact that there was someone I could even be a little open with was so nice that I actually began to look forward to the club meetings as much as I hoped to in the first place. Because of you, my life finally had a glimmer of light shine on it. And I know you believe you don't do anything special but, to me, having someone like you in my life was something I really wanted."
Natsuki looked up at Shujinkou with innocent eyes, "I guess I said all that to get to this…"
Despite feeling a strong urge to stop herself and look away, Natsuki continued to gaze into Shujinkou's eyes. "Thanks for being my friend."
Shujinkou scratched his right cheek as Natsuki suddenly stood up, "I'll save you awkwardness of replying to that by ending things here. Besides, I'm exhausted after all these heart-to-hearts. So… 'night."
She began her trek back to her room only to be stopped by a sudden response, "It's my privilege."
Natsuki immediately turned back around, her cheeks changing to match the color of her hair the moment she met Shujinkou's smiling face. She then just as quickly turned away from him, "You just had to have the last word, didn't you?"
Natsuki once again began to take her leave, this time trying her hardest to hid the giant grin she had on her face.