Author's Note

You can tell the pacing is slower because I'm taking three chapters to accomplish what the original story did in its first one. At this rate, this rewrite is going to be upwards of fifty chapters or more when you factor in the included rewrite of its sequel!

Okay. So as usual a lot of this was written past my bedtime. It was also edited by a friend (not ForteDragon this time though), so I guess I can't say it wasn't proofread like I usually do. The quality is obviously better than the original, but it's also kinda internal monologue happy this time… I'm turning Shino into even more of a quiet introverted person than she was in the original, just wow.

Unlike the beginning note of the first chapter, I'm not gonna make this one super long. Go ahead and read.


Airsoft Guns, Bamboo Blades and Unyielding Love

Chapter Two: First Time Anxiety


The bespectacled girl once again found herself questioning the words spoken about her. She was just plain – not cute at all. What did this girl see in Shino when she said things like that? She wanted to ask, but at the same time didn't want to start this sort of conversation with a perfect stranger.

Nicely enough, the once again bespectacled girl realized she had no further business here. She turned to face the owner of the shop and bowed lightly. "Thanks for fixing my glasses. I'll be going now. But I'll be online later tonight, so if you're on then, we can play some co-op."

"Will do. Catch you then!"

As Shino left the shop and headed for her home, she inwardly kicked herself for not getting the names of the two people she didn't recognize. But somehow, for reasons she couldn't quite explain, she had the feeling she'd see them again.


After arriving home, a certain bespectacled girl decided to grab some things and head for the park. She went into her room and dropped her school bag by her bed before grabbing a worn, black denim backpack from her open closet. She unzipped it, then walked across her room and opened her dresser's top-left drawer, and before her stood what appeared to be firearms. One pistol and one disassembled rifle.

In reality, they were just airsoft guns. Aside from the obvious issue of obtaining real ones legally on an island nation that banned them for civilians, Shino probably wouldn't be able to handle having actual guns. Their mere presence would bring up too many terrible memories of the last day she spent with her parents. Even though getting these airsoft guns created based on real models was already an attempt to move past that time via shock therapy, she could at least hold them without having panic attacks.

That said, her heart still began to race as she picked the pistol up and dropped it into her backpack. She did the same with all the parts of the shotgun as well, along with some pellets for each, and by the end, her hands were shaking. It really took a lot out of her just to hold them, even after several months of owning and occasionally using them.

Shino zipped up her backpack and left her room without even changing out of her navy-blue blazer-type school uniform. She realized when she passed the bathroom that she'd have to open it again once she got to the kitchen. She really must've been out of sorts if she was doing things that created more work for herself, no matter how small – normally, she conserved effort wherever possible.

It's all because of what that free-spirited girl said…

Once she made it to the kitchen, she immediately zeroed in on her targets: a bunch of empty cans that she kept on the white ceramic counter. She took a good portion of them from family parties – her extended family members were always nice enough to invite her to their gatherings, but at the same time, the fact that they even invited her to parties with drinking showed just how little they really knew about her.

Still, once they were too drunk to realize what happened around them, she did manage to get some empty beer cans off of them to take home. They made nice little targets for shooting practice, as she came to realize very quickly through soda cans earlier. If you were accurate enough and stood at the right distance, the pellets would go right through the thin aluminum.

She hadn't initially been planning on going to shoot up cans in the park that day. She had originally intended to just get her glasses fixed and go home to study and game. But those plans needed some adjusting… all because of that doll-like girl and her stupid mouth. She needed to do something to get her mind off that girl's words, otherwise she wouldn't be able to concentrate on anything.

It was, quite honestly, the first time in at least ten years that someone had called her cute. The last people to do it were her parents. Whether it was because she truly wasn't attractive or whether it was due to her never getting close enough with anyone else to consider them friends, she didn't know for certain. She typically assumed it was because of a combination of the two, however.

The feelings evoked when she was called that for the first time in years… Shino hated them. Or at least, she thought she did. It threw her so far off balance it was hard to tell exactly what she felt. That by itself was scary, not being able to know her own about it. Add to that the fact that the very person who said it was drop-dead gorgeous herself, and she was all kinds of confused. She didn't even know if she had positive or negative feelings about it. At the very least, however, she knew she absolutely despised not knowing for sure.

The ebony-haired girl shook her head to clear her thoughts before taking a bunch of cans and putting them in her bag. She added about twice as many as normal – she really needed to blow off some steam. After that, she zipped her backpack up again, slung it over her shoulder and left the kitchen, and a few seconds later, her house as well.

She made sure to lock up before she moved past the front door, but really, it was more of a precaution than anything else. The whole rural town was relatively peaceful – crimes in general very rarely happened, let alone robberies. It was why she moved there at the start of middle school few years back. The town was founded with affluent people in mind, and typically, only the projected type of people lived there, throughout its whole history. That alone severely cut down on theft in particular. When everyone was rich, no one needed to steal.

Her neighborhood in particular was essentially devoid of anyone younger than thirty-five, save for her. And even then, technically, Shino supposed didn't really count for much, since her house actually belonged to her grandfather, who was well over fifty already. The lack of teenagers other than herself nearly eliminated all other kinds of crimes in the area.

By the time she reached the end of the driveway, the bespectacled girl noticed something amiss, something different from normal. The house next door to hers had more traffic than usual. On its driveway, a moving van sat, parked with the cargo door open. Big, muscular men of fairly generic appearance aside from that were moving boxes into the house via the garage.

She remembered there being a 'for sale' sign in the yard up until about two weeks prior, when it disappeared, implying that the house had been sold. However, no further activity in regards to the house happened since then… until this day, apparently. The new homeowners were finally moving in, it seemed.

Shino shook her head before continuing on her way without so much as another glance. She had long since stopped meddling in the affairs of others, it just wasn't her business. And it wasn't her style to go meet them face-to-face, even if they were her new next door neighbors. Even if she actually wanted to, she wouldn't, simply because she had no parents or anyone else to do it with and make it bearable. She lived alone after her grandfather moved back into his other house a year back.

The best thing about her neighborhood was that it was very close to the park. She arrived at its fenced borders after only five minutes of walking. Shino walked through the gate and found herself on a path thick with the green of late-summer plant life. She walked along the blacktop trail for another minute, until the trees got a little less dense, before branching off onto a dirt path to her right.

She quickly ended up in a clearing of sorts – by a loose definition, anyway. The whole field was littered with tree stumps, indicating it had once been a part of the forest around it. About six months after Sinon moved to this town, she noticed people cutting down the trees in this area. Apparently, from what she listened in on, they were planning to build a nature center there. But shortly after they cut down all the necessary trees, the project lost funding due to budget cuts of some sort, and had to be cancelled.

Shino found great use of the typically level stumps left behind. They were perfect for setting her targets and her bag on top of. She took her backpack off her shoulders and set it on the stump closest to the trail back, then unzipped it and pulled out her supplies one by one.

Out came five cans to start with, some pellets, and all the pieces of her airsoft rifle. She assembled it in ten seconds flat, going as fast as she could with relatively tremble-free hands. Using a big, bulky one like this was, to say the least, a lot less stressful than even touching a model pistol, as she knew from experience. Though she almost always brought her smaller airsoft gun, she very rarely so much as pulled it out of her bag.

After lining up her cans on a stump around five meters from her bag, she walked back over and picked up her airsoft rifle. As she got into the zone, she took aim, becoming calm, cool and collected. She had gotten used to wielding this fake gun, and could do it without getting even a little agitated at that point. She finished lining up her sights on the far left can and then fired.

Bang!

"Hyaa!"

Bullseye, the pellet went right through the can. As for why it made that noise, her airsoft gun was fitted with a device that made a sound like real gunfire, though with decreased volume so she didn't get the cops called on her, upon her shooting. Shino got it as part of her— wait, did she just hear someone scream? And from right behind her?!

The bespectacled girl turned around in a flash, her model rifle turning with her. She immediately saw a very familiar girl right behind her: the very same girl who called her cute at the eyeglass store. There was no mistaking it. But why was she even here?!

"S-sorry, I didn't really mean to sneak up on you…" the doll-like beauty said, uncharacteristically acting shy. "I was exploring the forest when I saw you in the distance. I thought I'd come over and say hi, but then right as I got here, you shot that thing. I didn't even know you were holding it! But uh… can you point it somewhere else?"

Upon meeting her for a second time, the short-haired girl took in this new person's clothes for the first time. Before she had been shocked by her raw beauty to the point that she only really noticed the girl's shirt. But upon getting a closer look, she was also wearing a black windbreaker jacket and baggy cargo jeans. Her shirt was the only remotely girly article of clothing visible on her, and when you considered it was just a V-neck, that said a lot.

Shino sighed at this slight over-explanation before lowering her airsoft gun. So that must have been the reason she was acting so shy. She just heard what sounded like a real gunshot, and then the next moment, the origin of the sound was aiming straight at her. She must have been more than a little scared.

"You do realize this is just an airsoft gun, right? No need to be that scared of it," the bespectacled girl couldn't help but say.

The girl before her put a hand over her heart as her expression turned mildly defensive. "Cut me some slack, it was my first time hearing that sound in real life! New and unpredictable things either scare me or make me crazy nervous… and that was already scary on its own!"

This girl really just said whatever came into her mind, didn't she? Most people Shino's age, when accused of being scared of something like that, would try to deny it even when it was painfully obvious they were lying. But this beauty just came out and said that not only the event, but also new things in general, scared her. It was like she didn't have a social filter…

"Okay, whatever you say," the glasses-wearing girl conceded, holding her hands (and in doing so, her gun) skyward to signal she was giving up. "So you're new here, aren't you? It's a small town and I've never seen you before today."

"You got it!" the beauty bounced back, suddenly smiling as cheerily as she did in the eyeglass store. "We're moving in today. My sister and I were given free rein to explore the town while the movers get everything inside. She and I split up to go our own ways recently, right before I decided to check out the park."

They were moving in that day? That struck an awfully familiar chord… hadn't she just seen a moving van right next door? Was this person going to be her new neighbor? But no, this could just be a coincidence, two unconnected incidents. She probably shouldn't bring it up, just in case she was wrong.

"We'll probably see each other around, then. You look like a high schooler, so we'll likely meet each other there," Shino assessed coolly. As long as this girl didn't call her cute again, she'd at least be tolerable.

To clarify, this town was founded with the idea of rich people living there. And within that niche, at least in this area, kids were a fair bit less common than in working class families. There was only one school in the whole town. It was a private school, too, and it went from elementary school to high school. If they were even in the same level of schooling, never mind year and class, they'd probably see each other around.

"Oh, then let's introduce ourselves! It'd be nice to have someone I know in school right away!" the free-spirited girl exclaimed, her smile as bright as the sun itself. "I'm Kirigaya Kimiko! Nice to meet you!"

"Look, I realize you already gave me your name, but I don't really want to give mine to a perfect stranger," the bespectacled girl backed up a little, her inner walls erecting double strength. "Besides, it's probably better that you don't get to know me."

"But why is that—"

The beauty named Kimiko suddenly paused, then looked down. She put a hand in her jeans pocket, pulling out a touch screen cell phone. A quick look at the screen and her whole demeanor changed to be significantly more mellow. When she looked back at Shino, she was like a completely different person.

"Sorry if I was a bother to you," she said, giving a sort of rueful smile before turning around. "Looks like I gotta go now and help unpack. See you around."

With that, she left, walking back along the dirt path at an even, measured pace. The bespectacled girl kept watching her until she disappeared from view. She had to wonder what the girl read that caused such a complete tone shift.

A bother, she said?

That girl, Kimiko, was a lot of things. But so far, at the very least, a bother wasn't one of them. If anything, her most unsettling feature - her complete lack of any verbal filter - actually made her more tolerable than the girls in Shino's class.

If they ever met again and had time to talk in private, the short-haired girl decided she'd ask her what made her call herself that.


Author's Note

Okay, so in the last part of the scene we have a reversal from how it went in the original. Kimiko introduced herself and then Shino was all like "Back off bra, we barely just met". Like she should have been originally, given my version of her personality. I'm trying to go for a more realistic and in-character approach for Shino, since my Kimiko is like drastically different from how I normally write her in FF, never mind how her canon counterpart is.

Yes, I just made a chapter titled "First Time Anxiety" that was just talking about Kimiko's first time hearing gunshot noises IRL (or, from an alternate viewpoint that more of you probably noticed, the first time Shino was called cute in like ten years). No over the top romantic context here! Or at least, not yet, anyway. I'm at least trying to use normal pacing this time, unlike the original, which made Kimiko and Shino's relationship go from zero (strangers) to sixty (confessing) in just a few days.

I'm so tired… my left hand wants to kill me because I've been typing super un-ergonomically for the past several hours. I wanted to go to bed at twelve AM but then I stayed up until three-thirty to finish this, totally fucking up my sleep schedule right before I have a sleep study scheduled (this Tuesday night)… yay, irrational and irresistible writing urges FTW! I still waited until the next day to finalize and release the chapter, but the damage was already done by that point.

So anyway, I guess I shouldn't bother you guys with my problems. Go ahead and move on with your day, I'm done here for now.

See you next time!