Done at last! This chapter didn't take a long time because I had trouble writing it, I just didn't have the time :(
I'm trying to keep up with my mind's idea of this story, so enjoy the chapter and I hope to produce more soon.
Mikan didn't get the train back to her house – she wasn't going there – she went to the uptown residence of Hotaru Imai, her best friend.
Sort of.
"Hotaru!" Mikan chimed into the intercom at the gates to her house, "It's me!"
"You are forty-seven minutes and thirty three seconds late, Mikan," was the cold answer, and after a scary 'leave you out there' few moments the gates buzzed open.
Hotaru was in her lab, as usual, and after Mikan was let into the house by a cleaner she made her way up there.
"Horatu!" she pleaded as she knocked on the locked door, "I'm sorry I was late! Let me in please!" She knew her friend too well.
"I waited for five minutes, and then I began my next experiment," Hotaru explained coldly. "Now you will have to wait until I have finished." Mikan sighed and then wandered off to watch TV on Hotaru's modified wide-screen, and an hour or so later her childhood friend emerged from the lab, blinking in the natural light.
"Why were you late?" Hotaru demanded, hello-s and nice-to-see-you-s completely ignored, and Mikan shrugged.
"Time got away from me, I guess," she murmured vaguely, not wishing to divulge that she was on a date with a very confusing boy she couldn't quite remember if she hated or not anymore. Because she had been disappointed that she had to go, and that by default meant she wanted to spend more time with him.
Which wasn't good.
If she was honest with herself, she'd thought about saying something about meeting up again on the way back to the station – she just had this feeling of things not quite being done between them yet – but neither of them ended up saying anything so nothing happened. She didn't want to admit it, but she felt almost like it was a missed opportunity – if anything, he was a different class to normal boys, and maybe she could've worked with that.
"Who is he?" Hotaru suddenly said, cold and calculating as always.
"What?"
"I do not need to repeat myself," she re-stated; her posture stiff and her eyes glassy.
"Well... why do you assume it's a 'he'?" Mikan inquired edgily – Hotaru noticed everything. Everything. It was part of her Alice.
Hotaru's Alice was really strong, and her combined brilliance and difficult situation had permitted her a place at one of the top schools in the city. But she was in possession of a very sharp double-edged sword.
She could spot love in others, but couldn't feel it herself; predict actions and reactions, but not stray from her own time-reinforced routine, and she was cold, horribly cold. She didn't know what other way to be.
"One: I detect a contaminant in the air that has the properties of being a scented substance, more specifically marketed towards males, Two: eight out of ten of the times that you wear those clothes, it is related to a social exchange, also more specifically with a male, and Three: you have been touching your mouth seventy percent more than usual, suggesting to me that it too has had interaction with a male." Hotaru looked at Mikan, who immediately whipped her fingers away from her lips and went a little red.
"If you say it like that..." she mumbled.
"I repeat: who is he?" Hotaru demanded, refusing to tutor Mikan at all until she answered her questions.
"Look... it's just... he's only..." Mikan stuttered, "he's just a boy at school!" she rushed guiltily, "Are you happy?"
"I don't understand," replied Hotaru emptily, and Mikan frowned a little – Hotaru found it difficult to understand the concept of emotions, especially when people used things like sarcasm; that made it even harder for her.
"Sorry, I was just saying... he's just someone," she said, "you don't know him."
"I don't know him because you haven't told me who he is, if you did, then perhaps I might," she replied, and Mikan realized it was a hopeless battle: Hotaru wouldn't stop until she had the information she wanted.
"Hyuga Natsume, okay!" she snapped, and started to violently look through a text book.
Hotaru was quiet for a while, and then said, "I do know of him."
"Everyone does," Mikan hissed as she tried to get Hotaru to concentrate on helping her study. "There aren't many Alice-students who don't know about him." Much like Mikan's association with Narumi, Natsume also had a controversial past, which people never talked about, but everyone still knew of.
"Why were you out with him?" Hotaru asked anew, "Was it a 'date'?" Her expression was still vacant, and Mikan knew that Hotaru's understanding only went as far as using the words – in reality she couldn't understand the concepts of 'dating' or even affection between boys and girls.
All effects of her Alice.
"Well, yes..." Mikan said quietly, "but I don't like him."
"Then... why did you go on a date?" Hotaru was genuinely confused – something that never happened in her world of books and knowledge and invention. There she understood everything, but in the world of emotions she was always bottom of the class.
"It was a bargain," Mikan explained, "he asked, and..."
"So does he 'like' you?"
"Well..." Mikan looked at the facts: Natsume had asked her out on a date, he had agreed to buy her food and he'd tried to (and sort of succeeded) in kissing her a number of times. "I think he might."
"I understand," Hotaru said pensively, and finally started to help Mikan with her work.
Their parents knew each other from their times at the Alice Academy a long time ago, and Mikan and Hotaru had always been friends, or, at least the best kind of 'friends' Hotaru was capable of making.
"How do I do this one?" Mikan asked after a while, pencil resting between her finger and thumb.
"Mikan, why did you go on a date with Hyuga Natsume, who 'likes' you, but you do not 'like' him?" A little later Hotaru finally posed the culmination of all her earlier questions.
"I..." she said dumbly, "I..." She wanted to say because of Sumire, but that would require explaining a lot more to Hotaru, and Mikan didn't think she could do that properly. "I... don't know," she muttered, and Hotaru seemed to take it in.
"Oh, I see." She didn't ask any more questions about Hyuga Natsume that day.
Mikan arrived home after dark, tired and her head full of equations – if it weren't for Hotaru then her grades would be so much worse, but she was still a pretty poor student.
As she walked though the main room she eyed up a half-empty packet of cigarettes on the table – she wasn't a smoker – well, at least not really. Sometimes when she was really bored at home she'd pretend to enjoy smoking the odd cigarette if she was 'stressed', but it was actually just a device to pass time and stop her from thinking about things that bothered her. There were worse things she could do (like drugs), but she usually felt foul-smelling and tobacco-breathed enough afterwards not to do it again for a while.
But tonight she was irritated, firstly by the fact that she was still hopeless at maths, secondly by the fact that she hadn't stopped thinking about the date and Natsume on/off all day, and thirdly by the fact that she'd let her Alice get the better of her with that stupid piece of trash phone-charm.
She went to her wardrobe to change, and brushed her fingers over a few precious things – some from her mum, some hers – but all of them stolen.
Kleptomania, was her official tag, but it all fell under the broad umbrella of Alices; disorders of dysfunctions of one kind of another. Her mum had it, and passed it on to Mikan: they stole things – the Steal Alice – on impulse, or as part of some sort of weird internal mechanism not present in other people. They couldn't help it, and had a kind of natural skill in it as well. Some of the nicest designer clothes they owned were smuggled out of a store under a jumper or in a foil-lined bag, they'd never had the kind of money to buy them.
People with Alices all had some kind of social dysfunction – take Natsume, for example. He had the Alice of Fire – pyromania as the clinical name ran, because when something in his head flipped he simply couldn't resist making something burn, just like Mikan couldn't resist shoplifting or pickpocketing.
Her and Natsume were the worst kind – dangerous Alices, they were deemed 'harmful to society and/or property'. They were types who didn't fit in anywhere else, and the reason why their school existed; why it had such a bad reputation.
Alices like Hotaru and Ruka's weren't harmful – Hotaru had difficulty socialising and understanding emotions, not harmful; Nogi-kun found himself much more comfortable and able to relate to animals rather than people, also benign.
Narumi-sensei's was an Alice of people, so he was excellent at persuasion; but he also had an undercurrent in which he constantly tied to make people adore him, and when they did he was a fantastic and picture-perfect lover. However, this too had a dark side.
Because they were still all abnormal, there wasn't something quite right about them, and there was always a flipside. Hotaru's brilliance with numbers and inventions came at the price of her emotions, Narumi's social skills devoured his ability to ever be faithful, and Natsume...
Well, Natsume was just a problem all of his own.
Students like Mikan and Natsume had to go to extra classes for counselling – whereas other students got to pursue their Alices, they had to be trained out of them; taught how to resist and minimize their influence, and although they had a pretty good grip on them now, there were times when it could all fly off the handle.
Like that day when Natsume burnt the school, or that time when Mikan got arrested.
"Fuck it," Mikan sighed to herself as she sunk into an empty chair in her empty house – a can of beer in her hand and an eye still on the pack of Lucky Strike promising that this time it would be good.
"Oh, what's the point," she groaned, and then putting the half-drunk beer back in the fridge, dragged a blanket into the main room and fell asleep watching TV. At least then she could sleep to the sound of hearing other people's voices.
Natsume stared down the bag. It didn't stare back, but it did seem to taunt him.
He snatched it up off the floor where he'd thrown it and pulled out the plain shirt he'd bought; it wasn't the real thing he'd wanted, it was just camoflage.
At the bottom of the bag sat that dress, folded and wrapped in tissue paper, purchased at full price while Mikan was still changing.
Why did he buy it?
Natsume gritted his teeth and glared at the thing – ignoring the fact that he did buy the damn dress on some kind of stupid self-propelling impulse – there was still the question of why he didn't actually give it to her, and why he bought something else so he'd be able to lie about it.
What was the point in having it now? It wasn't like he was going to wear it. But, then again, she had worn it – it had been against her skin, and Natsume shuddered and resisted the urge to bury his face in the pinstriped fabric and breathe in deeply.
He didn't simply lust after her now, it was a need, and everything he did somehow came back to her. He was even more confused by the fact that it wasn't just her body he wanted anymore: she was invading his thoughts. He found himself stopping and thinking 'I wonder what she'd make of this' as he travelled home with only his thoughts for company, or looking at shop windows and imagining whether she'd like the clothes in there, or if she'd try them on or what she'd look like in them.
He knew what she looked like in this, though, and it was locked in his room with the accursed pinstripe dress, thinking about it (and her) way too much, that he was left with a throbbing erection that reminded him he was still hugely attracted to her, and now he didn't have anyone to relieve him.
Except himself, of course, but he hadn't done that for quite some time, he didn't need to. Well, he hadn't needed to, but now it was toss off or try to sleep with it, and he knew which one would be easier in the short-term.
He came in the end, one hand on the obvious, and the other fisted in the dress, his eyes screwed shut to shut out the shame he felt doing this – how much more pathetic could he get?
Mikan was going to have to pay for making him like this.
He had intended on contacing her that night to arrange a second date, but after cleaning up he felt too weird contacting her, he'd just...
It would be awkward; he decided against it.
On Sunday Mikan had to work, and Natsume's parents had the day off so they went to visit relatives, so it wasn't until Monday that they ran into each other again.
Mikan had a fresh set of books to take back to the Library – Hotaru had finished reading them (she only needed to read things once), and Mikan felt a heady mix of anxiety and disgust with herself. for feeling the former, as she walked into the Library after school.
He was there. He was always there.
"I'm returning these," she said coolly as she thumped the heavy text-books down on the desk, and Natsume – head buried in a book of his own – jumped.
"Then leave them on the counter and... oh." He stopped in the middle of his usual anti-social brush-off when he looked up and realized who was talking to him, "You."
"Me," she retorted haughtily, and noticed that Natsume had reverted to his usual costume of mis-matched unattractiveness, and he had his 'glasses' back on as well.
"Staring muc–?" he started to recite as her gaze lingered on him, but she cut him off by reaching out and pulling his glasses off – not rough this time. People behind her in the queue began to give each other strange looks, as if to convey the question 'what's going on there?' to each other.
"Why do you wear them?" she questioned as she put them on her own face and looked through the plain-glass lenses to confirm her theory; her chin propped on her hand and her elbow on the desk, she had once again given Natsume a shocking view down her shirt and of her bra.
"Polka-dots today, I see," he replied dryly, and she was blank for a minute before she realized what he meant.
"Hey! Answer the question!" she spat as her cheeks flushed, "Or... do you like what you see too much?"
"Oh, I yearn for you," he retorted – sounding ill-tempered and sarcastic, but really it was more of a truth than a lie.
"Poor lovesick dork," Mikan simpered; the books now totally forgotten and a new battle engaged in. "Why do you dress like that anyway?"
"Why do you dress like that?" he threw her own question back at her – Mikan's skirt was no less scandalous in length today than it was any other day, and Natsume was both disgusted and turned on.
"Why are you answering my question with another question?"
"Why are you answering my question with another–"
"Is there some sort of 'jerk' switch you turn on when you're in here?" she snapped, and Natsume raises his eyebrows slightly – his glasses, meanwhile, were still on Mikan's face.
"Is there some kind of 'slut' switch you don't turn off when–" He was cut off as she slapped him, and when he looked back at her there was a sort of game-set-match look in her eyes.
"The way you talk," she said just a little less confidant than she'd been only seconds ago, but it was only noticeable to Natsume, and she'd won the last point so she was still on the up, "you act like you don't want to meet at eight tomorrow evening in the same place."
"I never said that," he replied quickly, realizing the opportunity he was being granted, "that's..ok..." he trailed off, and then realized they were being stared at by the majority of people in the library, and then looked down to start scanning in the books as if nothing had happened.
"Bye then!" Mikan chirped sarcastically, and sauntered towards the door with a put-on swing to her hips; she was trying to get to him.
Natsume remembered something, and leapt up from the desk in the middle of serving someone and vaulted it. He sprinted after Mikan and caught her by the wrist, roughly pulling her back in his direction and swinging her against the doorframe.
"Hey!" she shouted, "What the fuck?!" Natsume leant in threateningly, pressing thin the air between them, and then casually raised his other hand and pulled his glasses off her nose.
"I'll have those back," he said softly, chewing-gum mint on his breath and the same aftershave he wore at the weekend, but with another layer of shower-gel underneath.
Although Natsume frequently looked like someone who didn't have a hygiene routine, Mikan knew that, like so many other things about him, appearances could be deceiving.
Polka-dots makes a comeback! And I explain the deal with the Alices, if you still don't get it leave a review and I'll reply trying to fill the gaps, but I hope it's not too confusing.
In fact, leave a review anyway. It would make me happy :P