Title: Teenage Angst

Characters: Ku Fei and the new class's Nakamura Sachiko

Genre: Angst

Rating: E

Timeframe: Chapter 28 of SW3 Book 2

Spoilers: None, assuming you've read up to Chapter 28 of SW3 Book 2

"We all struggled at that time. Just imagine it: you've lived a normal life since you were born, maybe getting into the occasional fight or dealing with life's occasional hiccup, thinking the world's all normal and dependable, and then BOOM! You suddenly find yourself thrust into an unfamiliar aspect of reality you didn't even think existed outside of anime and video games. Sounds good, right? Maybe; up until the point where you realize you're surrounded by beautiful, experienced people who you know, deep in your heart, that you can't ever match because no matter how hard to try to catch up, they're trying that much harder, and you're always alone, always watching them from behind and no matter how hard you try, you just can't ever catch up. That sort of thing can get to a person after a while."

Interviews, by 'A. K.'

Nakamura Sachiko, class rep of class 3-A, sat on the edge of a low boulder by herself in one of the forest environments of Eva's resort, her stomach still sore from when Kai had hit her in their most recent spar. 'Kai beat me...Kai barely even knows what she's doing! Ever since the festival, and that tournament...' Sachiko's thoughts trailed off, shying away from that terrible woman at the tournament, and she shivered, wrapping her arms around herself. 'I feel like...like I'm dragging everyone down.' What would happen, she wondered, if something happened and she had to face an opponent she couldn't hope to defeat in order to save someone's life? Everyone else in her training group was already so strong... Kagami had her magic, Taro had her regeneration and ki, Possum was a vampire...all she had going for her was an unusual fighting style and an authoritative voice. She always let her emotions get the better of her no matter how hard she tried to hold back her anger, her body was weak, and to top it all off she had a low pain threshold...even a light punch would send her gasping to the ground with tears in her eyes.

Sachiko shuddered. She didn't want to think about it, but it was looking increasingly as if she was...was useless.

Sachiko shuddered again, harder, and wrapped her arms tighter around herself.

What was she going to do...? It felt like she was wasting everyone's time, from her teammates to the older girls and teachers training her. She knew everyone was trying to be supportive but that only made her guilt worse, and now she couldn't even hold her own against Kondo Kai, who, despite being an oni, had, until defeating Sachiko in a spar session, been widely considered to be the weakest among the regular training teams.

A bubble of rage welled up and she sneered at the thought of the oni girl, so friendly and helpful and stupid, and weak, and...

Sachiko slumped a little more and the jealous feeling passed. Kai was all of those things except maybe stupid, and she had beaten Sachiko, fair and square. That fact hurt more than anything else. Sachiko, who had once made a regular thing of beating the likes of Urashima Taro in spar sessions, hadn't improved a bit, while everyone around her rushed forward, leaving her trailing far behind. And now she was losing to everyone.

"Do you mind if I sit down?"

Sachiko froze, her eyes going wide in horrified realization at the fact that someone had seen her sitting there alone, crying her eyes out. The visitor spoke again before she could come up with a reply.

"...I'll just sit down then."

Sachiko made a noncommittal noise in response; it was all she could manage as she desperately tried to wipe her eyes dry. She had an image to maintain; she was the strong, silent, class rep, she never cried.

She tried to watch by the side of her eye as someone sat down next to her. It took her a moment to recognize one of Negi-sensei's close friends, a dark skinned woman with light hair and a faint resemblance to the main sponsors of the Mahora Festival back in June, that royal family from Molmol. The mere thought of the festival itself was enough to bring those awful memories rushing back, and Sachiko looked down at the ground and swore to herself she wouldn't cry.

She just barely managed it.

"I saw you come here," the woman said in a friendly tone as she leaned back on the boulder and idly kicked her feet in the air; the woman's feet didn't quite reach the ground. Sachiko stared at the woman's shoes for a moment, shocked that she was shorter than Sachiko. "I thought you might like a little company."

Sachiko stiffened up and looked away. "I came here to avoid company," she said quietly.

The strange woman didn't seem to notice the pointedness in Sachiko's words; instead, she flopped back and put her arms behind her head as she relaxed on top of the boulder, and Sachiko looked over at her in surprise. Seeing this woman standing next to Negi-sensei, talking and training and doing morning exercises with him, she seemed larger than life; the training battles Sachiko had watched the woman participate in had only enhanced the effect. But, once she got looking at her, she realized the woman was short, almost tiny; she was easily half a head shorter than Sachiko herself, her body thin and fragile-seeming, almost childlike. Her mind tried to rebel at the strange disparity between what the woman had always seemed to be and what Sachiko was seeing now. The woman grinned up at her, a pleasant, open smile, and Sachiko looked away.

"Language too smart; I not understand," the woman said.

'Ku Fei, that's her name,' Sachiko thought to herself after an awkward silence. 'How can I tell her to go away without offending her?' she wondered. She really just wanted to be alone right then, not hanging out on a boulder with some strange woman she didn't even really know... 'Wait...why is she speaking like that now? Wasn't she speaking normally earlier?' She glanced over at the woman again and her thought processes ground to a halt.

'She's asleep.'

Ku Fei let out a little snore.

'Why is she asleep? Didn't she come to cheer me up or something...?'

Ku Fei twitched her nose and let out another snore, this one a little louder than the first.

Sachiko just stared at her for a moment, and finally sighed and slid off the rock.

"You're not going already, are you?"

Sachiko looked back up at the woman, who was sitting up, grinning at her. "What do you want from me?" she demanded, annoyed that the woman was clearly messing with her. She was tired of feeling bad, tired of constantly losing, tired of people looking at her. She just wanted to be left alone, maybe crawl off into a hole somewhere and die. Anything so she wouldn't have to face the others anymore.

"Nothing much," Ku Fei said. "Just thought you needed some company." She idly swung her legs, and Sachiko was again struck by how small the woman seemed.

"I need to be left alone," Sachiko snapped, her anger finally getting the better of her. She felt guilty almost immediately.

"You using smart talk again, I no understand-aruyo~," she said, looking for all the world like a clueless idiot.

Sachiko just stared at her. Never had she met someone so...so infuriatingly friendly as this bizarre woman. "I know you can understand what I say; you talk to Negi-sensei all the time," she said as sternly as she could.

Ku Fei's grin widened as she hopped down off the boulder, puffed her chest out importantly, and clasped her hands behind her back as she started to slowly pace back and forth in front of Sachiko.

"Can you please move? I want to leave," Sachiko said, trying to rein in her temper.

"No understand-"

"Please, just move!" Sachiko said in frustration as tears started to well up in her eyes again. She quickly turned away from the woman and frantically wiped at her eyes; it was times like this that she was glad she didn't wear any makeup.

"You feel pretty bad, don't you?" Ku Fei's voice had become soft and kind, losing the wild enthusiasm behind her earlier claims of not understanding the Japanese language.

Sachiko shrunk in on herself a little. "Go away. Please..."

"Like everyone else has run off ahead and left you behind," Ku Fei continued.

More tears came and Sachiko tried to wipe her eyes again as a hitching breath escaped her throat.

"And then you lose a match, or barely win, and you know you were right about them, right there in your heart, and you want to shrivel up and die, but you can't, because you know they would worry about you, and you can't have that, oh no."

"Sh-shut up," Sachiko said frantically, her breath hitching again.

"And then you have a crazy idea, like maybe running away to somewhere else, somewhere where you don't have to see all those people who are so far ahead of you anymore, somewhere where instead of being a medium-sized fish in a big pond, you can be the big fish in a small pond."

"J-j-just leave me alone...!" Sachiko squealed as she dropped down into a squat, hiding her face with her hands.

"Running away doesn't get you anywhere," Ku Fei said with finality.

"...then what?" Sachiko asked miserably. She hadn't asked for Ku Fei to come and lecture her; she just wanted her gone...! How dare she act like she understood what she was feeling? How dare she?! But Sachiko's anger, normally a hot presence in the back of her mind, refused to flare up again...she just felt too miserable to fight back anymore.

"That's when you find your true strength," Ku Fei said, her voice full of power.

Sachiko continued to cover her face and hunched over further. 'What is she talking about? 'Find my true strength'? What does she think this is? This is my true strength...I'll never be as good as them, never!'

"You'll find out who you really are, under the masks you show the world," Ku Fei continued, as if Sachiko had asked her to explain further. "You'll learn what you can really do, and from there you can grow, and grow, and grow, and then one day you'll realize how strong you really are, and the way your friends really see you. No one's skill only lies in battle, you know," she said in a chiding voice. "Everything relates to everything; everything is in balance, and that helps us become stronger."

Sachiko felt despair creeping back in; she hadn't asked for any mystical-sounding gibberish about balance, either. "Go away..." she said, utterly miserable.

Ku Fei let out an amused snort. "Told you, don't understand your smart talk-aru. Keep it simple please~" When Sachiko remained silent for a moment, she leaned back against the boulder and slid down to a seated position, and reached over to tousle Sachiko's hair. Sachiko didn't even have the motivation to try and swat her hand away. "You're in your darkest hour, Sachi-chan," Ku Fei said softly, pulling Sachiko into a one-armed hug. Again, Sachiko didn't respond. "It always gets darkest just before the dawn, right? Right. Just keep it up, you'll work through this, you'll become strong again in your own way. It's happened to all of us," Ku Fei said, her eyes seeming to focus on something far away as she recalled those memories. "Mana, Asuna, me, even Setsuna, twice! But we all worked our way through it, and we're stronger now because of it."

"...how?" Sachiko muttered, barely audible.

Ku Fei smiled. "Lots of ways," she said brightly. "Practice your skills like Asuna, read a bunch of books like Yue and Nodoka, have some kinda mental breakdown like Setsuna, or borrow the powers of a god, like me!" she said. "Ah ha! I heard that!"

Sachiko covered her mouth and looked away, trying to hide the fact that she had let a small giggle slip through at Ku Fei's ridiculous claims. 'Why am I laughing at her? She's annoying...!' Sachiko told herself, but she couldn't make herself believe it. She chalked the giggle up to total exhaustion and stress, and tried to forget about it. "Leave me alone," she said, more forcefully as she squirmed out of Ku Fei's grasp and stood up, facing away from her. Much to her surprise, Ku Fei let her go and stood up as well.

"Okay, but remember what I said! And when you come back, I want to be the first to see how far you've come, okay?" she said brightly.

Sachiko muttered something noncommittal in response and stumbled off into the forest, leaving her boulder and Ku Fei behind. She was really quite annoyed with Ku Fei for poking her nose into her business like that, but she found she couldn't get mad at her for it; she just didn't have the energy for it anymore.

Once she was far enough away for the trees to hide the other woman from sight, Sachiko found another boulder, this one with a nice curve that she had found through experience was quite comfortable to lay on, and stretched herself out on it, exhausted. Had she been out in the forest by the campus, she would never have let her guard down enough to do what she was about to do, but she wasn't in the forest outside in the real world, was she?. She laid down on the comfortable rock and soon fell into a deep, restful sleep for the first time since before the festival almost a month before.

Things were bad, but they would get better, in time. Ku Fei had helped her understand that, if nothing else. She was just in a bad spot; she would just have to stick with it and see it through to the end, and come out stronger for having experienced it. She wasn't ready to face her friends yet, not by a long shot, but she was no longer looking ahead at a world that held nothing but darkness for her; there was a light at the end of the tunnel, and she knew she would survive.

Author's Notes: So...Ku Fei seems to know what Sachiko's going through? Perhaps we'll see more on this in some future story collection, such as 'Meet The New Class', which I hope to post between the end of SW3 Book 2 and the beginning of SW3 Book 3. I hope you look forward to it!