07.28.11
A VISITOR
I don't know how I got to bed that night. Hell, I'm not even sure how I got from the couch to my futon or when. It was about 4:30 when I was jolted awake by a crashing outside, but we'll get to that in a minute.
I know I shouldn't really use this to talk about my present life since this is supposed to be about last year, but I just had an extremely tiring day helping my neighbor clean out her closet. I shouldn't have gone out early for the mail because then she wouldn't have seen me, and she wouldn't have used her chronic back pain as an excuse for needing help and gone on for a full twenty minutes about how her kids never come home and won't help. I wouldn't have felt bad for her and figured, 'oh, how much could one elderly woman have in her closet? This shouldn't take too long.'
As it turns out, age does not factor in to tidiness the way one might think. I swear, I was hit by a junk avalanche of cartoonish proportions the second that closet door opened. It was five tedious hours of sifting and organizing and listening to complaining… so you can imagine how very tired I am right now.
Somehow, though, I still have the energy to write this. I don't know, I'd been planning on just sitting tonight out and resuming work tomorrow, but I don't think I have to. My guess is it's because of how relieved I am to get this part done thanks to spending the last few days writing about what as arguably the most stressful situation they got me into for those entire three months.
'Arguably' being the key word, mind you.
So yeah, that's how I spent my day. That ends my pointless rambling, and now for the ever continuing story that you all came here to see (mostly) uninterrupted from this point on.
As previously mentioned, I somehow in my cloud of anger, frustration, dying adrenaline and, most confusing at the time, regret, managed to get into bed. I was awoken at roughly 4:30 in the morning by a loud crash outside.
After my mind got out of that initial 'just woke up' incoherency stage, I shoot up in bed and eased myself out of the futon. There was another crash right then, putting me even more on alert if that were possible. I stood up to full height and tip-toed to the closet where we kept the broom. It has a metal handle, so it works well for dealing with intruders. At least that was my hope, we'd never actually had an intruder before this.
I crept up to the door, careful not to make even the slightest noise as heavy footsteps approached, very quickly picking up speed. When I was right next to the doorknob and my hand was hovering over it, it began to jiggle. My body tensed, the beginnings of sweat pouring down my face. Having never dealt with a burglar before, I wasn't entirely sure I could do this and wondered if I should just go call the cops. Then, somehow, the lock on the door seemed to magically vanish as the door swung open. I could just make out a man taller than me before I screamed and swung the broom at him, hitting the back of his head.
The man grunted and stumbled into the house, but didn't appear to be all that affected by my attack. It didn't matter by then anyway, because now I could finally make who he was, and I'm sure a lot of you and it at least partially figured out by now.
"Tamaki?" I asked in disbelief. "Wha- what are you doing here? Where is everyone else?"
"They couldn't come, you ordered us not to follow you home! I just needed to see you again. I'm so sorry, Haruhi!" The over-emotional robot then ran up clung to me like I was a rag doll and cried into my shirt. "I must have scared you terribly, Haruhi!"
You got that right.
"I deserved it! I deserve to die after how horribly I've treated you!"
…Okay, that was going a bit too far.
"Tamaki," I said again, pulling away from him quickly. "Calm down, I don't want you to die and you've treated me just fine. It's okay."
"NO IT'S NOT OKAY!" Tamaki screamed, making me cringe since I just knew the neighbors would hear this eventually. "We've all been so foolish these last few weeks. We just love you so much, we never wanted to hurt you. We live to make you happy, Haruhi!"
Everything froze. Completely. I think I may have even stopped breathing for a few seconds.
"Happy?" I said in a low voice. "Happy?"
I could feel that boiling rage from before acting up again. And here I thought it was all spent from my little tirade earlier that day.
"Do you honestly think anything you all have done has made me happy?"
"Well-" Tamaki started, but I was not ready to hear his answer. I still had quite a bit more to say.
"I've told you again and again that I'm responsible for you because if something goes wrong and one of you gets hurt, I'm the one who's going to have to pay for it. That'll put me and my father out on the street! Is that what you want? Is that how you think you'd make me HAPPY?"
"I… I…"
"Stop kidding yourself! You've done nothing but cause problems and nearly get me killed. You expect me to just forgive you all for that? And you expect me to love you? I don't! I don't even like you! And you don't really love me anyway, you've just been programmed to!"
"That's not true."
Tamaki took three big steps, somehow getting from across the room to right in front of me in an instant. I swallowed a yelp and stepped back, not taking my eyes off his.
"I do love you," he went on, putting heavy emphasis on his words. "It has nothing to do with my programming."
"It has everything to do with your programming," I shot back. "I've read all your manuals, I know what you're built for and what guidelines you must follow. Even when you're not making trouble, everything you and the others do fit those guidelines. You don't love me, not for real."
Ever so slowly, his face fell. His eyes went wide like that of a child who'd just been told Christmas was canceled. I looked away, that face was somehow cracking through my anger clouded mind and playing with the niggling feelings of regret I was trying to keep as buried as possible.
I wished he wouldn't look at me like that.
"You're wrong," he told me softly, his hands beginning to shake. "I love you, the others love you too."
He backed away, and if I didn't know any better, I'd say he looked ready to cry.
"When you almost fell before, I was terrified. I thought for a second that you were really going to die and I couldn't bear the thought of that. Isn't that love?"
And there it was again. That… I don't even know how to describe it. Just this way about him that only showed once in a blue moon and made me question everything I knew about the androids. I saw it for the first time after they rescued me from those thugs, and now here it was again and at the worst possible time I might add.
I was supposed to be angry with them, not wondering if they may love me for real and genuinely want to apologize.
My thoughts were so frenzied I could barely speak. Disjointed bits of words and phrases fell from my lips one after another, and Tamaki just kept silent, waiting for me to gain some level of coherence and answer.
"Tamaki, I…"
I couldn't do it. I couldn't tell him to leave and I couldn't ask him to stay. I didn't know what I wanted from him, I just knew I was extremely close to letting my frustration out in the form of hysterical crying. Boy, wouldn't that have been a great sight for him.
He let out a sigh, his head falling, and I quickly figured out that he'd made his own interpretation of my actions.
"Well, I just wanted to see you one more time," he murmured.
I hung my head, I just didn't want to look at his face. I watched his feet turn around, take two steps towards the door, then stop. There was some shuffling, but I refused to look up and see what he was doing.
"We're staying at a hotel for the night," I heard him say. "I'm leaving their card in case…"
I don't know why he stopped there. Maybe he wanted me to get up and cry and ran to him and beg him not to go and whatever… but somehow, I don't think that's what it was.
The front door opened with a crack, allowing me to hear the chirping crickets outside. A long pause followed.
"Goodbye, Haruhi."
I heard the door close gently, along with his decrescendo-ing footsteps. They were long gone by the time I suddenly found it in me to straighten my head back up. I stared at the plain white painted door, taking in it's every feature from the faded gold doorknob to the noticeable crack running lengthwise down to the floor. Apparently, it had been there since my parents first moved in before I was born.
'I wonder if Mori could've fixed that,' I said to myself. The thought was like a bucket of cold water being poured down my back. I couldn't believe that had crossed my mind and I felt more than ever like jamming my head into the wall and keeping it there forever.
'Stop it, Haruhi,' my mind demanded. 'Don't do this to yourself. You know you're right, you have to be right. Robots don't have feelings, they only think they love you for real.'
With these thoughts coursing through me and cleaning out all the unwelcome ones, I went to my bed, kicking aside some books and clothes as I went. I made a mental note to clean up in here to tomorrow and got back into bed, making extra sure to keep my vision straight and not stray to either side of the futon where Hunny and Mori used to sleep.
I laid back down, stretching in my tiredness and taking a few deep breaths to relax myself. I tried to imagine myself in a peaceful place and lowered my arms back down. My left landed on something strange, so of course, I leaned over to pick it up. Suddenly, my efforts to forget all my troubles were rendered moot as I took in the introductory page of the Princely Model's manual.
Just great.
Groaning, I slammed my head down on the pillow and clamped my eyes shut, but I didn't put down the manual. When I opened them again, they gazed into the printed words which were fairly readable thanks to a streetlight located right in front of my bedroom mirror.
I skimmed it contents, though I knew most of it already, and my attention was caught at one particular paragraph:
Your lover figure is the perfect mate in every way. He is handsome, loving, attentive and obeys your every command. His internal hardware keeps him wired into complete compliance, and he is incapable of going against a direct command for any reason.
Ignoring the weird BDSM-like undertones of that, this little blurb stuck out to me for one very specific reason.
The androids could not disobey me, that I already knew. Now that I think about it, this whole situation probably could have been avoided if I'd been more firm in telling them no. Like when they first signed the contract, I shouldn't have just suggested they not do it, I should have ordered them not to.
Now I feel stupid. It's an unpleasant emotion.
Okay, back on topic. The manual directly states that they have to obey me. I told them not to follow me home and according to Tamaki, that's why none of the others came. I didn't know if they had some kind of shock system, or if they'd automatically shut down for a while or self destruct, but the point is, they couldn't disobey my orders.
But Tamaki did.
That realization left me completely floored. I told all of them, including Tamaki, not to come back to my apartment, and he did it anyway.
He went against my orders.
He directly disobeyed me, and once again, the manuals listed that as impossible.
He came to my house when I told him not to all so he could tell me that his love for me was real.
The implications of that were staggering.
You'd better believe I got no sleep that night. I couldn't get over what I'd discovery or stop trying to figure out what it meant. Any alternatives to the obvious fell flat regardless of all the effort I went to in order to justify them to myself. In the end, there was only one conclusion I could come to: I would have to find out when I went to their hotel the next day.
Posted by Haruhi at 11:08 pm 0 comments