We stood at the gates guarding the mouth to hell.
Well, maybe things weren't quite that dramatic. But that was just about how it seemed at the moment, for all intents and purposes. It was as though we were a raiding party in an MMORPG preparing for a boss fight, awaiting the moment we pushed through the looming doors and set foot into the lair of the terrible dragon lurking behind them. Yukinoshita would be the overpowered, self-assured ice-wielding sorcerer; Yuigahama would be the cowering, quivering healer standing way too far away for comfort; I would be the rogue-slash-thief who slunk around the shadows, doing the dirty work for the rest of the group and hoping not to draw any unnecessary aggro. Yet unlike in an MMORPG, there was to be no frisson of anticipation here for the challenge that lay ahead, only a keen sense of dread that pervaded my limbs, locking them in place, keeping me from taking another step forward.
Unfortunately, I appeared to be the only one who actually felt any trepidation. Yukinoshita briskly marched up to the door and, without so much as a smidgen of hesitation, yanked it open and strolled inside as though she owned the place. Which, if I hadn't intervened on her rival's behalf, she might well have done. "Is Isshiki-san here?" she called.
As Yuigahama and I followed her into the room, I observed the slender back of the student council president turning to face us, her split-second look of annoyance shifting into a well-rehearsed token smile. "Oh, it's you again, Yukinoshita-senpai," Isshiki chirped with a carefully measured hint of insouciance. "Have you come to give me your-"
Her gaze fell on Yuigahama, then on me. At that moment, her face seemed to break into a multitude of disparate, conflicting emotions – her mouth opened into a smile, but the corners of her lips were frozen, locking her mouth into an almost sardonic leer. The pools of honey in her irises rippled, as though being poked repeatedly by a knife, and her eyebrows curled in disappointed understanding.
"I see how it is," she murmured slowly, tapping her fingers noisily on the desk beside her. "That's why you said all that to me yesterday. I get it now."
Everything inside me was screaming for me to inquire as to what she was talking about, but for once I managed to keep a lid on my mouth before it could do any unnecessary damage. It was hence left to Yuigahama to ask, "What do you mean, Iroha-chan?"
"Did I say something? Sorry, I just kinda let my mind slip sometimes." The thinly-veiled sting in Isshiki's voice was audible, despite her best efforts to disguise it under her practiced façade of good grace. "Don't worry about it, Yui-senpai, it's nothing to concern yourself with. Just a little bit of an understanding between the two of us." She cleared her throat and nodded forcefully, as if physically bottling up her discomfort and saving its release for later. "You're here to help me out, right? I need all the hands on deck I can get right now, so you came right on time. Starting with these."
She pointed to a stack of paper beside her. "Budget forms for the stuff we're buying for the event," Isshiki explained. "I have Nitta working on the other half of them, but there's still a whole bunch left. I've never been good at math, so…" She clasped her hands together and pressed her head into them as she bowed. "You'll give me a hand, right, Yukinoshita-senpai? You did say you would, after all. Or at least, you said the Service Club would."
"In a fashion." Yukinoshita sighed, gave Isshiki one last pointed squint, and then sat down at the table and began perusing the paper. "Maybe you should be learning how to do this stuff yourself," she muttered as she scanned the pages. "You are the student council president, after all."
"Yeah, but part of being a good president is knowing what you can and can't do, isn't it?" Isshiki responded lightly. "I would never take on things that I knew I couldn't do."
"Makes me wonder why you took on the presidency in the first place, then," came the sharp retort.
"You're funny, Yukinoshita-senpai. In a lot of ways." Isshiki hopped over to the two of us. "Anyway, I also have something for the two of you. Yui-senpai, they're short-staffed over at the assembly hall right now, so I wanted you to help out there. They're setting up the decorations and things like that, so it's right up your alley, isn't it?"
"Well… you could say that," Yuigahama replied with a half-hearted laugh. "I'd prefer that to staring at sheets of paper for hours, anyway. If that's all you need from me for now… I'll see you in a bit. If you'll excuse me." She shot me a sympathetic look, then darted out of the room with a half-salute, half-parting wave, leaving me to face my fate alone.
"As for you, Senpai…" Isshiki put a hand to her chin and rubbed it for a while, as though massaging an invisible beard. Then, her eyes lit up – though not before she had snuck a glance at Yukinoshita, who had already fully immersed herself into her work, as the studious Ice Queen was wont to do.
Whatever idea Isshiki had conjured up, I had the feeling that Yukinoshita might just not be best pleased with. Whether that was by design was something I could only speculate about, though there was no denying the animosity that had been brewing for some time between them, a hostility that I knew I bore much culpability for fomenting. Not that there was much I could do about it now – the snowball had already been rolled down the mountain, and the ensuing avalanche would not be easily stopped.
"I think I'll have you come with me for now," Isshiki finally said.
Inevitably, we found ourselves in the only location a girl of her age might take a boy alone in a story like this. Isshiki snapped the door shut behind her, sneaking me a suggestive smirk as she drew closer, her passions tangibly aflame in the dying embers of the early evening. My heart pounded loudly in my ears, and that persistently familiar yet unwelcome blush overtook my features, painting my face a deep shade of rose. Of course, seeing this only caused the vixen before me even greater joy as she reveled in the mischief her mere presence alone had wrought upon my hapless self. Step by step, she inched forwards, backing me into the shelves pushed against the wall until there was nowhere to run, and most certainly nowhere to hide. As I steeled myself for what was to come, she raised her hand up towards me, her fingers curled with salacious intent, and-
"Can you get those boxes at the top of the shelf?" she asked, pointing at an uneven row of cardboard containers lined above my head. "Just those three. There's some poster paper and other stuff we need inside them."
"Oh… right, yeah." I turned my back towards her to hide the visible awkwardness triggered by my wanton and wildly intrusive thoughts, and reached up to grab the closest box. Before long, all three were safely on the ground – which, naturally, led me to wonder what sort of tribulation I might next be confronted with.
"What else do you need?" I asked resignedly.
"What do you mean?" Isshiki bobbed her head from side to side, her eyebrows bent in bemusement. "That's all I wanted you to do."
I let out a doubtful grunt. "Knowing you, you wouldn't bring me all the way here just for that. If you want something, just spit it out. Better than having you lead me around by the nose like you always do."
"'Like I always do'? How rude. It's not like you're a dog being led around on a leash." The ends of her lips twitched playfully. "Or maybe that's the sort of thing you're into. I'm surprised - I always knew you were a closet masochist, Senpai, but I didn't think you'd just out yourself like that. Unless that was all part of a ploy to try and bring out the sadist in me, in which case I'll have to politely decline; I only save that for special occasions. I'm sorry about that, I really am."
At this point, my heart was so numb to Isshiki's mock rejections that I genuinely struggled to figure out whether she was joking or not – though, really, it didn't matter either way in the end. Yet having been at the butt end of her humor for so long, and having resisted her countless, myriad attempts to trip me up, I decided it was high time I satiated her hunger for whimsicality by playing along for once.
"Yeah, you got me," I stated in as non-monotone a voice as I could muster – which, by the standards of most people, was still remarkably flat. "I only helped you become student council president and followed you around for the past couple weeks because I wanted you to step on me. Or something like that."
For the briefest and most heart-wrenching of moments, Isshiki didn't say a word, instead simply staring wide-eyed and slack-jawed at my face. Then, just as I began to worry that I had comprehensively grossed her out – just as I had done to so many erstwhile victims – her expression loosened completely, and she began to laugh. Not the tittering, cynical, artificial giggling that I had been subject to this whole time, but a full-bellied, fully-entertained chortle that veritably keeled her over, her arms clasped tightly around her stomach as she gasped and guffawed. It got to the point that I felt embarrassed to be standing there in front of her, watching her hooting and howling, even if I could thankfully take her mirth as a sign that I hadn't royally screwed up yet another attempt at social interaction.
"Senpai – I can't…" Isshiki managed to squeeze out between breaths, "I can't… believe… I just heard that… come out of your mouth…" She wiped a tear from her eye and sucked in a deep gust of air to calm herself as she looked up at me with a lopsided grin. "The way you said it was just… geez. You're a natural, Senpai. Maybe if you tried to be funny more often, people would like you more. Your one-liners would be the stuff of legend."
Just the merest thought of me trying to crack jokes in front of a crowd of normies who hated my guts was enough to send my brain's trauma centers into overdrive, and I rapidly moved to pour cold water over the notion. "Yeah, no, absolutely not," I replied. "Though I'm glad you seem to be amused, at least."
Something on my face caught her attention, and she abruptly put her hands on her hips, her erstwhile cheer swiftly replaced by a mildly annoyed scowl. "You really like watching me make a fool of myself, don't you," she noted dryly.
It was my turn to frown. "What makes you think that?"
"I've never seen you this happy about anything before." She raised a finger and poked my chest repeatedly as she spoke. "This must be sweet, sweet revenge for all the times I've picked on you, huh? Huh? You must be feeling pretty good about yourself right now, Senpai."
So, she was aware of how often she poked fun at my expense, after all. Nevertheless, retribution had never been my intent, no matter how satisfyingly such a dish might have been served. "I mean, I didn't really…"
Of course, I should've known better than to fall for that. She winked, the cheeky delight in her features having been restored and then some as she placed me squarely back under her thumb where I belonged. "Too easy. You've got a long way to go if you wanna catch up to me. Also," she pointed her finger up into the air, "there is something else I wanted to do here, actually."
In all the hubbub, I'd almost forgotten about the topic at hand. "More grunt work?" I offered.
"I told you we were done with that, didn't I?" Isshiki glanced nonchalantly at the slit in the door behind us, through which a sliver of the corridor was visible. "I wanted to talk about something."
"Something you don't want the student council hearing, I'm guessing."
"I couldn't care less what those guys think – just as they couldn't care less what I think. Yukinoshita-senpai, though…" She groaned heavily. "I don't know how to put this, but… either she's got it out for me, or she's gotten into you. Maybe both. It's bad enough that I can't get a read on her at all even when she's keeping her mouth zipped, but the things she does say just makes it a dozen times worse."
"I'm not really following," I said, somewhat nonplussed as to which direction this discussion was going in.
"I dunno what you said to her yesterday, Senpai, but she ran into the student council room and just started ranting about how I was ignoring her and Yui-senpai, even though I'd asked them for help, and how I was messing with the Service Club by getting involved with you." She shrugged. "No idea what that's all about."
Now I was properly confused. "You'll forgive me for not suspending my disbelief, but Yukinoshita 'ranting' is just about as unlikely as her being interested in me in any way, shape or form."
"I mean, maybe that was a teeny bit exaggerated, but the rest of it is true." Isshiki glanced furtively up at me, as if saying with her eyes: You wouldn't accuse me of lying, would you? And in all honesty, I was coming mighty close to doing just that. It simply wasn't Yukinoshita's style to be so… proactive.
Then again, as much as I was hesitant to admit it, it wasn't as if Isshiki's claim didn't make sense in light of what Yukinoshita had said earlier in the day. Plus, if I'd learned anything over the past few days, it was to not put people in boxes that they themselves didn't want to be placed in. If the people around me could change, then Yukinoshita was no exception, stubborn and incorrigible as she might usually be. In either case, it would probably be ideal to reserve judgment until I had the chance to speak to Yukinoshita again – presuming she was in a divulgatory mood at all.
"It's not like I don't believe you," I said, hoping to assuage Isshiki's indignation for the time being. "But I think it'd be best if I asked Yukinoshita what this was all about."
Isshiki smiled victoriously, as though I'd said exactly what she wanted - and expected - me to say.
"That's perfect timing, then," she replied, jabbing her thumb towards the door. "After all, she's been listening in to our conversation for a while now."
