The woman follows Hachiman into the house, and she's even considerate enough to pick up the water bottle and the towel. As Hachiman retrieves leftover soup from the other day from the fridge and sticks it in the microwave, the woman leaves the water bottle on the kitchen counter, dumps her sheet of paper in the recycling bin, goes off presumably to throw the towel into the laundry, and then floats back into the kitchen. Kamakura decides to loaf on one of the dining table's chairs.

Hachiman stations himself in front of the microwave, watching the soup inside rotate. The woman takes the chair next to Kamakura, which is fine; like in many families, the Hikigayas have a particular seating order at their table that they gravitate to. Hachiman wasn't actually going to sit next to Kamakura anyway, since Kamakura had taken Komachi's chair, and the chair that the woman had taken would normally be the Hikigaya siblings' mother's, on the notable occasions when she makes it home from work in time to eat dinner with her children.

The microwave dings. Hachiman serves a helping of soup for himself, and for the woman, and sticks the rest back in the fridge. So that he's not expected to make conversation, he collects his assignment from Ms. Hiratsuka, in the form of a written prompt on a sheet of paper, from the counter, where he'd discarded it that Friday. Then, Hachiman sits down opposite Kamakura, and writes as he eats.

It is in the nature of animals to live in groups, he writes. Technically, he's not writing for a specific class, but rather, this essay is a special assignment from Ms. Hiratsuka, a guidance counselor as well as Hachiman's homeroom teacher. She wanted him to write about the ecology of wild animals, whatever that means. He's basically winging it. Carnivores maintain a hierarchy. Those who don't become the alpha must shoulder that stress their entire—

"That's wrong."

Hachiman looks up at the woman, who had interrupted. Her eyes don't seem to be on the paper, but rather, she's looking back at him, holding her spoon halfway into the depths of the soup.

Hachiman frowns. "Huh?"

"Not all animals are social animals. You're thinking of wolves, aren't you?" She doesn't wait for him to confirm or deny. "But wolves don't operate in the way that you're implying. Wolf packs are families, and the so-called alphas, the leaders, are the leaders because they're the rest of the pack's parents."

"Huh," Hachiman repeats, blinking at her. "Do you know about it because you're a god?"

She stares at him, flatly, unimpressed. "Libraries are undervalued in this era."

"Right." Hachiman glances away, embarrassed. He preoccupies himself with his soup. Hachiman tries to sound casual as he asks, "But bears never live in groups, right?"

"No, they do." Hachiman winces. The woman ignores this. "Mothers with cubs, or mating pairs with one another, depending on the season."

"But those aren't really groups," Hachiman protests.

"Why not?" The woman looks at him balefully down her nose. "If you're defining group just to prop up your argument, it can't be a very strong one."

"Hey, now…"

"And," she goes on, still ignoring him, "In the first place, you're not a bear or a wolf. You're a human."

Hachiman's mouth presses into a complicated, thinly chastised grimace. "This report isn't about me. It's about the ecology of wild animals."

She just keeps staring at him. Hachiman cracks first, as he usually does when women or girls with bad personalities stare him down.

"Does it matter?" Hachiman mutters, his eyes back on his soup. He eats a spoonful just to stall, but after gulping it down, he continues, "Whether it's wolves, bears, or humans, living in groups is of no benefit to the individual."

Without missing a beat, the woman picks up Kamakura, who lets her, and she holds him up so that his little face is at eye level with Hachiman.

"You would turn him out so cruelly?" she asks.

It takes Hachiman so off guard that he sputters, surprised. "But that's—"

"And what about your sister?" the woman pushes on, relentless. "Just yesterday, she made you soup. Is there really no benefit in having her around? Is there no benefit to her in having you around?"

"That doesn't count!" Hachiman protests.

The woman lets Kamakura back onto the chair, and he scampers off. She raises both of her eyebrows, just slightly, at Hachiman. "Why wouldn't it?"

"She's my sister. She has to put up with me." Except that as soon as the words leave his throat, he already knows them to be a bunch of crap. He's not so naive. But he can't just back down, either.

The woman huffs. "When you talk to her, do you ever worry about saying or doing something that will make her think less of you, or abandon you?"

"What?" But gears in Hachiman's skull start turning. More securely, he answers, "No. Never."

"Do you believe she ever worries about those things, with you?"

Hachiman regards the woman with careful suspicion. "No."

The woman concludes, "You trust her." She lets go of the spoon to instead cross her arms, leaning back in the chair. It strikes Hachiman how strange it is, to have a god sitting around in his kitchen, eating soup. "Crucially, you trust her enough to be honest with her, to the best of your ability. A genuine interpersonal connection has been established." She spears Hachiman with a look. "You won't get anywhere by discounting that."

Hachiman pushes his bowl farther onto the table, so that he can lean onto the table with his own arms crossed before him, interested despite himself.

"Most people have friends," he posits, but he's pretty sure he can guess what the woman will get at in response.

She scowls. "Most people wouldn't know honesty if it hit them with a truck."

Hachiman chokes. Truck-kun?!

The woman stares at him. Hachiman waves her off.

"Nothing," he coughs. "Go on."

She regards him, also, with suspicion. But she does go on. "I really hate how humans kid themselves," she says, and her expression darkens into the most thunderous glower Hachiman's observed from her thus far, which is no mean feat. "You're all born into this world screaming and in pain, clueless and confused, and then you spend the rest of your short, erratic lives floundering in desperate search for something, anything, that will make the pain, the confusion, and the chaos of just being worth it. Bearable. Humans are social animals, and the answer is thus: an honest, genuine connection." The woman's agitation only grows. She begins to drum her fingers on her upper arm. "But every one of your social structures disincentivizes you from understanding as much, and even if you're able to understand, you'll most likely fail to put together the how and the why and even the essence of the what. You're taught by experience to believe that happiness can be found in a simple purpose, in power, or in a box. You're taught by experience that friendship, that love, is something you can engineer by pretending to be a less flawed, less honest version of yourselves, that will appeal more to those around you. That it's better to lie and say, yes, I like it, I'm happy, because it's worse to honestly express that no, I don't like it, I'm in pain. Because it might hurt someone else's ego."

The woman forms her mouth around that last word like it's disgusting, like she might gag. Stopping her drumming, she bares her teeth, grit together, and shakes her head.

"Humans are amazingly inclined to throw themselves onto the pyre, to risk their own physical safety, for the sake of others, even others that they've never met before," she finishes, at length. "That's the altruism of the social animal. But your kind will sooner jump onto that pyre than even for a second try to, in good faith, reevaluate your own core worldviews, even for the sake of people you claim to honestly love."

Wow, Hachiman thinks, blinking at the woman. She's even worse than me.

But mulling it over, he doesn't believe that he disagrees. In fact, he'd always recognized most of the relationships that have existed around him as superficial; he just hadn't, Hachiman realizes with some glee, taken it far enough. And in the way of his species, who are prone to hyperfocusing on the negative, he'd taken his solid dynamic with his little sister for granted, since it had come naturally to the both of them.

Maybe he's just proving the woman's point, since her case doesn't actually ask him to reevaluate his worldview, and only reinforces it. But since she's a god, it must be reasonable for Hachiman to elect to pat himself on the metaphorical back for getting the right of even as much as he did before.

Without really meaning to, Hachiman grins his allegedly creepy, allegedly very off-putting grin.

"So what you're saying," he summarizes, "Is that I'm better than most people."

The woman, though, in an unprecedented move, nods. "Better off than most people, at the very least."

Hachiman bristles. It might be the nicest thing that an adult has said to him in years, which is really quite sad, actually.

He draws back in his chair and, unable to look directly at the woman, changes the subject. "So are you going to try to find the other gods? If connection is so important and all..."

It's still kind of embarrassing for Hachiman to talk about gods like this, but the situation is what it is. The woman shifts, her perpetual hostility taking on a contemplative quality.

"I want to see the others again," she says. "But to do that, I have to reacquaint myself with the world, first. So that takes priority."

That makes enough sense, Hachiman supposes, since they've already thrown properly common sense out the window. But there's no follow-up from the woman, and the silence that stretches between them is terribly, unendurably awkward, for Hachiman if not for her.

Casting around for something to fill the dead air with, Hachiman allows a niggling curiosity that's been bothering him for a while now to win out.

"Hey," he starts. When the woman's eyebrows rise fractionally at him, he goes on and asks, "What happens when we die?"

The woman opens her mouth.

Hachiman immediately revises his position.

"Wait," he blurts, holding his hand palm-out in the universal sign for stop. "No, nevermind. That setup was really obvious. I don't want you to kill me."

The woman stares at him. "I wasn't going to kill you."

"You were going to kill Komachi?!"

She keeps staring at him, even less impressed.

Hachiman realizes that she was either going to answer him seriously or refuse to comment straight out, and begins to both relax and feel very dumb. He slumps into his seat, but if he's already in this deep, he decides, he might as well hit rock bottom.

Deadpan, Hachiman implores the woman, "Please, just spare Kamakura."

The woman still stares at Hachiman, but she also exhales, slowly, like a kettle releasing pressure. Something in Hachiman's gut unclenches, and he thinks, nonsensically: Boogiepop doesn't laugh.

Another silence descends, but this one isn't so bad. Not precisely companionable, but not bad. The woman eats some of the soup, which is bizarre to see, but it prompts Hachiman to have some soup too. For several minutes, they remain like that.

Eventually, Hachiman perks up. The woman does too, in reply.

Enterprisingly, Hachiman asks her, "Is there anything else you know about wolves?"

XXX

"Well," Ms. Hiratsuka says, looking up at Hachiman from the paper that his report is on. They're in the teachers' lounge, with Ms. Hiratsuka, whose black hair is long and who insists for whatever cause to wear a lab coat everywhere, at her desk. Hachiman standing to one side of it with his hands politely clasped behind his back. Also at his back is the God of Repulsion, floating and invisible to everyone but him. "It's certainly about the ecology of wolves. I'll give you that."

The inexplicable woman, the Fifty-First God, had for whatever reason decided to tag along with Hachiman to school that morning, which has been utterly surreal. She'd mostly spent the day sitting at his classroom's windowsill, facing outwards and phased halfway through the windowpane, her countenance increasingly murderous. Most probably, Hachiman should be worried that she might really kill someone, but he's been too distracted with how much his middle school self would have loved to be in this situation.

And he does find it cool, unfortunately, despite everything, to be privy to an intangible supernatural reality that no one else is aware of. Cool, and too petrifying to consider straight-on.

He's just trying to be normal about it.

But in the present, in the teacher's lounge and during lunch break, what he says to Ms. Hiratsuka is, "I thought that it was ironic and unfair how their social habits are so often misunderstood."

"I can see that," Ms. Hiratsuka tells him, flatly unimpressed. Hachiman, though, has never been particularly concerned with Ms. Hiratsuka's disappointment in him, and this has only become more true now that he's acquired the near constant, omnidirectional disapproval of a god in his life. Nevermind that that second part has only been a factor since the day before yesterday.

It's also true that his paranoid streak might have intensified. To be sure that Yukinoshita wouldn't interrogate the lack of a cut on his finger, he's wearing one of the bandaids that that girl from Crest Coffee had given him. Might as well put it to good use.

Ms. Hiratsuka signs, puts Hachiman's report down on her desk, and props up her head in one hand, not quite committing to a facepalm. "But you make it sound like shallow relationships, or even insincerity, are some kind of sin. I find it hard to believe that these are issues wolves are concerned with."

"The fact that they're not concerned with things like that is part of the point," Hachiman argues, still riding the high of self-superiority. "To be happy, all that a wolf needs is food, shelter, and companionship. Humans are the same way, except we've developed big enough egos to kid ourselves about it."

He's borrowing some of the woman's language from earlier, since he'd liked how harsh it had been. It's a bit of a surprise for him, then, that she frowns at him oddly from his periphery for a moment, like she's trying to puzzle him out, but much less of a surprise when she resolves to nod a curt assent.

Ms. Hiratsuka, however, huffs, annoyed with Hachiman. But Ms. Hiratsuka is pretty much always annoyed with him.

Her hand drops, and she instead leans sideways onto her desk, on her forearm. "So you acknowledge the human need for companionship, then?"

"Of course," Hachiman says, patently ignoring how just a week ago, he would have absolutely denied that humans strictly need company to any extent. But Komachi and Kamakura deserve more credit than that. "But if you have a good relationship with your family, that need is already satisfied. Like wolves, humans with happy home lives shouldn't have to worry about looking for companionship elsewhere until adulthood."

Ms. Hiratsuka's eyes narrow at Hachiman, anticipating a dig about how even though she's an adult, she herself still isn't married. Hachiman decides to let the implication speak for itself.

Ms. Hiratsuka sighs again, more emphatically, and lets the topic go. Instead, she straightens and asks Hachiman, "By the way, what's your opinion of Yukino Yukinoshita?"

Hachiman looks away, but he answers honestly. "Don't like her."

Coincidentally, looking away from Ms. Hiratsuka gives him a good view of the woman, who perks up at this. She is, Hachiman supposes, the god of not liking things.

Ms. Hiratsuka smiles ruefully. She too isn't looking at Hachiman when she says, "I see." She goes on, "She's a very bright student, if you ask me." What's that got to do with anything? Hachiman doesn't dislike Yukinoshita for her grades. "But, those who have more than others carry their own burdens, in their own way. She's actually very sweet." News to me. "Sweet, and sometimes, she's right."

Hachiman's eyebrow twitches. Ms. Hiratsuka doesn't catch it.

"But the rest of the world is neither sweet nor right," Ms. Hiratsuka continues. Hachiman can at least agree with that much. "Must be hard for her." Ms. Hiratsuka grins at Hachiman then, somewhat sheepish. "You're both such troubling kids, it just makes me worried that you'll have trouble adapting to society. It makes me want to bring you together in one place."

"What is that place?" Hachiman mutters. "A sanitorium?"

"Yeah, maybe!" Ms. Hiratsuka laughs. "But I think you kids are fun to watch together, so maybe I just want to keep you two close by."

XXX

When Hachiman steps out into the hallway, shutting the door behind him, it's deserted except for him and the woman. The woman, who had floated out after him through the wall. Her expression darkens exponentially, so Hachiman knows that she's going to speak up before she actually opens her mouth.

"Why don't you like this Yukino person?" the woman asks Hachiman.

Hachiman bristles, but he thinks he has a good enough grasp of the woman's personality to know that she doesn't mean it as an attack or an accusation, but as a genuine question. And, well, she really has been living inside a rock for the past fourteen thousand years.

Hachiman shrugs and starts to head back to class. The woman floats along with him, and he tells her, "She's rude, she's always on her high horse with me, and she doesn't like me, either."

The woman mulls this over. Then, she nods. "So that's what your teacher had immediately felt the need to make excuses for." The woman's expression sharpens with disapproval. "Her view is too simplistic."

Hachiman perks up, enticed by the prospect of more ammo against Ms. Hiratsuka the next time she tries to drag him into a group activity. "Yeah?"

"It's a disservice to both you and Yukino to reduce you to merely troubling, and to assume based on that that you'll be able to like each other." The woman shakes her head. "I have no experience with Yukino and only a very limited experience with you, but beyond troubling, I already know that you're clever, impatient, and willing to adapt to new situations."

Hachiman stops dead in his tracks to stare at the woman, taken entirely aback. He hadn't been expecting her to say anything nice about him.

She stops too, but otherwise, it doesn't seem to mean anything to the woman. She goes on, "If all you and Yukino have in common beyond being troubling, is being subjectively troubling to your teacher, it isn't wrong for her to give you two an opportunity to form a connection, but it is wrong of her to try to force one on you. It isn't something that it's even possible to force, when rejection is a fundamental right belonging to all living creatures." The woman scoffs. "If things do work out for you and Yukino in the end and you're able to understand each other, it won't be because you had your hands forced, but rather in spite of it. And if you're able to both understand each other and actually like each other, it will certainly be in spite of your circumstance."

Hachiman has no idea how to respond to any of the rest of it, so he snorts, and starts walking again. He isn't looking at the woman when he says, "Yeah, that's definitely not going to happen."

Two, though, can play that game, and the woman doesn't exactly reply to him either when she follows him and concludes, "If this Yukino person really does treat you badly, no one has the right to make excuses for it."

Hachiman doesn't know what the woman could possibly want him to react with. Luckily, they turn a corner into a more populous hallway, and he's spared from having to come up with something.

XXX

Note: Some dialogue is straight out of canon for now, since we're still mostly on the rails. Once we're through with Zaimokuza's introduction, though, give or take, we'll be off onto completely new ground.

Also, I entered the short story contest SpaceBattles has going on right now. So if anyone is already on there and feels like voting for IlPogitano's "Legitimate Methods of Problem-Solving" before November 4th, ya know... :^)