Normally, Hachiman eats his lunch outside, without anyone to bother him. Today, though, unfortunately, it's raining, so he's stuck cramming himself into his classroom just like all the other kids.
He sits at his desk, eats his sandwich, and drinks his box coffee in silence. Relative silence, anyway. Unlike most of the rest of his classmates, he doesn't have any friends to talk to, but he does have the invisible God of Repulsion to keep him dubious company.
She sits on top of the next desk over, which has been vacated by its usual occupant, who does have friends to eat with. Her legs dangle over the edge, and she's hunched over, her elbow on her knee and her head propped up by that arm's hand. Incessantly and unceasingly, she's muttering, ranting her disapproval of how their civilization has trained Hachiman's peers to behave.
It must be convenient, Hachiman thinks, to seemingly not need to breathe. He also thinks that the Stoneworkers must have terribly disappointed the woman too, just as the people of his era are disappointing her. He can't imagine that human nature has changed very much in fourteen thousand years, or ever, and even with the guidance of the woman's kind, the Stoneworkers' civilization still fell eventually to ruin.
But Hachiman isn't disinterested in the woman's critique. On the contrary, he feels a nebulous kinship with her horrendous disposition and baleful eyes, and he's not immune to the fact that she's been nice to him. And, anyway, he's always ranting along similar lines already, isn't he? He just keeps it confined to the privacy of his own mind.
"I really hate how humans set their own young up for failure," the woman is grumbling, her face dark enough that if Hachiman didn't know better, he would think that it's smog seeping out of her mouth, rather than merely words. "But who would have taught their parents better? And even if someone had taught their parents better, from every other outlet, they'd still have it reinforced to them that the only way to succeed and achieve happiness in their short, unpredictable lives is to be dishonest with others. That rejection is something to unequivocally fear, that it's somehow wrong for two humans not to click with each other, that it's somehow a failing on their part or an evil on the other party's part for them to be in any meaningful way different to one another. And that, of course, if your petty ego is slighted, then it's perfectly acceptable to…"
She goes on in this way. Hachiman is frankly impressed.
If looks could kill, most recently, Yuigahama's clique would already be dead. Their conversation had caught both the woman's and Hachiman's attention because it had gotten the loudest in the room; something about a nearby ice cream place having a sale. Hachiman files that information away for later, since he also likes ice cream well enough, and has no qualms about going out to places on his own.
But of more immediate intrigue is Yuigahama's predicament. Even as the rest of her friend group talk amongst themselves, as Hachiman and the woman watch, Yuigahama struggles to get a word in edgewise, hesitating and stopping herself every time an opportunity threatens to present itself.
Yuigahama, whose most visually defining characteristic is the short bob and side bun she keeps her hair in, is standing off to one side of the conversation, which isn't so damning as it could be. She's still included in the circle, and all four of the boys are standing too. The two other girls are sitting on either side of the desk that they're all crowded around.
If any of the others have noticed Yuigahama's distress, none of them act on it. Finally, after what feels like forever, she musters up the courage to take advantage of a lull in the conversation.
"Well, I, uh," Yuigahama starts. Hachiman winces, discreetly. "I've got somewhere to go during lunch."
"Yeah?" The leader of their clique's three girls, Miura, perks up. She has light hair, long and loose, which she keeps in artificial curls. "Good. Then you can pick up some of that lemon tea I like." She bonks her own head lightly with a fist, in a false show of self-deprecation. "Silly me forgot to bring a drink today."
"Uh," Yuigahama repeats. She brings up a hand as if in thought, but really, she's just hiding behind it. "But the problem is, I won't be back here until fifth period. I'll be gone for all of lunch, so I don't know if I can possibly bring it…"
It's the wrong thing to say. Miura blinks at Yuigahama.
"Huh?" Miura prompts. In more of a warning tone, leaning back with an elbow propped up on the back of her chair, she asks, "What's that supposed to mean?"
Yuigahama immediately takes a half-step back, like she'll run. Uh, oh, Hachiman thinks.
"You know," Miura adds, "You haven't been very sociable lately, Yui."
"Well," Yuigahama stammers. "You might just have to say… It's kind of out of my hands, for now. I hate to let personal matters take me away, but…"
"That doesn't tell me anything. Just say it straight," Miura interrupts. Which is perfectly correct, of course. But even if Yuigahama were honest with her, as the invisible, recurrently floating woman had gone on about, Hachiman highly doubts that Miura would actually take it in good faith. In fact, Miura begins to tap her free hand's finger impatiently on the desk. "We're friends, aren't we?"
Hachiman snorts, extremely quietly, into his sandwich. Yuigahama tries to apologize, but that's not enough for Miura.
"I told you, sorry doesn't cut it." Which Miura hadn't actually told Yuigahama, as it happens. "There's something you want to say, isn't there?"
Hachiman, himself, feels that he's had just about enough of it. They're so loud, now, he couldn't be pretending not to have taken note of them even if he'd wanted to, which he does. Everyone in class is looking, not just him and the woman. And Yugahama looks like she's going to cry.
It's making Hachiman's food taste bad.
He stuffs the remains of his sandwich into his maw, deposits the wrapper on his desk, and gets to his feet.
Turning to face Yuigahama's clique, he starts, "Hey, how about—"
Miura's glare shuts him right up. "Back," she orders, "Off."
Hachiman startles. Instinctively, he half-pivots away again.
That, however, means that he sees the woman, and her expression. There are many expressions that Hachiman, in his life, might have described as murderous, but routinely, she's been putting them all to shame. If there's anyone that he can imagine, vividly, killing someone, it would be the God of Repulsion. The God of Rejection. The God of Hate.
And she hasn't stopped muttering this whole time.
Suddenly, Yumiko Miura isn't quite so scary after all.
Hachiman scoffs, which takes Miura off guard. She clearly hadn't been expecting resistance from someone like him, who might as well be an amoeba in their class's ecosystem. But Hachiman, with his dead eyes and naturally caustic air, barks back, "That's my line." He gestures to the room at large. No one seems especially thrilled about this. "If you don't want other people butting in on your drama, don't make it everyone else's problem. Talk quieter, or take it outside."
Miura inhales sharply, furious. "Excuse me?" she hisses.
Yuigahama boggles at Hachiman like he's grown extra heads.
He smirks crookedly at Miura, because he knows other people think his face is creepy when he does that. "Can't you read the room? I said, you're annoying."
Which he technically hadn't. But, well, two can play Miura's game.
Three can, even. Because someone joins in from the open doorway.
"For once, I agree," Yukinoshita comments, dangerously mild, stationed at the threshold with her arms crossed.
When did she get here?! Hachiman demands, privately.
But Yukinoshita turns her attention to Yuigahama, frowning. Addressing her: "Yuigahama, if you're going to invite me yourself to eat lunch together and then not even bother to show up, I have to wonder what that says about you. If you're going to be late, isn't it common courtesy to at least text me?"
Yuigahama, bagged lunch in hand, immediately takes the out and goes over to Yukinoshita, on the other side of the room from where her clique all is. Battle lines have been drawn, Hachiman thinks, with some satisfaction, and sits back down. Yuigahama starts apologizing to Yukinoshita, palpably relieved, which Yukinoshita accepts with an ease that's almost irritating, considering how unforgiving she is to Hachiman. Somehow, the two wind up pledging to trade phone numbers, in just that short exchange. Apparently, they hadn't done so previously.
Miura, discontent to be ignored, stands up abruptly, her chair clattering behind her but not falling over.
"Hey, wait a minute," she snaps. "You and I are not finished talking this out!"
"Talking?" Yukinoshita questions. "You consider what you're doing having a conversation? Wow. It appeared to me like you were just forcing your opinions on her."
"Huh?" Miura blurts. She darts an unsettled glance between Yukinoshita and, bizarrely, Hachiman.
With a smile that could freeze hell over, Yukinoshita laughs, "I'm sorry, I didn't understand. I'm not well-versed in the ecosystem you all seem to live in." She tilts her head. "Sorry, I thought you were an ape trying to intimidate me. It's fine if you want to play king of the mountain and try to look tough, but please keep it confined to your own territory." Yukinoshita flips her hair, obnoxiously smug. "Your bluff will soon rub off, just like your cheap make-up."
The other students, Yuigahama included, stare at Yukinoshita in baffled incomprehension, but Hachiman already knew what she was like. He sips his box coffee, vaguely pleased not to be her target, for once.
"So this is Yukino," observes the woman, who's paused in her quiet ranting. She doesn't seem to Hachiman to be surprised by Yukinoshita, but certainly, she's contemplating her. It occurs to him, also, that she had defaulted to using Yukinoshita's first name. But then, she is a foreigner.
Miura blusters. She protests, "That makes no sense!"
But that's the point at which the leader of that group's boys, Hayato Hayama, inserts himself into the middle of the situation. Hayama, whose light hair is stylishly mussed and who wears this eye-catching cowboy tie instead of their uniform's standard necktie, places himself physically between Miura and Yukinoshita.
"Okay, that's enough, Yukinoshita," he says, diplomatic, and unexpectedly, Yukinoshita blinks first. She huffs and turns aside. But then Hayama looks meaningfully to Miura as well. "You too, Yumiko."
Miura huffs, herself, and sits back down, biting her thumbnail in frustration.
Yukinoshita tells Yuigahama that she'll go on ahead, and exists the classroom. A mass exodus of all the rest of the students, except for the members of Yuigahama's group, follows in her wake, since no one really wants to stay in the rotten atmosphere that had been created. Hachiman rides that same wave out, careful to use the doorway that's at the front of the room, so that he doesn't have to walk past Yuigahama.
Yuigahama and Miura are the only ones who hang back. Hachiman and Yukinoshita, meanwhile, are the only ones who hang around to loiter in the hallway.
Hachiman, Yukinoshita, and the floating, invisible woman, who had taken her cue to phase through the classroom wall and into the hallway after Hachiman.
Hachiman leans against the building's outer wall, against the window, the rain pouring away on the other side of the glass. The woman floats on to be suspended in midair out there, in the rain, just to one side of Hachiman. She lets the rain fall right through her, framed against the slate gray sky. Yukinoshita, on the other hand, leans against the wall opposite to Hachiman.
Muffled, both of them can hear Yuigahama meander through an ambiguous explanation of why she believes she's such a people pleaser to Miura. Hachiman is confident that the woman can hear it too.
Miura barks for Yuigahama to get on with it. After one more false start, she does.
"Watching Hikki and Yukinon made me think," Yuigahama admits. Hachiman's ears prick at Yuigahama's unfortunate nickname for him, and he sees Yukinoshita have the same reaction. "They say what they think, and pick up on each other's moods, and they seem to have fun without trying to match each other. They just seem right."
What dimension are you from? Hachiman wonders internally. Yukinoshita, with what must be a similar sentiment, frowns at the classroom's back door.
"So I thought," Yuigahama goes on, heedless, "Maybe I was wrong to try so hard to get along with everyone else. I mean, Hikki is totally reclusive, right?"
Hachiman jolts. Why is she disparaging him, now? Didn't he just try to stand up for her?
That's what he gets, he supposes.
"He pretends to sleep during breaks and laughs while he reads books," Yuigahama continues, "And it's creepy."
Yukinoshita snorts. From behind her hand, she comments, "I thought you only did that in the club. Didn't know you did that weird laugh in class too." She shrugs. "Well, that really is creepy, so you should probably stop."
Hachiman looks away from her, annoyed. The woman, though, sticks her head into the corridor through the windowpane, somehow even more visibly annoyed than he is.
"She claims not to be well-versed in this ecosystem," the woman grumps, "But she's just as concerned with its sensibilities as anyone."
"Creepy according to what ecosystem?" Hachiman echoes, since he hadn't had much of a comeback anyway.
It gives Yukinoshita pause. She blinks at Hachiman, and then smiles her furious, frosty smile at him, indignant at having her own words thrown back at her. "Your creepiness transcends habitats."
"That just means I have ecological staying power." Hachiman attempts to smirk, but it comes out wobbly and self-conscious, since it's Yukinoshita he's up against.
She inclines her head to him. "So long as you don't do anything creepy enough to get yourself arrested, I suppose. It would reflect poorly on the club."
Hachiman grits his teeth, but he doesn't have very much to say to that, and the woman only eyeballs Yukinoshita suspiciously through the windowpane. Still, it's more of a backlash than he's ever gotten out of Yukinoshita before, so he'll have to keep it in mind. Hachiman gets the sense that catching her in a contradiction has earned him more respect from Yukinoshita, somehow, even as it's earned him her ire.
In the classroom, Yuigahama is still baring her heart to Miura, and Hachiman's missed a good chunk of what she'd been on about through his bout with Yukinoshita. He tunes back in just in time to hear Yuigahama conclude, "Do you think that we could still try to be friends?"
There's a click, like a flip phone flicking shut, and then Miura's reply. "Well… Sure. I guess we can."
Hachiman doesn't believe her for a second. Yuigahama's displayed too much dissent to still have retained her usefulness as a crony, and whether it was her intention or not, she contributed to Miura's public humiliation by aligning herself with Yukinoshita over Miura in front of everyone. If Miura doesn't drop her like a hot potato over this mess, Hachiman will eat his hat, and he doesn't own any hats.
But Yuigahama just says, "Sorry." And, "Thank you."
Yukinoshita straightens from the wall and smiles, much smaller than her angry smile, and much more genuine. "Perfect," is her verdict. And why wouldn't it be? She's won against Miura completely. "She can actually say it."
Yukinoshita leaves then, down the hallway and around a corner. Hachiman watches her go, not entirely at peace with it all. The woman floats the rest of the way into the corridor, dry as she'd been when she floated out into the rain, and a moment later, the classroom's door slides open.
Yuigahama steps out with her lunch. She jolts at the sight of Hachiman.
"What are you doing here, Hikki?!" she exclaims, pointing at him. "Were you listening?!"
Hachiman jolts also. He looks away. "Listening to what?"
"You were!" Yuigahama accuses. She points at him with more conviction. "Eavesdropper! Creepy! Stalker! Pervert! Super creepy!" She angles her whole body away from Hachiman, while still glaring at him. "You're seriously way too creepy for your own good."
Hachiman glares back at her. "Why don't you learn a little restraint?"
"Huh? Why should I show any restraint now? Whose fault do you think it is, moron?" Yuigahama then actually sticks out her tongue at Hachiman. "Bleh!"
She starts to run off after Yukinoshita, but she skids to a halt some paces away. Her face is a little red with embarrassment as over her shoulder, she tacks on, "But… Thank you, Hikki. I mean, for standing up for me."
And then she's off again, like a shot, and disappears from view around the same corner as Yukinoshita.
Hachiman keeps glaring, now at that corner, for lack of a target. The woman glares that way also, but she's always glaring to some extent, so Hachiman doesn't read much into it.
"What does she mean, whose fault?" Hachiman complains. "Obviously, it's Yukinoshita's, right?"
The woman huffs. She doesn't address what Hachiman had said specifically, but she opines, "Both of them treat you badly."
Hachiman hadn't been expecting that. His attention snaps to the woman, who crosses her arms.
"When they express that they dislike you, do you believe them?" she prompts.
Hachiman snorts. "Of course I believe them. It's true."
"If they believed it to be the honest truth," she proclaims, slow with repulsion, "I would take no issue."
Hachiman doesn't know what the woman means by that. It's been, though, his position from the start that Yukinoshita and Yuigahama treat him unfairly, so there's nothing for him to argue with her over, either.
Still, for some reason, it makes something go mushy and warm in his gut to hear someone else acknowledge it.
Strange.
More explicably, the woman adds, "And you."
Hachiman jumps. Points to himself, like, who, me?
The woman's eyes narrow at him. Yes, you. "It would do you good to be more assertive."
"I'm plenty assertive," Hachiman argues, because this, he can argue. It's nice to be back on familiar ground. "Too assertive, some would say. They would be wrong, but they would say it."
She shakes her head. "It's useless to resent others for conduct you won't try yourself to correct."
"Except that I do try." Hachiman bristles, his hands balling into fists at his sides. "And they don't care. One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome, you know."
"Hm." The woman studies him, chronically unimpressed. "Do you think they realize how much it bothers you?"
"Why else would they keep telling me over and over again how much they can't stand me?"
"You won't know," the woman concludes, "If you don't ask. Neither you nor they are mind readers." Again, she shakes her head. Changes her position in the air, a bit, sort of like she's slumped. Gestures ambiguously with her palms. "You have a right to believe in what you've been told plainly, and you have a right to save the effort. But you won't achieve anything by stewing, either."
"Well," Hachiman snaps. "I happen to like stew. So there."
That, also, doesn't impress the woman very much. It doesn't even impress Hachiman.
She doesn't dignify it with a response.
So Hachiman insists, "I have Komachi and Kamakura, right? That's enough until I need to get married."
"How are you going to get married, then, if you don't build the skill of establishing new connections?"
"There's such a thing as arranged marriages!"
The woman just stares at him.
Hachiman deflates. "It doesn't have to be Yukinoshita and Yuigahama. If it's really so important for me to practice talking to people, there's eight billion humans on this planet."
The woman clicks her teeth. Hachiman doesn't think she agrees with him, but he's not sure what specifically she's taken issue with.
But for now, she shows mercy, and drops it. The woman looks away, to glare out the window with her arms crossed, and says, "It really is a stupidly big number. There were far fewer of you fourteen thousand years ago, and we got by then just fine."
Well! That's a statement with some terrifying potential implications. But, on the bright side:
Hachiman does forget all about his usual drama, if only for a while.