Anime and manga, as visual mediums, have established a few cues that immediately signal to the intended audience what a scene or character is all about. Yes, a character obviously spending more money at the hair stylist than most people employ to feed their children is an obvious clue regarding who the protagonist is among the masses of monotonously colored 'regular students,' but other than that perennial example, there are plenty to choose from.
A popped vein to signal a temper about to explode? A giant drop of sweat that means somebody is about as baffled by what's going on as the author was when the editor gave it a pass? A spray of nasal blood that acts as a surrogate for a vertical mood indicator and will forever have pubescent Japanese boys wonder when will it be their turn to die from exsanguination? Those are all staples of the genre, ever-present in too many works to count, even if they may fall in and out of favor on occasion.
There are subtler indicators, though, things that hint at tone and nuance, that immediately set the scene. That tell us what's about to happen in the general even as they make us anticipate the particulars.
Such as, for instance, characters drinking alcohol.
Somebody pompously leaning back, swirling a crimson (though sometimes purplish) liquid inside a baroquely fashioned glass cup or golden goblet? Yeah, it's plain to see where Haruno's acquaintances are hanging out. Somebody boisterously draining a giant jar of beer and letting out a triumphant yell after doing so? We're witnessing either a college student, an overworked wage slave, or a Christmas Cake about to sexually harass her quasi-adopted kid (with the ensuing audience envy justifiably sparked by that).
Somebody leaning over the bar's counter, amber light falling in a pool around them that only makes the surrounding shadows stand out starker? With a glass of whisky precariously dangling from their fingertips as the hunched-over character stares into sloshing amber?
We all know what that means: it means monologues, women with legs that reach all the way down to the floor, and a case that refuses to remain closed after so many years have gone by.
Oh, and trench coats. Can't forget about the trench coat.
Trench coats are cool.
"Absolutely not," Shizu traitorously says from her side of her recently defiled kitchen island.
"I don't know what you're talking about," I say as I finish rolling up the sleeves of my white button-up and then straighten the lapels of the vest that came with my Haruno-branded butler cosplay.
"What," her father contributes to the conversation.
"He's going to play the barman," Shizu explains to the uninitiated.
"So… he's going to serve drinks?" a clueless philistine questions.
"Not a barman, the barman," Shizu says. "He's going to stand on the other side of the counter, pretending this is a semi-noir scene, silently serving and nodding, maybe interjecting with a few sage-like lines if he gets the chance to—"
"Your lack of faith offends me on a personal level. Just how long have we known each other, Shizu? Do you really doubt my capability to—"
"Keep your mouth shut? Absolutely."
I blink at her. Then I pretend to be hurt.
"Is this an anime thing? Because my regret at not burning your collection when you were a child grows with every minute I spend locked with you two," the blasphemer says.
"It's a media thing," I charitably explain to people who lacked the same educational opportunities I enjoyed. "By extension, it is a manga and anime thing, yes, but this is more a staple of the detective genre than anything else. Really, it's often employed to depict the deep loneliness of a main character whose closest acquaintance is somebody who gets paid to spend time trapped with them—unlike you, dearest father-in-law, who're likely to end up paying money for the privilege to be psychologically tortured by your daughter."
"Oh. Really," he says with a narrowing of his eyes and a low thud of two thick forearms dropping on top of the surface that I think Shizu cleaned after I dragged her naked body up and down on top of it for purely recreational (I swear, Iroha) purposes.
"I mean, I assume that sports car wasn't paid with a teacher's salary?" I say as I grab a glass from the counter behind me and wipe the inside of it with the same rag I used to take the dishes out of the oven.
For some reason, both Hiratsukas are glaring at me.
It's as heartwarming as it sounds.
"That car was bought second-hand and restored, thank you very much," Shizu says in a tone that's not actually that grateful.
"And it was her present when she finished college," her father adds, only to receive a betrayed look from his daughter at the confession that vindicates once and for all my suspicions regarding the issue at hand.
"So. You're the kind of doting parent that likes to splurge on the occasional present?" I say as I turn my back on them and rummage through the single kitchen cabinet that will need a padlock installed before Iroha's next sleepover.
"I wouldn't say doting," he pretends to complain even as I catch both an embarrassed rubbing of the back of his neck and a pleased grin out of the corner of my eye.
"You wouldn't…" Shizu grumbles.
"And what's that supposed to mean?" he shoots back, hand still behind his neck in a pose that pointlessly displays how far my training arc still has to go.
"Dad, you threatened my boxing coach."
"… Josh and I are old friends. It was just a bit of manly ribbing."
I set two broad glasses, a bottle of something expensive-looking enough that it must've come from Haruno, and a bowl with ice in front of them with as dramatic a clack of glass on fake wood as I can manage, and grin at them.
"That does sound like a story," I say with a professional smile as I twist the cap open.
"… Don't," Shizu says.
"What?" her father asks, looking slightly bewildered between the two of us.
"It's a bartender thing. He's just going to stand there and listen to us talk while occasionally making non-commital noises or interjecting with wise-sounding—didn't he already explain?"
"I thought he was kidding."
"Oh, he was. That's why he's mortally serious."
I beam at her.
She glares.
So I pour her a glass of whisky—
"You better drop two ice cubes in that glass, brat, because if you pull Haruno's nonsense about chilled water, we're going to have words."
"I assume those words won't be, 'Please, Hachi—'"
"For fuck's sake—"
"'—pour me another glass of whisky?'" I finish with a beatific smile.
Then, the second manliest set of hands in the kitchen take the bottle out of my grasp, clutch the front of my shirt, and pull me over the counter to confront steel-gray eyes that are somewhat narrower than they were the first time we talked in the nurse's office, right after I brought up the idea about maybe helping Iroha figure out her sexuality with a didactic plan made solely for educational rather than titillating purposes.
So I…
Look back.
Into those very eyes that I've come to learn. To know better than the ones I find in the mirror, whether behind a broken mask or over a bitter smirk. Eyes that are far more expressive than I ever managed, no matter how deep in Baby Chuuni's First Delusion I delved.
And she keeps looking into me, and…
Sometimes, it feels like Iroha and I can hold entire conversations without words, just exchanging looks that shift in replies and counterarguments far too elaborate for me to be able to explain it to somebody else.
Haruno is… Haruno. She can read me. Better than she can read most people, I think. And she knows me enough to convey what she wants with as few clues as she can get away with.
With Shizu…
Words.
Words are not enough.
And never is it more apparent than when she looks at me and something passes between us that is not an exchange of lines and witticisms. That is not even a thought. That runs… deeper, yes, but also…
It's also something that comes from inside. That blooms and is passed to her before I can turn it into something articulated. That is barely an impression. A feeling.
That makes her eyes soften, her grasp on the line of buttoned-up, stiff fabric peeking above the V of my vest slackening before her hand reaches up to cup my cheek.
That makes it so I close my eyes and let out a small breath before leaning my head forward, my brow resting on hers, feeling her warmth, the softness of her unmarred skin, the reassuring firmness of… her.
Shizu.
Mine.
"Sorry," I murmur.
"Don't be," she says, her fingers trailing beneath my ear, caressing the side of my neck, playing with the short hair at the back of my head.
Then… then there's a bit more silence. A bit more shared warmth and solidity. A bit more of her aroma mingling with the wafting whisky in a way that I innately know matches her more than it would any of my other lovers.
It may lack a wafting, half-consumed cigarette to complete the picture, but there's also beauty in incompleteness.
Or, at least, I hope so.
"You're not going to make me leave so easily," her father says before a loud slurping noise tells me of expensive whisky being consumed out of spite rather than sincere enjoyment.
Which, actually? Please, dear father-in-law. Go ahead. Give me more ammo to point a properly motivated Haruno right at you.
━❖━
"Are you always so theatrical?" he says with a mild air of exasperation while drinking his second glass of expensive liquor with maybe the proper degree of appreciation.
"It's how I deal with stress," I reply, maybe more sincere than I should be.
I blame the alcohol. Or, at least, the few sips I stole after Shizu left for the bathroom.
I honestly don't see the appeal. Really. It's just… aggressive on the throat. It burns on the way down, and I'm glad that I started with a sip rather than a gulp because I can see myself devolving into a coughing fit, much to this man's amusement, if I tried otherwise.
I don't get it at all.
Maybe I will after the next sip?
"It takes time to properly work into your system," he warns me with an extended finger protruding out of his grasp on his own glass.
How rude. Don't you know pointing at people is rude? Particularly when you're unwittingly copying a Joseph Joestar pose. That is the height of rudeness. Nobody should be able to pull a Jojo pose without meaning to.
'Stop being jealous of your father-in-law unless you're planning an oyakodon.'
From what Shizu has said about her mother, that would be terrifying. Almost on par with a Haruno-Yukino sandwich.
'Stop! My penis can only get so erect!'
… Gross. I think I'm going to take another sip of whisky. Just to purge the mental image, you understand.
"I think I should cut you off," he grumbles.
"You're not the barman here. Nor my father," I say with no bitterness at all. Or, at least, no more bitterness than the next sip of amber, fragrant liquid brings. I think I enjoy smelling it more than I do drinking it. It's… when people go on and on about notes of an oak cask? I think I kinda get it? There's… It's not like it smells like wood. Not really.
It's more… like the smell of a forest on a summer evening? But figuratively rather than literally. Like… you can feel the warmth seeping into your bones. You can feel something just plain… comfortable. Like a blanket draped over your shoulders. You're warm, walking under the shadows of fragrant pines, with fallen leaves and green grass adding their own notes to the scent with every step, and then you walk past the shadows and into a clearing, the sun falls on your face, and the sheer feeling of exhilarating warmth catches you by surprise as all the other perfumes around you come to life, ignited by mere amber light.
…
I may be getting slightly tipsy.
'Iroha will never forgive us.'
I know, isn't that delightful?
"Soooo… Yeah," a masculine voice says before my glass—Shizu's glass of whisky is plucked out of my grasp.
"In my defense," I say, starting my line with the words most likely to work with whatever I come up with next, "Haruno has excellent taste in whisky."
"Oh. You fancy yourself an expert?"
"Not at all! It's just that it's Haruno. I would honestly be shocked if the choice in bottle didn't have at least three layers of meaning, of which Shizu's only aware of two at most."
In front of me, an unfairly muscled eyebrow that would likely get disqualified from any prestigious competition due to juicing rises in eloquent alarm.
"You are drunk," he says.
"In vino veritas, as Zaimokuza would say."
"Who?"
"My best friend. Or, well, my best male friend, because I don't fancy his chances if ever directly challenged by Yukino for the absolute, non-gendered category of the title. He's an obnoxious man with no concept of an indoor voice who will, at the drop of a hat that is not literal only because nobody has introduced him to the concept of fedoras, launch into a rant with no less than three mangled literary or mythological references that will be further obscured by his gratuitous usage of foreign languages, preferably dead tongues, because why not. Also, I just realized that I already used the 'no less than three' line, but, honestly, that's par for the course with Zaimokuza and his repetitive overuse of ornamental, superfluous language—he's an aspiring writer, you understand, and he's firmly stuck on the larval phase of the species, when they think that just because a word is hidden in the most recondite parts of the thesaurus, that makes it a better word than whatever a regular person would employ under the same circumstances," I amiably explain.
"… Are you an aspiring writer?" he rudely asks.
"I should slap you just for suggesting it," I say.
"You're a weird, weird man," he bizarrely counters, though not bizarrely enough to make up for his former Jojo posing.
"Thank you!" I genuinely say before trying to steal back my—Shizu's glass.
"So. In vino veritas," he says, holding the glass aloft like a bully keeping my 'To Kill' notebook out of my grasp and making sure they will top the list of recent additions.
"It's Latin. It means 'In wine, truth,' a pithy line about how drunk people often lack a filter and blurt out things without much room for deceit, thus making it so that it's easier to trust the aimless ramblings of a drunkard than the elaborate speech of a professional orator. Something that, in hindsight, is more depressing than humorous, but, really, what's comedy if not our best attempts at keeping tragedy tolerable?" I offer with a broad grin that, for some reason, makes the muscular man wince.
And take a drink.
That is most definitely not a sip.
"I… I don't even know where to start," he says when he deposits the empty glass on the counter.
"Oh, that's a Zaimokuza thing as well! See, when plotting a story, the chronological order is the default, but if you're writing a fantasy story, that's a terrible idea. I mean, don't start in media res, of course, that just makes the audience confused, and we all know that the average moron needs all the help he can get to not feel insulted by anything that challenges their intelligence, but… what was I talking about? Oh, right! See, in a fantasy series, the temptation is to start with an overly elaborate prologue. Something about how, at the beginning of creation, seven dark gods were sealed inside seven souls doomed to reincarnate and clash again and again, the conflict of humans driven by the trapped gods looking for an escape from their prisons—which is utter nonsense, you understand—the prologue, not the imprisoned dark gods. Nobody wants to read a textbook unless they're RPG-playing nerds, and they get off to their math fetish. For regular people, you need to omit as much of that as you can and drip-feed it through meaningful scenes and character interactions. You need to make people care about the infodump before you drop it on them. Really, I have told him a thousand times already…"
"You… seem to care about this Zaimokuza," he conversationally says in a way that would only be more fitting if he was manually drying a glass.
"Best. Friend. I only told him… oh, a few days ago. It physically hurt to admit it. You know, I used to have a running joke in my inner monologue about how pathetic he was. Patron Saint of Those Who Will Die as Virgins. Heh. Joke's on me: I'm pretty sure he tamed his redhead tsundere girlfriend way before I stopped being technically a virgin."
"I feel like I need a shower just listening to you."
"And now you feel actually parental," I say with a conciliatory grin and just a half-hearted attempt to reclaim the glass of whisky. In Shizu's name, of course.
"I take it you don't get along with yours?"
"Understatement of the century. Shizu hasn't told you?"
"She tells me about her issues."
"I feel like I am an entire issue. Maybe a subscription. An editorial department. Heck, I've gotten her fired, involved in a polyamorous mess, turned her into a pivotal part of a thankfully not hentai blackmail plot… I'm wrecking her life just by existing near her, aren't I?" I say with a smile that doesn't quite tremble. Or, at least, I don't think it does.
He… stares at me.
Palms on the kitchen counter, face as impassive as… I don't know. I don't have a lot of experience with people being impassive in my presence. The closest may have been Mom, but I already know all that went through behind that mask of hers. All the repressed trauma, the aching loneliness, the fear, the clumsy attempts at not being to Komachi and me what my grandparents were to her.
Yeah.
Mom looked impassive.
She wasn't.
So I wonder if it's the same for this man in front of me. Haruno would know. She would take a look at him, note a minute shift in posture and tone, and immediately jump to a conclusion that should, by all means, be wrong.
But it never is.
Not with Haruno. My Haruno.
"Do you really think you're hurting her? By being with her?" he says.
Calm and detached as nobody is. As no parent should be.
It makes me angry.
"Yeah. Yeah, I do. I think that I am… I am not worth it. I don't deserve it. Her. I… I am… I owe her. So much. So damn much. And I wish…I wish it was easy. No. Not easy. Never easy. But I wish… I wish it didn't hurt. Her. I don't care if it hurts me. Gods, I wish… I wish it was me, getting expelled, having my future in jeopardy. I wish it was me facing down a fucking final boss to rescue my girlfriend. I wish I did something other than plan that. I wish…"
I drift off, and I don't know why I'm looking between my hands. My fingers are spread on the grey countertop, and it's fascinating the way it's speckled with square motes of lighter and darker colors in an imitation of granite that doesn't match the wood finish. The varnished touch beneath my fingertips and the way my skin sticks to the surface when I lightly pull back.
So many things don't match.
"You wish?" a deep voice asks from somewhere in front of me.
"I wish loving me wasn't a curse," I mutter, naturally answering.
Because…
Because in vino veritas.
━❖━⧫━❖━
I would apologize for the delay, but, honestly, at this point, do you even want an apology? Another one? What are you, a collector of apologies? Because that sounds like a very esoteric concept for a short story, and it would make for a very interesting power system if the apologies were the source of magic that a character can use, fueled by sincere regret and earnest will to make up for past wrongs. Honestly, I could see it being a proper vehicle for a collection of snippets about a mysterious figure who swoops in like a judge from the underworld, revealing depths unseen about the characters in the spotlight and helping them reach an emotional catharsis that ties in thematically with a supernatural world in decline that—
…
It should come as no surprise whatsoever that, in the up-to-date chapters, I'm writing Zaimokuza once again. Mister Chuuni does things to my brain.
Wonderful, terrible things.
Anyway! See you hopefully sooner this time around. Time to kick things up a notch over here.
As always, I'd like to thank my credited supporters on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/Agrippa?fan_landing=true): aj0413, Crimson Grave, LearningDiscord, Niklarus, Tinkerware, Varosch, Vergil1989 Crossover King, and Xanah. If you feel like maybe giving them a hand with keeping me in the writing business (and getting an early peek at my chapters before they go public, among other perks), consider joining them or buying one of my books on https://www.amazon.com/stores/Terry-Lavere/author/B0BL7LSX2S. Thank you for reading!