The clubroom smelled faintly of old paper and cheap tea. Lin Qianshu had a habit of arriving at odd times, but today he was on schedule. When he pushed the door open, Yukinoshita was already there, face half-buried in a book as usual. The mood was the kind you get when a calm storm is waiting to break, polite and barely moving, until somebody drops a pebble.
That pebble was Hikigaya Hachiman. He did not storm in. He almost never stormed. Instead he arrived looking like a man who had rehearsed his own disappearance. He sat far from the others, folded his arms, and said he did not want to join the club. It was the kind of posture that could be read two ways: pride, or a quiet plea to be left alone. Lin, who had a soft talent for turning social friction into work, watched him with a bemused expression.
The teacher, who had dropped the ball into the club's hands, answered with blunt efficiency. She wanted Hikigaya in the club, and she wanted him there now. When she left, the room swelled with a strange energy: one awkward boy in the corner, one aloof club president pretending not to watch, and the rest of the world that did not quite fit into any of them. Lin decided to act before the awkwardness calcified into something permanent.
Hikigaya's face made it clear he had rehearsed a tragic exit. Lin saw the tiny flashes of emotion around him — anger, embarrassment, a trace of resignation that looked dangerously like something final. If you had to pick a precise moment when a person decides to vanish, this was it. Lin could not accept that. A person who was thinking about self-destruction had the same immediacy as a medical emergency in his world. He could not be casual. He intervened, clumsy and human and strangely kind.
The intervention went in the form of something simple and disarming. Lin offered help, but not in a sermon. He offered a seat, a small courtesy, and the bare minimum of dignity. It was the most practical kind of kindness: not performance, not theatrics, just a hand extended and a few words that suggested the world might not be finished with you. Hikigaya accepted, but his acceptance was cautious and defensive. He never trusted help that came with a pep talk. What he did not expect was that Lin's help came with the currency the world gave him: wish points. A tiny spark of value, enough to make both a person and a system notice.
Yukinoshita watched the whole exchange with that cool, unreadable gaze of hers. She did not say much, but when she finally nodded it was like the click of a lock being released. The club had its new member. Hikigaya's drama faded into something less poisonous. He would still be grim, still averse to trust, but now there was a foothold — a tiny, ordinary, bureaucratic foothold — to build on. For Lin, the victory was twofold: another person helped, and another potential wish or task had been activated. He recorded the minor mental changes with the clinical interest of someone who had learned to treat human beings as both people and opportunities.
When the meeting ended, the club felt more like a workshop than a charity. Lin had the uneasy satisfaction of someone who had stopped something bad from happening. He knew this was only temporary. People like Hikigaya did not change overnight. But the system tracked small things: a heart that turned away, a hand that reached out, a point that landed in an account. Those small things stacked. For now, the pebble had been picked up. The ripple would come later.
-------
Get early access to new chapters and help support my writing by becoming a patreon subscriber!
[email protected]/miostella