Fake Sugihara

Okay so.

I should not be trusted with my own imagination. Like, at all. In any capacity. Someone should have flagged this earlier.

That's the conclusion I arrived at somewhere between respawning my legally-distinct Sugihara avatar for the fourth time and watching him get completely annihilated by a Fate of War boss whose entire gimmick — I'm not joking, this is the whole thing — was moving slightly to the left. That's it. That's the mechanic. Move left. Destroy you. Go home.

"You're embarrassing," I told the screen.

He died again.

I paused it and just. Sat there. Looking at him frozen mid-collapse, sword half-raised like he'd had a thought and then immediately ran out of the will to finish having it.

"...Yeah," I said. "That tracks."

I dropped the controller somewhere and fell back onto my bed and stared at the ceiling and the ceiling was just. There. Doing nothing. Offering nothing. Structurally present and emotionally useless, which honestly, same.

You make me stop.

I put my palms over my eyes.

"That is not a normal sentence," I said into the dark of my own hands. "You don't just — you can't just say that and then go home and eat dinner like you haven't—"

I made a gesture at the ceiling. The ceiling received it with total dispassion.

The thing is though.

The thing is.

That is such a Yuta sentence. That is so specifically, precisely, almost irritatingly *him* that I can't even work up a proper response to it because he wasn't — he didn't mean it the way a person means things when they're trying to mean something. He meant it the way he says *the clock's running fast* or *the crystal's scratched.* An observation. A condition noted. A true thing, said out loud, because it was true and he'd noticed and apparently that's sufficient, apparently that's just what we're doing now, apparently I have to live here.

You make me stop.

Subcategory: things that are simply the case.

Devastating consequences: not his department.

I exhaled. It wasn't quite a sigh. It was more like my body giving up on a word it couldn't finish.

I grabbed my phone. 

Opened messages, closed them, opened them, hovered over Tomoe's name for an embarrassing amount of time, backed out, went back in. This is what cowardice looks like up close. This is the texture of it.

Azu: hypothetically,

No. Delete.

Azu: hey do you think it means anything if someone says you make them stop

Send.

Oh.

Oh I want to go back in time so badly.

I shoved my face into the pillow like I could smother the message from a distance. The pillow offered no such service.

Buzz.

Tomoe: HELLO?????

Tomoe: WHAT KIND OF SENTENCE IS THAT

Tomoe: AZUSA

"I don't know!" I said into the pillow. Muffled. Useless. She couldn't hear me. I said it anyway.

Buzz.

Tomoe: WHO SAID THAT

Tomoe: I WILL FIGHT HIM

Tomoe: OR THANK HIM

Tomoe: MSG UNCLEAR

I turned my head sideways, enough to breathe, and typed with one eye closed like that would help somehow.

Azu: Sugihara

Three dots.

Gone.

Three dots again.

Tomoe: oh

Tomoe: oh no

I sat up.

"'Oh no' what," I said. Out loud. To the phone. As if.

Tomoe: that's not a casual sentence azusa

Tomoe: that's not even like. A medium sentence

Tomoe: that's like... late game dialogue

I looked at the screen. At Fake Sugihara, still paused mid-collapse, going absolutely nowhere.

"Late game feels wrong," I said.

Azu: he probably didn't mean it like that

Tomoe: HE SAID IT THOUGHHH

Azu: he just. says things

Tomoe: YES AND THINGS HAVE MEANINGS THAT IS THE WHOLE ARRANGEMENT

I dropped back down. Held the phone above my face. It's going to fall on me one of these days. Right on the nose. It will be deserved and I will have seen it coming.

"He notices things," I told the ceiling. We're close now, the ceiling and I. We have a rapport. "That's just — that's him, that's the whole engine of him, he notices things and then he says the things he noticed and it doesn't mean anything *beyond* that, it's not — he's not—"

Buzz.

Tomoe: AZUSA

Tomoe: YOU ARE NOT A WEATHER PATTERN

Tomoe: HE IS NOT JUST "REPORTING CONDITIONS"

Okay that one got me. That one landed.

"Low-pressure system developing over my entire sense of self," I muttered.

Tomoe: DO NOT DEFLECT

Tomoe: HOW DID HE SAY IT??

And I stopped.

Because that's — okay. That's the actual thing. The thing I'd been turning over since I got home, since the hallway, since the door, like a stone you keep picking up and putting back down because you're not sure you want to know what's underneath it.

"Like it was obvious," I said, to no one, and then typed it slower.

Azu: like it wasn't a big deal

Azu: like it was just. Already true

Longer pause.

Tomoe: yeah

Tomoe: that's worse

"Worse," I said.

Tomoe: because that means he's not testing it

Tomoe: he already decided

Oh.

I sat up slow. The careful kind of slow. Like the thought was an animal and sudden movement would scatter it.

"No," I said. "No that's — no, that doesn't — no."

Because if that's true.

If that is actually, genuinely true.

Then what have I been doing. All that hovering. All that careful circling like I was being responsible, like standing at the edge of something counted as the same as being cautious about it. There's a difference between caution and just. Not moving. I know there's a difference. I've always known there's a difference.

"Idiot," I said.

Correct.

Buzz.

Tomoe: talk to him

I laughed. Short, surprised out of me.

"Absolutely not," I said.

Tomoe: YOU CANNOT JUST LEAVE THAT THERE

Tomoe: AZUSA THAT IS NOT A THING YOU JUST WALK AWAY FROM

"I can ignore anything if I apply myself," I said, which was not at all true for someone like me.

Tomoe: IF YOU FUMBLE THIS I WILL NEVER FORGIVE YOU

"Yeah ok I won't let you down," I said.

I lay back down.

The ceiling. Again. We're here again.

You make me stop.

I let the phrase hang out to dry, just to see what it did there.

It didn't make sense. 

Or actually no, it made too much sense and the weight of that was the problem.

Because if I follow it... wait no hold on, see... 

If I actually follow it somewhere, it goes somewhere very specific and I've been somewhere specific before. 

I know exactly how that sort of place looks like. I know exactly what you have to leave behind to get out of it.

I looked at my desk. The flyer drafts. The card stock. All of it.

The demonstration.

That's a thing with edges. A deadline. A reason to talk to him that isn't just wanting to.

"Okay," I said.

I'll just talk to him normally.

The most dangerous lie I have ever told myself, and I once convinced myself I could cut my own fringe. In winter. With craft scissors.

The next day didn't give me a runway.

Hallway noise, all at once — lockers and voices and someone's bag swinging into someone else's arm and that low murmurous hum of everyone existing slightly too close. Something metal dropped somewhere and rang out like a small catastrophe and I felt it in my teeth.

I was halfway to class. Rehearsing nothing. Running a loop of something that wasn't quite words yet, more like the shape words make before they form, when —

"Azusa."

I stopped walking.

*Of course.*

I turned around.

He was just there. Unhurried. Standing like he'd simply materialised at exactly the right coordinates without effort or intention. Hair a little messy. Bag strap sitting wrong. A pen in his hand that was — wait.

That was my pen.

The good one.

"You left it," he said.

"Oh," I said.

I reached out and took it and my fingers touched his for about half a second longer than was structurally necessary. Not on purpose. But I'm not going to claim it was entirely an accident either. My face did something. I looked at the pen with great concentration.

"Thanks," I said.

"You press too hard with it," he said.

"I know. It's a flaw of character."

"Makes the lines uneven."

"Okay that's just a personal attack now."

"It's fixable."

"I'm sure."

We started walking. Side by side. I'm not sure when that started — it just was, suddenly, the two of us moving in the same direction at the same pace and I was only noticing it because I was noticing *everything* now, the whole world had become this oversensitive instrument, which is Tomoe's fault, which is *his* fault, which is—

"You're doing it again," he said.

"I'm literally just walking," I said.

He didn't answer. He didn't need to.

"About the demonstration," I started.

"You don't need to overprepare it."

"I wasn't—"

He looked at me. Just briefly. Just enough.

"...I was," I said.

"You'll be fine."

"You say that like you've watched it happen."

"I have."

"*When.*"

"When you stop thinking about it."

Rude. Accurate. This is a pattern with him and it is deeply inconvenient.

We got to the classroom door and stopped and neither of us moved and the hallway kept going around us. 

I looked at the door handle.

"Can I ask you something."

There it went. Into the air. Can't take it back now.

"Yeah," he said. No pause, nothing.

"You said—" I stopped. The sentence was right there and it felt enormous. "You said I make you stop."

He nodded.

"I did."

"What did you mean."

No joke. No soft landing. Just the question, bare, in the hallway, in front of everyone and no one.

He looked at me. Not startled. Not performing. Just — arriving at the answer. Turning it over to make sure it was the right one.

Which was the worst part. Which was the part that made my heart do something I'd classify as *unseemly.*

"When I'm working on something," he said, slow, finding the words as he went, "I don't stop until it's finished. I just — don't. That's how I am."

I nodded.

"I don't stop unless something makes it worth it," he said.

And then:

"When I'm talking to you I forget what I was doing."

Oh.

"That's," I said. "That's so inefficient."

I want to be launched into the sun.

He shook his head. Barely. Just once.

"No," he said. "It's not."

Silence.

The real kind, the kind that has mass, that sits between two people and doesn't apologise for taking up space.

My heart was doing something I refuse to describe.

"Okay," I said.

"Okay," he said.

And then a locker slammed somewhere and it cracked the whole thing open and I pushed through the door and we went in and sat down and took out our things and it was fine, it was normal, totally normal, we were just two people in a classroom.

Except.

I have that now. Sitting somewhere just below my sternum like something warm I don't know the shape of yet.

And the thing about me — the real thing, the thing Tomoe knows and my ceiling knows and probably Sugihara is starting to figure out — is that when I don't know the shape of something I put it down and I back away slowly and I call that being careful.

So.

Yeah.

That's the problem.