[Fanfic, 100% OJ] Understand

Series: QP Shooting

Genre: Friendship/Drama

Length: 1000 words

B/D: Just me trying to understand a little about QP and Syura's friendship.

Her hands are cold, but the coffee is hot inside the styrofoam cup. She can’t drink fancy coffee. She’s ridden out too many nights on instant coffee granules, gotten used to the taste of burnt robusta. She doesn’t have the palette for fine arabica, or the wallet. She takes a sip, grimaces, takes another.

“Syura, I don’t get why you drink that stuff if you don’t like it,” QP says. QP has a soda, but she’s busying herself with trying to pick the ice cubes out by sucking on them through a straw.

“QP,” she says, putting on her lecturing professor voice, “Sometimes, in order to become what you want, you gotta act like you already are that thing. I wanna be a sophisticated lady who can drink coffee, so I’m drinking coffee.”

QP scratches her head, takes another bite of her burger. Fidgets in the ugly plastic seats. “I don’t get it,” she says, finally.

“It’s like… if you’re trying to level up as a mage in an RPG. At first, you’re bad at it, but then, because you cast spells, which is what a mage does, you get good at casting spells because you have lots of practice. So you become a mage!”

QP’s ears flicker as the words pass into one and then straight out of the other. Her simplicity is both a blessing and a curse; on one hand, it means she doesn’t worry about complicated things. But on the other hand, it means she can’t empathise with people who do. It’s one of the things that makes her a little distant from everybody, even though she’s friendly and cheerful.

But it’s not just the complexity of the thought that passes her by. At a time where everybody in school is floundering around in search of their identity, QP already knows hers. She’s happy with what she is, what she’s to become. The idea that ‘you are what you do’ is of no use to her; instead, it’s ‘you do what you are’. Down in the pit of her stomach, Syura squeezes the little ball of envy she has for her best friend a little tighter. If only everybody could be so natural, so easy-going.

“How’s the food?” she asks instead.

“Awful. I like chicken better.”

“You leave my babies alone. That’d be like me eating rabbit in front of you.”

“Why don’t they serve pudding? I’d buy it.”

Ah, pudding. Syura wondered when the conversation would turn to it. QP’s passion for pudding seems to consume everything at some point or another. Pudding is nice. Delicious, even. But Syura can’t understand the deep, undying love that QP has for it. It’s not like a game, where every line of code has to be scrutinised, where there are a thousands facets and if any of them isn’t polished just right, the game as a whole will fail to shine. Pudding is pudding is pudding.

“Didn’t you have pudding for lunch, anyway?”

“Two cups,” QP nods, proudly. As if it’s something to be proud of. “I wanted to give my bread to Krila again, so I packed an extra so I wouldn’t get hungry.”

“You really do have pudding for brains,” Syura replies, affectionately.

That’s the problem, in a lot of ways. Syura can’t understand pudding. She can’t even understand rabbits. But those are the things that QP loves, more than anything else in the world. It’s not bad to listen to her talk about them. Her enthusiasm is nothing if not infectious, a beautiful stream of babbling that usually doesn’t make any sense. But on some level, pudding is one of the walls that separate them. There’s no room in QP’s heart for anything else. Not games. Not even Syura.

That’s why she’s jealous of QP. Because QP doesn’t think about the complicated things. The past, the future. She lives in the present, loves in the present. She doesn’t know that this can’t last. She doesn’t know that, sooner or later, they’re going to drift apart. No more fights. No more hanging out in terrible burger joints, no eating pudding and playing games late into the night. Just a slow, gradual farewell as they float further and further out of each other’s reach, pushed apart by the tides of life.

That isn’t what Syura wants. She can’t think of anything she wants less. But it’s already happening, little by little. That’s why she drinks coffee until her hands shake, stays up late into the night typing lines of code to pore over later with fresher eyes. That’s why she records every cooking show, scouring them for pudding recipes. She wants to make something that will draw QP closer to her. She wants to become somebody who understands what QP loves. QP can’t do it. The clay of her has already set; she is who she is, and she’ll never be anybody else. Syura’s identity is still being made. She still has time.

“Hey, Syura. Are you alright? You’ve been quiet for a while.”

She can feel the breeze from QP’s tail swishing beneath the table. What should she say? The things on her mind aren’t the kind of things QP worries about.

“Ah, my tummy hurts. Maybe the food here is bad after all,” she shrugs, and hopes her smile is wide enough, her eyes sincere. “Sorry if you were getting bored.”

“Why would I get bored? You worry about the stupidest stuff, Syura. I like hanging out with you. I even like watching you play games. You always have the funniest reactions,” QP says. “Hey, hey. Wanna know a secret?”

“Sure?”

“I lied earlier when I said I had two puddings for lunch,” QP says, winking, and stealthily takes a cup of pudding from her bag. “Here. Maybe it’ll ease your tummy ache?”

“It always comes back to pudding with you,” Syura sighs, half smiling, half annoyed. The gesture is far from lost on her. She picks up her spoon, and tries, desperately, to understand.

A/N: This may not be satisfying from a stylistic standpoint, but it was an interesting piece for me. I ended up arriving at the position where Syura, in realising that she and her friend don’t actually have all that much in common, is trying her best to reach out to her; in that way, she represents the idea that even if you don’t quite understand each other, the effort to do so is what’s important. Meanwhile, QP (being QP) doesn’t really need fancy philosophy; she knows what she likes and that she enjoys spending time with somebody, and that’s enough. So the real distance between them might not be that they understand each other, but that they’re working off different ideas of what a friendship needs to succeed. Blah blah boring writer speak blah. Think of it as a prep piece for other QP and Syura stuff.

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