[Fanfic, 100% OJ] War and Peace

Genre: Slice of Life/Comedy

Length: 2000 Words

B/D: Hime and Suguri have a mid-afternoon chat about their new friends.

It was half past two in the afternoon, and the newspaper had not arrived.

This was a state of affairs that Suguri found deeply concerning. Her house, admittedly, was far from the nearest city, but the newspaper man was very reliable. She remembered when he was a fresh-faced youngster on a barely functional moped, given the unenviable task of navigating the nascent countryside roads to Suguri’s abode – a task he sometimes failed but always attempted. As the years had gone by, he had expanded until he could fit three Suguris (Sugurii? Sugurae? She was never entirely sure how you would refer to multiple clones of herself, or why you would want them) inside himself, and upgraded from his moped into a sleek and shiny van; selfishly, she dreaded the day when he died or was replaced and their newspaper acquisition rate became spotty once more.

It bothered her because the number one reason for their newspaper not arriving would be that something very serious had happened in the outside world – which was the exact situation in which she would most want to read the newspaper. It was a vicious cycle made up of sadness and ignorance, both on the list of her pet peeves – somewhere above obfuscation by civil servants, but below leaving cartons of milk in the fridge without any milk in them, which Hime regularly did. (She was opposed to it not because of convenience, but because an empty carton of milk had been robbed of its purpose and therefore was a very sad object, philosophically speaking. Hime contended that she was giving them a new lease of life as oxygen storage devices.)

Disquieted by the lack of vaguely biased broadsheet political commentary in her life, Suguri decided that the first thing to do was establish whether her newspaper delivery man had been kidnapped by newspaper bandits, and, if so, rally her friends to distract them while she infiltrated their stronghold. Having been awake longest, Hime was the first point of call.

“Oh, Geoffry? He’s sick. They called us about it on the telephone. The telephone, Suguri! It’s the first time I’ve ever heard it ring, you know. I jumped out of my skin,” Hime told her conversationally. She was currently prodding at a saucepan of what, she assured Suguri, would be jam when it was finished. As it was, it was a goopy proto-jam that would have looked very sad on a piece of toast. “I asked Sora to pick one up while she’s out.”

“Sora is away?” Suguri asked. She couldn’t imagine that Sora had been abducted by newspaper bandits, although it still remained an outside possibility. What if they had bribed her with food, or kittens? Suguri could tell many a tale of curious maidens lead to their certain doom by baskets of adorable kittens. The curious maidens were always herself, and the kitten wrangler always got a big surprise after her doom turned out to be less certain than advertised.

“Yes. She and Nath went flower picking this morning. Well, Sora went flower picking. I think Nath went Sora-watching.”

Suguri thought for a moment, before remembering who Nath was. Nath slept at real-people hours, and always came and left before Suguri was awake. She vaguely recalled her being quite tall, blurry and in need of a hug, although that might have been a palm tree. There was something very adorable about palm trees, when they weren’t trying to kill her by deliberately dropping coconuts on her head.

“I see,” she replied, because she was vaguely aware that Hime had said something that might demand a reaction. That was the problem she always had – whatever she was talking about just got lost in her rapidly advancing mental landscape.

Hime, however, was not a woman who allowed herself to be left behind, and immediately after she had taken her pan off the heat and ladled the still-gloopy jam into jars, she gave Suguri a quick bonk on the head with her wooden spoon.

“Suguri, you weren’t paying attention. It’s a bad habit, you know,” she said, sternly.

Suguri did not reply straight away, because the spoon had still had jam on it and the jam was in her hair. Her hair, that took her an hour to wash properly – a long, agonising, boring hour – had been contaminated by warm fruit goop.

“Hime, this is awful,” she said, and although it would would have been an exaggeration to say she had tears in her eyes, it wasn’t so very far from the truth.

Hime shrugged, although she pointedly did not relinquish her spoon and was therefore still a figure of immense danger. “Consider it divine punishment.”

While that was technically correct, Suguri was still very unhappy with the situation, and made no secret of it. “You have to help me wash this out later.”

“Ooh! Don’t mind if I do,” Hime giggled, and Suguri realised with a sinking heart that she had accidentally invited her best friend into the shower with her. Surely, though, she would take it as a joke. Surely. “But for now, I wanted to talk to you about those two.”

The silver-haired girl frowned. Was she being asked for an opinion? Probably. But what opinion was there to give? Sora was Sora, and Nath was Nath. Admittedly, she did rather enjoy Sora’s company; it was a change from Hime’s vivacity, which gave her time to relax and unwind. They sometimes went stargazing together. (Hime never joined them; she had seen quite enough stars in space, and was honestly a little sick of them. Perhaps, she said, in a few centuries, when she’d had chance to get nostalgic).

“Sora is plushy,” she said eventually.

Hime’s eyebrows knitted, and a frown flickered across her face. “Plushy? In which direction? Front or back?”

“…what?”

“If it’s front, don’t tell me. If it’s back, don’t tell her.” Hime thought for a second. “In fact, don’t tell either of us. It can be our little secret. Nobody needs to know.”

“...Good?” Suguri replied, slowly.

“Anyway, don’t you think they’re getting along well? Suspiciously well? We’re talking about two women who have actively shot each other, but they go out and have fun together all the time!”

Suguri was hit with the dreadful knowledge that she was about to be sucked into a tangled social web, and instinctively took a step back. Hime immediately took a step forward, spoon very much still in hand. It seemed she wasn’t going to get out of this one without a fight.

“You and I have actively shot each other, and we get along.”

“Yes, but that’s different. It was a bonding experience. We both aimed away from the face.”

“In fact,” Suguri said, “now that I think of it, almost all of my friends have shot at me at some point.”

“Almost all of them missed, too,” Hime said wryly. “It just means you have an eclectic social circle.”

“Who all have guns.”

“Who all have guns! They provide a great talking point that we can all share.”

Suguri did not think that firearms were a particularly good method of promoting peace, love and friendship, but Hime appeared to have gotten distracted from her initial point. Alas, the illusion was only momentary; like a heat-seeking missile, she returned to her original target.

“All I’m saying,” she said, swishing her spoon with each word she spoke and splattering tiny globules of jam on the countertop, “is that love might be in the air!”

She pronounced the last phrase with the air of somebody revealing the culprit at the end of a murder mystery. There was just the right amount of drama, a touch of flair, that devastating tone of certainty. All in all, she was proud of it – although, if she had perhaps paid better attention, she might have heard the point whistling as it it soared several nautical miles above Suguri’s head and vanished into the ether.

“Is that a problem?” Suguri asked, and Hime swore that the lone tuft of hair that stuck out from her head twitched a little. Her face fell, and so, too, did her jaw; she had been aware that her friend was a little dense in some areas, but this was like dealing with a social dwarf star. Sometimes, she wasn’t sure whether it was her or Suguri that was a literal space alien.

Suguri, for her part, watched her friend’s face flit through several complex emotions (irritation, despair, grim amusement) before she took a deep breath and calmed herself, a sure signal that she was about to quiet down and dim the glare of her inherent Hime-ness temporarily so that ordinary mortals could keep up.

“It’s not a problem,” Hime said carefully, her tone neutral (albeit a lively neutral). “But it’s exciting. I suppose I just wanted to gossip about it. When you live on an enclosed vessel, you know, full of maybe a few hundred people who just can’t get away from each other, where if you do something the entire ship knows about it an hour later, gossip just starts to be a fun pastime.”

Suguri frowned. “I’m bad at gossip.”

“I would never have guessed,” Hime replied, fondly. “But you have other very attractive qualities, so it’s alright. Next time I see Kyoko or Nana, though, they are in for some salacious details. Dirt shall be dished, my dear Suguri.”

The idea filled her with a strange sense of dread, but Hime seemed to have cheered back up, which was the main thing.

“Still, those two have bonded surprisingly quickly. Do all youngsters nowadays move this fast?”

Youngsters, Suguri thought, was a very relative term when everybody involved was over ten thousand years of age. That was leaving aside the whole issue of romantic tension, which, although she knew she was famously bad at detecting, she had felt none of. Still, it seemed like Hime had an itch to scratch, and although she might not be quite the right person to do it, the attempt had to be made.

“It’s probably the war,” she said.

Hime tilted her head. “Pardon?”

“The war,” Suguri repeated. “I don’t know if you’ve ever been in one, but… here on Earth, there’s been more than a few. Sora and Nath were in the last big one. They say that in times of war, people love more quickly and intensely, because they know it could be taken away from them at any time. Maybe they’re just going through that.”

She leaned against the counter top and let the thought sit in the air for a while. She was surprised when Hime put down her spoon and followed suit, a bizarrely satisfied look on her face.

“Thank you for humouring me,” she said, and gave Suguri’s hand a squeeze. “So, what you’re saying is that if I wanted to encourage two people to move things along more speedily, I should start a war?”

It was a joke, but there was something deeper hidden there. Suguri couldn’t quite figure out what it was, but she knew it was there. “Please don’t start a war in the name of love. I don’t want to have to fight you.”

“It would only be a little war,” Hime giggled. “Besides, wouldn’t you be on my side?”

Suguri gave her hand a squeeze back. “Even if I’m fighting you, I am always on your side.”

The look of contentment on Hime’s face grew, and she let out a satisfied little sigh. “Well, I suppose that shall have to do. I believe I’ve taxed your social muscles enough for one day.”

Suguri smiled at her, and Hime smiled back, but their smiles were very different.

“Now,” Hime said, and her grip on Suguri’s hand tightened. “Shall we go up to the shower and get that jam out of your hair? I’ll be very gentle, I promise.”

Suguri groaned. The conflict and the gossip were over. But it seemed a reprieve was far from sight.

A/N: The problem with my comedy pieces is that everybody becomes a gibbering loon in their third person narration. It's very fun though, so I'm going to keep doing it.