[Fanfic, 100% OJ] Yaks and Mountains

Genre: Humour/Slice of Life

Length: 1945 words

B/D: It's been a while since I had time to update this blog, but I have definitely been doing stuff... I promise! This is a quick, breezy little Kae/Nanako piece, requested by Quincy via Ko-fi.

Contrary to popular belief, Nanako was not that sensitive about her height. Sure, making cracks about how she was short was grounds for her to excommunicate you and then suplex you into the sun, but that was the whole point. It was an excuse for irrational hatred of everything, or at least chronic irritation, and Nanako was never happier than the moment right before she ripped somebody a new one. She needed an excuse, and her height just happened to be a fantastic jumping off point.

But despite that, she still had a grudge against tall things. In her opinion, tall people just uselessly took up space; if you chopped Kyoko off at the knees, you’d still have almost a full Nanako’s worth of height to work with. All those extra inches were completely unnecessary – hedonistic, even. Being tall was a symptom of some wider moral corruption, in Nanako’s not-so-humble opinion. (It didn’t help that the tallest person she had ever known went by the name of Shifu. In some ways, it was no wonder she projected.)

So, given that she had a stated antipathy to tall things, one may have wondered why she was dressed in a heavy sheepskin coat, fording her way through waist-deep snow on her way to the peak of a mountain – which, to be clear, are very high on the great big list of tall things. In fact, mountains tend to be very high in most contexts. It’s part of being a mountain.

Nanako herself was wondering why she was climbing a mountain, or, more accurately, why she had let herself be persuaded to climb one. Kae, for reasons that made sense only in a world full of fire and loud onomatopoeia, wanted to hug a yak. Presumably, Nanako thought, it was because yaks were large, smelly, stupid, ugly, and hairy in places that didn’t bear thinking about – much like Kae herself. 

But Kae, at least, stayed where you could see her. They hadn’t seen a single yak so far, even though they’d been looking as hard as they could, and to Nanako this indicated that yaks were sneaky and suspicious and ought to be vaporised on sight, preferably before the yak smell could waft over to them.

Ordinarily, she would have just flown up the mountain. But flying was apparently against the rules; Kae insisted that they walk as far as was possible before they gave up and ‘cheated’. What kind of idiot thought flying was cheating, Nanako wondered? How was using an ability you had a cheat? It’d be like being bitten by a shark and saying, ‘oh, it doesn’t count because the shark cheated. After all, sharks can swim.’

It did give her the opportunity to observe Kae tumbling from snowdrift to snowdrift, throwing herself bodily into them like a hyperactive Saint Bernard. That was always good for a laugh. And if you had to make your way up a horrible ugly mountain covered with horrible ugly snow, there were worse horrible ugly companions than Kae, who was at all times warm and toasty and potentially on fire. Really, apart from the fact that she hated pretty much everything she was doing, Nanako was having a pretty good time.

“Are you sure there’s yaks here?” she asked bitterly as another lump of snow exploded into smaller lumps of snow under the great force of a Kae-issue body slam. “Is this even a yak-bearing mountain?”

“There’ll be yaks at the monastery,” Kae said confidently, puffing up her chest. It was puffed up enough already for Nana’s tastes. “And there’ll be soup! Soup!”

Kae’s passion for soup was a mild mystery. She loved soup, regardless of flavour, probably because Nanako hated it. Nanako hated almost every food except things that were fried and greasy and horrible, because they made her feel like garbage for the whole day and she could complain about it accordingly. But Kae liked to set up a camp fire with a little copper-bottomed saucepan and heat up some soup until it was hot and delicious, and if they could get some nice crusty rolls they’d have those too, and it was all very agreeable so Nanako was forced to just be quiet and enjoy it. Sometimes, if they had any little scraps of leftovers – or had lucked into some meat – Kae would make a stew, and that was usually so good that Nana felt angry about it for the entire next day.

Although they hadn’t seen any yaks, they’d seen plenty of goats. Goats were okay. They loitered around the landscape, stood at strange and impossible angles, and generally wasted time being goat-y when they could have been anything else, but Nanako felt an odd kind of kinship towards them. Anything that would try and headbutt Kae deserved at least some grudging respect, and they were at least smart enough to know they were beaten after she wrestled them and let them go. They weren’t sneaky, unlike yaks, which was the main thing.

They saw no yaks, sneaky or otherwise, until they reached the monastery at the top of the mountain – which they hit rather sooner than they had initially believed. Unbeknownst to them, mountain climbing was not what it used to be, and there was in fact a worldwide shortage of mountains on which to climb. Mostly this was because most of the really big mountains had had bits shot off them or been exploded or otherwise molested in the course of the Great War. Suguri could and had done many things in the course of her planet regeneration, but she couldn’t just install more mountains as if they were flat-pack furniture. It was also the nature of existing mountains that, like senior citizens and ice cream cones, they became shorter and more horizontal over time.

The monastery was also not nearly as large as they were expecting. Somewhere in Nanako’s mind was a fairy-tale picture of huge blocky buildings with colourful roof tiles and little gold whatsits on the walls; instead, it was made with wood and also possibly reinforced concrete. It was blocky, though. Presumably, all the fancier monasteries had gotten shot off along with the top of the mountain, and monks – who were either not inclined towards worldly possessions, or else inclined towards embezzlement if they were – had settled on a more spartan living situation.

They were greeted at the gate by a short man who numbered amongst his possessions a robe with very long sleeves and a few wisps of greying hair left on his head; he did, however, smile, which meant Kae adored him immediately. Nanako remained suspicious, because somebody had to be.

“Hello!” Kae boomed, finding one of his hands inside the sleeves and shaking it wildly. “Can you teach me kung fu?”

“I am not that kind of monk,” he said kindly, as indulging a favourite grandchild. “This is a place of quiet contemplation, nothing more.”

“Oh! Do you do meditation under waterfalls?”

The monk looked around, as if to imply that if there were any waterfalls around, they, like the yaks, must be stealth-equipped. “We meditate, yes. And we farm.”

“Can you teach us to meditate?” Kae asked, and then dropped her voice to what she probably thought was a whisper. “It’s just… My friend has issues. With anger. She probably won’t stop being angry, but I’m thinking that maybe if we can get her to manage it, she’ll feel better sometimes. It’s worth a try, right?”

“I do not need anger management,” Nanako seethed. It was true, in a sense. Management was what you did when a particular resource, like trees or land or people desperate enough to work in a menial and soul-destroying customer service position, was finite and needed to be preserved. Nanako’s anger was not. “And why are you bothering a monk about this? Have you heard of psychiatrists?”

“Yeah, but they give you therapy. Monks give you either inner peace or kung fu, so I thought it was worth a try.”

The monk continued to smile, although perhaps less certainly than before. Being a monk was a pretty quiet life, and didn’t do wonders for your social skills; Kae and Nanako were a challenge he wondered if he could meet. “You may stay a while and observe our traditions, if you like – provided you are respectful of our way of life, and you work your fair share.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” Kae replied, flexing her arms. The heavy winter coat she wore didn’t do a lot to emphasise her muscles. “I’ll do tons of work! I’m great at working!”

“And your friend?” the monk asked mildly.

Nanako gave her most long-suffering sigh, and balled her hands into tiny little fists that were full of barely suppressed rage and also fingernails. “Well… I’d hate to have wasted this whole stupid trip. So I guess we can stay. For a little while.”

That was the problem with Kae, she reflected as the monk led them to their quarters, which were shabby enough to fuel her complaints for an entire week. The redhead was an idiot, but she wasn’t stupid. She thought. She planned. And when she planned, she planned stuff like this, where she did annoying things entirely for Nanako’s benefit. She’d done the same kind of thing about three weeks ago when she suddenly decided, after months of wanting a puppy, that she wanted a cat instead. After hours of arguing and two rounds of bare-knuckle boxing, she finally revealed that it was because cats were soothing to stroke and their purrs were relaxing, so they might help calm Nana down. Of course, Nana had had to put her foot down and state unequivocally that they were getting a dog and not a cat, and it wasn’t until the next day that she realised this was a significant upgrade from her previous ‘no pets at all, ever’ stance.

Kae was always doing things like that. And it was worse because she thought about it – she never tried to do things that would make Nana less angry, because she understood it was an impossibility and that at this point, being angry was a part of who Nana was. Instead, she always wanted to do things that might help Nana calm down when she didn’t want to be angry. It was infuriating, and the worst part was that it was hard to get mad about it because it was so well-intentioned.

So Nanako did the only thing she could: she threw herself down on the little straw-filled mattress that was their bedding for the next few weeks, she complained, and she cuddled up against her big, stupid best friend for warmth.

“There aren’t even any yaks,” she muttered darkly into Kae’s abdomen. “It’s all goats. I don’t think there’s a single yak on this entire goddamn mountain.”

“There’ll be yaks another time,” Kae said happily. “I’ll come and meditate with you after I finish chopping firewood tomorrow.”

“You’d better. I don’t want to sit there and experience peace and tranquillity by myself like some kind of idiot. You have to do it too.”

“I will!”

For a few seconds there was a comfortable silence, broken only by the sound of goats doing goat-y things outside.

“…I was kinda hoping it’d be the kung-fu kind of monks, though. That would have been way more fun. Do we have any soup left?”

“We do. Give me a spicy one so we can at least warm up. I’ll get the pot.”

The two settled down for dinner together, at the top of a mountain with no yaks on it. Enlightenment would probably elude them for some time yet.

A/N: So, life got super busy, as did commissions and stuff. There's been maybe 20k words that I can't post on the blog because it's nsfw, it's in the form of drabbles, or something else, so I've been struggling to make time for it.

In terms of life stuff, my employment situation changed, and then I had to put down my beloved pet cat at the age of 15, so life's thrown me for a loop. Luckily, next upload hopefully won't be too far in the future, because I intend to backport my ko-fi drabbles to this site once I have a batch of 50 (to avoid spamming small drabble posts on a site not really set up for it.)

On that note, I started a ko-fi! For every ko-fi donated, I do a drabble, and I set some goals as well. One that's already been hit is the Seabed Slow Read revival, which I've wanted to do for a while -- I'm hoping it'll go better this time, but my work ethic is better than it used to be. I write basically every day now. If you like my work and you'd like to tip me, here's the link: ko-fi.com/thevulpinehero1