[Fanfic, 100% Orange Juice x Katawa Shoujo] Portrait

Series: 100% OJ / Katawa Shoujo

Genre: Humour, slice of life

Length: 3661 words

B/D: This is a story for Célja, who wanted to know what would happen if  everyone's favourite armless girls met up and had a chat. The result: banter.

Nath sighed deeply, got comfortable, and set about one of her least-favourite tasks: checking the mail.

It wasn’t that she disliked reading. Or even, really, that she disliked mail. After all, she had dabbled in almost everything in the course of her long, long life, and pen friends were no exception. She remembered, albeit a touch dimly, the excitement of opening an envelope from halfway across the world, full of interesting news and tidbits…

Unfortunately, one of the other things she had dabbled in was investment, and over ten thousand years, it had lead to rather more money than she knew what to do with. Mostly, she tried to forget about it; every so often, she would slash her net worth in half and dump it into whatever causes she felt worth supporting at the time, often tech startups much like the one that was currently supplying her prosthetic arms. It seemed like quite a good idea, and was almost certainly better morally speaking than just hoarding the assets, but it did alert people to the fact that she had a lot of cash, and was not averse to parting with it.

As a result, she got a lot of mail – investment opportunities, cries for donations, scams, even blackmail. It all found its way to her mailbox sooner or later, and in quantities to make a grown woman weep. Even Nath, disciplined by nature, could only bring herself to check it once a month, and her designated Mail Day.

This month, however, was a little different. This month, she had enlisted Sora as her helpful(?) secretary.

Strictly speaking, Sora had enlisted herself. Mostly she seemed to want an excuse to wear spectacles and experience the wonders of junk mail. These were both things she could have done at any time had she asked, but she seemed to have adopted Hime’s belief that things were more thrilling if you had an excuse, because it meant you probably shouldn’t be doing them.

“Fast food… we have your daughter and if you don’t pay… ooh, yacht coupons… Oh! Nath, this one’s fancy. It’s probably important.”

Nath smiled, perhaps a little indulgently. In her own experience, the important letters were actually the least fancy; they came in plain brown envelopes and promised dire fates if ignored. (Privately, she thought the same thing about people. Sora was the most important person in her world by some distance, and seemed more attractive in her gardening overalls than any other woman might in an evening dress.)

Nevertheless, she took the envelope, gave it a sharp flick – quality card, she noted with approval – and carefully opened it by hand. In years gone by, she’d have held a letter opener between her teeth, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to show off that level of oral dexterity to polite company yet. Opposable thumbs – even artificial ones – were a godsend.

“Hmm… Oh, you found a good one. It’s an invitation to an open day at Yamaku High School,” she said. She needn’t have bothered; Sora had drifted towards her and was now draping herself over one of Nath’s shoulders, all the better to peek at the mail. “It’s a high school for people with conditions… well. Sham and I would have fit right in. I donate to them occasionally – I wouldn’t be surprised if Sham did, too.”

“Oh. That sounds amazing,” Sora replied, with the blithe expression of a girl who had been raised in the military and never actually set foot inside a high school. “Are you going to go?”

Nath looked at her best friend, and more particularly her best friend’s attempt at puppy-dog eyes, and sighed. Well, I am now, she thought. “Maybe,” was what she said.

“If you do,” Sora carried on, “you should take a secretary. You never know when you might need help with filing things. And phone calls. I can do phone calls as well.”

“I’m aware. You’re a woman of many talents,” Nath remarked.

Subtlety, apparently, not being one of them.

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“These are the school bathrooms. As you can see, they’ve been modified with accessibility in mind. These renovations are quite expensive, and are only possible with the generosity of people like yourselves…”

As the guide went over her script and walked them around the campus, the general mood among the student body could be summed up as ‘unimpressed’. Oh, certainly, they smiled, in a way that never quite reached their eyes, but Nath could tell when she was being pandered to. Underneath the slightly glazed friendliness, there was a definite statement of: What are you doing here? We didn’t ask to be stared at. It’s not a zoo.

The similarities of zoos and high schools notwithstanding, she understood. People stared at her all the time on the street, but the street was the street; it was a totally different proposition for somebody to come into your space and stare at you. In a sense, it was an invasion.

Still, their faces softened when they saw her shoulders. She’d left her arms at home today, in… solidarity, she supposed. She was bigger than them, and much, much older, but she could have been among them once, and that meant something.

Their faces did not soften at Sora, who was not obviously handicapped and had a gaze like a laser pointer, which she was swinging around with wild abandon. In fairness, she was looking at the building as much as the people in it; she’d never seen a regular high school, never mind one adapted so so many people of so many differing needs. She listened to their guide with rapt attention (or, at least, something that very much looked like it), sponging in the information as it was presented to her.

“Well, that’s the end of our general tour,” the guide said, turning smartly on her heel. “Now I’ll turn you over to our student council, who’ll give you a better idea of how daily life goes in Yamaku High.”

She opened the door she was standing in front of and waved them in. Inside were two girls: one with deep, blue eyes and another with pink hair shaped like drills. Nath felt a sudden wave of nostalgia; that style had been popular a while ago. Was it one hundred years, or two hundred? Probably not more than that.

“Wahahaha~ Welcome to the student council!” the pink-haired girl said theatrically. “This is Shizune, our student council leader, and I’m Misha.” Her hands moved as she spoke, with sharp and confident motions.

“Shizune is deaf and mute, so Misha interprets for her with sign language,” the guide added.

“Hello,” Sora said, raising a hand in greeting, before turning towards Misha. “You have a good laugh. It’s distinctive.”

“Wahahaha~”

Shizune nudged her friend, and rapped out a fluent sequence of hand signals. Too fluent for Nath to keep up with, if she was honest. Having lacked hands for most of her time on Earth, she’d never bothered to brush up on sign language, although she’d sometimes encountered situations where she wished she had.

“Oh, that’s a great idea! Let’s fob them off on – a-ahahaha, I mean, let’s introduce them to Lilly!” Misha translated, although not without a quick verbal backspace. “She’s got tea, and guests love tea!”

“That’s a good idea,” Sora agreed, having apparently settled into one of those moods where she’d go along with pretty much anything. “Is Lilly fun?”

Shizune made a few emphatic hand gestures, some of which Nath did not actually think were conventional sign language; Misha seemed to conveniently forget her translation duties for a few seconds until she finished.

“W-well, haha. You’ll see when you get there. Um, you might find a girl called Hanako there – she’s a little nervous. You don’t seem like a scary type, but don’t worry if she gets spooked.” Misha took a sideways glance at Nath, and took a somewhat exaggerated thinking pose. “Hm…”

“Hm?” Nath echoed.

“I was just thinking… We have an artist in this school who doesn’t have any arms, just like you,” Misha mumbled. “She’s a little… well. Loopy. I don’t know her that well myself… But would you like to meet her?”

Nath paused. An artist without arms. She’d more or less given up on creative endeavours herself, although she wasn’t sure if her lack of limbs had been the issue or the war had just snuffed out the creative spark in her.

But, even if she was interested… it would hurt, a little, to see somebody so much younger than her with the same condition. It always did. She had chosen – well, whether she could really say she’d chosen it when the military was pushing at her back was a point of discussion – her own fate. Other people hadn’t had that luxury. She was keenly aware of that.

As she mulled it over, she found her gaze drifting. It stopped, as it usually seemed to nowadays, on Sora.

“It’s okay. We’ll split our forces,” Sora declared, after realising she was being called upon to make a decision. “I’ll go on the tea gathering mission, and Nath can be the art appreciation station. I’ll catch up later.”

‘Art appreciation station’. Nath smiled; it was the kind of thing Sora sometimes picked up from Sham, only Sham said it tongue in cheek and Sora said it as if she believed in it with all her heart.

It wasn’t the only thing she seemed to have picked up from the idol; lately, she seemed to have adopted Sham’s habit of giving people a little push when they needed it. Nath had been surprised by how often she found herself being grateful for it.

“That settles it, I suppose,” she replied, still smiling gently. “Try not to stare too much.”

“Roger. I’ll stare the correct amount,” Sora replied smartly.

Thankfully, Misha explained, it probably wouldn’t matter with Lilly; she probably wouldn’t realise Sora was staring in the first place. She began to talk excitedly about the school as Sora fell into step behind her and Shizune, murmuring appreciatively when appropriate. She was good at that.

Nath watched them go, and turned to her guide. It seemed she had some staring to do herself.

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She had, if she was honest, expected the art room to be just a little bit messier.

Circumstances being what they were, Nath could excuse herself for sometimes being a touch old-fashioned, and one of her old-fashioned views was that artists should, well… be a bit mad. Otherwise, what was the point in even being an artist? That was what they were for. And, following on from argument, what was the point in being mad if you couldn’t be messy?

But the art room was very neatly arranged, almost disappointingly so. As she walked around, she felt a general sense of orderliness; there were pots for the paintbrushes, palettes for the paint, easels for the ease. A place for everything, and everything in its –

“Don’t step on my face, please.”

Nath didn’t jump – not exactly – but she might have gently left the ground and touched down again when she heard a voice from her ankles. Upon further inspection, she found a girl lying flat on her back, barefoot, with a paintbrush held delicately between her toes.

“My apologies,” she replied. “You’d think I’d be more aware of my feet, but I suppose not.”

The girl’s eyes – which had previously been locked on her artwork, flicked towards her. Then back to the artwork for a second, and then, as if not believing what she’d seen, back towards Nath.

“Oh, wow. You’re…”

“Like you. Yes,” Nath replied, looking at the empty sleeves of the girl’s shirt.

“I was going to say ‘tall’, but that too.” This time, her eyes didn’t go back to the artwork; apparently, Nath was interesting enough to set the paintbrush aside for a second. Just a second. “Are you an ex-student?”

“Not as such.”

“Ah. Then you must be rich. I heard they were letting rich people roam the school today. Like animals on a nature reserve.”

The girl’s nose wrinkled, just the tiniest bit. It was like when Sora tried to tell a joke; the expression stayed mostly the same, but there were usually little clues, no matter how hard they were to pick up on.

“I suppose I am rich,” Nath replied thoughtfully. “And I suppose that rich people do act like animals sometimes.”

The girl swung her legs to the side, and began the somewhat delicate process of getting up. She’d been lying on what looked like a mechanic’s creeper. She was a little shorter than Nath when she stood; her red hair was level with Nath’s chin.

“I’m Rin. Tezuka Rin. Somebody has to be,” she said, wiggling her eyebrows a little. “I’d shake your hand, but you know.”

“I do know. I’m Nath. No last name.”

“Wow. No arms, and no last name? They really got you good, didn’t they?”

“They?” Nath asked, arching an eyebrow.

“You know. They,” Rin replied airily. “Are you one of those people who likes to talk about art?”

“...Not particularly,” Nath admitted. “I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

“Great. Me neither. Last time I tried talking to rich people about art, it sucked. Anyway, art should speak for itself.” She spoke brusquely, as if reciting facts from a table. “So what did you want?”

“I’m not sure, really. I just thought it might be interesting to see an artist with a condition like mine.”

“Well, you’ve seen me.” Apparently satisfied, she slid back down on her platform and picked up the brush. “You can go now.”

“That’s a thing I can do,” Nath agreed. She took a chair from a nearby table and sat down. As a general rule, nobody made her leave until she was ready – at least not without heavy machinery.

For a time, silence reigned in the art room. Initially, it was a battle of wills; then, slowly, Rin seemed to drift back off into her painting mood. The sound of brushstrokes being added – sometimes carelessly and enthusiastic, sometimes considered and calculated, was the only sound there was.

It occurred to Nath that, although watching paint dry was still as boring as it was ten millennia ago, watching artists work could make for a nice spectator sport.

“If you’re just going to watch,” Rin said at last, “help me out a bit. I need the bluey-green, except it’s the one that’s a bit more bluey than greeny. In the cabinet behind you. There’s a drawer right on the bottom.”

With only a little difficulty – it was harder to do things with your feet when you had boots on – Nath retrieved what she thought was a pretty bluey kind of green. “You keep this art room very neat.”

“There’s kids with OCD, so we have to. It’s not just me.” She paused a little as she unscrewed the top of the tube with her toes. “This wasn’t the one I wanted. But I can work with this.” Another pause. “Is it fun, watching me paint?”

“Fun enough.” It wasn’t a lie; there was something deeply enjoyable about watching somebody with that level of focus. That intensity. “You remind me of somebody I know.”

The brushstrokes slowed a fraction. “Somebody important?”

Short, terse sentences. Flighty, but focused at the same time. Stubborn, yet not stubborn. Nath smiled. “Yes,” she said. “Very.”

“Oh, I get it.” Rin’s voice suddenly became knowing, almost cheeky. “You’re going to marry them so you can steal their last name.”

“She doesn’t have a last name, either.”

“Really? Wow. They really got you good. And it’s a girl? Does she have arms?”

“She’s got arms, yes.”

“That’s okay then. You can make her do all the finger stuff.” Another pause. “I’m jealous. It’s gonna suck when I move out of the dorms and there’s nobody to help with my bra.”

“You get used to it,” Nath said encouragingly, despite having spent ten thousand years pointedly not getting used to it or the concept of underwear in general. She had very graciously ignored the words ‘finger stuff’, and thus earned herself the moral license for a well-meaning white lie.

“So, um. This is weird. I’m weird. Sometimes. But.” As she tried to get her thoughts in order, she daubed paint absent-mindedly on the canvas, before realising what she was doing. She shrugged; apparently her odd swirls were better than whatever she had actually been planning. “Do you… understand each other?”

Nath exhaled. It felt like an important question, and one of the things she’d learned – was learning, would learn – was that it was better not to think about it. Just let the words escape. You gave the answer that you had, rather than guessing the one they wanted.

“Sometimes,” she said. “And sometimes not. People are complicated – even the people who seem simple. She thinks in a different way to me, and I’ve experienced things she hasn’t. So we can’t always get it right. We try.”

“Isn’t that frustrating?”

“…A little. But that’s natural, I think. When you try to communicate something but you can’t get it across, or when you try to understand somebody but you can’t grasp it… it hurts to fail. But making the effort is important. Besides, I think people are like the ocean.”

Although Nath couldn’t see it, Rin’s eyebrows were furrowing. “They’re full of water?”

“We don’t really know what’s at the bottom of the ocean.” Nath paused; this was another white lie. Suguri said she’d been straight to the seabed in search of discarded mines. She had gone over her white lie allowance for the day, and would punish herself by withholding ice cream. “But it still enchants people the world over. So, I don’t think you really need to understand somebody to lov–”

She paused again, suddenly suspicious. Nath did not have a spider-sense, but she was very quickly developing a Sora-sense. “Rin,” she asked calmly. “There wouldn’t happen to be a blonde girl standing right behind me, would there?”

The artist’s posture stiffened. “Wouldn’t know. I’ve been painting.”

“So that’s a yes, then.” She turned, and sure enough, her ‘secretary’ had returned and was standing at her left shoulder. “How long have you been listening?”

“I don’t have a watch,” was Sora’s reply. She had a quiet little smile that could have meant anything. “I was testing my stealth capabilities.”

“Or maybe you were trying to test my patience,” Nath said, although she couldn’t quite keep a straight face. “How was the tea?”

“It was good. There was a girl called Lilly, and she couldn’t see but she was blonde and she spoke very well.” A second passed as another thought dropped into Sora’s head from outer space. “So, she’s kind of like Hime, if Hime were blind and had any chest.”

“Hey. Don’t take cheap shots at your sister when she’s not here.”

Sora sniffed and folded her arms. “She takes cheap shots at me whether I’m there or not. That’s what being a sister is all about.”

“Really? I’ll have to talk to her about that,” Nath replied ominously.

“Oh, and there was a girl called Hanako as well. She had burns all over her face, kind of like Sham, but more shy. I liked her hat, but she wouldn’t tell me where she got it. How is art?”

“Art is good,” Rin said dryly.

“Oh, are you the artist?” Sora wandered forward without waiting for a response. “It’s amazing that you can paint with your feet.”

“I bet your friend uses her feet to do things all the time.”

“She can, but she prefers to do things with her mouth,” Sora replied seriously.

“If you know what I mean,” Rin appended, with a sly grin.

The joke apparently failed to pierce Sora’s dense outer shell, because she completely ignored it to focus on the half-finished artwork. “I like your painting. It’s kind of… sunset-y, but more swirlful.” She paused to think. “And there’s a gradient. I like gradients.”

“You might be my new favourite art critic,”the redhead deadpanned, turning to look at Nath. “Do you mind if I keep her?”

Nath arched her eyebrows. “Sorry, but I can’t let you. She’s one in ten million, for better or worse. I’d never find another secretary quite like her.” She stood up, stretching her back as she did. “Come on, Sora. Let’s go, before somebody else tries to headhunt you.”

“Oh. Okay,” Sora replied, but looked wistfully back at Rin. “You should tell us when you finish painting things. I’ll save up and buy an art from you.”

Rin’s nose crinkled. “Sure. One art, coming up. You want fries with that?”

“...It’s a good point, though,” Nath conceded. “Rin. I’ll leave you my contact details. If you become a professional artist and you need a patron, get in touch.”

“What if I’m an unprofessional artist?”

“That’s even better. Nath’s not that good at dealing with stuffy people.”

“Hey,” Nath scolded gently. “Stop revealing my weak points. Come on. Let’s walk around a little more.” She paused. “It was good talking with you, Rin.”

“Sure,” Rin said absently. Her mind had already returned to her artwork by the time Nath and Sora shut the door behind them, chatting casually about the probability of more tea. Once again, the room was filled by the sound of her own breathing, and the strokes of her brush. It seemed oddly lonely.

“You don’t need to understand somebody to love them, huh…?” she murmured. “Wish she’d been around to tell me that a few months earlier.” She looked up at the clock on the art room wall – big, bright, digital readout, perfect for students with vision problems. She sighed, and took up her brush again.

Sora and Nath had been a good distraction. But it would still be a while longer before Mutou’s extra science class was over, and her own ‘important person’ was free.

A/N: I characterised Rin mostly from memory, and tried to keep route details/living situations somewhat ambiguous while anchoring the story organically in the survival!verse setting I've already created. It's actually the first crossover fic I've ever done (discounting the weird situation the OJ series in general has) so I hope I pulled it off okay.