Work Text:
She’s gotten used to entering Nozaki’s apartment unannounced by now, but even with the door unlocked…
There’s an eerie silence as she opens the door today. No sound of pens scratching, or paper shifting, or… anything.
She takes a step inside, slowly closes the door behind her.
Still nothing.
“Nozaki?” she says, tentatively.
No response.
“Nozaki?!” she repeats, a bit louder.
There’s a sound from a nearby room, like sudden movement.
“Chiyo.”
She sags slightly. So… Nobody broke into his apartment and abducted him. Good.
“Could you… come in here?”
That said…
She steps slowly into the side room.
And there he sits. He’s leaned forward at his desk, his chin resting on his hands. There’s… a strange, solemn aura about him.
“Yes?” she says, eventually.
A long silence.
“I’ve been thinking about something recently,” he says. “I have something I need to ask you, and I need you to speak from the heart, and tell me the truth.”
“O- Of course,” she says, heart thudding in her chest. “I… I’ll answer honestly.”
He nods.
“Good.”
He stands, and slowly turns to face her.
There’s… a strange uncertainty in his eyes, not quite meeting hers, as he steps a bit closer, towering over her.
“Chiyo,” he says, and she nods, swallowing heavily.
He closes his eyes, and then his gaze locks with hers. The world seems to grow heavy around them, tension palpable in the air.
“How would you treat me if I was a worm?”
The silence stretches out, and his gaze doesn’t falter on her.
“W- What?”
“If I was a worm, how would you treat me?”
She doesn’t know what she was prepared for but it wasn’t this. But… He’s still looking at her with that serious expression, and…
“I would… I…” She forces her brain to grapple with the question. “I would buy you a terrarium with good dirt, and… and…” Her eyes flit from side to side, and she’s starting to blush now, “And I would make sure you that you were… Healthy, and… And…” She cracks. “I don’t know what worms like!”
There’s a long, long silence, and Nozaki nods silently.
Then, he sags.
“Neither do I.”
“What?”
He puts a hand across his mouth.
“I don’t know what worms like.”
Chiyo’s brain finally catches up to everything around her.
“Is… Is this part of next week’s issue?”
He blinks, as if surprised that she’s asking.
“Yes.”
There’s a silence.
“Oh.”
“Here,” he says, stepping back to his desk, gesturing for her to follow.
She walks forward, legs still jelly from leftover nerves.
On the table are what she immediately recognizes as unfinished drafts.
A set of hands, holding something small, and...
Ah, and there’s text…
‘ I’m so glad that even when I’m like this, Suzuki is still so kind to me…’
She blinks, and looks back at the hands.
She squints, looks closer.
A small, quite realistic worm sits in what are presumably Suzuki’s hands.
“It’s not done yet,” says Nozaki.
“Uh huh,” she says, too preoccupied to listen properly.
“His hands should be dirtier,” says Nozaki, and then, “loose dirt, grime, hmm… I wonder if it would be too much detail to have messy fingernails.”
Chiyo jolts back to reality.
“Wh- Why is she a worm!”
Nozaki blinks at her.
“A wizard transformed her.”
“This is- It’s- Isn’t a slice of life romantic manga? Why is there a wizard.”
Nozaki nods.
“Correct. The world is meant to be realistic, so obviously a wizard isn’t a normal fixture.
“Right, so-
He reaches down, turns the pages back, and she’s suddenly looking at one marked as much earlier in the story.
‘ Ha ha!’ says the wizard, stepping through a portal, ‘at last my transdimensional magic has succeeded, allowing me to reach this mundane world where I shall be all-powerful! And to test my skills…’
The next panel shows Suzuki and Mamiko talking to each other on a bench, the wizard in the foreground, his hand sparking.
‘… I shall shatter this pathetic couple!’
“Because magic is not supposed to be in this world, I made it so that he wasn’t from this world,” says Nozaki.
“That just makes it worse!”
“Ah?”
‘Be- Because- Because he’s- He’s…” She falls into silence, flips to the next page as if scared it’ll bite her. Mamiko is transformed from a human into a worm.
“And I looked it up,” says Nozaki, calmly, “and there isn’t a law against turning someone into a worm, so I’m okay to depict this.”
“Right…” She says, slowly deflating. “And… Why did you want to… Do this?”
“Ah,” he actually smiles, now, in that mild way of his, “I was thinking about how loving someone makes them beautiful, no matter what they look like. I wanted to tell a story like that, but in this kind of comic, the convention is that everyone is attractive, so it’s hard to say something like that without it ringing hollow.”
“Oh.”
There’s a long silence.
“And so… I thought that maybe, even though there are conventions for how people look, something like a worm is… just a worm.”
“Right…” says Chiyo. “And so, she gets transformed, and she’s scared that he’ll think she’s ugly and leave her in the dirt… probably loud enough for him to hear and reassure her?”
Nozaki shakes his head.
“Unfortunately, worms can’t talk. The closest she gets to dialog is her internal monologue.”
“But… Aren’t worms also simple enough they wouldn’t be able to be worried about what someone thinks of them, or feel ugly?”
“Ah,” says Nozaki, and pauses. “I suppose that’s true. Hmm…”
He reaches down, grabs some blank sheets of paper.
“In that case, she wouldn’t have an internal monologue at all.” He covers over the boxes containing Mamiko’s thoughts. “Which...”
There’s a silence, as they both take in the images of realistic worms with no additional context.
“ That’s not going to work,” they say in unison.
Nozaki worries at his chin.
“Realistically, Mamiko’s thoughts are a large part of the story. She’s the character the audience is meant to relate to, so to leave her perspective out is going to weaken the story as a whole.”
“Well…” says Chiyo, “what if… She didn’t actually get turned into a worm?”
“Mm?”
“It could be…” she says, piecing the thoughts together, “something else. Something that makes her feel like a worm. Like… Like she gets covered in dirt after someone pushes her, or she gets sick, and she feels disgusting.”
“Ah!” he says, “And the feeling of Suzuki’s arms around her even when he’s getting dirty is like what a worm would feel as someone carried it gently to safety.”
“Exactly!”
He flips through the pages, lighting on one where Suzuki’s hands are reaching out towards a conspicuous, unfilled void “then this page, where he was going to be putting her in worm storage, she could be lying sick in the bed instead.”
“And then, in lower opacity,” he says, sketching in the void that wouldn’t be filled by a bed, “he’s depositing the worm into safe dirt.”
“Pulling the ideas together for the reader.”
He nods, and skims back through.
“And the wizard would give her a sickness instead of transforming her.”
“W- Well maybe instead of a wizard, it’s just… someone who’s sick, and coughing, and knocks into her on the way past?”
He blinks as if the idea would never have occurred to him.
“Would it count as promoting that kind of behavior that it leads to them growing closer to each other?”
“Mmmmaybe you could have Suzuki condemn it in the story? Like… Get defensive over her?”
“Demonstrating his care for her.”
“Exactly!”
There’s a long silence as Nozaki keeps working.
“I do still think it would add more realism to consider appropriate living conditions and enrichment for a worm.”
“Well, we can work that out, right?”
--
‘ That look in his eyes… I’m covered in dirt, and my eyes are bloodshot from coughing, but he’s still looking at me like he did after the first time we kissed. Could he really… still find me beautiful even like this?’
Chiyo isn’t sure whether the worm with the shoujo sparkles around it was really the best option for that panel, but Nozaki was insistent.
In fairness…
“ It’s so beautiful seeing love that’s more than skin deep,” says a girl nearby, “I always worry when I’m too sick to do my makeup, but seeing Suzuki treat her like that… Love is real, even if I haven’t found it yet…”
“ I want someone to tuck me in like that when I’m sick,” grumbles another, “Someone who would keep me between 55 and 77 degrees with adequate food scraps so I can thrive...”
Ah! Well, apparently the emergency outing to the library to find a book on annelids was worth it for the added realism… In point of fact, it looks like that particular girl might have checked out that same book for her own perusal.
Silently, she wonders what they would have thought of the evil transdimensional wizard, if that made it into the final version.
And…
“S- So…” She says. “If I was a worm?”
Nozaki blinks, then smiles.
“I would do my best to make sure you were healthy, and try to find a way to reverse the process before you died of old age.”
Ah yes. The lifespan issue.
“You’d…hunt down an evil wizard to turn me back?”
He furrows his brow, and then nods.
“I suppose I would.”
She looks away, smiling.
Well… Maybe she didn’t confess anything meaningful, per se, but… At least she confessed enough that now she knows he’s willing to hunt down evil, wizards, for… her…
She giggles at the absurdity of it all.
This is really the person she has a crush on?
Well…
Yes. Yes it is.
And he’d take care of her if she was a worm.