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Sunraku breathed a sigh of relief. He’d made it through the interrogation without being murdered by Pencil and Katzo by cleverly twisting the situation in SLF they were currently mad at him about to be ultimately Pencil’s fault. Indeed, they were even allowing him to eat. The kebabs weren’t the steak he’d wanted or the sushi Pencil had wanted--Katzo had allowed them to operate under the impression for the whole day that whoever put in the best effort would get to pick where they ate, only to ultimately declare that since he was footing the bill for their visit he got to pick the restaurant--but at least they were easy to eat without taking his mask off; Sunraku was the only member of this friend group whose face and name wasn’t known to the public, and he intended to keep it that way.
So of course the conversation at the private table turned to their secret identities, somehow, and with her natural instinct for causing trouble, Pencil pointed at him with the sake bottle she was holding and said “Hey, Sunraku-kun, it’s not fair that you’re the only guy whose real name we don’t know, is it?”
Her face was flushed with alcohol, and for some reason--probably because it was the closest thing she’d ever done to blushing--it just made her even more beautiful.
Also worth noting was the fact that she was the only one drinking; Katzo and Megumi--the only member of Katzo’s “professional” team that hadn’t flaked on him, creating the crisis Pencil and Sunraku had to be called in to solve--were both nineteen.
“She’s right,” Katzo said. “It’s not nice, having this one-way thing going.”
“Dude!” Sunraku protested.
“You can keep your face hidden, but at least gimme a name,” Katzo demanded.
“Bullshit! That’s nothing but an invasion of my privacy!” Sunraku retorted.
“Aww, we won’t misuse it or whatever,” Pencil said with a butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth purity that led Sunraku to conclude (only half-jokingly) that she was immediately going to sell his information on the black market as soon as they got back to the hotel.
But they were going to keep pestering him and pestering him until he relented, he realized. Well, I might as well get something out of it, then.
“Hmm. I suppose I could tell you, if you accept my conditions.”
“Oh? Well, I’ll hear you out, at least,” Pencil said.
“Great, more weird conditions?” Katzo complained.
“Don’t worry, Katzo-kun; I don’t expect anything from you.”
“What does that mean?” Pencil demanded.
“Mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha! In all seriousness, though, the shameful truth is that my sister has the horrid taste to be a superfan of yours, and I figured that as long as we’re both here, I might as well do something for her.”
“Let me guess: you want me to give her an autograph?”
“Yes, actually.”
Pencil produced a magazine with her face on it--just because she’d dipped out of the public eye for a couple days didn’t mean she could afford to lose track of what people were saying about her, it seemed (or perhaps she’s just vain, Sunraku added uncharitably)--and a pen.
“Alright. What’s her name?”
“Hizutome Rumi.”
“‘To my #1 superfan Hizutome Rumi, love, Amane Towa.’” Her voice had a higher pitch to it than normal as she said this, but it was a voice Sunraku had heard out of her before--during interviews. This was the voice she spoke in as Amame Towa.
The distinction, or at least the fact that there was a distinction, reminded him of various Batman adaptations. Of course, many superheroes did something similar, going back to Christopher Reeve’s portrayal of Superman (if the single wikipedia search Sunraku had done on the subject was to be believed), but with Batman it was specifically and explicitly the case that the Batman voice was the real voice and the Bruce Wayne voice was an affectation. This in turn was meant to clue the audience in to the fact that Batman was the real persona, with Bruce Wayne being the mask--which in turn was something voice actor Kevin Conroy had read into the character, relying on his own experience with leading a double-life thanks to being a closeted gay man in late twentieth-century America.
That wasn’t Pencil’s deal--actually scratch that; it’s not like Sunraku had ever asked her what her sexual orientation was so he supposed he didn’t know--and yet she pulled the same routine in real life; that said something about the kind of life she led.
Pencil held the magazine out to Sunraku, then jerked it away when he reached for it. “And what’s your name, Sunraku-kun?”
“Hizutome Rakuro,” Sunraku said.
Thus ended the evening’s melodrama, save Megumi accidentally telegraphing her crush on Katzo a couple times (Imagine being completely oblivious to someone’s blatant crush on you, Sanraku thought smugly; couldn’t be me), and the rest of the evening proceeded amicably; before they knew it, the restaurant was closing and they had to leave.
Pencil stood, swayed, and sat down again.
“Pencil-san! Are you alright?” Katzo demanded.
“‘I’m not as think as you drunk I am,’” Pencil said cheerfully. “Seriously, though, I just need a minute. Go ahead without me.”
Katzo and Megumi did so reluctantly. Sunraku, who had hoped to take his mask off in private, did not.
“Actually, I could use a little help.”
Sunraku sighed as he stood, then walked over and helped her to her feet.
I currently have the most beautiful woman in the world--seriously, there were international polls attesting to it and everything--on my arm, Sunraku realized. She was leaning on him heavily, arm wrapped around his shoulders. He could smell her breath. He could smellher.
That wasn’t something you could do in SLF; PCs didn’t have smells that were detectable to other PCs. (No doubt they could code that over at Utopia, but it would be a lot of headache for little reward--even by their standards--and wouldn’t even be realistic anyway, since it wasn’t like they were prepared to implement a hygiene system into the game and kiss its mainstream status goodbye; not to mention the absolute nightmare implementing it into character customization would be.)
Booze. Sweat. Deodorant. Perfume. It was heady--and it grounded Sunraku in the fact that this was real in a way his previous interactions with Pencil had never been, which was even headier.
Whatever. Just don’t turn into a simp on me, okay?
“You realize you’re going to have to take that mask off, right?” Pencil asked.
“...”
“If international supermodel Amane Towa is spotted with ‘No Face,’ people might put two and two together to realize who the true identity of ‘No Name’ is.” They had attended Katzo’s game in cosplay to hide their identities.
“...Fine,” Sunraku said, taking off the mechanical jack-o-lantern headpiece.
Pencil immediately pulled out her phone and snapped a selfie of them.
“Pencil-san, you bitch…”
“Fine, I’ll delete it. It’s rather disappointing, anyway; I was hoping you were horribly disfigured under that mask or something. But nope; kind of cute, in fact.”
“Let’s just try and get back to the hotel in one piece,” Sunraku said, hoping she couldn’t see the blush.
This was, of course, a forlorn hope. Because obviously. “You’re blushing, Sunraku-kun! Look who’s not impervious to my charms, after all.”
“Yeah, I’m a heterosexual male with functional eyes--what of it?” Sunraku snapped. “Let’s just…let’s not make things weird, okay? Weird between us, I mean.”
The world knew Amane Towa--or Towa Amane, in the west--as a superstar model-slash-fashionista, having no inkling of the ruthless, fiendishly intelligent, sadistic mind behind the beautific facade. These things made her the perfect woman, of course, but it also meant that there was only one realistic way for her to respond to this, with her already-suspect inhibitions lowered even further. “You could at least return the compliment,” Pencil said with an exaggerated pout.
“What could I possibly say that you haven’t heard a million times before, so many times it has lost all meaning, from an endless horde of mouth-breathers? Besides, if you were looking for more simps, you wouldn’t do your gaming under the cover of anonymity.” While Pencil used her real face (and measurements) for her avatars, this was itself a form of hiding in plain sight; many people played as their favorite celebrities, after all.
Sunraku realized he’d said something a little too sincere, and continued: “I’m sure the others have gotten far enough ahead of us that it won’t look like we’re with them; let’s be about it.”
And so they made their way back to the hotel. All the while, Sunraku pretended her touch wasn’t electric, wasn’t fire, didn’t light him up. Wow, I’m really struggling with this. Damn it, he saw her literally all the time! Albeit usually in video games where she didn’t stand out too much against the flawless beauty of the typical NPC or avatar, or in Rumi’s magazines; this was real, and extremely physical. He could smell her, and he could feel her, the pressure as she leaned on him, and the feverish heat radiating off of her drunken body.
He pretended not to notice these things and soldiered on. She didn’t need another mouth-breathing loser drooling over her, she needed him to be her friend--end of story.
Thankfully, she didn’t press him on the topic--perhaps she, too, had sensed that his answer had been a little too real.
They made it to her room. He held her up as she kicked her shoes off. He led her to her bed (do not wonder what it smells like). And then she fell into it
--and pulled him down with her, on top of her.
He struggled to disentangle himself, to push himself up, to get out of the bed--he was going to, honest!--but he made a fatal mistake. He looked down at her. Saw her, beneath him, somehow perfectly framed by her hair like in one of her photoshoots (and yes, he had seen them all). Something caught in his throat; his heart, or his stomach. He had to keep moving. Get out of the bed. Get out of the room. He didn’t keep moving. Didn’t get out of the bed, or the room, or anywhere else. He was frozen. Completely frozen.
Pencil giggled girlishly. “What are you going to do with me, Hizutome-kun?” she asked--in the Towa voice.
“Don’t do that.” Since when was Sunraku’s voice that husky? “I like the real you.”
The faux-innocence in her expression melted away, replaced with something hungrier. “Oh, do you, now Sunraku-kun?” Pencil wrapped one hand around the back of his neck, one around the back of his chest, and pulled her down into her. Suddenly he could taste her; when she was done tasting him, she whispered in his ear:
“In that case, let’s violate the terms of my love contract, what do you say?”
Goosebumps flew over his skin. But also…
They’re still doing that? How barbaric. The thought gave his nerves the psychic icewater bath they so desperately needed, and he found the willpower to disentangle himself once again.
Unfortunately, the willpower quit him exactly where it had abandoned him the last time--above her. Holding her at arm’s length, but still in his arms.
“Pencil-san…you’re not in your right mind right now.” He whispered this; it took so much willpower to do even that much.
“Perhaps. But you know I like to live in the moment, Sunraku-kun. Live in the moment with me.” She ground herself against him, and could not have been unaware of how much his body appreciated it.
To his hormone-addled brains, this seemed like flawless logic.
I’m about to lose my virginity to a supermodel, a voice in the back of his mind said. To which another responded: Wait; run that sentence by me again? Not Pencil. Not even Amane Towa, or Towa-sama. A supermodel. Sanraku didn’t know what part of his psyche the first voice represented, but he knew it wasn’t his friend.
Just like how if he did this, he wouldn’t be her friend.
He doubted she’d hold it against him--she was, after all, the adult in the room during all this--but deep down inside, she’d categorize him differently. He’d be just another man who saw her as a body first and a person second.
And that was what he couldn’t abide; she had so few real friends, how dare he rob her of one of them to satisfy the momentary urges of his libido???
Put like that, the choice was so clear, so obvious, so simple. It was no choice at all, in fact.
“Damn it, Pencil--no means no!” With his newfound determination, Sanraku managed to get out of her bed and back towards the door--never turning his back to her, as one does when one is in an enclosure with a dangerous animal.
And then, worried she’d get the wrong idea from all this, he added: “I’ll see you in the morning, when you’re sober, Pencil-san,” before he closed the door behind him (or rather, in front of him).
I will never forget how she tastes.
He beat a hasty retreat to his own room, and from there to its en suite bathroom, where he quickly finished himself off by hand. With post-nut clarity came a bone-deep weariness of the soul. He felt like he’d just been through a war. Or, more relevant to his life, marathoned his way through a completely broken game, except without the satisfaction that brought him. He’d made the right choice--he knew he had--but holy fuck!
~
There came a knock at the door. Sunraku suspected he knew who it was, but that didn’t stop him from reaching for the gas mask he had been using before Pencil unveiled their joint cosplay. (Speaking of which, he totally forgot that whole pumpkin head animatronic deal at the restaurant, didn’t he? Fuck. Oh, well.)
He looked through the spyhole, then opened the door.
“I just want to say I’m sorry about last night, and also thank you for not taking sexual advantage of me,” Pencil said with a bow. Something was off about her--or perhaps that was just his uneasy stomach.
“Come on, man; don’t thank me for doing the bare fucking minimum human decency demanded,” Sunraku protested awkwardly as he ushered her inside.
Pencil smirked a bit--not her typical smirk that meant someone was about to have a bad time, but something more akin to a polite chuckle. “Many men would not have had the strength of character you showed last night, Sunraku-kun.”
“Yeah, yeah; get off my dick.” Perhaps not the best choice of expression, given the topic at hand. “What I mean to say is, that doesn’t actually change anything, now does it? Why should we lower our standards just because some fucking scrubs out there can’t or won’t control themselves? Skill issue.”
“You do make an excellent point,” Pencil allowed. “...So. What will it take for you to never speak of last night again?”
“Nothing.”
“Seriously?”
“This is too real for us to be playing those kinds of games about, Pencil-san. Of course I’ll keep it to myself.”
“...Thank you.”
Was that a blush? Surely not. She was probably still drunk from last night, is all. Yeah. That, or she’s relieved she’s not going to have to worry about jail time for soliciting sex from a minor.
“You’re welcome; let us never speak of this again.” Although, now that the issue had been resolved, as it were, the spirit of impishness revived in Sunraku’s heart. “That being said, now that you’re sober, if--”
She punched him and he laughed.
“Hey, how old are you, anyway?” Pencil asked.
“Seventeen.”
“Fuck. It really is a good thing last night didn’t happen.”
“You know I’m in high school, Pencil-san; what, were you hoping for younger?”
She punched him again, in the same spot, and this time it hurt.
“Man, I’m not into that R. Kelly shit.”
“Last night notwithstanding,” Sunraku observed.
“How the fuck is this ‘never speaking of it again’?”
“You brought it up.”
“...Seriously, though. I’m not. You were just…saying all the right things, you know?”
Sunraku considered making an I could say them again joke, but decided against it. This was getting too real, too raw for that. “That was ‘all the right things’ for you? That’s the saddest thing I ever heard get said,” is what he opted to diffuse the tension with instead.
“Heh. You’re not wrong,” Pencil said. “...Well, this is getting awkward. I’m going to go put on my makeup.” And with that she was gone.
Holy shit--she hadn’ been wearing makeup!!! That’s what was off. How hadn’t he noticed??? Some keen observer he was…
~
“Hey, I’m back,” Sunraku said, entering the front door.
Rumi silently glared at him. Mom and Dad were nowhere to be found, no doubt busy with various interests.
“C’mon, Rumi-chan. Your brother comes back after three days, and you don’t even say ‘Hi’? Ain’t that a little cold?”
“I was really enjoying life without a brother--too bad it’s over!” Rumi retorted. “I drank all your stupid energy drinks, by the way. It wasn’t enough to quell my rage.”
“Are you still mad about the shirt? I told you it was an accident.”
“That was an Amane Towa original! I loved that shirt!!!”
“Speaking of whom, I got you a souvenir. Here.”
“Don’t bother trying to cheer me--” Rumi caught sight of the magazine, and the fact that it was made out to her, specifically. “How…how did you get this?”
“Oh, you know--right place, right time.”
Another slip of paper fell out of it. Rumi read it: “‘P.S. yeah, I totally believe that this is for your sister--NOT! Just admit that you’re madly in love with me already; the cool guy routine just makes you look stupid.’??? Signed with a heart!?!?!?”
Fuck! Pencil must have slipped that in during dinner without him noticing. It was of course par for the course with her teasing--but the events that had happened later that night put a new edge on it, making it cut deeply into his soul. Sunraku felt totally exposed.
Awe, horror, and betrayal warred on Rumi’s face, and the battle only grew fiercer when she looked into his eyes and saw his naked guilt. “Onii-san…” she began, not quite believing what she was about to say, “…do you know Towa-sama???”
~
“Hey, thanks for that second message, Pencil-san--I didn’t check the magazine before giving it to Rumi-chan and now she’s pestering me for your contact information.” Sunraku’s voice dropped into a low growl: “And I’m this close to giving it to her.”
“Go ahead; apparently she does reader model work, so checking out her fashion should be entertaining, at least.”
“How did you--!? You did a background check on both of us as soon as you got our names, didn’t you?”
“It’s only fair, Sunraku-kun, since you already know so much about me,” Pencil teased. Or at least it was said in the cadence of a joke.
“...”
“You know more than I ever imagined you did, don’t you?” All facade that this was a joke was gone. “I’ve been thinking about why nothing happened on a certain unnamed night, and the only thing I can think of…unless I’m being totally vain…”
“Well, I’d never accuse you of not being vain, but the reason nothing happened was that I knew it wasn’t what you needed from me. I don’t understand your life in anything more than broad strokes or anything, but I know gaming is your escape from it, and I never want to be the kind of person you’re escaping from,” Sanraku confessed.
“...This conversation was a mistake, is over, and will not be revisited until at least December, if then,” Pencil declared. (Sunraku’s birthday was November twenty-first.) “Which is not a promise that it will happen, by the way!”
“You want me,” Sunraku teased.
“Shut the fuck up,” she said--flustered.
Yup; he was going to enjoy the shoe being on the other foot.
“So anyway, what I got from all this is that Rumi-chan can call you any time, day or night--got it. Okay byeee.” Sunraku logged out.