Chapter 7:

Azumanga Maou

***

Kaori frowned. Hard. Stressed and depressed. Candlelit misery was expressively figured into the face of an exhausted woman keeping vigil before the sweet sickly dying calfmother. An acrid scent of death and doom appeared to pervade the pen; and in the corner of her eye, morbid shades seemed to loom. These were symptoms of Kaori going crazy from exhaustion. Kaori's solution to keep from going crazy was to force herself to not go crazy. But tonight... There was nothing to focus on, nothing to distract herself with... and so she wandered, wandered the recesses of her own mind, plumbed the forbidden paths of memory, dredging up the things... those ugly, painful, misfigured things that still polluted her subconscious to this day...

A garden of daisies and falling petals. A dim anxious reflection in opaque glasses, a slack-jawed open mouth, spiky hair and a tie. The constant feeling of nausea and danger. Him humiliating her in front of the class and nobody saying anything. Him always pulling her away from Sakaki. Him following her around in Okinawa and showing up in the same novelty t-shirt as her, just to show he had been watching. The hell year with him as her homeroom teacher. All of the times that she'd catch him staring, all the times he'd intrude on her in places that were supposed to be private, the few times he'd cornered her and she hadn't been able to get away. The nightmare that infected all her high school daydreams. The most hurtful dance with the wrongest partner.

Those eyes unseen that followed her always even after her listless graduation. The sound of footsteps that would suddenly follow her and then disappear when she turned. A face in her window, a glimpse that's already gone when she looks, even at college sometimes, the weird anonymous letters and creepy phone calls, the way she'd found her place broken into a couple of times with everything gone through but no valuables stolen, the way that even after moving far, far way and years later, she still felt like she'd see someone walking up behind her in the chrome reflection of a milking machine and she'd make a sickened exclamation and everyone would look at her with unbearable concern...

Thinking about those hands.

Those sallow, trembling hands.

Him. God. Why was she was thinking about *him*.

Why did Kimura turn his gaze upon her? Why was he the worst with her out of everyone?

Did he sense what she didn't, did he realize what she hadn't?

Was there special intrigue for such a man, in knowing he's punishing a lesbian? Did he just sense that it hurt her in a specific way? Was it a better flavor than his usual fare?

(Not to get too meta--certainly not in this reasonably, tidily structured fanfiction, perish the thought!!--but the answer, it turns out, is a little more complicated than that. If we zoom out of reality completely and examine every little causal detail, it's certainly *true* on some level that Kimura was a product of his culture and consciously/subconsciously resented Kaorin for "seeming lesbian", maybe there are complex subconscious processes that exist in certain men that make them develop hatred and a desire to hurt, punish, destroy things that give them a feeling that is contrary to their ingrained sense of social order and feminine accessibility/submission. But ask yourself. Is it really just Kimura? Is the horror really limited to just this one pedophile teacher developing a sick, selfish, violent obsession with a dyke student? Rather, isn't it always like this? Isn't it all the sick teachers? Isn't it all the wounded students? Isn't it the fact that Kaorin's story iterates again and again throughout reality? Isn't it the fact that the world is sick, is utterly diseased with Kimura's sin? To put it in video game terms, isn't it a fact that the Yuusha, the Dragon Quest hero dies in ignominy, and the Dragonlord, the Maou wins? When we really zoom out all the way, and see the form of all causes and all ends, we can see that the world is a nightmare puppet theater run by a bored sadist with the taste of a literary hack, and everything reflects that. Sea-floating creatures get teeth and start biting, feeling is born and begets infinite pain, in ancient times hunger and sickness and weather torture and kill the humans into rigid and draconian organized agricultural living patterns, and then the war of all against all is begun and blood-tasting humans develop sacrifice-desire and they build civilizations in worship of it and then many years later as a direct causal consequence of everything in the universe that had come before, Kaorin gets placed in Kimura's third-year class, where she gets sexually traumatized by serial harassment and abuse which she faced at the place where she should have felt safest.)

Sometimes Kaori still felt scared. Sometimes she still woke up in the middle of the night after bad dreams where she tried to scream in a raspy little voice that no one could hear. Every weird spam call might be a call from him. Reflective surfaces were scary, she'd startle at shadows creeping by, and sometimes she'd be sure that things weren't how they left them at home, things would go missing and she was sure they had been *taken*, that he'd been back *again*. And usually when she was feeling crappy, like she was now, she would be trapped with the bad memories, would be forced to relive this stuff and be made angry and hurt all over again for "literally no reason."

But divinity is resourceful, and not everything belongs to some hack cosmic sadist armed with puppet strings. Tonight, Kaorin's anger and pain were instrumental in the saving of the life of the ailing pregnant heifer. If she hadn't spent hours experiencing boiling anger at the depraved treatment that she had been subjected to seemingly for no other reason than the outer-cosmic laughs from an audience of divine grotesques, if she hadn't been sitting there so upset this whole time then she would likely have fallen asleep. And if she had fallen asleep, she would have stopped petting the heifer. And if she had stopped petting the heifer, then that tiny, tiny extra little sliver of pain would have killed her, and if the heifer had died, Kaori's life would have been slowly, inevitably ruined, robbing her of the miracles that were to come. But here Kaorin was, awake and angry and petting and hanging on even if only by a thread, waiting for succor, waiting for a miracle..

Who are we to question it, you know? Who are we to question it when we are blessed with a miracle by a magical fairy or rainbow snake or a cool looking special divine person, by someone or something that represents a contrary principle to a malevolent existing order. If some hypothetical all-benevolent enlightenment wargoddess or luminous aesthetic reptile withershins away the pain of our existence and undoes it backforwards into auspicious blessings and fortuitous fortunes, I am sure we will have little room to complain. In time, everything will be undone and remade, and everything will be forgotten and remembered, and every broken heart in this world shall be mended strongly anew.

In deepest night, after some time worrying over the past to no conclusion, Kaorin's troubled brain ramblings were interrupted by the door opening and the streaming-in moonlight. Yuuka was here, working hard as always, bearing news as usual. The doctor was here. The doctor in the house. Yuuka, can you keep a watch on the heifer while Kaorin goes out to greet the doctor and brief him on the situation? Of course. Thanks, Yuuka, sasuga Yuuka, you're the best there is and that's all there is to it...

Kaorin took the opportunity to stride out the door and into the dark early morning. No comfort awaited her there, just an abundance of pale, cold moonlight to shiver in. What had been rain some number of kilometers south was crystalline powder here. The sparkling landscape unfolded along the rolling hills of the farm, each one gleaming the sacred gleam of fresh unturned snow. Everything felt absolute. Everything felt holy. And then she saw the figure striding towards her slowly and inexorably from the distance, bag slung over a shoulder. Kaorin suddenly had a weird feeling.

She was shivering violently, as much due to this sudden strange restless anticipation as to the freezing. Every mutually taken step brought the figure larger and more into detail and focus, and further defined its effective classification.

The figure,
the walking figure,
the tall, walking figure,
the long-black-haired tall figure walking,
the unexpectedly female figure,
the towering female figure with raven hair and an incongruously unconfident stride,
the soft-looking resplendent female figure in the labcoat and unseasonably cold clothing,
the well-proportioned lovely stylish woman doctor shivering and looking tired,
the cool, sad-eyed alluring and arrestingly beautifOH MY GOD IS THAT SAKAKI???