And the World Shall Forget You

[Nayt]

It wasn't long before Eld started to undress. Etsu just had to lay there and stay calm. Try to pretend this wasn't happening. Try to pretend this boy was no going to be sitting there naked anytime in the near future. This boy that she'd no longer a single idea what to think of. What was it, did she hate him? Did she like him? Did she still feel that way about him? It was all so unfair. And what was most unfair was that no matter how many times she told herself that Eld was a horrible person and that she shouldn't have any good memories of him anymore, Etsu just couldn't bring herself to believe that. Why! Why did he have to be so . . . so . . .

Suddenly, she felt something. Skin. Warm skin. Except this was very particular skin. Eld wasn't . . . he wasn't wearing any pants, and he just-- did he just sit on her hand . . . . ?

No. No, this is not happening. This is not what I think it is. This is . . .

She completely lost it.

Etsu withdrew her hands from Eld's side of the tent in a flash and cried as loudly as she could: "B-ba-- baakaaaaa!!"

Only to try to push him over as she sat up. She was going to hit him. Yes. She was going to hit him hard. But first she was going to make sure she'd pushed him over before leaning over to smack him in the arm or chest or anywhere she could get a hand across.

"I-- I can-not ber-rieve you would . . .!"

[Zach Kaiser]

Eld let out a yelp, surprised in equal parts by Etsu's reaction and how loud she was--he'd certainly never heard her achieve that level of volume before. Of course, he had bigger problems, namely that she was freaking out and he was completely naked.

"W-Weren't you asleep?! C-Calm down, and let me--" Put some clothes on, was what he meant to finish, but instead he ended up yelling again as Etsu started pushing him with enough vigor that he rolled over all the way onto his back at the very edge of the tent.

And the she was over him, hitting him and he was too concerned with protecting a very specific area to worry about the rest. He could only pray that she calmed down before she accidentally threw the blankets off or something and ended up making this worse.

[Nayt]

If she'd been thinking this through, Etsu would have just put a huge amount of distance between she and Eld. She'd have crawled out of the tent and retreated back to the lake for the next few hours, and hope that by the time she returned, that he'd be dressed, asleep, and willing to forget this ever happened. But Etsu just so happened to not be thinking any of this through at all. She was frustrated and angry and all kinds of ill feelings all at once. She wanted to strangle this boy just as much as she wanted to hold onto his arm and ask him to keep her warm at night.

Why?!

And so she pinned him-- sat on top of him, straddled his belly, and silently lashed out. She'd have screamed, but she already stressed her voice out and it would have just come out as a raspy breath.

Etsu was looking for his face. She wanted to slap him in the cheek, but she was having a hard time finding it, and wound up just fine with beating on his chest. Her blows weren't that strong, though. The first one was pretty tough, sure. But the second, third, fourth, and so on, all lost strength with each hit, until she was just lightly beating her palm off his chest and weakly pinning him down. Frustration only took her so far, it seemed, for without genuine hatred for this boy, she couldn't truly hurt him.

It was a real predicament.

[Zach Kaiser]

Eld winced as Etsu pinned him and began to rail on him, blows he was even more helpless to defend himself against as she was sitting on his arms. They weren't, in the long run, all that damaging, but the knowledge that he couldn't stop them (and the fear that she would begin aiming elsewhere) made them a bit worse than they should have been.

But she couldn't keep the strength up, and he finally found the ability to speak again. "H-Hey, c-calm down, I'm sorry, I thought you were sleeping so I figured it was safe to change under the covers."

Perhaps if he'd been able to look at the situation rationally he'd have realized this was due to more than him being naked, but rational thought was pretty difficult for him at the moment.

[Nayt]

Etsu finally let up on hitting Eld. Her blows by the end had become so weak that even she barely felt her hand beating on Eld's chest, and she wound up half-hunching over him with her hands on his chest as the only thing keeping her from collapsing upon him.

She felt absolutely miserable right now. Tired, weak, and troubled by all these thoughts and memories she'd been telling to go the heck away since she first heard Eld making love to another girl. Etsu had tried to wish it all away, but it wasn't happening. Eld wouldn't let it happen.

"You are . . . you are . . ." Etsu whispered, "Horribr-re. Hidoi nin."

Suddenly she wanted to choke him. And just as suddenly, she wanted to let her hands give way and let her body hit his, so she could wrap her arms around him and apologize profusely. She was living in memories, now, and all the betrayal she felt that night that she heard him with (who she had yet to identify as) Sarah was all coming out at once.

"Why . . . why wour-rd you-- how cour-rd you?"

And though she didn't realize it, Etsu wasn't just talking about Eld accidentally making her touch his bare rear end, or anything at all that had happened tonight . . .

[Zach Kaiser]

"I...sorry, I made a mistake, I should have..." He was going to say that he should have just changed outside despite it being cold and hard to see, but...now that she'd (sort of) calmed down, he was getting the impression that wasn't the issue. If that was all it was about, she would have just hit him (possibly repeatedly) and been done with it.

But she was really, truly upset about something with him, and it seemed like it stemmed from something further back than tonight. "Wait. How could I...what?" he whispered. Clearly, she thought he'd done something pretty terrible.

For a moment, his mind flashed to Akizetsumei's reaction to him upon waking up, and for once he found himself wishing he'd indeed done something terrible, and it easily beat the alternative.

[Nayt]

It took her a moment to really understand what she was saying, but when she finally did, the answer came to her as plain as day. She'd been holding it back for so long, but now she had to say it. She needed to say it. She needed Eld to know how badly he hurt her.

"Forget me," she whispered.

Had Etsu the strength to do it, she'd have hit him again, this time as hard as she could-- but fortunately for him, Etsu was all out of will for violence. What she did have were words, honest and genuine words to express her feelings, and judging by the breaks in her voice, it would be all too clear to Eld that it may have taken only a couple of rude words on his end to make this girl cry.

"I-- I never forgot you. But you forget me," she paused, took a deep breath, and shouted, "hidoi nin" as loud as she could.

[Zach Kaiser]

Now Eld was really confused. "Forget you? What do you mean?"

His mind searched hurriedly for a time he might have forgotten about her for some reason or another. Surely, there were a lot of days where he didn't pay her much mind but that had suited her just fine. Had there been a time when he was supposed to do something with or for her and forgotten her?

Suddenly, he recalled one of his parents mentioning that he'd met Etsu once before. "W-Wait, do you mean before you came here?" But if that was the case, why was it so important to her? They'd been visiting her family, and it had been his first time meeting her, but it wasn't as though they'd really done anything together other than maybe talk for a bit.

[Nayt]

"Of course!" she answered.

What else would she be talking about? Etsu was getting riled up just at the thought that Eld hadn't the slightest clue. Was he really so ignorant? So thoughtless? Or maybe it wasn't important to him back then, either, so it was ten times less important to him right now. So unimportant, in fact, that he'd forgotten it entirely.

"We were going to have sumiengumi!"

A word that would likely mean absolutely nothing to Eld, but everything to Etsu. Etsu hesitated, felt her voice cracking and growing raspy from over-exertion, and she suddenly found it even harder to keep herself from falling onto him. But Etsu kept herself still, held herself up and made sure she didn't fall. She wasn't going to collapse into the arms of this jerk. He was even more horrible than she ever imagined, a fact proven by every word they'd exchanged between each other just now, and likely with what they were to say soon enough.

"But you . . . you forgot." Or he never wanted it in the first place-- but who was to say that mattered? Eld had no say in such things, only his parents.

[Zach Kaiser]

"S-Sumiengumi?" Eld repeated. He knew Cizokian, but that word was unfamiliar to him. And clearly it was important, important enough that Etsu was nearly in tears over the fact that he didn't know what she meant by it.

He was guessing it wasn't some kind of dish.

"W-What is sumiengumi?" he asked meekly. While he was already filled with the vague guilt a guy feels when a girl is upset and he is unable to help (whether or not he's the problem itself), now he was feeling a specific kind as he suspected this was something he should already have known.

Was it really possible something important had happened during that trip (or was supposed to happen after it), and he'd simply forgotten?

[Nayt]

Etsu hadn't cried yet. No, she was holding back, but her tear ducts were at least starting to kick up. She felt the sting in her eyes, and knew for a fact that she wouldn't be able to hold back for much longer.

"A--" Etsu hesitated for a long moment.

He cared so little that he simply didn't even acknowledge the word. He'd heard it most likely and regarded it with a shrug of his shoulders. Didn't even give a damn what the girl in the situation must have felt. How afraid she was of it and him, but how accepting she would have been back then if he simply spoke up.

"Ar-ranged mar-raige," she finally said. Her tone was seething. If she wasn't so horribly conflicted right now, she might have spat on him.

And now it was too late. Eld had forgotten about all of that. About her. Even if he could pretend to care right now, it wouldn't have made the slightest difference . . .

[Zach Kaiser]

It was a shame that Etsu could not see Eldridge Tsukimono's face just then, because the look of bewilderment that crossed it was a rare sight indeed. "A-Arranged marriage?" he repeated, as though they were as foreign to him as the Ciozkian word she'd given first.

He shook his head; there was some kind of mistake here. "N-No no no, we weren't...it was just a visit to some family. It was my first time meeting them." Well, supposedly Kyoko had visited once when he was an infant, but of course he couldn't remember that.

"T-There wasn't..." But the more he thought about it, the less confidence he had in that claim. He remembered getting dressed up, and her being all dressed up too. She'd been really pretty. But he'd thought it was just to make a good first impression.

[Nayt]

"Do not r-rie to me," Etsu stated lowly.

Now she was upset. Really, really upset. She was less on the brink of tears and more on the precipice of getting her strength back. Of regaining the urge and will to slap Eld as hard as she could.

If only she could find his face.

"That is why we met and I know it," she said.

Eld was currently experience the most expressive anger this girl could muster. Her voice had lowered to a point where it was damn near a growl. If he could see her face, he'd see how her expression matched it perfectly: a mixture of hurt and anger that had simply ended in a slowly growing, yet sincere hatred.

"My mother and your father dis-cussed it. She tor-rd me. Ojisan even spoke to me!" She shouted again, but soon withdrew to a seething whisper when her voice fell raspy. She wasn't used to raising her pitch like this. It was becoming seriously painful for her. "But you forgot. Hidoi nin . . ."

[Zach Kaiser]

"I...I believe you." It was impossible not too; he did not think Etsu had the capacity to lie about something like this, with such obvious emotion. No, she was telling the truth. There was no reason for her own mother or for his father to have lied to her--to tell her that something like that was happening if it wasn't would have been needlessly cruel, and at the very least he could be certain his father wasn't needlessly cruel.

Which only left one conclusion: that setting up a potential arranged marriage between he and Etsu had been the true purpose of the trip, and that they'd never told him.

"Etsu...this is my first time hearing about any of this," he said quietly. A seed was planted, a seed of anger that would later send him into a fit of rage. But the time was not now, and Etsu would not be the target of it. Right now, he would have given anything he had for her to believe him, to believe that he wasn't some cruel boy who'd toyed with her heart and then forgot. He'd never known her heart was--or could have been--his to begin with.

"As far as I knew, it was just a vacation. We were just visiting you and your parents...I hadn't met any of you yet, so it was long overdue...I..."

Now it was his own emotions threatening to come loose. He didn't know what to think; the idea that Etsu could have been his bride was a lot to take in.

[Nayt]

And that hatred that had slowly started to boil quickly reduced to a simmer. Eld was horrible, wasn't he? He just didn't give a damn about her, right?

He's lying, she told herself.

But she was becoming less and less convinced of that with each passing second of silence. Of which there were many. It was a long, horrible silence that felt like hours. Days, even.

Hit him. Now! Make him pay for this!

But that hatred in her heart could muster up anymore. She had neither the strength nor the will to strike him anymore. It was sapped and she felt drained and weak all over.

"Y-- you are . . . r-r-- r-ry--" she wanted to say that he was lying, but she couldn't get it out. Couldn't word it correctly. All she could say, choked up as she was, was this and this alone: "I-if you . . . if you are gen-uine-- pr-rease ter-rr me now. And if you are r-rying, I wir-rr never forgive you. I wir-rr hate you untir-r the day I die."