“It won’t.” He tried to laugh it off, but it seemed Ami was actually afraid.
“I wonder if we’ll actually be okay…”
“With the way it’s raining now, it’ll probably stop in a few minutes.”
Ryuuji leaned on a post as he spoke, but Ami’s face remained gloomy at his words. Her wet hair was plastered to her white cheeks. Now it didn’t matter whether this was her mask or true self. The delicate awkwardness had been blown away in the face of the torrential rain, along with everything else. Ami simply shivered slightly from the cold, anxiously looking up at the moving sky. The tracksuit covering her thin shoulders was also thoroughly drenched.
“…Achoo!”
It was a small sneeze, like a baby mouse’s. It was completely different from Taiga’s weird, loud sneezes. It made him want to take off what he was wearing and put it on her shoulders. But, Ryuuji’s tracksuit was just as wet as hers.
“Aren’t you cold? …I have a trash bag I’m not using, so do you want to wear that? I can open a hole for your head.”
“Huh?! Like hell I’d do that!”
He was rejected in a flash. If Ami had had her mask on right now, she would definitely have smiled and accepted it.
“…Right. You wouldn’t want a trash bag poncho.”
“I don’t, I’d never. I wouldn’t do anything like that! Seriously… unbelievable.” With a bratty snort, Ami turned away childishly.
If this were the normal Ami, she definitely wouldn’t have shown how sullen she was. It seemed that the mask, once cracked open, could easily be shattered by some further incident. By (for example) a terrible, sudden burst of freezing torrential rain.
“…This is definitely the tadpoles’ curse.” He tried to break up the strained silence with something silly. Ami looked up at Ryuuji, unamused.
“…Why do I have to be cursed?”
“It’s payback for putting their lives in danger, right?”
“But you saved them, didn’t you, Takasu-kun?”
“…Well, in truth, I just pretended that I saved them, but I actually threw them over there into the grass…”
“Huh?!”
Ami suddenly sat up straight, speechless. Her mouth hung half open and her wide-open eyes seemed ready to overflow.
“…Hey, I’m obviously lying. Do I look like someone who could do something like that?”
“Wh…what! Well! I was afraid you were serious for a second—I’m here to tell you, Takasu-kun, that you look exactly like someone who could do something like that!”
How rude.
“Hey, what’s that all about? Sorry, but I’m actually a pretty nice guy. Though I’m saying that about myself, which is kind of awkward… but I actually like animals a lot and have an inko I hatched from an egg and take very good care of.”
“An inko as in a parakeet? …Is that the ugly perverted parakeet that Aisaka Taiga was talking about?”
“I can’t believe Taiga said that! She’s actually a really charming and good parakeet.”
“Are there good and bad parakeets? What’s its name?”
“Inko-chan.”
“…”
Ami was silent for a moment.
“Ahahaha! What is that?!”
Suddenly, she laughed out loud. Not knowing what she meant, Ryuuji’s eyes sharpened with confusion as she pointed at him.
“Normal people wouldn’t name it something like that! That’s not a real name, that’s just what it is! You’re weird, weird, weird, totally weiiird!”
“…Am I?”
“You bet you are!”
Ami swept up her wet and dripping hair, displaying the entirety of her round forehead. Patting both hands together, she kept right on laughing. She stamped her legs—she just couldn’t help herself. “‘Inko-chan!’ What is that?! Takasu-kun, you’re completely different inside from what you look like on the outside. Though you’re nowhere near as bad as that president!” She turned her eyes towards Ryuuji, brimming with tears from laughing too hard.
But then…
“Oh, no.”
Ami’s laughter ended just as quickly as it had started. It was as though someone had petrified her with a spell. Turned to stone, Ami looked past Ryuuji at something far behind him. Her expression looked more like a statue with every passing moment.
“What is it? Come on, hey! Kawashima!”
Without replying to Ryuuji, Ami ran out of the gazebo into the torrential rain. Ryuuji couldn’t keep pace with someone this inconsistent. Ami didn’t listen to him asking her to stop. She stooped and half-ran into the overgrown grass, bending over to hide herself. She took the cold rain head-on, but the distance between them grew and grew as she charged onward regardless. He didn’t understand what was going on, but he couldn’t just leave her alone, either.
“Wait!”
Ryuuji also jumped into the slanting rain. Then, once he caught up with her, he forcefully grasped Ami from behind. Somehow he managed to push her into a broken-down bike rack a ways out from the gazebo.
The bike rack at least had an iron roof, but the difference between it and the gazebo was like heaven and earth. They were still exposed to the wind and they didn’t have anywhere to sit. Rusted bikes lay piled in a messy heap right next to them.
“What’s going on with you?! Why’d you go out into this rain on purpose…?”
“Shh!”
“…!”
A cold hand reached out to the nape of Ryuuji’s neck. Between the coldness of her touch and Ami’s close scent, Ryuuji couldn’t speak, or breathe.
She clung to him, leaning her weight on him. Then, she roughly pushed him down into a crouch.
“Hey…wait…why…?”
“…Shh, because!”
Her body felt strangely cushiony and soft against him, but she was so slender, almost fleeting. Where Ami’s skin touched his, it felt so smooth he thought he might melt into it.
But he couldn’t do that. As his face turned a bright blood red, Ryuuji grabbed a pole out of earnest and absolute desperation. He pulled himself away to get free of Ami’s leaning body weight. In the sweet smell of rain, like a drowning man, Ryuuji sought to lose himself in the cold void and let his breath escape him.
But he heard the faint whisper of a hoarse voice.
“…Let’s hide like this…for a little…”
Then, Ami crouched and rounded herself up into a small ball. She completely settled herself into Ryuuji’s chest, as though using his body as a shield. He was so close that he could see her pearly gray eyes and her long eyelashes, which were wet and shimmering from the clear rain that clung to them.
“Ah, ah, ah… wai-wai…th-this is…” At his wit’s end, with a face so red that it looked like it would spray blood at a pinprick, Ryuuji raised his voice in embarrassment. If there was anyone who could act normally at such a sudden, transcendental embrace—and with an incredibly pretty girl, no less—he wanted to know who they were.
“…Over there…” she whispered in a small voice, pointing carefully to show him. He was still in a dreamy state as he looked in that direction, but the change came instantaneously. Ryuuji’s boiling blood dropped to below freezing in an instant, and he sunk down on his feet in a chill.
“…Th-that guy…”
Back at their original gazebo, the guy who’d just run in to escape the rain was unpleasantly familiar.
The man folded up his umbrella and looked around. It was that guy who looked like a college student at first glance, who, if he weren’t carrying a digital camera in this torrent, wouldn’t have been so strangely conspicuous.
Instinctively, Ryuuji had goosebumps. He exchanged his spot for Ami’s and managed to completely hide her.
“It’s the weirdo from yesterday…right? Why would he be in a place like this? It’s too much to be a coincidence…”
“…Do you really think there’s any chance it could be?”
“…”
He couldn’t answer Ami’s question. But n
o—it definitely couldn’t be a coincidence.
“He was waiting while I was at school…and followed us here…!”
A gross sensation slithered through Ryuuji. He shuddered unconsciously—and that wasn’t just because of the cold. “How would he know the school you go to? You made it sound like he was a weird fan you happened to run into yesterday.”
“…Right, and he is, but…” Ami’s faltering voice was mixed with hesitation. He understood. Several times, she opened her mouth, but she kept silent. She held her breath, sheltered within Ryuuji’s arm. Just like that, her body froze up.
“Say it. Now that it’s come to this, you can’t keep it a secret.”
When he quickly jolted her cold shoulders, her back faintly shook. Then, slowly, in a quiet voice, she finally spoke the words.
“Well…there’s only one way to put it. That guy…is a stalker.”
At the reverberation of those words, Ryuuji recalled the furious shout Ami had given earlier in her treacherous fight with Taiga—you stalker! He thought that might pretty much have been the one and only time Ami’s emotions were laid bare.
“Yesterday, how do I put this… I was too embarrassed to say it. I don’t want it to be a big deal…and that guy is an infamous nuisance in the industry. Somehow, he researches you and appears around your house or your parents’ house or your school with camera in hand. He’s been prowling around after other magazine models besides me and causing trouble.”
“…For real…?”
At Ryuuji’s grumble, Ami nodded, and then continued on. “The reason I moved here was because of that guy. My mom is an entertainer, right? My mom’s office told me there were problems with a weird guy prowling around our neighborhood…so I ended up coming here alone and living with my relatives. My dad is also busy with work, so he couldn’t leave his office at the city center. But…I didn’t think that this guy would keep looking for me even after the move…”
“So that’s how it is…”
“Yeah. I don’t think I could have helped having to move, but…I’m scared. I’m separated from my parents, and until this cools down, I took a break from modeling work, and a break from the agency. So no one is here to protect me…before, my manager would pick me up with a car but…ugh, I can’t believe it…I can’t believe he would follow me all the way here…!”
That would be scary.
It was scary enough to make even him cold, and he was a guy. For Ami, who was the target, it was probably so terrifying that he couldn’t even imagine.
He unconsciously held her more firmly with his arm.
“…Takasu-kun…”
“Until that guy gives up and goes, let’s keep hiding.”
He was a coward who couldn’t bring himself to say I’ll beat that guy up, but even Ryuuji could at least hide with her. They both remained there, trying to lower the sound of their breathing, huddled up together, waiting for the time to pass.
But while the rain might have made some people give up, this guy was still sitting on the bench. He started leisurely wiping his wet camera.
And during that time, the rain mercilessly changed directions. It blew right into them. Ryuuji’s tracksuit got wet and started to grow heavy. When he was wondering just how long they’d need to stay like this, he heard a voice.
“Heeey! Takasu-kuuun! Kawashima-saaan! That’s weird, they’re not anywhere. But in this rain… what’s goin’ on with it? Taiga, aren’t you cold?”
“I’m fine. What about you, Minorin?”
“I’m totes fine! But I really do wonder where they got off to. There was someone who saw them heading to the riverbank, too…”
“It’s raining pretty hard, so I wonder if they went back halfway. What if they already went back?”
“Wouldn’t we have seen ’em if they were on their way back?”
In the increasing wind and rain, the voices they heard were no doubt Minori and Taiga. He felt uncertain whether he could depend on those two. He wasn’t sure if he could trust that unpredictable pair—he wasn’t sure whether they’d been saved or if the situation had just gotten worse. But still, without thinking Ryuuji turned…
“Hey, those voices are definitely Taiga’s and Kushi… bwuh!”
He sputtered. Even though it was a time like this…
It was just such a terrible sight. Minori had opened a hole in a trash bag and was wearing exactly the article of clothing they’d talked about before—a merry see-through poncho.
And Taiga was using an extremely small, see-through takeout box like an umbrella over her head.
“Hey, Minorin, those takoyaki from earlier weren’t that hot. I know it’s a bit late, but I’m ticked off. Let’s go give them a piece of our mind.”
It was a takoyaki box…but it was somehow still keeping her completely safe from the rain. Was it fine if she got aonori and katsuoboshi stuck to her head? She really was actually stupid… no, if he laughed, his abdominal muscles would… but then the tension diffused.
Peering up at Ryuuji, who was desperately trying to suppress a laugh, Ami rebuked him with pinched lips. “Takasu-kun, you’re kind of…shaking.”
“Sorry…I kind of got caught up…it’s just that…a takoyaki box as an umbrella is… Bwahaha!”
Hadn’t he seen a goblin outfitted like that before? A Mizuki drawing clearly formed in his mind.
But it seemed Ryuuji wasn’t the only one who was inspired by the odd sight. The stalker, still in the gazebo, suddenly turned around.
“A cute, pint-sized goblin discovery!”
He brought up his camera, rude as you please. But there was no way that the queen of the beasts, the Palmtop Tiger, wouldn’t notice that move.
“…A goblin… me?”
In an instant, Taiga’s face twisted, baring fangs that thirsted for his blood. She turned her brutal gaze directly at the place where the voice had come from—the gazebo.
“You over there! I don’t know what you’re trying to do, but you’re pretty creepy! I didn’t just hear a suspicious looking person like you calling me a goblin, did I?!”
She licked her lips with a red tongue—when her bloodlust was up, it didn’t matter if she was dealing with someone she had never seen before, or even some kind of pervert. She would go off on them without hesitation.
She rolled up the takoyaki container she was using as an umbrella in her hands, and her simple sword was done. She gripped it firmly in both hands, and brought her elbows into a sturdy stance.
“Rain like this will wash away all the evidence,” she muttered, and went right into a fierce dash.
“Huh? Wha, whoa!”
Still silent, sturdily holding her sword-carton, her face was that of an ogress. She tore ahead at an unnatural speed. There was no way he wouldn’t be terrified of a mysterious goblin dashing full force towards him.
“Wh-what is this?!”
Flustered, the man grabbed his backpack. He barely got his umbrella open before he turned his back to Taiga and started running.
Taiga just kept on pursuing. “I don’t care who you are or where you came from—whoa!”
Sploop. Her foot was helplessly stuck in the mud.
All this happened right in front of the dilapidated rack Ryuuji and Ami were hiding by. Right before she was about to fall face first into the mud…
“…Y-you…”
…Ryuuji jumped out into the middle of the rain. With miraculous timing, he grabbed Taiga by the nape of her neck. He narrowly caught her in midair, posed like an ensnared beast. “You klutz!”
Stuck in the same position, Taiga checked her feet. “…I-I thought I was gonna fall for sure! I stopped breathing!”
She desperately clung to Ryuuji’s arm, wet hair drooping to her waist. She had a look on her face like a cat that had been hit by a car. She breathed in a delicate, long breath.
“Don’t go around chasing someone you don’t know! Throw that thing away! Toss it!” Ryuuji slapped the carton sword (or goblin umbrella) from her hands
. The top of her head seemed to smell a little like katsuboshi. As he was intently and absentmindedly staring at the crown of her head, Minori caught up to them.
“Taiga, what are you doing?! And wait, who the heck was that guy?! And wait, Takasu-kun, where were you?!”
Her face seemed to have a giant question mark in the middle of it as she wiped the mud off Taiga’s face.
At that point, Ami, equally soaked, came on out. She stopped in front of Minori, who turned in surprise.
“…And wait, where were you, Kawashima-san?!” She picked rotten scraps of grass off Ami’s shoulders.
“…”
A single droplet rolled down and fell from Ami’s rain-soaked face.
***
“A stalker?!” While Kitamura shouted, he pushed up his drooping glasses. “You didn’t tell me about anything like that at all! You said you were tired of modeling, and didn’t like your school, and that your parents didn’t come home much!”
“…It was hard for me to tell you. Because if I told you, Yuusaku, you’d just worry about me.”
As he looked into the face of his childhood friend, who had grown entirely too beautiful, Kitamura had a rare moment of hesitation.
As a thank you for participating in the cleanup, and to make it up to them for getting soaked in the storm, Kitamura had invited them to a late-night fast food place. Although the rain had tapered off to a light sprinkle, there still weren’t many other customers on account of the bad weather.
After Ami finished telling Kitamura about her incredibly bleak situation, for some reason, she turned her ivory face down in embarrassment. Ryuuji, as a witness, refrained from making a statement as he sat beside her. Minori furrowed her brow while looking at Ami in worry.
“…Oh…”
Taiga dribbled ketchup from the potato chip she was holding—probably succumbing to the nervousness that came with Kitamura being nearby. Ryuuji, still silent, pulled out the wet tissues he carried around for Taiga’s messes, and quickly wiped her skirt.
In a rare moment for the group surrounding the table, they were all silent.
“Anyway, for now…”
The one who cut the fuse was Kitamura.
Toradora! Vol. 2 Page 14