2022-06-21: Seduction

• Log: 2022-06-21: Seduction
• Cast: Akane Shinjo, Yuta Hibiki
• Where: Tsutsujidai - Yuta Hibiki's Room
• OOC - IC Date: 0096-06-21
• Summary: Concurrent with 2022-06-21: Reproach, Akane moves to try to get Gridman on her side. She ends up on her side, having an intimate discussion with Yuta Hibiki. (cw: clumsy seduction attempts by a teenage girl)

---

<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.

On the one hand: Yuta had wanted to feed Akane instead of the other way around, and she hasn't really gotten around to reaching out about that ever since the last time she agreed to it was interrupted.

... She's received some alarming news, though, or at least *confusing* news, and it's forcing her to up her timetable on a few things a bit -- and one of those things involves considering whether she wants *Gridman* on her side for something to come. Unfortunately, she has...

... no idea how to accomplish that.

So she immediately graduates to transgressing extremely intimate boundaries after school!

When Yuta returns to his apartment, Akane has plopped herself down, waiting for him. She lazily crosses and uncrosses her legs as she sits on the bottom bunk of his bed, stretching out.

She'd considered inviting Alexis along for part of this, too -- but at the moment, she can't reach him. She's sent a text, but... for some reason, he's just not returning her calls. She's not even getting a read receipt! How rude. ... that's fine, though; this might actually be a conversation better reserved for Hibiki alone.

<Pose Tracker> Yuta Hibiki has posed.

Walking home from school, Yuta stops at the bottom of the stairs leading up to his apartment. Riku hadn't been back yet, which had him worried, and so he'd asked Calibur and the others to keep an eye out for him. Vit, though, as usual seemed to be content spending his time hanging around with Rikka's mom - something that was starting to get him no end of needling from Borr. Well, it's best to let some sleeping dogs lay, as the saying goes..

His conversation with Kaworu some days prior weighed on him. His soft 'time-out' would most likely be the point at which Guy Shishioh established contact with him, which could be quite literally any day now. I'm not procrastinating, exactly. I've worked up the guts several times now to go talk to Akane about everything, it's just - .. I guess I'm apprehensive..not only because of the conversation, but because every time I try, something seems to conspire to keep us apart. I still don't wonder if what happened with Betterman wasn't caused by her.

It'd be impossible to tell, he supposed, taking his first step up. One foot after the other, and eventually he finds himself in front of his own front door. It's strange. I'm not realy all that bothered anymore by what I don't remember. I guess ... there's just been too much on my mind lately.

    Yuta pauses, "...."

Blue eyes squint slightly, "The door's unlocked? I wonder if Riku came back."

Pushing the door open and making the short walk to his bedroom, rather than his roomie, he finds the most shocking sight of all - a cute teenage girl! There'd be plenty of people his age who'd kill for this kind of romcom situation.

For Yuta though, he couldn't really bring himself to think about it in such an easygoing way. " ... Akane? I see you've made yourself at home - uhm, despite it being a boy's room .. sorry it's not as clean as it could be. It's a little embarassing," he admits, folding one hand over the opposing arm, which held the strap securing his school bag to his body. She had to have come straight here from school to end up getting here before me.

Yuta slides his bag off his shoulders and sets it down next to his closet. "Do you want something to drink, or eat? I should still have a leftover thermos of that soup I made last week."

It had been shockingly edible, even if not quite as good as it could have been. Progress was progress, Yuta figured. " ... actually -"

    "Let's talk, since you came here.." he trails off.

" - you had something on your mind, right? Me too."

<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.

"Hehehe... yep. It's not bad," Akane says; her eyes shut just a moment as she listens to him. "Welcome home, Mr. Gridman. I don't mind the room, though..." She stretches out on the bed, pulling the covers partway over herself and grabbing the pillow. One leg comes up, knee pressing against the pillow.

"Mmh... smells like Hibiki," she murmurs, as she starts to run a finger lazily across the middle of its back, then down once she finds a nonexistent spine.

"Soooo... you wanted to talk to me about something at school," she starts, before looping back to the question of whether she wants anything to drink or eat. Her eyes half-lid, one of them giving him a brief wink. "I guess I *am* pretty thirsty... do you have anything to drink~?" She doubts Hibiki is a tomato juice guy; this is really more about figuring out what his go-to is. She seems... less interested in a full meal.

"Buuuuut~... you had something on your mind too? ... that was the real reason you made soup, right?" Her expression doesn't change much -- it'd be hard to spot exactly how, even -- but the gap between seductive and melancholy proves small indeed. "Hehehe... sounds like Gridman's just like me." She moves the pillow up a bit, partially covering her mouth. She tugs the case up a tiny bit further, at that. "Still... I'll hear you out, either way."

<Pose Tracker> Yuta Hibiki has posed.

Yuta's a teenage boy, still. And even as inexperienced as he was, he was still capable of receiving 'signals' - especially in the wake of some of their previous interactions. As they both were right now though, it just made him feel..a little bit sick to his stomach. "You don't have to do that, you know."

It was a very uneasy feeling, the pubescent excitement meshing with the ooey, gooey emotions drizzling from his heart like oil and water. It was difficult to put into words, but, Rather, while there's something genuine this is coming from, sniffing my pillow and wrapping herself around it like that..

Picturing himself in place of his pillow, he already understood on some level that taking that at face value would be taking advantage of Akane's aching heart.

His eyes having been stuck on the placement of her legs, Yuta smacks his own red chees abruptly and sucks in a deep breath before walking over to seat himself at the edge of his bed. "It's not really 'why' I made soup. But it was the first thing I could think of to try and talk to you .. " he starts before smiling shyly. "Actually, since things kept happening, I was just going to go straight to your house. So I guess we were a little on the same wavelength, huh?"

Of course, doing that would mean exposing myself directly to Alexis-Kerib..

"But, I'm still Yuta Hibiki, you know - my name isn't Gridman, even if I'm the one who's been fighting along with Rikka and Sho .. did you know the whole time? - actually, that doesn't really matter to me." he pauses, before turning to face her directly instead of from the side. "Akane..if you can't keep doing this to yourself; letting Alexis-Kerib run free with your heart and doing as he pleases with it. Akane..y-you'll die if things stay like they have been."

The pleading look on his face is somewhere between miserable and gentle, "We'd miss you, you know? I don't want you to disappear. I'm sure Rikka would hate that too, and what about the rest of our friends?"

<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.

"Don't I?" Akane asks, tone a little playful. "I know you'd have a lot of fun with it too... really, you could have a lot of fun with a God." There's something that gets more distant, the more intimate she makes it sound -- something in her aching heart wants... *some* kind of companionship, at least. Whether it's *this*...

... that's a harder question.

"And besides," Akane murmurs, "I know exactly what it means to call on a girl in her room." She ... definitely couldn't actually let Yuta in there, though.

She sits *bolt* upright when Alexis's name comes up. There's a hint of anger in her expression as he tells her she'll die if she continues to let things proceed as they will. "Wow. You even know about Alexis, huh," she says, going from seductive to expressionless in no time flat. "It sounds like you're pretty on top of this. ... then again, you don't really get what's going on."

If he knows that much -- she might as well go all in. "There's no danger of me disappearing. Alexis isn't the one doing this." She thinks about Banagher's gun camera footage -- and then pushes it aside, because it doesn't change what she's about to say next. Akane doesn't flinch when Yuta tells her he wouldn't want her to disappear; her nails dig into her tights a bit as he goes for the second hit of the one-two.

She thinks of Marusan, at the mention of 'the rest of our friends.' ... Marusan's part of the Dance Club; she can just be friends with Kaworu, if anything happens. No -- she needs to make the situation clear, so Yuta doesn't -- so Gridman doesn't --

Okay. Back to basics. Just the facts.

"*I* make the kaiju. Alexis just helps bring them to life. Guess Gridman can't be on top of everything."

<Pose Tracker> Yuta Hibiki has posed.

"Is that really what you want, though..?" Yuta questions, as she mentions how much fun he could have with her - at least, the way she sees herself in this world. That view was not entirely wrong, but.. "Akane is Akane, of course, so .."

Even if she was the one who ruled this world, that didn't really change how he felt about her one way or the other. Or maybe I'm just not understanding what she's trying to say..I guess..

She sours very quickly. There's equal parts relief and disappointment in the stiff coldness. But, looking at it from one perspective, it meant he was reaching through to her somehwat. Yuta scoots closer despite the flash of anger that passes over her features, a motion as bold as it is foolish.

    Akane explains that she's the one who makes kaiju.

Yuta already knew that, though; or rather, it'd be more accurate to say that once he understood everything else, he was able to put two and two together without Nidaime or Kaworu needing to explicitly tell him that this was the case. The visual reference that Nidaime conjured when she explained everything had all but said as much.

His expression warbles to something almost amused before it transforms into a ghost of a smile, "Oh, the kaiju..that's not what I - that's not what I meant. I already knew that the one who made the kaiju was you. You also made that white haired boy, right? I never got his name.."

Idly, without realizing it, he was rubbing his sore shoulder, still sewn up with stitches.

"I'm Yuta Hibiki," he clarifies a moment later. I guess that's where he got insisting I was Gridman from..

"This world is a reflection of your own heart."

The mid-day sun pours in through the window behind them, from the cracks in the blinds, smattering their bodies and the sheeted western-style mattress with streaks of light and shadow. "As it is destroyed and restored over and over again, it gets weaker over time...it's not any different from my perspective than if I had to watch you stab yourself."

    The ultimate game over he recalled from the other day.

"The only thing waiting for you at the end of this cycle is despair."

"For some reason, the end of that line suits Alexis-Kerib's goals. This might be bad of me to say, but I don't really care what he wants."

"I just...can't stand how much you're hurting right now." Yuta admits, twiddling his thumbs as he tries to work up some guts. After another moment of hesitation, he decides to put his caution to the wind and move before she can object.

With just the two of them here, it's not like there'd be anyone to say anything weird about it afterwards for pushing the issue, like it had been before.

    Yuta attempts to hug Akane.
    "So...please, stop this."

<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.

A 'psychic rupture,' Kaworu had called it -- and now that begins to make sense. If this world really is her own heart, then of course it's rupturing (opening up). "Yuta Hibiki, Gridman... I'm not sure there's much of a difference at this point. It's just like with Ultraman Geed and Riku, right? You guys work pretty much the same way. Big, small... it doesn't change much."

Hibiki explains the situation -- the endless cycle of despair lying in wait for her at the end of this road. And Alexis... wants that?

"... Alexis always works so hard for me," Akane says, though there's not a lot of genuine care or gratitude in it. "He's always doing -- something. And he's the one who brought me here in the first place." There's one card she could play -- one thing she could throw in Yuta's face -- but... she doesn't want to, yet. Part of her doesn't want to hurt him.

She wishes she could go back to the simplest days of their school life -- to the gentleness of feeding Yuta. After all... isn't that the point of the dream? To see the healing she doesn't imagine really exists, least of all for --

Akane feels that embrace begin. It's what she invited, isn't it...? She doesn't return it, though -- she keeps the pillow between them. It's not a stand-in -- not a void she wants to invite Hibiki into.

It's a barrier.

Her body freezes up; she doesn't know what she can do to get out of this -- so she leans into it, instead. Her voice drops to a low whisper. "... Isn't it supposed to hurt the first time?" she asks, though there's less than zero enthusiasm in it. Her delivery is *flat*. Her legs hook around Hibiki's, and she attempts to pull him closer without actually returning the embrace.

"You don't need to treat me like a little kid... Hibiki-kun~." She leans her neck slightly back, exposing it -- calculated vulnerability, without giving up the actual physical barrier between them. "This world exists to please me... right~?"

<Pose Tracker> Yuta Hibiki has posed.

    "Is that so." Yuta murmurs.

For him, it went without saying that this would be the case - after all, as he'd mentioned, Alexis-Kerib had a vested interest in making sure this world turned out badly. Of bringing her to that awful finish line. Surely, Akane understands this also as she's saying it out loud. But ... the way she's talking - part of her might understand, but she doesn't want to accept it.

That's what he thought, anyway.

Akane's legs slip around his own and pulling him in meets no resistance. The pillow between them softly cushions their bellies and torso's, making an almost uncomfortabe wedge keeping the core of their bodies from touching.

"Uf.." Yuta intones, the shifting of their weight taking the two of them down onto their sides, sprawling them onto the bed. It was unpleasantly warm and stuffy.

With the flatness of her voice and his own intuition, the queasy feeling in his stomach magnifies. He didn't feel close to her at all, more like -

Despite the only thing between us being this pillow, I feel like I'm a million miles away.

The queasiness disappears, transmogrifying into an aching in his chest.

Rather than supping at the proferred flesh, Yuta rests his chin on the open spot she gave of her neck. " ... I'm not trying to look down on you or anything like that. But we're both just teenagers, aren't we?" he says, quietly. If his mouth weren't so close to her ear, it'd probably be too low to hear.

"Also..there's a difference. Between me and Gridman, that is. But I understand, it's easier to see me as the enemy if I'm Gridman, and not myself."

Yuta's head shifts, not really a nuzzle, but so that his chin wasn't jabbing her unpleasantly. "Is your heart only valuable to you as a commodity?" he wonders, softly.

Even if she wasn't genuinely returning the embrace, it wouldn't stop him from resting his hand on her back in a soothing gesture. "You should value yourself more."

That might seem like a strange statement to someone proclaiming that the world existed only to please them, but - at least, Yuta thought that wasn't realy why she said that. It's more like .. I think, she sees this place as something cheap.

Which was telling to him about how she thought of herself. "You don't have to be alone."

And it wasn't just himself, either - Rikka cared deeply about Akane. Even Sho, who hardly knew her, would surely step up to be her friend. Hass, and the rest of their classmates at school too, liked her just as well, and respected her. That meant something, Yuta believed, he just had to convince Akane of that too.

<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.

"We are," Akane offers, distantly, eyes half-lidded. She can tell he's not biting; it feels almost like an insult. If he's not going to do more than gently reassure her, why even bother offering this?

She doesn't move away, though -- not yet, at least. They can talk like this. For now, anyway. "... I didn't think Hibiki," back to surname only, it seems, "was so sentimental. I have a lot to offer..." That's a 'yes' on her heart being a commodity, then -- and perhaps a yes to at least some of his other inferences, too.

They're a messy tangle of limbs here and now -- yet Akane's thoughts are a million miles away from that. Part of her has totally checked out of this conversation -- Hibiki's hand does a lot to keep her at least a little bit present, but... well. Part of Akane just isn't ready for what he has to offer yet.

So instead, she throws down the gauntlet. "... You put a lot of this stuff on Alexis, and on me seeing you as the enemy... which is fine, I guess." She looks down at him, and nonchalantly announces: "You're pretty easygoing. You know it wasn't Alexis who killed Tonkawa, right?"

Start with the one she knows he remembers. She could go further back, into the days when Alexis was helping her design the kaiju, rather than when she was making them whole cloth. But that's not necessary. "The special dog. I was trying to do something for you, and she smooshed it. What kind of person plays ball in the classroom during lunch?"

'The rest of their friends,' indeed. As Yuta tries to find a way to convince her of the ways they value her, she's just as eager to convince herself they *don't* matter.

"I was like 'uugugh, come onnnn... seriously.'" She hasn't forgotten the truth of that situation at all. "And those guys at the concert who were hitting on me... what kind of 23-year-olds roll up to teenagers with the casting couch?" A hint of that empty smile creeps back into her voice. "I'm just making this world a little nicer. You, Rikka, Utsumi -- you guys deserve a nicer world, right? Why fight me...?"

<Pose Tracker> Yuta Hibiki has posed.

Yuta closes his eyes. What she's describing, it was something he'd rejected for a long time. More or less ever since he became suspicious of her when she confessed to him, Rikka and Sho about remembering the kaiju attacks - more pointedly, her unsatisfactory answers that day. He refused the truth in front of him until it was no longer something that could be refuted, when the curtain was pulled back in its near entirety for him to see.

Trying to reconcile how he felt about Akane with what had been happening...

    The price of love is steep, isn't it?

" - as long as it was just fighting kaiju, it was very simple. It wasn't complicated at all, I just had to fight. And if I couldn't win, I just had to summon the strength from somewhere to fight even harder and win anyway. If I couldn't win even still, then I needed allies who would help me save Tsutsujidai and the people who live here."

He could tell how hard she was trying to disconnect from the conversation. Saying stuff like this to egg at his sense of justice, or to try and create some kind of verbal wedge to drive between them. It was just another barrier.

You weren't ready for this yet, were you? But. There's no more time left to give you.

"This is so, so, so much harder than fighting a kaiju. It was always really scary then, too .. if I stopped winning, then people would die. And then everyone would forget about them."

As close as they were, the pillow packs tightly against his chest. But through it, he can still feel the faintest dull thrum of her heartbeat, if he paid close attention to it.

"But right now it doesn't really matter how strong I am, or how many friends I have, or how hard I fight."

"That's much scarier, and much more difficult than fighting a kaiju. Winning without my fists feels impossible, but that's the only victory I'll accept. Because..."

How he'd resolved to settle things in Tsutsujidai, it all hinged on Akane. How could he forgive her? If he did, why fight her? He could bypass all of those excuses and complicated questions with a very simple answer.

"I already told you - 'love is an intrusion'. That's why we fight you. It's not really about the world anyone deserves..and, it's not about who should live and who should die.."

"Even if you can't see in yourself what we see in you, you're still someone who is cherished by others."

And as Kaworu had said, "As long as I hold that in my heart, I can perservere. I'm never going to use my fists on you, but I'm not going to lose, either. I promise."

<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.

Hibiki... even knowing the violence she visits on the world, he wants to fight her and fight for her all at once? Akane's fingers dig into that pillow. This closeness, this intimacy -- she hates it. She wants to turn things around -- wants to pin him to the bed and rip and scrape and tear.

She wants to tell him to take this condescending garbage and go. "You can do a lot of damage without touching someone," Akane chirps blandly. (She thinks of a thrown phone. No, more than that -- she thinks of the things she's said in conversations where she's never raised a finger at all. She remembers a torn-up table at Starbows -- and lie upon lie upon lie.)

The game is up, at this stage. There's no way this is going anywhere with this -- *love idiot* -- insisting that she deserves kindness, that other people cherishing her is somehow right.

... Especially now that she sees that -- somehow, some way -- her problems are leaking out into the world she left behind.

She starts moving to sit up; if Yuta won't disengage from her, she *does* give him a push -- which requires at least a little bit of letting up her death grip on that pillow.

"... I don't think we're going to get anywhere like this," she says, tone a little cold. "Walk me home. I don't think we have anything else to say to each other."

Still... there is *one* thing she wants, and it's information -- and that, she might still be able to get. "Tell you what, though," she continues, as she (hopefully!) moves to stand. "The next time I throw a kaiju out there... I'll tell you *exactly* why, first." He might understand, if he sees her whole process -- that she's not a victim here, but the one in control. This road isn't leading her to despair -- just to freedom.

"You can do whatever you want at that point, though!" Finally -- back to her usual bland smile.

<Pose Tracker> Yuta Hibiki has posed.

It doesn't take much of a struggle to get Yuta to release her. The air is so thick that even one of Calibur's swords would be hard-pressed to hack into it, the two disentangling from eachother like a mess of un-attended wires left to mingle. "Maybe," he says, in response to the idea of hurting someone without ever needing to touch them. "But, I don't want to be the sort of person..who only knows how to beat problems into submission." his, or other people's. As if there was a difference, in this case. Her problems may as well have been his problems.

Yuta stands up after her, and with how clipped she was sounding with him, it was hard not to feel like a kicked puppy. It shows briefly on his face, too, but Yuta was a brave boy - and a very determined one, as he shoves whatever hurt he was feeling down into his chest and sucks it up. He knows he isn't wrong to have said the things he's said, or to resolve the actions he's decided to take.

    "Okay, let's go, then."

- it did feel significant, however, that despite saying that they had nothing to say to eachother and being in prime storm-out-the-door position, she still insists that he walk her home. How it was significant, he wasn't sure, he was still a teenage boy and his ability to gauge what others were thinking and feeling only went so far.

    He chose to take it as a positive sign anyway.

At some point on the way back to her house, the sun dipping on the horizon, she breaks their silence to make a proposition. "I see." is all he says.

"Whatever I want..then - don't complain about what I decide to do, okay?" he returns, with a small smile. It comes off as more of a grimace, really, mixed as it was with hurt, affection, determination, and kindness.

Yuta comes to a stop, at the front gate to the Shinjo Residence. "We're here already.." he murmurs.

There's a moment of hesitation before he reaches out to give her shoulder a single touch, before the hand retracts and makes a little wave. "Bye, Akane."

- at some point later, he still hasn't returned home. Rather, with the stars overhead, Yuta is left sitting on a park bench, gazing up at them listlessly. His hand, the one he'd used earlier, grasps at stars he couldn't hold. " ... it's really frustrating .. feeling like the 'happy end' I want keeps slipping through my grasp. I can't give up, though."

"Yep, that's the spirit." Borr says abruptly, from behind him. "E-eh? Borr?! How..how long were you standing there?"

"Uh, a while. You look like you're about to star in some sappy break-up music vid."

"W-well...say something sooner next time, okay?" "Next time?" "..you're impossible." the two trade back and forth.

"Anyway," Borr says, "We got worried since you were out so late. Still didn't see Ultraboy Goober at his usual haunts."

"Oh..well, thanks for worrying. Sorry..alright, let's go back, then."

"Yeah..but, hm..." Borr says, squinting from having gotten close enough to become suspicious, his nose crinkling. "W-what?"

"..why do you smell like perfume?" Borr blanches with a deadpan, "...er...n-no particular reason?"

And so they carried on like that all the way back to the apartment, as Yuta receives a thorough needling and masters the art of deflection.

<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.

"..." I don't, either.

Akane cannot move the quotation marks around. Not without feeling like a liar.

Akane indeed cannot bring herself to say anything else; she pulls up her phone once the two of them have disentangled themselves, and sends Alexis another message.

'Nevermind.'

---

"Fine," Akane says, coldly, shoulder twitching away at the touch. "But I'm warning you -- the next time I go for it... I'm going to get what I want." It's the last thing she has to say to Hibiki, she thinks.

Class is going to be a little awkward, from here on out... but maybe she won't skip, this time. Why should she cede her world to their guest? It belongs to her, after all.

Akane's own return home is a lonely one. She makes it upstairs, at least; she doesn't make it much further, throwing herself into the pile of regrets she refuses to let go and lying there.