ENTITLED: I'd Rather Pretend
FANDOM: Tonari no Kaibutsu-kun
DISCLAIMER: I don't own Tonari no Kaibutsu-kun, or any of it's characters. This was written only as a piece of entertainment to myself and others, and not for profit.
NOTE: I can't believe I finished! Thank you to everyone, who has stuck with me over this (considerable) period of time, and to all of your who checked in later. I had a lot of fun exploring this story, and I hope you all did as well. It was something very different for me, and a real challenge at times, so I always appreciated the feedback and guidance you provided in your consistently thoughtful reviews. You have my sincere gratitude and admiration. And to all of you who were worried—I was always going to write the ending this way. I hope you enjoy, happy early Valentine's day, and also...because I was so late, I made some art for all of you. It's on my DeviantArt page, which you can find through my profile.

CHAPTER NINE; Something that Finds You

"Friends can help each other. A true friend is someone who lets you have total freedom to be yourself - and especially to feel. Or, not feel. Whatever you happen to be feeling at the moment is fine with them. That's what real love amounts to - letting a person be what he really is."

—Jim Morrison

Sleep eluded Natsume, and then came all at once, so she woke on exam day to her mother's urgent screams, and no time at all to put her make-up on.

"Whoa," Sasayan said, when she pelted towards the family gate, still staggering into her shoes and dragging the sleep from her eyes, "Who are you?"

"Don't look at me," Natsume hissed. She stuffed her cosmetics into her jacket pockets, and she rummaged now for her mascara.

"I was kidding. You literally look exactly the same."

Natsume made an irritated sound, "Not to other girls!"

Sasayan started to skip impatiently when she slowed to apply her eyeliner. "Are you kidding me? Are you seriously going to make me late for my final exam?"

"Go ahead without me!"

"That," he was dancing from foot to foot as he snapped at her, "is a trap."

"If I pass, you have to buy me anything I want!"

"Absolutely not."

"Some boyfriend you are! This is why older men are the best." She wondered for a half-second if this was perhaps pushing it too far but Sasayan's only response was to growl, then lift her around the waist so that her feet kicked half a foot about the ground. He shifted her awkwardly, so she was pressed over his shoulder, and then began, with determination, to march.

Natsume squawked, "Hey!"

"Enough with your diversionary tactics! The future is waiting!"

"I'm crying!" Natsume wailed. This was true. Her eyes really were welling up. Some part of her realized that this was pitiful, and that she should probably learn how to handle glib, offhand comments without excessive weeping. But it was just so true. The future was waiting!

"You are really such a pain in the ass sometimes," Sasayan informed her, still marching. Natsume peered back, as she watched her home grow slowly further away from her. She had the odd sensation of choosing her own victimization.

"Let me down. I'll walk," she said impulsively. She was obligingly set on her feet. Wiping her eyes, she shuffled along at Sasayan's side for a moment, sniffing as quietly as possible.

"I'm sure they give you an automatic ten percent just for showing up to take the test," he boasted.

"Is my nose red?" Natsume muttered, now turning her face up to the sky and feeling below her eyes for moisture. Sasayan ignored her. She got the impression he was trying not to laugh.

He started telling her some baseball story from practice the night before, something about one of the guys on the team knocking another boy out because they'd both been distracted by a passing girl's skirt flipping up in the breeze. It was a moment of such pure slapstick that Natsume forgot her nerves, and laughed all the way to the testing room, and had to take her seat, still giggling, thinking about the way he'd waved at her as they were sent to their separate testing rooms.

It wasn't really until the paper was laid in front of her—and she heard the flip of thirty coversheets, that Natsume remembered she was supposed to be afraid. And by then, it was too late.

Tests became so much spiritually easier, once they'd begun. Natsume looked at her paper. There were some questions she knew, and some she didn't, and some she felt she could maybe weasel. She spent a long minute like that, just staring at her page, wondering at the relief she felt from knowing that at least she wouldn't be passing back an empty paper.

First thing's first: she wrote her name in the top corner. It looked strange. She wondered for a second if she had made a mistake. For a second, she almost panicked. What was writing anyway—had she somehow forgotten how it worked?

She imagined Mitty scowling at her.

A few hours later, time was called, and Natsume looked up, feeling slightly dizzy and more than a little empty. Her paper was collected. She watched it slip away, and then stood, forcing her knees to be painfully straight once again. She had the strange, blurry sensation that her body was somehow too full of water, and that at any moment she would sink into the ground, like a puddle into dry earth.

She followed the other students out of the classroom, down the hall, and into the entrance hall. She spotted a crowd of taller boys and headed straight to it, spotting Sasayan when she got closer. She stood mutely at his side while he laughed at some other boy's joke.

"Hi, Natsume-san!" said one of his friends. Natsume could not bring herself to answer much past a sort of low squeaking noise. She was duly shepherded out.

"So, how was it? You look like you need to be left somewhere dark and quiet."

"I'm not a trauma victim!" Natsume snapped. She looked at him. Her eyes welled up. "I think—I think—I think I did okay." She braced herself for a fight.

"Me too." He said gently.

"What does this mean?" she sniffed.

"Oh god, Natsume, it means our parents won't murder us. Now stop crying." He blew his bangs up from his forehead, and grabbed her hand, tugging her along behind him.

Natsume did not fail her exams. She did not do well by any stretch of the imagination, but there was a definite passing grade secured, and through some act of divine wonder, another school accepted her for a literature program. It was unbelievable. She was a scholar. What's more, Sasayan had been accepted to the same university. They could live five minutes apart. She could maybe scrape her way into a secretary job, or a business-attire office worker, or—or…

But there was still the acting thing. The school wasn't far from where Sasayan would be attending (no matter what he picked, all his schools were within about a five-mile radius from one another) but it wasn't within walking distance. It wouldn't be as easy.

And anyway—acting?

Natsume imagined herself sobbing on camera, swooning back into some handsome co-star's arms as a result of—overwork? Emotional stress? No, an incurable and mysterious illness! Yes, that was good—would she have to do sex scenes?

The ensuing thirty minute of imaginative hypotheticals reduced Natsume to a near comatose state, during which she was physically required to lie down.

In a daze, Natsume graduated.

She woke up the morning of her ceremony, already dressed, with no recollection of putting her school clothes on. Had she done it in her sleep? Had she somehow mixed up her uniform with pajamas? Were tiny goblin people sneaking about in the night and causing mischief?!

"You've wrinkled your shirt!" her mother shouted, while Natsume pelted out the door and raced to Sasayan's house. She was almost an hour early. He was definitely still asleep. It turned out, so was the rest of his household, as she discovered when she rang the doorbell, and had to wait a full five minutes before his mother shuffled to answer the door, clutching a robe around her.

Natsume apologized and thanked her at the same time. There was a lot of bowing involved. She tripped over the cat. She and the cat reacquainted one another with their mutual loathing. Sasayan's mother banged at her coffee pot while Natsume creeped to Sasayan's room. Only the very top of his head was poking out from beneath his blankets. Natsume meant to approach softly but ended up swearing explosively when she stepped on one of the toy models he'd strewn across the floor.

Sasayan rolled towards her, his eyes half-opened. "Go away, I'm naked."

"Who sleeps naked in Japan? You liar." Natsume hopped towards him, nursing her wounded foot. "Why are you reliving your childhood? Get up, we have to graduate."

"Please excuse my momentary nostalgiAAA—!" Sasayan ended on a squeak, as Natsume tried to tug his blankets away in an attempt to forcibly evict him from his slumber. He managed to seize hold of them before she was able to wrench them past his waist—revealing that he really was at least partially nude.

Natsume overcame her blush. She raised her chin in the air and said, "You're shameless. What do you think you're doing? Are you hoping I'll crawl through your window while you sleep?"

"Yes," Sasayan snapped, bending to rummage about on the floor for a pair of shorts. Natsume turned her face up to the ceiling, grumbling, then inched towards him.

"Move over."

"Sleep in your own bed!"

"I said, move over!" she hissed, and shoved him easily to the side.

"Kyah, so forceful, Natsume-san!"

"I'll kill you." She squished her face into his chest and breathed in slowly.

"Are you smelling me?"

"I woke up and felt emotional. Also my clothes were already on."

"I've been meaning to tell you, sometimes you do sleep walk over here."

"That's not funny." She withdrew her face and squinted at him. He was just inches away from her, resting on the same pillow. "We're about to become…not high school students."

"It was an alright set of years. I even got a girlfriend."

"Barely."

"Whose fault is that!?" he demanded, and rolled on top of her, squashing her face down into the mattress while she laughed.

"Stop! You are supposed to kiss me romantically. It's graduation day. And I don't want to do in front of everyone else! They've probably doubly reserved all the secret areas on school grounds?" Natsume ranted and she struggled to free herself.

"There are secret areas on school grounds and you never took me there?!" he grabbed hold of her wrists and clamped them down against her sternum. "What the hell is wrong with you, lady?"

And then he kissed her, romantically.

She should have kissed him longer. That moment had stretched out, had been enveloped in a perfect silence, as though a belljar had descended around them, and for that infinite second she had felt him—not so much his lips or his body, but the pure, aching sensation of knowing he was there, next to her and around her.

After that, it was as though the world went mad. She only just had time to blink. One second, she was lurching to her feet to clap, an awkward half-second after everyone else. She was crying into Shizuku's shoulder. Someone gave her cake. Young couples were stammering or breaking up or prying off the buttons of their school uniforms. Iyo made a waggly call-me gesture with her hand and swooped away in a black luxury car. Shizuku patted at her eyes with a handkerchief but was otherwise stoic. Sasayan's baseball team was quite literally throwing him in the air and catching him. The cake was now gone. Who took her cake?!

Suddenly, she was slipping an envelope into the post-box at three in the morning, and running across town in her sleep-clothes and a light jacket. She was eyeing the building Sasayan lived in, and wondering how she was supposed to reach the floor his window on. She was dong something very stupid. She was forced to bang on his window with her knee.

"Are you crazy?!" he snarled, and slammed the window back, already seizing hold of her ankles. "How did you get up here?! What if you'd fallen?! What if you'd died?!"

"I have to tell you something," she said, now tightly bundled against him, sniffling a little from the evening chill.

"You are such a maniac! Don't ever do that again! What the hell where you thinking?! Are you trying to be a ninja?! Is someone filming this?! Are we doing a parkour special?!"

"On the weekends I've been, um, doing some film work. And through this company, I got introduced to this program. I don't know if you can really call it a school. Maybe it's more like an apprenticeship thing? Anyway, I—want to do it."

"Literally do whatever you want just please don't spider your way up buildings anymore.""

She bit her lip, "You don't mind? That we aren't going to the same university?"

"No. Why would I mind? You seem like you're into this. And it's not like we'd be that far apart, anyway."

Natsume was quiet for a moment. A note of petulance crept into her voice. "You could mind a little bit."

"You're impossible."

"I want you to know that I didn't choose this because I don't want to be with you. I just want to make that clear. I thought about this a lot, and I started feeling like maybe it would be great to be so close but also, also I would just feel like maybe I couldn't do anything except follow you around, getting dragged along behind. I don't know. I don't want to lose you, but I don't want to lose…me, either."

"Hey," he said, "I never thought I was dragging you behind me. If anything, you're always way ahead. I can't think fifty steps ahead, the way you do. For you, the future always seems so clear, so impossible. But I think you forget about all the things in the middle. I think you forget, this," he kissed her, "This doesn't mean, immediately, that everything has to change. We can go as fast or as slow as you want. I don't mind. But let me go there with you."

"Okay," Natsume whispered happily, and nestled down to sleep.

"Literally," Sasayan said, "We can take the same train."

"Shut up."

"How am I supposed to sneak you out of here, anyway?"

"I'll just climb down."

"No, you won't."

The majority of Natsume's allotted pack-up-life time was spent staring into space, her face vaguely pinched as she contemplated the vast unpredictability of her universe. Other things she did included reading through her entire messaging history with Shizuku, crying, and sorting things into gargantuan piles while her mother supervised and rightfully complained.

But eventually things were put into bags, and the bags were put in her father's car, and then deposited on the train station's platform. Nervous, Natsume stared wide-eyed as the train swallowed up her rolling suitcase. "Your father will be coming with the rest of your things in a day, so just focus on getting settled!"

"Why are you abandoning me?" Natsume whispered.

"Get on the train," her mother growled, and pushed her on with a slight tap to the rump, "You have a smartphone, don't you? Call a taxi, say where you want to go. They know you're coming."

Trembling, clutching her pink backpack to her chest, Natsume tottered aboard and semi-fainted into her seat.

When she got on the train she didn't immediately look out the window. Her knees rubbed together, poking gawkily out from under her skirt. She'd never been on a train like this,before, and for a second she wanted to shout out that it was too hard, she couldn't be expected to do this on her own, so ill-prepared and nervous, a girl on her own when she'd never left home—

But that wasn't true, anymore. She'd left this town just a few months ago, with Iyo, to go to her audition. For a moment, Natsume was stunned. Life was always creeping up on her like that, things happening and finishing before she'd had a polite allotment of time to build up an appropriate level of anxiety for them.

"Hey!" yelled a little voice through her window. Natsume jumped, squeaking, and peered back down to the platform.

Sasayan waved at her. Her mother was speaking to him sternly, saying something Natsume couldn't hear. Natsume pressed her hands and nose to the glass, eyes stretched wide in a silent plea. Her mother visibly, and from a great distance, made it clear she was rolling her eyes and both of them.

And then Sasayan was bounding towards the train.

Natsume's heart leapt into her throat.

He flopped down across from her, panting a little, his smile goofy. "Christ Natsume, you look like you're about to have a heart attack."

"You're coming with me?"

"Well, why not? I might as well make sure I know where it is you're staying. Plus, I thought you'd probably be freaking out. I can't believe your mom isn't going with you! What'd you do to make her so mad?"

Natsume hadn't considered the possibility that she was being punished-for-character-growth. It seemed highly likely when she thought over the last several days of unsuccessful packing.

In the face of his incredible, dependable kindness and her flayed nerves, Natsume made a noise like, "Gk!" and folded.

True to his word, Sasayan trotted along behind her, pulling her wheeled bag, as she followed her phone's instructions. He'd suggested walking so that she could get a feel for the area.

"Thank you for coming with me," she mumbled over her shoulder. Now that she was actually doing it—walking through an unknown city, acceptance paperwork and smartphone in hand—the whole thing seemed actually manageable. What had she been so afraid of? A mugging?

"It's no big deal. I like this place! It's definitely your style. We should eat there sometime," Sasayan pointed at a French-style café. Natsume looked at it with wide eyes. He was right. Everything was adorable. All the girls were fashionably, sweetly dressed. One of them had even asked Natsume what sort of hair product she used while they were collecting her bag from the station.

"I'm supposed to check in with my university in about three days. So you should come visit as soon as possible, so we can explore that area together too," he said, and grinned at her. "By the way, do you have a roommate?"

She tried to remember her company's informational fliers on their contract housing. "I don't think so. It's just small."

"Perfect," Sasayan hummed. Natsume tripped.

If the woman at the reception desk even noticed Sasayan, she gave no sign. He followed her up to her new room, helped her unpack, and then started whining about food until he eventually entered into a sort of hunger-grump and stopped speaking. Natsume finally finished decorating, snapped at him to pull himself together, and marched to the nearest noodle bar.

"I suppose you think you're spending the night."

"Keep talking like that and I'll roll you on the floor," Sasayan grumbled. He slurped his noodles cheerfully. "Thanks for buying me dinner!"

"When was this decision made!"

"When I left my wallet in your room."

Natsume stabbed his arm with her chopsticks.

Newly restored from their dinner, the pair of them wandered around for some time, hand in hand, poking their heads into boutiques and ice cream parlors, traumatized one another through a modern art exhibit (there was a naked man lying on the floor in one room, randomly screaming—neither of them were emotionally prepared for the experience) until it was late enough to wander back to her dorm.

Natsume undressed him in silence, and pressed her ear against his chest. He stroked her hair. "It doesn't have to change."

"It does."

"How come?"

"Because everything else is changing, and we have to change with it, or everything will fall apart." She drew back, looking at him seriously. "I was worried, thinking about it, because I was worried that maybe I'd change things in the wrong way, and end up losing everything. But I really believe that if we stay as we are, we'll grow out of each other. That's just how life works."

Sasayan laughed, "You're getting wise on me."

She shook her head. "Not really. I just realized something, last night, when I was thinking about us. This entire time, I've been focused on the wrong thing, on something I should have known was a constant and therefore shouldn't have been so focused on. There are some things you can't change, like the waves of an ocean, like you. This entire time, I was thinking about how you felt about me, and what that meant about how I should feel about you. There were so many things I admired about you, and so many things I resented, but it's only now that I have to—have to take a chance like this—I realize, I always—more than anything—I wanted to know you."

He looked at her evenly, face free of judgment, or disappointment, or anger. She knew he could feel her words still blocked up inside her, knew that there was something coming next. She scrummaged around in her pockets, and withdrew the bent, scuffy letter she'd written him the night before, neatly addressed and post-marked. Suddenly bashful, she thrust the paper towards him, staring determinedly at her feet.

"You can't read it until after you leave, okay? It's too embarrassing. Any-anyway. I just thought that, maybe even if we're apart, we can learn to be together in new ways. I thought—if you'd let me, I thought maybe it was time to find out all those things about you I never got to know."

"Sure," he said, and put his lips on hers. "But there's just one problem."

"What?"

"I don't want to leave."

Dear Sasayan,

You know, I've only had to write a letter once before now, as a project for school. We were supposed to be pen pals with American students, but that fell through, they never wrote back.

This letter is short. I know how long it is because I wrote many copies, crossed out a lot of things. There were a lot of things I wanted to say to you, but I couldn't say any of them well or clearly.

I never had a boyfriend before. There were a lot of things I didn't understand, going in to it, and maybe I was stupid a lot of the time. I'm sorry. I know I made things difficult for you. I guess the reason why I went crazy sometimes was, I was afraid. You see, even though I do things that are stupid and dumb and hurtful, I know that I will end up doing them, and I get afraid of myself. I thought nobody would be able to put up with me. But you did. I've never understood why. The harder I tried to force myself to see what it was you liked or wanted about me, the more confused I became, the more I hated myself. Finally, I realized that maybe the problem was, I just couldn't imagine what it was like inside your head.

Things started to make sense to me then. There are so many good things about you. You're athletic and popular, patient and understanding. It's easy to understand why you have a lot of friends. But even you must feel like I do, sometimes, right? Isn't it unfair of me to always be assuming I am this great pit of fear and sadness? Wasn't it wrong of me to never wonder how you felt about the future—if you were afraid of the change, sad of what you had to leave behind?

I should have asked you then, but I didn't. I hope I can still ask you now. Here are my top three questions.

Do you think we would still get along as old people?

Do you think that as we grow older and change, we'll grow towards each other?

Will you wait for me if I wait for you?