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Writer's Block

"It'll just be for two weeks," Aiko muttered–almost pleadingly–into the lightly lit room.

Niizuma afforded her minimal attention as he worked on the storyboard for his new manga. "It's dangerous for a young woman to be alone with a man in an apartment…especially for that long." He screeched as drew the most exciting part of the chapter.

Having heard this from him for the second time, Aiko had to ignore how castigated the statement made her feel. Instead, she coolly argued her point. "I don't have anyone else to ask. I couldn't dare bother Aoki with this after she just got married…she will naturally be…o-o-occupied...and I don't wish to disturb her." As the inelegant sentence prattled through her lips, she was thankful for the dark shadows that hid the flush she sported. "Besides, I trust that you won't try anything." A mischievous smirk erupted across Eiji's lips at her naïve statement and haughty tone.

It was the least she could do to keep up appearances. The whole conversation was incredibly disconcerting: she was practically begging him for God sakes! Her pride had been wounded enough this past month after team Fukuda and company had to stage an intervention owing to her mortifying meltdown. The flood that wrecked her apartment and virtually left her homeless, courtesy of some imbecilic plumbers, was hardly helping matters. What's more, it took all the decent scripts that she had managed to concoct for +Natural along with it, yanking her back to square one.

He twisted his body to face her in ways that only Niizuma Eiji could. "Of course not! I am an eternal boy after all." Aiko couldn't discern which was cheekier–his grin or his trademark declaration.

"Unlike Ashirogi-sensei, I don't have a spare room where assistants can crash for the night, because I never need them to stay that long," he uttered while trying to figure out how to address the situation. "And I don't even have a couch."

"The floor is fine." Aiko straightened her posture – drawing attention to the fact that that, in fact, was exactly where she was sitting – to emphasize her point. "I can take my own futon."

Niizuma crinkled his nose in response, effectively portraying his disapproval of her proposition. "No. You can take my bedroom. I hardly sleep there anyway."

She stared at him in utter puzzlement, put off by his kindness. "A-are you sure?"

A warm smile lighted his features when he saw the nonplussed look on her face. "Hai!" If she had resorted to asking him of all people for a place to stay, she was obviously short on options...and friends. Was she actually expecting him to turn her away?

"I'll move in today then."

Niizuma resisted the smirk her tone spurred; only Iwase Aiko could make it seem as if she was the one obliging him in this situation… A cacophony of sound effects ensued as Eiji returned to work.

As she pulled a large suitcase into Niizuma's apartment, Aiko mentally thanked her lucky stars that it was a Sunday. It would be annoying if his assistants saw her and got the wrong idea. Eiji trailed behind with around five bags; he made it seem effortless despite his scrawny arms.

As soon as Aiko entered his drawing room, she noticed the new addition. Positioned close to Niizuma's desk was a black armchair. The elegant coffee table situated before it was something that she would have picked out herself had she had the chance.

"I figured you would need somewhere to work," Niizuma explained, after noticing how her gaze lingered on the new buys, then walked past her to deposit her bags in his room.

"I cleared out the closet so you should have enough space for your belongings. Considering how heavy those bags were, I'm sure you brought some books with you. You can put them on the night stand, but this book shelf is off limits," he warned while gesturing to the furniture in question. "My bathroom is adjoined to the room, so I'll occasionally have to pass through to take a shower and what not, but besides that…", he spread his arms to accentuate the statement, "this is all yours roomie."

"It's clean!" she chirped, delighted that the living space would actually be able to satisfy her tastes. Niizuma chuckled at her outburst, too amused to even be offended.

"Isn't it always?" he inquired as his eyebrows met in confusion.

When it came to his home, Niizuma Eiji was the furthest thing from a slob. Knowing his tendency to litter his floors with his own work, he always made an ardent effort to keep the place clean. It simply wouldn't do if an illustration was compromised in any way due to something as trivial as a little dust. Not even the pages he drew were dropped carelessly, but rather in an orderly fashion that whoever worked with him came to understand. There was always a method to his madness.

"I suppose it is," Aiko agreed contemplatively. With an exhausted sigh, she sat on the bed and kneaded the mattress in an effort to see how comfortably she'd be able to sleep on it. Not bad...

"I'll leave you to unpack," Eiji muttered before heading back to his workstation.

"Niizuma-san!" The word came out much louder than she intended. Its frantic delivery made the mangaka round the corner so fast Aiko was certain he got whiplash.

"Hai?" Doe-like eyes stared earnestly back at her, wordlessly pledging to help her with anything. She quickly averted her gaze, discomforted by his sincerity and embarrassed by what she was about to say. "Thank you."

Unlike the last statement, these words were much softer and practically inaudible, though he still heard them. With his typical boyish grin, Niizuma nodded in acknowledgement before prancing off to reclaim his beloved pen and chair.

"No, that's just silly," Iwase murmured as she furiously erased the last paragraph that she'd written. After spending hours working on the next chapter of +Natural, she had made little progress. She couldn't write anything that she had confidence in, as she regarded every character, action and line with complete ambivalence. Her frustrated whispers hadn't escaped Eiji; he had lowered the volume of his music since she started living with him. It had surprised him that she opted to use the pencil and paper approach as opposed to working from a laptop.

For what had to the fifth time for the evening, Aiko stood to refill her kyusu. "Would you like anything from the kitchen Niizuma-san?" she asked politely.

"Soda please."

Turning to his two assistants, she queried "And you?"

"Green tea, thanks."

"Nothing. I'll get something when I leave; we're almost done for the day."

Iwase took a quick glance at her watch to verify the man's words. 'Half past five. There's still a lot of time to turn this shitty day around,' she thought while heading to the kitchen. When she returned with the three beverages, Aiko was invigorated and determined. She took her seat and firmly, confidently grasped her pencil, ready to write a thrilling piece for the next issue. By the time the assistants left, she was back to mumbling and erasing again.

"Would you like anything from the kitchen Niizuma-san?"

Eiji thought it truly was a vicious cycle. He couldn't fathom how she could get any work done if she kept this up. Maybe Iwase had somehow convinced herself that she was giving herself breaks by constantly fetching tea–for its soothing properties no doubt–but she really was just wasting time. As someone who was as passionate about her work as he was about his, Eiji imagined Iwase also worked nonstop (when serious at least). This half-assed attempt that she was making right now had to be the worst of her.

"Why a pencil?"

Aiko's eyebrows furrowed at the odd response. "Huh?"

"Why do you write with a pencil?" he clarified, never looking up from his manga. "Why not use a laptop, since you edit while working?" Eiji could feel her unwavering gaze on him as she considered his words.

"Why do you ask?"

This time he actually spared her a glance. "Beeecaaaauuse I'm curious." By his tenor and mystified expression, Iwase could tell that he was surprised that she couldn't deduce his obvious reason on her own.

Feeling derided by him for the second time that day, she barely managed to contain the dignified huff threatening to escape. "It seemed only fitting since I switched from writing novels to writing manga," was her cryptic response.

"Ah." He didn't understand the connection.

Within a second, she was off to the kitchen again. Niizuma heard, rather than saw, her move.

"I think erasers are counterproductive." At this point, Eiji was just saying anything he could imagine to stop her from leaving as frustrated Iwase only to return as self-assured Iwase all over again. If she persisted like this, she had no chance of making her deadline.

"Do you now?" Iwase questioned, fascinated to know where Niizuma was going with this conversation. He wasn't usually this talkative.

He hummed his consent while inspecting a finished panel. "If you erase something, then what was the point of writing it? You've been writing since morning and have little to show for it, because you erase and erase and erase. That is why you're feeling so discouraged."

Even though she valued criticism, Iwase was not pleased with him questioning her methods. "How is that any different from what you do when working on the art?"

"I always avoid using erasers," he explained in a longsuffering manner, although it was explicit that he was affronted. "When I make a mistake, I either make it a part of the artwork, or scrap the whole panel and start over. As a writer, you have more wiggle room; the only mistakes that you can make are grammatical. If you write something that you don't like you don't have to abandon the plot, you can simply rephrase what you're saying."

"So…what you're saying is that writers shouldn't use erasers, because the effect of their mistakes are trivial when compared to the effect of an artist's mistake?" The words left her mouth slowly and deliberately, each syllable seemingly carrying the weight of bricks.

"No," Eiji replied measuredly, wary of her ire. "I'm only saying that you are focusing too much on things that aren't even mistakes, and that the eraser encourages that. If I were you, I would use a pen and zap errors with ink instead of erasing them. Like zap, zap, zap!" He pointed his pen as if it were a gun as he said this, using his thumb as the trigger. "That way, when you're ready to edit it, you can easily see everything that you conceptualized while writing. You may even reconsider what you thought were 'mistakes' and use them to improve what you're writing."

As sensible as what Niizuma stated was, it bothered Iwase. "How stuck I must seem for you to give me advice..."

The bitterness in her tone was blatant enough for Niizuma to afford her his full attention. They silently regarded each other, Eiji sporting a look of disenchantment and Iwase modelling a mixture of anger and annoyance.

"You're my partner. If you're stuck, we're stuck–"

"Don't you think I know that?!" she fumed. "My apologies for slowing you down, but I'm working on it!"

Seeing this side of Iwase unnerved him. She was clearly incensed, though he had not meant to offend her.

"I know," Eiji conceded. "And I also know that you're the cause of your writer's block." He hastily continued before she could interject again. "Being your partner gives me the opportunity to draw an interesting story that I probably would not have been able to come up with. You are an amazing writer Iwase-san. Everything that you do is deliberate and I add everything that you write to the manuscripts, not just as texts, but in the mannerisms and expressions of the characters as well. You don't make mistakes. …Besides, we are a teeeeaaaammmm. If there's need for improvement, I'll see to it. Isn't that how we've always worked?"

Eiji was absolutely right. When she was on her way to becoming a mangaka, she had fixed every error Hattori pointed out without complaint. Then, upon seeing how well Niizuma improved her story after reading her manuscript for the first time, she knew that she could trust him too. They were much more experienced than she was after all. Now, here Eiji was, trying to give her some advice to help her out of her slump, and she reciprocates by being a bitch. Sometimes she swears that 'bitch' is her default setting...

She was being completely childish by taking out her frustration on him when he was merely trying to help. The fact that she lost confidence in her work was her fault, not his. "Hai," she answered upon realizing just how unequivocal his words were. The break in her voice didn't go unnoticed by Eiji, neither did the mist in her eyes.

"Wanna try it then?" He extended his pen to her encouragingly–in what almost seemed like a peace offering–with enthusiasm lighting his big, violet eyes. Iwase graciously accepted it before returning to the armchair to write; Eiji's enthusiasm was very contagious. With his own content grin, he followed suit.

The rest of the night passed by as the day had: with Eiji listening to her voice her dissent of her own writing whilst drawing his new manga. But she never got up to refill her tea.

"There!" Nizuma didn't notice Iwase's approach until she was beside him with a completed script in hand. The woman standing before him was nothing like the one who had circled around his apartment all day using getting tea as a distraction from work. No. This one was much more sanguine and had finally managed to write something that she was proud of.

He leapt from his chair, grabbing the script in the same motion. "I bet it's good!" The smirk that crept across his features, after he had only read the first page, convinced Aiko that it indeed was.

Author's Note: Man these guys are hard to write. I spent so much time wondering if Eiji's speech pattern had enough childish elements to it, tweaking his lines every second. I still don't think I pulled him off. *sigh* Anyway, I just had to write a EijixIwase story after coming across some gems in the Bakuman fandom. :3 I think that there's much more to Aiko than the bitch she played to allow for some conflict and development in the plot every now and then. I hope that I can effectively portray that. =)

R&R please.