A Yandere Story 2 - Episode One: Mightier Than The Sword

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Episode One:

Mightier Than The Sword

In the days I’ve spent in this friggin city, I’ve- Wait… Wasn’t this intro already used before? Oh… Okay. Nevermind. I’m starting over.

Have you ever been told ghost stories when you were a kid? If you have… then you’ve come to the wrong place. Because this story has absolutely NOTHING to do with anything supernatural. Okay… this whole paragraph is irrelevant. RESTART!

Have you ever heard the saying “Time heals all wounds”? OH, THIS IS GETTING RIDICULOUS!

Do you see the previous three paragraphs above this one? That is a perfect example of a writer’s block at work. It’s the arch nemesis of the creative mind. I mean, it’s only natural. Anybody would have trouble trying to write an original introduction to a story like this. I mean, this is practically a horror story. Which also happens to be my life story. I know. Sucks to be me, right?

Maybe if I had just torn those pages out of my notebook and thrown them into a furnace, none of this would’ve happened in the first place... Wait. Scratch that. This is not MY fault whatsoever! If there’s anyone to blame here, it’s Kira Nakata. If she had never done what she did then maybe Sakura would still be-... Sorry. I’m going too fast. Tell you what. To help you get a better understanding of what happened, let me start at the very beginning.

To start things off, my name is Shirou Maeda. I’m a novelist. Er- WAS a novelist. I used to write stories that would just pop into my mind. But I’ve never shown my work to anyone, especially my friends and family. Last year, I had written a story about a girl who became lovesick for her upperclassman. It was one of my best stories yet considering I had written twelve chapters of it. But I never really got around to finishing it.

Anyways, the events started at my school, Akademi High. It’s a prestigious academy where only the above-average could attend. It doesn’t take much to get in, you just have to be a good listener. (Or have a lot of bribing money… joking.)

It was about 9:30 AM on a Monday and we were in our English classroom listening to our sensei talk about how appeal makes a piece of work seem interesting to an audience. Well… yeah. That’s the textbook definition of appeal. Everybody who understands the definition of appeal knows everything there is to know about it.

But that’s not the interesting part. The stuff gets interesting after our sensei finally shuts up. After we’ve completed our work for the period, my close friend, Rin Takanashi, busts out this deck of playing cards and we start playing two-player Poker, using potato chips as… chips. (And occasionally one or two will mysteriously disappear.)

He then starts the Small Talk Phase. One of several phases that usually leads to his downfall in Poker games. He starts talking about the weather like, “Hey, did you hear on the daily forecast that there’s this big storm coming?”

And I’ll be like, “No. Did you hear about the guy who made small talk with his opponent whilst not realizing he could see his cards the whole damn time?” And that’ll shut him up instantly.

Except for this time, my other close friend, Sakura Yamada, chimes in and she says, “Actually, I heard about that! They said it was going to be some sort of blizzard. But they can’t get an accurate prediction of its severity yet.” She looks over our desks and sees us playing the usual two-man Poker game and she asks, “Who’s winning?”

“I am. Rin gives himself away every single time,” I responded.

“Yeah… I can see his eye twitching…”

That’s the second phase. The Eye-Twitching Phase. Whenever he knows he doesn’t have a good hand, his eye starts to twitch. He thinks he can bluff his way to victory, but not like that mindset has ever scored him the pot before.

Just then, Sakura reaches for the pile of potato chips, snatches one, and eats it. This upset Rin greatly. He shouted, “Dammit, Sakura! Stop eating chips from the goddamn pot!” This is his third phase. The Pissed-Off at Sakura Phase. Whenever Sakura takes a chip straight from the pot, not only do the winnings decrease, but I can predict exactly what move he’s going to make next. It’s usually based on how calm he is when he tells Rin not to take chips from the pot.

If he says it without even looking at her, he’s going to call. If he doesn’t even warn her, it’s because he has to fold and he wants there to be as little winnings for me as possible. But if he screams at her so loud that sensei gets onto him, then he’s going to make a major bet.

“All in,” he says.

I already knew the outcome of this match so I decided to go “all in” as well.

Sakura says, “Okay, boys. This is for all the marbles. Flip those cards.”

I flipped my cards over. Sakura looks at them with a glaring smile. “Quite the hand you’ve got there, Shirou. Your turn, Rin.”

Rin gave a heavy sigh and flipped his cards over. If I didn’t know what the next phase was, I’d say “Good game, Rin. You almost beat me,” just to try and cheer him up. But the next phase was the Take The Pot and Scarf It Phase. Basically, he takes all the potato chips and scarfs it all down before I could take any.

“You eat like a chipmunk, Rin,” Sakura said.

And he eats pretty loudly too. In fact, one of our other classmates who was sleeping woke up and said, “Could you please stop chewing so loudly? I’m trying to sleep here!” I’m pretty sure that was Sota.

Now, I’m sure the impatient part of you is just screaming at me to skip all the filler bullsh*t and get to the key point of the story already. But the thing is if I only told you the key points of the story, not only would the length of this story be cut short, it would also make this look like it was rushed. And I’m currently writing this out in the middle of the night, so I practically have all the time in the world. So if you don’t, then feel free to skim through this all at your own expense.

But this is where the first critical point takes place. The moment I found out I had lost my notebook.

I could’ve sworn I had kept it in my bookbag and never took it out after I stopped writing, but then that would mean that it was stolen. And I didn’t believe it, because why would somebody steal something as cheap as a notebook?

“Have you guys seen my notebook by any chance?” I asked my friends.

“Nope. Why? Did you lose it?” Sakura replied.

“It’s not in my bookbag and I don’t taking it out.”

“Maybe it fell out when you pulled out something that was next to it,” Rin suggested.

He had a point. Regardless, the notebook was nowhere to be found. But it’s not like I put too much effort into looking for it. I didn’t really care for the notebook anyways because all it contained were the stories I had written last year that I didn’t bother finishing. I hoped that whoever did find it wouldn’t be able to trace it back to me. As long as they couldn’t do that, I wouldn’t have cared what they did with the thing.

The school bell rang and all the students were let out for the lunch period. We sat at our usual spot and my friends chose to continue the discussion about my notebook.

“So, specifically which notebook was stolen,” Rin asked.

“It wasn’t a subject notebook. It’s the notebook I kept all the stories I wrote in.”

“I didn’t know you wrote stories! What kind of stories do you write?” Sakura asked with an intrigued expression.

“Well, I’ve been writing this story called Tainted Love. It’s about this girl who becomes so in love with her upperclassman to the point where she becomes mentally insane about making him hers.”

I could see the look on Rin’s face as he said, “So… psychological romance novels. That’s… nice.” He was thinking why would anybody want to read or write something like that. But if you’re here reading this, then I really wish you could meet him face to face so you could prove him wrong.

Sakura gets this idea in her head, “Wait. Did you get the title from that one old song that was popular in the U.K. a long time ago? You know. The one that goes like: ‘ :musical_note:

Sometimes~ I feel I’ve got to~ *buh* *buh* Run away~ I’ve got to~ *buh* *buh* Get away~ :musical_note: ’ Did you get it from that?”

In all honesty, at the time I had completely forgotten a song like that existed. I know I’ve heard it before but I didn’t intentionally copy the song’s title and used it for my story.

“You know what. It’s fine. As long as that notebook can’t be traced back to me, I’m okay with it being lost forever,” I said.

“Really, man? You’d really let your creations become lost forever?” Rin asked.

“Well, it’s not really something I’d show to anybody I know, okay? I’d be worried if someone read that and never looked at me the same way ever again.”

“Well now I really want to read it…,” Sakura moped.

“You know what. I shouldn’t have said anything. Just forget about it. It wasn’t important anyway.”

Rin and Sakura didn’t say anything for a while. I just they’re still a little surprised that I even write stories. Correction: WROTE stories. After a few more seconds of that awkwardness, Rin broke the silence by mentioning a new transferring student that came to our school. But Sakura objected with the fact that they had already been around for about a week or so and nobody’s talking about it anymore.

But this was completely news to ME. Enlighten me, Sakura.

“She’s not in any of your classes, Shirou. She’s in my chemistry class. I think her name was Kira Nakata.”

“Did anything about her seem to stand out?” I pressed.

“Well now that you mention it. She did have a single wrap of bandages around her right wrist.” Rin suggested.

Oh great… When someone has their wrist wrapped in bandages, what do you assume? You’d assume that she’d cut her wrist (accidentally or purposefully), right? And before you say that maybe she broke her wrist recently, she didn’t. If she did, she’d be wearing a cast instead of bandages. (They’re not the same thing.)

“That sounds like the kind of person I’d want to avoid,” I concluded.

“Funny you should say that because she’s walking over here,” Sakura said.

“Wait. Wut?”

I scanned the place for her and then I saw her behind us. She was definitely walking over here. Something that I noticed about her was that she had been wearing the uniform skirt when it’s cold as hell outside. How is she not bothered by the cold?

She walked up to us and asked, “Are any of you ‘Shirou Maeda’?” I have no idea how somebody would just know my name or why they would even know who I am, so I was very skeptical. I was going to say, “Sorry. We don’t know who he is.” At least until my friends sold me out. I’m sure they didn’t think about it at the time. They were just helping a person find another person. But I’m sure they’ve learned their lesson now.

“What do you want?” I asked her directly.

“I was hoping I could talk to you about something.”

“Okay?”

“Away from everyone else…”

“Okay…”

I can see both Rin and Sakura’s smug faces from the corner of my eye. I wish I had slapped them right then and there. I didn’t question her, but I went with her to the east-end corner of the courtyard. I had seen this scene before many times, so it would not have surprised me if she had asked me out.

But that’s not how it went at all…

“Surely you recognize this,” she said holding up my notebook I had lost about a month ago.

“Did you take that out of my bookbag?”

“What? No. It fell out. I just didn’t return it.”

“Oh. Well, thank you for returning it. I’m very grateful-”

I reached out to grab my notebook, but the further I reached, the further she’d pull her arm back.

“Don’t blame me for being curious, but I looked inside and found some very interesting things in there. You’re quite the writer, Shirou. I think I might be your newest fan.”

“Look, that’s very flattering, but I’d rather we’d keep this just betwe-”

“My favorite story you wrote was a series called Tainted Love. Just the thought of how far one would really go just to claim their lover for themselves is very exciting! But there’s… just one problem: the ending.”

Yeah. I didn’t write an ending to Tainted Love because I couldn’t. I had absolutely no idea how to end a story like that. So I just gave up on it. I hadn’t written another story since. Well… until now, that is.

“Where is it?”

“Where’s what?” I asked feeling very confused.

“The rest of the story? Do you keep it at your house somewhere? Is it in another notebook?”

“...There’s no ending to Tainted Love. I gave up on it.”

“....What?!”

“I stopped writing after that. Haven’t written anything else since.”

“How could you have given up on something so great!”

Was it really that great? I mean, everything grows old after awhile. Did she really read all eleven chapters?

“Look. If you don’t mind, I’ll be taking my notebook back-”

On impulse, she flinched her arm back. She smiled.

“I want the last chapter of this story. If you don’t have it written by this Friday, I think I’ll spread this to the entire school.”

Oh great… It’d be one thing spreading this all over the internet because about nobody would know who I was regardless of them seeing my name. But spreading it across the school, a story like that… that could mean a lot of suffering for me.

“Okay… Fine… I’ll write the ending. But at least let me have my notebook back so I can re-read all the chapters I’ve written so far,” I said.

“Hmm… Alright. I already scanned all the pages into my computer anyway. Here you go.”

She was smarter than I gave her credit for. I slowly took the book out of her hand and began to quickly walk away as she gave me a big smile. I walked back to my friends that I left sitting on the bench and sat down without saying a word.

“So… Are you two dating now?” Sakura asked. And I still didn’t say a word…

The rest of the school day was kind of a blur. I don’t really it because I was reminiscing what Kira told me. I even walked home by myself and didn’t even talk to my sister once I got there. I went straight up to my room and laid everything I needed out on my desktop.

Later that night, I stayed up late in my bedroom looking over the sea of words that my one-year-younger self had written. And I had to say it wasn’t really all that bad. Well… to me. But I imagined my classmates won’t see it that way.

I tried looking over the most recent chapter I had written to see if I could quickly gain an understanding of the story despite the fact I had only written this one year ago. But even after reading the whole chapter entirely I still couldn’t think up an ending.

Surely you’ve heard this term before, but this is commonly referred to as a writer’s block. It’s basically where you can’t think of what to write next. This is what I was talking about earlier. This writer’s block is what was preventing me from writing that damn ending in the first place.

I guess it made sense at the time because I had only read one of the chapters out of chronological order. Nobody would be able to write a satisfying ending out of that. So that’s when I decided it was time to pull out all the stops. If I wanted to conquer this writer’s block, then I needed to read every. Single. Chapter. And thoroughly, I might add.

I opened my laptop and set it off to the side of my desk so I could type notes in it about the characters or plot that I could exploit for the ending, and then I started reading my notebook straight from page one.

Once I got to chapter three, my eyelids began to feel heavy. It was 1 AM in the morning so it made sense. I had typed a few notes on the main character and his ing cast. But as for the plot, barely anything was written. I tried keeping myself awake but before I knew it…

...my head had already hit the pages.

-End of Episode One-

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