[FIN] Girl Troubles

[Akira Midoriyama]

Akira was a wreck. Though he previously hadn't been sure why people used the term 'wasted' to describe a certain state of being, he felt he now had a better idea.

The last few days had been spent (or wasted) using a good portion of his meager income to drown his overwhelming emotions in ice cream floats. He was sure he would have gained at least 10 pounds already if that hadn't been all he'd consumed.

Besides those floats, however, he just had no appetite for much else. As a result of that, he was feeling just as awful physically as he was emotionally, and as a result of that, his appearance reflected his overall state of well-being.

One night, he decided he'd had enough. He had to do something about the mess he'd made. He was distraught over Sera, but he didn't dare try to call or contact her again so soon. It seemed unfair to bother Rosie or Luke when they had so many problems of their own to deal with at the moment. But there was one person he could talk to who he thought knew Sera better than he did. Perhaps Nate would be able to help him figure out where he went wrong and what to do next.

Taking out his phone, he scrolled through his contacts and selected Nate before pressing the call button. Then he waited, absently holding his breath as he heard the rings go through.  

[Suudonym]

The buzz of his phone in his pocket derailed Nate's thoughts in the middle of his sentence, and he dug the device out to check the screen. With a half frown he stood and moved towards the door before he stopped and glanced back at the sleeping woman to whom he had been speaking. "Eh… What do you care about phone etiquette. I hope you hear every word and it's awkward as hell to listen to," he decided murmuringly, returning to his seat and raising the cell phone with a press of a button to answer it. "Yo what up."  

[Akira Midoriyama]

Completely unaware of anything he might have been interrupting, Akira responded to Nate's casual question with a monotonous drone of misery. "Naaaaaate. You have to help me. I think I'm going to die," he groaned, feeling too sick to realize how melodramatic he must have sounded. "And I'll never have understood women."

He paused to pour himself a glass of soda, watching the foam build up before simmering back down. "You know something about them, don't you? I know you do. You wouldn't be such a playboy otherwise. What do you know?" His voice was slurred as he took a scoop of ice cream and plopped it unceremoniously into the glass of soda, watching with a dazed look as the scoop displaced a large amount of the carbonated liquid.

The fizzing reaction and resulting substance of the ice cream making contact with the soda only added to the overflow. Staring at it, Akira had the odd notion that the floating blob was a physical manifestation of his brain slowly disintegrating into mush.  

[Suudonym]

Nate's eyes narrowed and his brow furrowed at the tone of the voice that answered his greeting. Around the time of Akira's brief pause, a barely stifled laughter escaped him, following him through to his response, "I know that if you've taken more than the amount listed on the bottle you should call poison control, and if you have reason to think it's the onset of alcohol poisoning you should call 911. What the hell are you on about?"  

[Akira Midoriyama]

Nate's laugh caused the space between Akira's brows to crease in concertation. As foggy as his mind was, the 'voice of reason' coming through the phone actually made him feel compelled to pick up the now-empty soda bottle and read the label. "But it says it's one serving size," he protested without much conviction. If anything, he sounded bewildered. "How can I take more than how much was in it?" He turned the can over and shook it, as if expecting another serving to pour out. A few drops were all that remained and he frowned at them in disappointment.

Deciding he hadn't, in fact, taken more than the amount listed on the bottle, the distressed young man suddenly remembered why he'd called in the first place. "Miss Seraphine," he blurted. "Sera. Whatever. She's acting all weird. Why do girls have to be so complicated?" Akira sipped at his sugary, foamy beverage, a little less eager to finish the thing than he had been three floats ago. "I was asking her how she was and she told me she had gone to fight Rockets and I tried not to get upset but then she sounded sad and she's not usually sad and it's freaking me out!" he complained loudly. "What do I do? You know her better, don't you? Why is she doing that? Is she just messing with my head? Do all girls do that?"  

[Suudonym]

"Beer?" he guessed haphazardly, trying to think of what kind of liquors were commonly packaged in single servings and coming up with a list of one item. "You're not seriously smashed from one beer, are you?" Or from one anything, really.

He listened to the scattered story with an eyebrow raised, shaking his head as Akira practically begged for an answer. "Well if I had to guess, your first problem is probably the fact that you're saying 'girls, girls' like they're some kind of hive mind. She's not a 'girl,' she's a ********' human being with her own experiences and thoughts who also happens to have tits. So I-D-K, man, what do you think is going on in her life that maybe the conversation made her sad? Could be anything."  

[Akira Midoriyama]

"Five," he answered vaguely. "Not beer. Soda. For ice cream floats." But hey, at least he hadn't taken more than had been labeled on each bottle. "Is 'smashed' like being 'wasted'?" he groaned. Whatever the case, it was a new term for him to add to his slang vocabulary and it didn't sound any better than he felt.

"I-D-K?" Akira repeated slowly, trying to process what it meant before realizing they were letters. Ah, right. Chat speak. "Oh." He stopped to ponder the question. "I don't...maybe she thought she made me mad, but why would she get upset over that? She has no reason to care what I thinks. Or what anyone think, really. Right?" Something struck him about the tone she'd used. When he had last heard her use it. "...D'you think it's about her hand?"  

[Suudonym]

"Yes, and don't you dare try to tell me you are inebriated from soda. I will punch you." Not that physical retaliation would do anything for the situation, but it felt like an appropriate response nonetheless.

"I don't know how the conversation went so I'm positive I'm in no place to judge the situation, but the hand thing does seem like it would be a point of some slight sensitivity," he offered, lacing the lattermost part of the sentence in sarcasm. "I dunno, man, you can't assume anything about anyone from face value. If you're so bent outta shape about it why not just ask her? 'Hey you said this thing this way before and it's been worrying me, what was up with that.'"  

[Akira Midoriyama]

"I'm not! I'm just...sick, I think," he mumbled. "But I didn't even mention her hand! It doesn't make sense! I tried to explain that I was just worried about her, but she was still upset like she thought something was her fault. Even though I clarified it wasn't." With a heavy sigh, he answered Nate's inquiry in another monotonous tone. "She won't talk to me. I don't think she even wants to see me right now. I asked her if she wanted to go out for ice cream or something, but she said no."

Frustrated, he pressed his forehead to the table, eyes closed. "Man, I don't even know...I've done everything I know how, but I've just made things worse. Like always. This always happens when I try to comfort girls and I don't know what's wrong with me. They hate me."

Pushing his hair back, he said, "I know you said she's a human being, and I know that, but up until recently she wasn't like other girls and didn't give a s**t what anyone thought. Or at least acted that way. Now she's keeping the same distance from me that the rest of them do and I can't help thinking there's something wrong with how I'm doing things. That's why I wanted your advice."

He frowned. "Wait, so you knew about her hand, right? So she talked to you about it? How did that go?"  

[Suudonym]

"Mmhm." An eyebrow still raised, he frowned in the vague direction of a wall. "You're making an awful lot of assumptions. Did she say she doesn't want to talk to you? Did she say she doesn't want to see you? Maybe she was just ********' busy, man, who knows. Maybe she was on her period and felt too sick to go out. Maybe she was planning to make cake later or some s**t and thought you would be offended if you knew she was prioritizing cake over ice cream. Who knows. Arceus, you're worse than a schoolgirl."

He clicked his tongue, leaning back in his chair and shoving his unoccupied hand into his pocket. "You're doing the hive mind business again. Maybe it's not the fact that the people you're trying to comfort are chicks; maybe you're just s**t at comforting people. Here's the thing," he reflexively raised and shook a finger, "no girl is like 'other girls.' They all go through their own lives dealing with their own stuff and react in their own ways. Sera's not like other people, and at the end of the day that's really only because she's not other people, she's Sera. Everyone has s**t they're insecure about, regardless of whether or not they go around advertising it. If you think there's not stuff that would make Sera uncomfortable or make her feel bad or whatever, then it ain't a problem of understanding girls or even of understanding Sera: It's a fundamental misunderstanding of the entire goddamn human condition."

He exhaled, sticking his tongue out briefly that he was being made to talk and explain so much about such simple, basic matters. Jeez. He gave an unseen shrug in response to the ensuing question, "Wasn't really a conversation, no. I whined at her to hang out with me until she gave in to make me shut up and we had some beers. By the time it 'came to light,' I guess, we were both too drunk to really care."  

[Akira Midoriyama]

Another groan, this one incoherent, issued from Akira's end. "Okay, so maybe I made assumptions, but then what am I supposed to do? The more I try to ask her things, to communicate, the more she seems to withdraw into herself and the less I can actually figure out. Wait, what do you mean I'm worse than a schoolgirl?!"

"Alright, I get it. I'm s**t at comforting people," he grumbled. Well, at least he now thought he knew why Nate was more a people-person than he was. The people Akira used to know acted predictably because they acted how they were expected to act. It turned out people in real life weren't as easy to understand. Even the ones he thought he knew in the past...he'd only really understood their surfaces, the sides of themselves they showed publicly. He'd been fooling himself all this time.

"Right. Because that's the way to get through to people. Get too drunk with them for either of you to care what you're talking about. That's genius," he said, sounding a little peeved. Whether it was his lack of understanding, his envy of Nate's understanding, or something else entirely, he wasn't really sure. He just felt that, at the moment, everything he thought he knew about people was falling apart at the seams. "Thanks for the tip, Nate. I'll keep that in mind."  

[Suudonym]

"How about you tell her all this instead of me?" he suggested with a half shrug. "I don't know about you but if I found out that someone had gone to someone else behind my back to ask about me instead of just being straight with me, that would nooot really improve my opinion of them at all. I mean how hard is it to just call her up or even just text her and say 'hey I get the feeling I might have upset you and I'm sorry about that.' And you know what," he leaned forward suddenly, planting his feet on the floor, "if you did upset her, and she's irredeemably, irrevocably, irreparably done with you, you spend some time with your feelings, accept that you ******** up, and move on. Real talk, though, if you don't even know why you may or may not have upset her, I kinda doubt it's that serious." A subtle smirk came into his features, "And if the schoolgirl comment offends you, then you know damn well enough what I mean."

"Being drunk ain't the point," he corrected. "It's the fact that it didn't turn into a big deal. It's a ********' hand; I'm sure she's had more than enough of it being a big deal. If being drunk was what she needed to achieve a little normalcy, the hell's the problem with it?"  

[Akira Midoriyama]

"I already triiied," Akira complained. "I don't even know what you mean by 'all of this'. I've been as straight and direct as I can, but she doesn't seem to like that either!" He tugged on his bangs incessantly. "Okay, how about I text her that and we'll see how it goes? Then if it goes horribly wrong, I can blame it all on you." A pause. "I like that. I like that very much. I think I'm going to do that."

Another pause. "No I don't! Damn you, Ryuu, can't you be straight with me for once?! That's not funny!" There was the sound of his palm slapping his forehead. "Nate. I meant Nate. Stupid soda..." The slosh of an ice cream float being poured down the drain echoed faintly in the background.

"I haven't done anything to make it into a big deal. She's the one who was crying about it," he retorted. "What's the problem?! The problem is she's underage! She shouldn't be turning to alcohol when she's depressed, and if it makes her feel any sort of 'normal', something's wrong there." He stopped again. "I sound like a parent, don't I?"  

[Suudonym]

He began to respond and then stopped with a sighing groan, "Fine, text her those words exactly, but do yourself a favor her and believe what she says when she replies. If she says she's not upset with you, don't go thinking she's lying or hiding something or whatever. Don't just invent a bunch of scenarios in your head and take them as the final truth."

He furrowed his brow quizzically at the address, trying to find some way to turn it into a Mortal Kombat reference and failing to achieve a satisfactory result. Still confused, he shrugged it off. "Well I'm not gonna give you advice about something that's already done and over," he dismissed. "Seems rather moot. And for your information, in plenty of countries, nineteen is already a year over the drinking age - if a drinking age exists at all - so who cares if a few drinks can take the sting off something awful?" He exhaled a breathy laugh at Akira's self-evaluation. "Mmmhm. How old are you again?"  

[Akira Midoriyama]

"Alright, alright, I will," he conceded. "I don't do that about everything, you know."

A steady sound of discontent issued from the young man. "I reeeeally don't want to agree with you, but you don't seem to be leaving me much choice here." He sighed again, tugging harder on his bangs.

"Just...do me a favor and shut up, will you?" His attempt to suppress a smile was audible in his tone after he was asked his age. "There's only so much reality I can handle having thrown in my face in one night."