Work Text:
It goes like this:
Akane Tendo, age 15, starts attending high school, is almost immediately dubbed the most desirable girl in school by Tatewaki Kuno, and starts putting her martial arts training to good use fending off boys every morning before class. She spends the better part of the first half of her freshman year doing this, until one day she’s had enough.
She walks out of the house with her bento, her school bag, her dress neatly pressed (courtesy of Kasumi) and, instead of heading towards the school, walks to the Nerima train station and takes the first train leaving Tokyo. She doesn’t get off until the train stops at its last destination, somewhere in the middle of the countryside where there aren’t any hordes of stupid boys to fight off.
Akane Tendo, age 15 and a half, wades her way into an empty field and screams herself hoarse. Screams until she is spent and panting.
“Oh my,” a voice says. “Are you okay?”
Akane turns around to see the most beautiful girl in the world looking down at her from atop a massive…pig? At any rate Akane is tired, her knuckles are bruised, her face has forgotten how to ease out of her perpetual scowl, her hair is coming out of its low braid, and this mysterious girl is picture perfect and she had come to be alone and someone is seeing her…. Akane bursts into tears of shame and anger.
“Boys,” she tells this ethereal girl with the long thick hair she wants to run her fingers through and the kindest expression she could never quite pull off on herself, “boys are such pigs!” She does not say men, because she’s still nursing a crush on Dr. Tofu and she is convinced that if boys can just mature enough, be gentle enough, she will like them.
The girl frowns. “But that’s so unfair to pigs,” she says, standing on tiptoe to wipe stray tears from her cheek. “Pigs are so much better than men.” She says men because she has long since known she has no interest in them whatsoever. “Girls are too, for that matter.”
Akane stares at her for an impossibly long second before bursting into laughter that makes her cry all over again.
“You…you are so right.”
She goes home and shows up in class in the middle of the last period, and even though she is made to stand all the rest of it in the hallway with a water bucket she just looks out the window and smiles a small, secret smile.
She visits Akari as often as she can after that. Akane practices her katas alongside the fighting pigs and helps Akari with her chores, and in return Akari showers her with homemade sweets and cute accessories and all the affection and validation Akane has thought she was only allowed to receive from a man. A month after first meeting her, Akane cuts her hair, almost brutally short, and revels in how Akari cards her fingers through the short strands.
The boys are still dumb, she still has to fight her way to class every day. But more often than not in the evenings Akari is there to visit her, bringing fresh tea and snacks to enjoy while they do homework together. And maybe they talk about inconsequential things and laugh more than they study. Maybe she spends more time looking at Akari’s mouth and daydreaming than she’s supposed to.
Maybe Akane starts flipping off boys and wearing skirts long enough to drag in the dust, maybe she lets herself become muscular in ways that she thought would contradict her femininity and most certainly contradict what many people in Nerima think is feminine. But that doesn’t matter because nowadays she only has to fight off the kendo team, and when she sees Akari the shorter girl will beam and tell her she is so strong, strong as a pig, and Akane will blush because she knows Akari well enough now to know how flattering this line is supposed to be.
It goes, just like that: Akane Tendo falls in love and doesn’t have regrets.