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Kumiko is seven when she moves to the clan compound, with no parents and only one grandfather left. People with muscles and strange clothes and scars drift around the area, occasionally pausing to look at her, and she looks back. She doesn’t say anything, doesn’t flinch, doesn’t turn, just stares, and the people usually leave after a few heartbeats.
Her grandfather is an old man, with eyes that are older than his age. His hair is grey and his hands shake now and then, but his muscles are firm and his back is straight. He wields a katana like it’s his third hand. Or an extension of his right.
Her grandfather is the Sandaime of the Oedo clan, and she is slated to be the Yondaime, unless she refuses. Her mother was supposed to take up that title, but she fled with the teacher-husband that is Kumiko’s father. Her mother didn’t want to be associated with the yakuza, family or not, and even though Kumiko loves her mother and father like her own life, she is disappointed.
She is ashamed. Her mother had taught her to never let go of family, and yet she herself had ran from her own family so easily.
She is an orphan in a place she does not recognize, with people she does not know, and weapons she has never heard of. The people have tattoos on their back, they call her ‘Ojou’, and they bow in her direction at a good ninety degrees. She doesn’t react. Kumiko doesn’t know how to react to people bowing and referring to her as a Princess, she doesn’t understand the rationale behind it, she doesn’t understand the workings of this hierarchical society that her mother left behind.
This is a yakuza, this is a clan, this is family and bonds linked through blood and sweat and tears. Not all bonds are linked through blood but they are there and her grandfather deems that enough to welcome them into the Oedo clan so she will not speak of it.
But she wonders and wonders, because she cannot wrap her mind around it, not now, maybe in the future, and as she wanders into the hidden room behind the sliding doors, the room with ancient katana propped on the walls, Kumiko thinks that she will someday understand.
She reaches for a katana, unsheathes it, and pricks herself on the tip. It’s on purpose, and she lets herself feel the fleeting pain. It comes and goes, and Kumiko sheathes the sword, placing it back against the wall.
It’s in this room, where she feels pain from a weapon her mother tried to bring her up from, a weapon that symbolizes the ways of the old and the ways of the not-so-old, a weapon that is classic to her new family, one full of strangers and unknown people and only one blood relative. It’s in this room that Kumiko lets the pain of her lost parents wash over her, and she cries.
She cries for half an hour, until her breath is shuddering and her shoulders shake uncontrollably, and then she gets up, leaves the room, gently sliding the door behind her, and makes her way to her room.
She won’t let go of her parents, not now and not ever, but she will not adhere to their wishes of being brought up away from the yakuza either.
They are both her family now, one in the past, one in the future, but in the present, in the now, Kumiko is alone in her room and alone in her world.
She doesn’t let herself cry again.
-0-
When Kumiko is eight, she learns to fight. She is a bright girl, brighter than most her age, and she has Mathematics and Science down pat, already years ahead of her peers, and she has memorized the human anatomy. She knows the different pressure points, she knows which place to stab a man so that he can bleed to death, and she knows seven different ways to break a man’s bones.
She learns it all by herself, because despite growing up in a yakuza home, they refuse to let her come into contact with anything remotely yakuza. They don’t teach her how to fight, they don’t teach her how to bandage wounds, they don’t teach her how to hold her own against others.
Kumiko learns it all by herself, and the next time Itsumi and Daisuke get up and try and have a throw down, she gets up and slinks around behind both of them, jab them above the crook of their knees and disappears before the both of them collapse in a daze as their muscles give out on them.
The story of the ghost going around the Oedo clan stopping people from having fights by hitting them in tender areas becomes a legend, or something like a ghost story, because the perpetrator is always gone before anyone can do anything.
While the clan members destroy their brain over trying to figure out who the mystery ghost is, Kumiko practices katas in her room, punching the air and doing high kicks. She has read books on them, watched videos, and if the clan members don’t want to teach her, she will teach herself.
She attempts punching a tree on her way to school one day, a short distance away from the school. It takes her five minutes to stop whining from the pain it gives her as she cradles her black and blue hand, and she stares mournfully at the bruised knuckles. She’s pretty sure that the bones aren’t broken though, which is a relief.
She stares at the tree intently, and excitement wells up inside of her when she realizes that there is an indent in the tree. It’s small and almost unnoticeable, but for a girl of eight years and next to no energy, it is a feat worthy of celebration.
She celebrates that night by buying a small pole, and thick rope. She tells her grandfather that she wants to practice knots, because that’s what they’re teaching in school right now, as enrichment, and it’s not really a lie. It’s a half-truth, because Kumiko is going to tie the rope to the pole, and hit the pole with one finger.
She wants to know how long it will take her to reach the pole by wearing down the rope with her punches.
It takes her over a month, but it is immensely satisfying to peer at the worn rope and see wood instead of fiber.
Kumiko spares a few moments of celebration, saying ‘fight-oh!’ to herself and throwing her hands in the air, before she takes a deep breath and steps out of her room.
She goes to her grandfather’s room, and asks for someone to teach her how to fight. Properly. Alone, she can't do much, no matter how much she practices in the dead of the night. She needs a proper teacher, a proper educator who knows what he is doing to help Kumiko improve.
Her grandfather tells her that if she can defeat one of the clan members in a fight, he will get one of them to teach her. She agrees, and when it’s Itsumi that she goes up against, she almost laughs. As it is, she has to turn away and hide her silent giggles while the rest think that she’s crying, and later, after a good kick to the back of knees, Itsumi’s eyes roll back in his head and he tumbles to the ground in a mess of limbs and clothes.
Her grandfather raises an eyebrow, but accedes. She gets not just anyone, but him as a teacher, and Kumiko is grown up enough to know that that is an honor.
She grandly accepts, and sets out to prove true the saying that students always become better than the teacher.
-0-
Kumiko is in the prime of her youth, and while other girls mull over frivolous things like the latest fashion and simplistic things like love, she wonders if the business transaction with the Kuro clan will go okay. She likes the head of the Kuro clan, he’s a funny old man who has terrible puns but good eyes and a good spirit. His son is strange though, with his black hair and blacker eyes.
Kumiko thinks that that might be what classifies as good looking, but she doesn’t really bother about it right about now. He looks cute, yes, but if he doesn’t manage to hold his own against her in a fight, then he isn’t worth her time.
As it is, he can’t hold his own against her in a fight. He’s close, though, and she thinks that warrants her hesitant interest in him.
She is fifteen, and as she walks down the streets, she peers into alleyways and see gangsters roaming about, delinquents trying to play grown up with dyed hair and piercings all over.
Kumiko wonders if having a gang is that nice. Having a clan is nice, certainly, but she isn’t about to up and start her own clan, not when she has one like the Oedo clan. If she did start her own clan, her clan members might die of shock. Her grandfather would probably laugh and encourage her to chase her dreams.
It’s only when she meets a certain idiot with bleached hair and dangerous eyes that she decides, yes, she would like a gang of her own.
-0-
Yosuke is an idiot through and through, cutting class and distrustful of all around him. He only believes in the language of fists, and refuses to listen to anything else. He’s ultra high maintenance, and Kumiko’s interest is piqued.
He goes to the school down the road, or used to, because now he cuts school and skips lessons and hangs out around clubs thinking that he’s the new ‘in-thing’.
Kumiko thinks that he’s not all that, but goes along with it anyways. He’s funny, much like an alley cat, and he bristles whenever he sees her skipping down the road to meet him.
It takes two weeks for him to remotely tolerate her, and a few more for him to agree to hold a proper conversation with her. He speaks in slang and stilted sentences, using vulgar words and rude form, but he never really says anything that truly angers her.
If he does, by accident, Kumiko will suddenly fall silent before bouncing up and changing the subject. When she goes home, she beats up anyone who is willing to let her vent her anger on them, before going into the katana room and going through a few katas. The repetitive motion takes her mind off things.
When she meets Yosuke again, he mutters an apology in not so many words, with rude terms and vulgar words once more peppered in here and there, and she laughs while walking along with him.
It’s through him that Kumiko learns how to play ‘Dance Revolution’, how to play those riding games, how to play shooting games and air hockey and kick the can. It’s just two of them, but two is more than enough, and Kumiko doesn’t find it strange at all that she can relate more to a boy than she does to girls.
Good things don’t last, and one day, Yosuke doesn’t turn up. She searches for him, for an entire day, and still doesn’t find him. She goes to his school the next day and requests to know if he has turned up for school, only for the teachers to sneer and jeer at Yosuke’s name, saying that he hasn’t been to school for ages, and it’s a good thing that he hasn’t, because he disrupts the good aura of the school. They call him the black sheep of the school, and not in such nice terms.
Kumiko barely holds back from punching the teacher in the face, and settles for huffing and running out of the school.
She searches high and low for her friend, asking people on the streets and enlisting their help whenever possible. Her search leads her to an old warehouse, and she groans at the locked door, because a locked door means trouble, and coupled with an old warehouse, it’s practically a clichéd setting for a fight.
She storms in, kicking the door down, and is prepared to jump in to defend Yosuke if needed, only to stop in shock.
Yosuke isn’t the one being bullied, he’s the one doing the bullying.
He tilts his head up when he hears the door being broken down, and freezes in the spot for a moment when he sees Kumiko. His friends laugh and jeer at her, asking, “What’s a girl doing here now, want to save your friend? What a cute scene!”
It takes him a while before he laughs along emptily, and it stuns Kumiko even further that Yosuke is the ringleader.
She goes up to him, slaps him, and helps the victim up. She doesn’t say a word, she doesn’t look back, she doesn’t bother about Yosuke as she helps the victim limp to the door.
“Kumiko.” Yosuke calls out, as if it will stop Kumiko, but it does, because he’s saying it the way he says it when they’ve spent a fulfilling day out somewhere and he’s in a rare state of happiness.
“I’m disappointed in you,” she replies, and continues helping the boy out of the warehouse without looking back. Her voice breaks and wavers halfway through her sentence, and she’s trying not to cry.
She brings the injured boy to her house, sneaks him into her room and bandages his wounds, dabbing lightly at bruises and immobilizing possible fractures and icing whatever sprains he may have.
She learns that his name is Reiji, and that he used to be friends with Yosuke.
-0-
When Kumiko sees Yosuke again, it is a week after the incident. Yosuke has a split lip and a huge black eye, and his arm is twisted in a way that shouldn’t be possible, and Kumiko runs up to him, hitting him over the head.
“What do you think you’re doing? In this condition, you should be in the hospital! You idiot, hurry up and come over to my house, I’ll have to bandage that arm for you, why didn’t you tell me about this?” She asks hysterically, half dragging Yosuke to her house. She doesn’t bother sneaking him in, just drags him boldly through the front gate and the compound, pushing him into her room and closing the door behind them.
She forcibly treats his wounds as he stares at the ground, refusing to meet her gaze.
“Yosuke,” she says, after everything is over and done with. “Yosuke, what happened?”
“Kumiko,” he replies, broken and soft. “I don’t know.”
“Reiji says that he used to be best friends with you,” she tells him as she leans against the wall. “That you two used to be the best of buds, but something happened along the way and you two just broke apart.”
“I got stupid,” Yosuke tells her, and she reaches for the closest thing – which is newspaper – to throw at him. He dodges, and there’s a slight smile on his face as he continues. The smile isn’t happy – it’s sad and nostalgic and regretful. “I got stupid and Reiji kept getting smarter and I got angry.”
“So you decided to join in with people who were angry at the elites of the school as well?”
“Yes,” he nods, looking up at her. “I don’t know why I did that to Reiji. I didn’t… I don’t think that I truly wanted to hurt him.”
“I believe you,” Kumiko tells him sternly. “But don’t do something as stupid as that again. Now, we’ll have to call Reiji and tell him to come over so that you two can make up!”
Yosuke stares at her with wide eyes as she makes the call, and Reiji arrives shortly, with a bewildered look on his face.
It takes them two hours to make up, with lots of shouting and threatening, mostly done by Kumiko, and in the end, she forces them to eat hot pot together with the rest of the clan.
The duo becomes a trio, and Kumiko wonders if three people can form a gang as she reaches for a piece of meat.
-0-
Apparently, three people can form a gang, but they’re not much of a gang, not with one heir to a yakuza clan, one delinquent, and one smart teen.
Kumiko decides to increase the number of their gang, and goes around actively recruiting people, nudging the other two to do so as well. They grumble and complain but at the end of the week, both have two people each who would be sort of willing to join.
Yosuke brings two drop outs with him, Izuna and Kazuma, people who are not only interested in the mock fighting they have, but also the sort of tutoring services that they provide. Kumiko is brilliant in Mathematics and Science, while Reiji is amazing in all the rest, and together they help Yosuke rise up in the rankings. Izuna and Kazuma want to learn more, and they don’t mind the slight delinquency of the gang either.
Reiji brings his siblings, which is a bit of a shock. He is the youngest of three children, and the eldest brother is actually a real delinquent. Not to say that Yosuke is fake, just that Hisuke seems a lot more… delinquent-ish. His second oldest brother is interested in delinquency, but doesn’t want to actually join a gang that goes around causing trouble, so this little tête à tête is perfect for him.
Kumiko welcomes them all with open arms, and enjoys the look on their faces when they realize that their sort of leader is the heir to a yakuza clan. Izuna is excited, Kazuma and Hisuke are a bit hesitant, and what is a bit surprising is that Iemitsu is wholly on board for this, despite not wanting to ‘join a gang that actually gets into trouble’.
“I like the yakuza,” he tells them as he flicks his hair out of his eyes. “They’re pretty cool, when they’re not doing bad stuff. I respect their ideals and philosophies.”
That sentence alone gets him into the entire clan’s good books, and Kumiko shakes her head over how superficial they are. She sighs and hits Itsumi over the head when he offers to give Iemitsu the official rite of passage to join the Oedo clan. He doesn’t actually have the appropriate ranking to offer such a thing, anyways.
The three of them turns into a nice seven, the magic number, and they go around doing stuff that is borderline but not quite delinquent, like studying in arcades as they take turns to showdown on ‘Dance Revolution’, or mock fighting in Kumiko’s clan compound, or even randomly going off during break time to play kick the can in the park somewhere in between all of their schools. They aren’t openly breaking any rules, but people don’t exactly approve of them either, so they still retain the essence of delinquency.
It’s hilarious and highly entertaining when all of them score in the top fifty in their respective schools, despite the authorities really disliking the little gang that they hang around in, and constantly accuse them of disrupting the peaceful aura and never going to succeed in life. If they’re in the top fifty in their schools and are ‘never going to succeed in life’ solely because in they’re in a sort of gang that hangs out after school hours, go play in arcades and sing terribly during karoke, then the students who score below them and go to cram school will have even less of a future than them. And that piece of logic, when Kumiko points it out to her teacher, makes her teacher stutter and look like she’s swallowed a lemon.
It’s a rude piece of logic, but it’s logic, and Kumiko decides that if her teachers are going to play dirty and put them down just because of their supposed delinquency even though they’re really half-study group and half-gang, she’s going to play dirty as well.
-0-
They’re not truly a gang until they beat up another gang for trying to do stupid stuff on their ‘turf’. It’s not even a real turf, just an old abandoned warehouse (“Another one,” Kumiko rolls her eyes as she nudges Yosuke, who scowls and refuses to meet her gaze. “Shut up, okay?” He tells her, and Reiji snorts while Kumiko teases Yosuke. Izuna knows this story, and he eagerly tells it to the others while Yosuke snarls and grumbles.) in the middle of nowhere and there have been rumors that people are bullying other people in there.
Kumiko leads her gang to storm the place, and somehow, in the spirit of defending the bullied, a separate gang merges with them. The gang is made up of the beat up delinquents that Kumiko sees on the floor, and twenty against five really isn’t much of a fight, just plain idiotic violence and Kumiko knows this.
She’s angry, and she leads her gang into battle with the twenty-person-gang. They win, although they sustain their own grievous injuries (“I’m dying, Kumiko!” Kazama whines at her, stressed out. “It’s just a sprained ankle,” she tells him as she whacks him up the head and he whines at her some more. “Kumiko,” Hisuke groans by the side, a black eye and possibly fractured wrist even though the grin is evident on his face. “Save me.” “You’re already saved, you idiot!” She yells back, and all of them laugh. The other gang stares at them in something akin to wonder and awe and maybe a bit of jealously, but Kumiko is too daft to see it).
Kumiko forcefully drags all of them, her own gang and the gang that they saved, to her clan compound where she wraps them up and scolds the other gang for being stupid and irrational and not thinking before they go around picking a fight.
They bow before her and beg to let their gang merge with hers, and her original gang members – especially Reiji and Yosuke, because they know how outrageous she can get and yet this is an all time high for her – all groan and bury their faces in their hands and she loudly agrees and roars out a ‘fight-oh!’
When they’ve become a twelve-person gang, they decide that they need a gang hideout, like a classic old abandoned warehouse, Kagami recommends. It’s old school and useful, but Reiji argues that it’s not a conducive environment for studying.
Kagami reluctantly agrees, and Yosuke asks why they can’t keep using Kumiko’s clan compound.
“Because it’s not ours, ya see!” Yagami presses. “I mean, this entire area is Kumiko’s, not ours!”
Everyone nods in sudden understanding, while Kumiko looks around confusedly. “What’s mine is yours, isn’t it? I mean, we’re a gang!”
Her gang looks at her weirdly while her clan members break out into soulful sobs and murmurs that ‘Ojou has grown up! So responsible! So generous!’
Either way, the gang unanimously agrees to have a sort of hideout, and they search for an old abandoned building.
Kumiko finds somewhere first, and it’s not so much of a building as it is a small house, hidden away at the borderline of the forest and is almost breaking apart. She punches her fist into the air and shouts a ‘YOSH!’ and makes everyone pitch in to touch up the entire place, and after a month of tiring labor, the house is as good as new.
Kumiko decides that she likes teamwork very much, and ‘nakama’ are perfect when in need of help.
The house becomes their little go-to place whenever they feel bored, want to study, feel sad or overly excited or brash to the point where they might make stupid decisions and make each other angry or sad (mainly Kumiko, and seeing a girl who can bring men twice her size down to their knees cry because of them makes them feel insanely bad, even though sometimes it’s not actually their fault, it still hits them right where it hurts and they try to avoid it as much as they can).
They sleep over there sometimes, and the little wooden house is slowly but surely filled with their stuff. A katana makes it way into the house somehow, a welcoming gift from the Oedo clan. There are study guides, textbooks, books on anatomy and fifty different ways to kill a man (everyone in the gang has read it, for some reason or another, and they can all recite it word for word if anyone asks – it’s therapeutic, in a way, to know that no matter who pisses them off, they know fifty different ways to kill that someone, even if they don’t actually kill the person because murder is illegal, after all). There are beanbags and futons and one large kotetsu in the middle of the room.
Kumiko and her gang become famous in the underground, and their hideout becomes famous in its own accord. If someone has a problem that they would like solved, they could head to the house. If someone wanted some help in studying, for whatever reason, they could head to the house. If an idiot wanted to take on the Kumiko gang, they could head to the house (and meet a dead end, courtesy of the gang members). If anyone wanted anything at all, they could head to the house.
It became very famous, and Kumiko is very proud of her little house. It is the first time she truly feels a sense of accomplishment and friendship and camaraderie, because she has built something and made it known with her two hands and all her friends.
It is something she treasures, and she will remember this for years to come.
-0-
When she is seventeen and gets the Career Choice paper, she writes the words ‘TEACHER’ in big font.
She shows it proudly to her clan members, and a couple of them laugh hysterically, twenty percent of them collapse, and a few assume it’s a lie. Only her grandfather takes her seriously and nods in acceptance.
She shows it to her gang, and they pause for a while before shrugging and going back to their own separate activities.
“Aren’t you surprised?” She asks, curious.
“Not really,” Yosuke tells Kumiko, stretching. “You like giving all those passionate speeches about friendship and comrades and teamwork and the different between fights and violence even though that’s really something only a yakuza would know, so I don’t understand why you keep trying to educate us on it because if we tell others that they won’t get it, and well, it’s just your choice in the end.”
“I think you’d be a funny teacher,” Yagami tells her, and she hits him on the head. “Funny, but not half bad!” He protests. “I think you’d be interesting!”
“Yagami’s right,” Iemitsu tells her, and she’s akin to believe the top scorer amongst all of them. He’s in the best university in Japan, and had the chance to go to universities overseas, but decided to stay in Japan to be close to Kumiko and the rest.
Kumiko had spent ages hugging him after that admission. Iemitsu never admits that Kumiko would be good at anything. At least, not as openly as that.
She starts playing ‘Teacher’ with her gang a few years too late – girls usually play ‘Teacher’ when they’re eight and below, but when Kumiko was eight she was busy learning how to kill a man and she didn’t have any other female friends either, so now Kumiko is making up for lost time.
Her ‘students’ complain that she hits them on the head too much, cheers them on during mock fights a little too enthusiastically, and is far too eager to launch into passionate speeches about ‘nakama’ when she should really be teaching.
Her English is also quite terrible, Reiji points out, and Kumiko yells at him.
Her ‘students’ also complain that she loses her temper far too easily, and doesn’t have the undying patience that teachers usually have.
“You’re all idiots, how can I be patient with you?” She scolds them.
“Those words are going to bite you someday,” they chorus in retaliation, and she chases them around the house, before the chase leads them out into the streets and into the clan compound.
-0-
The gang that isn’t quite a gang splits up eventually, because they all grow up and get jobs and have to do things that don’t give them much free time.
The house still remains well-maintained, because all of them come back once in a while and whoever comes back makes a beeline for the house, or Kumiko’s clan compound, and whoever’s free will hustle together and go clean up the house.
Kumiko gets her first job as a teacher as Shirokin Academy, and when she’s placed in charge of 3-D, the ‘class full of delinquents’ that she ‘can’t turn her back upon’ because they’ll ‘scare her for life’.
Her first lesson with them is mildly interesting and funny and exciting, especially when they don’t listen, because it reminds her so fondly of her first encounter with Yosuke that she’s trying to fight back laughter throughout the entire thing.
She finds out who’s in charge here, and jots their names down in her mind.
Sawada Shin, she thinks, and she laughs.
Sawada Shin is an idiot with frowns and highlighted hair and dangerous eyes, and he doesn’t intimidate Kumiko at all.
Even Reiji looks more intimidating than him, in her mind, and Reiji is a perfect scholar.
Kumiko loses it when she tries to recount the story to her clan members, who immediately up and draw their swords and request for permission to hunt them down and hurt her students. Everything is hilarious and funny, and she laughs endlessly.
It’s even funnier when she calls up her gang and tells them all about it. They laugh and screech and call out insults that might make her students’ eyes bulge out at the vulgarity in them, and Kumiko laughs some more.
Teaching is very interesting, especially with a bunch of misfits like them.
And then Kumai steals the Head Teacher’s wallet (or yellow bag of money, which is hilarious – who keeps their money in a yellow bag? It reminds her of bananas), which heralds the start of something thrilling and amazing.
It’s fun to be a teacher, and Kumiko realizes after a while, when the leading gang in the class opens up to her, however slightly, that it really isn’t that hard. She falls in love with teaching all too quickly.
She really dislikes the Head Teacher though, and secretly sniggers at the names that her students call him. They have ingenuity, and she’s secretly proud of them.
-0-
Kumiko has contacts in the strangest of places, and she’s not afraid to use them.
Noda is an idiot and accidentally incurs a gigantic financial debt of about a million yen, even though he swears up and down that he did no such thing, and that he only borrowed a hundred yen from the swindler.
Kumiko doesn’t know how to deal, because the lender is someone who has power in society and she’s been taught that when dealing with people of power, one has to go about it carefully. It’s fine and dandy to go in with guns blazing when it’s a gang up against another gang, but when she’s up against a CEO of a huge and fairly famous business, she’s stumped.
She drags Noda – and by dragging Noda, his friends trail after them, so she is essentially bringing everyone – to her little house, and calls Izuna, putting him on speaker.
Izuna was a dropout, but he is high up in the world now, and Kumiko hopes that he can solve this for her.
“Kumiko?” Izuna asks, and Kumiko ignores the frantic whispers of “it’s a guy, Yankumi is talking to a guy, how does she even know a guy?!” behind her.
“What do I do if I want to expose a CEO of a big company as an idiot who tries to swindle stupid kids who are even bigger idiots out of their money?”
“Kumiko,” Izuna sighs, loud and long-suffering, and Kumiko can practically hear him shake his head. “Give me a moment, I’ll be right there.”
“Right,” she tells him, and hangs up.”
She flops backwards onto the beanbag and reaches around for a random book that’s strewn on the floor, and picks it up to read. It just so happens that the book is the one that teaches them how to kill a man in a hundred different ways – the sequel to the one that taught them fifty – and she hides her smirk when she hears the sharp intake of breaths by her students.
“Yankumi,” Kumai says. “What is that?!”
“It’s a book,” Shin answers for her, and she lowers the book long enough for her to nod her head and roll her eyes, before she goes back to re-reading the book.
Someone crashes in through the door at this opportune moment, dressed in a suit with messy hair and blue eyes. The students scramble and gasp a loud ‘EHHHHH-” while Kumiko launches herself at the man.
“Izuna!” She exclaims. “Meet my cute students!”
Izuna takes a look at them before scoffing. “They’re not cute,” he tells her even as his hands automatically wrap around her thighs, keeping her upright as she clings to him. “They look like delinquents, but worse.”
“Oi!” Minami calls out, and Izuna laughs.
“You needed help right?” He mentions, and Kumiko nods.
The two discuss details right there and then while her students look around in confusion.
Kumiko is just Yankumi to them, an idiot teacher that is irritating but mildly interesting at the same time. But Tadashi Izuna is no such person. He is the boss of the new business chains that are spreading around Japan and even in places like America and China and he is famous.
Their minds are blown when they try to relate Yankumi to Izuna because it’s just not possible.
“You guys should pay attention to Kumiko,” Izuna suddenly tells them. “She taught me all the Mathematics I needed to know, including stocks and statistics and all kinds of stuff. The main reason I’m good in business now is because of her.
“I was a drop out too, once, you know?” He adds thoughtfully, and lets only Kumiko see his smile when her students collapse upon each other like dominos.
Only Shin is relatively unaffected, but he looks like he’s thinking very hard on something.
Some sort of plan is decided without the help of the boys, and all Kumiko does is pat Noda on the shoulder and scold him for being an idiot before assuring him that this problem will be solved very soon.
Izuna departs with a short “Kazuma wants to meet up with you soon” and Kumiko bounces over to her students.
Three of them think that maybe associating themselves with Kumiko might have been too much for them. They’re possibly in over their heads.
Shin doesn’t tell them that it’s true.
-0-
Noda’s debt issue gets solved in a heartbeat, and his actual debt of about a hundred yen just disappears into thin air, and when Noda dares to breach the topic on his debt, Kumiko gets this smile on her face and Noda freaks out.
“He’s ruined,” Kumiko tells Noda. “That’s all you need to know.”
Noda doesn’t want to find out the extent of control Izuna has, and by that, the extent of control Kumiko has on Izuna. Kumiko alone is a force to be dealt with, but with Izuna, the top businessman of Japan?
Noda thinks that they might be the ultimate death duo.
He shudders when he thinks about them dressed in capes and spandex, going around destroying corrupt CEOs and gangsters who involve themselves in bad stuff, like violence and not fights.
“Shin,” he tells the teen when the four of them are gathered at his house, one of their usual haunts. “I think Yankumi is pretty dangerous.”
“So?” Shin asks, and Noda rolls his eyes.
Shin’s always been attracted to things that are possibly very dangerous and maybe life-threatening.
Kumai agrees with Noda and tells Shin that Yankumi might be a bit too dangerous for Shin to love.
Shin shrugs and goes back to playing on his console.
Noda buries his face in his hands to mourn the loss of his friend.
Shin is going to die one of these days, he just knows it.
-0-
When Kumiko teaches at Kurogin, after her old school closed down – and what a shame that was, it used to be perfect and friendly and amazing after she taught there and then it closed down – she falls in love with her teaching job all too quickly again.
She spends a lot of money on long calls to her gang, telling them about how they’re all so troublesome and remind her so fondly of how they used to be, themselves, as a gang, and it feels like she’s fifteen and wondering if a gang is something fun.
Kumiko arranges a meeting with them, in the house, at the usual time on a Saturday afternoon, and she awaits that date excitedly.
But in the end, she’s too busy for it, because her cute student can’t come to school due to his debt. And she’ll help pay off his debt to get her to come to school, if it’s the last thing she does.
Her gang watches her toil away at construction sites, and they sigh and they roll up their sleeves – some are wearing brand name shirts, with expensive dress jackets and cufflinks but they roll them up nonetheless, and join in the work, even for only a while. They get paid, obviously, and they give all of their money to Kumiko.
(“T-T-T-Tadashi Izuna-san!” The construction boss practically screeches when he sees the man approach him with sleeves rolled up to his elbows and dirt smudged on his cheek.
“Can a few of my friends help out with the building?” Izuna asks and jerks his thumb over his shoulder at the group of men hanging around the construction site. “We’d like to get paid at the usual pay too.”
“O-O-O-Of course, Tadashi-san!” The fat man stammers out.
Izuna sighs, and rolls his eyes when his gang laughs at him, because he commissioned this construction group to build one of his new buildings in the new business chain that he has recently set up, and when he had called for this group to help build the building he had not intended for he himself to participate in it.
“Izuna!” Kumiko calls out, bright and cheerful despite the long hours she must have worked and the aching seeping through her body, and Izuna sighs.
She saved all of them once, and now they would do anything for her.
If she has done all of this intentionally, Izuna thinks as he throws himself into the grueling work, like they used to, done all that back then in the hope of leading to this, of getting people to trust her without a doubt and getting them to help, Kumiko would be a very dangerous person.
She’s already dangerous, and deadly and efficient, but she’s all that in a good way.
If she had bad intentions, Izuna thinks that she might have taken over the world by now.)
Kumiko beams at them, and they scoff and roll their eyes and kick at the gravel on the pavement.
She makes them feel, even though they’re all business tycoons or cold and unfeeling prosecutors or playboys who don’t open their hearts to anybody.
They’re her gang from now to forever, and that’s the kind of loyalty Kumiko inspires in anyone who meets and gets to know her.
-0-
When Odagiri Ryu throws Kumiko’s hard earned money back in her face, Kagami is all for it to go and beat up the high school boy.
Odagiri Ryu, he seethes, and the liquid fire in his veins burn and burn and burn.
“Don’t be an idiot and go off rushing into things,” Hisuke tells him, pulling at his arm and dragging him to the couch when Kagami starts pacing again. “Kumiko has to deal with this by herself. If she’s not asking for help, then we shouldn’t butt into her life.”
“But Kumiko,” Kagami protests, even as he sinks into the couch and sighs. “She was crying. I haven’t heard her cry in a long time.”
Hisuke tenses. “She was crying?”
“Yeah, you didn’t know?”
Hisuke’s eyes harden, and the blue swirls from calm to stormy and dangerous and Kagami sits up. “Forget playing nice, this idiot made Kumiko cry, he’s going to die.”
This time, it’s Kagami’s turn to pull Hisuke back.
“Listen to your own words for once,” he advises the redhead, and Hisuke growls at him.
They spend the rest of the night in their bachelor pad discussing ways to make Odagiri Ryu feel pain, suffer, or die in the most painful way possible.
Somewhere along the way, alcohol is involved, and phone calls are made, and they come to a very sudden revelation.
Kazuma is the boss of the very bar that Odagiri Ryu works at. Or, now that they know this piece of information, used to work at.
They call Kumiko up, and the silence over the phone when they tell her this information is deafening.
“He’s probably getting beaten up if he wants to leave,” Kagami concedes. “But only if he’s learnt his mistake and is trying to leave.”
“I have to go then,” Kumiko tells him, and Kagami sighs. Hisuke takes the phone from him and launches into a thirty second long tirade on how Kumiko’s students really don’t appreciate her, and should learn to “adore their sensei more, because Kumiko is brilliant, dammit, and she can teach idiots how to do wonders!”
“It’s alright, Hisuke,” she says, and Hisuke can hear the smile in her voice. “They’re just teenagers. Like Yosuke. He made mistakes too, you know?”
“Yeah, and now he’s the leader of one of the largest organized crime syndicates in Japan.”
“But he’s not dealing with bad stuff! His half-gang half-clan is like the Oedo clan, isn’t it?”
Hisuke grumbles and hangs up.
Kumiko goes off to rescue Odagiri Ryu.
Kagami still isn’t pleased that Odagiri Ryu won’t be punished.
-0-
Kazuma gets there a moment after Kumiko does, and he leans against the bar top, arms folded and hooded eyes.
He watches as Kumiko beats up the idiots who attacked her students, gave them a thorough lashing, and knocked them all into submission. The idiots try to escape, through the back door, knocking each other down in their hurry to run away.
He stands in front of the back door, feet apart and hands clenched into fists at his side.
“What a coincidence,” he grins toothily at them, eyes gleaming. “Isn’t it a beautiful night today?”
They shudder and look to head in the other direction, but Kumiko is there and blocking the door and they are trapped in between two sharks of different kinds. Both of whom would be very pleased to introduce them to dead ends of different kinds.
Kazuma downs all of them one more time, piles them on top of each other and loads them into the wagon he’s brought. The wagon brings back fond memories of the gang following Kumiko around and fighting to help others, and the dried bloodstains that have long since faded into the wood is a nice reminder of the power they used to hold in Japan.
He gives a two fingered salute to Kumiko, catches Ryu’s eye and glares at him for a good three seconds, a glare that promises pain and suffering and everything that hurts if the student dares to make Kumiko cry again, and whistles as he drags the wagon full of unconscious gang wannabes.
He’s going to dump them at the countryside, strip them of their electronic devices and money, possibly leave them only a few pieces of clothes to share amongst themselves, and not do anything else.
He already has the countryside in mind, and there are no trains stopping by there. In fact, it’s on another island altogether that can only be reached via plane.
Kazuma smirks, and types out a message to the old gang. They’re probably going to want to drop in on the fellas a couple of times at the countryside, each.
-0-
Odagiri Ryu is an idiot, but he’s not particularly dumb.
He was upset at being forced to stop going to school, and when he first joined the club to work, it was to take his mind off things, like Hayato and his group of friends and his father and the fact that he couldn’t go to school. He didn’t like the teachers, the superintendent, or the teaching system and how all the teachers practically gave up on 3-D, but he wanted to learn.
And being kicked out of a place where he could learn some things, no matter how few, was a hit to his heart.
The club was a distraction, but he soon grew to enjoy the buzzing of the beat, the drumming of the noise and the continuous disco lights. The pay was okay, the people there seemed fine, and his colleagues were nice to him. They accepted him and offered a listening ear, even though they were probably old enough to be his father.
He had wanted to fit in, because he couldn’t reclaim his former place back in school.
Ryu honestly hadn’t realized that Kumiko had worked so hard to get the money.
And when he did realize, he didn’t want to continue this façade of sucking up to his colleagues just to sort-of-not-quite fit in. This new teacher was interesting, she seemed to accept them, and she had tried her very damn best to help him.
She had believed him, when he had sprouted such a goddamn lie, and Ryu was embarrassed.
It doesn’t help that she seems to have contacts in high places either. How she, a high school teacher, knows Kazuma-san, blows his mind. He’s pretty certain that Kazuma-san doesn’t interact with many people, only those he deems important enough to be in his presence – even Ryu hasn’t met him, only heard horror stories of him and his immense power over the entire club.
He slings his bag over his shoulder, and his lips twitch up very slightly when he walks into the school and sees her smiling at him.
His lips twitch up a bit higher when he sees Hayato, and Hayato’s eyes shine for a moment too long, before bags are thrown to the ground and fists are wrapped up in the front of shirts and words of a fight are spread.
Ryu doesn’t really know how to talk, and Hayato doesn’t really know how to either, but the language of their fists is something both of them understand, and now, a language that their teacher understands.
It forges a sense of camaraderie.
-0-
Kumiko loves her students. She loves the trouble they cause for her, the bright eyes they have when they are excited and delirious with happiness, and everything and anything about them.
They are her everything, from now to infinity, and they will forever be her students.
It’s what she tells them, the same thing she once told her gang when they graduated on the same day, when they met in the house in their school uniforms with their graduation certificates in their hands.
They photocopied enough for each of them, and they all kept a copy of each other’s graduation certificate.
Kumiko keeps hers in her cupboard, in a plastic folder, letting it stand out proud and bold and precious. It’s the thing she treasures most next to the picture of her and her family, and it ties with the current pictures of her students that she has on her table, as well as the picture of her gang crowded together after a particularly trying ‘Dance Revolution’ match.
They are sweaty and idiots and young and not in love but very much in friendship and they promise to be together forever and ever.
Kumiko wants her students to know that, know this feeling of perfection and treasure it for the rest of their lives, because no matter what anyone says, friendship forged during high school can and will last throughout an entire lifetime.
She still feels a bit sad about not having anyone that is really there for her, like a life partner, or a, dare she say it, boyfriend.
She’s long past the age where she goes cuckoo over having a crush and mulling about spring and falling in love, but she still goes on about it to entertain her students.
She thinks that love is too overrated anyways, and no one has come anywhere close to even possibly defeating her in a fair fight.
The boy with black hair and blacker eyes has grown up and grown out of her life, and she mulls over the fact that they might have had something someday, if she had chosen differently.
Sometimes, when she sits at the side of the house and stares at the rain pouring down, she wonders what love feels like. What that unexplainable feeling is, the thing that drew her mother to her father, that made them promise themselves to each other for eternity, that made them want to be together forever.
She thinks of highlighted hair and onyx eyes and a tilted smile, and wonders some more.
Sometimes, she calls up Yagami and invites him over for her to complain about her lack of a love life, even at her age.
He listens, and he’s been the best listener of all of them since they were young, and Kumiko appreciates it.
-0-
Kumiko loves her gang, but sometimes they are a bit overbearing, and try to do too much too soon just for her.
She loves them all the same, but when she sees Yosuke’s gang trying to intimidate Ren and Yamato she bursts into laughter. It ruins the effect, because the two of them have already seen her and are trying to gesture to her to help, or at the very least, distract the gang so that they can escape, and she just suddenly bursts into laughter.
It doesn’t help that she’s actually taken off her glasses and her hair ties too, which is a usual indication of her getting into her yakuza persona and ready to defend her students.
“Who’s the girl?!” A lackey yells, curse words spitting out of his mouth as he swaggers over. “Watcha’ doin’ here, ya bi-”
He doesn’t finish his sentence when a man with a scar on his eye and colored hair stalks over and smashes his face into the floor.
The people behind stare in shock, Ren and Yamato are in shock, and Kumiko is trying to stop laughing so hard. She’s pretty certain that the gang was actually there trying to warn the two teens, but somewhere along the way Ren and Yamato must have pissed them off, and they forgot their original intended purpose. It sounds very possible and Kumiko has to puff out her cheeks to stop herself from laughing again.
“Ojou,” the man bows his head in deference to her, and Kumiko chokes out a laugh.
“He got you guys to call me Ojou as well? Tetsu, you don’t have to call me that.”
“Ojou is Ojou,” he tells her in all seriousness, and a couple of the men from the gang surrounding Ren and Yamato nod in agreement. “We apologize for the misconduct of our men.”
“I won’t tell Yosuke about it, you don’t have to worry,” Kumiko tells them, striding forward and wrapping her arms around the shoulders of her boys. “And if you’ll excuse me, I’ll collect these two and make my way home. You guys should drop by sometime, I don’t see all of you nearly enough!”
They bow, Tetsu’s foot pushing the lackey’s face further into the ground, and Kumiko drags her boys out of the alleyway and into the sunlight.
“Why do you even know them?!” Ren yells at her, eyes wide, and Kumiko thinks that she can detect an undercurrent of fear and maybe awe but mostly disbelief. “They’re dangerous people, and okay, you’re quite dangerous too, and you haven’t answered my question of where you learnt to fight but they’re very dangerous, they’re practically like a real gang! Almost yakuza! What are you doing knowing them, and they call you Ojou!”
“You’re freaky, Yankumi,” Yamato tells her, and Kumiko blinks at them.
“I… just know them? I mean, Yosuke’s their leader, and I know Yosuke, so… I know them?”
Ren hopes that his teacher doesn’t die someday because of her stupidity and her obliviousness. Yamato tells him that that wish is stupid because Yankumi will most probably do that.
Or not, if she has contacts in the strongest and most notorious gang in Japan.
-0-
Ren is smart for his age, and he has his own contacts in his own places and one of his lesser-known talents is tracing. He can trace a person down to their parents’ great grandparents, their best friend in middle school and their first kiss. Alternatively, he can trace when was the last time they went anywhere, if he wants to.
Yamato knows that he can do this, and they often engage in tracing random teachers that they dislike.
It’s the first time that they’re tracing a teacher they sort of like, and it’s a shock when she has practically no information on her. All they know is that she’s young, single, orphaned at seven and lives with her grandfather. They know that she is in the yakuza, or at least affiliated to it, because they’ve been to her house, but if they hadn’t been to her house, they doubt that they would have known, which leads them to the question of why they can’t trace her.
They try their hand at digging into her background just a bit more, and all of a sudden, something pops up at the bottom of Ren’s computer screen. It’s a shimeji, one of those cute avatars that can move around the desktop and respond to the windows opened on the screen, or the mouse.
This one freaks them out a bit, because it can talk, and it’s playing around with the coding on the computer.
“You should stop trying to dig into Kumiko’s background,” it tells the two of them, the high and cutesy robotic voice coupled with it’s cute appearance starkly contrasting against the threats it spouts at them. “If you keep trying, I can’t guarantee what happens to you, your life’s information, and your computer.”
It grins and tilts its head at them, and it would be cute if Ren and Yamato weren’t so freaked out.
Ren swallows and quickly closes the tab, the window, the application, and sits back with his hands folded in his lap, Yamato following suit. The shimeji smiles at them, before tilting its head to the side in a considering manner, and it sort of startles the pair of boys.
“Oh wait…” It says, rummaging through the stack of folders in its mini briefcase. “You’re that Ren and Yamato. Kumiko’s students. Eh, then I suppose even if you find out, it’s not that big a deal. And what you do find out, it’ll be little and better for your head and life if you kept it to yourself. Unless you already know her family secret, which you…” It digs further into its briefcase, and Yamato stares at it like it’s an alien. It sort of is. “You already know! So it doesn’t matter much then! Oh, and tell her that the next meet-up is in Tokyo. Further details will be emailed to her. Fare thee well, and have a nice day~”
It hums and jumps and hops into a car that drives into the screen and later drives out of it, and Ren blinks at the screen for a moment before turning and blinking at Yamato.
Yamato blinks back, and the two of them shudder.
They like their electronics, they do, and that shimeji was nightmare-worthy. It was terrifying. The things it could have done to the computer was horrifying.
They wonder why Kumiko knows someone like that.
-0-
Sawada Shin is a boy with no sense of self-preservation. He does stupid things, he says idiotic stuff, but when he sets his mind to doing something, he leaves Kumiko speechless over and over again.
He says that he’s fallen in love with her, and Kumiko doesn’t believe it. She goes pink and nails him in the gut with a right hook and he groans and collapses. Kumiko lets him fall to the ground and she stares at him.
Love? She doesn’t recognize it. She’s had crushes, on the current Kuro clan head, on Shinohara-san, on Kujo-san, on Natsume-san, and she is familiar with the fluffy feeling in her heart whenever she sees them, the desperate need to get their attention, the desire to show off in front of them and look attractive.
But Sawada Shin, Sawada Shin, the first gang leader that she has ever taught, she feels nothing of the sort.
Kumiko tells Shin all of the above, tries to let him down gently, but Shin laughs at her.
“You tell me that your heart kicks against your chest when you see me sometimes,” Shin starts, stepping closer to her and backing Kumiko against the wall. “You don’t need to get my attention, you already have it. And you don’t feel the need to show off in front of me because I already know all the different sides to you, and I love you for all of those, and I don’t need any more reasons to.”
He smirks at her, and leans down, and Kumiko punches him in the solar plexus and absconds to somewhere safer. Shin falls to his knees and grips his abdomen, and Kumiko is flushed red.
She runs away – she has never run away before and she feels embarrassed, highly embarrassed, because she can face down thirty men and beat them, she can encounter a situation where she is about to lose all of her pride and honor and she can stand firm, but when she gets a confession from her ex-student she runs away. She runs away to the clan compound and into her room, curling up on her bed and pressing speed-dial.
It says something when Yagami, her ‘love guru’, is on speed dial.
Kumiko tells him everything, and he laughs at her, telling her that she’s already long in love with Shin.
She shouts at Yagami and demands for someone with more sense to take over, like Yosuke. Yosuke listens to her plight, and gives the same verdict as Yagami, just a tad more somber and an undercurrent of sadness running through his voice, which makes Kumiko believe him.
“You’re growing up,” he tells Kumiko. “You’ve always been the youngest of all of us, even though you’re our leader, and you growing up seems a bit strange to us. We don’t really want you to grow up.”
“Oh,” Kumiko replies, and as she has nothing more to say, she hangs up. She goes to ask her grandfather for advice instead, and he tells her to just go with her instinct. If she feels like it’s right, then it’s most probably right.
She tells him that that isn’t much help, and he laughs at her.
Kumiko feels like most people are just laughing at her nowadays.
-0-
Kumiko is a teacher at Akadou academy, and her colleague is one very familiar Odagiri Ryu, and sometimes, occasionally, maybe, her husband drops by to give her the forgotten lunch, or even forgotten chopsticks.
He still has highlighted hair and dangerous eyes and he loves scaring her students into submission. He almost gives Vice Principal Sawatari Goro a heart attack when he first comes by to give Kumiko her bento and drops a kiss on her lips.
“Y-You’re… Sawada Shin!” Sawatari screams at him, before slapping a hand across his mouth and looking around to see if anyone heard. The entire staff room is deadly silent and everyone is looking at Sawatari, trying to understand that outburst.
“I am,” Shin replies, raising an eyebrow, and hooking a arm around Kumiko’s waist.
“You’re dating a student!” Sawatari hisses at Kumiko, and everyone in the staff room gasps.
“Ex-student,” Shin corrects, and Kumiko elbows him lightly, warning him to not give Sawatari cheek, because in the end Sawatari is still her superior. “And I’m not dating her,” he adds smugly.
“We’re married.”
Kumiko thinks that Baba-sensei has a hilarious look on his face, while Ryu looks like he just swallowed a lemon, and Sawatari looks… He looks like he’s just been put in charge of tens of thousands of 3-D classes. It’s a funny expression, and Kumiko has to hide her face in Shin’s neck to hide her laughter.
Shin presses a kiss to her forehead and saunters out of the staff room, and all of a sudden, everything is a buzz.
“I thought you liked Natsume-san!” Sakura tells her, and Kumiko laughs.
“I did, but I liked Shin even more.”
Ryu pokes her on the shoulder and drags her up and out of the staff room, stopping in the corridor. “You’re married!” He says in a loud stage whisper. “And you didn’t invite us to your marriage?”
“I didn’t actually want it to be a big affair,” she beams at him. “It was mainly just the two of us with my family and my gang. The students of Shirokin Academy threw a party for us later.”
“You should have told us,” Ryu insists, and Kumiko ruffles his hair. She doesn’t question why he ignores the ‘gang’ part, and Ryu doesn’t tell her that all of her students have come into contact with part of her gang somehow or another.
“You can always throw a belated party for us,” she tells him. “I’ll tell the Akadou gang as well. Parties are always fun!”
“So Shin is… what does he work as, anyways?”
“Shin? Oh, he’s the heir to the Oedo clan,” Kumiko smiles. “He wanted to take over so that I could co-rule with him.”
Ryu tries not to faint at that admission, and barely manages it. His knees feel weak.
Kumiko is truly a yakuza heiress right now, and he turns to bang his head against the wall.
Hayato would have a field day with this.