Work Text:
“Wearing a skirt doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a girl, either.”
The sentence keeps playing on repeat in Seki Sakurada’s mind. With no one around to hear when she had quietly whispered the thought, it’s stuck like a looping track in her mind, forcing her to contend with each word alone. Sighing, she sets the heavy sack of charcoal down into the nearby wheelbarrow before leaning back against the truck she had just driven across town (on loan from the Student Union, of all people) and fixing her cap. She tells herself it’s just a quick breather- with Asakusa and the apprentice back inside, nobody will notice her absence for a few minutes at least.
It’s not the first time Sakurada’s had this thought. Actually, it’s something that’s echoed in her mind, in one form or another, ever since that first fateful day of elementary school when she had worn a skirt and the teaching assistant taking attendance had asked her, in a tone marked with confusion over a hint of hostility bubbling beneath:
“You’re a boy, so why are you wearing a skirt?”
Her heart still jumps remembering those words. She hadn’t quite understood the question back then. It was what Sakurada had always worn at home, even then she had intuitively felt that it was just right. She just wanted to wear a skirt. Why would she wear anything else? Looking back, of course, it was all so painfully clear. Hindsight is 20/20, to use a cliche of the sort she always has to consciously remind herself to avoid in her writing.
Speaking of writing: when creating a world and its people, it’s important to remember that individuals usually have their own experiences, views, and beliefs informed by, but not homogenous with, the wider society they inhabit. Shibahama is a pretty progressive place, both in its laws and thus its general culture- more so than many places in the world, and certainly to a much greater degree than she would’ve experienced if she’d been born a few decades prior, going off of what she’s read on the subject. But people don’t change overnight. Even if she is welcome in this country, this city, this school- that doesn’t mean everyone here welcomes her.
Least of all other children, who have yet to form their own experiences and opinions of the world and who thus judge it only by what their parents have shown them. The stares and whispers started that same day. She wasn’t just different for being a boy wearing a skirt, she was weird- the worst possible thing you can be in elementary school. The other kids started to keep their distance, only closing it in the same spirit one would when kicking a dog. And that was before Sakurada realized that perhaps that assistant had had a point- just not in the way he intended. Gradually, it dawned on her that being a boy wearing a skirt was an unsatisfactory situation- not because there was anything inimically wrong with it, but because Sakurada realized what she considered as feeling “right” went deeper than the clothes she wore. She saw other girls, how they looked and moved in their own skirts, and then she looked at herself in the mirror.
She was lucky, she knows, to have her parents. Absent though they often were, they loved her enough to listen as best they could when she told them what she felt was right and wrong- starting with the skirts, through to where she is now. And maybe their frequent absences were a good thing, in a backwards way. It taught her early on that there was no one to run to but herself when life took a sour turn. And it did, pretty quickly. Kids who couldn’t wrap their heads around the concept of a boy wanting to wear a skirt certainly couldn’t be expected to understand puberty blockers, dosages, daily pills and monthly checkups. She still vividly remembers the first time she got her shit kicked in after school- the feel of gravel beneath her fingers, the metallic taste of blood in her mouth. Maybe that, too, had been a valuable teaching moment.
Even before that point, Sakurada had already started holding her peers at an arm’s length. When the world bites you, you have to bite back, don’t you? The first year of classes hadn’t passed before her face settled into its now-distinctive flat grimace, her method of carrying herself calculated to ward off anyone who didn’t have a good reason to get near her. She learned to ignore whispers behind her back, and to return the vitriol when needed. It didn’t hurt that, by pure repetition, she got pretty good at holding her own in a fight. With bloodied knuckles and busted teeth she slowly started to build a name for herself as someone who wouldn’t go quietly into that good night.
But it wasn’t enough to merely be able to defend herself and hold others off when they came at her. If she was ever to be able to live in a modicum of peace, she needed to be respected, to make it clear that nobody could come at her. With her reputation as a delinquent already solidified (not helped by her lack-luster academic performance- she did just enough to get by in spite of her difficulty keeping letters in the same place on the page), she started to double down. It turned out that Sakurada was quite adept at manipulating her vocal chords, after she’d watched some videos online on how to feminize her voice (it certainly wasn’t easy though, as she still cringes remembering her first attempts). She might not have had too many book smarts, but a lightbulb immediately went off in her head once she tried a few impressions. What Sakurada had once considered a burden suddenly became a gift, a unique one at that. Could any other kid impersonate an adult like she did?
She started small- her voice stood in for class skippers at roll call, for parents at conferences. All for an appropriate fee, of course, but the small change wasn’t really the point. In this way, Sakurada made herself useful, an untouchable and valuable necessity for those who would otherwise victimize her while she only got better and better at her craft. Once she had her toehold, she started to ramp up her operations to the offensive. It turned out that many of the toughest bullies and scoundrels in Shibahama would turn tail and run without resistance at even the mere sound of an adult approaching. Many an illicit meeting was broken up by her rainbow voice, the abandoned wares and meal vouchers looted and resold. Anybody who crossed her path quickly found themselves with a phantom army of counselors hounding them into submission, and her voice commanded them to do any job she couldn’t handle herself. Before long, Sakurada was no longer a weirdo or a faggot- she was the Little Rascal of Shibahama, whose flat cap and rainbow voice were feared and respected by all from the Student Council to the Den of Evil…
And where did that leave her? She was no longer a harassed and bullied little girl but the ringleader of her own underworld operation, flush with power and riches. But Sakurada reigned alone. She hadn’t a single true friend to her name- only contacts, vassals, and enemies to deal with. When she went home, the fruits of her day boiled down to only whatever she managed to steal or grift from others- which she didn’t even really need, given that her parents already financed anything she could ever want. Her life consisted of crushing ants beneath her finger purely for momentary amusement, way up at the top with nowhere else to go. Having already clawed her way up to the precarious perch of safety she now held, she told herself that to wish for anything more was to jeopardize what she had. But she knew she was lying to herself.
It was perhaps funny that she had picked up writing as a hobby, given her troubles with written words. Actually, that was part of why she had gotten into it- she had wanted to prove to herself that she could overcome this singular weakness. They were small things at first, just a few sentences of a short story or maybe a couple of paragraphs. Even that was a struggle, but she kept at it. And eventually, with enough practice, she found that she…rather enjoyed it. It was cathartic, in a strange way, to give form to words and thoughts that she otherwise would never be able to express to anyone. To live out lives on paper far more enriched than her own, to give rather than to take joy (even if it was only to fictional characters). Soon enough, her already messy room was filled with guidebooks on narrative techniques and half-read novels, their pages heavily annotated and highlighted next to overflowing notebooks. Her father, when he was around, would do his best to encourage her- “You’ve got a real talent you know, you could be an author one day yourself!” And she wanted to believe that too.
But that was just the thing, wasn’t it? Sometimes Sakurada entertained the idea of someday getting her work published, maybe making a living off of this. But that future was so far off as to not even be really worth contemplating. When she thought about her life and its trajectory, she saw nothing but the present, the struggle to stay on top of each day and hold onto what she had. Writing silly stories had no place in that world, even if she found she rather liked it. And so it stayed strictly in the confines of her room, coming to her in spurts and bursts like water through a clogged pipe, unignorable yet simultaneously unsatisfying.
Things had gone on that way right up until the day she saw the poster for the audition. Some high schoolers were looking for voice actors, huh? Well, it was an easy 100,000 yen and a free meal. More importantly, it was something new, a novel means of flexing her vocal talents. Sakurada didn’t expect anything much to come of it, but at least it might be a stimulating break from her routine…needless to say, she didn’t quite expect to be hunted across the town by a pack of lunatics with seemingly superhuman powers.
The Eizouken were certainly something new to her though. Beneath their reputation (admittedly somewhat deserved) as a gang of thuggish troublemakers well beyond anything Sakurada could hope to achieve, she found that they were in fact…a bunch of weirdos. A pack of four misfits with varying levels of social competence holed up in their fortress of a clubhouse, prone to flights of extremely high-context fantasy, they worked away in the face of seemingly insurmountable pressure from the Student Council’s forces and the adults. Sakurada’s early days of indentured service to the club proved both back-breaking and hazardous- who knew bags of concrete were that heavy?- and she spent almost every moment of it fantasizing her own revenge.
It wasn’t all bad, admittedly. Working with the Eizouken had its perks- for instance, that lovely bath and ramen spot. It didn’t hurt either being under the wing of one of the most feared student organizations in town, who not even the Student Council could suppress (even if that monster Kanamori had thrown her under the bus that one time). And as she spent more time around these girls, reluctant though she was to admit it, Sakurada found herself increasingly drawn into their lives and work.
She remembers that night at the bathhouse, how she had blown up at the other four still working away after dinner. It hadn’t made sense to her then, how they could just get right back to their laptops and notepads after everything that had happened in the preceding 48 hours. Their headquarters had gotten rammed with a truck, for God’s sake! It was impossible, inhuman…she remembers as well how Asakusa had attributed her resilience to her own desire to chase as many wild ideas as she could name. Sakurada had belittled her then- stupid fantasies she’d called them, as she now reflects with a slight impulse of regret. But Asakusa had calmly replied with those words that Sakurada can still hear sometimes, in her meek and child-like voice:
“Imagination is just a burden if you do nothing but hold onto it.”
Something clicked after that. Not immediately, only after she’d gotten home and thrown herself onto her bed, feeling her exhaustion in her bones. She’d tried to compare Asakusa’s silly dreams to her own- only to find that, no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t name a single thing she wanted to do that went past the scale of “next week”. The tears had started then, rolling down her face silently without her even realizing. A shudder went through her body as she tried to reason her way through it. Surely, she was just tired from the day…but she knew it wasn’t that. She glanced about her room- the scattered notebooks, the dog-eared novels, the laptop with a barely started manuscript open. A realization was welling up inside of her, one that had been long coming and could no longer be cut off. She had imagination and dreams after all, the evidence was strewn all over her room. But she also had a choice to make. Half-assing that dream wasn’t viable anymore- she had to decide whether to shed that burden. Through tear-streaked eyes, she started to fumble with her phone, finally landing on a tab she had saved months ago- “Grand Prize winner is guaranteed serialization!”
“Oh…damn, there…there is something…that I want to do.” After a few minutes, she’d gotten up, gone to her desk, and banged out more words that night than in any writing session before.
She’d started going to the Eizouken’s meetings more frequently after that, even when she wasn’t required to. There was something about these girls and their adventurous ways that grew on Sakurada the longer she was around them, even if she couldn’t properly describe it or keep up with their antics all the time. In return, the odd quartet didn’t seem to mind her presence too much. In fact, they welcomed her, even accepting the (admittedly not tactfully communicated) pointers she had felt compelled to give them on their writing. It was a completely alien feeling- perhaps not quite friendship, but…comradeship? The feeling that not only was she accepted somewhere, but valued on the basis of what she could create and provide for others on an equal standing. For the first time in a long time, something felt right about it.
Maybe it helped that they were all at least kind of weird. Weird in the same way that Sakurada used to be considered “weird”. Mizusaki seemed to be the most “normal” of the group, but even she had moments where Sakurada could see she didn’t quite belong anywhere else. As for the others…
Doumeki was right out. They had made that clear the same day she had met them. Of course, at the moment Sakurada had been too afraid for her own life to do anything but nod, but it occurred to her later that Doumeki was the only openly non-binary person she had met. What was it like for them? Sakurada couldn’t imagine their life had been easy, and maybe that reflected in the sound engineer’s tendency towards a solitary, almost ascetic lifestyle. And yet, they still found just the right amount and kind of company in the Eizouken, enough at least to stick around. She could increasingly relate to that.
Kanamori was an interesting case. Sakurada herself, not even out of junior high, already stood head and shoulders over Mizusaki and Doumeki (to say nothing of Asakusa, though granted some larger breeds of dogs would probably outsize her). But the girl with the sharp teeth positively towered over all of them. That lanky and awkward frame with broad shoulders, the husky voice and sharp jaw, the perpetual edge keeping the world at an arm’s length…Sakurada recognized all of that. It felt rude to ask to confirm, but she couldn’t help but feel some kind of kinship towards her “boss”, even if she still scared the shit out of her sometimes. At the least, Kanamori had taken that edge and put it towards something good, protecting something- someone- other than herself.
Then there was Asakusa, who had set off this entire train of thought (Sakurada wonders, distantly, how long she has been out here, before deciding nobody will be likely to notice). She was only out here because the discussion of Asakusa’s clothing choices had set something off in her mind. Even by the standards of this group, the diminutive director was a bit of an enigma. She was quite open about the challenges of her rather unique upbringing, and how that had impacted her own view of the world. This time, it had been her propensity to wear pants and that odd camouflage hat. She’d said then that up and ditching these items would be difficult for her, regardless of what others thought of it. That was certainly something Sakurada could relate to with her own skirt and cap. But it was interesting- Asakusa didn’t identify as a boy as far as she knew, or as non-binary like Doumeki. By all accounts, she was perfectly fine with her assigned gender. She just chose to express it differently. They seemed to have inverse problems; where Asakusa was criticized for wearing clothes that didn’t match her preferred gender, Sakurada was shunned for wearing those that did. The devil was in the details, she supposed. Maybe it went to show that the whole concept of gendered clothing and outward expressions was bunk- but that wasn’t quite right, Sakurada knew. Wearing a skirt was an important expression for her, at least. Maybe it was more that those expectations were inapplicable for some people. You can’t expect someone like Asakusa to play nicely with such rules. People sure are interesting…
At the end of the day, all of these uniquely odd individuals had found each other and banded together for whatever reason. For protection. For cooperation. For the sake of their craft. Where does she fit into all of this in the long run? She doesn’t have the same boundless creative drive, not like Mizusaki and Asakusa and Doumeki. She has smarts like Kanamori, but no experience fending for anyone but herself. Sakurada travels with them on their adventures, and that is more than she had ever expected. But does she really have a place in their world?
She’s suddenly awoken from her daydreaming by voices- Asakusa and Mizusaki excitedly calling out for her to join them before they start the grilling. She smiles a little. Maybe she’ll be alright after all. Belatedly, she realizes the reason this eclectic cast has come together. They’re all here to pursue the way they want to live. And hasn’t she been doing that all along?