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Fact: Makoto understood that she liked Derek. This had been something tucked away in her database for a while.
Fact: Though unverified, some pieces of conversation have been stored into her database that suggest that there’s approximately a 73.5% chance that he likes her back in some way.
Those were the most verifiable points at the front of her head right now. The parts that she was easily able to write into her diary, which she was becoming much better at writing in, like every other girl in her class that seemed to have one.
They were, as majority of her classmates (and Alexa at some point) had categorized it as, ‘the easy parts’.
These must be the hard parts, then.
Fact: Both her and Derek, if this feeling of ‘like’ is mutual, seem to like each other in a way that does not fit the classifications for a relationship in the traditional sense that she is aware of it as.
Or a friendship.
There was nothing in her database that offered any kind of classification for this degree of like, and it made her hesitant to categorize it as ‘love’, which brought into existence a clarity error—if she is familiar with these facets of her and Derek’s relationship, why is it so difficult to find a label for it? Things were rarely ever difficult for her—
Except for love. Of course. That was known.
It wasn’t like her father knew much about love, at least the love that a girl her age should be experiencing—at least from what information she could collect about what girls her age did and felt. She had no information in her database concerning that. Not from him. Alexa could not offer anything sufficient, considering her emotional output levels sat at an outstanding 4.328%—the lowest she’s ever seen in a human. T.O.B.O.R seemed to have as much in his database about love as she did, if not less, and she couldn’t say she knew—and oddly enough, trusted—anyone else in the lab enough to request an answer to any of her queries. They sat queued in the back of her mind, untouched and itching at her in a way she’d never felt before.
Loitering at Club Candy didn’t seem to help her case either—while the sensory output of the explosions inside of the laboratory was enough for her to effectively control if she went up to her room, the sensory output here was much too overwhelming for anything in her database to be properly organized. It wasn’t just her auxiliary sensors—it was something else. Something she could feel, couldn’t feel, feel all at once. Something simulating something else. Something that warranted a tapping, something twitching at her sides, a discordant rocking in place and tapping near her eye socket that gave her systems the chance to regulate again, even if just for a moment. It didn’t give her much room to process anything in her mind, though—and she kept feeling some odd pit of dread settle in her stomach whenever she tried to speak with anyone in there.
That was odd. She doesn’t remember ever feeling that before, either.
Fact: In a broader scale of things, though the input and output of people in the laboratory was frequent enough to sustain a decent count of individuals in the building at once, and though the same could be verified for Club Candy, Makoto may as well be completely alone.
Fact: Makoto, for the first time in her life, was helplessly confused.
Unverified fact: It might be the same for Derek.
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So. The girl he likes.
Everyone’s been asking him about her. Everyone. His aunts, especially. About her interests, about her dislikes, about her life and what she wants for it—it felt more like an interrogation to see if she’d end up disencouraging his bad behavior or if she’d just end up fostering even more of it. Everyone just seemed to be looking for a means to tame him, and if a girl would do it, then so be it. It’d be better for them and for him, but mainly for them—all they cared about was making sure he didn’t get into any more trouble. That was it. Their perception of him was meant to lead his entire life, almost.
The past could never just be the past, could it?
The way he saw it, he couldn’t care any less about the questions they asked him, though he found that vague answers said in the most disinterested way possible was the quickest way to get them off his back. To him, Makoto was just a girl he liked. Someone he thought was kind of cute. He didn’t see it as anything to be hounded over. There wasn’t any reason to be so irritating over a girl!
It didn’t stop being any less irritating when he found out why.
The general expectation for a delinquent like him was simple—find someone or something that makes him stop doing the things he does. (or did, in this case.) If it’s something, devote his life to it until the behavior washes away. If it’s someone, date them, settle down with them, something. That’s what Shirley told him. Settling down wasn’t anything mandatory for him, but he was expected to date her, at the very least, and she was expected to tame him. Yeah, date her—date her like all of those leads in those cheesy rom-dramas that end up kissing under the rain after some big scene is caused by some misunderstanding of something or other—yuck! He swears there was a reason he kept asking his aunts to turn it off whenever it came on.
And sure, him working with MorcuCorp was a bad idea, even if it was just for the cash, and sure, he was still pissed off at Agent Loser-Face for catching him in the act, and sure, the swarm of insults she hurled his way simply with a glare didn’t do much to quell that anger—but why did they have to make it about a girl???? He couldn't even like anyone without everyone making it about how much of a delinquent he was. He didn’t even like like her!
Not like that, anyway.
-
That was the part he didn’t want to tell anyone. That part that a disinterested drawl couldn’t cover without him suddenly feeling wrong.
Derek liked Makoto. He liked the way she talked, even if she admitted that she thought she sounded stranger than the other girls in her class, he liked the way she looked, he liked pretty much everything there was to like about her—but Derek had seen romance, and it wasn’t…that.
The worst part was this—he didn’t just want to be friends with her.
How were you supposed to explain that to someone!?!?
Was there some kind of way to be with her without….y’know…all of that?
Fort Derek was the only place he could go to think about that. It felt like exile for a while, but it began to feel as comfortable as it did when he first made it once that while passed. There wasn’t a single loser in this city that could tell him a thing about his own feelings, and he was sure of it.
If only he could tell himself what they really were…
-
The loud, rainbow colored, energy drink laden, boosted speaker boasting atmosphere of Club Candy and the oddly quiet confines of Fort Derek seemed like they were a world away. And the laboratory in the Industrial District didn’t do much to bridge the gap. If anything, it made the gap wider.
They might as well have been a world away, considering their reputations were just as distant as the places they resided in—the map-stealing delinquent who was (keyword: was) tied up with Morcubus before he got humbled and sent back to a prison of his own making, (though it didn’t really feel like one) and the clean cut, (for the most part) oddly robotic, strangely intelligent schoolgirl who could carry eons more than her own body weight and execute every task granted to her with ease. And their backgrounds were even more so apart—it’s not often you find some kid roaming around the city by himself with his aunt barely looking at him unless he misbehaves and his other aunt barely being in his presence (at least he thinks so), but it’s not often you find a girl whose father is a mad scientist, either.
Maybe the meetings they have in the city every once in a while do something to bring them closer. Derek likes to hope it does.
Maybe they were only united in feeling.
Who knows? Maybe someday, they’ll both figure it out.