Work Text:
First-year New Year’s break, Nagano.
“Eijun, don’t tell me you already put it in.”
Sawamura Eijun stiffened. Instinctively, he hid the game console behind his back.
“What if I said... nothing happened...?”
“Then that means you already put it in.”
Wakana held up the piece of paper that had arrived with the cartridge, her expression complicated. “The only time I’ve ever seen letters made out of printed characters cut from different places and pasted together like this is in ransom notes and death threats on TV.”
Beside her, Nobu had already taken the cartridge out of the console and was turning it over in his hands, inspecting it from every angle.
“...The construction doesn’t look any different from an official cartridge. The contacts aren’t very worn either, so it probably hasn’t been used much. Is it brand new?”
“That is so not the point!” Wakana pressed a hand to her forehead. “Why would you dare play something when you have no idea where it came from?”
Sawamura defended himself in a small voice. “But... the instructions looked really interesting... And when I asked Dad to find me a console, the cartridge was already inside. It didn’t give any errors when I turned it on...”
Nobu leaned closer to Wakana, adjusted his glasses, and carefully deciphered the mismatched characters in the instructions.
“‘Is there anyone in the real world you want to keep an eye on? Recreate them in the game! Understanding interpersonal relationships from a god’s-eye view can help you in the real world too~’”
Silence filled the room for two seconds.
“...What part of that sounds interesting?”
“This!” Sawamura immediately shoved the console in front of them.
Two chibi characters in their default outfits were playing catch in an empty field.
The ball flew over.
The ball flew back.
The light, everyday background music looped endlessly. Half a minute passed, and the animation still hadn’t changed.
Nobu silently looked away. Wakana, however, remained where she was, narrowing her eyes slightly as she stared at the two little faces.
Nope. Other than the fact that they both had brown hair and brown eyes, and one wore glasses while the other didn’t, she couldn’t make out any other distinctive features from the character creator at all.
Wakana glanced at Sawamura’s intensely focused expression. Suddenly remembering that he had spent the entire past year in Tokyo studying baseball, inspiration struck her.
“Is... one of these you?”
A blush slowly crept across Sawamura’s face. He pointed at the one without glasses and said nothing.
“...I’ve played character-creation games on the computer before. Want me to help you redo it?”
The girl’s voice was like music from heaven.
Sawamura’s eyes lit up instantly. “Really?!”
He respectfully presented the console to her with both hands, an invisible Shiba Inu tail wagging furiously behind him.
Face shape, eyes, eyebrows, nose... Wakana hadn’t expected the character creator to break the face down into so many different settings. Without changing expression, she slid through the options one by one, until she found an unfamiliar category at the very bottom: facial markings.
The experienced Lady Wakana understood immediately.
“Go find me a stylus.”
“Yes!”
————
As the model, Sawamura went from sitting perfectly upright on his knees, full of energy, to slumping over the edge of the table, barely able to keep his eyes open.
By the time Wakana finally set down the stylus, Nobu happened to be finishing an enormous yawn.
Fighting off his sleepiness, he rubbed his eyes and looked at the newly remade character on the console. His eyes widened.
“...It looks like a completely different person.”
Sawamura Eijun leaned over for a look and fell silent for a very long time.
For once, Wakana sounded uncertain. “Did I go too far with it...?”
Before she could finish, Sawamura suddenly sniffed. Then his eyes filled with the exact same sparkles as the chibi character on-screen, and he gazed at her in worship.
“Wakana!”
“Hm?”
“Please redo the other five too!”
No one can say no to a puppy.
No one.
The next morning, Wakana visited the Sawamura household again.
“Did you find all the photos I asked for yesterday?”
“Besides the pictures I already sent you, the other two are both in this magazine!”
Wakana glanced at the open copy of Baseball Kingdom and immediately spotted a familiar photograph.
Seidou’s savior—Miyuki Kazuya.
She looked down at the screen. Sure enough, he was the other glasses-wearing protagonist from yesterday’s catch animation.
As Sawamura opened the editing menu, he couldn’t help complaining.
“Don’t let Miyuki Kazuya’s upright, respectable look in photos fool you! When he’s around me, he’s a total bastard tanuki! Wakana, can you make him look more like a bastard?”
“What does ‘make him look more like a bastard’ even mean?”
“Hmmmm...” Sawamura frowned. “He’s always tricking me by promising to catch my pitches, and he makes fun of me all the time in everyday life, but... but when we’re playing baseball, there’s nobody more reliable than him...”
“Sounds like he’s specifically picking on you.”
“No!” Sawamura thought about it for a long time and eventually became confused himself.
“I don’t think he means anything bad by it. It’s just...” Sawamura abruptly slapped the table. “Right! He likes making me mad!”
Sawamura slowly exhaled and sprawled sideways across the desk in front of Wakana. “That’s it... I don’t understand why I’m the only person he keeps picking on. That’s why I wanted to put him in the game and see what he’s actually thinking.”
“I see.”
Without changing expression, Wakana silently replaced the smirking mouth she had originally selected with a catlike :3 mouth.
The soft scratching of the stylus against the screen was strangely hypnotic, and drowsiness gradually crept over Sawamura.
He remembered that Wakana was here because he had asked for her help, so of course he needed to be a good host, but his consciousness slowly began to sink anyway.
Lying in the warm, cozy room, he suddenly mumbled a name.
“...Narumiya Mei...”
“Who’s that?” The sound of magazine pages turning came from beside him.
Half asleep, Sawamura murmured, “The... final boss... I have to defeat...”
Wakana paused her character creation and flipped through the newly saved photos on her phone. Then she cautiously tried another name.
“Furuya Satoru?”
“...My... best rival... won’t let him have Miyuki-senpai...”
“Kominato Haruichi?”
“Uuuuuugh... Haruichi, don’t turn into your big brother, change back, waaaaaah...”
Tears slowly began leaking from the corners of Sawamura’s eyes. Wakana hurriedly asked about the last character.
“Kuramochi Yoichi?”
Wait. She remembered this one. He seemed to be the upperclassman who shared a dorm room with Eijun.
“Cheetah-sama... those steals are so cool... can’t beat the final boss without you... gah... stop choking meeeeee...”
Sawamura’s face twisted painfully, but he soon settled down again and sank into an even deeper sleep.
Outside, heavy snow fell.
By the time Sawamura woke up, it was nearly dark.
Wakana was already gone. In front of him was only a glowing screen in the dim room, playing the animation of two little characters tossing a ball back and forth in an empty field.
“Eijun! Dinner!”
“Coming!”
Sawamura turned off the screen and thundered downstairs.
————
For the rest of New Year’s break, Sawamura Eijun spent every spare moment clutching the game console and attempting to understand “human nature.”
At first, all he did was follow the tutorial: feed each character, decorate their rooms, and buy them clothes. But after Wakana remade all their faces, everything changed.
Sawamura began to feel that the little characters had acquired traits almost uncannily similar to their real-life counterparts.
Chibi Narumiya Mei would actively seek out Miyuki Kazuya and chat with him, eventually becoming friends, while completely ignoring everyone else from Seidou.
Chibi Furuya Satoru would stick close to chibi Kominato Haruichi, while chibi Kominato Haruichi would voluntarily greet chibi Kuramochi Yoichi.
And chibi Sawamura Eijun?
Chibi Sawamura Eijun would stand by intersections, grassy fields, or beaches and toss a baseball into his glove by himself.
And those places just happened to be places chibi Miyuki Kazuya passed through frequently.
Maybe it was because certain things lined up uncannily well with reality. Or maybe it was because leveling up unlocked more freedom in the gameplay. Either way, Sawamura gradually started giving the characters gifts on purpose.
Every day when the clothing shop refreshed, he bought anything that looked suitable regardless of the price. Traditional Japanese kimono for Miyuki Kazuya, a prince outfit for Narumiya Mei, a pale-colored equestrian set for Kominato Haruichi, and so on.
Sometimes Sawamura could spend an entire afternoon simply watching the little characters walk around the island in their new clothes.
Then there was the constantly expanding “micro-personality” gift system, which allowed him to customize everything from walking styles and greeting gestures to eating habits and even appetite size.
Narumiya Mei’s smug hands-on-hips pose, Furuya Satoru’s elegant habit of eating in tiny bites, Kominato Haruichi’s stiff, perfectly straight posture... Sawamura shaped each character bit by bit according to his own understanding of them, until he was practically forgetting to eat and sleep.
“I, Sawamura, have finally given them every single micro-personality trait!”
His eyes gleamed as he watched his own character on-screen wave his arm wildly in greeting.
That was completely and unmistakably Sawamura-sama himself!
At last, every basic setting in the game world was complete.
Now all he had to do was leave them alone, and eventually he’d figure out what Miyuki-senpai was really thinking, right?
Sawamura hugged the console to his chest and fell sound asleep.
The next day, the game seemed to break.
First, while feeding chibi Miyuki Kazuya, Sawamura accidentally gave him a slice of classic chocolate cake.
For the first time, Sawamura saw the special animation that played when a character ate something they absolutely loved.
That couldn’t be right.
I remember Miyuki Kazuya saying he doesn’t like sweets.
Sawamura stared blankly at the screen.
Luckily, he had given chibi Miyuki Kazuya the “big eater” micro-personality trait, so Sawamura cautiously fed him a slice of red velvet cake next.
Chibi Miyuki Kazuya jumped for joy.
Sawamura gave him another, another test: a macaron.
Chibi Miyuki Kazuya jumped for joy again.
Sawamura silently exited the interaction menu and went looking for chibi Narumiya Mei.
One second after he selected Narumiya Mei, the screen went black.
Soft romantic background music began to play.
Chibi Furuya Satoru and chibi Narumiya Mei passed each other.
And then—
Chibi Furuya Satoru suddenly turned around.
The screen overflowed with pink hearts and bubbles.
“I can’t believe I never realized... Narumiya Mei is such a dazzling presence...”
Question marks practically covered Sawamura’s entire head.
When two choices popped up on-screen, he selected “It’s just your imagination...” without even thinking.
“No. It isn’t my imagination. I like Narumiya Mei.”
A determined blush spread across chibi Furuya Satoru’s face. The relationship chart immediately updated.
Furuya Satoru → Love at first sight → Narumiya Mei
Furuya Satoru ← Stranger ← Narumiya Mei
The game didn’t even give Sawamura a chance to chop the romance off at the root.
No.
Wait.
Why was there romance?
Wasn’t this a baseball game?
Why was there romance in a baseball game?
Sawamura tapped his head, frowned, and thought for a very, very long time.
At last, he remembered that the characters had sexual-orientation settings.
“If I left everything on default, all the male characters should be attracted to female characters, right?”
Muttering to himself, he opened Furuya Satoru’s orientation setting.
Male.
Narumiya Mei’s orientation:
Male.
An inexplicable sense of panic crept over him.
One by one, he opened the orientation settings of the remaining four characters.
Every single one of them was set to male.
And he couldn’t change it.
There was definitely something wrong with this game, right?
Sawamura silently turned off the screen and dug out the instructions made from scissors, glue, and pasted-together printed letters.
“‘Is there anyone in the real world you want to keep an eye on? Recreate them in the game! Understanding interpersonal relationships from a god’s-eye view can help you in the real world too~’”
Everyone in the real world is attracted to men?
Impossible!
I’m not!
Ugh. And I wanted this game to help me figure out why Miyuki Kazuya keeps trying to make me mad...
Sawamura let out a long sigh, bundled the game console up in his blankets without much care, and left the room.
On the third day, the game completely broke.
Sawamura woke because the game screen was shining painfully bright in his face.
Outside, the sky was still pitch-black.
Still half asleep, Sawamura checked his phone.
Exactly four in the morning.
His eyelids felt glued together. He fumbled around with his left hand and pressed the power button on the console.
Nothing happened.
He pressed it again.
Soft romantic background music began to play.
The sheer force of association made Sawamura jerk awake immediately.
Squinting through sleep-blurred, watery eyes, he stared at the scene playing on-screen.
Chibi Narumiya Mei stood by the roadside as chibi Miyuki Kazuya walked past him.
And then—
Chibi Narumiya Mei’s eyes suddenly went wide and vacant.
The screen overflowed with pink hearts and bubbles.
“I can’t believe I never realized... Miyuki Kazuya is such a dazzling presence...”
Sawamura immediately chose “It’s just your imagination...”
“No. I like Miyuki Kazuya. I’m going to confess to him.”
A smug blush spread over chibi Narumiya Mei’s face.
Two more options popped up.
Sawamura immediately selected “No way.”
Only then did the farce finally stop.
But the relationship chart had already updated.
Narumiya Mei → Love at first sight → Miyuki Kazuya
Narumiya Mei ← Gets along well ← Miyuki Kazuya
No one knew what Sawamura Eijun thought about while he sat there waiting for sunrise, clutching a game console that refused to turn off.
All anyone knew was that afterward, his entire approach changed.
“Hmmm... No. Narumiya Mei absolutely cannot get together with Miyuki Kazuya.”
“...”
“But according to the relationship chart, Miyuki Kazuya’s current relationship with Narumiya Mei is ‘gets along well,’ and that’s the highest level he has with anyone right now. If I keep letting them move around freely...”
“So what are you planning to do, Eijun?”
Wakana sleepily typed her text reply and let out an enormous yawn.
It was only six-thirty in the morning.
Six-thirty.
During vacation.
“What if I pair Miyuki Kazuya up with someone else, and then pair Narumiya Mei up with someone else too? Wouldn’t that solve the problem?”
“Yeah, yeah... Do that, Eijun. I’m so sleepy, I’m going back to bed. Good night.”
Having received the answer he wanted, Sawamura enthusiastically began sorting through the remaining four characters.
Since Furuya Satoru already had an unrequited crush on Narumiya Mei, then he could just make Furuya Satoru and Narumiya Mei fall in love with each other!
As for Miyuki Kazuya’s partner...
Kuramochi-senpai and Miyuki Kazuya’s current relationship was “Doesn’t seem interested.”
Getting that all the way to romance would be kind of difficult...
And leaving Haruichi alone to deal with Miyuki Kazuya sounded exhausting...
Hmmmmm...
Looks like only Sawamura-sama has the patience to endure Miyuki Kazuya’s teasing!
This difficult mission will have to fall to me!
Having established his overall strategy, Sawamura smiled in satisfaction, his golden-brown eyes gleaming with honey-sweet smugness.
Right up until the end of vacation, when he had to return to school, Sawamura continued pouring every spare second into the game.
You fall in love with him, I confess to you, you get your heart broken, I get married—plots like these erupted over and over, keeping him in a constant state of panic. Only with Wakana’s help did he finally manage to steer everyone’s relationships in roughly the direction he wanted.
It wasn’t until just before boarding the train to Tokyo that Sawamura returned the console to his dad.
“Hm? You can take it back to school with you, you know. Talk about it with your classmates. Maybe develop some interests outside baseball for once.”
“It’s fine! This game isn’t suitable for playing with them, and I already achieved my goal!”
Of course he couldn’t let them see it.
If they found out Furuya Satoru and Narumiya Mei were already each other’s “Irreplaceable Person,” while Sawamura Eijun and Miyuki Kazuya were both listed as “Madly in Love,” he’d probably be interrogated under torture...
The scenery outside the train window flew past.
Sawamura stared blankly at his empty hands.
“Ugh. In the end, I still never figured out why Miyuki Kazuya keeps trying to make me mad. I spent the whole time thinking about how to keep Narumiya Mei and Miyuki Kazuya apart instead, waaaaaah!”
The trip back to school always felt short.
Carrying several large bags, Sawamura returned to the dorm first, dug out the Sawamura-family special rice seasoning his mother had packed for him, and wandered distractedly toward the cafeteria.
Open the familiar refrigerator.
Find an empty space and put the seasoning in.
Close the refrigerator.
...
Wait.
Open the refrigerator again.
Sawamura’s hand began to tremble.
Slowly, he reached toward the food stored deep inside, each item labeled with Miyuki Kazuya’s name.
One slice of classic chocolate cake.
One slice of red velvet cake.
An entire box of macarons.
“Hey, Sawamura.”
A familiar teasing voice came from behind him.
Miyuki slowly leaned over and poked his head into the crook of Sawamura’s neck.
“You want some of those desserts?”
Sawamura didn’t dare turn around.
Rigidly, he asked, “Miyuki-senpai. These. Are all. For you?”
“Mm-hm ❤”
“But I distinctly remember. You saying. You don’t like. Sweets?”
Miyuki buried his face against the crook of Sawamura’s neck and nuzzled him, his voice low and rough.
“I didn’t, before. But for some reason I suddenly started craving them over winter break, so I bought a few things to try.”
“If Sawamura wants any, you can eat whatever you like ❤”
Sawamura’s eyes darted wildly in every direction.
Anywhere except Miyuki.
Then, sharp-eyed as ever, he spotted Furuya approaching.
Furuya was walking while typing on his phone, and the corner of his mouth had lifted by approximately one pixel.
“Furuya! Who are you talking to?!”
Without thinking, Sawamura slipped out of Miyuki’s hold and darted behind Furuya, catching a glimpse of one corner of the screen.
Narumiya-senpai: Did you only get back to school today? That train ride must’ve been really long. Coming all the way from Hokkaido to study in Tokyo sounds like a pain.
Narumiya-senpai: Still, I guess it worked out. If you hadn’t come to Tokyo, I never would’ve had the chance to meet you.
Narumiya-senpai: Next time we meet...
Sawamura couldn’t see the rest.
At that moment, he had no mental capacity to wonder why Furuya and Narumiya-senpai were happily chatting like old friends.
His mind was entirely occupied by the relationship status between chibi Furuya Satoru and chibi Narumiya Mei in the game he had put aside only half a day ago.
Irreplaceable Person.
Then if the relationship between him and Miyuki Kazuya in the game was real too...
Sawamura froze solid.
Miyuki poked him several times.
No response.
Even when Miyuki leaned down and whispered into his ear, “I’ll catch as many pitches as you want today ❤,” it had absolutely no effect.
Now this was strange.
“WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!”
Sawamura suddenly screamed and bolted out of the cafeteria, forgetting to close the door behind him.
Judging from the direction his scream faded into the distance, he was probably heading toward the dorm.
A long while later, Kuramochi opened the refrigerator, took out a cup of pudding, and slowly began eating it.
Miyuki turned slightly and pushed up his glasses with one hand, deep in thought.
“Kuramochi. What happened to Sawamura?”
“Mm... He’s loudly calling home and telling them to send him a game console.”
Kuramochi scooped up another spoonful of pudding.
“But Bakamura never used to play video games, did he? Weird.”