This fanfic takes place during the as yet unaired Read or Dream TV
series, and about 6 years after the Read or Die OAVs. It features
continuity from both the anime and the novels/manga, although I
haven't read any of the novels and only the first 3 mangas, so admit
I'm making a lot of stuff up here. It will likely get contradicted
within 10 seconds of the new show, but I don't really care. biggrin
For those unfamiliar with Nenene Sumiregawa, you might check here:
http://www.readordie.org/manga.php?page=characters
Sumiregawa Nenene stormed into her apartment. As always, she
seemed to be angry at something.
"Stupid idiots! Why in God's name am I bothering to help them at
all. Unfocused, airheaded, vacuous, irritating morons! They wouldn't
know how to use paper to wipe their asses, much less actually
accomplish anything with it. I swear, Yomiko, if this keeps up they're
going to pull you out of retirement and... um, why are you all dressed
up?"
She paused in the doorway to the bedroom, staring at Yomiko, who
was wearing a blouse that was actually ironed, and seemed to have tried
to make her hair less of a total mess.
Yomiko reached out and grabbed Nenene. She started for the door.
"You're late. I hope we can make it in time..."
Nenene stopped, pulling Yomiko back. "Whoah! Late for what?"
Yomiko sighed. "Nancy is released today."
Nenene's face shut down for a brief moment. It was scary to see,
as normally her face was a constant flow of emotion, looking very much
like words on a page. Now there was nothing to read in it.
Then she was back to normal. "Right. Sorry, I'd forgotten. If
we rush, we can catch the 4:45, though..." And she was out the door.
Yomiko bit her lip, and then followed. After a few seconds,
Nenene burst back inside. "Yomiko, how many times do I have to tell
you?!" She grabbed a key and went back out, locking the door behind
her.
***
Nenene sat outside on a bench, typing at a furious pace. The
police wouldn't let her take her laptop inside, so she said she'd stay
here while Yomiko went to get her friend. Now she was in her zone,
typing so fast sometimes she had to go back and reread later to see
what she'd come up with. Sumiregawa Nenene, award-winning 22-year-old
writer. This is why she was paid the big bucks. Well, okay, the
fairly mediocre bucks. Yen. Whatever. Stupid expression.
In actuality, Nenene only had half a mind on what she was writing.
The rest was pacing back and forth inside her brain, trying to figure
out how she was going to deal with this. She'd tried discussing it
with Yomiko, but conversations weren't the same as novels. They never
really went the way you wanted them to. Besides, Yomiko could wrap
Nenene around her little finger. She always could. Nancy or no Nancy.
She looked up and swallowed hard. There they were. She was
secretly hoping that prison might have been cruel to Nancy Makuhari,
but that obviously wasn't the case. If anything, she'd buffed up a
little from the few photos Nenene had been allowed to see.
She saved her work, closed her laptop, and stood up. She needed
to be polite, show off her best side. The last thing Yomiko needed now
was a jealous, cold-hearted b***h of a girlfriend. No matter how much
she wanted to be one.
And so she smiled politely, though wasn't really able to give it
any warmth. "Makuhari-san? I'm Sumiregawa Nenene. It's nice to
finally meet you."
Nancy returned the smile. Hers had warmth. Nenene tried not to
twitch. "It's wonderful to meet you as well, Sumiregawa-san. Yomiko
talks about you constantly. And she's brought me all your books to
read."
"Really? Did you have any favorites?" They began to walk back
towards the subway.
"I was very fond of the Choices series you did. It was quite a
shock seeing an ending like that in mainstream literature."
Nenene laughed despite herself. "Yeah, and it took forever to get
the editor to put it out like that. It was worth it, though."
"Did you..." Nancy paused, a faint blush coming to her cheeks.
"Did you base it on the relationship between you and Yomiko?"
Ooooh, she was tricky. She must know the answer. It was
transparently obvious in the text. At least to anyone who knew the
circumstances.
"Actually, it was based more on the relationship Yomiko had with
you. I changed the ending, though. I've never gotten the knack of
writing ambiguous endings like that."
Now it was Nancy's turn to brood in silence for a while. Nenene
glanced back and Yomiko, who was smiling broadly. She was probably
happy Nenene was talking to Nancy at all. Sometimes Nenene wished she
weren't so grumpy all the time. It was the one thing she knew that
Yomiko disliked about her. But some things are just ingrained.
Finally, Nancy spoke. "I see. I wish I could remember that,
then."
Nenene felt a chill run down her spine. That had been completely
unintentional. She'd gotten so used to Nancy being in prison for all
the crimes she'd committed that she'd forgotten that the woman no longer
remembered any of that... or indeed, had any memories of anything after
the time that "Nancy" had been killed.
Yomiko had dedicated herself to retraining the "evil" Nancy as
soon as she was recovered. Even after she'd been sentenced, Yomiko
would visit 3 times a week, bringing more books and telling more
stories.
So now Nancy was retrained, but the memories of her time with
Yomiko before the attack seemed to be gone forever.
Nenene winced. "Look, that came out badly."
But Nancy shook her head. "It's alright. I'm probably never
going to get the memories back now. It's nice to know that I can read
your books and experience some of what I missed."
Teeth ground in Nenene's mouth. Think happy thoughts, she told
herself.
The moment they got back to the apartment, she was going to send
Yomiko for groceries.
She and Nancy definitely needed to get some things straight.
***
Yomiko went out the door, somewhat reluctantly. She probably
expected to come back and fight a huge argument, or the apartment half
wrecked. Wasn't going to happen. Nenene used her words, not her
fists. Oh, and there was the small fact that Nancy could probably
crumple her up and stuff her into a small paper sack.
After waiting a moment, Nenene turned to Nancy. "Do you want
anything to drink?"
"No, that's alright." Nancy stared at Nenene. She probably knew
what was coming.
Nenene sighed. "Look, I like to talk straight to people. So I'll
be straight with you. I don't like this arrangement Yomiko wants us to
have. I think it's idealistic crap that only works in books with plots
even I wouldn't touch. But then, Yomiko's probably the most idealistic
person I know, so..."
She sat down. "I love Yomiko. I have for years. And then I get
back from a tour and I find her life shattered into little tiny bits.
And when I ask her about it, all I hear about is this gorgeous buxom
woman who swept her off her feet, and then turned out to be working
for the enemy."
Nancy was staring at the floor, but Nenene just kept going. "I
know that you don't remember any of this, and that's fine. But you
didn't remember all the crimes you committed, and they made you serve
time for them anyway. So I feel that I at least get to blame you a
little for this. It took me over a year to get Yomiko to even be in
the same bed with me again. Anytime I would touch her, she'd twitch.
Have you any idea how that can feel?"
Nenene could hear her voice starting to get hoarse, and suspected
she might be crying, but was starting to talk almost faster than she
could think. "The only time she was back to normal was just before she
visited you at the hospital. She'd go off, all happy and perky, and I
sat there and I waited. And then she'd come back, and she'd be sobbing
and shaking. And I just stood there, and felt completely and utterly
useless!"
"So I started writing. Because writing is easy, and relationships
are impossible. I wrote and I wrote, and out came these two women who
were you and her. You and Yomiko, the perfect action adventure
romance. Only with a happy ending. I wrote a happy ending, and I gave
it to Yomiko to read. And that night we made love for the entire
evening. And the next day she moved in with me."
Nenene took a deep, shuddering breath. "She loved me again
because I'd given you to her."
For a moment there was nothing but silence. And then Nenene
looked up at Nancy again. "So you can understand why I feel the way I
do, I hope. Because Yomiko and I don't have anything special like she
does with you. And now you're here, and I'm sitting waiting for Yomiko
to realize she has her fairytale, and doesn't need me to write it for
her anymore."
She fell back against her chair, and waited for the response. She
honestly had no idea how Nancy would respond. Yomiko had told her all
about her visits, but that was just the things Yomiko read to her, or
what new trick Nancy had relearned. Yomiko always got ecstatic about
reading, but she could never be a writer. She didn't know what to take
out and what to leave in.
She looked over at Nancy. She didn't really look as imposing as
she had when they'd first met. Nenene looked briefly down, wondering
if she was somehow doing that phasing trick and making herself look
smaller, but no. She had simply curled up a bit, staring at her hands.
"Yomiko told me about you as well," she began, "when I was in the
hospital. She said she'd never brought me up when the two of us first
met, as she didn't realize how I felt about her -- and how she felt
about me -- until it was too late for that sort of thing. So now that
I wasn't about to go anywhere, that was what she did. She wanted to
make sure I knew all about your entire history."
Nenene blinked, surprised. Yomiko had never talked about this
sort of thing.
"I was a blank slate then, Nen...Sumiregawa-san. Even now, I find
myself trying to use your first name. Yomiko always talked about what
new books you were writing, or how she was getting the Library to use
you for special missions more. I didn't always get the happy Yomiko
you think I did. She agonized over what she was doing to you. She
felt horribly guilty about the whole thing, because she had fallen in
love with two people, and she couldn't stop loving either of us."
Nancy looked up, staring right at Nenene, who exhaled sharply.
"I told her she had to stop seeing me. That she had to go back to
what she had with you. She kept talking about what had happened
between the two of us, but that didn't mean anything to me. I couldn't
even remember it. Instead, I heard about real romance. You and Yomiko
worked hard for your love. You fought, and you cried, and you kissed.
It was truly a beautiful thing. When she talked about me... it was
like a fairy tale. I couldn't believe in it."
Nenene looked down, at the ring that Yomiko had given her last
year. It was in the shape of a book, just the sort of cute thing that
Yomiko did. It must have cost her a fortune. Nenene couldn't imagine
how she'd stopped buying books long enough to save for it.
"Yeah, well, it just seems normal to me." She found herself
flushing, though. It was nice to hear someone else talk about Nenene
that way.
"I didn't fall in love with Yomiko while you were gone at that
tour. I fell in love with her at the hospital, when she was the only
one who bothered to treat me with any kindness. And when I was in
prison, when she came to visit me over and over, even though it was
tearing her up inside. How could I not?"
Nenene shook her head. How could anyone not love Yomiko? "She's
an amazing woman."
"When she came to me with her proposal," Nancy went on, "that I
should move in with the two of you, I didn't know what to say. I
wanted to say no. I wanted to tell her to go back home and be happy
with you and forget all about me. But at the same time, I wanted
desperately to believe it would work out. That we could do something."
Nancy got up and walked over towards a bookshelf. All the walls
were essentially bookshelves, it was part of the redecoration Nenene
had made when Yomiko had moved in with her. Even then, there were
stacks of books littering the floor which Nenene hadn't been able to
pick up yet.
She ran her hands along the shelf. "These are yours, right? I
recognized the spines." She pulled out the final book in the Choices
trilogy, the one Nenene had written about her and Yomiko. "I read a
lot in prison. I had to; Yomiko kept bringing me books, and would
always ask me about how I liked them on her next visit. But yours were
the ones I kept coming back to. You gave Yomiko a happy ending. A
happy ending I truly wanted for her. I thought that it was about the
two of you, I honestly did."
Nenene ran her palms down her legs. She couldn't just throw Nancy
out anymore. And Yomiko would be back soon. "So what do we do here?"
Nancy put the book back on the shelf. "Do we really have a
choice? Yomiko wants the three of us to live together. I've tried
saying no to her. It hasn't worked."
That earned a chuckle from Nenene. "Same here. I argue with
Yomiko and find myself doing whatever she wants anyway."
"So why don't we take things one step at a time? I'm not moving
into your bed, Nenene-san. I'll do whatever you want me to. This is
your apartment, yours and Yomiko's. I'm the one in the way."
Nenene sighed. "Well, why don't we try that for now, then.
And..." Nenene couldn't believe she was saying this. "Why doesn't
Yomiko stay with you tonight?"
She could almost here the clack sound as Nancy's jaw dropped open.
"What?!"
Nenene waved a hand. "You're right. This is what Yomiko wants.
And I'm going to have to accept the fact that she's in love with both
of us. And I know all about making love to Yomiko, whereas you never
have." She paused. "You haven't, have you?"
Nancy shook her head, still slightly stunned.
Nenene smirked. "Well, I'm certainly one up on you there, then.
You can spend tonight with her and find out just what it's like to be
ravished by someone who can do absolutely anything with paper."
That earned a full blush from Nancy. "I hadn't really thought
about that."
"Neither had I until our first time. I nearly had a heart
attack." She paused, thoughtful. "They taught you your old skills,
right? The phasing?"
Nancy nodded. "It was one of the few things that came back to me
naturally."
Nenene looked at her, her head cocked to one side. "Can you phase
into anything? Like a body?"
Nancy nodded. "I'm able to--" She stopped as she realized what
Nenene was getting at. "Nenene-san! How do you think of such things?"
"I'm a writer. I can't stop thinking of ideas. If I could, I
wouldn't be one anymore." Then Nenene turned more serious. "I want
Yomiko to be happy more than anything. And you make her happy. So I
can live with this. With you."
Nancy smiled. "Thank you. And I think you sell yourself short."
"Yeah, well, it's your job to keep reminding me of that. Not all
of us have bodies like yours. I get very self-conscious."
Nancy glanced down. "You aren't exactly flat, Nenene-san."
Nenene coughed. "Well, Yomiko's bigger than both of us, so that's
fine, I guess."
As if called, the door opened and Yomiko walked in. She looked
nervous, but then saw the two of them looking relaxed, and a huge grin
broke out on her face.
"I bought cake!" she announced.
As Nenene stared into Yomiko's eyes, she saw the love that had
always been there for her, even during the worst times.
Nenene sighed. "Well, maybe I can write a fourth book to the
trilogy," she mused.
END
Notes: Thanks to Greenbeans and Corvus for prereading. The idea of
Nancy being able to phase into Yomiko's body for sexual purposes comes
from a ficlet by Katie "Spacetart" Vieceli. I couldn't resist throwing
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