Classroom of the Elite:SS Collection

Is There Still Anything That Love Can Do?

Read "I am sorry (Ayanokoji Kiyotaka) before reading this. Thank you!

*****

"I am sorry, Kei."

"What the hell do you mean by 'I am sorry.', huh?! Don't joke around, Kiyotaka!"

Clutching his chest as hard as I could, I spoke as I continued shaking him.

"Do I look like I am joking?"

My grip on his chest loosened and I took a moment to gaze into his eyes. Then the bitter truth hit me that he wasn't lying.

He wasn't lying when he said that we should break it. I almost loosed myself there but then something bugged me.

He wasn't the usual calm and collected Kiyotaka that I knew. I felt that he was wavering internally which was almost next to impossible. But I am sure that I wasn't mistaken when his eyes displayed a rare emotion of certain uncertainty.

"Hey, Kiyotaka, tell me."

He spoke nothing.

I took hold of his hand and shake it firmly.

"Tell me, Kiyotaka! There is more to what you have said just now, right? Tell me everything!"

If I have to say so, then this was the moment that I had been the pushiest and stubborn in my whole life.

 Giving in to my stubbornness, he confessed everything. Why he wanted to break up with me and sever the ties between us. It was because he feared that I wouldn't be able to enjoy a normal life if he were to keep associating with me.

"Selfish......."

"Huh?"

"How can you be so selfish?!"

Like a kid throwing tantrum, I started punching Kiyotaka with all I have got. 

"You just thought about yourself. You never asked what I wanted and what I wished. How can you be so selfish?!"

He must have thought that he shouldn't be selfish and let me go but that was exactly what I would call selfish. He decided all that on his own.

"We staying in a relationship will get you nowhere. The love that you have for me will get you nothing. That love will achieve you nothing."

As expected of the love dead boy that I loved. He didn't understand a single thing about what that 'love' he had just said useless had done.

"Kiyotaka. If I had never met you, then I would have never broken out from that shell of mine. I am who I am because of you, because you were there for me, because of that 'love' I had for you.  Because of that 'love', I have grown this much. You may say that you were always using me but you don't understand, do you?"

Tears, without any warning, started running down my cheeks.

"What you considered using me is what I would call depending on others. And that means that you depended on me, you trusted me and that trust is also a form of 'love'. Yes, the same 'love' that you just said would do nothing good to me."

He said nothing and just listened to me.

"I am what I am because of you, because of your 'love'. And more importantly, I was able to be together with you because of love. So, this love has given me everything that I could have hoped for. This love has given me happiness; a limitless at that. Love has given me everything in my life that I could have hoped for."

He wasn't someone who didn't understand love.

I don't know the details but he was, since childhood, exposed to an environment with no love whatsoever. But love is something that is almost an integral feature of what makes us human. Although he had been under harsh conditions, just sixteen years wasn't enough to overwrite the love that coursed through our veins. 

It wasn't that he couldn't understand love. He didn't want to. I get the feeling like, rather than people around him, he views himself as someone who is not capable of understanding love. He forces that onto himself and has been living with that delusion of his.

I looked at him. A smile appeared on my face while tears continued to flow. I knew he understood what I was trying to say through my gaze but I felt the need to voice it out.

"You were saying that this love would get me nothing? But, now, tell me, Kiyotaka, is there still anything that love can do for me?"