Editing Maria-sama ga Miteru:Volume32 Chapter2 3

===<noinclude>Onee-sama's Racket. </noinclude>Part 3.===

(I give up)

Resting her hand against a hallway window, Katsura sighed softly.

Too much blood had rushed to her head, and now her legs wouldn't move as she commanded. She had rested for a little while, watching the world outside. She didn't know where she should go. Maybe she should just stay here.

However,

"Huh –  Katsura-san?"

As she was thinking about giving up, someone called out to her. – Turning around, she saw her classmate from first-year, Fukuzawa Yumi-san, standing there.

"It really is you, Katsura-san. What's the matter?"

"The matter?"

"You were looking like you might be unwell."

Yumi-san peered at her, looking concerned. 

"Ah, no, my body's fine."

Katsura hastily shook her head. It was like deja-vu. She saw the humor in that and smiled, which lured Yumi-san into smiling too.

Yumi-san's smiling face was nice. Basking in it, Katsura felt like a weight had been lifted off her shoulders.

"Yumi-san, you're going to the Rose Mansion from here, aren't you? You have some odd-jobs to do, right?"

As Rosa Chinensis en bouton, Yumi-san was friends with Shimako-san. So they would probably be doing the same thing. From Yumi-san's reaction, she knew she got it dead on.

"How did you know?"

"I have ESP"

Katsura said, as she held her right hand over Yumi-san's head.

"Ooh, you'll have to use that power to help me one of these days – "

"You know I'd really like to do that, but there are times when I can, and times when I can't use my powers."

Even as she was making such flippant remarks, Katsura was thinking that if she really did have this kind of power she would head straight to where her onee-sama was and use it on her. 

"And you Katsura-san? Where were you off to?"

"Ahh, I was going to my onee-sama's classroom."

Katsura had stopped here while she was trying to decide whether or not she should go, but her original objective unintentionally slipped out of her mouth. But she thought this was fine, as Yumi-san would be heading to the Rose Mansion and this was what she had told Shimako-san earlier.

" – Hey, Yumi-san. Isn't the Rose Mansion in the other direction?"

Katsura had expected they would head off in opposite directions, but Yumi-san walked off together with her.

"Ahh, yeah, I guess that's true."

Yumi-san muttered, awkwardly.

"I thought I'd go and see my onee-sama too."

"Huh?"

So it looks like Yumi-san would be escorting her to the third-year's classrooms.

"Rosa Chinensis isn't going to the Rose Mansion?"

"No, probably not today. But she may have gone home already."

Oh, right, they were doing odd-jobs, weren't they. The boutons of the retiring Roses wouldn't want to make their onee-samas do that kind of work.

Katsura resigned herself to the situation. Perhaps this was the will of Maria-sama. At any rate, she would walk with Yumi-san to her onee-sama's classroom. What happened after that, would depend on what she thought when she arrived there.

(But)

Would her onee-sama be in the classroom? As they approached the third-year classrooms, her heart started beating faster. Katsura looked down at her shoes as she walked along. At least she could say she was making forward progress.

"Sorry, Katsura-san."

Yumi-san whispered, as she stopped walking.

"I'll have to leave you here."

"Huh?"

Katsura had taken a few paces ahead of Yumi-san before she noticed, then stopped and turned around. Then she turned around once more, to see what it was that Yumi-san was looking at.

"Ahh."

She was a fair distance away, but it was definitely Yumi-san's onee-sama, Rosa Chinensis, ahead of them in the hallway. It looked like she was being mobbed by a group of first years, and some second years too, who were trying to get her autograph. 

Neither Rosa Chinensis nor the girls surrounding her seemed to have noticed Yumi-san, who quickly departed. So Katsura chased after her.

"Yumi-san."

Yumi-san had finally stopped walking when she reached the stairway, probably deciding that she was completely hidden there. 

"Huh? Why did you come back here, Katsura-san?"

Katsura's strength drained from her body when Yumi-san asked her this question with a blank look on her face.

Why did I come back here, you ask? Well, why. Probably because I was worried about you, Yumi-san, and chased after you.

"Well, let me turn that question back on you. Yumi-san, why did you come back here?"

"Hmm, well, I guess I thought that it would be better if I wasn't there, you know?"

"Better if you weren't there?"

"How can I explain it. It's not that I couldn't stand what was happening. But for the people that were asking Rosa Chinensis to sign their books, it probably wouldn't be good if her petit soeur suddenly appeared. I'm not bothered by them asking for her autograph, but they might hold back on account of me being there. So it would be rude to those that had worked up the courage to go and ask her."

"… Is that so?"

Katsura was still trying to understand why Yumi-san had to worry about being rude as she mumbled this.

"It's not as though I had arranged to meet with onee-sama. If I had waited another ten minutes, I probably wouldn't have seen this. So it's okay. That I don't show up there."

"You're not worried about it?"

When she asked, Yumi-san answered 'Nope' straight away.

"Why not? Other students are making a fuss over your onee-sama. By not refusing them, doesn't that mean she's not completely satisfied just with you? Is that fine? Don't you want to know what your onee-sama is doing when you're not watching?"

If Yumi-san had left that place because of jealousy, Katsura would have understood. It was what she wanted to have heard. But she was wrong. Her friend didn't seem to be pretending to endure it at all.

Is that normal? Then was she strange for being jealous over a single tennis racket? Katsura had no idea.

"Katsura-san, what happened?"

Yumi-san's perplexed face was not that of Rosa Chinensis en bouton, but the Yumi-san she knew so well, and Katsura cried out and embraced her. 

Katsura was worn-out from standing alone.



"There was a time when I was jealous of other girls getting close to my onee-sama."

Yumi-san spoke as though she was reading a weather forecast. Katsura hadn't said anything specific, but it seemed as though Yumi-san had sensed what was troubling her. Having climbed up the stairs and then exiting the building onto the emergency staircase, they could now feel the wind blowing against them. 

"But now I don't worry about that."

"Why not?"

"Because I have faith in my onee-sama."

Then, after thinking for a while, Yumi-san added the following:

"I think things started to get better after I decided to approach her directly about things that would upset me."

Katsura felt a bit better, knowing that Yumi-san was worried about these things in the beginning. Time and all kinds of experiences didn't just result in a broken heart. 

"I haven't talked to her about it."

So what should someone who has no time, nor experience do?

"What do you think will happen if you ask? If you're convinced it will open a terrible door, then you're going to feel far worse if you avoid it."

Even if it didn't seem as though she would end up in a position like Yumi-san's, it was the hint she had wanted. 

"But, you know Katsura-san. If you really want to ask her, you can't run away or just bludgeon her with your feelings."

"...Yeah."

And there you have it, a completely banal solution to her problem. But coming from Yumi-san, it had a certain persuasiveness.

"Ahh, but I think seeing your onee-sama off quietly, without causing an uproar, is another way you could go."

Yumi-san's words. Tomorrow was the graduation ceremony, after all.

"But if it was you, you'd go and see her, right?"

"Probably. It was never usually as big a deal as I was imaging it to be."

I get it, the anxiety you feel from doing nothing is worse than any danger you might face, right? It was true for people a long time ago and it still seems to apply.

"Thanks for the advice."

"No, no, I'm just giving you something you can use as a reference."

"Yeah. I'll think about it."

Eventually, Yumi-san had to leave to go to the Rose Mansion. Katsura waved goodbye as Yumi-san descended the emergency staircase. 

With the sound of Yumi-san's footsteps echoing in her ears, Katsura asked the question she had been wanting to ask for a while.

"Hey, earlier when you talked about 'other girls getting close to your onee-sama,' did you mean Touko-chan?"

"Bingo"

Yumi-san's voice came floating back to her through the gaps between the stairs.

"I see."

Katsura nodded to herself, then went into the school building and locked the door to the emergency staircase from the inside.

Rivals were probably always the biggest concern for petit soeurs.