You need a safe place to recover from the ordeal you just went through, both physically and mentally, and on this campus there's no safer place for you than your own dorm room. You can't really say the day's over, however; not when you still need to deal with the last leg of the freshman love triangle. Or rather, you need Mizore to help you deal with it, because the bottom line is that she has a better handle on this crap than you probably ever will.
As you leave the Wrestling Club's little arena, you take a few seconds to narrow down your intentions for the evening. Short term, to recap for emphasis: you're injured. And while you can heal yourself anytime you please, doing it in the open is just going to attract unwanted attention. Unbidden, your mind suddenly comes to the uncomfortable - and quite accurate - realization that you're a wounded animal in hostile territory, surrounded by would-be predators that would almost certainly attack if for even a second they could smell blood in the water.
....fuck that, you're going to learn from this episode what can happen when you don't take things seriously enough, and you don't plan on letting yourself end up the small fish in this pond a second time.
You don't think you told Kurumu to meet you at your dorm, but you're sure that she'll bump into Mizore when she goes looking for you, and consequently the two girls will both meet you there. And with that in mind, you decide to just go straight to the dorm.
_______________
Once you're there, it isn't a minute or two before your underclassmen come knocking. You've barely had time for a drink.
"Yeah, come in."
The door opens, and Kurumu's first to cross the threshold. "Hey senpaaaiiii?!"
One part of your mind is able to process the way her expression morphs from depression -- consistent with what you saw earlier -- to muted horror, caught out of the corner of your eye. And a split-second later, you realize that you haven't cleaned yourself up yet. You anticipated that Mizore would insist on looking at your wounds herself, so you planned to just save some time and effort and let her do as she wanted. You.... failed to account for Kurumu in that. Good grief.
However, most of your attention is on Mizore, whose eyes have narrowed and are slowly turning pale, as a chill slowly enters the room. Indeed, you can even see the way her clothes are starting to frost over. "What. The Hell. Happened to you."
You're not sure if it's because of the dislocations, the lacerations, or that most of your body feels like a single contiguous bruise, but a primal part of you instinctively wants to snap that, obviously, you got your ass kicked.
But! Mizore, your concerned girlfriend who wasn't there, deserves to be treated better than that. Kurumu, an increasingly-concerned underclassman judging by her expression, doesn't deserve to that kind of abuse.
And it's your own fault that you're in this sorry state to begin with, so you'll just suck up the hurt pride and deal with it.
Another, significantly larger part of you, insists that you play off your injuries as no big deal. You quite clearly returned here under your own power, after all, so it naturally follows that you can't be too seriously hurt.
But for all that Kurumu can occasionally act like an airhead now and then, she's becoming increasingly able to see through other people's bullshit; she doesn't need to be patronized. And Mizore, your caring and highly possessive girlfriend who's locking the door and looks like she might be plotting a murder depending on your response, deserves the truth.
"....I got my ass kicked," you admit with a certain amount of embarassment, "but it's nothing I can't recover from."
Mizore's aggressive expression doesn't let up in the least, and in her current state it's hard to tell if she even registered that you were speaking.
Stepping forward until you invade her personal space, you reach forward and snap your fingers an inch in front of her nose; that gets her to flinch, proving what you were already suspecting: that she was already getting too far into her own head. "I made it back on my own." You recognize that you're muttering, but you're close enough that she can still hear you. Taking a few steps back, you start healing yourself with Hamon, and within moments you're fully recovered. You watch as Mizore scans your body for any remaining trace of injury, and you feel mildly relieved that she's respecting your privacy in Kurumu's presence. Last thing anyone needs is for Mizore to tear your shirt off to check if your ribs are intact, or something.
The only thing that will take longer to fix is my pride.
.....but even if you say that, it still bothers me that it happened in the first place. Anyone who can do that to you is a problem for me.
Which brings to mind an important question: why didn't you just heal the second you had your door shut, before the girls came in? You could have avoided this whole situation. ....must've slipped your mind. It isn't like you to suddenly have nausea attacks in the middle of a fight, and especially not of that severity; you were probably distracted trying to figure out what the fuck that even was.
"So. Kurumu."
The bluenette blinks, pulled out of whatever her thoughts were by your sudden speaking of her name.
An awkward moment passes, and you resist the urge to curse. Is she being intentionally dense, or legitimately that out of it?! She had the reason to even come see you in the first place, and now you're the one who has to spell it out and remind her?! .....but god damn it, showing attitude about it will only feel cathartic for about a half-second before she either flips out or breaks down crying. "The shit with Aono and Moka. Dealing with it okay?"
Kurumu looks like.... she can't believe that you're bringing that up in light of how you were injured a second ago. But all the same, you're injured no longer, so you consider the matter closed. You get the impression that Kurumu disagrees, but evidently she's not willing to push the issue right now. With a significantly overdramatic sigh, Kurumu plops down on your bed. You get yourself a comfortable spot on the wall to lean against, and Mizore belatedly mimics your posture against the opposite wall, so she can watch both you and Kurumu at the same time.
"Well, you know how the first term went, right? As far as our relationships, I mean. Moka kept sending signals that she was seriously into Tsukune, but then she'd practically torpedo herself by sucking his blood when everyone else thought she was going to kiss him, or stuff like that. I'm a love monster, and I still don't know how much of that is Moka letting herself get distracted by his scent halfway, or if she was legitimately oblivious. But anyway, whenever the situation came up in discussion, no matter who brought it up, she'd always say stuff like 'Tsukune is my beloved friend', or 'Tsukune and I are just friends', or 'I'm Tsukune's friend, so I have to be there to protect him', whatever. Basically, any time Tsukune might've thought he could make a move on her, she'd keep friend-zoning him, and again -- literal love monster here, can't make heads or tails of what her deal is."
If Kurumu's a literal love monster, as she keeps pointing out, and she still couldn't decode Moka's feelings for a whole term, then she must not be that great.
"Hey!" Kurumu snaps. "I'll have you know that reading relationships is an innate skill of my species! Vampires are just.... obnoxious to get a handle on, that's all."
You're not impressed by her excuse. "Whatever."
"Okay," Mizore cuts in, "but how does that bring us to the point where you and Tsukune are apparently dating, and now Moka's on the sidelines?"
Kurumu pauses, gathering her thoughts, before shrinking in on herself. It's clear that whatever's next isn't comfortable. "It happened at Witch Hill, or I guess I should say that's where it started. When [The Memory Remains] used its Hamon on me, just barely grazing my throat... at the time, I didn't know that was just hurting me for the hell of it. All I knew was that it hurt like hell, and my throat was on burning so badly that I couldn't even scream. I seriously thought I was going to die."
Kurumu's hands, resting in her lap, slowly clench into trembling fists around her skit. "The entire time I was in that hospital, until they told me I could get up and move around, that was all I could think about. All that kept going through my mind was that I was going to die, and I hadn't ever hand a chance to really get my feelings across to Tsukune. What scared me worse than even the idea of dying, was dying without knowing for sure how Tsukune felt about me. I never did get a moment alone with him at the hospital, but the time wasn't right anyway. We were all suffering then, and we all needed time to heal. So when I bumped into Tsukune again later in the summer... I don't know if it was happenstance or the red string of fate, but I knew I had to take the chance. I just...."
Tears freely coming down her face, you can't help but jump a little at the sheer emotion in her eyes. Suffering, fear, desperation, more than she can convey with words -- and yet, she tries anyway! "I just couldn't bear the thought of everything going back to how it'd been in the first term! Of everything being ambiguous and unclear, nobody really knowing where they stood! Moka either couldn't or wouldn't send a clear signal to save her life, and I always knew that Tsukune had eyes for her but was too insecure to make the first move! Don't you get it? I had to step up and put Tsukune on the spot, I had to force a confrontation in order to make something happen, or else everything would've just gone on forever without changing!"
Truthfully, it's not difficult to picture the Betty and Veronica -esque situation that Kurumu's talking about. Will Archie find love and pick a woman, or won't he -- and if he does, then which of the two will it be?
"You couldn't accept the status quo," you sum up, "so you put yourself on the line and forced the issue, gambling your own feelings in doing so -- and seemingly, it paid off. You got a boyfriend, and now everyone knows where they stand."
"Except we don't!" Kurumu snaps, standing up in a violent motion. She's starting to punctuate her statements with sweeping hand gestures. "Back toward the start of the year, the other Moka was going to cripple me in revenge for the way I was trying to gaslight our Moka, and in hindsight I couldn't blame her if I wanted to! But while I fell in love with Tsukune because he intervened on my behalf and saved me, our Moka still gave me a second chance in spite of what I'd done to her! She gave me the chance to straighten up my act, she became my friend! My best friend!"
In a way, this kind of reminds you of the way Moka broke down during her rant.
"But on the morning we came back, when she saw me with Tsukune like that..... for just a moment, before she caught herself and tried to hide it, she looked like she'd been shot. And the smoking gun was..." in my own hands.
Reaching forward and grabbing you by your shirt, Kurumu loses control over her human disguise and lifts you straight up! "How am I supposed to live with myself for that?! Everyone's hurting even worse than before, and it's all my fault!"
Before either you or Mizore can even move, Kurumu abruptly appears to lose all strength in her body and collapses, falling to her knees. "It's all my fault," she weeps into her hands. "If only I weren't around, Moka and Tsukune might still be happy right now..."
.....fucking Christ, does she sincerely believe that?!
[]Tell her, pointedly, that that kind of attitude isn't going to make things better for anyone. She needs to have this discussion with Tsukune and Moka.
[]Ask Kurumu if she really thinks that fantasizing about killing herself will magically solve the problem. It's only slight hyperbole on your part, but a verbal slap in the face like that should piss her off enough to get her back onto a healthier mental track.
[](write-in)