"Um... Na... where are we going...?"
II
Mei-Yu Wang asked, because even for a roleplay, you still had to pick a suitable place.
Shikime Natsu heard the question and gave a small laugh.
"Let's go to karaoke."
He paused, then went on.
"The rooms are a decent size, and there's background music. It suits the kind of roleplay we're about to do."
At that answer, Mei-Yu Wang's eyes brightened.
Karaoke...
That place hadn't even occurred to her.
But now that Shikime Natsu had suggested it, there was no chance she'd refuse.
"Mm, okay!"
She nodded hard, a delighted smile spreading across her face.
The two of them set off toward the karaoke place, and the whole way there her pulse refused to settle.
A roleplay for two people. What would they be playing?
Before long they reached the entrance. Shikime Natsu pushed the door open and stepped inside, and Mei-Yu Wang followed close behind him.
The waiter at the front desk saw them and greeted them with a smile.
"Welcome. Just the two of you?"
"That's right."
Shikime Natsu nodded.
"And how long would you like the room for?"
the waiter asked.
Shikime Natsu thought about it for a moment, then said,
"Two hours."
"Certainly. One moment, please."
The waiter worked the computer with practiced ease, then looked up and smiled.
"You're all set. Right this way."
He extended a hand, indicating the direction.
Shikime Natsu paid the Private Points, then led Mei-Yu Wang down toward the far end of the corridor. Music and singing leaked out of some of the rooms; the place sounded lively.
Walking at his side, Mei-Yu Wang felt her nerves tighten.
Soon they stood in front of their room. Shikime Natsu pushed the door open and went in, and she followed behind him.
The room wasn't large, but it was comfortably arranged.
A curved sofa sat against the wall, spread with dark cushions.
A large screen hung on the wall, and in front of it stood two small low tables with a microphone resting on each.
The lighting was a warm yellow, wrapping the whole room in a soft halo.
Mei-Yu Wang looked the place over, and some of the tension went out of her shoulders.
"Sit wherever you like," Shikime Natsu said.
She nodded and settled onto the sofa. He sat down about half a person's width away from her, deliberately not too close, since sitting any nearer might have made her too nervous.
She turned her head to look at him, curiosity getting the better of her.
"Um... Natsu... what kind of script are we going to perform?"
There was expectation in her voice, and nerves too. Shikime Natsu considered the question briefly, then answered.
"How about the most classic one of all? Romeo and Juliet."
Mei-Yu Wang blinked, caught off guard.
Romeo and Juliet... that really was about as classic as scripts got.
At culture festivals, plenty of classes staged that play every year.
She had never acted in it herself, but she had watched it.
And... she vaguely remembered some of the lines from it, too.
Not all of them, not by a long way, but enough to have an impression.
"S-sure..."
She nodded, a little embarrassed. Then a thought struck her, and she asked with fresh anxiety,
"But... but what about the lines? What are we going to do about those?"
Unease crept into her voice.
"I haven't practiced or anything..."
If she'd known in advance that they'd be doing this, she could have memorized her lines beforehand.
Starting cold like this, she was bound to stumble in all sorts of places...
The thought made her expression tighten even further.
Watching her like that, Shikime Natsu let out a quiet laugh.
"We can just look the lines up on our phones."
Relief washed through her.
Right... why hadn't she thought of that?
Phones made everything easy now. A quick search and there they were. No need to prepare a cheat sheet at all.
She nodded, pulled out her phone, and searched for the script. Then she saw just how many lines there were, and her stomach knotted. This many? Could she really keep them all straight?
While she was still fretting over it, she lifted her head and asked, a little sheepishly,
"Um... which role are you going to play, Natsu?"
Curiosity colored her voice.
Shikime Natsu smiled and said,
"Isn't it obvious? I'm Romeo, and you're Juliet."
Her cheeks went faintly pink. She dropped her eyes to her phone screen and said in a small voice,
"Th-that's true, isn't it..."
After all, Romeo and Juliet was a scene between one boy and one girl by definition.
Shikime Natsu was a boy, so of course he was Romeo. She was a girl, so of course she was Juliet.
But... hearing him say it so plainly stirred something strange and fluttering in her.
After all... Romeo and Juliet were lovers.
Shikime Natsu, seeing the state she was in, said nothing more about it. He simply nodded with a smile, picked up his own phone, and started looking through the lines himself.
Mei-Yu Wang stared at the text on her screen and set about memorizing it in earnest.
Her brows drew together slightly, her lips moving in silence as if reciting to herself. She looked utterly serious about it.
Shikime Natsu was watching his screen too, though far more at ease. A single careless sweep of his eyes and he had all of it committed to memory. Even so, he didn't put the phone down.
Doing that would only have piled pressure onto her.
After a while she spoke up again.
"Um... if we're doing the roleplay, where do we start from?"
Shikime Natsu thought it over, then said,
"We only need to act out the lines from the scenes the two of them share."
He paused, then explained further.
"There's no need to run the whole thing start to finish, that would take forever. We'll just pick a few of the famous passages."
That eased something in her chest.
So it was only a few scenes... that made the whole thing far less daunting.
She nodded and said,
"Understood."
Then she lowered her head again and kept working through the lines on her screen, driving them into her memory.
A while later she drew a deep breath and looked up at Shikime Natsu, a trace of nerves in her violet-red eyes.
"I'm ready. We can start whenever."
Seeing how seriously she'd taken it, he nodded with a smile.
"All right. Let's begin."
Shikime Natsu rose from the sofa and walked to the center of the room. Mei-Yu Wang stood as well and crossed to face him, the two of them standing across from each other.
The room was quiet. Her heartbeat picked up speed, and she inhaled deeply, willing herself calm.
Shikime Natsu stood there looking perfectly natural and composed, a faint smile at the corner of his mouth, a gentle light in those pale golden eyes.
"Shall we start?" he asked, his tone mild.
"Mm..."
She nodded, her voice still thin with nerves.
He looked at her, and then he began, unhurried.
His voice wasn't loud, but every word landed clear and firm.
"But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun!" (Automatically rendered into English; the English portion won't be written out here.)
The way Shikime Natsu delivered the line was entirely natural, entirely smooth, as though he really were Romeo.
His gaze rested on Mei-Yu Wang, and there was something tender in those pale golden eyes.
Hearing it, her heart beat faster.
She hurried a glance down at the lines on her phone, pulled in a deep breath, and began to recite.
"O Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo?"
Her voice still carried a tremor, but she was giving it everything she had.
"Deny thy father and refuse thy name. Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love, and I'll no longer be a Capulet."
When she finished, the flush on her face deepened. It really did feel like being in love.
"With love's light wings did I o'erperch these walls, for stony limits cannot hold love out. What love can do, that dares love attempt. Therefore thy kinsmen are no stop to me."
As he spoke, Shikime Natsu took a step forward, closing the distance between them.
Feeling him come nearer, her pulse went wilder still. She dropped her head, not daring to meet his eyes, and kept going with her lines.
"If thou dost love, pronounce it faithfully. Or if thou think'st I am too quickly won, I'll frown and be perverse and say thee nay, so thou wilt woo; but else, not for the world."
Her voice grew smaller and smaller, until by the end it was barely audible. Her cheeks burned, and every inch of her was strung tight.
It was only reciting lines... it was only acting...
Mei-Yu Wang felt as though her heart might leap right out of her chest.
And so the scene went on between them. It was, at its core, a tragedy.
Romeo and Juliet, two people in love, driven to die together by the hatred between their houses.
But... partway through, Shikime Natsu altered the lines a little.
Mei-Yu Wang heard the change and froze.
She looked at him, surprise flashing through those violet-red eyes.
Shikime Natsu wasn't following the original script.
He had taken lines steeped in grief and turned them toward hope, and there was such gentleness in his voice that hearing him left her standing there stunned.
She'd never imagined he would suddenly rewrite the dialogue. None of that was in the script!
But... she didn't mind his unpredictability at all. If anything, the change made her happy.
If they'd followed the original all the way to its tragic conclusion, she would have found it terribly sad, as though it were an omen that the two of them were headed for a bad ending as well.
Caught off guard as she was, she followed where he led with the altered lines. She couldn't keep up perfectly, but she threw herself into it, and the whole shape of the story shifted, turning from a tragedy into something full of hope.
And she found herself, little by little, sinking into it.
As for the lines, by the end the two of them had abandoned the script almost entirely. Pure improvisation, really. Like describing a whole new world from scratch.
If anyone tried this out in the wider world, they'd be torn to pieces for it.
Adaptation, after all, isn't the same as making things up.
And then Shikime Natsu stepped closer to her, and those pale golden eyes turned very, very gentle.
"Mei-chan."
"I like you. Will you go out with me?"
Mei-Yu Wang went completely still. Her mind emptied out, thought impossible.
What had he just said? Not to Juliet, but to her?
Or was that part of the script too?
She couldn't tell anymore whether this was still the roleplay. If it was, then she hoped it would go on forever. And if it wasn't, then she hoped with everything in her that those words had truly been meant for her.
All day she had been thinking about confessing to him herself. She'd wavered, agonized, never sure how to begin, terrified of ruining it, so the words had stayed locked inside her. And now he had been the one to say it first.
A film of tears rose in her eyes, her lids going faintly red, and something enormous and wordless welled up in her.
"Mei-chan?"
Seeing her like that, Shikime Natsu called her name softly.
At the sound of it she drew a deep breath and nodded, hard, a radiant smile breaking across her face.
Tears swam in her eyes, but she didn't let them fall.
She didn't want to cry in front of him. She wanted to smile. She wanted him to see her at her happiest.
"I will..."
she said quietly, joy spilling through every syllable despite herself.
Then she took another deep breath, gathered her courage, and stepped forward. She walked right up to him, rose onto her toes, and pressed her lips lightly to his cheek.
In that instant, time seemed to stop.
She felt the warmth of his cheek, her heart hammering beyond all reason. If only this moment could last forever. She drew back a step and looked at him, those violet eyes brimming with happiness.
Yes. Whether or not he was still acting, he had called her by her name just now. So this wasn't roleplay anymore.
She would take it as his confession to her.
Mei-Yu Wang stepped back a little further, her smile as bright as a flower in full bloom.
"I will. My prince."
The smile at the corner of Shikime Natsu's mouth softened as he watched her, and he reached out and gently took her hand.
The warmth of his palm spread through her, and she turned her hand to hold his back.
Compared with the story of Romeo and Juliet, Mei-Yu Wang thought, she was lucky. There was no one standing between her and Shikime Natsu.
____
👻🔥Read More on P@treon: Walnut-chan🔥👻
🔥 New history: Zenless Zone Zero: Rewriting Fate in New Eridu — now up on The_Mikudayo
📚 Walnut-chan = 40 chapters ahead + you keep the translations moving
Help us hit our community goals:
🎯 100 Powerstones = +1 Bonus Chapter for everyone