Sixteen Years as a Girl
It was the feeling of something you had vanishing overnight, and something you had never possessed appearing in its place.
If it had been something welcome, you would have smiled and gone on your way. But when what vanished was precious beyond measure, the story always changed.
For Noah, that something was a gender that had flipped in a single night.
Sixteen years already since I reincarnated, huh.
She sat at her desk, staring blankly out the window, lost in thought. Sixteen years of living in this body had worn her previous life's memories thin. What remained certain, though, was that she had been a man — and that her sense of who she was had never once wavered, not even after being born a girl.
"Did you get confessed to again today?"
The girl in the next seat leaned over. Her name was Fujiwara Chise — one of Japan's Four Great Clans, and the childhood friend Noah had grown up beside since they were small.
"Can it."
Noah hated the fact that people kept confessing to her at all. That the ones doing the confessing were boys made her especially furious.
Chise's voice softened with concern.
"You don't look like you're in a very good mood."
"Someone pulls that on me first thing in the morning and I'm supposed to be cheerful?"
"H-huh? Isn't that a good thing, though...? It's the kind of everyday every girl dreams about."
Why is it only me...
Noah narrowed her eyes at Chise. Chise was a stunning beauty in her own right, and yet, somehow, she never seemed to get swarmed with confessions. That was even more unfair. Was Noah just that easy a target?
"If you hate it that much, Noah, there is a way."
"A way?"
"Join the student council!"
Without the slightest preamble, Chise thrust a student council application under her nose. Noah's personal information was already filled in.
Noah whipped her head away. The suggestion wasn't even worth answering.
Chise's cheeks puffed out at the silence.
"That's so mean."
"I'm not doing it."
"But I want to!"
"No."
Chise clasped both hands together and pleaded.
"Don't say that, okay? It's my one wish in this lifetime."
The student council? Whoever invented that thing had a real talent for making life inconvenient. Noah wanted nothing to do with it. And more than that—
"That 'one wish in this lifetime.' You already used it yesterday, when we went to the dessert shop."
"That was my lifelong wish."
"..."
Noah let out a long breath. They had been close since they were children, and that made Chise's requests almost impossible to refuse — which was exactly why she kept giving in. But the student council was where she drew the line. A dessert shop was a brief inconvenience and then it was over. Join the student council, and she'd be stuck being inconvenienced for the rest of her high school life.
"Fine. If that's how you're going to be, Noah, I have my ways too."
A triumphant little smile touched Chise's lips as she caught Noah's arm. Noah looked at her, expression flat.
And then, all at once, tears welled in Chise's eyes.
"I don't, actually...! It's been my wish since forever — since middle school — to serve on the student council with you, Noah. This time it's really, truly my one wish in this lifetime. Please, please."
Noah flinched, then slitted her eyes.
The Wish Gambit. She had fallen for this exact pattern more than forty times.
"Hmm? I'm asking you. Please."
Maybe I'll believe her. Just this once.
She sighed, the picture of reluctant surrender.
"Fine."
The moment she signed—
"Yes!"
The tears vanished. Chise beamed like the sun. Noah's brow furrowed. Chise bolted.
"..."
Left alone at her desk, Noah could not quite shake the feeling that she had been had.
Men should be manly. Women should be womanly.
Noah carried that hopelessly old-fashioned view of the world, a relic that did not belong in this century. So shouldn't being born a girl have meant living as one?
It did not. Her sense of self was far too stubborn for that. She knew perfectly well it was a contradiction. She also did not care.
In her previous life, Noah had been a soldier — a special forces first lieutenant with more real combat under her belt than most men would see in a lifetime. She had been the kind of hard-ass who went around muttering, Why are all the new recruits these days a bunch of fags? Her temper had been foul enough that they'd nicknamed her Mad Dog, and not because she bit and wouldn't let go. She bit first, anyone she hadn't met before.
One turn of the wheel later, her personality was still a complete disaster. The one mercy was that being born into a distinguished house had at least broken her of swearing at the end of every sentence.
Tsk. Kids these days are all so damn soft.
Noah swept a jaundiced look around the classroom, thinking like the fossil she was. Everyone was whispering and glancing her way. A few of the boys wouldn't even meet her eyes — they stared at the floor the instant their gazes brushed.
Pathetic. If it had been her, she wouldn't have sat there weighing the odds. She would have walked straight up. She knew she was considerably pretty; anyone who wanted a beauty like that ought to have the guts to try. The type that quit without even making an attempt was the type Noah truly despised.
"Um..."
"Get lost."
Of course, she also despised the ones who shoved their faces in without knowing their place. A person ought to live with some grasp of where they stood. The boy who had tried to speak wilted at the shoulders and retreated.
"Honestly, Noah. If you keep icing people out like that, you'll never make any friends."
"Don't need them."
"That may be true for you, but it isn't for me. I really thought I'd at least make one friend once we got to high school."
Noah gave Chise a peculiar look at the grumbling. The hurt on Chise's face was so plain that she flailed both hands in a panic.
"No, no, no. I didn't mean you weren't enough."
"I didn't say anything."
Noah's expression was thoroughly unimpressed. Chise scratched her cheek, then brightened as if a wonderful idea had just occurred to her.
"Want to go get cake?"
"If you want to eat, I suppose I don't have a choice."
The words were grudging. Her mood, against her will, had improved a little.
"There are a few things I cannot abide in this world. One of them is a man who takes money and then pretends he does not know you. Tell me, Mr. Mayor. How is it you swallow another man's coin and then refuse to acknowledge him? Once you have stuffed yourself that well, is it not the natural order that you heed your master's word?"
"Mmph— mmphhh—!"
Minamoto Genji, head of the Minamoto Clan, lifted a bamboo sword with a face empty of feeling. The ward mayor — limbs bound, his own underwear stuffed in his mouth — squeezed his eyes shut in terror and braced for what was coming.
WHACK. CRACK.
Genji began to beat the mayor like a hanging heavy bag. There was real weight behind every stroke of the shinai, and each one delivered a hideous, bone-deep pain.
"Nngh— nnghhhk—!"
Whether the mayor thrashed or not, Genji repeated the same motion without a flicker of expression. Blood burst. Consciousness began to gutter. He did not stop. He looked less like a man than like something that had never learned what a feeling was.
The door slammed open.
"Oyabun!"
A swordsman in a black suit, a blade at his hip, dropped to one knee.
"I have an urgent report!"
"A face I don't know. A new recruit?"
Genji halted his work and asked. The man bowed his head and answered at full volume.
"Yes, sir! Totsuki Kentaro!"
The Minamoto had a rule. When a new member joined the family, that day's report was his to deliver — so he would know whom he served, and so the oyabun could put a face to the name.
Genji tossed the bamboo sword onto the floor without ceremony and sat.
"You called it urgent. Then there is only one thing it can be."
"The young lady is in danger!"
"...Danger?"
"The Yamaguchi have raised the flag of rebellion. They're lying in wait at the dessert shop the young lady frequents...!"
"A serious matter. Make ready at once."
There was no rise or fall in Genji's voice. It was not the tone of a father who had just been told his daughter was in danger.
Kentaro answered, taut with nerves.
"Yes, sir! I'll gather the tools immediately and—"
"Why would you gather tools?"
"Sir?"
"What you ought to be fetching is a drum."
"...?"
"Pack what my daughter has already cleaned up into a drum, and dump it on the coast."
Kentaro stared at him, blank. Genji's brow furrowed.
"This one's slow on the uptake."
"M-my apologies! I'll prepare it at once!"
Kentaro paled, bowed at the waist, and fled.
Genji drew a handkerchief from his breast and wiped his brow. It was a wretched scrap of cloth, wholly unfit for the dignity of the Minamoto — old, the weave coming apart, crooked from the start, less a handkerchief than a rag. On it, in a child's disastrous hand, was written:
— NOA —
Noah had made it and given it to him when she was about five. Genji still remembered going a week without sleep afterward.
The memory of that happiness split his face into a foolish, helpless grin — an expression no one would ever have believed belonged to the head of the Minamoto, a man said to have neither blood nor tears. Then he remembered there was still someone in the room, and the smile vanished as if cut away.
He looked at the mayor hanging there, his eyes gone cold, and murmured.
"So. You saw."
"M-mmph!"
He had not intended to kill the man. The mayor still had his uses. A scare, then a send-off — that had been the plan. But he had seen the smile. Genji's smile was permitted to exist in one place only: in Noah's memories.
Minamoto Genji took a Japanese sword down from the cabinet on the wall, and ended the mayor cleanly.
"That ended quick."
"It's the entrance ceremony!"
Noah and Chise walked side by side, heading for the dessert shop. Officially it had been Chise's idea. In truth, no one alive loved sweets more than Noah.
That had not been the case in her previous life. A real man, she had always maintained, did not eat cake — that was girls' food. But perhaps the body had changed more than the soul. ...Sweets are seriously umai.
Still. Liking cake. She could not allow herself to do something that pussy.
"I'm just glad, honestly. I was worried you'd keep digging your heels in."
"About the student council?"
"Mhm! I want to join, but if you hated it, there wouldn't have been anything I could do."
"Then do it by yourself."
Chise laughed, awkward, and thought, You'd sulk for sure if I did.
"Fujiwara and Minamoto are one! We don't get to split up."
"Yesterday you told me to join because you wouldn't be able to look after me otherwise."
"The Minamoto is a steadfast wolf. Isn't it better if the fox — that's the Fujiwara — is there to help? Without a Fujiwara, a Minamoto just gets used by terrible people."
Chise poked Noah in the cheek.
"And of course, a Fujiwara can't keep herself safe without a Minamoto. We're the kind of existence that doesn't work without the other."
Noah stopped walking.
"Noah?"
Chise looked at her, puzzled. Noah's eyes had gone still and dark.
"Been a while. Time to loosen up a little."
The words had barely left her mouth before men stepped out of the alley from every direction. Yakuza, every one of them, and every one of them carrying something built to kill.
"Hey there, girls."
"How about the uncles here show you somewhere nice?"
"Ah..."
Chise made a face of genuine distress.
"Could we perhaps just... go?"
"Pffhah! You ever seen a yakuza who leaves just 'cause you asked, Miss Fujiwara?"
Chise waved both hands in a hurry.
"N-no, that isn't what I meant. I really do think you'd be better off just leaving!"
"The hell is she talking about?"
The yakuza snickered and closed in. Cold sweat slid down Chise's temple as she glanced sideways.
Noah's pink hair was bouncing up and down.
Hah—
After a couple of standing jumps, Noah's eyes flew wide. In the next instant she exploded forward and drove her right fist with everything she had.
KRAAAANG!
"Wow. No matter how many times I see it, Noah, you've got such presence."
Still... isn't this a little much?
Chise sighed at the yakuza plastered into the wall, the whites of his eyes showing.