Minako stared after him. She'd won the argument. He was gone. Things could be normal again.
She slammed the door as soon as she could no longer hear his footsteps echoing in the stairwell. A picture fell off the wall, and she watched it hit the carpet, a little sorry when it didn't break apart on contact. She was tempted to smash it just to punctuate the fall, but decided against it.
Instead, she stormed back into the main room of her apartment, fuming. "Who the hell does he think he is?" she seethed. "He doesn't even know me. Who is he to act like he has any clue about anything? It's his own damn fault for getting mixed up with me in the first place. For all he knew, I could have murdered him in his sleep. I could have taken his money, I could have... I could have done a lot of things."
Minako let herself trail off, and in the silence, she wondered about whose fault it was that he didn't know her. She was the one who hadn't even told him her name for a paranoid fear of reprisal. And even though he'd asked her for help, she was the one who'd let him in. She opened the door, and he'd trusted her to help.
And then what does she do?
"No," she argued with herself, storming into her bedroom to get out of her dress from the night before. "He deserved it. He had no right to pry, he..."
He was hurting. He was still hurting and she'd rubbed it in. Maybe she'd been trying to get him over it, but that had been stupid. How many years had he harbored this anyway? How long had he been grieving? How could she have been arrogant enough to think that a little tough talking was enough to get him over it?
She'd wanted to fix it. But this was the sort of problem that she didn't have the power to fix. She could only stand by and watch it heal.
"But why should I?" Minako hissed. "I don't owe him anything. He's just a boy."
Just a nameless boy she'd let into her apartment because he sparked something in her. Something she'd thought she'd lost. Not her soul, not her heart, but something just as important.
Her need to protect.
"God... damn him!" she shouted. Then she reached into her closet, pulled out the appropriate outfit one wore in these situations, and headed out the door.
Minako always did have a tendency to win the arguments no one was meant to.
