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keyofnik: And here it is. After everything they’ve seen, after everything Rei’s said, what do the others do? What do these so-called “friends” do? They leave. They turn their back on her and they walk away. I’ve been mostly talking about it in tags in posts up to this point, but to make it very clear, this entire situation? It’s caused by a complete lack of understanding from absolutely everyone. Usagi, Ami, and Mako don’t understand at all that this is a gravely serious situation and Rei is incredibly concerned. She’s worried about her grandpa’s physical and mental health. She’s worried about his care and money and the shrine and school and a thousand other things. Rei’s life has BECOME worry, and that’s why she opened up to them in the first place. But they don’t understand. Because Rei isn’t telling them. Rei’s people skills are so abysmal that the others simply don’t realize that by Rei saying “I’m worried about my grandpa” what she’s really saying is “PLEASE HELP ME.” She doesn’t know how to do more than she’s doing, and in her eyes, she shouldn’t have to. They’re FRIENDS, right? Don’t friends just kind of know this shit? Rei certainly does. Rei has a gift for seeing into people, to sizing them up and knowing their strengths and weaknesses and feelings. It just comes natural to her, and so being Rei, she assumes that EVERYONE should be able to do this. Rei has yet to learn that not everyone thinks like she does or sees things like she does. That this doesn’t mean they don’t care, it just means people are different and you have to adjust. But Rei’s had friends for approximately five minutes of her life after ten YEARS or so of isolation and working as hard as she possibly can to want no one and need no one. Consider what Rei had to go through to get to this point. Consider how many sleepless nights. Listening to Grandpa whooping and hollering as he swung through the trees at two in the morning, not caring that Rei had an important test the next day. Hearing him scrabble on the roof and holding her breath as she heard him slip and then hope to god she’d hear him running again and not a sick thud outside her window. His crying reaching her from his room, and she wants to go to him, but the last time she tried, he just screamed at her to go away, she’d be going away from him soon enough anyway and alone is all he’ll ever be so he’d better get used to it. Rei having to rush home from school to make sure someone’s tending to the shrine’s customers, because when she checked last week, they hadn’t made any money at all. She had to dip into her own personal savings to restock on Here! Curry!, because they’d run out of food the night before and Grandpa had Yuuichiro doing laps all day and hadn’t bothered to go the store. How far had Rei gotten before she realized how badly things were going? And what did it cost her to realize she couldn’t do this alone? To ask for help, Rei had to admit her own defeat. And she looked at her life and realized, I don’t doubt for the very first time that she can remember, that she had people she trusted to be weak around. Just a little, but maybe that would be enough. She works up the courage to go to her friends. To open up and say “My grandfather’s acting strangely.” That she did it in a nonchalant way, I don’t doubt. That she made it SOUND like it wasn’t a big deal I completely believe. Just the act of asking for help is taking so very much out of her, and she must protect herself however she can. But Rei’s just too good at it, and so the others completely fail to recognize just how dire this situation is. In Rei’s mind, she’s obliterated all of her precious defenses and she’s come to them completely naked and exposed. To the others, Rei’s just casually bringing up a topic of conversation, and when they see it for themselves, it looks like the same old same old. Rei’s so-called “friends” come in and don’t understand (Intentionally, surely! How could they possibly miss how OBVIOUS it all is?!), and then make it worse, and then chastise her — chastise HER!! — and abandon her. And Rei is GUTTED. It kills me how she says that at first. “What?” There’s so much utter disbelief in her voice. Because even after how they haven’t understood, how they’ve made it worse, how they’ve snapped at her, Rei still believes they can help her. After all of this “evidence” to the contrary, REI STILL BELIEVES IN HER FRIENDS. She turns to anger in a moment. Of course she does, it’s her first and best defense. But her instinctive reaction isn’t to get angry or yell back. It’s disbelief. It’s HURT. Rei has put so much trust in her friends already, and it’s DESPITE herself. It’s one of the purest, most unfiltered and exposed moments of Rei’s feelings about her friends that we’ll ever see. Here she has had every reason to already consider this risky idea a loss, but in her heart, SHE STILL HASN’T GIVEN UP ON THEM. And then her defenses slam back up. “Do whatever you want!” This was a terrible idea and she should’ve known that from the start. It was an important lesson she clearly needed to learn again. Rei doesn’t need them. Rei doesn’t need ANYONE. Not now. Not EVER.