Welcome to Mizer House, Ch. 14/x
Title: Welcome to Mizer House
Chapters: 14/x
Author: konicoffee
Genre: School life, Slice of Life, Drama, AU, Humor?, Crack with Plot, Smut (some chapters)
Disclaimer: I don't own any of the characters in this story.
Warnings: Extreme OOC-ness, language
Rating: R
Pairings/Characters: Kai/??? (open pairing)
Bands: The GazettE, ScReW, Malice Mizer, Alice Nine, An Cafe, SuG, more to be added later
Synopsis: Kai is in high school. He lives in an all-male dormitory with bizarre and quirky, but extremely attractive residents. Adventures, drama, and temptation fill the interiors of Mizer House. Premise is roughly based on Koko wa Greenwood.
Comments: Wow, an update in less than two weeks! This is a really chunky chapter, and it has major crack and major drama. It also reveals Byou's past with Gackt (remember? From like, ten chapters ago? /fail). I hope you like it!
Chapters: {Cast} {One} {Two} {Three} {Four} {Five} {Six} {Seven} {Eight} {Nine} {9A} {Ten} {10A} {Eleven} {Twelve} {Thirteen} {13A}
October came around rather quickly. Only a few weeks after the play we did, we found ourselves yet again hard at work, preparing for Malice’s Cultural Festival amidst loads and loads of homework. There wasn’t enough time to be stressed, though - not with a best friend whose idea of de-stressing was snooping around a nearby all-female dorm, and certainly not with a sixteen-year-old self who wanted to stop getting nightmares of Tora and Kazuki getting it on.
“Quit wobbling, Takuya!”
“In case you assholes haven’t noticed, two of you are standing on my shoulders.”
“Shut up, she’s...oh damn, look at those knockers.”
Nao and I didn’t notice the cold October night air as we watched one of our female classmates take her shirt off for a shower. She really wasn’t someone we paid plenty of attention to, but as she stripped off the articles of her uniform bit by bit, both Nao and I were wondering how the hell we never noticed how hot she was. We were covering our mouths by the time she finished taking her bra off. It was quite a stunt trying to stand on one foot on Takuya’s shoulder while watching this gorgeous girl expose her very impressive twins in perfect C-cup formation.
“That’s it, take your skirt off.”
“Guys? Oh shit, guys, there’s a girl…”
“We see her, Takuya. Oh boy, do we see her.”
“Idiot! She’s watching.”
Panic knocked all three of us off-balance, and with a soft thud we all fell to the ground. Clusters of “oh shit” and “let’s get the hell out of here” escaped us in hisses while we scrambled to get up and make a run for it. After spitting out some soil and some blades of grass, we got on our feet, shocked to find that there was no girl near the gate where Takuya said she was. Shit, she must have run inside to alert the other residents. Not wasting any time, we hurried towards the gates of the dorm, praying that whoever saw us didn’t recognize us.
The one we bumped into only a few meters outside the gate, however, did.
“Are you sure the ‘girl’ you saw wasn’t Uruha?”
“Positive,” Takuya replied, sinking deeper into the warm water of the Mizer’s large ofuro. “She wore Malice’s uniform. As much as a lot of people would like to see him in a skirt, Uruha wasn’t wearing one.”
I closed my eyes at the warmth of the bath water, aching from the chores Uruha made us do after he caught us darting out of Merry Suites’ premises. Really, what were the odds of Uruha being on his way to the dormitory to return a book right when we were fleeing the scene? Wincing at the pain on my shoulder, I tried not to be pissed off at the injury I sustained from our fall earlier. I kept my eyes closed, trying to hold the image of my topless female classmate. I tried, but hearing two other guys talking and knowing they were naked right beside me just made me think of Tora and Kazuki again.
For weeks, I couldn’t look at Tora or Kazuki without feeling horribly uneasy. I wondered how long this had been going on, and if anyone else knew about it. I knew of Kazuki giving up a career in London for “someone” in Japan, but never did I even guess that this person was none other than Tora. The idea of gay sex still disturbed the bejesus out of me, but every once in a while, I caught myself wondering what exactly Tora was doing that made Kazuki plead like that.
“Kai?”
I snapped my eyes open and blinked at the naked figure of my best friend. “What?”
“Takuya and I are done bathing. Are you?”
“You guys go ahead,” I told him. “My shoulder hurts. Maybe staying a little longer would help.”
I closed my eyes again, and when I heard the door close, I sank deeper into the water. It was starting to feel like someone was putting all his weight on my shoulder, pushing it down to break it off my neck. My whole body was hurting now, and though I did the same amount of work Nao and Takuya did today, I felt incredibly tired. The warm water was doing nothing to wash off the fatigue that was seeping through my joints.
“Kai.”
“I’ll be done in a bit, Nao.”
One, two, and a few more minutes passed. “Kai.”
“What the hell, Nao, leave me al-” My train of thought stopped instantly. That wasn’t Nao who called me just now.
The voice was female.
I slowly peeled my eyes open, and I felt them widen gradually at the girl looking over me. Her black hair framed her face, cloaking it slightly, as she smiled sweetly. Really, I would have smiled back if it weren’t for the fact that I was as naked as the day I was born and she was wearing Malice’s school uniform.
I wouldn’t have lost it if I didn’t notice that she was floating above me.
Forgetting about my soreness, my wetness, and my nudity, I jumped out of the ofuro and made a mad dash out of the bathroom. Too stunned, too scared to shout, I vaguely heard some people say something along the lines of “son of a bitch, Kai is streaking” when I passed the dining area, ran up the stairs, and raced through the corridor towards my room. Only when I fell on the floor of the room, my limbs tangled with Byou’s, did I realize that I unintentionally tackled my unsuspecting roommate.
“What the fuck, have you lost your mind?”
“Yes! I mean, no, I…” I struggled to form a sentence that made sense, but the only thing that came out of my mouth was, “there’s a ghost in the fucking bathroom.”
Byou gave me a confused look. He looked like he was genuinely trying to absorb what I was sputtering. “A ghost in the bathroom,” he repeated. “Are you sure it’s not just the two alcoholics pulling pranks on you?” He shoved me off himself and got on his feet, and looked away from me. “And for the love of all things holy, Kai, put some clothes on.”
Finally feeling the pleasant breeze on my private parts, I stood up and walked to our closet, heart still racing at the image of the floating girl I saw just moments ago. As I slipped on a pair of boxers, I thought about the possibility of this being nothing more than a prank. Maybe my vision was too hazy from being in hot water for too long that I thought I was seeing things. Perhaps the girl I saw didn’t look as real as I thought initially.
“Are you dressed yet?”
I raised my eyebrow and turned to my roommate, slightly offended. I knew I had an imperfect body with scars all over my torso from the car accident I was in before school started, but I’m sure it wasn’t so grotesque for Byou, of all people, to find it disgusting. “Since when have you been shy about seeing naked men?”
“Look, you pantywaist, when I’m at work, I’m totally fine with it. It’s a totally different story when…” Byou’s sentence stopped the same time his expression collapsed into one of extreme shock. Before I could ask him what the hell was wrong, he pointed his finger towards the closet, and instinctively, I turned around.
This was the greatest prank ever pulled, and that was the loudest anyone in Mizer had heard two people scream.
Byou and I almost broke the door down when we scrambled out of our room. At that point, the other guys were heading in our direction, not surprisingly curious as to what the hell was going on. They saw me streak, they heard me and Byou scream, and they found both of us scared beyond our wits outside our room with me wearing the emperor’s new clothes. That was odd, even for Mizer House standards.
“What happened?”
Before Byou or I could answer, all the lights suddenly went out. We all stood in the darkness for a few seconds before every alarm clock in the dorm went off at the same time. I felt a few people jump beside me, and my heart and seemingly everything else in my chest began to hammer against my bones. Jesus Christ on a pogo stick. Fairly certain that none of us set our alarms to go off at midnight, we piled up by my room’s doorstep in a pathetic semblance of a buddy system, each one of us not believing this was happening, each one scared shitless.
Only Takuya dared to move from his spot. “You just surprised us, that’s all,” was heard said in his voice from inside our room. “Come out. It’s okay.”
With that, the lights came back on, and the alarm clocks stopped ringing. “What the hell was that?” We all found out as the answer came walking out of our room with Takuya beside her.
“Ah,” Takuya started, as if totally unfazed. “She’s the girl I saw a while ago.”
Finally in some decent clothes, I stood with the other Mizer residents, and we all listened to her. The more of her story I heard, the weirder things seemed to get. Haruna Ono, as she introduced herself, joined the choir invisible a few decades before this very strange night. A sickly girl, she kicked the bucket in her second year of high school at Malice only days after she started dating this guy she really liked. Whenever she missed her boyfriend, she explained, she had this bad habit of “destroying things.” Haruna also mentioned a few things we really didn’t have to know, such as the fact that she was still a virgin.
“My lover was such a wonderful man. He-”
Aoi cleared his throat. “What are you here for, Haruna?” He asked. “What’s keeping you from resting in peace?”
Translucent and still floating, she set her line of vision onto the floor. “I died before I could have my first kiss,” she replied, smiling sadly. “And I don’t want to kiss anyone else but my lover, but…”
“But?”
“Kai.” My pulse stopped at the mention of my name then resumed, although at an uneven rhythm. “He looks so much like my lover, and…I want him to be my first kiss.”
Under normal circumstances, I would have been laughing my ass off, but this wasn’t even in the same zip code as normal. All eyes were on me while I stood before her, bewildered. I was caught in a downpour of questions. What exactly did her boyfriend and I have in common? Was she this psychotic when she was alive? I wasn’t sure at which point I started thinking aloud. “Why didn’t you just kiss me in the bathroom and get it over and done with?”
“I-I can’t just kiss a physical body directly. I need to take over another body,” she paused, obviously uneasy with whatever was going on in her ex-head. “For so many years, I’ve been trying to look for a body with enough spiritual strength to handle the possession so that I could kiss my lover.” The lights began flickering, signaling us of her misery and our trouble. “But I never found one while he still walked this earth, while his soul had not passed on yet.”
“I couldn’t find one,” she continued, and then she looked at Takuya. “Not until tonight.”
So she intends to possess…in order to…As I pieced together what she was trying to say, I felt my pulse stopping along with my train of thought. I waited for at least one of them to resume.
Nothing.
“You can’t be serious,” Takuya and I protested simultaneously.
With those words, the lights went out again. The only light we were afforded was her, glowing eerily and making the air temperature drop at freezing point.
“Just a kiss is all I ask.”
The sight of both Takuya and myself shaking our heads at her did not please her. Suddenly, all of our cellphones went off, alerting us all of an unknown caller. People were cursing now along with The Imperial March, the theme from Mission Impossible, a Bach fugue, an old-style telephone ringtone, a few random anime songs, a few random rock songs, and - was that Britney Spears singing? - all piercing through the air at the same time. The harsh noise cut through my skull, and I felt every vein in my head throbbing.
“You’ll leave us alone once it’s done, right?” Takuya managed to speak and be heard through the racket. “And you’ll move on?”
Haruna smiled icily, pushing the horror deeper into my chest. “Yes.” Then, to my dread, she turned to me. “You’ll kiss me, won’t you?”
“W-wait a minute…”
“Won’t you?”
That’s when her distress signals started getting physical. We went from merely covering our ears to dodging flying objects. Books, shoes, and Byou’s art materials were aimed towards us. Takuya and I were too busy avoiding her assaults to even think about making out, and that seemed to enrage her even more. The flying objects got bigger and deadlier - they now included vases, baseballs, small chairs, and pots and pans.
“I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die…”
“Someone help!”
“M-Mommy…”
“Dammit, you two, just do it already!”
With fear now finally showing on his features, Takuya looked at me. “Kai?”
Fuck this. “Fine,” I announced. “I’ll do it.”
Just like that, her attacks ceased. The lights remained off, and our clocks and our phones were still screaming, but at the very least we were safe at the moment. She no longer looked angry, but none of us wanted to risk pissing her off again. Awkwardness still swirling in my chest, I looked around nervously. “Do you all have to watch?”
“Kai, here’s the situation,” Uruha said. “An astoundingly lovesick ghost who died a virgin has the hots for you, and she is about to take over the body of the strongest man in the dorm. If she decides to do anything beyond making out with you, you stand no chance at defending yourself.”
“B-but-”
“He’s right. We all have to be here to make sure she doesn’t do anything bad to you.”
Resigned, I sighed. “Fine, then. Let’s do this.”
She smiled again, and I had to swallow my heart back into my chest. I watched her disappear at the same time a cold, unnatural glow replaced all color on Takuya’s face. It was surreal, really, how Takuya smiled at me the same way he did to the stray cats he always found so adorable. He smiled like that, yet he looked rather sinister. My pulse quickened as he approached me, eyes questioning.
He then touched my cheek. When he did, one, two…more tears rolled down his face. “Thank you.” I didn’t have much time to think of how unnerving it was to see Takuya cry. I didn’t have time to react, as he leaned closer and pressed his lips on mine.
I closed my eyes and prepared for a mental shut down. All I could hear was white noise. Or was it the heart rate monitor in my head reading a flat line? I couldn’t tell. It was hard for me to decipher anything at the moment with all the unanswered questions and unasked answers crowding in my head. But one thought stood out. Just one: this is my first goddamn kiss.
Almos instantly, another thought flashed in my head a little more clearly than the others. This is so fucking awkward.
In a few seconds, light stabbed through my eyelids and the raucous ringing in the air ceased. Right when I opened my eyes, Takuya pulled away, eyes wide, breath unsteady. The lights came back on, and the place was quiet again.
Have you lost your mind? That was a good question Byou asked me.
Yeah, I think I have.
Too tired to fall asleep, I lay awake, staring blankly at the ceiling. I was surprised at the silence in our room; I was expecting Byou to tease me about finally getting kissed. By a guy, might I add. Turning to the side, I sighed, wondering if Byou really was able to read me so well. I wondered if he knew how uneasy I felt about the subject and if that was the reason why he didn’t want to bug me about it.
Just when I closed my eyes, Byou spoke. “Those scars on your chest, from your car accident,” he started. “Do they still hurt?”
I quickly peeled my eyes open. Was that why he didn’t want to look at me a while ago? “No, they don’t. Why?”
“Mine do.”
I looked over the top bunk, and I caught a sad smile forming on my roommate’s face. With that, I descended and sat on his bed while he faced the wall. There was no need to ask him why he refused to show his face. “Do you remember me telling you about Chiyu?” He asked me.
“Yeah, your previous roommate. He was in an automobile accident too, wasn’t he?”
“He…he wasn’t alone. Someone was with him at the time.”
A few seconds of silence passed. “You?”
“I wonder about that,” my roommate laughed sadly, the crack in his voice noticeable. “Maybe I did die with him, Kai. Maybe I died with him and Chiyu.”
I quietly watched him while he shivered from sheer sorrow. “He was my first everything - my first boyfriend, my first kiss, and…everything, but I can’t help but remember him as my first heartbreak,” he said. “He taught History at Malice. He’s the guy who Yuuto replaced.”
My eyes widened when I remembered looking into his sketchbook, finding portrait after portrait of a certain teacher at Malice. I also remembered hearing him cry out in his sleep for a certain “Sensei,” and I thought, no, I knew it was the man in his sketchbook. I was wrong, of course; Principal Gackt was still alive. Now I had no idea who this "Sensei" was, but I did know that he was very important to Byou. He really must have been someone, if he could make this tremendously strong guy crumble this hard.
I found out who he was soon enough.
“His name was Kyo.”
Fatigue and stress now forgotten, I continued listening to Byou. He always listened to me when I needed him to; it was only fair that I did the same to him now.
“We weren’t dating for very long, but I really did love him,” he said. “Principal Gackt, on the other hand, was my art mentor. He had been my mentor even before I entered Malice, and it was through his recommendation that I got into the school in the first place. There was absolutely nothing between us, but Kyo didn’t believe me, especially not after seeing some nude portraits I did of Gackt.”
“So he,” I didn’t want to say it, worried that it would hurt Byou even more.
He said it anyway. “Yes, he broke up with me.” I wasn’t sure if I should apologize, but I chose to stay quiet. I chose to listen some more. “Shortly after that, he pursued Chiyu. Chiyu, however, wasn’t interested. But you see, Chiyu’s a really, really nice guy; he was nice enough to give Kyo one little date. Maybe he saw how hurt he was…how I had hurt him.”
“It happened on that date, didn’t it?”
He stayed quiet for a while, obviously trying but failing not to make a sound as he sobbed. “Haruna waited so many decades to find peace,” he choked. “How long do you think it took Kyo? Do you think he’s still trying to find it?”
I didn’t answer. I merely looked at him, and I found myself yet again in a situation where a friend was in need and I was completely useless. Not knowing what else to do, I lay beside him and wrapped an arm around his waist, holding him from behind. Exactly how deep his scars were, I could only wonder. All I knew was that they were nothing like mine. They weren’t just skin-deep.
Chapter Fifteen
Chapters: 14/x
Author: konicoffee
Genre: School life, Slice of Life, Drama, AU, Humor?, Crack with Plot, Smut (some chapters)
Disclaimer: I don't own any of the characters in this story.
Warnings: Extreme OOC-ness, language
Rating: R
Pairings/Characters: Kai/??? (open pairing)
Bands: The GazettE, ScReW, Malice Mizer, Alice Nine, An Cafe, SuG, more to be added later
Synopsis: Kai is in high school. He lives in an all-male dormitory with bizarre and quirky, but extremely attractive residents. Adventures, drama, and temptation fill the interiors of Mizer House. Premise is roughly based on Koko wa Greenwood.
Comments: Wow, an update in less than two weeks! This is a really chunky chapter, and it has major crack and major drama. It also reveals Byou's past with Gackt (remember? From like, ten chapters ago? /fail). I hope you like it!
Chapters: {Cast} {One} {Two} {Three} {Four} {Five} {Six} {Seven} {Eight} {Nine} {9A} {Ten} {10A} {Eleven} {Twelve} {Thirteen} {13A}
October came around rather quickly. Only a few weeks after the play we did, we found ourselves yet again hard at work, preparing for Malice’s Cultural Festival amidst loads and loads of homework. There wasn’t enough time to be stressed, though - not with a best friend whose idea of de-stressing was snooping around a nearby all-female dorm, and certainly not with a sixteen-year-old self who wanted to stop getting nightmares of Tora and Kazuki getting it on.
“Quit wobbling, Takuya!”
“In case you assholes haven’t noticed, two of you are standing on my shoulders.”
“Shut up, she’s...oh damn, look at those knockers.”
Nao and I didn’t notice the cold October night air as we watched one of our female classmates take her shirt off for a shower. She really wasn’t someone we paid plenty of attention to, but as she stripped off the articles of her uniform bit by bit, both Nao and I were wondering how the hell we never noticed how hot she was. We were covering our mouths by the time she finished taking her bra off. It was quite a stunt trying to stand on one foot on Takuya’s shoulder while watching this gorgeous girl expose her very impressive twins in perfect C-cup formation.
“That’s it, take your skirt off.”
“Guys? Oh shit, guys, there’s a girl…”
“We see her, Takuya. Oh boy, do we see her.”
“Idiot! She’s watching.”
Panic knocked all three of us off-balance, and with a soft thud we all fell to the ground. Clusters of “oh shit” and “let’s get the hell out of here” escaped us in hisses while we scrambled to get up and make a run for it. After spitting out some soil and some blades of grass, we got on our feet, shocked to find that there was no girl near the gate where Takuya said she was. Shit, she must have run inside to alert the other residents. Not wasting any time, we hurried towards the gates of the dorm, praying that whoever saw us didn’t recognize us.
The one we bumped into only a few meters outside the gate, however, did.
“Are you sure the ‘girl’ you saw wasn’t Uruha?”
“Positive,” Takuya replied, sinking deeper into the warm water of the Mizer’s large ofuro. “She wore Malice’s uniform. As much as a lot of people would like to see him in a skirt, Uruha wasn’t wearing one.”
I closed my eyes at the warmth of the bath water, aching from the chores Uruha made us do after he caught us darting out of Merry Suites’ premises. Really, what were the odds of Uruha being on his way to the dormitory to return a book right when we were fleeing the scene? Wincing at the pain on my shoulder, I tried not to be pissed off at the injury I sustained from our fall earlier. I kept my eyes closed, trying to hold the image of my topless female classmate. I tried, but hearing two other guys talking and knowing they were naked right beside me just made me think of Tora and Kazuki again.
For weeks, I couldn’t look at Tora or Kazuki without feeling horribly uneasy. I wondered how long this had been going on, and if anyone else knew about it. I knew of Kazuki giving up a career in London for “someone” in Japan, but never did I even guess that this person was none other than Tora. The idea of gay sex still disturbed the bejesus out of me, but every once in a while, I caught myself wondering what exactly Tora was doing that made Kazuki plead like that.
“Kai?”
I snapped my eyes open and blinked at the naked figure of my best friend. “What?”
“Takuya and I are done bathing. Are you?”
“You guys go ahead,” I told him. “My shoulder hurts. Maybe staying a little longer would help.”
I closed my eyes again, and when I heard the door close, I sank deeper into the water. It was starting to feel like someone was putting all his weight on my shoulder, pushing it down to break it off my neck. My whole body was hurting now, and though I did the same amount of work Nao and Takuya did today, I felt incredibly tired. The warm water was doing nothing to wash off the fatigue that was seeping through my joints.
“Kai.”
“I’ll be done in a bit, Nao.”
One, two, and a few more minutes passed. “Kai.”
“What the hell, Nao, leave me al-” My train of thought stopped instantly. That wasn’t Nao who called me just now.
The voice was female.
I slowly peeled my eyes open, and I felt them widen gradually at the girl looking over me. Her black hair framed her face, cloaking it slightly, as she smiled sweetly. Really, I would have smiled back if it weren’t for the fact that I was as naked as the day I was born and she was wearing Malice’s school uniform.
I wouldn’t have lost it if I didn’t notice that she was floating above me.
Forgetting about my soreness, my wetness, and my nudity, I jumped out of the ofuro and made a mad dash out of the bathroom. Too stunned, too scared to shout, I vaguely heard some people say something along the lines of “son of a bitch, Kai is streaking” when I passed the dining area, ran up the stairs, and raced through the corridor towards my room. Only when I fell on the floor of the room, my limbs tangled with Byou’s, did I realize that I unintentionally tackled my unsuspecting roommate.
“What the fuck, have you lost your mind?”
“Yes! I mean, no, I…” I struggled to form a sentence that made sense, but the only thing that came out of my mouth was, “there’s a ghost in the fucking bathroom.”
Byou gave me a confused look. He looked like he was genuinely trying to absorb what I was sputtering. “A ghost in the bathroom,” he repeated. “Are you sure it’s not just the two alcoholics pulling pranks on you?” He shoved me off himself and got on his feet, and looked away from me. “And for the love of all things holy, Kai, put some clothes on.”
Finally feeling the pleasant breeze on my private parts, I stood up and walked to our closet, heart still racing at the image of the floating girl I saw just moments ago. As I slipped on a pair of boxers, I thought about the possibility of this being nothing more than a prank. Maybe my vision was too hazy from being in hot water for too long that I thought I was seeing things. Perhaps the girl I saw didn’t look as real as I thought initially.
“Are you dressed yet?”
I raised my eyebrow and turned to my roommate, slightly offended. I knew I had an imperfect body with scars all over my torso from the car accident I was in before school started, but I’m sure it wasn’t so grotesque for Byou, of all people, to find it disgusting. “Since when have you been shy about seeing naked men?”
“Look, you pantywaist, when I’m at work, I’m totally fine with it. It’s a totally different story when…” Byou’s sentence stopped the same time his expression collapsed into one of extreme shock. Before I could ask him what the hell was wrong, he pointed his finger towards the closet, and instinctively, I turned around.
This was the greatest prank ever pulled, and that was the loudest anyone in Mizer had heard two people scream.
Byou and I almost broke the door down when we scrambled out of our room. At that point, the other guys were heading in our direction, not surprisingly curious as to what the hell was going on. They saw me streak, they heard me and Byou scream, and they found both of us scared beyond our wits outside our room with me wearing the emperor’s new clothes. That was odd, even for Mizer House standards.
“What happened?”
Before Byou or I could answer, all the lights suddenly went out. We all stood in the darkness for a few seconds before every alarm clock in the dorm went off at the same time. I felt a few people jump beside me, and my heart and seemingly everything else in my chest began to hammer against my bones. Jesus Christ on a pogo stick. Fairly certain that none of us set our alarms to go off at midnight, we piled up by my room’s doorstep in a pathetic semblance of a buddy system, each one of us not believing this was happening, each one scared shitless.
Only Takuya dared to move from his spot. “You just surprised us, that’s all,” was heard said in his voice from inside our room. “Come out. It’s okay.”
With that, the lights came back on, and the alarm clocks stopped ringing. “What the hell was that?” We all found out as the answer came walking out of our room with Takuya beside her.
“Ah,” Takuya started, as if totally unfazed. “She’s the girl I saw a while ago.”
Finally in some decent clothes, I stood with the other Mizer residents, and we all listened to her. The more of her story I heard, the weirder things seemed to get. Haruna Ono, as she introduced herself, joined the choir invisible a few decades before this very strange night. A sickly girl, she kicked the bucket in her second year of high school at Malice only days after she started dating this guy she really liked. Whenever she missed her boyfriend, she explained, she had this bad habit of “destroying things.” Haruna also mentioned a few things we really didn’t have to know, such as the fact that she was still a virgin.
“My lover was such a wonderful man. He-”
Aoi cleared his throat. “What are you here for, Haruna?” He asked. “What’s keeping you from resting in peace?”
Translucent and still floating, she set her line of vision onto the floor. “I died before I could have my first kiss,” she replied, smiling sadly. “And I don’t want to kiss anyone else but my lover, but…”
“But?”
“Kai.” My pulse stopped at the mention of my name then resumed, although at an uneven rhythm. “He looks so much like my lover, and…I want him to be my first kiss.”
Under normal circumstances, I would have been laughing my ass off, but this wasn’t even in the same zip code as normal. All eyes were on me while I stood before her, bewildered. I was caught in a downpour of questions. What exactly did her boyfriend and I have in common? Was she this psychotic when she was alive? I wasn’t sure at which point I started thinking aloud. “Why didn’t you just kiss me in the bathroom and get it over and done with?”
“I-I can’t just kiss a physical body directly. I need to take over another body,” she paused, obviously uneasy with whatever was going on in her ex-head. “For so many years, I’ve been trying to look for a body with enough spiritual strength to handle the possession so that I could kiss my lover.” The lights began flickering, signaling us of her misery and our trouble. “But I never found one while he still walked this earth, while his soul had not passed on yet.”
“I couldn’t find one,” she continued, and then she looked at Takuya. “Not until tonight.”
So she intends to possess…in order to…As I pieced together what she was trying to say, I felt my pulse stopping along with my train of thought. I waited for at least one of them to resume.
Nothing.
“You can’t be serious,” Takuya and I protested simultaneously.
With those words, the lights went out again. The only light we were afforded was her, glowing eerily and making the air temperature drop at freezing point.
“Just a kiss is all I ask.”
The sight of both Takuya and myself shaking our heads at her did not please her. Suddenly, all of our cellphones went off, alerting us all of an unknown caller. People were cursing now along with The Imperial March, the theme from Mission Impossible, a Bach fugue, an old-style telephone ringtone, a few random anime songs, a few random rock songs, and - was that Britney Spears singing? - all piercing through the air at the same time. The harsh noise cut through my skull, and I felt every vein in my head throbbing.
“You’ll leave us alone once it’s done, right?” Takuya managed to speak and be heard through the racket. “And you’ll move on?”
Haruna smiled icily, pushing the horror deeper into my chest. “Yes.” Then, to my dread, she turned to me. “You’ll kiss me, won’t you?”
“W-wait a minute…”
“Won’t you?”
That’s when her distress signals started getting physical. We went from merely covering our ears to dodging flying objects. Books, shoes, and Byou’s art materials were aimed towards us. Takuya and I were too busy avoiding her assaults to even think about making out, and that seemed to enrage her even more. The flying objects got bigger and deadlier - they now included vases, baseballs, small chairs, and pots and pans.
“I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die…”
“Someone help!”
“M-Mommy…”
“Dammit, you two, just do it already!”
With fear now finally showing on his features, Takuya looked at me. “Kai?”
Fuck this. “Fine,” I announced. “I’ll do it.”
Just like that, her attacks ceased. The lights remained off, and our clocks and our phones were still screaming, but at the very least we were safe at the moment. She no longer looked angry, but none of us wanted to risk pissing her off again. Awkwardness still swirling in my chest, I looked around nervously. “Do you all have to watch?”
“Kai, here’s the situation,” Uruha said. “An astoundingly lovesick ghost who died a virgin has the hots for you, and she is about to take over the body of the strongest man in the dorm. If she decides to do anything beyond making out with you, you stand no chance at defending yourself.”
“B-but-”
“He’s right. We all have to be here to make sure she doesn’t do anything bad to you.”
Resigned, I sighed. “Fine, then. Let’s do this.”
She smiled again, and I had to swallow my heart back into my chest. I watched her disappear at the same time a cold, unnatural glow replaced all color on Takuya’s face. It was surreal, really, how Takuya smiled at me the same way he did to the stray cats he always found so adorable. He smiled like that, yet he looked rather sinister. My pulse quickened as he approached me, eyes questioning.
He then touched my cheek. When he did, one, two…more tears rolled down his face. “Thank you.” I didn’t have much time to think of how unnerving it was to see Takuya cry. I didn’t have time to react, as he leaned closer and pressed his lips on mine.
I closed my eyes and prepared for a mental shut down. All I could hear was white noise. Or was it the heart rate monitor in my head reading a flat line? I couldn’t tell. It was hard for me to decipher anything at the moment with all the unanswered questions and unasked answers crowding in my head. But one thought stood out. Just one: this is my first goddamn kiss.
Almos instantly, another thought flashed in my head a little more clearly than the others. This is so fucking awkward.
In a few seconds, light stabbed through my eyelids and the raucous ringing in the air ceased. Right when I opened my eyes, Takuya pulled away, eyes wide, breath unsteady. The lights came back on, and the place was quiet again.
Have you lost your mind? That was a good question Byou asked me.
Yeah, I think I have.
Too tired to fall asleep, I lay awake, staring blankly at the ceiling. I was surprised at the silence in our room; I was expecting Byou to tease me about finally getting kissed. By a guy, might I add. Turning to the side, I sighed, wondering if Byou really was able to read me so well. I wondered if he knew how uneasy I felt about the subject and if that was the reason why he didn’t want to bug me about it.
Just when I closed my eyes, Byou spoke. “Those scars on your chest, from your car accident,” he started. “Do they still hurt?”
I quickly peeled my eyes open. Was that why he didn’t want to look at me a while ago? “No, they don’t. Why?”
“Mine do.”
I looked over the top bunk, and I caught a sad smile forming on my roommate’s face. With that, I descended and sat on his bed while he faced the wall. There was no need to ask him why he refused to show his face. “Do you remember me telling you about Chiyu?” He asked me.
“Yeah, your previous roommate. He was in an automobile accident too, wasn’t he?”
“He…he wasn’t alone. Someone was with him at the time.”
A few seconds of silence passed. “You?”
“I wonder about that,” my roommate laughed sadly, the crack in his voice noticeable. “Maybe I did die with him, Kai. Maybe I died with him and Chiyu.”
I quietly watched him while he shivered from sheer sorrow. “He was my first everything - my first boyfriend, my first kiss, and…everything, but I can’t help but remember him as my first heartbreak,” he said. “He taught History at Malice. He’s the guy who Yuuto replaced.”
My eyes widened when I remembered looking into his sketchbook, finding portrait after portrait of a certain teacher at Malice. I also remembered hearing him cry out in his sleep for a certain “Sensei,” and I thought, no, I knew it was the man in his sketchbook. I was wrong, of course; Principal Gackt was still alive. Now I had no idea who this "Sensei" was, but I did know that he was very important to Byou. He really must have been someone, if he could make this tremendously strong guy crumble this hard.
I found out who he was soon enough.
“His name was Kyo.”
Fatigue and stress now forgotten, I continued listening to Byou. He always listened to me when I needed him to; it was only fair that I did the same to him now.
“We weren’t dating for very long, but I really did love him,” he said. “Principal Gackt, on the other hand, was my art mentor. He had been my mentor even before I entered Malice, and it was through his recommendation that I got into the school in the first place. There was absolutely nothing between us, but Kyo didn’t believe me, especially not after seeing some nude portraits I did of Gackt.”
“So he,” I didn’t want to say it, worried that it would hurt Byou even more.
He said it anyway. “Yes, he broke up with me.” I wasn’t sure if I should apologize, but I chose to stay quiet. I chose to listen some more. “Shortly after that, he pursued Chiyu. Chiyu, however, wasn’t interested. But you see, Chiyu’s a really, really nice guy; he was nice enough to give Kyo one little date. Maybe he saw how hurt he was…how I had hurt him.”
“It happened on that date, didn’t it?”
He stayed quiet for a while, obviously trying but failing not to make a sound as he sobbed. “Haruna waited so many decades to find peace,” he choked. “How long do you think it took Kyo? Do you think he’s still trying to find it?”
I didn’t answer. I merely looked at him, and I found myself yet again in a situation where a friend was in need and I was completely useless. Not knowing what else to do, I lay beside him and wrapped an arm around his waist, holding him from behind. Exactly how deep his scars were, I could only wonder. All I knew was that they were nothing like mine. They weren’t just skin-deep.
Chapter Fifteen