arashi fiction 68 - from monday to sunday
Title: MWF
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Aiba/Nino
Notes: This is a story I did for jentfic_remix in the fall of 2012. Reading the original story linked below will help with understanding this one!
Link to Original Story: 愛じゃない？
Link to Original Writer: faded-lace
❥ They went to the same college, according to Aiba, anyway, but never spoke during their time there, and honestly, Nino isn't really sure why Aiba follows him around the way he does.
Mondays are the best, in Aiba's opinion. Though he certainly has his weekend fun, Saturdays filled with baseball and Sundays filled with barbecue, he also always makes sure the two-day break is a successful recharging of his internal battery. When Monday rolls around, Aiba's optimistic about a successful day of learning.
Or maybe he's just excited about the really cute guy in his first class of the day, the class with the long nose-haired professor and unhelpful PowerPoint slides that make him feel like he's going to fail every time a quiz comes around (he doesn't, and he's proud of his C average).
He'd never really considered himself to be a shy person. In high school he had tons of friends, from basketball and science club and more. He was panicked about his sexuality for awhile, but after fooling around with Yoko for a couple of months he'd gotten over that, even when they decided they worked better as friends. So he's not sure why he struggles in college with pulling together the courage to approach someone he likes.
Maybe because he's never liked someone he didn't really know before.
The Helvetica typeface is one of the most famous and popular in the world.
"He typed that in Arial," Nino whispers to a friend beside him, snorting with laughter. Aiba's right behind him, can hear what Nino's saying, and he really does want to contribute too. But he didn't even recognize what kind of font was on the slide and he's supposed to know about this kind of thing for graphic design. Fonts! Aiba should study letters, not numbers, like the number of times Nino cracks his knuckles in the course of a boring lecture.
Clear communication is the primary goal of typography.
Aiba sighs and doodles a pac-man gobbling up his notes. Well, Mondays are great until he remembers that it's followed by Tuesday - the day when this class isn't on the schedule and Nino still doesn't know his name.
❥ It's not that Aiba is stupid or a bad person or anything like that
It's just that he doesn't think he has anything in common with Nino, no way to start a conversation. Not until the horrible turned wonderful Tuesday that Aiba happens to learn his Typography class crush also plays baseball.
He never sees Nino outside of class, even though the college is fairly small. Maybe they'd passed each other in prior years without Aiba noticing, possibly because his heart had been occupied at the time with a guy who'd strung him along before placing him firmly in the friend zone. Aiba suspected Nino wasn't really the partying type, mostly because of all the gaming t-shirts he seemed to own (people who played games needed to be near those games, in their dorm rooms), so they'd never bumped into each other at one. Maybe they could have become smoke session buddies back when Aiba was doing that, but he'd quit fairly early into his college career after a health scare.
Whatever the cause of the distance between them, it's a stroke of luck that Aiba finds him chatting with a guy near his favorite study bench. Because his favorite study bench is a place he visits very irregularly. Ahem.
"It was crushed, all the bones broken," Nino explains about a very cute hand he's holding up. "And now I just can't seem to throw the way I want."
Poor Nino!
"I've been thinking about finding some people to play with on the weekends, but the shelf I put my glove on... is right behind my xbox."
Aiba listens intently, and even though it sounds like the kind of conversation he could jump in on --
I play! I play! Meeeeeeeeee!
-- it also seems rude to interrupt. Instead he holds his Typography book up in front of his face and turns his body toward the two talking figures. When he peeks up over the top, Nino's walking away.
Figures.
❥ Aiba may as well accept other people's offers, because Nino sure as hell wasn't ever going to say yes.
At least that's what he thinks on Wednesday when he's asked to go bowling by the guy everyone calls Hina, immediately following another unsuccessful attempt to speak up in class. How were you supposed to ask someone to spend time together when the room was dark and people were sort of concentrating?
The typographical principle
He'd written that in his notes right before zoning out, and just when he'd thought of tapping Nino on the shoulder to ask about the slide he'd missed, Nino's head dropped like an anchor. Aiba had seen it before - the sure signal that Nino was asleep.
text is composed to create a readable, coherent, and visually satisfying whole
Aiba had sighed when he'd read that bullet point, resting his cheek in his hand. Nino was a visually satisfying whole, but he wasn't easy to read. If Nino was a font, he'd be one of those European scrawly ones that you couldn't make legible even when you made them size 72 - but you wanted to prove that you could read it anyway, and squinted a lot, and maybe tried to cheat and type in "80" into the font size box to make it happen. But European scrawly fancy quill types weren't even readable to Europeans! At some point you just had to give up.
Didn't mean Aiba wouldn't want to use that kind of font on something that didn't need real words though, like a tiny treasure map in a pirate picture. And, well, Aiba didn't need words with Nino once he uttered the few that would get him a date. After that there could be no words at all and he'd be plenty visually satisfied and maybe satisfied in other ways too. Ways that he couldn't think about in class!
"Oh, and not just me," the guy called Hina speak up and shakes Aiba from his wandering thoughts. "Some other guys from the hall. Yoko asked me to ask you, he forgot to charge his phone."
Oh.
Well, it would have been a half-hearted acceptance of the offer anyway, Aiba thinks, smiling and agreeing to the bowling non-date. Besides, he doesn't really know that Nino won't say yes, if he ever does get around to asking. There's still a potential yes for him until the question pops out, right?
❥ Thursdays are usually good, because they're the day before Fridays
Even if he doesn't see Nino, Aiba can appreciate that he'll have one more shot during the week at making himself known. He's usually worn down by Thursday, not wanting to think of classwork or his parents asking him to come home and work at the restaurant for the summer even though he's already told them he'll be looking for a full time job. So instead he thinks about Nino and the class he'll have the next day. He thinks about the best tactics for getting his attention.
He rolls a baseball between his fingers as he organizes what he knows about Nino into a mental list. What he knows about Nino so far, aside from liking games and baseball, is--
• He has a dog, or dogs at home that he misses.
Aiba gathered as much from Nino's typography projects. All of them involved lines of text about dogs getting up to silly shenanigans. And they were all so cute. Dogs smelling natto from all the way upstairs. Dogs snoring and annoying him when he's trying to take a nap. One was about a dog that peed on a manga and was sent into space. Aiba highly doubted the last thing had happened, that was likely fictional, but it was still funny.
• He likes hats.
• He doesn't like expensive things.
Nino always came to typography class with a giant stack of papers he flipped idly through. Apparently it was the text book he'd photocopied from a friend. Maybe that was why he didn't recognize the cover when Aiba had been trying to signal him with it that one time!
• He was single. Sexual preference... fuzzy.
• His roommate was kicked out for smoking marijuana in a study room in the library.
• Left handed.
Aiba had actually been surprised about that last one, because any time Aiba watched him jotting down notes it was always with his right! But with careful observation, it became more apparent that Nino was more comfortable with his left hand for everything else. Fiddling with objects, tugging at people's shirts, holding a juice can, sending mails on his phone in the middle of a lesson -- all of those were left hand activities.
A lot of good that did him though.
"So, I heard you use your left hand a lot. Do you use it for masturbating?" Aiba asks an empty room.
When he turns red and laughs, he hides his face in his pillow, even though no one is watching.
❥ He's not really sure what he's going to say or do, not really sure what he even wants to accomplish
Especially not with graduation right around the corner. Even if he did manage to get a date with Nino, or even a friendly conversation, it's not like it was a guarantee that he'd live happily ever after. Aiba was confident, and hopeful, but he wasn't completely naive.
What if Nino graduated and then got a job overseas? What if he went on to further study, became a laywer or a high-class business-man, the kind that bought expensive watches even though they didn't need them to figure out what time it was because everyone used their phones for that anyway? What if that was Nino's life, one that Aiba didn't fit into? He had no idea what Nino's major even was! He'd never managed to get that information, and there were more than a hundred reasons that their majors could overlap at this one class.
Aiba was starting to wonder if this was all really worth putting his heart on the line. It's Friday and he's tired and he could use his weekend free time to recharge now.
All lower case font is easier to read than all uppercase font, probably because lower case structures tend to be more distinctive.
"Hey Nino, are your lower features distinctive?" Aiba thinks, then bites his lip.
Bad joke. He's definitely not using that one as his ice breaker.
Setting the mood
Oh god.
"I like to set the mood with a little music, wine, and Helvetica," Nino says, smirking and wiggling his eyebrows.
It takes Aiba a very, very long time to understand that Nino just said that to him. By the time a squeaking, gasping, nervous laugh is leaving his lips, Nino is turning back around to watch the professor change the slide. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit! His chance at an interaction and he'd completely missed it!
Aiba should be devastated, really. Only an idiot misses as great a chance as that one. Nino hadn't asked to borrow a pencil, or asked a question about the notes, or waved hello to him only to really be waving hello to the person behind him - which had been the plot of Aiba's nightmares one or twice. No. He'd said something flirty and cute, and directly to him, and Aiba hadn't been prepared. Granted, Nino had likely only turned around and said something to him because the person who usually sat beside Nino was missing from class today.
But, well, Aiba isn't that upset. Because there are two things he can take away from the experience, if he looks at things from a positive perspective.
One, he can graduate having almost, maybe spoken to his crush.
Two, he can add a new item to his Nino checklist. And it's really kind of great.
❥ He was never meant to be a salaryman
A fortune teller told him once that he just wasn't suited for office work. His parents had tried to convince him on multiple occasions that he should take over the restaurant, not bother with a suit and tie. But Aiba wore his suit with pride, and he liked his job, even if it could be kind of monotonous at times -- constantly in front of a computer screen, and not getting much time to stretch.
He usually found an excuse to roam about the office building though, taking frequent breaks with so-so reasoning for them (thirsty, out of printer ink, bladder problems, etc). Still, he liked to think he was productive. Just the other day he'd recommended a new font choice to his superior and he'd been praised, so!
Aiba wouldn't say he was perfectly satisfied with his post-college life, but it wasn't all that bad. In fact, it got better all the time. Because while most people didn't get second chances in life, Aiba had been given the amazing gift of seeing Nino again, and promptly being rejected for a dinner date.
Somehow, without the fear of rejection hovering above him, Aiba was more capable of speaking up than ever. Following your heart didn't seem as difficult when you'd already set it on the table, ready and waiting.
And unlike typography class, work wasn't a Monday-Wednesday-Friday affair. It was every day, except Saturday baseball and Sunday barbecue, but maybe someday it would really, truly be every single day of the week that he saw Nino's face.
He smiles when he and Nino arrive at the same time coincidentally, and holds open the heavy glass door for his colleague. He doesn't even wait the customary five minutes before he goes for it.
"Morning, Nino! Want to have dinner tonight?"
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Aiba/Nino
Notes: This is a story I did for jentfic_remix in the fall of 2012. Reading the original story linked below will help with understanding this one!
Link to Original Story: 愛じゃない？
Link to Original Writer: faded-lace
❥ They went to the same college, according to Aiba, anyway, but never spoke during their time there, and honestly, Nino isn't really sure why Aiba follows him around the way he does.
Mondays are the best, in Aiba's opinion. Though he certainly has his weekend fun, Saturdays filled with baseball and Sundays filled with barbecue, he also always makes sure the two-day break is a successful recharging of his internal battery. When Monday rolls around, Aiba's optimistic about a successful day of learning.
Or maybe he's just excited about the really cute guy in his first class of the day, the class with the long nose-haired professor and unhelpful PowerPoint slides that make him feel like he's going to fail every time a quiz comes around (he doesn't, and he's proud of his C average).
He'd never really considered himself to be a shy person. In high school he had tons of friends, from basketball and science club and more. He was panicked about his sexuality for awhile, but after fooling around with Yoko for a couple of months he'd gotten over that, even when they decided they worked better as friends. So he's not sure why he struggles in college with pulling together the courage to approach someone he likes.
Maybe because he's never liked someone he didn't really know before.
The Helvetica typeface is one of the most famous and popular in the world.
"He typed that in Arial," Nino whispers to a friend beside him, snorting with laughter. Aiba's right behind him, can hear what Nino's saying, and he really does want to contribute too. But he didn't even recognize what kind of font was on the slide and he's supposed to know about this kind of thing for graphic design. Fonts! Aiba should study letters, not numbers, like the number of times Nino cracks his knuckles in the course of a boring lecture.
Clear communication is the primary goal of typography.
Aiba sighs and doodles a pac-man gobbling up his notes. Well, Mondays are great until he remembers that it's followed by Tuesday - the day when this class isn't on the schedule and Nino still doesn't know his name.
❥ It's not that Aiba is stupid or a bad person or anything like that
It's just that he doesn't think he has anything in common with Nino, no way to start a conversation. Not until the horrible turned wonderful Tuesday that Aiba happens to learn his Typography class crush also plays baseball.
He never sees Nino outside of class, even though the college is fairly small. Maybe they'd passed each other in prior years without Aiba noticing, possibly because his heart had been occupied at the time with a guy who'd strung him along before placing him firmly in the friend zone. Aiba suspected Nino wasn't really the partying type, mostly because of all the gaming t-shirts he seemed to own (people who played games needed to be near those games, in their dorm rooms), so they'd never bumped into each other at one. Maybe they could have become smoke session buddies back when Aiba was doing that, but he'd quit fairly early into his college career after a health scare.
Whatever the cause of the distance between them, it's a stroke of luck that Aiba finds him chatting with a guy near his favorite study bench. Because his favorite study bench is a place he visits very irregularly. Ahem.
"It was crushed, all the bones broken," Nino explains about a very cute hand he's holding up. "And now I just can't seem to throw the way I want."
Poor Nino!
"I've been thinking about finding some people to play with on the weekends, but the shelf I put my glove on... is right behind my xbox."
Aiba listens intently, and even though it sounds like the kind of conversation he could jump in on --
I play! I play! Meeeeeeeeee!
-- it also seems rude to interrupt. Instead he holds his Typography book up in front of his face and turns his body toward the two talking figures. When he peeks up over the top, Nino's walking away.
Figures.
❥ Aiba may as well accept other people's offers, because Nino sure as hell wasn't ever going to say yes.
At least that's what he thinks on Wednesday when he's asked to go bowling by the guy everyone calls Hina, immediately following another unsuccessful attempt to speak up in class. How were you supposed to ask someone to spend time together when the room was dark and people were sort of concentrating?
The typographical principle
He'd written that in his notes right before zoning out, and just when he'd thought of tapping Nino on the shoulder to ask about the slide he'd missed, Nino's head dropped like an anchor. Aiba had seen it before - the sure signal that Nino was asleep.
text is composed to create a readable, coherent, and visually satisfying whole
Aiba had sighed when he'd read that bullet point, resting his cheek in his hand. Nino was a visually satisfying whole, but he wasn't easy to read. If Nino was a font, he'd be one of those European scrawly ones that you couldn't make legible even when you made them size 72 - but you wanted to prove that you could read it anyway, and squinted a lot, and maybe tried to cheat and type in "80" into the font size box to make it happen. But European scrawly fancy quill types weren't even readable to Europeans! At some point you just had to give up.
Didn't mean Aiba wouldn't want to use that kind of font on something that didn't need real words though, like a tiny treasure map in a pirate picture. And, well, Aiba didn't need words with Nino once he uttered the few that would get him a date. After that there could be no words at all and he'd be plenty visually satisfied and maybe satisfied in other ways too. Ways that he couldn't think about in class!
"Oh, and not just me," the guy called Hina speak up and shakes Aiba from his wandering thoughts. "Some other guys from the hall. Yoko asked me to ask you, he forgot to charge his phone."
Oh.
Well, it would have been a half-hearted acceptance of the offer anyway, Aiba thinks, smiling and agreeing to the bowling non-date. Besides, he doesn't really know that Nino won't say yes, if he ever does get around to asking. There's still a potential yes for him until the question pops out, right?
❥ Thursdays are usually good, because they're the day before Fridays
Even if he doesn't see Nino, Aiba can appreciate that he'll have one more shot during the week at making himself known. He's usually worn down by Thursday, not wanting to think of classwork or his parents asking him to come home and work at the restaurant for the summer even though he's already told them he'll be looking for a full time job. So instead he thinks about Nino and the class he'll have the next day. He thinks about the best tactics for getting his attention.
He rolls a baseball between his fingers as he organizes what he knows about Nino into a mental list. What he knows about Nino so far, aside from liking games and baseball, is--
• He has a dog, or dogs at home that he misses.
Aiba gathered as much from Nino's typography projects. All of them involved lines of text about dogs getting up to silly shenanigans. And they were all so cute. Dogs smelling natto from all the way upstairs. Dogs snoring and annoying him when he's trying to take a nap. One was about a dog that peed on a manga and was sent into space. Aiba highly doubted the last thing had happened, that was likely fictional, but it was still funny.
• He likes hats.
• He doesn't like expensive things.
Nino always came to typography class with a giant stack of papers he flipped idly through. Apparently it was the text book he'd photocopied from a friend. Maybe that was why he didn't recognize the cover when Aiba had been trying to signal him with it that one time!
• He was single. Sexual preference... fuzzy.
• His roommate was kicked out for smoking marijuana in a study room in the library.
• Left handed.
Aiba had actually been surprised about that last one, because any time Aiba watched him jotting down notes it was always with his right! But with careful observation, it became more apparent that Nino was more comfortable with his left hand for everything else. Fiddling with objects, tugging at people's shirts, holding a juice can, sending mails on his phone in the middle of a lesson -- all of those were left hand activities.
A lot of good that did him though.
"So, I heard you use your left hand a lot. Do you use it for masturbating?" Aiba asks an empty room.
When he turns red and laughs, he hides his face in his pillow, even though no one is watching.
❥ He's not really sure what he's going to say or do, not really sure what he even wants to accomplish
Especially not with graduation right around the corner. Even if he did manage to get a date with Nino, or even a friendly conversation, it's not like it was a guarantee that he'd live happily ever after. Aiba was confident, and hopeful, but he wasn't completely naive.
What if Nino graduated and then got a job overseas? What if he went on to further study, became a laywer or a high-class business-man, the kind that bought expensive watches even though they didn't need them to figure out what time it was because everyone used their phones for that anyway? What if that was Nino's life, one that Aiba didn't fit into? He had no idea what Nino's major even was! He'd never managed to get that information, and there were more than a hundred reasons that their majors could overlap at this one class.
Aiba was starting to wonder if this was all really worth putting his heart on the line. It's Friday and he's tired and he could use his weekend free time to recharge now.
All lower case font is easier to read than all uppercase font, probably because lower case structures tend to be more distinctive.
"Hey Nino, are your lower features distinctive?" Aiba thinks, then bites his lip.
Bad joke. He's definitely not using that one as his ice breaker.
Setting the mood
Oh god.
"I like to set the mood with a little music, wine, and Helvetica," Nino says, smirking and wiggling his eyebrows.
It takes Aiba a very, very long time to understand that Nino just said that to him. By the time a squeaking, gasping, nervous laugh is leaving his lips, Nino is turning back around to watch the professor change the slide. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit! His chance at an interaction and he'd completely missed it!
Aiba should be devastated, really. Only an idiot misses as great a chance as that one. Nino hadn't asked to borrow a pencil, or asked a question about the notes, or waved hello to him only to really be waving hello to the person behind him - which had been the plot of Aiba's nightmares one or twice. No. He'd said something flirty and cute, and directly to him, and Aiba hadn't been prepared. Granted, Nino had likely only turned around and said something to him because the person who usually sat beside Nino was missing from class today.
But, well, Aiba isn't that upset. Because there are two things he can take away from the experience, if he looks at things from a positive perspective.
One, he can graduate having almost, maybe spoken to his crush.
Two, he can add a new item to his Nino checklist. And it's really kind of great.
❥ He was never meant to be a salaryman
A fortune teller told him once that he just wasn't suited for office work. His parents had tried to convince him on multiple occasions that he should take over the restaurant, not bother with a suit and tie. But Aiba wore his suit with pride, and he liked his job, even if it could be kind of monotonous at times -- constantly in front of a computer screen, and not getting much time to stretch.
He usually found an excuse to roam about the office building though, taking frequent breaks with so-so reasoning for them (thirsty, out of printer ink, bladder problems, etc). Still, he liked to think he was productive. Just the other day he'd recommended a new font choice to his superior and he'd been praised, so!
Aiba wouldn't say he was perfectly satisfied with his post-college life, but it wasn't all that bad. In fact, it got better all the time. Because while most people didn't get second chances in life, Aiba had been given the amazing gift of seeing Nino again, and promptly being rejected for a dinner date.
Somehow, without the fear of rejection hovering above him, Aiba was more capable of speaking up than ever. Following your heart didn't seem as difficult when you'd already set it on the table, ready and waiting.
And unlike typography class, work wasn't a Monday-Wednesday-Friday affair. It was every day, except Saturday baseball and Sunday barbecue, but maybe someday it would really, truly be every single day of the week that he saw Nino's face.
He smiles when he and Nino arrive at the same time coincidentally, and holds open the heavy glass door for his colleague. He doesn't even wait the customary five minutes before he goes for it.
"Morning, Nino! Want to have dinner tonight?"