the road to nameless liberty: chapter one
a/n: wow so this is way shorter than i'd anticipated but i didn't want to write the first kouyou-akira confrontation right away /chickens out because i'm a coward so here have this uh idek what it is feel free to pelt me with rocks and unicorns
chapter one: plated sunshine, leaden clouds
“Besides being utterly boring and useless,” Takanori chirped over the invisible yet certainly nauseous stink of nail polish fumes, “what makes your math assignment more attractive than moi?”
Kouyou kept his eyes peeled on the graphs and depictions of quadratic equations, although the letters and numbers were beginning to melt into a blur, and ejected around the eraser-less end of his mechanical pencil, “It doesn’t chatter at a mile a minute.”
Taka huffed, mock indignation puffing his cheeks and bestowing upon him the resemblance to a small woodland critter, before he returned to his previous task of meticulously writing on his thumbs whichever cliché and sentimental kanji character popped into his upside-down-and-backwards mind. The final downwards stroke of ai was longer than politically correct, but Kouyou kept the remark to himself and continued being infinitely grateful towards whatever unidentifiable force had compelled Taka to cap the white polish bottle and set aside the toothpick he’d been using to paint over his black (as his soul) nails.
Kouyou loved Taka, he really did; some of the pursuits the younger boy thought worthwhile to indulge simply eluded his rational understanding. The question wasn’t even if said pursuits were romantic or not-everything was always overly wrought in poetics when Taka was concerned. It was whether the accomplishment of a chosen conquest would be deemed satisfactory in his crazy (not yet clinically diagnosed, they’re working on it) friend’s eyes; whether the scale on which he measured risk and reward would tip precariously close to risk but, by some twisted slipup of fate, ultimately bow at reward’s feet; whether the smell of victory in the air would be thick, intense, vibrant enough to split his reddened lips in that wild, unrestrained smile Kouyou sometimes categorized as bloodthirsty. ‘Sometimes’ was a necessarily qualifier there-he wouldn’t be the first fool to assume Takanori was a constant, was classifiable, and he wouldn’t be the first to be proven so wholly and absolutely wrong. Takanori was a natural disaster, an unstable element, the variable you should never forget to take into account, because the single time you did, you turned around to find the world in flames and shambles.
Takanori was unforgiving and Kouyou never forgave himself for letting the demented, brilliant bastard in. Taka never apologized for ransacking his life, either. There was no need to.
Kouyou cleverly masked his thought process behind his conveniently mastered poker face, because if Taka caught wind of Kouyou’s suspicions that he might be a hidden genius, he would never let him live it down. His ego didn’t require much to inflate beyond the capability of man-invented measurement systems.
“Is there a reason you insist on polluting the right side of my desk with your manicure kit,” Kouyou intoned, wrinkling the bottom-left corner of his homework sheet with a careless pull of his holey rubber eraser, “or is today Get-On-Kouyou’s-Nerves Day again? I say ‘again’ because it appears every single goddamn day in your calendar is dubbed as such.”
Takanori peered innocently at him through his thick, mascaraed lashes, batted those horrifying butterfly-ish things for emphasis on his inconspicuousness, and let a pout pucker his glossed upper lip. Kouyou refrained from verbally informing him that ‘inconspicuous’ stood against everything Takanori embodied. Instead, he let his body language work and shifted his chair slightly further from his friend to demonstrate his disdain.
“I have grounds to doubt you don’t pay close attention to your own calendar, let alone mine,” said Taka, a finely penciled brow rising to brush against overgrown bangs, as though he couldn’t begin to fathom the justification behind Kouyou’s childish behaviour. “If you did, you would know that end-of-term is fast approaching.”
“Uh huh,” was Kouyou’s curt, detached answer. “And that should perturb me how, exactly?” He punctuated the interrogation by scrunching his nose, for Taka had resumed his nefarious activity of inscribing ‘punishment’, ‘tears’ and ‘bondage’ onto his left-hand nails, whilst something suspiciously similar to ‘smile’ took shape on his right index finger.
His concept is two-faced love, how predictable, Kouyou thought, and suppressed the shudder that threatened to rattle his spine.
“End-of-term means end of classes,” Takanori explained, the slam of his fisted toothpick upon the increasingly messier desk causing the contents of Kouyou’s pencil case to clatter, “which means va-” and each intersected syllable was accompanied by “-ca-“ a jab towards the blackboard “-tion,” as though the toothpick had morphed into a lethal weapon, “which in turn signals trips to the beach, a cruise on the ocean of booze and junk food, free insomnia for each tax-paying citizen and all the gig-hopping your body wish it couldn’t withstand.”
Kouyou was left in a daze after the speech’s conclusion because Taka’s detailed bucketlist had been animated by elaborate wrist-flourishes all over the place, the crude mimicry of a dancer brandishing an intricately woven, brightly dyed fan. When he snapped out of it, it was too late to be fashionably late to mention Taka had mysteriously left “shop ‘til you drop” out of his plans.
“And you’re going to invite Suzuki.”
Now that pulled a bunch of alarms in his head that had him reeling forward, curved and pressed into the edge of the desk, and it was Takanori’s turn to back away.
“What did you say?”
His friend regarded him with apprehension, not once pausing in his application of a top coat to grant Kouyou his undivided attention. “I said, ‘and you’re going to invite Suzuki’. And before you launch yourself off your rocker and into the rocky currents, I want you to know that I mean it, and if you don’t, you can spend your week off cooped up in your room, alone, maxing your Pokémon games.”
“That was a low blow,” Kouyou pointed out, determined to ignore the earlier mention of a particular name he loathed to acknowledge existed. Not to say he equally hated the individual said name was attached to, no, that was unlikelier than he wished it was; the impersonal quality of hearing that person’s last name whilst he was used to affectionate monikers, the way it felt so foreign and made Akira feel like a stranger to him, the way Suzuki sounded so wrong and misplaced, like finding an ex-girlfriend’s clothes when sorting the laundry and then realizing you’d pinned it to the clothesline out of a malfunctioning habit-all these things scared Kouyou, scared him more than he was ready to admit.
His fall-out with Akira was still a fresh wound, raw and bloody and infected at the back of his mind, and let no one tell you it was just a flesh wound.
“You constantly pick at my repertoire of traditionally feminine pastimes,” said Taka, remorseless. “Gaming isn’t that uncommon a preference amongst teenage males. There’s nothing to be ashamed of, and certainly no motive to hide your Gameboy next to the porn mags under your mattress.”
“Can it,” Kouyou snapped. “I’m so sorry I’m not ingenuous enough or possess the free time to create a fake floorboard to stack gravures of hairy, occidental men under.”
Takanori just grinned, Cheshire and arrogant. “I’m glad we’re on the same page, Takashima.”
“What-” and when it clicked, Kouyou had to brace his hands on the desk’s edge to prevent them from busting in the other’s nose. “For the last time, I do not bat for the same team as you do; I like boobs and ass and thigh gaps.”
“Only a single trait you stated is exclusive to the female sex, and that’s in the strict sense of the term.” The little faux-blonde devil occupying the seat next to his appeared unruffled. He wasn’t even looking at Kouyou, busy inspecting his manicure for blemishes that were inexistent, knowing Taka’s obsession with perfection. When he finally slanted a glance in Kouyou’s direction, it was to say, “Apart from that, I can assure you Suzuki fits your criteria marvellously, but I’m sure you’ve had plenty occasions to ascertain that for yourself.”
His fingers twitched. He wanted to wring Takanori like a headless chicken, and if the pretentious runt soldiered on in his attempt to de-closet Kouyou against his will, he couldn’t guarantee he wouldn’t act on the impulse.
“I’ll invite him,” he managed to bite through gritted teeth. Takanori’s eyes lit up and the smirk that decorated his smug expression meant he was going to savor this victory, and Kouyou had gotten used to feeling horrible every time he surrendered to him. “But only if you invite Amano.”
The speed at which the geography of his friend’s face shifted could have ended in a seizure if something had gone marginally awry. “No.”
“Then I guess it’s just gonna be the three of us, as always.” Oh, he would never get used to that priceless look or the gratification it brought him whenever he outmaneuvered Takanori.
For the record, he looked like a pissed kitty cat, the only elements missing were the hissing and the raised hair.
~
“You’re a terrible friend, I don’t know how Takanori suffers your ass-backwards rendition of friendship,” Sana told him as they sat down for Wednesday lunch at their usual table for two. The chilled spring sunlight swathed over their plates of cafeteria curry and tinted the brown paste with its eerie pallor.
The earth had yet to swivel into summer, its honeyed palette and nuances, its sticky heat and the sun a ruthless glare overhead, but the clearly hysterical soul burdened with regulating the school’s temperature had rigged the AC to its highest, and no amount of tampering on his third-period English teacher’s part had appeased the relentless flow of frosty air. Kouyou was this close to shivering in his trousers, and he decided Sana was only able to maintain her impeccable composure in that shorter-than-issued uniform skirt because she was biologically below zero Celsius, her heart was made of ice and she was a cold bitch. She also had fantastic legs, which Kouyou’s wasn’t going to complain about ever, and if she wanted to flaunt them, he wouldn’t be the one to suppress her freedom of expression.
“Pot calling the kettle black,” he said, glad his voice didn’t reflect his physical state. “You dated me, remember?”
“You were hot, I was horny and high as a kite with Takanori holding the spool, it was a mistake,” retorted Sana, her plastic fork cutting into a choppily skinned piece of potato, the perpetual stabbing motion more aggressive than it needed to be. “I’m never going to forgive myself.”
“I’m still hot,” Kouyou snorted. “And you’re still friends with me.”
“I have a doctor’s slip that officially recognizes I have self-destructive tendencies. You should get one, too. You wouldn’t even need to stand in line, they’d just throw it at you, Homura-sensei’s been begging me to set up an appointment for you with a therapist since that time last year I sprained my ankle and you carried me to the infirmary.”
“He just wants to get into your pants. Not that you’re wearing any.” Kouyou leered. “Not that I recommend you start.”
Sana rolled her eyes and aimed a deft kick at his shin. Fuck, right, he didn’t need a reminder how sharp she liked her heels, the old bruise had just faded.
“It might have something to do with how, in the five-minute window he left the room, you managed to scare one upperclassman shitless, and he later found Patient Number Two in the hallway, in tears?”
“He tried to hit on you,” Kouyou retaliated around a mouthful of rice. “You’re so ungrateful, scorning your saviour and my good intentions. I was defending your integrity.”
“He was missing his front teeth and his mouth was bleeding out, I don’t think he tried chatting up an unconscious person.” Not to mention you pretty much lost whatever shrivel of integrity you had left after sleeping with Takashima Kouyou.
“He was ogling you.”
Sana sighed, and if she were as expressive as a normal human being, she would have lifted her arms to the sky in exasperation. “Your severely handicapped ability to react conventionally to social situations is no excuse to treat Takanori like crap. Apart from Yukkun and, I hate to admit this, myself, nobody stuck around longer than him after discovering you’re a major douchebag eighty percent of the time. There’s definitely no one who stayed to have derogatory epithets flung in their face each time they try to talk to you.”
The accusations, only they weren’t mere pointing fingers because they were true, stung like salt on an old, reopened gash, and he bravely suppressed the urge to grab his tray and leave. Sana was right, she was always right, when was she ever wrong? She’d been right when she said she was high during their initial hook-up, her mind hadn’t been clear, Kouyou was a mistake and he knew and he understood and she was right. She was right when she said nobody stuck around, no one stayed, not when they had an uncontrollable hurricane at their heels that brought nothing but destruction and sucked in everything that lied in its path. What reaction was he expecting other than run? Run far and fast and don’t look back. There wasn’t anything to be had in a relationship with Kouyou-he took and took and took until all that was left were bare bones and an empty bed, because he always got the hell out of dodge before his partner realized what a major fuck-up they’d been.
Sana was the only one who’d read the signs, who wasn’t too ensnarled by Kouyou’s material attractiveness to see the storm looming over the horizon. Their break hadn’t unraveled into frayed threads and broken trust; it was clean, seamless as a guillotine’s blade as it cut a road towards him, a painless death against the thousands of agonizing, small demises he’d experienced beforehand. Sana knew what she wanted, and it wasn’t Kouyou.
Sana didn’t know exactly what or whom Kouyou wanted, but she knew it wasn’t her.
And it was, once again, her words that pulled his head above sea-level, her voice like a lighthouse’s beacon piercing through the miasma, her sound advice that kept the unhinged ground under his feet from slipping into a landslide.
“So next time we go for yakiniku, you’ll treat him, and you’ll invite Suzuki,” she concluded, eyes soft and hands warm and smooth over his fist. She gently uncurled his fingers and massaged the angry red crescents his nails had left on his palm, a sequence of curved lines like a butchered Morse code, a desperate S.O.S. sent into the raging sea. A landmark of the deep-rooted self-esteem issues he hid in the bowels of his lonely, arctic planet, because he’d noticed no one hung around long enough to dig his pieces up.
He shut his eyes and let his demons slink back into their darkness. “Yeah, I will.” A wry smile stretched his chapped lips into a taut line, and he said, “You also agreed to be my roommate, I don’t think any degree of folly can excuse that, you’re clearly not human for missing that big of a chunk of your self-preservation instincts.” He earned himself a very hard flick on the forehead, because Sana was a bitch and she knew how to hurt people in the most effective and subtle manners.
(Sana didn’t know, but the main reason Kouyou had gone against the voices in his head that bellowed at him to latch onto her, you don’t get a chance like this twice in a lifetime, especially not when your name is Takashima Kouyou and you’ve already squandered one already, the main reason he let her go when she’d been his North Star and he was growing weary of being a vagabond, he was cursed to bohemia and it didn’t suit him-
Kouyou knew that someday, the earth was going to split and swallow him whole, and he could never live with himself if he dragged Sana into the pits of hell, because if she knew he planned on going down alone she would follow him, he wouldn’t be able to stop her, he never was, and this was why he didn’t tell her and she didn’t know. Because for all her wisdom and her excellent record of reigning Kouyou in, he really had meant it when he said her sense of self-preservation sucked.)
~
Kouyou knew exactly which classes he shared with Akira, and which he didn’t. He knew they had Chemistry together with Obata-sensei and P.E. with Inoue-sensei. He knew Akira deliberately sat at the opposite side of wherever Kouyou chose to sit, knew Akira lowered his head and clenched his pen like a lifeline whenever Kouyou brushed past, knew he was better off leaving Akira to his own devices than accidentally triggering a landmine and blowing himself to smithereens. He could also draw, from memory, every line of Akira’s body when he was in the action of pulling his shirt over his head. He could count the number of bumps along Akira’s spine when he bent down to grab his bag. He could tell you where Akira had lost the most weight and sculpt you a bust of how he used to look, healthy and happy and alive.
So when Kouyou walked into Obata-sensei’s class on Thursday morning, half an hour late and yawning profusely, and from the corner of his eye he saw Akira promptly shut down, he told himself, not today.
When he stalked into fifth-period Chemistry the next day, on time and not apologizing mid-stretch as he ordinarily was, and made eye contact with Akira who visibly recoiled as though burned, he thought, okay, not today either.
Tuesday rolled around and an entire week had nearly passed since he’d been confronted with the challenge. Takanori mouthed three days left at him during Tanaka-sensei’s tirade on the Sengoku era and he almost ripped Oda Nobunaga’s face off his history textbook. Finally, the bell rang on Friday noon, announcing the start of lunch break, and Kouyou hadn’t even spoken to Akira.
“You’re a wimp,” Yutaka said without a heartbeat’s hesitation while stealing Kouyou’s fries. He received a glare that he suavely shrugged off, and it was no wonder girls went crazy for him, long-term relationship and be-my-husband crazy, unlike Kouyou’s one-night-stand, hormone-induced crazy.
“Couldn’t have said it better myself,” piped Takanori as he swiped his drink, and okay, he knew everyone wanted a piece of him, but he wasn’t about to treat Taka twice in under a week.
“He looks traumatized if I approach within a five-meter radius of him.”
Yutaka dismissed his comment. “You suffer from chronic bitch face when you’re preoccupied, I don’t blame him. Have you tried smiling?”
Kouyou cracked a tentative grin, and Takanori stiffened, hamburger hovering an inch from his open mouth. Yutaka winced. “Uh, okay, discard that suggestion. We don’t want him to think you’re about to eat him.”
Kouyou jumped, and if he could, he would have backpedaled out the McDonalds. Wow, that was not supposed to sound as dirty as it did, he didn’t want to eat Akira, of course he didn’t, he wasn’t into cannibalism. Or ritualistic cannibalism. Frequent interaction with Takanori had taught him to be succinct and precise with his vocabulary. Frequent interaction with Takanori had also taught him there were no alternative universes where he escaped his friend’s conniving clutches without sacrificing a few limbs, especially those where Yutaka had given him a paintball gun on his sixteenth birthday, oblivious to the slight against humanity he had committed and unaware he’d condemned Kouyou to a bleak future and certain death by inhalation of toxic vapours-as if the nail polish alone wouldn’t do him in any day now.
(That single vain endeavour to avoid Taka after an exceptionally disastrous breakup proved futile because he’d broken into Kouyou’s house, reduced his wardrobe to a psychedelic mess, and then called him to ask if he wanted to go shopping.)
He spent the remainder of his lunch break practicing how to smile under pressure without looking like a serial killer while Yutaka held a napkin dispenser as a stand-in for a mirror and Takanori barked instructions, eager to play coach, and Kouyou had never been so relieved that nobody in his vicinity was dumb or suicidal enough to instill any kind of leadership responsibilities upon his little friend. At some point, ketchup was involved and things got messy, and they were kicked out on their behinds once the manager got fed up with Taka constantly asking for more sachets of sugar.
“It’s not my fault he eventually decided I was a drug dealer and ‘pack of sugar’ is codename for cocaine,” said Takanori, brushing imaginary dust from his ripped jeans and inadvertently catching a fishnet glove on his studded belt.
“In the event they locate your house and notify the police,” Yutaka replied, “my name is Kai and my lifelong aspiration is to become the housewife of some rad rocker dude. I am also a girl.”
“Calm down, nobody’s dragging Taka into an interrogation room and strapping him down to a chair,” Kouyou said, and upon detecting his Freudian slip, quickly amended, “Against his will, that is. Unless it’s roleplay?”
“Interrogation is up my alley, alright,” the blonde chimed, a wicked smirk darkening his features.
“Nope, red light, caution tape, the plane has left the airport,” Kouyou blabbered. “You are entering the Too-Much-Information zone with neither permission nor consensus, please exit immediately or I will be obligated to execute protocol number shut-the-fuck-up-or-I-will-duck-tape-your-mouth-I-swear-to-God.”
Yutaka slapped him upside the head. “You’re ridiculous.”
“I don’t know which is sexier,” interjected Takanori, determined to send this conversation careening into hell, “when you act all authoritative or when you threaten to gag me.”
Kouyou groaned and dropped his face into his hands, smearing the blotch of mayonnaise on his cheek.
Then, for the first time since the day had begun, Kouyou heard something intelligent that wasn’t a convoluted metaphor insulting his manhood.
“I heard that Akira helps with his family’s sweets shop now and then,” Yutaka said. “You might want to try there. After all, he can’t turn away a customer.”
“You’re a lifesaver,” breathed Kouyou, pupils dilated because Akira in an apron was not a vision he wanted to have seated on the curb of a sidewalk in front of a McDonalds.
“You owe me a mont blanc,” was his acknowledgement as Yutaka gave him a pat on the back and stood.
chapter one: end.
chapter one: plated sunshine, leaden clouds
“Besides being utterly boring and useless,” Takanori chirped over the invisible yet certainly nauseous stink of nail polish fumes, “what makes your math assignment more attractive than moi?”
Kouyou kept his eyes peeled on the graphs and depictions of quadratic equations, although the letters and numbers were beginning to melt into a blur, and ejected around the eraser-less end of his mechanical pencil, “It doesn’t chatter at a mile a minute.”
Taka huffed, mock indignation puffing his cheeks and bestowing upon him the resemblance to a small woodland critter, before he returned to his previous task of meticulously writing on his thumbs whichever cliché and sentimental kanji character popped into his upside-down-and-backwards mind. The final downwards stroke of ai was longer than politically correct, but Kouyou kept the remark to himself and continued being infinitely grateful towards whatever unidentifiable force had compelled Taka to cap the white polish bottle and set aside the toothpick he’d been using to paint over his black (as his soul) nails.
Kouyou loved Taka, he really did; some of the pursuits the younger boy thought worthwhile to indulge simply eluded his rational understanding. The question wasn’t even if said pursuits were romantic or not-everything was always overly wrought in poetics when Taka was concerned. It was whether the accomplishment of a chosen conquest would be deemed satisfactory in his crazy (not yet clinically diagnosed, they’re working on it) friend’s eyes; whether the scale on which he measured risk and reward would tip precariously close to risk but, by some twisted slipup of fate, ultimately bow at reward’s feet; whether the smell of victory in the air would be thick, intense, vibrant enough to split his reddened lips in that wild, unrestrained smile Kouyou sometimes categorized as bloodthirsty. ‘Sometimes’ was a necessarily qualifier there-he wouldn’t be the first fool to assume Takanori was a constant, was classifiable, and he wouldn’t be the first to be proven so wholly and absolutely wrong. Takanori was a natural disaster, an unstable element, the variable you should never forget to take into account, because the single time you did, you turned around to find the world in flames and shambles.
Takanori was unforgiving and Kouyou never forgave himself for letting the demented, brilliant bastard in. Taka never apologized for ransacking his life, either. There was no need to.
Kouyou cleverly masked his thought process behind his conveniently mastered poker face, because if Taka caught wind of Kouyou’s suspicions that he might be a hidden genius, he would never let him live it down. His ego didn’t require much to inflate beyond the capability of man-invented measurement systems.
“Is there a reason you insist on polluting the right side of my desk with your manicure kit,” Kouyou intoned, wrinkling the bottom-left corner of his homework sheet with a careless pull of his holey rubber eraser, “or is today Get-On-Kouyou’s-Nerves Day again? I say ‘again’ because it appears every single goddamn day in your calendar is dubbed as such.”
Takanori peered innocently at him through his thick, mascaraed lashes, batted those horrifying butterfly-ish things for emphasis on his inconspicuousness, and let a pout pucker his glossed upper lip. Kouyou refrained from verbally informing him that ‘inconspicuous’ stood against everything Takanori embodied. Instead, he let his body language work and shifted his chair slightly further from his friend to demonstrate his disdain.
“I have grounds to doubt you don’t pay close attention to your own calendar, let alone mine,” said Taka, a finely penciled brow rising to brush against overgrown bangs, as though he couldn’t begin to fathom the justification behind Kouyou’s childish behaviour. “If you did, you would know that end-of-term is fast approaching.”
“Uh huh,” was Kouyou’s curt, detached answer. “And that should perturb me how, exactly?” He punctuated the interrogation by scrunching his nose, for Taka had resumed his nefarious activity of inscribing ‘punishment’, ‘tears’ and ‘bondage’ onto his left-hand nails, whilst something suspiciously similar to ‘smile’ took shape on his right index finger.
His concept is two-faced love, how predictable, Kouyou thought, and suppressed the shudder that threatened to rattle his spine.
“End-of-term means end of classes,” Takanori explained, the slam of his fisted toothpick upon the increasingly messier desk causing the contents of Kouyou’s pencil case to clatter, “which means va-” and each intersected syllable was accompanied by “-ca-“ a jab towards the blackboard “-tion,” as though the toothpick had morphed into a lethal weapon, “which in turn signals trips to the beach, a cruise on the ocean of booze and junk food, free insomnia for each tax-paying citizen and all the gig-hopping your body wish it couldn’t withstand.”
Kouyou was left in a daze after the speech’s conclusion because Taka’s detailed bucketlist had been animated by elaborate wrist-flourishes all over the place, the crude mimicry of a dancer brandishing an intricately woven, brightly dyed fan. When he snapped out of it, it was too late to be fashionably late to mention Taka had mysteriously left “shop ‘til you drop” out of his plans.
“And you’re going to invite Suzuki.”
Now that pulled a bunch of alarms in his head that had him reeling forward, curved and pressed into the edge of the desk, and it was Takanori’s turn to back away.
“What did you say?”
His friend regarded him with apprehension, not once pausing in his application of a top coat to grant Kouyou his undivided attention. “I said, ‘and you’re going to invite Suzuki’. And before you launch yourself off your rocker and into the rocky currents, I want you to know that I mean it, and if you don’t, you can spend your week off cooped up in your room, alone, maxing your Pokémon games.”
“That was a low blow,” Kouyou pointed out, determined to ignore the earlier mention of a particular name he loathed to acknowledge existed. Not to say he equally hated the individual said name was attached to, no, that was unlikelier than he wished it was; the impersonal quality of hearing that person’s last name whilst he was used to affectionate monikers, the way it felt so foreign and made Akira feel like a stranger to him, the way Suzuki sounded so wrong and misplaced, like finding an ex-girlfriend’s clothes when sorting the laundry and then realizing you’d pinned it to the clothesline out of a malfunctioning habit-all these things scared Kouyou, scared him more than he was ready to admit.
His fall-out with Akira was still a fresh wound, raw and bloody and infected at the back of his mind, and let no one tell you it was just a flesh wound.
“You constantly pick at my repertoire of traditionally feminine pastimes,” said Taka, remorseless. “Gaming isn’t that uncommon a preference amongst teenage males. There’s nothing to be ashamed of, and certainly no motive to hide your Gameboy next to the porn mags under your mattress.”
“Can it,” Kouyou snapped. “I’m so sorry I’m not ingenuous enough or possess the free time to create a fake floorboard to stack gravures of hairy, occidental men under.”
Takanori just grinned, Cheshire and arrogant. “I’m glad we’re on the same page, Takashima.”
“What-” and when it clicked, Kouyou had to brace his hands on the desk’s edge to prevent them from busting in the other’s nose. “For the last time, I do not bat for the same team as you do; I like boobs and ass and thigh gaps.”
“Only a single trait you stated is exclusive to the female sex, and that’s in the strict sense of the term.” The little faux-blonde devil occupying the seat next to his appeared unruffled. He wasn’t even looking at Kouyou, busy inspecting his manicure for blemishes that were inexistent, knowing Taka’s obsession with perfection. When he finally slanted a glance in Kouyou’s direction, it was to say, “Apart from that, I can assure you Suzuki fits your criteria marvellously, but I’m sure you’ve had plenty occasions to ascertain that for yourself.”
His fingers twitched. He wanted to wring Takanori like a headless chicken, and if the pretentious runt soldiered on in his attempt to de-closet Kouyou against his will, he couldn’t guarantee he wouldn’t act on the impulse.
“I’ll invite him,” he managed to bite through gritted teeth. Takanori’s eyes lit up and the smirk that decorated his smug expression meant he was going to savor this victory, and Kouyou had gotten used to feeling horrible every time he surrendered to him. “But only if you invite Amano.”
The speed at which the geography of his friend’s face shifted could have ended in a seizure if something had gone marginally awry. “No.”
“Then I guess it’s just gonna be the three of us, as always.” Oh, he would never get used to that priceless look or the gratification it brought him whenever he outmaneuvered Takanori.
For the record, he looked like a pissed kitty cat, the only elements missing were the hissing and the raised hair.
~
“You’re a terrible friend, I don’t know how Takanori suffers your ass-backwards rendition of friendship,” Sana told him as they sat down for Wednesday lunch at their usual table for two. The chilled spring sunlight swathed over their plates of cafeteria curry and tinted the brown paste with its eerie pallor.
The earth had yet to swivel into summer, its honeyed palette and nuances, its sticky heat and the sun a ruthless glare overhead, but the clearly hysterical soul burdened with regulating the school’s temperature had rigged the AC to its highest, and no amount of tampering on his third-period English teacher’s part had appeased the relentless flow of frosty air. Kouyou was this close to shivering in his trousers, and he decided Sana was only able to maintain her impeccable composure in that shorter-than-issued uniform skirt because she was biologically below zero Celsius, her heart was made of ice and she was a cold bitch. She also had fantastic legs, which Kouyou’s wasn’t going to complain about ever, and if she wanted to flaunt them, he wouldn’t be the one to suppress her freedom of expression.
“Pot calling the kettle black,” he said, glad his voice didn’t reflect his physical state. “You dated me, remember?”
“You were hot, I was horny and high as a kite with Takanori holding the spool, it was a mistake,” retorted Sana, her plastic fork cutting into a choppily skinned piece of potato, the perpetual stabbing motion more aggressive than it needed to be. “I’m never going to forgive myself.”
“I’m still hot,” Kouyou snorted. “And you’re still friends with me.”
“I have a doctor’s slip that officially recognizes I have self-destructive tendencies. You should get one, too. You wouldn’t even need to stand in line, they’d just throw it at you, Homura-sensei’s been begging me to set up an appointment for you with a therapist since that time last year I sprained my ankle and you carried me to the infirmary.”
“He just wants to get into your pants. Not that you’re wearing any.” Kouyou leered. “Not that I recommend you start.”
Sana rolled her eyes and aimed a deft kick at his shin. Fuck, right, he didn’t need a reminder how sharp she liked her heels, the old bruise had just faded.
“It might have something to do with how, in the five-minute window he left the room, you managed to scare one upperclassman shitless, and he later found Patient Number Two in the hallway, in tears?”
“He tried to hit on you,” Kouyou retaliated around a mouthful of rice. “You’re so ungrateful, scorning your saviour and my good intentions. I was defending your integrity.”
“He was missing his front teeth and his mouth was bleeding out, I don’t think he tried chatting up an unconscious person.” Not to mention you pretty much lost whatever shrivel of integrity you had left after sleeping with Takashima Kouyou.
“He was ogling you.”
Sana sighed, and if she were as expressive as a normal human being, she would have lifted her arms to the sky in exasperation. “Your severely handicapped ability to react conventionally to social situations is no excuse to treat Takanori like crap. Apart from Yukkun and, I hate to admit this, myself, nobody stuck around longer than him after discovering you’re a major douchebag eighty percent of the time. There’s definitely no one who stayed to have derogatory epithets flung in their face each time they try to talk to you.”
The accusations, only they weren’t mere pointing fingers because they were true, stung like salt on an old, reopened gash, and he bravely suppressed the urge to grab his tray and leave. Sana was right, she was always right, when was she ever wrong? She’d been right when she said she was high during their initial hook-up, her mind hadn’t been clear, Kouyou was a mistake and he knew and he understood and she was right. She was right when she said nobody stuck around, no one stayed, not when they had an uncontrollable hurricane at their heels that brought nothing but destruction and sucked in everything that lied in its path. What reaction was he expecting other than run? Run far and fast and don’t look back. There wasn’t anything to be had in a relationship with Kouyou-he took and took and took until all that was left were bare bones and an empty bed, because he always got the hell out of dodge before his partner realized what a major fuck-up they’d been.
Sana was the only one who’d read the signs, who wasn’t too ensnarled by Kouyou’s material attractiveness to see the storm looming over the horizon. Their break hadn’t unraveled into frayed threads and broken trust; it was clean, seamless as a guillotine’s blade as it cut a road towards him, a painless death against the thousands of agonizing, small demises he’d experienced beforehand. Sana knew what she wanted, and it wasn’t Kouyou.
Sana didn’t know exactly what or whom Kouyou wanted, but she knew it wasn’t her.
And it was, once again, her words that pulled his head above sea-level, her voice like a lighthouse’s beacon piercing through the miasma, her sound advice that kept the unhinged ground under his feet from slipping into a landslide.
“So next time we go for yakiniku, you’ll treat him, and you’ll invite Suzuki,” she concluded, eyes soft and hands warm and smooth over his fist. She gently uncurled his fingers and massaged the angry red crescents his nails had left on his palm, a sequence of curved lines like a butchered Morse code, a desperate S.O.S. sent into the raging sea. A landmark of the deep-rooted self-esteem issues he hid in the bowels of his lonely, arctic planet, because he’d noticed no one hung around long enough to dig his pieces up.
He shut his eyes and let his demons slink back into their darkness. “Yeah, I will.” A wry smile stretched his chapped lips into a taut line, and he said, “You also agreed to be my roommate, I don’t think any degree of folly can excuse that, you’re clearly not human for missing that big of a chunk of your self-preservation instincts.” He earned himself a very hard flick on the forehead, because Sana was a bitch and she knew how to hurt people in the most effective and subtle manners.
(Sana didn’t know, but the main reason Kouyou had gone against the voices in his head that bellowed at him to latch onto her, you don’t get a chance like this twice in a lifetime, especially not when your name is Takashima Kouyou and you’ve already squandered one already, the main reason he let her go when she’d been his North Star and he was growing weary of being a vagabond, he was cursed to bohemia and it didn’t suit him-
Kouyou knew that someday, the earth was going to split and swallow him whole, and he could never live with himself if he dragged Sana into the pits of hell, because if she knew he planned on going down alone she would follow him, he wouldn’t be able to stop her, he never was, and this was why he didn’t tell her and she didn’t know. Because for all her wisdom and her excellent record of reigning Kouyou in, he really had meant it when he said her sense of self-preservation sucked.)
~
Kouyou knew exactly which classes he shared with Akira, and which he didn’t. He knew they had Chemistry together with Obata-sensei and P.E. with Inoue-sensei. He knew Akira deliberately sat at the opposite side of wherever Kouyou chose to sit, knew Akira lowered his head and clenched his pen like a lifeline whenever Kouyou brushed past, knew he was better off leaving Akira to his own devices than accidentally triggering a landmine and blowing himself to smithereens. He could also draw, from memory, every line of Akira’s body when he was in the action of pulling his shirt over his head. He could count the number of bumps along Akira’s spine when he bent down to grab his bag. He could tell you where Akira had lost the most weight and sculpt you a bust of how he used to look, healthy and happy and alive.
So when Kouyou walked into Obata-sensei’s class on Thursday morning, half an hour late and yawning profusely, and from the corner of his eye he saw Akira promptly shut down, he told himself, not today.
When he stalked into fifth-period Chemistry the next day, on time and not apologizing mid-stretch as he ordinarily was, and made eye contact with Akira who visibly recoiled as though burned, he thought, okay, not today either.
Tuesday rolled around and an entire week had nearly passed since he’d been confronted with the challenge. Takanori mouthed three days left at him during Tanaka-sensei’s tirade on the Sengoku era and he almost ripped Oda Nobunaga’s face off his history textbook. Finally, the bell rang on Friday noon, announcing the start of lunch break, and Kouyou hadn’t even spoken to Akira.
“You’re a wimp,” Yutaka said without a heartbeat’s hesitation while stealing Kouyou’s fries. He received a glare that he suavely shrugged off, and it was no wonder girls went crazy for him, long-term relationship and be-my-husband crazy, unlike Kouyou’s one-night-stand, hormone-induced crazy.
“Couldn’t have said it better myself,” piped Takanori as he swiped his drink, and okay, he knew everyone wanted a piece of him, but he wasn’t about to treat Taka twice in under a week.
“He looks traumatized if I approach within a five-meter radius of him.”
Yutaka dismissed his comment. “You suffer from chronic bitch face when you’re preoccupied, I don’t blame him. Have you tried smiling?”
Kouyou cracked a tentative grin, and Takanori stiffened, hamburger hovering an inch from his open mouth. Yutaka winced. “Uh, okay, discard that suggestion. We don’t want him to think you’re about to eat him.”
Kouyou jumped, and if he could, he would have backpedaled out the McDonalds. Wow, that was not supposed to sound as dirty as it did, he didn’t want to eat Akira, of course he didn’t, he wasn’t into cannibalism. Or ritualistic cannibalism. Frequent interaction with Takanori had taught him to be succinct and precise with his vocabulary. Frequent interaction with Takanori had also taught him there were no alternative universes where he escaped his friend’s conniving clutches without sacrificing a few limbs, especially those where Yutaka had given him a paintball gun on his sixteenth birthday, oblivious to the slight against humanity he had committed and unaware he’d condemned Kouyou to a bleak future and certain death by inhalation of toxic vapours-as if the nail polish alone wouldn’t do him in any day now.
(That single vain endeavour to avoid Taka after an exceptionally disastrous breakup proved futile because he’d broken into Kouyou’s house, reduced his wardrobe to a psychedelic mess, and then called him to ask if he wanted to go shopping.)
He spent the remainder of his lunch break practicing how to smile under pressure without looking like a serial killer while Yutaka held a napkin dispenser as a stand-in for a mirror and Takanori barked instructions, eager to play coach, and Kouyou had never been so relieved that nobody in his vicinity was dumb or suicidal enough to instill any kind of leadership responsibilities upon his little friend. At some point, ketchup was involved and things got messy, and they were kicked out on their behinds once the manager got fed up with Taka constantly asking for more sachets of sugar.
“It’s not my fault he eventually decided I was a drug dealer and ‘pack of sugar’ is codename for cocaine,” said Takanori, brushing imaginary dust from his ripped jeans and inadvertently catching a fishnet glove on his studded belt.
“In the event they locate your house and notify the police,” Yutaka replied, “my name is Kai and my lifelong aspiration is to become the housewife of some rad rocker dude. I am also a girl.”
“Calm down, nobody’s dragging Taka into an interrogation room and strapping him down to a chair,” Kouyou said, and upon detecting his Freudian slip, quickly amended, “Against his will, that is. Unless it’s roleplay?”
“Interrogation is up my alley, alright,” the blonde chimed, a wicked smirk darkening his features.
“Nope, red light, caution tape, the plane has left the airport,” Kouyou blabbered. “You are entering the Too-Much-Information zone with neither permission nor consensus, please exit immediately or I will be obligated to execute protocol number shut-the-fuck-up-or-I-will-duck-tape-your-mouth-I-swear-to-God.”
Yutaka slapped him upside the head. “You’re ridiculous.”
“I don’t know which is sexier,” interjected Takanori, determined to send this conversation careening into hell, “when you act all authoritative or when you threaten to gag me.”
Kouyou groaned and dropped his face into his hands, smearing the blotch of mayonnaise on his cheek.
Then, for the first time since the day had begun, Kouyou heard something intelligent that wasn’t a convoluted metaphor insulting his manhood.
“I heard that Akira helps with his family’s sweets shop now and then,” Yutaka said. “You might want to try there. After all, he can’t turn away a customer.”
“You’re a lifesaver,” breathed Kouyou, pupils dilated because Akira in an apron was not a vision he wanted to have seated on the curb of a sidewalk in front of a McDonalds.
“You owe me a mont blanc,” was his acknowledgement as Yutaka gave him a pat on the back and stood.
chapter one: end.