Hyoutei Roommates: Coping Methods #9: Ongaeshi, ~omake~
Title: Ongaeshi (Favours)
Part: ~omake~
Notes: *chuckle* Been a long time since I wrote one of these, too...
Ongaeshi, ~omake~
There was something very odd going on around him, but for the life of him, Oshitari couldn’t quite figure out what it was.
It wasn’t anything as overt as an event-he’d always made it a habit to listen to the undercurrents in the school, and as far as he knew, there weren’t any phases of the moon that he should have been paying attention to-but it was seeming like a day full of sidelong glances and little cutting smiles and clusters of girls immediately clamming up and giving him odd looks the moment he rounded a corner.
Curiouser and curiouser. He’d have asked Mari about it, except that she typically disappeared at every break to go run her little errands and keep an eye on the younger girls who hadn’t yet quite learned the ropes. Well, perhaps if it continued, he’d leave a note.
“Enomoto,” he flagged down the student council secretary as the lunch bell rang, and smiled at her over the edge of his glasses. She was one of his favourite members of the student council-definitely by far one of the smartest girls he knew, if rather infatuated with him. “Don’t forget, we’re meeting this afternoon after tennis practice.”
She blinked up at him over the rims of her glasses, and her lips curved downwards, just a hint, with a minute moue. “I’m sorry, Oshitari-san. I don’t think I can stay that long after school. Would you mind finding someone else to transcribe your proposal for you?”
He was too well-trained to gape, of course, but… no, she wasn’t joking, her highlit hair was falling around her face as she gathered her books and didn’t look at him. Enomoto was shy, but she was bright, and dedicated, with quite a gift for words-and she could always be counted on for student council business. Especially for him. She had been ever since the day Mari had come across the tennis courts to tell him that Enomoto had a crush on him; he’d always made it a point to keep smiling at her.
“It’s awfully late for me to find someone else, Enomoto,” he murmured, confused.
“Well, you should always keep your options open, shouldn’t you, Oshitari Yuushi?” but the girl’s smile was thin and knife-edged when she shrugged, and pushed back her chair, slipping her books neatly into her bag. “Unless, of course, something isn’t an option? ”
He found himself staring after her, surrounded by a crowded classroom, his mouth just a little open.
Options. Options. Fangirls and tape recorders and Taira Mari, no matter what anyone thought of her appearance, being known far and wide as one of the most scrupulously honest people in school. If she told the fangirls something, they believed it.
So much for assuming that if he annoyed her enough, she’d simply allow her revenge to build… and while her calling him ‘darling’ had actually sent chills up his back, the thought of Mari taking the entire shopping expedition out on him in small, dissipating little bursts had simply never occurred to him.
She’d even warned him, hadn’t she. Taira Mari took her promises seriously.
The thought of Mari using-or misusing, as it were-her power… well. Surely she couldn’t have turned all of the girls in the school against him, after all. True, he had said what he’d said, and it probably hadn’t sounded complimentary out of context. That said, his relationship with Gakuto was very public indeed, and everyone knew he was gay.
But after any number of tearful glares in the hallway, and one of the girls flying at him and pounding on his chest in PE class for being a ‘cad and a bounder and a tease’ when he offered her a hand to help her up after she tripped on the soccer field… he’d known that the fanclub was big, and he’d known that it was dramatic, but he hadn’t realised that it was quite so… pervasive.
By the time he got to chemistry class, it was no longer a surprise that none of his normal partners were willing to partner him during lab-and, indeed, one of them stuck her tongue out at him halfway through an experiment, and he was so startled by the display out of such a quiet little creature that the hydrogen peroxide and mouse liver extract had bubbled happily all over his hands before he managed to look away.
It wouldn’t have been more than a moment of inconvenience, ordinarily. Even the sudden abandonment by all the women whose help he’d counted on wouldn’t be more than a one-week setback; the fanclub was large, and dramatic, and simply too infatuated with the Hyoutei Regulars to stay angry at any one of them for long.
He hadn’t known, however, that the combination of chemicals, combined with the iodine that they’d been doing starch experiments with earlier, could turn his hands nut-brown.
“Oshitari… what happened to your hands?” Mari murmured when he stepped up in front of her on the bleachers. The fangirls around her-her friends; Kimura, of course, Higashi, Shibata, Tanimoto, Hasegawa-were giving him long, wincingly apologetic glances. But Mari’s quirky eyebrows were up; her eyes were almost golden, and grinning smugly around the corners.
Oshitari smiled wryly at her, and saluted. “Game, set and match, Mari.”
This time, he left out the ‘-tan.’
Now that he thought about it… maybe the true challenge was going to be making certain that there was a pre-Regular with enough balls and sass to give her pause.
~owari~
July 9, 2007
Poor Oshitari; no good deed goes unpunished, I guess. *laugh* I'm not sure how it happened... but yes, I walked around my high school with my hands a dark brown for about a week after a rather unfortunate chem lab spill. I think it had more to do with the iodine than peroxide and mouse liver extract, but hey, who knows?
Part: ~omake~
Notes: *chuckle* Been a long time since I wrote one of these, too...
Ongaeshi, ~omake~
There was something very odd going on around him, but for the life of him, Oshitari couldn’t quite figure out what it was.
It wasn’t anything as overt as an event-he’d always made it a habit to listen to the undercurrents in the school, and as far as he knew, there weren’t any phases of the moon that he should have been paying attention to-but it was seeming like a day full of sidelong glances and little cutting smiles and clusters of girls immediately clamming up and giving him odd looks the moment he rounded a corner.
Curiouser and curiouser. He’d have asked Mari about it, except that she typically disappeared at every break to go run her little errands and keep an eye on the younger girls who hadn’t yet quite learned the ropes. Well, perhaps if it continued, he’d leave a note.
“Enomoto,” he flagged down the student council secretary as the lunch bell rang, and smiled at her over the edge of his glasses. She was one of his favourite members of the student council-definitely by far one of the smartest girls he knew, if rather infatuated with him. “Don’t forget, we’re meeting this afternoon after tennis practice.”
She blinked up at him over the rims of her glasses, and her lips curved downwards, just a hint, with a minute moue. “I’m sorry, Oshitari-san. I don’t think I can stay that long after school. Would you mind finding someone else to transcribe your proposal for you?”
He was too well-trained to gape, of course, but… no, she wasn’t joking, her highlit hair was falling around her face as she gathered her books and didn’t look at him. Enomoto was shy, but she was bright, and dedicated, with quite a gift for words-and she could always be counted on for student council business. Especially for him. She had been ever since the day Mari had come across the tennis courts to tell him that Enomoto had a crush on him; he’d always made it a point to keep smiling at her.
“It’s awfully late for me to find someone else, Enomoto,” he murmured, confused.
“Well, you should always keep your options open, shouldn’t you, Oshitari Yuushi?” but the girl’s smile was thin and knife-edged when she shrugged, and pushed back her chair, slipping her books neatly into her bag. “Unless, of course, something isn’t an option? ”
He found himself staring after her, surrounded by a crowded classroom, his mouth just a little open.
Options. Options. Fangirls and tape recorders and Taira Mari, no matter what anyone thought of her appearance, being known far and wide as one of the most scrupulously honest people in school. If she told the fangirls something, they believed it.
So much for assuming that if he annoyed her enough, she’d simply allow her revenge to build… and while her calling him ‘darling’ had actually sent chills up his back, the thought of Mari taking the entire shopping expedition out on him in small, dissipating little bursts had simply never occurred to him.
She’d even warned him, hadn’t she. Taira Mari took her promises seriously.
The thought of Mari using-or misusing, as it were-her power… well. Surely she couldn’t have turned all of the girls in the school against him, after all. True, he had said what he’d said, and it probably hadn’t sounded complimentary out of context. That said, his relationship with Gakuto was very public indeed, and everyone knew he was gay.
But after any number of tearful glares in the hallway, and one of the girls flying at him and pounding on his chest in PE class for being a ‘cad and a bounder and a tease’ when he offered her a hand to help her up after she tripped on the soccer field… he’d known that the fanclub was big, and he’d known that it was dramatic, but he hadn’t realised that it was quite so… pervasive.
By the time he got to chemistry class, it was no longer a surprise that none of his normal partners were willing to partner him during lab-and, indeed, one of them stuck her tongue out at him halfway through an experiment, and he was so startled by the display out of such a quiet little creature that the hydrogen peroxide and mouse liver extract had bubbled happily all over his hands before he managed to look away.
It wouldn’t have been more than a moment of inconvenience, ordinarily. Even the sudden abandonment by all the women whose help he’d counted on wouldn’t be more than a one-week setback; the fanclub was large, and dramatic, and simply too infatuated with the Hyoutei Regulars to stay angry at any one of them for long.
He hadn’t known, however, that the combination of chemicals, combined with the iodine that they’d been doing starch experiments with earlier, could turn his hands nut-brown.
“Oshitari… what happened to your hands?” Mari murmured when he stepped up in front of her on the bleachers. The fangirls around her-her friends; Kimura, of course, Higashi, Shibata, Tanimoto, Hasegawa-were giving him long, wincingly apologetic glances. But Mari’s quirky eyebrows were up; her eyes were almost golden, and grinning smugly around the corners.
Oshitari smiled wryly at her, and saluted. “Game, set and match, Mari.”
This time, he left out the ‘-tan.’
Now that he thought about it… maybe the true challenge was going to be making certain that there was a pre-Regular with enough balls and sass to give her pause.
~owari~
July 9, 2007
Poor Oshitari; no good deed goes unpunished, I guess. *laugh* I'm not sure how it happened... but yes, I walked around my high school with my hands a dark brown for about a week after a rather unfortunate chem lab spill. I think it had more to do with the iodine than peroxide and mouse liver extract, but hey, who knows?