[fic] MEGA-crossover - Jinchi High School 5/?
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Thursday - April 28th
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“Attention students. It has come to our attention that the third gymnasium locker room was desecrated by some of our students yesterday afternoon. That sort of behavior is unacceptable, and will not be tolerated here!” The Headmaster glared out at the mass of students seated before him.
Hyde leant over towards Yuu, who was sitting cross-legged beside him. “So that’s what this assembly is about… Maybe Mana and those guys will finally get punished, right?”
Yuu looked over at him, warily glancing towards the colorful boys sitting several rows behind them at the back of the gym. He opened his mouth to say something, but shut it abruptly when the Headmaster began speaking once more, pacing back and forth on the stage and waving the hand that wasn’t holding the microphone around as he did so.
“This evening, the first basketball game of the year was going to be hosted here by us! Obviously, whoever wrecked the visitor’s changing room was hoping that the match would be cancelled, meaning we have a classic case of anti-school spirit on our hands! We take pride in our school, but it’s hard to maintain our good image with hooligans that refuse to be proud with the rest of us!” He paused, a small smirk working its way onto his features. “However, there are security cameras around the school perimeter, and there were only a few students who left the school later than everyone else.”
“Oh no…” Closer to the front of the seated crowd, Miyavi gulped as the Headmaster’s sharp gaze settled on him in particular.
“Some of you, left later than others, but I cannot base my judgment on that alone. Therefore, whoever the culprits are, please come forth and confess yourselves now, or all five suspected will be punished -guilty or otherwise.”
Miyavi felt his heart pounding in his chest. Mana and his gang would never confess, they wouldn’t even be under suspicion, since they’d done their damage earlier in the day and gone home. His fingers twitched, the silence in the large room was deafening. Kai hadn’t come to school today, he was probably still shaken after yesterday’s events, but he would have been one of those five on the security tapes, which meant if no one else confessed then he’d be punished for being nothing more than a victim!
Coming to a sudden decision, he took a deep breath and leapt to his feet.
“I did it.”
The colorful boy paused, hearing someone else’s voice speak his words before he’d gotten the chance to speak them. “What?!” He spun around, meeting a spiky-haired blonde’s equally surprised face from two rows over. “No you didn’t, I did it!” Miyavi corrected.
Yukihiro frowned in exasperation, speaking under his breath as quietly as he could while still being heard by the colorful-haired boy. “Shut up, you idiot. I’m the one who did it.” He raised his voice so that the Headmaster could hear him. “You don’t have to cover for me.”
“What?! No… I was the one who-“ Miyavi stopped, hearing several people snickering around him. One of his friends, a tall boy with long, flipped out, blonde hair was tugging on his pant leg as an indication to sit back down. “Oh…” His eyebrows lifted, realizing what Yukihiro was trying to do for him, but then he furrowed them, shrugging off his concerned friend’s hand and raising his voice. “No! Forget it! I’m not letting you take the blame! I’m the one that asked you to help me anyway! There was no way I could have knocked the door down by myself-- …Oh, whoops…”
Yukihiro was glaring at him, resisting the urge to slap a palm to his own forehead. More people started snickering at the colorful boy’s expense -who was now blushing furiously-, and the Headmaster raised an eyebrow, his gaze flickering between the two standing students in the room.
“So,” He said, sounding pleased that somebody had actually confessed. “I’ll be seeing both of you back here after last period today.” He turned his attention back to the whole student body. “In that case, you’re all dismissed. Go back to your first period classes.”
The mass of bodies all clambered to their feet as one and began pushing slowly toward the red double doors. Hyde turned to look back over his shoulder as he went, still as shocked as he first was when he saw Yukihiro rise and admit to the crime. The blonde boy and the other one were still standing where they were before, being bumped and jostled slightly as the crowd passed around them.
“So… that’s what he was doing in the gym yesterday…” Hyde murmured to himself, reaching the doors and slipping out behind Chacha and Yuu -who threatened teasingly to trample over anyone who didn’t let them through.
“Eh… Sorry about that, I didn’t want you to get in trouble because of me…” Miyavi apologized, taking a few steps towards the blonde as most of the remaining crowd was gathered at the back of the gym.
Yukihiro turned his face towards him, glare still intact. “Yeah, well now both of us have detention. Nice going. I’m really looking forward to spending more time with you.”
Judging from his glare and sarcastic tone, Miyavi figured he wasn’t actually glad at all.
“Um, I’m sorry?”
“Whatever. I don’t care anyway.” Yukihiro turned and stalked away, filing out through the doors with the last of the pack and leaving the other boy standing alone in the center of the empty gym.
The bell rang, but Miyavi didn’t feel like going to wood class.
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“All right, the bell rang five minutes ago. Everybody get in your seats.”
Yuu placed a sympathetic hand on Hyde’s shoulder. “Have fun…” He shot a look in the direction of the short, dark-haired boy’s seat before turning and heading to his own, Chacha close behind him. After the previous day’s incident, the teacher had moved the desks around so that the two blondes were now situated at the opposite end of the class from where Hyde and Gackt were seated at the back.
Hyde meandered his way over slowly, Gackt was already seated, fiddling anxiously with a sleek black cell phone on the desk’s surface.
“Hey.” Hyde offered the taller boy a smile as he sat heavily in the seat beside him. Gackt only glanced at him briefly, acknowledging him with a nod, before returning to pushing the cell back and forth, occasionally flipping it open as if checking for missed alerts, before shifting anxiously and starting over again.
“Gackt,” The teacher called, taking a pause from trying to calm the rowdy class. “You know the rules. No cell phones in class.”
Gackt looked up, surprised, with a somewhat pleading expression in his eyes. Hyde frowned at this, but the teacher continued.
“Turn it off and put it away please, or I’ll have to confiscate it.”
Gackt hesitated before his expression darkened and he nodded, holding down the power button and shoving it deep in his bag.
“… You alright?” Hyde ventured after a moment of watching the taller boy chew restlessly on his lip from the corner of his eye.
“Fine.” Was the curt reply.
Hyde rolled his eyes. “Yeah, sure…” He mumbled under his breath.
Gackt shot him a glare. “Do you have a problem with me or something?” He hissed defensively.
Hyde raised an eyebrow at him. “No.” He paused, pulling a pencil from his bag as the teacher passed them, handing out sheets. Once she’d gone, he continued. “You’re the one who seems to have a problem with everyone else.”
Gackt leapt up to retort, freezing with his mouth open to begin when the teacher turned back to face him.
“Gackt?” Her questioning voice contained a subtle warning note. “Is something wrong?”
“No. Nothing, Sensei.” He answered, glaring down at his desk. Hyde smirked cheekily, turning the other’s glare on himself as the teacher moved away, continuing to hand out sheets.
“Well, since we’re going to be lab partners, I’d appreciate it if you’d drop the “bad-guy” attitude. Your friends aren’t here to see you acting civilized anyway, so don’t worry.”
Gackt’s eyes flickered almost imperceptibly over to where Yuu and Chacha were sitting, looking confused before catching on and resuming a dark expression.
“You know,” Hyde said at length, watching the other boy carefully, “Yuu and Chacha really are worried about you. Apparently you weren’t always such an ass.” Hyde himself was surprised with how… bitchy… he was being. Gackt’s glare darkened at his words, making him look positively murderous, and it occurred to Hyde that this guy’s connections could have him running to locker rooms in his underwear if he didn’t watch his tongue.
Hyde’s eyebrows suddenly shot up in surprise as a realization hit him.
‘Locker room! It wasn’t Yuki and that other guy who trashed it… It was Mana and his gang!’ Hyde thought to himself. ‘Huh, maybe Yukihiro isn’t so scary after all… He must just be another victim here…’ Emotions and expressions flickered across his face according to each change in thought, and caused Gackt to eye him with a mixture of confusion and wariness. ‘Wait… then…!’
Hyde narrowed his eyes at the boy sitting beside him. “How can you still hang out with those creepy guys?! They’re terrible!”
“… That’s not true.”
“Uh, really? You can’t honestly believe that. Do you know what they did to a tenth grader yesterday? I was shocked! That Mana guy… I don’t care what connections, or how much money he has, there’s no way somebody as twisted as that is worth being friends with.”
Gackt frowned, looking somewhere between thoughtful and bothered by something. “Mana?… He’s not all that bad…”
Hyde snorted. “He isn’t? Do enlighten me, because the last time I checked he was a cowardly psycho who terrorized people for fun and let other victims take the consequences!”
Gackt’s expression darkened. “Hey, you can’t say stuff like that about-“
“Gackt, Hyde, please start working on the handout. You’ll lose points if you don’t have it finished by the end of class.” The teacher reprimanded them, going back to correcting papers at her desk.
Gackt waited until the other students had all looked away again before turning back to Hyde with the same glare but a lowered voice. “You don’t know him, okay?”
“I think I’ve seen and heard enough to know-“
“No, you haven’t.” Gackt interrupted. “People have their reasons for things… I-… We all have our own ways of dealing with things.” Hyde noticed his eyes shift awkwardly to the side, seeming like it wasn’t just the blue-haired menace that he was defending, but perhaps himself as well.
There was a pause before Hyde spoke, studying Gackt’s averted expression carefully. “So… what are you “dealing” with, then?”
Like a deer in headlights, Gackt’s eyes widened and he turned away completely to stare at his desk. “W-what?! I’m not! I never said that I was, okay? Were you even listening?”
Hyde grinned smugly. “Nope. I was reading.” A pause. “’Between the lines.’ Seriously, you’re too easy to figure out.” He chuckled at the other’s indignant expression.
“Stop making shit up.” Gackt whipped out a pen and pulled the sheet with the in-class assignment printed on it closer to himself. “…If we don’t pass this thing I’ll kill you.”
Hyde didn’t actually believe that he would -probably he’d just be pissed-, but the assignment was worth points, and Hyde couldn’t really afford to lose them.
“Right… I think that one’s the liver.” Hyde jabbed the diagram with the eraser end of his pencil. “The big one.”
Gackt filled in the name of the frog’s organ. “Okay, what’s the function?” He frowned. “…Is it the same as ours?”
Hyde looked lost. “Uh… function?”
Gackt sighed, pushing the sheet onto Hyde’s desk, and pulled some loose-leaf out of his bag and onto his own desk. “Fine. You finish all the labels, and I’ll do the functions.”
“Oh, um, okay…” Hyde stared at the diagram, biting his lip, before looking up at the other boy who was flipping through his thick biology book. “Uh… all the notes on the organs and stuff, well, I might not have been here-“
“You were. We got them yesterday. That’s what we were starting when I… left…” He turned to frown at Hyde. “You didn’t copy down the notes?”
“Eh… no… I got distracted doing something else and didn’t really pay much attention…”
Gackt looked frustrated. “Are you serious? Distracted? I can’t believe I’m stuck with you as a lab partner for the rest of the semester.” He sighed. “ What were you doing?”
Hyde bit his lip, looking away. “…Um, doodling?”
“Doodling?” Gackt repeated. It wasn’t so much a question as it was a statement, but Hyde affirmed it reluctantly.
“… Yeah… Sorry.”
Gackt just stared at him for a second before turning back to his textbook. “You’re an idiot.” He reached out and tapped the cover of Hyde’s closed one with an index finger. “Use your book. There’s probably a diagram in there somewhere.”
“Oh…” Hyde flipped it open slowly, looking for the first sign of illustrated frog-insides. “…Thanks.”
Gackt didn’t respond and the only times he spoke after that were to ask Hyde for the names of the other organs he had to find functions for.
They managed to finish just in time, luckily, and Hyde scrawled his name on the top of the sheet before handing it to the other boy to sign. “I’ll take it up.” He offered, watching Gackt nod as his pen flew over the paper.
“’K, here.” The sheet was passed back and Hyde admired the graceful flow of Gackt’s name next to his own messy one.
“Wow, you’ve got a nice signature.” He remarked, standing up with the sheets. “Practicing for signing autographs someday?” He chuckled, walking off down the aisle and not noticing the distant expression and wide eyes that his words had caused Gackt to turn on his back.
The taller dark-haired boy snapped out of his paralyzed state a moment later, but the only difference in his expression as he began digging through his bag was an obvious urgency. His toes tapped impatiently on the linoleum as he waited for the small device to start up, fingers pressing down on the speakers to muffle the jingle and bag shielding it all from view.
“Come on…”
. . . Menu . . . Missed Alerts . . . 1 Missed Call
Gackt’s heart leapt.
. . . From: Kozi, at 11:45 . . . There are no other missed alerts.
And then it sunk again.
The bell rang as he snapped the phone shut and stood, slinging the bag on his back and striding to the door. He pushed his way past several of the classmates that were hurrying to lunch and then disappeared in the sea of students filling the halls.
Hyde frowned as he watched him go and then made his way to the back of the room to get his things. His eyebrows rose as he got there, however, and he turned around with Gackt’s name ready on his tongue to call. Of course, the other boy was already long gone, so Hyde packed his things quickly and followed Yuu and Chacha to the cafeteria with Gackt’s forgotten textbook tucked under one arm.
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NEXT CHAPTER
Comments please =)
Also, anyone interested in me posting a Jrock xmas story? It's pretty crazy.... hahaha