Fanfiction! (TWEWY)
Title: N/A
Fandom: The World Ends With You
Pairings: Neku&Shiki, Neku&Joshua, Neku&Mr H. (Neku is a romantic mess)
Genre: Romance
Rating: K+
Length: 1,773 words
Summary: Neku is at Hanekoma's cafe for coffee and advice.
---
A peaceful month had passed since the conclusion of the reaper’s game. Not so much time, clearly, that Neku had yet managed to throw the habit of looking down at his hands every now and then, just to make sure they were really real.
He was still in the practice, when he was alone, of turning over his forearms to check for the blue-green hint of veins underneath, evidence that there was blood circulating through his body, deoxygenated blood being carried away. Most of all Neku wanted to reassure himself of the definite separation between the edges of his skin and the rest of his surroundings. Sometimes, like those nights laying awake unable to sleep, a background hum would come into his ears and Neku terrified himself with the absurd, half-asleep thought that the city was bleeding over his edges again, that the incessant noise would erode him until he was sucked back into the underground as a stream of pixels - until he had been driven insane enough to rank amongst them there in Shibuya’s underground.
But here in the cafe, the edges of his arms remained distinct enough against the lacquered surface of the table. Neku examined the overlap of the knuckles of his right hand as he picked absent-mindedly at the gold flecks in the tabletop, sealed underneath the lacquer. He traced over the specks lightly with his thumb. They reminded him a little of how Shiki’s eyes looked when they caught the sunlight, the way the deep chestnut iris showed up in brilliant bolts of mahogany and gold. Neku imagined her smile (over her shoulder sometime as they walked together?) and it settled his nerves a little. He turned his hands back over.
But it wasn’t long before a deep, sodden feeling seized him all over again as he remembered with a nasty pang of guilt for about the hundredth time that the person he was imagining wasn’t the real Shiki. The real Shiki was too shy to smile with so little restraint. She had hidden behind her hair so much ever since they met again that he couldn’t even picture her face right now, on the blank surface of the table he framed with his arms. The truth was, Neku was a little disappointed. He supposed he’d been naïve to imagine that the change to having friends would be as immediate as a snap of the fingers, because he still found himself crippled by a sense of awkwardness that sometimes manifested in protracted silences between he and each of his three new friends.
He felt guilty because it was his fault. His mind would always wander, so that Shiki had to forever tap him on the shoulder to ask him his opinion on whatever they were discussing, and he had been noticing lately that it always wandered to the same thing: a person, really, but not even the first Shiki he knew - not even Eri. Instead, a certain other person’s delicate profile that had a single curled strand of hair laying over the cheekbone. Whenever he was brought prematurely out of one of these reveries, he prayed the others wouldn’t notice the fact that his face was burning red.
It didn’t make sense. He would have his three best friends gathered around him and all he could think of was a fourth boy that wasn’t even his friend to begin with.
Mr H. threw a cloth over the back of one of the chairs and planted himself in a another, across the table from Neku. Neku was glad to see someone act with such an easy, un-expectant kind of air around him for once. It half-inspired him to exhale and let unwind the tight coil of anxiety that he had yet to get rid of since the end of the game.
“You look a little trampled, kid.” Hanekoma was saying, looking at him earnestly over the top of his dark glasses. “What’s got you worried?”
“Well… Um…” Neku winced as he spoke. “You know how Shiki changed appearance?”
“Mmhm.”
“It’s just that… yesterday, she, um, kind of asked me out. On a date, you know?”
Neku remembered the way the girl had been sitting next to him and when he wasn’t looking at her he swore it wasn’t a girl next to him at all but a roiling mass of tension just shaped like one. He swore he could hear the cloud of noise that was Shiki’s anxiety as she shifted her hand onto the top of his and almost failed to stutter out the words. He hadn’t withdrawn his hand but perhaps it would have been better if he had because then at least she wouldn’t have noticed his arm freeze up so obviously.
Even then, his mind had wandered to the same thing, to a certain boy with an uncharacteristically delicate profile and a curled strand of hair laying neatly across the cheekbone.
Mr H. tilted back on the chair, his arms folded in thought.
“Could it be” he said with a wry smile “that you’ve found it more difficult to adjust to Miss Misaki’s true appearance than you imagined?”
“Yeah…”
“Did you have feelings for her before?”
“Yeah, a little…”
Mr H. sighed; the chair’s front legs clodded down to the floor and he leaned over the table on his forearms.
“Listen, Phones, if I were you I wouldn’t try to pretend for her, alright? Things turn out the way they’re meant to. Besides, no one can invent feelings they don’t have, you know? I think it’s best to just be honest.”
Neku nodded.
“Spend more time with your friends. There’s always the chance that your feelings will change.”
“Yeah. Thanks, Mr H.”
Neku smiled to show his appreciation, and Mr H. gave him an encouraging slap on the back as he rose to return to the counter. Suddenly Neku panicked to see him leave, and called after him. If he was very honest with himself, he hadn’t come here today only for coffee and warm advice, though he felt guilty about that too, because now his mention of Shiki felt like nothing but a pretext.
“Uh, yes, Neku?” Mr H. asked, turning around.
“Uh… is, uh, he around?” He tried to muster the strength to say his name. “I mean Joshua.”
A strange look came into Mr H.’s face then. Like a cluster chord struck all at once out of fear, amusement and… was that hope? For a second, Mr H. looked like he didn’t know what to say, but then he had picked up a glass from the bar and collected himself somewhere along the routine of polishing it dry.
“No, not today, Neku. Did you want to see him?”
“I, um…”
It wasn’t really a matter of wanting or not wanting. If Neku had had it his way, he would never have met Joshua. Even the thoughts of his name, that smug curl of the ‘J’ that resonated so strongly with his smirk, brought a lump to his throat. He wanted to be Joshua’s friend, but he also wanted never to have been troubled with the option of being his friend or otherwise, because friendship with him wasn’t quite as simple as a matter of ‘meeting up’ or ‘seeing’ each other.
Still, those visions of him plagued Neku.
“Hey, Neku,” Mr H. said, and he walked back to the table to sit down, still holding the glass he was drying. Neku’s back stiffened at the fact that he had lowered his voice. “About Shiki… is her appearance the only reason you don’t feel comfortable with going on a date with her?”
“I - ”
Neku’s eyes widened as Mr H.’s black eyes, with their intensely calm gaze, bored into him, and suddenly Neku was aware that he understood fully. He broke the gaze quickly and looked down into his lap, flustered.
“Joshua is a very handsome boy, isn’t he?” Mr H. said levelly.
Handsome? Neku remembered the end of the game, when Beat and Shiki were passed out unconscious on the floor, and Joshua had just climbed into that huge throne in the middle of the room and lounged across it so that one leg was hooked over one of the armrests, and his arms fell down carelessly past the other.
“Why?” Neku had asked. He was on his knees, his voice faint with the effort of holding back tears, and all Joshua replied with was,
“Because it’s boooring. This city’s boring. It’s boooooring being composer.”
No, Joshua was about as rotten as you could get on the inside of a person. There was just something he did with the way that he moved - something about the way he lifted his slender wrist to brush back that perpetually stray curl of hair, or smiled with such perfect indolence, that had gotten itself, to Neku’s dismay, caught in a cycle in his own thoughts.
“Neku,” Mr H. said, very kindly, “there’s no wrong in being honest with yourself.”
“I didn’t think it was wrong!” Neku hurried. “I was just… surprised, I guess… I mean, I’ve always… and I still don’t know if I really - ” Neku stopped himself, took a breath, and tried again. “I feel confused, Mr H.”
Sometimes, lying awake on top of his discarded covers, the stark light of the city streaming through the window, he wondered if he should have shot Joshua when given the chance, and made this city a safer place. But then Joshua had gone to such great lengths to personally provoke Neku that, other times, it almost seemed as if he wanted to be shot all along. Maybe he really hadn’t been kidding when he said that being composer was boring.
Mr Hanekoma sighed his Hanekoma sigh and did something next that took Neku slightly off guard. He leant over the table… and Neku just felt the prickle of stubble brush past him as he leaned so close that there was no space between them at all, and suddenly he was aware with a shock that Hanekoma was kissing him. He froze up at the contact, his fingers clamping down around the edges of his seat. But he didn’t withdraw.
When Hanekoma finished, he sat back down, looking as cheerful as ever.
“Did that help?” He asked.
Neku touched his lip, a bitter taste of black coffee in his mouth, and slightly dazed at the new whirlwind of feelings that seemed to have been unravelled in his chest. A kiss with a girl had never done that to him before.
“I… think so.” He said. His heart was still fluttering.
Somewhere close, he heard a muffled giggle.
Fandom: The World Ends With You
Pairings: Neku&Shiki, Neku&Joshua, Neku&Mr H. (Neku is a romantic mess)
Genre: Romance
Rating: K+
Length: 1,773 words
Summary: Neku is at Hanekoma's cafe for coffee and advice.
---
A peaceful month had passed since the conclusion of the reaper’s game. Not so much time, clearly, that Neku had yet managed to throw the habit of looking down at his hands every now and then, just to make sure they were really real.
He was still in the practice, when he was alone, of turning over his forearms to check for the blue-green hint of veins underneath, evidence that there was blood circulating through his body, deoxygenated blood being carried away. Most of all Neku wanted to reassure himself of the definite separation between the edges of his skin and the rest of his surroundings. Sometimes, like those nights laying awake unable to sleep, a background hum would come into his ears and Neku terrified himself with the absurd, half-asleep thought that the city was bleeding over his edges again, that the incessant noise would erode him until he was sucked back into the underground as a stream of pixels - until he had been driven insane enough to rank amongst them there in Shibuya’s underground.
But here in the cafe, the edges of his arms remained distinct enough against the lacquered surface of the table. Neku examined the overlap of the knuckles of his right hand as he picked absent-mindedly at the gold flecks in the tabletop, sealed underneath the lacquer. He traced over the specks lightly with his thumb. They reminded him a little of how Shiki’s eyes looked when they caught the sunlight, the way the deep chestnut iris showed up in brilliant bolts of mahogany and gold. Neku imagined her smile (over her shoulder sometime as they walked together?) and it settled his nerves a little. He turned his hands back over.
But it wasn’t long before a deep, sodden feeling seized him all over again as he remembered with a nasty pang of guilt for about the hundredth time that the person he was imagining wasn’t the real Shiki. The real Shiki was too shy to smile with so little restraint. She had hidden behind her hair so much ever since they met again that he couldn’t even picture her face right now, on the blank surface of the table he framed with his arms. The truth was, Neku was a little disappointed. He supposed he’d been naïve to imagine that the change to having friends would be as immediate as a snap of the fingers, because he still found himself crippled by a sense of awkwardness that sometimes manifested in protracted silences between he and each of his three new friends.
He felt guilty because it was his fault. His mind would always wander, so that Shiki had to forever tap him on the shoulder to ask him his opinion on whatever they were discussing, and he had been noticing lately that it always wandered to the same thing: a person, really, but not even the first Shiki he knew - not even Eri. Instead, a certain other person’s delicate profile that had a single curled strand of hair laying over the cheekbone. Whenever he was brought prematurely out of one of these reveries, he prayed the others wouldn’t notice the fact that his face was burning red.
It didn’t make sense. He would have his three best friends gathered around him and all he could think of was a fourth boy that wasn’t even his friend to begin with.
Mr H. threw a cloth over the back of one of the chairs and planted himself in a another, across the table from Neku. Neku was glad to see someone act with such an easy, un-expectant kind of air around him for once. It half-inspired him to exhale and let unwind the tight coil of anxiety that he had yet to get rid of since the end of the game.
“You look a little trampled, kid.” Hanekoma was saying, looking at him earnestly over the top of his dark glasses. “What’s got you worried?”
“Well… Um…” Neku winced as he spoke. “You know how Shiki changed appearance?”
“Mmhm.”
“It’s just that… yesterday, she, um, kind of asked me out. On a date, you know?”
Neku remembered the way the girl had been sitting next to him and when he wasn’t looking at her he swore it wasn’t a girl next to him at all but a roiling mass of tension just shaped like one. He swore he could hear the cloud of noise that was Shiki’s anxiety as she shifted her hand onto the top of his and almost failed to stutter out the words. He hadn’t withdrawn his hand but perhaps it would have been better if he had because then at least she wouldn’t have noticed his arm freeze up so obviously.
Even then, his mind had wandered to the same thing, to a certain boy with an uncharacteristically delicate profile and a curled strand of hair laying neatly across the cheekbone.
Mr H. tilted back on the chair, his arms folded in thought.
“Could it be” he said with a wry smile “that you’ve found it more difficult to adjust to Miss Misaki’s true appearance than you imagined?”
“Yeah…”
“Did you have feelings for her before?”
“Yeah, a little…”
Mr H. sighed; the chair’s front legs clodded down to the floor and he leaned over the table on his forearms.
“Listen, Phones, if I were you I wouldn’t try to pretend for her, alright? Things turn out the way they’re meant to. Besides, no one can invent feelings they don’t have, you know? I think it’s best to just be honest.”
Neku nodded.
“Spend more time with your friends. There’s always the chance that your feelings will change.”
“Yeah. Thanks, Mr H.”
Neku smiled to show his appreciation, and Mr H. gave him an encouraging slap on the back as he rose to return to the counter. Suddenly Neku panicked to see him leave, and called after him. If he was very honest with himself, he hadn’t come here today only for coffee and warm advice, though he felt guilty about that too, because now his mention of Shiki felt like nothing but a pretext.
“Uh, yes, Neku?” Mr H. asked, turning around.
“Uh… is, uh, he around?” He tried to muster the strength to say his name. “I mean Joshua.”
A strange look came into Mr H.’s face then. Like a cluster chord struck all at once out of fear, amusement and… was that hope? For a second, Mr H. looked like he didn’t know what to say, but then he had picked up a glass from the bar and collected himself somewhere along the routine of polishing it dry.
“No, not today, Neku. Did you want to see him?”
“I, um…”
It wasn’t really a matter of wanting or not wanting. If Neku had had it his way, he would never have met Joshua. Even the thoughts of his name, that smug curl of the ‘J’ that resonated so strongly with his smirk, brought a lump to his throat. He wanted to be Joshua’s friend, but he also wanted never to have been troubled with the option of being his friend or otherwise, because friendship with him wasn’t quite as simple as a matter of ‘meeting up’ or ‘seeing’ each other.
Still, those visions of him plagued Neku.
“Hey, Neku,” Mr H. said, and he walked back to the table to sit down, still holding the glass he was drying. Neku’s back stiffened at the fact that he had lowered his voice. “About Shiki… is her appearance the only reason you don’t feel comfortable with going on a date with her?”
“I - ”
Neku’s eyes widened as Mr H.’s black eyes, with their intensely calm gaze, bored into him, and suddenly Neku was aware that he understood fully. He broke the gaze quickly and looked down into his lap, flustered.
“Joshua is a very handsome boy, isn’t he?” Mr H. said levelly.
Handsome? Neku remembered the end of the game, when Beat and Shiki were passed out unconscious on the floor, and Joshua had just climbed into that huge throne in the middle of the room and lounged across it so that one leg was hooked over one of the armrests, and his arms fell down carelessly past the other.
“Why?” Neku had asked. He was on his knees, his voice faint with the effort of holding back tears, and all Joshua replied with was,
“Because it’s boooring. This city’s boring. It’s boooooring being composer.”
No, Joshua was about as rotten as you could get on the inside of a person. There was just something he did with the way that he moved - something about the way he lifted his slender wrist to brush back that perpetually stray curl of hair, or smiled with such perfect indolence, that had gotten itself, to Neku’s dismay, caught in a cycle in his own thoughts.
“Neku,” Mr H. said, very kindly, “there’s no wrong in being honest with yourself.”
“I didn’t think it was wrong!” Neku hurried. “I was just… surprised, I guess… I mean, I’ve always… and I still don’t know if I really - ” Neku stopped himself, took a breath, and tried again. “I feel confused, Mr H.”
Sometimes, lying awake on top of his discarded covers, the stark light of the city streaming through the window, he wondered if he should have shot Joshua when given the chance, and made this city a safer place. But then Joshua had gone to such great lengths to personally provoke Neku that, other times, it almost seemed as if he wanted to be shot all along. Maybe he really hadn’t been kidding when he said that being composer was boring.
Mr Hanekoma sighed his Hanekoma sigh and did something next that took Neku slightly off guard. He leant over the table… and Neku just felt the prickle of stubble brush past him as he leaned so close that there was no space between them at all, and suddenly he was aware with a shock that Hanekoma was kissing him. He froze up at the contact, his fingers clamping down around the edges of his seat. But he didn’t withdraw.
When Hanekoma finished, he sat back down, looking as cheerful as ever.
“Did that help?” He asked.
Neku touched his lip, a bitter taste of black coffee in his mouth, and slightly dazed at the new whirlwind of feelings that seemed to have been unravelled in his chest. A kiss with a girl had never done that to him before.
“I… think so.” He said. His heart was still fluttering.
Somewhere close, he heard a muffled giggle.