I think I'm ready for a vacation...
The last time I was here was December, yeah? Yeah. WOW. Long time ago. I could make all sorts of excuses, but I'll call it like it is and blame my absence on school. Internal Assessments and all of that. They just never go away...LIES. Because after the end of this month they can't give me any more of them, ever again! It's cause for celebration! I can see my life at the end of this tunnel! Waiting for me to reclaim it! Ignoring the possibility that it might actually be a train!
Anyway, I also realized I promised holiday stories...but my mother deleted my writing folder in the first week of January before I could post any of them, and I haven't found time yet to rewrite them. Until now, since I stayed home today with a delirious fever and decided I would get started on that again. thelovemafia , I promised you Tsuna/Shou ages and ages ago, I know. Please forgive me for being so late!
Wallflower
Shouichi sat alone in his corner of the classroom, watching the other students. It was small and comforting, his little island in the sea of so much social activity, the other students talking, laughing, arguing as they went about their day. They overlooked him. He wasn’t there, no one saw him, and you know, that was okay, it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter that when the highest grades in the class were announced, people turned to each other and went “Irie who?” or that the teachers so rarely called on him because they hadn’t noticed the head bent down over his book, way back in the shadows behind the sunny windows. It was okay, he told himself as people bumped past him and knocked all his books to the ground without ever once apologizing or even bothering to look back-they could have at least laughed, he would think to himself, that would at least say they noticed-it was all okay, because someday he was going to work it all out, and he would know what to say to them, and then he could stop standing in the corner.
But until that longed-for day came he stood in the corner and watched the others, dreaming up a thousand little encounters that would never happen, wishing he were outgoing enough to at least make the attempt. But what if they laughed, sent him back to his corner? He was, he concluded, sighing and laying his head down on his desk, just as bad as that No-Good Tsuna, the other class wallflower, the class joke. Shouichi watched him, too, and wondered if maybe at some times they ought to try to be friends. Sometimes they had the same hapless look, tired, wide-eyed, indifferent. A mutual loneliness, were Shouichi inclined to be poetic.
Tsuna had his own friends. Where had they come from? Shouichi wasn’t sure. After that first (and last) terrifying visit to Tsuna’s house of babies and bombs, Shouichi was quick to re-evaluate any ideas of friendship he might have still been hiding somewhere behind the shield of his glasses. No amount of friendship was worth braving death.
The days slid past. He continued to be the top of his class. He came home alone in the afternoons, listened to his family bicker and argue, gazed at the TV with glazed-over eyes and the music too loud in his ears. He started at the ceiling late at night and tried not to think of anything.
“No one sees me,” he said to himself one sleepless night, insomnia and the light from his computer screen burning at his eyes, and it had the feel of a revelation.
If life were a book, the day would have been at the height of winter, in a freak storm that knocked out all the power in Namimori. Shouichi would have been home alone, huddled under blankets by candlelight when the knock would have come on his door. He would have opened it and let in a stranger who seemed to have been born from the blizzard himself, eyes like ice and hair like snow, to carry Shouichi from his corner of the room and freeze his heart. Or maybe that was hindsight speaking.
What really happened was this:
It was raining. Not unusual for the summer. Shouichi had been sent on errands by his lazy sister, who wanted juice but didn’t want to get off the phone to get it. She had sat on the remote and stolen his headphones and refused to return them until he went to buy her some. It was windy and his umbrella was refused to cooperate; it had blown inside-out at least twice now and Shouichi was soaking wet trying to get it to behave, not to mention that cars driving past kept splashing him with gutter water. The puddles climbed up his pants legs and he was tired and frustrated, and people kept bumping into him, and the bag was cutting into his wrist, and he was cold and wet and humiliated.
It was the last straw when a stranger, a foreigner, whose clothes were still spotlessly white and whose umbrella was perfectly tame, walked right into Shouichi and continued on as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened, while Shouichi went face-first into a mud puddle and the bottle of juice smashed against the pavement and exploded open, showering him in grape rain.
“HEY!” Shouichi shouted, his temper finally lost. “WOULD YOU WATCH WHERE YOU’RE GOING? CRAZY FOREIGNER!” Knowing he wouldn’t be understood, expecting to be overlooked as he always was.
The man turned, and Shouichi gaped at the smile that was as warm as a summer’s day, never seeing the menace behind it as the foreigner held out a hand from beneath his perfect white umbrella to help Shouichi to his feet.
“My apologies,” he said, in heavily accented Japanese, and Shouichi took his hand and came out of his corner.
Shouichi buried his head in his arms at his desk, pretending to sleep. Where was the camera? He had never managed to find them, although he knew they were all over this base and his rooms especially. Byakuran supervised everyone, Black and White Spell alike, and his pet, his favorite plaything, his Shou-chan. The skin between Shouichi’s shoulder’s crawled as he felt the invisible eyes on him.
How had he ended up here? Byakuran had said come. That was it. “Come help me, Shou-chan,” Byakuran had told him, squeezing his hands so tightly that Shouichi didn’t dare say no, even if he had wanted to. And like a little puppy lured in out of the rain Shouichi had done exactly as he had asked, turning up the music louder and louder so as not to hear too much of what his boss was doing.
He watched the world burn, watched in turn by Byakuran, watching Shouichi watch the world. He saw the Vongola run to the edges of the known world and saw families fall, crushed beneath a power explainable only by God. Shouichi’s stomach cramped as his eyes were glued to the screen, but there was no way to express how he felt, and no one to say it to. Surely the Black Spell must be as disgusted with their lives as he was. Gamma and his brothers…if Shouichi could reach them, just for five minutes outside of the sphere of Byakuran’s influence, could they come to some understanding? Or, for the sake of their princess, would they refuse to hear him, too?
Shouichi stared at the screen, watching the Vongola fall one by one, and could not even find the voice to scream.
“I can help you,” he said, so quickly and so quietly, ignoring the fierce gaze of the Vongola Cloud Guardian, ignoring the bright and steady eyes of the final boss of the Vongola. “Please, I can’t keep doing this, I can’t keep working for him, please, let me help you get rid of him, please, I can’t fight him by myself…”
There wasn’t a lot of time to make himself clear to these two, and he knew that all too soon, within minutes, he’d be back where Byakuran could hear him and the opportunity would be lost. Shouichi threw everything at their feet and silently begged for them to understand him, to hear that he was crying out for help, if only someone were to listen. It didn’t matter if they accept him or not, because he couldn’t hope for that. He just needed them to see and hear him for once, the way they never could when they were kids.
“Please,” he said, his fingers twisting in the fabric of his too-white uniform. “There isn’t anyone left.”
There is a rush of relief when Shouichi realizes that communications to the base have been cut off. Somehow, despite all the odds, the plan seems to be holding together. He forces his legs to stop shaking and his stomach to remain calm as he manipulates the base, separating and uniting friends and allies, drawing them closer and closer to the lab.
And even though he can’t hope for it, he does anyway. He hopes, when they meet for the first time in years, that even if he can’t remember who Shouichi is that the boy who was once No-Good Tsuna will be able to understand what he has done. That he will be able to forgive Shouichi for following Byakuran in the first place.
And he hopes, most of all, to finally be able to come out of his corner and under the sky where he belongs.
While I'm at it, please forgive me for being out of practice at this, too...