One Drop [4/?]
Title: One Drop
Chapters: 4/?
Author: yumemirunosekai
Pairing: Kame/Ueda (KameDa), MaruDa (friendship), AkaKame (onesided)
Rating: PG 15 (in general)
Warnings: adult themes, NO explicit smut, quotations
Genres: Slice of life, friendship, school life, teenage angst, angst, romance
Synopsis: It's but a game with a beginning, but no end.
Disclaimer: Some of the events here are completely fictional. I do not own anything except for the imagined situations, some of the plot, and the OCs. This is based on real events, but ONLY BASED ON. So please do not take any of the over-exaggerated incidents in this story to be true - I only write for the enjoyment for KameDa fans out there and to feed my over imaginative mind.
Score 4: Bully
Tatsuya begins junior high in the year 1995.
Once again, his parents choose a fancy school with uniforms that made other kids his age laugh, so Tatsuya doesn't wear the school's blazer - even though they insist he does - and ends up in the principle's office a week upon starting school.
His parents are called in and they are furious. Tatsuya isn't slapped, but his dad bans him from going out with his friends for a month, and this just fuels Tatsuya's anger.
Junior high is really different from elementary school, Tatsuya thinks. There are older kids here who act like they are boss, especially the 3rd years. In elementary school, everyone is the same, there is no hierarchy, no 'levels', and certainly no 'groups'. Tatsuya learns on his second week that he can't act as he pleased here - courtesy of a 3rd year sempai who 'teaches him a lesson' when Tatsuya refuses to apologise after the sempai bumped into him.
"It's your own fault." Tatsuya had said.
That evening, Tatsuya returns home with a bruised face and a split lip.
He winces when he tries to wash off the dried blood at the corner of his lip, and refuses to come down for dinner in case his mom sees it. Christ, Tatsuya doesn't want to know what his mom might do if she finds out. Probably do something to embarrass him further like demand that the third year apologise to him in public or something.
He would handle this himself.
Tatsuya tries to stay out of the 3rd years' floor after that. His friends commend him for standing up to his sempai; but there are other goody-two-shoes who says that he should have just apologised and gotten everything over with.
Tatsuya wants to pound their faces in.
The entire incident blows over fairly quickly, and Tatsuya resumes his usual routine of going to school and going home, going to school, then going home again. Occasionally, he slips away to the arcade with his friends, and ends up getting yelled at, but Tatsuya thinks it's worth it.
///
Tatsuya is labelled 'that mysterious boy' by many female students who attend the private girls school a few blocks away when his becomes a 2nd year in 1996.
His friends invite him to a Gokun, and Tatsuya agrees easily - after all, he has never been to one. Apparently a Gokun meant hanging out with a bunch of noisy boys and a group of girls (a few were rather pretty) in a cheap, overcrowded karaoke room with stupid songs to choose and poor lighting.
Tatsuya's natural air of mystery around him attracts a decent number girls. They ask him stupid boring questions like 'what's your favourite subject', 'where do you live', 'what are your hobbies', 'what kind of girl do you like' and Tatsuya smiles a strained smile at their obliviousness to his annoyance at them prodding and poking into his personal space.
Tatsuya is approached one day while he exits the school gates with his usual clique of friends, by a skinny girl with thick glasses. She stands in front of him, coy and shy with that irritating look in her eyes and Tatsuya wants to hurl.
She hands him a gilt box of chocolates with a gaudy pink note taped to it.
"H-happy Valentines Day, Ueda-kun." she whispers in a too high voice, and Tatsuya stares blankly at the box of treats stuck in his face.
His friends around him are sniggering and Tatsuya doesn't particularly like it.
"What the hell are you waiting for?" one of them whispers, grinning. "Take it, man!"
Tatsuya takes it, and mumbles a quite thanks. The girl bows and runs off as though the devil was chasing her. His friends pat him on the back and grin at him encouragingly. Some of them wish him good luck, and some merely nods in approval. Tatsuya soaks in the attention with a wry smile.
When Tatsuya returns home, he pulls out his schoolwork and dumps the stack of exercise books on his desk. The box of chocolates fall out of the mess onto the floor with a dull thud.
Tatsuya picks up the box and his eyes glide over the card (slightly creased now) where there is a note written in neat handwriting with a bright silver pen. He recalls the girl's blushing face as she handed him the gift a few hours ago, and a rather similar memory from his elementary school days stir in his jumbled mind.
He tosses the entire package, card and all into a wire waste bin next to his messy desk.
Girls, Tatsuya thinks, are a waste of his time.
///
The next day he is cornered by the sempais who he has been trying to avoid all this time.
"I hear you're the tough mysterious kid now, huh? Girls all go swarming around you now, huh?"
Tatsuya is beat up for the second time since he entered junior high that very day, and the day after that, and the day after that, but he doesn't tell anyone. No one, not even his closest friends.
///
That winter of the year 1996, just minutes before the 3rd year graduation, Tatsuya walks purposefully up a flight of stairs he's avoided all this time. He lets his eyes run along the the classroom number plates before pausing at a particular one. He doesn't bother knocking and roughly slides open the door, allowing a dam of noise to break out from within.
The 3rd years are all dressed, primped, polished and polished again, waiting patiently for the time to enter the gym for the graduation ceremony. The stupid tasselled hats and flowing black robes make them look more ridiculous than normal, and Tatsuya swallows the laugh the builds in his throat.
His vision zooms in onto a certain sempai perched at the teacher's desk, looking rather like an oversized chicken with his messy (blonde) hair and droopy waist hanging over his too-tight belt like the sides of an overstuffed sack.
Tatsuya walks up to that sempai, takes his hand, and shakes it, an unreadable expression on his face.
"Thank you for teaching me many valuable lessons during your time here, sempai. I won't forget."
He then reels in his right arm, fingers balled into a tight fist, and launches it forwards with all his might.
///
That day, Mokomichi-sempai isn't present at the graduation ceremony, much to many of the teacher's disappointment.
That day, Ueda Tatsuya understood what revenge meant, and the aftermath was the best thing he has ever felt in years.
///
In the year 1997, a sudden bomb drops into Tatsuya's comfortable daily routine and screws up the neatly laid plan he's gotten so used he doesn't have to think anymore when his mom brings home a stack of leaflets and starts dialling up many different numbers. She spends nearly half the day on the phone - much to Takako's despair, who Tatsuya is sure is spending friggin' hours on the line to talk to a certain boy (not that he cares).
By the end of that day. Tatsuya finds himself signed up for 7 different classes, starting immediately with piano the very next day.
Of course this pisses him off, and he eventually ends up in a screaming match with his mom.
"You need to stop wasting time and learn something!" she argues, much to Tatsuya's fury.
"I'm learning enough in school! Why do I need to take up extra classes? I won't have any free days then!"
"That's the whole point! Don't think I don't know where you and your friends hang out these days! The arcade! Why on earth would you need to be wasting time and money in such a place? I'm sure your father and I brought you up better than that!"
The argument ends with him storming out of the house, stuffing his feet blindly into his favourite skull patterned sneakers before vaulting over the wall (the gate was locked and bolted for the night).
Tatsuya walks blindly around the housing area, his mind completely in disarray. He was 14, just 14 for pete's sake, and now he's piled to the brim with this? He hates how much his life is being controlled, and he suddenly feels suffocated and trapped.
He doesn't notice a shorter boy walking in the other direction until he feels a bony shoulder slam against his side.
Being larger one of the two, Tatsuya just stumbles backwards. The smaller boy however, is forced back violently enough and sprawls unceremoniously to the pavement. "What the-" Tatsuya bites back the urge to yell.
"Are you blind? Watch it!" he spits, glaring daggers at the frail looking thing in front of him. The boy lying rather awkwardly on the ground is wearing some weird bright blue sports attire, and Ueda can't really see his face because of a baseball cap shielding his features.
"Whatever, forget it." he really doesn't have the time nor the patience to fuss over something like this. He stalks away without another word. As he rounds the corner, Tatsuya debates on where he should go now. If his mom is going to chain him down with goddamn extra classes, he is gong spend this last day of supposed freedom as he liked.