Work Text:
She was a transfer student.
At a first, passing glance, that should have been the only thing Akira Midousuji found of any interest about her. She was simply another face amongst classmates he neither cared for nor cared to know about.
And he should have forgotten her name before the end of the school day.
But he didn’t.
He remembered her name and the way it felt in his mouth when the teacher had the entire class greet her. He remembered that one second when her eyes met his as she was pointed towards her seat assignment in front of him. And he remembered the back of her head and how soft her hair looked as she slid into the long before vacated desk.
Why he remembered any of that as he laid in bed, trying to force himself to sleep before the passing of midnight, well, it just didn’t make any sense. Was he sick? He hadn’t felt right the entire day, and even less so now that he couldn’t get the thought of her from his head. It was as if there were tiny little moths fluttering about in his stomach, and when he remembered those things they would swarm together and try to fly up into his chest.
That first day he passed it off as signs of an oncoming illness, showing up the next day to Kyoto Fushimi with a sick mask and even less of a desire to be touched than usual, if that was possible.
But if he was getting sick, then whatever it was that he had caught got worse whenever he looked at her. And it was so incredibly hard to avoid her when she sat right in front of him and passed worksheets onto his desk with a smile.
Her smile made him feel gross, but it was even grosser than he wanted to see her smile again.
So for the rest of the week, he quietly observed her, half in fascination and half in disgust that her very presence was giving him some strange strain of the flu.
(He couldn’t think of it being anything but the flu, with sweaty palms that slid from his handlebars and waking up at night from odd dreams soaking through his bed sheets.)
From his designated spot by the bushes, he watched her eat lunch with a group of girls who giggled too much. And he listened for the sound of her voice, because when she read aloud during English, his uniform felt suffocating, sticking against his skin as the words passed her lips.
Even worse was that she walked past the bike house after school, and he found himself standing by the window each day that followed just to watch her go. When she finally did pass from his sight, he’d realize that how dry his mouth felt from hanging open for so long.
By Friday morning, Midousuji determined that the transfer girl had in fact given him some disgusting illness, infected him with some nasty germs she must have brought from her old school. What a foul place that must have been if she was exposing everyone to this strange influenza. At this rate, she’d get the entire school sick.
When gym class rolled around, he confronted her.
“You’re dirty. You’re going to make everyone sick.”
She looked up from stretching her calves, briefly glancing from left to right as if she didn’t know he was addressing her.
“Wherever you transferred from must have been really disgusting, and now you’ve brought all those germs here. That’s gross.”
Midousuji didn’t notice the twitch of muscle in her arm.
“I don’t like gross people, especially ones that spread their nastiness everywhere like you do.”
He was going to say more, go on about how she ought to take a bath or brush her teeth before touching anything or breathing the air.
But that never happened, because the next thing he knew was that the ground was incredibly close and his jaw ached and what was that dribbling down his chin?
There was blood on his fingers when he pulled his hand from his mouth. The left side of his face stung something terrible, but he was too stunned to process the pain sinking into his skin.
He could hear gasps and mutters of “oh my God” and “holy shit” from voices belonging to people he didn’t care for at all, yet were now all staring at him. And there stood the transfer girl, her arm still in the air with the widened palm that had struck the reminder of a blow to his face back into him.
(He never thought he’d have to feel that again, left that behind long ago when he was weak and his heart was open wide and people were closer but always left him and he cried and cried and cried until he was sure he’d go blind, the room melting into tones of yellow that had once reminded him of happiness and the flowers he’d given his mother on her birthday but now felt sick and foul like death and the things that came after.)
The gym teacher escorted Midousuji to the infirmary, where the nurse gave him an ice pack for his jaw, a Dixie cup to spit the blood in, and some cotton balls to stuff inside his cheek and lower lip. Nothing had been broken and no teeth had been lost, but the blow to his face had driven the flesh of his lip into his incisors. The bleeding would stop within the hour, he was told, but the subsequent swelling and soreness of his face would linger for the weekend.
(“Are you sure she didn’t punch him?”)
(“Slapped him right in the face is what multiple students told me. It’s actually kind of impressive. Quite the arm on her. Hope she tries out for sports.”)
Word about what happened spread to the upperclassmen not long after, becoming a morbid topic of interest to all who knew the name or the significance of Akira Midousuji.
For the members of the Kyoto Fushimi cycling club, whether the rumor was true or not was besides the fact that any news about Midousuji wasn’t good for them, let alone news that a girl had exchanged blows with him over any number of God damn things.
(Mizuta insisted it was only a smear campaign against Midousuji, going so far as to urge the others to place bets on how many moves it would take for him to defeat an enemy in a fight.)
(Even if the enemy was the entire wrestling team, which Mizuta argued would be four and a half moves.)
The moment their ace finally walked into the bike house with a bandage on his lip and a deathly quiet about him, the truth behind the rumor was more or less the realization that literally anything could happen to them at this point.
For one, Midousuji was unpredictable, ruthless, and (as secretly agreed upon between the majority of the team) probably unstable. He struck fear and uneasiness into anyone and everyone, teammate or competition, peer or elder.
Up until that day, information regarding #91’s interactions with girls was simply nonexistent. Only now had it simply become uncharted and possibly terrifying territory, especially if such interactions ended up with Midousuji’s face looking lopsided. But they knew enough about their ace to know that whatever might have irritated him from day to day would inevitably become vented and taken out on them. The thought of what should happen if Midousuji was actually in a fight was too terrifying to even think about.
However, none of them had expected him to go straight to his locker and begin changing for practice.
It took a full minute of silent arguing, of head shaking and head nodding, of miming nooses and beheadings, of pointing from one to another to the horror of the boy being indicated, but in the end, Ishigaki stepped forward to be the one to talk to Midousuji.
He was still technically captain after all, and part of that job apparently included self sacrifice.
Ishigaki was cautious in his approach, seating himself on the bench next to Midousuji as he pulled on his bike cleats.
“H-Hey, Midousuji.”
“Kun…”
He swallowed. “M-Midousuji-kun…a-are you alright?”
Midousuji continued tying his shoes, seemingly unresponsive or just indifferent to being talked to. But there was a strange, foreign aura about him that Ishigaki wasn’t sure how fearful he should be about.
He looked back to his team in a silent plea for assistance, only to be met with the sight of a swinging door and the feeling of complete abandonment.
What a team.
Absorbed in a wave of silent panic, Ishigaki didn’t realize that Midousuji had actually started talking.
“H-huh?”
Midousuji sat up from tying his other cleat, an expression unlike anything Ishigaki had ever seen before on the ace’s usually sneering face.
It was an expression of innocent confusion.
“You’re bad at listening,” he grunted. “I asked if you had gotten the gross new flu going around.”
Ishigaki held his breath. “New f-flu?”
“It’s nasty. It feels like there’s worms crawling around inside your belly and it’s always too hot and you have weird, lewd dreams at night.” Midousuji scrunched his nose in disgust, looking at the small distance between himself and Ishigaki. “You’ll catch it if you sit so close to me.”
Now, Ishigaki had been, so-to-speak, “around the block” enough times to know that those were not symptoms of any medically recognized influenza. If only arguably, Midousuji was but a boy nearing sixteen with the social understandings of a pet lizard. And while it was ludicrous to imagine at first, that didn’t mean it was impossible.
Clearly there was more to the involvement of the transfer girl who (rather impressively) busted their ace’s face.
“Didn’t a girl from Osaka just transfer into your class Midousuji-kun?”
At that, Midousuji perked, sinewy muscles stiffening at attention. “She sits in front of me and gave me the flu. I told her so,” he spoke, voice trailing into a soft, almost shy mutter. “She’ll make you sick with her germs if you go near her.”
Save for the lingering fear that Midousuji could snap at any moment, Ishigaki had to admit that it was pretty cute. Somehow there was something so humanizing in seeing the first-year who had ruthlessly and single handedly seized power over the Kyoto Fushimi cycling team reduced to such innocent ignorance in the face of the opposite sex. It could very well mean the start of something new between him and Midousuji.
Nonetheless, Ishigaki’s voice still quivered as he asked, “Midousuji-kun, have you ever had a crush on a girl before?”
Midousuji tilted his head. “Crush?”
“You know, a crush?” Ishigaki attempted a reassuring smile, despite being caught in a glare of pure confusion. “When you like a girl, but not in like, a ‘friend’ kinda way, but they way where you wanna hold their hand and, uh, kiss them?”
Predictably, Midousuji’s responded with an earsplitting screech. “Gross!” He reeled back in revulsion, as if Ishigaki had just spewed vomit all over the floor. “Why would I do something like that!?”
“I-It’s not something anyone chooses to do!” Ishigaki stuttered. “It just sorta…happens.”
A few heavy moments of silence passed, during which time Midousuji appeared to be captivated by thought, tongue lolling out of his mouth and eyes glazed over to the ceiling.
He wasn’t getting it. Ishigaki sighed. “I don’t think you have the flu, but a crush on the transfer girl.”
“How come?” Midousuji asked.
He really was oblivious to his own feelings, not that Ishigaki was entirely surprised. He’d have to put things in terms a child would understand. “Well, when you see her or think about her, is that when you feel all funny the way you described? Like there’s something trapped in your stomach that wants to get out?”
(Nod.)
“Do you want to see her smile? Listen to her talk?”
(Nod.)
“And those…uh…dreams…are they about her?”
(Silence.)
(Nod.)
“Those are romantic feelings Midousuji-kun, not symptoms of the flu.” Ishigaki smiled, shrugging in the face of Midousuji narrowed glance. “The transfer girl didn’t make you sick, you just have a crush on her.”
“Oh.” And it was as if Midousuji had simply discovered something once misplaced; neither overly excited nor disgusted by the very notion of having warm, fuzzy feelings for a girl, but rather indecisive over what to do about it. It didn’t last for too long, as he soon flailed his arms about like a petulant child, shrieking, “What do I do! Tell me what to do zaku!”
The two of them ended up missing practice.
Midousuji spent the entire weekend pouring over his plans.
They weren’t exactly his plans, per-say, but he was going to be the one to put them into action. Although strategy had always been one of his (many) strengths in cycling, somehow he still felt himself at a loss trying to adapt Ishigaki’s advice into procedure.
Ishigaki told him that girls weren’t like bikes. Even if he did do everything right and consider all of the factors involved, that didn’t mean he’d win.
He couldn’t manipulate girls the way he manipulated his competition, not when they had the power to say “yes” or “no”.
According to Ishigaki, what he could (and probably should) do was confess his feelings, even if no amount of skill could prevent the possibility of rejection.
“Write her a love letter or give her a gift, like chocolate or flowers, stuff girls like. That’s what people do when they want to let someone know that they like them that way.”
The flowers part was easy enough. Midousuji remembered how much his mother liked sunflowers. She grew a patch of them in a little garden outside his window before she got sick. When she was in the hospital, he always brought fresh for her ones whenever he came to visit. She’d smile and put them in a vase on the windowsill by her bed, then give him a pat on the head and a remark of how sweet he was. He never saw them wilt, until she was no longer there and he had to bike home with a withered flower in his backpack.
Midousuji took care of the garden every spring when the sunflowers came in. He didn’t want to see them die again, not when they reminded him of something happier.
If sunflowers had made his mother smile, maybe they would make the transfer girl smile too.
Writing the letter, on the other hand, proved to be far more difficult.
Midousuji ended up wasting the majority of his weekend sitting at his desk, chewing on the ends of pens until the ink turned his teeth blue.
“Just write how you feel.”
But Midousuji seemed to feel a lot of things he didn’t fully understand yet, and trying to put them all into writing just simply wasn’t happening.
The whole process went something like this:
1) Stare blankly at the stationery paper he bought and wait for something to come to him. (This step could last anywhere between five and forty-five minutes.)
2) Write a few lines of whatever it was that had finally seemed good enough.
3) Read over what he had written.
4) Realize what he had written was gross and not right and then throw it in the trash.
5) See step one.
By the time Midousuji was down to his final piece of stationery paper, he realized that he’d just have to make due with whatever it was that came out of him.
So he did.
And he was far from pleased with it, sticking his tongue out in disgust upon rereading the entire thing and wanting nothing more than to burn it and all of the rejected ones flowing from his trash can into one big pile of nothing.
Even though he’d spent forever on each word and every pen stroke, it still seemed...ew.
But it would have to do.
Monday came and so did she, taking her seat in front of him to make the moths and worms in his belly flutter and crawl about again. As the morning went on, pencils slipped from his fingers and graphite smudges covered what notes he had written down when not thinking about how nice she smelled. He thought a few times of asking to go to the infirmary, to back out of the whole thing even though the flowers and the letter were in his desk all ready to go, because his jaw was still sore and he’d bitten his fingernails too close to the skin.
Then the bell rang for lunch time and suddenly she and the rest of the class were gone, leaving him alone at his desk in an empty classroom with the flowers and the letter in his shaking hands.
“Midousuji-kun, it might not go the way you want it to, but then there’s always a chance that it will. The only way to know is if you tell her how you really feel.”
Ishigaki may be a spineless, husk of a captain, but somehow his words were...comforting.
Afterwards, Midousuji ate his lunch alone by the bushes as usual, listening for the sound of a voice that he never heard.
“Hey you.”
Midousuji pulled the brake, bike screeching to a stop in a cloud of dirt not even ten feet from the bike rack he’d just pulled away from.
When he craned his neck over his shoulder, there she was, staring straight at him.
Holding the bouquet of sunflowers he’d put inside her desk.
The familiar lilac color of his stationery paper peeking from her breast pocket
And just like how she had done when he had confronted her in gym class days before, he looked around in uncertainty that it was he she was in fact addressing.
She placed her hands on her hips, narrowing her stare at him with angled brows. “Yeah, you. Come here. I wanna talk to you.”
Midousuji felt something hard collect in his throat at he turned his bike around and pedaled back. He tried swallowing a couple of times, but it did nothing besides hurt.
“Midousuji, right?”
He nodded, unable to bring himself to correct her with the demand for honorifics because the stomach insects were scratching at his insides and flying and creeping into different parts of his body. When he was younger he would get on his bike and pedal as fast as he could to get away from feeling things that were unpleasant, afraid of the hurt and the pain that would always follow. But caught in the stare of the transfer girl, his joints seemed to have locked up, rooting him to the spot with no chance of escape.
The transfer girl frowned. “I’m not going to apologize for hitting you in the face. You deserved that,” she said, voice stony as she brought the bouquet of sunflowers up to Midousuji’s face. “And don’t think that this is being taken as an acceptable apology either. That was probably one of the rudest things anyone has ever said to me, and I’ve been called a lot of things. That’s why I had to transfer in the first place.”
In numerous races beforehand, taunting and manipulation had been his method of success. And he had never once felt bad about it, not when time and time again it brought him the glory of winning. He’d never given his words much thought once they left his mouth.
But now, Midousuji couldn’t help but wonder what sort of insults made moving to another city and enrolling in a new school the only escape.
The thought made him feel...remorseful? Was that what it was beating in his chest?
It was sad. And he could say anything, anything at all, and yet he just couldn’t make his mouth move.
He was gross. He had always been gross. And he was alone because he was gross.
This was the part Ishigaki had warned him about, wasn’t it?
However, instead of the rejection Midousuji had seen as clearly as the finish lines of numerous races, the transfer girl swung her backpack around and placed the bouquet of sunflowers into the back pocket.
She was keeping them?
“Anyways, I asked around about you,” she finally said, fixing the strap of her backpack onto her shoulder. “You scare people, you know that?”
“...”
The transfer girl tilted her head, looking him over with questioning eyes. “Is that why you’re always alone?”
“...”
(Speech just simply wasn’t happening for him at the moment.)
She sighed. “The only other thing anyone could tell me was that you’re a cyclist. I don’t know much about that sport, but apparently you’re one of the best. You’re fast.”
And then she was incredibly close, shoulder brushing against his arm as she moved behind him. He craned his neck just in time to see her mount the pegs of his back wheel and drape her arms over his shoulders.
“Do you ride past the post office by any chance? I live down that way.” Her breath was dewy against his neck, and the places she was touching felt as if they would sprout forth flowers and grasses and trees and bushes from his skin.
In Midousuji’s stomach, the moths and the worms settled into a still warmth. yellow in color, like the sunflowers outside his window.
And with his only slightly sore jaw, Midousuji said, “...yes.”
“Cool.” She held herself around his neck, chin propped against the inside of his shoulder and hair falling past his cheek.
It was soft.
Just as he had thought.
Transfer-chan,
You’re not gross. At all.
But you make me feel funny the way sunflowers make me feel funny. They remind me of something happy because they’re yellow and that’s why my mom liked sunflowers. I hope you like sunflowers too
I thought I was sick at first but now I think I have a crush on you. I don’t know what it really means, but the moths in my stomach don’t feel gross when you’re around. They get excited when you talk and when you smile and when you pass papers back to me.
I’ve never felt this way before but it doesn’t hurt me. I don’t think it would be bad if I stayed like this and I thought you should know.
Now you do.
From,
Akira Midousuji