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Giyuu thinks he’s well-liked by his students and fellow colleagues. He likes to believe he gets along with those who surround him eight hours a day, five days a week, overtime included. But something Shinobu of the first-aid student committee says bugs him to no end.
“You’re weird, but you’re far from funny,” she told him, gaze focused on the clipboard as she took an inventory of supplies in the first-aid cabinet. The PE teacher was nursing an icepack to the back of his head for the soccer ball he had unexpectedly received during his last PE lesson. Shinobu had welcomed him with a suggestion that ‘perhaps your students don’t like you’, to which he disheartenedly asked for advice.
“Do something about that humour of yours if you want to be popular with the students.” Her nudge of confidence was more like a stab of criticism (ironic considering her position as the head of first-aid committee), which made Giyuu’s brow twitch the slightest bit. She smiled sweetly, knowing the seed she sowed would bloom into a sweet fruit only she would savour.
Soon after, she kicked him out of the room, complaining how he was wasting space despite being one of the only two people, three beds and five chairs in the room. “Tell a joke or something, I’m sure you’ll get some laughs. Or get laughed at.” She waved as she slid shut the door behind him.
So Giyuu sits at his desk the following Monday morning, two books (and a dictionary) stacked on his desk sprouting colours of fluorescent memo notes from top and side marking one-liners that had made the to-be-popular teacher’s lips curl upward.
Despite his hunched posture and demeanour that makes him seem smaller than he really is, Giyuu feels he’s already making a wave of change. Although it’s far from reaching the shore, bit by bit…
“What’s this, what’s this?” A hand scoops up the books and the owner’s rumbling voice reads out the titles, “Smooth pick-up lines and 102 funniest jokes. Tomioka, you.” The art teacher, Uzui Tengen, raises a querying brow, a smirk of amusement rising in expectation. “What’s up with this?”
“The ceiling,” Giyuu answers as he spins around in his chair, his chest puffed out the slightest bit and lips curled up in the way only Giyuu can. A satisfactory delivery.
Tengen’s smirk drops. He blinks a few times then bursts out into a booming guffaw. “You’re right! Good one, Tomioka!” He smacks the smaller man in the back a few solid times, sliding the books back onto the desk. The art teacher stuffs his hands into the pockets of his hoodie, his hoots of laughter earning him a ‘shut the fuck up, Tengen’ from the mathematics teacher a row of desks away.
Giyuu vacantly rubs his neck from the near whiplash, then his chest from being winded. Tengen’s blows always seem to reverberate through his entire body. But what he leaves with Giyuu isn’t just vertebral microfractures and potential spinal shock. A small smile briefly flutters on his lips. It’s only Monday morning and he’s already gotten great reception. “A good one,” he mutters to himself.
-
As the day progresses, the temperature rises. Summer leaves those outside hot and exhausted and those inside in a much more bearable state.
So fortunately for Sanemi, the maths teacher, he spends his lunchbreak inside.
Unfortunately for Sanemi, the maths teacher, it’s not any more bearable.
The sliding doors to the staffroom slam open and immediately, Sanemi feels the room suffocate from the overbearing heat of the history teacher.
“I’m starving!” Kyoujurou announces as he marches two steps in, turns and slams the door shut. “Kamado boy and his crew were really absorbed in the cavalry battle today!”
Sanemi grits his teeth with each enunciation that left Kyoujurou’s mouth. Each lunchbreak was a cycle of wash, shout, rinse and repeat. He does his best to tolerate it, because he has dessert nestling in its own lunchbox to reward himself. He unties the cloth that wrap his two-tier bento and sets to work.
Kyoujurou marches along the adjacent row of desks to his own dedicated spot where his three tiers of bento he keeps yapping ‘delicious!’ for sits.
But when he doesn’t stop Sanemi’s eyes curiously follow him to the desk belonging to the sports teacher. There his gaze lingers for a moment before falling back to the meal before him, lifting rice and sides to his mouth.
With Kyoujurou occupied by the most boring person in the world, Sanemi relishes the peace for a bit longer.
There’s nothing interesting about him at all, Sanemi thinks to himself. Even Rengoku’s gone quiet—
“HA HA HA HA!”
Jerked from his train of thoughts Sanemi sits up straight, glaring at the source of the noise.
He had already heard enough from one loud buffoon earlier in the morning. Because the racket subsided quickly, he hadn’t bothered to check the reason for Tengen’s laughter. But now, the second, even louder buffoon seemed to be injecting his entire being into each projected release from his chest. And that rattled Sanemi’s eardrums.
His eardrums are rattled again, to his despair, as Kyoujurou exclaims, “Magnificent!” and finally leaves Giyuu’s side to return to his desk.
“Rengoku,” Sanemi warns the overzealous man. “Eat outside before you fuckin’ deafen everyone.”
“My bad, Shinazugawa!” Kyoujurou bellows (and it takes all of Sanemi’s patience to not blow his fuse), taking his lunch with him as he leaves the staffroom.
Sanemi sighs once Kyoujurou’s echoing greetings to other students are further and fainter, sparing a whimsical glance at Giyuu before returning to his meal once more.
“What’s he smirking to himself for?” Sanemi mutters before feeding more rice into his mouth.
-
Come late afternoon, the students have scattered and dispersed throughout the school to their relative afterschool duties, recreational activities or filing out of schoolgrounds.
For teachers, it was a time to wind down but not entirely switch off. Sanemi spends his time afterschool marking and working ahead to prepare the next day’s materials. As he works his way through a stack of tests (one of them being Genya’s class), he’s aware of the hovering steps behind him, the shuffling of pages and finally the clearing of a throat.
“Shinazugawa,” came Giyuu’s voice, “I see you’re marking tests today.”
“Yep,” came Sanemi’s curt response, eyes continuing to scan the test sheet, red leaving trails the page.
Silence. Then another ahem.
Sanemi doesn’t look up, because he knows if he ignores the other man, the sooner he’ll go away.
When the silence continues (and it continues to the point he temporarily forgets Giyuu’s presence), Sanemi bets Giyuu’s given up and leans back in his seat with a sigh.
“Shinazugawa.”
Sanemi’s face scrunched up. Of course, he bargained too soon. He leans forward again and resumes marking. “What.”
“Are you a test? Because I’d score you a hundred.”
“Are you this test?” Sanemi shoots back, holds his silence a moment longer as he writes a score on the top corner of the paper then taps it. “Because I’d score you a thirty-nine.”
“That’s an oddly specific number.”
“It’s a failing mark.”
-
“It doesn’t seem to be working,” Giyuu says as his shoulders droop further than they already sag, the chopsticks going limp in his hand. “I can’t make Shinazugawa laugh.”
It’s Tuesday, lunchbreak, at a relatively deserted staircase of the school building. There, he often sits alone. There, Tanjirou often sniffs him out to keep him company.
“But you’re plenty interesting, Tomioka, sir!” Tanjirou, a student and a frequent violator of the school’s dress code, encourages the teacher. “He just doesn’t understand your charms!” He pumps his fists as a motivating gesture.
Giyuu returns his gesture with a small smile, “Thanks, Tanjirou.”
“You know, the maths teacher always has a sweet scent lingering about him,” Tanjirou motions for Giyuu to come close, his voice falling into a whisper. “I asked Genya about it and it turns it out that…”
Giyuu nods with the new information.
He could work with this.
-
“Shinazugawa.”
Sanemi stops and turns, eyes the person who called upon him. “Whaddya want, Tomioka?”
Giyuu steps forward, fiddling with his jersey’s sleeves and struggling to maintain eye contact.
“Make it quick, ‘cause I’ve gotta get to the next class,” Sanemi urges, looking back down the hallway to his next designated classroom and counts the few students to enter. Sanemi taps his foot, checks his watch, glances at his classroom, checks his watch.
“I was wondering if you’d like an ohagi.”
Distracted, Sanemi answers dismissively, “Yeah sure, whatever,” already taking a step in the direction of the classroom. “If you’re done I’m go—“
Arms wrap around him, stopping him in his tracks. He looks down at the blue sleeves that wrap across his middle. “The fuck are you doing, Tomioka?” Sanemi almost screams and the attention of passing students fall on the two teachers.
“I’m giving you an ohagi.”
“Oha—the fuck are you on about?!” Sanemi forces his way out Giyuu’s arms and shoves him to the ground, stomping off to his destination.
“Tomioka, sir~, what were you two doing?” A sweet voice giggles. Shinobu peers down at Giyuu with the default smile of hers. Although not believing in it, she’s silently thanking Lady Luck for letting her be a passing witness to fulfil her amusement.
Giyuu dusts himself off and straightens up. He turns to Shinobu with the smug smile of his. “I was o-hugging him.”
No thanks to Lady Luck, Shinobu almost gags.
-
It’s Wednesday midday and Sanemi has a period free. With preparation planned for after school, he takes the time to tend to the new addition to the staffroom: a caged rhinoceros beetle nested by the window.
Gently, he places small cubes of old fruit atop the branch fitted within the cage. The beetle begins to slowly shift its large body to clamber up the branch.
“What are you doing, Shinazugawa?” comes Giyuu’s voice from behind.
Remembering the prior day’s incident, Sanemi refuses to look at him, but he was in a better mood than the day before, one reason being Genya’s improved score, so he answers him anyway. “Feeding the beetle.”
“That wasn’t there yesterday,” Giyuu points out, referring to the overall set up as well as the resident within.
“I picked it up on the walk to school this morning. Some bratty kids were messing around with it and it was missing a leg,” Sanemi explains, then grumbles, “kids these days don’t get the charm of beetles.”
Giyuu silently nods, then turns to watch the beetle. It struggles at the base of the branch where Giyuu sees a gap where its front left leg should be. And so he thinks.
“Shinazugawa.”
“What.”
“I think it needs a hand.”
“It’s missing a leg. What it needs is a leg.”
“… That’s not what I meant.”
Sanemi fits the lid back onto the cage and straightens his back with a groan. “Yep, I know,” he says plainly before walking off.
Giyuu watches him as he leaves before returning his attention back to the beetle. He lowers himself until he’s staring into the cage and thinks. “I think it needs a leg,” he tries, but he knots up his brows in dissatisfaction. “That’s not how the joke works.”
-
It’s Friday afternoon and Sanemi is beginning to think this week has been the most insufferable week ever.
He’s been attacked from all angles with jokes and one-liners that don’t tickle a bone in his body at all. He had carelessly knocked his elbow into his desk and complained about the tingling, which had earned him a snicker from Giyuu, “because it’s humerus.”
During a staff meeting afterschool, Giyuu was last to arrive and without any spare seats left around the table, he pointedly looked at Sanemi and said in an oddly firm manner, “you don’t seem to chair at all.”
To which Kanae of the biology department and advisor to the flower arrangement club remarked, “Oh, is that why you were here earlier?” and reprimanded in the kind voice of hers, “you mustn’t move the seats before the meeting, Tomioka. You’ll make the meeting run late.”
Sanemi sighs exasperatedly, tapping a stack of marked test papers to straighten them and sets them down. He gets up and saunters to the printer to collect a new batch of worksheets and finds Kyoujurou who’s staring intensely at the printer with arms crossed and a grand smile, each sheet printed adding to his own growing batch.
So far, he’s only heard Tengen and Kyoujurou bust their chops squealing at Giyuu’s so-called jokes out of the other teachers. Even though Giyuu got a pity laugh from Kanae, Obanai flat out ignored his snake joke (how coldblooded) and caused Gyoumei to grieve at his attempt at a dad joke. Knowing Tengen’s twisted sense of humour, he’d laugh at anything if it amused him. But Kyoujurou, on the other hand, was hard to read simply for the person he was. Intense.
He wonders why, despite his attempts to brush Giyuu off, Sanemi keeps getting hounded.
As Sanemi filters through a tray for all his worksheets, curiosity spurs him to ask, “Hey, Rengoku, what did Tomioka, the bastard, say to you on, uh, Tuesday, was it?”
Kyoujurou maintains unmoving, eyes still focussed on the timed ejection of each sheet.
When he doesn’t answer, Sanemi feels it’s too awkward to stand and wait. “Uh, if you can’t remember that’s fine, don’t worry about—”
“YOU’RE FIRED UP!” Kyoujurou barks and Sanemi jumps and swears. Kyoujurou turns to look at Sanemi, who’s clamping sheets of ruffled papers to his chest to keep them from spilling to the floor. “It was quite hot that day, right?”
Sanemi groans.
-
The day ends late with the group of teachers leaving the school grounds together when Tengen, at the head of the group, announces, “Let’s eat out! It’s been a while since we’ve had everyone rounded up.”
The declaration arouses chatter about where they should eat, what they would order and how far into the night they would drink.
Sanemi falls behind the group, using the space to stretch his arms above his head and roll his shoulders.
“What are you going to eat, Shinazugawa?” ccomes a voice from behind him.
Of course, there’s only be one person who’d fall even further behind the group.
“Depends on where we decide to eat,” Sanemi replies, stretching out his arms outwards to deliberately knock into Giyuu.
“I know what I want,” says Giyuu.
Sanemi stubbornly refuses to ask, but the expectant glaring burns holes into the side of his face. Maybe if he plays along for the rest of the night, Giyuu’ll be finally satisfied and forget come Monday.
Just for tonight.
“You’re probably gonna go for what you always order, aren’tcha?”
“Yep. I’m dying for salmon die-kon.”
“That’s not funny at all.”
-
“That’s not funny at all.” Shinobu rolls over onto her back on the beanbag of her sister’s room.
She knew that most of the ‘happenings’ would occur in the staffroom and she would need to ask Kanae for the gossip, but the tea was a lot more bland and lukewarm than she was expecting it to be.
“Don’t bully Tomioka so much, Shinobu. It’s not nice,” Kanae warns, but the scolding isn’t taken to heart.
“He’s a teacher. It’s his fault if he can’t get along with others,” Shinobu protests, adding on, “he was the one who asked for advice in the first place.”
“Oh dear…”
“He’s such a boring person. If he could hold even a simple conversation, I’m sure he’d be more liked.” Shinobu sits up, shrugging. “Not my problem anymore. His sense of humour is horrible. Just thinking about it makes me sick.”
Somewhere, a couple of neighbourhoods away, Giyuu sneezes.
“Someone who nose me is talking about me,” he sniffles, then smiles to himself. “That’s a good one.”