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Tadashi regrets his life. He really, really does. He should’ve picked communications. Or business. Or art. He’s never drawn a picture in his life, but anything would’ve been better than picking Health Science, no matter how tame of a major it seemed to be. If he’d just majored in art or something and stayed away from the sciences, his favorite subject in high school, he wouldn’t be sitting here, amidst the ruins of his dorm bed and desk, desperately clutching onto his 6-year-old, broken as fuck laptop, crying his eyes out in a mixture of sleep-deprived hysteria and absolute fucking fear.
A functioning Control+Z never looked so sexy.
Tadashi should have spent his savings on a new laptop instead of a phone contract. Who needs cell service when it might’ve saved him the trouble of trying to get out of an even more important contract--one that seems to be bound for the inescapable: the rest of his life.
It all starts with the dreaded freshman biology class. Not only is it the most weed-out class in the entirety of the science programs at his university, but half of the people definitely haven’t gotten the memo that they should drop. Otherwise Tadashi wouldn’t have been subjected to attempting to write his lab group’s entire lab report himself.
And, well, he shouldn’t be doing this anyway. His lab partners do not deserve his stellar contributions. But his lab TA hasn’t answered any of his emails for the last week, and he’s pretty sure his lab group blocked his number to avoid any more confrontations over their shitty, shitty brains.
Tadashi took it as god’s egregious wrath that he opened their shared word document to find an absolute trash fire of a lab report--a lab report that is worth 40% of his grade. He gaped as he scrolled through the four pages of shoddy graphs and barely legible Japanese. He almost cried when he saw they didn’t even cite their lab notebooks when the citation was given to them in their rubrics. He had to calmly, carefully shut his laptop (the thing wouldn’t be able to survive a rage-quit slam), spin in his desk chair, and reach for his pillow before he could scream in anger.
And then he set to work.
He texted his very good friend, Sou-kun, a panicked, anguished plea for caffeine and, by the time he’d rewritten their entire intro and downed at least four shots of espresso in varying sugared-sweet drinks that his spiky-haired, elementary studies major of a friend had provided, Tadashi was over it.
If he was going to write their entire lab report to save his grade, so be it. He’d be sure to only sign his name on it, to email a lengthy explanation to his TA and professor, to make sure that only he gets credit for it. It would be fine, as long as he just… ignored all of his other responsibilities and stayed up for two nights and a row. It was Tuesday afternoon, the report wasn’t due until midnight on Thursday. He could do it.
He could, right?
Tadashi steps out of his history pre-req, contemplating his own death, for the second time that week. He’d just been assigned two readings to finish by Friday complete with one-page reflections for each. Earlier, in his Advanced English class, his professor notified them of a possible pop quiz on Thursday (and everyone knows that that’s a definite yes). He also dropped his lunch coffee in his rush out the door.
With barely a suppressed whimper, he makes his way back to his dorm.
The lab report is half done, it’s 3:12pm, Wednesday.
Tadashi sits down at his desk, unpacks his bag, and opens his laptop. He grabs a notebook and a pen. He makes a list.
- Finish lab report results
- Make graphs and tables
- Make figure labels and captions for graphs and tables
- Scream
- Format
- Cry when formatting fucks up the graphs and tables
- Lab report conclusion
- Ask Sou-kun for more coffee
- Read history
- Contemplate switching majors--it’s not too late right?
He writes their results out.
Once he’s done with the writing (a rudimentary draft, he’ll have to go back and edit once he’s got the formatting done), he drags out the ridiculously thick lab notebook they make you purchase and opens a spreadsheet. Tadashi takes a moment to breathe deep and thank his past self for taking detailed notes and measurements--he’d been under the impression no one else would--and starts in on the meat of the report. He’s just started exporting his graphs to his word document when things start to go awry.
His Z key breaks. Or he thinks it does. He just knows for an absolute fact that he can’t finish writing out his observations of the culture they grew because he can’t type “next”. Or “method”. Or “murder”. Or… anything with a tsu in it. So yeah, his Z key is broken. But… that’s alright. It’ll slow him down, but he can just copy and paste; he can just look up the proper kanji he needs to type instead of inputting it himself.
By the time he’s onto formatting, things get even worse. Every time he moves a graph just a smidge to the side, it screws up his whole document and he has to move everything back to their places. Tadashi is regretting all of his life decisions, because he’s been staring at his laptop screen, diligently suffering through formatting this damn report, for hours. He glances at the clock down in the bottom corner. Oh, it’s Thursday already. Fantastic.
Tadashi keeps trucking along, praying silently each time he adds a new piece to the report that it doesn’t fuck up the last four pages of meticulously laid out material. He adds a caption to a graph, safe. He types out an experimental result, safe. He makes bullet points to outline his conclusion (so he can put everything in the right order before finalizing the writing)... and the document goes haywire.
Closing his eyes for a second, he takes one breath in… exhales slowly… and grabs his tumbler. It's empty. Not even a drop of cold cappuccino left in it. Tossing it onto his bed in frustration, he's about to tear at his hair and scream when a deafening crash yanks the scream right out of him.
Tadashi’s dorm room is as such: four small walls, one window opposite the door, two closets next to the door, beds on both empty walls. His roommate is never home, but their bed is across from his, lofted, with the desk underneath. His bed is on the floor, desk at the foot, and he sits with his back to his closet.
By the dim light of his laptop, he identifies a shadowy mass right where he threw his empty tumbler, right where his bed was sitting in front of him. Tadashi rubs at his eyes, certain that he’s delirious, and looks once again.
But there’s one thing that’s undeniably real: His bed is now splintered and even the front half of his desk is demolished.
He speechlessly eyes his now destroyed room, then, although he would have liked to simply shut his eyes and ignore everything, they traitorously lift to the shadows he really, really hopes is just a trick of the light, and comes face to face with glowing, golden eyes.
Tadashi does what any normal person would do in this situation: He starts sobbing.
The eyes narrow and a voice booms into his room.
“I AM THE GREAT DEMON TSUKISHIMA KEI! GREAT MAGE I AM AT YOUR-- YOU’RE A HUMAN?! A HUMAN DARES TO SUMMON ME? I DON’T FEEL A LICK OF POWER FROM YOUR PUNY FORM. HOW? HOW WERE YOU ABLE TO--?”
Tadashi is wailing at this point, clenching his laptop to his chest, desperate for this to be a dream, but the demon raises a shadowed limb and grabs his chin.
“ANSWER ME.” It demands.
“I- I DON’T KNOW??” His RA is going to break down his door for a noise violation, but he can’t keep his voice down, not when an apparent demon was just summoned into his room, destroying his bed and shattering Tadashi’s last shreds of sanity. First the lab report, then the added stress from his other impending assignments, and now this?
“I was just trying to make an outline!” Tadashi sobs. “You were supposed to be bullet points!” He accentuates each word with a stab at his keyboard, holding the Control button down and slamming his fingers into his useless Z button.
“How-- How can I stop it?! How do I undo?” He sniffs and switches to hitting the undo button at the top of his document, but all that does is undo his last edits. In fact, the bullet points he was supposed to make… didn’t even show up. Instead, he got… whatever this was in front of him.
“STUPID CHILD, A CONTRACT SUCH AS THIS,” the demon waves a hand, a scroll with an unknown language on it appears out of nowhere, “IS NOT SOMETHING YOU CAN SIMPLY UNDO.”
“B-but--”
“YOUR NAME IS YAMAGUCHI TADASHI, CORRECT?”
“...Yes,” he whimpers, still a blubbering mess.
“THEN YOU ARE MY NEW MASTER. I AM ENSLAVED TO YOU FOR THE REST OF YOUR PUNY, MEANINGLESS LIFESPAN.”
Tadashi cowers, gaping up at the demon in front of him. After a few long moments, his hysteria dies down enough that he can now look through his tears at the demon. Bright golden eyes that glare with the force of a thousand suns (Tadashi feels like he melts on the spot), long, blackened limbs that end in claws (at least this demon is bipedal, Tadashi thinks he might have fainted if not), two large black wings furl out from the demon’s back, and two curled, sharp horns adorn a crown of golden, shining hair. In the back of his sleep-deprived mind, his head voice has the audacity to think hot.
He slaps his hands to his cheeks, hard.
The demon doesn’t disappear. Tadashi doesn’t wake up. The demon simply looks at him, indifferent.
Is it too late to switch majors?