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Arthur is going to have a rotten day.
He’s panting, sprinting down the spiraling cement sidewalks ten minutes away from World Academy with primordial instinct being the only thing separating him from collapsing from utter exhaustion. Normally, he’d borrow some of his mother’s makeup - which is perfectly acceptable, mind you - to prevent the his horridly accumulated eyebags from revealing themselves, but he didn’t have the time to do much other than wolf down a glass of milk and a biscuit before lunging out the door.
And, considering the fact that crowds by streetlights looked ready to pounce, he isn’t getting to school any time soon.
The effects of being a student council president who spent half his time hunched over a desk working on his ever-expanding skyscraper of student activity and conduct forms were starting to manifest as a very painful burn in his lungs and arms. God, this couldn’t possibly get worse.
“Whoa, is that you, Artie?”
As if on cue, a bicycle-wielding Alfred F. Jones swerves into his peripheral vision, biking leisurely alongside his furiously animalistic pace. “He’ll go away if you just ignore him, Arthur,” he attempts to mutter under his very frequent breaths. But, of course, the American had to go and defy expectations at Arthur’s expense.
“Hellooo~?” Alfred chimes, drawing painstakingly long on the final vowel. “Earth to Artie, whatcha doin’ running like that so early morning - what happened to your bike?”
Arthur’s reply is barely coherent enough behind the constant panting. “For your information, Jones, I left my bike in the school shed because someone accidentally took my lock key home.”
“Oh, uh, sorry about that.” Alfred lifts a hand to rub awkwardly at the back of his neck. “I was gonna give it to you when I found it, but I got caught up with Kiku about this cool new game that just came out.” With his freed hand, he pats the empty spot behind his seat - one that’s normally used for cargo, Arthur notes.
“There is no way I’m hopping onto your bike like some bloody schoolgirl.” Formulating sentences - not to mention voicing them - is getting increasingly harder, but his annoyance serves as a kindling fuel to keep it going. “I would rather collapse the instant I step into Maths than get on a bike with your reckless, greasy, insufferable ars—“
He got on the bike.
“Don’t worry, Artie, just one more downhill ride and we’ll be there in no time.” Alfred chimes from in front of him, and Arthur tightens his grip around Alfred’s waist in anticipation. “No slowing down here, I can’t get a detention for being late today unless I wanna get kicked off of the baseball team!”
Alfred, the ever-enthusiastic arsehole, tips them over the steep hill without so much as a second glance at how utterly dangerous the entire thing could be. A ball drops in Arthur’s stomach as they begin to pick up speed, wind sifting through their hair and—
“Alfred!” he shouts against the whipping torrent of wind against his face. “The chime music is beginning to play - the train will be here soon!”
As if on cue, they’re roughly shifted as Alfred’s brakes kick in and they slow to a stop right in front of the lowered barriers of the aforementioned train crossing. “No worries, a real hero wouldn’t let any harm come to the ones he holds dear!”
Sputtering a bit at the remark, Arthur’s glad that Alfred can’t see his face at the moment. “A real hero wouldn’t scare the living hell out of them beforehand.”
The two trains pass by at that point, drowning out Alfred’s resounding laughter in a whirlwind of reverberating sound and clinking metal. He turns to Arthur with his smile and says something inaudible, the words dying out before the trains finish passing and the barriers are lifted once more.
As they begin to push forward once more, Arthur doesn’t ask what he said - probably something stupid, as usual.
Within minutes, they’re at the academy, the familiar muscle burn returning to Arthur as they bolt up the stairs towards their first period. Knowing the teacher, they’ll most likely be getting detentions if they're even a minute late - which is two minutes away according to Arthur’s watch. Why was his first period on the fourth floor of all places?
“Tsk. Tsk,” tuts Francis as they collapse into their seats, casually reading a novel by his desk. Despite its seemingly innocent title, Arthur knows what lies behind it. That perverted frog. “You two seem rather winded this morning. What a scandal - the student council president and the future captain of the baseball team coming in late to class red and panting, possibly from their secret rendezvous in the boys bathr—“
“Shut it, Francis,” hisses Arthur as he practically falls against his desk, unwilling to add any condescending remarks beyond it at the moment. He’ll have to make up for it.
Alfred, however, is not exactly how Francis described him to be. If anything, he looks completely fine - being the most wanted athletic person in the entire academy doesn’t come without reason, of course. “Besides we aren't late - there's a sub today!” He points to the board, where the instructions “Do exercises 14E and 14F, due next class” are written choppily on the whiteboard.
Momentary relief floods Arthur’s veins before their substitute walks into class with what looks like a stack of papers that most certainly, undoubtably meant that today they’re going to have a—
“Pop quiz time, everyone!”
The class groans in a mellifluous chorus of disbelief.
Though a good portion of his peers ground out comments from “Ugh, it’s a Monday too!” to “I didn’t even understand what we did last week!”, Arthur in particular looked like an animal fearing for his life - or, more specifically, his grades.
Despite how the refuses to admit it, the subjects he often found himself struggling with - Maths and Physics - are actually Alfred’s strong points (“I just like how objective they are - only one or two right answers and that’s it, unlike all that fancy-shmancy stuff we do in Lit.”). Initially, he was planning to have Alfred tutor him on this unit before they had any form of an assessment, but it looks like that was blown entirely out of the window.
Needless to say, he spent a good deal of the period writing out solutions he knew made no sense. But who’s to say that Terry’s speed while walking down the park at an angle of 84 degrees from his original standing point wasn’t 992.64 kilometers per hour?
Turns out, after they got their papers back by the end of the period, the 34% sitting in the corner of his paper did.
At least things couldn’t get any worse.
“Arthur! Stop dropping all the shrimp into the sink!” Francis barks from across the table, being as fiercely protective over quality ingredients as he usually is during home economics.
It doesn’t take a fool - something Arthur is most definitely not - to see that the culinary arts weren’t his strong point. Normally, he manages to get by with the amount of skill he possesses - just a few huffs of smoke to clear out when he opens the oven, or a couple of concerning cracking sounds every time he tries to fry something up.
Arthur, for the umpteenth time that class, bumps into the bowl of peeled shrimps sitting by the edge of the sink - who even put them there in the first place? - and sending them tumbling down to the point of inedibility (and Francis’s sanity down to the point of utter despair, not that Arthur minded) once more.
After spending a good ten minutes replacing the shrimp and dipping them in batter - as per Kiku’s request, they were cooking Tempura today - Arthur’s hovering over the pot of frying oil with one of them in his hands.
The instructions on the board - and Kiku’s constant reminders - said that being careful was crucial at this stage, as a small splash could send the hot oil splattering onto the cook’s hands—
“Bloody fuck!” Arthur hisses, instinctively stumbling away from the oil and into another group’s station.
—and could lead to even greater consequences.
The chopping board he unintentionally slams his hand on sends half a head of cabbage (how in the world did cabbage fit into this dish?) soaring across the room and into the pot he’d just backed away from. The vegetable creates an even larger splash, and manages to set the whole thing aflame.
“Ivan! Grab the extinguisher, quickly!”
Class ended early that day, much to Arthur’s relief.
“Honestly, it’s as if the world’s trying to break me,” Arthur complains, completely exhausted by the day’s events as he walks down the school courtyard with Kiku. “Not that I’ll let it.” Is his stubborn addition.
“You don’t seem to be having good luck today.” For a second, Kiku draws into himself, as if trying to recall something. “I remember your horoscope said that this week will be a very bumpy ride, you must be careful.”
Chancing a glance at a pair of boys - two seniors, Gilbert and Antonio - attempting to find out whether Gilbert makes a good swinging weight or not as the albino’s twirled around like a kindergartener in a playground, Arthur exhales rather loudly.
“I’m not one to believe in such superstitious things.” Wrong. If there’s anything Arthur believed in more than anyone else, it was everything to do with occult studies, myths, and superstitions. “My ‘luck’ is perfectly fine as it is.” He doesn’t notice how Kiku’s stopped walking, leaving Arthur straight in the path of—
“Fire in the hole!”
Of all the things he believed could’ve happened today, being hit with an airborne albino with all the centripetal force a bumbling spaniard could manage wasn’t one of them.
Arthur found himself buried (disgustingly) in a pile of sweaty male students that’d been sitting across from the spinning idiots before the incident. A small crowd has formed around them in the seconds before he’d realized what just happened, Kiku snapping a quick photo with that camera of his (because no matter how many times Arthur confiscated the item for invasions of personal privacy, old habits die hard).
But it wasn’t anything to do with “luck” - things just weren’t going his way today.
Right?
For once, Arthur’s more than relieved to be confined to the safety of his student council room after school. With Alfred at baseball practice, Francis off doing god knows what or who (at least attempting to), and Kiku quietly performing his duties as Vice President on his own desk in the room, Arthur gets a good half an hour of peace signing papers and looking over activity proposal forms.
“Have the career questionnaires been looked over, Kiku?” Arthur asks from the silence, eyeing the stack of thin booklets sitting over at his friend’s desk. “I’ll carry them over to the science department’s area if they are.”
The Japanese boy makes a sound of approval. “Thank you for doing so.”
Arthur smiles up at him, only for it to twitch into an annoyed frown as he hears the familiar sound of pebbles clinking onto the window behind him. He gets up from his chair and opens it - only to have one of the pebbles flick him in the forehead.
“You idiot, you could’ve blinded me!”
“Whoops, sorry, Artie!” Alfred apologizes from a floor down, his sports bag slung around his arm and his bike standing beside him - along with Francis as well. “What’s taking you so long - aren’t done with your boring paperwork yet?”
"No, Alfred," Arthur shouts, "because unlike some people, I don't prefer to do my work the hour before it's due!"
Alfred laughs. “Yeah right.” He swerves his bike around to face the entrance and gets on it. “We’ll be waiting by the gate, so hurry up!”
Francis, with a baseball bat and a sports bag slung over his own shoulder, tails after him. “Try not to drown yourself in work, Arthur. You have yet to pay me back for your revolting culinary performance earlier today.” At that, Arthur flips him off and he chuckles, walking off with a backhanded wave.
“Arthur, have you decided whether to take up sciences or humanities?” Kiku’s question dispels Arthur’s annoyance, something he’s always found comforting about the boy. “The forms are due by the end of this week.”
“I’ll most probably choose humanities, however I haven’t filled out the form yet.”
A pause. “What do you believe Alfred will choose?”
“Most probably sciences, they’ve always been his strongpoint after all,” he replies, staring off into the distance beyond the open window. It isn’t a hard question to answer - at least for someone who’s at least well-acquainted with him.
Kiku nods. “He’s very good at math.”
“And it’s the only thing he’s good at.” Arthur pauses this time. “Why bring him up?”
Kiku remains silent.
By the time Arthur finished carrying the questionnaires up to the science department’s storage, his arms were exhausted.
He kicks the ajar door open with his foot - lightly of course - and quickly works himself into the room before it shuts on him. After carefully maneuvering through the tables of sitting science experiments and atom models, he spots the questionnaire box on a long table at the end of the room and rushes over to drop his load into it.
Just as he’s sorting the pile into stacks according to sections, something catches his eye amongst the advanced chemical reaction formulas and molecular masses written out on the blackboard in front of him, a coherent sentence reading
“Time waits for no o—“
There’s a thump coming from next door.
The science room is divided into two sections: the main classroom where people store their regular, day-to-day utensils, and the storage room where the more infrequently used things are. Things such as large glassware sets, bunsen burners, model parts, chemical pots, microscopes, jars of preserved organs and various other breakable objects. All these items were separated from the main room by a wooden door.
One that Arthur stared at for several seconds, as the sounds of someone moving inside the storage room continued. Judging by the sounds of clinking glass and plastic, they were going through the materials as well.
Sucking in a breath and all his courage, Arthur clutches the small stack of questionnaires to his chest, inching his way towards the door’s handle and swinging the door open.
Amongst the tables and shelves of science instruments and chemicals, there was nobody in the room.
“What in the world?” He spots another door across the room, and warily makes his way to it incase the culprit’s in hiding somewhere amongst the objects. “I could’ve sworn someone was in here…”
When he backs up against the door, he attempts to twist the handle.
“Huh?” He tries again. “It’s locked.” And from the outside no less.
A prickle of excitement goes up Arthur’s spine at the thought of this situation being linked to some sort of supernatural entity, but before he could fantasize about meeting a local spirit who had some affiliation with science instruments, he sees something bounce onto the ground meters away from him.
A small, walnut-looking object with a red, flashing light.
Is it something from the science department? Slowly, Arthur walks over to it, eyeing the object cautiously (blinking red lights never entailed very good things, as he’s seen in many action movies) along the way. By the time it’s right by his shoes, he blinks at it, bending down to pick it u—
Thump!
The sound comes from across the room. Arthur snaps his head to look at it and spots a figure quickly making its way towards him. As it moves, he turns himself to follow it - unfortunately, he turns his body too much too quickly and ends up sending the questionnaires flying just as the figure is right before him.
He loses his balance, and as he’s falling his elbow jams straight into the round object on the ground.
They say that before you die, your life flashes before your eyes. But that’s not the case, so Arthur doesn’t know how to explain what happened next.
All he knows is that one second, he’s staring straight up at a cloud of questionnaires against the ceiling of the storage room, and the next everything is zoned out and he’s zipping through a vortex of incomprehensible light - bolting past him and bouncing off his skin like tiny prickles of stardust.
Then, he’s nowhere, sifting through a dark torrent of blackness like a lost fish floundering under the currents of the deep. And then there’s noise, and suddenly he’s falling through miles and miles of skyscrapers. He’s weaving through endless bridges and highways and listening to miles of cars and children’s laughs before suddenly everything is blue, bluebluesoblue as the sky pans out before him, and he’s falling slowly against a field of grass like an angel being put to life.
And his head smacks against the storage room floor as the airborne packets of paper fall successively onto his body like painful pelts of hail.
Alfred’s booming laughter only seems to increase the throbbing in the back of his head tenfold. But it seems to do wonders as the American clutches his sides with the sheer exertion it takes to keep himself upright.
“Well I’m glad my distress is so hilarious to you, Alfred,” he huffs, having finally gotten his lock key from the blond as is currently walking his bike down the sidewalk. “I could’ve easily cracked my skull open!”
“Pfft, I doubt it,” sneers Francis from behind them, “your skull is too thick for that.”
The comment seems to send Alfred reeling. “I can’t believe you just tripped over yourself - that’s just too unbelievable, even for you.”
Not knowing what to take from that last statement, Arthur brushes it off. “I wasn’t alone you plonker, someone else was in the room as well!”
That gets him to stop laughing. “What seriously?”
“Who was it?”
Arthur narrows his eyes at Alfred. He seemed to be getting an awful kick out of the entire situation, after all.
“Whoa dude, what are ya looking at me for?” Alfred asks, slightly offended by the implications of such a stare. “No way I’d knock you over.”
He turns to Francis.
“So now I’m the culprit.” The frenchman flips his hair behind his shoulder. “I’m not one to stoop to such immature means to get back at people, I may be an excellent lover, cook, and actor, but I’d nev—“
Unwilling to hear anymore of Francis’s indirect praises towards himself, Arthur turns away from them, deciding to abandon the accusations altogether. “I’ll ask the monitors who’d been in the science room before me. Surely they’ll know who it is and soon enough we’ll have the person soon enough.”
As they reach an intersection, Arthur feels his phone ringing in his pocket and picks it up.
“Yes?”
“Oi, brat,” came his brother Allistor’s crackled voice through the phone. There’s a disapproving sound from across the room, meaning their mother’s present as well. “Mum said you have an order to pick up for cousin Feli, go drop it off.”
Before Arthur could voice his protest, the call ends.
He sighs, digging his phone back into his pants pocket. “Allistor’s left me with errand duty,” he says as he slings his backpack on and gets onto his bike. “I’ll have to go on ahead today.”
“What?” Alfred whines, staying on the ‘a’ sound for added effect. “Don’t leave me with this guy, he’s gonna try to sell me Playboy copies again!”
Arthur doesn't bother to stay to find out how that particular conversation ends as he kicks his bike into motion, heading down the street and towards his usual stop at the bakery. It takes about ten minutes to get there, pick up the orders, and be on his way to the museum where his cousin Feliciano works as a restoration artist and original painter.
Feliciano - despite not looking or acting like it - is actually quite a talented artist, despite being not too much older than Arthur. His godmother - Arthur’s mother - constantly drones on about the status of his love life, encouraging the young Italian to go out and find love somewhere before it’s too late. On the flipside, Feliciano shows no interest in her constant persuasion - which is strange, considering how often he blindly flirts with the young women he meets.
As a bit of an incentive, his mother orders sweets from Feliciano's favorite bakery every once in a while to persuade him to take up on her advice. Knowing her, she’d immediately stop if the presents (bribes) weren’t yielding some kind of result, so Arthur would tell her otherwise whenever he dropped them off.
Arthur looks at the paper bag now sitting in his bicycle’s front basket and sighs, hopefully this unprecedented meet up with his cousin can turn this day around.
“Mom, the chimes are going to start ringing again soon!”
“We have to go now, there’s no time to—hey! Watch where you're going!”
Arthur shouts an apology to the woman he'd just been a hair’s length away from crashing into. He’s going down that same hill again - this time from the other side - picking up speed and hoping he can get to the bottom before the barriers fall down and the trains roar their way across the tracks.
Unfortunately for him, the familiar, uplifting tune of those warning chimes begin to ring when he's only halfway down the hill. Sighing, he clutches the breaks - hopefully visiting hours aren’t over by the time he gets there, if only Allistor had called him earlier, then he'd have a sufficient amount of time to—
He’s not slowing down.
Startled by the lack of response from his bike, he clutches the breaks again - even harder this time.
Still nothing.
Very confused at this point, he clutches and lets go of his brake handles in rapid succession, acting as if it were the spark to a gas stove’s burner that wouldn’t start up right away.
No change at all.
Ah, that's right, his brakes are broken.
If this was a normal day, he would've easily remembered such a fact and carried on without a hitch. If all the misfortune in the world hadn’t seemed to have rained upon him on this particular day, he would’ve remembered such a crucial thing.
Panic settles in as Arthur nears the now lowered barriers, watching as the red lights of the train crossing begin to go on and off in a perpetual cycle. Now processing the fact that his breaks won’t do him any good in this situation, panic begins to settle in. He presses the heels of his leather shoes against the pavement rolling swiftly beneath him, yet it doesn’t do much at all but help one of his shoes fly off in the process. All he manages to see are the blurred figures of passing shops, people, and parked cars before—
His front wheel slams against the barriers.
Physics was never his strongpoint, but neither the shocked, appalled faces of the standing crowd around him or the sight of those expensive cakes his mom had ordered for his cousin spilling out of their loose packaging were going to change the fact that he’s now hurtling over the barrier - hovering right over the tracks as one of the trains nears him from the corner of his upturned vision.
Looking back on the day itself (seems like he won’t have his entire life replaying before his eyes, considering the rather short amount of time he had left) nothing had seemed to go right for him. He’d completely failed his math quiz, almost set the entire home economics room on fire, had the entire weight of some senior albino boy thrown over him, and managed to fall over in the science storage room in what was possibly the most embarrassing way to do so.
And now he was going to die, how upsetting.
Today really was a rotten day.