Chapter Text
Quiz time! What does it mean to love a person?
Countless songs and poems have been written about this feeling, rhymes recited in an effort to spill the contents of the wielder’s souls. Rows upon rows of bookshelves stretch on walls with this very topic in mind. To have another person be the very center of your being, to surrender possession of your own beating heart. It can be grand, mind-blowing expensive weddings on crystal-sanded beaches, or more secluded, hand-holding through hidden corners of deserted streets. Maybe there’s no faithful answer to what love truly is, nor what it means to love, but if there’s something everybody
does
know about it, it’s that there's no better place for budding love than in a highschool campus. Nikolai Gogol, a senior student in a highschool going unmentioned because nobody really cares, can attest to this. After all, he’s a victim of this very plague himself!
He zoned out, the pestering sound of chalk meeting chalkboard fading into the background, unwanted. He stared out the window he sat beside in his classroom, because of course he sat by a window. All main characters did, and he was quite the main character. That is, if you asked him and absolutely nobody else. He squinted through the sun seeping through his bright eyelashes, thinking. Alas, the throes of love had snatched him in its palms, doing nothing but shaking him by his feeble elastic throat, throwing his heart into discord. Nikolai Gogol was in love! At least, that’s what he thought this feeling was. He’d never been so willing to commit multiple felonies for somebody else, after all, and if arson wasn’t Nikolai’s love language, then what was? Checkmate.
Ah, the mention of chess made him zone back into his tedious math class, looking over at his friend, who was sitting at the very front of the class, a top student without even trying and an avid chess player. Fyodor Dostoyevsky. He was staring at the teacher with droopy eyes, biting his fingers as he could usually be seen doing. Even if he had the word “BORED” written across his forehead, yes, with all caps, he wouldn’t have been able to make it more obvious of how unstimulated he was feeling. Still, Nikolai gazed with eyes curved into crescent moons at the way the sun’s rays glistened along Fyodor’s pale skin.
Fyodor was Nikolai’s very good, intimate (not quite intimate enough, if you asked Nikolai) friend, whom he’d known ever since he showed up at this hellbucket of a school. Nikolai had stuck to his side for the majority of their years together, nearly super glued onto him. Of course, because Nikolai was around Fyodor so often, he was by no means oblivious to the way the other made his heart pound harder than how straight white couples in American movies who just met at a bar two hours ago pound each other. Or how his smile was always stretched a little wider when he was around him. Or how his laughter would ring louder when it was laughter caused by him. Or how–well. The point is, Nikolai was pretty much your average lovesick teenager. So, being the average lovesick teenager he was, he had made up his mind.
He was going to confess his feelings!
Now, now. Just because every other teenager was lovesick and he was therefore average in those terms, this didn’t mean he had any plans of doing this in an average way, okay? Of course not. He was Nikolai Gogol! He was flamboyant! He was charming! He was creative! He was somebody who still hadn’t figured out how he was going to confess even after months of brainstorming! To be fair, his ‘brainstorming’ mostly consisted of him staring at a blank piece of lined paper from one of his class notebooks, holding in his breath with puffed-up cheeks while he rubbed his skull and tried to think. It didn’t work much.
But he was for sure gonna do it! He was!
That’s what he was complaining to Sigma about now, anyways, as he bit into a sandwich very aggressively while staring at Fyodor from across the cafeteria, who was chatting with Shibusawa, a friend of his from the chess club. Sigma rolled his eyes for the umpth time that day, trying to escape Nikolai’s whiny clutches to eat his cookies in peace, but alas, Nikolai had been following him more and more lately, complaining about the exact same subject in the exact same way every day without doing zip about it. To say it was getting on his nerves would be an understatement, but he was quite used to Nikolai’s insistent nature, as he also had the (mis)fortune of knowing him since freshman year. (0/10 stars, horrible experience, he would not recommend.)
Sigma sighed, taking a bite out of the chocolate chip cookie he always bought at the cafeteria everyday (now this he could recommend), opening his mouth to speak only when he finished chewing. “Gogol, if you want to confess so badly, just do it! He’s! Right! There! Just go up to him and tell him you love him!”
“But, Sigma-kun, I can’t tell him thaaaaaat!” Sigma swore he could see tiny chunks of the sandwich he was eating fly from his mouth as he cried, “What if he rejects me?? I don’t wanna risk it!”
Staring at him in repulsion, Sigma couldn’t blame him for his worries. Hell, if he were Nikolai, he’d be pretty worried about nobody liking him back, too.
“And I don’t wanna tell him about my crush like that. I’m not just some nobody, Sigma! I need to have flair!”
“Why don’t you tell him via a magic trick or something?”
“Hmmm… that could work, that could work!”
“It’s great that you’re considering this, I’ve only been suggesting it for the past two days…”
“What do you think I should do? Confess using cards or a classic disappearing trick?”
“Are you even listening to me?”
“No, I can’t do either of those! They're too overdone! No good!”
“Stop ignoring me, hey!”
“I need inspiration . Inspiration, Sigma-kun.”
“Maybe you’d find some ‘ inspiration’ if you shut up and actually paid attention to crap other than yourself, yeah?!”
“You’re so unhelpful, Sigma-kun. I thought we were friends.” Nikolai gasped. “Don’t tell me you’re… jealous?! Is that why you don’t wanna help me?!”
“...”
“...”
“...”
Sigma turned around and walked away. No. Not today. He could only take so much. Whatever shitshow Nikolai had going on, he could deal with it himself now. He purposefully blended into the packed crowd of famished teenagers around them, disappearing without a trace, escaping from the boy who tried to chase after him.
Seriously, Sigma-kun?!
How would Nikolai figure out how to confess if he didn’t even have anybody to help him? He’d been desolated, abandoned among a crowd of masses all in his lonesome. No matter. He turned back in the direction he’d last been staring at his beloved. He’d confess. For sure! And he would do it in the most magical way possible. Fyodor would be so blown away by his confession he’d immediately fall irreversibly in love with him and they’d elope and live in a cabin in the woods and–and Nikolai wasn’t about to let himself fall into another cycle of time-wasting daydreams. Not when he could use that time plotting his actual confession, so all his previous daydreams would come to fruition. He’d do it. He would.
For sure!