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It was the 30th of October a day before Halloween and all throughout Seasoning city people were preparing. Tome was walking back to her apartment with her dad holding a bag full of groceries and sweets for trick or treaters. Her parents were going away for the weekend and had allowed her to invite a few friends over for a sleepover on halloween night. Tome had planned everything out perfectly: Firstly they’d all dress-up in their halloween costumes, then go trick or treating some of their neighbours down the hallway, eat all the sweets they’d get, watch a horror movie or two and maybe even try to contact aliens. The last part of her plan was wishful thinking but still she might as well try.
As she got into her apartment and had started helping her dad unpack the groceries she had gotten a text on her phone from one of her friends, Taya, it read:
‘Hey Tome-chan i’m sry but i cant go tmrw my parents are making me help redecorate my grandparents house :p’ “Darn” Tome muttered under her breath, it was okay though, Akiko and Yumi were still coming her plans weren’t completely cancelled, anyways that meant more candy for her. Half an hour later while Tome was reading one of her alien books she got a text from her friend Yumi.
‘Hey Kurata I’m sorry but I can’t come to your sleepover. My parents said I couldn’t go :( ‘
“Ughhh, this sort of stuff always happens to me, at least Akiko can come over” Tome groaned to herself.
Meanwhile
Next door to Tome lived Teru Hanazawa and currently he was calling up a bunch of people he knew to throw a ginormous Halloween party, since he could because he owned this apartment and his parents didn’t seem to care much about him anyway. While on the phone to Mob he was quickly hanging up some halloween banners, trying to make his apartment festivised before the party.
“So Mob you down to come to my party tomorrow? There’s gonna be tons of cute girls there I promise!”
“I’m not really the type to go to a party for cute girls Hanazawa-kun…”
“I’ll make sure there’s some hot guys there too if that floats your boat”
“No! No no no I didn’t mean it like that Hanazawa-kun I just meant I don’t really go to parties for relationships… or at all really”
“Oh c’mon Kageyama, please come it’ll be great fun, anyways it’ll probably be your first Halloween party and let me tell you Kageyama-kun Halloween parties are great!”
“Ok fine, I’ll go, though… Do you think you’ll be able to convince Tsubomi to go too?”
“I thought you said you didn’t go to parties for girls Kageyama-kun” Teru teased, to which Mob hung up the phone. “Darn, poor guy is so shy about his crush” Teru muttered to himself before continuing to hang up decorations.
Later that evening, Tome was leaving her apartment to get some last minute supplies for her sleepover the next day. Coincidentally Teru was also leaving his apartment to get tons of snacks for his Halloween party. Though the two didn’t acknowledge each other much, just waving to each other as they passed. The coincidence continued as they both went to the same convenience store to buy snacks and both ended up walking down the same aisles and buying their items at the same time. The only reason they hadn’t talked to each other was because Teru had kind of forgotten who Tome was and kept thinking that her and Mob were dating because they went on ‘dates’ together. And Tome was too socially awkward to engage in a conversation with a conventionally attractive frat boy.
Once Teru had finished buying his items he waited outside the convenience store for Tome, once he saw her he cockily smirked
“You following me around?” to which Tome snarkily replied
“No! I just happen to be buying snacks for Halloween like a ton of people are”
“Yea, but there’s not a ton of people are following me around unlike you”
“There’s reason nobody’s following you around dummy”
“Temper, temper, I just wanted to see if a pretty girl like you had any plans for tomorrow night”
“Well I do, so go away” And with that Tome huffs and started walking back to their apartment building, closely followed by Teru who was trying to convince Tome to ditch her plans and come to his party. Little to say Tome was glad to get back to her apartment and get rid of him, for how good-looking he was, he was certainly annoying.
The next morning When Tome woke up, she crawled out of her scrumpled bed sheets and went over to her phone to check the time 9:28AM, “Not too late” she muttered to herself. She then sees that she has a text message from her friend Akiko.
“Hey queen! Im SO sorry but I can’t make it tdy I’m at a study camp, I’ve literally snuck my phone to text you this :( Also this study camp SUCKS”
“Oh for god’s sake” Tome muttered to herself now quite annoyed, she stumbled out of her room, a small bit of sleep lingering in her posture as she made her way to the kitchen. Expecting to be met with her parents, she walked into the kitchen only to remember that they were away from the weekend and had left early that morning. So Tome was basically stuck on Halloween with no one to hang-out with, what was she going to do now? Tome sat at the kitchen table thinking about what to do while waiting on her bread in the toaster. “There was always Teru’s party… he technically invited me, he was practically begging me to go, but I don’t want him to think that I’m some kind of loser because all my plans cancelled on me… wait a minute… since when have I cared that people think I’m a loser. Darn popular girls trying to pollute my ideals.” Tome thought to herself being awoken from her thoughts as her toast popped out of the toaster, she spread butter on her toast and began munching it down thinking about what to do. That’s when she came up with the idea of just going around to his apartment and telling Teru if she could go to his party. Would this option be kind of awkward, yeah, but what else did Tome have to lose.
With that Tome got dressed and walked a few feet and rang the doorbell, only to be met with an extremely disheveled Teru.
Teru had just woken up, it seemed he wasn’t a very early riser, “Oh hey Tome” he yawned out rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. “Why are you here so early Tom Tom?” Teru asked, a teasing tone worming into his still tired voice. “I- Never call me Tom Tom again… Anyways I was here to tell you I’m coming to your party-” Tome was cut of by Teru
“Why didn’t you just text me this?”
“I didn’t save your number…”
“Damn Tom Tom that’s so rude of you y’know, plus weren’t you meant to have plans or something tonight?”
“Yea well they all cancelled on me and stop calling me Tom Tom!” Tome huffed out
“Alright, alright I’ll stop calling you that, you’ll be happy to know that your boyfriend will be at the party tonight”
“Boyfriend? I don’t have a boyfriend?”
“Shigeo Kageyama? Isn’t he your boyfriend he says he's been on dates with you and I’ve literally seen you on dates with him… Did you guys break up?”
“We were never dating in the first place”
“So then why did Kageyama-kun tell me you guys had been on dates?”
“Oh I just called our meet ups dates, we were actually looking for espers who could contact aliens”
A beat of silence passes, before Tome peers past Teru to look at his apartment. “You know, if you’re holding a halloween party I think you’ll need a lot more decorations” Tome spouted out. “Oh yeah? Well it ain’t your apartment… but what would you add?” Teru questioned his tone becoming softer the longer he talked. “A carved pumpkin maybe? Oh! You definitely need some spooky demon mask or something like that!” Teru nodded listening to her answer, “How ‘bout we make a deal? If you help me out organising this party and I’ll be your boyfriend” Teru smug smirk slipped back onto his face.
“I don’t want or need a boyfriend”
“Oh Tom Tom, don’t go lying to me now, I’ve seen you buying those sappy romance mangas, you want some guy who matches your personality perfectly and for that I’m your man, and anyways ever since I lost all my hair in a fight I’ve been struggling to pull any ladies, so you’d be doing me a favour too”
“I’m already doing you a favour by putting up your Halloween decorations”
“Yeah but you’re doing that by choice” Teru cockily remarked a shit eating grin slipping its way up his face.
Tome reacts to this by rolling her eyes “God you are so annoying”
“You keep telling yourself that Tom Tom”
Their teamwork started to pay off as over the next few hours or so the apartment became the epitome of Halloween. Carved pumpkins outside the door and banners all around the apartment as well as a few small alien decorations that Tome was able to sneak in. The centre piece of the decorations was a small skeleton animatronic that said phrases when you walked past it, Tome didn’t seem a big fan of it though. Teru noticed that and asked “What’s got your knickers in a twist?”
“It’s just that stupid skeleton thing, it just gives me the creeps”
“What, you scared it’s going to come alive or something?” Teru teased
“Oh shut up” Tome huffed out and hit his side before continuing “Well we’ve done everything we needed to do, we’ve got all the party snacks out, we’ve done all the decorating and we’ve made the best Halloween party playlist ever, now what do we do?”
“Now all we gotta do is wait for everybody to turn up to the party, you can go back to your apartment and get ready if you want.”
Tome knew exactly what she was going to wear to this Halloween party, she had an old alien costume, the costume being the perfect mix of a halloween costume and stylish (at least in Tome’s eyes). Tome rushed off back home to find the dress and get ready, she had never really felt like this before, like there was this feeling of butterflies whenever she was around Teru, I mean she hated the guy and had always found him rather annoying especially after he had interrupted one of her ‘dates’ with Mob, but something about him had somehow pulled her interest back.
As she got ready Tome even tried to do a little make-up, putting on some mascara and attempting to cover up some of her acne. She felt kind of stupid to be honest, she had never been the type to dress herself up for someone, though the way Teru acted around her was enough to drive her crazy. No guy had ever been interested in her before and a part of her knew that this was what Teru did to nearly all the ladies he spoke to, as he was quite a ladies man after all. But little did Tome know that Teru was feeling the same way.
Teru, while alone in his apartment was also choosing what to wear, he had chosen a pretty basic Halloween costume, choosing to be a witch, but as he got ready he couldn’t help but think about how Tome made him feel. He was used to receiving lots of love letters from different girls and was used to being fawned over, so to have a girl who, honestly, didn’t pay too much attention to him was a change. He had to be honest with himself though, she wasn’t really the prettiest and she wasn’t the brightest either but she seemed to treat him like an actual human instead of some ‘big scary gang leader’ or some ‘stupid ladies man’. That thought made his heart flutter, she had been so helpful the past 24 hours, he wondered how she hadn’t already had a boyfriend, she honestly had a heart of gold, a heart of gold that had a weird obsession with aliens and whenever she heard a word even remotely sounding like ‘alien’ she would break into a massive tangent about aliens. But none the less a heart of pure gold.
Time had passed and soon enough people started arriving at Teru’s party, Shigeo was the first to arrive not understanding the thing about arriving late to parties, followed by Shou and few other of Teru’s friends from his gang. Tome arrived fashionably late (but only by accident) dressed in one of those corny but also kinda funny inflatable alien costumes where it looked like she was being abducted. She spoke to Mob for a bit explaining how she helped out with everything at the party and how she would’ve said she was “Teru’s right hand woman” bragging about how she made the best party food and put the best songs in the halloween playlist. But after a while even Mob could only handle so much of Tome’s bragging and slowly distanced himself from the conversation instead going to find Shou.
It was only when the song “Hot N Cold” by Katy Perry started playing that Tome had realised Mob had walked off. Tome had broken out of her daydreaming ramble to hear a song that she hadn’t put in the Halloween playlist… What an outrage! Tome instantly stormed off to find Teru and complain. She found him by the fruit punch in the kitchen.
“What the hell do you think you're doing playing Kary Perry at a Halloween party, no one listens to Katy Perry anymore!”
“Shou wanted me to play it, anyway, you can have a party without Katy Perry! Her songs are like the best white girl music for parties since… since, well, white girl music was invented!”
“Yea, but on Halloween? This isn’t a time for white girl music wig-wearing ass, we have spookier songs to play!”
“No need to get so worked up about it Tom Tom…” Teru’s voice was as smooth as silk seemed to enjoy watching Tome get herself in a state.”...Anyways it’s my party and I can do what I want”
“Alright, alright but if you’re gonna play Kary Perry could you at least play E.T”
“Is that just because you want to hear a song about aliens?”
“Maybe, but come on aliens are an interesting topic”
“To you Tom Tom, everyone else probably thinks you’re some tinfoil hat-wearing conspiracy theorist”
“I do think I made a tinfoil hat on-”
“Tom Tom that does not help your case”
The pair burst into a fit of giggles as the life of the party slowly started to die down and people started to leave. Teru took this as his sign to get closer to Tome, he put on some crappy 90’s love song and held out his hand to Tome “A dance, Tome?” To which Tome burst out laughing but accepted his offer taking his hand and walking to a clear spot in the kitchen, both of them awkwardly shuffling side to side while occasionally making eye contact.
“You know…” Teru started while keeping his hand on Tome’s shoulders while they ‘danced’ “...this Halloween party wouldn’t have been happening without you, I’m grateful” Teru then softly kissed the top of Tome’s nose causing a blush to spread all over Tome’s face.
“What was that for?” She stammered out
“To show I’m grateful Tom Tom, what? You've never been kissed before or something?”
“Not really”
“Well then I better make this one extra special”
Teru leaned down and pressed a kiss to Tome’s lips, Tome cluelessly returning the gesture by trying to copy his movements, their dancing had turned into a more gentle swaying as they stood in Teru’s kitchen.
It hadn’t been how Tome or Teru had expected to spend their Halloween but at this moment they wouldn’t trade it for the world.