Chapter Text
You could never get along with your classmates.
But it's not like you didn't want to get along, you just couldn't!
And it was always like this, even in grade school and middle school.
Especially middle school.
It was your final year of middle school, just like last year you had to adjust to a new classroom, a new timetable, a semi-new batch of classmates, faces familiar and foreign. And inevitably, the work gets harder when you swear it couldn't possibly be increased in difficulty.
Not that you liked school, you just arrive a bit earlier than the average student so you could get a few minutes of alone time. Though it was cut short quite a while ago now, cause homeroom was starting.
The chit chat around you and the teacher giving her all to shut everyone up quickly took a heavy toll on your mind and body. And so, your brain entered filtering mode, and all you could do was stare idly at your obliterated wooden desk.
You could only savour the quiet early morning before it would be tainted with more and more of "(Name) is hella weird" or "(Name) can do us a favour and jump" with a crude stickman doodle of you falling off the school building.
The thought of having to ask your parents to compensate for the ruined piece of furniture- an act of vandalism as the school took it again this school year made you want to cry.
A few minutes after homeroom began you notice something strange. The seat next to you remained blank. Did it mean that he wouldn't be in school today? You cheered silently, oh thank god.
"Oh my days sir we're so sorry... for being late, I guess!" Your train of thought was interrupted by his voice. Thought he was bent like a right angle, the gremlin-like grin on his face gave it away that he wasn't truly apologetic. His friend... Kaname, was it? Bowed at a lesser degree.
"Fuck this." Was all you thought when Atsushi Tanzawa plopped onto the empty seat for the nth time in your entire middle school life. "Here we go again."
...
Atsushi Tanzawa confused you as much as he irritated you.
The teacher asked you to read a passage out loud. The words dance and jumble up and fade into a blur on the page, even in a point of time where you wore glasses. She tapped her fingers restlessly all while you try to figure out the first word. It didn't help that everyone was staring at you too.
"Well? We don't have all day." Her words didn't encourage you to double your concentration, in fact it even made you more disoriented. Others around the classroom giggled amongst themselves, you got used to it at this point.
"And so Persephone must spend a third of the year in the Underworld with Hades..." Atsushi whispers in your ear.
"Persephone must spend a third of the year in the underworld with Hades..." you repeat, and with his not very subtle help you finish the paragraph.
What if it was a math lesson? When your lips are trembling, he flat out tells you what the answer is, saving your ass from humiliation.
In science? If your results weren't complete, he'd put his in plain sight for you to copy.
But that was only the sweet. Now onto the sour.
It was the humiliation he placed you in as much as he saved you from.
Whenever you doodled on your notes in class, he'd always take the opportunity to say it intentionally louder, "oh my god, is that a redesign of your fursona?" While holding up your notebook, drawing laughter from left, right, in front and behind.
That would warrant a few more slurs obscenely spread onto your desk.
He would take away your pens and books so you had no choice but to ask the teacher for paper, and borrow his instead, and gods that made you feel so pathetic.
But you are pathetic.
You don't fight back. You don't know how, whether in a physical sense nor did you have a way with words. Hypothetically if you did, you'd be silenced. Shut down immediately.
Atsushi was the opposite. He was smart, strong, charismatic and pretty. The kind that sent boys and girls flocking in hives.
And a really great artist too.
You see how he's focused, during after hours, just before the sun's about to set. He uses the crusty watercolors from school, you did too after your mother threw your set away, and yet he manages to write stories and weave tales without a word.
On the other hand, you wanted to start a new work. The actual colouring had to be saved for next time, you suppose that can't be helped. Usually there is not a word between you and him as the two of you work in silence, unless it's about your art-
"Oh my god, this is the ugliest fucking slop I've ever seen!" There he was again. For one more time, you don't retort, yet rage and frustration and the feeling of never being good enough start bubbling and rising.
"Okay." It was how you always reacted. You pretended it didn't affect you but it's obvious that it struck a nerve.
"Are you gonna cry or something? It's so obvious that you want to do it! Go ahead! You want to cry, right?" Atsushi continued his taunts, expecting a reaction from you. Were you going to play his game and snap? Were you going to block him out for as long as you could?
The clock in the corner ticked every second, as you made the decision to get on with your sketch. It didn't look bad. That was totally obvious ragebait.
"Do you actually hold a pencil like that? Let me show you the correct way, just like this-" The sudden physical touch on your wrist caught your senses off guard, and you lose control on the grip on your pencil- the course of your graphite goes off track, haywire, leaving an unwanted streak.
"Are you going to cry now, (Name)?" Atsushi was so, so excited, to finally see your visage contort, whether it was in anger or resignation or in tears. What would you look like when you snap?
"Can you not..." your gaze elevated. "Can you not touch me or my drawings ever again?"
Eh? Now it was his turn to be caught off guard. It was anti-climatic, to the very least, because why were you so polite? "Haha, I couldn't hear what you said just now! You could always be a bit louder, y'know, (Name)-chan~" There was the "(Name)-chan" you loathed again. As if not using your surname wasn't enough.
"I said," Now you were standing up fully, showing one aspect you were superior in- which was height. "Don't touch me, or my work! What part of it do you not fucking understand? Aren't you the one who gets full marks on every single test without studying? I won't pretend that I can stand your ass anymore. You can go piss off, go fucking die. I won't miss you!"
Atsushi blinked, then flopped onto the ground, rolling on the floor in laughter. "Oh my god, that was the most I've ever heard you speak in a sentence! So you do know how to curse!"
It was only now that you came to your senses. A hand over your mouth, your eyes widening. You try to utter the words "I'm sorry, I didn't mean it", but too bad that it was one of these moments where nothing could be uttered. You went non-verbal. Then you grabbed your neglected school bag that was sitting idly next to you before, then ran- all you could think of was running away.
But the feeling of something snapping inside you... not gonna lie, it felt good. So fucking good.