Chapter Text
Ryusei Shidou was not made for school at all. The school environment—made of strict rules, enforced schedules, mandatory silence, and desks neatly arranged in perfect rows—was the exact opposite of who he was: loud, impulsive, and constantly in desperate search of fun. If it were up to him, he would have never set foot in there again.
However, he was obligated by his mother, the only person in the world he couldn't say no to. She placed endless hopes in her difficult, overwhelming son, wishing with all her heart that he wouldn't end up leading a mediocre life without direction. Ever since Shidou was just a child, his mother had passed on her passion for art to him, teaching him not to fear colors, to get his hands dirty, and to use canvases as a battlefield.
For Shidou, painting had become his only true language. Through his paintings, he could express anything that crossed his mind or burned inside him: rage, ecstasy, boredom, desire. He didn't follow traditional techniques; his style was instinctive and visceral. Sometimes he inevitably went too far, and his paintings resulted in a chaotic mass of violent colors, splatters, and actual explosions of paint, incapable of leaving anyone who looked at them indifferent.
Despite this passion, now that he had reached his fourth year of high school, he had never joined the school's art club. He had always preferred spending as little time as possible within those walls and returning to paint in the solitude of his bedroom.
So, unfortunately for him, the moment to give in had arrived. Starting this term, the school administration had introduced various mandatory after-school clubs, and every single student was forced to attend or at least sign up for one of the activities.
At that moment, Shidou was sitting in class with his chin resting on the palm of his hand, completely lost in his thoughts. Today was going to be his first day attending the afternoon clubs, and the thought of having to stay locked in there for hours made him grimace.
Suddenly, he felt a persistent poke on his shoulder.
«Shidouuu?? Earth to demon!»
Charles was waving his hand a few inches from his face, shaking his light hair in an attempt to grab his attention with an amused expression.
«I'm right here, no need to yell,» Shidou said ironically, swatting the younger boy's hand away with a lazy gesture.
Charles leaned on his desk, snicker-laughing: «Today we start the after-school activities!» he said with a sarcastic smile. «Aren't you excited? Think of all the fun things we'll do...»
At Charles's words, Shidou rolled his eyes with a disgusted grimace: «Not at all. It's going to be the usual pain in the neck. Hours wasted on people who don't understand shit.»
Both of them had chosen unpopular activities to avoid the chaos of the busier clubs. To optimize space and limited funds, the school had decided to merge the clubs with low enrollment into one large room. The day before, Shidou and Charles had carefully studied the member list posted on the bulletin board.
For the Art Club:
Sae Itoshi
Ryusei Shidou
Sendou Shuto
Bachira Meguru
For the Music Club:
Oliver Aiku
Reo Mikage
Niko Ikki
Charles Chevalier
Apparently, the names at the top of each list indicated the leaders or representatives of their respective clubs.
A sharp, visceral smirk carved its way onto Shidou's lips as he thought back to the name at the top of his section: Itoshi Sae. The genius third-year—the perfect, cold, unapproachable one.
«Ah... that Mr. Perfect guy, Itoshi Sae,» Shidou muttered, lacing his fingers behind his head and chuckling to himself with a strange glint in his eyes. «They say he never smiles and considers everyone else talentless failures. I wonder what face he'll make when he sees my canvases... I can't wait to get on his nerves and see what's underneath that ice-angel mask.»
Charles giggled, crossing his arms: «Your leader sounds like a handful! Mine, on the other hand, is Oliver Aiku! A third-year guy with an unkempt beard and the air of someone who'd rather be at a bar than at school. Cool, yeah, but I bet he'll let me do whatever I want!»
Charles paused, then added with a mischievous smile: «Although on the music list, there's a certain Niko Ikki... that first-year kid with the huge bangs covering half his face. He looks like a ghost! I've already decided he's going to be my favorite target so I don't get bored.» The door to the multipurpose room creaked as Shidou pushed it open with a shove of his shoulder. The air inside smelled of a dense mix of turpentine, fresh paint, and old wood.
The first thing that caught his attention was the figure of Itoshi Sae.
Sae was already standing still in front of his easel with an impeccable, almost statue-like posture: straight back, steady arm, his fingers gripping the brush with surgical precision. He was applying color to the canvas with gestures calculated down to the millimeter, without a single smudge.
A single second of looking at him was enough for Shidou to feel a surge of pure irritation rise from his chest into his throat. What a ridiculous pretense. To Shidou, art was an explosion, raw instinct, and unbridled passion; seeing Sae so rigid, controlled, and composed struck him as just an arrogant intellectual posture, built at a desk to hide the fact that underneath all that discipline, there was no fire at all.
Shidou strode heavily toward the art club area, deliberately making noise to break that artificial silence. Sae didn't flinch, merely making an imperceptible pause with his brush, his voice uniform and cold as a glass blade:
«You're late. And you make too much noise when you walk.»
Shidou dropped his bag to the floor with a thud right next to Sae's easel. He took a step toward him, invading his personal space, and leaned to the side with a smirk dripping with sarcasm.
«And you're way too stiff, boss,» Shidou said softly in a rasping tone. «Look at you. You look like a mannequin put in a display window. Are you actually having fun, or do you just like playing the part of the perfect guy?»
Sae moved his wrist to finish a stroke of gray, then stopped his hand. His piercing eyes slid to the side, staring at Shidou with detached disdain.
«Painting requires control, not the messy chaos you drag around with you,» Sae replied without raising his voice. «If you only came here to cause trouble, you can go back to wherever you came from. Your presence is disturbing my concentration.»
Shidou chuckled, a low sound bubbling up his throat. «Your control is just an excuse because you're scared of smudging the edges, Itoshi. You make me sick to my stomach.»
The two stared at each other for a second that seemed to stretch into infinity.
Underneath that still surface, Shidou's words had hit a raw nerve. For a fraction of a second—an eye blink that anyone else in the room would have ignored—Sae's hand froze on the handle of the brush. His grip tightened imperceptibly until his knuckles turned white. Deep within his irises passed a tiny tremor, a flash of pure shock: how was it possible that this loud guy had pinpointed his protective bubble on the very first glance? Sae had spent years building that wall of rigor and detachment to protect his vision. No one had ever dared to look past it. And now, a guy who had just walked in was telling him to his face that his "perfection" was nothing more than armor born out of fear.
But Sae was a master at regaining control. Within the span of a single breath, the micro-crack in his mask vanished. He released the tension in his fingers and resumed painting with the same mechanical precision.
«Do you really think you've figured something out?» Sae said, his voice so flat it sounded inhuman. «Chaos isn't art, Shidou. It's just the useless noise of someone who doesn't know how to master the medium. I don't have time to waste on someone who mistakes incompetence for passion.»
He turned back to the canvas, giving Shidou his back. But inside him, the atmosphere had grown heavy. He kept painting, but for the first time, every single motion required an ounce of extra effort to stay upright. Shidou stared at him for a few moments, chuckling with amusement: he had seen enough to know that something had shifted.
Meanwhile, in the rest of the large room, the life of the two clubs went on in its own chaos.
In the section dedicated to music, Niko Ikki was desperately trying to carve out a moment of solitude. Huddled in a corner with his guitar in his arms, he hoped his long bangs would be enough to make him invisible to the world, wanting nothing more than to play in peace.
Niko, however, hadn't realized yet that a literal Big Bang was about to crash over him. Charles, the moment he stepped foot into the room, spotted that silent figure immediately. With a lively smirk plastered on his lips, Charles started approaching with light steps like a predator looking for entertainment, ready to ruin Niko's quiet and turn him into his personal pastime.
Beside Niko's corner, Reo Mikage sat at the upright piano, entirely detached from the rest of the room. He had placed his phone on a tripod next to the keys and was recording a video: his fingers glided over the keyboard playing sweet, melancholic notes, intended for who-knows-who on the other side of the screen.
Not far away, Oliver Aiku was slouched comfortably in a chair with his smartphone in hand. He seemed distracted, but every now and then he raised his eyes from the display to cast sly, unwelcome glances toward the art area.
It was precisely those glances from Aiku that were throwing Sendou Shuto completely off track. Not much inclined to focus anyway, Sendou was barely trying to jot down a few pencil lines on his canvas, but kept turning around constantly, distracted by Aiku's presence and unwanted attention.
To complete that surreal picture, there was Bachira Meguru, who, completely disinterested in rules, was filling his sheet with utterly weird and questionable drawings, occasionally whispering strange theories and bizarre things into the ear of an unfortunate Sendou, while the atmosphere in the room turned into an open construction site of tensions, out-of-tune notes, and crossed glances.
The atmosphere in the multipurpose room was now a slow-release powder keg. The initial silence had been swept away by a heterogeneous hum made of rustling brushes, guitar chords hinted at in the background, and the tapping of heels and pencils on the polished wooden floor.
Charles lost no time. Without even taking off his jacket, he slid behind Niko's back with the annoying grace of a cat. Niko, with his eyes glued to the strings of his acoustic guitar and his bangs hanging down to block his upper view entirely, startled when he felt a presence way too close.
«Cute guitar, ghost! Are you playing sad stuff, or are you practicing to perform at your own funeral?» Charles's voice rang out just an inch from his right ear.
Niko's back went stiff, his fingers tightening on the fretboard of his instrument. His eyes, hidden beneath his black hair, narrowed into two irritated slits.
«I'm not a ghost. And I'm concentrating,» Niko muttered in a low tone, trying to take a step back to regain his distance. «Can you... go somewhere else?»
«Uh, so you do talk!» Charles replied with an even broader, more provocative grin. Without asking permission, he reached out and gave a sharp flick to the low E string, making a heavy, completely out-of-context note resonate through the room, shattering the harmony in the air. «Oops! Out of tune. Starting today, I'm gonna help you make some real music, how 'bout that?»
Niko let out a long, resigned sigh, instantly realizing that this afternoon was going to be an endless nightmare.
A bit further away, Reo sighed without interrupting the fluid movement of his fingers over the piano keys. The melody he was playing was melancholic, elegant, almost nostalgic. His phone screen remained lit while the front camera recorded every single nuance of his performance.
«Could you keep it down?» Reo murmured without even turning toward Charles and Niko, using the tone of someone accustomed to being listened to without having to try. «I'm recording. If you ruin this take, I'll make you clean the room after class.»
While Charles continued his psychological demolition work on Niko, the tension in the art section was at another level: quiet, sticky, and wound up tight.
Sendou was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He gripped his 2B pencil as if it were a weapon, but the paper in front of him remained almost completely blank, save for a few confused sketches of a human figure that looked more like a lopsided dummy than an anatomy model. The problem wasn't a lack of technique—or rather, not just that. The problem was the constant, nerve-wracking sensation of having a pair of eyes pinned on him.
On the other side of the room, Oliver Aiku sat comfortably straddling a chair, his chin resting on the wooden backrest. He wasn't playing, he wasn't reading sheet music. He just sat there observing the art side with a amused smirk curling the corners of his lips, twirling a colorful guitar pick between his fingers. Every time Sendou tried to draw a line, his gaze inevitably drifted toward Aiku, ending up intercepting the third-year's heterochromatic eyes.
«Damn him...» Sendou ground out through grit teeth, pressing the graphite so hard against the paper that the tip snapped with an audible crack. «What the hell is he looking at the whole time?!»
«Maybe he likes your drawing, Sendou-chan!» Bachira popped up out of nowhere, suddenly appearing at his side with hands smeared in yellow and blue paint.
Sendou's eyes went wide, almost jumping out of his skin: «What the fuck are you talking about, Bachira?! And move, you're smudging my paper!»
«I'm painting the monster of inspiration,» Bachira continued, ignoring him entirely while waving a canvas where a huge orange blob with two purple eyes seemed to float in the void. «He says there's too much trapped energy in this room today! It has to come out, or the canvases will suffocate!»
Bachira dashed away giggling, leaving Sendou to slap a hand against his forehead, while Aiku, from afar, sent a small nod of understanding to a dumbfounded Sendou, making him blush instantly from a mix of anger and embarrassment.
At the center of all that chaos, Shidou and Sae were two opposite poles refusing to touch, yet conditioning the entire atmosphere of the room.
Shidou hadn't started painting yet. Quickly, he grabbed a wooden stool, spun it around, and sat on it straddling it legs wide, placing himself less than three feet from Sae's easel. With a challenging smirk on his face and open fingers resting on his knees, he watched every single movement of the "boss."
Sae tried to ignore him. He kept laying down his brushstrokes with clinical composure, but inside his veins, his blood had begun to run faster. The fact that Shidou wasn't doing anything other than staring at him annoyed him infinitely more than if he had started shouting. He felt that wild gaze pinned to the profile of his face—an overbearing presence constantly reminding him that his shell of perfection had been scratched.
«What is it?» Sae finally said, breaking the silence with a cold voice, without taking his eyes off the canvas. «If you're signed up for the art club, you should have a brushstroke to make. Or did you just come here to rot?»
Shidou widened his visceral grin, leaning slightly forward:
«I'm just waiting for you to make a mistake, Itoshi. But the more I look at you, the more I realize something...» Shidou pointed his chin at Sae's painting—a geometrically perfect composition, free of smudges, but incredibly sterile. «You're not painting what you feel. You're painting what you think you should show others. Your art is clean, yeah... but it's dead. It doesn't make any noise. It doesn't give anyone goosebumps.»
Sae's hand froze for the second time in twenty minutes.
This time, the reaction was different. No shock. A dark shadow crossed Sae's eyes, replacing his usual indifference with a barely contained spark of rage.
Sae put his brush down in the water jar with extreme slowness, producing a light metallic clink. Then he turned slowly toward Shidou. The two boys found themselves inches apart: the first icy and ruthless, the second fiery and bold.
«Do you really think art is just spitting out guts onto a canvas without any logic?» Sae said in a whisper so low it was a poisonous hiss meant only for him. «If you're so convinced that your madness is worth more than my technique... pick up a brush. Show me what you're capable of, demon. Prove to me there's something behind that big mouth.»
Shidou snapped to his feet in a second, adrenaline bursting through his veins like a spark on dry straw.
«You don't have to tell me twice, boss.»
Shidou didn't need to be told twice.
He grabbed a brush at full speed, squeezed out a tube of bright pink paint, and started painting the first thing that came to mind: explosions, chaos, and everything that viscerally defined him. Between one violent brushstroke and the next, he didn't stop throwing bold, mischievous smiles at Sae, who returned his glare with a grimace of visible disgust.
When Shidou finished, his canvas had turned into an abstract explosion of pink, resembling a shower of fireworks. As he spoke about it and showed off his work, his cheeks flushed with a faint blush of pure emotional ecstasy.
On the other side, Sae saw Shidou as his exact opposite. Yet deep down, he felt that this loud guy was the first person ever to understand the fire burning inside him. Naturally, he didn't want to show it: he kept pretending the painting disgusted him, far too obstinate in protecting the rigid, flawless image he had built around himself for years.
But looking at Shidou's completed canvas, Sae felt a sudden lump in his throat.
Shidou had actually found his way to express himself.
Sae, on the other hand, despite his technical perfection, had never found someone who truly understood him, nor a way to release what he held inside. He was in the art club purely out of boredom, constantly searching for "something" that kept eluding him. But at that exact moment, staring at Shidou's violent pink, he felt the strange sensation of finally being on the right track.
«So?» Shidou broke the silence, stepping forward with a sly smile. «What do you think, handsome?»
Sae rolled his eyes at that statement, regaining his composure instantly. «I can do better.»
«Oh yeah?» Shidou teased him, tilting his head to the side. «Prove it.»
Sae made a bored face and turned toward his blank canvas. Inspired by Shidou's raw instinct, he decided to create something similar, yet adapted to his own style: a stylized couple beneath a cascade of fireworks. Given the short time left before the end of the period, Sae focused on a quick, essential composition.
Shidou stayed watching him the entire time, arms crossed, his gaze visibly captivated and interested in every single movement of his fingers.
Once the final detail was done, Sae turned around. Finding Shidou's gaze pinned squarely on him, he felt a sudden wave of heat rush to his cheeks. He blushed faintly, trying to hide his embarrassment while wondering what on earth was going through that crazy guy's head.
Shidou looked at him with a brazen, playful air. He shifted his eyes first to Sae's flushed face, then to the fireworks painted on the canvas, and a grin spread across his lips.
«You like explosions, huh?»
Sae shrugged in a gesture of total indifference, pressing his lips into a thin line.
«You know what? I like you. Give me your number!» Shidou blurted out point-blank, staring at Sae with wide eyes hungry for an answer.
Sae looked bewildered by such a direct, shameless request. He scanned him up and down, then a small, imperceptible corner of his mouth twitched upward before turning serious again.
«If you paint three decent portraits of me... maybe I'll reconsider.»
Shidou startled at that answer, caught completely off guard, before a huge, triumphant smile lit up his face.
«Do you promise?»
Sae rolled his eyes again with a huff, turning his back to him to go clean his brushes. But as he busied himself with the rag, his heart was beating significantly faster than usual. Shidou wasn't the kind of person people held high expectations for. Yet, against all odds, there he was the very next day, right on time in the multipurpose room, sitting at his easel and completely absorbed in painting Sae.
Sae was seated in front of him in a slightly awkward pose. He was a very particular person: he never spoke more than necessary, yet he allowed Shidou to say utterly scandalous things without losing his composure. Sometimes, he would even reply with his signature stoic humor. That calm, non-judgmental attitude made it strangely easy for Shidou to interact with him; for the first time, he didn't have to hold back. He could simply be himself.
While Shidou kept tracing lines on the canvas, the life of the club went on in the background. In the music corner, Charles and Niko were trying to focus on new guitar chord patterns—with Charles missing no opportunity to tease him—while Reo sat at the piano, intent on letting his fingers glide over sweet, romantic notes, clearly lost in thoughts dedicated to someone special.
«Your skin is radiant,» Shidou observed suddenly, raising and lowering his brush. The faint rustle of the bristles scraping against the canvas was a source of pure familiarity to him. «By the way, stop with this statue routine, Sae-chan!»
Sae, motionless in his chair with a touch of stiffness, merely raised his shoulders slightly, pulling his scarf up to his nose to hide his face.
«You're not so bad yourself. I don't see any flaws,» Sae murmured from under his scarf.
Shidou froze mid-air with his brush, surprised. «Are you serious?»
«Sure,» Sae answered in his usual cold, inflectionless voice, but with a steady glare.
Shidou resumed painting, humming thoughtfully to himself, his eyes sparkling with a whole new light.
«Sae-chan... do you wanna go to a cafe or something after this?» he proposed out of the blue, without breaking his gaze from the painting. «Maybe get a coffee together.»
Sae didn't reject the idea right away. He paused for a moment, then asked: «What kind of coffee do you like?»
Shidou chuckled, a little uncertain: «Honestly, I don't know, I don't go out to drink it often... What about tea instead?»
Sae looked him dead in the eye: «Tea is just colored water.»
«Oh,» Shidou blinked, caught off guard.
«Mhmh,» Sae grunted, averting his gaze to the side to avoid eye contact.
Shidou decided not to push the cafe idea and dropped it for the moment, plunging back into painting. He felt a strange, unfamiliar sense of relaxation settle inside him as he painted Sae: his pale skin, almost like porcelain, and his green eyes that, under the late afternoon light, truly looked like two pure diamonds.