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countofcrows · 6 years ago

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Adolescence

Being a teenager is hard.

a short drabble set in a high school setting where Sougo has a mild crush on kagura but wont admit it.

word count: 2576

She moves with a catlike grace in the crowded space of the school halls. Children dart awkwardly around her, careful not to get in her way as she waves her arms and twists on the tips of her toes. Her friends laugh; giggling behind their hands as they watch with curious eyes to see where this performance of hers will take them. It’s a small show put on just for them; to keep her friends happy. It’s her number one priority--it always has been.

Sougo watches from a distance, eyes narrowed and transfixed on the girl at the end of the hall. Her red hair, the colour of fully bloomed poppies, flies behind her and leaves a trail of liquid fire in its wake. When she turns on a dime, her locks catch up to her body once more, crashing against her like waves of a crimson sea. Sougo watches her laugh and brush loose fly-aways from her face, spitting her hair from her mouth when it catches along her bow-shaped lips. Her friends laugh harder as she contorts her face, and she plays up her fuss to keep them entertained.

She must have felt him staring at her--really, he wasn’t trying to hide it. Her eyes flicker past her friends and meet with his own. Her azure blue eyes are a stark contrast to his rusted crimson--the colour of dried, stagnant blood, and just as lifeless--and there’s a brief flicker of curiosity in them. She bounces up onto her tippy-toes, the motion as fluid as a trained ballerina, to give her some added height while trapped behind a sea of kids looking to get to their next class.

They maintain eye contact for another moment. It feels almost endless, like an empty sea of time that stretches between them. The silence carries a weight Sougo feels deep in his chest. An indescribable pain that is like a scratching in the pit of his stomach. A hurried, anxious clawing full of impatience that nags at him in the back of his brain like he’s missing out for keeping his distance.

What are you waiting for? Go talk to her!

Standing here won’t earn you any brownie points.

Coward.

His own silent insecurities shine in this silence. They mock him for his adolescent naivete; snicker and jeer in his face as he remains rooted in place, like a growing tree.

The connection between him and the girl is broken when the hallway fills up enough that kids start bumping into him. His shoulder is jerked and his head pitches forward and his eyes break away from the girl whose violent red hair is swallowed by this seemingly endless sea of pubescent little freaks. He rights himself and narrows his eyes in search of the girl--so tiny, with her birdlike frame and slender wrists--and is surprised by his own disappointment when he does not find her.

He collects himself, both mentally and physically, before going against the flow of students in search of his next class. He avoids eye contact and keeps his balled fists hidden casually in the pockets of his pants and he purposefully ignores the wistful sighs and prolonged glasses of the girls from younger classes.

He thinks of the girl with red hair and bright eyes and remembers with a half smile the first time they had ever met. First day of school, opening ceremony, and Sougo was late to school due to over sleeping. He caught the girl trying to climb the school gate, stuck on the highest point when her skirt is punctured by the metal spikes. She’s cursing and shouting and begging God to give her a break and Sougo sits back and watches in mild amusement while she struggles.

He remembers her noticing him after a while. She calls him out for being a “weirdo pervert who is trying to catch a peek up her skirt” and he rolls his eyes and replies he’s not interested in freshman. He walks away from her and slips through the fence where the rods are weakest and are easily moved (a trick only seasoned veterans of the late variety would know of) and waves sarcastically and wishes her well.

He doesn’t mean it.

She knows he doesn’t.

They had run into each other several times after that. Random instances in time that resulted in some sort of catastrophe. He’s lost several good shirts to her accidentally-on-purpose dumping her lunch on him. He hears her indignant howls in his dreams (or nightmares, really) when he remembers putting gum in her hair once or six times.

They bicker and fought like an old married couple and Sougo was forever known as the third year who let a first year get under his skin. He remained apathetic to the rumours. He always had been. He didn’t care what other kids thought about him while he was having fun.

She had a loud mouth and a boastful personality and she rose to every challenge he ever posed. There was no winning with them, it was simply a silently earned point of respect until their next encounter. They danced around each other with careful choreography and their words were biting and bitter exchanges charged with emotions Sougo didn’t even know he possessed until meeting her.

He’s spent every night for months brainstorming ways to make her miserable. He loses sleep thinking about the faces she will make with his next attack. He ponders strategies in the shower. Scribbles notes for future tactics in his work books.

She consumes his mind like an infection or some sort of advanced tapeworm. His mouth curls in disgust every time she is mentioned to or around him. He laughs in the face of anyone who calls her his friend. The notion makes him sick.

He’s sure it makes her sick, too.

The teachers hate their interactions. Sougo knows that in the staff office they have a board placing bets on how long Sougo and the girl will go without fighting next. Every time the two of them are in the same vicinity, the teachers sigh in exasperation and bicker amongst themselves over who has to deal with the inevitable fall-out.

It’s hilarious, really.

When he gets to class, his eyes stay transfixed on the clock above the door. He watches the hands tick away with increasing impatience. His leg bounces beneath his desk and his pencil taptaptaps against the cover of his unopened notebook. In his peripheral, he can see the sidelong glances and irritated glares from students disrupted by his noises. They can all go to hell, as far as he’s concerned.

He is counting down until school is done. Not for the reason most kids do. No, he isn’t anxious to leave the campus and get home to do hours upon hours of studying. He’s anxious to get to detention.

Detention is Sougo’s favourite part of the day. It’s where he’s trapped in a small little white walled room filled with empty desks and only he and the red haired girl occupy the space. There’s a teacher in there, though usually is it Mr. Sakata, and he’s hardly an excuse for a teacher.

To keep up appearances so as not to disturb Sakata while he naps, Sougo and the red haired girl will bicker under their breath in hushed, heady whispers of snarky remarks and cheeky one-liners. Sougo will often sit behind her, flicking rubber bands at the back of her head or whistling a grating tune. He’s come close to having his face smashed in with a nearby chair, and at this point he’s really just wondering how far he can go until that inevitably happens.

They have detention together almost every day at this point into the year. It’s a wonder how they haven’t been suspended yet, but Sougo thinks that the teachers at their dingy, under-funded little school just simply don’t care enough. He can’t blame them--he wouldn’t either if he was forced to teach the mouthbreathers that occupied the student body.

He stares at the clock until his eyes dry out and his hand goes numb from tapping his pencil back and forth and even then he still persists for a little longer because the seconds that tick by feel like hours and Sougo has never been patient.

When the bell finally rings he jumps up from his seat and carefully catches himself as he starts to slowly pack away his things like a lazy house cat finally stretching after a 12 hour nap. He pretends to bow when asked and follows along the flow of his classmates with heavy and dragging footsteps. He never cared much for appearances, but at this point everyone knew where he was going. They didn’t need to think he was excited for detention, now did they?

He trudges down two flight of stairs and turns down several hallways until he ends up in the detention room. Sakata doesn’t even look up from the copy of Jump he’s reading and Sougo simply walks in breezily like he owns the place.

The girl is sitting by the window, glancing out with a frown and furrowed brow and Sougo wonders what happened between now and the last time he had seen her.

His heart picks up a bit when he sees her. He thinks it’s the anticipation of their next match getting to him, but he also thinks that’s an excuse to help him sleep at night. His air is heavy in his lungs and he breathes out slowly on the way to his seat behind her.

She doesn’t look up when he moves in her vicinity. He catches the slight softening of her expression, a lapse in her facial mask that is gone in the blink of an eye--easily missed, had he not been expressly familiar with her face enough to notice the subtle changes. He smirks to himself as he drags his chair back and flops into it, lifting up his long lanky legs to rest his feet atop the desk without a care in the world.

They’re silent for a long moment, before she breaks it:

“Did you have gym today? You smell.”

“Pretty sure you just learned what it’s like to be self aware--I’ve been inhaling your stink for weeks.”

He hears the sharp intake of an indignant breath, a denial quick on her pursed lips reflexively. He watches her shoulders flex underneath the thin white fabric of her uniform shirt, bending and swaying as her fingers twist angrily into the pleats of her skirt. It’s the clear indicators that he’s getting to her that make it all worth it.

She tries again, trying to tamper down her clear irritation as she works on her newest insult. He responds in like, his blase attitude irritating her even further. She says something cocky that makes him snap and he feels his temper rise.

In his eighteen years of life, Sougo has never had such an emotional reaction to a woman before. It’s not like his sister, where his codependency on her revolves around him fabricating a new personality around her. With the red haired girl it’s like he’s never been more himself.

His stomach twists in knots and tangles with each passing remark made between them. His fingers flex and curl behind his head, his palms starting to sweat due to a weird anxiety he can’t seem to shake. He hides his expressions with ease due to her back being to him but part of him aches to see her face. It’s a hollow, unjustifiable ache that reeks of betrayal and Sougo knows if he admits that to anyone he’ll never live it down.

“You were staring at me earlier.”

Their careful back-and-forth verbal tennis match comes to an abrupt halt when Sougo feels his brain shut off completely. He stalls for a moment, not expecting to be called out for an action he does more often than he’d like to admit. For God’s sake this was breaking the rules--they didn’t talk about awkward teenage moments. They just lived them!

“I was wondering how a baboon learned how to dance,” he shrugs despite her being unable to see it.

She whirls in a blur of reds and whites, her hair spinning as she swivels around in anger and for the briefest moment Sougo catches a whiff of her shampoo and he feels his nose tickle.

He blinks at her when she slams a fist down on a small corner of the desk unoccupied by his feet. Her thin eyebrows are drawn down, creating wrinkles in her forehead and she snarls at him in an entirely unhuman like fashion. Her chest rises and falls in deep swells and retractions when her breath goes from normal to huffing.

“I am not a baboon!” she argues, baring her pearl white teeth at him in a way he thinks is supposed to be intimidating. He’s sure it would work on anyone else. Too bad for her, it’s just him.

“I’ll believe it when I see proof,” he arches a brow at her and his muscles tense when he thinks she’s going to lunge forward and throttle him.

She stops herself but he notes with a selfish pride that he can see the cold fury hidden behind her eyes.

He looks at her face, taking in the round curves of her cheeks and the soft rose blush of her lips. Her eyes were framed with thick lashes that swept across her pale skin when she blinked and Sougo wanted to launch himself off the nearest cliff when he found himself envious of those lashes.

A lock of red hair falls in front of her face when she leans back to brush her hair back with a sigh. She regards him with narrowed eyes and a simple downturn of her lips. She does a sweep of him with her eyes, taking him in thoughtfully and he’s never felt more exposed under someone’s gaze than he does right then. His whole body feels electric.

In one single, fluid motion he slides his feet off the top of his desk and let them fall to the floor and he presses off his chair and leans forward, resting his chin in his palm as he props an elbow on the desk. He smirks at her when she watches him cautiously, her brain doing the mental calculations of what he was capable this close to her. She looks completely unruffled and he revels in it.

He reaches up with his free hand and twists the tail end of the renegade lock of her hair and it’s soft as silk between the pads of his fingers. There’s a charged silence between them, leaving them at a crossroads of where their relationship could go from there. The act he was performing was so uncharacteristically tender, there had to be a catch.

And there was.

He curls the rest of his fingers around the lock of hair and tugs roughly, releasing quickly and leaning back when she shrieks and pitches forward with a closed fist. He laughs until her knuckles connect with his jaw and then he retaliates in a similar childish manner.

The tousle and scream and shriek until Sakata tells them to quiet down and even then they both get in a few extra hits when he’s not looking.

Oh yes, Sougo thinks cheerfully. Detention is my favourite time of day.

#okikagu #okita sougo #kagura #drabble #crows fic #i wrote this at 3am i know its not coherent

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