#listen MTTCI is the weirdest thing I have ever decided to write

[ran-orimoto]

I don't know to whom praying to get something about Chiaki written by you. If you accept commissions in writing I'd run

I don’t accept commissions but you could still give me inspos! It would be a pleasure to me. Still, the good news is that I have already written about Chiaki once, though it’s just a bad introduction of her MTTCI version, who’s a ballerina and not a soprano, told by Junpei’s point of view. I don’t know when I will take MTTCI in my hands again, but I think it should happen before Christmas because you all always asking about Chiaki makes it hard to resist to such a temptation.

[ Context of the chapter is Junpei, for some specific reason explained later, has accepted to sing for a spectacle in a ballet academy. Since the dancers are practicing, he has been left outside, on a bench, and he has incredibly (LOL ahahah) been chatting with a rather lively Izumi. This is the end of the chapter and it contains fatphobiac insults, as the random OC I added in here is just an a$$ (like Junpei eh, ahahah. I have no mercy in anyone’s regards in the lame world of MTTCI). ]

[ …]

Despite the utter mess he was making while chatting with Izumi, he couldn’t deny she was still making him feel like he had been taken up to the sky she adored so much, had been walking on dreamy clouds for who knew how long. Now, though, some aggressive noise had accidentally made him let go of Izumi’s grip making sure he wouldn’t fall from such a height.

But he had. He had down into a place as immense as the expanse where he came from yet colder, much colder than that one.

“Nakamura-San!”

She marched out of the frozen room without looking back, decelerating only to bring her fingers behind her head. With a single gesture, an undulating motion of her wrist, she unraveled her low chignon in a cascade of dark chocolate, her long pail neck leaning forward in a liberating reflex.

She totally ignored his presence, just like the one of a skinny young man trotting after her.

“Nakamura-San, wait! We have been fantastic! Today I told myself we could really be the best duo out there. Imagine…Us starring in the most famous theatres in Europe, at New York’s Metropolitan too.”

Oh no, dude, you’re so pathetic, please, In the background of that mushy romantic film he didn’t absolutely want to be an extra of, Junpei found it impossible to grimace. And it’s not only because of those ridiculous tights I thank Heavens I could never wear in my life. She’s not interested, indeed, she detests you. She is repulsed by you. She isn’t even looking at you in the face, man!

Not even impulsively grabbing the girl’s hand to force her to turn helped him in his intent, until…

“Chiaki, listen…!”

At his touch her shoulders had already tensed, but that physical response affected her whole body once she heard what Junpei soon discovered it was her first name.

Dumb move. How can you be so stupid?, Junpei asked himself, slowly opening his bag to find a book into which plunging his disinterest. That was such an ashaming spectacle: he wasn’t going to give his eyes that unfair treatment. They didn’t deserve it. Still, surely, it would be so nice if they acknowledged he was there and they were showing a stranger their mutual lack of respect and tact. If he had worn one of his coveralls, they would have undoubtedly seen him. It would have been flashier than the lame blue salopettes he was wearing on a simple orange sweatshirt.

“It’s Nakamura. Nakamura-San for you, to be precise,” She stared into her interlocutor’s restless orbs, her face stuck in a stern arrangement, a detail Junpei casually grasped while searching for a specific page of his music sheet.

“Su-Sur-“

“And, sorry to tell you,” She insisted, cutting him short, impassive. Junpei’s focus would usually take a while to get used to reading and studying, so it was normal he was keeping on getting distracted, wondering how her eyebrows weren’t minimally curving because of her distress. “We haven’t been fantastic. You were out of step, your arms were feeling like noodles on my hips and you would have also stepped on my foot, if I hadn’t made my leg slip backwards on purpose.“

“T-Then…You have been fantastic…Nakamura-San?”’

Junpei’s thinned irises travelled through the lines of the same stave back and forth, hopping on the scribbles occasionally warping the notes’ circular shapes, dwelling on those more than on what he was supposed to be working on. The environment had grown too taciturn for him to animate that mute paper in his mind, so he got unavoidably led to diverting his intellectual efforts on some other topic, on the trembling muscles of the black-haired lad and the statue in front of him.

A statue ready to flee from her despised pedestal.

“I’m sorry, Kobayashi-San,” She sighed, closing her spheres whose shade was still unknown to Junpei. Incredibly, he perceived a minimal turmoil in those features, maybe just a fruit of his fervid imagination.

He also sensed a pang in his stomach at the sight of the young woman, of that Chiaki, leaving her dance partner there , without adding a clarification to that apologize holding so much else in itself. Junpei couldn’t understand why he had got that hunch, -and he wasn’t interested in finding out the reason behind it, no!-, but he could confess to himself it was hurting, somehow. Cautiously observing the profile of the dejected ballet dancer, the tremors of his lips, the abandoned dangling of his limbs next to his hips was having a certain effect on him.

But ,again, he didn’t know why.

He didn’t…

The young man stood in that same spot for a whole minute, losing his dismay in the undefined shadows projected in the near corridor. Then, he found the strength to forge steel fists of frustration and viciously send a glare to the uninvited spectator. That was a decision Junpei should have expected at some point, but he had foolishly grown convinced he had become invisible. Thus, he had lowered his guard and consequently had- he had to admit it, regrettably-, minded about someone else’s business, someone else’s disgrace.

“What are you looking at, eh? Tell me. Don’t you have anything else to do, fatso?”

“Hey,” So, they were starting like that, weren’t they? It was typical. “Since I’m a fatso, you should have noticed I was here. Don’t I occupy this entire bench?” In spite of the heat the young man’s comment had generated in his throat, he wasn’t going to yell in a refined ballet academy, but that didn’t mean he would allow him to disrespect him. “Joke’s on you, man, if you have decided to talk about private matters here.”

“Whatever you say,” The young man replied, displaying his interior weakness once more. Judging from that little he had managed to analyze in the previous confrontation with the girl, he could state he was a spineless and submissive kind of dude. The only thing he could do was to look down on others, as if he had the right to do so. Probably, in his life he had met people giving him the freedom to act in such a superb way, but in that case he could do that just because Junpei was sitting and he was standing. “Looking at you, I wonder how much you have eaten to become so fat.“

“Excuse me…?” Even if he had muttered that question while concealing his shame under his bangs, those words stained with poison had still been spat on Junpei’s appalled face.

“Yes, in the photos on Facebook you look so different. And thinner. What has happened to you?”

It happened that I’m not the same person, easy, He reminded himself, painfully clenching his jaw as a photo of a slightly older opera student materialized in his memories: sliced back hair just like his yet much darker, cocky grin challenging the camera and flash, a stately poise, a handsome, an exceptionally handsome raising star of the lyrical singing panorama.

“Uhm…It’s a bit hard to explain,” The commotion in his tone had faded, his fiery spirit had been tamed by an imposing energy. And he hated that.

“I don’t care ,don’t worry. I’m just laughing at the fact the girls were so excited about this beautiful tenor who was supposed to come. Oh well, better for me. Now that Chiaki is mad at me, I still can try with Kikuchi-San. She is the third girl in the second row, can you see her? She is not as curvy as Chiaki, but-“

“Kobayashi dude, whatever you’re called, now I’m the one telling you I don’t care, man,” He snapped at him, but still turned. He did not because he was curious about who this girl was, what he looked like: when he said he didn’t care, he was serious about it since there only was a girl on Earth mattering to him. He did because Fate had decided that morning would be troublesome to him and had to keep on being such until the end, until he would escape from that chicken coop.

If he had to be honest with himself, however, that definition didn’t really feel that fitting once he found himself surrounded by minuscule shimmers directly pointed at him, on his lumbering silhouette. He was feeling more like if he had become the visitor of an aquarium being contemplated by a shoal of fish that had gathered and attached their mouths to the glass, their thoughts incomprehensible to the human on the opposite side.

Yet, Junpei had experienced the same emotion even without a glass in the middle of his life, even a second after he had put foot in there, had bowed before a displeased audience, had continued smiling despite anything.

Despite being aware he wasn’t the one everyone had been waiting for.

I’m so sick of this place, Izumi-Chan. For real.