#the enemy server | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

lisatelramor · 5 months ago

Text

First Meetings

When their parents divorce, Yuusaku took his emotions out through books. Somehow everything was better with escapism, and he could even make up his own stories. Bored in class? Books. People being annoying? Picture all the ways that they’d get eaten in a fantasy universe. Alone because your dad is working? More books. Books were his best friend, and his imagination made up for the part of him missing his brother and mom. Sometimes he would look in the mirror and pretend that it was his brother. He grew out of it, but it was fine. He was fine, and he didn’t need much outside of his books and his brain. Most people were boring anyway.

Toichi though? Toichi took an entirely different path. Yuusaku stayed with their father. Their father who was well off and had a good job. Toichi went with their mother, who had a sum of money from the divorce, but the world was much less kind to a divorced woman with a child than a man. Rumors followed them, and it was hard for his mother to keep a job, so though they had money, it was never as much as they had before, nor as certain and stable. Toichi found himself alone, but also under scrutiny. He wasn’t like Yuusaku who preferred books. He’d always liked their parents’ attention and praise and suddenly he had none of it and no brother to drag on adventures, just strangers and stress and new places. So he started to act out. Pull pranks. Try sleight of hand tricks like the street magician he met at the park who taught him the basics.

Class was boring. He could think circles around his peers, so why not cause chaos? Why not poke and prod and get in peoples’ faces until they lash out? It wasn’t like his mom had time to care if he got in trouble. And even if it was negative attention, it was still everyone looking in his direction, and that was almost as good as approval, right?

It was the second year of the divorce that they moved again, and Toichi found himself in yet another new school, seven years old and hadn’t seen his twin in a year and a half. He had no patience for this new place either.

Nakamori Ginzo was sick with his usual spring cold when the transfer student came. It was just a few weeks after the start of the semester, an odd time for anyone to change classes, so it stood out like an ink splotch when he got back, all sniffly and grumpy from the lingering sinus pressure. Toichi-kun—Ginzo never caught his last name—was a few centimeters taller, hair wild, with a grin that looked a bit like the feral cats behind the convenience store. Ginzo had one glorious day where he thought that he might be able to make a new friend. Then he saw Toichi steal one of Hanako’s erasers and knew he didn’t like anyone who’d take someone else’s things.

Ginzo made Toichi give it back.

Toichi laughed at him and treated the whole thing like a joke. If he’d returned the eraser and kept quiet, Ginzo probably wouldn’t have thought twice about him beyond that poor impression. But then the next day Toichi interrupted the class with off-topic questions. And the next he ‘borrowed’ a pencil and never gave it back. And the next he had a chocolate bar at lunch while Misano from the next class over strangely had his go missing.

Maybe Ginzo could have ignored all that—difficult since he had a strong sense of black-and-white morality even then—but Toichi must have seen him glaring at him or something because one day Ginzo went to put his outdoor shoes away and finds his cubby full of frogs. And then Toichi somehow got all the girls with water balloons right before gym class. And then he somehow copied Ginzo’s homework when he turned away to get his lunch, and Ginzo was sure he’d never hated someone so much.

The next time Ginzo caught Toichi setting up a prank, he confronted him. And Toichi laughed. Ginzo felt the most red-burning rage he’d ever felt in his seven-year-old life and punched Toichi right in the nose. Toichi stopped laughing at that. The next thing the two know, they were wrestling on the ground, trying to beat the hell out of each other and Toichi was saying words that well-mannered boys should not be saying, and both of them had blood on their faces, though whose blood it belonged to was debatable.

In the end they were both sent to the office and yelled at, and Ginzo’s mother picked him up before giving him hell for making trouble. (Ginzo’s pride took a dent about being hauled off by his ear while his Ma called him ten kinds of idiot, but at least he wasn’t Toichi, left sitting on the bench with unhappy adults all around because his mom couldn’t come get him until later.)

“You can’t go getting into fist fights,” his father said later after yelling at him loud enough to bother the neighbors. “You’re the son of a police officer. Think about how that looks.”

Ginzo thought that being the son of a police officer meant he definitely should be fighting Toichi, but he knew better than to open his mouth about that. It wasn’t like his parents had seen Toichi steal an eraser or making girls cry with water balloons. If they had, surely they’d agree that he was in the right for trying to stop Toichi. But it never worked to argue with adults about things, so he didn’t say any of it, just stood there with his arms crossed, like a tiny mirror of his father, scowl and all, before he got sent to bed with only a bowl of plain rice for dinner.

If Toichi had stopped the pranks there, Ginzo would have let it go and neither of them would have gotten into any more trouble. But he didn’t. And so Ginzo found himself dragged into one mess after another, trying to grab a teacher’s attention or ending up yelling at Toichi before they both got booted out in the hall to hold buckets of water until their arms felt like they were going to fall off.

None of the punishment seemed to faze Toichi at all. Even holding buckets, he made faces at Ginzo until Ginzo snapped, and it was Ginzo who got in worse trouble.

Ginzo hated him. Really. Truly. They were definitely enemies with how often they ended up at odds or getting punished together. If he had a bit less of a Nakamori temper, maybe Ginzo would have been able to escape some of the punishments. But it was like Toichi found his anger funny, because once he found a sore spot in Ginzo’s metaphorical armor, he’d push and poke until Ginzo was red-faced and yelling. Or worse, trying to punch him again.

Toichi got really good at dodging. That only made Ginzo angrier.

Unfortunately, it made Ginzo’s parents angrier at him too. After the scuffle that left him down a baby tooth and having to write a formal apology for breaking a school window, Ginzo escaped his parents yelling when they started to argue with each other.

They argued a lot sometimes. Loudly. Ginzo could take them yelling at him, but somehow he could never handle them yelling at each other, so he always would go to the playground a few blocks away whenever they got loud enough to forget he existed. He’d crawl under the slide where the grass grew up a bit too long because it always felt safer there.

That time when he got there, he wasn’t the only kid hiding. Up on top of the slide was Toichi, sprawled out with bare feet against the sides of the board so he wouldn’t go sliding down, staring up at the clouds as the setting sun made them a rosy pink. Ginzo almost turned around and walked home at the sight of him.

He must have made a noise because Toichi looked over. Toichi had a bruise on his cheek. Ginzo was the one to put it there. But Ginzo had a split lip and was missing a tooth because Toichi headbutted him in retaliation. Toichi wrinkled his nose. “What are you doing here?”

“That’s my favorite slide. What’re you here for?” If Ginzo hadn’t been in the middle of his parents fighting, it would have been time for dinner.

“Mom’s not home yet,” Toichi said like it was all the reason needed to be looking at clouds on top of a slide.

“So you gotta be on my playground?!” Ginzo asked. He stomped a foot. “Get down!”

“No.” Toichi watched him from the top. He had the high ground and he knew it. “And it’s not your playground. It’s for whoever wants to use it.”

“Well use one closer to where you live. This one’s mine and I don’t want to share.”

“No,” Toichi said again.

Ginzo made a sound of rage and started climbing the ladder to the slide. Toichi escaped before he could even reach the top, making Ginzo even madder. It was like a rage-induced game of tag, only Ginzo was trying to hurt Toichi and Toichi made avoiding him look easy.

In the end, they were both out of breath though. They collapsed in the grass a few meters apart.

“You get dumb when you’re angry,” Toichi said between gasping breaths.

“Shut up! I’m not dumb!”

“No,” Toichi agreed, “just when you’re mad.”

“I’ll bite you.”

“What are you, a dog?” Toichi laughed.

Ginzo growled, then felt dumb for playing into it even though he didn’t mean to. He huffed and pouted, turning his back to the other boy.

Toichi’s breaths evened out little by little.

“It’s too quiet at home,” Toichi said to Ginzo’s back some while later. “And boring.”

“My home’s too loud,” Ginzo complained. “Go get yelled at instead of me.”

Toichi let out a breath that almost sounded like a laugh. Ginzo still hated him. Definitely. He was just too tired to do anything more about it at the moment.

“Does your tooth hurt?” Toichi asked.

“No,” Ginzo lied. He’d cried when it fell out, all bloody. His tongue kept finding the spot where his gums were raw and empty.

“Liar,” Toichi said.

“No, you are.”

Toichi gave that tiny laugh again. Somehow it sounded a lot more real than the laughs in class after a successful prank.

“I still don’t like you,” Ginzo said.

“I know.” Toichi didn’t sound bothered by that at all. “You’re too annoying for me to like you either.”

“I’m annoying?!” Ginzo sat up, finding he did have enough energy to get mad after all.

In the distance, he heard his mother yell his name and knew if he didn’t start running back now, he’d be in a world of trouble. “Shit,” Ginzo swore, though he knew it was a word he wasn’t supposed to say.

On the ground, Toichi burst into giggles. “I’m telling!” he said between bursts of laughter.

“Shut up!” Ginzo kicked ineffectively in his direction before hauling himself to his feet. “Stop disrupting classes!” he yelled even as he moved back towards home.

“No,” Toichi said behind him, still infuriating, just like when he chewed half his food and stuck out his tongue to gross Ginzo out at lunch.

Ginzo ignored him and went home.

Ginzo caught a cold sometime late December. Bad enough to stay home a day or two. When he went back to school, it was weirdly quiet and Toichi wasn’t in his seat by the window. It wasn’t until the day after that when Ginzo learned that Toichi had transferred. His mom got a job somewhere else and they’d had to leave.

Ginzo hated Toichi, so he should have been relieved. Instead, he ended up hiding under the slide, crying for reasons he didn’t have the words to understand. He was seven and emotions were a lot, and the world was still too much sometimes let alone when it took away someone who’d been a constant for the last nine months.

(Would Toichi even miss him? Ginzo definitely wouldn’t miss him. He was just mad that Toichi didn’t say anything. Definitely just mad, not sad.)

(Years later, his daughter makes a friend. The first meeting with the kid’s parents goes terribly—

“It was a joke!”

“If that was supposed to be funny, then you make a really shitty clown!”

—But something about Kuroba reminds him of being a child angry at another child for a bunch of frogs and water balloons. That feeling gets extended to Kid later. Bunch of immature, lying, thieving bastards that just want to mess with Ginzo’s head. He definitely isn’t enjoying the back-and-forth verbal sparring or the one-sided chase. He couldn’t remember the name of the kid from elementary school, but he bet that guy would have gotten along with Ginzo’s latest headache.

Toichi meanwhile remembers fairly clearly and wonders if Ginzo’s gained much maturity since elementary school since he has just as short a fuse. He might also still enjoy riling him up. Just a bit. Perfectly reasonable thing when Ginzo makes such hilarious expressions. Toichi grew up, but he didn’t grow up that much.)

#magic kaito #magic kaito spoilers #detective conan spoilers #i guess #another one for the mk server because we joked about ginzo toichi childhood enemies

17 notes · View notes