A/N: I have not posted on in years. This place is still as impossible to work as it used to be. I've fixed the upload problems, hopefully!
It's snowing at Roman High.
The snow comes in on icy blasts. Tree limbs are almost torn asunder from the strength of it, their dead leaves ripped from their branches and sent scattering across the sidewalk. Sakura Chiyo's breath comes out in a puff of hot, white air. She's the last person in the entranceway. Behind her, the school is absolutely silent. The teachers and staff are in their shared offices. Everyone else has gone home.
Snow is starting to collect on the walkway. Chiyo hadn't thought to bring an umbrella—the weather hadn't called for snow—and now she'll be soaked if she walks home now.
Chiyo sighs again.
"I wonder…" she says aloud, because the whole situation reminds her of that time, in the rain, when Yuzuki'd let her borrow her umbrella, and she and Nozaki-kun had walked home together.
She smiles, thinking about it.
She wonders if Nozaki-kun will show up like last time.
"I bet I'm the only one stupid and careless enough to forget to bring an umbrella!" she says loudly. It echoes off the shoe lockers and falls to the floor.
Chiyo waits, but nothing.
"Of course, he wouldn't show up…" It's not Chiyo's day. Nothing can go right once everything starts to go wrong. It's against her nature not to cheer up as soon as she can convince herself to, but there's something pulling at her today. She doesn't know if it's the dreadful weather or what, but the series of events that just happened don't make it easier. It started with receiving two failing grades in a row, then her mom texting her to reveal that her uncle—the one she's closest to—had fallen ill, then letting her clubmates know she wouldn't make it today, then running all the way home to sit waiting for two hours for any word, only for her mom to call and tell her it was all right, it was only overwork and she needn't head home early, when she was already there, and she'd run immediately back to school, only to find out the club had adjourned for the day. It was enough to make anyone upset.
The only thing that'd make her feel better right now, besides curling up in her bed with a manga and a warm drink, would be if Nozaki announced his love to her, right then and there.
Like that'll ever happen.
No, Chiyo! Chiyo smacks her cheeks and screws up her face in determination. You've been working hard! You've definitely gotten closer to Nozaki-kun.
She flips up her phone to look at his most recent text, just to prove the point.
Sakura, would a robot make sense?
Chiyo sighs.
She'd also told Nozaki, as she'd escaped from cleaning duty after class to head home, that she wouldn't be able to ink today. He'd seemed startled, wished her uncle well, and then nothing else, which seemed much more muted than normal. At the time, she'd been too overwhelmed by the situation to feel one way or another about it. But now—she wondered what'd been wrong. Either way, she needs to tell him what's happened.
Maybe she'll just go there instead of going back home. It's closer.
Sakura stares hard at her phone. Swallows. Grips it tight.
Sorry to worry you! My uncle is all right. It was just overwork. My mom's with him at the hospital right now, so I can come, actually!
Send. Chiyo breathes deeply and throws back her shoulders. She thrusts one foot out into the cold and then another and squares up against the wind and the snow and the freezing air. Her scarf, jacket, and gloves aren't really enough. She should've just gone home earlier instead of sitting around hoping it would die down.
Jeez, Chiyo! Why're you so stupid sometimes?
She raises her trembling hand with her phone still in it. Fine, she'll just text Yuzuki. Maybe she'll come back and get her? Chiyo sends a text begging, pretty please, for Yuzuki to bring an umbrella. She has to squint, the wind's so strong. The school courtyard isn't yet a sea of white, but it's getting there. The trees are like light poles splattered with white paint. She tightens her jacket around her.
Her ringtone goes. LOL is the response.
Yuzuki!
Okay, okay. Kashima-kun?
A second later. The customer you are trying to reach is temporarily out of service.
Oh, right. Chiyo remembers now. A Hori-senpai-Kashima-kun accident had occurred, the usual ones with Kashima sneaking off, and her phone had been the awful result. There would be no getting in contact with her today.
Okay. Mi—Mikorin, then? She's almost at the gate. Is she walking especially slow or something? It feels like it's taking forever. The wind is brutal and unrelenting.
She's only a step away from her place of fate. At least, that's what she likes to think of it as. Where her entire world changed.
But isn't Nozaki already there? is Mikoshiba's response.
Chiyo stops in place. She rereads the sentence three times, trying to understand the hieroglyphics. Is this Japanese? Is she dreaming? Why would Nozaki-kun be here?
"Sakura, are you—" comes Nozaki's voice from her right, and she leaps, squealing, into the air. Not unlike a cat, she falls on her ass, and her phone scuttles off the walkway and into the snow. She'd used her hands to brace herself, and they end up scraped and bleeding for it. The landing felt harder than what she expected it to, probably because it's like punching a frozen lake.
"Are you okay?" Nozaki kneels down in front of her, wrapped up in a brown overcoat, like a brawny angel descended from heaven on high. His lips are blue. His skin is pale and chafed red. She feels even colder just looking at him.
"N-N-N-Nozaki-kun? What are you doing here?" Her teeth chatter. For some reason, she wants to cry.
"I was waiting for you," he says, offering a hand. Chiyo is too in awe to take it.
"But, I told you—and—how did you know I was here?"
He rolls his eyes up to the sky, as if considering something. Then he stares over her head, at the school behind her. "Somebody told me."
Sakura whips her head around, but the school is just a hard mass of plaster. There's snow on the roof. In the cracks and crooks of the building's curves. On the window seals. On the second floor, it looks like there might be the outlines of people pressed up against a couple windows, but with the way the snowfall obscures, she can't be for certain.
"Who?"
Nozaki just smiles.
"You haven't been waiting too long, right?" Chiyo eventually takes his hand, and they stand up together. Powdered snow slides off her skirt. She feels weak in the knees. He grabs her phone for her before she can even make the effort to do so.
"No," he says, handing it to her. Even though there's snow in his hair. Even though there're snowflakes on his lashes. She wants to reach up and brush them away.
Why can't you be brave, Chiyo? Why can't you ever be brave?
"No-No-Nozaki-kun, I—" She's gonna say it. She has to say it.
Nozaki takes this opportunity to sneeze. It comes out before he can cover his mouth. Chiyo flinches, snot flies, and she's lucky that none of it gets on her. He wipes his nose and lips with the back of his hand.
"Sorry," he says. "I guess I'm catching a cold."
Now that she's looking at him properly, he's not holding an umbrella, either. He's getting sick because of me, she thinks glumly. Sure, she might not be able to confess. Sure, Nozaki might be a little too dense to notice her affections. But she can do something for him. She can show her thinks in the only way she can.
"Um, here." She takes off her scarf and tries to hand it to him. He's not wearing one. He doesn't even have gloves on. How did she not notice that before? He could get really sick.
"No, really, I'm fine. I don't want you sick, too."
"Take it."
"No, I'm fine."
"Take it." Chiyo forces it firmly into his chest. He pushes back with intense force. She doesn't let up.
"Take it."
"No."
"I don't need it."
"Neither do I."
A sudden gust hits and the scarf goes sailing into the air and wraps itself around a bare tree limb. They stare up at it. They'd need a ladder.
"Let's go."
"Uh-huh."
It takes a little longer than usual to get to his apartment, what with all the snow and the moments where they need to pause because of white-outs. Chiyo's neck is especially cold the entire way. Nozaki's key almost won't turn in the keyhole, and when they open it, his place is almost as cold, if not colder, inside, because Nozaki had clearly turned off the heater when he left. Mikorin isn't there, or Hori-senpai, or even Wakamatsu-kun.
"I just told them to go home. The weather's so bad," said Nozaki as they step inside and slip off their shoes. That's probably for the best, but it makes Chiyo realize, even though she's been there multiple times, that she'll be alone with him.
"Um." She follows him, feeling like somebody else in her own body. There's another Chiyo who wants to confess, really confess, while the other knows it'll just lead to another autograph, which she doesn't have a frame for and would be really inconvenient to receive right now.
"Hmm?" He goes into the kitchen. Chiyo settles in her usual place at the table. The living room is pretty clean, means Ken-san was here recently, though there's manga everywhere and drawing paper all over the table. So, he was drawing, even if his assistants weren't there.
That's a little lonely, somehow.
The sound of a kettle hitting a stove. Tea.
"Do you—do you want me to do some inking? In exchange for letting me stay here while it dies down." Her parents are out, her dad working and her mom at the hospital, but they know she's here. Or at least, they know she's at a friend's place. That's what she's chosen to tell them. She doesn't know how her dad would feel about her being at a boy's place with just him.
"No." But then there's a sudden shuffling noise. Chiyo's already started grabbing sheets of paper and looking over the barebones manga. She'd ink here and here and…
She looks up. With a wide smile on his face, Nozaki is leaning over the counter, camera in hand, sailor uniform in the other.
"No."
They drink tea while he mopes. Chiyo inks, anyway. Mikorin's already started on some of the flowers, at least, and Hori-senpai has finished all the backgrounds. She admires how fast he works.
Nozaki has turned the heater on. It purrs overhead, a welcome warmth on a terrible day. The windows are battered with the wind still. The TV is on, but the volume's so low it's like white noise. Homemade curry and rice is set out before her and him. Nozaki picks at his meal. Chiyo consumes hers at a leisurely pace.
"How's your uncle?" Nozaki asks after an uncountable, snuffling sip. Always loud, as if to make a point. The steam from his cup of black tea flies around like a candle in a breeze. "Is he all right?"
"Oh, you didn't get my text?"
Nozaki gets out his phone. "No? Did you send me one? Ah, here it is." He reads it. "I'm relieved to hear that. You sounded pretty upset."
"Yeah. I wish she wouldn't scare me like that! You have to be prompt about these things." Chiyo puffs out her cheeks.
He folds his arms. "Things like that…usually, in manga, the love interest passes out, and the heroine comes running. Or the relative dies for drama's sake. It's usually pretty emotional but a little overdone." There isn't much time for Chiyo to say or think anything before he seems to snap to what he said and hurriedly tries to correct it. "Not that that applies in real life. Sorry."
"It's okay. I know what you mean, though. When the relative dies, it can be sad sometimes. But it's usually very romantic when one of the main pair ends up in the hospital. It's so sad if he dies, though!" She's read so many tragedy manga where the male love interest gets sick and dies at the end. It always got her, every time.
"I've always considered that happening to Suzuki." He starts scribbling notes. "And then he'd fall into a coma."
Him dying or getting sick? "Why is it always comas with you? Why not just pneumonia or something?"
"Because it's more interesting."
"But it's so sudden…" Mamiko is calling out Suzuki's name on the page she's on. It's her usual distressed appearance. Suzuki is turned away from her with a grim expression. She doesn't know what happens next, because it's the last panel on the page. With all her heart, she's screaming out to him.
"Because sudden is interesting." He nods twice.
"Nozaki-kun, I—"
"Maybe I could make it a long arc," he says, jerking his head back and staring at a spot on the ceiling in thought. There's a sparkle in his eye she doesn't like. "Like this." He grabs for a blank sheet of papers and starts drawing something hastily on it. Five minutes pass before he has a basic, blocked-out sketch to show her, and he slides that beside the next page she's working on (Suzuki's told Mamiko he can't see her anymore and has run off).
"Suzuki-kun, my mother!" cries out Mamiko, running down a poorly drawn hallway. He embraces her in his arms in the next panel (which is more than he has ever done in the manga).
"Mamiko!" he cries. And then he suddenly collapses.
"Suzuki-kun!" Mamiko kneels over his prostrate body. A small panel of an ambulance siren going.
Suzuki in a hospital bed. Mamiiko weeping over him.
"Why did this have to happen? Mom's dead, and now I might lose Suzuki-kun, too?" And then Mamiko faints.
Chiyo stares at Nozaki-kun.
"What? No good?"
Chiyo shakes her head. Chiyo goes back to inking in silence.
The snowstorm, as it turns out to be, clears up by eight pm. Consequently, Chiyo has also almost finished her inking. Satisfied, she sits back and stretches. They'll easily be done by the deadline, if not way before. She realizes with a start that she doesn't know what Nozaki's been doing this entire time. She'd fallen into the inking fugue that happens, and she'd been nervous about being alone together before!
She discovers Nozaki sprawled out on the table, his eyes shut and his breathing slow and steady. His head is lying on his crossed arms.
She really hopes she hasn't got him sick. It's the last thing she would ever want. She swallows all her nerves and reaches out to stroke his hair. He doesn't move. No one shows up to get in the way. Her fingers run through his soft, still slightly damp hair. He continues to sleep, completely insensible.
She loves him. Right now, it hurts a lot to know that, to the point where it's an almost unbearable fact to keep inside. She can't keep kidding herself with the idea that she's gotten closer to him, and that eventually he'll figure it out. Eventually, she'll have to accept that someone needs to step forward. It's her fault they're this way, and she knows it. If she'd just confessed straight-out, she might've received an actual answer. But then, would she be where she is now? Would she be enjoying this comfortable atmosphere, be friends with all the people she's met, or would he have turned her down and would she have moved on with life? Chiyo's not sure she wants to know. If this is all she can have, then she'll take it.
Her fingers idly draw along his forehead. The wrinkles twitch slightly.
"Umetarou-kun," she says in her softest possible voice. "Would you please go out with me?"
His handsome face remains asleep. She draws back just in time for her phone to ring. This doesn't wake him either, though he shifts and sighs. Chiyo answers.
"Hello?" she says, covering her mouth with the hand facing Nozaki.
"Why didn't you answer? You know how many times I called? I thought you were dead! You didn't answer my text." Mikoshiba's voice blasts straight through one ear and out the other. She flinches at its power.
"I'm sorry, I forgot! I'm at Nozaki-kun's place."
"You should'a told me!" he wails, clearly on the verge of tears. Chiyo feels bad, having honestly forgotten Mikorin's text amidst all that happened.
"I'm sorry!"
"Mmm," Nozaki hums. His eyelashes flutter, but he doesn't show any signs of waking. As Chiyo begins to calm Mikoshiba down, he says something in a sleepy, whispery way.
"Okay."
Chiyo glances up. He's settled and still again. Chiyo smiles fondly at him, ignoring Mikorin's remonstrations. She likes to imagine that that's his answer. That he's saying "okay" to dating. That would be the greatest of her life. But it's time to return to reality. She turns back her full attention to her friend, and before she's even got off the phone, Nozaki's woken up and offered to walk her home.