Title: From A to Z
Summary: Koibuchi University. The quiet, complacent, dowdy Amamizukan dorm is shaken to the core when a male student offers to model for the dorm head, Mrs. Chieko, on her newest artistic endeavour. For all intents and purposes, """ has hit the fan. AU. Tsukimi/Kuranosuke.
A/N: Short (real short) story, just to flush out all my squees!
Show: Princess Jellyfish
Pairing: Tsukimi/Kuranosuke
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There was a ninja scampering just above her head.
Evidence: The noises emanating from the ceiling mere centimetres from her forehead went far and beyond the scope of normalcy. She had heard the girls in her dorm yawn or scrape or giggle or mutter or even dance around their rooms during the night, but this was practically surreal.
There was a large scrape, as if a chair had been thrown back, a splash, two wall-clock ticks and a tremendous whoop! The ceremony ended somewhat unceremoniously with three gentle coughs, one not-so-gentle curse, and what could have been a belch. Then an apocalyptic crash.
Tsukimi blinked tiredly.
It had been fine before Monday night, but for the following week the room above her own had been orchestrating the return of 1980s synthetic keyboard sound effects. Something else scraped from above her, making her start, and then a – oh god, was that a laser beam? At this rate, her roommate would wake up, and then-
"Tsukimi," an eerie voice floated by her shoulder. She started for the second time in the space of a minute, only to find a single hand drift up from the bunk beneath her and grope at air.
"Are you awake?" The voice (presumably attached to the hand) persisted. "I can't find you." The hand groped around some more, frighteningly bony in the semi-darkness.
The fact that the hand was groping made her shift further away. She pushed her pillow closer to the offending appendage, just in case.
"What is that?" Tsukimi asked.
"What?" The voice attached to the hand enquired.
"Those noises. Do you think they're hurt? Maybe I should go up and help."
The hand made a peace sign, and her roommate, Mayaya, waved away her concern. "There are always casualties in battle."
"They're doing battle?"
"Love is a battle."
"Mayaya?"
The hand paused in its enthusiastic gesticulating. "Hmm?"
"This is an all-girls dorm?"
-x-x-x-
"That's mother for you. She sits up all through the night, drawing boys making moves on each other and doing a hell of a lot of almost-kissing. Then they take each other's pants off and perform sexual manifestations of their affection for one another."
Chieko possessed the tact of a charging bull, but somehow this delivery didn't make a single one of the virgins squirm. If anything, they were somewhat removed. Some even curious, on what was hopefully a scientific level.
"Oh, I see."
"But how?"
"Understandable."
"Noisy," Tsukimi added, more factual than accusing, then after a brief pause held her hands up and quietly admitted, "not that I really mind."
In all truth, it made the dorm seem a little bit cosier at night. Amamizukan, being the oldest dorm on campus was something of an artefact. It was a charming old place, with gleaming tiles and a winding staircase, but it had the tendency to creek and moan on windy nights, sending all the occupants burrowing further under the covers. It had felt like years since she was in a full house, and constantly hearing someone close by made her ridiculously happy.
"Only a woman understands these things," Chieko nodded wisely, without actually pointing out what they all should understand. No one else seemed to understand, either. Furthermore, none particularly felt like women.
Exhibit B, for example.
Now, Mayaya had her own charms, to be sure. They were small and circular and quietly gleaming and locked in a small safe box, then padlocked, duct-taped, put inside another box, locked again, duct-taped again, sealed with putty, dried into a block of concrete, stowed away in a shipping container with the only key swallowed by a Blue Whale swimming idly somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. But they existed, and by laws of existentialism, it was not their recognition but their existence that counted.
Unfortunately for Mayaya, though, society lived not by laws of existentialism, but by Face Value.
And simply put, Mayaya had no Face Value.
And that's why at the supermarket, the girl behind the counter with highlighted hair, painted lips and doleful eyes called her Madame. And Mayaya had been her junior in high school.
Again, consider Exhibit C.
Exhibit C showed signs of premature aging, an itchy attitude, and outbursts of pent-up aggression. Cheiko wasn't even a student at Koibuchi University, but instead, the hired nurse. And here she was, sitting under a wimpy sapling by the toilet blocks with three sourly, dowdy, cloudy students who wouldn't know Spring Essentials if they were hit in the face with a pair of pastel-yellow flats.
"I need to get back to work," she sighed, eyeing her wristwatch. She snapped up like a toy soldier retracts; back straight, a determined glint to her eyes. She glanced down at the wayward group of young women she somehow was drawn to. "Stretch before you jump around," she instructed Mayama (who had somehow convinced the board to allow strenuous role-play to not only be a subject, but also one-fifth of her credit for the semester). "Don't coop yourself up in your room all weekend," she eyed Tsukimi paternally, who had more experiencing in cooping than the average non-free-range chicken. Before departing, she eyed Jiji, and bit out, "Calcium."
Which brings us to exhibit D.
Wallflower used to be an apt description for someone who was content, yet bland, non-essential and overall unattractive in all ways, without being noticeably unattractive. That is, before movies and media took the traditional wallflower and cast her as people like Anne Hathaway, Logan Lerman, and Lidsay Lohan.
The trouble is this; Jiji never had the natural beauty of Anne, the appeal of Logan, or the brimming confidence of Lindsay. She does, however, have the brown, sagging cardigan of her Aunt, the hairstyle of her Mother, and the watery responses of her ageing Grandmother. As a side note, she also meets with her grandmother every Tuesday morning at the front steps of McDonalds (her grandmother gets a coffee for free on her pension card, and then harasses the fifteen-year-old staff to give her another, because the aforementioned coffee was too sweet, too hot, too cold, too bitter, or all of the above at once). The two then drink their free coffee and perve on the older men waiting in line for their decaf latte.
"He could have been Richard Gere's father," Jiji surmises, a small, shy smile emerging.
"What'd he order?" Banba, who had overheard the conversation as she was on her way to the ladies room, made herself comfortable on a fresher patch of grass and played with the zipper on her Thomas the Tank Engine pencil case.
"Vienna."
Sympathetic sounds were offered, like tokens of pity. No one dared ask who this Richman Gear actually was.
"I was on a train to Vienna once," Banba offered.
"You've been overseas?" Tsukimi asked, surprised. She turned her mini chip packet inside-out, fingering the salt caught in the edges.
A great mass of hair shook, catching at some of the lower branches of the sapling. "It was on channel three. I lived the experience, though."
"Sounds exciting," offered a new voice.
Exhibit Unnamed, Unidentified, but most definitely male. Temporarily called Exhibit Z, for fear of placing him too close to the other lettered exhibits.
He was tall, lithe, confident, and seemed to be applying a stick made of some kind of miracle moisturising substance to his lips. He grinned roguishly down at the small group of non-women, who, in return, awarded him with their best impression of the Terracotta Army, China.
"I'm looking for Chieko." He said this served with a small, complimentary smile, free of charge.
Silence.
"It's about a job," he offered helpfully.
Stony silence.
"She's sometimes with you guys, right?"
Steel abrasive silence.
"You know what? I'll check her office."
They watched, dumfounded, as a cheerful blonde boy in pants that were criminally tight bounded away, in search of their dear, unfortunate, about-to-get-the-shock-of-her-life friend Chieko. Just before he rounded the corner of the toilet block, he paused, turned, and waved at them with all the might his skinny arms could deliver.
"Who…?" Mayaya managed, barely. Her eyes seemed slightly out-of-focus.
A knowing glint had overcome Banaba, not unlike her uncanny knack for scanning people and inanimate objects for information. "I know that…," she struggled, trying to spit out a word as if it should never have been in her mouth, "…guy."
Jiji leaned back, catching a fleeting glimpse of the disappearing figure. "It's heading toward Amamizukan."
"It would be," Banaba nodded sagely, sending an entrapped leaf soaring back towards the heavens. "It's working there. Or, will be."
"Doing what?" Jiji ventured, curious despite herself.
"Chieko's mum, our dorm head? The one with the late-night boy-loving drawing sessions?"
"What about it?"
"She's hired a new model."
There was a pop! sound as Exhibit A, Tsukimi Kurashita, turned to stone.
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A/N: Continues tomorrow ;)
A/A/N: I get weirded out by my own writing when I try and AU a show I'm still relatively new to. But I had to. The love. It burns.
Review, Fav, Subscribe and Stalk me. I'm begging you. In a non-prostitutional way. I swear. Nothing weird. WINKS.