"Hey, Mikitaka, if you're an alien, do you ever get homesick?" Josuke tossed another pebble, watching it skip the surface of the water a few times before finally sinking down into it. With summer having arrived, more free time meant hanging out much more often, and as it turned out, as busy as the Morioh Lake was, there were still a few quiet spots to be found.
Spots where they could talk, swim, be themselves without worry. It was pleasant, to say the least. In the end, they had dubbed it 'Dugang Turf'. Not like they were a gang, or really even a tightly-knit clique. Just kids (and a few adults) who shared the same odd qualities.
"All the time." Mikitaka exhaled through his nose and cut Josuke off from his train of thought, watching a few ducks swim in the distance. "More than anything, I'd like go home." He paused, resting his head in his hands to imitate Josuke's posture. "Not that I dislike your company. I just miss my family. In all honesty, I never wanted to leave in the first place."
"Then why'd you leave?" Josuke would miss his mom if he'd had to leave home, too, and so he frowned in a sympathetic gesture. He threw another rock, scaring a duckling as it landed in the water with a plop.
"I had to. That's just what people like me do, I suppose. I wanted to be a... nurse; I believe that's the word." Mikitaka chuckled darkly, idly running his fingers through his hair.
"Well, yeah, aren't women supposed to be nurses?" Josuke raised an eyebrow, his neck popping quietly as he tilted it. His eyes were trained on Mikitaka as the alien thought, searching for the words.
"No," he began, "the ones who get to be nurses are.. hm." He made an odd trilling noise in the back of his throat; assumedly, that was supposed to be a word. "They do. Not the men, the women, or the trrlkk." He sighed, closing his eyes. "If I was male or female, I might have been able to do that, but it would be simply ludicrous for a trrlkk to become a caretaker."
"..A turlk?" The edges of Mikitaka's lips tilted up slightly at the butchered pronunciation, though his slumped posture still looked downcast. "Is that what you are?"
Mikitaka only nodded, giving a small hum of confirmation.
"...So does that mean you're not a guy?"
"I suppose not, no. I'm what you might refer to as a true hermaphrodite, in actuality. I don't mind being referred to a male, though; I understand that the human species generally only has two distinct sexes." At Mikitaka's response, the human teen gave a quiet 'huh', watching the mother duck lead her children away to some other side of the lakeshore. Maybe Mikitaka really was an alien; if he even knew what a 'hermafrodait' or whatever was.
Josuke sure had no clue. He didn't feel the need to think too strongly on it for now.
"Then you're a guy, for now at least. It'll be simpler like that." Josuke flicked a rock at his friend, the alien mostly unresponsive as it bounced off his coat and landed on the dirt.
—•—
Josuke had to admit that he'd only become more curious after that conversation. What kind of weird alien biology was Mikitaka hiding, if he wasn't a boy or a girl? He'd even been to the library to look at stuff about hermasomething, but he mostly just found stuff on snails, and he really didn't think Mikitaka had a snail dick or whatever. In fact, he'd always looked very male to the teen, though he did have a slight curve to his hips when he really thought about it.
And now, watching the other's fingers as they so nimbly pressed the buttons on the SNES controller, they did look pretty girly, with perfectly manicured nails and the soft fingers of a pianist. He wasn't just handsome, in a no-homo way, he was actually kinda pretty.
Mikitaka made an odd, but endearing chitter under his breath as he game over'd, reaching over to the console to shut it off. Josuke considered this a perfectly fine time to voice his latest inquiry.
"Hey, Miki?"
"Yes, Josuke?"
"If you're a, uh, whatever you are, turk or hermawhat or all that," Josuke waved his hand dismissively, hoping Mikitaka wouldn't care about his lacking vocabulary. "Does that mean you have, like, a dick and a vag? Or something else?"
"A what?" Mikitaka raised an eyebrow, beginning to neatly put away the controller.
"Y'know, like..." Josuke made a rather inappropriate and penetrative hand gesture.
"An ovipositor? Yes, I do have one." What the fuck was that. "I have a brood pouch as well." He was pretty sure he never learned this in biology. He was beginning to think Mikitaka was just making these words up on the spot.
"...What?"
"An ovipositor. I use it to lay eggs in my, or someone else's, pouch." Quite frankly, Josuke didn't understand how Mikitaka could say that with a straight face. Literally what the fuck? "I forgot; humans have quite a different set of genitalia. Would you like to see? Merely for educational purposes, of course."
"Okay um, let me think. Hell no."
A very flustered Josuke ended up chasing Mikitaka out five minutes later after he offered to draw his reproductive system instead.
AUTHOR'S NOTE:
I've never written for either character before, so let me know if something's off! I hope I can write more for Miki in the future, he's too cute omg.