Disclaimer: Tachibana Higuchi owns Gakuen Alice – not me.
Trouble with Glasses
-;-
"When you have nothing left but love,
Then for the first time you become aware that love is enough."
"Fuck no."
Persona crossed his arms stiffly with an air of impatience, "It is required, Natsume."
"Required my ass. I am not going in public like this."
Sometimes this little pest could be such a handful. Persona flicked an irritated glance at the boy and clicked his tongue impatiently before returning his gaze to his black-manicured fingernails. He was starting to get short-tempered with the child. He decided to end this quickly. Persona silently strode over to the kid and gave him a well-deserved slap across his face. His voice, when he spoke, had a certain tone of finality to it as he whispered threateningly in a cold and menacing breath,
"Then you'll just have to learn to deal with it, won't you?"
It was another bright day at the Alice Academy and Sakura Mikan was busy bouncing around the school announcing the happy news to anyone who would listen.
On the other hand, Hyuuga Natsume satisfied himself by lying down on the bench in their homeroom with one of his favorite manga carelessly hanging across his face, seemingly enjoying a short nap before the first morning lesson started. Well, at least, he was enjoying it until Mikan strode over, sat down on the bench, and tried to make conversation with him.
"Good morning, Natsume!"
Grunt.
"It's a really beautiful morning, isn't it?
Grunt.
"Well, I guess it's not really a beautiful morning anymore since I heard we're going to have a quiz today in Math."
Grunt.
She paused. "Can you help me study for it?'
Grunt.
Mikan frowned. Sure, it wasn't everyday that Natsume willingly made conversation with his classmates, but today he was being unusually uncooperative about it. She felt her tolerance for Natsume rapidly building up.
"So what's that manga you're reading now?"
Grunt.
"Is it interesting much? I've actually been looking for a new manga to read recently."
Grunt.
"Oh, there's the class bell. I think you should get up before the teacher comes in."
Grunt.
"Shouldn't you show more respect to the teachers at the academy, Natsume?"
Grunt.
"… Natsume."
Grunt.
She paused again as she silently resisted the urge to strangle the boy. Mikan usually prided herself to be a patient person, but he had crossed the line too far that day. She practically pounced at him, jumping from the bench, the force almost knocking the manga that Natsume had placed on his face to the floor, and lunged for the graphic novel that Natsume was now clutching to his face for dear life. "Don't touch me, Polka," he snarled as she attempted to pull it out from his death grip. "Well, you refused to talk to me, so I refuse to follow those orders." She spat back without missing a beat. Their classmates watched their quarrel from a distance curiously – Natsume was holding the book almost too awkwardly to his face and Mikan, in turn, was angrily trying to wrench it out of his grip without actually ripping the pages out.
But why was Natsume being so difficult over a stupid graphic novel?
Mikan gave a final tug ("Give – it – to – meee!") and, after much wiggling and struggling, a loud ripping noise echoed throughout the room. Natsume stiffened, quickly sitting up. That had been one of his favorite manga!
"What the hell did you do to it?" He roared with a start, pulling the manga down to his lap for better inspection when he finally caught the eyes of his classmates.
And they stared. They stared real hard.
His classmates' gaze, including Mikan's, who had fallen to the floor holding onto the ripped manga pages for dear life, was directed at Natsume's face. Of course, it was not unheard of at the Alice Academy that students could often be found gawking over the Hyuuga as he had always been the center of attention due to his handsome looks. But, no, that was not necessarily the case for their undivided attention that day. They were looking at his face, yes, but more specifically, they were looking at the object that was sitting on Natsume's face, supported by his nose and ears.
Hyuuga Natsume was wearing glasses.
"W-What the hell is that?" Shouda Sumire started feebly, her lower lip trembling slightly as she broke the sudden silence of the classroom. Imai Hotaru, who happened to be sitting across from her, opened her mouth to answer the rhetoric question, only to find that no sound came out. Her jaw had dropped open from the shock as well. Although normally calm and composed, at the moment, Hotaru's features were molded into one of surprise, and for some reason, disgust. Quickly recovering from the initial shock, she cleared her throat loudly before stating matter-of-factly, "They're glasses, genius Shouda."
Sumire did not even acknowledge the fact that Hotaru had openly insulted her. Not only was her lower lip trembling like mad, but also now her entire jaw was twitching as if she were having a spasm. However that didn't stop her from relentlessly staring at Natsume with a continually horrified expression. "Natsume, y-you… glasses," She did not know how to describe this bizarre scene standing before her. "You, g-glasses… you…"
"What?" Natsume spat out, annoyed, angry, and feeling humiliated.
Sumire gulped. She slowly raised a finger, pointing accusingly, before finally squealing, "You look like a nerd!"
Hyuuga Natsume – previously the heartthrob of Alice Academy.
Over a single night, he had been degraded from being one of the most admired guys at school to a mocked nerd.
"How does it feel to suddenly go from the top to the bottom, Hyuuga?" Hotaru smirked sardonically as she took out her fireproof camera. Natsume growled threateningly at it before walking towards his seat. "Your fan club disbanded – did you know that? Must be a record time for a club to have disbanded so fast." Natsume lied down on his bench and placed a newly purchased manga on his face to spare him the mortification Hotaru was presenting him. "I'm sure you'll no longer have anymore fan girls tagging along your tail." She paused, and then gave a snicker. "Or did you actually enjoy all that attention?" Natsume sat back up - his temper barely contained - and was just about to give her a piece of his mind when a flash went off in his face.
"And this'll make an excellent photo to sell to the newspaper club." She laughed with satisfaction, a small smirk on her face before she turned away. "Probably worth the first page."
That was the final straw. He was going to skip school that day.
As he stood up to leave the classroom, Sumire swayed in her chair faintly. "Tell me, Anna," she all but wailed, although she had intended it to be a whisper. "Why is it that I find him so unattractive at the moment?" Anna shook her head and sighed deeply. When she caught Natsume looking in their direction, she gulped uncomfortably and quickly adjusted her seat so that her back faced him. Natsume could hear her whisper as he walked out,
"I don't get it either, Sumire. I really don't."
Natsume wanted to rip his glasses off his face, break it into a thousand pieces, burn it crisply into ashes, and then feed those damned crisp ashes to Persona.
Why couldn't Persona have just allowed Natsume to buy some contacts and save him from the humiliation? It obviously made a lot more sense. Firstly, if he were to go on missions, then his glasses would only prove to be a burden to him since if he lost them mid-battle he would be blinded, and inevitably, made vulnerable. Second, it would also have saved him from a good deal of attention and drama shit that he currently had to endure at school (he had actually heard from Nogi Ruka, his best friend, that Sumire had gone to the Alice hospital due to being in denial of his use of glasses.) Lastly, and most importantly (at least to him), was that it seemed as though Mikan was refusing to meet him after that entire fiasco at the classroom in where his glasses had first been made known to the public. In short, Natsume concluded bitterly, Persona was making him wear glasses purely out of his sadistic needs to see the tortured expression Natsume was making right now.
Well, if he wasn't such an infuriating piece of sadist balls.
He glared at his reflection in the mirror moodily. To him, it certainly didn't seem like there was much of a difference from him wearing the glasses and not. Natsume didn't understand why they were making a big commotion about them, and honestly, didn't want to know either… apart from the fact that these glasses had just furthered his chances of getting to Sakura Mikan.
Natsume punched the wall, feeling helpless.
DING DONG.
Suddenly, an all too familiar voice called out, "Natsume, are you in there?"
The fire caster couldn't believe his ears. He took off his glasses, rushed to the door, and practically wrenched the door open in his eagerness. There she was, in all her auburn glory, looking up at him with a dazzling smile on her face. She laughed when she saw his expression, "Hi, Natsume. Why aren't you wearing your glasses? You don't like them?"
'You don't like them' was an understatement. He fucking hated those things.
He told her so.
Mikan laughed once more. "But you need to wear them. If you don't, then your eyesight will just get worse and worse." She forced the glasses back onto his face. "See? It's so much better like this." She smiled, making Natsume's heart flutter. So she didn't hate him and his glasses after all. He felt like his heart could do a hundred somersaults.
"But, don't you have 20/20 eyesight, Polka?" He grumbled, barely hiding his glee, forcing his brows to furrow into a frown. "How do you know this when this information is practically useless to you?"
Her grin slowly turned mischievous. "Well, actually… Wait just a moment."
She turned around and began to fidget with something on her face. Natsume arched a curious brow before she turned around and stretched her index fingers to show him. He stared. Contacts. She wore contacts. He stared dumbfounded at her, lost for words. "You wear glasses," he asked in disbelief. Mikan merely shrugged.
"Oh, and I almost forgot about this." She clapped her hands before taking out a rectangular package from her pocket. It had been carefully wrapped in polka-dotted wrapping paper. "Open it, I looked for them for days at Central Town!" Natsume blinked as he stared down at it. They were glasses, the exact same as his own. Natsume scowled down at the grinning brunette. "Do you enjoy mocking the new Hyuuga Natsume now that he has nerdy looking glasses on," he asked sorely, shoving the glasses back in her hands. She looked alarmed at his words, her eyes widening. "What, no! I wasn't mocking you." She pouted before taking the glasses and putting them on herself.
"They're matching glasses. You and me match, see?"
She grinned stupidly as she pointed at them.
"I wanted to get the same glasses as yours when I saw them, but I couldn't find them anywhere in Central Town. I looked around for a long time until I found someone who could get me a specially ordered one, but trust me when I say they were really hard to find. That's why I haven't been around you for the past few days; I was at Central Town arranging myself to get one of these so we could wear them together. Neat, right?" Mikan was making an idiot out of herself as she continued to smile wildly, pointing back and forth at the glasses they both wore. But Natsume really couldn't care less.
Had he ever said he hated glasses? Well, if it was with this idiot, then who cared about the damned glasses.
Thank you, sadist Persona – he really owed him one.
~ Nemesis of Truth
Edited on July 31, 2011.
I imagined Natsume's glasses like those that Harry Potter wears in the movie. You know those round spectacles? Only, just imagine them with weird patterns on them. Yeahh? Haha, I think I'll just have to leave it up to your imaginations to visualize how Natsume looked like, in the end. So... REVIEW!
