Some days- not every day, mind you, but some days nonetheless- Atsuki wonders if it's really him reading the Shinen and not the other way around.
And when it's one of those days, sometimes he's too deep in thought to really shut ∑ off completely.
Were he properly rested, he would not have gazed into this region of Sayuri Makino's mind while half-paying attention to what he wa drawing in Art Class, and would not have been overtaken by a deep-set arachnophobia.
Suddenly he is deeply afraid of spiders- they are deadly and disgusting and when he looks at one he wants to vomit and recoil, scream and cry, all at the same time. He is suddenly beset by every spider Sayuri has ever seen- the huge back one when she was eight, and the daddy long-legs that used to live in the corner of her elementary school classroom, and the garden spider last night perched on her white-painted windowsill, silent and perfectly still.
It is a transparent almost-brown- he can see its insides- and gathering up her courage, she takes the blanket and smacks at it once- it starts to skitter away, unharmed- twice- it is writhing in agony, and his fear of it increases tenfold as he sees its leg, still twitching, coming out of its head- a third time, and a fourth, and she flings the blanket away from her, bravery spent, as she scrambles out of her room and down the hallway, tripping and falling on the hardwood floors, because never mind the fact that she is hundreds of times larger than it, the spider is going to kill her--
"Saijo!"
He snaps back to reality. He has fallen backwards with his chair to the floor, and now he is sprawled haphazardly, legs in the air as he tries to regain his bearings. He had thrown the charcoal down onto the floor, and it is broken into two or three large pieces; he has upset his easel. It fell at such an angle that the half-dead spider from her memory, which he had drawn without knowing, is fully visible to Makino.
She sees it, turns white, makes a choking sound, and passes out.
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a/n: just setting the tone for the moment. the plot will come later, yeah?
does anyone know how to have honoka NOT kill kiryu? it's bothering me...