"...hello, Sakurazuka Seishirou!"
"Are you showing off your wealth?"
No. My mother won't have me riding my bike to school.
"What's your father's surname? Why do you have your mother's?"
It's Hayashi. I was supposed to be a Hayashi Seishirou.
"...you are Seishirou, right?"
"My Dad told me his mother is a princess, that's why he have her surname."
I won't put it that way, but she's pretty enough to look like one.
"Well, he's too weird to be a prince."
"Right! My Dad also told me his mother wasn't married when she's pregnant."
They were married, though.
"So he never have a father? Was it adultery?"
I did have a father. He's just dead.
"Bad kids don't have dad, you know."
Seishirou blinked.
"Fuuma Monou from class A said he didn't cry when his father died."
"I was right, then. He's a bad child."
He listened as his name rang, snaring the walls of the corridor, high-pitched only for him.
"After all, fruits never fall too far from the tree."
In the span of what merely two seconds, Seishirou relaxed his slightly tightened jaw, shaky knuckles warping behind black satin pants even when amber eyes remained sharp in its gaze, unaffected. Seishirou also resisted the instincts flaring him up to run, but for the fact that his uncle is still going to pick him up here. That he had to remind himself it's certainly not because he never heard his name spelled in such friendly tone.
"Ahem, good afternoon, Se—can I call you Seishirou?—I'm Sumeragi Hokuto, and this is my twin, Subaru."
Seishirou kept his stance. Sumeragi, she said?
Instead of watching a wavering smile over his lack of response, Seishirou could only hope that the widening smile on Hokuto's face is good enough a reason for himself to start moving.
His own lips now widens in a wicked smirk of mockery before it turned into a low rumbling of giggles. He'll think about his uncle later.
Those kids aren't real; he had read something about hallucination as a side effect of insomnia—there goes his attention as he spun around and walk ahead.
Reaching the first step on the stairs, he can still hear the twins murmuring to one another and Seishirou's shoulders shook in a fit of muted laughter.
"...this is just pathetic."