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#And in Kindergarten the friend group I had would literally split up on the basis of favorite colors 'Purple vs. Pink' for recess every day
candied-cae · 2 years
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What’s your favourite colour?
I’m gonna be honest- I’ve been trying to tell myself that blue is my fav since elementary school when I found out girls are allowed to like “boy colors” and I didn’t have to pick Purple over Pink bc they were the only acceptable options…
And I don't really own anything purple…
But considering the last FOUR TIMES I’ve drawn (incredibly inaccurate) lil personas of myself over the last year and a half have ALL had purple hair…
I think I need to accept that purple’s my fav again.
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patchwork-panda · 4 years
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If A Moment is All We Are (5.1/?)
This chapter is REALLY long so I split the text ver into 2 parts for Tumblr. 
AO3 link: here
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Story type: Romance/Drama/comedy
Pairing: Dazai x OC/reader (Dazai is endgame, fic is long-running and will also feature Kunikida x OC)
OC (Kusunoki Kyou) and Ability are based off of "The Story of Your Life," written by Ted Chiang, aka the basis of the Amy Adams movie "Arrival."
Rating: M for Blood/violence/themes of depression, anxiety, suicide TW: The second half of this story will deal more heavily with themes of suicide, depression/anxiety. *No major character death will occur*
Story follows OC as she joins the ADA, partners up with the detectives to solve various cases around Yokohama and develops feelings for Kunikida and Dazai (Dazai endgame).
Written for those who want an immersive ADA experience :)
Updates every Sunday evening around 6pm PST
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It wasn’t always like this.
Okay, maybe it was.
For as far back as I could remember, the visions had always been random, random events I would see of the future. If I was in physical contact with someone, the visions would be from their future. If I wasn’t, then the visions would be from my own life. Sometimes when I was really stressed, the visions of my future would actually come in the form of a dream, like in manga or novels.
Perhaps that was the best way to explain how The Story of Your Life worked; it was like taking out a book, keeping a finger against the pages and flipping until that finger finally caught on a single page. Then, flip open that page and read the first paragraph that jumps out; the book was the person’s life and the paragraph was the event, a single scene from that person’s future that I bore witness to.
The visions didn’t always show me death, blood and despair.
In fact, the very first vision I had was that of a puppy—a cute little thing my friend Kiko gifted me at my fifth birthday party. I must’ve seemed shockingly unsurprised (and possibly rude) to Kiko and her parents, but I couldn’t bring myself to explain that I’d seen her giving me this puppy half a year ago.
In retrospect, the puppy vision had been great. Sure, it took some of the fun out of a surprise gift but it was still a vision about a puppy. Honestly, if my visions were nothing more than glorified versions of baby animal videos, I’d be perfectly fine with that.
Maybe then, I wouldn’t be left with this overwhelming fear of my own Ability.
I used to be able to touch people, shake their hands, and hold them. In the beginning, “The Story of Your Life” only activated with a prolonged touch...
At first, “prolonged” meant more than ten seconds. That meant getting to play tag in kindergarten, going over to friends’ houses and having sleepovers. Normal stuff. My life didn’t even change all that much when ten seconds shrank to seven some time around middle school; I was able to play contact sports and go out on shopping trips without incident. Seven seconds became five halfway through high school. Again, no need to make lifestyle changes. I could still hold hands with friends, so long as it didn’t go on for too long and I was still able to have my first kiss without seeing even a hint of my boyfriend’s future.
And then, college. Five seconds was no longer doable. It became three at best and just before I’d become a shut-in, even an instantaneous touch was enough to trigger my Ability. By then, however, I’d gotten pretty used to having the visions, so I remained relatively unbothered when I’d see a vision of the barista breaking up with his girlfriend when I got my morning coffee. In other words, managing my Ability was no big deal.
Or so I thought.
About six months ago, my visions went from being an occasional distraction to a panic-inducing nightmare. I still wasn’t sure why...
Maybe it was just luck of the draw. I’d only seen good things, mostly, for the first ten-plus years at least: faraway cities, weddings, and graduations. Every once in a while there would be a failed exam or a lost wallet but overall nothing too out of the ordinary for an otherwise regular teenager to see.
Maybe it was just a sign of the times. As I got older, so did the people around me, so the more likely it was that they were entering that phase of their lives where things could start to go south. Or perhaps their previous lives were just catching up to them.
Or maybe, it was karma finally catching up to me. I’d be lying if I said that I’d never used my Ability for personal gain before. There were a few exams I managed to ace with the help of a well-timed touch of the hand and a few pitfalls I’d managed to avoid through a combination of sheer luck and a decently fast reflex. Perhaps six months ago, whatever granted me this power finally decided that I had a good run and it needed to end in the worst way possible...
And it all happened so quickly.
I never had much control over my visions to begin with and they never really bothered me before but suddenly, they were invading every part of my life—and with each vision I saw, the accuracy increased. My dreams became more vivid than ever; I would see things that had yet to occur and before I moved out, my college roommate would wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of my screams. I started passing out in the middle of class if someone so much as tapped my bare shoulder and when I came to again, it would be a minute before I remembered where I was and what I was doing. I was starting to consider seeking some kind of help until one day, I finally saw my first death.
It was horrible. I was at dinner with friends on a group date and I hit it off with one of the guys. He wanted to take me to the movies that weekend, and being relatively new to college and Yokohama in general, I agreed. Then, smiling, he’d held my hand just a millisecond too long and I saw it: him getting hit by a car while crossing the street.
I tried not to think about it too hard. Sometimes the vision were wrong. There were times when they’d been off by just a fraction of a second and because of that, I still had hope. Maybe there was a chance that things could change last minute, either by a miracle or by someone’s sheer force of will. But as time passed, my anxiety grew. He was running late and I didn’t like it. Finally, I spotted him at the intersection and, frantic, I waved him down just as the “walk” sign lit up and he started crossing the street.
That’s when it happened.
A single black vehicle, no license plate, ran a red... and ran into him.
I would remember seeing his body flying into the air for the rest of the semester.
After that, I started taking an alternate route to class, just to avoid going anywhere near the part of campus where he’d died. It wasn’t that people were whispering behind my back or accusing me of having a part of it—I just couldn’t handle the memory.
That was the first death.
The first.
It was as if some kind of floodgate had been opened. I had never seen death before that day but after...? Death became all I saw. I briefly shook hands with a foreign exchange student and immediately saw an image of a middle-aged woman lying in a hospital wing. The woman had been the student’s mother and I heard she died a week later. I could not have been responsible for the cancer that claimed her life but I spent weeks feeling guilty about it anyway. There was another incident where I accidentally, and literally, bumped into my English teacher on the way to class. I saw his brother being hit by a bus downtown. His death was announced a month later, on the morning news. When I saw it, I broke down in the middle of the cafeteria and my friend Eri had to take me home.
And it just kept happening.
I became afraid to touch people. I began wearing longer layers during the summer months and started keeping to myself. When even a brush of the hand or bumping into people on public transit could trigger a vision, I started wearing gloves. I got a lot of stares on the subway for wearing itchy winter gloves in the subtropical heat and the knitted fabric made gripping the overhead handholds difficult so I ended up changing to disposable nitrile instead. I got less stares for that but unfortunately, I eventually had to give up public transit entirely when I got squished between two tourists and had a panic attack in the middle of the car.
But giving up public transportation put me in a tough spot. My dorm was pretty far from campus and I didn’t know how to drive. If I really wanted to, I could walk but that would take far too long and make for far too many chances to see another person’s death. And I really didn’t want to ask anyone for a ride because that would just mean more questions and more explanations I wasn’t willing to give.
And yet somehow, I managed to make it work for a time, waking up early to go to class, avoiding hangouts in-between classes and running back to my dorm as soon as I got a chance. But I was still attending classes with lots of people in a crowded lecture hall and living with roommates in a dormitory building. Ultimately, the stress of trying to avoid people while also trying to keep up with increasingly difficult classes caused me to start having nightmares. They were frequent and they were bad. And I knew that these were all things that would someday happen to me: me and a friend being held hostage in an abandoned apartment building, a woman in a suit and sunglasses pointing two machine guns directly at my face, a man didn’t recognize growing steadily colder in my arms as I screamed for him not to leave me...
That following morning, I woke up sobbing—crying as if I wished I was the one who had died instead. When my roommate tried to comfort me, I jerked away out of instinct and immediately realized I’d made a mistake.
And that was it.
I couldn’t it take any more.
About a week later, I left the dorm and found myself a tiny studio apartment, one that I could still afford on my shoestring budget and more importantly, one where I could live completely alone.
Soon after, I dropped out of college and became a shut-in. In true shut-in fashion, I shunned all contact from classmates and friends in case someone came to visit and decide they needed to barge in because they couldn’t—shouldn’t—do such a thing. My apartment had become both my sanctuary and my jail. So long as nothing changed around me, none of the horrible visions would come to pass.
Thankfully, a month into my new lifestyle, the nightmares stopped.
So long as nobody came near me, I wouldn’t have to witness another death with my waking eyes...
I still remembered the night I decided to stop going to class. It was the same night I looked out the windows and saw my own reflection, touched my fingers to my face and pulled them away, confirming that it was indeed blood and not salt tears that dripped down my cheeks. I started avoiding mirrors from that day on and threw myself fully into watching anime, joining fandoms and drawing commissions, anything to distract myself from the invasive, self-destructive thoughts that grew stronger whenever I looked into a reflection of my own eyes.
Yes... Staying was the only solution. If I never stepped out of the apartment again, the world would be spared the sight of my hollow eyes and bloody tears... And I—I would be spared the curse of witnessing things I should never have seen to begin with.
***
“So you’ve been holed up in your apartment for the last six months doing...”
Kunikida frowned, tapping his pen against his chin.
“What exactly? Rent in Yokohama isn’t cheap. How have you been supporting yourself?”
“Commissions,” I explained. “I started watching a lot of anime and playing video games and fans pay good money for drawings of their favorite characters, original characters or even pictures of themselves in a stylized form.”
Summing up my Ability meant practically telling these two my entire life story, not just recalling the events of this morning, and I had to commend the detectives’ patience for sitting through what I would’ve considered a pretty long-winded explanation. Now I was even telling them how I’d stretched my budget and supplemented my allowance.
I held out my hand.
“If I could have some paper and something to write with, I could show you, if you like...?”
Dazai immediately ripped Kunikida’s notebook and pen out of his hands. Ignoring his partner’s protests, he held them out to me and, throwing his arm out to keep Kunikida from taking back his own things, sat back to watch me draw. Within seconds, a coarse outline appeared on the pages, followed by facial features: eyes, nose, hair—a minute later, I handed back Kunikida’s notebook, a quick, rudimentary pen sketch of each detective on its two open pages.
As one, they leaned in to stare at it.
“This is pretty good,” Kunikida said, looking up at me. He squinted down at the page, tracing the lines with his fingers, mumbling, “Does my hair really look like that?”
“It is... isn’t it?” Dazai agreed, rubbing his chin.
As Kunikida puzzled over the drawing, a mischievous glint appeared in Dazai’s dark eyes.
“Kusunoki-san... Have you ever considered a career as a sketch artist?”
At once, Kunikida shot him a warning look.
“Don’t even think about it, Dazai,” he growled, “Making decisions without the President’s approval—”
“I’m not making a decision, only a suggestion,” Dazai declared. “And what’s wrong with a good suggestion?”
“Dazai...”
Ignoring Kunikida entirely, he turned to me.
“Really, I don’t know how we survived like this for so long. We’re a detective agency, one of the best in the city and yet, we don’t have a sketch artist... It’s a shame, don’t you agree, Kusunoki-san? What do you think? Interested in a change of career?”
“Wait... are you asking me to join you?” I asked warily, looking from one detective to the other. “Why would you want someone like me? I can’t fight. I don’t even know how to shoot a gun.”
“I’m asking you,” Dazai said pointedly, “if you would be interested in becoming a sketch artist. I mean, it just so happens that we are in dire need of one—(“No one said that!” Kunikida roared)—and you happen to have the exact skill set we are looking for! Not to mention you’re an Ability User... Just think of all the people you could help.”
“I don’t know,” I mumbled, looking away, “Wouldn’t someone like me be more of a burden than an asset? I can’t even control my Ability, much less use it to help people—”
“But what if you could control it?”
I froze. Having had no control of my Ability for my entire life, the possibility hadn’t even occurred to me...
“There’s a way?” I asked, looking back up just as Dazai’s grin turned into a triumphant smirk. “How?”
“I could tell you,” he drawled, his smirk growing even wider, “But it’s a closely guarded secret. You’d have to join us if you want to find out... Of course, I’d be more than happy to vouch for you if you’d like to apply—”
“Dazai—!! You—!”
Kunikida was on his feet.
“We can’t just offer a job to every stray Ability User we rescue from the Port Mafia! Atsushi was one thing but—”
“Oh my, so you’d be perfectly fine sending a nice girl like her back into the jaws of the Port Mafia? Really, I thought better of you, Kunikiiiiiida-kun—”
“That’s not what I said!”
“So you agree, we should take her in?”
Kunikida’s face was in his hands.
“Look, it’s not that I don’t want to help, but it’s not our decision to make! And besides, she’s clearly been through enough, what makes you think she would agree to—”
“I’ll do it.”
Kunikida’s mouth dropped open. He looked stunned.
“You will—? Wait, no, I never said I agreed—”
“Let me apply,” I said, looking him firmly in the eyes. “I want to help people. I’ve always wanted to. Isn’t that what you do here at the Agency? Use your special Abilities to make their lives better?”
“That’s true,” Kunikida admitted, folding his arms over his chest, “But this can be a dangerous job. Especially for a non-combatant. You almost died today! Why do you want to help people so bad? In fact, let me ask you...”
His eyes flashed from behind his glasses, his expression fierce.
“Why did you go so far for a neighbor with whom you weren’t particularly close?”
I glared right back.
“I had to save her.”
“But it sounds like you already did, when you pulled her off the sidewalk—”
“That’s not good enough!” I burst out, startling Kunikida. “How could I say I saved her, truly saved her, if I knew she was going to die in a week and I did nothing to stop it?”
My hands clenched into fists.
“That doesn’t count. Saving someone means seeing it through to the end, to fully committing yourself and doing what’s right! Isn’t that what you did for me? What both of you did to bring me here today?”
Kunikida was struck dumb. Stuffing his hands into his pockets, Dazai got to his feet.
“I think it’s about time I take Kusunoki-san back to her apartment,” he said, making his way to the door, his long tanned trench coat swishing elegantly as he moved.
He patted Kunikida on the shoulder.
“I’ll let you think about what we should tell the President later.”
Kunikida instantly flushed an angry, embarrassed pink.
“Dazai, you—”
Ignoring his partner, Dazai called out to me.
“Kusunoki-san? I won’t be taking you back to your original apartment tonight. We’ll be going to one of the Agency’s safe houses instead. After everything that’s happened, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Port Mafia had staked out your building and had someone ready and waiting for you at home. And if you’re wondering, Yamazaki-san is on her way to her nephew’s place in Nagano, so you won’t need to worry about her.”
“But what about my things?” I asked, “What am I gonna tell the landlord?”
“It’s already been taken care of,” Dazai replied, opening the door for me. “Shall we?”
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prorevenge · 5 years
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High School Teacher bullied my dad, also bullied me, and in response, we nuke her.
XXL story, TL;DR at the end.
The town where this happened is a small one, and the school that I went to is a 70 year old school. My granddad and my dad are also alumni of this school. Let me just start off by saying this that the alumni of this school are really successful, and the school has had a long history of being very charitable and also offer amazing retirement benefits to teachers depending on how long they’ve worked here. My great granddad donated some of his property to the school when it was being constructed, and he was an advisor and a part of the school board in his time. The school was an all boys school up to 1996, when they had their first Co-Ed class, and is a full Co-Ed now. The school also has all classes, from kindergarten to high school, split in two buildings, the first one houses Kindergarten to Fifth grade, and the other has the classrooms for Sixth grade to Twelfth grade.
Part 1: Teacher vs Dad - The Incident
Said teacher (we’re gonna call her MD) was my dad’s Math teacher when he started High School. She was a young woman just finishing her teaching degree, and was a masters in math and Chemistry. At that point, she was the most qualified teacher the school had.
Unfortunately, MD was also a nasty person. She walked into the class and the students were expected to be sitting in ‘ready mode’ - backs straight, legs together, and hands on the laps, with only the needed textbook and a pencil to take notes on the margins. The class was expected to greet her with a ‘Good Morning/Afternoon’ when she walked in, and she assigned tons of weekend homework. She would simply stop teaching for the entire hour long class if one person spoke without having asked to speak. You couldn’t drink water without her permission, couldn’t go to the restroom unless she finally saw your raised hand and asked you to speak.
There were multiple cases of people complaining against that, but with her being the most qualified teacher there, the school board didn’t take action. Instead, they supported her by saying that this would help discipline the students.
But this is not even the beginning of it. Her exams were incredibly hard, and with the classes being full of teenage boys, they would talk and even one of them doing so would cause her to stop teaching, and not teach until the next class. She would then lecture on a different topic, completely skipping that part of Chemistry. Suffice to say, before the finals, the entire class was in a panicked state, trying to self study enough to at least pass the class.
My dad ended up getting 41%. Our education system said you failed the class if you had under 40%, so he was relieved that he passed. But when he went through his answer sheet, my dad noticed that his totaling was incorrect, and that he in fact had a 49 on that test. He raised his hand, and after about 5 minutes or so of him just sitting in his seat, calmly, with his hand raised, he was called on and MD asked what the problem was.
Dad told her that there was a totaling mistake in the final, and that he actually had a 49. This somehow offended her. Instead of calling him forth and checking his paper, MD decided that it was simply impossible for her, a Masters in Math, to make a mistake in something as simple as addition. She waved him off, and my dad was shocked. But she just calmly turned to the next person with a question.
My dad, on the other hand was not happy. He walked up from his seat, which was basically considered a crime in her class, and put the paper on MD’s desk, and started totaling his points loudly. MD incredulously watched him do that, and was at a loss for words. Though when he was done totaling, you could see her face was flushed and she was furious. She looked furiously from the paper to my dad, and then back to the paper, and the suddenly, a cruel smile appeared on her face.
MD: “Oh okay, I see the mistake. But that is no excuse for this behavior. This awards a subtraction of ten points from your final.”
The class that was amazed at the first sentence went back to having grim looks. And my dad stood there, jaw dropped, that he now had 39 points, and had failed this class.
Instead of responding and making this situation worse, he simply took his final, packed his backpack and left the classroom.
He went and spoke to his granddad, who was on the school board. But he said he couldn’t do anything since grades were completely in the hands of the teacher concerned. My dad took his loss, and decided that revenge was not worth the trouble, and switched classes. He dropped Chem and took up Econ, and that was the last interaction he ever had with this teacher.
Part 2: Teacher vs My Brother and I
My younger brother(B) is two years younger to me, and so, when I was in freshman year, starting high school, my younger brother was in seventh grade. We had an auditorium under construction, and the library was newly renovated, so a teacher was assigned to chaperone the younger class students at the library. My younger brother’s class, unfortunately had MD as their chaperone. My dad had specifically instructed me to be very careful around MD, and I was on the lookout, but my younger brother had no idea just who he was dealing with.
Before summer, our library allows students to take any two books of their choice, for the break. So, when my brother walked past MD to the librarian, and was stopped by MD, he was really confused. He had an Enid Blyton book and a copy of Backyard Science Experiments. Both my younger brother and I are really good at science related topics, and he had been waiting for summer break to do some cool science experiments at home with me.
MD: “Wait a minute, what book do you have there, B?’
B: “A story book and a Backyard Science Book ma’am.”
MD: “What are you going to do with that Backyard Science book! (Turning to the other library staff) I taught his father. No brains in there. You would have no idea what to do with this book. Leave it for someone who does.”
And with that, she snatched the book from his hands, and walked away, the library staff giving awkward laughs behind her.
When he came looking for me, crying, I was furious. I was a really popular guy at school. I won quizzes and debates, and represented the school in national competitions. My friends and I literally had an entire showcase of trophies at school, with our names embossed on it, and most teachers loved us. Man, the Vice Principal of the school and our group were on first name basis! (He chaperoned us on all the competitions we represented the school in).
But when he told me what had happened, I was dumbfounded. I had no idea how to react, but for the moment, I went to the library and got another copy of the Backyard Science book to console my brother. But then, we were out for summer vacation, and I didn’t think too much of it.
<Side note: In the summer, we attended a science summit, and my school friends and I won prizes for having the most efficient hydraulic-gear based pulley system, and the second fastest chemical fuel race boat. This was before I ever took a high school Chemistry or Physics course. This was announced in the school assembly the first day after summer break.>
When we came back for fall, I had a chem class with MD, the first day of school. This was also right after the assembly, where my group was given the award. So we go to the Chem lab, and MD is on the Lab Instructors desk setting up an experiment designed to liberate hydrochloric acid fumes in a gas flask. Some moments pass by, and we could see that some mistake had been done, and there was no reaction in the mixture (turns out the Zinc granules were impure and rusted). But MD somehow got the idea that turning on the Bunsen burner on full blast would help the experiment. After collecting the gas for about 3 minutes, which is 2 and a half minutes too long, since hydrochloric acid fumes are toxic if inhaled, she is satisfied. She then pulls up the flask to show the class how we do experiments.
Cherry on the icing, is when she opens the flask and brings it uncomfortably close to the girl beside me.
MD: “Does it smell pungent?”
The girl awkwardly smells it and jerks away. To someone who has no clue, that would be a plausible confirmation, but I knew that it was complete horse sh*t. I could see that the girl knew about pungent fumes and cringed away on reflex, and not because it was actually pungent.
I don’t know why I did it, but at that moment, I snorted. Loudly.
MD instantly zooms in on me. Walking toward me with her face contorting into an ugly expression, she goes, “something funny you’d care to share with us?’
I knew I messed up. But I was also angry. This person in front of me had bullied my younger brother, and my dad. I remembered that, and suddenly, all my verbal censors were shut down.
Me: “You and I both know that she didn’t smell anything pungent. That experiment you just did was a failure.”
MD: “Oh! You think you know more than me? (Turning to class) He knows more than me. You know what, I’ll step down. Why don’t you teach the class professor NicholasFiend.”
Me: “Oh absolutely.” To the absolute shock of everyone watching, I walk up to the podium, and while maintaining eye contact with MD, “First thing to remember class! Turn to experiment 1 of your lab textbook. Read the warnings. The gas is pungent, and poiso...”
MD: “HOW DARE YOU! Has no one taught you manners! This is no roadside shack, and you would do well to remember that. Else you’re gonna have a couple broken bones.” (This was in a different language, but if you want the exact translations, it was, ‘I’ll break your limbs and feed them to you’)
She is absolutely furious. Grabs me by the hand and proceeds to drag me to the Principal’s office. On the way there, we cross the Vice Principal’s office, and he sees MD dragging me away, and runs out .
VP: “What is going on here!”
Before I can say anything, MD starts ranting to him about how disrespectful and unacceptable my class behavior is, and is heaving by the end of her spiel. The VP gives me a searching look, and then responds with a, “Go back to class MD, I’ll deal with him.”
We head back to his office, and he offers me a seat, and a glass of water.
VP: “What actually happened in class, NicholasFiend?” He asks with a sigh.
I tell him exactly what happened. Once he hears my side of the story, he looks at me incredulously asks me if I really went to the podium and started lecturing the class.
I look up, and see the gobsmacked look on the VP’s normally reserved face. (Imagine someone who looks like a male Minerva McGonagall being completely shocked) I couldn’t stop myself. It started with a snigger, which turned into full blown laughter. I laughed till my stomach hurt and my eyes teared up. To my surprise, VP was also smiling widely at that.
He shook his head, and that reserved expression was back.
VP: “I know that what happened there had you concerned for class safety but that is no reason for such disruptive behavior. Aside from that, I’m personally going to investigate what happened in that class, and if MD is found to be intentionally forcing students to inhale harmful chemicals, she will be sacked immediately. Oh and you’re supposed to hand over a written apology to MD about this behavior. Now get moving.”
I sighed, and headed back to class. And I really thought that I had ended MD’s career.
Oh how wrong I was. She changed the story so it looked like she had purposely done the experiment wrong and was about to reprimand that girl for inhaling what could have been a harmful chemical. MD pulled one on me and had me look like I was just an insolent child who thought that he knew everything be reading a chapter of the book. And here, I stopped myself. This event was me just going in head on with the teacher who had been in the school for longer than 35 years.
Part 3: Pro Revenge Mode
Now I knew that to help my brother, I needed to get rid of her. My dad knew about what happened in school, and he wanted me to not engage MD. He said it was not worth it. But by now I was in the game. She had played her card. It was my turn now. I don’t know what made it so that she had such a problem with my dad and my younger brother. They were quiet and hard working students. I felt she had something against our family, and I was convinced that my younger brother would have to deal with the problem if I somehow messed up and got expelled or made a worse enemy out of MD.
This was war, and I had a new plan. I started to act really sheepish around her, and made it a point to stay back after class, and ask her questions in the most polite way possible. I was the kid who was guilty of not understanding the plans of elders. I portrayed myself as an amazing student who MD had succeeded in humbling. I slowly, but surely made my way into the category best described by the term ‘boot licker’. It hurt me inside to do it, but what I had planned, if this went well made me light headed with anticipation. I was in it to win it. I conceded defeat in a fight to win the war.
Two years later, I am in Junior year. My younger brother just started high school, and he was taking the Chem class with MD. I was the highest scorer in Chem, and was a pet to MD. She had started to like the NicholasFiend I had portrayed, and made me the Lab Assistant for that year. Two of my best friends knew what I had planned. Everyone else in class hated me for being the teachers’ pet and getting straight A’s when the next highest grade was a B-. Everything was going according to plan.
On the first day of class, I replaced her stool (one of the three legged ones) with a broken stool. This was supposed to be the first in a series of pranks that would hit her that day. She came to class and went to take her seat, and boy she fell.
Well, she somehow hit her hand on the wall and cried out. Yup that must have hurt. But she was definitely overweight. And it couldn’t be traced back to me. I smiled on the inside, as I rushed to her and helped her back up. I ran and fetched her another chair, while inside, the freshmen were trying their best not to laugh. When I got back from the room that had extra stools, I walked in to the sight of her screaming like a banshee. But what got me furious was that she was screaming at my younger brother.
Apparently, she had said something like, “Stupid stools and stupid Lab Assistant fools.” To which my brother had responded with, “It’s not my brothers’ fault you’re too heavy for the stool.” Though I loved him for it, he really needed to learn where to come to my aid. But then, I didn’t do much, and just replaced the chair silently, while silently trying to communicate to my brother to calm down.
Nothing else of concern happened that day, till the time when school was over, and the teachers were heading back. Stage 2 was in motion. We heard a loud bang, and immediately, the large crowd of students nearby all headed towards the teachers’ car parking lot.
We saw MD’s car smoking and her exhaust blown right off. Keep in mind it was an older car, and we had decided to block off the exhaust with clay, that had hardened over the course of six hours on a sunny day. Well, that car had to be towed, and she went home with some other students that day.
She didn’t show up to school for 2 days after that, but she did show up to school on the third day, which was a half school day, because our country celebrates Teachers day. It is tradition that students go to their teachers, current and old, and wish them the best, give them cards, gifts, etc. This was by far the most ambitious prank pulled in the school that I know of. The two days she was absent, we went around telling people to not visit her on children’s day. It helped a lot that my friends and I were some of the most popular people in school, and with the other ‘cool guys and girls’ agreeing to that, we spread the word and got confirmation that no one from the entire class in my year was going to go to her to wish her on Teachers’ day.
But the what actually happened was something no one could have expected. I guess it could have been because we acted so fanatical about it, that our classmates spread the word to all their friends and no one, not a single person in High School, went to her on Teachers’ day.
It was the most amazing feeling of accomplishment I have ever had. She had made this situation for herself. By being the nastiest person I’ve ever seen, it was no surprise that people were fine with doing this to her.
For the first time in 70 years, in our school, a teacher had not had a single well wisher on Teachers day.
Well things are never perfect, and as it so happened, word of what had conspired got to her. The next day, I had just set up the lab. The freshmen were getting settled in, and here comes MD, anger radiating from her in waves. She walks up to me, and I get the hardest slap I have ever gotten in my life, right across my face.
I’d hate to admit it, but that left a blue mark on my cheek, and my nose and lip bleeding. My younger brother, who saw that happening ran towards me, but my shock slowly subsided and I smiled a bloody smile that probably scared him. I told him to go get the Vice Principal.
Twenty minutes later, I was in the school emergency room, with a nurse wiping my lip and me holding a cloth to my nose. The Vice Principal comes in with the Principal and two cops in tow, and they inform me that my parents have been informed, and ask me if I would like to talk about it now or when my parents are here.
I say that I can answer their questions as soon as my lip is bandaged.
So I tell them about the cases of bullying against my brother and I, and also tell them that she is a really incompetent teacher. I tell the principal that he could check the school average in science subjects. And sure as I guessed, in the average scores in the National Exams, we had Physics and Biology come in at 92 and 90, with Chemistry at a surprising 79. Topping that off with assault charges, and she lost her license to teach, two years before she retired, and with that, lost amazing retirement benefits that the school offered. Her car also had no insurance. Huh.
That is not all though. One could ask what would be worse? Well, consider this. The fall she had off the stool, had her go to the hospital for an X-ray of her wrist and hip, that she suspected might have broken. Well, the wrist sure had a hairline fracture. The hip was fine. But well, the X-ray showed another thing.
I don’t think it is normal for anyone to laugh when someone is diagnosed with Stage III cancer. But I did.
Also, I later met with her only living family member. Her nephew, who had long cut all contact with her, but had been contacted by the police and the hospital. That’s where I found out the truth. Well I could never have guessed what I found out there. MD’s mom was my great granddad’s niece. Through my great granddad’s younger brother, who had stolen money from the family, and tried to kill my great granddad. Well, he was disowned. Good sh*t. And no one knew this entire time! Well, not that anyone would care. Happy that the nasty woman is out of our lives. For good this time. Apparently she died last year, with no one by her side.
TL;DR: Nasty teacher failed my dad for no reason. When my brother and I were in school, he got bullied by her. I made her regret it. Got her teaching license revoked, retirement benefits taken, destroyed her car, fractured her wrist, and she ended up getting diagnosed with cancer. Turned out to be a family member from a line disowned long ago for attempted murder, and she died alone.
(source) story by (/u/NicholasFiend)
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flydotnet · 5 years
Text
Tango à Trois - Chapter 1: Hollyhock
Next Chapter (TBA)
Summary: Aoi Zaizen is a confused bisexual girl with two crushes at once and who doesn't know how to cope with that. Miyu Sugisaki is Aoi's best friend with a crush and doesn't know how to cope with growing another crush. Yusaku Fujiki is a confused teenager with a crush on his classmate and doesn't know how to cope with having a crush at all.
Chapter Summary: (N/A)
Fandom: Yu-Gi-Oh! VRAINS Pairs: Aoi/Yusaku/Miyu (subsets: Zinnia, Angelmaker, future Moonlight), secondary Kiku/Takeru and Ema/Akira
Chapter Count: 1/?
Notes: If everything feels kind of weird, it's because it's all set in a no-LI, no-Link VRAINS-ish AU for VRAINS I've come up with like eons ago in Internet time.
I came up with this ship on the fly (haha pun) in a group chat on Discord and stuck with it for some goddamn reason, and now I can't let go of it. In case you were curious yes I actually have some semblance of plan for this despite having this rushed, shitty first chapter because this is literally a random outlet for when I'm less inspired by my actual WIP novels lmao. While I know nobody is really gonna give a shit, I'm still posting it to show there are other ships than DSS around this hell of an Earth
xoxo, Fly
AO3 version available here.
Aoi had always been a rather confused girl when it was about romance. She used to blame it on her brother’s overprotectiveness, but seeing as she was still confused when he started dating Ema, her current future sister-in-law (there was no way they were getting split up, they were the perfect awkward couple in her eyes), that had clearly been a wrong hypothesis and, needless to say, she felt dumb because of it.
In fact, Aoi was confused enough by what love even was to begin with. It was about finding people attractive and wanting to spend something like eternity with them, right? So why did she find everyone attractive? Why were girls cute and boys handsome? Wasn’t she supposed to be like her brother Akira and find either boys or girls attractive? He had told her it was fine if she was into girls, but he had never said anything about being into both, if that was the term for it. What if that wasn’t natural? What if she was never meant to find both attractive? Was she defective? So many questions…
 So she turned to her childhood best friend, Miyu. The latter had always been more in-touch with relationships and socializing, she’d have an answer, right? So they sent each other messages on one night, because Aoi was way too shy and intimidated to bring up such a sensitive topic in a public setting like school (someone could hear them, and it’d be catastrophic). Sure enough, Miyu told her it was called being bisexual, and it was perfectly normal.
Aoi’s heart strangely fluttered when her best friend, her most trusted confident, confessed to her that she, too, was bisexual and into both girls and boys. Was it relief or excitement, she didn’t know. She couldn’t guess or make a solid supposition, she couldn’t know.
 On another evening, she took it to Ema to make sure it was normal. Her brother’s girlfriend, recently turned fiancée, had truly become the big sister figure she had never gotten: Ema was the best person to confide something to and yet make sure her brother would never be aware of it unless Aoi told him herself. Ema had taken the topic seriously yet lightly, never overdramatizing everything like her sister-in-law had the tendency to do. However, even after confiding that she, too, was a bi lady (there really were a lot of bisexuals in her circles, huh), the flutter in Aoi’s heart didn’t appear again. She put it on the behalf that it could have just been her relief making her heart be all weird, but… there had to be something more to it. She knew it.
Aoi’s next step was talking it out with a long-distance friend she had met right before her brother had gotten his current job at SOL: Kiku. By that point, she knew she was bisexual and to distinguish romantic attraction from platonic feelings (mostly by using her brother and Kiku as references), but she still wanted to talk it out with another confident. Much to her fortune, Kiku took the news very well, wording huge words of supports and wishing her all the happiness in the world she could muster. The encouragement would have not been this overwhelming would Kiku’s boyfriend Takeru not have heard her happy squeals and joined in on the fun. Aoi was pretty sure she was radiating red when she got showered with an entire dictionary of nice words.
Eventually, she told her brother about it. Even if he was the one person she trusted the most in the world, the one she’d no doubt count on would something ever go wrong, the man who had raised her instead of their parents since she had been ten, she was still tense when telling him about it. He had shown distress at first, mostly because of how nervous she was when asking him “big brother, can we have a talk, please?”, but quickly untensed when she spat out the information. A pat on her shoulder and a hug later, her ears almost went deaf when he told her he was proud of her for being brave enough to tell him and wished her the best of lucks. Her entire being destressed with all of this behind her, but that didn’t solve another issue that had risen.
 The fluttering in her heart.
 The thing was, Aoi had ever only felt her heart flutter in this strange, intense way around two persons: Miyu and a boy from her class that she had eventually befriended. She wasn’t surprised to figure out she had a crush on Miyu: it only took her a few days to get over it, strangely enough. Perhaps it was because they had known each other for years; and knowing her best friend was no stranger to being attracted to girls comforted her into getting over it and acknowledging her romantic feelings. They had always been very close, always holding hands as children in the park and indulging in it when nobody was looking in middle school: there was nothing weird about what they were doing, what she was feeling.
Perhaps there even was a chance for Miyu to be in love with her too.
 However, the boy was another question altogether. Yusaku Fujiki was his name: he had always been rather quiet, not overly shrouded in mystery but never proactive in group conversations. They had shared classes for a few years by then, mostly subjects where she rather preferred teaming up with someone as discreet and apparently socially awkward as Fujiki rather than anyone else in the classroom (it also allowed her to escape from alpha bitchy popular girls and guys trying to hit on her as soon as they crossed gazes). Eventually, they became comrades, then friends, hanging out in most classes and between those to pass the time. Miyu had never been in the same class or workgroup as her: but it wasn’t too grievous when she had someone to rely upon, her now-trusted Yusaku.
Oh, that phrasing may have been too forward.
While Miyu and she had always been on a first-name basis, as calling each other by one’s surname was not a thing in kindergarten times, it hadn’t been the same with Fujiki. Getting to know each other as classmates passing papers off to each other to pass the time, helping each other in subjects in which they absolutely sucked (hers was Maths, his was Literature, and they were fine with that), joking about shared teachers were how they bonded, different experiences still retaining value to them: but they had to grow comfortable with the other and being close to them.
It wasn’t an easy task for someone like Aoi, who had always been “the SOL Security Manager’s sister” and trying to be profited upon (and, usually, her brother could immediately tell and sent them off): but Yusaku wasn’t like the others. He had never given a single damn about her brother’s job (or her brother at all, now that she thought about it), had never seen her as anything other than a classmate he liked to hang out with even outside of classes.
 And that was where it hurt, in a way.
 She was convinced Yusaku only saw them as that: friends. Considering their respective characters, it was already a miracle they had befriended each other and texted the other so often (as in, every day, and she was always excited to see what next trivia he could send her about his cat Ai and his friend Jin and his online best friend Takeru… Wait, that name was familiar), she couldn’t ask him to do much more than that. They were too introverted to have a mutual crush on each other…
…oh wait, that was even weirder.
Okay, finding both genders endearing and attractive was perfectly fine. Aoi was bi, her best friend was bi, her sister-in-law was bi… but falling in love with two persons at once, if that was her case, had to be abnormal. No, her feelings for Yusaku had to be something else… Perhaps she saw him as a twin brother? No chance, it was different from how she felt about her brother… Perhaps she saw him the same way she viewed Kiku, a trusty friend? No, no luck there either, there was the flutter and the weird pulses to hold his hand and maybe kiss him passionately against the wall… But then, what did she feel for Miyu?
The same thing, yes. Oops.
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