![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
neko_kirin3104068. Snorkel
Pair/s: Ohno/Sho
Prompt: 025 Snorkel
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 1522
Summary: The one about the missing necklace and a mysterious engraving on a tree.
Series: Prism (formerly, Waku Waku Orphans)
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18
There wasn’t really anything that Sho could say he treasured.
Not since he took off from home with the devil himself literally snarling and snapping at his heels.
The devil with the crocodile cane and a limping gait that had been Sho’s one saving grace.
Odd though, how he could hardly remember the actual running. Just that, he had woken up here, in some room and on some bed, with some pesky boy, not much younger than he was, burrowing a snotty face into his armpit.
Kazunari would fill him in on what he had supposedly forgotten in the morning.
“You’ve been here for close to a week.” The boy narrowed his eyes incredulously. “And I’ve been telling you that every day since. Are you really okay? Or are you just dim?”
He never did like Kazunari then. He doubted he felt any better seven days prior. “I’m not dim!”
“Then, you’re not okay?” The boy’s gaze grew wide with exaggerated fear. He even jumped off Sho’s bed and scrambled back to his own, hugging a pillow tight and gasping out, “You’re not insane or anything, right?”
“What—?! No!” Was he or wasn’t he? He couldn’t really tell. Not when he had obviously just lost a sizable chunk of his memory. His breath hitching, he instinctively fumbled at his chest. At the steadfastly calming lifeline that had always been there, but that he couldn’t really feel there anymore. “My necklace!”
“Your what?”
Sho bit his bottom lip against a sob, not wanting to look pitiful even when it’s exactly how he felt right now. Even though he had never met the man, or had never really felt even a slight bit of longing attachment to him, his dad’s necklace meant more to Sho than just a mere trinket.
It had been a constant presence on the most trying moments of his life thus far. It kept him company whenever he had to stay out by the lake. Made for such an amenable tool, too, for etching his childish, oft angsty, artworks on that maple tree. Slashing up lines and gouging out grooves to form familiar shapes and odd characters to distract himself, lose himself in that space, that moment, so his thoughts didn’t end up wandering back to the cabin, where Yumiko was spending the usual ‘strictly for Mommy only’ afternoon with another man.
It even helped him mark his growth progress on the tree like how he imagined a diligent dad would do. Except that it didn’t have any means of teasing him about how he seemed to be stuck at half a foot less than a garden elf, like how Yumiko would sometimes do.
It did, however, provided him with a quiet companion, when he got tired butchering the tree and was just lying on the blanket by the lake, watching the clouds lazily roll by as he clutched the hook pendant tightly in his hand.
Whenever he needed to calm the anxious stirrings in his chest, keep his curious mind from wandering all over the place, he would idly stroke his thumb along the bumps and fissures of the tribal patterns engraved on that brass pendant, and knew somehow that things would be okay. Eventually. Yumiko would be calling him back to the house any moment now, like how she always did. It was the one thing that Sho could completely trust her not to mess up on.
But Yumiko’s gone now. And apparently, so was the necklace—
“Aaaah! Why are you crying?!”
Kazunari’s squeaky exclamation jerked him out of his grieving headspace; an instinctive sob escaping his throat the moment he became aware of the warm trails of tears blitzing down his cheeks. He rubbed a hand to his face, took a deep breath and a couple more to try and pull himself back together, though every intake ended up in a sob and every expiration was a whimper.
“Hey...?”
He didn’t really hear the unexpected concern in Kazunari’s voice, but the warmth of the boy’s sudden presence beside him was enough to make him stop and pay attention. He turned his blurry gaze to his roommate just as the boy grabbed his hand with both of his, palm and stubby fingers curling into a warm and comforting grip that tugged at a corner of Sho’s chest.
“You’re really not all there, are you?” Kazunari’s gaze was surprisingly laced with fondness. His voice, too, was soft and calm. “But it’s gonna be okay. You’re gonna be okay.”
Kazunari began stroking his thumbs along Sho’s hand, drawing light circles on his skin, idly tracing the bumps and fissures on his palm, like the way he did to the hook that had always kept him anchored to his sanity.
And everything that went haywire within him—his nerves, his mind, his heart—began to settle and relax into the wordless reassurances of a boy he hardly even knew, but was already feeling an odd sort of connection with.
Beyond the walls of their room, though, Kazunari was just a mean little boy who seemed to have it in for him.
And Sho could easily just forget whatever bit of fondness he had started feeling for his roommate the previous night, only to get reminded of it again at bedtime.
Whenever Kazunari crawled into his bed to cuddle with him, he couldn’t find it in himself to refuse the boy.
He almost felt bad when he got transferred to another room. Almost, being the operative word.
“But, why?” he asked Headmaster Hatori, when he was called to the office to be informed about the room transfer. He took all efforts he could to keep his eyes focused on the headmaster so they didn’t end up staring at the portrait hanging on the wall behind the man. The fat lady on it kept staring at him, as though threatening to turn him to stone if he as much as met her gaze. He knew it was ridiculous, but he also didn’t want to tempt fate.
“No special reason. Just that Oh-chan needs a roommate.”
Sho frowned at the headmaster’s apparent discomfort. “I already have a roommate.”
“Yeah, but Oh-chan doesn’t.”
“What do I have to do with Oh-chan?”
“Nothing that you don’t already know.”
It would’ve been funny, the way Headmaster Hatori gasped at his own words. But neither of them felt like laughing. And Sho didn’t think it would be any use asking what the old man meant, because said old man didn’t seem like he himself had understood what he just said.
If anything, Headmaster Hatori looked troubled by it, with the way his brows kept twitching as he dabbed a handkerchief to his face. “Just... go get your things and do as I say, all right, Sho-kun?”
“Fine,” he mumbled, then bowed and left the room. But not before giving in to his own morbid curiosity and stealing a glance at the portrait that seemed to have hounded him to the door with a warning scowl.
Kazunari wasn’t in their room when he went back to supposedly get his things. He didn’t really own anything, not even the unfamiliar clothes he was currently wearing. But he had wanted to at least say a few things to the boy.
Then again, what would it matter? It wasn’t like he was going away to the other side of town. Surely, they’d still be seeing each other every day, and everyday he would still be Kazunari’s most favored prank victim.
Oh-chan, however, was waiting for him in the room that they were going to share.
“Hey...” The boy smiled from the bay window right across the room from the door.
“Yo...” Sho mumbled with a half-hearted wave. “I’m Sho Sakurai. Headmaster Hatori says we’ll be roomies from now on.”
“All right!” Oh-chan jumped from the window with a nimbleness and enthusiasm that instantly made Sho’s heart race for many different reasons. “I’m Ohno. Satoshi Ohno.”
Sho frowned at the hand that the grinning boy extended out to him. Something about that name had just joggled a previously muted part of his memory. He barely brushed palms with the boy, their handshake lasting not even a second, and yet already managing to charge his hand with tiny pinpricks of heat that fueled the vision he was suddenly seeing in his head.
Of himself back at that lake, his fingers curiously ghosting over a character on his maple tree that he did not at all remember putting there—
“Everybody around here calls me Oh-chan. I prefer Satoshi, though. You can choose whichever you want.”
“Satoshi...” Sho said in a pensive whisper, still seeing that vision of himself carefully tracing the strokes on the name that had mysteriously appeared beside his own name that he did remember engraving on the tree. “You’re Satoshi...”
It didn’t come to him all at once, but Sho had always felt it since then—
“Yeah. I guess, you can call me Satoshi...”
What Satoshi was and the terrifyingly bizarre way that the boy and this whole place had come into existence.
“And you’ll be my Sho-chan from now on..."
Next>>>>>
***Sho’s hook pendant should look more or less like this.
Pair/s: Ohno/Sho
Prompt: 025 Snorkel
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 1522
Summary: The one about the missing necklace and a mysterious engraving on a tree.
Series: Prism (formerly, Waku Waku Orphans)
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18
There wasn’t really anything that Sho could say he treasured.
Not since he took off from home with the devil himself literally snarling and snapping at his heels.
The devil with the crocodile cane and a limping gait that had been Sho’s one saving grace.
Odd though, how he could hardly remember the actual running. Just that, he had woken up here, in some room and on some bed, with some pesky boy, not much younger than he was, burrowing a snotty face into his armpit.
Kazunari would fill him in on what he had supposedly forgotten in the morning.
“You’ve been here for close to a week.” The boy narrowed his eyes incredulously. “And I’ve been telling you that every day since. Are you really okay? Or are you just dim?”
He never did like Kazunari then. He doubted he felt any better seven days prior. “I’m not dim!”
“Then, you’re not okay?” The boy’s gaze grew wide with exaggerated fear. He even jumped off Sho’s bed and scrambled back to his own, hugging a pillow tight and gasping out, “You’re not insane or anything, right?”
“What—?! No!” Was he or wasn’t he? He couldn’t really tell. Not when he had obviously just lost a sizable chunk of his memory. His breath hitching, he instinctively fumbled at his chest. At the steadfastly calming lifeline that had always been there, but that he couldn’t really feel there anymore. “My necklace!”
“Your what?”
Sho bit his bottom lip against a sob, not wanting to look pitiful even when it’s exactly how he felt right now. Even though he had never met the man, or had never really felt even a slight bit of longing attachment to him, his dad’s necklace meant more to Sho than just a mere trinket.
It had been a constant presence on the most trying moments of his life thus far. It kept him company whenever he had to stay out by the lake. Made for such an amenable tool, too, for etching his childish, oft angsty, artworks on that maple tree. Slashing up lines and gouging out grooves to form familiar shapes and odd characters to distract himself, lose himself in that space, that moment, so his thoughts didn’t end up wandering back to the cabin, where Yumiko was spending the usual ‘strictly for Mommy only’ afternoon with another man.
It even helped him mark his growth progress on the tree like how he imagined a diligent dad would do. Except that it didn’t have any means of teasing him about how he seemed to be stuck at half a foot less than a garden elf, like how Yumiko would sometimes do.
It did, however, provided him with a quiet companion, when he got tired butchering the tree and was just lying on the blanket by the lake, watching the clouds lazily roll by as he clutched the hook pendant tightly in his hand.
Whenever he needed to calm the anxious stirrings in his chest, keep his curious mind from wandering all over the place, he would idly stroke his thumb along the bumps and fissures of the tribal patterns engraved on that brass pendant, and knew somehow that things would be okay. Eventually. Yumiko would be calling him back to the house any moment now, like how she always did. It was the one thing that Sho could completely trust her not to mess up on.
But Yumiko’s gone now. And apparently, so was the necklace—
“Aaaah! Why are you crying?!”
Kazunari’s squeaky exclamation jerked him out of his grieving headspace; an instinctive sob escaping his throat the moment he became aware of the warm trails of tears blitzing down his cheeks. He rubbed a hand to his face, took a deep breath and a couple more to try and pull himself back together, though every intake ended up in a sob and every expiration was a whimper.
“Hey...?”
He didn’t really hear the unexpected concern in Kazunari’s voice, but the warmth of the boy’s sudden presence beside him was enough to make him stop and pay attention. He turned his blurry gaze to his roommate just as the boy grabbed his hand with both of his, palm and stubby fingers curling into a warm and comforting grip that tugged at a corner of Sho’s chest.
“You’re really not all there, are you?” Kazunari’s gaze was surprisingly laced with fondness. His voice, too, was soft and calm. “But it’s gonna be okay. You’re gonna be okay.”
Kazunari began stroking his thumbs along Sho’s hand, drawing light circles on his skin, idly tracing the bumps and fissures on his palm, like the way he did to the hook that had always kept him anchored to his sanity.
And everything that went haywire within him—his nerves, his mind, his heart—began to settle and relax into the wordless reassurances of a boy he hardly even knew, but was already feeling an odd sort of connection with.
Beyond the walls of their room, though, Kazunari was just a mean little boy who seemed to have it in for him.
And Sho could easily just forget whatever bit of fondness he had started feeling for his roommate the previous night, only to get reminded of it again at bedtime.
Whenever Kazunari crawled into his bed to cuddle with him, he couldn’t find it in himself to refuse the boy.
He almost felt bad when he got transferred to another room. Almost, being the operative word.
“But, why?” he asked Headmaster Hatori, when he was called to the office to be informed about the room transfer. He took all efforts he could to keep his eyes focused on the headmaster so they didn’t end up staring at the portrait hanging on the wall behind the man. The fat lady on it kept staring at him, as though threatening to turn him to stone if he as much as met her gaze. He knew it was ridiculous, but he also didn’t want to tempt fate.
“No special reason. Just that Oh-chan needs a roommate.”
Sho frowned at the headmaster’s apparent discomfort. “I already have a roommate.”
“Yeah, but Oh-chan doesn’t.”
“What do I have to do with Oh-chan?”
“Nothing that you don’t already know.”
It would’ve been funny, the way Headmaster Hatori gasped at his own words. But neither of them felt like laughing. And Sho didn’t think it would be any use asking what the old man meant, because said old man didn’t seem like he himself had understood what he just said.
If anything, Headmaster Hatori looked troubled by it, with the way his brows kept twitching as he dabbed a handkerchief to his face. “Just... go get your things and do as I say, all right, Sho-kun?”
“Fine,” he mumbled, then bowed and left the room. But not before giving in to his own morbid curiosity and stealing a glance at the portrait that seemed to have hounded him to the door with a warning scowl.
Kazunari wasn’t in their room when he went back to supposedly get his things. He didn’t really own anything, not even the unfamiliar clothes he was currently wearing. But he had wanted to at least say a few things to the boy.
Then again, what would it matter? It wasn’t like he was going away to the other side of town. Surely, they’d still be seeing each other every day, and everyday he would still be Kazunari’s most favored prank victim.
Oh-chan, however, was waiting for him in the room that they were going to share.
“Hey...” The boy smiled from the bay window right across the room from the door.
“Yo...” Sho mumbled with a half-hearted wave. “I’m Sho Sakurai. Headmaster Hatori says we’ll be roomies from now on.”
“All right!” Oh-chan jumped from the window with a nimbleness and enthusiasm that instantly made Sho’s heart race for many different reasons. “I’m Ohno. Satoshi Ohno.”
Sho frowned at the hand that the grinning boy extended out to him. Something about that name had just joggled a previously muted part of his memory. He barely brushed palms with the boy, their handshake lasting not even a second, and yet already managing to charge his hand with tiny pinpricks of heat that fueled the vision he was suddenly seeing in his head.
Of himself back at that lake, his fingers curiously ghosting over a character on his maple tree that he did not at all remember putting there—
“Everybody around here calls me Oh-chan. I prefer Satoshi, though. You can choose whichever you want.”
“Satoshi...” Sho said in a pensive whisper, still seeing that vision of himself carefully tracing the strokes on the name that had mysteriously appeared beside his own name that he did remember engraving on the tree. “You’re Satoshi...”
It didn’t come to him all at once, but Sho had always felt it since then—
“Yeah. I guess, you can call me Satoshi...”
What Satoshi was and the terrifyingly bizarre way that the boy and this whole place had come into existence.
“And you’ll be my Sho-chan from now on..."
Next>>>>>
***Sho’s hook pendant should look more or less like this.
