Challenge – Yama Pair Shorts: 070 Jump
Nov. 17th, 2014 04:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
neko_kirin3104070. Jump
Pair/s: Ohno/Sho
Prompt: 012 Jump
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 2302
Summary: What happened before Kazunari went missing.
Series: Prism (formerly, Waku Waku Orphans)
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20
“I lost a tooth.”
Sho narrowed his eyes at the boy who had just scooted to his side at the breakfast table. “What?”
Kazunari hooked a finger to his lips and pulled down to expose the lower left-side corner of his mouth. “Look.” He swiped his tongue on the gap where a molar should’ve been. “See?”
Sho peered in, furrowing his brows in both interest and concern. “What happened?” He consciously brushed his tongue along his own choppers to make sure that he’s not missing anything himself.
“I woke up and it’s just gone.”
“Oh no!” Sho wheezed, dropping his spoon to the floor. A few curious looks were turned their way. Kazunari bumped his shoulder and gestured for him to keep it down. “Did you swallow it in your sleep?” he snarled under his breath while straining to reach down and grope the floor for his spoon without breaking gazes with Kazunari.
“No,” Kazunari mumbled, his lips barely moving; eyes shifting cautiously to check if the coast was clear before leaning closer and practically gasping out, “I think Oh-chan took it!”
Sho pulled back instinctively, his face screwing up into a snarl just as his fingers curled into an angry fist around the spoon he had just retrieved. “What the hell, Kazunari?!” The boy had already fooled him with crackpot stories like this for more times than he’d care to remember. He should’ve really known better by now.
“I’ve been feeling sleepy more often, too.” Kazunari turned his eyes to his breakfast tray, pointedly ignoring Sho’s now very obvious, and no doubt also very red, contempt. “And yesterday, my nose bled again— ”
“What’s all that got to do with Satoshi?”
“Didn’t he push you down the stairs—?”
“I slipped.” Sho’s heart protested with a misplaced throb. A part of him didn’t believe the lie he had been telling himself about what happened the night he broke his arm. But the part who didn’t want to cause unnecessary trouble had always kept him from looking the truth in the eye—
That Satoshi might not have exactly pushed him, but the boy wasn’t exactly innocent either.
And even though his arm was healing faster than he would’ve expected, the wariness and suspicion that the incident had brought was still secretly pulsating, building up in Sho’s nerves.
“Did you really, Sho-chan?” Kazunari’s gaze was surprisingly more concerned than challenging. It only made Sho feel more uncomfortably exposed.”And what about that boy he supposedly made disappear? Did he just vanish on his own, too?”
Sho’s hand shook violently as he placed the spoon on the table. There was so much lump amassing at his throat, in his chest, that he felt like he could blow himself inside out with the slightest cough.
He took a deep breath, narrowed his eyes. “I slipped,” he insisted.
Satoshi appeared at the doorway then, still rubbing the sleep from his eyes, making Kazunari balk away with a derisive scowl. The boy picked his tray up and practically leaped back to the table he was sharing with Yoko without another word.
“You didn’t wake me up, Sho-chan!” Satoshi whined when he got to the table with his breakfast tray. He sat down opposite Sho with a pitiful pout. “Come to think of it, you never did wake me up! Why is that?”
Sho’s head was still swelling with all the muted thoughts that the brief conversation with Kazunari had sparked back to life, more viciously consuming now than he would’ve ever allowed it to be.
But he gulped, willed his nerves to calm down, and put all of his remaining strength into the smirk he barely managed to give his roommate. “Isn’t that Shibata-san’s job?”
“Well, yeah.” The foreboding frown that flashed across Satoshi’s face was there for only a blink, before the boy was pouting again, and whining like the harmless roommate that Sho used to know, was fondly familiar with. “But I’d really want to come down together for breakfast with you, you know?”
Sho flushed under the boy’s doting gaze. He bit his lip and turned his eyes to his tray, trying to find comfort in Miss Ayase’s breakfast fried rice and getting none.
Why was it that no matter how scared and wary of Satoshi he thought he should be, he always ended up just falling right back into the boy’s charms with just one look that said everything he wanted to believe about Satoshi Ohno?
“Uhm, yum!” his roommate crooned around a mouthful of rice, face scrunched up in a look of utter bliss.
Sho giggled at the sight of it.
His injured hand curled into a fist in silent protest.
Sho had no idea just how big Waku Waku was. He had seen in more than a handful of times from outside whenever he sneaked out with Satoshi to that hill on Old Man Joshima’s field, or was sent to dig up potatoes for dinner with either Yoko or Hina.
If he were to compare it to the cabin that used to be his home though, he’d say it’s probably a hundred times wider and about as much floors higher with the naive exaggeration of a boy who had lived all his life in cooped up spaces.
Whenever he was left with some time to idle around by himself, while Satoshi raged childish havoc out in the courtyard with Masaki and Quirky Shingo and some of the other Waku Waku boys he got along with (or not) on any particular day, Sho liked getting lost in the hallways. Walking down familiar passages and turning into corners leading to more unfamiliar pathways to explore.
He felt like the whole place seemed to be expanding to accommodate his tireless curiosity. For every time he went on this sort of hunting trips, there was always something new he’d see that he had never seen before. New corners, new pathways, new discoveries.
There was, however, one particular hallway that he had developed quite a fondness for. Because in it, and for some odd reason, he thought he could hear Yumiko’s voice humming to him from the walls.
It scared the bejesus out of him that first time, but grew to like it fairly quickly. It was, after all, his mom.
There was always a special kind of delight swelling in his heart whenever he turned into that hallway and there was suddenly his mom’s voice—soft and haunting—chanting out that familiar song she would always insist on singing to Sho at night—
“Kono ki nanno ki kininaru ki...”
Sho remembered how he would whine about being too grown up for lullabies. How he would complain about using such an old song from some old commercial that Sho wasn’t even old enough to have seen—
“...yumemite yumemite sonohi wo machimashou...”
But Yumiko would just keep singing, while brushing her hand through his hair, until he could no longer do anything more but sigh. And smile. And close his eyes.
Because he really did love that song. And he absolutely loved his mom singing it to him every night—
“...kono ki nanno ki kininaru ki...”
Even now that he had been here for four years, and had been coming down to this hallway for more times than he’d bother to count, he could still vividly hear the loving chants from the walls, guiding his every careful steps. Caressing the palm he was brushing along the wall with the warm breath of his precious memories—
“...konoki no konoki no shita de aimashou...”
He froze and opened his eyes when he heard a sob. Then the song started again, but this time it was in a different voice. Small, choked up, scared, and very real.
He followed the voice, his steps trembling along with his breath as he neared the dark corner from where it was coming from.
“Kazu...?”
The boy just kept chanting in broken sobs as he hugged his legs closer to himself and rocked his small, quivering frame against the wall, his face buried deep in his knees. “Kono ki nanno ki kininaru ki...” He was stuck on that one line, repeating it over and over in a progressively faster trill.
Sho dropped to his knees beside Kazunari and grabbed the boy’s shoulder with his good hand. “Kazu, hey! What’s wrong?”
Kazunari finally stopped singing and whispered, “I saw it.”
“What?!” Sho squeaked, no longer able to tame the apprehension in his chest. “What did you see?!”
Kazunari raised his teary gaze to Sho as he unfolded his fist to show a vial with a blood-stained molar in it. “My tooth! It’s my tooth! It’s mine! It’s mine!”
There was a brief moment when Sho wondered whether this was just one of the boy’s more elaborate pranks. But could Kazunari really fake such a genuine look of fear in his eyes?
He took the vial, his eyes only slightly wary, and turned it around in his palm. There was nothing in it that Sho thought could validate Kazunari’s claim (it could very well be just a fake tooth the boy had found somewhere), but seeing the date sprawled out on a paper neatly stuck by clear tape around the vial’s body squeezed his heart and made him gasp—
June 17.
“It’s my birthday,” Kazunari said, still choking on his muffled sobs. His eyes red and swollen and showed no signs at all of the mischievous brat that Sho used to know and had oddly grown to be rather fond of.
“Where’d you get this?” he asked.
Kazunari pointed a shaky finger at something behind Sho. “I—In there!”
Sho looked over his shoulder and frowned at the red door that he would often stand in front of whenever he went down this hall. He had always wanted to see what was behind it, but it had also always been locked.
How Kazunari even managed to open it seemed to be a small matter compared to finding out what was in that mysterious room that had always teased Sho’s curiosity.
He grabbed Kazunari’s arm and tried to pull the boy up.
“NO!” Kazunari protested. “I’m not going in there—!”
“I’m not leaving you out here, okay?” Sho flinched at how loud his own voice had sounded. Kazunari took it as enough cue to relent and follow him inside.
It was the smell that hit him first. Of blood and something rotten that he couldn’t quite place. Then it was gone just as quickly as it came. And all that’s there was a room that looked no different from any other room in Waku Waku. A bay window there. Two beds here. A dresser in between. And a mirror in one corner—
“It was in there...” Kazunari pointed to a small cupboard by the bay window. No other room had anything like it, as far as he could tell. Sho walked to it with apprehensive steps, dragging the boy along and gripping the vial in his injured hand.
He kneeled before it and pulled one lid open first, his breath and heart already hitching even before he could open the other.
Inside were several other disembodied molars sealed in vials neatly arranged in files and ranks like little tin soldiers awaiting their leader’s next command. Each of them was labeled with the owner’s birthday too, much like the one that Kazunari was claiming to be his
“What the hell is this?” Sho drawled, horrified. He instinctively scanned the hoard for a particular date, almost choking on the panicked lump that rose to his throat when he found it. He reached in and took the vial marked, August 30.
“It’s from that boy, right? The one we can’t remember?” Kazunari squeaked beside him. “Oh my god! Is Oh-chan gonna make me disappear, too?!”
Sho was looking into Kazunari’s frightened eyes for a long time before he managed to pull himself back together and grip the boy’s hand in an intended reassurance that ended up cold and barely comforting.
Things had clearly gone far beyond Kazunari’s make-believe stories and cleverly fleshed out pranks this time. And Sho had yet to figure out just how he was supposed to wrap his brain around all of it.
“I’m scared. I’m scared, Sho-chan!”
Without even thinking about it, Sho pulled the younger boy in a tight embrace with his one good arm, oddly noting how they were almost the same height now, of all things. “We can’t let Satoshi find out or even suspect we’ve been to this room. Do you understand, Kazunari?”
“I’m not going back out there!” Kazunari snarled into his chest.
“But he might come back here and see you!” Sho snarled back, promptly catching his breath when the boy pulled away to look into his eyes.
“Then don’t let him come,” Kazunari pleaded, clutching Sho’s shirt with trembling hands. “Don’t let him come for me, Sho-chan. Please...” The boy wrapped his arms around Sho’s waist and buried his face back into Sho’s chest. “Please, don’t let Satoshi come in here and hurt me...”
Sho left the room with a determined promise that he would never let anything happen to Kazunari.
He was already halfway down the hall when he remembered how the boy had fumbled with his pocket for a moment before completely pulling away from his embrace.
Sho pushed his good hand into his pocket, his fingers practically freezing around the familiar brassy feel of the memento he thought was long gone.
He didn’t even need to pull the thing out to see. He already knew what it was.
He just couldn’t understand why Kazunari had taken it and hidden it away from him for this long—
He didn’t even notice the silence that guided his steps down the hallway that used to be his special place.
Next>>>>>
***Song lyrics borrowed from the Hitachi advert jingle, What Tree Is This Tree. The one that Nino chanted on VSA Hawaii SP. xp
Pair/s: Ohno/Sho
Prompt: 012 Jump
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 2302
Summary: What happened before Kazunari went missing.
Series: Prism (formerly, Waku Waku Orphans)
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20
“I lost a tooth.”
Sho narrowed his eyes at the boy who had just scooted to his side at the breakfast table. “What?”
Kazunari hooked a finger to his lips and pulled down to expose the lower left-side corner of his mouth. “Look.” He swiped his tongue on the gap where a molar should’ve been. “See?”
Sho peered in, furrowing his brows in both interest and concern. “What happened?” He consciously brushed his tongue along his own choppers to make sure that he’s not missing anything himself.
“I woke up and it’s just gone.”
“Oh no!” Sho wheezed, dropping his spoon to the floor. A few curious looks were turned their way. Kazunari bumped his shoulder and gestured for him to keep it down. “Did you swallow it in your sleep?” he snarled under his breath while straining to reach down and grope the floor for his spoon without breaking gazes with Kazunari.
“No,” Kazunari mumbled, his lips barely moving; eyes shifting cautiously to check if the coast was clear before leaning closer and practically gasping out, “I think Oh-chan took it!”
Sho pulled back instinctively, his face screwing up into a snarl just as his fingers curled into an angry fist around the spoon he had just retrieved. “What the hell, Kazunari?!” The boy had already fooled him with crackpot stories like this for more times than he’d care to remember. He should’ve really known better by now.
“I’ve been feeling sleepy more often, too.” Kazunari turned his eyes to his breakfast tray, pointedly ignoring Sho’s now very obvious, and no doubt also very red, contempt. “And yesterday, my nose bled again— ”
“What’s all that got to do with Satoshi?”
“Didn’t he push you down the stairs—?”
“I slipped.” Sho’s heart protested with a misplaced throb. A part of him didn’t believe the lie he had been telling himself about what happened the night he broke his arm. But the part who didn’t want to cause unnecessary trouble had always kept him from looking the truth in the eye—
That Satoshi might not have exactly pushed him, but the boy wasn’t exactly innocent either.
And even though his arm was healing faster than he would’ve expected, the wariness and suspicion that the incident had brought was still secretly pulsating, building up in Sho’s nerves.
“Did you really, Sho-chan?” Kazunari’s gaze was surprisingly more concerned than challenging. It only made Sho feel more uncomfortably exposed.”And what about that boy he supposedly made disappear? Did he just vanish on his own, too?”
Sho’s hand shook violently as he placed the spoon on the table. There was so much lump amassing at his throat, in his chest, that he felt like he could blow himself inside out with the slightest cough.
He took a deep breath, narrowed his eyes. “I slipped,” he insisted.
Satoshi appeared at the doorway then, still rubbing the sleep from his eyes, making Kazunari balk away with a derisive scowl. The boy picked his tray up and practically leaped back to the table he was sharing with Yoko without another word.
“You didn’t wake me up, Sho-chan!” Satoshi whined when he got to the table with his breakfast tray. He sat down opposite Sho with a pitiful pout. “Come to think of it, you never did wake me up! Why is that?”
Sho’s head was still swelling with all the muted thoughts that the brief conversation with Kazunari had sparked back to life, more viciously consuming now than he would’ve ever allowed it to be.
But he gulped, willed his nerves to calm down, and put all of his remaining strength into the smirk he barely managed to give his roommate. “Isn’t that Shibata-san’s job?”
“Well, yeah.” The foreboding frown that flashed across Satoshi’s face was there for only a blink, before the boy was pouting again, and whining like the harmless roommate that Sho used to know, was fondly familiar with. “But I’d really want to come down together for breakfast with you, you know?”
Sho flushed under the boy’s doting gaze. He bit his lip and turned his eyes to his tray, trying to find comfort in Miss Ayase’s breakfast fried rice and getting none.
Why was it that no matter how scared and wary of Satoshi he thought he should be, he always ended up just falling right back into the boy’s charms with just one look that said everything he wanted to believe about Satoshi Ohno?
“Uhm, yum!” his roommate crooned around a mouthful of rice, face scrunched up in a look of utter bliss.
Sho giggled at the sight of it.
His injured hand curled into a fist in silent protest.
+++
Sho had no idea just how big Waku Waku was. He had seen in more than a handful of times from outside whenever he sneaked out with Satoshi to that hill on Old Man Joshima’s field, or was sent to dig up potatoes for dinner with either Yoko or Hina.
If he were to compare it to the cabin that used to be his home though, he’d say it’s probably a hundred times wider and about as much floors higher with the naive exaggeration of a boy who had lived all his life in cooped up spaces.
Whenever he was left with some time to idle around by himself, while Satoshi raged childish havoc out in the courtyard with Masaki and Quirky Shingo and some of the other Waku Waku boys he got along with (or not) on any particular day, Sho liked getting lost in the hallways. Walking down familiar passages and turning into corners leading to more unfamiliar pathways to explore.
He felt like the whole place seemed to be expanding to accommodate his tireless curiosity. For every time he went on this sort of hunting trips, there was always something new he’d see that he had never seen before. New corners, new pathways, new discoveries.
There was, however, one particular hallway that he had developed quite a fondness for. Because in it, and for some odd reason, he thought he could hear Yumiko’s voice humming to him from the walls.
It scared the bejesus out of him that first time, but grew to like it fairly quickly. It was, after all, his mom.
There was always a special kind of delight swelling in his heart whenever he turned into that hallway and there was suddenly his mom’s voice—soft and haunting—chanting out that familiar song she would always insist on singing to Sho at night—
“Kono ki nanno ki kininaru ki...”
Sho remembered how he would whine about being too grown up for lullabies. How he would complain about using such an old song from some old commercial that Sho wasn’t even old enough to have seen—
“...yumemite yumemite sonohi wo machimashou...”
But Yumiko would just keep singing, while brushing her hand through his hair, until he could no longer do anything more but sigh. And smile. And close his eyes.
Because he really did love that song. And he absolutely loved his mom singing it to him every night—
“...kono ki nanno ki kininaru ki...”
Even now that he had been here for four years, and had been coming down to this hallway for more times than he’d bother to count, he could still vividly hear the loving chants from the walls, guiding his every careful steps. Caressing the palm he was brushing along the wall with the warm breath of his precious memories—
“...konoki no konoki no shita de aimashou...”
He froze and opened his eyes when he heard a sob. Then the song started again, but this time it was in a different voice. Small, choked up, scared, and very real.
He followed the voice, his steps trembling along with his breath as he neared the dark corner from where it was coming from.
“Kazu...?”
The boy just kept chanting in broken sobs as he hugged his legs closer to himself and rocked his small, quivering frame against the wall, his face buried deep in his knees. “Kono ki nanno ki kininaru ki...” He was stuck on that one line, repeating it over and over in a progressively faster trill.
Sho dropped to his knees beside Kazunari and grabbed the boy’s shoulder with his good hand. “Kazu, hey! What’s wrong?”
Kazunari finally stopped singing and whispered, “I saw it.”
“What?!” Sho squeaked, no longer able to tame the apprehension in his chest. “What did you see?!”
Kazunari raised his teary gaze to Sho as he unfolded his fist to show a vial with a blood-stained molar in it. “My tooth! It’s my tooth! It’s mine! It’s mine!”
There was a brief moment when Sho wondered whether this was just one of the boy’s more elaborate pranks. But could Kazunari really fake such a genuine look of fear in his eyes?
He took the vial, his eyes only slightly wary, and turned it around in his palm. There was nothing in it that Sho thought could validate Kazunari’s claim (it could very well be just a fake tooth the boy had found somewhere), but seeing the date sprawled out on a paper neatly stuck by clear tape around the vial’s body squeezed his heart and made him gasp—
June 17.
“It’s my birthday,” Kazunari said, still choking on his muffled sobs. His eyes red and swollen and showed no signs at all of the mischievous brat that Sho used to know and had oddly grown to be rather fond of.
“Where’d you get this?” he asked.
Kazunari pointed a shaky finger at something behind Sho. “I—In there!”
Sho looked over his shoulder and frowned at the red door that he would often stand in front of whenever he went down this hall. He had always wanted to see what was behind it, but it had also always been locked.
How Kazunari even managed to open it seemed to be a small matter compared to finding out what was in that mysterious room that had always teased Sho’s curiosity.
He grabbed Kazunari’s arm and tried to pull the boy up.
“NO!” Kazunari protested. “I’m not going in there—!”
“I’m not leaving you out here, okay?” Sho flinched at how loud his own voice had sounded. Kazunari took it as enough cue to relent and follow him inside.
It was the smell that hit him first. Of blood and something rotten that he couldn’t quite place. Then it was gone just as quickly as it came. And all that’s there was a room that looked no different from any other room in Waku Waku. A bay window there. Two beds here. A dresser in between. And a mirror in one corner—
“It was in there...” Kazunari pointed to a small cupboard by the bay window. No other room had anything like it, as far as he could tell. Sho walked to it with apprehensive steps, dragging the boy along and gripping the vial in his injured hand.
He kneeled before it and pulled one lid open first, his breath and heart already hitching even before he could open the other.
Inside were several other disembodied molars sealed in vials neatly arranged in files and ranks like little tin soldiers awaiting their leader’s next command. Each of them was labeled with the owner’s birthday too, much like the one that Kazunari was claiming to be his
“What the hell is this?” Sho drawled, horrified. He instinctively scanned the hoard for a particular date, almost choking on the panicked lump that rose to his throat when he found it. He reached in and took the vial marked, August 30.
“It’s from that boy, right? The one we can’t remember?” Kazunari squeaked beside him. “Oh my god! Is Oh-chan gonna make me disappear, too?!”
Sho was looking into Kazunari’s frightened eyes for a long time before he managed to pull himself back together and grip the boy’s hand in an intended reassurance that ended up cold and barely comforting.
Things had clearly gone far beyond Kazunari’s make-believe stories and cleverly fleshed out pranks this time. And Sho had yet to figure out just how he was supposed to wrap his brain around all of it.
“I’m scared. I’m scared, Sho-chan!”
Without even thinking about it, Sho pulled the younger boy in a tight embrace with his one good arm, oddly noting how they were almost the same height now, of all things. “We can’t let Satoshi find out or even suspect we’ve been to this room. Do you understand, Kazunari?”
“I’m not going back out there!” Kazunari snarled into his chest.
“But he might come back here and see you!” Sho snarled back, promptly catching his breath when the boy pulled away to look into his eyes.
“Then don’t let him come,” Kazunari pleaded, clutching Sho’s shirt with trembling hands. “Don’t let him come for me, Sho-chan. Please...” The boy wrapped his arms around Sho’s waist and buried his face back into Sho’s chest. “Please, don’t let Satoshi come in here and hurt me...”
Sho left the room with a determined promise that he would never let anything happen to Kazunari.
He was already halfway down the hall when he remembered how the boy had fumbled with his pocket for a moment before completely pulling away from his embrace.
Sho pushed his good hand into his pocket, his fingers practically freezing around the familiar brassy feel of the memento he thought was long gone.
He didn’t even need to pull the thing out to see. He already knew what it was.
He just couldn’t understand why Kazunari had taken it and hidden it away from him for this long—
He didn’t even notice the silence that guided his steps down the hallway that used to be his special place.
Next>>>>>
***Song lyrics borrowed from the Hitachi advert jingle, What Tree Is This Tree. The one that Nino chanted on VSA Hawaii SP. xp
