Work Text:
Ordinary
Yeah, he'd admit that he and Gakushuu made an unorthodox pair, even his friends had been (and probably still are) quietly disapproving of their relationship, but Itona liked him. Gakushuu Asano demanded attention with everything he did and played people like a fiddle, but he'd always had the softest smiles reserved for Itona that made his heart beat way too fast.
But Itona's not dumb enough to not see that they're in wildly different leagues. Gakushuu is nothing like him and he’s constantly surrounded by people of similar caliber who all like him as badly as Itona does. Itona doesn't know what to feel about that.
They've formally met when Gakushuu's pleading to 3-E for help to topple the fascist dictatorship that is Kunugigaoka's education system - not the best basis for a first impression, and Gakushuu hadn't quite had the time to process Itona's existence yet - Karma had been goading him, after all. But later, much later, when Itona steps into class and Isogai and Gakushuu are in conversation about something, Gakushuu turns to him and offers a hand to shake and says, "you're the transfer student, Horibe, right?"
"You can just call me Itona," Itona had said softly, awkwardly returning the handshake.
Gakushuu smiles at him.
Well.
Then Gakushuu tacks on, with a rather Karma-like smirk on his face, "you kicked me in the face during Bo-taoshi."
Dear god. Itona's eyes widen. "Oh, I'm sorry about-"
"It's fine," Gakushuu says, waving a hand to cut Itona off, and Itona shuts his mouth with an audible click. Then, "cute headband."
Itona bursts into flames.
"Asano!" Isogai scolds, laughing.
Asano shrugs, looking unapologetic, and later Isogai apologizes on behalf of him and Itona has no idea what it’s for. “You don’t…” Isogai says, an odd look in his eyes, but he quickly snaps out of it and laughs and brushes it away.
Much later, Nakamura (who had a knack for sneaking up on people and hiding in places she shouldn’t be) asked Itona what it was like meeting the golden boy first-hand, to which she received a blank look, and Isogai drags her out of class by the arm and has a loud conversation that Itona only hears semi-coherent bits of and cannot decipher.
And much, much later, having excruciating herself from Isogai’s grasp, she tells Itona that Asano was flirting with him. She tacks on, “you’re lucky, he doesn’t do that with a lot of people, you know, what was it like?”
“I didn’t know he was flirting,” Itona says lamely. “Did he flirt with you before?”
“I could only dream ,” Nakamura deadpans, but there’s a slight flush on her cheeks. “But you thought he was cute , didn’t you?”
“No,” Itona says.
“Nuh uh, you were the shade of Karma’s hair.” She swings an arm around him and pokes him in the cheek. “You may be a little pervert like our octopus here but turns out you don’t like boobs as much as you thought we do, huh-”
“Bye!” Itona says loudly, and sprints out of class, Nakamura’s laughter following him.
He didn’t think Asano was… cute… Well…
Itona’s not exactly blind… Asano is, objectively…. More attractive that other people… objectively.
No. Itona wasn’t going to think about that. If Asano became a class ally then good for him, good for them, he seemed like a strong ally to have. Maybe he could curry favor for 3-E with the main campus students so Itona didn’t get stared at whenever he wanted to use the vending machine.
Asano was… an enigma, Itona decides, but he shouldn’t dwell on it. He had machines to build, examinations to study for. He doesn’t see Asano soon again, Nakamura stops laughing at him, they go into their exams… and they emerge, victorious, Itona clutching his examination slip proclaiming that he’s in the top 50 and Karma laughing with first place… first place? That means Asano-
“Congratulations, 3-E!”
Itona doesn’t think about expectations, or parenthood, or a grapple for power; except he does.
“I know you are disappointed to be unable to personally witness the aftermath but I can assure you that your victory and my father’s loss drove the point home!” Asano straight-up giggles. “I regret that I hadn’t taken a picture but it was like he had a short circuit in his brain! Hilarious!”
3-E exchanges wide-eyed glances with each other, Karma looks down at his first place, and then Isogai steps forward and says, “what happened to your face?”
“This?” Asano touches his bandage, something that certainly wasn’t there a day ago when they passed him in the hallways. He beams, brilliant and sadistic, and he says, “a short circuit.”
The next time Itona sees him, the bandage is off and he’s in the midst of a discussion with Isogai and Kataoka about some sort of school event. Itona tries to sneak around the trio to get to his seat.
He fails.
“Itona!” Crap. Why does Isogai insist on including him in class activities? “Do you have any suggestions about the school play?”
“No,” Itona says. Where the hell is Terasaka? He’s going to give him shit for being late.
Itona looks up. Asano’s smiling a little at him, and there’s a faint healing mark on his cheek. Wow, he has nice round cheeks for an oddly sharp jawline on a fifteen year old.
“My losses seem to end with me getting hit in the face, huh?” Asano says, and Itona turns red.
“Asano!” Isogai yells, and Kataoka bursts into laughter.
Itona opens his mouth, closes it. Blurts, “I think I’ll be backstage,” and then sits down hard in his seat.
“Shame,” Asano says, eyes glittering. “I was hoping to see you in the lights.”
Isogai smacks him on the shoulder. Itona winces a little, but Asano seems to take it in stride. Kataoka rolls her eyes and looks at Itona to say, boys, right?
And boys indeed, Itona thinks, watching the discussion and mind drifting. Away from the hustle and flurry of the main campus and, ah, bo-taoshi poles, bantering with Isogai and Kataoka and making gestures in the air with his hands, Asano seems like a regular teenager who’s not on a pedestal of principal’s son or student council president.
Itona never thought he was scary. He’d had his fair share of monsters, and monsters to Itona wore labcoats and held scalpels. Asano to his classmates was an antagonist and perhaps to the collective goals of the class he had been, but looking down at his feet or in casual conversation or even colliding with Itona’s shoe, all Itona saw was a boy.
A very cute, attractive boy, but that wasn’t the point.
Too bad no one else saw it that way.
This, Itona would think much later, was one of the roots of many of his insecurities with their relationship - he saw Gakushuu as someone ordinary, on the same ground as him and everyone else, and Gakushuu had told him that it was a refreshing light to see himself in. But there were plenty of other people who looked at Gakushuu like he was extraordinary, like he was the best fucking thing in the universe, and Itona wonders if he’ll one day lose to them.
Itona wasn’t going to say Gakushuu wasn’t amazing. He was brilliant in his own right, and Itona could give credit when credit was due; but Gakushuu was far from being where he wanted to be, above everyone else. And that was the problem, really, because Gakushuu strived for perfection and the extraordinary, and Itona couldn’t pretend to lie to him to say he’s someone he isn’t.
He supports Gakushuu, he really does, but sometimes he wonders if it’s worth any more than the people who go to him with stars in their eyes and high praises, people who are more eloquent and tactful and elegant than Itona and who might be smarter than him too. Gakushuu shines bright among them.
He’d said, once, interrupting the heated argument between Karma and Gakushuu out on 3-E’s front lawn, “you’re not a genius,” and both of them turned with unnerving synchronization to stare at him.
“Neither of you are geniuses,” he had blurted, wondering why he was digging a hole for himself. “Both of you are idiots. Plenty of people get full marks for exams, you’re not special. You’re just good at math.”
3-E and Gakushuu - Asano, then, gaped at him in wordless horror, and finally Karma turns to Asano and said, “do you hear that? And you’re not even that good at math.”
Gakushuu laughs about that day. He’d said that the line was delivered so bluntly and tactlessly that he doubted it was meant to insult, and that alone had shocked him into thought for a long while. Itona had already been cute, in his eyes, “but I really wanted to pit you against my dad, after that line.”
“I don’t want to,” Itona says.
“You’re the human equivalent of the reverse Uno card,” Gakushuu tells him. “You’ll fry his brain.”
Itona presses his hand to Gakushuu’s cheek - he tilts his head, leaning into the contact, and Itona brushes his thumb against the now-invisible mark of where his father once struck him. “I don’t know what that means.”
“Akabane explained it to me and it seemed fitting.”
Itona hums.
He doesn’t speak a lot, he doesn’t compare himself to the arsenal of words that Gakushuu can rightly call his weapon, but Gakushuu doesn’t seem to mind. It’s nice, he says, to be with someone he doesn’t have to constantly compete with or stand his ground against, he’s got plenty of exercise at school and at home.
Itona thinks he understands. He had an obsession over power, once, over the need to be ahead of the pack. Now he’s happy with the status quo, with the ordinary boy who’s oh so extraordinary to everybody else. He wonders what Gakushuu thinks about it, but he’d never dared to ask.
It was one of the things that drew Itona to him in the first place. Power, fighting for, and the lack thereof; the imbalance. Asano wasn’t extraordinary but he didn’t blend into the background. Itona hadn’t noticed him in Bo-taoshi, he hadn’t looked at him in the hallways, nor in assemblies. He’d had his power then, in his self-secure pedestal, and Itona’s not for people who push their dominance over others heads. He has a particular empathy for crumbling thrones, he supposes, and ordinary boys who look down at their shoes to ask for help in toppling a regime.
Asano had a stage, in Kunugigaoka, he had his own battles to fight. Normal people, ordinary people, had their own wars to win, so it didn’t quite mean much to Itona that Asano’s stage just happened to be bigger than others. Itona’s metaphorical battle involved many, too, and even the essence of science fiction - tentacles, monsters, and loss of control. He’d only gotten his power back, the ground he’d so desperately tried to chase, when the tentacles were removed from him. He appreciates it, normality.
Itona doesn’t know how it happens. Itona doesn’t know how it happens.
Let him reiterate: Itona doesn’t know a single fucking hell of how it all happens and he wouldn’t even be able to tell you if you held a gun to his head, but there he was, kissing Asano Gakushuu at the back of the main campus of Kunugigaoka Middle School, standing on his tiptoes and curling his fingers into Gakushuu’s collar.
Kissing Gakushuu Asano is pretty nice.
It’s exhilarating in all the weird ways, and afterwards he doesn’t think it felt like kissing the student council president or the principal’s son in the principal’s school or anything remotely scandalous like that - he was kissing a boy behind their school and there was a simple thrill in it like they were in a western hollywood movie. Gakushuu looks at him weirdly when he says it, waves it away when Itona tries to explain it, and then leans forward and kisses him again.
Gakushuu tells him later on his side of the impulse. “You called me an idiot,” he says, adjusting his collar.
“I call everyone idiots,” Itona says, his lack of filter evident, “I call Terasaka an idiot.”
“Well I’m not too happy with being put on the same level as Terasaka,” Gakushuu says, rolling his eyes a little, “but it’s nice to be normal sometimes. I like the way you look at me like I’m nothing special, there are no expectations I’d have to pretend to live up to.”
Itona doesn’t know why they’re here together. Neither of them are quite normal, by society’s standards, and on opposite ends of the spectrum. They’re in wildly different leagues, and Itona has maybe three or four high school friends and he calls up Hazama and Terasaka sometimes, and 3-E meet up whenever a few of them have coinciding schedules. Gakushuu was always surrounded by people of similar caliber, he had smart friends and attractive friends and athletic friends, international and local, from middle school and high school and college and even in the working world and all of them liked him.
He was waiting for Gakushuu once at a parking lot, and had faltered in waving when Gakushuu emerged with a group of women and men in dresses and suits, all immaculate and laughing at something his boyfriend said.
When he was introduced, they looked at Itona with disbelief and scorn they just couldn’t hide enough, and a girl says, “like Horibe Electronics, that went bankrupt years ago?”
Itona’s not one for social events. Gakushuu steers them out of the conversation and Itona keeps his mouth shut before he says “I don’t even know who you are,” and it’s not something they talk about.
Itona thinks he’s an anchor of a semblance of peace, a resting place Gakushuu can go back to when things get too hectic. He wants to be there for him, like that, and Gakushuu had said that it was calm and refreshing; something ordinary. There’s no squabbling over money or power or the differences between mortgages and bankruptcy and higher-up social conventions.
Itona hasn’t dropped the L word yet but he thought about it, when Gakushu’s asleep on his bed in a ratty t-shirt and shorts and Itona wonders what it would be like to wake up to this. He doesn’t think about fancy parties or status or ruling with a kingdom at his feet, he thinks about a quiet life of nothing and everything all at once.
But it’s not something Gakushuu would like, he imagines. One day Gakushuu was going to take over the world and Itona doesn’t think he’d be in the picture with him.
There’s still plenty of time before that, before then, and Itona settles in next to him and hopes. Gakushuu, still asleep, reaches out an arm and cuddles in closer. It’s warm, and snug, in Itona’s twin bed. He should really get a double, at least, but then Gakushuu would be just that slightly bit further from him.
Itona’s not a jealous person, but sometimes he wishes he were, because then he’d want to fight for it. He wants this, with Gakushuu, safely in the middle, but Gakushuu wants to be on top and so many people want to be there with him. He thinks he might accept the loss, because he’d never thought they’d end up together anyways.
Itona wishes they could be normal. He doesn’t want to be extraordinary, because being extraordinary meant sitting on a cold table with electrodes on his arms and needles in his hair, and being extraordinary for Gakushuu meant late nights and red eyes and bandages on his cheek. He doesn’t want any of that for either of them.
Itona doesn’t really think Gakushuu is that ordinary at all. No one else carried the ocean in their voice or held the stars in their eyes like he did, and no one else looks at Itona like he’s the extraordinary one. Itona can never say it, not even to himself. If he does, he might lose that little bit of what Gakushuu was trying to find in him.