A fully clothed Ieyoshi sighed. It seemed to have become his default go-to reaction to events that weren't interesting enough to capture his attention. And precious few things were ever truly interesting to him nowadays. Perhaps this is what puberty feels like? Ieyoshi sighed again. How boring.
Currently, the elder-by-eight-seconds Sawada twin was making his way across the school's courtyard and towards the massive metalwork fence that marked its perimeter. He was accompanied by Damien, of course. Over the course of this, the first month of school, it'd become a sort of habit of the twins to meet up with Damien and Aobane at the outer gate after school and walk most of the way to their homes as a group. This day, Ieyoshi met up with Damien somewhat earlier, at the steps outside the main hall. Interestingly enough, Ieyoshi was not accompanied by his other half, which struck Damien as odd. The two were typically inseparable. If the morning taught him anything, it was that them being separated was an omen, if anything.
"Haku's not with you again? Don't tell me he's taking another run ahead of you," he asked while putting emphasis on
another run.
"He already got kids calling me the Hokage because of the smoke bombs."Ieyoshi sighed again, this time in response to Damien's question. As they were walking, they'd passed by the area that several hours earlier had been the scene of their morning commotion. People had started calling him "batman" because of it, not that he cared—or, at least, that's what he told himself.
"Yeah. And apparently I'm Batman." He felt like there was more he could say, but meh. The next order of business for him was making it home and questioning Godot about this nonsense Ieharu was spouting with guns and bullets and assassinations and all that. Knowing his younger twin, he was probably talking to a teacher about a book or a poem or something. Why he cared what they thought was beyond Ieyoshi's ability to fathom.
"But if he comes running at me this time, I'll put him down."Of course, he was joking. Maybe.
Damien did a fangirl pose jokingly.
"Oh, my hero! Not the hero Namimori deserves, but the one we need!" He pretended to faint flinging his body towards the ground. Right before landing on his back, he caught himself with one hand with ease.
Despite himself, Ieyoshi laughed. His version of laughing was a curt smile followed by exhaling loudly.
"Isn't your village missing you, bitch?" Ieyoshi's voice lightened considerably with his words. Joking around with Damien was always a welcome break in the grinding monotony that he called his daily existence.
Damien quickly popped up back to his feet.
"Haha, you mean village full of bitches? Of course they are." He stood as if he were a Hokage with his hand on his invisible large hat. His other hand stood at his side.
"Ladies," he paused for a brief moment,
"I have returned." Ieyoshi made a face, rolling his eyes in dramatic dismissal. He always gave a slight performance with Ieyoshi and Ieharu for fun. They were close.
"Anyways, I wonder what they're calling Haku?"By now, they'd reached the ashen gunmetal gates that marked the entrance to and exit from the courtyard proper. Instead of going through the gates, Ieyoshi stopped, electing instead to turn and lean against the steel beam that made up part of the left gate's hinge, arms folded. His brother—typically accompanied by that Kuroiobashi kid—should have caught up to them by now, but he had yet to appear.
"Pfft. Maybe they'll call him perv. Or idiot. Or crouching idiot, hidden perv fool.""Haha, if only they knew how he really was. Poor Haku," Damien laughed.
"How about poor us," Ieyoshi responded, chuckling.
When five minutes turned to twenty, all the chattering first and second -years began evacuating the courtyard at a leisurely pace and heading home—long after the too-cool-to-hang third-years had swaggered their way through the front gates, of course. Still, there was no sign of Ieharu. Ieyoshi had long since closed his eyes, as if snoozing, though he was doing anything but. He was merely listening, taking in the sounds of the environment. Though his senses weren't nearly as sharp as Damien's, he could quite easily pick out some familiar voices amongst all the chitchat. Especially Ieharu's voice, which was like a lighter fluffier version of his own.
After several moments of hearing everything
but his brother's voice, he sighed, opening his eyes.
He did hear someone interesting. Scanning over the various disparate cliques and courtyard gaggles that so poetically described high school life, his eyes landed upon a-a... a girl? Hmm. Ieyoshi frowned slightly, squinting. For some reason, the girl looked familiar. Like,
really familiar. And though he forgot names fairly easily, he'd never forget a face he'd seen before. The girl was tall but sported a small figure, complete with intense blue eyes. Her smooth thin black hair somehow reminded him of one of his father's guardians. Lambo. That was his name. So, where had he seen her before?
He looked down at his folded arms, chewing through his own memories. Things like this really irked him. He'd seen her somewhere before, but where, damn it? After a few moments of pondering, Ieyoshi gave up, filing the question away somewhere in the back of his mind.
He looked up again, his eyes scanning the crowd for something else—anything else!—that would pique his interests and stave off the twin specters of boredom and annoyance.
He spotted Jett. Jett Hideaki. He was milling about along with his sister, though Ieyoshi didn't quite remember her name. He knew Jett, however. Though he personally abhorred watching sports, everyone knew the school's premier basketball champion and most valuable player, even the first-years. Ieyoshi wasn't quite sure how he felt about the Hideaki siblings. Jett especially. He was an imposing person, perhaps intimidating to some, but...
Ieyoshi began to chew on his lower lip.
Whenever he and Jett came within close proximity of each other, something inside of him... it was like he felt a sort of kinship with the guy. Like the two of them shared a relation on some sort of base fundamental level. It was strange, it was unexplainable, it was whatever.
He also spotted Izaya, who was running around the courtyard for reasons only Izaya was aware of. Like Jett, everyone in the school knew Izaya's name, but for less glorious reasons. Ieyoshi shook his head shortly after catching sight of the green-haired kid. Oh well. In any good action movie, the stupid ones always died first.
While following Izaya with his eyes, Ieyoshi crossed eyes with—
Again, Ieyoshi squinted. There were many unfamiliar faces in the crowd, but this one was quite... let's say odd. Red eyes, for a start. Blood red. Glasses. Hair slicked back, as if by hand. Average height. He looked like the type of person that turned out to be the crazy serial killer at the end of a horror flick, but for some reason Ieyoshi felt nothing when he looked him. Absolutely nothing. Not impressed. Not intimidated. Not scared. Not happy. Not even bored. He just felt nothing, a sense of no presence, as if he were staring at a whitewashed brick wall instead of a human being.
Certainly, the guy wasn't in his class. Ieyoshi would have remembered such a face. He didn't seem tall enough or cool enough to be a third-year, though, so he was probably part of the junior class. Interesting. Odd, but interesting.
He stared for a while longer before feigning a loss of interest, lest someone notice him glaring.
Full of unsated curiosity, Ieyoshi pondered asking Damien who the red-eyed guy was, or at least if he had an opinion about him. That's when something slipped by his left peripheral. Now typically, Ieyoshi would have paid it no mind, for such things always pass by one's peripheral vision without incident. This time, however, his body tensed up, the joints in his arms locking for a brief moment. It was a small panic reaction, a flinch, as if someone had tried to jump-scare him. This was a result of Ieyoshi's extremely acute intuition, which lent itself to a very hyper sense of awareness. It was a wholly passive perception and quasi- sixth sense, and one of the precious few areas that he had his friend Damien beat hands down—and that guy goes through Varia-style training regularly.
With a reaction spanning milliseconds, he snapped his head to the left, and saw what triggered his sense of danger.
Uncharacteristically vivid blue hair, like out of a cartoon, tufts of which stuck out from under his hood. A now-familiar face. A boy... at least, Ieyoshi was fairly sure he was a boy. The same one from this morning.
Ieyoshi followed the boy with his eyes as he passed through the gate and out the other side, walking between several others as he went. As far as he could tell, the blue-haired kid hadn't taken notice of him. On the other hand, no one else seemed to take notice of the kid, not even Damien. It was as if he were a ghost, or a rock, and people just seemed to move around him, passively acknowledging his existence. It was fascinating to observe, but eventually the kid moved out of view, and Ieyoshi didn't want to give off the impression that he was interested.
Ieyoshi sighed softly. There was something about that kid. Something about the red-eyed guy. Something about many of these so-called students. Something he couldn't quite put a finger on. One thing was for sure, though: he needed to hone his intuition. He got feelings all the time about places and people, but rarely did he know enough about what his instincts were telling him that he could act on them in an effective and efficient manner.
He did have one feeling he recognized: his intuition told him he'd be dealing with the blue-haired kid—dealing with all of these strange people—a lot more directly over the coming months. It was just his luck, after all. If he wasn't being tackled by crazy familial relations in the morning, it was gonna be something else.
Ieharu placed his hands under the one of the bathroom sinks' faucets. A stream of perfectly-warmed water met his hands instantaneously. His father always talked about how, "back in the day," water faucets always had "hot" and "cold" handles on them and you have to mix and match them manually to get it just right. Nowadays, they have faucets that have infrared thermometers attached to them. They set the water to the perfect temperature automatically, based on skin temperature. Honestly, Ieharu couldn't fathom having to twist little knobs to make water come out. It was dumb. If he wanted cold, he'd just say "colder" and the faucet would obey him. If he wanted warmer water, he'd just say "warmer". Why did it take people so long to think up such a basic idea?
The boy giggled at the thought. Living in the past must've really sucked.
The faucet automatically added the correct amount of soap to the water, so he didn't have to do anything but move his hands around a little before they were sufficiently clean.
Tucked under his arm was a book titled
A Wrinkle in Time, by a long-dead American author named Madeleine L'Engle. Currently, it was Ieharu's favorite book, though the designation of "favorite" was doled out on a weekly basis to the works of prose that found their way into his hands, if that. He was truly a voracious reader.
The book itself, of course, wasn't any normal paper book. It was technically a paperback, sure. It wasn't one of those old-fashioned e-readers or anything—it was better. The book's "paper" pages were each a type of foldable hardware, and the pages themselves could switch text and content at the will of the reader. One moment, he could be reading A Wrinkle in Time, the next he could be perusing a newspaper or pretending to read his class's Social Studies book.
Gokudera—Damien's dad—always complained when Ieharu took it out.
"You kids are spoiled rotten," he'd always say.
"You don't need these all these newfangled toys! Isn't a smart phone and infinity internet enough for you brats?"Haha, old people are funny.
Ieharu let his hands rest under the luxurious warmth of the running water for a while longer before removing them from the stream and moving towards the door. He waved his wet hands over a small silver plate on the wall, which unleashed a burst of air as his they passed, shearing the excess moisture from his skin like an air blade. The bathroom door opened for him shortly after, though Ieharu paid the automated marvel no mind. Such things were rudimentary at this point.
The school day had come to an end a while back, yet he'd gotten distracted talking to his teacher. They continued the class discussion about the nature of main characters in prose, with Ieharu relating what they'd discussed to
A Wrinkle in Time.
Oh well, Ieyoshi would forgive him if he were just a little late.
Next order of business: go meet with Aobane and head down to meet Ieyoshi and Damien. He'd asked Aobane to wait by the elevators while he went to the bathroom, so he was probably still there. Hopefully. Ieharu's cheeks burned red with the thought of him having taken too long in the bathroom. Agh!
Turning on his heel, the boy began walking down the hall. The elevators where in a small niche on the right side at the end of the hall.
He made it about two-thirds of the way there before he was stopped.
"What is this guy doing?" Ieyoshi lamented, not bothering to hide his exasperation at his brother's absence. The courtyard was virtually empty at this point. Even some of the staff were beginning to head home. Creepy teacher Zenith-sensei had even passed him by, offering a creepy wave and generally being a creep. Ieyoshi wasn't quite sure why he didn't much care for the man, or why he seemed like such a creep, but...
Whatever. He'd give it five more minutes, max, and then Ieharu would be walking home without him. On second thought, maybe he should leave now. It'd do his brother some good to be independent for once. The elder twin looked over to Damien.
"Wanna just go?"Damien looked in the direction that Ieharu would walk in. Alone. He started to get a bit worried.
"Eh, but shouldn't we wait a bit longer. I mean especially after today when he—""DAMIEEEEEENNNNN!" Enn charged forwards and leapt towards him with his arms outstretched, smiling widely. He completely ignored Ieyoshi. Behind him somewhere in the distance, a brown-haired third year with a jagged scar across his face watched in surprise, barely hiding anxiety as he walked towards the gate, green sweater slung over his shoulder.
"Damien there you are I couldn't—"Damien instinctively ducked on his knees and dodged Enn's charge. He knew in that instance, what this meant. Enn flew over him and rolled to a crouch a few feet away, continuing without pause.
"—find you—" got up instantly and leant in low, sprinting towards Damien's back and lashing out with a punch.
"—anywhere!" A grin fell on Damien's face as the punch flew in his direction. It was Enn's turn to be the attacker while he was the defender. He placed his right palm out and blocked the punch instantly.
"Mmm, close but not there yet," Damien replied. At this point his body was faced towards Enn and his eyes were fixed on his every move.
"Don't worry," Enn grinned happily, a wild look in his eyes. Ah, fighting Damien was fun! So much fun that Enn didn't want to think about even trying to kill him. He hadn't had this much fun ever after he left Italy and couldn't take part in hits as much as he liked anymore, since Shou didn't like it. Shou was right, high school was great! He grabbed hold of the wrist of the hand holding his own hand and pulled as he whirled and bent, hurling Damien over his shoulder.
"I'm just getting started!" The game of attack and defense went on. Enn attacked furiously, sending flying kicks, punches, a flurry of blows were all thrown at Damien. To each, he merely blocked, ducked, and jumped back, and it was clear to those who knew them well that they were just playing around, albeit semi-seriously.
Ieyoshi merely looked on at the two, mouth slightly agape, a disturbed look fresh upon his face, as if someone had told him one plus one equaled fish with a zealous fervor. He wasn't really familiar with this kid who so cavalierly attacked Damien, though he knew his face, and knew his reputation. He was a fellow first-year, and one of the more annoying ones, too.
Great.
After a few moments of observation, he sighed and looked away, bored once more. Maybe he'd just go home anyway.
"Enn, why'd you run that fast—" the brown-haired third year came to a halt as he stared at the scene, panting a little. A group of emotions rapidly cycled over Shou's face before settling on a strange sort of resignation (and relief that his brother wasn't seriously trying to kill someone) and a mixture of worry and anxiety.
"Oh no stop..." he straightened and turned to Ieyoshi, eyebrows creased in worry over the situation.
"I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry I'm so so sorry," he apologised frantically, bowing a little in apology.
"Enn was waiting for me to finish with club and then he ran off before I could stop him I'm sorry!" Ieyoshi eyed the guy before him. Shou, was it? He wasn't in Ieyoshi's class, but he'd seen seen the guy around—primarily around Enn. Most likely a third-year, though he didn't have the air of one. If memory served, Shou and Enn were brothers.
Great.
Shou didn't seem as bombastic and frenetic as his brother, so that was a plus.
"It's whatever," he said, shrugging in acknowledgement of Shou's apology.
"Hey, you haven't happened to have seen my brother around, have you? He looks just like me, except his hair is dyed black for some reason." He shot a glance over at Damien and Enn.
"And I'm about to leave him to walk home alone, too," he added, grumbling under his breath.
"O-Oh," Shou said, straightening up from his bow into a sort of relaxed posture, hooking a thumb around his bag-straps. He thought back throughout the day, trying to think about whether he saw—um, Iehaku? That was his name—going about his day, Eventually, he shook his head.
"I don't think I saw him," he said regretfully, shaking his head.
"Sorry."Ieyoshi was about to sigh for the thousandth time this day, when his intuition pricked him. Looking away from Shou, a figure in the distance was approaching them, moving most expeditiously in their direction. Ieyoshi raised his eyebrows in expectation, frowning slightly at the realization that it certainly wasn't his twin brother.