Femininity, part 1/2 [Fuji, Yukimura], G
May. 9th, 2006 08:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fromastudio posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
almondinflowerFemininity, part 1/2
Characters: Fuji, Yukimura
Length: about 1600 words?
Disclaimer: Konomi Takeshi's.
Genre: Gen as per usual, but pushing it.
Notes: So those drabble requests? Are so not turning out to be drabbles. This is written for the lovely![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fujis, who wanted Valentine's dresses, Fuji and Yukimura. I haven't quite managed Yukimura yet, but he should crop up in part 2. Hopefully.
Part 1
Due to the appointment of one of the most singular characters ever to grace Japanese education to the position of Seishun Gakuen High School Div. principal - Kawamura said in earnest tones but with a little frown that he was sure the school board knew what they were doing, while Inui hmmphed and scribbled on his handheld PDA, which on his sixteenth birthday had replaced the stack of notebooks underneath his bed (“Good data,” he said, and nobody disagreed) - the school held its first ever Valentine’s Day festival towards the end of Fuji’s second year.
It was not precisely a St. Valentine’s festival. Technically it was a ‘student-organised fair for fostering links between Seishun Gakuen and the local community, as well as to showcase student activities and talent,’ which usually meant it was a message to the public high school two streets down: ‘See how much better we can do things with an extra hundred million yen in the annual budget.’ The propitious selected date of the fete being what it was, though, no class or club in Seigaku Koko could be expected to come up with ideas for booths that were workable, legal and non-licentious. Or at least none of the supposedly above-average brains in class 2A could do so.
On the first of the mornings set aside for festival preparation, class representative Oiishi stood up and patiently but wearily attempted to organize the students, in particular the small but growing clump of students in the back corner taking bets on this year’s chocolate intake, which showed every sign of ignoring his efforts until Tezuka, seated in the next-to-last row by dint of height, folded his arms across his chest and glared. This did not intimidate the students so much as it reminded them that there was no way to measure the outcome of the bets, since it was almost certain that Tezuka would get the most chocolate, and dead certain that whatever quantity he received, he was not making the information public.
After this discouragement, there was a general drifting of bodies towards their assigned seats, and some semblance of order achieved, with no other distractions save the usual one of Nakasato-san, who showed little interest in showcasing anything other than her long toned legs, ivory-pale and hairless, emerging from a pleated skirt eight centimeters shorter than regulation. At least one-third of Class 2A’s male population could be seen watching Nakasato’s calves at any moment. Even Tezuka had looked at least once; Fuji had caught him at it one afternoon during a particularly desultory math class - although it would be unlikely to happen this morning, since the tall bespectacled boy was currently occupied reminding everyone, in typical motionless and non-verbal Tezuka fashion, that he was student body president and had to run the festival, which meant that he was exempt from helping out with the class booth, or otherwise participating in any inconvenient and embarrassing duties that might crop up.
Some days Fuji thought it might be convenient to be Tezuka, save for the side-effect of boring oneself to death. Tezuka seemed to get his way in everything, with none of the effort that Fuji had to put into doing so: for every hour spent thinking up elaborate schemes to cancel a day’s worth of class, Tezuka merely had to nod and bow and produce his usual lack of expression, which somehow resulted in total cooperation on the part of whomever he was speaking to.
Fuji contemplated Tezuka’s unnatural and unfair superhumanity, not for the first time mourning the fact that beneath the (extremely thick) layer of stoicism there was no scrap of humanity to be found conducive to cooperating with Fuji’s purposes. This had been particularly galling this year since Eiji, his usual partner-in-crime, was no longer in the same class - a mistake on Fuji’s part: Yuuta had overwatered the cacti the morning before last year’s final exams, and caught between grief for his favourite star cactus and resisting the urge to stab his younger brother in the throat (Yuuta had been about to graduate from St. Rudolph, and everyone was being extra-nice to get him to move back home), he’d glanced down five minutes before handing in the paper and realized in horror that he’d answered every single question correctly, even the ten-step differential equation meant for college-level. There was no chance of going to class 2D after that, and so Fuji bade Eiji farewell, and said hello to advanced mathematics, straight-A expectations, Oishi’s earnestness and Tezuka’s stern seriousness.
There were advantages, like Nakasato-san’s legs, although as Fuji turned his attention back to the classroom discussion he realized, with the first prickle of unease, that Nakasato for only the third time that year was showing interest in school activities and this could be constituted either as a Very Good or a Very Bad thing, depending on which side of the crossfire you ended up on.
That there would be crossfire was never in doubt, particularly as Nakasato opened her mouth and said, in that deliciously artificial and languid voice of hers: “I think we should have a kissing booth.”
Any suggestion Nakasato made would have been greeted with enthusiasm by the male half of 2A, particularly when uttered by those pert lips painted over in pink glitter gloss, but it was testament to the effect of Valentine’s Day that the girls, who hated Nakasato as much as the boys loved her, took to the idea at once. With such a majority vote in effect the decision was made at once, even with the class representative looking askance (with good reason, since he’d been placed back on the ‘tennis club bachelors’ list after abandoning the egg-style haircut, and besides being expected to receive a trunkful of Valentine’s chocolate he would no doubt be recruited to man the booth). Fuji smiled and abstained from voting as hands were raised, not so much to look neutral as because he hadn’t finished calculating the odds yet – potential enjoyable humiliation to other people versus potential unenjoyable humiliation to himself? It was a delicate equation.
What he hadn’t calculated upon that Nakasato-san was watching with narrowed long-lashed eyes as the vote was counted, and as the best-looking girl in second-year Nakasato considered it her duty to have the most eligible males in the school hanging off her every word. Tezuka she’d given up as a lost cause, and Oishi was obliging enough to satisfy even Nakasato’s ego, but from Fuji she seemed to demand a certain level of lovelorn behaviour, which he enacted occasionally for entertainment, but now she was staring at him the way a five-year-old child stares at a broken clockwork toy, and suddenly the whole thing had become very unamusing--
“I think,” Nakasato continued, in triumphant tones, “that we should have Fuji dress as a girl.”
#
It was from shoujo manga, his sister Yumiko explained over tea and biscuits the next afternoon, and Fuji smiled sweetly and said, I know about these strange places girls get ideas from, but is there any way to get out of doing this, and if not could we please go to that Cajun restaurant in Shinjuku for dinner, I’m feeling quite desolate here?
He hadn’t thought he could feel much worse, especially when Eiji walked up at club practice and told him he would look cute as a girl, but the downward spiraling of his stomach as they went clothes-hunting that weekend told him there was further to go. Nakasato-san picked out matching dresses in snowy white and ice-blue, only hers was strapless and ended halfway down her thighs while Fuji’s was several sizes larger and went down to his ankles, with elbow-length floral sleeves because thin as Fuji was, he played tennis five days out of seven and it showed, in the broad angles of his shoulders and the musculature of his legs. This seemed not to deter the girls of 2A one jot, as they simply pulled the ribbons tighter about his waist, muttered something about a makeup session, and proceeded to squeal about how beautiful his bones were. Fuji accepted this with a weak smile, being used to compliments but not to hearing them while dressed in lace and faux satin with four teenage girls critically examining his hair, lips pursed.
“They say they’re going to curl it, then maybe put some flowers in,” he told his sister over dinner that night (spiced ramen and strawberry cake; Mother had her hands full encouraging both her sons’ flagging spirits).
“I’d wondered about that,” Yumiko said, and added, “have they bought you gloves as well?”
Fuji answered in the negative, to which Yumiko replied by saying she would buy him some tomorrow, and before Fuji could say, Hell might freeze, or Eiji sit still in class for one hour, she’d told him that he could either wear gloves or get a manicure and moisturize his hands for the six days remaining until the festival. Fuji was about to respond rather indignantly, that he did moisturize, when he remembered his current objective of retaining whatever vestige of masculine pride remained to him.
He submitted to the gloves, and the fact that they were silver-white leather and resembled Gundam Wing more than they did Card Captor Sakura was little consolation in the face of everything else, in particular tennis practice which was starting to slip across the border from ‘masochistic’ to ‘downright unbearable’. The one bright spot was that Eiji had abandoned teasing Fuji in favour of Oishi, mostly because Eiji couldn’t reconcile himself to the thought of his doubles partner kissing more girls in a day than he normally did in a week. Echizen still being in junior high would have been another bright spot, except that Fuji knew Momoshiro still went over to the Seigaku Chuu school grounds twice or thrice a week (as did Tezuka for tennis practice, but Fuji had no fear from that quarter) for burgers and camaraderie. That Fila cap and now-breaking-on-adolescence-but-still-cocky voice would no doubt be a presence at the festival.
“At least he won’t want to kiss you,” Kawamura said, which was meant to be consoling but had the reverse effect of reminding Fuji that aside from being in a dress and flowers and fake diamond choker he had the added duty of salesman. Or rather, being the goods on sale.
“Prostitution is such a crude practice,” he said to Yumiko. His sister just looked at him and reminded him that he’d always liked Moulin Rouge, and Fuji protested that the movie was about love and bohemian freedom, and this bodies-for-sale thing was an outdated imperialist custom, and he’d meant to sound witty and self-deprecating but it came out whiny and sort of panicky in a way that reminded him of Inui’s Aozu juice.
“Just give up,” Nakasato advised him the Thursday before the festival. She was experimenting with eyeshadow on his cheek, in particular the blending of viridian with silver powder and its combination with ultramarine mascara. She offered Fuji her black compact mirror; he looked in spite of himself and then promptly wished that he hadn’t.
“Aren’t I cooperating well enough, Nakasato-san?” he said, in his usual voice which sounded sweet and wistful to everyone, even his family and the tennis regulars who knew otherwise. Fuji had never set out to make himself look gentle and deceptive; genetics had simply turned out that way, and at some point in elementary school he’d given up and decided it was a convenient device. “I have no intention of letting the class down. I just wish--”
Nakasato’s hand paused in mid-air, her makeup brush two inches away from dusting Fuji’s cheek with rouge. “You just wish?”
“Don't you sometimes wish,” he continued, “that things could have turned out differently?”
The brush descended, and Nakasato continued to apply makeup in swift, expert strokes. Her oval fingernails gleamed in the classroom light.
“I do, actually,” she said, and as she leaned forward her long dark curls of hair swung forward to brush Fuji's shoulder. “Quite frequently.”
On to Part 2.
Characters: Fuji, Yukimura
Length: about 1600 words?
Disclaimer: Konomi Takeshi's.
Genre: Gen as per usual, but pushing it.
Notes: So those drabble requests? Are so not turning out to be drabbles. This is written for the lovely
fujis, who wanted Valentine's dresses, Fuji and Yukimura. I haven't quite managed Yukimura yet, but he should crop up in part 2. Hopefully. Part 1
Due to the appointment of one of the most singular characters ever to grace Japanese education to the position of Seishun Gakuen High School Div. principal - Kawamura said in earnest tones but with a little frown that he was sure the school board knew what they were doing, while Inui hmmphed and scribbled on his handheld PDA, which on his sixteenth birthday had replaced the stack of notebooks underneath his bed (“Good data,” he said, and nobody disagreed) - the school held its first ever Valentine’s Day festival towards the end of Fuji’s second year.
It was not precisely a St. Valentine’s festival. Technically it was a ‘student-organised fair for fostering links between Seishun Gakuen and the local community, as well as to showcase student activities and talent,’ which usually meant it was a message to the public high school two streets down: ‘See how much better we can do things with an extra hundred million yen in the annual budget.’ The propitious selected date of the fete being what it was, though, no class or club in Seigaku Koko could be expected to come up with ideas for booths that were workable, legal and non-licentious. Or at least none of the supposedly above-average brains in class 2A could do so.
On the first of the mornings set aside for festival preparation, class representative Oiishi stood up and patiently but wearily attempted to organize the students, in particular the small but growing clump of students in the back corner taking bets on this year’s chocolate intake, which showed every sign of ignoring his efforts until Tezuka, seated in the next-to-last row by dint of height, folded his arms across his chest and glared. This did not intimidate the students so much as it reminded them that there was no way to measure the outcome of the bets, since it was almost certain that Tezuka would get the most chocolate, and dead certain that whatever quantity he received, he was not making the information public.
After this discouragement, there was a general drifting of bodies towards their assigned seats, and some semblance of order achieved, with no other distractions save the usual one of Nakasato-san, who showed little interest in showcasing anything other than her long toned legs, ivory-pale and hairless, emerging from a pleated skirt eight centimeters shorter than regulation. At least one-third of Class 2A’s male population could be seen watching Nakasato’s calves at any moment. Even Tezuka had looked at least once; Fuji had caught him at it one afternoon during a particularly desultory math class - although it would be unlikely to happen this morning, since the tall bespectacled boy was currently occupied reminding everyone, in typical motionless and non-verbal Tezuka fashion, that he was student body president and had to run the festival, which meant that he was exempt from helping out with the class booth, or otherwise participating in any inconvenient and embarrassing duties that might crop up.
Some days Fuji thought it might be convenient to be Tezuka, save for the side-effect of boring oneself to death. Tezuka seemed to get his way in everything, with none of the effort that Fuji had to put into doing so: for every hour spent thinking up elaborate schemes to cancel a day’s worth of class, Tezuka merely had to nod and bow and produce his usual lack of expression, which somehow resulted in total cooperation on the part of whomever he was speaking to.
Fuji contemplated Tezuka’s unnatural and unfair superhumanity, not for the first time mourning the fact that beneath the (extremely thick) layer of stoicism there was no scrap of humanity to be found conducive to cooperating with Fuji’s purposes. This had been particularly galling this year since Eiji, his usual partner-in-crime, was no longer in the same class - a mistake on Fuji’s part: Yuuta had overwatered the cacti the morning before last year’s final exams, and caught between grief for his favourite star cactus and resisting the urge to stab his younger brother in the throat (Yuuta had been about to graduate from St. Rudolph, and everyone was being extra-nice to get him to move back home), he’d glanced down five minutes before handing in the paper and realized in horror that he’d answered every single question correctly, even the ten-step differential equation meant for college-level. There was no chance of going to class 2D after that, and so Fuji bade Eiji farewell, and said hello to advanced mathematics, straight-A expectations, Oishi’s earnestness and Tezuka’s stern seriousness.
There were advantages, like Nakasato-san’s legs, although as Fuji turned his attention back to the classroom discussion he realized, with the first prickle of unease, that Nakasato for only the third time that year was showing interest in school activities and this could be constituted either as a Very Good or a Very Bad thing, depending on which side of the crossfire you ended up on.
That there would be crossfire was never in doubt, particularly as Nakasato opened her mouth and said, in that deliciously artificial and languid voice of hers: “I think we should have a kissing booth.”
Any suggestion Nakasato made would have been greeted with enthusiasm by the male half of 2A, particularly when uttered by those pert lips painted over in pink glitter gloss, but it was testament to the effect of Valentine’s Day that the girls, who hated Nakasato as much as the boys loved her, took to the idea at once. With such a majority vote in effect the decision was made at once, even with the class representative looking askance (with good reason, since he’d been placed back on the ‘tennis club bachelors’ list after abandoning the egg-style haircut, and besides being expected to receive a trunkful of Valentine’s chocolate he would no doubt be recruited to man the booth). Fuji smiled and abstained from voting as hands were raised, not so much to look neutral as because he hadn’t finished calculating the odds yet – potential enjoyable humiliation to other people versus potential unenjoyable humiliation to himself? It was a delicate equation.
What he hadn’t calculated upon that Nakasato-san was watching with narrowed long-lashed eyes as the vote was counted, and as the best-looking girl in second-year Nakasato considered it her duty to have the most eligible males in the school hanging off her every word. Tezuka she’d given up as a lost cause, and Oishi was obliging enough to satisfy even Nakasato’s ego, but from Fuji she seemed to demand a certain level of lovelorn behaviour, which he enacted occasionally for entertainment, but now she was staring at him the way a five-year-old child stares at a broken clockwork toy, and suddenly the whole thing had become very unamusing--
“I think,” Nakasato continued, in triumphant tones, “that we should have Fuji dress as a girl.”
It was from shoujo manga, his sister Yumiko explained over tea and biscuits the next afternoon, and Fuji smiled sweetly and said, I know about these strange places girls get ideas from, but is there any way to get out of doing this, and if not could we please go to that Cajun restaurant in Shinjuku for dinner, I’m feeling quite desolate here?
He hadn’t thought he could feel much worse, especially when Eiji walked up at club practice and told him he would look cute as a girl, but the downward spiraling of his stomach as they went clothes-hunting that weekend told him there was further to go. Nakasato-san picked out matching dresses in snowy white and ice-blue, only hers was strapless and ended halfway down her thighs while Fuji’s was several sizes larger and went down to his ankles, with elbow-length floral sleeves because thin as Fuji was, he played tennis five days out of seven and it showed, in the broad angles of his shoulders and the musculature of his legs. This seemed not to deter the girls of 2A one jot, as they simply pulled the ribbons tighter about his waist, muttered something about a makeup session, and proceeded to squeal about how beautiful his bones were. Fuji accepted this with a weak smile, being used to compliments but not to hearing them while dressed in lace and faux satin with four teenage girls critically examining his hair, lips pursed.
“They say they’re going to curl it, then maybe put some flowers in,” he told his sister over dinner that night (spiced ramen and strawberry cake; Mother had her hands full encouraging both her sons’ flagging spirits).
“I’d wondered about that,” Yumiko said, and added, “have they bought you gloves as well?”
Fuji answered in the negative, to which Yumiko replied by saying she would buy him some tomorrow, and before Fuji could say, Hell might freeze, or Eiji sit still in class for one hour, she’d told him that he could either wear gloves or get a manicure and moisturize his hands for the six days remaining until the festival. Fuji was about to respond rather indignantly, that he did moisturize, when he remembered his current objective of retaining whatever vestige of masculine pride remained to him.
He submitted to the gloves, and the fact that they were silver-white leather and resembled Gundam Wing more than they did Card Captor Sakura was little consolation in the face of everything else, in particular tennis practice which was starting to slip across the border from ‘masochistic’ to ‘downright unbearable’. The one bright spot was that Eiji had abandoned teasing Fuji in favour of Oishi, mostly because Eiji couldn’t reconcile himself to the thought of his doubles partner kissing more girls in a day than he normally did in a week. Echizen still being in junior high would have been another bright spot, except that Fuji knew Momoshiro still went over to the Seigaku Chuu school grounds twice or thrice a week (as did Tezuka for tennis practice, but Fuji had no fear from that quarter) for burgers and camaraderie. That Fila cap and now-breaking-on-adolescence-but-still-cocky voice would no doubt be a presence at the festival.
“At least he won’t want to kiss you,” Kawamura said, which was meant to be consoling but had the reverse effect of reminding Fuji that aside from being in a dress and flowers and fake diamond choker he had the added duty of salesman. Or rather, being the goods on sale.
“Prostitution is such a crude practice,” he said to Yumiko. His sister just looked at him and reminded him that he’d always liked Moulin Rouge, and Fuji protested that the movie was about love and bohemian freedom, and this bodies-for-sale thing was an outdated imperialist custom, and he’d meant to sound witty and self-deprecating but it came out whiny and sort of panicky in a way that reminded him of Inui’s Aozu juice.
“Just give up,” Nakasato advised him the Thursday before the festival. She was experimenting with eyeshadow on his cheek, in particular the blending of viridian with silver powder and its combination with ultramarine mascara. She offered Fuji her black compact mirror; he looked in spite of himself and then promptly wished that he hadn’t.
“Aren’t I cooperating well enough, Nakasato-san?” he said, in his usual voice which sounded sweet and wistful to everyone, even his family and the tennis regulars who knew otherwise. Fuji had never set out to make himself look gentle and deceptive; genetics had simply turned out that way, and at some point in elementary school he’d given up and decided it was a convenient device. “I have no intention of letting the class down. I just wish--”
Nakasato’s hand paused in mid-air, her makeup brush two inches away from dusting Fuji’s cheek with rouge. “You just wish?”
“Don't you sometimes wish,” he continued, “that things could have turned out differently?”
The brush descended, and Nakasato continued to apply makeup in swift, expert strokes. Her oval fingernails gleamed in the classroom light.
“I do, actually,” she said, and as she leaned forward her long dark curls of hair swung forward to brush Fuji's shoulder. “Quite frequently.”
On to Part 2.
