text my brother

i need to sleep

is he done pretending to be straight then

i do not know because our little thing notwithstanding i am not interested in his sex life

figure it out

you're useless

and you're a dick

a handsome dick, but a dick nonetheless

awww you think I'm handsome?

zzzzzzz

ugh you're so annoying

Well, one twin is as good as the other, honestly. Maybe he'll have better luck with Toshiki.

yo Toshiki

are you done pretending to be straight

I'm frustrated and need to take it out on someone and Akira's blowing me off

Haru is in school as usual the next day still chipper as fuck.

Yutaka is also chipper as fuck, because Kobayashi Toshiki is a pretty quick study and really hot and that was a great pick-me-up. He will not at all think about how resoundingly he got turned down and how badly he failed last night, nope, no siree, not him.

Then they can nod politely at each other and there's not much more to be said.

You know what Yutaka needs? He needs to find someone new to fuck here at this school. He's got like three more promising leads, and he needs to know that he hasn't lost his touch. He can too still be some other boy's mistake. Maybe that cute guy in the baseball team who dyes his hair blond, he looks hot in those tights.

The blond guy on the baseball team is convinceable that it's not gay if he's on top if Yutaka turns on enough charm and promises enough discretion.

Yutaka can be so, so charming, and so, so discreet. This is what he's for.

And yet.

Today's a bad day. Yutaka sometimes has those. Days when he doesn't want to get up in the morning, when he looks at his life and his choices and can't see the point. Like, spite is a great motivator, as are hot boys and sex, but what's he gonna do, live on spite? Become a NEET who happens to be extremely rich?

Would his father even let that fly? If he weren't studying or working Iwasaki-san would almost certainly want to put him to work somehow or other. And what would he do, refuse? Refuse for how long? And to do what instead? Just keep finding more boys to fuck, keep wasting his time and energy on absolutely nothing at all, with no plan in sight, no future in waiting? He doesn't even know what he's going to do for university, he had vaguely been thinking about maybe engineering but, like, with what grades?

What's the point?

So he might as well just do what Iwasaki-san wants. Learn how to be a nice suit, how to obey and be obeyed, be in the nice grey corporate structure of Mistubishi UFJ Financial Group and eventually succeed him, because "merit" is a joke and after a short twenty-year break after World War II his family name got back to the top of the group and there's been one or another Iwasaki on the board of one or another Mitsubishi company since.

But this sounds miserable.

So, again, what's the point? If he doesn't want to be another nice cog in the Mitsubishi machine, but he doesn't have anything else in particular he wants, then he might as well die.

He doesn't really know what's triggered him this time, honestly, but he's been in this funk since he woke up, and when he saw fucking Swan Masaharu being incredibly cheerful as he's been every fucking day for like almost two weeks in maths class that just soured his mood even more. Research medicine. Must be nice to care about things and want to achieve them. Must be nice to have a loving family. Must be nice to have real friends who want you to have a nice boyfriend. Must be nice to be smart enough to read Mark fucking Twain and dispositionally lucky enough to actually enjoy it.

Must be so.

Fucking.

Nice.

So, yeah, fuck this shit. He's tired. He's tired of it all. Tired of his fake friends, tired of fucking one boy after another without ever caring about any of them, of accumulating notches on his bedpost. Tired of his obsessive, unloving father who demands to be called "otō-sama". Tired of school, tired of people, tired of life.

He's not sure where his feet are taking him, right now, except that he knows it's "away from that miserable school". He doesn't care that he's skipping class, or about anything else, really.

He just wants out.

"Ah shit," says fucking Swan Masaharu, right in the middle of class, while the teacher's sort of checked out and left them to do their quizzes that look suspiciously like the same ones they got last time. He gets up out of his chair, pulls down a neighboring student's collar, and - yup. He sighs, pulls his phone out of his pocket and sets on his desk, and -

- in a flash of brilliant light that's golder than gold and brighter than sunlight -

- his wrist brace is gone. His school uniform is gone. He's in a traditional Japanese archery outfit, navy blue and white and gold, hakama and sandals and robe and all, with archery gloves the left one of which is backed by a luminous gold cabochon.

He dials the phone and lets it ring.

He materializes a bow, out of absolutely nowhere, and then - unstrings it, and the string keeps replacing itself, over and over again, as he checks oblivious torporous students each one after the other for a mark and ties the ones who have them to their desks, apologizing under his breath as he goes.

The person on the other end of the phone picks up. "In the middle of the day?" asks a woman's voice.

"Yep." He gives the address of the school. "How quick can you be here?"

"Give me ten."

"All right. Meet you at the portal."

Not all of the kids who ought to be in this classroom right now in fact are.

Yep, yep, once he's got the teacher lashed to her desk he's abandoning the phone in the classroom - that was just to give his teammate a more legible excuse to bail on whatever she's doing than the telepathy does - and he's going out and chasing down anyone else who needs to be tied up. "Iwasaki!" he calls, though he's not super optimistic about it.

Did he hear his name? It sounded like it was in his head, though...

...well, if he did, who gives a shit? If they care so much they can, can, he doesn't even know what they can. Something. They can do something, he's sure. It's nothing to him either way.

Oh, a bridge. There's a thought. An attractive thought, even. What better way to be out than that?