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bi-focal12 · 6 days

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i feel like my writing has been on a steady decline lately, so pls enjoy this offering from a writing class that i took last spring (when i felt my writing was getting a lot better). it was one of the first, serious original writing pieces i worked on and i definitely leaned on bakugou katsuki's personality to help inform how i wrote Tony lol, but i was pleasantly surprised with the outcome!

i'd love to hear your thoughts (and if anyone's interested in beta-ing my i7 work, pls message me!)

it never got a title but i suppose ill call it...

In Ten Year's Time (1,737 words, original one-shot)

The bus was late.

Tony slumped further in his seat, trying to tune out the chattering next to him while the hard metal rungs of the bench dug further into his back. Tony didn't care if Maria's youngest child had finally started kindergarten or if the acne-ridden line cook sitting in between them was saving up to go to flight school. He did care that their conversation was making the words of his essay prompt swim on the page, 'night shift' and 'empty nest' burrowing an unwanted space between 'where do you see yourself in ten years?'.

Hopefully by then he'd be done waiting at this stupid bus stop.

Maria cackled loudly at something Acne Face had said and Tony took a deep breath through his nose, bouncing his left leg and focusing more intently on the notebook balanced on his right.

In ten years I will be, he wrote, pencil jerking when one of them- Maria, probably- began playing a video clip that started out like an air raid siren. Old people never knew how to fucking lower their volume in public. Tony didn't bother erasing the jagged line that streaked across his page or the one knitting his eyebrows together.

...in anger management, he finished wryly. Or jail.

Maria's shiny clump of necklaces caught the light as she leaned forward and Tony made the mistake of glancing up to investigate, caught in the headlights of her searching gaze while the large man in between them tried to respectfully shrink into nothingness.

"I'm sorry honey," she said apologetically, the remnant of a laugh still caught in her throat. "Are we being too loud?"

Tony grit his teeth against his instinctual, biting response. As much as she was getting on his nerves now, Maria was unbearably nice to him and always dropped off an apple pie during the holidays.

"A bit," he forced out, along with his best half-smile.

Her pleasant expression- endlessly patient while he searched his vocabulary for words that wouldn't sting- turned apologetic and Tony's stomach soured. "It's- it's whatever," he amended, turning away. "I was gonna wrap it up anyways. Bus should be here soon."

"Still," she said softly, followed by an awkward apology from the line cook that might have been the result of an expectant look from Maria. Tony couldn't be sure, eyes locked on an uninteresting pebble.

He rolled it around beneath the sole of his show for the five seconds it took for him to become bored, then kicked it and watched the rock skate clumsily over the curb and into the empty space beyond. Where the bus should be.

"Tory's not picking you up, today?" Maria continued pleasantly.

Tony shook his head, biting down a mean grin while imagining the way his mother's face would scrunch up at the nickname. "Nah."

"Well," Maria replied, the sigh and shifting fabric letting him know that she'd given up on eye contact, "might still be faster if she gets you from here."

"What?" Tony asked, turning his head only to be met with a pale, tattooed bicep. With a barely audible huff, he leaned forward to see around the line cook. "But the bus is supposed to come at four," he insisted.

The line cook chuckled and Tony scowled at him, unencumbered by apple-pie shaped shackles.

The man reigned himself in with an awkward cough. "I don't know where you heard that," he said, "but this bus never shows up earlier than five."

Tony stared at him, then Maria, then the line cook again. The man offered him a shrug.

"Five," Tony repeated blandly.

"Five," they agreed.

Tony clenched his fists, silently burying himself in his backpack to escape their sympathetic grimaces but he could still feel their eyes on the back of his neck like a rash. He rifled carelessly through notebooks and folders and textbooks, crumpling half of them in his wake before coming back up with a fresh sheet of paper and the stub of a pencil.

The stubs were harder to snap.

Tony chewed on the inside of his cheek and tuned out the tentative chatter starting up again on his right.

Where do you see yourself in ten years?

Tony scribbled his name on the top of the page, first and last. Then the date. Then the name of his homeroom teacher just for the hell of it, trying to at least look like he was busy and not avoiding the rest of the page.

"College applications, huh?" the line cook commented.

Tony's nostrils flared. Apparently he didn't look busy enough.

"Oh, Angelica had such an awful time with hers," Maria lamented. Tony had already chosen his prompt but he leaned further over his paper to write down the other two. "Something about who you'd want to have dinner with? Honestly, how a college can pick you based on your dinner guests makes no sense to me," she complained, huffing, "and if Mother Teresa isn't good enough for them then they're not good enough for my daughter."

The line cook whistled appreciatively, a bit of mirth slipping out in the shade of his voice. "You tell 'em."

Tony slowly uncurled from his hunched over position, not quite turning his head to face them.

"Angelica got rejected?"

"Mm," Maria agreed solemnly. "Three times." Then she shrugged, the bitterness alighting from her shoulders like birds on a wire. "But she'd happy where she is."

Tony tapped his pencil stub against his knee, retreating from the conversation once more.

Angelica was two years older than him and he only ever really saw her at church or the odd Christmas party but he knew for a fact she had ranked first in her year. Hell, he'd overheard her reciting her valedictorian speech instead of prayer during communion too many times to count.

Tony pulled out his phone, tapping until he found the right screen.

He held his breath.

S. Antonio, 42

And kept holding it, idly wishing that he could just pass out and not have to deal with college applications anymore. He imagined a puppet doctor in a crisp white lab coat saying, Sorry ma'am, turns out your kid's terminally ill and needs to be exempt from college applications. Bed rest only.

His little wooden limbs would jangle as he shrugged.

Then he imagined his puppet mother pointing in the doctor's face, demanding that they heal him because Tony wasn't allowed to die before becoming a doctor himself and the puppet doctor would droop like his strings had been cut and do as he was told because Tony's mother controlled the universe.

"Uh...hey, kid? Everything alright over there?"

Tony's head snapped up to the line cook, blinking away his daydream and the black spots while he heaved in a lungful of air as subtly as possible. "I'm fine," he spat on the exhale.

Tony's pencil stub lay on the ground between his feet, having slipped from his shaky hands. The sheet of paper, still mostly blank, lay plastered to his thigh.

"Essay that hard?" the line cook asked lightly, lips quirked up in a careful smile.

Tony sneered in the face of it, bristling. "No," he snapped. Heart pounding and lungs still trembling, Tony sat up straighter and gave the man a onceover. "I know damn well where I don't want to be in ten years."

The man's eyes widened but a chuckle was quick to follow. "On your way home to the love of your life after a good day at work?"

Tony's mouth fell open, letting loose a weak, "I-"

"Antonio!" his mother called, her sleek gray car pulling into the space in front of the bench. Right where the bus should be. "Get in, what're you waiting around for?"

Tony scrambled to shove his things back into his bag, staunchly avoiding eye contact and standing before he was finished, nearly tripping for his efforts. The back of his neck burned.

"Nice to see you, Tory," Maria called.

Victoria's mouth pursed, then smoothed out into what she probably thought was polite neutrality, fingers tapping the steering wheel at regular intervals. "You too," she said, voice so falsely sweet it could rot your teeth. Tony wondered if they could tell. "How's Angelica doing? I heard she moved back home?"

Tony paused, hand on the open frame of the passenger side door. His mother's interest might not have been genuine but Tony knew as soon as he was inside the car she'd be off without waiting for the answer. He stepped away to load his bag in the backseat, instead.

"She's happy," Maria replied, the serene smile audible in her voice. "Rediscovering her passions." Tony's mother offered a noncommittal hum, sharp eyes darting to her son's hesitating form. "And your children?" Maria inquired.

"Oh, they're wonderful," Tony's mother replied. "Brock's nearly finished with law school now. Columbia. And of course, Antonio here's getting ready to apply to all the best schools in the country." She smiled, polished teeth flashing. "A little doctor in the making."

Tony kept his eyes low as he slipped into the passenger seat and his mother hardly waited for the door to shut behind him before pulling away. For a few, long moments neither of them said anything, letting the quiet hum of the engine permeate the empty space the way other families listened to the radio. Tony's leg bounced silently.

"Maria's nice," he finally said, the statement hanging in the air like a reprimand.

His mother's grip on the steering wheel tightened. "Mhmm."

Tony rolled the words around behind his teeth, weighing the risks, before adding a careful, "So's her wife."

"Did I say anything unsavory?" his mother snapped. Tony shook his head, shifting in his seat to stare determinedly out the window, cursing his inability to disappear or turn back time or sew his mouth shut.

"Well?" she pressed.

Tony wished he hadn't said anything at all. "No."

"That's what I thought," she said shortly. Then she sighed. "I don't know why you always have to paint me as the villain, Antonio."

"Sorry," Tony muttered quietly.

In his head, he wrote, In ten years, I do not want to be like my mother.

In his head, he wrote, Maybe I'll sit on a bus bench with a friend after a good day of work and won't daydream about dying.

Maybe I won't even mind if the bus is late.

#writeblr #oneshot #writing on tumblr #writers on tumblr #writing #original story #writer stuff #bakugou katsuki #i7 #writers and poets #college

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bi-focal12 · 7 days

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Fool Me Once, 793 words, Riku x Iori, i7 shenanigans

“I swear to god,” Iori groaned, rubbing his temples as Riku followed him into the dorm’s common space, “every time you describe your brother as kind, an angel loses its wings.”

“What?” Riku exclaimed, his kicked-puppy expression glued to Iori and not the five other i7 members shooting him varying looks of concern and dismay. “But Tenn-nii is kind!”

A sudden, metallic crash drew their attention to the kitchen, where Nagi-san was flailing dramatically to the floor.

“My wings!” he cried, clutching his chest as he fell. “Riku, how could you do this to me?”

Iori and Sogo-san sighed in unison.

“Nagi-kun, we need that pan for dinner,” Sogo-san gently chastised.

Still lying on the ground with his eyes closed, Nagi-san picked up the pan and offered it in Sogo-san’s general direction.

Seriously, Iori thought to himself, how is this guy my senior?

“I-it’s not that bad! Really!” Riku defended. “He’s nice!”

Yotsuba-san groaned and fell to the floor.

Riku flushed a deep red.

“In his own way he is!”

“Oh no,” Yamato-san replied in monotone, slowly lowering himself to a horizontal position on the couch while he continued to flip through his magazine. “My wings.”

“Guys,” Riku complained.

“As a big brother myself,” Mitsuki began, ignoring Iori’s eyeroll, “I’m seriously concerned about your standard of niceness.”

“Didn’t you try to sell me, once?” Iori interjected bluntly.

Mitsuki waved away the protest. “I was like, three then. But now when my dear baby brother is upset, I- a superior big brother- make him pancakes in the shape of cute bunnies.”

“How come you only make the rest of us regular pancakes?” Yotsuba-san complained from his wingless position on the carpet.

“Now what does "Tenn-nii" do?” Mitsuki continued pointedly, heedless of the interruption.

“I know this one,” Sogo-san announced proudly before clearing his throat and drawing his features into something poorly resembling Kujo-san’s cold stare. “Nanase, who?”

“But-“

“And what does dear Iori-kun say?” Mitsuki prompted next, grinning widely.

“What?” Iori replied, narrowing his eyes in the face of so many sudden, teasing grins in the room. This felt like a trap. “We’re talking about-“

“Nanase-san,” Yamato-san said in a poor affectation of Iori’s voice, “I’ll make you a superstar!”

Mitsuki pretended to swoon into Yamato’s arms, effectively crushing the man and his magazine into the couch.

Iori frowned, ears burning. “That was-“

“Nanase-san, let me control you,” Nagi said next, reaching his hand out in front of himself like he was on the cover of a shoujo manga.

“You heard that?” Iori exclaimed.

Yotsuba-san laughed. “You said what, Iorin?”

Sogo-san began fanning his face. "Oh my."

“Nanase-san,” Mitsuki picked up next, rising off of Yamato-san to mimic Nagi-san's overtly romantic gesture. “You’re so cute. Ahem, I mean. You’re so stupid.”

Yotsuba-san gasped and pointed. “Iorin’s a tsundere!”

“I am not!” Iori howled. “And I don’t have to stand here and take this. Nanase-san-"

Riku turned toward Iori with wide eyes, his face only a few shades lighter than his hair, and Iori suddenly had no idea why his instinct had been to turn to him in the first place.

“Cat got your tongue?” Yamato-san teased.

“I’m leaving!” Iori declared, retrieving his keys from the shared bowl near the front door. The rainbow keychain he’d given Riku stared back at him mockingly.

“We’re making bunny pancakes for dinner!” Mitsuki reminded him.

“I’ll be back!” Iori huffed angrily, slamming the door behind himself.

Within the dorm, Riku stood frozen.

Tamaki wandered over to lightly fan his burning face.

“S-so…”

“Yay!” Nagi cheered, popping up from the kitchen floor. “Moment of realization!”

“So Iori-kun’s…a better brother to me?” Riku asked haltingly.

Nagi wailed and collapsed back onto the ground, various noises of exasperation and disappointment from the other members following suit.

Riku had to bite his lip to keep from laughing at them. Discreetly, he pulled out his phone.

Iori <3: are they done yet?

Riku: pretty sure, yeah

Riku: “brother” heh