i feel the warmth in my chest (and the chill on my skin makes it that much clearer)
(1,964 words)
Evan and Gregory, while waiting those few agonizing hours before Halloween can truly begin, go outside into the chilly weather and play in the leaves.
🎃🍫👻
It's a crisp Autumn afternoon when Evan steps out onto Gregorys porch. The screen door slams behind him, and the air transitions from warm to chilly in only seconds. The breeze washes over his face like a wave, and Evan finds he dosnt mind the cold that much in this moment.
It makes his nose numb and his fingers freezing, but unlike how he usually feels about the cold, he welcomes it. He takes a deep breath, smelling the scent of fallen leaves and crisp air and the pumpkins Evan had carved with Gregory last week sitting by his feet next to the stairs. It fills his lungs, and alongside the aftertaste of Aunt Chicas cookies on his tongue, the chill is pleasant, unlike how its usually so unbearing and biting in his own home.
It doesnt take long for the temperature to wash over him fully. By the time hes stepping down the stairs, his thin,white overcoat flowing behind him, its left his shoulders shaking and his teeth chattering.
But so like he's not used to, the deep, bone chilling cold only adds onto his excitement. It's that type of chill you can only get during Halloween, with that specific vibe and feeling coming along with it. Evan has never liked that unmatched feeling. All it ever told him was that Halloween was on it's way, and along with it, Michael and his pushing and pulling and jabbing and messing with. With the addition of the neighborhood kids jumping in if they'd see him walking down the street on the one night of the year it would be acceptable to scare him with scary masks and bloody fingers and camouflaging cloaks, it made for a pretty dreadful day.
He takes another look at his costume, a ghost, with white flowy sheer fabric that makes him look like he floated right down from the clouds. Underneath is a white sweater and pants, and his makeup is done to make him appear ghastly and, well... dead. Eyes sunken in with deep shadows and complection pale.
Gregory is matching with him, kind of. Gregory's costume is of a murder victim. Hes wearing sort of varsity jacket with a plastic knife stabbed in his gut, and his face is painted with bloody makeup and a faux black eye. Gregory hadn't explained the specific costume he called a 'Zombie Murder Victim High School Football Star', just gotten excited over the fact that they matched with their undead themes.
Its Evans first year matching with someone. His first year having someone to go trick or treating with. Theres something about this year. It doesn't leave him guessing. It doesn't leave him on edge, wondering who will strike first, all while being so uncertain but sure at the same time that something will go wrong. This year, he has Gregory and his family. This year, he has people who actually care about how he feels, and understand how to have fun.
This year, he knows Michael will be across town with his friends, and that his father will lock himself in his workshop. He knows that the neighborhood kids wont dare mess with him now, because of how many times Gregory has shown them a thing or two over the better part of this year.
This year, Evan isnt dreading the coming hours. He isnt hiding in his room, celebration or joy for the Holiday nowhere to be found, because he has to watch his back and sides. This year, he isnt considering running away for the night, even though he had always known he would never be brave enough to do it.
Instead, he's going trick or treating with his best friend, and he only feels excitment and anticipation, compared to the stark contrast of last year where all he felt was on edge and trapped in his own house.
The sun is only just setting by the time he steps onto that little pathway leading to the backyard from the front porch. Waiting for it to get dark has been agonizing. It had only gotten too much when he and Gregory were sat in front of a movie they'd seen a thousand times, makeup and costumes done, and unable to sit without wiggling or fidgeting, and Gregory had jumped up and gone "That's it! I can't just sit here anymore!"
That's why Evan's followed him outside. For the better part of the day Gregory has been more restless than a bored puppy.
Evan thinks the description fits when he finally catches up to Gregory and finds him digging through the shed in his backyard. Evan doesn't really know why he came out here. Theres much less to do outside than there is inside, but his intentions become clear when he moves to stand by Gregory's shoulder, and he goes Aha! while retrieving something.
Evan stares blankly when Gregory pulls out a rake, turning to face him and grinning at him. "Want to build a leaf pile and do cannonballs in it?"
He doesn't even have to ask.
It's not long before they're trekking through backyard, browning leaves crunching under their sneakers as they head to that big tree in the middle of the yard. When they get there, they waste no time grabbing the big rake and making the inklings of a pile on the flattest bit of ground.
The rake is heavy, and Evan can barely control it, if how it swings around and almost hits Gregory in the face is any indication. The handle is ice cold on his fingers, but it only makes Evan that much more aware of the excitment thrumming through his veins.
With Evan using the rake, Gregory takes to getting on his knees and shepherding the leaves to the pile with his hands. Gregory laughs over the dirt under his fingernails and how the still-damp leaves from the light shower earlier are chilly on his hands, and it makes Evan abandon the rake and get on the ground with him.
It takes longer than it should to finish the pile. They keep getting caught up in throwing the leaves at eachother like snowballs and using their hands to push waves at eachother like they're in a pool. The leaves end up more scattered than the were originally, and Evan has to get the rake again.
By the time they finish and theres a huge pile of damp leaves sitting in front of them, the sky is a dark, deep blue with the horizon a yellow. The sun is only barely peeking through the trees, and it's enough for the automatic porch lights to come on.
With the lack of sunlight, it's gotten that much colder. Evan's shivering enough that it makes his laughs warble, but he doesnt care. He doesnt care about the cold.
They only take a short break before they jump in. Evan lays flat on the ground, damp excess leaves and ice cold dirt underneath him. His throat is dry from the chill and how much he talked, and laughed, and his cheeks are sore from smiling too much. His nose is numb, and the thin, cheap Spirit Halloween costume does nothing for keeping him warm, but he doesn't need it.
Through the cold, it makes the warmth blooming in his stomach that much clearer. It makes the laughter bubbling in his chest and the excitement that the fun isnt even over, yet, he still gets to go trick or treating with Gregory after this, that much more apparent.
He has the warmth that spawned inside of him from spending time with his best friend and having fun with him to keep him toasty. So unlike his own home, where the chill is all there is. No warmth or comfort to adhere for that fact.
It's only now that Evan thinks that maybe, he doesn't really dislike the cold. Just how the cold is what comes with his unfeeling house and unpleasant family members and uncomfortable atmosphere.
Because here, right now, as he lays on the freezing ground, sky darkening above them and the last bit of leaves on the big tree in Gregory's backyard fluttering in the chilly breeze, he realizes he likes what comes with the cold, and not what the cold comes from.
With the cold comes the awareness of the warmth unfurling in his stomach. With the cold comes drinking the delicious, steaming hot chocolate Aunt Chica made. With the cold comes bundling up with his favorite sweaters, cuddling up under a fuzzy blanket, and watching a movie with Gregory.
With the cold comes those agonizing few hours before Halloween truly begins, and making a leaf pile with your best friend.
Evan knows his all-white costume is dirtier by the time he finally gets up, the knees of his white jeans brown and dirtied, but he doesnt have time to dwell on it when all he hears is a breathy laugh before hes shoved face first into the leaf pile.
Even through the leaves submerging his head, he can hear Gregory cackling. He sputters when leaves get in his mouth, and while regaining his footing after rolling around a few times, he wastes no time shooting up and grabbing Gregory by the shoulders.
Gregory yelps when hes yanked down with Evan, and all Evan is aware of when his eyes shut in glee from how hard hes laughing is the soft, scratchy, earthy leaves beneath him, the breeze in the air that just screams Halloween, and Gregory's body fallen on top of him.
Gregory grabs some leaves and smushes them into his hair. All Evan can do is screech at the wet chill before grabbing his own fistful and doing the same. Leaves fall over them like a wave when they roll around, wrestling in the yard.
They only stop when they get too tired to keep going. His costume is definitely dirty by now, damp like the leaves and dirt. The scent of wet earth and the cold and Halloween washes over him, and all he can find in himself to do is grin, and giggle breathlessly and chatter with Gregory as he lies on the ground, shoulder to shoulder with him.
Its almost pitch black by the time Freddy opens the door leading to the backyard, stepping outside, Frankenstiens monster costume and all. "Kids? Are you two ready to go? Its almost time for trick or treating!"
Evan only shares a fleeting look with Gregory before they both shoot up, previous exhaustion from their little fight completely gone. Evan runs side by side with Gregory to the door, his costume with the mud stained hem flowing behind him, and all Evan can feel in this moment is warmth, despite how his nose is numb and his shoulders are shaking and theres this chilly, floaty feeling in his chest.
He knows that there are definitely leaves in his hair when he steps inside after Gregory, and when the heat of the home blasts him in his face, making his freezing face tingle, the warmth prickling and sharp, Evan finds that with the cold can come the warmth, and maybe it isnt so weird that Evan feels nothing of the sort when it comes to his own house, and his own family.
It was never about the cold.
Just like how the warmth with Gregory and his family has never been about the temperature.
He only has time to grab his candy bucket (shaped like a mummified teddy bear) before he and Gregory are shooting through the front door, racing to Freddys car. He smiles even wider when the cold air rushes across his face again, and he can hear Gregory's footsteps next to him and Freddy and the others' voices behind them.
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Someone Worth Loving | Yandere!Imayoshi Shouichi
for anon who asked "in which a popular s/o was the crush of imayoshi in first year until there year, but s/o didn't want to be tie down so they just play around, and yan! imayoshi was a delusional to think that he's special. i think imayoshi will be very oc, so feel free to change something hehe. i love your writing style and works"
this was fun to write, challenging but also a good chance to have a think about yandere!imayoshi further and outside my usual box for him. he's not particularly delusional here - i just can't see someone as socially aware and intelligent as ima being a delusional yandere. but i figured the combination of a) him not being a control freak and being pretty laidback; having that darker side, but also not wanting people to perceive him as evil unlike hanamiya + b) probable abandonment/grief issues after losing his mum + c) liking prim and proper girls = a more intriguing and unique yandere than i usually give him credit for.
so thanks for the ask anon, and without further ado...
content warning for slight explicit-ness. this is a yandere fic - it's not romance, and it's written accordingly.
It was love at first sight for Imayoshi.
On that fatal first day, you skipped through the doors of the Touou classroom that you would share with Imayoshi for the next three years, holding hands with a ‘friend’ you had befriended just minutes prior (whom, Imayoshi already understood, would be forgotten about as soon as someone more suitable appeared to take her place), asking her where they should sit.
The other girl pointed to two empty desks near the front. That was when you let go of her hand.
“I just have to sit by the windows,” you said, not at all apologetically, as if it was a given, not even sparing a second glance at the girl beside you - her eyes a little wide, almost a touch teary as she realised that she was already being demoted to rank of Friendless First Year.
There was only one seat left near the windows. They’d have to split up. And the remaining chair was by fellow first year Imayoshi, who was pulling a pen out his backpack, pondering whether to ignore you or put on a show of bored confidence and do introductions.
As he pondered, you sat down beside him. Your knee briefly pressed against his. Then panicked, pulled away. You looked around the classroom as if you were ignoring your seatmate by accident, just curious about all the new faces. You had felt the sparks too.
It took only this long - just those few seconds - for Imayoshi to stumble across realisations that would affect the rest of his life.
(1) For all that confidence you showed off - confidence that, as you grew older, would become glam and men double your age wrapping their arms around your shoulders - you were an insecure coward like the crowds of girls who looked up to you from the distance.
(2) Imayoshi was feeling something. At the time, he called it curiosity; it would take later introspections for it to be correctly labelled as love.
Not that there was much reason to love you, at the beginning anyway. Though the two of you talked often, quick conversations in at least a couple classes a day, they were nothing but the usual seatmate discussions. You, an idiot, had cottoned onto the fact that Imayoshi was breezing through every class. You put on your usual batting-eyelashes persona, cutesy obsequiousness (“I’m so sorry to bother you again, but for number 13...”) punctuated with meaningless sweet-nothings (“Honestly, Shouichi, you’re the best. I love you.”), and who was he to deny your requests for help?
Of course, with anyone else, Imayoshi would have gotten fed up by now - the occasional question was fine, but in almost every lesson? - yet it was cute how you thought you could rely on him. Like you seriously believed that him talking you through integrating exponentials meant you could trust him.
When he’d walk into the classroom at break, while you were sat gossiping with all your girlfriends (an ever-expanding plague of copycats, B-rate versions of you), they’d all stop talking but you.
You’d say, “don’t worry about him - that’s my bestie, Shouichi. He’s literally saving my grade right now.”
And then everyone would go back to gossiping, and you’d flash him a quick smile, and Imayoshi would never comment on how he technically hadn’t given you permission to use his first name, or on how it was so fucking stupid of you to dismiss him as the nerd who let you copy his answers sometimes. Like he didn’t have ears; like he was just one of your pawns; like he didn’t own you.
Okay, that was an exaggeration. Maybe. But Imayoshi did in fact have ears, and he was a being with agency who overheard plenty of gossip and rumours, gossip that could destroy your sweet little reputation - not to mention your relationship with your parents - if he so chose. The fact that he didn’t was chivalry in action. Anyone else would have faced his bored wrath - he’d already manipulated a few rumours such that you had discarded one of your close friends on account of them.
Yet, for the time being, he was content letting you bathe in the sunlight.
After all, he couldn’t have his future wife kicked out of school for being a pathetic, needy slut who couldn’t let a party finish without having at least slammed her lips on at least one total stranger.
If you got expelled, you wouldn’t be in the yearbook. And then what would the two of you reminisce over, twenty years from now, cuddling on the sofa?
So he tried to be content with observing you, playing his part as the polite nerd, and it worked for over a year. There were highs (you cheering him on during the final basketball match in your first year); there were lows (you had brought some brainless baseball jock to the match). But Imayoshi endured. Imayoshi took his time. Imayoshi let you gush over how happy you were to be sitting next to him again in your second year - “you’re my guardian angel, Shou-chan”. Imayoshi turned a blind eye to the partying and the boys, who lingered by the classroom door hoping to catch sight of you, and the never-ending stream of friends, and the way you’d smile at him like you adored him, only to switch it off as soon as the class was over. As soon as you had no more use for him.
Imayoshi, mature for his age, understood that he couldn’t make you who he wanted you to be overnight. Unfortunately, it seemed that girls like you just had to go through this phase.
It was in the third year that things went downhill.
When it rains, it pours. On the first day of term, you hadn’t greeted him when you entered the classroom, too busy texting frantically on your phone, a new fluffy pink keychain dangling from it that didn’t match any of your girl friends’ and so had to be a gift from a stranger.
Imayoshi had greeted you, of course.
But when you had looked up briefly to smile and say hi back, he had been demoted: "Shouichi" instead of "Shou-chan".
You were working harder than before too. Suddenly, the two of you were working in silence side by side, your hair falling over your face, hiding it from Imayoshi. You never once tucked it behind your ear to ask Imayoshi for the answers to the next section. You just sat and wrote away, like you fancied yourself the best in the class now. Clearly, you’d been studying over the holiday. Fine. Good even - Imayoshi couldn’t marry a complete fool, even an obedient housewife needed some brains. But to reject him because of it? Discard him like all the other toys you got bored of using?
He felt his anger swell and spin in a strength of feeling he had not known since his mother died. Murder occurred to him; abduction no longer seemed unreasonable. He tucked away duct tape and rope and sleeping pills in a shelf his sister could not reach, locked it for good measure, and spent his nights tossing and turning and questioning his own identity.
He heard rumours you were in trouble. Kicked out the house, financial issues, an abortion: almost everything got mentioned. Someone had a friend whose mum was a cop, and apparently you’d been visiting the police station following a domestic violence case, a prostitution case, or maybe just a mugging. The specifics were unclear and frequently changed, but Imayoshi took sight of the bruises on your neck and arms, just visible under layers of concealer, and on he went pondering.
He would never get the truth out of you directly, no. These days, whenever he entered the classroom at break, you and your few remaining trusted friends whispered until he left. The trust was gone; and the gossip no longer appropriate for male ears to hear.
A complete stranger would have been treated in the same way. A stranger.
He’d put so much work into you, spent two years as a loyal servant, letting you feel smug and superior, and this was what he fucking got for it?
"Imayoshi was not rash," he told himself.
"Imayoshi wants to be rash," his reflection parroted back to him.
“Imayoshi?” called Susa, nudging him in the middle of a study session, “you okay?”
“Tired,” replied Imayoshi, realising that the page in front of him was still empty.
He smiled an easy smile, and forced the thought of you out of his mind before he snapped his pencil in two.
----
And “he’s tired” was what Susa repeated when Harasawa, fiddling with his hair, asked why Imayoshi acting a bit out of it today.
The coach glanced at Imayoshi with critical eyes, and saw a stranger in him. “Do you want to take a break?”
“I’ll be alright.“ Imayoshi forced the familiar grin across his lips yet again. “Some match play will wake me up.”
The last thing he needed was some time away from basketball. For every minute he wasn’t concentrating on the game, he was thinking of you smiling at male ‘friends’, you cuddling up with police officers, you flirting with strangers on the street, you and that miniskirt you wore everywhere outside of school and the men who would stare and you feeding into their attraction, and they’d put a hand around your waist and let their fingers slip underneath your tights, and they’d murmur “hotel?” to you, and you’d rub up against them and-
Sakurai passed the ball to Imayoshi, and the captain dribbled and felt a moment’s peace. He passed it back to Wakamatsu, standing ready under the hoop-
You’d be pulling off your clothes real slow, really teasing them, and they’d be touching and licking and sucking on that skin that belonged to Imayoshi alone. They’d throw you to the bed; you squeal, maybe whimper at the big bad man standing in front of you. God you’d be noisy, slut that you are - you wouldn’t talk to Imayoshi any more but you wouldn’t shut up for these salarymen (why did Momoi have to mention that word on the street was you were in the JK business now? If hearing of you being with classmates wasn’t torture enough!), even when you were gagging you’d be crying out, tears in your eyes, and maybe they beat you, maybe they ground into you until you couldn’t walk, your underwear ripped, miniskirt stained around your hip, lying hopelessly on a bed in an empty room, your skin littered with both hickeys and bruises.
Maybe you’d pray for a better life. The audacity to pray having spent all these years betraying him.
“Are you sure everything’s alright?” muttered Susa in the changing room, briefly squeezing his friend's shoulder.
Imayoshi looked around feeling like he’d awoken from a nightmare.
Everyone but Imayoshi had long finished changing out of their kit. People were talking, laughing, bouncing a spare basketball against the wall. Aomine, despite being a known virgin, was proudly announcing his list of the easiest lays in the school. Your name came in at number two. And before Imayoshi could ask Aomine how he knew that if all he spent his free time doing was jerking off to magazine pages, Wakamatsu interjected.
Wakamatsu told Aomine not to talk about you like that.
Wakamatsu was blushing.
"You fucking siren," murmured Imayoshi under his breath, thinking of the way you used to bat your eyelashes at him.
Something about the blonde made Imayoshi see mistakes like never before. God himself couldn’t have made it any clearer. Imayoshi had let you run wild for too long, and in your own sickness you had diseased everyone else too. You had brought shame to yourself, and - worse - to the Imayoshi name that you would one day take on as your own.
It was time to remind you to whom you belonged. Maybe, just maybe, it wouldn’t be too late to make you an honourable housewife, an obedient little dog.
“You still there?” said Susa with a little more concern, nudging Imayoshi again.
“Don’t worry,” and this time Imayoshi didn’t need to force that closed-eye, cruel grin. “I’ve got something to sort out, and then I’ll be back to normal.”
He would teach you that he had never been your toy.
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