Sakura Kiss (Wizard School Romance)

Sorry if you are getting multiple alerts. I'm an old man.

Back in my day, you counted votes by hand and then you made a post to close voting. I was with it. But then they changed what it was. Now what I'm with isn't it, and what's it seems weird and scary to me.

You glace left, then right. Nobody steps up to your defense, but you suppose that's not surprising. Nobody stepped up to Ban's defense, and he's a much bigger deal than you. So, lacking a convenient miracle, you turn back to Hinata in all her furious glory. The air seems to crackle around her – or maybe it really does crackle, that can happen when magi get really worked up – and her stare threatens to bore a hole in your skull.

"You can't just treat people like this," you tell her, meeting her stare head-on. "Threatening them and kicking them in the nuts and stuff. I mean, it's not the face, which is appreciated-"

"No it's not," Ban croaks, writhing just a little bit, "just punch me in the nose next time." Hinata glares at him out of the corner of her eye, and he curls protectively around his crotch.

"What I mean," you say, mostly to draw her Hinata's attention back to you before she can take another swing at ending the mighty clan Ban. "Is that I'm going to give you a chance to walk away, because I'm a real human being and not a living cliché from a seventies gang PSA."

You're surprised to see her hesitate. Her eyes dart to the left, where a gap in the crowd has opened up, and for the briefest moment you can see her eyeing the sliding door that leads into the nearest school building. Then the crowd shifts, and the gap vanishes, and her face hardens with decision. She makes a noise somewhere between a laugh and a snort and starts forward, hands balled into fists.

"Okay, let's go," you say, raising your hands as the crowd around you dissolves, leaving nothing but you and Hinata and five feet of open floor. "These hands are rated E for equa-"

Hinata kicks you in the balls, because of course she does.

Your world explodes into color and pain and suddenly something hits you in the side of the head. It takes you a moment to realize it's the ground. The ground itself is your enemy. You roll over onto your back just in time to see, emerging from the disorienting flashes of light that constitutes your vision, Hinata's foot. "Face!" You manage to grunt, screwing your eyes shut, and then there is impact just to the right of your ear. You crack your eyelids to see Hinata standing over you, her foot twisted at an awkward angle, her heel half an inch from your cheek. For a moment she just stares at you, face red with effort, dark eyes wild, and then she screams, a sound more like a wounded animal than a girl, and knocks the wind from you with a well-placed kick to your ribs. "Come on!" She shouts, kicking you again. "Come on! Come on! Come on!"

She really only gets in another kick or two before the crowd moves in to restrain her. A certain level of sadism is to be expected, but it only takes a heartbeat for the violence to stop being funny, and before long she's being dragged away from you kicking and screaming. The entire crowd is in chaos, you can hear teachers bellowing orders, and then Ban is there, one hand under your armpit and the other waving off a gaggle of concerned onlookers. As he lifts you to your feet, all you can see is Hinata.

"Are you okay?" Ban asks, his voice the only thing you can understand through the noise and chaos. "Yuta, Yuta, are you okay?"

The crowd snaps closed, and you lose sight of her in the press of bodies. "I'm fine," you say, leaning on him to take the pressure off your ribs. "I'm just...if we're the ones that got kicked in the dicks, why is she the one crying?"

[X] [?????] [1] You finally decide to follow the music.
[] [?????] [2] You get a lesson in noblesse oblige.
[] [?????] [3] You endure a rooftop confession.
[] [Hinata] [3] Harada and Nezu and the Terror in Blonde.
[] [?????] [4] Your ego is bruised as bad as your balls.

The music is in your head.

You hear it during class, driving you to distraction. You hear it in the hallways, and you stumble into the wrong classroom no less than three different times. You hear it in the fields, whether you're supposed to be running laps or listening to the wind. You hear it in your bed, where even Ban's gentle snores cannot quiet it. You hear it in your dreams, an endless ephemeral piano that draws you deeper, deeper, deeper.

The walk to the first year dorms is long, and hot, even as the sun begins to vanish below the horizon. You shade your eyes against the red and orange light, the gentle breeze blowing a procession of cherry blossom petals across the well-worn trails that crisscross campus. In the distance, class 1-C collects the petals in great bags, where they'll be magically preserved and woven into wreathes for next spring's culture festival. A figure sees you looking and waves excitedly, with their whole body instead of just their hand, and you imagine it's probably Natsume even though the glare of the sun means you can really only see the shadowed outline of her body. Normally you wouldn't mind walking over and having a chat, even if she's just going to rag on you for your encounter with Hinata, but instead you only wave distractedly.

Because the music is there. It weaves in and out of the cicada cries that form the background static of summer at Hiyari, slow and sad and sometimes even hesitant, one note lingering for a single second that feels like an eternity before blooming into a complex melody, reminding you of nothing so much as standing paralyzed on the edge of a cliff before summoning up all your courage and leaping, sudden, into the waiting sea far below.

Before you even realize what you're doing you've turned one hundred and eighty degrees, back towards the school building which rises high above you. You're throwing open the door and being met with a rush of too-warm air. You're sprinting down the hallway, straining your ears, spinning in place as soon as the song begins to fade, moving back in the other direction. You're pounding up the stairs, taking them two or three at a time, chasing that endless ephemeral piano that draws you closer, closer, closer.

You're at the building's top floor now and the siren song is louder than ever – and yet you can't entirely trust your ears, because the piano still sounds like it's coming from above you. This building doesn't have roof access, a fact you confirm by hanging dangerously far out the window and peering up at the sloped, slatted roof, covered in years of accumulated bird shit.

You pull yourself back inside. Maybe it is a ghost. Or the remnant of some spell, cast long ago and now just spinning its wheels until all the energy leaks from it and it fades, entirely forgotten. Maybe Ban is fucking with you. Maybe you're just hearing things. Maybe the pressure at Hiyari is affecting you more than you realize and you're suffering from a very insidious and specific form of hallucinatory insanity. You lean against the window and take a moment to just drink it in, closing your eyes and humming along with the rhythm of the song. It's not perfect, as you've never heard it before, but you do okay for yourself.

You look up, and that's when you see the cord hanging from the ceiling. It sways gently, back and forth.

You stand and pull it. There is a loud creak as the door opens, unfolding from the ceiling, the built-in ladder descending by means of some complicated mechanism until it reaches the ground just as the door will go no wider. You can hear the music now, really hear it, loud enough that you know it can't possibly be a dream.

You start up the ladder and emerge into...an attic. It's kind of a piece of shit, if you're going to be completely honest. It's hot, for one thing, though somehow no hotter than the rest of the school. Dim, hazy light filters in from a large circular window that you're eighty, ninety percent sure isn't there when you look from the outside. Most of the space is taken up by a mishmash of school equipment that looks like it's been there for decades, though someone has clearly attacked the accrued dust recently in a haphazard attempt to clean up. But most of their effort, clearly, went into clearing a space large enough for the full-sized piano which sits in the middle of the room, perfectly situated in the light of the window.

It is this piano that has haunted you for the past three weeks. This close, its music is even purer and more sweet than you could've possibly imagined, and the sound of it freezes you in place. If you move – if you even breathe – you'll shatter the moment, and you'll wake up sweating in your bed, this entire scene a wishful dream. The music further away than ever.

A girl sits at the piano. Her back is ramrod straight, and her fingers glide across the keys as if she's hardly touching them at all. Her hair, which wouldn't even touch her shoulders, is pinned messily up atop her head, and you can see the sweat rolling down the back of her neck in the window's half-light. Her song stretches on and on, each note just a little slower and more final than the last, until finally her hands come to rest and the music fades to silence. She turns to face you.


"Before you say anything," you say, holding up a hand. You try to keep your voice calm and composed, but it's hard when you're still half-in, half-out of the room, so you clamber up the rest of the ladder before continuing. "You have to be straight with me. Have you been a ghost this whole time?"

Arashi stares at you, dark eyes flat. "I'm in your class."

"Yeah, I know that." You recognize Arashi Tatsuko from class, though she's absent as often as not and hardly speaks even when she is there. "The two aren't mutually exclusive. And if you are a ghost, and I ask, you have to say. Those are the ghost rules."

She considers that a moment. "Which answer will get you out of here more quickly?"

"Obviously it's yes, I'm a ghost."

This time there's no hesitation before she speaks. "Yes, I'm a ghost." You can hear the eyeroll in her voice, which you don't think is entirely called for – frankly, you think "ghost" is a perfectly rational first instinct, considering the circumstances. But upon further consideration, you figure that if she were a ghost, she would've disappeared mysteriously by now, or tried to kill you. Instead, she turns back to the piano and plays a few notes almost absently.

Okay, ow. Well, you can tell when you're not wanted. Respecting is more of a toss up, but you can always tell.


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