Perfectly Normal
Word count: 1355
Rating: Gen
Pairings: none, implied future Roloceit, possible minor Moxiety
Warnings: I'm being haunted by memories of middle school, super minor references to self harm which are very iykyk
Happy Ace Week 2023!! 🖤🩶🤍💜 ♠️ (Oct 22-28th)
~~~START~~~
The realization hit Remus like a ton of brick in the hallway one day in seventh grade.
For the past year or so, he hadn’t understood why everyone his age was pretending. He hadn’t understood why his peers were so eager to grow up, why they couldn’t be satisfied being kids for just a little longer.
And it wasn’t like there was any big catalyst to his discovery, it was just like the facts were suddenly sliding into place. The puzzle he hadn’t even known he’d been working on was suddenly laid out in front of him, completely solved.
No one had been pretending.
Distantly, he heard the bell ring, and noticed that the halls had cleared out around him, but he had too much to think about without adding in trivial things like passing period into the mix. Besides, he had lunch now, it wasn’t like anyone could mark him tardy if he dilly dallied just a little bit longer.
The summer before sixth grade, Remus and Roman had sneaked downstairs after they were supposed to have gone to bed and ended up watching most of Bros. Their cousin Remy had been meant to be babysitting, but with their charges put to bed, they’d ended up crashing on the couch almost immediately after putting the movie on. It had been an enlightening experience for both of them, and Roman especially changed afterwards.
He was into boys after that, and not in the normal way where he wanted to recruit them to be knights in his games. No, after that summer, Roman started having crushes, he referred to certain boys as cute, and expressed to Remus privately that he wanted to kiss Nerdy Logan. He even went as far as to write Nerdy Logan’s name in his notebooks surrounded by little hearts!
Remus had found it strange.
Obviously the movie had impressed upon him the nature of Adult Feelings and Adult Relationships, but that didn’t make him an Adult. He didn’t have Adult Feelings yet, and he didn’t understand why Roman — and most of the rest of their classmates — were pretending to.
But he understood now. No one had been pretending, it was just Remus who wasn’t feeling it.
Remus was the odd one.
Not that he wasn’t used to being the odd one. He always seemed to be the one taking jokes too far, or coming up with ideas that were too dark. He didn’t even have any real friends besides Roman and Janus, everyone else just kinda tolerated him because he was Roman’s twin and there was no getting rid of him.
He needed to talk about this new realization, but who to go to? Roman would think he was crazy for not having noticed sooner, and while Janus wouldn’t say it out loud, he would think Remus was stupid too — after all, had Remus just been thinking Janus had been doodling “Roman Kingsley” in his notebooks to conform to society this whole time?
Besides, neither Roman nor Janus even had this lunch, so it wasn’t like he could have gone to either of them anyway.
No, Remus needed to share his discovery with people whose opinions didn’t matter. And he had just the emos in mind.
The two of them sat in the corner of the cafeteria every day. No one sat near them, no one even liked them — the other emos sat clear on the other side of the cafeteria! The purple one and the pastel one.
The purple one, Virgil, had gone to Remus’s elementary school. Two years ago, he’d shown up to school with short hair that his dad had let him dye purple, a new name, and new pronouns, and since then, he’d only had two friends: the pastel one, and Nerdy Logan.
The pastel one hadn’t gone to their elementary school, but he and Virgil had been attached at the hip since the first day of middle school. He didn’t dress dark like Purple did, he didn’t have the swooshy hair or the eyeliner like other emos, no, the thing that made him unmistakably emo was the impressive array of kandi bracelets covering his arms. Small ones, chunky ones, ones with intricate patterns, ones with unmistakable emo song lyrics on them — the only kandi bracelets Purple had were a couple the pastel one had clearly made for him. In the kandi bracelet economy of the emo population, the pastel one was clearly a millionaire.
And yet, that clearly wasn’t what bought someone emo-popularity.
Pastel’s eyebrows shot up when Remus took a seat across from the pair. Purple glared.
“Do you ever feel like everyone knows something that you don’t?” Remus started.
“Um…” Pastel started, visibly confused — though that was probably more to do with Remus coming over to talk to them. Purple rolled his eyes and turned back to his food.
“Like, I thought everyone was just faking it, but no, I’m the only one!”
“Did I miss the part where we became friends?” Purple finally demanded. “What do you want?”
“I thought everyone was pretending to feel the Adult Feelings, and I just now realized that they actually were,” Remus informed the pair who, in all likelihood, already knew that people already had Adult Feelings.
“Adult Feelings?” Pastel asked. Neither emo looked like they understood what Remus was getting at.
“Y’know,” Remus shrugged. “The Adult Feelings of wanting to fuck.”
Purple choked on his food. Pastel tilted his head to the side in confusion.
“What does that mean?” He asked genuinely.
“No!” Purple shrieked, clamping his hands over Pastel’s ears. “Do not tell him!”
It was Remus’s turn to roll his eyes, but he backed off a little. “You know when you want to kiss someone?”
“Yes,” Purple said at the same time Pastel said “no.”
Now Purple and Pastel were looking at each other in confusion.
“That’s my point!” Remus crowed excitedly. “Most people already want to kiss people, and I thought they were just pretending to want to kiss people!”
“So, you’re asexual?” Purple asked, turning his attention back on Remus. “You came over here to tell us you just figured out you’re asexual?”
“What’s ‘asexual’?” Remus asked. Pastel was also looking curiously at Purple, who shrunk slightly at the attention.
“It’s– uh, it’s when you don’t feel, um, when you don’t feel… it’swhenyoudon’tfeeltheneedtofuckpeople.”
Pastel tilted his head once more, but Remus sat back.
“Oh,” he said. Apparently, there were a few more puzzle pieces because the picture was even clearer than before. “So, no Adult Feelings?”
“Yeah, that’s one way of putting it,” Purple agreed.
“And it’s normal?”
“Perfectly normal.”
Remus nodded. Asexual. He turned the word over in his mind. A-sex-ual. It felt right. Comforting.
“This is the flag,” Purple continued, turning his phone to show Remus an image he pulled up on google.
“You’re shitting me!”
Pastel frowned at Remus’s language, but chose not to comment.
“What?” Demanded Purple, checking his phone screen before turning his confused look back to Remus.
“It looks like you just color-dropped a flag from yourself!” Remus laughed.
“Whatever,” Purple rolled his eyes. “Can you leave now?”
“Nope,” Remus grinned. “We’re friends now.”
“Okay!” Pastel cheered.
“Nooo,” Purple groaned.
“Here,” Pastel — not knowing his name was about to become a little awkward considering they were friends now, but Remus would smash that bridge into pieces and build a boat out of the wood when he got to it — took one of his simpler bracelets off his wrist and handed it to Remus.
It was a single band with alternating green and black beads. Remus accepted it with the utmost honor.
“I’ll treasure it always,” Remus promised reverently, slipping the bracelet into his own wrist.
Purple rolled his eyes, but seemed to accept Remus as one of them now.
Pastel and Remus continued to discuss Adult Feelings for the rest of lunch period with Purple (clearly the most knowledgeable of all of them) interjecting periodically. At one point, some of Roman’s friends who tolerated Remus came to try to “save” him from the emos, but Remus told them to go away. He had his own friends now.
~~~END~~~
I think this is the hardest I have ever projected onto a fic. It’s left me a little dizzy 😵💫
General taglist:
@royalty-of-all-things-snuggly @pixelated-pineapple @arsonic-knight @misunderstood-shadowling
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Modern au where lwj and Wwx meet in middle school, and wwx doesn't know how to deal with his crush (who totally isn't his crush haha right he's straight) constantly ignoring his pestering, so one day wwx just throws his nasty ass school lunch straight into lwj's face. and the room goes dead silent. Rice and green pepper slowly slide down lwj's stone cold face, revealing a glare so full of hate that it actually makes wwx take a step back. He can't believe he did that. What the fuck was he thinking oh my fucking god he just threw his lunch into the dean's nephew's FACE oh my god madame yu is gonna kill him--
The entire lunchroom watches, jaws dropping, as the prestigious, twin jade of Gusu middle school Lan Zhan takes his bunny-patterned water bottle full of warm, green tea, and pours it directly over wwx's head, making sure to shake the last few drops out onto his slightly greasy black locks.
There is a pregnant silence in the lunchroom, broken only by the sound of green tea dripping onto the floor. Wwx wipes the tea out of his eyes to sputter at lwj, his jaw almost on the floor. Lwj looks down his nose at him, and the corners of his lips turn up in a wicked smirk.
A voice, awfully similar to Nie huaisang's, yells out "FOOD FIGHT" and the lunchroom ERUPTS into chaos. Food is being flung all over the place, everyone is screaming, and right in the middle of it all is wwx and lwj, literally wrestling on the floor in a puddle of tomatoes and eggs and watermelon chunks, smashing whatever food they can grab off the tables into each other's hair, their faces, their clothes. At one point lwj bites him, literally BITES his forearm HARD, and wwx's resounding yelp is drowned out by the sheer cacophany of a room of middle schoolers with big metal trays and haphazardly fisted food as their weapons.
"WE SHOULD DO SOMETHING" jiang cheng yells to Nie Huaisang, the both of them hiding underneath the lunch tables. "ABSOLUTELY NOT, THIS IS THE BEST THING IVE SEEN IN MY ENTIRE LIFE” Nie Huaisang yells back, absolutely cackling in pleasure.
Eventually lan Qiren and some other teachers come and finally get everything to quiet down. "WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS??!!" lqr yells, his face scarlet with rage. Every person in the room immediately points to wwx and lwj, who are still wrestling in the middle of the lunchroom floor, completely oblivious to the world around them. Lwj finally pins wwx down, straddling his hips with a lil bowl of shrimp in his hand, and is a Second away from dumping it straight into wwx's face when he finally looks up. "Uncle!" he jumps to his feet, back ramrod straight but he's so covered from head to toe in food that he's more reminiscent of a jackson pollack painting than the former pride of the school. Wwx jumps To his feet too. "Uh,,,good afternoon, laoshi?" Wwx chuckles nervously as lqr's face turns purple.
Wwx is suspended for a week. Lwj gets a weeks worth of detention and he is grounded for a month.
("Its bullshit!! Why were you suspended and he wasn't?! You both were guilty!!" Jc fumes a few days later. Wwx sighs. "Cause you can do that when the dean is your uncle, I guess". He replies.)
("This is stupid." Lwj tells his uncle. "If you're going to suspend him then you should suspend me too. I am just as guilty as he is."
He is grounded for another month for Backtalking.)
Lwj lies in his bed, his earbuds blasting. He thinks about how wwx looked underneath him, covered in filth and eyelashes flecked with sauce and tea, but with his silver eyes aflame with the challenge, and his big, loud mouth stretched into a snarl. Lwj thinks about kissing that snarl right off his face.
"Oh no." He thinks to himself.
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Chapters: 5/6
Fandom: 僕のヒーローアカデミア | Boku no Hero Academia | My Hero Academia
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Midoriya Izuku/Uraraka Ochako, Midoriya Inko & Midoriya Izuku, Midoriya Izuku & Uraraka Ochako's Parents, Bakugou Katsuki & Midoriya Izuku
Characters: Midoriya Izuku, Uraraka Ochako, Bakugou Katsuki, Midoriya Inko, Uraraka Ochako's Parents, Tsukauchi Naomasa, Bakugou Mitsuki, Bakugou Masaru
Additional Tags: Middle School, Middle School Student Midoriya Izuku, Middle School Student Uraraka Ochako, Middle School Student Bakugou Katsuki, Runaway Midoriya Izuku, Good Parent Midoriya Inko, Mentioned bullying, Quirkless Discrimination (My Hero Academia), Implied/Referenced Suicide, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Fluff and Angst, Emotional Hurt, Self-Esteem Issues, References to Depression, Childhood Friends, Developing Friendships, Midoriya Izuku Needs A Hug, Hurricanes & Typhoons, Mental Health Issues, Puberty, Angst with a Happy Ending, Family Bonding, Teen Crush
Summary:
After the worst day of his life, instead of heading home, Izuku turns around, and boards a train, leaving his distraught mother with no answers.
In a small rural town in Mie, Ochako's boring everyday life is interrupted by this skittish city boy.
Meanwhile, back in Musutafu, Katsuki's left to witness the utter mess Izuku's left behind.
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