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“Oh, god-”
“Wait! Just- let me talk to you, please,” Shiro begs. Azul stares at the wall in frustration. He doesn’t know why he should, he doesn’t have to, but he figures Shrio isn’t about to let him go without potentially pinning him to the ground.
“Fine,” he relents, dropping his books on an empty table and facing him. “What?”
The library is empty. It typically is most days, especially during the summer when everyone spent their time in the sun.
Shiro stands at the other end of the table, fixing his permanently perfect hair. Azul watches him with an empty expression, ready to clock out of this conversation the moment he tired of it.
“Why do you hate me? I don’t like that you hate me,” he says. To his credit, he does sound genuinely upset. It didn’t change Azul’s response, though.
“I don’t hate you,” he corrects, “I just dislike you.”
Shiro fixes his perfect hair again, “why?”
Azul shrugs. He doesn’t feel exactly courteous enough to explain. Shiro squares his shoulders, he isn’t giving up, clearly. How annoying.
“What can I do to fix it?” He says, desperate. Azul sighs and picks up his books. He knew this would be a bad idea, and he’s getting tired.
“Please!”
He stops. Christ, he nearly screamed that.
“I don’t see why it’s so pertinent to you-”
“Because you don’t like me and I don’t know why, so I have to fix it,” he says seriously.
Azul blinks. Then snorts.
“Not everyone will like you, Shiro. It’s a way of life.”
Shiro’s nostrils flair. “I get that,” he says through gritted teeth, “but at least they’ll be nice enough to explain why.”
Azul snorts again, hoisting his books closer to his chest. “I don’t owe you that.”
“I disagree. You’re being an asshole.”
“I’m fine with being an asshole. Why do you need to know so bad?”
Shiro crosses his arms, fingers flexing underneath his biceps. Azul wonders if he’s stopping himself from fixing his hair again that really did not need fixing.
“So I can fix the problem and we can become friends,” he says. Azul laughs. Loud and hurtfully. Shiro glares at him.
“We will never be friends,” he says, wiping away a stray tear. “Not in any lifetime.”
Shiro huffs, “fine, then. Civil, at least. Or to prevent this from happening with anything else.”
“You can’t prevent the future,” Azul says, “if it’s gonna happen, it’ll happen.”
“I can and I will,” he says firmly, “now tell me what I’ve done.”
Azul levels him. He’s deadly serious, not that he ever thought he wasn’t. He’s done this with a few other students, too. Gently pulling them aside and asking what he did wrong, and if there was anything he could do to fix it. They all spill, explaining that this comment was hurtful or that he didn’t invite them to his party, and he apologies and corrects his behaviour.
He likes to communicate. It’s healthy. It’s everything Azul isn’t. He doesn’t communicate, he doesn’t tell people they’ve hurt him and they continue to hurt him again and again until he’s become so emotionally detached from them, he ghosts them. And then everyone thinks he’s the dick because he didn’t tell them they hurt him, and he knows he’s a dick because he can’t expect people to read his mind.
To him, it’s harder to talk about his feelings than lose a close friend. He’s an asshole. He knows this. He doesn’t need the school’s perfect prefect to tell him this.
But he’s tired, and now he’s annoyed. Shiro hasn’t really interacted with Azul all that much before this which is why he didn’t know about his hidden resentment. But after they were paired up for a science project and Azul immediately asked for a different partner, Shiro shot him that look, the look he gives everyone before he’ll talk to them.
At the time, Azul thought bring it on. Now, after a literal month of pestering, he wants it to be over.
“This is why I don’t like you,” he says, dropping his books again. A loud thud bounces off the walls. “This,” he gestures between them, “you just don’t let things go. Everything has to be perfect, everyone has to like you. You’re an obsessive people pleaser that wouldn’t even begin to know how to please himself. Everything you do is to bend to the will of everyone around you. You’re pathetic. You’re a doormat. You’re the nicest person I’ve ever met and I would kill to be like you. To be liked like you are. But I can’t, because I hate myself, but you know what?” He strides towards him, poking a finger into his chest. Hard.
“I’ll never hate myself as much as you hate yourself,” he leans back and laughs bitterly, “that has to count for something, right?”
He walks back to his books and stands over them, pressing his hands flat against the table. He let’s out a breath and the silence washes over them like a thick wave of unbreakable water.
Then, he hears a sniffle. He looks over just in time as Shiro’s face crumples and he runs out the room, hand covering his mouth to hide his cries. Azul sighs and rubs his forehead. Great. He made the school’s nicest, kindest, most popular student cry.
He didn’t intend to make him cry. Jesus Christ, if he had just stopped pestering-
Azul is tired. He’s tired and annoyed and now he feels guilty. He stares at his books, shoves the one on the top and leaves without them.
Students laughter sounds muffled through the windows.
Azul feels like he lives in the middle of nowhere. He’s a twenty minute train ride from town and a ten minute walk away from the station. His house is old and part of the roof is covered with tarp because they haven’t gotten anyone out to fix it yet.
His bedroom window has a crack in it and the floorboards creak in protest with every step he makes. His aunt is at work and their Native American Indian dog they found on the side of the street five years ago stares at him with her big brown eyes.
Azul smiles and ruffles her fur until her hind leg kicks and she pants in delight.
“Walks?” He asks. She barks in delight. Her name is Duke because they thought she was a boy at first.
He hooks her collar around her neck and stuffs her lead in his pocket. She was incredibly easy to train and doesn’t wander off too far, always ready to stand beside his legs if he requested it.
They walk the same route everyday. Their backyard has a gap in the hedge which leads to a beaten out, yellow path that takes them across the countryside and away from the main roads. Duke does most of her sniffing in the wooded part of their route, biting at acorns and wagging her tail at sticks until Azul picks it up and tosses it in the air.
Once they break out of the woods, an overgrown beige field lays out before them. Years under the sun without the care of a farmer.
Duke sprints ahead, Azul can see her tail peeking out above the tall grass. He follows behind her, hands stuffed into his pockets.
At the end of the field is an abandoned barn. It’s red walls are faded and the windows are boarded up. They usually walk on by. Azul tends not to explore lest he discover a dead body. But for the first time ever, really, Duke snuffles around the door of the barn and her tail wags with much more velocity than usual.
“Find something?” Azul asks, crouching down beside her. The earth beneath the door had been dug at, small creatures desperate to make their way inside, he supposes.
“I’m not letting you bring home another rat,” he says sternly, “that was disgusting.”
Duke stares at him with bright eyes and he sighs, standing to his full height and jiggling the bolt lock on the door.
“Guess we can find another way inside. Come, Duke.”
They round the building a few times for an entrance. Duke sniffs unhelpfully while Azul pulls at wooden panels haphazardly nailed into the walls. They were all different colours and made the building look like patchwork.
Duke barks. Azul looks over to see half her head lifting a sheet of metal that was leaning against the wall. “Good girl,” he praises, shifting the sheet away and revealing a small hole, easy enough for them both to slip through.
It wasn’t much nicer inside. The floor is covered in scratchy hay and rusting tools hung from the walls uninvitingly. There’s a small tractor with a missing wheel, leaning heavily on it’s side and causing it to cave in a bit under the weight.
Above is another floor, but it’s half the size of the first and has an open layout. There’s a seemingly self-built staircase leading up to it and Azul stares at it in trepidation.
Duke, incidentally, is having the time of her life, rolling around in the hay and swinging her tail so fast Azul worries she may break it. Currently, she has a paw on the tracker’s remaining tire, stretched up and trying to see inside of it. Azul left her to it and gripped onto the splintering banister tight as he climbed to the second floor.
Ah, fuck. Shit. Jesus hell.
He didn’t think he’d see an actual dead body- oh wait, they’re not dead- oh double fuck. It’s Shiro.
There’s a single window not boarded up. It actually has glass in it which seems like a miracle. Shiro is sitting in front of it, curled up. He has a ratty blanket around his shoulders with holes and worrying stains across it. Azul cringes at the sight.
“Were you trying to find me on purpose?” He asks. He didn’t even need to look to know it was him. Or maybe he saw him through the window. That makes more sense.
He looks over the edge, Duke is digging in the corner.
“No,” he says, “actually, my life doesn’t revolve around you, unlike literally everyone else.”
“You’re an asshole.”
“Thanks!” He says with fake enthusiasm.
Shiro drops his head to his knees. Azul sits next to him and looks out the dusty window.
“I walk my dog here,” he finds himself explaining, “we don’t usually come in.”
“I know,” Shiro says quietly, “I see you all the time.”
Azul frowns, “ah… creepy.”
Shiro lifts his head up. His eyes were half-lidded and dull, something he’s never seen on him. His heart aches, for some unfathomable reason. How annoying.
“I would’ve talked to you,” he says, “but I didn’t want anyone else knowing I was out here.”
“I wouldn’t have told the school news team,” Azul snorts, “I have better things to do then headline ‘the Shiro you all know and love? He actually spends his time in a creepy barn in the middle of nowhere. He’s probably a serial killer. Hide your kids!’”
Shiro chuckles, against all odds, and Azul finds himself chuckling, too.
“Hide your kids,” he quietly repeats in amusement, “you know what I mean,” he adds and Azul sighs because yeah, he kind of did.
He wouldn’t have wanted Shiro to speak to him anyway, because he doesn’t want anyone knowing he lives out here. He’s not embarrassed, but his aunt is. He respects her wishes.
Duke, apparently bored of the first floor, clambers up the stairs and bounds over to them. She sniffs at Shiro to decipher if he’s a friend or foe, decides the former and flops between them, resting her head on her paws. Azul instinctively begins to scratch her ears and her tail thumps against the floor appreciatively.
“Duke, right?”
Azul looks at him. “The walls aren’t soundproof.”
“Ah,” he nods, “yeah, Duke.”
Shiro nods and strokes her back softly. He only does it twice before returning his arm around his legs.
“Did you mean all that?” He asks after awhile. Azul sighs.
“Kind of, I mean, I was a dick about it but I’m not wrong. You let people treat you like shit because you’re so afraid of saying no,” he says, looking over at him. He’s staring just below the window, a frown etched into his face.
“It sucks to watch. It sucks even more to watch people suck up to you as if you were god themselves. It just sucks.”
Shiro cracks a smile, “that’s a lot of sucking.”
“Too much sucking,” Azul agrees, “stop being so sucky and stop letting your friends be so sucky.”
Shiro doesn’t have anything to say. He unfurls himself, stretching out his legs and leaning back on his arms. He looks out the window.
“I don’t have any friends,” he admits, “not really.”
Azul supposes that makes sense. Shiro makes friends with people, but they don’t bother being friends back, thinking they don’t have to because he’s so perfect. Everyone takes him for granted and everyone wants nothing to do with Azul.
Maybe they have more in common than he thought.
“Neither,” he says.
Shiro nods slowly, “we could be friends,” he offers.
Azul looks at the side of his face, “so you don’t have to live knowing there’s someone who doesn’t like you?”
“Oh, no,” he smiles, meeting his eyes. “I want you to dislike me. I want you to dislike the way I talk, the way I act in school. I want you to dislike my habit of fixing my hair all the time and I want you to dislike me when I start rambling. I don’t want to be liked. Not by you.”
Azul holds his gaze. It’s strong and sure and steady. He wants this. It’s not some game. He wants this.
He laughs. How absurd.
“Alright, I’ll agree to your conditions, under one of my own.”
Shiro nods, “anything.”
“You keep thinking of me as an asshole, no matter what.”
Shiro laughs, too. “Way ahead of you, asshole.”
“Good to hear, people pleaser.”
Shiro laughs again and strokes Duke’s back. They look out the window and don’t stop talking until the sun is setting and Duke is whining.
“See you around,” Shiro says as Azul gets up and Duke clambers down the stairs.
He looks at him, his figure shadowed in orange light.
“See you around.”