Chapter Text
“I can't believe it.”
“I can’t believe it either…”
“[Name]-chan, you were a really good friend when we knew you.”
“We’ll miss you dearly.”
“Quit talking ‘bout me like I’m already dead! Who is it?!” You pushed your classmates away from the board as you squinted at the postings. Your finger traced the list until they landed on your name, the printed kanji familiar. The name next to it… ah. Despair made your blood freeze in your veins. There was no mistaking it. For the lab final worth 35% of your final grade, there was the matchup of:
GROUP A; BLOCK C (10:00-11:30 AM): SHIRABU KENJIROU & [SURNAME] [NAME]
“Never mind,” you decided simply. You sat down right in the middle of the floor, placing your hands in prayer and closing your eyes. “I’m dead.”
---
That was how it had been decided. It was purely randomized, but you were just starting to think that it was because a higher being hated your guts. Shirabu Kenjirou was not a nice guy. He was well known, having been upgraded to a regular on the boy’s volleyball team as a second year, and he was polite enough to be popular. But when it came to anything pertaining to studies…
He slammed the two kilogram pile of textbooks on your desk, jerking you awake. You looked up as he glared down at you, his brown eyes fierce under his neat hair.
“Rule 1,” he said stately before you even had a chance to wipe the drool off of your face. “If you drag me down a tiny bit, I’m going to lock you in the cupboard and leave you there until somebody notices you’re gone. Rule 2. We’re getting 100% on this lab practical and anything less means that I’m going to take you out into the yard and practice setting with your skull. Those are my rules. Do you understand?”
“Jeez,” you replied blearily. “Can you even play volley with a disembodied skull?”
And that was how everybody realized that the pairing of Shirabu and [Surname] was the worst one that the teacher could have chosen—because who in their right mind paired a studious #1 tryhard with a girl who came dead last in just about everything but coming in last place? One thing was for sure; blood was to be shed, and nobody knew whose just yet.