Synced Isolophilia - Mafuyama x Male OC

sunlit stairwell (pt.1)

summary: mafuyu and ritsuka's first encounters with karu.

karu's gender preferences: female to male
pronouns: she/her to he/him

tw: very slight mention of blood, injury, and insecurities

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Mafuyu's POV

I'm falling out of love.

And it's painful.

It's a song in my playlist on loop.

It's playing over and over again until it makes my head throb. It plays till my ears bleed, plays till it causes me to lose my mind, and plays up to the point where I can't run away from it.

I'm not falling out of love with music.

I'm not falling out of love with Ritsuka either.

I'm falling out of love with myself.

The never-ending melody repeats until I find myself standing by the back door of the gym that leads to the sunlit stairwell, the place where I fell in love for the second time.

And there I see a shorter boy in a skirt—specifically the school's female uniform.

He wore a similar white collared undershirt with the fragile-looking red string tied into a bow underneath a black cardigan. A navy blue skirt wraps around his relatively small waist; long black socks hug his ankles and plain white indoor shoes with thin laces on his feet.

Two hair clips accompanied his messy black hair. Both intersected on the left side of his bangs. My observant eye picks up a small bunny shape from a lavender-colored clip, while the other was a plain black one.

Additionally, he sat in the far corner of the floor with his eyes closed, as if it seems the sun seeping in was poison. He gently holds his phone that has a pair of white earphones plugged in. The wire lightly dangles between the earbuds inserted in his ears and the device's audio jack.

I am taken aback by his appearance. But the real reason I'm hesitant is due to the fact he's currently singing my song.

I turn my head to Ritsuka, who's looking up at the boy as well. He puts on an expression of awe.

Well, our song. Given's song.

The song's lyrics regarding a dead loved one starts to render up in my memory. The familiar instrumental faintly leaking out of the earphones because it couldn't captivate the volume's intensity and the distressing voice present in front of us makes me internally shudder. I can grasp the meaning of "wolf in sheep's clothing" from it. It emits treacherous cries while disguised as an addicting harmony.

The expression on Ritsuka's face was telling me that he didn't know what actions to take next. He picks up my gaze on him, mentally agreeing with what I was thinking.

This is what love sounds like.

Love sounds ethereal, euphoric, innocent, and serene. Until you dig deeper into its core, it's dark, frail, unstable, vulnerable, and many other adjectives I can't list in one go. Love is hell in heaven.

Though at the same time, I'm jealous of how well he sings. He has better control of his vocal cords if he's able to turn such an originally powerful song into a quiet, soft ballad. Ritsuka and I watch and listen to his smooth attempts from the chorus to the second verse. I couldn't believe how... angelic he looks.

Immersing ourselves for the little, "ah-ah" part, we were too late. The consequence for that is getting attacked by his delicate flow full of loneliness and sorrow. However, I guess the length of the note was too long for him to sustain once a noticeable crack in his voice shows up, causing him to stop abruptly. A string of coughs and mumbled curses follow afterward.