Karma x Reader || Appearances

|43| Never Enough

(Your POV)

It was finally the day of the play but you were exhausted.

You had trouble sleeping that night, your argument with your brother plaguing your mind and making your head ache. After who knew how long, you were finally able to fall asleep but those events only seemed to fuel your nightmares.

The next day, you woke up quite tired. Then, when you were going down for breakfast, you bumped into your brother but no words were exchanged. You only glared at each other.

You were still hurt by his words. You were hurt that he had mocked you for wanting a family. You were hurt that he hated you just for receiving even the slightest bit of attention from your father. You were hurt that he had gone back to seeing you as his competition...

Shaking those thoughts away, you opened the door to your classroom and entered inside. You didn't want to continue thinking about it. Right now, the only thing you wanted was to see your friends and forget about everything.

Koro-sensei didn't take long to enter and was quick to give a motivating speech to lift the class's morale. Once he finished, you all went down the mountain towards the main campus. As always, the end class had to watch in the sidelines, isolated from the other classes and to make matters worse, you would be performing during lunch break.

Not long after, it was finally your class' turn. From backstage, you watched the curtains open to reveal Sugino and Kanzaki sitting down and dressed like an old couple. In the middle was Koro-sensei whose face, resembling a peach, was the only thing that could be seen as his body was hidden by the podium he was resting on.

"This is a peach," Ritsu's voice opened the play.

Hazama's script was kind of dark and somewhat weird but you found it entertaining nonetheless. However, it didn't take you long before you began to feel a bit uneasy.

"Amazing! What a magnificent artifact! The media could have a field day with this," Sugino said. "I could be filthy rich for my whole life just by showing it!"

You bit your bottom lip and awkwardly scratched your arm. That situation reminded you a little bit of your own mother who had puppeteered your life and had signed you up for all those castings and auditions.

"The rift that had grown between them in their thirty years of marriage had become like the river in which they washed their clothes," Ritsu read.

Without realizing it, your hands went straight to your neck. You adjusted your tie and tied it tightly, your mind filling with a million thoughts as you exhaled loudly.

Sometimes, you would wonder if your parents would ever get a divorce. You knew one of the main reasons why they were even together was to keep up with appearances. But even so, your house could get quite suffocating... even for them.

"And the suffocating atmosphere between them," she continued narrating as Yada turned on the smoke machine, "had become like the carbon dioxide emitted from their burning firewood."

You inhaled and exhaled quickly, your breathing turning more and more agitated as the seconds went by.

Your brother was leaving. You had believed you were finally getting an ally. You had believed you could be together in this. But you were wrong. He didn't care about you. He only reached out because he was looking after himself. So now you were all alone... once again.

"Just one peach won't be enough to compensate for your emotional abuse of your wife," Kataoka said darkly.

You began hyperventilating, the gas now unbearable. You felt like you were drowning, like that day at the stream. You desperately turned your head, left and right, as if you were expecting the rest to have as many difficulties breathing as you did. But you were the only one in that condition. Why was no one reacting to this? Weren't they suffocating too? Or was this only you?