Lightning Serenade

Chapter 8: Fields VI

Denki's heart sunk like an anchor into his stomach when the technicians announced that it was time to go to the cafeteria for dinner. His heart then soared when he realized that Hitoshi and Neito weren't making their way for roll call for the trip over to the cafeteria. He thought it was too good to be true, so he thought it would be pretty self-sacrificing and heroic of himself to tell them to go to dinner with the rest of the patients.

"We can't. New patients on the unit don't get to leave until they have been here for three days," Neito said with a shrug. "I think I should be exempt since I've been here a million times, but they never let me. They don't seem to care what I think," he sassed, shooting a lighthearted glare in Chizato's direction. The technician just shrugged at him, unable to change the rules that have been in place since the facility was opened for a single patient. "Why aren't you going?" Neito asked, turning back to Denki, and not maliciously. As far as Neito was concerned, Denki could have been admitted the day of or the day after he had left, and that would put him at or over three days.

"Oh! I didn't know that! Well, this is only my second day... and I tried to escape when I first got here. Momo said that I'll be stuck here for a while after that," Denki disclosed, rubbing the back of his neck as he admitted to his impulsive action.

Neito's eyes roamed over Denki thoughtfully before he guessed, "you used your quirk to get the door open, didn't you?"

Denki's eyes lit up at the intelligence of his new friend. "Yes!" he said excitedly. "How did you guess?"

"It's what I would have done if I had your quirk," Neito admitted, looking down at his hands, visualizing the electricity cracking across his fingers only hours earlier. "I mean, if it was my first time and I was scared," he clarified before his companions thought that he would escape and leave them behind if given the chance. "This is honestly my favorite hospital out of all of the places I've been. It's almost like a second home, I'm here so often."

When Neito noticed the awkward silence, he looked around at his companions' faces.

"Well don't pity me!" Neito demanded. "I have a blast here! It's so much better than being at home."

Then, after more sad looks, "Not like that! It's just boring as hell if I'm not causing trouble!" Neito sighed, adding, "I don't have it bad. It just gets boring when no one will even look at me. My parents are always busy, and the cleaners just started to ignore me when I would try to get them to do something with me, saying that they have to work."

After that, when his friends' sad faces didn't change, Neito yelled at his friends to just forget it, but he was cut off abruptly by Denki's hug. Before he could complain, Hitoshi's arms went around both of the blond boys, and Neito couldn't say no to his soulmate, could he? Okay, he could, he just didn't want to. And honestly, he wouldn't have wanted to say no to Denki either. So, he let himself have that moment of comfort, as long as they would stop giving him looks of pity afterwards.

When Denki got distracted as they were eating, hands flailing about as he told them a story that might have been a little exaggerated, they had to remind him to keep eating. Denki would duck his head and blush every time, but Neito and Hitoshi would just chuckle and nudge him, telling him to keep going with the story, but reminding him that Touya commanded him to get all of the calories he could for the upcoming training. Denki would shovel a few mouthfuls of food into his mouth, chew a few times, and force it down before jumping right back into the story, delighted that his new friends were actually paying attention to what he was saying, sometimes jumping in with their own comments of the situation and what they would have done under that circumstance.

Denki loved the interaction. The whole back-and-forth conversation was rare for him to get because everyone else either got annoyed or couldn't really follow along with his train of thought. They would get frustrated that they had started talking about playgrounds and ended up talking about an apple orchard that Denki had visited with his parents.