Polar Opposites

5 - To See

It was a cold, dreary evening, a cold chill running through my veins as I looked upon the trees outside, and I had only just finished showering to witness the sky asunder above me, several stars littering the blank open space above with no greater illumination being endowed upon it. 

For some, it was a splendiferous scene that awakened within them curiosity and inspiration. For others, it was nothing more than the world passing by another, giving it a subtle wave before walking away from it forever, their paths never crossing again. I had no opinion on them, simply thinking of the stars as what they were: white blotches that couldn't be erased, stagnant and forever living until they were destroyed by themselves. They were undisturbed, kept trapped by the void-less nothing of space before breaking away from it by crumbling and dissolving into nothing.

That was just my opinion, however, and I doubted that such an opinion as mine would be shared equally amongst the people here, if at all. The students at ANHS were not me, and I was not them. Their opinions were their own; my opinions were mine and mine alone. To be honest, I didn't care what they thought about anything; I just cared about living a normal life.

But I suppose I was just delusional to think someone of my caliber could live a normal life.

Walking away from the window and back to my sofa, I looked around my room and noticed Ibuki on her phone, laying on her side and with a visible frown on her face. Her legs kicked about gently, swaying and rocking in a rhythmic fashion, creating a tempo that she did not notice, too focused on the screen that her eyes were glued to and nothing else. She had taken a shower before I had, yet her hair looked smoother and cleaner than mine. My hair was a bit messy, disorganized, and tangled, all at the same time, but a sense of organization still remained.

"What are you looking at?" Ibuki noticed me staring at her, throwing me a look and taking her eyes off her phone for the first time in two hours. 

"I'm staring at nothing," my words were as dead as usual, completely void of the emotion and denial that a human normally would exhibit. Ibuki still gave me a glare, scoffing and directing her attention back on her phone. This attitude was one that permeated through the very few hours that we had spent together, the cold disgust that Ibuki had shown me freezing everything in the very room I was in except for me. I could not tell the distinct nature of her mood, nor the capricious changes of it that I could not explain. 

But in all honesty, I lacked all care for what she was doing or what her mood was. To me, it was nothing more than the actions of a girl who lacked the care, love, or simply understanding to treat me with respect. I knew how that felt; I knew how that was; I knew how that was; I knew how she acted, but at the end of the day, who I was to judge.

"You're so weird, you know?" She tells me as if I hadn't heard that comment one-thousand times over. I know I'm weird to some, being a silent bird amongst the flock with very little care for what happens, but that shouldn't constitute me as inherently weird, even if, to some extent, there is some truth to that statement.

"Yeah, but aren't most of the people here like that?" There was no shortage of oddities within this school, people who shouldn't have been accepted being entered in as if they were flies to an open window. No school would accept a person--a creature--as vile as that of Ryuuen; no school would accept someone as careless and as gruff as people like those in Class D, but this place did, all in the hopes of measuring potential.

"...Well, I guess," Ibuki relented, giving me a sigh and closing her eyes. Resting her hands on the back of her head and closing her eyes, Ibuki's countenance irked and shifted as if she had come to an epiphany, something that I could only raise an eyebrow at.

"...But there's something so... odd about you, something that I can't quite trace. You're always one step ahead, it seems, in every single facet," she sighed, giving dropping her phone and letting the bright light emanating from it hit my face, "I feel like, no matter how much I look at you, I can't tell who you are. But all I know is this: you're not odd naturally, you're not odd by choice,

you're odd because you want to stand out, all so you can fit in."

My hand twitched a little from her comment, but Ibuki opened her eyes once more.

"All I know, though, ever since you beat us at that rooftop, is that you're not like us. But maybe that's a guess in of itself."

And then, Ibuki's phone turned off, the darkness of the room coveting my face once again, dispelling the light as fast as it had existed.

---------------------------------------------

It's been a while, but I'm back.

This chapter is both filler and also a push to the next chapter, so stay tuned.