The MagiArtist Collection

Innocent Silence (Silence Suzuka & Tokai Teio x Reader)

Your head rested on the softest, warmest pillow you could find. A cool breeze passed over you. The rise and fall of her chest was slow and even. None of it made you want to get up. Instead, you held onto Silence Suzuka a little tighter, a small thanks that you'd met her at all.

"Dancer..." She woke slowly, saying your name. "We've done it again, haven't we?"

"Yeah." You lifted your head from her chest so she could sit up, and she pulled you up with her. Your legs wobbled as they remembered how to stand.

"We should really stop dozing off during our runs." Suzuka looked around. The two of you were far from the academy, in a grassy field neither of you had chosen so much as collapsed into. "And overdoing them, it seems."

"Do we... want to walk home?"

She shook her head. "Might not be enough time. If we ran here, we can run back in half of it." She was already loosening her legs.

"Are you sure? You should take it a little easy," you said, though you were stretching too.

"It's fine. With you, I get to see the scenery with someone beside me." She smiled, and then she was gone.

"W-wait!" You raced after her.

It had been like this since you were small: a boy who could run like a horse girl, with no explanation anyone could offer. No one save your mother. She told you that you were 'sired'. Horse girls were only ever born girls, but on rare occasions, after a night with a human, even a human of the same gender, that human would carry the horse girl's child.

That was how you came to be. It was why you had two names. Otori Yuki, from your mother. Slow Dancer, from whoever at Tracen Academy filled out your paperwork. You never asked why. Asking about the name meant asking about the one who sired you, and you weren't sure what to call that person, let alone how to look for them. Father? Mother?

You had come to Tracen to find out. Then you met Silence Suzuka, and the search quietly stopped.

She was a beauty that made you hesitate, save for your fluttering heart. She dismissed you at first, and you were fine with that. But in practice race after practice race you settled into second, always behind her, until the question the other girls asked stopped being 'who's the fastest?' and became 'will Slow Dancer overtake Silence Suzuka?'

You had no intention of doing that. You ran because you wanted to. There was nothing in you that needed to win.

The furthest you ever got was beside her, for a few seconds at a time, before she pulled ahead again. Often you wondered why she pushed herself to be out in front. One night you asked.

"Don't you get lonely at the front?"

She shook her head.

"I just want to see... that scenery from the lead."

You sat with that for a while. Maybe it was your heart going soft at how calm she was, but you meant it when you answered.

"Then... let me see that scenery with you."

From then on she brought you along whenever her trainer assigned her a run. Sometimes the runs lasted as long as the trainer wanted. Sometimes they lasted so long the two of you had to sleep afterward. Those naps were the part you treasured, because it was the only time you were allowed to truly rest against someone you had once thought was aloof. Especially when her arms came around you.

"Oi."

You stirred.

"Oi!"

A slap on the shoulder woke you properly.