IshiMondo Collection

‣ about him

You were never supposed to feel like this.

You're Mondo Oowada. You're a goddamned gang leader. The flag of the Crazy Diamonds is emblazoned on your jacket and on your soul. You're the biggest and baddest teenager around. You'd strike any man who called you a wuss, pummel any man who accused you of being too soft. Or at least, that's what you would have done before you met that damned hall monitor, that infernal prefect.

Everything was different before you met Kiyotaka Ishimaru.

You saw no problem with becoming friends with him. After all, the man had earned your respect, had proven to be a formidable opponent in battle and had shown that he was not afraid of you, that he would not back down because you yelled or threw punches. You respected that. Hell, you probably needed that. The friendship was not the problem.

The problem was that after months of being friends, you went and did the dumbest thing you've ever done, something that's kept you up at night and driven you to the point of weeping silently into your hands alone in the bathroom of your dorm. Something that's cost men their lives, something that regularly drives people to the point of insanity.

You went and fell in love with him.

You've spent your entire life believing yourself to be straight, as most people generally do. You've asked out girl after girl and faced rejection after rejection, and at first you tried to convince yourself that that's all this was, that you were simply fed up with women. And then you thought about it, and you realized that you can't remember the names or the faces of any of those girls.

You remember your brother's assembly of beautiful women, and how you admired their beauty but never desired it for yourself, never felt any envy. No, the only thing you had succumbed to was the pressure, the teasing of the other bikers who asked you over and over again when you planned on getting a girl for yourself.

You realize now that you've probably always been gay, and accepting that is one of the hardest things you've ever had to do.

Now that you have accepted it, though, it has yet to bring you any peace. If anything, it has made things more difficult. Now, you notice when your friends make derisive comments, and when the media portrays you as some kind of pervert or animal. You had always been aware of those things, but you had never attributed them to yourself, and had therefore been able to turn a blind eye.

It's different now. Now, it hurts. It hurts.

It hurts when your friends talk about girls and assume you to be part of the conversation. It hurts when the girls talk about getting married in the future and you remember that you can't, that you may very well never be allowed to marry the person you love. Not in your country, anyway.

It hurt the most when Kiyotaka said that his father wanted him to marry into a wealthy family, and that he would probably have to marry some woman he didn't love, and you thought for a brief second that you recognized the kind of pain that flashed through his eyes as the same pain you've been swallowing for the past few months.

Taka.

You don't even know what it is about him that you like so much. He's loud, he's brash, he's obnoxious. He's a stickler for the rules. He's a hardass, an unapologetic teacher's pet. He's never so much as loitered.

None of that is true. You know exactly what you love about him and why, because you spend hours staring at your ceiling and recounting the ways you love him and every subtle movement he makes when he thinks no one is looking. You also know that what other people assume about him isn't true.

You see the way they pick on him, and you want to pound them into the dirt, but Kiyotaka always stops you. He knows that you won't do it if he tells you not to, and that pisses you off sometimes, but he isn't wrong. You're not used to wanting to protect people, but all you want to do is hold him in your arms and whisper into his ears that it will all be okay, that the things those people say don't matter, and then you realize that, for the most part, he already knows that. He doesn't need you to shield him the way you sometimes think he does.