Chapter 2
So of course, that's when everything started to go to hell.
Gakushuu was about to start going to school. His father was starting to get busy and his mother always had been. It wasn't a surprise. He had been expecting it for a while, almost as much as he had been dreading it.
His father had come back home almost cheery one evening. He pulled out a basketball Gakushuu remembered playing with in his cram school, and played with him till the sun set.
Then the next day, they went to his father's student's house.
He had no idea what was going on, at first. His father was frozen stiff, and they were just standing in front of an unfamiliar house.
"Father?" He called out, confused. He was supposed to meet his father's student. His father didn't look at him, but his grip tightened on him.
His father went in the house, and his father made him sit in a corner and there were people, and apparently, they were in the middle of a funeral.
Normally, it wouldn't have been a thing he cared about. He had been to funerals before, not to mention he was a kid. There were no expectations on him for any occasions.
But.
Wasn't this his father's student's house?
He had gotten cheerful stories about Ikeda for a while, and had occasionally met him too, though he didn't remember him very clearly. He had met many of his father's students, and the first of which would have been when he was really young.
He didn't remember much about Ikeda. But he had heard plenty about him.
His father took him back home late.
Gakushuu didn't complain about the lack of food, nor at being left alone for hours on end.
His father took time off from teaching. He stayed in his office for 2 days, and then he stayed out for a week straight.
The only time he spent with his family was when he ate. His mother didn't speak, and his own attempts were rebuffed harshly. Sometimes, a little too harshly.
But he didn't cry, or complain. He tried not to let his mother know about the bruises he got accidentally either.
His mother found out once, and his parents got into a fight. The first fight he had seen them get in.
He worried.
He worried about the quiet in their house. About the bruises on his father. About the tinge of fear in his mother's eyes.
He tried to talk to his mother, but his mother flinched, and smiled awkwardly and the cheer that she always brought was missing.
He forced a day out with his mother, and they had fun. The creases in his mother's eyes almost smoothed out, and she was even laughing.
But the moment they reached home, his father took him away and put him in front of books.
Suddenly he wasn't allowed to see his mother until he completed the workbook in front of him.
He completed it in 3 hours, and when he finally met his mother, she was crying.
His heart shuddered.
His father started him on a new routine in the morning.
He would wake up, his father would watch him clean up his own bed (he struggled with his small hands, and his small body) and then he would run and run and run until he was gagging and trying to puke.
Then he would take a bath, and sit with his parents and eat.
His mother attempt to smile at him while holding on to her fork just a little bit harder than the day before, and then his father would lock him in his room with a few tests and workbooks.
He had no idea what he did. Or what his mother did.
If he cried, or tried to talk to his father, or if he protested, or didn't continue, his father wouldn't let him see his mother. He wouldn't let him go out.
He took away the toys he had unknowingly collected, the soft fluffy clothes that he hadn't outgrown. He took away the boxes of clay he used to play with, or the jar of small marbles he sometimes took out to play with.
Studying was okay. Maths was fun. English was easy. Japanese was complicated, but easy too. He learnt Chinese, and that was a little confusing, but it was okay.
Talking about business was still fun. Talking about politics and it's effects on the world was fun too.
But there were things that used to be fun that he couldn't do anymore.
He couldn't sleep in and wake up to his mother playing with him. He couldn't see his mother whenever he wanted. He couldn't refuse to eat at all. He had to earn back toy privileges.
He started to see his mom even less. Sometimes he wouldn't see her for a whole day. Sometimes he could could on his fingers the number of times he saw her in a week.
There was arguing, crying and fighting. His father sometimes got bruises and his mother would come out crying more often than not.
He wasn't sure what was wrong or right.
But no one smiled anymore.
He went to school.
It had crying and screaming and paint and glitter and laughter and tears and-
It was a hell of a more lively place than his home.
He didn't talk much.
He hadn't seen his mother aside from breakfast in a month and his father was starting to occasionally tell him he did well in a test, or if he had a surprisingly insightful comment about something.
He wasn't an idiot.
He could see his family fall apart in front of his eyes.
He could see his mother crack down, he could see his father twisting himself, blinding himself to what was in front of him.
There was a sense of oppression in his house now.
And he was getting quiet quiet quiet as time passed by.
His mother cracked first.
She packed up her bags, and left.
He didn't see if she was crying, but he had seen her cry plenty of times in this house. He didn't need to see her cry one more time to know she was suffering.
His father became quiet in a different way, even as he forced him to robotically go through the routine no matter their grief.
There was some time when he didn't move from his bed. No matter the threats, cajoling or panic his father threw at him.
He spent hours curled up on himself. He didn't cry. He wasn't sick. He got force-fed and he spent the next few minutes puking it out.
His father spent the whole day at his bedside.
The worst part here was, his father cared. He ran his hand through his hair, ran him a bath, and carefully shampooed his hair. He brushed his back and put him back to bed.
Gakuhou was gentler that week.
Gakushuu got up on his own, and asked for music lessons the next day at breakfast.
He learnt violin first.
He played a lot. From the first few months where the sounds were almost always bad, to the months after when he could play out tunes and songs, to even a year after, when he took part in a local competition and came first.
He grew up.
He had always been smart, but Gakuhou nurtured it further. He didn't accept anything less than a 100% on his tests. Gakushuu had the intellect of at least college student (or so he assumed, since most of the material he had come across seemed quite doable) if not the knowledge of one.
His father made him brush his basics until he could multiplicate in his mind, until he could do most of the work in his head, until he started to come to the conclusion as he read the questions.
And then he upped the difficulty.
He taught him Japanese, the nuances of language and how to cut the sentences open and form something else completely. And with it, Gakushuu learnt more about himself and his father.
He learnt his own talking patterns and habits, and how his father calculated his words and impressions.
He spent time dissecting his own words and separating the feminine and masculine sentence structures, and then realized how his father had caught him at age 3.
He wore a dress and played the brilliant daughter for a day, and then he changed back and played the brilliant son.
His father let him pick another instrument to learn and put him in gymnastics.
His father became busybusybusy and that left Gakushuu time. He did his workbooks that became tougher, he played with words almost as often as he played with music and he picked personas for himself every outing.
He played the charmer almost as often as he played the loner.
He found a persona for himself in school. A sporty kid with charm that oozed out of him. The other kids liked playing with him and the adults like him being polite.
He wasn't a social idiot and so he offered genuine niceness when he talked to people. He was good at a lot of things (which his father praised almost as often as he scoffed at), but arrogance never helped anyone.
Confidence, though, did.
He kept sympathy from other kids because of his strict father, but still took out enough time to actually enjoy playing sports (which his father approved).
He was active all the time.
He felt like two different people sometimes. The quiet at home was soothing, but also grating. The loud and energy at school was frustrating, but it also created an energy outlet he needed.
If he needed noise at home, he played his instruments, if he needed quiet at school he pretended to sleep.
He was only human, no matter what his father tried to make of him.
He made his first friend from a quiet kid called Ren. He was carrying some book to school and some other kids slapped them from his hand and into the ground.
He was tempted to tear their bags open and drop their books but that would leave evidence and his father would disapprove.
He challenged them to a game of soccer during their break. Ren Sakakibara quivered behind him.
It was an easy win considering his own fitness was far ahead of theirs, and his dynamic vision and lack of fear of injury made him pretty much the best.
He would probably start sport competitions soon too. It was starting to look like a common theme.
So it was actually a surprise when Sakakibara actually came up to confront him a few days after.
"Do you want my family name?" He asked, his jaw set in grim determination, and his eyes looking straight at Gakushuu's. There was a glint in his eyes which made him think research, but there was a focus that told him he had already decided on Gakushuu regardless of whatever he had found out about him.
Until that point, he hadn't even been aware that Sakakibara was someone important. His father would have been disappointed.
"Yes, I do." He accepted gracefully, because here was a boy willing to hand him influence for helping him. Ren took a breath before nodding firmly.
It was innocence and naivity and somehow it was refreshing.
"Okay," he said, "You can call me Ren."
Gakushuu's lips raised into a surprised smile.
"All right."
Ren came under his "protection" so to say, and suddenly there were a hoard of other boys vyvying for a spot on their group.
Ren somewhat skillfully deflected the attention, to Gakushuu's continued surprise.
His father silently approved and put Gakushuu in a martial arts class in return.
Gakushuu studied and studied and grind down, and then he ran away for a day.
Gakuhou called the police on him.
Gakuhou handed Gakushuu a phone with strict orders to always carry it on him.
Gakushuu ran away with the phone a month later, but didn't get the police called on him.
Though in retaliation his workbooks increased and time spent with Ren decreased.
His father established his own school, and somehow managed Gakushuu just as strictly as before. He got introduced to the staff and facilities, and he spent the day sending his father dirty looks when he got explained how the class E system would work and where.
He couldn't decide if his father was too sentimental or not enough.
His father spent even more time trying to talk about general work probabilities and he argued back about how anyone could have the talent to become great.
One talent would be all they needed and teachers should allow students to find it.
His father added even more extracurricular activities to his school and to Gakushuu's already busy schedule, in retaliation.
Ren came to cheer for Gakushuu's competitions.
It was nice.
Ren brought the sense of light-hearted cheer that he had been missing since his mother left. And Ren had a typical old man father and young step mother case, which made it easy for them to overlook him.
Ren's father was a dirty old man, and Gakushuu honestly wished he could take him away. Ren, on the other hand, didn't want to touch the Asano family with a 10 foot pole.
Gakushuu protested. His father definitely broke his family, but he was giving Gakushuu a ton of useful skills for real life. It might seem overbearing and overwhelming at times, but in some ways he appreciated and enjoyed a lot of his lessons.
He wasn't allowed to stop a lesson he had started, however. Or skip classes, but he could take initiative and choose what he was interested in.
Academics was a must, but he choose which languages he wanted to learn or extracurricular thesis or projects he wanted to do.
He wasn't too interested in sports but soccer was an important social activity, and his father avoided any mention of basketball, even though he probably enjoyed that more than soccer.
He enjoyed music so his father had suggested guitar (a cliche that everyone enjoyed) and he had chosen the classics-violin and piano. He played the flute too but he had given that up after a while for greater proficiency at piano.
He had actually been quite interested in vocals as well, which had ended up taking priority for quite a while. He didn't really take part in any competitions for it though. It might have been something to do with his past life, but he found something oddly familiar about it.
He would have said voice actor, but that didn't sound completely right either. His memories of before were hazy as always, and while it felt somewhat creepy, he didn't mind it too much. It felt comfortingly familiar instead, to have some form of familiarity with some things in life already.
The suffocating oppression from his father felt lighter on the days he found an oddly familiar mathematics problem, or when he dressed up feminine, or those days he ran away from home.
His father encouraged his escapades, as long as he was careful and didn't interrupt his lessons (which was fucking hard, by the way).
Gakushuu liked many things his father forced him to do, when he wrote it down, or thought about it objectively. But he hated the way he felt like he didn't have a choice. His father had an opinion about everything, and it felt like he wasn't allowed to have any. Or at least, nothing real.
He could skip out for a day, but god forbid he prefer aikido to judo. He could have a preference for sports, but he couldn't stop playing it completely.
He could like animals, but he couldn't keep a pet. He could be kind, but the kindness couldn't be from his heart.
He had his own opinions which he enforced against his father. And every time it felt like he had to fight against a tsunami.
Why did he have to justify any genuine kindness to be a part of something bigger? Why did it suddenly become something that made a bigger lie into a truth, because it held a hint of genuine kindness in it? Couldn't he just be kind for the sake of it?
Why did everything need to be a social experiment and not an opinion on life? He wasn't Gakuhou Jr and he would never be. Some of the defiance Gakuhou allowed (because Gakushuu straight up told him he was probably going to be depressed otherwise) and a lot of things- small or big- he denied.
He got leeway because many times he didn't force an issue that his father thought was important. He was allowed his own opinions because he didn't defy his father on others.
There was a part of Gakushuu that was a careless adult as much as there was a responsible youth.
There were lines he didn't cross, but that was because he had reasons to, and not because he had a learned instinct by his father to not to.
His father had tried to brainwash him, and then manipulate him, but he had also tried to teach him the how's and whys of manipulation too.
In a way, he trusted his father, but in many others, he couldn't afford to.
His father was only human, even if he seemed to be at a superhuman level at times.
But Gakushuu was his son who had lived once before as a completely different being.
So they both learnt compromise.
(Not to mention Gakushuu's occasional genuine disregard for his own life that would scare the breath out of Gakuhou.)
(And so he had to learn from his son, as much as he didn't want to.)