Chapter Text
"Wha- Who is that?!"
"D'you think he's single?!"
"Look at him!"
"He's so handsome!"
Whisper-shouting between female students filled the air as Masaru walked through the halls of PK Academy, trying to find his classroom and failing miserably.
He wasn't aware of the eyes of love-struck girls on him, looking down at his schedule with nervousness in his gaze.
It wasn't long before he started wondering if it would be a good idea to ask someone for directions. Sure, it would be easy, but he was embarrassed. It was his first day, and he was already lost! What if the person he talked to thought he was weird?
Before he could keep thinking about it, Masaru heard how someone talked to him.
"Hi... Are- Are you lost?" A girl asked, her two friends standing behind her and looking at Masaru with sparkles in their eyes. "I can-" She got cut off by one of her friends, as if they'd talked about what they were going to say before.
"We can show you around the school. What class are you on?"
"O-oh. I'm being transferred to class 3, I think... Do you know where it is?" Masaru asked, a hopeful smile plastered on his face as he spoke. In response, the girls nodded eagerly before starting to guide him to his classroom.
He thanked them and watched as they walked away, oblivious to the slight blushes that spread through their faces and the giggles they shared as they did so.
Then, he waited for the teacher to give him permission to enter the classroom while he thought about how he could introduce himself without looking like a fool. It took less than a minute for the teacher to let him in, but it felt like an eternity to Masaru.
"Alright, class, today we'll have a new student joining us," she said as she looked at the class, then at Masaru. "Would you like to introduce yourself?"
Masaru nodded with a quiet hum, blissfully ignorant to the amount of stares he was getting from almost all of his female classmates, and a couple of his male classmates. He wrote his name on the board swiftly and quietly before speaking.
"Hi! I'm Suzuki Masaru, and I'm fifteen years old," he said with a cheerful yet slightly raspy voice, wishing he could have gotten some more sleep the night before and that, hopefully, his classmates wouldn't notice how tired he was.
He didn't notice the pair of purple eyes that glared daggers into his very soul, not right then, at least.
"I moved from Argentina to Japan last year, but I had some problems in my other school, so that's why I switched schools in the middle of the year. I like to write, read books, sing... I don't...really know what else to say." He scratched his neck nervously, looking away from the prying gazes of his new classmates. "I, uh- Where am I supposed to sit?"
He had a big, beaming (yet slightly awkward) smile on his face as he spoke, something else for his classmates to think of as pretty. And at the chance of getting to sit next to him, almost all of the female students of class 3 started staring at him and raising their hands to offer themselves as volunteers to be his desk partner.
But the teacher had other plans.
"You can go sit down next to Saiki, Suzuki," she said as she gestured towards a pink-haired student sitting in the middle row, and if it hadn't been for Masaru's nervousness, he would have noticed that Saiki was looking at him with a slight mix of curiosity and confusion in his gaze.
(Switching POV's — Saiki)
"Why can't I read his mind..?"
Those thoughts rang through Kusuo's brain as he stared at the new student in his class, not understanding just why he couldn't hear Suzuki's thoughts like literally everyone else. Everyone had thoughts.
Everyone.
Was this boy just...stupid? Like Nendou? Did he just have a mind devoid of any complex thoughts?
God, that would be such a pain. He could barely even handle the one Nendou he had in his life, much less two. What if this guy was even worse? What if he started following him around, assuming they were friends just because they sat next to each other?
As he payed some attention to the class, Kusuo noticed how the boy next to him (Suzuki, right? That was his name? He hadn't payed that much attention to the presentation when he was trying to figure out why the fuck he couldn't read Suzuki's thoughts–) was making small doodles on his notebook instead of actually listening to their teacher.
A small ghost sat in a swingset. A woman with long, curly hair held a flower. A balloon had a pair of eyes and a smile as he watched his own shadow. An owl stared off into space with a lazy eye.
It was a bit boring to watch what Suzuki was doing, sure. But Kusuo had decided it: he wanted to know why the fuck he couldn't read this boy's thoughts. He was clearly smart; at least that had been made clear once he got called to the front by their professor to solve an equation out of the blue. So what was it?
He didn't have anything out of the ordinary visible. Nothing at all. Kusuo kept looking at Suzuki from bottom to top, sneaking glances as best as he could as he tried to look for something, anything that could lead him to what this boy did that made his mind unreachable.
When he was about to give up for the day, Kusuo heard that Suzuki asked him a question. It was simple, really; just if he had a pen he could borrow after the one he used had ran out of ink. But when Kusuo tried to answer, Suzuki didn't seem to hear him.
That was weird. Everyone was capable of hearing him, no matter the fact that he wasn't actually speaking and just using his telepathy to transmit his thoughts.
"It's, uh, it's fine if you don't have one to spare. I just-" Suzuki said after a bit of silence, his gaze darting back to his notebook as his cheeks flushed ever-so-slightly with embarrassment.
So, Kusuo did what he thought he wouldn't have to do in ages: speak.
"No, I have one. Here."
He put the spare pen on Suzuki's desk before turning his attention back to the class, or at least pretending to.
This was going to be a long year.