Disillusioned he was not.
The situation has become strikingly clear to him the moment a young teen of about sixteen years had poked her head into his classroom, looking as lost and out of place as a self-described punk at a pretty princess-themed birthday party.
He'd stiffened, but otherwise paid no particular heed to her appearance. Stranger things, unfortunately, had befallen him in recent times, and with much less provocation. As a safety precaution (meant to preserve what little of his crumbling sanity he still possessed as a result of these asinine undertakings), he'd taken to simply looking the other way, as though she weren't there.
But she was annoyed by his inattention and made it known by calling out in a sickeningly cheerful voice, "Oi! Shrimp! Sunflower! Tora's Soon-to-be-Boyfriend! Your regal presence is requested in the damn hallway!"
He would have decapitated her then and there, but the teacher was piercing him with a rare, steely look, and his fellow students had already swiveled in their seats to stare at him from various angles and viewpoints - he had no choice, really. Murder would have been far too flashy under such circumstances.
He'd wait until they'd retired to a more secluded location, as he thought she no doubt had a mind to do.
Beaming, the girl latched onto his arm the moment he'd stepped into the hallway, chattering idly as she began their odd procession down to the grand entryway.
"...didn't think I'd be able to find ya in such a big place. Wish Raya or Kay were here; they'd have found you right away with their Haki. If you had a Devil Fruit, though, I probably woulda asked Maddox. And Timor's pretty good at tracking himself, but it's not his specialty, so maybe I wouldn't have bothered with--"
He coughed. Once, twice, breaking into her rambling words. She nearly stopped walking, but shook her head and continued onward to her predetermined destination (yet unknown to him, of course).
"Like I was saying, Shrimp, I wish your author woulda drawn me a map or something. Or, like, told me what class you were in. Huh. Maybe she did. Like in Monitor or Inquisition or something. I coulda missed it; I'm oblivious like that sometimes. So I guess I shoulda--"
Another cough, this time a bit more throaty, with less politeness embedded in it. Irritation crossed her features, her fingers wrinkling the polished fabric of his blazer, but she didn't slow, only said, "What." Without the proper inflection, it was a statement more than it was a question, and it demanded a response like her earlier ranting hadn't.
Eyeing her frigidly from the corner of his slitted eyes, he said, "I fail to see what you require of me, as there aren't any aggravating scenarios prepared as of right now."
"Ah," she replied, grinning in a way that prompted a cautious frown from his sullen lips, "see, that's the thing. This isn't for a scenario. I'm just taking you out for some fun."
"Fun," he echoed, without much enthusiasm, the gears whirring in his prodigious mind already churning out blueprints of escape of both the simple and convoluted design.
She winked (poorly, as it were, the gesture made rather creepy from the pained motion it required of her). "You betcha, Shrimp. Fun" - he thought he detected a grating sarcasm in the word this time - "because you're clearly lacking in that category."
While he couldn't truthfully deny that (he'd been told on many occasions by that infuriating trollop, Tominaga, that he was extremely dull and therefore unfun), he could sure as hell snap a lie off his silver tongue in order to combat the nagging ridicule that saturated her voice.
"You seem to take me for the quite the deprived fool, incapable of behaving as a normal teenager might, when in fact it's your mental faculties that should be called into question. Only a mind addled by bouts of lunacy could concoct such detestably maddening characters."
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Soundless Imaginings | One-Shots
Random|| another space for my groundless writings ||
