Title: On Waking
Author: Derien
Fandom: Daegaer - FJS
Notes: Written 10/07/04 for Daegaer's first lines challenge. I can't help trying to picture what happened later to Akinari and Chojiro after Aziraphale and Crowley left them returned to life. Chojiro and Akinari (the Fluffy Japanese Schoolboys) belong to Daegaer, I'm only borrowing them.

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Hanabusa Akinari pushed his round-framed glasses further up his nose and frowned at the textbook. Since he'd been ill he'd had an even harder time with his studies. The doctors hadn't been able to tell his parents what had happened, but the last couple of years had gotten all scrambled in his head. It worried the doctors that his friend, Chojiro, had suffered the same symptoms at the same time, because it indicated to them that this might be some contagious disease. His parents reluctantly had accepted the doctors contention that they'd found no drugs in the samples of bodily fluids taken from both boys, but were still certain that the boys had been doing something together, something that they shouldn't have. Akinari was puzzled by it, and kept returning to the same thoughts.

Tanaka Chojiro had become a good friend to him, that much he could remember. His only real friend, he thought, that he'd had in the past two years. His parents told him, and he knew it was true, that they had spent all their time together for the past several months, but trying to peice together how their time had been spent made him blush. He could remember plenty of completely innocent hours spent getting beaten on his own video games, studying together. He could also distinctly remember skipping out of the last half of a day of school with Chojiro because he didn't want to change up for gym, fearful the other boys would see the marks on his body left by... something. Here was where it all became confusing. He knew Chojiro had beaten him up a few times before they became friends, but that these marks were not caused by something bad like being beaten up, but by something exciting that he didn't want his family to find out about. Perhaps they had been doing drugs together, as his parents thought?

It was even more confusing, that, when their parents arranged for them to see each other in the hospital, something had seemed wrong and off about Chojiro. This person he met looked the same, and retained some of the same mannerisms, but somehow didn't feel quite like the person who featured in his broken memories. He knew his parents were not keen on him seeing Chojiro at the moment, and they wanted him to study to make up for lost time, but soon he would be back to school, where he could talk to Chojiro again. He might not be sure of who, exactly, Chojiro was at the moment, but it was certain that this was someone he'd gone through something with, and perhaps the only other person who might be able to shed some light on what had happened to them both.