An update that isn't a year apart, who would have thought? Anyway, this one ain't got much action. It's more focused on thoughts and feelings.

He tried, he goddamn tried his very best to read and do his homework before classes, tried to motivate himself, but it was hard. It took him a lot of effort and energy to maintain his focus, to keep up a façade, but having to deal with school, as well as keeping a secret bigger than most, it was hard to keep up. There was a reason as to why he stopped going to school once he hit puberty, a reason for his sudden outbursts of anger: he easily got stressed.

Whenever he reached a deadline, one he couldn't follow, he would get disappointed in himself and those expecting things from him that was unreachable. It was his coping mechanism, anger was the one emotion he knew so well, that he almost felt at home in it. He knew it wasn't a reasonable mood, that it would make others uncomfortable, but sometimes, he just couldn't help it. He's never been good at feelings, or following orders and expectations, but now, his own life depended on fitting into a mold. He had to maintain a fully human persona, and he was getting used to coming up with excuses as to why he couldn't join certain events.

When the class was going to the pool on a hot summer day, he said he couldn't swim, and when that wasn't good enough, he was allergic to chlorine. He didn't share locker room with the other students and used the bathroom instead. He'd even go as far as to not use his full-strength during P.E, knowing he was far stronger than any other teen his age.

But it wasn't just his physical abnormalities that he would come up with excuses for. On especially stressful weeks, he would fake to be ill, or come up with reasons as to why he was late. One day, his bus was canceled so he had to walk the whole way, on another, his cat had eaten his homework, and on one particular day, he showed up with a burned book, lying about the reason why it had been turned into ashes.

All this stress did him nothing good, it was eating him up, so when Yukio started blaming his bad grades and lack of focus on laziness, he felt about ready to jump out a window and burry himself. If there was one thing he knew he wasn't, it was lazy. He was constantly overworking his brain, trying to come up with reasonable explanations to why he did what he did, but him not being able to follow in a pace that's normal to most, left him with a feeling of never truly being good enough. While he wanted to improve, he didn't know how. Sure, he'd gotten a tad better after Bon helped him study, but the pace was still far to fast for him to properly follow.

He'd learned to stop daydreaming, or rather, to fake paying attention. He would still daydream, and those dreams felt relieving. He'd rather imagine himself as a knight in shining armor, than having to face reality, knowing that he was on borrowed time. His life could end whenever, and he at least wanted to spend his remaining time doing things he loved, eat good food and spend it with those around him that he saw as friends, or at least as he thought to be friends. Instead, he was spending all his time on long, complicated essays, using synonyms he'd found online to make it sound like he was smart. And so, he sat by his desk on his laptop until midnight, fumbling with sentences and fancy fonts, trying to at least make it a bit enjoyable.

He was great at pretending to be something he wasn't.

Reviews are appreciated, so I know how many still follow the story.