Nowhere

PART ONE: INQUIRIES

Okay, first off, I'm planning on this to be rather lenghty so if you don't like the long idea, leave now. Also, THERE WILL BE BOYxBOY love, don't ask why, it's just the way it happens. But it's not going to be smut or anything like that, the T just stands for the fact that people swear, fight, and guys kiss. (eventually) Now my second warning is simple also, if you don't like cliff hangers, think their the worst thing in the world then LEAVE NOW. I can't help myself. There shall be cliff hangers.

So enjoy! And reply. I love it when people reply.

EDIT: The wonderful Rose Justice edited, then CookieMonster525 swept through and helped edit too!

Disclaimer: I don't own Eyeshield 21, never did, never will. Oh and I'm not making any money out of this, shocker.

Chapter One: Nothing Happens, Nothing Happens, Then Everything Happens

Never in my life was I the noticeable type of guy.

It wasn't like I strived to be but no one could ever confuse me with someone popular, and it wasn't like I was an overachiever. I just…was. Usually I sat in the far corners of the classroom, and kept my head low.

Despite being so good at being invisible, every now and again I'd wind up as someone's gopher or some low form of a bully-ee. But hey, this was school; stuff like that's bound to happen when you're on the smaller side of the stick.

According to daytime TV though, kids who are bullied get really messed up, but that wasn't ever a problem of mine. Maybe, because my parents never really had those super high expectations like some of the other guys at school.

College was my choice and their best encouragement was, Um, don't worry Sena you don't have to stand out. Thinking it out that could be the one of the reason to why I didn't have any goals.

As far I was concerned, I was just another typical Japanese kid, living in a nice, simple - okay fine - boring suburb half an hour drive away from Tokyo. I never expected anything grand out of me, and over time just accepted it, the less you expect out of life the less you have to worry about.

But something messed that all up, you see.

I became an international hero and found myself headed to Deimon, a rich school in the mountains of North America.

Then my life got weird.

--

Before I get into that though, I should probably explain just how the whole international hero thing started.

It all started on a smothering hot day near the end of August. The whole region was suffering from a massive best-to-finish-the-summer-with heat wave. I'm not over exaggerating, promise, our air conditioner choked and died on us three days before said heat wave struck.

Meaning, we had to go outside to cool off because the house was so hot and stuffed up. After a cold shower every morning, I would bolt outside only to avoid getting sunstroke in my own bedroom. (Mine was upstairs and heat rises.)

Everyone in my neighborhood must have had air conditioner problems too because no one was lingering inside their houses. It was like this every summer break though; no one wanted to send a lot of time indoors, just to be stuck in a cubical once fall came around.

One of the many, many things that separated me from the other kids my age was that, over time, I had come to hate summer break. It just meant sitting around pretending to look busy and un-bully-able-ish while really doing absolutely nothing.

I kept myself busy by heading to the park everyday and wander around there, hoping not to get mugged. I never was but it had been reported before.

I was trying to walk as slow as possible, the more I lingered in one spot the time deducted out of my summer break.

At least that's what I kept telling myself, in reality it was just making me more bored than I had to be.

With a sigh I reached into a back pocket and pulled out a crumpled banknote I forgotten was there, and decided that now was as good of a time as any for breakfast.

I usually waited until later when the morning work rush was over but because a donut sounded like a great idea to kill time, I decided to get one right away.

Making sure to look both ways before switching to the other side of the road (early morning drivers tended to be vicious) I headed for the Mister Donut right near the street corner.

My donut plans ended with a halt, though, once Mister Donut's parking lot came within visible distance, lounging in three parking spaces was a black stretch limo with tinted windows, with an American flag where the antenna on normal cars usually was.

Four midnight black SUVs surrounded the limo and men wearing expensive dark suits attempted to look causal while stalking around the limo. It seemed kind of pointless to me. Trying to not look suspicious while wearing heavy black suits, standing next to dark hot cars, in the middle of a parking lot with the scorching red sun beating down on them?

Not even they were able to pull it off logically.

As I came close I learned wasn't the only curious bystander hovering just outside the parking lot, a small crowd of curious spectators had gathered and were all muttering to each other, trying to get a better look at the seven men about to die of heat stroke. (And do so in a completely unsuspicious manner.)

"Sena-kun?" I turned surprised and Ayaka waved me over into the sweating crowd of bystanders. Ayaka was a pretty girl from my school, we never really hung out together much but once she invited me to go to a carnival with a bunch of her friends.

That was too years ago, I think, the reason was because we had the same birthday and every year Ayaka did something big for her birthday. I usually had trouble keeping track when mine was. Probably out of pity she had let me come along.

I didn't do anything at the carnival, it had been rather cold, just pretty much carried everything, but was thankful all the same.

"Hello Ayaka-san, what's happening?" I asked and she shrugged shifting her bag from one arm to the other. "I'm not sure; I came by earlier this morning to buy some donuts for my mom's office, but it was closed. So I got something at the drug mart instead, I was on my way back to the office when I saw that."

She threw a hand to the direction of the limo wearing a slightly irritated frown, flipping her brown hair out of her eyes, Ayaka was half Hawaiian, but her dad owned a share of some semi-major car company in Japan.

I was about to suggest that he'll carry the bag of food from drug mart– after all it wasn't like he was busy. But then they walked out, and the pieces finally clicked together.

I'd only seen him a handful of times in the newspapers and once on TV but I recognized the President of the United States instantly.

Well, the fact that a gasp ran through the crowd and at least several people shouted out, "Look it's the President of the United States of America!" kind of made it a dead giveaway.

Skipping next to him was a very pleased blue-haired girl munching down on a donut, wearing a very smug look on her face that I could see even from my distance.

"Whoa, Sena-kun look! Oh, I remember now, it was all over the news last night, the President's coming to Tokyo today for some trading agreement! I didn't know he would be passing though this area though!" Ayaka gasped and I nodded wide eyed.

My first time seeing someone remotely important in my life and I get lucky enough that it's the President of America, it's like meeting a king or something.

Yeah, about then was when I got bored and my attention drifted away from the President and his donut-happy daughter to the crowd around me. My eyes caught a rather dirty looking man who was hovering on the other side of the parking lot.

Squinting I could make out a bright green windbreaker bundled under his arm. Odd, we were kind of in the middle of a heat wave; the possibility of a windy day was rather slim.

I tried to see if anyone else noticed him, but all the attention was drawn only to the President. Turning to Ayaka I tapped her arm, wanting another person's option on what the dirty man was doing, but her attention was drawn onto something else and she didn't give me a second look.

My eyes widened though when he started to dig into the tightly wadded windbreaker. Even though he was on the other side of the parking lot, I could make out the black shape.

"G-gun, I think he's got a gun!" I yelled just as a cheer went through the crowd – the President had just waved and was headed in that direction with his back turned away from the dirty guy with the gun!

My feet acted on their own accord and I shoved my way through the crowd, ignoring Ayaka's cry of "Sena-kun!!" I bolted through the front line of people.

Instantly the sweaty guys in the suits headed in my direction. I twisted past them on a complex path I made up on the spot. I made eye contact with the blue haired girl as I speed past her and the President – who seemed keener on protecting her than himself – and it almost looked like she was smiling.

I heard a loud exploding noise and prayed that I wasn't the one who just got shot. I head butted into the guy's midsection, momentary overwhelmed at the smell of body odor and something akin to molding fruit.

Fighting isn't like in movies where the bad guy would just fall down and stay that way peacefully. He was able to recover quicker than me and jabbed an elbow into my ribcage pushing me under him.

Even though he was malnourished and thin, he obviously was better than I was at the whole fighting thing. Duh. I was lucky that the gun had been knocked far enough away or our fight probably would have ended a lot sooner.

I tried to ignore his string of cusses and was almost able to wiggle my out when both of his hands wrapped around my neck, cutting off my much-needed oxygen.

I began to feel myself slip almost instantly, without air I was losing whatever slim chance I had of fighting him off. His eyes grew brighter as my attempts became weak, unable to even blinking away the red spots that were clouding my vision.

Then everything stopped.

He stiffened for a moment, then his whole body grew weak and collapsed on top of me; I nearly died on the spot from smothering. The man was rolled off me and three very irritated sweaty F.B.I agents glared down at me, not quite sure if they should knock me out too.

Luckily they didn't, and Ayaka came straight to my rescue, standing up for me. I wasn't able to say much of anything, too deep in shock. Ayaka couldn't answer any of the questions they threw at me though and sat close putting her arm other my shoulder.

I didn't even put in the effort to tell her she was practically killing me, it was hot after all.

To make matters worst though, my whole right arm felt like it was on fire or as if someone had been attacking it with a hammer.

Ayaka tapped me gently on the shoulder; even though I was in pain I could almost sense that she was secretly enjoying all the attention. "Sena, one of the agents really needs to talk to you, strange enough none of these guys can speak fluent Japanese. So I'm going to be, like, the translator okay?"

I nodded not really listening to what she was saying. My eyes were glued on the apporching ambulance; hopefully they would have something for burning arms.

Ayaka started speaking to the man in quick English and he replied, but kept both eyes on me. "He says that the would-be assassin is already on a police car and on the way to the nearest jail cell," Ayaka paused and let the man talk some more.

"Also…He needs to know where you live, your home address and stuff so he can, like, call your parents."

I shot her a worried look, not really liking that idea, "I don't think they need to go out and call Mihae or Shuma, however Ayaka-chan, please ask him if someone could look at my arm. It kind of hurts."

Ayaka repeated my sentence in English and the man smiled looking slightly amused. "He said okay, he'll get the ambulance to come right away."

Looking around I made eye contact with the blue haired girl. She winked and waved, looking no wear for the worst.

Odd.

--

"Sena dear, y-you could have gotten yourself kill!" I smiled groggily up at Mihae; the nervous woman was constantly wringing her hands together occasionally turning to stare at the door like any moment it might spontaneously combust.

It had been a whole week since I pulled my superman act and, so far, life hadn't really slowed down. Five reporters had barged in and asked me serious questions to which I gave smart and witty answers (pshh yeah right), I was given a load morphine for the pain, which I think is the same stuff they use on elephants.

Moreover, hundreds of flowers were sent daily, leaving my new white room smelling like a can of Febreze, and the whole time I was still stuck in a fuzzy limbo for most of the time. Ayaka had already visited twice bringing along a whole binder of newspaper clippings.

In the so-called fight, if me lunging at the gun guy could be called that, my right arm broke, and I had multiple bruises covering almost every inch of my body. (My left toe however was just fine, not hurt the least.) But even though I'd seen guys slither out of alleyways with worse battle scars than me.

But the hospital didn't seem to know about those guys because they were treating me as if I was some billionaire who had just woken out of some twenty-year coma.

The top doctors treated my arm; the nurses would bring me a whole range of stuff to do; from Candyland to their sons' Xbox 360. I could even get free food from expansive restaurants that were more than willing to hand over food for the boy who saved the American President.

Also everyone working must have either been deaf or suffering from some sort of short-term memory lost because every time they did one of those selfless things I would continually remind them that they really, really didn't need to.

But the nurses would just get this fluffy, teary look in their eyes and tell me that I was a great kid, while the doctors would just laugh like we were old pals.

The day I was released from the hospital was a bittersweet one.

I wasn't use to getting so much attention, or any at all, and didn't quite enjoy it as much as I would have thought. Once away from the too-generous hospital, I was sure that life would return to normal. Right?

Uh, no.

I stepped out of Shuma's beat up Toyota and wasn't quite expecting the bright, intense, flashing of hundreds of cameras.

--

We got a lot of stuff.

Neighbors who completely ignored my family and I beforehand were suddenly flocking us every chance they got. 'Did we want to join them for dinner?' 'Could Sena watch over their kids?' 'Did we need anything?'

Despite the fact that we always said no, pounds of meat, gifts, mail, and other sorts of encouragement and praise were delivered daily by a rather tired mailman. I was given toys and gadgets that only kids spoiled rotten ever received. The bookstore three blocks away sent over a whole cart full of books, all ranging from picture books to YA books as if they weren't quite sure what my reading level was but wanted to prove that they were proud too.

Big companies sent us stuff too! We now had enough water bottles to last us through Armageddon. Someone must have thought me saving the President might reawaken our need to get our house checked for termites and sent us a free gift card. (However, we never heard anything from the air conditioning company.)

Yeah, I got a lot of free gift cards, enough that I would have been able to throw away all of my second hand store bought clothes and start over.

If I could walk all the way down the front yard without having my picture taken or some guy trying to hug me and tell me that I was Elvis in a past life, I might have done so.

I guess it was kind of cool, I had transformed from just plain old Sena into some sort of international icon.

But despite all that, I couldn't help but to feel guilty, the way the newspapers ranted on me, you'd have thought that I saved all of Japan instead of just tackle some crazy guy with a gun.

For us the mail was our biggest problem. We had special agents who went through it before us and discarded anything threatening or just plain creepy. But that didn't stop all those people who didn't seem to have anything better to do with their lives than to tell me what a great person I was.

Meaning that the hall closet was stuffed full of praising letters that none of us had gotten to reading yet. Mihae had somehow been stuck with the idea that if we just ripped them open we might hurt someone's feels out in Scotland, so each letter was read carefully and then we sent them a fancy Hallmark thank you card. (Someone out there must have been making a list or soemthing)

But then that letter came.

I had been chucking the mail into the closet, trying to not cause a paper avalanche, when I held up a cream-colored letter and got ready to chuck it into the closet where it would hopefully spend the remainder of its days.

Mihae caught a glance of it though out of the corner of her eye as if was screamed 'important!' to her secretary instincts.

"What's that one?" She asked whisking it out of my hand and shredded it open.

She pulled out a packet of what looked to be, from my view of sitting cross-legged on the floor, very fancy and important pieces of papers.

She scanned over the packet a couple times the color slowly rising in her face. "Mihae, what's wrong?" I asked, pretending that I wasn't getting majority freaked out.

"Oh this is wonderful!" She gasped and swayed a little. I jumped up and grabbed her arm; it would be pretty bad if she passed out in the front doorway.

"Yeah, sounds great, let's, um, sit down." She nodded, not glancing my way and stumbled into the kitchen. I shut the closet and followed after her, holding my graffiti-covered cast with the other arm. After I got it off I could probably sell it on E-bay for a hefty price; nearly every almost-but-not-quite famous person had signed it along with everyone in my neighborhood so now there wasn't any space that was safe from ink.

"Shuma! Shuma come look at this!" For the last three days Shuma, he's my dad by the way, had been pacing around in circles, not quite sure what to do.

His boss at the paper copy factory had gracefully given him the whole week to spend time with his, and here I quote, "Amazing and outstanding son", which is ironic because the first time he met me he thought I was a girl.

But Shuma was a natural-born workaholic and as far as I know, had never missed a day of work since I'd been born. Basically the idea of being forced to take time off work, even if he was being paid, was torturous. And there's only a limited amount of time the three of us could spend together and be happy about it.

"What's this?" Like said Shuma was a workaholic and had to be doing something or his brain probably would have turned into gray matter.

So while contained within our home - every time we left the house I was proclaimed Elvis and hugged - Shuma took on the long delayed task to paint over the tacky lime green kitchen walls. Now they would be the same eggshell white like the rest of the house, oh joy.

Shuma pushed back his dark black hair and taking the letter from Mihae and skimmed through it. For a moment he frowned but then smiled a little, the same type of loving smile he had given the new computer we bought three months ago.

"Er, is there something I should know about?" I asked, interrupting the weirdly happy moment.

"Sena, son, this is wonderful news." Oh-no, I was worried now. The last time that Shuma called me 'son' it was because he was trying to butter me up before telling me that my pet gerbil had died.

"Wonderful?" I repeated my suspicion easy to read. "Yes, wonderful, Mihae give him the papers please." Mihae handed me the smooth thick packet of papers and I stared down, pretending to read the small English text.

To the right of the paper was a fancy crest full of loops and pretty stuff that I couldn't quite make out on the black and white paper. "Er…" I started smartly, not quite sure what this was all leading to. I couldn't read English, the desire had never stuck me before.

"Sena! Oh course you probably don't know, but a full scholarship, it's almost too good to be true, this is one of the best schools in the world." Mihae smiled, and I nodded finding no reason to be estatic over anything including school."

"So this is an…English school?"

"Not just a school, son, Deimon Private School is one of the best all-boy boarding schools in world." Shuma stated in awe. I nodded faking admiration and swallowed feeling a cold chill run down my back as I stared at the letter.

Deimon Private School.