Fatty fatty fatso!

Is so fucking slow!

"Please, please s-stop…"

Fatty fatty fatso!

Is so fucking slow!

"It's not funny!"

Fatty fatty fatso!

Why won't you fucking die?

Chouji slapped his hands over his ears, face between his knees, and whined low in his throat as the taunting voices continued to break through his weak defenses and destroy him.

And then their haunting rhyme was replaced by echoing laughter, people turning in their seats, fingers pointing, eyes on him.

All eyes on him.

But no one moved to help him. There were about two hundred teenagers and at least three sensei on watch, but no one moved to help him! Only, instead, they moved to hurt him more, as if he wasn't already on the ground, as if he wasn't already defeated, as if, maybe, they enjoyed his pain.

Most likely, that was the truth. And he felt the sharp jab of someone's shoe in his side, pitching him sideways and causing him to sprawl across the linoleum floor. He yelped at the sudden pain and momentum, struggling for a moment to right himself, before he looked up into the face of a girl laughing down at him.

Because he was as low as the ground and, really? It wasn't so hard for everyone to turn on him, not when it was so easy to blend in just by making his life hell.

Chouji sucked in a deep breath, held it, and quelled both his indignant fury and his nearly overpowering instinct to run away – because they never took it this far, the teachers never ignored him for this long, this was getting further than words, and he was afraid. He was terrified.

They weren't done with him yet, not as long as no one was going to help him.

He then did something incredibly stupid: he rolled over onto his hands and knees, with the innocent intention of getting to his feet and getting the hell out of there, and instead heard raucous laughter as a heavy weight threw itself on his back and hands tangled in his thick hair.

"Ride that fat pig!" someone screamed, earning more laughter, and Chouji trembled as sneakered heels dug into his sides and a hand slapped his butt.

"Come on, giddy up!"

Giddy up.

His rage was quick to surface. He. Wasn't. A. Fucking. ANIMAL.

But bucking up and trying to dislodge his attacker didn't help. Flailing his arms back, trying to get a grip on his assaulter, didn't work either. No, now it was slowly occurring to him, over the jeers of his fellow peers, above the hooting of his 'rider', that he was doing exactly what they expected him to do.

He was acting, very much so, like an animal. A pig, a bull, a horse – whatever. He was being ridden and there was no dislodging the teen riding him. His eyes filled, unexpectedly, with tears, and he clenched his teeth together to force back his roar of shame and fury and fear, and forced himself to go still.

They weren't going to let him stand.

They weren't going to let him go.

And, if he tried to roll over to get the guy off of him, they would most likely start bouncing on him like a trampoline.

So, really, all he could do was crouch there, arms shaking as a second rider (she was a girl, thin as a stripper pole and just about as innocent as one, too, and she was welcomed with a proffered hand of the guy still on Chouji) joined and dug her stiletto heels into his shoulders.

And, still, nobody helped him.

One teacher made a half-assed attempt to tell the teens to stop, but then, after one shout and having no one listen, retreated back to a corner of the cafeteria and, instead, started harassing another kid for spitting on the floor.

It was safer that way, wasn't it?

Chouji swallowed back a sob and tried, knowing it would be of no use, to stand again, bringing one leg up to his chest till he could put the pad of his shoe flat on the ground, and then putting his hand on his knee to lever his upper body mass back.

And then he was frozen there, unbalanced and about to tumble, as the guy on his back dug his knee into his thigh and sneered, "And what do you think you're doing?"

The girl laughed and petted a hand through Chouji's hair. "Down, boy. Down."

It was nearly too much to handle.

It was too much to handle.

And the rage bubbled in his throat, angry words, vicious words, words that weren't even words, they were sounds that normal people just didn't make because they weren't words, but they were so much stronger. His mouth dropped open, the sounds on the back of his tongue like acid, burning his mouth, a painful ache in his teeth, tongue bitten and nipped by the fury, the hatred, the downright shame –

He saw, from the corner of his eye, through wisps of brown hair, a pair of tan Emerica skate shoes approaching in wide, lazy strides, and the fury increased because they were not-so-lazily approaching him and this was just another one of his tormentors coming to join the game, let's see how fast we can break the fatty fatty fatso.

A few feet from him and his two riders, one foot came up, sole of the shoe facing him, and he thought he was going to get kicked sideways again. Except the foot shot out, deadly fast, and Chouji jerked as the heavier body on his back lost his perch and fell off. The girl, without the guy to lean against, scrabbled, clung to Chouji's hair, and then followed the guy down to the floor, heels cutting across Chouji's shoulder blades.

He hissed in pain, catching his weight on the one hand still grounded, and his mouth flew shut again, trapping all of that bitter noise deep in his hurting chest.

And then he realized something: the cafeteria was silent.

Chouji turned his head up slowly, nervous, still furious, not altogether trusting of the idea that an Emerica skate shoe won't implant itself in his face, and heard more than saw the offending shoe softly touch the linoleum again.

Heard more than saw because, at the moment, he was much more focused on a pair of dark, beady eyes that were lit with shadowy irritation in a face scrunched in disgust. The amazing part, the thing that made Chouji feel boneless with relief and awe, was that that face and those eyes weren't directed at him.

His so-far hero was glaring at the cafeteria and hundreds of eyes, eyes that had watched Chouji fall, fell themselves. Except a few pairs, as there were always those people who were willing to fight, who were willing to say, This is wrong but, hey, I'm not going to stop!

"How troublesome…" the teen grumbled, raising a hand to rub the back of his neck (Chouji wondered, for a moment, how his ponytail defied gravity like that, or, if, his head hurt from how tight the ponytail appeared to be), before letting it fall, palm facing Chouji, slightly outstretched from his body.

Chouji stared at it for a moment, then followed the length of the teen's arm, across his Gorillaz band shirt, and then finally reaching the curve of his collarbone, up his throat, to his expression.

"Well?" the teen grumbled again, and Chouji had the impression that this guy looked lazy enough to always grumble, like it wasn't even worth it to speak up. "Are you going to take it or just leave me hanging?"

And then, oh, he felt kind of stupid. Because that hand, palm facing Chouji, slightly outstretched from his body, was an offering.

Chouji took it, and was half-shocked that most of the work of picking him up was actually done by the so-far hero.

Then, more shocking, the teen didn't let go of his hand immediately after getting him off the ground. The last time someone had bothered to help, not so much in saving him, but for the matter of getting him out of the way, she had let him go as if he had bit her and then had rubbed her hand down her jean-clad thigh, hissing that he'd felt sweaty and greasy and that his hand was chubby.

The teen's grip tightened when Chouji tried to do the right thing and let go.

It was enough that Chouji was willing to take the 'so-far' off of calling this guy his 'hero'. His face heated up because, well, he was almost happy.

"Are you alright?" his hero asked.

Chouji's mouth opened, a squeak came out, and he settled for nodding instead, unable to think of anything more to say in that moment of completely and utter astonishment.

The hero half-smiled and his lips moved, maybe to say something in reply, but -

But… like with all the other things that had ever made him happy in school… it was cruelly ripped away. Like the painting of Kuro-Shijimi he had done two years ago in Art class (four weeks of hard work done on his own time, ruined by a lighter), or when he had had a friend during sixth grade (and, in the end, private tutoring had taken that friend away).

This time, it was a chortle, that grew into a laugh, that grew into words.

Fatty fatty fatso!

Is so fucking fag-o!

His hero reached out, grabbed an apple from the nearest person's tray, and threw it.

Fatty fatty fat-

A teen went down, hard, and didn't get back up.

His hero tugged on Chouji's hand till he got the hint and shuffled back a few inches. Then his hero was standing on the outside of him, pushing nonchalantly toward the double doors, and Chouji blinked stupidly at the show of protectiveness.

It wasn't until they were nearly out the doors that the silence shattered, again, but with dozens of voices instead of one, not too few of them being challenges thrown at his hero's back, a small number coming after them, but stopping, instantly, once given the lightest touch that said, no, don't go, you just saw that mofo knock out Kenji with a fuckin' apple.

Halfway down the hall, he could still hear the noises, the voices, the words blending together into one long droning of excitement and rumors.

They would be talking about this for days, and Chouji grimaced because, by the end of those days, the very teen pulling him along now would most likely be the one pulling him down.

"Name's Nara Shikamaru, by the way."

Chouji's mind was thrown for a loop, trying to figure out what was just said to him. It took a moment for him to reconnect with the physical world beyond the warm hand in his and the clawing suspicion of what was to happen. "U-um, Akimichi Chouji."

"Well, Chouji, looks like you're stuck with me now."

And his mind, already so confused, stopped. "Huh?" To him, that kind of sounded backwards. People were stuck with Chouji till they decided to ditch him. Till that happened, they were as much a target of bullying as he was.

This was the first time he was said to be stuck with someone else.

The teen, Shikamaru, threw him a look over his shoulder that was lazily unabashed, mostly bored, and their twined hands were getting sweaty. "Everyone else in this hellhole looks too troublesome for me to hang out with, y'know? So I hope you don't mind that I'm taking over your buddies list."

A buddies list? Geez, Chouji didn't even have one, if Shikamaru meant what he thought he did.

"If you do that," Chouji's voice was low, cracked from all the wordless things he had wanted to scream but had never managed to, "then no one else will come near you. I, like, repel people, or something."

"Heh. That's cool. I'm not really a people person, so that suits me just fine."

And Chouji stopped breathing, a little too cautious to believe that this would work out, but hoping for it to anyway. "Ummm… Shikamaru?"

"Yeah?"

"Thanks for… You know, what you did back there."

"It wasn't really much." Shikamaru shrugged one shoulder, brought his free hand up to rub the back of his neck, and Chouji swore he saw his cheeks flush with some color before he managed to turn away. "Tsch. I can't believe the teachers weren't doing anything about it."

"They usually try to make it look like they do." Then he focused on the more pressing question. "Shikamaru?"

"Yeah, Chouji?"

"Why are you still holding my hand?"

Shikamaru shrugged again. "I'll tell you later."

~::~

Author's Note: Why IS Shikamaru still holding Chouji's hand? Is that my hinting at something other than friendship? Is anyone surprised? I doubt it.

EmbertheAngel requested something along these lines: "I would love for you to do a BulliedChouji story with a SaviorShikamaru. Or at least Shika would stand up for him."

I hope you enjoy!