Friendship || Shiki & Yuri
@feyericheskiy
“Today, we will be working in partners.” Today, Shiki heard the one thing she kind of didn’t want to hear. She didn’t really like doing partner work all with people that weren’t friends all that much.
Like most universities, Enyo had its set of general education requirements. For Shiki, she had knocked out most from classes in high school. However, she hadn’t cleared all the requirements, and so the class she was in right now was for that.
The class wasn’t bad at all. Shiki thought it was an okay class; she liked what she was learning. She didn’t have anyone she knew well or was goods friends with in this class, though, so she made sure she never missed class. There wasn’t anyone she could contact, and Shiki was sure that if she asked the professor for a summary of what she missed, she would be asked why she hadn’t asked any of her classmates first. And the suggestions to make connections after would not be something Shiki wanted to listen to.
It wasn’t that she didn’t recognize anyone either. She recognized a few people from other classes she had or from seeing them often on campus. Some even lived in her housing community. Some were just well-known students.
Kind of like the guy that sat next to her.
Yuri Plisetsky was pretty famous on campus for being a professional figure skater. His achievements were known campus-wide, and most students knew who he was. Shiki knew about him before she had discovered that he would be attending Enyo, as she followed the figure skating scene and he was one of the few skaters that was her age. But sitting next to him in class was something that she did not account for; and so when he sat down in the seat next to her the first day of class, Shiki had been totally unprepared to handle it. She soon found out that she didn’t even have to worry about dealing with him, though, because, well...
The boy was totally unsociable. Or at least, he came off that way. His face varied from serious to frowning; there was no venture into the positive spectrum and he came off strongly whenever he participated, a combination of intimidation and confidence. Shiki was not surprised, as Yuri was infamous for his “punk” attitude. Some of the students in her class had tried to socialize with him and appeared to be blown off, so Shiki kind of steered clear of him. The most “socializing” she did with him was passing papers.
“You will be working in partners, with the person sitting to your right.” Shiki’s back stiffened when she realized who her partner was. Her eyes darted sideways briefly to the figure skater. It was one thing to just sit next to him, but now she had to talk to him.
Would she make it out alive? She didn’t even know. But one thing was for sure. She was going to do this no matter what. There was no way she was getting out of this, so she had better suck it up and deal with it.
Receiving the worksheet, she stared down at the instructions. They were to discuss the topic listed and write down their thoughts. For her and Yuri’s topic, it was friendship.
Great. Here goes nothing!
Turning sideways, she faced Yuri so she could speak to him. Everyone else around her did similarly, chatter filling the air as they began to discuss. She gave a small smile to him, hoping to be amicable as possible.
“So...uh...what do you think? About the topic. What do you think about friendship?” Shiki asked, wincing inwardly at how stilted she sounded.