Feeling Strange: Fan Sidestories

This is an official thread for any fan-written sidestories to Keah's "Feeling Strange." Starting it off with the first of several short chapters in a series about Hibiki-sensei's past and present. No sex in this section. Just some PG-rated characterization. ^^

Any comments or suggestions are welcome. I'm not very good at writing, and I'm concerned that reading too many sappy romance novels has deteriorated by language abilities ...

Kyou = Hibiki.

Feeling Strange: Hibiki

01: The Circumstance of Takebayashi Asumi #1

***

Anxiety filled my stomach with butterflies.

For once, the deafening bustle that seemed to pervade every corner of the city was not unwelcome. If only a little, it distracted me from the knowledge that the athletic girl that sat beside me in the rail station waiting area was in fact my boyfriend Kyou; and that he about to gamble our future together on something immoral and probably illegal ...

It was a quarter to seven, and in fifteen minutes he would be on an evening train bound for a gym instructor posting at a girl's boarding school in some unfamiliar town, impersonating a woman who didn't exist. I would be alone in a city that I didn't yet know well enough to call home. Any number of things could -- and probably *would* -- go wrong.

"There's nothing to worry about," he said in a soft, feminine voice, putting his arm around me. "I'll be fine."

I nodded slowly, not really feeling it. The familiarity would have otherwise been reassuring, but the fact that he was presently wearing a dress he had bought for _me_ made my face burn. The countless invisible eyes that I imagined observing our half-embrace were filled with condemnation, and I pushed him away slightly, not wanting to be mistaken for somebody abnormal.

Kyou sighed and settled for holding my hand instead. It was awkward, but within the limits of my tolerance. Intimacy with "her" was unimaginable.

"I don't want to do this either," he said, "but you know as well as I do that we've exhausted all the other possibilities."

And it was true.

A year of seeing Kyou being rejected by every municipal school he interviewed at had made it painfully obvious that fitness education majors were simply _not_ in demand. Very little now remained of the money his family had given us before we moved into Misaki from the country, and minus rent and utilities, the salary I made at the local bakery wasn't anywhere near enough to support the both of us. It was pure luck that the Sacred Heart Girls' Catholic Academy decided to give us a way out -- a teaching position with high enough pay that in three trimesters we would have enough in our bank account to send Kyou back to college.

The only catch was, due to some clerical error, the job was being offered to a _Miss_ Amamiya Kyouka.

Kyou's appearance hasn't ever been as masculine as he's wanted it to be, and all throughout our childhood it was a sore point for h