Disclaimer: Not mine
"Still waters run deep"
-Proverb
1) Sakuno, despite having trouble in English, is far from dumb. She actually applied and got into an upper echelon girls middle school with the promise of full scholarship all on her own.
2) Unfortunately the acceptance letter comes a week after the one from Seigaku and by then her grandmother is so excited about getting to see her every day that she doesn't have the heart to disappoint her.
3) She knows that Echizen Ryoma will probably never like her as much as he likes tennis.
4) This is perfectly fine with her because she doesn't like him as much as he likes tennis either.
5) After Nationals are over she has decided that she is never going to make him another bento ever again. His less than appreciative comments have really started to grate on her nerves, something that is fairly hard to accomplish.
6) The only reason she is going to wait that long is because he never remembers to bring his own lunch anywhere and if he passes out from hunger in the middle of a match and costs Seigaku the Championship it will disappoint everyone who has worked hard for it, not just him.
7) She realizes that if she had not met him on the train she would probably have a crush on either Momo-sempai (who is nice) or Fuji-sempai (who is pretty).
8) Also, both of them will eat pretty much anything and probably would have been far more appreciative of her cooking.
9) Sakuno has almost no natural balance.
10) What most people don't know is that this is because of the chronic inner ear problems she suffered from for most of her childhood. The surgery that eventually solved them saved her hearing but she will be clumsy for the rest of her life.
11) Thinking about her former hearing problems does not upset her nearly as much as her family believes it does. They were, after all, the reason she became friends with Tomo-chan.
12) When they were younger Sakuno was one of the only children willing to play with a girl everyone else had dubbed loud and annoying and Tomoka never minded having to repeat herself on the rare occasions when her friend couldn't hear what she was saying.
13) Another interesting consequence of her former condition is that Sakuno can read lips and often does so without meaning to.
14) This has lead to several situations in which Sakuno knew quite a bit more than she cared to and accounts for the reason she cannot be around most of the tennis club without blushing. The locker room conversations of middle school boys are disgusting, detailed, and far too informative. There is certain information that no one should know about their sempai-tachi.
15) Unfortunately for Sakuno, she knows all of it.
16) Because of this she is also very plugged into Seigaku's gossip network and most of the first year girls know that Sakuno is the person to ask if you want to know if your crush likes you back.
17) Despite this she has managed to completely miss her own steadily growing fan base. Oddly enough it is almost entirely comprised of people who have seen her with her hair down.
18) She has yet to realize that Echizen's disparaging comments about the length of her hair are his backwards way of telling her that he wouldn't mind accompanying her to rectify the problem, as close to a date as he is willing to get.
19) If she knew this she would find his absolute lack of communicative skills both mind-boggling and kind of cute.
20) . . . She might also rethink the whole bento thing. Maybe.
A/N: My first 20things fic! My Sakuno muse was feeling less than charitable towards the tennis prince at the beginning but by the end she seemed to forgive him. Sort of.
As always reviews and constructive criticisms are appreciated.
