Author's Note: Set after the events in Free Eternal Summer but before the boys graduate high school. Current rating is T but will change to M later because of sexual content.

The characterization of Sousuke was quite challenging to me, so while my beta readers assured me that I was doing alright, I kept angsting over it. (This seems to be a recurring theme with every fanfiction I write.) This was actually written last year but I put off posting it because I lacked confidence in the direction of the story and the writing quality. I hope you guys enjoy the story, I will be trying to update twice a month. To any readers that have read my other stories and reviewed, favorited or followed them, thank you for your continued support!

The cover image for the story is Lucy (the OC of this story), drawn by my friend, Minji.

One

The warble of birds was not what woke him, instead it was the soft strain of an acoustic guitar playing a familiar melody. Light was filtering in through the curtains, diffused as it spilled across the linens that his naked limbs were entangled in. He groaned as he tried to rouse in vain, still feeling the weight of exhaustion tying him down in bed. A quiet humming soon accompanied the guitar, and the pleasant harmony encouraged him to close his eyes again.

When he next opened them, which must have been quite some time later, a face was hovering over his. He would have thought she was watching him sleep—and those prosthetic eyes were real enough to fool him into questioning that for a second. But she flinched at his touch, which assured him that he had caught her entirely off-guard again.

"You're awake?" she blustered, her cheeks rapidly coloring.

Suspecting she intended to escape, he seized her around the waist and pulled her onto the mattress with him. "You're not leaving," he told her mischievously as he nuzzled into her neck. Scarlet strands tickled the tip of his nose, and when he inhaled it was the scent of lilacs that flooded his nostrils.

She giggled, and he could feel the rumbling of her throat under his lips. "You were sleeping like a log," she told him. "I thought my playing might wake you up, but when I came back I could hear your breathing."

Those beautiful blue irises stared back at him, their color so vibrant that they evoked the image of the sky in the middle of summer—bare of any hint of clouds. The moment he made that comparison, he stopped thinking about the fact that they weren't real. Even if her eyes were originally different—he couldn't remember what they looked like when they were—these were real enough to him now.

"Sousuke?" Her lilting voice gently called out to him, and he could feel the warmth of her hands encircle around his own, trying to pry herself out of his warmth.

"I'm not letting go," he insisted.

That seemed to give her pause, and she hesitated. Her eyes blinked instinctively, but it wasn't as though those prosthetic eyes required it at all. It was something he suspected she had trained herself to do, because the prostheses did not require lubrication like normal eyes—and yet he wondered if it was still an unconscious habit from before they were implanted.

"You're being immature."

Although she was scolding him, her tone wasn't the least bit admonishing. "I don't care." He dismissed it readily, smiling against her supple skin.

"But you will have to let go," she insisted. "You can't hold me here forever."

"I can."

There was a pause. "No," the woman argued, sounding more forceful this time. "You have to let go."

—

"Sousuke!"

He jolted at the sound of his name, and unlike the dream he'd been immersed in moments before, the person calling out to him was not the least bit beautiful or serene. In fact, it was the rather perturbed face of his roommate scowling at him. "The hospital today," Rin reminded. "You have physical therapy."

An inner groan and then he was doing a stiff, zombie-like walk to the bathroom. It was the same monotonous routine every Saturday morning. He moved like clockwork, showering and slipping away from the dormitory to board the train to the town over.

It wasn't until he had taken up his seat and was nearly lulled back to sleep by the motion of the train that he finally paused to think about his dream. It was oddly vivid for something that seemed completely random to him.

That was his thought as the train slowed to a stop at the station just before his, at which time someone happened to board. It was unusual for him to see other people moving about much in the early morning. Although he was accustomed to the occasional passenger, and so he had no intention of paying her any heed.

At least until he heard something clicking against the floor, and it was a distinctively different sound from the high heels he was used to hearing from the local business women as they clambered on.

"Excuse me, is anyone sitting here?"

At first he suspected the thing beside his leg that had nearly bumped him to be a cane, but the voice clearly didn't belong to an elderly person. Languidly he gazed up at her, and his heart hammered as he likened the teenage girl before him to the same one that had appeared to him in a dream that very morning.

She waited patiently for a response.

"Uh..."

The train suddenly jerked into motion, and she nearly toppled over. Sousuke instinctively leaped out of his seat to catch her, fearing she might lose balance. Yet the moment his hand landed on her shoulder, she shrunk away from his touch with an alarmed expression.

"S... sorry," the woman apologized haltingly as she guided herself to a seat, scooting to the edge of it, effectively putting as much distance between them as possible. Then she folded her walking stick—patterned white and red to alert others to her "condition"—and then stowed it away in the tote bag hanging from her shoulder.

He felt awkward leaving things like that, considering he might have stepped out of line in trying to help her if she clearly didn't want it. Although he wasn't trying to be disrespectful, his ignorance about the blind was evident in how he'd attempted to handle the situation. "I'm... the one who should apologize."

She turned her head toward him—angled slightly in the wrong direction. Those eyes of hers stared ahead with such clarity that it seemed she was watching everything, recording it all—but he knew that wasn't possible. "All… right, I suppose," she accepted. Despite saying that, she soon averted her focus in the opposite direction.

The air still felt grossly uncomfortable, and perhaps it was because of her uncanny resemblance to the girl in his dream that he couldn't leave the conversation there. So he cleared his throat to get her attention and asked, "So... what's your destination?"

"Shouldn't you be asking my name first?" she bristled.

His brows furrowed and he turned away, a little disenchanted with her hostile personality. Perhaps the coincidence stopped at their appearance. The girl in his dream had seemed so affectionate. He had felt an unimaginable attraction to her.

The silence stretched on between the two of them for several long minutes. He was content to leave it there, but she soon was the one clearing her throat. "I only ride this train on the weekend to go to my part time job. It's at the next stop."

He peered back in her direction, only to find that she again had her face angled toward him. This time it felt eerily as though she was staring him down—like those blue irises had him completely pinned him in his seat.

"And you, Nosy-san?"

"Yamazaki," he corrected her coldly. "Yamazaki Sousuke."

Although there was a split second of shock and subsequent hesitation as though she was contemplating something, her lips soon curled into a satisfied smile. "That name sounds much better, Yamazaki-kun. You're about my age, right?"

"I don't know your age," he said gruffly. Although he did assume she was correct—he wondered how she had so easily guessed his age.

"Seventeen."

"I also don't know your name, Seventeen-san."

She trembled—and at first he wasn't sure if it was because she was angry, but then she let out a strangled laugh. "Tanizawa Lucy."

"Lucy?" he echoed skeptically, clearly unwilling to believe that her parents would have given her such a name.

Before she could say anything more to him, the loudspeaker called out the name of his stop. He was about to say as much to "Lucy," but she stood up at the same time as him, unfolding her cane as she did so.

"Oh." It was more or less a spoken afterthought as he remembered that she had said this was her stop, too. "So you work here?"

She seemed surprised by his question. "Yes, I work at the library here."

His first thought was to ask how or what kind of work she did there as a blind person, but he suspected that such an inquiry was shamelessly insensitive so he swallowed it back. Instead the two disembarked together, although walking beside her made him self-conscious. The ease with which she navigated through the gates and upstairs was more impressive than he would have ever given her credit for. There were more questions springing to the back of his mind—did she have the whole area mentally mapped out?

"I have to go this way," she said once they were out on the main street together. "Are you going the same way?"

It occurred to him just then that he hadn't yet told her why he was coming here, so of course she was none the wiser about his intended destination. "No," he answered automatically, his gaze switching to the hospital whose silhouette was outlined by the rising sun. "I'm going the opposite way."

"Then I shall bid you adieu here, Yamazaki-kun." For as initially guarded as she seemed, she now offered a blithe smile as she dipped her head. "Perhaps we'll see each other on the train again then."

"Wait," he called after her the moment she began to turn away.

"Yes?"

Sousuke hesitated. This was unlike him. "I'm going by the library before I go back," he told her. The way he awkwardly looked away was a clear indication that he was feeding her a blatant lie. Somehow he was grateful that she couldn't see as much.

Her lips broke into a grin, a row of pearly whites peering out from behind them. "The library? Did you really intend to go there all along? Or are you just coming to see me?"

Bulls-eye, and he was left at a loss to respond. Maybe he should lie again? Had she really seen through him so easily the first time?

"When you jumped up to grab me earlier, I noticed it. Your muscle tone is much higher than average. Were you on a sports team? Or maybe you still are." She inclined her head. "Either way, not someone I pegged for frequenting a library."

"Anyone can read books."

"Anyone can, it doesn't mean everyone does."

He realized just how argumentative she was at that point, and suddenly any desire to visit her workplace waned greatly. Although he realized it might make him hypocritical, he wasn't the most talented in dealing with difficult personalities. Typically he was the one that other people adjusted themselves to try to accommodate. Being on the other end was an entirely unwelcome experience. "I won't visit the library then." Intending to cut out the conversation there, he turned to leave.

"Yamazaki-kun!" she bellowed at him, giving him pause. The moment he stopped and turned back to face her, he realized she was approaching with slow, gradual steps. Her stick was swinging out low in front of her, and the moment it tapped against the side of his shoe, her smile widened.

Lucy dug her hand into her pocket and produced some small coins, then with her other hand—still brandishing her walking stick—she reached toward where she must have thought his hand would be. She was grasping through the air, and rather than watch and wait for her to find it, he lifted his hand to meet her.

"Take these," she told him in a hushed voice.

"Why?"

"So you can buy me a juice when you come to visit." There was a triumphant look on her face. "If you have my money, then you can't back out. If you do then you're thief. I'll even let you surprise me with the flavor. So make sure you visit and find me!"

He stared blankly down at the coins in his hand, unsure of how to respond to her bold request. Why had she made such a fuss about him coming like she didn't want him to, only to turn back around and try to coax him into coming after all? If Sousuke understood nothing else, then he at least knew that the woman with the blue prosthetic eyes was an unpredictable creature that could not be underestimated for even a moment.

"Why do I have to come now?" he asked finally, just as she peeled away and was preparing herself to depart for the library.

The hand holding her walking cane flexed and unflexed while precariously balancing it against the ground beneath her. "Because I have the feeling that I want to see you again, Yamazaki-kun. Is that a good enough reason?"

A moment of silence passed as he resigned himself, expelling a sigh of exasperation. "I don't understand you."

"You don't have to understand me to visit me, right?"

"No, but I have to want to understand you."

Rather than continue to quibble with him, she tightened her grip on her walking stick. "All right," she conceded. "That's a bit awkward. It's my turn to apologize this time then. Please forget about what I said." A brief head bow, and then she was quickly moving in the opposite direction.

In the wake of it all, he was left staring down at the coins, now catching the light of the sun that had finished peeking above the horizon. Sousuke had never once been terribly conscious of his own words and actions, least of all in how they impacted other people—unless it was Rin. But for the first time, he felt like a genuine ass hole.