"HARDER!"

Hiei's legs pumped underneath him, arms propelling him forward, forward, forward.

Twenty meters. Ten meters. Something caught on his chest and twisted up around his knee, his foot. He gasped and grabbed the soft material of his shorts. The cheering came in a loud wave that pounded against his throbbing head. He swam in it and dove down, hacking for air.

"Good race, kid."

He coughed. "What time."

"Eleven exactly." Enki patted him on the back, all smiles. "You won."

Hiei pulled the finish line ribbon from his left leg and tossed it on the ground. "I know I won." He stood up from the synthetic track and snatched the water bottle from his coach, gulping it down. "But with my slowest time this week."

The other kids were stretching and talking with their own coaches, staring at the scoreboard. It was only state finals, not even regionals, so his time didn't have to be perfect. His closest contender had been half a second behind.

"Stop chasing ten seconds," his coach said, ruffling his protégé's black hair in the way he hated. "If you keep practicing, you'll get back to it."

Hiei snorted and stood. There was another two hours before the 200m. Luckily, this conference arranged the schedule so that no contender had to compete in back-to-back events. He headed to the inside of the stadium and pulled his headphones from his backpack.

Enki called back to him. "Aren't you going to watch the rest of the team?"

He put his earbuds in and turned the volume up.

"Both wins, huh?" Said coach Enki, his sweat stains seeping through his shirt like a Rorschach blot. He turned on the air conditioning in the van. "Not bad."

Hiei slumped down in his seat at the front. Other kids in the back pushed and shoved each other in the bench-style chairs. One girl yelled that another was tugging her pony tail. Enki urged quiet, and was ignored. Some of the occupants had just turned fifteen, but most were older. The younger group's conference would be held the next day. After catching each other up on their ranks, times, and what they wanted for dinner, the kids died down, quaking legs finally catching up to them. Within the first half-hour, three of the ten had fallen asleep, sweaty hair and arms and faces leaving marks on the van windows. Hiei reached forward and turned the A/C down. He was getting goosebumps.

The ride back was always better than the ride over. The tension that always built during the morning drive dissipated after a concrete win or (rarely) loss, and Hiei could just stare at the road and think of nothing or anything instead of strategy and training and his desire for victory. Now, he thought of nothing, and rubbed his exposed arms.

Enki yawned and scanned the radio, keeping the volume low. His large finger hesitated every time at the news channels, waiting for a flicker of insight or information to pass the airwaves, but ultimately always settled on one old blues station or another. By now, he and Hiei were the only two both conscious and without earbuds (Hiei's had broken after a rival team member's parent had "accidentally" stepped on his bag), so they were the only ones affected by his music selection. Since Hiei had long ago announced his permanent apathy on all radio-related matters, Enki always had free reign.

"Hey," said Enki. The sky was darker by now, half by clouds and half by the approach of dusk. "We need to talk."

Hiei kept his gaze on the passing yellow lines and waited.

"You're going to college. I've gone through all your recruitment mail. You know you've been solicited from these places since fourteen, right?" Enki said.

"Not interested."

"Well, I sent your SAT scores to a few places anyway, along with the clips we have of some of your best times. Even put in that one time you did hurdles." Hiei winced. Not his best event. "Anyways, you're basically accepted at a handful of places already. Really good track and field schools. The best."

Enki had forced Hiei to take the SAT last year, just after he had turned seventeen, for some accreditation related reason that allowed the permanent training camp Enki operated to continue to be registered as a school. They did, technically, learn, but it was a formality tacked on to the end of the day after training. Hiei had never put in much effort into studying, or anything he didn't like, so he had answered the test questions but did not dwell on whatever his scores meant or how they compared. The test had been a minor inconvenience and he had not thought about it since he put his pencil down.

"You do know some of these places have coaches that live, eat, and breathe track more than I do." Hard to beat Enki at eating, Hiei thought, eyeing the large, fleshy bulge that filled the gap between the coach's ribcage and the steering wheel. "You've been living in these training camps your whole damn life, and they can't get you an individual trainer for your own events. You don't need someone who knows how to do javelin toss or shotput. You need someone who can help you run."

Hiei grit his teeth. "It's not that hard. You go fast."

"Weren't you complaining about not getting to your best time again today? You know it's more than that, and I don't have time to baby you anymore." Enki reached back into the pouch behind his seat and tossed some fliers at Hiei. "Pick your favorite."

Hiei grunted and picked them up. They all looked the same, with boldfaced white serif letters placed over an image of a leafy campus or smiling young adults. He highly doubted Enki had sent his scores to all of these places. "I'll pass."

Enki poked at Hiei's chest. "Read them. Google their facilities. If you can't find one with a better program, then you can stay at camp for another year."

"Eyes on the road."

Enki swerved around a Fiat. "Hard to believe they make cars that small."

They settled back into silence, but Enki knew that changing topics meant Hiei would do it. Hiei knew that Enki knew he would do it, too, so he shoved the pamphlets into his backpack and feigned indifference for the duration of the ride.

Location. Size. Student-Faculty Ratio. Club offerings. Meal plans. Greek life. Dorm life.

"Come on," Enki said, slapping down a college-search book (Princeton Review?) on the table, "you have to care about something."

Hiei looked up from his phone. "Like what?"

"Like anything I just listed."

Hiei went back to scrolling.

Enki sighed. "So you'll go, but won't pick where."

"There's free ice baths and saunas for athletes here," Hiei said, sliding his phone across the table to show him the website. "Twenty-four hours."

"So you wanna just go there? The place with the saunas?" Enki dragged his hand over his face. The red of his lower eyelids peeked out for a second from the force, briefly making him look as exasperated as he felt, before they sprung back into place. "You're not going to worry about classes or anything?"

Hiei grabbed his phone back and opened another window in his browser. "You're the one making me do this."

"That school is halfway across the country, you know."

"What, are you planning on visiting?"

Enki opened his book again and flipped around. "Okay, if that's really where you want to go, I'll call them and see if they'll cover all your costs."

Despite what Enki had said earlier, he had only applied to the schools that offered Early Action and didn't require essays. After some goading, Hiei had been willing to explore options at schools that took regular decisions in January. But no essays or SAT subject tests. Or the ACT. Or effort.

"If I have to pay for anything, I won't do it."

"Yeah, I got that."

"Including books."

"Now you're interested in your education?"

Hiei slid off his chair. "I'm interested in my wallet. I don't suppose you're paying for me."

"Right you are. I think six years-worth of free housing has been good enough."

"Yeah, yeah." Hiei pulled open the door of Enki's office. "See you tomorrow."

Hiei laid in bed longer than he intended to, thinking. He never really considered his training environment or regimen to be that influential on his times. If he could sleep, eat, and run, most of the rest was up to his own abilities. In the past three years, he hadn't gone below ten or above eleven seconds, and that was hardly due to his coach's individualized attention or advice. He had a sneaking suspicion that Enki was not interested in his actual success in track but on his more generalized future. "Sappy bastard," he grunted, before turning out the lights.

Hiei didn't like people, enclosed spaces, or loud noise.

Move in day had all of those things at once.

It was like the first moments in a van before competition, only way worse. The lobby of the dorm was a crowd of parents and kids, all carrying overstuffed boxes of towels and lamps and school supplies and yelling about things that they had forgotten or couldn't find. Enki had dropped him off at the airport a few hours ago with a farewell that seemed almost too eager and left him to move in alone. Not that having him here would have made it any better. His stomach would have had enough mass to displace a significant portion of the crowd and force Hiei even closer to the other bystanders that encircled him. Really, it was a blessing he couldn't come.

The elevators had been reserved for people with large items, so everyone else was condemned to walk up the stairs. The stairwell was about the same as the lobby, but it had only two inches of personal space instead of five. Hiei held his duffel bag close to his stomach and tried not to grind his teeth flat. After eight agonizingly slow flights, he pushed aside some freckle faced girl two feet taller than him to throw open the door to the fourth floor.

The hallway was nearly empty by comparison. A few students frantically flitted around, but the rooms showed little signs of occupation beyond a stray box or mattress pad strewn on the floor. The floor was, however, extremely loud. There was a noise that sounded like two baboons fighting, complete with the clanking and clunking of the battle. And, unfortunately, it was getting louder with every step he took towards his own room.

He stopped outside of 418. The noise was coming from inside.

"Kuwabara, move your stupid butt!"

"Shut up Urameshi, I have to do this backwards!"

"Yeah, well I can't see."

"Yeah, well whose idea was it to get this stupid couch in the first place?"

There was the sound of stumbling and a massive thud. Hiei pushed open the door.

One boy was ferociously cackling as the other was trapped underneath a stained couch in a jarring pattern of jaundice yellow and vomit green plaid. Somehow, the couch was trapped between one of the bedframes and a desk, with the unfortunate ginger stuck between the three pieces of furniture.

"Get this thing off of me!"

"I will after I get a few dozen pictures." He was already at it, the phone making obnoxious sounds to prove it.

"URAMESHI!"

"Both of you," Hiei said, just loud enough for them to hear, "get out."

Abruptly, the laughing one whirled around. "Hey, shrimp, move along. I think you missed your turn for the day care center."

The stupid lug with the red hair somehow managed to force the couch off of himself and scrambled to get in on the action. "Who the hell are you?"

"This is my room," Hiei said, "and I think you both have done enough damage to it."

"No way, kid, I'm going to have to see some evidence," said the black haired boy, placing his hands on his hips.

Hiei held up the key to the room, clearly labelled with the number 418 in bold sharpie. "Will this suffice?"

He scoffed and slapped the key away without a glance. "That's gotta be a housing mistake. Kuwabara's form says this is his room, and it's a single."

"Um…"

Urameshi glared and turned around to face the lump apparently named Kuwabara. "What?"

"I guess I forgot to tell you…" Kuwabara's face turned as red as his hair. "A few weeks ago, the housing office sent me an email. They said they didn't have enough space to give me a single."

"What?! Are you serious? Can they even do that to you?"

"Yeah, did you not notice the two beds in here?"

Dread sunk into Hiei's bones. No. No. Absolutely not.

"I'm not rooming with anyone," Hiei said, picking his key up off the floor with one hand and fishing for his housing form in his pocket with the other. The form he had been given in mid-August definitely said he would have his own room, and there was no room for compromise.

Kuwabara pulled out his phone and clicked on it a few times. "Uh, is your name Hiei?"

Denial. "I'm not living with anyone."

"Check your email, dude." Kuwabara pointed to the text on the screen. "It says you're my roommate."

"You're living with this thing?" Urameshi asked, pointing to Hiei. "Yikes."

Anger. Hiei wanted to scream. College was supposed to be as minimally intrusive as possible on his life. In less than two minutes, these two were already intruding on his sanity.

Kuwabara lunged at Urameshi, but Urameshi quickly dodged, letting his friend fall flat on his face. "Too slow!"

The idiots were back to fighting. Hiei pulled up his email on his phone and confirmed the worst. He indeed was downgraded to a double, assigned to one Kazuma Kuwabara. Fantastic.

"Fuck you!"

"Fuck you!"

"Shut up, both of you" Hiei said, his inflection unchanged, "we're going to the housing office."

Both of them stopped abruptly, and Urameshi released his grip on Kuwabara's hair. "Kuwabara, why didn't you think of that?"

"Because the office just opened today, stupid." He pushed his friend off. "Plus I didn't realize my roommate was going to be a goth dwarf."

"If you don't hurry up, I'll show you how dark I can be." Hiei dropped his duffel bag on the floor, kicking it under the one bed that was accessible around the dirty couch.

Urameshi looked between Hiei and an appalled Kuwabara. "Whatever, man." He crawled over the redhead and pushed past Hiei with his shoulder on his way out the door.

"Wait!" Kuwabara said, scrambling out the door after his friend. "Don't leave me with him!"

As soon as they cleared the doorway, Hiei slammed and locked the door behind him. Stepping over the couch onto the bed he claimed for himself, he started a new email to the director of housing and CC'd the athletic, financial aid and scholarship directors, and, after a thought, added Enki's horrible gmail (sportzguy57). He scrolled back to look at the emails Enki had sent on his behalf to figure out how to format the damn intro. To whom it may concern, please give me the damn room you said I'd have a month ago. Thanks. He saved it as a draft and decided his time would be best spent unpacking for now.

The other two had left him in peace for less than two minutes before they started banging on the door. "You dick! I thought you were coming with us to the office!"

"I'm sure it will be helpful for you to get their advice," Hiei grunted, retrieving his duffel bag and beginning to pull out the contents. "Seeing as you're homeless."

There was more yelling, so he put his new headphones in and went about this business. Unfortunately, this peace didn't last much longer, either.

As the door slammed open, Hiei pulled out one earbud. "All settled?"

"I got a spare from the front desk, asshole," Kuwabara growled, pointing the key at Hiei in the least menacing way possible.

"Well, that solves neither of our problems."

Kuwabara was seething. "Then come with us!"

Hiei sighed. This guy was probably going to bother him until he agreed, and since he couldn't lock him out anymore, he was mostly out of options.

Bargaining.

Every parent was crammed into the housing office, along with their respective offspring. Hiei, Urameshi and Kuwabara were jammed in the back. Half of the problems Hiei overheard could have been solved with a map and an ounce of self-sufficiency.

"I can't believe you didn't call them as soon as you got that email," Urameshi grumbled, slumping as far in his chair as he could while remaining physically on it. He elbowed his friend. "This is all your fault."

"Me? How is this my fault?" Kuwabara snapped.

"Because now I have nowhere to live!"

"Well that's your own fault for getting kicked out of the dorms."

Yusuke pulled out his phone and started texting. "Maybe I can live at Kurama's house 'til I've found a place."

"That's a terrible idea," Kuwabara grumbled. "And he's gonna say no."

Yusuke frowned. "He just did."

"Told you."

Hiei was going to have an aneurysm.

"Next?" called the woman at the desk.

Fuck the line, he was going to be next.

Hiei pushed through dozens of legs to reach the counter, which was about even with his collarbone. "There's a problem with my room," he said, placing his hands on the counter and standing on his tiptoes to match the receptionist's gaze. "I've been assigned a room with another occupant, but my paperwork says I was given a single."

The woman frowned. "I'm sorry, but we had an unexpectedly high number of students enroll this year. Some rearrangements had to be made. If you want to change rooms, that form will be available soon on your school login page."

Hiei grit his teeth. "How soon?"

"Soon enough," she said, malevolence sparking into her eyes. Or maybe that was the computer glare on her glasses. "I'm sorry for the inconvenience. Next?"

Kuwabara, who had just managed to push through the crowd, slapped the desk. "Are you kidding me?! I can't live with this guy!" he said, gesturing to Hiei. Hiei nodded in agreement.

"The form will be available on your university login page soon, sir. Again, next?"

Urameshi grabbed Kuwabara and started dragging him out of the office, and Hiei followed. As soon as they got outside, Yusuke collapsed on a bench. "So what now?"

"Like hell I'm going to wait for that form," Kuwabara said, smacking a fist into his palm. "There's gotta be another way."

"We could break into the key box," Hiei said. "And you two could live in some other room for the next week until the rest of the building moves in."

Urameshi sat up. "That's actually not a bad idea."

"Are you kidding? That's stealing!" Kuwabara said, horrified. "We'd be squatting! I have standards!"

"I don't." Urameshi hopped off the bench with a devious expression. "So what's the best time to execute?"

"Probably tonight." Hiei said. "The desk hours for the dorm said they won't be fully staffed during graveyard until this Monday. There's security cameras outside the building, but not inside."

Kuwabara balked. "What the hell, dude? Were you looking for them?"

"Good call. So what, one in the morning sound good?" Urameshi asked.

"Holy shit," Kuwabara said, looking to Urameshi. "You guys are not seriously working together on this. He's a little punk!"

Urameshi shrugged. "Yeah, but so am I."

They met on the second floor staircase at one.

Hiei peeked out from the stairwell door. "Coast is clear."

Urameshi pushed the door open, crouching and far more alert than necessary. They made their way behind the desk, careful to scan for any lingering students in the lobby. Hiei pulled out his knife.

"Whoa there," Urameshi said. "Did you lure me here to shank me?"

"And how were you going to pick the lock?"

"With a bobby pin, like any normal petty criminal." Brandishing the accessory from his pocket, Urameshi went right to work on the key lock. Hiei snorted and leaned on the desk, knife still in hand, keeping watch.

"You know, I might apply for a job behind the desk. It looks like easy money," Yusuke said, fiddling with the pin. Hiei didn't comment.

"What, not into small talk?"

"No. Especially not while we're committing a crime."

Urameshi shrugged. "I mean, we're not killing anyone." He glanced at the knife. "At least not yet. This was your idea, by the way."

"If I realized how much talking would be involved, maybe I should have just kept the plan to myself."

"And give up your room? Nah, you needed me."

This was true. Without his involvement, it would be Hiei that would be sleeping in a room that was not his own. It wouldn't have bothered him if not for the fact that Kuwabara would still be in the room that was rightfully his, which was unacceptable.

The lock sprung free and Urameshi let out a little "yahoo!" before Hiei shushed him. They decided to take the two keys of the room immediately below 418, for convenience's sake. Urameshi put the lock back in place with a click, and aside from a few new scratches around the key hole, it looked just as it had before their arrival.

"I'm still gonna have to find somewhere else to live," Yusuke said as they climbed the stairs. "Half of those boxes are mine." Receiving no reply, he continued. "I guess I could pester the guys to let me live at the frat house."

Hiei scoffed. "You're in a frat?"

"Well, yeah. Gamma Alpha Psi for life," he said, making some sort of hand gesture Hiei interpreted to be a hand sign associated with the fraternity. "Kuwabara's in it too."

"Do they only take idiots?"

"You're the idiot," Urameshi said. "How do you not know about Gamma Psi?"

"I have no interest in that sort of thing."

"Yeah, but you should've heard about it last year. Our parties are killer."

"What do you mean last year?"

Urameshi stopped at the third floor landing. "Well, y'know, freshman year."

Hiei's expression was blank.

"Wait, are you a freshman?" Urameshi immediately doubled over, slapping his knees. "Are you serious? I shoulda guessed from the height alone, but damn dude!"

Hiei gripped his knife a little harder and climbed the stairs around Urameshi. "Keep laughing."

"Don't worry, I will," Urameshi snickered, following after him. "Oh man, Kuwabara's gonna lose it."

Kuwabara did indeed lose it, because a goth freshman under five feet tall had evicted him from his own room and had convinced his best friend to go along with it. "YUSUKE! This is embarrassing, and you're letting him do this to me!" He shouted, pulling at his coiffed pompadour. "And he's doing this to you, too!"

Urameshi shrugged. "Yeah well, a bed is better than a couch anyway."

Hiei was on his bed playing on his phone, headphones on. The idiots were supposed to have left the room by now. It was almost two. "If you plan to enjoy that bed, I'd suggest going downstairs before your ugly friend exposes you both," he said, flipping through his playlists.

Urameshi covered his mouth to keep from laughing while Kuwabara aimed to lunge over the couch. "Hey asshole, watch yourself."

"You two have both made threats against me and neither you have delivered. You must realize that diminishes the impact of your words." He looked up at Kuwabara, who was standing over him, red faced and shaking, and smirked. "Not that they had any to start with."

"Why you-" Kuwabara reared back his fist.

Hiei narrowly dodged by turning on his side, giving Kuwabara a strong kick to the chest that forced him to take a step back. Hiei pushed himself off the bed and quickly ducked- Kuwabara had recovered his balance faster than he anticipated. He rushed again, and Hiei countered by punching just above his most sensitive area."

Kuwabara recoiled and toppled over the couch, landing headfirst on the floor. "YOU ALMOST HIT ME IN THE NUTS," he yelled. From this position, he just looked like a pair of angry legs.

"If you come at me again, I will hit you in the nuts," Hiei said.

Urameshi did a terrible job of covering his snorts of laughter. "Be careful Kuwabara, he is eye level with your dick. He's got a clear shot."

"I'm going to kill him!"

Still laughing, Urameshi grabbed Kuwabara by the arm and helped him to his feet. "Yeah, we got that." Kuwabara was clutching his scalp, and his pompadour had shifted positions.

"Are you finally leaving?" Hiei asked, jumping back up onto his bed with more difficulty than he'd like to admit. Damn college and its stupid lofted furniture.

"Having second thoughts?" Urameshi asked, smirking from behind his large friend. "Do you miss us already?"

Hiei let out a humph as Kuwabara slammed the door behind them.

Hiei woke up early the next morning. The room was still a mess of boxes on his roommate's half, and the couch was still at an awkward angle. Hiei stepped off the bed (now he was grateful for those times Enki made him do yoga) and fumbled through his duffel back for his running clothes. The temperature here wasn't that much different than at camp, so he didn't have to buy any new clothes.

The morning was quiet. He brushed his teeth in an empty communal bathroom, walked down a silent stairwell and passed the unstaffed front desk on his way out the door. The athletes moved in a week ahead of the rest of the school, so he hoped it would stay this way for at least the next few days- though it wasn't like many college students would be up before six. The sky was still a uniform gray-blue, without a hint of sunrise. The street lights were still on, and there were even a few stars on the horizon. Hiei slung his calf behind his thigh and tugged his foot forward in a stretch before beginning his pace.

There wasn't much to the residential side of campus. Most of the dorms were vertical, so they weren't part of the scenery for long. Since nobody had moved in yet, there were no flags or post it note creations hanging in the windows. The gym, which had recently undergone a million-dollar renovation, loomed behind the ROTC building and the sports medicine complex. He'd visit it when it opened later. The dining hall next to the student union opened in an hour and a half. There was another one on the bottom floor of the architecture building, he heard, but he didn't really want to bother finding out where that was.

He crossed the main divide into the academic side of campus. Most of the buildings here were old with red bricks and white doric columns and large domes, but there was the occasional concrete and metal eyesore that was probably cutting edge in the 70's. Hiei hadn't checked to see where his classes were yet, and probably wouldn't until the first day. Hell, he didn't remember what classes he registered for.

The campus itself wasn't more than two miles long, so he'd have to at least run it twice for an adequate warm up. The sun was slowly starting to cast an orange hue along the tops of the tree lined main road. When he lost his focus for a moment, it was almost nice to see the morning like this, with the warming from the early morning light creating a thin fog of evaporation over the pavement. Misty, tranquil. Alone.

Or not.

Up ahead, where the fog thinned out, there was someone was sitting on a bench. Just reading. Or at least that's what it looked like.

At what? Five thirty? Six? There was no way they could be reading with the light this low. There's not a reason for anybody to be up, reading, at this hour. Classes hadn't even started. What was the point?

Hiei didn't want to change course, but he sure as hell didn't want to pass the only other person awake on this damn campus. He hesitated. It was either avoid the stranger or continue along feeling very, very uncomfortable.

He shook off his sudden and uncharacteristic response. They could fuck off, for all he cared.

The street lights had turned off a few minutes ago, so maybe it wasn't that difficult to read in this light. Ahead of him, the sky was turning more orange by the second. Plus, he had checked his watch no problem earlier, but the bench was probably damp, and unless they had just got here, then-

"Beautiful morning, isn't it?"

Hiei stumbled and stopped, barely catching himself. He didn't realize how fast he had been going. "What?" he said, with a gulp of air. He looked up, hunched over and with his hands on his knees, to the man reclined out on the bench.

He smiled. "It's lovely," he said, and gestured with his book behind Hiei. "Look at that sunrise."

Hiei turned and squinted. It was blinding. "How can you tell?" Hiei grumbled.

The man laughed, breezy and politely, and turned back to his book. "A fair point."

Hiei wiped a line of sweat from above his eyebrow and spat on the ground. When he stood up in full, he noticed the man was holding the book rather close to his face, shoulders just slightly moving. Hiei blinked in disbelief, and caught a quick flash of green eyes flitting in his direction.

This was not a polite laugh anymore. He was laughing at him, and trying to hide it.

Hiei felt his face redden, for the first time in ages, from something other than physical exertion. He reached deeply for an insult, for something perfectly rude to say, to hurl it out of his mouth with a violent force. But he couldn't formulate anything that would work, and whatever pitiful generic slur he considered died in his throat before they even hit his tongue.

Hiei ran his best 1600m of the month between the man and the end of campus.

The dining hall was abandoned at seven in the morning. The limited food options that were available were either slowly overcooking under red heat lamps or prepackaged. Hiei took a seat in a booth at the far back with five hard boiled eggs and a bowl of oatmeal. Protein. Carbs. The essentials. He wasn't very hungry. He was still angry, and his run hadn't worked up much of an appetite. He stirred the oatmeal aggressively, pretending he could pulverize the face of that man on the bench. Maybe if he added two grapes for eyes it would be more cathartic. By the time he stopped stirring to seriously consider getting some, the oatmeal had gone cold. He scraped it into a trashcan by the yet-unmanned burger stand and got a fresh batch. Aggressively eating it, he supposed, would be more productive.

"So," Urameshi said, sliding into the vinyl booth seat across from him. "Guess what?"

Hiei let his spoon drop into the oatmeal with an unimpressed plop.

"The girl living underneath you and Kuwabara is directing a freshman program that starts a week early." Urameshi said, slumping down. "Her RA got a key from a night duty housing guy and they found Kuwabara and I asleep. Dragged us back to the housing office and conducted an 'investigation'" he added air quotes for emphasis, "and then they decided that it must have been me that was responsible for the whole thing! Can you believe it? They didn't even blame Kuwabara at all!"

Hiei dug into his food and tried to listen to as little as possible.

"I mean, he wasn't technically in the room at all when they came in, but they knew that he let me into the dorm. And I mean, he was in there for a while before his conscience got to him."

While Urameshi kept talking, Hiei thought back on his run. He ended up doing a full eight miles because he was annoyed with suddenly changing his route before the first two had been completed. It had given him a pretty good lay of the campus, since he had decided to screw his planned route and just check out the buildings. His time was decent. He should have pushed himself a little more, he thought, forcing the spoon laden with sub-par oatmeal in his mouth. After his quick almost-mile after that (stupid fucking) encounter he had slowed down considerably for the rest of the run. Plus, he hadn't had a chance to run yesterday during move in and needed to do some sprint sessions. The gym would open around 9:30. His coach said it had a spa-worthy sauna, and he wanted to relax his legs for a bit before he took a shower. He wanted as much alone time as possible, where he wouldn't have to deal with random assholes reading on benches on campus at 5:30 in the fucking morning ruining his privacy.

"Are you even listening? This was all your fault in the first place for kicking Kuwabara out of his room!"

Hiei smashed an egg and rolled it between his palm and the faded white dining hall issue plate, letting pieces of the shell flake off. He hoped it would end the conversation.

"Did you even hear me?"

Hiei shoved the whole egg in his mouth.

"I have to see the Dean of Student conduct!" Urameshi said, raising his voice even louder than his normal tone. "I hate that guy! He's barely older than me."

Kuwabara, who had approached from behind, thumped his plate stacked high with bacon and eggs on Urameshi's head. "Hey dummy, you roped me into the story when nobody had to know I was involved."

"You were sleeping directly in front of the room!"

"Yeah, I was trying to be lookout for your sorry butt!"

"You? Lookout? You sleep like the dead! No wonder we got caught!"

Hiei chewed his egg darkly.

Urameshi got up to get breakfast and Kuwabara took his seat, scooting in and starting on his eggs. Hiei half expected him to say something, but when he glanced over at his roommate, Kuwabara jumped a little and quickly looked away. Hiei swallowed his egg and switched over to the oatmeal.

The silence didn't last. "I think Yusuke likes you," Kuwabara said, suddenly and quietly. "And he doesn't really have that many friends."

"You can keep him." The oatmeal was sticky and unsatisfying. Next time he would add brown sugar.

"I mean, he's a good judge of character. I don't really see anything good in you, but if Yusuke does, I trust him. It might surprise you, but Yusuke is a lot like you. He's an asshole."

Hiei grunted. "I'm not interested in making friends, especially not with you." He looked up, expecting a punch, but Kuwabara just went back to picking at his eggs.

"I'm too tired to fight with you, shorty." He did have dark circles under his eyes. "But anyway, he wants me to try to get along with you, even if that's literally impossible because you're mean as hell." Kuwabara ran a hand through his hair, which lacked the meticulous styling he had yesterday. He didn't seem to second-guess the blatant insult he had just thrown at his friend, behind his back no less, but Hiei couldn't disagree with him. "Anyway, he said that if we negotiated 'ground rules' it wouldn't be so bad, but really he just wants you and I to not hate each other since we're stuck together, at least for now. I don't have any rules for you, okay? So you stay on your half of the room and I'll stay on mine." He held out a hand. "Deal?"

Hiei didn't care about this Yusuke or Kuwabara, but if he said yes, they would probably both leave, and since Yusuke was walking back towards the table, he had to make it fast. "Fine," he said, after a moment's pause. He did not take Kuwabara's hand and returned to his eggs.

Yusuke returned with two plates identical to the one Kuwabara had, and nudged his friend over with his foot until he made enough room. Kuwabara's large stature took up most of the small bench, and with Yusuke's wide stance, the two barely fit together. "Move your elbow," Yusuke said, going in for bacon on Kuwabara's plate.

"Stop! You have your own!"

Evidently, they were not leaving, but they could at least be quiet. "Do you two ever stop fighting?" Hiei asked, with as much venom as he could muster.

Yusuke smiled. "Oddly enough, it's one of our better qualities."

Hiei growled, but did nothing.

Acceptance.

The three went their separate ways after breakfast. Hiei spent the rest of the morning unpacking and sleeping. Kuwabara returned to the room (their room now, he supposed) around two.

At first, Hiei didn't notice him. He had turned off the lights, shut the blinds, placed a pillow over his face and put his headphones on full blast, so it was only after Kuwabara had carefully inched about a foot inside that Hiei sat up. Kuwabara screamed.

"Uh, sorry to wake you," he sputtered once his face regained color. Or at least that's what it looked like he said. Hiei couldn't really tell with the music.

Hiei grunted and covered his face again. If they had to room together, he was going to keep their interaction to a minimum. That was their agreement, wasn't it?

"Dude? Hello?" Kuwabara said, loud enough to hear.

Hiei sat up again, his patience already wearing, and shifted one of his earphones to the side. "What?"

"Do you want a blanket or something?"

"No." He went to cover his face again before Kuwabara kept talking, but he was too quick.

"It's just that, uh, it's kinda weird that you're sleeping on a bare mattress."

Hiei glared, attempting to indicate the conversation was over.

"I have an extra set of sheets if you want them, y'know, if you get cold or somethin'."

"No." He pushed the earphone back into place, and was only vaguely aware of Kuwabara telling him to sleep well.

The rest of the first week was uneventful. Slowly, more people moved in on the floor, and Hiei managed to avoid most of them by only visiting communal spaces at odd hours and only when necessary. He met the coach for the men's university track team and held a skype meeting with Enki and his new old coach about training methods and schedules. He looked up where (and what) his classes were. He took a lot of naps and ignored his roommate and his unofficial roommate when they were all unfortunate enough to be in the room at the same time.

When his first day of classes finally arrived, he really didn't want to get out of bed.

"Having trouble sleeping?" Kuwabara asked, when Hiei got up to pee around five.

"I always get up early, idiot."

"Yeah, but normally you're leaving for your run by now," he said, rubbing his eyes. "Guess none of us are immune to Mondays."

Hiei grunted. Perceptive idiot.

If Kuwabara was still awake when Hiei came back, he didn't say anything.

Unfortunately, they both had class at nine, and they had to interact that morning despite his best efforts. Hiei tried to leave early to avoid the inevitable question as to whether he wanted to accompany Kuwabara to class, but Yusuke was waiting at the door.

"Oh, it's the troll doll's first day," he said, smiling. "Big moment for a little boy."

"Can we just go?" Kuwabara said, with a nervous glance at Hiei's darkening expression.

The two-mile stretch of campus, so short yesterday, felt like forever at an average walking speed. The company he kept probably contributed.

"Where's your first class, Kuwabara?"

"Uh, Tilton Hall."

"Aw man, that's at the end of the far quad." Yusuke put his hands behind his neck and sighed. "The things I do for you."

"Shut up man, you wanted to come. Where's your first class?"

Yusuke smiled. "It was an hour ago in Dilbrandt."

The moment Kuwabara turned to grab for Yusuke's shirt and pummel him for skipping on day one, his attention was diverted over the shorter man's shoulder. His expression brightened considerably. "Okubo! Sawamura! How was your summer, guys?"

While Kuwabara stopped, Hiei trudged on, hunching a little under his near empty backpack (okay, a Gatorade drawstring bag he got for free once). Yusuke kept with him.

"Believe it or not, that dope is the popular one." Yusuke shrugged, and hooked his thumbs in his pantloops.

Hiei found that rather hard to believe.

The two crossed the main street that separated the academic buildings from the residence halls. The academic side was awake and bustling, mostly thanks to the coffee shops in the bottom floors of the science lab building and the library. Some clubs had also set up tables on the path running along the quad, hoping to recruit young, impressionable freshman.

They ascended the small hill that opened out to the larger knoll of the quad. One table had been smart enough to set up directly next to the coffee shop by the science labs. By the looks of it, they were handing out free coffee too. Smart and underhanded. The table was swamped with people. Hiei couldn't even tell what they were trying to promote.

Yusuke jumped forward and squinted, shielding his eyes from the glare of the morning sun. "KURAMA?!"

From behind the crowd of people around the table, a person with red hair poked his head up and smiled.

Hiei's throat went dry.

Yusuke broke from Hiei's side and ran over to the table, shoving two of the girls by the red haired guy aside. "Dude, what's up? How was your summer? How much longer are you stuck handing out fliers?"

The closer Hiei got, the more his blood boiled. If his class wasn't just past the table, he would have changed directions, like he should have last time. He didn't like him. He didn't like the way Yusuke liked him. He didn't like his loud hair color or his shifty green eyes or the way he could stand the crowd of people and the loud noise in such close proximity, that he could touch and hug and smile at people and still be solitary enough to sit and read alone in the early morning hours that didn't belong to him. That he had the audacity to laugh at him and then think that it mattered enough to hide it. What a two-faced bastard.

Despite everyone else talking and chatting (and Yusuke doing his best to try to give the red haired man a noogie) the red-haired man pulled out of the crowd right in front of Hiei, flier ready. "Excuse me, would you be interested in-"

Hiei ripped the flier from his hands, crushed it into a tight ball, and threw it behind him.

"What the hell!" yelled some girl in the crowd. "That's so mean!"

Hiei kept walking.

He walked up the white stairs and past the columns into the academic building, taking the seat in the row furthest in the back of the lecture hall and dropped his bag at his feet. He kicked it under the chair with more force than necessary. He didn't want classes or roommates or their friends or anything else about this stupid college deal. All these annoying assholes kept following him around and grating on his patience. All he wanted was to qualify for nationals, go to trials, and win gold in the men's 100m and dammit, he could probably get 200m too. Who had the balls to blatantly laugh in someone's face for no goddamn reason and then give him a fucking flier with a smile? Did he even remember last week? How quickly did he forget the people he mocked? What was his name again?

Some of the class had already settled in. The room itself was massive, arranged in an amphitheatric semicircle around the stage and podium at the front of the room. He hadn't intended to be early, but there was about ten minutes left before class. It probably helped that he hurried. Hiei sunk down in his chair and pulled out a pencil, halfheartedly adding random shapes to the crude art that decorated the attached-half desk in a patchwork.

It was syllabus day, so only about half the class looked up when the teacher hurried in exactly on time. She set a large binder on the podium and removed two wrinkled papers. "Alright class, welcome to introductory Evolutionary Biology. The textbook, Johnson and Murphy 2016, is listed on your syllabus, which your TA and tutor, Shuichi Minamino, is currently distributing. Once you've received your syllabus, turn to page 3, showing grade distribution and course materials…"

Hiei closed his eyes. From what he gathered from Kuwabara's phone conversation with Yusuke yesterday (even when they weren't in the same room, those two were always talking), the first two classes, and most of the first week, was an absolute joke. They would go over the schedule and talk about the honor code and academic violations and plagiarism. Nothing he couldn't ignore. The tip of his pencil snapped. He was pressing harder than he thought.

"You'll see that you'll be required to purchase a clicker. We will be using the clicker every class to monitor attendance, participation, and comprehension of the lecture. These are available at the bookstore and come with a code you must enter on the company website. You'll log in with your student ID and enter our class code, listed below…"

His attention was already fading. The chair was surprisingly comfortable if he shifted his hips to just the right angle, and since nobody had sat in the row in front of him, Hiei propped his feet up.

"If you flip to the fourth page you'll see the tentative schedule for the semester. Tests will be cumulative and therefore will cover all material learned up until that test day. So the first test will cover up until the first test, obviously, and the second test will cover the material given from the first test to the second test as well as the first test material. Do I make myself clear? Please stay up to date on all lecture material. Tests will be based on both readings and lectures. Lecture material will not necessarily be covered by the reading…"

The more the teacher droned, the more Hiei's eyes began to droop. She was boring, the classroom was dim, and all he really wanted to do was go back to bed. He wanted to start the day over already. He let his head lean back a little bit in his chair, and decided he might just fall asleep instead of trying to stay awake through this. Just when he felt himself slipping away, he jolted up at a gentle tap on his shoulder.

Hiei gripped the chair as the attached desk flopped back to its spot between the seats. Impulsively, his feet slammed on the floor, and scattering the few items in his backpack somewhere underneath the hundreds of seats. He looked up, already fuming and ready to pounce, when his breath got stuck somewhere between his lungs and his trachea.

The guy with the red hair smiled. "Glad to see you're awake." He held out a neatly stacked set of papers, secured with a green paper clip. "You might want to keep this."

Hiei wordlessly took the paper. It was too thick to crumple even if he had wanted to.

"However," he said "if your syllabus becomes misplaced or damaged, there is always a PDF copy available online." His smile widened and softened (softened? Was it his smile that softened or was it his eyes?) "Welcome to the class."

He walked away, leaving Hiei sitting, dumbfounded, still holding the syllabus. And, for the second time that week, he felt a warmth creep up his throat and across his face.

He skimmed the top of the syllabus.

Dr. Koto Akawa

EBIO 1010

MWF 9:00 AM- 9:50 AM, Shamo Hall 315

And then there it was.

"Teaching assistant," he grumbled, watching as he continued to pass out syllabi. "Shuichi Minamino."