Comments: If any part of this is odd, blame me not watching any Spiral for a while. Waaaah. Set after the end of the anime, no spoilers, etc. AyumuXHiyono…. Sort of. I do not own Spiral or any of it's characters, I'm just a fangirl with too much time on her hands.

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All of his life, Ayumu had been trying to be as much like his brother as he could. As smart as his brother, as intelligent, as perfect.

In the end, he had to admit that so far, it wasn't working very well. A person can only be who he is, but the problem was that Ayumu had been trying to be like Kiyotaka for so long, he had forgotten who he was, if he had ever known.

For so long, he'd been telling himself that he wasn't good enough. Maybe he thought that the more like Kiyotaka he could be, the less lonely Madoka would be, and maybe if he could be as perfect as his brother, people would like and accept him.

No matter his reasoning or motives, the result was the same - Ayumu was always trying to be something he wasn't.

That's what he found so remarkable, and somewhat puzzling, about the girl sitting at a computer a few feet from him, Hiyono Yuizaki. She was simply herself, and never tried to be anything more or less than that. It was a completely foreign concept to Ayumu, how anyone could consider themself good enough, to not pretend, to not live your life striving for impossible, ill-defined goals.

A few months earlier, he would come to this room, the room designated for Tsukiyomi Academy's newspaoer staff, and either sleep, or discuss leads on the Blade Children with Hiyono as she researched the matter, fingers flying across the keyboard skillfullly, eyes scanning back and forth across the computer screen. Then, he had a reason to come there - you could almost call it business.

But now, the Blade Children were no longer any concern to either of them, yet Ayumu still continued to come to the newspaper club room. Hiyono was working on things far less important now, simply articles for the paper which amazingly didn't fall under the category of "gossip column", but it didn't feel like anything had changed.

He had always hesitated to call Hiyono a friend, because friends were pretty rare to him - he was a solitary person, though not exactly by choice, and it was more comfortable to consider her his researcher, or, at best, his partner in crime (or prevention of crime, whichever the case may have been). Yet now, she could not possibly be labelled as his researcher, as there was nothing left he needed researched, and they were no longer in the business of mystery-solving and saving lives.

Yet, he came to the club room every day.

Every day, he would still come here, sit at the table, and pretend to sleep, peeking out from under a magazine hiding his face at his "researcher", usually too absorbed in work to notice him for long. And he had no idea why. There was no reason for him to be there, and reason and logic was his trade. It made no sense to him.

One day, he decided staring at her from under a magazine was too strange, and instead opted to do some extra schoolwork. In the middle of unraveling a complex math equation, though, Hiyono bopped him on the head and said in her nagging voice "You're great at that stuff anyway, so quit with the extra work. Here, Ayumu, I made another Hiyo-Hiyo Super-duper-mega-big riceball!", and set a paper-wrapped riceball almost as big as his head on the open algebra textbook.

"Hmmf. I'm not great. At all," said Ayumu, closing the textbook and unwrapping the riceball with feigned reluctance. He realized he was no longer talking about algebra.

"Sure you are, Ayumu. You're really smart," she said, getting to work on her own colossal riceball.

"...So I'm fine the way I am?" Ayumu asked quiety, looking down at the salmon center of his snack.

"Just fine with me. You really shouldn't try so hard all the time, you know. It's not good for you," Hiyono answered, her mouth full of rice.

Whether she understood the full meaning of his question or not, he realized in that moment, before she switched to rambling aimlessly about something unimportant, why he still came here every day.

He couldn't find reasons as to how she was comfortable simply being herself, or how she could accept and like him, in all his imagined inadequateness, or why he was quite so fascinated by and drawn to her.

But, as he discovered, certain things go beyond logic.