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"With your understanding, take my worries from me."

Koizumi Itsuki beamed with an artificial sugariness that sickened him as he tweeted, "Miss Suzumiya!"

Suzumiya Haruhi halted in her tracks. She tilted her head back just enough to identify her shouter. "Koizumi?" A confused frown replaced her curious blinks. "What'd you want?" Her voice deliberately lacked all efforts to sound polite. It cartoned a salty aftertaste that curdled into a bored mutter by the time it got to the "you" part of her inquiry.

Itsuki shut his eyelids into bridge shapes to consummate an apologetic smile. "I apologize for my bad timing, but it appears that you've left your belongings behind." He presented them to her with a hand behind his head.

Suzumiya's blinks multiplied. "My homework..." She took the books and batted beads of grime off her manga cover, pausing in mid-swipe. "I guess I must've forgotten it." Based on her inaudible supposition, she was put off by her own absentmindedness.

He wasn't any less. Perhaps his brigade chief had reached a point where her ennui now included brownouts. Suzumiya opened her manga. A bookmark flew out and floated downwards, sailing to and fro like a feather before landing on the floor.

"Let me get that for you." Itsuki knelt down. When he looked up, she was staring at him with a nauseated expression. He thought that maybe she had felt violated by his male gaze position (which he didn't exploit), but the opinion was retracted after she held the look far longer than what was proper when he was back on his feet. "There we are." Itsuki handed her the bookmark.

She incredulously accepted it. Instinct urged him to glance at the panel in her manga. To his bemusement, the character under her thumbnail had been drawn in his likeness. He was clothed from the chest up in nothing except sleepy eyes, wispy bangs, and a kind smile. The next panel's illustration showed him smiling gaily with closed eyes and upturned lips to offset its predecessor.

Itsuki's trajectory shifted to Haruhi's scowl. Building tension between himself and his chief implied that they would soon run out of things to say if either spoke again, so he patched up the conversation. "Well, I'd better get going, then." He stepped back. "I don't want to take up any more of your time. Please have a wonderful evening, Miss Suzumiya." With that, he bowed gracefully and left just as.

"Hold it."

Koizumi Itsuki froze. He looked behind his shoulder. "Is there...something on your mind, Miss Suzumiya?"

Suzumiya's arms were crossed. She looked down her snout at him with one eye narrowed into the shape of an isosceles triangle. "Did you ever come up with any ideas for Spring Break like I told you to, or did you slack off again?"

Itsuki had no recollection of her asking him to complete such assignments, but he went along with her revisionism. "Certainly." He rotated until his feet were parallel with hers across the hallway. "I have a few ideas that I've been meaning to speak with you about, but we never had the chance to discuss them." He smiled cheerfully. "Would you like to go over them tomorrow?"

"Let's get it over with right now," she ordered. "I want to see how much thought you've put into them."

On a normal basis, she wouldn't have been so hard on the reliable deputy because he didn't matter, but today, he was becoming uncomfortably aware of her bitterness towards him, like a foreigner tasting Natto beans for the first time.

Itsuki chuckled and scratched the back of his noggin. "Well, it might take me some time to remember all of them now, but I'll do my best." He nodded.

She closed her eyes and headed for the exit, giving him a backwards wave. "You'll remember it faster once your feet start moving."

Itsuki opened his eyes to blink widely and outstretch his hand, jerking forward in one step. "Ah — Miss Suzumiya..." His muscles ossified when she paused to blink over her shoulder.

"Hm?" The curiosity she expressed made her oval face adorably childlike, a charm which had been increased by the tiny "o" her lips were settled into. The charm was erased by her signature scowl. "What is it now?" she groaned, her hands finding her hips. "Are you coming or not, Koi-zumi?"

Itsuki decided that there was nothing to be gained by beating around the bush or rebelling against the empress's decree. He let his arm fall to his sides and bestowed a stellar smile upon her in hopes of overwriting the impression his precedent reaction had left. "It would be an honor to walk you home, Miss Suzumiya." Another bow was executed to bring it full circle.

Peach splinters from the afternoon highlighted an unsettling feature on his face. Even though it was a flicker of a second, she swore to herself that she had seen it. Sadness simmered in his warm smile and drowsy eyes — an insomniac lassitude that made him look ten dynasties older. This aura he projected felt in part due to a visible shortage of sleep and Vitamin D. She was in fear of his bones collapsing into dust.

As if to telepathically tell her not to worry, his smile lengthened a full centimeter wider. His eyelids became upward U's, and in doing so, swapped his persona back over to her ex-transfer student's. "So! Does the lieutenant have permission to escort his commander, after all?" He cocked his head, forelocks swaying accordingly.

Haruhi's mouth underwent a series of aerobics. She flipped her long hair with the back of her hand and walked off. "Permission granted."

Itsuki shoved his hands into his pockets and tagged along. The walk turned out to be a headache. The hill itself could be called an easy downwards hike, but Miss Suzumiya was a nuclear minefield. Ill-rehearsed for such a mission, he quickly developed a phobia of being alone with her. She had the habit of either ignoring or henpecking him. He couldn't disobey her by turning loose, so he renewed his smile and pitched his free-styled ideas for Spring Break, asking her to check-mark bulletin points such as googling a resort town for hot spots, contacting one of his wealthy "relatives" in Los Angeles for a Hollywood tour, and bringing the brigade to a campsite rife with paranormal activity.

The deputy personally preferred the mountain trip because he'd be able to assemble his telescope for stargazing. Alas, Suzumiya Haruhi didn't bite his line. She contributed little except blunt, monosyllable answers before looking at the street. All he could do was smile sympathetically at her profile. He wondered if this was the dynamic Kyon had seen between them in "that other world," or if they had ever, at any point, been closer than what they were in this one.

After a few more starts and finishes, Itsuki gave his commander's ears a break. He was more than content with looking at the panorama of metropolitan life. The color on the skyscrapers was always vertically divided between a brown shadow and an amber light at sundown. It may have made the city look tired and yawning, but he found it as beautiful as the rain. Thirty seconds into his reverie, Suzumiya chose to hotwire the conversation:

"Koizumi?"

Itsuki looked back at his caller. Her shadow, strolling alongside his on the sepia pavement, looked small, lonesome, and humpbacked. "Yes, Miss Suzumiya?"

Suzumiya's side locks bounced beside her cheeks with her steps. "What was with your face today?"

He studied her intently. Smiled. "Why?" He looked at the road. "Was there a bug on my face?" he joked.

"Don't say something so stupid," Suzumiya warned. "I meant that it looked different."

He curved her again, "Unfortunately, Miss Suzumiya, I regret to say that I didn't have a mirror on me."

Suzumiya wasn't detoured by his blissful ignorance. "Was that some kind of joke?"

"A very bad one," he apologized. "I've been trying to work on my humor lately, but I'm starting to think that I should just throw in the towel."

"Anyway," she resumed irately, "like I was saying...your expressions — they weren't exactly different, but whenever you smiled, it didn't feel right."

Itsuki's immortal grin died. It was resurrected in the form of a sheepish smile. "Miss Suzumiya, am I the cause of your distress?"

Her glower made brief contact with him from the corner of her eye. She then wrinkled her nose at her feet and poked her lips out like a bird's beak. "If you were Kyon saying that, I'd be telling you not to flatter yourself." She hesitated. The hand holding onto the strap of her book bag tightened their grip.

Itsuki waited for her to continue.

Suzumiya never did.

His heart thumped unnaturally. He stared into the blue beyond, ignoring the girls who whispered behind their palms as they eyeballed the couple. A change of subject was contrived to cheer her up: "I've been meaning to tell you how happy we all are to be a part of your adventures in the SOS Brigade, Miss Suzumiya." His voice and words were softer than Scottish cashmere, matching the tender smile that had sown them together. "I think we can all agree that the brigade has given us a place to belong."

Suzumiya's shadow lagged until it stopped completely. Itsuki's shadow stopped in front of hers. With open palms, he turned so that his shoulder faced her. Suzumiya stood there behind him. He frowned solemnly.

The sunset crimsoned the outline of Itsuki's body, but the side of his face was crosshatched by a shadow. He added four more degrees to his rotation. "Miss Suzumiya?"

The fringe that hid her forehead was also hiding her eyes from him. "Then why aren't any of you acting like it?" The dumbfounded, almost airy murmur was full of sorrow and corked rage.

Itsuki flinched. His eyebrows created a parenthesis of bunny lines on his forehead.

"You all think I don't use my eyes anymore..."—her fists drained the blood from her knuckles as her voice hardened into aluminium—"but I saw the way all of you acted when I walked into the club room last week. Every time I looked up, Yuki was staring at me, you were smiling at your hands on the table, and Mikuru wouldn't look at anything except her own feet." Her flushed face jerked up to glare daggers into his, forelocks flying airborne. "If your SOS Brigade leader is that much of a flea bite on your neck, then I command you to just quit the brigade before I throw you out myself!"

Itsuki's heart imploded. What he saw glistening in her eyes was a whirlpool of frustration, uncertainty, and chronic depression as though she had lost something valuable to her and couldn't understand when or why. He instantly knew that the words in her last outburst belonged to someone else. If one had opened her skull and written them on her brain, then only one had the power to engrave it.

The esper moved his gaze to the sidewalk, expelling a sigh that only showed in the slumping of his shoulders. He smiled sadly at the ant parade marching between his shoes. The light in his pupils danced. "Would it be alright if I asked if Kyon was the one who told you that, Miss Suzumiya?"

Suzumiya jumped. Itsuki slowly turned on his heel to approach her. Suzumiya's fist came up to her chest as she leaned back.

When he stopped, he kept a foot between them. His gentle, half-lidded gaze and unaccusing smile juxtaposed her defensive expression. "You have never been a flea bite to us, Miss Suzumiya," he guaranteed. "There's nothing keeping us from resigning if that was the case."

Her brow went smooth from his words, but only for a nanosecond.

Itsuki placed a hand on his sternum and nodded. "You are a very important person to each one of us." He knew that he was not an important person to her, but in his heart, he was a member of the S.O.S. Brigade before he was a member of the Organization(*), and Miss Suzumiya was his lovable brigade chief (*) before she was "God."

Like she had been photosynthesized by the sun rays in his eyes, her fists lost their curl as her iciness thawed entirely, and embarrassment supplanted it. She frowned at the ladybug on the cement as her eyebrow twitched.

"Kyon included," he appended. "He may not realize it,"—he winked—"but you're just as important to him as you are to us."

Suzumiya petrified. "Bah!" She huffed and crossed her arms, yanking her head into the opposite direction with a blush. "Whoever said his feelings were all that 'important' to begin with? Don't make him sound so special."

Itsuki chuckled between syllables. "As you wish, Miss Suzumiya." He stepped aside and extended his palm to the road. "Shall we carry on?"

Suzumiya blinked at the hand gesturing for her to lead the way. She glanced at him before taking the offer with her nose aimed at the sky. Itsuki stared at her for a while before aiming his smile at the sun. The reek of Closed Space was becoming less and less of a stench.

"There's something else I noticed."

"And what might that be, Miss Suzumiya?"

She nibbled on her ribbon's tail. "You're the one who actually showed it to me."

"Is that so?"

Suzumiya slipped into an untranslatable silence. He wished his ESP had been packaged with mind-reading equipment.

Eventually, Suzumiya looked at the stars peeking out. She unknotted her thoughts to allow one to touch his ear, but her whisper sounded like it was part of a soliloquy he hadn't been meant to overhear: "I mean, how can anyone smile like that all the time, anyway?"

He nearly stopped walking.

"Everyone has a full range of emotions, right?" Suzumiya crossed her arms again, staring at her toes. "I never really thought about it until today after I finished Tsubasa,"—she turned her head to him, rocking forward with her arms still crossed to see his perspiring face—"but there must be something bad about your personality." She rerouted her focus to the forefront. "I ruled out a long time ago that you weren't an extraterrestrial or some type of android from outer space."

Both students hung back as the railroad's crossing bell clanged.

Suzumiya looked the other way — away from him. "Besides..."—she clutched her elbow pits and brought her shoulders closer to her ears, the crossed arms squashing her breasts inwards—"what's there to smile about on this boring, disappointing planet, anyway?" she mumbled gently. Her body language didn't make her look so much like a closed message as it did a girl trying to console herself just then.

Their hair danced on the zephyr sweeping past them. Itsuki didn't allow her to see his face. He kept it turned the other way. When, how, or why she came to these conclusions was unknown, but the speed of Suzumiya's maturation was happening faster than the esper could swallow. Would he have to change his personality again now that her perspectives on the world and its people were changing?

After almost two years of the same manuscript, Itsuki could not transition so easily. "Actually," he bravely began, after the sound of beaten train tracks had melted into the distance, "there are a variety of things to smile about in spite of one's internal state at any given time, Miss Suzumiya." Itsuki finally twisted his face back around to her, warming the ambiance with his transfer student smile.

"Like what?" Her interest was genuine.

"Well..." Itsuki traced the slope of his nose to pretend like he was in deep thought. After he secured his answer, he smiled ahead with an, 'I've got it' nod and then raised a finger to help articulate his philosophy. "The opportunity to share this 'boring, disappointing' planet with the people you love, for instance. The opportunity to be alive and have the freedom to explore that planet with those people. The overall opportunity to be happy, and to be yourself."

"So then...today, that last opportunity was missing?"

Itsuki's finger sagged.

She looked ahead. The railroad's boom barrier was hoisted. They didn't walk.

"I guess you never realized that if you're not being Koizumi, then the whole club is out of whack. Koizumi is the always-smiling reliable one who's never down even if everyone else is."

"I see." Koizumi Itsuki smiled tightly. Inside, he was telling himself to breathe. "Then I deeply apologize for not acting like myself to you lately, Miss Suzumiya. To let you down was never my intention."

"Don't be so dramatic," she countered. She knew how to make the phrase sound as though it was coming from a place of chastisement instead of encouragement. "It's not like you're a humanoid interface from Mars."

He was only mildly humored by her irony. On impulse, he changed the topic by caroling, "Speaking of androids and extraterrestrials, what exactly do you plan on doing once you find what it is you're looking for?" A biplane captivated him. He looked up at it. "Asking them what life is like in their world compared to ours, perhaps?" His eyes shut into their upturned angles again. "I actually think that would make a very interesting interrogation."

Suzumiya examined his grinning profile with one of her unconscious scowls. The linen-like creases in her forehead started to ride back.

"I myself have always been interested in stars and planets for that very reason." Chuckles dinned in Itsuki's throat. He lifted his palm to shade his eyelids, the cupid mouth relaxing into a lazy smile. Flakes of gold radiated from his iris. "I used to imagine other worlds on the planets I couldn't see with my telescope, ones with societies that were completely different from our own."

"Like what?" she plumbed.

Itsuki supplied a cloudy answer, "Well, I didn't have a particular picture in mind back then." He went back to his embarrassed emoji smile. "It was just a pastime of mine. I grew out of it eventually."

The conversion stood out to her. Koizumi Itsuki wasn't bursting with the charisma of a gentleman who had the mien of a rose in this moment. Beneath the flitting shadows of cumulus clouds that were passing over his face, the disposition of an ordinary, yet lonely stargazer with inconsolable anguish enveloped him. A breeze played on Itsuki's hair before becoming a violent gust that forced her to clap her hands over her ears. Itsuki held his fist to his eye level and glared at the wind, pressing his book bag against his blazer like a stoical superhero getting ready for a face-off with his archenemy.

When he noticed her stare, he smiled the smile of her ex-transfer student, but the draft made him drop his book bag and fight to keep his blazer buttoned as it tried to undress him. Haruhi cackled, arm circled around her tummy while she slapped her shin. He held his bangs and shrugged back at her with a sweat drop next to his smile, saying something about persistent weather. After the gust vanished, Itsuki wiped off a cherry blossom that had been sticking to his shoulder. Both of them, for some reason, paused to see where its journey would take it.

A drop of water suddenly hit the blossom and pasted it flat against the concrete. Haruhi gasped. Rain thwacked her nose. She moaned at the clouds circling the sky. Before anyone knew it, the city was covered in rain.

Wet and shocked, Haruhi growled at the situation. "Oh, great! This is just GREAT!" She used her book bag as an umbrella. "I'm getting all wet!" Body-warmed fabric jacketed her head, keeping the rainfall from melting her.

She hesitantly elevated her chin. The person she found was a drenched Koizumi without his uniform blazer. A river of rain trickled down between his eyebrows as he smiled that same tired smile from the hallway. His dripping hair clung to his cheeks.

"Why're you standing there like you're actually enjoying it?" she said with some uneasiness, noticing the serenity pearling his aura now.

He smiled shamefacedly. "This may sound strange, but..." Wet strands framed her vice commander's jaw as he hiked his tired eyes up to the sky with a loving gaze. He raised his chin an inch or three higher, making the bowing length of his eyelashes seem longer. "I honestly do enjoy it." Water leaped off his bang and squiggled down his smile.

"What are you doing? Trying to catch a cold on purpose? Stop smiling at the clouds in ecstasy and come on!" Haruhi pulled him down the sidewalk, causing bicyclers to swerve out of her way.

The unlikely duo's shoes splashed in puddles and mud for two blocks straight until they reached Haruhi's front door. Her porch light flickered on. They bent over and gasped for breath. Koizumi panted something about how that had been an adventure, and something else about his astonishment over the way she almost outran the rain, but she was too far gone to be giving a damn. Haruhi regarded the jacket straddling her head and opened her mouth to speak—

"Oh, it's no problem, really." He saved her the embarrassment.

Haruhi felt a wave of guilt crash against her all the same. As a result of getting the brunt of the downpour, Koizumi was so thoroughly soaked that his wrinkled white shirt was sticking to his body.

"And before I forget, I wanted to let you know that today honestly was just an off-day for me. There's no real need to be concerned. It happens to the best of us."

Haruhi involuntarily hugged his damp jacket against her nape. "You know..."—she pushed his jacket against his stomach with a thrust that made him go, "Oof!"—"even though it was really bugging me, you showed me something different today just when I thought I knew everything there was to know about you."

He had to fight against the temptation to hang himself with a cable cord when he got home.

"And for an ordinary human,"—she flung her head up to blind him with a supernova smile—"that type of enigma surprisingly makes you a hundred times more interesting than you were before! How totally wacky is that? You really are a mysterious transfer student!"

Itsuki could only gaze at the girl's shimmering face with private agony and discomfort. He had told Kyon last year that "Itsuki" was less pleasing to those who knew him past the sparkling molars of "Koizumi," (*) but never did he expect the aftereffects of two weeks of sleepless nights, burdensome nightmares, and dogmatic factions to twitch her antennas. Either he had underestimated how kindred they were in the field of depression, or her new manga was to blame.

With the dazzle that labeled Suzumiya as the Suzumiya here to stay, she pirouetted on her toe and marched off to jam her key in her door. She grinned over her shoulder and said, "You were sort of starting to become a real bore, anyway. Looks like you saved yourself!"

His eyebrows scrunched back against his forehead.

"Oh, and before I forget!" Suzumiya chimed before dangerously sharpening her pitch: "Just because I said Itsuki isn't all that bad doesn't mean I want you acting like a Johnny Rain Cloud all the time. I don't mind Itsuki, but Koizumi is the reliable one. Got it?"

He bowed. His shins felt weak. "Whatever you say, Miss Suzumiya."

She opened the door and stood in the rectangle of gold light. "Haruhi," she blurted.

He recoiled. He looked up and readied himself to question her, but she was already announcing, "See you tomorrow!" from behind the door before slamming it in his face.

Itsuki's countenance darkened with the emotions he had been holding back. The esper backed away from her door and wrung out his jacket. He swung it over his shoulder, letting the arms slap his thigh as he turned a quarter of an inch back to the house. "Me, then. Just Itsuki. Is that really all it took to improve your mood, Miss Suzumiya, or are you still reimagining me, as well as yourself, as someone else?"

A raindrop slipped down his eyelash and leaked off the curled edge. Itsuki, with his palm turned up in a shrug and a defeated smile, aboutfaced to disappear into the rain

AUTHOR NOTE

I honestly haven't stepped foot in Tsubasa, but I read bits years ago and found Fay terrifyingly similar to Koizumi, so I thought a great way to make Haruhi outright "look" for signs that might imply Koizumi was more than what he put on would be to make her interested in Tsubasa. She could then project the characters onto the people in her life and look for similarities (even if they aren't there), now altering her perception of what she expects from Koizumi. Through this, there's a huge possibility that she would've had it in her mind that he *is* like Fay even without him revealing any change in mood.