I still don't own Skip Beat.
Kaene's intuition proved to be correct. It was on the very next filming of Kimagure Rock after the incident that Ren sought out 'the chicken.' Kyouko was able to behave more casually than she thought when she saw him coming.
"Yo," she said in her disguised voice, raising her wing in greeting.
"I'm glad I found you," Ren said with a sigh.
"What's up?" Kyouko's chicken person asked, "You seem upset."
"Well, I think I screwed up. No," he amended, "I know I screwed up."
"This is about that high school girl again, isn't it?" she asked.
"Yeah," he said, and let out another long dejected sigh.
"Oh, come on, it can't be that bad," she said patting him on the back with her wing."
"Oh, but it is," he told the chicken. "I told her I loved her."
"But that's great!" cheered the chicken.
"and she thought I was teasing her," he finished.
Kyouko froze for a minute. He had told her he loved her, and she had thought he was teasing her. But then she shrugged it off. It had to be a mistake. 'Of course,' she rationalized to herself, 'If the Tsuruga Ren confessed his love to a normal high school girl, of course she'd be skeptical.'
"Of course she'd be skeptical," she repeated her logic aloud for him to hear, "You're the Tsuruga Ren. You don't just go around confessing your love to high school girls. Of course she must have thought it was too good to be true."
"I don't think that was the case," he replied.
"Why? What happened after you confessed?" she asked.
"Well, she acted all surprised," he said.
"And?" Bo waited.
"So, I let her think it was a joke," he told her.
"Are you kidding me?" she asked.
"No, why?" he asked.
"It's because she's insecure! The Tsuruga Ren just confessed to her! Of course she'd be surprised! You have to assure her that you mean it! That's when you take her in your arms and kiss her!"
"I tried something like that once and she couldn't function," he told her.
"Is this girl an idiot?" Bo wondered aloud.
"Hey," Ren said, taking offense at the chicken calling Kyouko stupid.
"Well, you've kissed her, told her you loved her and she still doesn't get it? That only leaves one possibility. She's stupid."
"She's not stupid," Ren defended. "She just doesn't believe in love."
"Huh?" asked the chicken.
"Well, she is a LoveMe member, after all," he explained.
"Is it Mouko-san?" she burst out before she could stop herself.
"What?" Ren asked, his eyes immediately opening to three times their usual size.
"Um, Kotonami-san, is it Kotonami-san? Or Amamiya-san?" she asked trying to recover from her fatal error.
"Oh god," Ren uttered. He pinched the bridge of his nose and took a deep breath before turning to Bo and slowly lifting off the head of the costume. Kyouko didn't protest. She knew it was too late, and her head was swarming with so many ideas that she wouldn't have had available neurons to devote to body movement even if she'd wanted to stop him.
Her eyes were already filled with tears as he finally set the headpiece aside. "I'm so sorry Tsuruga-san!" She wailed. Not the words he wanted to hear from her right now. "I didn't mean to deceive you! It's just that when you first met Bo, you didn't like me and I felt like I could help you as Bo, but I didn't think you'd want to talk to me as me, and even when you didn't seem to dislike me so much anymore, I didn't think you'd want to come to a lowly kohai for advice and I thought it would be ok as long as I never told anyone and you never found out because I only wanted to help and I would never to anything to betray you and—"
"Mogami-san," he put a finger on her lips to stop her hysterical rant. Then it came. First, in a small puff of air, then as a diaphragm flexing, body shaking, peal of laughter. He had been so worried that he had just exposed everything to her, and here she was, completely glossing over it and worrying about the exact same thing.
Kyouko was surprised at first, then relieved, then offended. Her sempai continued to laugh until he was breathless and had to wipe a tear from his eye.
Her expression became black. "I don't see what's so funny, Tsuruga-san! I was so worried that you would hate me and then you start laughing while I'm here waiting on the chopping board!"
"That's why it's funny, Mogami-san," Ren said, stifling a few chuckles, "You were worrying about me hating you, while I was worrying about you hating me."
'Or erasing me,' he added in his head.
"Eh? But I could never hate you, Tsuruga-san!" she vehemently declared.
"Even though I love you?" he asked.
"Eh?" It seemed that in the panic of exposure, Kyouko had stored all the information from their conversation in a part of her brain for later sorting, but with the repeated declaration, it all came rushing back, and likewise every red blood cell in her body came rushing to her face.
"I love you, Mogami-san," he repeated. "It seems that I won't be able to hide it anymore, so all I can do is tell you and hope you won't hate me for it."
"I could never hate you, Tsuruga-san," she repeated, as if on auto pilot.
"Are you alright?" he asked, noticing her vacant look and that the blood which had been so recently coloring her face seemed to have all but abandoned it.
"I'm alright," she said robotically. "It's just a lot to take in."
"I understand," he replied, for the moment, reveling in the fact that she hadn't run away in terror. "I won't force you, Mogami-san. I understand how you feel about love. But please, don't cut me out. Things don't have to change if you don't want them to, but please at least stay my favorite kohai."
She nodded silently.
"Why don't you go change, and I'll drive you home," he suggested, "You must be tired."
Kyouko again, nodded silently and robotically made her way down the hall and into the storage room to put away her costume and change, her mind going over and over the things that her sempai had just said.
When she came out, Tsuruga-san was waiting for her outside the door with a very familiar smiling chicken head in his grasp. "You forgot this," he said, handing it to her.
"Thank you," she replied, taking it and putting it away before re-emerging.
'At least she's gotten back to the point where she can utter simple sentences to me,' Ren consoled himself, 'I thought it might take weeks.'
The ride to Kyouko's home was silent. The robot-Kyouko sat stiffly in the passenger seat, staring unseeingly through the window.
"Nothing has to change, Mogami-san," Ren reminded her with a sad smile as she stepped out of the car."
"Thank you for the ride, Tsuruga-san," she said with the ghost of a smile on her lips as she got out. She turned around and bowed once more before disappearing into the restaurant she called home.
AN: And one more.